‘Goliath’s Curse’ and the Surprising Benefits of Societal Collapse
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2025
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re obsessed with apocalypses, big and small. We fantasize about what the future might look like after the fall of society and fear the coming tribulation. Rome fretted about decline until its end. Stories of the Sea Peoples terrified the monarchs of the Late Bronze Age. During the 30 Years’ War, Europeans imagined Armageddon had finally begun.
But a funny thing happens after the collapse: things tend to get a little better for everyone.
Luke Kemp is here to hold our hands through the end of the world as we know it. Kemp is a researcher at Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author of the book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse.
- Beauty in collapse
- Matthew’s AI test
- The Doctor Doom mask
- “Collapse was good for most people.”
- Sea People’s mentioned
- Why a Goliath and not a Leviathan?
- Down with Thomas Hobbes
- Fear of a mass panic driving collapse
- “Emergency powers have a very funny tendency to stick around”
- The problem with guns, germs, and steel
- The Tree of Evil
- On the purpose of human sacrifice
- Doctor Doom is the belle of the ball
- Are we ending on a high note?
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:12.6 | Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. Did you know that Angry Planet is almost entirely listeners supported? It's true. If you want to be part of the team, go to Angry PlanetPod.com, sign up. $9 a month, get you early and commercial free access |
| 0:25.6 | to all of the mainline episodes. It gets you a couple of bonus episodes that aren't on |
| 0:30.8 | the main feed and some written work. Again, that's at Angry Planetpod.com. With that further |
| 0:35.9 | ado, here is the episode. |
| 0:42.5 | Thank you. that's at angry planetpod.com. Without further ado, here is the episode. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew |
| 0:47.1 | Galt. Let's try to find some beauty in all the collapse. Today with me here is Lucas Kemp. We're going to be talking about |
| 0:55.2 | his new book, Goliath's Curse. Sir, can you introduce yourself? Of course, Matthew. First of all, |
| 1:01.2 | thank you for having me. I'm Luke Kemp. I'm a researcher at the University of Cambridge with |
| 1:06.9 | the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, where we study any scenarios and risks |
| 1:13.3 | that could result in global societal collapse or, in the very worst case, human extinction. |
| 1:18.9 | And I should emphasize that we're studying these things not necessarily trying to create them. |
| 1:26.1 | There's a lot of that going around these days. Just feel like a lot of people are studying things trying to create them, There's a lot of that going around these days. |
| 1:28.6 | Does feel like a lot of people are studying things trying to create them, even though they |
| 1:31.5 | know they're bad. |
| 1:32.6 | Open AI being the prompt example. |
| 1:34.7 | Yes. |
| 1:35.4 | And we're, you've given me too good a segue, but like that's, um, so AI and nukes are kind |
| 1:43.9 | of like two of my primary interests and two of my like areas of expertise. |
| 1:47.4 | And I gave you the book, the new, the, the AI test. |
| 1:51.6 | And I was like, all right, well, I got to see how he talks about AI. |
| 1:55.0 | And that will tell me a lot about the way this guy thinks and what my assessment of the work is. |
... |
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