➡ The world is facing risks that could lead to global devastation, such as nuclear weapons, advanced AI systems, and potential engineered pandemics. These threats are a result of inequality and power concentration. The rise of AI could replace many jobs, leading to loss of bargaining power and political voice for many people, and potentially increasing mass surveillance and democratic backsliding. The interviewee, Luke Kemp, a researcher on existential risk and societal collapse, discusses how civilizations fall when they become too complex, and how wealth inequality can make a state increasingly fragile until it collapses due to various threats.
➡ Wealth inequality is increasing globally, making countries more unstable. However, modern states are more resilient due to advanced systems like police forces and surveillance. Technology can sometimes level the playing field, but often ends up being controlled by the wealthy. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could further increase wealth concentration and surveillance, potentially leading to autocracy rather than collapse.
➡ The world today faces many new threats due to our increased global interconnectedness and advancements in technology. These threats include cyber attacks, bioweapons, artificial general intelligence, nuclear weapons, and more. However, these threats are not created by all of humanity, but rather are a product of inequality and vast concentrations of power. The author suggests that addressing these inequalities could potentially slow down the pace of these threats and make the world safer.
➡ Data is the new ‘kingdom’ in our interconnected world, but it’s not all good or bad. While it can help us, like touchless technology reducing the spread of diseases, it also makes us vulnerable, like in the case of cyber attacks. Technology is a double-edged sword, providing resilience and vulnerabilities. The future is uncertain, with the possibility of a global collapse due to our reliance on dwindling fossil fuels and the fragility of our tech-dependent world. However, history shows that collapse isn’t always negative, as it can lead to healthier and fairer societies.
➡ The text discusses whether societal progress requires catastrophe or collapse, using examples from history and video games. It suggests that while some believe a “new world order” might only emerge after a major conflict, progress can also come from shared social struggles and technological change. The text also explores the idea of wealth inequality and how it has historically been leveled through major events like wars or societal collapse. Finally, it debates whether societal decadence can lead to downfall, with the author arguing that strong social safety nets and unions can actually foster innovation and risk-taking, rather than creating dependency.
➡ The text discusses the potential dangers of becoming too reliant on state or power structures, suggesting that societies that provide more public goods often experience deeper collapses. It highlights the importance of having strong social networks and skills to survive in times of disaster. The text also debates the negative effects of decadence and overconsumption in modern society, and the potential for societal collapse due to these factors. Lastly, it discusses the role of technology and resource constraints in societal stability, suggesting that while we are not currently facing significant resource constraints, the declining energy ratio could lead to a slower societal collapse in the future.
➡ The text discusses the potential risks of societal collapse due to factors like nuclear weapons, climate change, and wealth inequality. It also highlights the importance of being prepared for such scenarios, recommending stockpiling freeze-dried food. The author expresses concern about the concentration of power and the potential for mass surveillance and autocracy, suggesting that more equality and shared control could help prevent this. However, they also acknowledge the difficulty in predicting the future and the potential for different outcomes.
➡ The text discusses the importance of privacy and the dangers of mass surveillance, using historical examples like the Nazis’ use of archives to track citizens. It emphasizes the need for decentralization and democratization to ensure the state serves its citizens. The text also highlights the value of understanding technology and being prepared for its potential misuse. Lastly, it suggests that addressing issues like climate change, nuclear weapons, and AI, and reducing power differences between common people and elites, can help create a better world.
➡ The text discusses how humans are naturally good at cooperating and self-organizing, but certain conditions can lead to the rise of harmful individuals and systems. It mentions experiments showing that people can be influenced to act against their conscience, and warns against the belief that we’ve evolved beyond such behavior. The text also discusses the tendency for people to turn to authoritarian figures when they feel threatened, and how this can lead to harmful regimes. Finally, it criticizes the use of emergency powers during crises, arguing that they often do more harm than good and that ordinary people are generally capable of responding well to crises.
➡ The discussion revolves around the increasing political extremes in the U.S., with the left and right becoming more hardline. However, it’s suggested that both sides actually agree on many important issues, like greater democracy and universal healthcare. The speaker, Mamdani, a social democrat, advocates for policies that alleviate the cost of living for ordinary people and increase citizen participation in politics. The conversation ends with information on where to find the speaker’s book, Goliath’s Curse the History and Future Cytoclapse.

We do live in a time where suddenly we have risks that could plausibly and scientifically lead to devastation at a global level. We have nuclear weapons, we have potential advanced AI systems, and even the potential for an engineered pandemic. All the threats we’re dealing with are the product of inequality and vast concentrations of power. Collapse, when it occurs, often is accompanied by glutter violence. It’s not everyone trying to kill each other, but usually small groups of armed young men trying to recreate this power structure and, and previously that battle was fought with muskets, iron weapons. Today we have nuclear weapons and killer robots, AI in particular, large language models.

The key point of them is to essentially replace white collar jobs. If you replace large amounts of people, it means they lose their bargaining power. If they lose their power, it means they’re less likely to have any kind of political voice. And you’re likely to see a supercharging of things like mass surveillance and democratic backsliding. Growing wealth inequality has a whole bunch of knock on effects that make an empire a state increasingly fragile until it’s knocked over by some kind of combination of different threats. Follow the money, follow the actions. It’s pretty clear they don’t care about democracy.

World War three is already happening. This is a house of cards and it is in the process of collapsing right now. You’re going to see an economic crash the likes of which we’ve never seen. Hi folks, Canadian prepper here today on the channel we have Luke Kemp, who’s a researcher focused on existential risk and societal collapse, with an academic background in existential studies and protracted global catastrophes. He’s the author of Goliath’s Curse, a book that digs into how civilizations fall when they get too complex, why breakdown can be abrupt and what patterns keep repeating across history.

Today I hope that we can use that lens to talk collapse in the real world as it pertains to the events going on today, what actually drives it, and what gets misunderstood by some people when we talk about societal collapse, as well as what warning signs we we might be seeing right now. So this is a very complex topic. This is a very dense work. I know you have done three hour podcasts on the topic. I’m hoping we can kind of distill it down to its core rudiments today. But in plain English, what do you mean by civilizational collapse and what counts as collapse versus well, we’re just going through a tumultuous decade.

First of all, thank you for having me and happy to keep it as concrete and concise as possible. When we talk about collapse, we talk about the contraction and fragmentation of different power structures. When a state falls apart, we call it a state failure or a state collapse. When an economy crashes, we call it an economic collapse or an economic depression. When all the different power structures go down together, we call it a societal collapse. I personally tend to avoid the term civilization in favor of a term which I use in the book Goliath. Hence why it’s called Goliath’s Curse.

Namely because most of the definitions we have for civilization tend to suck and tend to be really biased. Like the idea of an advanced culture in general. When we actually look archaeologically at what’s happening, when we see the rise of the first civilizations, the big thing is you’re seeing a switch towards societies based on domination. Hence the term Goliath. Okay, And I know you’ve talked about how history is a story of organized criminals. Can you expound upon that a little bit? What do you mean by that? When you look across the world to see what’s the commonality of where states arise? So the first dynasty of Egypt, Uruk and Mesopotamia, the Shah dynasty in China, there’s some pretty clear elements that they all share.

Interestingly, it’s not just having a surplus. That was the common probably nif you’ve heard from people like Karl Marx, Jared Diamond, Adam Smith is that once we had enough resources, we could pay for people to not be farmers, but instead to be landlords, managers, kings, bureaucrats, et cetera. That doesn’t quite make sense. Across the world, we have 10 areas that have agriculture, but only five of them develop states. What’s useful is to compare two different areas which both have agriculture but didn’t want to have state and the other one did not. So compare Papua New guinea to Egypt.

Papua New guinea never develops. Pharaohs never has pyramids. The key difference is they have agriculture. But they’re growing bananas and taro. Bananas you only store for roughly a month, taro, six months. Taro you grow underground. So it’s pretty invisible. Wheat, by comparison, which they grew in Egypt, is easily seen, stolen and stored. You can store it for decades on end. It advertises itself with tall crops when it’s ready to be harvested. And across the world, lootable resources. There’s resources that are easily seen, stolen and stored. Things like rice, wheat, etc. Are what characterize the earliest states.

The other thing is they all tend to be places where you get what I call monopolized weapons. Weapons which one group can easily monopolize. So you don’t see this first states popping up in China or the near east until you get the introduction of handheld bronze axes and swords. And that’s because, just to interrupt you for a sec, that’s because only they have access to the foundries and the higher level processes that would be required to make those weapons. That’s something that the elite in those societies would keep exclusive control over. Well, one of the things is it’s just simply really hard to make bronze.

