In my latest WhoWhatWhy podcast, you’ll see that there’s a moment in the conversation when something clicks. When the thread connecting baby names to the fall of the Roman Empire to Bitcoin to Jeffrey Epstein to the basket of deplorables to the last reserve currency suddenly becomes visible. And once you see it, you can’t look away.

That thread is the signal. Not communication. Not language. Something older and more fundamental than either: the mechanism by which civilization itself coordinates billions of people who will never meet, across timescales no single human life can fully comprehend.

Simon Pearce writes the Liminal Lens Substack and is president of Emotif, a strategic consultancy that helps organizations thrive in an eara of rapid change and disruption – He has spent years mapping how that mechanism works, how it fails, and what it looks like when a civilization is deep into the failure.

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