A Bit of Optimism - Digging Up the Past with Sarah Parcak

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Sarah has the coolest job: Space Archaeologist.She uses satellites to find undiscovered sites buried deep beneath the ground. But the real interesting stuff is what we can learn about ourselves from studying our past.This is… A Bit of Optimism. Watch Sarah's first TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFC5CwZVCEw&themeRefresh=1Watch Egypt's Lost Cities on the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011pwms  

Two of my favorite things are Star Wars and Indiana Jones. And if you combine them, you get Dr. Sarah Parkak. She is a space archaeologist. That's right, a space archaeologist. That means she practices archaeology by looking down from on high. And she and her team have discovered thousands, yes, thousands of new sites around the world. But it's not just the new places she's discovered that are so fascinating. It's what she's learned about people.

This is a bit of optimism. Sarah, it is so good to see you. Thank you so much for being here. This is a big treat for me, mainly because I am a huge fan of Indiana Jones. And you're about the closest thing to Indiana Jones in the modern world. Thank you.

It's great to be here. It's great to see you. It's great to see you. It's been a couple of years. So just for those who don't know you, you are a space archaeologist, which if I didn't know you, I would think was a completely made up job. You'd think it would. And people think that I made up the name because they're like, no, that's not. But NASA came up with the term. They have a whole space archaeology program that was set up specifically to fund exactly what I do, which is using different kinds of satellite and aerial based platforms.

So images from those to help map archaeological sites and features on the ground. So did you start off as a traditional archaeologist with paintbrushes digging up bones and villages around the world? So yeah, so I started off by taking, you know, all sorts of archaeology classes. So in pottery and stones and bones. And my first excavation actually was in Egypt. So I'm really a trained Egyptologist. I didn't take my first remote sensing class until my last year as an undergraduate. And so what is the advantage? I mean, I know the obvious advantage is you can look down from up high and it's like looking out of a plane that can see more stuff. But practically speaking,

when I first heard about what you did, I thought, well, good for mapping, but you can't discover stuff from space, can you? Don't you have to be on the ground, like pushing away dirt? How can you see stuff that's been covered up for sometimes thousands of years? I'm so curious about the advantage of a satellite for something as hands-on as archaeology. What satellites and drones and airplanes do is they give us this great advantage of perspective. So if you're dealing with a vast landscape, you know, hundreds of miles square, what the satellites do is they pinpoint exactly where the sites are in the landscape. So traditionally, archaeologists would spend weeks and weeks and weeks driving around trying to find sites. Now, you know, we know, okay,

today we're going to visit five sites or seven sites or 10 sites. We have a strategic plan of how to map them, but specifically on sites so much is hidden from the naked eye. And so you have to look in different parts of the light spectrum. I say it's sort of like a space-based or air-based X-ray and things that are slightly buried under the earth affect the overlaying soils and vegetation and sand. And you can see those differences in the near, middle, and far infrared, which of course we can't see with our eyes. And sometimes these things can

be buried 10, 15, 20 feet under the ground. Let me say it back so I'm fully clear. So let's say there's a pyramid that we didn't know existed. And over a couple thousand years more, the sand has been blown and built up and it's now covered the pyramid. And it's 20 feet above the pyramid, the sand layer. However, over these years, it's not exactly flat. And you can see underneath, it's not a completely flat layer. There's something under there. Is that sort of what you're talking about?

So when people think about things like a pyramid or a temple buried under the ground, you know, it's not exactly like Hollywood CGI where like the wind blows in and all of a sudden there's this huge pyramid like Giza or a temple like Karnak Temple. It's usually just the foundations that are left or just the bottom few layers. So because of the stone or mud brick or whatever these things are made of, and that slowly degrades through time and the little particles are on the surface, that's what the satellites allow us to detect. And you can clearly see, you know, okay, there's a 40 by 40 meter structure

or 100 by 100 meter structure and it's oriented in this way and it's near these other six known pyramids that are the same size and shape and orientation. Ergo, it's probably a pyramid or a large tomb. And do you have other teams that then go out and actually excavate the site? Or do you still also go out and excavate the site? It depends. I work and have worked collaboratively on projects all over the world across five continents. I'm currently working on

projects in India and Jordan and potentially Guatemala. And of course, there's a site where I've been working in Egypt for the last seven, eight years. So yeah, I prefer to go out on the ground myself because it's super fun to go and excavate and explore. And let's be practical. You can't fight mummies that have risen from the dead from a satellite. You have to be on the ground for that kind of work. But that's where I use my special space lasers. Ah, sorry. Right, right. So I don't think people know just how freaking amazing the work that you do is. How many new sites have your team discovered over the course of your career? Sites that we didn't know existed before? I've lost track at this point. Many, many, many thousands,

thousands and thousands of sites. Thousands. And how many new pyramids in Egypt? So I always get in trouble when I talk about potential pyramids in Egypt. I mean, there are bunches, right? I mean, a new pyramid got found close to where I work in Dashur that I'm pretty sure was one of the ones we discovered about a decade ago. Yeah, I think there are dozens of undiscovered pyramids. And yeah, dozens. I mean, especially in places like Sudan, there are probably hundreds of them, but they tend to be much, much, much smaller. They built pyramids as tombs much later on.

But yeah, all over the world, all over the world, people are using these technologies and they're finding big sites like Angkor Wat are significantly larger than we assumed. Even in places like Jordan at Petra, my team and I found a large, we call it a monumental structure. It's probably a temple that wasn't really well known before. So everywhere we go, it just allows us to see differently. As fascinated as I am by your work, the real reason I wanted you to come on here is because what you and I do is actually very similar. very similar. You and I are all about peeling back layers to better understand community, culture, people, how we interacted, the way we lived our lives. I do it for an individual. I peel back the layers of someone's life and someone's personality to get to the core of who they are and understand their why. And you do something very, very similar, physical layers.

But at the end of the day, it's not just to discover a temple and be like, hey, look what we found. The reason every archaeologist I've ever talked to is interested in archaeology is not for the stuff. It's for the people who used and lived in the stuff. That's right. For me, it's always about the people. People get so excited when there's a new tomb discovered or a temple or a pyramid. And that's great. And it's exciting and it's important. But for me, for the work that I do, it's always about the people. And it's about getting people to understand that we haven't changed really in the 300,000 years or more that we've been human. And I think that should give us a sense of, I guess, hope and optimism. People keep trying to reinvent who we are and how we experience one another and our basic humanity. And we shouldn't, right? We just were the same we've always been.

I remember I gave a talk some years ago, and I was talking about the dangers of cell phones and the addictive quality of cell phones and talking about how young generations are particularly susceptible because they grew up with it and they were exposed to it at a much younger age. And one young woman raised her hand and said, I completely disagree. We've evolved to be better at using the cell phones than you have. I was like, that's not how evolution works. There's no evolution in a decade. And to your point, which is we are the same thing now as we, you know, we're the same legacy animal as we were 300,000 years ago.

The world around us has changed and our systems can be easily hijacked, but we're the same. If we imagine, you know, what things were like 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, you know, what the archaeological evidence shows us all around the world is just how well adapted we became to our environments. You know, when Europe got colder during the Ice Age, we started making better clothing, better weapons. We're constantly innovating no matter where we are or what we're doing. And I'm working on a new project that's looking at how we migrated out of Africa, you know, 100, 120, and went to the world where there were dozens of different and diverse environments, and we adapted. So yeah, all this creativity and innovation that we associate today with, whether you're in New York or Silicon Valley or wherever in the world, that's part of what

makes us human. I find this so fascinating. And my grandfather used to tell me when I was a little kid to remember that we're no smarter or dumber than we were thousands and thousands of years ago. We just have more technology at our fingertips, but they were just as smart as we are. How can they have built the pyramids? Well, they were really, really smart, just like we're really, really smart as a community. But when we think about the future of humanity, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, my understanding long ago when I took anthropology in college, my understanding of human beings is that we would come into a piece of land, we would exploit the heck out of it, eat all the berries, kill all the edible things. And then when we had exhausted the resources, we would move.

And apparently we had known about farming long before we started farming, but we never needed it because we could just move. And then when the ice age came and the polar caps started coming a little lower and it became more difficult to move, then we said, all right, let's just stay put and start farming. And then society started to grow and we started to live in populations much larger than the traditional 150 odd people. Is that true? I think farming evolved in different places for different reasons. Certainly it started in and around the Fertile Crescent and in Turkey. And there are these amazing monuments, to some extent, probably the first temples at the site called Göbel-Eki Tepe in Eastern Turkey. And there are these huge stone pillars with animals and effigies and men on them. And

it seems likely that sort of hunter gatherer groups, or maybe there was some basic farming that went on at that time, sort of came together seasonally and worshiped at them and then left. And maybe over time they thought, you know, we like these communities. We like it when we all hang out. It makes it a lot easier to find a partner if we're living closer together. The pickings are pretty slim in my band of 30. I don't want to hang out where the babes are. Because we had to farm to have society, right? To be able to build a surplus because we knew sometimes there weren't enough rains. Sometimes if we were reliant on rivers, sometimes they wouldn't flood in such a way where we could get enough water to our crops.

So yes, certainly 10,000-ish years ago, plus minus, depending on where we were, farming started evolving. We domesticated animals over time, goats, sheep, cows, et cetera. Yeah. And then that caused us to stick, to stay in one place because we could, we had enough food, we had enough resources. And then from there, we could make things, our artistic abilities could evolve. Because with farming, you could have artistic classes and intellectual classes and governing

classes where before everybody was a farmer and everybody was a hunter and everybody was a gatherer, right? Farming allowed for societies to expand and for new stuff to develop and invent. Right. And then there are all these big debates like, when did we start having culture? Because you go back 15, 20, 30,000 years to the caves in Europe and you have these beautiful artistic renderings. Was that art that was done by just one or two people per group? Was it something that was a community practice? Was it done by only women or only men or only elders? We don't know. And could there even potentially have been language? This early system of graphic communication, there are dozens of signs that we see in caves throughout Europe. So I think there was always great creativity, but so many of the portable items that we would have carried, probably made of wood, simply just didn't survive.

So it's hard to say, but certainly well-defined cultural traditions evolved once we settled in one place, for sure. And I'm cynical, can't help it. So when I think about the future of humanity, here we are facing a climate disaster, and we're seeing it manifest in all sorts of ways, including extreme weather events that are now more common and more aggressive all over the world, whether it's colds or hots or winds or storms or

whatever it is. And more frequently, I start to think to myself, when we lived in relatively small populations and we could destroy the resources on the land, we would just move to a different part of the land. And now we're destroying the resources available on our planet. It's been in our history for thousands of years. That's what we do is we just screw up the place we live and then we leave. But what happens if you screw up the place you live and you can't leave? Does that mean we destroy the planet and we have to move to Mars? This seems very, very human to completely annihilate the place we live. So I tell people, you know, in the past, the past is kind of neutral. It's

neither good nor bad. It just was. I think people make value statements about how we existed, like it was this utopia, and we existed as one with nature, or, you know, we destroyed things. And the past has a lot of lessons for us, good and bad. You know, there are countless instances of indigenous groups that sort of figured out how to live not in like perfect harmony, but certainly in much more of a balanced way with nature. And then there are other groups like the Maya, where they impacted their environment to such an extent that they created these microclimates that impacted their ability to grow crops. And there were droughts that probably contributed to the ending of the Maya empire over a series of generations. So it

just depended on where we were and we adapted. I think that's the interesting story. And sometimes we couldn't. Sometimes there were large scale climate disasters. You know, I study and have studied this period of time, kind of getting back to pyramids, the end of the pyramid age, so 4,200 years ago. And there was this global climate event that's been very well studied. It's been published in dozens

and dozens of top peer-reviewed papers. And probably due to a series of solar flares, it was like a global El Nino event. And it caused a decrease in monsoon rainfall, which ultimately led to the Blue and White Nile basins not filling up properly and a series of droughts over 50 years in Egypt. And it was the end of the pyramid age. It was massive internal strife, warfare. They stopped building pyramids. They stopped sending expeditions abroad. There were not well-defined leaders. And then out of this mess rose this new ruling class from Luxor. And thus you had this time period known as the Middle Kingdom, which was ancient Egypt's Renaissance and much greater sort of equity and the rise of the middle class. So out of disaster, all of a sudden you have a shift towards something new and interesting. And it's an interesting lesson for us today.

That's just one example of dozens that these radical shifts in society that we're seeing, whether it's climate change or disease or war, new and better things can evolve. We have that capacity. The opportunity is that there's always growth out of that. The problem is sometimes those destructive periods last decades or hundreds of years before the new beautiful thing arises. We might say to ourselves, oh, who cares about the things that we're doing to ourselves now, war and disagreement. Don't worry, ultimately, it'll be better for the future. It's like, A, maybe, and B, 200 years from now, 100 years from now, 50 years from now. So yeah. So I mean, it's kind of a bummer, right? We're in this intermediate period,

like in ancient Egypt, we're in between things. And yet at the same time, we have all these amazing gene therapies and vaccines that are going to end up curing all these amazing diseases or helping them from spreading further. Cancer could get eradicated in our lifetimes. Alzheimer's, dementia. We're on the verge of all these extraordinary breakthroughs and we're alive to see it. Why can't we turn all that innovation into figuring out how to protect and save what we have here? And we know, by the way, we know how to fix Earth. And no one wants to hear it because it

means we have to think radically rethink capitalism, because capitalism is the thing that's destroying our planet, just unchecked consumption and growth, and the need for more and more and more and more and more and more. Where does it go? Nowhere good. I have to try to be optimistic on the one hand, because I'm the mother of a 10-year-old and I can't be terrified all the time. On the other hand, I know what happens to cultures that get out of control, which is where we are. I know what happens during periods of mass climate change. We're in it. It's only going to get worse. And nations just aren't committed to lowering the average temperature per year. In some ways, it's too late. But there's also all this optimism

amongst the climate community. Like it's not too, too late. We can limit the damage that's being done. Part of the gloom and doom that's spread by a lot of folks, it's to dampen hope and to get people to think, okay, well, this is our lot.

We're stuck. We're not stuck with anything. We're never stuck. We can always come up with new ways of being. So yeah, I'm caught in between, I guess. Can you offer some historical context of other societies of other cultures where overconsumption led to their demise. Just take the Great Depression, the roaring 20s in this period of overconsumption and speculation led to the stock market crash. I'm curious if we go way further back in the historical record, if you've been able to discern any of those patterns as well. Yeah. So one example, the Khmer, so the great temples in and around Angkor Wat, building temple after temple after temple. And the population grew and grew and grew and grew because for every temple that was built, you had hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people that were needed in order to support their infrastructure.

And the number one thing you always need to support large groups of people, especially in areas that rely on rice, is water. And they ran out of water. There were just way too many people. And no water means that all of a sudden the structures break down. So that's just one example. Although I want to kind of get rid of this idea of collapse. I don't like it anymore because the Khmer didn't just disappear. The systems that the elites functioned under broke down, but the Khmer are still an active culture. It's still, you know, the Maya are, the Inca are, these ancient quote unquote cultures are still around today. So that's just one instance of many where because of this, this overconsumption and growth and overpopulation, there just weren't enough

resources to support the people living there. And that was it. There just weren't enough resources to support the people living there. And that was it. That was the end of the sort of the great Khmer civilization. What is your favorite ancient culture? Oh, definitely it's Egypt. I mean, I've been obsessed with Egypt ever since I was teeny, teeny tiny. By the way, there's no good reason for a child of the 80s from Bangor, Maine to be obsessed with ancient Egypt. Like I grew up pre-Cable, I guess I saw things, you know, whether it was National Geographic or maybe some PBS specials, but there's just, there's no way for me to be exposed to it. And yet somehow I found out about

it and fell in love with it. To me, it's fascinating and otherworldly and yet not. Like there are so many great stories from ancient Egypt that show us how much like us we are. They basically invented bureaucracy. So how many years back are we talking about here? Ancient Egypt goes back, there's evidence from the desert from 8,000, 7,000 years ago, but ancient Egypt as we know it started quote unquote around 5,000 years ago. So around 3000 BC. So the great pyramid age Giza, that's 2400 BC, Egypt, King Tut, that's around 1300, 1200 BC. So that's the time period that we're talking about. You said the ancient Egypt's invented bureaucracy. What did they do? And why did they do it? All right, to build a pyramid, right? You can't just say, you know, hey, guys,

put the stones there, right? It's going to be a mess. In order to build a pyramid, people stand in front of the pyramids of Giza today and they're blown away, right? Because they're 500 feet tall, there's 1.3 million blocks. Oh my God, how did they do it? And the blocks are huge. They're massive. Many tons each. And to me, the thing that's fascinating is because I'm a settlement archaeologist, I'm interested in landscapes. I'm interested in environments and people. Like what are the systems that had to evolve in order for that to be possible, right? So you have thousands of people living in one place. What does that mean?

It means they have to have enough food and water. They have to have places to live. They have to have clothes. They have to have medical assistance. We know there's all community that's been excavated at the pyramids. It's the place where the people lived who built the great pyramids and elsewhere. They would have needed assistance. We know there's all community that's been excavated at the pyramids. It's the place where the people lived who built the great pyramids and elsewhere. They would have needed beds. They would have needed medical assistance. And also we know from excavating

their tombs, these are people who hurt themselves. They broke their bones. Their bones got set. You're going to lift all these blocks and move them. You're going to need your protein shakes. And they didn't exactly have protein shakes in ancient Egypt. They had beef. So there were huge cattle estates that grew in the Delta because they had to. Well, okay. So you're working in a pyramid and you're working using copper tools all day, carving blocks. Those copper tools are valuable. It's really easy to slip them in your kilt and be on your way. So what did thegyptians do they had checklists they had logs okay um merit uh here's your copper tool at the end of the day you turn your copper tool in and there's we actually have these administrative lists where people are checking off the people who

were in and even today even today working on a dig i know like obviously we're separated by thousands of years and a dig is not building a pyramid but it's the same thing every day the rice so the guy who who's your manager checks in everyone, make sure they're there, make sure everyone has the tools they need. And at the end of the day, they check into, and then there's a whole payday thing that goes, it's like, it hasn't changed. It hasn't changed in thousands of years. That's why I love it. There's so many things that are the same. If I can extrapolate big ideas. Hey guys, what if we didn't just build a little house or a little tomb for when I die? What if we built the largest building that ever existed on the planet? So when I die,

it's like people think I was really important, right? So you have to have vision of a world that doesn't exist. And people be like, you're insane. That's crazy. We have no idea how to do that. He goes, come on, guys. I believe in you. Figure it out. And you have this human ingenuity of teams coming together for an entrepreneurial venture with a vision much bigger than anything that anybody can imagine doing. And they figure out systems. And the thing that's hard to get your head around when you're standing at Giza or in front of any buildings, you stand in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza, oh my God, how did they do that? And what you're looking at is the equivalent of like an iPhone 14. You got to go back to like Alexander Graham Bell, you know, 200 years before or more. So initially,

how to build a pyramid for dummies, right? So you start off by putting bodies in the ground. This is not innovation. It's what we've been doing for a really long time. Well, over time, dogs come and dig up the bodies. So you want to cover them with stones. Well, dogs still can get in. So you bury them deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. Meanwhile, Egyptian society is evolving and you have power structures that are in place. So you're not just putting people in the ground, you're putting pots and tools and jewelry with them. Well, then over time, you want to pots and tools and jewelry with them. Well, then over time, you want to mark where these people were buried, because you want to come and honor them and make offerings. So you put a little superstructure on them. And first it's

stone, and then there's mud bricks. So you have what's called a mastaba, or a bench tomb, and the tomb gets deeper. Well, then society gets more and more and more stratified, and Egypt sort of gets unified, and you have these rulers. And you don't just have, you're like, well, they don't just need a marker. Like they need a place to live for eternity. So there start being rooms developed and the tombs start getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more complex. So this is over a couple hundred years. And then at that same time, all of a sudden the superstructure start getting bigger and bigger.

And then alongside that Egyptian start experimenting with my brick. And at the same time, the tombs are getting bigger, bigger. And then alongside that, Egyptians start experimenting with mud brick. And at the same time, the tombs are getting bigger, not pyramids yet, they're just getting bigger. The Egyptians are building these massive temples and sacred structures. So they're experimenting with size and scale. And then all of a sudden they flip from mud brick, building the tombs from mud brick, all of a sudden they're going to stone. And then around 2700 BC, so around 4700 years ago, the guy that I call the Steve Jobs of Azira comes along. His name's Imhotep. And he's the chief architect for King Djoser in Dynasty III.

And so he's building this huge complex for Djoser, who's a super powerful king. And he builds this huge mastaba, this huge bench tomb out of stone. And he's like, you know what? Nah. And he makes it bigger. And then he makes it bigger. And then he goes, you can quote me on this. I'm a stack them some bitches. And he's going to put one on top of the other on top of the other. And all of a sudden, it's the first pyramid. It's not quote unquote, I hope I can use that word. It's not like a true pyramid, but it's the first proper pyramid. And then his kids and grandkids and so on keep evolving. So it's over hundreds of years that we finally, finally get to the pyramids at Giza.

And it makes sense when you look back in time and you see how things evolved. You can even see in ancient Egypt, there's a king called Sneferu, who was Khufu's dad. And he was actually a great pyramid builder. And he has a whole bunch of pyramids a little bit south of Cairo. And he has this one pyramid called the Bent Pyramid, where he's, you know, clearly his architects are going like, oh, crap. And they change the angle because it's going to collapse otherwise. So they're experimenting and they're tinkering and we can see their thought processes as

they're building. So we can actually see how they were innovating on the go. I love that. What do you know about human beings that you learned not from studying contemporary human beings, but by looking backwards? The only thing that matters is love. In all these tombs that we see throughout history, all they're doing, it's like they're screaming, we were alive. We were alive. Look at what we did. We married and we had kids and we lived. And it's all about love. And that's what they're celebrating again and again and again. Song, music, dance. It's just, it's love. And I don't mean to sound like a 60s hippie,

but you see this and it's so powerful. And to me, that's what connects me and makes me feel humble when I'm excavating. Because it's almost like they're all waving at you, kind of going like, I mattered. I was here. Can you maybe do me a heavy and say that I mattered? And it was just all how they lived, how they loved, how they moved through life, what they did. And everything goes back to their families and how they honored their ancestors, how they loved, how they moved through life, what they did. And everything goes back to their families and how they honored their ancestors, how they carried on their cultural

traditions. Everywhere, everywhere you go in the world, every culture doesn't matter. And obviously you can see that much better in places like Egypt and Mesopotamia and elsewhere. But it's this great celebration of who we are and what we're capable of. And it is such optimism, you know, in spite of all these awful things that we dealt with and continue to deal with. So that's, that's what the ancient people have taught me. And that same stress that I think every modern human has, which is does my life matter? Do I matter? I mean, that's again,

