Jeremy LaKosh; Historical Context, Christopher Columbus, government centralization and economics.

About this episode

Accountant, retirement-community operator, and amateur historian Jeremy LaKosh returns to discuss the origins and ambitions of his deep-dive history podcast "History in Context," which he started after joining the Articulate Ventures Network gave him confidence and technical feedback on presentation. The first half covers Coronavirus-era practicalities — Illinois's chronic Medicaid payment delinquency, unemployment fraud, and LaKosh's retirement community's evolving, non-authoritarian approach to resident safety (briefing residents on risk and letting them choose their own bubble size rather than mandating isolation, after an early lockdown produced a spike in anxiety-driven maintenance complaints). The conversation's heart is LaKosh's revisionist deep dive on Christopher Columbus: after reading 300 pages of primary-source material, he found no evidence of the "flat earth" myth, discovered Columbus calculated his position around the globe via stellar navigation, and argues that his political overreach (holding onto colonial governorship too long) — not his exploration itself — drove his historical vilification, with many of the worst post-Columbus Caribbean atrocities committed by his successors. Both men use this as a springboard into a broader argument about centralization, citing the French Revolution as proof that removing central authority can produce prolonged violence, and connecting Republican/Democrat naming conventions to a Republic-vs-democracy philosophical divide traced back to Federalists (Adams) vs. Jeffersonian Republicans. They lament the collapse of civil discourse (invoking Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" debates as a lost model) and diagnose social media's "honor culture" — zero-sum, must-annihilate-the-other framing — as corrosive to a previously meritocratic hierarchy of ideas. Both discuss personal discipline experiments during "Sober October" (Vance's Twitter/phone fast; Jeremy's caffeine reduction from 7-8 cups to 2 daily) and close with LaKosh's specific, dated 2020-election predictions.

“I would hint to a moment in history where centralization was torn down and it created great conflict, and that would be the French Revolution... that absence of central authority created a great amount of violence that extended for a long period of time.”

“It ultimately can be used to whip up a mob and to get people to do things that they never would have done, had they just been focused on what can I control and what should I be doing for myself and my family.”

“To bring him down to a paper-thin version, not only cuts down him, but it also cuts down us as individuals. Like what are we as individual human beings capable of? If you have enough confidence and enough ability to get other people to row in the same direction as you...”

Key moments

• ~2%: French Revolution invoked as historical proof that removing centralized authority produces prolonged violence, not liberty.
• ~10%: LaKosh's retirement community pivots from mandated lockdown to risk-disclosure-plus-personal-choice after anxiety-driven complaint volume quadrupled.
• ~28%: Origin story of "History in Context" — sparked by confidence/skills gained inside the Articulate Ventures Network, using a 1960 garage-sale textbook as a denser primary-source scaffold.
• ~34%: Columbus deep-dive reveals no primary-source evidence of the flat-earth myth and describes his mid-voyage celestial position calculation.
• ~50%: Republican vs. Democrat naming tied to Federalist (central authority) vs. Jeffersonian Republican (individual/local authority) founding-era divide.
• ~63%: Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" debate series held up as a lost model of high-quality, non-personal civil discourse.
• ~76%: "Whip up a mob" — social-media zero-sum honor culture explicitly linked to the erosion of a merit-based hierarchy of ideas.
• ~92%: LaKosh's specific dated predictions about post-election violence, timing, and Trump's re-election odds (65%).

Notable quotes

“I think that if Donald Trump is reelected, I think that we will have enormous amounts of violence and arson... if Joe Biden wins, that violence and destruction will not come until sometime next summer.”

“None of this is being talked about today... I read 300 pages of original research, and there was zero mention of the world being flat.”

“It ultimately can be used to whip up a mob and to get people to do things that they never would have done.”

“The French Revolution was a tearing down of central authority, and that absence of central authority created a great amount of violence.”