Is history inevitable, or made by choices?
From 2009 through 2026 John holds that history is made by collective choices: progress is possible and never guaranteed, and the world will change in ways we help decide. Hank agrees that what we choose builds the world (2015, 2019, 2025), adding in 2018 that we got very lucky and in 2025 that the future grows in unexpected ways.
Axis: history is made by choices ... history follows inevitable forces
Positions by date: 43 records in 43 videos. The position was refined (2021, 2025), never reversed, in these records.
John
| date | how | position | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009-01-04 | first on record | John argues that although the roots of every war go back thousands of years, an old argument is not necessarily intractable. | Israel. Gaza. PUPPY! 00:00:32 |
| 2009-01-11 | restate | John rejects explaining African wars as tribalism that has been happening forever: there is tribalism in Chad, but also in America. | SOMALI PIRATES! France Penetrates Chad! 00:00:32 |
| 2015-06-08 | restate | John says we are in the middle of history and can collectively decide whether decreasing economic mobility is permanent. | Monday Bonus Video! 00:03:24 |
| 2015-11-03 | restate | John's second lesson: we are always in the middle of history, with a future none of us can know, as the hanged monkey could not know its own. | Monkey Hangers 00:02:58 |
| 2015-11-16 | restate | John says the war seems inevitable to us, but the farmers' faces show it wasn't: history is choices we collectively make about how to see and respond to the world. | On Our Way to the Dance (Pizzamas Day 6) 00:01:27 |
| 2016-01-26 | restate | John says he believes human progress is possible even if it isn't inevitable, having faced at Davos the question of whether people make history or history makes people. | Billionaires and Radical Hope: Thoughts from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland 00:02:59 |
| 2017-01-17 | restate | These conditions result from our collective choices: every day we choose what to value, worship and paint, and future humans will know us by the choices we make together now. | How Young Is History? 00:03:25 |
| 2017-12-12 | restate | John says these changes are neither natural nor inevitable: they come from our investments as a species in research, health care systems, and training and paying health workers. | 2017 is the Best? 00:02:23 |
| 2017-12-19 | restate | Though big forces act on and within us, John says we are not mere passengers in history: the human story is something we are part of, not scrolling through. | History Is Happening 00:02:57 |
| 2018-02-06 | restate | Reading history gives John the uncomfortable but productive feeling that better human lives are possible but not guaranteed. | Sawdust Bread 00:02:47 |
| 2018-07-10 | restate | The early 17th century is a reminder that progress is never simple, universal or guaranteed. | The General Crisis 00:03:40 |
| 2018-12-07 | restate | John says this did not happen by accident or because progress is natural, but because we as a species decided to prioritize children. | BABIES! The 2018 Project for Awesome is here… 00:01:33 |
| 2021-02-02 | restate | Sidelining illness once made sense because history was seen as human choices and disease didn't feel like one; now we have much choice around it: we chose to eliminate smallpox. | I Predicted the Pandemic (over and over and over again) 00:02:55 |
| 2021-08-31 | refine | We must also make space for individual choices: Steiff saw the potential of ready-made soft toys, made excellent ones and carefully hired extremely talented people. | The Woman Who Invented Stuffed Animals 00:05:21 |
| 2021-09-28 | restate | Frank Snowden's Epidemics and Society helped John see that infectious disease has always been among history's most important forces: we think of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra, but it's mostly microbes. | 11 Great Books You Probably Haven't Read 00:00:58 |
| 2022-03-01 (said on 2022-02-27, implied) | restate | What breaks John's heart and leads him toward despair is also where he finds hope: there is nothing inevitable about it. | Hard Week 00:02:26 |
| 2022-08-02 | restate | John says the painting now looks like a celebration of liberty and democracy's inevitable victory, but there was nothing inevitable about it then or for decades afterward, and there still isn't. | Liberty Leading the People: How Revolutions Turn 00:03:24 |
| 2022-10-11 | restate | John says we can't change historical rates of premature death, but we can choose a world where fewer people die early, and he knows because we have made that choice before. | Most People Have Never Been 20 00:03:24 |
| 2022-10-25 | restate | John says nothing was inevitable about that progress: it happened because activists, healthcare workers, governments and charities worked together in messy, hard work. | Instantly Debateable 00:03:24 |
| 2022-11-15 | restate | John says progress is never inevitable: this is happening because of the extraordinary commitment of Sierra Leone's health workers and because of supporters. | 3 Years In: What Happened, Why, and What's Next 00:02:55 |
