Brief history of humans on Earth | Tim Urban and Lex Fridman
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- čas přidán 22. 02. 2023
- Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Tim Urban: Tribalism, ...
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GUEST BIO:
Tim Urban is the author of the blog Wait But Why and a new book What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies.
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It still baffles me that we still think we are the only generation of humans with great knowledge of the world
That is crazy lmao there is a whole renaissance era
Umm i don’t think anyone really thinks that 😂 too much time on the internet
Are you insinuating that things haven't changed? Go 1 page back on that book and over 80% of humans were still farmers, without any knowledge of evolution and worshipping God being the most important thing in the world.
Full podcast episode: czcams.com/video/GkZz2I6sK08/video.html
Lex Fridman podcast channel: czcams.com/users/lexfridman
Guest bio: Tim Urban is the author of the blog Wait But Why and a new book What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies.
16 minutes is the briefest brief we'll ever get from Lex
“Sapiens”, a Brief History of Mankind” by Yuval Noah Harari is a great book about civilization
Excellent book.
I love Tim Urban but I think that chart is super misleading. Half or more of the people who have ever lived were born in the past 2000 years so the final 8 pages of his book should take up half the size. The final page itself should be maybe 10% of the entire book? And the entire bottom row should be MOST of it. Most humans have experienced civilization and technological change, because it's built into who we are.
Tim made a powerful point in the second half with his story about travel. We form our attitudes about the world during our formative years, and that person stays inside us as we progress through life even if and as our circumstances change.
@Lex you flashed an Appalachian book at the start, but not Tim's book
Great point.
This is prime r/im14andthisisdeep content
A reminder that pretending to know more than you actually do is a career path.
Being an "influencer" is a career path, somehow. I can't seem to wrap my head around it without having to contort unnaturally.
To say that for the majority of human history nothing happens is an insult to the hunter gatherers today.
the greeks and the romans had hot water, as we know... we can speculate that egyptians and chinese got it too... but I get his point, he got caught in the moment
Only a select few had access to hot water.
@@ltmund true, I didn't mean all greeks, romans and egyptians had hot water, just pointing out that baths with hot water existed and saunas too... Places with geothermical energy had naturally hot water.
I understood what he meant... he meant that most people wouldn't take hot water baths, wouldn't even cross their minds.
Also warm baths and hot springs have been around for thousands. I agree he got a little dreamy there lol
@@ltmund anyone with access to fire had access to hot water. Dude is dumb
Exactly, people just heated their water on a stove or fire.
1767 the shower was invented by William feetham in London...obviously...but I would argue and say the Romans probably had bucket with holes in first.and yes the romans had hot water and Central heating...not to mention stoneage man living near hot springs and geezers.
I know Aztecs and Incans were pretty advanced too in regards to aquaducts, irrigations systems, heating and cooling systems, etc just like Egyptians and Romans did. I would not be surprised they showered with cold or hot water if they desired to. At least nobility.
@@Afreshio thanks for the insight into Incan culture I didn't even consider them
Also hot baths have been a thing ever since we could make fire and create vessels to hold the water.
I think it's modernocentric to assert that hunter gatherer societies knew nothing about their lives and world. Their knowledge of everything in their habitat would have been as detailed as ours because cultural evolution would have honed that knowledge over many millennia.
"Sapiens" goes over that idea that hunter gatherers were possibly higher IQ levels then us today simply bc of the amount of things they'd need to know in every day life far surpasses what we need in order to get by. Interesting thought
They were and still are very knowledgeable about plants, mushrooms, animal hunting and behaviour, even stars placement for orientation purposes. Every anthropologist knows that.
@Jacob Cory ¹p
Your first sentence states your argument but the second is opinion with no facts. D-
@Jacob Cory Hunter gatherers spend only about 20-30 hrs a week procuring and preparing food.
As a child I was very poor and at times very hungry. Almost on a weekly basis I lay my head down on my awesome pillow and lay on my comfy full size bed and I say “Thank You”. It’s great to sleep better than most kings in the history of kings.
A lot of people still don’t have hot showers
The majority, actually
Or cold
My spouse and I live in a 2600sqft house. It’s amazing how easy it is to feel that it’s just supposed to be that way. Or to look at someone who has a 6000sqft house and say, why don’t I have that.
What we should be saying is. Wow this is great. I grew up in a 1400sqft house with 1 shower. I’m living the high life.
