← Are We Doomed?
Are We Doomed?
Are We Going the Way of the Roman Empire?
00:37:16
How civilizations fall (and whether we're seeing that now).
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This message comes from NPR sponsor Carvana. Carvana believes selling your car should be refreshingly simple. Enter your license plate or vin, get a real offer down to the penny, and schedule a pickup on your time. No surprises. Sell your car today@carvana.com Pickup fees may apply pretty much every day. This has happened for years. My father reads the newspaper and comes across some article about the state of the world, and this pronouncement emits from
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him, I'd say without question, we're going the way of the Roman Empire.
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This is the refrain. We're going the way of the Roman Empire. He could be reading about a new conflict.
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We're going the way of the Roman Empire.
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Or a tax change.
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Way of the Roman Empire.
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Someone runs a stop sign.
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Roman Empire.
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The refrain is followed inevitably by my mother sighing out her own reply.
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I am sick and tired of hearing about the Roman Empire.
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It sounds like typical mom and dad stuff, but then I was talking to a pretty renowned historian who's written about Rome and a lot of other civilizations. He said something that's been stuck in my head.
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Every single complex society that has ever existed in the history of the world so far has collapsed. Do we think we're different?
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Do we think we're different? One of the reasons I wanted to do this show in the first place is that I think there's a pretty pervasive feeling of bleakness, of things falling apart, that the course we're on as a society or maybe a world, is just unsustainable. Is that true, or is that just a feeling? I called that historian because I was wondering if we can look to the past and see what signs there were that other powerful nations would topple. What did it look like then? Are we seeing those now? Or I guess you could put it another way. Is dad right? Are we going the way of the Roman Empire? Sorry, Mom. From nuanced tales, distributed by the npr network, this is are we doomed? I'm ben bradford. Today on the show, if you or someone you know thinks about Rome at least once a day, this is the episode for you. If you're not one of those, but you suspect you live in a nation that's in decline, this is also the episode for you. We're going to look at what's felled ancient societies and democracies today. There is a pattern. Do we see it now? And what would it really mean? Are we going the way of the Roman Empire? Ian Morris is an archaeologist and classics professor at Stanford who's written about the fall of civilizations around the world. He says, this is a worthwhile question for us.
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Yeah. Yeah. Well, I do tend to think that large groups of people are all pretty much all the same. Wherever you go in our world, wherever you go back in history, people don't act so differently from the way they do today.
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Rome is especially useful because a lot of people wrote a lot down about how it fell. Ian says to understand what happened and how it applies to us, go back first to Rome at its height, huge, powerful, idolized for centuries. After a millennium passes and you've still got Edward Gibbon, a British historian in the 1700s, salivating over it.
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And Gibbon has this great line. He said, if a man were called upon to name the happiest age of mankind in which he would choose to live, it would be emperors who reign from about the year 98 to the year 235. When he says the empire, this is like the happiest society that the world had ever seen. And Gibbon, of course, he's writing 250 years ago.
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Yeah, he didn't have electricity.
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No, he didn't have any. He didn't have dentists or any of these things that we kind of take for granted now. And so he thought the Roman Empire was just like perfection.
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Ian says that's because Rome at its height is a huge, intricate, sophisticated power.
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It's got 60 or 70 million people living in it, which is a vast population for those times. It's got a city of million people. In the city of Rome, it's built
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a complex network of trade and shipping around much of the world.
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It's got a marketing system, moving goods and services and people around unlike anything the world has ever seen before.
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The empire prizes culture and learning.
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If you're a wealthy Roman man, you get to partake in this cosmopolitan, sophisticated, literate world where you'll serve part of your career in the army, part of it in the Senate, part of it writing books.
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That does not mean it's a great place to live for everyone.
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Probably the ordinary peasant standard of living in the Roman Empire is probably higher than it's been in any other empire in world history, which means it's horribly low.
