Factually! with Adam Conover - We All Feel Like the World's Ending Because It Is (Kind Of) with Lizzie Wade

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Do you have the not-so-creeping feeling that the world is ending? You might be right. The world’s ended before, and the world will end again—just not in the way we see in TV and movies. Lizzie Wade’s new book, Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, explores how events like the colonial extermination of indigenous peoples or the Black Death were the end of the world for the affected people, as well as what came next. This week, Adam sits with Lizzie to talk about why it feels like the world is ending, and what that actually means for us it’s true. Find Lizzie’s book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything.

Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me on the show again. I don't have you noticed, but we're living in an age where everybody feels like the world is ending and not for bad reason. You know, we got climate change that we are doing less about than ever. There's the advent of AI. There's dawning fascism around the world. Or if you yourself as a fascist, maybe the end of the world is day laborers standing around at a Home Depot parking lot.

Whatever, no matter who you are, anyone can find a reason to believe that the end is nigh, right? I mean, even in casual conversation, people talk about the future as though it might not happen. They say, oh, such and such will happen if we still have a democracy by then, if we still have a country, if the world still even exists. There's even a name for a person who has given up on the very idea of a future, the doomer, this archetype that encapsulates these feelings of fatalism that all of us have. In other words, shit has gotten pretty bleak. We all recognize that we're not just in a single crisis, but a tangle of interlocking crises, the environmental, political, and economic crises that are shaping our world. So you could be forgiven for thinking that this is it and that everything is about to end.

But here's the unfortunate fact we all have to face. The world is not actually going to end in total. You are going to have to get up tomorrow and enter the new world that is being created, just like every human has before you. And in fact, the world has ended many times before now. We have had apocalypse after apocalypse throughout history when one world ended and a new one began. And in fact, the world that we inherited,

that we live in today, would not have existed if not for this happening over and over again. I'm not going to tell you that we're not living in apocalyptic times, but what I am going to tell you is that apocalypse doesn't mean the end of everything. It primarily means the birth of something new. And we are probably going to be a part of what that new world is. We are going to have to live in it. And therefore, we need to think about how other societies in the past,

different people around the world have lived through the great calamities that already happened to them and that created the world that we live in today. And if we do so, that might give us a better idea of what lies in wait for us on the other side of our own apocalypse. And that is what we are going to do today. My guest today is absolutely incredible. I know you are going to love this conversation. Before we get into it, I want to remind you, though,

that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of our show ad-free. You can also join our online Discord community where we have awesome community features. We're doing a bi-monthly book club. We'd love to have you join us. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover if you'd like to join.

And if you'd like to come see me on the road, I am touring my new hour of stand-up comedy all around the country. Head to Adam Conover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. I'd love to give you a hug in the meet and greet line that I do after every single show. And now, let's get to this week's episode. My guest today is Lizzie Wade. She's a science writer, and she's the author of the new book, Apocalypse, How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures.

I know you're going to love this conversation. Please welcome Lizzie Wade. Lizzie, thank you so much for being on the show. show. Thank you for having me. So why do you think that at this moment in American history, people have started talking about our current moment as though it's the end of the world or the end of the country or started using these more apocalyptic terms? I mean, I grew up in the 90s. People weren't talking that way in the 90s. Yeah, me too. And I think, you know, it's people are talking like it, I think, because, you know, to be perfectly honest and scary is

like it could happen and it has happened in the past. And, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Those two statements are in conflict. You say, I'm like, why do people feel like it's the end of the world? You're like, could happen. World could end. And it's happened before. So hold on a second.

If the world's ended before, what the fuck are we doing here? What do you mean? I mean, that's a great question. I think that's part of what my book tries to answer. But I think, you know, that many, many people in the past throughout, you know, the 40,000 years of human history, at least that my book covers have felt these exact same feelings and, you know, that the world that they knew, that they live in, that they were used to, that they thought would continue for the rest of their lives, suddenly starts coming apart

around them. And that could be for many reasons, you know, climate change is a big one, but usually not the only one. You know, societal collapse comes for, you know, comfort kind of every society before the ones we know today. So in some senses, it's not an unusual or uncommon experience for people to have gone through. And I think, you know, when I, when I started out writing this book, I sort of felt like, oh, one of the things that will be unique about our time is how, like, aware we are. Like, I sort of imagined these apocalyptic events taking people in the past more by surprise because, you know, they didn't have like the internet and 24-hour global news and they weren't able to be aware of things

on the other side of the world immediately the way that we are. But I think actually one of the things I learned and concluded was that these feelings that we're feeling now, that you know, something is happening and we're not sure what or where it's going next are things that people have felt throughout so many societies and so many points in human history. But the argument that I have often heard before is, hey, people have always felt like the world is going to end, therefore it isn't. And there's some truth to that. You always wake up and have to deal with tomorrow. Like, and the lust for an apocalypse is in some way, you know, just part of the, I think, innate human thirst for death that, hey, if there's an apocalypse, it means I don't have to go to work tomorrow.

It means I don't, it means what I do right now doesn't matter. means I can get stoned and play Donkey Kong because there's no world tomorrow. And the unfortunate truth is if I get stoned and play Donkey Kong until 5 a.m., I am in fact screwing myself tomorrow because I do have work to do because I do have a rent to pay and that is not going to change. And the same is true of climate change and any other problem that we have where, in fact, in fact, unfortunately, there will be a world. And so normally we use this historical argument, a same as it ever was argument, right?

That's what I call these. is usually meant to tamp down despair and freaking out. Oh, don't worry so much. This is just same as it ever was. But you're kind of making a different argument. You're saying people in the past thought the world would end. And it did for them, in a sense. And it may for us, but we should conceive of the end of the world differently than we commonly do.

