Thinking about

Building a New Hanseatic League — Pursuing through Temple
Accelerating tech and industry in Africa — exploring via Monolith and its subsidiaries
The concept of Ecumene as it might relate to 21st C geopolitics
Filmmaking — I recently executive produced a short film and am playing around with screenwriting in my down time
The practice and historical tradition of Grand strategy
How to start a terraforming company
Serious studies of technological hype cycles and S curves (Carlota Perez et al)
The succession problem
What really happened at the Council of Nicaea
Non-existent books (to my knowledge) I’d like to see written (PS: If you have a decently good plan on how to execute on some of these, reach out; will help you get funded):

a complete reconstruction and cataloguing of African history, anthropology, intellectual history, etc.

Persia was the first empire in history to posit an ideal of “moral empire”, and its founder, Cyrus the Great, was the only biblical figure other than Jesus to be anointed as a Messiah. People praise Aurelius’ Meditations, but I find Stoicism utterly useless, unless one is a slave or a king, becuse at that point, one is best served not desiring. For the rest of us who must struggle with desire — for power, for meaning, for adulation, for love — I imagine Cyrus’ memoirs, and his insights on statecraft and striving for the good life, would be a treasure. *Ideally this should be written in the beautiful style of Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian.

The true history of the 20th C — and the birth of the modern world, broadly speaking— is a mystery. Almost nobody really knows what actually happened, and the mainstream accounts are 90% Anglo-American propaganda (primarily because they ignore the predominance of deliberate, covert elite coordination, as renowned Georgetown historian Quigley uncovered). In our modern consciousness, WW2 is understood as a good vs evil story; an LOTR-style light vs dark epic battle. In reality, it was more like the war between the five families in The Godfather: a power struggle between mafia heads to establish the Hegemon of the new world. Meaning, the war was only great powers pursuing their interests, and putting millions through the meat grinder of modern industrial warfare to secure them. This is hard for most people to understand, seen as most view history through the lens of MCU hero-villain dialectic, but anyone who’s spent time actually studying the war can understand this claim, even if they reject its harshness. So I want to see a true history of the war, recounting how the Anglo-American empire essentially conquered the world, and revealing the actual machiavellian tactics of all participants, alongside the insane fuckery of the early 20th century. I imagine this written not as a dry, post-modern historical text, but written in the syle of a historical "epic poem”, similar to Merezhkovsky’s Life of Napoleon or Carlyle’s French Revolution.

The older I get, the more this pattern keeps repeating: smart people falling for the dumbest ideas possible—indeed, ideas that only a smart person could fall for (see Utilitarianism, Eugenics, 19th century racialist theories, etc). Put another way: bullying nerds might actually be a brilliant evolutionary strategy. I’m joking. But also not. This is a very understudied phenomenon that needs more serious consideration.

A book contrasting influential statesmen from the ancient world of the Romans and the modern to post-modern American state, written in the style of Plutarch and Vasari's Lives, would be an interesting read. Caesar and Lincoln; Augustus and FDR; Washington and Cincinnatus; Hamilton and Agrippa; the Gracchi brothers and the Kennedy brothers; Brutus and Aaron Burr; Pompey and General Lee; John Adams and Cicero. The parallels are there and quite striking. I think it reveals something about how history is really a powerful memetic force, with great figures modeling themselves after one another, and in the process approximating similar triumphs, and similar tragic fates. This idea of history as LARP, beyond the usual trite stuff of “history repeats”, is very academically underdeveloped.

An account of Alexander’s conquest of Persia, but from the Persian perspective. What was it like to mobilize the infrastructure of the greatest empire in the world at the time, and find that nothing can stop this crazy 25-year old playing with daddy’s army?

A story as cliché as any: talented founding patriarch succeeds big, sets his kids up for life. But the kids, pampered by father’s success, are fuck-ups. The true heir is either a grandson, distant niece or nephew, or completely unrelated. Why? Why isn’t Michael Jordan’s son as good as him, or even half as good, despite the advantage of having MJ as your dad? There is something going on here beyond the nature/nurture debate. Of course, some have solved this problem. Alexander more than surpassed Phillip. Augustus outdid Caesar. Can their strategies be used to mitigate this?