ICYMI 👉 I’m going Live on Substack with today at 12pm EDT/9am EDT for “How to Tell Strategic Stories that Clarify Climate Crisis.” Come with questions!
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Luke Kemp.
Luke researches the end of the world. He is a Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge. He has advised and led foresight studies for multiple international organisations, including the WHO and Convention on Biological Diversity. His work has been covered by media outlets such as the BBC, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. He is the author of the bestselling book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse.
I’ll be frank. If you’re looking to understand collapse from a systemic point-of-view, with the most contemporary research available, you have to start with Goliath’s Curse.
Buy Goliath’s Curse here!
“Collapse” is one of those words that’s bandied about a lot—especially with conversations about the future of the United States and U.S. hegemony—and is therefore prone to debate, misconceptions, and a variety of uses. Luke cuts through that noise to make the case that collapse isn’t just a sensationalist concept or a fringe worry—it’s a recurring feature of history in human societies, a cocktail of human evolutionary psychology and the power of symbolic communication, which allows us to craft stories and ideologies that, among other things, grant particular people the ability to cast themselves as more deserving of finite resources and form dominance hierarchies.
Before I go any further, I also want to give a huge shoutout to Onassis ONX Studio for making the space for this interview.
Combining empirical research, historical case studies, and contemporary global trends, he shows how what he calls goliath fuel—stuff like lootable resources and new technologies—allows for the formation of “goliaths,” a word he uses to sidestep the colonialist implications of “civilization,” going to pains to demonstrate how many of the empires we glamorize today were ruthless and brutal engines of domination. He also shows how these same features, which manifest broadly as systemic inequality, sow the seeds for the fall of these goliaths.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about the patterns behind past collapses, why “collapse” doesn’t always mean apocalypse, and what insights from past collapses we should use to evaluate the current “Silicon Goliath.” We explore how factors like inequality, environmental degradation, and political fragility intersect in surprising (and not-so-surprising) ways, and why understanding these dynamics is crucial—not to amplify despair and nihilism, but to work toward more equitable, democratic, just social, political, and economic configurations.
If you’re looking for guidance and clarity around the past, present, and future of these goliaths, and how you might consider becoming a “David,” this is the conversation for you.
Another episode you might like:
Rachel Donald: Why is the World in Crisis—& What Can We Do About It? | Urgent Futures #40
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with leading futurist Andy Hines discussing his decade+ research into “imagining after capitalism”:
