TRANSCRIPT: What Should Leaders Learn from History? – Dr. Roy Casagranda

In other words, whether we want to or not, we have been in a state of constant change for 12,000 years. Just look at what we’ve done in the last 200 years, the last 50 years, the last 20 years. The pace of change has actually accelerated so that it’s geometric. It’s an exponential curve, which is of course scary, because it means that on one hand, some of the innovative force is out of control.

It’s out of balance, and the preserving force has lost control of that. And as a result, we see a pendulum swing. If your society has some balance, the pendulum swing should be kind of gentle. It shouldn’t be too horrible.

Sweden’s Balance

There is one state that has done a decent job in the last two centuries of getting a level of balance, and it’s Sweden. It’s used for 175 years. It’s used its democratic institutions to slow things down if the change was too fast, and the Swedes would vote conservative.

But then when the Swedes were ready for more change, they would vote socialist. And it went back and forth. Today, Sweden, a country of 11 million people, is one of the largest economies on the planet. It’s stable, the people have buy-in, they have levels of happiness.

The Spanish Conflict

By contrast, one of the most shocking events in terms of imbalance was the conflict that took place in Spain from 711 to 1492. In the South, the Muslim-ruled Spain was innovative, it was diverse, it was accepting. It had commerce, it did inventions. It changed things as minor as how shoes were made. The term cord wiener comes from Cordova.

In stark contrast, the fanatic fundamentalist Christian states of the North sought not just to create a unified Spain, they sought to crush that diversity and create a homogenous state where everybody believed essentially the same thing. They sought to then also purge the Jewish and Muslim populations from Spain in the process.

What’s incredible about the Spanish moment is not only that the conflict lasted 781 years, and not only that by most people’s standards the bad guys won, the homogenous crusher population, but that it all kind of came together in one year.

So it obviously was a process that took eight centuries, but in one year, 1492, a bunch of it lined up just the way they wanted it to. The Kingdom of Granada falls, the last Muslim kingdom. The Jews are expelled, and then 10 years later the Muslims are expelled.

Now obviously a lot of Jews and Muslims converted, and they became the conversos and the moriscos, but it’s also the year that the world is forever, dramatically, completely changed. it’s flipped upside down and shaken, because it’s the year that Columbus starts the conquest of North and South America by Europeans. It’s the year that triggers a catastrophe for the Native American populations. Within a century, somewhere around 150 million Native Americans die.

It’s incomprehensible. Mass enslavement, conquest, whole civilizations are destroyed. And it was possible because the Spanish had so much momentum from the war machine that they had built to crush the Muslim South that they just simply took that momentum and unleashed it into the new world.

And when they did, they brought that preserving force of homogenizing wisdom. And the result was that even though the Spanish created a massive empire that stretched across two continents and then the Philippines, they didn’t have the ability to adapt. They didn’t have the industry to sustain their war machine, to replace the armada when the English sank it. In other words, what they had done by creating this locked-in, homogenous society is they had lost the ability to innovate and adapt for the future.

So even though the Spanish empire lasts 300 years, the only reason it lasts 300 years was its massive size gave it the momentum to sustain itself. In other words, the preserving force got out of balance and in control. And it was catastrophic. The thing that made the conquest of the Americas possible was also the very thing that doomed the Spanish empire.

A More Recent Example

But having said that, that’s actually not what I want to talk about. I don’t want to talk about the past. I do, but more recent past. I actually want to dive into something a little bit closer to us.

And I was thinking about it. And we live in a world where everything is ideological. Everything is liberal conservative. I’m so exhausted by it. Sometimes socialist. And at the end of the day, I have awful news for everybody. Nobody knows enough to be certain of anything. And the fact that you’re certain makes me certain that you’re wrong, right?

So to avoid that, not upset people, I decided to try and do something a little apolitical, but to still illustrate my point.

NASA and the Grand Tour

So my story, I’m going to give you a little story, is about NASA, right? Space exploration. Usually people don’t get too upset about space exploration. I should be able to get away with it.

In 1972, NASA approached President Nixon because they had just made a discovery. It was a really cool discovery. It turns out that if they launch a probe by 1977, if they launched a spaceship by 1977, they could catch the four big gas giants with the one spaceship. They could send this probe to Jupiter, use its gravity to slingshot it past Jupiter to Saturn, past Saturn to Uranus, past Uranus to Neptune, and then leave the solar system and send us data back the whole way.

