Here is Everything We Don't Know (Extended)

[Music] This is green, this is red, and this is blue. But how can you tell what you're seeing as blue is the exact same thing as what I see as blue? We've named the colors to give us a way to communicate and reference them, but in reality, there's no way of knowing what you see is the same as what another person sees. Even with the small steps and the giant leaps we've made as a species, there's still a lot to learn about Earth, life, and The Human Condition. There's still everything we don't know.

On the 26th of February 2015, one picture of a dress divided the internet. You are seeing white and gold? Where are you looking at? I oh just changed white, wa—no, you're kidding! While some saw it as gold and white, others saw it as blue and black. And ever since then, there's been a number of repetitions of the same experience, either using the same sense—in this case, sight—or even other senses like hearing, in the famous "Yanny or Laurel" debate. These experiments remind us that there's no way for us to tell that you and I sense the same things. What I call red might just be what you call blue, and there might be someone out there who sees human beings with purple teeth but just refers to it as white.

71% of the entire Earth is covered by water. Humans are made up of about 60% water, potatoes 80%, watermelons 93%, and cucumbers 95%. It's very clear that water is essential for life on Earth, but we really don't know that much about water—not even about the very oceans we came from. In fact, we've only explored 5 to 10% of the Earth's oceans. The rest? Well, who knows what's down there? It's even scarier when you realize that fish like the blobfish and the barreleye fish belong to the slim percent of things that we've already discovered. The deeper you go, the crazier things seem to get.

What's at the bottom of the ocean? For the most part, we just don't know. But back on the surface, countries that are bordered by water use something called coastlines to mark their territory. The coast is the land along the sea, and the boundary between the coast and the sea is known as a coastline. So how long is the US coastline or any other coastline in the world? The answer is—well, again, we don't really know. Coastlines constantly curve and cut in and out. Even the smallest deviations from a straight line can add distance, and over time, these small distances add up. Some of these features are massive, like bays, while others are minuscule. Now, measuring each and every little crevice isn't really efficient, so surveyors cut corners and straighten rough edges into easily manageable lines.

If you do a quick Google search of the measurement of any coastline, you'll find a lot of different answers; they all cut corners just differently. Humanity as a species, though, well, we've done really well for ourselves. When in a pinch, we invent something to push us through. We made clothes when the weather was harsh, shelter so we could be safe from wildlife to rest and recuperate, weapons to hunt for food, money to replace pure bartering. What about fire? Was fire a discovery or an invention?

And music—music has been described by scientists as a relatively recent invention by humans. It's believed that music helped our ancestors to bring together a close-knit community. But did humans really invent music, or did we just discover that certain sounds sound nice with other sounds? Birds sing, whales sing—even tree frogs have a nice rich baritone sometimes. So can we really say man invented music? If we did, then what is the true definition of music? I guess we'll never know.

On the list of man's greatest inventions has to be tools. In fact, for a really long time, scientists were pretty sure that this is exactly what made us human. We were the only animals who, through the use of such a variety of tools, were able to expand and grow so quickly—except we aren't the only ones who use tools. A lot of animals, mainly primates, use tools for all kinds of reasons. A study by Jane Goodall on African chimpanzees would change the definition of man forever. In the research, it was discovered that these chimpanzees use tools to gather food, brush their teeth, and even more so in response. Would this mean we must now redefine man or redefine tool? They use tools for the exact same things we would do. We accept chimpanzees as human? Well, of course not. This begs the question: if using tools doesn't, then what makes us human?

In the same research, it was also discovered that chimps had individual personalities and were capable of rational thoughts like emotions and sorrow. They gave pats on the back, hugs, kisses, and even just messed around with each other just for fun. They developed affectionate bonds with family members and with other members of the community, and some of these bonds lasted for over 50 years. If emotions, rational thought, and affectionate actions do not, then what makes us human?

In the past, it was thought that humans were the only animals who were self-aware. However, in the past 30 years, extensive research has proven that many other animals are too. In fact, in 2012, a group of neuroscientists created the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which states that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds and many other creatures, also possess these neural substrates. If consciousness, sentience, wakefulness, and the ability to feel and experience do not, then what makes us human? We really just don't know. All we know is that one day we weren't, today we are, and one day we will be no more. We don't know what happened before we existed, and neither do we know what will happen after we die.

If a person dies and comes back to life, it's referred to as a near-death experience because we see death as a finality. But what if it isn't? What if one of the beliefs of humanity's many religions is true? Even the Earth itself can be very weird, and sometimes you just see formations that make no sense. Like who built Stonehenge and why? The same goes for the pyramids. Some people think the gods of Egypt made the pyramids, others are convinced it was made by human effort, but in reality, we just don't know. The human mind is everything. All of man's greatest inventions, theories, and discoveries have all come from a human mind. We first conceive of an idea in our mind before we can ever create it in the real world.

But perhaps we don't yet know or understand exactly how powerful the mind can be. The placebo effect gives us a glimpse. I made an entire video about the placebo effect, but basically, doctors appear to give a patient treatment, but in actuality, they don't. However, this fake treatment registers in the brain, perceives it as real, and kickstarts the healing process. Basically, the mind heals the body because it thinks the body is getting treatment, even if it isn't. In research on social cognitive and effective neuroscience, it was discovered that self-affirmation helps to maintain a positive self-view and helps to restore your self-confidence and self-worth simply by telling yourself nice things. It is indeed possible for your mind to convince your brain and body that you are those things, and these are just the things we know the mind is capable of. Think about everything we don't know.

There are a lot of things we know about animals. Dogs are sweet and loving, cats can have an attitude, and the lion is apparently the king of the jungle—even if it lives in a savannah. Not everything makes sense, and we really don't know as much as we think we do. Going to space is one of man's greatest achievements. However, what space exploration has clearly shown us is just how small we are in the grand scheme of things. There are at least 2,500 other solar systems that have been discovered, but that number could go up to the tens of billions. We just can't know for sure. That's just in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies that are out there. It's so incredibly massive that you just can't help but think: are we alone in the universe? And if we aren't, why hasn't anyone said hi?

We have ideas, but as always, we don't know, and we really can't prove most things. A very fundamental question for nature is what exactly is the universe made of, and why is there stuff in it to begin with? We know that almost all matter is made up of indivisible atoms, but why? Why do atoms exist, and where do they come from? When we die, what exactly do those atoms become? Everything else. At this point, you've listened to me talk for about 7-8 minutes. Time is persistent for everything with mass. Time never stops. We all know that yesterday is in the past, today is the present, and tomorrow is the future. But what exactly is time, and where does it come from? Even more confusing is: did humans discover or invent time?

There are so many things about the world that we just don't know, and while some are deep questions like we've talked about, others are more well-trivial. While watching the video of this person yawning, you probably also yawned. So even more importantly, why is yawning contagious? When we're happy, we laugh; when we're sad, we cry. But why? For a long time, it was believed that laughter was a social tool to show one another that we're enjoying what's currently happening. It was an evolution tool used to help enhance connectivity in societies. But if that was the case, then laughter should be unique to us humans—or at least primates. But it's not. Other social animals like dolphins and even rats laugh. So why do we laugh? Also, why do we cry? It's as if crying has emotional healing powers. Crying activates our parasympathetic nervous system and helps return our bodies to a normal fully functional state. It's a good thing for your body, so why do we associate it with such sad things? We often cry after something bad has happened, not really while it's happening. Is it a process that evolves solely for our brains to process emotionally painful things? Then again, we cry for happy reasons as well. So scratch everything I just said.

