The Bronze Age Collapse and History's Selective Memory

Hey, Upstream listeners! Today we're sharing a deep cut from Turpentine's show, Live Players. Samo Burja and I discuss the significance of the Bronze Age collapse, the dynamics of centralization and decentralization in global politics, particularly focusing on Europe, Russia, and Ukraine, and explore how history is often politicized and misinterpreted. Please enjoy.

Excited to get deeper into some areas of your piece. One of those is the Bronze Age collapse. So what do you find particularly interesting or noteworthy about this? It's one of your most popular pieces.

Well, I think it is important primarily for its historical significance, and I wove it into this and other pieces because it demonstrates that you can have actual you know, undisputable technological backsliding happen in a rather advanced and sophisticated civilization. It's not simply the case that as soon as we have writing, we are on a one-way ratchet where knowledge is only accumulated and it's never lost, where technical sophistication only arises and it never dissipates. And With the Roman Empire, there has been a lot of revisionist history, and some of it has argued, sometimes correctly, often incorrectly, that even the early Middle Ages were in some ways more technically sophisticated than classical antiquity. On net, I think this is completely— this is mostly false, but there are a few narrow domains where I think we continue seeing technical progress. I don't know, have you ever heard of Greek fire?

Greek fire, what's that?

Okay, it is a, for now, disputed substance assumed to be some mix of oil and other materials that was attested to by numerous historians in the Eastern Roman Empire, so in the Byzantine Empire. So this was in the later centuries. Basically, their ships would show up and they would spew napalm. on other ships, and this was completely militarily devastating. There are also reports of Byzantine soldiers using them as grenades and even having hand-powered flamethrowers. So if you want to really wreck your intuition of history and these optics of history, imagine, you know, a late Roman soldier dressed as a medieval medieval warrior with a flamethrower, right? I think the hand-carried flamethrower is only attested to 2 or 3 times, but the ship-mounted version, when your enemies are scared of this weapon and they refer to the weapon and the weapon is a known state secret, which is why we don't know the precise mix of this incendiary fluid. I think then we can be pretty sure it existed and it was in use for several centuries. So let's say that's concretely something, a weapon that the Romans did not have, the Romans of, let's say, 100 AD, and that the Byzantine Empire centuries later, the successor state to the Romans, did have. But again, like, you know, you could even Byzantium itself could be seen as this remnant of a more advanced classical civilization. I don't think there's anything more advanced about, say, 7th century Gaul in the Frankish realms compared to the 1st century Gaul. So if you think about it regionally, right? But note, I have to talk about all of these complexities, right? When talking about the Roman Empire, we have these deep cultural intuitions about what the story is. It's like, you know, light of civilization and barbarian hordes. What about something that's More unknown. This other story, this other play happens thousands of years earlier, thousands of years before Byzantium, right? So it's not 1000 AD, it's 1000 BC. So by the time the Roman Empire was just beginning its ascent, the history of the Bronze Age collapse was already forgotten in ancient, say, people in classical antiquity. They did believe Troy existed, and we now know that Troy did exist, and Troy was a city of this Late Bronze Age civilization, and it was in fact also destroyed in the so-called Late Bronze Age collapse. It's called the Late Bronze Age collapse because it is both attested to in the written sources, such as those of the Hittite princes. You know, there's this very theatrical one where we have a clay tablet that was never sent in a ruined city of a Hittite prince desperately asking for military reinforcements against an unknown enemy. And it's like there's something just so kind of remarkable about this. When I read the archaeological paper, the archaeologists think that the clay tablet wasn't even baked, but was baked by the fire. That burned up the city. So imagine it's like your unsent email and it's like they're stuck open on a computer screen when the computer's like shattered or something. It's like, that's kind of interesting, right? It was that sudden. And the second reason is there is archaeological confirmation. There's a layer of destruction, not just in the site where, you know, we now believe Troy stood, which has several layers of settlement and resettlement, as many cities do.

Yeah.

because city locations are kind of rare, valuable, historically deeply stable. There's a layer of destruction going from the Peloponnesian Peninsula in Greece all across Asia Minor into the Levant, right into the Phoenician and Canaanite and other cities, and down in Egypt. And the Egyptians record numerous invasions by mysterious Sea Peoples. And we also note that they basically stopped monumental construction For 100 years. The Egyptian civilization is one of the only of the region that survives this collapse, right? The Hittites are gone. By the time of, say, the Romans and the classical Greeks, they might remember Troy because they have this oral epic of a great war and a great city being destroyed partially by their own ancestors, right? The Hellenes, the Greeks, they They viewed themselves as the descendants of Agamemnon. That is remembered, but the Hittite Empire is completely forgotten, only rediscovered in the 19th century. This is why I say that, and by the way, the Hittite Empire, this was this huge polity that was vying with control with the Egyptian Empire, the Egyptian New Kingdom at its peak. Fighting many wars and eventually having this sort of peace treaty alliance set up. You know, the Egyptian pharaoh considered the Hittite king a brother and peer, right? An equal. And that was fairly rare for the Egyptians. They were correctly convinced that they were kind of the center of the world at the time. So yeah, I find it fascinating that whole civilizations could be lost to historic memory, that We have a complete loss in some places of metalworking. We have a complete loss of literacy in Greece. Before this, the Minoans and the Mycenaeans are literate, right? And they are perhaps slightly distinct from the Greeks themselves. The Minoan language, especially in its older form, is still somewhat disputed. But it's clearly like, you know, Mycenaean language is an ancestor of Greek. The Greeks stop using writing for 400 years. When they are next literate, when we next find evidence of the Greeks writing, they borrow the alphabet from the Phoenicians. So this old system of writing is so completely forgotten. And all of this taken together also shows that it's not just that decline sets in when, like the Romans, you construct basically a world state without external competition other than barbarians, and you no kind of decadence sets in. The Romans conceived of themselves as the universal state. One interesting example of how the Romans did know the world was round and how they were megalomaniacal is, I encourage the readers to look up a reconstruction of the statue of Constantine the Great. So Constantine being the first Christian emperor, created Constantinople, undoubtedly also a classical Roman emperor. The, maybe the beginning of, you know, the beginning of the Byzantine civilization as well. You know, the statue just has him hold an orb, and the orb is just called Terra Orbis, so sphere of the world. So, you know, the Romans were just like, they occasionally would depict Roman emperors as holding an orb or in a more sinister way, stepping on an orb. And I'm like, okay, okay, global dominance is, is on their mind and they know the world is round.

