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Speaker 1: trying to think about the future to construct future stories
Speaker 1: that are closer to the truth than other future stories.
Speaker 1: Because we don't do that, we die. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the
Speaker 1: importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.
Speaker 1: And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have. Instead of
Speaker 1: what we do, we think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is a return guest, David Christian.
Speaker 1: He's a distinguished professor of history at mcquarie University and
Speaker 1: director of the school's Big History Institute. David co founded
Speaker 1: the Big History Project with Bill Gates and has delivered
Speaker 1: keynotes at conferences around the world, including the Davos World
Speaker 1: Economic Forum, and his Ted talk has been viewed many,
Speaker 1: many millions of times. He's the author of numerous books
Speaker 1: and articles, including the one discussed here with Eric Future Stories.
Speaker 1: What's Next? Hi, David, welcome to the show. Thank you
Speaker 1: very much. Friend, binting me. I am excited to have
Speaker 1: you back on. We're going to be discussing your latest book,
Speaker 1: which is called Future Stories. What's Next? But before that,
Speaker 1: let's start like we always do with the parable. In
Speaker 1: the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild,
Speaker 1: and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
Speaker 1: of us that are all is it battle. One is
Speaker 1: a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
Speaker 1: and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
Speaker 1: grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and
Speaker 1: looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins,
Speaker 1: And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 1: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 1: that you do. It makes so much sense to me,
Speaker 1: and I one time to meditate and so many stations
Speaker 1: important for me. I'm not a very religious person, but
Speaker 1: I learned it within a Buddhist tradition, And in the
Speaker 1: Buddhist tradition, virtues are things you cultivate, and so your metaphor,
Speaker 1: the story of the wolf is very similar to that
Speaker 1: Buddhist metaphor of cultivating virtues like kindness and sympathy and friendliness.
Speaker 1: And I think the idea of cultivation I like very much.
Speaker 1: It implies feeding. You have to feed your crops to
Speaker 1: make them grow well, and and the same as true
Speaker 1: I think of virtues and vices, because some kids grow
Speaker 1: up in environments where what is admired of vices and
Speaker 1: they cultivate the vices. I spent a favorite of time
Speaker 1: reading and writing about the Mongols and Jinger's Khan, and
Speaker 1: that was a fighting culture. So the wolf that was
Speaker 1: fed was a wolf that we today would not like
Speaker 1: very much, but in those days they admired very much
Speaker 1: because everyone else was a fighter and you needed fighters
Speaker 1: on your side. Yeah. Yeah, So your latest book is
Speaker 1: Future Stories, which is sort of an attempt to look
Speaker 1: at where the future is going, and your previous book
Speaker 1: was about the past, and you are one of the
Speaker 1: key luminaries in a field that's known as big history,
Speaker 1: and I'm kind of curious what led you from big
Speaker 1: history to the future and what does having a comprehensive
Speaker 1: overview of history do as far as helping us to
Speaker 1: see into the future in a sense, Eric, My answer
Speaker 1: is very simple. I had always been attracted by this
Speaker 1: idea of trying to see total picture, and as a
Speaker 1: historian in through big history, I was trying to see
Speaker 1: what the whole of the past would look like. And
Speaker 1: I've now published two or three books on aspects of
Speaker 1: big history, and so the question what's next was on
Speaker 1: my mind, and in a sense naive answer to that
Speaker 1: question is, well, you've done the past, what about the future?
Speaker 1: So that's the simple answer, but of course there are
Speaker 1: much more complex answers as well. I have a gorgeous
Speaker 1: one year old granddaughter who you could just hear her
Speaker 1: yelping in the background at some point, but I think
Speaker 1: a lot about her future and what it will be like,
Speaker 1: so that aspect of it is very important to me
Speaker 1: as well, and also the fact that the difference between
Speaker 1: the past and the future. I'm a historian, and many historians,
Speaker 1: the classic cases the great historiographer, aren't you calling? Would?
Speaker 1: I thought that historians had no business thinking about the future.
Speaker 1: It was improper for them to do that, because, after all,
Speaker 1: there's no documents from the future. We have documents from
Speaker 1: the past, but not from the future. And I found
Speaker 1: myself just increasingly fascinated by the question what is the future?
Speaker 1: How can you study the future? Finally, it's sort of
Speaker 1: dawned on me that we will spend the rest of
Speaker 1: our lives in the future. I certainly thought, why don't
Speaker 1: we spend more time in our schools and universities thinking
Speaker 1: about the future. So those were the sort of questions
Speaker 1: that prompted me to wonder if I could possibly write
Speaker 1: a book about the future. You say that so much
Speaker 1: anxiety and efforts, so much hope, and so much creativity
Speaker 1: are directed at the future. Indeed, it may be that
Speaker 1: most of our thinking is actually about possible futures. And
Speaker 1: I certainly know that to be true for myself. I mean,
Speaker 1: if I pay close attention to where my mind is
Speaker 1: and what it to do in it is in the
Speaker 1: future a lot of the time. Now, I know some
Speaker 1: people have a tendency to look backwards more. I'm very
Speaker 1: much a future oriented person, but I think for many
Speaker 1: of us that's where most of our spare thinking goes.
Speaker 1: It goes to the future. I think that's absolutely right.
Speaker 1: A lot of thinking that we don't think of as
Speaker 1: thinking about the future, if you look at it, turns
Speaker 1: out to be about the future. We're speculating what if.
Speaker 1: That's why I like the title future stories. We're telling
Speaker 1: ourselves stories about the future. Now, those stories are sometimes
Speaker 1: they're just intriguing and they're kind of fun, but a
Speaker 1: lot of the time they're really important. There are a
Speaker 1: matter of life or death. Any anyone involved in a
Speaker 1: business knows that the future story in which you invest in.
Speaker 1: You put a lot of money into this project. Once
Speaker 1: you commit to that story, it's really important that that
Speaker 1: story should be not too wrong. So one of the
Speaker 1: questions that fascinated me is how do we and age
Speaker 1: to get it right so often? I mean, what are
Speaker 1: the skills involved and trying to think about the future
Speaker 1: to construct future stories that are closer to the truth
Speaker 1: than other future stories. Because we don't do that, we die.
Speaker 1: Our lives depend on being able to construct reasonably plausible
Speaker 1: future stories a lot of the time and to get
Speaker 1: it right a lot of the time. Before we move
Speaker 1: into some of the ways that we think about the
Speaker 1: future and creatures all around us think about the future,
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about time itself. In the book,
Speaker 1: you describe two ways that people have traditionally looked at time.
Speaker 1: You call it a series time and b series time.
