41: Great Founders, Complex Thought, and State Capacity with Samo Burja

Samo Burja is founder of Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm that investigates the political and institutional landscape of society. He is also a research fellow at the LongNow Foundation, where he studies how institutions can endure for centuries and millennia, and a Senior Research Fellow in political science at the Foresight Institute where he advises on how institutions can shape the future of technology. Writer, speaker, and strategist. We discuss his Great Founder Theory, his hypothesis that “a small number of institutions founded by exceptional individuals for the core of society”; as well as the requisite infrastructure for complex thought that Samo says has almost entirely disappeared, and the causes of Western nations' decline in state capacity.