Yeah.

And sort of maybe the Middle Ages forget this. Still, the universal state, a lot of people are worried about world government. Why? Because you could have this totalitarian system that decays. And the critics of the Roman Empire would say that yes, Rome was that in aspiration and also in reality for the Mediterranean. So maybe that's why its civilization started decaying. That's why they were losing technology. That's why their population was going down. And in a way, the barbarians were almost a merciful release. The counterstory is also, you know, Rome is civilizing, is bringing technological advancements, law, et cetera. But the Bronze Age collapse shows that even if we had a Balaji-style global system of network states, completely independent cities that are just trading with each other, that might still be a fragile system. Because in the Bronze Age collapse, the key thing was the trade routes bringing tin and copper together to be used for weapons, tools, art, those were broken. And then bronze became sparse, and then production went down because the security needs were so high. You reused any bronze you had in tools for weapons. And pretty soon, most of the cities were gone. So even decentralization is not complete insurance, at least political decentralization, is not an insurance against civilizational failure. And that's why I think the Bronze Age collapse is so interesting for all of these reasons.

Well articulated.

We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. There's a growing expense eating into your company's profits. It's your cloud computing bill. You may have gotten a deal to start, but now the spend is sky high and increasing every year. What if you could cut your cloud bill in half and improve performance at the same time? Well, if you act by May 31st, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help you do just that. OCI is the next-generation cloud designed for every workload, where you can run any application, including any AI projects, faster and more securely for less. In fact, Oracle has a special promotion where you can cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to OCI. The savings are real. On average, OCI costs 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking. Join Modal, Skydance Animation, and today's innovative AI tech companies who upgraded to OCI and saved. Offer only for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. See if you qualify for half off at oracle.com/turpentine. That's oracle.com/turpentine. Hey everyone, Erik here. In this environment, founders need to become profitable faster and do more with smaller teams, especially when it comes to engineering. That's why Sean Lanahan started Squad, a specialized global talent firm for top engineers that will seamlessly integrate with your org. Squad offers rigorously vetted top 1% talent that will actually work hard for you every day. Their engineers work in your time zone, follow your processes, and use your tools. Squad has frontend engineers excelling in TypeScript, React, and Next.js, ready to onboard to your team today. For backend, Squad engineers are experts at Node.js, Python, Java, and a range of other languages and frameworks. While it may cost more than the freelancer on Upwork billing you for 40 hours but working only 2, Squad offers premium quality at a fraction of the typical cost. Without the headache of assessing for skills and culture fit. Squad takes care of sourcing, legal compliance, and local HR for global talent. Increase your velocity without amping up burn. Visit choosquad.com and mention Turpentine to skip the waitlist.

On the decentralization versus centralization, is your mental model that over the next few decades, we will have a barbell where the incumbents, so to speak, the biggest countries will get continually bigger, consolidate more, increasingly more powerful, but that there will also be a long tail of increasing countries, or as Balaji says, network states, and that kind of the middle will get hollowed out. Or how do you think about, like, will we have more centralization and decentralization, or what's your prediction there?

I think these trends are very difficult to forecast. In a way, the world was most consolidated in 1947 under 3 large states, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire. As the British Empire fell, arguably that was already in some ways a decentralizing world, but in other ways it was a centralizing world.

Why?

