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The last 15 years has seen an extraordinary amount of political instability in the West.

Whether it's the rise of Donald Trump and the US or Brexit here in the UK,

we have seen events after events which frankly nobody predicted.

Today's guest is Peter Turchin, he's a historian but he's also someone with a background

in applied mathematics. And he thinks that the events we've seen in recent years are merely

the leading edge of something far bigger. And he knows that because he can draw on 200 plus case

studies, social breakdown, civil war and revolution. So what we've seen in the last decade,

15 years, could that really be the beginning of something far bigger? Civil war in the United States,

for instance. Huge questions, a huge book and one hell of a guest. Peter Turchin, welcome to Downstream.

Thank you. Big question to start with, can you predict the future?

I don't think so. The future is essentially unpredictable. But what we can do, we can try to

bring you about a better future for us. So you can't predict the future. I don't think so.

But you can have a pretty good idea about what's going to happen. You talk about these broad

patterns across time and you can you can broadly foresee highly plausible outcomes. Is that a better

way of putting it? Okay, let me step back and tell you that we have, we are working on building

a science of history which we call biodynamics. And as part of that, we have built a large database

of past societies sliding into a crisis and then emerging from it. And what we found in brief

...