Angry Planet - ‘Goliath’s Curse’ and the Surprising Benefits of Societal Collapse

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

We’re obsessed with apocalypses, big and small. We fantasize about what the future might look like after the fall of society and fear the coming tribulation. Rome fretted about decline until its end. Stories of the Sea Peoples terrified the monarchs of the Late Bronze Age. During the 30 Years’ War, Europeans imagined Armageddon had finally begun.But a funny thing happens after the collapse: things tend to get a little better for everyone.Luke Kemp is here to hold our hands through the end of the world as we know it. Kemp is a researcher at Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author of the book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse.Beauty in collapseMatthew’s AI testThe Doctor Doom mask“Collapse was good for most people.”Sea People’s mentionedWhy a Goliath and not a Leviathan?Down with Thomas HobbesFear of a mass panic driving collapse“Emergency powers have a very funny tendency to stick around”The problem with guns, germs, and steelThe Tree of EvilOn the purpose of human sacrificeDoctor Doom is the belle of the ballAre we ending on a high note?Buy Goliath’s CurseCentre for the Study of Existential RiskThe rewards of ruinSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. Did you know that Angry Planet is almost entirely listeners supported? It's true. If you want to be part of the team, go to Angry PlanetPod.com, sign up.

$9 a month. Get you early and commercial free access to all of the mainline episodes. It gets you a couple of bonus episodes. that aren't on the main feed and some written work. Again, that's at Angry Planetpod.com. Without further ado, here is the episode. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt.

Let's try to find some beauty in all the collapse. Today, with me here is Lucas Kemp. We're going to be talking about his new book, Goliath's Curse. Sir, can you introduce yourself? Of course, Matthew, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm Luke Kemp. I'm a researcher at the University of Cambridge with the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, where we study any scenarios and risks that could result in global societal collapse,

or, in the very worst case, human extinction. And I should emphasize that we're studying these things not necessarily trying to create them. There's a lot of that going around these days. Just feel like a lot of people are studying things trying to create them, even though they know they're bad. Open AI being the prompt example. Yes. and we're, you've given me too good a segue, but like that's, um, so AI and nukes are kind of like

two of my primary interests and two of my like areas of expertise. And I gave you the book, the new, the, the AI test. Um, and it was like, all right, well, I got to see how he talks about AI. And that will tell me a lot about the way this guy thinks and like what my assessment of the work is. And you passed happily the AI test, um, which was immediately when you started talking about it, you pointed out that all the definitions are vague and that we should perhaps narrow down what we're actually talking about and then it was a lot of skepticism. So I appreciate that. That's one of the ways I knew that this was going to be a good book.

Well, first of all, I'm very glad I passed the AI test. I read it by a few friends who are both more and less skeptical of AI and also seem to pass their test as well. Obviously, in the book I am very skeptical, but I do just say that they're always. still in the long term, a chance that these systems could become much more advanced and dangerous, and we should be guarded against that. But ultimately, we also need to bear in mind that these are hype speculative products built by venture capitalists who have a vested interest and try to make them seem as powerful as possible. Well, absolutely. And also, I like just

the look of your bookshelf that you've got behind you. You've got Blood in the Machine, the Brian merchant book, which I've also got back here behind me. And is that a Dr. Doom mask? It is a Dr. Doom mask. Well, spotted. They don't know that we talked about the Dr. Doom mask before we started recording. What's the story with the Dr. Doom mask? So when I first joined the Center for the study of existential risk back in 2018, my brother, as both a bit of a joke, but also a serious gift, gave me this Dr. Doom mask. he three printed it and then crafted it himself by hand. And it was essentially a bit of a joke because obviously I was joining a center that works on

Dimsday and by that stage I was a doctor. I'd passed my PhD. And it was also a bit serious insofar as it was a character we always both enjoyed from the Marvel comic books. And it's become a bit of a nickname since then. I took it to a few of the dinners we have at what I call Caesar, the Center for Study of Accenture Risk. People started calling it and now it's even in the media as well.

I think recently my book review in the New York Times literally calls me Dr. Doom. It's caught on. How does one become interested in this area of study? By being really, really pessimistic. No. Jokes aside, generally speaking, I actually find the film selects people who want to think about the really big questions and don't have a lot of respect for disciplinary boundaries. For me personally, I never understood why you have to stay in one particular discipline or area.

For me, it's more about what's a problem that you want to understand to potentially solve, and more than useful tools, ideas, theories we can use to solve that problem. And similarly, I also always had this very big interest in how can I do the most good in the world? And that would initially do many of things like climate change, that was my original area of focus. but eventually in the process of actually lecturing for climate change, I realized there were other threats on the horizon. I was lecturing for a course called Climate Change Science and Policy back at the Australian National University,

and by the end of the course, the students were always dreadfully depressed for obvious reasons. And we tried to cheer them up through two different lectures, one on social movements, protest movements, and the other on techno-fixers. And I started to look into what's called geoengineering, which is essentially trying to cool the earth down by firing up aerosols into the atmosphere, which actually reflects sunlight and hence cool the earth. And in the process of researching that, I realized all the ways it could go wrong. And that was kind of my gateway drug to thinking about things like nuclear weapons, AI, etc.

And I realized that even if we managed to decarbonize the Earth in our world by 2050, but we still had nuclear war in 2015, we're still doomed. And hence, it's a bit of a Pokemon problem. You're going to catch them all. You have to address all the different existential risks. And in many ways, that's the genesis of the book. I, in the book, don't just try to understand collapse in how it's played out for our history. But I'm also interested in what are the very root causes behind all these different existential risks we face? The book is weirdly comforting. It's Maybe it is because I'm a pessimist, too. But it does this really good job of both reminding you that this has happened before,

that there have been collapses before, that we kind of exist. Humanity and civilization exists on this grand cycle of boom and bust, and that bust is not always so bad, is it? No, not necessarily. There are winners in a collapse. and sometimes the winners are the people that were not doing great when the civilization was thriving, right? Precisely. In general, people tend to think of collapse as being this ancient apocalypse,

and that is simply not the case. Claps is a process that has winners and losers and losers, costs and benefits. There's good things and bad things about it. And it depends upon who you are as well. In general, I think most past collapses were probably good for most people. For instance, if you look at the collapse of the Western Empire, afterwards people, based upon their skeletal remains, grow taller and they seem to be healthier. They have less trauma on their bones and less holes in their teeth, less dental cavities.