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There's also the torture, the slavery, and the habit of attacking everyone on the border. Nevertheless, this is a society that has grown huge, wealthy and globally influential. Its culture, language and architecture have spread around much of the world. And most of all, it is a nation that is very, very secure in itself.
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They had this famous saying, roma aeterna, eternal Rome. This is never going to change.
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They're like, we did it. We solved society. We got it.
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Exactly. We got it, right. We nailed this. Yeah. This is just going to go on forever and ever.
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And. I always wonder if people in the ancient world were, like, exhausted by Mondays. You know, that feeling of, I have to get up, do the commute, work, stop by the store on the way home. It's this feeling of drudgery that we get, but it's based in security. Things will not change. The store is going to be there. The roads are going to be there. The nation is going to be there. It sounds like people in Rome probably had this feeling. But of course, the Roman Empire did end. It was not eternal, so why not? And what does it mean for us?
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For a long time, it didn't matter what I was speaking about. Somebody would stand up and say, did lead poisoning cause the collapse of the Roman Empire? I could talk about the Maya. Doesn't matter. It's actually lead poisoning is what we really care about.
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Well, you know, maybe we should just get that out of the way while you mention it. Did lead poisoning cause the end of the Roman Empire?
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No.
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Okay, great. This theory goes that Romans used lead in their chalices and utensils, which is true. And then that poisoned them, maybe a little. And drove them insane. There's less evidence. And that's the reason the Empire fell. Big leap. We can't pin it all on lead, which is a shame, because that would be a relatively easy thing to avoid. Instead, Ian says you have to go back to that description of Rome in its heyday. Huge, wealthy and powerful. Roma aeterna.
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The success of the Roman Empire has a lot to do with creating the forces that then begin to challenge and undermine it.
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The global trade, the military might, the huge population. These are all strengths. Until they're not. It's the second century A.D. rome at its zenith. You're a soldier of the Empire, fighting all the way over in what's now Iraq. You're conquering new territory. That's the Roman way. How the Empire pays for itself has always paid for itself. How it pays you. But this time, you've marched so far, no matter what. This boondoggle is too expensive to be worth it. Which puts pressure on the Empire's business model. It's a new economic challenge. Then the soldier next to you complains of a fever this far from home, he's encountered a new disease. No one has resistance. As you travel back victorious. Of course, it spreads from your legion. Eventually, you're parading through Rome itself. When you start to feel feverish, you pass along this illness. Now a pandemic into the city. A quarter of the people who get sick die. We're not sure what this disease was. Maybe the first western outbreak of smallpox or measles, but it killed millions of people. So now the Empire has a pandemic and a growing budget problem. Plus far flung provinces all the way into the Middle East. On top of its usual wars and trade, all of it's spurring huge population shifts as people travel due to upheaval or opportunity. It's just a lot to handle. Keep this in mind. Rome faces what we'll call new outside crises. Over the next generation. The problems only compound recovering from pandemic, holding together the far reaches of the Empire. The expense grows, it leads to inflation, it leads to unrest. Germanic tribes sense weakness and launch new invasions. Roman citizens longing for better days, embrace new religious cults and waves of mysticism, nationalism and nativism against non Romans. And who's in charge of the Empire? It's hard to keep track because the big crises are bleeding into Rome's politics. Go now. A generation later, you're the Emperor newly installed. Your hold on power is tenuous. You're faced with all these problems which have only built for further economic crises. Barbarian invasion, cults at home, territorial unrest abroad. And none of that is what you're most worried about.
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Survival is always the number one issue here. With the ancient emperors, you have to worry very much about poison or a knife in the back.
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That's how you disposed of your predecessor who disposed of his, and so on. You don't know it, but that knife is coming for you. You're one of 24 emperors who will briefly hold the title in just this half century.
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All the time, what they're thinking about is what do I need to do to ensure my continued political survival.
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Governments within Rome rise and fall with coups and hostile takeovers. To maintain power, you promise more and more. You raise the army's pay, distribute bread, salt and wine to citizens. You know there is only one way to pay for it.
