 It's my enormous honor to chat this morning with Professor David Christian of Macquarie University in Australia. He's a man of many parts, but he's co-founder of the Big History Project, president of the International Big History Association, and once famously described as a guy who's right across the sciences, humanities and social sciences and brought it together in a single framework. And I'll let David tell you just who said that. David, you started, you know, like myself as an academic, a plain old academic in Russian history with a nifty little sideline in the history of vodka. And I was kind of, did that set you up for the big history? I, yes, I was a sort of ordinary proper historian doing Russian history and teaching, teaching the history of Russia during the Cold War, which was great, but I drifted into social history and actually one of the nice little links between the history of vodka and sort of big history is once reading, because I always read popular science, reading that in the galaxy, there are, if you collected all the ethanol floating around the galaxy, you could fill a goblet the size of planet Earth. So there's the connection in history, but it was, I mean just very quickly, it was wonderful stuff, the vodka stuff, because the Russian government in the 19th century was a superpower, between 30 and 40% of its revenue came from the sale of vodka. So once I understood that, I thought that understanding tracking vodka in the villages through networks of great corruption, I mean think of the drug trade today, then to the governments, and that made me realize that the Russian government, and in fact it's not just the Russian government, built their power as states by selling mind altering substances, and that is something that I think most historians are not sufficiently aware of. Let us be very grateful, you didn't get into milk instead, but I mean I should explain, I'm an archeologist, so I've always thought history was big, big in terms of its scope, and especially big in terms of its social importance, its need in the educational system, but when you're talking big history, you've got a very specific sort of agenda in mind, I want you to unpack it a little bit for me. The phrase big history, I coined it because I needed a sort of cute way of describing what I was doing, I'm slightly worried by it, it's grandiose, it's inflated, all of those things, but it seems to have caught on, so for better or worse I'm stuck with it. But I think what, the project in a sense is very simple, I became fascinated with the idea of the whole of history. History has conventionally done, actually is about the past on a scale of a few thousand years for the most part, and I began to wonder what the whole of history is. I've been reading Coon, and was very much aware of history as a pre-paradigm discipline, a discipline without paradigms. In biology you could ask the question, what's the core idea of biology? So I was wondering what's the core idea of history, and this led me to the idea of could you teach a course on the whole of history? And once I started thinking about that, it didn't take me long to realize that such a course would have to go to the origins of humans, but to do that properly, you're going to have to go back to evolution, to a paleontological scale, but then to do that properly, you're going to have to go back to the geological scale and talk about life itself as an emergent property, and to do that properly, you have to go back to the cosmological scale. So it didn't take me long to get back to the Big Bang, and God bless contemporary physics, it stops at the moment. I'm terrified that the physicists will find a way of getting beyond the Big Bang, which will mess my course up, no end. I was going to say it's probably only a matter of time before that happens. Do you ever get pushback though, that, you know, that, no, history is human, history is, yeah, how do you respond to that? There's been a lot of pushback. Mostly from, you know, my own tribe, that is to say, professional historians. Not so much from scientists who very often will say, yeah, so what's the big deal about this? And I don't know, my response would be that conventionally for the last history, for the last century, we have defined history as the history of humans over the last few thousand years based on documents. But you think what that excludes, as an archaeologist, this would be a familiar argument, you know, if you base your history on documents, you basically end up talking about elite chaps. And he means chaps, ladies. Yeah, I do need chaps. And so your history is very warped if historians try to make generalizations about humanity on the basis of this very warped sample, that small sector of humanity that had access to literacy and perhaps was literate. It's predominantly male. It's predominantly elite. It's predominantly modern. You exclude the Paleolithic. You exclude most of the rural world. You exclude the vast majority of humans. So big history is democratic? I think it is democratic indeed, yes. You encounter, my students encounter humans first as a species because they approach human history through talk about the biosphere and evolution. And I think at the moment I'm hearing a lot of talk at Davos about global citizenship, the need for some sense of global citizenship. So it seems to me that big history is a very powerful way of helping students towards a sense of humanity, not as a vague or cloudy concept, but as a very precise one, you know, a human community with a global history that needs to be seen as a community. So big history, you've been teaching it for quite some time at Macquarie and I gather other people, but it seems like it's coming together. It's coalescing. And can you tell us a bit more about the rollout on big history and how this is taking off? Well, I started doing this and I did get pushed back from, I think I told you, I once had a screaming match with a very good friend of mine in the corridor who said, I will bring shame on our university. We will become a laughing stock. Oh, academics, academics. 