The Joe Walker Podcast - A Short Story Of Everything - David Christian

Episode Date: June 7, 2018

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From Swagman Media, this is the Jolly Swagman Podcast. Here are your hosts, Angus and Joe. Hello there, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to another week on the Jolly Swagman Podcast. I'm Joe Walker, and this week my guest is David Christian. David is an historian. He's perhaps best known as the father of Big History, a new multidisciplinary approach to history. He's the co-founder with Bill Gates of the Big History Project, and he's just published a new book called Origin Story, which is his popular account of Big History. Before I introduce this episode, David's inspired me to share a few more thoughts on the topic of generalism. Now, one of the goals of this podcast

is to help you become the generalist you could be. And in episode 49 with the famed short seller Mark Cohodes, I gave a defense of generalism in the introduction where I argued that it's both possible and desirable to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of many, to be a polymath. I don't want to rehash that defense here. If you'd like to hear it, you can go to the first 10 minutes of episode 49. But instead today, David's inspired me to take this opportunity to share with you a few more of my ideas about generalism, some things that I've been tossing around in the week since episode 49. I'm going to share two points with you. The first point

is an historical figure who I think is a great example of a generalist, and I thought this might inspire you. So the figure is none other than Winston Churchill. And if you'd like to learn about Churchill's life, of course, there are perhaps more words written on him than any other political leader, but there are three biographies which I think you simply can't pass by. The first is the trilogy called The Last Lion by William Manchester, and it's probably the most authoritative and impeccably researched set of biographies on Churchill that's available. The second is The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson, which is somewhat of a panegyric, but has a definite literary quality. And the third is Churchill by Paul Johnson, which is a short book. I think my copy is about 168 pages, but it's beautifully written. And I wanted to share

a passage with you from the end of that book. And I love this passage because I think it captures Churchill's life in all of its variety and prolificness as the generalist that he truly was. So to quote Johnson, in his 90 years, Churchill had spent 55 years as a member of parliament, 31 years as a minister, and nearly nine years as prime minister. He'd been present at or fought in 15 battles and had been awarded 14 campaign medals, some with multiple clasps. He'd been a prominent figure in the First World War and a dominant one in the Second. He had published nearly 10 million words, more than most professional writers in their lifetime, and painted over 500 canvases, more than most professional painters. He had constructed a stately home and created a splendid garden with its three lakes, which he had caused to be dug himself. He had built a cottage and a garden wall.

He hunted big game and won a score of races. How many bottles of champagne he consumed is not recorded, but it may be close to 20,000. He had a large and much-loved family and countless friends. There are two reasons I love that passage. One is that it shows the full gamut of Churchill's abilities, all the way from him teaching himself to be a bricklayer up to his famous oratory. But the second reason is it strangely reminds me of another quote by a different writer on a different topic and that is the famous american science fiction writer robert heinlein who wrote stranger in a strange land and starship troopers and in his book time enough for love he has this quote which is about generalism but it really could be written about churchill it does remind me of churchill

and i'd like to share that with you as well. And the quote is this, a human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. Now, of course, specialization isn't just for insects. It's also a very important aspect of human societies and the modern economy. But that leads me to the second thing I wanted to share with you, which is that in my defense of generalism in episode 49, I gave a caveat, which is that I think we can and should aim to shape ourselves like capital T's with a broad generalist base and mastery over a skill or a few skills over the top of that base. Now, the other idea I've been reflecting on is that a great example of what this capital T should look like is the classic liberal education. And the best proponent of

the liberal education is John Henry Newman. and the best defence of a liberal education is his book, The Idea of a University, which was based on a series of lectures he gave in Ireland in 1852. But that book sort of set the agenda for the debate about what the purpose of a university should be in the century that followed. And what Newman argued in the idea of a university is that a university education should begin with a broad liberal education, and only then should students develop some depth in a particular field and master a vocation. And the legacy of that idea is alive and well today in the Oxbridge model, in the Ivy League model, and in what in Australia is, I guess, known as the Melbourne model, which is an undergraduate degree that's quite

generalist. The best example of that is the PPE degree in Oxford and Cambridge, or Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. And then postgraduate degrees allow some more vocational focus, whether that's, for example, medicine or law. So, I thought that was an interesting piece of evidence if you're looking for further credibility as to how you can shape yourself like a capital T. There is, of course, the classic liberal education, and that brings me to this week's guest, who himself is nothing less than a capital T. David Christian read widely in the 1980s and is incredibly well versed in everything from physics to evolution,

but his specialty is in Russian history. And that unique combination of a broad generalist base with a deep focus on Russian history has led to the formation of this incredible new discipline known as Big History, which you're going to learn about in this episode. To briefly summarize Big History, it frames our human story in the context of the history of the whole universe, and David traces a thread all the way through from the Big Bang to today. At first, I thought big history was somewhat of an intellectual party trick, but the more I've reflected on it and after my conversation with David, I think his big history is a really important tonic for the tribalism of our times, because the more you zoom the lens out on our human story, the less you see of our trivial differences,

and the more you notice our commonalities and our shared origins. And that, I think, is one of the greatest virtues of the big history way of thinking. And that is what we talk about in today's episode. So, David and I also discuss his upbringing, how his experience of growing up in the unfolding Cold War shaped his outlook on the world. We talk about the various intellectual threads and traditions that have combined to form Big History. We talk about the time he met Bill Gates and how together the two of them have co-founded this Big History Project, which is an attempt to teach big history in schools across Australia and the United States. And David also gives a thrilling account of big history itself and takes us through what he calls the eight thresholds.

I hope you find this conversation as inspiring as I did. So without much further ado, please enjoy this chat with David Christian. Boom, we're on. David Christian, thank you for joining me. Pleasure. So we're here to talk about your new book, Origin Story. Congratulations. Thanks a lot. And it's a popularization of the idea that you pioneered called Big History, which is a really exciting idea and almost a movement, I guess you could say.

But before we get to that, I wanted to ask you about your history. So you had a childhood that may have been quite different to most in that you got to experience a lot of different continents. Tell us firstly where you grew up and what are some of the salient episodes from your childhood? Yeah, well, my mum was American. She met my dad, who was British, in Turkey in the last year of the Second World War. He was demobilized, went to Nigeria as a district officer. So, was born in New York, and then my mum took

me on a tramp steamer to Lagos. So my childhood until the age of seven was in West Africa. So my personal thermostat was set in West Africa, near the tropics, which is why I like warm climates, and always struggled with English weather. But then I was sent off to school. So, my school and university and my accent is stuck in England. But I think that experience gave me a kind of cynicism about nationalism, you know. And also, I'd like to think it gave me a sense of a sort of shared humanity because, you know, many of the kids that I knew when I was a kid in Nigeria, they weren't technically Christian. They had very different religious traditions, very different cultural traditions. politicians um and uh so so that's one of the reasons i think why why i i always had this interest as a historian in the idea of a history of humanity of what what historical story all

humans share just as in in in national stories you know we we get the story that members of you know everyone who lives in australia the idea that they share a story, whether their family comes from Lebanon or, you know, Vietnam, it doesn't seem to matter that it's an Australian story. Well, there's also a human story, and so I became interested in that. And we were talking beforehand, you mentioned that the Cuban Missile Crisis had an impact on you when you were growing up. What age were you when that was unfolding? I'm trying to remember. I think I was, I to be able to it's it's a simple calculation i want to be able to figure out but um but i think i was about 16 16 and um i remember very vividly there was a group of us who used to play a ball game a sort of fives after school

and and then eventually we had all dispersed to go home, and I had to get a train home. And one of my friends came up to me and shook my hand. This is during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And, you know, you didn't shake hands normally at the end of a school day. So I said, so what's that about? He was slightly embarrassed, and he said, I'm not sure we're going to see each other again.

And that's when it really sunk in for me you know he'd seen more clearly than I had and I also remember something else flicking through my mind at that point which is I wonder if there are kids over there because during the Cold War there was very much a sense of the world as divided in two and that was the dark side

you know so I wonder if if the kids just like me who are over there thinking, oh my God, maybe we'll not meet again tomorrow. And I think that left me with a sense, again, a sense of a common humanity threatened by, in this case, nuclear weapons. But we now know there are other sort of threats to a common humanity and how bunkers it was

that we were starting to, we were threatening to throw weapons at each other. But we now know there are other sort of threats to a common humanity and how bunkers it was That that we were starting to we were threatening to throw weapons at each other which could destroy the biosphere in 24 hours You know and it was very close Kennedy after the Cuban Missile Crisis was asked how close did we come to an all-out nuclear war? He said I would say between one and two and one in three. So it was real. Yeah. I can't remember the name of the guy,

but there was a Russian who famously refused to press the button when they saw what they thought was impending missile strikes from the US. That's right. And it turned out to be a mistake. Yeah. I can't remember his name, but I think he held off just for 30 seconds or so, which was enough to figure out it was a mistake.

So we've been that close. And at the moment, and for quite a few years, it's as if that threat has dropped off the agenda. We forget about it. We talk so much about climate change, which is a real threat, but it's a more slow-moving threat, less dramatic. But there are still several thousand nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, which means they could be released within 15 minutes, most of them in Russia and the US. So, that threat hasn't gone away.

No. And it's also a measure of this very strange moment we live in, where suddenly, during my lifetime, our species has acquired colossal power, and it's acquired enough power to determine the future of the entire biosphere. So, the fact that we have the power and we didn't have it before World War II. We never had anything like this power. We've acquired the power not only to change climates, to change the oceans, to sort of change biodiversity, but also actually the power technically to blow up the biosphere in 24 hours,

much of the biosphere. That's utterly new. In 4 billion years, never has a species had this power. So people need to know this, but you can't see it unless you stand right back from the sort of stories we conventionally teach about national histories. And you have to look at the history of the biosphere and then see that this is a very

strange moment and one that puts huge responsibility on us humans because millions of other species are sort of sitting there sort of saying, you know, metaphorically, oh my God, what are they going to do next? You know? Yeah, I believe Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royale, gives our species about a 50-50 chance of making it to the end of the century, which is scary. To a lot of people, that sounds like alarmism,

but we're bad at comprehending tail risks. And, yeah, I'm a natural optimist, but I'm also a realist, and I think that 50-50 is pretty spot on. You just reminded me, one of my favorite quotes, I can't remember the attribution, but it's that humans are the focal point at which the universe has become aware of itself and it would be such a deep shame to extinguish the light of consciousness over something as silly and arbitrary as national disagreements and lose the big picture it's a bit as if i mean i use this metaphor um of the universe sort of opening an eye yes and then what we're talking about is that eye closing again very very quickly um it just colossally sad yeah yeah so just briefly going back to your background david you studied at oxford and then at ontario i guess ontario ontario yeah london ontario london Ontario, I guess. Ontario. Ontario, yeah. London, Ontario. London, Ontario. And you had a very global perspective growing up and a lot of empathy, and that helped shape

your ability to see the big picture. And then you kind of hone in then on a particular academic field and and your specialty was russian history what was it about russian history that originally uh gripped you look i think it was you know as a as a again as a school boy um at about the same time you know living through the cuban missile crisis living during the cold war as i said you, we had this very strong sense of us and them. That was the dark side. And I wanted to know more about the dark side. So, that's one impulse. You know, there are millions of people living over there. How do they live? You know, what's it like to live in the realm of darkness? You know, I lived in England. So, of course, we thought of that as

the realm of darkness. That was one fascination. The other, I think, was a sort of adolescent fascination with Russia, the Russian soul. You know, I read Tolstoy. The literature is just colossal. I mean, Russian art, Russian music, Russian culture. And so, I got interested in Russia through that as well, and then tried to teach myself Russian. And eventually, that was hard going. I tried to teach myself with linguophone 78 records. So, the linguophone course was a whole box full of 78 records that you had to listen to. And tried to and then i went to school and and did a proper course on on russian i love the language it's very beautiful how is your russian actually it's it's kind of um it's not i would say it's not beautiful for a russian listening

to me it's not a beautiful experience but but you know particularly after let me confess particularly after a glass or two of vodka yeah Yeah. You know, the flow is pretty good. That's the secret. Maybe Russians themselves are actually bad at Russian, but they're on vodka the whole time. No, I'm surprised, I think, because I learned it, I went through this really intense experience of living as a graduate student in Leningrad,

in the Soviet Union. Wow, how old were you? you know, what happens if you're suddenly surrounded by another language, your mind spends all the time thinking, how could I say that in Russian? What's the Russian word for this? So, it's really intense. And somehow Russian, I've tried to learn other languages and it hasn't worked, but Russian's got pretty well locked in. So, I can read Russian almost as easily as English now. How old were you when you were living in Leningrad? I was about 23.

Wow. So, I was a graduate student doing a doctoral thesis and doing research on 19th century Russian history. Were they welcoming? Look, at that time, there were cultural agreements between the Soviet Union and many countries. So, I went from England under the British Cultural Agreement, which was run by the British Council, under which every year, Britain and the Soviet Union swapped of 50 scholars. Now, they all always used to wonder why Britain sent useless creatures like history graduates to research something as useless as 18th century Russian history or 19th century

Russian history, whereas what they did was they really used those agreements to send atomic physicists to try and get some really serious knowledge you know so um it was for me absolutely fascinating but it was tough i mean it was a very different world um but once again you know you live in a very different environment and anyone who's done this being you know dropped into a very different world you know your first reaction may be that everything's alien, but that comes a point pretty soon where suddenly you're meeting real people with real problems. You know, they have love affairs, they have, you know, they worry about money, they have fights with their parents, all the things humans do. They're just doing it all in a different context. And you think,

oh my God, it must be really tough just being a human being in this context or that context so it's a humanizing experience for me i think that's why i think learning other languages is so important um because then every time you hear someone speaking your language who's had to learn the language, you have respect for the difficulties and challenges they faced. Apart from being history, was there anything about studying Russian history that prepared you for big history? Or was it a non sequitur? They're both positive and negative things. I mean, the fact that the Soviet Union, when I grew up, or the communist world, seemed

like half the world. I felt I was studying the other half of humanity in a sense. I mean, that's a bit naive, but that's what it felt like at the time. So, in that sense, studying Russia for someone who grew up in England was a bit like studying the other half of humanity, then the Soviet Union itself is so huge and diverse. And also behind the Soviet experiment, which clearly was a failure in many different fronts, by many different measures, but behind it was this utopian project, going back to the October Revolution,

of building a better and fairer world. You know, a world in which all the achievements of human beings, instead of being enjoyed by a few privileged countries or by sort of elite classes would be made available to everyone. That was the project. And it failed. So, studying the Soviet Union, you're constantly asking this question, why is it so difficult to build a better world? What are the problems? What are the barriers? So, that's one sense in which I think that may have propelled me towards the idea of big history. But the other, I think, was the sense that I eventually realized I felt uncomfortable because I realized I was sort of teaching a national history. I mean, I'm not Russian. As far as I know, I don't have any Russian ancestors.

I was just a kind of, you know, Russian tragic. I was just fascinated by Russia and Russian culture. But I realized that the courses I was teaching at Macquarie University were teaching the same subliminal message as all other national-based courses, that human beings are divided into competing tribes. And the best way of studying humans is to study the Russian tribe, and then the Chinese tribe, and then study the Russian tribe and then the Chinese tribe and then the American tribe and then the Australian tribe. And as I said earlier, in a world with nuclear weapons, that's not the best way of studying humans. In no institution that I know of do we actually teach courses on humanity, the history of humanity. I don't know of a university that has such a course or an educational system that teaches syllabi and the history of humanity to high school students.

Let's talk about big history now. Are you able to give us the gist of it? And there's a concept in big history of thresholds you can maybe talk us through. Well, let me go back first to the idea of origin story. Yeah. Because in the world we have lived in for a century, and I think this applies to most countries in the world, educationally speaking, is a siloized world where there was this sort of fundamental idea that rigorous knowledge is specialized knowledge, you know, that the best way of doing research is to divide up knowledge into specialized areas. Now, there's a lot of truth in that.

But what got lost in this world was the idea that, yes, but at some point, you have to put all the pieces back together again. And you have to try to help people see the links this is consilience what Leo Wilson called consilience the fundamental unity of knowledge exactly and that got lost so we don't teach it now the bizarre thing is if you look back into the past you'll find that even just go back just a hundred years or so the idea of consilience was normal everywhere in the world. All the great 19th century European thinkers, the philosophers, Darwin himself, the sociologists, Comte, all these people took it for granted. It was just absolutely taken for granted that the ultimate goal of research is to accumulate a huge amount of very precise, rigorous information and then put it all together into a larger story. So, that's the project of Hegel. It was Marx's project, actually. Darwin sort of trying to do the same thing. And if you go back in time, you realize

that all educational systems took it for granted that there was such a story. Newton grew up in the Christian world. And the Christian story provided the unifying vision behind Newton's science. The idea that, you know, and everything in that story is unified by the idea of a God, of a creator God. And Newton thought of the universe as like the body of God. And that's what he's describing. So, the idea of a unifying story is actually universal. The strange thing is I don't think I'm doing anything strange. What I'm arguing for is a return to a form of education that we've sort of lost track of. And just for 100 years,

if you think of Australia 500 years ago, if you were an Australian 500 years ago and you were being educated, you'd be educated by elders who would have worked really hard to preserve the best knowledge that's been handed down generation by generation. And it's their best shot at understanding how the world works. And they distill it and then make it available to young people.

So what I'm doing, so this is a roundabout answer to your question about big history. What I think I'm doing is simply returning to that and arguing that beneath this huge explosion of knowledge in modern science, there is a modern origin story waiting to be teased out. And it's desperately important that we help people see that story because without a unifying vision, we have no real guidelines to where to go, to what it's all about, to what our place in the universe is. So we live in a sort of fragmented world where many people feel lost. And that was the point about teaching a unifying story, is that it can provide a sense of place, of meaning, and of purpose. And I think that's true of a modern science-based origin story too. And that's really the project, is to tease out that story

and to make it available as a teaching project and as a thinking project for everyone. Can you walk us through the eight thresholds? Yeah, but let me preface that by saying that that you know this is i've been teaching this for 30 years now so this is my best shot yeah at distilling modern knowledge i i wouldn't want to claim that it's the only way of doing it so this is my best shot and it's the story i tell in the book origin story and it goes roughly like this there is a plot this is great it's a story um you know the book, Origin Story. And it goes roughly like this. There is a plot. This is great. It's a story. You know, you can look at this colossal body of information.

You can find a story there if you look for it. And the story goes like this, you know, that our universe popped up 13.8 billion years ago. We don't know why or how, but something the size of an atom pops up somewhere in space and time, and it's expanding like crazy, and it contains everything in our universe. And the scientific evidence that that story is true is now incredibly good. Lots of details we still have to figure out. But the early universe was very simple. If you look at the universe about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, that's about as long as humans have been around on Earth, by the way. You can think of it as a kind of thin mist of hydrogen and helium atoms. There are no other elements. Spread more or less evenly everywhere. Everything is at the same temperature. There's also photons of light traveling through these atoms. There's dark matter, which we don't understand. There's dark energy, which we don't understand. But there's not much structure here. There's not

much complexity. So over 13.8 billion years, now you look at our world today, staggering complexity. Every time I fly a plane, I just think of the number of moving parts that have to get right for this thing to work. Staggering complexity. So here's the question. How do you get from that very simple early universe to this incredibly rich, know world that we live in today and there's one more there's a villain to this story the villain is entropy you know you can think of i like to think of entropy sometimes as sort of you know dark glasses twirling a mustache you know and and and cackling away in the background. What entropy tries to do is

break down every structure. So, every time the universe comes up with something interesting, entropy says, I'll smash you. This is the second law of thermodynamics. This is the second law of thermodynamics. So, that's entropy is the villain. So, the question is how, if entropy is spending all its time trying to break down structures, how is it possible to get from that simple early universe to today? So, you asked about thresholds. So, this is the role of the thresholds.

Now, there's nothing, the idea of thresholds is not strictly a scientific concept. It's an organizational concept. It's a way of helping you through the story. But so, what I focused on in the way I teach this and write about it is just eight moments. Now, we could have a thousand, but, you know, eight seems to work pretty well. It could be six, it could be ten, you know. Moments in the universe at which suddenly something, somewhere in the universe where the conditions are just right, you have the right Goldilocks conditions, something new appears. And when that happens, it's always magical. It's like watching a baby

being born. You think, where did this come from? And we sort of know the general answer. The general answer is that things that already existed were suddenly rearranged in new ways so that they had new qualities that had never existed before. And that's true of a baby. When a baby is born, you said nothing like this baby has ever existed before. So that's what the thresholds are. And they build.

Complexity builds on complexity. So very quickly, I mean, the eight thresholds I focus on, and you know, if you could tell the story differently and focus on different ones, the first is the Big Bang itself, you know, without a universe, you know, there's no story. So, that's the first threshold. The universe creates, provides us with the raw materials for everything. It provides us with a certain stock of energy. Now, the first law of thermodynamics tells us that stock of energy is fixed. It's never going to change. The second law tells us that the form

that that energy takes will change. And only when energy itself has some sort of structure, it's what the physicists call free energy, can you actually use energy to do something. You know, if everything is pushing in the same direction, you can do something. It's like water from a waterfall. You can drive a turbine. But if it's all pushing every different way, it's just heat energy. It's random. It can't do anything. That's the energy entropy loves. So how can energy create new

things? Well, in that early universe, you have energy. You also have a number of rules, and those rules guarantee that the energy will move in certain ways, not others. So a minimum of structure was guaranteed from the start. So threshold one, the universe. Threshold two, probably within 200 or 300 million years, we get the first stars, is the creation of stars. A universe with stars already has a lot more structure. You know, stars have structure. You now have gradients of heat and light and density. You have galaxies.

It's a lot more interesting. Then threshold three, inside dying stars, you create new atoms. So you create the whole suite of elements of the periodic table. Now, most of the universe still consists of hydrogen and helium, but 2% consists of all the other atoms. So now the universe is much richer in terms of material variety and those atoms can combine so suddenly you can create new types of stuff and we see clouds of atoms in the galaxies and we can see molecules forming including amino acids and the sort of things we're made of so that's how threshold three the creation of new elements threshold four using four, using those elements, so some of them form molecules of silica, dust.

Some of them form water or ice, H2O. Using these new materials, you can create new types of objects, planets and moons and asteroids. You can create solar systems. We now know there are billions of them. So threshold four is solar systems and asteroids. You can create solar systems. We now know there are billions of them. So threshold four is solar systems and planets. And on the surface of particularly rocky planets, you have an incredibly interesting chemical environment.

You've got a great diversity of different chemical elements because most of the hydrogen and helium has been driven away. You have water, a fabulous environment for rich chemistry. That takes us to threshold five. Now, we only know of life on planet Earth, but I think the betting at the moment is that the universe is crawling

with bacterial life. You know, whenever you get rocky planets with these rich conditions, gentle flows of energy, lots of elements, lots of water or liquid, it could be methane liquid, you probably get something that we could call life. And life's utterly different because living things have something

we can think of as purpose or meaning. So suddenly information and meaning becomes important. Bacteria have to know whether the environment is alkaline or acid, which direction they should move. So living things have purpose. They're trying to survive and they're trying to reproduce. So that's threshold five, is life. We only know of it on Earth, but the betting is there's lots of it. Then, now this is the point at which the story could be getting a bit human-centered, you know. So if there are any Martians or aliens who read this book, this is the point at which they may throw it away. What about, you know, what about the Martians?

What about the aliens, you know? Threshold six is humans. So, I argue, and I think it's probably right, that the appearance of humans on planet Earth, and you have to hang around about four and a half billion years before you get humans, is a big, big deal. Because, and the reason is language. we're the first species that can exchange information so richly that information accumulates across generations so with this organism human beings wait a few thousand years and you find you know information is accumulating they've got more technology now information for a living organism is power. If you know about your environment, you can extract more energy from it. You can extract more food from it. Your populations can grow. So with human beings over 200,000 years, this process of accumulating information has got faster and faster and faster. And the result is we've got more and more powerful. Until today, we dominate change on an entire planet. The entire planet's changing, and it's changing in my lifetime.

Because suddenly, there is this collective being, which is humans, who sort of rule the biosphere. Now, at the moment, we don't fully understand that role. We have to get across it very quickly. We have to become adults. We have to realize we are managing a planet. We just have to do it well. And that's a challenge we're going to have to take up in the next 50 or 100 years. That's the challenge for a younger generation to become good planetary managers and this is like an explosive moment in the history of the planet suddenly there's a species managing the planet can we do it well at threshold seven and eight are really within human history the appearance of agriculture and the appearance of the fossil fuels revolution um 200 ago. That change gave us access to vastly more energy than ever before.

And the fossil fuels revolution, I think, or modernity or industrialization, whatever you want to call it, explains why the changes in the last two centuries have been so explosive and so rapid and have suddenly turned us into a planet-changing species. That was a longer answer than you wanted on the thresholds, but that's a sort of quick run through the thresholds. Wow. That was incredible. You need to do like a documentary or something.

Okay, let's talk about how Big History came about because you were teaching at Macquarie University in Sydney from 1975 until about 2000. And the first Big History course wasn't taught until 1989. But during the 1980ss you were reading widely and the question i want to ask you is whether you already had this this idea of big history in your head and you were going out and purposefully educating yourself on the topics that you needed to learn in order to put it all together, all these eight thresholds, or was it just a discursive kind of flanerial experience that ultimately led to big history? No, it wasn't really planned. I mean, I've always been a kind of science nerd.

I've always enjoyed reading good. So, I loved reading people like Isaac Asimov or, you know, Carl Sagan, these great popularizers, Richard Dawkins, you know, all these people. I've always enjoyed reading them. So, why the turn from Russian history? Look, one way, if you've been in universities, you know, if you're a young scholar, you try to establish your credentials and you establish your teaching, you learn to give lectures and you get across your own discipline. In mid-career, many, many scholars start thinking, okay, it's time to go in a new direction. And I think for me, I can remember at a certain point just thinking what that new direction might be. And I had this idea already that teaching national histories is probably not the smartest thing to be doing.

H.G. Wells said this back in the 1920s, you know. If we just keep teaching national history as we don't teach the history of humanity, we just guarantee more war. You know, that's what he said. And when he wrote, he tried to write a big history, the outline of history. The science hadn't kicked in yet, so he couldn't tell the story very well. So, I started thinking, what would a history of humanity look like? And I remember literally sitting down with a piece of paper and thinking, okay, let me just brainstorm. I'm not going to tell anyone. They'll think I'm going mad.

But what would it look like? And so I thought, first thing, I mean, if you're living in Australia, you know you have to go way back beyond agriculture. You have to talk about, you know, foraging societies, you know, paleolithic societies. And so I immediately thought, we're going to have to go back 200,000 years because that was, roughly speaking, the best date for the first humans. And then I thought, no, but that's not quite enough. We're going to have to talk about how humans appeared.

So I suddenly realized that I'm moving beyond the history discipline I'm moving outside of my discipline I'm going to have to talk biology and then it got worse because I thought I'm going to have to talk about not just how humans evolved but about evolution in general and that to do that seriously I'm going to have to go back four billion years to the appearance of life on earth and then then I'm going to ask what is about this planet that allowed life to it? So I'm going to have to talk about geology and planet formation. And then I thought, I realized I'm going to have to talk about stars. So it pushed me back and back.

These questions pushed me back and back and back until eventually I realized it doesn't go on forever. Because at the moment, the idea of the big bang provides a starting point now it could change if we develop science it takes us beyond the big bang but at the moment there's a good starting point for the story so then i started wondering and you know living in a university if you're a teacher you're a trained academic these ideas are looking pretty bonkers, pretty crazy by now. I started thinking, gosh, it would be kind of fun to teach a course on the history of the universe, but how the hell would you do it? And then through a series of sort of coincidences, most university history departments

would never consider teaching such a course. At Macquarie, I was allowed to have a go at teaching this, and not just as a boutique third year course where you know if it was a disaster then you know a few poor third year students would suffer quarantine it that's right yeah but but it could be quarantine no it was a big first year course wow so I began so my colleagues voted to let me do it god bless them and then I panicked I thought oh my my God, suddenly. Yeah, the case of the dog catching the car and not knowing what to do.

Exactly. I'm out of my comfort zone, out of everyone's comfort zone. So I started, you know, ringing up colleagues at the other end of the campus. Literally, I looked in the university directory and thought, oh, there's an astronomer. Maybe they could help me out here.

And the first course, they were great, you know. So, it was wonderful seeing lecturers from different parts of the campus. Normally, it doesn't happen. How did the first students react? Well, this was the key, was that the course was a mess in some ways. The lectures were great. But, you know, the astronomer would start talking about supernovae or introducing entirely new jargon. And so, my students were a bit lost. I was a bit lost. You know, all the tutors who were involved in this were a bit lost. I was a bit lost. All the tutors who were involved in this were a bit lost. So there wasn't a coherent story, but many, particularly the brightest students, loved the project of trying to put everything together, even though the course was a bit of a mess.

And I think that's what really kept us going. So it attracted large numbers of students and we kept going with it. And gradually over the years, a sort of coherent story began to emerge. And that's now the story that I'm trying to tell in this book is that story that began to emerge. So, I began to realize that for educational institutions not to teach such a story, it's not because there isn't a story to be told. You know, one of the great things we can say about big history is we have proved that there is a story there. And not only that, we've proved that it's teachable. Eventually, I realized teaching big history was actually not more difficult than teaching Russian history.

It's difficult only because it's an unfamiliar project. So, it's a project that looks completely crazy in the existing educational environment. But by now, I'm absolutely convinced it's the educational environment that's the problem, not the idea of big history. Yeah, that's right. Well, I mean, all new things look crazy at first, and then they become the orthodoxy. Well, not only that. Eventually, I realized that what I'm doing is not crazy at all. It's something that everyone did in every society in the world

before about 1900. It's about 1900 that this idea of teaching an origin story vanished. I think the reason is simply sort of globalization, that all the regional origin stories that worked very well, the Christian story, the Muslim story, the Taoist story, the Confucian story, the indigenous stories, they all worked very well until the world gets more globalized. And suddenly, people realize there are other stories that are believed in as passionately as their own story. And that began to undermine the credibility of all of these stories. And it created sort of disillusionment, a sense of chaos, and a sense of loss, profound sense of loss. And that sense

of loss has shaped a lot of 20th century literature, art. You've got the art of the 20s. It's all about chaotic, cubist world broken into fragments. So, my argument really is that what's been happening is, yes, those stories did sort of begin to break down. Some people reacted by clinging to them more and more passionately, and that's still going on. But maybe beneath the chaos, what's happening is we can slowly tease out a new story. And that's what I'd like to think Big History is doing. And another influence on the formation of Big history was your wife, Chadi. And I read that she's a Jungian, so a follower of Carl Jung.

Can you explain the connection there? Yeah, absolutely. When I began teaching this, I began actually very naively. I thought, let's put all these stories together. I mean, that's one way of describing big history. You take the story the historians tell, the anthropologists, the paleontologists, you just put them all together. You know, the details of this, there's nothing new about them. You just find them in different disciplines. So, I began naively thinking, let's just stick

all the stories together. It'll be a great, and suddenly I'm teaching history of the universe. Charlie was, she's always been fascinated by Jung and is very knowledgeable about Jung, but also she worked for several years as a storyteller. So she's fascinated by story and Jung is fascinated by story. And it was Charlie who said to me, you know what you're doing is you're teaching an origin story or creation myth was the term she used.

But I've moved to the phrase origin story because the word myth for many people means false story and the word creation for many people implies a creator so i prefer the phrase origin story because origins a modern origin story doesn't actually begin with a creator that's so she um and she was the one who really explained to me the the significance of origin stories in our own psyche you know each of us has a personal origin story and we have a family origin story and we have a national origin story and and a human origin story and ultimately a sort of total origin story that puts all those stories together. And they're sort of layers of identity.

Exactly. It's like a map of everything. This is what origin stories do. They tell you where you are. They map you as a person, as a member of a family, as a member of a religious tradition, as a member of a national tradition, as a member of a species, humanity, and they put everything together. And so, she was the one who really made me aware of the importance of the idea of storytelling and of the sort of psychological inner meaning of origin story. The archetype.

Yeah, the idea of archetypes. I'm not sure that I either fully understand or go along with Jung's idea of archetypes. But what is clear is that I think all humans have a need for a story like this and feel the absence of it in modern education in a kind of diffuse way yeah yeah i'm with you there i have um i guess reservations about jungian archetypes and for that matter a lot of jordan peterson's work as well because i feel like it's unfalsifiable and that's not really how i operate but there's definitely no denying that it's a great teaching tool, and there's something in it that resonates deeply with human psychology. Yeah, and I think we know absolutely, as we get better at understanding how the human brain works,

that it predisposes us to think about the world in certain ways. And one of the ways it predisposes us may be to think of story. You know, story is a wonderful way of holding together information in a way that's engaging and understandable. Is story just about cause and effect or is there something more to it? Yeah, good question. I'm not sure of a quick answer but i think the idea of stories is engaging is important you know you can teach about absolutely magical things like the big bang but if i worked i could work really hard at it and teach it in a way that was stunningly boring because there was nothing to interest you or engage you i could talk about all

the technical details of the big bang unless you're a serious nerd cosmology nerd you know you'd just be bored witless so telling story telling about the story in ways that engage our sense of story of plot of excitement yeah There's something at stake here. Yeah, and almost something visual. Like there needs to be imagery there. Yes, yes, there does. But the imagery can often be in words. But I think what's really important is a sense of something at stake. So, for me, the archetypal story is the detective story.

You have a body, dead body, you know, stabbed a hundred times in a room that's locked from the inside, you know. And so, the big history story for me is the one I've said already, you know. You have a universe, for God's sake, that appears from an atom-sized entity. And that is extraordinary enough. And then you've got entropy working a way to destroy all structures. And yet, despite entropy, apparently, actually with the collusion of entropy, but that's the subtlety of the story, complex things get built. So, here's the detective plot. How the hell do you build complex things

in a universe like that? And it's really urgent for us because we're complex things, and the world we live in is complex. Now, when you say complex, you just made it in a colloquial sort of sense. Look, I don't think there exists a precise or really rigorous technical definition of complexity. There are various definitions. And so I suppose I'm attempting to take a colloquial use of the idea of complexity and build on it. There are certainly problems with any colloquial use of complexity. But at some level, we're definitely talking about something real. So if I were to pick you up and throw you randomly somewhere in the universe, the odds are overwhelming that you would end up in a place,

and during the split second before you died, you might think, is this place complex or simple? It would be extremely cold. It would be close to absolute zero. There would be nothing there. There would be no light. Hardly any atoms around you. Little smidgens of energy.

And you'd probably think before you blacked out, you know, I think this place is simpler than Sydney. So, you know, at that colloquial level, there's a difference between simplicity and complexity. Going to Melbourne or something like that. Yeah, could be Melbourne. Melbourne's almost as complex as Sydney, yeah. Right. So, one of the other big influences on you,

and I only want to dwell on this briefly, but I find it very interesting, is the French Annales School, which was a school of historiography founded in the 20th century and what was distinct about that i got really as a graduate student i got really interested in annals they were very very fashionable for graduate students of our generation and what they what the french annals historians annals i was pronounced annals yeah um historians there was a journal annals historians… Annals, I was pronouncing it. Annals, yeah. Historians, there was a journal, Annals, and that's why they were called after that. They tried to link disciplines.

They were very interested in geography. So, they were very interested in the role of geography in shaping human history. But the other thing they did, particularly Fernand Braudel, who I love his work, is they pushed towards larger scales. And what Braudel talked about was the longue durée, the long periods. Now, his longue durée was not 13.8 billion years. It was about 300 years. But what Braudel said very decisively is, if you look at different scales you see different things so if you look at the scale of a year you know you'll see political events they're like the sort of foam at the surface of the ocean of history you know and you look at the details and you look at you know in his case he looked at the mediterranean and the time of philip ii um if you dive down a bit to a scale of sort of several decades then you start looking at

slower processes like like you know the rise and fall of of entire economies you know periods of of growth periods of decline and if you look even deeper at scales of several hundred centuries then you're looking at things like material processes, how people eat, how they build their houses, what their diets are. And those things don't change that much. Then sometimes they may change very suddenly. So suddenly he was very interested in diets, in housing structures, and how ordinary people live. That fascinated me as a social historian. So, the Annals pointed towards the idea that we, as historians, we spend perhaps too much time

looking at the details and that to really understand human history, we perhaps need to stand back and widen the lens. Now, I'm trying to do that on a much bigger scale. I mean, I think if you look at human history on a scale of 200,000 years, you'll see different things than if you look at it on a scale of one or two years. And we need both visions. So, it's a bit like, you know, those earth, you talked about visuals, you know, those earthrise photographs that we we saw those astonishing photographs in the 60s photographs taken from orbiting orbiting the moon well i remember very vividly looking at those pictures and thinking suddenly i'm seeing the whole of planet earth not just my city or my my town or my sub. And suddenly I look at that and I can have a sense that that

is my home. But it's a home I share with 7 billion other people. When I first saw it, it was probably 5 billion or 4 billion people. So, different perspectives give you different aspects of reality. And so, I began to think it's a mistake for historians just to focus on modern history, just to focus on fairly short-term processes. We need to do that, but we also need to look at much deeper processes. And in my case, my argument is that what Braudel argued for, you can push that argument back and back and back. And there's something to be learned about human history if you look on the scale of 13.8 billion years. And that is how strange is the complexity and precarious, potentially dangerous, is the complexity of our world. So we need to get on top of it and manage a staggeringly complex biosphere now.

Wow. It's almost like the more you focus the lens, the pettier and more tribal our story becomes. Exactly. Exactly. There are lenses at which all you see are tribes. There's a lens, of course, at which all we individuals see as me. Yes. There's a lens, of course, at which all we individuals see as me. So, classically, we think of someone who's too caught up in that story as a rather selfish puss. Yeah.

You know, we'd like people to also be aware of their local community. Yeah. And then of their nation, but also, in my case, of humanity as well. We need all these lenses. Tell us now why big history is important. And we've sort of alluded, I think, to a few of the answers already. But what does it bring to our intellectual toolkit that we were previously lacking? Well, what's very hard to see if you don't do it is that at the large scale, there are new things to see. Now, this is a big problem, because if you don't look at those

large scales, you won't see them, and you may be convinced, and I've been told this by some people, if you look at the very large scale, you simply lose. There's nothing interesting to see at that scale. You know, you lose the important details. Well, there are new things to be seen, like those Earthrise pictures. So this is my first argument. There are new things to be seen at the large scale. And the second argument is that the new things you can see at the scale are immensely important. And if we don't see them,

at this moment in the planet's history, where we humans are managing an entire planet, we will not see the things we need to see in order to manage a planet. So I'm thinking about things like climate change denial. If you just look at the details, climate change denial probably makes lots of sense. It's hard to see that the climate is changing because of human activity unless you stand back a bit. So if you never make the effort to stand back, you'll never see that. You'll never understand the urgency of doing something about building a more sustainable world. And frankly, if you don't see those things, if we don't grapple with those challenges, what's at stake is the future of our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, and also millions of other organisms on this planet.

So, it's like saying these are things we desperately need to see. To not see them is dangerous. And this is why I believe incredibly strongly that the big history perspective is desperately needed for a younger generation, because the people I teach in universities wait 20 years, they'll be running the show. They'll be the people facing this huge challenge of trying to not just be planetary managers or planetary stewards, but good planetary stewards. So that we can build a better world. So that we can increase the chances that our great-grandchildren will live well. That's the challenge. And we will not be able, in my view, we won't be able to face it unless we see the things we need to see.

And what you need to see is that what's happening right now is new on a scale of four billion years. So, any scale less than four billion years is too small to understand what's happening right now so okay so big history is important because it it reminds us not only about common humanity but that we should be good environmental stewards but flesh that causal link out for me a little bit more i don't understand precisely. So, in other words, why is it not possible for someone who studies big history to then go on and be a climate change denier and a tribal aggressive nationalist? If you take on that whole story, you understand there are multiple perspectives. Then I think, let's put

it this way, it's not impossible to go completely crazy. It's going to be a bit harder. It's going to be a bit harder to take the tribal perspective that seriously. The difficulty, of course, is that to persuade people there's something to be seen when they haven't seen it is always a difficult task because they can't see it. So, they think, so why should I care about this? But, of course, many people have seen this, all the people. Now, there are thousands and thousands of scientists working very rigorously and very carefully to understand climate change. So, the science is very good. Declining biodiversity is another issue.

The whole issue of nuclear armaments. There's a huge amount of... So there are lots of people who do understand these things, but we teach people in this siloized way. So, you know, it's very hard for them to see these things. So it's like saying to someone who is, I don't know, is blindfolded and is walking towards a cliff, please take off the blindfold because if you don't, something dangerous is going to happen. There are things you need to see. I mean, we say

this all the time in real life. It's really important to see this. Otherwise, it's very dangerous for you. And maybe, you know, imagine a bus driving towards a cliff and the bus driver is blindfolded. Now, you could say to the bus driver, please take off the blindfold because, you know, unless you do, this is going to threaten everyone in the bus. So, this is a very, admittedly, this is a homo sapien centric history. I'm curious whether you considered the history of non-human animals as well well we're at the point where i would say that even if you are human centric and as a biological creature i'm designed so that i care about my own descendants so so you know caring about my children my grandchildren my great-grandchildren, and something built in to be by natural selection. But we're at a point now where we know that to not care about other organisms

is a naive blunder for us humans. If we don't care about the diversity of grains, for example, if we think we can live just with a very small number of rice species or wheat species, that's a big mistake, particularly in a world whose climates are changing, whose rainfall patterns are changing, whose, you know, humidity patterns are changing. So, to not care about biodiversity is a foolish mistake, even if we care primarily about humans. Biodiversity gives resilience. Ecologists understand this. An area where there's a lot of diversity is likely to be able to respond to change much better than an area where there's a limited number of species and yet we know the number of species is declining faster than it's declined for 65 million years since

an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs so so let's put it this way um we actually have to care about all the other organisms we share the bio the with, partly because we're in charge. We're captains of this plane full of other organisms because we're all in this together, not just with other humans, but with other organisms. Eventually, if we mess up, we humans, we humans will really pay the price. A lot of other organisms will pay the price, but the biosphere will survive without us. Cockroaches will love it.

All I can say is that's not a scenario that appeals to me. Yeah. I don't just mean biodiversity though although that is very important but things like factory farming i mean currently we're sort of perpetrating suffering on an industrial scale and one of the things that one of the insights that a big history approach brings is you know as you've um explained David, is that kind of tribal boundaries or national borders pale into insignificance compared to the grander human and then cosmic story.

But you could also take that in another direction and say that it also helps to realize that we're just one of many species which can all suffer and do suffer equally. It would be very interesting to see whether big history can kind of push our moral, the boundaries of our moral concern in those directions as well. Look, I think it's... I'm a big Peter Singer fan.

I think it's very likely to do that. So the first answer to your question is, there's a self-interested reason why humans should care about other species. But the second reason is one of the many stories that's part of the big history story is a story of a biosphere, a biosphere that's flourished for four billion years. You know, we need to care about the bacteria in our gut. So, we humans are very strange in all sorts of ways, but we're also part of the biosphere. We depend on the biosphere.

And I would like to think that the big history story will help people develop empathy for other species, particularly for large brainy species in other words for species that well we need some sort of empathy for bacteria but we have no evidence that they have consciousness or that they feel pain or anything like that but because they're part of us they you know we have more bacterial cells on and in our bodies than we have cells with our own DNA. Yeah. So, we need to care about them. But big brainy species. So, like the animals that we often

experiment on in labs, we can be absolutely certain now. People like Jane Goodall have broken through the taboo on imagining that other species feel pain or suffering. When their children die, they suffer. We can be sure about that. So I hope this is one of many ways of increasing our sensitivity to the suffering of other species. At the moment, we're a horribly cruel and damaging species. I want to ask you about Bill Gates now. So in 2005, you were invited to speak at a conference in Maine

and a talent scout found you at the conference and asked if you would record some videos of you explaining big history. And those tapes were put out in 2008. And sometime later in his home gym in Washington, Bill begins watching your lectures. And he reaches out to you. At this stage, you're teaching at San Diego State University where you began in 2001. And Bill has one of his people

reach out to you and arranges a meeting. Can you take us to that moment? You met him in a hotel, just explain the story. Well, let me go back a bit. The Talent Scout was working for a company called The Teaching Company, which specializes in producing lectures. Yes. And this was, and they thought maybe lectures on Big History would work. And Bill Gates, who's a voracious reader and consumer of lectures, came, stumbled on these lectures and he loved them. And one of his reactions was, I wish I'd done this as a kid. Yeah. Which is what I always thought.

I think I began teaching Big History partly because I wished I'd done this. Anyway, so I'm, you know, I was at, this is 2008, just during the global financial crisis. I was in my office at San Diego State and it was a Monday morning and I had a lot of administrative stuff. So I was in a foul mood. I wasn't looking forward to the day. And I get a phone call and I say, yes, yes, what do you want? And a very nice woman's voice at the other end says, oh, is this a bad time? I said, no, yes, what do you want? And a very nice woman's voice at the other end says, oh, is this a bad time? I said, no, no, what do you want?

And I was actually embarrassingly rude. I'm not proud of this. But then she said, oh, well, look, I can call back some other time. I said, no, no, no, what is it? She said, I'm actually calling from the office of Mr. Bill Gates. So I said, oh, yes. And she said, you may not know this, but Mr. Gates is a great fan of Mr. Bill Gates. So I said, oh, yes. And she said, you may not know this, but Mr. Gates is a great fan of yours.

And he loves the idea of big history. So now I'm getting interested. And she said, and he's coming down to San Diego to visit his friend, Craig Ventner, who was one of the people who deciphered the human genome. And if you can find some time in your busy schedule, Mr. Gates would like to meet with you. So I'm very proud of the fact that I got the answer right,

which was yes, I think I can find some time in my busy schedule. So anyway, I went over to a hotel in La Jolla near the University of California, San Diego, and I'm ushered into a hotel room, and there's just Bill and me having a chat. And I was very nervous. Do you remember what he said? Oh, yeah.

I mean, he just welcomed me in. But within five minutes, we were just having a great conversation because he said he loved the idea of big history. And he said something. It was very precise. He said, I'm not sure the details of the course i learned anything new because you know he's always read very widely but it was it's the putting of it all together that was revolutionary for him and and and he said i think this needs to be in schools and i'd always thought it needed to be in schools,

but I had no idea how you move from a sort of boutique university course to a school syllabus. I had no idea how to do it. And he said, so, after, you know, we chanted for about two hours. But at the end of it, he said, so, here's my idea. If you would like to work with me on this, I would like to fund the building of a free online syllabus in Big History. It's very enthusiastic about online education. And we'll make it really beautiful. It'll be educationally clever. We'll make it as good as we can. And it would just be available to schools and then we'll make it available and we'll encourage those schools who want to try there are always schools that want to try new syllabus so one by one he said it's probably best to go through individual schools rather than trying

to talk to the educational authorities you know in the in the in the state you'd be talking state by state yeah because they're so locked into existing syllabi and there are so many moving parts there that it's very hard for them to move so what you want to do is build this syllabus get a lot of schools doing it accumulate a lot of experience so you can prove that it's teachable and you can also demonstrate how it's taught because he said if you go straight through the educational bureaucracy, they'll say, yeah, cute idea, but no, no, no, this is how we're going to teach it. And you'll lose control. Yeah, that's a very startup approach, isn't it? Because it also enables you to iterate from school to school.

Exactly. And you did make changes, like you cut it down from 20 to 10 units. We made a huge number of changes. So, the teachers are very much co-generators, co-creators of the Big History Project, which is what it's called. And we produced the syllabus, we've changed it over the years, and I've in fact had less and less to do with it over the recent years. It's sort of taken a life of its own and it's based in Seattle. But there are over a thousand American schools teaching it now. Wow. And about 100 Australian schools. So we know it's teachable. We know it works. You know, it's not perfect. God knows.

And now at Macquarie University, we're building a second online course, which will be designed more for the australian environment it'll be fundamentally very similar but but but more for the australian educational environment um and then eventually what we want to do is is produce courses for different levels the big history project is really for kids sort of 13 14 that sort of age we want to produce a junior version, a primary school version of Big History. It's already being taught in one of the schools in Sydney. For primary school kids, it's absolutely wonderful. They glom onto it just like that. And I often think we underestimate the intellectual capacity of primary school kids. And then we'll build an upper level. And eventually, you want

to start translating it into more and more languages, because I think this is something that what I'd love to see, and it might be a fantasy, I would love to see this origin story, big history, taught in every high school in every country in the world and treated as something that's as fundamental to education as maths is or history or literature anything you name i would put my money on the world being a better place if that was the case i agree with you of course yes yes absolutely i think i think it'll because one of the things the big history course can do if you do a big history course again there's no guarantees. But I think it suddenly can make it a lot easier to see humanity as a whole, as having its own history. So, this brings me right back full circle to the idea of a history of humanity.

It's built into the origin story, you know you can understand the huge challenges that faces as a species over the next 50 years, which will be an important turning point, not just for humans, but for billions of other species, for the biosphere as a whole. I just want to come back to Bill quickly. So, he agreed to fund the Big History Project project which you two co-founded in 2005 no actually about uh we really got going about 2010 and technically it was through bill gates that he he said a great way of launching this would be with a ted talk so i did a TED Talk on this in 2011, and that was technically the launch of the Big History Project. And the idea was that, you know, there's a lot of people not going to understand what Big History is. We need a quick way of helping people to get their minds around it. And so, that's how, that's what the Big History TED Talk was designed to do.

So, that you could say, someone says, what's big history? And you can say, well, look, if you've got 18 minutes, you know, here's something that might give you a feeling for it. And in the TED talk, I sort of try to tell the whole story in 18 minutes. It's a great TED talk. We'll link to that on our website as well. And it's a semester long course? You can teach it in several different ways. I personally think, you know, half a year is probably best. If it gets too long, what starts happening is people get so fixated on the details, they lose the story. And they get to the modern part of the story and they've forgotten the Big Bang.

So, there's very good reasons not for making it too long. I think a semester is about right. But also it depends on the school environment some schools are teaching it over a year some in on shorter terms just because of the conditions so it has to be flexible to fit into many different school environments what's bill like as a person well look for me he's been absolutely wonderful i I mean, from that first meeting, look, I don't think he'd be upset if I said he's a real nerd. He's using nerd in a very positive sense. And I think I'm a nerd in that sense, I'd like to think. So, when we first met, it was two nerds meeting and yakking away about something we were both enthusiastic,

because he was blown away by the idea of a big history i think it's wonderful so you know you can imagine the two of us for two hours saying big history is great for this reason and it's great for that reason and great for this reason so um he's immense been immensely supportive he's very very clever he's very wide widely read and of course i'm enthusiastic for him. But I think his philanthropic work is absolutely wonderful. He works like crazy and he doesn't need to. He's the richest man in the world.

But one of the things he said to me that really struck me was he said, I had a heap of fun making a lot of money. And now, he said, I've got this huge amount of money and I feel it's an obligation to spend that money in such a way that I use all my business skills so that every dollar I spend, I maximize the good results that come out of it. So now he's using all his business skills to try to spend that money in a way where you get the maximum good for each dollar. I once heard him say, and it shocked me at first, he said, if you're spending more than $1,000 to save a life, you're spending too much money. And at first first i didn't quite get what he was saying it sounded cruel but what he's really

saying is money is leaking away through corruption or inefficiency or incompetence and if you spend more than a thousand dollars and that extra money is money that could have been spent saving another life. So, it's important in philanthropy to be as rigorous, as tough with your money as if you're running a big corporation. And his workday is fantastically busy. It's scheduled fantastically tight tightly and i'm immensely impressed he both he and melinda you know spend spend much of the year traveling around um managing this vast project of trying to spend a lot of money very well and i sometimes think um would i prefer to see all of that money in the hands of the US government or in the hands of Bill and Melinda Gates?

At the moment, I say it's a no-brainer. I think it's a no-brainer. I suspect it's getting much better spent in the hands of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Yeah, a benevolent dictator almost. Sort of, yeah. We've done a few episodes on effective altruism and and bill is is probably an example of an effective altruist i'm not sure there's a direct connection between

him and the movement of effective altruism per se but i know he is is well connected with peter singer who's a famous effective altruist so i think there's there's some connection there he's deeply committed yeah deeply committed bothly committed. Both of them are. To the idea, in fact, I think the motto of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is, unto those to whom much is given, much is expected. And I think they take that very seriously indeed. Yeah. And they're incredibly transparent in everything.

They evaluate everything they do. Yeah. They put out reports. It's great. He's taken a're incredibly transparent in everything. They evaluate everything they do. They put out reports. It's great. He's taken a huge amount of flack. I mean, I've taken flack for accepting money from him. Right. And there are people who... What do people say? Oh, there are people who assume that if I,

you know, if the Big History Project is funded by Bill Gates, that means... It's Bill's history. It's all about Bill Gates, and he's smuggling in his own agendas. All I can say is I've seen absolutely no sign of that. I've been very much involved in the design of the syllabus. At no point have I been aware of him trying to interfere in any way in the content of the syllabus.

And I don't think he has any reason to. He loves the idea of the syllabus. And I don't think he has any reason to. He loves the idea of big history. He thinks I know my way around it. And so, he's not interfered at all. But there are people who worry about the amount of money he's put into education, that it's a personal agenda of his. So, you know, these are serious questions that are being asked, but all I can say is I feel his impact on this Big History project has been wholly positive. We're doing things we couldn't have conceived of without his support. Exactly.

David, before I let you go, I wanted to ask you this. You're someone who's very widely read, a polymath. Are there any books that you revisit or reread that could be in any area, but books about absolutely anything that have had a real impact on you and that you come back to. The trouble is I wouldn't want to pick one because there are so many. Give us a handful. If you're going to force me, I'm going to say Darwin's Origin of the Species. For me, this is science at its very best. He's got a great idea that he knows is going to face a lot of skepticism, particularly in 19th century Victorian Britain. The research he does to tease out this idea of natural selection, to explore where it works and where it doesn't is astonishing. Then the honesty and

transparency of the book. There are areas where he knows the argument is weak and the evidence is weak. And instead of trying to cover up, he says to the reader, this is an area where there are real problems. And then the beauty of the writing, this is written not just for professional scientists. It's written for every halfway educated person. It reaches out to people in general. And it's a big unifying idea. And what it unifies is the realm of life. And it tells us that we're very much part of that realm. We're not separate. We're not separate creations. That's one of his fundamental insights. So, when you look at the history of life

on Earth, for example, the first three billion years is a history of bacteria. And you might think, well, that's not terribly important to us. Well, not at all. What the bacteria do is they evolve all the gadgets necessary for cells to work in a huge number of different environments. What's happened in the last 600 million years is cells have evolved new gadgets, which are all about cells working together within a single large organism, meta-organism. So he showed this underlying unity of life,

even though the amount of information he had was very limited by comparison with the amount today it's elegant it's it's beautifully written it's treats the reader with huge respect um this is science at its very very best david this conversation has been fascinating and inspiring in terms. And thank you so much for your time. Your book, Origin Stories, is out now. And I encourage everyone to grab a copy and read it. I certainly will be. So thank you again.

Thanks a lot. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for listening to my conversation with David Christian. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. And if you'd like to follow up on any of the links to the things we discussed, including a link to Origin Story, David's new book, a link to Stanislav Petrov, the name of the Russian guy who famously saved the world by refusing to press the nuclear button,

including the famous Earthrise photo that David mentioned and many, many more links. You can find them on our website, thejollyswagman.com. If you enjoyed that episode as well, please share it with your friends or share it on social media. We'd love you to spread the word about what we're doing and spreading the word about big history as well. So until next week, I'm Joe Walker.

Thank you for joining me. Ciao.