← Ologies with Alie Ward
Ologies with Alie Ward
Collapsology (SOCIETAL COLLAPSE, LOL!) with Joseph Tainter
01:27:08
What is your Roman Empire? It’s about to be this episode. What causes the big dogs to stumble and fall? Do societies collapse suddenly, or would one notice as it happens? What *is* a complex society – and is it better than a simple one? Depends on who you ask, and we went straight to the source: the legendary anthropologist, scholar, historian and author of “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Dr. Joseph Tainter. New obsession awaits you in the fall of the Roman Empire, cities lost to the desert dust, diminishing returns, fiddling amid the flames, the worst beard in history, fossil fuels, fertilizer, bread, circus, hanging chads, and if you should go live on a small goat farm. Happy 250th birthday to the currently United States of America!
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A
Oh, hey, it's the smoldering core in your bag of charred popcorn. Alie Ward. And yes, collapsology. It's a real word. And it's all about the fall of empires and the disintegration of societal complexity. So this ologist is an anthropologist, historian, a legend, a one of a kind expert in the field, literally wrote the book on the topic titled the Collapse of Complex Societies, and he also authored the Way the Wind Blows, Climate History and Human Action, as well as the book Drilling the Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma, and has been on radio and tv, worked on movies as a consultant, and continued to teach as a professor of environment and society in the College of Natural Resources at Utah State University until just very recently, I listened to the audiobook of the Collapse of Complex Societies alongside your podmother Jarrett Sleeper on a road trip. And Mercedes Maitland is also a fan of this ologist's work, and she produced and did a huge amount, like nearly all the research for this episode. This one is steered by her mvp, and so we were certainly more familiar with him than he was of us.
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B
Ologies, right? Yeah.
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C
So it might be geology, it might be, in this case, collapsology.
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B
I'm just interested that there is such a term.
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C
Apparently it was coined in 2015 by some French, I think, sociologists. So if you look on the Wikipedia for collapsology, there is a subcategory all about you.
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B
Hang on, I'm gonna. I'm gonna make a note on that.
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C
Yeah, I was thrilled to find that there was an actual ology for it.
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B
Thank you for mentioning that. That will help me. Thank you.
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A
So this is exciting. So you will hear much more from him in a minute. But first, thank you to patrons of the show who support us for as little as $1 a month and submit your questions before we record. Thank you to everyone out there wearing merch from ologiesmerch.com and as always, free. No dollars. You can support us so much just by leaving us a review. And I read and I cherish each one. It's like a log on a fire, such as this hot one from SS Reviews who says Ologies ignites wonder and
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celebrates love of learning, adding, I often
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find the episodes I think will be least interesting are the most captivating. So thank you for that. Yes, this one's a tangle of history and facts. It's a good one. We're gonna dive in. But first, thank you to sponsors of the show who enable us to donate to a relevant charity for each episode. You're more than just one thing. You're the boss. Hey Google, what time is my meeting with Tim today?
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And we're good and always their mom. Everyone in the all new Mazda CX5
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more to move every side of you.
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Learn more@mazdausa.com Google is a trademark of Google LLC. Sequences shortened and simulated.
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Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.
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Now, I was looking for fun ways
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to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial.
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C
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See terms.
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C
Oh, it's summer.
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A
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C
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A
See vrbo.com, for details. Okay, let's talk about fiddling amid the flames, the worst beard in history. If you should go live on a small goat farm. The problems with civilization, the ups and downs of empires, the fall of Rome, cities lost to the desert, bread circuses, fossil fuels, fertilizer, hanging chads, doomsday clocks, the cost of complexity, the beauty of simplicity. When does a return diminish? And how do you know if collapse is knocking at your door and breathing down your collar? With Author of the book the Collapse of Complex Societies, anthropologist, professor, historian, legend and collapsologist, Dr. Joseph Tainter.
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B
He himself.
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C
And so yes, you are officially a collapsologist, which is not a term that I knew existed before looking into it recently, but you wrote a very seminal book this in 1988. Can you give me a little bit of information about what led you to want to go down that as a
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B
rabbit hole, research wise, probably more than one thing. But I'm an archaeologist and have always been interested in the big problems, the big questions of our history as a species. And there's a limited number of those. I mean, one is just human biological evolution. Another one is why did human societies ever grow more complex, which is related to what I've worked on. There's things like the origin of the state, the formation of empires, a number of big questions like that that take comparative research. And one of them is why did ancient societies collapse? And collaterally our societies today still vulnerable to collapsing? So there was that intellectual aspect to it, and I had it in mind for a while. I was working on a monograph on the prehistory of northwestern New Mexico, where one of my case studies of collapse is located, the Chocoan system, and had an invitation from a colleague, Dr. Tom King, to give a presentation on that at a professional meeting. And at the same time, my wife encouraged me to pursue that topic. She saw that that would be an important thing to concentrate on in the future. And so I simply began concentrating on it. And as I did, I had ideas come to me and also some reading in other fields. In the field of ecology, there is an aspect of ecology founded in economic reasoning. I think it's called optimal foraging theory.
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A
Let's back up for a sec for a little context on Chaco history. So I just got back from a
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C
trip to New Mexico, actually, and I
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A
sadly did not make it up to that territory we were buzzing around. So New Mexico, I had to go back. However, in his book, Dr. Tainer writes, across an inhospitable upland plateau of northwestern New Mexico are the remains of once populous towns and villages, now utterly ruined and filled with wind blown sand. These Chacoan towns, while not as widely known as the Mayan cities, present a similarly compelling picture. Instead of cities overtaken by jungle, the Chacoan image is of lost towns filled with drifting sands and frequented only by desert fauna or occasional Navajo or dine herders. The Chacoans, clearly masters of this desert, he writes, but somehow, disturbingly, they lost their mastery and the desert prevailed. And he paints this picture that the Chacoans built a series of walled stone towns called pueblos across the basin and connected many of them by roads that traversed the desert. They ascended mesas, they crossed ravines, and they had exotic goods imported from as far away as northern Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. And they got trees to roof the towns. They were carried up to 50km across the desert to Chaco Canyon. Which was the center of the basin. And from as early as 500 A.D. this regional society, he says, thrived for about 500 years until sometime after the middle of the 11th century. Around 1050 A.D. something went wrong, and construction at the towns ended. And then many began to be abandoned, and the trade networks that they had established declined. The towns were scavenged for building materials, and then by around 1300 AD, the last sedentary peoples had either left or they reverted to a more simple, mobile lifestyle. So before the Chacoan society collapsed, how did it develop that complexity? Dr. Tainer's hypothesis is that like many, even hunter gatherer groups, resources were shared so that if one agricultural producer in the group had a bummer year, the entire group could ensure survival by reallocating. But if you think like planning a bachelorette trip is hard to organize with a lot of people, just imagine orchestrating all of the admin and logistics of an increasingly complex society. It is not easy. And when this society got too vast, more people were hit harder by the bad years and there just wasn't enough to go around. And the bad years got bad. There was a devastating so called mega drought that hit in the mid 1100s. And that was really the death knell for them. The complex society just couldn't survive it. Oh, and that ecological theory he talked about, that also sparked his book, the optimal foraging theory. It's a deep dive, but in the smallest nutshell, it's that hunters and foragers have their own economy of what they're going to harvest. If berries are good and the chance for a deer, say that part of the day is bad, then they'll put more energy into getting the berries right. Mercedes told me that as an archeology student, her professor, Dr. Eugene Morin at Trent University, compared the optimal foraging theory to a fresh bag of Doritos. You're like, yeah, I'll rip that thing open. I'll take the big, nice whole ones at the top. Mm. But if the bag's almost gone, you're like, yeah, I'll tip this back and I'm gonna drink the crumbs. You get what you can when you can get it. So one bag of Funyuns, it's worth two on the shelf. Fundamentally, that's just economics.
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B
I had been reading in that and just all of these things came together and gave me the idea for the book and the idea for explaining collapse. And I actually sat down. It's hard to believe. I sat down one afternoon and in about 20 minutes, I sketched out the entire book and the arguments in it.
