0:00

It's

0:02

hardcore history. Addendum.

0:07

I hear from many of you that say just turn

0:09

on the microphone and talk and it'll be

0:11

a good show and we'll be glad to get it.

0:14

So today will perhaps be a

0:16

test of this theory's validity.

0:21

What's held up today's show for

0:23

a while now is probably

0:26

some old training in a news business

0:28

that doesn't exist anymore.

0:30

Where as a youngster

0:32

learning the ropes, you would

0:35

come back to your editor with some

0:37

facts, some information, some quotes,

0:40

some background stuff. And you'd

0:43

present it to them. And

0:45

they'd say, Okay, what's the story?

0:49

Right? Meaning, all these elements

0:51

that you have have the makings for a good

0:54

news story. But what are you trying to say? I mean,

0:56

is this a man bites dog story? Or is

0:58

it a dog bites man story? I mean, you

1:01

know, you don't know. A lot

1:04

of the more complicated stories require

1:06

somebody telling you what the story is,

1:09

what does all this mean, right? All this information

1:11

you're throwing my way, what am I supposed to think?

1:14

And so I was trying to apply that to today's

1:16

show. And it just completely discombobulated

1:19

the entire thing, because I'm not

1:21

trying to tell you what to think at all, nor

1:24

do I have a point.

1:27

Sometimes I'll

1:29

talk to people, you

1:30

know, via social media or whatever,

1:32

and they'll say, be fun to have dinner with you. Well,

1:34

this is what dinner might be like. I'm just

1:37

warning you. Bunch

1:39

of different things that have nothing to do with

1:41

anything else. I mean, I used to love

1:44

Larry King's newspaper column back

1:46

in the 80s, 1980s. At

1:49

that time, Larry King was like the busiest man on

1:51

earth. He did TV, he did radio, he

1:53

did a newspaper column. And looking

1:56

at him now, I have no idea how he accomplished

1:58

it all, but he certainly organized

2:00

his projects in a way that,

2:02

you know, took into account how busy he was because the newspaper

2:04

column was, well, I

2:07

don't even know how to describe it to you. Imagine

2:10

40 sentences. Each sentence

2:12

have no connection to any

2:14

of the other sentences in the piece.

2:16

So it would say something like, before

2:19

President Reagan heads off to this summit

2:21

with the Soviet Union, he needs to bear

2:23

in mind, you know, the words of Alexander

2:27

Solzhenitsyn, you know, and

2:29

then the next one would be I love the way Jackie

2:31

Kennedy's wearing her hair now. It takes

2:33

years off her life. You know, it would

2:35

just be, you know, the Yankees have won five

2:38

in a row. Keep up this pace and they'll make

2:40

the playoffs. I mean,

2:42

at the same time, you kind of understood why he

2:44

did it, right? It's a way for a very busy guy to

2:46

churn out a newspaper column.

2:48

And that's maybe what my thing is going to sound like

2:51

today, where it's all the elements of a good

2:53

news story without the reporter telling you what

2:55

the story is, because I don't know what the story

2:57

is.

2:59

This actually started off as a completely different

3:01

piece with a bunch

3:03

of different strands, all of whom, all of

3:06

which went nowhere. They

3:08

just sort of drifted off into

3:10

the ether. But they all at least

3:13

emanated from the same point. I thought that was progress. If

3:15

I could just tie up all those loose threads, we'd have a heck

3:17

of a show. And that's what I spent the

3:19

last two weeks trying to do. It doesn't really work.

3:22

And as, as I'm trying to do this as

3:25

is normal with an art project like this, it

3:27

takes on a life of its own and develops in an area

3:29

completely, you know, often one direction

3:31

from the original piece of I have a completely different show

3:33

in front of me right now.

3:35

And much more the way of notes than

3:38

I'm accustomed to using and I find that if you have

3:40

more than just a couple of notes, it's

3:43

less helpful than having no notes at all. all

3:45

drowning in notes, I don't even know where to look at

3:47

none of its, as I said, connected to anything else.

3:50

It's a whole bunch of facts, figures, interviews,

3:52

quotes, and data, and no editor to

3:54

tell me what the heck the story is. So

3:57

let me ask if we're reading.

4:00

the equivalent, forget about like newspapers

4:02

and what do they say journalism is the first draft of

4:04

history. So let's think about this less like the newspaper

4:07

and more like the history book and less like

4:09

a human history book than a great

4:12

giant galactic history

4:15

book, right? The kind of history books that they're reading

4:17

on other planets about the history of this

4:19

galaxy and I'm wondering about

4:21

the section that they're going to have on

4:24

us.

4:26

obviously in a great galactic history book, everybody's

4:28

just going to be shrunk down to a small little space,

4:31

a little mention, the poor students

4:33

in galactic middle school are going to have to read

4:35

about, you know, Earth and humanity

4:38

and all that is just going to be an extra credit,

4:40

you know, assignment on the back of a real test. But

4:43

what do you think the great galactic history

4:45

book is going to say in its Earth

4:48

section, when it has to condense, you know,

4:50

our entire existence down to just, you

4:52

know, a

4:53

few points, right? what's the story here on

4:55

this Earth humanity timeline

4:57

question?

5:00

And I was thinking about that because the only way

5:02

of course,

5:03

to look at a subject like that is through

5:05

a very, you know,

5:07

long lens, right? You can't

5:09

just take 1520 AD and say, what's

5:12

a, let's base it on this year. What's humanity

5:14

like? You got to take a big picture view,

5:16

right?

5:18

Well, let me start this conversation, this

5:20

dinner conversation that goes nowhere off

5:23

with a gift one of your number

5:25

gave me a long time ago now.

5:27

One of the greatest gifts I ever got a completely

5:29

outside the box sort of thing and completely

5:33

geared towards my own personal proclivities

5:35

right being a history nut being

5:38

a person from a country that's

5:41

had many successive waves of

5:43

immigration from other countries, a person

5:45

who is of multiple nationalities like

5:48

so many other Americans Canadians

5:50

and Australians and people like that, right? Come

5:52

from an immigrant country, gonna have a lot

5:54

of different people in you probably. So

5:57

this listener sent me this wonderful gift.

6:00

It was an early version

6:02

of the DNA ancestry

6:04

test, the genealogy tests.

6:07

Now these things are everywhere now, but this was long

6:10

before the craze hit very early

6:12

on, very outside the box, not cheap.

6:15

And

6:16

I was so intrigued by the possibilities

6:18

that I overcame my natural reticence to

6:20

sharing my genetic code

6:22

with anyone swabbed my cheek

6:25

or whatever the heck they were asking for back then

6:27

put it back in the mailing, uh, packets,

6:29

send it to the lab and waited

6:32

with bated breath for the results here to find

6:34

out exactly how closely the DNA

6:36

evidence matched the analog

6:39

family tree history that like many

6:41

of you I had also done.

6:44

Talk to your grandmothers and grandfathers

6:46

about who your you know deep ancestors

6:49

were, what countries did we come from, what ethnicities

6:51

are we, and I thought I had the math right? I could say well if

6:53

your grandmother on your mother's side is half this and

6:55

half that that means you're 12% this and I mean

6:58

I thought I had it figured out but I wanted confirmation

7:00

that my math was right so I sent away

7:02

to the DNA test and when it came back

7:04

to me and I opened it up it was nothing

7:07

like what I expected

7:11

instead of answering questions about things like my ethnicity

7:13

or the

7:14

percentage of each ethnic group

7:16

I belong to it didn't

7:18

deal with ethnicity at all

7:21

when

7:22

I opened up this packet

7:24

of results, and I'm going, you know, I'm

7:27

not, this isn't, I'm just putting in fake numbers

7:29

here, but I mean it was something akin to, you

7:32

open it up and it says, your ancestors moved

7:34

out of Africa 150,000 years

7:37

ago into what's now southern Russia.

7:39

They lingered there for another 50,000 years

7:42

before heading, I mean it was one of those sorts

7:44

of things. In other words,

7:46

it was

7:47

deep genealogy, deep ancestry,

7:50

it never even got to the point where modern

7:52

ethnicities developed. Right? Stopped

7:55

before then. So instead of finding

7:57

out exactly how Irish or Scandinavian

7:59

or whatever.

8:00

you were all you

8:02

found out about was what you're, you know, the

8:04

equivalent of your caveman ancestors

8:06

were doing. And

8:09

at first I was disappointed because this was

8:11

not what I was expecting nor what I was after.

8:13

But I've had the opportunity many times

8:15

since

8:17

to think about this, to

8:19

think what this DNA test

8:21

was reminding me about.

8:25

It was reminding me about how

8:28

long

8:29

anatomic modern human

8:31

beings have been around.

8:34

And it's important to remember this

8:36

because it is the vast, vast

8:38

majority

8:40

of, you

8:41

know, the time that we've spent on this planet

8:44

that happened before we started paying

8:46

any real attention to

8:48

ourselves in the history books. And

8:50

by that, I mean, you know how old

8:52

your history books are in terms of how far

8:55

back they go, right?