Bruh I’ve lived in 800 sq fr apts almost my entire life. As do millions and millions of people. Who probably wish they had a backyard ngl. 😆
2600 sf house?! Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit! 🙄 😆 🤣
Most people where I live (Manila Philippines home to 13 million people) have a 200-500sqft house/apartment.
My apartment is 600sqft and I feel very lucky as I'm aware how most people live.
I live in the uk, lower middle class / working class house: 900sqf. For a family of 4. I do thing I’m living a high life!
They had hot baths 2000 years ago. In Rome people bathed a lot and also wore perfume. Not sure about showers.
Dude needs to read Dr. Graeber who describes a much different world of our ancestors.
News flash! There are still people who don’t take hot showers! I’m in my 50’s and my great grandma was born in 1900. Her house even well into the 1970’s had no indoor plumbing. No hot water or refrigeration. Everything was salted & cured. Vegetables & fruits were pickled or Jarred ( Preserved ).
Damn she old af
I just don’t take showers. Easiest way to get a private train car on any subway
No showers is a good tip. I also dont eat so no need for refrigeration. I also only eat pickles when I do eat.
@@CerealOverdrive how does your comment have no upvotes? I had to give it one. I’m dying laughing😂
Love your channel name lol.
I have always had these same fun thought experiments!
Hunter gatherers weren’t in a constant state of awe. they were worried about their next meal, worried about their children surviving, about predators. I’m sure there was some brief moments of reflection and awe but their world was brutal and violent.
Showers been around for a long time all you need is a hot spring which were around for a longer time then us
I'm pretty sure people back then heated water with a fire and put it in a huge tub and had it drained and replaced when the water got cold. Or they did their business fast while the waters hot
He said some
Inaccurate stuff, they also knew elders and acestors and children and circle of life, he may have meant many hundreds pf thousands of years ago.
I am still in awe about banana bread.
Bravo! This was an outstanding interview with one of my favorite bloggers and authors.
I don't buy the notion that we wouldn't miss hot showers, the same way we would miss pizza if they took it away forever
Icelanders have been bathing in hot spring water for a thousand years, so...
Absolutely love this channel and it’s so nice to see people speak the way I think 👍
Or you think the way they speak. Careful there
Counter to hot showers: hot springs. Also counter to no showers, the Californian natives are said to have very regular wash routines
I'm sure it was exciting to be the 1st, but just remember, someone had to eat the poison berries to find out that they were not edible 😉
Humans are the most adaptable creatures on 🌎
I’m pretty sure rich people took warm baths is old time. Which is low-key better they a shower for comfort
Lol, @ 0:09 the screenshot of the book is incorrect I presume?
They boiled water, my great great grandma Pot on the outdoor pit. Took care of Behind the ears the face pit's but there was a way to get clean.
That chart is equivalent to humans believing Earth was the center of the solar system/universe in like 400 BC
My other thought is, being from Texas, is that I do celebrate the birth of one of our saints - St. Carrier, born Nov. 26, 1876 - every year with some kisses to the sky in his name every so often starting probably in May. Hell, I turned the AC on the other day when it hit 85 degrees in February and upstairs was getting stuffy. We humans are living in such a sweet spot of time in human existence despite the perceived tumult and annoyances. So, when you're feeling a bit pissy....choose to be grateful instead.
While I understand everything this guy is saying, one of the azing things about studying history is the familiarity you feel with the people. Reading Cicero taught me that. Very similar to any average person todaym
There's a yin-yang to everything. We are the same, yet also very different. I mean just take a minute to think. Societal changes- no more slavery/ empowerment of women; Technology-we have access to watching videos/listening to music/AI; Health- vaccines to illnesses, lifespans are way longer.
Love this topic. Hope to hear more discussions about it on this channel
I still know Cubans that have been here since the 80’s still get emotional in the supermarket. Mostly because they still think about what their family does not have in Cuba.
Different times, different needs. Some people will never know what they’re missing if they never experience it.
My favourite convo to date ❤️
Likewise
Just started watching Lex. Does WWII come up in every conversation?
Well researched! Keep up the good work bro.
Lex: “go on…” 😂😂😂
I look at the existence of human life as being very short especially when researching all the various forms of life that had millions of years on earth
I haven't had a hot shower for 4 years. But I remember the luxury.
A walk in the woods, is also a self-help book in a way
" They didn't know anything" seems relative
To describe human history as nothing happened until it was written is short-sighted. I imagine our ancestors incrementally advancing throughout our history and several times during our evolution we almost became extinct.
Somewhere around 100,000 years ago humans had explored the entire Earth and with advancements in tool, cooking and clothing technology we were able to manipulate our environment to ensure our survival. This is something that was not guaranteed and took incredible insight and creativity from those people who were the first to achieve those breakthroughs.
Homo sapiens were not the first to achieve many of the behaviors that today we take for granted. Without acheulean tool technology or cave art we would not have Einstein or Picasso.
Surely the pages -10 to zero would look very similar to pages 1 to 10?
Cold Showers are better. Except if you want deep cleaning.
I have never understood why it took humans so long to form societies. 190,000 years to start farming, but all along we have been the same creature.
They had societies even 200,000 years ago, it was just tribal and nomadic/semi nomadic life.
Very similar to tribes still living in the Amazon rain forest or Papua New Guinea today.
Dude is clearly not an anthropologist *or* an archaeologist if he thinks nothing changed until 10,000 years ago.
He didn’t say that
Or an evolutionary biologist, or a physicist, or a philososher. Palmar grasp reflex became vestigial over 100k years ago, implying we had the technological or cultural means to leave a baby somewhere at least that long ago. Throwing items to hunt (only animal on earth that can do so) is over 100k years old, tending to wounded is at least 70k years old, Leaving items at graves is over 50k years old. List goes on endlessly. Youd have to be very ignorant about what actually matters to look at human evolution as narrow mindedly as this dude does, which begs the question, why does he think he is qualified to talk about it?
@@N8Dulcimer hey this makes me curious .. let's stipulate that this guest is a dog, for the moment. as a "validation fail," .. so you want good guests on your show. you want expertise. but no process of picking guests is perfect .. how do you minimize this sort of failure?
@@raulrodriguez3066 God this is even worse than I remember .. watch the first 30 seconds again. "It's a brilliant visualization because .." it helps you understand the (very very wrong) claim that almost nothing happens for almost all of the last 250,000 years. FYI quite the contrary, #1 almost no archaeological record of large-scale civilisations (such as cities built of stone) is far from the same thing as no evidence of #2 large-scale social groups with a *variety* of social structures for tens of thousands of years (at least), and then #3 a lack of evidence for group size or social complexity is, in any case, NOT evidence that "all human life on the planet was basically the same monoculture, same group size, etc ...." from 250,000 years ago until just a few thousand.
@@frentz7 Fundamentally anyone you bring on as an 'expert' should be respected by other experts. So if you bring a guy on to talk about evolution, just run it past any of the academic friends of the show first. He's brought real evolutionary biologists and anthropologists in multiple times and when you present a guy like this as if he's the same thing, to talk about the same topics, it delegitimizes the entire process.
If you want to interview people whove been outcast by the scientific community, that is at least exciting because at one point they were considered an authority then had an idea no one liked. Interviewing bloggers who run adjacent to science about big topics like this just serves to misinform people. Einstein himself said once that misinformation is much more dangerous than ignorance alone.
Human history is recorded in the stones that are all around us. We’re blind to it, but even in the mountains, and the large rock formations, there are traces of humans. We underestimated the Stone Age! They drew on rocks, the way we write in books.
Before you don’t believe it, remember, we used to think the world was flat. And then, until recently, we thought rats were born from trash piling up. Literally created from the trash. There’s so many things that we used to think were true… When there’s 40-100 people across the country who are sharing the lithic art, and explaining what it represents, it’s something to look into. Portable Rock Art 🪨🗿👍
This sounds like conversations I remember having in 8th grade.
But now your conversations are phd level I bet
@@Wingedmagician Well, considering Lex holds a phd, and my comment was about his conversation, I guess not.
Sounds like a waste of paper
This guy has no idea what he's talking about on most topics but that doesn't even slow him down from talking about everything with all the conviction of an expert. Good for him!
Tim forgets that knowledge has been lost over the ages. Have him try and build a pyramid like Giza with the tools of the age, not to mention the star charts they had, etc etc etc
Nothing discussed about how the consciousness was different. Much More ethos less ego. Big difference
I wish he didn’t talk too fast , this would have been a much more intimate conversation about the human past
Man, this guy's scatterbrained
There were poor men in England who never ate beef there whole life as it was too expensive
lol the book cover is wrong
The book cover that shows up is the wrong one, right?
@3:52 cmon bruh. Does this dude not know how you eat heater for a bath? 💀💀💀 It’s been done for thousands of years.
This is the theory also pf generalimprovements. They are under the surface until they go over.
Egyptian bathtubs in Vatican, Rome
The most ancient structures discovered on earth are showing features that are challenging our understanding.