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You see Again, Roman emperors knowing what's going to happen if they devalue the coinage, but doing it anyway. Because that's the best thing.
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For me, it all meant political instability. An unstable, constantly shifting government made the nation internally fragile. And so fires keep growing across the Roman Empire. Diseases, grain costs. Germanic tribes invading and the government unstable. Infighting focused on short term opportunism does not put them out, cannot put them out. A generation later, it's the Third century,
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the Roman Empire starts to spiral down. And the more the empire spirals down, the higher the costs of maintaining it get.
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Now you're a wealthy landowner in France. You've paid taxes to Rome for as long as anyone can remember. But the roads the Empire's supposed to maintain are decaying. You're not sure its soldiers are going to protect you anymore if you're attacked. And a novel thought strikes, but why
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don't I break away from the Roman Empire and run my defense locally? Raise the taxes locally, keep all the money locally.
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Maybe you don't need Rome. And maybe you can get away with
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that because like in the good old days, if you just decide, I'm not going to pay taxes anymore, you can be pretty confident some guy is going to come out from Rome and set fire to your house and sell your family into slavery and behead you.
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Yeah.
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Which really focus the mind. And now they're thinking, you know, I don't think that guy is coming. And the more they think that again, the more it spirals down, the smaller the scale of everything gets. You just start thinking, I don't hear so much about the empire anymore. Until eventually you get to the point where you just don't hear anything anymore. So that's kind of how I like to think about what happened.
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A slow fade, although with moments of traumatic upheaval. In one five year period, Rome lost half its territory in wars. Imagine half of Europe shifting hands. It was like that. Security was tenuous over time. The aqueducts ran dry without drinking water, without farms delivering grain. The city that had once been vibrant with almost a million people lay nearly abandoned. Cows grazed upon what had once been the Roman Forum, the city's heart. Ruins of the empire stretched from England to Egypt. Now, this all took centuries, and we're talking in incredibly broad strokes. And it's also only one of many explanations.
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There was a German guy back, I think it was in the 1970s, wrote a book about all the theories about the fall of the Roman Empire. He came up with something like 193 discrete theories.
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But if there's a through line to be found across the major ones, it seems like it's the mashup of two general factors that you heard. One, a powerful, capable society grows politically unstable, it erodes internally, and two, it is hit with big outside crises. War, pandemics, famine, mass migration, climactic shifts such as volcanic eruptions. The result, it's too fragile and it collapses. It's not just Rome. Historians tell a similar story about the end of Major civilizations throughout history of the Maya in Central America, the Han Dynasty in China, the Mycenaeans in Greece. Internal instability leaves them unequipped. When crises hit, the state fails. Collapse every major society so far.
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And I do think this about our own society. I mean, you ask, are all societies doomed to collapse? Well, every single complex society that has ever existed in the history of the world so far has collapsed. Do we think we're different?
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So if history is a guide, at a certain point, big crises and political instability will overwhelm our society and we will go the way of the Roman Empire. Dad is right. Congrats, dad. But before we all go cry in the shower and light our 401s on fire, there is a major caveat here. I think if we are doomed to collapse, it's eventually that's not the same as saying we are headed there now. So I think the next question, now that we know how collapse happens, is to figure out whether the warning signs here are blinking. We can start by looking at one of our political instability. We have a lot of research on that and not just from the past. From the CIA. This message comes from NPR sponsor Carvana. Your time is worth more than a waiting game. Carvana gives you a transparent offer for your car in minutes and picks it up from your door. Sell your car today@carvana.com pickup fees may apply.
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How did we get here? That's a question we have been trying
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to answer a lot here at npr. We are exploring global histories on Throughline.
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We are hearing from national security experts on sources and methods. We're watching the markets with Planet Money.
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You can support this work across all
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our podcasts with NPR.
