Ben Landau-Taylor; Predicting where civilizations are headed? Which will succeed?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:00:00] Some civilizations are going to like really be pretty co-extensive with the language groups like you will see in China. Like if you think that Russia is a separate civilization, which many do, then like you'll see it carve pretty closely to the language barriers there. But then if you look at like western civilization, you find that within that one there's a whole lot of linguistic diversity.

Vance Crowe [00:00:24] Hi, I'm Dan Crow, a small business owner living in central Illinois and you're listening to the Vance Crowe podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we talk with Ben Landau Taylor, this guy man, he is clever. He has all sorts of views about how the world is changing, what prediction models you can use to say whether this thing will happen or that thing will happen. And a vast understanding of history to be able to draw from all sorts of examples and ways of thinking. I found this conversation to be totally intoxicating and we are no doubt going to have been on again, before we get to the interview, I am about to release my negotiations class. I spent about six months putting this thing together. I've test run it with people in the network as a class. I've written it down as a book and it is really close to going out to the broader public. If you are interested in taking this class where I will distill down for you a way to think about how can I get along better with people, how can I build the sort of relationships that allow people to overcome problems, how can I explain myself when our emotions are getting high and what can I do to make it so my ideas are better understood so that other people can improve them, accept them, or spread them around themselves? So if you're interested in that, I hope you go to Vance Crowe dot com slash podcast and sign up for us to let you know when we do publish the class.

Vance Crowe [00:02:01] I'm really looking forward to it. I've spent a ton of time and energy and this is really my passion. So this is an exciting thing to be putting out into the world. Vance Crowe dot com slash podcast. And now onto my interview with my man Ben Landau Taylor, Ben Landau. Taylor, welcome to the podcast.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:02:22] Yeah, thanks. It's good to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:02:24] So the executive producer Ben Anderson is always very clever at scouring out the internet and finding interesting people. Your name came across my desk, we scheduled it and then I had a chance to like deep dive into your stuff and I'm really excited 'cause you know a ton about economics. You talk about subjects like sociology that I haven't been able to dig into since probably college and I'm really, I think this is, I think you've got a lot of interesting to say stuff to say. So before we begin, what do you do? You live out in San Francisco, what do you do for for work?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:02:59] Yeah, so I'm with a consulting group called Bismarck Analysis where we've been doing a lot of sociology research, especially led by Sam Ria who's the founder and a bunch of the methods and a bunch of the theories that he does as has come up with. And then we apply those for doing consulting for high net worth individuals, helping them figure out, you know, it's highly customized, tailored to whatever it is that they're trying to do.

Vance Crowe [00:03:27] What types of things are they trying to figure out and trying to do? Invest in the market or are things wider than that? Yeah,

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:03:34] So there definitely is some of that. And like there was, you know, like a project of you know, this investment fund that's looking at making a deal with a sovereign wealth fund. And so we're looking into the sovereign wealth fund, like here's the domestic political patronage they're doing and how it fits into that. Here's what they're trying to do on the world stage. We've also been done work with philanthropists and like understanding the space of what the charitable interventions can and can't do to guide the their giving. We've worked on people with more theoretical interests. So it ends up a pretty wide variety of things. 'cause like broadly speaking, what we're trying to do is just understand how society works in or well enough to do like engineering grade navigation of institutions and that can be applied to a whole bunch of things.

Vance Crowe [00:04:24] Wow. So it sounds like the purview that's either normally done by, I don't know, analysts for a, for a defense department or or lawyers, it's it it, I'm surprised with your background with sociology.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:04:39] Yeah and like a lot of my like formal academic background like was, you know, there was like a little bit of history, a bunch of economics, but a lot of the broader stuff I've done like in a more autodidactic way and yeah, like it def there's a lot of overlap in like this type of thing I think needs to be done by anyone who's trying to strategically interact with the world on a large scale. And like defense departments absolutely are one of the people who need to do that and there's a lot of others who also need that and some of them are better at getting either figuring that out for themselves or getting from getting it from others.

Vance Crowe [00:05:19] And so let's talk a little bit about some of your ideas that you've been putting out on online. The one that really struck out to me, you had written a book review, but most people are writing book reviews about books that are coming out right now or way more on the edge, but yours was a book review of something from before World War I, the great illusion. So what do you do in reading and reviewing a book from pre-World War I and what does that tell us about today and and and military power?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:05:50] Yeah, so there's two questions there. So like why am I reading this a hundred year old book, this guy's writing it to try to prevent World War I from happening World War I did happen. Why does this still matter at all? Right? And like if you're trying to understand what's going on in the world and how things are working, you can't do it just by reading all the stuff that's coming out now. Like it's too narrow. It's like trying to do astrophysics just by looking at, you know, the sun and ignoring all this stuff of what we can read from, you know, the universal background radiation of all this stuff that happened when the universe began. Like you need the whole data set because there's a bunch of things about how society works that change over time. Maybe they change because societies aren't structured differently or because of physical technology or because there's more people and unless you look at stuff from the different periods, you're not going to be able to tell universal laws that govern all human societies apart from things that happened to apply in the year 2021. So I'm reading things from, you know, 1910, I'm reading things from 1580, I'm reading things from like 30 BC because that way you can get enough of a zoom deck view, you can tell, oh like this thing that everyone thinks is a universal law is actually very particular. This thing that everyone thinks is very particular is much closer to a universal law That's true in all or almost all human societies. And like you need that scope of vision to be able to tell. And also there's like a lot of things like when you're, you can't actually, you know, if you're studying geology you can like stand outside of the mountain and look at the mountain but like when you're studying society, you're inside a society and it's really hard to see a lot of things about the system that you grew up in and that you take for granted.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:07:37] And one of the ways I've found that's easiest to see a lot of the stuff going on is to look at it in a different circumstance where you're not so invested in it. I'm just way less invested in the political battles of 1910 than I am in the stuff I grew up with. And so you can see a lot of the weird moves that are a lot clearer when you're just not as invested in it. And then it can be like, oh and this is like the same thing that's going on over here. Like one of the things that really struck me with that book, the Great Illusion where the sky is arguing against all of these people who like really want a big war to happen between England and Germany and like it struck me that the people who were in favor of the war, like their rhetoric is really similar to a lot of the rhetoric that like I saw in my own youth of people who were talking about why we needed to invade Iraq, people who were talking about why we needed to bomb Syria. It just has a really similar pattern of arguments, really similar language choices, really similar tone and like seeing the way that that has been continuous for I guess at least a hundred years, maybe more, I haven't read much of this stuff from like the mid 18 hundreds. So like that's a notable thing that I just wouldn't have known

