Why Civilizations Fall? | The Mal Show (Podcast) with Dr. Roy Casagranza

In this episode of The MAL Show, we step beyond finance and into the deeper forces that shape how we think, believe, and act.

This conversation takes us on a journey through philosophy, religion, political economy, and civilizations—exploring ancient history, Islamic history, Egyptian history, and the roots of how societies form, evolve, and understand themselves over time.

Our guest is Roy Casagranda—an academic and lecturer known for his powerful ability to connect civilizations, belief systems, and historical moments into one coherent, thought-provoking perspective. Through years of teaching political science and history, he has developed a unique lens on power, meaning, and the evolution of human societies.

Together, we explore:

The roots of civilizations and why they rise and fall
The relationship between religion, philosophy, and power
How historical narratives shape modern societies
The search for meaning—and whether it can ever be fully understood
The deeper forces—seen and unseen—that continue to shape the world today

This is not just a conversation about history…
It’s a conversation about understanding the world—and our place in it.

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#themalshow #history #economy #war #podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

There is one war in human history that was good for the economy, and it was World War II. And so people look to it and they go, see? And it's like, no, that's the exception to the rule that proves the rule. You can't make a rule out of an N of one. All the other wars regularly do things like create recession. They slow down economies.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Our guest today is Dr. Roy Casagranda, an academic lecturer and one of the most compelling voices in historical and political economy.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

As a person looking back, Stalin was definitely evil. He was cruel. And what they did was cruel. If they hadn't done it, they would have never beaten Hitler. At the time, you're like, oh, this is bad. But now in retrospect, you're like, oh thank God.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

But there is a point of view that the wars create a massive demand for weaponry, for now for AI solutions, for weaponry. So are wars really bad for their country?

SPEAKER_01 0:51

One of the things that I've learned over the course of my life is everybody's equally worthless. Like this idea that somehow there's a group of people who are better than anybody else, to me is just preposterous. It's it's foolish.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Why are people so afraid of immigration then?

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Xenophobia, nationalism. You think my culture, my society, my skin color is perfect, don't mess with it. And then there's all these immigrants with different cultures and different skin colors coming in and messing you up. And you're worried your daughter will sleep with them and make babies. They'll look like me, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

And can we say that the majority of the kind of Arab slash Muslim wars have been along these lines, have been liberations from Romans, liberation from Persians, etc.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Stop being so arrogant that you think you understand what a super being will is. Like I don't understand how a person could be so narcissistic that they they know what a supreme the supreme deity of the universe is planning or thinking or doing.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

We go on a journey through philosophy, religion, political economy, and civilizations, through ancient history, Islamic history, Egyptian history, and the roots of how societies form, evolve, and understand themselves over time. Our guest today is Dr. Roy Casagranda, an academic lecturer and one of the most compelling voices in historical and political economy thought. He has spent years teaching political science and history and is known for his ability to connect different civilizations, belief systems, and historical moments into one coherent, thought-provoking perspective and story. This is a conversation about truths, about meaning, and about the forces, seen and unseen, that continue to shape the world we live in. Before we start, please don't forget to subscribe to our channel to get the latest episodes of the Mat Show. Let's begin. Dr. Roy, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. It's like a dream you being uh you being here. You know, like a couple of weeks ago, my wife sent me a podcast episode that you've done. She's like, look at this, like the amount of dates and stories and historical facts that Dr. Roy is giving. And we're like both like, what's this? How did we miss this? And then we started watching more of the episodes, and then she came to your show, and she thankfully managed to convince you to come on the show. I would have never been able to, so I don't know if she did she did her magic. And then I was listening to your a couple of uh podcasts on uh on the on the Pudunwara uh show, the one you've done in person and virtually. And it's it's it's incredible. Like the like you're literally able to go from a story in the US to a story in the Middle East, you know, every date, you know, every battle. And then I went on your website and you have your CV there, it's like I don't know how many pages, and it's like it's it's a book, every line is a book that you wrote.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

Like, how do you do it? Uh like how do I remember dates? And how do you write books and how do you know all these stories? So, I mean, I only have uh one novel out, and then I have a a chapter in uh in an international relations book. Uh the rest of it is articles. Um, I don't I I love writing. I actually have a bunch of books that haven't been published yet, uh, or maybe they will never be published. Uh and then I don't know, I've since I was a child, I was uh obsessed with history. And I I'm not sure why, but I think it was because I wanted to understand how we were here now in this moment. And the more I dug, the more I realized I needed to dig more. And I think in the beginning I thought, you know, maybe you could master this. And then as I got older, I realized there was no way that this there's too much to learn. It's infinite. And so uh I'm not sure. It's just obsession, mental illness.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

I feel you have infinite knowledge. So I think I think today, because unfortunately you don't have infinite time. I have with you, but you don't. So today we're gonna focus on a few things that we wanna wanna cover. And you've had kind of very specific points you've made around the economy, around some of the alternative economic models, some of the economic uh wars, the relationship between money and religion and psychology, etc. So we'll come to each of these of these topics, but before that, I want to start with you on a personal uh level. So when I come to your identity, I will have to read because the number of origins you have, I cannot even remember. So if I get this right, you are American, but you're part Italian, German, Greek, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Egyptian, born in Lebanon and lived in Algeria. Did I get it correct?

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Sure. I also lived in Germany, uh, Lebanon a little bit. Uh and then of course, England, because everybody has to live in England at least a year. How did this happen? All of these roots and and places. Uh my parents were working for Aramco. My you know, my father was uh my parent, my grandparents, my father's parents were already mixed, right? So my my grandmother was Swedish and Finnish, and then my my grandfather was uh Italian and German, with we don't know how, but some Spanish and Greek mixed in there. And uh my parents were working for Aramco and they met each other and fell in love. And so I'm an oil baby. I am the product of petroleum, which should please you. 100%. We we love oil.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

We love oil. So you said you you fell in love with Egypt when you were that when you were 13, but you said something else. You said I hate nationalism. Yeah, I do. How do you combine these two concepts?

SPEAKER_01 6:34

So I there's nothing wrong with loving the place that you're from and loving the people that you're around and loving the history that you're part of and the culture that you're part of. Nationalism is where you you you think that your culture and your history and your people are superior to other people. Once you cross that line, you've just made everybody else on earth inferior. And, you know, one of the things that I've learned over the course of my life is everybody's equally worthless. Like this idea that somehow there's a group of people who are better than anybody else, to me, is just preposterous. It's it's foolish.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Or equally worthy, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Maybe. But I like to say it the other way. Because at the end of the day, we're we're all dust. And even all our civilizations are dust. If you know, if humanity went extinct tomorrow, in uh 10,000 years, the pyramids would be a lot smaller and crumbled, but they'd be the only thing that would remind the universe that we even existed. And when people first looked at it, they wouldn't even be sure that it was a structural thing that we made. And that's our destiny, that's our fate. Uh Hermes, the Greek god, came to humanity and said, Beware humanity, for you are doomed. And I and I think there's a lesson in that. There's this all the world religions recognize this at some level. Like everything we do, we're we're not going to take it with us. And I and that's what I don't understand about uh how people interact with each other. Like, we need to be more humble. We need to accept our frailty.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Do you think this notion of superiority, is it that we feel superior, so we end up being unjust to other people, or is it we want to be unjust to other people because we want to use that economic means? So this superiority becomes the tool that kind of actors use to drive that behavior.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Oh, for sure. So there's no doubt that politicians are manipulating the public, right? And so, like the this nonsense of America first or or you know, the the foolishness a hundred years ago in in Germany, it doesn't matter what the people are thinking of uh going into that, they're gonna be manipulated into believing something new, and that's what happens. Um, but the people do believe it. And you know, like if if anybody was gonna be a nationalist, it's me. I'm part Viking, part Roman, part Farao. Like all the great civilizations. I even have Greek just to just to drive it in. I'm a little ashamed about my Spanish though, because they were so cruel.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

You you you you kind of you you made that point as well that every culture of these and all of the culture has had its moment in the sun. Then what happened? What drives the decline of civilizations?

SPEAKER_01 9:16

I think civilizations are a lot like human beings. You you're really excited when you're a teenager and you look forward to the you know, this amazing future and you work really hard in your 20s and you work really hard in your 30s, and then by the time you're in your 40s, you start to notice there's some joints are hurting, and by the time you're in your 50s, your back is out and and you start to fall apart, and then eventually you burn out and you're tired and you're sick of it all, and you want to retire.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

But for humans, it's a biological fact. Right. Civilizations they have access to all the resources in the world. Why don't they renew their blood? Why don't they bring younger people in to drive the continuation?

SPEAKER_01 9:52

I think a few things happen. One is once a civilization becomes really wealthy, affluenza kicks in and people become lazy. Because why not? What what right? They can do so little and they can still be wealthy. Um, and that's catastrophic. That's the end of a civilization once the affluenza kicks in. I think uh another thing that happens is most civilizations are sort of born on a set of ideas, and people become attached to the ideas. So rather than allowing the innovations to take place to replace the bad ideas with better ideas, they hold on tightly and they lock themselves into a position where they can't evolve. And once that happens, they're doomed. So there's there's multiple things that doom a society. And then there are the things that are out of your control. Um, climate change. One of the interesting things about the phase that we're in is this what this isn't the first time humanity has experienced climate change. There was a period uh in the 1500s and into the 1600s where there was a little ice age, and the Thames River used to freeze over, and people would ice skate on the Thames River. And you know, the consequence of that little ice age event was globally food production collapsed, and there was actually uh food shortages all across Europe and the Middle East and uh even in Asia, and and it changed uh the economic situation for them. And you know, some states did better in that situation, and other states were really harmed by it. And I and I think that's one of the things that we also can't account for, right? You a civilization can't prepare for things that are out of your control. Uh strangely enough, climate change is in our control, we're just not doing anything about it.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

But uh so it was the other way around, it was cooling, not heating that was happening to the world.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Yeah, well, and we've had heating phases too. Um and in fact, the the biggest maybe it was in a way a catastrophic event that we know of uh that really affected humanity. Like we know what the cause was. There was an event 170,000 years ago that we don't have any idea what the cause was, but the the event uh 11,700 years ago, it was called the younger dryas. The North there's a current in the North Atlantic that's that flows, that's really hot, and it surfaces in the North Atlantic and it brings all that that heat up and then it superheats the air above it, and that air then blows to the east because the prevailing winds blow west to east and it brings it over Europe. Like if you look at where um Europe is in a relationship to the United States, you know, Rome's where New York City is, but Rome's a lot warmer than New York City. And then if you look, you know, Berlin is where Winnipeg and Canada is. But Berlin's a lot warmer than Winnipeg. Stockholm, Sweden's where Anchorage, Alaska is. And you realize then Europe is way hotter than it should be. It's because of that North Atlantic current. It turned off 11,700 years ago and it created a miniature ice age on top of Europe. Scandinavia, Scotland, all of that area was completely covered in ice. But then to the further south, the ability to produce food, they weren't doing agriculture yet, but the ability to produce food through hunting and gathering collapsed, and there was a massive migration out of Europe. People poured into what is today Iraq. That those people in Iraq then had a choice. They had two choices. They could kill the invaders and try and drive them away, or they could welcome them and feed them. And the only way to welcome them and feed them was to invent agriculture. Interesting. And they changed the world in this moment because they decided on compassion instead of cruelty and created a new way of producing food.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

So this is a case study where immigration, mass immigration worked. The immigrants managed to work, the hosts managed to work, there was no disagreement. So it can work.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Yeah, we're right now in a place where mass immigration works. It's 89% immigrant, and it works fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Why are people so afraid of immigration then?

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Xenophobia, nationalism. You you think my culture, my society, my skin color is perfect. Don't mess with it. And then there's all these immigrants with different cultures and different skin colors coming in and messing you up, and you're worried your daughter will sleep with them and make babies. They'll look like me, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

But to your point, people can just look at the UE, can look at the Gulf and say, hey, it works. It works.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

It works in the United States. The United States is a settler colonial project at in the beginning, but eventually it turned into an immigrant project. You know, in the beginning, it was we need to slaughter the Native Americans and steal their land, and then we'll bring in slaves to do the labor for us, and we'll kick back and become filthy rich doing nothing. But eventually, a massive immigration population, especially Italians, um, and now Mexicans have been pouring into the United States. And without those immigrants, the United States wouldn't be as wealthy as it is. Um despite that, the United States has all this xenophobia and like we need to close the border. If it was up to me, I'd open it wide open. Because the people who want to go and work in your country will go and work in your country, and the people who don't want to go and work in will stay where they are. Like there's no reason to keep a border closed.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

I think your obsession with history is clear already moving within 11,000 years as we speak. Now you said that was in an attempt to answer the question of why are we here? Did you ever find the answer to this question? Why we're here? Yeah, you're saying like obsession with history is trying to solve like why are we here? What are we trying to figure out?

