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Historical Collapse Explained: Why Civilizations And Empires Fall | Luke Kemp · The Smart Cookies podcast

• 0:04
  Luke Kemp is a research affiliate at the Center
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  for the Study of Existential Risk at the University
• 0:09
  of Cambridge and the author of the magnificent
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  book Goliath's Curse, the History and Future
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  of Societal Collapse. Luke, welcome to the podcast.
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  Zaza, thank you for having me. You took doomscrolling
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  to an entirely new professional academic level.
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  Is that as stressful as it sounds? Or let me
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  put it this way. What kind of cutting -edge supplements
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  are you taking to be able to have a decent night's
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  sleep every day? Being known as Dr. Doom, I kind
• 0:39
  of had to take Doom Scroll into the next level.
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  It just wouldn't be right otherwise. I live on
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  a diet of Prozac. No, not really. You'd be surprised.
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  Too bad. This was a nice start. You'd be surprised.
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  You often develop an emotional buffer to studying
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  these things. And strangely... Studying bigger
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  risks is often easier because they're more abstract
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  in a way. They feel less personal. And I, like
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  every other human, have certain cognitive biases,
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  including the, well, in the words of Stalin,
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  the death of one man is a tragedy, the death
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  of a million is a statistic. And I still fall
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  prey to that as well. And ultimately, you have
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  to also just do what you can and accept that.
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  risks do happen catastrophes do happen and there's
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  only so much you can do in the world do you have
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  any advice so should i also like start studying
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  this because doom scrolling is not doing me any
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  good let me tell you you know it's just usually
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  drenched in sweat um so yeah what kind of buffer
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  are we talking about for the lay people out there
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  i think there is a value in trying to understand
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  at a deeper level why catastrophes happen why
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  societal collapses happen rather than getting
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  enamored with the day -to -day politics of the
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  matter and for me i don't read very much news
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  at all i tend to almost just solely read books
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  and i do think that is both better for your attention
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  span but it's also better because it gives you
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  a better sense of autonomy once you understand
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  why these things occur at deep level you can
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  better understand how to deal with them well
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  I think getting caught in the deluge of misinformation,
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  disinformation, and just everyday news, it can
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  be both fragmenting, disorientating, and often
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  disempowering. And next thing you're going to
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  tell me is that you don't even have social media
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  or something. Barely. I technically have an Instagram
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  account, but I think I've used it once perhaps.
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  holy shit you know what all of the guests that
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  i have really really smart people such as yourself
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  they all have one thing in common and that's
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  they don't have social media yeah i mean unfortunately
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  that way yeah yeah the evidence unfortunately
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  does weigh against the use of social media i
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  think some things like substack for instance
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  can be quite helpful particularly for budding
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  authors there are way to have regular practice
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  beyond that These things are designed by some
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  of the smartest people in the world to take away
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  and fragment your attention. And it's always
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  useful to be aware of that. Okay, let's jump
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  right in. For the book, you examined 324 cases
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  of societies, usually empires that collapsed.
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  You call these Goliaths. What's the one or maybe
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  there were several things that bind them together
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  that they have in common? The reason the book
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  is called Goliath's Curse is that Goliaths contain
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  the seeds of their own demise. And in particular,
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  that is increasing wealth inequality. Across
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  the case studies that I cover in the book, a
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  commonality is that they're almost always multifaceted.
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  They don't just involve one big thing like warfare,
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  climate change, or disease. They must always
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  involve that plus several other things like revolutions,
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  popular resistance. But the big one always seems
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  to be... preceding the collapse is growing wealth
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  inequality. In the book, I show how growing wealth
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  inequality spills over into other aspects of
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  society. It tends to result in more competition
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  and conflict between elites. It tends to result
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  in an increasingly disempowered and what some
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  people call a miserated working class, what we
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  today call a cost of living crisis. It also increases
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  things like polarization, corruption, socio -political
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  violence, and all these snowball together to
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  slowly hollow out the state and society until
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  eventually it's knocked us under by a combination
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  of different shocks. So things like warfare and
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  droughts. So wealth inequality is the master
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  variable behind societal collapse. Since I'm
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  approaching middle age, yikes, there's more and
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  more talk of Roman history on this. What a cliche.
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  So last year, I talked to historian Peter Heather,
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  who wrote the book Why Empires Fall. And his
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  central thesis is that as empires conquer and
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  grow, they unwillingly develop the periphery
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  as well around them until it becomes a superpower,
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  too, of sorts. He said that it happened in the
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  case of Rome in the third and fourth centuries
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  with Persia, which grew into a serious rival.
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  And it's happening now as the West is declining
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  and China is rising. don't think that was Rome's
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  main problem, right? It's part of Rome's problem.
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  So the CIA and the US military have a term for
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  this. It's called blowback. Essentially, when
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  your military and intelligence interventions
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  actually cause more harm than good. And the US
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  has a very long track record of this. We're ranging
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  from the Middle East through to Latin America,
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  as did Rome as well. The key question, of course,
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  is why did Rome have to continuously keep conquering
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  and expanding its territory? And part of that
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  is just as what Rome was. It was essentially
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  a militaristic Ponzi scheme. But additionally,
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  Rome kind of had to do this because it had to
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  constantly placate all the elites at home. And
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  I also note that when you have a society that's
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  built upon a small number of people dominating
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  others for essentially the pursuit of status,
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  one of the best ways to achieve status is by
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  basically getting more and more luxury goods,
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  particularly those imported from further away.
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  And also just by doing things like military conquest.
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  When you actually look at Rome, their conquests
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  were almost always done in the glory of Rome.
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  It's almost become a cliche now, the glory of
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  Rome. But conquest was a way of proving Roman
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  superiority. So even this is all tied up with
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  inequality and having an elite dominate society.
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  Yeah, he also said, Professor Heather also said
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  that the question, why did Rome fall is in fact...
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  a less interesting one to him because all states
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  eventually fall. Instead, we should be asking,
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  why did it exist for such a long time? This is
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  true. And I think the second, perhaps even more
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  important question is, how did Rome come to conquer
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  all of Europe for an enduring period of time?
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  It's a fantastic book by a colleague of mine
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  at Stanford, Walter Scheidel, who points out
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  that most of the areas of the world, China, the
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  Middle East, for instance, They tend to be characterized
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  by having enduring periods of an overarching
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  empire. Europe doesn't have that. Rome is pretty
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  much the only time that you have one empire sitting
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  over and uniting most of, at least, Latin and
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  Western Europe. The other one that comes close
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  is the Napoleon Republic, or the Napoleonic Empire,
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  I should say, the French Empire, which only lasted,
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  I think, around about five or four years after
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  it actually took over Europe. So it was fleeting.
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  Rome was incredibly unique in this regard. And
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  one of the key things is simply that it had immense
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  military mobilization. So at some stages, roughly
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  a quarter of fighting age men were mobilized
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  for military, which is just completely unprecedented
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  for antiquity. That didn't happen again until,
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  again, the Levian Mass under Napoleon. So Rome
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  was unique in some ways, but it's worthwhile
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  noting that all empires... operate on the basis
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  of trying to conquer and subjugate other polities
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  that's pretty much the definition of empire so
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  in that basic sense rome wasn't really different
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  it was just uniquely successful here's a fact
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  that they kind of blew me away you're right that
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  there's solid evidence that after the fall of
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  rome people actually started becoming taller
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  and more healthy Precisely. Here's something
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  you won't hear every day. And the response most
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  people will have to this is that's because so
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  many people died that there were more resources
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  left over for the few survivors. I was thinking
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  that maybe just like the stronger people, like
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  physically stronger people survived. That's another
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  possible interpretation. The evidence weighs
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  against both of those for a few reasons. One
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  is that this wasn't just true in the wake of
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  Rome. Even at the very peak of empire, people
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  outside the empire were taller and healthier
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  than their Roman counterparts. Like the Gauls
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  or whatever. Precisely. The old trope we have
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  of these... muscle -bound Germanic barbarians,
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  it's kind of true. In comparison to the average
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  Roman soldier, they would have been taller, stronger,
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  bigger, and in better physical health in general.
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  Because Roman sources even say that these guys
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  were huge. Exactly. And that wasn't just simply
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  genetics, basically. This is also due to the
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  fact they had more protein in their diet, a more
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  diverse dietary source, and additionally, probably
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  less prone to disease because they weren't clustered
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  into cities. And Rome... wasn't even good for
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  its own citizens to begin with. So prior to the
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  rise of the empire, human height was increasing
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  quite rapidly in the Italian peninsula. Once
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  Rome comes about, it starts to stagnate to the
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  extent that archaeologists have calculated that
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  if the Roman empire hadn't occurred, you probably
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  would have seen people be roughly eight centimeters
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  taller, which is enormous. So in general, being
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  in an empire historically wasn't necessarily
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  a good thing for you. And this isn't just true
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  of Rome. Across the world, we see that most hunter
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  -gatherer peoples were taller and in better health
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  than most of their counterparts living under
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  urban empires for a range of different reasons.
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  One including Rome was just vastly unequal and
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  a huge amount of taxation was being taken from
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  the peasants, often giving very little in return.
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  Another being that, again, if you're clustered
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  into cities and having a grain -based diet, you're
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  having less protein, more exposure to disease.
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  And when things collapsed, it often meant, at
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  least a partial release from taxation. It also
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  meant that people tended to start to consume
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  more diverse foods in their diet, more protein,
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  and they tend to have less exposure to disease
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  on top of that. So it's a mixture of different
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  things ranging from social political through
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  to dietary and exercise. But in general, the
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  key thing here is that collapse wasn't always
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  a bad thing for everyone. Yeah, I'm going to
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  be honest. I mean, everything you're saying right
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  now makes sense to me, but I'm still struggling
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  with it, you know, in my mind. And it's probably
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  because I've seen too many HBO shows. But let's
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  say I'm a small -time farmer somewhere in Italy
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  in the 5th century, and the state that I used
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  to be part of all of my life just vanished, just
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  collapsed overnight. Wouldn't I instantly become
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  easy pickings for a couple of hoodlums armed
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  with rusty clubs and such in this suddenly Hobbesian
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  world? It's worthwhile remembering that in the
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  case of Rome, it wasn't like everything just
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  descended into a complete chaos. The Gauls, Visigoths,
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  etc., they all more or less created a kind of
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  patchwork of other kingdoms and states, which
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  took over a whole bunch of the provisions that
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  Rome otherwise supplied. The main difference
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  for a lot of people, if you're, for instance,
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  a peasant in Spain, is that you just start to
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  see your tax collector less frequently. And when
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  they come around, they're probably speaking some
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  kind of Germanic dialect rather than Latin. That's
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  the biggest difference. And it's worthwhile noting
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  that's a key thing here is that it really depends
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  upon where you are and who you are. collapse
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  is not uniform if you're living in roman britain
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  during its collapse and within a single century
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  you potentially go from living in a market town
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  where everyone speaks latin you see administrators
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  and columns of roman soldiers all over the place
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  you have roman bath houses and big aristocratic
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  houses to a world in which people are speaking
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  a mishmash of different germanic and other dialects
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  the bath houses and aristocratic houses have
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  all been abandoned The market town is now just
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  more of a small kind of trading post. And you
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  don't see Roman bureaucrats or columns of Roman
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  soldiers. And you probably do also live in much
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  more poverty as well. By comparison, as mentioned,
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  a Roman peasant in Spain or even aristocrat living
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  in France, they don't really experience that
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  much change. Yeah, so part of it must be the
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  semantic problem. As soon as we say collapse,
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  I'm picturing... a matrix or terminator or madman
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  it's only a desert and i have to fight i have
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  to fight people trying to take everything from
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  me or something one of the hardest things to
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  do in the book was to try to dispel much the
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  mythology and i think even propaganda we have
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  when it comes to thinking about collapse and
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  history in general collapse itself is something
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  of a term of propaganda as you mentioned we tend
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  to have these images of life devolving into a
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  hobbesian scramble for resources in which the
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  weak get killed off and the strong prevail that
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  just doesn't seem to be true when you look at
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  the evidence we have from what's called disaster
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  risk management studies. So studies of how people
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  behave during terrorist attacks, earthquakes,
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  tsunamis, and other kinds of disasters, we tend
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  that people tend to behave pretty pro -socially.
