The One You Feed - David Christian on A Big History of Everything

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

David Christian is a Distinguished Professor of History at Macquarie University and director of the school’s Big History Institute, which he founded with Bill Gates. David has delivered keynotes at conferences around the world including the Davos World Economic Forum and his TedTalk has been viewed more than 7 million times. He’s the author of numerous books and articles including the book we discuss in this episode, Origin Story: A Big History of Everything. This episode is truly awe-inspiring, fascinating and mind-blowing.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, David Christian and I Discuss A Big History of Everything and…His book, Origin Story: A Big History of EverythingLooking for the balance in dualitiesWhat an origin story means to him as well as the guidance it offersHow modern society has lost touch with origin storiesLinking knowledge together as well as telling an ancient origin story using modern scienceKnowing who you are, where you are and what challenges you faceHaving a deep sense of awe for how things are as well as The story line of increasing complexityWhat we know & don’t know about The Big BangPure potentiality becoming energy and matterEverything that has ever been came from something that started 13.8 billion years ago, and was a million times smaller than the period at the end of a sentence.Emergence of stars, planets, and life happenedCells acting with purpose and preference and how collaboration and specialization is inherent.The origin of life and the appearance of humans, as well as the unique contribution that human beings that make the emergence of our species are all transformative events on the planet Earth.The impact of our utilization of fossil fuelsDavid Christian Links:www.mq.edu.au/bighistoryTwitterTed TalkFeals: Premium CBD delivered to your doorstep to help you manage stress, anxiety, pain, and sleeplessness. Feals CBD is food-grade and every batch is tested so you know you are getting truly premium grade product. Get 50% off your first order with free shipping by becoming a member at www.feals.com/wolf Calm App: The #1 rated app for meditation. They have meditations, sleep stories, soothing music, and Calm masterclasses with may One You Feed Guests. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolf Phlur: Get a luxurious scent made with transparent, clean ingredients. Eric created his own sampler set that you can try! Get this curated sampler set or create your own. Get 20% off your first Phlur sampler set at www.phlur.com/wolfSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Origin stories are immensely powerful. We need them. They help us place ourselves in the universe. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out out or you are what you think ring true And yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity self-pity Jealousy or fear we see what we don't have instead of what we do We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit But it's not just about thinking our Our actions matter. It takes conscious,

consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, friends. If you're looking for a free and easy gift, consider sharing this show with someone you know. It's a gift to them, and it's a big gift to us. Happy holidays to you from the one you feed. a distinguished professor of history at Macquarie University and director of the school's Big History Institute. He co-founded the Big History Project with Bill Gates. David has delivered keynotes at conferences around the world, including the Davos World Economic Forum,

and his TED Talk has been viewed more than 7 million times. He's the author of numerous books and articles, including the one we discuss on this episode, Origin Story, A Big History of Everything. Hi, David. Welcome to the show. Hi. Very pleased to be on the show. Yes, I am very happy to have you on. Your book is called Origin Story, A Big History of Everything, and it is a wonderful and fascinating book, and I loved reading it so much. And we're going to get into a lot of mind-blowing details from it here soon. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves

inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It's a lovely parable. Of course, I agree with it. But I also think like whenever we think in dualities, we actually need to look for a balance somewhere. And the bad wolf is not something I think that we need to eliminate entirely from our lives. There are times we need the bad wolf.

So I might be inclined to agree that perhaps you should give the good wolf a bit more food than the bad wolf. So I might be inclined to agree that perhaps you should give the good wolf a bit more food than the bad wolf. He seems remarkably resilient. Yes. And I agree with you. I don't think starving the bad wolf is really the idea. It's not a very kind thing to do. No, no, it's certainly not. So let's talk about your book. It's called Origin Story, A Big History of Everything. So what is an origin story to you? In what way are you using that phrase? I'm acutely aware of using the phrase in a particular sense. And it's like all these phrases.

