i'm afshin rattansi, we're going underground as the man so-called, mainstream media call us president elect joe biden. marks veterans day on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. while a likely pick for pentagon, michele flournoy stresses the need for the usa to become a force to be reckoned with. coming up on the show, there will be a smooth transition to a 2nd term, but mr. action right, took us $37.00 plus days, you know, watching back in 2000 conducted a successful transition then, did the corporate funded networks call it too early? as u.s. attorney general bill barr authorizes federal prosecutors to investigate allegations of voting irregularities in last week's presidential election. we speak to barry richard, the more who helped win george bush's legal fight against al gore in 2000. and this coronavirus lockdowns on the robot revolution, forced us to ask questions about the very ways we live and work and apologise.

james suzman, his groundbreaking, new book and work history of how we spend our time examines the history of the universe and humanity to ask if the key to tackling not just the future of work. but everything from pandemics to wars to inequality, lies in our affluent hunter gatherer. a past all the more coming up in today's going underground, but 1st as the 2020 u.s. election appears to still be the subject of litigation. let's go straight to award winning lawyer. barry richard who represented george w. bush in the florida litigation. that's all al gore beaten in 2000. he joins me now via skype from tallahassee in florida. barry, thanks so much for coming on. is joe biden, the president elect? yes it is. that's an easy question. well, russia, china, they still waiting on it. what makes you so sure that the u.s. attorney general bill barr is wrong about investigating voting irregularities at the election that well, i'm not suggesting he's wrong about investigating irregularities. nothing

inappropriate about that. he's the attorney general leon's, the right to investigate anything within his jurisdiction. i'm just saying that i don't see anything that i think will result in a change in the election. but presumably you watched the giuliani, who i should say as being on this show, he was on this show on election day. he's now produced witnesses claiming republicans were prevented from monitoring absentee and that made them ballots. you know, you can usually find witnesses in any election. there's some alleged irregularities . elections are big, messy businesses. the issue is whether there is credible evidence of either an irregularity, schröder of sufficient magnitude to change the results of the election. so the fact that you come up with 2 or 3 people who say something and look right now doesn't mean that the election is going to be overturned. if that were the case, we'd never have anybody like he's saying what you're saying. partly because the margins a so different this time till what they were in 2000 when you won for george w.

bush against al gore. well, they were jute big differences. that's one that margin in pennsylvania was over $46000.00 votes, so you would have to be able to walk into court with credible evidence that there were well in 46000 ballots. the validity in which part in question i haven't even seen anybody come in with a 100 pieces of evidence of a flaw regularity a 2nd in 2000, the problem was one that everybody acknowledged. it was a expect that leave you signed a ballot, and there were many, many thousands of doubts that had been rejected by the other readers. and a difference was only 537 votes, so that was a big difference from what we're doing with here. ok, so the monitoring doesn't matter so much. what about military ballots that have yet to come in? because, you know, trump says that he wants the troops home from afghanistan by christmas. and biden

has been a bit more nuanced about his position on afghanistan. you know that the military ballots could turn over the margins you just talked about. it depends upon the number of military ballots that there are. i don't know how many military ballots there are from pennsylvania, but i doubt that there are more than 46000 ballots. so you agree with james baker that trump certainly shouldn't have called a halt to voting in a, in a democracy. oh, of course not. why would we halt the voting simply because in a democracy the president doesn't call doesn't halt the voting, and the court doesn't hold the body. not under these circumstances. now, the supreme court, the u.s. supreme court did order it netted ballots that received after november a server, which was the usual that was brought to the or now before that the slowly election should be segregated and preserved, which they were. but i, i don't. so if there were more than a couple 1000 that was now i know judge and ito didn't go all the way from the

trump side big. it doesn't impress you that u.s. supreme court justices, clarence thomas and neal gore search all say along with alito that there is a strong likelihood, a pennsylvania court decision of separating mail in ballots, violated the u.s. constitution. well, i think that, that, i think i can't question the validity of what they're saying as a matter of law, i don't necessarily agree with that. it's a matter that has to be determined, but it is the one issue which is fundamental, is that even if the court were ultimately did get to determine if it violated the law, it would have to once again affect the number of ballots that would make a difference in the election, that's a fundamental principle that every court recognizes, including the united states supreme court. so as a matter of academic interest. and it may or may not have been in violation of u.s. constitution, but it would make any difference. i think that might be one of the things the court had in mind when it, when it held off to wait until after the election. presumably going to tell me the