And that's not just because so many people died that there was enough resources or more than enough resources to go around. Instead, we see that even people outside the empire were taller and healthier, hence the trope of the muscle-bound genetic barbarian. And even prior to the ascent of Rome, people were growing taller, to the extent that when the empire rises up and height stagnate, archaeologists estimate that without Rome, without the empire, people would have been probably eight centimeters taller than they were, which is really quite an enormous change.

In short, Rome wasn't necessarily good for its citizens. By the end of the empire, it was roughly three quarters of the way towards the maximum theoretical level of inequality. That maximum is a situation which one individual takes all the surplus wealth and only leaves enough for everyone else to basically survive and reproduce. Rome was not alone. A study of 28 pre-modern societies found that the average was 77% towards that maximum theoretical inequality.

I believe we tend to look back into the past and project Denmark. We think about our current welfare states and we think, wow, states are great. They provide social safety nets. They provide a whole bunch of public goods. Most states in the past must have been like that. That's not the case. Most states in the past were far more unequal and far more predatory. And a good example is looking at states today who are predatory and looking at their collapse. For instance, in 1991, the Somalia regime of Bahre falls apart. A decade later, Somalia looks better. Essentially, every quality of life indicator, barring education because the West withdraws its aid, most quality of life indicators improve. Maternal mortality drops by 30%. If mortality has fallen by 24%, and extreme poverty is down by 20%. In general, you're better off being in Somalia. And that's true even when you compare Somalia to its more stable neighbours, like Ethiopia.

They are actually doing worse off than Somalia is. It's Samarais improved more substantial than they have. It was as simple as you're better off being under a local warlord or local government than you were being under the predatory Bahre regime. The reason that we have this really apocalyptic, doom-laden vision of collapse from the past is because most of the records we have about collapses were written by its greatest victims, the elites. It's what I call the 1% view of history.

There's a great example of that. One of my favorite historical mysteries that you touch on in the book is the Sea Peoples. Can you tell us about the Sea Peoples and how their story kind of reinforces exactly what you just told us? Yeah. So towards the end of the Middle Egyptian Kingdom during the late Bronze Age, we have a story told by Ramseys of the Sea peoples, with these invaders who have destroyed other lands and they come to Egypt, and Ramsey's being the fantastic military leader he is, repels them. And of course, this is in very kind of glorified language,

talking about himself as the savior. And for a long time thereafter, many people, including archaeologists, blame the sea peoples as being the primary drivers of what's called the late Bronze Age collapse, a period when multiple different empires, city states, and other polities in the Mediterranean, all fell apart. We don't have much evidence of that anymore. It seems like the sea peoples were probably not one coherent group, but rather there were a whole bunch of different groups, mainly from both the Italian Peninsula and kind of higher up the Mediterranean, who migrated most likely due to drought

conditions, and they were probably composed of a whole different collection of people, including, yes, some pirates, but also a lot of climate refugees and migrants, a lot of people who are fleeing the slavery and different types of press conditions at home, and as more places collapsed, more people probably joined the Sea Peoples. But they weren't a coherent group, and as far as we can tell, they weren't responsible for most of the destruction that was caused. Many of the different site destructions at Ramsey's Blabings of the Sea Peoples, we know were actually due to other empires, all occurred after the Sea People, sorry, before the Sea Peoples arrived. So the Sea Peoples is no longer a good explanation for why the late Bronze Age collapsed. What is instead is actually

a combination of factors, including an earthquake storm, a megadrought, which hit the region, and also rising inequality across the late Bronze Age. It's notable that in Greece, you had the Mycenaeia, who were basically these warlords who resided in palaces, they took and monopolized things like wool, they threw great feasts, they were basically tyrants. They all fell apart during the late Bronze Age collapse. And yet further northern Greece, you have a whole bunch of much more egalitarian communities, including in, I think, Corinthia and the O'Belian coast. They never collapse.

Despite going through very similar drought conditions and facing many of the similar threats, they never fall apart like their tyrannical cousins in the South do. And the key difference seems to be one, One was egalitarian, the others would not. That's one piece of evidence that hints towards that inequality may be more of the big driver as to why the late Bronze Age was so unequal. So in short, don't blame the sea peoples, blame the rich. So yeah, you kind of paint this picture, or I guess it's more implied, of the 1% kind of watching

things go bad, some of it stuff out of their control, a lot of it under their control, and then blaming immigrants for their problems in the aftermath. Seems familiar, doesn't it? It feels so familiar. Why a Goliath? Why do you call these civilizations Goliaths? Why not a Leviathan? When you write a book on Capps,

the first thing to ask yourself to put a Capsing, and most people say civilization, I didn't like that term for two reasons. one, the definitions suck. They tend to be really vague, like in advanced culture, which is also really biased against indigenous peoples. Or a checklist like long-distance trade, which all hunter-gatherers technically have.

Or something like writing, which the Incan Empire, stretching all the way from Argentina to Chile, did not have. As a scientist, I don't like to use terms which have bad definitions. On top of that, it's always been, let's face it, a term of propaganda. People who call themselves civilized have usually used that as a pretext and justification for conquering other less civilized people.

