Economist Explains Why the Pilgrims Left the Netherlands and Illinois Tampons in Boys Bathrooms

Samo Burja [00:00:00] I know in Europe, you know, you might literally just, you know, peasant might just literally be something you call someone as they're a little bit uncultured or whatever, right? It might be used as, as an insult. This probably goes back to like, you know, the old feudal aristocracy versus farmers. And with the city dwellers having illusions that they're basically aristocracy receiver, maybe even better than aristocrats in some ways.

Vance Crowe [00:00:22] I'm Christina Hudson Kohler, an egg processing manager living in Syracuse, New York, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we talk with Samo Burja, who is a sociologist and lover of history that is a prolific writer. I have been reading Samos Workforce several months and find him to be an amazing thinker. So we sat down in this interview to talk about why some civilizations thrive and others just crumble and fall away. He has some very interesting points about technologies that have been lost over time, and how the value of mentorship is one of those things that we've lost, but it is one of the only ways to pass on deep amounts of information. We also get into a little bit edgy of a conversation about the Catholic Church and how it endured despite none of its participants being able to have children. And finally, we wrapped up with Samos, somewhat controversial take that agriculture has been around for a lot longer than 10,000 years, which to me is a mind blowing concept, which was fun to talk about with him. Samo is an extraordinary guy, and I'm really glad that you're here to check out this podcast. We're gonna head to the interview, but before we do, if you've been a long time listener of the podcast, you know, I talk about the Articulate Ventures Network, which was a group that I started during COVID because we were all stuck in our homes and listeners of the podcast wanted a way to support what I was doing.

Vance Crowe [00:01:55] Instead of just putting a hat out, I decided I would start this digital neighborhood. And it has grown into a community of people that want to get together and talk about interesting ideas, practice getting better at speeches, holding book nights, book club nights, and movie nights, just getting together and having the sorts of conversations that we were told the internet was gonna let us have. And yet, we don't get to do very often in those free mediums like Facebook and Twitter. So if you've been looking for a place to join a community where they're going to be interested in what it is that you have to say and can have discourse without all of the negative emotions, you ought to consider joining the Articulate Ventures Network. And you can do that by going to Network dot Articulate Ventures. I hope you'll check it out. And now onto my interview with Samo Burja. Samo Burja, welcome to the podcast.

Samo Burja [00:02:49] Yeah, great to be here with you.

Vance Crowe [00:02:51] You know, I was actually in the field of sociology in college. My father was absolutely adamant that I not make that the only thing I studied. And the more I got into it, the more I became disillusioned. It seemed like the mussies of all sciences and kind of just people's hypothesis. So when I encountered you and your work and the work of your colleague Ben du Taylor, I have been shocked that you are bringing a whole lot of life back to sociology. So as we begin, what is your definition of sociology and how in the world did you get so deeply into this field?

Samo Burja [00:03:29] I almost went into the field against my wishes. I started sort of in a more stem education physics background, but I had a strong interest in history, and especially a strong interest in, say, the history of science and other institutions that mattered for knowledge production. That almost inevitably pushed me to try to, you know, first think about organizations, institutions, but also asked some questions about our own society. How do we process knowledge? How do we accumulate knowledge? Why is it that society seem to eventually fail and decay, right? It seems to be an unusual fact that, you know, all civilizations sooner or later decay and fail. That's not a given. We could have easily lived in a universe of like, you know, unrelenting study progress. In fact, many people think we live in that universe. Despite all the evidence to the contrary for the definition of sociology, I'm just being very practical here. I almost don't care about the academic field. There are many good authors in it. However, sociology properly is the study of society as a whole. And you know, everything that is done with people by people. So I think it includes obviously, political science, economics, anthropology, and several other fields. It's one of the sins of I think, contemporary academia to overspecialize whether or not it's appropriate for the subject matter, right? Like the, it's, it's rewarded career wise, and then in some domains this is appropriate, and in others it isn't.

Samo Burja [00:05:00] It fragments the subject matter.

Vance Crowe [00:05:02] Yeah, and I think in a field like sociology, just like if you're trying to study nutrition, right, you're actually talking about incredibly abstract things. People oftentimes, I think, put dieticians in this vaulted category that they know about food. But really you have to know about human physiology. You have to know about biochemistry, you have to know about exercise. You have to know about all of these things. And if you overlook any one of the domains, the whole is so large in your theory of knowledge as to be almost unusable. But in order to be a field in academia, you're right, people force this specialization. That's that, that when you look at it from a little ways away, it it, it becomes absurd almost.

Samo Burja [00:05:44] Well, yes, especially since it's a holistic, you know, you have to have a holistic perspective. So many systems are running in parallel if you consider, say the human body and say, you know, nutrition or medicine, so many processes running simultaneously, all of them affecting each other. And then if you look at human society, isn't that an apt description of human society as well, or heck, even a single organization. And I think that then we also have the problem with experimentation. You know, you know, medical experiments have to have intricate ethics committees, social experiments. You know, I think we don't run that many, and it's kind of impossible to imagine a society that could just run other societies as experiments that doesn't work at all. So you're stuck with a methodology that I think is closer to geology, right? In geology, we don't create a new planet. We don't run new experiments with planets. What do we instead, do we dig up the rocks, we think about them, we think how they got there, we hypothesize where we're gonna find, you know, different kinds of rocks, and we go out and we dig again. And because of this methodology, often, you know, the greatest advances in geology came from people at the periphery of the academic world, right? The theory of continental drift is a young theory proposed in the 20th century by, I think a South African geologist, because he was out there digging rocks. Meanwhile, his colleagues in geology, in, in say, Harvard or London or elsewhere, well, they were much more interested in theory, and they were much more interested in catalogs of other people's work.

Samo Burja [00:07:17] So the analogy here would be, and maybe I'm biased because of my strong interest in history, is that I think we should just study this, you know, fossil record that we have, not just of animal plant life and everything else, but of past civilizations, past societies. How did they build their cities? How did they approach farming? How did the first human communities come together? What is the difference, you know, between say, you know, an ottoman imperial system with the salt on top, or the Chinese one, and all of this stuff. I think it used to have a healthy tradition in its own right, in the western world. And I could say more about that possibly later, but for various reasons, I think that approach is, is disfavor right now.