where my work exists, which is, will I be remembered? Is this a life worth living? What's my purpose on this planet? It can't just be to eat and breathe and consume. I want to know that this life was worth living. And if I have done something, I want to tell people or I want people to know. a song of love or loss, and I'll paint a painting of love or loss, or I'll build a business in my own vision, in my own image, or I'll raise a family with the hope that my children will continue my legacy and teach their children the lessons that I taught them, that it's really, we're the same. And I think too, the other thing that I've learned from ancient Egypt, and it's so taboo, this death, having a good death. People are like, oh my God, death is the end. But it's a celebration. It's, you know, to be surrounded by your friends and loved ones when you go, no matter how

you go, if you're lucky enough. I mean, God, what more do you want in your life? And again, that's something we see time and time again. And I think we spend so much time worrying about what is this meaning? And I think we're animals. We are. We're smart animals. We're dumb animals, mostly.

But does a bear worry about its existence? Does a moose? Does a fish? They're living, right? They're existing. They're moving through their world. They're being in the moment. And I guess, too, that's a lot of what working around the world, seeing all these amazing cultures, just all the ways they celebrated their landscapes, their food, the Island, you have these great moai, so these great heads, right, that carved in stone, and they're put up to mark landscapes, whether they're sort of boundary markers, in some cases, they're water source markers. And the big question was, how were they

moved? Were they dragged? Were they put on logs? And these two colleagues of mine figured out that they are actually walked. So you put a bunch of ropes on them and you sort of walk back and forth and you're able to walk them along the landscape. And they have this funky pattern. And they talked to one of the elder Rapa Nui women. So Terry Hunt and Carl Lepo are my colleagues' names. They were asking her like, oh, we're trying to figure out, you know, how to move. And she's like, oh, you sing the walking song. And asking her like, Oh, we're trying to figure out, you know, how to move. And then she's like, Oh,

you, you sing the walking song. And they're like the walking song. And she's like, yeah, the statue walking song. They're like, that's what, what are you even talking about? She goes, that's like, you should have come in before I could have told you they walked. They sang the song as the statue was being walked. And it was this perfect rhythm telling you exactly when the, the groups were supposed to move back and forth. So all these clues and answers about like how we existed and

how things were done are still there. You just have to kind of brush off the modern crap. Nothing's changed. Marine Corps, they have cadences so that everybody stays in lockstep and crew teams. Somebody goes stroke, strokes. Everybody knows when to row at the same time, like keeping time so that things happen at the right time. We see this on, I have to show you videos. Like, so I did a project in Luxor a couple months ago. My team of extraordinary Egyptian workmen, but they're really engineers. They had to move these multi-ton stunts and they all had to do it in unison and in such

a way that would protect the stones and more than anything else, you're doing a way that protected them. And so there's this, hey, and it fits with the movement of the stones, their songs they sing. There's such weird words. They go back, they go back to ancient Egypt. I know that they're the same songs that have been sung for thousands of years. That's unbelievable. I love that. So love and purpose are as live as well now as they were in ancient Egypt. And were the ancients more superstitious than we are now? I mean, they didn't have some of the scientific discoveries that we have. So they didn't fully understand all kinds of phenomena like Rora Borealis or thunder and lightning and the sunrise. So they worshipped gods and they attributed these things to gods

who are making these things happen, which made them way more superstitious and way more religious. Do you think that, you know, knowing what you know about ancient cultures is superstition and religion super valuable to the point where you say we don't fear death, we celebrate death, and we don't live our lives in fear, we live our lives in celebration. I assume that religion and superstition have a lot to do with that. So in so many ancient cultures, you know, the religion was their science. And I don't mean that in like an evangelical way. But know in ancient egypt the astronomy towers the ways they observed the tar the stars they were in the temples and they made amazing astronomical observations in ancient egypt and in other cultures in ancient egypt the doctors were trained in the temple so it was their way of understanding the natural world and kind of finding this interesting balance between worshiping and hoping that the Nile flooded

appropriately every year. So it's easy to say that they were more superstitious than us, but so many people now like believe in ghosts and paranormal and like Friday the 13th is an unlucky day and people have their lucky things that they were. I think we're just as superstitious and we're just as religious as we were. The problem I think with us today, and I heard this fact given years ago, and I don't know whether to try to prove it or disprove it, but it seems reasonable enough-ish that over the course of your lifetime, if you're living in rural modern day England, but over a thousand

years ago, the amount of information that you would have gotten over the course of your lifetime as a peasant, just someone working in the fields, maybe once a year you go to a fair, would roughly be equivalent to your average Tuesday New York Times today. So the information we get today on a daily basis is so vast. How do we parse our way through it? How do we make sense of it? And that's really, I think, one of the ways that we've changed as a society, as a culture over the last number of hundred years, just this vast information.

How do we sift through it? How do we make meaning from it? What do we anchor? What do we hold on to? And whether you go to a church or a synagogue or mosque or temple, people have their communities of faith. Or maybe you don't believe. Maybe you're an atheist or agnostic, but you still have your communities.

You still have things you do for luck or not. So it's all ways of parsing through a world and making sense of it because the world's messy. Well, I mean, I talk about this. You know, people ask me, Simon, are you religious? And my answer is I believe in belief. It doesn't matter which side of the equation you're on. You got to believe in something because belief gives understanding of the world around us.

As you said, it creates community and you can't have love without community. You can't have feelings of safety without community. I don't think you can have even optimism without community. I talk about this all the time. I don't even think you can have courage without community, which is until you're around people who say, I believe in you, you got this, let's do this together. We don't have the courage to move multi-ton blocks. We don't have the courage to try something new and different. That's very likely going to fail a bunch of times before we get it right. It's community that says, all right, let's try again. Because by ourselves, most of us would

give up. That's the thing that caused us, I think, to leave Africa, right? We were following game. The seas were much lower, 100, 120,000 years ago. And so animals migrated across East Africa into modern day Yemen and Saudi Arabia and on. And so we followed them and then we kept going. What kept us going? Why did we keep going? What is this thing that drives us on and on? And to keep experimenting and to keep trying things.

I saw this great comment by one of my colleagues, I wish I could remember who said it, you know, throughout history, you imagine these young teens exploring, you know, you're with this group of people, and you're in this new landscape, that plant killed Thad, that plant made Joe see God for days. And that one, you know, cured him. So you just were constant, we're smoking, we're drinking, one, you know, cured him. So you just, we're constantly, we're smoking, we're drinking, we're, we're, we're always naughty. We're always naughty teenagers, wherever we go. Like, cause how do we get this vast body of knowledge about the world's plants and animals and landscapes? And it's because we're constantly experimenting and trying and like your point, like it's, it's courage, right? All right. Let's, let's see what this plant does. Who knows? Let's roll the

dice. This is what I've learned in talking to you, right? Nothing has changed. What I've learned from talking to you is this is like Groundhog's Day. Maybe the scale is bigger and it's a little faster moving, but we're basically the same animal trying to figure things out, make things a little nicer for ourselves. We're still curious.

We're still exploring. We're still pushing boundaries. And the thing that we need to do those things more than anything else is each other. Because back in ancient Egypt, that was high tech. They were more technologically advanced than other cultures around them, but it was their curiosity, their community, their ambitions, their egos, their insecurities, all of these things that drove them. And I really love what you said about love, which is at the end of the day, if community is the thing and we need each other as social animals, the only way that communities can be built is if we take care

of each other, love each other, and keep each other safe. If we could just double down on loving each other, taking care of each other, and keeping each other safe, and we just double down on what we know has been the constant throughout all of human history, then I think we have a lot to be optimistic for. Sarah, as always, a sheer joy talking to you. I can't wait to talk to you again and learn more so much fun. So much fun. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. This was a blast. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about

the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at simonsenik.com, where you can get access to more than 35 on-demand classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.