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You need to look as far back into the past as you want to look into the future.
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It's about this concept that I found in Aristotle and one of the emotions that he talks about is zeal.
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It it is something that like spurs you to achieve more to excellence.
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When we first discover something or invent something, we think that it can do everything.
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We think that it can turn us into gods, that it can help us to transcend human nature.
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That's what the heroic stories are for.
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That's why it's interesting to engage with the past if you are fundamentally a futurist.
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My guest today is Alex Petkas, host of the Cost of Glory podcast, co-founder of the Classical Society, a refugee from academia.
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You have a PhD in classics from Princeton and were a professor, but decided, "These guys just sit around and yap. They don't do anything." Alex, welcome. Great to be here, Jim. Nailed it.
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So so let's let's start first on your book.
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Is the working title still Zealots, a book for those obsessed with greatness?
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It's something like that.
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Yeah, we we still have to I still have to tidy up a couple chapters and come up with a a proper title, but but yeah, it's about this concept that I found in Aristotle and you know, many people who read Aristotle read the ethics or the politics or the metaphysics, but one of my favorite books of his is the rhetoric. Mhm. I've read it.
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I kind of fancy myself a rhetorician.
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It's it's not easy reading, but if you skip to the second book out of three, he goes through this amazing catalog.
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It's the first catalog in uh Western intellectual tradition that I'm aware of that is a real kind of study of human psychology or something that we would recognize as a study of human psychology.
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And he's talking about the emotions of a crowd that an orator would have to persuade.
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And one of the emotions that he talks about is zeal.
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Or it's usually translated as emulation, which I think is kind of an old-fashioned word for us.
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I don't really think we we use it as an operative concept, but it it's zelos in Greek, which is where we get the word zeal.
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Aristotle describes it as a a type of pain felt when a man sees present among others who are like him by nature things good and honorable which he himself is capable of attaining.
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And um and it's it's a simple concept, but extremely powerful, extremely generative, and it connects with all kinds of deep cultural forms and structures like heroism and competition that are you know, extremely salient in Greek culture in particular, but also in like human excellence in general.
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And so I felt like somebody needs to write a book about it and that's what I'm doing.
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>> Yeah, yeah, I love the concept for the book and when you were going through his definition, it made me think instantly of Girard and mimetic desire. Definitely.
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And and and Girard is he has a there are a couple of you know, if you really do your homework, you can find some essays of his that take a kind of positive look at zeal or or or mimetic desire, which is very much is species of mimetic desire in his terminology.
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The mimetic meaning of course imitative and you know, the desire that basically the idea of Girard is that we desire what we see others desiring. Mhm.
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And zeal is a form of that imitative desire, but Girard is usually pretty negative on mimetic desire like To put it mildly.
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Yeah, might cause the apocalypse. Yeah.
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>> Um yeah, it probably will. >> than that. Besides that.
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But but Aristotle has a a very positive notion of it and he distinguishes it from this other species of mimetic desire, envy, phthonos in Greek, which just sounds nasty.
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In Greek as as I think in English, it it sounds like um phthair is a is a louse, you know, like a bed bug.
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So it starts with that you know, p t h sound and then and it rhymes with murder or you know, phthonos.
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It's so like phthonos sounds wicked wicked word.
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Um and it's envy is always bad for Aristotle.
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It is it is the pain you feel when you see others succeeding in short not over the fact that you haven't succeeded so much as over the fact that they are succeeding.
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So it's it's the desire to kind of it's the tall poppy emotion.
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Um and and and that I think Girard doesn't strong I don't think he strongly distinguishes between like positive and negative mimetic desire.
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It's just like all one thing with many ramifications, but but Aristotle says envy is characteristic of bad men.
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It's characteristic of of the old and zeal is characteristic of the young and of of good men.
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And it it is something that like spurs you to to achieve more to excellence.
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Whereas whereas envy is about like destroying other people who you know, to bring them down to your to your level.
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It's like ressentiment, Nietzsche's ressentiment.
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Um so I think that I think we especially need in this Girard well, I mean in our niche I guess in tech and and culture, people are aware Girard and um you know, I think that we need a positive spin on mimetic desire because you know, it's it's part of human nature and you know, Aristotle sees following out the strong aspects of human nature as as a key to to bringing out our excellence to happiness, to virtue and so on.
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And I've always thought of rhetoric as also linked to the ability to persuade. Right? >> Yeah.
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Fundamentally, that's what it is. Yeah.
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I'm obsessed right now with this idea that all innovation, all technology especially is dual use. Right? >> Mhm.
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It it itself like AI for example, it itself is a tool and neutral and you can unless it's been nerfed, right?
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And no, I think blowing up the entire world is a great idea, Jim, you know, when it goes into sycophantish mode.
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And so as I was getting ready to talk to you, I was thinking, why did we get why did the term zealot become a negative term?
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I want to talk about dual use technology cuz this is this actually like relates to the foundational myths of technology in Greece.
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So let's put a pin in that and circle back to it.
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But the the zealot concept I pretty sure that it has to do with the way that the term is brought into English, which is via the the Bible.
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So in in the times of Jesus, you know, Roman Judea, there are a lot of upset local Jews who are you know, seeing the the Roman overlords importing kind of sneaking in pagan cults and they see a lot of the local Jewish leaders being nice to the Romans so that the Romans don't stomp them as they tend to do people who don't comply.
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Um and and you know, Herod the Great is a great figure in this story, you know, building a temple to Augustus and you know, having you know, statuary in it.
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And in the Greek translation, this is interesting, of the Old Testament, which is called the Septuagint, it was done in Alexandria, Egypt in the 2nd century BC, the there is this concept that occurs over and over.
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The Hebrew root is qana, which is um sort of like the passage where you might have heard this I'm a jealous God, you know, you will have no gods before me.
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That that whole idea that that that uh God that Yahweh doesn't like you um going and and uh honoring other gods like as though you were a a kind of faithless wife.
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And and that qana is is his response to you being a faithless wife, Israel.
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And and he says, "I'm a jealous God."
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And the Greek uses that word zeal.
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Literally, God is a zealot. I am a zelotes. I'm a feeler of zeal.
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But but it's that kind of competitive um jealousy that also is is a shade of the Greek meaning.
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It's not the clearly not the shade that Aristotle is using, but you know, it is a competitive emotion is a rivalrous emotion, zeal.
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And so they decided to translate qana and the qanaim are the zealots in the Roman in Roman Judea.
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And and the zealots are you know, of course there's probably good versions of them.
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I mean, depends on your perspective on history.
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The the the people who held out at Masada against Titus were Kana'im of of some branch.
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There's There's all these splinter factions.
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And um And so they're they're trying to, you know, vindicate God's honor and God's right in in Judea and drive out the bad idols.
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And so uh Zealot Simon the Zealots, you know, these these concepts become associated with the certain kind of religious extremism and it's um in the the kind of Puritan movement in the 17th century was a big generative uh period for this dis- discourse of the Zealot.
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You know, the the the Puritans are are these uh over-excitable Zealots and they're they're trying to uh rip all the beautiful paintings and the roods and and and the iconography and get rid of the the the monasteries.
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So, like um there's a sense in which uh this plugs into modern English religious politics and gets energized in this way against Zealot.
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And Zealot is kind of become a a bad word in our day.
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But in the uh pre-Hebrew Hebraization of the Greek language with that you get with the New Testament and and the the Septuagint, a Zealot, a zelotes, is could just be a follower of a philosopher, somebody who feels zeal for their master or feels zeal for, say, the heroes of the past.
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It's It It would be a positive thing to be like a devotee of something in a good sense uh or or at least without the religious connotations.
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So, there's interesting history there um but you know, I think we have a chance to kind of revive this term or at least the concept uh for today. Yeah.
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Um and you know, we put a pin in the idea of looking at uh tech innovation, etc.
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today through the eyes of the Greek myths.
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I know that uh that is something near and dear to your heart.
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But as I was kind of thinking about it, it's like it does seem to me that at least the well-known ones, right?
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Prometheus and his punishment for bringing fire to we mere mortals, uh Daedalus and Icarus, uh don't fly too close to the sun.
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It It seems like uh that a lot of the myths would be what David Deutsch would call, you know, sort of littered with the precautionary principle.
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Yeah, I think that's right.
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Um I was We were speaking earlier about this.
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I was at a um launch of a short film by uh Jason Carman and the Story uh company that that I know you are uh a fan of and uh just last week in San Francisco and in the the basic the premise of the uh film which I'm not giving it anything away and everybody should go see it.
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It should be on YouTube today, I think.