Vance Crowe [00:08:02] So you talked about, you know, looking at how cities form and how clusters of people come together, essentially, whether that's in just their small tribes or it's scaling out to being civilization wide. I think one of the challenges of having a conversation with just a normal person on the street is our level of understanding about history really comes down to at most 19, 20, 30 hours of, of Western civilization knowledge. And that's, if you've gone to college, when you look around at the, at the study of history, how could somebody ever wrap their arms around it so that they would feel confident that they say, well, the, my my understanding of how the world got to where we are is full enough for me to have a picture that's, that's worthwhile

Samo Burja [00:08:52] To me, it's an interesting, it's an interesting challenge. I would propose that, you know, the so-called T-shaped expert is the right way to do it. So you have a very shallow knowledge of many, many areas and a deep specialization in one of them, maybe in two of them. So what I would recommend for people who want to have this kind of orienting casual or sense-making understanding of history is to, you know, first study one or two periods, not even periods like one or two countries in a particular period, or one in two great institutions in a particular period, right? Perhaps, you know, the Medieval Catholic church strikes up your interest. You know, perhaps, you know, if it's, if it's an interest in your own country's history, Abraham Lincoln's presidential administration and the evolution of the presidency in the 19th century strikes up your interest. Perhaps, you know, the Hungry Years war is remarkably interesting, and there's almost, you know, an infinity of material that you can mine from the hundred y War. What does it include? It would, for example, include, you know, the sociology of the formation of religious movements, right? John de Ark, it would talk about modern state formation, right? As both the French and the English monarchy, our competing, which can mobilize more troops, which can impose better systems of taxation. People today might not realize, but during the Hungry Years War, what we today think of as France and what we today think of as England, England actually had a much smaller population.

Samo Burja [00:10:23] It, the reason it could keep pace is because ironically, England, the king in England was a stronger force, a stronger political force than the king in France. Today, of course, our associations are the opposite, but that's because the lesson the French took from the hundred Years War was that you absolutely need a strong monarchy to win wars because otherwise you're gonna get carved up by foreign pretenders. And I could keep on going, right? I could talk about cities, I could talk about the formation of nationality, and that's just the hundred Years war. And of course, even, you know, the US presidency in the 19th century might seem narrower, but to understand what their thinking, suddenly you have to know things about, you know, Quaker culture, how the puritans settled the world, the new world, the classics that they're referencing all the time, the biblical references that they're referencing all the time. Otherwise, you can't read primary sources. You don't understand them. You don't comprehend them. So my, my advice would be to understand the mechanics of history, observe both the modern world and at least one really distinct example, like a society that's significantly different, right? And then after that, do a casual reading, like the casual reading will inform you as to events. The deep study will inform you as to, you know, the mechanics of human nature of like power, of like economic development. And I think you need both.

Vance Crowe [00:11:50] You have been working on a, I don't, it's a, a theory, right? It's the great founder theory that you've been writing in a manuscript, and it is absolutely phenomenal how many different angles that you've carved away from it. And the, one of the most important things I think you talk about in this article is about how you have, well, first, why don't I let you explain the great founder theory for, for people that haven't read it, and then we'll, but we'll go into some of my comments about it.

Samo Burja [00:12:17] Yeah. A great founder theory can be properly understood as a variant of the so-called great man theories, which are, you know, deeply sort of unpopular today. They're not investigated in the 19th century. People really like them, possibly because of the instructive example of Napoleon, right? Like, look at Napoleon. It's impossible to say this man did not shape history. If you say everything done in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars was overdetermined by socioeconomic forces, you're just wrong. Right? Maybe the conditions right for a Napoleon were inevitable. Sure. But like the exact person with his, you know, adventures in Egypt with the reform of the legal code, with the reintroducing an imperial title, crowning Yourself Emperor after there was just a revolution to depose an absolute monarch. I'm sorry, those things very much were not over overdetermined, right? That's, that's a revolution in the classical sense where you return to where you started. Yet all of France, you know, supported him. They were interested in him. So does is great founder theory, just great man history. No, it's not. There's one key distinction, I believe that institutions vastly outlive their founders, and they have a vastly stronger impact on history than any sort of direct action could have. So say a successful general can conquer and conquer and conquer, but they might not be a great founder if they don't set up either a new system of military in organization, or if they don't set up and enforce a new code of law, or if they don't, you know, build, build various kinds of society, changing infrastructure and so on.

Samo Burja [00:13:58] Or, you know, say advance a new religion. So some conquerors that we might know from history, some of these great individuals, great artists, great scientists, I think their contribution to mankind is invaluable. But unless they participated in institution creation and building, they're not the subject of my theory, and I don't think they determine the big course and flow of history, right? A different religion or a different state, or a different system of law. Just imagine plopping that down anywhere in Europe, in the Amer, in Mesoamerica, in Asia, and you tell me that history will go the same way. It really won't, right? Like the rise and falls of empires are perhaps in a way inevitable, but which empire rises. And when an empire falls, that's not inevitable. What are the social norms? Religions promote that's not inevitable, right? You might, for example, change the way we think of family. You know, today we, we in the western world don't think highly of cousin marriage, but there are many cultures where that is considered preferable, since you know that if you go to business with cousins and distant relations, they have no real incentive, you know, to betray you. They have a reason to cooperate with you. And this is quite rational. It's a rational economic choice in a lower trust society, in a society that's higher trust, where you can, you know, do business with people who are initially strangers, but hopefully eventually become friends. I actually think that they do have to become friends. It it, there's a small point I'm gonna make here.

Samo Burja [00:15:31] I think in a, in a small way, 18th and 19th century business, business culture was healthier than modern business culture. There's a reason that, you know, you know, when, when in 19th century fiction, right? When Scrooge is visited by ghost of Christmas, past, present, future, all of that, the person who's minding his soul is his former business partner, right? Who passed away. Like, that's a detail we missed today. Today, we wouldn't write it that way. It would be a past love, you know, like Dante's Beatrice or whatever, or a distant love. It might be a relative, it wouldn't be your business partner. And I think it's, it's very important that people still considered business, you know, a business relationship. You know, in a 17th, 18th century Protestant context, that still means doing God's work, God's work with other people who are in the same communities you are, right? And I think we kind of, we kind of lost that mildly transcendent perspective of the social technology. And if you try to define business partnerships only by narrow self-interest, I would argue they're too fragile.

Vance Crowe [00:16:38] You, you talk a lot about social technology in your writing, in many interviews I've heard you say, which are like the types of technologies or the, the things that allow societies to behave. And to your point about business relationships needing to be friendships. In the past, there was some limit to how far your relationships could go because you just couldn't meet enough people. A letter could only go as far as you could find people to carry it for you. You know, your, the number of people that you encountered on a given day were always around just based on whatever your geography was. And that's when concepts like the Dunbar number become, you know, deeply important because you have to have a number of social relationships. There's a limit to the number of social relationships that you can have, and the number of people that know who you are. Your reputation is far more important in those scenarios. You can't just pick up and leave and, and become transient. And it's something that modern humans probably have a difficult time wrapping their mind around if somebody doesn't point it out to them, because it's so ubiquitous in our culture that I could just pick up the phone and call anyone anywhere I wanted, as long as I have their number.

