Do Your Own Research: You Can’t Have Billionaires and Democracy. Ancient Collapse Proves It. w/ Luke Kemp
Novara Media
Novara Media
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2026
⏱️ 109 minutes
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Summary
It’s the question that will come to define our lives: is our society going to collapse? But the field of collapse research is fragmented, chaotic, and often plain deranged. Who can you trust?
Luke Kemp is the author of Goliath’s Curse and a research affiliate at the Cambridge University Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He’s also a political radical.
He told Richard Hames about how close we are to the same tipping point that brought down every other empire in history, why states are criminal gangs in disguise, and why Rome was the Isis of its day.
Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.
Music by Iglooghost.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's in some ways the most pressing question of our time. |
| 0:12.3 | Will our society collapse? |
| 0:15.3 | It's something I think about a lot. |
| 0:17.6 | And there is a kind of collapse culture emerging at the moment. Among my environmentalist |
| 0:23.3 | friends, it's become almost the default scenario for how climate change will play out. Among my friends |
| 0:30.3 | in the AI risk world, they think often less about climate change, if only because their |
| 0:36.2 | predictions for catastrophe tend to play |
| 0:40.0 | out over the course of years and not decades. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has sometimes justified |
| 0:48.2 | his extraordinary wealth by saying that he is going to rescue us all from a catastrophe that |
| 0:53.6 | consumes the earth by taking us to Mars. |
| 0:57.5 | There is too much noise and not enough signal in this culture. We need some way to sort the real threats |
| 1:05.2 | from the urgency washing. Fortunately, my guest this week has done just that work. Luke Kemp is a research affiliate |
| 1:13.8 | at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Excellential Risk, better known as Caesar, and he's also |
| 1:20.1 | the author of Goliath's Curse, the history and future of societal collapse. We spoke about |
| 1:27.1 | what Stephen Pinker gets wrong about our tendencies |
| 1:29.8 | towards violence, why collapse in history wasn't always actually that bad, but why it probably |
| 1:36.5 | will be this time, and why ancient Rome was really the ISIS of its day. |
| 1:43.9 | Luke Camp, welcome to your own research. |
| 1:46.9 | Richard, thanks for having me. |
| 1:50.3 | Over, I think about a week ago from where I'm recording this, |
| 1:54.0 | the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists put out the latest iteration of the clock |
| 1:59.8 | that tells us how many seconds we are to midnight. This is, |
... |
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