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Uh it's called The Greatest Lie.
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The premise is is imagining a future in which there are no books or or rather in which everybody for the most part has forgotten how to read whether by um because the technology was too entertaining and it seemed pointless or because the powers that be decided that people shouldn't read books.
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Probably a combination of both.
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It's uh but um and so books are burned and if you have books, this is, you know, a crime.
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And uh you know, you could think of other familiar sci-fi stories that that relate to this issue.
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But uh there's a character in there that plays an important role.
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I won't give away, but his his um his his name or his nickname is Prom as in Prometheus.
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And so, you know, I think these still myths still have a whole lot of resonance to draw on.
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But Prometheus i- is an interesting myth because the it definitely relates to this dual use thing.
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So, um Prometheus brings fire down to mortals uh because Zeus didn't want us to have fire.
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And uh fire, of course, is how you cook meat.
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It's It's important for civilization for uh blacksmithing work.
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Uh of course, it can also destroy your village or a forest.
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But the I think the context is really interesting of the Prometheus myth.
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So, the first telling that we have of it is in this Greek author Hesiod um who is uh writing around the time of Homer, probably a little before the Homeric poems were codified.
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Hesiod's writing in the maybe 700 BC.
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Shortly after the invention of writing, which is also a very important technology that I want to put a pin in that one, too.
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But the context of the Prometheus story is Prometheus so the myth goes invites the gods to a feast with humans. There's a big uh party.
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And the feast is really clearly depicted as a kind of proto sacrifice.
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It's like the the paradigmatic sacrifice event.
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The the the feast at which the gods and humans both have a share.
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And Prometheus kind of tricks Zeus in the context of this feast.
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He's like, "Well, you know, we're going to we're going to sacrifice We're going to slaughter this cow or sheep or whatever it is.
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And uh we're going to split it up um based on, you know, the gods get the first choice, right?
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Because they're they're the best.
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And uh but but Prometheus pulls pulls a fast one on Zeus, so he thinks, and he divides up the animal such that the um the bones get wrapped in fat, white glistening fat, which is apparently the better looking portion.
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And uh and then there's another portion which is like the the actual nutritive meats of the animal that get wrapped in this ugly cow stomach.
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And uh Prometheus brings the portions before Zeus.
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He says, "Zeus, which which one do you want, I mean, oh king?"
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And Zeus apparently knows that Prometheus is pulling a trick on him, but he he kind of wants to, you know, complete the story or he wants to kind of shame humans.
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It's not really clear what his motives are.
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But he picks the one that looks better, that Prometheus clearly wanted him to pick, which is actually just like fat and bone.
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And it's um it's not very nutritive.
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And uh then humans get the better portion.
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And so, uh when he when he opens up his his presents, uh he gets he gets angry even though he knew it was going to happen.
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And he punishes humans and Prometheus.
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Humans kind of get punished for just receiving the better proportion even though they didn't necessarily have agency in it.
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And uh and that's when he decides to withhold fire.
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Says humans are not going to have fire for that reason.
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Um to kind of get them back.
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And uh and it's then that Prometheus goes up and he sneaks in.
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He uh steals fire in a fennel stalk and brings it down to humans.
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And um and so, this it fire is this is like the foundational myth of technology in a lot of ways.
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It is part of this trade that we made it with the gods.
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Like technology is a thing that uh that was withheld from us and then uh we we kind of got back in the context of setting up our relationship.
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Like what is the permanent communication structure going to be between humans and gods? Sacrifice is it.
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You know, this is how we give them things in order to, you know, we we sort of honor them by sacrifice um and we hope to get blessings and benefactions from them in return.
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Um but somehow in the context of that story, technology comes out and I think that this partly relates to the Prometheus story to how humans how technology represents something that is that we get from what is from the divine or from what is most divine in us.
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But it was kind of a violation.
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There was some There was something that was was problematic about it.
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The the second part of the story is in in punishment for Prometheus stealing technology again, uh you know, and bring it to humans, Zeus punishes not just Prometheus by tying him to a rock in the Caucasus and having a bunch of birds eat out his liver and it grows back every day.
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But they he also punishes humans by giving us Pandora and her box.
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And she opens up the box and all the bad things come into the world, you know, sickness and and misery and wars.
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And so, you know, it it's kind of that that violation is responsible for most of the bad things that happened in the world.
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Civilization is is a product of technology.
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It's It's It's not just um it's not just gadgets and fire.
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It's also like the ability to order a city, the ability to have agriculture is uh is a technological feat.
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And and we lost something.
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There was maybe an earlier time in in the kind of hunter-gatherer days when life was better before all the miseries of technology came.
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So, it's It's very problematic, but it you know, it's it's it's just perennial.
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Um you know, technology didn't come about late in the human story.
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It's like as soon as we were humans in a in any recognizable sense, we we had it and used it.
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Uh so, I think the myth gets at that.
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The Correct me if my memory is wrong, but isn't what's at the bottom of Pandora's Box hope? True.
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Yes, and very importantly.
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So, uh it's not it's not all bad.
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That she I think she keeps hope in the jar is the idea that such so that we can kind of we have some kind of control over it.
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It's not just floating around in the world, but but we still have hope in the jar and and you know, that's that's the balance part of it.
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And and as I'm listening to you, it's just like to me why are so many of myths so negative?
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So, I as I was listening to you about Zeus getting pissed off, right?
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Because he's bringing fire down to the humans.
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Like Adam and Eve, right? >> Mhm.
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The the apple is knowledge and if you bite the apple, that's it, man.
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You're out you're you're out of uh perfection and you have to go and you know, go in into the world. What do you think it is?
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Because obviously, these are all human problems, right?
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And we create these myths.
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Why do you think that there is such a preponderance of the negative having to do with innovation, moving forward, learning more?
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I mean, all of the things that we humans seem to be particularly gifted at.
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It it it is it just political, right?
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>> Because if you're looking at it in just the surface, you're going to think, well, of course the king doesn't want the population to be able to overthrow him or whatever.
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So, he's going to always put the brakes on anything.
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You know, I've been thinking about it in terms of mesh networks, distributed value networks, of which the Greek city-states were one.
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Uh we'll talk about that later, but uh why the preponderance is is it just uh hey, I'm at the top of the hierarchy. I'm writing the myths.
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The myths are going to be settle down. Don't ask for too much.
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Know your place or is it something more?
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I think that is one perspective and that's probably right, but um I think another perspective is is also possible and probably equally right that the Adam and Eve story God's threat which is true, is that you're going to become like God.
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You're going to become more God-like.
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You know, seeing their eyes are going to be opened and um they're going to they're going to have this understanding like like I do and and and I think that to to go to the Icarus example Icarus is um so, it's not necessarily anti-technology 100% because He's fine.
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Yeah, Daedalus makes the wings for him and and his boy and they actually do escape.
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They're trying to get away from the evil tyrant Minos and it works.
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Like they they get they escape the island of Crete. Daedalus gets to safety.
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Icarus was doing fine until he he did something crucial and that was mistaken, which is he tried to go up and be like a god.
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He tried to fly up to the sun Mhm.
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and and cross a certain limit.
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And I think that that is potentially the the cautionary tale that that there is a kind of deeper wisdom to it that the technology um when we first discover something or invent something, we think that it can do everything.
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We think that it can turn us into gods, that it can help us to transcend human nature.
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At least in the Icarus story, the the the warning is about is not about being ambitious.
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And uh I was reading the biography of Alex Karp lately and uh this is apparently Karp's dad used to take Alex and his brother to the Philadelphia Art Museum.
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He loved to go to the the painting of of Icarus and Daedalus and say, "See, Alex? That's what happens."
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You know, he was he sort of was always trying to tamp him down.
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>> And that that also just immediately ties back to tall poppy syndrome. Yeah.
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>> You know, Rousseau, another one like man in his natural state was so much better, so much you know, wiser, so much more noble.
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But but then of course, you come to American thinkers and Emerson basically says man is a god in ruin. Mhm. And that's a bad thing.
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We we don't want to be a god in ruin.
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We want to And and and it and it does seem to me that a lot of those myths when you look at American philosophers and thinkers they look at it a little differently or am I just reading too much into it? I think that's right.
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I mean it I mean, Tocqueville talks about the particular genius of the American people is this you know, culture of tinkering and and um frontier pushing not just physic you know, geographically, but technologically.
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I think that we just have this much more immediate sense that um you know, whether it's the railroads or the steamship that it's it's this incredibly powerful tool for mastery and prosperity and and and and flourishing.
