Peter Turchin: Is a Societal Collapse Looming for America? (Transcript)

Most of that outcomes are in between, in fact.

The 2010 Prediction

DANIEL DAVIS: And so I guess obviously we’re going to want to look at the United States today and kind of where we are and just kind of as a stage setter for anybody who may not have seen. You kind of came to some national recognition, really back in 2010 during the Obama administration when you predicted that there would be some political instability in the United States.

And this piece from Newsweek earlier this year, actually they wrote that 15 years ago, smack in the middle of Barack Obama’s first term, amid the rapid rise of social media and a slow recovery from the Great Recession, a professor at the University of Connecticut issued a stark warning. The United States was heading into a decade of growing political instability.

It sounded somewhat contrarian at the time. The global economy was clawing back from the depths of the financial crisis and the American political order still seemed anchored in post Cold War optimism. Though cracks were beginning to emerge, as evidenced by the Tea Party uprising.

But Peter Turchin, an ecologist turned historian, had the data. “Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent and predictable waves of political instability,” he wrote in the journal Nature in 2010, forecasting a spike in unrest around the year 2020, driven by economic inequality, elite overproduction and rising public debt.

And of course, we all know what happened on January 6th of 2021, right? At smack dab at the beginning of that debate. How in the world did you see that coming from that far away?

The Complexity Science Approach

PETER TURCHIN: So let me just give you some background. Yes, I was trained as a complexity scientist. What does it mean? It means that we use the tools of complexity science, mathematical models, all right, and analytical tools from statistics coupled with large databases in order to test theories about dynamics of complex systems.

So I argue that human society is such a complex system and therefore we can use the tools of complexity science to investigate them. Why do we need mathematical models? Well, because different theories propose make different premises about why things happen. Such things change, like the breakout of political violence. Right.

But in complex systems we deal with non linear feedback loops because changing one variable affects another variable. And that could feedback on the first variable. And human brain, unaided human brain is just not good at tracing those complex feedback loops. That’s why you have to translate variable models, variable theories into mathematical models. That’s the first step, so that we know that predictions follow from premises.

And then we need to collect large data sets. So I started my scientific career studying population dynamics of animals, looking for population cycles, collapses of populations, even insects, mammals, other animals. And as such, and then at some point about late 1990s, has reached into studying human history using pretty much the same methodology.

And initially I was not terribly interested in studying our contemporary societies, just because when you do, you enter the political arena and people who don’t like your conclusions immediately start accusing you of all kinds of nefarious things. For example, on my own substack, like substantial proportion of commenters think that I am Putin’s stooge.

DANIEL DAVIS: I get a lot of that too. So welcome to that.

PETER TURCHIN: I can imagine. So initially I didn’t want the ball into politics, but we were studying societies from Rome and from China and Europe, Russia and so on and so forth. And every time I would give a talk in the early 2000s, people would listen to me and say, well, where are we? Finally I decided, I broke down and decided to look at it.

And what I found around 2007 or 8 shocked me because all the markers of crisis were approaching. You’ll talk about the drivers, I’m happy to talk about specifics. But so what happened next? I decided to publish the prediction.

And think about it. This is not a prophecy, what I published in 2010. It was a scientific prediction. The goal of scientific prediction is to extract predictions from the theory and compare it to alternative theories in order to find out which theory is better. The best way to decide which theory is better and which theory is worse is by comparing how well they predict independent data, data on which they were not developed.

And contrary to what you said, I have to correct you a little bit. But when I published it in 2010, nobody paid attention. In fact, I didn’t mind because I didn’t want my prediction to affect things. Not that I extent to that.

And so then periodically science reporters would find out about my work, 2013, 2016 and so on. They would come and interview me and I could see in their eyes that they thought I was crazy, but it was interesting. And because it was more important to be interesting than to be right. And so they just published things.

And then of course, the effect Notoriety came only in 2020 when, when really, well, the proverbial brown matter hit the fan. And that is when people started paying attention. But even now at the political level, there is very little interest in my theories. And I’m fine because I’m a scientist. I don’t want to be part of the political process, which is very nasty today. We can talk about it.

Trump as Product, Not Cause

DANIEL DAVIS: Indeed. Yeah, well, I’m very interested in your theories because they show a lot of accuracy. And so we’re obviously very interested in what they say now based on the data. And I want to just, even before we get into specific things from your book, I want to ask you to explain to our audience.