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  They tend to be altruistic, they tend to be quite
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  good at self -organizing. They're not perfect,
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  but they're pretty decent overall. And that makes
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  sense from an evolutionary point of view as well.
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  If we were just trapped in a constant struggle
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  for power and resources between each other, and
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  we had these really high rates of violence that
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  Steven Pinkerson obviously speculated about,
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  like 25 % of people dying, then we probably don't
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  survive the Ice Age. That's just an evolutionary
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  recipe for disaster, for extinction. But in the
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  book, I go all the way back to the Paleolithic,
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  and I point out that all the evidence points
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  to the opposite. We were very good at cooperating
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  across groups. We tended to have low rates of
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  violence. And we even have things like trade
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  from the East Coast to West Coast Africa 100
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  ,000 years ago. That's kind of difficult if people
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  are perpetually locked into a struggle when they're
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  not living under a king or a ruler. Yeah, so
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  let's stay here for a moment. What kind of constellations
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  did we coexist for all this time before we began
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  farming then as smaller bands of hunter -gatherers?
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  Modern humans developed roughly 300 ,000 years
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  ago in what's called the Middle Paleolithic.
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  And the image people usually have of this is
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  of small groups of ragtag family members, usually
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  20 to 30 members in a band. Yet when we actually
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  look at evidence of pneumatic egalitarian hunter
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  -gatherers, our best analog for the distant past,
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  it's that often less than 10 % are actually closely
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  family related. So this is often groups of more
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  or less strangers who often speak different languages.
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  And people move across groups frequently, to
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  the extent that the average person often has
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  thousands and thousands of social connections.
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  They're much more similar to a city dweller socialite
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  than they are to some kind of isolated farmer
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  or anything of the sort. On top of that, as mentioned,
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  these people seem to be... Not entirely peaceful,
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  but peaceful enough to have very large zones
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  of cooperation. So the best evidence, ranging
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  from genetic through to archaeological studies,
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  suggests that violence was roughly probably 1
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  % to 2%. So in other words, for every 100 people
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  born, one to two of them would probably die at
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  the hands of another human being due to lethal
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  aggression. Globally, that's kind of similar
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  to the modern world. If you count in... People
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  taking their own lives in the modern world may
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  even be slightly more violent. That's crazy.
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  And then the biggest thing here is that when
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  you actually look at trade, so how people share
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  things like musical instruments, lithics, figurines,
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  even things like cave art, we see that we have
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  big, big trading zones all the way from the East
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  Coast to West Coast of Africa 100 ,000 years
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  ago. We have the Ognacian culture, which was
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  40 ,000 years ago, spanning essentially from
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  modern day Spain through to Russia. And even
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  when humans arrived into North America, we have
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  what's called the Clovis culture, roughly, I
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  think, 14 ,000 years ago, which covers essentially
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  all of North America, of Canada and the US, where
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  people seem to have very similar shared designs
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  for arrowheads, blades, etc. All of these things
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  suggest that people were constantly moving across
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  groups, exchanging culture, genes, technologies.
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  And importantly, they did so without having rulers,
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  without, as far as we can tell, having any kinds
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  of lords, masters, or kings. Nonetheless, they
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  were capable of doing great feats of cooperation.
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  In the book, I call this fluid civilization.
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  In other words, civilization being large -scale
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  cooperation. That is based upon voluntary interaction
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  rather than violence. And fluid in this case
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  because people are constantly moving across different
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  groups and orders. So then my next question has
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  to be like, if we have 100 people trying to work
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  together, somebody has to organize. That's what
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  we've been told since we were kids, right? And
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  the person who organizes is usually delegating,
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  is usually becomes the chief. So how did they?
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  delegate tasks if they didn't have somebody who's
• 18:28
  in charge and stuff? How can we do this even
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  theoretically? In short, we don't fully know
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  insofar as the archaeological evidence can't
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  tell us that. We don't have written records from
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  this period either. The best we have is the analog
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  of modern day nomadic egalitarian hunter -gatherers,
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  particularly in places like the Central African
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  Republic and Tanzania. And what happens here
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  is often what's called a task -based leadership.
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  In other words, someone who's particularly good
• 18:54
  at one particular task or skill will often temporarily
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  provide leadership in that. So a particularly
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  good hunter often leads the hunt. A particularly
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  good cook will often take the lead in both cooking,
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  but also showing others what to do as well, particularly
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  children. The key difference here is that this
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  does not spill over into every other aspect of
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  life. So you don't have someone who, because
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  they're a really good hunter, everyone listens
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  to them when it comes to political matters. Or
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  they suddenly start to develop a harem because
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  they're also an emblem of God or something like
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  that. So power, when we think of it, it comes
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  in many different forms. There's political power,
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  the ability to change decisions and have authority.
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  There's violent power, the ability to force others
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  to change based upon violence or coercion. There's
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  information power. And there is also economic
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  power, essentially having more resources than
• 19:45
  others. Most of those forms of power were flat.
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  throughout history. And even when we had to temporarily
• 19:53
  have something more of a leader, they tended
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  to not have much power at all, apart from in
• 19:57
  the political domain. It might be able to influence
• 19:59
  the decision a bit more, but that didn't mean
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  they got paid a hundred times more than other
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  people. It didn't mean they're worshipped as
• 20:06
  a god, and it did not mean that they could command
• 20:08
  an entire army. So we can still very easily coordinate.
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  And even in the modern world, we see that we're
• 20:14
  capable of doing a lot of spontaneous bottom
• 20:17
  -up coordination. You know, look at things like,
• 20:20
  oh, here's a good story. At one stage, two different
• 20:25
  groups were trying to compose an encyclopedia
• 20:28
  of the world, including all of history. One was
• 20:31
  organized by a corporation, which put in something
• 20:33
  along the lines of $1 billion to create this
• 20:36
  massive online encyclopedia. The other one was
• 20:39
  just done by a group of enthusiasts and interested
• 20:41
  people who self -coordinated. One was called
• 20:45
  Encyclopedia Computantica and the other Wikipedia.
• 20:48
  Wikipedia is essentially one. Even though it
• 20:51
  didn't have a ruler, it didn't have any clear
• 20:53
  big coordinators per se, it was done in a really
• 20:55
  bottom -up fashion. Encyclopedia Britannica took
• 20:59
  the opposite approach and essentially failed.
• 21:02
  Not quite failed, it just didn't do as well as
• 21:05
  Wikipedia. But we have so many examples, both
• 21:09
  from nature and from history, of people self
• 21:11
  -coordinating in a really effective fashion.
• 21:14
  And again, even if you do have a leader or a
• 21:16
  manager, it doesn't mean they have to be a god
• 21:19
  king. What a disarmingly simple answer. I was
• 21:23
  like, I've cornered him now. He's not going to
• 21:25
  have an answer to this. But it's like, if you're
• 21:28
  the best hunter, yeah, you lead the hunt. If
• 21:31
  you're the best gatherer, you lead the gathering
• 21:33
  expedition. Again, that makes total sense. So
• 21:38
  masters of propaganda again at work, because
• 21:40
  I have this image that half of the population
• 21:43
  back then must have been hacked to death somehow,
• 21:46
  you know, like, like Otzi, you know, the Iceman
• 21:49
  whose body had a bunch of arrowheads stuck in
• 21:51
  his back, although I'm not really sure if that
• 21:53
  counts as prehistory. I think that was like five
• 21:55
  millennia BC or something. Yeah, so this was
• 21:58
  actually during... I think the Neolithic, not
• 22:00
  the Paleolithic, if I'm correct. It was still
• 22:03
  during a particularly cold period, and he was
• 22:05
  obviously in the mountains of the Alps. And Otzi
• 22:09
  is one example that's often carried out of our
• 22:12
  violent nature. And as mentioned, we've been,
• 22:16
  I think, heavily influenced by the likes of Stephen
• 22:18
  Pinker and several other different scholars who
• 22:21
  put forward estimates ranging from 15 % to 25
• 22:24
  % of a lethal kill rate. throughout the Paleolithic.
• 22:29
  It's worth noting these numbers are usually very
• 22:33
  suspect. So Pinker's list, for instance, I believe
• 22:35
  has something. So Pinker has this long list of
• 22:38
  different sites where he tries to develop the
• 22:41
  quantitative estimates for how often people died
• 22:44
  due to violence. The problem is that at least
• 22:47
  three of these sites in a list of, I think, 21
• 22:49
  are duplicates. And importantly, only one of
• 22:53
  the sites, just one, actually goes back to the
• 22:56
  Paleolithic. And that's one called Jebel Sahaba,
• 22:59
  which occurred roughly, I think it's 12 ,000
• 23:02
  to 14 ,000 years ago, during essentially the
• 23:06
  exit from the high sage into the Holocene. So
• 23:08
  this is a period of dramatic environmental upheaval.
• 23:11
  We see in Jebel Sahaba, which is I believe in
• 23:14
  modern day Sudan, a collection of different skeletons
• 23:19
  and around 51 of them or so have different...
• 23:23
  markings of violence, including things like parry
• 23:25
  wounds. So for instance, it's a fracture in the
• 23:27
  forearm when you try to block a blade with your
• 23:30
  arm. And things like embedded projectiles, puncture
• 23:34
  wounds, etc. Many of these don't seem to have
• 23:37
  died from these wounds because wounds are at
• 23:39
  least partially healed. But nonetheless, it's
• 23:41
  the first sign throughout the entire Paleolithic
• 23:43
  we have of any kind of violence. People have
• 23:46
  done far better systematic assessments of violence
• 23:49
  throughout the Paleolithic. So for instance,
• 23:51
  two Archaeologists from the Field Museum in Chicago,
• 23:54
  Haas and Pishteli, they did a very large -scale
• 23:57
  analysis of, I believe it was 400 skeletons,
• 24:00
  or 4 ,000 skeletons, you should say, across 300
• 24:02
  sites across the Paleolithic. The only one they
• 24:06
  could find that had unequivocal signs of violence
• 24:08
  was Jebel Sahaba. That's the one site. And genetic
• 24:12
  evidence suggests, as mentioned, also that humans
• 24:15
  were probably killing each other at something
• 24:17
  closer to a 1 % to 2 % rate. And other systematic...
