https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6OayDV0YptA
Again with computers, right? It kind of starts with war, right? But now look what we’re doing. This is crazy. You’re in Ireland right now. I’m here in South Carolina in the United States. I think there’s something else to be said. She isn’t new and does have multiple echoes within the past. People being a plague on the planet. And then you’ll hear also about population collapse. This is actually something which does have a history. A good example of what happens there in the Middle Ages is what’s called Catharism. And they had this kind of interesting take on Christianity saying, see, you know, having babies is basically evil. Saying, yeah, they were doing the whole demiurge. You know, there’s the evil God of the Old Testament. And then there’s the good God of the New Testament. And they’re kind of vying against each other. They go kind of hand in hand, the death, the projection of doom with the, oh, that’s, you know, having kids like, no, that’s, that’s no good. And yeah, you’re right. We do tend to think of these things, but it’s different now. And I’m like, you know, you need to read a book. All right. Welcome, everybody. I’ve got Adam back here with me. And what we’re going to do is called Echoes of the Past, where we’re going to explore how some of these patterns that we’ve been talking about, say, in history, have been recurring over and over again. And this isn’t a prepared sort of a thing. It’s more like, hey, a few months ago, I was like, let’s think about doing this. And the next video we’re going to do is going to be the Russian Revolution since we’ve done all the other revolutions. And to some extent, shortly after I came up with the idea for this video, what happened was I went, hey, we haven’t done the Russian Revolution. Then I was like, what does that mean in terms of Echoes of the Past? This is not a good trend. So this is more about exploration. And I know, Adam, we’ve gone over Rome versus Greece, right? And we’ve gone over a bunch of revolutions and we’re over the frontier of ideas, which is more of a retrospective from the past projecting into the future. That’s sort of like Echoes of the Past. But, you know, and it doesn’t have to be a pattern, we’ll say, of today. I’ve got a few in mind. In fact, I took a note or two of the other day from something. But what sort of patterns do you see either, you know, currently from the past or in the past from further back that you want to highlight? Yeah, well, I mean, there are a couple and probably more of them will come out as we get further into the discussion. But some of the things I’ve been thinking about actually kind of recently in conversation, one of them is a kind of, it’s a kind of intergenerational thing that, in some sense, people say it’s a new, it’s kind of entirely new. In some sense, I think it’s not in the sense of having these different generations somewhat at odds. I think most of the way people frame it is different. But fundamentally, what they’re seeing is a pattern that does recur over time. And particularly at this period now, there’s a couple periods in history where I think this actually is an apt kind of comparison, where there is a kind of echo going on. Another thing is schooling, which is kind of interesting thing. It’s an interesting thing that people discuss nowadays as this kind of widespread thing, which in the past, it kind of peaked and troughed. And it’s interesting to note when it peaks and when it troughs in that historical context. So a couple things like that is kind of what I’ve been thinking about recently. Yeah, that’s kind of it really for me at the moment. Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff. I heard a talk with Jordan Hall and James Courthides and good stuff. They were talking about Symbolic World Summit, which you and I both attended. I think it’s in the Symbolic World Summit recap video. It’s quite good. You should check it out. They had this sort of wrap-up talk. And the first half of it was very good. I really enjoyed it. There’s always stuff I could go, oh, why? But the second half, which, yeah, I’m not a fan of the second half. But one of the things they went off on was the collapse of the monetary system. And I was like, well, there’s an interesting pattern. So they seem to cast it as, well, money’s going to collapse. I don’t know what exactly that means or what they think they mean by that. But whatever. It kind of doesn’t matter. This happens all the time. It’s happened all the time. One of the instances you were talking about was Russia in the 90s just stopped paying their debts. Like, yeah, you know, all those Russian bonds were just not paying you back. That was the end of that. And it caused huge ripple effects. There’s a thing called long-term capital management. Look that up on Wikipedia. Quite the story. But the way they cast it was, oh, well, then everybody will stop relying on money as trust. I don’t know anybody that relies on money as trust now, but whatever. And they’ll have to rely more on local relationship or something. Or Weimar Germany. Anybody remember what happened when the economy collapsed in Germany after World War I? Exactly. Love and happiness did not emerge. That’s all I’m going to say about that. If you don’t know about the Weimar Republic, it’s sort of the thing that happens in between, well, if you want to couch it this way, World War I and World War II, right? Or it’s the break between the big wars in the middle of the big single world war, which I think is a better way to think about it. But also, like, there was a, you know, a lot of people go, well, that’s why we need a non-fiat currency. All currencies are fiat. You can’t build a non-fiat currency. That doesn’t even make any sense. Egypt had a gold economy, right? And then was it Mensur Mensur? I think that’s his name or something like that. He comes through from from south of Egypt. And, you know, they’ve got nothing but surface gold back then. And he just destroys the Egyptian economy for 50 years because he had gold and they had gold, but they didn’t have that much gold. And just did one king. He gets so much gold. He’s just spending left, right and center and wrecking the economy with gold in a gold economy, right? Because, you know, supply and demand is real, but it doesn’t explain everything, right? Like it doesn’t explain where demand comes from, right? It doesn’t explain the constraints of supply. It just says there is supply and demand. So you kind of see this. And of course, it happened a bunch in Rome, right? Happened in the U.S., right? We had two collapses, actually back to back kind of. J.P. Morgan saved us from both of them. The famous banker. Ironically, J.P. Morgan, I think, was the bank that led the charge to bail out long-term capital management, too. But you see kind of a pattern like that. And it’s just the collapse of money is not usually a good thing. Maybe you come up with an instance or two where it’s good, but I would bet my farm on that one. Definitely. But I like your point out of the generations, like how people handle generations in generational sort of splits, right? I think we very much have now. I would say the generational split goes along with the change in technology, right? Which is the Peterson Sphere stuff, which I have an article on on petersonsphere.com website, where the split in the generations is one generation is using the one news source, right? Or set of news sources or technologies of news. And the other generations is into a completely different set of information, just based on technology and skill set and things like that, right? Because once you know how to use a TV and you use a TV, it’s different from using YouTube. YouTube’s far more complicated than TV in some ways, easier than others. So you get these sort of generational splits, too. And you sort of saw that, or you sort of end up seeing that, I should say, in military technology all the time. Right. So like one of the things that Napoleon took advantage of, and we talked about him before, is this sea change in technology, where he’s not an old Stoge general, right? He’s a young and he’s trained in this new technology of firing cannons, canoneering and artillery as such. And, you know, the artillery revolution echoes for a long, long, long time. Right. And so you may think that, oh, you know, Napoleon and cannons and canoneering and all that, and barrel rifling and things like that. Right. But actually, the way it works is the only reason likely that we have the modern computers that we have is to calculate trajectory to rockets, which is just basically technology 2.0 on top of artillery. Rockets are big artillery that go further. Right. That’s all it is. Right. Yeah. You could now you don’t need a cannon barrel, although you can use one because Saddam Hussein tried to use one in Iraq, too. Oh, yeah. He built a giant cannon and aimed at it. And I don’t know if it’s I think it’s aimed at Israel, but it might be aimed at Iran. It’s hard to tell. Yeah, I don’t trust any of my information sources. But yeah, well, because that way you get around having rockets. I don’t have a rocket of a giant cannon that fires the same distance as a rocket, but I don’t have any rockets. So you can so that so that the spark that set off by artillery, it kind of burns out, right. It ends with computer technology, because now we can build rockets that go into space, the bank, basically. Right. And you can’t you actually can’t do that without a computer, not because you can’t do calculations. That’s not the issue. Can do the calculations quickly enough. That’s because technology just kind of speeds things up. Right. It’s a lever, but it’s usually a lever over time. Right. And Jonathan Pichot talks a lot about that, right. Technology is a lever. And technology speeds up time. Yeah, it’s a lever over time. It’s not only a lever over time, but it’s often also a lever over time. And so that’s it. That’s another sort of echo that just kept echoing from Napoleon out. And then a lot of the technologies we have, except for computer technology, although maybe even computer technology, all of that is left over from Nazi Germany. Right. Nuclear power. They were the first ones. Rockets. They built all the rockets. We stole all the rocket scientists from them in the US. Like, you know, we’re still living with that, with the legacy of all the technologies that were born out of the Great War or Great Wars, if you want to split it into two. That’s still, we’re still in that. We don’t understand that, right, because we’re swimming in it like, like, the fish in an aquarium. So those are some of the, those are the ones that came up for me. Yeah. Well, particularly on the technology front, it is quite radical pre and post war. I mean, even just, let’s say the idea of refrigeration, that is something which is firmly a product of the wartime effort and everything that goes into that. Whereas, you know, if you consider the start of World War I, people are still relying on canned food, and they’re still relying on those sorts of rations. And of course, you know, they’re grand, they’re fine. But, but when you have, when you have the ability to refrigerate stuff, you can actually keep things for longer. And then you also have all of the chemical research that goes into preservatives. And so you can keep stuff, you can keep food for longer. And that kind of has its form in the modern day army ration with its self heating, you know, you just pour a bit of water and it heats itself. And that’s only in the space of a couple of generations. I mean, to connect me, for