Odd Lots - What Businesses Can Learn From the Collapse of Civilizations

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

History is littered with collapsed civilizations ranging from the Maya to Angkor Wat. But what can they tell us about the world today, or doing business in it?. But what can they tell us about the world today, or doing business in it? On this episode, we speak with previous Odd Lots guest, archaeologist Arthur Demarest, often described as the "real Indiana Jones" and who is also Ingram Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Demarest has recently been applying business management concepts to his studies of the Mayan economy and the civilization's subsequent collapse. He talks to us about what businesses can learn from these moments in time.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask, Alexa, play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, do you remember the episode that we did was not long after the 2016 election at the time, and maybe still is one of our biggest, most popular odd lots ever? Oh, it's definitely one of my personal favorites. And it was one of the earliest odd thoughts episodes as well. Right. I guess maybe at the time being the biggest at the time is not saying as much.

But nonetheless, it was very popular. We talked to an archaeologist about civilizational collapse. Right. Not just any archaeologist, though, one who has been called at various times the real life Indiana Jones. Right. So I was like right after the election. And of course, like half. the country was really freak out. You know, half the country was probably thrilled. The half

the country that was really freaking out was very interested in this idea like, oh, God, what does the end of civilization look like? Because maybe that's what we're seeing now. Right. And so we brought on an expert, a literal expert, in the end or collapses of civilizations. Right. And so all the ominous signs, we walked through it. He's an expert on the collapse of the Mayans. And, you know, what parallels, if any, there are between then and what we're seeing in modern society in the U.S. That's right. Well, we have them back. That is very exciting.

Exactly. So we are once again talking about collapse and ancient civilizations. But our guest, this time, he has been doing more work lately, specifically on parallels to kind of the business world and sort of taking theories from management and economics. and applying them to see what parallels there are between that and, again, what causes an organization to collapse. So I find this really interesting because at the moment, in particular, you have a lot of hand-wringing over what's going on with the big tech firms. And, of course, for technology, culture is such an embedded aspect of a tech firm. And so people are talking about whether or not those tech firms are maybe not going to collapse, although I guess, you know, there's a question mark over things. like we work, but whether or not they're heading for hard times and how that culture is feeding

into that. And even if you don't get outright collapse, like this idea of sort of endemic cultural problems that lead to rot, I think is a really important phenomenon across all kinds of businesses beyond tech. Like, just think about banks and or think about a bank like Wells Fargo that has had numerous fines and scandals over the years, despite the best efforts of management to root out all that stuff. It's just extremely. extraordinarily difficult, it seems, to undo the rot that can form inside a complex organization. Right. So how does that culture, how does that organizational structure within a company actually impact its business, and how does it change over time? And what can we learn from the Mayans to preserve the robustness of companies?

All right. So without further ado, we want to bring back for a repeat performance on Odd Lod's, Arthur Demarest. He's the Ingram Professor of Anthropology, director at Vanderbilt's Institute of Mesoamerican Archaeology. Arthur, thank you very much for joining us. Hi. Yeah, I'm happy to be on here. You know, this is an audience that I think matters. Thank you. It's good to be on here.

I have to make one quick correction. Sure. Oh. The collapse stuff has got little to do with Trump. I've been doing this since 89, and it's been building slowly. And then in the last 10 years, all of a sudden, I'm in great demand everywhere to give talk. Right. I didn't mean that you just started jumping on the collapsed bandwagon.

I do think that helped explain the interest, at least on the pocket. You know, I think it's the stuff that I worry about is more serious as the information technology people and business people. And, of course, the global warming issue. and but there's really, I was surprised. It's one reason why I'm doing this, that the interest was coming from beyond academics and from people who can actually make a difference. And so I sort of shifted over to communicating on these kind of venues.

And then I learned that business, strategic management theory, partnership theory, these things work really well on looking at ancient civilizations And so, you know, me and my collaborators, one of them is an expert in strategic management, it became a feedback cycle, you know, where we're providing information. We're trying to, we have articles submitted to business journals. And on the other hand, we're using that for my archaeology journals to try to explain collapse. Although I'm getting, you know, some plaque on that because business is bad. It's evil capitalists like you guys.

