What can Aristotle, Plato, Prometheus, and the Greek city-states teach us about AI, innovation, and the future of human flourishing?
Cost of Glory host Alex Petkas joins the show to explore how old myths still matter in a world shaped by technology. We talk about Prometheus as the foundational myth of tech, Plato’s fear that writing would become a tool for forgetting, the real lesson of Icarus, why decentralization creates cultural power, and what it means to remain fully human in the age of AI.
I’ve shared some highlights of our conversation below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
Links
Highlights
The Strength of Greek Cultural Software
Alex Petkas: I think one of the unique powers of Greece is that it produced a kind of cultural software that wouldn’t have been produced had it been centralized, because the Romans never produced that kind of cultural software. Or they did very late and only by kind of copying the Greeks.
I mean, Roman history starts in the 700s BC with the kings, the founding of Rome and Romulus and driving the kings out. And then the Republic is established around 504, I think. And they don’t have any meaningful writing until the third century BC, until the late third. The early 200s is when we get some of their first writing, the plays of Plautus and there’s a little bit of stuff, but they don’t have literature. And even the plays of the early Roman poets are just kind of copy translations, very creative and well done and funny ones of Greek plays. And then it’s only in the, I think in the following generation or so when the Romans finally write history, their own history. It’s been Greeks writing Roman history up to that point.
And Fabius Pictor, the first Roman historian that we’re aware of, wrote history in Greek because to write history is a Greek thing and you’re writing it for an audience that reads Greek. You’re trying to tell your story for a literate audience. The Carthaginians know Greek, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians know. Everybody knows Greek, but nobody bothers to learn Latin because there’s nothing written in it. I mean, obviously you want to negotiate with some Roman emissaries, you might want to learn Latin, but they’ll probably know Greek so that you can speak Greek with them as Scipio and Hannibal. They speak Greek amongst themselves.
Jim O’Shaughnessy At that time every educated person either in Rome or elsewhere spoke Greek.
Alex Petkas Yeah. And this is very much a product of this decentralization of Greek city states all over the Mediterranean, needing to communicate with each other, vying for status, prestige, entertainment. There’s a kind of competition and cooperation between them. They’re always allying with each other and then breaking alliances and stabbing each other in the back. And it’s all very fun and bloody. I’m sure it was maddening to live through for a lot of them.
But the earliest Greek literature we have, Homer is written in this kind of Frankenstein dialect that nobody spoke. Aeolic, Ionic, Doric, because he was trying to, because this epic dialect that Homer spoke, which has centuries of tradition behind it that we can’t necessarily see, because the writing didn’t exist, but it was written in such a way that Greeks from various regions could pick up enough and feel like their own ways were evidenced in the poem. Even if it wasn’t their local dialect. They could probably pick up the gist of it if it was their local dialect. Of course they could certainly understand it. But it’s this kind of blend that is a very Panhellenic, as they say, a pan-Greek cultural form. The Greek epics. And the most important Greek literature that we have from the centuries after Homer, things like Herodotus and Thucydides, the histories, the Greek tragedies, Athenian tragedy, the characters, when they’re speaking, speak in Athenian Greek, but the choruses speak in Doric Greek, which is the dialect of Sparta on the one hand, and then Thebans on the other hand. And the Spartans, they kind of admire and love and hate, and Thebans, they think are just contemptible pig farmers, but nonetheless, there’s a tradition behind it.
And so they, for that reason, this sense of the power of the network is there. It’s not a political power, a military power until Philip and Alexander united in this generation after Plato. But if that network system, if that software, that cultural DNA didn’t exist, then I think the Romans would have had a very difficult time uniting the Mediterranean because they very much used the Greek power, the Greek cultural power to rule the Eastern, which were much richer, much more civilized, educated, talented provinces when they established their empire. And they kind of used the Greek model to eventually develop their own literature under Caesar and Augustus. Virgil’s poetry kind of takes its cue from the Greeks. And I wouldn’t say that Roman literature is inferior to the Greeks, although the Romans constantly talk as though that were the case, but it was something that they learned from these people who had mastered cultural power but had not quite mastered political power. And maybe if they had mastered the centralized political power, then they wouldn’t have had the cultural power that was maybe the more lasting thing in the first place.
Zeal vs Envy
Alex Petkas: Many people who read Aristotle read the Ethics or the Politics or the Metaphysics. But one of my favorite books of his is the Rhetoric, because I kind of fancy myself a rhetorician. It’s not easy reading, but if you skip to the second book out of three, he goes through this amazing catalog. It’s the first catalog in Western intellectual tradition that I’m aware of that is a real kind of study of human psychology or something that we would recognize as a study of human psychology. And he’s talking about the emotions of a crowd that an orator would have to persuade. And one of the emotions that he talks about is zeal, or it’s usually translated as emulation, which I think is kind of an old fashioned word for us. I don’t really think we use it as an operative concept, but it’s zelos in Greek, which is where we get the word zeal. And it is a feeling. Aristotle describes it as “a type of pain felt when a man sees present, among others who are like him by nature, things good and honorable which he himself is capable of attaining.” And it’s a simple concept, but extremely powerful, extremely generative. And it connects with all kinds of deep cultural forms and structures like heroism and competition that are extremely salient in Greek culture in particular, but also in human excellence in general. And so I felt like somebody needs to write a book about it, and that’s what I’m doing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy Yeah, I love the concept for the book. And when you were going through his definition, it made me think instantly of Girard and mimetic desire.
Alex Petkas Yeah, definitely. And Girard, if you really do your homework, you can find some essays of his that take a kind of positive look at zeal or mimetic desire, which is very much a species of mimetic desire, in his terminology, the mimetic meaning, of course, imitative. And the idea of Girard is that we desire what we see others desiring. And zeal is a form of that imitative desire. But Girard is usually pretty negative on mimetic desire, to say the least […]
But Aristotle has a very positive notion of it and he distinguishes it from this other species of mimetic desire, well, not his terminology, but envy, phthonos in Greek, which just sounds nasty in Greek, as I think in English it sounds like there is a louse, a bedbug. So it starts with that phth sound and then it rhymes with murder or phonos. So phthonos just sounds wicked. Wicked word. And envy is always bad for Aristotle. It is the pain you feel when you see others succeeding. In short, not over the fact that you haven’t succeeded so much as over the fact that they are succeeding. So it’s the desire to kind of, it’s the tall poppy emotion.
And I think Girard doesn’t strongly distinguish between positive and negative mimetic desire. It’s just all one thing with many ramifications. But Aristotle says envy is characteristic of bad men. It’s characteristic of the old. And zeal is characteristic of the young and of good men. And it is something that spurs you to achieve more, to excellence. Whereas envy is about destroying other people to bring them down to your level […] I think that we need a positive spin on mimetic desire because it’s part of human nature. And Aristotle sees following out the strong aspects of human nature as a key to bringing out our excellence, to happiness, to virtue and so on.
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy: My guest today is Alex Petkas, host of the Cost of Glory podcast, co-founder of the Classical Society, a refugee from academia. You have a PhD in Classics from Princeton and were a professor, but decided these guys just sit around and yap. They don’t do anything. And you decided, I want to be filled with zeal. I want to do things. I want to be high agency. Alex, welcome.
Alex Petkas: Great to be here. Jim nailed it with that description.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So let’s start first on your book. Is the working title still Zealots, a book for those obsessed with greatness?