Is that the argument? Yes, I think so. You know, I think for me looking at, you know, I don't think that the statements the world is ending and the statement there's always a future are incompatible. I actually think they're kind of the same statement. Like there is there always will be a future. And the end sort of having to confront that what that future is going to be. Like the end of the world also means the beginning of a new one and actually living in

these moments like the one we do right now, like the ones, the people, you know, in many cultures over, you know, long spans of human history lived here in the past. Like, these are the moments, you know, these are not the moments where people give up. These are the moments where people have to be the most engaged, the most thoughtful, the most creative, the most forward thinking. And, you know, that's how these new worlds get created out of the world that is, you know, the past world that's being destroyed. Okay, that's the incredible adjustment you're making to our normal dialogue about

Apocalypse. Because instead of saying the world is ending, the end, blackness, it's over, everything has ceased, you're saying the end of the world always means the birth of a new one. And guess what? You're going to be alive for both, probably. Probably not, you know, I don't think you and I will get to the end of this story. Like, I think people very rarely live through the whole sweep of the process. But I think, you know, people who know us might, you know, grand children might. And I think that, yeah, kind of reconceiving of the end of the world as the beginning of the world. And actually, the ends of these worlds, you know, are often kind of the only, the best or only chance that societies really get to change on a truly fundamental and

very radical level. And sometimes those changes are not, you know, often those changes are not fun to live through. I'm not arguing that they're desirable exactly. But I, do think they're full of opportunities and the more like conscious we can be that we're living in a in a moment not of kind of increasing you know and not of diminishing opportunities but of just like exploding opportunities I think is like it makes me feel more you know not not in control of the event but it makes me feel like my decisions matter a little bit more and and you know this is a really interesting moment to be to be living through and like a one that's really full of opportunity. Right. The end of the world, the beginning of a new one is a moment

not of less opportunity, but of more because something new is being created. And there's new possibilities that did not exist back then. Let's get concrete and talk about some of the past ends of the worlds that there have been. You write about the black death, about colonialism. I'm also imagining like revolutions, like the French revolution is the death of one world if you're a French monarchist and the birth of a new one, right? And then, of course, the Napoleonic transition years later.

Where should we start? Let's start with the Black Death. How did the Black Death transform society, end one world and begin another? Yeah, great. That was one of the ones that was, you know, most terrifying to imagine, even as I was writing this book during COVID,

so it sort of seemed both more relatable and is just absolutely unrelatable and unimaginable, the scale of death and destruction that people lived through in a really short span of time. I mean, it took five years for the whole thing to be over in Eurasia. And if you lived in a city, it would come through in 12 to 18 months. And half of the people that you ever met would have been dead or more. Wow. You're living in a place. You're living in a city, London, any other European city, and the plague rolls through. And 18 months later, half of the people, people in the city are dead. Yeah. Wow. And I thought, you know, this was one of the ones that I was

like, oh, well, there's no way they could have known it was coming. Like when I thought about my experience, sort of knowing in those months before COVID hit where I live and, you know, in Mexico, where it's, you know, hit kind of March 2020 as well. And sort of knowing that something was happening, waiting for it, knowing that it wasn't quite here, thinking, will I know, will I know when it has started, all of that kind of liminal time. I think people in a lot of cities in Europe actually felt that way too, especially once you get like a little away from the Mediterranean up to London where it kind of came for the trading cities of Italy first and kind of around the Mediterranean and kind of worked his way north. And so London, by the time I hit there, they would have known exactly

what had happened in Florence and what had happened in Marseille. Wow. You know, they would have, and they actually prepared by building these huge mass graves, basically, like before the plague hit because they basically knew that was the only thing that they could do. Wow. So they were like, the plague is coming. Not let's try to stop it because we have no way to do that. But, hey, in other cities, they ran out of gravesite. So at the very least, let's dig some big fucking holes.

Yeah, basically. Jesus Christ. And, you know, at the time it was, like all of it was processed as a very religious experience, like, because that's how people, you know, that was sort of the framework that people lived their lives. So, save-bearing people, being able to bury people in hollowed ground, I guess, and, like, save their souls was really important. So, like, being able to prepare for a proper burial was, like, extremely, extremely important, you know, and as you say, it was sort of beyond their reach to actually stop the people from dying, but they could do something within

their worldview that did seem really vital. And they did. And so those graves now, hold, you know, all over Europe really, like when you can identify a plague, you know, sometimes they're called plague pits, which is a little, I think, disrespectful for the amount of planning and effort that actually went into these things. Hey, hey, hey, hey, buddy, it's not a pit, all right. This is a, this is a grave. It's got sides. It's got a bottom.

It was built by a professional. Anyone can build a pit. Only I can build a grave. That's what the, yes. They weren't just like tossing people in here. I mean. Sorry that my London Grave digger had a Brooklyn accent. It's the only one I can do.

So for the black death to be the end of a world, I can only imagine the number of dimensions that that would mean. The end of a social world, the end of, certainly I would imagine how much that would affect the economic system. If you're working in any particular business and half of all people die, that's half of your customers. It's half of your suppliers. I mean, to have that amount of people die all at once would be. devastating for any society, it would be, it would change the way of life for in every possible way. What are some examples? Yeah. So when you look at, you know, when people, because the, the scale of death was so massive and rapid, certainly people living through it who would write

it down, kind of experience this as like it could take anybody at any time, kind of random, indiscriminate. But when, when bioarchologists have actually looked at the people buried in these graves, particularly, in London, which, you know, England had suffered through a century of famines and crop shortages and kind of there was like a livestock disease like beforehand. That was really devastating for, you know, the food supply. And, you know, when you look at the skeletons of people who are buried in these mass graves, you can see that they tend to be the most vulnerable people in a society. So people who had previously suffered malnutrition who have, who had have all these like signs of other other diseases that they'd suffered through their lives

and those tended to be the people more likely to die in the black death and so extrapolating a little from that you can sort of see like okay this was a very unequal feudal society where you know I think there are economic there's economic studies of kind of the wealth distribution and it's just shocking I mean it's even it's even I'm not going to say it's worse than we are today but it's up there I mean maybe not numerically but there were probably more people people living in just abject filth, I would imagine. And they, and they really didn't have any choice in their lives. You know, you're built, you're born into a certain social status, not even a certain social status. You're built into it. You're born into a certain place. And that is a place

that you have to work until you die. I mean, peasants had no choice in where they lived, where they moved, where they worked, who they worked for, what they got paid, what they were able to afford to eat like nothing. It was very, um, it was, it was very limiting and very limited and it just became harder and harder over that century that led up to the plague, which kind of set the stage for all of these vulnerable people being hit by what was in by any accounts of devastating disease. And so it does seem that, you know, more what we would call today working class people, although of course it was, you know, they had different conceptions of this and words for it, you know, far more of them died than kind of the nobility. I think there's only like

one member of the English royal family who die and who dies in the plague. And it's because like she's on a trip to Spain or something. I mean, it is impossible not to compare what you've just said to COVID when you're describing it. In my mind, you're describing essential workers going to working at grocery stores because they've been deemed essential but not being provided masks and dying in larger numbers than laptop workers like myself who got to stay inside in order grocery delivery, those disparities are certainly still with us, but it sounds like they were perhaps magnified in some ways then. Also, the Black Death was many orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID even. Yes, many, many. I don't want to, you know, there were certainly like

completely haunting comparisons as I was writing this throughout the, throughout that time. But, you know, I still think that imagining what that was like was like beyond what I can, I can conceive of. I mean, it must have just been horrific. I mean, the psychological toll alone must have been extreme. And you can only sort of see that and kind of obliquely through the some written accounts, mostly by, again, like religious figures, like priests and people in monasteries. But the, so, you know, the transformation really happens, though, after the Black Death when so many people have died, so many, you know, yeah, again,