• 24:21
  analyses of the skeletal evidence also points
• 24:25
  towards Jebel Sahab basically being the only
• 24:27
  real example here. And on top of that, we have
• 24:31
  this field of killology, which examines how people
• 24:34
  behave during war, in the battlefield. And this
• 24:38
  does all the things ranging from interviewing
• 24:40
  soldiers through to battlefield reenactments.
• 24:42
  And the startling finding is that people don't
• 24:46
  like to kill each other. So even during the world
• 24:49
  wars, during the Vietnam war, people would frequently
• 24:51
  either fire above the line of sight above the
• 24:55
  enemy, or they even like turn and shoot. And
• 24:57
  there's some fantastic sites they find in from
• 25:00
  the civil war where there's all these muskets
• 25:02
  that are found that are loaded up with multiple
• 25:05
  different ball bearings. And basically the key
• 25:07
  thing is people keep on loading the rifle because
• 25:09
  that's a way of looking busy without shooting.
• 25:12
  So no one's going to say, Hey, why aren't you
• 25:14
  shooting the enemy? If you're just sitting there
• 25:15
  constantly refueling your rifle. But where are
• 25:19
  all these casualties from these big battles,
• 25:22
  the Battle of Stalingrad coming from then? A
• 25:26
  few things. One is that the majority of wartime
• 25:28
  deaths are actually from disease, not from violence.
• 25:31
  The second is, if you have even just 10 % of
• 25:36
  people still shooting a lot, and there's very
• 25:38
  large numbers, then yeah, a lot of people will
• 25:40
  die. And the case like Stalingrad... It was just
• 25:45
  such a bad battleground and there was so much
• 25:47
  also systematic group coercion, you know, so
• 25:50
  you had waves of soldiers being sent in who basically
• 25:52
  had to more or less run directly machine guns.
• 25:55
  If they turned, they get shot by their either
• 25:57
  superior officers or comrades. So this is not
• 26:01
  to say violence doesn't happen. Obviously it
• 26:03
  does. But the key thing is that in general, we're
• 26:06
  actually far more reluctant to kill each other
• 26:08
  than we commonly assume. yeah i was just watching
• 26:11
  an interview on youtube with like a really old
• 26:13
  fella uh the interview is from the 50s i don't
• 26:16
  even know when they recorded it was black and
• 26:18
  white and he participated at the battle of some
• 26:20
  he was a german and he killed somebody and he
• 26:23
  you know as an old man he said he's still thinking
• 26:26
  about it every single day about that guy and
• 26:29
  that he's like dreaming about him every night
• 26:32
  so it doesn't seem like the best kind of fun
• 26:34
  one can have in in life no and if we actually
• 26:38
  descended from killers if roughly a quarter of
• 26:42
  people were being killed at the hands of another
• 26:44
  human and that those who are the murderers tended
• 26:47
  to be more likely to pass in their genes then
• 26:51
  you'd expect that we'd all be actually much much
• 26:53
  more at ease and almost comfortable with killing
• 26:57
  and it's kind of the opposite you know killing
• 27:00
  Depending upon the context, it can cause PTSD.
• 27:02
  It can last with people through their very deathbeds.
• 27:05
  It's such a disturbing, pivotal act. And again,
• 27:09
  that's something you wouldn't expect if we were
• 27:11
  evolutionary programs and hardwired to do it.
• 27:14
  So if everything was, if we were getting on just
• 27:17
  fine for hundreds of thousands of years, then
• 27:21
  why did we decide to switch it all up as we started
• 27:24
  settling down? It doesn't seem like the best
• 27:26
  idea. Unfortunately, this is something that happens
• 27:29
  over the space of millennia. We often talk about
• 27:31
  the agricultural revolution, and it may have
• 27:34
  been revolutionary in its consequences. It was
• 27:37
  not in terms of its pace. Even just the lag between
• 27:41
  the intensification of agriculture and the creation
• 27:43
  of the first states, the very first empires and
• 27:45
  kingdoms of the world, on average, that was roughly
• 27:48
  3 ,000 years across different continents. It
• 27:51
  varied very much based upon region, but in general,
• 27:54
  the average is roughly 3 ,000 years. And just
• 27:56
  doubling the amount of a crop like barley in
• 28:00
  different fields across Southwest Asia, that
• 28:03
  also took roughly, I think, 2 ,000 years or so.
• 28:06
  So this was a really slow, to many people, imperceptible
• 28:10
  process. Why did it occur? Why do we end up in
• 28:14
  societies where we live under kings who have
• 28:18
  harems, who essentially rule over everyone else,
• 28:21
  in almost the polar opposite to what we've evolved
• 28:24
  in? This seems to be due to a combination of
• 28:27
  both psychological factors, what I call the darker
• 28:29
  angels of nature, and environmental ones. So
• 28:32
  let's start with the environmental. In the book,
• 28:35
  I point out that there's a couple of key factors
• 28:38
  that seem to explain why we have states and empires
• 28:41
  popping up in some places of the world and not
• 28:43
  others. The typical response here has been it's
• 28:47
  because of agriculture. Once you have a surplus,
• 28:50
  That means that suddenly you can start to do
• 28:52
  big projects. And as you mentioned, we need to
• 28:54
  have rulers to manage, delegate power and control
• 28:58
  the projects. That doesn't seem to quite make
• 29:01
  sense for a few reasons. One is that often we
• 29:05
  have big things like irrigation canals, grand
• 29:07
  monuments, even entire cities like in Tiwanaku,
• 29:10
  which appear to have been done in egalitarian
• 29:13
  fashion. The elites come later, hijack the process
• 29:17
  and essentially take the credit. A second is
• 29:20
  that we have many places in the world where we
• 29:22
  have agricultural surpluses, but we don't have
• 29:25
  the emergence of states. A good example here
• 29:28
  is comparing Egypt to New Guinea. Both of them
• 29:31
  had agriculture roughly 7 ,000 years ago. Yet
• 29:34
  in the case of New Guinea, they never adopt pharaohs
• 29:37
  and they never build pyramids. What gives? The
• 29:40
  key difference here is what they're growing.
• 29:43
  New Guinea, they were growing taro, yams, and
• 29:47
  banana. Bananas, you can only store for roughly
• 29:50
  a month once they're ready to be harvested. And
• 29:53
  the case of yams and taro, they're underground,
• 29:56
  so they're fairly invisible. They can only be
• 29:59
  stored roughly six months after you dig them
• 30:01
  up. And even when they're ready to be harvested,
• 30:03
  you can leave them in the ground for a longer
• 30:05
  period of time. In comparison, the Egyptians
• 30:09
  grew wheat. Wheat is easily seen, stolen, and
• 30:13
  stored. It is what I call a lootable resource.
• 30:16
  So in the case of wheat, it advertises itself
• 30:19
  when it's ready to be harvested by these really
• 30:21
  tall stalks it is additionally really easy to
• 30:26
  store you can store it for roughly a decade or
• 30:28
  two you can also move it very easily and upwards
• 30:31
  it's very easy for a tax collector to come by
• 30:33
  grab the crop when it's ready and take it back
• 30:36
  to a leader That's not the case for yams, taro,
• 30:39
  and bananas. And this pretty well explains why
• 30:43
  we see certain areas of the world like China,
• 30:45
  Egypt, Mesopotamia, develop states but not others.
• 30:49
  A second big factor here, and it's worth noting
• 30:52
  that essentially we can't really have very intensive
• 30:55
  agriculture until we exit from the ice age, have
• 30:57
  better soil conditions, and have far better growing
• 30:59
  conditions for them as well. The second big factor
• 31:02
  here, and this is the first one, it's what I
• 31:04
  call lootable resources. The second one is monopolizable
• 31:08
  weapons. As we start to settle down, we have
• 31:10
  larger populations. We start to have more rapid
• 31:13
  technological progress, including things like
• 31:16
  the development of weapons. In China, Egypt,
• 31:21
  and Mesopotamia, you don't see the creation of
• 31:24
  the world's very first states until you have
• 31:26
  the introduction of handheld bronze axes and
• 31:30
  swords. And similarly, we see across the world
• 31:33
  during colonization, once you start to give gunpowder
• 31:36
  weapons to different groups, they start to become
• 31:38
  more hierarchical, which makes sense. Once one
• 31:41
  group has a huge violent advantage over the rest
• 31:43
  of the population, nothing's really stopping
• 31:45
  them from starting to create a cartel. And last
• 31:48
  but not least is people, because they were settling
• 31:51
  in certain areas and also because they were relying
• 31:53
  more upon grain, became more tempted to land.
• 31:57
  It's what I call caged land. When we look at
• 31:59
  Mesopotamia, It literally means in Greek, the
• 32:02
  land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
• 32:06
  Egypt is buffered between the Red Sea and the
• 32:09
  Nile. And in the case of the kind of key areas
• 32:12
  in China, like the North, for instance, where
• 32:15
  the Eugene Empire is developed, they're basically
• 32:17
  in river valleys, which are more or less circumscribed
• 32:21
  above mountains and rivers. In general, when
• 32:26
  people had less ability to move and to escape
• 32:28
  when they were more tempted to land, they were
• 32:30
  more likely to accept autocracy. So the overall
• 32:33
  picture being painted here is that the original
• 32:36
  states were something much closer to organized
• 32:39
  crime rackets than anything else. The other question,
• 32:42
  of course, is like, why did we do that? You know,
• 32:44
  why is it when we have these kinds of resources,
• 32:47
  these kinds of weapons in these kind of geographical
• 32:49
  conditions, do we end up in these big dominance
• 32:52
  hierarchies with one person dominating the larger
• 32:56
  masses? I point towards a few psychological conditions,
• 33:00
  what I call the darker angels of our nature.
• 33:03
  One is simply all of us crave status. Only some
• 33:08
  are willing to take it by force, what's called
• 33:11
  status -seeking through domination. Those people
• 33:14
  become obviously very successful. When we look
• 33:16
  at the history books, it becomes a roll call
• 33:18
  of mass murderers, people like Genghis Khan,
• 33:20
  Alexander the Great, Napoleon. The key thing
• 33:24
  is that once you can, people who want status
• 33:27
  throughout the Paleolithic couldn't really get
• 33:29
  it. There was no surplus to get, basically, and
• 33:32
  there was no resources they could easily store
• 33:35
  for themselves and didn't have the weapons to
• 33:36
  dominate everyone else. Once you have those,
• 33:38
  suddenly the status seekers can get what they
• 33:40
  want. A second factor here is that people who
• 33:43
  tend to be higher and dominant status seeking
• 33:46
  also tend to be higher in the dark triad. The
• 33:48
  dark triad. Psychopaths. Yeah, that's one part
• 33:51
  of it. So the triad is three. One is psychopaths.
• 33:54
  Another is Machiavellians. So basically people
• 33:57
  who pursue their self -interest ruthlessly and
• 34:01
  will use others as a means to an end. And last
• 34:04
  but not least is narcissists. Even when good
• 34:07
  people got in charge, we tend to become corrupted
• 34:09
  by power. We have a pretty good body of evidence
• 34:12
  from neuroscience and psychology that people
• 34:14
  who get the position of power tend to have less
• 34:17
  empathy, less compassion, tend to overestimate
• 34:20
  their own abilities, and they tend to be more
• 34:22
  likely to cheat both in games and on their spouses.