It requires an alloy of both tin and copper and you’d have to have the supply chains, for instance, and the actual foundry process is also quite difficult. So hence it’s something which usually only a small elite tend to get. So would there be back in the day, was there sword control as there’s gun control now to prevent like tyrannical or prevent uprisings against the tyrannical government? It varies by polity. In some cases where attempts, for instance, to outlaw the outlaw the crossbow, because the crossbow was a great leveler in conflict, for instance, you could very easily, if you’re a peasant, take out a knight.

That eventually failed. But depending upon the time poldi, there have been attempts to try to regulate the use of weaponry. Interesting. Very interesting. Well, our second amendment audience will, will appreciate that. So why would you say then like I get that there’s this, this history of, of organized criminality that emerges and it becomes more refined and I guess in some societies becomes like a monarchy of sorts, and then it becomes just more of a nepotistic oligarchy. Perhaps what we’re seeing right now with the capital cronyism. Why do societies collapse then? In light of that model, how collapse unfolds varies upon the time and place you’re looking at.

But across most of the case studies I looked at and they had this big database of over 400 of them, the biggest factor is rising wealth inequality. Once you have rising wealth inequality, it tends to spill over into all the other forms of power. So if you have rich people, they’ll tend to start to build up their own private armies, as we see at the end of the Han dynasty in the Western Empire. They tend to also start to get more involved in politics. So if you have rich people, they can do things like lobbying, buying political positions, as we see today, things like campaign financing.

That tends to make states over time less inclusive and less democratic. Wealth inequality also has big links to things like polarization, corruption, democratic backsliding. And on top of all that, we know that once you start to get a growing elite class that tends to make the rest of us poorer. What we call a cost living crisis to get today, or what we see is what’s called popular miseration in the past. But additionally, if you have a really growing big elite class, there’s more reasons for them to fight amongst each other for a small number of high status positions.

This is what’s very wenkly called structural demographic theory. It’s a very academic term. But in short, what? Growing wealth inequality has a whole bunch of knock on effects that make an empire a state increasingly fragile until it’s knocked over by some kind of combination of different threats. Things like climate change, disease, etc. It’s a process I call diminishing returns on extraction. And so do you think that we’re approaching that point of peril in our society whereby the economic inequality is reaching a point where it could potentially cause collapse? And how will automation and AI factor into that? Will that be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back? We are seeing growing wealth inequality across the world.

Back in the 1980s, the top 1% captured roughly 25% of global wealth. Today it’s around about 40%. And when we look at places like the US, there’s been a lot of discussion over why is the US democratically backsliding. Why do you see it becoming more polarized, the rise of the far right. But interestingly, it’s not just happening in the US is it? It’s happening in the uk, Germany, Spain, Australia. It’s a OECD wide phenomena. And that all follows a pretty clear pattern. We see across the world that during the world wars we had a great compression, a great leveling of wealth which basically led to pretty high levels of equality.

That starts to rise again in the 1980s and that’s when you start to see the rise in all these other things. Polarization, for instance, corruption. I do think that this is unfortunately going to make a lot of states much more fragile like in the us. I don’t know if that will lead to collapse. One of the big things here is that historically most states have not been as powerful as they are today. Most states throughout history didn’t even have a police force, let alone a well armed police force with intelligence agency, mass surveillance systems and much, much larger bureaucracies.

So while they are growing more unequal, we have to bear in mind that states today are far more stable and resilient than ever before. Which isn’t necessarily a good thing because instead you’re probably looking at autocracy rather than Collapse. So do you think technology though is a bit of an equalizer in and of itself? You’re seeing decentralized systems. Master Valence can kind of work both ways. There’s quote unquote white hat hackers. Could that not be a double edged sword to have that technology at their disposal? It could be. So we do see technology across history sometimes acting as leveling force.

For instance, the introduction of iron weapons, which are much more easily made in a more decentralized fashion, led initially to more democratic polities. Likewise, the Industrial revolution seems to be something which after some time, once you get the rise of unions, suffragettes, abolitionists, leads to democratic welfare states. So technology can sometimes lead to more equality, but it does depend and it’s worthwhile noting even in both those cases, eventually the technology ends up getting co opted. So in the case of Iron Age weapons, Rome starts the Republic, but ends up as an empire, same as many, many other Iron Age polities.

Likewise the Industrial Revolution, initially it’s actually pretty terrible for people and does not lead to more democracy. And even then today we see it backsliding once again. The problem is that unless you address the underlying dynamic of the wealth pump, of essentially the rich getting more rich and more powerful, they will find a way to usually co opt the technology. Even if technology does have a natural leveling effect. Unfortunately, I think most of the technologies we’re thinking about today will not have that effect. So for instance, AI in particular larger language models, the key point of them is to essentially replace white collar jobs.

That’s one of the key ideas behind it all. Even when we actually look at the definition of AI, it’s about replacing or sorry, competing with humans on economically relevant tasks. If you replace large amounts of people, workers, it means they lose their bargaining power. If they lose their power, it means they’re less likely to have any kind of political voice. And you’re likely to see a supercharging of things like mass surveillance and democratic backsliding. It’s a very interesting1 because AGI is one of those things. I know a lot of people have high hopes for it, but it’s one of those tools that I can never see them relinquishing control of.

Like they’re never going to. I mean, for matters of national security alone, they’re never going to allow the average Joe to have access to an artificial general intelligence that can create a bioweapon that could wipe out humanity. And a lot of people would, you know, understand that. Right. But that also comes with the fact that this is exactly what you’re saying. It’s the gated technology that will enable them to have a significant moat over the population in terms of, you know, their technological capabilities. So this could be ultimately like, I mean, a game changer in that respect for the proverbial them in that they now have access to something that, you know, people think, well, I, I can access Chad, cbt, but you’re getting the diluted version.

Right? You’re not getting the. What it can really do, which is in the hands of the government, the military, the CIA. So, you know, have you thought a lot about how that factors into your model, like weaponized AGI in that respect? Yeah. So part of this depends upon how the AGI looks and how powerful it is. There’s a difference between something which is comparable to humans on a whole bunch of different cognitive tasks versus something that is orders of magnitude more intelligent than a human on different tasks. All that being said, I think that you’re right here, that while there’s a big talk from people like Daro Modi, the CEO of Anthropic, or Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, about democracy, when you actually look at their actions, they portray a very different motive.

Amodi has spoken a lot about how democracies have to get to AGI first, and yet right now he’s selling a lot of anthropics products to dictators in the Middle East. Internally, they act like an autocracy, and on top of that, they’re selling a whole bunch of their models to Palantir, one of the key linchpins in the surveillance economy right now. And of course, they’re most likely going to be working increasingly with the US government and potentially with the military in anthropics. Defence, they’ve been a lot more reticent and hesitant to work with the military, although OpenAI has not been.

But overall, when we look right now at how much money we’re spending or even how we’re using AI, we’re putting at least 100 times more effort into improving facial recognition and mass surveillance than we are into improving democracy. That’s what in economics we call revealed preferences. Follow the money, follow the actions. It’s pretty clear they don’t care about democracy. So it looks like AGI could be a supercharged wealth concentration mechanism, one in which creates a class of, like, the first trillionaires. Because if AGI is all it’s cracked up to be, I mean, that allows you to potentially, you know, even game the stock market or have the ability to create Profitable technologies which the average commoner won’t have access to.

So you talk about how it reaches a tipping point with private armies. Are you seeing any indication that that might be the case? I mean, when Elon Musk, I guess, has his own private security force and it reaches a certain level, is that what we’re looking for or how does that look? It’s probably more private ownership of infrastructure the military depends upon. We see this already to an extent with Starlink. So the Ukrainian military forces depend heavily upon Starlink to coordinate their military, particularly when it comes to drone strikes. If Musk were to suddenly pull their access to Starlink, that would be borderline catastrophic for the military efforts, at least to begin with.

I’m sure they’d eventually find a way around it. But that, to me is my bigger fear, is that what you’re seeing is the intrusion of AI systems into government services, into the government infrastructure, yet ultimately are still provided by, and in some ways still partially controlled by private actors. So it’s kind of state capture by different means. And I think the same applies as the military here that increasingly you’ll see the military dependent upon systems developed by billionaires. Interesting, because I guess historically it was the other way around. A lot of the biggest discoveries were kind of birthed from government funding, and then it would be capitalized upon, you know, whether it was, you know, forming the, the basis of space flight or the Internet, which was created by the military, or, you know, pretty much every major technological development of the 20th century in some way was birthed from the military industrial complex that was of course taxpayer funded, but that technology eventually was monetized by billionaires.