Alex Petkas: It’s something like that, yeah. We still have to tidy up a couple chapters and come up with a proper title, but yeah, it’s about this concept that I found in Aristotle. And many people who read Aristotle read the Ethics or the Politics or the Metaphysics. But one of my favorite books of his is the Rhetoric, because I kind of fancy myself a rhetorician. It’s not easy reading, but if you skip to the second book out of three, he goes through this amazing catalog. It’s the first catalog in Western intellectual tradition that I’m aware of that is a real kind of study of human psychology or something that we would recognize as a study of human psychology. And he’s talking about the emotions of a crowd that an orator would have to persuade. And one of the emotions that he talks about is zeal, or it’s usually translated as emulation, which I think is kind of an old fashioned word for us. I don’t really think we use it as an operative concept, but it’s zelos in Greek, which is where we get the word zeal. And it is a feeling. Aristotle describes it as “a type of pain felt when a man sees present, among others who are like him by nature, things good and honorable which he himself is capable of attaining.” And it’s a simple concept, but extremely powerful, extremely generative. And it connects with all kinds of deep cultural forms and structures like heroism and competition that are extremely salient in Greek culture in particular, but also in human excellence in general. And so I felt like somebody needs to write a book about it, and that’s what I’m doing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I love the concept for the book. And when you were going through his definition, it made me think instantly of Girard and mimetic desire.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, definitely. And Girard, if you really do your homework, you can find some essays of his that take a kind of positive look at zeal or mimetic desire, which is very much a species of mimetic desire, in his terminology, the mimetic meaning, of course, imitative. And the idea of Girard is that we desire what we see others desiring. And zeal is a form of that imitative desire. But Girard is usually pretty negative on mimetic desire, to say the least. Might cause the apocalypse. Yeah, probably will. Besides that. But Aristotle has a very positive notion of it and he distinguishes it from this other species of mimetic desire, well, not his terminology, but envy, phthonos in Greek, which just sounds nasty in Greek, as I think in English it sounds like there is a louse, a bedbug. So it starts with that phth sound and then it rhymes with murder or phonos. So phthonos just sounds wicked. Wicked word. And envy is always bad for Aristotle. It is the pain you feel when you see others succeeding. In short, not over the fact that you haven’t succeeded so much as over the fact that they are succeeding. So it’s the desire to kind of, it’s the tall poppy emotion. And I think Girard doesn’t strongly distinguish between positive and negative mimetic desire. It’s just all one thing with many ramifications. But Aristotle says envy is characteristic of bad men. It’s characteristic of the old. And zeal is characteristic of the young and of good men. And it is something that spurs you to achieve more, to excellence. Whereas envy is about destroying other people to bring them down to your level. It’s like Nietzsche’s ressentiment. So I think we especially need in this Girard, well, I mean, in our niche, I guess, in sort of tech and culture, people are aware of Girard. And I think that we need a positive spin on mimetic desire because it’s part of human nature. And Aristotle sees following out the strong aspects of human nature as a key to bringing out our excellence, to happiness, to virtue and so on.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I’ve always thought of rhetoric as also linked to the ability to persuade, right?
Alex Petkas: Yeah. Fundamentally, that’s what it is.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And so that’s kind of like I’m obsessed right now with this idea that all innovation, all technology especially is dual use. Right? It itself, like AI, for example, itself is a tool and neutral. And you can, unless it’s been nerfed, right? And no, I think blowing up the entire world is a great idea, Jim, when it goes into sycophantic mode. But the difference, because as I was getting ready to talk to you, I was thinking, why did the term zealot become a negative term?
Alex Petkas: Yeah, well, I want to talk about dual use technology because this actually relates to the foundational myths of technology in Greece. So let’s put a pin in that and circle back to it. But the zealot concept, I’m pretty sure that it has to do with the way that the term is brought into English, which is via the Bible. So in the times of Jesus, Roman Judea, there are a lot of upset local Jews who are seeing the Roman overlords importing, kind of sneaking in pagan cults. And they see a lot of the local Jewish leaders being nice to the Romans so that the Romans don’t stomp them, as they tend to do people who don’t comply. And Herod the Great is a great figure in this story, building a temple to Augustus and having statuary in it. And in the Greek translation, this is interesting, of the Old Testament, which is called the Septuagint, it was done in Alexandria, Egypt in the second century BC. There is this concept that occurs over and over. The Hebrew root is kana, which is sort of like, well, the passage where you might have heard this, “I’m a jealous God. You will have no gods before me.” That whole idea that God, that Yahweh doesn’t like you going and honoring other gods, like as though you were a kind of faithless wife. And that kana is his response to you being a faithless wife, Israel. And he says, “I’m a jealous God.” And the Greek uses that word zeal. It’s literally “God is a zealot. I am a zealotes. I’m a feeler of zeal.” But it’s that kind of competitive jealousy that also is a shade of the Greek meaning. It’s clearly not the shade that Aristotle is using, but it is a competitive emotion, a rivalrous emotion, zeal. And so they decided to translate kana and the kanayim are the zealots in Roman Judea. And the zealots are, of course, there’s probably good versions of them. I mean, depends on your perspective on history, the people who held out at Masada against Titus were kanayim of some branch. There’s all these splinter factions and so they’re trying to vindicate God’s honor and God’s right in Judea and drive out the bad idols. And so zealots, Simon the Zealot, these concepts become associated with a certain kind of religious extremism and it’s in the kind of Puritan movement in the 17th century was a big generative period for this discourse of the zealot. The Puritans are these over excitable zealots and they’re trying to rip all the beautiful paintings and the roods and the iconography and get rid of the monasteries. So there’s a sense in which it plugs into modern English religious politics and gets energized in this way against zealot. And zealot has kind of become a bad word in our day. But in the pre-Hebraization of the Greek language that you get with the New Testament and the Septuagint, a zealotes could just be a follower of a philosopher. Somebody who feels zeal for their master or feels zeal for say the heroes of the past. It would be a positive thing to be a devotee of something in a good sense or at least without the religious connotations. So there’s interesting history there but I think we have a chance to kind of revive this term or at least the concept for today.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And we put a pin in the idea of looking at tech, innovation, etc. today through the eyes of the Greek myths. I know that is something near and dear to your heart but as I was kind of thinking about it, it does seem to me that at least the well known ones, right, Prometheus and his punishment for bringing fire to we mere mortals, Daedalus and Icarus, don’t fly too close to the sun. It seems like a lot of the myths would be what David Deutsch would call littered with the precautionary principle.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, I think that’s right. We were speaking earlier about this. I was at a launch of a short film by Jason Carman and the Story Company that I know you are a fan of just last week in San Francisco and the basic premise of the film, which I’m not giving anything away and everybody should go see it, should be on YouTube today. I think it’s called The Greatest Lie. The premise is imagining a future in which there are no books or rather in which everybody for the most part has forgotten how to read. Whether because the technology was too entertaining and it seemed pointless, or because the powers that be decided that people shouldn’t read books. Probably a combination of both. And so books are burned. And if you have books, this is a crime. And you could think of other familiar sci-fi stories that relate to this issue, but there’s a character in there that plays an important role. I won’t give away, but his name or his nickname is Prome, as in Prometheus. And so I think these myths still have a whole lot of resonance to draw on. But Prometheus is an interesting myth because it definitely relates to this dual use thing. So Prometheus brings fire down to mortals because Zeus didn’t want us to have fire. And fire, of course is how you cook meat. It’s important for civilization, for blacksmithing work. Of course it can also destroy your village or a forest. But I think the context is really interesting of the Prometheus myth. So the first telling that we have of it is in this Greek author Hesiod, who is writing around