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Yeah, right. Like I'm constantly trying to figure out like how did we get to this moment and why is it shaped the way it is? Uh yeah, and I don't have an answer. It just it just all the little pieces stack together.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Do you think religion steps in to answer this uh this this question? For example, as Muslims believing that we are here to construct uh earth to kind of be uh kind of gods, kind of uh caliphs, if we can use it that way, if we can use the Arabic word khalifa, uh on on earth to kind of build it. Do you think that provides the answer?

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I mean, I think that's the beauty of most of the religions on the planet today is that there is some kind of built-in answer. Um it I don't think it it explains the details of how we got to this moment, but it certainly could provide motivation and comfort for people.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Wanna take you back to the to the US? Uh you said before that the US government was bankrupt in 1776 when the country was established. Yet kind of less than 200 years later. We're bankrupt again. We'll we'll come to that, but maybe just before that, because I think also you also made the point before that the US had a time from 48 to 73 where the economy was really, really strong. So maybe let's talk about that and then we'll come back to today again. But during this period, how is it from like 1776 to 1973 at least that the US went from bankrupt to the biggest and most powerful economy in the world? How do you do this in such a short period of time?

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So uh in 1790, sorry, 1789, we had a effectively a kind of soft coup d'etat. And the original constitution of the United States, which was put into effect in 1781, which was called the Articles of Confederation, was overthrown and it was replaced by the Constitution. And what the Constitution allowed that the Articles didn't, is it allowed the federal government to tax. And that was how the federal government finally had the money to start paying off its debts and eventually uh break even. The real reason why the United States became what it is is its geography. There was this huge tract of really fertile land that was rich in resources that had amazing forests that could be turned into ships. Um, that land was as long as you brought in immigrants to do it, you could go in there, genocide the Native American population, take the land, take the resources, expand, create agriculture, build cities out of nothing, and ultimately generate the kind of wealth almost effortlessly. It was this brilliant moment. And, you know, people poured in year after year after year, and you know, the population in the United States exploded and it drove the economy. It was uh an amazing period when you think about it. It was ruthless and it was brutal, especially the you know, the way we treated Native Americans and slaves. Um and even the workers, the workers in the factories were they were, you know, they were this much better off than a slave. Um, but it allowed the United States to generate massive amounts of wealth without having to do the hard work that Europe had to do, right? Europe had to sort of build factories in places that already had cities, then cities themselves had narrow streets because they were feudal. So they had all this old uh infrastructure that needed to be upgraded or replaced. Uh it was really convenient when there was a city fire, you could just start over.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

There was a moment though, within that 100-year period where you had the Great Depression in 1929. Now, you said that this effectively was because capitalism has failed at that moment. However, when you read, for example, and and you say that this is partially why government interference in the economy is required. However, when you read, for example, Milton Friedman, he actually says that the Great Depression was because of how the government mismanaged the situation. And had they left it to capitalism and the private sector, there wouldn't have been a Great Depression in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

So the part of that is true, right? The whole tariff crisis that was created in the years before uh definitely fueled.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Tell us about this tariff crisis.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

So what happened was in World War I, um, or before World War I, the United States was a booming economy. It was industrializing on a scale that the world had never seen before. There have certainly been countries who industrialized faster than the United States since, but nothing before. Um and it was maybe the fourth most powerful state on the planet, like you know, in Great Britain, Germany, France, United States. World War I happens, and it's a catastrophe for the powers in Europe because they they didn't just slaughter each other, they wasted all this industrial might. But they also had to retool their economies and switch from a customer-based economy to a war economy, which meant that instead of making shoes, they were making combat boots. Instead of making suits, they were making jackets, right? And that they were making trucks to transport troops around instead of civilian cars. Well, when that happened, the French and British, and even to a degree the German consumers still wanted all those goods. So the United States stepped in and filled in the in the gap, and it was a huge boom, boom to the US economy. Um you know, we didn't enter the war until year three. It only lasted four years, and we came in. By the time we actually sent troops to Europe, we only fought for about a year. So we did one quarter of the war. But you know, in a way that was kind of on purpose because the lit later it took for us to get into the war, the more Europe will have killed itself and the less we will have, but we can still get the rewards for winning. And uh when the war ended, France, Great Britain, and Germany went, okay, we're gonna switch back to civilian production. Thanks, United States, for covering for us. You can go back to whatever you were doing. And the United States went, No. No, we're in this market now. And Europe went, No, but we're our factories are going back online. It's gonna create a glut of goods in the Global economy and the United States went, oh well. And that then forced those different governments to try to figure out what to do because it was causing the price of goods to collapse to the point where it was you were selling your good for less than it cost to make it. And so one way that they tried to do this was implementing tariffs. And they started putting tariffs on everybody, thinking that it would slow down the importation of those other goods and it would allow the local producers to raise their prices. In the short term, they actually saw some benefits for that. But in the long term, it it just exacerbated the problem because what it did was it passed on the cost to the customers. Because right, you're a corporation, you're not going to eat the tariff, you're gonna you're gonna raise your prices. So then the what it did was it made it so that the economy actually slowed down in the long term. Of course, that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was how did you keep the economy afloat? And what the, what, what the businesses realized was they turned they could, if they could turn the stock mart into a Ponzi scheme, they could generate the money from the stock market, and then that would keep their companies afloat. And what they were hoping would happen is other companies would go bankrupt in this crisis, and then that would reduce the amount of goods being produced. And so they all they had to do was survive until that happened. The problem was before that happened, the investors realized it was a Ponzi scheme and started to sell, and that caused a panic. And that's when the stock market collapsed. The stock market didn't cause the crisis, the stock market was the symptom of the crisis.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

So it's not about the kind of the prices on the screen collapsing in the pictures we see in 1929. That's not the actual depression. The actual depression is a 1919 onwards driven.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

Exactly. And and you know, if you looked at the portfolios for all of those companies, they were making fantastic goods, high quality goods. They were making it efficiently. So they were doing what they were supposed to do. The problem was there was just too much product in the marketplace and there weren't enough customers. Because right, if I'm if I make a refrigerator and it lasts 30 years, then I've lost that customer for 30 years, which is one of the lessons of the Great Depression. Make a refrigerator last five years, and then you get that customer six times in that 30 years. So that's on purpose. Of course it is. We were making my father in uh let me think of what year. My my father in the 90s had a refrigerator from the 50s that worked great. It was even, you know how everything had rounded edges and it there they were looked aerodynamic. They even made the refrigerator like that. And and it was working fine. Uh and you have to ask yourself the question like, wait, so they made a refrigerator that could last 40 years. Why can't we make a refrigerator now that can last 40 years?

SPEAKER_00 24:55

Do you see parallels with the stock market today where you have AI companies which are significantly losing money? However, the market is at an all-time high, and we've been now in a bull period for effectively almost getting now into close to 20 years since the crisis.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

Yeah. Uh so this is, I think, dangerous, right? If you're looking at that, uh, it looks like a bubble to me. AI, especially. I feel like there's there's too much enthusiasm for what AI is going to do, at least for the AI companies and their product output. Um I I think at some level people have gotten it's like the tulip event in in the Netherlands, right? Where people were trading tulips and there were there was effectively such an incredible marketplace for tulips. Like tulips were going for in today dollars, probably like a million dollars.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

For a flower.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

Yeah. And people lost their minds. And, you know, the the whole tulip crisis only lasted a few years, but in that time it created this really weird economic bubble that burst. One of the tragedies of it was there was a specific tulip that people really loved that had these stripes in it. And that those were going for crazy amounts of money. And it turned out it was a virus that was causing the stripes. It wasn't a genetic mutation. So there was no way to genetically engineer the stripes to keep happening. And then once the plant became immune to the virus, the stripes went away.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

So if I take you back now to this period between 48 to 73, you described it as the only time in history where you can work and make wealth.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Shouldn't that be the norm?

SPEAKER_01 26:37

It should be the norm. I would wouldn't that be amazing if that was the norm? So that my that data isn't my data, that's Piketty's data. Uh he wrote the book uh Wealth in the 21st Century. And uh what uh what he says in the book is he what he did was he went and he looked at uh everything we had data on. By the way, we have fantastic data on the Roman Empire, for example. Uh and it gets and it gets better every few years. A few years ago, they found uh in a dig in London, they found tablets that were that you could still read that had the data from uh transactions, economic transactions that had taken place. And the way the the tablets were, they were, you could erase them and reuse them. They they had uh like a black background, and I think they just burnt the wood and made it charcoal, and then they put wax on it, and then you would take a stick and you would draw into the wax, and then you could see the black, so the black would come forward, and then when you were done with the day, you just took a hot iron over the top of it, and you'd erase it. And they found a bunch of these that were still written on, and you could read them. So we've been able to compile crazy amounts of data from the Roman Empire, and wherever there was data, he he looked at it, and he concluded that there was a 25-year span of time in human history where you could work and make wealth. And he said, if you didn't live in that time period in the United States, your best bet was to be born wealthy or marry into a wealthy family or or win the lottery. But you know, statistically, the odds of that happening are so remote you're wasting your money.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

What happened in 73? What changed?

SPEAKER_01 28:15

So uh a few things happened. One of them was the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War tore up the US economy. Back then, you had to pay for wars. Today the United States doesn't pay for its wars. Um, it uses petrodollars that are in US banks to then take out loans, and it runs up a catastrophic debt to pass that that debt on to future generations. And then that way, the United States, you can live like it's the end of the world. You can party, you don't have to pay taxes, right? And you can be rich and and just let your children and your grandchildren figure out what to do with the debt crisis when it finally hits them. And so, but in in 73, we didn't live in that kind of weird world where we didn't care about our children or grandchildren, and so we paid for the debt or for the war as it went. Um, that was one problem. Another problem was Nixon. The Nixon administration, you know, it was a conservative Republican administration, didn't like the wealth distribution the way it was, and the Nixon administration wanted to reverse that. Um in 1973, we that was the closest the United States came to being an egalitarian society. The top 1% made 8% of the wealth that year.

SPEAKER_00 29:31

8%.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

8%. And uh today the top 1% in the United States makes 40% of the wealth. The next 15% make 40%. So the top 16% make 80% of the wealth, and then the you know, the bottom 84% share the remaining 20% of wealth, but it's worth pointing out that the majority of that is still the next 20% 20%, right? So uh there's very little wealth going down to the bottom 60%. And that and that that's by design, that was the goal of the Nixon administration. He didn't fulfill completely fulfill it, but he definitely got the thing in moving in that direction because 73 was 8%, 74% it was nine. So he you already saw a percentage change, one percentage point change in one year. Um, and that's what Reagan did then, right? He's he he tried to complete the Nixon, the Nixon goal, and that's why he cut taxes for the rich.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

But why this goal? I mean, it seems like from the outside in that the US in 73 had found almost the perfect mix between capitalism and socialism by having a capitalistic society, yet good distribution of wealth. Why was the goal to change what seemed to be working perfectly?

SPEAKER_01 30:41

I don't get it. I mean, the only thing I can think of is this greed. They just wanted more, and they were they were upset that the there was such a big middle class and they decided to plunder it. But I don't understand that because one of the great things about that huge middle class is that you had consumers to buy your your overpriced crappy goods that were gonna break. And, you know, like why wouldn't you want to have a large consumer base? And it also meant the United States was relatively stable. The likelihood of uh, you know the people rioting and protesting in the streets had dropped pretty dramatically because of this wealth distribution. In a way, we sort of bought everybody off. But why not? I mean, you're the richest country on earth. Why not buy off your own population and distribute some of that wealth out? And that became sort of like the American dream was I'll get a piece of that, all I have to do is work hard. And I don't understand the ideology of no, that's not good. We need to do something different. It's almost like let's be a feudalist society with dukes and barons and uh you know viscounts and counts and earls and and everybody else can be at our at our feet working hard and gaining nothing.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Wow. You describe the debt currently as catastrophic. However, you have a different point of view that says it's all about how we look at it. You even had people at some point saying we should change the debt calculator to be called the savings calculator because ultimately that is just people's money that is saved. And you had some people who argue that look, debt is just money, and the way money was even created historically was because you needed to keep record of the of the kind of who owed who what, and that's why they created money. So kind of money and debt are almost synonymous, and there's no problem, it's just people who are saving with other people. And at the end of the day, it's in the US local currency, they can always print it. So what's the problem?

