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

"

(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 hypocoherence–

Joe — What does that mean, "hypocoherence"?

Jones —

"