All the great powers of Europe were gone and it was just the Soviet Union and the United States shaping the future of the world. On the other hand though, There were many small and middle-sized countries that were part of the British Empire that became their own states. The fall of the Soviet Union, again, you could say, oh, was this a decentralizing event or a centralizing event? And I would say it depends on scale. Obviously, Ukraine is an independent country. Estonia is an independent country. Estonia, or at least independent from Russia, right? They both do rely on the NATO alliance and the United States. Estonia became very successful, prosperous. Lithuania, Latvia, a little bit less. Ukraine developed its own deep national identity. Kazakhstan is geopolitically significant and balances Chinese, American, and Russian interests. All of these are new players, new actors, new states, right? Everything from weird Central Asian despotism like Uzbekistan saw to just a successful digital parliamentary democracy, as Estonia demonstrates. All of that happened with the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet it's undeniable that the United States was compared to its next greatest rival, most powerful in 1991. China wasn't yet rich. Japan just started stagnating. Germany may be reunified, but that was limited to Europe, and Russia was no longer a player. So in a way, I would even say from 1991 to 2014, I would say we actually were living under straightforward US hegemony. No country could alter borders in their favor to grow their territory. You only saw fragmentation, right? And even then, only if the US agreed to the fragmentation. Think of like the Yugoslav Wars. Think of the invasion of Kuwait. So I think there's strong evidence that there is a period of US hegemony. And why do I say 2014? Well, Russia started getting bigger again in 2014. Putin annexed Crimea in a well-executed and competent operation, perhaps much better executed and much better done than the more recent invasion of Ukraine. However, I think that We won't see Russia grow that much. They're trying to do some geopolitical consolidation, but its population fundamentals are low. I also don't think we're going to see China grow that much. Economically speaking, China will keep on growing, right? So even if China, say, annexed Taiwan, that doesn't mean they're going to annex Korea or fight more than a very small war with India for some border. territory, right? I don't think that they have any aspirations or goals to directly govern more of the world. But will China be a more important state 10 years from now than it is today and more influential on the small independent countries elsewhere? I think yes. So I think the world we're going to see is giants like the United States, like China, Probably not the European Union, though if it got its stuff together, it could maybe actually achieve something like that if a European federation were to happen. Possibly India by the end of the century. And these countries are going to have very strong interests, but not all of these countries will tell the small countries how to govern themselves. So geopolitically, I don't think we'll see decentralization. But in terms of government experimentation and local autonomy, there will be decentralization. Like both the Soviet Union imposed its system on its allies and the United States invited its allies to adopt its system during the Cold War. China today, it almost doesn't care. It doesn't care if you're governed by a Communist Party. Its only troublesome ally that has a Communist Party is North Korea. And the other Communist Party governed state is their deep geopolitical enemy. I'm talking about Vietnam. Vietnam's key policy challenge right now, you know, all is forgiven, let's say, with the United States because the United States is useful to balance against China. And Vietnam has fought a war against China more than once and wants to preserve its autonomy. So in an interesting way, maybe China would prefer if Vietnam was governed by a dysfunctional democracy or a tinpot dictatorship rather than another organized tiny little CCP, except it's the Vietnamese variant. Because that tiny Communist Party compared to China, at least it's still a country of 100 million or so. It doesn't want to be governed by Beijing, right? It wants to be governing itself. So there's an interesting way in which China, I don't think, is going to spread its variant or its political system. People accuse it of supporting authoritarianism, but I think the answer is that China is democracy agnostic. It doesn't care if you're a democracy. It doesn't care if you're a dictatorship. The US cares a little bit, though even the United States only ever applied these standards to its European and to a lesser extent, East Asian allies. Saudi Arabia is a key US ally. It's not a democracy. How does it treat human rights? But why does that work? We have an unprincipled exception for Saudi Arabia, right? As the geopolitical pressure mounts on the United States, I think there are 2 ways it could go. It could try to be a crusader for global democracy, which arguably it tried to do in the early 2000s. I think the Iraq invasion, I think it's, you know, it's far worse. It's You, it would be so optimistic to think that the US made a lot of money selling Iraqi oil. But the truth is, when you look at the numbers, it's so disappointing and you're like, I'm trying to figure out who made money on this. And I wish, I wish some corrupt neocon had made a lot of money on this, but I can't find it. Did Dick Cheney profit?

