Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Smile! Civilisation is Collapsing" with Sarah Wilson

Transcript

"Smile! Civilisation is Collapsing" with Sarah Wilson · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Hello, hello, hello.
0:12
Thank you for all coming out to the Wheeler Centre at Federation Square in downtown Melbourne.
0:17
G'day humans, as my podcast usually begins.
0:20
And g'day to any Indigenous folks.
0:22
It's a privilege to be wrestling with big stories
0:26
in a place where the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people wrestled with big stories for tens of thousands of years.
0:32
It's also a privilege to be here with my friend, Sarah Wilson.
0:36
She's a multi-New York Times best-selling author, a social philosopher.
0:41
She was the editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine Australia, a host of MasterChef Australia,
0:46
and founded the global I Quit Sugar movement.
0:50
Her new book about the collapse of civilization and how to survive it is called I Eat the Stars, which she wrote on Substack.
0:59
Please welcome Sarah Wilson.
1:01
Thank you.
1:06
You will have seen there was a QR code, which you can continue to use.
1:10
And after I've chatted with Sarah, then we'll get to some of your questions on this handy device.
1:15
Sarah, I was thinking about the corrosion of US democracy after reading your book and Roman decadence and sort of the collapse of empire.
1:28
and so I wanted to know first off which appeals to you more aesthetically the Eiffel Tower
1:36
or the 90 foot tall ultimate fighting championship arena that Donald Trump is building
1:43
on the south lawn of the White House have you seen it I have seen I've seen it in under
1:48
construction it's glorious it is glorious aesthetically or more so from a pop cultural
1:54
historical perspective let's start with aesthetics because Donald Trump said that it could last for
1:59
as long as the Eiffel Tower has he said that I did um aesthetically no look I I imagine it'll be
2:07
go the same way as the swimming pool there'll be some kind of painting malfunction or dodgy day
2:12
that he employed to put together the struts you know just kind of used a cheaper version and the
2:17
whole thing falls down I mean if you had to like imagine going back to Sarah Wilson 15 years ago
2:22
or any of us 15 years ago and showing you a photo,
2:27
how much explaining would you have to do
2:31
about what's happened in the intervening years
2:34
to understand why President Donald Trump
2:37
is building an ultimate fighting championship arena?
2:41
Then someone shot his ear, but he didn't actually die,
2:45
and then all these women started wearing bandages
2:48
in solidarity on their ear.
2:51
I mean, how do you explain any of that?
2:53
The whole thing is thoroughly absurd, and I think it's a sort of a reflection,
2:58
it's an eruption of everything else that is going on in the world.
3:03
And, you know, this is a nice segue into sort of the subject matter of my book.
3:07
My subject is really the everythingness, the clusterfuck of all the absurd things
3:13
that seemingly make no sense, and certainly made no sense when I endeavoured to write this book.
3:21
And it was really a journey to try to see how it all fits together,
3:24
like what the hell is going on.
3:26
What is going on?
3:28
Well.
3:30
How long have you got?
3:31
Yeah, well, 350-odd pages in that book.
3:34
We've got an hour.
3:35
So I basically, I mean, I came to this subject matter
3:40
through the climate crisis.
3:41
I was a climate activist for 20 years,
3:44
and I'd been peddling this message of hope.
3:47
We can still make it if we all get solar panels
3:50
and hashtag vote climate.
3:52
And if our husbands just finally learn how to recycle,
3:54
you know, this was the big thing.
3:56
And what I was observing is that, first of all,
3:59
there was a dissonance going on
4:00
because what was actually happening in the world
4:02
didn't match up to what people like me
4:04
and the climate scientists were saying and promising.
4:09
Not a single nation on the planet
4:10
had stuck to its Paris agreements.
4:11
We'd gone past seven of the nine planetary boundaries.
4:15
We went past the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold
4:19
above pre-industrial temperatures.
4:21
And we were still, at the end of a Guardian article
4:24
or an ABC article, saying,
4:26
but if we all act together right now, we'll still make it.
4:29
And it was creating what I think is a cognitive dissonance.
4:33
And it was making people feel really itchy,
4:35
like this is not stacking up.
4:38
And then AI arrived, the LLMs arrived.
4:42
Do you remember that Christmas
4:43
when everybody was just playing around with it
4:44
and going, oh, this is kind of cool?
4:45
Yeah, I remember.
4:46
And the horse bolted, you know?
4:48
I used to have a show on the ABC, on ABC Radio in Sydney,
4:52
and I still remember when everyone was fooling around with ChatGPT,
4:55
but we thought that the reason why it was really clever
4:58
was because it could write you a poem in the style of a pirate.
5:04
Or a smurf.
5:05
Or something like that.
5:05
And you'd be like, tell me the story of Genesis,
5:08
but as Kylie Jenner.
5:10
And we were like, this is the future.
5:14
And while we weren't looking,
5:15
you know, enrolled the tech bros with their sort of bad faith technology.
5:20
So there was that.
5:21
And then we, you know, nuclear threat was dialing up.
5:24
The Middle East conflict was dialing up.
5:27
We were presented with more and more threats.
5:29
Food security, trade routes were having a problem.
5:33
You know, the AMOC, the new sort of global climate catastrophe
5:40
was something that we're all trying to learn about.
5:42
And I was like, why is this all happening to us all at once right now?
5:47
And I started to look into some work in and around complex systems theory.
5:54
And so happens that there's a range of institutes and universities and think tanks around the world that have been looking at this kind of thing for decades now.
6:05
and modelling a whole range of complex systems
6:08
that make up our civilisation,
6:09
which is essentially a complex system of complex systems.
6:13
And it turns out it's all interrelated.
6:15
These complex systems are all gliding into each other,
6:20
knocking each other on like dominoes.
6:22
And this is precisely what happens
6:25
to all complex civilisations throughout history.
6:29
So Luke Camp, another Australian,
6:32
who works out of the Centre for Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge
6:36
did a lot of the research on this.
6:39
He looked at thousands of complex civilisations
6:42
like the Roman Empire, the Mayan Empire, the Qing Dynasty and so on
6:45
and found that without fail, every one of them collapsed.
6:50
And they collapsed because of their complexity.
6:54
So the very thing that saw them build aqueducts
6:57
and create cities further and further afield,
6:59
expand, expand, create more armies,
7:01
which required more horses, which required more taxes,
7:04
which required farmers to produce more grain to pay the taxes.
7:09
All of that kind of clusterfucking is exactly what became the weakness
7:15
at a certain point, at a sort of a threshold.
7:17
I like that clusterfucking is now a verb.
7:20
Well, it's actually an army term, so I feel comfortable using it
7:22
in public spaces because it's not just me issuing profanities
7:26
all over the place.
7:29
And what ends up happening with these complex civilisations?
7:32
is that there'll be a relatively small crisis.
7:36
So it might be a volcano eruption.
7:38
It might be a fairly localised flood or drought.
7:43
It might be an invading army arrives.
7:46
Might be a 90-foot-tall ultimate fighting championship arena.
7:49
That could be the downfall of our civilisation.
7:51
I think there's as good a chance as any that it is that.
7:54
But it'll be something relatively small.
7:57
And because there is no fat left in the system,
7:59
because all the resources are spent trying to keep the complexity going,
8:04
it can be enough to topple the whole lot.
8:06
And once one system goes,
8:08
it has this cascading effect on all of the other systems.
8:11
And we're at that juncture.
8:12
We're at that critical juncture where all the complex systems
8:15
that have been growing since the 1700s,
8:18
since industrialisation in that hockey stick curve,
8:21
they're reaching a point around about now where they're peaking.
8:27
We've reached peak fossil fuel in 2023.
8:29
We're going to hit a peak population.
8:31
You've probably heard a fair bit about this.
8:33
In about some time between 2040 and 2060,
8:36
there's a bit of discrepancy in the modelling.
8:39
We're going to top out at about 9 to 10 billion humans.
8:43
And then what happens after that?
8:44
We come back down the other side in the same shaped hockey stick graph,
8:49
bottoming out at around 1 to 4 billion people in a couple of hundred years.
8:53
That's what most modelling is predicting.
8:56
So when you just have a couple of these systems start to wobble and go
8:59
and start to go into a descent, it has this knock-on effect.
9:03
That's a really long elevator pitch
9:04
for what complex civilisational collapse is.
9:07
So when you say collapse,
9:08
I mean, it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.
9:11
And the book is quite catastrophic
9:13
in the way that it characterises collapse.