the time of Homer, probably a little before the Homeric poems were codified. Hesiod’s writing in maybe 700 BC, shortly after the invention of writing, which is also a very important technology. I want to put a pin in that one too. But the context of the Prometheus story is Prometheus, so the myth goes, invites the gods to a feast with humans, there’s a big party. And the feast is really clearly depicted as a kind of proto sacrifice. It’s like the paradigmatic sacrifice event, the feast in which the gods and humans both have a share. And Prometheus kind of tricks Zeus in the context of this feast. He’s like, well, we’re going to sacrifice, we’re going to slaughter this cow or sheep or whatever it is, and we’re going to split it up based on, the gods get the first choice, right, because they’re the best. But Prometheus pulls a fast one on Zeus. So he thinks, and he divides up the animals such that the bones get wrapped in fat, white, glistening fat, which is apparently the better looking portion. And then there’s another portion which is the actual nutritive meats of the animal that get wrapped in this ugly cow stomach. And Prometheus brings the portions before Zeus and he says, “Zeus, which one do you want? I mean, oh, king.” And Zeus apparently knows that Prometheus is pulling a trick on him, but he kind of wants to complete the story or he wants to kind of shame humans. It’s not really clear what his motives are, but he picks the one that looks better that Prometheus clearly wanted him to pick, which is actually just fat and bone. And it’s not very nutritive. And then the humans get the better portion. And so when he opens up his present, he gets angry, even though he knew it was going to happen. And he punishes humans and Prometheus, humans kind of get punished for just receiving the better proportion, even though they didn’t necessarily have agency in it. And that’s when he decides to withhold fire. Says humans are not going to have fire for that reason, to kind of get them back. And it’s then that Prometheus goes up and he sneaks in, he steals fire in a fennel stalk and brings it down to humans. And so this fire is the foundational myth of technology in a lot of ways. It is part of this trade that we made with the gods. Technology is a thing that was withheld from us. And then we kind of got back in the context of setting up our relationship. What is the permanent communication structure going to be between humans and gods? Sacrifices. This is how we give them things in order to honor them by sacrifice and we hope to get blessings and benefactions from them in return. But somehow in the context of that story, technology comes out. And I think that this partly relates the Prometheus story to how technology represents something that we get from what is from the divine or from what is most divine in us. But it was kind of a violation. There was something that was problematic about it. And of course, the second part of the story is in punishment for Prometheus stealing technology again and bringing it to humans. Zeus punishes not just Prometheus by tying him to a rock in the Caucasus and having a bunch of birds eat out his liver, and it grows back every day. But he also punishes humans by giving us Pandora and her box. And she opens up the box and all the bad things come into the world. Sickness and misery and wars. And so that violation is responsible for most of the bad things that happen in the world. Civilization is a product of technology. It’s not just gadgets and fire. It’s also the ability to order a city, the ability to have agriculture is a technological feat. And we lost something. There was maybe an earlier time in the kind of hunter gatherer days when life was better before all the miseries of technology came. So it’s very problematic, but it’s this perennial technology didn’t come about late in the human story. It’s like as soon as we were humans in any recognizable sense, we had it and used it. So I think the myth gets at that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Correct me if my memory is wrong, but isn’t what’s at the bottom of Pandora’s box hope?
Alex Petkas: Yes, and very importantly so. It’s not all bad. I think she keeps hope in the jar, is the idea, so that we can kind of, we have some kind of control over it. It’s not just floating around in the world, but we still have hope in the jar. And that’s the balance part of it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And as I’m listening to you, it’s just to me, why are so many of these origin myths so negative? So as I was listening to you about Zeus getting pissed off, right, because he’s bringing fire down to the humans, like Adam and Eve, right? The apple is knowledge. And if you bite the apple, that’s it, man, you’re out. You’re out of perfection. And you have to go into the world. What do you think it is? Because obviously these are all human problems, right? And we create these myths. Why do you think that there is such a preponderance of the negative having to do with innovation, moving forward, learning more? I mean, all the things that we humans seem to be particularly gifted at. Is it just political? Right? Because if you’re looking at it on just the surface, you’re going to think, well, of course the king doesn’t want the population to be able to overthrow him or whatever, so he’s going to always put the brakes on anything. I’ve been thinking about it in terms of mesh networks, distributed value networks of which the Greek city states were one. We’ll talk about that later. But why the preponderance? Is it just a, hey, I’m at the top of the hierarchy, I’m writing the myths. The myths are going to be, settle down, don’t ask for too much, know your place? Or is it something more?
Alex Petkas: I think that is one perspective and that’s probably right. But I think another perspective is also possible and probably equally right that in the Adam and Eve story, God’s threat, which is true, is that you’re going to become like God. You’re going to become more godlike. Seeing their eyes are going to be opened and they’re going to have this understanding like I do. And I think that to go to the Icarus example, Icarus is not necessarily anti-technology 100% because he’s flying. Yeah. Daedalus makes the wings for him and his boy and they actually do escape. They’re trying to get away from the evil tyrant Minos. And it works. They escape the island of Crete, Daedalus gets to safety. Icarus was doing fine until he did something crucial that was mistaken, which is he tried to go up and be like a god. He tried to fly up to the sun and cross a certain limit. And I think that is potentially the cautionary tale, that there is a kind of deeper wisdom to it. That technology, when we first discover something or invent something, we think that it can do everything. We think that it can turn us into God, that it can help us to transcend human nature. At least in the Icarus story, the warning is not about being ambitious. And I was reading a biography of Alex Karp lately, and this is apparently Karp’s dad used to take Alex and his brother to the Philadelphia Art Museum. He loved to go to the painting of Icarus and Daedalus. And see, “You see Alex, that’s what happens.” He was always trying to tamp him down.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: That also just immediately ties back to tall poppy syndrome. Yeah, Rousseau. Another one like man in his natural state was so much better, so much wiser, so much more noble. But then of course you come to American thinkers and Emerson basically says man is a god in ruins. And that’s a bad thing. We don’t want to be a god in ruins. We want to, and it does seem to me that a lot of those myths, when you look at American philosophers and thinkers, they look at it a little differently. Or am I just reading too much into it?
Alex Petkas: I think that’s right. I mean, Tocqueville talked about the particular genius of the American people is this culture of tinkering and frontier pushing, not just physically, geographically, but technologically. I think that we just have this much more immediate sense that whether it’s the railroads or the steamship, that it’s this incredibly powerful tool for mastery and prosperity and flourishing, that by the time we were doing that in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe had already kind of had its stable system. It was the American ideal of masculinity is one thing you could call it. There’s a great article on this by Matthew Gasda in the American Affairs journal a couple of months ago. To flourish in Europe in the 19th century was about finding a good patron, performing well for him for the most part. Whereas in America there’s this culture of self-reliance and one of our greatest levers in that effort is mastery of technology and extending human agency further beyond its frontiers. Not that they’re completely empty. That’s another whole story when we could get into, of the conquest of the Americas. But I think that to go back to Icarus, there is this recognition in Greek culture that the technology is powerful and it’s good, but it just always comes with drawbacks that tend to be underestimated by the people who first get their hands on it or first develop it. And there’s another great story about writing that Plato tells. I’m sure you’re familiar with this, but it’s in his dialogue, the Phaedrus, which is a great dialogue about rhetoric, actually, and in the context of this, Socrates and his interlocutor talking about writing as a technology. And he tells a story that he heard from the Egyptians at some point. And his interlocutor says, “Are you making this up, Socrates?” And he’s like, “Quiet, listen to the story.” But the story is Thoth and Amun are these two Egyptian