Jared Diamond — Pulitzer Prize winner, bestselling author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, and UCLA professor since 1966 — delivers a masterclass on why past civilizations collapsed and what we can learn from them today.

Diamond opens with an analogy: asking "what's the single main reason a society collapses" is like asking "what's the single main reason a marriage fails." There's rarely just one cause — it's usually a combination of factors, and getting even one badly wrong can be enough to bring down the whole system.

The talk covers:

🏝️ Ecological factors — deforestation on Easter Island, the collapse of Cahokia, drought and the Anasazi in the American Southwest, the fall of the Khmer Empire at Angkor, and how soil salinization cost the Fertile Crescent its millennia-long agricultural dominance.

⚔️ Collective societal mistakes — the Norse in Greenland, who refused to eat fish and failed to build relations with the Inuit, with a surprising modern parallel to Brexit.

👑 Individual leadership failures — Alcibiades and the disastrous Athenian expedition against Syracuse, Kaiser Wilhelm II ending the alliance with Russia, the 1973 coup in Chile, and Imperial Japan's decision to go to war with the United States.

🌍 New global threats — globalization, human-caused climate change, and nuclear risk, which mean the danger of collapse today is no longer local but potentially global.

🕊️ Reasons for hope — foreign aid, the shift to renewable energy, the mobilization of younger generations, and the historical power of peaceful protest, from the civil rights movement to Tiananmen Square.

The lecture closes with a Q&A touching on current events: political polarization in the US, the role of the Supreme Court, voter turnout, women in leadership, and a preview of Diamond's upcoming seventh book on the conditions under which leaders can actually make a difference.

📍 Recorded at UCLA

In this lecture, Lawrence H. White — Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Senior Fellow at the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center — offers a comprehensive reading of one of the most consequential books of the 20th century.

Published in 1944, Hayek's The Road to Serfdom marked a turning point in his career: from technical monetary economist to public intellectual. White traces the historical context that made the book necessary — the intellectual prestige of central planning in the 1930s, FDR's New Deal and its corporatist inspiration, and the chilling admiration some American progressives harbored for Mussolini's "efficient" state apparatus.

White walks through the book's core arguments: why central planning is not merely economically inefficient but inherently incompatible with the rule of law and individual liberty; why partial interventionism tends to escalate rather than stabilize (Mises's logic of interventionism); and why, in a centrally planned system, it is the least scrupulous who tend to rise to positions of power.

The lecture also examines how the book was received — from Churchill's rhetorical overreach in the 1945 British elections to Paul Samuelson's influential (and deeply flawed) misreading — and closes with Keynes's famous letter from the ship to Bretton Woods: enthusiastic agreement in principle, followed by the conviction that good planning by the right people would make Hayek's warnings moot.

In this remarkable conversation, physicist and author Brian Greene sits down with Edward Witten — widely regarded as the greatest theoretical physicist of our era and the only scientist ever to receive the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics — picking up a dialogue that began 39 years earlier at Harvard in 1986.

The evening explores some of the deepest questions in fundamental physics: what is quantum mechanics, and why is it so difficult to reconcile with Einstein's general relativity? Why does gravity continue to resist quantization? And where do we stand today in the search for a unified theory of everything?

At the heart of the discussion is String Theory — its history, its genuine breakthroughs (including the revolution of the 1990s and Maldacena's celebrated duality between gauge theory and gravity), and its still-unanswered challenges. Witten is candid: physicists have uncovered a vast and mathematically breathtaking structure, but the unifying principles behind it remain unknown. Unlike Einstein, who developed the concepts of general relativity first and then found the mathematics to match, string theory was stumbled upon without anyone knowing what it really was — and in many ways, that mystery persists to this day.

Greene and Witten also reflect on the sociology of science: the early resistance to string theory within the physics community, the courage required to bet an entire career on a radical idea, and the long periods of waiting and uncertainty that define life as a theoretical physicist. Witten admits that much of the time, doing research simply feels like hanging around doing nothing.