Why are some people right-handed and others left-handed? Why isn't everyone ambidextrous? Wouldn't that have made a lot more sense? We can have theories for many, many things, but they remain just that—theories. In actuality, proving theories as a fact of nature is a lot harder than you'd think. Many scientific theories are superseded with time, considered obsolete, or simply wrong. We used to think that Earth was the center of the universe; then one day, we realized it wasn't. Then again, not everyone could accept the fact that their view of the universe was so wrong. I mean, there's a theory that as recently as World War II, the Germans attempted some advances under the impression that the Earth was hollow. So it is very possible that mostly everything we do know about the world right now is wrong. Honestly, it probably is. We simply don't know everything about everything, and that's okay. All we can do is keep asking questions and keep learning about the world around us, trying to uncover each of its mysteries one stone at a time, hopefully answering the most important question of them all: What does existence truly mean?

If a tree falls down in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? How do you know? Taking it one step further, if you hear the tree hit the ground but don't see it, why do you trust your sense of hearing? This might seem like a ridiculous question, but the truth is that despite our total reliance on them, our senses deceive us all the time. You hear this audio, and some of us hear "Yanny," while the others hear "Laurel." You think you hear your friend laughing in the other room only to come out and see it's just the TV. A stick that looks bent in the water turns out to be straight when you pull it out. You spend what seems like hours walking through a dark and creepy forest, but then wake up and realize you were just dreaming.

The world is a strange place, and for all the knowledge we've managed to gather as a species, there's still a lot more that we don't. Here is everything we don't know too. I think, therefore I am. You've likely heard this phrase before, coined by 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes. The simple declaration serves as the foundation of all modern philosophy. It's a statement of knowledge; an assertion that if I know nothing else, I at least know I exist. While this may not seem like a revolutionary idea at first glance, it's actually quite significant. Philosophers since the time of Socrates have wondered whether or not it's possible to know anything because it always seems that the more questions we ask, the fewer answers we're left with. Descartes himself was renowned for his astonishing ability to doubt everything, no matter how trivial, no matter how seemingly obvious. He treated all of his ideas with a radical level of skepticism, believing that doing so would eventually lead him to the truth.

This skepticism led him to ask a question that science still hasn't been able to answer: How do I know I'm not dreaming right now? Or even more frightening, how do I know that my mind isn't being deliberately fooled by some evil genius? Think of it like the movie "The Matrix." It's possible that at this very moment, you're hooked up to a giant machine that is feeding you all the sensory data you're currently experiencing. You aren't really watching this video; it's just the machine making you think that you are. While unlikely, technically it is possible, and there's no way we can disprove it. This is why some people argue that we live in a simulation. Do we, or don't we? We just don't know. Descartes argues that our inability to rule out this scenario forces us to doubt everything we think we know: a state of radical skepticism in which we can't trust anything we experience or think.

Fortunately, Descartes offers us a way out. Even if we are forced to doubt everything, the one thing we cannot doubt is the fact that we're doubting. If we can doubt, then we can think, and if we can think, then there must be a mind doing the thinking. So while we may never know whether or not the world around us is an illusion, or if we even have physical bodies, we can rest easy in the knowledge that we have minds—that we exist, right? Well, not so much. Later philosophers from Kant to Heidegger criticized Descartes' claim, arguing that the existence of thoughts does not necessarily imply the existence of a thinker. Frederick Nietzsche even went so far as to say that the idea that there is something called thinking is itself an assumption. All we can really say then is that something is happening. What that thing is, we just don't know.

If you're rolling your eyes at this point, it's understandable. To most people, this all sounds like a bunch of over-intellectualized nonsense with no bearing on the actual world. Even if we do live in "The Matrix," I still know that 2 + 2 equals 4, that the sun is going to rise tomorrow, and that the Earth beneath my feet is solid. Well, hold up on the last point. Part of the reason why it's so difficult to say whether we truly know anything is because we live in a dynamic universe where nothing is ever stable. Everything in existence is always moving and always changing, including the Earth itself. Even as you watch this video, the very face of the planet is evolving. Plate tectonic theory is a relative newcomer to science, first pioneered in the 1960s. Our understanding of how the Earth shifts and moves is still fairly limited. We've discovered certain things, like the fact that the Earth's rocky crust is in the form of plates that sit on top of a mantle of liquid magma. As this magma circulates and turns, it pushes the plates around, knocking them into each other and creating earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountains.

What this means is that, contrary to what we think, the ground beneath our feet isn't solid; it's constantly changing. And if it is, how can we say we know it? Tomorrow, an earthquake could reshape our continents, and so the best we can ever have is a rough approximation of what we think it used to be, not what it actually is. Maybe I'm just trying to strongarm a metaphor here, but it seems like whenever we investigate what we think we know, our ideas start to crumble. It's an interesting quirk of reality, really. The simpler a question is, the harder it can be to answer. It's for this reason that many people fear death because we simply don't know anything about what happens after it. Yet I cannot help but think that the fear that we don't know anything about death presupposes that we know what life is, because in reality, we don't know either.

Well, it's easy for us to tell the difference between living and non-living materials, say like an apple versus a rock, but when we try to pin down a precise definition of life, things get complicated. All life forms, whether a plant or animal, bacteria or fungus, are composed of cells and are able to meet certain basic fundamental conditions. These include responsiveness, metabolism, energy transformation, growth, and reproduction. For instance, when you smell food, you respond by feeling hungry. Eating a sandwich then starts your metabolic process which allows you to convert calories into energy. This energy is then used to do things like grow muscles or attract a mate. But this is what life does, not what life is. The main problem is that the primary feature of life is that it's always changing, and definitions by their nature are meant to be static.

Perhaps if we knew where life came from, we'd have a better sense of what exactly it is. Unfortunately, we don't know this either. Of course, one day, science will figure this stuff out. The secrets to life, the Earth, and everything else will be unlocked. All it takes is more advanced technology, more sophisticated methods, and we'll be able to know the answers for certain, won't we? Here's the thing, though: science isn't ever 100% certain. When researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, otherwise known as CERN, announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, they did so by stating that their observations had passed the crucial threshold of five-sigma certainty. To most people, this term is nothing more than academic jargon, but Sigma in this context is the statistical unit of measurement used to determine how probable it is that a given result is correct. The higher the value, the more likely a particular finding is true, with five Sigma being the gold standard representing a 1 in a million chance that a given observation is inaccurate.

Though there's still a chance. You may think I'm splitting hairs here; after all, one in a million is as good as true, isn't it? Well, no. A 2011 experiment conducted by CERN reportedly found that a series of nearly massless ghost particles called neutrinos had traveled faster than the speed of light. This was, of course, impossible, as the finding violated Einstein's principle of relativity. Yet the experiment passed with a six Sigma confidence, meaning that it had a staggering 1.5 billion chance of being false, and yet it was, for later experiments all failed to replicate the original results, and the first experiment was written up as a fluke. Science is very good at explaining what is happening and how it happens, but not really why it's happening. Pass any scientific revelation through a series of why questions, and you'll always get to a point where we just don't know.

