Joseph Henrich (professor of human evolutionary biology)

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.

[1] Experts on expert.

[2] I'm modest mouse, and I'm joined by...

[3] D. Shepherd.

[4] We've switched chairs.

[5] I wonder if you can feel it in this intro.

[6] I feel small in this seat.

[7] You look preposterously tiny in the lazy, but your feet barely come off the end of the cushion I sit on.

[8] No, they don't even, like, bend.

[9] Like, they just stick straight out.

[10] That's right.

[11] It's not even that they don't touch the floor.

[12] They're not even bent.

[13] Do your feet touch the floor in this?

[14] Oh, God, yeah.

[15] Oh, my God.

[16] You're so much taller than me. Yeah, that's just occurring to you in here.

[17] It's easy for me to forget.

[18] Seven years into our friendship.

[19] Well, sometimes I forget.

[20] This is a long time coming because I've been talking about incessantly.

[21] My favorite book I've read, I think, in the last year or so, is the weirdest people in the world.

[22] How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous.

[23] This book, it really shook my thinking.

[24] It did.

[25] I feel like it was a watershed moment.

[26] moment for you.

[27] Oh, thank you.

[28] Before and after.

[29] Yeah, definitely a before and after.

[30] Do you remember where you were when you read?

[31] That'll be what people ask.

[32] Yeah.

[33] I see it all the time now.

[34] I see it all the time.

[35] And then talking to him, he gave us even more tidbits.

[36] Yeah, it was really fascinating.

[37] I really enjoyed it as well.

[38] We think different, y 'all.

[39] If you're listening to this, probably you think different.

[40] And you're considered weird, probably if you listen to this.

[41] Yeah, weird.

[42] Western, educated, industrial, rich.

[43] Democratic.

[44] The author is here to talk about the book Joseph Henrik, and he is a professor and chair at Harvard University in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

[45] This was a...

[46] Unified.

[47] Oh, to the apex.

[48] To the apex.

[49] This is incredible.

[50] This is mind expanding.

[51] I hope you enjoy Joseph Henrik.

[52] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to armchair expert early and ad free right now.

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[55] He's an I'm transparent.

[56] Hello, sir.

[57] Can you hear us?

[58] Hi, I can hear you.

[59] Oh, wonderful.

[60] Can you see us?

[61] Yes.

[62] Okay, good.

[63] Who do you find more attractive?

[64] Just right out of the gate.

[65] Just go to pick one.

[66] You're both beautiful.

[67] Oh, wonderful.

[68] I hope you know that I've been just feverishly pushing on the team to get you.

[69] I love your book.

[70] incredible.

[71] Thank you.

[72] Do you do a lot of press and interviews and such?

[73] Not too much.

[74] Maybe a podcast every month or so.

[75] Oh, okay.

[76] That's fair.

[77] Yeah.

[78] That's a fair amount.

[79] That's a tenable schedule, I suppose.

[80] So I have to say, as someone who loves your book, I also have not been this intimidated about trying to walk through a book, because it is incredibly dense.

[81] And I come into it with having already majored in anthropology.

[82] So a lot of the concepts, I'm already pretty hip to.

[83] And even with that.

[84] There's a lot of economic theory in it.

[85] There's a lot of psychology in it.

[86] There's so much and it's so paradigm shattering for me in the same way that I think for a lot of people, Sapiens was the Yuval Harari book.

[87] Let me just start by saying, I imagine most of us take our thinking for granted that we assume we think pretty consistently across our species that humans are generally similar in their thinking.

[88] And right out of the gates, we learn in your book that this is not the case.

[89] I guess first and foremost, the thing, when I try to get people to read this book, what I'll say to them is, like, how we would describe ourselves.

[90] Like, let's start there.

[91] If I were to ask you to tell me about yourself, what would you list and what would other people list?

[92] Right.

[93] Psychologists do this by using something called the 20 statement test, where they have people complete the statement I am and then finish it off.

[94] I could say something like, I am a scientist, I am a kayaker, I'm curious.

[95] And those would be characteristics that would tell you about me, but people in lots of places might finish it by saying, you know, I'm Jessica's father, I am Ross's brother, and I am R's friend, which tells you about my relationships and kind of where I fit into the social network.

[96] It's a question of whether it's about your social roles and obligations, or whether it's things that are highlighting what makes you unique and special in the world, separate from other people.

[97] The title of your book is, weirdest people in the world, how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous so weird is an acronym in your book and it stands for western educated industrialized rich democratic so when we talk about the differences going forward we're talking about people that are weird they're western educated industrialized rich democratic and then people that are not that and how much variation there is between our group of weirdos and maybe the rest of the world and how that came about.

[98] So yeah, you say that if you ask the IM test, you're going to hear about someone's attributes, maybe their accomplishments and aspirations, and then other people, they're a reflection of their kinship group or their role in that kinship group.

[99] So the brain, when you say that it's different, I guess my first question is, and even after reading the book, I was like, do you mean structurally our brains are different, us weirdos, or do you mean that we're using our brain in a way that on, say, an fMRI, it would just show different networks and stuff.

[100] How does it vary?

[101] So I start the book with the example of reading.

[102] And so when people learn to read, we can actually see that they get specialized circuitry in the left hemisphere.

[103] They get a thicker corpus callosum.

[104] They get whole brain activation for speech, even though what they're being trained to do is read.

[105] And so you actually have physical changes to the brain as a consequence of basically a cultural training routine.

[106] So throughout most of human history, nobody learned to read, so people had thinner corpus callosa.

[107] And then gradually universal reading began to spread with the Protestant Reformation and whatnot in the 16th century.

[108] Yeah, so this was fascinating for me. And I never questioned how we had this literacy revolution.

[109] And it was basically Martin Luther breaks off from the Roman Catholic Church.

[110] His kind of tenant is individuals should have a relationship with God, and they themselves should read this book.

[111] There shouldn't be an intermediary or a sage.

[112] So he goes on this great quest to make the world literate.

[113] Walk us through kind of like pre -Martin Luther, post -Martin Luther literacy rates throughout Europe.

[114] So in Germany, you go from less than 1%.

[115] You know, and a couple centuries later, you're up 50, 60%.

[116] And then by the 19th century, you're quite high, 80, 90%.

[117] And then, of course, in the modern world today, lots of places have quite high rates of literacy.

[118] This is just an example of something that actually changes our brains, not because of any genetic change, but because when we grow up in a different world and our minds face different challenges, we actually get new hardware.

[119] One of the challenges to understanding psychology is we have this digital computer metaphor.

[120] So people tend to think about their brains like a computer and they expect there to be hardware and software.

[121] So psychologists often think they study the hardware and they leave it to the sociologists and anthropologists to study the software.

[122] But it turns out our brains are somewhere in between where they can create firmware.

[123] They can make new hardware, are new connections that don't exist if you don't experience a certain environment.

[124] Yeah, and I think the most generic paradigm for that is like nature is the hardware, nurture is the software, our culture is the software.

[125] So we can see where this reading phenomena was beneficial in many, many ways, but also it comes with some loss, which I like.

[126] There's some facial recognition loss.

[127] It comes at a price, right?

[128] Yeah, so you can think about it is we only have so much neurogeography.

[129] And so if we start using that to specialize in one thing, we get less good at other things.

[130] And because recognizing letters happens to fit into our brains at a place near the fusiform gyrus where we do a lot of facial recognition, it actually leads us to be right hemisphere biased.

[131] So it looks like reading is driving out some of our facial recognition in the left hemisphere and leaving us kind of asymmetrical in terms of our facial recognition, more right hemisphere bias.

[132] So if you study facial recognition in illiterate populations, there's not much right hemisphere bias.

[133] illiterate populations that you get this.

[134] And it looks like, I mean, there's some controversy around this, but that readers are less good at facial recognition.

[135] And people who are schooled in general, they're less good at spatial navigation, for example.

[136] So, you know, if you ask me or if you ask someone to say, point to Philadelphia, I'm in Boston.

[137] People in lots of societies could point to Philadelphia and be on target.

[138] But, you know, when you spend all day in school, instead of navigating through space, we get less good at that kind of spatial navigation.

[139] And especially now with, you know, GPS on your phone, people are even worse than they used to be.

[140] That makes me feel better.

[141] That's a good reason for why I have no spatial awareness whatsoever.

[142] Because you went to college.

[143] I did a lot of reading when I was little.

[144] That's interesting because, yeah, I did very little as a dyslexic.

[145] I have a great sense of direction.

[146] The other great part of this book, in my opinion, is I often tried to explain to people the notion of cultural relativity.

[147] And there's these kind of juicy examples you might give to get people interested, like infanticide among the Inuit, right?

[148] On face value, you're like, well, this is.

[149] This is a horrific, amoral thing.

[150] And then as you learn how their culture sustains itself, it starts making more and more sense, at least in that little pocket of the world and that time and space.

[151] And mostly the joy of anthropology for me was like stepping out of the judgment and the verdict and just simply learning some difference, just observing some difference.

[152] And I think we all have a real lack of humility, myself included, again, because we think our brains work the same.

[153] And we think we've discovered a lot of things.

[154] And we rarely think about how unique it is.

[155] So I think your book is like an incredible exploration into humility and constantly questioning, is this how humans are supposed to be?

[156] Or simply, you know, Martin Luther doesn't come onto planet Earth.

[157] We're on a completely different trajectory of thought.

[158] In that, there's some fun moral examples in this book.

[159] And I would love to just talk about the Rob Bob briefcase situation.

[160] Yeah, so we're interested in the role of intentionality in other mental states and making moral judgments.

[161] So folks in weird societies often have the intuition that whether someone meant to do something, whether they stole something on purpose or did it by accident, whether they started a fire on purpose or by accident, really matters for how guilty or punishable the person is.

[162] But it turns out that Westerners are at the extreme end of the distribution and how central intentions are and how worried they are about mental states.

[163] So if you look at the law codes of pre -Christian European societies or law codes in lots of other places, Africa, you'll find that you're equally guilty whether you started the fire by accident or you did it on purpose, or your arrow glanced off of a pig and hit a guy and killed him or you just shot him.

[164] So the role of intentionality seemed to vary a lot in the anthropological record.

[165] So we did these experiments where we gave people in different societies vignettes.

[166] And in the vignettes, we subtly varied whether something got stolen a bag or a briefcase got stolen on purpose at a busy market or whether the person actively took it or we left it ambiguous.

[167] And what we found is just a great deal of variation.

[168] So the place where I work in one of these remote islands in the Fijian archipelago, people seem to judge those as equally bad.

[169] And we asked them, you know, all kinds of questions about should this person be punished and how much and would they get a bad reputation and how good or bad what they did was.

[170] The scenario is a guy is with another guy.

[171] They're friends.

[172] The one guy puts his bag, down, the other guy picks it up, takes it, and walks away.

[173] The next example is both people have a bag.

[174] They both set them down and then the person leaves by accident grabbing the wrong bag.

[175] They're saying that's bad?

[176] Equally bad.

[177] Wow.

[178] Yeah.

[179] So if you look at it from the point of view of the victim, they lose their bag in either case, right?

[180] Because it's a busy mark that the person just leaves and accidentally takes the wrong bag home.

[181] So the victim is out a bag, whether it was stolen on purpose or by accident.

[182] The same thing from the point of view of the family of someone who was killed by accident, they've lost a relative.

[183] So they're less concerned about whether it was by accident or due to irresponsible behavior or something.

[184] So that's what we found, and we found it across a bunch of different domains, quite strong results.

[185] And, you know, when you begin to look at, it really then makes sense in the history.

[186] So if you start to read the church's thinking about the law and say the high middle ages, both legal scholars and theologians are thinking through the role of mental states.

[187] And they're thinking about in terms of sin, what's a sin, what's a worse sin?

[188] And mental states are playing a big role.

[189] And this is interesting because it actually becomes part of Protestantism.

[190] So we mentioned Martin Luther.

[191] And there you have a religion where getting into heaven is all about your mental state.

[192] So by faith alone was the famous debate back in those days.