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Um that you know by the time we were doing that in the 18th and 19th centuries, you know, Europe had had already kind of had its stable system.
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It was you know, um the the the American ideal of um masculinity is is one thing you could call it.
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Um there's a great article on this by Matthew Gazda in the American Affairs Journal a couple of months ago.
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You know, we to to to to to flourish in Europe in the 19th century was about uh finding a good patron, performing well for him for the most part.
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Whereas in America, there's this culture of like self-reliance and and and our one of our greatest levers in in that effort is the mastery of technology and uh and extending human agency further beyond its frontiers.
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Um you know, not that they're completely empty.
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That's another whole story we want to get into of the the conquest of the Americas.
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But but I I think that you know, to go back to Icarus, like there is this recognition in Greek culture that the technology is powerful and it's good, but it it it it just always comes with drawbacks that tend to be underestimated by the people who first get their hands on it or first develop it.
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And there's another great story um about uh writing that Plato tells. Mhm.
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I'm sure you're familiar with this, but it's uh it's in his dialogue the Phaedrus, which is a great dialogue about rhetoric actually.
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And uh in the context of this, Socrates and his interlocutor are talking about writing as a technology and he tells a story that he heard from the Egyptians at at some point and his interlocutor says, "Are you making this up, Socrates?" And he's like, "Quiet. Listen to the story."
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Uh but it's it's uh the story is Thoth and Ammon.
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These two Egyptian gods, Thoth and Thamus is what he calls them in the dialogue, but it's Thoth Thoth and Ammon-Ra.
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And Thoth is uh trickster god.
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He's he's an inventor of many things, geometry, astronomy, and he's he's very excited about all his inventions and he he finally gets gets his bag of goodies together and he goes to the king god, which is Ammon-Ra or Ammon, and he says, "Ammon, I I got all these great tools.
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You're going to love them and here's the one I'm most proud of. It's called grammata.
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It's called letters, writing.
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And this is a cure for forgetfulness.
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We're never going to forget anything again because we can write it all down and uh it's never going to go away.
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We can put it in stone even."
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And Ammon says, "Thoth, you are like a father who is biased toward his child.
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You know, you have birthed this technology um but but you don't you don't see its its weaknesses.
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And uh there's an interesting word play there in the Greek because tech technology or an art uh also that the word for it in Greek is techne.
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Uh t c h and e where the c h is a chi, but the word for giving birth or or bearing a child is tekain with a kappa.
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So, with tech is is a kind of common sound between the two words.
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They're not actually etymologically related, but they're close enough that it's extremely plausible.
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And so, Plato kind of plays on this is like every technology has is like a child of a father.
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And and the people who who bring it forth tend to be overly biased toward how beneficial it's going to be and not see the weaknesses.
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And so, Ammon says, "No, Thoth.
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You've got it exactly the opposite.
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This is this is not a tool for remembering.
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It's a tool for forgetting, right?
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Because we're going to write things down and not need to remember them anymore.
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Um and uh you know, it's like I'm you know, we're all going to be master cartographers because we have Google Maps. Exactly the opposite.
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You know, we're we're going to rely on this technology.
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It's going to kind of become this second brain for us, which means it's not your brain at all.
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It's it's somebody else's brain um that you're just leveraging somehow.
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Uh so and I think that that that myth kind of captures Plato's own anxiety about the technology of writing.
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Yet he's doing this as the greatest writer of his generation, like by far.
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Like and and he he elsewhere says that no serious philosopher would commit his most important doctrines to writing.
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And I have never done so.
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Uh because the more important thing for Plato is to implant your ideas in in other people.
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Uh and um and so Plato was like deeply skeptical of writing on the one hand and yet he he leveraged it to this incredible unprecedented scale to found a philosophical school that lasted a thousand years.
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It's like lasted, you know, longer than anything any other Greek institution.
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He used his dialogues to attract students to himself, to kind of give people a sense of what Platonic philosophy was about, but he didn't um he he I guess he kind of knew the limit.
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He knew that to to try to fly close to the sun and to um to lay out your doctrines in a in a straightforward treatise rather than in dialogues where you're kind of hinting at what you're about, but you're not ever kind of firmly saying it, that that would be crossing some boundary maybe that that the technology's not really for.
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Uh so, I think that that that is actually good model like maximum skepticism, maximum uh leverage at the same time to kind of keep those very much in tension ideas uh in your mind at the same time.
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Like you need to know the limits um in order to to decide um what is really promising, what's really worth investing in, whether it's as an investor in the strict sense or as like a culture.
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Uh but also to see um the incredible possibilities in it and and to use them and to experiment and to to try it out.
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There's a lot of rabbit holes you just uh opened up for us because um you know, back to fire, right? So, we didn't ban fire.
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We on the other hand came up with fire codes, fire engines, fire departments, fire alarms, fire extinguishers.
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Because as a new technology is birthed, right?
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We don't know yet what the downsides are going to be.
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But as I mentioned earlier, I I definitely look at all technology as dual use and it can be used both for good and bad.
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It depends on which human hands it happens to be in, right?
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So, you you can use AI for example for mass persuasion at scale um negatively, right?
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to get people take their agency away from them, have them become learned helpless creatures.
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Uh or you can use it to do the opposite, to, you know, have the greatest tutor in the world.
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Um and, you know, educate at a level that our old way of doing simply wasn't possible to do.
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So, I I'm I'm also fascinated by the idea that and back to rhetoric, right?
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You know, a lot of the Greek myths are also very insightful about human nature, right?
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I'm thinking of Discordia or Eris, I guess.
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Uh the the and she did the golden apple deal.
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What For the for the most beautiful, yes.
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Yeah, for the most beautiful.
33:15
And uh that to me also just like really strikes a chord on on human nature.
33:19
And so, I always try to look at a lot of these myths through, you know, what do they teach us about ourselves?
33:27
Because after all, we came up with them.
33:32
And and and the power and of myth and and symbols.
33:35
I think of Marduk, right?
33:39
Like the Babylonians, they really wanted to rule all of Mesopotamia, but they had a problem.
33:44
And their problem was their god was a puny god.
33:46
It was just like a nothing. It was a local god.
33:49
And so, they're like, wait a tick. Let's do a rewrite. Let's rebrand.
33:54
And so, they came up with this uh myth that I'm sure you're aware of where their god tore I can't remember what kind of mythological creature it was, but it was this badass creature and it the god tore it in half and and threw half of it up and created the heavens and and the stars and then threw the other half down and created the earth and then subsumed, I guess, 50 gods.
34:18
I don't really remember how many. And it worked.
34:25
Basically, uh Babylonia, everyone in Mesopotamia is like, man, their god is like he's the real deal.
34:32
I guess I guess they do have the right to rule all of Mesopotamia.
34:37
And so, it does seem to me that many of our myths are used for very human purposes, um either controlling other humans or ruling or or whatever.
34:50
But I I definitely think that there is so much to them that really describes us. Absolutely.
35:00
And uh I mean the the Greek equivalent of the Marduk story might be um Zeus because who is not born the the king god.
35:11
He's born to the king god and the king god tries to eat him as he ate the his other brothers and sisters, Cronus.
35:19
Cronus is kind of uh chaotic wicked tyrant and there's, you know, lawlessness and chaos and about the earth.
35:27
And um and and there's of course the prophecy is is the reason he's eating his children is that there's a prophecy that he will be overthrown by his child and his that his child will become more powerful than him.
35:40
become more powerful than him. And so, he just to make sure he makes sure, you know, he eats all of the uh the other gods, the brothers of Zeus and and sisters of Zeus and then Zeus's um mother, Rhea, hides uh hides Zeus away in a cave in Crete and
35:56
she she feeds Cronus a stone wrapped up in uh swaddling cloths and then Cronus, you know, eats it and vomits forth the other gods, but then Zeus grows up and it's interesting in the story of Zeus's kind of rise to power, which again we get from Hesiod in the Theogony. He's a He's
36:13
He's a He's a great poem.
36:16
He summons various deities to his side to help him overthrow his father.
36:21
One of them is Zeal, Zelos.
36:25
There's power, Kratos, Bia, you know, power, victory, and force.
36:29
Uh Nike is uh victory and then and Zelos are are these these uh children of of Styx that he he summons to help him overthrow the the the wicked tyrant.
36:44
So, I mean these and these are you know, kind of stories that encapsulate so much of human experience, you know, throwing off a kind of crusty old um establishment that is looking after its own interest rather than the interest of the um people that it's supposed to be um you know, serving.
37:05
Zeus Zeus overthrows it through the power of of force and zeal and you know, we use these for for good as well as, you know, for evil.
