But what did you think about what Station Eleven had to say about, I guess, the state of humanity and how we can find meaning in the despair?

Well, Station Eleven for me is the antidote to what I was talking about, that strand of misanthropy or nihilism or bring it on, which, like I said, can produce wonderful stuff.

You know, that's all over J.G. Ballard, right? And he's like a...

you know, fantastic visionary writer.

But after a while, I did get a bit tired of seeing communities collapse into barbarism all the time, and it just becoming incredibly ruthless and bleak.

And what Emily St. John Madel does in the book and is taken into the TV show is I think it checks this real humanism and a sense of a real sense of loss.

So a vast percentage of the population is killed in a pandemic in this story.

So how do you think that living in the shadow of now multiple potential world-ending technologies impacts our minds?

In 1534, John of Leiden did something rather bold.

He kind of declared himself the king of God's kingdom on Earth and turned himself into a dictator.

And the great book about these kinds of sects, including this one, called Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cone, he says it's actually like early example of totalitarianism that he saw in it.

Norman Cone was somebody who had worked for the British services after the Second World War, and he had interviewed...

A lot of ex-Nazis, he'd met a lot of communists, and he thought there was a real connection between the kind of Hitler's, for example, own version of apocalyptic thinking and what had been going on in Münster.

And so this is an extreme...

In some ways, it seems like something very much... of the 16th century.

But remember how I mentioned Lord Byron was at the center of sexual scandals? Well, the British Lord didn't find himself hiding from volcanic ash only in Switzerland.

The idea is we should be using the historic wealth generated in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street and by whoever owns DraftKings right now to improve life, for example, of someone suffering in Bangladesh.

I love the idea, this kind of radical empathy, where all human lives were, were kind of equal, and there were people giving large percentages of their income to what, through utilitarian logic, was the best use of their money.

So mosquito nets always gets mentioned because it's just, uh, incredibly cheap and save lives.

And then it took a turn through one of its founders, William MacAskill, towards longtermism, which is then you start thinking of, uh, all the future generations and their lives are as valuable.

So it's not just that person that you've never met in, uh, in Bangladesh.

It's somebody five generations or more from now.

And then he starts calculating, literally calculating all the people who might ever live on this planet, right? And then you have a responsibility to them and you have a responsibility to the future, and responsibility to the future is obviously important, as in you wanna be a custodian of the planet and so on.

And here's Dorian Lynskey with his take on the evolution of effective altruism.

Well, some do and some don't, don't they? I mean, look at Bruce Springsteen.

I think, yeah, I think Bruce Springsteen and you two actually are interesting examples because they've been doing it for so long.

They've literally been talking about politics sort of, you know, to varying degrees since the early 1980s.

And they're sort of allowed to get away with it.

that people kind of know that Springsteen is going to come out very hard on certain issues.

Sheeran comes from a different generation.

He's not shaped by the 60s.

Do artists now need to be more connected with audiences and their politics? And is it now impossible for huge artists like Ed Sheeran to try and sit on the fence, as he has always tried to do?

way.Dorian, do you think it's blown up? And who do you think's gonna come out better from all of this, Ed Sheeran or Macklemore and the other artists?

I don't, I mean, [laughs] Ed Sheeran, who, you know, who I, who I've interviewed and who I, who I, I like, uh, liked as a person, is obviously coming out of this very badly.

You know, I d- I do think that obviously if we don't know all the details of what it would've meant to, to stand up to Kraft, what that means to the tour, are there alternative venues available, what were the costs of that? But, I mean, un- undoubtedly, what it, what's happened is that everybody else on the bill has taken a stand for free speech and, you know, and let's say that Macklemore said nothing out of line here.

It was a very simple, um, free Palestine message, and Sheeran is ended up in this position where he seems that he does not support free speech and that he does not support the Palestinian cause, which, um, you know, I don't know whether that's entirely fair, but it's a, pretty much a disaster for him.

Can I ask you both what you think the audience will make of all of this, the people who'll be turning up to Ed Sheeran's shows?

I mean, just fan bases, when you're that big, fan bases are so large.

You know, like when, when U2 tour and Bono will make a particular statement against, you know, very critical of, you know, the American government or whatever, and then people are absolutely fuming in the audience, and then he stops saying that, and then he goes into another song, and then they kind of go, "Ah, well, we're back to this now." It would be interesting to see how the tour unfolds 'cause it's a bit, suddenly it's kind of like a cursed tour, [laughs] you know.

And the scrutiny on, on anything he says or any protests in the audience is gonna be enormous.