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C
And I gotta ask, what was the morning like? Did you take a long walk?
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A
Did you. Were these all shower thoughts?
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C
Like, how. What. What kind of coffee were you drinking?
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B
I think I was reading. I was working in the government at that time. I spent a lot of years as an archaeologist in the US Forest Service before I came back to academic life. But there was a conference coming up on, you know, a lot of the work this government does in archaeology is in the realm of protecting archaeological sites against damage. There was an emphasis on asking, well, can we model the location of archaeological sites? Can we predict where they're going to be found? And I was simply reading. And I learned then from that work of this field in ecology called optimal foraging theory, which is an economic theory of how animals, including people, including us, choose to forage in different kinds of environmental patches. And it has to do with costs and benefits. And I saw this, I read it, and I thought, oh, wow, maybe I've got the answer. And then I sat down and sketched out the book. I mean, it was a bolt from the blue that just hit me.
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C
What a day. What a day. That literally changed how we think about the world.
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B
I mean, I'll never forget that day. It was. I went home and told my wife about it because she'd been encouraging me to work on collapse. I went home and told her, I think I've got it.
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C
What a day.
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B
But then it took me another three years to do the research and the writing, but that was how it came about. But there's a related aspect to it that I think about sometimes, which is that I'm a child of the Cold War. I was born in December 1949. I grew up in the Cold War. I remember us doing silly things as school children, like hiding under our desks as if that could protect us from nuclear blast. I'm from and grew up in San Francisco, which we always assumed would be a target. And I remember at a young age thinking, well, it will happen. I just assumed it would happen. And I used to have thoughts about our home being gone. And I was out camping somewhere with my parents and my brother and my sister. We were out camping somewhere because there was no longer a San Francisco. We were just living in the wilderness, and that was what would eventually happen. So, I mean, that was just always in the back of my mind that that possibility just. Just interested me. I grew up with it.
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Yeah.
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B
So this kind of topic was intrinsically a personal interest to me and also
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C
of academic interest, you know, And I'm
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A
from the Bay Area myself.
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C
I was born in San Francisco and grew up in the East Bay. And I was wondering, you know, you attended Cal Berkeley. Was there anything about the culture of San Francisco that informed sort of a look at greater political infrastructure at all? I feel like growing. There was a certain counterculture in San Francisco that informed my way of thought.
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B
Yeah, well, I. I remember the origin of what was called the hippie era, Haight street and so forth in San Francisco. There was a high school girlfriend in particular who had quite an influence on me in that regard. And in fact, in my later high school years, I found myself just changing politically. And I don't want to go into it and detail because I keep politics out of my work for very specific reasons. And I find that my work seems to have had an influence across the whole political spectrum. So, I mean, what you're saying is. Yes, but I personally went through a transformation from being somewhat of a conservative to somewhat of a more liberal person. This one girlfriend had an influence on me, but also things just happening in San Francisco at that time. But I want to emphasize again that I keep deliberately keep politics out of my research. And I'm retired recently from teaching. And I would always say in each class that we do not get into politics in this class, on the other hand, politicians are fair game.
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C
I think also as a researcher, part of the interest in allure is to kind of remove a lot of preconceived notions and dive into what's historical and what's factual as well. I imagine that's gotta be part of the thrill of it. And looking back to. I think one thing I love about your work is you have to spend time defining a civilization and defining complexity before you can understand its fall. And I wanted to ask a little bit about that. I also think it's interesting that you started with this Chacoan society in the Pueblo people in the Southwest. And I feel like a lot of times when we hear civilization, a lot of it has kind of colonial undertones or pre contact civilizations aren't really acknowledged. Can you kind of give me an overview of what is a civilization? And is that a timeline thing? Is that a political structure? Is that a population number?
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B
Let me state first of all that I try to avoid value laden terminology in my work and civilization is a value laden term. We all approve of things that are civilized. And conversely, now I do use the term because people are familiar with it and I discuss it in the book. And I also discuss why I don't like to use it, it is a value laden term contrived by people who consider themselves members of what would be called civilizations. And the evolution of human societies has been conceived in terms of becoming civilized, which is seen as an accomplishment. My own perspective on it is completely different. That there was never any aspiration to achieve things that are part of what we call a civilized society. That they simply happened as a manifestation, as a side effect of the evolution of the phenomenon of complexity in human societies. And I think in the book, the way I defined it is that a civilization is a complex society, but it's characterized by certain things that we like and approve of. You know, say, great traditions of art and architecture and music and so forth. And those are all wonderful things. I appreciate those things too, but they're value laden and I try to avoid them in my work.
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A
So in previous generations, when we had just a really primitive and unevolved understanding of archaeology and human history, loaded terms like primitive and unevolved were used often. So called savagery and barbarism were pitted against terms like industry and individualism and civilized in a way that glorified complexity at any cost. Not accurate, and really only helpful to people who want to promote eugenics and exploitation. How can we call that civilized? So the term civilization as well as primitive and unevolved, all of those are value laden. And he largely tries to avoid them for good reason. What would you say when it comes
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C
to a collapse of that society? What sort of has to exist to collapse?
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B
Well, complexity. Yeah, there's no thing that has to exist. I see that in the evolution of complexity in human societies as more or less a continuum from small hunting gathering bands, the way in which our ancestors once lived, and some people today still do, to highly, highly, highly complex societies that occupy much of the developed world today. And I'm continually struck by it. I've had occasion recently to spend time in these large chain hardware stores. I won't mention any names, but every time I go in one of these and look at, I don't know, three or four acres of shelves full of stuff, I think, my God, the diversity, the complexity of our material culture is incredible. I mean, I don't know how you could even begin to quantify it. It's just something impressionistic. But it shows exactly what the term complexity refers to.
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A
And if you need a tidy list. In his book, Dr. Tanner explains that complexity is generally understood to refer to things like the size of a soc, the number and the distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it Incorporates the number of distinct occupational roles or jobs and the variety of ways to organize these into this functioning whole. And complex societies, he writes, are problem solving organizations. They're class structured, internally differentiated, controlled societies, and the resources in them that sustain life are not equally available to everyone. And he says, these complex societies, the ones that today we're most familiar with, are an anomaly of history, and they require constant legitimization and reinforcement, and it's expensive to maintain per person. Like, think of the last time you moved, right? Think of all the stuff you have. Think of all the boxes you have even after you pack the boxes. Think of all the pens that are sitting behind dressers and the paper clip, the scrunchie behind the couch. All of the stuff you have put it into a truck, right? How much of that stuff do you need? How was all of that harvested? Raw materials and manufactured and packaged and marketed and paid for? How did it get in your hands? That stuff costs money and energy and fuel. Does it all make your life better? Probably not. People had to make it and design it and invent it, though, and you had to do jobs to buy it. And, you know, I was just listening
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C
to Simon Winchester's book, the Perfectionists, about machining and sort of the origin of metrology and just how meticulous a screw
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has to be, just how precise everything
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C
down to a bolt has to be to be interchangeable.
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B
Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
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C
And when it comes to the complexity
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A
of society, is division of labor. Part of that is sort of a strata of who does what involved?
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B
Oh, yes, very much. And it's, in fact, one of the earliest things that archaeologists and historians look for is division of labor. You know, the fundamental division of labor in hunting gathering bands is men and women generally, that men are considered long distance hunters, women are considered hunters of small game and plant food collecting near the camps. And then children also are involved at certain ages in certain kinds of labor. But that's the simplest, earliest division of labor in human societies. It seems to be pretty much universal.
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A
And if you caught our recent paternology episode about fatherhood with Dr. Darby Saxby, you may recall that she said women in hunter gatherer societies tended to bring in more calories in men. And it also has been debated over time how accurate that delineation of roles were, especially when it came to women and children hunting small game or men foraging while out on a hunt. Not to mention that gender is a fluid thing and could have varied in a lot of hunter gatherer societies. Now, the question of who has access to these societies, to study them is also a pretty big point of dubiosity. But I'm going to give you a hint.