who we would call essential workers have. died and there's nobody left to do the work of keeping these manners running, keeping these society running, do the farming, do the tent to the livestock, make the food, harvest the grain. And, you know, all of these, the people who, you know, the way that we can see this is the elites writing down their experiences. And to them, this seems absolutely horrifying. It's like the world has turned upside down. All these people have power that never should have power. You know, why are they determining what they want to do and how much they want to work and how much they want to get paid? And, you know, obviously this opens the door. You know,

you can see a lot of a lot more social mobility. A lot of times you can only see this in the ways that the kind of elite social structure was reacting in kind of a backlash way. So they were passing laws for decades after the Black Death, trying to get people to stay where they were born, except the wages, the pre-plag wages, you know, go back to the way things were. And, you know, I think that backlash did have some power to, you know, constrict people's lives in a certain way again. But just like the length of time that that went on to me, like, I mean, it was decades after the plague had been fully done and probably most of the people affected by at least the later laws were not even alive when the plague had happened and to just like see those

social shockwaves reverberating through the society and people just refusing to go back to the way things were before despite trying you know the elite class trying to force them to I mean it was it um it was it was it was quite chilling actually the parallels Wow, right, the parallel to the post-COVID moment where workers are used to working from home or the labor market is tighter and they're saying pay me more, I'm going to go where I want, and then seeing the bosses say go back to the office and that sort of thing, that basically the gentry of Europe where I doth proclaim all workers must work in the field, better synergies come into play when we can see each other face to face. Like, as you pick my Routabagas or whatever. Mm-hmm. But did it lead to more lasting social changes in Europe? Like, obviously, there was some decades of tumult in a reshuffling of social hierarchies,

but did this lead to any broader breakup or disruption of what was a really strict social hierarchy in most places until then? Yeah. Interestingly, like, the social hierarchy did kind of, like, reestablish itself. I think there are other people who have made the argument that this was kind of like set the stages for, you know, capitalism to arise and kind of this, yeah, this sense that like labor was connected to, you know, it wasn't just like birthright. It was like things you had to choice over it. And I think that there are, there is probably some truths to that, although it took a long time for societies to really change. And I think other people have. have argued that, you know, you don't see, for example, like a societal or political collapse of the European system, like many of the countries, or at least cities that experienced these this plague are like the same cities speaking the same languages as we do today.

And like many of the other examples in the book, that wouldn't be the case. Like, there is a surprising amount of continuity. And some of that's because society was really kind of atomized in the first place. It was kind of based around these manners. And so, like, even though people were moving around more, like, the larger structure of it was kind of adaptable. There's also some people argue that it just happened so quickly that it didn't really, like, you know, it's hard to do a political revolution if you're, if everybody, you know, is dead, you know. And so I think the psychological toll was really huge. But you can see for several centuries, actually, the most interesting thing to me is, like, that the lives.

of the most marginalized people in, at least around London, which is where these studies have been done, their health was a lot better in the centuries after the plague. And it had been very poor in the century leading up to it, which made the plague worse. And in the century after, you know, there's fewer, there's less malnutrition, people are taller. There's kind of this bioarchologists always look for this kind of lines on people's teeth that indicate kind of a interruption in the growth during childhood and, you know, which speaks to like some kind of major physiological stress. People have less of that. And it just seems like it was a lot more pleasant, like the lives of even the poorest people in England, at least,

were a lot more pleasant and a lot more, you know, a lot more equal. Like actually, inequality really falls. it like plummets in the decades after the black death, like that's from data from Italy. So you can sort of see this like very, even though the structure of society didn't change, people were kind of like coming onto a similar level in terms of their health and their wealth and maybe not like power exactly, like political power. But it really did have, you know, and it wasn't like, you know, that didn't in any way make the plague like worth it or like not such a bad thing. I mean, I don't think anyone who lived through it would have ever said that, and I don't think they should.

Are you worried you're going to, you've got to really watch out because people who are still touchy about the Black Plague are all over the place. If you hint that the Black Plague was maybe a good thing, they're going to be jumping down your throat. I don't, you know, I, who knows, like, that's, I think there's a sense that, like, there is a growing sense that these diseases can take out the people who, you know, the weak among us, you know. And I think that that, I think it is, this is the very social structures that, you know, that make these inequalities so deadly are, you know, the ones that are setting you up to die of COVID or to die of the black death. I mean, it's nothing about people's moral good or even like physical fitness in a vacuum. But there are people pushing the ideology that death from sickness is a moral failing and that these kill only the people who deserve it. and that the strong of us will survive. There are people in real life now,

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What was the way that people were, sort of able to seize that new world at the time, if there was one. Yeah, I think, like, people were, you know, I think in the, in the, in people's, like, very personal lives, individual lives, something I could see in these documents was that people were just moving around much more than before, like, whereas before you'd be kind of, like, imprisoned on these manners working in the same jobs your parents had, you know, getting, you know, not enough wages to pay for your food. you could say like oh well i'm going i'm going over that like they're paying more over there like the

work is not as onerous like there's more opportunities that sense of like opportunity i think probably really springs from this moment and leads to a lot of the other things although you know i will say that this is not um yeah there isn't like an immediate political collapse which is surprising to me actually um but i'm imagining what it would be like to survive the black death. You're a peasant on some manner estate. You know, the Lord tells you where you can and can't go. And then half of the people you work under and work around die. Suddenly the manor estates in disarray. The Lord is dead. The butler is like, you know, and you're like, well, I'm going to get the fuck out of here then. Like, no one's, let me grab the key and leave.

Right. And maybe I'll go next door. Maybe I'll go walking around. I mean, it would be apocalyptic, you'd maybe be walking through an eerily empty countryside, like a character in Stephen King's The Stand, but, like, it would cause you to move from one place to another. It causes the social order to be reshuffled and new opportunities to grow. Yeah. And in Italy, like a lot of the estates got broken up because, like, basically their inheritance laws, like, it was like real chaos, right? As you say, and so, like, there was just, like, a lot more land available for purchase or for, you know,

different kinds of people to get their hands on in some way. And so like hereditary wealth gets really interrupted. And of course, like within the next few centuries of which plague continues to recur in all of these places, the elites that do pass laws to kind of make that social disruption that happened after the black death. You don't see it in subsequent outbreaks of the plague. And that's a lot of because of how like the legal system changed in response to like the explosion of opportunities and sort of, you know, more comfortable lives that became possible for people who they didn't think should have those comfortable lives. Wow.