number of dead people, all of those who voted won't affect those margins. but fundamentally, if the highest office there in the land, the attorney general himself says to pursue substantial allegations of substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities. pride set of occasion that still doesn't impress you well 1st of all the characterization of them as stansell by the attorney general is not a law. he's an advocate and he's abrogated his current position. as to whether or not they're important. i all i'm saying is i have yet to see any credible evidence of sufficient number of votes being in fact in a change the election. i didn't read by the way that we're going to the supposed dead people. but the doubt was investigated by the pennsylvania authorities and found to have substance. i can't, i can't speak to whether that's any more credible than what the attorney general

said. but i know that regardless of what either one of those says, we have to see evidence that would change the result of the election. and we haven't seen it yet. i you surprised about what's going on. i mean, at the moment the department of justice is an action. crimes branch boss has resigned. and also, at the same time, the general services administration boss or administrator emily murphy says there will be no immediate help for any biden transition till at least the middle of november, maybe not the not even then. what exactly is going on as compared to what you were going through back in 2000, when i can only speak to what's going on. and while i am nonpartisan in my representation of candidates and public officials, what i can tell you the difference between now and 2000 is that in 2000, as i mentioned, everybody acknowledged the problem of there was no question that there were

defective ballots. the only issue was how we got them only counted to determine who the real, where was the other little differences. both candidates at that time were committed to a lead in the courts do their job and to accept in the results and supporting whoever the winner by richard. thank you. well, while mainstream media speculates about a biden presidency and celebrates a covert vaccine from share price, rocketing scandal, hit drug make a phase, or is it something more profound that we are missing joining the global pandemic? does society need to be reordered? and should we really worry about jobs lost through automation? dr. james looks at humanity's past from the discovery of fire to the present day and finds lessons for the future in the affluent and fiercely egalitarian lives of our hunter gather ancestors, author of work, a history of how we spend our time. he joins me now via skype from cambridge. james, thanks so much for coming on. millions of people are in lockdown because of many of

them desperately worried. their mental health issues being considered by the authorities. tell me how this book in a way that may suggest that they shouldn't worry so much given that work is actually relatively new phenomenon in the 1st place. it's often easier to look at the world and rarely, long time scales. and, you know, certainly at the moment where, oh, absolutely swept up in the immediacy of this pandemic. and, you know, we are one of the 1st generations through all of human history that actually hasn't had to do you really serious illness. and to be confronted by our own mortality. so this is really absorbed and eaten us up. and you know, what i've tried to do in this book is really stark. a far longer picture to understand these broad currents that are not just shaping work, but really human life and work is an incredible prison through which to see it. and taking a much longer perspective, invites us and puts it puts

a completely different shine on where we are now. it makes us realize that these kind of changes that we've had and that we've endured over the last months of working from meeting on zoo, on and so forth. that these are really all fairly small waves in what is a far deeper set of currents that are fundamentally going to change our relationship with walk. and with that, because work is so central to the way we organize our lives, our societies, our politics, those changes in work which are going to be brought about by automation, climate change, which we're having to adjust our working practices to. and out of the reality that we're so extraordinary productive at the moment and these are going to make everything changed fundamentally. and there's so many such a range to this book. you talk about hunter gatherer civilizations and the

mythologies about them. do most people watching, they will think that hunt together lives were, as you say, in the book, nasty, brutish and short, like hobbes. you've got some tools behind you. they weren't apparently, indeed they did their work. look, the truth is, you know, out deep history, you know, from 10000 years ago they're not a lot of traces fock you know, just to look at. we don't have is contextualized the broken bones in the rock star tools that we find. we can text and eyes and by looking at societies that for one reason or another continued to hunt and gather into the late 20th century, the group who worked with the city. so it was a popular known as the bushmen. they lived in the kalahari desert and they really form part of a continuous lineage of hunting and gathering people in southern africa as pows, we can tell really from the very 1st origins of homo sap in st. 100000 years ago. and on top of this, they live in a desert. it's not 0 allowed out of milk and honey. it's not the easiest place and