Vance Crowe [00:08:51] If that's, and I think it, it's like a natural thing for us to reimagine the past and what was leading up to something to World War I to be either far more nefarious or far more heroic than it actually was. Right? Like we can only remember so many stories. The stories have to have really big climaxes and crushing defeats and that way you can remember the story but that's never actually accurate. So like the the it I, I think that the retelling of history that you are living in in the present moment to try and understand what's going on. I mean like particularly the fashion layer that you're dealing with right now of just like what is everybody else saying is important has got to be a, a really hard burden to get past.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:09:36] Yeah and like one of the things I find really helpful for that is like I imagine if there's some historian in like the year 2300 or 3000 or whatever and they're reading what's going to like what is going to make it through from all of the books at that point, like how is it going to be parsed then is like a really useful thought experiment I find for sort of focusing in on, it's not like that's the correct perspective on today, but that's another lens on today which is often really clarifying. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:10:05] I mean I think the digital pho photography really changed my view on what photographs will be around in the future and I have a good friend named Lyle Benjamin who always says he thinks that this period that we're in right now will be the least photographed time in our history just for photographs that last because you take so much quantity but they're always in this digital format. It ends up being complete noise even to yourself so that nothing will remain like something has to be able to break through and be carried on and be understood by your children or your children's children. Like the the photographs that mean the most to us, you know, if dad has to really, really work hard to remember who was great aunt Cindy. So imagine just the, the huge volumes of photographs that are being taken right now. And so when you think about to the year, you know, 3000, it's, it's mind bending to think about what would, what would stand that test of time.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:11:04] Yeah And like, you know, when I take photos I'll generally like upload them to social media, whatever and then forget about them and like I can't find anything that I put on social media 15 years ago. Meanwhile my mom has her big book of like all of the physical photographs and like yeah you could go way further back than 15 years with those. You can probably go like 60 or 70. So we're already seeing, you know, like 10 years ago I remember hearing a lot of people saying that the digital information could be preserved forever because it was so cheap to store. But if you go and try to find the stuff from 10, 20 years ago online, that's really not what I've seen.

Vance Crowe [00:11:38] Yeah, I think it'll end up being digital sand over top the monuments that we were trying to build, right. To just either blow away or cover up everything of, of, of value. So you were talking in there that you're searching for books that give you like a universal understanding of human beings. Do you have like a theory of how humans engage or, or like the, the primary motivators that can kind of give you a model because otherwise you're approaching every single situation completely differently?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:12:13] Yeah, so unfortunately it doesn't seem like there's like a really simple key that like fits in a nice paragraph and explains everything. Although if anyone has one, please do let me know. But like I find that you have to sort of bring different things to bear and like it's not, and like you, you see sort of zoomed out, there's a lot of sort of recurring patterns but none of them are like super, super precise the way it is if you're just like shooting billiard balls around and you can calculate their trajectories. It's like a lot of heuristics and a lot of general laws that usually apply and like it's very hard to get in the social sciences something that's going to apply with like 98% certainty and it's not that hard to get a bunch of things that will be like 70, 80%, this is the likely thing that will happen unless some surprising thing comes up and throws everything out of whack. And like there's a lot of general patterns of like here's sort of the sensible way for things to go. Here's like if everyone does what's in their interest from the sort of power politics perspective, here's how things would go. Often people do that, sometimes they just don't and like then things will usually go worse for them, but like it's not hard to find examples of like, oh like the, the fundamentals of power say that you should be allying with these guys because those guys will invade but then they just don't understand that and don't do it and then they get, you know, they get swamped or whatever.

Vance Crowe [00:13:42] Well it's, I mean it's an interesting thing to, to try and guess what the future is gonna be, right? So like that is a very, very dangerous game to play be and if particularly if somebody's keeping track of how often you were correct because things can look like they're heading one way a hundred percent and then flip over the, to to be the exact opposite, just just a little while later. Do you find that you have a, a hubris to you you have to have like this overabundance of confidence or how do you keep yourself in check and yet still try and look into the future?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:14:19] Yeah, so this is, you know, we could do like a whole hour just on this but briefly like a couple of things are like trying to keep track of what you think is going to happen and how confident you are in each of the things. So I know which predictions I'm like, oh yeah, I'm really certain it's gonna be this and I know which ones I'm like eh, like probably and like there's some places where I'm like okay so it has to be either A or B and if it's not either A or B then I don't know what's gonna happen. Like you know, the trajectory of the United States, you know like okay, like either we're going to see like a long slow decline like we've seen Britain do starting about a hundred, 130 years ago or we're going to get like another, a big revival in a big sort of reshaping of the core American institutions like we saw around the time of the New deal and I'm like, I'm pretty confident it'll be one of those two, I have no idea which of the two and if it's not one of those two I don't really know. Like I would be very surprised if it's not one of those two things. So it's like here's the area that I'm uncertain about and here's the area that I'm confident about and like keeping those separate. I like to make small bets with people a lot so it's like, oh yeah, I'm pretty sure here's how things are gonna go over the next year, over the next two years. And someone's like, you're insane. I'll be like, let's just bet a hundred dollars on it. And like it's not so much about the money, it's like if you lose, it's very obvious that you lost, you can't sort of pretend to yourself that you actually secretly got it right 'cause like you wrote it down and the judge called it and now you have to give this person some money.

