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Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas

podcast. Today it's a new set of conversations as part of our series, Where Are We Going, which is

about the fate of humanity. I'm talking to the writer Luke Kemp, who is the author of a remarkable book called

Goliath's Curse, about the long history of societal collapse.

A Goliath is what Luke Kemp calls the structures of power and authority that human beings

build to control their societies.

This is the story of how they get built,

of the fuel they use, Goliath fuel to be constructed, and what happens when they fall apart. What we call states, what happens when they fail. We start this story at the very beginning.

Look, I want to start with a big question, and I'm not completely sure how to phrase this question.

So you can push back if I'm phrasing it in a way that you don't like.

But if we look across the broad sweep of human history, and we're talking

here hundreds of thousands of years, certainly tens of thousands of years, not just thousands,

let alone hundreds, so the big sweep, how would you characterize the default condition

of human social organization and structure? And as I was thinking about where I wanted to start

...