So Black Death rolls through, kills half of people, but for some peasants, they end up with a more comfortable life. Okay. Yeah. Let's go to another example. In what ways would you consider colonialism and apocalypse? I love this example. I want to hear you break it down.

Yeah, so this is one, you know, that really comes from my experience living in Mexico City. I'm from California originally, but I've lived here for like 12 years. And I think colonialism for someone like me in the U.S. is something that I'm encouraged not even to see or think about. And in Mexico City, it's much closer to the surface because of the history here with the Spanish invasion and the war with the Aztec Empire is like, iconic you know kind of birth of the country you know speaking of end of one world beginning of the new one of the next one and um so you know for one thing that makes colonialism an absolute an absolute apocalypse is the scale of death and destruction that it wreaks havoc for centuries on indigenous communities not only indigenous communities to be honest like everyone was dying of disease at this time and i think it's a little bit overstated that you know indigenous Americans were simply like passive victims of these inevitable epidemics. And it sort of didn't matter what the Europeans did because these diseases, these new diseases were going to kill everyone.

I don't think that's true at all. I think these new diseases hit very often in conditions of just the very conditions that made people extremely vulnerable to the black death, right? Like famine, oppression, economic marginalization, increasing racism as the Senate. countries goes on. And, you know, those are really far more determinative than the actual fact of a disease or no. And so, but, you know, millions of people who, you know, would not have died in an alternative world did die. And these cultures and communities are disrupted. If, you know, I also, I think in Apocalypse, the, you know, it's always, there is always a future. always a new world. And there was a future for these indigenous people and communities. They were not

wiped out that, you know, there were not driven extinct. That's sort of a pernicious myth that many of us learn. But, you know, it was a extremely, it was extremely destructive and devastating. But I think it was an end of the previous world that they lived in. I mean, if you imagine being a member of any pre-contact civilization, any pre-1491 civilization, things are going one way. You're dealing with your own problems. You know, you're worried about your own nation

or empire's concerns. And then some people show up in some boats and you're like, oh, who the fuck are these people? And then 10 years later, everything is completely different and it's never going back, right? Like either you're at war or a disease has whipped its way through your community or suddenly, at the very least, there's new products and languages and, you know, new, uh, people have

whatever, uh, new technologies now, uh, new, new, new animal, new forms of livestock, new crops, new, just, uh, the, the, the, the people who came on the boats are now, they've set up a colony somewhere. They're living there. It transforms a previous regime that I imagine would have been stable for, for a longer period before that. Suddenly there's massive amounts of change. Your old way of life is gone. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the same. actually could be said for Europe, maybe not in terms of the absolute devastation and violence that people in Europe faced. But, you know, the new world was created for Europe, too, like all these different, all these new foods, all these people were actually tons of indigenous

people went to Europe, both, you know, by force and by choice. People from all over the world are mixing and meeting each other. And if we think of globalization as something that began in the 1990s, but it was already happening by the 1590s, you know, like it was like there were people from everywhere, all corners of the world meeting each other in Mexico City for the first time. And like that moment where everything is kind of up for grabs and, you know, that moment of kind of apocalyptic imagination and creation that is happening alongside and often because of the incredible destruction is, you know, I think very poignant to me and very like a very pivotal moment to imagine because of course the new world that is created out of that apocalypse

is the world we live in now, which is still a post-apocalyptic landscape kind of built from the rubble of this experience and in ways that I don't think we've really been taught, or at least people like me in the U.S. have never really been taught to appreciate. Yeah. And to the extent that we are taught to appreciate it again, it's to see the people who inhabited the older world that ended as passive, right? As the, you know, the Native American shedding a single tier, right? As the train rolls through or the cowboys show up or the litter, you know, goes across the landscape as opposed to people who are actively involved in creating the new world

because they happen to still fucking live here and took a part in it, right? So what are some of those stories of how those folks, you know, turned apocalypse. I was about to say turn apocalypse into opportunity. That's horrible, but that's a horrible framing that I really shouldn't have said. But to your point of, you know, there's a new world being birthed that everybody participates in. What are some examples of that? Yeah, everybody is participating in this. And I think the miss that I am hoping to kind of challenge in this book is that this was, yeah,

that there was sort of one side of this experience that was making the changes and the other side of this experience who was just suffering and dying. and the other myth is that that kind of that suffering and dying was inevitable. And I don't think anything that happened was inevitable. I mean, nothing in history is ever inevitable. It just seems that way, and, you know, 500 years later in the world, that that moment that grows out of that world. But going back to the beginning.

I mean, sometimes it seems that way in the present. Sometimes people in the present say, well, what's happening right now is inevitable. I can't stop progress. And it never, inevitability is fake. Yeah. Yeah. I think inevitability is totally fake in that sense that like, you know, human history is this trajectory of linear progress and all we have, you know, we've gone up and up and up and up and now

we're at the top and now the only place we have to go is down is I think like a really limiting and damaging way of viewing our selves in our history and our future. But anyway, going back to the people who actually participate in this colonial apocalypse. So, you know, I focus on the story of Mexico City, which is, you know, one that's close to my heart since I live here, but also I think does set the stage in many ways for many of the myths we have received about this event and this experience. And essentially, I think that, you know, one of the things we tend to learn about colonialism and maybe one of the reasons why we don't see it, where we don't tend to see it as apocalyptic is like we sort of think that the Europeans are in control of it in some sense. And

kind of they're the ones making all the decisions. They're the ones kind of pushing things forward or not. And I think when you look at the Spanish Aztec war, which I think, you know, usually gets called the conquest of Mexico. And, you know, I think it really should be sort of referred to as a Spanish Aztec War. Or you could even call it the Slashkletka-Mashika War because basically what happened was when the European invaders arrived, they kind of walked into this. political landscape that I think you could argue that they never fully tried to understand or never really understood. But basically you had an imperial power based in Tenochitlan, which is now Mexico City, the Mishika, who we now call the Aztecs, and, you know, who controlled much

of what we, what is now like kind of southern Mexico, today central and southern Mexico. and, you know, they were not, you know, the indigenous conceptions, or at least Mishika conceptions of empire weren't really about territorial control or kind of cultural imposition or conquest. Like it was more about tribute and taxation and kind of having access to the, you know, the kind of the luxury goods that these places would produce. And, you know, it all kind of fed back into making Tenochi-Land, like one of the greatest cities. the world has ever seen probably. I mean, it was such, it was even the, even the Spaniards who arrived are always talking about how it looks like something out of a dream and it's so clean and like

beautiful and it floats on this lake and it's just so fantastic. And, you know, but of course, because the Mishika were an imperial power, there's always resistance to imperial power. And one of the main forces of resistance was this republic just slightly to the east over the mountains. called Plashkala, which is now the Mexican state of Plasgala, and sort of the determining factor in the fate of the Aztec Empire and the success of what we think of as a Spanish invasion is not like the arrival of the Spanish or the horses or the guns or even the diseases. It's the Tashkata's decision to ally with the Spanish. And, you know, they were thousands and thousands of indigenous warriors who fought in this battle.