37:13
But in Zeus's case, it was for good and it established justice in the universe.
37:16
Um so, these things these things are very uh powerful and they I think they're s- as relatable as ever today as you can see, I think in the in the the uh greatest lie movie. Mm.
37:33
And uh I mentioned earlier that I've been kind of uh really fascinated with distributed value networks.
37:38
Could they techs people call them mesh networks.
37:43
Uh but essentially what they are systems that distribute cognition, risk, value creation across autonomous specialist zones.
37:52
And if you look historically, that type of network, I think of a spider web as opposed to a bicycle wheel, right?
37:58
So, the bicycle wheel would be Rome, hierarchy um that the Roman Catholic Church adopted um and most nation states adopt.
38:07
Um the the spider web uh is basically you you have to have conditions like the Greek city-states if we want to make it geographic, where there is no central power, right?
38:26
So, if you contrast all of the different Greek city-states, each one was very good at something very different.
38:36
And, you know, I had the thought that the a great example of the power of that is, you know, the Persian Empire.
38:45
They had great bureaucracy, they had great military, but they never produced a Socrates. Mhm.
38:49
Whereas the Greek city-states, because there was no central power, we got all of the great ideas from them.
38:59
And, you know, it carries forward.
38:59
You have the Republic of Letters that gets captured by when they formed the Royal Society.
39:06
You you had uh you know, um uh Raphael had within his workshop, it was a mesh network.
39:17
He had people who worked for him, who were specialists in faces, in hands, in a variety of things.
39:23
And and so, you keep seeing uh Gutenberg, right?
39:26
We wouldn't have the printing press if Germany had been united because the Chinese had movable type centuries before.
39:39
But because the emperor, no no no no no. Right? Uh he he squashed that.
39:42
So, I guess the thesis is why do we always seem to default to the inferior network?
39:57
And is that simply because, you know, a powerful entity comes in and captures all the value of that particular network?
40:04
Uh like what happened as we watch as various empires displace one another? What do you think?
40:12
I think of the Greek city-states versus Rome.
40:15
A lot of people are very um you know, on my podcast I I I do this combination of Greek heroes and Roman heroes um based on the stories of Plutarch.
40:29
Uh Plutarch wrote um Parallel Lives cataloging the greatest heroes of Greece and the greatest heroes of Rome, pairing them up.
40:40
I think he was writing in part to sort of help the Greeks understand the Romans and help the Romans understand the Greeks by kind of bringing them for a fireside, you know, encounter with uh each culture's greatest heroes.
40:55
But um and and my my listeners sort of debate amongst themselves and and various forums like are the Greeks more impressive?
41:03
Are the Romans more impressive?
41:04
Is Caesar more impressive?
41:06
Is Alexander more impressive?
41:07
Uh you know, who who are we most like or who do we have the most to learn from?
41:11
learn from? And and so there's a constant comparison between these two cultures going on implicitly in Plutarch and I I think about this a lot as someone who's more of a Hellenist than than a Romanist, even though I spent most of my time in my show doing doing the great Romans like Caesar and Cato and and
41:31
I think one of the the unique powers of Greece is is that it produced uh kind of cultural a kind of cultural software that um that was not that wouldn't have been produced had it been centralized because the Romans never produced that kind of cultural software or or they did very late and only by kind of copying the Greeks. I mean, Roman history starts in,
41:55
I mean, Roman history starts in, you know, the 700s BC with the kings, the founding of Rome, and Romulus, and driving the kings out, and then the republic is established around 504, I think.
42:10
And um and they don't have any uh meaningful writing until the 3rd century BC, until the late 3rd, like the early 200s is when we get some of their first writing, like the plays of Plautus and and um and there's there's a little bit of stuff, but they don't have they don't have literature.
42:30
And even the the the plays of of the early Roman poets are just kind of copy translations, uh very creative and well-done and funny ones, uh of Greek plays.
42:43
And and then it's only in the I think in the the following generation or so when the Romans finally write history, their own history.
42:52
It's it's been Greeks writing Roman history up to that point.
42:54
And Fabius Pictor, the first Roman historian that we're aware of, wrote his history in Greek because Greek, you know, to to write history is a Greek thing and you're writing it for an audience that that reads Greek, you know, you're you're trying to tell your story for for a literate audience.
43:11
The Carthaginians know Greek, you know, the Phoenicians, uh the Egyptians know you know, everybody knows Greek, but nobody bothers to learn Latin cuz there's nothing written in it.
43:22
I mean, if obviously you want to negotiate with some Roman um emissaries, you might want to learn Latin, but they'll probably know Greek so that you can speak Greek with them as as Scipio and Hannibal It was essentially the court language, right? >> Yeah. At that time.
43:37
Every every like every educated uh person either in Rome or elsewhere And this is very much a product of this decentralization of Greek city-states all over the Mediterranean needing to communicate with each other, vying for status, prestige, entertainment.
43:54
You know, there's a kind of competition and cooperation between them.
44:01
They're always allying with each other and then breaking alliances and stabbing each other in the back, and it's all very fun and bloody.
44:08
Uh I'm sure it was maddening to live through for a lot of them.
44:11
But, you know, the earliest Greek literature we have, Homer, is is uh is written in this kind of um this kind of Frankenstein dialect that nobody spoke.
44:26
Aeolic, Ionic, Doric, um because he was trying to uh because this this epic dialect that Homer spoke, which has centuries of tradition behind it that we can't necessarily see because it's uh um cuz the writing didn't exist, but it it was it was written in such a way that Greeks from various regions could pick up enough uh and um and feel like their own um ways were evidenced in the poem, uh even if even if it wasn't their local dialect.
45:01
They could probably pick up the gist of it.
45:02
If it was their local dialect, of course they could they could certainly understand it.
45:05
But, it's this kind of blend that that is a very pan-Hellenic, as they say, a a pan-Greek um cultural form, the the Greek epics.
45:16
And uh you know, the the most important Greek literature that we have uh from the centuries after Homer, things like Herodotus and Thucydides, the histories, um the Greek tragedies, Athenian tragedy is uh the the characters when they're speaking speak in Athenian Greek, but the choruses speak in Doric Greek, which is the dialect of Sparta on the one hand and then the Thebans on the other hand.
45:45
And uh you know, the Spartans they kind of admire and love and hate, and the Thebans they think are just like contemptible pig farmers, but nonetheless there's a tradition behind it.
45:54
And so they if for that reason this this like sense of um of of the power of the network is is there.
45:59
It's not a political power, a military power until Philip and Alexander unite it um in the generation after Plato.
46:08
in the generation after Plato. But, it that if if that network system, if that software, that cultural, you know, DNA didn't exist, then I think the Romans would have had a very difficult time uniting the Mediterranean because they very much
46:24
used the Greek power the Greek cultural power to rule the eastern, which were, you know, much richer, much more civilized, um you know, educated, talented provinces, and they established their empire, and they kind of used the Greek model to eventually develop their own literature under Caesar and Augustus. Uh you know, Virgil's poetry kind of
46:44
Uh you know, Virgil's poetry kind of takes its cue from from the Greeks, and I I wouldn't say that Roman literature is inferior to the Greeks, although they the Romans constantly talk as though that were the case.
46:56
Um but it it was something that they learned from these people who had mastered cultural power but had not quite mastered political power.
47:02
And maybe if they had mastered the centralized political power, then they wouldn't have had the cultural power that was maybe the more lasting thing in the first place.
47:11
>> one of the reasons why America became the country that it became was for most of our history the federal government was very weak.
47:20
The central authority in America was, you know, it was the United States of America, and every state had lots of rights and were in the earlier parts of our history were far more powerful in many respects than the federal government was.
47:39
Um and so what you got was an unintended mesh network uh because you could get away with doing something in, you know, South Dakota that you that was prohibited in Massachusetts.
47:49
When we got very centralized, kind of the imperial federal system that we live under now, uh I'm not saying that innovation has has dried up, but it it was cer- it certainly slowed from the pace of just the hyperkinetic, everybody doing something different, and all of the items that came together to address, you know, what became the United States, the richest country, most powerful country in the history of the world.
48:23
Um and so I'm I'm I'm always fascinated by that.
48:26
But, let's bring it back to now, right?
48:28
So, if if if somebody's 22 and she's listening to this podcast, and she's like, "Wow, Greco-futurism, like I don't I don't know anything about that."
48:41
Where where would you point her uh if she wanted to learn more about the thesis and and how it's applicable to using as kind of a framework for looking at all of the innovation and technology, and the both yearning for more of that and also the desire or the fear of that, right?