Take gravity, for instance. When an apple falls from a tree and hits Isaac Newton on his head, we know it’s gravity. We can even measure it as 9.8 m/second². But when it comes to explaining why this happens, almost 350 years later, we're still clueless. Every other physical force in the universe—electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear force—has a corresponding subatomic particle, yet we still don't know what the particle responsible for gravity is. Physicists have theorized the existence of something called a graviton that, similar to the Higgs boson, requires massive amounts of energy to detect. In fact, it's predicted that it would take a mass spectrometer to the size of Jupiter operating at 100% capacity to identify one. But why is a graviton so hard to find? Why is it that physics behaves like this, and is it possible that it could work differently?

The notion of alternate physics is most commonly associated with the multiverse theory—the idea that there isn't a single universe, but an infinite array of different universes. We don't know if this is true, of course, but if it is, then it's possible that among these countless variations, there exist other types of physics. Maybe in another universe, gravity isn't so difficult to measure; maybe instead, electromagnetism is the rogue force confounding their scientists. But it isn't just other universes that may operate under alternative sets of physical laws. Even our own universe may be subject to alternate forms of physics that we've yet to discover. In 2022, researchers at Columbia University programmed an AI to study video footage of different physical phenomena and then search for the minimal set of variables that described its observations. The footage included things like a pendulum, a lava lamp, and a fireplace. When the AI returned its results, the researchers found that they could identify some of the variables that the artificial intelligence had defined, but not others. The belief is that the AI was applying novel sets of physical laws currently unknown to humans.

Unfortunately, since the program can't communicate what it's thinking, the exact variables remain a mystery. However, it does raise an interesting question: If we were to meet an alien species, is it possible that they might use alternate laws of physics? Ted Chang's "Story of Your Life," the inspiration for the 2016 film "Arrival," explores this idea. Fair warning, there are spoilers ahead. In the story, humans make first contact with aliens after dozens of spaceships suddenly appear in orbit. But rather than wanting to take over the planet, it seems that the extraterrestrial visitors just want to talk. To get the conversation going, both humans and the aliens work together to slowly decipher one another's language as well as the respective approaches to physics. It quickly becomes apparent that the scientific and mathematical concepts that are advanced to us, like calculus, are elementary to them. Surprisingly, though, the reverse is also true. The aliens deploy strange, seemingly convoluted methods to describe basic principles like velocity. While both methods provide accurate results, each is highly specific to the species that developed them.

Eventually, it's explained that the aliens don't perceive our universe as causal; instead, they witness all events as happening simultaneously. This accounts for their weird set of physics. Chang's "Story of Your Life" raises interesting questions surrounding concepts like time, perception, free will, and subjectivity, forcing us readers to wonder if there's such a thing as objective reality. How do we know that the reality we experience is independent of our own consciousness? This problem has plagued philosophers since antiquity. Plato in particular is known for having proposed the idea of the realm of forms—a non-physical, immaterial plane from which the physical world manifests. Science actually functions on a similar principle, assuming that there is an objective reality that exists beyond our senses, which can be observed and measured. Despite our best efforts, though, no one has ever confirmed the existence of an objective reality. In fact, given that everything we know has to come first to us through our senses, and therefore our own subjective perception, it's impossible to prove an objective reality. We'll just never know.

In his book "The Spell of the Sensuous," philosopher David Abram argues that the very idea of an objective reality isn't representative of the universe we live in. In actuality, Abram says we exist in the realm of inner subjectivity, a term he borrows from the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. This form of reality, rather than being a separate and isolated phenomenon, is created by the collective experience of all its participants. The universe doesn't exist as an object of our subjective perceptions; instead, it arises out of our very interaction with it. If this idea sounds a little out there, consider quantum mechanics, where our mere observations literally affect the state of matter. Just by measuring a photon of light, we can change it from a wave to a particle. So maybe there's no such thing as objective reality; maybe all that exists is our collective inner subjective experience. There's simply no way of knowing.

Plunging into the depths of uncertainty is never pleasant. That's why humans came up with reason and science in the first place. We want to feel as though we know things. It gives us a sense of control in an otherwise chaotic, unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous universe. For the majority of my life, I was agnostic about most things. If there wasn't what I deemed to be rational scientific proof to support an idea, I just didn't believe it. But the more I learn, the more I realize how limited my own experience is and just how much we as a species don't know. Ordinary matter accounts for just 5% of the entire universe. The rest of it—95% of everything that exists—is a complete and total mystery. We just don't know. It seems naive, if not outright arrogant, to close myself off to new ideas just because they don't fit within my current understanding of how things work. Tomorrow, the Earth could shift. Life as we know it could completely change, and everything that science has taught us could turn out to just be a fluke. But rather than meeting this dilemma with fear or outright rejection of scientific principles, we should take it as an opportunity to learn, embracing uncertainty as a means of transforming our perception. To me, this seems like the only rational path forward, because as it turns out, everything we don't know is, well, everything.

Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the president of the United States—when you think of the people controlling the world, these names come to mind. But the truth is, while these people have a significant influence over our lives, four companies secretly control the world, and only a handful of people hold significant power in those companies. These are the people who have the potential to change your life for better or worse without you ever realizing what's happening. I made a video talking about how BlackRock controls the world, and unsurprisingly, they are one of the four companies we'll discuss today. Altogether, these four companies manage almost $24 trillion worth of assets. They have the most influence over the United States's monetary policy and operate with very little oversight, which means they're afraid to do almost anything they want. Their power doesn't end in the United States; these companies also own a significant stake in the vast majority of European companies that are listed on the US Stock Exchange.

Now, you might think this is an exaggeration. How can four companies control so much wealth? But it is true, and the information is available once you just look for it. From the largest retail stores like Walmart and Home Depot to transportation companies like GMC and Boeing, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and media companies like Disney, Viacom, News Corp, NBC, CBS, Time Warner, and AT&T—they influence the banking system as they're involved in every decision made at the largest financial institutions like Bank of America, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup. In the United States, the US Federal Reserve, the country's central banking institution, has board members who represent these four investment firms. Global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are influenced heavily by these companies.

So who exactly are these four companies? Before I answer that question, when researching this topic, I was bombarded with a lot of data. The largest of the four companies, BlackRock, was founded in 1988 by Larry Fink. Like the other three firms, BlackRock is a fiduciary, which means that a person has placed trust in them to act in their best financial interest. BlackRock does this primarily through mutual funds, a collection of assets that invest in stocks, bonds, and other securities like real estate. BlackRock currently has 70 offices in 30 countries around the globe and holds $10 trillion in assets. The company is currently worth $20 trillion, which is half of the US's yearly gross domestic product, or GDP—this is the measure of value created by a country by producing goods and services.

The other three companies are Vanguard, State Street, and Fidelity Investments. Vanguard manages $7.6 trillion in assets and is the world's largest issuer of mutual funds. At the end of 2022, it had 203 US funds and 227 international funds, which served its 50 million investors. Vanguard's founder, John Bogle, created the index investment fund in 1976, now known as the Vanguard 500 Index Fund. You might be wondering the difference between an index and a mutual fund. An index fund is a type of mutual fund that is passively managed, as opposed to other mutual funds which are actively managed. So when Bogle invented this index fund, he created a formula to track returns on the market and invest accordingly.

State Street is owned by Vanguard now, but is the second-oldest continually operating US bank. Its predecessor, Union Bank, was founded in 1792. State Street manages $3.9 trillion in investment assets. Along with Vanguard and BlackRock, it is one of the prominent three index fund managers that dominate corporate America. Fidelity Investments manages $4.3 trillion in assets; it was founded by Edward Johnson the second in 1946 and has remained a family-owned and operated business ever since. Fidelity was the first major American finance firm to market mutual funds to everyone via mail and door-to-door sales. Before they opened their doors, the mere idea of investing had been reserved for wealthy individuals.