Speaker 1: Can you kind of walk us through what those are
Speaker 1: to think about the future, to ask questions like is
Speaker 1: it a thing? Or is it a concept? Or is
Speaker 1: it a dimension? You have to think about time, because
Speaker 1: of course, the future is that part of time that
Speaker 1: we haven't seen yet. So you have to spend a
Speaker 1: bit of time looking at the philosophy of time, and
Speaker 1: that is fiendishly complex but also absolutely fascinating. You know,
Speaker 1: as a big historian, I dip into so many different fields,
Speaker 1: so I had to kind of wade into the philosophy
Speaker 1: and science of time. And it's very mysterious and very spooky.
Speaker 1: It's a bit like wandering into a jungle, and it's
Speaker 1: full of paradoxes and contradictions, and the truth is, we
Speaker 1: don't have a good, universally accepted theory of time. You know,
Speaker 1: different disciplines have their own approaches, and these two metaphors
Speaker 1: of time as a river and time as a map
Speaker 1: seemed to me the simplest and easiest ways into that
Speaker 1: very complex territory because the metaphors themselves are pretty easy
Speaker 1: to grasp when they're pretty close to our own experience.
Speaker 1: When time as a river is that we all have
Speaker 1: all the time of time as a sort of flow.
Speaker 1: We're being carried along by something, you know, and we
Speaker 1: see new things. So in the book, I use the
Speaker 1: metaphor of Huckleberry been un a raft floating down the
Speaker 1: Mississippi and new things come into view. Then the other
Speaker 1: metaphor is time as a map. So if we think
Speaker 1: about the future, we often have in our minds something
Speaker 1: that's a bit like a map. It's a bit like
Speaker 1: the sense of what we might say if we were
Speaker 1: looking back at our own lives in a hundred years time.
Speaker 1: So you know, this happened here, that happened in that here.
Speaker 1: So those are the two kind of metaphors of time.
Speaker 1: And by exploring what philosophers and scientists and theologians what
Speaker 1: they've said about those metaphors, I felt was one of
Speaker 1: the simplest ways into this kind of philosophical jungle about time,
Speaker 1: it does yield some answers to the question what is
Speaker 1: the future? As we know from physics, there isn't any
Speaker 1: thing in fundamental physics that points to a direction of
Speaker 1: time that's accurate correct if you look at the universe
Speaker 1: in the most fine grained way, if you look at
Speaker 1: quarks or bits of energy, it really the question what
Speaker 1: does time mean for a quark? It's not a significant question.
Speaker 1: We're projecting our own experiences on sub atomic entities, so
Speaker 1: it's not clear that the idea of time means anything
Speaker 1: for them. I don't pretend to be a scientist or
Speaker 1: a philosopher. But I think the simplest way to respond
Speaker 1: to that is to think that time is in a sense,
Speaker 1: it's change, but change is something that really matters for
Speaker 1: complex entities, complex structures in the universe, because they will
Speaker 1: eventually break down. So that our sense of time has
Speaker 1: a lot to do with our sense of being born,
Speaker 1: of growing, and eventually of dying. And we use a
Speaker 1: word like time to capture that sense, but it's not
Speaker 1: a word that has any significance. Really, they're probably meaningless questions. Yep.
Speaker 1: You quote the Japanese zen master Dogan, who talks about time,
Speaker 1: and I will say that I'm a Zen student, and
Speaker 1: when I hear Dogan talk about time, I'm always like,
Speaker 1: what is he talking about? You get into these deeper
Speaker 1: questions about time, and it does get, as you said,
Speaker 1: very difficult and very jungle like. But for most of us,
Speaker 1: we have a pretty clear sense of time, right like,
Speaker 1: yesterday happened, yesterday, tomorrow is gonna happen tomorrow. I can
Speaker 1: think about the future, I can plan for the future.
Speaker 1: So let's move our conversations in that direction. What I
Speaker 1: found really interesting, though, is you talk about how the
Speaker 1: fact that every living thing cares about the future, say
Speaker 1: a little bit about why that is and what you
Speaker 1: mean by living things, because you literally mean every living thing. Yes,
Speaker 1: and so there's quite a few pages in the book
Speaker 1: because you're about E. Coli bacteria and how they cope
Speaker 1: the future, and about the sort of stories they tell themselves.
Speaker 1: If what I've just said is correct, which is that
Speaker 1: time is an important concept for complex entities, or it's
Speaker 1: a concept that's significant for complex entities, it's a concept
Speaker 1: that matters for living entities. So I can't, in any
Speaker 1: even metaphorical sense, imagine that the sun cares about the future.
Speaker 1: The sun is a complex thing. It will eventually break down.
Speaker 1: It's like a rock. I mean, a rock doesn't really
Speaker 1: care if it's being eroded away, so it will vanish,
Speaker 1: but living things do. Now again i'm talking metaphorically. Many
Speaker 1: biologists would feel a bit queasy about the idea of E.
Speaker 1: Coli having a purpose. It's not quite what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: but I'm saying something very close to it, which I'm saying,
Speaker 1: they behave as if they preferred some futures to other futures,
Speaker 1: and they seem to put effort into creatively steering towards
Speaker 1: the futures. They prefer that we can define in very
Speaker 1: general terms the futures. They prefer that all living things
Speaker 1: prefer they are the futures in which they survive longer. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: given a choice between jumping off a cliff and not
Speaker 1: jumping off a cliff, I'm willing to give a bet
Speaker 1: that most humans will, unless they're in a really bad way,
Speaker 1: will prefer not to jump off the cliff. The same
Speaker 1: it's true for the bacteria. Given a sniff that's food
Speaker 1: in that direction, they'll head in that direction to survive.
Speaker 1: And then the second goal is to reproduce, because one
Speaker 1: of the really distinctive things about living things is they reproduce,
Speaker 1: so that eventually the jig will be up. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't go on making guesses about the future forever.
Speaker 1: But the trick of living things is they reproduce. They
Speaker 1: create copies of themselves or near copies of themselves, so
Speaker 1: the if I die, the copies will carry on. And
Speaker 1: that is the whole foundation for natural selection and the
Speaker 1: vast creativity and this magical diversity of living organisms that
Speaker 1: we see in the world today. In the book, you
Speaker 1: show how E Coli in essence think about the future
Speaker 1: and how they plan for the future and how they
Speaker 1: adjust for it. And again that sounds on its surface
Speaker 1: like that's impossible, but you say that these living things
Speaker 1: and they have purposes and goals. And there's no way
Speaker 1: that we can go into all the detail about how
Speaker 1: a cell does all of this. But I wonder if
Speaker 1: you could share a little bit about what you found
Speaker 1: most fascinating about what cells are able to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let me have a go. And again, we need to
Speaker 1: be very careful with the language here, because I don't
Speaker 1: think we can actually purpose to a bacterium, partly because
Speaker 1: we're not sure what the word purpose really means. How
Speaker 1: I get lots of E. Coli coming to me for
Speaker 1: life coaching. They're looking for their purpose. They're not sure
Speaker 1: what they're doing with their lives. So, but what living
Speaker 1: organisms do is they seem to discriminate between alternative futures.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a future in which it's in a
Speaker 1: part of your belly where it thinks, yeah, this is great.