Because that was the story, right? That Dick Cheney somehow—

Very, very marginally, very marginally. Dick Cheney would have been better off literally going to Silicon Valley and investing and investing. In the same time period, maybe Al Gore made more money than Dick Cheney. Maybe Al Gore made more money, but the green tech he invested in mostly failed. I don't know if Al Gore was clever. Maybe he bought, maybe he invested something in Tesla. I don't know. Like that would've been the one green tech company. But yeah, no, maybe Al Gore made more with his, certainly he made more with his media properties, right? Than Dick Cheney did. No, but I think they were acting from an imperialist logic. But it wasn't the imperialism just of oil, though maybe oil justified it. I think it was also a desire to, hey, we're the global hegemon right now. We can topple these few remaining dictatorships, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, whatever. Then they're going to be democracies, and then the US is going to be permanently safe and possibly permanently globally dominant. You know, there was the so-called Project for a New American Century. Once you Read through all of their texts, you realize this is what it amounts to. It's like the US has a unique opportunity to permanently reshape the global geopolitical landscape, permanently alter politics. We're going to succeed at altering its politics so that they're more similar to ours, and then we're going to be the sort of custodian of this system for another 100 years. I think that project failed, right? I think it failed. But the US might choose to revive it or try to revive it. So that's one variant of the US. I think that's going to be a US that will actually be a hegemonizing force and will prevent autonomy of its European and Asian allies. Because even when we talk about democracy, like, what is democracy? Do we mean populist democracy, or do we mean the kind of democracy where you ask Populist democracy, maybe someone like Orbán gets elected. Is that democracy? Is that not democracy? Like Orbán in Hungary. And then maybe the European Commission just runs a referendum until the population gets the right answer. That's what happened with basically the Lisbon Treaty and various other things. You would just run a referendum, people would say no, you'd run another campaign, people would say no, you'd run another campaign, people would say yes. And like you, some countries have 2 or 3 referendums on the same topic. Is that really democracy? No. But again, these are productive disagreements about the meaning of democracy and the meaning of liberalism and the meaning of rights. And you cannot be a crusader for the whole basket of liberalisms. You can only be a crusader for one. This is as true of liberalism as it is of communism, as it is of any belief system, any religion, right? If we look at the history of the wars of religion, the most pious would often fight the heretics rather than the infidels, the most viciously, right? The most zealous regimes, right? So having said that, you can probably guess that I don't think this is a good path for the United States, and I hope the United States will allow and even encourage more experimentation. I think we're still in a phase where We're feeling some amount of triumphalism over, let's say, Europe's economic woes of the last 2 years. But really we shouldn't be, right? Because the US isn't getting more powerful and wealthier faster than Europe is becoming less wealthy and powerful. Like, so in other words, Europe is declining faster than the US is rising, which on net means a less favorable world for the United States, a smaller market for American products in Europe, and also less cultural productivity. It's like the US is incredibly creative, but the US always borrowed from the broader Western world, right? Or NATO Plus or whatever you want to call it, like anime from Japan, K-pop, French cuisine, Italian fashion, et cetera, et cetera. This was a very nice creative system during the Cold War. It was certainly more culturally dynamic than the Soviet block ever was. And, you know, that from a civilizational perspective, no one should cheer on the decline of their cousins because, you know, maybe your cousin is just first and you're slightly younger, but you'll develop the same bald spot or the same heart problem that your cousin has. It might be hereditary.

Is the decline that we're talking about with Europe kind of inevitable or already baked in? Or are there, you know, certain major forks in the road or major decision points that could alter things in a meaningful way?

I mean, I really think that if Europe adopted a simultaneously more federal and flexible system, it could do a lot. Imagine if it wasn't the European Union, but it was the Swiss Confederacy, except the size of Europe. In a way, Switzerland has pretty good federal institutions that actually govern some things. And every single valley in Switzerland also has significant autonomy, significant ability to set its own laws and so on, like the canton system. So whenever people say, oh, a federal Europe is impossible, I say it already exists. It's just not evenly distributed, right? It exists in the Swiss Alps. They speak German. They speak French, they speak Italian. What is it? Romansh is the fourth language. You know, they're culturally very different. They pretend to be similar, but try talking to people from the different parts and you realize, nope, they're just very different. And, you know, I don't really see why the core of Europe couldn't produce something like that. Brussels isn't it though. Brussels is Too focused on the powers that it can exercise, which are negative powers, which are the powers to forbid. And it has very little ability to, you know, use its power to cause things to be done. So it's a vetocracy in the making. Since Europe is so heavily betting on government, I think a deep reform of the EU and a change of this system Could do a lot for European dynamism. I don't think that there's any reason that the EU could not have its own deep technology stack. Now, that doesn't even mean it it has to do exactly what the U.S. wants. Like hypothetically, if they blocked, if they if let's say the U.S. outlaws TikTok, there will be a TikTok replacement run by an American company within what? Like A few months. Okay. Let's say Europe bans TikTok, but also bans the American replacement for TikTok. Actually, it's also banned Instagram and it's also banned YouTube. The US, of course, is not very happy with this, but even if we're super pessimistic about Europe, we got to admit that within a year at most, there would be clones of all of these. Right. So again, you know, I'm not proposing this kind of digital Cold War is going to happen between Europe and the US, though it might well happen between— and it has been happening between China and the United States, where of course China has always banned American apps. And now we're just talking about whether America will ban and block China's apps too, right? Because the economic advantage, if you make it so that a company can operate— if a Chinese company can operate in China and the US, but an American company can only only operate in the US, that's a structural disadvantage, right? So maybe you have to play tit for tat. But no, but really Europe could do remarkable things there and it could do a lot with privatization and also of key functions, right? It could do also a lot with a more agile system. I think Emmanuel Macron is showing what an active European-style government can do to foster AI in a country that had no preconditions for it, right? Literally doing things like reaching out to investors, lobbying to, while having regulations, not over-regulating AI, at least domestically, talking up, you know, what is it, Mistral, the French AI company. According to some sources, you know, even the French government helps recruit engineers trying to get people of French citizenship and ancestry to come and work for their companies or to move headquarters from London into Paris, right? We'll see if that works. But the fact that there is a French AI company we can name at all, like that's already an improvement, isn't it?

Who would you say are the live players or even great founders in Europe? Maybe it's on a country level or on a leader level or like, Who are the players that are most likely to set Europe's trajectory over the next decade plus?

