A cashless economy reduces resilience because digital payment systems are vulnerable to power and internet failures, malware, or the withdrawal of private providers; a resilient society therefore needs a certain percentage of the money supply held as physical cash, and there is a generational and class divide in cash dependence.

Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora is a useful corrective to figures like Elon Musk who imagine colonizing Mars, because it dramatizes how humans cannot escape their biological dependence on Earth's specific ecology.

We had a great conversation a couple of years ago that got around 600,000 views.

The experience of the Cultural Revolution shaped the mindset of some of China's most successful companies, making them risk-averse, wary of overly complex supply chains, and focused on loyalty, leadership and collective identity—an antithesis to Western just-in-time supply chains and isolated individualism.

The book Why Empires Fall is about 150-160 pages while Icarus Economics is slightly longer in presentation but not in word count.

Nearly all major historical pandemics—diphtheria, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, the Black Death—are the result of zoonotic spillover, and the increasingly rapacious relationship of capitalist economies to nature is driving more frequent spillover events, as evidenced by three novel coronaviruses in roughly 25 years.

Liberalism has a unique understanding of time as an eternal present in which the future and past are mere extensions of the present, which makes it structurally difficult for Western societies to think long-term, be 'good ancestors,' or build things meant to outlast a single generation—unlike the medieval builders of cathedrals who worked for eternity rather than the next quarter.

Right-populist politics is internally inconsistent and cannot solve the structural problems it identifies: parties like Reform want to end immigration (which functions as a Ponzi-like mechanism to fund future pensions) while simultaneously promising to keep the triple lock, an unworkable combination.

Increased health care spending yields diminishing returns: after 2020 the UK substantially increased health care spending yet outcomes did not improve much, refuting the post-war left/center-left assumption that more health spending is always straightforwardly better.

We are living in what will be seen as a kind of dark age, marked by pornography, gambling, children on phones, polarization and ugly buildings, partly because the assumption of perpetual growth made people willing to demolish beautiful buildings and run roads through cities on the belief that anything lost could simply be rebuilt.