In both sides, of course, but like kind of the political maneuverings of this long history. Like, I really tried to see this moment not as like, it was a moment of a long and continuous indigenous history and indigenous relationships that, you know, Europeans and Africans also just kind of also happened to be around for. And like that, you know, and obviously the consequences of that decision, you know, they could never have predicted them. Like they could never have seen that far into the future. But also like our ideas about like even our racial categories,

like thinking of people as Europeans, European people, African people, indigenous people like those were not relevant categories to anyone at that time like even you know the Europeans came from all these different countries Africans would have come from tons of different communities and countries and indigenous people were not did not see themselves as like one mass like one passive mass of people you know like versus the Europeans it was much more complex much more complicated much more nuanced and I think understanding that just brings a lot of texture to yeah that world that creation of the new world um both in its complete tragedies and horrors and also it's its opportunities and sort of moments of

of new possibility you know like for centuries it seemed like the tashotega had been resisting the aztec empire for centuries in what was essentially a stalemate and you know suddenly these agents of chaos arrive and they're like oh what can we do with this you know and what happens next is not the aliens show up and and when the individual warring nations pick sides right to put it in science fiction terms. And it's not just like this story like inevitable triumph of superior technology or culture. It's like it's much more complicated and much more interesting I think and it's and it really like gives a lot of texture to how our world got formed and where we could go.

with it next, I think. Let me ask, how does that affect your view of colonialism overall? Because of course, you know, when we talk about colonialism here in the U.S., we are not brought up talking about how much it extracted from the countries upon which it operated, that is obscured from us in our history. And so we often, those of us who care about this will tend to put a lot of emphasis on, hey, colonialism bad, you know? Colonialism like ruined many, many places in the world. In fact, when you look at the entire world and all of its problems, you should look at it as a bunch of European nations went and extracted a bunch of wealth from other places

and built themselves beautiful cities. I went to Amsterdam last year. I'm like looking around going, this is like the physicalized wealth of many other nations went to building this beautiful city, right? I'm looking at coffee beans from Java and whatever the fuck else. I'm getting the crop strong,

but you know what I mean, turned into stone and artwork and beautiful things and that's a dynamic we have to understand about the whole world and so we often say that to demonize colonialism to say this was a bad economic system

that hurt people who was extractive at the same time you're saying look it's more complicated than that these are nations or places that had their own or places that had their own histories

that had multiple groups that had you know to which the arrival of the colonial power was maybe a small part of the history right and that they have agency as well so how does that

do those two things go together or complicate themselves for you, you know, the degree to which we want to have a moral judgment of colonialism as a system, but holding that next to, hey, the people at that time and those places also had agency. Yeah.

No, I think the moral judgment, my moral judgment is a strong and negative of colonialism for sure because I think, you know, a lot of the decisions got made. But I think it's like really, what it does for me is help me understand, you know, that there was, there was a long period of time where things were still being negotiated. And, you know, it helps

me break out of this sense that like, oh, it was over quickly. And the way things turned out had to be, that that's how it had to be. And so like everyone is kind of passive in that story, you know, including us living today or especially us living today who are just like, well, that was a shame. But there's really nothing anyone could have done about it. And there's certainly nothing we can do about it today. And like for me, I think thinking of these, um, of these colonial stories as more complex and far longer and involving far more, you know, kind of stories of different communities that took very, you know, a lot of different trajectories just makes me feel like, okay, this is a story that continues today in a very real way. Like it's not, it's not something that ended.

Yes. And I think that, you know, as you say, like Amsterdam is an, And a lot of European cities are like a manifestation of this wealth. I think about it, you know, in a way that I worry makes me like extremely irritating. It's like when you think about how used to how used we are, how much we're used to like the availability of sugar and desserts. And, you know, I watch the Great British Bake Off and I'm like, hmm, I wonder why they have these desserts. Like I wonder how all that baking became part of British culture, right? Yeah. Like I wonder where all that trigger came from to the point where these would seem like normal things to make. And, you know, I'd sort of, it has, I sort of feel like it's, you know, I can't do anything without thinking about it now. And it is absolutely horrifying. But I think what it does is sort of like, you know, for me, it, it, the thoughts that I hold intention actually are more like, okay, this thing, this horrible force in the world, it didn't have. to be this way. It hasn't ended. It's not over. This is still a very present thing shaping my life

and the lives of everyone I've ever met. And also, we can't really go back. Like, we can't turn back the clock and we can't say, you know, we can say we wish this hadn't happened. We can say we know it shouldn't have happened. But, you know, the tremendous damage and also, you know, beautiful museums and buildings and wealth, like those things all got built. And you sort of have to start from where you are now in terms of thinking about how to move forward. And I think that that's for me, that's actually where the idea of our world as post-apocalyptic seems to me like a great opportunity actually. You know, like it's never really worked. We're just clinging to this myth that this has to be this way because it's some kind of signal of progress. And yeah,

it was all inevitable. There was nothing we could do then. There's nothing we can do now. I think those are kind of the biggest lies that have ever been told. And I think when you sort of, I know when I've started to see kind of the cracks in that story and the ways that our world is, is suffering for the patterns and the, you know, the destruction that happened back then, it really makes me feel like, okay, like, well, things are, things are about to really change.

now. Like we, I think we are at one of, you know, I think we are at the beginning of something new. And I think it makes me far less afraid to think of letting the old world go when I think of where it came from and what it truly is and how much better it could be. Ooh. Okay. Yes. Well, when you, so I'm loving this. When you put today in its context as being built on many past apocalypses, past worlds that other people lived in, and their world was destroyed and became something new, became the world that we currently live in. That's happened multitudes of times. Well, one of the first things it does, it makes you less precious about the world we currently live in. Hey, you know what? Maybe things weren't so fucking hot right now a second

ago, you know? Maybe we could embrace there being something new to a certain extent. And then also when you have a view of the end of the previous world being caused by other people just like yourself and happening to other people just like yourself, right? Well, you're talking about the story of colonialism where, well, there's people in that story who are doing very bad things on purpose. There are people in that story who are doing bad things on accident. There are people in that story who are doing good things or things are the best of intentions, but, you know, they result in an outcome that maybe they wouldn't prefer. There's people who are victims and villains, certainly, but they're, they're not, they're not supernatural forces.