gods. Thoth and Thammuz is what he calls them in the dialogue, but it’s Thoth and Amun Ra. And Thoth is a trickster god. He’s an inventor of many things, geometry, astronomy. And he’s very excited about all his inventions. And he finally gets his bag of goodies together and he goes to the king god, which is Amun Ra or Amun. And he says, “Amun, I got all these great tools, you’re going to love them. And here’s the one I’m most proud of. It’s called grammata. It’s called letters, writing. And this is a cure for forgetfulness. We’re never going to forget anything again because we can write it all down and it’s never going to go away. We can put it in stone even.” And Amun says, “Thoth, you are like a father who is biased toward his child. You have birthed this technology, but you don’t see its weaknesses.” And there’s an interesting word play there in the Greek, because technology or an art, also the word for it in Greek is tekhne, T-E-C-H-N-E or the ch is a chi. But the word for giving birth or bearing a child is tekein with a kappa. So tech is a kind of common sound between the two words. They’re not actually etymologically related, but they’re close enough that it’s extremely plausible. And so Plato kind of plays on this. It’s like every technology is like a child of a father. And the people who bring it forth tend to be overly biased toward how beneficial it’s going to be and not see the weaknesses. And so Amun says, “No, you’ve got it exactly the opposite. This is not a tool for remembering, it’s a tool for forgetting.” Right, because we’re going to write things down and not need to remember them anymore. And it’s like we’re all going to be master cartographers because we have Google Maps. Exactly the opposite. We’re going to rely on this technology. It’s going to kind of become this second brain for us, which means it’s not your brain at all, it’s somebody else’s brain that you’re just leveraging somehow. So I think that myth kind of captures Plato’s own anxiety about the technology of writing, yet he’s doing this as the greatest writer of his generation, by far. And he elsewhere says that no serious philosopher would commit his most important doctrines to writing. “And I have never done so,” because the more important thing for Plato is to implant your ideas in other people. And so Plato was deeply skeptical of writing on the one hand, and yet he leveraged it to this incredible unprecedented scale to found a philosophical school that lasted a thousand years. Lasted longer than anything, any other Greek institution, arguably into the times of Justinian in the Byzantine period. And he still obviously has powerful effect on us today through his writings. And so he used his dialogues to attract students to himself, to kind of give people a sense of what Platonic philosophy was about, but he didn’t ever, I guess he kind of knew the limit. He knew that to try to fly close to the sun and to lay out your doctrines in a straightforward treatise rather than in dialogues where you’re kind of hinting at what you’re about, but you’re not ever firmly saying it, that would be crossing some boundary, maybe that the technology is not really for. So I think that is actually a good model, maximum skepticism, maximum leverage. At the same time, to kind of keep those very much in tension, ideas in your mind. At the same time that you need to know the limits in order to decide what is really promising, what’s really worth investing in, whether it’s as an investor in the strict sense, or as a culture, but also to see the incredible possibilities and to use them and to experiment and to try it out.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And I mean, there’s just so much, there’s a lot of rabbit holes you just opened up for us because back to fire, right? So we didn’t ban fire. We, on the other hand, came up with fire codes, fire engines, fire departments, fire alarms, fire extinguishers. Because as a new technology is birthed, we don’t know yet what the downsides are going to be. But as I mentioned earlier, I definitely look at all technology as dual use. And it can be used both for good and bad. It depends on which human hands it happens to be in. You can use AI, for example, for mass persuasion at scale, negatively. Right? To get people, take their agency away from them, have them become learned, helpless creatures. Or you can use it to do the opposite, to have the greatest tutor in the world and educate at a level that our old way of doing simply was impossible to do. So I’m also fascinated by the idea that, and back to rhetoric, right, a lot of the Greek myths are also very insightful about human nature. Right? I think I’m thinking of Discordia or Eris, I guess. And she did the golden apple.
Alex Petkas: For the most beautiful. Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. For the most beautiful. And that, to me also just really strikes a chord on human nature. And so I always try to look at a lot of these myths through, what do they teach us about ourselves? Because after all, we came up with them and the power of myth and symbols. I think of Marduk, right? The Babylonians, they really wanted to rule all of Mesopotamia, but they had a problem. And their problem was their god was a puny god. It was just like nothing. It was a local god. And so they’re like, wait a tick, let’s do a rewrite. Let’s rebrand. And so they came up with this myth that I’m sure you’re aware of, where their god tore, I can’t remember what kind of mythological creature it was, but it was this badass creature. And the god tore it in half and threw half of it up and created the heavens and the stars, and then threw the other half down and created the Earth. And then subsumed, I guess, 50 gods. I don’t really remember how many. And it worked. Basically, Babylonia, everyone in Mesopotamia is like, man, their god is the real deal. I guess they do have the right to rule all of Mesopotamia. And so it does seem to me that many of our myths are used for very human purposes, either controlling other humans or ruling or whatever. But I definitely think that there is so much to them that really describes us.
Alex Petkas: Absolutely. And I mean, the Greek equivalent of the Marduk story might be Zeus, who is not born the king god. He’s born to the king god. And the king god tries to eat him as he ate his other brothers and sisters. Kronos is kind of chaotic, wicked tyrant, and there’s lawlessness and chaos about the Earth. And there’s, of course, the prophecy. The reason he’s eating his children is that there’s a prophecy that he will be overthrown by his child and that his child will become more powerful than him. And so just to make sure, he makes sure he eats all of the other gods, the brothers of Zeus and sisters of Zeus. And then Zeus’s mother, Rhea hides Zeus away in a cave in Crete and she feeds Kronos a stone wrapped up in swaddling cloths. And then Kronos eats it and vomits forth the other gods. But then Zeus grows up. And it’s interesting in the story of Zeus’s kind of rise to power, which again we get from Hesiod in Theogony, it’s a great poem. He summons various deities to his side to help him overthrow his father. And one of them is Zeal. Zelos, there’s power, Kratos, Bia, power, victory and force. Nike is victory. And then Zelos are these children of Styx that he summons to help him overthrow the wicked tyrant. So I mean, these are kind of stories that encapsulate so much of human experience, throwing off a kind of crusty old establishment that is looking after its own interest rather than the interest of the people that it’s supposed to be serving. Zeus overthrows it through the power of force and zeal. We use these for good as well as for evil. But in Zeus’s case, it was for good and it established justice in the universe. So these things are very powerful. And they’re as relatable as ever today, as you can see, I think in The Greatest Lie movie.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I mentioned earlier that I’ve been kind of really fascinated with distributed value networks. The tech people call them mesh networks, but essentially what they are, systems that distribute cognition, risk, value creation across autonomous specialist zones. And if you look historically, that type of network, think of a spider web as opposed to a bicycle wheel, right? So the bicycle wheel would be Rome, hierarchy that the Roman Catholic Church adopted and most nation states adopt. The spider web is basically, you have to have conditions like the Greek city states if we want to make it geographic, where there is no central power. Right? So if you contrast all of the different Greek city states, each one was very good at something very different. And I had the thought that a great example of the power of that is the Persian Empire, they had great bureaucracy, they had great military, but they never produced a Socrates, whereas the Greek city states because there was no central power, we got all of the great ideas from them. And it carries forward. You have the Republic of Letters that gets captured when they form the Royal Society. You had, Raphael had within his workshop, it was a mesh network. He had people who worked for him who were specialists in faces and hands in a variety of things. And so you keep seeing Gutenberg, right? We wouldn’t have the printing press if Germany had been united because the Chinese had movable type centuries before, but because the emperor, no, no, no. Right? He squashed that. So I guess my thesis is, why do we always seem to default to the inferior network? And is that simply because a powerful entity comes in and captures all the value of that particular network? Like what happened as we watch as various empires displace one another. What do you think?