And additionally, it comes from the Latin root of civilitas. It has this implication of political restraint, virtue, good manners, civilized conduct, of course. Yet when you actually try to look empirically at what marks the rise of these very first states, these first kingdoms, empires, Every single one is preceded by large-scale warfare. Most of them involve large-scale human sacrifice, and all of them have the unifying thread

that they're essentially a change towards dominance hierarchies. Situations that are no longer egalitarian, but rather you have a small number of individuals who are ranked above everyone else and take resources from everyone else. In the book, I refer to this as evolutionary backsliding. we move away from being the kind of uniquely galitarian mevels, homo sapiens that we were, towards looking more like the harams of grillas and the hierarchies of chimpanzees.

I use the term Goliath for a few reasons. One is that Leviathan is attached to Thomas Hobbes, and I hate Hobbes. Jokes aside, Leviathan is referring essentially to the state. And the Roman Goliath was not just, the Roman Empire. It was also the collection of other dominance hierarchies, things like rich versus poor, slave versus master, man versus women. All of those are different systems of domination. All of them still underpin the empire. And it's a collection of all of those, which makes the Goliath. Additionally, I just felt that Goliath was a much more suitable term. Leviathans refer into some

kind of weird mythical monster from the Bible, while Goliath is referring to an individual. And these structures are, of course, made up by individuals. And it's referring to an entity which is intimidating, relies upon violence, is very imposing in size, but is ultimately quite fragile. And similarly, when you look at these early Goliaths, these early civilizations, they're all very big, they rely upon violence to enforce their rules. They're born of the Bronze Age like Goliath was.

And additionally, they're often surprisingly fragile. So Goliath just really suited the bill in multiple ways. Can you talk about your beef with Hobbs a little bit more? I thought there was a very interesting anecdote when you kind of introduce him. You're quoting him saying something like he and fear were born at the same time. That was Hobbs actually referring to his birth because his mother gave birth early when they saw a Spanish Amato, heard about a Spanish Amato. He was marked by such levels of insecurity. He lived for a civil war, for instance. He had to flee his

home country. So it's pretty naturally he had a grim view of him and deeds. In many ways, my issue is less with Hobbs. He's just one guy who is making up ideas based upon his personal experience. My issue is more with the fact that so many people continue to valorize Hobbs, we know that he was unfortunately for his idea. He has no basis for his ideas. He basically comes up with this idea of what humans are like when we don't have authority structures, what he calls a state to nature, but that's built upon him just making a checklist that's psychological assumptions. And I find William Blaine Hobbes, he had no access to archaeological finds, anthropologists, or even finding social psychology. The problem is we shouldn't be

holding up a 17th century philosopher who had no access to good information evidence. And the thing is that now all the evidence we have from those areas is just that Hobbs was wrong. Hobbs believed that when people were not in authority structures, we tend to be both violent, solitary, and that led to lights that were nasty, brutish, and short. We weren't capable of large-scale cooperation, we weren't capable of creating monuments or industry or trade or anything like that. Life in general was pretty bad and fragmented. that's not all when we see what we see or we look for the first 300,000 years of human history. Anatomically modern humans, who are sapiens sapiens, we've been around for approximately 300,000 years.

And for roughly the first 300,000 to approximately 12,000 years ago, we lived in small nomadic hunter-gather groups of roughly 40 to 200 people. But while they were small groups, they actually lived in very large societies. The average person across their lifetime probably knew thousands of people. So constantly changing cross-group and meeting new groups. On top of that, these weren't groups of rag-tag individuals. Instead, even amongst modern-day egalitarians, they tend to have less than 10% of people being closely blood-related.

And often they have members who speak different languages. They're actually quite cosmopolitan. And that constant churning of people across different groups, he created these big webs of shared trade culture and genes. And we see this even 120,000 years ago, where we have evidence of shared genes, culture, Lippic stone tools, and even musical instruments, all the way from the West Coast to the East Coast of Africa.

The same thing happens in what's called the Ornassian culture, roughly 40,000 years ago in Europe, where we have shared cave art, figurines, and tools all the way from Siberia, through to Spain. And they could do that because, A, they were very cooperative. As we know, humans love people. The worst thing you can do to someone even in prison is give them solitary confinement, where by nature, not solitary, we're prosocial. And we seem to actually like being altruistic. We're actually very pro-social. You see this during periods of natural disasters,

where people don't actually devolve from this offence and resources. We tend to be really good self-organizing. We tend to be pretty pro-social and altruistic to others. And importantly, even about authority structures, about any of those and members, we tend to be free legal violence. In the book, I survey several lines of evidence, including the biggest systematic studies of spilly deletence, genetic studies, which all converge upon

the fact that roughly 1 to 2% of people would have died from human violence. In other words, for every 100 people during the Paleolithic, to have first for 100,000 years, only one to two would have died at the hands of another human being, which is about the same as the modern world. Which makes sense, it would be such hard to have these big, shared website trade in culture if you're constantly having to cross war zones, which of course is like if you think

could bring up where they estimate that, you know, we probably had violence rates of 15, 25%. And importantly, I kind of find it silly people still believe in Hobbs, because when you think think of this from the evolutionary point of view. It is an evolutionary recipe for disaster to be constantly at war of each other, incapable of responding to disasters, and living in very small groups. You have no genetic diversity. You are constantly killing each other, which means your numbers are low. And additionally, you can't cooperate. And during the ice age, that was incredibly bad. We had multiple different ice ages where the world was five degrees cooler and we had 86 active volcanoes in Africa.

You don't survive unless you're very altruistic and you're very good at cooperating and you're pretty non-violent. How much of this is new kind of stuff that's found in the archaeological record in the past like 30 years that's kind of changed the way we think about all of this? And also how much is hangover from the story that we've told ourselves for the past several hundred years? do you mean the Hobbsian vision? The Hobbsian vision and the Pinker Vision

because there's a lot of, and I also want to talk about Jared Diamond here in a minute, but there's a lot of like, I wouldn't even call it debunking of other kind of like pop history stuff, but there's a critique. There's a lot of good critique of like, I think a lot of books that a lot of people have read

and have given them a vision of humanity in the world. Yeah, and generally also very pessimistic. Richard. And I think it's not usually based upon the most recent archaeological ethnographic evidence. It's at best usually somewhat cherry-picked. So in the book, for instance, I talk about how Stephen Pinker obviously does have data, which he uses to buttress this claim that humans by nature are really violent without authority structures. The problem is he's pretty selective. So, for instance, he has a list of, I think, 21 sites or something like that. Three of them are duplicates. and most importantly, none of them actually come from the Paleolithic, except for one.

