Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Society Is Closer To Collapse Than We Think - Luke Kemp

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Today on Open Book, we’re diving into one of the biggest questions in human history: why do civilizations rise—and why do they collapse? Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp joins me to explain why the forces shaping our future might be the same ones that brought down every empire before us. Luke Kemp is a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. He has lectured in economics and human geography and has advised the World Health Organization, the Australian Parliament, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and many other institutions. His research has been covered by media outlets such as The New York Times, the BBC, and The New Yorker. This book was a revelation, get it now: Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse here: https://amzn.to/4lrFlDm Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://linktr.ee/anthonyscaramucci⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Conditions apply. Lootable resources, monopolize weapons, and caged land. When you look at the very first states across the world, They're not united by agriculture. There's 10 places in the world that independently produce agriculture. Only five of them actually creates states. Wheat you can store for decades. It advertises itself through really high stalks.

It's the perfect tax crop. And that's the same for China with rice and essentially every other state across the world. They had other corn, rice, wheat, or a similar what I call ludicol resource. A resource that is easily seen, stolen and stored. But that often wasn't enough to make a Goliath. You also needed to have the weapons to take the resource. and people. And if you wanted to take the resources by force, you had to make sure people couldn't escape. What I call caged land. So Mesopotamia means the land between two rivers and Greek.

In Egypt, you basically buff between the Red Sea and the Nile. In general, when people become more dependent on crops and fields, they have to stay in one place. So that picture of monopolazal weapons, looted resources and caged land is essentially one of not glorious civilizations rising up, but instead of organized crime. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us now is a Cambridge scholar, Luke Kemp, but he's also a best-selling author, and he's written a book called Goliaths Curse, The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Man, Luke Kemp, what a title. But before we get to the book, I want to talk a little bit about you

and tell us a little bit about your background. Thanks to having me, evening. As you mentioned, I'm originally from Australia, as you can probably tell from the accent, and I was a lecturer in climate change science and policy. In the course of teaching that course, I realized that there are many other global threats that we faced, apart from climate change, and we had to address them all. If we decarbonize the economy by 2050, but we had a nuclear war in 2015, were unfortunately still doomed.

And that took me to the University of Cambridge to join the Center for the Study of Existential Risk. And existential risk is essentially anything that could cause either global side of collapse or human extinction. And this book took around about seven years to write, and it was my attempt to grapple with both, what are the root causes with the greatest challenges we face today, and how have societies dealt with and persisted for catastrophes in the past, and what can the tell us about a future? You're doing something here that I love, but I'm also afraid of. So let me tell you what you're doing.

You're saying something which I think categorically is true. And one of the things about human nature is we don't like the truth, Luke. You know, a homer told us that through the rhetorical device of the character Cassandra, right? She was trying to warn people about the destruction of Troy. Aaron Sorkin did that and a few good men. And we don't like the truth, right? So one of the things you say in the book is that you don't like the word civilization and that you see these things more as a political hierarchies.

And it's a little bit of a punch in the gut. So tell us why you say that. Why do you reject the word civilization to use your own words as too flattering? Civilization is too flattering for us slightly more intelligent than the apes. So go ahead. Tell me what you mean. Yeah, so one of the things I struggled with in the book is trying to use more precise, accurate definitions. We often forget that history is written by the 1%, who wrote the records,

and that has some pretty big ramifications for how we think about history. And civilization to me has always been a terror propaganda. When you go to write a book on collapse, you have to ask what's collapsing, and the natural answer here is civilization, yet when you look at the definitions, they're all pretty bad. They tend to be things like an advanced culture, which doesn't really help much and it's pretty biased against indigenous people. Or it's something like a checklist of different factors, things like long-distance trade, which technically all huntagavans have, or writing, which some of the biggest empires like the Incan Empire, which stretched all the way from Chile to Ecuador, did not have. Hence, when I actually looked at the very first states, Uruk and Mesopotamia or Egypt, what was uniting the United States? them was not something like big cities, for instance. What was uniting them instead?

Was he had a big change from living in a more egalitarian social setting to living in dominant hierarchies, in which a small group essentially dominated everyone else for the use of violence, extracted resources from them, and ruled through force. And when you look across history, that's the defining characteristics of what we call civilization. I'm a big Thomas Hobbes fan. You would say, what a hell is that possible? There's just something about that book. When I read that book, it resonated with me. And there's also, you know, they do teach the book at West Point.