So, thanks. So, Arthur, maybe just to begin with, can you walk us through the parallels between a society like the Mayan civilization and what we see in business today? That's a book. But civilizations, people don't think of, they sort of think like a bunch of people who kind of do the same things. The civilizations at their core are networks. They're primarily political and economic networks because the ideas and the religious. and the idiot, that's tradition. That continues even after collapse, so on. But their networks, and the political and economic networks, as today, are always almost inseparable. So you start

to look at why whole networks can collapse. And then how responses are, because most collapses don't happen. The government, corporations, whatever, their problem-solving institutions. So there are responses and you can see which ones succeed or fail. And of course, that leads right into the kind of theory that everyone is doing in management, strategic management investment. I mean, you guys are in the, you know, your channel's in the prediction been kind of into. So a lot of that applies. A lot of the same thing. Partnership networks. We're using it to explain the relationships between cities economically in trade and politics and then ways in which those go bad. And you have basically the equivalent of bankruptcies.

Before we get into, like, I want to really sort of pull on some of these reads here and the similarities and how you can use management theory to understand archaeology and vice versa. But before we dive down into that, Tracy mentioned in the intro that people call you the real life Indiana Jones. And so just to set the scene a little bit more, like you're a real archaeologist in terms of what people have in their heads or you go to some remote location and you squat down a lot and you dig up dirt and you look at stuff probably mostly pottery and things like that, I'm guessing. Just sort of talk to us about what you've been up to a little bit in terms of your day-to-day life since the last time you appeared on the show. Well, you know what?

The Indiana Jones thing, I don't mind it. I used to not like it. I was told that once by Harrison Ford, and I discovered that it's good for business. You guys know about that. I would be so flattered if Harrison Ford called me Indiana Jones. Yeah, I'm sorry, it helps to get support. But I do exploratory archaeology. I accidentally started working during the Civil War in El Salvador as a graduate student.

and because very few people are crazy, I ended up being one of two archaeologists, and then finally just one of one, and I had a whole kind of country to myself that was not much explored, and I discovered that, wow, I mean, that led to a very accelerated career, and so ever since then,

I actually go to those areas where nothing's been done before very little, and I do exploration, and then we do large-scale, multidisciplinary projects. And that's the part that's not like the Indiana Jones thing. I mean, you don't like, you know, read the glyphs and kiss the girl and shoot the guns and all that. I mean, it's always, and 90% of what, not 90, but I'd say 60% of it is lab work.

But we study ancient cities. And right now, my entire project for the last 20 years is studying an ancient economic network that holds together. And we're following. I mean, we're literally, the research design is, We do neutron activation, other analyses. We discovered that pottery, jade, or obsidian, the volcanic glass is coming from another place. So we go and dig that place.

And then we dig that. We see about that. So we've actually covered, I don't know, like a thousand square kilometers, but it isn't just the usual regional. We are following an economic network. So, I mean, we do dig lost cities in the jungle, and we do have shootouts with the bad guys and open tombs and all that. But that's just, you know, that's just what you have to do to get started. Then it becomes essentially the study of economy, politics, and sociology of cities and regions and networks. And as that works gotten bigger, it's gotten more and more parallel to contemporary economic networks and, I don't know, multinational corporations.

So talk to us about what you've discovered then, because, you know, I remember a little bit from the previous episode, but the Mayan civilization was quite unique in many ways. And I remember you were talking about how they developed a big trade network, where goods were distributed all over the jungle. What does that have to do with modern corporations or the modern economy? Again, academic, there's a, I've learned that there's a great range of business theory and academic, strategic management theory and so on is probably a little different.

But their studies then lead to reading about it and lead to something else. But one of the things that they've been talking about for a long time is just an example, community networks, which would be like the EU or even the Western economy where you have partnerships that are based on multiple partners. They have an ideology that they develop and business practices have to be within a range of legitimation and all of that. And those kinds of community networks, a very tight one, is what was developing in the jungle between all these different cities. And then it's stabilized and there was great wealth.