I want to look at the situation because you mentioned as it got closer to 2020 and the rise of Donald Trump has been talked about a lot of times and a lot of people have the opinion, depending on which side of the political aisle you’re on, that Trump led this disruption, he brought it into it.

But as I understand from some of the things I think I’ve written, maybe I’ve mischaracterized it, but you’re saying he’s more a product, not the cause of some of these things because of these turmoil things going on that kind of elevated, brought them up. And maybe even without Trump, we still might have had instability. Could you explain that?

The Structural Drivers of American Political Instability

PETER TURCHIN: Sure. So, well, let me again give a bit of a background. So in my research, I am interested both in the evolution of social, of complex societies and also why they periodically go through these periods of state breakdown. So both questions are interesting.

By the way, I would like to mention that I have a book called “The Global Holocene Transformation: What Complexity Science Can Tell Us About the Evolution of Complex Societies.” This book will be published later this month. It’s an academic book. It has like more than 100 graphs, modeling equations and things like that. Because that’s a very interesting question.

You know, for over 95% of our evolutionary history, humans lived in simple small scale societies. Suddenly, over the past 5,000 years or so, we have seen states appear and take over the world. So today, pretty much everybody lives in complex societies, organized states. So why? That’s a big question that we don’t have time to go into. But that’s the subject of my book.

So the second part of research is now why do our wonderful complex societies, which are in principle capable of delivering pretty high living standards for the majority of population, and periodically do so. So think about United States back in the 1950s and 60s, that was the period of unprecedented wealth affluence, I would say, for the huge majority of the population.

But then what we found that when we study the dynamics of the society. So for example, we quantify internal disturbances, such as urban riots, rural uprisings, terrorism, and then all the way up to civil wars and transformative revolutions. So when we quantify these dynamics, we found that there is a rhythm, it’s not perfect periodicity, right, but there is about 200 plus minus. And by the way, that depends on the properties, on the characteristics of the society. But all complex societies, until now, and including our own, have been part of this cycle.

Historical Patterns in American Political Instability

So the United States, for example, had a disintegrative period during the second half of the 19th century. And so of course, the peak of that was Civil War, 1860s. But then there was another peak in 1920. Very few people realized that United States was in a revolutionary situation, but it was actually resolved without a revolution and civil war.

And so when I started studying United States, I looked at the general factors that we have identified in the study of past societies. So what are those factors? There are really three major drivers of instability.

The first one is what you call popular immiseration. That’s when the living standards of the majority of the population stagnate or even decline. That breeds a lot of popular discontent and elevates mass mobilization potential. People become angry and unhappy and they can be easily mobilized by leaders to work against the regime, the prevailing regime.

But by themselves, common people are not capable of overthrowing states and causing revolutions and civil war. So think about it. In the medieval period, peasants would rebel, and then armored knights would just ride and disperse and kill some and disperse others. Today we see somewhat similar things. You know, when you see violent demonstrations, you see sort of robocops, heavily armored cops, who essentially can control those outbreaks.

The Role of Counter-Elites

So the second component is key, and that is organization. Where does organization come from? It comes from people we call counter elites. Elites are, we use the sociological definition. These are simply the small proportion of people who concentrate social power in their hands. Coercive social power, economic, political, and also ideological.

What’s key is that elites are reproduced. Some of the children of the elites become members of the elites. Others move from the general population into elite strata. And periodically there are periods when the numbers of elites become too large. This is called elite overproduction.

And then we have too many elites. So it’s like a game of musical chairs, except you keep the number of chairs constant, so you still have one president, 100 senators, and so on and so forth. But now we have many more elite aspirants who want those positions. And as that happens, the competition between them intensifies. And the result of that is that there are many more losers. And some of those losers decide to start breaking the rules of the game. And those are the counter elites.

And the third component is the state gets in fiscal trouble. And so oftentimes the state bankruptcy, for example, on the eve of the French Revolution, is the triggering event that causes the outbreak of things to happen.

So let’s talk about how these insights actually help us understand the rise of Trump.

DANIEL DAVIS: Yeah, so I guess in your telling here, he would be a counter elite because he was not part of the regular. He wanted to break into it. So he’s a counter elite, which is kind of going against the grain, at least of the system. Definitely in the Republican Party.