Alex Petkas: Yeah, that’s a fascinating issue. And, well, I think of the Greek city states versus Rome. A lot of people on my podcast, I do this combination of Greek heroes and Roman heroes based on the stories of Plutarch. Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives, cataloging the greatest heroes of Greece and the greatest heroes of Rome, pairing them up. I think he was writing in part to sort of help the Greeks understand the Romans and help the Romans understand the Greeks by kind of bringing them for a fireside encounter with each culture’s greatest heroes. But my listeners sort of debate amongst themselves and in various forums like, are the Greeks more impressive? Are the Romans more impressive? Is Caesar more impressive? Is Alexander more impressive? Who are we most like? Or who do we have the most to learn from? And so there’s a constant comparison between these two cultures going on implicitly in Plutarch. And I think about this a lot as someone who’s more of a Hellenist than a Romanist, even though I’ve spent most of my time on my show doing the great Romans like Caesar and Cato. And I think one of the unique powers of Greece is that it produced a kind of cultural software that wouldn’t have been produced had it been centralized, because the Romans never produced that kind of cultural software. Or they did very late and only by kind of copying the Greeks. I mean, Roman history starts in the 700s BC with the kings, the founding of Rome and Romulus and driving the kings out. And then the Republic is established around 504, I think. And they don’t have any meaningful writing until the third century BC, until the late third. The early 200s is when we get some of their first writing, the plays of Plautus and there’s a little bit of stuff, but they don’t have literature. And even the plays of the early Roman poets are just kind of copy translations, very creative and well done and funny ones of Greek plays. And then it’s only in the, I think in the following generation or so when the Romans finally write history, their own history. It’s been Greeks writing Roman history up to that point. And Fabius Pictor, the first Roman historian that we’re aware of, wrote history in Greek because to write history is a Greek thing and you’re writing it for an audience that reads Greek. You’re trying to tell your story for a literate audience. The Carthaginians know Greek, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians know. Everybody knows Greek, but nobody bothers to learn Latin because there’s nothing written in it. I mean, obviously you want to negotiate with some Roman emissaries, you might want to learn Latin, but they’ll probably know Greek so that you can speak Greek with them as Scipio and Hannibal. They speak Greek amongst themselves.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: At that time every educated person either in Rome or elsewhere spoke Greek.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. And this is very much a product of this decentralization of Greek city states all over the Mediterranean, needing to communicate with each other, vying for status, prestige, entertainment. There’s a kind of competition and cooperation between them. They’re always allying with each other and then breaking alliances and stabbing each other in the back. And it’s all very fun and bloody. I’m sure it was maddening to live through for a lot of them. But the earliest Greek literature we have, Homer is written in this kind of Frankenstein dialect that nobody spoke. Aeolic, Ionic, Doric, because he was trying to, because this epic dialect that Homer spoke, which has centuries of tradition behind it that we can’t necessarily see, because the writing didn’t exist, but it was written in such a way that Greeks from various regions could pick up enough and feel like their own ways were evidenced in the poem. Even if it wasn’t their local dialect. They could probably pick up the gist of it if it was their local dialect. Of course they could certainly understand it. But it’s this kind of blend that is a very Panhellenic, as they say, a pan-Greek cultural form. The Greek epics. And the most important Greek literature that we have from the centuries after Homer, things like Herodotus and Thucydides, the histories, the Greek tragedies, Athenian tragedy, the characters, when they’re speaking, speak in Athenian Greek, but the choruses speak in Doric Greek, which is the dialect of Sparta on the one hand, and then Thebans on the other hand. And the Spartans, they kind of admire and love and hate, and Thebans, they think are just contemptible pig farmers, but nonetheless, there’s a tradition behind it. And so they, for that reason, this sense of the power of the network is there. It’s not a political power, a military power until Philip and Alexander united in this generation after Plato. But if that network system, if that software, that cultural DNA didn’t exist, then I think the Romans would have had a very difficult time uniting the Mediterranean because they very much used the Greek power, the Greek cultural power to rule the Eastern, which were much richer, much more civilized, educated, talented provinces when they established their empire. And they kind of used the Greek model to eventually develop their own literature under Caesar and Augustus. Virgil’s poetry kind of takes its cue from the Greeks. And I wouldn’t say that Roman literature is inferior to the Greeks, although the Romans constantly talk as though that were the case, but it was something that they learned from these people who had mastered cultural power but had not quite mastered political power. And maybe if they had mastered the centralized political power, then they wouldn’t have had the cultural power that was maybe the more lasting thing in the first place.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, that’s kind of my thesis that one of the reasons why America became the country that it became was for most of our history, the federal government was very weak. The central authority in America was, it was the United States of America. And every state had lots of rights and were, in the earlier parts of our history, were far more powerful in many respects than the federal government was. And so what you got was an unintended mesh network because you could get away with doing something in South Dakota that was prohibited in Massachusetts. And then when we got very centralized, kind of the imperial federal system that we live under now. I’m not saying that innovation has dried up, but it certainly slowed from the pace of just the hyperkinetic everybody doing something different and all of the items that came together to address what became the United States, the richest country, most powerful country in the history of the world. And so I’m always fascinated by that. But let’s bring it back to now, right? So if somebody’s 22 and she’s listening to this podcast and she’s like, wow, Greco-Futurism. I don’t know anything about that. Where would you point her if she wanted to learn more about this thesis and how it’s applicable to using as kind of a framework for looking at all of the innovation and technology and the both yearning for more of that and also the desire or the fear of that. Right? That is all, any innovation always produces a sizable minority that wants it to be destroyed. I mean, just browse Twitter, browse Instagram. AI is awful. It is godless. And generally speaking, people think that’s unique to AI or now, but it’s not at all. I mean, they said the same thing about calculators, about computers, about photography. Right? And what’s interesting is the pattern remains virtually the same. When photography came on the scene, everyone who was making their living as a portrait artist was a little put off by this new technology. And what’s interesting is if you map it out, you see the same response to photography as we’re getting now to AI. The people who were at the top of the heap, who they fear that this new technology is going to nuke them and remove them from the top of the hierarchy. One thing you always see is a movement from the end product, the painting. Is the painting good? Does it capture the likeness? Does it capture the soul? All of those ideas that people would debate on whether that particular portrait was good or bad, right? The artists themselves move from focusing on that to process. Right? And you see it now with AI like, oh, no, you can’t, if in writing, in filmmaking, in all of these things. Well, they’ve shifted entirely from hey, did you like the movie, did you like the book? What moved you in the book to no. Was the book made only by human hands? And, but then what happens of course, is as it gets better and people become more and more acquainted with it, that goes away. And everyone was like, oh no, I was always in favor of. Because back to portrait painters, right? What they didn’t anticipate at the time. And this really links to the idea that as a new technology, whether it be writing or our tech of today, we don’t know what’s going to happen with that new technology. And so I think that we are generally an emotionally based creature and that the ruling emotion is fear and especially fear of the unknown. And so we get very cautious. But then as people use it more and more again, back to portrait painters, we got Bacon out of it. You didn’t have to do a perfect likeness of your subject. And in fact, this whole new school of portraiture emerged that is wild and incredible. And actually many people think, yeah, I can look at a photograph of that guy, but his portrait of that guy really captures him. So, but back to our 22 year old. Where are you going to point her? What are you going to tell her to read and watch?