It carries baggage and it carries different baggage for different people. But for me, what it means is the idea of unifying knowledge, the idea that in all human societies we know of, and I think this was probably true 100,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago in Lake Mungo in Australia, which is where I begin the book, people told origin stories. That is to say, older people, people who'd accumulated some wisdom and knowledge, put all of that knowledge together. And they put it together in a sort of story-like form that made it accessible to young people. Now, I remember as a kid, I grew up in Britain in a Christian culture. So as a kid, I learned the Christian origin story in kindergarten. And as I got older, I learned to understand it in more and more sophisticated ways.

And now it's not the only story that I believe in at all. In fact, I'm much more committed to a sort of scientific story. But my argument is that origin stories are immensely powerful. We need them. They help us place ourselves in the universe. They tell us what we're part of, what thing it is that we belong to. And that is a profound way of providing guidance, telling us what we need to do, where we are, what our relationships are, what our networks are, what our place is in everything.

And my argument is that what basically happened is that in the last hundred years, What basically happened is that in the last hundred years, modern societies abandoned the project of telling origin stories. We abandoned it so decisively, we've more or less forgotten. We don't even notice that we don't tell origin stories in our schools. We teach knowledge in bits and pieces. And in fact, nowhere in a school curriculum, and very rarely even in a university curriculum, do you find courses that try to link all forms of knowledge. And many people think that's a naive and impossible project. So we've lost all the virtues of origin stories because of the way we teach and we research and we organize knowledge in modern society. Right. I think some of that speaks right to the level of specialization things get into each of these fields. And that's what I find remarkable about this book and about the type of science

or history you're part of. It's called big history, right? Which is like you said, trying to sort of put it all into some sort of context. And in order to do that, you obviously have to move a few levels up from going as deep as a specialist would go. However, what I found really impressive about the book is you're still going into more detail about how a lot of things happen than most people even know. So it's not like we have to sacrifice accuracy in order to have an origin story. I'm not attacking specialization at all. Specialization has been hugely successful in the 20th century. The amount we know about our world and our universe and our planet is staggering. What I think is the real problem is that the other side of knowledge, which is linking things together, that's what's missing

from modern education. So in telling a modern origin story, it's more or less as if I'm asking a question that I think has been asked since the Enlightenment. Can we construct an account of how everything came to be that is as coherent as the accounts we find in traditional religions or traditional indigenous stories, but that's based on the knowledge of modern science. That's the challenge. And it's very difficult. And getting the balance right is very, very difficult indeed. So sometimes in origin story, I suspect I've gone a bit too deep on some things, but that's the project. Can we tell the equivalent of an ancient origin story using the staggering information that has been generated by modern science? And I like what you say about it being a way to construct

either meaning or some sense of orientation to where we fit within everything, because we know that a lot of people are rootless and untethered. Tell me how knowing this story makes you feel more a part of the world, or how it helps you to have a sense of meaning. As a school kid, I lost my faith that Christianity would tell me everything I needed to know. And like a lot of people, I felt there are other forms of knowledge I need to acquire. But of course, I got them in bits and pieces. So my world, it was as if my world got pixelated, you know, when I was in my teens. And as a scholar. And then I realized that this pixelated world of knowledge where you have lots of bits of knowledge, it's a bit like looking at the

world through a broken glass. You can't ever see what unifies everything. That, I think, can be dangerous. And it can be dangerous psychologically. The great French sociologist Emile Durkheim began his career writing a book about suicide. And his argument was that many people commit suicide because of what he called anomie, a sense of rootlessness, or not knowing what it is you're part of. They don't know what they're connected to. They don't know who they are. And I feel this modern knowledge doesn't help young people get a sense of what is the universe they are part of, what is the planet they are part of, what does it mean to be a human being, all of these things. And I think it's profoundly important at the psychological as well as an intellectual level. And it's a sort of mapping.

In fact, my first book on Big History was called Maps of Time. You'll have seen those maps of the Milky Way where there's an arrow that says, you are here. Well, that's the map I'm thinking about. The map of the universe that says, you are here. This is your place in space and time. So once you understand that place in space and time, then you know who you are, you know where you are, and you're beginning to get a sense of what are the challenges you face. And what is your task? Right. I think the other thing that, for me, an origin story or understanding

where we come from and how we get here is that it brings out the sense of mystery and awe. And I'm going to quote a Jewish mystic, Abraham Joshua Heschel, about awe, because I think it ties this stuff together a little bit. He says, awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are, but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. And I love that idea that it gives us an intuition for the dignity of all things. Yes, that's a lovely idea. I don't know that quote, but certainly I think, you know, all really good scientists understand that sense of awe. If you learn about, you know, how do single celled organisms operate with millions

of cells? How do those cells collaborate? Once you begin to get into that, it is absolutely awe-inspiring. Or when you start trying to imagine how big the universe really is, it's impossible to avoid a sense of awe. What does the Big Bang mean? I don't think we really understand. We can sort of tell a story, but telling a story is not quite the same as really understanding what's going on. So the story itself, I think, is full of awe and mystery. And then you can eventually stand back and say, well, so this huge awe-inspiring whatever it is, I am part of. And I think that is powerful. I agree completely. I think that's the next step of it is like, I belong here. I am part of this. This is my home.

That's what Durkheim was talking about. He was saying, you know, many particularly young people commit suicide because they have no sense of a home. Psychologically saying, you know, many particularly young people commit suicide because they have no sense of a home. Psychologically speaking, they're street people. And what an origin story can do is give you a sense of your home. Perfect. So one of the things you say very early on is that the heart of the modern origin story is the idea of increasing complexity. So let's start there with that part of the story. Yeah, when I first began teaching, I'm still not quite sure why I did it. I think really, I began teaching this because I wanted to get a sense of the history of humanity as a whole. In a globalized world, 7 billion humans are sort of stuck together on a raft. And we have to see the unity of humanity. But as I did

that, I found myself pushing back and back and back and thinking, well, where did humans come from? And that forces you to talk about evolution. And what is this planet we evolved on? So these questions pushed me back and back and back until I began to think that to really understand my place in the universe, I have to tell a history of the universe. So when I began teaching in 1989, the truth was I had no idea how to do that, because it's not a thing that many people do these days. So what I did is I invited people from many different disciplines, from astronomy, from geology, from ancient history, from archaeology. And they all gave great lectures.

I'm so grateful to them. But the story didn't quite hang together. So it took me several years to try to see the storyline behind increasing complexity really comes from the work, or at least I learned it, from the work of Eric Chaison, who's an astronomer, who's taught forms of big history. He calls it cosmic evolution. At Harvard and in Boston for many, many years, and that as you watch the history of the universe, what you see is the appearance of increasingly complex things. Now, put like that, it sounds very abstract, but the global society we all live in today is staggeringly complex. So this is really a story about us. How, step by step, from a universe that began very simple, do you build up to the staggering complexity of our world today?

How do you get that? How does the universe create something as complicated as my brain or your brain or the Internet? That story held everything together. And eventually I started focusing on some of those moments when something new appears. Now it's a bit arbitrary, but I focus on eight in my teaching, which works pretty well from a storytelling point of view. And you can show step by step how more complex things appeared in the universe until eventually you get to today's society. So it's a way of placing today's global society in the history of the universe. So basically what you're doing is you're describing what you're calling thresholds. We could think of them as key transition points where the universe seems to have taken another leap of complexity, right? And so threshold one is the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, or so we think. The other thing

that you do in the book that I really like is you break 13.8 billion years ago down to 13 years, eight months ago, because it gives a sense of things. And it's kind of interesting if you say, well, the universe started 13 years, eight months ago. Well, we started burning fossil fuels six seconds ago. You know, billions of years is hard to wrap your head around. That's a little bit easier to wrap your head around. And I like the way you did that. But let's start with the Big Bang. Because in a sense, you alluded to this in the earlier part of the conversation, but we have a pretty good idea of what happened really shortly after the Big Bang, but we don't really understand what on Earth happened at the Big Bang or what was there before that or what caused it to happen. Yes, I think that's true. And I think most cosmologists would probably agree that the actual moment of the Big bang we don't have hard evidence about we have

hard evidence for things that were happening within a you know a billionth of a second after the big bang and this this is this is staggering but but astronomers can actually measure um fluctuations in energy in the universe just 280,000 years after the Big Bang. And in the next decade or two, they will be able to look at events much closer to the Big Bang, probably using gravitational waves, which is a new sort of technology. But we don't know what happened at the beginning. And one of my arguments is that actually this is true of all origin stories. If you look carefully at them, at the very beginning of the story, no storyteller knows quite how to begin it. Do you begin with nothing?

If so, how do you get something out of nothing? Do you begin with something, in which case there was no beginning? Something existed forever. Is that wasn't quite not in existence. It's a sort of mushy world of potential. And then something happens so that the potential turned into reality. And that, strangely, is very close to the sort of thinking of modern quantum physics, which often you have to hedge your bets on whether something exists or not. And then there comes a moment when you can say, okay, now it exists. Yeah, it's fascinating because along with the Hindu origin stories, I'm a practicing Zen Buddhist, and we talk a lot about emptiness. Emptiness is form, form is emptiness, right? And it's that idea that what is emptiness? You know, what is nothing? Well, one of the ways someone in Zen might describe it is full of pregnant possibility is what it is. It's really crazy, but it's what's so insane is that

everything we see and can see or will see was all there in this tiny beginning that was so infinitesimally small. That's where everything came from. And you make a great point. You say that it was a point smaller than an atom. And an atom is so small you could fit a million of them into the period at the end of this sentence. So something a million times smaller than a period at the end of a sentence contained everything that is or will be, at least as far as we know now. And that's staggering. If you're looking for awe, there's a good place to start. The thing is that as weird as that sounds, if you're unfamiliar with it, the amount of evidence that points towards that conclusion is now colossal. And the main piece of evidence is just the realization. Well, actually, astronomers began to realize it in the 1930s, but they didn't take it seriously really until the 1960s was the idea that our universe is expanding. It seems to be expanding in four dimensions.

It's getting bigger. And if it's getting bigger, then, you know, in our minds, we can wind it backwards. In the past, it must have been smaller. And if we keep going, it must have been infinitesimally small. So the logic behind that is very powerful, but it's very hard to get your minds around it. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Oh, yeah, really. No really. Go to reallyn no, really.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple

podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We got a lot of complexity to go through, but this is threshold one, the universe appears, right? And then the next threshold is we get stars. So maybe give us a couple minutes on how we get from a universe that is initially just pure energy to stars. thresholds because there are certain things that seem to happen at all thresholds. And I think the best way of describing a threshold is to say that it's not something that happens to the whole universe. Most of the universe is incredibly simple today. It happens in special Goldilocks environments in the universe. Suddenly, in a particular part of the universe, you find that things that already exist recombine in new ways. And suddenly, they combine in ways that have new qualities. And that's what we see over and over again.

Emergence is the word. It's not magical because the components of the new thing were already there. It's just that they're arranged in new ways. And that's true, of course, of you and me as well. All the atoms in our body have been around for a long time. It's just they're arranged in a very particular configuration. So there are sort of rules about thresholds. And the second rule that Eric Chaison pointed out is that whenever you get these new structures emerging, you're probably going to find that there's a lot of energy maintaining those structures and flowing

through them so to understand the structures you can look at the flows of energy today we can look at the flows of fossil fuels to understand modern society for example so back to what the big bang gave us threshold one it gave us time it gave us an expanding space it gave us time. It gave us an expanding space. It gave us energy, all the energy in today's universe, because the amount of energy doesn't change. And it gave us something else, which is a number of rules. So this energy was not completely random. There were a number of rules. The rules said things like, one of the forms that energy will take is gravity, and gravity is a force that pulls everything together. So there were rules at the beginning, and they explain why the universe was not complete random. There was always a bit of structure. So that's all about thresholds in general. The second threshold, and it's a really good threshold to understand, to get a sense of how thresholds work. And I can tell the story sort of very, very quickly, actually. There's a lot of technicalities there, most of which I don't understand. About 200 or 300,000 years after the Big Bang,

the universe is cooling down. It begins incredibly hot, but as it expands, it cools. And there comes a point where atoms can form. Electrons can glom onto protons and form atoms. And we know quite a lot about the universe at that point. And the main thing we know is that it consisted of hydrogen and helium, tiny smattering of one or two other chemicals, but basically just those two elements. And it was incredibly smooth. So you can think of the universe, the early universe, as a sort of thin mist of hydrogen and helium atoms. And the whole thing was almost at exactly the same temperature. So this is very, very simple. This is what I mean by saying the early universe was

simple. There's nothing complex here. So how do you get something more complex? Well, gravity is the crucial actor of this threshold. What gravity does is it clumps matter together. So if there's an area where the hydrogen and helium atoms are slightly closer together, then that means the gravitational pull between them is slightly greater. So gravity breaks this homogenous universe into billions and billions and billions of clumps, sort of clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. And as they get clumpy, gravity gets more powerful and pulls them together. And inside these clumps, you find atoms banging into each other more and more and more as they get denser until eventually the clouds of matter start heating up again while the rest of the universe is cooling. So now you can imagine these clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms getting denser and denser and denser. Eventually the atoms break up, and then at a certain point, protons start fusing together.

And that's what happens in an H-bomb. So when that happens, when you reach that temperature at the center of each cloud, you suddenly have a huge release of energy as some matter is turned back into energy, because matter is really a sort of congealed form of energy. So now at the center of each clump, you've got a huge furnace pushing back against gravity. So these two forces sort of stabilize and you have a star. And if you think about it, a universe with stars, trillions and trillions and trillions of them, is very different from that simple early universe. You now have huge differences in temperature. You've got these hot spots in stars, where most of the universe is cold. You've got areas where matter is very concentrated, very dense, and areas where it's very empty. You've got flows of energy

now from the stars out into empty space. So this is a much more interesting universe than the early universe. And the flows of energy that are now created create the possibility of new and more interesting developments. It's totally fascinating the way we go from, like you said, this thin mist to stars. And the next thing that happens is we go from largely hydrogen and helium to lots of other elements. And we're going to go through this threshold very quickly because essentially that happens as a star dies and explodes at an even hotter level. So that protons can bang together and come together in groups of 10, 6, 16 or 90 protons to form new elements. And that happens in dying stars. So what you see is that each threshold creates the preconditions for the next threshold. Right. And so our next threshold, which happened about 4.5 billion years ago, so going back to our analogy of the

universe being 13 years, eight months ago, well, four years, six months ago, we got something that's pretty important to us, which is our sun and our solar system. Yeah, well, I mean, actually, that threshold happened much earlier in some parts of the universe. We now know there are billions and billions and billions of sort of solar system. Just that our solar system appeared four and a half billion years ago, you know, about four years and eight months on that sort of shorter timeline. And from that point on, we have to focus on our planet and our solar system because we know very little about other solar systems. But planets were created in a universe that was now chemically complex because dying stars had created new elements, all the elements of the periodic table, and they scattered

them through space. So you now have a universe in which you can create new kinds of stuff, like water and ice or dust particles. And that's the stuff that makes up planets. So planets, particularly rocky planets like Earth, are chemically much more complex than stars. Jupiter is much more like a star. Jupiter and Saturn are basically gassy, and they're mostly hydrogen and helium. But rocky planets like the Earth or Mars or Venus are chemically incredibly complex and interesting. billion years ago, or three years, nine months ago. So we're about seven tenths of a billion years, 700 million years, which is a long time. But in the times we've been talking about, it's pretty short. Something remarkable happens. And that is we get something that we call life. Yes. At this point in telling the story, I always have to remind my students that,

you know, the thresholds we're focusing on, I think they're pretty important, but there could be other thresholds. But focusing on, I think they're pretty important, but there could be other thresholds. But this is one of the most important of all, the emergence of life. And I think most astrobiologists today would say there's a very good chance that life has popped up all over the universe. But as yet, we can only study it on our own planet maybe in the next decade or two we'll get good evidence that life exists elsewhere but so from now on we really have to focus on planet earth and what we know about planet earth but we know that on this planet as you say life popped up pretty quickly pretty soon after the planet was created So it's as if this planet created the ideal Goldilocks conditions for an extraordinarily rich chemistry.

Because life really is molecules forming in more and more complex ways and interreacting in more and more complex ways. But you go on to talk about life. You say something I think is really important. And we're going to skip over how we define life because, you know, there's a little bit of debate there, but your book has some great stuff on it. But I just want to read something you say about life because I think this is really, to me, pretty fundamental. And you say, the spooky thing about life is that whole cells give the impression of acting with purpose. Something inside each cell seems to drive it as if it was working its way through a to-do list. The to-do list is simple. One,

stay alive despite entropy and unpredictable surroundings. And two, make copies of itself that can do the same thing. But all of a sudden, we have this new thing and you say, here in the seeking out of some outcomes and the avoidance of others are the origins of desire, caring, purpose, ethics, even love, perhaps even the beginnings of meaning, if that means the ability to discriminate between the significance of different events and signs. Organisms are different because it's as if they prefer some futures to others. And the future they prefer is one in which they survive long enough to reproduce. Now, again, that sounds kind of

mechanical, but we know that must be true because you and I are the heirs. We belong to a lineage that goes back four billion years. Every single one of our ancestors survived long enough to reproduce, otherwise you and I wouldn't be here. So what that means is that we are the heirs of organisms that were good at surviving and eventually good at reproducing. Right. And this is another one of those thresholds to me that seems to contain a certain amount of mystery, despite the explanations of it. This seems to hold a little bit of mystery in that we go from strictly chemical reactions, increasingly complex chemical reactions, to like you said, something that actually cares about something.

There are several points in this story where we have to be honest and say we don't have a good grip on this. One is the Big Bang. A second is the origin of life. Origin of life biologists know a huge amount now about the chemistry of the early Earth, but we still can't quite explain how you get from purposeless chemicals to something that acts with what looks like purpose. And of course, the third great mystery is consciousness, which we don't know how to explain, how to deal with it. So there are really, I think, three great areas of mystery where we're really uncertain. There are many more, of course, but one is the Big Bang. The second is the actual origin of life. I think biologists are very close to cracking this one.

But the third great mystery is consciousness. You know, the fact that I experience things, You know, the fact that I experience things, I'm aware of things, we don't know how to explain that. As I said, that doesn't mean we won't eventually come up with an explanation. We've managed to explain many things we couldn't explain in the past. But at the moment, these are areas of mystery in the precise sense that we don't really understand them. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to read something you wrote about early life, because we tend to say, all right, single-celled organisms were around a long time before anything else happened. And we might go, well, you know, okay, that's kind of pretty simple, a single-cell organism. But a cell itself is pretty amazing. And you say this, you're describing a cell. Billions of molecules swim through a thick chemical slurry being nudged and pulled by other molecules thousands of times each second. Rather like a tourist in a crowded market full of traders, touts, and pickpockets.

If you were injected in one of these molecules, you would find this a terrifying world. Enzymes will try and glom onto you and change you. Perhaps hook you up with other molecules to form a new team that can cruise the markets looking for new opportunities. Imagine millions of these interactions going on inside every cell, every second, and you have some idea of the frenetic activity that powers even the simplest of cells in the early biosphere. Yes. As I was writing the book, I should confess, I went deeper into molecular biology than I have ever before. And, well, you began this interview, Eric, by talking about awe. And my sense of awe for what happens inside single cell bacteria increased

massively. This messy, murky environment inside the cells with molecules sort of jostling into each other and bumping into each other and vibrating. Somehow or other, from all of those relationships between complex molecules, you get cells that act with a sense of purpose. It's as if all that's going on in this complicated world is sort of computational, it's computing something. And in fact, fact recently i've been reading about how e-coli bacteria you know our stomachs are full of them they're single-celled organisms how do they predict the future because in effect they do all living organisms have to kind of relate themselves to their environment in such a way as to avoid bad things happening and increase

the chances of good things happening. So it means they all have to think about the future. They all have to make bets on the future. It's as if they're all at the horse races. And most of the time, they bet well. So how do they do it? And we sort of know some of the mechanisms involved, but they work very, very well because these things survive and they navigate. So an E. coli cell, for example, it has these kind of flagella. It can wave around and it has two types of movement. It can move forward. So if things look good, you keep moving forward.

If things start looking bad, there are proteins in your membrane that detect something bad. Then what you do is you go to plan B, and plan B is to tumble. You just spin around randomly and head off in another direction. That is future thinking. It's staggering. part of the human condition and one of the things that becomes a problem is when we are trying too hard to get more of what we want and trying to get away from what we don't want and i agree with that as a truism i also often say to people like take it easy on yourself because that mechanism is embedded in every cell in your body it's inherent to life it's wired in it is it is but it doesn't guarantee selfishness in the crudest sense it does mean that all of us live in this world from a particular point of view you know i'm in australia you're in columbus so so you know what i'm going to do in the next hour or two is going to be very different from what you do. So we all have our personal perspectives.

But there are so many environments in which collaboration is the successful strategy that to say this is not to say that every living organism is selfish in the narrowest possible sense. And their collaboration is about what's to take us to our next threshold here. And so earliest life on Earth, 3.8 billion years ago, and then about 3.2 billion years go by until, you don't mark this as a threshold, but it's another big event, which is we get our first large organisms on Earth about 600 million years ago? We probably got large multi-celled organisms earlier than that, but they really take off about 600 million years ago. And this is, by the way, a very good reminder of the fact that the idea of thresholds is not a kind of rigid scientific concept. It's more like chapter headings, because I think many biologists would say that the creation of multi-celled organisms ought to be a threshold.

It's a profound change in the nature of life. But what it means is it's lots of cells collaborating and specializing. Certain types of cells, eukaryotic cells, learn to switch on and off the genes in their DNA so that they could become specialists. So some could become muscle cells, some could become nerve cells, and so on and so on and so on. In multi-celled organisms, a lot of the work of the cell is not devoted just to surviving. It's devoted to maintaining relationships with other cells and with the rest of the organism you're a part of. I can't help but think that this is the situation we live in today's world. I could not survive as a single person without fitting myself into colossal

networks of other people. I think in today's world, we're slowly turning into sort of a complex, global, 7 billion person large multicellular organism. I agree. I think it's a really useful analogy that I do think holds true to a certain degree. So we've got big organisms, and now the next big threshold is us, 200,000 years ago, or in our story that started 13 years, 8 months ago, about 100 minutes ago. So a big question around this one is, say the appearance of humans counts as a threshold in this story, is that simply a sort of species bragging? Is it just because I'm human that I think humans are so great? Or is there an objective sense in which the appearance of humans is a transformative event, at least on planet Earth. And I increasingly take the second view. I think our appearance was transformative for the history of planet Earth and is proving

to be transformative for the history of planet Earth. Because we humans do something that no other organisms did in the four billion years that preceded us, which is we share information about our environment. So we do it so precisely and in such massive volume that over time, groups of humans acquire more and more information, not just as individuals, but as groups. So we're the first species in four billion years in which information accumulates across generations. And if you add that for a living organism, information is crucial, knowing what's happening in your environment is absolutely crucial. And the more you know about the environment, the better your chances of surviving and controlling that environment. So if you have a species in which knowledge of your surroundings is growing from generation to generation,

then you have a species that's going to get more and more and more powerful, faster and faster. And today, we live at the culmination of that story where we as a species dominate change on planet Earth. What we do in the next 50 years will determine the future of millions of other species. It'll determine the future of the Earth's climate, of its oceans. For millions of years, we have become a planet changing species. So in a sense, our appearance really is a turning point for planet Earth. Certainly is for better and worse, you know, for better and worse. And what's staggering is when you talk about the next 50 years is going to decide a whole lot of things related to climate.

It's amazing that again, if you take this entire story and you go, okay, about 13 years, eight months ago, this whole thing, the universe started. And now we're fouling up planet Earth, right? We're messing with some pretty big forces, right? And that started, in essence, about six seconds ago. We need to keep balance on this because, yeah, what's happening is very sudden indeed. When we talked about thresholds, we saw that there are energy flows associated with each of these thresholds. So when humans first appear, because they share information, they get better and better at controlling energy. So by 10,000 years ago, humans are controlling flows of energy and resources all around the Earth.

Then they learn agriculture. That gives them more energy, more control over the energy flowing through the environment. And what makes today's world so different is we're tapping into fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are stores of energy that was laid down over 300 million years, that was laid down over 300 million years, mostly in the form of carbon. So as we use that staggering store of energy, it allows us to build the very complex societies of today. It allows us to build societies in which most people are much wealthier than they've ever been before. So most of us enjoy quite high living standards. But the other thing is we're throwing back into the atmosphere carbon dioxide that was buried over 300 million years. And we're doing so at a faster rate than you've seen for millions of years. the climate, because the crucial factor that determines how hot the earth is, is the mix of greenhouse gases. And what we're doing is we're pouring greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere, and that is dangerous. Right. And, you know, I think it's the hope of people who are wanting

to see a change here. And I think is that work like the type of work you're doing will give us a greater appreciation for what we're doing and how quickly we're doing it and how sudden this is. I very much hope so. And this is one of the reasons why I'm passionate about big history. I think young people today need this wider vision. I mean, let me just give you one quick illustration of what I mean. To understand climate change, basically you need to understand how climates have evolved over 4 billion years. And the crucial point is, Carl Sagan pointed this out 40 years ago, the sun has been emitting more and more energy over 4 billion years. years. And yet, the surface of the Earth has remained at a temperature between roughly 0 and 100 degrees, the temperature at which you can have liquid water. How is that possible? Well, the answer is that the Earth's atmosphere has slowly changed over 4 billion years. The amount

of carbon dioxide, the amount of greenhouse gases, which was very high when the Earth was cooler, and that was a good thing because it kept the Earth warm, has slowly diminished as the sun has become more powerful. So some beautiful thermostatic mechanisms have functioned, and we messing with the thermostats. And what those thermostats did was keep planet Earth life-friendly for 4 billion years. And that's not an easy thing to do. Mars lost life. Venus lost life. Our neighbors lost life. So this is a really tricky thing.

We are messing with those thermostats. And the first thing we'll do is just make life more and more uncomfortable for human beings. The cockroaches will survive fine. But what we're really damaging is the future for our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. And that is the great problem that we face, I think, in the next 50 years? Can we avoid degrading the future of our children and grandchildren? I could not agree more. And I think that is a good place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much. I did love the book. It was such an enjoyable read. And I just feel like my appreciation for the big story or big history is so greatly enhanced. So thank you so much for the book and the work that you're doing.

Well, thank you so much. I'm delighted that you enjoyed the book. All right. Take care. Okay. Bye. And thank you very much indeed. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

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