I'm missing bits because fucking SoundCloud puts an ad for themselves as soon as you play pause. Fuck them.

As a summary:

– The things that make a civilization collapse are often the same as its strength.

— The collapse happens very fast because of the fragility created by pushing the strengths to the maximum.

— Civilizations tends to accelerate when they reach a crisis, accelerate decision making, accelerate building things, that creates their apogee, followed by the immediate collapse.

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(30s advertising and introduction)

Interviewer – How (Joe Washington) do you feel about the future of our civilization?

Joe — Tracy, it just all looks so bleek, everything is so depressing, it seems like all of the things that we took for granted - political norms - down the drain

Tracy — I know you have an interest in Guatamala - your mum. The Maya civilization is famous for its collapse. Let's connect it to today. An Indiana Jones-kind researcher described Westerans as guys in a tent drinking Scotch and reading philosophy books. And here he is:

Jones (the Indiana Jones - couldn't get his name) – When you live in the jungle under a tent, you need some Scotch. You can't access with riverboat.

Tracy – What makes civilizations collapse?

Jones – The patterns are often the same. Often the strength are the same things that bring it down. Things fall apart little by little, but the apogee is often the collapse: The collapse looks really good from monuments and stuff. From the way they collapse, you can often see what went wrong and how it was structured.

Joe — Examples of an aspect that made it ?

Jones — Both Maya and Angkor in Cambodia: Those civilizations aren't supposed to survive in rainforest because of soils and stuff; Their successful secrets were to adapt their cities to the tropical forests, mimic the diversity, various field systems, be spread out, so it had to be decentralized. And it was great but when it got too successful, built up, population grew, put a strain on the environment, switched to our kind of economy: Long distance exchanges, overproduction in each area followed by exchanges on a market just like capitalism, and once it took hold, the Maya area weren't competitive, they moved to the coast. In the Maya the religion/kings/ceremonies is the head, and anything that goes wrong is their fault. The rainforest made them vulnerable.

Tracy – When nearing collapse, what patterns emerged? Trump? Judgements on the elites?

Jones — Yeah but those are usually reactions to an ongoing collapse. But the problem is leaders do more of what they do. They double or triple down on the existing order and it's almost always counterproductive. In the Maya things weren't going well so you had to build more temples, make the gods more happy, so you take more from the environment and things go down. You see that in business, technology and the politics.

Sponsor break.

Joe — So you see that in business. Give us some examples from business schools.

Jones — Short-term thinking. You really see that from CEOs. The shorter cycle on which they're judged, fast reactions, fast solutions, like politicians: We've got to slow down, it takes more than 4 or 8 years to build back up. The accelerating pattern looks like an apogee, but it's a bubble like in the hi tech, the e-bubble, real estate, it's a good example of intensifying something that has been successful but actually begins to undermining the system. Once you start studying that you look back at things like the Renaissance: It was a collapse! It ended in disaster as in the Golden Age of Greece. When people look at that they don't see that. That's because of leadership/problems: you start to think of shorter and shorter solutions.

Tracy — Euphoria, market bubbles: Is there a particular thing, a tipping point towards the collapse?

Jones — Not really, not all of the collapse have the kind of pattern of apogee pattern. But you do see the pattern of intensification, the pattern of shorter-time thinking, faster and faster decisions. You also study non-collapses: Sometimes there's a near-collapse, they change something, they have a big recession then they go on. So you also get to study why there was a collapse in one situation and not the other. For our civ, I would take the hypercoherence–

Joe — What does that mean, "hypercoherence"?

Jones — Well it's one of our great strengths: It's the integration of the society, leading to better decision-making, leading to great wealth. We're probably the most hypercoherent: the satellites, Amazon, etc. BUT if there's a problem with one part of the system, it brings down the full system. It becomes a vulnerability and the response to that, because of business competition, is even more hypercoherence, and more fragility.

Tracy — So the best would be to build some kind of walls/buffers in this system, the opposite of globalization?

Jones — Lots of reasons for not doing that: As societies become more complex, investments become less profitable, system goes from diminishing marginal returns to diminishing returns. The other problem is it costs money to back up the system, cutting down on a degree of hypercoherence, the rules of the Maya state or Renaissance can't get away with those costs, the public wants more wealth, not more backups.

Joe — Some question

Jones — Status war / status rivalery / competitive art in Renaissance: It does generate the magnificence, as Bill Gates says "It's the best times to be alive" – That's more and more expenditure, leaders competing with other leaders, CEOs but also countries, and that keeps making everyone more and more fragile.

Tracy — So when Trump says we should increase defense spendings...

Jones — People treat it more as a symptom than a cause. People begin to get more and more dissatisfied. But the problem (with renewing our infrastructure) is that can't be done quickly. It's an entanglement: You depend on a huge system (e.g. the interstate system, the subway, the rail), but you can't maintain it, and people want to extend it.

Joe — How quickly can it all collapse?

Jones — Very quickly. With more time I could make your listeners weep. The Maya civilization was most spectacular at around 790 and by 810 it was just in pieces. It ramps up just slowly then that reaches a critical point and –.

+ conclusion about Scotch.

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