10 years later, she said, OK, David, I got that one wrong. We're good friends. But so for quite a long time, I felt very marginal. But it didn't matter. I was having a lot of fun. But particularly the states now there are probably 40 or 50 courses like this. So it's becoming more acceptable. Still pretty marginal. But the idea of big history is now, I think, being taken a lot more seriously by a lot of historians. And the really exciting thing for me is that quote you gave at the beginning was Bill Gates, because I recorded some lectures on big history, which he saw and liked very much. And contacted me and said that this needs to be in high schools, which I'd always thought. I had no idea how you'd get something like this into high schools. The bureaucratic nightmare, I could imagine, was terrifying. Yeah, so I can imagine. And so he said, I can support you getting this into high schools. And so what he is supporting, the big history project. And what that is doing is creating, I find it incredibly exciting, we're creating a high school syllabus for a course about, it could be taught as a semester length course. You could spread it over the year. It'll be available in the middle of 2013 as a website. All the material will be on the web. And once we open it out, it'll be free. There'll be no logins, no passwords. It'll be completely open access. And our hope is that already we're seeing a lot of interest from high schools in Australia and the US, but also elsewhere. Well, what friend of Bill and man of Ted you are, what appeal to Mr. Gates about this? What's the famous academic question? So what? Is it a fad? Like new math, it'll be gone again. And two years we'll be doing something else. What's, why is this going to last? What he said was he is a real intellectual enthusiast. I think since leaving Microsoft, he is indulged in a passion for just learning, different subjects. He loves lectures on economics, on cosmology, on archaeology, ancients. But what he said was that what this course did was it put it all together, which is a very simple and neat way of describing what I think is the power of this. And I should say that as a teacher, I've never taught a course that has had the same power to kind of generate epiphanies among students. And I think the reason it does that is because students go to school and university full of questions about the meaning of life. I certainly did. What's the whole damn thing of which we're a part? And the experience they get almost universally throughout the world is deeply disillusioning. It is teachers who, with the best intentions, say, look, shut up about the meaning of life. Just get on with the French Revolution or the difference between bases and acids or whatever it is. Read and write and arithmetic. That's all you need in life. And that's a dissolution we've all been through. And when someone, and I'm in the position now of being able to say, not we'll solve the, we'll tell you what the meaning of life is. What we can say is we can tell you a sort of universal story that will take you a long way down the track of exploring the question of your place in the universe. And it will do it using the best and most up-to-date scientific information. And that sense, I think of this as looking at knowledge, as taking students to the top of the mountain. They lose detail, of course, which is why this would never replace other courses, but it's a fabulous supplement. They can see how different disciplines fit together. And they can see, more importantly, how they fit into the scheme of things. So this course can do some of the work that traditional origin stories did. And I've actually realized that it's bizarre that modern education does not teach a universal story of any kind. And I think it's a deep failing of modern education. The story's there. It can be told with scientific rigor, particularly in the last 50 years, the science has got so good that you can do this. But what about cultures that have alternative origin stories or do not embrace the big bang to us or that religion or ideological considerations come in? How does big history deal with that? Because I know right now it's Australia, the states, and Korea, but you're at this. I think Korea at the moment. So how's this? One of the reasons for thinking about this as an origin story is precisely because I was teaching it in Australia, I was deeply concerned not to teach it in a way that would give the subliminal message that indigenous Australians have been here for 40,000 years and they never got it, we've got it. I really didn't want to give that message. And I found that thinking about creation stories is a powerful way of doing that because then what you can say is that each society uses the best knowledge, the most authoritative knowledge it has to construct a map of everything. And that map is generally at the heart of educational systems. And it plays a very powerful role in giving students a sense of coherence and of place and of their role. And so every society does that with the best knowledge available. We can guarantee that a lot of what I'm saying in this course in 100 years time is gonna look almost as cute as stories about rainbow serpents. So an origin story is the best available universal story of your time. With no claim to, yeah. The origin stories vanished from modern education about a century ago, I think, with this tsunami of information that we dealt with by siloizing. Siloizing, yeah. You said, and I too here at Davos, like the global citizenship theme. Big history, global citizenship. You've got young kids out there. What particular aspects of things do you think they'll take away from a big history class that will then play on onward? I'm thinking about bridging the humanity science divide, which is something that as an archeologist I'm very concerned to do. Or environmental issues or awareness, yeah. Well, first it's a wonderful way of bridging the two cultures. Right. The thing is it does it in a completely natural way. It's not a smorgasbord course. What they don't get the sense, okay, we're gonna do a bit of physics, a bit of chemistry, a bit of history, and how wonderful is that? It's a coherent story. And very often students, they don't notice the scenes between the courses. So suddenly we'll be talking about the Paleolithic and I'll get students saying, but hang on, weren't we talking about evolution of hominids? And aren't we now talking about history? And I'll say, yes. But actually, if you tell it as a coherent story, then the barriers kind of drop away. There's not the hiccup between, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the biggest barrier of all, E.O. Wilson in his book, Consilience, nailed this very precisely. The biggest barrier of all is between the humanities and the sciences. And I increasingly think it's my tribe that has been policing that barrier. Maybe your tribe as well, the archaeologists. Because they see science as a threat. And that has all sorts of nasty consequences, including fear of science, fear of science, education. And I remember with my impression is that educating students about thinking about the environment in a holistic way is absolutely key. And it seems to me that history and archaeology, we have quite a bit to say on these themes that tend to be approached very specifically through a scientific lens. And it's like all truth about climate change or environmental change or human nature relationships all comes through the sciences. Complete nonsense. So I think we're allies here. I went to some wonderful sessions actually on sustainability and environmental issues yesterday. They were great. But I sat there feeling that if you can imagine a whole, I mean, our ambition is that courses like this will be in the majority of schools in most countries in the world within 15 or 20 years. Most students will know this story. And my feeling is that this is a wonderful preparation for understanding so many contemporary global issues. First, students will be, they will not freak if I say to understand climate change. You need to be not worried about the prospect of thinking on scales of billions of years, which is what you need to understand the role of oxygen. You need to be not freaked if someone says, you'll probably need a bit of chemistry, a bit of physics, but also a bit of economics, a bit of history to understand climate change. They won't be freaked because they will have had this experience of moving more or less seamlessly across disciplines. And if someone says, and you need to think about the whole planet, the biosphere is at the heart of the second half of this story. So the idea of a biosphere of human history being embedded in the history of the biosphere will, I think, seem completely natural to students who've done this course. Did you road test this on your own children? Did you try them, you know, dinosaurs at breakfast or something like that? They were too old, so I couldn't think. And, you know, breakfast table conversations with dad, wittering on about the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, it didn't work. But my daughter is hoping to teach this course. She's just qualified as a teacher. Congratulations. I'd love to see her teach you. That would be great. I'm curious, and I'm sorry if it plays out this way, Australia, America, are the kids reacting in similar ways to the courses or is one side embracing it more readily than the other? No, I should explain that I taught in San Diego for eight years. Actually, it coincided almost exactly with the Bush administration. And I was so, I was- I wonder why that came in. That's just a quick way of giving the dates. But so I was teaching quite a lot of fundamental students, by the way, which comes back to your earlier question. Oh, interesting. And with many of them, I was able to just say, this is a story you probably need to know. It is not my job to tell you what you will choose to believe. But I can help you around this story. You probably need to know it. And so is there a difference? I'm mostly operating, let's be fair, with I'm mostly working with teachers. So initially it will be the interest of teachers. Our website is being piloted. The first course has just been completed in six schools in the States. For me, this is incredibly exciting. And the initial feedback is wonderful. From one example, one of the pilot teachers in Michigan in Ann Arbor said, she had a teacher parent night. And the parents completely dominated the discussion. And they said, we love this course. She said, but they said, every day our kid comes home, we sit them down, we grill them. And for me, that's one of the most flattering things I could imagine. You may be hated by all these students. You realize that. Could be. But I think the reaction of students, my own students, it's students really respond. They don't have the prejudices against this sort of story that professional scholars have. And there is huge interest amongst teachers. So I'm very optimistic that a lot of schools will want to experiment with this. I gave a talk in DC to an international, it was a Microsoft Partners in Learning conference. Teachers, very good teachers from 70 countries. In the next two days, I had