But just as today, when you read these journals about innovation network, those are very profitable, but that kind of slows and they have a tendency to fall behind. So then you have, of course, in this case, city states that make breakaway networks, which are very high risk. It's very much like the initial trading with China, you know, which is very high risk, but very profitable. There's high gains, but there's high risk we're seeing right now in dealing with cultures, societies, economic systems that have a different ethic, that have a different economic. culture. And reading about that, that is exactly what happened with this great city-state. They were the big center for trade and obsidian, all sorts of things coming from the highlands. The Maya economic network that was so community network, all interacting with each other, very stable, started to have a lot of problems. And the nobles of this city, part of the south,

made a decision to kind of turn away. And it was very surprising. I mean, in the terms of of today. It would be like China and given transport more and they started trading with long distance partners in other areas forming, you know, initially it's like diatic relationships that they say. It's just like, you know, one city with another city.

It doesn't have the stability. In 40 years, they just boomed into this giant, it's like Venice, this giant purely commercial, non-territorial kingdom and it then crashed. And the whole story is

just like stuff out of your journal. So, Arthur, how did Conquen manage to sort of differentiate itself from the rest of the mind civilization? Because often when people think about big companies, big multinationals, there's a lot of conformity there. And there's a sort of organizational structure that encourages, I guess, cohesiveness. You're not necessarily rewarded for taking a risk and going off and doing something completely different. Conformity tends to be rewarded. So how did this particular city manage to break away? Well, again, this is where the theory is coming from management schools really helped.

You know, there's institutional entrepreneurship where you have entrepreneurship, but it changes. It's like it changes the game. It's playing a different game. And that's one thing people don't realize it is very high risk. And these rulers were not stupid. You know, they would make these innovations. And the scary part about responding to collapse is that they would do the right thing, but it would usually fail. Because of this legitimacy, because both, you know, the consumers and the other firms, let's say, would not buy into it.

Give me, what's an example? Okay, so when you say they did the right thing when confronted with the risk of collapse, but it didn't work. It failed. What specifically? Give an example. of, okay, here's, give an example of what you're talking about. Well, again, you know, there's, I am just written something on four different in using strategic, man, with my colleague, I collaborate with an endowed chair in strategic management.

And in Conkwen, for example, I can tell you about four other states, we just wrote on this, but in Conkwen, the decision was trading partners. and what happens when you have throughout history, when you have new trading partners, there's these risks and stuff, but new ideas come in, not just products, but new ideas about structuring your own economic system.

And when the Maya of Conquen started trading with Mexican states that were far away and had more market-oriented economy, every time they added a new trading partner, the structure and economic system at Conquen changed. And one of the things is this vertical integration. They were shipping stuff out, you know, in and out. They were import, export.

Then they started instead, which of course increases the value. And then they were shipping it out semi-processed. And then later, they were in like the production of jade. and again, preliminary state, not the final product forms, and they did it,

they started doing mass production. I mean, just huge. It's the largest J. Workshop ever found in the Americas. And so you see these business ideas

coming in. And, again, studies of business architecture, you see it in everything. You see the palace changing from a

30 years as eight reconstructions to a, giant almost like an office building. It's just like Venice. The nobles are rising in power. They are almost, they're the merchants involved. The king and his family eventually get sort of pushed literally to the side of the palace. And the rest of it is like offices. And it's very nice. But, you know, he is now kind of legitimator in chief. He's like head of marketing. And it seems that he doesn't really have that much power, and it's divided up. So you see it in the architecture in order to win over

partners and to, you know, legitimate these new relationships. They build architectural things within their center that are of the religious system. You know, like there's this short. The Maya ball game was so important that, you know, that game that was just sacred and it was also entertainment. It was, it was worth of the same. The one where they killed the losers? No, that's the killing or the not of the losers is there's so many. I mean, all that stuff comes from a thousand years later in another region. You know, it's the Maya ballgame is kind of like, if you would say that, you know, with baseball, cricket, you know, it varied and transformed into different things.