Nixon, they knew, was going to resist. The reason they knew Nixon was going to resist is because Nixon was part of the preserver force. In American parlance, we’d say conservative, but it’s not really a liberal conservative thing, so I want to be careful with it, which is why I’m using the preserver force. In 1968, Nixon believed he had been elected to undo the 60s.

That was his mandate. He wanted 1973 to be 1953. Honestly, I think if it could have been 1853, he would have preferred that. But at least 1953, the year he became vice president for Eisenhower.

So two years after we land on the moon, 1971, Nixon slashes NASA’s budget. They’re punished for their success. So by 1972, they know they’re in trouble. So they go to the president. Tears are already in their eyes because they’re worried he’s going to say no.

And they tell him about this unbelievably strange event where the planets are not really lined up, but kind of lined up, right? For probe purposes, they’re lined up. They need to launch by 77, so they can’t wait for the election results. And besides, Nixon might get a second term. So they need the permission now.

So they go to him, and they go, will you authorize us to send this probe to look at the four big gas giants? Of course, his answer is no. And the reason his answer is no is because he sees science as part of the problem. What does science do? It asks questions. It never really answers any question. By the time you’re done answering a question, you end up with 13 more questions.

And the result is that it leaves us going, wow, I just don’t like electrons. Electrons are so bizarre. We can actually have a situation where we can look at an electron, and it behaves like a particle. And then we can change the parameters, and it acts like a wave.

But here’s what’s really weird. The way we change which one it does is if we looked at the data on how it was behaving. If we don’t look, it acts like a wave. As soon as we look, it acts like a particle. It’s almost as if the electron is aware that we’re looking. You look at that, and you go, OK, never am I going to think of electrons again. I’m done with it. It’s protons for my future, because protons are predictable.

Nixon’s Resistance to Change

So Nixon is looking at this, and he’s going, we just did the 60s. And it’s because of people like you, innovators who hold summits to have ideas talked about. That’s what this is, in case you hadn’t figured it out already. It’s a chance to share and maybe make people uncomfortable on occasion, but to get ideas out there.

And Nixon goes, the 60s, which, by the way, was 15 years long, started in 54, ended in 69. The 60s was total upheaval. It was a revolution in the true sense of the word, an actual revolution. We changed everything. We changed the way people dressed. We changed the way men wore their hair. We changed the music we listened to. We changed the political structure. We made space for women, women to have more political rights, men to have more economic rights.

We made space for black people. We made space for brown people. We didn’t make everybody equal by any means. That would be naive and silly and foolish to think, but at least it got better. We changed our relationship to drugs, to marriage, to sex, to everything. And Nixon and his folk hated every moment of it. It was torture for them. They wanted the old order returned. And so he says no. He says no to NASA.

NASA’s Compromise

So they start begging. And they’re trying to get something out of this. And somebody has the idea, two planets. What if we compromise? How about this, Mr. President? Just give us two planets, Jupiter and Saturn. And the president goes, OK, just two planets, which is, of course, brilliant on NASA’s part, because all they have to do is launch the probe at the first two planets, and it’ll automatically get the other two.

In 1977, after launching Voyager 2, NASA changes its course so that it will officially pick up Uranus and Neptune. And we did. And Voyager 1 and 2, of course, get to go down in history as the greatest probes ever sent into space. They’re amazing.

The Consequences of Nixon’s Interference

So Nixon interfering with NASA, maybe not the worst thing to ever happen to the world, but it has a serious consequence. The Saturn V rocket that we launched to the moon was never intended for the moon. Werner von Braun didn’t care about the moon. We cared about Mars.

The whole goal was that the moon was going to be the first step to Mars. That’s where we were going. And so that same year, NASA got stuck asking the president permission to also go to Mars. And he said, absolutely not.

We’re not wasting American taxpayer dollars that could be used to cut taxes for the rich and fight the war in Vietnam. And so he said, no. So they had a backup plan. They said, OK, how about this, Mr. President? What if we design, test, and use a space pickup truck? And he goes, a space pickup truck? What’s that? The space shuttle, obviously.

It’s a spaceship with a payload in the back that you could put things in it. And he goes, oh, I can relate to pickup trucks. And I bet the American public can, too. And he approves it.

Now, in NASA’s mind, they thought they were manipulating the president again. They thought what they were going to get was the space shuttle to build a space station by bringing stuff up to it. And then once they had the space station, they would bring the stuff up to build a spaceship to go to Mars off the space station. This is the first necessary step.