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C
It was usually not women or people
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outside the demo of European males who came in with their own biases and suppositions. So once again, diversity in science gives greater clarity of information.
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C
I know you start your book kind of going through a short list of which societies through history going back thousands of years have had a rise and a fall. Would you mind going through a little bit of that? You know, Mesopotamia, the Western Chao Mayan, Some of the ones that we may or may not realize was collapse?
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B
Well, yes, the famous, well known cases that a lot of people are familiar with, if you say had world history in high school or classes like that, the famous ones are the collapse of the Roman Empire, specifically the Western Roman Empire, what's called the Maya Society, typically called Maya civilization in Central America. Those are probably the two most famous ones. Some that are less familiar to people. The Zhou dynasty of China, the Hittite empire in what's now Turkey, the Egyptian First Intermediate Period, and societies that didn't leave written records behind, like one of my case studies, the Chocoan Society in the American Southwest in the Four Corners area. These are some of the best known cases. Now, when I did the survey of the literature, I found about two dozen cases of clearly documented collapses. What I mean by a collapse is a rapid simplification that an established level of complexity is lost. I don't know whether lost is a good term, but it disappears and is replaced by structures that are simpler. So the potential to collapse in human societies, I see it as inherent in all societies with any level of complexity.
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A
So collapse can happen in the big complex societies or the smaller, less complex ones. Dr. Tayner writes that simple societies can lose an established level of complexities, just as do great empires. And sedentary horticulturists may become mobile foragers and lose the trappings of the village life. And a group of foragers may be so distressed by environmental factors that sharing is largely abandoned. And these, he says, are as much cases of collapse as the end of the Roman Empire. And he stresses, no less significant for the populations that experience them.
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B
The potential for collapse is a continuum from the simplest human societies to us today.
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A
You know, I feel like that brings
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C
up a correlation and I'm definitely projecting. But if we look at where things have gone in the last few, you know, decades, 50 or 60 years, where I feel like maybe we're seeing less multi generational living or Child rearing. And I have friends who have children who say that, you know, they live far away from the grandparents, and so they have to spend a lot of their income that they make on childcare. And meanwhile, the, the grandparents are lonely and don't have a role. I was just interviewing someone about menopause and the grandmother hypothesis where to age out of reproduction. You. You still have value in a human system as child rearing. Are we seeing that fracturing of cooperation
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A
kind of as a marker of collapse?
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B
No.
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C
Okay.
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B
Actually, you're bringing up a very interesting example because what you were showing is the fundamental aspect of complexity, and that is complexity costs to become more complex. Any kind of system, a living system, it can be an animal species, a human society, to grow in complexity, has to consume more energy, which for us is translated into money, into things like money and time and various things like that, but basically time and money, but those are all transformations of energy. So if you're living a thousand miles away from your parents and you want your children to. To visit their grandparents, that's 1,000 miles away. You have to travel. And that takes money, which is ultimately energy, as we can see today with the oil crisis and airlines talking about cutting back their flights because they're worried about being able to get fuel. But this, I mean, this illustrates a very important point. And thank you for the example. It shows how complexity imposes metabolic costs. And in my work, that's fundamental to understanding both the evolution of complexity and collapse.
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A
And I think it's interesting to look at some of the, say, symptoms of a collapse or markers of a collapse.
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C
I'm sure not all collapse is looked at as a disease model, but you mentioned that it's always political. It involves less social stratification, less economic specialization, less trading, less art, less monuments. And I wanted to ask about that social stratification and whether or not that is something that we see more in capitalist societies, like the death of the middle class, you know, gig economy AI, where people maybe feel like they have less of a role in that economic metabolic system. You know, your initial publication of the book was 1988.
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A
How do you feel with the rise
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C
of technology and the changing of how we're employed, how have things changed since 1988?
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B
I mean, new realms of technology have. Have developed. I mean, I started the book in 1983, and it was on my old manual typewriter, which is almost as old as I am a lot of typing. And I discovered the other day I still have it. I can't bring myself to throw it out, of course, not just an illustration. And this is the earliest I remember my first computer had something like 20k of memory, something like that. And I was thrilled to have it, absolutely thrilled to have it, because I could correct my typing on it. And of course, the technology changed in part because of NASA and the technologies developed as part of the space program, which led to a lot of the information technology that served as the basis for a lot of what we have today. You know, we often forget that, that in fact, the government is responsible for much of what we consider valuable and information technology today through funding the space program.
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A
And for more on Alive Humans in Space, you can see our recent Astrobromatology episode about space food with Maggie Koblentz, or the space archaeology episode about junk accumulating in orbit with Dr. Alice Gorman.
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B
But yes, I mean, the difference between then and now is. I mean, it's transformational. Many of us find it difficult. I finally retired from teaching only about a year ago. I'm 76 years old, and I used to tell students that, you know, when it came to information technology, I'm hopelessly 20th century. I was often asking students, how do I do this, how do I do that? I mean, I did my dissertation on punch cards for good sake. I don't know if any of my students has ever seen a punch card or maybe even heard of them.
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A
Don't worry, I gotcha. So a punch card, it looks like a Scantron, but it has holes in it. And they stored or processed data based on the patterns of those punched holes. And maybe you did not experience those, but perhaps you recall the prolonged hanging chad debacle of The Al Gore versus George W. Bush election in the year 2000, in which one vital Florida county had controversy about voting machines not counting ballots with hanging chads. And the result was this Supreme Court case, Bush versus Gore. And then less than a year later, we had nine, 11, the war on Terror. And let's get back to societal collapse.
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B
You bring up a good example of, well, really, it's the role of capitalism today in developing technology and changing the economy, which entrepreneurs undertake because they see opportunities for profit. And this is an important point, actually, in my work because I've argued from the days of the class book, even before that, that complexity costs. And because complexity has a metabolic cost, we can't simply assume that societies in the past grew to more complexity because people somehow aspired to it. See, before fossil fuels, increasing the complexity of a society meant people had to work harder. Now, when you get to the point of like state organized societies, society became more complex, people paid higher taxes. So when you stop and think about that, you wonder, why ever did human societies grow more complex?
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A
Yeah, what's the point?
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B
And the argument I have made is that complexity grows to solve problems. And as it grows, it requires greater consumption of energy. And as I say, and as I emphasize, in the past, this meant that people had to work harder.
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A
And again, this is called marginal productivity or declining marginal returns. And think of how increasingly complex our world is growing, right? How increasingly costly it is to fund and organize and feed that complexity. So now toss into that the factors of the wealthiest hoarding the spoils of all that labor, rather than it going back into the system to spread out and the stagnation in wages as inflation rises and costs for living rise. And all of this complexity and energy consumption leading to a rapidly changing environment for which we are beyond poorly equipped.
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B
You haven't thought this through.
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A
So, yes, complexity can be lucrative, but also very costly. So to quote the Stoic philosopher notorious, more money, more problems.
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B
Now, we're largely unaware of this today because we think complexity is free. We paper it with fossil fuels. We're learning with the current fossil fuel crisis, in fact, complexity isn't free, that society can be in fact endangered by a lack of energy. So the solution of problems, the growth of complexity to solve problems, requires increasing consumption of energy. Now, that was my original argument, and it still is. I think that is the main way that complexity has grown in human societies. It grows by small increments to solve problems.
- [33:59]
A
And Dr. Tainter says that even in our own society, complexity can sometimes grow in these spurts when there's opportunity to grow. And in rare cases, there have been short periods of this excess energy that would allow that complex growth.
- [34:15]
B
And they're so rare, we know them by special terms. The agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, those are the two main ones. And we're going through another one now. I think with the technology revolution and its energy cost is apparent if you pay any attention to the controversies over the energy cost of data processing centers that are causing people in local communities to be concerned about what's going to happen to their electricity bills and so forth and so on.
