Joseph Henrich (professor of human evolutionary biology)

Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert expert on expert. I'm modest mouse and I'm joined by The shepherd we've switched chairs. I wonder if you can feel it in the centro Um, I feel small in the seat You look preposterously tiny in the lazy, but your feet barely come off the end of the cushion I said no they don't even like Ben like they just stick straight out. That's right It's not even that they don't touch the floor.

They're not even bent. Do your feet touch the floor in this? Oh god. Yes You're so much taller than me.

Yeah, that's that's just occurring to you here Easy for me to forget. Seven years into our friend. Yeah, I can't forget this is a long time coming because I've been talking about incessantly My favorite book I've read I think in the last year or so is the weirdest people in the world how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous This book it really shook my thinking it did. I feel like it was a watershed moment for you Oh, thank you.

Very good. Yeah, definitely a before and after. Do you remember where you were when you read that'll be what people ask? Yeah, I see it all the time now.

I see it all the time and then talking to me gave us even more tidbits Yeah, it was really fascinating. I really enjoyed it as well We think different y'all if you're listening to this probably you think different and you're considered weird probably if you listen to this Yeah, weird western educated industrial rich Democratic 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 This was a unify. Oh to the apex to the apex. This is incredible.

This is mind-expanding. I hope you enjoy Joseph Henrik Hello, sir. Can you hear us? Hi, I can hear you.

Oh wonderful. Yes. Yes. Okay.

Good. Who do you find more attractive? Just right out of the gate You're both beautiful. Oh wonderful.

I hope you know that I've been just feverishly pushing on the team to get you. I love your book It's incredible. Thank you. Do you do a lot of press and interviews and such?

Not too much. Maybe a podcast every month or so. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a fair amount That's a tenable schedule, I suppose.

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 and I come into it with Having already majored in anthropology. So a lot of the concepts I'm already pretty hip to and even with that there's a lot of economic theory in it. There's a lot of psychology in it 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 Evolterari book. 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 and they're thinking and right out of the gates we learn in your book that this is not the case 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 Like let's start there if I were to ask you to tell me about yourself What would you list and what would other people list right?

Psychologists do this by using something called a 20 statement test where they have people complete the statement I am and then finish it off I could say something like I am a scientist. I am a kayaker I'm curious and those would be characteristics that would tell you about me but people in lots of places might finish up by saying You know, I'm Jessica's father I am Ross's brother and I'm our his friend which tells you about my relationships and kind of where I fit into the social network 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 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 so yeah, you say that if you ask the I am test You're gonna 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 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 and say an fMRI it would just show different networks and stuff? How does it vary? So I start the book with the example of reading and so when people learn to read we can actually see that they get specialized circuitry in the left hemisphere They get a thicker corpus callosum they get whole brain activation for speech even though what they're being trained to do is read And so you actually have physical changes to the brain as a consequence of basically a cultural training routine So throughout most of you in history nobody learned to read so people had thinner corpus callosa And then gradually universal reading began to spread with the Protestant Reformation and whatnot in the 16th century Yeah, so this was fascinating for me and I never questioned how we had this literacy revolution and it was basically Martin Luther breaks off from the Roman Catholic Church His kind of tenant is individuals should have a relationship with God and they themselves should read this book There shouldn't be an intermediary or a sage So he goes on this great quest to make the world literate walk us through kind of like pre-Martin Luther post-Martin Luther literacy rates throughout Europe So in Germany you go from less than 1% you know in a couple centuries later you're up 50 60% and then by the 19th century You're quite high 80 90% and then of course in the modern world today Lots of places have quite high rates of literacy 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 in our minds face different challenges We actually get new hardware one of the challenges to understanding psychology is we have this digital computer metaphor So people tend to think about their brains like a computer and they expect there to be hardware and software So psychologists often think they study the hardware and they leave it to the sociologists and anthropologists to study the software But it turns out our brains are somewhere in between where they can create firmware They can make new hardware new connections that don't exist if you don't experience a certain environment Yeah, and I think the most generic paradigm for that is like nature is the hardware nurture is the software or cultures the software So we can see where this reading phenomena was beneficial in many many ways But also it comes with some loss which I like there's some facial recognition loss it comes at a price, right?