[193] Did you have to have good works or was just belief enough?

[194] And at least some Protestant denominations thought belief was enough to get you into heaven.

[195] So you can see the kind of culmination of that process.

[196] How is it adaptive or beneficial for someone in this Fijian archipelago to not assess that?

[197] Because you have many examples we'll get into where all of a sudden it becomes crystal clear.

[198] Definitely these delayed gratification things we think are universal.

[199] So what makes it irrelevant?

[200] Well, there's a couple of ideas on that.

[201] And I don't think we've nailed it yet as to why it's the case.

[202] But one idea would be that this is relevant when you're assessing someone outside your local group.

[203] Because, say, you have two clans, and this would have been relevant to pre -Christian Europe.

[204] You have two clans and someone kills someone from another clan.

[205] Both clans are going to think their guy is innocent.

[206] You end up with a debate about hidden mental statements.

[207] which can't be established.

[208] So you might imagine you get social norms that say, let's not have a debate about invisible mental states, which we can never establish.

[209] Let's just kind of make a decision about what the blood payment is, the blood money, the Vergelt, based on what we can agree on, which is someone got killed and we know who the killer was, that kind of thing.

[210] Oh, that makes a ton of sense.

[211] So it's like super pragmatic without like a complicated jurisprudence system where you're going to have a group of people evaluate it and actually maybe get to the bottom of that.

[212] out of the gate, you recognize this will never go anywhere.

[213] So anthropologists have noticed that for a long time.

[214] We never had the evidence before to really say, well, actually, this affects the individual's judgment in the circumstance, because you might think that, well, that's the official rules.

[215] But really, when people are thinking about that, they're caring about intention, it's just when they go to negotiate, they say, okay, well, we're not going to have success if we argue about this.

[216] So it turns out the institutions and norms about how we're going to negotiate this may penetrate our minds and affect our, you know, kind of on the fly.

[217] judgments.

[218] Oh my God.

[219] Isn't that?

[220] That's interesting.

[221] So fascinating.

[222] The other thing, and this was presented in Yuval's book, Human Rights is a story.

[223] It's a Western story.

[224] We have a concept of human rights.

[225] We think there's some kind of, you know, morality principle.

[226] But if you live in a different context, our version of morality is maladaptive.

[227] So how we lived for 150 ,000 years, when you came upon a stranger, this notion that everyone would have a right.

[228] And in fact, everyone you come across was probably the person that was going to perpetrate your death, so you can't possibly have a morality towards that person.

[229] I mean, there's a lot of research from people like Sarah Matthew and Rob Boyd studying how people think about the moral circle.

[230] And what you're saying seems to be true, certainly in some population still today, that when you get to the edge of the moral circle, the people in the outside, it's okay to kill them, basically.

[231] In fact, it could be perfectly fine to kill them or even encouraged to kill them.

[232] It could be heroic to kill them.

[233] Because they're the out group and they're a source of problem and maybe they're raiding you.

[234] And so, you know, it seems perfectly sensible.

[235] They probably killed some of your relatives or ancestors.

[236] So there is this moral circle where the responsibility ends sharply.

[237] And then what's interesting in the case of human rights is that one of the things that's developing over the second century, so say a thousand C .E. to now is this way of thinking.

[238] So it's two interrelated things.

[239] One is analytic thinking, which is where when you want to explain things, you assign properties.

[240] So if you want to explain atoms, you assign charge or weight or some kind of property to the atom, and then you go from there.

[241] If you want to explain people, you assign dispositions, personalities.

[242] And the idea is that if he's outgoing, then that explains why he's so social at the party or something like that, extroversion.

[243] So those are dispositions.

[244] And putting that in a law context, well, you want to explain why you can't do something to somebody else or why you can, you assign to them human rights.

[245] And then if they have these human rights, right to life, liberty and property, John Locke, then a bunch of kind of legal deductions follow from that.

[246] But it's all from this kind of fiction of assuming that everybody has these inherent rights that are inside of them like some kind of gene or disposition or the charge on a property, that kind of thing.

[247] And there's a completely different approach in other places like China where people see things in terms of lineages, families, and relationships.

[248] How much you're going to get punished, say, for striking someone, really depends on your social relationship with them.

[249] If a son strikes a father, the punishment is different than if a father strike a son.

[250] And then you get into all kinds of more complicated things.

[251] Everything you kind of listed right there, like, okay, property, so that's an abstract notion that anyone can own anything.

[252] Right out of the gates, that's kind of a new concept, owning, other than maybe what you had in your hand, you can't look at an area of land and saying that is now officially mine.

[253] That's very bizarre.

[254] Yeah.

[255] In societies with intensive kinship that, you know, had clans or these large families, property was often communal.

[256] So you You don't even own anything as an individual.

[257] You owned it as part of an ethnic identity or a lineage identity or something like that.

[258] Right.

[259] So you couldn't say like, no, you can't take this from me because me couldn't have this.

[260] Again, I think we rarely think of how many layers we build up on something that's very, very subtle, that's foundational.

[261] We take so much pride in like who we are and that we think we have a say in that really and we don't.

[262] Or in other societies you wouldn't.

[263] Well, yeah, but like we were born in China, we would be completely.

[264] different people based on literally just the structure of the country.

[265] It shouldn't be so surprised.

[266] I mean, like in the modern world today, we're getting a lot of pushback on human rights.

[267] Countries like China and elsewhere are saying, you know, don't bother about this human rights stuff.

[268] That's your way of thinking.

[269] Yeah.

[270] So I would love to hear your opinion.

[271] Like we're proceeding currently with this Russia -Ukrainian debacle with the assumption they're thinking the way we think.

[272] Or they should think the way we think.

[273] Yeah.

[274] Like, oh, well, he wouldn't do.

[275] this because it's going to result in a loss of income and people are going to be upset.

[276] You know, we're kind of trapped in what we think would be a logical next move.

[277] How much variation is there even between, say, Russia leaving communism some 30 years ago?

[278] They think differently.

[279] Can we comprehend how they think?

[280] One important lesson.

[281] I almost thought about writing an op -ed on this is that there are these experiments looking at Russia going back to at least the 2000.

[282] So a common finding among Western subjects is that if you have a public goods game, So in a public goods game, it's an experiment, doing an econ lab.

[283] Participants are given like 20 bucks.

[284] They can contribute as much of the 20 to a common pool.

[285] Whatever goes into the common pool is increased and then distributed equally amongst the group.

[286] So this is a basic cooperative dilemma.

[287] And the question is, what are the conditions that lead to cooperation?

[288] So if you do this anywhere in the West, basically, if you let people punish, what they'll do is they'll punish free riders, so people who refuse to contribute.

[289] The free riders will respond by contributing.

[290] and then you can go up and you can get pretty good stable cooperation if you play the game into the future.

[291] It'll even work if you keep re -switching up the people, so it's a one -shot game each time, but people are kind of learning something from the previous round and taking it forward.

[292] Then the economists who first started doing this were kind of generalizing to the species, but then they kind of wanted to test that, so they went to Russia.

[293] And when they did it in Russia, they did the first round, okay, some people free road, and then people punished, and then people attacked with punishment the people who punished them.

[294] And so they did counter -punishment.

[295] And so this diffused the cooperation -inducing effect of punishment and, you know, meant the group didn't get to full cooperation.

[296] They got into a spiral of Hamarabi's Code or something.

[297] A spiral of punishment and counter -punishment.

[298] Because it was like, how dare you punish me for doing what I thought was appropriate?

[299] And this was done at a few different sites in Russia, and you get basically the same story repeatedly.

[300] And then a real -world example, which almost made it into the book but didn't.

[301] You remember the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

[302] Oh, yeah.

[303] So they did a version of this in Russia, and there were these lifelines where if you didn't think you knew the answer, you could ask the crowd, and the crowd would vote.

[304] In Russia, the crowd would give you the wrong answer.

[305] They would intentionally not pick the one thing.

[306] It diffused that lifeline.

[307] In anthropology, one of the kind of mindsets, people can fall into it pretty easily, is zero -sum thinking, which means that if you get more, I get less.

[308] And so there's a sense in which at least some folks in Russia are zero -sum thinkers, and they don't want other people to do well because it's as if they're, you know, taking away the good that can otherwise be redistributed.

[309] Yeah, very finite view of everything.

[310] If you have a limited number of lands, you know, if most of your wealth is in land and you have fixed land, that'll happen.

[311] If your economy hasn't been growing, so, you know, this may now afflict a subset of Americans because, you know, not all Americans have experienced economic growth over the last few decades.

[312] and that could put them in a zero -sum mindset, so there's a few different ways this can happen.

[313] I think we have it here.

[314] I think we have weirdly both.

[315] I think we have this, like, national desire to see people rise, but then zero -sum thinking starts coming into play where it's like, no, no, now we don't want them to have any of that because it's too much for one person.

[316] And I think so often, again, we're ensnaring you in a lot of pop -cultry things, but, like, I've noticed this phenomenon where people are generally really excited if someone wins the lottery, and they generally hate people who achieve fame in a way they feel is unjustified.

[317] So Paris Hilton originally, the Kardashians.

[318] And it's very interesting because if you think of them as just lottery winners, they would not be upset.

[319] And I guess the distinguishing aspect is someone, they could always buy a lottery ticket, but then maybe there's a fear that they can't get famous in this abstract way that the other person did.

[320] Like, it's at play in the way we feel about lottery winners and stuff, I think.

[321] Yeah, yeah.

[322] And so that would be an interesting way to study it across societies is to look at how people think about lottery winners.

[323] Okay, so I think like a really interesting kind of foundation we should think about detailing is the way our societies functioned for, again, 150 ,000 years where there was not an arm of government, there was not a police force, there was nothing institutional.

[324] So it was left upon the 100 members of their group to self -regulate, and then the consequence of which was quite egalitarian, right?

[325] Because you could never have a really despise ruler because ultimately be one guy and he may be the toughest, but three other people could keep him honest and they could overthrow him.

[326] So it had this kind of natural egalitarian force to it.

[327] How did that change and what were the outcomes of that?

[328] Probably the largest change in a movement away from relatively more egalitarian societies occurs with the origins of agriculture.

[329] So you begin to get larger -scale societies and social structures where one clan, for example, can put itself above other clans.

[330] And I spend a little bit of time in the book just giving situations and trying to use ethnographic cases to look at how and when that happens.

[331] It can be a very slow process where a clan or some other kinship unit gradually aggregates ritual power and various other rights and responsibilities, which are slowly over time given by other groups, other clans.

[332] And then soon they're kind of a ruling clan, and then they can use that to build alliances and to do other kinds of stuff and eventually become a ruling clan to get the emergence of chiefdoms and then eventually stratified societies.

[333] Stratification occurs when, say, the ruling clans stop intermarrying with the lower clans, really a kind of who people are breeding with and where the offspring are coming from.

[334] Again, if you just were born here and you didn't question it too much, you would imagine a lot of these things come natural to us.

[335] We are so drastically different in how individual we are and how we as individual humans in the West can exist on our own as a result of many, many weird forces.

[336] Marriage we kind of assume is monogamous by nature or probably always was, and that, of course, isn't the truth.

[337] So can we walk through a couple of these really profound, bizarre changes we went through from first communal living to kind of individual life and how that came about in the last couple thousand years?

[338] The oldest and most fundamental of human institutions is really the family.

[339] But most weird people don't think of the family as being all that important because if you're from a monogamous nuclear family, maybe you've got a couple of siblings, you might know a few of your cousins, but it's really not that big a deal.

[340] Whereas over most of human history, men would have been polygynous, there would have been half -siblings.

[341] People would have been emmeshed in these kin -based societies, kin -based networks.

[342] They would have been the main source of security, the group that works together for production, so they're both production and security, redistribution would have occurred there.

[343] If you get injured, that's the people are going to take care of you.

[344] If you get old, those are the people who are going to take care of you.

[345] So you're really depending on this family network.

[346] And then you're kind of distrustful, the further you get from that family network.

