Podcast appearances and mentions of Joseph Tainter

In this episode, Noah Smith recently went on the Break the Rules podcast, hosted by Lev Polyakov, for a debate with Auron MacIntyre. They discuss the societal implications of AI development, focusing on Trump's relationships with tech leaders, AI systems like Stargate, surveillance, economic productivity, regulatory measures, geopolitical competition, and immigrant labor's role in technological advancements. – RECOMMENDED PODCAST:

Eli Dourado is on a mission to end the Great Stagnation, that half-century period of economic and technological disappointment that began in the 1970s (what I refer to in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist, as the Great Downshift). If we want to turn the page on this chapter of slow progress and deserved skepticism, we're going to have to accept some creative destruction.Dourado believes that the courage to embrace major change is key to meeting our potential. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Dourado about the future of the US job market and energy production in a world of AI.Dourado is chief economist at the Abundance Institute, and author of his own Substack newsletter.In This Episode* The dawn of a productivity boom? (1:26)* Growing pains of job market disruption (7:26)* The politics of productivity growth (15:20)* The future of clean energy (23:35)* The road to a breakthrough (30:25)* Reforming NEPA (35:19)* The state of pro-abundance (37:08)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationThe dawn of a productivity boom? (1:26)Pethokoukis:  Eli, welcome to the podcast.Dourado: Thanks for having me on, Jim.I would like to think that what we are experiencing here in the 2020s is the beginnings of an extended productivity boom. We have some good economic data over the past year and a half. I know this is something that you care about, as I do . . . What's your best guess?I think the seeds of a boom are there. There's plenty of low-hanging fruit, but I'd say the last few quarters have not been that great for TFP growth, which is what I followed most closely. So we actually peaked in TFP in the US in Q4, 2021.Now what is that, what is TFP?Total factor productivity. So that's like if you look at inputs and how they translate into outputs.Capital, labor . . .Capital and labor, adjusting for quality, ideally. We've gotten less output for the amount of inputs in the last quarter than we did at the end of 2021. So slight negative growth over the last three years or so, but I think that you're right that there is room for optimism. Self-driving cars are coming. AI has immense potential.My worry with AI is other sociopolitical limits in the economy will hold us back, and you kind of see the news breaking today as we're recording this, is there's a strike at the ports on east coast, and what's at issue there is are we allowed to automate those jobs? Are the owners of the ports allowed to automate those jobs? And if the answer ends up being “no,” then you can say goodbye to productivity gains there. And so I really think the technology is there to do a lot more to kick off a productivity boom, but it's the sociopolitical factors that are slowing us down.And I definitely want to talk about those sociopolitical factors, and the port strike is hopefully not a harbinger. But before I leave this topic, I suppose the super bullish case for productivity is that AI will be so transformative, and so transformative throughout the economy, both automating some things, helping us do other things more efficiently, and creating brand new high-productivity things for us to do that we will have maybe an extended 1990s, maybe more, I might hope?What is your bullish case, and does that bullish case require what they call artificial general intelligence, or human-level, or human-level plus intelligence? Is that key? Because obviously some people are talking about that.Can we have an important productivity boom from AI without actually reaching that kind of science-fictional technology?I don't actually think that you need one-to-one replacement for humans, but you do need to get humans out of the loop in many, many more places. So if you think about the Baumol effect, the idea here is if there are parts of the economy that are unevenly growing in productivity, then that means that the parts of the economy where there is slow productivity growth, perhaps because you have human labor still being the bottleneck, those parts are going to end up being massive shares of the economy. They're going to be the healthcares, the educations, the parts of the economy where we have lots of inflation and increased costs. So the real boom here, to me, is can you replace as many humans as possible? Over the short run, you want to destroy jobs so that you can create a booming economy in which the jobs are still available, but living standards are much higher.If you think about these big chunks of GDP like health, housing, energy, transportation, that's what you need to revolutionize, and so I can think of lots of ways in health that we could use AI to increase productivity. And I also have very little doubt that even current levels of AI could massively increase productivity in health. I think the big question is whether we will be allowed to do it.So you don't need AGI that is as good as a human in every single thing that a human might do to limit the number of humans that are involved in providing healthcare. Housing, I think there's construction robots that maybe could do it, but I think the main limits are, like land use regulation, more sociopolitical. In energy, it's kind of the same thing, NIMBYism is kind of the biggest thing. Maybe there's an R&D component that AI could contribute to. And then in transportation, again, we could automate a lot of transportation. Some of that's happening with autonomous cars, but we are having trouble automating our ports, for example, we're having trouble automating cargo railroads for similar make-work reasons.I think the bull case is you don't need AGI, really, really sophisticated AI that can do everything, but you do need to be able to swap out human workers for even simpler AI functions.I don't actually think that you need one-to-one replacement for humans, but you do need to get humans out of the loop in many, many more places.Growing pains of job market disruption (7:26)I'm sure that some people are hearing you talk about swapping out human workers, replacing human workers. They're thinking, this is a world of vast technologically-driven unemployment; that is what you are describing. Is that what you're describing?Not at all. If we had the kind of productivity boom we're talking about, the economy would be so incredibly hot, and you need that hot market. People have all kinds of fantasies about how good AI could get. Can it substitute for a human in every single thing? And I'm not even positing that. I'm saying if we could just get it good enough to substitute in some things, the economy's going to be booming, it's going to be hot, there will still be things that humans can do that AIs can't. There's lots of things that maybe we want a human to do, even if the AI can do it, and we will be able to afford that a lot better.I think that the world I'm thinking about is one where living standards are way higher for everybody — and higher levels of equality, even. If you have the sort of uneven productivity gains that we've had for the last several decades, where tech does really well, but every other part of the economy does badly, well, that drives a lot of regional inequality, that drives a lot of different kinds of demographic inequality, and if we had broad-base productivity growth, that means better living standards for everybody, and I think that's what we should aim for.When I talk about what you've been referring to as these sociopolitical factors or how we might slow down progress, slow down automation, the whimsical example I use is there being a law saying that yes, you can have kiosks in every McDonald's, but you have to have an employee standing next to the kiosk to actually punch the buttons.As you mentioned with this port worker strike, we don't need my scenario. That is kind of what's happening on these ports, where there could be a lot more automation, but because of both unions and our acquiescence to these unions, we don't have the kind of automation — forget about sci-fi — that doesn't exist in other places in the world. And I wonder if that doesn't sort of encapsulate, at least in this country, the challenge: Can we get our heads around the idea that it's okay in the long run, that there will be some downsides, and some people might be worse off, and we need to take care of those people, but that's the disruption we need to tolerate to move forward?You can't have a growing economy where there's no churn, where there's no displacement, where it's complete, where there's no dynamism. You need to be able to accept some level of change. I sympathize with people whose jobs get destroyed by automation. It is hard, but it's much less hard if the economy is super hot because we've been prioritizing productivity growth, and if that were the case, I think we'd find new jobs for those people very quickly. The process is not automatic, but it's much slower when you have low productivity growth and a stagnant economy than it is when you have high productivity growth and a booming economy.The question I always get is, what about the 60-year-old guy? What's he going to do? And I'm not sure I have a much better answer. Maybe there's other jobs, but it's tough to transition, so maybe the answer there is you cut him a check, you cut that 60-year-old a check, and if you have a high-productivity economy, you have the resources for that to be an option.Right! So that's the other thing is that we can afford to be generous with people if we have a really rapidly growing economy. It's that we don't have the resources if we're stagnating, if we're already overextended fiscally, that's a terrible position to be in because you can't actually afford to be generous. And if there are people that truly, like you said, maybe they're very old and it doesn't make sense to retrain, or something like that, they're near retirement, yeah, absolutely, we can afford that much better when GDP is much higher.Where do you think, as a nation, our head is at as far as embracing or not being fearful of disruption from technological change? If I only looked at where our head was at with trade, I would be very, very worried about entering a period of significant technological disruption, and I would assume that we will see lots and lots of pushback if AI, for instance, is the kind of important, transformative, general purpose technology that I hope it is.Again, if I look at trade, I think, “Boy, there's going to be a lot of pushback.” Then again, when I think about risk broadly, and maybe it's not quite the same thing, I think, “Well, then again, we seem to be more embracing of nuclear energy, which shows maybe — it's not the same thing, but it shows a greater risk tolerance.” And I'm always thinking, what's our societal risk tolerance? Where do you think we're at right now?I think most people, most Americans, don't actually think in those terms. I think most Americans just think about, “How are things going for me?” They kind of evaluate their own life, and if their communities, or whatever, have been struggling due to trade stuff, or something like that, they'll be against it. So I think the people who think in these more high-level terms, it's like societal elites, and I think normal people who have just lived under 50 years of stagnation, they're kind of distrustful of the elites right now: “I don't pay attention to policy that closely, and my life is bad, at least in some dimensions is not as good as I wanted it to be, it's hasn't had the increase that my parents' generation had,” or something like that. And they're very distrustful of elites, and they're very mad, and you see this nihilistic populism popping up.You see kind of a diverse array of responses to this nihilistic populism. Some people might say, “Well yeah, elites really have messed up and we need to do what the common people want.” And then the other people are like, “No, we can't do that. We need to stay the course.” But I think that there's a hybrid response, where it's like, the elites really have done bad, but we don't just want to do what the populists want, we want to just have better elite-led policies, which include things like, we have to take productivity growth seriously, we can't just paper over a lot of the tensions and the conflicts that arise from that, we need to embrace them head-on and do everything we can to produce an economy that is productive, that works for everybody, but maybe not in the way that the populists think it will work.You can't have a growing economy where there's no churn, where there's no displacement, where it's complete, where there's no dynamism. You need to be able to accept some level of change.The politics of productivity growth (15:20)I would love to see what American politics looks like if the rest of this decade we saw the kind of economic productivity and wage growth that we saw in the fat part of the 1990s. We act like the current environment, that's our reality, and that's our reality as far as the eye can see, but I'll tell you, in the early '90s, there was a lot of gloom and doom about the economy, about productivity, how fast we could grow, the rise and fall of great powers, and America was overstretched, and after really three or four years of strong growth, it's like America Triumphant. And I'm wondering if that would be the politics of 2030 if we were able to generate that kind of boom.Yeah, I think that's totally right. And if you look at total factor productivity, which is my KPI [key performance indicator] or whatever, if you look at 1995 to 2005, you were back to almost two percent growth, which is what we had from 1920 to 1973. So you had a slow period from 1973 to 1995, and an even slower period since 2005, and you get back to that two percent. That's the magic number. I think if we had TFP at two percent, that changes everything. That's a game-changer for politics, for civility, for social stability, we'd really be going places if we had that.I was mentioning our reaction to trade and nuclear power. The obvious one, which I should have mentioned, is how we are reacting to AI right now. I think it's a good sign that Congress has not produced some sort of mega regulation bill, that this recent bill in California was not signed by Governor Newsom. Congress has spent time meeting with technologists and economists trying to learn something about AI, both the benefits and risks.And I think the fact that it seems like, even though there was this rush at some point where we needed to have a pause, we needed to quickly regulate it, that seems to have slowed down, and I think that's a good sign that perhaps we're able to hit a good balance here between wanting to embrace the upside and not utterly panicking that we're producing the Terminator.Absolutely. I think AI is something where the benefits are very clear, we're starting to see them already. The harms are extremely hypothetical, it's not evidence-based, it's really a lot of sci-fi scenarios. I think the right attitude in that kind of world is to let things ride for a while. If there are harms that arise, we can address them in narrowly tailored ways.I think government is sometimes criticized for being reactive, but reactive is the right approach for a lot of issues. You don't want to slow things down preemptively. You want to react to real facts on the ground. And if we need to react quickly, okay, we'll react quickly, but in a narrowly tailored way that addresses real harms, not just hypothetical stuff.I love what you're saying there about reaction. I'm a big preparer. I love preparation. If I'm going to go anywhere, I over-prepare for all eventualities, I will bring a messenger bag so if the world should end while I'm out, I'll be okay. I love to prepare. But one lesson I draw from the pandemic is that only gets you so far, preparation, because before the pandemic, there were a gazillion white papers about the possibility of a pandemic, all kinds of plans as a culture, we were sort of marinating in pandemic apocalypse films, maybe about turning us into zombies rather than giving us a disease.And then when we finally have a pandemic, it's like, “Where's the respirators? Where's this, where's that? We didn't have enough of this.” And so, while I'm sure preparation is great, what really helped us is we reacted. We reacted in real time because we're a rich country, we're a technologically advanced country, and we came up with a technological fix in a vaccine. To me — and again, I'm not sure how this is you meant it — but the power of being able to react effectively, boy, that's a pretty good capability of a well-functioning country.Yeah, and a slight difference between the pandemic and AI is it was not the first pandemic. AI is just such a unique set of theorized risks that people are like, nothing like this has ever happened before. This is like the introduction of a brand new super-intelligent species to the planet. This is the first time two intelligent species — if you want to count humans as an intelligent species — two intelligent species will the planet at the same time. And the theorization here is just so far out of the spectrum of our experience that it is hard to even see how you could prepare if those risk materialize. The only intelligent thing that is likely to do any good is to have our eyes open, and let's see what the harms are as they materialize.The problem with coming up with remedies for theorized harms is that the remedies never go away once they're implemented. Safety regulation never gets laxer over time. And so if you're implementing safety regulations because of real safety problems, okay, fair play, to some extent. I think in some dimensions we're too safe, but it kind of makes sense. But if you're doing it to just theorized harms that have never materialized, I think that's a big mistake.And you've written about this fairly recently. To me, there's a good kind of complexity with an economy that you have a high-functioning economy where people can connect, and colleges and universities, and businesses, and entrepreneurs, these networks work together to produce computer chips or large language models. That's a good kind of complexity.But then there's the other kind of complexity, in which you just have layer after layer of bureaucracy, and programs meant to solve a problem that was a problem 20 years ago and is no longer a problem, and that kind of complexity, that's not the kind we want, right?Yeah, I think you want the sophistication in the economy, but in a way that works for everybody. There have to be benefits to it. If you increase the burden of complexity without producing any net benefits, then people start to rebel against it, they start to be indifferent to or apathetic about the health of society. And there's an anthropologist, Joseph Tainter, who wrote this book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, and his theory is that once you have complexity without the marginal benefits of complexity, you're in for a shock, at some point, when people start becoming apathetic or hostile to the current order. And the complexity grows and shrinks as a system, you can't ever just control like, “Oh, let's do more, or let's do one percent less complexity.” Once people start to rebel against it, it snowballs and you could end up with a very bad situation.The problem with coming up with remedies for theorized harms is that the remedies never go away once they're implemented. Safety regulation never gets laxer over time.The future of clean energy (23:35)Nuclear versus solar versus geothermal: What do you like there?Solar panels have massively come down in cost, and we're not that far away from — in sort of number of doublings of deployment, and sort of long-deployment space — we're not that far away from the cost being so low that . . . you could almost round the panels cost to free. It almost makes sense. And the problem is, if you look at the solar electricity costs on utility-scale farms, they have not really moved in the last few years. And I think this is in large part because we're designing the solar farms wrong, we're not designing them for the era of cheap panels, we're designing them, still, to track the sun, and complex mechanisms, and too much space between the panels, and too much mowing required, and all that. So as we adapt to the new paradigm of very, very cheap panels, I think that you'll get lower solar costs.I think the other thing that is obviously complimentary to all of these sources actually is battery innovation. I'm very excited about one particular new cathode chemistry that maybe could drive the cost way, way down for lithium ion batteries. And so you're in a world where solar and batteries is potentially very, very cheap. And so for nuclear and geothermal, they have some advantages over solar.If batteries get cheap, the advantage of not the firmness . . . I think people think that the advantage of these sources versus solar is just that solar is variable and the other sources are constant, but that's less of an advantage if batteries are cheap, and I think you also want batteries to be able to respond to the fluctuations in demand. If we had an entirely nuclear-powered economy, the nuclear plants actually want to run at constant speed. You don't want to ramp them up and down very quickly, but demand fluctuates. And so you still want batteries to be a buffer there and be the lowest-cost way to balance the network.So the things that nuclear and geothermal can really compete on is land density — even gigawatt-scale nuclear where you have these giant exclusion zones and tons of land around them and so on, they're still more dense per acre than solar, and geothermal is maybe even denser because you don't need that exclusion zone, and so they could be much, much better in terms of density.There's an advantage — if you want a lot of power in a city, you probably want that to be supplied by nuclear. If you're more rural, you could do solar. Another possibility is portability. So there's future versions of nuclear that are more mobile. People have talked about space-based nuclear for being able to go to Mars or something like that, you want thermonuclear propulsion and you can't do that with solar. Or powering submarines and stuff. So I think there's always a place for nuclear.And then the other advantage for both nuclear and geothermal is if you don't need to produce electricity. So if you're producing just the heat — it turns out a big part of the cost of any sort of thermal source is converting it to electricity. You have to have these giant steam turbines that are very capital intensive. And so, if you just need heat, say up to 600 degrees C heat for nuclear and maybe 400 degrees C heat for deep geothermal, those are really good sources for doing that, and maybe if we had continued advances in drilling technology for geothermal or if we could figure out the regulatory stuff for nuclear, I think you could have very cheap industrial thermal energy from either of those sources.Nuclear and geothermal are competing against a backdrop where we'll probably have pretty cheap solar, but there's still some advantages and these sources still have some utility and we should get good at both of them.What do you think that energy mix looks like in 25 years, the electrical generation mix for this country?It would be surprising if it wasn't a lot of solar. My friend Casey Handmer thinks it's going to be 90-plus percent solar, and I think that's a little crazy.Do you happen to know what the percent is now?Oh, I don't know. It's probably like three or four or something like that, off the top of my head, maybe less. The other question is, what's the base? I think a lot of people just want to replace the energy we have now with clean energy, and much more we need to be thinking about growing the energy supply. And so I think there's a question of how much solar we could deploy, but then also how much other stuff are we deploying? Let's do a lot of everything. You do have to drive the cost of some of these sources down a bit for it to make sense, but I think we can.And then the real gains happen when maybe some of these . . . what if you could do some sort of conversion without steam turbines? What if you had ways to convert the thermal energy to electricity without running a steam cycle, which is hundreds-of-year-old technology? EssentiallyYou're just finding a new way to heat it up.Yeah, so you look at why has solar come down so much? It's because it's solid-state, easy to manufacture, any manufacturing process improvements just move forward to all future solar panels. If we had thermoelectric generators or other ways of converting the heat to electricity, that could be really great, and then there's other kinds of nuclear that are like solid-state conversion, like alpha voltaics and things like that. So you could have a box with cobalt 60 in it that's decaying and producing particles that you're converting to electricity, and that would be solid state. It's sometimes called a “nuclear battery,” it's not really a battery, but that would be a way to power cars maybe with something like that. That would be awesome.Nuclear and geothermal are competing against a backdrop where we'll probably have pretty cheap solar, but there's still some advantages and these sources still have some utility and we should get good at both of them.The road to a breakthrough (30:25)When, if ever, this century, do you think we get AGI, and when, if ever, this century, do you think we get a commercial fusion reactor?AGI, I'm still not really a 100 percent clear on how it's defined. I think that AI will get increasingly more capable, and I think that's an exciting future. Do we even need to emulate every part of the human brain in silicon? I don't think so. Do we need it to have emotions? Do we need it to have its own independent drive? We definitely don't need it to be a perfect replica of a human brain in terms of every capability, but I think it will get more capable over time. I think there's going to be a lot of hidden ways in which AGI, or powerful AI, or highly capable AI is going to happen slower than we think.I think my base reasoning behind this is, if you look at neurons versus transistors, neurons are about a million times more energy efficient. So six orders of magnitude is kind of what we have to traverse to get something that is equally capable. And maybe there's some tricks or whatever that you can do that means you don't have to be equally capable on an energy basis, but you still need to get four orders of magnitude better. And then the other thing about it is that, if you look at current margins that people are working on, things like the ChatGPT o1 model, it's a lot slower, it does a lot of token generation behind the scenes to get the answer, and I think that that's the kind of stuff that could maybe drive progress.Let's say we have a world where you ask an AI for a cure for cancer, and you run it on a big data center, and it runs for six months or a year, and then it spits out the answer, here's the cure for cancer, that's still a world where we have very, very powerful AI, but it's slow and consumes a lot of resources, but still ultimately worth it. I think that might be where we're headed, in a way, is that kind of setup. And so is that AGI? Kind of. It's not operating the same way as humans are. So this is different.You're not going to fall in love with it. It's nothing like that.I'm pretty uncertain about AGI: A) what it means, but what does it even look like in the end?Fusion, I'll give you a hot take here, which is, I think there will be net energy gain fusion developed in this decade. I think that someone will have it. I think that probably the first people to get it will be doing it in a completely uneconomical way that will never work economically. Most of the people that are working on fusion are working on DT fusion, which is another one of these sources that basically produces heat, and then you use a steam turbine, and then that produces electricity. I think that the steam turbine is just a killer in terms of the added costs.So all these sources are basically fancy ways of boiling water and then running a steam turbine. So what you want to look at is: What is the cheapest way to boil water? With fission, you just hold two magic rocks together and they boil water. With geothermal, you drill a hole in the ground and send water down there and it boils. With these DT fusion reactors, you build the most complex machine mankind has ever seen, and you use that to boil water — that's not going to be as cheap as fission should be. So I think that we'll struggle to compete with fission if we can ever get our act together.There's other kinds of fusion called aneutronic fusion. That's harder to do. I think it's still possible, maybe this decade, that someone will crack it, but that's harder to do. But the nice thing about that is that you can harvest electricity from those plasmas without a steam turbine. So if it's going to be economical fusion, I think it's plausible by 2030 somebody could crack it, but it would be that aneutronic version, and it is just technically a bit harder. You'll see some reports in a couple of years, like, “Oh, these people, they got net energy out of a fusion reactor.” It's like, okay, it's a scientific breakthrough, but look for the cost. Is it going to be competitive with these other sources?Do we even need to emulate every part of the human brain in silicon? I don't think so . . . We definitely don't need it to be a perfect replica of a human brain in terms of every capability, but I think it will get more capable over time.Reforming NEPA (35:19)Do you think we've sort of got a handle, and we've begun to wrangle the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA] to the ground? Where are we on reforming it so that it is not the kind of obstacle to progress that you've written so much about and been a real leader on?My base scenario is we're going to get reforms on it every two years. So we had some a year and a half ago with the Fiscal Responsibility Act, I think we were possibly going to get some in the lame duck session this year in Congress. None of these reforms are going to go far enough, is the bottom line. I think that the problem isn't going to go away, and so the pressure is going to continue to be there, and we're just going to keep having reforms every two years.And a lot of this is driven by the climate movement. So say what you will about the climate movement, they're the only mainstream movement in America right now that's not complacent, and they're going to keep pushing for, we've got to do something that lets us build. If we want to transform American industry, that means we've got to build, and NEPA gets in the way of building, so it's going to have to go.So I think my baseline case is we get some reforms this year in the lame duck, probably again two years later, probably again two years later, and then maybe like 2030, people have kind of had enough and they just say, “Oh, let's just repeal this thing. We keep trying to reform it, it doesn't work.” And I think you could repeal NEPA and the environment would be fine. I am pro-environment, but you don't need NEPA to protect the environment. I think it's just a matter of coming to terms with, this is a bad law and probably shouldn't exist.I am pro-environment, but you don't need NEPA to protect the environment. I think it's just a matter of coming to terms with, this is a bad law and probably shouldn't exist.The state of pro-abundance (37:08)What is the state of, broadly, a pro-abundance worldview? What is the state of that worldview in both parties right now?I think there's a growing, but very small, part of each party that is thinking in these terms, and I think the vision is not really concrete yet. I think they don't actually know what they're trying to achieve, but they kind of understand that it's something in this general direction that we've been talking about. My hope is that, obviously, the faction in both parties that is thinking this way grows, but then it also develops a little bit more of a concrete understanding of the future that we're trying to build, because I think without that more-concrete vision, you're not actually necessarily tackling the right obstacles, and you need to know where you're trying to go for you to be able to figure out what the obstacles are and what the problems you need to address are.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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Is AI a miracle? A threat? Will it free us? Enslave us? Both? Neither? What's the future of AI and governance? AI and art? AI and elections? AI and social media? AI and the economy? AI and the world?Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast: AI and Everything. On this special episode, we present highlights from more than a year of conversations with leading experts on the state of the AI revolution.Featuring Adam Thierer, Samuel Hammond, Liza Lin, Arnold Kling, Brian Frye, Joseph Tainter, James Pethokoukis, Robert Atkinson, Alice Marwick, and Ari Cohn.Links:Tech Policy Podcast 327: The Collapse of Complex SocietiesTech Policy Podcast 337: China and Domestic SurveillanceTech Policy Podcast 346: Who's Afraid of Artificial Intelligence?Tech Policy Podcast 355: Conservative FuturismTech Policy Podcast 361: AI, Art, Copyright, and the Life of BrianTech Policy Podcast 363: AI and ElectionsTech Policy Podcast 369: AI and State CapacityTech Policy Podcast 375: Tech Facts and FallaciesTech Policy Podcast 377: AI and Wicked Problems