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Find out more at NPR. Are we headed the way of the Roman Empire? Collapse takes two big crises hitting and a nation too internally fragile to absorb them. It's like Jenga, the game with the Tower of Blocks. A powerful sneeze could blow it over any time. But it gets a lot easier as you pull blocks out and the tower gets wobbly. We can determine if a nation is getting wobbly. And we don't have to look all the way back to Rome to do it either. A few decades ago, the CIA asked a group of academics what countries governments are about to fall. And can you please put that into Excel for us?
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The result was probably the largest research project on political conflict ever conceived and devised.
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This is Monty Marshall. Monty's retired, but for 20 years he was a key member of the Political Instability Task Force funded by the CIA. It predicted what nations would fail, falling to coups or into war or autocracy years in advance. Monte provided the data, which makes him maybe the best person to help us figure out whether we're in trouble. What did you find makes political collapse occur?
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Well, the first law of political science united we stand, divided we fall. And that's exactly true.
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Monti says countries at risk of falling apart are the ones that are fighting within themselves.
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The number one indicator of impending political instability is polarization.
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It's not just disagreeing. Democracy at its finest is people shouting at a city council meeting about sign ordinances. Monty says the division has to grow deeper, and it creates a chain reaction.
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Politics goes from rational, logical, material to becoming more and more emotional.
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Arguments stop being about how we solve common problems and become about who's got better values.
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Looking at symbolic cues, vilifying opposition, glorifying one's own group. All expressed in a rhetoric that's not susceptible to negotiated outcomes.
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So common ground disappears. Political opponents are identified as not just wrong, but malicious. The country divides into factions. They withdraw their trust in a shared government. And again, there are signs people start
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reverting to their ethnic identities or their value identities or their religious identities because they no longer trust central authorities.
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Are you uncorking a bottle of wine for your shower cry? I don't think I need to belabor the point that this all sounds a lot like the last several decades of U.S. politics. And if I do need to belabor it, I actually have a whole series on this called landslide, which you can check out. What I want to know from Monte is where it leads. So in other countries where you studied this and you sort of saw this process play out, I guess the question would be, what happened next?
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Well, polarization, untreated, invariably leads to political instability.
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Political instability, that's our term for what makes us fragile and vulnerable to collapse. As a reminder, it may sound innocuous, but instability refers to attempted coups, authoritarian takeovers, even civil war. Again, Monti says there is a common path nations around the world have followed when they get to this point. Actually, two typical paths.
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One, if government structure is strong enough, will lead to autocratization. One group taking control over all others.
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This was Venezuela, Hugo Chavez in the late 90s. One faction consolidates power over its opponents, takes control, often brutal, repressive control. We can't agree. So whoever's strongest simply seizes power.
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Autocratic rule is the principal form of governance in divided societies.
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That is one common path for polarized, unstable autocracy. Mani says it's usually how Established democracies become unstable. The other path is that no faction is strong enough to take control and
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they fight either armed conflict or in the worst case scenario, complete collapse of central authority.
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This was Lebanon in the 1970s. As it divided along religious lines, the government fell apart and militias warred for territorial control.
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And that's the worst possible outcome because a collapse of central authority is always accompanied by very large scale political violence.
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That can be civil war or even genocide.
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Once violence reaches a certain level, it's uncontrollable.
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It is so dark to repeat, the pattern we just heard was polarization, to factionalism, to instability, and it accumulates into authoritarianism, political violence, or full on collapse. The Political Instability Task Force found this pattern over 100 times in modern nations around the world, from Algeria to Zambia. Monty says if he were looking at the US today, he would clearly see it here too.
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It's like, okay, the dynamic has started. Now we've got political assassinations because the dynamics encourage violent behavior.
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A widely used global measurement of countries political freedom called polity, which Mani ran for years now scores the US as out of democracy and on the cusp of autocracy. All indicators are blinking that we are on the same path as other governments who've experienced political collapse.
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Do we think we're different?
