The Hello everyone watching and watching and listening. Today I'm speaking

with historian and author Neil Ferguson we haven't spoken before

although I've wanted to for a long time.

We discuss the historical and deeply mythological precedent of world-ending narratives

how the global doomsday ethos abdicates local responsibility

while empowering the elite class, the out-of-control gigantism plaguing our

administrative states today and how we might strive as

individuals to deal with the genuine tragedy of life, morally, humbly and

religiously.

So I was reviewing your book, Doom,

this morning, and I've been wanting to talk to you

about it for a long time.

I'm very interested in the apocalyptic vision and its

implications for political organization as well.

And I thought I'd just start with a couple of comments to get us going.

The apocalypse in some ways is always upon us and you write about that in your book.

I mean because people might ask, well, why has mankind always been consumed at the narrative level with notions of the

end of the world? And the answer to that is at least in part because we always inhabit demarcated

conceptual worlds and even embodied worlds and all of those worlds do come to an end

and so the idea that there's a universal end

is built into the fabric of reality,

and it's something that we have to permanently contend with.

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