And here we are. It’s 2023, and we’re not really close. We haven’t gotten to Mars. What they needed the president to do was do a Kennedy. Kennedy said, “By the end of this decade, we’ll be on the moon.” They needed the president to say, “By the end of this century, we’ll be on Mars.” He didn’t. So there are consequences at that level.

The Consequences of Nixon’s Policies

But actually, there are consequences that are way worse than that. Nixon tried to identify what were the causes of that revolution that we call the 1960s. And he and his friends concluded there were two things that caused this. One was the incredible US economy. From 1948 to 1973, for 25 years, the US economy was so amazing that you could conceivably get a job. I mean, a regular job. I don’t mean an amazing job.

Just a job. And the pay would be so high. And the benefits so amazing that you could not only afford to buy a house and feed your family, you might be able to send your kids to school, to college. And you might be able to retire really well.

Piketty says in his book, “Capital in the 21st Century,” that that was the only time, in fact, in human history where a person could work and make wealth, right? Because if you look at the middle class today in the United States, they don’t make wealth. They barely get by. The difference between the middle class and the lower class is that the middle class has stable housing and the lower class doesn’t have stable housing.

The wealth distance between the lower class and the middle class is negligible. It’s meaningless. They’re barely getting by.

But for 25 years, people were prospering. And what they realize, it’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If people aren’t fretting about food, if they’re not worried about shelter, if they’re not in constant fear that the economic situation they’re in will collapse, they have mind space to start to ask bigger and better questions. Like, wait a minute, what about civil liberties? What about civil rights? What about human rights?

And the next thing you know, by 1954, six years into this explosive economy, we’re in the middle of a revolution. The other thing that Nixon identifies as a problem is our education system.

The State of American Education

Now, if I say that today, the American education system, usually people laugh. And by the way, that’s appropriate. So feel free to go ahead and do it right now.

So I’m a college professor. I’ve been a teacher for 28 years, I think. Something like that. And I have to tell you, I have a steady stream of students who’ve just basically never held an idea in their brains in their lives.

And they can barely read, and they can’t do math. It’s not a thing. They whip out their phone, their external brain, and they use that instead. And then I think, wow, but when you think, like when you learn math, it builds neural pathways in your brain.

So that means that part of their brain isn’t developed, which means they think differently than I do, which is fascinating. It could be a power. Maybe having a mathematical brain or a mathematically trained brain limits you in some way.

But at the same time, it makes me worried, especially when I read the essays and then begin to cry.

Nixon’s Impact on Education and Economy

So what Nixon tries to do is begin to chip away at the American education system on purpose. He doesn’t really do that much damage. Honestly, he doesn’t do that much damage to the economy either, but he does damage the economy. 1973 is pretty much the high point of the American empire. For those of you who haven’t figured it out, we’ve been in decline for 50 years. 1973 was our apex, was our height.

But it was also the moment when we had the most egalitarian society we’ve ever had. It was class mobility. The distance from the poorest person to the richest person was really, really low. And it was a time of innovation.

I mean, we landed on the moon. That wasn’t a bad thing to do. Think of how primitive the computers were. They were so awful that they had to hire mathematicians to double check the results from the computers because they knew the computers weren’t reliable. They could get the answer quickly, but they couldn’t get it to you accurately.

They were black women. We put them in back rooms. Don’t worry. Nobody had to know about it. They were called computers. That was their title. That was their job title.

So Nixon doesn’t quite do all the damage, but he does some. And by many socioeconomic indicators, the United States starts to go backwards in 1973. In other words, in many ways, the economy of 1973 is something that most Americans dream of and reminisce of. It’s our imaginary moment, when we think of the economy, that the preserver nature wants to get back to.

So when a politician stands up and says, I’m going to do something like make America great again, they’re thinking of the 1973 economy when they hear that. They’re thinking of 1853 when they think of the social order.

So really, they hear, make America 19th century again. Reagan is the guy who does the destruction to the education system. He slashes funding. It’s terrible. We’ve had 40 years of underfunded education.

The Saturn V and SLS Comparison

So why does all this matter? I’m going to give you, since I’ve been doing this NASA thing, I’ll give you one more NASA thing, just to bring this home.

So from 1962 to 1972, so for 10 years, that’s when we built the Saturn V rocket. In my mind, it’s still the best rocket ever. I know the SLS is a little bit more powerful, but the Saturn V was glorious.

When I say 1962, the first two years were just designing the rocket. They didn’t actually start building the components until 64. In today dollars, it cost $10 billion. $10 billion to do the Apollo program, basically.