SPEAKER_01 32:35

Well, if you print it, it causes inflation. So that there's a huge problem with that. There's sort of like this libertarian idea, let's get rid of taxes and let the government print money as it needs to, it'll cause massive amounts of inflation. So that's why that's an awful idea. Um, because even if you somehow figured out a way and you won't, but even if you did figure out a way somehow to create uh a balanced economy where you were you were creating kind of a stable level of inflation, you're still diminishing the amount of wealth people have in real time because the their buying power is dropping. So the reality is that you're still taxing them, you're just taxing them in a different way. So there's a one of the problems with the argument that you were making is there's this kind of idea of z zero-sum economy, that if I take all the debt and all the assets and I merge them together, I should end up with zero. So for me to have wealth, you have to have debt. And that's not really true. If I take all the wealth in the universe and I put it together, like think of all the skyscrapers just in the city alone. There's way more wealth in this city than there is debt. And if I sum it, I'm gonna end up with a really big positive number. I don't know what that number is, but I know it's a really big positive number. And you just do that for the whole planet and you realize this is a nonsensical idea. Here's why the debt is a problem. I think we're we've cleared $39 trillion. It's growing by $2 trillion a year. Well, you don't have to be a mathematical genius to realize that at some point it's gonna, it's already past the GDP size. At some point it's gonna reach a point where the our ability to pay the interest on the debt will start to have a really serious consequence for the economy. So then at that, then when that happens, you're gonna start to see the economy shrinking even more. Also, to sustain the debt, you have to have money in the banks to back the debt. So it only works as long as super rich oil countries are putting money in into US banks because they're they believe in the dollar. As soon as they start to lose their confidence in the dollar and start to pull their money out of US banks, then there's nothing to back that debt. So the debt puts the United States in a really vulnerable position. And so, in in addition to passing the debt on to future generations, which is fiscally irresponsible, and then creating this problem with the interest, right? What's the interest on a $39 trillion debt? Well, the United States government doesn't have the money to pay it, so it takes out loans to pay the debt. That only works as long as people are confident in the US dollar. I don't know about y'all, but I'm starting to lose confidence in the US dollar.

SPEAKER_00 35:23

What about the argument that Japan has 200, 300% debt levels without necessarily being benefiting from any petrol in the Japanese currency or anything? Uh and sure the Japanese economy is not the fastest growing in the world, but it's still number four.

SPEAKER_01 35:39

Used to be number two. Japan is not a great example. It's been in a recession for what, 30 years, right? Like Japan in the 80s, Japan was mocking the United States because its economy was roaring. And there was even talk that maybe Japan might pass the United States. And then in the 90s, they and they've been ever since. And they've fallen to fourth place. They were in second place from the end, you know, almost the end of World War II, a few years after, obviously, until the nine, well, until I want to say the aughts, maybe it was even the 2010s before just China finally passed them, but Germany just passed them. And Germany's so much smaller than Japan. Like I'm embarrassed for Japan. And so yeah, I wouldn't use them as my example. The roaring tiger has turned out to be a little kitten.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

Now, another thing you said is is is the war in Vietnam has been bad for the for the economy. And I think you made the point before that wars in general are bad for the economy. But there is a point of view that that the wars create massive demand for uh weaponry, for now for AI solutions, for uh for weaponry, uh creates profitability. And that's also maybe partially why the US market today, even after many, many years of different, different wars globally, is at an all-time uh high. So are wars really bad for the economy?

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Yeah, the answer is yes. So there is one war in human history that was good for the economy, and it was World War II. And so people look to it and they go, see? And it's like, no, that's the exception to the rule that proves the rule. It's not you can't make a rule out of an N of one. All the other wars regularly do things like create recession. They slow down economies. Bunch of reasons. Like the Iraq War, the 2003 Iraq War, the estimates are it took out $10 trillion from the global economy.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Trillion.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

$10 trillion from the global economy. So the United States ran up a three or four trillion dollar debt. It just it didn't pay it, right? It just added it to the debt. And then on top of that, $10 trillion were evaporated from the economy. It disrupts trade, it messes up the, you know, the in this case, it was the ability for Iraq to sell its oil. There are all these knock-on effects that wars create. If if I build a building and it creates office spaces and people move in and put businesses in, that building will generate money for the economy for the for the next 150 years until it collapses because those the skyscrapers we build probably have 150-year life expectancy. Um, if I build a missile and I launch it, it's it's it the only economic benefit that you had was the investors in the military-industrial complex, and then the workers who made it got paid a paycheck. There's no real positive effect on the economy afterwards, unless you get lucky and you're the contractor that gets to rebuild whatever was destroyed. But it's it's it's it has a negative impact directly on the economy. Um, the reason it worked in World War II was because of the Great Depression. There was a surplus of goods in the marketplace. If you could blow those goods up, now you got rid of your surplus. So one of the things the United States did to boost morale in the United States was the United States said, we don't have enough silk for parachutes, we don't have enough steel for tanks, and we don't have enough rubber for the truck tires. We need those. So if you have spare tires laying around, if women, if you have nylon, I'm sorry, silk stockings, bring your silk stockings. And if you have extra pots and pans, bring them and donate them to the United States government. And people did. They couldn't wait to do this. And then we just threw it all away. We didn't, what are you gonna do with silk stockings? You're gonna make parachutes out of them? We just threw it in the garbage.

SPEAKER_00 39:39

Literally threw it.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

Threw it away, threw it in the garbage. It was the United States government didn't need it, it had all that stuff. It was just a morale booster thing to try and make Americans feel like they were part of the war. Because at the time, Americans believed it was important to be part of the economy and contribute as opposed to today, where they just tweet all day and watch Netflix and smoke pot and play video games. They don't care about it. And so there was there was a cultural shift, and everybody became super selfish and narcissistic and focused on themselves. And that cultural shift is exactly what happens towards the end of a civilization.

SPEAKER_00 40:19

Wow. So we talked about all of the things that don't work. Now let's try to find some of the alternatives that can work. You did say before that Nordics have built a great model. I was reading this book, I think it's called The Almost Perfect People. That's an amazing trial. Yeah, it's like it has almost between brackets because it kind of tries almost to say some of these are really myths. So, for example, there's these statistics that the Nordic are the happiest people in the world consistently. Right. And it doesn't really, sometimes for people doesn't really make kind of sense because when you meet Nordic people, they're incredible people, but they don't necessarily seem to be the happiest in the world, in terms of they're not necessarily the ones who are laughing the most, etc. And the book was arguing it's all relative to expectations, just because Nordics have very low expectations. And that's why they're happy. So it's not so sometimes people are like, is the Nordic model really the perfect combination between socialism and capitalism that works, or is it a bit of a fantasy for people outside looking at the Nordics and saying, hey, they've figured it out?

SPEAKER_01 41:22

So it's a little bit of both, right? There is definitely uh a romanticization of the Scandinavian states, because they're definitely not perfect in any way, shape, or form. Um having said that, one of the ways that you can measure this is look at how countries dealt with the 2008 economic crisis. And Sweden was one of the first states to come out of it. And so you then you have to ask the question: how does this country of 10 million people uh it's playing with the big boys, right? It's it's playing with Germany, which is what, uh seven and a half times bigger, it's playing with Japan, which is 12 times bigger, the United States, which is 34 times bigger, and it it ranks, even though it's 10 million people. Now I think today it's 11 million people. Um how did it come out of that crisis so quickly? It must have done something right. There must have been something robust in its economy that allowed it to steer its way out. And it and it's true also for Iceland. I I really don't know the data on on the other Scandinavian states, but I know Iceland and Sweden did a pretty good job of coming out of that crisis. Um another thing that you can look at is the products that are produced. And I it's pretty clear that there's a disproportionate number of Swedish products that end up on the marketplace compared to their size. Um, you know, for a while they were even competing in the in the weapons industry with uh combat aircraft, the Vigan. I don't think they're really a competitor now, but they you know, they were competing in the auto industry for the longest time as well. Ford owns Volvo, so it I don't know what that means. Are they still competing or is it done? So what's the secret? So I I think there are a few things. I think one of the things that the Scandinavians have done right is they have the right kind of social interaction and sense of you know how their membership in the world should look like. So most of the Scandinavian states, for example, spend 1% of their GDP, sorry, of their state revenue. Yeah, state revenue on foreign aid. And they don't do it because they have this guilty feeling of, oh, we colonized the country and now we feel like we need to compensate. Um, because they didn't, right? They they weren't the closest they came to that was Denmark, and Denmark owns some Caribbean islands that it sold the United States and Great Britain, and then of course Denmark has Greenland. Um so they're not doing briefly. Sweden was in the in the Delaware area, but uh the British kicked him out. Um so Why are they doing this? And that first of all, they they peg that foreign aid so in a way that it can't be used for military purposes. It has to be used to improve the society. They're thinking a couple of things. One, trading partner will have some kind of relationship with that state long term, and it'll it'll just grow our economy because as their economy grows and they buy our goods, our economy grows. Another thing they're thinking, this is the cynical part of it, if their economy is growing, they'll have less need to immigrate to our country. And so we don't have we won't have the big immigration problem. Because Sweden has a pretty open immigration policy. I think Sweden is now 10% refugee. And, you know, that's remarkable because I don't know many countries, you know, maybe Turkey is 10% refugee. I don't think it is, but it that you know that's a huge burden for the Swedes to take on.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

And Turkey as well is mostly refugees from surrounding neighboring countries, whereas in the Nordics, you're taking them from far away, which is different. So that makes it even more remarkable.

SPEAKER_01 45:04

Right. Although they also have taken a lot of Middle Easterners, but you I see what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 45:07

Yeah, they kind of went a long way to get their they weren't forced to accept them, maybe compared to other countries where they were their their borders and there weren't many options.

SPEAKER_01 45:14

I I talked to Sweden about this at one point because I I uh a person that I was in contact with wanted to get asylum in a different country, and I was like, go to Sweden. And I I asked the Swedes, like, what I I talked to the Swedish embassy, I asked them like what should he do? And they said, look, we won't take an application for a refugee anywhere in the world. Because if we did, everybody would come and we don't have the resources for that. They said, if they reach Sweden, they're in. Tell them to get just get to Sweden however he can. We'll let them in.

SPEAKER_00 45:47

Very interesting. Now, one of the things you mentioned is uh kind of Denmark selling some of their islands. And uh the US has done a bunch of these deals over history in terms of buying different parts. And I think these have always probably turned out to be the best investments in history as kind of countries that bought pieces of land that end up with resources, etc. How did this model work historically of like buying countries? And uh and because it seems quite fascinating from a historical perspective that you can just buy for like $15 million and $10 million, you can buy things that can then become countries with like incredible resources.

SPEAKER_01 46:22

Okay, so I can only think of three occasions where the United States actually legitimately paid money. Because there are there are occasions where the United States conquered a place and then went, would you like some money for it? I don't think that counts. Okay. Um the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Um, and then of course we bought Alaska from Russia. Uh was called Seward's Folly because uh Seward was the guy that was behind, pushing really hard to do it, and everybody thought it was an idiotic idea because they thought the land was worthless. And then uh the U.S. Virgin Islands we bought from Denmark. Um so uh in in all three of those cases, well, in the first case, it was obviously brilliant. It almost doubled the size of the United States by doing it in terms of land. And you know, that that land is, you know, the state of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, um, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, like it's that chunk of the United States. It's good land. It's not the best parts of the United States, the best parts we stole from Mexico. It's Texas and California. And I'm saying that as a Texan.

unknown 47:29

So it is the best part.

SPEAKER_01 47:30

It is the best part. If you look at the the stuff we stole from California, it's 25% of the US GDP. Um, Texas and California are two largest states in GDP and population. And so it does you don't have to spend too much time trying to figure out, oh, that the best real estate in the United States is what we stole from Mexico. Um, we did pay Mexico for that land after the fact. So the in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, uh, when Mexico surrendered, we you know chopped off literally the top 50%. We cut Mexico almost exactly in half. I think it was 4951. Just and uh and then a few years later, we were surveying where we're gonna put the railroad tracks, and we the survey team in the south went, oh, we're gonna run into these really nasty mountains. And they crossed the border into Mexico and they looked around and they went, oh, we didn't annex enough. So the United States actually went back to Mexico and said, hey, we'd like to renegotiate the border. And it's called the Gadsden Purchase. And we said, and Mexico went, we're bitter about you stealing the northern half. And then the United States said, okay, we'll pay you money for the northern half, and we'll buy this chunk of land from you. And the chunk of land is Southern Arizona, a piece of southern Arizona and a piece of southern Mexico. And so that that doesn't count because that was theft to begin with. Um, but that turned out to be the best piece of real estate. Alaska isn't that great of an investment. Um, it does have oil, but the United States spends more money than it generates from Alaska. Alaska is a money pit. And part of the reason is the United States has had this policy of wanting to expand it economically. So it treats it like a colony. We'll we'll put money into it, and hopefully in a hundred years it'll start to generate its own money. I said it's a bad investment short term, but long term with global warming, it'll turn out to be good real estate. So give it, you know, 20, 30 years. Uh, you know, by the time the polar bears are extinct, Alaska should be uh nice and warm.

