Youve got me appetite. All right. Even if youre not a history buff, in these scary, unprecedented times its incumbent on all of us look back to see where weve been and how we got here. And hopefully some perspective of where we are going. This sixyear investment produce a global history of the human journey which takes us from the stone age to the virtual age. Mister ansari proposes that the history of the world is a story. Were telling one another and since theres no single circle of storyteller, there must be many world histories area Mister Mister mac journey asks us all in all 20 narratives actually forms and informs us one single big story of our planet and if so , what might be . The book explores links and rebel facts that stitched the fabric of history. Theres a lot of little moments. If anybody finishes reading it because it just came out. You dont. You dont count. All right. Its like columbuss discovery of america sparked the rise of corporations and banks in europe and through the entire world into one great global drama area crocus rights of the story as an afghan american, because his san franciscobased author draws on his experiences of life in the world of islam and secular west to help readers understand the outcomes of overlapping narrative. He examines the role of interconnected with the element of everything from boardgames to belief systems, science and multinational corporations. A wellwritten and valuable to on the diverse narrative that has helped shape Human History. Of course we know him from otherthings. Many people have read his other books. Youre a good crowd here. Ttso preceding this publication there have been five other books. Road trip, gameswithout rules ofteninterrupted history , afghanistan. A history of the world through islamic eyes and then a work of fiction, the widows husband a historical fiction that takes place in 1840 in kabul and west of cabell and east of new york, his memoir published in the wake of the 9 11 crisis and chronicles a bicultural life. Hes also written i was very surprised about this six books series for children. So in your free time, i dont know what youre doing but being here tonight is really a joy and lets put our hands together for this amazing man. I have two microphones here. Is this the way it goes now . Im not going to know which one is which, im just going to do the best i can. 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 jessen and was about eight, so you do the math. I dont know how long ago that was. At that time i had not only wrote childrens books but i kstold her a lot of childrens stories and i made them up on the spot and i had the idea then that im going to write a childrens history of the world so i told her, i sent jesse im going to write a history of the world and she wrinkled her brow and said didnt pay already write that one . So 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. So its 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 thfrom this that ndfor the past six years ive been working on this and people occasionally run into me and they say what are you working on and i said i history of the world and they say no really. What are you working on and i go really and then it doesnt improve whmatters when i say , its a history of the world from the big bang to right now. And a common response then is it must be 40,000 pages long. But thats the whole point. Thats why there was this childrens history of the world idea i started out with. The whole idea is this book is shorter and the history of afghanistan that i wrote. Thats not only, that doesnt only reflect the fact that afghanistan is more complicated than theentire world. But its also goes right to ththe point because if youre only, 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 what do you leave that and what you believe in . Why do you take Something Else and why do you leave something in . There has to be some principle of inclusion and exclusion. Im going to suggest that for me the principle is your including everything that tells the story and youre going to leave out stuff that gets in the way of the story. The question is where do you find the through line for a story of Human History . Ill leave the big bag alone because im thinking of humanity. So around the time that i first started seriously thinking of writing this book as as one knows if shes here i went back to afghanistan in 2011 and when i grew up, afghanistan was like a synonym for the word remote and i said you either said remote or afghanistan, they have the same meeting meeting but coming towards kabul, i said im not heading towards remote now. I landed in kabul, theres the wreck of former soviet tanks and big indications of the american president. Theres cars everywhere and it feels kind of like paris and new york. Just a different flavor, maybe grunge or its one of those world cities and so then i thought okay. Maybe remote isnt in kabul, youve got to leave the city to find what used to be here. So we got in the car and we drove i think it was about eight or 10 hours and we got to the Central Highlands of afghanistan. We got to the place where those buddhists used to be that the taliban bombed out of existence. There was nothing whats there now is some buddhist shaped holes in the mountain but there is a down there. Theres a somewhat substantial town so my friend said no, were not stopping here. Theres a place further down the valley called the valley of the dragon, we will go there. Sowe drove along. And somewhere along the way in this desert, im looking up and i see a little glistening of white lines on soa little mud village clinging to the hillside there. By that time was kind of run out of roads following the tracks of earlier vehicles and going up in this little village, we dont see much. Maybe theres some tracks but that feel like maybe this is remote so im saying what is this little glistening white line and mark i asked for binoculars. And when i see a bear is a satellite dish. Im like what do they do with a satellite dish and mark operate a television how did they operate a television, theresno electrical lines going. How do you think its a . Theres a trsolar panels. How did they pay for any of this. A lot of times its opium being grown here and opium is kind of as good a currency as gold in a sense because infinitely subdivisional you can pay for small things with a little bit of opium and decay, you can start so there here. What happens with the opium that goes to the darkest on, as] is gone. Its processed there into more refined versions of the drawing. And it goes across turkey and albania into your inand probably some of it comes to san francisco. Im like okay, so there is kind of a network here that connects me in san francisco. Theres a village there in the valley near borneo. But i say what could they possibly be watching on the thing. Theres lots of programming coming out of kabul now and the most popular show right then was afghan star. Some of you probably know what afghan star is but half of you dont. So afghan star, the thing is all over afghanistan. They compete and make it out to a playoff chevy chip sort of thing finally one person is by cell phone vote of the audience chosen the winner of the year and that the afghan ofstar. Obviously clone off of American Idol iswhich was off of british title now. I didnt put a date on it the way back before villages and cities and all 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 roamed around forged and they probably knew other relatives in their areas where they know medically migrated but they didnt have any idea of all the thousandss of other bands of humans that were on the planet. If thats the beginning lets just start there and then this is where we panted up the planet as one tangled spaghetti mess of anything that happens to any human or anything human does may have Ripple Effects that goes out and has some effect on somebody else anywhere else on the planet and on that planet there is no place left. Its unaltered by our press so i thought thats the trajectory. We could take that as a trajectory or blue line. Thats when i started writing the book and in the course of thinking about it and exploring it and thinkings about how this ever increasing interconnectedness took place what i gradually started donned on me that its obvious that im going to sayed it anyhow, the interconnection, the interconnectedness not just evenly spread out pretty now wasnt like we were living in a still pool of water with little ripples. Thats not how it is. The human world consists not of still waters but lots of oral pools and beach whirlpool was some group of people that are talking to each other but not that much towh somebody else. And in the end i thought well okay so there are three things that are at play here. Everybody lives in some environment in everything they do has something to do with how they get whatgs they need out of that environment, whatever it ens rappel whatever it is out there that might hurt them. And as humans always from the time we were able to say okay this is the human species we did it by making and improving tools. Those are the two things. But there is one other thing and its the third part of the whole story. Let me just start reading this. I dont know if i should read from the beginning but i will go ahead and read a little passage from chapter 1 here. So one day in the fall of 1940, four french teenagers were roaming the woods near their home in Southwestern France searching for legendary buried treasure they had heard about when their. Dog robot suddenly scurried into a depression formed by an uprooted tree and began buying a something. The teenagers rushed over hoping that no it wasnt an old treasure chest. It was only a small dark opening in the ground so they did what teenagers do and what i certainly may have done myself at that age, they squeeze through the opening to see where it went. They had flashlights with them which was a good thing because the whole went down the long way before opening a class into a cavernous room and they are flashing their lights around based on the walls and even on the ceiling 15 or 20 feet above their wonder struck eyes bigger than life paintings of buffaloes and dear and other animals rendered gracefully and realistically and black red oak red and yellow. They found one of the worlds most spectacular galleries of paleolithic art. Spectacular but not unique actually. Kid paintings like this up and down all over the world since 1868 and they are still being founded hundreds of sites from spain to libya to indonesia. In many cases the paintings in a 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. Then i go through some examples but the thing is it doesnt like you turn up examples of the givings of doodling and thousands of years later people have learned how to make it kind ofs vaguely like an animal. No, we were not that much distinguishable from neanderthals and other bipedal primates that we share the planet with and suddenly humans took an uptick and that raises the question what happened . What caused that quick something must have happened 40 to 50,000 years ago. What was the . My proposal is we came in to true language and true language is not the ability to make words mean something. You know, my cat raul knows 10 or 15 words there is one word that he knows which means food and he says it and then he gets food. A and coco the guerilla using sign language actually new 1000 words or somewhere in that range so coco could say things like ice cream. Crows can make up new words for things that appear in their environment. They can make up a word that among them no means the person they came and hurt one of us. Farmer brown coming but words like that are just pointed. They are not at a significant level not different than pointing. What im talking about when i say chile in which his vocabulary embedded in grammar and syntax. What i mean is words can stop referring directly to things in the world and stop having a relationship with other words. And