I'm John Natch with Professor Eric Klein. The new book is After 1177 BC.

Civilization collapsed, the globalization trade collapse, but there were big winners called technically

anti-f fragile. Guess. One came with the alphabet, maybe, the other came with iron, maybe. The Phoenicians, who the professor

tells me never called themselves Phoenicians, they identified with cities, tire and

Sidon and Beirut, Bibloz. Those traders, and then there are the genius

metallurgis of Cyprus. And this is important to mention because we're talking about how you deal with collapse.

The Assyrians dealt with it with leadership. The Egyptians dealt with it by retracting.

They took a recession.

The Phoenicians and the Cypriots are opportunists.

Accidentally, Professor, were they geniuses?

I'm gonna go with genius rather than accidental. It seemed very deliberate.

But yes, both the Phoenicians and the Cypriots are at the top of my list. They're the top-ranked people in terms of how you deal with a collapse,

how you deal with catastrophe when your society and or your globalized network go down.

What do you do when there are supply chain issues and so on?

The Phoenicians and the Cypriots, as you mentioned, are what I call

anti fragile which is a term that I've borrowed from

Nassim Nicholas Talib

who has a book of that title and he defines

anti fragile as when you flourish in conditions of chaos, which is perfect for what happened after the collapse.

Basically the Phoenicians who are in what is today modern day Lebanon, they are the surviving

Canaanites in Central Canaan. There is no evidence that they really ever went down. They simply pick up and continue, but they do transform.

Same thing with the Cypriots. So what the Phoenicians do, one of their secrets is that they're right there on the Mediterranean and they take over from Ugarit, when Ugarit is destroyed and so as one of my colleagues has called it the

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