Ben Landau Taylor is a writer, historian, and one of the minds behind the Bismark Brief, whose research is focused on understanding the life cycle of civilizations. Much of his work has been informed by the work of Caroll Quigley, who in the 1970s put together a seven part framework for how civilizations are born, mature, and eventually go extinct. His model was one of an economic instrument of expansion, where the tools of growth defined the success of the empire - a direct contradiction to contemporary Arnold Toynbee's perspective that it wasn't economics that drove civilization - it was some kind of spiritual commitment to a common cause. The economic model seemed more reasonable to Taylor, who then wanted to know - was it simply applicable to European history, or was this a more universal model? We talk about the ways that the rise and fall of civilizations generalizes across history, the place our own civilization is in the progression, and what the future might hold.