Hearing that alone, you might be wondering what exactly is wrong with these companies. They all sound like industry pioneers who have done incredible things to stay in business for so long, and while that is entirely right, it's only half the story. To figure out the other half, let's start with what these companies tell us they do. Each of these firms helps everyday people invest their money, and whether you're a multi-millionaire or an hourly worker looking to create a small investment fund for your family, they've helped democratize investing. Often investing with them can seem like a good idea, especially lately, because in today's world, we're not just worried about making money; we're concerned about making money and helping move society forward. That's where ESG investing comes in.

ESG, which stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance, is a type of investing that considers social and environmental factors. So basically, what is the company you're investing in doing about environmental issues, issues like climate change? All four of these firms advertised their commitment to ESG, as you would expect. Some people have mocked these firms' stance on ESG, calling it "woke investing." In response, companies like BlackRock have responded by saying it's not woke; it's capitalism. The way they see it, climate change poses a risk, so investing in companies that further the effects of climate change is also a risk. On the flip side, investing in companies trying to mitigate that risk is good business.

To give them all the credit, they put their money where their mouths are. In 2021, Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street successfully shook up the board of ExxonMobil by installing new members who promised to take on climate change, and BlackRock led the state of West Virginia—a huge coal producer—out of the investment firm due to their pledge to invest in net-zero companies. But when you peel back the curtain, it's not as wholesome as these firms would like to make it sound, especially when it comes to ESG investing. Every single one of these companies is about as hypocritical as they get. Vanguard specifically praises its own ESG investing while also owning $86 billion in coal companies, making it the world's largest investor in the industry. BlackRock is the top investor in fossil fuels and deforestation, war profiteering, and doing business with human rights violators.

Look no further than BlackRock's deal with the Chinese government. The firm became the first company to have access to China's vast mutual fund market, followed by Fidelity. This left many skeptics wondering what did they promise President Xi Jinping with this deal? These two companies will be pouring more and more money into the Chinese companies, which are primarily controlled by the Chinese government, a growing adversary of Western democracies. Even more controversial are the firms' investments in Russia. All of these companies had assets invested in Russian companies, and once the war broke out in Ukraine, they all responded, at least publicly, by freezing those investments or pulling out of them altogether. Whether or not those assets will stay out of Russia long-term is questionable. Regardless, years and years of investment from these four companies undoubtedly helped fund Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

No matter how you slice it, these companies are riddled with conflicts of interest. In Ukraine, BlackRock is one of the leaders trying to advise the country on rebuilding once the conflict is resolved. This might seem benevolent, but not all that glitters is gold. In reality, BlackRock is simply capitalizing on a war that their funds helped finance so they can make more money. Closer to home than the others, the Johnson family, which founded and runs Fidelity, also runs a venture capital arm that competes with Fidelity. These investments mean the family benefits while Fidelity investors get a crappy deal. For example, from 2011 to 2012, F Prime Capital—the family's venture capital arm—invested $1 million in Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical Incorporated before it went public. This investment prevented Fidelity's mutual funds from making the same play because if it did, it would have violated US securities laws. So the family-owned fund got the better stock value, while the public funds, which invested in the company at a higher rate, kind of got screwed.

Essentially, these companies, which have immense power and control in our world, tell us a manicured PR statement about what they're doing, but in reality, the story is much more complicated and [Music] problematic. None of their success would have been possible without the various proprietary technologies they developed to help their investing strategies. The prime example is BlackRock's Aladdin technology, which began the trend of using technology to minimize the risk of investing. It manages $20 trillion in assets and predicts the outcome of every single investment while getting information and personal data on everyone who knowingly or unknowingly gave BlackRock their money. This technology and others like it are perfect for investors. They've helped to lower the cost of managing the investment while improving returns. This type of technology is what makes companies like BlackRock and others grow. It gives them an edge; it allows them to apply their investing strategy company-wide. It'll enable investors to diversify their portfolios more effectively. Technologies like this democratize investing, allowing anyone of any level of wealth to benefit from a sound investment strategy. This is why over 80% of all assets invested over the last decade have gone to these four companies.

But at what cost? And if these companies continue to revolutionize, advance their technologies, and control more and more investor assets, then what are the risks of ownership concentration? If BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street continue increasing their influence over the biggest companies across every industry, competition is just going to decrease. They'll be competing with themselves, which isn't competing at all. This leads to less consumer choice and higher prices. And we can see this already happening in the airline industry. Over the last 14 years, airfares have increased by as much as 7% because there's less pressure to compete. BlackRock and Vanguard are among the five largest shareholders of the biggest three operators.

But this isn't just about the companies; it's about the people who run and own them, the people who make the decisions, pull the levers, and hold so much power you can't imagine. Starting with Larry Fink, the founder, chairman, and CEO of BlackRock. He started out at a New York-based investment bank, where he rose to manage the firm's bond department. Unfortunately, his career there ended when he lost his department $100 million after an incorrect prediction about interest rates. This led him to focus his next venture on investing in risk management, and BlackRock was born. He founded the firm in 1988 and grew it from $5 million to $8 billion in just 5 years.

Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity Investments, didn't grow the company she leads from the ground up. She's the granddaughter of Fidelity's founder, Edward Johnson II. She started as an analyst and portfolio manager at the company before being promoted to the president of Fidelity's asset management division. In this position in the early 2000s, like in an episode of "Succession," Johnson unsuccessfully attempted to remove her father as CEO over disagreements about how to lead the company. It wouldn't take too long for her time to come, though, as in 2014 she was named CEO. State Street's CEO, Ronald Oley, has ties to Fidelity, having previously served as the president of asset management and corporate services there before entering his current role.

The world of finance is a lot smaller than you think, and Vanguard, uniquely, is owned by its clients instead of by the funds they invest in. Its president and CEO, Mortimer J. Buckley, started his career as an assistant to the company's founder John Bogle—Bogle, the guy who essentially invented the index fund—may not like the direction his business is going in. He's warned of ownership concentration, saying that too much money is in too few hands. Undoubtedly, asset management has made Mr. Buckley a very wealthy man, but perhaps he sees beyond that. Maybe he understands the power he and others like him have over every industry they invest in and every investor who entrusts them. He may be issuing a warning to us all, but it's not one we're likely able to do anything about because these four companies are just too influential.

A global financial system meant to empower individual investors has empowered a select few instead. So while we get distracted by celebrities' faces on the front of magazines or flashing by in our social media posts, these company leaders are behind the scenes pulling the levers and secretly deciding the financial future of our world, whether we like it or not. The worst of it all is BlackRock.

Watch this video next to understand why. You wake up to the sound of the alarm on your iPhone and annoyed that you couldn't get more sleep. You grudgingly unlock your phone to see what's going on in the world, and there's an email from Amazon telling you that your package has been delivered. So you force yourself out of bed to get the package, and it's some Johnson & Johnson medicine you ordered the night before—the wonders of overnight shipping. You think to yourself, you glance across the room to see the clock—it's 8:00 a.m. and you have to be at work by 9:00. Flustered, you open your Microsoft computer to answer some work emails before getting dressed. There's no time to cook breakfast, so you'll just grab something at McDonald's on your way to work.

What if I told you that every single company you just interacted with within the first hour of your day is heavily influenced, in large part, by one company—BlackRock? Now I'm sure you've heard about BlackRock; there are dozens of videos here on YouTube that talk about how it's the company that controls the entire world. But the reality is far less glamorous. Here is why everything you've heard about BlackRock is wrong. Before we talk about that, let's talk about data. Every time we browse on the internet, companies collect an insane amount of data from us. Information which is then sold to data brokers who, in turn, sell it to the highest bidder or just lose that information in data breaches. According to a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were 68% more breaches in 2021 than in 2020, and that number is only going up. A few months ago, my friend got an email telling him that his information was released in a data breach from a company that he had never heard of, and right after, he started getting personalized email ads from shady companies. This is how scammers are able to figure out your phone number, name, and even your address.

The good news is that you can get these data brokers to delete the information they have about you. BlackRock is an investment firm that controls a huge number of shares in some of the largest companies in the world. They have a total of $10 trillion in assets across the globe—that's an amount equal to half of America’s total GDP controlled just by one company. It's easy to dismiss such a powerful company as all-out evil, but the truth is, BlackRock doesn't own these companies or even own shares of these companies. Their clients own the shares—BlackRock simply manages them.

That's not to say that BlackRock doesn't have any influence on these companies—they definitely do, because they control such an incredible amount of their stock. It's possible that companies want to keep in BlackRock's good graces so they don't pull their investments. Now, while BlackRock might not be the evil company some people make them out to be, the truth is there's still something very shady about them—their hypocrisy. BlackRock was founded 34 years ago by Larry Fink, and he grew the company from 5 million in value to 8 billion in just five years, primarily by managing money invested by large institutions like pensions, university endowments, and substantial fortunes invested by the uber-rich.

Today, Fink serves on the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum, commanding the attention of business tycoons and political leaders around the globe, and his company is on the cusp of consolidating so much power that it could essentially control the world. Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate—the worst day on Wall Street since the crash of 1987. The 2008 financial crash turned out to be an incredible opportunity for BlackRock. It secured an uncontested contract to control many of the banks that had collapsed. That gave Larry Fink, who was already incredibly wealthy, even more power and a direct line to the American government. The same thing happened in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic when the government called in BlackRock to protect the Federal Reserve from financial fallout. Periods of economic uncertainty like these were key to BlackRock's rise to power.

And as the famous saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. BlackRock would like you to think that they are being responsible. In the summer of 2020, while the world was angry about the murder of George Floyd, BlackRock came out with a statement saying that companies had to serve a social purpose and that they would be giving every company an ESG, or Environmental, Social, and Governance score. Companies that promised more diversity in hiring and leadership, or offered environmentally friendly policies and technology, received higher scores than companies that didn't. Although this concept had been around since 2004, BlackRock became the loudest proponent of ESG investing in 2020, and in all honesty, it worked. Before this statement, ESGs were mentioned in far fewer than 1% of earnings calls, but by May 2021, that number rose to around 20% and in a sense remained the fastest-growing segment in the asset management industry. People are more concerned about the environmental and social impact of companies, and that's a good thing, right? Socially responsible companies get the upper hand.

In an ideal world, yes. But we all know that the world we live in is far from ideal. While there's been some positive improvement, the main result of BlackRock's ESG statement has been a massive surge in companies participating in practices like greenwashing—pretending they're more sustainable, diverse, or responsible than they actually are. It's also exposed the hypocrisy of BlackRock itself because while it claims to champion ESG investing, the company remains the largest investor in fossil fuels and war profiteering and maintains a pretty friendly relationship with human rights violators. And it's not just BlackRock. The second-largest investment firm in the world, Vanguard, is guilty of the same technique—promoting ESG investing on the one hand, but on the other, unwilling to stop investing in oil and gas companies or pull out of companies with questionable human rights practices.

We see this time and time again from BlackRock; they do something that seems like they're moving in the right direction in the eyes of the public, but behind the scenes, they're unwilling to tamper with their investments, even if it's for the greater good of society. Take climate change, for instance. BlackRock says that climate risk is investment risk, meaning that investing in companies that aren't creating policies to help address climate change is a risky move. In 2021, BlackRock actually did do something about this by helping shake up the board of ExxonMobil and installing new members who promised to take action on climate change. Previously, the oil and gas behemoth was responsible for 2% of the world's emissions; now there are new self-imposed mandates to help reduce that over time. This is a great move by the company, no doubt, but the fact that it's still the world's single biggest investor in fossil fuels makes this feel more like virtue signaling than actually trying to make meaningful change—and hypocrisy doesn't end there.

As mass shootings continue to end lives in the US, BlackRock has spoken out against gun violence and said that gun manufacturers should do more to protect the lives of the American people. But who's the largest investor in gun manufacturers? You guessed it, BlackRock. The investment firm holds a 16% stake in Sturm, Ruger, 15% in Vista Outdoor, and significant percentages of other manufacturers just like them. BlackRock says it talks to these companies about improving safety, but so far, it's unclear whether or not there's actually been any policy change. Outside of America, BlackRock's US Aerospace and Defense fund has billions of dollars invested in major weapons contractors worldwide, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. They're supporting these companies that then get huge Pentagon contracts and use taxpayer money to engage in violence and war around the globe. Often these weapons are supplied to foreign governments in the name of peace, like Saudi Arabia, which received weapons from the US government and used them to indiscriminately attack civilians in Yemen during years of civil war. Funding this war and an increase in nuclear weapons shows that BlackRock constantly skirts its own commitment to human rights.

So does its engagement with authoritarian governments. BlackRock is officially the first global asset manager to have access to China's mutual fund, leaving critics wondering what did Fink promise Chinese President Xi Jinping to allow him to access the Chinese Communist Party's fund? To be fair, BlackRock isn't the only investment company out there looking to do business with China, but because of its widespread power, it's been the most successful in gaining a foothold in the controversial territory, which is surprising, especially for a US company. This power also made it a major player in the war in Ukraine, as we saw in China. Despite its emphasis on ESG investing, BlackRock has a tendency to overlook human rights in favor of monetary gain. It's been investing in Russia's most prominent companies for years. The British pensions that BlackRock controls alone have contributed $630 billion to Russia after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, a precursor to what would become the more than a year-long war in Ukraine. BlackRock reconsidered some of its investments in Russia, but just one year later, it was back to being among the top shareholders in the country's biggest corporations.

Even when it became clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin was planning an invasion last year, BlackRock didn't budge. And like most other Western firms, it did eventually pull assets out of Russia once the war started. But think about all the money it flooded into Russia over the years—money that the authoritarian government controlled and used in its expansion mission that led to this deadly war. All of this begs the question: how did one company gain this much global power and influence? Well, it started with technology. BlackRock's business is built on ETFs, or exchange-traded funds. An ETF contains diversified investments to reduce an investor's risk. Rather than buying stock in a single company, you're investing in a fund that buys stocks, commodities, and other securities. This practice proved to be very lucrative for BlackRock and its investors, thanks to a portfolio management software it created in 1998 called Aladdin. Aladdin predicts the possible outcome of every investment and collects information and personal data on everyone who has ever knowingly or unknowingly given BlackRock money. This allows the software to predict how likely it is that a specific investment will fail.

Eventually, this technology put Fink and BlackRock on top, making the company the go-to firm for ETF investing, which keeps getting more and more popular. Global ETF assets could explode to $25 trillion by 2025, meaning trillions more for BlackRock. But we don't need to wait until 2025 to see the effects of the power BlackRock has right now. BlackRock oversees assets for 10% of the entire world economy. Companies like Fox, Comcast, and Disney have to consult with BlackRock before they make major moves since it has such a large share of their ownership. BlackRock and other large firms like Vanguard are the biggest investors in global giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. This level of ownership creates an anti-competitive environment. You feel this in the prices of airline tickets. BlackRock and Vanguard are among the five largest shareholders of the three biggest airline operators, which means that there's very little incentive to lower prices in order to compete with each other. This level of ownership consolidation reduces consumer choice and raises prices. It also means that eventually, a handful of powerful people at these investment firms could wield more power than the executives at the companies they own shares in.

Even Jack Bogle, who founded Vanguard, says that this kind of ownership concentration is bad; too much money in the hands of too few will not work out well for the global economy. There are solutions that governments could put in place to stop these companies from gathering too much influence. Things like not allowing funds and ETFs to vote as shareholders in companies or creating ownership caps that would dictate how much of a company can be owned by a single entity. Laws can be passed limiting how much influence an investment firm can have in the companies they're invested in, even if that influence is intended to be benevolent, like with the ESG. But how soon could any of this happen? Because BlackRock and Vanguard are less than a decade away from managing $20 trillion in assets, that would upend the asset management industry and intensify the already staggering ownership consolidation of the world's largest companies, sending prices through the roof.

One of the biggest problems with the system of business is that the more money BlackRock manages, the lower its fees for investors. So we end up in this cycle where the best way to invest our money today creates a potentially catastrophic environment for our money and our society tomorrow. Unfortunately, most people don't have the luxury of looking that far ahead. What looks good in the short term is all that matters, and that is how BlackRock thrives. It hopes you will overlook its hypocrisy around the environment, diversity, and human rights because it puts out statements about being a responsible company as the future hinges on its investors not caring about these things. The problem is that many of its investors don't even know their investors; they're simply part of a pension fund or an endowment that BlackRock manages. There are smaller funds that do support ESG investing without conflicts of interest, and there are options like managing our own shares that help us avoid the moral pitfalls of large companies like BlackRock. But much like how most of us couldn't live without Amazon's next day delivery for our last-minute essentials, using these large flawed companies is just easier.

Over the past decade, the public has become more and more critical of what massive companies do and say. As that magnifying glass emerged, BlackRock made sure that its messaging about making the world a better place was heard and publicized. BlackRock's hypocrisy won't end; its public image versus private actions will most likely always conflict with one another. But as consumers and investors, it's our responsibility to know what's happening. Taking them at their word is the easier option, but that's exactly what BlackRock is betting you'll do. That's how they've gotten this far. This is the same ignorance that allowed banks and governments to drown us in debt.

Click the video on your screen right now to find out more. Lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe. On December 25th, 2021, NASA launched the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. Hubble has provided and continues to provide us with some of the most magical pictures of our universe, but the JWST is projected to be 100 times more powerful than Hubble. Built over 30 years, the JWST is designed to capture more light and detail than Hubble ever could. This will let astronomers gather more information and allow them to dig deeper into the history of the universe than ever before. About six months after its launch, the JWST delivered the most detailed image of the universe ever taken, known as Webb's First Deep Field. The image isn't just star-studded; it's galaxy-studded. In this image, you see galaxies that span enormous distances and maybe an even greater duration of time. The distances we're dealing with here are so large that it would take millions, maybe billions of years to travel to them, even at the speed of light.

When we look at these images, we're looking into the past. This pale red dot, for example, is a galaxy that appeared 13.1 billion years ago. We know this because that's how long it has taken the light from it to reach us. But for all of its size, do you know how much of the night sky that everything in this entire image would cover? Just about the width of a grain of sand held at arm's length. There are hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe, and some scientists even put that number in the trillions. These galaxies, in turn, have hundreds of billions of star systems, much like our own, and these star systems have planets orbiting around them. What are the chances that there wouldn't be another planet with life in some faraway galaxy? What are the chances that in this incredible vastness of space, we're all alone? You see, no matter how difficult it is for life to exist, and no matter how rare it is, the universe is so big that there should be millions, if not billions, of planets able to support life. You can define whatever requirements you want for life: temperature, distance from a star, number of moons, presence of water, number of asteroid impacts, and so on. Purely by chance, there should be many planets with life on them, and surely some of that life would be intelligent enough to reach out to us, right? It's not like the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology are exclusive to Earth. They're not.

But if there is life on other planets, if there's nothing special about Earth, where's everybody else? Where are all the aliens? Enrico Fermi asked this question in a lunchtime conversation with his colleagues in 1950. Fermi was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist considering the existence of space-faring civilizations. Truth be told, humans haven't been around for that long. And if in our short existence on this planet we've considered branching out to Mars or some other world, it's reasonable that another civilization might have thought the same thing. If a civilization has been around long enough and it's sufficiently technologically advanced, it should try to branch out to other planets in search of resources. At the very least, it should try to reach out to them to communicate. That hypothesis, though, stands in contrast to reality, which has given us no evidence for life other than our own on this planet. The Great Silence, as it's called, persists today. The mismatch between our intuition that the universe should be teeming with life and its apparent emptiness is known as the Fermi Paradox.

So where are the aliens? Just this morning, jet fighters raced aloft over Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, to intercept a reported saucer returning. Pilots swore that it was a light that could not have been a reflection and that it evaded them at a very high rate of speed. Well, even though we've always been fascinated with aliens, we haven't officially been looking for them for very long. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is the most famous organization actively looking out for alien life in the universe, and it only formally began in the late 1950s. Some of its significant efforts include sending radio signals to outer space and listening for ones that may be sent our way. Of course, this only covers intentional signals. SETI is one of the first organizations to intentionally send radio waves, but our technologies have been emitting radio waves through space-time ever since they were invented. This includes everything from mobile phones, televisions, FM, AM radios, and even the earliest radio transmissions in the late 1800s. For all we know, our alien counterparts are laughing over Charlie Chaplin movies right now.

But if you think about it, our radio signals may not have even reached potential intelligent life yet. As we mentioned at the start of the video, the distances we're dealing with in space are pretty literally out of this world. Even if we consider the oldest transmissions from over 100 years ago, when radio waves were first sent out, they would have only traveled a tiny portion of space. If today, at this very moment, our earliest signals were to reach our so-called galactic neighbors and they were so intelligent and capable that they recognized our existence and decided to reach out immediately, it would take another 100 years for the reply to reach Earth—barring a breakthrough in physics that allows them to break the speed of light. Before we ever know if our earliest attempts to reach out were successful, most of us would be faded memories. What if life exists not 100 light-years away, but 50 or even 20 light-years away? Well, in that case, aliens would have had enough time to receive and reply to our signals by now.

So why haven't they? One answer would be that aliens simply don't exist, which, let's be honest, is rather boring. So let's assume they do exist. The logical question would then be: Why haven't they reached out to us? To answer this question, we need to place alien civilizations into three advancement categories: less advanced than us, equally advanced, or more advanced. If they're less advanced than us, it's likely that they simply don't have the technology to reach out to us. It's also important to know what science to look out for. For 2 billion years after life started to evolve, it would be unobservable. If another civilization were to look out for the same things we're looking for right now, then there's the possibility that they're equally advanced as we are, and if that's the case, they might be paranoid about contacting us because they're uncertain about what they're dealing with.