Samo Burja [00:17:45] Well, we have an illusion that we can maintain an infinite number of meaningful relationships, and we mostly maintain this illusion by having very few relationships and maintaining the optionality for many, many of them. However, you know, optionality cannot be consummated. You know, you can't make use of it. You can't grow out of it. Only what is actual, what is actualized, what comes into existence. So I'm gonna say, you know, even on my face, you know, on my Facebook account, you know, I like all my Facebook friends, but let's be honest, the term Facebook friend, you know, I feel Twitter follower is a much more honest phrase than Facebook friend. Once you're at 6,000 people, you know, these aren't all your friends. They don't know what's going on at best. They're people who are like acquaintances, who are somewhat interested in you, who maybe wanna see your, you know, a picture of you getting married or maybe want to read your article or something like this. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that type of social relationship. It's just that, you know, the, the full meaning of the social technology of friendship is perhaps one that's eroded over time, right there, it's, it's like an emotional and a logistical thing. And it was very important for civil society back in the day. There's one, there's a reason that some political theorists refer to republics as communities of friendship. Now, I think that's a different sense and a different meaning of it, but there is, there is something to this, you know, non-kin cooperation that you see. But to say, address something that I think you alluded to in the questions, like something that's like a little bit, a little bit more broad, general, important social technologies, right?

Samo Burja [00:19:25] When I mentioned religions state formation, when I went into this discussion on the nature of friendship, these are all social norms that are culture, but they're not arbitrary culture. They have a mechanical effect, right? So I think I like the term social technology rather than the term culture, because I think in contemporary discourse and thought we perceive culture as empty flavoring or coloring where it doesn't change anything. It actually deeply matters. It deeply matters what your code of codes of laws are, what your ethical intuitions are, what mechanisms you use to resolve disputes. You know, is your society oriented around market production or gift economies or, you know, command and control economies. All of these things produce very, very different societies, and there's a way in which societies must be a certain way to support certain, certain material technologies. So there is an overlap between material and social technologies. They shape each other over time.

Vance Crowe [00:20:31] Yeah. You know, the, your comment about culture being misunderstood in society, I have several times taken Stewart Brand's concept of pace layering and showed it to people. And one of the hangups that I realized people had when I would show it to them is that on the base layer of the pace layering, so basically for anybody that's ever seen this, it's saying, what rate do things change? And on it's just essentially imagine circles that run o outside of each other. So on the top layer, the, the, the surface would be fashioned, and it's going really fast, and it goes in all these weird directions, right? Underneath it is commerce, then infrastructure, then governance, then culture, then nature. And I think most of the time when people are looking at that pace layering, and they see culture down there, they confuse it for the fashion layer, which is yes, the things that make up, like, what does it feel like to live in this culture? What kind of clothes do we wear? What kind of things are we into? What movies are we watching? What music is hot right now? Not understanding that that that word culture, what he's trying to capture there, as best as I can tell, is what is the mode with which you understand how you are to interoperate with other human beings. And the reason that changes so slowly is if you move and, and each time you go down a layer, the, the layers move slower like a clock or gears. And on the, on that base layer of culture, anytime one of those things moves quickly, things have gone horribly wrong. It is not stable.

Vance Crowe [00:22:02] Things don't get produced in the chaotic eras of, of culture change, at least on its face, not, not by default if you make large changes.

Samo Burja [00:22:11] Yeah. I think one of the correct ways to say, think of a period like the renaissance isn't the discarding of the old, it's the revival rebuilding of the old, right? There's a harmonious evolution that you see from the 13th to the 16th century out of this concept of, you know, man is created in the image of God. You know, man should, you know, be developing all of these virtues and then a rediscovery, a literal rediscovery of the heritage of antiquity, of Greek texts that were never translated into Latin, suddenly making their way first into Latin. And then, you know, the new languages of Europe like German and Italian and French and Spanish. And that produces together a revolution of thought that we think of today as the Renaissance, right? Sometimes there are fun examples where there are statues literally dug up from the ancient world, like beautiful, realistic marble statues with depictions of like, you know, chiseled into the marble. There's the, the, the image of like, you know, cloth wrinkling and lying on a human arm or a leg. And then they find these statues, they're amazed, they try to make replicas, they kind of fail, they succeed at making replicas, and then they go on and they do their own motifs. And we have beautiful things like, you know, the David or, or so on, right? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:23:32] And, and we as humans also have this weird concept. And you mentioned you this at the beginning, that human progress always happens. We don't realize how much a civilization can be built up that they can learn and have as shared knowledge, but if they don't find a way to pass it on regularly, then that knowledge goes away. So the kind of canonical example being people forgetting how to make concrete for hundreds of years between when they had it in Rome and on into the rest of civilization, or how close they got to making the toilet, and then having that go away too. And once you lose those technologies, which sounds weird, how could you lose the technology? Then it's just gone. And you have to rediscover it in some way.

Samo Burja [00:24:16] Well, yeah, and especially with regard to Roman concrete, you might, you might know this already, but roman concrete was made with volcanic ash in a specific mix that allowed it to endure seawater very well. There are still ports in Italy that maintain, you know, Roman concrete. If you try to do this with modern concrete and hope that it lasts for 2000 years, you'll be sorely disappointed. The Roman concrete had a minor self-healing property where it would leach minerals from the seawater and so on. And modern concrete, well, it just erodes and crumbles over time. They only recently recreated a recipe that has some of the same formula. But think about that. Not only was, you know, not only did they have concrete, that concrete that was better than ours, granted relying on a supply of volcanic ash, sure. But the supply didn't run out. You know, Mount Aetna and Vesuvius and all of that, they're still, they're still doing their thing, you know, as the ruins of Pompe test.

Vance Crowe [00:25:14] So let's talk a little bit about how great founder theory turns into institutions, right? So you have a leader at the top that has a vision, they are able to bring together a group of people to start enacting that vision. But the way it turns into an institution is if they find a way to pass on both the explicit and the implicit knowledge. Like what? Like technically, how do you do this? Yes. But then what about all those things that you can't possibly write down,

Samo Burja [00:25:43] Right? So

Vance Crowe [00:25:44] Describe this a little bit more in detail for people. What, what is the challenge to making a bureaucracy that endures?

Samo Burja [00:25:50] Yeah, just a little bit of a correction. The great founder doesn't need to start at the top sometimes to even start at the middle or at the bottom of the old society, but otherwise, your description is correct. They inspire, organize, draw together people into a new mode of living, either very narrow like a military process, or very wide, like a whole new religion. And then this, this causes a terra formation of society. But the succession problem you described, that one is very difficult. No one ever fully understands what, you know, what is our origin, right? Sure, sure. You know, human origins, maybe you know what your family is, you know, maybe even when your religion was founded, maybe you know things about your nationality, things about your childhood. But you know, you're never going to recreate the set of experiences that went into making you the, the, the essence either. So what you're doing is essentially picking and choosing what is the enduring an essential institution a feature of this institution, right? What are the virtues you can't skip over? What are the skills you can skip over? Whether the mechanisms you, you can't skip over? And how do I make this very transmittable? You know, my company is, is named after a statesman. I greatly admire my company's called Bismarck analysis, but I'm gonna actually critique Bismarck, one of the most important critiques of this 19th century statesman. You know, he basically created what we would think of as the modern state, is that he created a foreign policy, so brilliant and intricate, that no one could possibly wield it except him.