A new movement is taking shape around the idea of restoring "abundance." Uniting thinkers from across the political spectrum -- including "supply-side progressives," "conservative futurists," and "state capacity libertarians" -- the movement aims to jump-start technological and economic progress by removing artificial constraints on supply and improving the quality of government. On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey interviews a leading analyst and advocate of abundance: Eli Dourado, chief economist at the new Abundance Institute and an expert on policy barriers to the emergence of new technologies. Discussing the "great stagnation" in productivity growth, Lindsey and Dourado focus on how most of productivity growth occurs outside the R&D lab, and how therefore broad institutional and cultural factors weigh heavily in determining an economy's overall vitality. Sharing an interest in the work of anthropologist Joseph Tainter, a leading theorist of civilizational collapse, the two also discuss our modern technological civilization's vulnerability to decline and cataclysm -- and how an abundance agenda can reduce that vulnerability. 

On this episode, Dimes and Judas discuss recent polling showing the majority of Americans now favor mass deportation of illegal immigrants, the disgusting fate of cryogenically frozen people, and the Libertarian Party being taken over by a gay meme. After discussing how the military intelligence community is hijacking AI through social engineering of social media, they segue into a discussion of the book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Joseph Tainter. Accounting several histories of civilizations that have fallen across history, they explore how the nature of complexity itself is the problem for both its skyrocketing demands of energy processing, but also its internal coherence. Lastly, on this episode of The Copepranos Society, Dimes welcomes American Elitist to speak on the recent Old Glory Club conference, the nihilism of Zoomers, and what can be learned from Osama Bin Laden. Timestamps: 00:38 – Dimes is Freezing in the Heatwave that is Killing Judas 03:55 – Eschatonic song submission “Bloodite Chat Fight” 05:59 – “I Glued My Balls to my Butthole Again” song 06:53 – Reparations Now Include Being in Jail for Selling Too Much Crack 11:01 – Judas the Weeder Suggest Dimes Fills his Yard with Corn (A Grass) 13:27 – Recap of “Digital Archipelago” Appearance and Post-Right Strategies 21:28 – A Full Chested Endorsement of Overreacting to Bad Takes 31:17 – What Happened to All the Cryogenically Frozen People? 41:44 – Axios Poll Showing Most Americans Support Deportation of Illegals 49:32 – Increasing Amount of Hispanics Support Deportation, Will That Save Them? 59:49 – Gay Meme Chase Oliver Elected to Lead Libertarian Party 1:08:18 – Show News and Updates 1:11:55 – Crimes Chat: [REDACTED] on Exploitation of Right-Wing Populism 1:19:54 – “Group Chats Rule the World” Article 1:28:10 – Discussion of “Reddit is a Psyop” by Flesh Simulator and Socially Engineering AI 1:36:42 – “Collapse of Complex Civilizations” Discussion Begins 1:38:42 – The Costs of a Complex Society are the Growth Ceiling 1:40:37 – A More Effective Definition of “Collapse” 1:44:25 – Examples of Complex Civilizations Which Collapsed 1:49:59 – The Symptoms of Collapse Within the Dominant Hierarchy 1:54:23 – The Crisis of Legitimacy Becoming Exponentially Expensive 1:55:30 – The Types of Early States 1:57:08 – Summary of all the Varied Explanations for Collapse 2:00:36 – The Problem of Increasing Demands of Energy to Process Information 2:04:31 – Growth Demands vs. Diminishing Returns for the Human Capital 2:11:31 – American Elitist Interview Begins

Por Mpswriterjoe Roma: a maior civilização ocidental de todos os tempos? A civilização que todos os outros admiram. Suas conquistas militares, proezas de engenharia e contribuições culturais continuam a moldar nosso mundo hoje. Afinal, há uma razão para o Capitólio em Washington, DC, ou o Banco da Inglaterra não parecerem deslocados na Roma do século I. Mas por mais espetacular que tenha sido sua ascensão, seu colapso foi igualmente devastador. Gerações de historiadores dissecaram cada documento e fragmento para decifrar exatamente o que deu errado. Para entender aquela lição mais preocupante: que tudo que sobe deve cair. Então, por que Roma entrou em colapso? Como o maior império que o mundo já viu se fragmentou? E isso vai acontecer conosco? Essas questões têm sido debatidas há séculos e as respostas nem sempre são claras. Neste artigo, vamos explorar a ascensão e queda de Roma e considerar se há alguma lição que possamos aprender com seu colapso que possa ser aplicável à nossa própria sociedade. O colapso de Roma Do Coliseu ao Panteão, o legado do Império Romano ainda pode ser visto e sentido no mundo de hoje. A data dada para o colapso de Roma é normalmente 476 DC, quando o rei germânico dos Torcilingi depôs Romulus Augustulus. Na realidade, a Queda de Roma não foi um evento único. Roma sofreu crises intermináveis no século III. Em resposta, eles degradaram gradualmente a moeda até que, em 265 DC, havia apenas 0,5% de prata em um denário em comparação com a prata pura nos primeiros dias do Império. Os custos logísticos e administrativos de administrar um império tão colossal aumentaram, causando o colapso. Além disso, a partir de 250 d.C., um período de 300 anos de variabilidade climática começou levando a grandes mudanças na precipitação e temperatura. Essas convulsões climáticas também afetaram os gauleses e os bárbaros germânicos que invadiram e saquearam a cidade. Foi a morte por mil cortes. O colapso das sociedades complexas A ideia de uma sociedade em colapso não é nova, e muitos historiadores e estudiosos estudaram os fatores que contribuem para o colapso social. Em seu livro de 1988, “O colapso das sociedades complexas ”, o antropólogo Joseph Tainter sugere que, à medida que as civilizações se expandem, elas devem se tornar mais complexas para lidar com os vários problemas que surgem. No entanto, a complexidade requer energia. À medida que a sociedade gasta cada vez mais energia para manter sua complexidade, os retornos diminuem com o tempo. Eventualmente, uma parte do sistema quebra, ou o ambiente muda, e o sistema complexo é incapaz de responder com rapidez suficiente, levando ao colapso total. O Império Romano não estava sozinho em seu colapso devido à sua complexidade. A civilização maia também enfrentou um destino semelhante. Eles construíram sistemas complexos de agricultura, irrigação e comércio, mas seu sucesso acabou levando à sua queda. À medida que sua população crescia, eles desbravavam mais e mais terras, mas eventualmente tiveram que desmatar demais. O desmatamento levou à erosão do solo, que destruiu sua capacidade de produzir alimentos. Sem comida suficiente, a população diminuiu e a complexa sociedade entrou em colapso. Não são apenas os fatores ambientais que podem contribuir para o colapso social. Tainter argumenta que, à medida que as sociedades se tornam cada vez mais complexas, os benefícios tornam-se cada vez menores. Os recursos necessários para sustentar a complexidade tornam-se cada vez mais significativos enquanto os benefícios diminuem. Eventualmente, a sociedade chega a um ponto em que não consegue mais sustentar sua complexidade e o sistema entra em colapso. Os desafios que enfrentamos Então, somos como Roma? Existem paralelos definidos entre nossa própria sociedade e a da Roma antiga. De certa forma, nossa sociedade é ainda mais precária, dependendo de um grande número de insumos, cada um dos quais funciona como um fator limitante. Se não tivéssemos um, tudo pararia. A pandemia expôs algumas dessas limitações, pois as cadeias de suprimentos just-in-time e a manufatura global deixaram muitas nações vulneráveis. No entanto, o COVID-19 teve uma taxa de mortalidade abaixo de 1%. E se a próxima catástrofe for ainda pior? À medida que continuamos a expandir e desenvolver nossa própria civilização, devemos estar cientes dos riscos de complexidade e dos desafios de manter nossos sistemas ao longo do tempo. Podemos precisar escolher entre complexidade cada vez maior e longevidade. Se quisermos sobreviver, uma vida mais simples pode ser a única solução. Fonte: Masonic philosophical society --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/malhete-podcast/message

Professor Joseph Tainter is an American anthropologist and historian studied anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Northwestern University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1975. As of 2012 he holds a professorship in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University. In this interview Professor Tainter discusses the thesis of his widely acclaimed work “The Collapse of Complex Societies”, 25 years after its publication in 1988. His book is among great classics of the study of collapse. In my view a work whose quality and relevance is comparable to Limits to Growth. Link to his book: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/collapse-of-complex-societies/author/tainter/ We have discussed the following with Prof. Tainter: 1) What is “collapse”? What is “complexity”? 2) Can you explain your theory of decreasing marginal returns over complexity? 3) What was particularly "complex" with the Western Roman Empire? 4) Why has the Western Roman Empire collapsed while the Eastern Roman Empire has not collapsed? 5) Why do you think Western society has NOT collapsed for 1500 years now? Why has it NOT collapsed over the last 200 years? 6) What major instances of decreasing marginal returns over complexity do you observe in global modern society? 7) What do you think of “Limits to Growth” by Meadows et. al?