9:15
I mean, there's a lot of death, suffering, famine, warfare,
9:20
you know, population decline and misery.
9:24
And a lot of the book is about...
9:25
I mean, the most interesting and, I think,
9:27
sort of touching and profound part of the book is how we should exhibit resilience and
9:33
the kind of characteristics that you would want to have as a human being in a world that is
9:37
undergoing tremendous change, regardless of whether or not you necessarily agree with
9:42
Sarah's judgment on collapse.
9:43
I think it's a really useful book in terms of
9:46
the kind of people who we would want to be during any, you know, traumatic period.
9:52
the Roman Empire fell
9:54
Italy's still there
9:56
Italians are still banging around
9:58
having lots of sex and eating pasta
10:00
these civilizations come and go
10:02
it doesn't have to be the end of the world
10:03
the British Empire fell
10:06
and it was probably a good thing
10:08
so
10:10
can't you make the case that yes okay
10:12
of course the civilization
10:13
that we know which is led by the United
10:16
States as we've known it since World War II
10:18
is probably coming apart in some way
10:21
and that will be fine.
10:22
We will manage that change.
10:23
There will be upsides, there will be downsides
10:25
and we'll muddle through.
10:27
There's a couple of points there.
10:28
So the first point is that I do describe
10:31
what various experts say could happen,
10:34
but really it's about describing what is already happening.
10:37
So the collapse is already here.
10:39
We're already in it.
10:41
And the way that collapse goes,
10:42
it's not like the movies where suddenly
10:44
we're walking across apocalyptic scenes
10:47
with a shopping trolley.
10:48
You know, it's a gradual at first and then sort of all of a sudden event.
10:55
We are in the gradual at first stage.
10:58
And what I will say is that I don't at any point say we are going to collapse into smithereens and disappear without a trace.
11:06
In fact, my rally call is we're at this very important juncture where we as a species get to make a choice.
11:15
I'll also just clarify that, you know, that what about, you know, the Roman Empire and Italy still
11:20
exists kind of argument, is that the really distinct difference about our civilization
11:26
is it's global.
11:28
So the Roman Empire did collapse and barely left a trace apart from its aqueducts
11:34
and so on.
11:35
But people decamped to other parts of Europe.
11:39
You know, indigenous Australians
11:41
back then had absolutely no awareness that the Roman Empire was collapsing.
11:46
The difference today is that our complex civilization made up of complex systems is global.
11:53
So the trade routes are all connected.
11:55
Our climate is no longer a, you know, or our climate crisis
11:58
are no longer a flood that might happen in an isolated area.
12:02
It's the whole atmosphere.
12:04
Our food systems are all interconnected.
12:06
Our water systems are all interconnected.
12:09
AI threat is absolutely global.
12:13
So is the nuclear threat.
12:15
War is now a global phenomenon.
12:17
So we can't escape it like we could in the past.
12:21
But I do call it collapse, and I think that's the
12:25
most appropriate word.
12:26
That is what the historians refer to it as.
12:29
But one way to get around it
12:30
psychologically is to bear in mind that what is actually happening is the system is going down.
12:37
It's the system that's been around for about 270 years.
12:41
And the opportunity we have is, well, if we stay tethered to the system, we go down with it.
12:46
If we release ourselves of the system and start to create a what comes next, then we will have a very different future.
12:55
And really another word for collapse is a simplification.
12:58
So all of that complexifying that has brought incredible abundance and technologies and so on,
13:05
it's going to come undone but it doesn't have to mean death and carnage you know the population
13:11
reduction issue that's not necessarily about people um you know having barnies and we reduce
13:18
the population that way it's literally because of the fragmentation the inequality that's playing
13:22
out it means that people are having less children and we're not replacing the population the
13:27
replacement rate once it drops below 2.1 children per woman it can't lift again that's historically
13:34
always been the case, every bit of modelling shows that in the past, if a population dropped
13:39
below 2.1, you'd bring in migration policies.
13:42
In 2026, the world isn't too open to migration
13:46
policies.
13:48
But on top of that, the global replacement rate now is 2.1 and about to drop below it.
13:54
So there's nowhere to get other humans from, you know?
13:58
Yeah, yes.
14:00
Unless there's some alien civilisation that we don't know about who can migrate.
14:03
I mean, Elon Musk is giving it a good crack.
14:05
But I mean...
14:08
Firstly, the Romans didn't only survive
14:11
because they left the Roman Empire.
14:13
I mean, people stayed in Rome.
14:14
It's still there, right?
14:16
I mean, life did go on.
14:19
So even if the crisis is global,
14:22
the fact that we don't have Mars or Venus to escape to
14:25
isn't necessarily fatal.
14:27
Secondly, on the issue of population decline,
14:30
I mean, that is an interesting counter-argument,
14:32
I think against trying to be too certain about what's going to happen in the future in the sense
14:36
that up until three seconds ago everyone thought that overpopulation was going to be horrendous
14:41
it's a point you make it's literally a decade ago every environmentalist who spoke to up until
14:45
you know five years ago was well there are too many people there are too many people we're going
14:49
to have fewer and fewer people Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb and all the catastrophizing
14:55
about there being too many people well it turns out they were wrong people when they get a certain
14:59
amount of rich and a certain amount of self-possession.
15:02
They decide to have fewer kids, especially
15:05
when those kids don't die of horrible diseases anymore, thanks to the industrial revolution
15:10
that you're hoping we're going to put behind us.
15:14
It's not hoping we'll put behind us.
15:16
It's disappearing behind us, like it cannot hold.
15:21
The notion of infinite growth on a finite planet, which is essentially the premise,
15:25
mythology behind industrialisation.
15:29
It's a fundamental arithmetic error, like how on earth
15:32
can that ever stack up?
15:33
But we created a mythology and all civilisations are essentially buttressed
15:38
by mythologies.
15:39
And we as humans have always needed mythologies to keep things moving forward,
15:43
because if we all sat there... Well, I mean, the infinite growth can't work if the infinite growth
15:46
means infinite increasing consumption of finite resources.
15:51
Which it does.
15:51
Well, it doesn't have
15:52
to.
15:53
I mean, there's a lot of growth that comes out of productivity as well.
15:56
So you can, I mean,
15:57
this is almost Malthusian, the shape of this argument, which is, I mean, Malthus had a water
16:01
tight case as well, which was, you know, he was basically assuming that there was a finite amount
16:08
of productivity that you could get out of an acre of land.
16:11
And therefore, if people just keep on
16:12
growing, you're just going to run out of land.
16:15
He didn't know that we were going to invent new
16:17
kinds of rice, you know, discover new kinds of wheat, get better and better at doing things.
16:22
And then create AI, which its founders, its creators tell us could, in fact, kill us.
16:29
I mean, I think you probably read the bit in the book where I talk about the P-Doom figure.
16:33
These dudes, the bros in Silicon Valley, walk around talking about their P-Doom figure,
16:37
which is the probability of doom, the probability of wipeout by AI.
16:42
There's a little bit of fuzziness as to exactly what the definition of it is.
16:46
But essentially, it's, in most cases, wipeout by AI by the end of this century.
16:51
And I think Elon Musk's P-Doom figure is 20.
16:54
That means he thinks it's a 20% chance.
16:56
I mean, they're all terrifyingly high.
16:58
And I mean, even if it's only, you know, some of the optimists in Silicon Valley are like,
17:02
don't worry, there's only a 10% chance that it's going to kill us all.
17:05
Would you get on a plane if there was a 10% chance?
17:08
Would you put your children on that plane, you know?
17:11
But look, I take your point.
17:14
But one of the things I'm very careful to say, and I've done this with all of my books,
17:19
as you know, the title of my book, I Quit Sugar, is not, you must quit sugar.
17:23
It's, I quit sugar,
17:24
I gave it a go, I went down this ridiculous rabbit hole for several years, got all of the information,
17:29
got pillied for it, got bullied for it, and I've emerged with some information,
17:33
give it a go if you like, you know, go for your life, like, see how it goes.
17:37
And with this book,
17:38
it's the same.
17:39
Like, the defining feature of our moment in history is uncertainty.
17:45
The point is,
17:45
we do not know where it's going to head.
17:48
And I do take your point that humans have lived in
17:52
liminal times like this before.
17:55
And, you know, I sort of think back to the time between the two
17:59
world wars, which is fairly recent.
18:03
An old world was crumbling, an old world order was crumbling,
18:06
and there was no sort of sense of what was ahead.
18:09
And, you know, there's that Antonio Gramsci quote,
18:13
now is the time of monsters.