instance, to the first World War, I have to go to my, my grandfather’s father, my, my, my great grandfather’s father, right, which doesn’t seem, seems like a big, big stretch. But I met my great grandmother. And to that degree, you’ve got a kind of first degree relation, you know, to our second degree relation to the the first World War as somebody born, you know, in the early half of the new millennium, it’s like, that’s, and so to keep that in mind, that’s how much of a change has happened with technology in so short of time. And that goes for everything plastics. And again, a novelty from the, from, from the wars before then all toys are made, all children’s toys are made out of wood. If you get children’s toys at all, you know, children’s toys, even as a, as a larger thing become, become a bigger deal. But also that generational change is important to consider as well. And keeping it within about three or four generations, you see, you can see an attitude difference depending on where you’re at. And a good example of this to take us way, way back would be with Rome and the fall of the Roman Republic, you have four generations there. You have Marius, then Sola, who Marius is Caesar’s, Julie Caesar’s uncle. Sola comes in, he becomes dictator, right? He’s of a different generation to Marius. He’s the young up and coming guy who steals Marius’s thunder while he’s kind of at the peak of his career. And then Caesar is like, you know, a kind of, of the next generation after Sola. And then who comes after Caesar is Augustus, the next generation there. And you can see there’s actually, historically, there’s a massive change in attitude, right? So with Marius, it’s kind of taking the Roman Republic and it’s kind of dilapidated state and revitalizing it and kind of building on that and kind of extolling himself and trying to kind of carry on a political campaign or reform. With Sola, it becomes, I’m going to take the power. I’m like, I’m going to take the reins. I’m going to lead and I’m going to be the guy to set things right so that things will be better. And the attitude with Sola was a lot different than with Marius because Sola decided to kill all of his political opponents straight out of the gate. What does Caesar do? Caesar doesn’t do that. He grants clemency to his political opponents and he ends up getting stabbed for it. However, that was his attitude, right? It was a case of, look, we may have been at odds, but we need to come together and build something better from that conflict, from that former conflict and cooperate. And then Augustus comes in and it’s kind of almost a kind of echoing of what happens with Sola where he just kills his opposition. Or if you’re in opposition, he’ll give you a chance. And if you renege on that chance, that’s it. You’re gone. You’re kind of a pariah in some cases if you’re not a big threat or if you could be a threat, you’re killed. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, you know, there’s a lot of echoing and we’ll say government types, right? And how governments are conducted and what that conduct looks like. And throughout sort of the flattening of the world, which definitely sort of from maybe, where we put it from, probably from the, you know, in the middle 1800s or something, or maybe the 1700s, right? The world starts to get much flatter. Of course, we’ll probably put it all the way back at the beheading of the English king as we did in a previous video. There’s a bad thing. But you certainly see this attempt to nail down government, right? With the sort of the enlightenment, the enlightenment is the rediscovery of the ancient Greek canon, right? And some of the Roman canon too, right? From effectively the Middle East or from the archives of, you know, European states, such as they were, right? So there’s this rediscovery of these texts. That’s what sparks the enlightenment. That’s what the enlightenment is effectively, right? We were in the darkness and a lot of people say, well, the Dark Ages weren’t dark. Yes, they were. That’s just not true. There was a lot of darkness, right? Like we lost a lot of technology and some of it we didn’t need. Like you don’t need concrete in the Middle Ages because you don’t have any cities big enough to require it, basically. Or maybe one or two, but like, you know, whatever. You can get along without concrete. Romans had underwater setting concrete for a long time, right? So there was some darkness there, right? There were some lost texts and the enlightenment represents the darkness of knowledge, roughly speaking, and maybe sparks the so-called Age of Gnosis. I like to call it, especially on Twitter. So that Age of Gnosis sort of thinking is right there with the rediscovery of, oh, the ancient Greeks knew something about government and Romans had a government and, you know, that’s sort of, what is a state? What is a city-state? How should these things operate, right? And we kind of flatten them out. Like, oh, you know, maybe it should work like this. And we’re kind of struggling because we got rid of this stupid king idea anyway. So here’s a nice replacement to some extent. And, you know, that almost kind of seems to have worked in the United States, at least for a couple hundred years here, right? Some of those ideas. Now, I would argue that they weren’t done by flat world people believing flat world things and that our misinterpretation of the enlightenment is the problem. But you can see that echo of the struggles with how do we govern, right? Because we had Greece, which is this test tube, experimental place of governments. Like, there were so many governments in ancient Greece. You can’t imagine the types of governments they tried. They just tried everything. And they figured out real quick why democracy doesn’t work. So be grateful you don’t live in a democracy. We don’t have any democracies, by the way. You may think we have one, but there actually aren’t any. There’s a democratic republic in the US. That’s a republic informed by a democratic process. And we have a lot of democratic processes everywhere. Those don’t seem to work out, by the way, just on average. All the ones that aren’t republic democracies seem to fail. So you see that echo of trying this again, right? Trying what modified form of direct democracy can we use, right? And also the misunderstanding. A lot of people don’t participate in government around the world because they don’t understand it. They don’t understand how to participate. They don’t understand if they should. And maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe that’s better. Maybe the feudal lords had it correct. I don’t know. Very little say in your government. And you can bring us your grievances and that’s all we do. Right. Well, but the thing is with the democracy thing and the republic thing, there is a firm echo of, let’s say, echoing of the ancient world, the pre-Roman imperial world. Now, in some sense, because you have the returning of these, a widespread returning of, for instance, a republic or a so-called democracy and what have you. And that was very conscious during the enlightenment to kind of, I think there was a conscious effort by some of the people who were thinkers at the time to really reach back to that and to reach beyond kind of, you know, which reached beyond the idea of a king and the kind of medieval conception of the world. I think that in some sense had its place, but to the degree to which it kind of separated itself out. It couldn’t understand that the medieval world was a consequence of what happened in the ancient world. It was a consequence of the fall of the Roman Empire. I guess that’s why that’s such a major topic in a lot of history because people want to study what happened there. There’s various opinions and whatnot, but in any case, this kind of resurgence of kind of active interest in ancient forms of government is to a large degree part of the enlightenment. And I think when it comes to democracy and what the Greeks had to say about democracy, it was a pretty easy thing that they ended up saying. And this wasn’t even democracy on the level of basically unlimited suffrage, which is what is happening now. It’s on the level of males over the age of the property owning males. And so, it’s not a very good example of that. Property owning males over the age of 35, that was what Athenian democracy was. And that was the most democratic in Greece at the time. And even then, it ended up being that the Greeks noted, it tends to increase entropy. And depending on the scale that you have, it can work. It can or can’t work. And to that degree, I think you see that in the French Revolution. You see that in everything that happens post the French Revolution. You could say even post the beheading of the English King was this experiment with a return to this idea of democracy. I mean, even the parliamentarians, they were consciously looking back to whatever Greek texts they had about Athenian democracy. They had this conception as parliament as though they were a kind of new Athens. That’s why John Milton, who was a writer at the time, he writes Paradise Lost. Another thing he writes is called the, I believe it is called the Areopagetica. Yes, that’s right. And what does that title mean? The Areopagus was the kind of public stage of Athens for politics to occur. And so this is like, it’s a very early thing, but this conscious bringing back of these ancient concepts of democracy start kind of way earlier, but have been in some sense fulfilled. I mean, I think to a large degree, you can look at what happens in the 20th century. And you could probably say that’s somewhat an outgrowth. And the ancient Greeks had it right, somewhat an outgrowth of this democratic principle showing itself in how states operate. Because when wars happen in democracies in the ancient world, they don’t stop easily. Once the train, the war train starts going in the Peloponnesian war with Athens and Asparta, they can’t stop it easily. And it becomes a kind of a war on the scale, let’s say, equivalently for the time and the population of the ancient Greeks. Of, let’s say that the Great War, World War One, what’s called World War One and World War Two. Right, right. Yeah, when people don’t sort of appreciate how long wars used to last. Right? We look at World War One and World War Two, or better yet, the one World War. Here we go. Like, wow, that was a long time. It’s like, well, no, actually, these sort of attempts at different forms of government tend to yield longer wars because once you’re kind of in the war fervor, right, there’s like once you enter a war, there’s damage immediately. Immediately. There’s economic damage, there’s people are killed, right? There’s all sorts of things happen immediately. People are killed whether or not they’re joined in battle. Like, it’s just moving people around, especially in the ancient world. But even now it is dangerous. We lose people in the military all the time in training accidents, all the time. And in transportation accidents, it happens. It’s terrible. But yeah, what happens? They’re dealing with a big piece of equipment here, guys. And so when you’re sort of in that milieu, now you want revenge, or you want payback, or you want some compensation for what you lost. And it’s like, yeah, but that’s not gonna happen. And so it just makes it really hard to your point to actually put an end to something like that once it started. And I think the proclivity for direct democracy, even one, you know, by landholders, which is probably the most reasonable way to do democracy, by the way, you know, the problem becomes, if they feel