Professor Thomas Oatley is the Corasaniti-Zondorak Chair of International Relations at Tulane University. He focuses his research and teaching on the intersection of American hegemony and international political economy (IPE). Widely regarded as a scholar at the leading-edge of IPE research, Thomas has in recent years adopted an explicit complex systems frame to undergird a powerful critique of orthodox IPE and international relations approaches to studying the global economy and world order. In this conversation we talk about the value of thinking in terms of complex systems, why complexity theory remains on the margins of global political scholarship, the nexus between our global financial and energy systems, green industrial policy and much, much more. Thomas can be found here: https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/departments/political-science/people/thomas-oatley He tweets @thoatley We discussed: ‘Energy and the Complexity of International Order', Global Environmental Politics (2021): https://direct.mit.edu/glep/article-abstract/21/4/20/107829/Energy-and-the-Complexity-of-International-Order ‘Green industrial policy and the global transformation of climate politics' (with B. Allan and J. I. Lewis), Global Environmental Politics (2021): https://direct.mit.edu/glep/article/21/4/1/107853/Green-Industrial-Policy-and-the-Global ‘Toward a political economy of complex interdependence', European Journal of International Relations (2019): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354066119846553?journalCode=ejta Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1990): https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/archaeology/archaeological-theory-and-methods/collapse-complex-societies?format=PB&isbn=9780521386739