• 34:25
  That explains the wonderful year of 2026 to a
• 34:30
  T. Indeed. All right, but back to Goliaths. So
• 34:34
  eventually elites start hoarding resources, right?
• 34:39
  But what's the mechanism of decay then? How does
• 34:42
  it settle in? One of the key things seems to
• 34:47
  be that once you have a Goliath, so a Goliath,
• 34:52
  just to take a step back, is kind of my alternative
• 34:54
  term for civilization. When you start to write
• 34:56
  a book on societal collapse, you have to ask,
• 34:59
  of course, what is collapsing? The response of
• 35:01
  many people is civilization. Yet when you actually
• 35:05
  try to define civilization, people, to be frank,
• 35:08
  just have bad definitions. It's usually something
• 35:10
  incredibly vague and biased, like an advanced
• 35:13
  culture, or something like a checklist of factors,
• 35:16
  things like writing and long -distance trade,
• 35:19
  which doesn't quite make sense. Essentially,
• 35:21
  all hunter -gatherers had long -distance trade,
• 35:23
  as we discussed earlier. And writing, there were
• 35:26
  empires that were enormous and had no writing,
• 35:29
  such as the Incan Empire, which stretched all
• 35:30
  the way from Argentina to Chile, but didn't have
• 35:33
  any form of writing. I think what we really mean
• 35:39
  when we refer to civilization is quite clear.
• 35:43
  When one group can dominate another and you have
• 35:46
  a small number of people who are ranked above
• 35:48
  others in terms of status, what's called a dominance
• 35:50
  hierarchy. And a Goliath is a collection of these
• 35:54
  dominance hierarchies. Rome was not just the
• 35:57
  empire. It was also distinctions we have between
• 35:59
  slave and master, rich and poor, man and woman.
• 36:03
  So Goliath is basically these big collections
• 36:05
  of dominance hierarchies that make up one society.
• 36:09
  And when we talk about collapse, it's essentially...
• 36:12
  the fragmentation and contraction of those different
• 36:16
  dominance hierarchies, those different structures
• 36:18
  of power. And that can have winners and losers,
• 36:21
  can have costs and benefits, but it's not necessarily
• 36:23
  always a tragedy. Why do Goliaths tend to always
• 36:28
  reemerge? So even after you have a collapse,
• 36:31
  you almost always have another empire or state
• 36:33
  popping up. And in many ways, this is actually
• 36:36
  a more interesting question than why did they
• 36:39
  collapse in the first place? I point to a few
• 36:42
  factors here. One is that what I call the Goliath
• 36:45
  fuel, so we discuss little resources, monopolizable
• 36:49
  weapons, caged lands, the key conditions that
• 36:52
  allow for Goliath to grow, they don't actually
• 36:54
  change. Even if you have a collapse, people are
• 36:57
  still usually relying upon agriculture. Even
• 37:00
  if you have a collapse, people still often have
• 37:02
  access to bronze and iron age weapons. Even if
• 37:05
  you have a collapse, you'll probably still be
• 37:07
  in the same geography and still be partially
• 37:09
  caged. And on top of that, even if one empire
• 37:12
  goes down, often the stories and even things
• 37:17
  like the bureaucracy that underpinned it will
• 37:19
  continue on. And we see this really clearly in
• 37:21
  China, where despite dynasty after dynasty falling
• 37:24
  and being overthrown with things like coups,
• 37:27
  the bureaucracy and the form of writing was exceptionally
• 37:31
  consistent, which allowed for the kind of quick
• 37:34
  readoption of empire across Chinese history.
• 37:37
  Once elites start hoarding, resources um why
• 37:43
  does that necessarily entail that that that this
• 37:47
  goliath is going to go down why does this affect
• 37:50
  the entire society then eventually of course
• 37:53
  yeah the key thing here is that once you start
• 37:55
  to have a goliath structure you tend to have
• 37:59
  increasing wealth inequality it becomes an engine
• 38:02
  for inequality this is for two big reasons one
• 38:06
  is that Simply, if you're powerful, you have
• 38:09
  more means to get power. So the success become
• 38:12
  more successful. You see this very clearly in
• 38:15
  the case of rich people today. If you're rich,
• 38:17
  you can both A, afford crack lawyers to basically
• 38:20
  defend your case in court. You can also afford
• 38:22
  to have lobbyists to change regulations in your
• 38:26
  favor. You can also start to do things like influence
• 38:29
  the media in your favor. And it's pretty clear
• 38:32
  this is happening across billionaires today.
• 38:35
  Elon Musk is not just simply the world's richest
• 38:40
  man. He also owns X and has used that to his
• 38:43
  own advantage. He has Starlink, which has enormous
• 38:46
  influence over violent power today. Ukraine would
• 38:50
  have a big struggle if suddenly Musk cut off
• 38:53
  their access to Starlink, which is helping to
• 38:55
  navigate and coordinate all their forces. And
• 38:58
  on top of that... He's obviously very involved
• 39:00
  in politics. I don't need to remind people that
• 39:01
  he was both instrumental in getting Trump elected
• 39:03
  and then in running DOG, the Department of Government
• 39:07
  Efficiency, thereafter. So success tends to spawn
• 39:12
  more success. Power begets more power. And the
• 39:14
  second one is quite simple. Things like land
• 39:20
  and shares and stocks increase more quickly in
• 39:23
  value than wages do. We see that in the modern
• 39:25
  world. If you own a house, that's going to increase
• 39:28
  in value much more quickly than your wages are
• 39:30
  going to go up, which is partially why we have
• 39:31
  the cost of living crisis today. Those two factors
• 39:34
  mean that in general, over time, you start to
• 39:37
  get rising wealth inequality. And this can lead
• 39:39
  to absurd levels of inequality. So one study
• 39:43
  of 28 pre -modern states found that on average,
• 39:45
  there was 75%, so three quarters, of the way
• 39:50
  towards the maximum theoretical level of inequality.
• 39:53
  That maximum theoretical limit is a situation
• 39:57
  in which one person takes the entire surplus
• 39:59
  and everyone else has just enough to survive
• 40:03
  and reproduce on. Pretty startling. But that's
• 40:07
  the levels of inequality we're dealing with here.
• 40:09
  And as I mentioned at the beginning of the talk,
• 40:11
  inequality tends to have all these big knock
• 40:13
  -on effects, which I go in depth into the book,
• 40:16
  ranging from once you have increasing inequalities,
• 40:19
  you tend to have a growing class of elites. A
• 40:23
  whole bunch of people competing, usually for
• 40:25
  a small number of high status positions, like
• 40:28
  a phone. Additionally, as you start to have a
• 40:32
  growing elite class and more inequality, it means
• 40:34
  that most goods increasingly concentrate at the
• 40:39
  hands of a small few, which means it becomes
• 40:41
  more expensive for everyone else. Once again,
• 40:43
  cost of living crisis today, or what we call
• 40:45
  historically popular immiseration. As you get
• 40:48
  a class of people who are increasingly miserated,
• 40:51
  combined with a whole bunch of elites trying
• 40:53
  to get more power, you pretty much have a powder
• 40:56
  keg for social conflict, for things like coups,
• 41:00
  rebellions, warlords, and civil wars. And that's
• 41:04
  something we see throughout history. On top of
• 41:06
  that, inequality seems to just naturally increase
• 41:09
  things like corruption, polarization, in the
• 41:12
  modern world, democratic backsliding. There's
• 41:13
  strong empirical relationships for those things.
• 41:17
  And additionally, I always also point to that
• 41:19
  once you have a more unequal society with private
• 41:22
  elites increasingly capturing the state, it tends
• 41:25
  to mean that the state becomes more incapable
• 41:28
  of addressing oncoming disaster. If you have
• 41:32
  a bunch of rich people who are invested in the
• 41:34
  status quo and benefit from it, they won't want
• 41:36
  to change it, even if changes are needed to address
• 41:39
  some kind of oncoming disaster. And it's a combination
• 41:43
  of all these factors. And I also point towards
• 41:45
  things like Peter Hever spoke about, what's called
• 41:47
  imperial overexpansion. It's basically an empire
• 41:50
  conquering far too broadly and creating more
• 41:53
  and more enemies and the costs of conquest start
• 41:56
  to tally up and become greater than the benefits.
• 41:59
  All these things can be linked back to inequality
• 42:01
  and all of them lead to a state that's increasingly
• 42:04
  fragile and vulnerable. So when these fractures
• 42:09
  that you talked about appear like coups and uprisings
• 42:12
  and such, is it usually the case that one set
• 42:17
  of elites is just replaced with another set of
• 42:19
  elites? Or do they bring sometimes actual systemic
• 42:24
  changes to the forefront? More frequently, it
• 42:28
  is just a change of elites. And you wouldn't
• 42:31
  consider that a collapse, right? No, not necessarily.
• 42:34
  The French Revolution is not a collapse, is it?
• 42:35
  No. No, precisely. And I wouldn't even say, for
• 42:38
  instance, that the fall of the Soviet Union was
• 42:39
  a full -blown collapse. When you look at the
• 42:41
  fall of the Soviet Union, many elites stay in
• 42:44
  power. It's worthwhile remembering that Putin
• 42:48
  was already high up in the intelligence services
• 42:50
  prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. And many
• 42:54
  of the oligarchs we deal with today, once again,
• 42:56
  were still powerful before the fall of the Soviet
• 42:58
  Union. I come from Eastern Europe, and that's
• 43:01
  like a very well -known phenomenon that, you
• 43:03
  know, I was born in Yugoslavia. And a lot of
• 43:05
  people all throughout Yugoslavia that were prominent,
• 43:07
  occupied prominent communist positions in the
• 43:10
  leadership then just elegantly transformed themselves
• 43:13
  into oligarchs of all sorts, you know? So yeah,
• 43:17
  I totally understand what you're talking about
• 43:18
  here. What we call elite migration. There's some
• 43:21
  funny examples, like at the end of the Byzantine
• 43:23
  Empire, a whole bunch of the elites just simply
• 43:25
  adopt Muslim names once the Ottomans take over.
• 43:29
  That makes it easy. Loyal to the very end. And
• 43:33
  on top of that, like, The economy did collapse
• 43:36
  to a certain extent, but it was back on its feet
• 43:38
  roughly within, I think GDP per capita was already
• 43:40
  substantially higher than prior to the fall,
• 43:43
  roughly two decades later. And the violent apparatus,
• 43:48
  the military, did not change a great deal. Things
• 43:52
  like the nuclear stockpile, for instance, did
• 43:54
  more or less get out of control for a short period
• 43:55
  of time during the collapse, but they maintained
• 43:58
  most of the nuclear stockpile. And similarly,
• 44:01
  the actual... The ideology changed in some ways.
• 44:05
  So communism, I think, and this is the biggest
• 44:06
  change that happens is communism was discredited.