SPEAKER_00 49:38

Very interesting. Uh now, another another model, uh, you said before uh South Africa gives us hope. Now, obviously, on the maybe on the kind of political side and the human transformation side, it gives us hope. However, on the economic side, it doesn't. What what's the difference?

SPEAKER_01 49:59

So I I'm not sure because South Africa econom from the economic side has been a disappointment, right? Its economy shrinks year after year after year. Um it that saddens me. I I can't help but wonder in what manner and in what extent, considering how rich South Africa is in resources and potential. So, in what manner and what extent is this racially driven? Like, is there an issue of, well, it's not a white-dominated state anymore? So I, as a rich white investor, don't want to don't want to put my money into it. Um, I think there's also the, especially, you know, not the current administration, but the previous administration, even the one before, got hit with lots of corruption charges. And so uh Cyril Ramaposa right now, you know, like one of the big things he has to do is sort of clean up that sense of corruption uh that got, you know, uh Tabo Mbeke, and I I'm trying to think of who the other one was, but that those two guys that got in trouble with corruption charges. So, yeah, I'm not sure. Um, also, just for the record, on the social and political side, South Africa also isn't perfect by any means. But what it what it did gives us hope because they figured out a way to to at least create some measure of reconciliation. You know, South Africa is totally a segregated society. There's white neighborhoods mixed, the mixed people population is called colored. So there's white colored, Asian neighborhoods, black neighborhoods, there's still high crime, the wealth isn't really that well distributed. Um and and so yeah, they've they've got a lot of work to do. That like I think it it would be really naive to assume that you could take a society, an apartheid society like that, and transform it overnight. Um but considering what could have happened and how this is going to turn out, I do think it is a hopeful story. It could have been much worse.

SPEAKER_00 52:02

Now, if we can't easily find a model that works now, maybe let's go a bit back in in history. You made the point before that the Roman state was the longest surviving state in a specific form uh for 2,200 years, between the republic, the empire, before the republic, etc. How did its economy, what was the economic model of the Roman state that kept it going for that long?

SPEAKER_01 52:25

So uh during the period of the Republic, before it became the empire, it was already an empire by definition. So an empire is a state that rules multiple countries and nations. So they had already become imperial during the republic. Um what they what when I was a kid, I was taught the Romans were these great innovators who invented thing after thing after thing. It's not true. I wish it was true, but it's not true. So what they what they did was they took the phalanx, which was a Greek invention, and they modified it and turned it into the Legion. And the the Roman Legion was just the best combat machine for centuries. They had these shields, uh, the the scudum, it was uh 105 centimeters tall, so it was a big shield, it weighed 10 kilograms, it was designed to just protect the soldier. It had a uh uh an umbo, which was a metal ball on the front, so you could use a shield to bash people, and then you would use your sword. And the idea was you would lock the men in front together, they could put their shields together, and then you could, if you needed to, you could actually put the shields from the ranks built behind you above you to protect you from arrow fire. And so at that point, you're like this moving human wall. Nobody could stand up to it. The reason why they wanted this heavy infantry that was so I mean, you think about it, most armies that were conquering armies relied heavily on cavalry. The Romans relied heavily on heavy infantry. The reason they wanted this was because when you conquered a place, you could steal its wealth, you could enslave its population, you could steal its technology. And that became the model under which the Romans survived for centuries, was basically conquest and then plunder. Um, when the guy, everybody incorrectly calls Julius Caesar, his name was Gaius Iulius Kaiser.

SPEAKER_00 54:27

So why is he then? Why do we know him as Caesar then?

SPEAKER_01 54:30

I I don't understand how, because his name is C-A-E, right? Yeah C-A should be cut anyway. Uh so I don't I don't know what happened. Easier, maybe maybe in in Italian it's Cesare, but his name was Kaiser. So when the Germans say Kaiser, they have the pronunciation correct because the Germans knew how Latin was pronounced. Interesting. So anyway, uh when when Gaius Iulius Kaiser conquered Gaul, which is today France, there were three million people living there. He killed one million, so that's genocide. He enslaved one million, that's genocide. And then he left the remaining million and told them, Welcome to the Republic. And he took that million that he enslaved back to the slave markets in Rome and sold them off and made crazy money off of this. And that's how they fueled the Roman economy. Uh, also, uh, Gaul had really advanced metallurgic technologies. They stole that tech, brought it back to Rome, and then began using it themselves. And so that was their model. When they captured Egypt, it solved all sorts of problems for them because Egypt had the Great Library, and the Great Library was constantly innovating new technology. So it made it so they didn't need to keep conquering to get new technology. So when they captured Egypt in 31 BC, that was a game changer. Also, Egypt produced crazy amounts of food, and there was already a canal that allowed you to take a ship from the Mediterranean and go to the Red Sea. You went approximately to where Cairo is today. Cairo obviously didn't exist at the time, and they had a the Egyptians had dug a canal 4,500 years ago that goes to this to roughly where Suez is. And so you would just take your boat to where Cairo was and then take that canal to the Red Sea. So it made it so that Egypt was already at the center of the world for trade. And so they had trade, grain, and tech. And they they after that, they were like, wow, what we don't need to keep this conquering going. And they couldn't, they had reached the their communication limits. They there was no way to, with the technology they had to really expand the empire much more. Um, so then at that point, they started to stagnate because the model that they had was built on expansion. It was a Ponzi scheme when you think about it, right? The way we'll generate new wealth is by stealing wealth from another group of people and bringing it back. And that's that's not a that's not a great model. It worked though, and the reason it worked was geography. It's the same reason why the United States is as wealthy as it is today. It's geography. The Mediterranean. The Mediterranean is a superhighway. As long as the Romans had uh the fleet, had naval control over the Mediterranean, they could move troops and goods around really quickly and they could adjust. Rome started to fall apart because they started to lose chunks of the Mediterranean. Once that happened, they were doomed. But through tenacity, they held on and they shrank and shrank and shrank and shrank, but they wouldn't go away until the Turks finished them off.

SPEAKER_00 57:35

But Dr. Ruy, when you say that the longest surviving economic model in history is conquest and plunder and saved, where do we go from here?

SPEAKER_01 57:47

Well, I I there's a lesson. It the Romans failed in the end, right? They they reached their limit and they couldn't continue going. Uh so I think what the Romans should have done was they should have turned into a commercial enterprise and started to focus on trade and developing their economy. In other words, they needed to change the way they were thinking about wealth. And they did to a degree, towards the end. They started to finally adapt, but it was it was too late. They should have started to adapt earlier. Also, they got hit by malaria. And uh there's not much you can do about that when that happens, right? Because they didn't have the way a way to fix the malaria. They didn't know how to do vaccines, um, and it devastated their population. So they just didn't have the the human power at that point to resist the conquest of the western part of the Roman Empire as the Germanic tribes invaded. The Germanic tribes didn't invade out of cruelty, they were invading because they were being overrun by the Huns and they just needed to go somewhere. And uh they did they realized that the Western part of the empire was frail, it was weak, and so they just overran it. But they they were escaping, they were running away. And you know, those types of catastrophes, I don't know how you plan for them. Uh you just they, you know, what are you gonna do?

SPEAKER_00 59:16

Now, as an Egyptian, I don't know how I feel about you saying on one hand, Egypt was almost the end of the conquest, it was almost so good that you almost didn't need to conquer after that. You had the library, which was the technology, you had the food, etc. So on one hand, you feel an immense pride in what it was, and then you compare it to today, where we are importing both knowledge and food. Yeah. How did we get here?

SPEAKER_01 59:44

That's that's uh series of catastrophic events. Um, so the the first disaster for Egypt was that when the Roman Empire uh accepted Christianity, so you know, Emperor Constantine made it legal, and then uh uh 315 is the year in my head, but I'm probably wrong. And it was around the year 315 that Christianity finally became a legal religion. And then in 391, it became the only legal religion. So within a very short span of time, Christianity went from being illegal to being the only legal religion. When they did that, they burnt the great library and they actually destroyed, almost destroyed the city of Alexandria. Uh a mob attacked the Jewish quarter. At the time, uh Alexandria had the largest Jewish population in the world, and it had a the city had its own Jewish quarter that was then destroyed. They tried to find the pagans because the city was still about a quarter pagan and attacked them, and then they burnt the great library. Um once that happened, Egypt didn't have a mechanism to generate new technology. It it had lost its uh, you know, it was the internet of the world at the time. Um so once that was gone, that was a disaster. Another disaster that then took place was uh much later, it was uh the crusades. The crusades really wore down Egypt's economy. At one point, King Amalric, the Crusader king, invaded Egypt five times over a six-year span of time. And in the process, the city of Fustat, which was the original capital uh uh after the Arabs conquered Egypt, uh, was burnt, by the way, by uh the the wazir of Egypt. He set it on fire himself because he didn't want the crusaders to capture it. Um, it was a stupid thing to do. And you know, though that kind of uh warfare puts a real burden on your economy. And eventually, of course, Salahdin takes over Egypt and then uses Egypt to capture Syria, and then once he has Syria, he captures most of Palestine. And you know, year after year of just non-stop warfare against the Crusaders. Then uh came the Mongols, and it was Egypt that stopped the Mongols. The the the you know, the Mongols had lost battles before the Battle of Ainjalut um in 1260, but the Battle of Ainjalut also managed to stop the Mongols from going in that direction, right? I'll give you an example. There was a I'm forgetting the name of the battle. Uh there was a battle in what is today Afghanistan between uh the Khorasmian Empire and the Mongols, and the Khorasmians defeated the Mongols, but it didn't matter. The Mongols still destroyed the Kharasmian Empire. Um the Battle of Anjulut, the Egyptians not only defeated the Mongols, they actually stopped them from invading Egypt. But the devastation to the rest of the world was, I mean, it's undescribable. The Mongols, the estimate is that the Mongols killed 75% of the Persian population. And Egypt isn't a planet, it's interconnected to the rest of the world. Its economy was connected to to everywhere, including Persia, through trade, through, you know, uh people were always migrating around. And there were Cairo had a whole Persian section because the Persian economy was so tied to the Egyptian economy. But the Mongols didn't just destroy Persia, they destroyed Iraq, they destroyed Syria, right? They were, they were, they destroyed whole portions of Anatolia. They were on a this catastrophic genocidal rampage. Then, as if that wasn't enough, came the bubonic plague. And the bubonic plague uh killed probably half of Egypt's population. Um, and it's overnight, like within a two-year span of time, half the population's dead. And like, I don't even know how you would how you would manage to function after that. It's it's indescribable. And after that, even before that, um at the end of the 11th century, there was a conversation taking place about whether philosophy and information and knowledge was worth it. And Ghazali, you know, wrote, wrote a book called The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and he said in the book uh that philosophy never answers questions, it only creates new questions. And we should turn to religion because religion answers questions. And then, of course, Ibn Rusht writes the reply, the incoherence of the incoherent, and he says, You gotta be kidding me. Look at what all this philosophy and science has done for us, it's changed our lives. We we need to be an open, innovative society. And uh Ghazali won the argument, and in part because the catastrophes were so severe, like it's just one after the other after the other. Um, and then when the Ottoman Empire was at its apex, it was technologically light years ahead of Europe. Um, it almost captured Vienna twice. The Ottoman Empire owned a huge chunk of Europe. It owned North Africa, it had a piece of the Middle East. It was it was bigger than the Roman Empire. And what ended up happening was the Janissaries, the army, was this conservative, had this conservative culture and hated all the innovations that the Sultan kept trying to implement. And the army kept resisting the innovations because they they didn't want to change their society and adapt. And in the end, the army won out and the Ottoman Empire got left behind and ultimately destroyed because they chose not to innovate, which is a catastrophe. And I, you know, Egypt, of course, in 1517 got absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, so that Ottoman history pulled Egypt along. But Egypt got lucky because Muhammad Ali then was pushed back against all that and basically made Egypt autonomous and tried to modernize. And Egypt, for the longest time, was ahead of the whole rest of the third world. Modernization really up uh maybe up until 1970. It was you know the leading force for the third world resistance against imperialism, and then Egypt started to really fall behind after that. Um, part of the problem was too many people and not enough resources, and then the cities were in the agricultural land. So as the cities expanded, you lost farmland, and that was a catastrophe. Nasser recognized that and started and built Medinat Nasr just to move people and you know Heliopolis, just to get people out into the desert so they'd stop eating up the agricultural land. But it never it didn't really work. And of course now Sisi's taking that to a whole new level. Uh it'd be nice to see if that does work. But it but it's a it's a big ask to get people to sort of abandon their agricultural land and go out into the desert to live.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:53

At this point, about too many people. On one hand, we look at China using the too many people to establish this economic medical. Yeah. And on the other hand, you have countries which say too many people are the problem. Which way is it?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:08

