Eric Larson

figure it out.

And, you know, I vacillate on that, Jess.

And I imagine, you know, depending on the week that you and I talk, we may have a different sort of flavor for where we're landing.

It's so funny.

You phrased it in a really thoughtful, provocative way, which is, you know, juxtaposition between technology and history, right?

And the two can be instrued as orthogonal.

Technology is about discontinuities, advancing in a discontinuous way.

History, at least in our retrospective sort of attempt to understand it, sort of looks log-linear, looks like a straight line, but if you sort of decompose it, it's pretty, pretty jagged.

And then you had three industrial revolutions.

Mechanization,

electrification and computerization, right?

And across those three industrial revolutions in 250 years, you saw technology uplift humanity by every dimension that we care about.

Sanitation, literacy, safety, democracy, and technology, especially over the last quarter millennium, has marked the upward surge of human flourishing.

If I look over the first three industrial revolutions, I think that there is a huge misconception and that the historians have extracted the wrong lesson.

The primary narrative is that the originator of the technology, the inventor, is the winner, right?

So that the society that invents the steam engine or Arkwright's mill, electricity dynamo, or the transistor, or the personal computer, that society that originates the technology wins.

wins geopolitically, wins technologically, wins in GDP and total factor productivity, wins civilizationally.

And I don't think that's the case.

I have a very different view of the history.

And what it comes down to for me is that it is the implementation