Badlands Media - Space Revolution Ep. 18: Technology in History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but it Sure Does Rhyme - Pt 2

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Cohost Matt Trump finally makes it on the mic after last week's traffic detour, and the wait was worth it. He brings a giant lens: humanity over millennia, with Johan Huizenga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages as the anchor. Lt Gen (Ret.) Steven L. Kwast riffs alongside him. The framing is unforgettable. Matt calls our current moment the return of the future. In the 1960s, with Apollo and Star Trek, humanity was thinking in millennia. Then we pulled in the sails. Under Trump and Musk, we are unfurling them again. The deep-dive walks through the Portuguese caravel breakthrough that opened the New World, why it took a century of violence and printing presses and reformations before things matured, and why our space era follows the same pattern at vastly higher speed. Along the way: why globalism became a Pandora's box, why nations and families are the structures we cannot skip past, why Ming dynasty politics destroyed their own 600 year naval head start, and why young engineers raised on the internet are turning hundred year timelines into hundred day ones. Build with the right moral compass, then full speed ahead.

The badlands, one of the badlands, explain those badlands. That's a hell of a name. If you are not moving forward and exploring and learning and discovering, you are falling backwards. We want peace, and we want a future that trends with less violence. Welcome everybody to Space Revolution. Today is episode 18. Technology and history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. the lessons of history that help us understand what we should do going forward in the future.

And my co-host is Matt Trump. Matt, welcome to the team. Glad to be here. Glad to be here, General Cross. It's my pleasure. Yeah, this is really fun. I've been looking forward to this and learning from you. And, you know, ultimately this comes down to kind of framing the issue.

If our goal is to have a more peaceful, prosperous, and healthy future where we are kind to much. Mother Earth and kind to Mother Nature. The use of these technologies is essential to drive them to that in-state. And you can only do that if you understand history and how history repeats itself with new technologies coming on board based on human nature and human nature never changes. So the study of history is essential to responsibly manage this powerful technology into the future for the benefit of all mankind. And so we have a, you know, a man who has spent his whole life understanding history, human nature, technology. And Matt, over to you to kind of tee us off. And then

we'll have a conversation and we'll take a look at all of your comments there in the chat for questions that we want to apply and I'll interrupt with those questions as appropriate. So thank you very much, Matt. It's over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, you know, when you came on to the Badlands Network and then there was an opportunity to be co-host, which I didn't know about that until all of a sudden there was a spreadsheet in the telegram chat. I said, well, I want to sign up for that. I definitely want to be on.

And so I did. It was last week's slot, and I waited for it and waited for it weeks and weeks. and I got the pleasure of meeting you at Gart. And then, well, I wasn't able to be on last week because of some technical difficulties, let's say, basically between my two ears, there was a communication problem. But that's the past. And we're going to talk about the future tonight. And the whole concept of the future, among the topics that you have talked about on your show,

you range from, I've noticed, a spectrum of scale in your topics from, from, I don't want to say small, because there's hardly anything that's small about the things that are discussed on this show. But I would say, maybe more narrow in focus, maybe the asteroid mining being an example, which was one of my favorite shows, actually, that you did. And I bought a book, Homeward Book, and I read it because I thought it was a very, very, very fascinating topic, which I'll touch on a little bit tonight, too. But there was also at the other end of the spectrum, maybe the big questions that you have brought up on the show.

And I know that Josh, who is gracious enough to lend me this week, to appear on the show. So thank you, Josh. About the broader scale of history that's at work here. And by history, we don't necessarily mean just the past, but including our ourselves and the future in the context of all of humanity, past, present, and future. And so I thought being this, my first time on the show that I would, I'd go big instead of building up from the small. And then maybe we'd focus more on the smaller things over time, or not, we'll see.

But the idea of this big picture and the thinking about the future, that word future, to me, is a very emotional word that goes to something very primeval in me. And part of it, and it does for a lot of people, of course, maybe everybody listening, but part of that comes definitely from my childhood. And those who have watched my show know that I tend to talk about the past a lot, and then I'll tell, I often bring in my own personal life, because that's the perspective I have to say, well, you know, things used to be different in the past, and I can testify to that from my own lifetime experience

and from people I know, my grandparents, my parents. So one of the things I remember, well, I should mention that you and I are both about the same age, and I think around the same age. I was born in the mid-1960s, but we had, I think it's fair to say we had very different childhood circumstances that I know from your background you talk about having spent your childhood in Africa. That would have been a very exotic thing for me. I had a very sort of standard American Middle Western upbringing, which I thought was, oh, I thought that was so boring to be that. I'm very grateful for the particular upbringing I have. I would have thought the kind of upbringing you had, I would have thought that was the most fascinating thing in the world to have experienced

what you did. Yeah, it's always interesting. You know, the grass is always greener on the other side until you get over there and find out it's artificial turf. Yes. Because there's good and bad with everything. And when you live it, you're always looking over the fence on the other side going, man, I wish I could have that Midwest upbringing.