• 44:08
  But overall, the actual idea of having an elite
• 44:13
  -based society with a small number of people
• 44:15
  ruling everyone else, patriarchy, et cetera,
• 44:17
  those things don't change. So collapse is always
• 44:19
  something of a subjective judgment of how much
• 44:22
  the power structures have to change. But I think
• 44:24
  it's pretty clear in most of these cases of warlord
• 44:26
  coups. They're not really full -blown societal
• 44:29
  collapses. Instead, it's more things like, I'd
• 44:33
  say, both the fall of Rome, but also things like
• 44:36
  the late Bronze Age collapse, where you have
• 44:38
  a whole bunch of different empires across one
• 44:40
  region, like the Mediterranean, all falling apart
• 44:43
  in a pretty synchronized fashion. Yeah, can you
• 44:45
  talk about that a little bit? That's still a
• 44:47
  mystery, isn't it? Or did I miss something? Ish.
• 44:51
  there's actually i think there's we have an increasing
• 44:53
  contraction of what exactly happened during the
• 44:55
  late bronze age collapse so i just heard the
• 44:58
  talk of like sea peoples invading and stuff some
• 45:00
  sort of mysterious peoples coming for all of
• 45:03
  them but that sounded like an alien invasion
• 45:05
  or something yeah it's the typical explanation
• 45:08
  that people like to point to and historically
• 45:10
  it was one of the favorite explanations it's
• 45:12
  not any longer most archaeologists don't take
• 45:14
  it as the either best explanation or even necessarily
• 45:18
  a very plausible one so Context, the late Bronze
• 45:23
  Age collapse occurred. If you're going to pick
• 45:26
  one date, my colleague Eric Klein, who's kind
• 45:30
  of the foremost archaeologist of this period,
• 45:32
  points to 1177 BC when you have this invasion,
• 45:37
  probably by the Sea Peoples of Egypt, which interestingly
• 45:40
  was repelled. But it's actually a process that
• 45:43
  takes over a century to unfold. And it's worthwhile
• 45:45
  noting that while some empires such as the...
• 45:50
  Hittites fall apart dramatically, called the
• 45:53
  Mycenae, for instance, the kind of original warlords
• 45:56
  of Greece. Others more or less continue pretty
• 45:59
  well. So the Assyrians, for instance, become
• 46:01
  the Neo -Assyrians, and some archaeologists have
• 46:03
  actually described it as more like a minor recession
• 46:05
  for them rather than a full -blown collapse.
• 46:07
  And similarly, there's some decentralization,
• 46:10
  but also a fair bit of continuity in the Egyptian
• 46:13
  kingdom at the time. But in short, you have all
• 46:15
  these different empires who seem to undergo a
• 46:19
  dramatic crisis, in some case a collapse, during
• 46:21
  this period. The period does coincide with what
• 46:25
  some call a mega drought, essentially huge drought
• 46:28
  conditions that cover an entire region. That
• 46:31
  doesn't seem to be a full explanation. First
• 46:33
  of all, because in some areas in Greece, for
• 46:36
  instance, you actually see the drought come after
• 46:38
  the collapse, after the abandonment of the palaces.
• 46:41
  And in other cases, we see areas that were hit
• 46:44
  by drought, but it didn't seem to have an impact.
• 46:46
  For instance, on the Ibulian coast of Greece,
• 46:49
  there's a large number of more egalitarian communities.
• 46:51
  They were hit by drought as well. Didn't seem
• 46:54
  to make any difference to them whatsoever. In
• 46:59
  general, what seems to have happened across the
• 47:01
  late Bronze Age is two things. One is... Three
• 47:06
  things I'm going to say, actually. One is...
• 47:08
  every single one of these empires and big polities
• 47:11
  was becoming more unequal. They were also becoming
• 47:13
  more vulnerable because of that. And we see in
• 47:16
  many cases evidence of things like revolutions,
• 47:18
  for instance, during the collapse period. The
• 47:23
  second is there was a confluence of other different
• 47:25
  threats. So it wasn't just drought. There was
• 47:28
  also, for instance, a earthquake storm that hit
• 47:32
  the area as well. A third big one is that this
• 47:36
  was one closely interconnected network, which
• 47:39
  meant that once one node, once one city, once
• 47:42
  one empire went down, it had big knock -on effects
• 47:44
  for others. This is partially because of trade.
• 47:47
  So the Late Bronze Age is, of course, known by
• 47:50
  bronze. Bronze is an alloy created by both tin
• 47:53
  and copper. And tin in particular is pretty scarce
• 47:55
  and became one of the kind of key trading nodes
• 47:59
  across these different empires. But they also
• 48:01
  did things like have lots of intermarriages.
• 48:03
  really close to Matic ties. But this meant that
• 48:07
  once a couple of key trading hubs went down,
• 48:10
  it could destabilize the entire network. Actually,
• 48:12
  one study from a few colleagues of mine suggested
• 48:14
  that all it may have taken is just simply the
• 48:17
  Hittite empire falling apart and the trading
• 48:19
  city of Ugrit falling apart for the entire city,
• 48:22
  sorry, the entire network to become destabilized.
• 48:25
  And lo and behold, that's actually what happens
• 48:27
  during the late Bronze Age. We don't have a high
• 48:29
  enough resolution to know exactly when things
• 48:32
  fell apart in what sequential matter, but that's
• 48:35
  one kind of plausible explanation. In terms of
• 48:38
  the Sea Peoples, it's fallen out of favor for
• 48:40
  a few reasons. The Sea Peoples, A, don't seem
• 48:44
  to be one big group of peoples. Instead, it was
• 48:48
  probably a ragtag collection of migrants from
• 48:52
  essentially the Italian Peninsula and further
• 48:54
  up who were more or less moving due to climate
• 48:56
  change. potentially people who were both fleeing
• 49:01
  political and economic repression in places like
• 49:03
  Greece and also things like pirates. But it was
• 49:06
  really more just a different mix of people who
• 49:09
  were often fleeing persecution and migrating
• 49:12
  rather than like one coordinated mercenary group
• 49:15
  as the Sea Peoples kind of conjures. A second
• 49:18
  one is that many of the things bland in the Sea
• 49:21
  Peoples just didn't seem to happen. So our main...
• 49:24
  source in the sea peoples comes from ramsay ii
• 49:27
  who defeats them during a battle and of course
• 49:30
  he has a bit of a shall we say vested interest
• 49:35
  in portraying these as an evil apocalyptic force
• 49:38
  that he solely defeats but he blames a whole
• 49:42
  bunch of different things including the falls
• 49:43
  of the hittites on the sea peoples and that we
• 49:47
  just know that simply did not occur So in general,
• 49:51
  the Sea Peoples just aren't really a good explanation
• 49:53
  of this. And it also just doesn't explain why
• 49:56
  we have evidence of things like revolutions,
• 49:58
  for instance, in different places across the
• 50:00
  area. All right, so we've done a pretty good
• 50:04
  deep dive on Goliaths and why they fall. But
• 50:07
  were there any large societies that succeeded
• 50:10
  and even thrived that didn't do the whole vertical
• 50:13
  pyramid style of hierarchical organization? One
• 50:18
  interesting thing is that when you look across
• 50:20
  the great expanse of history, many of the earliest
• 50:23
  settlements and cities across the world last
• 50:26
  for incredibly long periods of time. And they're
• 50:29
  often egalitarian. I point towards a few different
• 50:31
  ones of these in the book, including places like
• 50:34
  Geno Geno in East Africa. And interestingly,
• 50:38
  in many of these cases, it's once they start
• 50:41
  to become more unequal and you start to see evidence
• 50:43
  of an elite class, that's when they become unstable
• 50:46
  and fall apart. And there's numerous different
• 50:48
  examples I go through. For instance, Tiwanaku,
• 50:51
  the very first city and potentially the very
• 50:53
  first state in South America. Monta Arban, potentially
• 50:57
  the first city and first empire and state in
• 51:00
  Central America. January, I already mentioned.
• 51:03
  And even places like Teotihuacan, which was a
• 51:05
  city of roughly somewhere in the ballpark of
• 51:09
  100 ,000 people, which... begins, interestingly,
• 51:14
  in a very autocratic fashion. You have evidence
• 51:15
  of things like mass human sacrifice, there's
• 51:17
  definite rulers, but then it seems to have some
• 51:20
  kind of large -scale revolution where elite iconography
• 51:23
  and temples are all targeted and burnt down,
• 51:27
  and thereafter you have no real signs of at least
• 51:31
  political elites, and things seem to be much
• 51:33
  more equal. At least, I think I've gotten this
• 51:38
  right, but... The Gini coefficients, this is
• 51:40
  one measurement of inequality, that was calculated
• 51:43
  for Teotihuacan, was roughly half of modern -day
• 51:46
  Denmark. So it was twice as equal as modern -day
• 51:49
  Denmark, basically. Not bad numbers. Denmark
• 51:54
  is pretty cool. Yeah, big fan, big fan. So we
• 52:00
  definitely do have examples of both fairly long
• 52:03
  -lived and fairly large polities that were egalitarian.
• 52:06
  And in many cases... the first signs of destabilization
• 52:11
  occur once they start to become more unequal
• 52:14
  and elite -led. And this also includes places
• 52:16
  that you may have heard of, like Çatalhöyük,
• 52:17
  one of the first kind of mega -villages in modern
• 52:22
  -day Turkey. Okay, so I'm confused. What makes
• 52:28
  us have this psychological moment where we're
• 52:31
  doing just fine, but that some guy shows up and
• 52:34
  he's like, he told me I need your stuff. And
• 52:37
  we're like, yes, let's do that. I don't understand.
• 52:41
  You know, is there any explanation for what happens
• 52:44
  there? Why do these people succeed? Or is it
• 52:48
  like you said, they just like monopolize violence
• 52:50
  and they show up with swords and they're like,
• 52:52
  okay, you're going to give me your stuff now.
• 52:54
  It almost certainly varies by case. Part of it
• 52:57
  is just the change, the sheer change in physical
• 52:59
  conditions. If you do have people who have Bronze
• 53:01
  Age axes and swords and you don't, it's just
• 53:04
  kind of hard to resist. particularly since most
• 53:08
  of us don't like violence that much. A second
• 53:11
  one is that while this was often resisted initially,
• 53:16
  it's just really hard to stop it from occurring
• 53:18
  over the long term. So when we look at, say,
• 53:20
  for instance, northern Mesopotamia or Egypt,
• 53:23
  it's not like a state happens all at once. Instead,
• 53:25
  you seem to see these, over the space of centuries,
• 53:28
  attempts and experiments to centralize power,
• 53:30
  they often fail, and then eventually it happens
• 53:32
  again until you do get a state emerging and it
• 53:34
  becomes more... long lasting and one of the key
• 53:39
  things that tends to happen alongside this is
• 53:41
  it's not just simply people with more weapons
• 53:43
  necessarily taking food they often have stories
• 53:47
  to justify this as well so it's notable that
• 53:49
  whenever we have big empires and kingdoms popping
• 53:52
  up we also have these different myths stories
• 53:56
  and ideologies which justify hierarchy in the
• 54:01
  case of mesopotamia the king was either a god
• 54:05
  or reflection of God. Same in Egypt as well.
