we've never had 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 good, big differences. that's one that margin in pennsylvania was over 46000 votes, so you would have to be able to walk into court with credible evidence that they were willing 46000 ballots at the validity, in which part in question i haven't even seen anybody come in with 100 pieces of evidence of a florida 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 the 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, and i doubt that there are more than $46000.00 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 or the u.s. supreme court did order, and that ballots that received after november served which was the use shoe that was brought to the or now before that, this will, the election should be segregated and preserved, which they were. but i,

i don't say there were more than a couple 1000. now i know judge and ito didn't go all the way for 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 act, 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 or ultimately did get to determine that 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 analogues to wait until after the election. presumably going to tell me the number of dead people also 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 affected. change the election. i didn't read by the way that with regard to the supposed dead people of the day i

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 them says, we have to see evidence that would change the result of the election. and we haven't seen it. i use surprised about what's going on. i mean, at the moment the department of justice is alexion 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 out while i am nonpartisan, in my representation of candidates in public officials. but i can tell you the difference between now and 2000 is that in 2000, as i mentioned,

everybody acknowledged the problem. there was no question that there were defective ballots. the only issue was how we got them only challenged to determine who the real, the where was the other little differences. both candidates at that time were committed to letting 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 celebrate a covert vaccine from share price rocketing scandal, hit drugs make a phase a. is there 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 gatherer ancestors were 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 cove. it. many of them desperately worry. 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 a relatively new phenomenon in the us. yes. 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 nice, 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 that much longer perspective invites us and puts it puts a completely different shine on where we are though 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 the meeting on zoo, on and so forth that these are really all. ringback 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, our deep history, you know, from 10000 years ago, then a lot of traces fok, you know, just to look at, we don't have, we, you know, there's not a huge amount of material evidence. what we have to do is contextualize the broken bones in the rock star tools that we find. we can text size 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, that bushman were ready to consume considered to be the most a published and miserable of all humans. and that the anthropologists who went that 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 that is very skilled, hans's. and so there really weren't 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're all 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 i had to gather ancestors, lived like people like this in jossy 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 that we do know it wasn't seen as, but you, it wasn't seen as the thing. they're organizing 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 a very recent sliver of history. james,

i'll stop you there. more often dr. james says when on the history of how we spend our time after this break he has no point which will give those full soup will sure. wish to be pushed your

truth into the body of the club or was if you were sure i can board, it doesn't actually matter. vegetable would have been murdered by you to go there. when yours goes all of those who do use the word because those told me again, we will see in the movie it is with the we've seen the most news, but it's the most severe. some of it is in your speech coming off the news, the in the 20th century was thing, era of revolution, the great depression and world wars, the 21st century of mental illness. those aren't my words. that's what surfaced some psychiatry to tell us. the only question is, should we accept it as a fact? yes or no. during the vietnam war, u.s. forces neighboring laos. it was

a secret war. and for years the american people did not know how much in the case of the mouth, country per capita. human history, millions of unexploded bombs still in danger. lives in this small agricultural country. jordyn wieber thing going to continue to happen. even today, kids in laos full victim to bombs dropped decades ago. it is the us making amends for the tragedy in laos. what helped to the people need in that little land of mines? welcome back. i'm still here with anthropologist and author of work history of how we spend our time dr. james has been 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 that. yeah, it's a very look, this is a very fun, you know, we all grew up and there was a real, i'm excuse exotic out there. as you know, i grew up beautiful quite literally. i actually had mice. we were beaten when we didn't work out, and there's this whole idea that hard work is an absolute and it's beaten into us. and it's one of these absolute ideas, and that's underwritten by a whole series of economic ideas, which in a sense we take for granted one of these paths that we have organized how society round and it sort of borrows from biology is this idea that one humans are

hideously competitive creatures and when this constant survival of the fittest, which is a kind of corrupt reading will evolution anyway. and then the 2nd thing is this idea which, funnily enough, very few people interrogate. but every single want to be can all make institutions is based on this assumption of scarcity. you're open any economics textbook or 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 a scar 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 desires. to 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 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 economies 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. but this kind of popular myth that you know, economics, our economic systems, a built in 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 fake news. yet 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 gains in you know, how we live long lives. we're actually materialist on a shingly comfortable at the moment. but you know,

this point at which the medicine, when you take too much of it, can make stop making the patient sick. and the club of rome report really is that 1st stop warming of saying that, you know, our 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 this estate ability 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 reserves. they can be leisure. saluting, look our relationship with having 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 go and 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, a 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 of doctors 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 an avowed communist had dreams of this kind of communist socialist utopia, emerging out of the ashes of the 1st world war that didn't happen. many ended up

focusing being that kind of be, you know, a fairly noti fellow, he 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 how deep history things like the transition from foraging to palming. and, you know, we all now talk fairly comfortably about the agricultural revolution or will and the industrial revolution as if they sort of moments before all very good and sauced of writing. these really want things that were talked about a great deal. the point with big odintsov in the most interesting thing and bodies highlighting of the transitions that came out of agriculture and he had to differ slightly different ways of looking at things to certainly the way i did. 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 were 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 where 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 forages. societies like this in haasil hunting and gathering ancestors. as far as we can tell, is the phrase fish see it 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 that 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 know the scaffold, see it suddenly there needs to accumulate. so misses, and you could accumulate scepticism different by growing more stuff by taking more stuff or somehow accumulating 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 societies, 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 a became independent from their pocket government in 1901. and i was city explaining to someone as nicely as i well know your equal under the law old. and so then they said, well, what does equality under the law mean? where 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 when changes for stocks that will surprise us, as i hope 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 saying 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 when the show will be back on saturday in a week when palestine negotiators say barack had died in an atheist's of the day, israel launched operation pillar of defense in gaza, which killed or wounded hundreds of palestinian men, women, and children, as nato nations promote it. israel's right to defend itself until then join the ongoing you tube, twitter, facebook, instagram, and sometimes they

are tactics that can be used to get innocent people to confess, to crimes. they didn't commit. i don't even think people in the us really get that the police are allowed to lie to you. the person who falsely fast actually came to believe the lie that they were told about their own behavior. once a false confession is taken, the case is closed and nobody really can tell the difference between a good confession and one that isn't i was always on the bull, but most rational. big city, bright lights, you jump, but you know geez, and many dangers. it's also a city where up to 300000 crimes are committed every day

for the last was an input and you're almost, it's still think there was a police one police officer $200.00 residents in russia's capital cost on the english channel that will not go along with the last group

banks, geysers financial survive. the bellatrix. this is a central plank support diet. good news for the club. and right now they stopped. the vote recount is ordered in the u.s. state of georgia. as wrangling over the president continues to claim victory. riot police fired tear gas in the armenian capital, as crowds accuse the government of capitulating signaling a peace deal. but prime minister claims the truce, most of the disputed region would have been lost. and the developers of a russian corona, virus vaccine prepared to start mass distribution.