So for all this talk about how humans are in our state of nature, he only has one archaeological site which actually goes back to the stone edge. That's called Jabal Sahaba, which Jabal Sahaba has roughly, ooh, I pick it's 62 skeletons and something like 48 of them in the zone. Don't quote me the numbers here seem to have evidence of violence of them. It's unclear if this is one big war, because of much of the signs of violence actually healed, it's more likely these were people who were engaging in raiding and kind of small-scale violence against each other. That's remarkable and well-known because it's pronounced the only site that we have from the Stone Age that shows any violence.

And additionally, Jabal Sahaba was during a very particular time. It was during a time when the world was warming and we had a huge amount of environmental and geographical upheaval. but not mistaken, the actual area where Gibelso Harbour occurred, basically it was having a big cleft cleft clipped into it during the exit from the Ice Age. So naturally, that would have created very conditions, very different conditions for conflict. But in short, I think most of this is usually based more upon vibes than evidence.

The ideas of pinker, diamond, etc. It's more a general vibe of humans are pretty bad, and actually having hierarchies pretty good. And they basically just reach for evidence that justifies that. That's a less charitable interpretation, but I think in general, that vision of humanity is really more a vibes-based one than evidence-based one. Why would you pick that view of humanity? It seems like at a certain point it is a choice, right? Not necessarily.

I think some people just have solid different values. Some people are more authoritarian, for instance, by nature. But I think one really important thing is that view tends to get amplified much more. Because, of course, it's the view that upholds existing elite structures. It's really good for people in charge to have the vision, to have people have the in-built vision that if we're not in charge, everything goes to shit. And we see that in disaster flicks as well, right?

You know, whether it's contagion, Armageddon, etc. All that big disaster flicks have a very similar vision that if bad things happen and the authorities aren't in charge, there'll be mass panic and mass disorder. And once again, that's not supported by evidence. When you look at the what's called disaster and risk management literature, which are basically groups of scholars who study how people react to things like earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc., even terrorist attacks, they converge on humans, once again, are pretty good at self-organizing,

and we're pretty pro-social altruistic. We're not perfect, bad things do happen, There is a need to have good emergency management and planning, but in general, we're pretty good. And it's well accepted now that the idea of mass panic is a myth. Yeah, let's walk through this, because this was another interesting part of the book that kind of hooked me, is the idea of a mass panic and how our fear of a mass panic and a disaster drives so many of our choices. And also, it's a pop culture obsession, right? Precisely. And it's not a positive one. So a lot of people do believe this. I think site a survey, which is looking across both the general public, disaster risk

officials and urgency planners, and as well as officials like police, billi-peer, etc. And all them have majorities who believe that mass panic, mass disorder, etc., are the prevalent condition for what happens during disasters, which once again isn't true. And it can't have some pretty bad effects. You know, if there's definitely a whole bunch of practices we have of trying to not tell people about, say, for instance, fires, and there was an instance, I believe, during the Cold War where the US held back information about how to respond to things like chemical weapons attacks, etc., because they're afraid of mass panic. I'd much prefer a populace who is well-informed and well-prepared than one who's basically completely ill-equipped and prepared

for a disaster because we think they're going to freak out if they hear about it. Again, with no evidence behind that. I think that if we accepted that people are actually pretty good at responding to disasters and we're also pretty good at self-organizing without authority structures, there's probably a fear that suddenly we start to entain the idea that, well, maybe we don't need to have so much hierarchy in life. Maybe we don't need to have leaders who are equipped with more and more power when disaster strikes, which of course is the general model. We tend to use things like emergency powers. But whether it's a pandemic or war, we tend to almost respond and sit to any kind of threat by giving a small number of people top of hierarchy more power. When in reality,

we should probably do the opposite. I cover this actually in a small article I did for the BBC called the Somp Reflex and putting forward the idea that if we're actually going to follow the evidence, we should probably do what I call an emergency emancipation. We should probably try to give more freedom and more power to everyday people during these kind of disaster scenarios rather than less. And we should actually keep a tight way you should have more accountability over leaders during that time. Well, that's always the moment the big power grab happens, right? Is it during the emergency? Yeah, I mean, emergency powers have a very funny tendency to stick around. Look at the Patriot Act. Patriot Act establishes a massive L system, which as far as you

know, probably still insists today. I mean, it definitely still exists today and is much worse than it used to be. Yeah. And we've got more private sector companies getting involved. It's so funny, because I'm old enough now to remember much of my life that occurred before all of that stuff that we live with now. And I have friends that are young enough to be adults, but have no conception of what life used to be like before we were kind of monitored everywhere all the time.

And it was just kind of taken as given that somebody could pull a picture of you off of a camera as you were passing by or, you know, grab a piece of your phone call out of a bucket. Anyway, that's a different episode. Why? Let's go, let's talk about Jared Diamond, since we're kind of on this critique train of, you know, we went through Hobbs. We went through Pinker. guns, germs and steel, which is kind of the big thing that people associate with Diamond, is this kind of story about, in part, you know, what happens when the Spanish meet the new world and how they conquer it.