18:15
And he wrote that as a prisoner under Mussolini
18:20
and was writing about this very liminal time.
18:22
We're in a similarly liminal time.
18:24
And I think the most difficult thing
18:27
and probably the thing that I really focus on the most
18:29
is the fact that uncertainty is something
18:31
we're going to have to grapple with.
18:33
There is a chance that things will get a little bit shit
18:35
and then a little bit more shit.
18:36
I can almost guarantee that.
18:38
I don't think we're going to recover
18:39
from what we're going through at the moment,
18:41
which is that assumption that I was talking about when we were talking about the climate movement
18:46
like don't worry it's all going to be fine we can still make it and the still make it promise was
18:52
that we can continue business as usual consuming consuming on on a finite planet we can't go back
18:58
to that um and so what I'm saying is that no matter what happens no matter what even the
19:06
best case scenario modelling, which I would like to work to, because I think that's what we really,
19:11
as humans, do need to work to, is going to land us in a very precarious position.
19:16
And the ultimate, I think, threat that we really face is in this liminal time of uncertainty,
19:22
we lose our shit, we lose our cool.
19:25
And that is, I think, where we could go severely wrong,
19:30
is that mass civil unrest is our greatest threat.
19:33
It's food scarcity is one thing, AI doing its thing,
19:36
but it's going to be the fragmentation, the polarisation
19:39
that's going to be the real issue.
19:42
And so I wrote this book not so much to paint a doom and gloom picture
19:46
and enjoy, you know, being right.
19:49
It was more to say this is where we're heading
19:52
if we don't get a group of ourselves,
19:53
if we stay tethered to this system,
19:55
if we put our energy and resources into trying to keep this system going rather than attending to our tender vulnerable
20:04
species then
20:06
We are in trouble
20:07
Yeah
20:07
And so really most of the book you know there's this sort of parallel journey that I go on
20:12
To try to work out what that could look like yes
20:14
and I mean that that is the lovely thing about the book that it's not a
20:18
Relentless downer of data about how terrible everything is no I get bored of that myself and in fact
20:23
I was just going to say, a big part of the reckoning that we're going to have to go through, and I wrangle with it the whole way through the book, is to let go of our left brain dominated ways, which requires, you know, the left brain is the part of the brain that tries to keep everything rationally watertight.
20:45
The right brain is the side of the brain that deals with emotion and poetics and spirituality and so on.
20:52
and we've been a very left brain culture and to talk about these ideas and to also talk about
20:57
life beyond this system we've got to embrace a lot more of our right brain the left brain wants
21:03
to take a system say the climate system or population decline and talk about it over here
21:09
and not let it go until we've wrapped it up with a nice watertight answer and then we can come and
21:15
talk about that to talk about where we're at with these complex systems we've got to go a bit over
21:20
here.
21:21
Okay, now we've got to jump over here and then over here.
21:23
And it can feel chaotic and messy.
21:27
But that is actually what complex system theorists invite us to do.
21:32
They say we're going to have to
21:33
join the emergence of all of this.
21:36
And we don't have to look too far to see how that operates.
21:39
We only have to look at nature.
21:41
And that's also another thread in the book, is looking to nature
21:45
and looking at the broader scheme of things.
21:47
And it can seem, some of my stuff can seem like
21:49
woo-woo stuff at the moment at times but um i think that that's that way of thinking that
21:55
we're going to have to embrace to fully understand the moment we're in i mean the reality of what
22:02
happens to human beings when they're undergoing intense uncertainty is that they become
22:08
more stupid and they become more possessive and they become more disoriented i mean not just us
22:13
all primates, probably all mammals.
22:16
And one thing that you see,
22:18
certainly in the information ecosystem,
22:20
where we're having all of our conversations
22:22
about all of these big things,
22:24
is that people hunker down.
22:25
People get defensive.
22:26
People get more wedded to their beliefs
22:31
the more that they get challenged.
22:32
And we have this sort of, you know,
22:34
echo chamberification of the media
22:36
where algorithms are contributing to it.
22:38
Yeah, it's part of the complex system.
22:40
You know, it's a complex system.
22:41
Yes, I mean, complexity is not fun.
22:44
You know, it's not a nice place to sit in.
22:47
It's uncomfortable.
22:48
Yes, uncomfortable conversations, you might even say.
22:51
That's it.
22:51
That's it.
22:52
But throughout history, we have had sort of buttressing
22:57
and checks and balances.
22:58
We've had moral leaders, spiritual leaders that have been able
23:02
to steer us through that discomfort.
23:05
And one of the key features of neoliberalism in particular,
23:10
so you know what's been happening for the last 50 to 70 years is that we've you know I think I've
23:15
used this phrase before with you we've we've got rid of the moral umpires off the footy field of
23:20
life right so all the people that could actually steer us through these complex times and tell us
23:26
stories and mythologies because we are all descendants of the humans who are able to tell
23:33
bigger stories that could bring us together as a community and to work in such a way that we
23:42
don't descend into our most base individualistic tendencies because we are a weak species,
23:48
we are a frail species, we don't run fast, we don't have claws, we don't have fangs.
23:53
What has actually seen us survive to this point is cooperation and community and these kinds of
23:58
things and we need moral leaders and part of the problem, you know, another complex system that's
24:02
kind of collapsing all over the place is the fact that we don't have those in place at this really
24:07
tricky uncomfortable juncture in history and so part of me writing this book is to invite people
24:14
to start to turn to those kinds of sources philosophy spirituality nature and to have
24:21
these kinds of conversations with family and friends yeah you talk about islands of sanity
24:26
you know places that we can carve out whether that's podcasts or friends or community centers
24:31
or whatever it might be, where you can feel like all of that hostility
24:36
and all of that groupthink is set aside.
24:39
And there are, I suppose, leaders and mentors who are capable
24:43
of being genuinely intellectually empathic and genuinely curious.
24:48
I am interested in the fact that you were developing these ideas
24:51
while living in France.
24:53
And it's something that you weave through the book a little bit
24:55
about how there is a different attitude towards ideas,
24:59
argumentation, connectedness in France
25:03
than there is in Australia or the United States.
25:07
And the analogy that you give, which I love,
25:09
is the practice in French bistros and cafes
25:13
of having the chairs on the outside
25:16
pointing out instead of towards each other.
25:21
So when you go to a French cafe
25:23
and you're sitting down with your friend,
25:24
you're sitting side by side, not facing each other,
25:26
but looking at the world as it goes by.
25:29
can you unpack that for us yeah um as we did we sat in a few months ago yeah um in a french terrace
25:37
facing out to the world and unpacked this very very concept um so anyone who's been to france
25:43
knows the deal they face outwards and i i'm not entirely sure whether it's because the french
25:49
people are inherently very curious and therefore they just got all their chairs and faced out to
25:55
the world, or whether that sort of structural setup has created a curiosity.
26:01
It doesn't really
26:02
matter.
26:02
The ultimate outcome of it all is that France, and Paris in particular, very much fosters
26:10
debate, nuanced discussions.
26:12
They say, you know, when you arrive in France, if you get invited to
26:15
a dinner party, make sure you bring a good bottle of wine and a good argument.
26:19
And the French are
26:19
almost disappointed if you bail out and go, oh, I'm not really into politics.
26:23
I mean, that is
26:24
a slur on society, if you say that, which is great.
26:28
And, you know, I went to France.
26:31
It was
26:32
sort of a, it was a conscious decision on many fronts.
26:36
I think I've told you this before.
26:37
It
26:37
was because, like, I just needed to meet a different type of man.
26:41
But it was because,
26:44
that was half the room.
26:45
I won't take any offence on behalf of Australian men.
26:48
them.
26:50
But it was, and it was also because as a 50 plus woman, like you are treated like royalty
26:57
over there.
26:57
Like if you're waiting in a queue somewhere, the waiter will come over and just
27:02
grab you and put you down at a table.
27:04
You get treated extremely well as a midlife woman.
27:08
But really what it is, is because it's a place where nuance is encouraged and it's part of the
27:14
fabric of society.
27:16
And, you know, I then sort of extrapolate from there and look at the fact that,
27:20
you know, intellectuals and people who were struggling to understand where the world was
27:24
heading in that liminal time between the two world wars came to Paris, just like they've come
27:30
throughout history to this city.
27:32
And part of it, again, it's structural, Josh, because the apartments
27:36
are so small.
27:37
The apartment I was living in was 20 square meters.