Yeah. Yeah. Once you get to that perspective of seeing your life through that, you can comfortably. to a lot of peace. Yeah. And I certainly have. And I can't imagine having had anything else than I did have to come out with the background I needed in life that God gave me to have the particular kind of perspective that I

have, which is, yeah, it was pretty standard, you know, the white bread kind of thing that they would, they said back in the day. Yeah. But now I know that I can, I can come from that perspective. I know that. and I can connect to other people through that perspective in a way that maybe I wouldn't have otherwise. And so I'm grateful for that now. And one of the things that I remember very strongly about my own childhood because of when I was born

was that the concept of the future of humanity was a question that was very much on people's minds on the forefront of the public discussion back when I was a child. and maybe for at least for the first 10 years of my life or so, it was, it was something that, that, that was that touched upon all public discourse in some way or another. And of course, of course that was due in no small part to the fact that that was the period of the Apollo program and the height of, the height of the space race and of early space exploration, a term. that almost sort of fell out of usage for a while, the idea that we explore space. But in my childhood, that was not only something

that was on the news. It informed our entire, our politics, our society, religion, in ways that in later years it sort of retreated from that. But the future of humanity was very much one of the things that people thought so much about. And that it was reflected in our art, our television shows. Obviously, those were the years of

of perhaps the most influential science fiction television series of all time, which was the first Star Trek original series, which I remember watching as a child on television during its original run. And I know there's been many sequels to it, but in some sense that it defined the parameters

of a way of discussing about the future through narrative and through art that we've kept up through the years, but it's changed and altered to reflect our own vision of the future. So I just wanted to look at, and I wanted to, in doing this show, is to harken back to that spirit of thinking about the big, not just the big picture, the even bigger picture, which is humanity over the course of not just decades,

not just a human lifetime, but hundreds of years, millennia. and where are we where are we where are we going and and and how will future how will people in the future if there is if we humanity is lucky enough to survive and we that that we how will they see our time yeah and that is that's that's one of the reasons that I brought out the I I thought about the book by high Zinga, the autumn of the middle ages in regard to this topic. Because I think his book is a wonderful look at not just the historical events of the threshold of modernity, if you will, the transition to the Renaissance and modernity, but a look into the psychology of how people thought then. I think it's that you really get a sense of, from his research, of how people, how human beings were different at that time and how how things would then change he doesn't go into the aftermath

of the of the time period he's talking about but there's no shortage of people who have done that so that bigger picture and that's that was the reason I suggested that book so um you know the scale of millennia so yeah I've got some notes here to make sure I come I don't miss some some critical things here so now we're in an era we have been since the 1960s of the era, or from the 1950s, technically, of the era of space exploration. And there's so many parallels to the time of the time or just before the year 1500 and the years after that with the discovery of the new world. So maybe this would be a good point to share some of my images here, because this will

help me stay on track of my thought. So I'm going to share some slides of some images. No, that's not the right one. As you're bringing those up, you know, for all of our listeners, this study where you deeply consider how human nature reacts to new discovery and new technologies, it has played over, you know, as they say, a story as old as time, because it played out with the discovery of fire and it played out with the discovery of, you know, metallurgy and the ability to make tools that were, and then pulleys and levers and the physics. So depending on how you tell

the story, but this is one of those unique slices of research that really give you the rhythm and the tone and the tenor of how history repeats itself in good ways and bad ways, depending on your understanding of yourself and the context within which you live. So Matt, go ahead. Okay. I didn't quite hear the last few words you said there, but I'm I was just saying this book is one example of many historical examples that you can study that show lessons we need to learn about how we have a relationship with technology to make sure we are driving the future. We are building a future that allows humanity to survive and to survive with more prosperity, health, and security than ever before.

Indeed, indeed. I think that's what I, before I before I discussed the slides, I think I wanted to make one extended point about that idea that in my youth I felt things were about the future was that by the way, I thought I'd be sharing the slides now. I can't see it there, let me bring it on stage. Oh, okay, good, all right, good, all right.

Yes. So some of you will recognize what that is. This is sort of an ironic way to start the slides here. This is good. I like it. I thought, let's have a little bit of humor to start off this. But one of the things that that I wanted to say in regard to that period of my childhood and that idea of focusing on the big picture was that people were, people truly believed in the 1960s that it was a, it was. was a time of change on the order of millennia. And there was the development of the consciousness of the of the platonic age, the platonic months of the 26,000 year cycle of earth, that there was,

that there were characteristics of ages on 2,000 years, approximately in length. And that maybe we were on the cusp of a new one. There was the, that was of course, the age of Aquarius idea. that that in that it it and it wasn't in isolation it was connected to so many other things that were happening in the 1960s not just the space x not just space exploration but social change that seemed to be things that were changing that were millennia old um religion it was the time of great change in the catholic church for example with the second phatican council and there was an idea that may we have to we have to take a fresh look at our own religions even in the west maybe and that but also invention new technology and that that everything was was up for grabs going forward but that in the years after that I say that lasted about 10 years into my childhood and then at some point there was sort of a retreat from it the in a part it was because the the space exploration sort of wound down and we we somewhat retreated from that And we purposely tried to make space a more prosaic idea, actually, with the space shuttle.

We're just going to make it a routine thing, make it a normal part of our life and our civilization. And that was at a cost, though, of an idea of the heroism of the earlier era that had spurred this great vision for humanity. And there was this idea, I think, that, you know what, maybe we let ourselves and our vision get too far ahead of ourselves. and we need to concentrate more on the here and now. We've got the year 2000 is going to happen, and things will happen after that, who knows. But for the last couple decades of the 20th century, it seems like we pulled our reins in a little bit on our vision.

And that was reflected in our art and also in our politics to some degree. Oh, yeah. That about, at some point I became nostalgic for that future. I remember thinking, you know, what happened to the future? Yeah. What happened to our vision of that? And then about three or four years ago, I noticed that it was largely because of, well, it was President Trump, but also Elon Musk in the idea of this private space program, which people had been talking about for years. And all of a sudden, it was here.

And it's happening. And it's like, oh, my gosh, it's happening. They're showing it on TV. And people are excited about it in a way they were excited. about the Apollo launches back in the 1960s in a way that it hardly happened since then. And the phrase just popped into my head, the return of the future.