Speaker 1: You know, I've never had so much food in my life.
Speaker 1: You know, I'll lap it up. There's times when they
Speaker 1: think whoops, I've been carried to a bit of Zimmer's
Speaker 1: belly where you know there's there's not much food. They
Speaker 1: seem to care. They act as if they care, whereas
Speaker 1: rocks don't. Now the question is how do they do that?
Speaker 1: And I think we have to go back to natural
Speaker 1: selection again. The idea of natural selection, going back to Darwin,
Speaker 1: often loose kind of like a self fulfilling prophecy. Well,
Speaker 1: it actually is. If you make copies of yourself, but
Speaker 1: add one more thing. The copies are never a hundred
Speaker 1: percent perfect. That guarantees diversity. Now you ask the question
Speaker 1: of all the diverse offspring of E. Coli, which are
Speaker 1: the ones that are most likely to have descendants? And
Speaker 1: the answer is the ones that are equipped with a
Speaker 1: sort of biochemical machinery that steers them in the directions
Speaker 1: that allow them to live longest. Does that make sense,
Speaker 1: therefore increases their chance of surviving. So that's that's slightly
Speaker 1: different way of describing what natural selection is saying. Now,
Speaker 1: what that means is that natural selection is guaranteed to
Speaker 1: build into all living organism some sort of machinery that
Speaker 1: can discriminate between good futures and bad futures, and I've
Speaker 1: already defined what a living organism thinks is a good
Speaker 1: future or a bad future. So if we look inside
Speaker 1: a self, there's no thinking going on. We can we
Speaker 1: can say that definitively because I think you need billions
Speaker 1: of neurons, and each neuron is bigger than an ecoiself,
Speaker 1: So it's not thinking. But there is a biochemical machinery
Speaker 1: there that includes DNA, RNA and lots of proteins that
Speaker 1: relate to each other in such a way that they
Speaker 1: behave a bit like a computer, and they also receive information.
Speaker 1: Information is crucial front of this, and they can take
Speaker 1: that information and they compute it and they can act
Speaker 1: on decisions, so that for example, they receive from a
Speaker 1: protein that's sticking through the skin of the membrane of
Speaker 1: the molecule and says, WHOA, I can see some of
Speaker 1: a sparta, which is food in that direction that can
Speaker 1: be processed inside the cell, and it leads a bit
Speaker 1: like a computer to a decision to keep going in
Speaker 1: that direction. This machinery is staggeringly elaborate and biology some
Speaker 1: biochemists have teased out a hell of a lot of it,
Speaker 1: but with still only the beginning of our understanding how
Speaker 1: complex it is, and that shouldn't surprise us. It's evolved
Speaker 1: over four billion years in gazillions of organisms. So I
Speaker 1: try to give a glimpse of how that machinery works
Speaker 1: in one of the chapters of Future Stories. It's absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: You actually do a really good job for a non biologist.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's why, since you're not a biologist, you do
Speaker 1: a really good job of describing it in ways that
Speaker 1: are understandable to non scientists like myself. I hope so
Speaker 1: I wrote it because I was trying to understand it
Speaker 1: myself as a non biologist, but it absolutely fascinates me.
Speaker 1: The payoff to it all is that even something so
Speaker 1: small that we can't see it with the naked eye
Speaker 1: can have kind of biochemical machinery that's capable of doing
Speaker 1: some pretty sophisticated calculations and lots of them. And in fact,
Speaker 1: it does all the things a computer can do. You know,
Speaker 1: they're they're kind of if this end, if this and
Speaker 1: this and this, then if this or that then you
Speaker 1: know so, so it does all those things, and there's
Speaker 1: a sense of memory, not memory like in the way
Speaker 1: we would think of it. But they know something that
Speaker 1: happened before this very moment. Yes, having to make use
Speaker 1: of information, you need to be able to retain it
Speaker 1: for just long enough so that, for example, sensor molecules
Speaker 1: that stick through the membrane, if they detect the molecule
Speaker 1: they're looking for in the outside world, they will change
Speaker 1: their shape slightly. Now that change of shape is felt
Speaker 1: inside the membrane and that gives a signal. So as
Speaker 1: long as the protein, the sense of protein is in
Speaker 1: this slightly different posture, if you like, it's holding a
Speaker 1: memory that there is this food molecule outside. And all
Speaker 1: of this machinery is am mentally important because it's going
Speaker 1: on in every cell of my body and your body
Speaker 1: every second. So it's the foundation for all future thinking.
Speaker 1: We could not live if every set in our body
Speaker 1: was not making these sort of calculations to ensure its
Speaker 1: own survival. Yeah, it's staggering the complexity that is in
Speaker 1: a single cell, let alone a human being. And then
Speaker 1: you you extrapolate that out and you start going, well,
Speaker 1: humans are sort of like cells to society, and it's
Speaker 1: the complexity you know, it's even further out. It's really
Speaker 1: kind of awe inspiring thing. Yeah, indeed, and I use
Speaker 1: this as a metaphor, but I wrestled with the thought
Speaker 1: about whether it's a metaphor or a pretty direct description
Speaker 1: of the way reality works. Single celled organisms like E.
Speaker 1: Coli have their own mechanism for discriminating between good and
Speaker 1: bad futures. But once you put billions of cells together,
Speaker 1: then each cell has to have a second apparatus that
Speaker 1: helps it relate with all the other cells, because it
Speaker 1: now depends on the survival of the whole thing. And
Speaker 1: that is so true that some cells, when order to
Speaker 1: commit suicide, will do so for the better good of
Speaker 1: the whole organism. So all of these single cells have
Speaker 1: to learn how to live together. Now you think of
Speaker 1: human beings multi celled organisms, and we now live in
Speaker 1: a world where a few hundred years ago, what happened
Speaker 1: in a particular part of the world had no impact
Speaker 1: at all on another part of the world. But suddenly
Speaker 1: the world has changed. Were suddenly in a world where
Speaker 1: a war on the border between Russia and Ukraine affects
Speaker 1: wheat prices, it affects interest rates everywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: So we're now in a globally connected world. It's a
Speaker 1: bit like the first cells that began to collaborate to
Speaker 1: form the first multi celled organisms. And the big question is,
Speaker 1: can we develop systems of morality, of communication of information
Speaker 1: that allows us to collaborate, because we're now getting to
Speaker 1: the point in the world where the survival of humanity
Speaker 1: as a whole is vital for the survival of each
Speaker 1: individual and certainly for the survival of our grandchildren and
Speaker 1: great grandchildren. So we're moving in the direction of multicellular organisms.
Speaker 1: And one of the predictions I make for the future
Speaker 1: is that within just a century or two will be
Speaker 1: pretty close to that, because we humans will find that
Speaker 1: the decisions we make will shape the future of planet Earth.
Speaker 1: Will have become planet managers, and planet Earth will have
Speaker 1: become a conscious planet. Okay, that's a metaphor, but it's
Speaker 1: one of those metaphors that's pretty close to being a
Speaker 1: literal description of reality. It's an interesting point when you
Speaker 1: zoom out a little bit, which is what I think
Speaker 1: big history allows you to do. It allows you to
Speaker 1: zoom out and go, all right, let's look at things
Speaker 1: from a much bigger perspective. And when you do that,
Speaker 1: you start to get a sense of like things take time,
Speaker 1: and when you realize that it only has been a
Speaker 1: blink of an eye literally that humans have been able
Speaker 1: to impact each other in the ways that we do.
Speaker 1: From a networked perspective, it's easy to feel a real
Speaker 1: sense of fear about what's coming. And I do think
Speaker 1: we are facing in some very scary things. But from
Speaker 1: the big picture time frame, we're just learning how to
Speaker 1: interact with each other. We haven't been doing it in
Speaker 1: the way that we are now very long. And that
Speaker 1: leads me to a idea that you talked about in
Speaker 1: the book that I thought was very interesting called punctuated equilibria.
Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about what that is,
Speaker 1: because I think it speaks to this idea. Yeah, let
Speaker 1: me go back one step earlier in the book, but
Speaker 1: I talk about the future. One of the first rules
Speaker 1: is there is no evidence from the future. We have
Speaker 1: no evidence from the future. The only way we can
Speaker 1: construct plausible stories about the future is by looking at
Speaker 1: the past, which is very paradoxical. Means we have to
Speaker 1: look backwards to think about the future, and what we
Speaker 1: look for in the past is trends. So the idea
Speaker 1: of punctuated equilibrium is linked to the idea of trends,
Speaker 1: and in the past you can see trends, or some
Speaker 1: of them are very very regular, very powerful, like every
Speaker 1: morning the sun rises, you know, or every year the
Speaker 1: government will try to tax me. You know, I will
Speaker 1: eventually die. These are predictions we can make with great
Speaker 1: confidence because the trends are so powerful. The idea of
Speaker 1: punctuated equilibrium was really first formulated by the biologists Niles
Speaker 1: Oldridge and Stephen Jay Gould in the I think was
Speaker 1: the eighties, and they were talking about how species evolved.
Speaker 1: And Darwin seems to have thought that evolution was a
Speaker 1: sort of steady, gradual process that was going on all
Speaker 1: the time, that all species were slowly changing. Now there
Speaker 1: some truth in that, but what Eldridge and Gold said
Speaker 1: is no, no, Actually, the history of living organisms and
Speaker 1: I'm now going to project it on a broader history
Speaker 1: actually change his pace. Sometimes it's very fast, sometimes it's
Speaker 1: very slow. So there are moments when suddenly quite such
Speaker 1: a new species appears and flourishes, and then there are
Speaker 1: periods when not much seems to happen. I mean, in
Speaker 1: teaching big history, I eventually came to realize that that
Speaker 1: sort of pattern is characteristic of all complex things, including
Speaker 1: the sun. You know, it was created quite suddenly. It
Speaker 1: will be stable for about nine billion years, but then
Speaker 1: it will get erratic, and then it will collapse quite suddenly.
Speaker 1: And that's true of our own lives too, of course.
Speaker 1: So in looking to the future, we should not just
Speaker 1: project a single line into the future. We should expect
Speaker 1: what they called punctuations, sudden sudden changes, perhaps bad changes,
Speaker 1: but also perhaps very good changes in the future. And
Speaker 1: we can be damn sure the next hundred years is
Speaker 1: going to be pretty rough. But the good news, I
Speaker 1: think is that most of the people who think very
Speaker 1: seriously about the possibility of existential crisis total collapses, I
Speaker 1: think would agree that the possibility of total collapse at
Speaker 1: the moment looks pretty limited. So that I agree with
Speaker 1: you completely. I think what will happen is that we
Speaker 1: will make big mistakes. They will look catastrophic on a
Speaker 1: global scale, but over a century or two, we will
Speaker 1: learn how to be good planetary managers. And that's planting.
Speaker 1: Because we live in a phase of human history at
Speaker 1: which things are happening very very fast. We live during
Speaker 1: a sort of punctuation in human history. Yeah, yeah, things
Speaker 1: are happening extraordinarily fast, and as you say at one
Speaker 1: point in the book, that it's in some ways easier
Speaker 1: to predict what might be happening on huge global time
Speaker 1: scales than it is the next couple of hundred years.
Speaker 1: And of course it's the next couple of hundred years
Speaker 1: that we care about the most, because, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: your granddaughter is in the other room and we're concerned
Speaker 1: about and my son is twenty three, and so maybe
Speaker 1: he's going to have children, and we are worried about
Speaker 1: what is coming. But I thought this idea of zooming
Speaker 1: out a little bit further sort of gives us a
Speaker 1: sense of like, well, you know, like you said, the
Speaker 1: next hundred years might be rough, but there's a lot
Speaker 1: to show that we may figure this out. Actually, going
Speaker 1: back to the metaphors of rivers and maps, the two
Speaker 1: metaphors contradict each other many ways, despite that all of
Speaker 1: us live in both worlds a lot of the time,
Speaker 1: So that projection of the future is a sort of
Speaker 1: map of the future to all of us. I think
Speaker 1: have our internal maps of what the future may be. Like,
Speaker 1: I want to change direction a little bit, and I
Speaker 1: want to talk about how we experience time. There was
Speaker 1: a period of time where anthropologists thought that perhaps older
Speaker 1: indigenous societies they didn't have time. You know, there were
Speaker 1: certain anthropologists who look at their language and said, well,
Speaker 1: they don't seem to have words for this. And more
Speaker 1: and more, I think you point out that we are
Speaker 1: thinking that, no, we just didn't quite understood how it is.
Speaker 1: But nonetheless, there is still an enormous diversity in the
Speaker 1: way different communities have experienced and described time and the
Speaker 1: past in the future. And you say that one way
Speaker 1: of explaining this diversity is to see human experiences of
Speaker 1: time in sort of three distinct rhythms, the rhythms of
Speaker 1: natural time, psychological time, and social time. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about what those three are, because I
Speaker 1: think this is really interesting. Yeah, that chapter, which was
Speaker 1: trying to say something sensible about how the first human
Speaker 1: societies may have experienced time and the future, was almost
Speaker 1: the most difficult chapter of all, too right, because I
Speaker 1: had to wade into that rich and complex anthropological literature.
Speaker 1: But for what it is worth, I ended up not accepting,
Speaker 1: and I think many anthropologists today except the idea that
Speaker 1: the sense of time was absent in societies from what
Speaker 1: I now like to call the foundational era of history
Speaker 1: rather than the prehistoric ERAa of history. One way of
Speaker 1: thinking about the similarities and differences between how different societies
Speaker 1: have thought about time is to see that time has
Speaker 1: experienced in three different ways. As you said, first is
Speaker 1: natural time, so that's the seasons, day and night, and
Speaker 1: that's not something we have much control over, although even
Speaker 1: day and night, you know, by having electric lights, we
Speaker 1: have some control over our experience of that. The second
Speaker 1: is psychological rhythms. Now these are very different from natural rhythms,
Speaker 1: most of which are fairly regular. Psychological rhythms can be
Speaker 1: all over the place. You know, how does time move
Speaker 1: in dreams? How does it move? You know, if you
Speaker 1: eat magic mushrooms or drink or if you're very happy
Speaker 1: or you're very miserable. So that's psychological time, and there's
Speaker 1: no reason to think that humans two hundred thousand years
Speaker 1: ago were radically different in either psychological time or natural time.
Speaker 1: But there's a third experience of time, and that is
Speaker 1: through our relations with other humans. So if you look
Speaker 1: at a diary, the diary of a very busy politician,
Speaker 1: it's crammed with events. Their sense of time is governed
Speaker 1: by the behavior of other human beings. Now, that is
Speaker 1: the experience of time that has probably changed most in
Speaker 1: human history. From a world in which you lived in
Speaker 1: communities of maybe twenty or thirty or forty people, the
Speaker 1: natural rhythms and the psychological rhythms probably dominated your sense
Speaker 1: of time. In today's world, we are so interconnected, so networked,
Speaker 1: that the behavior are the humans is slowly becoming more
Speaker 1: and more dominant. So if I fly from Sydney to London,
Speaker 1: I'll get to London, my body will tell me it's
Speaker 1: time to go to bed. My watch will probably tell
Speaker 1: me no, no, no, I'm arriving at nine am at Heathrow,
Speaker 1: and therefore I need to act as if I'm wide away.
Speaker 1: So for me, that's the best way of explaining why
Speaker 1: human experiences of time seem to be so various, even
Speaker 1: though the fundal makeup of humans has not changed that much.
Speaker 1: And one of the payoffs to all of this is
Speaker 1: that in a world in which social time does not
Speaker 1: dominate your experiences, cyclical rhythms are very important, and it's
Speaker 1: easier to think of the universe as a fairly permanent place.
Speaker 1: Apart from those cyclical rhythms that fundamentally things don't change
Speaker 1: in our world where we're so interconnected, not just in time,
Speaker 1: but also in space. We're connected with previous generations through history.
Speaker 1: We can see time. We have a sense of change
Speaker 1: that may not have been anything like as strong in
Speaker 1: much earlier societies. Right right, And I think it's true
Speaker 1: social time dominates natural time and psychological time for us,
Speaker 1: because we override natural time and psychological time over and
Speaker 1: over and over again in order to keep up our
Speaker 1: social time. You know, and by social time, we just
Speaker 1: mean I have to be at work at nine am,
Speaker 1: and my day it ends at this time, and I
Speaker 1: have plans for dinner with so and so at this time,
Speaker 1: and you know, we're just we are on everyone else's
Speaker 1: or our collective time. It is true how much we
Speaker 1: override those other two types of time. I think that
Speaker 1: the industrial rhythms of factories, this sense of social time
Speaker 1: taking over the rhythms of our lives is actually quite modern.
Speaker 1: If you if you go to a peasant village a
Speaker 1: few hundred years ago, Yes, social time is important, I
Speaker 1: mean so that you know the festivals. You You don't
Speaker 1: have much choice as a person about when the festivals happen,
Speaker 1: or when the harvest happens, or when the plowing happens. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: you don't need a watch with the second pound. In
Speaker 1: our world, you probably because the scheduling is now so tight.
Speaker 1: We are so locked within social rhythms, and that is
Speaker 1: really an aspect of the modern world. In a peasant
Speaker 1: most of your life was dominated by the behavior of
Speaker 1: maybe a hundred two hundred other people in your village.
Speaker 1: Occasionally outside has has made a difference. But now every
Speaker 1: day of my life is affected by the lives of
Speaker 1: millions of others. Sorry, that was that was That was
Speaker 1: my I mean, she wants to come see grandpa. Huh, Yes,
Speaker 1: she's just visiting for a week. Okay. You said something
Speaker 1: a minute ago that I thought was really interesting. That
Speaker 1: tied back to another question I had. And you said
Speaker 1: in the book that we are living in the first
Speaker 1: period of human history for which the assumption of a
Speaker 1: fundamental stability is false. So that up until now our
Speaker 1: ancestors had a sense that the world was essentially stable
Speaker 1: and didn't change a whole lot, and we now know
Speaker 1: that's not true. What are the implicate patians of that
Speaker 1: on us? Well, one of them is that our sense
Speaker 1: of history, our sense of history as an evolving timeline,
Speaker 1: is probably something fairly new, the idea that there's a
Speaker 1: fundamental stability to the universe, that old people have wisdom
Speaker 1: because the world has not changed that much. Of course,
Speaker 1: it's changed in some ways, but not that much. All
Speaker 1: that seems to have gone. I mean, we now live
Speaker 1: an era where for young people the wisdom of the
Speaker 1: old is probably outdated wisdom. You know, it's the young
Speaker 1: people who tell the old people how to work their
Speaker 1: mobile phones or their apparatus. Is we in the modern
Speaker 1: world all live in this world of change, like fish
Speaker 1: in the ocean, just all around us. So it seems
Speaker 1: so natural that so it takes a stretch of imagination,
Speaker 1: I think, to project yourself back into a world where, yes,
Speaker 1: there was changed, there was birth, there was death, there
Speaker 1: was marriage, there was sickness, and so on. The universe
Speaker 1: as a whole was thought of a stable. We think
Speaker 1: of a discipline like geology, for examples, not until the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century, and that's quite recent in world history, that
Speaker 1: some geologists began to think that maybe the land forms
Speaker 1: had changed over time. It's not until the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: that biologists began to take seriously the idea that living
Speaker 1: organisms had changed before that they assumed that living organisms
Speaker 1: were the way they had been created, the land forms
Speaker 1: were the way they had been created. So that's really
Speaker 1: what I mean. You talk about some principles that we
Speaker 1: can use when we sort of look forward to the future,
Speaker 1: or we try and anticipate certain futures. Could we talk
Speaker 1: through what those are? Yes. One of the reasons I
Speaker 1: had such fun writing this book was the thought that
Speaker 1: if thinking about the future, constructing good future stories is
Speaker 1: so important to our lives, why aren't they classes about
Speaker 1: the future in our schools and our universities. And I realized,
Speaker 1: do I have any sense of the basic rules of
Speaker 1: future thinking and the answers? No? No one ever taught
Speaker 1: them to me. So I thought, is it possible to
Speaker 1: sort of write down some basic principles? And so these
Speaker 1: are just the ones I came up with, but I
Speaker 1: think they sort of work pretty well. The first is
Speaker 1: a negative one, which is we have to take seriously
Speaker 1: the fact that we have no evidence, no records. I
Speaker 1: have a birth certificate, but I don't yet have a
Speaker 1: death certificate. That's the difference between the past and the future.
Speaker 1: If you'd asked a physicists two centuries ago whether we
Speaker 1: can know the future, they'd have said, in principle, yes,
Speaker 1: because physics was deterministic. But it's just ignorance that means
Speaker 1: we can't. Nowadays, modern science argues that no, the universe
Speaker 1: actually is not deterministic. In other words, the future is
Speaker 1: not even in principle, predictable in detail. So that's the
Speaker 1: first principle. We have no evidence about the future. So
Speaker 1: the second one is it's kind of paradoxical, is that
Speaker 1: if you want to learn about the future, you have
Speaker 1: to look at the past. And we've already talked about
Speaker 1: this is and this is why my preface includes that
Speaker 1: wonderful picture illustrating Dante's infairn No, which is how the
Speaker 1: soothsayers were punished by having their heads twisted around. Well,
Speaker 1: that's actually a very good metaphor for how we look
Speaker 1: at the past. So the third principle is that in
Speaker 1: contrast to thinking about the past, where we can change
Speaker 1: our understanding of the past. But I don't think many
Speaker 1: people believe we can actually change the past in the future,
Speaker 1: what we do now will affect the future. So the
Speaker 1: stories we tell now about the future will change the future.
Speaker 1: Whether you know the number of people who take climate
Speaker 1: change seriously will have an impact on the future of
Speaker 1: climate change. That's the third principle that's very different from history,
Speaker 1: where you can't change history, you can change how we
Speaker 1: think about it. And then the fourth is the practical
Speaker 1: implications of all of that, And the main one is
Speaker 1: that the way you get from the past to the
Speaker 1: future is by looking at trends. And I've talked about
Speaker 1: that already. The trick there is to discriminate between different
Speaker 1: types of events in the world. Now, there are domains
Speaker 1: of reality where we see very strong, clear trends. One
Speaker 1: is the sun rises in the morning, for example. Now,
Speaker 1: most of us, when we see trends like that, we're
Speaker 1: willing to bet a lot of money. I'm willing to
Speaker 1: a lot of money that tomorrow the sun will rise.
Speaker 1: But there are so many domains in which that's not true.
Speaker 1: There are domains in which there's a pretty good probability.
Speaker 1: I mean, demographic historians, for example, will predict how many
Speaker 1: people there will be on Earth in fifty years time
Speaker 1: within an araor band, but with quite a lot of confidence.
Speaker 1: And then there are areas in which we can't really
Speaker 1: say anything sensible at all. I mean, what are the
Speaker 1: odds on a plane crash landing into my house during
Speaker 1: the next five minutes. Now that's an area where I
Speaker 1: have so little idea it doesn't even worry me. So
Speaker 1: those are the basic principles, and they all depend on
Speaker 1: a sensitivity to how regular trends are in the past,
Speaker 1: and our best projections of the future, and even e
Speaker 1: colis best predictions depend on finding the most powerful trends,
Speaker 1: the most regular trends in reality, and then kind of
Speaker 1: riffing on that. So climate change, for example, the science
Speaker 1: is now so good that that looks like what I
Speaker 1: break the future into sort of four domains of probability.
Speaker 1: It's not the most probable, but very very probable. Indeed,
Speaker 1: you know, anyone who bets on the horses knows a
Speaker 1: lot about the difference between favorites and near favorites. And
Speaker 1: I gathered the Kentucky derby someone made a lot of
Speaker 1: money recently by betting on a long outsider. That's right. Well,
Speaker 1: you've got a wonderful little part in the book where
Speaker 1: you talk about Sir Isaac Newton, who lost a bunch
Speaker 1: of money he invested in something called the South Sea bubble.
Speaker 1: In sEH he ruefully commented, I can calculate the movement
Speaker 1: of stars, but not the madness of men. It's such
Speaker 1: a great quote and really speaks to economic forecasting is
Speaker 1: one of those areas. I think that people often speak
Speaker 1: very authoritatively, as if they know what's coming. But you know,
Speaker 1: the stock market seems more like a big casino than
Speaker 1: anything else, and one that you have far less understanding
Speaker 1: of what the odds are than we do in a casino.
Speaker 1: We at least know what the odds are on, say,
Speaker 1: a game of craps. Well, I mean, I think one
Speaker 1: of the payoffs to this sort of argument is that
Speaker 1: any domain in which the future depends on the decisions
Speaker 1: of human beings lies probably somewhere in the middle range
Speaker 1: of regularity. I mean, there are regularities to human behavior,
Speaker 1: but it's still pretty unpredictable. And that means that we
Speaker 1: can be pretty sure about the impact of increased greenhouse
Speaker 1: gas emissions on climate change. What we are much less
Speaker 1: sure about is whether politicians the next few decades will
Speaker 1: make the decisions necessary to reduce those greenhouse gas emissions.
Speaker 1: So the whole area of politics and history. The whole
Speaker 1: domain in which humans decide what will happen is one
Speaker 1: of the less predictable domains of all. That's a bit scary.
Speaker 1: And those domains in the middle, by the way, those
Speaker 1: are the domains which generate most anxiety and fear, because
Speaker 1: if it's absolutely certain, we don't worry about it. I'm
Speaker 1: not worried about that plane crashing into my house in
Speaker 1: the next five minutes because I have a clue. But
Speaker 1: it's in the middle range that we developed most anxiety,
Speaker 1: and that anxiety itself drives a lot of future thinking.
Speaker 1: It explains, for example, why CEOs of companies are often
Speaker 1: willing to pay economic forecasters a lot of money to
Speaker 1: make confident forecasts. Forecasts that are much more confident than
Speaker 1: either the forecasters or the ceo. Is no are really justified,
Speaker 1: right right? You talk about how as living organisms we
Speaker 1: seek out trends, we make our best guess of what's coming,
Speaker 1: and then we place our bets. And you tell a
Speaker 1: lovely story in the book about Krishna and our Juna
Speaker 1: that speaks to this. Could you tell that I've been
Speaker 1: looking for a way to fit this into the podcast
Speaker 1: for years now. You've finally given me my opportunity. Well,
Speaker 1: I I'm no expert on it. I feel I know
Speaker 1: it in a very amateurish way, but it's very beautiful
Speaker 1: And for me, I realized as I was writing about
Speaker 1: time as a river and time as a map that
Speaker 1: actually it provides a beautiful story about the relationship between
Speaker 1: the two. Because Prince Our Juna is lined up in
Speaker 1: an army just before a massive battle, and his charioteer
Speaker 1: is Krishna, perhaps the greatest god of all, and Our
Speaker 1: Juna is anxious. He's worried because what's going to happen
Speaker 1: in the next few hours looks as if it will
Speaker 1: be terrible. He can see over in the other army,
Speaker 1: he can see uncles, he can see you know, close relatives,
Speaker 1: and that it's going to be absolutely terrible. So this
Speaker 1: is the anxiety of the future that we all experience.
Speaker 1: So what does he want. What he wants is to
Speaker 1: be able to take time out so that he can
Speaker 1: perhaps glimpse a map of the future. He's in time
Speaker 1: as a river. It's carrying him inexorably towards what looks
Speaker 1: like a disaster. But what he wants is time as
Speaker 1: a map. He wants a map of what's going to
Speaker 1: happen so he can have some glimpse. So he says
Speaker 1: to Krishna, please, in effect stop time, stop the child.
Speaker 1: So Christna does that. Now I imagine them in some
Speaker 1: sort of anti room which is not in time, it's
Speaker 1: not out of time. But they have a conversation, and
Speaker 1: in that conversation, Krishna gives Our June or just a glimpse.
Speaker 1: Because Chrishner Force can see the maps he sees all
Speaker 1: of time, so he gives Our Juna just a glimpse.
Speaker 1: And what he sort of says is you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: so anxious because everyone on that battlefield is going to die.
Speaker 1: I am going to kill them, I know that, but
Speaker 1: they will never really die, nor will you ever really die,
Speaker 1: because in the map of time nothing changes, you know.
Speaker 1: This is what William James called the block universe. Our
Speaker 1: Junah says, says to Chrishna, Look, I want to opt out.
Speaker 1: I'm going to throw away my bow and arrow. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to fight. Christiana says, you cannot not fight. Now.
Speaker 1: That's a way of saying to all of us, if
Speaker 1: you're alive, you act. You cannot not act, even non
Speaker 1: acting is acting. You have to act, you have to
Speaker 1: engage in the battle. But he says, strike home with confidence,
Speaker 1: act with confidence, and our Juna goes back stabilized, a
Speaker 1: bit more centered because he's had a sly glimpse of
Speaker 1: the future. So I take that as a beautiful metaphor
Speaker 1: for the fact that all of us live in the
Speaker 1: river of time. What we desperately want is a glimpse
Speaker 1: of the future. But those glimpses are rare, they're hard
Speaker 1: to get. The gods, if they exist, will give us
Speaker 1: tiny little glimpses. That's all. Yeah, you say in the book,
Speaker 1: do not be troubled, as Christian had told our Juna,
Speaker 1: but strike, which is after we remember the phrases, after
Speaker 1: we do our best forecasting, we act confidently. Let's now
Speaker 1: talk about for potential scenarios for the future of humanity.
Speaker 1: So again, one of the things that we're most concerned
Speaker 1: about is we're concerned about like the future, as in,
Speaker 1: like what's going to happen at work tomorrow? And is
Speaker 1: my trip to Europe next month going to go good?
Speaker 1: But the other thing that we get very concerned about
Speaker 1: is again these existential where is this whole thing going
Speaker 1: with us humans, and you come up with four scenarios
Speaker 1: based on a futurists by the name of Jim Detour
Speaker 1: dataur I'm not quite sure how to pronounce the gentleman's
Speaker 1: name you talk about. These are sort of four scenarios
Speaker 1: that we as humanity might be facing. Yeah, the future
Speaker 1: stories we can never guarantee. There there are no guarantees
Speaker 1: that any of us stories are correct, so that what
Speaker 1: we aim for in trying to think about the future.
Speaker 1: It's a bit like betting on horses. We put as
Speaker 1: much effort as we can into studying past trends and
Speaker 1: were trying to make the best predictions. But if we're
Speaker 1: serious about predictions, we know that the odds that our
Speaker 1: prediction will be true are actually pretty limited. So it
Speaker 1: makes sense never to offer just one scenario, but to
Speaker 1: offer several. And there is this whole world of futurists,
Speaker 1: of people who specialize in thinking about the future and
Speaker 1: future scenarios, and they often talk about scenarios. So that's
Speaker 1: the approach I adopted. And Jim Data is very famous.
Speaker 1: He used to run workshops in which he asked people
Speaker 1: how they imagine the future, and he came up with
Speaker 1: four now I've sort of modified them a bit for
Speaker 1: my own purposes. But let me see if I can
Speaker 1: remember them. You've you've got the boat, but anything I
Speaker 1: can help. Yeah. The first is existential catastrophe and that
Speaker 1: we need to take seriously for the first time in
Speaker 1: human history since actually, and this happened in my lifetime,
Speaker 1: we have developed weapons that could ruin the biosphere in
Speaker 1: twenty four hours. Now we all known this. We're also
Speaker 1: developing biological weapons that could do much the same. We
Speaker 1: can't rule this out entirely. There are other existential crisis
Speaker 1: but I mean, those who look at these reckoned that
Speaker 1: the most likely way in which human history will end
Speaker 1: in the next century or two is through over powerful
Speaker 1: technology that we're not in control of. This is a
Speaker 1: sort of sorcerer's apprentice scenario. Most of them, I think,
Speaker 1: agree that complete collapse is unlikely, more likely as a
Speaker 1: sort of partial collapse. I mean, it could be returned
Speaker 1: to societies of small numbers of people eking out a
Speaker 1: tough existence without so many of the of the good
Speaker 1: things that the modern era has offered, but with many
Speaker 1: of the bad things the modern eras offered. That's the
Speaker 1: first scenario. The second This is very much from Jim
Speaker 1: Dator's work, societies that are probably fairly authoritarian, but are
Speaker 1: controlled by governments aware of the dangers to humanity. So
Speaker 1: this is disciplined sustainability. That's not the phrase I use
Speaker 1: it in the book, but pursue Little Gwin's wonderful book
Speaker 1: That Dispossessed describes two planets, one of which is a
Speaker 1: fairly ascetic environment run by anarchists, in which people actually
Speaker 1: live not bad lives, but materially they look pretty primitive
Speaker 1: while our standards. The third is for anyone you know
Speaker 1: with a tinge of sort of green sympathies in the
Speaker 1: modern world, is the real utopian scenario, and that's one
Speaker 1: in which the next century has its rocky moments certainly,
Speaker 1: but eventually more and more governments realize that their own
Speaker 1: future depends on building a sustainable world, and that depends
Speaker 1: on collaborating with others. So this is a scenario in
Speaker 1: which human being successfully create a sort of global superorganism
Speaker 1: and they work together, and there will be friction, there
Speaker 1: will be complications, but basically, within a century or two
Speaker 1: we become pretty competent planetary managers. And that's a scenario
Speaker 1: in which we may be able to retain many of
Speaker 1: themterial advantages of the modern world, but will also surely
Speaker 1: live in a moral realm where the idea of having
Speaker 1: more material goodies is no longer dominant in the way
Speaker 1: it is in our world. And the fourth scenario is
Speaker 1: one that I think many sort of economic conservatives today
Speaker 1: take very seriously, which is that actually things aren't as
Speaker 1: bad as they look, and just let capitalism rip and
Speaker 1: the market will. As problems loom like greenhouse gas emissions,
Speaker 1: the market will eventually take care of them, and the
Speaker 1: future will be one of more and more growth. I
Speaker 1: think even most economic conservatives would concede that there actually
Speaker 1: are going to be some limits so that populations are
Speaker 1: already slowing down um there will have to be some
Speaker 1: sort of curb on greenhouse gases. But I think they
Speaker 1: would argue that that we're already beginning to see businesses
Speaker 1: all around the world introduce those curbs for good economic reasons,
Speaker 1: because they see their own business future. Now you can
Speaker 1: kind of ask questions about where each of these scenarios
Speaker 1: will leave us in a hundred years time, and that's
Speaker 1: really what that part of the book tries to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone's favorite. Uh. I say that with the tongue in cheek.
Speaker 1: Some people he is absolutely a hero to. To other
Speaker 1: people he's a villain to. But Elon Musk today was
Speaker 1: talking about how he thinks the biggest risk to our
Speaker 1: future is slowing birthrates. He says the environment will be fine,
Speaker 1: and you know, this is a guy who clearly, with
Speaker 1: Tesla and his solar company, has made investments in trying
Speaker 1: to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, but he was very
Speaker 1: concerned about the declining birth rate. That was one thing
Speaker 1: that struck me in your book was this idea that
Speaker 1: population is starting to slow down after essentially growing for
Speaker 1: a all of history in a way that we're actually
Speaker 1: nearing a point where population was stabilized. And I think
Speaker 1: that is very very clear. Indeed, I think if you
Speaker 1: ask any demographer who thinks about global futures, there's a
Speaker 1: very broad consensus. I'm not saying anything original and saying
Speaker 1: is and the story of human population group, We can
Speaker 1: tell the story very simply. In a sense humans what
Speaker 1: makes us different is our ability to share information and
Speaker 1: accumulate more and more information. Information gives you control over
Speaker 1: the resources that surround you, so that's the impults that
Speaker 1: eventually has given us control over planet Earth as a species,
Speaker 1: the first species on Earth, but as group by group
Speaker 1: populations got slightly better at managing their environments, and of
Speaker 1: course there are a lot of tapses along the way.
Speaker 1: It meant that humans spread into more and more niches,
Speaker 1: So in the foundational area of human history, that was
Speaker 1: probably the main driver or population growth very very slow,
Speaker 1: so that by ten thousand years ago there were probably
Speaker 1: the best estimates that they're probably six or seven million
Speaker 1: people on Earth. And then agriculture kicks in, and agriculture
Speaker 1: allows much larger populations in a given era, so that
Speaker 1: really kick starts arise in population growth. Until two centuries
Speaker 1: ago there was almost a billion people and now they're
Speaker 1: almost eight billion. So this is a rising curve with
Speaker 1: two kinks in it. The reason why populations rose so
Speaker 1: rapidly in the nineteen and twentieth centuries is very clear
Speaker 1: is that modern technology and increased production of food lower
Speaker 1: death rates. But in the past, birth rates are always high.
Speaker 1: And the reason is very simple. If you're a peasant,
Speaker 1: the one resource you have control over is the number
Speaker 1: of hands in your household. So for every peasant family,
Speaker 1: having the maximum number of children possible was crucial, so
Speaker 1: fertility rates are always very high. So from the late
Speaker 1: eighteenth century, death rates begin to fall, but fertility rates
Speaker 1: remain as high as ever, and that explains the staggering
Speaker 1: increases in population in the nineteenth and twentie centuries. And
Speaker 1: then from I think it was about nineteen sixty sixty nine,
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly, for the first time growth rates
Speaker 1: begin to slow. And the reason for that is that
Speaker 1: fertility rates begin to fall. As more and more people
Speaker 1: become urban word journals, the fertility rules change. You don't
Speaker 1: want as big a family as possible. What you want
Speaker 1: is a few, healthy, well educated kids, so that fertility
Speaker 1: rates began to fall. And now we're at the point where,
Speaker 1: after this two centuries of staggering growth, we're back to
Speaker 1: some sort of equilibrium. And I think most demographers would
Speaker 1: predict with a considerable level of confidence that by the
Speaker 1: end of this century global population rates will have slowed.
Speaker 1: They'll be faster in some areas, slower and others. In
Speaker 1: your pan, populations are already declining in a number of
Speaker 1: other countries. But I can't agree with Elon Musk. Look,
Speaker 1: this poses a threat. It's actually one of the most
Speaker 1: positive pieces of news in the world today that, at
Speaker 1: least in one area, the number of humans the pressing
Speaker 1: we put on the biosphere shows signs of not accelerating
Speaker 1: into the distant future. Well, David, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: We are out of time, but as always, it is
Speaker 1: such a pleasure to talk with you. I enjoyed the
Speaker 1: new book so much. I feel like reading one of
Speaker 1: your books. I learn more in its pages than I
Speaker 1: do in most any other book. You've condensed so many
Speaker 1: different ideas and disciplines and and all of it into it.
Speaker 1: It's really it's such an edifying thing for me to
Speaker 1: read and to get to talk with you. So thank you,
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Indeed, I've really enjoyed our conversation. Yes,
Speaker 1: and I will let you get back to your lovely grandchild.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. If what you just heard was
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