Vance Crowe [00:15:54] Yeah. There's something to those longer bets that by, by having to say am I really willing to put a hundred dollars on this crazy idea I came up with? You know, well while hanging out with a bunch of people then like, but sometimes you're like, no I do, I feel really strongly about this. I think Bitcoin was one of those things where people made bets, right? They actually did make a choice on, on things like crypto, how, how does that fit into your future? I mean that's such a game changing technology or potentially that a lot of models that didn't have that included that once they get updated with them, I imagine the futures change rather dramatically.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:16:33] Yeah, so that's a really tricky one because I think in order to really understand what's going on with all the, like the cryptocurrency technologies, Bitcoin and the others, like in order to know what's going to happen there you have to have like a good theory of finance and I think either nobody or almost nobody has a good theory of finance. There's a lot of people who say that they do, but like most of them are wrong. Some of them might have something. So I'm not really sure. My current best guess is that like it doesn't really get very important unless states like states use it as in incorporated into this sort of load-bearing financial apparatus that's used to like sort of coordinate production and wealth distribution worldwide. Like if there's some successor to like what Bretton Woods was and all of those, you know, agreements, you can see a bunch of these if you go back for a few hundred years, every now and then the sort of international financial order gets renegotiated. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this happen in the next 10, 20 years. If it does happen then like I, I don't know whether it would incorporate cryptocurrencies into it, but if it does that would be a really big deal and if it doesn't then I think that they'll end up sort of slowly like being pushed into the margins in the way that like, like being this sort of sideshow that seemed interesting for a while but ul but ultimately a footnote.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:18:09] But I don't know whether there will be incorporated like that. I just, I don't understand finance in general and I don't, and like it depends a lot on when it happens and which states are sort of on top at the time when it gets renegotiated. So this is one of those areas where I've been thinking a lot about it, I'm sort of narrowing in on which questions need to be asked, but I really do not have a confident read here.

Vance Crowe [00:18:33] It's interesting that you were talking about the way they would come together to renegotiate the the new economic order that that reminds me so much but I had never thought of it before this of when the people that would come together, the cardinals would come together to elect the pope, you know, and they're trying to make a decision about which way do we want this to go? Are we gonna give the people a more conservative one to hammer down on tradition because that's what we need more of or are we gonna have somebody that's gonna guide us through a changing it from Latin to whatever your native language is? Like it's fascinating to me because I really had thought of Brenton Woods as maybe a standalone event. I had never thought about it being in a larger cycle of, of many times where people have come together.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:19:17] Yeah. And like those are always a lot more fraught than the Cardinals getting together because the Cardinals are sort of on the same page in a pretty fundamental way. Whereas when you're getting like the finance ministers of like the United States and Britain and Germany and they were fighting a world war not too long ago and like, like they're going to have a lot of very sharp disagreements and like it's really not a coincidence that you see the sort of international financial order go from the gold standard to these sort of free floating standards to the US dollar standard as Britain is declining and Britain is very much the backer of the gold standard for quite a long time. And then like as the sort of hegemon within western civilization or whatever you want to call it, switches to being the United States, then it ends up switching over to like, you see this, it start disintegrating around World War I and then they sort of have to acknowledge that it's being just that it, that the old order wasn't really working with the great Depression. That's the time when people stop using the gold standard and then with Bretton Woods like the, the dominance of the dollar gets like codified in these agreements And that's really connected to like who's going like who would win in a war? Like where is the like balance of power who controls the seas in a way that I don't think you're likely to find with the cardinals.

Vance Crowe [00:20:40] Wow. So as you're thinking about military power and countries that are in charge, how much do you think there's, is there enough instability that some other new dominant power outside of Russia, China, the US could become a major player?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:20:59] So I think you may be seeing regional players but on on terms of like the world stage, no I think it's going to be those three for at least the next 15, 25 years. It's very hard to predict further out than that but

Vance Crowe [00:21:13] Like well it seems, it seems to me there's something, you know, that that happens with progress or at least has been happening that would really impact social order, which is in order for you to have a distinct culture, you have to have a distinct language. One that has an us and a them. You either know it or you don't and Chinese has that, Russia has Russian is that English being the lingua franca. So it's actually spread maybe that kind of says where the cultural area is but since so many languages are going extinct, eventually you'll hit a point where you only have a few languages at all to be able to create distinct cultures or rises of, of power. So that that it makes me wonder if we will always have the polls around those languages.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:21:57] Yeah. So it's interesting here like you see these sort of cultural units overlapping with these political and military units and like so like what exactly is the relation here is a pretty complex question which people have had a bunch of different answers to. The one that I like best is Carol Quigley's analysis where he like breaks things into like different civilizations. His book The Evolution of Civilizations, he has a big chapter on like why this is the correct unit of analysis and like some civilizations are going to like really be pretty co-extensive with the language groups. Like you will see in China, like if you think that Russia is a separate civilization, which many do, then like you'll see it carve pretty closely to the language barriers there. But then if you look at like Western civilization, you find that within that one there's a whole lot of linguistic diversity and like we sort of have lingua English as the lingua franca on the way that French used to be in Latin before that. But it doesn't seem like, I don't expect that to like flatten any time in the near future. So I think that like there's these sort of cores of cultural similarity and understanding, which often but not always extend with the, with the languages. And unless you're going to like zoom out to things that descend from Latin or I don't actually know much linguistics, maybe you could find some similarity, but it's not literally the same language.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:23:30] It's a, so it's if you take this sort of civilizational rather than the national unit of analysis, it looks pretty different

Vance Crowe [00:23:41] And do, do you, wow man, like your que like I'm afraid to ask you questions that are really big because I don't want you to be like, look, I don't know, I can't predict those things but I'm, so I guess what, what is the subject that's fascinating you right now? What's keeping your attention and at what level of analysis are you looking at it?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:23:59] So one of the things I've been thinking like a lot about is like the, so there's this concept of what we call institutional health where it's basically within a society how well are the most important institutions working? So if you're looking at the institutional health of the American system, you're going to be looking at government, you're going to be looking at academia, you're going to be looking at business journalism, bunch of other things, the military. And so like in general, are these things good at their jobs? Do they get sensible outcomes? And like you can see that like when you get peaks of institutional health like in like the middle of the 20th centuries, you start landing on the moon, you start building interstate highway systems, it's a lot of stuff starts happening. So when I was saying this like 10 years ago, it was like a lot more controversial these days. A lot fewer people argue when I claim that institutional health in America has been slowly declining for the last few decades. And like we're now sort of starting to really see some of the seams starting to fray. So the thing here that I've been thinking about a lot,

