YouSaid · the spoken record

Samo Burja

lines on the record: 70
first: 2023-08-01
most recent: 2023-08-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think it was in my mid twenties where a person that I just corresponded with on the internet let me stay and just sleep in their couch for like a month while I was hunting for a job here in Silicon Valley and I'd never been in the United States before but that was very generous of them and immensely helpful.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The timing can be absolutely crucial. It might have seemed like a terrible investment, actually, after Steve Jobs left the company the first time. It might have seemed like a complete write-off. I think that perhaps the strongest lesson is the societal consensus of where society is going can be profoundly wrong. This means that even everyday investments and everyday individuals and everyday companies and cities and so on, like real estate, whatever, the common wisdom might be wrong. And discovering when it's wrong can actually lead to good investments, even if you don't find the next Steve Jobs, you might say, for example, realize that, oh, actually, there's not that many reasons to be optimistic about Paris or Berlin real estate if the economies of the countries are going down in the long run, maybe even Tokyo is not that great an investment because eventually.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With capital location, it's tricky because so much of it is that capital is kind of always on fire. So sometimes the least roomed investment is actually a great investment because it beats out what would have otherwise happened. I think that venture capitalists would very much agree with the hypothesis that you should seek the outliers. I think very, very few of them actually manage to figure out who the outliers are. It's also the case that while something might be world shaping, it doesn't necessarily always make for a great financial investment. The vehicle of investment is not clear. Say if you met a Steve Jobs early in his career, you might not know which of his ventures to invest in or when to invest or when exactly this will become among the most valuable companies in the world. Soon if you knew the individual, the human capital.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These civilizations tend to be mortal, so there will be progress for a civilization until there's not, and then the civilization fails, and perhaps there's a new civilization that picks up at a more advanced level. Perhaps the new civilization is actually more primitive than what came before. I think that my view of history would not be that it's exactly cyclical, not at all. There's further evolution. I do think that the idea that we've been on a curve of for compounding material immoral progress for the last 10,000 years, we think that can be easily disproven.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that this leads me to my second disagreement. I think we lose far too much information about past societies to be able to develop such highly accurate quantitative models. We have decent quantitative information on, say, the economy of the last hundred years. And if you've ever tried to study even, say, economics or politics of 18th century Europe, you realize there's all kinds of data that are really hard to access. And if you go even further back to the 14th century, it gets even more difficult. So really, we're operating with a very sparse data set. So yeah, Peter Turchin's very interesting, I think Stephen Pinker, rather well-known. I think I completely disagree with the idea of a linear ratcheting development of human progress over time. I think that progress is always bounded by the civilization you find yourself.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are not really well captured by these statistical models. And these are things that are not, I think, overdetermined. Now, ultimately, we can get into debates of free will. And you can say, ah, but every individual is a deterministic product of their society. And sure, that's true. If the fate of the society actually depends on a few individuals, then it is not possible to study those individuals sociologically. What's happening inside my brain? It doesn't make sense to use theories of elite overproduction for that. Then it becomes maybe a psychological or biological question. And you know what? The brains of the great founders that shaped our world, they're long decomposed. So we can't actually study that. So we have to acknowledge the limits of our sociological knowledge. It's almost kind of like an event horizon consideration, even if theoretically it's fully deterministic.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not so much that I think he is wrong in some of the patterns that he observes. It's just that I think that patterns hold until they don't. These are long patterns that break. There is no clear statistical way to predict when these patterns break. And the breaking of the patterns think sometimes is due to the work of break founders, where they might take a civilization that was on terminal decline, that was set to self-destroy and emulate in like interminable civil wars and reorient totally different political system directs those energy outward. Or you might have the periphery of declining empire that manages to break away from that empire's independence, develop a whole new different set of social norms, and it becomes the core of a totally new civilization. These are things that”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, to produce like a macro mathematical model of history, he ends up finding what I think are patterns of distribution of elites, applies this old sociological theory that's actually from the 1900s, Wilfred Pareto already spoke of it, the idea of elite overproduction, where elites in societies fact and direct surplus to achieve certain goals.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting and it's a difficult question. I think that Peter Turchin has an interesting approach. He's an American not quite historian, more like complex systems theorist. He's founded this field called Cliodynamics. You could think of it as an almost Harry Selden-like.