To me, it felt like the future's back. And in the last couple of years, we've had the future back. And this, so to show today, I think I wanted to reflect that kind of concept. But I'm showing you on the screen here, I think it's a little bit of a tongue-and-cheek image. I would I'm

this is of course a typical Burgundian nobleman from the time period of the Johann Huizenga's book the autumn of the middle ages so there's its book

and this is an actual true photograph of a true Burgundian nobleman from the year 1450 and of course I'm joking this is from a science fiction television program that was made in the late 1980s but I wanted to

bring it up because it popped into my head. And this of course is the character Q from Star Trek the next generation. And this is from the pilot episode of the show in fact when he he's a super advanced being, of course, as you know, he can sort of pop in and out of space. He doesn't even need technology. And he essentially puts humanity on trial for for its past. And the image that the that the producers used, the writers used for this was from the looks like something from the high middle ages, which in sort of a judgment about that period, but also to reflect what might be considered a different time

period in humanity. So in talking about this subject today, I couldn't help but think of that. Because of things get reflected in our art. Now, a couple other books, I just wanted to say that I withdrew upon in thinking about this. The world since 15, That was one of my first college textbooks. So I'm going and in the course the year 1500 really marks for anybody who's taking a Western civilization course marks what is usually considered the threshold between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

And one of the things like this is the edition that we used in my college freshman history class. And and so Hizinga's book covers just the decades leading up to this threshold where the, the, you know, oh, the modern era starts in the year 1500 and we move forward from there. But I couldn't help notice the irony that the cover photograph here is of the earth from space. I thought that was, oh, okay. So the next edition, by the way, they retreated to a Renaissance map of the earth. But for a moment, they decided to put the earth from space on the cover, which I thought was nice. Jung's book Aeon, I thought about this, and also Pierre Thier,

de Chardin, the future of man, very controversial character from the 1960s, who was a Jesuit priest. So, oh, there's what I'm talking about. The addition there, they retreated from a space image, and it almost felt like the way we were sort of retreating from space. And that time. So just a few things about the Middle Ages that when we talk about that time period as a reflection of, let's say, you know, we could very easily make the parallel between the very late Middle Ages and the late 20th century, that the decades leading up to the year 1500 were not unlike in a lot of ways the decades leading up to the year 2000 for reasons we can even deepen just from the superficial parallels. But it's important

when we talk about the Middle Ages. I want to emphasize that we keep in mind that our own ideas about the Middle Ages may not be correct and may in fact be divergent from the facts. There's a, I'll just going to throw in a very, a great online essay. I may have to do one of my own shows about this. The Renaissance myth by James Franklin, he's an Australian professor. And I stumbled across this article years ago. And it changed the way I looked at the Middle Ages. And I'll bring this up again too, because I think it goes to this parallels about things rhyming, not repeating, but rhyming.

But what really did happen after the year 1500? But I just want to make the distinction. A lot of people's ideas about the Middle Ages. Sometimes they're thinking of the Dark Ages, which are different. So late antiquity, so the ancient world goes up to around the year 650 or so. The Dark Ages pick up after that, and then the Middle Ages pick up around the year 1000. And the Dark Ages really are what the dark means is not necessarily it was a dark time for humanity. Although you might dark time for the Western world, at least.

But that it was dark in the sense that we don't really have history from them. We don't have a lot of recorded history from that time period. We have accounts from later, but we don't have any direct accounts of history from them. So we sort of had to reconstruct it. And there's been, there's a lot of speculation that perhaps our reconstruction of that time period isn't, isn't so accurate. But that's for a different time. But it's just important to emphasize that we do need to, we do need to make

sure we're talking about the right Middle Ages. People some haven't somehow have the idea that they were primitive. Well, this is something that was made in the Middle Ages. This is the Amiens Cathedral in Northern France, one of many Gothic cathedrals that date from centuries before the Renaissance. That there was such, you know, it was so primitive they could build these stone structures

with stone roofs that towered 100 feet in the air and that still stand today. magnificent things and that they were built over the course of centuries through persistent effort of people at the time who had the leisure who had the leisure as ordinary craftsmen to donate their time to this and so even that alone we you know this is from the middle ages too this is from the around the year 1250 that things got so advanced by the year 1250 or so that the stone roof that was soaring of the air they didn't even need the walls anymore they could pierce the the walls with glass and have this kind of structure.

So we need to keep that in mind. Yeah, there's a great book out there. You know, it's a divergent a little bit, but pillars of the earth that is, you know, chronicles in a story way, this investment you're talking about where there's, and it really goes to your point that there was a sense of people, they were part of a long line of humanity that we're building the future and that you spent your whole life just building that one stained glass window and then you handed it to the next artisan down the way. That mindset of the vastness of history and the future and the dedication to the future where you're a servant to the future is really something we're talking about here

because we are servants of the future and when we forget that like we did between the mid-60s and until just recent, we pay the price. Absolutely. That's a good way of putting it. These people in the Middle Ages were very future-oriented in their own way, not in the way we necessarily would be when we talk about our recent future orientation and their ones today, but in their own way they were. And it's almost incomprehensible what they did at the time.

In fact, some people have a hard time accepting that this was a creation of the human hands of the Middle Ages, and yet we know it was. Now, Hizinga's book, I should mention, if you read it, he's Dutch, and he focuses a lot on the time period in the 15th century, so, you know, around the year 1400 to 1500 of the kingdom of Burgundy, or the duchy of Burgundy. And this is, when we talk about Burgundy, here would be the region sort of historically that you might mean by that. And I think it's, I think it's interesting to point this out. So by the time of the events of the late Middle Ages in the 15th century, it was the Duky of Burgundy,

and it really been subsumed into France for the most part, the kingdom of France. But the nation of Burgundy is a nation that no longer exists. It's essentially, the remnants of it are the low countries, but it had its own language, it had its own identity to some degree. And I think that gives us an additional estrangement from that time in the Middle Ages,

that there was such a prominent nation that really doesn't even exist anymore in Europe. And here's some of the lands of the, of the Duky of Burgundy at the time of the, of, of, uh, of,