27:40
I mean, it's about the size of
27:41
most people's laundries, which in Australia, everyone's obsessed with renovating their
27:46
laundries, I've noticed.
27:48
Anyway, so I mean... Not just the laundries, I've got to tell you.
27:50
They're renovating everything.
27:51
Well, they've run out of all the other rooms.
27:52
It's now the laundry.
27:54
But I was, you know, everybody lives in these tiny apartments and it forces the 2.2 million
28:00
residents down onto the street to do their humaning.
28:05
That is where they enjoy their meals,
28:08
they talk, they observe.
28:11
And so during that liminal time between the two world wars, people
28:15
like Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Hemingway, Albert Camus came, and they were trying
28:21
to wrangle with what the hell was going on.
28:23
Simone de Beauvoir wrote that book, it was an essay
28:25
turned into a book called What is Existentialism?
28:28
And she made the point that, you know, these
28:30
thinkers were in Paris to try sitting in cafes, wrangling with all of this, trying to work out
28:37
what the point of existence was.
28:39
And that's when existentialism and communism and socialism
28:43
were sort of fomented.
28:45
So it's a city where difficult times are fully embodied
28:51
and thinkers create great art
28:55
and sort of instances of human flourishing out of that.
28:59
And there's a history of it.
29:00
There's a history of fighting for things as well.
29:02
I mean, and you channel it very well in the book
29:04
by sort of saying that we can all learn a little bit
29:08
from that way of life just by being more connected,
29:11
by modelling what it would be like to move through the world
29:13
in a way that was actually connected to the strangers around us,
29:17
that was actually curious about the people who were walking past us,
29:20
that engaged with the cashier rather than simply...
29:24
You know, I mean, one theory that you have
29:25
about why non-French people find the French brusque when they go there
29:31
is that the French are constantly engaged in little pleasantries
29:34
which make up the fabric of their social life.
29:36
And when we come in and go,
29:38
oh, I'll have a latte, please,
29:41
without first doing the banter that would be expected,
29:44
it's like just someone abruptly coming in
29:46
and breaking the social contract that they're living with.
29:49
And maybe it's our job to import a little bit of that
29:51
and have more of a social fabric.
29:54
And I'll give you something just I read the other day.
29:57
In France, 18,000 tabacs,
30:00
tabacs are like these little terrace type,
30:02
They sell tobacco, coffee, croissants and wine.
30:07
And so people, especially in small villages,
30:08
but they're all throughout Paris.
30:09
It's so French.
30:11
It is.
30:11
And pornographic magazines.
30:12
Yeah.
30:13
All of which are subsidised by the French government
30:16
to keep the Frenchiness going.
30:18
I'm not joking.
30:18
They do subsidise most of those things.
30:22
And by the way,
30:22
Macron is also trying to get cafes listed
30:28
under UNESCO heritage listings.
30:29
Of course.
30:30
Yeah.
30:30
Because it's so Frenchy.
30:32
But you're not going to be able to call a cafe a cafe anymore.
30:35
No, you can't call sparkling wine champagne.
30:39
We'll start calling our cafes coffees, which is what the French often try to call cafes when they're trying to be Australian.
30:46
Anyway, but just recently I came across this study that had been done in Switzerland that found that these 18,000 tabacs had shut down in the last 10 years or so across the country.
30:56
and where a tobacco, these little,
30:59
it's sort of like a corner bar
31:00
where people have their coffee in the morning
31:02
and then in the evening they come and have an aperitif with friends
31:05
and they sit around, it's usually on a village square
31:08
so the kids are running around
31:09
and it's where people meet, the posters all hanging up,
31:12
you get your tobacco and a lottery ticket.
31:16
And when they shut down, in the area where they shut down
31:20
there's a spike in the far right vote
31:24
and it's because of the denigration of the community vibe.
31:31
So people go insular, they go into their little silos,
31:35
we're living in fearful times,
31:37
so that actually encourages people to start to develop conspiracy theories
31:41
and they don't have the community leaders
31:43
and also the responsibility of being aware of sounding like a dick
31:48
if you start talking about,
31:49
well, we've got to get rid of these people or whatever.
31:51
I mean, a lot of the conversations we hear online these days, if these people were down the pub, there'd be somebody that'd turn around and go, oh, mate, time for you to go home.
32:02
You know what I mean?
32:02
Like, when we're in a collective, we behave a hell of a lot better because we've got an awareness of each other.
32:08
And I think we're reminded of the fact that we are a frail species and we do need each other.
32:13
Now, in response to this, because this trend's been going for a while, the mayor of Paris has been very proactive in creating third spaces.
32:23
And so anyone who's been there recently would have noticed the sheer number of bikes.
32:27
I mean, it's still a Latin country.
32:30
This place is like it's kind of like the Hunger Games if you try to get on a line bike and ride around the city.
32:35
I absolutely love it because it is madness.
32:38
but they got rid of a third of all roads and parking spots
32:42
and converted them into bike lanes and pedestrian lanes
32:45
and also public parks and skate parks
32:48
and community eco centres and this kind of thing
32:52
and it's really made a difference.
32:54
It's cut pollution by 50%
32:56
but it's also increased that sort of community vibe
33:01
and increased the left vote.
33:03
I mean, one of the reasons, you know,
33:05
in addition to the fact that your mate at the pub would tell you to shut
33:08
up because you're being a wanker if you mouthed off to, you know,
33:11
about migrants too much in the pub.
33:13
The other reason why you can do it when you don't have that pub to go to is
33:18
because online it's not just that there isn't a human being in front
33:22
of you to check you, it's also
33:23
that you can self-select your human relationships.
33:27
Even if you don't mean to algorithmically,
33:29
and you can find yourself, when you replace human connection
33:33
and you mediate it through the prism of algorithms
33:37
that are going to reinforce what you already believe
33:39
and demonise things that you don't believe
33:41
and put you in touch just accidentally with other people
33:44
who are liking and commenting and sharing
33:46
on the kinds of things that you're interested in.
33:48
It is a kind of extremification machine.
33:51
And I sometimes wondered when I was reading the book
33:54
whether or not when you talk about collapse
33:57
and about how we're living in collapse now,
34:00
this is not just a theoretical future thing,
34:02
This is something that's happening now.
34:03
And you said a moment ago, look at Trump and look at AI
34:05
and look at all of these different things that are happening.
34:09
Is it possible that we're partly deranged
34:11
by the information ecosystem
34:14
and 30 years ago you just wouldn't know as much
34:17
about all those things, let alone 100 years ago?
34:21
It's entirely possible and I think it is in fact the case.
34:26
But that's how complex systems collapse happens.
34:30
we create technologies where we don't have enough nuanced discerning conversation about it as a
34:37
community because we've also become fractured and fragmented prior to that and then you have
34:44
these AI dudes coming in and essentially in the past I think in that little time between the two
34:50
world wars there was this vacuum that was created in the uncertainty and the volatility and fascism
34:59
entered the scene because fascists aren't necessarily, I don't think there's this cabal
35:04
of people out there planning.
35:07
I think it's more opportunism.
35:08
So there's a vacuum that opens and
35:11
fascist authoritarian bad faith actors step in and they create convenient scapegoats and they
35:17
create a mythology.
35:19
Fascists are great at stories and mythologies that indulge our worst tendencies.
35:25
so what do you know the dudes behind AI are techno-feudalists I mean there's no secret going
35:34
on there they've created these manifestos Mark and have you read Mark Andreessen's manifesto
35:39
I mean it's unbelievable and it was inspired by an Italian fascist leader he sort of quotes him
35:45
throughout.
35:47
Curtis Yarvin, he's created the Butterfly Revolution manifesto, which J.D.
35:53
Vance
35:54
quotes on a regular basis.
35:56
These are manifestos that are really, really fascist.
36:00
And these are
36:00
the guys, along with Peter Thiel, being the prime kind of mover in all of this.
36:08
They've got a vision
36:10
of a tech CEO coming in and taking over.
36:13
That is their aim.
36:15
So while, yes, this is partly because AI and social media
36:19
and technology has come in and stirred things up,
36:22
that is another system that's feeding into everything else.
36:25
This is precisely how it goes,
36:28
is that we get to a point of vulnerability
36:31
and all of our resources, all of our time,
36:33
I mean, distraction is a really big part of it.