Samo Burja [00:27:29] So part of the genius of good succession is creating something that is functional and simple enough to transmit even if you're capable of creating a greater artwork, a greater science, a greater company, pause to consider, will I be able to hand this on? And if I won't be able to hand it on, well, am I okay with this being an effect on society for one generation? Maybe I am, there's some institutions that should only last one generation. But if you're hoping for a deeper, wider reform, well, you know, that's gonna take a while. And again, I think the perspectives here often are, are quite explicit, right? You know, religion is always tricky to talk about. But you know, if you, if you look at the New Testament, and in Jesus' message, it's definitely intended to be something that slowly transforms all of society, even if only a small number of people ever became Christian, or if you say, read Confucius, right? Who's more a philosopher. He, his perspective is that there is a slow outward radiation of the right way of being, of the right way of living. Go starting with say, filial piety and continuing with this, you know, service to the common good in the state and so on. And we could give other examples as well, such as, you know, Plato's thoughts on how society might be reformed or improved. So this long-term perspective exists in people because I think people can help but care about the biggest things. So if you care about the biggest things, why don't you try to, you know, plant seeds, you know, that grow into oaks still.

Samo Burja [00:29:07] Let's talk now about the concretes of succession. I said you have to pick and choose what is worthy of transmission. I think that one of the strongest, strongest recommendations I have is the equivalent of a master apprentice relationship in say, medieval European guilds or in, say, martial arts context. Because in that case, if you establish an imitation between student and teacher, this imitation goes beyond the explicit, right? The way you move a hand when you grab a tool. It's one of the reasons that these so-called tat skills that are difficult to put into words still matter. Even if you're doing something like the practice of law, where you might think, oh, this is all explicit. No, no, no. The way you discuss problems with your colleagues, right? The way you ask your clients for information, these are things about verbal behavior that you just can't describe in words. It would be an explosion of words. You would need a hundred words to describe what you're doing with 10 words and 10,000 words to describe what you're doing with a, with a, with a hundred words and so on. It would be exponential. So some things have to be transmitted just through observation, imitation, and importantly also correction. If those are internalized successfully and deeply, I think interesting things can happen. Important about the master apprentice relationship isn't just imitation between, you know, teacher and student and all of that. It isn't just the opportunity to closely observe someone at work.

Samo Burja [00:30:42] It is also the apprentice is exposed to similar constraints and problems as the teacher is, right? They're doing the same type of business. Look, they're not just bringing you coffee, that they might start by bringing you coffee. You have to give them the same type of work that you do, menial or not, and let them succeed or fail at it. And if that happens, then you know, incentives instead of being something you're trying to shield your successor from, become your allies in molding your successor. They, I could give some other historical examples of how this has worked. Like beyond that, that approach, there's also the question of, there's also the question of where do you recruit from, right? Like, the job that you leave someone might not be the same job you started off with. You know, if you are recruiting for a successor for a company that started off as just you and your friends, but now as like 50,000 people or 5,000 people, well maybe, you know, searching in the same corners of society that you search for your friends initially. Maybe that won't work. Sometimes it might, but maybe it won't.

Vance Crowe [00:31:56] Yeah. I think about this

Samo Burja [00:31:58] 'cause you've, you've been transformed through the process of running your company.

Vance Crowe [00:32:02] I think about this in the, in the challenge of a lot of the industry groups that have come up, particularly in agriculture. So I, I work in this space. I go to talk to a lot of farm bureaus, a lot of co-ops. And the challenge that they have is the people that were there to build the original institution, the farming itself is different and the needs of that institution are different. And you can't just say like, oh, well let's just, let's just hire from within because you may not have the skills from within to be able to make the organization adaptable enough to change so that they can adapt to the new circumstances. But then also going outside brings in a new problem because now you may actually be changing the core focus or vision of the group. Whoever you put in as the leader may not want to do the same thing that the organization was doing there before. So you kind of have that, what is it? Th it's, no, it's not a th trap. It's the, it's the ship, right? Where you replace all of the ship

Samo Burja [00:33:00] Athe

Vance Crowe [00:33:01] Thesis. That's right. And like, how many parts can you replace in an organization and still have it be the same? And I think that modern society is really grappling with this problem because society has changed around them so quickly that to figure out, do we need to have more apprentices? Do we need to go outside to find the next person? How do we propagate this organization without losing it?

Samo Burja [00:33:23] I honestly feel that we have grappled with it, but it's not an impossible challenge. There are societies that do a decently better job of it, even in an industrial context. And I, but I'll be honest, I think we, we suffer from having few good ways of solving this problem, right? I think for example, deindustrialization in northern England with the American rust belt would've been much milder. Had there been a desire to find people who wish to figure out how to do industry in the societal context that they found themselves in rather than say people who perhaps came in from a more financial background to whom offshoring seemed as attractive as building domestically. Right? Now, to be fair, either can turn a profit, but arguably, or running a very different organization depending on what your goal is. 1950s, the CEO of General Motors would say, you know, what's good for General Motors is good for America, and what's good for America is good for General Motors. There are a few companies today that can make that boast. And the the interesting aspect of this as well to me is, let's look at Japan, right? In Japan there's a practice called Muhi, which is son-in-law adoption. This means that, you know, whoever is the head of the family and the head of the industrial conglomerate sort of picks around for a talented business leader, someone who seems, you know, ambitious, hungry, has good skills, has good values, and then they marry him off to their daughter.

Samo Burja [00:35:00] The person when they marry the daughter, take on the old family name. So that's why it's called son-in-law adoption. Not only do you get a son-in-law, son, the son-in-law adopts your family name. And, you know, many companies that are household names today, at one point in their history, had this method of succession, like including Toyota, right? So this was a practice in 20th century Japanese corporations, you can probably see why this wouldn't work in most western countries, right? People, you know, usually don't get to choose or influence who their daughter marries if they have a daughter. The idea of, you know, someone sort of changing their last name and then being, you know, truly taken up into the father-in-law's business. Well, okay, maybe that can happen, but I don't see it happening that much. And when the rest of society looks on and looks at this, well, if it's a small family business, everyone approves. But if it was a company like Toyota, no one would approve. We would consider it, you know, nepotistic or corrupt or something like this. We would assume that, oh, you know, this useless, you know, son-in-law is being promoted just because of the daughter. And it's, it's private benefit. And this is such a big company with so many employees, surely we can do something better. But the idea of like choosing your romantic partner on the basis of that competence, that that I feel is, is also different from our conception of marriage. And I don't think we should, you know, or at least contemporary. I'm not saying we should adopt Mushi, but I'm giving Mushi as an example of a social technology in Japan, in an industrial society that alleviates the succession problem, right?

Samo Burja [00:36:39] And we should, we should consider what our equivalents might be, what would be our innovations that could work in such a way?