8:57

Now, modern history combines with archaeology

9:00

and anthropology and about a hundred other wonderful

9:02

modern scientific specialists whose

9:04

job it is to uncover the prehistoric

9:07

past, but traditionally history

9:09

started with writing,

9:11

and writing started with urban societies.

9:13

And so, you know, the history books I have

9:15

from 1950 start with like Mesopotamia

9:19

and Sumeria.

9:23

implication, not the stated

9:26

necessarily, sometimes stated, but

9:28

usually not stated is that nothing

9:31

of real value happened

9:34

before urbanism and writing and all

9:36

these sorts of things. And there was also

9:38

this implied idea that anything

9:40

of value that even happened afterwards

9:42

happened in the societies that were doing

9:45

these things that set these new

9:47

modern humans apart from all the humans that

9:49

came beforehand, right? The humans that existed

9:52

before cities and writing and complex

9:54

modern societies. But that's the vast,

9:56

vast, vast majority of time,

9:59

right?

10:00

anatomically modern human beings have

10:02

been around and this is the current number the current number

10:04

changes right it keeps

10:06

getting revised earlier and earlier

10:08

I'm just going to try to be really safe here

10:10

and say anatomically modern human

10:12

beings have been around from between 250 and 350,000 years ago.

10:18

No,

10:19

let that sink in for a minute. 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. Let's

10:23

just take 300,000 as a good round current number.

10:28

300,000 years. Now this doesn't

10:30

take into account previous versions

10:33

of humanity, which lived at the same time.

10:36

There's some overlap, right? Neanderthals

10:38

are here when modern human beings

10:40

are too. There's interbreeding

10:43

going on, right? another

10:45

fascinating part of human history.

10:48

But so we have anatomically modern

10:50

human beings 300,000 years ago, I was doing some

10:54

preliminary research for this just so I didn't sound

10:56

like too much of an idiot. And

10:58

there was a distinction made with

11:00

anthropologists between anatomically

11:02

modern human beings, and behaviorally

11:05

modern human beings. Now,

11:08

I'm not sure what that necessarily means. But

11:10

I think they're talking about things like use of fire

11:12

and that sort of deal. I'm

11:15

not sure, but even that was

11:16

suitably ancient, something

11:19

like 150,000 years ago, just for comparison's sake. Now

11:23

if we remember that

11:25

the human history that our history books from 1950

11:28

would have said began, began

11:31

about five or six thousand

11:33

years ago,

11:36

well when you have 300,000 years that you're playing with, five or 6,000

11:42

years is the very most

11:44

recent

11:46

edge of that entire

11:48

history, right? The

11:51

vast, vast majority of the history

11:53

of the human species predates

11:56

where your history books start.

12:00

And there are,

12:01

well, there are probably multiple ways

12:03

of looking at this, but let me

12:05

just look at it in sort of a pass

12:08

fail way, right? Two ways.

12:10

One way of looking at this is

12:13

that all of human activity going

12:15

on before what my 1950s history book would

12:19

consider to be the important time when

12:21

things get started, although they might've said the important

12:23

time is the agricultural revolution,

12:25

right? A date that also keeps getting pushed

12:27

back. But that would still mean the vast

12:30

majority of human history happened before the agricultural

12:32

revolution. The point is that if

12:34

you try to envision

12:37

what's going on in that period

12:39

before real history begins,

12:42

it can either be something like

12:45

a more complex version

12:48

of chimpanzee life, what

12:51

societies of chimpanzees live

12:53

like and what their daily activities

12:56

are concerned with their

12:58

social structure and I mean obviously more

13:00

complex like chimpanzees with fire, chimpanzees

13:03

with very modest religious

13:05

you know understanding, more complex

13:08

chimps right

13:09

and I think that's very possible. You

13:12

go look at you know cavemen in

13:14

air quotes caveman society that

13:16

looks a little to me like complex apes

13:19

but it doesn't necessarily have to be that

13:21

way. There's also So like the Middle

13:23

Earth possibility, and you know, for those

13:26

who don't know, Tolkien's, J.R.R.

13:29

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings idea of this

13:31

thing called Middle Earth is not a place.

13:34

Middle Earth is a time period in our

13:37

own world, and it's supposed

13:39

to have existed before the so-called

13:42

Age of Man began. So

13:45

it's deep prehistory, and I guess

13:47

with the Age of Man beginning, you know, Sumeria's

13:50

their future.

14:00

terms of the great human story,

14:02

just maybe on a much smaller scale,

14:05

right? As much smaller venue, a much

14:07

more tight locality, but the

14:09

same sorts of drama and romances

14:11

and great wars and big leaders

14:13

and heroes and villains. And I mean, in

14:15

other words, the exact same human story

14:17

we have in the last 6,000 years of human

14:20

history, just earlier, smaller.

14:24

There's that old line that quantity has a quality all

14:26

its own. Well, 300,000 years

14:29

of history seems to give you enough time for a

14:31

bunch of good stories to happen, even if they're happening,

14:33

you know, at a much slower pace than they happen in

14:36

the modern world, I would think.

14:38

If that great galactic history book,

14:41

you know, it had the aliens monitoring the

14:43

first 300,000 years of human history,

14:46

maybe they have some good stories in it that we don't

14:48

know anything about.

14:51

But I've often wondered about the

14:54

greatness of prehistory.

14:56

There's

14:57

a line from Gwyn Dyer's fabulous

14:59

late 70s early

15:00

1980s documentary on war where he

15:04

had

15:07

wondered about the first time

15:09

a thousand human beings had ever gathered

15:12

in the same place at the same time,

15:14

a very early prehistory question,

15:16

And he thought it likely that the

15:18

first time a thousand people were ever in the same place

15:20

at the same time, it was because a battle was happening.

15:24

When that makes you think of all the prehistoric battles,

15:26

right? When was the first time an army of 500

15:29

men absolutely knocked

15:31

everybody over in terms of its

15:33

size? Wow, did you 500 men? Can you believe

15:35

it? Nobody's ever had an army that big. Or

15:38

the first great empire, even on the, you

15:40

know, the first great empire might have been 20 miles

15:43

long and 5 miles wide. But

15:47

if that's the biggest amount of territory

15:49

that's ever been controlled by one people over

15:51

another, that's an empire, isn't it? By the

15:53

strict definition of the terms. So I think

15:55

about all these sorts of things.

15:58

was the first great king and And

16:00

we have to remember too, when it comes to things

16:02

like so-called prehistory, prehistory

16:05

and history happen at different times in different

16:07

places, don't they? Just because history

16:10

started in a place like Sumeria in 3200

16:12

BCE, it's still dark as heck in

16:17

terms of prehistory, not that far away

16:19

from Sumeria, isn't it? You're

16:22

going to talk about the various nomadic

16:24

tribes living outside the walls of

16:26

a city like ore or something,

16:29

well,

16:30

it's still prehistory in their

16:32

community, isn't it?

16:33

And that applies all the way up to modern

16:36

times. I mean, the history

16:38

of Native American or African

16:41

tribal peoples that didn't pay attention to

16:43

writing or didn't write, that's all stuff

16:45

that's dark to us now.

16:49

Their history begins when it starts being

16:51

written down by somebody themselves

16:54

or some outsider group

16:56

makes you think about all the history that

16:58

existed that didn't get written down.

17:01

So I think about this all the time, though, and ever

17:03

since that DNA test, specifically,

17:05

because I try to keep track of

17:08

what I like to call the long view,

17:11

right, looking at history in terms of,

17:14

they'd probably say in one of the new

17:16

kinds of books that get marketed all the time, the

17:18

mega trends, right?

17:22

But there are certain elements of

17:24

human behavior and

17:27

conduct and activity and what

17:29

one might say make up the general

17:32

pieces of information in the great

17:34

galactic history book that implies

17:37

that there is some kind of story, right? We have lots

17:39

of facts and interviews and data, but

17:41

the galactic history book

17:43

writer of the future is going to have

17:46

to try to come up because his editor is going to make

17:48

him, with what it all means. When

17:50

you're talking about these human beings on this

17:52

planet for several hundred thousand years, what's the story?

17:57

I was writing down some of the things that just

17:59

seemed to be.

18:00

constants with us.

18:03

Because

18:03

some problems, of course, are temporary,

18:05

others are created by circumstances

18:08

in your time period, but some

18:10

just seem to be ever present, no

18:12

matter, you

18:13

know, how long the lens we're

18:16

viewing our past is. I mean, there

18:18

seems to always be war and

18:20

conflict.

18:21

There is no sustained period of

18:24

time that I've ever seen where people aren't fighting.