36:36
The Romans through bread and circuses,
36:38
we've got Peter Thiel and we've got Steve Bannon you know flood the zone with shit I mean the chaos
36:44
is a tactic and it is part of all of this and it happened in a very similar way at a similar
36:50
juncture with other complex civilizations yeah I mean the and not only do we have all of that
36:55
I may I remind you we also have a 90 foot tall
37:01
wrestling arena you wanted to make your comparisons to ancient Rome and the bread
37:04
circuses we literally we literally have that um i mean you also make a distinction in the book
37:09
speaking of of the chaos mongers i mean these are these are very strange guys these are very strange
37:14
and peculiar but they're running the agenda i would not be surprised if nobody remembered who
37:19
they were in eight years time i mean these are not this is these are not the people who are running
37:24
with the exception of elon who is sui generis these are not the people who are running the
37:27
companies the ir companies altman and guys like that are you know they will give trump as much of
37:34
of a leash as he needs in order for him to keep making money but they're quite idealistic about
37:39
they used to be they used to be but they get caught up in the same sort of cycle that so
37:45
many things that characterize our civilization and previous civilizations do and that is that
37:49
zero-sum race to the bottom i agree sam altman and um and uh send up a try at google and they
37:57
They all had altruistic agendas.
38:00
And then, you know, a few years in...
38:04
Well, I'm not saying that they're motivated purely by altruism.
38:06
I'm just saying that there are different...
38:08
It is not true to say that all of Silicon Valley
38:10
is run by crazies like Mark...
38:12
I mean, I don't want to call Mark Andreessen crazy.
38:14
Curtis Young's crazy.
38:16
I will.
38:16
Peter Thiel's crazy.
38:17
Mark Andreessen is a techno-optimist
38:20
who seems to be overly besotted by the possibilities that...
38:24
Of conquering nature once and for all.
38:26
Yeah, the technology provided.
38:27
But, I mean, he is...
38:28
But they're all part of that PayPal mafia.
38:30
They're all in cahoots.
38:31
Like Mark Andreessen's company, what's it called?
38:35
Herchwitz Andreessen?
38:37
Horowitz.
38:38
Horowitz.
38:38
Andreessen Horowitz.
38:40
That's right.
38:41
They got the contract to install Doge.
38:44
They were part of getting Elon Musk in.
38:46
Peter Thiel owns Palantir, which owns the surveillance technology
38:50
and the immigration technology and, you know, the drone technology
38:55
that's at the centre of all of these wars.
38:58
I'm not saying there's nothing to worry about.
38:59
I'm just saying that...
39:01
LAUGHTER
39:02
That would be a very outrageous claim.
39:05
I'm just saying that there is a...
39:07
That to have any...
39:08
I mean, you talk about, you know, these uncertain times.
39:12
Yeah.
39:13
Is it possible that your diagnosis of collapse
39:18
is a psychological coping mechanism
39:21
to provide you with certainty?
39:22
because actually it's not that dissimilar
39:25
from the certainty of these crazy tech bros.
39:27
Marc Andreessen has a faith.
39:29
When he says we can conquer nature,
39:31
what he's doing is he's extrapolating from the past
39:34
and saying Malthus was wrong
39:36
and the doomers of the past were wrong.
39:39
Humankind has always proved itself capable
39:41
of overcoming challenges by wrestling nature tooth and claw
39:47
and using our wits and our wiles
39:49
to create a better future for people.
39:51
It's a really good question and I want to answer it fully.
39:54
I will just add to that, of course, that a lot of these dudes
39:56
are also fully Christian evangelical who believe in the rapture
40:01
and the second coming of Jesus.
40:03
I don't know if you heard Joe Rogan's latest theory on all of this.
40:05
No.
40:07
What's the other major sort of entity in history apart from Jesus
40:13
that was born without a mother and he's gone AI
40:16
and so AI is the second coming of Jesus.
40:18
I don't know what Kool-Aid.
40:19
Seriously, this is one of his most recent arguments.
40:22
I mean, interestingly, a lot of them also converted like three seconds ago.
40:25
I know.
40:25
To this evangelical Christianity.
40:27
Evangelical.
40:27
Yeah, the rapture is this idea that Armageddon, the apocalypse is coming.
40:34
They're looking forward to it because if you're a believer,
40:37
you somehow get vacuumed up to heaven.
40:39
Yes.
40:40
It's sort of a vacuuming thing, isn't it?
40:42
Yeah, the rest of us are going to get left behind.
40:44
We get left behind in the chaos that they've created.
40:47
That is a question, though, you know, what if I'm wrong?
40:50
you know that I asked throughout the writing and the researching of the book and I had
40:56
an exercise book next to me and I handwrite my all of my books I handwrite because it it goes
41:01
at the same pace as discerning thought so does walking by the way we emerged walking and that
41:07
part of the brain evolved as we were able to eat more food because we were on two feet not four
41:11
and so that's why walking in nature and handwriting can actually produce the most discerning
41:18
thinking that's a slight distraction but um I I hand wrote um my book and then I also had this
41:26
exercise book where each time I I felt myself getting egoically attached to this like in
41:34
to feeling right about all of this I I wrote it down and then I I had to have a good hard look
41:41
at myself in the mirror and then I would go and sort of interrogate interrogate whatever it is
41:45
that I was obsessed with at that time.
41:49
And as you mentioned from the outset, Josh,
41:51
this book was written on Substack.
41:54
I didn't think it would be published by a mainstream publisher
41:56
at any time in my lifetime.
41:59
And I wrote it as a serialisation.
42:01
So I wrote a chapter a week and my Substack community,
42:05
65,000 subscribers, would give me feedback and respond
42:09
and interrogate me and call me out if they felt like,
42:14
well, hang on, aren't you just caught up in some cognitive bias that, you know, keeps you safe in
42:19
these uncertain times?
42:20
So I went through all of that.
42:21
And can I just actually ask,
42:23
how many of you in the audience are part of that Substack community?
42:27
Okay, that's a good, what,
42:28
20%?
42:28
Yeah, hands up, down, up, down.
42:32
Anyway, thank you to all of you.
42:34
I just want to pause
42:34
for a moment and say thank you to all of you for, I guess, being co-creators in this book.
42:42
You were absolutely, you kept me vertical.
42:45
But to answer your question, what if I'm wrong
42:50
or what if the modelling is wrong that I'm reporting on?
42:53
And my answer to that is, and I do question myself the whole way
42:58
and I make myself aware of how easy it is to sort of descend
43:04
into sort of all kinds of biases that make me feel safe
43:08
in my reporting of all of this.
43:09
And I think a lot of the tech bros like pushing the P-Doom figures and everything because that also makes them feel safe.
43:17
They like being in rightness and making people a little bit scared and being the oracles that you've got to come to to get the facts and figures on our future.
43:24
Yes, our technology is going to destroy the world.
43:26
So the only way, the only thing for you to do is to buy our technology.
43:29
That's right, invest in it.
43:30
Yeah, exactly.
43:31
And I mean, the investing in AI is keeping the world economy going at the moment, that and war, which they also are leveraging off.
43:40
but my answer to that is that and we haven't quite got to the juicy
43:44
spiritual threads of this book but a lot of what I'm talking about is accepting that so much of
43:53
what we're caught up in in this system is not making us happy our nervous systems are responding
44:00
children's nervous systems are absolutely responding to what is going on they know this
44:06
wrong way go back, that we've gone too far.
44:09
We've really pushed this thing way, way too far.
44:12
And when I started writing about it, the Substack community came back with a very overwhelming
44:17
response to the first chapter where I really pull apart this idea of hope and that we no longer have
44:21
hope.
44:22
And the response was relief.
44:24
Over and over again, people said, I don't know why,
44:26
this sounds really strange, but I feel relieved to know that I'm not going insane, that this
44:32
doesn't stack up, that we shouldn't be trying to save this system.
44:36
So then I talk about ways of
44:40
sitting in that and embodying it and getting radically okay with the discomfort of what's
44:46
going to come and accepting that we are a species that should be living in a more simplified way,
44:54
in congruence with nature and its rhythms, and that we're built for tough times.
44:59
And I can,
45:00
go into that in a little bit of detail, but I want to stay on point here and say that
45:04
everything that I ultimately suggest that invite people, the readers, to do is what we'd want to
45:11
do anyway.
45:13
I think we're aching to stop golf and to stop watching unboxing videos and to quit.
45:22
This was one of the subset communities said this, I just want to let go of the LinkedIn version of
45:27
myself.
45:28
You know, all of that sort of racing the Joneses to some sort of deadline or...
45:36
The neoliberal promise is that if you put all of this work in and you create nest eggs and you put
45:40
your kids into expensive private schools and you beat all of the Joneses, you're going to arrive
45:45
at this magical point.