let me just say a little about that. So the meaning of many words is not their relationship to something in the physical world. Its their relationship to other words. Developing language meant we would start using words as if they were the object named. Words could then separate from the thing that have an existence of their own. Once that happens a whole world anof words can form parallel to the world. To language users could enter that world and interact as if it were the world itself. Picture two guys talking. One says lets meet for lunch tomorrow at that taco place on cortland and the other says im game. What time, about noon . Nothing in their physical setting corresponds to any of the words that these guys have spoken. Tomorrow, lunch, noon. What do they point to . Nothing in those arent the most distinctively linguistic. Consider act facts on and about. Those dont point to anything anywhere. They exist only in the linguistic universe they share with tomorrow and lunch and noon. When we acquire true language we have graduated beyond merely making sounds that triggered their bodies to run or fighter salivate. We elevate her game to make sounds that conjured up in our fellow humans imagination a simulacrum of the whole world. In two guys talk about getting tacos tomorrow at noon they are not only interacting in a world. They are each imagining the same world. If they werent they wouldnt both show up at the same place and time tomorrow. Thats the truly incredible thing, mentioning the same word. I will drive that home by saying here we are, 40 or 50 people read we are not experiencing the material physical world directly. We are experiencing a model of the world we have created together and we share and we think its the same world. In the course of human cultural developing you can trace how for example people who lived on the nile river, because of the way the nile is, this wonderful waterway protected from all other things, the Sahara Desert is that way and anotherr desert that way. We think waterfalls that way so and 600 miles of the river feeds the soil all along it in the river steadily moves north. Over that river is a breeze that constantly blows out. So anyplace along that reverse you have a boat to put in the water you take a sail down and you are going north of the cape at the sail upup your going sou. No wonder all along that river emerges a monolithic and sort of homogenous some civilization but i will not go into but if you go to mesopotamia is a different kind of river and once again people are there because they can grow crops there but the culture is different. Their idea of the world is tuned in to the environment which they are living. The indus river, read the book andnm you will see a different kind of river and in china different kind of river. In these various empire meant there are worldviews building up and when i speak of worldviews to a large extent what im talking about is when people are talking more to one another than they are two to others out there whoever they may be. They are stories recirculating reinforce and weave together o until they not only have the narrative they have sort of the metanarrative. They have the story of the world that they all kind of feel themselves to be living in and situate themselves within. 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 imaginary worlds, these worlds that are collectively constructed communally inhabited but experienced as individuals. This whole thing starts in place in his groups expanded the world expands at some point they run intoto an expanding worldview fm some other places. Thenen those overlap and then things happen. Not necessarily fighting though. When you have people occupying different worldviews and they become aware that they are someone else over there and they have some other with world. One of the things is curiosity. I wonder whats going on over there. Im going to keep the fire warm. Im going to go and talk to those guys. They speak a different language. I cant talk to them. So there is that thing that happens and sometimes two groups and a a former 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 problems but more like clouds of ideas that are coherent internally and have a structure they grow in the overlap and sometimes they clash. Sometimes interweave and become one bigger narrative. Is would say these narratives, even when they interweave the ghost of them stays in the bigger narratives of form. What we have today is a planet on which it doesnt matter if someone is living on the nile river or someone slipping on the mississippi. Location doesnt matter anymore. These narratives can be anywhere in the world and their all overlapping at the same time and what we are negotiating his how to figure out what is the big story inside of them. I let one more thing. Maybe i wont add one more thing. I will say this. And narrative we share with other people is how we hang together with other people is a leordinate it group able to coordinate which consists of the unknown of it all. The narrative we share with other people is sort of like a social self and a w social self implies a social other. There is a self and there is always other out there. Self another is not necessarily warfare. Self and other is just a condition of humanity. If there is a sense that theres not going to be enough, resources are thin, someone is 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 its how people sort when the violence might be coming because of resources or the other possibility the violence might be coming because the narrative we are living in is incoherent and it doesnt explain whats going on anymore. And now people are at a loss as to how to construct an identity living and not a coherent constellation of ideas but in a chaotic cloud of ideas. At that point its possible he might see people clustering into smaller constellation so it makes sense that they can be somebody they know inside that cloud and theres another thing. When ive been presenting this book i did an