Alex Petkas: Well, I think that one of the things AI really raises for us maybe at a deeper level than most, if any technology paradigm shift we’ve had before is what is really human? What is human intelligence really? What is universal about us? What do we need to preserve to remain human? Because it’s probably the case that if we’re going to be happy and flourishing, it’s going to have something to do with being us, the humans flourishing and not just seeing our robots flourish as Matrix pay pig energy suckers or givers for the robots. And that’s one of the reasons I think it’s good to go back to these earlier cultures to kind of strain away some of the dross of what are our priors and assumptions. And one of the things that I think good sci-fi does is kind of isolate interesting elements of what is essential about human flourishing that we’ve, that we are at danger of losing or have the hope of recovering. I mean, this is there in the Dune series, the force shields that they have in their battles and make it so that you can’t just shoot somebody dead with a laser because everybody’s got laser guns now. But your force shield’s going to stop it. You actually have to go up and penetrate through that shield with a sword. It kind of brings back this kind of warrior honor culture among these peoples. And Dune has these resonances with ancient myth like the House of Atreides that’s taken right from Agamemnon’s house in the Iliad and the Odyssey. So I think good sci-fi kind of looks back to what is deep and universal about human nature very often and takes cue from the myths and the ancient histories. But this is something, I think there’s a pattern that is already inherent in Homer. So we mentioned earlier about the way that Homer is drawing on this ancient tradition of oral poetry that existed for hundreds of years, probably thousands of years actually before Homer, because we can see common patterns and common, even phrases that originate from this proto-Indo-European dialect between Homer and the Vedic poems of India that was discovered in the early 20th century. These parallels. And one of the things that an oral culture preserves in its stories, that they spend so much cognitive fuel remembering, reciting. They have festivals at which poets are heard. They have a whole tradition. Why are they putting so much effort into memorizing and retelling ceremonially these stories at the highest level of society? What is the agenda there? And I think that if you look at the content of heroic poetry across cultures, and Homer’s the one that I’m most especially familiar with, it’s these stories of the gods and myth that we’ve talked about that kind of deal with perennial human problems. But it’s also just really vivid examples of heroes, of humans who have pushed the limits of what is possible to do as a human being. Achilles, facing the choice of a long, obscure life versus a short, glorious life, he can do either, but he can’t do both. And choosing the short, glorious life because he desires something greater than comfort and ease, and that ends up serving the community because they end up winning the war in the Iliad. And similar story with the Odyssey, Odysseus has a choice between being the lover boy of this nymph Calypso, but living in obscurity on this island where she promises to make him immortal, but her name actually means the Hider. She sort of obscures that. That’s like a similar choice that Odysseus is making. And he chooses to leave the island and go home and rescue his family and establish his household. But all the heroic myths tend to deal with greatness on some level. They tend to deal with stories that kind of expand the conception of what a human should be capable of. And I think that’s kind of the purpose anthropologically, if you will, of what these stories that still resonate with us from the past. Plutarch is another example of this with more historical heroes. I think they are interesting and important and kind of powerfully affecting for present generations to kind of serve as an exhortation to us to think big, to dream big, and to know what is possible to achieve as an individual human or as a culture, as well as to be aware of some of the characteristic failure modes of ambition. Greek tragedy is the great database of this kind of thing. But it’s an idea that I find really interesting from, I’m kind of borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche and I’ll summarize it in this way that people need to look, if people want to build an ambitious future where we’re flourishing and it’s not dystopian, but that it isn’t kind of a preservation of the status quo and easy comfort and managed decline. You need to look as far back into the past as you want to look into the future, which should be far, I think if you’re ambitious. And Nietzsche describes this in the Uses and Abuses of History, or the Advantage and Disadvantage of History is an early text that he wrote before he came out as a creative destruction philosopher. But he talks about the monumental style of approaching history very much in these terms. That history is above all, he says, “for the active man, the powerful man who is fighting a great fight, struggling a great struggle, and needs examples and teachers and comforters and finds none of them among his contemporaries.” And so I think that kind of captures this essence of this Greco-Futurist spirit that I think you can kind of see in Dune, you can kind of see in Star Wars. In some sense there’s a kind of, it’s from a galaxy long ago.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Far, far away.
Alex Petkas: Far, far away. And long ago, that looking deep into the past is this source of inspiration for doing very different things on the surface. I mean, American founders looked to the Roman Republic and the Greek city states for encouragement and also for cautionary tales. And they aren’t really doing something all that like a Greek city state at the time. Even if your ambition is something technological or financial, there are these universal constants of sacrifice, above all the power of the will to achieve things that people who don’t have that will are just not going to achieve. And if your enemies have more willpower than you, they’re probably going to win. If they want it more, if they desire it more, if they have, if they’re inspired, almost possessed by this vision of what they can achieve. Even if it’s bad and you’ve got the better vision, if you don’t have the inspiration, you’re probably going to lose. And that’s one of the things that you get from kind of consulting these great examples and believing you can do it too. It circles back to this concept of zeal, that’s what the heroic stories are for. That’s why it’s interesting to engage with the past if you are fundamentally a futurist. And that’s why I think this particular fusion of Greco-Futurism. But I would call the founding of the American Republic a Greco-Futurist project. Plutarch is the most cited of all the ancient authors in the Federalist Papers, much more than Plato or Caesar or the Bible. And it’s because he kind of is the encapsulation of this historic monumental spirit that I think is one of the most powerful tools you can have in forging a new future.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, I had Matt Clifford on the podcast and he had an interesting idea in that we were talking about the great man theory of history. And his observation was that after Napoleon was defeated, basically much of the philosophy of the continent was, we probably want to dampen the variance a little bit here. We want to give ambitious men like Napoleon a different staircase to climb. And that’s how we got MBAs, and that’s how we got all of that. And then of course, the Internet came along, the greatest variance amplifier until AI, which now even amplifies variance more. If you use it right. I underline if you use it right. Right? Because if you don’t, it’ll push you to the middle. And you’ll get the classic AI slop, right? If you simply tell an AI, hey, write a science fiction story that inspires me, it’s not going to inspire you. If, on the other hand, you use it as a tool and you can do all sorts of searches, it can synthesize old stories, it can say this, right? As a tool, it’s very effective just on its own. And that brings us kind of back to the conversation, how do we focus on human flourishing? My idea has always been the centaur model, right? Which is man, humans plus our innovations, plus our technologies and things like AI. We need both Apollo and Dionysus, and instead we split, right? You’re either Apollonian or you’re Dionysian. And I just think that’s wrong. We need Athens and Sparta. We need Rome and Greece, right? Because the Romans had indoor plumbing, man, and that’s very nice. And they had roads and they had aqueducts, and they were very good at all.
Alex Petkas: Fish ponds and.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly, right. But they had to borrow much of, didn’t they simply rename the Greek gods and just say, those are good, we like those.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, yeah, we have 12 too. Sure.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah, we got those. Just different names. Just different names. But I mean, do you agree, I think that the, this, the splitting it into a dichotomy. Right? And that is not the right path, in my opinion. I could, of course, be absolutely wrong.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. Well, Chiron the centaur is the teacher of Achilles, actually.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, that’s right.
Alex Petkas: And all the other centaurs were kind of wild men, disrupting parties and stealing away women and some famous scenes on the Acropolis friezes. But Chiron was one of the reasons why he was the perfect tutor for Achilles is he had sort of tamed the beastly nature in himself and became very learned in rhetoric and poetry and probably geometry. Use your imagination of what great wisdom the wise Chiron had. But he still preserved that beastly element in him, but it was tamed. And that was part of what I think a guy like Achilles needed to maintain the kind of wildness and the sort of, the fact that we’re animals. We are inescapably animals. And that is a source of some of our greatest weaknesses. I mean, if anybody has small children and get them close to sugar, the drives can really powerfully take over, but it’s also a source of our greatest strength and taming ourselves too much kind of gets to the duality of technology. When Enkidu in the Gilgamesh epic comes into the city for the first time and he meets a lady and they have a nice time together, she gives him some beer and it’s very nice and he gets in a good mood but he goes back to the wild and he can’t talk to animals anymore. He used to be able to have a conversation with a rabbit. So we need to kind of preserve these originary elements of what and understand what are we designed to flourish as. And what can we design our society to enable us to flourish as. How can we expand the possibilities without cutting off the kind of more earthy elements which have to do with getting together and hanging out around the fire? If our techno-optimist future doesn’t include getting around fires on the beach, I think we’ll be considerably more miserable for the fact. So you have to take these things along with you somehow and preserve the kind of wild DNA, ecstasy of a, I mean, I’m not saying go to a rave party but there is a kind of.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Conviviality, you could go to a rave party.