But you’re saying it could be the other way around now that we’re starting to move towards a system whereby we’re relying on the Tony Starks of the world to, to create technology for governments to oppress their populations. Well, it’s kind of a bit of both actually. When you look at the pioneering work on machine learning that was done by people like Geoffrey Hinton. It actually came from public universities, so in many ways it did come from the government. And similarly, when you think about AI systems, they’re based upon the mass theft of data from everyone. They’re essentially, even though they don’t like to think of it this way, based on mass surveillance and their acts of collective intelligence, they require data from everyone across the world.

If they didn’t have access to Reddit, they’d be kind of screwed. So even though they’ve made this into a private profit machine, the actual basic architecture is something which really should be publicly owned. That’s why I found it kind of amusing when the CEO of Anthropic was decrying the Chinese for stealing their model, because it’s kind of what they have done to us. Took all that data from the planet, essentially, and then now somebody has stolen the condensed LLM form by training their models on it. Exactly. Sweet, sweet hypocrisy. Yeah, I guess what goes around comes around, as they say.

So, you know, we’re living in an era now and, and I’ve always thought it’s interesting because people will often criticize, you know, like the Christian eschatologists or the doomsayers, the melanarians as well. You know, everybody throughout history has always thought that the world was ending. But we’re living in an era today where there’s a lot of unprecedented developments and a certain degree of interconnectedness globally that never previously existed. So there’s like a multitude of potential existential threats that never existed even 200 years ago. So we have like the, you know, the threat of cyber attack, bioweapons, not just pandemics, which of course was a thing throughout history, but now the ability to actually engineer those.

We have AGI, we have nuclear weapons, which of course is a huge one. The Global Integrated Monetary System, which there could be cascading failures throughout if there is one, one of these dominoes that goes down. We have vulnerable supply chains, we have big data, we have big agriculture. So how much of your work factors in these relatively new threats? Yeah, most of my work, at least initially, focused almost entirely upon these new threats. So people often say every age has had its fears about doomsday, that every age has its own, as you mentioned, eschatological fear mongering, which I find to be fairly intellectually lazy because things are very different today.

The field of existential risk is largely something that dates back to the last two decades. And that’s in large part because we do live in a time where suddenly we have risks that could plausibly and scientifically lead to devastation at a global level. Things like extreme climate change, nuclear weapons, engineered pandemics, or even natural pandemics. So this is really different. In the book I talk about both existential risk in general and all these different threats. I’ve mentioned things like nuclear weapons, etc, but I also do talk about something you’ve alluded to here, the fact that the world is accelerating, it’s far more interconnected than it’s ever been and it’s far More concentrated.

I call that in the book the Death Star syndrome. That essentially when you get systems that are more interconnected, more tightly coupled, so when one thing moves, the other thing moves as well. These tend to be really good at buffering against small shocks, but they tend to perpetuate big enough shocks. So for instance, globally we’re pretty good at dealing with small fluctuations in currency, small economic crises. But once we had a housing bubble in the US during 2007, 2008, that caused global ripple effects across financial markets. And I put forward we see a similar thing when it comes to collapse.

We do of course, still have collapses today, places like Somalia for instance, and Libya. But in general these tend to be very short lived. The best study I could find on modern day to day collapse tried to take an empirical look and had all these different indicators for when a state would collapse, including does it have monopoly on violence, can it effectively make rules, and can it take taxes? And in general, any state that collapsed and lost all three of those abilities regained them within the space of six months. Which makes sense because in general, when a state collapses, the entire international community mobilizes to prop the state back up.

The difference is if you have a big enough shock, like the US and China falling over suddenly, the interconnectedness becomes a liability rather than a good thing. So this is something we see across complex systems, and I think it applies to the world today. Hence the Death Star Syndrome. The Death Star in Star wars look to be impregnable, invulnerable, but you’re hitting the right spot and suddenly the entire thing falls apart. Interesting. So you’re saying that for a very complex society, if there is a regional disaster or regional collapse, that society will be more resilient in helping the reconstruction of said society.

But there are certain Achilles heels or linchpins or bottlenecks throughout this interdependency that could lead to a cascading failure. Exactly. So a sufficiently big interconnected system will be good at buffering against small shocks. But if the shock is big enough, it’ll amplify it through the system. Something we see in financial markets, we see in ecosystems, and many others. And so what does this look like? Where are we right now in terms of that? How much complexity becomes a liability? And are we starting to see fracturing that could potentially be one of those big events that causes the undoing of the entire system, the entire global system? Yeah, this is one of the weaknesses in the literature is we don’t have really clear thresholds across the systems in terms of this is where it gets tricky, or this is where it’s more likely that a big shock is going to amplify.

But on a general trends basis, it’s pretty clear that the world is becoming way more tightly coupled, far more fast paced, and far more interconnected and interdependent. For instance, most trading that happens in financial markets I think currently above 80% is done through algorithms. And that’s because they’re far quicker than humans. If you’re looking at the spread of something like diseases back in the Middle Ages, during the Black Death, they mainly spread through the pace of a ship. They’re going at over 100 times faster now with the speed of a jetliner. And when you look at online viruses, for instance, in cyber attacks, they can happen incredibly quickly.

So a great example is the WannaCry ransom attack. And that ransomware attack affected 300,000 computers across over, I think, over 60 countries in the space of less than eight hours. So things can happen really, really quickly. Now, I want to quickly pivot away from the Death Star syndrome towards something else, which is I mentioned we have all these other big hazards now. So we have global climate change, which is far more rapid and pervasive than everything we faced in the past. We have nuclear weapons, we have potential advanced AI systems, and even the potential for an engineered pandemic.

What’s interestingly underlying all of these is once again, wealth inequality. If you want to build either a killer robot or you want to build a large language model, you need to have COBALT. And roughly 70% of the world’s cobalt supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where essentially miners are paid a couple of dollars a day to work in some of the most atrocious slave like extractive conditions possible. Around about somewhere in the ballpark of 10 or more percent are children. So basically children, workers. And 40% of the workforce is what we call artisanal miners.

Basically, they work in completely unregulated industries if they were being paid properly for their labor. And if you didn’t have this exploitation, suddenly it would cost far more to build a large language model, to build a killer robot, and interestingly, even to build something like a nuclear weapon. A little known fact is that the first nuclear weapon detonated in the United States, the Trinity bomb, that was based on cobalt dug up in a mine in the DRC called Shinka Lobo, which is in the native language refers to an apple that if you squeeze it will burn because everyone who worked, they got radiation sickness.

But in short, no matter where you look, all These big hazards we’re dealing with are always based upon inequality. And as a quick side note here, they’re also based upon concentration of power. If you’re worried about nuclear weapons, 87% of the stockpile is held by two countries, the US and Russia. If you’re looking at this for a private lens, then only roughly two dozen companies are responsible for upgrading, maintaining, and creating those weapons. This holds true for climate change, of course, for AI, etc. So all the threats we’re dealing with are the product of inequality and vast concentrations of power.

They’re not something that’s being created by all humanity. That’s very interesting. So inequality exacerbates the existential risks. So had we had a fair worker rights regimen in Congo, wherever this stuff is mined, it would be more difficult to create the nuclear bomb. Is that. Or maybe, I guess. Well, how would that factor into the green revolution, though, where a lot of green tech requires those same elements to be mined? Wouldn’t the creation of solar panels and battery systems that minimize the reliance on petrol fuels? How does that factor into your, your theory there? Yeah, no fair point.

And the truth is it would probably slow down the renewable energy revolution. You know, if you’re paying a, a fair price for things like cobalt, then suddenly the price of things like batteries would increase. But what you’re seeing is essentially a slowing down of the world in general, which is potentially kind of something we need right now. And this also, I think, holds true for things like data. You know, we already discussed, for instance, how AI models are based upon mass theft of data. I talk about this as being the latest lootable resource. If grain was the earliest lootable resource that provided the basis for the earliest kingdoms, empires, and organized crime syndicates, if you will, Data is the newest one.

But again, if we were being charged a fair price for our data, and we actually had a fair say in where it went, then suddenly you wouldn’t see these things being created. But that also means you probably wouldn’t see the good things we potentially get from AI systems and machine learning. It’s not perfect, but I’d say it’s a far better world and most importantly, a fairer one. That dynamic about how things are faster nowadays and how we’re more interconnected and how that can. The example you use was increase the rapidity of the spread of a pathogen.