Well, one of the things China did was it actually took its population growth and put it under control and did the one child policy. Um, and so yes, they had a massive booming population that they then harnessed and then put to work. They did it under the communist model, and there there were serious consequences for that, right? Lots of people suffered and died in the process. It wasn't free. Uh, Egypt never had that kind of strength or organization to pull off something like that, or will. I mean, I think when you engineer a society like the Soviet Union is another fantastic example of a society that went from almost no industry. When the Russians had the revolution in 1917, as a they were uh 2% industrialized, Egypt was 5% industrialized. Egypt was more advanced than the Russian Empire when it came to industry. And so, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:02

So sad.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:02

It's so sad. The United States was 40% industrialized. So, you know, just to put things in perspective, uh by the time World War II broke out, Russia was 40% industrialized. They they went from two to 40 in uh what is that 17 to 41, 24 years, which is insane. As a person looking back, Stalin was definitely evil. He was cruel, and what they did was cruel. If they hadn't done it, they would have never beaten Hitler. And so uh I guess, you know, like it's greater good? Yeah. At the time you're like, oh, this is bad, but now in retrospect, you're like, oh, thank God.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:47

Wow. The other thing that's very sad is you said basically Alexandria was pretty much the most diverse city in the world, right? If it was one quarter Jewish, one quarter pagan, and then the rest I assume mostly Christians. Yeah. Um today, obviously, in in most of the Arab world outside the the the Gulf. The Gulf obviously today is the most diverse in the world. Yeah. But outside the Gulf, maybe you have internal diversity in terms of like uh different religions, etc., but you don't necessarily have that that level of uh of kind of of diversity and openness and being able to co-live together in that diversity. But it doesn't seem that the co-living is not as like in Alexandria, if I understood you correctly, the problem was when people came from outside, but the Egyptians actually inside were living pretty okay. It was the Romans that came and effectively slaughtered the Jews and the pagans, etc. But it seemed like internally everyone was happily co-living together.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:42

Um to a degree. So what happened was uh there was a religious argument that was taking place in Egypt. Um so the monophysite and became meophysite later, uh, about the nature of Jesus. And that that crisis was uh to me, it's not a crisis. So you disagree about the nature of Jesus, let it go. Uh the Romans took it so seriously, they actually were executing Egyptians to try to force Egyptians to believe the way they did. Um, and any by the nature of Jesus, was he all God and perfect and infallible, or was he God in a man's body and therefore susceptible to temptation and sin and and and pain and suffering? And the Romans believed the latter and the Egyptians believed the former. And like I They killed them over that difference. They kill them over that difference, but it but it it things like that really make me wonder like, you think you understand the nature of an omnipotent being? Like, we're an ant compared to an omnipotent being, if an ant. Maybe we're like a one-saw creature compared to an omnipotent being. How can we possibly understand the nature of that being? And then we're so arrogant about it, we're gonna kill each other over it? It's insane. Anyway, so uh, so there was actually this strong, powerful tension. So in in 391, or it might have been 392, when they burned the great library and slaughter the Jews and um the pagans, when they did this, one of the reasons they did it was as a distraction event. Like, yes, we don't get along. We think Christianity should be practiced differently than you, but you know what? We have a big enemy together, and it's the non-Christians. And so they actually got a mob and they together to do this. Um, so it's to create a common enemy. To create a common enemy, and then they ethnically cleansed the city, and it was a catastrophe for the Romans and the Egyptians.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:41

One of the other things you said is the Arabs conquered Egypt. Now, as an Arab Muslim Egyptian, I would say Arabs liberated Egypt from the Romans. Yeah. Historically, which is the accurate term.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:54

So the the Coptic population of Egypt would agree with you, right? They believed that the Arabs came as liberators, and they actually assisted Amr ibn al-As when he came, right? He had 3,000 men. There was no way he could conquer Egypt with 3,000 men.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:08

And that's why Arab al-Khattab was extremely worried about Egypt.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:11

He actually sent a letter telling him not to go. And uh Amr got the letter before he entered Egypt. He refused to open it until he entered Egypt. He opened it and it said, if you're already in Egypt, keep going. If you haven't reached it yet, turn around. Which shows he knew what the Khalifa was thinking. And he just was like, I'm gonna wait till I'm in Egypt to open this letter. He opens the letter and he he ended up conquering Egypt. He did it because the Coptic population, which hated the Romans because of years of abuse, um, rose up and they they didn't do much fighting, but they did logistical support and food supplies, and you know, they acted as guides and they showed the Arabs where to go and where the Romans were, and they gave them intel. And it made it so that Amr had this amazing advantage over the Romans and he defeated them. And and I think that has been for the majority of history. Obviously, there are hiccups along the way, and there are moments when this isn't true. For the majority of history, I believe that the average cop sees the Arabs as their liberators and friends, and that there's no tension. Obviously, there are moments when there are, because no relationship is perfect.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:28

And can we say that the majority of the kind of Arab-slash-Muslim wars have been along these lines, have been liberations from Romans, liberation from Persians, uh, etc.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:39

So, you know, uh sometimes. My default setting is always I side with the defender.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:48

But uh it is also true that when the Arabs were conquering chunks of the Roman Empire, they were conquering land that the Romans had conquered. And that there were times, especially in places like Syria and Palestine and Egypt, where the local population saw the Arab invaders as liberators, not invaders. Um in the case of Persia, I think the Arabs were definitely conquerors because you for two reasons. One, the the uh the majority of the population living in Persia were Persians. It wasn't that they had they weren't really, Persia itself really hadn't conquered anybody. Obviously, the Persian Empire had in the past conquered lands. Um, the majority of people living in what is today Iraq, which was part of the Persian Empire, were Arab. They were Christian Arab. So when the, and they fought the Muslim Arabs when the Muslim Arabs invaded, they were the majority of the Persian soldiers in Iraq fighting Khalid ibn al-Walid were actually Christian Arabs. So in a way, it was a civil, it was almost a civil war. It was a national civil war where it was Muslim Arabs versus Christian Arabs. Um those Christian Arabs did see the in in the Iraq area, did see the Arabs as the invaders and didn't see them as their liberators. And one of the reasons was, and this is why Persia was conquered, Egypt was liberated. I said conquered for Egypt, you're right, you needed to correct me. Um the Persians had this belief that everybody had value, whether it didn't matter what their religion was, didn't matter what their culture was, and and they loved diversity and they celebrated diversity. So the the people who were initially conquered by the Persians were very well integrated into the Persian society, and so they didn't have a grievance like the Egyptians did with the Romans.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:35

There was an argument though, and uh and tell me how historically correct is that the Persians had a certain economic system on the farmers in the land. That's true. I don't know the word in English, but it's Arabic, it's the Haklin, who were apparently collecting very exorbitant taxes.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:48

It was a serfdom system.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:50

Yeah, and apparently when the Arabs came because they changed it to the zakat model where you only pay the two and a half percent direct to the state, it was more advantageous to the kind of the Persian farmers.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:00

For sure. So what the the serfdom system that the Persians had set up originally was if you lost a war against the Persians, instead of being sold off into slavery, they put you on farms and then you became a serf.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:16

Like a forced labor, if it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:18

Yeah. I mean it's it's better than a slave, not as good as a peasant. It's somewhere in between peasant and slave. Um, you you're literally owned by the land, so you're not, you're not, you don't have the right to leave the land. Um and then, you know, if you're you're taxed, so you you're just sort of stuck as this farmer, you'll never be rich. You'll always be a poor farmer. Um by the time we got to the Sasanians, which are of course the guys that the Arabs fought, that those that serfdom system had been locked into place. I don't think it was ever meant to be. I think the Persians saw it as a way to just deal with prisoners of war, and then eventually, generations down, they'd get integrated into the system and the serfdom thing would go away, and it never did. It just got locked into place. Because, you know, you're you're a lord, you own a chunk of land, there's all these, there's all this free labor. You're not gonna happily and willingly give it up. And so, in a way, they kind of got corrupted. And you're right, eventually the Arabs even created private property, and the the peasant system was abandoned during the Abbasid period. Because when the Arabs invent invaded Roman and Persian territory, they had a peasant system in the Roman and Persian thing, and then they had a serfdom system in the Persian system. Actually, the Romans had slaves. And what eventually happened was during the Abbasid period, uh the serfs and the peasants and the slaves, not all the slaves, but some of the slaves were freed, and then they were given the land, and they were given ownership of the land. And that was a revolution that created an agricultural revolution that completely changed the world and created modern agriculture in the process.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:57

Now, you said you you always side with the defenders, so we cited a lot of defenders. Obviously, you referred to Egypt pushing back the Mongols and Angalut. Is it fair to say that's one of the most like impressive and fascinating defending stories in in history? And if so, how how did how did they because I feel very proud as an Egyptian, right? They see these Mongols that kind of just genocided for the whole world and they came to Egypt and here they are, they stopped. Yeah. Is it uh are we do we dramatize as Egyptians, or is it really just kind of such a heroic, massive moment that we did a favor for the whole world?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:30

It was truly epic. Uh not the whole world, Russia suffered because the Mongols went, oh, Egypt's too hard to conquer. Let's go conquer something easy, and they went and conquered Russia and stayed for centuries, right? The Golden Horde was still around in the 1300s, ruling whole chunks of Russia. Um the first two times the Mongols were stopped were Egypt, the Battle of Angeluta, of course, is in Palestine. It was a Mamluk army, so ethnically, it was a mixture of every nation in the region, right? There were Circassians and Turks and Kurds and Persians and Egyptians and Nubians. You name it, like if you could think of a national, there were there were French and Germans because there a lot of the crusaders were actually, when they became prisoners of war, were offered, you can become a Mamluk slave. And that's a you know, that's a good ending for you. And a lot of them went, yeah, sure. And so there were all these blue-eyed blonde guys running around with the Mamluk as well. So it was this multinational force that defeated the Mongols. And then uh a couple of decades, 15 years later, I want to say it was in the 70s. So Angelut was 1260 in the 70s. The Mongols decided to invade Japan and they sent a fleet. And as the fleet was arriving at Kyushu Island, uh a typhoon hit and it sank the Mongol fleet right at as they were hitting the shore. So the Mongols were trying to swim to shore, and the samurai were on the beach killing them as they're coming out of the water. And then uh the next like 10 years later, the Mongols did a second invasion, and just as they were arriving at Kyushu Island, a typhoon hit again, sank the fleet, and the samurai were just on the beach slaughtering the Mongols as they were coming to shore. And those were the first two countries to ever stop the Mongols.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:21

Wow. Now you mentioned the philosophy and religion, some of the pushback on that, right? And I think again, as an as an Egyptian Arab Muslim, obviously we're very fascinated by philosophy from a contribution to science perspective. However, as a kind of when it comes to Islamic history, some of the kind of parts that were linked to philosophy, like in Muhat Azira, these times ended up being very bloody because these kind of debates of whether the Quran is kind of is is is made or is God's word, that kind of the philosophers kind of came up with some of these discussions. And in these discussions ended up in a lot of deaths and killing and people dying. So on one hand, we appreciate how philosophy is enriching, but on the other hand, we worry that once these debates start, they things can that come out of them can become very bloody and dividing. So, how do you balance that?