45:47
Of course, we never do.
45:47
We never arrive there.
45:48
And we're exhausted.
45:50
Our kids
45:50
are exhausted.
45:51
They're all neurodivergent.
45:53
They're so sensitive and they're absorbing what is going
45:57
on and it makes no sense and the invitation is simply to go maybe we should be letting this
46:02
collapse maybe we shouldn't be putting all our effort into to rigidly holding that which should
46:10
not be beholding and you know that phrase mother nature always bats last comes to mind so
46:18
to answer the question that was a bit of a circular emergent very complex way of answering things
46:24
doesn't matter because this is the way we want to live anyway.
46:27
I sort of feel that nothing I'm
46:29
suggesting is dangerous.
46:32
It is going to get worse before it potentially possibly gets better.
46:37
And I don't think it's not going to get better in our generation nor in our children's generation.
46:42
So we might as well get ourselves used to this.
46:45
And the invitations that I issue is we need to
46:48
get fully adult.
46:49
We need to stop thinking that someone's going to come and fix things.
46:51
We need
46:52
to stop paying out political leaders.
46:55
Political leaders are just meant to represent us.
46:57
They're
46:58
not going to come and fix all of this.
47:00
There's no leader out there that can, for instance,
47:02
fix the population decline issue.
47:05
There's no policy out there.
47:07
The abortion policies do not
47:09
work.
47:09
In fact, it generally results in less births when there's an anti-abortion policy
47:16
that comes in and that's been shown time and time again.
47:19
So we need to actually sit in the
47:23
discomfort of what's going on and choose to radically, somewhat defiantly, return to our
47:31
full humanness.
47:32
Ultimately, you know, the final chapter in the book is called Homecoming and I
47:37
think there's a, there's this strange circular silver lining to all of this.
47:44
Collapse and
47:44
particularly the tech stuff, the AI stuff,
47:47
it's actually forcing us to ask a question
47:51
that we've needed as a species to ask regularly
47:54
and we haven't done it for a long time,
47:56
and that is, who are we?
47:58
You know, who should I be in this moment?
48:02
Who do I need to be in this moment?
48:04
And I think we're ready for it.
48:08
I mean, that is one of the nice things about the book,
48:11
is that, as you say, regardless of whether or not
48:14
the collapse thesis is correct, being more human, being more connected, being more cognizant of
48:20
your place on this planet in the midst of a civilization and a society and a culture
48:25
instead of endlessly scrolling Instagram is a good thing either way.
48:31
If there's a 10% chance that AI
48:33
does kill us, but there's a 90% chance that it cures cancer and revolutionizes energy production
48:43
so that we have infinitely abundant, cheap energy
48:47
and lifts 8 billion people out of poverty
48:51
into lives of leisure and plenty.
48:53
This is like a classic...
48:55
Is that a...
48:57
Was it the trolley dilemma?
48:59
Is it worth taking or do you still want to proceed
49:02
towards your tree-huggy future of love-artism?
49:07
Yeah, because I would rather bet on nature
49:12
holding us and moving us to where we need to go.
49:15
I think the emergent intelligence of nature
49:17
is way beyond those tech bros.
49:20
Now, AI is also emergent.
49:22
Talk to people who have to live with nature.
49:23
Talk to people who aren't in the industrialised world
49:26
and aren't as well off as we are
49:28
about how they feel about being subjected to the whims of nature.
49:31
We've escaped nature.
49:33
Why does it have to be...
49:35
Well, you're starting to sound like Marc Andreessen now
49:37
because that's in his...
49:38
I mean, we have.
49:39
We're blessed in the sense that we are not struck down
49:42
I would say we're cursed as well.
49:44
I don't think it has to be a black and white,
49:48
it's either this or that.
49:50
I think we've got off track.
49:51
I think capitalism did an incredible job for many, many decades.
49:56
It did rise, lift a few ships,
49:58
and it did bring more technology
50:02
that created all kinds of flourishing until it didn't.
50:07
And so I'm not suggesting that it's an either-or.
50:10
I'm not saying that we need to all move to the hills and start prepping and homesteading and
50:15
dressing our children in linen.
50:18
In fact, I warn against that.
50:20
I get asked that question,
50:21
should we be prepping?
50:22
And absolutely not.
50:23
We stay where we are.
50:25
We are in this system.
50:26
We've
50:26
got a foot in both, in the old system and the what comes next.
50:31
And so, yeah, I don't think it's a
50:35
matter of choosing what technology we take into the what comes next.
50:42
It's a matter of choosing
50:43
what aspects of being close to nature and then being also within a large metropolis we take into
50:49
the what comes next.
50:50
So I'm not saying, I mean, I think there's a lot of modelling that is saying
50:55
that we will all wind up in the next probably century or so living like the people who grow
51:01
our coffee beans.
51:03
That's one phrase that's used.
51:05
I don't know that it's helpful to speculate on
51:08
that.
51:09
The more interesting thing to do is ask questions like, who am I going to be in this
51:13
moment?
51:14
And that's where I try to steer these kinds of questions, you know?
51:18
There is a beautiful quote that you have in the book from Bronte Velez, which I've carried with
51:23
me ever since I read it in your book, which is, how can I be useless to capitalism today?
51:29
That's the inverse, isn't it?
51:30
And I love it.
51:31
How can I be useless to capitalism today?
51:33
You should have it on a necklace, like what would Jesus do?
51:36
How can I be useless to capitalism?
51:39
It's funny, isn't it?
51:41
Somebody else on this 26th event book tour that I've been doing
51:46
over the last five weeks has pointed out that quote,
51:49
and there's a lot of quotes that I reference in that
51:51
that are equally beautiful.
51:53
But I think the reason why that one really appeals to people
51:57
is because I think we can feel the relief, you know?
52:02
There's this sense that capitalism has reduced us to productive units
52:09
and we're exhausted.
52:10
It doesn't make sense.
52:11
We're also complicit in it because we keep scrolling our stupid phones.
52:14
Of course, but that's because we are a vulnerable, tender,
52:17
slightly ridiculous species.
52:19
Stop making excuses for ourselves, Sarah.
52:20
Just turn your phone off.
52:22
Another point you make, and I'll get to audience questions in just a moment,
52:25
so if you have anything that's come up, then feel free to jump on.
52:28
And I've got the iPad here, so we'll ask them in just a moment.
52:32
Another point I thought that really touched me was,
52:36
amid all this kind of civilizational collapse that you deal with in the book,
52:40
there's also a more personal collapse, which is we're all aging.
52:44
We're all collapsing.
52:45
We're not just collapsing.
52:47
Even if we're not collapsing as a civilization,
52:49
I'm collapsing right now.
52:52
I am in the process of deteriorating towards my grave.
52:55
And we all are.
52:57
I was going through perimenopause through this whole process as well,
53:01
which was a perfect combination for that
53:04
and sort of being slightly neurodivergent.
53:07
This is not a big secret.
53:09
I've written a book about being bipolar.
53:11
So bipolar and perimenopause saw me in a fetal position under the table
53:17
for large tracts of the writing process of this book.
53:22
I think the point you're making is,
53:23
and it's what the existentialists wrangled with
53:26
is that we're always going to die
53:31
and we've never known when.
53:33
And this is actually quite a nice little piece to end on, I think,
53:37
before we go to questions,
53:38
is because one of the things that the moral umpires
53:44
on the footy field of life,
53:45
so the existentialists, the philosophers, the spiritualists,
53:48
have all written about in similar times
53:50
to the one we find ourselves in,
53:53
is that when we learn to face death as, you know, adults with our grown-up pants on,
54:00
instead of running away from it and living in absolute denial of it,
54:05
with longevity measures and all of this kind of thing,
54:08
it has this incredible paradoxical effect.
54:11
And what it does is it creates an urgency to live, to live fully and beautifully.
54:16
And that is kind of the background to the title of the book.
54:20
I ate the stars is from a poem by Rebecca Elson who's was a NASA astronaut and she was also a
54:26
poet and she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she was given six six months to live and this
54:32
was in her late 30s and so she wrote this beautiful book of poetry called a responsibility to awe
54:38
and there's a poem in it that says as an antidote to fear of death I eat the stars and it's this
54:44
idea that in our most fearful moments, we as humans, we've got this strange ability to see
54:56
the absolute beauty of life and to cry deeply and to be fascinated by children's faces.
55:04
We build
55:04
cathedrals, right, in times of uncertainty when we know we're not going to see it eventuate.