Vance Crowe [00:36:44] Well, and we have this in Western society and, and it's become a, a very deep problem, right? Like you talked about social technology of having a religion or, you know, the way you're setting up government, but all religions, one of the very, very first things that they talk about is this is how you're going to hand down your property. Yes.

Samo Burja [00:37:02] After

Vance Crowe [00:37:03] You've had children. And the idea that, well, we've somehow transcended this. We can just use government laws to tell you how this is gonna go, or will let each decision be made by the individual. And all of a sudden you realize the things that were binding families together at one time are now ripping them apart. Where you could have people that were conjoining their, their resources, trying to figure out how to maximize the little that they had, and now they're fighting over it. And I think a lot of these cultural practices that could seem abhorrent to us now do so because we've lost the context under which they were in. And in a society where violence was much, much more likely, the idea that you didn't have inheritance already figured out before the children are born, it would be odd.

Samo Burja [00:37:52] Right? And I have to say that, you know, there's some social critique that I could give here, which is that, you know, if you think of something like primogeniture, right? Primogeniture means the first son inherits everything. This wasn't just true of kingdoms, this was true of like, you know, farms or companies and so on. So I'm gonna say, you know, we know our society is so much more advanced because we've replaced inheritance by the first son with inheritance, by lawyers. Really Exactly. Consider, if you have several children and you have a significant, you know, you have a modest fortune or a significant fortune, how much of it do you expect will go to lawyers who your, who your kids will fi hire to fight each other. Now, it might seem more civilized than, you know, a good battleax, but a lawyer is, can be just as expensive and just as destructive. And there's an industry in a way that, that benefits off of this. A comparison could also be me to divorce law and divorce lawyers and so on. And I'm, you know, I'm not saying this to be just cynicism for cynicism's take, but to say that, you know, we have solved far fewer of these problems than we pretend to, we are very proud that, you know, obviously it's kind of arbitrary and strange that the first child should be privileged over the other ones. But what if the first child being privileged over the other ones actually was a simple way to prevent them fighting each other, right? Possibly leading to the destruction of the family wealth and so on in, you know, that that is a, that is an aspect we don't think about.

Vance Crowe [00:39:26] Well, and this brings up my hypothesis that I've been itching to bring up with you, which is one of the things that happens in cultures that survive, or at least as I look around and I have a limited view, but is that you have one group of people that are charged with genetic propagation. They have children, and then there always seems to be a small group of people that are charged with mimetic propagation. This is how our culture works. And oftentimes those people are selected out, and they are not supposed to be a part of the breeding pool. They aren't adding children. And this would be the example of let's say the Catholic church, right? Who I've heard you say before, one of the Catholic social innovations was instead of just being focused on your kin, as in who you were related to, now you want to be focused on who, who is a brother in Christ. So now we're all working together and you've got a larger social system, but now you need some of the people to be, who are the ones that are propagating? Like how are our rituals work? Who, who gets married? How does, how do different disputes get settled out? And then the ones that are having children, and I would say that it's not just the Catholics that didn't let their priests marry. This goes on in Norse cultures where they have Sears, you have Buddhist cultures, which have their own group of people that separate out Chinese culture, which has Unix. Is this a social technology that has been lost to time, that we run a very real risk that we may not be able to pass down our society, our civilizational knowledge if we don't have this group of people that gave up the ability to propagate genetically and now are propagating memes?

Samo Burja [00:41:09] Well, I think that there's a very real way in which the dispersal and the concentration of interests is one of the key variables that social technology shifts and fewer as, as fundamental as say, giving up a certain companionship or giving up offspring, right? So celibacy certainly it's a very powerful social technology and it's been used very productively. I will say, however, that, you know, in the modern, in the modern context, right, in the modern context, I think that there is a lot of fertility, depression of despair. Now we have this thing called a demographic transition where societies wants to become wealthy, tend to have fewer children. Usually what happens in all the societies that have become quite wealthy and industrialized so far, the result is sub replacement fertility. You know, the, the people in this society aren't dedicating themselves to mimetic transfer. I think they're just failing to propagate. So as long as you make a distinction of a dedication in an institutional context where you are basically, you know, the church is your family or the monastery is your family, right? Like that type of dedication versus say, you know, just an individualized sort of mild failure, right? To propagate. And the only reason why I'm pointing this nuance out is it's not to undercut your point at all, but just to remind people that we are in an era of, it's not yet visible, but I think we are in an era of global population decline, where fertility basically all over the world, except for Africa, is below replacement.

Samo Burja [00:42:52] Even places like India, you have entire provinces, it hasn't even gotten rich yet, but their entire provinces with sub replacement fertility and you know, India's, you know, vast country, 1.5 billion people according to latest count, it's probably gonna hit like a little below 2 billion and it's never gonna go above 2 billion. China is already in population decline as well. So, you know, there's errors of demographic expansion and errors of demographic contraction, and there are errors of, you know, range expansion and range contraction. So I think different social technologies thrive in different contexts. I think the priestly celibacy technology works exceptionally well in two environments. One is a highly urbanized environment where you need to take people out of social life to retain what truly matters. So that would be, say the court, you know, again, court un in China or whatever, or you know, if you think about the hierarchy of the Catholic church at the very center of like, you know, various places in, in Europe. And the other context is a context of economic contraction where what you are trying to do is dedicate your energies to the replacement of something. And I think that expresses itself less in an urban environment and more in a monastic environment. So if I were thinking of celibacy, I would be like, okay, it can be a tool in large hierarchical organizations that exist in a dense social context of many dynasties competing.

Samo Burja [00:44:25] How could you possibly be neutral if the papacy was just another dynasty? Right? The papacy was powerful precisely because it wasn't just another dynasty. It wasn't just, you know, a French king or an Anglican king or whatever, you know, they would cl start eventually competing because it was not a dynasty in a context dominated by dynasties that gave it a kind of neutrality and trustworthiness. Though of course it still pursued its own interests, you know, not just the will of God, however they interpreted it. Monasteries though I feel, are things that are secluded from the world where they construct alternate communities and they dedicate themselves to particular, to particular modes of life. And it's essentially the case that, you know, instead of supporting their family, they support the monastery and it's the monastery that then supports the continuation of the social technology. One way to think of a monastery is that, you know, you talked about Dunbar's number earlier, how would you expand Dunbar's number in practice? Well, one way to do it is to make everyone kind of uniform and kind of predictable. What if we all rose at the same time and went to bed at the same time? What if we all ate our meals together that were cooked communally? What if we all wore the same clothes? What if we all had the same allowed list of possessions? Wait, that starts to sound like a monastery or a prison. The difference being a monastery is voluntary and you know, a prison is not so a, a super scaling of a household is the monastery.