SPEAKER_01 1:21:17

So, and how I would balance it uh is stop being so arrogant that you think you understand what a super being's will is. Like, I don't understand how a person could be so narcissistic that they they know what a supreme the supreme deity of the universe is planning or thinking or doing. Um so I my default setting is you you can't, nothing that you would reveal through science or philosophy it can contradict the supernatural being. Like I don't understand how it could. Like if I find out that gravity works one way, then that's how gravity works. Like, why would that be a contradiction to this? So I what I where I think people get stuck is my father said X, and that's what I now believe, your father might have been wrong. And and just be open to it and and let's let philosophy go where it should. The contributions of people like Farabi, Ibn Sinah, Ibn al-Haytham to where we are right now are groundchanging. So the most important philosopher, I'm gonna say something really controversial and it'll make people hate me. The most important philosopher of the 20th century was Martin Heidegger. Now, the reason people hate Martin Heidegger is for 11 months he was a card-carrying Nazi. And during that 11 months, he got his professor fired because his professor was Jewish and took his job. So Martin Heidegger was not a good person. He re never fully recanted, he denounced the Nazi Party, said they were a bunch of lying charlatans after 11 months, but he still had fired his uh his professor. And Edmund Husserl was brilliant, his teacher was amazing. Ironically enough, he also had a love affair with a Jewish student of his. Her name was Hannah Arendt. She herself was brilliant, but she had to flee Germany for obvious reasons. So he he's a problematic person. I'm I'm the person that says don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Know what the wrong was and then see what you can get out of it. Heidegger transformed all of philosophy. Whether you hate him or love him, everybody today who does any philosophy is a Heidegger. He he he shifted the way we see the see philosophy. His teacher, Husserl, created phenomenology. Husserl got phenomenology in part from the works of Ibn Sina.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:51

So what's phenomenology?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:52

Okay, so how long do we have? I'll try to do the nutshell version. So I experience reality. So, for example, right now I'm experiencing this table by touching it. I can see this table. If I pick this cup up and set it down, I can hear this table, right? Uh my senses tell me there is a, and if I bang into it, I'll feel pain. Like my senses tell me there is a there's a table here. And so this was an interesting question that Socrates had. Like, what is the true nature of reality? And what Plato concludes is that there are three layers of reality that we interact with: the ideal, the idios, the form, and then what's in our head, and then the thing. And he says the perfect form is that there's a plane of existence called the idios, and that's where everything is perfect. When it comes into our head as an idea, it's imperfect, but it's inspired by like our mind reaches up and pulls the thing into our head, and then when we make it, it's this imperfect table. So there was a perfect form, a copy of it, and then a copy of a copy. Soc uh Aristotle comes along and goes, This is insane. What is this guy talking about? This table is a collection of essences. It's essence of wood, it's essence of uh whatever they did to do the stain, the oh, it's essence of particle board, right? It's it's essence of veneer, it's it's got 90 degree angles on it in places. Essence of brown. There's all these things that we put together, essence of rectangle. And when you put those different essences together, you make this table. Ibn Sinak came along and went, that's interesting because this table has a scratch mark there and another scratch mark there, and another one there, and it's they've got this thing peeled off here, right? There are these imperfections in this table. When this table came out of the factory, they weren't there. So that means there's a relationship between a thing and time. So Aristotle might be right that this table is a collection of essences, but those essences then get information added to it. And as a result, as you move forward in time, you this table will gain more and more information. Same is true for me. As I get older, I might be putting it in my brain, but that doesn't even matter. I get scars and I get broken bones and I get more moles and I get wrinkles and hair that's turning white and teeth that are falling out, right? There's more and more information being added to me. And when I die, there's even more information because now I'm gonna have all these bacteria decomposing my body, and the the atoms that were in my body are getting scattered. So it'll be even harder to describe me. And so what he realized was the universe is in constantly increasing information. And then he asked a really strange question: what happens if I take the whole universe and run backwards in time? At some point, I reach a point where all of the universe is contained in this point, and that point has enough information that the entire universe can unfold from it.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:09

The Big Bang.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:10

Well, he was a Muslim. But he was a Muslim. 900 years before the Big Bang, he described entropy and singularities, but why not be a Muslim?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:20

But how do you reconcile the Big Bang with uh creation?

SPEAKER_01 1:27:24

So he called it necessary being, and then he said God made necessary being. Done. What's the problem?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:31

So God made the big bang.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:32

Yeah. By the way, that's what the Catholic Churches said too.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:36

Well, we believe that God made the human directly. Okay. So he made the big bang, but then he made the separate human.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:44

I'm not a theologian. You guys figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:49

Lots of great.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:52

By the way, that's what Ghazali said. He said he's a heretic. Well, look what he came up with. This is wrong. And then, of course, Ibn Narush came back and said, no, what What's wrong with this? How does this contradict anything? All it does is it reveals God's plan. And so that's where we get into trouble with interpretation. But then Husserl came along and he he he loved that. And then he he goes into this whole thing about how we experience reality. And then Heidegger built on that. And his dissertation was called On Being and Time. Well, necessary being information increases over time. Like Heidegger's whole understanding of the universe came directly from Ibn Sinath through Husserl. And then he transformed philosophy. In other words, everything is linked together. Aristotle's link to Ibn Sinat is linked to Edmund Husserl, is linked to Martin Heidegger, is linked to this moment and the way the world understands philosophy. And whether anybody likes it or not, that's the reality moving forward. No matter what your religious interpretation, that's the world we live in.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:00

You said you're not a theologist. No. But you're at the his you're at the intersection of history, economics, politics, psychology, philosophy. Why not religion?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:12

Uh because I've discovered over the years that there are too many interpretations, and I don't know how to sort that out. Uh and I so I what I did with myself was I just went, okay, what do I believe? That'll be for me. That's my private thing. And everybody else can figure it out on their own.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:35

Because I think you obviously then the level of knowledge you have about the Muslim and the Arab world. I don't think any Muslim or Arab today has that level of knowledge. And that's why I assume that probably everyone is so curious to know what's in your mind, because at least in my mind, you're like, wow, this guy has like knows us inside out. What was his conclusion?

SPEAKER_01 1:30:03

Well, my conclusion is uh Muslims are good people. That's my conclusion. I by the way, I I think Christians can be good people, Jews can be good people, Buddhists, Hindus, everybody can be a good person. Uh okay, Farabi did something that I thought was really interesting. He asked, and this is this will probably annoy some people too. Uh, he asked the question, how many Muslims, Jews, and Christians are there in the world, right? Because in Islam, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and even Zoroastrians can't have access to heaven. They just, it's harder for them because Islam is the more complete uh answer. And so then he asked the question, well, what about the Buddhists and and the Hindus and the pagans? And what what about them? And then, of course, the he ran into this problem. Well, they didn't choose to be Hindu or Buddhist or pagan, they were born to those religions. And they maybe haven't heard about the Abrahamic religions or Zoroastrianism. So, does that mean God is gonna burn them in hell for all eternity because they had no way of accessing a pathway to the afterlife? And so what he concluded was if if God is all-merciful and all Rahman or Rahim, right? If he's those two things, there's no way he could do that to human beings. So there must be a way for them. And that that's become my philosophy. There everybody must have a pathway to salvation, because I can't believe that God wouldn't would be cruel. Why? Why would an omnipotent being be cruel? Humans are cruel.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:48

And even in our Islamic faith, again, I don't know what what the word in English, but we call it in Arabic Ahlul Fatra, which means which like the literal translation is the people of the time period. I'm sure there is a better translation, which basically says that the people who lived in a time period where they did not receive a message about the single uh God, then it is neither straight heaven nor straight uh nor straight hell. But there's effectively kind of almost like a third way that I don't think there's a consensus on what that uh third way is, whether it is as another test that they undergo on like judgment day or something. But you're absolutely right. There is this is a kind of a big point where I think everyone has consensus that this concept exists, but then kind of what's the treatment of it. I think one of the key points is as we're going through this discussion, there were so many incredible moments in Islamic history a long time ago, right? When these inventions came, etc. However, one of the points you made is that every civilization has an imaginary moment 3,000 years ago, it's trying to go back to. But as Muslims, we would like to believe it's not an imaginary moment, there was a real moment of absolute kind of this golden age that we want to go back to. How do you see that?

SPEAKER_01 1:33:04

I I see that as romanticization. So the you know, the seventh century was a heroic period. It's one of the reasons why I became so fascinated in in Arab and Muslim history was uh so you know, my education was there were Egypt and Sumer, and there was, you know, over the course of a school year, which is Arak now uh there over the course of a school year, maybe we had five days on Egypt and five days on Sumer, and then you know, uh six weeks on the Greeks and six weeks on the Romans, then there's the Dark Ages, and nothing happened apparently because the sun went away, that's why it was dark. And then on the other side of it, Columbus, and the next thing you know, the world is great again, but the dark ages are a thousand years. And you know, I was trying to connect things and trying to figure, and then one day I I was sitting around and going, I don't know anything about the Middle East during the medieval period. I I have really liked I realized it was a big zero. And so I went to the library. I I think I was uh a freshman or a sophomore in college. I went to the library and I checked out a book written by Sir John Baggett Globe Basha.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:24

And uh This is the British person in Jordan.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:27

Yes, the British person who went native, and when the British pulled out of Jordan, he stayed and and fought for Jordan. Uh it was trans-Jordan at the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:37

Um interesting you say that because a lot of times he gets portrayed as an agent. Yeah, who in like in the 1948 kind of did not necessarily pursue the Arab War. So it's interesting that your first way of describing him actually seemed pretty, pretty positive. Is that different views? Are we kind of a bit misinformed about him?

SPEAKER_01 1:34:57

I I he's complicated, I don't know. Because at the end of the day, did he completely abandon his loyalty to the British Empire and white people? I don't know. Because he clearly fell madly head over heels in love with the the Arab world and uh and and so he wrote these really amazing books. Uh there are flaws in it, because every historian has flaws because nobody has perfect knowledge. Um and I read the first one, I don't even remember which one it was, and I was so blown away, I ran back to the library and grabbed another one and read it, and I was blown away. And I think I read like four of his books. And uh some of them were a little redundant, but I didn't care because the stories were so epic. And then that that caused me to sort of re-evaluate how I understood the world. And one of the ways in which I I was forced to re-reevaluate the world was, you know, it the seventh century leads to the creation of this empire that then leads to this Islamic golden age that really starts after the Abbasid Revolution and it completely transforms the world and then gets erased. It's like Europeans took an eraser and went, what? No, that didn't happen. Muslim philosophy? That doesn't wasn't a real thing. Um, and of course, Muslim philosophy is complicated because in the Islamic Golden Age there were Jews and Christians contributing because it wasn't a religious thing. And you know, we think some people want to say it was Arabs, but there were maybe half the philosophers were actually Persians. It wasn't a nationalist thing either. It was a multinational, multi-religious project that that changed the way we see the world. Ibn al-Haytham did the first scientific method. Ibn al-Haytham is the first guy to do calculus. Ibn al-Haytham said all objects in the universe exert gravity. Ibn al-Haytham said for the first time ever, light has a finite speed. He also said it travels in waves, which is true, but it also travels as a particle, which is also true, which confuses me and makes me very sad. Um, but you know, like he they they were they were doing psychology before Freud. They were they were doing sociology. Ibn Khaldun is the guy who created the uh the modern way we look at history. Uh he's the guy who created sociology. When you think of the contributions that came after the seventh century, you you can't help but then go, okay, there must have been something in this that event in the seventh century that led the the it's like Ibn Sinna, there's there was enough information in that moment that it led to this moment over here. And of course, that's the way all history is, that there's an event that takes place, and then something, there's a consequence that can be hundreds, maybe thousands of years later, and we're we're we're experiencing that. And it so it was this brilliant, vibrant moment. And one of the things I think people do that that's I I think is a mistake is they over-idealize the people in that moment. One of the reasons why I was so attracted to the seventh century is here's this moment of revelation. And then all these different people are trying to figure out what to do in that moment. And they're flawed, normal human beings who then rise up above and do something extraordinary. They weren't perfect human beings that did something extraordinary, and that's to me the amazing thing about the story is that they were they were normal human beings who did something extraordinary.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:28

You described it as the Habbasid revolution. Yeah. Now we study it as a very kind of bloody uh move where they take some of the last Amoites out there and they kind of kill them, and they even put them in like boiling water and they eat on top of their. What was it?

SPEAKER_01 1:38:46

I mean, it was brutal because all political movements like that are brutal. Uh, but it was so there was an argument that I I'm not sure to what extent people understood the argument, but there was an argument taking place culturally and politically within the Arab Empire. And the argument was: are we gonna be like the Romans or are we gonna be like the Persians? And of course, they wanted to be like themselves, but they couldn't help but be influenced by the Romans and the Persians because those two empires had been there for centuries, and those two empires' cultures now were inside that Arab empire. Like there was no way you could ignore those two cultures. And in a weird way, that's what the first fitna is about. Because in reality, obviously the first fitna had nothing to do with this conversation, but the way it rolls out is uh Ali ibn Abi Talib is in Iraq, and uh Muwahuya is in Syria. Well, Syria is Roman, Iraq is Persian.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:45

And so, in a strange way, that conflict is whether the Arab Empire is going to be pointed towards Rome or pointed towards that from an influence perspective, or is that culture with like Roman being a bit more materialistic, Syria being a bit more materialistic at the time, the Umayyads versus Sayyidina Ali being more kind of let's say yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:06

So it's it's both. Um because Muawiyah wins, what ends up happening then is Damesh becomes the capital. And once that happens, it means it's gonna have all this Roman influence. When the Abbasids defeat the Umayyads, um they move the they eventually moved the capital of Baghdad, obviously not right away, because they had to build it first, right? But they eventually moved the capital of Baghdad, and in that moment, then it made it so that the Persians were the influencers. And so, from a political standpoint, it is a brutal event. Um, the Umayyads were tricked, they were told that they were going to be negotiating, and then the next thing you know, they're slaughtered. One of them escapes, he gets to Spain and breaks Spain out of the Arab Empire, and in a way that signals the end of the Arab Empire, right? Because it just slowly breaks up. So the Abbasids from uh from an imperialist standpoint failed. They they they they signal the end of the Arab Empire, but from like a cultural and a philosophical and a scientific standpoint, it's uh it's this incredible period. Modern agriculture, modern medicine, philosophy is taken to a new level, mathematics, right? Al-Khurazmi creates algebra. Like you get the word algorithm was the Roman attempt to say Al-Khorazmi, because Khhorazmi created the world's first ever algorithm. And so, right, like that's a transformative moment. Creating he created algebra and algorithms, and you think, wow, what an innovation. So the Abbasid period might have started off brutal, but it was clearly uh a golden age. It was a golden period.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:53

Now that's we talked about another slaughter. We talked about so many slaughters so far in in this episode. However, you did say there were a time in the second and the sixth century where kind of wars have ended for some time. I think you even said in the sixth century it seemed at some point like the war has ended forever. The Romans and the Persians had integrated, they were trading together. I think they inter they intermarried even at the kind of at the at the kind of at the Persian emperor uh level, if that's the right kind of word. Do you see hope that we can approach this moment again now where kind of war can end, trade can take over?

