Geopolitics and Empire is joined by ethicist Daniel Natal of the Daniel Natal show,

and he's also a top-tier analyst and brain. Welcome to the podcast, Daniel.

Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah, I am not a top-tier brain. That would be you, I think.

Big fan of yours always have been and follow your work very closely so that I can

plagiarize it.

No, I mean, your stuff is fantastic.

We chinty program last year.

And yeah, it's time to have you on.

And I think one of the topics we're going to broach that everyone is broaching now is

who rules the world i was

on jeremy ryan slates program he was asking that question i was on sean shan atwood's

program he was asking that question everyone wants to know now who rules uh the world so let's get

let's get into that well i've got an interesting theory and my

interesting theory, and this is going to go way down the rabbit hole and hopefully it doesn't

bore anybody, but it starts with my son. My son asked about the middle ages. He suddenly

got into, you know, kind of the feudal age for whatever reason. And so we studied it. We read a couple

books on it, saw videos on it. And there's three basic powers in the Middle Ages. One was,

of course, you know, the kings. One was, of course, the church. And the third that nobody talks

about are the guilds, right? And so there were the mercantile guilds and the trade guilds

were the two basic. But for our purposes, it's the mercantile guilds basically were extremely

powerful. They ruled the middle ages. Most of the domestic policy was done by these guilds.

The king was dealing with international stuff. The church was dealing with international stuff.

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