You kind of add some context to that, that is perhaps not only just guns, germs, and steel that help. Obviously, in Guns, germs and Steel, Jared Diamond puts forward the idea, as per the title, that the key reason why Cortez and his conquistadors managed to conquer the Aztec Empire and why Pizarro and his conquistadors managed to conquer the Incan Empire is largely because they had better weapons, guns and steel,

and they also had a whole bunch of diseases that the people of the Americans were not prepared for. And the reason they had these diseases, Diamond puts forward, is largely because of the orientation of the different continents. In this case, the orientation of Europe is basically west to east, which means it is very easily kind of moved goods, travel, sorry, very easily moved people, goods and diseases, which meant there was more mixing of diseases. We had much spread of

things like diseases and germs. The people who survived the pandemics, of course, became immune to them. But they also carried much worse diseases, which the peoples of the Americas, who lived in a continent which had a south-north axis and had kind of less movement, were more exposed towards. I think diameter is partially correct. It's indisputable that better weapons did play a role and that lots of people did gire due to disease. You know, things like tuberculosis and smallpox did ravage different parts of the Americas.

What he's missing is that they wouldn't have been enough. that when Cortez arrives to take on the Aztecs, there's already been actually some Spaniards who tried to take on the Maya and they got their asses kicked. They basically landed, they got more or less massacan, they got back on their ships

and their captain died of his wounds on the way back. The same thing happened to a group of Spaniards who tried to take over a part of Florida, which was inhabited by a group called the Colusa, which basically hunter-gatherers who farmed fish, and had maintained their own little kind of mini empire. They too got repelled, and I think once again the captain died of his wounds on the way back. In short, there were plenty of times when the indigenous peoples actually very effectively beat off colonizers,

despite the fact that the colonizers had better weapons and still had these diseases. In the case of the Aztec, it's really noticeable that they were highly unequal. I think it was roughly 42% of income went to the top 1%. And because of that, that provided Cortez with a makeshift army. So we often tend to think of the conquest of the Aztecs as being a situation where a couple of plucky conquistadors with very good weapons, go rambo and take out everyone else. That overlooks the fact that the vast majority of the army that Cortez was using

was actually indigenous allies. Actually, when Cortez lands, he has to face off against one of the Aztecs neighbors, Shlachlokan, and basically they are beating the Spanish. They would have beaten the Spanish entirely, except for the fact that they decide to take a step back and say, look, we have a shared enemy. We also want to get rid of the Aztec Empire.

Maybe, rather than us exhausting ourselves, we team up and take on Moctosuma. If they hadn't made the decision, there's a good chance that Cortez goes down as a failed footnote in human history rather than as a great conqueror. and by the time that Cortez marches upon Tenotitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, a second time, he has an army of over 100,000, perhaps even 200,000 people, and over 90, 95% of those people are indigenous.

This is as much a story about local rebellion as it is about guns, germs, and still. It's also interestingly a story about inequality. The provinces that rebelled were the ones that were the most heavily extra-exhavenial. from the Aztec Empire. The same is true of the Incares well. Obviously, Pizarro walks in during a civil war and he manages to get a whole bunch of support that he wouldn't have up why he gotten because of that civil war. So the story of the Asteric Empire and the Incan Empire, as I mentioned in the book, is actually a bit closer to the fall of Rome or even the fall of the Han Dynasty than being this single story of great European conquerors taking of empires. The empires in many ways

were already toppling themselves. Top-heavy. What is it, what are the conditions that need to be met for an empire to topple over? In the book, I put forward the idea of diminishing returns on extraction. We know very well that wealth inequality tends to increase over time. This is based upon the work of my colleague at Stanford, Walter Shidel, in his book, The Great Leveler. And in general, wealth inequality increases until you have a great level event. such as a bloody revolution, mass mobilization warfare, a pandemic, or, of course, a state collapse. There's some exceptions, but that's the general rule.

It's not just simply that inequality tends to increase, but that also spills over into other areas of life. It's really hard to have lots of rich people who don't want to get involved with politics. And you see this, of course, in Rome, Rome, both the bureaucracy, as well as the leading military class, and of course the actual Senate is staffed almost entirely by the wealthy, by the petition class. Likewise even today, it seems like people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had a really big interest in politics. And that's something which happens throughout history. Essentially wealth and equality, it spills over and other forms of power. And this creates what I call extractive institutions.

Essentially institutions where the elites take more and more from the poor. That has a whole bunch of corrosive knock-on effects. Some of these have been detailed by Peter Turchin, his idea of structural demographic theory, essentially that once you get a growing number of elites who are competing for often a limited number of positions like a throne, they're more likely to, well, compete, to do things like coups, rebellions, civil wars, which of course we see in the lead up to the floor of Rome, particularly for the third century crisis. They also tend to take more from the poor, which means you start to get a poor working class who are increasingly, emiserated, poorer and less healthy. And we said that, of course, both in the Han Dynasty in Rome

and multiple empires throughout history, we also see it today. We have the cost of living crisis in places like the US, the UK and elsewhere. And even the US, we actually see life expectancy and human height dropping due to this emissuration. On top of that, we have good studies suggesting that inequality is linked to corruption, essentially there's high levels of corruption when you have high levels inequality and vice versa. And having a really top-heavy society of elites who benefit from the status quo tends to mean that a society is less able to respond to oncoming disaster, which explains why there's a repeated phenomena where these societies don't seem to be able

to reform themselves to address oncoming crisis. We see, of course, the same thing today when it comes to climate change in the fossil fuel industry. Last but not least, I talk about how once you have a top-heavy society with a large number of elites trying to compete for status and compete to have more resources, that tends to drive things like extracting more wealth through conquering neighbors, imperial over-expansion, or of course just taking more and more from the land, would be through farms or mines. And Rome, for instance, towards its end has stripped most of its silver mines in Spain and increasingly has less and less silver that can actually put into its coins. It has to debase his currency, meaning the currency becomes

less and less valuable, and they have to underpay their soldiers until eventually they're a bell. So in short, there's a whole bunch of knocker effects, but they all stem from the same underlying wellspring, rising wealth inequality. And unfortunately, all those problems in that dynamic may seem kind of familiar today, because we have had rising wealth inequality ever since the 1950s or so, or so in 1970s, I should say, we live in a world where we had a great compression of wealth inequality during the 1940s and 50s with the world wars, which destroyed a huge amount of old money and also led to the creation of democratic welfare states. But since the 70s, we've had rising wealth inequality back in 1980s, the top 1% globally

captured about 25% of wealth. Today, it's closer to 40%. and unsurprisingly, since that wealth inequality has arisen, we've seen the rise of both the far right, democratic backsliding, and increasing levels of polarization alongside falling levels of public trust institutions. All of those things have called relationships back to rising wealth inequality. Yeah, you've got this metaphor and picture in the back half of the book, the tree of doom and

wealth inequality is the root from which right am I screwing that up that's correct, yes? It's one part in the book I've pushed you