Vance Crowe [00:25:17] Well first what would be the s symbols of that fray? Just so, so we're defining terms here when you say that it looks like these institutions are fraying, how do you know?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:25:28] Yeah, so one of the examples that gets used a lot, which I think is very striking because it's a very sort of visible thing that you can just look at is, so here in San Francisco, you know we have the Golden Gate bridge and not too long ago there was a new on-ramp to the bridge that was built which cost more money inflation adjusted and took longer to build than the actual bridge to stay within the realm of construction. We have this big high speed rail that like $10 billion or whatever was spent on to build in California. And like we got like some track in the middle of nowhere but nothing actually got built near any of the cities that's supposed to connect. And if you compare this to building out the interstate highway system, if you compare this to like, so like a much smaller example that I like to use, so I'm based in Oakland, I'm pretty close to Lake Merit, which is this artificial lake that we have here, which in the, I think it was like the early 19 hundreds maybe, they just decided there should be a lake and they dug it out and it's absolutely beautiful, wonderful place. It's also now like this wildlife sanctuary, all the birds come to nest and you're allowed not allowed to change anything about it at all. And so like the, the attitude that led to the construction of this glorious landmark which people have to preserve you would not be allowed to do because of this idea of how we have to preserve the thing. So like sticking with the construction because it's very visible. You can see if you have the high speed rail, like you see it a lot there.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:27:00] You also see it with like, you know, if you compare the rollout of how a lot of the, you know, response to the coronavirus pandemic is to the smallpox eradication campaign or the polio eradication campaigns of the mid, mid-century. Like it doesn't really look for that good in comparison when you look at the sort of institutional bureaucratic trying to roll it out. When you look at the actual science of the vaccines, we're way ahead on physical technology. Of course you can see this in like the foreign policy where we're like, you know, we've been fighting all of these wars in the Middle East for decades and it's not really clear what we're doing there or why or if we're going to win or what it would even mean to win. Whereas like, you know, if you go back to the forties, the fifties, we can win wars, we can occupy South Korea, we can occupy Japan. That ends up going great for the places that we end up occupying. Like so

Vance Crowe [00:27:57] Does this mean the people in in positions of power in these things are like play acting, they're, they're like pretending or they're just not as effective or how, how would you describe why this is occurring?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:28:09] I think it's because doing this stuff is very, very, very hard and the, the knowledge of how to do this is like quite technical and it's quite easy for it to be lost. So the people who are at these relative peaks of institutional health knew how to get along with each other. They knew how to, you know, navigate the bureaucracies. They knew how to train their replacements. That's a really big one that people aren't put nearly as as good at or putting as much attention into. They knew how to make deals between like internal subcultures that have really different norms. They knew how to like, you know, defer to the correct authorities. They knew how to respect things going through the right channels, but also pay attention to things outside the channels when you needed to. This is really hard to do and as the people who knew how to do that have retired or died in this case the replacements were often just not as good at those things. And so it's not that they're play acting, I think they're trying as best they can and they're doing like by the standards of sort of world history, they're like doing pretty okay. So in terms of like how good are these people, we've sort of regressed to the mean

Vance Crowe [00:29:30] Oh man that is super interesting because to think that basically all governments work in this way and this is just kind of where it generally gets to. But every once in a while you can have a golden age where things are going well, people learn, you can extend it if you can pass along that information. That makes total sense to me. And you can actually, I remember when I was, I studied under a Chinese professor in graduate school and he told me that one of the biggest consequences of the one child policy was actually that culture was not passed down in the same way. Yeah. And that young people didn't learn how to disagree with one another and they didn't learn how to look each other in the eye or how to handle conflict. And so he was like, once that became instantiated in the society and then you add in the internet, it was, it was, that was a major cultural shift for China. And I remember thinking like, oh that's just them. But I think that's occurring right now. Like there are times when I'm like, ah, I don't wanna do that. I don't want to have to hear his voice. I'm just gonna text him this bad news. Knowing, knowing for a fact that calling somebody and and and having an actual discussion makes the greases the, the, the gears a lot better. And if you think about that on an institutional level that happening millions and millions and millions of times a day, you can see why that decay would happen.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:30:50] Yeah. And I'm like kind of worried about what's going to happen as we run out of the last of our sort of reserves of baby boomers and power. Like I think power is going to pretty much skip over generation X for the most part and millennials are going to come into most of the influential positions and I think that might cause some problems. 'cause I think there's a lot of this stuff that the boomers know how to do that most millennials don't.

Vance Crowe [00:31:17] So is the, is the woke and the kind of cancel culture, is that a regression to the mean? Is this a thing where people just, this is just kind of the way societies are and we got out of it for a while?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:31:31] I don't think it's quite the same. I don't think it's like super unusual but this one seems like it's sort of more cyclical where at least in the United States you sort of get waves of this sort of thing where like this one is still not as intense as the last. So like people talk about the sort of nineties political correctness wave and when they're talking about this, the sort of the last sort of really big hysterical wave like this that was like really, really big was the like whole like anti-communist McCarthy stuff, which like the, like the current wave there is a core real thing that they're objecting to and correct about and is a big deal. And then like the McCarthy stuff, the way that it's being talked about is just like really unmoored from the realities of the thing that they're trying to object to and trying to accomplish. And it leads to this sort of like, you know, like the sorts of patterns that we see and the way that it's gets unmoored and epistemically ends up co causing a bunch of issues. Like,