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Okay, are we depressed? Great. At this point, I guess I can give you two pieces of good news. First, this is gonna sound counterintuitive, but you could argue what we're going through right now is normal.
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There's only about 35 countries in the world who have not experienced a period of polarization. It's just a basic dynamic in complex societal systems that they go through periods where they lose their sense of unity.
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And so obviously some of those countries didn't make it as countries.
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Well, actually, they've all made it as countries, but to varying degrees of success.
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Counterintuitive, right? Monty is saying countries regularly start to fall apart and then come back together. They're boy bands. They break up in chaos and infighting, often about who knows what, and then they reunite for a new tour. Maybe they repeat the process a few times. Quality of the music can vary, but few nations stay broken up for long. They dip their toes in political instability and the violence that comes with it, and they run away.
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It's really the realities of the political dynamic that catches people's attention.
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He says most people aren't thinking about how their political paradigm ensures a stable supply chain or balanced power grid.
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People are often in a kind of an abstract reality where they take things for granted. They think things just happen.
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My food comes from the grocery store, my electricity comes from flipping my light switch on.
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And it's only when they lose those things, you know, in political instability, all of a sudden their water gets cut off or their electricity gets cut off and they have to start reflecting. It's like, wow, what happened? Yeah, we had it so good. Now all of a sudden, everything is deteriorating.
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I know, I know. This is supposed to be the good news. Well, here it is, as you said. People see what they've wrought essentially through their division, and then what happens?
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Well, they come to their senses, they turn around.
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But again, it is depressing and frustrating to hear. We have to traipse down this path first when there are so many examples of where it leads. But now our second bit of good news. The Political Instability Task force that MANI was part of had a strong track record in its predictions. It was right about 80% of the time about countries it thought were headed toward government collapse. But that means 20% of the time the task force was wrong. Nations can avoid instability, authoritarianism, or widespread violence. And Monty thinks we could be one of them.
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In long standing democracies, there's a culture of nonviolence, there's a revulsion of displays of violence, and people abstractly can think about political violence, but when they experience it, when they see what it's like, it triggers their cultured revulsion. And so in the United States, what I expect, the more political violence there is, the more opposition there will be to the direction that the country is going.
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So maybe we'll pull back. We have some advantages that might help us wake up. Or we keep going down this well trod path, knowing where it leads, descending into autocracy or breaking apart into widespread violence, all the while pulling blocks out of our Jenga tower. And what if, as we're wobbling, there's a sneeze? Collapse means more than a government falling. Remember, Rome had a whole procession of emperors shanking and poisoning each other, and society trucked along a while longer. When collapse did happen, it was so much bigger. Collapse meant the city square, trafficked by millions, fading into pasture for cows. Collapse meant supply lines and trade routes breaking down until from Britain to Africa, only ruins remained. Collapse sent ripples far outside any one nation. Today we are so much more intertwined with the rest of the world than Rome ever was. What could collapse mean for us? What would it look like? Do we need to be welding sheet metal to our cars and preparing for the Thunderdome?
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Screw it. I'D rather live somewhere else.
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Are we headed the way of the Roman Empire? And if so, what would our collapse look like? Author Annalee Newitz has researched and written about lost cities, examining after collapse, what happens. She tells me a story about one ancient city. A thousand years ago, houses on stilts and intricate, beautiful sandstone temples rose in the rainy tropical forests of Southeast Asia. It was the city of Angkor. You may know it for the stunning temple Angkor Wat.
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Angkor existed at the nexus of two monsoon systems, which meant it had really wet, wet seasons and really dry.
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Dry. Dry seasons, to prevent residents from drowning during rains or dehydrating from droughts, required elaborate infrastructure.
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It was known for big reservoirs, canals connecting the reservoirs in order to collect all that rain during the wet season and then use it for agriculture and drinking water and everything else during the dry season.
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Massive public works projects ran throughout Anchor, and it kept building. At its height, it rivaled Rome in population.