They're not, they're not like gods and demons and angels and, you know, they're all, they're all people and all of them had agency. All of them created the new world together. You might ask yourself, am I one of the good ones or am I one of the bad ones? And you might make a choice to try to make a world that's a little bit better than you would have an option of making. But the main thing is, you are not sitting there shedding a single tier for the world that went by, neither was anybody else, right? You're an active participant. Is that sort of part of the point? Yeah, I think we're all active participants, and I think a lot of the thing, you know, I think what sort of makes colonialism stand apart for me in how long it's

lasted, like, based, you know, compared to some of the other apocalypsees in the book, is that it really precluded the kinds of recovery that we, that we're able to see in other Apocalypses, which really come out of, like, new communities forming, new ideas getting invented, like new adaptations to a new reality. And I think, like, in a lot of senses, colonialism, you know, precluded those large-scale adaptations and large-scale kind of figuring out the best way, you know, these terrible things have happened. But, you know, working together, we can sort of figure out what we want to leave behind both from. the apocalyptic experiences and from the world we lived in before and kind of figure out how to

move on together that process really you know it kind of it was able to happen on very small scales here and there but it certainly that is not the process that led to the world that we live in you know colonial violence is the process that we're still you know if colonialism was so successful we wouldn't need to like continually reenact it and continually um impose it with you know violence around the world. And, you know, it was, it's, it's not like a natural adaptation to, to a new reality, which I think is when you have the most successful recoveries from apocalypse, the, that's what people are able to do. And I think, you know, we, we could go either way, you know, like, we could, we could be entering a moment where, um, the, the powers that be kind of

like after the Black Death, like where we let them really limit our choices or they, you know, deprive us of, of the power to decide for ourselves and work together and really look around and what's happening and what we, not only what we want to leave behind, but also what we want to create next. And I think, you know, the best, the most successful recoveries but from apocalypses are people, our communities that are able to do that together and really look forward into something new and different. You know, life's been a little crazy for me lately.

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before my eyes. I used to work in television. I grew up watching television. I wanted to be on television, I got to be on television. Television doesn't exist anymore. It's no longer real. Now it's YouTube. That's where I am now because that's where things are, right? And I spend time mourning that. I'm like, oh, I really missed that. I thought that was better in a lot of ways than YouTube. We don't need to get into it. I've talked about in other episodes. Or I think about you know, the wanton destruction that's being done to our system of government. I did an entire six-episode Netflix show about many of the problems of government. but many of the good things as well, many of the people who are, I had incredible respect for

our weather science apparatus, for instance, like these incredible scientists who work in the public good. I met them. I'm like, oh, these are some of the most civic-minded people I've ever met. This is a purely good thing on this earth in a world that needs more of them. And I developed a love for 80% of those people have now been fired with prejudice by the federal government. I think about, you know, how much I love nature. I was brought up loving nature by my parents. how much of that, you know, natural ecosystems are continuing to shrink the, you know, the biggest bill that ever would have protected the environment to some degree. The Inflation Reduction Act has been just torn to shreds by the new government, et cetera. And so I could sit around and

mourn those things, and maybe I should because there are going to be some bad things that come from that. But I could also look back at all those systems and things that I'm mourning and saying, well, hey, it wasn't all great. You know what I mean? Commercial television, not perfect, right federal government hurt a lot of people right did a lot of bad things um not like our current systems of environmentalism were working that well and i could say instead well now that all the sandcastles have been kicked down maybe it's an opportunity to build some better ones maybe it's an opportunity to build some to think about hey what kind of systems do i want built and that folks who agree with me we could do that collectively maybe uh you know hey maybe if a whole

bunch of people are getting kicked off their health insurance tens of millions by the government maybe that'll be an opportunity for us to come up with a better social health insurance plan, for example, in a couple of years after a lot of people die, not saying it's a good thing, but, you know, that that is the opportunity that comes out of such incredible destruction. Is it something like that? Yeah, I think so. It's like, you know, I think that these moments of apocalypse, which, you know, we've talked about with colonialism, it was, you know, really caused by human beings.

like not all of them are like obviously the plague was you know experienced and what as a literal act of gone by the people who were who lived through it or didn't live through it as a case maybe a lot of these apocalyptic forces are not really in our full control um you know even something like climate change which of course is caused by human activity but you know even if we stopped emitting CO2 into the atmosphere tomorrow. We've still locked in decades or centuries of pretty extreme climate changes already, including quite high sea level rise. And we're going to have to figure out a way to deal with that and how it is going to feel to live in that world. And so, you know, I think mourning these past, what we're losing is really important and, you know,

really thinking about what we're missing from what are we mourning exactly and how can we carry that forward into new systems and really thinking about like how you know like these are the moments when everything starts to break apart and I think that that you know it just provides an incredible opening for new ideas. And, you know, it makes things that previously seemed impossible are all suddenly possible. And I think that that is not, you know, it's not a pleasant thing to live through, even though I'm sort of giving it like a more optimistic spin. I mean, I think we, I know that's a feeling I vividly remember from March 2020 where it was like, oh, everything that we thought, like everything about the world I thought I was living in

was just kind of made up and vanished overnight. And like, that can happen. You know, I didn't know that could happen. I didn't know how that would feel. And now I do. And I think that that was, you know, so scary to a lot of people that we've retreated from that experience and that kind of, you know, opportunity or really demand from the universe that we like expand our imaginations as to what is possible for our lives and societies.

And but, you know, I think, I think these moments come where you don't really get a choice anymore and like that you only have your expanded imagination. And I do think that people in the past, you know, I found it really heartening to see how people did reinvent things and did continue to go forward and did, you know, and often it was really hard during, it was hard after. like it's never easy um but that you know i think i think when i think about the destruction of of the federal government in the u.s like it's sort of you know it's kind of the uh culmination maybe uh of this sort of resource extraction inequality uh oppression you know elite hierarchy mindset of where like one um you know of of of colonialism you know it sort of seems like okay we're

reaching like the apotheosis of of that uh yeah apocalypse and post apocalypse and and seeing all of that break apart is absolutely horrifying and yeah it's it's certainly in kind of those cracks and those um those pieces you know i don't think anyone at any point wish like wishes for these experiences but I think when people go through disasters and you see this in the past archaeologically you see this you know just in newspapers in the present like when people go through a disaster um we expect it to be you know a pure tragedy a pure you know make people territorial make people um kind of out for themselves uncooperative more violent um and that is so rarely what happens. Like, it only happens when resources are being artificially limited

by some outside forests or power, you know? And when people are, you know, over and over again, when people experience disaster. And I've had this experience myself after the earthquake in 2017, Mexico City, and just watching the city come together to help each other, you know, it's like people will, people ran towards the, the collapse. buildings, you know, like anyone who could get there was running towards the places and the people who needed the most help. And I think that that's not part of how we think, how we're sort of taught to think about disasters and catastrophes and apocalypses, but it actually comes from, it's like a very, very deep human impulse and stretches like all the way back in our species