of, uh, just to, just to give you an idea of, of the estrangement between then and now is that these, these are Burgundian lands, if you will, and there's a duke of Burgundy and then there's, but the Duke of Burgundy and the Burgundy and lands were,

we're not just the duke of Burgundy. They were, they were, they were the county of Flanders and, and various other small things. that were ruled by counts that were subservient to the Duke and even lands in the Holy Roman Empire. That kind of political arrangement is very foreign to us now. We are much, it took modernity to happen after the year 1500 for us, for humanity, for Europe to

develop a sense of that these are borders between one domain and another. And in the middle, in the middle ages, even going into the Renaissance, there was a much more sort of fluid organic overlap that when we look at historical maps now almost doesn't make sense to us. But again, it emphasizes the distinction between the medieval mind and how medieval people thought about their world and now. And again, this brings up a broader point that I keep coming back to, which is how, what are going to be the things about our time that are going to seem really strange to people in the future, 500 years from now? They're going to look back at a us and go, how could they possibly exist

in that kind of world? Here's another map, just a reference about around the time period of Hizenga's book showing, well, it was during the time when England and France were at war. That's what really destroyed the integrity

of the Duky of Burgundy, is it got caught in the middle between the war between France and England and really didn't survive the hundred years war. Here's a map of some trading routes in the Baltic during the Middle Ages, this was the Hanseatic League.

And the reason I'm pointing this out is just to show you the scope of some of the trade routes in Europe in the high Middle Ages. These were the kind of things you would have had between the cities along the Baltic and Britain. And here, here now is the map.

I'll leave this up for a minute. This is the map that really started off my whole discussion. I could have, maybe should have led with this map to sort of set the tone. I love this map that you're seeing on screen right now. This, this is from, I got this off of Wikipedia. I used to write for Wikipedia substantially back 20 years ago or so. I didn't make this, and I made a lot of maps. I didn't make this map, but I love this map. It's, it's in a Wikipedia article, and the, the article is,

the Volta Dumar, is the, is the title of the Wikipedia article. Volta Dumar. And that's Portuguese for the return of the sea, the turn of the sea. And what you're seeing here is, was a revolution in humanity. This, as much as anything else, is what led to the end of the Middle Ages in the beginning of the Renaissance. And the change, this radical change in the psychology and mindset of the European peoples is what you're seeing on screen right now. So what is this? Well, I'll just go it. Let's see.

Going the wrong way. If you go back to antiquity in the Roman Empire, Rome made a big priority of holding within its empire everything that touched upon the Mediterranean Sea as you see here. So that's in, this is antiquity.

This is Roman Empire at its highest. And you'll notice that it extends outside of the Straits of Gibraltar on the western side and even down a little bit on the coast of Africa. And one of the most fascinating things you think about when we think about antiquity is, why didn't Rome go farther? Why didn't they go farther down the African coast? Why did they only get so far? And the reason is, well, the reason is a lot to do with this map right here is they did try. We know that people did try. The Phoenicians did try in ancient times.

The Romans tried. But the situation is this. And this really determines a lot of history and the way it would flow and the timing of it. Is that going down the coast by the ships of the time, you could go down to about what's now called Cape Bougadour, which is in what is now northern western western Sahara, a very controversial area of the world, which claimed by Morocco and at one time by

Mauritania, but really south of Morocco proper along the coast. And if you went that far, you could get back. But if you went farther than that, you basically couldn't get back. And you were lost. And there were a couple reasons for that. One is that there are a lot of reefs right around right at where the canary islands come out from the coast canary islands being in the news just this past week by the way with the with the with the hauntavirus and the the also the trade winds would then take you right out the sea and with the sales they had at the time you really weren't coming back it's it's quite possible that the romans and phoenicians made it to the new world to the coast of Brazil or the Caribbean.

That's not out of the question. The problem is that they couldn't get back. There was no way to get back as far as we know. Maybe the people did come back. But if anybody did, and this is the key about one of the things about the discovery of the new world, people say, well, you know there was discovery before Columbus people knew. It's like maybe, maybe they did get there. But it didn't become part of the general consciousness of Western civilization.

It took Columbus's voyage for there to be knowledge of the new world that was widespread in public to happen. And that's a key thing. So obviously, I'm sort of, I could have put up a slide here of, say, the Artemis mission trajectory to the moon and said, look, we're sort of at that stage. So what happened in the, around the year 1400, around the time of the events of Hizinga's book, in the very late middle ages is that the Portuguese were able to develop this. Now, if you know, though, I have very limited sailing experience. I grew up in Iowa as a boy, and I went to Boy Scout camp every summer, and I just loved sailing and getting the sailing merit badges.

And we had a boat that had one of these kind of sails. It's a late teen sale. And if you know anything about it, as I learned when I was a boy, is it allows you to sail into the wind. You're not at the mercy of the wind direction as much. You can't sail right into the wind, but you can sail pretty close to, in a beam, very close to the wind. And so you can, and you do a lot of zigzagging to do that, right?

You tack back and forth, but you can get up wind. And so what the Portuguese were able to do around the time of the middle of about 50 years before Columbus, and there's no accident of that, is they discovered, this using their caravals, they discovered this technique. And not only that, they discovered what, what we would come to call. So there's, that's, you know, there's an illustration of using that technique. The North Atlantic gyre. So they essentially discovered without knowing it, a large system of circulation and wind in the North Atlantic.