[347] And in the modern society, of course, we can live as individuals because we have unemployment insurance and social security and all these impersonal institutions that fulfill the role traditionally filled by families.

[348] And monogamous marriage of the kind that you were mentioning is really comes about with Christianity.

[349] I mean, the kind of pure monogamy that we have today.

[350] So a critic would immediately say that Athenians were monogamous, but elite Athenian males could have sex slaves and could take additional wives as long as they weren't fellow Athenians.

[351] And then there was this other thing that people need to recognize, which is you're living in a group of 100 people, you're related to most people.

[352] So there has to be a migration.

[353] be it patrilocal or matrilocal, where you're sending away either the boys or the girls.

[354] It's very rare that they send the boys away, but it's generally the women.

[355] To prevent genetic uniformity and deformation, there has to be this constant trading of humans to keep the genetics healthy in your group.

[356] So tell us what that does to the mindset and how reversing that, how that affects the mind.

[357] So the interesting thing about weird families is that we have what anthropologists call neolocal residents.

[358] where the new husband and wife set up family independent of either of the other families.

[359] Across human societies, typically it was what you said, which is one or the other.

[360] So one sex is coming into a new community and then building new social relationships and whatnot.

[361] And then being together helps build the kind of social and emotional bonds with other people.

[362] So how that movement pattern works affects who bonds with who.

[363] So if you have the men staying in the same place and women are moving about, you have a group of men who are all father's sons and grandfathers who are all part of the same lineage, community, or whatnot, that have these really strong bonds.

[364] And often you get petro -local stuff when you have violent threats, right?

[365] Because you can bond together as males to defend the group.

[366] Right.

[367] You send your son out in hopes that you guys can make some peace.

[368] Right.

[369] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[370] What's up, guys?

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[389] Why did Christianity emphasize monogamy?

[390] Yeah, please, walk us through.

[391] So monogamy and the dwelling away from your family, if I recall correctly.

[392] Both happened as projects.

[393] I was mentioning the Athenian case.

[394] Technically, Rome also had monogamous marriage, but they had publicly fronted brothels and sex slaves.

[395] And, of course, many members of the Roman Empire were not themselves under Roman law.

[396] So like all the barbarian tribes would have also had polygynous marriage.

[397] So in part, the church gets some monogamy from the fact that Rome was monogamous.

[398] But then it adds these taboos on cousin marriage.

[399] It ends sex slavery.

[400] It gives women the choice.

[401] So the notion of saying, I do, for the bride is introduced.

[402] They're trying to end arranged marriage.

[403] And there's a big debate.

[404] So part of it is that Christianity was very concerned with sex.

[405] And so if you look at St. Augustine and whatnot, he's sort of obsessed with, well, not having sex.

[406] And this kind of comes into Christianity and affects it.

[407] But it's also beginning to expand the incest taboos, which are being placed on these more distant cousins.

[408] So there's all this concern in Christian writings about, say, plagues hitting cities due to incest.

[409] And they don't mean brother -sister sex.

[410] They mean sex amongst cousins.

[411] And they think that God hates that and, you know, is kind of punishing them.

[412] Well, that one's kind of fear -derived.

[413] but there was also some kind of strategic power plays by the Catholic Church.

[414] Well, they figure out ways to monetize these things.

[415] So later in church history, they begin selling dispensations.

[416] So Europeans still want to marry their cousins, but they have them pay.

[417] So you can marry some cousins by paying the church and getting special permission.

[418] So they also sell annulments.

[419] So the church does away with divorce.

[420] Because what happens is if you don't let rich, powerful men be polygynous, then what they do is they do sequential marriage.

[421] So they'll marry one woman, divorce her when she gets a little bit old, then marry another one and keep doing that.

[422] But so the church ends divorce to stop that.

[423] But again, you can pay your way out of that if you want.

[424] And how about the family dwelling?

[425] Am I right in that there was a big push for both people to leave and start a new home?

[426] What was that all about?

[427] Like lots of societies, lots of European societies had either bride price or dowry.

[428] And so in bride price, you pay the bride's family for her, essentially.

[429] still common in lots African societies and elsewhere.

[430] And then dowry is when the woman comes with money into the men's house.

[431] And the church wants to stop that.

[432] And it's not totally clear to me why they wanted to stop that.

[433] But they didn't think there should be all these marriage transfers and you shouldn't be buying women and stuff like that.

[434] So they just say, okay, what you should do is give that and help the couple set up a new household.

[435] You know, if you get married, you often get all these gifts that are supposed to give you your pots and pans and stuff like that.

[436] Well, that goes back to this tradition of trying to help the couple set up a new household.

[437] independent of the others.

[438] Because if you're moving in with your mother -in -law, you can just use her pots.

[439] But if you're setting up a new household, then you need all the gear.

[440] Oh, my gosh.

[441] Okay, let's talk about the marshmallows.

[442] The spoils go to the marshmallows to those who wait or however it's phrased.

[443] But let's introduce delayed gratification and when we plot it globally, what it predicts.

[444] So one of the things that psychologists and economists are interested in is economists call temporal discounting.

[445] You can just think of it as patient.

[446] So if I give you a choice between, you know, $100 today or $160 in three months, which one are you going to pick?

[447] Well, if you're patient, you'll go with $160 and get the more money.

[448] But if you really want your gratification now and you want to go out drinking tonight, you'll just take the $100 and go out tonight.

[449] We can measure that using that kind of approach in different societies.

[450] And there's quite a bit of variation.

[451] Of course, there's variation within countries among individuals within the same country, but also between countries.

[452] And it seems to be associated with another thing that psychologists have measured in children, which is this marshmallow task.

[453] And this is kind of like a way to torture young children.

[454] You put them in a room with a marshmallow and you tell them they can eat the marshmallow.

[455] But if they're willing to wait until the experimenter comes back, they'll get two marshmallows.

[456] And then the experimenter goes out and just waits until the kid caves in in the original experiment.

[457] The videos are so cute.

[458] They're like covering their eyes.

[459] Right.

[460] And so some kids have strategies, which is interesting.

[461] Because if you just sit there and look at the marshmallow, you definitely lose for sure.

[462] Yeah.

[463] So the smart kids figure out ways to, like, sing a song or look away from the marshmallow and chew on their sleeve.

[464] Oh, that's great, right.

[465] And both of these traits seem to be associated with, you know, doing better in school, not smoking, saving more for retirements, earning higher incomes, all this kinds of things that at least in the modern West, we associate with, you know, prosperity and longevity and things like that.

[466] Well, right.

[467] So on this spectrum, Sweden is like apex patients.

[468] Oh.

[469] And Rwandans are very low on the opposite end of the spectrum.

[470] And then, of course, the outcome of it is a much bigger economy, higher pay, higher education.

[471] But I think, well, minimally they'd question why that is, right?

[472] And then the worst assumption would be like something guns, germs, and steals addressed, which is like, populationally speaking, they have some different brain structure that is preventing them from being that way.

[473] But my favorite example is, it's in Africa somewhere.

[474] I can't remember exactly where.

[475] But they're offering people kind of food, right?

[476] And they would play along so if you can get this much food today and go away.

[477] Or you can come back tomorrow and you get this much food.

[478] Or you can come back in a third day, you get this enormous amount of food.

[479] So walk us through that because I was like, that's so much more logical what this person does in that society.

[480] So are you thinking of the, I think they were soup cubes?

[481] If you took more of the soup cubes and you waited for the more soup cubes, you were going to end up giving them all away anyway.

[482] And this, I think, is one of the main things that can help us understand this variation.

[483] So where I work in Fiji, I do ethnographic field work in this island in Fiji.

[484] And I know people who would accumulate a little nest egg of savings from, you know, odd ways of earning income and stuff like that.

[485] And they could almost never keep it because some cousin would get sick or, you know, need a medical procedure or want to have a wedding or something like that.

[486] and suddenly, you know, all the relatives get tapped for resources and your little cash would go away.

[487] So there's a big incentive for just spending what you have now because if you don't, someone else is going to get it, right?

[488] In a sense, because you have obligations to all those people.

[489] And then even conceptually, the soup cubes one, it went kind of like this, I think.

[490] It was like she could take these soup cubes back and then she would have enough for herself.

[491] Following day she could bring some back and it would basically she would be able to share with everyone in her group.

[492] But then the third option is she would be bringing some back just a stockpile.

[493] She would have already shared it.

[494] And because she receives everyone else's sharing, there's literally no need for stockpiles because you're a big group that looks out for one another.

[495] It is really that we're alone in this Western world that we have to constantly be thinking about our war chest because we're not going to have anyone to step in and help us, ever.

[496] Well, and I also would imagine if you live in a more dangerous society, you don't even know what your life is going to be three weeks from now.

[497] You don't know if you'll be alive.

[498] So why wouldn't you just take what you can get immediately?

[499] Right.

[500] So there's consume now.

[501] But the other thing is like, so they do this experiment that I talked about in Liberia with men.

[502] And they would start to save and then something bad would happen.

[503] They would get their money stolen.

[504] So also if you don't have a secure place to put whatever it is you're trying to accumulate, you should spend it now.

[505] Otherwise, eventually someone's going to, you know, find your cash and take it.

[506] You're inviting marauders, really.

[507] Yeah, you're making yourself a target.

[508] Yeah, this little principle would be completely malice.

[509] adaptive there.

[510] And again, we would take that for granted that that's what a, quote, smart person or a logical person or whatever, how we think about it.

[511] And so the way to think about it is that our patients for these different kinds of currencies, money or food or whatever, are calibrating to the worlds we confront.

[512] And those worlds are affected by whether we have secure banks or whether we have to store for the future in social relationships.

[513] So one of the things that lots of interviews tell you is that when people get stuff, one of the reasons they're giving it away to others.

[514] rather than stockpiling it, is because in some sense, they're storing future security in the goodwill of others.

[515] Right, that's the investment, is having been a great share and you will then receive.

[516] Ah, I love it.

[517] That's in a world where it's all about social relationships, right?

[518] Not in personal institutions.

[519] I mean, look, you hate this, but this is evidence for not having free will and that where you're born, at what time in this spectrum of life you're born, makes all the differences to who you are.

[520] Well, I think it'll definitely predict a range of outcomes quite well, but I also think you still have free will.

[521] What do you think about that, Joseph?

[522] Well, the main thing I would have to add to that is that one of the things that we see developing in the West, and it's not that this has not found other places, because a lot of the moralizing religions have a notion of free will, but you get a real big push for the idea that individuals can make free choices.

[523] And at least some of the experiments suggested that in the Western world, people who believe more in free will are actually more likely to make the more moral or the more pro -social choice.

[524] But that's probably because their circle is broader, right?

[525] Yeah.

[526] Yeah, without any immediate circle, really you're left with just everyone in your in -group, which at that point could be America, it could be Los Angeles, it could be California.

[527] It's broader.

[528] The experiments that I have in mind are, they've been done mostly with college students or others like that around here.

[529] And what they do is they give someone a philosophical argument that tries to persuade them of greater free will or less free will.

[530] And when people are reminded or persuaded that there's free will is more real, then they give them some kind of charity -giving task or something.

[531] The same person would be more likely to give to charity when they've been a little bit persuaded that free will is more likely to exist.

[532] Well, that is interesting.

[533] Do we extrapolate from that, which is like if determinism is real, then I don't really need to do anything, so I'm not going to alter the future in some sense.

[534] Right.

[535] It makes you power listen.

[536] Right.

[537] Okay, so again, this is another thing that we just take for granted, which is like if I want to eat some oranges, I'll just go over to the store, I'll see a stranger putting oranges on a shelf.

[538] I'll grab one.

[539] I'll go up and I'll give money to a stranger.

[540] And I will walk out trusting I can eat that without dying.

[541] So tell us how that has evolved, how economically now we have these impersonal transactions.

[542] Yeah, so across so many societies, you know, exchange is old in humans, but this idea of just freely exchanging with a lot of trusts with strangers, I mean, there was a time where, you know, if someone offered you some fruit or something, you assume it was the bad fruit or the poisonous fruit, because why would they be trying to sell it?

[543] And you had no way to verify quality, so you tended not to make many exchanges, and there was just a lot less exchange in the world.

[544] But if you can get more trust in strangers, and there's kind of a chicken or egg problem here, but if you can generate more trust in strangers, then you can have more exchange, have more economic growth.

[545] You can have more specialization.

[546] So I make the case that this shift towards monogamous nuclear families and away from these kinships, structures, where people were forced into communities of strangers like what became occupational guilds, or in these charter towns that sprang up in Europe, or in monasteries, people were interacting with people who were at least initially strangers, and then they developed these voluntary association relationships with them.

[547] That's when you get the cultivation of trust.

[548] And guilds begin monitoring people so their workmen or their craftsmen, you know, if they give someone a bad deal, the other members of your guild will sanction you.

[549] So then you've got to be kind of trusting and fair with strangers because the other members of the guild are monitoring you.

[550] And eventually, you know, most of your profits are not coming from people who everybody's related to, but they're coming from just strangers who want to make exchanges.

[551] And so that seems to kickstart this market integration.

[552] You get more trust and more fairness among strangers.

[553] And then more commerce.

[554] And you get the commercial revolution.

[555] Okay.

[556] I think maybe this would be the time now.

[557] One of my absolute favorite aspects is first evolution is like everyone did everything, probably sex separated.

[558] So you were gathering if you were female and you're hunting and whatnot if you're male.

[559] as we become agrarian or we start growing stuff now we have some stockpiles people can specialize in different things they can be woodworkers they can be this and that and that just keeps growing and evolving and evolving to the point where you get to an hourly employee tell us when that was new and what impact that had on how we think that seems to be coming kind of well at least in europe it's high middle ages late high middle ages in the early modern period so think 13th 14th century people are becoming obsessed with time.

[560] So you get the spreading of clocks towards the end of that period.

[561] But before that, people are using hourglasses and candles and other kind of techniques to measure time.

[562] And there begins to be this equation between time and money.

[563] And first, it's used for overtime only, but then people begin paying hourly rates or piece rates or things like that.

[564] And one of the things I point out is that we have this, not only do we have time thrift, so we tend to think about us being short on time, got to save time, more time, but we also think time is money.

[565] So that, of course, traces to Ben Franklin, but it seemed like before Ben, you know, he had a way of crystallizing things.

[566] It was in the zeitgeist and people were thinking about time and money together in a way that you don't see in other societies or in the past.

[567] Well, yeah, when you think of it in the most simple terms, you imagine that originally it was like, hey, I'm going to give you a sheep if you build this fence.

[568] It's task oriented.

[569] I will give you X when you complete Y. And now that's off the table.

[570] It's just like you will endlessly do this task in this increment, and each increment I'll pay you on, that's very abstract, really.

[571] Again, we take it for granted that that's how it works.

[572] But one of the things I thought was really fascinating about what the outcome was, was soon as we adopted that system, people chose to work more hours than they needed to.

[573] And the explanation, at least in the book, which I found fascinating, was this coincides perfectly with this kind of rise in products basically products from different parts of the world there's navigation now and that people would actually work longer so that they could buy like a pocket watch or they could buy this candle holder and then in fact this is what i love about the full circleness of our human nature which is even when we escape it ultimately that was done to establish your class or hierarchy or your social standing now in a system that that's unclear.

[574] I think the root of so much of our anxiety as humans is we just live in too big of a group.

[575] We don't know where we're at.

[576] We're innately obsessed with, are we alpha, beta, gamma?

[577] And then without that clear distinction, we are left to try to cobble together that in a very abstract way.

[578] So people just start accumulating these knick -knacks and being willing to work longer so that they can be perceived as somewhat higher class.

[579] Have I done justice to that point?

[580] Yeah.

[581] And just to make one additional connection to what we talked about at the beginning, was we talked about how Westerners or weird people are very individualistic.

[582] They're focused on themselves, their own attributes and accomplishments.

[583] But consuming was kind of a way of signaling who you are and your uniqueness and your values.

[584] So pocket watches were so important because merchants and carpenters and craftsmen and lots of people who engaging in commerce want to say, you know, I'm the kind of guy who shows up on time and delivers the goods when I tell you.

[585] So if I'm wearing a watch, you know, that's signaling that to you.

[586] And servants want to have a watch because the master wants me to come in at 2 o 'clock and clear the food, right?

[587] And so I got to be in there at 2 o 'clock.

[588] And if you don't have a watch, we tend to think we're surrounded by time, everything.

[589] But, you know, imagine a world with many fewer time pieces or, you know, you got to go by the sun or something.

[590] It's almost impossible.

[591] It sounds liberating.

[592] I know.

[593] I'm jealous.

[594] And you recognize immediately that nothing could get done.

[595] Right.

[596] Like, we couldn't have this conversation.

[597] How on earth would we know?

[598] Like, I don't know.

[599] I'll hang out for a few hours and hopefully that'll overlap.

[600] Hopefully you'll show up, yeah.

[601] And that's what it feels like sometimes when you're.

[602] you're doing ethnographic field work.

[603] I'll show up to get in a boat to go to some island to do some interviews and, you know, I'll show up at 6 .30 a .m. and my boat driver will show up at 9 .30 or something like that.

[604] Oh.

[605] By the way, you can experience that even in a micro level when you just go between Western countries.

[606] Like when I've filmed movies in Italy, it is way more loosey -goosey.

[607] Yeah.

[608] Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[609] They are so over -scheduled here.

[610] Even last night, in the middle of the night, I like woke up to check the time.

[611] In the middle of the night, I woke up to check the time.

[612] Yeah, you have to check.

[613] And my phone was dead, I thought.

[614] It was doing its software update.

[615] But I was like, oh, my God, oh, my God, it's dead.

[616] And I spent like 20 minutes trying to revive it because I was like, how am I going to wake up?

[617] How am I going to wake up on time?

[618] How am I going to make sure I get here on time?

[619] Like, I was panicked.

[620] That's how obsessed we are.

[621] One of the fun pieces of data from psychologists that I talk about in the book is a psychologist went around the world and they went to like train stations and airports and the old analog clocks.

[622] This was before digital clocks were everywhere.

[623] And they looked to see how much they were off.

[624] And so in some places, you know, in Greece or whatever, the clock was like 10 minutes off.

[625] Oh, wow.

[626] In Switzerland, you know, it was 30 seconds off or something.

[627] Oh, wow.

[628] So funny.

[629] Okay, so we're part of the problem here.

[630] So we're obsessed with the social sciences.

[631] We love having someone on who's just gotten some groundbreaking conclusion through an experiment that was run, and we have a greater sense of who we are intrinsically.

[632] And you point out, all we really know about is the thinking of graduate students.

[633] That's all we've pretty much learned in the social sciences.

[634] Tell us how, yeah, most of this data or knowledge is gathered in what it says.

[635] Yeah, so, I mean, I began critiquing this in 2010 with the paper version of the weirdest people in the world.

[636] And there we just reviewed the available psychological evidence and we showed all this interesting variation.

[637] But what we came across as we were putting all that together, this is with two collaborators, Steve Heinen, Ardor, and Zion.

[638] We found out that 96 % of all psychological experiments are done with weird subjects mostly at the time with university undergraduates.

[639] So psychologists would just bring the kids from their university into the labs and that's the basis of the textbook.

[640] So there are all these grand claims made in the textbooks that at least until recently went completely unqualified.

[641] They were assumed to be things about human psychology, but it was actually things about American undergraduates.

[642] So I mentioned 96 % that would be Westerners, but 70 % of all subjects at that time were American undergraduates.

[643] So, you know, thrown out the Brits and the Australians and the Canadians.

[644] That's kind of this thin slice of this highly unrepresentative sample.

[645] It was also true of behavioral economics at the time.

[646] In the last 10 years, economics has made a lot of changes and I think improved this.

[647] Psychology has made fewer changes because they've gone to the internet now.

[648] So a lot of experiments are run on this service that Amazon provides called M -Turk, where you can get people online to do your experiments.

[649] But that's still almost entirely Americans, and it's Americans willing to work for 10 cents a question online.

[650] So that's some other strange, thin slice of humanity.

[651] Well, right.

[652] You could almost say all of the studies thus far are conclusions about kids who waited for the marshmallow.

[653] Right, right, because they went to college and all that sort of thing.

[654] Yeah, it's almost a study, which is interesting, because if you think about the self -perpetuating nature of it, it's like, well, then the conclusions begat the behavior.

[655] So it's like, oh, we found this out.

[656] Well, we found that out about the people that are successful in our society.

[657] So that's now a benchmark or that's an attribute we should circle and nurture.

[658] And then that leads to this prosperity and this kind of runaway train of our accomplishments.

[659] what are we losing?

[660] What is the cost?

[661] What is the price of this?

[662] Again, it's just to be pointed out objectively.

[663] These weird people have created way more shit.

[664] They have stockpiles of everything.

[665] They're the wealthiest of all time.

[666] They have access to the most knowledge of all time.

[667] So it has what we would probably call some benefit.

[668] But what are the blind spots of all this?

[669] Yeah, I mean, I try to really highlight the blind spots as I go along.

[670] So I have different subheadings in the book like Missing the Forest.

[671] And that's a section on analytic versus holistic thinking.

[672] So one of the things we really see emerging strongly is an emphasis on analytic thinking.

[673] So focusing on objects, assigning them properties, thinking about things as moving linearly through time as opposed to cyclically through time.

[674] But folks that are more holistic tend to focus on relationships and background and the connections between things.

[675] So one of the things that science has had to do is deal with the fact that, you know, first we broke everything down, big reductionism, get it down to its small parts.

[676] We have atoms and genes and molecules and things like that, but then we had to figure out how they fit together.

[677] And so then later you get work in social networks or ecology, things where you try to put together stuff in networks and whatnot.

[678] How they interact with one another.

[679] Yeah.

[680] And the other thing that's interesting is innovation.

[681] So if you look at the sort of collective intelligence of groups, it's not that analytic thinkers are the best.

[682] You really get the best mix when you have analytic and holistic thinkers because you need people who are going to keenly attend to the relationships between things and people who will kind of clear all that away and focus narrowly on the small parts.

[683] You're reminding me of a great part of the book.

[684] It's been about six months since I read it, so some of it has just completely vanished into the ether.

[685] But you're reminding me, there's a whole section on how it's changed our education and our thinking.

[686] I can't remember the details, but I know that if you give one person a project, and then you give them an X amount of time, and then you give two people a project, three people a project, there's this cumulative exponential effect.

[687] Yeah.

[688] So there we are trying to understand, the role of cultural learning and social connections in generating innovation and what I call cumulative cultural evolution.

[689] So what we do is experiments and we have what's called a transmission chain.

[690] So some person has to solve some difficult problem.

[691] It could be tying a complex system of knots or it could be learning to use a difficult to use image editing program.

[692] And then they can each pass what they learn onto a next generation and then on the next generation for 10 generations.

[693] And then each generation can look back at the previous generation.

[694] And sometimes we restrict them to just learning from one teacher.

[695] So everybody can learn from dad, right?

[696] Their cultural dad.

[697] Or they can learn from anybody.

[698] So they have a community and they just can go to the best person.

[699] And when we let people learn from the best person, we get rapid accumulation of knowledge where people get better and better.

[700] And so this is core to this notion that we really need trust in strangers and whatnot because the more we do that, the more we can share ideas, create novel recombination, and drive innovation.

[701] And tap in different ways of thinking, like holistic versus analytic thinking.

[702] What we found, so in one case, we would train up the first round of experts.

[703] And so they'd be really good at the task before they started down the transmission chain.

[704] And we found that when you could learn from anyone, you would maintain most of the knowledge that the first person had.

[705] But if you could only learn from one person, you could actually lose knowledge.

[706] So, I mean, if you look at the Middle Ages, right, the Romans could do things like glass, and cement and things that disappeared from Europe and no one knew how to build the buildings that were around them until the British regenerated cement and pane glass and all that kind of thing.

[707] Oh, wow.