Ran Prieur is a philosopher, writer, blogger, and is well known for writing on collapse, society, psychology, freedom, drugs and consciousness. We spoke about these topics and more.Leafbox: Ran, thanks so much for taking some time. I've been a reader of your essays for many, many years... I've watched some of your documentaries, but I think I get a sense of who you are, but if you were to introduce yourself to someone new who's never read one of your works, what's your first kind of statement, usually, on who you are, what you're into.Ran:Oh, I don't know. I've been doing a blog for about 20 years. I used to write about ... I guess I'd say I used to write about critique of civilization... Now I'm writing more about psychology and metaphysics and less about politics and society, but I'm still kind of interested in that stuff. I'm writing a novel. It's going very slowly. I just like to think about things and write about things.Leafbox:So maybe we can start there since you're in Seattle and you're more interested in the psychology. I was watching the short documentary about you, and I think a lot of ... I wouldn't call you a ... I guess  not a prepper, but a doomer, but there's kind of a sense of a meaning of crisis in the West. And I'm curious where you think that comes from?Ran:The sense ... where does the sense of crisis come from?Leafbox:Yeah. The meaning of crisis in the West, possibly.Ran:The meaning of crisis, like what meaning do people get out of thinking there's a crisis? Or ... I mean, I can talk a little bit about why people might ... what sense of meaning people might get out of ... I mean, I think there is a crisis and I think there's a lot of things that are going on right now that can't keep going the way they're going. And I used to more of a doomer. I still think that there's going to be a lot of big changes. I think we're in the middle right now. We're in the middle of a slow collapse and people get a sense of meaning about ... well, I think that's part of the reason that we're in a slow collapse, is people want to be part of something.People want to feel like they're participating in something that they feel good about. And society is not doing a very good job of giving that feeling to people.So they get into other things and other movements, some of which might destabilize the system that we've got. People might ... I mean, it's fun to imagine that everything is going to collapse and that I have these special skills other people don't have that let me do better other people. And a lot of people think that way, I might say the intersection of meaning and collapse.Leafbox:And where do you think ... why do you think society's failing to give meaning to Western, kind of modern people?Ran:Why do I think it's failing? Well, you can see this and a lot of things where something starts out ... when something starts out, people are excited about it and then it just builds up all kinds of cruff, it builds up lots of stuff that's just added on and it's easy to add stuff and hard to take stuff away. There's an important book that I haven't read, but everybody talks about it, The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, and he just talks about how complexity ... societies keep adding complexity, incrementally. It's easy to add complexity incrementally and hard to remove it incrementally.So they just tend to build up more and more complexity and then lose a bunch of complexity all of a sudden.So, you know, you could look at how much more expensive it is now to build things than it used to be. If you want to build a tunnel or a new subway, even accounting for inflation, it's way more expensive, and nobody is sure exactly why that is, but I think it's just that society gets more complex and the more complex it gets, the more clunky it gets.And part of that is the ability to provide meaning. I think ... I can go on a bit of a tangent. I'm optimistic about the unconditional basic income. If we get something like that, then ... what people want is they want to do things. The goal for society should be a society that builds itself upward from what people enjoy doing. And ... it's hard to do that. And a society might originally build itself upward for what people enjoy doing. And then people are just doing it to go through the motions and not really enjoying it, like in ancient Egypt, the first great pyramid was better than the second. The second was better than the third. I think it's because for the first great pyramid, people were excited about like, Oh, that's cool. We're going to build a pyramid. And then they built it, and they're like, Oh man, another pyramid. But that was all they knew how to do.So I'm just trying to triangulate this whole idea of why society starts to feel less meaningful as it goes on longer.Leafbox:Do you think other civilizations have the same decadence of collapse, like Asian or Russian or Middle Eastern or developing?Ran:Yeah. I think the same dynamic happens all over the world. I don't think this is uniquely a Western problem. It is a modern problem and there's never been so much complexity as there is right now. And just so much ... so many things we have to keep track of, and not all that stuff is going to be fun. And so it's going to be tedious, but I don't think this is uniquely Western at all. I think it's just modern. It has to do with the ... humans are always going to try, humans have been trying a lot of things that we've never tried before and we tend to mess it up and try, do it the wrong way a bunch of times until we get it right. That's happening right now all over the world with the internet and social media and lots of technologies that we haven't worked out how to work them well yet we're working them in a way that's not satisfying.Leafbox:So do you know who Balaji is? He's that South Indian American kind of venture capitalist, philosopher, writer, Bitcoin guy. And he's modeled the future based on what he considers three contemporary forces, that being what he calls the CCP model, which is the Chinese kind of authoritarian state versus what he calls the NYT model, New York times, future model, where it's kind of a progressive eco kind of authoritative state, versus the BTC model, which is the Bitcoin kind of decentralized, utopian, anarchistic model. Peter Thiel also has a similar model, but he calls it sharia law versus the CCP model, versus eco hyper kind of ... progressivism, like European, or ...I'm curious if you're in Seattle and Washington, and you're kind of worried about collapse, what's your future image of what is going to collapse and what's the future? Is it a Mad Max image? Is it a CCP kind of China image? Sharia law image? I'm just curious what you think. Use the term "long emergency," kind of the long slow collapse, but I'm curious what you see the future as.Ran:Well, I have to break it down into different things. I don't ... and one of those things is technology, and another one of those things is the economy. And if I could just start with those, I think economic collapse is inevitable and there's going to be ... the economy we've got is based on perpetual growth, exponential growth, and there's no way we can keep having exponential growth. I think we're probably actually already done with the age of exponential growth and they're just kind of counting things that they shouldn't count to try to argue that ... economists are trying to create the illusion that we still have exponential growth and we don't. But we're going to have to figure out a way to live without that. So there's going to be all kinds of economic troubles.And technology, my latest thinking on that is it's not going to be monolithic or global. It's going to be different everywhere. There's going to be really advanced ... I mean, technological innovations and ventures are going to continue. There's going to be lots of cool stuff and materials, and lots of questionable stuff, and AI, I mean, it's exciting stuff, but dangerous stuff. There's going to be lots of cool technological stuff and dangerous technological stuff continue to happen all through this. But in other places it's going to totally go to hell. There might be some neighborhoods that are Mad Max-like, but it's not going to be on a global scale.Yeah, that's all I can think of right now. I mean, I don't really know much about China at all. It's such a big subject that I haven't really looked into it, but they're going to be in trouble because their system is also based on perpetual growth, and Americans continue to buy more things than the Chinese are making and they have their own troubles with the limits of authoritarianism.Leafbox:You ... going to limits of authoritarianism. I used to be more of a fan of the concept of UBI, but I think the whole last two years of COVID have made me very nervous about UBI, and the potential of UBI being connected to state requirements. I'm just curious if you have any kind of fears of UBI being limited to authoritarian aspects?Ran:I don't think ... the best thing would be not to have a UBI, but just have everything necessary be free, but that's really hard to pull off in practice. So I think I see the UBI as a transition from more of more of a top-down economy to more of a bottom-up economy where people can ... if people's basic needs are taken care of, then they can work more for quality of life and less for money. But yeah, I-Leafbox:Ran, my fear is let's say you live in Singapore, a modern technocratic state, and you get your UBI, a thousand Singaporean dollars a month, and then they start requiring you, if you didn't get the latest booster, Oh, we saw you spit on the ground once.Ran:Oh, yeah.Leafbox:There's a lot of carrots and sticks associated with the UBI.Ran:Then it's not unconditional, is it? Then it's a conditional basic income and that's not good. It's got to be something everyone gets, I think.Leafbox:So your definition is unconditional. I didn't hear that.Ran:Yeah, that's what the "U" is, unconditional. Everybody. I mean ... and I see you're right, that's a real danger that they're going to do that and they're going to call it unconditional though really it is conditional. I mean, you're probably right. That's going to happen in some places and to some extent, so then the challenge is to try to keep it ... try to make sure that they can't take it away for things like that. For any reason, really. I mean, I think should everyone should get it.Leafbox:Have you heard of central bank digital currencies?Ran:Yeah, that sounds ... yeah, I don't really, that's not really something I follow, but ... yeah, I don't really know much about that.Leafbox:It's just a way to create debt mechanisms. Instead of the central treasuries creating money and then giving it to banks, they would give it directly to the end user via an app. So the digital one in China has that.Ran:Okay.Leafbox:But the problem is then they can have negative inflation or turn off your cash based on whatever they do. So if you ... in China, "Oh, you said the word Tiananmen," and then they'll just turn off your cash. So something similar is happening in the US with like if you say anything wrong on PayPal, then they'll just turn off your PayPal account. Or if we saw that in ... you remember in Canada with the truckers, they got their bank accounts turned off, and things like that.Ran:Yeah. I mean, that's a danger. They could totally do that. I mean, there's a constant struggle. It's never going to end, the struggle for people to be able to live in a way that they enjoy living and the struggle between that and the other desire that people have when they have power to leverage that power and get more power. And we're never going to be done with that struggle. We're just going to have to ... I think we're less willing, humans as a whole are less willing to see people starve and die from lack of having necessities. I think in practice as it works out like that, there's going to be the people who don't obey or whatever are going to live worse.Leafbox:So that's interesting how you said ... do you think you have a tendency ... I believe you're kind of in the underground and kind of counterculture always, but how do you maintain that freedom? That kind of philosophy of freedom?Ran:I'm not sure. Could you phrase that another way? I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.Leafbox:I'm curious how do you keep free in terms of your thoughts or actions against a state or a group that might be against those freedoms?Ran:How do I personally?Leafbox:Yeah.Ran:Well, I've just been lucky. I've been lucky that I have enough money that I don't have to have a job. That's how I do it. And I don't spend a lot of money. I try to live frugally so that the money I have will last the rest of my life. But in general, people just have to find some way to make it through, there's going to be ... there's a lot of niches. There's a lot of ... people just have to find a niche. And I mean, I don't know, I'm starting to veer off into trying to give advice to people who I don't know anything about, but I'll just say that yeah, for me, I've just been lucky. I bought a house in Spokane when the market was low and sold it when the market was high. And I got the money from that.Leafbox:Ran, I was going to ask you where do you ... just maybe in terms of freedom, where do you see the counterculture now?Ran:Where do I see the counterculture now?Leafbox:Yeah.Ran:In terms of freedom? I'm not sure exactly. I mean, there's always going to be cultures and countercultures and freedom is such a loaded word. But ...before I talk about freedom, if I were to define freedom, I like to define, I like to say the most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. And all other freedoms come from the freedom to do nothing. If you don't have the freedom to do nothing, you don't have the freedom to do anything. It's like the void from which everything is created. It's like, I've got nothing to do, we have nothing to do, then you can figure out what you really want to do.So for me, that's the basis of freedom. And the word freedom gets thrown around a lot, and this is ... when people talk about freedom, sometimes they're talking about power, like, okay, you're driving your car and somebody cuts you off. That to you, it feels like power. They've exercised power over you by cutting you off. To them, it feels like freedom. They get to go wherever they want. So that's the constant trade off of freedom versus power. And a goal of a society should be to have as much freedom as we can. And as little power, people having power over other people as we can.Leafbox:Interesting. And then Ran, right now what kind of ... maybe ... I've followed some of your zine work and I've seen the development of your novel. What kind of other things are you interested in right now? Could be anything, technology, lifestyle, baking, anything?Ran:The ... I've been ... my latest obsession, one of my favorite motivational quotes is from the filmmaker John Waters, who said "Life is nothing if you're not obsessed." So I just like to get obsessed with little things. And I've been obsessed lately with hits of the seventies, believe it or not. I grew up in the seventies and I remember a lot of songs from then. I've just been going back and re-listening to a lot of those songs I remember from the seventies and making playlists. So that's my latest little obsession, but yeah, you mentioned baking. I'm doing ... I'm starting to make pasta now, which is surprisingly not that hard, to do homemade pasta. It takes more time than using pre-made pasta, but it's not hard and it's a lot better. So that's another little thing I'm doing.Leafbox:Are you still interested in the occult, and pan-psychism, and some of those-Ran:Totally. Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I'm totally ... I mean, it's been a while since I've read any books on that stuff, but I'm always interested in woo-woo stuff. Yeah. In models of reality, other than materialism, and ... just all kinds of weird stuff.Leafbox:And then where does that interest in the woo-woo come from?Ran:I don't know where it comes from. It's something that's always been there. I just always like ... I like to see the cracks, I like to look beyond, I like to see things that are not working the way they should and are ... it's hard to explain it. That's not quite how I say it. What is it exactly? I mean, it's just ... it's newness. It's novelty. It's the world's supposed to be this way in terms of description of reality. And then you see something that doesn't fit, and wow. What is that? Maybe let me follow this thread and see where it leads.And there's the idea that maybe outside of this I mean it's the whole, what the movie The Matrix points to, that the reality we see is not the real reality. And the real reality is more interesting. I wonder if it comes down to a kind of boredom, I don't know. You want-go ahead.Leafbox:I think he wonders ... you have a lot of writing about psychedelics, and I think that always opens up questioning of reality. And I'm just curious if that has an overlap there, or-Ran:You know, I've used psychedelics. I'm actually watching that Michael Pollan TV show, How to Change Your Mind. And I read his book, and something I noticed about his show, How to Change Your Mind—they have all these psychedelic trip reports and every single trip report is better than any trip I've ever had or anyone I know has ever had. They make it seem like every time you do psychedelics, you go off in another universe and you explore all your past traumas and you come back a changed person. And I'm afraid people are going to get their hopes up too much from watching that.But I still think ... the insights that I've got from psychedelics are not that earth shaking, but they really helped me appreciate nature more. That's my favorite thing to do. I mean, I haven't done ... actually haven't done psychedelics in quite a while. I haven't done a large dose in a while, but when I do, I always like to go out and walk in nature and I just appreciate a lot more the beauty of ... well, when I'm speaking carefully, I don't call it nature. I call it the non-human made world. And compared to the non-human made world, the human made world looks pretty clunky and ugly, but we have a lot of room to do it better.Leafbox:What do you think about the kind of democratization of psychedelics?Ran:Oh, yeah, I mean look, they're not ... there's some problems. They're not completely miraculous, but I think it's overall good that more and more people are using them. And I think overall that's going to be good for society. It's not automatically going to make you a better person to use psychedelics. And a lot of people are going to use too many and fry their brains. But overall I'm in favor of more and more people using psychedelics. And I think it's going to cause some interesting changes in the world. It's inevitable.Leafbox:Going back to the occult and ... I think on one podcast I heard you were talking about, I think biblo ... I've heard the term-Ran:Bibliomancy, yeah.Leafbox:Are you still using that, or how is that?Ran:I do. It's a fun thing to do. It's not ... it's kind of like a parlor trick where you don't know exactly how it works and the way ... I guess, after I wrote about it, I found out that the normal way the people use bibliomancy is to open a book, you open a book at random, you riffle the pages, you put your finger down, and the way most people do it is they're looking for a phrase or a sentence. And that's not how I do it. I like to look to pull out a single word. So I use a dictionary, or ... I recommend a thesaurus to beginners because it's more simpler answers, but I use a dictionary. I just flip it on. I might be starting to write and I'm like, Let me have an idea. I say, Give me a seed crystal for what I'm going to write about today, and our starting point. And I put my finger down and there's a word. And surprisingly often whatever word I land on either fits the question or it's helpful.So yeah, that's something I enjoy doing. And it's something that's helpful. And I have to be careful talking about it because you can ... if people get in trouble, if you do it too much, you can really get into a bad mental state where every time you need to make a decision, you go, I mean, it could be bibliomancy, it could be tarot, it could be whatever you're doing. You could get in a pattern of relying on it too much or taking it too seriously. So I have to do all these disclaimers, but if you don't get all wide-eyed and goggle-eye about it, if you just say, Oh, I'll do this fun thing and it's going to help me, then I think it can help. I Find it helpful. Yeah.Leafbox:Do you have any religious practices, Ran?Ran:No. I mean, religious is a ... that's something I write about, is religious is a hard word to ... it's a tricky word to define, but I guess you could say bibliomancy is a religious practice, but I was raised Catholic and I went to Catholic church and at the time I did not like it. And I don't go to church now, but looking back, I kind of appreciate the epic spirituality of Catholicism, how it really gives a sense of a world beyond this world that's really epic and beautiful.And I know there's ... the word religion points to a lot of things. And some of those things are harmful, and some of them are necessary. One of the things it points to is just community. It's like people being with a group of people who think the same way, and that's always going to be that. And the challenge, if you're choosing that group of people, is to make sure they're not thinking in a way that's damaging or that's veering off from reality, so-Leafbox:Are you agnostic, or atheist, or what's your spiritual belief system?Ran:I mean, it's pretty much what anyone who's done psychedelics says, is that mind is more fundamental than matter. There is a universal ... I mean, I don't use the word God, because it ... sometimes I use the word God cause it's a really convenient word, but I don't want to give anyone the idea that I believe in a human-shaped sky father deity. That's a silly idea, and I think it's on the way out as more people use psychedelics and as the patriarchal culture, hopefully, the patriarchal culture is going to decline. And when people think about the absolute universal, they're not going to think about some old man. They're going to think about something that's way beyond what we can understand, but we see a little sliver of the universal.So I guess I would say ... I wouldn't say I'm a religious or a ... I wouldn't say an atheist because that kind of implies ... that implies materialism, belief that the matter's final reality. I don't like to say I'm religious cause that implies belief in a sky father deity. But I believe in a universal consciousness that we are all a part of. And there's all kinds of things about reality that we can't understand from here.Leafbox:Do you think there are ... that universal force is only good or are there evil forces, or-Ran:A quote I like is that, it contains ... call it the universal, call it God, whatever, "It embraces all opposites." So it includes absolutely everything. So there's good in it, there's evil in it. I think evil ... have you ever see the movie Time Bandits? It's one of my favorite movies. It's like an early Terry Gilliam film, and there's this bit in Time Bandits where they run into God, the Supreme Being, and they ask ... this little kid asks God, "Why is there evil?" And God says, "Oh, I forget. But it seems to me it has something to do with free will."So I think ... one thing I like to imagine is ... people imagine you're going to die and you're going to go to heaven. What if we're already in heaven right now? And we don't know it because we've forgotten certain things. We've wandered off into a bad neighborhood of heaven. And if heaven is heaven, it has to include the possibility to ... oh man, there's been some smoke in the air lately. Very smokey. Wow. The air doesn't look very smokey, but I'm getting these coughs. Let me see if I can go inside and see if it helps.I forgot what I was talking about, let's see, I was talking about the idea that if we're already in heaven.Leafbox:Correct. Yeah, in the neighborhoods, heaven.Ran:Yeah. This could be a bad neighborhood of heaven. And we're just trying to find our way back into a good neighborhood, or ... there's this famous question, can God make a rock so big he can't lift it? Or can God make a burrito so hot that he can't eat it? And you could say that, can the universal consciousness forget that it is the universal consciousness? And that's a common insight that people have on psychedelics, that ... that's like a cliche. Oh, we are all God. I think that's basically right, that there is a universal consciousness that divided itself up, or duplicated itself into all of us, and beyond that, it's really hard to say what's going on.Leafbox:Where does your universal consciousness emerge from?Ran:It's on the inside. It's not on the outside. It's like ... a metaphor I like to think of is, there's the universal consciousness just like looking through different keyholes or pinholes. And it looks through one keyhole and it sees what you see. It looks through another, it sees what I see. Not just what we see, but what we experience, our whole sense of self. So your whole sense of self or my whole sense of self is something larger that's making itself smaller and constraining its view in different ways. So where does it emerge from? It always existed. It's outside time and incomprehensible to us. But within us, it's ... go ahead.Leafbox:No, I was going to ask just related to consciousness is, do you have any thoughts on augmented reality and relationship with consciousness?Ran:Augmented reality ...Leafbox:VR ... if this is ... a lot of people-Ran:Yeah. I see what you're saying. I mean, that's a new path. I mean, augmented reality is a new thing that consciousness is doing. At the same time I wonder if we're just ... there's two directions you can go with it. You can go outward or inward. You can use it to go deeper and deeper inside of things, or ... man, having trouble putting this into words. But imagine you've got augmented reality, just trying to teach people how to do martial arts, and they go, they put on