49:02
Um that is all Any any innovation always produces a sizable minority that wants it to be destroyed.
49:10
Um I mean, just browse Twitter, browse Instagram. "AI is awful. It is godless."
49:16
You know, and and generally speaking, people think that's unique to AI or now, but it's not at all.
49:26
I mean, they said the same thing about calculators, about computers, about photography, right?
49:30
And what's interesting is the pattern remains virtually the same.
49:36
When photography came on the scene, everyone who was making their living as a portrait artist was a little put off by this new technology.
49:46
And what's interesting is if you map it out, you see the same response to photography as we're getting now to AI.
49:56
You the the people who were at the top of the heap, who this new who they they fear that this new technology is going to nuke them and remove them from the top of the hierarchy.
50:06
They One thing you always see is a movement from the end product, right? The painting. Is the painting good?
50:15
Is does it capture the likeness?
50:17
Does it capture the soul?
50:19
You know, all of those ideas that people would debate on whether that particular portrait was good or bad, right?
50:24
They the the artists themselves move from focusing on that to process. Mhm. Right?
50:33
And and you see it now with AI.
50:36
Uh like, oh no, you know, you you you can't if if in writing, in filmmaking, in all of these things.
50:44
Well, they've shifted entirely from, "Hey, did you like the movie? Did you like the book?
50:48
What what moved you in the book?"
50:50
to, "No, no, was the book made only by human hands?"
50:56
And and but then what happens of course is as it gets better and better and people become more and more acquainted with it, that goes away and everyone was like, "Oh, no, I was always in favor of that."
51:07
Because back to uh portrait painters, right?
51:10
What what they didn't anticipate at the time, and this really links to the idea that as a new technology, whether it be writing or our tech of today, we don't know what's going to happen with that new technology.
51:26
And so, we we I think that we are generally an emotionally based creature and that the ruling emotion is fear.
51:36
And especially fear of the unknown.
51:36
And so, we get very very cautious.
51:39
But then as people use it more and more, again back to portrait painters, we we got bacon out of it.
51:46
You didn't have to do You didn't have to do a perfect likeness of your of your subject.
51:54
And in fact, you this whole new school of portraiture emerged that is wild and incredible.
52:02
And actually many people think, you know, yeah, I can look at a photograph of that guy, but his portrait of that guy really captures him.
52:11
So, it but but back to our 22-year-old.
52:15
How Where are you going to point her?
52:17
What What are you going to tell her to read and watch?
52:22
Well, I think that one of the things AI really raises for us um maybe at a deeper level than most if any technology paradigm shift we've had before is what is really human? Like what what is it?
52:35
Um what what is human intelligence really?
52:38
What what is universal about us?
52:41
What what do we need to preserve to remain human?
52:45
Um because it's probably the case that if we're going to be happy and flourishing, it's going to have something to do with being us the humans flourishing and not just seeing our robots flourish as, you know, you know, matrix pay pig, you know, energy suckers or or or givers for the robots.
53:05
But you know, I I and that's one of the reasons I think it's good to go back to these earlier cultures to kind of strain away some of the dross of uh what our our priors and assumptions.
53:18
And And one of the things that I think good sci-fi does is um kind of isolate interesting elements of what is what is essential about human flourishing that we've that we are at at danger of losing or have the hope of covering.
53:34
I mean, this is there in in the in the Dune series, you know, the the the like force shields that they have in their battles make it so that, you know, you can't just shoot somebody dead with a laser cuz everybody's got laser guns now.
53:52
Um but, you know, your force shield's going to stop it.
53:54
You actually have to go up and, you know, penetrate through that shield with a sword.
53:57
It kind of brings back this this kind of warrior honor culture among among these peoples.
54:04
And um and you know, it it Dune has these resonances with ancient myth like the House of Atreides.
54:09
That's taken right from Agamemnon's house in in the in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
54:14
So, I I think good sci-fi kind of looks back to what is deep and universal about human nature very often and and, you know, takes takes cue from the myths and and the ancient histories.
54:25
But you know, this is something I think there's a pattern that is already inherent in Homer.
54:35
So, we mentioned earlier about the way that Homer is drawing on this ancient tradition of oral poetry that existed for hundreds of years, probably thousands of years actually before Homer.
54:46
Because we can see common patterns and common even phrases that originate from this proto-Indo-European dialect between Homer and like the Vedic poems of of India.
54:59
Um that it was discovered in the early 20th century, these these parallels.
55:03
And And one of the things that an oral culture preserves in its in its stories that they spend so much cognitive fuel remembering, reciting.
55:16
They you know, they have festivals at which poets are heard.
55:21
They have a whole tradition.
55:24
Like why are they putting so much effort into um memorizing and uh retelling ceremonially these stories at the highest level of society.
55:34
Like what is what is the agenda there?
55:35
Um And And I think that if you look at the content of heroic poetry across cultures, and Homer's the one that I'm most especially familiar with.
55:47
It's It's these stories of the gods and myth that we've talked about that kind of deal with perennial human problems.
55:53
But it's also just really vivid examples of heroes, of humans who have pushed the limits of what is possible to do as a human being.
56:07
Achilles um uh facing the choice of a long angle uh you know, obscure life versus um a short glorious life.
56:18
Um you know, he he he can do either, but he can't do both.
56:25
And choosing the the short glorious life uh because he cuz he desires something greater than um than comfort and ease.
56:34
And um and and that ends up serving the community because they end up winning the war in the in the Iliad.
56:40
And a similar story with the the Odyssey, Odysseus um making making has a choice between um uh being the the lover boy of this nymph Calypso, uh but but living in obscurity on this island where she promises to make him immortal.
57:00
Um but her name actually means the hider.
57:03
She's a she's sort of obscures um that that's like a similar choice that Odysseus is making.
57:10
And he he chooses to leave the island and go home and rescue his family and establish his household.
57:17
But like all the heroic myths tend to deal with greatness on some level.
57:19
They tend to deal with um stories that kind of expand the the conception of what a human should be capable of.
57:31
And I think that's kind of what the purpose uh anthropologically, if you will, of what uh these these stories that still resonate with us from the past.
57:43
Plutarch is another example of this with more historical heroes.
57:47
They I think they are interesting and important and kind of powerfully affecting for present generations to kind of serve as an exhortation to us to to think big, to dream big, and to know what is possible to achieve as as an individual human or as a as a culture, as well as to be aware of some of the characteristic uh you know, failure modes of of ambition.
58:18
Uh Greek tragedy is is the great database of this this kind of thing.
58:23
But it's it's a it's an idea that I find really interesting from I'm kind of borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche.
58:33
And I'll summarize it in this way that people need to look if if people want to build an ambitious future where we're where we're flourishing and it's not dystopian, um but but that it isn't kind of a preservation of the status quo and like easy um you know, comfort and managed decline, you need to look as far back into the past as you want to look into the future.
58:58
Which should be far, I think, if you're if you're ambitious.
59:00
And Nietzsche describes this in the uh abuses uses and abuses of history or the advantage and disadvantage of history is an early to um text that he wrote before he kind of came out as a uh you know, uh creative destruction philosopher.
59:21
But he talks about uh the monumental style of approaching history very much in these terms um that that uh history is above all, he says, for um for the the active man, the powerful man who is fighting a great fight, struggling a great struggle, and needs examples, and teachers, and comforters, uh and finds none of them among his contemporaries.
59:50
And And so, I think that's that kind of captures this essence of this Greco-futurist spirit that I think you can kind of see in Dune, you can kind of see in um Star Wars in some sense.
1:00:00
There's a kind of It's from a galaxy, you know, long, long ago, right? Far, far away.
1:00:09
Far, far away and long, long ago.
1:00:09
That that looking deep into the past is this source of inspiration for for doing very different things on the surface, you know, s- I mean, um American founders looked to the the Roman Republic and the Greek city-states for encouragement, also for cautionary tales.
1:00:31
Um And and they aren't really doing something all that like a Greek city-state uh at the time.
1:00:40
Even if you're Even if your ambition is something technological or or financial, you know, there are these universal constants of um you know, sacrifice above all.
1:00:52
The the the power of the will to achieve things that um people who don't have that will are just not going to achieve.
1:01:00
And your If your enemies have more willpower than you, they're probably going to win.
1:01:07
You know, if if they want it more, if if they desire it more, if they if they have if they're inspired, almost possessed by this vision of of what they can achieve, even if it's bad, and you're and you've got the better vision.
1:01:20
If you don't have the the inspiration, like you're probably going to lose.