There's a paragraph in that book about hegemonic behavior that they do teach at West Point. And Hobbs basically says we're at from a civilization perspective, or to use your terms, political hierarchy, we're at our most peaceful and most prosperous when there's one super powerful hegemon using their military might generally benevolently. suppressing the internecine conflicts. And so we can debate whether or not that that's happening right now. But the Hobbes' delusion is something I had not thought of. And you basically say prior to civilization, we seemed to be doing pretty well. We were less likely to die violent deaths. And so this notion that prior to civilization, life was solitary and poor and nasty and brutish

and short, not what you think. and I want you to clarify this stuff for us if you don't mind. So as humans, we've been around for roughly 300,000 years since what's called the Middle Paralympic, which was a period of ice ages, where the Earl World was roughly negative 5 degrees Celsius, and on top of that, roughly a third of it was covered by ice sheets. It was not an easy time to live. And yet when people like Hobbs talk about the state of nature, when we avoid, with no kings or emperors, that's the period they're really empirically talking about.

That lasted all the way into roughly 11,000 years ago. And when you look at it, we don't appear to live life sort of nasty, British and short. So first of all, in terms of violence, the best genetic in archaeological evidence all suggests that we had a violence rate of roughly 1,2%. So for every 100 people born, maybe one would die from lethal causes, which is pretty much the same as the modern world at a global scale today. On top of that, we seem to be pretty good at cooperating and trading. So all the way from the East Coast to West Coast of Africa, 120,000 years ago, we have evidence of trade in things like lithic stone tools, musical instruments,

as well as just basic genes and culture. And people weren't living in really small rag tag groups. Yes, Numerica Galateran and Hunter Gavras often do live in groups of roughly 20 to 40 people, sometimes ranging up to 200. But what we forget is those groups are often quite multicultural. So amongst the modern-day pneumatic egalitarians, only roughly 10% of their groups tend to be closely blood-related. And often have people who speak different tongues in the same group. And apart from that, one forager, or often than thousands of people across their entire life, because they're constantly moving across groups, which is why you get these huge cultural zones of shared culture genes instruments. And on top of all that, as far as we can tell,

our default mode of governing during that period was democracy. That's what we see of most Dominican egalitarians, is they don't have kings, they don't have hierarchies, they don't have any large levels of inequality. They tend to make decisions communally as a group, and often by consensus. This wasn't a clinical period. Infant mortality was still high, for instance, but we didn't have many infectious diseases. And if you lived to the age, of 18, you'll probably likely live a pretty good, decent long life. And one last thing is to remember that the way Thomas Hobbes described us as living nasty, brutish, and short lives would be an evolutionary recipe for disaster. We as a species wouldn't have survived the Ice Age.

Let's talk about this now, right? Because we go from this to rising hierarchies. You call it Goliath fuel. Okay, so what's Goliath fuel? Go ahead, Luke. Goliath fuel is lootable resources, monopolized weapons, and caged land. When you look at the very first states across the world, they're not united by agriculture. There's 10 places in the world to independently produce agriculture, but only five of them actually creates states. Compare Papua New Guinea to Egypt, both have agriculture roughly the same time, 7,000 years ago, yet in New Guinea they ever have pharaohs, they've built pyramids. The difference is what they're growing. In New Guinea, they have yams, taro and banana. Yams and taro, you grow underground. They're basically

invisible. And when you dig them up, they only last a couple months. Bananas last usually less than month. By contrast, wheat, you can store for decades. It advertises itself for really high stalks. It's the perfect tax crop. And that's the same for China with rice and essentially every other state across the world. They had either corn, rice, wheat, or a similar what I call lootable resource, a resource that is easily seen, stolen, and stored. But that often was enough to make a Goliath you also needed to have the weapons to take the resources and people. So in both the Near East, in neat and China, you see the first states appearing after you get the introduction of handheld bronze axes and swords. And if you wanted to take the resources by force,

you had to make sure people couldn't escape, what I call caged land. So Mesopotamia means the land between two rivers and Greek. In Egypt, you basically could buffer between the Red Sea and the Nile. In general, when people become more dependent upon crops and fields, they have to stay in one place. So that picture of Goliath fuel, of monopolazal, weapons, looted resources, and caged land is essentially one of not glorious civilizations rising up, but instead of organized crime, where you have protection rackets arising and then slowly expanding into larger and larger empires. So history is best told as a story of organized crime.