18:27

There

18:27

used to be an idea And

18:29

this is because both history

18:32

and many other disciplines are connected

18:34

to the trends of

18:37

human society during the time period

18:39

that they arise. That's a famous problem in history,

18:41

isn't it? The main thing they try to teach you in

18:43

historiography is how the heck do

18:46

you weed out

18:47

the corruption that

18:49

the historians operating within

18:51

their own time period, as we all do,

18:55

infuse into how they're assessing

18:57

the material, right? How do you divorce the

18:59

historian and the times that they're working

19:01

in from the times that they're assessing? And

19:04

this is a problem that we all have even

19:06

today, right?

19:10

When I was a kid it was during this period where there

19:12

were quite a few people who were trying to insinuate

19:15

that something like war and conflict between

19:17

human beings, especially organized conflict,

19:20

was something that only developed with cities. that

19:23

we lived a more Garden of Eden

19:25

type existence, a

19:27

more gathering of the tribes kind of

19:29

existence before cities

19:31

ruined it all for everybody, and

19:34

that man or

19:35

woman or humanity in their

19:37

natural state is of a peaceful

19:40

helping nature.

19:42

Well there's enough

19:43

stuff today I would say, and this is my own personal

19:46

bias coming in because I choose the sources as

19:48

we all do that sound right to me, but put

19:50

in the camp of those anthropologists

19:53

and archaeologists who've come out and said, the

19:55

evidence seems to indicate we're a pretty

19:58

murderous species.

20:00

and that we were pretty murderous species before

20:02

someone started writing down exactly how

20:04

murderous we were, war

20:06

and human conflict

20:08

and genocide and things like ethnic

20:11

cleansing. This stuff seems to have always been

20:13

with us. And if you doubt the ability

20:15

of, you know, peoples in a much lower state

20:18

of organized development to be

20:20

that way, just go look at chimpanzee

20:22

society now.

20:25

You watch chimpanzees for a while and

20:28

you get a pretty darn good idea

20:30

of just how murderous

20:32

and hierarchical and

20:34

everything else we could be because the

20:36

chimpanzees, I mean, it's almost like holding up

20:38

an embarrassing mirror when you go

20:41

watch them because you go, wow, I

20:43

see all these same elements

20:45

still in us today. We may think of ourselves

20:48

so far removed, but certain

20:50

of the base level things seem pretty unchanged

20:53

if you ask me. And war

20:56

and conflict and domination

20:58

and those sorts of things seem to be pretty developed

21:01

in chimpanzee society, especially

21:03

for a bunch of non-humans, and I think

21:06

we still exhibit those things today. So that's a pretty

21:08

much of a constant when I try to gain

21:10

some perspective on humanity

21:13

as a species over the long view.

21:17

ethnicity and immigration.

21:20

These are things that are still a big part of

21:22

news stories today. You could

21:24

throw colonialization in there too,

21:27

and these things seem to

21:29

be ever-present in the, you

21:31

know, historical chronicles too, and

21:34

seem likely to have existed before history

21:36

did as well. Right? Same

21:38

things we have problems with. And one of the great things

21:40

about the long view I feel like is

21:43

the fact that it absolutely

21:45

takes

21:46

the ethnicity issue and

21:49

makes it a non-issue over the long

21:52

haul because what people, and I think

21:54

we've been,

21:56

maybe corrupted is not a bad way to put

21:58

it, corrupted by

22:00

19th and early 20th century

22:02

historiography.

22:04

And the fact that just as it always is history

22:07

and history writing and history research

22:09

and history teaching is intimately

22:13

wound up and intertwined with

22:15

the values and attitudes of the time

22:17

period where the writing, the teaching, and

22:20

the reading is going on, right? And

22:22

in the 19th century especially, you have a time

22:24

period where nation states are in search

22:27

of their roots. they're doing their own national

22:30

version of my DNA ethnicity

22:32

test,

22:34

trying to find out where they come from.

22:37

But a lot of this isn't just an open ended

22:39

in search of and

22:41

we'll go wherever the data leads us kind of

22:43

thing. It's goal oriented.

22:46

I mean, everyone wants to come from some

22:48

wonderfully august,

22:50

glorious historical lineage. Nobody

22:52

wants to be the descendants of a couple

22:54

of peasants or a couple of serfs.

22:57

We all want to be, you

22:59

know, descended from great peoples and kings

23:02

and, you

23:02

know, societies that made an impact

23:05

on the past, right? We all want royal lineage,

23:08

historically speaking.

23:10

That's why the 19th century spawned all

23:13

these, you know, connections

23:15

to

23:16

pre-nation states. I mean,

23:18

the French started

23:20

glorifying their Gallic past, the Germans,

23:24

you know, their

23:25

Germanic histories and you go look at the

23:27

statues they put up and they're wonderfully

23:29

romantic figures, right?

23:32

But how's that any different from

23:34

modern-day Italians celebrating

23:36

their Roman past or

23:40

current Greek citizens celebrating

23:42

their

23:43

famous ancient Greek history and on

23:45

and on and on, right?

23:48

They're

23:49

hardly the only ones. I mean a lot of people

23:51

were infected by this 19th century

23:54

desire to tie one's modern

23:57

people to some

23:58

ancient ancestry.

24:00

some glorious exalted ancient ancestor.

24:02

I mean, the Kurds, there's

24:04

a belief in Kurdish society that their descendants

24:07

of

24:07

the ancient Medes, right, partners

24:10

in empire with the ancient Persians.

24:13

Syrians today believe themselves.

24:16

And I've seen articles that back them up on

24:18

this and articles that disagree.

24:20

So I can't make it up. Syrians

24:22

today consider themselves to be the descendants

24:24

of the ancient Assyrians. I mean, everybody's

24:27

looking for glorious ancestors, right? And

24:29

the truth is, is some people have them. I mean,

24:31

DNA seems to show, waiting

24:34

as always, when we talk about DNA for

24:36

more evidence, but DNA seems to show that

24:38

a lot of Jewish people today are descended from Jewish

24:41

people who lived thousands of years ago. So it's not

24:43

impossible.

24:46

One can come from an illustrious,

24:48

glorious past. But in the 19th century, the

24:51

implication almost was that

24:54

peoples were hermetically

24:56

sealed off from each other and you had these different

24:58

peoples. A perfect example would be, look

25:01

at how the Nazis, although Nazi

25:04

ideology when it came to race and ethnicity

25:06

wasn't so much singular

25:08

as it was past its sell

25:11

by date. Because if you'd taken Nazi racial

25:13

philosophy and

25:16

taken it a hundred years into its own past,

25:18

there would have been a lot of people who would have thought the same way

25:20

as the Nazis. And

25:23

the Nazis had a belief that people were

25:25

pure of blood, right? And

25:28

you pick up a history book from the late 1800s

25:30

and early 1900s and you look at exactly how

25:32

obsessed it is with ethnicity

25:35

and race and peoples

25:37

and where their background is in

25:40

terms of their breeding and

25:42

these people are Nordic and these people are Slavic

25:45

and these people are Mongolian. I

25:47

mean, it's an absurd amount

25:49

of fascination when the

25:52

great galactic history book readers

25:54

are going to try to make sense of what humanity

25:56

was. And the reason it's absurd is

25:59

because of how t- temporary it all is

26:01

when we're taking the long view. Races

26:05

and ethnicities are some

26:07

of the long views version

26:09

of short term issues because

26:11

they're ever changing. And that's what the 19th century,

26:14

both peoples, cultures and

26:16

historians got wrong was this idea that somehow,

26:19

you know, once upon a time when the world stage we'll just

26:21

pick one people, but you could fill anybody

26:23

in for the same thing, that there were a bunch of

26:25

blonde haired blue eyed peoples that arose

26:28

independently, although back

26:31

in that time period, we might've been talking about Adam

26:33

and Eve type origins, but you know what I'm

26:35

saying, arose independently in the North

26:37

where they're still to be found. And then sometime

26:40

in relatively recent history, they

26:42

started having interactions with other peoples

26:45

and ethnic societies. And that's when interbreeding

26:47

started. In other words, from a Hitlerian,

26:50

Naziistic race

26:52

trader standpoint, that's when

26:54

things turned evil. It was much better back in the

26:56

days and blonde haired blue eyed people never

26:58

made it with people who weren't of their own kind

27:03

became what the Harry Potter world would

27:06

refer to as mudbloods, totally

27:09

ignoring the fact that we're all

27:11

mudbloods. That's one of the great secrets

27:13

and pieces of perspective that the long

27:16

view gives us. And that's that the current

27:18

ethnicities as we identify them

27:20

are temporary things, long-term

27:23

things from our short term way of

27:25

looking at it. I mean, if I'm going to live to be 90 years

27:28

old, uh, ethnicity seems pretty

27:30

set in stone to me. If I'm going to live

27:32

to be 200,000 years old, every ethnicity

27:33

I see

27:36

is a passing fad.