And this is in line with what Stephen Hawking said: that reaching out to alien life would be a big mistake because they might come for our resources and our planet. They might carry pathogens we can't fight off. They might have colonial intentions. The list goes on. Given how we've treated other human beings because of differences we created in our own minds, it's fair to say that it would be a mistake to assume that an extraterrestrial species would greet us with kindness.

The third possibility is that the aliens possess far superior intelligence. Humans are no longer attractive to them. It might be a difficult pill to swallow, considering how human-centric we are, but hear me out. If the universe is teeming with life, if there's nothing special about us, then there's not much point in them reaching out to us. Much less spending precious resources visiting us. Colonial intentions would likely be less important to a civilization that can, for example, harvest the power of stars.

We'd be like the ants of the universe. To most people, ants might be interesting when they first see them and they can be intriguing, but then interest subsides, and we walk past millions of ants every day without paying any attention to them. Sure, some biologists might still be interested, but most of us simply ignore them. We could apply a similar line of reasoning to a superior alien civilization. The exact reason a nearby alien civilization might exist, namely the abundance of life, is also why we haven't felt their presence.

On a more cynical note, they might not have visited us yet because they prefer an ambush rather than a hello. The Dark Forest Hypothesis states that the universe is full of cunning civilizations that would rather forego the risk of contacting anyone else and observe from the darkness. Whether to reach out is up to them, but as this hypothesis suggests, just because we haven't been contacted doesn't imply nobody is listening. Of course, this is assuming they haven't already visited us.

On July 26th, 2023, David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified under oath that non-human biologics were recovered by a highly secretive UFO recovery program run by the US government. Now, I know we've had many so-called sightings of alien spacecraft and a lot of grainy video footage to go along with it, but this is the first time someone whose credentials have been verified has gone under oath and said things that could easily land him in jail if proven false. Skepticism is needed; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Nevertheless, even if David's claims are real, there's simply a general lack of evidence. If one alien spacecraft can reach Earth, so can hundreds or thousands more. If they visited us once, there's no reason to believe they won't do so again.

At a civilization level, a government cover-up can only go so far, especially when there's a strong likelihood that a civilization reaching out to us would be far more advanced than us. Having said that, though, we come back to our starting point: Where are the aliens? And if they're so common, why haven't we been bombarded with visits? Well, one of the more widely accepted theories is that of the Great Filter. It's a hurdle in the evolution of a civilization that typically leads to its extinction. It could be anything: an asteroid impact, a massive volcanic eruption, an incurable virus, runaway artificial intelligence, self-destruction—the list goes on. The idea is that most civilizations that go through the Great Filter fail and are inevitably destroyed. If that's what's happened so far in the universe, that would explain the Great Silence. Our civilization alone may have passed this intergalactic test, thus we exist when others don't.

But that's only half the story. You see, the scenarios I spoke of only make sense if you assume we've already passed the Great Filter. What if we haven't? What if the Great Filter isn't behind us but waiting for us in the years ahead? Maybe we exist not because we've passed the Great Filter but because we've yet to go through it. Asteroid impacts have happened in the past, but could also hit us in the future. Nuclear annihilation is only a button or two away. We've seen some devastating viruses take their toll, and runaway intelligence—well, we're on our way. The Great Filter could be any of these things, or it could be none—it could be something else entirely, something our human-centered minds cannot even imagine.

Part of the intrigue with alien life involves asking one question: How special are we? Almost everything about the Fermi Paradox is a projection of that—the things we look for, how we look for them, how we expect them to behave. It's a self-centered, egotistical pursuit that is ironically very human. But this human-centered curiosity might end up costing our civilization dearly. As Stephen Hawking said, maybe seeking out extraterrestrial life is a terrible idea. For all we know, the Great Filter is just that—our curiosity. Maybe it's the courage to ask, "Where are all the aliens?" Maybe we shouldn't know. We could be dealing with something genuinely otherworldly in the vast unknown of space. Who dares wins? Not this galactic race; we don't.

Maybe the Great Filter is not a catastrophe that will happen to us; maybe it's one we seek. Hopefully, the James Webb Space Telescope has some answers, or at least newer questions for us. Watch the video on your screen to understand why the JWST is so [Music] important.

As the nukes dropped on every major city around the globe, everyone sought shelter, but there was nowhere to hide. In an instant, civilization as we knew it was destroyed. Every server, library, and entity that stored information about who we are, what we did, and how we lived was gone. Only a handful of children worldwide survived: all kept in the deepest bunkers we could find. No adults could make it; everything about humanity before the blast would be lost entirely. In around five generations, sure, there are tales, mysteries, and legends, but no historical record of life before the final world war.

There's no way our descendants, thousands of years from now, can know who we were. The story might sound a little far-fetched, but the reality is, for all we know, this could have happened already—maybe except for the nuclear part, because no evidence suggests that man-made nuclear weapons existed before Oppenheimer. But the rest of it could be true because there's so much we don't know about the history of our world and humans. At one point, we knew more until the [Music] fire in 48 BC.

The Library of Alexandria, located in Alexandria, in what is now Egypt, burned down. Historians estimate that at one point, the library held over half a million documents from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India, and other nations. Sadly, as the pages turned into ashes, the most significant assembly of information about the ancient world disappeared. There are a lot of theories about who started the fire; Julius Caesar is one of the most routinely accused people. He was driving his soldiers into Egypt when an Egyptian fleet in Alexandria cut him off. Legend has it that Caesar's ships were outnumbered, so they set all the ships in the harbor afire. This fire then spread and destroyed parts of the city, including the library.

Another theory blames the fire on one of the Muslim conquerors of Egypt. The story goes that the scrolls were burned for fuel for thousands of hot baths in the city. But there's some skepticism about why a Muslim would burn Jewish and Christian texts since they also hold the holy texts in Islam. Most likely, it wasn't a dramatic fire that started in the harbor or an attempt to make fuel, but a series of events that happened over time to destroy the library, culminating in a fire. But who burned it isn't the real question we have. What knowledge was in there that we missed out on is a better question. What insights did historians and philosophers have about humanity that we'll never know? These are the more essential questions—questions that we might never truly know the answer to.

Beyond the Library of Alexandria, what about all the information never written down in the first place? The reality is that most of human history has been lost over time, and as a result, so many people have come up with their own conclusions about what we were. But before discussing those, there are things we need to know about our past. Prehistoric humans might not have had tools like we do today, but what they had in abundance was a really good understanding of math and engineering. That's why structures like the Great Pyramid in the Library of Alexandria could exist in the first place.

Humans first appeared about 300,000 years ago while Earth was in the middle of the last ice age. It was a harsh environment to come into existence in. As a result, human populations were tiny and grew slowly. The Stone Age, our most ancient time, lasted until about 3,000 BC. This era was marked by the use of tools and saw, most importantly, a transformation of our culture from hunting and gathering to farming and food production. Humans in the Stone Age lived in caves or very simple huts and tepees. They learned to control fire to keep their homes warm, scare away predators, and cook their prey like woolly mammoths, deer, and bison. These early humans were also the first to leave behind art in the form of etched people, animals, and signs on the walls of caves or carved into items.

