Imagine a breakfast wrap.

You know the one, because there really is only one.

Sausage, egg, cheese, bacon and a potato rusty all wrapped together.

Yep, there it is.

I think my work here is done.

Served until 11am. Hello, my name's David Ronsman, and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, it's the final of my four conversations with

Luke Kemp about societal collapse. We have done the ancient past. We have done the recent past.

We have done the present. So now it's about the future. Where and when might collapse happen?

Who will be responsible for it? Who or what are the agents of doom?

Are they human or are they inhuman? And how can humans, we humans, fight back?

Luke, we've come in many ways to the crunch of these conversations. This is part of a series called

Where Are We Going? And we're going to be talking about how some of the dynamics we've been describing

might play out in future. We left the last one with a five-year time horizon. We're going to go

a little beyond that. Might even ask you to put some probabilities on some outcomes. But I want to start with something

that you said last time, which is about what's distinctive about the world we are in now. And the

way you framed it is that essentially we live under a global galah. That's how you put it, a single

overarching structure of power and authority and domination with lots of interleaved and interplaying

aspects to it, clearly states are absolutely integral to this, including the most powerful

states, particularly, but not exclusively, but that there are other actors who are part of the

interlocking chain here, including, for instance, technology corporations,

and others too, the big fossil fuel companies. In many ways, the whole world is subject to similar

...