we're not to apologise when the 960 is expecting to see it. endless struggle for survival. you know, people in popular mythology, the bushman were ready to consume, considered to be the most a published and miserable of all humans. and that the anthropologists who went there discovered that despite living in a desert environment which is considered incredibly hostile and bleak, they only worked 58 hours in a week to get that basic food needs that were very skilled, far, which is very skilled, hans's and so they're only work 15 hours and more than that,, there were actually at the time these studies took place in the 1960 s., there were better nourished then the average european was at the time. i mean, it was before that huge surge in post-war agriculture, but they were well nourished, healthy, and content, and enjoyed a great deal more leisure time than we do now. and it raises some very profound questions about the nature and the way we were going to rise societies. and of

course, what happiness and contentment means. and indeed, what one means and why we worked as hard as we do know. if a hunter gatherer ancestors lived like people like this and aussie, and we have every reason to believe that they did or that there are at least a reasonable adult, then it means that for really most of human history, 300000 years for the 1st 290000 years of human history, people had a very, very different approach to work that we do know it wasn't seen as, but you know, it wasn't seen as the thing that organize our lives. it wasn't seen as the ticket to participate meaningfully in a society. it was seen as something very, very different. so where we are now is very recent sliver of history. james, i'll stop you there. more than dr. james says, men on the history of how we spend our time after this break.

join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guests of the world of politics. sports business, i'm show business. i'll see you then he exclaimed joe biden, to be president elect come on group. that's not how it works. final vote tallies, make that determination, and we aren't there yet. close the election, free and fair. and what is the possibility? have the country explained the election was still welcome back. i'm still here with anthropologist and author of work history of how we spend our time dr. james says, i'm one of the management consulting companies being commissioned by the government here to work on coronavirus. transmission. ideas is mckinsey,

you talk about them in the book, the bedrock of our investment banking system, financial services terms like scarcity, which relates to go on together as you talk about at the heart of our meritocratic system. so-called is, this is this habit, spencer, quote, some bible of the fittest. this is the progress. this is the great, this of human civilization. you call into question all of the. yeah, it's a very look, this is a very fun, you know, we all grew up or what i say we all, i'm excluded to god or is that, you know, i grew up beautiful quite literally. i actually had mice were beaten when we didn't work out. there's this whole idea that hard work is an absolute call for you, and it's beaten into us. and it's one of these absolute ideas not underwritten by a whole series of economic ideas, which in a sense we take for granted in one of these spots that we have ogunnaike is now society round and it sort of borrows from biology is this idea that one humans are

hideously competitive creatures and this constant survival of the fittest, which is a kind of corrupt reading evolution anyway. and then the 2nd thing is this idea which, funnily enough, very few people interrogate. but every single one of our economic institutions is based on this is sumption of scarcity. you open any economics textbook in chapter one, it will be, you know, what, what is the definition of economics? it is the study of how humans distributes gas resources. why resources, gas, there is also has a sketch apparently because we all have infinite desires and limited means that is the mission of economics. that's the organizing principle that you know, it's a funny concept because firstly, i mean, i think very few of us actually think about selves as infinite, having infinite desire. know what's really interesting though, is that hunter, god is like, this is hard to see that i worked with that had the opposite approach. they did not

see the world as shaped by a fundamental scarcity of there was a competition for resources. they viewed the world in which they were only 15 hours week. they viewed it as generous as providence as sharing. and let's be clear, they had much tougher lives materially than many of us do know, but it was an approach. and it was a different way of seeing a while, and as a result, they organize their colonies on the basis of an assumption of abundance rather than an assumption of scarcity. and that produces very different kind of social forms and ways of organizing their life. so this fundamental thing, you know, and economics pretends it's a science or it doesn't, you know, most economists who know that it isn't the sides. me even though they're kind of grass and all these things have. but this kind of popular myth that you know, economics, our economic systems of built on some fundamental assumptions on some basis in

human nature and biology is a myth. and what this does is it frees us to really liberate ourselves. and when we start looking at the challenges of life in a much more automated future and with constraints like climate change, it allows us to free our imaginations from this prison that we've sort of barges knocked our selves into and advising on. since you mentioned the graphs you do talk about the club of rome report that appeared to show that it is precisely opposite preoccupation with g.d.p. growth that will destroy g.d.p. growth. tell me about that and why i say the new york times call that garbage in, garbage out. it was so attacked as they can use. yeah, it was, it was, it was stacked as early fake news have capitalism and this kind of growth focus that we have had, has been very effective in providing us all sorts of games and you know,

how we live long lives. we're actually materialist on the shingly, comfortable at the moment. but you know, this point at which the medicine, when you take too much of it, can, may stop making the patient sick. and the club of rome report really is that 1st stop warming of saying that. you know, all productivity comes with costs and that cost is ultimately that we reach a point where what a serf does so well in getting reaching levels of development and so on. and non life spans ultimately is going to cannibalize our future. and that is really what we're seeing with the sustainability issue and, and to be sure there, the idea of progress is still in the air. you talk about skyscrapers, i don't know being similar to the spots on the peacock tails. people don't necessarily do things that we think of as work full work reasons, they can be leisure to do to look our relationship with work. i mean, this is sort of, i suppose, you know, there's this big story about the future of work in the future of energy. but

there's also something we have to acknowledge that within ourselves is that we're walk is, you know, but then all life works or life goes and captures energy and use that energy to grow, to reproduce, to order it sounds into whatever hold it has and happens to end up on to go and capture more energy in the morning. capture. the more that you do and humans have evolved through millions of years of natural selection, a whole series of traits which make us super designed to be purposeful creatures. we are, you know, if you think about the basis of prison is in a sense, in many ways it's not out of the ability to be purposeful, but work is not always our job. most of us go into our day jobs, which, you know, in many cases, already boring and unfulfilling and they don't do their day jobs on the basis of that they can afford to go and do some other kind of work as a form of lesson. now if you think about a very prince, the water,

some of the biggest leisure time activities here in britain, you know, fishing, hunting, god name, or of those i actually work gobbling is, you know, having a vegetable patch made vegetables is very, very fundamental sense. well, we have to recognize that we all like to work. you know, what constitutes fulfilling and meaningful work. and this is sort of what the strange situation at the moment is now is, you know, we run a position where actually we should be empowering people to be able to fulfill it. yet we have an economy organized which incentivizes people to do work, which is deeply unfulfilling. and things like this covert crisis says the, you know, the pandemic has made it very clear to many people. i think that, you know, it's a reasonable question to ask us of what is, what is it with an economy in terms of if, how economy is meant? judy kaye can allocate resources to a specific needs. how do we have an economy that attracts the greatest and the

brightest into being derivatives? trade is rather than being a happy dimeola, just sort doxes or notices or cares when we're coming up. and these are the sort of big questions that i think we have to engage with and look at. well, i want to return to the practical suggestions in the book, but so many characters walk through the pages of this book that you critique, adam smith and, and others. notably, just take us through one of them since i have to be speaking to you next through m i 5 and my 5 trying to hunt him down very goal child just very briefly explain his contribution to the foundations of this new work of us. whether very big golden child was, you know, he was no stranger and stranger an archaeologist. he was also a bizarrely. he grew up, he grew up in the sort of late phases of or in the early 20th century at the end of the 1st global. and he was, at the time i met about and about communists had dreams of this kind of communist

or socialist utopia, merging out of the ashes of the possible war. that didn't happen. many ended up focusing being that kind of be, you know, a fairly noti fellow, they ended up focusing his efforts on revolutions of a different sort. and the revolutions he was most interested in was understanding the transition, the revolutions in a deep history. things like the transition from foraging to palming. and you know, we all now talk fairly comfortably about the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution as if they sort of moments before very gordon's highest of writing. these really one things that were talked about a great deal. the point with big odintsov, the most interesting thing about is highlighting all of the transitions that came out of agriculture. and he had to differ slightly different ways of looking at things too. certainly the way i do, but you know, agriculture is the most important transition in history in human history, what it fundamentally changed our relationships with everything we went from being