Vance Crowe [00:32:35] So let, let me stop you 'cause you used an example that I have cl clouded understanding of, right? Like I used to think the Senator McCarthy hearings were, you know, him standing up and being an absolute lunatic running people out on a rail because there were communists. But I also have heard stories where people like no, there really were communists and they weren't his hearings, they, he was just a, a person that spoke at them and they had actually found Russian agents inside of the government and they were expelling them. So which of those two versions is your version of the, of the past and how does that apply to the woke culture that we're talking about today?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:33:18] So my understanding of McCarthyism, I haven't looked super, super deeply, but my picture is that both of those are pretty correct. There were in fact a bunch of communist agents or I guess it would be more accurate to say. So Soviet sympathizers within the government and within high cultural positions and also McCarthy was a like raving loon who was often accusing people on the basis of basically no evidence. And you know, a while later, like not too long after there were a bunch of intercepted communications that the United States spies got, which like found a bunch of highly placed agents a few decades later those got declassified and some of the people who McCarthy was accusing are on those lists. A bunch of them aren't. So what I think was probably happening was that he was listening to a bunch of people who, some of them knew things and some of them were just bullshitting and he didn't really care that much and he just wanted to make a spectacle. And it's a lot easier to do that when there's at least a germ of truth and like it happened in that case that some of the people he accused it was basically right or basically partly right. And others were sort of like maybe hanging around in those circles, maybe the type of academic who you would associate with that because a bunch of those academics were sympathetic but he didn't really know in the specific cases.

Vance Crowe [00:34:55] That's interesting. I mean I see that going on right now. I mean there are conspiracies that go on in in the US and some of them people point out, but oftentimes if you're in whatever conspiracy theory network or hangout group, I mean their ideas are are totally unmoored from reality. And so you have this great mixture of the two and that that definitely seems to be happening right now.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:35:19] Right? Because like, you know, sometimes people do conspire and also a lot of the times people have these really unhinged, they're like, they're more hysterias than theories about like how the things are, like what the actual contents of those conspiracies are. And it's often pretty diff like tricky to actually go through and check which ones have something to them and which ones are just nuts.

Vance Crowe [00:35:47] Okay, so let's get back, 'cause you were telling me about you had these thoughts about institutions and and how the, they're not as healthy as they were, but that was actually leading you to a point about what you're actually thinking about lately,

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:36:00] Right? Which is where do you, like what do you do to plant the seeds of an institutional revival that can take us to, you could call it another golden age, you could call it like healthier institutions, but like how do you like get it so that all of these disparate parts, you know, the government, academia, the industry I focus a lot on the industry are one, working well according to their own rules. Which part of the challenge is that the rules are actually quite different. The things you want your academics doing are quite different from what you want your industrialists doing are quite different from what you want your politicians doing. So how do you get a group of people who can be good each individually in their own spheres and also who can work together well? 'cause one of the things you find when you look at any era that's doing really well in these ways, whether it be, you know, the United States at its height or like the, the Roman Empire or the Han Dynasty or whatever, like you'll find that these elites are relatively good at getting along with each other and pretty good inside their own domains. So I think the thing you need is to just get people who are good enough. And so how do you plant that seed? How do you get those people? How do you get that group started?

Vance Crowe [00:37:16] And is your imagination that this is a giant group or is this a small group? Is this something that has to happen over and over and over again or is it one giant conference that happens and then people go forth and start the revival?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:37:31] Yeah, so I think it's a slow grind that starts small. It eventually becomes medium sized and I don't think it ends up necessarily permeating like 98% of the population or whatever, but I think you do need like skilled leaders in the important domains. And like I think if you had several thousand people who are highly skilled and able to work together, well then that would do it.

Vance Crowe [00:38:01] You're, you're reminding me of a thing, there's a guy named Jim Rutt who has been working on a program called Game B and your model here seems to be a very good one to overlay over the, over the top of of their organizational ideas. You're familiar with Jim Rutt?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:38:18] Yeah. Like a bunch of my friends and a bunch of the people in the game B area talk to each other. I we've been learning a bunch from each other. Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:38:26] It, it seems to make a lot of sense. I I'm struck so I run a network of my own and I am struck by just how disconnected people are from their, the people that they live right next door to. You know, they, they, you know, certainly this happens in apartments. I lived in apartments where I didn't know the people that lived across the hall or, or next, next to me, right? But it's an even more unsettling thing when you're living in a neighborhood and you don't know your neighbors. And I think that people are really hungry for that. But the institutions that used to facilitate that, which would've been church and probably some civic groups, they just don't exist anymore. And so you don't have people practicing on the local level. You don't have the T-ball and, and the, you know, the sports complex to bring people up at their skill level so they can then go on up another level. I, and so I see people trying very hard to try and figure out how to fix it on the community level.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:39:25] Yeah. And like this is a really interesting one to me actually, especially here in Oakland. Like Oakland does have a whole lot of this or like I should, Oakland has a fair amount of this type of civic infrastructure, but the class of dynamics of it are really interesting where like you'll see that the people doing that tend to be like lower middle class and people with this sort of upper class aspirations just like aren't really involved in it. Which is sort of the opposite of what it was in my grandfather's time.

Vance Crowe [00:40:00] Yeah. So there's a guy named David Goodhart that has this concept of somewhere versus anywhere people and the elites of our society, the ones that get educated, they say, Hey, I wanna travel, I want to have an a job where I can pick up and move anywhere I want. I want to be able to have transactional relationships 'cause I can buy anything I need. Versus somewhere people who are much less transactional and their role is really like, I'm, I'm here not because it's the best job opportunities or the best place for me to make money, but instead I like the relationships here. I'm comfortable, I don't want a, a lot of change. And that the, the what David's concept is, is that we really are stratifying between somewhere and anywhere people. And once he named that, it really made a lot of sense to me and I, I personally am probably an anywhere person that's converting right now into a somewhere person.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:40:57] Yeah. And when you look at this from the perspective of like rising elites, it's sort of tricky to do that if you are purely in the sort of anywhere mode because at some point you have to sort of build up a substantial power base that is yours that is not like, you know, sort of lent to you because you're the under secretary of whatever or like the department head of this or that and can be taken away or you're just going to give up when you do do your lateral move to get your, you know, pay increase or whatever. Like if you want to like really end up rising, you need something that is fundamentally yours. And a hundred years ago, a lot of this with a sort of like local civic infrastructure, the local party machines that sort of arose from the physical location. When you see people rising today, sometimes it's local in that way. Sometimes it's some other thing that they sort of made a really big bet on in a way that's sort of counter to this sort of infinite fungibility, infinite optionality ethos that you see in a lot of these anywhere people and sort of like the question of when do you make that bet is like a really hard one I think.

