 Because I would argue that we're living through the equivalent of another axial age. We have no idea how to respond to the world in which we live. Because while we still have many of the problems that the philosophers of the actual age were discussing and presented to us, we have a vast array of new problems that have completely and totally befuddled us. Our religions, our cultures, our constitutions, our legal systems, our social norms, our language, basically our philosophical systems, don't know how to address them. This is my central argument for next year. And so, yeah, it's just that easy. It should be no problem. And so how we need to reshape our thinking and our minds and our actions to do essentially what the philosophers began doing 2,000 plus years ago. Faced with all these new opportunities, faced with all these new problems, faced with these new systems and structures and ways of thinking and technological innovations, how do you respond when certain things just don't work the same way anymore? And I'll just give you one example that goes back to the axial age. When you start meeting foreign peoples, you have a couple of choices. The first choice usually is kill them. If you decide not to kill them, then you have to figure out how to live with them. So you can either exclude them or you can start mixing with them. And when you start mixing with them, well, then you come up with all these crazy marriage laws. Marriage laws are always fun. Anthropologists love to look at all the different rules we've come up with for ways to marry. But in theory, the marriage customs that we have have been inherited from cultures that go back way before the axial age, probably running to pre-agrarian age in some time. So we have customs that were developed over 10,000 years ago that still have this incredible influence on a society 10,000 years later. Now, if nothing fundamental has changed in your society in the intervening 10,000 years, your custom is probably just fine. It seems like things have changed. That's my theory. And it means, not irrationally, that institutions like marriage struggle. And we have all these debates now about marriage in all kinds of different ways. And in fact, we've changed our marriage culture dramatically without saying that we've changed it. We keep saying we're doing the same thing and we don't do the same thing at all, which is a classic sign that your intellectual and cultural norms are not keeping up with what's actually going on. And so that sort of ancient 5,000, 10,000-year-old custom is having a rough time of it because the world in which that custom was developed is long, long, long gone. And so trying to understand how ancient institutions, ancient ideas translate into a new world with new forces, new concepts, new cultures, it's virtually hard. It's really hard, basically. It's virtually impossible. In fact, it's a stupid idea for a lecture series. Let's just say that right up front. Let's just be clear on that. And yeah, I think it's worth a shot for the same reason that the people were giving it a shot a couple of thousand years ago. We don't think of them as facing technological innovation, but they were. I mean, when someone develops a new kind of pot, those urns, those beautiful urns that they shipped everything in. Man, I wish Amazon would ship things in Grecian urns. Wouldn't that be great? Because then I would really like to get stuff from Amazon. I would just throw out whatever inside and just keep those beautiful urns, right? No, we get ugly boxes, urns. Let's push for urns. But though that development of a new urn does a couple of things like people go, oh, that's beautiful. We want it to is very efficient at carrying this. So we need to copy that. And three, it means that your potters, your people who make this, they have to change. And so what we call technology advancing, it was already happening. The second a ship lands with a superior product, all of your craftspeople and your traders go, oh, problem. Got to solve that because it's going to bankrupt us if we just keep buying all that stuff. The classic example here is the opium warts. If even people know the opium war history is England had nothing that China wanted and China had everything that England wanted. So England was sending basically all of its gold and silver to China. And so England was like, we got to find something to sell the Chinese. And they came up with opium, which was a very friendly solution. So they said, if we can get a lot of Chinese people addicted to opium, that would be great because we run India. So that's cool. And then the Chinese were like, no, we don't think you should be allowed to sell your drugs in our country. So they had a war and the end of the war was, oh, no, it'd be lovely if you sold us your drugs. And then England got their gold back. Right. So there was, I mean, this and that's not 2,000 years ago. This is recent history. That the fact that England couldn't come up with something to compete with the goods from China forced them to go to war with China. And this was this was happening in the ancient world just over and over again, where somebody developed something that's better, new, you either outlawed. That was always popular. Oh, no, nobody can buy that. But then that tended not to work. Smuggling has been popular for a long, long time. And so then you go, oh, we have to do something to compete. We either have to conquer those people. We have to force them to integrate with our society or we need to just copy it. Make something like it that people here will consume and this will balance things out again. So we think of our time. We are living in a time of unprecedented technological development. But the response started 2,400 years ago. The necessity of reshaping your thinking to continuous pressure from outside technologies, outside markets, outside peoples, outside ideas. That's what's new about the Axial Age. Before then, you could live moderately isolated. You could have a small controlled space or even a large controlled space where very few people had access to any resources and so they just told everybody else what to do. 99% slaves, 1% ruling, you know, 5% ruling. But I don't know exactly what the percentage reaches. But at some point, when 7 or 8 or 9% of your population is not working in the field and is literate and skilled and has some capacity and some free time, you get problems. And history is perfectly clear. If you try to control those problems by isolating your country, you fail. You either fail today or you fail tomorrow or you fail in 75 years. But basically, eventually someone is going to have worked out something that destroys your way of life. And so this process that feels so inevitable, feels so modern, feels this constant pressure of new ideas, new concepts, new goods, new technologies started there.