There’s also what I noticed throughout the pandemic, and it’s our most kind of recent example of this sort of thing, is that on the issue of Fomites. You’re familiar with what that those are, right? Yeah. So interestingly with the fomites, I’ve always thought that the touchless technology, like the ability of not having to open a door or contactless money, how you don’t have to exchange things, minimizes so technology, on the one hand, it actually minimizes our interaction. Better surveillance tools mitigate the increasing speed at which things can spread. So it’s almost like an arms race in a sense, where you’re.

Have you thought about that dynamic at all? How it’s not simply about, well, okay, we can take planes and spread an illness from one side of the planet to the other in the span of a few hours, but there’s also these other resiliencies in place that are the consequence of enhanced technology. Yeah, I think this is the key dynamic that’s occurring here, is that improving technology, it both provides elements of resilience, but it also does provide greater vulnerabilities as well. And it ends up being kind of an arms race between the two. Whenever you look at these graphs of things like the world improving, it always tends to be a big exponential once you get roughly the Industrial Revolution.

But the same is also true when you look at things like impacts on the Earth system, carbon dioxide emissions, or even the explosive potential of weapons. I have a graph in the book which looks exactly like that with big exponential uptick during the Industrial Revolution. So you kind of have both. I think the. In the long term, unfortunately, I don’t expect resiliency to win framed in a very simple way. If you have exponentially improving technology and continued arms races, where do we think it’s going to end in the long term, over the space of decades and centuries? Do we really expect that we’re always going to have a techno fix at just the last minute to make sure that race is won? I don’t think so.

And I think even when you look at just the last few decades, it’s unclear if we are winning the race or if we’re just relying upon sheer dumb luck when it comes to nuclear weapons. Sorry, go on. No, I was just going to say that technological layer comes after the mechanical layers. So the mechanical layer is airplanes. So we can send a person to the other side of the planet without relying on, you know, doors that open themselves. But if there was ever a, you know, a cyber attack that prevented, you know, interact machines from working or whatever, it’s kind of like a superficial layer on top of the mechanistic layer that is the ability to transport people, which Is the biggest threat that underlies it all, that the technological layer comes afterwards as a way to try to mitigate but that is more potentially fragile because it opens itself up to all these other threats like cybersecurity or emp, grid down vulnerability, whatever the case might be.

Yeah, this is a tricky thing is whenever you tend to build new technologies they’re dependent upon the earlier technologies as well as so AI systems are dependent upon the Internet which in turn is dependent upon computers which in turn require electricity, which in turn requires things like transmitters of course early the combustion engine, etc. And each of those has vulnerabilities across the stack. And of course if you have a full blown collapse and you lose most of the stack, it potentially becomes more difficult to re industrialize as well. So one of the things I talk about in the book is what is the likelihood that we end up having another industrial revolution and reaching the same level of technological advancements if we have a global cyto collapse now in the near term future.

And the big problem here of course as mentioned, trying to actually get all the technologies back in place. But another big one is when we look at all those technologies but being reliant upon having fossil fuels, upon having an external infusion of energy which we didn’t have access to before. The big thing of fossil fuels is the energy ratio. Initially if you got it would take around about one barrel of oil to get 100 or 200 out of the ground. That’s what we call the energy ratio. Today it’s closer to 20 to 1. So it’s been dwindling over the last two centuries and it’s going to keep on dwindling.

And it becomes an interesting question of do we have a high enough energy ratio to do another industrial revolution? And the simple answer is we don’t know. There’s been very few studies on this and a few that have been done. Let’s come to the conclusion of we just simply don’t know. Contrary to popular belief in the apocalypse, most people aren’t going to die by the hands of marauders. In fact the you’re probably going to die from disease. This is why you need antibiotics. The problem is getting them requires a prescription. Well, today’s sponsor is Jace Medical.

They’ve created a revolutionary service that allows you to get prescription medications like antibiotics with relative ease, hassle free. This will be worth more than gold in an emergency for somebody who needs them. So do yourself a favor and take your prepping to the next level while you still can. Check out the link in the description below. And now back to the video. One thing we see in, in Hollywood films is that oftentimes collapses are depicted really quickly because of course it makes for more engaging content. But do you think that perhaps people overstate the accelerated nature of these collapse events? Is it going to be one big event? Or is collapse a process, as I like to say, as opposed to an event? It’s always been a process.

So even my definition, for instance, it’s about the contraction of fragmentation of power systems. And that takes time. If we look at the fall of the Western empire, many things, like population for instance, took decades or even centuries to change over time. And some things like ideological power, the power of the Church, didn’t really change that much. If anything, it grew over time. So I think we tend to make collapse into a bit of an apocalypse, at least historically, when it wasn’t. The other thing I mentioned in the book, which sounds controversial to a lot of people, but is actually pretty uncontroversial to most archaeologists, is that collapse wasn’t always a bad thing.

If we look at say for instance the fall of Rome afterwards, the skeletons we have, the people tend to be taller and they tend to have less stress on their bones and less holes in their teeth. They were, in short, healthier. The response of most people is, well, so many people died and that there was more resources left over to the survivors. That doesn’t really hold up. Even people on the outside the empire were taller than those inside the empire. Hence the old trope of the muscle bound Germanic barbarian. It was kind of true. Rome just wasn’t particularly good for its citizens.

It was incredibly unequal, predatory and extractive. And one of the big things here was when people moved from the cities like Rome, into the countryside, they tended to have more exercise, a more, well, varied diet, usually more protein. And additionally, when the empire fell apart, they didn’t get a visit from the tax collector as frequently. So historically, collapse hasn’t always been a bad thing. It’s got cost and benefits, winners and losers. And I think there’s a case to be made that in general across most collapses, they’ll probably a good thing for the average citizen. That being said, I do think collapse going into the future is likely to be much worse for a combination of reasons, including we depend upon globalized, industrialized supply chains today our states are often actually a lot better for us.

You know, Denmark actually does do good things for its citizens. It provides public goods and last but not least, claps when it occurs, often is accompanied by glutter violence. It’s not everyone trying to kill each other, but usually small groups of armed young men trying to recreate this power structure. And previously that battle was fought with muskets, iron weapons. Today we have nuclear weapons and killer robots. If there seems to be a metamorphosis that happens where you need collapse of a system in order to transcend a new level. Like kind of when the bubonic plague preceded the Enlightenment era or even the world wars, how they proceeded a at least a very short lived it seems international rules based order which allowed humanity to thrive up until this point where it seems like things are now in decay.

Would you agree with, with that assessment that there is, you almost need collapse to enter into a new level of the game. Like you need that level of violence. And I guess what is the next level after this? Should we see a global collapse? There was this game that Microsoft made back in the day, it was called Spore. And you started on the level of a bacteria and you worked your way up to like a galactic civilization. And every time you know, you to get to the next level there usually was some big war where you had to become a bigger bacteria, you had to take over more territory and ultimately the only way you could get off the the planet was with you if you conquered all of the other tribes on the planet.

Do you think that the real new world order quote unquote only emerges after World War iii? I don’t think you need to have catastrophe or collapse in order to have progress. It can sometimes act as an impetus for progress. So my colleague, actually Canadian Thomas Homer Dixon, has this idea of catagenesis, which essentially means creation from collapse or catastrophe I should say. And that definitely does happen throughout history. But there’s also some pretty great examples where you don’t require catastrophe. So for instance, whenever we think about progress we tend to really think about the last 200 years.

When you think about things like the elimination of smallpox, increasing human height, increasing literacy rates, all the things that we see growing up in a graph on sites like Our World and Data, they basically all happen more or less after the Industrial Revolution. But the interesting thing is there that they don’t happen. With the Industrial Revolution initially, things in the UK look much worse. For instance, people get shorter, life expectancy gets lower. And there’s horrible tales of children dying in mines and working 18 hour days. What ends up making progress is, is instead a shared social struggle.

It’s union movements, movements by suffragettes, abolitionists, siemenicus, which basically create an impetus for the state to suddenly share the bounties of new technology. So it’s when you have technological change plus shared struggle is when you tend to get progress. And that doesn’t, by nature, require catastrophe. But one thing that does lend itself to this idea that catastrophe can be useful is when we look at wealth inequal. In particular, the best work we have on looking at the history of wealth inequality is by a colleague of mine at Stanford, Walter Scheidel, in his book the Great Leveler.

And his grim conclusion is that while there are some exceptions, the most reliable way to level wealth inequality throughout history is through what he calls a great leveler. Either mass mobilization warfare, like the world wars, a pandemic, a bloody revolution like the Bolshevik revolution, or a societal collapse. Those are the best, most reliable ways to level wealth and equality. Sorry to interrupt, but is this why a lot of people might fantasize about the apocalypse when they’re $50,000 in debt and they’re like, man, I just wish, you know, I just wish this thing would collapse so I don’t have to pay my.

My debts? Yeah. And I think it’s understandable that people who are not benefiting from the social order that actually feel like they’re being exploited, the social order, they’d prefer to see it toppled. That’s completely understandable. Again, I think historically that’s often been a good thing, but I don’t think that’ll necessarily be a good thing going forwards. I think we need to find peaceful ways to change the system rather than just trying to wholesale destroy it. Is there a point of decadence, though, like with unions, for example? There seems to be a point where, yes, they’re needed at the onset of the Industrial revolution because people are dying in factories, but then it also can potentially breed a weak society of dependency, one in which people kind of take advantage of and abuse.

Because I know, I’ve worked in government before, I know the unions have a lot of power. You can just call in sick for any reason and still get paid, and the people who work hard are not really rewarded. Like, there’s no meritocratic component to it. Is there a point where that becomes problematic as well, where decadence and this overindulgent tolerance to an excessive degree almost breeds a certain level of intolerance? I think. What do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, there’s this old quote of good times make weak men, weak men make bad times. I haven’t seen much evidence for that.

If we look at places like Norway, Denmark, et cetera, where they tend to have very strong unions and very strong government support and provisions. It actually seems to lead to higher rates of things like mental health innovation. So patents per capita are much higher in those countries as well. And in general, even at a psychological level, we see that interestingly, people tend to be more likely to take risks, including entrepreneurial risks, when they feel like they have a social safety net, whether that be family or sometimes the state as well. If you feel like there’s absolutely nothing you can rely upon, then it’s less likely you’re going to try to do cool new risky things, basically.

So I don’t see strong support for that. Although I think of course there are individual exceptions, but at a systems level, I don’t think it’s true. So you don’t think that because, I mean, the common trope is that Rome fell because it became too decadent, it became too frivolous in a lot of its fixations, that people lost what allowed Rome to thrive in its early stages, whatever that was. So you don’t think our society is making us weak? No, I don’t think so. And Rome, there’s a fair amount of consensus across scholars and historians of Rome of what made it collapse.

Things like wealth inequality, weak institutions, imperial over expansion. No one really agrees that decadence was the, the basis for the fall of Rome. What about the, the, you know, like the Coliseum spectacles and just the bread and circus aspect of that. Isn’t there a component of that which could not emerge if people were mentally stronger? Like, yeah, but even there, the coal spiel was built on the Vespasian before, well before you had the fall of Rome. And similarly the provision of free grain into Rome, what’s called the cure noni, happened once again well before the fall of Rome as well.

And ultimately we don’t really have any evidence that’s made Rome a less effective war machine. Instead, I see the bread and circuses as mainly being a way to distract a populace who otherwise would have been growing increasingly discontented with the sheer inequality of Rome. It’s worthwhile remembering that while we tend to hold up Roman’s pedestal and think of it as this strong society full of strong people, it wasn’t necessarily very good for most people. By the peak of rome, it was 75% towards the maximum theoretical limit of inequality. And that maximum level is a situation which one individual holds all the surplus wealth and everyone else has just enough to survive and get by on.

The secret to Rome was nothing special, it was just really good at doing warfare. It Mobilized far more people than anyone else for war. The rates of military mobilization, which is roughly a quarter of the population, at least for fighting age men, you didn’t see that again until Napoleon. And that’s why Rome was successful. It just simply out competed and conquered most of the surrounding territories. It was a kind of military Ponzi scheme. Doesn’t mean the people were necessarily much stronger, just had way larger groups of them and they had better military tactics. We don’t need to resort to moral fortitude or anything like that.

So you don’t think there’s, there’s at all any tipping point in which a system can potentially enable people to indulge in counterproductive behaviors that are not conducive to their health and well being and their own individual resilience? Because, you know, one of my contentions is that preparedness emerges as a mechanism perhaps unconsciously for a lot of people. People understand that they are very dependent on this elaborate complex society of systems of critical infrastructure of which we’ve discussed. There’s many vulnerabilities. And so the more enmeshed and entangled you are in this system, like the higher up the high rise and deeper into the inner city core that you live, the more hopelessly dependent you are on that system, should it any aspect of it ever.

Faltering altar so you, you see this refound interest in preparedness which seeks to get people to gain a greater familiarity with those, I don’t know what you would call them, like pre industrial revolution skill sets that could enable them to endure the type of collapse that we’re talking about that could be the consequence of reverting down this, you know, revolutionary pathway. To me it just seems like there is a tipping point where you can have too much of a good thing. You know, like there has to be some point along the way that, that, you know, just paying people too much or giving them too much for too little is not good for their health.

Yeah, so I guess there’s two different things here. One is, do we have evidence of decadence leading to increasing fragility of societies? And the second one is, is there a cost to becoming too dependent upon the state or power structures in general? I think for the first one, again, just not much evidence for it empirically. For the second, I think this is where there is good evidence that you probably shouldn’t become too dependent upon power systems. There’s a great irony that generally speaking, states that are more good for their citizens, that provide more public goods, they tend to undergo deeper, more long Lasting collapses.

There’s at least one study archaeologically which suggests this. For instance, and as a note in the book, when Somalia fell apart, it seemed to be good for its populace. If Denmark fell apart, it would not be. And similarly, we look today at studies of disaster risk management. So how people react to things like earthquakes, terrorist attacks, bombing campaigns. It’s pretty clear that people who have more social capital basically like better social networks and better networks beyond the state, they tend to be better at handling themselves during a disaster. Because the key thing is if the state isn’t there for you, but you have other people, other communities who are, you’re more likely to survive and persist.

And I think this is a pretty clear, remarkable finding that generally speaking, people are pretty good at handling themselves during disasters. But again, you want to make sure you have those backup systems. So I think the idea of making sure you’re not too dependent upon the state or upon in general, industrialized power systems is probably a good thing. Where I’d caveat this is, I think for a lot of preppers, they think about this more in terms of stockpiling ammunition and beans. Well, if we’re looking at this scientifically, most the evidence suggests that you should be stockpiling friends, favors and skills.

Yeah, I would probably argue that you need a bit of everything from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It seems though, in this financialized world that we live in there, where people are almost incentivized to conspicuous consumption, you know, you don’t have to correct the underlying bad habit. We’ll just give you a drug to fix whatever ails you. If you want to eat bad food all day, we’ll find a new drug that allows you to melt the weight off relatively quickly with all kinds of negative side effects, of course. And that that mechanism ultimately has some really deep, nasty underlying like knock on effects for society that aren’t good.

I just, it seems like I think you might be underestimating the detrimental effect of, of decadence because there seems to be a mechanism there. Why humans? I mean, we naturally are hedonistic. We gravitate towards things that are calorie dense because it was a survival necessity at one point. Things that are perhaps devoid of nutrients because we’re still operating on the same fundamental survival mechanisms in a world of great abundance. And it’s like giving a child a loaded gun. Eventually they’re going to shoot somebody with it. I’m a little skeptical about the idea that, that you can’t have too much of a good thing.

I think ultimately you can hold both position that there’s no strong empirical or scientific evidence that decadence, whatever that means, contributes to societal collapse, while still also holding the position that decadence in the modern world is a bad thing that has lots of bad knock on effects. And I totally agree, if we look at say for instance, the fact that as one Silicon Valley insider said, that we have the world’s smartest brains dedicated to making people push buttons on a screen, that’s a bad thing, making people increasingly addicted to apps, high sugar treats, etc. There’s loads of reams of literature and all the bad things this creates across society.

Does that create societal collapse, at least historically? Once again, the empirical evidence isn’t there for it. But again, you can hold both those positions that it’s a bad thing, but not necessarily that it’s a driver of societal breakdown. I think we’ve reached a new level though, because post green revolution, I mean there are certain, like we are living in unprecedented times as we talked about, there’s numerous existential threats that it didn’t really exist before. So looking at this strictly through a historical lens, when we’re in a completely different set of circumstances, that it’s hard to extrapolate empire collapse that has happened in the past to what could potentially happen today.

For just a myriad reasons, technology has really been a game changer in a lot of ways. And I mean I, I’ve never looked or you know, cared to. Not that I haven’t cared to, but I just, I have to take your word that there’s no empirical evidence of that. I’d have to, you know, obviously do my own research. But in terms of preparedness though, I, I do think that there is a little bit of everything that is required. I agree that community, and especially here in the west, it is, there’s a lone wolf mentality. It tends to permeate the prepper mindset, which is, you know, kind of just a consequence of our very individualistic nature.