Trump as a Counter-Elite

PETER TURCHIN: Yeah, exactly. So when I published the prediction in 2010, I had no idea who Trump was. But there were many people like him. For example, if you look in past societies, if you look into the crisis of the Roman Republic, we have these populists, they actually had a party called Populist Party back in the 2nd century BCE. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, for example.

And so what happened, they were part of the elites. They were part of that senatorial aristocracy. But by that point, there were too many people who wanted to get into Senate. And at the same time, there was a huge potential because the population was greatly immiserated by that point. And so what they did, they channeled the anger against the regime in order to propel themselves into office. They were not terribly effective at this. They got killed by the established elites. But this is an example.

So what we see, Donald Trump actually fits this very well. He has channeled the discontent of American people in order to get into power. And he has been much more successful than the Brothers Gracchi, for example. He is the counter elite because just to finish, he’s a billionaire. He was a billionaire even before. So you cannot call him just a common person. But he wanted to get into power, and he was frustrated in doing that. And then he started playing a very clever game, breaking rules in a very certain way that actually did propel him into power. But the raw energy came from the population.

DANIEL DAVIS: That’s exactly where I was about to go. If the population wasn’t in a state of what you call immiseration where they were discontent, then Trump’s antics probably would fall flat. And I’ll just ask a question. Let’s say during the, I want to say it was 1992 election, I think it was where Ross Perot came up, where he was an outsider, he was also a counter elite, but the population wasn’t in a state of immiseration or so and it didn’t seem that he was successful. Is that kind of an explanation of why one worked and one didn’t?

The Wealth Pump and Growing Inequality

PETER TURCHIN: Actually the turnaround happened during the 1970s. That’s when the mechanism that I call the wealth pump started operating. So let me just explain that. So prior to 1977 and 78, the wages of American workers moved up together with the GDP per capita. So essentially the fruits of economic growth were fairly shared between workers and economic elites.

And then something happened. I’m sure you’ve seen this graph where the productivity of American workers kept going up but their incomes stagnated. So that turned on the wealth pump which took wealth from the majority of the population and passed it on to the top 1%.

Now by 1992, the process had not gone far enough yet to create enough. It’s a slow process, it builds up. But by 2016 we’ve been at it for 40 years and a new generation was born that clearly saw that they could not achieve the wealth level, living standards of their parents. And they saw, it’s always a relative thing. Obviously they were better than people in Chad, but that’s not who people compare themselves to. They compare themselves to others, but especially to the previous generation. And so that discontent accumulated to the point where it could be channeled by political entrepreneurs.

Current Trajectory and Future Outlook

DANIEL DAVIS: And so obviously Trump is the chief political entrepreneur, at least he has been so far. Certainly got him into office here for the second time. But now I’m wondering kind of where your research and study shows things are headed now because you talked about the beginning of the 2000s as a period of political instability.

Now I wonder, now halfway through the 2020s, if you have any updated conclusions or observations of what the second half of the 2020s may look like. Because I mean we seem to see more of, at least from my non-scientific observation, seems that we have more of the immiseration of the population. And now then we’re seeing National Guards being sent into cities, even more distrust in government because of things that have been happening in both the previous administration, this administration, it just seems to keep eroding trust in any government institutions.

And we seem to have more of the super elites. There were some, the Biden administration, President Trump on his inauguration day has a whole raft of them up on the platform. And it seems that there’s getting to be a bigger divide between the governed and the governors. And so the question is, is even Trump going to be able to capitalize on all this or could it actually overcome him? What does your history tell you?

PETER TURCHIN: Well, so the drivers for instability continue operating. There has been no sharp turnaround in the well being of the general population. The period, I mean, the wages did grow, but then they got all eaten up by inflation. And also keep in mind that it took 40 years for the discontent to build up. It will not be resolved in one year or two.

Same problem is that where did all that wealth, you should ask yourselves, where did all that wealth that was pumped from the majority of the population, where did it go to? It went to creating huge numbers of newly wealthy people. So for example, if you look at households with $10 million or more in constant terms, their numbers over the past 40 years increased tenfold. I mean, they have 10 times as many deca-millionaires. And by the way, the numbers of billionaires increased 20-fold, again using constant terms, the constant definition.

So all those people, not everybody, not all of them are interested in politics, but the more of them you have, even if it is a small percent, you have 10 times as many wealth holders who are interested in politics. So that has also built up and you have plenty of such people around. So if it wasn’t Trump, it would be somebody else.