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could call it science, but if you'll determine science has become really watered down and distinct, let's call it something like belief in the power of reason, I think. And it is ultimately and ironically a belief that is very hard to justify with reason. But okay, that doesn't preclude it from being an extremely powerful force that reshape the world.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of science or philosophy or the idea that through reason we can come to understand the world. This is something that could be taken for granted. There are many societies that are much more fatalistic than our society is, where it is assumed that the world actually on a fundamental level does not make sense. Therefore, to try to reason your way to an understanding or proximate understanding of it is a futile endeavor. In our society might say that, oh, it's impossible in an individual lifetime to think through everything that's happening in the world, but at least what until recently was the mainstream consensus was that in principle, that's possible. Like in principle, you could figure out the physics of gravity and electromagnetism. In principle, you could figure out the biology, frog, or the biology of your own liver. In principle, you could figure out how society works. So that sort of view, which again, you”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To say the United Nations did not succeed at this mission. It failed. We take it for granted it failed. But in 1945, that was far from obvious. And even today, the debates of how far sovereignty goes or not were not fully resolved. So this idea that, oh, actually, there's no legal authority beyond a particular country's government. It's an interesting one. And even in medieval Europe, for example, first there was an authority above a king. It was at least divine and then the fung question was above this authority is pope the person that interprets this authority. That's a large reason for the conflicts between popes of medieval Europe and the kings and emperors of medieval Europe. It was unclear what exactly sovereignty really entails. So, okay, we have sovereignty, we have property rights. I think that the idea”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, want to emphasize that it's not just the idea of liberty rights, it is a whole set of concrete institutional enforcement mechanisms. And one could even argue that concept of property has changed actually quite significantly several times over the last hundred or so years. Property is a very important lens to see the world through. It's a very deep set of ideas and assumptions about the distribution of society. I think that when it comes to political order and sovereignty, world could have looked very different. Like there's a way in which in 1945, when the United Nations is created, It's supposed to be kind of like what the European Union is today. It was supposed to be a United Nations parliament even. It was in the charter as an option. So in a direct elected body, it was supposed to govern war and it was supposed to govern global cultural development and it was supposed to prevent outbreak of things like World War II and it was supposed to focus safeguard rights of individuals in those countries.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People, you can pay them to do the work, but you can't really pay them to care. And you can pay them to do exactly what you've defined the payment cause them to do and nothing more, nothing less. There's always something that's not captured by this”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, maybe intermediates like owner of the company, there's a board, there's a CEO, and then below the CEO is like the chief technology officer or whatever. And there's like an interesting clear chain of borrowing there. You could go even further, and it's actually been an interesting dispute to what extent is property owned or bureaucratic. But it's always a relative description. There's no such thing as like in all cases absolutely own power, or it is impossible to lend power without giving up some of your power as well. This extreme example of like a despotic ruler in Han China, as soon as you delegate, there are some things about the job was done that you don't know that fundamentally this power now rests with your sole service. Perhaps the way to think about this is in economics people talk about the principal agent problem. There's a way in which you can pay people.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should in theory be borrowed power sort of the whole concept of servant of the people, et cetera, comes from as well. And every job, unless you have engineered so that you cannot be fired, is a form of borrowed power. If I was hired to redesign a key aspect of a modern car, the ability to shape what the next model, what the next Tesla will look like, only until I'm fired. And then it's very clear that my power was borrowed from ultimately the owner of the company.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over time becomes more and more the owned power of the bureaucrat because it's totally illegible. So by the time you roll to the last Louis, state apparatus can work fine without the king at all or has diffused into all of these interesting bureaus. Different example might be a more everyday example. There's a way in which if you are employed by a key organization, if you look at the Secretary of State in the modern United States, they have certain powers and certain abilities to change the world and change US foreign policy. They also usually have quite a bit of owned power. However, if they can be dismissed by the president or anyone else, there's some other mechanisms as well from their role, they lose that power. So that was actually always borrowed power. So most political offices and republican systems of government.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Own power is something that is sort of inherently within your reach. It is something that you have new difficulty defending and you really rely on very few people to carry it out. Borrowed power is wielding power on someone else's behalf. So there's an interesting way where over time borrowed power can change into own power. Let's have a simplistic example An absolutist monarchy in the 18th century, the king controls all taxation, let's say, and the king relies on civil servants. And at first, the civil servants are dismissed at the leisure of the king. Over time, though, it becomes harder and harder to know who to fire. So what at first is the borrowed power of a bureaucrat versus the power of the king.