Emmanuel Macron puts on airs. However, I think in tech, he actually is a live player, and I think he might succeed in jumpstarting something in France, and that has been a longstanding policy of his. I think that I would disagree with Orbán politically, but he has been politically a live player for a long time. I agree with some of his stuff, but I think that his system is fragile and it is not clear it will secure the long-term interests of Hungary. I think that there were some interesting prime ministers and parties from smaller countries like Finland, Estonia, Poland, and there's actually clusters of interesting politicians there. So I would say in Poland, there are some live players in politics, and I think also this is the case for Estonia. So if I were to do or see something interesting done in terms of experiments in governance, I wouldn't be shocked if an Eastern European country was the first location for a charter city. You know, maybe not Montenegro, though that is on the Mediterranean coast, maybe not Croatia, but I think all of these countries have the advantage of being agile, young countries. They're old cultures, old nations, but think about it. They had a big government reset in 1991. And a lot of these countries, if you had worked for the Communist Party, you could not reenter government. And that was actually a big advantage. In making it much more, a much more adaptive system, right? So both, let's say both Belgium and Estonia might adopt comparable digital services for citizens. However, in Belgium, no bureaucrat loses their job. And Estonia, for every Belgian bureaucrat might hire, like for every 2 Belgian bureaucrats might only hire 1 Estonian bureaucrat. So the civil service, once already there, if you try to use technology to shrink it, that's politically super difficult because everyone's now implicitly your political enemy. On the other hand, if you've already fired your whole government and you're struggling to build it up, getting all the functions handled that previously were handled by a different regime or even a foreign power, they conceive of it as a foreign occupation in the Baltics. In that case, well, great software makes my hiring problem easier. So instead of hiring 10 bureaucrats, I'm going to hire 3 bureaucrats and buy 7 computers, right? And to some extent they succeeded at that. In that case, the bureaucrats are not your enemies. They're actually like kind of your allies. You just hired them. You're bringing them in politically. You have then the capital to reform. So yeah, I think I think Western Europe outside of say France, I'm pessimistic on. Northern Europe, I would be optimistic on. So Sweden, Norway, Denmark, they still have a lot of flexibility, a lot of autonomy. Let's remember, Norway's not an EU member state and Sweden does not use the euro. It's one of the few EU members that retains its own currency and is not tracked to ever basically give it up. So I think Nordic countries have also shown decent economic growth. People in the US might not think of them as such, but they're also among the most capitalist European countries. Like Spotify and IKEA are Swedish companies, and they're both very consumer-oriented, right? We might make fun of the flat surfaces of the IKEA furniture, but it's flat so that it's easy to ship. Bringing down costs.

On Orbán, just to understand their situation better, what are examples of things you agree with or don't agree with?

Well, I think, for example, people pick their political enemies and friends on a very tribalistic level, but I tend to analyze things more from a policy view. I think that they are doing the right thing by giving large subsidies to young families, even though they're a poor Eastern European country. Because the truth is, if you are poor and old, you will stay old and poor. But if you are young and poor, your country might yet one day become rich. Now, when I say poor, I don't mean, you know, developing world poor. I mean poor for Europe standards, right? Poorer than average in Europe, and so therefore also poorer than the United States. They have a lot of immigration, as is true of all of Eastern Europe, and they have low fertility. And until recently, they had high mortality. For the last 20 years, the health indicators for Eastern Europe, all of Eastern Europe, have improved massively. Like all of these problems we now mostly associate with Russia, like alcoholism, et cetera, premature death in middle-aged men, old men, That's been resolved. So, okay, you get a few extra years of people working, a few extra years of good health that helps their inverted demographic pyramid because all these countries already have the inverted demographic pyramid where the older population is starting to outnumber at least the childbearing population and the young population as a whole sometimes, right? Childbearing age being, you know, the part of the pyramid that actually can reproduce at any given time, right? So it's very important when, when that gets outnumbered, because that means that you could even have a fairly old country where the fertility suddenly rises to say, let's say a TFR, a total fertility rate of 1.7 could suddenly spike to 2.7 and the population could keep on getting older for decades to come. On average, because there were so few people having those 2.7 babies, right? So few people were in that age range when that statistic changed, right? So I think there's something important there. I think I would agree with it. I don't think it has been enough, but it has made a difference. So I agree with that. Secondly, you know, not every country Is really not every country needs to have a cultural conception of nationalism. Like civic nationalism is, you know, it's very workable as the US demonstrates, as France demonstrates. But I think, you know, there's no harm in some US allies and some democracies just being nationalist, especially if, if they're small. It's like, you know, Hungary's not going to go on a bent of world conquest. Their nationalism is frankly It's harmless geopolitically. And to some extent, they kind of need forms of nationalism. It's like Quebec. The Québécois think of themselves as like 8 million French speakers in a sea, an Anglophone sea. They're on a complete— they're on a continent with 400 million English speakers. They're part of a country that's predominantly English speaking. They need to have the sort of like, if they want to continue speaking French and if they care about their children sharing their cultural legacy, they have to do these kinds of Subsidies, right? And, you know, Hungary, you know, maybe it still technically has more than 8 million people, though I doubt it. I think it's actually about 8 million because all of these Eastern European states are incentivized to underreport immigration. So there are people who legally on paper live in Hungary, but in reality live in Berlin or live in London or whatever. So I think Hungary's probably around 8 million people. That's comparable to Quebec. And, you know, they don't find themselves on a continent of everyone speaking English, though maybe in the future that's what the EU language will be. I think it's totally reasonable for them to say, hey, wait, we can't actually accept 500,000 young refugees because if we did, there'll be more young refugees than there are young Hungarians. And then maybe in 100 years we don't speak Hungarian. Where I disagree with is I certainly believe there are people who perhaps feel mistreated in Hungary. I don't really much care about their whole cultural war with LGBT rights or whatever. I think that's like a distraction. And, you know, again, Erik, sorry for getting too political for the show, but you asked me the political question, so I'm giving you the honest answer. And I think there's a needle to thread here, which is, well, look, what can we respect individual rights and simultaneously take care of these larger communities that people still care about and want to be members of? Again, there's nothing wrong with having lots of babies. There's nothing wrong with being proud of being Hungarian and learning the Hungarian language and promoting it. However, to say those things, sometimes the assumption is that you mean like you endorse truly inhumane measures or whatever, or that you endorse like a coarse nationalism. And I think we have had a breaking down in Western discourse that any society that endorses, you know, some of these, the assumption is, oh, you have to go all the way the other way. And I really think that there is a tricky situation where there's been a false dichotomy put between, like, you know, let's say super socially conservative nationalism and some form of civic or progressive liberalism. And, you know, we see these contradictions play out across the Western world. Like, they even are playing out in Israel, right? Israel is an example of a country where, you know, obviously, like, it is much more socially liberal than its neighboring countries. And it's undergoing an internal culture war between the more secular side and the more religious side. And the Western world, if you're like kind of on the center left, you would kind of dislike Israel. If you're on the center right, you like it because everyone can kind of sense that these questions of national culture, of like fertility, of security, all of these Can be kind of mapped onto this, you know, this Middle Eastern but very culturally Western country. There was a funny line about, you know, what was it? I think the ADL at one point declared that Orbán was enabling antisemitism in Hungary, and the Israeli foreign minister like was like, "No, no, no, no, he's just like actually banning Soros, and Soros is actually bad." So I found that kind of funny. It was like it was like. One of those rope pull moments.