And it’s different in the East. I’ve talked to a lot of Eastern academics and preppers and their approach to things is a lot more collectivist in nature. Nonetheless, you know, there is a, a certain, there’s an element of skill building, there’s an element of community, there’s an element of of course, resource acquisition. And maybe on that topic, just to pivot a little bit, how important are energy and resource constraints with respect to collapse? Because you know, you’ve talked about the energy returned on energy invested with respect to oil and how that’s diminishing I’ve heard it as low as one barrel to get two in some cases, depending on, you know, if you’re talking about shale or tar sand oil or whatever.

But we’ve had Nate Hagens on who’s a natural resource expert, who’s really, you know, well versed in that and has a lot of interesting perspectives on it. But, but how much do you think that factored in? Like everybody uses the Eastern eye Easter island example. I don’t even know if that’s true. But you know, there was the, a lot of examples of the Malthus style catastrophe. Could, could that really be a factor here whereby we, because of that Jevons paradox, we just consume out consume our what’s resources that are available and that precipitates collapse. Worthwhile noting that Easter island, also known nowadays as the Rapanui, is not, as far as we can tell, an example of ecocide, where essentially they overshot their local carry capacity and then the society collapsed.

That was based upon some pretty old studies, but the most recent, both reconstructions of their own territory from archaeological findings but also genetic data, suggests that they didn’t have a population collapse until after Europeans arrived. The leading theory now is that Europeans arrived, they introduced diseases which caused a huge population collapse, and they also carried a lot of people off to work in guana mines in Peru. So slave raiding, basically. So this seems to be more a case of colonization and genocide than ecocide in terms of resource constraints going into the future. In short, it depends, and I see this being a bigger problem in the long term rather than the short term.

Right now we’re probably not butting up against any big resource constraints. The biggest issue me is going to be energy ratio, which depending upon where you measure it to whether it’s the point where the energy enters the economy, for instance, or where it’s used, as you mentioned, could be substantially lower. Even the case of a declining energy ratio. I suspect this to be something which will lead to a kind of slower collapse, a process rather than a more abrupt one, like a nuclear holocaust, for instance. And a lot of this will depend upon innovation, basically whether or not we can find ways to improve or create a technology that has a new, far better energy ratio.

Of course there’s been lots of innovation and research going into things like nuclear fusion, but thus far with very little success. So a key thing here is essentially whether or not we can rely upon technological change. I’m familiar enough with the research around technological forecasting to know that we’re not very good at it. And I wouldn’t rule it out, but I also wouldn’t rely upon it either. So in general, I do think this is an issue. I think we need to be very aware of both energy ratio and resource constraints. It wouldn’t be the thing I’m most worried about right now, which if we can pivot back a little bit to extrapolation.

For me, I definitely try not to extrapolate from the past into the future too easily. As mentioned, I think lots of things are different today, like states being more resilient, but we do have these big existential risks like nuclear weapons, climate change, etc. If you’re worried or interested about decadence, the one thing I point to there is that people probably don’t pay enough attention to these things and aren’t willing to mobilize around them. It’s pretty strange that the US could basically cause the apocalypse any day it wants to. Importantly, the US President could. That decision to launch nukes rests in the hands of one individual, the U.S.

president. And yet no election has ever been decided on that basis. People tend to be much more interested in celebrity gossip and day to day struggles and tribulations than in those big questions. I think that is right now a big problem we have is that while the production of risk is very concentrated, it comes down to big tech, the fossil fuel industry, military industrial complexes. Ultimately, if people mobilize sufficiently, there are ways to democratically control these what I call agents of doom. The most important piece of emergency gear you can own is food. You can’t stockpile enough of this stuff.

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That will give you 15% off. I would recommend every few weeks or a month buy a few varieties, put them in your pantry, set it and forget it. And if you ever come on hard times, you know that in the very least you have high quality food at the ready. What is your forecast then? I suppose for the next I don’t know what your timeline is for when we start to see Things fall apart here. How do you think this plays out in the next 10 years? Yeah, in the book I have a short section on forecasting.

So making numerical predictions about the future. And in short, we can’t do it very well. The very best approach here is superforecasters, where you get groups of people who are preternaturally good at making future predictions. You get them together, you have them share information, deliberate amongst each other, and then you take the average of their guess and then you tweak it ever so slightly using a machine learning algorithm. They’re very good. They tend to win all the intelligence agencies tournaments. But even for them, after a year, they tend to have very low accuracy. It plummets very quickly thereafter.

And they’re also tending to focus on questions like who’s going to win the next election? Not really big questions like societal collapse. So I try not to give very precise quantified predictions. Instead, what I think we can do is understand the dynamics. What are the things that tend to lead to collapse over time, what drives it over time? And the key thing here is that wealth inequality is growing. As we discussed earlier, things like AI for instance, are likely to make it much worse. Democratic backsliding will continue. The business as usual trajectory, the default trajectory, whether it be over decades or potentially centuries, is going to be self termination of what I call the global life, the global system.

As it stands, that is the most likely outcome. That’s the default for me. But it doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. There are ways to change it. It’s kind of a Faustian bargain to have a situation whereby a government introduces something like universal basic income in an attempt to address widespread inequality. And then they say to you, well, you’re going to be able to have this ubi, but you’re going to need to. I don’t know, I guess the, the most dystopian example would be putting a chip in your brain so we can track you wherever you go. There has to be some sort of trade off.

We’re going to give you this ubi, but we’re going to have programmable digital currency. Aren’t you at all concerned that the. Well, I agree with you that inequality is not a good thing. I don’t think anybody would say, yeah, it’s, you know, I mean, some people might argue that you need a little bit to keep things interesting and keep things competitive. Don’t you think about how that could potentially be a crisis that is abused in order to bring in just more levels of. I know you’re working on surveillance and control and of course the whole problem reaction, solution model of okay, we have this inequality problem.

How do we address it? Well, we give everybody their annual. What do you call it? What is, what is Trump calling it? The dividend, the freedom dividend or something like that, you know, in order to. Which of course is inflationary, it has all kinds of potential downsides. Again, it butts up again this against this whole meritocracy element because how are we going to manage the emergence of technologies which make the human worker obsolete? I don’t know. Do you have any thoughts on this? In the book, while I talk about self determination being the most likely outcome in the long term, the other one I talk about is what I call Silicon Goliath.

Essentially a world where we don’t collapse. We manage to find a whole bunch of technological solutions and other solutions for the problems we’re facing. But the trends continue and you do end up in a world of mass surveillance and autocracy. And I do see this as being something that occurs if we continue to have things like improving AI systems. And even if we do have the kind of best case scenario where AI takes our jobs, but we all get to live in leisure and pleasure due to a UBI is that it’s probably going to be a world in which we may not have jobs, but we also probably don’t have any political voice.

I don’t think that’s necessarily because inequality. I think in general states will find different pretexts to usher in mass surveillance. So for instance, the biggest mass surveillance in the U.S. what’s called the PRISM system, was created in the wake of the 911 terrorist attacks that became the opportunity to say we need to sacrifice freedom for security. So to me this is part of a much longer trend that in general states governments, they tend to find ways to always change greater amounts of power and energy into greater amounts of control and information about their citizens. And interestingly I’d say the best way to reverse that is usually actually by having more equality.

You basically want to have states have less power vis a vis their citizens. The citizens, the more power they have. The states have to negotiate more of them and they’re less capable of just more or less going towards autocracy or throwing into mass surveillance systems. If you look at say for instance the rise of welfare democracies during the World wars, almost every theory here revolves around workers started to get more power relative to their bosses. And as they had more bargaining power, it meant that the bosses had to give concessions and the states had to get concessions, including things like.

Like the expansion of the vote. So I’d say even here, if you really wanted to avoid a mass surveillance dystopia, you’d probably want to see people having both more democracy, but also probably shared control and ownership of the machines. And I don’t think we’re going to get that. I’m not very hopeful. It seems unlikely. This is the thing with preppers, right? It’s like you have this centralizing force in the state where the state wants to have a monopoly on everything, it seems. And so in order to counteract that surveillance component, you have to have some degree of autonomy.

And the only way you can have autonomy is if you’re somewhat outside of the system a little bit. So you have to be able to grow your own food, you have to be able to harvest your own energy that’s not, you know, hardwired to a smart grid, harvest your own water, have firearms, not only to protect yourself, not be reliant on the state’s monopoly of force, but be that equalizing force. So that should there ever be some sort of tyrannical government that emerges that I think we would be very naive to think that we’re past that as a species.

