Ken Sofer joins Chelsea to explore why The Odyssey still feels so relevant three thousand years later, from the collapse of the Bronze Age and the rules that hold political systems together to AI, cheaper warfare, fragile supply chains, and what happens when people pursue glory faster than they can control what comes next.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arrived this summer as a massive retelling of one of the oldest stories in the Western canon. But beneath the monsters, battles and spectacle is a world already close to breaking.
By 1200 BCE, the world of The Odyssey was running on one of the most sophisticated systems humanity had yet built. Egypt and the Hittites exchanged diplomats under a formal peace treaty. Mycenaean kingdoms traded across the Mediterranean. Bronze weapons depended on copper from Cyprus and tin moving thousands of miles from places as distant as Afghanistan. Then the system buckled. The Hittite Empire disappeared as a major power. Mycenaean palace civilization collapsed. Across parts of the region, populations fell dramatically.
How does a world that connected come apart? And why does a story born at the edge of that collapse feel so familiar in an age of drones, AI, fragile supply chains and shifting power? Ken Sofer joins us to follow that thread through three thousand years of history. The technology changes. The problem at the center of the story does not: who gets to wield power, what keeps it in check, and who lives with the consequences when those restraints fail?
Tune in for this thoughtful interview, listen or watch! We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
“Who bears the consequences for our glory and for these decisions and for these things that change history? The end of the world does not come evenly for everyone.” —
Ken Sofer
Guest
Ken Sofer is the founder and principal of New Colossus Advisors and an adjunct professor of American Foreign Policy at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He previously served as Director of Public Policy and Advisor for Policy and Planning in the Office of the President at the International Rescue Committee.
Carve-outs
Ken: Silicon Valley norms do not always travel well. NDAs may feel routine inside tech companies, but the same approach can create immediate distrust when it reaches city councils and local communities with controversial issues like data centers.
Ken: Safety nets can make risk-taking possible. Connecting entrepreneurship to stability encourages people to be more willing to build and experiment when failure is survivable.
Chelsea: Genghis Khan understood decentralized execution and tech innovation centuries before modern management did. A clear central objective paired with freedom in the field helped armies move faster and rewarded performance over bloodline.
Ken: The most vulnerable should not be fighting each other for scraps. People struggling at home and abroad are often forced into a false competition for limited resources, while climate change puts even more pressure on communities with the least room to absorb it.
Chelsea + Ken: We are borrowing from the future. AI, energy use and other technological bets can create enormous value now while leaving environmental, economic and social costs for people who had no voice in making the decision.
Key points
Political order depends on predictable rules: The Odyssey is full of norms around hospitality, strangers and restraint because trade and diplomacy only work when people have some idea how others will behave.
Interconnected systems can become powerful and fragile at the same time: The Bronze Age depended on long supply chains and complex political networks; drought, food shortages, conflict and displacement became much harder to absorb once those systems began failing together.
Technology changes both the cost and shape of power: Iron, horses, drones and AI all expand what different actors can do, while modern conflict increasingly reaches into energy, communications, food systems and other infrastructure civilians depend on.
Capability can outrun control: From Odysseus to Oppenheimer to frontier AI, the episode asks what responsibility looks like when people create or unleash something whose consequences extend beyond their ability to manage it.
Collapse changes who is positioned to lead for what comes next: The Bronze Age gave way to iron, more decentralized trade and new political powers, raising the same question today: who adapts to the next system, and what rules will shape it?
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Links
Greek tragedies: The Trojan Women by Euripides, Ajax by Sophocles, Hecuba by Euripides.
Plutarch’s Life of Pompey and “cease quoting laws to us that have swords”
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
UK AI Security Institute incident report: unsanctioned agent behavior during cyber testing
Anthropic’s investigation of real-world cybersecurity-evaluation incidents
Tech / finance: BowTied Bull
Technology and warfare: How horses transformed life on the Great Plains, National Park Service
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