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Like every single king would be known for building a particular reservoir or some other kind of water system.
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But then over time, as happens, the rulers did the boy band thing. They started infighting, grew shortsighted, and can you guess what happened next?
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As their politics became more unstable, the maintenance of these systems and was neglected.
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Dams fell into disrepair. Canals filled with sediment. If my father had lived in a stilted house in Anchor, he'd have been grumbling.
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I'd say, without question, we're going away to the Roman Empire.
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And he had been right.
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The city was hit with a series of droughts and floods, and it just could not withstand that double whammy outside
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pressure, and it folded. But I contacted Annalee to talk about what happened next. Inhabitants don't just disappear during a collapse. It's not the Rapture. For that reason, some scholars don't call it collapse anymore. They call it transformation. In Anchor, the royals fled. Other citizens stuck it out for a while, but food and drinking water grew scarce.
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Then slowly, it is further and further abandoned.
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Eventually, it was like Rome. Almost all that was left was ruins scattered throughout a rainy forest. Annalee says Anchor is a good example of what societal collapse looks like. Cities are hit hardest. Residents flee.
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We see this pattern again and again in cities where neglect of infrastructure combined with natural disaster leads to people saying, screw it. I'd rather live somewhere else. I'd rather live in a tiny town or go to a different city.
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It makes sense. Cities are complicated. They require a lot of project management, not just to keep food and water available, but you've got waste disposal, firefighting. If Services stop because a nation can't provide them, because that nation no longer exists. People have to leave.
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Like a fire is much worse if you have no fire department.
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So if we apply that concept to today, can we envision what the experience here might be if we went the way of the Roman Empire? It gets pretty weird.
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D
If our ancient history is an Egypt, what's likely to happen is fragmentation and abandonment. You might see mass abandonment of areas like cities where when infrastructure fails, it's catastrophic.
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I think I'm picturing like the. And maybe this is not exactly right, you know, the post apocalyptic movie the Shell of the city, the skyscrapers with their exposed metal beams and a few people scurrying between it, finding their canned food and cooking on garbage cans.
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Yeah, I mean, I think that that's not completely unrealistic. That's part of the vibe here.
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Sweet. It feels cartoonish to even imagine that the ruined abandoned cities feverishly depicted in Like I Am Legend could have any predictive power. But in past collapses, cities have fallen apart. They've fallen apart because the logistics to keep them going have unraveled. They've unraveled because there's no longer a government capable of managing them. And with no government, trade and communication between different regions scales back too. Fragmentation. These are all hallmarks of past civilizations collapsing. And Ian Morris, our historian who talked us through fall of Rome, says the cumulative effect is that technology backslides.
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C
To counter surreal collapse, you have to have a society that slides from one level of growth and development down to a major level below it.
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Think about after Rome. The aqueducts and baths run dry. Literacy plummets, architectural techniques, the manufacture of pottery and currency all disappear.
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C
We live, in my terms, we live in like in a fossil fuel age. This is what powers our economies, is what drives everything along. I think for us to count as a proper collapse, we're going to have to tip over that edge where we're no longer able to sustain that kind of economy. We go back into an agrarian civilization or even back into one of hunters and gatherers.
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So sharpen your spears and sign up for CrossFit. Except one of the reasons we don't do a lot of hunting and gathering today is that it wouldn't feed all that many of us. And that's been a problem in past collapses too.
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C
Like when the Roman Empire comes apart, the population probably falls by at least half within the Roman Empire of a couple of centuries in 1200 BCE in Greece, population probably falls by 75% over two centuries.
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It's a Combination of people leaving and starving and dying of unchecked diseases or disasters or wars and just in general, I think having a bad time. All of which is to say that I think collapse or transformation if you prefer would be unpleasant, don't you? The idea that we could be barreling toward this future sounds crazy town when you just put it out there. And I'm not saying that. I'm not saying we are headed for collapse. It's just everyone I ask keeps saying it. A scholar of the past.