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People come to an accurate understanding of history, your role in human civilization will be accounted for. Wow, I don't even know what to say about that, right? I'm happy I'm not in that position. I don't envy anyone who happens to be in that position. Humanity is going to look at what you did.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it's dishonest to say that they are not exercising power when you choose to work on something or choose not to. Then your talents and positions are actually unique. I call it luck in an important sense because I don't think it's helpful or fruitful to be excited by those opportunities. And I think the sort of like Oppenheimer mild dread of wait, I have to figure this out. That's actually like a much healthier one, though even that can go too far. And so because of that, I think that maybe the view should be that, okay, yes, all of these individuals are powerful and the wisest of them also realize, though, that they are also responsible. In a way, my view of history is also like kind of terrifying. It's like, okay, if you are a great founder, if you're one of 500 people in history, and if eventually,”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remarkable. If I think of a recent film that tries to present this, I think the Oppenheimer film is a pretty good example. Oppenheimer mythologizes himself to a great extent, but it is true that he personally was not completely replaceable. If he personally would not work on the Manhattan Project and led a lot of the scientific work and persuaded many of the scientists to work on the project, maybe the United States has the atomic bomb in 1946 or 1947. That is a very different world. That is a world where World War II has already ended. Maybe the atomic bomb is never used on civilians ever. Or maybe, you know, in the 1950s because no one knows how terrible it is. where dozens of cities are destroyed. These are difficult weird decisions.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shape the world, you just have to be powerful in some sense. And perhaps it doesn't mean that you are extremely prestigious in your life, that you're accredited in your life, but there are changes you are affecting on the world, either people are aware of or not that ultimately are kind of just your decisions. These are not decisions taken by the consensus of society. In fact, actually, this might be my most radical claim. I don't think society as a whole decides to do anything. I think due to basically a certain kind of luck, the talents, character you're born with, or that you're raised into, right? That's in a way luck. You don't choose for your parents will be who your educators will be, what your environment will be. So due to a certain kind of luck, people come to be able to choose for all of society. And that's really...”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of people, that's in a way a very distributed form of labor. You can get an estimate of who owns the land, where is land, etc., etc. And it's only possible due to a very deep division of labor and a very deep standardization of, say, the kind of surveying that's done. So there is a bureaucratic, not just a factory equivalent, some sort of economies of scale. No matter what I personally did, I probably could never on my own figure out how many people are living in the United States today. Were that information not already pre-gathered by the U.S. government?”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a scaling function. The institution is many, many people working together towards a common end. And there's a straightforward way in which an organization of a thousand people, like if I personally undertook it as a mission to build a car, it could be a lifelong quest for me to build every single part of the car with a metal workshop somewhere in my basement. But on the other hand, if I worked in a factory and I worked there for 40 years, I might not have assembled a single complete car, but I've probably assembled the equivalent of five or six or honestly no, probably more like 60 or 70 cars. They've contributed parts to thousands of cars. And this industrial logic applies to so many things. It applies to bureaucracy in its best sense. Say when you take a census of a country that is just counting the number.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You someone went to Harvard today or went to Yale, you know something about them. Wait, do you know anything about them? You don't know anything about them. What you know is facts about what kind of person Yale and Harvard. Study there. That's what you know in a very fundamental sense. So that's how those elite universities function as cross-generational repositories love social reputation. I'm more skeptical of their ability to transfer knowledge, but let's say that the education system in general, not elite university specifically, also function as the mechanism of formal transfer of knowledge and the verification that knowledge has been transferred. So we therefore have the educational function, we have the transfer of social reputation function, so kind of social accounting function. And finally also”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's put it this way if human beings were truly physically immortal, if we continue to live in the same society for thousands, maybe even millions of years, I'm not sure we would even have institutions. We might have tribes, but every individual would become this deep repository of know-how and social connection and obligation favors owed, favors given, it would be something really interesting. It might be actually a very anarchic society at the end of the day. But because we are at least physically mortal, I assume just generally mortal, the result is that you're born into a world, you are introduced by your parents in a way, and your society, and institutions function as repositories of social reputation that outlives an individual.