55:11
We
55:11
don't know where it's going to wind up.
55:13
So this is part of the process of the book, is to face
55:18
what could be coming our way.
55:20
I'm going to sort of tone down my language.
55:23
I feel that
55:24
tough times are definitely ahead, and they're very, very close.
55:29
Years, not decades.
55:31
And
55:32
the sooner that we can learn, to quote Montaigne, to die well, then we will get to live well.
55:40
and I ultimately think we need re-education in how to live well
55:47
and we need to do it for the sake of our children
55:49
more than anything else.
55:51
That brings us to a couple of questions.
55:53
Rachel asks, how do we choose where to live
55:56
if we're privileged enough to feel we have a choice?
55:58
I'm not originally from Melbourne, she says.
56:01
Stay where you are.
56:02
That's my answer to that.
56:04
So a lot of people ask me, well, should we be prepping?
56:07
and, you know, like, I don't know,
56:08
stockpiling tins of tuna and toilet paper
56:11
and getting chickens and heading off to, you know,
56:14
Daylesford or something.
56:17
That isn't going to work.
56:19
The really good news is if you're feeling a bit frantic about that,
56:22
it won't work because are you...
56:25
I mean, it will require, if things get bad enough
56:27
to justify having a stockpile of tinned tuna,
56:29
you're going to have to defend it with a gun and violence.
56:33
And are you prepared to do that?
56:34
and I'm not because it goes against everything it means to me to be human.
56:39
And what about when
56:39
the neighbor's kid comes around hungry?
56:41
Are you going to pull out the gun?
56:43
So I don't think
56:45
anybody should be putting themselves in that position.
56:47
Also, the studies have shown that
56:48
less than 5% of these so-called intentional self-sustaining communities last longer than
56:52
five years.
56:54
What does work, and multiple studies have shown this, is forming community bonds where
57:00
you are.
57:01
If you're in an apartment building, take muffins around to your cranky neighbour.
57:06
Join food co-ops, join tool sheds, book clubs, whatever it might be.
57:13
What I'll say to that is that as a climate activist, I always found them really soft
57:17
solutions like community gardens.
57:22
And I always found it deflating.
57:24
I thought we had to get an
57:26
upriver solution.
57:27
You know, we had to get the leaders all on board, acting all at once.
57:30
And then you became totally disillusioned with upriver solutions.
57:33
Yeah, because they don't work.
57:35
And historically, they've not worked.
57:37
Like I said before,
57:38
we are the descendants of the humans who are smart enough to operate in community and upload
57:45
their skills and their resources to a sort of a shared platform of whatever, you know,
57:51
technology you're able to use back then.
57:53
That's how we've survived in the past.
57:54
And it's how we're
57:55
going to have to survive again because nothing else will work well i mean just to be give us
58:01
some credit in the sense that in the past couple of hundred years another way that we've survived
58:06
at juncture points is by not giving up on the possibility of leaders who unite us and bring
58:11
out the best in us correct you know we've got a cuban missile crisis we got through the holocaust
58:16
we got through like we we have and it is largely because we didn't have people like donald trump
58:21
in power i would argue again we came together so it was coalitions it was um it was uh various
58:29
protocols that were drawn up to bring us together and to unite you know if we'd all gone off in our
58:36
atomized way which is what trump and so on are trying to do um we wouldn't have developed those
58:42
solutions it's hive mind emergent community very human solutions that have got us through and those
58:49
are good examples.
58:50
And in terms of politics...
58:52
It's worth remembering that FDR played a role
58:54
and Martin Luther King played a role and Gandhi played a role and Mandela played a role.
58:58
Leaders still do need to exist.
59:01
I think that politics has got off track primarily because
59:05
it has also become corrupted by various systems.
59:08
And my nuanced argument with all of this is,
59:11
is that don't think that leaders are going to let go of their vested interests.
59:16
Instead,
59:16
we need to fight for preserving democracy.
59:19
And so that's something, you know, good democracy,
59:21
we don't throw democracy out the window.
59:24
We try to preserve it.
59:25
I mean, less than 7% of the world
59:28
now lives in a liberal democracy.
59:31
The US just lost its liberal democratic rating a couple of
59:35
months ago.
59:35
The UK lost it last year.
59:37
70% of the world lives... By whom?
59:41
The VDEM Institute in
59:42
Sweden, which is the...
59:43
They decree that the US and the UK are no longer liberal democracies.
59:46
Well, in the absence of another institute in the world
59:48
that studies democracy very, very closely...
59:51
I'd imagine there are a couple.
59:52
Curtis Yarvin's probably got one.
59:54
Yeah, probably.
59:54
In 10 minutes, there'll be a book signing as well,
59:56
and thanks to Readings, the bookstore, for providing books.
59:59
You'll be able to buy a book and to have it signed by Sarah.
1:00:03
On the question of politics,
1:00:04
there is a question from Anonymous, interesting name,
1:00:09
about politics.
1:00:11
It seems a lot of Australians are feeling like something is wrong.
1:00:14
They sense it in their psyche.
1:00:16
but large swathes of them in response are voting One Nation.
1:00:20
Do you think there's any way we can gently bring them back?
1:00:23
Yeah, I mean, we have to have a lot of compassion for each other.
1:00:28
People are scared, people are threatened,
1:00:30
they're losing their jobs, their AI,
1:00:33
their children don't have career paths, you know,
1:00:36
that they can rely on any longer.
1:00:38
Cost of living is real for more and more Australians.
1:00:40
It's a rude shock because Australia has lived in relative opulence
1:00:45
compared with even the OECD nations for three to four decades,
1:00:49
apart from a small blip during COVID.
1:00:52
So what happens in times like this is that we do go very tribal
1:00:58
when we're scared.
1:01:00
And so our worst tendencies come out.
1:01:03
And if there is no other, we create one.
1:01:06
And if we haven't thought of one ourselves,
1:01:07
we turn to people like One Nation who provide one for us,
1:01:10
generally brown people.
1:01:12
and they create a storyline that we can adhere out you know affix our fears to and so again this is
1:01:21
I mentioned this before the challenge that we face is or the the challenge that we need to rise to
1:01:27
is to actually fill out that vacuum that's been created by the uncertainty and not allow
1:01:33
the far-right leaders and the bad faith actors to come in and take over we've got to be fully
1:01:38
aware that this is what's happening and it's what happens throughout history and it's always
1:01:41
happened.
1:01:42
And Hannah Arendt, if she believed in God and heaven, she'd be up there watching us all
1:01:47
going, guys, this is the moment.
1:01:50
This is the moment when you all rise up and you don't say,
1:01:54
oh, it won't happen here.
1:01:55
Because that's what they've always said, right?
1:01:58
I mean, all of the
1:01:58
things that Hannah Arendt and then Timothy Snyder and so on who write about these things, they're
1:02:03
saying, we're cruising towards fascism.
1:02:06
So in answer to that, what do we do?
1:02:07
You mentioned that
1:02:09
phrase.
1:02:09
It's not my phrase.
1:02:10
It comes from Meg Wheatley.
1:02:12
We create islands of sanity.
1:02:14
You cannot
1:02:15
change people by bludgeoning them over the head with reminders of what they're doing wrong when
1:02:20
they're scared.
1:02:21
The best thing we can do is role model the hell out of a better way of being.
1:02:25
And so I almost take it on as a, I don't know, as a responsibility to be happy in all of this,
1:02:34
to not look like I'm defeated, to actually, and it's not hard because the more that I've faced
1:02:39
truth, and I think I told you this, you know, I came back to Australia a little over a year ago,
1:02:44
and my mother, who's always really struggled with my books, she often can't talk to me
1:02:49
for between six months to two years after a book comes out because it's just too overwhelming for
1:02:54
her.
1:02:54
It's not that she disagrees with anything I write about, it's just too much.
1:03:00
But this time,
1:03:01
And she said to me, you're writing about really difficult things, but you look so happy.
1:03:06
And I said, well, I am because it makes sense now.
1:03:09
You know, the dissonance, the cognitive dissonance that I've been feeling for 45 years, I'm now 52.
1:03:16
Like, I remember feeling this way as a young child.
1:03:21
It's resolved itself.
1:03:22
I can see the patterns.
1:03:24
I can see where humanity is hurting and what's going to, you know, ease some of that.
1:03:30
and the Islands of Sanity premise is about being, embodying the messages that we feel are better
1:03:38
messages and people then can come that way when they're ready and not feel ostracized, you know.
1:03:43
Not everybody's ready for this information yet, you know, people need to get to this level of
1:03:49
realisation on their own.