So these two factors continue unchecked. And the third one, which is indebtedness of the state under Trump, it has, well, I’m not blaming him. It’s a bipartisan thing. It keeps exploding more and more. So essentially what this all means is that the drivers for instability, they continue operating at full speed.

DANIEL DAVIS: And so what does that lead you to conclude in the near term, let’s say the medium term, say the remainder of the 2020s.

The Revolutionary State of America

PETER TURCHIN: Yeah. So first of all, on my Substack that you have showed, I argue that when Trump gained power for the second time, we entered what is a state of revolution, in fact. So prior to that we were in the revolutionary situation. Now we are in the revolution.

This is a “nice revolution” in a sense, because typical revolution is actually quite bloody. People getting their heads cut off and so on and so forth. So so far we have escaped the worst, the violence. Although there’s that number violence in terms of number of people getting killed as it’s definite uptick. It’s much more now in this decade than in the previous decades. So it’s been building up.

All right, but most of the struggle between elites now takes the form of lawfare. All right, so first, of course, back before 2020, Trump and his cohort of counter elites, they were the subjects of lawfare. And it’s not just Trump. I mean, if you think about it, a number of his associates went to prison, in fact, and others lives were ruined. Right?

And now, of course, the tables have been turned and it is the Trump administration that’s practicing lawfare. Actually, it continues because there’s enough established elites. They are out of power, maybe in political domain, but they still control large swaths of the judicial system. And so this is a continuing thing.

So Trump, for example, Trump administration has been weaponizing accusations of, you know, when people buy property and, you know, and break law, essentially by doing that. So I’m talking about suits against Letitia James, you know, Adam Schiff and whoever said the governor of a bank, people like that. So this struggle has intensified.

And from the political point of view, it doesn’t matter how you get rid of your political opponents, whether you kill them or you put them in prison or destroy their political career. Their outcome is essentially, this is what happens in every revolution. Counter elites have to clean. They have to get rid somehow of the previous established elites. And so that is precisely what’s happening.

So the prognosis for the to the end of the 2020s is that we will continue to have a lot of social turbulence. So my hope is that it will not tip over into hot civil war. So it will continue to be this reasonably nonviolent civil war. But it’s judging by history that the probability that it would tip into a hot civil war is actually growing and moving the troops into cities. It’s actually a move that intensifies the probability of things going south because you have people with armed with guns who are not really trained that much to deal with urban disturbances. So it is potentially a dangerous situation.

The Sparking Event Theory

DANIEL DAVIS: We actually had Stephen Marchand on our show, the author of “The Next Civil War,” a few months back, and he made the case and argued that all of the conditions needed for an explosive civil war, which would obviously be different than the north, south kind of situation of 1863, but some version of it exists right now. And he said that the only thing lacking so far is a sparking event, whether it’s like a political assassination, some even ecological disaster, you know, that some big, huge thing or something else happens economically, some kind of a economic collapse that causes all kinds of chaos. What is your view on that question?

PETER TURCHIN: Yes, that’s precisely. Well, I know his book, but his theory is verbal and is not really science. I mean, which is fine, but what we do, we have studied several hundred of such cases. And so we can do statistics. And so his intuition is correct.

Typically there are root causes, which I named. They build up slowly and fairly predictably. But the actual breakdown, that state breakdown that happens has to be triggered somehow. And those triggers are highly unpredictable.

So think about how the Arab Spring started because this Tunisian fruit vendor self immolated. But, you know, back in 1960s, a number of US veterans, Vietnam vets, self immolated. But there were no structural conditions that this could trigger. All right, so the same thing.

So now we are in this very, very precarious situation when things can get triggered by, yes, assassination of a leader or for example, serious, you know, United States cannot really go bankrupt because we just print more money. But if one of the ways that civil wars have been triggered in the past was when the government stopped paying the police and the army, right? And so that, then there was nobody to keep the breakup of violence, and then the different elite groups would start fighting out. It’s the cycle of revenge and counter revenge and that escalates very rapidly into the civil war of many sides.

American Exceptionalism and Institutional Resilience

DANIEL DAVIS: And so what do you say to those people who say, well, okay, that may have happened in the past, but this is the United States of America. We have, we have laws and balance of power and a lot of intelligent people, and that’s just not going to happen here. We’ll find a way to work around it.

PETER TURCHIN: And that’s actually not such a bad argument because we have studied this crisis over the past several thousand years. We noticed that earlier complex societies were much more fragile. They were much more likely to do a true collapse when half of the population would be gone. You know, that would be civil wars, you know, for decades. And then somebody comes from the outside and picks up pieces, right?

And then as we come closer to today, the probability of this, of such, you know, really bad outcomes has been declining. And the reason is we actually can trace it. It’s because we have more institutions, democratic institutions is certainly some of those, but not only the more effective bureaucracy. So China, for example, is not a democratic country, but it has a pretty effective democracy. So the states became more. Less fragile.

And so this is my hope. That’s why I hope that maybe we are now in a situation where our accumulated institutions will prevent hot civil war, so we will have all this instability will continue happening without thousands of people getting killed.

DANIEL DAVIS: We certainly hope that’s the case. My concern, though, seems to be that the trust in government institutions which are needed to keep that from happening, continues to get whittled down. If that gets to some unknown point, then we could be in trouble. That’s kind of one of my concerns. Do you see historically any reason to think otherwise?

The MAGA Revolution and Geopolitical Transformation

PETER TURCHIN: Yeah, no, exactly. So that’s the breakdown of intradict consensus, that it’s a necessary condition for breakout of civil wars and things like that. Let me just go back. Why do I think that we are in revolution? Well, we are in revolutions. I define this in two ways.

That one of them is revolution, meaning revolving of the elites. Revolution of the elites. And that’s what the MAGA movement is trying to accomplish. They are now trying to replace the established elites, previous established elites, with new ones.

Second one, revolutions. Some revolutions are transformative. They really change the nature of the state. And that’s also what MAGA movement is attempting to do. Think about things like, very clear in the political arena that Trump is essentially destroying NATO. All right? He has turned around the previous elite consensus that maintain that we have to continue American supremacy and control all the upstarts like Russia, China and so on and so forth. And so that consensus has been actually breaking down here in the United States. All this still continues in Europe. All right?

And so what’s interesting is that again, because I’m always thinking about the deep history, all right? It’s, you know, many people, your people who watch your show, I’m sure they’re familiar with geopolitics and they know about, you know, the Eurasian, you know, the heartland and the rims, the oceanic rims.

Well, it turns out that there are very deep historical roots to this configuration of geopolitics, because the main rivals of United States, which is China, Russia and Iran, they all arose on the shores of the great steppe about 3,000 years ago. The nomads learned to ride horses, shoot arrows, and they became a weapon of destruction. And so the societies around them basically had no choice but to scale up and acquire east institutions that would make them into big empires. And that lasted for, well, 3,000 years, essentially.

But now there was another military revolution, which some historians will say Europeans as white inner Asians. Right. So now we have Europeans from 1500 or so riding ships and shooting cannon. And so that created this pressure from the oceanic side. And so those old empires, now they had to reorient themselves against the pressure from outside.

So United States is essentially providing that pressure that keeps, that makes them become more internally cohesive and unified. So we saw that happen in Russia, which was the basket case in the 1990s, and now it is a fairly effective military machine. But more China and Russia are brought together by this external pressure.

China-Russia Alliance and BRICS Cooperation

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, yeah, as a matter of fact, we had this comment here from Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin just earlier this very day talking on that issue. “Russia relations have withstood the test of the international situation and serve as a model of interstate relations, eternal good neighborliness, friendship, comprehensive strategic interaction, mutually beneficial cooperation and win win outcomes. In recent years, under our leadership, China and Russia, in the spirit of their original goals and with determination, have been achieving fruitful results in cooperation. We are ready together with you to continue supporting each other in national development, prosperity, to steadfastly defend international justice and equal equality, and to promote the formation of a more just and rational system of global governance. Our close communication reflects the strategic nature of Russia China relations which are at an unprecedentedly high level. This was fully demonstrated during your May visit to Russia and our joint participation in the celebration of the 85th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Tomorrow in Beijing, large scale solemn events will be held on the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the victory over Japan and the end of the Second World War, in which we will take part together.”

And you have just said that there might even be rain, but I am sure that this will not overshadow our festive mood. And the Chinese armed forces, with their customary brilliance, will carry out this festive solemn event. And right now we’re seeing a lot of coordination between not just China and Russia, but you can also add in a little bit if you’re on North Korea, who’s also going to be at this event tomorrow for the first time since 1959, which is hard to believe, India was trying to join in with that, Brazil, etc. With the whole BRICS issue. How do you see that playing out and how does that play into your theories?