27:39

There was a story I read, um,

27:41

not that long ago and it was in a, it wasn't

27:43

in a professional

27:44

publication. It was

27:47

something like the BBC or something as a public

27:49

thing, but they were talking about a facial

27:52

recreation that had been done on

27:54

a skeleton.

27:57

I don't know how much of a skeleton.

28:00

in Britain as Cheddar Man. And

28:03

Cheddar Man is a figure

28:05

from prehistory and they found this

28:09

figure in Britain and I believe

28:11

they've done DNA, I don't know, I don't remember the

28:13

story well, I didn't go look it up, shows you how much

28:15

prep went into this, right, trying to figure out what the story

28:17

is without, you know, checking the facts of the story.

28:20

But the the news story was,

28:22

and they always say a dog bites man's

28:25

story is not a news story but a man bites dog's

28:27

story, now That's news, right? Well,

28:29

the cheddar man story probably wouldn't have been

28:32

as big of a deal had this

28:34

facial Recreation, I guess it was

28:36

like a forensic person who works maybe with murder

28:39

victims or something today But they're they're taking the DNA

28:41

and the skulls and whatever they have to work with in there

28:44

and they're giving you this this recreation

28:46

of a face of a prehistoric Britain

28:49

and it doesn't look anything like the British

28:51

people today doesn't

28:53

look like a very, you know, good representation

28:56

of the Kentish Anglo-Saxon type,

28:59

because it had

29:01

dark, dark skin, dark,

29:03

dark hair, and maybe if I'm

29:05

recalling it, blue or green eyes or

29:07

the light eyes. In other words,

29:09

it was a completely different ethnicity

29:12

that one, then one would expect to see as

29:14

an ancestor of the people in

29:17

a place where it's assumed to be cold

29:19

and dark and the people have very light skin,

29:22

very light hair, although a lot of Celts

29:24

don't have light hair, but you know what I'm saying? There's a certain type

29:26

we associate with the British Isles. The problem

29:28

is, is that our view on this is skewed

29:31

by the timeline. Because if you went

29:33

back to the British Isles at around the time,

29:36

Cheddar man was actually living, you

29:38

would expect to see something different because back

29:40

then something different was living there than

29:43

the type of people that live there now. And

29:45

the reason why is because of that eternal

29:48

human quality that makes up one So those

29:50

constants, when we look at the long view of history,

29:53

people move

29:55

and they intermix with each other while they

29:58

do. DNA test.

30:00

showed that, you know, I came out of Africa,

30:02

my ancestors did 150,000 years ago, or whatever it was, is something

30:04

that's going

30:07

to be the same for most, if not

30:10

all of us, there's going to be some people that probably still

30:12

live in the place where humankind

30:15

first became anatomically modern,

30:17

right, they can say we are the indigenous

30:19

inhabitants of this place, because when humanity

30:22

first arose, we were here, and

30:24

we've never moved. The vast majority

30:26

of us have the implications

30:29

for that though, if you think about it are profound,

30:32

but only if we're looking at this through the

30:34

long view.

30:36

And this gets me to a phrase that I'd like to

30:39

jettison from my lexicon, but it's

30:41

going to be hard. I'm going to need, I'm addicted to it.

30:43

I'm going to need some kind of patch or something to help me get through

30:45

the process of weaning myself off

30:47

a phrase. Maybe it's a phrase that

30:50

I use because I'm

30:52

falling out of love with it. And I like I think other phrase is better.

30:54

That's a good way to put it.

30:56

The phrase is indigenous peoples.

31:00

Now I use this phrase as many other

31:02

people do. I'm talking about the native

31:04

Americans, for example, I'll say the indigenous

31:06

peoples, but I'm falling out of

31:08

love with this phrase. I think I like the way the

31:11

people in Canada treated better. They call

31:13

their native American tribal

31:15

peoples, they call them First Nations. And

31:18

I think that's a better representation of what the

31:20

term should mean because indigenous

31:23

peoples gets me into trouble when I'm looking at things

31:25

through my long-term, long view

31:27

lens, because that

31:29

implies that we're all indigenous

31:32

to somewhere, right? So if you say,

31:34

well, I'm not a tribal Aboriginal

31:37

person, my family

31:39

comes from a bunch of different places, where's

31:42

their homeland, right? Where am I indigenous

31:44

to? And you quickly can see what the problem in that

31:47

sort of an approach might be, and that's

31:50

the people move, right? I don't live where

31:52

my ancestors lived. Am I indigenous to where

31:54

my ancestors were from? Well, when did they get

31:56

there?

31:57

And how long do you have to be someplace

32:00

be considered indigenous

32:02

to it, because as we just said, according

32:04

to the long-term DNA tests,

32:06

we're all indigenous to like northeastern

32:09

Africa, and once you leave there,

32:11

well, you're either

32:13

the first person to arrive someplace

32:16

or you're squatting on somebody else's

32:18

land that got there before you did. 300,000 years

32:22

of human history, with people moving

32:24

and intermixing all the time, means

32:27

that almost nobody is probably

32:29

on the land that they inhabited

32:32

first before anyone else

32:35

got there. Now the First Nations in Canada,

32:37

I just assumed that they're the first people in that part of

32:39

the world to establish hierarchies

32:41

in governments and some sort of an organization, you

32:43

know, tribal organization or whatever. And I think that's

32:46

accurate. But this indigenous people's

32:48

thing gets complicated.

32:53

Ethnicity does too. I'm, I was looking

32:55

for, um, I was doing some searches, but I couldn't

32:58

figure out the right search terms to spit

33:00

back the results that

33:02

I wanted. I was trying to find a

33:04

person who's up on the latest DNA

33:07

and isotope evidence and everything

33:09

else that can help us answer a question

33:12

about how many people who inhabit certain

33:15

geographical areas today

33:17

are related to the people

33:19

that used to be there. And of course, you've got to define

33:21

what you mean by used to, right? But I was specifically

33:24

thinking of like, Roman times.

33:26

So are the people in Italy, or maybe

33:28

the question should be how many

33:31

of the people in Italy today

33:33

can trace their genetic heritage

33:36

back to ancient Rome. And

33:39

I was starting to play with that. And then the long view question

33:41

hit me again, though, in a shorter term

33:44

sense. But which Rome are we even

33:46

talking about? I thought to myself after

33:48

I'd posed the question to myself,

33:51

because the Rome of like 450 BCE,

33:55

when it's a single city state at war

33:57

with other Italian city states.

34:00

10 or 12 miles from

34:02

itself, well that's one kind

34:04

of Italy, isn't it? Made up of one kind

34:06

of people. But the Rome

34:09

of, say, Tiberius

34:12

or Marcus Aurelius, you know, the Roman Empire.

34:15

Um, well that's a multi-ethnic, multicultural

34:18

society, isn't it? With

34:20

not just people from all over the world,

34:23

you know, Rome's an international city back

34:25

then, but even the emperors

34:27

coming from places like Spain and the Balkans

34:29

and North Africa and in Syria. I mean,

34:31

all those places are contributing leadership

34:33

positions to the Roman

34:36

state. So if I was to say something like, well,

34:38

how many people in Italy today

34:40

can trace their roots back to the Roman Empire? Some

34:42

person who just got there one generation ago

34:45

from Syria might be able to say, I can. So

34:48

you got to be careful because people were moving around

34:50

and interbreeding all the time.

34:52

This

34:53

idea of race

34:56

purity that the Nazis had was a bunch

34:58

of nonsense

35:00

and it's worth looking for just two seconds upon

35:03

how something like that gets started. There's

35:05

a book out there, it's pretty darn good one too, it's

35:08

the title something like the most dangerous book

35:10

ever written or something like that, but it's

35:12

a book about Tacitus' work

35:15

on the Germans. Tacitus

35:17

was an ancient Roman writer, actually was Roman imperial

35:20

writer and he wrote a famous book

35:23

on the ancient Germanic

35:25

tribes, right, contemporaries

35:27

of the Romans. While the Nazis

35:30

in their wisdom to try to find racial history

35:32

latched on to this book because there's parts

35:35

of it that talk about something that they

35:37

could use as evidence of race purity, because

35:39

Tacitus says in one part that the

35:41

Germans never mingled their blood

35:44

with lesser people. Now

35:47

the most dangerous book points out what any

35:49

good history professor talking about Tacitus'

35:51

book would also point out, and that's the Tacitus

35:54

just like most ancient writers is not writing

35:57

books for the same reason we write books so

35:59

don't that he is. He's actually writing

36:01

a book to chastise Romans about things that

36:04

they do, and he uses this Germanic

36:06

stuff as evidence for, look at

36:08

how they do it, and they're so strong. If we did

36:10

it more like them, we'd be sure. So he's making

36:13

a case with something. This idea that

36:15

the Germans didn't mix their

36:17

DNA with other people during the Roman

36:19

era is nonsense because the Germans

36:22

like almost, you don't want to say every

36:24

human society because that's not true, but the the vast

36:26

majority of human societies. And this is another

36:28

thing that maybe,

36:30

you

36:30

know, belongs on our list of constants

36:33

is slavery. The Germans were slaveholding

36:35

society. If you have slaves,

36:37

you're going to be mixing your DNA with them.

36:42

Another example of, you know, how you can sort of

36:44

be blind to this obvious fact. I

36:46

mean, if you look at some

36:48

of the great Kings from

36:50

the past, that would have been Nazi racial,

36:54

ideological, prototypes,

36:57

right? The kind of people they were celebrating. How

36:59

about, and this is a bit of a spoiler alert for

37:01

the Viking show still to come, but how about the famous

37:04

Danish king Knut, the

37:07

king that ruled much of

37:09

Scandinavia while he ruled England.

37:12

He seemed to be creating this giant, theoretically

37:14

had it continued, you could have had this giant northern

37:17

block of nations, right? He's

37:19

sort of the Nazis

37:21

iconic dream

37:23

of the Nordic peoples

37:25

ruling over vast areas. But

37:28

this Danish king's mother

37:30

had the Nazis done the

37:33

classifying would

37:35

have been seen as an unter mention,

37:37

a subhuman. Knut's

37:39

mom was from a

37:41

Slavic people. She was the daughter

37:43

of, well, my history books often say

37:46

Polish king, but this predates the creation

37:48

of a real Poland, but it's a Slavic king

37:51

and Knut's parents

37:53

married

37:55

into a dynastic marriage. And that's the

37:57

other thing you forget. It's not just people at the lower

37:59

end. of society, the slaves

38:02

mixing their DNA into the gene pool, royal

38:05

marriages of the sort that were famous a

38:07

hundred, 200 years ago, where you would marry,

38:09

you know, your son off to another king's daughter

38:12

to try to cement a dynastic relationship

38:14

that's been going on from time immemorial.

38:17

In fact, romantic love is the

38:20

new kind of reason people get married, creating

38:23

dynastic relationships between

38:25

powerful families is the really

38:28

old ancient reason that people get

38:30

married and they're mixing their

38:32

DNA at the very highest level. So

38:35

these ideas of Tacitus, well the Germans never

38:37

mingled their blood with lesser peoples unless of course

38:39

they're marrying the queens of lesser peoples

38:42

and creating, you know, dynastic alliances.

38:45

I mean, in other words, all of

38:47

that stuff is ridiculous and people

38:49

have been mixing from time immemorial and moving

38:51

from time immemorial. And that means that

38:53

none of the peoples who are in the locations

38:56

that they are now probably used to

38:58

be there and they almost certainly just like

39:00

Cheddar Man in Britain looked differently.

39:03

I

39:05

mean just look at some of the mass people

39:08

movements that we have in

39:10

the 6,000 years of recorded

39:13

history and

39:14

the good news for those of us wanting to look back

39:16

on those moments is that they're often

39:19

extremely disruptive of

39:21

the status quo during the time period we're talking

39:24

about and you know they've always said that journalism

39:26

is the first draft of history. Well, history

39:29

writing often follows similar rules

39:31

and the old line, if it bleeds, it leads,

39:34

works just as well for history as it did for

39:36

you know current news writing and many

39:39

of the moments in history where the

39:41

if it bleeds, it leads standard most

39:44

applies are these time periods where vast

39:46

numbers of human beings are on the

39:48

move. I mean, is the most

39:50

famous, the one where the Germanic

39:52

tribes were set in motion, the famous folk

39:55

or von der Rohe, right? movement of people,

39:58

the great migrations they're sometimes called. Well,

40:00

everybody knows about that, right? These are the migrations

40:03

that supposedly set in motion some

40:05

of the forces that toppled the Western Roman

40:07

Empire, the tribes, you

40:09

know, they're famous too, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths,

40:12

the Vandals, the Lombards, there's a whole bunch of

40:14

them.

40:16

But people forget that that

40:18

movement of peoples was supposedly started

40:21

by another great movement of peoples that

40:24

hit those Germans like a bunch of tumbling

40:26

dominoes, the Huns and

40:29

the Huns of course live in

40:32

one of the great ethnic melting

40:34

pots on the face of the earth. They

40:36

live in the Eurasian step where if we want

40:38

to play the ethnic melting pot game, you

40:41

could have a ton of fun. It's one of the most interesting parts

40:44

of the great Eurasian step

40:46

and that's how many different peoples have lived there

40:49

and how often they've been mixing with each other because

40:51

of course they have famously

40:53

mobility and they move like

40:56

waves across this giant flat

40:59

expanse of land and the numbers

41:01

of people that have exploded

41:04

out of the heartland over by the

41:06

Altai Mountains and then usually

41:08

spreading southward and westward have

41:11

subsumed numerous tribes

41:15

in the past. I mean the first one in recorded history

41:17

that was mentioned in one of those books where

41:20

writing happens are the Khmerians,

41:24

contemporaries of the ancient Assyrians

41:26

and people like that. Well, what

41:28

happened to the Khmerians, right? These are supposedly,

41:31

they would say a hundred years ago, ethnically Caucasian

41:34

people, probably speaking an

41:36

Indo-European language. I mean, they'd have a

41:38

whole bunch of ways of phrasing it, but

41:40

the Khmerians got treated

41:43

the same way that the Huns

41:45

and the Mongols of later eras treated

41:48

the steppe enemies that they

41:50

ran into when they were overrun, pushed

41:53

farther westward, and then

41:55

eventually absorbed by the Scythian

41:57

tribes, sometimes called Scythian.

42:00

in the old days. I'm

42:02

firmly in the camp, by the way, of those people

42:04

trying to change the soft sea

42:06

back to the hard sea as it used to be and as

42:08

it still is in the languages that invented

42:11

those terms, right? Scythians

42:14

is a Greek term and the Greeks would

42:16

not have said Scythians, so Scythians,

42:18

just like Sumerians are not Sumerians, they're

42:20

Camarians.

42:23

And after the Scythians, they had

42:25

the same treatment that they meted out to the Camarians,

42:28

done to them by the Sarmatians who

42:30

had the same thing done to them, probably by the

42:32

Sakha, who had the same thing done to them

42:34

by early versions of the Huns. You

42:36

had Turks, you had Magyars, you had Avars,

42:39

which are both Turks. Of

42:41

course, you had Mongolians eventually. In

42:44

other words, over and over and over again, you've had

42:46

these tribes both ethnically

42:48

cleanse areas, drive people

42:51

out of areas, genocide

42:53

peoples, and usually

42:55

after defeating them, absorbing them.

42:59

Ethnically speaking, these people of the steppe

43:01

are endlessly fascinating. Some

43:03

of the tribes, the Chinese referred

43:06

to a couple of them as the Wusun and the

43:08

Yuxi, these are tribes which

43:10

would be in modern day China today,

43:13

but looked much more like they belonged

43:16

quite a lot farther west, if we're just going to take

43:18

their ethnicity, their hair color, their

43:21

eye color into account. People in modern

43:23

day China generally

43:25

look pretty Chinese, and the more towards

43:28

the Han, as you go, the more this is true.

43:31

But if you look at the great step overall,

43:33

you can see the remnants of the

43:35

DNA mixing and scattering everywhere.

43:38

It's a fabulously mixed territory where people

43:40

can have Asian features with Western

43:42

color eyes or Western style

43:45

hair with, I mean, it's, it's, it's the,

43:48

the same culture that bred

43:50

these descriptions of Genghis Khan

43:52

that can ring true when you hear

43:54

them that he had Asian features

43:57

but maybe green eyes or

43:59

red eyes.

44:00

hair.

44:02

This same mixing that you see

44:05

on the Eurasian step through all of

44:07

recorded history, and which my

44:09

history books would have maybe treated from 1950, maybe

44:11

would have treated as an unusual

44:13

aspect of this area, the unusual

44:16

mixing of different races and ethnicities, is

44:18

in fact the norm pretty much

44:20

everywhere.

44:22

And Cheddar Man is a perfect example,

44:25

and if not Cheddar Man, because someone will write me and go, well

44:27

that was all wrong with Cheddar Man, it doesn't matter, you're

44:29

finding this in all the other areas too. The people that

44:31

live there now often bear little resemblance

44:34

to the people who used to live there. That does not

44:36

mean that you can't trace your history back

44:38

to them. There could be a very Anglo-Saxon

44:41

looking person in modern-day Kent that might find

44:43

out that they're a direct descendant of

44:46

Cheddar Man. The only thing worth

44:48

noting though is that if you, you

44:51

know, had gone back to your ancestors times

44:54

they're all going to look quite a bit different than you.