[708] There was a whole technological set that disappeared.

[709] Yeah, so Europe gets disconnected and lost some technology that the Romans had generated.

[710] And then, you know, they recreate it later.

[711] But there's a period of time when people were living amongst the ruins that they themselves could not build.

[712] Because none of the knowledge was passed down to them?

[713] They had lost key knowledge.

[714] So some other work that I've been doing looks at how if you lose the kind of masters on a technology, you can actually step down and then not be able to do that.

[715] So in my previous book, The Secret of Our Success, I look at how there were these Inuit, so this Arctic foragers living in Northern Greenland.

[716] And an epidemic hit and killed their master canoe makers, which left them stranded in Northern Greenland.

[717] And they gradually began to lose some valuable technologies because they were disconnected from the larger collective brain of the other Inuit.

[718] And then when things started to kind of bad, another Inuit was paddling north along the Greenland coast and basically found them and reconnected them to the rest of the Inuit.

[719] And they got all the knowledge they had lost that was stored in the minds of the rest of the population.

[720] I remember seeing like 15 years ago being in New York, it was on the news or something that there were a lot of these cathedrals that needed refurbishment and there was a lot of masonry that had literally, you were down to two or three people that could have figured out how to fix these.

[721] And then they had to start a whole program to reteach people this kind of arcane way of dealing with masonry, and that was kind of real time in our society.

[722] One of my favorite examples is the U .S. military has these Trident submarines, and there's a catalyst for the tried submarines for the nuclear weapons called Fog Bank.

[723] It's super secret.

[724] And they made a whole bunch of this catalysts in the 1970s and 80s.

[725] And then the engineers all retired.

[726] And then in the 2000s, they ran out of Fog Bank, so they had to make more.

[727] So they got out the recipe book.

[728] You'd think, you know, that's what you need, right?

[729] but they couldn't recreate it.

[730] And so, you know, billions of dollars got spent and finally they recreated it and they realized that the original way they made it, there were impurities that turned out to be crucial in a way they didn't understand at the time.

[731] And when they recated, they had better technology so there were fewer impurities and it prevented them from recreating it.

[732] So when you have secret programs, you can lose knowledge too because the engineers who knew had retired, right?

[733] And the way had doing it had changed subtly.

[734] Do you think the internet in some sense is going to safeguard us from any future loss?

[735] Yeah, I mean, potentially, I think it certainly can help.

[736] The Internet, though, has the same problem that knowledge always has, which is there is a kind of free rider problem in the sense that people can go to the Internet to get lots of knowledge, and they might not want to put the knowledge they have on the Internet.

[737] I worry a little bit about that.

[738] Things like YouTube videos can help preserve more tacit knowledge, which is something new.

[739] Things you can't write down, but you could show in a video, can be preserved that way, and that could be a big benefit.

[740] There has to be some anthropological work done on YouTube videos, because I myself have found more and more, A, I think I could do anything.

[741] Like, sincerely, there's been so many things I've been up against where I was like, fuck, this dryer gasket that I ordered, it doesn't fit on this machine.

[742] I'm going to send it back.

[743] Oh, shit, I'll YouTube video it.

[744] Oh, if you use the stick, you know, whatever it is.

[745] And then I think, oh, my God, I would have quit.

[746] Couldn't be done.

[747] We get in arguments all the time.

[748] I'm like, if a Dennis were to post the video, Monica, I could do a filling here, too.

[749] It is a pneumatic drill.

[750] I have one.

[751] What do we talk?

[752] It's not magic.

[753] Yeah, yeah, no, that's super cool.

[754] Second thing I worry about, besides the free rider problem, is that, you know, we build these mathematical models of all this, and we try to understand what leads to innovation and recombination of ideas.

[755] And there is a point at which you can be too interconnected.

[756] So imagine you have a hard problem, and there's a bunch of solutions, but some of the solutions aren't too good.

[757] If you have a big group that's not very connected, different parts of the overall group may end up with different solutions.

[758] And then finally, whatever the best solution is can spread to everybody else.

[759] But imagine that everybody goes for one of the suboptimal solutions.

[760] And then that's the only thing around.

[761] Other people might try and their initial efforts aren't going to be as good as the existing solution.

[762] So they might not ever find the really good stuff.

[763] There is a worry about being too interconnected.

[764] You always want to be kind of only loosely connected.

[765] Well, I think we saw this in a very fascinating way throughout the last two years of the pandemic, which was like, again, this is my assessment of it.

[766] People will be offended.

[767] the countries who had a great sense of responsibility to their elders, per se, or their kind of more extended family, they seem to most quickly adapt really productive strategies from stopping the spread of it.

[768] Early on, you could have said, well, that's the solution to pandemics.

[769] You know, everyone should behave the way that population did.

[770] But then as you watch the whole thing unravel, it's also like, well, here's what's interesting is one of the countries that was terrible at that aspect, happened to be brilliant at mapping the genome of the virus and creating a vaccine insanely quick.

[771] And so my conclusion after watching all that is like, we don't need to all be like this and we don't all need to be like this.

[772] We need a world where all those different varieties exist and we benefit from each of them when the time is right.

[773] There's actually a paper by Ricardo Hausman and his colleagues, one of my colleagues here at Harvard, in which they look at innovation in cities and epidemiology in cities.

[774] And cities that are most innovative are also most likely to spread diseases.

[775] Sure.

[776] Because people socially interact and they pass ideas around and they pass pathogens around.

[777] Also, it makes sense to me that countries where there's big family units and stuff would be extra careful because it would spread much faster within them.

[778] So, like, a lot of us here didn't have the same level of fear because we could be in our house by ourselves.

[779] But it even happened, the phenomena happened, intra -country, which was the red states spread it like fucking wildfire and the blue states didn't or at least slower but then when the vaccine came out the red states were much quicker at getting it out to everyone so that was a weird kind of counterintuitive thing which is they weren't going to say like well let's go through this perfectly morally and oh you got to be 91 years old to get the first round and then those people didn't show up and now we wasted all this time every time you think you're going to be able to make some conclusion about us humans and what the right or wrong way is it's like no there's going to be some really adaptive strategies over here that come with a price and vice versa.

[780] And we shouldn't aim to completely homogenize all of us because we'll lose all of those.

[781] Yeah.

[782] I mean, this is one of the ideas that I really hit pretty hard in the secret of our success, is that humans are bad at figuring out effective institutions and effective policies.

[783] So you really got to take advantage of variation selection.

[784] So you want a lot of different groups trying different stuff.

[785] So you can use those as mini laboratories and then take what you.

[786] works best.

[787] Because we just don't have the cognition to like, okay, this is what's going to work best, you know?

[788] Right.

[789] And even by the way, boy, I just happen to watch a TED talk about algorithms.

[790] And I think I understand algorithms in a different way that I didn't, which is like an algorithm in its simplest sense is you're going to have a data and then you're going to have some definition of success.

[791] And then the algorithm is going to look at all the data and see which combination produces this thing.

[792] But implicit in labeling success, you might fuck the whole thing up.

[793] So if our success was just stopping transmission, that somehow might have counteracted the innovation.

[794] I don't know.

[795] You know, it's like you've got to be really careful that you think you want success to be this or that.

[796] Even the best success is unknown.

[797] Okay, again, I fucking love your book.

[798] He brings it up all the time.

[799] You can't imagine how many people have to hear my version of your book.

[800] And these are people that have their own great books.

[801] One other thing I just want to touch on, and then I want to ask you a couple of because ultimately you teach human evolution and biology at Harvard.

[802] So I have some really sacrilegious thought recently about evolution I want to hit you with.

[803] But before that, I guess I'm curious, too, have you read Dopamine Nation or the molecule more either of those?

[804] No, I haven't.

[805] Okay.

[806] There are also a lot of biological differences, dopamine being the chemical that says stand up, go look for more food, in essence.

[807] So when you look at migration and you look at people in America, and then also, let's just say dopamine is the main driver of bipolar disorder.

[808] And so when you measure the U .S. population for rate of bipolarism, I want to say, and don't quote me, but I want to say it's around 3%.

[809] And then if you look at Japan, which has had virtually zero immigration, there are a very homogeneous population that were there and they stayed there and no one came in.

[810] Their rate was like at 0 .07 bipolar.

[811] There's been a bunch of bizarre unnatural selections that have happened, even within these different countries or populations that are really fascinating.

[812] And again, change your psychology.

[813] We Americans are abnormally high dopamogenic people.

[814] So is the argument that that's due to the genes?

[815] Because there's lots of cultural factors that could affect that as well.

[816] By these selection arguments, I think they're plausible.

[817] The argument goes that we have a genetic predisposition to dopamine baseline levels.

[818] Because all the people have kind of elevated or highest levels of dopamine are the ones that were willing to get on the Mayflower and cross a sea for a month, they already had a really high rate of dopamine, a baseline dopamine.

[819] And so those are the people that have made it here, or people who have pretty high levels of dopamine genetically, and now they're here.

[820] So, yes, I imagine there would be a lot of trauma, nurture aspects to bipolar, but just as far as a genetic baseline, the argument is ours is much higher than some of the more homogenous non -migrating countries.

[821] Okay.

[822] I mean, I have to take a look at the book and the argument.

[823] I have a student here working on a related project is that we think that some of the distribution, so take the autism spectrum distribution or other kinds of traits that people might have that have a psychological basis or a sort of genetic basis.

[824] Since women began entering the labor market in the 1970s, and then especially since online dating has occurred, people are better able to select mates who share their traits.

[825] So for example, imagine two engineers or two economists getting together, married and then having babies.

[826] They have baby economists and baby engineers.

[827] So we think that that could be pushing out some of these distributions and adding more variance to the distributions.

[828] But I mean, we want polygenic scores.

[829] We want to know exactly which genes are doing this.

[830] Yeah, that's interesting.

[831] You say that because I was on a show that was all about autism for six years.

[832] And one of the theories I heard during that period, this kind of works in concert with that, which was prior to the tech economy, people that were maybe tilted in the autism direction didn't find themselves in social situations where they would have met mates, right?

[833] So these were very isolated endeavors, but now you had computer programmers, you have colleagues now, you have coworkers, this becomes an industry of over a million people that would have otherwise never met each other.

[834] And then their social skill sets happen to match up beautifully.

[835] And so that was one of the explanations of the Explanations autism rate.

[836] Yeah.

[837] And you know, now with online, you know, people can match on all kinds of characteristics.

[838] So anything that we're like likes like and there's genetic variation for it, we think it's plausible that it's pushing out the variance.

[839] It shouldn't change the mean, but it should change the variance.

[840] Yeah.

[841] Wow.

[842] That's fascinating.

[843] This isn't the hairbrain question I want to ask you, but it just makes me think I've thought this is someone who's fascinated in anthropology, which is like as the world starts sharing this kind of culture of the main platforms, Facebook, Instagram, whatever they are, that's terrifying to me, I guess, because I was someone who was interested in all this variation among humans.

[844] That's why I wanted to go into it.

[845] Do you worry about this kind of unicultural possibility that this interconnectedness would create?

[846] Well, I mean, I do worry about that, although I think that the variation is just going to be different and it's going to keep regenerating itself.

[847] So if you look at, say, Japan and China, they've adopted lots of Western institutions.

[848] I mean, beginning of the 18, 80s, Japan was copying Western laws and adopting forms of government.

[849] But the society that they seem to be forging doesn't look like the West.

[850] It has some similarities, but it's actually a third thing that's neither traditional Japan nor a Western society.

[851] So it's just making something new.

[852] Japanese legal codes look awful lot like American legal codes, but Japanese don't sue each other the way Americans do.

[853] It operates differently even though the formal institutions are the same.

[854] Okay, so you believe kind of in the strength of the culture?

[855] Yeah, I think that.

[856] we're just going to get new variants.

[857] They'll look a bit more Western, because they've adopted some Western institutions, but it's going to spawn off in a new direction, essentially.

[858] So I don't think we need to worry.

[859] And one of the characteristics of analytic thinking is that we tend to think of things along linear lines, but actually we have a tree that's being created.