Human nature, I don’t think, has evolved as fast as technology. I think most people would agree to that. There needs to be some decentralized skill sets that people possess, like polymaths, almost with respect to their ability to. To subsist, that is outside the system, to act as like a safeguard against the emergence of this dystopian, hyper centralized, tyrannical government that you envision. This turnkey totalitarianism, which it may be great right now, but, you know, if some. Somebody gets into power and they take the reins of that, then it might not be too good. What do you.

What do you think of that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the examples I opened the second book on is when the Nazis took over a new territory, they tended to always go straight to the archives because the records were so important to them. In the Netherlands, they had really meticulous details, their citizens, including their religious affiliation. In France, they didn’t have that. In the Netherlands, roughly 75 of the Jewish population ended up getting killed. In the France, I think it was less than a quarter. And a lot of that just came down to how much information the state had about citizens.

Right. And even if you have a pretty good state today with massive alien system which isn’t abusing its citizens in a world of democratic backsliding, you can’t always rely upon that. And I tend to agree, of course, that having a backup and decentralizing is by nature a good thing. You want to more or less have diversification to spread your risks. I think one thing I’d always recommend here, bud, is also that it’s worthwhile bearing in mind that if these systems become sufficiently powerful, there’s only so much you can do, particularly as a small, isolated group. Ultimately, if the US government has fleets of autonomous drones, there’s not really much you can do about it.

Hence I think you always need to have both that decentralization, that backup, but also have an attempt to actually democratize and tame the state, make sure the state is in the service of its citizens, make sure it is by the people, of the people and for the people. I think those are the two strategies you need to pursue, not just one. I have to agree with you, and I’ve never been a technophobe. I know a lot of preppers shy away from technology and understandably so. But I also think that you need to understand how it works.

You need to make it a part of your preparedness, a sort of cyborg like approach to preparedness, if you will, where you’re preparing for Mad Max and Blade Runner equally, because indeed the system could become sufficiently powerful enough that no matter where you, how deep in the woods you went, you know, they would be able to find and track all your movements. And that’s quickly what we’re working towards with things like Starlink and whereby even if you do go off grid now, most people aren’t really off grid because they’re, you know, they’re, they’re in the middle of nowhere, but they have a, a very strong connection to the Internet, the global Internet, and they can be tracked and everything that they do is, you know, potentially scrub.

But that’s interesting observation about the data acquisition of the, the Nazis. And of course, if that’s the case, then I’m probably screwed. You know, I, I’ve got so much videos, my likeness could be replicated a thousand and deepfake thousand ways from Sunday. I did make a point of mentioning to my audience the other day that one of the most valuable commodities you have is your privacy. Because in a day in day and age where, you know, people are just putting their lives out there on social media in a way that, and I think you talked about how like the pharaoh, pharaohs of the past could only dream about, you know, the amount of data that was available nowadays.

I mean, it’s, it’s game over. If a rogue actor takes over, you know, I mean, we’re screwed basically, because everybody’s ideas and opinions are out there. Which is why I’ve always taken kind of a gray man approach in terms of politics. You know, I think you have to be a bit of a moving target nowadays, not put all of your information out there. And I think there’s some element of wealth nowadays that is equivalent to a person’s lack of participation in the digital world. Like that guy who’s never used Facebook or, you know, the government doesn’t know anything about that guy.

I mean, that guy’s got something that’s really valuable. I don’t know how you quantify that, but it’s got to counter. I agree. And it’s worthwhile noting that even the very rich who often say that privacy is a old traditional norm, that we’re evolving past, people like Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk even, they tend to have secretive compounds. They often have properties where they buy all the surrounding properties, like a moat. They value their privacy quite a lot, for obvious reasons. As you mentioned, privacy is an indispensable resource, particularly in the modern world. And I think ultimately, if we want to have a future that’s worthwhile, we need to both make sure that we don’t collapse, of course, and address all these big things like climate change, nuclear weapons, etc.

But we also have to make sure that we address these other underlying issues, like mass surveillance. And I think the key to both is once again leveling the power difference between the average person between the commoner and the elites. Once you get that, that’s a way of both decreasing the threat of mass surveillance, but also decreasing the threat of things like nuclear weapons, climate change, AI. That’s the. The common thread to making a better world. For me, one of the only affirmations I need to continue with this preparedness arc is the fact that all of the elites that you just mentioned, from Altman to Thiel, they’re all preppers in their own right locations.

They’re preparing for their, you know, technology to take over the world. So, yeah. Have you ever watched the documentary called We Live in Public with Josh Harris? So this was like one of these Internet bubble gurus. I would strongly recommend you watch that. He did an experiment, and it was on the eve of the year 2000. This guy was like, very prescient. Like, he seen social media before it was even a thing back in the 90s. And he set up this situation where he had a bunch of participants partake in this experiment where they went into this bunker and it was few weeks that were running up to New Year’s Eve.

And basically the catch was that, you know, they would provide everything, they would provide your food and you could do drugs, you could have orgies with one another, but they, they got to film it all. So there was cameras everywhere and everybody could see what everybody was doing. So you had your like sleeping pod and in your sleeping pod you had a camera of everybody else’s sleeping pod. And you can just, you know, watch what everybody else was doing, like from. You could watch them take a crap if you wanted to, if that’s what got you off.

And so I guess he was trying to, you know, kind of forecast what social media would be like, because I think he’s one of the first people who ever did streaming of his life. And he streamed his life 247 back when, you know, it was in the dial up days. So you could imagine. But ultimately the experiment ended badly, as you can imagine, because there was a gun range down there as well. And there was a situation where, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the. It wasn’t Milgram, it was the Zimbardo experiments where, yeah, people would, you know, assume the role of an authority figure and really take it too far.

While people were doing that sort of thing, there was interrogation. The police had to break it up. It was just this debaucherous, this kind of schizophrenic chaos and it didn’t end too well. So, no, I, I would encourage you to go and watch that. You really got to watch that because I know it might inform a little your perspective about this whole decadence argument. But I don’t know, one thing that’s worth noting is Zimbardo experiments actually end up being something of a farce where we actually have evidence now that Zimbardo was, was encouraging the guards to basically abuse the prisoners.

So he kind of already stacked the experiment a little bit. And there’s actually an alternative which was organized by the BBC, where they tried to write a more scientific, if you will, approach where it was this much more. You select the people at random, you put them without any clear instructions to abuse the prisoners or not. It actually kind of ends up in almost like a communist utopia of sorts, where like the guards and the prisoners just sit there playing cards all day and like, like talking about how to organize their food more productively, et cetera.

One thing we didn’t discuss here is that while in General, the book is maybe much more pessimistic about the future. Researching history actually may be much more optimistic about people. If you look at the Paleolithic, so that period from roughly 300,000 years ago to 11,000 years ago, when we evolved as a species, we were surviving through the ice ages. It’s pretty clear that we did so with pretty low rates of violence. Both the archaeological finds and the genetic evidence suggests we probably only had around about a lethal violence rate of 1 to 2%. So out of every 100 people, maybe one was dying at the hands of a human being.

And we were really good at cooperating. So there’s evidence even a hundred thousand years ago of trade in stone tools, musical instruments, genes and culture all the way from the east coast to the west coast of Africa. So we’re actually quite good at self organizing. And I think most people are pretty kind, decent, altruistic and trustworthy. To me, the bigger problem is once you start to get certain conditions, like I mentioned earlier, monopolize weapons, lootable resources, you start to have these criminal rackets where you’re selecting for the worst of us. When you look at people like Altman, Thiel, Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin, they’re clearly not the average person and they’re clearly not representative of the best of us either.

And I think that’s the key thing, is that our institutions right now are selecting people who want status, and they’re also selecting for people who are in the dark triad. But in general, most people are actually pretty great, I think. And that gives me a lot of hope for the fact that we can find different ways to organize ourselves more democratically in a better way in general. There’s definitely a lot of options for a better world beyond this one. Well, the problem with the Zimbardo thing, it was about the fact that people could be nudged into complying to doing bad things.

Right. It was very similar to the Milgram experiments where it wasn’t so much as, you know, leave this participant in this room with this learner and see if they sing Kumbaya. It was, what can we compel people to do that is beyond their good conscience? And with that slight amount of nudging, or maybe it was more extreme in the Zimbardo case. It’s been a while since I, I researched that stuff. You could potentially get people to do very atrocious things throughout history. And I guess the question is, I, I don’t know, maybe throughout history, people have always thought they’ve evolved past that.