No go ahead sorry basically The tree of doom has multiple roots and one way you can think about half the roots being environmental and the other half psychological so the question is

why do we end up in these big dominance hierarchies, empires and kingdoms in the first place. In the book, I put forward the argument, and I think it's a very well-evidence one, that what really changes here is we start to get new environmental conditions. Once we end up the Ice Age and we enter into a new period of climatic warm stability, the Holocene,

we start to get access to new resources, both large flows of fish like salmon, and also certain kinds of grasses, things like wheat, rice, and corn. And when you have access to those resources, we tend to see things like slavery, hierarchy, states and kingdoms evolve. It's not just simply that agriculture creates a surplus

and you can start to pay kings, or that you even need kings, rather it's certain types of resource create a hierarchy. So if we compare, say, Egypt to Papua New Guinea, both had agriculture roughly 7,000 years ago. Papua New Guinea never develops pharaohs or pyramids, and the key reason as to why is their agriculture is based upon banana and taros. Banana can be stored for about a month and taro for about six months. Taro also grows underground.

It's very hard to see, and you can actually keep it underground for a couple months even after it's ready to be harvested. Wheat by comparison advertise itself of high stalks and can be stored for decades. All of the very first societies, and all the first Goliaths are based upon these what I call lootful resources, resources that could be easily seen, stolen, stored. Alongside of that, we also tend to have things like monopolized weapons, weapons that can be easily hoarded by a small group. So we don't see the first states arise in China or the Near East until the introduction of bronze-held axes and swords. And you also tend to see Goliaths pop up in areas where people can't flee or exit very easily, what I call caged land.

For instance, Mesopotamia, in Greek means the land between two rivers, and Egypt, of course, is cordoned off between the Red Sea and the Nile. The image here is that once you get certain environmental conditions, you start to get essentially criminal protection rackets. History is a story of organized crime. And I call those three different forms of, those three different things which lead to Goliaths as Goliath fuel. Monopoly, large weapons, liberal resources, and caged land. Alongside of that, we can look at the psychological conditions that lead dick lives. And in here, I put forward the fact that we know everyone wants status,

but only a small number of people learn to pursue status for domination. Those people tend to be high in the dark triad, Machiavellism, psychopathy, and narcissism. We also know that there's pretty good evidence that people who get into positions of power, even if they're pretty confident heavily, end up you're usually getting corrupted by power. They become less synthetic, have less compassion, less risk aversion, and they're more likely to cheat both in gains and their spouses. And last of the least, when people feel threatened,

they're more likely to accept authoritarian leaders and structures, which is something we see across history, whether it be in Nazi Germany, or the rise of Putin during the Chechnine bombings. The collection of those things, Glythe, fuel, plus what I call the darker angels of nature, they lead to the emergence of these Goliaths, the systems of violence and inequality, and as those Goliaths which then eventually sprout out

into the Great French to be faced today, nuclear weapons, climate change, engineer pandemics, all the different forms of global catatrogly risk. And that's essentially the tree of doom, all the way from the root causes, through the trunk of Glyves to all the phrase we face today. People on the... How do we know that they tend to cheat at games

and on their spouses. So in case of games, you just put them to literally laboratory games, where you can choose to either affect or cooperate, and people who are primed to feel powerful are more likely to affect. In terms of cheating on their spouses, I'd have to go double-check the studies, but I am aware of one, where was this as simple as looking at

where was the highest rate of membership for Ashley Madison, which was essentially an app and site, which allowed people to cheat on their spouses. It's basically tender for cheating. And the highest rate of usage in the States was in Washington, D.C. Of course. Why is human sacrifice a core component of early Goliaths, and why do you think it fell off or has it fallen off?

Why was it used? multiple reasons. One is that it becomes a way of expressing that it's bad when other people do violence, but it's good when I, the leader, do it. We often use to talk about states as being defined by a legitimate monopoly upon violence. And in many ways, human sacrifice is the perfect way of enshrining that. Once again, it's okay if I kill people. It's actually good for society, but it's bad if everyone else does it. Secondly, it becomes a kind of act of intimidation, not just to outsiders, but also to your own citizens. Here's what can happen if you don't follow the rules. I also talk about it as an active conspicuous consumption. When we look

throughout history for signs of inequality, we tend to look for things like grand burials, individuals buried with jewelry and weapons from very far away, or great monuments, or different housing sizes, some houses being far grander and bigger than others. The similarity across all these examples of inequality is they're all acts of conspicuous consumption. They're all basically using energy in a wasteful extravagant manner. And human sacrifice is exactly the same. It's taking people who literally could have spent their entire lives working, doing productive things, and instead of killing them. It's the ultimate act of conspicuous consumption in some ways. It seems to work when we look at studies of human sacrifice. It does seem that more unequal hierarchical societies and more

likely to practice human sacrifice, but they're also less likely to basically move back into being egalitarian groups. I also do talk about how, and this has been more speculative, it may have just been a way of having a kind of religious prototype for taxation or for tribute. That in many ways what you're doing with human sacrifice, you're saying there's a big God who provides all these different kind of benefits to us, and in exchange, we have to sacrifice resources, people, for that God. And then suddenly have a king who's also saying, I can protect you, I can provide a whole bunch of different services for you, but in exchange you have to give me a tent for a third of your grain. So it becomes almost a kind of supernatural form of tribute and a way of justifying tribute

in the real world. Human sacrifice does seem to fall out of favor, at least in most very large Iron Age empires. In Rome, for instance, human sacrifice was very rarely practiced, except for occasionally when enemies were the gates, and that was an estate-sponsored practice, human sacrifice, at least in very large studies, tends to more or less get we get out. And it's most likely just because they found better ways of actually trying to encourage large-scale cooperation, and after a while, human sacrifice was actually probably more harm than good. You know, sacrificing people often can piss a lot of people off.