[860] So you want to resist your analytic thinking inclination to think of everything.

[861] Your weird brain.

[862] Yeah.

[863] Okay, here's my hairbrain theory that I've launched once or twice on here.

[864] I can't do it justice the way it is in my had, but you would be perfect to answer this.

[865] So in order of events, I had a Darwinian understanding of evolution, you know, natural selection or mate selection, and I started interviewing psychologists that introduced this notion of the epigenome, which is floating above the DNA and really deciding what we're going to turn on and turn off, and that in fact, that epigenome can be passed on and be hereditary, and that trauma could be hereditary.

[866] Am I on good standing so far?

[867] Yep.

[868] Okay.

[869] So the more I thought about this, this is where, like, my mind's been taking me is, so the original theory in evolution, which was debunked, just to set it up, was that these scientists, these armchair experts, would look at giraffes, and their conclusion was, well, the leaves got higher, so the giraffes stretched their neck, and then they passed on somehow this to their children whose necks were stretched, and that they themselves, in essence, decided to evolve this long neck.

[870] And of course, this was debunked by Darwin.

[871] But now that my understanding of the epigenome is growing, I'm starting to consider, is it possible we have the ingredients for any fucking thing?

[872] And that the epigenome really is combining what we need to survive in our environment and that it's ultimately in charge of our DNA.

[873] And doesn't that in some way challenge Darwinian evolution?

[874] One of the things that I work on is related to this.

[875] It's called gene culture co -evolution.

[876] And it's the idea that cultural practices construct the environment that our genes respond.

[877] So I've made the case that lots of our genetic traits are actually responses to culturally built environment.

[878] So a simple example would be sometime, I would guess, around a million years ago, humans start using fire.

[879] And if you look at our length of our colones and our teeth and stuff, it looks like we're a cooking species.

[880] So we break down and sort of predigest our food so we don't need very big guts like gorillas and chimpanzees have.

[881] We don't need big teeth.

[882] We don't need like all the musculature that they have for grinding up things because we cook it.

[883] it up or we cut it up or something like that.

[884] So it looks like our cultural technology and our genes for our digestion have co -evolved over long periods of time.

[885] I mean, I think our brains evolved to be able to acquire all this cultural information.

[886] So we have big brains that are flexible so we can acquire the knowledge, but also the ways of thinking we need to navigate different institutional environments.

[887] And the epigenome can play a role in this because that just creates opportunities to take advantage of any flexibility that epigenetic markers, methylation, things like that can do.

[888] Yeah, the epigenome is kind of like the playbook.

[889] Is that fair to say?

[890] Well, it's a way of creating inheritance of characteristics across generations, I mean, epigenetic inheritance without actually changing the DNA just by changing what regulates.

[891] Right, what ACEs, Gs, and T's they're going to put together.

[892] Right.

[893] Which proteins are going to be made when and how much?

[894] Yeah, and I feel like with that variety, I don't know, but it seems challenging to our original understanding of it.

[895] Yeah, and I think people are modifying their thinking.

[896] The way we can respond phenotypically through learning and other kinds of plasticity does create new opportunities.

[897] So not just waiting for the mutations.

[898] We're getting some variation, some adaptation through these non -genetic processes.

[899] Once they exist, then the genes can respond genetically.

[900] Yeah.

[901] And then it's also working in concert with mate selection, which is now our culture has determined this is advantageous.

[902] So that somehow heavily impacts mate selection, which heavily impacts the DNA.

[903] Yeah, it just seems like it's a lot more back and forth than maybe we ever wanted to acknowledge.

[904] Yeah, I think a lot of evolutionary biologists, especially people who study humans, are thinking along these lines.

[905] Okay, I'm not novel in this.

[906] You're right up there.

[907] You're right up there with us.

[908] Okay, okay, great.

[909] Well, Dr. Henrick, this has been awesome, man. I hope everyone read your book.

[910] If you don't walk away with a huge dose of humility, you need to pick it up and read it again.

[911] I just think it's a wonderful message to encourage people to question why and how they think and how that came about and to just not feel like we're on bedrock all the time.

[912] I think it just will lead us into far more discoveries, far more learning, far more everything to have that humility of, oh, no, we're pretty specifically operating because of where we grew up and who our parents were and what our economy was and all these things.

[913] So thank you so much.

[914] Keep working.

[915] And if you ever want us to come sit in on your class, wink, wink, at Harvard, we love to.

[916] Okay, great.

[917] Thanks a lot, guys.

[918] It was good fun.

[919] Take care.

[920] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate, Monica Padman.

[921] I ate almost exclusively gluten on the trip.

[922] Oh, you decided to pocket.

[923] England, right?

[924] Yeah.

[925] Lena Stores.

[926] Favorite restaurant.

[927] Of all time.

[928] Love it.

[929] I mean, man, those artichokes.

[930] You remember those little delicate little artichokies?

[931] They're so good.

[932] Yeah.

[933] Yeah, that place is incredible.

[934] Oh, I had a really great moment.

[935] Okay.

[936] I wonder if you would remember this.

[937] So you and I were there at Lena Stores, and we met a server, female server.

[938] Okay.

[939] Wait, hold on back.

[940] You and Kristen were in London.

[941] We're in London town.

[942] Last week.

[943] Yeah.

[944] And so the server comes over.

[945] I look at her and I'm like, hmm, I recognize her.

[946] I say, I recognize you.

[947] I said, did you work here in October and November?

[948] Yeah, yeah.

[949] Great.

[950] She walks away.

[951] She's across the restaurant.

[952] And all of a sudden, I remember.

[953] I'm like, she has some tattoo.

[954] She has a Valentino Rossi tattoo.

[955] I go, do you have yellow 46 on your wrist?

[956] And she turned and she was like, oh my God, yes.

[957] It was a huge moment.

[958] That's a beautiful moment.

[959] Do you remember that?

[960] I do.

[961] Yes.

[962] I do.

[963] It was so weird.

[964] I was like, I knew I knew her face.

[965] Then she walked away and then I was like kind of looking at her across the restaurant.

[966] I'm like, there's something really memorable about her.

[967] Wow.

[968] It's a tattoo.

[969] Oh, it was wonderful.

[970] I was high on that for like 10 minutes.

[971] I guess it goes to show you remember people who you have something in common with.

[972] Yeah, like maybe I imprinted her as an in -group subconsciously, primitively.

[973] Yeah, that's a ding, ding, ding.

[974] Oh, it is?

[975] This is Joseph Henrik.

[976] Oh, my God.

[977] Yeah, so you were in London town.

[978] We were both in New Yorktown.

[979] Yes.

[980] How long was your trip to New Yorktown?

[981] I last saw you on Monday.

[982] Right.

[983] I got in on Saturday, and I left on Wednesday.

[984] Oh, so you had two more days that are unaccounted for.

[985] What happened?

[986] So we saw Kristen perform at Carnegie Hall.

[987] She sang at Carnegie Hall.

[988] She did an incredible job.

[989] Just outstanding.

[990] It was beautiful.

[991] And also, I've never been to Carnegie Hall.

[992] I don't think I have either.

[993] It was amazing.

[994] I was like, oh, gosh, I get it.

[995] Like, there's just a feel in here.

[996] Sure, some history.

[997] Yeah, yeah.

[998] And seeing an orchestra perform is magical.

[999] I think.

[1000] I think it's enchanted.

[1001] It's a cliche, you know?

[1002] It's like it just sounds so unified.

[1003] It's beautiful.

[1004] But then when you start looking and you see everyone's doing something completely different, but it all sounds.

[1005] Yeah, synchronization is a really appealing thing for the human.

[1006] It is.

[1007] So then, okay, I have a story.

[1008] Oh, great.

[1009] I have a New York story, New York Minute.

[1010] First of all, I was at Bergdorf's, and there was a picture of Mary Kay and Ashley.

[1011] I posted it.

[1012] Oh, I saw that post of yours.

[1013] I just want to beat them so bad.

[1014] Yeah.

[1015] And it is generational because when I got back from New York, I went to this thing, and Callie came with me. And I was like, oh, there was this picture of American Ashley.

[1016] She was like, oh, icons.

[1017] Mm -hmm.

[1018] Yeah, I know.

[1019] I mean.

[1020] I'm like.

[1021] Are they your generation's Anna Wintour?

[1022] Anna Wintour is still Anna Wintour.

[1023] But there's...

[1024] Well, like Audrey Heparin, like, I can't say their name.

[1025] I think heparin's a fucking thing I would put in my pick line to flush out before I put my antibiotic in the heparin.

[1026] I think it's a, I think it's like a diabetes drug or something.

[1027] Oh, maybe a antiquagulate or guigalette.

[1028] Okay, so I have a New York story besides Mary Kate and Ashley.

[1029] I'm a little like anxious to tell the story.

[1030] Those are your best ones.

[1031] No, there's one tiny part of it that I think might hurt your feelings.

[1032] Oh, great.

[1033] And I hit, and, but then I think ultimately you'll like it.

[1034] Okay, let's hear it.

[1035] And I hope you do.

[1036] Yeah.

[1037] I was at a bar.

[1038] Yeah.

[1039] And this is the guy who bought you a drink?

[1040] No. Okay.

[1041] This is another bar.

[1042] Mineta Tavern.

[1043] I'll say that.

[1044] Shout out.

[1045] And, you know, in New York, everything's so small.

[1046] So you kind of have to sit at the bar if you're by yourself.

[1047] Yeah, yeah.

[1048] You're not going to give you a table.

[1049] Yeah.

[1050] So I was at the bar.

[1051] There was a person next to me. And he started talking to me. And he was like, where are you staying?

[1052] And I said, oh, the Carlisle.

[1053] And he was like, why are you staying there?

[1054] Oh.

[1055] And I was like, oh, I mean, it's just, it's really nice.

[1056] And that's kind of it.

[1057] And he was like, yeah, but what's around?

[1058] There's like nothing there.

[1059] I was like, yeah, but I'm just, I'm on vacation.

[1060] So I'm fine with walking and like exploring the city.

[1061] Where is this bar located in the village or something?

[1062] In the village.

[1063] Yeah.

[1064] So then, okay, really quick sidebar.

[1065] So I walked there.

[1066] Oh, wow.

[1067] You know what I do?

[1068] I walk.

[1069] Yeah, you're a longer.

[1070] I walk.

[1071] So I was supposed to go to this bar.

[1072] My chef recommended.

[1073] I obviously reached out to my chef beforehand and I was like, what do I need to go to right now in New York?

[1074] She sent me some stuff.

[1075] One of them was this martini bar.

[1076] So I was like, I'll go there.

[1077] And I Googled it.

[1078] And the walk was an hour and 40 minutes.

[1079] Whoa.

[1080] That's a monster of a walk.

[1081] Yeah.

[1082] So I was like, do I?

[1083] Yes.

[1084] Oh, wow.

[1085] So then I did it.

[1086] I walked all the way there.

[1087] Of course, I was faster than an hour before.

[1088] Yes, of course.

[1089] Don't be ridiculous.

[1090] And then I get there and they're close for a private party.

[1091] Oh, bummer.

[1092] When she told me that, I had true panic.

[1093] Yes.

[1094] Like, oh, my God, I literally just lost an hour and a half of my time.

[1095] And then she was like, we're still setting up.

[1096] And I was like, well, can I have a drink while you're setting up?

[1097] Like, I looked like I was like I needed it in my veins or something.

[1098] Like you were going into DTs or something.

[1099] Yeah.

[1100] She said no. So then I left, and I was like, well, I've got to find something around here, so then I went to a menina.

[1101] Now we pick up back at the store.

[1102] Yeah, we're back in.

[1103] That was a flashback.

[1104] Yeah.

[1105] He says, Carlisle, and then I was like, well, it's really nice.

[1106] And then the bartender comes up, and he's like, he's staying at the Carlisle.

[1107] Oh, my God.

[1108] So now they're both shaming you.

[1109] He is still trying to shame me to the bartender.

[1110] The bartender's nice.