this full body suit, and they have this simulated person they're fighting. You can only go so far simulating it. Or let's say somebody's trying to figure out how to do augmented reality about how to fix a car, how to repair an engine. And you can only go so far with a simulation before you have to go back to reality. If you're trying to learn martial arts, you have to go back to the real physical world.And it's funny because on one hand I think the physical world is not exactly real, but the physical world is where we work it all out, and you've got to get back to ... augmented reality has to remain anchored in the physical world, and if it veers off too much from it it will kind of make people insane and be less effective.Leafbox:Ran, do you think that reality is a simulation?Ran:I mean, I think that's a nice metaphor. I think this whole physical world, it's not that ... now one way to think about it is this whole physical world is not really real because it's all being simulated. But the way I see it is, this is the simulation. I'm a flesh avatar, of something that I can't understand, and this whole physical world is the ... it's not that it's real because it's being simulated. It's that it is a simulation that we are all in and this is what we have to work with.It's like, this is how ... imagine you're just one mind. Let's imagine solipsism. You're just one mind floating in space and you create this entire world. Solipsism is a cool idea because you can't be falsified. It's like, you can't prove that's not true, that you alone are floating in nothingness and imagining everything. But then where it breaks down is, okay, if I'm imagining everything then where does all this stuff come from? Where does all the not me come from? Where does all this stuff come from that ... where does surprise come from? Where does all the stuff come from that is not consciously part of me?You could say, well, it's still me, but it's my subconscious. But in that case, it's much bigger. I mean, it doesn't really make sense to say it's only me given that the part that's not me that I'm not conscious of is so much is so much bigger.So trying to tie that back to the physical world, it's like, you're floating in space and you find someone else floating in space and you join together with them to make a world together. And then sometimes there's two of you, then there's three, then there's four. And if it's just you, you can do anything, you know, you can create anything. It's just your conscious mind floating in nothingness. You can create anything. You can create anything you want. The same was ... it's like a single player video game with good mods and good cheat codes. You can do anything. But then as soon as it gets multiplayer, you have to work it out with other people.So when I see the physical world as just ... the physical world is what you get when you have multiple perspectives that are trying to reach agreement. And I don't know, I think in one sense, reality is a popularity contest. But then if reality's a popularity contest, who gets to vote? And I think it goes far beyond humans. There's all kinds of perspectives or beings or aspects of consciousness that are collaborating to decide what this world looks like. And maybe humans aren't all that important in the whole scheme of it.Leafbox:Well Ran, that connects me to, have you ever done DMT?Ran:I never have. I would like to, but I know there's ways to synthesize it from Morning Glory seeds, I'm just too lazy to do that. So I'm just kind of waiting until someone gives me some, but I would like to do DMT. Yeah, never have.Leafbox:Have you read any of the research in DMT, like the beings, or the prolonged DMT experiences?Ran:I have seen that people are trying to get it to make DMT that last for a longer trip. That's a cool idea. I mean, maybe something bad will happen, but I think they should try it. I think it would be fun. I mean, yeah ... I look at the psychonaut subreddit. That's basically where I look, where ... that's the only psychedelic community that I look at regularly, is the psychedelic subreddit. And they're always talking about machine elves and the various DMT entities that you run into. I've never ... and haven't ever used a big dose of any psychedelic. I always just using just regular kind of small doses, but I've never actually hallucinated. I've never seen anything that's not there. My mind has never gone off into some other world. So it would be cool to do that sometime.Leafbox:Yeah, there's a neuroscientist out of Okinawa, Andrew Gallimore. I think he's in charge of that DMT, kind of psychoneurotic extension program. Very fascinating.Ran:Okay, cool.Leafbox:They're just trying to enter into that other world for longer to see what happens or what they can learn or take back or ... a lot of interesting. Have you ever ... I don't know if you've ever done, heard of the game of life computer science program? it's like-Ran:Yeah. I think I read about that a long time ago. Can you remind me about what that is?Leafbox:Well, every first-year computer science student basically learns the game of life, and you set up these rules and it almost looks like a checker board. You put these little bacteria on there and you set rules. If the bacteria's next to another bacteria, they mate, if next to three, they fight. And then what happens, these self-emergent civilizations emerge just from these basic rules. And a lot of people extend that then to reality, that the rules are just beyond our grasp, but those rules are defining the consciousness or the reality or ... so it's similar to what you're talking about of, it's just the fascinating neuroscience and math and information. And so the DMT people want to enter that world because they think that's a way to see the information behind this layer of reality.Ran:Okay. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I mean, that's a cool idea. I have to wonder about the limits of the human brain to ... it's like maybe the drugs put your brain temporarily into a state where you can see this stuff, and then ... but you can't stay in that state and you have to come back to this state and then you're like, It made total sense when I was in there, and now that I'm back here, it doesn't make sense. So I wonder how that could line up with ... how that could synergize with actual trying to actually change the human brain to have a different structure. And that's getting into some real weird stuff.I think one of the technologies that is going to come along that is going be interesting and dangerous, but also maybe, fun is brain hacking. I think there's going to be a lot of, assuming we don't get a total tech crash—when I'm talking about doom, I always have to keep the possibility open that we are going to get a total technology crash. But if we don't, if there's still people somewhere that are doing new stuff with technology, I think brain hacking is going to be big.Whatever we can do by ... it's going to get to a level where ... or LSD will seem primitive. You take this molecule and put it inside your brain and you could actually have implants in your brain that are doing whatever. I think there's going to be a lot of action on that front in the coming decades.Leafbox:So would you consider yourself a techno utopian, then? Kind of-Ran:Oh, I don't I that ... man, no. I do ... I don't want to put that tag on myself. I think technology is going to do some cool stuff. There's this quote from I think Arthur C. Clarke that says, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And I like a variant on that, which is, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. And that's the insight I get when I'm on psychedelics is like, Wow, everything ... you know, you go out, you walk down to a river in early summer, and this is it. This is ... these creatures, these plants and animals and water and whatever, they've got a system that's robust, that's enjoyable. And humans are tinkering around trying to do our own thing just like that. And we're trying to duplicate in our creations the heavenly nature of the non-human made world.So I do think I'm utopian in the sense that I think we can do a lot better. And I think inevitably we're going to do a lot better, humans. I think humans, it's our nature that we try to ... we're always doing crazy new things and we make a lot of mistakes and then eventually we start to get it right. I think we're still, in a lot of ways still in the mistake-making phase and we're going to get it right. And I think in a thousand years, they'll look back at us as pretty brutish and primitive. And if we were to look a thousand years ahead of them, we'd say, Oh, they're doing some cool stuff, but maybe they'd also be doing some stuff that we don't like. So in that sense, I'm a utopian.Leafbox:Do you have any thoughts on biogenetics and some of ... what are your fears on technology, in terms of ... some of mine personally are just losing the aspect of humanity.Ran:Yeah. I think that's the way that humans could actually go extinct. If there's one way ... if you ask me what way is most likely for humans to go extinct, is through biotech where we ... we're like, We're going to make this change to our own genomes that looks like an improvement. And because we're shortsighted, it's not an improvement and it makes things worse. And we can't go back to the way it was before. And we go extinct. That's a real possibility, that humans are going to drive ourselves into extinction through irreversible biotech.But then when I talk to people who actually know more than I do about genetic technology, it's really hard. It's not like the DNA is like a blueprint where you go in and you're like, Oh, we're going to give people wings. It's really hard to go in there and just get whatever changes you want. You have to muck around and try different things, and then something comes out that is not what you expected.So yeah, but we're going to do it. Humans are going to do crazy stuff with genetic technology. And then it's going to be interesting to see where it goes.Leafbox:Talking about genetics and biotechnology and even bio warfare, do you have any thoughts on the last two years of COVID, or how has that been for you?Ran:Oh, I mean, I enjoyed quarantine because I like to stay home anyway. And I think one good thing that came out of it was the whole working from home thing. I mean, I'm here in Seattle, the King County administration building is now empty. They've gone 100% working from home. And there's a lot of places that ... and it's better overall. And I think it's going to ... there's a lot of managers, a lot of managerial jobs that are not really necessary, and the managers want to keep people in the office because they have power over people, but people working from home and then things might work out better with fewer managers. I think that's a big benefit that's come out of COVID, is more working from home.Of course, with the class aspect, the service workers can't work from home. And it's funny, the people who still had to work during COVID are the people who make the least money, but a lot of people did get ... are living better now because of COVID making it easier to work from home.Leafbox:I read some of your thoughts on 9/11 on your website.How do you feel about kind of ... I call it kind of the mind virus, or some of the ... that went on for the last two years, or three years with the pandemic. I think the West lost a lot of ability to ... free speech. The psychological operations were clear. I'm just curious what you think about just some of the responses to the virus, or the vaccine, or anything like that. The masking, the rules.Ran:I mean, yeah, some of the rules are silly. Like, they actually said that it's not good to wear a mask, and the reason they said that was they wanted to save the masks for the medical places where they were really ... I mean, it's going to be clunky, there's going to be mistakes. But I think overall ... I mean, when COVID first appeared, my first thought was, why are we taking so many precautions against something that only has a 1% death rate? But then it makes sense when you look at hospitals because if hospitals get overwhelmed, a lot of people would die who would not otherwise die. So the way I started framing COVID was, as long as hospitals are not getting overwhelmed, we should call it a win and we should just do whatever precautions are necessary to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed, and beyond that, we should just let people get sick if they want.I think ... I understand why people are afraid of vaccinations because here's the central authority saying you've got to put this thing in your body. But when I look at the science, it looks pretty good. I got the vax, I got the Moderna vax, and I think it helped me when I got COVID to get less sick than I would've got. I think it's a pretty interesting technology, the mRNA thing that they developed, and it might ... we might still not have it if they hadn't had to develop it really fast to try to fix COVID.Leafbox:I was just curious, do you partake in any of the conspiracy theories or are you outside of that?Ran:I think, I mean as far as I can figure out, it did come from a Chinese biolab. It was accidentally released. That's what I think about it, is that, it was a Chinese biolab that was tinkering with bio weapons or something, and they were sloppy with, and it accidentally got released. That's where I think it came from. And beyond that, I don't really prescribe to any of the COVID conspiracy theories.Leafbox:What do you think about conspiracies in general? What do you think?Ran:I mean, conspiracy's one of those words that points to a lot of things. But I think it's good for people to not take it face value, what we're told, and to try to figure things out on our own. At the same time, I mean with the internet, it's really easy to just create these groups that veer off into beliefs with, I mean, you get into echo chambers really easily. And it's easy, I mean, it's human nature to want to tell beautiful stories. I think that's where a lot of this comes from. You want to tell a story about the world that makes the world seem more exciting and more fun to live in. And the internet allows us to self filter where we get our stories from. And people can go off and find their own stories that paint a world that seems more exciting for them to live in or more meaningful. And they can find other people who back up from that.I stopped writing about politics because I just got tired of arguing. But I'll say this about Trump, is that he's a political cold reader. He's a cold reader is someone who like, someone like a fake psychic who will say, "Oh yes, I've been thinking of a person named Jeff," and was like, "Oh yes, yes. You know my brother's named Jeff." Trump does that on a massive scale where he'll just say stuff and whatever people respond to, he says more of that stuff and that's why he became president. Because he's so talented at doing that. But that's also what the internet in general does, is if you start thinking of a certain way and you plug it in, it can reinforce that. And you can get, I mean, this AI is going to do some crazy stuff like bots that, I mean, I haven't read it a lot. And they're more and more bots on, right?And my view of AI, which I mentioned on a blog a couple weeks ago is that, I think the way to look at it is something created by humans and AI is part of the human story, and it's going to give humans, this is going to be interesting to see what the intersection on the internet of bots feeding back what people want to believe or feeding back stories that people enjoy telling each other and how that could grow in AI space.Leafbox:Ran, how do you avoid, or do you drop into the echo chamber?Ran:Well, so how do I avoid dropping into an echo chamber is just to ...Leafbox:Or, conversely, do you go further into it?Ran:To go further into it is, I mean, I guess, I've done that a little bit in the past where you're like, you're into something and you, to go into it is, I guess it's, you can almost put in terms of, you can always define in terms of the body. Do you feel like your body's expanding or do you feel like it's contracting? Or you could just say the mind is expanding or contracting and to go, it feels good to contract, it feels good to zoom in. It feels good to look at smaller and smaller things and see more importance and value in smaller and smaller things. And I try to resist that by ...And the nice thing about having a blog is people will tell me when I'm wrong. And readers have done that a lot over the years and it's helping me change my opinions a lot, is to have to people emailing me saying, "Hey, here's some evidence that goes against what you're saying."So the way to avoid, the way to get out of an echo chamber is just painful expansion into stuff that you don't like hearing. And you have to be willing to endure some pain to see things that don't fit your narrative. And I'm not great at that, but I do try to practice that. And there are some people who say they intentionally go to all the whole spectrum of political sites to keep their perspective wide. I'm just not interested enough to do that. But I do try to remain open to the idea that I'm wrong and practice.I think it's good to, for metaphysics, I've written about this in terms of, for example, solipsism. I don't actually believe in solipsism, but if I can go temporarily into that space is helpful and I can pull out of it. Or determinism, I can go temporarily, if I start to think I'm better than other people, then I go into determinism mind space and under determinism, any way that I'm better than anyone else is 100% luck. And I can't go around thinking, Oh, I'm all smart and these people are stupid, because I'm just lucky and they're unlucky. And you go into determinism and then it does its job when you go out of it. So I think that's a good mental skill is to practice going into and out of ways of thinking. And if a way of thinking is fun and compelling, then it's easier to get into it and harder to get out of it, but you have to practice that.Leafbox:Ran, what's some of the examples of where you've changed your mind?Ran:I guess I'd go, I guess it'd look more like, I used to think that the whole system was going to collapse. If you look back at stuff I was writing in 2003, about 20 years ago, I thought that the whole global society was a lot more delicate than it turns out to be. People use the house of cards metaphor, the whole thing is going to come down like a house of cards. Well, the moment that I changed my mind on that was Hurricane Katrina. And if you'd asked people a year before Hurricane Katrina, what would happen if America's largest port city would be shut down for months, they would say, "Oh, it would cause a cascading series of effects and we'd all be living in the ruins." But actually, no, it just, where I was, the only effect of Katrina was gas prices got a little higher. So, I changed my mind on how fragile or how robust the human society is. It really can take a lot of pretty hard hits.At the same time, every complex society eventually falls. And I think there's going to be some event, I know I'm going off on a tangent here. There's going to be some event in the future where everyone looks back on the effect of the equivalent of the Visigoths sacking Rome. People don't know much about Rome. Ancient Rome would be, "Oh, Rome was just buzzing along fine. And then one day the Visigoths sacked it, and then it was over." When really it was weakening for hundreds of years before that event happened and continued weakening for hundreds years after. So I think we get we're going to have a Visigoths sack Rome event. It hasn't happened yet. The history will look back, dumb history will look back and say, "Oh, that's where it all collapsed," and to us it'd be like, "Oh, that's just another bad thing that happened."So, I'm going back to the subject where I've changed my mind on, like the critique of civilization. I haven't exactly, I still think that the best primitive tribes live better than us. And if you could pick any human society that ever happened in the history of the world, if they got the best ones, they would all be nature based cultures. But at the same time, a lot of nature based cultures are terrible. So the tribal people were in the whole range from living a lot better than us to living a lot worse in terms of subjective quality of life. So I used to write a lot about civilization, and now I stopped using that word because it has too much baggage. The word civilization points to things that I'm against, like central control and empire. And it also points to stuff I'm in favor of, which is people getting nicer to each other. And those don't necessarily go together.Leafbox:Have you heard of Dmitry Orlov?Ran:I actually, I read his stuff, I haven't read his stuff recently, but back in the aughties, I actually emailed back and forth with him a couple times and I read his stuff. He's an interesting thinker.Leafbox:I just wondered if he, I mean, he definitely thinks, well, he leans more to the west in his analysis. But I mean, he does have the example of Russia collapsing, and I lean to the long emergency framework, like you.Ran:Okay, okay.Leafbox:Collapse takes centuries. It's not like an instant thing. And some things get better, some things get worse. So it's hard to know really.Ran:Yeah. Yeah.Leafbox:I am concerned ...Ran:Go ahead.Leafbox:Just personally, I just wonder, in your writing, do you have any topics you want to write about but can't or self censorship or anything like that?Ran:Not really. The left right now has certain things that it doesn't want people to say, but I'm not really interested in saying those things. So, I mean, the main self censorship, I don't write about, I stopped writing about politics because I'm tired of arguing. But, it's funny that some of the most hostility I get is when I'm too optimistic, when I say, like I said, something nice about Steven Pinker and his idea and his idea that humans are getting progressively nicer. People got pissed off about that and it's true, when you look at Steven Pinker, his reasons for why he thinks the people are getting nicer don't really add up. But I think that data is accurate, and I believe in something like moral progress or ethical progress.And that's oddly one of the things that I've got the most pushback from writing about, that the people are getting nicer. I think we are, and over time, you look back thousands of years ago is all kinds of terrible stuff that's not going on now. And I think in thousands of years there'll be terrible stuff is going on now that will not be going on. At the same time, there's going to be new crazy stuff. But to go back to your question, I don't really, other than not writing about the hot button subjects anymore, I don't really do any self censorship.Leafbox:Ran, maybe just to wind it down, how do you design or build your moral framework then?Ran:That's an interesting question. How do I design and build my moral framework? I mean, I think, this is an idea, a phrase I got years ago from some new age book, and that is the greatest good of all life everywhere.And my moral framework is the greatest good of all life everywhere, which is beyond my comprehension. But I can work towards that and, I mean, morality is all about being unselfish. It's all about getting out of the small view of what's good for me and the larger view of what's good for other people. And I guess that would be that's my moral framework.It's just thinking about trying to understand better the interests of more people. And at the same time, I know what makes me happy. I don't know what directly experience what makes me happy, and I don't directly experience what makes other people happy, nor do they experience what makes me happy. So for the same time, I have to serve myself. I have to do what makes me feel good. And that's balanced against trying to figure out what other people need and not stepping on other people's toes. So that, I guess, that's my moral framework.Leafbox:To maximize the good in the world, I guess, or even in all layers.Ran:Yes. And it's hard to find, if you say, "Okay, the greatest good." Well, what ... It gets into hard stuff to define, but it's a challenge, it's a constant challenge to try to work out what to do. I wonder if in hundreds of years they'll look back. I wonder if I'll get canceled in hundreds of years because I eat factory farm meat. But that's something I do, and I look forward to some future world where we'll be able to eat without that. But right now, that's too much of a sacrifice for me to make, is to give up eating meat.Leafbox:Well that's a whole world of topics. I heard the most interesting argument against vegetarianism is the moral value of all the animals alive. So, there's just so many animals, billions of animals that are obviously factory farming versus an organic, wonderful farm and a rural place. So it's just an interesting thing. You'd have to terminate all those lives in all ...Ran:That's an interesting idea. I say that's better to not exist at all than to exist as a factory farm animal. But another argument I've seen is the vegetables, to clear farmland to grow vegetables? A lot of animals have to be killed. You have to cut down a forest to build those fields. And a lot of creatures that we're living in whatever the field is now in, have their way of life destroyed. So there's no morally pure way to eat. Although there could be, in the future. This is my utopian vision is that is genetically modified trees so that everywhere you go you can just live by eating the fruit off trees, which is totally unrealistic now, but who knows? In a thousand years maybe we'll just be able to live off eating the fruit off trees.Leafbox:We'll see. Very complex.Ran:Yeah.Leafbox:Ran, is there anything else you want to discuss today? I mean, there's a hundred topics I could ask you, but I don't want to take more of your time.Ran:My voice is getting a little tired, so I think I probably better hang it up. But, it's been nice.Leafbox:Thanks so much,Learn more of Ran's thoughts @ RanPrieur.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leafbox.substack.com