And so you can see that the current takes. you down off the coast of Africa, the canary current, and then sweeps across the North Atlantic to the Caribbean. And then it only comes back when it circles up around the North American coast and comes back as the Gulf Stream to Europe. And the winds do likewise. The winds do likewise. So you don't just have to float with the current. You don't just have to go in the direction of the wind. But you sort of did before the invention of the late teen sail. So what the Portuguese able to do is they discovered that if you, go out to sea, if you do something contrary to what you would think to do, which is you go far out to sea,

and then you use the trade winds to tack upwards until you can get to the westerlies, and then that can take you back to Europe. And so they started out in these small loops, being able to go and return, much as our space exploration and humanity now is, is like. that to some degree is what we've been in the era is we go a little bit out and we make sure we can get back you know we go a little bit farther out and we make sure we can get back and eventually of course this would lead to much bigger loops we could go all the way down the coast of Africa and come back making a bigger bigger arc each time and along the way they discover the Azores and Madeira

as islands out at sea which which were useful stops and eventually then all the way around the coast of Africa within very short time. It only took a couple decades after the discovery of this technique to be able to use it and exploit it. And of course, this is exactly, you can see the two loops. This is exactly the technique that Columbus would use to go to the new world on four different voyages. Very soon after this technology of the Volta du Mar had been discovered.

So there, and there you see the voyages in the bigger loops out there. there. And this, this as much as anything else, is what led to the end of the Middle Ages and this start of the Renaissance, because it opened up, all of a sudden Europe knew it was part of a much bigger world. And the, and the politics of the Burgundian kingdom perhaps then seemed smaller than they did before. Just as our politics can, it seems smaller. It seems smaller. the farther out we go. And that we, we've had, you know, the famous, I don't know which, which of the astronauts said it. Maybe you do that, you know, there's no, you can't see the borders when you're in space.

Can't see the borders. Yeah. And that, you know, which was, I think people at the time in the 1960s and 70s, really, you know, we took that to heart. It's like, oh, yes, we're all, we're one Earth. And this led to, of course, the proto-environmental movement with the first Earth Day. We just see our planet through that kind of eyes. It was amazingly, amazingly transformative to that.

But it had sort of a dark side that. And this touches upon some of the things you wisely brought up in regard to how we approach the future, which is that, you know, in the 1970s and 80s, that there was this idea that, well, nations, then if we can't see the borders from space, then the future is towards one of of global unity and in shows like Star Trek, that was certainly the future that was pitched to us.

But then that was sort of used to abuse us a little bit for control in the sense that, well, if nations then are outdated, aren't they? And the sooner we get rid of them and go to a global government, the better waft will be. And that was, I think, certainly abused, and I think I'm not the only one who thinks that, to then impose,

to get rid of things before their time, if ever. That is, I think, a big reason why we had to take a pause from that kind of thinking and say, you know what? Nations aren't such a bad thing after all. And Trump's presidency, in a large part, emphasizes nationalism. Yeah. I mean, in fact, at this point, really gets back to the purpose of Badlands and the journey we're on, where something that is good,

meaning this realization that as a human race, we belong to one another, that that can be distorted into a weapon to control people and enslave people. And so as we move into this space revolution and we once again are reminded that we are part of a huge universe to realize that there's a you know the there's a reason why we have individual nation states the variety the spice of life the tower of babel we can go back to and you know the fact that there is strength in diversity of different languages different cultures different foods different ideologies this is the beautiful part of humanity and what God intended. And as we as we start reaching for the stars, literally, and re-reminding ourselves of these things, we don't fall into the same trap because

globalism is truly the trap of we're all one people. And so let's unite. Let's get rid of borders. And it just opened up a Pandora's box of fraud, waste, and abuse and slavery and treachery. So this is one of the great lessons that started here, you know, and in many different ways, led to where we're at now. Yes. And I think it's no accident that the return to the future has happened under Trump's presidency when we've had a return to the idea that nationalism can be very healthy. that we overreacted against nationalism because of events in the 20th century where we were told that that people defending their nationhood and their idea of a nation was a bad thing and led to catastrophic war.

And even that idea was misplaced at the time, but it certainly was abused that way. And so the retreat from the idea that we had to retreat from space a bit, at least pull our furl our sales a bit, if you will, to stabilize our view of what humanity's future needed to be. And that this is, when we're unfurling them again, apparently, right when we've discovered also, there's been a resurgence of nationalities and families.

Personally, as I'm a Christian, and I personally believe that it's part of God's hierarchy, that between individual and God, that part of that is the idea of structures that are hierarchical, of the family being one. And that was certainly one of the things that in the 1960s, there was the idea that maybe we don't need families going forward. Maybe we don't need families. Maybe we don't need nations.

And how awesome it would be when that happens. And let's get there as quickly as possible by removing these structures, family and nationhood. And we've had a re-appreciation of both those structures, I think, in the West that is healthy and has been necessary to create the conditions for a return to an outlook to the future as the big picture. I think that's no accident at all. Yeah.

The other point that, you know, this reminds me of as you look across history, when you pull back the sales, when you literally start attenuating the speed of discovery and exploration, because you're either afraid that you're going to do harm or you're worried about what kind of future is being developed. You're focusing on the wrong thing that God intended us to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth. and in my mind, fill the universe. And to slow down is, again, a distortion of what God created us to be. Explorers, pioneers, mavericks, people who are intellectually curious. We want to know everything about everything and all the time.

And that aggressiveness, it's a positive aggressiveness, is the key to not only survival, but instead of focusing on pulling back the sales because we're going too fast, instead focus on your own morality, your own internal life, your own view of how God has created you to be a good steward of our world and our universe. And then all speed ahead, you know, damn the torpedoes, because if you have the right moral compass, speed is not a problem. It's actually your advantage. Yes, absolutely. I think it's no accident that we've picked up speed again, just as we've discovered traditional structures

that we thought we were past humanity at one point. And I do believe we thought we were past them in the 60s and 70s. That was the thrust of intellectualism, of rationality at that time period, was that the fruit of that 1960s revolution and consciousness is we no longer need these structures, And we discovered, yes, we do. Not only do we need them just to maintain what was. We need them to go forward to the future.