- [34:49]
A
This was the sound at Laura Evans home in suburban Chicago last spring. And it never goes away, Never goes away. And it's not just the noise taking
- [34:57]
C
a toll, she says in the last
- [34:59]
A
year, her average electricity bill has spiked. 23% of the residents oppose this construction because it will not generate real local jobs. They will most likely bring in Outside staff and will only worsen traffic. Furthermore, it will put our families at
- [35:13]
C
risk, especially children like Those attending Rancho McDonald's.
- [35:17]
F
How about you listen to the community? When you represent Pittsburgh, you represent this right here. Leave the AI data centers alone. You can keep it.
- [35:26]
B
You can keep it. Put it in your backyard. I mean, it's yet another example of how growth of complexity in our society through capitalism, through opportunity, takes advantage of existing energy, but also at the same time imposes a cost of more energy on us and on our descendants.
- [35:46]
A
And you know, I know that you've argued that you complex societies don't always
- [35:50]
C
mean that they're fair, right? Complex society doesn't always mean like that. It's a utopia.
- [35:57]
B
I would say they're rarely fair. Even in the supposedly most egalitarian societies, there's always a degree of stratification.
- [36:05]
A
And let's touch on Tainter's four main points for understanding collapse. Okay, so number one, human societies were problem solving organizations. Number two, sociopolitical systems require energy to be maintained. And number three, increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita. So those three lead to the fourth, which is investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns. So we solve problems. Sociopolitical systems need some energy. That energy costs more per person as it increases and it becomes diminishing returns.
- [36:50]
C
Oh, dear.
- [36:51]
B
And the example I like to give is the very best example is the Roman Empire, which expanded territorially in the last few centuries bc and it was so successful that by the first century bc, the people of Italy, who by this point were all Roman citizens, they eliminated taxation of themselves. I mean, this was the benefit that they gained. Now we're talking about a society here run entirely by solar energy. And in a society like that, like the Roman Empire, production of energy through agriculture is 90% of the economy. So the government had to run on the basis of 10% of the economy. This was in part to fund government functions. The bureaucracy in the army, always a major cost. Particularly in the Roman Empire, which was the first society in history to maintain a standing army sufficient for all of its needs. No previous society had done this. Well, this costs, you know, these guys had to be paid. You know, their horses had to be cared for. My wife and I have always had horses. I can assure you they're expensive. You know, keeping a horse for a cavalry soldier is an expensive matter. Yeah, and, you know, a lot of these soldiers would have servants. And the cost was imposed on the population. The 90% of the population actually producing food, producing energy through the coinage that the Roman Empire and early other early societies were producing. What we see in the Roman Empire is an early silver currency running about 98 to 99% pure silver, as good as they could make it in those days. And the currency kept its value. At this point in the year 64 AD, two things happened. Two challenges happened that were too expensive to cope with on the pure silver currency. One was a war in the east with what was known, we know today, as the Parthian Empire, it's the ancient Persian Empire. And the other was the Great Fire of Rome in the year 64. This is when legend tell us that Nero filled what Rome burned. Well, Nero may or may not have fiddled, but Rome did burn. And it was very, very expensive to rebuild after that.
- [39:11]
A
So let me put you up to speed here. So this was a blaze that ripped through Rome in July of the year 64, devastating, pretty much destroying 10 out of the city's 14 districts. And it started in an area of shops near the Circus Maximus, which was essentially NASCAR with horses. And some historians are divided on the gossip of was it arson started by then emperor and general murderous rascal Nero, who it's said Nero was out of town at his vacation home having an orgy and playing the fiddle while it blazed. It was a fiddle or it was a type of lute. And apparently he loved to perform. He sang poorly. Also, if you're in the market for the worst beard ever, may I suggest the Nero? It's kind of like a thick chin strap that completely avoids the chin. It's all sideburns and a corridor of neckbeard. Really astonishing. But this fire. So firefighters did not have hoses that could, like, knock over a mammoth. They didn't have those. And so despite these raging winds that were having it spread, they firefighters were trying to put it out with buckets and by dousing the fire in vinegar. Eventually, they demolished more buildings as a firebreak, which worked. Then a few days later, another fire started. And, well, yeah, most of Rome was toast. So imagine if 75% of New York and D.C. were both suddenly smoldering ruins.
- [40:46]
B
We're fucked.
- [40:47]
A
So in the recovery process, after all of these historical buildings were demolished, possibly by their own leader, that leader Nero, constructed himself an egregiously large and lavish palace. It was rife with ivory and marble and gold leaf adornments.
- [41:08]
B
Because you can't get more beautiful than that. I always like gold. So what we find that to cope with this, all of a sudden, the government is a little sort of money, which means a little short of taxation, which means a little bit short of the foods that are produced by solar energy. And so the currency begins to be debased. About 10% copper was added into it, and all of a sudden it's down to 90% silver. Well, still pretty good coins. Very nice, beautiful coins. I've seen a lot of them. Very lovely coins. I've illustrated some of them in and the things I've written. But it's the beginning of a slippery slope that just continues on for over another 200 years. What you see is the silver content of the currency going down and down and down as the government was increasingly unable to solve the problems of its own complexity, being largely the government and the army on the basis of existing taxation. So we finally get to about the year 235 A.D. when the emperor at the time brings out a new coin. See the base silver coin. I don't want to get into technical terms, but it was called a denarius. It comes from the Latin for ten. The silver coin was the denarius. This emperor comes out, I think, about the year 235, he comes out with a new coin that's supposedly worth two denarii, except it actually only weighs one and a half.
- [42:45]
A
So a piece titled the Decline and Fall of the Roman Denarius in the journal Materials Characterization explained it thusly. So by decree of Caesar Augustus, this was the year 15 BCE. The denarius was nearly pure silver back then. It was up to 98% silver. It had a fixed weight and value in relation to the rest of the Roman monetary system. People knew what they were getting. Now, over the next 270 years, the silver content of the denarius declined gradually and then precipitously to about 2%. It went flip flopped from 98% silver to about 98% not silver. And the final stage of the denarius, this paper continues, was a duplex plated coin with a copper core and that silver surface. And eventually the surface coating was so thin, so janky, that it quickly rubbed off after the coin left the mint, it was like a dusting of silver. So this sad money was supposed to have equal value to the old ones, but by the year 280, it was pretty much just like having an arcade token in your pocket. It was worthless. Also, we happen to have a whole episode on ancient Rome with classical archaeologist Dr. Darius Aria. No relation to the denarius. Back to that, though.
- [44:02]
B
And people can tell this. People know when this happens, you know, they handle these things every day.
- [44:08]
A
Is this inflation, essentially?
- [44:10]
B
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's inflation going on at the same time we have data on rising costs that people were experiencing at this time. Yes, it's very inflationary. I mean, it's obviously inflationary. And so the Mint would take in the single value coins to take in the denarii, flatten them out a little and. And then issue them as worth two. And sometimes they didn't flatten them out very carefully because I actually own one that shows the underlying coin and then the new value stamped on it. I've illustrated it in a couple of the things that I've written. I came across this in the coin sale a number of years ago and, boy, I grabbed illustrated so perfectly the argument I've made about the Roman Empire. Increasing complexity requires increasing expenditures of energy, which is manifested in silver coins acquired through taxation. And at the same time, there were constant increasing challenges simply by being the Roman Empire. The Empire made itself attractive to outside peoples. The famous ones being the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe, who were continually trying to force their way into the Roman Empire. The primary frontier being Gaul, what's now France along the Rhine river, but also in the east and in the north later on, it's the huns. In the 5th century, it's the Huns in the east, it was always the Persian peoples who were trying to grab parts of the Empire. The Roman Empire was just intrinsically attractive to everyone else because everyone else saw it as being enormously wealthy. You know, the Germanic peoples were not trying to destroy the Roman Empire, they were trying to get into it. They wanted to be part of this bounty.
- [45:51]
A
Listen, let's say you're a billionaire, a celeb like your Oprah or Vince McMahon of the WWE Empire. No matter how you got that money, a lot of people are going to try to rob you or become your friend so they can party on your yacht.
- [46:07]
B
And we've seen by the third century, the fourth century, that the size of the army is doubled. There's an increasing proportion of cavalry in the military, and as I was just illustrating, horses were expensive. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about increasing the cost of simply being the Roman government. So the Roman Empire had to become more complex and more costly simply to continue existing. And in time, it simply couldn't afford to be the Roman Empire. What we find is that later in the Empire, people were fleeing from their lands to avoid having to pay taxes. You know, you were talking about the peasant population. You see people actually selling their children into slavery because they couldn't raised them. This is the base peasant population that was the whole basis of the empire. These are the people who paid the bills. Even wealthier people were trying to get away from paying taxes. I mean, this is normal. Wealthy people always do that.
- [47:06]
A
And in his book, Once Again the Collapse of Complex Societies, he explains that rulers must constantly convince you that they're fit to reign. And he writes, legitimizing activities include such things as external defense and internal order, alleviating the effects of local productivity fluctuations and undertaking local development projects, and also providing food and entertainment, AKA bread and circus, as in imperial Rome for the urban masses. And bread and circus. If you've ever heard that, it's come to mean, like diversion and appeasement of the commoners, like scrolling and having a $2 burger. You got objects just shiny enough that rulers seem like they're doing a great job because you're not paying attention. So why bother peeking behind those expensive velvet curtains? Shut up. Everything's fine.
- [48:01]
B
But you see the cost of the Roman Empire growing and growing until it was simply becoming less and less effective its own existence. And it's a perfect example of diminishing returns to complexity, diminishing returns to the cost of being a complex society. So, I mean, this is the process that really was the model for understanding collapse. In other cases that I found to be well documented, that complexity grows to solve problems. It requires more energy. Eventually a point of diminishing returns is reached, the society becomes weaker and less able to solve problems. And eventually a crisis comes along that it can't overcome, and it collapses, it simplifies, breaks up into smaller parts, and then the smaller parts evolve on their own. Now, the classic example after the Roman Empire was the evolution of smaller societies in northern and western Europe, eventually leading into the, you know, the European nations of today.
- [49:03]
A
Hey, would you know a collapse if it bonked you on the noggin? In his book, Dr. Tainter notes a few key aspects. Let's talk about them. So there is, first and foremost, there's a breakdown of authority and central control. So prior to the collapse, revolts, provincial breakaways signal the weakening of the center, the base starts to splinter, and revenues to the government often decline, while foreign challengers become increasingly successful and you begin to get your ass beat. Now, eventually this leads to this elimination of the umbrella of law and the protection of the populace. Laws and systems no longer matter or work, and people don't feel safe. Uh oh, I'm wondering, is there a
- [49:51]
C
fix in terms of needing Those resources to problem solve. Is that where expansion and colonization comes in so that you can take those resources and use them to run the empire? Is there an exhaustion of resources? If you have gotten too big, you've kind of extracted what you can?
- [50:13]
B
Sure. Again, we'll go back to the Roman Empire. So when the Romans would conquer a province, they would appropriate those people had stored away as products of solar energy. Okay, this would be stored food, works of art, precious metals, and people, those were all products of past solar energy through farming, through agriculture. And so the Romans would appropriate these accumulated bits, savings of past solar energy and bring them to Italy. I mean, that's why, you know, that's why Italy itself and Rome itself was so full of works of art, beautiful sculptures from the Greek part of the world, the ancient Mediterranean part of the world, the eastern Mediterranean. A lot of those were appropriated and brought to Italy. Slaves were brought to Italy. So the accumulated treasures, surpluses from past solar energy were taken by the Romans and brought to Italy. Well, what happened after that is that the empire then had to maintain itself on annual solar energy. And this is an analogy to us today because of course, we also maintain ourselves on the products of past solar energy. You know, we talk about, well, could we maintain our society on ongoing daily solar energy through, you know, solar collectors or whatever? You know, we talk about that as a possibility today. Well, the Romans had to experience it. They had to maintain the empire on annual solar energy, which of course goes up and down year to year. Some years the crops are good, some years the crops aren't good. And so there was always this problem of collecting taxes, collecting enough taxes to pay for the solution to ongoing problems, to pay for the complexity of being the Roman Empire. So it's a matter of the transition in the Roman case from the accumulated treasures of past solar energy to year to year solar energy. And this is one of the things that made them weak. Why? They simply did not have the resources through time to continue to solve the problems they were facing.
- [52:24]
C
Is that sort of like living paycheck to paycheck? And if your car breaks down, if your dog eats something and has to go to the vet, you're really kind of up, shit creaking.
- [52:36]
B
It was exactly paycheck to paycheck.
- [52:37]
A
Yes. And I know that less social stratification
- [52:41]
C
is also a hallmark of a collapse. Can you explain what that means exactly?
- [52:46]
B
Well, it would mean that the hierarchy of the society simplifies. You go to the Roman Empire, are really any of the imperial societies or any of the societies Organized as states, which means they have a formal government. There's always a hierarchy of individuals. You know, the Romans recognized three social classes, the very highest, the middle and the poorest, who were 90% of the people. But I mean, even within something like that, there are gradations. You know, there are levels of government employees, There are levels of, say, merchants, people who make a living by as merchants, as money changers, you know, which we know from ancient literature, relations of people who made a living in various ways and had various degrees of wealth. Some landowners were, of course, extremely wealthy. That's always the case. But as the empire collapsed, that structure, it collapsed, simplified a lot of those social positions, simply went away.
- [53:46]
A
Hey, if your brain loves numbers and you need the timeline here, happy to provide it. So many people mark the fall of Rome occurring in the year 476. This is when a Germanic chieftain booted Emperor Romulus Augustulus, whose name, yes, has six youths in it. And if you're like, I could have sworn it was 1453. It's not you, it's history. So the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Western, widely thought to be that 476 event, but the organization and the wider rule of Rome's eastern empire really ate shit in the 1400s. So after that event in the late 400s, Western Roman Empire, what happened? That's a thousand podcasts worth of info, but I'm gonna sum it up for you in like 10 seconds. So what happened was the Dark Ages, when complexity moved into a period of cultural decline, some say intellectual decline. And in short, the rich got less rich and there were fewer written records and artifacts for museums to ponder over. Hence that lacuna is a dark patch lost to time. But don't call them Dark Ages, okay? We don't do that. They are referred to by academics and historians as the Middle Ages because the Dark Ages, incredibly value laden and biased as a term. Who are we to say it was dark? And because many people may have left city centers for parts that were more remote, the archaeological finds could simply be scattered about. And humanity's failure to treasure hunt effectively for them is not necessarily a reflection of intellect or the prized productivity as we've come to know it. And Dr. Tainter writes, Complex societies, it must be emphasized again, he emphasizes again, are recent in human history. Collapse, then, is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity. So to. To a population that is already receiving little return on the cost of supporting that complexity, the loss of the Complexity can bring economic and perhaps administrative gains, he says. So, hey, have you ever burned fossil fuels to drive to your desk job where you're forced to use AI and then you eat a $22 salad at your desk? Maybe you've dreamed of homesteading in a small village like compound with people you like Instead, as long as there's food and a doctor nearby, doesn't sound too awful. So the fall of the Roman Empire. It's a very long, complex series of dramatic events. Scandals, assassinations, plundering, mishaps, some absolutely horrific romantic decisions. So if you like, kind of like a Game of Thrones, you like a Love island, and you need a new obsession that takes up most of your idle thoughts. The Roman Empire will become your Roman Empire.
- [56:49]
B
And in some ways there could actually be some people who benefit from that. One of the things that's intrigued me is did the peasants of Western Europe live better after the collapse of the Roman Empire when they were no longer paying the heavy Roman taxes? I think we don't really have data to answer that question. But. But, you know, for example, did they see more of their children survive because they could feed them? Did they no longer have to sell their children into slavery because they couldn't feed them anymore? These are the questions that come about from wondering whether, you know, does anyone actually benefit from a collapse? It's an interesting question.
- [57:26]
A
Yeah.
- [57:27]
C
Not all collapses are horrible for everyone, from what I understand. And you know, talking about this last social stratification, I also find it impossible not to think about the number of billionaires that are in the world these days, a lot of them in America. And then at the same time, I know plenty of people who would have been middle class creators, professionals, writers, accountants who are now working gig economy, doing doordash and uber in order to afford bills where it seems like more people are being pushed into gig economy things. While there's also a billionaire, a number of billionaires that are accumulating wealth.
- [58:10]
A
Is that an example of social stratification?
- [58:13]
B
Oh, it really is, yes.
- [58:15]
F
Yeah.
- [58:15]
A
Okay. Can I ask you some questions that some listeners submitted for you?
- [58:20]
B
Sure.
- [58:20]
A
Okay, great. But before we do, let's take a quick break and we're going to donate to a relevant cause. And this week, in Dr. Tainter's honor, it's going to Utah State University's Ecology center, which promotes and supports ecological research and grad education at USU and beyond. And this includes immediate support for graduate students. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
- [58:42]
F
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E
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G
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- [60:43]
A
your question so many good ones from patrons via patreon.com Ologies and we will get through as many as we can, including a popular departmental one asked by Nikki G. Peter Hankins, Jane Nelson, Grace Conroy and Don Smallchek as well as
- [60:58]
C
Renee Wagner wanted to know what's the big difference between societal collapse and governmental collapse? Are they independent from each other?
- [61:07]
G
No.
- [61:07]
B
No, I wouldn't think so. The government is an aspect of the society. The government is an aspect of the continuum of complexity, of the overall total complexity of the society.
- [61:18]
E
There you go.
- [61:19]
C
What about on an individual level, Jane Nelson said, does it count as a collapse of society if it's that individuals are collapsing, you know, the gap between minimum wage and a living wage, people working hard to get us to consume more. Like what percentage of the population needs to be existing in survival mode before we consider it a society to have collapsed?
- [61:45]
B
Well, we go back to my concept of what a collapse is. It's a rapid simplification. You can look at people being shifted from well paid manufacturing jobs into doordash type jobs, for example. And we can react as human beings, we can react to that. But I don't see that as a collapse particularly collapse is a long term process. The factors that lead to collapse develop over periods of decades to generations to centuries. What we're looking at with say the decline of manufacturing in the United States, the shift to a gig economy, these are short term phenomena now. They're what we're living through today. So of course people are concerned about them. I understand that, but it's not really what I work on. I generally don't work on short term economic phenomena. I like to concentrate on longer term, broader, larger overarching trends.
- [62:43]
C
I'm glad that you mentioned time because we did have people. Lizzie Carr, Shelby Paxton, Ben Resnik Spicy Boy asked in Lizzy Carr's words, I've read something before this said most empires last about 250 years before collapsing. Is that true or is that flim flam?
- [62:59]
B
I don't know. I mean you'd have to define what is an empire. Give me the case studies you're basing that on.
- [63:06]
E
Yeah.
- [63:07]
B
Where do you time the beginning, where's the end? And I don't know the answer to that.
- [63:10]
C
I wonder. I think also with the 250th anniversary of the United States coming up, but the lines aren't quite that stark. You know, the awareness of it was on the minds of a lot of listeners. Grace Conroy wanted to know what could that feel like day to day for people experiencing it?
- [63:31]
B
A collapse today would be global in this occurrence and billions of people would die within a few months. So what would that be like to experience?
- [63:40]
C
Would that be a lot of famine cut off from energy, things like that?
- [63:43]
B
Yes, famine, disease, conflict, they would all arise.
- [63:48]
A
So when it comes to that conflict, is that a symptom of collapse?
- [63:53]
C
LCK based in Finland wanted to know. Looking at what's happening in places like Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Congo, et cetera, it seems like human rights based values that what it's built on are maybe collapsing are Things like mass conflicts, mass casualties. Are they a step in societal collapse?
- [64:14]
B
No, no, no. They're a manifestation of increasing complexity. Ah, they're exactly the opposite. If you look at the conflict in the Levant, you know, Israel against Gaza, Israel against Lebanon and so forth. There are new dimensions to this conflict now that did not exist before. I mean, the conflicts existed for a long time, but it's being carried out in new ways now with more effective technologies, much of which we've provided. An Israeli F35 stealth fighter shot down an Iranian warplane, marking the first ever confirmed air to air takedown by an F35. It's actually a growth in the complexity
- [64:52]
C
of the system that's so surprising and so the opposite of what many of us would think. You know, that the complexity isn't always like we have a great bullet train and universal healthcare. Complexity is not always good.
- [65:09]
B
No, no. In fact, the evolution of military is one of my primary case studies for evolving complexity. I gave a presentation a number of years ago. There was a conference put on, I think annually by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. And I was asked to come to one at the Santa Fe Institute. And I gave a presentation about the evolution of complexity and the evolution of costs of complexity and illustrated it with, with my limited knowledge of the evolution of military technologies and research I've also done on the evolution of warfare in modern Europe. By modern, I mean from the, say, the 1600s to today. And I was, I have to admit, I was pleased to learn a few years later, one of the organizers of that conference sent me an email and he wrote that sometimes when people around here are talking about developing new weapons technologies, someone asks, what would Tainter say? I have to say, well, my goodness,
- [66:11]
C
I got through the Tainter effect.
- [66:15]
B
I mean, I reached people, they understood what I was saying. They understood the need to look long term and to understand the relationship of cost to benefits.
- [66:25]
A
This was his June 2011 keynote address to the Office of the Secretary of Defense Highlands, titled Failure and Collapse in Complex Systems. The transcript or recording not available publicly. So unless you were at that event 15 years ago, you had to be there. Department of Defense stuff or Department of War sorry. So speaking of such listener Stacy Pinkiewicz offered that in the face of the climate crisis and the war machine, it can be hard to feel hopeful. I try to embody, Stacy says, think globally, act locally. And while I may not be the one to redirect the efforts of the federal government, I can be highly engaged in my local community and its welfare and Patron LCK from Finland wrote in Obviously my societal circumstances are different to what's going on in the US right now. No shit. But we seem to be following, Elsie says, a similar path to the States when it comes to the increase of militarization, anti intellectualism, racism, surveillance as a tool of oppression, et cetera.
- [67:27]
C
And, and did the military industrial complex
- [67:29]
A
kind of ramping up after World War II?
- [67:31]
C
Did that have a lot to do with it? And did we see a similar bump in complexity with the advent of the
- [67:37]
A
atom bomb and nuclear weapons?
- [67:39]
B
I mean, certainly from the beginning of the 20th century on, from, let's say, World War I. I mean, it's hard to point to a starting point. Modern European history is considered that. The term modern is considered from the 1600s on as. And this is a period of increasing complexity in military systems throughout. Since World War II, certainly the complexity, the rising complexity has certainly grown. But then there are periods when things seem to change. And it's very interesting right now that the discussions I've seen just in the last few weeks about the development of drone technology and how that is making obsolete a lot of the weapon systems that we've spent decades and billions and billions of dollars developing and producing and are now putting to use. It's an interesting point because from time to time there are revolutions, there are transformations that reset what I call the marginal product curve, that reset the relationship of cost to benefits.
- [68:42]
A
So in his book, Dr. Tainter presents a line graph. It looks like a gentle roller coaster. It slopes upward in a hump and then it falls and then ascends to a larger hump which then falls again. It's kind of like picture a camel, asymmetrical, whose front hump little less endowed. So this curve, double curve is representative of what he calls the marginal product of increasing complexity when with technological innovation or acquisition of an energy subsidy. So things going up, then they're starting to fail, and then gobbling up another energy source. He breaks it down. So empire growth tends to follow a logistical curve. At first, growth begins, slowly accelerates as the energy subsidy is partially invested in further expansion, and then falls off when the marginal cost of further growth becomes too high. So to recover when some new input into an economic system is brought online, whether that's a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential, at least temporarily, to raise marginal productivity. Great. However, in the long run, he says, marginal returns will ultimately begin to decline again. This is also known as chasing the dragon until perhaps your ass hits rock bottom. Sometimes that's death. Other times it's just a new beginning. That's complex society.
- [70:16]
B
And this seems to be the beginning of one now where the development of drone technology is resetting the cost benefit curve and making relatively simple, inexpensive technology effective against our own highly complex, very expensive technology. And you know, our own military is aware of this. I understand that some of our military people have been studying with the Ukrainians who are developing a bunch of this. The Iranians have also been developing it. And this is a transformation going on. But what happens in this kind of situation, and this does happen, where the complexity curve, the marginal product curve can be reset through some kind of innovation, is that what happens is that then complexity starts to grow again, it starts to increase again because, okay, so people now have drone technology and it's hard to defend against it. Well, you're going to invest in defending against it and then they're going to make the drones better and then they'll make the defense better and so forth and so on. It's going to be a typical evolutionary curve that seems now to be resetting itself so that the system is simplified and less expensive. Maybe simplified and less expensive. I mean, it seems that it might be going that way, but then it'll start to grow in complexity and costliness again because that's simply the nature of military competition. So what do we do?
- [71:39]
C
Some people, obviously with plenty of existential anxiety, Mie Carrie Steele, Kathleen Sachs, Pablo DeFlorence, Paul Gladys, Tim McCallo, Russ Tharp and Isabella Fitzpatrick wanted to know if there's anything a person should do to be ready for it. Pablo asked, do I need to start growing my own food? Russ Tharp wanted to know, did ancient
- [72:04]
A
Rome have doomsday preppers and was it useful?
- [72:07]
C
And like, what do you think about the prepper movement?
- [72:11]
B
They actually did. They actually did. There's actually ancient literature. One phrase I remember in particular from a writer in the third century who wrote the age is now senile. You know, there's this old analogy that societies age like, say organisms do and so forth. So the age is now senile and we still use that analogy today. I mean, yes, the Romans had perceptive people who were worried about this sort of thing. Probably every complex society has had such people who see who are perceptible enough to see the trends beyond just the day to day problems of getting food and raising their children and so forth, which most people concern themselves with and little else.
- [72:55]
A
So an astute pop cultural question from Sean Thomas Kane. Dave Brewer Dystopian fiction readers Jennifer Tran Rottweiss Waffle, Jenny Lowe Rhodes, Patricia Evans and Emmett Potential prepper Julie Burkhart, Daniel Gray, Katie Hammond, Patricia Evans and Atticus Atlas. Who asked, why are humans so interested in post apocalyptic fiction movies and fantasies? It seems like everyone assumes they'd be the ones to survive. Statistically that's not possible. Do you think that's why people love
- [73:24]
C
apocalypse movies so much as like an instruction? What do you do?
- [73:28]
B
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, when I talk, people always ask me, are we prone to collapse? And what can be done about the complexity problem? I've actually written some new material about coping with complexity that is not yet in print. I hope it will be fairly soon. Should have been in print by now, probably publishing somewhere else, but it doesn't come out soon. But how to cope with complexity.
- [73:54]
A
Yes, I'd like that.
- [73:55]
B
And there are strategies for how do you cope with complexity? I came up with, I think it's 11 different strategies for coping with complexity. And the final one I give, that always gets the laugh, is don't solve the problem, then the complexity doesn't grow. You just learn to live with it. And we do that all the time, appropriating bodies, Congress and state legislatures, they do that all the time. I mean, that's one way of coping with complexity is you just ignore the problem. Kick the can down the road. Is the expression just shove it all
- [74:25]
C
in the back of a closet and say you'll deal with it later and then forget it, I imagine.
- [74:30]
B
Yeah, yeah, we'll live through it somehow, you know, we'll muddle through. I mean, there's an expression I'd like to use. I use it in an interview in France once and then I had to explain what the term meant. We're a species that muddles through. You know, that's an American colloquialism, maybe an English colloquialism in general. We are a species that muddles through. Okay, so if anyone is listening to this, is not familiar with the term, it means we proceed, we find our way step by step, without a plan. That's just what we do. That's what we've always done and that's what we'll always do. We muddle through.
- [75:05]
A
Mercedes would like to note, isn't that strangely hopeful? And I'm pretty sure that was just a rhetorical thought. But I will add that Mercedes is a huge supporter of mutual aid and advocacy and has been for me, a really inspiring force. You can see our two genocideology episodes with expert and scholar Dr. Dirk Moses. And that yes, part of that muddling through is speaking up for others under the literal rubble and lending a hand to survive. But life is full of facing hard times and enduring. That's the whole point.
- [75:41]
C
You know, Sam the science teacher said, as a teacher of immigrants and refugees, I'm wondering if it only feels like societal collapse to people in the United States. Rob Harbers wanted to know, and so did R.J. deutsch and Ashley Bauer. Matt and Leslie wanted to know essentially how much longer does the US have? Are we as screwed as it feels like at the moment? And I know that people probably treat you as like a Doomsday Almanac, keeper of the Doomsday Clock, which I know. I think we're at 17 seconds to
- [76:15]
B
midnight now, but no, it's down to three seconds.
- [76:18]
A
Is it down to three?
- [76:19]
B
Yeah, I think it's down to three. They recently changed it. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist I think is.
- [76:27]
A
Mercedes says you're both wrong. Ugh, it hurts. But we're gonna get to the actual time in a second. We're gonna fact check us. But if you're like, wait, what? There's a stopwatch for the destruction of humanity, that's wonderful. Yeah. So in 1947, a group of scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which brought the world nuclear warfare with The World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they created a newsletter called the the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. And their goal has been to alert the public about the existential risks that humanity is posing to humanity. And if all of human history were a clock, the number of seconds to midnight represents how much time relative to that we have until we fuck it up so hard we all pretty much die. And in 1947 they set it to seven minutes to midnight. In 1991 we reached a placid and comfortable 17 minutes to midnight. Now in January 2026, the atomic scientists had their annual press conference.
- [77:28]
D
Thank you for joining us today. My name is Alexandra Bell and I am the President and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It is the determination of the Bulletins Science and Security Board that humanity has not made sufficient progress on the existential risks that endanger us all. We thus move the clock forward. The Doomsday Clock is a tool for communicating how close we are to destroying the world with technologies of our own making. The risks we face from nuclear weapons, climate change and disruptive technologies are all growing. Every second counts and we are running out of time. It is a hard truth, but this is our reality.
- [78:13]
A
Two grim faced scientists Turned a rotating pedestal to reveal a clock face. Just a whisper from the 12.
- [78:24]
D
It is now 85 seconds to midnight. This is the closest the world has ever been to midnight.
- [78:31]
A
Oobly. So the good news first. We were thinking that it was five or 17 seconds, but that's how much it's moved up in the last few years. That's the good news. Bad news is, well, it's never been worse. And this 85 seconds was set about a month before the US Department of War, in military cahoots with Israel, launched Operation Epic Fury to bomb Iran a month later. Now, if you're thinking there should be an ology for the apocalypse, good news there is. It's called eschatology. And we covered it years back with Dr. Emil Torres, then known as Phil, not to be confused with our lepidopterology guest, also another Phil Torres. But Dr. Emile Torres is a philosopher and a historian of human extinction. They report, sadly, it's an increasingly relevant topic, and you can check out their 2023 book, Human A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation. And if you're more kind of in a listening mood, you can enjoy their podcast, Dystopia now, in which they and comedian Kate Willett explore the philosophies and religions of Silicon Valley and tech billionaires shaping our country and our world and our future. But where were we? Yes, 85 seconds to midnight. That's where we were.
- [79:50]
B
Pay attention to things like that.