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But a very different pattern of coordination. And in that case, you can't really say what the institution persisted. Say if Athens is conquered by Persia and is governed by Persian governor, and it's not given autonomy, you can't really say that this is the same Athens with Socrates. And of course Persia never conquered Athens. However, now that I've laid out an example, let's say Athens, every institution must solve the succession problem that is human beings are mortal and sooner or later no matter how talented, how long lived, you have to replace them. And for whatever pattern an institution embodies, be it a political system, an educational system, an economic production system, you have to find new individuals who can fulfill that role. And there are a number of ways you could do this, but that is the most fundamental role of institutions.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institutions are essentially these deeply infrenched repeated patterns of human behavior where every institution has to basically replace the members to compose it. We talked about many examples today sometimes talking about states, sometimes talking about religions, organized religions that is, but it also can be something like a particular city, the city of Athens as it exists in the classic era, is a particular set of institutions. If you completely change the politics of Athens, who are the city is still there, but whatever unique genius was cultivated, whatever their version of a meritocracy or natural aristocracy was where exceptional people came to prosper, have political power, and then they would also on the side debate philosophy with each other. That goes away. There is the case that you can have nearly the same material base.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel like a lot of the advocates of a more hard technology view want to have it both ways. They want technology to be all important, but they will acknowledge oppressed that technology is fragile. So I'm like, wait, which is it? If technology is all important, except for it being very fragile, wait, maybe we should study the societal causes of that fragility. And they do acknowledge these are societal causes. They're not like material causes. That's the way to think about it. It's that social organization is a prerequisite for technologies, for material technologies, and material technologies are a prerequisite for many kinds of social organization.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down with that technology. And then finally, there are clear examples of technology advancing and then regressing. If it was purely the growth and development of a technical base with no social factor whatsoever, the Roman Empire would never have fallen, or if it did fall, we wouldn't have lost technologies such as Roman concrete or heron steam engine, which was a primitive steam engine used in Alexandria. We wouldn't have lost mathematics, significant chunks of mathematics that were forgotten for a thousand years. People understood quite well in 200 BC the Earth is round. This was known. Eratosthenes calculated the size of the Earth. So there are all sorts of interesting examples where we can show that the scientific knowledge advances and regresses. And more importantly, when we can show technology advances and then regresses.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, a tool of despotism or a tool of liberation. It's a mass of circuit, it's not an individual exercise. We're discussing guns. What about the printing press? I mentioned Marthin Luther earlier. Honestly, the first thing that was printed on the printing press wasn't Martin Luther's Bible. It was indulgences. So it was first used as a financial mechanism to fund the papacy and strengthen the papacy. It only later comes to be adopted to print Bibles in the Moscow dialect in German that is. And also there were variants of the printing press that were introduced in Chinese society and Korean society long before the printing press was invented in Europe. So a simplistic story where you say, oh, guns lead to personal liberation or printing press leads to information liberation. These are not hard tendencies. These are possible routes you can go.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rise and fall of very advanced civilizations all the time. It wouldn't have civilizations going down blind alleys. Consider 16th century Japan, very adept at gunpowder warfare, very adept at using the gun. The gun is outlawed after Japan is unified. When Japanese guns stagnate for the next two or three hundred years, look, if it was just you introduced the gun to society and then modern warfare starts to develop, the friend wouldn't have fallen behind the Western world. We often talk about again in the American mythological context if you introduce personal firearms, that's a force for liberty, yet in much of Asia actually in the 18th and 17th century, the introduction of firearms empowered large centralized militaries, the rifle in hands of a Napoleonic soldier can be either”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's crazy. That's a crazy technological dependency from our society, but it goes the other way too. The technology depends on the social. I described global trade. Well, the global trade rests on the chip fabs themselves. No, not really. Maybe you could say that, oh, it rests on the hard technology of the US Navy. But wait, what is the U.S. Navy? If the U.S. Navy is keeping the world's ocean safe and navigable for trade and the U.S. has supported a system of free international trade, et cetera, et cetera, it becomes very murky. It becomes very hard to derive this phenomena of the technology itself. Most importantly, if the technology itself, the material technology, was all that was driving forward human history, it would look much more like a ratchet. It wouldn't look like this thing with fits and starts, this thing that has a”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think material technology that is hard technology that you describe and social technology are intensely mutually symbiotic. You can't have one without the other. Everything from say a Bronze Age empire relying on the infrastructure of bringing copper from the eastern Mediterranean.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Greek perspective, he kind of is a demigod that's the interesting thing megalomania, something that is immensely destructive and it is profoundly personally tragic. But if you're Alexander the Great, is it even Megalomania? Or is it just an accurate appraisal of sort of where in the world you are and how your culture perceives you?”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Italian Renaissance in the 18th century, etc., etc., Napoleon inspired these debates as to what even is morality if you are Napoleon and the whole Nietzschean arc goes from there as well. I would say that if you believe you are a demigod, you are deluded and you're basically insane. But if you're Alexander the Great, you're basically also correct. Has Greeks thought of demigods? Alexander the Great is a demigod. She's at least as much of a demigod as, say, Hercules is. So when he claims that, you know, oh, my actual father is Zeus or Ares or whatever, when you look at his life, this guy who conquers the known world is acknowledged by many people as some sort of divine being in his lifetime when he visits the eastern empires in Persia, in Egypt, and he conquers them. He adopts those political forms. Like, honestly, from...”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sociopath is a strong word because many of them have deep empathy in the sense of being able to understand other humans. So there are some of them that definitely have sociopathic traits. That's definitely true. It's an interesting question as to what the role of sociopathy even is in society. I used previously the example of a surgeon, right? Being a surgeon immensely beneficial to humanity. But a pretty sociopathic activity, you're kind of cutting through people. And again, his blood on his hands because he was operating in the Chinese Communist Party. They're definitely political prisoners. He ordered could be executed. There are some professions that demand a type of sociopathy, some political, historical positions. Maybe it's just always immoral to be in them or maybe they have their own type of morality. That's like, again, an ancient discussion. It's been reheated many times over.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very unreasonable social position, and the majority of people who try to adjust and change the world to fit them, they just fail because there are very good reasons for most of the things that we do. There's very good reasons to do things the way they've always been done. And you have to be so immensely psychologically fortified against basically everyone disagreeing with you at first to achieve something in your life. So let's put it this way. They all are immensely psychologically tough, become tough through the course of their life. They all suffer negative social censor. And at the end of the day, I think many of them, but not all of them, are somewhat deluded about their personal capabilities.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Won't be surprised that he had to flee several times in his life, faced a religious persecution, was in real danger of dying, being executed as a heretic multiple times in his life. But on the other hand, he was also such a combative disagreeable person. So another feature is I think a lot of these people are quite unreasonable people. I think if you're a reasonable person, you adjust yourself to the world. And then if you are an unreasonable person, you try to adjust the world through yourself. It doesn't need to be egotistical. You might view yourself as a humble instrument of God. But let's be honest, viewing yourself as the humble instrument of God preaching the truth to your society. And that's pretty egotistical too. You have to be kind of full of yourself to think that God shows you specifically. Maybe God did for all we know. Let's be metaphysically agnostic here. But it is.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It this way there's more commonalities than what I said though. Almost all of them have deep conflict and social opposition experience serious opposition in their life. It's much stronger than just fierce intellectual criticism. It is at least public slander and all the way to violent opposition. People will recognize breaking with a societal pattern as antisocial behavior. This is actually mostly correct for most of how society operates, deviation is a pretty good monitor that someone is basically behaving in bad faith trying to take advantage of a system, not living up to whatever the ideals of the society are, however if you institute new ideals, these new ideals must necessarily be from the perspective of old ideals, a norm violation. St. Marthin Luther, you probably”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we have to be very careful when reasoning across so many diverse case studies, especially since here's an interesting one, most of these individuals have become so well known that they've become mythologized. So is it the case that, say, human psychology follows the Joseph Campbell story, or is it the case that when we tell a life story, we can't help but format it in this Joseph Campbell style? You ask this question if I just went from the written sources. I'd say, oh, yes, yes, they all have a hero's journey, but actually I'm much more skeptical of that. I'm much more like, well, when we retell their story, we always retell as a hero's story. And when I or you or anyone who's listening now goes to read a book about Napoleon, a book about the actual historical Confucius, it won't be able to avoid telling a hero story, a story of journey beyond the limits and returning with something unique. However, look, let's...”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“History will be limited since this is an experiment that has played itself out. It's an experiment that doesn't necessarily reproduce itself. So that would be the commonality. I think radical reimagining of how society can be, followed by spussing it in a way that's charismatic. I think it inspires disciples sharing on this mission, this reform program, or directly implementing it yourself with political decisions, essentially.