Yeah, we're going to claim Soros. Yeah. That's funny. Let's talk a little bit about Russia and Ukraine and what that means for the region. And you're too humble to take a victory lap, but you were saying something controversial a year or so ago, or whenever the war broke out, which is, hey, Russia's in a pretty good position here, or they're not as in a tough position as people think. It's not inevitable that Ukraine is going to win. And in fact, Ukraine is probably not going to win. And it looks like that's in fact what's happening. Why don't you talk about what was the perspective you had back then? Why was that controversial? What ended up playing out and how does that shape the region as a result or influence the region? Yeah.

The basic analysis that I had taken at the time was a look at one of the inputs into how the war works out, which was the structural health of the Russian military. And the Russian military did have significant supply issues and so on. But the key operation that they had been very successful with before, and they are very successful with now, is basically setting up governments in regions that they occupy. Note, we have not heard much about any Ukrainian resistance or insurgency in the significant still occupied areas. Partially this is because a lot of Ukrainians left. Partially is because many of the Ukrainians are Russian nationals, but it's also because Russia knows how to set up a puppet government and knows how to tell the puppet government what to do. So Donetsk, Luhansk, these were technically for many years considering themselves independent countries. Now they've been now legally folded into Russia. So from the Russian claim and the Russian perspective, many of these provinces are now parts of Russia. And, you know, this is of course not acknowledged by the West. This of course should not be acknowledged by Ukraine, but that is their position domestically, right? The US and the West has had a hard time setting up, let's not, maybe not puppet states, but let's call them client states. The implosion of Afghanistan is a good example of this. And the example that I used in the analysis was how well they executed the operation in Crimea, where they basically find people who are essentially willing to be traitors from the Ukrainian perspective and just run the government there. So the Russians, I think, do not and cannot have the warfighting capabilities of the United States. That's a fantasy. The budgets are incomparable. The global reach is incomparable. It was already the case the US was the stronger of the two back in 1988, right? And it certainly has been true ever more so every single year since. The Russians couldn't hope to fight a symmetric sort of war against the US, but what they did successfully specialize in their military was a significant resilience To air power, so they don't even propose we're going to have air supremacy. We are just going to deny air supremacy to whatever the opponent might be. And let's say a year ago people were saying, "Oh, this is a complete failure of an invasion," partially because they're not guaranteeing air supremacy. But that's turned out to not be the case. Maybe tanks are not the vehicle of 2023. But artillery still works for delivering ordnance, and both Ukraine and Russia are relying on a combination of drones plus artillery. So Russians are good at combining the military and political aspect of an operation to like basically pacify territory. And secondly, I think that they did not need air supremacy. It was not a show of Russian weakness. It was a show of a different strategy. Though admittedly, a strategy that's adapted on, hey, we need ground-to-air systems, we need systems that can shoot down lots and lots of planes because NATO, and especially the United States, has way more planes than we do, right? We can build planes that match many of their capabilities, but we can't build them in the numbers to actually win an air war of attrition. So those were 2 interesting things. I do think Ukraine fought surprisingly well, and I wrote also some articles about this a year ago on how they've mobilized society. I think we've reached the limits of Ukrainian mobilization. They mobilized very well. They got a significant cohort of people fighting. They have reoriented their economy to a war footing, and I don't think they have easy Reserves domestically to draw upon. Now it is actually, after the mobilization was achieved, sort of, they could grind the Russians to a halt, push them back a little, but now they can't make any advances. There was a big failed offensive, I think. People don't call it failed, but it was extremely costly for them. And the Russians are just holding this land bridge to Crimea. And then I think this war is going to last for a while longer. So there'll be periods where it looks like, you know, the Ukrainians are making advances, or it'll look like the Russians are making advances. But I think on net, the ultimate outcome in a strict military sense will be a marginal Russian victory where the Russians will acquire territory and Ukraine will lose territory. And then the question is how exhausted will Ukraine be? I think the normal wisdom is that, oh, this war, we could fight it until 2025 and the West will keep on backing Ukraine. But I think Western support is always fickle. Consider once it became apparent that South Vietnam would collapse without US support. At first, despite, you know, all the anti-communism, et cetera, The American public was supportive of it, but very quickly the American public was tired of Vietnam. I think that it is a feature of democracies that they are relatively good at supporting an active, dynamic war, and they're relatively bad at securing long-term military, political, economic, financial support for a country that looks like it might lose. So if I was Ukraine, I would still be trying to get some sort of victory or peace in the next year because 2 years from now, unless something changes, Western support will be much weaker. Russian determination will be unchanged, and we might see something truly catastrophic, like some point of exhaustion. Where after having exhausted mobilization, after having lost support, the government in Kyiv might actually collapse. Now, on net, this won't make, you know, this won't mean all of Ukraine would be occupied. I do think there would be some sort of NATO intervention and some sort of stabilization to like grab at least a region of Ukraine and keep it a notionally independent country, maybe set up a new government. But we could see something for Ukraine catastrophic, like a Russian occupation of Odessa, cutting it off from the sea, or even a Russian occupation of many of the regions east of Kyiv, maybe even an occupation of part or all of Kyiv again in the future. That'll be a significant Ukrainian defeat and a significant Russian victory. I think that's possible. I would put that at sort of a 25% odds. But I think the default course will be Ukraine is going to lose some more territory. It's going to have to de facto accept losing it, but hopefully it keeps Odessa. Hopefully it keeps some of these areas that it's liberated. I do not believe they will reacquire the Crimean, the land bridge of these provinces to Crimea. I don't believe they're going to reacquire Crimea. I think that is a An under 10% outcome, right? So I feel if I were Ukraine, I hope that there's some sudden escalation of US-Russian relations for reasons unrelated to Ukraine, because that could get the West excited to invest heavily into this war. And unfortunately, the West is often a very good short-term ally, but a bad long-term ally, as I sketched out with the dynamics of democracy, PR, public support, political support, et cetera.