PETER TURCHIN: It plays exactly into my theories. I have books called “Ultra Society,” which I published 10 years ago, which argues that cooperation. Notice they all said cooperation many, many times. Now my argument in that book is that cooperation is a necessary glue that holds our societies together.

The question then becomes, how does cooperation evolve? Because this is very fragile. It’s easier for me to free ride than to cooperate by giving my resources for the public good. So this is like one of the general laws of history, that cooperation is nurtured by outside pressure, by threat, by existential threat.

So whereas 3,000 years ago the nomads were existential threat to those imperial states, now that existential threat is NATO essentially. And that’s why you see these countries both unifying internally. All right? And now they are also brought together. Think about it. Just 30 years ago, Russia and China were rivals, all right? And now they are in unprecedented cooperative agreements. So it’s the general law. Outside pressure results in increased cooperation, internal cooperation.

Predicting the Unpredictable

DANIEL DAVIS: Yeah, we’re certainly see that playing out there. Listen, I know we’re running low on time, but just real quick. So given all of these things you’re talking about, all of the models that you have come up with, if you had to put a number on it, I mean, or if you had to characterize it some way, how concerned would you be that we could go from this revolutionary phase or whatever into something that’s more destructive instead of something that is reforming and constructive?

PETER TURCHIN: So that’s a very hard question. In fact, there may not be an answer. Certainly I don’t know the answer. There may not be the answer. Let me give you an explanation using earthquakes as, you know, as an analogy, right?

So with earthquakes we know precisely which where the pressure grows inside, all right? Because the plates move in a certain way. And so there was a huge earthquake in Kamchatka. It was predicted 30 years ago, but they could not predict when exactly it would result in the quakes.

It’s probably likely that the same thing is social quakes. It will be the pressure going. Sooner or later something will result in a real bad outbreak. That’s why we need to get into reversing the immiseration, reproduction and so on, so that we remove those conditions. But how to quantify the pressure, at what point it will actually things start breaking? That’s our science is behind seismology. So I don’t think anybody can tell you.

The Path Forward: Shutting Down the Wealth Pump

DANIEL DAVIS: And just the last question here, if you could pick one main thing, what could we do to relieve the pressure and give us the best chance to go in a non-violent direction?

PETER TURCHIN: Shut down the wealth pump. We should allow workers’ salaries to increase together with their productivity. That’s very difficult to do because the current system is extremely lucrative for economic elites who have become filthy rich on it. And they are the ones who control newspapers or at least mainstream media, they control much of the government and so on and so forth.

But if we can do things like what FDR did back in the… Actually it started during the early 1900s under the Progressive Era, and then it was clinched during the New Deal. That’s when they shut down the previous wealth pump that caused civil war and so on and so forth.

So we now obviously we are a different country, so we’ll have to use a different set of tools. But our research shows that the only way societies can exit from those end times is by shutting down their wealth pumps.

DANIEL DAVIS: And by shutting down the wealth pump that then relieves the pressure on the immiseration of the population. Is that correct?

PETER TURCHIN: And that also shuts down, first of all, it shuts down the growth of the wealth of elite holders because there is no wealth flowing up to them. And it also said, the second part of that, we didn’t talk much about elite aspirants because some of them are wealth holders, others are degree holders.

So as immiseration disappears, there’s much less incentive for people to go to college. And then college enough, get a degree and so forth. I’ve been a professor at a State University for 30 years. Ninety percent of my students had no interest in education. They just wanted to have the paper with which they compete in the job market.

So shutting down the wealth pump will actually work both on immiseration and on elite overproduction. That’s how it worked in the previous exits from crisis.

Conclusion and Hope for the Future

DANIEL DAVIS: Fascinating. Well, listen, we really appreciate you coming on today and giving us some hope. A lot of the signals aren’t looking good and we’re moving in a direction that are troubling, but it’s not without hope. And we appreciate you illuminating that, both the risks and the potential reward. Thank you very much.

And as a reminder to people, there’s “End Times” with Peter Turchin right there. Got a new book coming out and of course we suggest that you go to his Substack which has current things on it.

PETER TURCHIN: Thank you for having me, Daniel.

DANIEL DAVIS: Always my pleasure. Thank you. And we appreciate you guys. And we will look forward to seeing you tomorrow on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.

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