[1111] It's just like, he doesn't know how to respond.

[1112] Yeah.

[1113] So then he says like, okay, so what do you do?

[1114] I co -host and produce a podcast.

[1115] What is it called?

[1116] I don't like this guy the way you're doing his voice.

[1117] You're going to hate him.

[1118] The point is that this is not a good guy, but he's nagging.

[1119] Yes.

[1120] So he's like textbook negging.

[1121] It's actually, for me, a little fascinating.

[1122] Everything I say, he's doing it.

[1123] Yeah.

[1124] And so, okay, what's it called?

[1125] Armchair expert.

[1126] Okay, immediately picks up his phone Great To start looking it up And I was like It's exclusive to Spotify And so then he's like Looking it up And he was like But like what is it?

[1127] Oh Jesus God bless you I would have I know It was rough Well I still have a full drink And like I don't want to chug it It's a nice drink Yeah it was expensive Yeah It was like $13 Probably Yeah So he was like What is I was like Oh it's just like a long form interview show And it's with Jack Shepard and he was like oh, Jack Shepard, I know him.

[1128] He was in a bunch of movies I didn't like or it was in a string of bad movies or something and I just like I like whip because I know what I'm like kind of smiling up until then and then I like whip over and I was like he's my best friend so you should cool it.

[1129] Oh good!

[1130] And then he was like would he say you're his best friend?

[1131] Oh God, he's trying to act like you're low status.

[1132] And I was like What?

[1133] He said, well, you just said he's your best friend, but would he say you're his best friend?

[1134] And I was like, yeah.

[1135] Oh, my God, this guy's a fucking troll, a real -life troll.

[1136] He thought he's on Twitter.

[1137] Yeah, so that part ended.

[1138] And then he was like trying to teach me about the comedy seller.

[1139] I'm like, I know about the comedy seller.

[1140] And he was like, he should come with me. And I'm like, I'm not.

[1141] Uh -huh.

[1142] Yeah, I was like, no, I'm going to do other stuff.

[1143] Yeah.

[1144] This thing you tried doesn't work just so you know.

[1145] Exactly.

[1146] Yeah, and he was like, no, but really, like, you never know who's going to stop by.

[1147] And then, yeah, because then he was saying something about Aziz and a, or no, no, no, maybe I said something about Aziz.

[1148] And he was like, yeah, he's, you know.

[1149] Okay, you don't like him anymore.

[1150] Yeah, he doesn't like him.

[1151] He doesn't, oh my God, you're miserable.

[1152] He's miserable that he hasn't done anything and he hates everyone who's done something.

[1153] And he's a quote, restractor of something.

[1154] And the fact that you can afford to stay at the Carlisle made him really mad.

[1155] Exactly.

[1156] At one point he did say that, well, good for you for being successful.

[1157] Oh, God.

[1158] He was like really trying to get me to go with him.

[1159] Yeah, he wanted to take you out.

[1160] Couldn't just say I like you and I'd like to have a conversation with you so I'm going to insult you.

[1161] Yeah, and then he was like, well, if you were staying another day, I'd take you blah, blah, blah.

[1162] And I was like, no, you wouldn't.

[1163] That requires me to go.

[1164] Yeah, yeah.

[1165] Oh, boy.

[1166] He eventually left, thank God.

[1167] Oh.

[1168] But it was nuts.

[1169] I have never experienced that in real time.

[1170] The real name.

[1171] A nagging approach.

[1172] Mm -hmm.

[1173] Yeah.

[1174] Now, here's an interesting thing.

[1175] It's fun to be playful and challenging in a conversation.

[1176] That part's fun.

[1177] That's what he thinks he's doing.

[1178] Like, if you said, all right, let's start from, I'm the guy, okay?

[1179] Okay.

[1180] Where are you staying?

[1181] The Carlisle.

[1182] Oh, my God, is Mr. Belvedere there?

[1183] The Drummond?

[1184] You haven't seen him in the lobby?

[1185] Yeah, no. That's kind of fun.

[1186] Yeah, that is.

[1187] Like, I'll make a joke about the Carlisle, but I'm not going to, like.

[1188] Make me feel shitty.

[1189] Mm -hmm.

[1190] Yeah.

[1191] Is you just soil your stuff?

[1192] Not yet, but I bet it's getting closer.

[1193] Oh, my God.

[1194] Oh, God, that makes me think of something.

[1195] So I was on the flight home.

[1196] Okay, I'm excited.

[1197] Well, first of all, I met a wonderful Barbara.

[1198] She was the purser on my flight.

[1199] She's a big arm cherry.

[1200] Uh -huh.

[1201] And she's coming to show.

[1202] What's the purser mean?

[1203] They're in charge of everything.

[1204] Oh.

[1205] They run the whole staff.

[1206] Oh.

[1207] So they're like the boss of all the flight attendants.

[1208] Oh, okay.

[1209] The purser.

[1210] And she's coming to show.

[1211] to the show.

[1212] That's so nice.

[1213] And she's with her daughter and some other flight crew members.

[1214] Hi, Barbara.

[1215] So Barbara, shout out, love you.

[1216] Secondly, and God, I hate for Barbara to hear this.

[1217] Oh, no. But I had gas.

[1218] Sure.

[1219] And here's where I got lucky.

[1220] I had a blanket.

[1221] Uh -huh.

[1222] So the first thing I did, and this might have made people curious, is I stood up and I laid the blanket on my chair.

[1223] Oh, okay.

[1224] Like, most people use a blanket to cover themselves.

[1225] Sure.

[1226] Or they leave it in the bag.

[1227] But I opened mine up and I put it on my chair.

[1228] This is what they're thinking at this point.

[1229] They're thinking, oh, he's like scared of germs.

[1230] Or he likes an extra layer of comfort between the leather or whatever.

[1231] Sure.

[1232] Luckily, I had my Danny Rick gear on, my Danny Ricardo sweatsuit, which is a very thick.

[1233] It is nice and thick.

[1234] It's very thick.

[1235] It's good quality.

[1236] You got at least a half inch of cotton there.

[1237] Then this blanket, thank God, was a good size kind of pilted down type deal.

[1238] and I was blasting, and it never smelled.

[1239] Great.

[1240] My Danny Rick pants and that fart blanket I laid down, did a perfect job.

[1241] And then another funny thing about farts on that plane, several different times.

[1242] It's an 11 -hour flight.

[1243] Yeah, you're going to have farts.

[1244] Well, not just me, and that's where this is going.

[1245] So I'm regularly walking up there to get chips, this and that, more Diet Coke, whatever.

[1246] And when you're walking the full length of the cabin, which was huge on this flight, You're walking by, I'd imagine, 20 rows.

[1247] Okay.

[1248] And every three, I'm smelling a unique fart.

[1249] Because people are sleeping because the flight is so long that, like, everyone's in their sleep, just...

[1250] Like, they don't even know.

[1251] Yeah, they don't know.

[1252] As you're walking, it's just, like, walking through one cloud after another of unique farts.

[1253] And then I would, of course, glance at, and try to figure out what person I thought, which is ridiculous.

[1254] You can't judge a fart by the cover.

[1255] But, of course, it's like, I'm seeing an old man. I'm like, oh, that's his.

[1256] You basically, and I hate to say this, you basically pick the least attractive person.

[1257] Of course you do.

[1258] And that's what's unfair.

[1259] And it's not fair.

[1260] No, I'm farting the most.

[1261] But I felt a little safe because there's like a 12 -year -old kid across the aisle for me. And I thought, oh, if this does start smelling, they'll think, oh, the kid doesn't know better.

[1262] The kid can't control himself yet.

[1263] He doesn't have enough practice controlling himself.

[1264] It's him.

[1265] But it was me, but it wasn't me because of the Danny Rick pants and the blanket.

[1266] If it was us, we would see right through that blanket.

[1267] Like, if we were on that flight, we would know it was you.

[1268] Oh, if I saw someone laying out the blanket, I'd be like, thank you, bro.

[1269] Good looking out.

[1270] You have gas and you're going to try to do your best and not make us smell it.

[1271] Because it is my deepest desire that no one ever smell a fart of mine.

[1272] You should know that.

[1273] But also, what's going to happen?

[1274] My intestines explode?

[1275] They would have.

[1276] You need to get it out.

[1277] Yeah.

[1278] Yeah, I had all that gluten in there from all those meals.

[1279] And I just had several cubic meters of gas in me. that just passed beautifully into the filter.

[1280] Here's the thing.

[1281] That wasn't an anomaly that when I walked through the cabin, there was little fart clouds everywhere.

[1282] The stewardesses know it.

[1283] I feel so bad for that.

[1284] This is when actually, to be honest, the masks helped.

[1285] Oh, my God, I want to put this out there as a question for flight attendants about farts.

[1286] That would be a great story.

[1287] Like, what's the worst one ever?

[1288] Do people complain?

[1289] Okay.

[1290] This is good.

[1291] This could make for a great story.

[1292] Okay.

[1293] All right.

[1294] Forget that though.

[1295] Given that it's so obviously a problem.

[1296] Yeah.

[1297] Why don't they hand out little cushions to sit on?

[1298] Fart pillows.

[1299] But like engineered, everyone gets one.

[1300] It would clean up the whole thing.

[1301] That's so unsanitary.

[1302] Why?

[1303] Because then the next person is sitting on someone else's old fart.

[1304] No, it goes exactly where the blankets go.

[1305] Where however they get clean, the far pillows, every flight get picked.

[1306] This would be a great gift to everyone who flies internationally.

[1307] Well, everywhere, really.

[1308] Yeah, but the longer the flight, the worse it is.

[1309] That's true.

[1310] I've been on some flights in New Zealand.

[1311] Oh, God.

[1312] Yeah.

[1313] Like, people are eating three meals.

[1314] Everyone woke up too early so they didn't get their dump out.

[1315] That's right.

[1316] That's right.

[1317] Oh, gross.

[1318] My heart goes out to all the people.

[1319] I mean, look, when you're sleeping, you don't know.

[1320] Like, I slept pretty much the whole flight there and back, and I'm sure I let some.

[1321] It's inevitable.

[1322] It's inevitable.

[1323] You have your guard down.

[1324] Yeah, vulnerable.

[1325] And you've relaxed everything down there.

[1326] That's what just happened on every other seat.

[1327] Ew, ew.

[1328] Especially the old -timer.

[1329] Ageism.

[1330] That's ageism, I think.

[1331] Well, they really can't control themselves as well.

[1332] It gets looser.

[1333] Yeah, it does.

[1334] That's why there's different products in the marketplace to help with the incontinence and other.

[1335] And look, the other thing is, just to be harsh on rich people, there can come some entitlement like you know i'm in first class or i'm in business class and i really need to be comfy and i don't really i paid and i don't really care if i'm disrupting other people because i paid a lot well there's i think you're on to something a little bit but i think i'm a little more gracious about it which is one they're in a pod yeah okay so they think they there's an illusion of privacy yeah so they're a little bit but that's like that's choosing to be ignorant It is and it isn't like I've had that moment I'm like I don't let this out I bet it stays in this little box Of course Yeah Let's just say willing Ignorance Yeah willing Yeah and that's okay Willful ignorance The second thing is Yeah you go This wasn't the case for me But there are Some of those first class tickets To like England and back Like 12 grand Yeah And for the people who spent 12 grand They're like You bet your ass I'm farting Like I spent 12 Yeah if you spent 12 grand And you don't want to sit there uncomfortable for nine hours Yeah, with your intestines potentially on the verge.

[1336] This can't be what Henrik was hoping for in his fact check.

[1337] Well, he's an anthropologist.

[1338] Yeah, maybe he would be interested in like how Western this is of us.

[1339] Yeah, but it's not just Western because there are Asian countries who fart a lot.

[1340] Well, some of them as we read, I think it's a sign, a good sign that the food was good.

[1341] Did we read that?

[1342] Yeah, remember I read it out loud.

[1343] I know.

[1344] I'm not going to say the source was great.

[1345] Okay, that's my.

[1346] But I was trying to remember there's like a limerick.

