Well, you got me at the title. Okay. All right. Even if youre not a history buff, in these scary unprecedented times its incumbent on all of us to look back to see where weve been and how we got here now. And hopefully some perspective of where were going. This sixyear investment produced a global history of the human journey, which takes us from the stone age to the virtual age. Mr. Ansary proposes the history of the story were telling one another, since theres no single circle of story tellers, there must be many world histories. This dramatic journey asked us all, these asks us in all interwinding narratives, actually inform us on one single big story of our planet and if so, what might it be . The book explores links and Ripple Effects that stitch the fabric of history. Theres a lot of pivotal moments. Has anybody finished reading it . Because its just came out. Okay. Well, you dont count. Okay, you dont count. [laughter] all right. Okay. Its columbuss describing the banks in europe and drew the entire world into one great global drama. Kirkus writes of the story to mean an afghan american, San Francisco based author draws nicely on his experiences of life in the different worlds of islam and the secular west to help readers understand the outcomes of overlapping narratives. He examines the role of interconnections and development of everything from board games to belief systems, science, and multinational corporations. A wellwritten and valuable take on the diverse narratives that have helped shape Human History. Of course, we know him from other things, right . How many people have read his other books . Okay. Are a good crowd here. Okay. Proceeding this publication, there have been five other books. Road trips, games without rules and often disrupted history of afghanistan, destiny history of the world through islamic eyes and then a work of fiction, the widows history a historic fiction that takes place in 1840 in kabul and west of kabul, and east of new york. His memoir pub published in the wake of the 9 11 crisis, and chronicles a bicultural life and hes also written, i was surprised about this, six book series for children. So in your free time. [laughter] i dont know what youre doing, but being here tonight is really really a joy and lets put our hands together for this amazing man. [applaus [applause] so i have two mics here. Is this the way it goes now . And this is cspan, i dont know which is which, im going to do the best i can. So, anyway, you know, i did write childrens books and although ive been working on this book, i say for six years, i remember maybe the origins go back a little further. I remember when my presently 36yearold daughter jazz manipula manipulate jasmine was eight, you do the math. I not only wrote childrens books, but told her stories and made them up on the spot and i had the idea then that im going to write a childrens history of the world. I said jazzy, im going to write a history of the world. And she wrinkled her brow, daddy, didnt they already write that one . Now i want to say that not only did they write that one, but even though ive written one here myself, i myself actually wrote another one earlier. [laughter] so, its really true that i have been thinking about this for a long time. And the way ive been thinking about it, i think i can trigger off from this, the past six years ive been working on this, and people say what are you working on . And i say the history of the world. And they go, no, what are you working on . It doesnt improve when i say its a history of the world from the big bang to right now and the a common comment is, it must be 40,000 pages long. Thats the whole point. Thats why there was the history for the childrens books. And this is shorter than the history of afghanistan that i wrote. That doesnt only reflect the fact that afghanistan is more complicated than the entire world [laughter] it goes right to the point. If youre going to undertake to write the history of the world from the big bang to right now, clearly youre going to leave some stuff out so now, what do you leave out . And what do you leave in . And why do you take something out and why do you leave something in . There has to be some principle of inclusion and exclusion. And im going to suggest that for me the principle is that youre including everything that tells the story and youre going to leave out stuff that gets in the way of seeing the story. So the question is, where do you find the through line for a story of Human History . Ill leave the big bang alone for right now, right now i really am thinking of humanity. And so, around the time that i first started seriously thinking of writing this book, as she knows if shes here, i went back to afghanistan in 2011, when i grew up afghanistan was like a synonym for the world remote. If you said remote and afghan had the same meaning. And kabul, im not headed to remote now, thats not happening now. I landed in kabul, theres the wrecks of former soviet tanks and then big indications of american presence, theres buildings, cars everywhere and it feels kind of like paris and new york, different flavor, maybe grungier, one of those cities. And maybe remote isnt in kabul. Youve got to leave the city to fine what used to be here. So with some people, we got in a car and we drove, i think it was about eight or 10 hours and we got to the Central Highlands of afghans, where the buddhas used to be that the taliban bombed out of existence and you know, there was nothing. Whats there now is some buddha shaped holes in the mountain. Theres a town there, a somewhat substantial town. So my friend said, no, were not stopping here, theres a place further down the valley, its called the valley of the dragon, well go there. So we drove along, drove along and somewhere along the way in this desert, im looking up and i see a little glistening of white line on a little mud village thats clinging to the hillside there. By that time weve kind of run out of road and were following the tracks of earlier vehicles and going up to this Little Village, we dont see much, you know, maybe theres some tracks, but its that feels like maybe this is remote. So im saying what is this little glistening white line . I asked for a binoculars and what i see up there is a satellite dish and im like well, how do they what do they do with a satellite dish . Operate a television. What