Samo Burja [00:46:00] So in an era of economic contraction, technological simplification, like the early dark ages, the monastery, the super scaled household can take onto itself. You know, a lot of the functions that a functioning city would have because it's vastly stronger. It's not a household of 10 people, it's a household of a hundred people, of 200 people, right? And that, that's how I would break it up, right? It's sort of neutrality through celibacy or investment in a, in a super, in a super household that is then the super household is the one trying to maintain knowledge and so on. There's a third category, I guess of the her of the hermit. But I would say that the hermit, again, not having a family and you know, going back to the village and doing, you know, whatever the hermit's preaching is, I think that's also read by people as a sign of neutrality. You're not just trying to install your kids above us, you're trying to play, you're trying to be a prophet. Basically.

Vance Crowe [00:46:56] The interesting thing about the Catholic church, right? The the monasteries to your point, ended up being their own little enclaves where you now have a diversity of ideas, right? This is where the Jesuits came from. Yes. This is where different schools of thought pop up that are not necessarily against the papacy. They have to walk a line where they don't get just smashed out, but they're able to create some sort of diversity there. And then you have what in modern days is, you know, the diocesan priests, which were, you know, allowed to intermix in the society. The church became, as to your point, the the family. And it's an interesting thing because the Catholics were able to keep a centralization of their resources in a way that the Protestants weren't once in my reading of history, once the ministers were allowed to marry. Because now you

Samo Burja [00:47:43] Create

Vance Crowe [00:47:43] Like a competition, right? The pastor isn't just the pastor of the church. He now has his own family, literal family to look after and provide for and to give advantage to or, or whatever. But the Catholics didn't do that. And so they were able to integrate into society and continue the, the bureaucracy in a way that just didn't happen with, with, with people that were purporting to have, you know, commune with God that didn't give something up. It almost feels like the Protestants tried to, to, to have that the person that was going to in between God without having the sacrifice that the, that the celibacy of the Catholics had.

Samo Burja [00:48:22] I mean, I think it's very obvious that the, the religious property was a notably larger component of Catholic society than Protestant society. You know, you just look at, you know, the cathedrals of Europe, right? Or you look at, you know, land ownership or you look at, you know, again, any, any sort of measure. And part of the reason that the monastic, you know, there is something of a very limited monastic tradition in Anglicanism that should be emphasized. So there do exist ways, even in Protestant societies. There are people who sometimes, you know, you know, give up family and so on for religious reasons, though arguably, you know, the Anglican church, it's sort of interesting. It's like maybe, maybe the good way to describe it would be a Catholic church with Protestant characteristics. Like maybe that's what it was historically. Still there is a big difference between the two. I think it results in some interesting distinctions, like I think that say the Catholics did a better job as societies of maintaining the humanities in particular. I think it's not an accident that so many people on the Supreme Court, even if they're Protestant, they're educated in what were Catholic founded schools, right? And Catholic founded, you know, legal organizations and you know, it's not just, you know, a papers to conspiracy to overthrow America's 19th century history. You know, commentators thought it was, I think it is a legitimate focus on a particular kind of institutional continuity in a thought, even though the legal system itself is, is of course, Protestant.

Samo Burja [00:49:58] It's common law.

Vance Crowe [00:49:59] Well, and you look at like the Jesuit Catholic university system, whether it's in the US or abroad, one of the things that they did was allow philosophy in when, and even when I was going to school in 2000, I remember my Protestant friends, the ones that were deeply Protestant, saying, philosophy is Satan's who, right? This is, this is going to allow you to, to think about God in ways that are, you're not allowed to. But learning the basics of logic and, you know, philosophical thought allows you to apply it into things like jurisprudence in a way that, that if you've never been exposed to classical Phil philosophical thought, you just don't have access to that way of thinking.

Samo Burja [00:50:39] Well, I'll say something interesting though, since we're discussing the key social technology and I'm, you know, I will say, you know, again, Catholic church is arguably the most impressive organization in human history. I don't know of any other organization Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:50:52] With the reach, power, and length.

Samo Burja [00:50:54] I say this as a sociologist, right? I, i I might say, you know, I might say things even about organizations I thought are bad. I might say, you know, things like, you know, Vladimir Lenin is one of the best revolutionaries of human history, right?

Vance Crowe [00:51:05] Very, very. That

Samo Burja [00:51:06] Doesn't mean I necessarily like London,

Vance Crowe [00:51:08] Right?

Samo Burja [00:51:09] But I, I think if we're being objective, you know, that's, that's the best description of the Catholic church. But to say something for Protestants, right? The community of believers and the role of friendship through the Protestant work ethic, right? Today we think of the Protestant work ethic as individual rather than communal. But I recommend reading, say about the early puritan colonies in North America. They definitely, they definitely have a communal Protestant work ethic, not just an individual one. This sort of human communitarian aspect where, you know, you go and you debate God with people, you pray with them, and then maybe God tells you that the correct, you know, way for you to serve him is to set up a spice trading company that goes to the East Indies. I think that's a Protestant virtue that's not a Catholic virtue.

Vance Crowe [00:51:59] Yeah, that's a great point, right? The, the idea that you would take a group of people, I mean, the Catholics weren't itching to, to go over to the new to the new World until, until ba, until they tried to go to Maryland. But before that it was, you know, for hundreds of years it was the Protestants having dreams or visions to go in that direction, right?

Samo Burja [00:52:17] Right. And today, you know, we might not associate the spice trade with say a, a godly impulse, but I think there's this interesting tension and contradiction with a mix of, you know, virtu virtues and vices that drives these people where, you know, what are you coming to the new world to, well, gold and souls today, we might be tempted to say, oh, it was all about the gold. But I think it was actually about both things, right? How else are you gonna sponsor your voyage to India unless you sell spices. So if you can't go to India, how are you gonna, you know, preach about, preach your religion and so on.

Vance Crowe [00:52:52] So, you know, when as we're talking about religion, it seems apparent to me that in the western world, religion, you know, going to church has historically gone down, down, down. And I, I right now have seen a big rise in things like astrology. So, you know, we've had various baby seekers, right? We just had a child. And anytime I'm talking to a young person now, I ask them about astrology and I am astounded at the level of knowledge that they have about this like, obscure thing that I, you know, I know there are 12 horoscopes, but that's, there's only, like, that's 'cause there's 12 months. I don't know anything outside of that.

Samo Burja [00:53:31] Yeah. What

Vance Crowe [00:53:32] Do you think is going on in western society that we've skewed the, the going to church and yet there's still some pull towards that belief system in some sort of higher order?

Samo Burja [00:53:45] Hmm. Well, I think the correct way to think about it is that it's not that we've become a post religious society, it's that the social form of religiosity changed. Part of it, I think is a genuine move, a, a gen a move away from communitarianism, where again, going to church is a group activity. It's not an individual activity. If you practice it as an individual activity, sure it might have some benefits, but really

Vance Crowe [00:54:11] You get bored and quit going. Exactly. The only

Samo Burja [00:54:13] Reason

Vance Crowe [00:54:13] You go is for the community. That's right.