44:57

And and here's the part that shows a certain continuity

45:00

in the mixing of human DNA in another 10,000

45:07

20,000 30,000 years, if we're looking at the long view here, people

45:10

are going to be different colors yet again,

45:12

the ethnic question

45:14

is an ever changing

45:17

target, right? And I would like to say that it

45:20

will solve itself when we're all some version

45:22

of the same color. But if you do look at human

45:24

history over the long haul and try to pick out

45:26

commonalities. One of the things we

45:28

tend to be really good at is disliking people

45:31

that are different than we are. And

45:33

just like that Star Trek episode where

45:35

you had the one guy who had the left side of

45:37

his face black and the right side of his face white

45:40

and the other guy who had the exact black and white

45:42

face but on different sides

45:45

as the first character and they found

45:47

a reason to not like each other because of that.

45:49

But to the outsiders, they looked

45:52

like the same people. There's that great line where

45:54

Captain Kirk says, you know, but you're both the same color

45:56

and and the Frank

45:57

Gorshin played character says, what are you talking

45:59

about can't you You see, I'm black on the left

46:01

side. He's black on the right side. I

46:03

mean, in other words, we'll find some

46:05

reason that we're ethnically different enough

46:08

to get upset over our ethnic heritage

46:10

if human history is any guide.

46:15

Nevermind that to us today, people 30,000 years

46:17

in the future may all appear to be the same color.

46:21

The star-bellied, sneech-like aspect

46:24

of human history shows we'll find

46:26

a reason to declare some people

46:29

better than others and other people worse.

46:32

This

46:34

same question about movement and

46:37

time seems to work pretty well with

46:39

this idea of things like land

46:42

ownership or

46:44

land rights. I mean how much of our

46:46

problems today in the in the world and especially

46:48

over the last hundred hundred and fifty years seem to be

46:51

related to who owns the land.

46:54

This is connected to colonialism too

46:56

and colonialism is another one of these ancient

46:59

things.

47:02

Native Americans and other tribal peoples

47:04

often have as part of their founding

47:07

origin legends that

47:10

they are

47:11

or were created as the human

47:14

beings who lived in a certain spot.

47:16

Now there are other tribal peoples who

47:19

have a tribal story

47:23

about moving from some other place. I

47:25

mean a lot of the tribes that we just

47:27

spoke about the Germanic type tribes

47:29

that are famously involved

47:31

in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Goths

47:34

and stuff, they all had origin

47:36

legends that said that they were from elsewhere,

47:38

from Scandinavia.

47:40

So they knew that they had moved, but many many

47:42

peoples have a founding

47:45

origin legend that they come from the

47:47

territory that they're currently in and have

47:49

always been there.

47:52

It seems pretty obvious

47:55

that unless they were the first people that

47:57

showed up in the human migration that first

48:00

step foot in a given area

48:02

that they're wrong about this, that none of us inhabit

48:04

the area we used to inhabit. As I said, unless

48:07

you come from the same part of Africa where human

48:09

beings anatomically correct human

48:11

beings first arose, you're a squatter

48:13

on somebody else's property, or maybe you were

48:15

the first people. You arrived in virgin territory.

48:18

There were no human beings

48:20

in the area that your ancestors first

48:23

arrived at and declared their homeland. It

48:27

seems unlikely a modern ethnicity

48:29

or a modern nation state

48:31

can claim something like that. It

48:34

seems strange to us when some of the Zionists

48:36

in Israel will proclaim that territory

48:39

to be their ancestral land,

48:41

going back to the Bible. But the Bible, in

48:43

terms of its ancientness,

48:46

is a new document when we're looking

48:48

at things through the long view, the 300,000 year lens.

48:54

you start asking, well, you know, who was

48:56

there 10,000 years ago? Who was there 20,000 years

48:59

ago? And then everything when

49:01

it comes to the land that certain ethnic

49:04

peoples don't just live on

49:06

now, but are associated with, right? Their

49:08

heritage is connected to the land. It

49:10

all looks like they're just the people

49:12

that own the current deed to the property.

49:15

It's like selling a house, historically speaking.

49:17

Oh, yes, they bought these

49:19

from the Amalekites

49:22

who had gotten it from the Guti, who

49:24

had originally got it from the Sumerii. I

49:26

mean, you know, makes

49:29

you start to feel

49:30

like there are no indigenous peoples,

49:33

that human beings are by their very nature,

49:36

newcomers everywhere.

49:39

I thought I'd play this little game and I found

49:42

that I use it all the time now. But

49:44

I got the idea talking with my wife's

49:46

grandfather once.

49:48

And I forgot when this happened. and I want to say it was like 2000 or 2005,

49:52

somewhere in there, and he was in his mid 90s, one of those

49:55

amazing people who are still exercising

49:57

like crazy. I mean, just completely

49:59

with. And

50:00

you look at them and you go, holy cow, this person's 95

50:02

or whatever they were. And he

50:05

was telling me what it was like in the Pacific

50:07

Northwest, where I live and where he grew

50:09

up when he was a kid here. Right? So, you

50:12

know, the 1930s, 1920s, and

50:14

I was zoning out while he was talking because

50:17

I just couldn't help but think to myself how

50:20

wild it was that if you took this man's

50:22

lifetime, whatever it was 95 years, and

50:25

you just added another lifetime,

50:28

you know, the same lifespan as he

50:30

was currently living to it. So two 95

50:32

year old lifetimes, you

50:35

would find yourself back

50:37

in time to where there were almost

50:39

no European people in the Pacific Northwest,

50:42

right? The spot we're standing on has

50:44

only native peoples. Um,

50:47

if you add this man's lifetime by

50:49

another lifetime. And

50:52

that got me thinking about

50:55

human lifetimes as a substitute

50:57

for talking about years or centuries

50:59

or dates.

51:02

Because, and I was trying to do the math

51:05

correctly. So if you just wanted to

51:07

imagine that a human

51:09

lifespan was about 50 years, and

51:12

we all know, don't we, that the infant mortality

51:14

rates in earlier times skew the patterns

51:16

a little bit, I think 50 would still

51:19

be considered a little high by some people. But let's

51:21

just say your average lifespan

51:23

over time is 50 years.

51:27

If you take two of those lifetimes,

51:30

right, then you have a century. So

51:32

two lives to a century. That

51:35

means that if you have four

51:37

human lives, then you're back

51:39

to that point. My

51:41

wife's grandfather was talking about four 50

51:44

year human lives. And there are

51:46

no Europeans basically in the Pacific

51:48

Northwest.

51:50

That seems pretty short, right? when you just say,

51:52

Oh, it's just your great, great, great grandfather.

51:56

Well, it gets even weirder when you go even

51:58

farther back in time, right?

52:00

If you take 10 or 11 of those 50 year lifespans,

52:05

great, great, great, great, great, whatever you want to say, 10 or 11 of

52:07

them. And now you're

52:10

back in Columbus's time.

52:12

And you're talking about there being no Europeans

52:15

anywhere in the hemisphere.

52:19

You say 1492, or you say five or 600 years ago, it

52:23

just seems like forever ago. You

52:25

say 10 or 11 50 year lifespans. Doesn't

52:29

seem that long at all, does it?

52:34

You want to keep playing that game if you say

52:36

a 20

52:37

of those lifespans.

52:41

Great, great, great, great, great grandfather, whatever it is, 20

52:43

lifespans. And you are in,

52:45

you know, the early middle ages,

52:48

Norman Saxons, William the Conqueror,

52:50

Vikings, 20 human lifetimes of 50

52:53

years. 40 of

52:56

those human lifetimes, 40 of

52:59

them. And you're in Julius Caesar's time

53:01

period, the death throes of the

53:03

Roman Republic,

53:05

60 of those lifetimes.

53:07

And you're in old Testament time,

53:11

90 of those 50 year lifespans,

53:14

90 and

53:15

you can watch the great pyramids

53:17

being built in Egypt.

53:21

And before that,

53:23

it's basically prehistory. So

53:25

the thousands and thousands of human

53:27

lifetimes that are part of your ancestral

53:30

genetic code, only the

53:32

last 90 or 100 or something like that,

53:36

all that is is all recorded

53:38

history and it's hardly any

53:41

of your past.

53:43

That to me is absolutely mind blowing.

53:46

And I feel like the ramifications should

53:48

be huge even if, you know, to

53:50

my

53:51

editor's dismay, I can't tell you

53:53

what the story is here.

53:57

One of the things I have always been fascinated

54:00

with is how the people

54:02

from a very, very long time

54:04

ago saw their

54:07

own very, very ancient past.

54:10

I mean,

54:11

for example, there

54:14

is a King's list

54:17

that the Neo-Assyrian

54:19

scribes put together

54:21

in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Neo-Assyrians

54:24

were the last of the great Assyrian

54:27

states, the high watermark of their political

54:29

and military dominance. Think 750

54:33

BCE and you're right there. Well, the

54:36

Neo-Assyrian scribes concocted

54:39

a king's list, right?