Vance Crowe [00:42:09] Yeah. And I think like if you, if you looked at people in the past you'd say, hey look, the guy that spent three or four years away and then came back and was a somewhere person, look how well he did. Now what happens if you extend that a little further? Maybe I can keep my optionality open for 7, 8, 9 years and then I'll go put my roots down and you start seeing co my wife and I, I'm, I'm nearly 40. We just had our first daughter and you know, there were my, my parents were saying you guys are gonna be the only older parents around like that. But no, when we go to to see other, you know, like playgrounds, all the parents are in their forties that I see.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:42:46] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:42:48] Which is a different thing, right? Because that means they spent 20 years doing anywhere people things, running around, building a career, doing all these things and only when you have a child I, maybe there are other reasons, but I think when you have a child suddenly local infrastructure, local politics, local things start making a big difference to you. So we've really changed. I wonder, I I bet that has not been a, a factor in a lot of the past because so much of science has changed. You can have children much later.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:43:21] Yeah, I think, yeah like I definitely see similar changes in a lot of my friends when they have kids. Like it definitely seems to be at least a pretty substantial factor.

Vance Crowe [00:43:32] So when you think about the trying to find trends and then also having to deal with massive disruptions of, of innovation, so like things that really change the game. What are the, what are the inventions that have really changed the game in the past and what are you, what are you looking for in the future?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:43:54] Yeah, so for the like really game breaking ones, like I make a distinction between incremental technology and breakthrough technology and like where, you know, like an incremental technology is we have made our plane 2% faster. We've made it like, like 6% more fuel efficient and like a breakthrough would be like we have, you know, invented fixed wing aircraft, we have invented like jet aircraft. Like the sort of like things are just totally different. And one of the things is like as you read the predictions as you like go into any time period before these breakthroughs happen, it doesn't really seem like anyone can predict them. So like the incremental advances are often pretty predictable. You can see where they're pretty likely to go and be more or less right. And a lot of the more thoughtful people can get the trends from them reasonably accurately. But like people can identify a breakthrough that they'd like to see happen but it just doesn't really seem like anyone's ever been able to time them until they actually happen. So you know, some of the really big ones have, I don't, I I think this, these are pretty clear, you know like the automobile, like the machine gone, the internet, the telephone like having like fast ships that can really make it so that you're going between continents in like days instead of six months.

Vance Crowe [00:45:19] Do you think that the example you used before about the monorail in California was people believing that there was about to be a disruption technology or at least a major innovation step?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:45:33] I have a hard time understanding what they were really thinking. So I don't think that most of that was premised on technological advance. 'cause the stuff I've read from the proponents of that was sort of taking it for granted that like we can do this. Which like, let's be clear, that's not an insane thing to think like we know how to build trains like high speed rail. Those exist, I've ridden on them. They're great, like lots of countries have them. So the physical tech of what was trying to be done absolutely exists. And there wasn't any like advanced technology beyond, it was sort of like at but not beyond the cutting edge of what we can do in terms of rail. And so it was just sort of this assumption that we can take what we know works and build it that turned out to be wrong. But it's not because of the technology

Vance Crowe [00:46:22] Man, you're actually really selling me on the idea of these institutions being broken because I try and think about if we tried to do a moonshot of to do a monorail across the country right now, I don't think it could get done. Probably not at least for 15 or 20 years at the best. Right?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:46:39] And like, you know, Musk is trying to do a literal moonshot right now. You know, we did the actual moonshot a long time ago. It's not clear whether we're going to succeed today. Like maybe we can, but a lot of that is going to be because we just have much, much better physical technology. Like if you took the physical rocket technology that we have today and like brought it back to the Apollo program, like I would love to see what they could do with that. It would be amazing.

Vance Crowe [00:47:07] You know, it's funny to think about if you could have some sort of inflation measure for how well a government works, but adjusting for scientific improvement, right? Like, because oftentimes at least what we're describing here, a lot of the reason that the government has been able to be successful is because the rate of scientific improvement has increased so dramatically that it covers over some of the failings.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:47:32] Yeah, that would be like insanely hard to quantify. Like quantification in general is like a thing that comes in when you're sort of like, you've got a really precise theory and like you know exactly what to measure and like I don't think we're at that point

Vance Crowe [00:47:48] Yet. So you also wrote an article that I thought was a little heretical depending on what circles you run around in about unions and about how unions are not today what, what what they used to be. I think I people say that a lot, but your meaning was something quite a bit deeper. So what, what were unions and their value in the past and what are they now?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:48:11] Yeah, so like this ties back to what we were talking about with localism before. They used to be this very independent power base that was built among workers at like particular factories of like, we're just going to get together. Like, because we all live in the same place and like, you know, this factory owner is like cutting the wages, you know, having us work these incredibly long days bringing in hired goons to just like beat up anyone who doesn't like how they're running the place we're going to get together and like use this sort of like basically have a competing power base that can use force to get our, to like push back on this stuff that we can, you know, you you like we can beat up strike breakers when the, we can like throw bombs into the factories when we're pretty sure nobody's in them. There's like, there's a lot of like physical brawls between police and the unions or, or like the, or the higher de goons and the unions like a bunch of, a bunch of bombings. Like they're basically this like yeah like their own parallel, very limited like ability to deploy force in order to do like pretty extremist class warfare of our class is just getting absolutely screwed. And unless we band together to deal with the fact that they have force and we don't, we're going to just keep getting the short end of this and they cause a fair amount of economic disruption.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:49:49] They're, a lot of them are like very radical anarchists. And then they start sort of in the period between like of World War I through World War ii, they start getting sort of integrated into the American system from what I know it's pretty similar in Europe, but I've studied that a lot less where you get like a bunch of business elites who are like, okay, we're going to give them a bunch of what they want. We're going to give them the hours, we're going to give them better working conditions, we're going to give them like a lot more money. And also at the same time as they're getting these concessions, they're being like brought into this sort of coordinated group of elites that I was talking about with how like the functional, like when the healthy institutions can work pretty well together and then this gets really codified under FDR or they have the national Labor relations Board, which is like, okay, these are the particular, like these are the protections you have when you're striking. Striking used to be very illegal. Like that's the factory that belongs to this guy. You're taking away his factory from him. And then there was sort of like custom that was built up around when that law is not going to be enforced then it got codified and unions are protected when they're striking. But also the federal government decides who does and does not count as a union in this sense. And if the NLRB says you're not a union, then you don't get these protections.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:51:21] And you sort of see this transition in who the union leadership is from these sort of like coal miners who got radicalized RA radicalized when their cousin got killed in a mine collapse or whatever to these sort of like middle management types who went to college and like maybe went through some NGOs and like have a bunch of legal training. And so you don't have the class warfare because it's a different class that's in charge. You don't have the independent power base of a bunch of local guys who can get together and do at least small scale challenges to like how forces deployed. It's just like a, like in terms of where it's drawing power from and what its role in the society is, it's completely different from what it was 120 years ago.