Samo Burja [00:54:15] E exactly, exactly. That's the reason you keep going and you know, it has to be a genuine fellowship, can't be fake in various ways, can't be toxic in various ways, and so on and so on. So part of it is just atomization. Atomization, I think is one way to think about it is that there's this big 19th century push where essentially peasants are driven into the cities. Their old way of life is completely inappropriate for cities. This association doesn't exist in America. But I know in Europe, you know, you might literally just, you know, peasant might just literally be something you call someone as they're a little bit uncultured or whatever, right? It might be used as, as an insult. This probably goes back to like, you know, the old feudal aristocracy versus farmers and with the city dwellers having illusions that they're basically aristocracy cracy or maybe even better than aristocrats in some ways. But still there's a massive culture shock. I think the right way to think of it is that moving in the 19th century from tight-knit villages into a large anonymous city is a culture shock. As great as joining a cult or joining the military, completely different mode of life, completely different modes of accountability, completely nor different norms of what is plain speech and what is not plain speech, different norms of behavior, different like industrial work and and so on. And it was still hard work, right? Industrial society, we see this today in China as well. The Hong Kong and Taiwanese stereotype of the mainland Chinese often mirrors the stereotype people had say, of Eastern Europeans coming to Germany or to the United States in the 19th century or earlier, you know, French peasantry making their way to Paris to work in factories and so on.

Samo Burja [00:56:02] So there's a big culture shock there. And the big, the, I think, unresolved tension and question of our society is, by the way, I don't think we are a post-industrial society in the sense of overcoming industry. I think we're perhaps a post-industrial society in the sense that the industrial revolution perhaps failed sociologically. It succeeded in making us vastly richer. But we actually didn't figure out what a five generation blue collar family might look like. We found various scrappy solutions to help one generation of blue collar workers make it to the next, and then make it to the next and make it to the next. But it's always been Apache solution. There hasn't been like a new tradition yet formed there. Don't get me wrong. There are traditions of like, skill of worksmanship, of like honor, you had this in the US also an interesting multi-ethnic component where people would identify as, you know, Irish or Italian or create China towns and this sort of social technology would help them survive in a kind of urban environment. But I do feel that, you know, we've actually not produced a mature industrial so society yet. That's my, that's my view.

Vance Crowe [00:57:12] Well, I, I agree particularly as you frame it that way. And my, my strong sense is that people are going to go to some form of church in the future. I think there is too much.

Samo Burja [00:57:23] Yeah. There's gonna be a new communalism of some kind. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:57:26] Absolutely. Because you just, like right now the, the rugged individualism that was required to conquer the west is no long, it doesn't fit, it, it doesn't make sense in the modern world. And I think that you can maybe do it for a generation or two and still be riding on the, the, you're

Samo Burja [00:57:45] Floating acrimony the inheritance, economic and cultural. Yeah. Yeah. The, the frontier closed, right. That was a big soul searching moment in American history a hundred years ago. The frontier closing. And there were several attempts to solve this, right? Today, it might be hard to remember, but, you know, national parks were created to help preserve a sense of rugged individualism with nature. It's unclear whether they achieved that, but that's why Teddy Roosevelt supported them at least. But yes, some adaptation has to happen. It's no longer, it's no longer a period of range expansion. As I was saying earlier. If anything, we're in a period of, you know, range contraction. Even if we're much wealthier, if you look at the organism, you know, you might say, why is this, you know, this organism has such a favorable environment. Why aren't they making more of themselves? The answer is in some way you've not identified, the organism is not in a favorable environment. They might have the food, but maybe the food is subtly poisoned. They might not have predators, but perhaps they, perhaps they have disease burden or perhaps the organism, you know, perhaps these, you know, perhaps humans just don't know how to support each other and form things that would register to them as a good family making environment in a post-industrial context.

Vance Crowe [00:59:00] Yeah. And I don't think it's a mistake that it was around 2000 years ago that there was all of this, you know, like radiation of all these different religions starting to pop up. Right? Right. There must have been conditions that were occurring that said we got civilization to this point. But the thing that got us here, what do we do next? Us here isn't going to get us there. Yeah. So you, you watched everything from Christianity and Islam, but many, many other churches started that just didn't succeed. Right. We only have, and that actually I've never thought about. Well,

Samo Burja [00:59:29] The man cans, the man cans are gone. Right. Various gnostic secs are gone. The zero ASINs are holding on by a thread, but they're also basically gone. Right. The, the Parsi people are still zero es string to this day, but there are small people. You

Vance Crowe [00:59:42] Know, this makes me wonder, 'cause like I think about the commodity brokers, right? There's, anytime you're in a commodity, it always, there's always ends up being three major players and then one or two kind of offshoot players. I wonder if religion is that way too, right? There's, there's always going to be some pressure that's gonna take it down to just a few and, and there are gonna be three or four major players like what we're seeing right now. And I, I think we're going to see more in the future pop up. Yes. Because the, there, there's no way that society's instability can move, can, can keep going without some sort of, I think they'll probably show up as cults first and people will, some people will really, really hate them, but some of them will survive and thrive communally in the future.

Samo Burja [01:00:27] Yeah. I mean, again, arguably, you know, the distinction between, you know, a, a, a cult and an organized religion is mostly in like how sustainable it's, right.

Vance Crowe [01:00:39] So Samo, you recently wrote an article and it touched on agriculture, so I know we're running up on time, but I wanted to make sure we left a little bit of time for that since so much of the audience is farmers in, in today's world. So tell me a little bit about the latest article you published.

Samo Burja [01:00:55] Yeah, the article I wrote is titled Why Civilization is much older than we Thought. It's an article that examines the consequences of a fine called Goli tepe, which is means Potbelly hill. It is in Southeast Turkey. What was discovered was this, you know, large enclosures with tall stone pillars. Each of the stone pillars weighing 10, 10 to 20 tons. And the interesting thing about it is that it's 11,500 years old. So it means it predates the consensus origin of agriculture, right? We think f agriculture is 10,000 years old. Well, I analyzed to be briefed both this site and a number of other fines, and I reached two conclusions of how we should update our view of history. The first conclusion is I think agriculture isn't strictly necessary for complex societies. I think we've had both. We've had fishing villages and so on, and we've had much more complex societies of hunter gatherers than we previously thought. The second conclusion is, despite this observation, I think Gobekli Tepe itself must have been built by farmers. Now it's on top of a hill. It's in a very dry region looking at climatological papers. This region was very dry back then. The reason in a very dry region, you might use the Tigris or Euphrates River for irrigation. And then farming to feed yourself is pretty obvious. It's far away from any lake or sea that could support fishing. So the only way the estimated 500 laborers needed to build this site could have been fed, was through agriculture.

Samo Burja [01:02:33] Why is that interesting? Well, that means we're starting to press up on the border of the last, you know, the end of the last ice age. If we cross that threshold, if agriculture in whatever shape existed prior to the end of the last ice age, this means our old scientific paradigm, right? In the Kian sense is broken. Our old assumption is humans didn't start farming until the climate was stable enough for a few thousand years for us to figure out farming. But not just Gobekli Tepe, other sites such as the o Halo site in near the Lake of Galilee that's been dug up by, you know, Israeli archeologists. That site features early farming. Now they call it proto farming, but you know, it's the planting and harvesting of plants, and it's a small scale, they say, but really the scale isn't what matters. That site is 23,000 years old. So that definitely breaks the paradigm. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:03:35] And so this is something that I have talked about and read about extensively about the, the current philosophy, which I kind of feel like we were reverting all the way back to the very beginning where we were talking about the continental drift because the current idea is agriculture's 10,000 years old.