| 2023-03-14 | restate | John says that change was neither natural nor inevitable: many people collaborated across time and space, in anger, frustration and disgust, but not in hopelessness. | The Seduction of Despair 00:02:30 |
| 2023-05-09 | restate | John cites Margaret Atwood's line that very little in history is inevitable, and says he believes it. | on hope 00:02:28 |
| 2023-05-16 | restate | John says what fascinates him about history is that so much might happen, and then only one set of things does. | Did TB Cause World War I? 00:04:23 |
| 2023-08-08 | restate | John says imagining more control over our fate than we have can be a helpful delusion: feeling powerless as on a plane he could not function, and he does have a little agency; his choices matter. | TAKE IT UP A NOTCH 00:01:27 |
| 2023-08-22 | restate | John says we act as if everything is stable and always has been, but that is a lie; so much is new, which encourages him, because it means we can change it. | The Panera Phenomenon 00:01:35 |
| 2023-09-27 | restate | John says we have chosen today's world, in which 1.6 million people die of tuberculosis, and we can choose a better one. | John Goes ... to the UNITED NATIONS? 00:04:02 |
| 2023-12-12 | restate | John says we don't have to accept the world that we are choosing right now. | POTATO! 00:02:32 |
| 2024-08-27 | restate | John says we feel we must accept the world as it is, but the world will change, each of us has a little say in how, culturally and structurally, and the future is not inevitable. | How The Internet Is Rigged 00:06:49 |
| 2024-09-10 | restate | John repeats that the world not only can but will change, and together we have some say in how it changes. | The world will change. 00:00:29 |
| 2025-01-28 | restate | John concludes that continued progress for human health is not natural: it will result, or fail to result, from human choices. | This Is Not Normal 00:05:21 |
| 2025-10-01 | restate | John is not saying progress is inevitable or that the world will get better, only that these two examples show the world can get better. | Real Reasons for Hope 00:04:23 |
| 2026-03-24 | restate | Admitting it is a tiny bit tenuous, John argues that much had to happen for the French Revolution to go as it did, and at least one of those things is tuberculosis. | How Panda Express Is Tuberculosis 00:03:58 |
| 2026-09-08 | restate | It should also be cause for concern, John says: for almost all of human history there was no progress in life expectancy, evidence that progress is not inevitable or natural. | The Life Expectancy Lies That Won't Die 00:05:21 |
| 2026-10-02 | restate | John says the current system will still end, and together we will help decide when and how, and what replaces it, because any human power can be resisted and changed. | the most powerful attention-consuming tools in the history of the world 00:03:25 |
Hank
| date | how | position | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-05-15 | first on record | Hank says it may feel we are destined for a cutthroat world of ever-increasing inequality, but not if we choose compassion: we decide our world by being it. | Happy Graduation, Future Dead People 00:02:42 |
| 2018-07-13 | restate | Reason seven: we got very, very lucky; there is no guarantee that a rerun of the experiment would end as well. | Why Do So Few Countries Have Nukes? 00:05:08 |
| 2019-12-27 | restate | Hank says we can feel powerless against people who want other things and have more resources, but we are not: whom we donate to and vote for, our conversations and how we imagine the world build the world. | Why I'm Worried about 2020 00:03:16 |
| 2023-03-31 | restate | Hank says AI can be done in better or worse ways, but right now many people seem to think it is inevitable so it might as well be them. | The Coming AI Invasion 00:03:17 |
| 2023-09-28 | restate | Hank says we can make different choices because we already have, showing charts of world deaths by age since 1950, polio burden since 1980 and TB death rates since 1990. | What the Heck is the UN? 00:07:13 |
| 2024-04-12 | restate | Hank says it is important to notice that some things, like eclipses, are inevitable, while others exist only because of human choices. | Feeling Like a Failure (During an Eclipse) 00:03:44 |
| 2025-06-13 | restate | Hank doesn't think there is one natural path we will all land on: what we do matters, and even with a fixed destination it would matter because suffering now matters now. | Moving to Hope from Hopelessness (3 ways) 00:03:51 |
| 2025-07-25 | restate | Hank says we decide whether trees cause a second mass extinction or are part of the Garden of Earth; he thinks we can choose the latter, and letting trees kill everything again would be shameful. | The Molecule that Changed Everything 00:06:50 |
| 2025-10-17 | refine | Hank's point: the future does not grow out of our intentions, fears, hopes or stories; it just grows in unexpected ways, as the telegraph's makers never foresaw the problems their solution created. | We Never Know What Anything Means 00:04:51 |
Dates are upload dates, which set the order. Where the speaker gives a different recording date in the video, it is added as "said on YYYY-MM-DD, implied" (derived from the date said in the video).