- [79:52]
C
Yeah, that makes my stomach drop like I've just gone on a horrible roller coaster. But I mean, again, you're not a forecaster, but like, is it as fucked
- [80:01]
A
up as it feels?
- [80:03]
B
Maybe. What has come to concern me over the last few years is globalization. That globalization makes us vulnerable. And Covid is a good example of the downside of globalization on a fairly small scale. I taught a world geography class and I would talk to them about this, about globalization. And. And I would use this famous example, the famous photograph of. I think it's a vast parking lot full of Ford pickup trucks, all of which were ready to go to market, except they're missing one computer part. One chip, One chip. And. And that was because of globalization and decline in trade and interaction because of cop. And I see that as a shot across the bow. It's a warning shot of what could happen if the globalized system should completely break down. It would cause a collapse, it would bring on a collapse, and it would not be pleasant to see. I think there would be an awful lot of starvation that would happen around the world. And what could bring it on? Lack of energy, lack of the fundamental energy supplies that we rely on.
- [81:17]
A
And is that mostly fossil fuels or
- [81:19]
C
are we looking at solar energy, like livestock and food and wheat?
- [81:23]
B
For right now, to maintain our complex societies, we're talking about fossil fuels.
- [81:28]
C
Would a move toward more renewable energy mitigate that?
- [81:33]
B
Yes, yes, it would. Certainly it would. But energy transformations, from what I have read, they usually take 50 to 100 years to be fully brought about. And I think we are proceeding that way now. I hope that we are. There's resistance to it, of course. There are, you know, this entrenched self interest within the fossil fuel industry, the present automobile industry and so forth and so on, and various other industries where there are entrenched interests in maintaining the fossil fuel economy. And so there's, of course, resistance to a transformation to less reliance on fossil fuels. You know, I used to teach a sustainability seminar and I would tell students, look, we will never get completely over off fossil fuels. We'll never get, we'll never do it. If for no reason, then petrochemicals, fertilizers, various other products that come from fossil fuels and that we find beneficial and that don't contribute much to climate change. You know, the, the late Shah of Iran, he said something once that always stuck in my mind. You know, the Shah of Iran who was overthrown, leading to the present regime in Iran that we've had trouble with ever since, for the last 47 years. But the Song of Iran once said that petroleum was too valuable to burn as a fuel. And that has always stuck in my mind that he was right. And it always impressed me that this man was, you know, this, this autocrat who could have anything he wanted in the world, was perceptibly not was an intelligent enough man to see that, to understand it, even though his own well being depended on burning fossil fuels. But he saw that it was, it's the wrong thing to use fossil fuels for. You know, petrochemicals, plastics, fertilizers. I mean, all these other things that we need that fossil fuels can be used for and that we'll never be able to stop using them.
- [83:30]
A
Now the political history of Iran is again a series of 1,000 podcast episodes. But what does too valuable to burn mean? And how do we fertilize crops with oil? So it's a little something called the Haber process. And I knew neither jack nor shit about this, but it turns out that nitrogen, very abundant in the air, but it does not like to be nabbed into ammonia. And you need that ammonia to grow things and to feed complex societies. So to convert it using the Haber process, you need energy from hydrogen, usually in the form of natural gas or coal, oil, petroleum, et cetera. So this Haber process, it was pioneered in the early 1900s by a German by the name of Fritz Haber. And for saving the world from famine, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918. Because food, even now grown using the Haber process, feeds half of the world. Oh, wait, okay. For his work for the German forces and in World War I, he is also considered the father of chemical warfare. And wrenchingly, his work developing this warfare led to the chemistry used to murder over 1 million Jews in the Holocaust. He himself was a Jew. Complexity, it's a mixed bag, to say the very least. Now back to 2026 and evading world hunger. Morocco is also a big producer of rock derived phosphate fertilizer. But the tariffs on those, that's a whole other ball of wax or tar. Either way, those oil barrels are indeed filled with black gold.
- [85:21]
C
And I'm wondering, you know, you're so prolific, you've been doing this for so long, continue to write and continue to be a really important voice in this. I'm wondering if there's something that is
- [85:31]
A
very hard that you dislike about the
- [85:34]
C
work and something that really keeps you motivated, that you love.
- [85:39]
B
I'm 76 years old.
- [85:42]
C
That's young.
- [85:44]
B
Yeah, I mean, I'm decades overdue for a new edition of the Collapse book. I had committed to doing it, but then other things keep coming up and getting in the way and I'd like to get it done. I mean, I have new material to put in. I have new case studies to add to it. It good case studies that illustrate some different things. Now, a lot of this material I've put out in articles, but it needs to be brought together into a new edition of the book and I hope to be able to do it more
- [86:10]
A
hours in the day.
- [86:12]
B
Yes, more years in a lifetime is what it comes to.
- [86:16]
C
What about your favorite thing about the work itself?
- [86:19]
B
I just enjoy it. I don't do this sort of thing because I think I'm going to save the world. I do it because I enjoy doing it. It's interesting, it's fun. I learned things doing it. It tickles my mind. That's why I do it.
- [86:32]
C
Mercedes, our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, was reading your book and 38 years later, and yeah, my husband and I. My husband listened to the audiobook recently and so it remains more relevant than ever. So the Tainter phenomenon is real. You've made thank you. You've made a lasting name for yourself. So I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. It's a real honor. It really is.
- [86:57]
B
It's a pleasure. I like doing this. It's personally satisfying because it means my work broke out of academia.
- [87:04]
C
Absolutely.
- [87:05]
B
I have had some impact among general readership and the general public, and that to me is the most satisfying aspect of my career. That and the fun of doing it. So thank you. I'm happy to do interviews like this.
- [87:18]
C
Yeah. Thank you so much.
- [87:21]
A
So ask smart people not smart questions because sometimes they truly wrote the book on the topic. And that book is the Collapse of Complex Societies, which we will link for you in the show Notes alongside his Google Scholar page so you can marvel at all of his work. Thank you again so much Dr. Tainter for being on. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might also like the Revolutionology episode. Futurology Nomology is a two parter about the Constitution. The we've got Agnotology, which is a study of ignorance. Syndesiology with James Burke is about connections. You can just head to ologies.com to see a sorted list like a menu of our 500 plus episodes on everything under the sun. We even have one about the sun. We also have Smallogies which are kid safe and family friendly cuts of our Ologies classics. Those are free in their own feed. Wherever you get podcasts, just look up smologies S M O L O G I E S or click the link in the show notes. Thank you patrons of the show who support for as little as a dollar a month at patreon.com ologies you ask the best questions. Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch.com the lovely Erin Talbert Admin Zoologies Podcast Facebook group Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is the schedule producer of our complex calendar. Managing Director Keeping us from Collapse is Susan Hale and Jake Chaffee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio pick up all the auditory pieces and stitch them together every week. Huge thanks again to Mercedes Maitland who also produced this episode and did so much work and brought her archaeological background and societal curiosity to it. She she's a marvel. I appreciate her so much. Nick Thorburn fiddled with the theme music and if you stick around till the very end, you know I may tell you a secret. I may burden you with one. This week. It's that for the past few months I've noticed like a spot on my nose. Is it a freckle? Is it an age spot? Is it cancer? Who knows? Not me. Because here in Southern California dermatologists are in in high demand and mine, whoms I love can't see me for like eight months. I'm also out of retin a so I gotta ask about that. And I don't use AI. I just don't. So I'm not about to have Dr. GPT take a gander and hallucinate me a diagnosis. What is my point? My point is I'm glad we have doctors. I'm so glad we have them. I don't like the health insurance industry, but I'm glad we have doctors. Where would we be without them? Not at the doctor. I love all you doctors. I wish we had more of you. Also, if you're a dermatologist in East LA area who takes Blue Shield and you're curious about my no spot, I'd love to show you. Slide in those DMs, Instagram, hit me up. You know. Meanwhile me and my no spot say.
- [90:40]
C
What is your Roman Empire?
- [90:42]
B
What does that even mean?
- [90:44]
F
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- [91:00]
G
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