There's this famous tweet someone once had was, if you think the news is fake, imagine history. And we're talking about how sort of the Russia-Ukraine war is politicized in terms of what people want to call it. We began the podcast by talking about how our understanding of history is incorrect or flawed in certain ways, or we had discoveries that have changed our perception of history in some ways. Going back to that quote, if the news is fake, imagine history. What are areas in which you think history or understanding of history is not just incorrect, but almost corrupted? Or our state of history is people just don't want to believe certain things or accept certain things or call certain things what they actually are. And thus our understanding of history is just incorrect as a result of some sort of political intervention or meddling or refusal to accept A certain reality.

Oh man, there's so many aspects of this. And of course, on some of them I will be wrong, though on average I'm pretty confident in these. One, I think prehistory was much more violent and had much more organized violence and war than the literature has been proposing for the last few decades. I think anthropologists had an ideological bias to try to show a peaceful, harmonious mankind before agriculture, because the sort of pseudo-Marxist view was always that you had sort of primitive communism that was replaced by this slave system that was replaced by feudalism, that was replaced by capitalism. And then eventually through post-scarcity, we'll have communism again, right? The idea there was no property and so on, but also the idea that say, oh, patriarchy is a recent imposition on the human species. The matriarchal societies were peaceful. So there's also a feminist variant of it. I think, you know, both of them might well be true in some ways. It's definitely, you know, I would believe lower inequality. I would believe in more matriarchal societies, but those matriarchal societies, the archaeological evidence now shows were very violent too. At least they might've been matriarchal, but still a lot of the men were doing the dying and a lot of the men were doing the killing. So. Maybe the human condition is what it is there. And that's very important. And again, how often have you heard someone invoke like evopsyche or like a history of patriarchy or whatever to just talk about dating, right? So it's like, it's, it's so relevant almost in our day-to-day lives what the nature of humans was thousands of years ago. We might want to dismiss it, but we all treat it as relevant. We all find it emotionally compelling if it's relevant. Therefore, there's an incentive to distort it, to be selective. And where does this go further? I honestly think, for example, you know, I think Peter Thiel is correct to think deeply about René Girard and this concept of the scapegoat, because it is one of the few good theories I have for why human sacrifice seems to have been so prevalent thousands of years ago, and why perhaps it even persisted in ways that we don't today recognize as human sacrifice, like The Roman gladiatorial games began as a religious rite. It became— it began as a fight between 2 slaves after the death at the funeral of a great, you know, of a powerful, wealthy individual. Like, that's very close to the kind of human sacrifice that happened, say, in Egypt or China, where the servants might be killed to be buried with their, with their lady or lord. Right. Like there would be some number of them killed to be buried with them to be their servants in the afterlife. But the games became so popular in Rome that eventually they just started throwing the games and kind of forgot about the religious component. But still, so that's an example even of more recent human sacrifice or like, you know, witch hunts, literal or political, etc. So that's number 2. Humans will Organize in mob violence against individuals, and justice does not restrain us necessarily. And then third one, much more concrete, where do these play out? You know, Aztec society is fascinating, very interesting, multifaceted. But, you know, I do, you know, I don't think we should think of history as good guys or bad guys, but if one insists on thinking on good guys versus bad guys, In a relative sense, the Spanish were a net improvement over the Aztecs. So, okay, you know, that's a thing you can't say in academia. That already, that already says like you're endorsing colonialism, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, there's a reason so many native tribes immediately when this small group of armed Spaniards show up, they rise up in rebellion and pledge fealty to the Spanish because they're like, well, at least you're not gonna demand blood sacrifice from us. You're not gonna demand tribute for our young people to go be sacrificed by these priests. On top of these pyramids. And these were truly huge numbers of human sacrifices. This was, there was a revisionist history that from about like the 1940s onward, the 1950s, many decades, they were trying to downplay the human sacrifice element. But over the last 25 years, starting with like, you know, 1997 or so, there've been so many finds of so many, you know, basically like Pillars of skulls, right? Literally pillars of skulls built in. And it was hard to deny that the scale of human