threatened, they will, like if their property is threatened, they’ll vote for war. And it’s easy to do a, well, this is a border dispute, but you know what, I own property there. And sure, they’re only gonna take my property and maybe a little bit of yours. But next week, it’ll be all of your property. Don’t you think you want to defend my property for me? And we’re very cooperative creatures. So, well, yeah, we don’t want to set a precedent of giving in, right? And so in some ways, a democratic approach to sort of resolving the issues around conflict is a negative and not a positive. You’re better off having a level headed person who can say, nah, bro, you’re gonna lose your stuff. And that’s for the good. And you know, whatever, we’ll figure it out, right? Rather than letting that person convince other people that, you know, they also don’t want to be in the situation and they also don’t want to be in the situation and therefore, because that’s actually bad logic at some point, right? Like, yeah, it’s not always bad logic, but it gets that way really quick. So you see that sort of echo towards war rather than away from it. Like, oh, we all had to vote on war, we wouldn’t vote that way. And if you read American Nations by Colin Woodard, he kind of talks about this, right? He says the Appalachian region in the US, which is basically where all the Scottish rebels and Irish rebels live, they would never vote for war, right, initially. But once certain other groups voted for war, they were all in, like, all right, let’s crush the enemy. Very strange. Right. Well, we were totally against war until we were totally in. Well, it makes sense in some sense because of the cultures that they were. They were very, you know, Ireland or Scotland, whatever the case may be, there’s a lot more voting involved. There’s a lot, like even in ancient Irish tribes, not that most of the people in Appalachia are descendants of Scots, so they’re actually Anglo-Saxons. But whether it be Anglo-Saxons or Gaelic Irish, there is this idea of a kind of the need to vote on things rather than kind of have, kind of have rather than solely just have the one leader. You can have that as well, but it’s a lot more kind of bottom-up, if you want to put it in that way, to that effect. And so that does make sense that the Appalachians would be like once they, but because the part of, and this contrasts with most of Europe in the medieval age, because you had lords of the manor, you had liege lords, earls, dukes, and kings. And the wars in the Middle Ages were of a lot, generally of a lot smaller scale because of that. Even the crusades, which were a massive military effort, they still didn’t reach the kind of numbers that, for instance, the early Roman Republic was fielding. I mean, the kind of Romans could lose 50,000 men on the field. And even a whole battle, and a typical battle in the Middle Ages, never even both combining both numbers of both sides, never even reached half of 50,000. And that puts it in perspective, the difference in that, in the governance structure, but also in some sense in the attitude of the people and how that reflects in the form of government. And I think when you look around today, although you could say that most, a lot of European states would be masking themselves as direct democracies, I think we’re probably seeing a change to some degree in that attitude now because, and this happens, this is another pattern that happens. You have a very large war, you have a very catastrophic war that inflicts great loss, like for instance, the First and Second World Wars. And then the equivalent for Rome is the Punic Wars with Carthage. And that’s a titanic war that is on the scale of the First and Second World War for Europe and America. A lot of men die, a lot of the best men die. And so that you have in that post-war period, a kind of almost a leaderless age. And then there’s entropy that comes post the war, because you have all of this destruction. So in the case of modern times, it’s the fact that a lot of Europe was kind of leveled, like whole German cities, with really old buildings from the 1500s and 1400s flattened and then they had to rebuild them. And the same happened in the Punic Wars. Rome lost, probably in the grand scheme of them, hundreds of thousands of men. And it wasn’t just the poor men, it was the rich men, the patricians, everyone. And it ended up with Carthage being kind of wiped out as a civilization and Rome kind of taking precedence. But there was consequences of that, a flood of slaves, new slaves coming in, that changed the entire, you know, unpredictably, the Roman economy so that the landholding farmer of Rome, which was the backbone of the army, was kind of being displaced by this slave labor that was coming in. And the senators got rich off of it, of course, because everyone got rich off of the war, but the senators, you know, because they had more means beforehand, could exploit their advantage. And that created problems later on. And that’s when you have the beginning of the kind of real entropy of the Roman Republic that ends with, you know, Sulla and Caesar and ends with Augustus. I’m not saying that the exact same thing is happening now, but I think just on that basis of this idea of a great conflict followed by a period of relative peace. Now, of course, there are still wars that went on, but not to the same scale as World War I and II, you know? Right. Right. Well, and I think one of the things we don’t sort of appreciate, aside from just the echoes, like, oh, nothing new under the sun, right? Stuff’s happened before. But one of the things we don’t really appreciate quite as much either is the fact that when you see these echoes, there are an important hint about the patterns in the world, right? That maybe are inevitable, right? And so you always see in any system, for example, you know, and, you know, of course, as an American, I’m going to argue the US really, really nailed this particular one around war and leadership in particular. You see this pattern where no matter what kind of government you have, and this is very true in ancient Greece, right? They’re the ones that kind of started a lot of this, at least that we know of, because we have a lot of a lot of text from them about this. They started this thing of, well, look, whatever else, when war happens, we put someone in charge of the entire government. Just right, boom, blanket, flat out, right? And you see very early on in Greece, too, that people manipulating that like, oh, well, really, you know, we need is a war. And look, I’ll, you know, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. Right. So it’s not like I’m not saying that solves the problem. But also, it seems to be necessary to conduct a war to do that. And it seems like, you know, and you could say, well, the other hasn’t been tried. No, it was they all lost. That’s, you know, like, like, no, no, no, you, you may think that this hasn’t been tried. But actually, it might just be that there’s no records. And often there are records, you didn’t look it up. You know, yeah, a lot of a lot of, of sort of nation states or city states or whatever they were back then, however, you want to categorize them got wiped out because they took a vote. Right. And not even I’m not even talking about like a modern, you know, open democratic book. It took a vote amongst the noble house within the city. And that took too long. And now it’s the end. They just weren’t prepared. Right. And this happened. This happens a lot with war in particular, a function of preparedness large. If you’re not prepared, if you don’t think you’re going to get attacked, the odds of you surviving attack go down immediately and precipitously. And if you don’t prepare early for an attack, or if you haven’t been preparing over time for an attack, that gets really messy, really fast, you know, your odds of winning are very, very slim. And, and the thing is, you again, you may say, well, you know, that that that’s never happened. Everyone’s always prepared for war. Like, you need to do a little looking into history, because it is documented quite a bit where cities were like, nah, you know, the Crusades aren’t coming to my city. And then of course, we’re Christians. It’s like, well, yeah, except, you know, maybe they are coming. Right. And that that happened all over ancient Rome, you know, happened all over ancient Greece, especially with the Greek colonies would just be totally unprepared. Right? Oh, yeah, we’re paying we’re paying our tribute to Persia, and Persia comes in, boom, and that’s the end of that. And, and, and, you know, you can read the victors go, they were totally unprepared and didn’t see this coming. Right. That’s why that’s why you don’t understand that peace doesn’t work. If one side wants war, war it is. And if you’re just unprepared, you’re called the loser. That’s what happens there. And then you don’t write the history about how your wonderful peace first movement worked to stop war, because it didn’t. Right. And, and so people get confused by that. But when you study history, and you see these echoes, they’re good hints about how things have to be structured to operate in the world, right, because it keeps happening in certain patterns over and over again. And that tells you certain important things about the structure of sort of everything around us, whether it be government itself, or a corner case of government, which is war, war is a corner case. It’s an outlier, hopefully, hopefully, please hope, right. Or, or, or it’s, or it’s something like the the progression of technology, right, through an economic system, because you because you see that, again, with computers, kind of starts with war, right, but now, look what we’re doing. Like, crazy, just crazy. It’s awesome. But it’s crazy. You know, you’re in Ireland right now. I’m here in South Carolina, in the United States, and we’re having a real time conversation, all because of Napoleon, you know, to some extent. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about being thankful towards Napoleon for that. But you know, I guess if I have to, I have to be but I think there’s something else to be said about this as well. Because something that that occurred, and something that’s also in a lot of people’s minds nowadays that we’re seeing talked about, which isn’t, which isn’t new and does have multiple echoes within the past, right. So the idea, for instance, of humans being a plague on a plague on the planet, and which is, you’ll hear this being talked about. And is not is not new in some sense. It’s strange, because you’ll hear people being well, it’s perhaps not strange. In another sense, you’ll hear people talking about people being a plague on the planet. And then you’ll hear also about population collapse. So people basically, population decline. Right. And so this is actually something which does have it have multiple instances in history. So an example of the idea of, you know, oh, you know, we, we, there are too many people on the planet, or equivalently, an equivalent statement might be something like, and, you know, procreation is bad and shouldn’t be partaken in a good example of what happens there in the Middle Ages, is what’s called Catharism. And so that was so these these are people in southern France, and they had this kind of interesting kind of take on Christianity, let’s say. And they were kind of saying, well, see, you know, having babies is basically evil, roughly speaking, they were saying, yeah, they were doing the whole demiurge, you know, there’s the evil God of the Old Testament. And then there’s the good God of the New Testament, and they’re kind of vying against each other. It was quite, it was quite out there even for the time. And and that was an example. And of course, that portion of the population, like, you know, you would have population decline in there. But it happened in such a small degree of time, you didn’t see those effects. But that idea kind of kind of exploded, and then was kind of contained, and to some degree by what was called at the time, the Albigensian Crusade. But if you go back even further to ancient Rome, you see, by the time of Caesar, I believe, you have Rome as actually, it’s not replacing its citizens, it’s in a population decline. And that’s a serious threat, because if you can’t, you know, if you can’t even replace the people you have there, it’s like, how are you going to, for instance, react to a war? And there’s all this, you know, reform that happens. But at that time, it’s also interesting what you see happen. And there’s this plant, I don’t know if I might have mentioned it in some of our other conversations on the channel, but it was called Silphium. And it was grown on the northern coast of Africa, we know it existed. And I think we also know what sort of species it was, but it’s extinct now. So, and it was basically a sort of, like a contraceptive, so guys would take it and then, and like they wouldn’t have kids when they’re having sex. And this is a very interesting point. This is also around the same time that this population collapse is happening. And it continues on for a long while after. But the ancient Romans farmed that plant so hard, they made it go extinct. So talking about technology, and kind of like echoes of the past, it’s like, this is a kind of, this is the kind of thing that’s happening at that time. And you see that population freefall. And you see also a kind of, basically, it kind of Rome reaches out from there to other peoples. So they reach out to the Gauls and the Spaniards, they go outside of Italy to fill the deficit in their armies. And that kind of has knock on effects. But that kind of interesting thing about population decline, and the idea of, oh, we don’t want to have kids or having kids is evil. These are, in some sense, not new. You can see them in some sense combining. It’s a kind of a present situation that we’re seeing now. You can see that combining and playing on. But it’s still kind of fundamentally composed of those same sort of elements. Yeah, they go kind of hand in hand, the death, right? With the projection of doom, with the, right? They all kind of show up at the same time with the, oh, let’s, having kids, like, no, that’s no good. And yeah, you’re right. We do tend to think of these things. And we also, like, it’s so weird. It was like, but it’s different now. And I’m like, you know, you need to read a book. Any book will do. Just not a recent one. You will see those words translated into every language of humankind throughout history. No, it’s different now. It’s, oh, my goodness. No, it’s the same. It’s exactly the same. It looks different because we have different technology. We have different, you know, architecture. We have different city sizes. Or, you know, we think we’re special. More likely, we just think we’re special. And so we think it’s different now. But actually, it’s completely the same last time. And the time before that, the time before that, the time before that, this is all happened before. And maybe how to deal with it is different for lots of different reasons, not just because, you know, we’re modern or whatever, that term. See my video on modern and modernism. You know, but also because maybe, and maybe the fundamental problem with that is that when, you know, when these things, you know, sort of occur, some people reach back to the past. So they dealt with it this way, right? You always have to modify it. And, right. But really, a lot of things have different, multiple different proximal causes. And we tend to think of proximal causes as singular, like, oh, you know, the economy of Rome collapsed because it’s like, do you have a piece of paper and a pen? Because it got like 20 reasons. And they’re all, you know, you can’t single one out. Like that that actually doesn’t work. That’s dangerous to do with history, because then you get into the business of predicting stuff. And you think that’s reality is this some one to one mapping thing. And you’ll see that sometimes with historians, right? They’ll get close to the modern day. And then they’ll say, they’ll kind of imply, well, this is what’s going to happen, right? All that I’ve been saying, for instance, for the past couple of minutes is really, this is a pattern you can see now. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to play out in the exact same way, because obviously people can, things can change, right? We’re in the present, right? We’re out of the realm of history at this stage. We’re in the business, if you will, of making history right now, as it were. But we won’t see that until long after. I mean, a good example. We won’t see that. Yeah, we won’t see that. Right. Exactly. Like even some recent event, like the lockdowns, right? That happened all across the world. We’re so proximate to that. I don’t think we’ll actually ever gain the perspective that will have to be, you know, like a generation or two removed before you actually see that being seen in retrospect rather than. And that’s the important thing with intergenerational aspect as well, because there’s kind of information that we have proximate to it that people two or three generations away won’t have, right? There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know about the First World War that my great-great-grandfather did know at the time. And the best, in the worst case, you speculate. In the best case, you actually try and get the information and sort of kind of bring, try and build up a picture of what was happening there without going too far, as it were, and kind of, you know, interpolating too much and saying, well, it was exactly like this and there’s no other way about it. Right. Right. No, I’m glad you mentioned that. Yeah. Well, and if you want to see somebody sort of doing excellent historical work and finding some really interesting patterns and great correlations, you know, again, read American Nations by Colin Woodard, right? Because he then does exactly what you’re saying. He gets, he brings it up to the modern times, right? As soon as he gets past the Civil War, everything starts to break down like this history just goes to garbage, absolute garbage, like very slowly, to be fair, right? But then as he gets closer and closer to recent times, it just completely degrades. And his conclusion is so absurd, I’m surprised he wrote it down and anybody let him publish it, which is Greenland is the way. And I’m like, but if you looked at the history of Greenland, you’d know that can never be true. You just know immediately from the history of Greenland, if you actually did the same timeline with Greenland and the attempts that have been made to be what Greenland is now and how often they fail and how long that takes, because it’s not immediate, you would realize Greenland is not the answer. I don’t know where he got that answer from. But yeah, you know, you often see that sort of attempt to go too far with it, because we don’t really have a perspective. I mean, I think again, I kind of hinted at earlier, but like, we’re living right now, you and I, with the possible exception, although I’m not 100% sure that this is true, the possible exception of the transistor. All the technology we have comes out of, the technology doesn’t come out of the wars. That’s actually wrong. That’s actually wrong. The technology comes out of Germany. For real. Like, I don’t like that. Not too happy about it. But, you know, Germany was a cultural hope at the time. That was the thing. It was a cultural and scientific. But they were. Right. They were making ridiculous progress. I mean, if you go, like, we don’t really understand this yet. But to some extent, if you go and look, you do a quick sort of historical overview based on, I don’t want to call it progress, because it’s not based on change, right? And the rapidity of change. Germany, post World War One, goes from nothing, not enough food grown in the country to feed your people and no way to import food, because France sucks, basically. Just, ugh. I’m French-Canadian, so yeah, we left for a reason. Right. To the most technologically advanced nation in the world, despite, and this is where the economics breaks down, despite having no resources, because they have virtually no resources. Now, they did have some, but they wiped them out. And that’s actually why they attacked Russia when they did, because they just ran out of stuff. Like, our land does not have any more stuff. We need to conquer Russia to get the stuff that we need to continue the war. Period. Full stop. End of statement. And, you know, you could speculate all day long, and maybe it’s fair, and maybe it’s not, on whether or not Hitler would have done that if he could have found a different source for resources than Russia. You know, now I’d like to think he wouldn’t have attacked Russia, but, you know, because everybody makes that mistake, right? Never attack Russia. Another echo of the past. Yes. Yeah, right. Well, and, you know, it’s all the way in the Princess Bride. You know, like, land war in Asia. Yes. So, you know, I mean, there’s an echo from Napoleon to Hitler right there. Never persecute a land war in Asia. I don’t know what to tell you. And it doesn’t work out for Napoleon for completely different reasons, because his military campaign is completely successful, and he takes the city. And the Russians are just unimpressed and go, yeah, we don’t care. We’re not surrendering. And he’s like, wait, what? The rules of war dictate that now I own Russia. And they’re like, nah, bro, we’re just move our we’re just moving our headquarters. It’ll be fine. And Napoleon’s completely nonplussed. And he just doesn’t know what to do. And, and oh, by the way, they basically ruined everything around him. Yes. So he had to leave in the winter. He had no choice. Like there was, you just couldn’t stay there. Because they had basically burned their own fields. And yeah, and yeah, and starve their own people, by the way, just for don’t read about that. Oh, ah, just awful. You think all the atrocities atrocities happen? When, when the Nazis were around? Oh, it was rough before that too. That right? Oh, yeah. Even the communist government, I mean, they were they also did try that trick of starving the populace because because why not? Apparently, right, right. You’re right. That’s another pattern of trying to starve out populations, right? Or taking all the resources away, thinking that that’s going to work. And it often doesn’t. I mean, sometimes, I mean, always has a devastating, horrible, horrific effect. And like, I never want that to happen. Unfortunately, I can live in the world where that never happens. But but it often doesn’t have the effect they expect. Because it just turns out that the way we think about economics is wrong. And yeah, I mean, there’s no reason for Germany to rise from the ashes and to rise that quickly. And you know, a lot of people point at the US I think even we did before is, you know, this great power rises up from relative obscurity. True. Right out of nowhere, mostly as a result of what we call the second industrial revolution. Fascinating. We should do a deep dive on that. That’s, that’s, that’s one of my specialties. Anyway, then then I can then I can know something, not have to research it much. You’ll have to do all the work. But but truth be told, Germany did it first, and they did it better. And they did it in a smaller time frame. And they and they did everything you have, everything you have, except maybe computers is their fault. Everything, all the power generation, right, nuclear weapons, as such rockets, rocketry, spacecraft, it’s all from almost directly from actual Germans. Most anything to do with chemicals, which includes like plastics and stuff like that, right? All the chemical technologies, right. That’s farming, the Haber process for agriculture, the nitrogen, yeah, nitrogen fertilizer. Yeah, that’s all that’s all from Germany. Right, right. Yeah, all the food production, everything is yeah, basically transformed in in in Germany by Germans for this purpose. And and so there’s still the standout. And yet, at the same time, they’re not sort of one sort of country. And one of the echoes I want to touch on just something I found out relatively recently, which I didn’t for some reason didn’t know. But I bothered to look at a map. I told you about this earlier, right? I bothered to look at a map at a certain time period and notice that in fact, we go anywhere does Germany come from? Well, Germany basically comes from the milieu. And it’s a mess. It’s a real milieu of the Holy Roman Empire, which incidentally does not include Rome somehow. But yeah, kind of long story. But but you see these empires that were holding things together. You know, now you’re probably going to put that at Charlemagne or something, right? Ultimately, yeah, that’s the origin. But there is change between then, of course, it centers on Germany at some at some point, or modern day Germany at some point. Right, or part of modern day Germany. Yeah, yeah. And then and then and then it it’s sort of, you know, coalesces together, lasts for a while, and then, you know, breaks apart. Right, which is a very common echo from the past that you see, right? When when governments get too big, or empires get too big, or whatever, they become unwieldy and harder to manage. And I think to some extent, you know, you could say we crack that code for a certain size level for a certain scale level. But I don’t think we have, you know, very stably. And so, you know, can something the size of the United States survive for very long because it’s a very large country? Very, very, very like look on a map, start to realize, you know, plus population because you can look at Canada, Canada is huge. But the fight for people live in Canada. So whatever. And they’re all within 100 miles of the United States pretty much. Yes. Are they really not just part of us? Right. And then and then you can look like right to the south of the United States, Mexico, Mexico is not actually that big. Not compared to the United States. But I like Mexico is a mass man. Mexico has always been a mess. Yeah, right. It’s it’s always been warring tribes, basically, you know, they had a little or states and you know, they had different cultures, right. But even now, like the government is just holding on by a thread. You know, they’ve got a battle between so so like we’ll complain. Well, we sort of encultured creatures about something foolish like the corporations taking over the government. What about the cartels in Mexico that own entire chunks of the government? Like, don’t you think they’d be happier if a company or two were in charge? Right. You know, and and and yeah, if you want to if you want to talk about that echo, will it is the East India Company? I’ve talked about this before the East India Company really did control and probably created the modern United Kingdom for all intents and purposes. And of course, it dissolved at some point, but like it really kind of created the idea of parliament, at least as a permanent thing. If you’re not familiar with that, you can watch our English Revolution video where we go over that. But basically, yeah, I mean, when you behead the king and and you have a mega corporation larger than I think it was probably larger than maybe maybe the only country it wasn’t larger than was China. But the East India Company’s actually got a military larger than than England, right, which is pretty large military. So you get the huge corporation that basically sort of like is in bed with parliament to some extent, and and enables all that. And then that actually sparks off the revolution that that that forms my country. So thank you, East India Company, you morons. I appreciate it. You know, and and we end up with this government that’s an echo from the past of the texts that were rediscovered, the the ancient Greek and some Roman texts that were sort of rediscovered, which is a fair thing to say because like, there’s basically no one knew about the Norse reading at the time. And so all of those echoes sort of come together. And here we are around again with, you know, alleged corporate surveillance done on behalf of the government and I just met with Congress the other day where they were that the FBI went to the Bank of America and said, Yeah, give us these records, Bank of America just handed over the records, the congressman’s like, Why is this okay, Ken? I don’t I got you can’t do that. You got to have a court order, dude. What’s the matter with you? Right. So you got me you see these transgressions and their transgressions, and they’re wrong. And the people involved should be hung for treason, or at least tried for treason, and then hung, because they’re certainly guilty at that we know what happened. We know they’re guilty. You know, but they’re but no one’s gonna do that, unfortunately, which is sad for the United States. But but that’s what that’s that that’s part of the echo. Like you see, government FBI is part of the government, man, and corporation Bank of America is a bank, like they’re not supposed to be part of the government, just cooperating for no good reason, even when in the United States, we have a better system that requires a court order. Yes, yeah, you can’t just be the government and go, Hey, you hand over these records, because I work for the government, like what? That’s nuts. So so yeah, you very much see that all those echoes sort of, you know, crashing into one another, at some point, and they do tend to go together, I think. Yeah. Yeah, that’s you’ll see that you’ll see these sorts of things occurring together, because it’s a generally will come out of a generational attitude as well. So East India Company is something that comes out of you need you need to be after the English Civil War, you need to behead the king, because you need the the landed gentry or the kind of magnates of England to be free to basically, and profiteer right to basically run their own businesses, without having to worry about and tariffs that go directly to the king, rather than, you know, that then the tariffs come back to you, because you’re, you’re one of the great men of state, and you get to set the rules as to trade and stuff like that. Right, right. And of course, you see that doesn’t work. I mean, this is the one way to look at it is the beheading of the king is the decentralization of government. And decentralization has its own set of problems. And so one of the ironies, I’m just going to tie this right into Bitcoin, because I can. One of the ironies is that, you know, you have to decentralized ledger, a ledger can never be decentralized, that doesn’t make any sense. You could keep multiple copies of the ledger, but now you have to keep them in sync, because the ledger isn’t consistent and the same and a single source of the truth. It’s not a ledger anymore. It’s something else, right? Or it’s a personal ledger. It’s not a, it’s not a public ledger that anybody can reference. And that’s sort of the problem. When you misapprehend the problem that you’re seeing, right, and John Brevicki talks about this, you need good problem formulation, you end up with weird solutions like decentralization, which is just a trade off and is just a trade off and has its own set of issues, right? You say something like, oh, well, the problem is we can’t trust the banks. Okay, I agree, you can’t trust them. By the way, I hope you don’t have a bank account, you have a credit union account, or you guys have what, building cooperatives or something over there. Right. So there are alternatives to banks. So if you’re doing business with the bank and you’re upset at the banks, you’ve got to perform a contradiction, you need to upgrade your thinking, probably stop thinking on your own and start actually conforming. Because you’re bad at thinking if you’re doing business with banks and hating banks at the same time, you never needed to. Somebody asked me this the other day, actually on Friday on a call, he’s like, do you have a bank account Mark? And I’m like, well, not at a bank. And I haven’t since I was like, I don’t know 22. So like, the minute I could get out of banks, and for me, it was just the small banks, the small local banks were okay, right, but they all got bought up and in, you know, where I was, so I eventually just fled to credit unions. But you could say there’s a trust problem. And maybe that’s corrupted credit unions now too, in the United States. hint. It might have, although it’ll never be as bad as the big banks. But this the reason why that happened has nothing to do with the public nature of their ledger. They just, it’s just not that. Right? Yeah. It has more to do with their competence, first of all, because I’ve worked at banks. Yeah, trust me, you’d like to think that they’re like actively stealing your money, but no, if they were doing that, your money would be safe, my friend, because they’d screw that up for sure. These guys, these guys trip on their own feet all the time. It’s really funny. Bankers are among the dumbest people, honestly, as a group. Not all of them. There’s some very smart bankers, but most of them are just completely incompetent. They do the dumbest things. The banks lose more money than you can dream of, by the way, just on a daily basis. Oh, they lose and waste more money. It’s so funny to watch. I’m like, are you kidding me? You know, you hear about the occasional $30 billion missed trade. Yeah, that’s the only one you hear about, and there’s a lot more. There’s a lot more that happens. And some of it gets magically corrected. And yeah, you know, that’s a trust issue. But the problem isn’t the trust. The problem is the incompetence and the people taking advantage of the structure of the banking system, especially when it’s in bed with the government too much. So one of the problems here is, you know, we have this FDIC, you know, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, right? That will make sure that your deposits are safe. Now, you never need that in a credit union because credit unions don’t overextend. Like they can’t legally. Right? So we now have one. We now have FDIC insurance in the credit unions. Fairly sure that that’s not needed. Fairly sure that all they’re actually doing is stealing money from the credit union users and giving it to the federal government. But that’s not a trust issue. That’s a corruption issue. Because if you saw the books and you saw it happening, why would it be bad? You’d have to know it’s bad. Looking at the books, looking at the trust isn’t going to help you. You see all these attempts in the past to fix things using the wrong problem formulation. Oh, the problem with banks is trust. No, the problem with banks is not trust. Oh, the problem with government is that we have a king. No, the