Charles C. Mann is the author of three of my favorite history books: 1491. 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. We discuss:why Native American civilizations collapsed and why they failed to make more technological progresswhy he disagrees with Will MacAskill about longtermismwhy there aren't any successful slave revoltshow geoengineering can help us solve climate changewhy Bitcoin is like the Chinese Silver Tradeand much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Some really cool guests coming up, subscribe to find out about future episodes!Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy my interviews of Will MacAskill (about longtermism), Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection), and David Deutsch (about AI and the problems with America's constitution).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group-chats, and throw it up on any relevant subreddits & forums you follow. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.Timestamps(0:00:00) -Epidemically Alternate Realities(0:00:25) -Weak Points in Empires(0:03:28) -Slave Revolts(0:08:43) -Slavery Ban(0:12:46) - Contingency & The Pyramids(0:18:13) - Teotihuacan(0:20:02) - New Book Thesis(0:25:20) - Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley(0:31:15) - Technological Stupidity in the New World(0:41:24) - Religious Demoralization(0:44:00) - Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories(0:49:05) - Virginia Company + Hubris(0:53:30) - China's Silver Trade(1:03:03) - Wizards vs. Prophets(1:07:55) - In Defense of Regulatory Delays(0:12:26) -Geoengineering(0:16:51) -Finding New Wizards(0:18:46) -Agroforestry is Underrated(1:18:46) -Longtermism & Free MarketsTranscriptDwarkesh Patel   Okay! Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be here.Epidemically Alternate RealitiesDwarkesh Patel   My first question is: How much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World, bringing their diseases. Considering disparities and where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cited is correct, then some of these places were bound to have good institutions and some of them were bound to have bad institutions. Plus, because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of all this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, then maybe 50 years down the line, would someone from Italy have done it? What is the contingency here?Charles C. Mann   Well, I think that some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that at some point, people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere. This leads almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases: diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases. When people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere meet, there are going to be those kinds of diseases. But if you wanted to, it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, does just that. It's a great alternative history book. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America, bringing all these diseases, and by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. So when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went and conquered Europe. It's far-fetched, but it does say that this encounter would've happened and that the diseases would've happened, but it didn't have to happen in exactly the way that it did. It's also perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether or not slavery was a good idea. There were a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy asking the Pope “Is it okay that we do this?” You could imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So, I think some of it was bound to happen, but how exactly it happened was really up to chance, contingency, and human agency,Weak Points in EmpiresDwarkesh Patel   When the Spanish first arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just how well you should have expected this civilization to be functioning at any given time period?Charles C. Mann   Well, typically, empires are much more jumbly and fragile entities than we imagine. There's always fighting at the top. What Hernán Cortés was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs––who are better called The Triple Alliance (the term “Aztec” is an invention from the 19th century). The Triple Alliance was comprised of three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. The other two guys really resented them and so what Cortes was able to do was foment a civil war within the Aztec empire: taking some enemies of the Aztec, some members of the Aztec empire, and creating an entirely new order. There's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really emerged into the popular consciousness. I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it; everything was largely from Spanish and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest. The allies of the Spaniards actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. So there's a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491. However, the conquest wasn't as complete as we think. I talk a bit about this in 1493 but what happens is Cortes moves in and he marries his lieutenants to these indigenous people, creating this hybrid nobility that then extended on to the Incas. The Incas were a very powerful but unstable empire and Pizarro had the luck to walk in right after a civil war. When he did that right after a civil war and massive epidemic, he got them at a very vulnerable point. Without that, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allied with the losing side (or the apparently losing side in this in the Civil War), and was able to create a new rallying point and then attack the winning side. So yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fratricidal stuff going on in the leadership.Dwarkesh Patel   It does also remind me of the East India Trading Company.Charles C. Mann   And the Mughal empire, yeah. Some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his people in. In fact, I was struck by this. I had just been reading this book, maybe you've heard of it: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.Dwarkesh Patel   I've started reading it, yeah but I haven't made much progress.Charles C. Mann   It's an amazing book! It's so oddly similar to what happened. There was this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal empire, and one side thought, “Oh, we'll get these foreigners to come in, and we'll use them.” That turned out to be a big mistake.Dwarkesh Patel   Yes. What's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy. Niall Ferguson has a good book on the British Empire and one thing he points out is that in India, the ratio between an actual English civil servant and the Indian population was about 1: 3,000,000 at the peak of the ratio. Which obviously is only possible if you have the cooperation of at least the elites, right? So it sounds similar to what you were saying about Cortes marrying his underlings to the nobility. Charles C. Mann   Something that isn't stressed enough in history is how often the elites recognize each other. They join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below. It's exactly what happened with the East India Company, and it's exactly what happened with Spain. It's not so much that there was this amazing efficiency, but rather, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement for Xcalack, which is now a Mexican state. It had its rights, and the people kept their integrity, but they weren't really a part of the Spanish Empire. They also weren't really wasn't part of Mexico until around 1857. It was a good deal for them. The same thing was true for the Bengalis, especially the elites who made out like bandits from the British Empire.Slave Revolts Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super interesting. Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the new world in Haiti? In many of these cases, the ratios between slaves and the owners are just huge. So why weren't more of them successful?Charles C. Mann   Well, you would first have to define ‘successful'. Haiti wasn't successful if you meant ‘creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time.' Haiti was and is (to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations) in terrible shape. Whereas in the case of Paul Maurice, you had people who were self-governing for more than 100 years.. Eventually, they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil. There's a great Brazilian classic that's equivalent to what Moby Dick or Huck Finn is to us called Os Sertões by a guy named Cunha. And it's good! It's been translated into this amazing translation in English called ​​Rebellion in the Backlands. It's set in the 1880s, and it's about the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves, and so forth, and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally, from the time of colonialism. Now the new Brazilian state is trying to take control, and they fight them to the last person. So you have these effectively independent areas in de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. There are some in the US, too, in the great dismal swamp, and you hear about those marooned communities in North Carolina, in Mexico, where everybody just agreed “these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything.”  If they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much. Is that successful or not? I don't know.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, but it seems like these are temporary successes..Charles C. Mann   I mean, how long did nations last? Like Genghis Khan! How long did the Khan age last? But basically, they had overwhelming odds against them. There's an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence. Similar to the reasons that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality–– these were seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.Dwarkesh Patel   Right. It reminds me of James Scott's Against the Grain. He pointed out that if you look at the history of agriculture, there're many examples where people choose to run away as foragers in the forest, and then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.Charles C. Mann   Right. And so this is exactly part of that dynamic. I mean, who wants to be a slave, right? So as many people as possible ended up leaving. It's easier in some places than others.. it's very easy in Brazil. There are 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon and the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. They're still Brazilians and so forth, but, you know, they ended up not being slaves.Slavery BanDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super fascinating. What is the explanation for why slavery went from being historically ever-present to ending at a particular time when it was at its peak in terms of value and usefulness? What's the explanation for why, when Britain banned the slave trade, within 100 or 200 years, there ended up being basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world?Charles C. Mann   This is a really good question and the real answer is that historians have been arguing about this forever. I mean, not forever, but you know, for decades, and there's a bunch of different explanations. I think the reason it's so hard to pin down is… kind of amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and put red in countries in which slavery was illegal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. It's the most ancient human institution that there is. The Code of Hammurabi is still the oldest complete legal code that we have, and about a third of it is about rules for when you can buy slaves, when you can sell slaves, how you can mistreat them, and how you can't–– all that stuff. About a third of it is about buying, selling, and working other human beings. So this has been going on for a very, very long time. And then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes. So there's some explanation, and it's that machinery gets better. But the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers, who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and when they're caught, you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery, or to create a wage where you can run wage people, pay wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but somewhat have more legal rights, then maybe that's a better deal for you. Another one is that industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with the agricultural laborer. So as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery become less and less important and it became easier to get rid of them. Another one has to do with the beginning of the collapse of the colonial order. Part of it has to do with.. (at least in the West, I don't know enough about the East) the rise of a serious abolition movement with people like Wilberforce and various Darwins and so forth. And they're incredibly influential, so to some extent, I think people started saying, “Wow, this is really bad.”  I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment, but I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement in which we're all tangled up in South Asia, but I just don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, the social aspect of it is really interesting. The things you mentioned about automation, industrialization, and ending slavery… Obviously, with time, that might have actually been why it expanded, but its original inception in Britain happened before the Industrial Revolution took off. So that was purely them just taking a huge loss because this movement took hold. Charles C. Mann   And the same thing is true for Bartolome de Las Casas. I mean, Las Casas, you know, in the 1540s just comes out of nowhere and starts saying, “Hey! This is bad.” He is the predecessor of the modern human rights movement. He's an absolutely extraordinary figure, and he has huge amounts of influence. He causes Spain's king in the 1540s to pass what they call The New Laws which says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow enacted to the colonial economy in Spain because they depended on having slaves to work in the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, which was the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire. It was all slave labor. And they actually tried to ban it. Now, you can say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned. But it's still… this actually happened in the 1540s. Largely because people like Las Casas said, “This is bad! you're going to hell doing this.”Contingency & The Pyramids Dwarkesh Patel   Right. I'm super interested in getting into The Wizard and the Prophet section with you. Discussing how movements like environmentalism, for example, have been hugely effective. Again, even though it probably goes against the naked self-interest of many countries. So I'm very interested in discussing that point about why these movements have been so influential!But let me continue asking you about globalization in the world. I'm really interested in how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that have been independently evolving and separated for tens of thousands of years. What things turn out to be contingent? What I find really interesting from the book was how both of them developed pyramids––  who would have thought that structure would be within our extended phenotype or something?Charles C. Mann    It's also geometry! I mean, there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. And pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long-lasting monument that's a cylinder. Pyramids are also easier to build: if you get a cylinder, you have to have scaffolding around it and it gets harder and harder.With pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one, on and on, and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me. Now the material you make them up of is going to be partly determined by what there is. In Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a lot of stone. So people are going to make these earthen pyramids and if you want them to stay on for a long time, there's going to be certain things you have to do for the structure which people figured out. For some pyramids, you had all this marble around them so you could make these giant slabs of marble, which seems, from today's perspective, incredibly wasteful. So you're going to have some things that are universal like that, along with the apparently universal, or near-universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated. Dwarkesh Patel   Yes, I visited Mexico City recently.Charles C. Mann Beautiful city!TeotihuacanDwarkesh Patel Yeah, the pyramids there… I think I was reading your book at the time or already had read your book. What struck me was that if I remember correctly, they didn't have the wheel and they didn't have domesticated animals. So if you really think about it, that's a really huge amount of human misery and toil it must have taken to put this thing together as basically a vanity project. It's like a huge negative connotation if you think about what it took to construct it.Charles C. Mann   Sure, but there are lots of really interesting things about Teotihuacan. This is just one of those things where you can only say so much in one book. If I was writing the two-thousand-page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Tehuácan pretty much starts out as a standard Imperial project, and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth. There's no reason to suppose it was anything other than an awful experience (like building the pyramids), but then something happened to Teotihuacan that we don't understand. All these new buildings started springing up during the next couple of 100 years, and they're all very very similar. They're like apartment blocks and there doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. It's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is because that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status. So based on the way it looks, could there have been a political revolution of some sort? Where they created something much more egalitarian, probably with a bunch of good guy kings who weren't interested in elevating themselves so much? There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this, and they make this argument that Tehuácan is an example that we can look at as an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. Now, in my view, they go a little overboard–– it was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way can start looking very differently quite quickly. You see this lots of times in the Americas in the Southwest–– I don't know if you've ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places, but you should absolutely go! Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because of the roads terrible but overall, it's totally worth it. It's an amazing place. Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible, it's just really a fantastic thing to see. There are these enormous structures in Chaco Canyon, that we would call castles if they were anywhere else because they're huge. The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, is like 800 rooms or some insane number like that. And it's clearly an imperial venture, we know that because it's in this canyon and one side is getting all the good light and good sun–– a whole line of these huge castles. And then on the other side is where the peons lived. We also know that starting around 1100, everybody just left! And then their descendants start the Puebla, who are these sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. It looks like a political revolution took place. In fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing (in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner but also seriously) that this is the first American Revolution! They got rid of these “kings” and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice about what went on.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. I think I got a chance to see the Teotihuacan apartments when I was there, but I wonder if we're just looking at the buildings that survived. Maybe the buildings that survived were better constructed because they were for the elites? The way everybody else lived might have just washed away over the years.Charles C. Mann   So what's happened in the last 20 years is basically much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. I mean, what you're saying is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only people with things that survived while the ordinary people didn't? You can never be absolutely sure, but what they did is they had these ground penetrating radar surveys, and it looks like this egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. So it's possible that there are more really, really poor people. But at least you'd see an aggressively large “middle class” getting there, which is very, very different from the picture you have of the ancient world where there's the sun priest and then all the peasants around them.New Book ThesisDwarkesh Patel   Yeah. By the way, is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point? It's okay if you're not––Charles C. Mann   Sure sure, it's okay! This is a sort of weird thing, it's like a sequel or offshoot of 1491. That book, I'm embarrassed to say, was supposed to end with another chapter. The chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up, and I'm very fond of it. And apparently, I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter; the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. So I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth, and it just was awful. So I just cut it. If you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. At the end, the author sort of goes, “Hey! I'm ending, look at how great this is!” So this has been bothering me for 15 years. During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home like so many other people, I held out what I had since I've been saving string and tossing articles that I came across into a folder, and I thought, “Okay, I'm gonna write this out more seriously now.” 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long so I thought “Maybe this could be an e-book.” then I showed it to my editor. And he said, “That is not an e-book. That's an actual book.” So I take a chapter and hope I haven't just padded it, and it's about the North American West. My kids like the West, and at various times, they've questioned what it would be like to move out there because I'm in Massachusetts, where they grew up. So I started thinking “What is the West going to be like, tomorrow? When I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now?”It seems to be that you won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there are some things we can know. It'd be hotter and drier than it is now or has been in the recent past, like that wouldn't really be a surprise. So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. All the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent–– from the south, so to speak. And there's a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific coast, so it's going to be a real ethnic mixing ground. There's going to be an epicenter of energy, sort of no matter what happens. Whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, or hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful, because energy is a fundamental industry.And the last thing is (and this is the iffiest of the whole thing), but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294 federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. That's been going in this very jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, as long as I've been around, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. So then you think, okay, this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties. Nature is also going to really be in kind of a terminal. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s! And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth. There's this breakpoint in history when people who looked like me came in and sort of rolled in from the East and kind of took over everything. And the West disappears! That separate entity, the native people disappear, and nature is tamed. That's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid. Do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? Dwarkesh Patel  No.Charles C. Mann So he's like one of these guys where nobody knows who he is. But he was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote this article in 1893, called The Significance of the Frontier. It was what established this idea that there's this frontier moving from East to West and on this side was savagery and barbarism, and on this other side of civilization was team nature and wilderness and all that. Then it goes to the Pacific, and that's the end of the West. That's still in the textbooks but in a different form: we don't call native people “lurking savages” as he did. But it's in my kids' textbooks. If you have kids, it'll very likely be in their textbook because it's such a bedrock. What I'm saying is that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. A wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, says, “To know the past, you first have to understand the future.”It's funny, right? But what he means is that all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. A whole lot of history is about asking, “How did we get here? How do we get there?” To get that, you have to have an idea of what the “there” is. So I'm saying, I'm writing a history of the West with that West that I talked about in mind. Which gives you a very different picture: a lot more about indigenous fire management, the way the Hohokam survived the drought of the 1200s, and a little bit less about Billy the Kid. Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley Dwarkesh Patel   I love that quote hahaha. Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I remember that in a chapter of 1493, you talk about these rowdy adventurer men who outnumber the women in the silver mines and the kind of trouble that they cause. I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to the technology world or Silicon Valley, where you have the same kind of gender ratio and you have the same kind of frontier spirit? Maybe not the same physical violence––– more sociologically. Is there any similarity there?Charles C. Mann   I think it's funny, I hadn't thought about it. But it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this off the top of my head. I like the idea that at the end of it, I can say, “wait, wait, that's ridiculous.“ Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose, or were oblivious about what they had to lose, and had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing, the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things! They just get up and keep‌ trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. It's pretty clear they are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's at least a sort of shallow comparison, there are some certain similarities. I don't think this is entirely flattering to either group. It's absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia, and in northern‌ Mexico, created to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these cesspools of violence and exploitation that had consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley and its products *chuckles* I use them every day, and I curse them every day.Dwarkesh Patel   Right.Charles C. Mann   I want to give you an example. The internet has made it possible for me to do something like write a Twitter thread, get millions of people to read it, and have a discussion that's really amazing at the same time. Yet today, The Washington Post has an article about how every book in Texas (it's one of the states) a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state databank. They can see and look for patterns of people taking out “bad books” and this sort of stuff. And I think “whoa, that's really bad! That's not so good.” It's really the same technology that brings this dissemination and collection of vast amounts of information with relative ease. So with all these things, you take the bitter with the sweet. Technological Stupidity in the New WorldDwarkesh Patel   I want to ask you again about contingency because there are so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think you talked about how the natives had different forms of metallurgy, with gold and copper, but then they didn't do iron or steel. You would think that given their “warring nature”, iron would be such a huge help. There's a clear incentive to build it. Millions of people living there could have built or developed this technology. Same with the steel, same with the wheel. What's the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with didn't happen?Charles C. Mann   I know. It's just amazing to me! I don't know. This is one of those things I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained, and I went out to walk the dog. I'm always amazed that there are literal glistening drops of water on the crabgrass and when you pick it up, sometimes there are little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass. Every now and then, if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes and it forms a lens. And you can look through it! You can see that it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see that things are magnified. So you think “How long has there been crabgrass? Or leaves? And water?”  Just forever! We've had glass forever! So how is it that we had to wait for whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it. In book 1491, I mentioned the moldboard plow, which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. It was invented in China thousands of years ago, but not around in Europe until the 1400s. Like, come on, guys! What was it? And so, you know, there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity. One of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. I mean, that's the most wonderful thing about trade. So in the case of the wheel, the more amazing thing is that in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel on child's toys. Why didn't they develop it? The best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. A cart then would have to be pulled by people. That would imply that to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they had these travois, which are these things that you hold and they have these skids that are shaped kind of like an upside-down V. You can drag them across rough ground, you don't need a road for them. That's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this, and you think “maybe this was the ultimate way to save labor. I mean, this was good enough. And you didn't have to build and maintain these roads to make this work”  so maybe it was rational or just maybe they're just blinkered. I don't know. As for assembly with steel, I think there's some values involved in that. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those things they had in Mesoamerica called Macuahuitl. They're wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them and they are sharp as hell. You don't run your finger along the edge because they just slice it open. An obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any iron or steel blade and it doesn't rust. Nice. But it's much more brittle. So okay, they're there, and the Spaniards were really afraid of them. Because a single blow from these heavy sharp blades could kill a horse. They saw people whack off the head of a horse carrying a big strong guy with a single blow! So they're really dangerous, but they're not long-lasting. Part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in the sense that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers in grunts, it was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. This was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. So maybe not having steel worked better for their values and what they were trying to do at war. That would've lasted for years and I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario where they're not just blinkered but instead expressive on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hassig about old Aztec warfare. It's an amazing book which is about the military history of The Aztecs and it's really quite interesting. He talks about this a little bit but he finally just says we don't know why they didn't develop all these technologies, but this worked for them.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar to China not developing gunpowder into an actual ballistic material––Charles C. Mann   Or Japan giving up the gun! They actually banned guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them, and they said “Ahhh nope! Don't want them.” and they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, supposedly under the Edo period, Japan had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war. Dwarkesh Patel   Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways. Charles C. Mann   Yeah, that's a depressing thought.Religious DemoralizationDwarkesh Patel   Right. In Fukuyama's The End of History, he's obviously arguing that liberal democracy will be the final form of government everywhere. But there's this point he makes at the end where he's like, “Yeah, but maybe we need a small war every 50 years or so just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it.” Anyway, when the epidemic started in the New World, surely the Indians must have had some story or superstitious explanation–– some way of explaining what was happening. What was it?Charles C. Mann   You have to remember, the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither the Spaniards, or the English, or the native people, had a clear idea of what was going on. In fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad, and the air was bad. That was malaria, right? That was an example. To them, it was God that was in control of the whole business. There's a line from my distant ancestor––the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who's my umpteenth, umpteenth grandfather, that's how waspy I am, he's actually my ancestor––about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So they see all of this in really religious terms, and more or less native people did too! So they thought over and over again that “we must have done something bad for this to have happened.” And that's a very powerful demoralizing thing. Your God either punished you or failed you. And this was it. This is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads. People thought “Their god is coming in and they seem to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God.” Now, both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on! But if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, “Well, maybe I should hit up their God.”Critiques of Civilization Collapse TheoriesDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, super fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse. There's Joseph Tainter's book, there's Jared Diamond's book. Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time?Charles C. Mann   No. Well not the ones that I've read. And there are two reasons for that. One is that it's not really a mystery. If you have a society that's epidemiologically naive, and smallpox sweeps in and kills 30% of you, measles kills 10% of you, and this all happens in a short period of time, that's really tough! I mean COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's 1/330th of the population. And it wasn't even particularly the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't kids, it was elderly people like my aunt–– I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer. Because I don't mean it that way. But it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict and so forth. Now, imagine something that's 30 or 40 times worse than that, and you have no explanation for it at all. It's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a super challenge. What's actually amazing is the number of nations that survived and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.That relates to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in the ways that they sometimes do. Like both of them talk about the Mayan collapse. But there are 30 million Mayan people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards were still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. In the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost exit province. And that is where the Commandante Cero and the rebellions were going on. We were looking at some Mayan ruins, and they were too beautiful, and I stayed too long, and we were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. And we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. I was like, “Oh God, not only have I got myself into this, I got my son into this.” And the guy comes and looks at us and says, “Who are you?” And I say that we're American tourists. And he just gets this disgusted look, and he says, “Go on.” And you know, the journalist in me takes over and I ask, “What do you mean, just go on?” And he says, “We're hunting for Mexicans.” And as I'm driving I'm like “Wait a minute, I'm in Mexico.” And that those were Mayans. All those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards. So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed when there are Mayan radio stations, there are Maya schools, and they're speaking Mayan in their home. It's true, they don't have giant castles anymore. But, it's odd to think of that as collapse. They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions. So there's this whole aspect of “What do you mean collapse?” And you see that in Against the Grain, the James Scott book, where you think, “What do you mean barbarians?” If you're an average Maya person, working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. So after the collapse, you're probably better off. So all of that I feel is important in this discussion of collapse. I think it's hard to point to collapses that either have very clear exterior causes or are really collapses of the environment. Particularly the environmental sort that are pictured in books like Diamond has, where he talks about Easter Island. The striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land, in the middle of the ocean, and Dutch guys come there and it's the only wood around for forever, so they cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair, ship repair, and they enslave most of the people who are living there. And we know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.Virginia Company + HubrisDwarkesh Patel   Why did the British government and the king keep subsidizing and giving sanctions to the Virginia Company, even after it was clear that this is not especially profitable and half the people that go die? Why didn't they just stop?Charles C. Mann   That's a really good question. It's a super good question. I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer, because it was so stupid for them to keep doing that. It was such a loss for so long. So you have to say, they were thinking, not purely economically. Part of it is that the backers of the Virginia Company, in sort of classic VC style, when things were going bad, they lied about it. They're burning through their cash, they did these rosy presentations, and they said, “It's gonna be great! We just need this extra money.” Kind of the way that Uber did. There's this tremendous burn rate and now the company says you're in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves and do all this stuff. The cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing. So, you know, I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia Company. A second thing is that there was this dog-headed belief kind of based on the inability to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. I reproduced this in 1493. There were all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing these little skinny Philippines-like islands. So there's the thought that you just go up the Chesapeake, go a couple 100 miles, and you're gonna get to the Pacific into China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought to be very narrow path. Sir Francis Drake and some other people had shown that there was a West Coast so they thought the whole thing was this narrow, Panama-like landform. So there's this geographical confusion. Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity, because it's not perishable: it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back, and it's just great in every way. It's money, essentially. Basically, you dig up money in the hills and there's this long-standing belief that there's got to be more of that in the Americas, we just need to find out where. So there's always that hope. Lastly, there's the Imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys with a colony. You see that later in the 19th century when Germany became a nation and one of the first things the Dutch said was “Let's look for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed,” and they set up their own mini colonial empire. So there's this kind of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” aspect, it just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class. So then you got to have an empire that in this weird way, seems very culturally part of it. I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to index other things. You see that over and over again, all over the world. So that's part of it. All those things, I think, contributed to this. Outright lying, this delusion, other various delusions, plus hubris.Dwarkesh Patel   It seems that colonial envy has today probably spread to China. I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise. Is this kind of like when you have the impulse where if you're a nation trying to rise, you have that “I gotta go here, I gotta go over there––Charles C. Mann   Yeah and “Show what a big guy I am. Yeah,––China's Silver TradeDwarkesh Patel   Exactly. So speaking of China, I want to ask you about the silver trade. Excuse another tortured analogy, but when I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up with China and how the Ming Dynasty caused too much inflation. They needed more reliable mediums of exchange, so they had to give up real goods from China, just in order to get silver, which is just a medium of exchange––but it's not creating more apples, right? I was thinking about how this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today, (obviously to a much smaller magnitude) but in the sense that you're using up goods. It's a small amount of electricity, all things considered, but you're having to use up real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. Maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake and you can compare it to the Ming Dynasty. But what do you think about this analogy? Is there a similar situation where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium of exchange?Charles C. Mann   That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way money works, right? I go into a store, like a Starbucks and I buy a coffee, then I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it, and they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper. So the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. History is of course replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money. Things that to us seem very silly like the cowry shell or in the island of Yap where they had giant stones! Those were money and nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. I would get some coconuts or gourds or whatever, and now you own that stone on the hill. So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things such as (in Bitcoin's case) strings of zeros and ones. That part of it makes sense to me. What's extraordinary is when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly–– which is what you're talking about in China where people had a medium of exchange, but they had to work hugely to get that money. I don't have to work hugely to get a $1 bill, right? It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing. But you're right, that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's, to a lesser extent, what you're doing in Bitcoin. So I hadn't thought about this, but Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy. To me, it's absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. A guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change and he wants to set them up in really weird remote areas. And I was asking “Well who would be your customers?” and he says Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits. And that's really crazy! To completely upend your life to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. So there's a kind of funny aspect to this. That was partly what was happening in China. Unfortunately, China's very large, so they were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes, but it definitely weakened the country.Wizards vs. ProphetsDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, and that story you were talking about, El Salvador actually tried it. They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano and use the geothermal energy from the volcano to incentivize people to come there and mine cheap Bitcoin. Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct, or the wizards were more correct for that given time period? Because we have the introduction of potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and this drastically increases the population until it reaches a carrying capacity. Obviously, what follows is the other kinds of ecological problems this causes and you describe these in the book. Is this evidence of the wizard worldview that potatoes appear and populations balloon? Or are the prophets like “No, no, carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually.”Charles C. Mann   Okay, so let me interject here. For those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book, The Wizard and the Prophet. And it's about these two camps that have been around for a long time who have differing views regarding how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, that's my name for them––Stuart Brand called them druids and, in fact, originally, the title was going to involve the word druid but my editor said, “Nobody knows what a Druid is” so I changed it into wizards–– and anyway the wizards would say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and then we can escape these kinds of dilemmas. The prophets say “No. Natural systems are governed by laws and there's an inherent carrying capacity or limit or planetary boundary.” there are a bunch of different names for them that say you can't do more than so much.So what happened in China is that European crops came over. One of China's basic geographical conditions is that it's 20% of the Earth's habitable surface area, or it has 20% of the world's population, but only has seven or 8% of the world's above-ground freshwater. There are no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there are only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools, and that's you know, rice. So there's this paradox, which is “How do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water?” If you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. So prophets believe that there are these planetary boundaries. In history, these are typically called Malthusian Limits after Malthus and the question is: With the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery?The great thing about history is it provides evidence for both sides. Because in the short run, what happened when American crops came in is that the potato, sweet potato, and maize corn were the first staple crops that were dryland crops that could be grown in the western half of China, which is very, very dry and hot and mountainous with very little water. Population soars immediately afterward, but so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, that becomes adaptable when China becomes a wealthy and powerful nation. In the short run, which is not so short (it's a couple of centuries), it really causes tremendous chaos and suffering. So, this provides evidence for both sides. One increases human capacity, and the second unquestionably increases human numbers and that leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's a thick coin with two sides. By the way, I realized I haven't gotten to all the Wizard and Prophet questions, and there are a lot of them. So I––Charles C. Mann   I certainly have time! I'm enjoying the conversation. One of the weird things about podcasts is that, as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream journalist interviewer and I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired. You know, they should make you switch roles or something.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, maybe. Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects I find fascinating.Dwarkesh Patel   Oh, it's my pleasure to get to talk to you and to get to ask these questions. So let me ask about the Wizard and the Prophet. I just interviewed WIll McCaskill, and we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history. I asked him about Norman Borlaug and said that he's saved a billion lives. But then McCaskill pointed out, “Well, that's an exceptional result” and he doesn't think the technology is that contingent. So if Borlaug hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about short wheat stalks anyways. So counterfactually, in a world where Ebola doesn't exist, it's not like a billion people die, maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around. That was his view. Do you agree? What is your response?Charles C. Mann   To some extent, I agree. It's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this, and I mentioned in the book, in fact, that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist, who's a step behind him and did much of the same work. At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. The insane amount of work and dedication that he did.. it's really hard to imagine. The fact is that he was going against many of the breeding plant breeding dogmas of his day, that all matters! His insistence on feeding the poor… he did remarkable things. Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered but it would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. I mean, that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim! Because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism, the discovery of antibiotics, and so forth, were leading to a real population rise, and the amount of human misery that would have occurred, it's really frightening to think about. So, in some sense, I think he's (Will McCaskill) right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And another thing you might be concerned about is that given the hostile attitude that people had towards the green revolution right after, if the actual implementation of these different strains of biochar sent in India, if that hadn't been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are just totally won over by the prophets and they decide to not implant this technology at all. If you think about what happened to nuclear power in the 70s, in many different countries, maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution. So it's important to beat the Prophet. Maybe that's not the correct way to say it. But one way you could put it is: It's important to beat the prophets before the policies are passed. You have to get a good bit of technology in there.Charles C. Mann   This is just my personal opinion, but you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are. They're incredible at diagnosing problems, and very frequently, they're right about those things. The social issues about the Green Revolution… they were dead right, they were completely right. I don't know if you then adopt their solutions. It's a little bit like how I feel about my editors–– my editors will often point out problems and I almost never agree with their solutions. The fact is that Borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminathan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me in this book. When I went to Tamil Nadu, I listened to this and I thought, “Oh! I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat, and they made it into Indian wheat.” You know, I don't even know if Borlaug ever knew or really grasped that they really had done that! By the way, a person for you to interview is Marci Baranski–– she's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution and she sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.In Defense of Regulatory DelaysDwarkesh Patel   So if we applied that particular story to today, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that were as powerful back then as they are now. Do you think it's possible that these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? If you just backtest our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or that it would have taken way too long or something?Charles C. Mann   It's possible. Bureaucracies can always go rogue, and the government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. There's a current big political argument about whether former President Trump should have taken these top-secret documents to his house in Florida and done whatever he wanted to? Just for the moment, let's accept the argument that these were like super secret toxic documents and should not have been in a basement. Let's just say that's true. Whatever the President says is declassified is declassified. Let us say that's true.  Obviously, that would be bad. You would not want to have that kind of informal process because you can imagine all kinds of things–– you wouldn't want to have that kind of informal process in place. But nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty in that scenario.Now say you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassification and immediately add more delay, you make things harder, you add in the problems of the bureaucrats getting too much power, you know–– all the things that you do. So you have this problem with the government, which is that people occasionally do things that you would never imagine. It's completely screwy. So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that and that impedes everybody else. In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30 when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfonamides. They killed hundreds of people! It was a flat-out poison! And, you know, hundreds of people died. You think like who would do that? But somebody did that. So they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay, and then something was solidified. Which they did start here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem. I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by the government here in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. I was tracing it crudely, but I think you see the trade-off. So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? I would argue that sometimes it's well managed. It's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism, in record time, and they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews and were given to millions and millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. I mean, that's a real regulatory triumph there, right?So that would be the counter-example: you have this new thing that you can feed people and so forth. They let it through very quickly. On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, especially for the chestnuts, they've made extraordinary efforts to test. I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. *chuckles* You know, I just feel that there's this great problem. These flaws that you identified, I would like to back off and say that this is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case. The edge case sets the rules, and that ends up, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And the vaccines are an interesting example here. Because one of the things you talked about in the book–– one of the possible solutions to climate change is that you can have some kind of geoengineering. Right? I think you mentioned in the book that as long as even one country tries this, then they can effectively (for relatively modest amounts of money), change the atmosphere. But then I look at the failure of every government to approve human challenge trials. This is something that seems like an obvious thing to do and we would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. So I wonder, maybe the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering actually couldn't happen because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.Geoengineering Charles C. Mann   So let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend, Neal Stephenson, called Termination Shock. Which is about some rich person just doing it. Just doing geoengineering. The fact is that it's actually not actually against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere. In his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. So I guess the question is, what timescale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials within the next 10 years. Is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that it's way, way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and precautionary principles say that that's way, way too fast. So you have these different constituencies. It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long-lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. I don't mean to imply that 10 years is nothing. But it's really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of?Dwarkesh Patel   Well, it's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise, like people say maybe it was just bound to be the state. Charles C. Mann   I think that was a very successful case of regulatory capture, in which the proponents of the technology successfully created this crazy…. One of the weird things I really wanted to explain about nuclear stuff is not actually in the book.