conversations with teachers. And I counted from at least 15 different countries saying, I want to teach this. I want to teach this. When can we do it? And a nice little coda to that story is talking to a teacher from Delhi who said, I want to teach this in Delhi. And then she said, oh, by the way, you know all of this is in the Marparita. And then the next day, I talked to the teacher from Saudi Arabia. And she said, I want to teach this in Saudi Arabia. And then she said, by the way, you know all of this is in the Quran. And when people teach it in other countries, is there variation in the curriculum? Or do you invite teachers to modify or to bring in a special dimension? Or is the big story, is the big story globally? Once our syllabus is released, I'd love to see different people teaching their versions. Sometimes worried about the possibility that my thinking about this could. But you need a story. Yeah, but we need a story. The moment it's mostly being taught in the US and the pilot project is just starting in Australia, next year we hope to pilot it in 50 or 60 schools in the US and Australia. But the pilot is starting up in Korea. Maybe another one in Scotland. I'm going to be talking with educational people in Scotland about this. My hope would be that this would be the first history syllabus that could be taught throughout the world without much tweaking. Science courses, you can teach the same chemistry in Beijing as in Rio or Johannesburg, not history courses. But this one, I think, they may be a little bit of tweaking right at the end. So a Korean course, I can imagine Korean teachers will want when we start talking about agrarian civilizations. They probably want to Korean examples. But I think the tweaking will be minimal. It'll be a bit like the tweaking you do if you have an American chemistry course and someone tries to teach it in Seoul. Now, high school is the whatever you call it in each country is where you're targeting. But my experience with really interesting ideas to teach is that they can scale from kindergarten to retirement homes. And what are your hopes beyond the particular school context? This project, we are thinking of year nine. So with 13, 14-year-olds, and the reason that the logic is above that, in most countries, syllabi are more tightly locked in. So there's space at that level. Also, they're just mature enough to really get a hold of this. But in the last two or three years, I've been giving quite a lot of talks to teachers, saying, what a great thing this is, and you'd have a lot of fun if you taught it. And quite a lot of times, I've had primary school teachers, elementary school teachers coming up and saying, I'd love to teach this at this level. And frankly, I think you could teach it at all levels, but just in more and more sophisticated ways. What about CEOs? I would love to. This is something I've been thinking about, is that we produce week-long intensives. If someone wants to get an overview of this story, get a feeling for the power of the story, I would like to start teaching in, probably in Sydney or elsewhere, week-long intensives in big history. They could be for teachers, preparing teachers for CEOs. Politicians. For politicians. And I think there's very broad perspective. I mean, seeing the conversations at Davos, I really think the very broad global perspective that this can help you towards is something that we're going to need in the next 50 years to tackle global problems. I mean, it's often said that the histories we tell, or the histories we write, or that we teach, say, more about our present and ourselves than the past. So for the 21st century, a big history, you see this as a positive. You see this as a hopeful move. I certainly do. And in fact, it's a recovery of something we've lost. Because it took me some time to realize that I was not doing something strange. What I was doing was teaching in a way that most societies throughout most of human history have taught. They have all taught, unifying visions. I mean, in the Christian world, the Bible was at the heart of it. In the Muslim world, the Quran was. In, you know, Paleolithic cultures, you know, creation myths were at the heart of this. And it's just for a century. Modern education has stopped teaching this. So I think this is a very natural move for us to recover or discover a modern origin story. It's scientifically based, scientifically rigorous. That is the origin story that you need if you live in the early 21st century. I deeply believe that. Scientifically based, scientifically rigorous, but with the human as very much. Is there something you'd like to say before we wrap up? Something that I haven't raised in this conversation or a particular angle that you'd like to underscore? I think you've taken us around most of the important territory. My hope is that when our big history project is rolled out next year, I hope it will look like something that a lot of teachers will think, ah, yes, this is what we need to teach. And it won't displace anything else. It's not a threat to existing forms of education. I think it will supplement other teaching very powerfully. A chemist, a student who does a chemistry course, who is actually already familiar with the idea that elements beyond hydrogen and helium were all forged in dying stars. You know, that some chemistry happening in space, that life is all about chemistry in its earlys. I mean, they will be so much better prepared to see their chemistry not as a technical thing, but as part of a story that includes the student and the society the student is a member of. And the planet. Folks, a view from the top of the mountain. It's been an honor and a pleasure. Thank you very much, Professor Christian. Thank you very much, too. My pleasure. Thank you.