are how did they operate a television, theres no electrical lines coming in. Well, theyve got solar panels. How do they get solar panels . Theyve got a motorcycle and they go where theres solar panels. How do they pay for any of this . A lot of times theres opium grown here and opium is kind of as good a currency of gold in a sense because infinitely sub divisible and pay for small things with a little bit of opium and it doesnt decay, you can store it, its there next year. What happens with the opium . Well that goes to taz stand, uzbekistan and processed into more refined versions of the drug and goes across turkey, al baena, europe and probably some of it comes to San Francisco. So im like, oh, okay. So there is some kind of a network here that connects me and San Francisco, this Little Village up there in the valley. And, but i say what could they be possibly watching on that thing . Well, theres lots of programming out of kabul in fact the most popular show right then was afghan star. Some of you probably know what afghan star is. How many dont . Okay. So afghan star, singers all over afghanistan compete, you know, and they thin out to a playoff championship sort of thing and then finally one person is by cell phone vote of the audience chosen the winner of the year and thats the afghan star. Obviously cloned off of american idol, which was itself cloned off of british pop idol. So now, wait, british pop idol, afghan star, american idol, and you know, at that same time im just browsing around, reading information and finding that that time, that year, anyhow i was told that 80 of the childrens toys used by sold to kids for that year were made in china and china, one of its products was inexpensive motorcycles that was made just for the market that im looking at in that valley. So at that point i thought back and i said, all right, 50,000 years ago i didnt put a date on it, but way back before villages and cities and all of that stuff, the human animal on the planet existed as small bands of relatives, basically, and they were probably not much bigger than 180, 200 people. And they lived in no fixed spot, roamed around and foraged and hunted and probably knew other bands of relatives in their areas where they kn nomadicly migrated, so if thats the beginning, lets start there and then this is where we ended up is the planet is one intertangled spaghetti of human lives, anything that happens to any human or that any human does anyplace, might have Ripple Effects that goes out and has some effect on somebody else, anywhere else on the planet. And on that planet, theres no place left thats un, you know, thats unaltered by our presence. So, i thought, okay, thats maybe the trajectory. We could take that as a trajectory or a through line. Thats when i started writing this book and in the course of thinking about it and exploring it, and thinking about how this ever increasing interconnectedness took place, what ive gradually sort of dawned on me that and its obvious, but im going to say it anyhow, the interconnectedness did not just evenly spread out, you know, it wasnt like were living in a still pool of water and little ripples and just, thats not how it is. You know, human the human world consists not of still waters, but lots of whirlpools. And each whirlpool is some group of people that are talking to each other, but not that much to somebody else. And in the end, i thought, well, okay. So, theres three things that are at play here. Everybody lives in some environment and everything they do has something to do with how they get what they need out of that environment, whatever it be and repel whatever it is out there that might hurt them. As humans, always from the time we were able to say okay, this is the human species, we did it with environment and tools. Theres one other thing, the third part of the whole story. Some of you started reading this so i dont know if i should read the beginning here, but ill go ahead and read from chapter one here. One day in the fall of 1840, someone in france, searching for a buried treasure they heard about when their dog robot suddenly scurried into a depression made by an uprooted tree and pawing at something. The teenagers rushed over, no, it wasnt an old treasure chest, it was a small dark opening in the ground so they did what teenagers do, what i myself might have certainly done at that age, they squeezed through the opening to see where it led. They had flashlights with them, which was a good thing. The whole went down a long way before opening at last into a cavernist room, and there flashing their lights on on the wall, and 15, 20 feet bigger than life paintings of buffalo, deer and other animals rendered gracefully and realistically in black, red, oaker and yellow. Theyd found one of the worlds most spectacular gallery of paleolythic art. Theyre still being found in hundreds of sites from pain, to libya to indonesia. In many cases the paintings in the given cave were made over the course of thousands of years. People were coming there to paint generation after generation. But the oldest of them were made about 40,000 years ago, and the odd thing is, those earliest paintings were already quite sophisticated and then i go through some examples, but, you know, the thing is, it isnt like you turn up examples of crude beginnings of doodling and then thousands of years later that people have learned how to make a kind of a have aingly animal. No. We were not that much distinguishable from neanderthals and other bipedal primates that we shared the planet with. Humans took an up tick and raises the question, what happened, what caused that, something must have happened about 40 to 50,000 years ago. What was it . Okay. My proposal is, we came into true language and true language is not the ability to make words that mean something. You know, my cat raul knows 10 or 15 words. You know, theres one word that he knows which means food and he says it and then he gets food. And cocoa the gorilla using sign language actually knew a thousand words or somewhere this that range and cocoa could say things like ice cream. And crows can make up new words for things that appear in their environment they can make up a word among crows, that bastard that hurt one of us, caw, caw, farmer brown coming. Words are pointing, and theyre really not at the, you know, at a significant level theyre not different