When you think about it, that’s nothing. It was money well spent. Just the pictures back from the moon were worth $10 billion. We decided that we’re going to jumpstart the space program 50 years later. What have we been doing for 50 years?

Point to something we’ve achieved in the last 50 years besides cell phones. I was going to reach for mine, but I realized I didn’t have it on me. And we have these incredible computers, these handheld computers. OK, that’s great.

And the entertainment. Man, Hollywood can really knock it out of the park. TV these days, incredible. But name something like, truly, do we cure cancer? Name something that we’ve done that’s monumental in the last 50 years that stands up to going to the moon. A discovery we made. Higgs boson was pretty cool. I remember exactly where I was when Higgs boson was discovered. I was on a dirt road in Vermont, driving, listening to BBC, crying, because I couldn’t believe how cool it was.

But that was just for a few nerds. Something that the whole world could look at and go, wow, this is incredible. This is the moment. We’ve achieved something. All the civilizations before us have those things. There’s something they can look to. And we did, too, until 50 years ago. It’s almost like we decided we were done.

We achieved what we wanted to. We went to the moon. We’re finished. We’re going to redo it. We’re going to go back to the moon.

So we have to restart the whole space program, including building a rocket to replace the Saturn V. That project took 11 years to build SLS, Space Launch System. I feel like that’s the worst named rocket ever. Space Launch System. Isn’t that a rocket? Did we just name our rocket Rocket? I feel like we named our rocket Rocket. 11 years, $11 billion. Saturn V was 10 years, $10 billion.

Let’s just call it even. It’s close enough. What’s an extra billion in an extra year? We built 15 Saturn V rockets. We built two SLS. Somehow, 50 years ago, we were 7 and 1/2 times more productive. 50 years ago, when our computers were so awful, we had to have a backup team check the math. 50 years ago, when we didn’t have all the alloys and plastics that we have today. Same money, so you can’t blame it on the funding. Same amount of time, so you can’t say it was rushed.

How is it that 50 years ago, we were so much more innovative that we could land on the moon six times, that we could link up with the Soviets in space? And we’re just now trying to re-figure all that out all over again.

And the answer is that the preserver force in the United States economy was so good, so thorough, that the United States simply doesn’t have the ability to operate the way it used to.

A Plea for Balance

So here’s my plea. My plea is for world leaders not to give up on the preserver force. If the innovative force gets out of balance, that’s not good. It’ll erode things.

For example, history. It’s quick to forget. It’s not interested in the past, or culture, or family ties. It’s dangerous.

What I’m saying, maybe, is hold onto it a little less tightly so that when the innovations come about, we can adapt. And engage more of the community. One of the things that’s happened over the course of the last 50 years in the United States is college has become more and more exclusive, not inclusive. It’s become so expensive that a person has to ask themselves a really strange question. Am I willing, because the United States is such a strange place, we want to charge crazy amounts of tuition for public post-secondary education.

Do we really have enough MDs that we can afford to weed them out? Do we really have enough engineers? And the answer is obviously no. The United States is 6% Asian, but 30% of our MDs are Asian.

So we’ve compensated for the fact that our education system is terrible by just importing and brain draining on the rest of the world. What we should do is fix the education system.

So I keep saying 1853 is the thing they’re looking to. Because in the 1853 system, white men like me are the only people who have privilege and power. Are the only people who have a guaranteed path to that. I can be completely mediocre, and I still have a chance at it.

Well, the United States is 59% white today.

So 29% white men. Throw in class, even if you let half of the white men, because the other half are too poor to go anywhere, even if you let half of the white men achieve, you’re down to 14.5%, 15%.

Can you really afford to throw away 85% of your talent? And my answer is not in 2023. In 2023, there are too many things that have gone wrong. The environment has gone wrong.

Our planet is destabilizing. We’re 90 seconds to midnight, according to the doomsday clock. We have some real problems, and we’re going to have more pandemics in the future. Actually, frankly, I think COVID was an easy one.

And I think we got really lucky. I mean, think of bubonic plague in smallpox. This could have gone really bad. And it just didn’t.

We dodged that one. What we need to be doing is we need to be harnessing our intellectual capability. And also, we need to remember something that, at some level, the preserver force has it wrong. Because the thing the preserver force is preserving was, at the time, the innovation. In other words, through the lens of history, at the end of the day, the preserver and the innovator looked the same in the past.

It’s only now that we’re upset with it, and obsessed with it, and freaking out. And so on that note, I ask for more balance when it comes to allowing change to happen in society.

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