Vance Crowe [00:52:08] Yeah, I mean I can, so I spent some time in DC and you really see any organization who used to have a home office that was the primary place where everybody gathered, but it was back home back in Illinois or Iowa or Nebraska. When they move their head, when they move an office into DC because all of the power base is coming outta there, then they have to hire all new people. They have to raise money very differently and the decisions start coming down from DC which is not only more centralized control of those groups. So then it homogenizes them, but it also only selects from the people that are already out there, which o oftentimes are anywhere people, right? They're highly educated, they're in the transactional thing, they're in one group and made shift to another one. I think this doesn't just happen with unions. I think this happens with everybody that decides that some part of their existence has to do with the federal government. Eventually they get ensnared in that.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:53:04] Yeah, absolutely. And like, so there's a sort of very natural cycle to how this happens. It tends to follow pretty similar timelines of like how these things get integrated. And so what you want overall, if you're going to have a paradigm like this one, which I think is a pretty good one, I think this type of American system has worked very well, but the way you want it to be going like this is you want there to be this sort of new ones arising and new ones sort of dissolving as they sort of get too old and like don't really have anything unique to offer. And in the, you know, in the first half of the 20th century up through, I don't know, maybe the mid seventies or early eighties or so, you saw a bunch of these, you know, things arising a lot of them in the social movements and such. But nowadays there's very few like sort of new constituencies, new in interest groups of these types. It's sort of a lot of these old ones that have mostly been integrated. There's exceptions, but it doesn't feel like there's as many arriving as you would see like during the heyday of the counterculture or like the 1920s or something like that.

Vance Crowe [00:54:21] Well this reminds me of something you said earlier. You were one of the first people I've ever heard that were like, I'm really worried about the last of the baby boomers leaving, right? Because most of the people that I am around believe that the baby boomers have hung on to power and continued to pull value out of the organizations far longer than they've been contributing into them. And so like there are no management positions to move to. There is no way to prevent the organization from becoming ossified because it's being run in an instantiated by groups of old people

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:54:56] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:54:57] What do you think of that?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:54:58] Yeah, I think that this is true and there's this sort of perverse way that these are like, that, like this thing you're saying causes, the thing that I'm saying where the, a lot of the way that you're going to produce competent people is by having them sort of naturally rise up the ranks and sort of learn each thing one step at a time. Like the, Romans had one of the really dramatic versions of this. They had the curses of norm, which is the, like the road of honors, which is all the positions you're supposed to go through in the right order. If you're going to be the council, the sort of top guy where first you know you're going to like run for local office, then you're going to be like the aide to a military governor that you're going, I, I don't have the order. Right? But it's like you're going to govern across,

Vance Crowe [00:55:39] Oh, this is very, very common in other places where you go sit in all the chairs or, or you do your round around the table, right? Right. So

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:55:45] You

Vance Crowe [00:55:46] Start in one position, secretary, then treasurer, and then move all the way around until eventually your vice president, then president, then pass president. Right?

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:55:53] But the thing is that, you know, this is a generalization. There's many exceptions, but for the most part the, the boomers were not paying much attention to succession. They were not making sure that the younger people went through all of the steps. They were not, you know, stepping aside so that a younger person could move into the vice president's chair and learn those things. And so this gives you one, the boomers just being in there forever until they're carried out with their shoes on. And two, it gives the people my age, like for those who are going through the sort of institutional track and waiting to be promoted, you, you just don't get nearly as many opportunities to learn. And so this means that when, when we do run out of boomers, like you just don't have people who have been training and are ready to step into those. There just haven't been very many opportunities to learn to be able to do that. Well.

Vance Crowe [00:56:47] Yeah, I think that's going on in academia as well, right? It, I think a lot of people are staying on as dean and chairmans of departments for way longer than they used to. And instead of having a new person that was making a really crap wage after they got outta college to getting a little bit more, to taking on more responsibility, but part of that responsibility is getting along with other departments, getting the university to, to be more active and updated. But the whole university system to me seems incredibly ossified right now and and generally run by bureaucrats.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:57:22] Yeah. And like the bureaucratization is sort of a separate thing, but like it's also a pretty big deal, isn't it?

Vance Crowe [00:57:30] Yeah. I mean, like I I, I work with a lot of student groups and what you end up finding out is there's a professional that's in the, either at the head office or something that actually steps in and does everything because they're paid to do that. That's their job. And so the very thing that young people could be getting, which is experience putting together a conference or doing these things, they've, they've made it a transaction and they've offshore it to the, to the bureaucrat whose job it is. And you see that harming the, the way that those things get structured. 'cause kids would set up a different conference than the professional would and then you see it in them not learning the skills that they would normally get just, just from interacting with people outside of academia.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:58:14] Right. And like, you know, if you read the stuff that from, that was written in those periods, you know, you know, there's this biography of Scotty went on to become the chair of General Electric and when he was in college in like, I guess this would be what, like 1900, 19 10 or something. He's doing a bunch of this organizing. He is like organ, you know, running the, the speeches and the conferences, doing the campaigning for the presidential candidate who he wants to win just like on his own by just like knocking on his buddy's doors. If you look at the sixties, you know, the radicals there are organizing their marches, they're organizing like the physical occupations of the campuses. They're not like going to the dean for help with that because the deans are opposed to it. They don't want to be kicked out of their own offices. The students are doing all that themselves.

