Is Society About to Collapse?

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The climate crisis, the rise of AI and the cost of living - do you feel like our society is on the brink of falling apart? Dan is joined by Dr Luke Kemp, Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge, who has spent seven years analysing 400 societies over five millennia to discover what has led to the collapse of Ancient civilisations in places like Mesoamerica, China, Egypt and across Europe.

He explains the impact inequality, leaders with traits of 'the dark triad' and environmental factors have on a historic society's survival. He identifies what changes we could make to stop it from happening to us, too.

You can learn more in Luke's book 'The History and Future of Societal Collapse'

Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore

Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday, 12th September 2025!

To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career, as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask!

Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/.

You can also get tickets for the live show of 'The Ancients' here - https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/

We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello,
0:00.6	folks, Dan Snow here.
0:01.6	I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history hit.
0:06.1	I'd love for you to be there.
0:07.5	Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London,
0:10.4	in England on the 12th of September to celebrate the 10 years.
0:14.1	You can find out more about it and get tickets with the link in the show notes.
0:17.6	Look forward to seeing you there.
0:29.4	Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. People are getting nervous out there.
0:33.6	It feels like there are headwinds. We are facing headwinds. There are wars.
0:39.6	There has even been the talk of breaching the nuclear taboo, the taboo against using nuclear weapons,
0:44.5	which is hell, thank goodness, for 80 years, but Putin has talked about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, just beyond terrifying that we could see those deployed again on battlefields.
0:49.3	We have great power rivalry.
0:50.9	We have a climate crisis.
0:53.0	We have a migrant crisis. People are moving around.
0:55.9	We have a cost of... Things are expensive. We've got lots of crises. And it's making people think
1:01.1	about collapse. It's making people think about those civilizations that have gone before that have
1:05.9	collapsed. Well, into that mental space galloped Dr. Luke Kemp. He has just written a book called
1:13.1	Goliath's Curse, and he set the internet on fire when this book dropped, because he spent
1:18.2	seven years analysing the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over five millennia.
1:24.7	He is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Exessential Risk at the University
1:30.9	of Cambridge. I bet that's a cheery common room. I'm grabbing a quick coffee and it'll break in their
	...

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