But this kind of ball court is not like that. It's not sort of a sacred religious thing. It's a big, giant open ball court with eating vessels and broken. probably corn beer vessels all around it, like some modern stadium. And you don't find that anywhere in the Maya, you know, lowland civilization. And so where does it come from? Where do you find it? In the area up in the highlands where the jade comes from, where the jade sources it.

So they're cultivating these relationships by creating religious similarities. It's actually marketing. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Rafini.

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plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg Television. Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. So if I understand it correctly, in moving away from the Mayan civilization or in trying to build new relationships with new trading partners, this particular city starts introducing new elements of different societies. And eventually that starts undermining its own previous rituals and legitimacy of its

authorities, is that right? There's just a is a bust, I mean, a one-day destruction, and the analysis of the spearheads and so on from that show that it was their trading partners. They went too far, and this is a real, this is something that when we're responding to all the crises today, I hear a lot of, you know, people saying the right things we should do, except they're not going to succeed because you, you really, you know, you have to change economic cultures. And so all this construction of these different ideological systems, and it was too much. It was too fast. And it led to this boom.

But, you know, in the end, there's a kind of lack of sincerity, perhaps, in this. The local, regional, sub-regional population may not have been happy with all of these other practices. And it was, it just like a bankruptcy, but with ritual saccharacterious. They sacrifice the king and the queen and all of the nobles. Well, some bankruptcies can be like that. Yes. So if, you know, businesses want to hear from you and, you know, I know you're skeptical of all of them and you know they're all going to fail. Nonetheless, they want to get your insolns.

I don't think that. You know, people think that. I mean, it's just my, I'm like a coroner. I mean, this is my job. You know what I mean? Yeah. But along the way, I, they're a positive. Okay.

Okay. So what is the lesson in terms of balancing risk and reward? A city is changing its economic model. It's opening up to new trading partners, but it didn't work. So what can management within an organization take away from that to make better informed decisions about new strategic ventures? Well, I should defend Conquin by saying that they did really well. And the others also, you know, they went down more slowly. So, but, yeah, what you, well, the first thing that I've discovered is people don't really believe in collapse. So that's the first thing you have to get that. And then the other is what I just said. The right thing to do is not necessarily going to be successful. But what is positive is that some of these collapses didn't happen. And that is, as problems were developing, they anticipated it, as Conquen tried to do.

and they did some other things. Those are high risk, but it's just like in business investment. If you got that right, the other things, it led to success. And they didn't do it. This is the problem today. They didn't do it because, oh, they want to save the world or they want to save the civilization or whatever. They did it for their own success.

And yet, it can be the right thing to do. and so that kind of thing, which worked short term in the case of Conquent, we see examples. I mean, it's not as exciting to talk about non-collapses, but, you know, we study, when I say we, there's maybe 20 people who have gradually joined collapse studies. I've been doing it, I think, longer than anybody, but it's our field. If you anticipate those things, you can make changes that lead to success. And that's sort of what we're working on now, because again, I really have done this all my life. I want to see, I don't want to give publishing a journal, nobody reads. The people that can make a difference are people in business and government who

first and foremost are interested in their own success. So let's stipulate that most entities will ultimately probably fail. Nonetheless, it sounds like a key thing is this. idea of taking the risk of collapse seriously. And you hear a lot from business leaders, like, oh, we're always paranoid. And there's like this sort of pride in being paranoid. Only the paranoid survive. I think that's a famous book from a founder of Intel. Nonetheless, it sounds like what you're saying is that maybe people give lip service to the risk of collapse, but they don't really internalize it. So, I mean, I would start by asking, what are the signs of internal organizational collapse that if you're a business leader,

you're like, actually, we should really take the fear of collapse seriously so that it goes beyond just being a motivational mantra, so to speak. More positive lessons. I was about to talk about non-collapses. But a lot of it's very obvious right now. I think I may have talked to about this in the last show, but hypercoherence is our biggest problem, bigger than global warming because it inhibits responses. And that, like a lot of these eventual causes of collapse, is a great thing.