these fargas who worked very little to farmers who were tied to a seasonal cycle who were tied to a limited number of crops, who had these fast growing populations, and this is what all ideas about what can in fact, lots of our economic norms and institutions all emerged out of what happened in funding when i talk about scarcity. scarcity is a pro. i drew a cultural revolution and you said it right at the beginning of the interview, the most famous phrase used to describe for a just society is like there's an aussie hunting and gathering ancestors. as far as we can tell, is the price fiesta got a terrier. and when you said fish, they got a tear and there is no who. you know that it's not exaggeration, people in those societies and there are no gender. there's no gender hierarchy, what 7 gender roles of different women do of things and so, but nobody puts a higher value on one or the other. and the minute anybody starts getting ideas

above their station, they get knocked down muscle to sleep by their peers. and it looks to me and certainly the evidence suggest, given the small scale sizes that humanity lived like this for the bulk of our history again. and that this was a very successful model for engaging in living sustainably as parties. it was only really with the invention of farming and farming had all these risks that came with it. and the need to use the scaffold, see, suddenly there needs to accumulate. so misses, and you could accumulate scepticism different by growing more stuff by taking more stuff or somehow cumulating social capital. so it changed the entire dynamic, i mean really inequality. and the idea that inequality is natural and systematic, i think, was very much a product of funding and very much a product of scarcity and funding. and again, i think now, you know, we talk a great deal about living in equal society is not real equal under the law and so

on and so forth. equal under the bill of rights and what have you. it's interesting in namibia when the, maybe it became independent from their pocket government in 1901. and i was city explaining to some of those losses as i well know, you're all equal under the law old. and so then they said, well, what does equality under the law mean when we're all materially unequal? well, how to get there. and i presume die electrically using both so that we have the benefits of both. you say that the bull jobs of corporate lawyers, p.r. health and academic administrators, the financial services industry. there is a chance to change the way you say it's going to be climate change, a $917.00 russian type revolution due to that inequality or a viral pandemic. they could be the catalyst that i wish i wish i had written that now. it's like hundreds or, well look my, my sense is this, you know, where i do unique time in human history. i mean,

nothing that we've ever done before is a model that we can transpose and use now and human kind of generally, i mean, no history. you know, the reason why we have these kind of lurching things we don't as revolutions is we tend to get quite fixed in our ways where species, who's so brilliant to changing. so it dr. bull and amazing. but at the same time, we're fearful of change. and so it's only really what changes for stocks that will surprise us of are we, how did that rather? well, people handle fairy difficult things all the time. and in fact, you know, when i look at this pandemic in the lockdown, people coped with it remarkably well. so changing habits often requires some kind of x. tunnel shock. and that's why i talked about whether it's the stresses of inequality that pushed us to that's why i think most likely coble climate change. so there's a, you know, there are these big risks and it is really about getting us to position of say, the world is different. now, how do we make the best use of what we have?

and for me, the answer to that is to experiment, to have experiments, not work, and to try something else. you know, we keep hoping that there are these ready answers. and what we need to do is embrace science embrace the fact that we've got these absolute constraints and recognize that we are in uncharted territory. and so this requires imagination and a little bit of bravery. but above all, it requires a kind of openness and a consensus to say, you know, the future is in front of us, how we going to get that, and what do we need to do to do it? and we have to recognize will make mistakes in the way. talk to james as a thank you. thank you. that's over the show. day in a week when negotiators save the day, israel launched operation pillar of defense in gaza, which killed or wounded hundreds of palestinian men, women, and children as major nations promoted israel's right to defend itself. and you'll enjoy the ongoing you trigger facebook instagram

the same wrong. oh, just don't call me to shape out. that's ok. and in the trail,

find themselves worlds apart. to look for common ground. and today's headlines, the creators of russia's coronavirus vaccine are preparing to start mass distribution of airplanes through trial shows. it is 92 percent effective. congress says it's ready to buy the drug. you're not going to negotiate. can go both simply by most you brush over your head was your fault, my solution won't be production, or at least the production to hungary is also this, our army invent their fury at their government, accusing it of capitulating to azerbaijan by signing a peace deal. although the armenian prime minister says that.