Alex Petkas: I’m not saying I didn’t in my teenage years for sure. But you also, and with the temptations or with the benefits of building great financial empires out of AI businesses and great military supremacy, we have to think of what is that makes us human and what’s going to make us flourish and what’s going to enable us to keep building more ambitiously. Because if people get demoralized because they’ve over indexed one material benefit of technology, they’re going to kind of sap their spirit and lead into inertia and managed decline. We need to preserve that full extent of our nature that the Dionysian amidst, I think a very Apollonian present and future where there’s so much order and so much law and there’s so many procedures to learn and society is so ordered. It’s so hard to kind of go outside the bounds that we need to have those wilder elements and the kind of more earthy elements along with the ride, or we’re going to not want to be on the ride at all in the first place.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, but I would again argue that the very technologies that we’re talking about could give us that ability to be less orderly. Right? You can use them for cultural credit scores or you can use them to deconstruct a bunch of stuff and find synthesis between ideas that we as humans simply can’t. We can’t look at a data array of 500 million different things and pick out like, hey, these 10 come together in a completely new and interesting synthesis. Right? And back to fire again. Fire allowed us to cook our food. Right? And what did that, what happened after that? The development of our prefrontal cortex. Right? So essentially we became homo sapiens. Right? Very wise animal. Right? And it seems to me that when we started cooking our food, we weren’t thinking, oh, this is going to give us an entire new executive function to our brain and make us the apex predator of this planet. You see where I’m going? So it’s like we’re trying to, I think many people want to try to define things before they’re ready for definition. Right? It’s like we often kill the baby in the cradle because we think we know what will happen. Right? That’s the idea of prophecy. And if you do a deep dive on prophecy and its base rates, I’ll give you a hint, they ain’t good. And so what is the world’s oldest profession? No, not prostitution. It is declaring that the world is soon going to come to an end. And so we have this inherent trait in our humanity that is highly indexed on negativity bias. And look, are there evolutionary reasons for that? Yeah, and they were probably really useful at that time. Right? We are all, in my opinion, the descendants of cowards. And by that I mean we’re the descendants of the ones who, when they saw the bush rustling, they didn’t go, oh, I wonder what that is. They ran the fuck away because it could be a saber tooth tiger, but we are so far removed from that. And yet that is so much still in our base code. It causes trouble if you’re trying to find the right mix. So I’ll turn the question back to you. If you were designing the curriculum or you were designing the way for our society to optimally move forward, what’s it look like?
Alex Petkas: Well, I was thinking about this as we were talking about the drawbacks and the fear, the FUDing of every technology as it comes about. And in the case of writing, there’s been a lot of, and reading, there’s been a lot of discussion about how, long before the rise of AI or even the Internet, the rise of television and the telegraph, even Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great landmark work. And this that we’re losing the ability to, that we’re losing something important about literacy. It’s kind of like a rehash of Plato’s concerns about writing making us forget everything. Well, when writing came about, there were still maybe even more developed mnemonic techniques that orators used, that scientists use, that philosophers use. I mean medieval memory palace is actually ancient, ancient invention and through the tool of writing you can actually get that tool of incredible memory feats to more people.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And writing lets you time bind your ideas and send them forward into the future. If you have nothing but an oral tradition. As people die out, memories change. Right? The grandson’s recitation of the particular great poem that his grandfather taught him is necessarily different because it’s being filtered through him. I’m not saying that’s bad or wrong. I’m saying that writing allowed Plato to send his ideas. And here it’s 2026 and we’re still talking about them and we’re still riffing on them. Right?
Alex Petkas: Yeah. And writing was crucial for the development of science too.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No writing, no science.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. Geoffrey Lloyd is a great scholar that’s worked on this, the origins of Greek science. Without writing you can’t really have a scholarly dialogue across space and time. And it’s very difficult, prohibitively difficult. And the development of formal logic that Aristotle was one of the great innovators, sort of hard to do if you can’t look at a statement as a kind of objectified thing, put it on a board and say what is the real logic behind the statement? Does the conclusion follow from the second premise? And things like that are really crucial for the development of a scientific culture that actually refines definitions and concepts and arguments precisely. But one of the things that I think that we are in danger of losing and where I think the cautionary tales are important to pay attention to so that we can spend some time at least prioritizing what we should preserve is the degrading of literacy. Not just in the ability to read, but in deep literacy, which something Postman talks about. Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows is interesting on this that reading long books for hours on end is a cognitively very unnatural thing to do. It’s not what our hunter gatherer brains are primed to do. To sit there and read a book while a squirrel crawls across your peripheral vision. That requires a lot of discipline. It requires a kind of habit of attention to develop. It’s like a muscle that we have to work out. And literacy is one of the things, deep literacy. Reading for long periods of time is one of the things that trains that faculty in us to pay attention for a long time to something that our lizard or hunter gatherer brains find kind of boring. But our higher cognitive faculties know that there is gold in this and it’s going to take a while to get through it. But we’re going to be able to refute some scholar when he comes to town, or we’re going to develop some theory of how the atom works. We need to preserve the attention abilities, the cognitive abilities that you tend to have from a highly deep literacy culture in order to maximize our potential to leverage AI and to think to use it intelligently. So I would like to see us, and I think this is one of the interesting things in a lot of these cautionary tales. There’s a kind of problem identified where an entrepreneur can come in and say, all right, there actually is a solution here. It might not be throw more AI at it. It could be like, let’s start more debate clubs. There’s a lot of debate clubs popping up. The Hamilton Society in San Francisco has gotten a lot of attention lately. What I think they’re doing is really great. And reading and long form conversations in a kind of public spectacle spirit used to be a really crucial part of American culture in our high 19th century. The Lyceum Institutes all across the country, there were thousands of these institutions where just seamstresses and factory workers would go and hear Emerson speak. And we used to have these institutions and there were incentives built in to get people out there. Reading used to be a very social activity in the ancient world. Most of the texts that you’ve ever heard of from antiquity were meant to be kind of performed. Not just plays, but even Livy’s History of Rome or Virgil’s Aeneid or Plato’s Dialogues. They’re kind of meant to be social events that gather people together where some person will read or a couple of people will read and everybody else listens and they discuss afterwards. And it’s a time to kind of connect with people and meet business partners or political allies. I think that people are craving a lot of that social interaction and there’s an opportunity for endeavoring people to go and create some of these things and work out the incentives in the right way that will make life richer as we hopefully free up some more of our time from the drudgery of sifting through spreadsheets.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I wonder too how, for example, I’ve always been a big reader, right? And I always thought that was more just because I was voraciously curious more than anything else. But when I got scolded for working ahead in a particular reading assignment in grade school rather than send me to the library. I’ve talked about this before, but they made me sit and make a Christmas tree with my hands at my desk. I think it is the beginning of my anti-authoritarian and rebellious nature. But when I went and complained about it to my father, he walked me into our library at home and he pointed at the Encyclopedia Britannica and he went, read that. And I did. And I’m a huge fan of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. I’ve read all of the books and I don’t think that’s weird, I just think it’s. But I do wonder, is it just inherent in the individual or is it something that can in fact be taught? Right? And I guess one way you experiment with that is you do exactly what you’re doing and what others are doing with the Hamilton societies and everything. So, for example, one of the things that I use AI for extensively is steel manning, particularly steel manning ideas I don’t agree with. And I do that because we all have confirmation bias. It’s naturally built into us. And I think maybe that’s one of the best things that Elon Musk has done with Twitter, putting Grok on there. Because I’ve gotten into the habit of, I’ll see a post that I think is foolish, right? I’ll just be like, this guy’s an idiot. But I’ve gotten into the habit of hitting the Grok button and saying, steel man this argument. And almost always, not always, but almost always I’ll be reading it and I’ll be like, you know, that’s a very good point. So the idea of having those tools available, I definitely think debating is going to get better, but I sense one of my worries is a cognitive chasm, right? You’ve got the EU trying to regulate the shit out of AI, trying to cut its nuts off and make sure that it can’t do anything that they don’t like. And that movement is here in the United States too. It is not in China. Unless of course, you want to talk about Tiananmen Square. But if we don’t handle it right, there will be a cognitive chasm that opens up and I don’t know if we let it get very wide how you bring the side that was not using these tools. Right? Somebody who’s got access to an AI that can build steel mans of their opponent’s argument so that they can anticipate and get ready for that argument is going to kick the shit out of somebody who doesn’t have that tool in a debate society. Right? And another thing, AI is getting better and better at understanding patterns. Right? Those are the primitive patterns. What happens when we can understand through all of his writing, Plato. And an AI is like you type into the AI, okay, Plato. What do you think about modern event this? And it’s going to be pretty good.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, it’s scary. I mean it’s not scary, it’s exciting.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I don’t find that scary. I find that incredibly exciting.
