Professor Murphy, good to see you.

Hi, Nate.

So we are old friends and colleagues.

And earlier this week, you posted an excellent essay, the simple story of civilization.

I was so struck by its simplicity and brevity and hard-hitting points

that I gave you a call and thought we could have a conversation

for you to unpack it.

Yep, glad to do that.

Okay.

So in your do the math essay earlier this week, you compared the span of human life on earth

to a single human lifetime to bring perspective on how much of an anomaly our current culture

and economy are. Can you walk us through that analogy in brief?

Sure. So what we're going to do is take 75 years as a typical lifespan plus or minus and

map that onto the two and a half to three million years that humans have been on this planet.

So for a little bit of context, that itself is only one five thousandth of the

age of the universe. So this is still a narrow time slice in the big scheme of things. But all the

same, in this 75-year span of human habitation on the planet, the first 70 years are various

species of humans evolving and coexisting on the planet, mostly in a

sustainable way. The last five years of this 75 years is the age of homo sapiens, you know,

somewhat recent, but we're getting used to it. It's 200,000 years and mostly in a sustainable way.

It's the last 15 weeks that we would call the age of civilization.

That's 10,000 years where we've had agriculture settlements leading the cities.

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