The End Is Always Near

Dan Carlin, the creator of the Hardcore History podcast, looks at the moments when civilizations came close to collapse or fell, from the Bronze Age to the present and from plague to nuclear war. Mixing narrative history with thought experiments, he considers both what happened and what might have happened instead. Carlin asks whether hard times produce harder people, whether humanity can hold weapons this destructive without destroying itself, and whether technology could one day peak or go backward. He also weighs, given what is known about human patterns, whether the present world is likely to end up as ruins for future archaeologists. It became a New York Times best seller.

Morgan Housel, who ranks Carlin among the best storytellers of history, noted that it examines eras when the world seemed to be ending, from wars and famines to pandemics and collapsing societies.