And that without that, when we try to discard them is when we slowed down. And we became mired in the now. And such that, you know, we came upon the year 2000 and everybody, I think if you're old enough, you remember there was more than, oh, the future is happening. There's a sense of what now? What happens now? And what happened now, we were presented with a huge terrorist event that seemed to humble us, make us more fearful. And I remember Vice President Cheney's words in the aftermath of 9-11, which was, well, this is going to be generations of warfare of civilization.

This is the future of civilization for generations to come, is this warfare between these ideologies. And I thought, even at the time, I thought how bleak we have descended from the 1960s in that vision of, of the heroic vision of space that we're, we're doing, we barely go to space. We do so for purely utilitarian reasons. We barely go above the top of the top of the atmosphere. You know, we still had unmanned missions we were sending out. But we, as far as human beings, we were limiting ourselves to, you know, barely keeping above falling to. Earth in orbit, you know, and that and how sad that became. Yet as we've discovered the strength of our, of our tradition or our traditional structures, our sails are filling with wind again.

And that is no accident. But all people have to do is really look at the human body. If you don't move, you die. You know, moving is key. No matter how old you are you are or young you are. If you are too lazy to move, you will die. And back in the day, you know, you would die by being eaten by something that was willing to move faster and more aggressive. But the same is true in geopolitics. And so, you know, when people criticize or are not willing, again, to take the risk to move out, to try new things, to take the risk of failing, but failing forward, failing responsibly, failing in a positive direction. You know, Elon Musk is a good example of that, where when he would blow up a rocket, you know,

everybody would tell me, oh, you know, see the guy's a failure. But I said, no, you don't know what you're looking at. What you're looking at is a guy that discovered what doesn't work faster. Edison said the same thing, you know. I didn't discover the light bulb. I figured out the 5,000 ways it doesn't work. and eventually got to the one that does. This mentality has to be in our psyche as Americans.

And one point on this, the American culture is uniquely postured to dominate this reality, meaning that we are the envy of the rest of the world because we are Mavericks, we are pioneers, we are self-sufficient. We don't want anybody to tell us how to live or what to do. We want our privacy. And so to get back to those roots where, you know, we give power to politicians and we hold them accountable. We have our hands around their necks.

And if they do one thing that's counter to our values that are enshrined in our Constitution, then we get rid of them. We, you know, choke them out in a healthy way, meaning get them out of office. This is why going back to the fundamental of one citizen, one vote, and then the technology that can help us hold these guys accountable and gals accountable. and gals accountable when they make policies that are counter and we throw them out fast, it's so critical. Because if we're going to capture the greatness of the American culture in this space revolution and we're going to dominate technology that can change fate for the good of humanity, we need to shed ourselves of all these things that we're indoctrinated from critical race theory

to wokeism to the relativism, that everything is okay. everybody is just fine. Everybody gets a trophy. That literally dilutes the human spirit. It delutes our survival. And we as a nation are right at that pivotal edge here, where we are either going to win the midterms and President Trump will be able to turn this flywheel

to invent and expose and discover. And then we're off to the races and we will not be caught for another thousand years. Or we lose and we sink back in. to the destructive reality we got to see with the Biden administration. Yes, we are definitely at that pivot point where we've been, we've been, the door is now open to the future as it once existed, the return to the future, the return of the future, I should say. That was the phrase that I kept popping in my head, the return of the future.

And it's open and are we going to go through it or not? Now, we should recognize, I have up and up on the screen. here, a map of, that is another fascinating map, I think, about the events of the, just after around the year 1500, the transition between the Middle Ages and now, and that, and now, the Renaissance, I should say, or the modern era, if you would say, begins in the year 1500. Well, so the Portuguese and the Spanish, by the year 1500, had already ventured out across the Atlantic ocean using the sailing techniques. So the question is, when did England our ancestor as a nation from which gave birth to the United States? When did they start going out? And the answer is

pretty much right away, right after Columbus. It only took until the year 1498 or maybe 1497. I might have that wrong. So they for, you know, Columbus was from Genoa, right? And so there was a different Genoese by the name of Giovanni Cavoto, or John Cabot, as he became anglicized, who shows up at the court of the Tudor court, Henry the 7th. We aren't even at Henry the 8th yet. Henry the 7th. This is really the medieval era in England. And this guy shows up from Venice with a bunch of old maps from lore, from the, you know,

the Vikings, et cetera, and says, you know what, if you pay me, I'll sail for England to the New World. And they and Henry the seventh, the Tudor King father of Henry the eight says go. Okay. Let's do it. So he sails across, even before the year 1500. This was the first venture of now England, the kingdom of England. It wasn't even kingdom of Britain yet across to the new world. And the first place you get to from England going across is Newfoundland. And so they made contact on Newfoundland and set up the first English colony there before the year of 1500. And there were, he made a couple voyages into the St. Lawrence, mouth of the St. Lawrence, which is mouth of the St. Lawrence is really the gateway to, to North America from, from Europe

in a lot of ways, to the interior of the North American continent, which was why it was important to control that. And it eventually becomes a struggle between Britain and France over that. And into the Arctic, into Hudson Bay, and both England, France would begin exploring there. But one of the keys to that I wanted to point out is that that there was a big gap of time

that England founded a colony in Newfoundland but they didn't really start to settle the new world for a hundred years after that. It took a hundred years to pass before England really establishes its first

permanent colonies. James Town was 1607. So you can do the math between 1499. and 1607 and the other English colonies along the coast there that so it took a while for and it took national competition certainly and it took it took patience for people to for things to happen in Europe that would set the conditions for a successful expansion of European civilization across the Atlantic and that it almost it must have been you know, imagine going back in time and living then,

how frustrating one would be from a modern perspective. It's like, you guys, can't you get it going? You know, of course, they needed maybe some improvements in sailing ships, etc. But that was, it took a while. It took 100 years for England to really take hold. So in the meantime, Verrazano sails for France. He's the first to sail on the coast of North America.