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C
We are rerunning an awful lot of the script of these ancient societies.
- [33:14]
A
A researcher of lost cities.
- [33:16]
D
Unfortunately, we're witnessing exactly what the tipping point looks like right now.
- [33:21]
A
A modern conflict analyst.
- [33:22]
B
It's like, okay, the dynamic has started.
- [33:26]
A
And you know, my dad Roman Empire. I think it is really important to realize that probably we are not a special unique snowflake of a society somehow immune from the forces that have felled past powers.
- [33:39]
C
Do we think we're different?
- [33:41]
A
We are probably not. So if we want to avoid the unpleasant fate of Rome or Anchor, we need to stop doing the things that helped bring down Rome and Anchor. I think we can. Civilization collapse can take a really long time. Rome's slow fade took centuries. Since then we've developed some easy button ends of the world. But if we hold off on those, history suggests we have to time to turn things around. And I think based on what we've heard, we can start to glimpse how. You know, I have just spent a lot of time regaling you with stories of governments, cities, societies and entire empires collapsing. But what I have not mentioned is all the times these places faced crises and did not collapse. And that's a big part of the historical record too.
- [34:31]
D
We have these examples of horrific disasters happening and then we have examples of cities being rebuilt even bigger and fancier than before.
- [34:42]
A
Rome was sacked by the Gauls in its early days and recovered to become a big fancy empire. Delhi was sacked and destroyed and rebuilt. Athens sacked, destroyed, rebuilt. We don't even have to look back that far. New Orleans flooded by hurricane rebuilt. Los Angeles wildfires, rebuilding. Why? Because collapse takes two things. Big crises which did hit these places, but they were resilient.
- [35:12]
D
There's really kind of a fork in the road that a lot of civilizations come to where they have to pick whether they're going to fight with each other or just band together to fight against a larger force.
- [35:24]
A
Big crises will hit. What we can do is work to seal up our cracks before they do and be strong enough to come together after that. Is obviously a tall task, and I don't fully know how we turn from the path we're treading of political instability and division. I don't have a solves for you today, but I will say I am starting to detect a pattern across not just this, but a multitude of the biggest threats we face, from polarization to nuclear war. And the solutions I keep hearing across major challenges have something to do with how we come together, how we find common ground, how we find good information, how we distinguish the true threats from phantoms designed to scare us or distract us or push us apart. I do think that there are answers, and I think finding them is a big part of this series now and going forward because we may be going away to the Roman Empire, but we're not there yet. We have time to turn back. We can put down the shower wine and let's figure out how. For my mother's sake and the rest of us, let's prove my dad happily wrong. If you like this show, listener support is going to be key to keeping it going. You can help us by going to doompod.com support. We have bonus episodes for supporters and a whole community you can be part of. Thanks to everyone who's already signed up. We do not take it for granted. Next episode of Are We Doomed? Maybe we're not. If you've decided that people who drive Toyota cars are murderers, you could find examples. Does every generation just think it's doomed, or is it just us, the Internet, tigers and donuts and what they say about human progress and whether it will continue? Are We Are We Doomed? Is a production of Nuance Tales. Our producer is Lindsay Kilbride. Our editor is Tracy Samuelson, engineer and sound designer Jay Sebold. Our fully animated YouTube episodes on YouTube.com wedoomedpod are by Al Kamalazad. Theme music composed by Dylan Dagenet. The show is distributed by the NPR Network. Big thanks to Dan McCoy, Kalia Ali and the rest of the team at NPR for all they do. And most of all, thank you for listening.
- [38:15]
D
Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza.
- [38:18]
A
With conflict unfolding in so many places,
- [38:21]
D
firsthand reporting has never mattered more.
- [38:24]
A
NPR supporters power that work.
- [38:26]
D
They make it possible for our journalists
- [38:28]
A
to get go where news is happening and supporters get perks for NPR podcasts, things like bonus episodes, archive access and more. You can sign up@plus.npr.org.