Samo Burja [01:03:51] Exactly. And

Vance Crowe [01:03:52] We didn't even get bread until 8,000 years ago, or maybe even even ear sooner than this. And so to push it back,

Samo Burja [01:03:59] This is evidence against it.

Vance Crowe [01:04:00] Yeah. This is, this is like a mind shattering concept, right? It's one that much of what we believe and, and then all of the, the knock on effects of, of saying, well, no, it's actually older than 10,000. Like entire schools of thought will just shred in a, in a moment. Well,

Samo Burja [01:04:19] It's gonna, it's going to take some time, it's gonna take new fines for now, you know, if you write a paper about 23,000 year agriculture, you carefully use the term proto agriculture because it's too old to just call it agriculture. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm joking, but I do feel that they have to be, colleagues have to tiptoe around each other. Now, of course, you know, I don't blame the archeologists themselves in a way, there's not that much money in archeology shock, right? There's not that much funding for labor intense digs and so on. So of course discoveries are few and far between, but we have to think about the consequence of every confirmed discovery. And remember that whenever we find something from the past, it is the floor, not the ceiling of past achievement. This is both true of technologies, as it's true of other things such as domestication of animals or other types of milestones. Now, agriculture, if it's not 10,000 years old, but 20,000 year years old, why not 50? Why not 60? Why not 200,000? So if I were to make a bet, and I did operationalize a bet to any qualified challenger, and my bet was that in 20 years we'll find evidence of at least one dense farming fed settlement, right? That exceeds a few thousand people. That is 20,000 years old. So as old as the oja site, right? And that's an interesting bet in its own right. But you know, if you ask me, I think humans have been farming for a very long time, maybe from our very beginning and just, it was the case that farming was one of the modes of sustenance.

Samo Burja [01:05:54] And we would go between farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering. Even if you think of medieval farmers or early antiquity, hunting and gathering was an important part of farm life. Like my, my my great, my great-grandfather was a farmer, and my grandfather would always say how to go, you know, I'm from Slovenia originally, how to go into the forest every fall and collect a lot of chestnuts and how those chestnuts proved like an in significant food source for about two to three weeks. Now, in the American context, I think there's a blight that's destroyed chestnut trees, but I'm sure you can think of say hunting and so on, and how this, this, you know, it isn't that we just exited nature and started doing pure farming, rather farming was a part of our relationship with nature. We would clear out some forest, we would farm, but we would still go to the forest, you know, pick, pick what the forest had to offer. So I think that's actually human history rather than caveman. I think that's the actual stone age looked like that. And I think that's a, that's a revolution in thought.

Vance Crowe [01:06:59] So when you put this hypothesis out there in the world of academia where we started talking about before, how was it received by your non-con contemporaries because you didn't stay in academic in, in academia?

Samo Burja [01:07:12] Well, I, I think they appreciated me calling for them, receiving more funding and they engaged with the ideas sometimes with minor criticism. But, you know, I wrote the, in research, the article quite thoroughly. So they mostly were like, oh, okay, well this is plausible, but I disagree. No one's, no one's called me an ancient aliens guy yet. And I'm happy about that. It always, this is, it always takes work to present new ideas. Well,

Vance Crowe [01:07:36] And is your bet, is that on the, the long nows long bet platform?

Samo Burja [01:07:41] Well, it, it will be as soon as I find a qualified challenger. Please, like any, if anyone's listening, go read the article and if you have a relevant background in, you know, archeology or history or whatever, contact me, I'd be happy. I'd be happy to set that up. Yes, if,

Vance Crowe [01:07:57] Well, this is absolutely phenomenal, SAMO, I would have you on anytime at all. So just know that I'm gonna be writing and calling again to do more. If people wanted to learn more about you, read your articles, learn more about your business, how would they go about doing that?

Samo Burja [01:08:14] Well, they can visit my website, Samo Burja dot com, so S-A-M-O-B-O-R-J a.com or find me on Twitter. My website links to all the articles I've ever written under essays. It also features a few interviews and has links to my other material. You know, you can also visit the Bismarck website. We mostly work for private clients, so we only released two papers since the majority of our reports are client facing. But you know, for some of the reports we've, we have permission to publish. So you might find there a paper by my colleague Ben Lendo Taylor on machine tools or, and you can find a paper on the role of scientists in decision making with the creation of the atomic bomb and the policies that followed it. And that's one I co-authored with my, my former colleague, Zach LGAs.

Vance Crowe [01:09:06] And you are doing something really unique, which is you are publishing a manuscript, or you've posted it as you've been writing it. Yes. So instead of waiting for it to be published, you've started putting it out. And I have read it. It is absolutely fantastic. And I can tell you that it has prompted me to call meetings with people I'm on the board of directors with, to, to do all kinds of things because I think the, the writing is very preciate and, and really deeply appreciated. So I hope you keep writing CMO.

Samo Burja [01:09:36] Thank you. Thank you very much. And part of the reason I write at the philosophy of why I'm putting it online first, my philosophy is that we're all kind of still living in the past. Look, it's 2021. Show your draft, show your work, first off, it's proof that it's your idea. Even if someone copies you. Secondly, all the critique you'll receive improves it, it gives you time to improve it before the first print edition. You know, we no longer live in a immutable world. We live in a world where, you know, Wikipedia is viable. Why not apply this philosophy to writing books?

Vance Crowe [01:10:07] I really like that. I've been writing a book for a few months now, and maybe I will give that a shot. That's nerve wracking. Well, SAMO, this has been fantastic. I'm really glad you came on. Thanks so much for your time.

Samo Burja [01:10:19] Yeah, it was a pleasure.

Vance Crowe [01:10:21] Thanks so much for checking out this podcast. I loved talking with Samo. If you've stayed long this far, you might be interested in joining the Articulate Ventures network that I talked about before. You can always do that by going to network Articulate Ventures. Also, if you've been around in the, this whole time, you may know that my schedule for giving speeches is starting to book up. I am going to be traveling all over Arkansas, South Dakota, Tennessee, and that's just in the next few weeks. But if your organization is looking for somebody to come in and talk about ideas that will push your group forward, get them excited, and help them figure out how to do things like overcome the, the, your critics worst arguments about you, how to build relationships with a community that you've just joined, and even talking about ideas of succession planning, I would love to hear from you. You can learn more about hiring me as a speaker by going to Vance Crowe dot com. Alright. If you wanna hear anything about the show, the the notes also have things that were written by Samo and I hope you'll check 'em out. We'll talk with you next week.