Vance Crowe [00:59:05] This is really interesting and it makes me deeply wonder what you think of the, you know, where culture is at right now in the US You had mentioned that things are kind of as fever as maybe they were in the McCarthy era, but where does this go? Do we, do we have, you know, a Maoist revolt, you know, does pole pot come to, to the top in the US or is this absolutely overblown and really what we're gonna be dealing with is domestic terrorism? Because it seems like the conversations are all around these wildly different polls.

Ben Landau-Taylor [00:59:41] Yeah, so I think that if you're looking at like any of those sort of extreme large scale violence things, I don't think that's in the cards. I don't think the people behind this have the psychological setup to be doing, to be personally conducting the violence. I think if they did, you'd already be seeing it. And like the amount of violence that we've seen is like pretty low. And there was a little bit last year, but it was mostly of this type of like, almost the sort that you get when you have like, you know, two hunter gatherer tribes screaming at each other in this sort of ritualized way. And like sometimes it gets a little overboard and someone gets hit too hard kind of deal and less of the sort of like targeted assassinations and bombings that you saw a lot of in the seventies. I don't think we're even gonna hit that level, let alone like, you know, serious something like the troubles, I think like that would absolutely shock me if that happens, then just stop taking me seriously. 'cause yeah, like I think that it's going to be like a lot of shakeups and like people within the elite using this type of thing to maneuver for position to be like, these people who are in power here are unethical in these ways and they need to be removed and we need to take their place so that we can do things better. And you're going to see a bunch of shuffling, again, this is much closer to what you saw in the fifties. There was not a whole lot of like mass violence, but there was a lot of institutional rejiggering.

Ben Landau-Taylor [01:01:14] And I think that that's much more what we're going to see.

Vance Crowe [01:01:17] That's interesting. I, you know, there, there may be a parallel between that and the me Too movement, right? Like you had these really instantiated high level celebrity people, Charlie Rose, you know, Matt Lauer, like people that had been in these roles that maybe in the past would've been, maybe they would've been handing down, bringing other people up. But, but instead the, the institutional shakeup was we have changed cultural norms and you were on the other side of that line and, and we're going to really pound you really hard for that.

Ben Landau-Taylor [01:01:52] Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's quite important here that the sort of like big head on a pike, there is Harvey Weinstein who is less important as like a celebrity. I'd never heard of him before all that happened. And more important as this sort of like behind the scenes fixer sort of institutional lubricant type role. And I think that's actually very significant about it because I think that's much more what it's targeting.

Vance Crowe [01:02:16] And so you think about big names like here Harvey Weinstein, what about the part of culture where we have with Jeffrey Epstein? So you have this like person that met with all these other really important people and then he was arrested and then he killed himself. And so now the, the names of these people, where does, where does an anomaly like event like that or fit into your, your prediction models? Is this just a blip that nobody in 3000 will remember?

Ben Landau-Taylor [01:02:49] Yeah, so I think that it's not going to be super significant in the year 3000. Like, you know, people like me who still have opinions about the Dreyfus affair might know about it, but like it'll, but like that kind of thing where like it's this sort of very, it's this window into a thing like for that to occur there has to be a bunch of other stuff happening that is not publicly reported. Like it's not the type of thing where it's like if you find a dinosaur skull out in the middle of nowhere, like there has to be, you know, you don't get skulls on their own. There must have been an entire dinosaur at some point, you know, and I don't know what the rest of the dinosaur looks like, but like it pretty clearly shows that there's something that was happening that like you would not find in the, you know, on, on the New York Times or Fox News or whatever.

Vance Crowe [01:03:44] That's a good way to describe it. So Ben, I know we're about ready to run outta time, but as you think about helping people think about the world in this broader scope that you do, where does somebody begin to develop, you know, a, a, a theory about the way that, that the world works or enough of an understanding of history to be able to apply things?

Ben Landau-Taylor [01:04:07] Yeah, so the main thing I would recommend here is what we call the case study method where you partic you, you zoom in on a particular thing that is just innately interesting to you and you try to understand it getting as close to primary sources as you can to, until you just have a general sense of the shape of that thing. So like, it can be historical, it can be contemporary, like be you want to pick something that you, you will be able to understand. So the Epstein thing would just be too complicated to be your first big one like these. But you know, it might be like how did the Civil War start? There's a ton of good records on that. Or like, like what went on with the, you know, the like why was the legislation around the 2008 financial crisis passed in the way that it was? And then you try to get as close as you can to the primary sources and really understand that you do like three or four of those. You're in a much better position to start evaluating all of the big, you know, galaxy brain theories that people start throwing at you. You can be like, oh, huh. It matches all of the things I've looked at. Or be like, wait a minute, it doesn't match this thing from like medieval France.

Vance Crowe [01:05:18] Man. I think what you're describing there is sounds intoxicating and fun and like a lot of work and

Ben Landau-Taylor [01:05:26] If it were easy everyone would do it.

Vance Crowe [01:05:28] Yeah, exactly. But I think that you probably, if you're doing this in your everyday life, there are probably, there are probably some young dreamers that love history and sociology that would love to, to be like you one day, Ben. I would,

Ben Landau-Taylor [01:05:41] Yeah, this is a way to do it.

Vance Crowe [01:05:42] I would love to have you back on the podcast. I feel like I need to read and read and read a lot more to get ready for us to have a good dialogue. But I'm so grateful you came on, man. Yeah,

Ben Landau-Taylor [01:05:51] This is really good. Thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun.