YouSaid · the spoken record

Lizzie Wade

lines on the record: 36
first: 2025-05-11
most recent: 2025-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“How this story is going to end. And I think there's still just a lot of transformations that it has in store for us and how it intersects with climate change. We're living through these things minute to minute and hour to hour and year to year. And it's just, you know, we just don't know the end of these things yet. And I think, but I think this sense of being able to see the things that we need to and want to change about a society that's a real gift of apocalypse. And I think one that we will have, you know, unfortunately have many opportunities to seize in the coming years.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know apocalypses are because they're transformations, like the transformations just don't happen because of the natural disaster or the pandemic or the climate change. They happen because of the people transforming and deciding, looking around at their society and saying, this isn't working for us anymore, what do we need to do? What are we going to do next? Who are we going to be? How are we going to change? And I think people in the past, you know, when we look at, you know, their arc of these stories on a century's long basis, we can see those transformations happening. And I think, you know, many of us have the sense that, well, the pandemic is over, its story is over, its narrative is over. We're going to kind of lock it in a box and not thinking about it again. But, you know, looking at the Black Death and how long those reverberations lasted through European society, I just think, you know, we have no idea.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It, I would say. Of course, it's hard to know how commoners in Egypt or the classic Megaclavs, the commoners are not really writing down, and they're not journaling about their feelings as we are sure to have in when we study the history of the COVID pandemic. But that sense that the way things work is something about it has turned rotten, you know, like something about it clearly.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think an apocalypse, as we saw in the COVID pandemic in that case, as in the Black Death, pre-existing patterns of inequality, health disparities, which are obviously connected to racism, colonialism, all the kind of organizing hierarchies of our society, like things that we'd naturalized as being kind of just the way things are or something that we don't have a lot of agency to change the consequences of those became extremely stark and like literally life or death overnight and in a way that they'd always been but we maybe hadn't been able to see and quite such a stark way you know and so i think the these moments of apocalypse are times when how a society really works is becomes evident to you know many of the people living in”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work whose labor really matters the most to keeping society running, whose, like, how are we thinking of ourselves as individuals instead of in a collective network at borders, you know, like it all sort of came crashing down around us? And I think that a lot of people have wanted to forget that feeling of, you know, total You know, I want to call it liberation almost like it was but in a very scary and unexpected way like where you sort of had to where you realize that everything sort of had to be put back together from scratch and I think a lot of people didn't want to do that and that was that has contributed to a lot of the issues we've had since I would say but I think you know the sense of justice you know”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Question. I mean, it's something I thought about a lot because, you know, one of the actual original meaning of the word apocalypse is a revelation, the unveiling, the revealing. And I think that was a sense that I, you know, I had started researching this book before the COVID pandemic, and that was a meaning I sort of struggled to understand and how it had been incorporated into the more modern meaning of disaster and end of the world and whatever. And then, you know, in March 2020 as my life completely changed, as so many of ours did, that sense of being able to see things that I couldn't see before, this sense that everything was up for grabs suddenly and all these roles of society, whether that's that you have to go to school or you had to go to an office or who's”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And did I sure limited people's lives again in certain ways. But the fact that that backlash went on for so long among people who wouldn't even have been alive during the Black Death, that just to me said revealed just how transformative these social changes were and how scary and how scary for the elites to think that society could be organized in a fundamentally different way. And of course, within a few centuries it was organized in a fundamentally different way.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot more agency and power, the health effects like malnutrition wasn't quite as widespread. People grew taller or live longer. There were health effects that the health signals improved throughout the society. But we also see in the historical record, of course, the elites writing again just how much resistance there were to these changes. And the English parliament is passing laws up until 40 years after the Black Death is over, which is especially back then several generations of people trying to keep workers back in their place, trying to limit restrict wages to what they were before the plague, trying to keep people from moving around and negotiating and bargaining. And I think that you could say you could see that as, you know, of course, that was quite oppressive.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love to do this necessary work. And so they started demanding higher wages, started being able to move around more and kind of the similarly to how the scribe in HNUF describes it, like society was kind of turned on its head and the people at the bottom were suddenly, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to say they found themselves on the top of the society, but they found themselves with a lot more options and choices. you know, able to put pressure on history and on their lives in a way that they really couldn't before. And we see this, and of course, this is difficult to, we can see some of these effects in people's bones. There was quite a health really improved after the Black Death, not necessarily because of the Black Death. There were a lot of climate challenges in the century before that led to the poverty arising. But, you know, it seems like life, you know, as workers demanded.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In English society is where a lot of this research has come up, and people who are already fragile and had health problems in the past, most likely because of malnutrition and poverty, which had really risen in the century before the Black Death, they were the ones who were most likely to die of this disease. But then after, you know, within quite short order, there was kind of no one left to do the work of keeping everyone else alive. So, you know, society was sort of as feudal. Society. So it was kind of worganized around these manners and estates. And suddenly the people who were farming or taking care of animals or, you know, the workers who are really keeping these estates running, the people that survived had, you know, incredible societal power over that they'd never had before. And because they were really needed and there was really no one.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a sense that it just ripped through that it was uncontrollable, that had no rhyme or reason, no pattern to it. When you're living through the loss of 50% of people that you know in this course of a year, you know, because of course it took four years or so for it to make its way across Europe, but in a certain place it could rip through it in a matter of months or maybe a year if it was a bigger city. People thought that there was, you know, it was just kind of an act of God, like literally, and in the ways that we think about it. But, you know, archaeologists can see today how it was actually, you know, mediated by the inequality and the hardships that had already existed.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's staggering. I mean, even researching and writing about this during the COVID pandemic, I mean, it was just beyond anything I could have ever imagined. And I think anything any of us can imagine and will hopefully, you know, never have to experience anything like that. I mean, the sense of loss and the speed of it was just staggering. And I think there's been a sense that because there is a sense among people back then who are living through it that, you know, they obviously interpreted their world and mostly through religion. And so there's a lot of religious interpretations of this event, like comparisons to Noah's flood and being worse than Noah's Flood and a punishment from God. There's a lot of astrological interpretations that to us seem like quite strange and mystical that for people then would have been very vivid and alive.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the Black Death is probably one of the most apocalyptic events that we can imagine, and that truly people lived through.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could this be a monument kind of to El Ni ⁇ o in some sense? Of course, we don't have writing, so it's hard to know for sure, but the fact that the building materials are left behind by these floods and places that people couldn't occupy before become really rich wetlands over the course of decades of this disaster. And people sort of come together in new ways and start cooperating on these really big projects and eventually leads to some of the complex, most complex and biggest societies the world has ever seen. And that doesn't happen. And that happens because of El Nino in some sense, or it's possible to see it that way. And I think that that really made me think differently about what could be possible for our future, that it's not just, you know, inevitable fragmenting and desperation, but opportunities to build different kinds of communities.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of this sense that natural disasters are getting worse, environments that we trusted can no longer be predicted and only knew it's like almost the environment becomes like the opposite of what people have grown to expect. And I think as we talked about in our post-apocalyptic stories, we sort of think that would inevitably lead to a fragmenting of the communities we've built. It might make it impossible to cooperate, impossible to build something new, impossible to look towards the future because you're like, just all you can do is prepare for the next disaster. And actually what archaeologists see in Prue is the exact opposite, that, you know, shortly after El Nino was born, as we know it, people really started coming together to build big societies, big monuments. Sometimes with the kind of mud El Nino left behind, which is very evocative of”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very lush river valleys, and during an El Nino event, these valleys will flood and normally there's almost no rain in this environment. It'll be huge amounts of rain all of a sudden, flash floods, mudslides, destruction. It is enormously destructive to the people who live there and the industries that are based there large-scale industrial farming of rice and sugar cane. And in the past, archaeologists have found that El Nino that actually sort of comes and goes over tens of thousands of years periods. And El Ni ⁇ o, as we know it today, kind of appeared around 5,800 years ago, although on a slightly less frequent, you know, it came slightly less frequently than it does today. And I think what has stuck out for me about that story is that we would think and we are thinking now in this period.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I think the Mexico example is a great one. We've been taught to sort of see our world today as this kind of inevitable culmination of centuries of progress and we kind of have nowhere to go but down from here. And that was part of what makes it so scary to think about how our societies might need to change and change quite radically in the future. And in the book, I argue that this is actually already a post-apocalyptic world and there's nothing like that's so great about it or so special that we can't think of other ways to do things and transform. And one that really has stuck with me is the birth of El Ni ⁇ o in on the north coast of Peru. So El Ni ⁇ o obviously affects climate around the world, but it really is quite catastrophic on the north coast of Peru, which is a very dry desert interspersed with”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How society might need to change in response to it. And I think being able to look in the past and seeing not only did people have these emotional experiences and went through these events, but they adapted, they survived, they created new things. They really seized the opportunity to transform, and they didn't stay the same as they were before the apocalypse arrived. And I think that that's just such an important lesson to learn from our ancestors. And I think there are so many different ways to be human. And we've experimented with so many already, and there's certainly so many more to come. And I think that sense of possibility in the past that there are people who have been through exactly all of the things we are so scared of and they figured it out. And I think that's so important for us to have in mind as we face our own future.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To problems that have been brewing for a long time. I think all of those could have different answers. There's not one way people have experienced apocalypse even in the same society. But I think that sense, I really wanted to bring to life that sense that we are not actually alone in what we're facing in the future that so many people have been through a similar similar experiences in the past. They were likely just as freaked out as we are today in their own ways and reacted to it in their own ways. But like we are, there are things we can learn from the past and not just about how to prevent these catastrophes because I think, you know, we're in a lot of denial right now about how what is coming for us. How and you know”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the course of centuries or millennia, you know, really are unprecedented. But I think that emotional experience of looking around you and having an environment that you thought you understood and trusted and could count on become unfamiliar, you know, within the span of a few years or decades, the sense that natural disasters have started coming and are keeping coming in ways that are that you never expected or knew to prepare for the sense that a government that you thought was stable and, you know, and that stability was important to your concept of the world and your place in it, when that starts to disintegrate, who are you? Is that something that we need to resist at all costs or can that be a solution?”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think one of the feelings that I had when thinking about the world that we live in and the future that we are entering and that our generations to come are going to live in is one of the things that makes it so scary is the sense that it's unprecedented and that we're entirely alone and there's nothing we can learn from we're the first humans to have caused such a catastrophic change in our climate there's no real sense that's going to stop and even if it did stop tomorrow we are still locked into a certain amount of really scary changes and the sense that that yeah that we are the first people to experience something like this and to a certain extent of course there are pieces of it that are unique like the possible climate extremes that climate change could result”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the field have been really important and have sort of been in a feedback loop with this more philosophical shift of whose stories are we most interested in telling?”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Harder to appreciate in the past, but these new tools of archaeology are really opening new perspectives, and archaeologists themselves are, you know, they just don't, they're much more open to different kinds of stories, much more excited to work with local communities to incorporate local knowledge into what they study, the questions that they ask. And it's less about, okay, what do I as this white foreign explorer coming to another country and taking all these beautiful artworks? It's less about the elite artifacts that past generations of archaeologists might have been most interested in just because of the way they said about the leadership structure of the society and more about the experience of everyone else. And I think that the scientific shifts.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, painted pot emerge intact from an excavation, but it's in that kind of encumulation of less impressive artifacts, let's say, and different ways of looking at them that can really reveal perspectives that a royal tomb just would never capture despite the fact how beautiful and stunning those artifacts can be. That is such a limited view of a past this, of any society. It would be like excavating, I don't know, like the White House or, you know, like an elite space of government and or the richest, fanciest neighborhood in a city and claiming that was the experience of everyone who lived in it when our own experiences, that's obviously not the case. And we can really appreciate that in our own world and in more recent history, but it has been.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I think absolutely that's a huge part of it. I think if I were a science journalist in the 1920s covering archaeology, the stories I would be hearing from scientists and researchers would be extremely different, still very said in these elite narratives. And I think as archaeology, as their scientific toolkit has expanded to include things like dietary isotope analysis, ancient DNA, even simpler things like just really detailed bioarchaeology, chemical residues left on ceramics, for example, like the amount of information archaeologists can get out of the things they find, which can seem humble in the extreme. I mean, it's a lot of the time ancient people's trash. And sometimes it looks like it, you know, like it's not, it's very rarely will you get a beautiful.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often these environments that were slowly drowning were also extremely productive and welcoming to humans and their communities, especially places where people were hunting and gathering and fishing. Instead of trying to think about the rising sea taking something away, trying to see it as maybe what could the rising sea be giving these people who lived in such intimate relationship to it over such a long period of time. And of course, I can't say, I can't claim that the stories I tell in my book are necessarily 100% exactly how people felt and experienced things in the past, but I think they have just as much evidence behind them as the more pessimistic and violent stories that we've sort of been indoctrinated with. And I think we deserve to be able to imagine something different and better.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Running catastrophe collapse. We sort of think of them as terrifying experiences, and I think they often were. But I also tried to think about, okay, what might my own cultural conditioning be encouraging me to leave out of these stories and to try to find those pieces of it? So, for example, one foundational apocalypse in our species history, I would say, is the sea level rise at the end of the last ice age. And when we think about that, we think about loss, right? Like the loss of environments, the loss of homes, how we imagine what is happening to us and what will continue to happen to us. But I think when you actually think, okay, how would this have played out on the scale of a human life or a human, you know, a few human generations so you could have a collective memory that gets passed down?”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's difficult and it's not always clear from the archaeology, but I think for what I did, the book contains lots of imagined stories, but from known historical figures who may have written down their experiences or otherwise had them recorded like this Egyptian scribe who has a name and some other stories are sort of from the lens of a community. And I think trying to find those stories is very difficult. And a lot of it for me came from, it really was an imaginative project. And I tried to think not only how might have people have experienced this event, but how have we been taught to think about their, what they're most likely feelings were, you know, fear, catastrophe?”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has kind of like an elite science or, you know, it's coming from that academy. It grows out of the 19th century like these, you know, kind of wealthy European and American explorers going to other countries and taking their treasures back to the museums where we can see them today, where they were kind of primed to see these events through one perspective and one perspective only. And archaeologists today are much more interested in trying to find the experiences that are harder to see or weren't recorded. So, you know, the commoners, the marginalized, women, children, and all of those people might have had a very different experience of these cataclysmic events.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To whose labor was conscribed and exploited by the hierarchy that existed when the state was unified, when that unification breaks apart. There are a sense that a city was abandoned when we find the last or when archaeologists find the last date carved into a stone monument. A certain extent makes sense. There is some process in that city, some kind of life in that city that did come to an end when history stopped being recorded in that same way, but it did not mean that one day to the next everybody disappeared or died. It mostly meant that the elite, you know, the divine kings of the Maya world were losing their power for reasons we might not ever fully understand. It just didn't make sense for to have a lot of artists and scribes and historians living in these cities. That didn't mean that nobody could continue to live in these cities or did. And I think, you know, archaeologists also”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the ancient Egyptian state. And the descriptions are so vivid of a prolonged drought, of people walking into the Nile and committing suicide by crocodile rather than try to survive this political collapse of a unified Egyptian state and the Nile floods that it relied on. But when we look at the archaeology, which is harder to find in a lot of cases than these texts that have survived, we see people who didn't get to write their experience into the historical record often had really different experiences of these events when society was kind of, when the hierarchies of societies were coming apart. Obviously, the people at the top, the elite court scribe was going to have a really different experience in that than someone who didn't have that much to begin with or had”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a wonderful question and one that I continually ask myself why when these stories, when these true stories are so rich and so fascinating and really I rarely use the word inspiring, but there's so many possibilities contained in them. Why have we gotten stuck with the most boring versions of these events and the scariest? The ones that make us feel like a future is impossible. And I think it's actually because through archaeology and also through sort of the way that the past was recorded in the past and by who we've ended up with, you know, a really elite view of these events. So in ancient Egypt, for example, which is one of the stories in my book, we have this incredible papyrus by a scribe who at least purports to have lived through sort of the first collapse.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About violence and endings and sort of the impossibility of empathy during events like these and these disappeared societies that leave nothing behind. And I just felt like that wasn't the story I was seeing through the science and through the archaeology. And it's not the story archaeologists study. And I just felt like we really deserve better stories and truer stories about our past, especially as we confront a future that's going to be just as, if not more apocalyptic than anything I describe in the book.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, you know, when I went out with archaeologists into the field or talked to them about their work, you know, these stories of disappearance, tragedy, loss, forgetting endings, that wasn't really the story that they were finding and it wasn't the story they were interested in studying. And what they really wanted to see was what happened after, how people survived, how people regrouped, how these cataclysmic events rippled through societies and affected different kinds of people in those societies in different ways from the, you know, elites who would be buried in royal tombs to the commoners who unexpectedly may have had a lot more choices when the worst came to pass. So I just felt like, you know, we have all these stories about apocalyptic events, all these post-apocalyptic pop culture and myths that we're accustomed to that are.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or the government, you know, and I think, but there are more sustained apocalypses that did. So, you know, climate change in our present is one, climate change in the past is another one. You bring up the apocalypse. I start out the book with, which is the extinction of other human species around 40,000 years ago, most famously, the Neanderthals, but not exclusively. And I think I came to the topic through my reporting on archaeology. I felt I've written a lot about archaeology in the Americas and, you know, one of the classic iconic stories of American archaeology writ large is the classic Maya collapse and these sort of abandoned cities in the jungle and what happened to the people who lived there and what happened to the society that they built that was obviously so grand and archaeologists of the past had interpreted it as having disappeared.”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course. So, yeah, so I define apocalypse in the book as you say a transformation. I think that's the really key word to keep in mind and the one that I always came back to in terms of thinking about events in the past and in the present and future. A longer definition that I use is that apocalypse is a rapid collective loss that fundamentally changes a society's way of life and sense of identity. So, you know, In contrast to sort of a more singular natural disaster such as something we might think of. is the volcanic eruption at Pompeii that of course was completely devastating for that city and all the people who lived in it and many of whom died even more of whom had to go on to rebuild their lives elsewhere but you know it didn't take down the roman empire for example it didn't fundamentally change the politics or the subsistence strategies”
2025-05-11 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Ancient Civilisations Teach Us About Survival? With Lizzie Wade · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT