The One You Feed - What's Next? Our Future Stories with David Christian

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

What does the future hold? And how do we make sure we're making the best decisions for ourselves? In today's episode with David Christian, you will discover answers to these questions and much more! "What are the skills involved in trying to think about the future? To construct future stories that are closer to the truth than other future stories? Because if we don't do that. We die." - David Christian David Christian is a distinguished Professor of History at Macquarie University and Director of the school's Big History Institute.  David co-founded the Big History Project with Bill Gates and has delivered keynotes at conferences around the world, including the Davos Economic Forum.  His Ted Talk has been viewed millions of times and he is the author of many books and articles. 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! Also From the Interview with David Christian... His book, Future Stories:  What's Next The questions leading him to write about the future How we are always thinking about and telling ourselves stories about the future Thinking about the philosophy and science of time The two metaphors of time being like a river and a map How time is an important concept for complex entities Punctuated equilibrium refers to trends from the past to predict changes in the future How time is experienced in 3 ways:  natural, psychological, and social time The best predictions of the future depend on finding the most powerful trends of the past The four possible scenarios for the future of humanity David Christian links: David's Website Twitter Ted Talk By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with David Christian, check out these other episodes: Big History of Everything with David Christian (2019) What We Know But Don't Believe with Steve Hagen  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before we start, I want to give a much to all of our other Patreon members. If you'd like to experience being a Patreon member and all the benefits that come with it, go to OneUFi.net slash join. What are the skills involved in trying to think about the future, to construct future stories that are closer to the truth than other future stories? Because if we don't do that, we die. 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, 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 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is a return

guest, David Christian. He's a distinguished professor of history at Macquarie University and director of the school's Big History Institute. David co-founded the Big History Project with Bill Gates and has delivered keynotes at conferences around the world, including the Davos World Economic Forum, and his TED Talk has been viewed many, many millions of times. He's the author of numerous books and articles, including the one discussed here with Eric, Future Stories, What's Next? Hi, David. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm excited to have you back on. We're going to be discussing your latest book,

which is called Future Stories, What's Next? But before that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, 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 grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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 makes so much sense to me. And I at one time learned to meditate. And so meditation's important for me. I'm not a very religious person, but I learned it within a Buddhist tradition. And in the Buddhist tradition, virtues are things you cultivate. And so your metaphor, the story of the wolf is very similar to that Buddhist metaphor of cultivating virtues like kindness and sympathy and friendliness. And I think the idea of cultivation, I like very much. It implies feeding. You have to feed your crops to make them grow well. And I think the idea of cultivation, I like very much. It implies feeding. You have to feed your crops to make them grow well. And the same is true, I think, of virtues and of vices, because some kids grow up in environments where what is admired are vices, and they cultivate the vices. I spent a fair bit of time reading and writing about the Mongols and Genghis Khan,

and that was a fighting culture. So the wolf that was fed was a wolf that we today would not like very much. But in those days, they admired very much because everyone else was a fighter and you needed fighters on your side. Yeah. Yep. So your latest book is Future Stories, which is sort of an attempt to look at where the future is going. And your previous book was about the past. And you are one of the key luminaries in a field that's known as big history. And I'm kind of curious, what led you from big history to the future? And what does having a comprehensive overview of history do as far as helping us to see into the future? And what does having a comprehensive overview of history do as far as helping us to see into the future? In a sense, Eric, my answer is very simple. I had always been attracted by this idea of trying to see a total picture. And as a historian in through big history, I was trying to

see what the whole of the past would look like. And I've now published two or three books on aspects of big history. And so the question, what's next, was on my mind. And in a sense, naive answer to that question is, well, you've done the past, what about the future? So that's the simple answer. But, of course, there are much more complex answers as well. I have a gorgeous one-year-old granddaughter who you could just hear her yelping in the background at some point. But I think a lot about her future and what it'll be like. So that aspect of it is very important to me as well. And also the fact that the difference between the past and the future.

I'm a historian. And also the fact that the difference between the past and the future. I'm a historian, and many historians, the classic case is the great historiographer R.G. Collingwood, thought that historians had no business thinking about the future. It was improper for them to do that, because after all, there's no documents from the future. We have documents from the past, but not from the future. And I found myself just increasingly fascinated by the question, what is the future? How can you study the future? Finally, it sort of dawned on me that we will spend the rest of our lives in the future. I suddenly thought, why don't we spend more time

in our schools and universities thinking about the future. So those were the sort of questions that prompted me to wonder if I could possibly write a book about the future. You say that so much anxiety and effort, so much hope, and so much creativity are directed at the future. Indeed, it may be that most of our thinking is actually about possible futures. And I certainly know that to be true for myself. I mean, if I pay close attention to where my mind is and what it's doing, it is in the future a lot of the time. Now, I know some people have a tendency to look backwards more. I'm very much

a future-oriented person, but I think for many of us, that's where most of our spare thinking goes. It goes to the future. I think that's absolutely right. A lot of us, that's where most of our spare thinking goes. It goes to the future. I think that's absolutely right. A lot of thinking that we don't think of as thinking about the future, if you look at it, turns out to be about the future. We're speculating. What if? That's why I like the title Future Stories. We're telling ourselves stories about the future.

Now, those stories are sometimes they're just intriguing and they're kind of fun, but a lot of the time they're really important. They're a matter of life or death. Anyone involved in a business knows that the future story in which you invest in, you put a lot of money into this project. Once you commit to that story, it's really important that that story should be not too wrong. So one of the questions that fascinated me is how do we manage to get it right so often? I mean, what are the skills involved in trying to think about the future, to construct future stories that are closer to the truth than other future stories? Because if we don't do that, we die.

Our lives depend on being able to construct reasonably plausible future stories a lot of the time, and to get it right a lot of the time. Before we move into some of the ways that we think about the future, and creatures all around us think about the future, let's talk a little bit about time itself. In the book, you describe two ways that people have traditionally looked at time. You call it A-series time and B-series time. Can you kind of walk us through what those are? To think about the future, to ask questions like, is it a thing or is it a concept or is it a

dimension? You have to think about time because, of course, thing or is it a concept or is it a dimension? You have to think about time because, of course, the future is that part of time that we haven't seen yet. So you have to spend a bit of time looking at the philosophy of time. And that is fiendishly complex, but also absolutely fascinating. You know, as a big historian, I dip into so many different fields. So I had to kind of wade into the philosophy and science of time. And it's very mysterious and very spooky. It's a bit like wandering into a jungle.

And it's full of paradoxes and contradictions. And the truth is, we don't have a good, universally accepted theory of time. You know, different disciplines have their own approaches. universally accepted theory of time. You know, different disciplines have their own approaches. And these two metaphors of time as a river and time as a map seem to me the simplest and easiest ways into that very complex territory. Because the metaphors themselves are pretty easy to grasp, and they're pretty close to our own experience. I mean, time is a river, as we all have all the time, of time as a sort of flow. We're being carried along by something, you know, and we see new things. So in the book, I use the metaphor of Huckleberry Bin on a raft floating down the Mississippi, and new things come into view. Then the other metaphor is time as a map.

So if we think about the future, we often have in our minds something that's a bit like a map. It's a bit like the sense of what we might say if we were looking back at our own lives in a hundred years' time. So, you know, this happened here, that happened in that year. So those are the two kind of metaphors of time. And by exploring what philosophers and scientists and theologians, what they've said about those metaphors, I felt was one of the simplest ways into this kind of philosophical jungle about time. It does yield some answers to the question, what is the future? As we know from physics, there isn't anything in fundamental physics that points to a direction of time. That's accurate, correct?

Yep. If you look at the universe in the most fine-grained way, if you look at quarks or bits of energy, it really, the question, what does time mean for a quark? It's not a significant question. We're projecting our own experiences on subatomic entities. So it's not clear that the idea of time means anything for them. I don't pretend to be a scientist or a philosopher, but I think the simplest way to respond to that is to think that time is, in a sense, it's change. But change is something that really matters for complex entities, complex structures in the universe, because they will eventually break down. So that our sense of time has a lot to do with our sense of being born, of growing, and eventually of dying. And we use a word like time to capture that sense, but it's not a word that has any

significance, really. They're probably meaningless questions. Yep. You quote the Japanese Zen master, Dogen, who talks about time. And I will say that I'm a Zen student. And when I hear Dogen talk about time, I'm always like, what is he talking about? You get into these deeper questions about time. And it does get, as you said, very difficult and very jungle-like. But for most of us, we have a pretty clear sense of time, right? Like yesterday happened yesterday. Tomorrow's going to happen tomorrow. I can think about the future. I can plan for the future. So let's move our conversations in that direction. What I found really interesting though, is you talk about how

the fact that every living thing cares about the future. Say a little bit about why that is and what you mean by living things, because you literally mean every living thing. Yes. And so there's quite a few pages in the book, as you remember, about E. coli bacteria and how they cope with the future and about the sort of stories they tell themselves. If what I've just said is correct, which is that time is an important concept for complex entities, or it's a concept that's significant for complex entities. It's a concept that matters for living entities. So I can't in any even metaphorical sense imagine that the sun cares about the future. The sun is a complex thing. It will eventually break down. It's like a rock. I mean, a rock doesn't really care if it's being eroded away, so it'll vanish. But living things

do. Now, again, I'm talking metaphorically. Many biologists would feel a bit queasy about the idea of E. coli having a purpose. It's not quite what I'm saying, but I'm saying something very close to it, which I'm saying they behave as if they preferred some futures to other futures, and they seem to put effort into creatively steering towards the futures they prefer. Now, we can define in very general terms the futures they prefer that all living things prefer. They are the futures in which they survive longer. Okay, so given the choice between jumping off a cliff and not jumping off a cliff, I'm willing to give a bet that most humans will, unless they're in a really bad way, will prefer not to jump off the cliff. The same is true for the bacteria. Given a sniff that there's food in that direction, they'll head in that direction to survive. And then the second goal is to reproduce, because one of the really distinctive things about living things is they reproduce, so that eventually the jig will be up. You know, you can't go on making guesses about the future forever. But the trick of living things is they reproduce. They create copies of themselves or near copies of themselves

so that if I die, the copies will carry on. And that is the whole foundation for natural selection and the vast creativity and this magical diversity of living organisms that we see in the world today. In the book, you show how E. coli, in essence, think about the future and how they plan for the future and how they adjust for it. And again, that sounds on its surface like that's impossible. But you say that these living things, they have purposes and goals. And there's no way that we can go into all the detail about how a cell does all of this. But I wonder if you

could share a little bit about what you found most fascinating about what cells are able to do. Yeah, let me have a go. And again, we need to be very careful with the language here because I don't think we can attribute purpose to a bacterium, partly because we're not sure what the word purpose really means. Oh, I get lots of E. coli coming to me for life coaching. They're looking for their purpose. They're not sure what they're doing with their lives. But what living organisms do is they seem to discriminate between alternative futures. There's a future in which it's in a part of your belly where it thinks, yay, this is great. You know, I've never had so much food in my life. You know, I'll lap it up. There's times when they think, whoops, I've been carried to a bit of Zimmer's belly where

there's not much food. They seem to care. They act as if they care, whereas rocks don't. Now, the question is, how do they do that? And I think we have to go back to natural selection again. The idea of natural selection, going back to Darwin, often looks kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, it actually is. If you make copies of yourself, but add one more thing, the copies are never 100% perfect. That guarantees diversity. Now you ask the question, of all the diverse offspring of E. coli, which are the ones that are most likely to have descendants? And the answer is the ones that are equipped with a sort of biochemical machinery that steers them in the directions that allow them to live longest. Does that make sense? It therefore increases their

chance of surviving. So that's a slightly different way of describing what natural selection is saying. Now, what that means is that natural selection is guaranteed to build into all living organism some sort of machinery that can discriminate between good futures and bad futures. And I've already defined what a living organism thinks is a good future or a bad future. So if we look inside a cell, there's no thinking going on. We can say that definitively because to think, you need billions of neurons and each neuron is bigger than an E. coli cell. So it's not thinking. But there is a biochemical machinery there that includes DNA, RNA, and lots of proteins that relate to each other in such a way that they behave a bit like a computer. And they also receive information. Information is crucial for all of this.

And they can take that information and they compute it and they can act on decisions. So that, for example, they receive from a protein that's sticking through the skin or the membrane of the molecule and says, whoa, I can see some aspartate, which is food, in that direction. That can be processed inside the cell, and it leads, a bit like a computer, to a decision to keep going in that direction. This machinery is staggeringly elaborate, and biologists and biochemists have teased out a hell of a lot of it, but we're still only at the beginning of our understanding of how complex it is. That shouldn't surprise us. It's evolved over four billion years in gazillions of organisms. So I try to give a glimpse of how that machinery works

in one of the chapters of future stories. It's absolutely fascinating. You actually do a really good job for a non-biologist. Maybe that's why, since you're not a biologist, you do a really good job of describing it in ways that are understandable to non-scientists like myself. I hope so. I wrote it because I was trying to understand it myself as a non-biologist. But it absolutely fascinates me. The payoff to it all is that even something so small that we can't see it with the naked eye can have kind of biochemical machinery that's capable of doing some pretty sophisticated

calculations and lots of them. And in fact, it does all the things that computers can do. You know, there are kind of if this, then, if this and this and this, then, if this or that, then, you know, so it does all those things. And there's a sense of memory, not memory like in the way we would think of it, but they know something that happened before this very moment. Yes. I mean, to make use of information, you need to be able to retain it for just long enough so that, for example, sensor molecules that stick through the membrane, if they detect the molecule they're looking for in the outside world, they will change their shape slightly.

Now, that change of shape is felt inside the membrane, and that gives a signal. So as long as the protein, the sensor protein, is in this slightly different posture, if you like, it's holding a memory that there is this food molecule outside. if you like. It's holding a memory that there is this food molecule outside. And all of this machinery is immensely important because it's going on in every cell of my body and your body every second. So it's the foundation for all future thinking. We could not live if every cell in our body was not making these sort of calculations to ensure its own survival. Yeah, it's staggering the complexity that is in a single cell, let alone a human being. And then you extrapolate that out and you start going, well, humans are sort of like cells to society.

And the complexity, you know, is even further out. It's really kind of an awe-inspiring thing. Yeah, indeed. And I use this as a metaphor, but I wrestle with the thought about whether it's a metaphor or a pretty direct description of the way reality works. Single-celled organisms like E. coli have their own mechanism for discriminating between good and bad futures. But once you put billions of cells together, then each cell has to have a second apparatus that helps it relate with all the other cells because it now depends on the survival of the whole thing.

And that is so true that some cells, when ordered to commit suicide, will do so for the better good of the whole organism. So all of these single cells have to learn how to live together. Now you think of human beings, multi-celled organisms, and we now live in a world where a few hundred years ago, what happened in a particular part of the world had no impact at all on another part of the world, but suddenly the world has changed. We're suddenly in a world where a war on the border between Russia and Ukraine affects wheat prices, it affects interest rates everywhere in the world. So we're now in a globally connected world. It's a bit like the first cells that began to collaborate to form the first multi-celled organisms.

And the big question is, can we develop systems of morality, of communication, of information that allow us to collaborate? Because we're now getting to the point in the world where the survival of humanity as a whole is vital for the survival of each individual and certainly for the survival of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. So we're moving in the direction of multicellular organisms. And one of the predictions I make for the future is that within just a century or two, we'll be pretty close to that because we humans will find that the decisions we make will shape the future of planet Earth, will have become planet managers,

and planet Earth will have become a conscious planet. Okay, that's a metaphor, but it's one of those metaphors that's pretty close to being a literal description of reality. 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.

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It's an interesting point when you zoom out a little bit, which is what I think Big History allows you to do. It allows you to zoom out and go, all right, let's look at things from a much bigger perspective. a blink of an eye, literally, that humans have been able to impact each other in the ways that we do from a networked perspective. It's easy to feel a real sense of fear about what's coming, and I do think we are facing some very scary things. But from the big picture time frame, we're just learning how to interact with each other. We haven't been doing it in the way that we are now very long. And that leads me to a idea that you talked about in the book that I thought was very interesting called punctuated equilibria. Can you talk a little bit about what that is? Because I think it speaks to this idea. Yeah.

Let me go back one step. Yeah. Let me go back one step. Yeah. Earlier in the book, when I talk about the future, one of the first rules is there is no evidence for the future. We have no evidence for the future. The only way we can construct plausible stories about the future is by looking at the past, which is very paradoxical. It means we have to look backwards to think about the future. And what we look for in the past is trends.

So the idea of punctuated equilibrium is linked to the idea of trends. And in the past, you can see trends. Some of them are very, very regular, very powerful, like every morning the sun rises, you know, or every year the government will try to tax me. You know, I will eventually die. These are predictions we can make with great confidence because the trends are so powerful. The idea of punctuated equilibrium was really first formulated by the biologists Niles Aldridge and Stephen Jay Gould in the, I think it was the 80s. And they were talking about how species evolve. And Darwin seems to have thought that evolution was a sort of

steady, gradual process that was going on all the time, that all species were slowly changing. Now, there's some truth in that. But what Eldridge and Gould said is, no, no, actually, the history of living organisms, and I'm now going to project it on a broader history, actually changes pace. Sometimes it's very fast, sometimes it's very slow. So there are moments when suddenly, quite suddenly, a new species appears and flourishes. And then there are periods when not much seems to happen. I mean, in teaching big history, I eventually came to realise that that sort of pattern is characteristic of all complex things, including the sun. You know, it was created quite suddenly. It will be stable for about nine billion years, but then it will

get erratic and then it'll collapse quite suddenly. And that's true of our own lives too, of course. So in looking to the future, we should not just project a single line into the future. We should expect what they call punctuations, sudden changes, perhaps bad changes, but also perhaps very good changes in the future. And we can be damn sure the next hundred years is going to be pretty rough. But the good news, I think, is that most of the people who think very seriously about the possibility of existential crises, total collapses, I think would agree that the possibility of a total collapse at the moment looks pretty limited. So that I agree with you completely. I think what will happen is that we will make big mistakes. They will look

catastrophic on a global scale. But over a century or two, we will learn how to be good planetary managers. And that's partly because we live in a phase of human history at which things are happening very, very fast. We live during a sort of punctuation in human history. Yeah, yeah. Things are happening extraordinarily fast. And as you say, at one point in the book, that it's in some ways easier to predict what might be happening on huge global timescales than it is the next couple of hundred years. And of course, it's the next couple of hundred years that we care about the most because, as you mentioned, your granddaughter is in the other room and we're concerned about it. My son is 23 and so maybe he's going to have children and we are worried about what is coming. But I thought this idea of zooming out a little bit further sort of gives us a sense of like, well, you know, like you said, the next hundred years might be rough, but there's a lot to show that we may figure this out.

Yeah. Actually, going back to the metaphors of rivers and maps, the two metaphors contradict each other in many ways. Despite that, all of us live in both worlds a lot of the time. So, that projection of the future is a sort of map of the future. All of us, I think, have our internal maps of what the future may be like. Yeah. I want to change direction a little bit, and I want to talk about how we experience time. There was a period of time where anthropologists thought that perhaps older indigenous societies, they didn't have time. There were certain anthropologists who look at their language and said, well, they don't seem to have words for this. And more and more, I think you point out

that we are thinking that, no, we just didn't quite understood how it is. But nonetheless, there is still an enormous diversity in the way different communities have experienced and described time and the past and the future. And you say that one way of explaining this diversity is to see human experiences of time in sort of three distinct rhythms, the rhythms of natural time, psychological time, and social time. Can you talk a little bit about what those three are? Because I think this is really interesting. Yeah, that chapter, which was trying to say something sensible about how the first human societies may have experienced time and the future was almost the most difficult chapter of all to write because I had to wade into that rich and complex anthropological literature. But for what it's worth, I ended up not accepting, and I don't think many anthropologists today accept the idea that the sense of time was absent in societies from what I now like to call the foundational era of history rather than the prehistoric era of history. One way of thinking about the similarities and differences between

how different societies have thought about time is to see that time is experienced in three different ways, as you said. First is natural time, so that's the seasons, day and night, and that's not something we have much control over, although even day and night, you know, by having electric lights, we have some control over our experience of that. The second is psychological rhythms. Now, these are very different from natural rhythms, most of which are fairly regular. Psychological rhythms can be all over the place. You know, how does time move in dreams?

How does it move, you know, if you eat magic mushrooms or drink or if you're very happy or you're very miserable. So that's psychological time. And there's no reason to think that humans 200,000 years ago were radically different in either psychological time or natural time. But there's a third experience of time, and that is through our relations with other humans. So if you look at a diary, the diary of a very busy politician, it's crammed with events. Their sense of time is governed by the behavior of other human beings. Now, that is the experience of time that has probably changed most in human history. From a world in which you lived in communities of maybe 20 or 30 or 40 people, the natural rhythms and the psychological rhythms probably dominated your sense of time.

In today's world, we are so interconnected, so networked, that the behavior of other humans is slowly becoming more and more dominant. So if I fly from Sydney to London, I'll get to London, my body will tell me it's time to go to bed, my watch will probably tell me, no, no, no, I'm arriving at 9am at Heathrow, and therefore I need to act as if I'm wide awake. So for me, that's the best way of explaining why human experiences of time seem to be so various, even though the fundamental makeup of humans has not changed that much. And one of the payoffs to all of this is that in a world in which social time does not dominate your experiences, cyclical rhythms are very important. And it's easier to think of the universe as a fairly

permanent place apart from those cyclical rhythms, that fundamentally things don't change. In our world, where we're so interconnected, not just in time, but also in space, we're connected with previous generations through history, we can see time. We have a sense of change that may not have been anything like as strong in much earlier societies. Right, right. And I think it's true. Social time dominates natural time and psychological time for us, because we override natural time and psychological time over and over and over again in order to keep up our social time. You know, and by social time, we just mean I have to be at work at 9 a.m. and my day it ends at this time.

And I have plans for dinner with so-and-so at this time. And, you know, we're just we are on everyone else's or our collective time. It is true how much we override those other two types of time. Think of the industrial rhythms of factories. This sense of social time taking over the rhythms of our lives is actually quite modern. If you go to a peasant village a few hundred years ago, yes, social time is important. I mean, so that, you know, the festivals, you don't have much choice as a person about when the festivals happen or when the harvest happens or when the ploughing happens. Nevertheless, you don't need a watch with a second hand.

In our world, you probably do, because the scheduling is now so tight. We are so locked within social rhythms. And that is really an aspect of the modern world. social rhythms. And that is really an aspect of the modern world. In a peasant, most of your life was dominated by the behavior of maybe 100, 200 other people in your village. Occasionally, outsiders made a difference. But now, every day of my life is affected by the lives of millions of others. Sorry, that was my little one. She wants to come see grandpa, huh? Yes. She's just visiting for a week. Okay. You said something a minute ago that I thought was really interesting that tied back to another

question I had. And you said in the book that we are living in the first period of human history for which the assumption of a fundamental stability is false. So that up until now, our ancestors had a sense that the world was essentially stable and didn't change a whole lot. And we now know that's not true. What are the implications of that on us? Well, one of them is that our sense of history, our sense of history as an evolving timeline is probably something fairly new. The idea that there's a fundamental stability to the universe, that all people have wisdom because the world

has not changed that much. Of course, it's changed in some ways, but not that much. All that seems to have gone. I mean, we now live in an era where for young people, the wisdom of the old is probably outdated wisdom. You know, it's the young people who tell the old people how to work their mobile phones or their apparatuses. We in the modern world all live in this world of change, like fish in the ocean, just all around us. So it seems so natural. So it takes a stretch of imagination, I think, to project yourself back into a world where, yes, there was change, there was birth, there was death, there was marriage, there was sickness and so on. But

the universe as a whole was thought of as stable. I mean, think of a discipline like geology, for example. Not until the 17th century, and that's quite recent in world history, that some geologists began to think that maybe the landforms had changed over time. It's not until the 19th century that biologists began to take seriously the idea that living organisms had changed. Before that, they assumed that living organisms were the way they had been created. The landform organisms were the way they had been created. The land forms were the way they'd been created. So 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.

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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. You talk about some principles that we can use when we sort of look forward to the future, or we try and anticipate certain futures. Could we talk through what those are? Yes.

One of the reasons I had such fun writing this book was the thought that if thinking about the future, constructing good future stories is so important to our lives, why aren't there classes about the future in our schools and our universities? And I realized, do I have any sense of the basic rules of future thinking? And the answer is no. No one ever taught them to me. So I thought, is it possible to sort of write down some basic principles? And so these are just the ones I came up with, but I think they sort of work pretty well. The first is a negative one, which is we have to take seriously the fact that we have no evidence,

no records. I have a birth certificate, but I don't yet have a death certificate. That's the difference between the past and the future. If you'd asked a physicist two centuries ago whether we can know the future, they'd have said, in principle, yes, because physics was deterministic, but it's just ignorance that means we can't. Nowadays, modern science argues that no, the universe actually is not deterministic. In other words, the future is not even in principle predictable in detail. So that's the first principle. We have no evidence about the future. So the second one is, it's kind of paradoxical, is that if you want to learn about the future, you have to look at the past. And we've already talked about this. And this this why my preface includes that wonderful picture illustrating

Dante's Inferno, which is how the soothsayers were punished by having their heads twisted around. Well, that's actually a very good metaphor for how we look at the past. So the third principle is that in contrast to thinking about the past, where we can change our understanding of the past, but I don't think many people believe we can actually change the past. In the future, what we do now will affect the future. So the stories we tell now about the future will change the future. Whether, you know, the number of people who take climate change seriously will have an impact on the future of climate change. That's the third principle. That's very different from history, where you can't change history, you can change how we think about it. And then the

fourth is the practical implications of all of that. And the main one is that the way you get from the past to the future is by looking at trends. And I've talked about that already. The trick there is to discriminate between different types of events in the world. Now, there are domains of reality where we see very strong, clear trends. One is the sun rises in the morning, for example. Now, most of us, when we see trends like that, we're willing to bet a lot of money. I'm willing to bet a lot of money that tomorrow the sun will rise. But there are so many domains in which that's not true. There are domains in which there's a pretty good probability. I mean, demographic historians, for example, will predict how many people there will be on Earth in 50 years' time within an aeroband, but with quite a lot of confidence.

And then there are areas in which we can't really say anything sensible at all. I mean, what are the odds on a plane crash landing into my house during the next five minutes? Now, that's an area where I have so little idea, it doesn't even worry me. So those are the basic principles, and they all depend on a sensitivity to how regular trends are in the past. And our best projections of the future, and even E. coli's best predictions, depend on finding the most powerful trends, the most regular trends in reality, and then kind of riffing on that. So climate change, for example, the science is now so good that that looks like, well, I break the future into sort of four domains of probability. It's not the most probable, but very, very probable indeed. You know, anyone who bets on the horses knows a lot

about the difference between favorites and near favorites. And I gather the Kentucky Derby, someone made a lot of money recently by betting on a long outsider. That's right. Well, you've got a wonderful little part in the book where you talk about Sir Isaac Newton, who lost a bunch of money he invested in something called the South Sea Bubble in 1720. He ruefully commented, I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men. That is such a great quote, and really speaks to economic forecasting is one of those areas, I think, that people often speak very authoritatively as if they know what's coming. But, you know, the stock market seems more like a big casino than anything else.

And one that you have far less understanding of what the odds are than we do in a casino. We at least know what the odds are on, say, a game of craps. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think one of the payoffs to this sort of argument is that any domain in which the future depends on the decisions of human beings lies probably somewhere in the middle range of regularity. I mean, there are regularities to human behavior, but it's still pretty unpredictable. And that means that we can be pretty sure about the impact of increased greenhouse gas emissions on climate change. What we're much less sure about is whether politicians in the next few decades will make the decisions necessary to reduce those greenhouse gas emissions. So the

whole area of politics and history, the whole domain in which humans decide what will happen is one of the less predictable domains of all. That's a bit scary. And those domains in the middle, by the way, those are the domains which generate most anxiety and fear. Because if it's absolutely certain, we don't worry about it. I'm not worried about that plane crashing into my house in the next five minutes because I haven't a clue. But it's in the middle range that we develop most anxiety. And that anxiety itself drives a lot of future thinking. It explains, for example, why CEOs of companies are often willing to pay economic forecasters a lot of money to make confident forecasts, forecasts that are much more confident than either the forecasters or the CEOs know are

really justified. Right, right. You talk about how, as living organisms, we seek out trends, we make our best guess of what's coming, and then we place our bets. And you tell a lovely story in the book about Krishna and Arjuna that speaks to this. Could you tell that? I've been looking for a way to fit this into the podcast for years now. You've finally given me my opportunity. for a way to fit this into the podcast for years now. You've finally given me my opportunity. Well, I'm no expert on it. I know it in a very amateurish way, but it's very beautiful. And for me, I realized as I was writing about time as a river and time as a map, that actually it provides a beautiful story about the relationship between the two. Because Prince Arjuna is lined up in an army just before a massive battle. And his charioteer is Krishna, perhaps the greatest god of all. And Arjuna is

anxious. He's worried because what's going to happen in the next few hours looks as if it'll be terrible. He can see over in the other army, he can see uncles. He can see close relatives. And it's going to be absolutely terrible. So this is the anxiety of the future that we all experience. So what does he want? What he wants is to be able to take time out so that he can perhaps glimpse a map of the future. He's in time as a river. It's carrying him inexorably towards what looks like a disaster. But what he wants is time as a map. He wants a map

of what's going to happen so he can have some glimpse. So he says to Krishna, please, in effect, stop time, stop the challenge. So Krishna does that. Now, I imagine them in some sort of ante room, which is not in time. It's not out of time. But they have a conversation. And in that conversation, Krishna gives Arjuna just a glimpse because Krishna, of course, can see the maps. He sees all of time. So he gives Arjuna just a glimpse. And what he sort of says is, you shouldn't be so anxious because everyone on that battlefield is going to die. I am going to

kill them. I know that. But they will never really die, nor will you ever really die. Because in the map of time, nothing changes. You know, this is what William James called the block universe. Arjuna says to Krishna, look, I want to opt out. I'm going to throw away my bow and arrow. I'm not going to fight. Krishna says, you cannot not fight. Now, that's a way of saying to all of us, if you're alive, you act. You cannot not act. Even non-acting is acting. You have to act. You have to engage in the battle. But, he says, strike home with confidence. Act with confidence. And Arjuna goes back, stabilised, a bit more centred, because he's had a slight glimpse of the future. So I take that as a beautiful metaphor for the fact that all of us

live in the river of time. What we desperately want is a glimpse of the future. But those glimpses are rare. They're hard to get. The gods, if they exist, will give us tiny little glimpses, that's all. Yeah. You say say in the book do not be troubled as krishna told arjuna but strike which is after we i was trying to remember the phrase yeah after we do our best forecasting we act confidently let's now talk about four potential scenarios for the future of humanity. So again, one of the things that we're most concerned about is we're concerned about like the future as in like, what's going to happen at work tomorrow? And is my trip to Europe next month going to go good. But the other thing that we get very concerned about is again, these existential, where is this whole thing going with us humans?

And you come up with four scenarios based on a futurist by the name of Jim Dator, Dator? I'm not quite sure how to pronounce the gentleman's name. You talk about these are sort of four scenarios that we as humanity might be facing. Yeah. Future stories, we can never guarantee. There are no guarantees that any of our stories are correct. So what we aim for in trying to think about the future, it's a bit like betting on horses. We put as much effort as we can into studying past trends, and we try to make the best predictions. But if we're serious about predictions, we know that the odds that our prediction will be true are actually pretty limited. So it makes sense never to offer just one scenario, but to offer several.

And there is this whole world of futurists, of people who specialize in thinking about the future and future scenarios. And they often talk about scenarios. So that's the approach I adopted. And Jim Data is very famous. He used to run workshops in which he asked people how they imagine the future. And he came up with four. Now, I've sort of modified them a bit for my own purposes. But let me see if I can remember them. You've got the boat. I can help. Yeah. The first is existential catastrophe.

And that we need to take seriously. For the first time in human history, since actually this happened in my lifetime, we have developed weapons that could ruin the biosphere in 24 hours. Now, we all know this. We're also developing biological weapons that could do much the same. We can't rule this out entirely. There are other existential crises, but I mean, those who look at these reckon that the most likely way in which human history will end in the next century or two is through overpowerful technology that we're not in control of. This is a sort of sorcerer's apprentice scenario. Most of them,

I think, agree that complete collapse is unlikely. More likely is a sort of partial collapse. I mean, it could be, you know, return to societies of small numbers of people eking out a tough existence without so many of the good things that the modern era has offered, but with many of the bad things the modern era has offered. That's the first scenario. The second, this is very much from Jim Dator's work, societies that are probably fairly authoritarian, but are controlled by governments aware of the dangers to humanity. So this is disciplined sustainability. That's not the phrase I use in the book, but Ursula Le Guin's wonderful book, The Dispossessed, describes two planets, one of which is a fairly ascetic environment run by anarchists, in which people actually

live not bad lives, but materially they look pretty primitive by our standards. The third is for anyone, you know, with a tinge of sort of green sympathies in the modern world is the real utopian scenario. And that's one in which the next century has its rocky moments, certainly. next century has its rocky moments, certainly, but eventually more and more governments realize that their own future depends on building a sustainable world, and that depends on collaborating with others. So this is a scenario in which human beings successfully create a sort of global superorganism, and they work work together and there'll be friction, there'll be complications, but basically within a century or two, we become pretty competent planetary managers. And that's a scenario in which we may be able to retain many of the material

advantages of the modern world, but we'll also surely live in a moral realm where the idea of having more material goodies is no longer dominant in the way it is in our world. And the fourth scenario is one that I think many sort of economic conservatives today take very seriously, which is that actually things aren't as bad as they look. Just let capitalism rip. And the market will, as problems loom, like greenhouse gas emissions, the market will eventually take care of them. And the future will be one of more and more growth. I think even most economic conservatives would concede that there actually are going to be some limits,

so that populations are already slowing down. There will have to be some sort of curb on greenhouse gases. But I think they would argue that that we're already beginning to see businesses all around the world introduce those curbs for good economic reasons because they see their own business future. Now, you can kind of ask questions about where each of these scenarios will leave us in 100 years' time. And that's really what that part of the book tries to do. Yeah. Everyone's favorite, I say that with the tongue in cheek. Some people he is absolutely a hero to, to other people he's a villain to. But Elon Musk today was talking about how he thinks the biggest risk to our future is slowing birth rates. He says the environment will be fine. And

you know, this is a guy who clearly with Tesla and his solar company has made investments in trying to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, but he was very concerned about the declining birth rate. It was one thing that struck me in your book was this idea that population is starting to slow down after essentially growing for all of history in a way that we're actually nearing a point where population will stabilize. Yes. And I think that is very, very clear indeed. I think if you ask any demographer who thinks about global futures, there's a very broad consensus. I'm not saying anything original in saying this. And the story of human population growth, we can tell the story very simply in a

sense. Humans, what makes us different is our ability to share information and accumulate more and more information. Information gives you control over the resources that surround you. So that's the impulse that eventually has given us control over planet Earth as a species, the first species on Earth. But as group by group, populations got slightly better at managing their environments. And of course, there were lots of capsids along the way. It meant that humans spread into more and more niches. So in the foundational era of human history, that was

probably the main driver of population growth. Very, very slow. So that by 10,000 years ago, there were probably, you know, the best estimates are there are probably six or seven million people on Earth. And then agriculture kicks in. And agriculture allows much larger populations in a given era. So that really kickstarts a rise in population growth until two centuries ago, there was almost a billion people. And now there are almost eight billion. So this is a rising curve with two kinks in it. The reason why populations rose so rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries is very clear, is that modern technology

and increased production of food lowered death rates. But in the past, birth rates were always high. And the reason is very simple. If you're a peasant, the one resource you have control over is the number of hands in your household. So for every peasant family, having the maximum number of children possible was crucial. So fertility rates were always very high. So from the late 18th century, death rates begin to fall, but fertility rates remain as high as ever. And that explains the staggering increases in population in the 19th and 20th centuries. And then from,

I think it was about 1968, 69, I can't remember exactly, for the first time, growth rates begin to slow. And the reason for that is that fertility rates begin to fall. As more and more people become urban wage earners, the fertility rules change. You don't want as big a family as possible. What you want is a few healthy, well-educated kids. So the fertility rates began to fall. And now we're at the point where after this two centuries of staggering growth, we're back to some sort of equilibrium. And I think most demographers would predict with a considerable level of confidence that by the end of this century, global population rates will have slowed. They'll be faster in some areas, in Japan, populations are already declining in a number of other countries. But I can't agree with Elon Musk that this poses a threat. It's actually one of the most positive pieces of news in the world today that at least in

one area, the number of humans, the pressure we put on the biosphere shows signs of not accelerating into the distant future. Well, David, thank you so much. We are out of time, but as always, it is such a pleasure to talk with you. I enjoyed the new book so much. I feel like reading one of your books, I learn more in its pages than I do in most any other book. You've condensed so many different ideas and disciplines and all of it into it. It's really, it's such an edifying thing for me to read and to get to talk with you. So thank you. Thank you very much indeed. I've really enjoyed our conversation. Yes. And I will let you get back to your lovely grandchild.

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