problem with government is not that we have a king. It might be that we have a corrupt king or it might be that we have corrupt noblemen who don’t like the king. Right? But it’s not the king. It’s not kingship. That’s not the problem. And so we go and we try to solve these things and then we just end up making everything worse. Right? That’s another echo. Yeah. And it comes back as well to what you were talking about earlier with the money collapse. Again, that’s happened multiple times. You don’t get through a century in history without having some sort of financial monetary collapse. And a good example of that is Rome. From Caesar to maybe like 300 AD, the currency of Roman coinage was supposed to be made of silver. By the time you get to 300 AD, it’s less than 1% of the coin is silver. It’s something else and everyone’s been skimming off the top because of the… And they’re trying to implement all of these measures to make sure that the silver content doesn’t go down, but they can’t… No emperor is able to really do that to any satisfactory degree. And you see as well another example of this is when they start to fix prices to try and rejig the economy, the Roman economy. They’re trying to fiddle around with stuff and none of it ends up working because they’re looking at the symptom and they’re trying to treat the symptom rather than actually treating the real problem at the end of the day. In the case of the silver going away, it’s not even the men you’ve put in charge of the mints, it’s the quality of the men you have in charge of minting the coinage who come from the society you’re in just think they can do that. Oh, I’ll take that off the top. Why not? We’re pretty wealthy as an empire. We don’t have any enemies knocking at the door. Who’s going to notice? Right, right. Yeah, and I’ll throw something out here and see what you think. So one sort of echo that I’ve noticed is that to use recent terminology, which I don’t actually like, but we’ll use it because I think people understand it. When you democratize something, when you make it spread out common to people, that tends to create problems, right? And one of them is, yeah, things tend to decentralize immediately. But what that means is it comes with an increase in fraud immediately. Fraud just everywhere, right? And you can sort of point to it, we’ll say within technology. So one of the things you see on YouTube to this day, you’ve always seen it, but you see it more, is how to make money on YouTube videos. It’s a little ironic and self-referential, right? Here you are on YouTube, probably making money because you get 200,000 subscribers on YouTube by telling people how to make money on YouTube. It’s a little, you know, but that’s because it’s cheap to use that as a communications medium. In fact, it’s more or less free, right? It only costs you your time, energy and attention. So it’s close to free as you can get. That’s the freest thing you can get is time, energy and attention. So you can pretty much just do that now. And, you know, now you’ve got a bunch of junk channels out there. And there are some channels that will actually give you good information on how to make money on YouTube, but you can’t tell the difference. So this democratization, you know, does that. And the other place that I’ve seen it, you know, particularly in technology is everyone’s a freaking programmer. Everyone’s a freaking software engineer. And you know what they’re not good at? Programming. They’re just not good. It’s just terrible. Right. And part of that is democratization of the education or the training. I have a video on education and training. But that’s part of it. Like part of it is definitely that. Like, oh, there’s a way in which we can educate people to be good software engineers. And we’ve got this down. It’s a solved problem. We know what they need to know. And even if you did, that doesn’t mean they’re good at it. Right. Like, I mean, there’s people you meet who are klutz’s. Right. And so they can’t even work at McDonald’s, they might be able to do another job that doesn’t require so much manual, you know, touching of things. Some people are just, you know, physically klutz’s. Right. I have to be the polar opposite. I almost never drop anything. It’s freaky. People are always freaked out. They’re like, what? How did you do that? And I’m like, I don’t know. Yeah, I dropped things, I catch them with the same hand. Yeah, I’m just whatever. I’m just an outlier in that in that anyway. But some people just like, they just drop stuff all the time. I know people who drop stuff every day. And I’m just like, how do you drop stuff every day? Good Lord, how are you surviving in this world? And they survive fine. I just don’t understand how, you know, so, so you can’t just democratize something like programming and make anybody a programmer. Right. And and when you try to do that, you just destroy the programming and very hard to find a good software. Very, very hard. Right. And it’s very hard to know which companies are good at it too. Like, the same problem, there’s too many companies in the game, right, too easy to get into. It’s too easy to slap, you know, software engineering house and, you know, on your on your title and just roll with it. And so, yeah, you know, you end up with with this spreading out this flood of whatever it is. And I think you see that echo kind of everywhere with this democratization idea is what we would call I don’t know what they you know, do you have a name for it from from way back when? Democratize? I don’t think so. And there’s nothing that comes to mind for that. It would I mean, effectively, it would just be kind of, yes, an equivalent to extending suffrage and stuff like that. It’s really hard to universal universal suffrage for everything, something maybe that’s what I try and try and term it as. It’s every everyone has to be able to do everything. Yeah, even though, right. There are some things that people should actually not should be kept from doing. Well, plus, if you try to involve everybody in everything, then a no one’s good at anything and be you can’t like to just you have limited time, energy and attention. And if you try to play, you know, oh, I know enough about economics to manage my own portfolio. And I know enough about programming to be my own programmer. And I know enough about accounting to do my own taxes. And I know enough about politics to figure out who to vote for by myself on my own, right, by just engaging, you know, on and on. And I know enough about cars to fix my own car. Right. Like, yeah. Even if even if you did, which you don’t at all, by the way, you couldn’t do it. Like, it doesn’t matter. Make any knowledge does not help you. Because you’re constrained by time, energy and attention. And there’s not enough time in the day, even if you did know how to do everything like that, you need to work all of that around. You know, having a job or whatever the case may be right, you’d have to somehow, if there’s a problem with your car, it’s probably easier to hand it off to somebody else to fix. And if you’ve got to, you know, be somewhere for the whole day. Yeah, exactly. And and yeah, a lot of the, you know, how to be wealthy people talk a lot about, you know, knowing when to trade your time for your money. Right. And that’s really the key. I mean, that’s the key of this. It can’t be one key. But they’ll talk about that a lot. Right. Because, yeah, in a democratized world where you can just grab YouTube and figure out maybe what the code is on your car and what it means and how to swap that part. Man, you’re not good at it. You probably don’t have the tools, even if you do. You know, you’re probably not set up. You know, like, you’ve got the time to learn it and then you have the time to work out how to do it. And then you’ve got the time to actually even if you’re good at it, even if you start off like amazing at it from the get go, you still have a time sync that’s there that you need to account for. Right. Right. And the setup to do something is a lot, usually a lot more time than doing it. Right. And so you can look at something and say, oh, well, this takes this long to replace on this car. OK, sure. That’s for a mechanic in a shop with a lift. You’ve got all the tools ready and knows how to use them. That’s not for you at all. And even if it was, you still have to set up. It’s still not free. Right. And I used to work on my own cars quite a lot till I moved. But my buddies had a shop with multiple lifts and all the tools. And he had way more knowledge on fixing things than I did. But I could diagnose better than he could still can. But like he would know like, oh, if you’re going to take that off, you’ve got to do this first. I wouldn’t know that. Whatever. So that made it easy for me to and most of the time, most of the time, his guys would do it anyway. And I wouldn’t have to. So I still didn’t fix it. We’d go to lunch. Yeah. And the little worker bees who had nothing to do. We’re given a thing to do, which happened to be my car. Exactly. You know, so that’s a hack. Let’s be friends with an expert and make them do it. Well, the thing is about all that is when you democratize everything, it’s a case of you have to make the choice. What’s everyone going to be? Are they going to be a patrician or are they going to be a plebian? And the easiest choice is that everyone is a plebian in an ancient Roman sense. So what you have then is just a degradation of everything. And where do you have a leader? Where are the leaders at that point? Because the Roman Republic, medieval Europe in the Middle Ages had whatever society you pick, had a certain set of people who did not work. They did not work for a living. And that’s because their time was spent doing other things, whether it be doing the business of government, whether it be doing sometimes, I guess, whether it be doing basically just like philosophy. I don’t know why they’d be doing that, but some of them ended up doing that. Or educating people. Educating people as well. True. Right. Which wasn’t really a job. If you were a tutor or whatever, you were often given a place to live and all your food, kind of good deal. Yeah. Well, actually, a good example of that is Ireland. A lot of the monasteries there were also centers of learning. And the way it would work is that the men who came to be students there would pay for their teacher, who’s a monk usually, they would basically pay for their pension, as it were. They’d set them up. They’d make sure that they would be taken care of for the rest of their life effectively. Nice. Yeah. But that’s how a lot of the communities, that’s how a lot of the towns in Ireland got their start. They grew up around monasteries like that. But that’s the thing. In any case, you do need, and that’s part of the flattening of the world, when you flatten everything out, work still needs to be done. And it’s a case of, well, do you have everyone working? Is that really the best? I mean, there are the people who can work who don’t, and then there are the people who can’t work and are, in some sense, forced to. Right. And they do a poor job. And they do a poor job, right. Or they die on the front. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s no good when you try to get everybody conform to your ideal democratized vision of the world, which, you know, it’s just utopia by another name. Right. And like, another back to the echo of sort of mislabeling problems or mislabeling what went wrong. You see a lot now, I think, in particular, but also in the past, where people, because we did go over this, when we talked about beheading of the king in England, people get into a situation where, oh, we don’t want a head leading, because, you know, a bad thing happened once. Right. Right. And then so you can point at the dictators of the 20th century. And right. But really, when you say that, oh, well, they were very charismatic, or, you know, whatever, they were threatening people with violence or however you want to, whatever it was, because there were a bunch of dictators. Like people, you’ll talk about the big two, but actually, there’s a bunch. There’s Spain. There’s Portugal. They have pretty bad dictators in there, too. Italy had a bad dictator get dragged through the streets. You know, it’s made the change run on time. Not really. All right. Haha. Fooled you. Didn’t even do that right. So you see a bunch of this reticence about leadership. Right. And that plays into the democratization, right, because they’re like, oh, the leaders do bad things. It’s like, well, okay. But people do bad things, and all leaders are people. So what did you say? You didn’t say anything, right? You just, you kind of, you kind of made out like the property of leadership was associated with doing bad things, when in fact, people who aren’t leaders also do bad things. And so, yes, nothing to do with the leadership, you’ve made a bad association. But then you get this democratization idea, and you’re like, well, anybody should be able to do the things that a leader can do. But actually, that doesn’t seem to be the case. It doesn’t seem to work out in the real world, especially because once you have democratization, or you think you do, because you really never do, right, sort of, sort of, requires some degree of equality that is unattainable, I would argue, you want to tear those people down, because they’re anti democratizing things by being special and leading. And so you get into this, no, no, we got to tear them down, right, you get into that phase. And I think, again, you saw that after they beheaded the king, right, no one wanted to step up and make any decisions. You saw that, you know, at the end of the French Revolution, right, you saw that, you know, at the end of the French Revolution, nobody wanted to step up and make any decisions and declare anything, because that would sound too much like a king, right. And then, of course, the chaos just continues extra long until somebody steps into the breach. And it just happens to be, you know, the greatest French general who wasn’t French at all. And, you know, had a hatred of the country anyway, and probably used that against, against France in the end. Right, which is another pattern, because, boy, it seems like Hitler did the same thing with Germany. True. Yeah, yeah, he was Austrian. So there was that, right. So, right. It’s the same. Yeah. Hitler and Napoleon seemed to be the same guy. Stalin was from Georgia, which is just complete backwater in Russia. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s not, it’s not, it’s not, this is, you can say that a lot of that, a lot of the problems of the 20th century, there, it is just a recapitulation of the French Revolution, but everyone has to, everyone has to join in on the slaughter, effectively, because of the wide scale of it, right. The idea of conscription being widespread at that stage. And yeah, I mean, even then, that’s the problem that people end up having with leadership. This is, this is pointed out by the Greeks when it comes to democracy. There was an Athenian, a great general for Athens, right. He won the many victories, but when Philip of Macedon and Alexander came to the fore and basically subjugated Greece, he was taking the lead of actually trying to preserve Athens. And so he went out to negotiate, for instance, with Alexander and Philip, actually, as well, because he knew, he knew Athens couldn’t beat Philip even early on. And he ended up basically being killed by a mob, even though his entire life was spent trying to protect Athens from what had happened to Thebes. So Alexander burned down Thebes because they resisted him. And then they went back on their word to him. And he just, he burnt the whole city to the ground. And that’s one of the ancient of classical Greece. And he just levels up. So it’s Thebes, Athens and Sparta. They’re the three biggies. Right. Those are the three major ones. And so, but Folkion ends up, after Alexander dies and stuff like that, and the fallout of the civil wars within his empire, Folkion ends up being basically dragged out by the mob of Athens. And because of the politics that was happening, there is one factor and because of the politics that was happening, there is one faction of Macedonians outside the gate. And there was one inside who were fighting amongst each other. And basically, one side used the mob’s fury against Folkion to take him out because he was trying to save the city. And they didn’t want to play on that level. They were willing to win the Macedonian empire. They didn’t care about Athens. And so him and a lot of his friends, they just end up being killed in the public square. And that was it. And no hemlock, I believe it was just, as far as I’m aware, they were butchered. Either that, no, he drank hemlock. That’s true. But in any case, when he was being marched out of the public stage, he was spat on. Really? Yeah. Yeah. That’s awful. But it was only in retrospect, the Athenians understood that they had lost somebody who was actually helping them. And he was posthumously named Folkion the Good. But it didn’t matter at that stage because that’s showing in stark terms. And if you read the Plutarch’s life of him, he gets into a lot of detail about what’s happening during that kind of mob attacking him, basically. And you get the sense that this is a man who’s basically lived his life for the city and has basically been cast aside by the people. And part of that is because he actually was the only one who stepped up to lead. During all of that time, after Alexander and stuff like that, nobody wanted to deal with it because they knew whatever they did, it wouldn’t please everyone. Right. They didn’t want the responsibility of disappointing people. Right. If somebody has to lose, somebody’s got to take the hit, somebody’s got to make the sacrifice, somebody’s got to give up something for a bunch of people that they probably don’t even like. At the end of the day, on both fronts, people within the city you don’t like and people that you don’t like outside the city, the benefit of the people trying to conquer you or something. Right. You don’t want either set. But we often don’t have that option. That’s really the problem. It’s usually an all or nothing thing. It’s like give up a little now or give it all up later. And the later is usually sooner than you think. That’s the problem. Things go horribly wrong a lot quicker than we’ll say people realize. And the deferment generally just makes it worse. The deferment of the decision and the responsibility to take it, it always comes out with a worse outcome. That’s why the whole, all during the Roman Republic, you could say, you know, you’re going to be a great leader, you’re going to be that’s why the whole, all during the Roman Republic, you know, you could say that this deferment of the restructuring of the government to have what ended up being with Augustus, the first of the Senate, what was basically the first emperor. The deferment of that led to, you know, probably, you know, hundreds of thousands of people dying and properties lost and families torn apart. Because basically there were people who were in positions of authority who couldn’t reconcile themselves with the change that was happening. That was as a consequence of their own, actually of their very own actions. Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s sort of rough. Yeah, definitely. But that is what happened with the upper, with the patricians. That’s why you needed Augustus to come in and basically strong arm them. And by that point, you’re basically, you’re making them weaker as a class of people because they’re just, then they become the kind of side guys. They can never take on any responsibility anymore because they can’t be trusted with it. And that was the case for a long time in the Roman Republic. Yeah. Well, they also don’t understand what responsibility is. And I think that’s, that’s the ultimate problem that we have now is that people don’t understand what responsibility is. So we’ve been trying to flatten the world, equalize the world now. And so we don’t understand that no, but in order to get an unequal world, which we need, it’s not optional, you need to engage in a certain way. Right. And that way is very much wrapped up in responsibility and having somebody taking the responsibility deliberately, knowingly, on purpose, with forethought and malice in some cases. Right. I mean, they have to go in there. Risking loss and risking great loss as well. Yeah. Risking loss. Well, and you give up something, believe, and leadership is extraordinarily expensive. Yes. You can’t trust people anymore. Everyone’s, you know, good friends are now trying to lie to you, gain advantage. Exactly. And not all of them, which makes it worse. It makes it worse because you have to discern who’s of good will and who’s not. And of course, that’s what in the case of Caesar ended up getting him killed on the Senate floor, you know, stabbed multiple times. And the funny thing about that whole execution is it wasn’t like everyone was on board. It took, if you actually read the accounts of Caesar’s assassination, it wasn’t like one knife and then another guy comes up and another guy, it’s like one knife goes in and it just cuts his hand. Right. So he’s still good, but he’s like, what are you doing? Get your hands off of me. And then some of the other guys who have the knives with them start saying, won’t somebody do it? You know, can somebody do it, please? Can somebody stab him? But it’s like, now brothers get him and nobody’s, and it’s just, it takes a couple of people who just maybe have malice to Caesar to hit him. And then, then everyone starts stabbing him. So it’s not even in some sense, it’s, it’s not even a good way to go of, you know, having everyone on you all at once. It’s a slow death and it’s humiliating for you because you’re getting stabbed if you’re Caesar. And it’s humiliating for the senators because they, these are supposed to be, and they style themselves as this as well afterwards, the liberators. Right. Right. Yeah. People don’t realize how things actually unfold. It’s usually not. All the things you think are slow happen very quickly and all the things you think are quick happen very slowly. Right. Only about 20 senators actually stabbed Caesar. The rest just stood and watched. Oh, wow. Yeah. Even though all of them were in on it, they didn’t, they didn’t want to be the one to wield the blade, which tells you all you need to know about the quality of men who were there as well, because they, they couldn’t, they couldn’t make the decision and then follow through with it. Yeah. It had, had, had the, had the tables been turned, Caesar would have just slipped their throats one at a time by himself. Just like you, you, you. Right. Yeah. Because he was a leader and he was like, yeah, dude, let’s get this done. Right. And they weren’t leaders. They were weak. And so they were, oh, it’s a little bit of blood. I don’t know. There’s still time to change your mind. It’s like, no, dude. And that quality of, of, of confidence is, you know, to me, I mean, I think it’s super significant. Right. Like a lot of, and a lot of people sort of misunderstand that they, they, I want to say they misapprehend it. Right. And, and, and one of the ways that, that, that people sort of misunderstand in history, that whole thing is they’ll see something like a calm or a quietness as, or confidence as arrogance. Right. When true arrogance is speaking about something you know nothing about, you know, if you don’t know, or know very little about it, pretending to know you more about a subject than you actually do, which people do all the time. And that gets, you know, sort of reflected and, and reverberated and echoed. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s Russia’s song, Tom Sawyer, right. Though his mind is not for rent, don’t put him down as arrogant. His reserve a quiet defense. Right. Writing out the day’s events. Okay. Right. He’s reserved because he’s defending against today. Right. And so his mind is his own. Right. Because he’s reserved. It’s not arrogance. And they, you know, they, they kind of intuit that in the song. Right. And talk about it. And, and that’s super important. But then we, you know, we don’t see that nowadays. You know, this guy’s up there on the stage talking about something, then you can’t tell who knows stuff and who doesn’t. Yeah. Right. So if you, if you’re sitting there listening to, say, Jordan Hall talk about money, which he just seems to not have studied history in a little bit, you know, you know, you might mistake him for somebody who’s actually saying something that, you know, authoritative, when in fact, he really did not understand the consequences of what he was, you know, and being an accelerationist for economic collapse is kind of popular nowadays. But, you know, accelerationism, and this is an echo, right, like, a lot of people want an answer. And so they want to hurry up and get the answer, right, because they’re impatient. So like, let’s hurry up and get to this is get it over with. And I sort of joke about that occasionally, right, with the battle between science and religion. Let’s just, let’s arm both sides and see how it goes. It’s done with fairly sure religion is going to win anyway. Let’s arm all the priests. But, but you see this accelerationism because they want an answer. And that, you know, that’s great. But then you’re listening to a bunch of people and you have no discernment as to whether or not you should be listening to those people. Yeah, right. You know, is this person an expert in this? You know, are they an uncorruptible doctor that’s taking no money from a pharma company? I don’t know, right? Are they a researcher who didn’t get any money from the CDC? I don’t know. You know, like, and finding that out is non-trivial. It’s often almost impossible to find that information, even if it exists. Because sometimes people do backdoor deals, guys, you know, and then bags of cash change hands. I’ve seen it, it happens. So, you know, what do you do when you don’t have a sense of who to trust and who not to trust? Right? You get caught in this echo of mistrust or distrust, where you’re trying to do everything on your own authority, right, or all by yourself, or trying to know everything all by yourself. And I think that’s where it gets dangerous, right? You’re told democratization exists, you’re told you’re part of the demos, and therefore you can know these things. And therefore you can know which experts to trust and which not to. But of course, by definition, you couldn’t know that. That’s virtually impossible. If you were an expert, you wouldn’t need to listen to them. And if you’re not an expert, how do you know if they’re right or not? Like, that just doesn’t make any sense. And that’s why we need leaders, right? And you see that pattern of getting rid of the leader, and then needing a leader again, and getting rid of the leader, and needing a leader again, right, all the way back. It happens constantly. And the thing is, is that when it comes to something like accelerationism, I think it’s hard to tell, of course, because you don’t, you know, we don’t know what was happening at the time. But when you get to Augustus, there’s a kind of resolution that, yeah, well, this isn’t exactly the Roman Republic that we, we, you know, of our ancestors. But for the sake of not spilling any more blood, we’ll go with this. And I think before then, there was a kind of real push to try and get to that stage. There was a kind of accelerationist elements within the Roman government. And a good example is the Catiline conspiracy. And, you know, these guys were making moves that really didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense to Catiline or Catalina. He had men, he had men and resources, but he didn’t have enough to take the Republic. But he still tried it anyways. And of course, he ended up getting killed for it by Cicero. That was actually kind of Cicero’s golden moment. And he was proclaimed the great father of the Republic. But that element is really kind of a, comes from, I think, a cry for leadership, because they’re, they’re not, they don’t want to make, the lack of discernment, they’re willing to kind of forget, like move past that and just say something needs to be done. And the problem with that is that when they actually do something, it worsens the situation rather than improves it. So the Catiline conspiracy really did tear at, tear more at the seams of the Roman Republic than really needed to be done at that stage. And it probably ultimately made the outcome worse, because it generated within the Senate, a real dislike for Caesar’s party, who had men involved with that, for obvious reasons, that they wanted to do the reform and this guy was willing to take up the sword to do it. And that, you know, that later shows itself with Caesar and Pompey, and then more wedges being driven between them. And then of course, it shows that ultimately in Caesar getting stabbed, all that ill will that’s brought about by guys who are, you know, I guess, acting out in the absence of a leader, it does make the kind of outcome ultimately worse in the end. And the leader you get is probably worse than the one you could have had. I mean, if I had to choose between Augustus and Caesar, I’d probably choose Caesar, because Caesar actually had an idea of clemency, of actually being willing to forgive. Whereas Augustus was like, I’m not making that mistake again. Right. Yeah. Now that’s interesting. Look, I think on that note, we should wrap it up. Any any general thoughts or wrap up thoughts you want to give and then I’ll close it out for us. Yeah, okay. Well, I think my wrap up, in some sense, perhaps should have been my intro. But oh, well, it’s better late than never. When it comes to history, I guess, because we touched on it somewhat briefly, it really isn’t about kind of making predictions of the future. And additionally, there is this idea, there is this concept of the past as a foreign country. And to a large extent, I do agree with that statement. But it matters how you frame that. Because you see, when it comes to the past being a foreign country, ultimately, the people in the past are still humans. And you share a lot with them in terms of, you know, were you of that time, you would have understood things maybe a lot easier. And I think a lot of people when they’re talking about the past being in a foreign country, it is a lot of that technological change. A lot of the stuff they might use for cooking or cleaning might be, you know, a lot of, you know, majorly different, but they’re still cooking and cleaning. Sometimes it’s referring to kind of differences in values. But I think in the grand scheme of things, that may be the case, right? I mean, the ancient Romans were very far removed, I guess, from us in terms of their outlook on certain things. And then in other cases, we actually line up quite well. But when it comes to the patterns and the echoes that we see, these are something that’s very much common to us. And though the past might well indeed be a foreign country, kind of, if you will, the music or the echoes of human life within that country are actually going to be familiar. Oh, I like that. I like that. Yeah. And I think the reason why these echoes are important is because, it’s sad to say, nothing’s new under the sun. The things you’re going through, the things that we’re experiencing, which country you’re in, right, or what view of the country you see are not new. And sure, they might be worse than they were 50 years ago or 30 years ago or 10 years ago, whatever timeframe you want to pick, because things are cyclical and they don’t stay stable because entropy, right? But we do have tools for dealing with this. We do know how to deal with this. And we can’t extract from the past those things. And one of the big problems I saw, especially on Twitter with arguments about my favorite topic, the Georgian socialism and communism and fascism, hint socialism is the bigger bucket, the other two are subtypes, was people just don’t pay attention to history. And so they have no chance of seeing these patterns, of seeing these echoes. They have no hope really for staying out of the nihilism, staying out of the determinism, coming to really negative conclusions on their own authority and then being trapped within that. And that, I think, is where the danger is, is when you’re trapped within that sort of, oh, this is what happened before and it’s going to happen again for sure, because you haven’t looked at all the time something like that happened and all the different ways it played out. Because a lot of times, especially when we’re looking back at history, because we’re looking back, we look at end results and we’re not looking at how things started. And it’s always good to look at how things start so that you can find out if the end that happened was inevitable or if it was a side effect or if it was due to a completely different factor. Because it’s easy to pick something in time and say, well, look, if Hitler had gotten all his armament in place and actually bombed the three Russian cities at the same time with the technology that he had and there hadn’t been three weird, strange, mystical disasters preventing that, then he certainly would have taken Russia when you know full well from Napoleon that that wasn’t going to work. It was never going to work. He could have taken all three cities. All he would have had were three destroyed cities that he himself destroyed with no food. And so the German blitzkrieg would have failed one way or the other. Why he didn’t know this? Probably he didn’t read Napoleon. He didn’t understand. But that’s what happens when we fail because the one thing the echoes of the past can give us is hope for the future. To your point, not a prediction of the future, but hope for the future, that the age that we’re in, pattern that we’re in, that where we’re stuck is just part of a cycle. So thank you very much, everybody. Adam, thank you so much for making time to do this. We got to prep for Russian Revolution. I got to do a bunch of research on that because I don’t know nearly enough. And hopefully you’re pre-prepared better than I am. And I will have Adam back on for that. And if you like these videos, like, subscribe, tell your friends, threaten your relatives, whatever it takes. And let us know in the comments. Interactions help. Let us know you like this, you didn’t like this, whatever parts of it. You want to see Russian Revolution, that helps spur us on and get us a little bit motivated because we’ve just been all over the place. We should have done this like two months ago, but things. So yeah, the interaction helps. So thank you very much, everybody. And we’ll see you next time.