1:01:24
And that's one of the things that you get from um kind of s- consulting these great examples and believing you can do it, too.
1:01:33
It's It It circles back to this concept of zeal.
1:01:35
Like that's That's what the heroic stories are for.
1:01:38
That's why it's interesting to engage with the past if you are fundamentally a futurist.
1:01:43
And that's why I think this this particular fusion of Greco-futurism, which I would call the founding of the American Republic a Greco-futurist project, you know.
1:01:50
Uh Plutarch is the most cited of all the ancient authors in the Federalist Papers, like much more than Plato or Caesar uh or the Bible.
1:02:00
And uh it's it's because he kind of is the encapsulation of this historic monumental spirit that I think is one of the most powerful tools you can have in in um forging a new future.
1:02:18
You know, I had uh Matt Clifford on the podcast, and he had an interesting idea in that uh they We were talking about the great man theory of history.
1:02:27
And and his his observation was that after Napoleon was defeated, um basically much of the uh philosophy of the continent was, "You know, we probably want to dampen the variance a little bit here.
1:02:48
We we want to give ambitious men like Napoleon a different staircase to climb.
1:02:57
Uh like and that's how we got, you know, MBAs, and that's how we got all all of that.
1:03:02
Um and then, of course, the internet came along, the greatest variance amplifier, until AI, which now even amplifies variance more if you use it right.
1:03:16
I underline if you use it right, because if you don't, it'll push you to the middle, and you'll get, you know, the classic AI slop, right?
1:03:26
If If If you simply tell an AI, "Hey, write a science fiction story that inspires me."
1:03:36
It's not going to inspire you.
1:03:36
If, on the other hand, you use it as a tool, and I'll it you can do all sorts of searches, it can synthesize old stories, it can say, "This this is right?"
1:03:52
As a tool, it's very effective just on its own.
1:03:55
And And that brings us kind of back to the conversation is like, "How do we focus on human flourishing?"
1:04:01
My idea has always been the centaur model, right?
1:04:07
Which is man, humans, plus our innovations, plus our our technologies and things like AI.
1:04:16
We we need both Apollo and Dionysus. Mhm.
1:04:20
And And And instead of we we we split, right?
1:04:23
You're either a Apollonian or you're Dionysian, and I just think that's wrong.
1:04:27
We need Athe- Athens and Sparta.
1:04:30
We need Rome and Greece, right?
1:04:34
Because the Romans had indoor plumbing, man, and that's very nice.
1:04:37
And they had roads, and they had aqueducts, and they were very good at all of that. >> and Exactly, right?
1:04:43
But they had to borrow much of like Didn't they simply rename the Greek gods and just say, "Those are good. Yeah, we like those." >> Um so Yeah. Yeah, we have 12, too. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we got those.
1:04:58
They're just different names. Just different names.
1:05:01
Uh but I mean, do you agree?
1:05:01
I I I think that the this I the splitting it into a dichotomy, right?
1:05:10
And and that isn't the that that is not the right what path, in my opinion.
1:05:16
I could, of course, be absolutely wrong.
1:05:20
Yeah, well, Chiron the centaur is um is the teacher of Achilles, actually. Yeah, that's right.
1:05:26
And uh and all the other centaurs were kind of wild men like, you know, disrupting parties and stealing away women, and there's some famous scenes on the Acropolis uh friezes.
1:05:39
Um But But Chiron was One of the reasons why he was the perfect tutor for Achilles is he had sort of tamed the beastly nature in himself, and uh and he became very learned in, you know, rhetoric and poetry and probably geometry.
1:05:55
Uh you know, use your imagination of what what great wisdom the wise Chiron had, but he still preserved that that beastly element in him, but it was tamed.
1:06:07
And that was part of what I think a guy like Achilles needed to to maintain the kind of wildness and the sort the fact that we're animals.
1:06:18
Like we are inescapably animals, and that is a source of some of our greatest weaknesses, you know?
1:06:26
Just I mean, if anybody has small children, and get them close to sugar, you know, like there the drives the drives can really powerfully take over.
1:06:37
But it's also like a source of our greatest strength, and um and and taming ourselves too much is um This kind of gets to the duality of technology.
1:06:47
Like um you know, when when when when Enkidu in in the Gilgamesh epic um comes into the city for the first time, and you know, he meets a a lady, and they have a nice time together.
1:07:01
She gives him some beer, and it it's very nice, and it he gets in a good mood, but he goes back to the wild, and and he can't talk to animals anymore.
1:07:10
Like he used to be able to like have a conversation with a rabbit.
1:07:13
Um so like we um we need to kind of preserve these originary elements of what And And And understand like what what are we designed to flourish as, and what can we design our society to enable us to flourish as?
1:07:35
Um Like how can we expand the possibilities without without cutting off the um the kind of more earthy elements, which have to do with getting together and hanging out around the fire.
1:07:46
Like if if if uh if if our techno-optimist future doesn't include getting around fires on the beach, like I think we'll be considerably more more miserable for the fact.
1:07:57
So you have to take these these things along with you somehow, and and preserve the kind of wild Dionysiac ecstasy of uh of a I mean, I'm not saying go to a rave party, but like, you know, there there is a kind of conviviality >> You could go to a rave party.
1:08:14
You could I I'm not saying I didn't in my teenage years. Uh for sure.
1:08:19
for sure. But But you also, you know, and and um with with the temptations or or with with the benefits of um you know, building great financial empires out of uh AI businesses and um and great military uh supremacy, like we have to think of what what is it makes us human, and what's going to make
1:08:45
us flourish, and what's going to enable us to keep building more ambitiously, because if if people get demoralized because they've over-indexed on one material benefit of technology, they're kind of kind of sap their spirit and lead into, you know, inertia and managed decline. And And we need we need to preserve that
1:09:02
And And we need we need to preserve that full extent of our nature, the the Dionysian a- amidst I think a very Apollonian present and future, where there's so much order and uh and so much uh you know, law, and there's so many procedures to learn, um and uh and society is so
1:09:25
ordered, it's so hard to kind of go outside the bounds uh that you know, we need to have those those wilder elements and the kind of more earthy elements along with with the ride or or we're going to not want to be on the ride at all in the first place. Yeah, and and but I would again argue
1:09:45
Yeah, and and but I would again argue that the very technologies that we're talking about could give us that ability to be less orderly, right?
1:09:57
You can use them You can You can use them for cultural credit scores or you can use them to deconstruct a bunch of stuff and find synthesis between ideas that we as humans simply can't We can't look at a data array of a 500 million different things and pick out like hey, these 10 come together in a completely new and interesting synthesis, right?
1:10:25
And you know, back to fire again.
1:10:28
Fi- Fire allowed us to cook our food, right?
1:10:33
And what did that What happened after that?
1:10:35
The development of our prefrontal cortex, right?
1:10:38
So essentially, we became Homo sapiens sapiens, right? Very wise animal, right?
1:10:46
And it it seems to me that when we started cooking our food, we weren't thinking, "Oh, this is going to give us an entire new executive function to our brain and and make us the you know, apex predator of this planet."
1:11:01
Um you You see where I'm going?
1:11:04
So it's it's like we're we're trying to I I think many people want to try to define things before they're they're ready for definition, right?
1:11:15
It's It's like they we often kill the baby in the cradle because we think we know what will happen, right?
1:11:25
That That's the idea of prophecy.
1:11:28
And like if you do a deep dive on prophecy and its base rates I'll give you a hint, they ain't good.
1:11:36
And and so like what what is the world's oldest profession? No, not prostitution.
1:11:43
It is declaring that the world is soon going to come to an end. Mhm.
1:11:49
And so we we have this inherent trait in our humanity that is highly indexed on negativity bias.
1:12:00
And look, are there evolutionary reasons for that?
1:12:03
Yeah, and they were probably really useful at that time, right?
1:12:07
We are all, in my opinion, the descendants of cowards.
1:12:11
And by that I mean, we're the descendants of the ones who when they saw the bush rustling, they didn't go, "Oh, I wonder what that is." They ran the away.
1:12:24
Because they you know, it could be a saber-tooth tiger.
1:12:26
But we are so far removed from that and yet that is so much still in our base code it it causes trouble if you're trying to find the right mix.
1:12:39
So I'll turn the question back to you.
1:12:41
Like if if you were designing the curriculum or you were designing the way for our society to to optimally move forward what's it look like?
1:12:55
Well, I was thinking about this as as we were talking about the uh the kind of drawbacks in the in the fear the the the fudding of uh of every technology that comes about and in the case of writing, there's there's been a lot of and and and reading, there's been a lot of discussion about how you know, long before the rise of AI or even the internet, you know, the the rise of television and the the telegraph even.