• 54:08
  In China, there was the idea of the mandate of
• 54:10
  heaven, that things on earth, if they mimic the
• 54:13
  heavens, would be essentially perfect and in
• 54:15
  order, and it was the emperor's charge and role
• 54:18
  to essentially ensure that heaven was reflected
• 54:22
  upon earth. These happen all the time. Even in
• 54:26
  the case of North America, we have evidence of
• 54:28
  these more hierarchical early cities that actually
• 54:31
  happened prior to European occupation. And in
• 54:33
  places like Cahokia, the very earliest city in
• 54:36
  the United States, or North America, I should
• 54:37
  say, people basically speculate at this stage,
• 54:41
  but there's good evidence for it, that the elites
• 54:43
  were justifying their reign based upon an ability
• 54:46
  to control the weather. Like Kim Il -sung in
• 54:50
  North Korea. Yeah, I mean, this still happens
• 54:53
  today, right? It's almost always, we're doing
• 54:55
  something either right now or in the future,
• 54:57
  which is very special. And we can't always show
• 55:00
  you what exactly it is. Sometimes it's supernatural.
• 55:02
  Sometimes it's things like, don't worry, we'll
• 55:04
  get you to Mars. But that's always used to justify
• 55:07
  why I should be in power. Shouldn't you produce
• 55:11
  some skills then? If you can control the weather,
• 55:13
  people can just go, okay, make it rain. My last
• 55:16
  interview was with Professor Kenneth Bartlett.
• 55:20
  And we talked about the Renaissance. And there's
• 55:22
  a fascinating period in Florence when this friar
• 55:25
  Savonarola um took over sort of like a um he
• 55:29
  had a little republic for three years where he
• 55:31
  instituted some sort of theocracy a really strict
• 55:34
  one and people thought he had a telephone line
• 55:37
  to to god himself but then there was a bit of
• 55:40
  a pickle when they challenged him to to walk
• 55:42
  over like hot coals and it started raining so
• 55:45
  people were really disappointed because it was
• 55:47
  all so terribly anticlimactic and then he got
• 55:51
  sentenced to death because people were like if
• 55:52
  you have a telephone line to god then you know
• 55:55
  what is this We were promised a spectacle. So
• 55:58
  I'm just wondering, why didn't that happen more
• 56:00
  often if you claim that you're the descendant
• 56:04
  of God or God himself or whatever? It does happen
• 56:07
  surprisingly frequently. In so many cases of
• 56:10
  collapses and coups in China, there is some narrative
• 56:13
  about the mandate of heaven being lost, that
• 56:16
  the emperor is corrupt, that these natural disasters
• 56:19
  that are occurring, floods or droughts, are because
• 56:22
  the emperor has lost the mandate of heaven. Similarly,
• 56:25
  there was a drought that occurred, as well as
• 56:28
  actually several floods, during the collapsed
• 56:30
  period of Cahokia. And some archaeologists think
• 56:33
  that this may have undermined the kind of ideological
• 56:35
  legitimacy of the ruling elites and priest class
• 56:39
  at the time. One reason it often doesn't happen
• 56:42
  more frequently is that elites were really good
• 56:44
  at making sure people didn't get up close and
• 56:47
  personal. So for instance, in Egypt, the pharaoh
• 56:51
  was essentially cordoned off from the rest of
• 56:52
  the public. People weren't allowed to get too
• 56:54
  close apart from their own personal retinue and
• 56:56
  advisors. And that's probably because if people
• 56:59
  actually saw them peeing and shitting and could
• 57:03
  actually touch them and see that they bled, they'd
• 57:05
  realize they were not gods. Yeah, yeah, makes
• 57:10
  total sense. So based on the criteria you used
• 57:12
  when tracking the downfall of these 324 regimes,
• 57:17
  Where would you say we are right now, if we switch
• 57:21
  it up a little bit? Because I'm not sure if you've
• 57:23
  noticed, but it's not exactly a big techno festival
• 57:25
  out there recently. I mean, in some places like
• 57:29
  Berlin, it's definitely a bit of a techno festival
• 57:31
  at times. Yeah, but even there, things are going
• 57:33
  downhill, let me tell you. That is true. You're
• 57:35
  going to be here for a couple of hours if I start.
• 57:37
  Having lived in Berlin, I've realized how much
• 57:40
  the price of rent, for instance, has increased.
• 57:43
  Fuck yes. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, it's
• 57:47
  worthwhile noting that we live in a pretty exceptional
• 57:51
  age where we must take for granted that states
• 57:54
  are often pretty good. They take care of the
• 57:55
  welfare of their citizens. We have welfare democracies
• 57:58
  over a substantial chunk of the world. That is
• 58:01
  an historical apparition, and it is in part caused
• 58:04
  by the world wars. So prior to the world wars,
• 58:07
  the world was far more unequal. It's during the
• 58:11
  world wars that you have what's called the Great
• 58:12
  Compression. where essentially there's a huge
• 58:15
  level effect where wealth inequality gets leveled
• 58:18
  across most major polities, all the way from
• 58:20
  Germany to China. That's caused by a few things.
• 58:23
  One is just simply the destruction of old money
• 58:26
  and old capital. A second one is you suddenly
• 58:29
  have an armed and increasingly educated populace
• 58:32
  who want more from their states, and they get
• 58:34
  more. They start to get welfare packages, and
• 58:36
  they start to also get the vote as well. On top
• 58:40
  of that, in order to actually have a fighting
• 58:42
  force that felt like they had a stake in the
• 58:44
  state, many different places, like the UK, for
• 58:48
  instance, started putting in place more progressive
• 58:50
  taxation and also better public goods provision
• 58:53
  and more welfare. That's somewhat lasted, but
• 58:57
  there has been a change. So in the 1980s, wealth
• 59:01
  inequality started to rise again across most
• 59:04
  countries. And it's rough that time you also
• 59:07
  start to see the rise of things like political
• 59:09
  polarization, democratic backsliding. And of
• 59:13
  course, the things we see today. Trickle down
• 59:14
  economics. What a scam. And it's worthwhile that
• 59:19
  while people often speculate about why is the
• 59:21
  US seeing democratic backsliding, the rise of
• 59:25
  the authoritarian right, polarization. all these
• 59:28
  things, it's not just happening in the US. It's
• 59:31
  happening in the UK, in Australia, in Germany,
• 59:34
  across essentially the entire OECD. And the common
• 59:37
  connective tissue across all of those is rising
• 59:40
  wealth inequality. So I do think that we're seeing,
• 59:44
  in some ways, states returning back to the historical
• 59:47
  baseline of being far more predatory, autocratic,
• 59:51
  and unequal than we're used to. However, that's
• 59:55
  not actually the biggest cause of concern for
• 59:58
  me. Well, great. There's more. You can always
• 1:00:02
  rely, count on me for a good uplifting dose of
• 1:00:05
  optimism. Dr. Doom to the rescue. Yeah. One of
• 1:00:08
  the things I tried to do in the book is point
• 1:00:10
  out that collapse has changed over history. So
• 1:00:13
  in the case of many of the earliest cities and
• 1:00:16
  many of the earliest states, it's worth noting
• 1:00:19
  they didn't have good ways to control their citizens.
• 1:00:21
  They didn't have writing, for instance, didn't
• 1:00:23
  even have a basic census. They didn't have well
• 1:00:26
  -developed stories of subjugation, which meant
• 1:00:28
  that it was much easier to go through these kind
• 1:00:30
  of boom -bust cycles of contracting and having
• 1:00:34
  some kind of more highly centralized regime and
• 1:00:38
  then fragmenting and basically kind of going
• 1:00:41
  back to more egalitarian settings. So what you're
• 1:00:43
  saying is they didn't have Palantir. That's all
• 1:00:48
  they needed. There's Peter Till to the rescue.
• 1:00:50
  We see this all the way from the very first farmers
• 1:00:52
  of Europe. We see it in the first farmers of
• 1:00:55
  North America and the Southwest. And we see it
• 1:00:57
  with many of the earliest settlements and cities.
• 1:00:59
  It's not a universal phenomena, but it is surprisingly
• 1:01:02
  frequent. That's what I call the primal curse
• 1:01:05
  of Goliath. Then we have the next curse, what
• 1:01:08
  I call diminishing returns and extraction, which
• 1:01:09
  we've talked about quite a lot already, which
• 1:01:11
  is as you have increasing wealth inequality and
• 1:01:14
  a more extractive state, it tends to have a whole
• 1:01:17
  bunch of knock -on effects that makes the state
• 1:01:19
  more fragile. Today, things are a bit different.
• 1:01:22
  The things that worry me the most are not necessarily
• 1:01:25
  having a civil war in the US, as terrible as
• 1:01:28
  that would be. The most worrisome thing are what
• 1:01:33
  many of my colleagues and I would call existential
• 1:01:35
  threats or existential risk. Things like nuclear
• 1:01:39
  weapons, climate change, potentially advanced
• 1:01:43
  AI systems, and engineered pandemics. And the
• 1:01:48
  connector behind all these different things tends
• 1:01:50
  to be global wealth inequality and exploitation.
• 1:01:55
  For instance, if you want to build a... killer,
• 1:02:00
  autonomous drone. Or you want to build a leading
• 1:02:03
  language model. Both of those require cobalt.
• 1:02:07
  Roughly 70 % of the world's cobalt comes from
• 1:02:10
  the Democratic Republic of Congo, the DRC. Most
• 1:02:14
  of it's mined by people who are paid usually
• 1:02:16
  only a few dollars a day to work in some of the
• 1:02:18
  most appalling exploitive conditions possible.
• 1:02:22
  Tens of thousands of those workers are children.
• 1:02:24
  And roughly 40 % of the workforce are what we
• 1:02:27
  call artisanal miners. In other words, it's a
• 1:02:30
  bit of an anodyne term for miners who work in
• 1:02:32
  unregulated conditions that are incredibly dangerous,
• 1:02:35
  including tunnels that are prone to collapse.
• 1:02:38
  If you started to actually pay those people properly
• 1:02:41
  and give them things like healthcare coverage,
• 1:02:43
  et cetera, the price of cobalt would skyrocket.
• 1:02:46
  And that would suddenly slow the production of
• 1:02:49
  things like advanced AI systems and killer robots.
• 1:02:52
  On top of that, worthwhile bearing in mind, AI,
• 1:02:55
  of course, is built upon the systematic theft
• 1:02:57
  of everyone's data. And this is also true of
• 1:02:59
  other things. You know, if we look at, say, for
• 1:03:00
  instance, nuclear weapons, the world's very first
• 1:03:03
  atomic weapons were built with uranium that comes
• 1:03:06
  from a mine called Shinkalobwe. Shinkalobwe is
• 1:03:09
  also in the DRC. And at the time, it was under
• 1:03:12
  the supervision of Belgian authorities. And if
• 1:03:15
  you thought the colonization by the French or
• 1:03:18
  the English was bad, the Belgians were... essentially
• 1:03:21
  the worst on Earth. But because they were in
• 1:03:24
  charge, the Americans got literally cutthroat
• 1:03:28
  price deals on cheap uranium, which they used
• 1:03:31
  to build atomic weapons. And of course, when
• 1:03:33
  you look at the bigger nuclear powers of the
• 1:03:36
  world, so the UK, for instance, Russia, the US,
• 1:03:40
  China, there's an interesting imperial feel to
• 1:03:43
  the way they even test their weapons. So the
• 1:03:45
  US tested its weapon in places like the Marshall
• 1:03:47
  Islands, France and places like Algeria. And
• 1:03:50
  the UK in places like, well, the outback of Australia.