histories. And I think that that piece of ourselves and peace of our, you know, past and our nature and who we are deserves like just as much credit and just as much inclusion in how we imagine kind of the worst experiences that we can go through. Like that doesn't, it doesn't turn us into monsters. It actually, in some senses, brings out the best in us. Yeah, we've done it before. There have been previous times a great calamity that resulted in very positive changes in societies in the United States, you know, the Great Depression into the FDR era, right? That's like one of those great swings that we can talk about as just an affirmatively good thing, as dark sides like any part of American history, but where that, you know, sort of falling apart of society led to

a rapid rebuilding for the better and a regime change for the better. And I think maybe what those of us on the progressive left, or perhaps we might say the the pro-human, pro-truth, pro-world improving part of our political culture, we could take the lesson that, you know, from what is happening, that more things are possible, not less. I mean, I would look at what, you know, the forces of the destruction, the anti-human, you know, right-wing, you know, greed-based forces looked at COVID and said, oh, well, hey, if all the society is fake, then why don't we just win? Why don't we just do everything we ever want? on to do. Why don't we kick down every castle? Fuck it. Fuck it. Why not? And they,

they turned out, it worked. You know, they just, fuck, they just shut down the corporation for public broadcasting. They've wanted to do that for like a, for like, since 1970. You know, they're, they're destroying the Department of Education. My God, this is like stuff that, they're the dog that caught the car. They're so happy, right? And the, and people on the other side are going, oh my God, the world is over, right? Why not take the lesson? Hey, guess what? victory, ultimate victory for your side could be within your grasp as well. You know, like the fall of the old regime means that everything is on the table. Why are you weeping and crying and rending your garments when, in fact, the vacuum that you could fill is even larger, you know, the degree to which the people are realizing, oh, the world of the 90s that we grew up in, that I grew up in, that, you know, or whatever, the previous regime is, is a lot, it's more fragile than we thought.

like a lot of people are still sitting around going like can you can you believe this is happening could you what what blah blah blah blah blah and like the people who get past that and say yeah no the world's fucking changing let's change it my way right let's have agency let's not just be crying on the sidewalk but let's do something about it those are going to be the people who create the new world and you can be one of them perhaps yeah yeah I think so it's it's I think that there's a real, it's been quite depressing to me to sort of see the lack of imagination on the American left, at least to just, you know, when so much destruction is going on from the right wing, like it can seem like the best thing you can do and hope for us to defend the status quo. But, you know, the status quo was not that great. And like the people's dissatisfaction with is what led to. to this rise in power of people who want to destroy it,

you know, in the most chaotic and horrible and unequal and, you know, just the apocalyptic way possible. But I think having a vision of, you know, not trying to, like, I think the worst, you know, I think I just find the phrase go back to normal, especially after COVID, to be like completely offensive and horrifying. And like almost the worst thing you can say, like, there is no back, there is no normal. Like we have to look forward and I think we have to take big risks and big swings and

big ideas because this is the moment. These are the times when a society can and does really change. They have to. And how, you know, if we want to participate in the direction of that change, we need to accept that that's where we are. And that was the biggest mistake that, you know, the Biden era made on the side of, you know, anything left of center was the desire. Hey, well, let's just go back to normal. Let's just, hey, let's just put American society back together. Jeannie was out of the bottle, turns out.

Like, it was a fake normalcy. You know, in fact, we were still living in the Trump era, still living in the COVID era, still living in the era when, you know, the capitalist systems are breaking down where the stock market is hitting record highs, but people can't afford basic necessities. We're still living in the gilded age and putting the guild back on. doesn't, you know, change the reality that we are careening towards, I don't know if it's a depression, but we're careening towards something new and that realizing that, oh my God, you know, we can't just, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer didn't figure it out, but maybe the rest of us can.

And the amount of imagination and opportunity that that brings us could be a lot larger than we expect. I think all the time about the Ursula Le Guin quotation, I'm sure you know the one I'm about to say. I'm going to butcher it. I'm not going to remember it exactly. But it's, you know, capitalism seems inevitable and unremovable. But at one point, so did the divine right of kings.

That's the quote of something along those lines. And we talked about, you know, how the, you know, there have been apocalypses that affected the divine right of kings in the past, right? We don't believe in that anymore, or at least in far fewer places around the world. And the same could be one day true of the system that we live under. It will be true one day. It will be true. This is a bold prediction.

Well, eventually. I'm not sure that I'll live through it, but I think, you know, a truth about societies is that is that they end, you know. And that doesn't mean that civilization ends. It doesn't mean it results in a dark age. It often results in something, yeah, more flexible, more creative, more equal, more interesting than what came before. You know, some of the examples of my book are like ancient, you know, the fall of the of Old Kingdom, Egypt. I mean, it goes way far back to almost the first kings in the world. Like, they eventually, these systems that have organized themselves to seem inevitable have always come

apart. And I think that, you know, the more kind of unequal and hierarchical as society gets, the more vulnerable they get to these apocalyptic forces because it just becomes very brittle and unable to adapt. And I think that was part of, what we could see with COVID, just at least like a shadow of that experience, at least, like, of a system that we'd constructed to not be able to handle these shocks. And yet we know more and more shocks are going to be coming and they're just going to get bigger and bigger and more and more shocking. And I think that that's, you know, we're backing ourselves in, we've already backed

ourselves into a really tough corner and we will get out of it. I mean, I'm, I used to think that humans, that it was a real, that there was a real chance that humans would go extinct from, you know, anthropogenic climate change. I don't really, I don't think that anymore. I think we will survive and we will make it through, but things are really, are really going to change. And I think kind of leaning into that change and embracing that change, it's like resisting the change that gets you into real, into real trouble, I think. and sort of embracing the possibility, yeah, all of the new possibilities and all of the new things you're able to create and be stepping into the new world instead of staying clinging to the old one is, I think it's going to be like a very powerful, the people who are able to do that are going to have a much more pleasant experience over the course of their lives. and I think are going to be able to kind of enact much more, much more power over the society that we have, you know, building the society that is going to come.

