Collapsology (SOCIETAL COLLAPSE, LOL!) with Joseph Tainter
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
Oh hey, it's the smoldering core in your bag of charred popcorn. Ali Ward, and yes. Collapseology. It's a real word. And it's all about the fall of empires and the disintegration of societal complexity. So thisologist 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 Down the Gulf Oil debacle and our energy dilemma, and has been on radio and TV, worked on movies as a consultant
And is 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 audio book of the collapse of complex societies alongside your podmother Jared Sleeper on a road trip. And Mercedes Maitland is also a fan of thisologist'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. Apologies right yeah. So it might be geology, it might be in this case collapseology. Apparently it's it was coined in twenty fifteen by um some French, I think sociologists. So if you look on the Wikipedia for collapseology, there is a subcategory all about you.
I'm gonna I'm gonna make a note on that. Yeah, I was thrilled to find that that there was an actual ology for it. Thank you for mentioning that. Thank you.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (87 minutes, 13,965 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.