It can make them feel very nervous and precarious. While if you can do other things, like have just a larger standing army or a police force, for instance, that is a much better way of maintaining social order and justifying your rule than we're not going to be in sacrifice. So we do see the time that kind of a selection mechanism against food sacrifice. Do you see any remnants of it in modern Goliaths? If we were to look at sacrifice in a bit more of a capacious manner, one could argue that we're quite happy to sacrifice groups of people all the time for the global economy.

In the book, I talk a fair bit about the Democratic Republic of Congo, where approximately 70% of cobalt comes from today. and most of that cobalt is, not most of it, 40% of it is dug up by miners who are what are called artisanal. Essentially, they work in incredibly dangerous, unregulated environments. They often are working in tunnels deep underground, which are prone to collapse. They don't have things like health care or insurance and often getting paid roughly a couple of dollars a day, maybe three or four dollars. And roughly 40,000 of those people are children. They're basically child miners. they're often working in the most atrocious, hazardous, slave-like conditions possible.

They are, in many ways, kind of modern-day slaves. Many of them do die. There's numerous stories of children dying in very young ages due to things like collapse tunnels. And in many ways, at the very least, big tech in the existing supply chains are kind of happy at that situation. It keeps the minerals like cobalt very cheap, and it keeps the global constant. and more importantly, the very big companies operating. In some ways, that is a version of large-scale human sacrifice. We're sacrificing entire classes of people in order to build things like large language models

and kill robots in order to cheap the global life pumping. And there's numerous kind of sacrifice zones like that across the world in a whole bunch of different ways. In the book, I talk about how often we think about what I call existential risk. Things that cause either human extinction or global cytoclapse, things like nuclear weapons, climate change, AI. They all rely upon global inequality. They all rely upon really cheap minerals and rare earth metals, often mined by very underpaid, exploited people. And that's just one example of a kind of sacrifice we're consistently making in order for the global Goliath to operate.

What is the Death Star syndrome? It's a very cool term I use in the book. The Death Star Syndrome refers to a condition where very large, interconnected, complex systems tend to be really good at buffering against small shocks, but once a shock is big enough, it actually is amplified by the system. And of course, this harkens back to the Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars film, where you have the Death Star, which seems impregnable. It's capable of destroying entire planets, but all it takes, due to a really bad design floor, is one missile in a particular place for the

entire thing to fall apart. And we have the evidence that this Death Star Syndrome seem to exist. It seems to exist both for ecosystems like Coral reefs, but it also seems to exist for financial systems. We're quite good if we have a small financial shock in a different country to basically send capital there and buffer against the shock. But once you have a sufficiently large shock, like say, for instance, a housing bubble in the United States, suddenly that can percolate and amplify across the entire global economy resulting in an entire global recession or depression. That's the problem we face today, is that we can basically handle the small shocks well,

but a sufficiently big one might topple the entire system. I use the analogy also of having a whole, like a hundred ladders, which you have to push each one over individually, they're quite easy to push over. If you tie a hundred ladders together, they're really hard to push over, but once you get enough force, you push them all over together at once. I think we're facing a similar thing when it comes to collapse. When you look at modern day studies of state failure, in general, state failure doesn't last long. when countries collapse today, within six months, they tend to have some kind of operating state back in order. They tend to have an operating legislation and operating legal system, etc., etc. I think that's a good example of when mobilizing usually through UN peacekeeping forces,

sometimes for the US, through foreign aid, etc., when mobilizing the global system to prop up states whenever they collapse. But of course, if a large enough state or a large enough collection of states fall apart, suddenly that's going to have big knock on effects and big ripples across the entire world, which could lead to an entire global societal collapse. You're making me feel real good right about now. You're very welcome, Matthew. So I think I first learned about this book. There was a piece in, I think was it Aon, is maybe the name of the magazine where it was

talking about, yeah, it was talking about how collapse maybe. good actually. And then I started to see you crop up kind of like everywhere in all these places that I look like you talked to Douglas Rushkoff and you were on the fifth column. And people are very interested, it seems to me, in the idea of collapse just right now. And I'm wondering how you're feeling is Dr. Doom being kind of popular and having people so interested in the topic that you're talking about? It's good points and bad points. It's always nice to be popular.

It's nice that I spent seven years writing a book and people are actually reading it. As an academic, I'm usually used to writing, spending lots of time writing things that no one reads. So it's good to have that change. It's also meant a lot more media work than I'm used to. I'm still getting used to actually doing media in general. I try not to let the status really get to me. given the book talks a lot about how status competition is often a bad thing and can lead to very unhealthy places for society, I'm trying to certainly not like that get to me.

And I keep a close group of friends who are very happy to tear me down in regular intervals, so that's helpful too. But most importantly, I'm just happy the book is actually out there and the people are reading it and that maybe it has some kind of impact upon the world, whether that's just changing the minds of people and how they view both our current predicament in the past, or maybe even helping to actually change the way politics and our policy towards existential risks is. But we shall see.

But doom is in the air right now, I'm saying. It is. And doom is often in the air. I'm sorry, what? I said, a spectra is haunting the world to paraphrase marks. Yes, it really is. But doom is often in the air. And I think people often think that collapses on the horizon.