than pointing. What im talking about when i say true language is vocabulary embedded in grammar and syntax. What i mean is words can stop referring directly to things in the world and start having a relationship with other words, and let me just say a little about that. The meaning is not relationship to something in the physical world, its their relationship to other words. Developing language meant we could start using words as if they were the objects named. Words could then separate from things of their own, once that happened a whole world of words could form parallel to the world of things. Two language users could enter that world and interact within it as if it were the world itself. Picture two guys talking, one says lets meet for lunch tomorrow at that taco place on courtland and the other says, im game, so what time . About noon . Nothing in their physical setting corresponds to any of the words these guys have spoken. Tomorrow, lunch, noon, what could they point to . Nothing. And those are not even the most distinctive distinctively linguistic of their utterances. At, of, they only exist in the world. When we acquire true language we graduate beyond words that cause had your buddies to run and salivate. We have sounds that conjured up in our fellow humans imagination the whole world. When two guys talk about getting tacos tomorrow at noon, theyre not only interacting in a world theyre each imagining, theyre imagining the same world. If they werent, they wouldnt both show up at the same place and time tomorrow. Thats the truly incredible thing. Theyre imagining the same world. And i will, you know, drive it home by saying here we are wherever we are, 40, 50 people. Were not experiencing the material physical world directly, were experiencing a model of the world that we share and we think its the same world and you know, in the course of human cultures developing, you can trace how, for example, people who lived on the nile river, because of the way the nile is, its this wonderful waterway protected from all over things, the Sahara Desert that way, another desert that way and big cataracts of water falls that way. So its the 600 miles of a river that feeds the soil all along it and that river is a current that just steadily moves north and over that river is a breeze that constantly blows south. So, whoa, if anyplace along that river, you put it in the water and put the sail down going north, put the sail down, south. No wonder all along that river emerges a monolithic and sort of homogenous civilization. Ill not go into, but go over to mesopotamia and its a different river. People are there because they can grow crops there. Their culture is different there because their idea of the world is tuned into the environment in which theyre living. In this river, you know, read the book, its a different kind of river, in china, a different kind of river. So, in these various environments there are world views building up and when i speak of world views, to a large extent, what im talking about is when people are talking more to one another than they are to others out there, whoever they may be, their stories recirculate and reinforce and weave together until they not only have a narrative. They have a sort of meta narrative. A story of the world that they all kind of feel themselves to be living in and situate themselves within. And the history of the world to me, one of the things that you can see happening, and therefore, one way in which you can construct a single whole story out of it, is by looking at the way these imagery worlds, im just going to call them that, these imagined, these worlds that are collectively constructed, communally inhabited, but experienced as kids. These Little Things start someplace and then as the groups expand, the worlds expand and some point they run into an expanding world view from some other place and then those overlap and then theres things happen. Not necessarily fighting though. You know . When you have people who are okay buying different world views and they become aware, there is someone else over there, they have a whole other way of thinking about the world. One other things that happened, curiosity, whats going on over there . Im going to keep the fire warm, im going to talk to those guys. Did they speak a different language . I cant talk to them. So theres that thing that happens or sometimes two groups trade and you know, they form a relationship that way or sometimes, one group wants what the other group has and then there might be some fighting. So if you look at the history of the world, you see this constant expansion of these i dont want to call them bubbles. Theyre sort of like clouds of identifies that are coherent internally and they have a structure and grow and overlap and sometimes they clash and sometimes theyre one bigger narrative and i would say that, you know, these narratives, even when they interweave, the ghosts of them stay in the bigger narrative that form. So what we have today is a planet on which, you know, it doesnt matter if someone is living on the nile river and someone is living on the mississippi, location doesnt matter anymore, these narratives can be anywhere in the world and theyre all overlapping at the same time and what were negotiating is is how to figure out, what is a big story that were all inside of. Ill add one more thing before i okay. And maybe i wont add one more thing. [laughte [laughter] i will say this, you know, a narrative we share with other people how we hang together as a coordinated group that is able to cope with the environment that consists of the unknown out thereness of it all. And the narrative that we share with other people is sort of like a social self. And a social self implies a social other. Theres a self and theres always other out there. Self and other is not necessarily warfare, you know. Self and other is just a condition of humanity. If there is a sense that theres not going to be enough, you know, resources are thin, someones going to have to be excluded from the dinner table. Thats when it becomes more the case that people start looking around and saying, who am i not going to share with if it comes to that . And i think these narratives or to put it another way, culture is the significance of it is that is how people sort when the violence might be coming because of resources, or the other possi