1:13:25
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great landmark work in this that we're we're losing the ability to um that we're losing something important about literacy.
1:13:37
It's kind of like a re- rehash of Plato's concerns about writing making us forget everything.
1:13:42
Well, when writing came about uh there were still maybe even more developed mnemonic techniques that orders used that um scientists use it, philosophers use it.
1:13:57
I mean, medieval memory palace is is actually an ancient ancient invention.
1:14:02
Um and it through the tool of writing, you can actually get that tool of of um you know, incredible memory feats to more people.
1:14:12
>> Yeah, and writing lets you time bind your ideas and send them forward into the future.
1:14:17
If you have nothing but an oral tradition as people die out, memories change, right?
1:14:24
Like the grandson's uh recitation of the particular great poem that his grandfather taught him is necessarily different because he's going It's being filtered through him.
1:14:34
I'm not saying that's bad or wrong.
1:14:37
I'm saying that writing allowed Plato to send his ideas and here it's 2026 and we're still talking about them.
1:14:47
And we're still riffing on them, right?
1:14:51
>> Yeah, and and and writing was um was crucial for the development of science, too. Like >> Totally.
1:14:57
Yeah, without writing, no science.
1:14:57
Yeah, Geoffrey Lloyd is a a great scholar that's worked on this.
1:15:01
The The origins of Greek science have have you know, without writing, you can't really have a scholarly dialogue across space and time.
1:15:13
And it's very very difficult. Prohibitively difficult.
1:15:15
And the development of formal logic that Aristotle was one of the great innovators in, sort of hard to do if you can't look at a statement uh as a kind of you know, object- objectified thing.
1:15:32
Like put on put it on a board and say like or what what is the real logic behind the statement?
1:15:36
Does the premise uh this is you know, the conclusion follow from the second premise and things like that are really crucial for the development of uh of a scientific culture that that actually refines definitions and concepts and arguments precisely.
1:15:50
But you know, one of the things that I I think that we are in danger of uh losing and where I think the cautionary tales are important to pay attention to so that we can pri- prio- spend some time at least prioritizing what we should preserve is the the degrading of literacy in in not just in the ability to read, but in deep literacy which something that Postman talks about.
1:16:17
Uh Nick- Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows is interesting on this that you know, reading long books for hours on end is a cognitively very unnatural thing to do.
1:16:35
It's not what our hunter-gatherer brains are primed to do to do.
1:16:37
It's to to to sit there and read a book when while a squirrel crawls across your peripheral vision um that requires a lot of discipline.
1:16:49
It requires a kind of habit of attention to develop.
1:16:55
It's like a muscle that um that we have to work out.
1:16:58
we have to work out. And literacy is one of the things like deep literacy, like reading for long periods of time is one of the things that trains that faculty in us to pay attention for a long time to something that our our lizard or hunter-gatherer brains find
1:17:12
kind of boring, but our higher cognitive faculties know that there is gold in this and it's going to take a while to get through it, but we're going to um be able to refute some scholar when he comes to town or we're going to you know, develop some theory of how the atom works. Like we we need to preserve
1:17:29
Like we we need to preserve the attention abilities, the cognitive abilities um that you tend to have from a highly deep deep literacy culture in order to maximize our potential to leverage AI and to think to use it intelligently.
1:17:47
So I would like to see us um And and I think this is one of the the interesting things in a lot of these cautionary tales, there's a kind of problem identified where an entrepreneur can come in and say, "All right, there There actually is a solution here."
1:18:03
Uh it might not be throw more AI at it.
1:18:06
It could be like let's start more debate clubs.
1:18:11
There's a lot of debate clubs popping up.
1:18:13
The Hamilton Society in in San Francisco is is getting a lot of attention lately.
1:18:17
What I think they're doing is what they're doing is I think really great.
1:18:23
And and reading and long-form conversations in a kind of public spectacle spirit used to be a really crucial part of American culture in in our high 19th century.
1:18:35
The The Lyceum institutes Oh, totally.
1:18:40
>> all across the country, there were thousands of these institutions where just, you know, seamstresses and and factory workers would go and hear Emerson speak.
1:18:49
And like we used to have these institutions and and there were there were incentives built in to to get people out there.
1:18:57
Reading used to be a very social activity in the ancient world.
1:19:01
Like most of the texts that you're you've ever heard of from antiquity were meant to be kind of performed.
1:19:06
Not just plays, but even Livy's History of Rome or um you know, Virgil's Aeneid or uh uh Plato's dialogues, they're kind of meant to be social events that gather people together where some some person will read or a couple people will read and everybody else listens and they discuss afterwards and it's a time to kind of connect with people and meet business partners or political allies.
1:19:32
I think that there people are craving a lot of that social interaction and there's an opportunity for endeavoring people to go and create some of these things and work out the incentives in the right way that will um that will make life richer as we hopefully free up some more of our time from the drudgery of sifting through spreadsheets.
1:20:02
I and and I wonder too how like for example I've always been a big reader, right?
1:20:08
And I always thought that was more just because I was voraciously curious more than anything else.
1:20:12
But like when when I got scolded for working ahead in a particular reading assignment in grade school rather than send me to the library.
1:20:23
I've talked about this before but they made me sit and make a Christmas tree with my hands at my desk.
1:20:29
I think it is the beginning of my anti-authoritarian and rebellious nature.
1:20:35
Um but when I went and complained about it to my father he walked me into a lot our library at home and he pointed at the Encyclopedia Britannica and he went read that.
1:20:47
And I did and like I I'm a huge fan of Will and Ariel Durant's uh Story of Civilization.
1:20:53
I've read all of the books.
1:20:56
And I I don't think that's weird.
1:20:56
I just think it's but I do wonder is it just inherent in the individual or is it something that can in fact be taught, right?
1:21:07
And and I guess one way you experiment with that is you do exactly what you're doing and what others are doing with the Hamilton societies and everything.
1:21:17
Like so for example one of the things that I use AI for extensively is steelmanning particularly steelmanning ideas I don't agree with.
1:21:31
And and I do that because we all have confirmation bias.
1:21:33
It's naturally built into us.
1:21:37
And I think maybe that's one of the best things that Elon Musk has done with Twitter.
1:21:42
Putting Grok on there because I've gotten into the habit of like I'll see a post that I think is foolish, right?
1:21:49
I'll just be like this guy's an idiot.
1:21:51
But I'm I've gotten into the habit of hitting the Grok button and saying steelman this argument.
1:21:58
And almost always not always but almost always I'll be reading it and I'll be like you know that's a very good point.
1:22:08
So so the idea of like having those tools available I definitely think debating is going to get better.
1:22:18
But it I I sense one of my worries is a cognitive chasm, right?
1:22:22
You've got the EU trying to regulate the out of AI trying to cut its nuts off and make sure that it can't do anything that they don't like and and you know that that movement is here in the United States, too.
1:22:38
Uh it is not in China unless of course you want to talk about Tiananmen Square.
1:22:44
Uh but the if if we don't handle it right, there will be a cognitive chasm that opens up.
1:22:52
And I don't know if we let it get very wide how you bring the side that was not using these tools, right?
1:22:58
Like somebody who's got access to an AI that can build steelmans of their opponent's argument so that they can anticipate and get ready for that argument.
1:23:10
It's going to kick the out of somebody who doesn't have that tool in a debate society. Right?
1:23:16
And and you know another thing like AI is getting better and better at understanding our patterns, right?
1:23:24
Those are the primitive patterns.
1:23:26
Like what happens when we can understand through all of his writing Plato?
1:23:32
And and an AI is like you you type into the AI okay Plato, what what do you think about modern event this?
1:23:40
And it's going to be pretty good. Yeah. Like like >> Scary. I mean it's not scary.
1:23:48
>> I I I don't find that scary.
1:23:48
I find that incredibly exciting. Yeah.
1:23:54
I I do too and I mean I use AI extensively in research and I think a lot of it has to do with asking the right questions not what what tell me a sci-fi story, you know, make something up that's going to inspire me but what what are the things that have inspired the people that I admire and why?
1:24:08
And bam then now you have like a very intelligent presentation of what what book you should read next and I keep >> I should I I should also emphasize which in an ideal world you should simply use as a jumping-off point for your own ideas.
1:24:28
You know, I I that's a great idea.
1:24:31
I would have never thought of that on my own but these other ones I I don't like, right?
1:24:36
But using it as a jumping-off point you're going to be starting from such a higher level back to the debate.