It leads to success, but eventually it can go too far and lead to crises. And right now, the degree of integration of corporate systems, of overall economic systems, of medical systems is military systems worldwide is fantastic. It leads to greater profits. It helps this, that, and the other. But it is also dangerous because something that happens in one place radiates through the system. And you see this every day. You just saw it.

I mean that, you know, hey, 50 years ago, who would give a damn if some a plant in Saudi Arabia blew up or drones hit it? Now, everything radiates through the system, and that makes it very difficult to respond, and we see it every day. I fly a lot. Every time I fly, the system is down. Once there was a storm in New England, and we couldn't get from Hong Kong to Kuala Lampur because, you know, there weren't enough. The planes were tied up somewhere, and every time, you know, the system is down. You're here all the time. Arthur, I was going to ask, I mean, a lot of...

of people will look at global integration or hypoccoherence as evidence of progress, right? This is how the world is supposed to go. We're supposed to be heading towards more integration, more connections with other people. So how do you walk that back? Because once that gets set in motion, it feels like it becomes very, very difficult to make the argument that actually maybe we need to reconnoisse. consider some aspects of that. Well, that's the legitimation problem. I don't think it's taken seriously enough. I mean, what you just said, not this thing and that thing, but the ideology that is so

hard to accept. And that's really what you have to work at. But the secret of success is, so you look at some of these things where they're predictable. You make modifications. You invest in those. It's going to be middle term or long term. But, you know, Warren Buffett says that's, you know, the way to do it. And then you can see that there are profits to be made in that at the same time, or mitigation of losses.

And at the same time, it helps this. I mean, I'm just a, you know, guru type. I mean, the people who would, I hesitate to talk about specific operationalizing things, but the transport system and the communication systems in trouble. And so a lot of people have said things like eat local and all of that. But there is something to be said in restructuring things so that there's more regional autonomy. I want to go back to a question that I sometimes wonder with businesses, which is, you know, obviously sometimes business leaders, management guru types, they talk about, they talk a lot about pivoting or they sensing an opportunity and rotating the business in some way to take. advantage of that. And it's, they cite historical examples of, oh, maybe some tech company shifted

to the internet at just the right time or whatever it is. But I'm curious, like, how much of, when a, when a, you know, in your work and your archaeological work and you see a city, or you see some network shift its focus, how much was it the result of some intentional choice to do something new versus a sort of sequence of maybe haphazard or action? accidental decisions that sort of formed, formed in an emergent basis where no one really made the decision, but some sort of natural order progressed and took the organization into a new direction. And both happened today. I mean, this discussion about, you know, this has been noticed by people, and there are people doing it to some degree. But I think there's a tendency

to look back on these divine kings and so on and not realize that they were smart. And they had I mean, in the case of Conquen, I think that he was the chief of marketing for, I mean, this office building, there are like offices for different nobles. And they, I think that most of this, in the case of Conquen, it surprised me, I think almost all of that was conscious. It happened too fast. I mean, you don't like to say, oh, well, we're going to build a ball court in this weird-ass style that just happens to be that of where the jade comes from. or we're going to start using our hill and hill worship to a greater degree than normal. And that just happens to be the form of religion in one of the places that's right on a major nexus of trade routes. It's clearly conscious.

And you see that. I mean, I've been working on this way in about four cases, and they do different things. And each of the different things they do correspond to contemporary deceit. decisions in business strategy. And the fact that, you know, I talk about collapses. So I'm talking about when that fails, but it usually succeeds. I mean, there was a Maya near collapse around 250. They had grown.

It was a big boom. But they were using an agricultural system of this, you know, slash and burn agriculture. You cut down the jungle, you burn it. It makes ash that allows for production. They were doing too much of it. And then they started to have a crisis. And some of the cities really declined. Some almost ended.