It's a Hobbesian, though, a little, right? I mean, it's like a... A little bit, a little bit, right? I mean, and, but, you know... I think Hobbs was wrong about our lives being nasty, British and short. He's wrong with the average individual, but he's right in a weird way that when you look at the rise of states, it's not being kind of gang warfare. I brought you on for a reason. We are tough on each other. I mean, your book has become a bestseller. Your book, I mean, I think the New York Times compared it and said that it's like pickety filtered through Mad Max and Fury Road, right? I mean, it's basically you're being named the best book of the year by the Sunday Time or by Kirkus, I should say, because of the strength of the messaging.

There's some good things that have happened in civilization though, or I would call civilization. What are the good things? Yeah, there's still a lot of good things that can arise up here. So first of all, you do eventually start to get lower rates of violence. So for instance, when you look at the first states appearing, there's a huge spike of violence. But once the empires are established, they start to quell internal resistance. You do, of course, get really cool new objects, palaces, ziggurats, great monuments. you also do eventually get big advances in science and technology.

Now, it's worth noting it's questionable whether you need to have these civilizations or Goliaths to do so. We had big advances in things like sailing, for instance, well before the first states popped up. And we even, for instance, had often cities and farms before you had elites inequality at Goliaths. It's worth noting that maybe the things we tend to associate with states, say, for instance, Settling disputes, providing basic goods and services, providing basic infrastructure, they're things that criminal rackets also often provide to the people they're watching over. So saying that something is an organized crime racket isn't necessarily a bad thing. They often do provide a whole bunch of goods and services.

And if you're extracted in resources from population, you have an incentive to take care of that population in a basic way. Again, I agree with all of this. You're saying something else in this book, which really resonates with me as an American. You've analyzed over 300 collapses. And you find that the average state lasts about 326 years. And the biggest ones are most fragile at the 150th year, right? And that's interesting because that's roughly the Great Depression for us, right? And that was a fragile period of time, which we had to dig ourselves out of and obviously led to the Second World.

war. U.S. is at 250 right now. It is. Should Americans be reading that as an actuarial table? Are we in trouble here in America? I wouldn't read it as an actuarial table. The range here is quite large. It goes all the way from the 14-year reign of the Chin Dynasty, all the way through to the Byzantine Empire, which lasted over a thousand years.

On top of that, I think states today quite different in some regards. For instance, most states throughout history haven't had things like a specialized police force, let alone into intelligence agencies. The US has both. And of course, on top of that, things like mass surveillance systems. So I think modern states have a whole bunch of mechanisms that should in many ways make them more resilient. The catch is that we're facing much more severe, pervasive threats than we could happen before. And on top of that, I think we're facing a whole bunch of new technological reality. which also make collapse potentially more likely and more likely to be global this time.

But I am worried, by the way, because I will also say this about America. We seem to be moving in 80-year cycles. We go from the Revolutionary War 80 years later to the Civil War. We have to redeem ourselves. And then we go from there to the Great Depression, which leads to the Second World War. And now we're 80 years out from the Second World War. We've seemed to have had roughly 383-year epics. and I think we're in a period now where we have to reflect again and see if we can find some level of renewal.

But, but I mean, let's go to one of your most provocative findings, at least this is my opinion, okay, that the states more aggressively subjugate women, the ones that do that are more prone to failure. Walk me through the casual mechanisms of that and why patriarchy is a cause. for fragility and is a symptom of decline. Yes, this is based on the work of several other scholars who looked much more closely at the gendered aspects of collapse. There's potentially several different reasons for this. I think one of the most intense ones is simply, when you have regimes that oppress women far more stringently, that tends to also be representative of regimes that are in general much more oppressive and much more extractive.

Overall, my big fear on collapse is what's called diminishing returns and extraction. Essentially, you get growing wealth inequality at a time, both because in general, capital increases more quickly in value than the labor does. On top of that, once you have power, it's easier to get more power. And as you get increasing levels of wealth inequality, you start to get more and more power concentration. So one of the best predictors of democratic backside today is wealth inequality. And as you get that, you basically get more extractive institutions.

They're taking more from the average person. And that has a whole bunch of knock on effects, including things like high levels of social political violence, more infighting between a growing group of elites competing for a small number of thrones, and high levels of corruption, oligarchies are less likely to address oncoming threats, a whole suite of different problems. But I see the gendered component as being, in many ways, more or less just a correlation for the deeper problem of extractive institutions. I think that it's about egalitarianism to me.

When I read the book, I'm like, if you're treating people more equally, you have longer duration. That would include men and women. It would include different ethnic people. It would include having some rights for slaves in the city of Athens, even as an example. Yeah. But the other striking idea in the book, if you don't mind, is that the collapse can be invisible until after it happened, meaning that we may already be living through phases of the

collapse, that these things have a tendency to be slow and they creep up on us. And so give us some examples from the book and from your research. Yeah, we tend to forget that clats can be quite a slow phenomenon and depends upon who you are and where you are. In the case of Rome, for instance, the political collapse is quite swift. You have two sackings of Rome, the emperor's deposed within the space for a couple of decades. And yet, when you look at say, for instance, the depopulation of Rome, which goes from being a million people to under 40,000, and the depopulation of surrounding areas, that takes roughly over a century tramfold. And similar, when you look at, say, big changes in the kingdoms that followed them,

changes in the military structure as well. Again, they usually take decades to centuries, potentially. And interestingly, when you look at both Rome, but also the late Bronze Age collapse and most other historical collapses, many of the people at time didn't really think they're living for a collapse. They would have seen the sacking of Rome. They would have seen individual disasters, but it was pretty rare they would step back and say, we're undergoing a societal collapse. And collapse in many ways seems to be a slow running process, but it has a lot of inertia, which of course raises the spectra of, are we going through a collapse today?

I personally don't think so. I think we do have room to pull back. But unfortunately, there are numerous danger signs, which I go through in depth in the book. Well, give us a couple. Well, if wealth inequality is one of the key issues here, then we've had growing wealth inequality since the 1980s. So there was a huge great compression in the 1940s and 50s, a combination of both the World Wars destroying old money, and also the rise of welfare states,

helped to compress it wealth inequality. That started to rise again, and in the 1980s, roughly 25% of global wealth was held by the top 1%. Today it's closer to 40%. Similarly, in the US, roughly a third of national household wealth is held by the top 1%. And on top of that, we're facing very different, much more acute threats. So currently we have nuclear weapons of roughly 12,000 in current stockpiles. And if all of those are used, you're looking at a global drop in temperatures of roughly 9 to 10 degrees Celsius lasting over a decade.

We're facing climate change. We're well-thready warmed by over 1.3 degrees degrees Celsius. And we could be warming by somewhere between 3 to 6 degrees by the end of the century. And on top of that, we also have the spectra of advanced AI systems and engineer pandemics,

which haven't hit us yet, but are plausible threats going to the future. So we have both growing vulnerability in terms of our wealth inequality. And I'd say that that wealth inequality is probably behind a whole bunch of the things we see across the OECD today. where it's the rise of the far right,

democratic backsliding, increasing polarization, all the things that people tend to worry about. And as mentioned, we also face these new threats. And a risk is usually fordive as a combination of your vulnerability, your threat, your exposure, and response.

We have worsening vulnerability, worsening threats. Our responses don't seem to be that good, to be frank. And on top of that, the exposure is now global rather than regional. There's resiliency in human beings. We both know that.

I'm sure you and I have been through our trials and tribulations. And there's resiliency in states. You know, how do you become, and I'll use your words, how do you become a more just collapse-resistant world? What are some of the things that that would require? Yeah, so in terms of resiliency, see, we are certainly resilient. And even after a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a nuclear bomb,

they still had a bank up and running two days later. And of course, individually, as a species, we've gone all the way from Sahara through to the Arctic. So I do think we're incredibly resilient in many ways. And what tends to make us even more resilient seems to be by having more inclusive and democratic institutions. So I looked across an interesting body literature, which tries to survey what societies have undergone different kinds of climate change in the past

and how have they fared, which ones have fallen apart, which ones seem to have prospered throughout it. And the equivocal finding from across, sorry, the unequivocal finding, I should say, from across these studies seems to be that more inclusive institutions often make for societies that are better adapting to climate change. And this also coincides with more recent literature and what's called disaster risk management, which basically looks at how people and communities survive during things like earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, even bombing campaigns. And again, one of the best predictors there is both a combination of state capacity but also

democracy. And this makes a lot of sense. When the state falls apart and you can't rely upon power structures, you tend to rely more upon the communities around you. And if you're already a bit more embedded into them, you have close social connections, things which are often built by having more democracy, you're more likely to survive, for something. On top of that, democracies tend to mean that elites are more responsive to oncoming crises and more responsive to the needs of people during a crisis as well. And on top of all

that, some of my backgrounds in what's doing forecasting and foresight, basically how do we better predict the future? And a common thread across most methods that work tends to be they involve getting together large groups of people, taking the average, and making sure they deliberate. They genuinely share information, change their minds and discuss. Something, unfortunately, we don't see in Congress too often, but that seems to help us as a species, as a collective, improve our decision-making. So for all those reasons, democracies in many ways seem to be a bit more resilient than other forms of polity throughout history.

It's incredibly well said. I mean, you're obviously a brilliant writer, and you've brought something new to the, you've bought something new to the experience, and so I give you a lot of credit for that. Thank you. Yoan Hari, who's a great writer, he said that we should read this book, your book, Goliath's Curse,

before your descendants find it in the ruin. A very catching blood. Right, you're right, you're like that, right? Okay, does this research make you more pessimistic or more optimistic about the world our children will inherit? writing this book made me more pessimistic about the future, but more optimistic about people. Before writing the book, I actually had fairly different politics. In many ways, I was a bit down to democracy.

I felt maybe we just needed an enlightened dictator. And I wasn't particularly optimistic about people and our ability to coordinate during things like disasters. But in general, I think we're pretty good at self-organizing. I think most people are pretty kind, decent, altruistic. That makes me a lot more optimistic about our ability to create new worlds and to potentially create better futures. But unfortunately, as a lad in the book, I think we're facing several underlying deep problems

that mean that the long-term future is likely to, over the space of decades or centuries, result in global societal collapse. Think of it in a very simple way of, If we have arms races and improving technology over the space of decades, where do we think that's going to end? Are we just going to always get lucky, like with nuclear weapons? And similarly, if we're constantly extracting more from the environment, over the space of decades, are we always going to have a plucky techno fix at the last minute?

I think these things will catch up to us, unfortunately. Right. Interesting. So, all right, so we're down to the last five words. I'm going to say the word. You're going to come up with an idea around the word that I'm... Are you ready? Okay.

Sounds fun. All right. So I'm going to say the word, uh, society. You're going to say what? Claps. Okay. Right. Okay.

I got that. Unfortunately. What about the word democracy? Justice. Okay. I say the word autocracy. Concentration. Okay.

Okay. Collapse. Extraction. What do you mean? So I mentioned extractive institutions that when you have societies that are more lopsided and you have a leaks taking more and more from the everyday person. That's a pre-percursor to collapse. Right.

That's happening, by the way. So we'll have to figure out a way to correct that. And, you know, we've got to be careful about the way we're corrected because you don't want to lose some of the market forces that have made people so prosperous. Yep. I say the word Goliath. You say what? Fuel. Yeah, that's the best. That's been great.

All right. Well, listen, I really have enjoyed this, and I appreciate you coming on. Ladies and Gentlemen, Luke Kemp, the title of the book is Goliath's Curse, the history and future of societal collapse. It's great to have you on, and I'm going to recommend this book to everybody, and it's a very provocative book. and there's a lot of truth in this book, which I find fascinating because Luke, as we both know, people don't like the truth, Luke. We don't like the truth. I think and hope sometimes they do it. I think that's one of the reasons why the book has had a successful entry to the marketplace

despite the fact being 400 pages is I think in some ways, even when it's unsettling, people do like certain that's truth. I would say there's groups of people who don't benefit for the truth and definitely don't like it. Yeah, amen. There's no question. All right. Well, listen, I appreciate you joining us today. Let's stay in touch if you don't mind. All right. Thanks again for being on Open Book. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CG's national series on the Canadian Standard of Living, Productivity and Innovation.

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