History isn’t only about kings, wars, or inventions — it’s about how humans transform. How our relationships, art, psychology, and even our bodies change when economies shift.

In this episode of Decoded by Mo, I’ll navigate from machinesto services to experiences — tracing how value creation evolved across the last two centuries, and how resilience kept reinventing itself along the way.

I begin with the Industrial Age, when coal, steam, and steelmultiplied human muscle. Cities like Manchester became “workshops of the world,” filled with factories, smoke, and new opportunities — but also poverty, disease, and child labor. Time itself was rewired: factory bells replaced seasons, railways created standardized time zones, and education trained children for industrial discipline.

Art became both mirror and critique. Dickens, Turner, Shelley, and Blake captured the hopes and horrors of industry, while futurists celebrated machines. War accelerated everything — from tanks and planes to nuclear bombs.Oil emerged as the fuel of modern power, shifting global wealth to the Middle East. Resilience in this era meant enduring disruption, adapting to machines, and surviving mechanized war.

Next, the Service Economy took shape. Once goods were abundant, value shifted to banks, insurance companies, hospitals, schools, and bureaucracies. White-collar work surpassed factory work. WWII logistics and Cold War systems showed that resilience meant organizational scale and institutional strength. Education expanded into universities and MBAs. Cultureindustrialized too: Hollywood, advertising, and pop music turned services into identities. But fragility appeared in overgrown bureaucracies and crises like the Great Depression or the oil shocks.

Then came the Experience Economy. Disneyland in 1955 sold fantasy, Starbucks turned coffee into identity, Apple built theaters of technology.

People no longer measured wealth only by goods or services, but by meaning and memory. Tourism became the largest industry on earth. Pop art, advertising, and music festivals blurred art and commerce. Even geopolitics became theater: the Cold War staged experiences through Olympics, propaganda, and the moon landing.

But experiences proved fragile. They depend on authenticity, trust, and stability. Over-commercialization, overcrowding, or crisis can collapse them overnight. COVID-19 revealed this fragility dramatically — yet resilience emerged digitally through streaming, virtual events, and online communities.

Across these three shifts, one lesson stands out: value keeps moving, and resilience keeps changing shape. Machines gave us productivity but alienation. Services gave us stability but bureaucracy. Experiences gave us meaning but fragility.

Understanding these transformations isn’t about nostalgia — it’s about preparing for what comes next. Because just as goods gave way to services, and services to experiences, we now stand at the threshold of platforms, data, and artificial intelligence.

This episode isn’t just about economics. It’s about how technology, war, art, and culture reshaped who we are. And it’s about how resilience — in body, mind, and society — remains the thread connecting past and future.

History isn’t just a story of kings and battles — it’s the story of how humans learned to create value, survive collapse, and reinvent themselves again and again.

In this episode of Decoded by Mo, we take a long journey through time — from the hunters painting bison on cave walls, to the farmers who built temples from surplus grain, to the merchants who turned oceans into highways of fortune. Along the way, we’ll see how resilience — a word we use sooften today — was always at the heart of human survival.

We begin in the Extractive Age, when survival depended on memory, ritual, and movement. Hunter-gatherers tracked stars, plants, and animals with astonishing knowledge. Their myths — from Anansi the Spider in Africa to Raven Steals the Sun in the Pacific Northwest — carried lessons of resilience throughwit, courage, and storytelling. Cave art and songlines became the first libraries of value.

Then came the Agricultural Age, where planting seeds transformed everything. Farming created surplus, specialization, and inequality. Religion, law, and education became instruments of power: Pharaohs tied divinity to theNile, Babylon carved laws in stone, scribes trained in cuneiform and hieroglyphs, the Maya created humans from maize. Monumental art — from pyramids to ziggurats — stood as symbols of stored value. Resilience shifted from mobility to stability, but also carried fragility: droughts, floods, andinvasions could destroy entire civilizations.

The Mercantile Age followed, where value left the soil and moved to the seas. Spices, silver, and silk remade the world. Nations embraced mercantilism, colonies became engines of extraction, and joint-stock companies like the Dutch East India Company pioneered capitalism. Myths and storiesreflected this new horizon: Sinbad’s voyages, Odysseus’s cunning, Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage with so much gold it disrupted economies. Coffeehouses became the“internet of the Enlightenment,” where information itself became value. Resilience scaled globally — nations rose by adapting to networks of trade, and fell whenthey failed.

Across these ages, one truth emerges: value is never static. It moves, transforms, collapses, and rebuilds. And resilience is always the deciding factor — whether through mobility, storage, fleets, or finance.

Why does this history matter now? Because the challenges we face today ; climate risk, inequality, technological disruption — are echoes of the past.Ancient myths and systems remind us that resilience isn’t just about surviving shocks, but about creating meaning, building systems of cooperation, and adapting faster than collapse.

This isn’t just economic history. It’s a story of art, education,religion, geography, and human imagination. It’s about how we got here — and what lessons we might need again as we enter the age of AI.

We often ask the wrong question about AI: “Will it take my job?” But behind that fear is something deeper — we’ve allowed our jobs to define us. When a role disappears, we’re left wondering: then who am I?

In this final episode of the trilogy, I bring together the voices of leaders and thinkers — Demis Hassabis, Jensen Huang, and Sam Altman — and reflect on what their insights mean for us.

AI isn’t replacing people. It’s replacing processes — writing, learning, connecting, sharing. But being human has never been just about process. It’s about meaning, intention, growth, love, and connection. That’s the part no machine can touch.

My invitation is simple, not easy:

• Learn AI. Use AI. Experiment with it. But don’t become dependent on it.
• Never outsource your brain, your muscles, or your spirit.
• Improve yourself — not because AI is chasing you, but because growth is what makes life meaningful.
• Stay connected. Build friendships, community, and love. Algorithms can predict emotions, but they can’t give you connection.
• And above all, be spiritual — whatever that means to you. Ask yourself not what do I do? but who do I want to become?

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We blame past generations for war, plastics, and even bad fashion and hairstyles. Future generations will judge us too. What will we leave them?

This is the time to reinvent ourselves. And the good news is — we’re still in time.

The jobs of tomorrow won’t belong to the strongest, the smartest, or even the most technical. They’ll belong to those who never stop improving, who never stop connecting, who never stop being human.

That was Decoded by Mo. Thank you for listening. Stay curious — and peace be with you.