Yet here comes the same little song about humans having technology for ... well never until around 1000 years ago (or a bit more if you take antique greece).
Strange that history is one of the fields were technical evidences are discarded because they are not inline with the allowed timeline.
I love people who think like this. Who just change the vantage point extremely in order to come to new realizations or a new sense of relativity.
If The Universe was compressed to fit into a single calendar year. Each “day” on that calendar would last around 38 million years, and a single human lifetime would last just about 0.2 seconds, on average. December 31 at 11:53pm the homo Sapiens appeared…
Trying to become a producer rather than consumer, but Thank you.
Some advanced villages or small groups had a few hundred years of progressive advancements and flamed out to disease or a five year drought. How many start overs happened?
I suppose alcohol would destroyed somebody from 20k years ago... Strong beverage is something pretty new in history.
I don’t think they were up to much more than dancing around a bonfire and hunting shit, the interesting stuff started when civilization started around the Assyrian empire
Probably why I gaze into a fire mesmerized
A Walk In The Woods
Looks like the first hot shower was created in the early 1800s.
Correction: General George and Jefferson never took a shower, they had sponge baths, they never had bathrooms! they never knew about 7 million years of human prehistory and paleoanthropology!
During the Roman Empire Thermae (hot baths) were public….
George Washington might have bathed in a hot spring?!
Advancement is exponential. Can some clever mathmatician calculate when this rate of advancement is too overwhelming for the limited space and resourses available. More concerning is when does the paranoia of this eventuality become unsustainable and anarchy becomes the prevailing cultural model
Bro. The Romans had hot water.
Kind of overlooking the fact that we are domesticated. Our feelings, ways of communicating and being are all a result of domestication. Dont compare the dog to a wolf and say their experience in the same environment is the same experience
Hyperbole on hot showers but fact the vast majority of human civilization had no access to hit showers many still in 2023
Sapiens by Harari is great read
Think about how humans branched off of the ape tree 7 million years ago a evolved to be sapiens, 300,000 years ago and did NOT know or was conscious that it was happening
They literally have cave paintings of humans taking showers, and named it after the guy that thought of it, Unga G. Shower from around 17000 B.C. - Read a book. Geez
Now everyone just hates each other over who’s getting mom and dad and grandma’s money when they die I was raised poor so money really doesn’t mean anything as long as I’m living there a lot of things I don’t need to be happy with life that’s how u find true happiness
This is what happens when assumptions are presented as fact....
Do we really know "more," today? (Urban mentioned a tower of knowledge.) I'm not sure. What don't we know anymore?
They would still know some stuff, if language existed, they would talk in the tribe.
Ha!! The thought of early colonists showering at all.
Such a dirty time in America
Cold showers lol.. They took a hot bath.
Do we evolve from animals?
i mean all selfhelpists are scammers. could have atleast ironed his shirt.
Why did the speaker not dive deeper into human history. Classic example of covering subjects a mile wide & an inch deep. Nothing here was truly insightful, only common knowledge.
But I could see the speaker's intelligence. Just rewrite the focus!
Love this podcast but i think its naive to think you could drop in at any point of time in human history and live for more than a week, that shows how used to this lifestyle we are
Initially, I thought he was Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Hebrews 11:3
By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
This is really western centric, I mean I don't expect him to have any other perspective. But the arrogance to think that we are the best of the best, for however long we have existed is ridiculous. But I get where he comes from. We're still unraveling the mysteries of our past, maybe let's not be too arrogant about it. And recorded history, doesn't entail all history.
It's absolutely undeniable that the power and capability we have now has never been achieved by early humans though. Not even close. I could imagine a society of maybe Mayan-level civilisation 50,000 yrs earlier but if so they didn't leave much behind. But the progress of the last 500, especially last 100 yrs has never happened before. No doubt.
@@geoffcunningham6823 What would we leave behind if we got wiped out right now?
Sorry the East can’t pick their shit up
@@sandel9601 buildings, roads, vehicles, a lot of plastic. were you asking genuinely?
@@eonasep All of that will eventually decompose. Depending on the event, it could also get buried so deep that next "generation" of humanity wouldn't find it in thousands of years with their technology if we didn't find a way to leave ours behind for them to pick up.
Boskoe 100 pre tatoos
I don’t agree that the book of human history is filled with empty pages until the Neolithic or Scientific Revolution or whatever. He really thinks the arrow is the only important invention prior to farming? Humans have constantly been evolving technology for hundreds of thousands of years, possibly millions depending on how far back you date mastery of fire. This comes across as very non-expert recency bias.
🤔
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