Alex Petkas: Yeah, I do too. And I mean I use AI extensively in research and I think a lot of it has to do with asking the right questions. Not what, tell me a sci-fi story, make something up that’s going to inspire me. But what are the things that have inspired the people that I admire and why? And bam. Then now you have a very intelligent presentation of what book you should read next. And I keep.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I should also emphasize which in an ideal world you should simply use as a jumping off point for your own ideas. That’s a great idea. I would have never thought of that on my own. But these other ones I don’t like. Right? But using it as a jumping off point, you’re going to be starting from such a higher level. Back to the debate. If you’ve got the ability to have the equivalent of a very smart colleague who’s like, yeah, you didn’t think about this or this, and they’re going to come at you with that in this debate. And if you’re not ready, you’re probably going to lose. And just the preparatory ability and the ability to see new. I mean honestly, to see nuance again, to see the type of thing we’ve gotten so black and white and so tribal and people aren’t thinking anymore, they’re simply brainwashed into a, and I don’t mean all people. I mean many people get captured by these ideological frameworks and they go, in my opinion, brain dead and blind because they’re not thinking.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. And one of the ways that you can break through ideological frameworks is storytelling.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
Alex Petkas: This is one of the reasons, I think that sci-fi is such an interesting genre that’s going to get more important as things accelerate, which it tends to be triggered by the acceleration of new ideas. There’s sort of precedence for science fiction in classical Athens. Look at the plays of Aristophanes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The Clouds I was going to bring. Yeah, I love. Yeah, The Birds, The Clouds. They’re really funny stuff.
Alex Petkas: It’s hilarious. And Aristophanes is at his best when he’s making fun of Socrates in The Clouds. And I think that, well, it’s a good illustration of how the introduction of new ideas always brings about this anxiety. And you need to manage that through storytelling and example giving. And one of the things that science fiction can do is, well, fiction in general kind of mediates between the rational mind and the emotional and appetitive. It’s the faculty of imagination that kind of mediates between these two things in ancient psychology. And you can kind of get people to put aside their priors by telling a story about the future that just shows them what it could be like, that could be good. Or there are some things to be concerned about that they can warn us for the present. But science fiction is not just a product of the age of science. It’s just a kind of subset of fiction that we really developed it through the art of, through these older ways, oral storytelling, and also especially literacy that allows you to craft these narratives at scale. Francis Bacon, the other Bacon in the 16th.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: It was him who inspired the fellowships at O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Really, the idea of the sending. I guess it was Atlantis, sending out all of the people to investigate and everything. And I was reading about that. I’m like, huh, maybe. And then of course, everyone’s like, Jim, that is uber geek mode. We’re definitely not going to be presenting it that way. But the thing on science fiction, one of the things that we do at Infinite Books is science fiction got very. And for people who are just listening, I’m holding up a copy of a science fiction book called White Mirror that we published through Infinite Books. For a while, it just seemed to me that I’m a huge science fiction fan, by the way. And so much of it just got so incredibly negative. Everything was a dystopia, everything was bad. Right? And stories matter. I could not agree with you more.
Alex Petkas: Aristotle calls fiction more philosophical than history, actually, because it allows you to see the universals.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yes.
Alex Petkas: And it allows you to reveal character because you can understand better why people did what they did because you can make it explicit, whereas it’s often never really told in history because you don’t have access to people’s minds. But through the imagination, you can get into that and it can be so much more instructive about what are the real problems at stake. So, and this is connecting with the old ways and for a new age, we’re always going to have to do that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And one of the projects that I ultimately want to get around to here at O’Shaughnessy Ventures is there is a huge body of, it’s not exclusively American, but it’s mostly American that maybe starts in 1860 and goes through the early 1920s of pragmatism. William James, for example, we are doing a project right now. A lot of William James papers are not digitized, and we found that out. And we have a project going up in Boston where we’re doing that. And I think that training data is vital. And I think that if you have an AI, again, just remembering it’s a neutral technology that depends on what its training data is. And I think that if you use better training data and not Reddit chats, you might end up with a much more powerful AI system than the one that has been universally trained. I could absolutely be wrong, but that’s why I think it’s an experiment worth doing.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. I mean, it’s all kind of in the user and how you use these things. But what if you had an AI that was just based on the Western canon and nothing else? What kind of answers would that thing give you for your problems?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I’m fascinated by that.
Alex Petkas: Plato’s jealous. Rolling over in his grave at the kind of interlocutors that we’re able to summon.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. Well, this is such a fun topic for me. I’m looking at our time here. When will Zeal, the book be coming out?
Alex Petkas: We’re aiming for by the end of this year. Yeah. So I’m not sure we’ll have to talk to the book team to see how quickly we can get it out from final draft to hitting the print and in your mailbox and in your Audible AirPods, but hopefully by the end of 2026. The book will be out.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Terrific. I’m very excited about it and I will put it in the show notes. But where is the easiest place other than your podcast for people to find you online or in person?
Alex Petkas: Yeah, well, I live in Texas, so look me up if you’re ever down. And Twitter is probably a good place to follow me. I’m not that active these days because I’m trying to actually write the book and not get distracted by all the interesting things.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Believe me, I’m writing a book now too and have the completely non-social media computer to work from.
Alex Petkas: Indeed, indeed. I’ve just got one. So, but at Cost of Glory on Twitter is where I post and costofglory.com is my website, which you can find the podcast through. It’s on YouTube as well. We’ve been doing some great videos.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I know it well. Well, now we come to the final question, which is we’re going to make you emperor for the day. We’ll make you a Roman emperor since you know, but you’re a Roman emperor with every technology available today. But what we’re going to let you do is say two things into a magical microphone. You can’t kill anyone, you can’t put anyone in a re-education camp, but you can say two things into this magical inception microphone. Everyone on the planet is going to wake up whenever their tomorrow is and they’re going to say, I just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all the other times, I’m going to act on them. What you got?
Alex Petkas: Get to the garden and find resonance with a historical figure that speaks to you somehow in a way that you haven’t ever been spoken to before. I’ll leave that kind of enigmatic and cryptic, but those are two really important things to me.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Of those two things, inceptions, what historical character do you identify with?
Alex Petkas: For the longest time it’s been Plato for a lot of the reasons that we’ve talked about. I think that he was so attuned to the dangers of objectifying knowledge and to treating knowledge as something on the page or in the machine rather than something that is in a person who has agency and will and desires. And I think that I’m really inspired by him building something that was intangible and yet lasted for a millennium. And I’m trying in my own little way to do something similar to compare small things with great.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know what else was cool about Plato is he was a killer marketer.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: He was maybe the first and best because naming the dialogues after rich patrons and the ability to raise money. He was a multi-dimensional success story, I think.
Alex Petkas: And if you read his dialogues, I mean, from the Republic to the Symposium, I mean, there’s these constant prods at the reader, suggesting that he knows his audience so well and he’s trying to, he’s not just trying to get you to think about this idea, he’s trying to tempt you to come pay him a visit in Athens. And it really worked.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And it works, I think there. Yeah, I’m big on looking at historical characters that I admire and trying to see them in a different light. Right? I read a lot of philosophy because I was really interested in it, but I never really took, I took some courses, but it was obviously not my degree. But I personally think a philosophy degree, moving forward into the world that we’re moving into, not a bad degree to have.
Alex Petkas: Yeah. Second that philosophy and maybe a classics degree. I’m not sure if I’d, you should definitely learn ancient Greek. If you’re out there and young and energetic, that’s never going to go old.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Alex, this has been super fun.
Alex Petkas: Really enjoyed it, Jim.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