[1347] I never did find that.

[1348] about if you burp it's an insult to the chef but if you tut out your rear end I think it might, you know what it is I know exactly where it is now I can't believe I didn't remember Shells Leverstein?

[1349] Close, really close Austin Powers Oh he says a little saying Okay, okay Yeah that cute little saying about it being a blessing Okay actually Lynn let me look it up Austin Powers Um proverb About farting Pardon me for being rude It was not me. It was my food.

[1350] It just popped up to say hello, but now it's gone back down below.

[1351] Yes.

[1352] I guess it's not really what I thought it was, but it's still a cute little...

[1353] Say it one more time.

[1354] Okay.

[1355] Pardon me for being rude.

[1356] It was not me. It was my food.

[1357] Oh, I love that.

[1358] It just popped up to say hello, but now it's gone back down below.

[1359] Oh, wonderful.

[1360] Okay, so that actually makes way more sense.

[1361] When you said similar to Shell Silverstein and you said Austin Powers, that felt like a big stretch.

[1362] But this does sound like Shell Silverstein.

[1363] Big time, right?

[1364] Mm -hmm, mm -hmm.

[1365] But comedic, playful.

[1366] Really playful.

[1367] Mm -hmm.

[1368] Okay, on to...

[1369] Han Rick.

[1370] Yeah, global literacy today.

[1371] Oh.

[1372] 86 % literacy rate.

[1373] The whole planet.

[1374] That's impressive.

[1375] That's really good.

[1376] Global literacy?

[1377] Yeah.

[1378] I think that's great.

[1379] Although, again, just in the vein of what he is exploring, which is like, we all conclude that's a good thing.

[1380] Like, that it would be good.

[1381] to be able to read because you could get knowledge and dot -da -da -da -da -da.

[1382] But you lose facial recognition, huh?

[1383] It's just interesting.

[1384] I just say priorities are cultural.

[1385] 100%, yes.

[1386] I do think, though, as we are becoming more globalized, some of the priorities are becoming less cultural.

[1387] Like, in order to, you know, deliver goods from one country to another, like you have to share, kind of be able to read.

[1388] you have to probably be able to communicate.

[1389] Okay, so percentage U .S. bipolar, an estimate of 4 .4 % of U .S. adults.

[1390] Even higher than I think I said on here.

[1391] I think I want to say 3 % or something.

[1392] I think you did.

[1393] 4 .4, that's huge relative to Japan.

[1394] Okay, so the lifetime self -reported bipolar.

[1395] So, you know, in Japan, this is 2019, was 0 .6.

[1396] 0 .6 versus 4 .4.

[1397] That's like fucking 100x different.

[1398] It's a big diff.

[1399] Big, big dip.

[1400] I also do wonder, though, self -reported.

[1401] Like, here we are also a little more open to...

[1402] I'm so sorry, I just got to correct myself.

[1403] That's 10x.

[1404] That's not 100x.

[1405] Oh, okay.

[1406] Yep, sorry.

[1407] I couldn't correct it for you because I'm not good at that.

[1408] I know, but there's a listener.

[1409] I'd be like, you did that wrong, and they'd be right to say so.

[1410] No, I appreciate it.

[1411] Still, 10x of any disease would be like, what?

[1412] Yeah.

[1413] Like, if we got cancer, 10 times the rate is Japanese.

[1414] Yeah.

[1415] Okay, so maybe a factor in that, probably not one that would account for that much of a difference, but is that we are a little bit more open, especially recently, to discussing mental health and accepting it and diagnosing it and stuff like that.

[1416] I agree with you.

[1417] Like, I could see someone saying, well, culturally, they'd be less likely to admit it.

[1418] But I will say that this isn't something somebody admits or not.

[1419] This is someone takes the DSM and they are diagnosed that.

[1420] But the Japan one is self -reported.

[1421] It's not like the psychiatrists are reporting it.

[1422] Oh.

[1423] Okay.

[1424] You're Hammurabi's code.

[1425] Homorabi.

[1426] Amarabi's code.

[1427] And in case people don't know what that is, I have it here, but would you like to tell?

[1428] Yeah.

[1429] Hamarabi, I believe, was an early king in Mesopotamia, like, you know, in the Euphrates region.

[1430] And it was one of...

[1431] Babylon.

[1432] Babylon, right.

[1433] Okay, which is in there between the tigers and Euphrates.

[1434] I think it was the first written code of law, and it was dictated by him, and it was an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

[1435] And most of biblical law is based on Hamarabi's code.

[1436] Great job.

[1437] Did I?

[1438] Okay.

[1439] 1755 to 1750 BC, Babylonian legal text, longest, best -organized, and best -preserved legal text from the ancient Near East.

[1440] 282 rules, established standards for commercial interactions and set fines and punishments to meet the required.

[1441] of justice, carved onto a massive finger -shaped black stone steel that was looted by invaders and finally rediscovered in 1901.

[1442] Oh my God, it exists?

[1443] That's an artifact.

[1444] I love to see.

[1445] Let's see.

[1446] I'm on history .com, trusted brand.

[1447] One of it's in the Kmart corporate museum.

[1448] Parking lot.

[1449] It has an attraction in one of the Kmart parking lot.

[1450] Or like where you enter, it's just there.

[1451] A bunch of gum sticks to it.

[1452] but people put their gum on it as they pass.

[1453] Packed up and shipped to the Louvre in Paris, but this is a long time ago.

[1454] With an ear, it had been translated and widely publicized this early.

[1455] Okay, that was when they first found it.

[1456] This long time ago.

[1457] Where is a rich?

[1458] I can't find it.

[1459] Let me try one search.

[1460] Just do a search.

[1461] I'm going to do one search.

[1462] Because I'm just reading on history .com.

[1463] Yeah.

[1464] Who currently owns Amarabi's Code?

[1465] It is Mesopotamia.

[1466] present -day Iraq.

[1467] I think it's still in the Louvre.

[1468] Is it still?

[1469] It's still?

[1470] Shit.

[1471] We should have saw it when we were there.

[1472] Fuck, damn.

[1473] I know.

[1474] I'm pissed.

[1475] I was sitting there looking at Mona Lisa.

[1476] I'd rather seen Hoverami's Code.

[1477] Mona Lisa's code.

[1478] Mona Lisa has my initials.

[1479] Yeah.

[1480] MLP.

[1481] People don't know her last name is actually Patrick.

[1482] Oh my God.

[1483] Mona Lisa Patrick.

[1484] Lisa can't be her last name.

[1485] Or is it Mona of Lisa?

[1486] You know these Italians.

[1487] It was always from a town.

[1488] Is there a town, Lisa?

[1489] Oh, my God.

[1490] Liza.

[1491] Mona of Liza.

[1492] Okay, hold on.

[1493] Wow, it is, art is crazy.

[1494] Are you looking at a photo of it?

[1495] Yeah, like, it's just crazy.

[1496] It is crazy because it's like, why is that the most famous painting at Voltaire?

[1497] Yeah, best known, most visited, most written about, most sung about, most parodied work of art in the world.

[1498] And it's just an average photo of somebody.

[1499] I guess it's that she smirks and that wasn't common then?

[1500] She is.

[1501] She is playful.

[1502] It's the first capture of playfulness.

[1503] Well, and that is worth.

[1504] That would be.

[1505] You're right.

[1506] In fact, I'm glad I saw that instead of how Ravi's code.

[1507] The painting is probably the Italian noblewoman Lisa Garadini.

[1508] Ooh, Garadini.

[1509] Mama, me. Lisa, Garadini.

[1510] May I call you a mama?

[1511] See, see.

[1512] Mama Mia.

[1513] Papa Pia.

[1514] Baby got a diarrhea.

[1515] It's no problem.

[1516] Okay.

[1517] Lisa Gerardero Oh, is a Lisa Diakia?

[1518] No, Garradini.

[1519] Garadini.

[1520] Garadini.

[1521] Garadini.

[1522] Yeah.

[1523] Father of Gabon.

[1524] Sister of legendary Gabon.

[1525] Where's the Lisa come from?

[1526] Oh, the Lisa's her name.

[1527] Where's Mona come from?

[1528] Okay.

[1529] Mona being of vulgarity in Italian.

[1530] Oh.

[1531] It was vulgar Lisa.

[1532] Well, that's why she's smirking.

[1533] She is.

[1534] so playful.

[1535] Oh my gosh.

[1536] Vulgar, Lisa?

[1537] Wait.

[1538] Mona and Italian is a polite form of ad...

[1539] Oh, I'm getting mixed messages.

[1540] Okay.

[1541] Mona and Italian is a polite form of a dress originating as Madonna, similar to ma 'am, madame, or milady.

[1542] Oh.

[1543] In English, this became Madonna.

[1544] So it's Madame Lisa.

[1545] Yeah.

[1546] That makes sense.

[1547] Although the title of the painting, though traditionally spelled M -O -N -A in English is spelled in Italian as M -O -N -N -N -A.

[1548] N -A -L -A -L -A.

[1549] So, okay, M -O -N -A in Italian is vulgarity.

[1550] Okay.

[1551] But it's spelled actually M -O -N -N -A.

[1552] Onomatopoeia.

[1553] Oh, my gosh.

[1554] Okay.

[1555] I was just looking up good careers for people with autism.

[1556] Oh, interesting.

[1557] Wow.

[1558] Not based at all on the Mona Lisa.

[1559] No, I've pivoted.

[1560] No, because we talk about autism in the episode.

[1561] So some good careers, animal science.

[1562] Oh, sure.

[1563] Researcher.

[1564] Mm -hmm.

[1565] Accounting.

[1566] Mm -hmm.

[1567] Shipping and logistics.

[1568] Okay.

[1569] Art and design.

[1570] Right.

[1571] Many people with ASD are very visual -oriented and excel at creating 2D or 3D images.

[1572] Okay.

[1573] Manufacturing.

[1574] Computers.

[1575] We're not getting into computers.

[1576] That's what, okay.

[1577] So that's actually why I wanted to do this because you kept saying computer science over and over.

[1578] And then I wondered, like, is that...

[1579] Programming.

[1580] I know, but I just don't think, I mean, I'm sure, but it's hard to find out.

[1581] Yeah.

[1582] It's hard to know how many actual people are artistic.

[1583] Well, I would imagine the vast majority of people, is it ASD you're saying?

[1584] Yeah.

[1585] Okay, that our ASD are undiagnosed.

[1586] I think the younger people in our culture are diagnosed, but not the older people.

[1587] Correct.

[1588] So we have to wait to get this info.

[1589] Okay, information technology, that's, and then engineering.

[1590] Okay.

[1591] I just don't think it's just relegated to that area.

[1592] Oh, surely not.

[1593] But even if you look at, okay, so some of the ones you listed, if you're a 2D artist, you're not working with a ton of other 2D artists.

[1594] If you're a logistics person, you run the logistics.

[1595] A hundred percent.

[1596] The point that had been made to me is that you have co -workers for the first time, like many coworkers that are similar to you.

[1597] Yes.

[1598] And then now there's a lot of dating opportunities.

[1599] It is interesting.

[1600] Yeah.

[1601] Especially what he said also about like online dating and stuff where you can just match up exactly to who you are.

[1602] Right.

[1603] Yeah, it is interesting.

[1604] It makes everyone accessible in some ways.

[1605] I do wonder, though, I guess like a knee -jerk assumption would be that autistic folks would do better with other autistic folks.

[1606] Like maybe the whatever emotional thing you're expecting, it doesn't bother you when it's not there because you yourself don't have that need as much.

[1607] But again, that would be such a guess.

[1608] I don't know if what makes a better couple is an autistic person and a not autistic person.

[1609] There's just so much variation amongst people on the spectrum that it's hard.

[1610] I never watched this show, but people love it, love on the spectrum.

[1611] Yes, yes.

[1612] People really, really love it, and it does explore that, I think.

[1613] Yeah.

[1614] That's all.

[1615] Okay, well, great, great updates.

[1616] Great updates.

[1617] All right.

[1618] Okay, love you.

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