Is the end near? In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—and with the specters of political violence, debt crises, secular stagnation, climate change, and resource depletion before us—the potential for societal collapse is (unfortunately) a hot topic. Is collapse inevitable? What are the signs that a society is on the road to collapse? Where are we along that path? Dr. Joseph Tainter, author of the seminal 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, joins the show to discuss these questions and more.

This week @EchoChamberFP https://www.instagram.com/echochamberfp/ is a 'TwO Parter'!!! In 'Part One', we have a climate documentary, we finally look at the twenty fifth Bond installment, AND, we have the new Nicolas Cage dose of crazy! Today we have: 12th Hour Watch Review: Here. https://youtu.be/P70wWCAhDvU Digital Release Date: 22nd April 2022 Director: Susan Kucera Cast: David Morse, Dr. Paul Piff, Dr. Maureen O'Hara, Dr. Thomas Metzinger, Dr. Bruce M. Hood, Dr. Jorgen Randers, Dr. Azim Shariff, Dr. Daniel Wildcat, Dr. Ugo Bardi, Dr. Michael Ranney, Dr. Kari Norgaard, Pete Russell, Dr. William Catton, Dr. Dario Maestripieri, Richard Dawkins, Dr. Joseph Tainter, George Dyson, Paul Roberts, Dr. William Calvin, Dro. Robert Trivers, Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, Dr. Brian Fagan, Jay Julius, Dr. Sue Blackmore, Rob Hopkins Credit: Rangeland Productions, Video Project Genre: Documentary Running Time: 52 min Cert: 12a Trailer: Here. https://youtu.be/xWBc_r1gyHg Website: Here. https://www.12thhourfilm.com/ Twitter: @12thhourfilm https://twitter.com/12thhourfilm Facebook: Here. https://www.facebook.com/12thhourfilm/ Instagram: @12thhourfilm https://www.instagram.com/12thhourfilm/ ------------ No Time to Die Watch Review: Here. https://youtu.be/YoLJNdqd9bs Theatrical UK Release Date: 28th September 2021 Theatrical USA Release Date: 8th October 2021 Digital Release Date: 20th April 2022 Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga Cast: Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Christoph Waltz, Rory Kinnear, Rami Malek, Lashana Lynch, Billy Magnussen, Ana de Armas, David Dencik, Dali Benssalah, Ralph Fiennes Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Eon Productions, Universal Pictures, United Artists Releasing Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller Running Time: 163 min Cert: 18 Trailer: Here. https://youtu.be/N_gD9-Oa0fg Watch via Prime Video USA: Here. https://www.primevideo.com/detail/No-Time-To-Die/0SILOEE0B6Y2YL1HOCOU40O6L1 Watch via Prime Video UK: Here. https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Time-Die-Daniel-Craig/dp/B09LRC7WSJ Website: Here. https://www.007.com/no-time-to-die/ Twitter: @007 https://twitter.com/007 Facebook: Here. https://www.facebook.com/JamesBond007GB/?brand_redir=266350353379883 Instagram: @007 https://www.instagram.com/007/ YouTube: Here. https://www.youtube.com/c/007 ------------ The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent Watch Review: Here. https://youtu.be/aHtW1y6E6gY Digital Release Date: 22nd April 2022 Director: Tom Gormican Cast: Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Lily Mo Sheen, Ike Barinholtz, Paco León, Alessandra Mastronardi, Jacob Scipio, Neil Patrick Harris, Katrin Vankova, Tiffany Haddish Credit: Saturn Films, Burr! Productions, LionsGate Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime, Thriller Running Time: 107 min Cert: 18 Trailer: Here. https://youtu.be/CKTRbKch2K4 Website: Here. https://www.nickcage.movie/ Twitter: @NickCageMovie https://twitter.com/NickCageMovie Facebook: Here. https://www.facebook.com/NickCageMovie Instagram: @nickcagemovie https://www.instagram.com/NickCageMovie/ ------------ *(Music) 'Luchini aka This Is It' by Camp Lo - 1997 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eftv/message

Kellan and I were pleased to interview Dr. Joseph Tainter. The conversation revolved around his widely known book "The Collapse of Complex Societies".A big thanks to our sponsor, ReadyWise. ReadyWise is an emergency food storage supplier with a great variety of meals (including vegetarian, vegan, and gluten free options!) that last up to 25 years. Click here for a 10% discount using the code KK10 (plus you get an additional 10% discount with your first purchase). Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/collapsepod)

Hubris in The West today means we think we are so advanced that we can escape the collapse of complex societies. Our recent history has cemented an air of invincibility, but if you look closely, all the signs are present that the empire is far more vulnerable than we think. So, is our societal decline preordained, or will we be the first civilization to cheat the inevitable? Ross Ashcroft is joined by anthropologist and historian Dr. Joseph Tainter to discuss what we can learn from our past about how and why complex societies collapse.

Hubris in The West today means we think we are so advanced that we can escape the collapse of complex societies. Our recent history has cemented an air of invincibility, but if you look closely, all the signs are present that the empire is far more vulnerable than we think. So, is our societal decline preordained, or will we be the first civilization to cheat the inevitable? Ross Ashcroft is joined by anthropologist and historian Dr. Joseph Tainter to discuss what we can learn from our past about how and why complex societies collapse.

Photo: Denarius of Geta     In the terminal collapse of the Roman Empire, there was perhaps no greater burden to the average citizen than the extreme taxes they were forced to pay.    The tax ‘reforms’ of Emperor Diocletian in the 3rd century were so rigid and unwavering that many people were driven to starvation and bankruptcy. The state went so far as to chase around widows and children to collect taxes owed. --Business Insider. By the 4th century, the Roman economy and tax structure were so dismal that many farmers abandoned their lands in order to receive public entitlements. At this point, the imperial government was spending the majority of the funds it collected on either the military or public entitlements. For a time, according to historian Joseph Tainter, “those who lived off the treasury were more numerous than those paying into it.” .The New John Batchelor ShowCBS Audio Network@Batchelorshow"We had a very nice experiment in 2017. We lowered taxes and investment grew substantially." Diana Furchgott-Roth, GWU.https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-tax-biden-idINKBN2BU2SO

New years resolutions, vaccine manufacturers getting filthy rich and Orphan Black on human cloning. The up/downside to logging just about everything that can be logged - and what for? A primer for forgetting by Lewis Hyde https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41940448 and our respective take on what we log, why and how. What should be forgotten? What remembered? On education and M-GAP and LGGI:ing that, as well as what happens when families are actually at home together so much more of the time than apart. Joseph Tainter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477.Collapse_of_Complex_Societies?

In this episode, we discuss the connections between the nine-part documentary series “The Vow” and the compelling NY Times article “How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?” which revisits Joseph Tainter's seminal text, "The Collapse of Complex Societies." 