1:24:43
If you've got the ability to have you know the equivalent of a very smart uh colleague who's like yeah, you didn't think about this this or this and they're going to come at you with that in this debate and if you're not ready, you're probably going to lose.
1:25:00
And and just the the preparatory ability and the ability to see new I mean honestly to see nuance again.
1:25:07
To see the type of thing we've gotten so black and white and so tribal.
1:25:15
And and like people aren't thinking anymore.
1:25:17
They're they're simply brainwashed into a not and I don't mean all people. I mean many.
1:25:25
Uh you know, people get captured by these ideological frameworks.
1:25:28
And and they go in my opinion brain dead and blind because they're they're not thinking. Yeah.
1:25:38
And one of the ways that you can break through ideological frameworks is uh storytelling. Totally agree. Totally.
1:25:45
>> one of the reasons I think that sci-fi is such an interesting genre that's going to get more important uh as things accelerate which it tends to be triggered by the acceleration of new ideas.
1:25:56
You know, you get you there's sort of precedents for science fiction in in classical Athens.
1:26:04
Like look at the plays of Aristophanes the the clouds >> Aristophanes.
1:26:09
I was going to bring him up. I I love that. >> Yeah.
1:26:11
The birds, the clouds like they're really funny stuff.
1:26:14
It's it's hilarious and and you know, Aristophanes is you know, at his best when he's making fun of Socrates. Yeah. No, I know.
1:26:27
And and I think that that it well, it's a good illustration of how new the introduction of new ideas always brings about this anxiety and you need you know, you need to manage that through through storytelling and example giving and one of the one of the things that science fiction can do is um well, fiction in general kind of mediates between the rational mind and the emotional and appetitive.
1:26:50
It's it's the the faculty of imagination um that kind of mediates between these two things in ancient psychology and and um you can uh kind of get people to put aside their priors uh by by telling a story about the future that just shows them what it could be like that that could be good or there there's some you know, things to things to be concerned about that that can warn us for the present.
1:27:24
But you know, science fiction is um is not just a product of the age of science.
1:27:30
It's it's just a kind of subset of fiction that we we really developed it through the art of through these older ways oral storytelling and and also especially literacy that it that allows you to um yeah, craft these narratives at at scale.
1:27:49
Francis Bacon the the other Bacon Well, you know, it was him who inspired the fellowship said uh O'Shaughnessy Ventures. Really?
1:27:59
The idea of the sending I I guess it was Atlantis sending out all of the people to investigate and everything and I was reading about that and I'm like huh, maybe and then of course everyone's like Jim, that is uber geek mode.
1:28:13
We're definitely not going to be presenting it that way.
1:28:18
But the thing on science fiction like one of the things that we do at Infinite Books is science fiction got very and for people who are just listening I'm holding up a copy of a science fiction book called White Mirror that we published through Infinite Books.
1:28:33
Um for a while it just seemed to me that I'm a huge science fiction fan by the way.
1:28:39
Um and like so much of it just got so incredibly negative.
1:28:46
Everything was a dystopia.
1:28:46
Everything was bad, right?
1:28:49
And and like stories matter.
1:28:53
I could not agree with you more.
1:28:56
Um the >> Aristotle calls fiction more philosophical than history actually because it allows you to see the universals Yes.
1:29:05
>> you know, it allows you to reveal character because you can understand better what why people did what they did because you can make it explicit whereas it's often never really told in history because you don't have access people's minds, but through the imagination you can get into that and you can it can be so much more instructive about like what are the real problems at stake.
1:29:25
So, and this is connecting with the old ways in a lot, you know, for a new age.
1:29:30
We're we're always going to have to do that. Yeah.
1:29:34
And you know, one of the projects that I ultimately want to get around to here at O'Shaughnessy Ventures is there there is a huge body of it's not exclusively American, but it's mostly American that maybe starts in 1860 and goes through the early 1920s of pragmatism, you know, William James.
1:30:03
For example, we are doing a project right now.
1:30:09
A lot of William James papers are not digitized. Mhm.
1:30:12
And we found that out and we're we have a project going up in Boston where we're doing that.
1:30:18
And and I think that training data is vital.
1:30:25
And I think that if you have an AI, again, just remembering it's a neutral technology that depends on what its training data is.
1:30:35
And I think that if you use better training data and not Reddit chats, you might end up with a much more powerful AI system than the one that has been universally trained.
1:30:50
You know, I could absolutely be wrong.
1:30:53
And but that's why I think it's a an experiment worth doing.
1:30:58
Yeah, I mean it's it's all kind of in the user and and how you use these things, but um you know, what what if you had an AI that was just based on the Western canon and and nothing else?
1:31:10
Like what kind of answers would that thing give you for your problems?
1:31:13
Yeah, I'm fascinated by that.
1:31:16
Play Plato's jealous rolling over over in his grave at the kind of interlocutors that we're able to summon. Exactly.
1:31:24
Um well, I'm this is such a fun topic for me.
1:31:26
I'm looking at our our time here.
1:31:32
When when will Zeal be the book be coming out and where can people find you?
1:31:37
>> by the end of this year.
1:31:40
Yeah, so I'm I'm not sure we'll have to talk to the book team to see how how quickly we can get it out from final draft to hitting hitting the print and in your mailbox and in your audio audible AirPods, but hopefully by the end of 2026 the book will be out. Terrific.
1:32:00
I'm very excited about it.
1:32:04
And I we'll put it in the show notes, but where is the easiest place other than your podcast for people to find you online or in person?
1:32:14
Yeah, well I I live in Texas, so look me up if you're ever down.
1:32:17
And the Twitter's probably good place to follow me.
1:32:24
I'm not that active these days cuz I'm trying to actually write the book and not get distracted by all the interesting things.
1:32:30
>> Believe me, I'm writing a book now, too, and you just have to have the completely non-social media computer to work from. Indeed.
1:32:37
Indeed, I've just got one.
1:32:39
So, but but at costofglory on Twitter is is where I post and costofglory.
1:32:43
com is my website, which you can find the podcast through. It's on YouTube as well.
1:32:48
We've we've been doing some great videos. I I I know it well.
1:32:54
Well, now we come to the final question, which is we're going to make you emperor for the day.
1:32:59
We'll make you a Roman emperor since, you know, but you're a Roman emperor with every technology available today, but what we're going to let you do is say two things into a magical microphone. You can't kill anyone.
1:33:13
You can't put anyone in a re-education camp, but you can say two things into this magical inception microphone.
1:33:22
Everyone on the planet is going to wake up whenever their tomorrow is and they're going to say, "I just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all the other times, I'm going to act on them."
1:33:34
Get to the garden and find resonance with a historical figure that speaks to you somehow in a way in a way that you haven't ever been spoke spoken to before.
1:33:57
Of those two things inceptions, who what historical character do you identify with?
1:34:06
For the longest time it's been Plato for a lot of the reasons that we've talked about.
1:34:10
I think that he was he was so attuned to the dangers of objectifying knowledge and to treating knowledge as something on the page or in the machine rather than something that is in a person who has agency and will and desires.
1:34:31
And I think that I'm I'm really inspired by him building something that that was intangible and yet lasted for a millennium.
1:34:40
And you know, I'm I'm trying in my own little way to do something something similar to compare small things with great.
1:34:47
You know what else was cool about Plato?
1:34:48
It's like he was a killer Yeah. Oh, yeah.
1:34:53
He he was maybe the first and best because like naming the dialogues after rich patrons and the ability to raise money.
1:35:03
He was he was a multi-dimensional success story, I think.
1:35:09
And if you read his dialogues, I mean from from the Republic to the the Symposium, I mean there's these constant like prods at the reader like um suggesting that you know, he he knows his audience so well and he's he's trying to he's not just trying to get you to think about this idea.
1:35:31
He's trying to tempt you to come pay him a visit in Athens. And it really worked. >> And it works.
1:35:39
I think that yeah, I I'm I'm big on looking at historical characters that I admire and trying to see them in a different light, right?
1:35:49
Like I read I I read a lot of philosophy cuz I was really interested in it, but I never really took I took some courses, but was obviously not my degree, but I I personally think a philosophy degree moving forward into the world that we're moving into, not a bad degree to have. Yeah. I second that.
1:36:12
Philosophy and and maybe a classics degree.
1:36:16
I'm not sure if I'd You should definitely learn ancient Greek if you're out there and young and and energetic.
1:36:21
That's that's never going to go old. Yeah. Yeah.
1:36:23
Well, Alex, this has been super fun. Really enjoyed it. Yeah.