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All believers. Like that's a radical departure from where previously society was set to go in, say, the Arabian Peninsula of the 6th century. You are posing that actually we shouldn't worry if something is not sufficiently communist or if something is private property or not, actually anything that generates wealth, I will just define as communism. That's a radical thing that Deng Xiaoping is doing. Whether he intellectualizes it as he does in some essays or whether he puts it into practice, these are just different mechanisms of breaking from a social consensus of how everything should be oriented and then instantiating it in the world and having it actually work. Because if you propose a failed social reform, it is implemented and it's just an unmitigated disaster, then your effect on human”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It comes to the thinkers, I have to emphasize all of the thinkers I listed are people who inspired very dedicated disciples. That's true of Confucius. That's true of Marx, right? Let's remember he was supported by basically a rich tree error, Reich Engels supported him. He was extremely well known in his time. Benjamin Franklin obviously a thinker, but also a political actor. All of them inspired at least disciples and many of them personally created relevant new organizations. And the common thread that I would put is I think each of them was willing to radically revise either in thought or in action a key plank of society as existed before. You are proposing that the community of your local tribe and clan is going to be replaced by the community of”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economy, when we take it sort of for granted that say Bolshevik Revolution and the Islamist world is in the past, quite possibly China is here to stay for a very long time, and perhaps we can think of them as a distinct civilization. And maybe it's lazy of us, but think of them as historical China that's imperial Confucian China. They're an intensely modern society. They're building huge numbers of shaways. People owned cars mostly. They drive around. And the consequence of this sociologically is that in some ways it's going to become more similar to the United States, which is also car-oriented culture. Like this is just fundamentally such a different China, but I think thinking of it as a new civilization is perhaps warranted. And if that's the case, if this China is actually sustainable, then Xiaoping is probably another great founder of that.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we were recording this podcast in 1971, it would be quite plausible to argue that say Marx was a great founder. Again, you don't want to necessarily always endorse the effects of someone or their reshaping of civilization to acknowledge it. Because if we were recording this in 1973 or something like this, half of the planet is communist. And here's a fun one. If China becomes a dominant civilization for the next few hundred years, You know what? Maybe Marx was a great founder. Why? Because modern China isn't Confucian. It's a Marxist society. If you read CCP documents and their official ideology, they in fact believe that they are practicing a straightforward evolution of Marxist theory. This is in a way the state ideology of a country with 1.3 billion people, the world's second largest”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Martin Luther could be considered such Protestant Reformation was immensely destroyed at first in Germany, but it's undeniable the result was the Thirty Years' War, the Wars of Religion, all of that, stemmed out of a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire in Germany. It is undeniable that the Reformation and Lutheranism specifically created a distinct northern European civilization that rose and became first the driver of global capitalism and then a driver of industrialization, technological progress, and came to in a lot of ways militarily dominate most of the world and has maybe two expressions. You could say that the British Empire is an expression of this Protestant civilization, and then so is sort of the German Empire. So again, it branches off into many different”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very much a cliche to talk about America's founding fathers, but I'm pretty sure an histiography can disagree here, at least two or three of them will end up being considered great founders. Benjamin Franklin is a good guess, Thomas Jefferson is a good guess, Alexander Hamilton is a good guess. Say Hamilton can be argued to be the father of American industry in a way through trade policy and through this prioritization of factories. The Jeffersonian political ideology is radical and very different from what you have previously in the British Empire and in the colonies. Of course, his role as president to put some of that into practice. There are other exceptional individuals in the last 400 years that are not in the United States that could be considered great founders. I think for better or worse,”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it would not be an exaggeration to say that people from all walks of life could suddenly enter positions in not just the friend state, but all of these puppet republics and kingdoms that were set up, even in countries that were strictly opposed to Napoleon, who were only coerced into alliances such as Austria and Prussia, some of these reforms were imitated because they were still administratively and politically successful. Now, having said all of this, It's still not clear Napoleon is a great founder. It might turn out that in fact the civil code and this reform is much more important than we think. However, it seems to be a fairly short chapter in European history with it being not directly related to the Industrial Revolution as such. It doesn't seem like Napoleon's reforms were particularly conductive, of France becoming a great industrial power.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Napoleon won many battles. He was an exceptional general. But if he were to become a great founder, I'm not yet convinced that he is even, it would mostly be through the military and legal reforms that he instituted. Now, when it comes to military reforms, I think that his method of directing battles and so on with the general staff and everything, that was somewhat influential, but I think it was overdetermined to have developed in that direction even without Napoleon. The interesting thing, though, is that his code of law that spread across Europe, that could be argued to be profoundly influential. That was actually the moment when Europe stepped away from feudalism and adopted a very different legal framework. Say guilds were outlawed in Loth Europe. It would be an exaggeration to say markets were open.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source