Marxist, teacher, and professional podcast guest, C. Derick Varn comes on the show to have a sprawling conversation about various societies, 21st-century politics, the history of American political movements, the impact of technology on politics and culture, the legacy of the Cold War, emergent dynamics, philosophy of science, string theory, anthropology, New Atheism, free will and more. --- Show Notes --- -Neoreaction (for dummies), Nick Land https://web.archive.org/web/20170720102354/http://www.xenosystems.net/neoreaction-for-dummies/ -The Density Divide, Will Wilkson -What share of people are online?, Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/internet#what-share-of-people-are-online -Could an iPhone fly me to the moon?, Graham Kendall https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/apollo-11-moon-landing-mobile-phones-smartphone-iphone-a8988351.html -Helen Viola Jackson, last known Civil War widow, dead at 101, Elizabeth Elizalde https://nypost.com/2021/01/06/helen-viola-jackson-last-known-civil-war-widow-dead-at-101/ -The End of History, Francis Fukuyama -Francis Fukuyama interview: "Socialism ought to come back", George Eaton https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/10/francis-fukuyama-interview-socialism-ought-come-back We Stand on Guard, Brian K. Vaughn https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/we-stand-on-guard Reality Check: Being Nonreligious in America, Secular Survey https://www.secularsurvey.org/ The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death Terror Management Theory, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory The Rise of Post-modern Conservatism, Matt McManus https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-24682-2 Reactionary Modernism, Jeffery Herf Self-domestication: In Humans, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication#In_humans Frans de Waal, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal Humans, not climate, have rapidly driven rising mammal extinction rate, Science Daily https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200909100244.htm Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A8BB63BC4A1433A50A3FB92EDBBB97D5 Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477.Collapse_of_Complex_Societies -Mortal Science Podcast https://soundcloud.com/mortalscience -In the Enemy Camp, Swampside Chats https://soundcloud.com/swampsidechats/sets/in-the-enemy-camp Pop the Left YouTube Playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFad02vA5AOH8vV8rUp6mwkACCa77u2UM C. Derick Varn reads five poems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnteApw_4DU

The identification of the ego with power structures greater than itself, raises a whole host of questions around ego identity as healthy vs unhealthy; around tribal identity and tribalism and its transformation with the emergence of civilization. What role does mythology play relative to this complex set of issues? What about the psychology activated when confronting civilizational collapse? Are there psychologies that recognize consciousness beyond that of the conventional ego? References Civilizational collapse gets named on a few occasions, explicitly citing Jared Diamond as best-known example. Joseph Tainter, 1988, “The collapse of complex societies”, is perhaps “the classic” that begins a subfield of study on the theme. Jared Diamond's book is from 2005: “Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed” Reference is made in this episode to conventional psychologies of the ego wherein health means well-adapted to society, over against more radical or spiritual psychologies that see the ego itself as the problem and society as problematic enough such that being adapted to it is unhealthy. Arguably, the whole psychodynamic tradition, from Freud to Jung as its founders, right up the whole field of “transpersonal psychology”, plays on the conventional/spiritual distinction. (See, for example, Freud's "Civilization and its discontents" (1930) from which this episode derives its title. ) Norman O. Brown brilliantly explored within psychoanalysis some of these themes in his works “Life against death: The psychoanalytical meaning of history” (1959) and “Love's Body” (1966) An example of that distinction (overt in the title already) is by Daniel Brown, Jack Engler, and Ken Wilber, 1986, “Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development” A favorite psychologist of mine (i.e. Chris) who articulates the notion of being "positively maladjusted" to unhealthy society, alongside the theme of ego-death or “disintegration” as potentially positive is Kazimierz Dabrowski (“Positive disintegration”, 1964). See the website https://positivedisintegration.com/ Terror-management theory also gets mentioned: for this theory, see Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, 2015, “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life”. https://ernestbecker.org/resources/terror-management-theory/

McAlvany Weekly Commentary Peter Zeihan “U.S. consolidation is the order of the day” Following depression the U.S. will see the fastest re-tooling in world history Time to review these shows: Carmen Reinhart, Robert Higgs, Dr. Joseph Tainter, Neil Howe, & Harold James About This Week’s Guest: Peter Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist who combines an expert understanding of […] The post Disunited Nations – Who Wins Or Loses When Global Order Breaks Down? appeared first on McAlvany Weekly Commentary.

Asher goes for a deep dive in his interview with investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed about how the novel coronavirus is rippling through the systems that make up modern society. To set the stage, they cover some heady territory, including Thomas Homer-Dixon’s “synchronous failure,” Joseph Tainter’s analysis of collapse and the diminishing marginal returns of complexity, C.S. Holling’s “adaptive cycle,” and Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine.” With these frameworks of systems thinking in mind, they explore how we can make progress toward re-envisioning a prosocial, equitable, and environmentally sound society. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show (https://postcarbon.org/donate)

Essayiste et chercheur indépendant, il explore la question de l’existence et interroge la capacité d’adaptation de l’humanité à terme.

Assistant à l’institut d’Etudes politiques de l’Université de Lausanne, il achève cette année une thèse consacrée aux discours de la dette étatique à la fois en philosophie économique et en histoire des idées politiques.

Militant.e.s de la Grève du Climat (CH).

Biophysicien et universitaire suisse, prix Nobel de chimie en 2017.

Ingénieur, synthéticien et blogueur sur martouf.ch

Journaliste, essayiste et romancier suisse né en 1948.

Docteur en sciences de l’environnement de l’Université de Lausanne. Quel rôle pour l’école dans la transition écologique ? Esquisse d’une sociologie politique, environnementale et prospective du curriculum prescrit.

Civilization is always getting more complex. This is measurable in various ways, including the number of laws on the books and number of job descriptions in employment records. Modern society consists of systems built upon systems. Each new system is intended to solve a problem, but the total mass of these systems eventually outweighs their utility. When a society becomes so complex that it cannot be governed, it eventually collapses. Glenn Campbell explains complexity, based loosely on the work of anthropologist Joseph Tainter. (Search YouTube for "Joseph Tainter complex".)

Naturopathe, auteure et co-fondatrice de l’ancien Dispensaire des femmes (Genève).

Traducteur et journaliste indépendant, spécialisé dans les domaines du renseignement, des opérations clandestines, des questions stratégiques et du terrorisme global. Il est diplômé d’un Master 2 « Histoire, théorie et pratique des droits de l’Homme » à la faculté de droit de Grenoble. En 2015, il a lancé son propre […]

Économiste et politologue, docteur de l’université de Grenoble, auteur ou directeur de plusieurs ouvrage et articles sur la nation, l’Europe, la guerre, la paix et Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gabriel Galice est Président de l’Institut International de Recherches sur la Paix à Genève (GIPRI). https://gipri.ch/ Il est le promoteur du colloque « […]

Every historian has their own theory about why the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Was it their hedonism, invading barbarians or incompetent rulers? Glenn Campbell offers his own view based on macroeconomics and the theories of anthropologist Joseph Tainter. At its base, the Roman Empire ran on grain, which could be stored and taxed. Collapse became inevitable when the cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the grain collected.

Professeur honoraire à l’Université de Lausanne, Institut de géographie et durabilité (IGD), Faculté des géosciences et de l’environnement, depuis le 1er septembre 2006. Directeur de l’Institut des Politiques Territoriales et de l’Environnement Humain (IPTEH) de septembre 2006 à juillet 2009.

Militant intersectionnel, co-fondateur et coordinateur des mouvements vaudois et romand des Grèves pour le climat, il est également étudiant EPFL en science du vivant.

This is an audio version of Vervaeke & (Green)Hall: Bullshit & Simulated Thinking which was published on the Rebel Wisdom YouTube site on August 1st 2019.  This is the second 'explorations in meaning' conversation between Jordan (Green)Hall and John Vervaeke, a unique dialogue between two of the most pioneering thinkers we've featured on the channel. In this conversation they examine the similarities between Jordan's concept of 'simulated thinking', and John's work on 'bullshit', linking it to Joseph Tainter's work on system collapse. John Vervaeke is a professor of psychology at Toronto University and creator of the cult hit YouTube series 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis'. Jordan Hall (formerly Greenhall) is a futurist and culture hacker.

Journaliste économique suisse romande, rédactrice en chef du magazine économique Bilan jusque récemment, auteur de plusieurs ouvrages liés à l’actualité financière, principalement suisse et américaine.

Ola Söderholm och Johannes Nilsson pratar om Romarrikets kollaps och vår egen. Med utgångspunkt i böckerna ”Roms öde” av Kyle Harper och ”The Collapse of Complex Societies” av Joseph Tainter.

Ola Söderholm och Johannes Nilsson pratar om Romarrikets kollaps och vår egen. Med utgångspunkt i böckerna "Roms öde" av Kyle Harper och "The Collapse of Complex Societies" av Joseph Tainter. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On parle des énormes défis écologiques à venir avec Rodolphe Meyer, alias Le Réveilleur, docteur en sciences environnementales. Retrouvez Rodolphe sur le web ! YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1EacOJoqsKaYxaDomTCTEQ/ Twitter : https://twitter.com/Le_Reveilleur Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/Science4Allorg/ Twitter : https://twitter.com/science__4__all Tipeee : https://www.tipeee.com/science4all Mes goodies : https://shop.spreadshirt.fr/science4all Mes dates à venir : https://www.dropbox.com/s/t3abghdmh5964sx/Actu.txt?dl=0 La formule du savoir (mon livre) : https://laboutique.edpsciences.fr/produit/1035/9782759822614/La%20formule%20du%20savoir A Roadmap for the Value-Loading Problem https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.01036 Probablement? en audio : http://playlists.podmytube.com/UC0NCbj8CxzeCGIF6sODJ-7A/PLtzmb84AoqRQ0ikLb4yC4lKgjeDEIpE1i.xml Moi en podcast avec Mr Phi : Version YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNHFiyWgsnaSOsMtSoV_Q1A Version Audio : http://feeds.feedburner.com/Axiome Sous-titres sur les autres vidéos : http://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_panel?tab=2&c=UC0NCbj8CxzeCGIF6sODJ-7A Marie Wild https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI7DUjUYcPOLZ0pRuk4klkw Game Spectrum https://www.youtube.com/user/XxIxostxX Passé Sauvage https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLhOJJbPciPdocXTaAk2SdA Les revues du Monde https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnf0fDz1vTYW-sl36wbVMbg Cataclysmes : une histoire environnementale de l'humanité | Laurent Testot https://www.amazon.fr/Cataclysmes-Une-histoire-environnementale-lhumanit%C3%A9/dp/2228917583 Sapiens : une brève histoire de l'humanité | Yuval Noah Harari https://www.amazon.fr/Sapiens-Une-brève-histoire-lhumanité/dp/2226257012/ Dette : 5000 ans d'histoires | Graeber David https://www.amazon.fr/Dette-5000-dhistoire-Graeber-David/dp/B00CQHSWIM/ Les Limites à la croissance (dans un monde fini) : Le rapport Meadows, 30 ans après https://www.amazon.fr/Limites-croissance-dans-monde-fini/dp/2374250741 L'effondrement des sociétés complexes | Joseph Tainter https://www.amazon.fr/LEffondrement-sociétés-complexes-Joseph-Tainter/dp/235512051X/

In October 2015, Joseph Tainter was my guest in omega tau 184 to discuss his concept of increasing complexity and eventual collapse of societies. In this episode, our guest Paul Arbair discusses these concepts in the light of today's rising populism in several countries. The episode is based on two articles Paul wrote on his blog: one on Brexit and one on Trump.

On April 20, 2010, a blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil platform killed 11 workers, critically injured others and caused a leak that spilled thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for more than three months. The Deepwater Horizon, one of worst environmental disasters in history, is now the subject of a pulse-pounding new movie. Historian and archaeologist, USU Professor of Environment and Society, Joseph Tainter will watch the film with special interest. He is author, with Tadeusz “Tad” Patzek of University of Texas-Austin, of “Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma.” Tainter, also author of the influential book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” says “It takes energy to find and produce energy and the world's remaining, untapped petroleum reserves are in deep, dark, cold, remote and dangerous locations...Energy is becoming very costly in terms of resources, safety and environmental health.”

Rebecca Costa is a self-proclaimed sociobiologist, author of The Watchman's Rattle: A Radical New Theory of Collapse, and host of the radio program The Costa Report. Throughout The Conversation we have regularly talked about the question of cognitive limits in an increasingly complex society, but we have only addressed the idea in passing. Wanting to dedicate a full episode to cognitive limits, we launched a search for interviewees that lead us straight to Rebecca Costa. There are lots of connections in this episode, but the most developed ones are with Joseph Tainter and George Lakoff. The Lakoff connection is especially interesting because, like him, Rebecca calls our attention to the biology of the mind—in essence, calling us to recognize what kind of animal we truly are. Both cite science to support their claims about how we think and behave, yet both have radically different conceptions of what the human animal is and the scope of reason in the mind.

Charles Hugh Smith is an economics writer, former builder, and general renaissance man who blogs at oftwominds.com, a site CNBC ranked as one of their top alternative economics blogs. We talk about (comparatively) rosy collapse scenerios, parallel economies, the possibilities and limits of desktop fabrication, and why you should be out paving a bike lane. There are lots of interesting connections in Charles' interview, notably with Joseph Tainter and Douglass Rushkoff.

Joseph Tainter, our guest in this episode, is an anthropologist and historian. In 1988 he wrote a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies in which he argues that societies inevitably increase their inherent complexity, and, if and when the complexity becomes too "expensive" (diminishing returns), a society will collapse. In this episode, Joe explains his rationale and provides historic examples for collapse. We then discuss his theory relative today's world, concluding with a not alltogether positive outlook.

McAlvany Weekly Commentary About this week's show: Complexity is insidious in its increasing costs Maintaining the status quo is too expensive Crises are solvable with sufficient reserves Order Joseph Tainter’s book: The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)“ About the guest: Tainter’s best-known work is The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter argues that sustainability or collapse of […] The post Dr. Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies appeared first on McAlvany Weekly Commentary.

Chris Carter is a self-taught electrical engineer and founder of MASS Collective, a workspace in Atlanta, Georgia that combines hands-on learning, apprenticeship, and traditional education for students and makers of all ages. We've talked about education with Mark Mykleby, Lawrence Torcello, and Andrew Keen, but our only conversation dedicated entirely to the subject was with Lisa Petrides back in the early days of The Conversation. Lisa's work leaned towards research and the development of new educational models, but Chris is coming at the problem from a very different perspective—as an autodidact who felt underserved by traditional education systems. This episode starts with a discussion of what MASS Collective is before moving into a discussion of creativity, critical thinking, and civic engagement. In an unexpected echo of Joseph Tainter, Chris leaves us with the image of systems—all systems, natural and social—described by a sine wave oscillating between order and chaos.

Chris Carter is a self-taught electrical engineer and founder of MASS Collective, a workspace in Atlanta, Georgia that combines hands-on learning, apprenticeship, and traditional education for students and makers of all ages. We've talked about education with Mark Mykleby, Lawrence Torcello, and Andrew Keen, but our only conversation dedicated entirely to the subject was with Lisa Petrides back in the early days of The Conversation. Lisa's work leaned towards research and the development of new educational models, but Chris is coming at the problem from a very different perspective—as an autodidact who felt underserved by traditional education systems. This episode starts with a discussion of what MASS Collective is before moving into a discussion of creativity, critical thinking, and civic engagement. In an unexpected echo of Joseph Tainter, Chris leaves us with the image of systems—all systems, natural and social—described by a sine wave oscillating between order and chaos.

David Miller is a state representative and mineral explorer in Wyoming. Rep. Miller was the architect of Wyoming's House Bill 85, the so-called "Doomsday Bill," which created a committee to study Wyoming's response to a collapse of the US Federal Government. Our conversation spans themes from across the entire project, from the transhumanism of Max More to the primitivism of John Zerzan to the scientific optimism of Ariel Waldman. This conversation also grows naturally out of the previous conversation with Dr. Joseph Tainter. Similar themes of debt and complexity arise and Rome makes another appearance, but the context is different this time. The episode concludes with Micah and Aengus discussing the role of facts in the project and if one can be a technological positivist without opening the door to transhumanism.

David Miller is a state representative and mineral explorer in Wyoming. Rep. Miller was the architect of Wyoming's House Bill 85, the so-called "Doomsday Bill," which created a committee to study Wyoming's response to a collapse of the US Federal Government. Our conversation spans themes from across the entire project, from the transhumanism of Max More to the primitivism of John Zerzan to the scientific optimism of Ariel Waldman. This conversation also grows naturally out of the previous conversation with Dr. Joseph Tainter. Similar themes of debt and complexity arise and Rome makes another appearance, but the context is different this time. The episode concludes with Micah and Aengus discussing the role of facts in the project and if one can be a technological positivist without opening the door to transhumanism.

Dr. Joseph Tainter is an anthropologist and historian who has studied collapse in numerous ancient civilization and penned The Collapse of Complex Societies. This is our first deeply historical episode and Dr. Tainter begins by offering his definition of complexity and taking us through the story of Western Rome's collapse. Extrapolating from the past, Dr. Tainter paints an alarming scene of our possible future. In our conversation, he critiques the primitivism of John Zerzan, the transhumanism of Max More, and the technological optimism of Ariel Waldman and Colin Camerer. What are we left with? Not optimism, not pessimism but, perhaps, Ragnarok.

Dr. Joseph Tainter is an anthropologist and historian who has studied collapse in numerous ancient civilization and penned The Collapse of Complex Societies. This is our first deeply historical episode and Dr. Tainter begins by offering his definition of complexity and taking us through the story of Western Rome's collapse. Extrapolating from the past, Dr. Tainter paints an alarming scene of our possible future. In our conversation, he critiques the primitivism of John Zerzan, the transhumanism of Max More, and the technological optimism of Ariel Waldman and Colin Camerer. What are we left with? Not optimism, not pessimism but, perhaps, Ragnarok.

Thomas Homer-Dixon presents his lecture Civilization Far From Equilibrium: Energy, Complexity and Human Survival at the Equinox Summit - Energy 2030.

Thomas Homer-Dixon presents his lecture Civilization Far From Equilibrium: Energy, Complexity and Human Survival at the Equinox Summit - Energy 2030.

Thomas Homer-Dixon presents his lecture Civilization Far From Equilibrium: Energy, Complexity and Human Survival at the Equinox Summit - Energy 2030.