That mass panic is always looming, right? But I don't know, man. Things feel real bad right now. And I'm sure you're probably tired of talking about the American context of things at the moment. But I think we're feeling pretty collapsey right now. And we usually in this show on a down note, almost always. But something I appreciated about this book is this kind of reminder at the end that we have solvable problems, that things can be pushed back against, and that things do change for the better. And can you kind of walk me through your end notes here?

Absolutely. I think one of the beautiful things about the world is that building a safer world, building a world that escapes from collapse from what I call the end game, is also building more just one. In the book, I put forward both a set of very particular policies we can do to reduce existential risk and a whole bunch of different structural forms we can do to address the underlying drivers of societal collapse. One of the entry points for this is talking about a thought experiment I have in the book, which is what I call the Trinity jury. So you and some of your listeners may be familiar with the Manhattan Project, The Quest by the United States. United States to build the world's very first time of weapon. And prior to the detonation of the

world's first-time bomb, the Trinity Test in the Santernine New Mexico in 1945, there was a set of bets placed by scientists who were betting on whether or not the world would be destroyed. That's because when the physicists, Edward Teller had made a calculation that there was a non-zero probability that detonating the bomb would trigger an uncontrollable nuclear reaction, which would ignite the entire atmosphere of Earth. thus killing not just humans, but every single shred of life upon Earth. By that time, the US also knew that the Nazis no longer pursuing their bomb, nor were they capable of doing so. They still, of course, went ahead and detonated that weapon.

The question I have in the book is, imagine you did what we call a citizen's jury or citizen's assembly. You randomly select citizens from across the United States, doctors, nurses, plumbers, teachers, and you ask them, guys, we have this weapon. It's a chance it kills not just everyone, but literally everything living on Earth. And by the way, the Nazis are no longer pursuing their own bomb. And we think the war probably ended in a few months.

Do you think we should detonate it? The reaction I get from people is usually, it varies from laughter to, of course, fucking not, but the underlying sentiment is always, no, they wouldn't have. And that's because I don't think they would have. We have very good growing evidence that when you have these citizens assemblies and citizens juries, random selected groups of people who are briefed by experts, deliberate amongst themselves and then come to a conclusion, they tend to do a pretty good job. It tends to result

in less polarization, more legitimacy, and just overall better decision-making. And when I think of so many instances throughout the history of global cultural risk, for instance, Exxon, bearing the information about climate change it had in 1970s, and then, spending tens of millions of dollars on misinformation and disinformation campaigns to misinform the public and cast doubt on science of climate change. When I think about those instances and whether a citizen's jury had been there, I think history plays that very differently. I don't think a citizen's jury would have said to Exxon, yes, that's a good idea. We really like the idea of our friends and family being lied to

so you guys can make more profit in pursuit of destroying the world. I highly doubt they would approve that. And this is true for a whole bunch of different areas. And today, we even just from surveys have good evidence that if we were actually making policy based upon majority opinion, we probably would have abolished nuclear weapons, we'd probably have been able to track to net zero emissions, and we probably would have placed a ban on lethal autonomous weapons, because that's what most people want across most major economies. And if we had actual scenarios of citizen assemblies and juries, where they're also in four, by experts, I suspect that would strengthen.

So one of the biggest things put for in the book is democratization, democratizing not just our governmental systems, but also our workplaces. It's pretty hard to call yourself a democracy if you're voting every four years, but you're actually working nine to five in an autocracy. I put forward a whole bunch of other measures as well. As mentioned, wealth inequality tends to spill over in our areas, and because of that, we need to basically level all the different forms of power. If we have a functioning democracy

with these citizens' assemblies and citizens' juries, but we have billionaires, it's a matter of time before a billionaires find a way to rig the system. Hence, I also suggest things like having a wealth cap of $10 million. Anything beyond that, let's face it, it's there purely for status competition.

If we want to, we can give the billionaires a little sticker saying, congratulations, you want capitalism, we're all very proud of you. There's no reason that they should have more than $10 million to subvert democracy and potentially build up their and private armies. We need to start learning history. So in the book, I put forward all these kind of deeper changes we can make, these different forms of leveling power, and always put forward

very particular policies. And some of these are just pretty simple. If we want to actually address things like climate change or any other kind of environmental or social damage, all we need to do is to start making companies and others pay for the social and environmental damages of the economic activities. All that's doing is making the economy more honest. Right now, when you buy something, you're being lied to. It's not showing the full price of what that product or good is doing. It doesn't show you all the people who are dying of air pollution every year,

which, by the way, is roughly 90, 12 million people. Once we start to include them the price, just by being honest, you suddenly dramatically change the entire economy, the entire world. And I see all this is just basically doing the right thing. All you're doing is making the economy more honest, sharing power more widely, being more democratic, more free. These are all things that if we really value things like freedom, democracy and truth, we should be doing anyway. They just have the beautiful extra benefit of saving the world. Luke Kemp, the book is Goliath's Curse.

Where can people find this beautiful dream mirrored against the Star-Carrant? horror of history. It's published by Penguin, so you can basically find it in any major bookstore. I always encourage people to try to buy from your small independent bookstores. Bookshop.org is a great website that will get you the book from an independent bookstore. And they usually come pretty quick. That's how I got my copy.

Sir, thank you so much for coming onto Angry Planet and talking us through this. Thank you so much for having me, nephew. I really enjoyed the conversation. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Jason Fields and Kevin O'Dell. If you like the show, please go to Angry PlanetPod.com. Give us $9 a month. We are almost entirely listener supported, and it really helps us keep the show going. I've got a bunch in the can. I've got kind of a counterpoint to this coming out soon. It's not really a counterpoint. It's more of a more on the theme of maybe this isn't so bad what's happening right now.

Maybe it'll all be fine. some counter programming for the existential horror that's ongoing in your life. Anyway, we will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.