Like maybe they had this generational exceptionalism that we have right now. Like maybe the Nazis thought they were beyond, you know, I don’t know what, what atrocity preceded Nazi Germany and that they were immune to these potential shortcomings of human beings and these vulnerabilities to, you know, follow orders and do, you know, bad things. I think one of the dangers is that nowadays people actually believe that we’re beyond that. Like, people actually have this illusion that, wow, it can never happen again because we’re just more morally evolved here in the West. Yeah. Could that not amplify the gradient even worse? You know, for lack of better examples, we could use Stalinist Russia or we could use Maoist China or whatever, but you know what I mean? Could we see a, an even worse version of that in the future? Because people don’t believe that we could succumb to it.

Yeah, I think we definitely do have a kind of societal myopia and we tend to very easily forget the lessons of the past. I mean, look at the pandemic, right? Like we had a really bad global pandemic, and then afterwards, the actual investment in things like vaccine capacity in general, any kind of pandemic preparedness measures just went out the window. No one really took any clear lessons in the pandemic. And likewise of Nazi Germany, like, Germany has a whole bunch of really good measures to avoid concentrations of power. For instance, you can’t declare a national emergency at the national level in Germany, you can do it at an individual state level, but not the national level.

And yet you still do see increasingly Germany veering back towards the ideologies that the Nazis espoused. This, I think, is part of a deeper trend which I identify in the book as what I call the authoritarian impulse. In short, we have very good evidence from both neuroscience and social psychology that when people feel threatened, and that could include things like economic precarity, when they feel like their livelihoods and their jobs are at risk, they tend to be more likely to accept authoritarian figures and authoritarian structures. So that’s the reason why a lot of people who feel very endangered right now look towards strongman leaders, whether they be Trump, Putin, etc.

A lot of it is that they want to have someone who can save them, basically. And an authoritarian figure is a perfect emblem of that. It gets kind of wacky, actually. Interestingly, even studies suggest that people prefer people with more masculine features when it comes to wartime settings. But ultimately, I think that tends to be self defeating. It tends to lead to the kind of regimes which commit all these Atrocities that we tend to condone for at. Sorry, tend to abhor threat history. So would that also be the same with the pandemic, whereby we did see a creeping form of health authoritarianism there, where people were scared, so they wanted the government to perhaps overreach and overstep its boundaries, to agree? I mean, a lot of people thought that while there was a legitimate threat, like me as a prepper, I was warning people in January that this could be it.

But then when the government started bringing these very draconian sort of style conditions in many respects, which some of them were justified, I think, but there was other ones that were. Now we’re seeing that there were potential. I mean, I’m not going to get into the vaccine debate, but, you know, there’s profiteering, there’s a danger in. I guess what I’m trying to say is authoritarianism can be dressed up in many different ways. Different ways. And that threat that people want, the totalitarian strongman, in some ways, that’s just the government. Right. It’s maybe in one case it’s the populist movements with Trump, but in another case, it’s like they want the government to coddle them and mandate all of these health measures that do erode people’s liberties to a certain extent.

Have you contemplated how that works both ways across the political spectrum? Yeah. So in the book. Sorry, on the book, during the pandemic, I wrote an article of BBC Future called the Stomp Reflex, which essentially put forward that whenever we have any kind of big societal crisis, whether it be in anything at the gates or a pandemic, it tends to justify emergency measures, things like declarations of martial law, emergency powers. And those almost inevitably tend to be based upon an idea of you can’t trust ordinary people, you can trust elites. And on top of that, we should give elites less oversight and more sweeping powers in general.

And there’s two big problems here. One is that it just doesn’t have any real evidence. There’s an excellent study where it looked at the number of emergency powers used for different natural disasters, things like earthquakes, et cetera. But it also controlled for how big those disasters were. And in general, the more emergency powers used, the bigger the body count. So these things weren’t actually helping. And the second is that, as I mentioned, when you look at studies of disaster risk management, how people respond during crises, average people are actually pretty decent. Again, not perfect. There are things like, you know, frenzied buying during different kinds of international, during different times of crisis, you got to Stock up before the panic? Ideally, yeah.

But like in general, people are pretty good. Like a great example here is you may have heard of boat lift. So in the wake of the 911 attacks, basically the Coast Guard puts out a call to move people from Manhattan island across the Hudson River. Over half a million people are moved within a day. And the vast majority of the ships are small boats, ferries, dinghies, et cetera, piloted by regular people. It ended up being the largest maritime evacuation throughout history and it was completely decentralized, done by people who were just trying to do the right thing.

So the idea that we have to worry about mass panic and instead we should give lots of power to elites during a crisis I think is fundamentally flawed and is more of a power grab than an evidence based response in general. I think we should just once again have actually stronger oversight and probably more good democratic responses when we have crises. And you’re right, this can happen on both the left and the right. Caveat is that when it comes to the authoritarian impulse in particular, there’s definitely a stronger literature for this being a far right impulse rather than the far left, but it can technically happen on both levels.

See, it seems to be a pendulum that swings in both extremes. And what we’ve seen with the pandemic that almost spawned this reaction from a lot of people, which arguably has culminated into what we see today. And I presume that the response to that will be even more extreme. So we seem to be in a situation whereby the pendulum is swinging to increasingly more violent extremes. And maybe next, I mean, the greatest example is the New York Mayor Mamdani, who at least he self describes as a hardline socialist communist. I don’t think he really is, but it just, it’s one of those stark contrasts where we see a lot of people thought, well, you know, the Republicans, they got the House, they got the Senate, they got the potus.

And. But what, what is the reaction to that? Well, New York elects a, you know, a quote, unquote socialist mayor. So we see things oscillating in such a way where every time we, we reach a new transition period, it becomes more and more extreme. So I can imagine that the reprisal for a lot of things that Trump is going to be doing from the left is going to be pretty extreme as well. And that is going to be yet even more, you know, hardline reaction from the right and so on and so forth, and that that potentially creates, exacerbates this civil unrest to a point of possible civil conflict.

Yeah, I think that first of all, it’s worth while remembering that Mamdani identifies as a social Democrat. So the key thing here is that while he wants a strong state that provides many provisions to its citizens, he wants that state to be overseen and heavily tethered by citizens. In general, I would say we should look more at people’s actions rather than anything else. And in the case of people like Mamdani, most of the policies they’re putting forward are more or less about alleviating the cost living crisis on ordinary people and trying to give people more of a say in their politics.

If I see someone who is saying they’re left wing or Democratic, but they’re not proposing things like citizen assemblies or juries, they’re not trying to encourage greater voter turnouts, and they’re not trying to basically improve wealth inequality and give ordinary people more of a go, then to me, they’re not really left wing or socialist, democrat, etc. So I’d look more at policies here. And I think the key thing here is that both people on the left and the right actually, surprisingly do converge on lots of things. If I asked a Bernie Sanders supporter or a Trump supporter, do you like the idea of having a citizens jury? So making policy rather than having elites do it, just take a random selection of citizens across the country, have them informed by experts, have them debate, deliberate and reach a decision.

And we have loads of experiments with this where it works really well. It depolarizes people, it tends to result in better policy. I think both the Trump and the Sanders supporter probably can agree that’s a good thing. And likewise, when you look at the survey data around things like universal healthcare, etc. Interestingly, both people on the left and the right tend to usually agree. So I think we don’t need to have a pendulum because ultimately most people actually do agree in a whole bunch of the most important things that matter, including greater democracy. I mean, ideally, I agree with you and I think when you articulate it like that, a lot of people would agree.

Nonetheless, they will still succumb to the same old politicization of these issues and. Yeah, tribalistic. Exactly. Well, I think we’re going to cut it there because, I mean, we could continue to talk about this for hours, but giving people a taste of what you’re about, and if you guys want more information on your book, where can they find that information? Where’s the best place to go? Yeah, so my book, Goliath’s Curse the History and Future Cytoclapse is available at essentially any major bookstore. You can get it from Amazon. Of course you want to. I always encourage people to go to a local, smaller, independent bookseller.

For me in particular, I don’t have much. I have a pretty small social media footprint. I am on both Blue Sky, Macedon, Ukemp and I’m also starting a substack called Kemp. I think it’ll be called the Final Word. But apart from that, there’s not much information you can get about me because I’m also taking Massive Ellen seriously. Very good, very good. Very well advised. Well, I’d encourage people to go check that out. I’ll post a link to the book in the description below. And one of your other podcasts that you did here recently, which is the three hour one.

I can’t remember what the host of that one was, but it was actually really good too. So if people want a deeper dive into this kind of stuff, go and check that out. Luke Kemp, thanks a lot for coming out. I greatly appreciate it. No worries. Thank you so, so much for having me. Take care. You too. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at Canadian Preparedness where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices. No junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off.

Don’t forget the strong survive but the prepared thrive. Stay safe.
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