1:03:52
Another nice thing about your message is the exhortation not to
1:03:55
bash people over the head with um you know our self-certainty about what's the what's right or
1:04:01
what's the correct i mean and you and i have spoken about this i wish we could have another
1:04:04
hour and we would talk about it in fascinating detail but about perhaps the the stridency with
1:04:10
which the progressive side of politics um operated in the 2010s that could have partly contributed to
1:04:16
the backlash i mean i only raised that on the one nation question in the sense that i i also think
1:04:21
that part of the response to that does have to be to not demonise people who voted for Donald Trump
1:04:28
or who want to vote for Pauline Hanson, and not to condescend to them either and go, oh,
1:04:32
you poor little puppets, you're being misled about everything and you're the potential fascists of
1:04:36
the future because you don't understand anything.
1:04:40
We're all hurting.
1:04:41
The point is we're all hurting.
1:04:42
Well, to acknowledge as much of what is reasonable in their concerns as possible and to own the fact
1:04:49
that elite progressives on both sides of,
1:04:54
from both political parties, and by progressives,
1:04:56
I just mean people who are in favour of high rates of immigration,
1:04:59
did not obviously do a good enough job
1:05:01
of listening to the concerns that people might have
1:05:04
that might be non-racist demographic concerns
1:05:08
about the changing shape of their neighbourhood,
1:05:10
which are legitimate for people to have in a democracy.
1:05:13
When they're struggling to get jobs
1:05:14
and their children are struggling to get jobs,
1:05:17
it's completely understandable.
1:05:18
For anyone wanting to hear more of this kind of debate,
1:05:21
I think we did this on our last conversation.
1:05:22
We did, actually, yes.
1:05:23
We covered off the progressive woke.
1:05:24
Sarah's been on uncomfortable conversations.
1:05:26
I will still defend the woke cause,
1:05:29
but the thing about having discussions with Josh
1:05:32
is we can go there and it doesn't get heated
1:05:35
and we can cover the nuances and cede, yeah, common ground.
1:05:41
Anyway.
1:05:43
We do this as a rapid fire, so, you know,
1:05:47
25 words or less, so on and so forth.
1:05:50
There's lots of great questions.
1:05:54
I'm stuck in a large corporation responsible for driving AI adoption
1:05:58
at the fastest possible pace.
1:06:00
Do I try to change it from the inside or leave?
1:06:06
Gosh.
1:06:08
I would argue stay.
1:06:12
It's again that Pima Chodron line that I use all the time,
1:06:15
start where you are.
1:06:16
If you're working in a corporation like that, then it's going to
1:06:19
happen anyway.
1:06:20
If you're not there, then somebody else will be doing the same job.
1:06:25
Be the message.
1:06:26
Provide a vision of another way of being.
1:06:29
As long as it's not destroying your soul,
1:06:32
because that must be very, very hard to reconcile.
1:06:36
But I do feel that there is room for us all to be
1:06:38
where we are and role modeling the hell out of better behavior while everything that's going on
1:06:44
is going on.
1:06:45
There's a chapter I write about Moloch, and this is more than 25 words.
1:06:47
I'll
1:06:48
just point to it.
1:06:49
But it's a game theory that actually stems from a Hebrew myth of a God where
1:06:54
you've got to sacrifice the very thing you cherish to save the thing you cherish, setting up this
1:06:59
kind of zero-sum race to the bottom scenario.
1:07:02
And so much of what we're in is a zero-sum race to
1:07:05
the bottom that we cannot escape except for, and I go into great detail in this chapter on it,
1:07:10
by communicating, collaborating and being collective.
1:07:14
It's actually the only fix.
1:07:15
And, you know, I spoke to a game theorist,
1:07:17
a world poker champion who explained all of this.
1:07:19
When you get into a Moloch scenario in a game,
1:07:22
the only thing you can do is stop the game and go,
1:07:24
right, let's escape this, collaborate
1:07:27
and get the rules of the game back on the board.
1:07:30
And so I think if we can understand that AI
1:07:32
and the race to the bottom that is AI is happening,
1:07:36
whether we, I mean, I think protesting data centres
1:07:40
is a really human way of feeling we still have agency.
1:07:44
You wouldn't like my last...
1:07:45
I also write a column in the Australian Financial Review
1:07:47
and my last column was arguing
1:07:49
for massive solar-powered data centres in the desert
1:07:52
to sell data to Asia.
1:07:55
I'll read the article before I opine on it.
1:07:56
What do you reckon?
1:07:57
We can argue that off the air.
1:08:00
One person asks,
1:08:01
if you grew up in Somalia and then came to Australia,
1:08:05
do you think you'd still want our system to collapse,
1:08:08
knowing how much worse shit can get?
1:08:10
No, that's such a good, challenging question.
1:08:15
No, I mean, that's completely understandable that, you know,
1:08:19
and I hate using these terms,
1:08:20
but second and third world countries are feeling that they've missed out,
1:08:24
you know, and it is a tragedy in all of this.
1:08:29
I often get asked, well, you know, Sarah,
1:08:30
your book's sort of very much geared at Western nations.
1:08:34
And I'm like, well, yeah, because I write in an English language for people who can afford 30 bucks to go and buy my book, you know.
1:08:42
But I take that point.
1:08:46
I take that point.
1:08:47
I don't think anybody wants things to collapse if we, you know, we're weighing things up.
1:08:53
It's a different question.
1:08:55
Well, I assume that that's a reference not to you wanting collapse, but to thinking that.
1:09:01
Letting it go.
1:09:01
Letting the system go.
1:09:02
I think that the correct response to collapse,
1:09:04
rather than trying to shore up industrial economies,
1:09:10
is to go with what is the next thing after this thing
1:09:14
that has just provided the greatest wealth that has ever existed?
1:09:17
Well, the next thing would be characterised, I hope,
1:09:20
because this is the wonderful, what I call stunning possibility,
1:09:24
the opportunity we have, whatever it is, is characterised by equality.
1:09:28
Peter Turchin, the polymath who wrote the book End Times,
1:09:32
and he was all over the place talking about this stuff a couple of years ago.
1:09:35
He did all the study out of the Vienna Existential Centre or something.
1:09:40
He said that all collapse in civilisations,
1:09:44
it comes down to high levels of inequality and polarisation.
1:09:48
They're the two levers that we have the best chance of pulling
1:09:53
to stem the tide on collapse.
1:09:56
So I would say any person, Somalian or otherwise,
1:10:00
would probably vote for any kind of system where there's equality entrenched
1:10:05
in whatever's going on.
1:10:08
Last question from the audience.
1:10:11
If religion failed us, secularism failed us,
1:10:16
and the odds of techno fanaticism failing us are high, where should we look
1:10:21
for a mythology that will help us live well?
1:10:24
Philosophy.
1:10:26
And when people say to me what should my children be studying
1:10:29
at university now, and I'm not the first person to say this, I think is that one of the founders
1:10:35
of, God, what's, one of the tech companies said, you know, that she would advise everyone to go
1:10:44
and study humanities, because no matter what happens, an ability to think, and to think
1:10:48
discerningly, is going to be worth a lot, no matter what happens.
1:10:53
So yeah, I think philosophy
1:10:55
is a really good starting point because it's still kind of tethered to the left-centred way
1:11:00
of thinking.
1:11:01
It's quite structural.
1:11:03
But the process of engaging in philosophy gets us
1:11:06
asking these kinds of questions.
1:11:08
And it's actually the asking of the questions,
1:11:10
being alive in this, embodying this, that that's what's going to matter.
1:11:15
Because ultimately,
1:11:17
it's being human, as human as we can, that's going to get us through this and also be the
1:11:22
ultimate act of defiance.
1:11:25
So philosophy, spiritual traditions, any kind of natural
1:11:30
engagement with nature, that's, I think, going to be our guru.
1:11:35
Go and drive up to the French Alps in a camper van like you do and go jogging through the forests.
1:11:40
Or just go to a park.
1:11:41
Good job if you can get it.
1:11:42
Congratulations on I Eat the Stars.
1:11:45
Everyone should follow Sarah
1:11:46
on Substack.
1:11:47
You should follow-
1:11:48
And Josh as well on his-
1:11:49
Comfortable Conversations, wherever you get podcasts.
1:11:51
Thanks to Readings, the bookstore.
1:11:53
Thanks to the Wheeler Centre for making this possible.
1:11:55
And please thank Sarah Wilson.
1:11:57
Thank you.