SPEAKER_01 1:42:31

So I do. Um what happened with the Romans was, you know, they they in 53 BC, there's the Battle of Carhe. Um it wasn't technically the first time the Romans and the Persians had fought, but the the the Persians that the Romans had fought before were the Siloicids, so they were Greek-ruled Persians. Uh at Carhai, it's the Parthians versus the Romans, so now it's Persian-ruled Persians. Um, that conflict then lasted right up until 628, 629, when the Persians surrendered to the Romans in their last war against each other. But right before that last war broke out, there was an emperor Morikius for the Romans and a Persian emperor Husro II, and they ended up reconciling. Husro actually got in trouble, and Moricius came to his aid, and uh they became so close that Moricius' daughter Mary married Husro II, and they did, they normalized relations. The the conflict that had lasted for you know 600 years just evaporated in a moment. It just took these two guys to become best friends. Um, and then in 602, uh a Roman general named Focus murders Moricus, and that triggers the next war because Chusro wants to avenge the death of his friend. Um, and it's a catastrophe for the Romans and the Persians. So the cycle of history is we we figure something out, the world gets better, and then we get up to here, and then we screw it up.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:08

Why?

SPEAKER_01 1:44:08

And the world goes to crap, and then we fix it again, and then it goes crap. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:15

You said I think you said something before you.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:17

Kierkegaard actually talks about this, the philosopher. He said he he put it in religious terms. He says, We sin, we repent. We sin, we repent. We sin, we repent. But when you think about it, that's the cycle of history, right? We we we're doing something awful, we fix it, we do something awful again, we fix it, we do. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:34

But you said something because you said before leaders are more important than institutions. Yeah. And here you are saying effectively two leaders unilaterally, maybe unilaterally is a big word, but after 600 years of war, two leaders stepped up and said, enough is enough, right? And today we seem, again, maybe maybe I'm naive, but for example, you see some of the Lebanese leadership, right? Stepping up and saying, look, after 50 years of war and etc., enough is enough, right? We just want to kind of build an economy and and prosper. Uh kind of you see, in a way, the Gulf taking that view, right? That we just want to build an economy and prosper and make peace with everyone. So if enough people, and in a way you can also argue that this is the narrative coming out of Syria at the moment, right? When the Syrian leadership says, we've been 15 years in civil war, we're completely kind of really consumed by war. At this point, want to build our economy. So if you have enough people stepping up and saying, we want to focus on the economy and build it, we're consumed by war, we've had enough, we've tried that route so many times. If you have enough of these leaders, do you see enough momentum to then get to this kind of end of end of war? Not end of a single war, but a more sustainable end of war.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:56

So for that to happen, there needs to be that on the other side. And uh I don't see it on the other side.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:04

On the religion point, you said before no religion was ever practiced correctly. Now, some people who are uh religious kind of say they like this argument because it kind of almost segregates any kind of wrongdoing to be on the people, not on the religion, and protects the religion. Some other people, their challenge with this is okay, if the religion was never practiced correctly, what's this message that is sent to people that but could never be practiced correctly? What's the point then? Because the message is sent to be practiced. So if the message was never practiced correctly, what does this say about the message itself?

SPEAKER_01 1:46:43

I think the problem is human beings are flawed. And okay, I'll give you an example. So there was a fun study. And what the study was is they took college students who were in the physical sciences, and they showed them a video of two objects falling, and they made one obviously heavier than the other, and they had the heavier one hit first. Then they showed a group of students who were in the social sciences and humanities a video of two objects falling, and they had the one that was obviously heavier, and they had the two objects hit at the same time. Now we all know it's supposed to hit at the same time, but they asked the social science and humanities students what happened, and most of them, like 70% of them, said the heavier object hit first, even though the video shows them hitting at the same time. In the other video, which was doctored to make it so the heavier object hit first, they asked the physical science students, what did you see? And 70% of them said, We saw it hit at the same time. And and right, they're trained to be observers and set up, they're supposed to see what happened, but our brains aren't like that. Our brains aren't linear. We spend most of our time experiencing the world through our beliefs rather than our senses. And it's hard for us to break that down. My experience has been traveling really forces you to stop doing that. And the reason is because you go into a situation making all sorts of assumptions, and then you realize none of these assumptions apply in this moment. And then you slowly, as time goes by, start making fewer assumptions about the situation you're in. Um, I'm sure there are other ways to do this. My point in saying this is we're just all profoundly flawed. And so to expect us as flawed beings to make something like a religion work correctly, I think is is weird. It's not it's a naive assumption. And I think you have to be a narcissist to believe that you could do it, right? I think you have to go into it with humility and say, I am a flawed person. I'm gonna do the best I can.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:03

And is that why you say all ideologies are dump?

SPEAKER_01 1:49:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:08

And I guess that's also why you say you have a problem with fundamentalism.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:11

Yeah. I mean, because the the idea that you anybody has enough information that they could force their beliefs on another person just blows my mind. Like, how? How do you know enough about this situ any situation that you can categorically say, I have the answers? I think you could say, I have the answers for me. This is the way I see the world. But how could you possibly believe, be so confident that you could believe you could enforce it on the rest of the world?

SPEAKER_00 1:49:41

And on that, because we talked a lot about macro and it's been fascinating the history. I want to end with you on the individual person, the human, as as you said, because you also have fascinating pieces on psychology. One of the pieces you make, and this is where everything you said so far is like exciting. Extremely knowledgeable. For me, this way it gets even more complicated for me. So I'll ask you for some explanations. So you said the economic realm has colonized the normative realm.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:13

Sorry, you have to explain this to me.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:15

Okay. So if you were to jump into a time machine and go back to ancient Egypt, I'm doing ancient Egypt on purpose. And you're gonna walk up to a farmer, and that farmer, uh, as you know, his field, right? He's he's out there working Abu Ghardan, is next to him because he's clearly helping. And you walk up to this farmer and you say, uh, what you're doing is economic. That farmer would be confused because that farmer would go, and it's also religious, and it's also uh political. Because in his mind, there's no separation between politics, economics, and religion. They're merged together. He when when he pays his taxes, he's gonna take it to the Egyptian temple. And the priests are gonna take the grain, because you gotta remember there's no coins. Egypt didn't get currency until the rest of the world did, which was just 2,600 years ago. Egypt was 4,000 years old by that time. So the currency that they used was barter. They traded. So you bring your grain to the, if you're a farmer, you bring your grain to the temple, and that's your taxes. The temple stores that grain to use it for projects like construction projects, like building pyramids, or in the event of a famine, so that it it becomes the way that the government can mobilize the people. So who's the top priest? Pharaoh. Who's the top leadership leader, political leader? Pharaoh. Who's the top economic leader, right? So everything's merged together. United States comes along, and the United States says, well, they're not the first to do secularism. Uh, Northern Europe is. When the Protestant Reformation happens, the Protestant states go, that's it. Religion is out of the government. Not because they were true seculars, it's that they didn't want religion interfering with their political decisions. So they're separating it to get priests out of the system, to get ministers out of the system. Um, United States comes along and says, we're gonna take secularism and we're gonna apply it even to economics. So we're gonna take religion out of the government, we're gonna take the government out of economics. And so we made it so there were three different realms in which you operated in. And we we unleashed the economic system. We let it go the direction it wanted to. What happened then is the economic system came back to the normative realm where religion is, where morals are, where ethics is, where philosophy is, where art is. And it came back to the political realm, which is the steering mechanism, the government, the institutions. And the way it came back in the case of Europe and the United States is campaign finance. So if I'm a businessman, I can send money to a politician. Now that politician's obligated to vote in ways that please me, because if that politician doesn't, in two years when they're running for re-election, I'm sending that same amount of money to his opponents. Right? So all of a sudden now, instead of the political system driving the economy, the economy is telling the political system what to do. When it comes to the normative realm, it's even more sinister. The economic system through advertising changes the way we see the world. So, for example, my favorite example is Coca-Cola and Santa Claus. So in Christianity, Easter is the big sermon, the big holiday, because Jesus is executed on Friday and on Sunday he comes back to life. And Christmas, it's important, but it's the birthday. Everybody's born. I mean, now obviously not everybody is through Immaculate Conception, but still, it's that's not a big miracle. I mean, it is a miracle, but it's not the big miracle. The big miracle is coming back from the dead. Well, Coca-Cola advertisers went, people buy our product in the summer, we want to sell it in the winter. They went, Coca-Cola went to the advertisers and told them, how do we get these the sales up in the winter? And they came back and they said, we'll make you an ad campaign. And they they they basically redid St. Nicholas as Santa Claus. And the the way they did it was they merged him with the story of Chris Kringle. They made him, they changed his colors because St. Nicholas was usually portrayed as a with green and brown clothing.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:46

Um that's why the original Santa Claus, you have some of the green and brown as the alternative. Wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:53

And he's frequently portrayed as a younger man. They made him older so they could make his skin pink and his hair white. They put him in a red and white uniform because that's what Coca-Cola colors are. And they made him heavy set because that way he's jolly and happy. And then uh they they would they would show him drinking Coca-Cola. And so, like if you in the wintertime in the United States, Santa Claus is on Coca-Cola cans because they they they reconstructed him. And then a whole series of stories come about to keep enforcing this, to keep driving people to drink Coca-Cola in the winter. Eventually, it leads to reindeer. Christmas trees were a separate thing, they already existed. But the the way uh gifts were done was you would get like a piece of candy or a piece of coal in a stocking that you hung over the fireplace. If you were good or bad, now all of a sudden there's presents coming underneath a Christmas tree. And like the whole system, the economy is changed, but the way we see Christianity is changed because now all of a sudden Christmas is the centerpiece of Christianity, and Easter has sort of lost its importance at some level. I mean, clearly, not completely, but still it's eroded. And so the religion was changed. They didn't just change the culture, they changed the way people interact. And then, of course, part of the religion has become going to the store and buying super expensive gifts that people use once or twice and putting it underneath at Christmas. What does that have to do with any religion? That's that's just capitalism. That's not religion. And and then people who weren't Christian felt the need to start coming up with something to push back against it. So Hanukkah was an you know it's an important Jewish holiday, but never something that you made a big deal out of. You celebrated it just like you celebrated any other holiday. But to compete, the Jewish population then began to promote Hanukkah as like the alternative. Wow. And then, you know, Kwanzaa comes about, and there's so there's all these things to try to sort of push back against it. So it's even changing other religions. And then, you know, you go to a Muslim country and you see Christmas trees, and you see, and and by the time it's here, it has nothing to do with Christianity anymore because Coca-Cola already divorced it from Christianity. It's this new thing. It's it we it's there's a new religion, it's called capitalism. And that Santa Claus is the saint of capitalism.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:26

This is so fascinating. This is so fascinating. I thought we were moving to that. We're coming back. And sorry, I I I just you have so many fascinating stories. I can't, I have four to go back. I have to ask you about this the pharaohs, the Egyptians, not having a currency coin until the rest of the world uh brought it. Now, we, and I say we as an Egyptian taking pride in Egyptian history, we've developed everything. We found we found God even before the world found it, we found everything. Why is it that currency coin is the one thing we didn't find?