Others kind of continued. But during the subsequent 50 to 100 years, a lot of that was probably decision-making at the level of villages and communities. But they also built giant reservoirs and a lot of things that would require labor. They had done that before. But they really intensified. Then is that there was a recovery. and the giant boom, which we call the late classic period, starting around 600 or so, just this incredible boom in industry and grow,

well, their versions of it, I mean, Jade workshops and all that, and huge structures, and it was a big boom. But, you know, a lot of the collapses I study, we've labeled them, that's me and my strategic management expert, as apogee collapses, apache-slash collapses, where you can see this incredible process, and identify a bunch of symptoms that indicate that it might to... And most people have this model of Rome.

That's the big one. You know, there's going to be these signs and decline and very sudden, especially if a lot of the problems are inherent in this tremendous progress and the things that are making stuff successful, which makes it hard to change, but it also makes hard to change what you guys just talked about, the legitimacy. They're getting people to buy into this idea of making these changes that in the short-term

might have constructions. And then the other thing, and this is true, my economic leaders and then Angkor and everywhere and with us, is that short-term thinking is a problem. And again, I'm not, you know, Warren Buffett, lots of people, they tell you that, but also that you get these feedback. cycles, in crisis, leaders tend to do more of what they do. And that's what a lot of the, you know, they tend to, they do temples and war and the temples get the support of the gods. So you, they intensify this. And it looks like, I mean, my colleagues talk about it, wow, the great golden age,

but it was really a way of, they knew what was coming. They saw signs. There were dietary problems. And they were intensifying what they do. And it was counterproductive. So sort of spinning their wheels ever faster and getting in more trouble that way. So just on the short-term incentive part, I mean, that feels like a real issue for societies and civilizations and also for corporates in very similar ways. How would you actually go about changing that thinking? Because we can all identify that short-termism is a problem, but it feels very, very hard to actually counteract that. I really believe in collaboration. When I talk about these digs of the big cities and this trade network, I mean, that's like 40 people and there's all these different experts. And I really believe that the ideas we have, I have to collaborate with people in business and strategic management. But one of the big problems today, and it's the main problem with war, is that CEOs and so on are being judged really short term. And the changes for legitimation. the changes and investments, it can't like be, oh, let's change everything.

You know, I mean, it could be a part of your investment in these future things. And then as some of that starts to have success, you don't have to force people to do it. Like I said, when they avoided the collapse, you know, around 250 or 300, and then they had a big recession, you could say, and a recovery, I don't think that was because they didn't. They didn't have a concept of civil. They weren't trying to save the world. They were trying to succeed in their own areas. And then some places did and started doing pretty well. And some farmers, and of course the others saw that.

And it was a small percentage that started doing that probably in the beginning. So, you know, as you know, nothing succeeds like success. You don't have to just put all your eggs in one basket and do some cosmic change. Just as you said, that would really be hard. It does seem like in terms of the things that have allowed these companies to grow at an extraordinary rate are currently the very things that threaten, you know, to be their undoing. And so obviously liberal use of individual data and breaking norms regarding privacy has obviously allowed a lot of these companies to make incredible profits and grow extremely fast. now those are the very things that are causing people to freak out. What were some examples of, as you said, some places they thrived for a while, they staved off near collapse by doing something different, by sort of recognizing that the existing trajectory was unsustainable? What were some pivots that the successful entities did to hold off on collapse a little while longer? rules the king that does this because that's the guy recorded, but we know from Conquem.

There's a lot of other people and economic advisors and economic agents, but if they, you know, they can see what's going on below and its effect on them. And so, you know, decisions were made at the local level, but also at the higher level to respond. And that's a very specific decision. You know, when you dig a gigantic reservoir, it takes an enormous amount of labor. It's a giant investment. It's kind of a high-risk investment. But you can see there are water issues developing.

So you go in that direction. And the states that did that became very successful. Now, you just pinpointed a real problem. And the thing about these apogee collapses where right at the peak, suddenly everything falls apart. Those are the most dramatic ones. They're not all like that. But one of the things you just mentioned is, again, if this weren't confusing enough to my colleagues, the strength slash weakness. The strengths of a civilization in that kind of collapse are the very things that over time become weaknesses as the impact of them develops more and more.