sacrifice, yeah, it pretty much was what the Spanish reported. The Spanish were not making it up. Now, this doesn't mean that all the other things that happened, like the outbreak of smallpox or the enslavement of some of the natives to work in mines in places like Peru or whatever, That's, that's still bad. It's just no longer— hearts are no longer being ripped up, ripped out of your people's chests on top of a giant pyramid every day. And tribes are no longer expected to provide people to be sacrificed on a— for the Spanish, right? They were expected to do that for the Aztecs. So that's another one. I think the colonization of the New World. Oh my God, is there, is there Anything that's not politicized about the history of the Americas? I would argue even, here's the thing, ancient civilizations in North America. I actually think that the historians and archaeologists in North America are not that interested in demonstrating advanced Native American societies here. And the reasoning is multi-level. They are supposed to be basically noble savages that we have corrupted with our wicked ways when coming here, rather than they were multifaceted humans with good and bad, where many peoples had over many centuries replaced each other, conquered each other, perhaps built great cities that were then forgotten. I would say that when North America is far too pleasant, fertile, and hospitable a continent to have not had previous advanced civilizations. And I am very skeptical that there have not been more. I'm skeptical of the claim that we simply don't find any. I think we've not done much digging. Archaeology is much less funded in North America than in Europe, and any finds that are found are instantly politicized and you have to tie them to whatever Native American tribe lives in the region where if you listen to the Native Americans themselves, they'll often say, hey, we only moved here like, you know, 10 generations ago. And before this, here lived giants. I'm like, are we talking literal giants? Probably no. And this is where I'll loop back to the Bronze Age collapse through the internet. You know, you'll find these conspiracy theories about the Smithsonian destroying giants, right? The giant skeletons of giant people. When the Mycenaean civilization collapsed and these Mycenaean Greek palaces went into ruin, centuries later when classical Greek civilization emerged, they were convinced these palaces were the work of giants, of Cyclops, right? And then with archaeology today, we found that no, actually it was Mycenaean Greeks, maybe a little taller, maybe a little shorter. But when you see giant constructions from a long-lost society, you often tell stories of giants and you're like, okay, previously Giants lived here. This is something that we say around the world. We attribute giant construction to giant people, especially if you can't imagine your small village or your small village of shepherds ever building something like that that you see up in the mountains when you go climb there. So I suspect North America has had multiple rises and falls of civilization. I think that if we let go of our ideological preconceptions and dug, we would find some very interesting things. I encourage people to look at the copper plates that are dated. This is mainstream normal history, the Mississippi Mound Culture and the copper plates found in Cahokia, especially like the largest site. Those copper plates look awfully Mesoamerican to me. So if you were to dig up that whole area and, you know, publicize it and analyze it, I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out that this was a related colony or culture of a predecessor civilization to the Aztecs, maybe even to the Mayans, or a contemporary. And also, I wouldn't be shocked if they practice human sacrifice. And there immediately you see the problem. Imagine we find A big city in North America, obviously populated by Native American people and totally forgotten culture. We'd never seen them. They might be somewhat related culturally to Aztecs or Mayans or whatever, and they practice human sacrifice. How politically unacceptable would that find be? Like, I just think completely, right? So, so, so that's why I'm not avoiding controversies. Like, North America, far too hospitable to have not had civilization. We know there was farming here. We know lots of people died because of the introduction of, of European, Asian, and African diseases as well. I think Europeans didn't even encounter the great civilizations of North America, but they must have been there. And I think that this is a, you know, this is something that perhaps first we should dig up Mexico, because in Mexico they are proud of the achievements of the ancients. So maybe we should first demonstrate much older civilization in Mexico before we do the more difficult task of having people look at Mississippi or look at ancient California with fresh eyes.

I think that's a great place to wrap up. I've kept you a little bit over time, but this has been a great tour of some long history, some stuff on Europe, Russia, and then a little bit full circle at the end in terms of what You know, where, where history is a little bit politicized or a little bit corrupted. Samo, as always, a pleasure.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co, and let's partner together.