54:41

One king after another after another that stretched

54:43

all the way back in time, that

54:46

chronicled their rulers going back.

54:48

Remember, from their own time period, which

54:50

is like 750 BCE, going back 2000 years

54:53

from there. I

54:57

loved that they referred to the first 17 Kings

55:01

in their Kings list as the Kings

55:04

who lived in tents, denoting

55:08

that these were like nomadic

55:10

Kings, right? People who didn't even live in houses. Now

55:14

most historians will tell you that those sorts of legendary

55:17

historical creation lists are

55:20

a bunch of nonsense and that they go from, you

55:22

know really attestable rulers that we know

55:25

existed to people that may or may not have

55:27

existed to a bunch of You know kings in

55:29

the distant past that were almost certainly fictitious

55:31

But how's that any different than all

55:33

of us doing what the 19th century

55:36

made common right trying to associate

55:39

our current situation

55:41

with some wonderful glorious ancient lineage

55:44

The ancient Assyrians were no different

55:48

What is a little different though, is

55:50

what became of them, maybe compared

55:53

to what will become of us. my

55:55

favorite story almost certainly I mean

55:57

it's top five for me from the ancient

56:00

world and all the ancient writings, and

56:02

we quoted it in the show we did on the Assyrians,

56:05

Judgment at Nineveh, available from the website

56:07

if you want it, although one of the many shows

56:09

I'd like to redo with the modern sort of approach

56:12

where we go and do it more deeply and over a longer

56:14

period of time, but is the wonderful story

56:17

from the Greek general Xenophon

56:20

when he came upon what

56:22

used to be some of the grandest cities

56:24

in the world a couple hundred

56:26

years after their grandeur had passed.

56:30

And they, you know, Xenophon was a Greek

56:32

general whose men were involved

56:34

in a Persian dynastic struggle. They ended

56:37

up on the losing side and, and

56:39

had this amazing account

56:41

of trying to get home from

56:43

the battle site, which was deep in, in

56:46

like Iraq, uh, all the way

56:48

back to Greece, harried the whole way by

56:50

the, by the enemy forces. But at one point

56:53

in Xenophon's account, and he's writing

56:55

this, you know, like in 401 400 BCE,

56:58

right? For us, it's very, very ancient times,

57:00

but he runs across

57:02

ancient cities, cities that are ancient

57:05

in his time period, right?

57:07

We wondered about how the Assyrians

57:09

saw their ancient past.

57:11

Well, this wasn't Xenophon's ancient past.

57:13

These weren't Greek cities. These were

57:15

Assyrian cities, but Assyria

57:18

had been gone for a couple hundred years and

57:20

Xenophon had no idea about them. He

57:22

talked about these,

57:24

I always call them ghost cities, because they're

57:26

cities that are literally just turning to

57:28

dust, because these cities

57:31

were often made up of the mud bricks

57:33

that they used to use as an archaeological

57:36

building material back

57:38

then.

57:41

And Xenophon described

57:43

how tall the walls were, how big

57:45

the city these circumferences were and all these kinds

57:47

of things. And you can tell he's plainly

57:52

astonished by what he sees.

57:54

These are cities that are probably bigger than anything

57:57

in Greece or certainly as big as the big

57:59

cities in Greece.

58:00

and yet they're clearly from a much earlier

58:02

time period.

58:04

Now this is a guy being pursued and on the run

58:07

by his enemies, but he still had time to make a few

58:09

inquiries to the local

58:11

people squatting here and there around

58:13

these giant ancient structures.

58:17

And the people give him the wrong answer.

58:20

They don't know who it belongs to either. It's

58:22

only a

58:24

couple hundred years since they were destroyed,

58:27

A series of enemies combined and brought

58:29

that empire down and destroyed these cities,

58:32

but Xenophon already can't figure out

58:35

who it was that built them.

58:38

I love that story because it's a story about

58:40

antiquity, looking back on an even earlier

58:43

antiquity.

58:45

And there seems to be kind of a

58:47

sort of a cosmic lesson there that

58:49

we seem to think ourselves immune

58:52

from. And it's the lesson that

58:55

someday somebody could be going

58:57

through our ruins and asking,

58:59

you know, the few squatters here and

59:02

there who built them.

59:05

And if you don't believe that's possible,

59:07

let me just suggest to you

59:10

that that's probably what your average

59:12

Assyrian person on the street

59:14

would have said to me if I did

59:16

one of those. And I used to hate those, those classic,

59:19

you know, we used to call them MOS is

59:21

man on the street. But today you'd say person on

59:23

the street interviews, if I'd gone to

59:25

your average, a Syrian in Nineveh and said, so

59:27

do you think someday this city will be a ruin? And

59:30

no one will even remember Assyria. I

59:32

would think they would think I was crazy. And

59:34

that's

59:35

what people today would think if I asked them a similar

59:37

question, but

59:39

the long view seems to indicate

59:41

that that's how most things have gone in the past,

59:44

which means one of two things. As I always say,

59:46

either things will continue to go as they

59:49

always had. and that will be interesting,

59:52

or they will defy the way

59:55

things have always gone and go in a different

59:57

direction, which is equally interesting.

1:00:01

So, either we end up a ruin to somebody

1:00:03

else, or we don't, both fascinating

1:00:05

outcomes.

1:00:08

There are some other things, though, that

1:00:10

we haven't brought up that I think also are

1:00:13

part of what the long view seems to

1:00:15

indicate to me.

1:00:17

We've always been hard on

1:00:19

our environment.

1:00:21

And this is another thing that I think was part

1:00:23

of an earlier era

1:00:26

of things like anthropology that maybe

1:00:28

is starting to also be seen in a different

1:00:30

light, this idea that human beings

1:00:33

lived in harmony with nature

1:00:35

once upon a time.

1:00:38

I don't think that's true.

1:00:40

And I think, like I said, the, and

1:00:42

again, maybe I'm choosing sides here, but the anthropologists

1:00:45

and stuff that I've been reading seem to suggest the same

1:00:47

thing. We've always been extremely hard

1:00:49

wherever we've lived on the environment. The difference

1:00:51

between earlier eras and today are twofold.

1:00:55

One, we create stuff now

1:00:57

that doesn't biodegrade. So

1:01:00

if you were tough on your environment, but it was

1:01:02

just a question of chopping down all

1:01:05

the foliage and leaving around

1:01:07

biodegradable material and all that kind

1:01:09

of stuff, well, that goes away eventually.

1:01:12

If instead we're dealing with things like plastics

1:01:14

and polymers and all kinds of other things, right?

1:01:17

Contaminants that don't go

1:01:19

away. Well, that's a different, you

1:01:21

know, in other words, we're being no better stewards

1:01:24

of our environment than our ancestors were,

1:01:27

but the materials that we're polluting our

1:01:29

environment with are much

1:01:31

more permanent. So the environment

1:01:34

staves much more damaged, much longer.

1:01:38

And of course, the other thing is when you're moving

1:01:40

around in a nomadic state, which would

1:01:42

have been most of human history, if we're looking at

1:01:44

the 300,000 year lens, well, that

1:01:47

means that you're able to give land

1:01:50

time to recover after you've been hard

1:01:52

on it. And you see this with eight populations,

1:01:55

right? They just, they'll move from one burned

1:01:57

out territory to another and by the time

1:02:00

they get back to the original location in

1:02:02

their range, it's had time to recover

1:02:04

and they haven't polluted it with forever chemicals,

1:02:07

right? But we've always been hard on

1:02:09

the environment. So the fact that we're still hard

1:02:11

on the environment is part of

1:02:13

the consistency of

1:02:15

looking at human behavior over the long

1:02:18

haul, which means that trying

1:02:20

to extricate ourselves from this

1:02:22

mess of destroying our environment

1:02:25

is going to be well, no

1:02:27

one ever said it was going to be easy, but we would literally

1:02:29

have to change the way we have always been

1:02:31

not revert to a way we used to

1:02:34

be again. I think it's a myth that we ever

1:02:36

were in that,

1:02:37

that particular way. So

1:02:39

humans have always moved. And

1:02:41

this is where the notes that I have around me

1:02:43

just it would start to overwhelm me. But there were two lines

1:02:46

that I juxtaposed one right by

1:02:48

the other. One was this concept

1:02:50

and again, you'll often hear this from environmental

1:02:53

groups, a concept known as seventh

1:02:56

generation philosophy. And

1:02:59

this is supposedly tied back to

1:03:02

the Iroquois Confederation. And

1:03:04

the story goes that

1:03:07

the people who ruled those

1:03:09

Native American groups were taught

1:03:11

to think about their decision

1:03:13

making and how it would affect seven

1:03:15

generations into the future. Now,

1:03:19

I love this concept, but

1:03:21

I find it hard to believe in

1:03:23

it. And the

1:03:25

quote that I juxtaposed next to it

1:03:27

was a quote by the 20th century

1:03:31

economist John Maynard Keynes,

1:03:34

who was, and the

1:03:36

context behind it was somebody

1:03:38

was talking about going

1:03:41

through some hard times and letting

1:03:43

the economic system correct

1:03:45

itself over the long haul.