That is such a beautiful way to put it. And I'd love to end us there, but I just have one final thought I want your question on, which is I want your answer to, which is that something distressing that I see is I see young people. And I'm a, I still consider myself a more or less young person. I'm still on the first half of my life, hopefully. but people who are younger than me have a fatalism

about the world ending. I think about this it's personified so much by Bo Burnham and his work inside that he did during the pandemic which of course is brilliant but it has this

fucking world weariness to it you know? He's got this all these songs about the world ending that's what they're about and oh it's all gone it's all past

like it's so sad and he's also got a song about how he's turning 30 in that p i'm turning 30 like it's the end of some fucking you're 30 man you're a third of the way through your life you're young i watched that when i was like 39 i was like stop complaining like you got your life ahead of you right and so that that's how i feel a lot of times when i see you know tic talks about you know where like people who are 26 are doing nostalgia content not just about how oh didn't you like the TV shows of the past, it isn't that fun to think about, but like, oh, life was

better and oh, things are bad now and we're just not going to, you know, the world is getting so bad and, and like this, this throwing up the hands and sort of like fainting onto a couch and giving up is, and I'm painting with a broad brush here, but I see that, that tone everywhere. And what do you think is causing it and how do we shake people awake to their agency that like my god you are going to create the world of the future so fucking do it you know yeah i think it's a great question and i wish i had uh i wish i could just shake everyone into a new awareness i mean even me you know it's it's it's really tough and it's it's tough to feel like the world that you were promised and the rules that you were told to follow are not going

to get you you know have not gotten you the results that and that's the disappointment, right? People feel lied to. They feel lied to about they were told this is how the world is supposed to work and they learned it's false. But here's the thing. Every generation learns that. Every generation, parents teach their kids. The world is the way it is on purpose. And it was designed that way because things are good. And then you hit 25 and you're like, oh, fuck, it's all chaos and nonsense and everyone's a moron. We all have to learn that. And so we're all lied to and we have that moment. But it's, I understand that pain. Yeah. I do too. And it's, you know, I think it is. it is extremely painful and I and you know my I think what what what helps me is when with what we were talking about with colonialism actually it's like the lies are bigger than I ever imagined like the lie is everything like and like the and getting angry about that and getting like truly not just getting disappointed about what I'm supposedly missing out on by getting angry that I was ever taught to want those things in the first place, that it was ever, that society was

set up in the way it was, you know, and it shouldn't have been, and it grows out of these horrible moments of destruction and oppression. I mean, that really makes me livid. And yeah, I think there's like a lot of that anger in this book of like, what would I have been able to, What would I have been able to do or know if I had been told these true stories? And I think that that, like, getting in touch with not only the true stories, but also how that makes you feel and how, you know, what has been concealed from you. I think this is sounding a little conspiracy theory, but I do think that the lies of inevitability and progress have done extreme damage to the way. that we think about ourselves and our effect on the natural and our literal effect on the natural world. And I think that there's just so many different ways to be human, so many

different ways to have a society. And, you know, just kind of getting in touch with just a few of them in the book really made me feel like, wow, there's so many possibilities out there that nobody told me about and actually people lied to me about and like kept from me. And I think that that, you know, feeling that kind of sense of betrayal actually can lead to some good places. Like if you are, allow yourself to feel it. Like I think that one of the things, you know, one of my takeaways from the whole COVID experience was like, you know, especially U.S. society is like really bad at dealing with grief. And we really didn't take the time to fully mourn what we went through, grieve the people we lost, grieve the lives that we thought were

possible, that, you know, were revealed to not be the lives that we're going to have next for whatever, you know, myriad reasons caused by the pandemic. And, you know, I think not being scared to, yeah, get in touch with those, to really feel those losses and to accept them and admit them and mourn them is sort of like the first step in in thinking about what comes next and what comes into the future. I don't think you can just like jump to this kind of utopian vision of apocalypse like without doing some, you know, going through the quite difficult emotional experience first. And so I think, you know, but again, you know, these these experiences are coming for us and and at a certain point you don't really get a choice anymore and I think

that that is very scary but also um you know there there will come a point when people will have to get off up the couch and like you have to make the new world and you know people have always have always done it and I think that seeing ourselves as you know the descendants of you know millions of people throughout history who have confronted, you know, a very similar experience, even similar emotional experiences to what we're having now and did figure out ways forward. I mean, I find that I used to feel very alone in this climate change moment. And, you know, I think writing this book not only, like, I'm not sure that it, that it's quite right to say that it made me more hopeful, but it certainly made me feel less alone

in what we're all going through and what is possible. possible for us. Yeah. Well, hope is, hope is the wrong word, you know, uh, I,

I have started to say, fuck hope. Because hope is like, hi hope. You know, I'll sit around and like, oh, hope things get better,

you know, I'm not going to do anything about it, but like, maybe someone will come along and do something for me, you know, that was the Barack Obama approach. Oh, hope.

Oh, hopefully that guy will help. Well, he, you know, not, didn't do as much as we hoped. Right.

as opposed to, it's a passive word, as opposed to seeing yourself as part of history. And look, the new world is going to be created whether or not you get off the couch, right? So you might as well. And be a part of it and make it a little bit better. You always have that opportunity. We are always creating the future. And we are living in a present that other people created in the past.

And, you know, I think having that full picture of it, I don't, it's too reductuous. Oh, does it give you hope? Does it make you less empathetic? It's make you less hopeless. I don't know. It gives you more power if you understand it fully in its fullness. The line of history behind you and ahead of you with clarity and you dispel all the lies because the lies are designed to keep you helpless, you know?

And if you just, if you only get so far in dispelling them that you're just, again, feeling helpless on the couch, you haven't dispelled the lie all the way, you know? And so I really love you. your book because you're approaching this with such nuance and clarity and, you know, taking me through a next level where all those old emotions don't even apply and I can just get busy creating and living, you know? And so I can't thank you enough for coming on the show. The name of the book is Apocalypse, how catastrophe transforms our world and can forge new futures. Did I get it right?

Yes. You can get a copy, of course, at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. and I hope you do. This would be fun to do as a next copy, as a next installment of our Patreon book club, maybe I'll suggest to our community. Where else can people find you out there in the world, Lizzie? Yeah, so the best way to follow my upcoming work is through my newsletter,

which you can find at lizziewayd.com. And you're absolutely brilliant, and I hope that people follow you there. It's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much, Lizzie. Thank you for having me. It's been delightful. Thank you once again to Lizzie for coming on the show.

If you want to buy a copy of her book, once again, head to factuallypod.com slash books. Every book you purchase there will support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you'd like to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Khan over five bucks a month. Get you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the credits of the show and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues. This week, we got some new supporters. I want to thank Jake. I want to support Callan, hey, look at distraction, Uber Elder, and Evarri.

Eggburger. If you want me to read your name or silly username at the end of every episode of the show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. We'd love to have you there. Once again, if you'd like to come see me on the road, head to Adam Conover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. I would love to come see you on the road. Of course, I want to thank my producers, Sam Radman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at Headgun for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast. What's going on? It's Lamarne Morris.

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