• 1:03:53
  So they used the periphery of their own empires
• 1:03:58
  to test these weapons. So across the board, it's
• 1:04:01
  usually wealth inequality, which is one of the
• 1:04:03
  kind of key connective tissue behind existential
• 1:04:07
  risk. And when we look at the production of existential
• 1:04:10
  risk, it's not like this is being done by everyone.
• 1:04:13
  87 % of the stockpile of nuclear weapons is held
• 1:04:16
  by just two countries, the US and Russia. who
• 1:04:19
  are also responsible for the vast majority of
• 1:04:21
  advances in the technologies to deliver these
• 1:04:24
  weapons in an increasingly fast pace. If you're
• 1:04:28
  looking at this from a company lens, then it's
• 1:04:30
  roughly only two dozen companies who are involved
• 1:04:32
  in the production and maintenance of nuclear
• 1:04:35
  weapons and nuclear facilities. Climate change,
• 1:04:39
  roughly 80 % of cumulative historical emissions
• 1:04:43
  come from just 10 countries. Yep, basically.
• 1:04:48
  And a quarter if you're looking at the US, for
• 1:04:51
  instance. If you're looking at something like
• 1:04:55
  AI, then essentially it's only really three big
• 1:05:00
  firms you're worried about. Google DeepMind,
• 1:05:03
  Anthropic, and OpenAI, all of which are headquartered
• 1:05:06
  in the US. So the production of all these big
• 1:05:09
  risks are highly concentrated and they correlate
• 1:05:11
  with power and secrecy. We talked about killer
• 1:05:14
  drones. So would you say that it's ever possible
• 1:05:17
  to bring down the elites without some serious
• 1:05:20
  violence, since this is the only language that
• 1:05:21
  they understand? Like, again, French Revolution
• 1:05:24
  style. Because historically, as well as now,
• 1:05:26
  it doesn't seem that these guys are too keen
• 1:05:29
  on letting go of their silky bathrobes and creepy
• 1:05:32
  private islands. It's worthwhile noting that
• 1:05:36
  the French Revolution in many ways didn't work
• 1:05:37
  very well, right? We end up with the... empire
• 1:05:40
  shortly thereafter yeah that's what that's true
• 1:05:43
  and what didn't really work very well is just
• 1:05:45
  simply killing individuals doesn't change the
• 1:05:49
  structure and it tends to have a whole bunch
• 1:05:52
  of very perverse counter effects as well what
• 1:05:56
  really tends to do the trick is having some kind
• 1:05:59
  of policy change. In the case of the Great Compression
• 1:06:02
  during the World Wars, yes, it was partially
• 1:06:04
  driven by the World Wars, but it was also things
• 1:06:06
  like taxation. In the case of the United States,
• 1:06:08
  the top income bracket had a tax bracket of 90%.
• 1:06:12
  And it's worthwhile noting that's also during
• 1:06:15
  the kind of golden age that people think of for
• 1:06:17
  the US as well. When Trump talks about making
• 1:06:19
  America great again, he's more or less thinking
• 1:06:22
  back to the 50s and 60s when taxation was much
• 1:06:25
  heavier and much more progressive. And worthwhile
• 1:06:28
  noting, of course, that may have been a golden
• 1:06:31
  age economically for white men, not necessarily
• 1:06:34
  for everyone else. But in general, policy can
• 1:06:39
  work. The problem is that, of course, changes
• 1:06:42
  to try to make policy much more, to redistribute
• 1:06:46
  income and wealth tend to be resisted by elites
• 1:06:49
  who wield so much power over the political apparatus.
• 1:06:54
  I don't think there's any easy way around this.
• 1:06:56
  It's a bit of a chicken and egg show. Sorry,
• 1:06:58
  chicken and egg situation, I should say. There
• 1:07:00
  are certain cases, like in the 1920s and 30s
• 1:07:03
  in the US, where it does seem like elites start
• 1:07:07
  to realize that this is not in their self -interest,
• 1:07:09
  that these staggering levels of inequality are
• 1:07:13
  actually making society more unstable. And ultimately,
• 1:07:16
  they're better off accepting some kind of reform
• 1:07:18
  rather than large -scale revolution. I wouldn't
• 1:07:22
  necessarily rely upon the enlightened self -interest
• 1:07:24
  of elites, however. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm
• 1:07:28
  not going to count on Mark Zuckerberg, this fucking
• 1:07:30
  socially awkward penguin, because he's building
• 1:07:34
  some sort of bunker in New Zealand for himself.
• 1:07:36
  So I don't think that counts as being enlightened.
• 1:07:40
  No, I talk about this in the book as well, that
• 1:07:42
  the people who... Interestingly, most prepared
• 1:07:45
  for the apocalypse are also the ones who are
• 1:07:47
  creating it. So you talk about Zuckerberg having
• 1:07:49
  his own bunker. Peter Thiel and Sam Altman have
• 1:07:53
  a deal that if things go wrong, whether it's
• 1:07:56
  a nuclear war or AI going rogue, they will take
• 1:08:00
  Thiel's private jet and jet down to New Zealand
• 1:08:03
  where he has some property. Anyway, how do we
• 1:08:07
  get around this? In the book, I put forward one
• 1:08:11
  particular measure, which I think is incredibly
• 1:08:13
  promising. That's what's called deliberative
• 1:08:16
  or open democracy. The Greeks wouldn't call the
• 1:08:21
  modern world or modern states like the US or
• 1:08:24
  even Denmark democratic. To them, voting was
• 1:08:27
  aristocratic and democracy was when you had sortition,
• 1:08:32
  when you had the random selection of people into
• 1:08:34
  position to power. I have a whole bunch of experiments
• 1:08:38
  for this today. There's this big burgeoning literature
• 1:08:41
  on what's called deliberative democracy, open
• 1:08:43
  democracy, where you randomly select citizens,
• 1:08:45
  you have them briefed by experts, and then eventually
• 1:08:49
  they start to create policy decisions. And this
• 1:08:54
  seems to work really well. It's like a lottery
• 1:08:57
  of sorts. Exactly. A lottery is done to actually
• 1:09:00
  select the citizens, and then from there, they're
• 1:09:02
  brought together in either a jury, so roughly
• 1:09:04
  12 people, or an assembly, ranging from hundreds
• 1:09:06
  to thousands, who are then briefed by experts,
• 1:09:09
  and they are the ones who make policy and make
• 1:09:11
  the legislation. It's kind of similar to how
• 1:09:14
  we use juries today, except for in the case of
• 1:09:16
  juries, they don't make rules. But if the expert
• 1:09:19
  is Peter Thiel... That's not going to be that
• 1:09:21
  good, is it? Well, that's the key thing. You
• 1:09:23
  want to have actual experts rather than people
• 1:09:25
  who obviously have a really big investment interest.
• 1:09:27
  Venture capitalists. Yeah. Understood, yeah.
• 1:09:30
  Well, this is the one weakness of the system
• 1:09:33
  is it depends upon, of course, who's organizing
• 1:09:36
  and running it. But, of course, this is going
• 1:09:39
  to be a weakness of any political system. But
• 1:09:41
  in general, we find all the experience we've
• 1:09:43
  done with this is that it tends to reduce polarization
• 1:09:46
  in the people who are actually involved. So you
• 1:09:50
  have Democrats and Republicans at the beginning
• 1:09:52
  of the experiment who are at each other's throats.
• 1:09:54
  And by the end, they often like each other. At
• 1:09:57
  the very least, they respect each other and understand
• 1:09:59
  where they're coming from. The results tend to
• 1:10:01
  be seen as more legitimate and they tend to be
• 1:10:03
  better as well. And in the book, I give one thought
• 1:10:08
  experiment to help explain why this is probably
• 1:10:12
  particularly true of global risk of things like
• 1:10:16
  nuclear weapons and climate change. In 1945,
• 1:10:20
  we had the detonation of the world's very first
• 1:10:23
  atomic weapon, what's called the Trinity Test,
• 1:10:25
  in the sands of New Mexico. The night beforehand,
• 1:10:29
  the physicist Enrico Fermi was taking bets amongst
• 1:10:33
  the other scientists as to whether or not detonating
• 1:10:36
  the bomb would destroy the entire world. That's
• 1:10:39
  because his colleague, Edward Toll, another physicist,
• 1:10:42
  had made a calculation that there was a non -zero
• 1:10:44
  chance that igniting the bomb would also ignite
• 1:10:46
  the entire atmosphere of Earth. thus extinguishing
• 1:10:49
  every single shred of life, not just humans.
• 1:10:54
  By that time, we also knew that the Nazis couldn't
• 1:10:58
  build their own bomb. Their program was not going
• 1:11:01
  to be successful. We still, or the US I should
• 1:11:05
  say, they still went ahead and detonated the
• 1:11:08
  weapon despite the risks. I posed the simple
• 1:11:11
  question of, imagine that you had a jury of randomly
• 1:11:15
  selected US citizens from that time. nurses,
• 1:11:18
  teachers, cleaners, farmers. And you gave them
• 1:11:22
  information. You told them, this is no longer
• 1:11:25
  about beating the Nazis to the bomb. And additionally,
• 1:11:28
  detonating this weapon could destroy the entire
• 1:11:32
  planet. Not just you and everyone you love, but
• 1:11:35
  every single person here. Do we think they would
• 1:11:39
  have said, yes, that's a good idea. Please go
• 1:11:42
  ahead and detonate the bomb. Almost everyone
• 1:11:46
  I speak to says, of course not. The reaction
• 1:11:49
  is one of exasperation. And I think most people
• 1:11:52
  are thinking about how they themselves would
• 1:11:56
  react if they were put in that jury. And similarly,
• 1:11:58
  back in the 1970s, ExxonMobil and numerous other
• 1:12:02
  fossil fuel companies knew about the impacts
• 1:12:04
  of climate change. They made surprisingly accurate
• 1:12:06
  models of it as well. And they buried the information
• 1:12:09
  and spent tens of millions of dollars financing.