That was 1524. We're about, you know, 18 years before Copernica. publishes his works. So the 16th century, the 1500s were a very frustrating and very violent time. It was probably more violent during this time than it was the previous century

because you had more advanced technologies that right when the Volta du Mars being discovered is right when the European firearms are being perfected. So you have new technologies of weapons without the political structures that to constrain them as they might have otherwise. So Verrazano, you've heard that, that's the Verrazano Bridge in New York. He was the first to sail into New York Bay.

And I'm putting this up there in part because I made this map for Wikipedia years ago. And it's still in Wikipedia. And it's one of the ones I'm most proud of. I drew it in Photoshop back then using US government satellite maps and a bunch of primitive tools back in 2004. Yeah, I had a lot of fun doing that kind of thing back then. And soon, though, within just a few decades after that, we have a lot of exploration because once the sailing techniques had been discovered, once people realized you can get back and all this, there was, there was a, there was the scramble to between the European powers to, to the European nations, I should say, to, to claim various parts of it. And, you know, the idea of claiming parts of a new world is sort of so weird to us in a way. It's like, well, why didn't they just claim? the whole thing. It's like, well, there were sort of gentlemanly rules about how you did that, right? And it would seem rather odd to us in a way that they would bother with anything like that.

And of course, there were overlapping ones. And, you know, oh, they, you know, I once got, speaking of Wikipedia, years ago, I got into a big, a big edit war with somebody over California because they, they were, they wanted to make sure that the article reflected that Juan Cabrillo, the Spanish Explorer, only got as far north as San Diego. Diego along the coast and that Drake was the first to to probably set foot on the most of California and that was very important to him for various reasons having to do with with nationality and all this and I thought wow I didn't know anything about that that's a whole new world to me that kind of thinking but it was important to people at the time

but we cannot even mention all this without saying the other big technological revolution that advanced that happened in the middle exactly as the Voltadoom is being discovered, we have the invention of the printing press, which changes everything. That's the, along with the caraville is the big technological, technology revolution that would happen then that would disrupt European civilization. And I say disrupt, because it did have a very disruptive influence in a lot of ways. It, you know, it perhaps the most, you know, we think of the Bible as being, the Gutenberg Bible as being the most influential product of that. the but there was also then euclid's geometry which had been hitherto only passable by by manuscript by hand copying

since it had been written now we can print it out and we can make standardized copies of this and this is probably the number one reason why we would have the scientific revolution is science you know science is not we say science is about discovery it's about hypothesis and proving things and discovering through experiment in theory. Yes, it is. But science is a communication. Science is about communication. Science is a communal effort by humanity sharing knowledge.

There were Archimedes did science, quote, unquote, but the Romans didn't have a scientific revolution. The Greeks, Hintry Greeks didn't have a scientific revolution because they didn't have the means to transmit the knowledge on the wide scale that would be necessary to create a scientific revolution. not until the printing press. But again, it this wouldn't,

it wouldn't really, it took maybe a century after this for the scientific revolution to happen. And so there's no, it's no accident that right around the same time as you have the printing of Euclid's geometry, that you have Columbus. Columbus's voyage.

And we talk about disruption. Well, every, you know, people might remember that this is also the time, right after the year 1500 of the Reformation. and the Protestant Reformation, which would take the unified Christian West and split it apart,

for good or bad, depending on where you are on various things. But Luther, and they say, well, Luther had 95 beefs with the church, right, the 95 feces,

and he nailed them to the door of the cathedral in, in Wittenberg, I think, on October 31st, 1517. Okay. And what do you picture when you picture that? Maybe, you know, he wrote them out by hand and stuck them on the door. No.

The original theses, as far as I read it, he printed them in a printing press. And when I read this, I read, oh, of course, the Protestant Reformation itself was downstream from the creation of the printing press. It was about creating a standardized, standardized Bible. in translation with a standardized commentary about it as well, that without the printing press, you do not have that. And so you have a very hugely disruptive in Europe because of the technology that would, in part, slow down the new world and somewhat a parallel to what we've had in recent years.

We had to work things out. Copernicus, of course, 1542, during the violent chaotic century of the Renaissance. But finally by 1600, things have matured enough. It took a century, over a century, for things to mature enough in European civilization

when we first have the scientific revolution. And this is the printing then of Kepler's de Stella Nova, which how revolutionary it was that there was a new star that had been discovered, the Kepler's supernova, that blew people's mind, that that that, could exist because up till then everybody thought the heavens were static and now you have the you

have the scientific revolution over a century after so many of the events that were pivotal to it's starting it took 100 years and then it happens very quickly yeah it happens all of a sudden with with kepler's work with galileo's work and this is also the same time which you have the serious settlement of the new world finally but with the english and the dutch and here's that's adrian Locke's map of Long Island. So he was a Dutch explorer. A few years after Hudson and his the maps of that time period, I love them so much because you can see the outlines of the area around New York just coming into focus like an image on the internet. You know, right, right. They filled in the parts over the over between 1600 and 1610 and and just how quickly and how exciting that must have been when that was finally unleashed. But it took things working out in Europe. And it is, it's taken things working out here in our time period to resume the space, the heroic endeavor to go into space, I think. Yeah. So this is beautiful because there's two other points that I'll just highlight that are woven into your descriptions of history here that are worth pointing out.

The first is that, you know, back to this theme that technology history doesn't, you know, is not necessarily this, it doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And one of the other factors that I'm reminded of with those maps, all those maps that we saw with lines going from Europe to the new world would have been very different if in 16, in 1400, the Ming Dynasty, who had already figured out sales to do what you showed and had, already built ships that were literally futuristic compared to what Europeans were building. And it was because the political parties were fighting with one another.