But on the other hand, he then continues by saying, "There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics." What did you make of his statement and the message that he's sending out?

I think that he is trying to maintain a, a sort of relatively apolitical and neutral position.

Um, and, and, and, and that's fine.

I think that's probably why we, we notice protest songs, we notice political musicians, 'cause that's not everybody.

Here, he, he's got himself into this situation where, you know, he has booked... basically everybody he booked on his tour has sort of pro-Palestine sympathies, and yet, for whatever reason, that did not seem to sort of, uh, uh, occur to him what might happen.

It's almost somebody with a mindset from perhaps a different era-

Dorian, do you think it's blown up, and who do you think's gonna come out better from all of this, Ed Sheeran or Macklemore and the other artists?

I don't-- I mean, [laughs] Ed Sheeran, who, you know, who I, who I've interviewed and who I, who I, I like, uh, liked as a person, is obviously coming out of this very badly.

This is a truly thrilling read with more perspective on EA and longtermism.

And I thought it was such an interesting example actually of how some really interesting and quite s- quite radical, interesting moral thinking and serious thinking about existential risk, which I'd say that's great, that's important, can lead you to making just awful decisions.

And then it became like, oh, well, okay, logically money would be better spent on preventing existential catastrophe that has a 1% chance of happening than it is on those mosquito nets.

Elon Musk was at one point a kind of fellow traveler of effective altruism.

He showed an interest in it.

Real quick, the allegation of deaths caused by cuts to USAID is contested, but it's currently being peer reviewed and future projections are being modeled.

It's the exact opposite of what effective altruism was meant to be about.

But with longtermism, it, it seems to be able to lead you into like, oh, only the biggest, sexiest, most dramatic challenges matter and philanthropy is boring.

Can you tell me what that refers to?

Well, it comes from the concept of the millennium in, in Revelation.

People would think that you, you have the Battle of Armageddon, and then you have the end of the world.

Actually, between Armageddon and the end of the world is a thousand years of, you know, sort of close to sort of paradise on Earth and the, the reign of Christ on Earth when Satan has been banished.

And then at the end of that thousand years, Satan comes back and there's another battle, and then he is finally defeated, and then the world ends.

So millenarian refers to, to that sort of belief in, in, in apocalyptic narratives.

Uh, but then there's disagreement about when the millennium is.

Okay, for the record, I haven't necessarily decided all these people are terrible people, but there's certainly a huge amount of public animosity towards them.

Why are so many of the people spearheading AI development so cavalier with a technology that they themselves concede, and often even brag, has the destructive potential to end the human race?

I found this amazing quote from John von Neumann when he was working on the Manhattan Project, and he said to his wife, particular point in the process, he goes, "I think what we're creating might destroy the whole planet." He says, "But, you know, you've got to follow the science." [laughs] He was just sort of...

Intellectually, he was just like, "Well, what, you know, what are you gonna do? You've got to follow the knowledge." So I don't think it's that unusual.

I think what's happened now is that it becomes a form of marketing.

People want-- If you say, "My invention that I'm trying to raise capital for and turn into a profitable business is so powerful and world-changing that it can either take us to heaven or hell," then that's good marketing.

And what's so interesting to me is how he distinguishes the way we talk about death and destruction with the way we talk about paradise or utopia, or the time when we will all start being nice to each other, as Tim Morton said, or however you personally wanna think about it.

As I was writing the book over and over again, you would see versions of either Revelation or the flood.

You would see it in apocalyptic fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction and catastrophe fiction and on and on and on.

It was quite a year and quite an era.

So you've got scientific discoveries that the Earth is much older than the church claimed, discoveries of the first dinosaur skeletons, and the idea that catastrophe could reshape the Earth.

And then, you also have that mirrored in politics through the French Revolution and the idea that the world, as you knew it, could be turned upside down.

Also, a lot of people like Byron and Shelley, they were traveling around Europe, fascinated by the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

So all of these things are kind of in their heads that the world, as we know it, can be wiped out.

And then, in 1815, this volcano in Indonesia called Tambora erupts.

The biggest eruption in modern history.

The novel, and later the film, showed us something we hadn't quite seen before.

Dorian Linsky wrote Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World.

So the first secular narratives about the end of the world which, as far as I could tell, were Lord Byron's poem Darkness and Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man.

Both appear in the first quarter of the 19th century.

And there's lots of different things happening at the same time.

There's the discovery that the world is much older than people had imagined.

For example, skeletons identified for the first time as dinosaurs.

There was the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century and a general fascination with ruins.

How influential was that poem? (instrumental music)