• 1:12:13
  misinformation campaigns to cast doubt on the
• 1:12:15
  science of climate change. If we had a citizen's
• 1:12:17
  jury sitting in on their board meetings, do we
• 1:12:21
  think that the citizens would have said, this
• 1:12:23
  is a really good idea. Please, yes, lie to me
• 1:12:27
  and all my friends and family and bury evidence
• 1:12:29
  this could have an incredibly destructive impact
• 1:12:32
  across the world. Of course not. So in general,
• 1:12:35
  having more democracy and having better democracy
• 1:12:39
  is one of the best things we can do to prevent
• 1:12:42
  future global thought of collapse and in general
• 1:12:44
  just make the world a better place what would
• 1:12:47
  the framework be to actually make this an institution
• 1:12:51
  to actually make this work because now we live
• 1:12:53
  in live in these like huge actually we live in
• 1:12:56
  one globalized big village but as individuals
• 1:13:00
  we're pretty powerless and pretty sedated by
• 1:13:03
  like what we talked about at the beginning doom
• 1:13:05
  scrolling and such uh bread and games so um Do
• 1:13:10
  you have any advice for regular folks like me
• 1:13:13
  on what to do? A few things. One is to be democratic
• 1:13:19
  in the first place. Vote, try to be involved
• 1:13:22
  with more of these kind of both community initiatives,
• 1:13:25
  protest movements, et cetera, that are trying
• 1:13:28
  to change the world to address things like wealth
• 1:13:30
  inequality, but also address things like climate
• 1:13:32
  change, nuclear weapons, et cetera. And make
• 1:13:35
  sure that collapse and risk is actually something
• 1:13:40
  that influences your politics. The fact that
• 1:13:42
  we have not had a single election in the US or
• 1:13:45
  elsewhere really determined by nuclear weapons
• 1:13:48
  or by climate change is absurd. These would be
• 1:13:51
  pretty big issues alongside things like the cost
• 1:13:54
  of living, of course. Yeah, but if most people
• 1:13:55
  over there don't even believe in climate change,
• 1:13:57
  that's going to be a bit tough, no? Interestingly,
• 1:14:00
  when you look at the survey data, most people
• 1:14:02
  do. Really? Even in the States? Yeah, even in
• 1:14:05
  the States. This is one of the surprising things
• 1:14:07
  is when you look at survey data, whether it's
• 1:14:09
  the United States, Australia, or Norway, most
• 1:14:12
  people use some of the ballpark of like three
• 1:14:14
  quarters, do believe in climate change and believe
• 1:14:16
  it's an issue and believe that we should be doing
• 1:14:18
  more about it as well. Even things like AI, when
• 1:14:21
  you ask most people, do you want to have a general
• 1:14:24
  artificial intelligence machine built? Most people
• 1:14:28
  are like, no. And you ask people, has AI been
• 1:14:30
  good for the world? Again, most people will say
• 1:14:32
  no. So if we just simply had direct democracy
• 1:14:36
  and had policy reflecting general popular will,
• 1:14:39
  we'd probably have less risk in the world. But
• 1:14:42
  I do think these deliberative experiments work
• 1:14:45
  much better because they ensure that you're more
• 1:14:47
  buffered from things like misinformation and
• 1:14:49
  disinformation, and they also ensure that people
• 1:14:52
  are actually working with good information when
• 1:14:54
  they make decisions in the first place. Another
• 1:14:56
  piece of advice I give in the book is don't be
• 1:14:59
  a dick. which sounds deceptively simple, but
• 1:15:02
  it encapsulates a few things here. One is trying
• 1:15:06
  to be - I have to work on that. I have to be
• 1:15:07
  honest. Don't worry. I think we all do to some
• 1:15:10
  extent, myself included, is to just be more democratic
• 1:15:15
  and share more power than you can. Don't accept
• 1:15:19
  relationships of dominance, even when you're
• 1:15:21
  the one who's dominating. And another big thing
• 1:15:25
  here is try to use your career to - Make the
• 1:15:28
  world a better rather than worse place. And in
• 1:15:31
  particular, this isn't just about doing good
• 1:15:33
  of your job, but also not doing great harm. So
• 1:15:35
  don't work for arms manufacturers, don't work
• 1:15:39
  for AI labs, and don't work for fossil fuel companies.
• 1:15:42
  Different groups who are profiting from destroying
• 1:15:44
  the world and actively lying to the public, there
• 1:15:47
  is no ethical basis for working for them and
• 1:15:50
  supporting them. Last question, Luke. If collapse
• 1:15:55
  would happen today, a bit of a speculative one,
• 1:15:58
  what do you think it would look like? Since we
• 1:16:02
  said we live in one big Goliath now. It's not
• 1:16:05
  like the old days anymore where we had individual
• 1:16:07
  empires kind of competing with each other. But
• 1:16:12
  if things really go wrong now, do you think it
• 1:16:15
  would still be good for most people? Okay. Well,
• 1:16:19
  fantastic. In the book, I talk about it. sorry
• 1:16:23
  in the book i talk about how collapse has a bright
• 1:16:30
  past but a dark future and this is for a range
• 1:16:32
  of reasons one is as you've mentioned we live
• 1:16:34
  under a single global life today which means
• 1:16:37
  societal collapse in a deep sense is more likely
• 1:16:40
  to happen globally rather than happen regionally
• 1:16:42
  so there'll be no way to run a second is that
• 1:16:45
  people are much more reliant upon global industrial
• 1:16:48
  supply chains than obviously were in the past.
• 1:16:50
  In the past, people would - It would be kind
• 1:16:52
  of like, we talked about the Bronze Age collapse
• 1:16:54
  where all of these smaller empires were connected.
• 1:16:57
  You said there were nodes in effect. Exactly.
• 1:17:00
  Much closer to that. It would be like this, but
• 1:17:01
  on a global stage. Right, got it. Yeah. I call
• 1:17:03
  it the Death Star Syndrome, that as you have
• 1:17:05
  increasingly large -scale interconnected systems,
• 1:17:08
  they tend to be better at buffering against small
• 1:17:10
  shocks, but they tend to amplify big ones, which
• 1:17:14
  is what we see in the case of financial crises,
• 1:17:15
  for instance. Another reason why things will
• 1:17:18
  be worse is that states in the past were pretty
• 1:17:20
  bad, they were quite predatory, but today states
• 1:17:22
  often provide a lot of good things to their citizens.
• 1:17:25
  While the collapse of Somalia was actually seemingly
• 1:17:28
  good for most of the people living in Somalia,
• 1:17:30
  it won't be that same case in Denmark. Denmark's
• 1:17:35
  actually pretty good for its citizens. And last
• 1:17:37
  but not least is we have different weapons. In
• 1:17:40
  the past, when you had... Small groups of armed
• 1:17:43
  young men trying to recreate a state or a kingdom
• 1:17:46
  in the wake of a collapse. They were doing so
• 1:17:48
  using things like muskets, iron swords, bronze
• 1:17:51
  axes. Today, we have killer robots and nuclear
• 1:17:55
  weapons. Apart from that, how collapse looks,
• 1:17:58
  it really depends. We have scenarios ranging
• 1:18:02
  all the way from having full -blown nuclear war
• 1:18:05
  and pandemics through to just simply fossil fuels
• 1:18:08
  becoming increasingly scarce. And the energy
• 1:18:11
  ratio, so essentially how much energy we expend
• 1:18:13
  to get energy out of the ground, becoming worse
• 1:18:16
  and worse. And so we just have to live with more
• 1:18:18
  simplified, basic lives over the space of decades,
• 1:18:23
  which would still constitute a collapse, but
• 1:18:25
  it would be obviously far less violent and far
• 1:18:27
  longer. So how the future plays out is uncertain.
• 1:18:30
  I don't think we can put a date on doomsday,
• 1:18:32
  and I certainly don't try to do that in the book.
• 1:18:33
  The best we can do is understand the dynamics
• 1:18:36
  which lead to societies falling apart. and try
• 1:18:40
  to prevent this from occurring. And it'll be
• 1:18:43
  monumentally difficult to do so. I do think the
• 1:18:46
  most likely trajectory in the long term is self
• 1:18:48
  -termination, but it's also not the only path.
• 1:18:51
  And I do think that we can change that path going
• 1:18:54
  forward. You said there's no, how did you put
• 1:18:58
  it? We don't have a date for the doomsday? There's
• 1:19:01
  no date on doomsday. Right. But I believe the
• 1:19:03
  atomic society. disagrees with you that clock
• 1:19:07
  and they just put it to 85 seconds until midnight
• 1:19:10
  which is as closest as we've ever been so there
• 1:19:14
  we i speak to a i know a fair few people who
• 1:19:16
  involve the bottom of scientists and it's worthwhile
• 1:19:19
  noting this is while useful it's more of a pr
• 1:19:22
  exercise than it is a legitimate foresight or
• 1:19:25
  forecasting exercise when it comes to forecasting
• 1:19:27
  making numerical predictions about future events
• 1:19:31
  the very best approach is what's called super
• 1:19:33
  forecasters where you basically have to give
• 1:19:35
  it people who are particularly good at making
• 1:19:37
  predictions you put them into big groups you
• 1:19:39
  have them share information and deliberate and
• 1:19:42
  then you take the average essentially slightly
• 1:19:44
  adjusted by machine learning algorithm and that's
• 1:19:47
  the prediction they are far better than anything
• 1:19:49
  else and even they they have very little accuracy
• 1:19:52
  after a year and they're not particularly good
• 1:19:54
  when it comes to really complex unprecedented
• 1:19:57
  questions In short, we have no reason to believe
• 1:20:01
  that the bulletin is actually making a high fidelity
• 1:20:05
  or accurate guess about the future. But again,
• 1:20:08
  I think what they can do, kind of what I tried
• 1:20:10
  to do in the book, we can look at dynamics and
• 1:20:12
  we can understand whether the pressures of the
• 1:20:15
  world are pushing us towards doomsday or away
• 1:20:17
  from it. Luke, thank you so much. Fascinating.
• 1:20:21
  If... Terrifying, not going to lie. But I really
• 1:20:24
  recommend the book to everybody. You don't have
• 1:20:27
  social media, like we said at the beginning,
• 1:20:28
  but people can get your book at fine bookstores
• 1:20:31
  everywhere and on Amazon as well, right? And
• 1:20:34
  I will actually be starting a subsection shortly,
• 1:20:36
  which should be, I believe, at El Kemp. And I
• 1:20:39
  haven't quite named it yet, but it's most likely
• 1:20:41
  to be called The Final Word. If this podcast
• 1:20:43
  is published when it's up and running, we're
• 1:20:46
  going to include it in the description as well.
• 1:20:48
  Luke, thank you so much. Zaza, thank you so much.
• 1:20:52
  I really enjoyed this. Thank you very much for
• 1:20:53
  listening. Please subscribe to the podcast on
• 1:20:54
  YouTube, follow and rate on Spotify and Apple
• 1:20:57
  Podcasts. Otherwise, I will just fade into obscurity
• 1:21:00
  forever. Also, feel free to support me on Patreon.
• 1:21:03
  This is a one -person podcast. I do everything
• 1:21:05
  by my little old self. You'd be surprised at
• 1:21:07
  how much work gets poured into this, especially
• 1:21:10
  with no team and coupled with my stubbornness
• 1:21:12
  when it comes to reading. stupid ads which I
• 1:21:15
  refuse to do but you can help by hopping on Patreon
• 1:21:18
  and finding the Smart Cookies podcast on there
• 1:21:20
  and giving me your money of course and then last
• 1:21:23
  but certainly not least I have to thank my existing
• 1:21:25
  patrons like always without you there is no Smart
• 1:21:29
  Cookies podcast which makes you not just absolute
• 1:21:31
  legends but also producers of this show so eternal
• 1:21:35
  thanks goes to The list is getting longer, which
• 1:22:05
  makes me super grateful. Thanks again, everybody.
• 1:22:09
  Means a lot.