And one political party gained power and they burnt the ships to the ground. They literally destroyed 600 years of where China knew everything about what you just described with winds and the ability to sail. and they destroyed their future, but had they not destroyed their future because of politics, they would have been the ones discovering the new world, and we would have had it, we would have a very different world and a very different map now than back then. So this pattern where discovery happens is tied directly to politics and why the people in America have to be in control and not let the politicians cripple our potential as human beings to build the future that we want.

And the second point I'd like to just point out here is in addition to that story about how politics changed fate and destroyed technology that would have been changing all of that. The other difference in our age is we are in the age of acceleration. So what took 100 years, as you pointed out, will take two. years or three years and and our young generation is ready for it i mean they they are growing up on the internet they are growing up on technology and uh you know uh the older you are the more it makes your head spin how quickly turn but i have a group of young engineers i i hire very young engineers because they are creative they are energetic and they think faster uh you know than

than i could ever imagine and uh you know i'll i'll say hey Learn about this and apply it to our suite. And they will do it in literally days when in the 60s or 70s, it would have taken years to do that because they have access to the Internet and artificial intelligence and all these tools to be able to move faster. And they've learned in school all of these platform first principles of engineering and science that make them capable of doing this with the mathematics and the computation required. as their assistance. So when we talk about the fact that history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme,

two lessons that come out of what you've described in this first tranche of what we're going to do for the Badlands listeners on this space revolution to bring it in to clear focus is, one, politics will kill you even if you have the right ideas and the right technology. And two, you better move fast because if you don't move fast, others will, and it'll, it'll, it'll, make you look like you're moving backwards compared to more aggressive civilizations that are willing to move faster. That's the main, you know, one of the main things that are really important to me when I think about how we as an American society need to approach the age we're entering into and this space revolution that's going to cascade technologies upon us like you read about. If we're not ready intellectually and with that spirit of a maverick and a pioneer,

we're going to get caught flat-footed. So Matt, you know, I am looking forward to our next episode where we can kind of take the next step at eating this elephant because, and I hope that our listeners can read some of the chapters and really start absorbing these historical lessons because the more you read and understand this, the more you will look at what's unfolding in our history right in front of us and it'll remind you of these historical things. And you'll remember the traps that killed people, that destroyed the environment, that made the civilization disappear. You'll recognize them immediately. And then you can help be an advocate for policies and politics that avoid those traps, even though they're different technologies,

different journeys happening at a different pace. It is the same human nature just manifesting in a different way that rhymes with the past, but you'll know what to do if you study these histories. Well, thank you so much, Steve. That was so well put. And I do think this is a good place to stop. And we can pick it up to some degree from here. As far as a story, we've reached up to the beginning of the 17th century here. These two images on the screen are almost from the same year. and going forward from here, humanity is definitely in a new era. We're definitely in the modern era of science,

and there's a reason why, and the art begins to drastically change right around this time. And so we could pick it up from there, because it may give us clues to how we're going to look about, how we think about our own time, that I said that one of my most favorite things is in science fiction, say in the television shows like Star Trek, is when they, when they do episodes where they look back on the 20th century, maybe through time travel or some other means,

and they comment on our time. So, you know, that kind of question, which is, what is the future going to be? Because that's so hard. And maybe only visionaries and artists and mystics, they can catch a glimpse of it. We may be able to discern some misty outlines. but we're probably going to be wrong about so many things. But I like the kind of question is, what will they think? What will people in the future, might they think about our time? It looks very primitive to them, but seems very normal to us. So I think this is a good place to stop, and I'd love to continue it at some point.

And I've had such a great time talking to the audience and really, really have enjoyed. And I want this to be multiple chapters in a book where we really get a little deeper into this, because it is so important. And that last chart you had up, 1609, a good place to stop this chapter and then take another chunk of this the next time around. Two years after that is when Galileo, they created the Academy of Sciences in the Vatican, and then Galileo was literally strung up because of his description of what he thought the universe worked like.

And we're doing that right now with quantum. We think we have one, you know, general theory of relativity, and we're finding out it's wrong, and there are people really upset about it. And it's moving at the speed of light, no pun intended. But again, that same pattern is repeating right now. And Matt, I can't wait for you to come back and we'll take the next chapter. And over a series of these, we can really kind of say that we did due diligence. on really looking at a slice of history that is similar to the slice of history we are living now.

So then in 300 or 1,000 years from now, as they write books about us, they say they understood the context of what they were doing, they understood human nature, they understood their own morality, and they guided technology into our age that brought us more peace, prosperity, and health. That's my prayer. And I think we have a fighting chance at doing that if we tell these stories and we have the patience, like they built those great cathedrals. We have the patience to realize we are one small piece of this solution. And we will hand this baton up onto the next generation, those young people that are coming into our companies and our lives. And that we can't rush this.

We have to tell the story. We have to take the time to learn this and understand it. because if we rush this knowledge, this learning, we'll miss the deep points that save us from ourselves. So thank you, Matt. You have a great evening, and I will see you on the next show. I'll schedule you in the near future here, and we'll just fold it in, and it'll be part three.

It will be my pleasure. Thank you so much. Have a good night, everybody. And thanks for listening, and I'll follow up on all the chats and comments. Sorry, Rumble wasn't working, but the good news is we have multiple ways of learning together. Thank you. Today we remember those who gave everything. And memory is never still.

No, Cheege. We can't stop for sense. We have to deliver all of these soft disclosure gift cards. It goes by Zach Hay. The lotion detective. Getting over the beer brush. Thank you so much for joining us. And don't forget to hit the thumbs up on this video.

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