1:03:48

And he said, and the

1:03:50

quote is something like, well, in the long haul,

1:03:52

we're all dead. We're

1:03:54

in the long run, we're all dead. And

1:03:57

the point he was trying to make was that

1:03:59

if you tell...

1:04:00

somebody, well things will get better, but

1:04:02

they won't get better till after your lifespan is

1:04:04

over. Well you're condemning that poor

1:04:06

person then to have to live a terrible

1:04:08

life because you're telling them that that it's

1:04:11

it's part of something that you're doing for the good

1:04:13

of something farther past your

1:04:15

horizon and he was insinuating that

1:04:18

you might change the future horizon if you

1:04:20

just tried to improve this person's life now and

1:04:22

didn't try to worry about the amorphous stuff

1:04:25

you know in the future. Well I

1:04:27

was trying to think about artificial intelligence,

1:04:29

which is all in the news right now, of course. And

1:04:33

if you had said to an

1:04:36

AI program that

1:04:38

it needed to run society,

1:04:41

but that it needed to have as its founding

1:04:44

sort of guiding principles,

1:04:46

this seventh generation philosophy

1:04:48

is its thinking. And

1:04:50

I can't tell you that I came up with

1:04:52

any specific scenarios, except that AI

1:04:55

destroys the world, which is the one I I normally come up

1:04:57

with about 80% of the time. But

1:04:59

the idea of trying to manage human

1:05:02

resources for the good

1:05:04

of people 200 years from

1:05:06

now, for example, just seemed

1:05:08

to go against all of the

1:05:10

human proclivities built into us.

1:05:13

I mean, if you have to, I mean,

1:05:15

throughout most of human history, we live so hand

1:05:18

to mouth that the idea of trying

1:05:20

to preserve things for future generations,

1:05:23

And this goes back to the Keynes quote a little bit,

1:05:26

would certainly mean a poorer lifestyle,

1:05:28

or maybe not even surviving,

1:05:31

to the current generation you lived in, right?

1:05:33

If the Sierra core really were trying to decide

1:05:35

things for seven generations in

1:05:37

their future, then they were prosperous

1:05:39

people indeed.

1:05:42

Most people don't have those kinds of, you

1:05:44

know, the wealth and the options and the surplus.

1:05:49

It's hard enough getting through the winter, much less trying

1:05:51

to preserve stuff so that people 200 years in

1:05:53

the future have enough for themselves, right?

1:05:55

Don't cut down this forest now. Well, why? We

1:05:58

make our lives so much better. What about people?

1:06:00

200 years from now. Well, if we don't manage

1:06:02

our resources better now, we won't be here 200

1:06:04

years from now. See what I'm saying?

1:06:07

Interesting to think about how an AI would

1:06:11

try to figure out a way to manage

1:06:14

human resources

1:06:16

and needs and actions

1:06:19

with that long of a timeline. I

1:06:23

mean, we might have to put up with a ton of things

1:06:26

today going away that make our

1:06:28

lives what they are on

1:06:30

the grounds that to do otherwise

1:06:32

would be to hamstring people

1:06:34

hundreds of years from now from living

1:06:37

lives,

1:06:38

you know, well at all.

1:06:42

This is exactly the sort of problem,

1:06:44

you know,

1:06:45

something that's so runs against the grain

1:06:48

of what

1:06:49

our past history seems to indicate

1:06:51

is our pattern where

1:06:54

a person like yours truly

1:06:56

is is

1:06:58

susceptible to seduction by

1:07:00

something like the artificial intelligence

1:07:02

wild card answer to our problems,

1:07:05

because otherwise it can

1:07:08

become depressing

1:07:09

to look at just how consistently

1:07:12

we live a certain way over the long view

1:07:15

and then expect those ways

1:07:17

and those patterns of behavior to change

1:07:19

just because we've invented

1:07:21

weapons, for example, that are so destructive

1:07:24

that fighting the kind of wars that we had

1:07:26

become accustomed to fighting would

1:07:28

be practically suicidal, genocidal

1:07:32

for sure. You can't even imagine

1:07:34

something like that happening, but our past history

1:07:37

would suggest that imagining

1:07:40

anything else is probably

1:07:43

being far too optimistic,

1:07:46

unless of course you can throw a wild

1:07:48

card into things that,

1:07:50

you know, upsets that balance. In

1:07:52

other words, what if you had a fix, you

1:07:54

know, something that came in there

1:07:57

and prevented

1:07:58

us from doing the very

1:08:00

things we've always done, depressingly

1:08:02

always done, right? We're going to destroy the environment. Well,

1:08:04

let's invent something that will prevent

1:08:06

us from destroying the environment,

1:08:09

right? So the seventh generation

1:08:11

thinking infused into our robot overlords.

1:08:14

That's how the Kurt Vonnegut

1:08:16

novel on Dan Carlin's idea

1:08:18

for saving us from ourselves with artificial

1:08:20

intelligence would go. It would make a great

1:08:23

movie, wouldn't it? Perfect science

1:08:25

fiction dystopian classic, you know,

1:08:28

invented by misanthropic people who didn't

1:08:30

trust people to handle people problems

1:08:33

and wanted a wild card instead. But you can

1:08:35

see how it could seduce a person like yours

1:08:37

truly. And

1:08:39

there's something wonderfully symmetric

1:08:41

about the whole thing that's appealing also, this

1:08:43

idea that

1:08:45

our answer to the problem

1:08:47

of inventing all these things

1:08:49

over time that have made modern

1:08:52

life possible, right? The kind of lifestyles

1:08:54

and progress that, you We all

1:08:56

live lives that only the very,

1:08:58

very, very, very most privileged and wealthy

1:09:00

people in the past ever lived. I mean, we've got this wonderful

1:09:03

planet we've created through all of

1:09:05

our inventiveness. There's a wonderful symmetry

1:09:07

to the idea that we could invent our way out

1:09:10

of our inventiveness problem or at least

1:09:12

our inventiveness byproducts problem.

1:09:15

I like that.

1:09:17

And one can also make the

1:09:19

case that

1:09:21

the last couple of hundred years

1:09:24

have put human collective intellectual

1:09:26

capacity and the ability of entire human

1:09:28

societies to adjust under

1:09:31

huge amounts of pressure and

1:09:33

the need to speedily evolve

1:09:36

to handle

1:09:37

what are

1:09:39

historically very rapid changes.

1:09:42

I mean, the last couple of hundred years, there's, well,

1:09:45

as we've always said, there's

1:09:47

going to come a time where

1:09:49

you're going to reach the limits of

1:09:51

humanity's ability to evolve

1:09:54

and adjust to changes at the pace

1:09:56

of change as it continues to speed up.

1:10:00

have reached that point already, or it may

1:10:02

be in our future, but at some

1:10:04

point it's going to arrive. And

1:10:06

at that point, the only thing one

1:10:08

can suggest that would solve

1:10:11

a problem like that is human

1:10:13

inventiveness, having invented

1:10:16

something that could go beyond

1:10:18

human evolutionary

1:10:21

capacity to change more quickly

1:10:24

than human brains and human

1:10:26

societies can change.

1:10:30

That is a pro-artificial

1:10:32

intelligence argument right there, isn't

1:10:35

it? The idea that you need something

1:10:37

like this to sort of save

1:10:39

humanity. The

1:10:42

anti-artificial intelligence argument

1:10:45

though is well known and well understood

1:10:47

too. it boils down

1:10:49

to a question, is

1:10:51

it ever smart

1:10:54

to build something that will

1:10:56

be smarter than you are?

1:10:59

I don't know what the right answer is in a

1:11:01

case like this, because sometimes I wish we had

1:11:03

something smarter than we are, but

1:11:05

the obvious downside of that is,

1:11:07

well,

1:11:08

obvious.

1:11:11

And even if we had a choice in the matter,

1:11:13

and I'm not sure we do, I don't know what the right

1:11:16

choice would be. remember James Burke asking

1:11:18

the question, the great science historian a

1:11:20

long time ago, if you looked over

1:11:22

the technological horizon, and

1:11:25

you didn't like what you saw, and

1:11:27

you didn't want to invent and

1:11:29

deal with the ramifications of inventing

1:11:32

something in the future, could you

1:11:34

decide not to?

1:11:36

And I don't know what the answer to that is. And I

1:11:39

don't know

1:11:40

exactly which way this will go. But

1:11:42

if you are a betting person,

1:11:45

It would be smart to look at exactly

1:11:47

how things have gone and

1:11:50

note that it's probably the safe

1:11:52

bet

1:11:53

to assume that we humans

1:11:55

will do

1:11:57

just what we have always done.

1:12:00

You