Today, we are used to thinking about the whole planet as a single unit, but for most of history, earth was in fact an entire galaxy of isolated human worlds.

In this episode of Made You Think, Adil, Neil and I continue to discuss Sapiens by Yuval Harari. In this second part we cover the most recent part of Human and Society evolution and how we moved from scattered collection of isolated human beings to a cohesive global civilization.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most humans ran its course within three ancient frames: the nuclear family, the extended family and the local intimate community. Most people worked in the family business or their neighbours’ family businesses. The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police. Yet throughout history, such imagined communities played second fiddle to intimate communities of several dozen people who knew each other well. The intimate communities fulfilled the emotional needs of their members and were essential for everyone’s survival and welfare. In the last two centuries, the intimate communities have withered, leaving imagined communities to fill in the emotional vacuum. The two most important examples for the rise of such imagined communities are the nation and the consumer tribe.

We cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Cognitive Dissonance as a survival feature of human beings
• The absurd of national identity when talking about ethnic cuisine
• Industrial Revolution, Internet, and the re-framing of communities
• Who was the first guy to circumnavigate the world
• How merchants shaped today’s world
• Meaning of Happiness

And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of Sapiens by Yuval Harari!

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, a book that covers Postmodernism, a kind of Religion according to Harari, as well as our notes on The Way of Zen, to know more about Buddhism and the search of Peace.

Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more.

Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show

• Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee [0:45]
• Polytheism [13:46]
• Christianity [13:46]
• Judaism [13:46]
• Muslim [13:46]
• Mahomet [13:46]
• Janaism [19:01]
• Buddhism [19:40]
• Postmodernism (Discipline and Punish episode) [24:59]
• Pepe the Frog Meme [27:29]
• Was Magellan the first person to circumnavigate the globe? - Ask History [33:30]
• Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea [35:50]
• Crypto episode [40:00]
• Ethereum [40:30]
• Mechanical Turk [45:41]
• Fancy Hands [45:41]
• Netflix [48:30]
• ESPN [48:30]
• Twitch [49:31]
• /r/The_Donald sub-reddit [52:42]
• Woman subreddit forgetting her passport in Japan [55:25]
• The Yacht Week [1:00:00]

Books mentioned

• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (Nat’s Notes) (book episode part 1)
• Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault [24:59] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode)
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins [24:59]
• Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb [13:58] (Nat’s notes) (book episode)
• The Way of Zen by Alan Watts [21:43] (Nat’s Notes) (Neil’s Notes) (book episode)
• Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam [51:58]

People mentioned

• Yuval Noah Harari (official website)
• Adil Majid [0:36] (Crypto episode)
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb [27:29] (Antifragile, Skin in the Game)
• Barack Obama [15:56]
• Constantine the Great [15:56]
• Richard Dawkins [24:59]
• Carl Jung [24:59]
• Jordan B. Peterson [24:59] (on Twitter) (12 Rules episode) (Order and Chaos)
• Pepe the Frog Meme [27:29]
• Ferdinand Magellan [33:30]

Show Topics

1:37 – The Arrow of History. How we moved from scattered collection of isolated human beings to a cohesive global civilization.

2:11 – From considering cognitive dissonance a bug of our mind to a feature that helps us manage contradictory beliefs. Examples: Democrats and Republican, Religion, and positions on immigration examples. The truth is that we don’t think in binary.

6:35 – "Traditional" ethnic recipes are made with non traditional ingredients. The idea of national identity fall into the absurd. Countries that claim an identity did not exist 200 or 300 years ago.

11:06 – The result of today's globalization comes from 3 groups: Money, States, and Religion. Commerce would be the first thing that started tying people together. Money as the foundation of States and Religion.

15:56 – The moment religions scaled. How Christianity may have spread to support Constantine the Great’s plans for the Mediterranean. The traits of "successful" Religions.

19:56 – Tangent. Buddhist Monks that accept and inflict violence. Zen Buddhism.

21:16 – Politics in the new Religion. Constitution as the new God. Ways Catholicism's circumvented monotheism to absorb local religions.

24:38 – The challenge of growing and functioning all together. Science, the secret of success. Memetics vs Postmodernism.

25:33 – Globalization leading us to two concurrent and opposing directions: integrating us on a global scale (access to the same stores/products/music/culture) while dividing us