And those are really hard to change because they look at it and they say, as you usually, just that this, but again, if some people start doing these other things and they're successful at it, you won't have to, you know, you were mentioned, I mean, there's lessons of collapse, it's almost always finger-shaking, you know, when you just kind of, oh, yes, you guys should, you know, you should stop doing that, you should wear a hair shirt, it ain't going to work. And so that, you know, you have to be successful in some ways and then attract more people, but it isn't going to be easy. Arthur, the last time we had you on, we focused on this idea of the collapse of civilizations, and you were sort of, I guess, pessimistic about a lot of things. What do you think now?

You know, this is, what is it, two or three years after that original podcast recording, when you look at civilization or society now, what are you seeing and how does it relate to your area of expertise? But writing for these journals and being on this channel, it doesn't help my career. And academics, it's like, what are you doing? I think we can, I feel like we can make a difference to me. People are now, and I didn't really feel that. I felt it a little bit, but the reaction has been quite interesting.

And, you know, the Journal of the Journal of Academy of Management, we just submitted an article. they had a doomsday issue. They have a special upcoming doomsday issue. And it's like, wow. And it's about negative scenarios in grand schemes and how they can invest. I'm curious to see what else comes in. I think maybe we helped inspire that a little bit because, of course, those people listen to this show and other things like it. So I'm feeling a little more optimistic.

Well, you sound more optimistic than the last time you were on the show. So maybe that's a good place to end it. optimistic note for once. Arthur Demarest, it's always fascinating to talk to you. We'll have you back on again in three years, maybe after the next election. You know, if we're still around in three years. Civilization is still around. We can't wait to have you back.

Really appreciate you joining us. Thank you, Arthur. Thanks, Arthur. Thank you, guys. So, Joe, I found that conversation fascinating, as always with Arthur. but I have to say I had no idea that archaeological academia hated us so much. Yeah, I didn't either. I thought like that, but I think there is, I don't know much about academia,

but I do think, I do sometimes get the impression that they look down upon anyone whose ideas are able to be digested by the public. Let's put it that way. For the record, we like archaeological academia. Do you ever, you know what I was thinking about through that conversation? It's like, you could really tell all that stuff from like shards of pottery. Yeah. You know what I'm saying?

Right. So one thing I found really fascinating was when he was talking about Conquen and the development of this sort of big office building and how you could see that the space allocated to royalty got progressively smaller as their legitimacy changed or deteriorated. Yeah. And I love this idea of the city sort of building monument to their trading partners culture. Right. And I think that's that feels very modern. as a phenomenon or you like go to Las Vegas and there's obviously all kinds of things that are built like specifically with Chinese tourists in mind, things like that where trade is certainly

becomes the conduit for ideas for better or worse. And in some cases that's good, but in other cases, you could see how that could eventually become a problem. Right. And you could see how society would sort of eventually maybe revolt against that idea or that change. But I think the most disturbing aspect of these conversations that we end up having with Arthur is the notion of societies or civilizations or entities thinking that they're doing the right thing, but then just going about it in the wrong way or getting it wrong and then causing their own collapse. Well, you know what I was going to say that I didn't find to be disturbing is this idea that to stave off collapse, what's not needed for someone to say like, oh, we're collapsing. We've got to do something about this per se, but rather

for a new success model to emerge. And so that the way to stave off collapse is not just to reverse what you're doing or to stop what you're doing, but to take a totally different turn and to show people that some other way of organizing society, some other way of farming, some other way of creating a product, whatever it is, can thrive. So it's kind of a hopeful idea, just that success could be contagious and replicable once someone shows the way. Right. You don't have to convince people that this is necessarily the right thing to do because it just sort of unfolds and becomes obvious in a way. All right. Well, on that happy note, again, this has been another edition of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stallwart. And you should follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson.

and check out all of the Bloomberg podcasts on Twitter at The Handel at Podcasts. Thanks for listening.