With time, their tools evolved from rough, dull shapes to polished, pointed items that served as spears and arrows. Eventually, they started settling more prominently in villages and began farming. We know this from the appearance of polished hand axes and other tools used to till farmland. As they settled, advancements were made in home construction, pottery, sewing, and weaving. As human civilization expanded, something interesting also happened. Human activity reached a tipping point where hunting and farming began to impact the natural world. The proportion of plants to animals was relatively stable until about 4,000 BC; since then, humans have been affecting our environment at an increasing pace.

In 3,300 BC came the Bronze Age, which lasted until about 1300 BC. This is where tools really took off. Metal was introduced, which not only led to the production of better tools but also better weapons. And with better weapons came many different things to fight about: organized government, law, and religion. In this time, humans also started using advanced tools like a potter's wheel and began creating textiles instead of just wearing animal skins to keep themselves warm. And perhaps most famously, this was the beginning of written history—Egyptian hieroglyphs. The first known recordings appeared. Then we entered the Iron Age, from 1300 BC to 900 BC. Humankind had a lot going on, and we saw the introduction of heating and forging iron, which led to the mass production of tools and weapons.

Four-room homes, some with stables for domesticated animals, showed up. There's also evidence of early city planning with blocks of houses and water systems running between them. Agriculture, art, and religion all became more sophisticated, and finally, we developed writing systems and written documentation. At the end of the Iron Age, we moved into the early historical period, where documentation of human history pretty much became more widespread. This is basically everything we are sure of about the ancient world, much of which we learned through fossils. But fossils can only tell us so much. How did these people live? What were their daily routines like? What were their favorite foods?

Small talk, big dreams—we sadly don't know. And so many people have made theories about what humans might have been like before recorded history started. Much like the Greeks made up myths of powerful gods to explain their daily lives and emotions, people have been developing theories about the history of humankind forever. Theories like the "original Eve," a human who birthed, literally or figuratively, the rest of humankind. It could be possible because, in the 1980s, DNA sequencing demonstrated that this Eve might have existed as recently as 120,000 years ago. Then skulls found in East Africa provided suggestions about what she might have looked like and where she might have lived. People became obsessed with the idea of this real-life Eve—not just a figure from the Bible, but a woman who was the ancestor to us all. This idea made its way into pop culture, grasping people worldwide.

And what about the possibility that our distant ancestors were much more advanced than we give them credit for? It's always been assumed that humans in the Upper Paleolithic period—from 50,000 to 15,000 BC—were bands of foragers, never establishing any sort of tradition or organization within their groups. But recently, evidence of princely burials and grand buildings have appeared. Burials were found across Western Eurasia. They weren't full cemeteries but isolated graves of individuals or small groups—bodies placed in specific postures and sometimes decorated with ornaments.

The idea that a band of foragers would bury some but not all of their dead in this ceremonial way had never been considered. Similarly, stone temples dating back to this time were discovered in Turkey, some over 5 meters high and weighing about 8 tons. The temples had raised pillars and were linked by stone walls, and each post contained a unique sculpture carved with images of the world ancient humans were living in. Such structures imply the coordinated activity of humans; it takes a lot of communication and teamwork to build something so significant. We always assumed little happened in the Paleolithic Era, but perhaps there was more of a society than we thought. Maybe ancient humans in this time weren't moving about in small groups, never settling into tradition or community. Perhaps they had leaders and dynasties. The evidence is murky, but who's to say one way or the other?

Theories about our ancient ancestors are constantly changing. For instance, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people in Europe and North America thought that primitive humans weren't capable of full consciousness like they were still savage in some way. Now, no scholar would claim that. Yet some experts still dismiss distant humans in imagination or skepticism of their world. Others have always taken seriously the idea that humans were our intellectual equals. Why wouldn't they have some sort of political system or burial ceremony? It's almost impossible to know, and the questions don't stop with our human history.

What about the history of our planet? What came before us that was never recorded? Could there have been a civilization before humans created the one we live in today? To have civilization, you need a food surplus, which frees up most people to specialize in doing things other than producing food. You need farming, and you also need to require specific minimum population density or you wouldn't have enough individuals to run this theoretical civilization. Is there any way we could know if something like this existed? Fossils could easily miss an industrial civilization that lasted only 100,000 years, which, for the record, is 500 times longer than our current industrial civilization has been around.

Any ancient civilization would have needed energy and the capacity to exploit fossil fuels and other power sources as we do. Scientists can theoretically look for worldwide effects that leave traces of this. Perhaps there would also be naturally occurring evidence like remnants of certain fossil fuels. There could also be non-natural evidence like a product that compares to our plastic use. And you might think that we haven't found any signs of this, but you would be wrong. There's been the discovery of a thermal maximum event that occurred about 55.5 million years ago and lasted for about 100,000 years. We found chemical signals and traces of warming that look similar to the chemical signals and traces of our current world. It led to a global temperature rise of 9 to 14°F. Could this be evidence of a pre-industrial age civilization? According to scientists who explored the issue, probably not. But it is important to ask, because we'll never discover anything if we don't ask.

What did ancient languages sound like as they rolled off people's tongues? What did they do when they encountered others who spoke differently than them? Were they afraid, or did they have a way to translate? What emotions did people have when someone died? Was it the same grief that we have experienced? What about relationships—did mothers fight with their teenage daughters? Did people long for a sense of romantic love? There's only so much we can gather from skeletal remains and fossils. We'll never know what these societies were like because society is so much more than the remnants it leaves behind after it falls. And that's why an event like the burning of the Library of Alexandria is so poignant. It's a cautionary tale of the danger of the deep prioritization of institutions that preserve and share knowledge.

The term "Alexandria" has become shorthand for ignorance winning out. From the French Revolution to the late 20th century, Alexandria is a common term to describe the destruction of libraries and archives that are abandoned and forgotten. So yes, books were burned in Alexandria, but perhaps the actual crime was people not caring enough about their preservation in the first place. Attacks on knowledge can come from violence, like in the Holocaust or China's Cultural Revolution, but it can also come from the apathy towards institutions, like we're witnessing today. In Iraq and Mali, Islamic extremists have targeted libraries. In the United Kingdom, more than 800 public libraries have closed over the past decade due to a lack of resources from the government. Now tech companies are taking control of our archives as we move deeper into the digital era, but there's little regulation around what these powerful companies can do with our knowledge and history.

In the end, it's going to be our experiences that tell the story of our world. Do we want to leave it in the hands of a few to decide what stories get kept and which get burned? I expand on this idea in this video: Big Tech is destroying ownership. Click on your screen to watch that next.

Have you ever paused to think about how one of the most famous sentences of all time doesn't make grammatical sense? Well, because we all apparently heard it wrong and continue to say it wrong. According to the man himself, Neil Armstrong, what he did say that day when he stepped foot on the moon was, "One small step for a [an] and one giant leap for mankind," which makes much more sense. There are going to be a lot of things that sound strange at first, but as we've all come to find out, sometimes reality can be stranger than fiction. Like how the sounds of the T-Rexes speaking in Jurassic Park are actually just tortoises having sex, and how the eagle only sounds like this because of Hollywood magic, when in reality, it sounds more like this.

Here are true facts that sound completely made up. It's pretty common knowledge at this point that humans can live with just one kidney, but did you also know that you can live without a spleen, an appendix, a gallbladder, tonsils, six of your ribs, and one lung? In fact, many people do, and they lead pretty normal lives. The only thing you can't do with just one lung is participate in strenuous exercises or run long distances. But with