SPEAKER_01 1:57:54

Yeah, it's interesting. It's actually really strange because Egypt was really slow to adopt currency even after the rest of the world got it. So I'm around 650 BC, the it looks like this is this is the best story we that we have right now. The Ionian Greeks, so the colonies in Militos, Ephesus, that area, uh, so it's in what is today Turkey, took Electrum, which was a mixture of gold and silver, and they made these really tiny coins that were basically half ovals, uh, half half spheres. Um, and they did it but with a press. They just, so that it would be roughly the same size, but they were tiny. So I guess you would just sort of keep them in a bag. I would have lost them all the time. It's a mess. I don't know why they made them so small. Um, and then eventually a next door kingdom called the Kingdom of Lydia figured out a way to separate silver from gold because they didn't know how to do it. And when they did that, that made Lydia fantastically wealthy because now you could have silver coins and gold coins, and then in that moment, uh right, you knew the true value of the coin because when it was electrum, you didn't know how much silver was in it, you didn't know how much gold was in it. And and now that by the time the Lydians had done that, that was about 5 uh 80-ish, somewhere around there, 580 BC. Egypt uh didn't really start doing coins until the Ptolemies, which would be after 300 BC. So even after the a whole portion of the Mediterranean was using coins, Egypt was really slow to adopt them. I'm not sure why Egypt didn't do it. Other my if I were forced to guess, I my answer would be that Egypt didn't have that kind of market attitude. Um, you know, like the greatest sin in ancient Egypt was letting somebody go thirsty or hungry. It was more communal. It was very communal. And the, you know, when the when the Romans conquered Egypt, it drove them nuts because Egypt had like a social network. If somebody got in trouble, everybody in the community took care of them. There was no concept of private property ownership, right? I mean, you had private property like your jewelry, but the this idea that somehow I could deed off a chunk of land and buy it and sell it was was weird to the Egyptians. Um, and then also to make things interesting, uh, women were nearly equal in every respect in ancient Egypt. They owned businesses, they were there were you know, somewhere between five and ten percent of the pharaoh were women. Um the only the only thing that women couldn't do is become like a high priest.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:40

Uh, and so that that also I think played a role in the how fast Egypt developed, but it but then again it doesn't explain anything with the coins, I just don't know what you know, Inja, saying ancient Egyptian was communal is so fascinating to hear because you know, as Egyptians, we're sometimes forced into this like pathetic debate of having to choose between our pharaonic identity and our Muslim identity and Arab identity. And now when we when you actually hear that at the core of this pharaonic and ancient Egyptian identity was a very communal core, which is the exact same core of the Islamic and Arab culture, we kind of almost stop having to choose between these differences.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:18

You don't choose. Why would you choose?

SPEAKER_00 2:01:21

But unfortunately, you see, you see, like sometimes in in Egypt, kind of you have these openings of the Grand Egyptian Museum or movement of the monuments, and it's a moment of massive pride for Egyptians. And always someone trying to spoil this moment by no, but you know, these these these these pharaohs, they were this and they were that. And and the other way around, right? You see moments of massive Arab pride in Egypt, and then someone always trying to spoil it by no, no, this was uh again, what's this was these were the invaders. It's always this kind of, I don't know why. Yeah, it's almost like this, we're in this mutually exclusive. And you have some work, I think, on rhetoric and identity, because we always have this like mutually exclusive game, which is which is like so pathetic.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:03

I mean, it's a complicated situation. If you think there was some ideal past that you need to get back to, but if you realize that every moment in human history is just another flawed one, then I think you just embrace it all. There were okay, there were here's here's a weird moment that I think is really uh maybe it I don't know. It's what popped into my head when we were having this conversation. So it the 18th dynasty Farao, they're the ones who made the Valley of the Kings. And then of course the 19th and 20th dynasty kept burying there as well. So there's three dynasties in the Valley of the Kings. And uh the tombs all got busted into and robbed except Tujun Khamun's tomb, which people had just forgotten about him because he was so unimportant. Which then makes Unimportant. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:54

I thought he's like uh he's so important.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:56

Or is it just because we found his It's because we found his tomb intact because people forgot about him because he was so unimportant. Wow. If he had been important, he would have been plundered because everybody would have known about him and they would have known about his tomb.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:08

If this is unimportant, how did the important look like?

SPEAKER_01 2:03:11

Ah, that breaks my mind. But his tomb is tiny. Like you go, like you go to Tohutmus the Al-Talet, Tohutmus III's tomb, and you're just going down and down and down, and you think, this is a work of monumental engineering, this one tomb. Uh and then you go to Tutan Khamun's tomb and you're like, it's just two rooms. This poor kid, like nobody even cared about him. They barely even made him a tomb. Um, and then you wonder how much gold did they put in Tohut Moses' tomb if they put this much in Totan Khamun's tomb? And then Totan Khamun, of course, is also he he not only did he die young and barely do anything, um, but he was in a moment of transition because Akhnaton, Amenhotep IV, who became Akhnaton, changed the religion to a uh monotheistic religion, they were switching it back. So Tutan Khamun's name was originally Tut'Ang Aten, but they brought back the god Amun, so he became Tutankh Amun, uh, because he's in that transition. So um we just assumed archaeologists, everybody just assumed historians, that when the grave robbers plundered the tombs, they destroyed the mummies because the mummies were gone. And about 200 years ago, there was a farmer in the desert. So there's really fertile material in the desert. So Egyptian farmers go into the desert and they they they pull out high phosphorus materials and then they bring it back to put it in the farm field. And this farmer's out there digging, and he digs into a cave, and he looks down into the cave, and he's like, Wow, this is really interesting. So uh he goes back and he gets uh torches and a rope and he lowers himself down into the cave. He found the mummies.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:07

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 2:05:07

There were dozens of mummies. Somebody had actually gone through the Valley of the Kings, pulled all the mummies out, and hid them because they were worried the grave robbers were gonna desecrate the bodies. And they hid them in this cave, and this guy finds them. So it's still the Ottoman Empire. Well, it's really uh Muhammad Ali's version of the Ottoman Empire. So is it is Egypt independent or is it still part of the Ottoman Empire? It's like in that fuzzy space, but you know, they're technically Ottoman. So these Turkish soldiers come to get the photo to take them to a safe place because they obviously can't stay in this cave anymore. And they when they do they they pull them out on carriages one at a time. Thousands of Egyptians came out and they watched as these photo were taken by. And of course they they start to uh do the joy cry, but also they burst into tears because they felt this several thousand-year-old connection, like it's 3,000, 300-year-old connection to these people, and they knew they were part of this and that there was no separation between the two.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:29

And that's that's the way I think people need to be connected to history. It's not a this or that, it's a this and that, and there's no getting around it. It's it's the same problem Mexicans have. Are they Aztec or are they Spanish? And the answer is they're Aztecs with a little bit of Spanish. The Egyptians are the same. Are they Egyptian or are they Arab? They speak Arabic, so they're Arab, but they're also Egyptian. That does that doesn't delete their Egyptianness. There's they're both fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:02

We talk so much about history, about the presence. I want to end with you on the future. Why would you do that? You've written on Gen Z. How do you see the future generation coming out of all of this? They're kind of owning less, so they're pushing back on some of the capitalistic things we talked about. They're trying to free themselves a little bit, focus more on experiences. What else do you see them doing? And then with Gen Alpha after that, where do you see them heading?

SPEAKER_01 2:07:35

So, my experience with them in the classroom, you know, I started teaching Gen X, then pretty quickly got millennials, and then I ended up on Gen Z. Uh, soon I guess Alpha will be in the picture. Um, my experience has been that Gen Z doesn't believe the lies very easily. They're really skeptical, more skeptical than millennials and and Gen X. There's a population of Gen Z that are totally drinking the Kool-Aid and they've totally bought into lies. But the my sense of it is that the majority don't. They think their parents and their grandparents are, you know, not exactly on the level with them, and they feel like they've been cut out and they're not wrong. And uh as a result, through that skepticism, I actually find a glimmer of hope because it's it's my belief that they will be the guys who rally and figure out how to fix Europe and the United States at least. I don't know about the rest of the world. Um, you know, there are parts of the world that don't really need much fixing, uh, and there are parts of the world that need huge amounts of fixing. And I think right now, especially the United States, needs fixing. There are parts of Europe that definitely do. Um, but you know, Ireland is is is doing great. They don't, they're they're they've gone through a lot of soul searching already. Canada is doing great. The United States is a disaster, it's a basket case. And if somebody doesn't, and by somebody I mean a group of people, not one person, if if a group of people don't start to figure out how to move the United States in a different direction, I don't see how this ends well. Um, you know, the blue states like California and New York are holding on to their secular identities. Places like Texas are theocratic. They they are ruled by Christian fundamentalists who are shoving their version of Christianity down everybody's throat. And uh it's uh a disaster. And how can you be divided like that and be a single state? Um, so my my my hope rests on Gen Z figuring this out. Because if if they don't, I don't know how this works. And especially because, you know, my I'm Gen X, and we got bottlenecked because the boomers didn't have many kids. So the boomers are this big generation, then there's Gen Z in the middle, and it's like the squeeze generation, then there's this big millennial and sorry, Gen Xen X in the middle. Yeah. What's interesting about it is when you look at it, it's like an X then. And the reason we got named X is because we were an unknown variable, and the assumption was that at some point we would do something interesting, and our name would get changed, and it's never been changed. So we're gonna die as an unknown variable because we never did anything worth doing, worth noting. So Gen Z needs to do something so that they get rid of that Z. But uh, like the millennials did, right? They were Gen Y and they they didn't do anything, but they got named Millennials. Um, the reason I'm bringing this up is, you know, Gen X got squeezed out of power by the Boomers because the boomers all thought they were gonna live forever. So instead of cultivating the leadership for the next generation that they made too small, they they they held on to power for too long and they became a they became a bunch of octogenarians still in their position instead of retiring and letting Gen X move into positions of power. So my generation's been skipped. The problem is because the boomers didn't train Gen X to take over, and they're just dying without that, then there's nobody to train the millennials to take over because Gen X never had that power and didn't understand, they were never apprenticed. So one of the things that needs to happen is we need to get back into a world where each generation teaches the next generation and doesn't leave them to be raised on their own like wild animals, like even animals train their children. Uh and and I don't know how what happened to the boomers that they thought like this. I think they got too narcissistic and ended up with too much affluenza and they just sort of abandoned the world. That obviously isn't going to apply to the to much of the rest of the world. I think that's very much a US and maybe to a lesser degree a European problem. Um, but you know, Japan and Korea are in serious trouble right now, so maybe they got affected by this too.

unknown 2:11:57

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:57

Roy, that takes us full circle. Back to where we started. We started at 13 at this incredible soul finding journey in which you've built this incredible amount of knowledge about history, economy, psychology, geopolitics, everything really. And I think today was just a glimpse of the incredible amount of and fascinating stories and insights you you bring, which are gonna take us a whole series to cover there. And I can't wait for you to be back. If we end with someone who wants to start that soul-finding journey on a personal level, hoping to reach the level of tolerance and acceptance and multiculture and co-living that you've reached, what's one practical thing you think someone listening to us today can do to start on that journey?

SPEAKER_01 2:12:48

Uh travel. Travel. Travel is the great educator. Like if you're in college, take a semester off and travel. One of the things that's beautiful and wonderful about living in the UAE is you almost don't have to travel because you're constantly running into other cultures. You know, you go to the, you go to the hospital and there's a Filipina nurse and there's a Romanian doctor, and you know, like there's all these different people constantly interacting with each other. And and so whether you like it or not, you're in this diverse multicultural society that works together really well. Uh I that's it's one of the things that really attracted me to the UAE was, you know, Emirati culture is welcoming and it's accepting, and it's it's it's opened up this door and it's brought all these different people in. And there's virtually no crime. Everybody works together. There's this sense of community, even in the crisis that we've just been going through, there's this profound sense of community. Like, you know, we we hunkered down and and and just powered through it. And I think if we could make that kind of thing be more global, like more countries had that feeling, I think that would be profound. I think the UAE, in a way, is this like beacon. But you don't have to come to UAE to do this. You could just travel. Just pack up. And by packing up and traveling, I don't mean if you're in the United States, you go to Canada, although I love Canada. This isn't me bashing Canada. I mean you need to go to like Botswana, you need to go to Egypt, you need to go to Brazil, you need to go to a place that takes you out of your comfort zone, you need to go to Thailand or something, right? Vietnam, go to Indonesia, go to a place that will make you think, it'll make you question your assumptions. And then it'll make you also see that the other people are just people. There's nothing, like I can't understand. I'll give you an example. I was talking to a friend, this is like, I don't know, 20 years ago now, and she said, I hate Sudan. And I went, What? No, you mean I hate the government of Sudan? Maybe that's true. How can you hate a whole country? The Sudanese are just wonderful people trying to make the best out of the circumstances they're in. And she went, Oh my God, you're right. But like it didn't, we we get into this pattern of we we put things in categories and boxes and we put boundaries around them, break those, get rid of those stupid boxes. And and I think that's the thing you could do to get on that journey.

SPEAKER_00 2:15:22

Indeed, we're all grateful to be living in this uh bacon of hope in the UE. Dr. Roy, thank you so much for this incredible masterpiece of storytelling, history, stories, uh, economics. I've personally taken the biggest crash course I've taken in my life in this time with you, and I'm really hopeful it's one of many to come.

SPEAKER_01 2:15:43

Inshallah. Thank you so much. Thank you.

unknown 2:15:46

Thank you.