Yeah, so you can think about it So we only have so much neurogeography And so if we start using that to specialize in one thing we get less good at other things 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 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 So if you study facial recognition in literate populations, there's not much right hemisphere bias It's only literate populations that you get this and it looks like I mean there's some controversy around this But that readers are less good at facial recognition and people who are schooled in general They're less good at spatial navigation for example So, you know if you ask me or if you ask someone to say point to Philadelphia, I'm in Boston People in lots of societies could point to Philadelphia be on target 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 And especially now with you know GPS on your phone people are even worse than they used to be That makes me feel better that's a good reason for why I have no spatial awareness whatsoever Because you went to college I did a lot of reading when I was little That's interesting because yeah I did very little as it is like second I have a great sense of direction The other great part of this book in my opinion is I often tried to explain to people the notion of cultural relativity And there's these kind of juicy examples you might give to get people interested like in fanticide among the inner wind right On face value you're like well, this is a horrific amoral thing 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 in that time and space And mostly the joy of anthropology for me was like stepping out of the judgment in the verdict And just simply learning some difference just observing some difference And I think we all have a real lack of humility And myself included again because we think our brains work the same And we think we've discovered a lot of things and we rarely think about how unique it is So I think your book is like an incredible exploration into humility and constantly questioning Is this how humans are supposed to be or simply you know, Martin Luther doesn't come on to the planet earth We're on a completely different trajectory of thought in that there's some fun moral examples in this book And I would love to just talk about the rob bob briefcase situation Yeah, so we're interested in the role of intentionality in other mental states and making moral judgments So folks in weird societies often have the intuition that whether someone meant to do something Whether they stole something on purpose or did a bi accident Whether they you know started a fire on purpose or by accident Really matters for how guilty or punishable a person is But it turns out that westerners aren't the extreme end of the distribution And how central intentions are and how wary they are about mental states 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 So the role of intentionality seems to vary a lot in the anthropological record So we did these experiments where we gave people in different societies vignettes 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 And what we found is just a great deal of variation So the place where I work in one of these remote islands in the Pha-Gin archipelago People seem to judge those as equally bad and we ask 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? The scenario is a guy is with another guy their friends The one guy puts his bag down the other guy picks it up takes it and walks away The next example is both people have a bag they both set them down and then the person leaves by accident grabbing the wrong bag They're saying that's bad? Equally bad Yeah, so if you look at it from the point of view of the victim They lose their bag in either case right Because it's a busy market the person just leads and accidentally takes the wrong bag home So the victim is out of bag whether it was stolen on purpose or by accident The same thing from the point of view of the family of someone who was killed by accident They've lost a relative so they're less concerned about whether it was by accident or do that you know irresponsible behavior or something So that's what we found that we found that across a bunch of different domains quite strong results And you know when you begin to look at it really then makes sense in the history So if you start to read the churches thinking about the law and say the high middle ages Both legal scholars and theologians are thinking through the role of mental states and they're thinking about in terms of sin What's the sin what's the worse sin and mental states are playing a big role And this is interesting because it actually becomes part of Protestantism So we mentioned Martin Luther and there you have a religion we're getting into heaven is all about your mental state So my faith alone was the famous debate back in those days Did you have to have good works or was just belief enough and at least some Protestant denominations thought belief was enough to get you into heaven So you can see the kind of culmination of that process How is it adaptive or beneficial for someone in this fajean archipelago to not assess that because you have many examples We'll get into where all of a sudden it becomes crystal clear definitely these delayed gratification things we think are universal So what makes it irrelevant? Well, there's a couple of ideas on that and I don't think we've nailed it yet as to why it's the case But one idea would be that this is relevant when you're assessing someone outside your local group Because say you have two clans and this would have been relevant to pre-christian euro You have two clans and someone kills someone from another clan both clans are going to think they're guys innocent End up with a debate about hidden mental states, which can't be established 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 Let's just kind of make a decision about what the blood payment is the blood money the bear gelt based on what we can agree on Which is someone got killed and we know the killer was that kind of thing Oh, that makes a ton of sense So it's like super pragmatic without like a complicated jurisprudence system where you're gonna have a group of people evaluate it and actually Maybe get to the bottom of that out of the gate you recognize this will never go anywhere So anthropologists have noticed that for a long time 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 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 gonna have success if we argue about this So it turns out the institutions and norms about how we're gonna negotiate this may penetrate our minds and affect our you know kind of on-the-fly judgments Oh my god, isn't that's interesting so fascinating the other thing and this was presented in you vol's book human rights is a story It's a western story. We have a concept of human rights We think there's some kind of you know morality principle But if you live in a different context our version of morality is maladaptive So how we lived for 150,000 years when you came upon a stranger this notion that everyone would have a right and in fact Everyone you come across was probably the person that was gonna perpetrate your death So you can't possibly have a morality towards that person I mean, there's a lot of research from people like Sarah Matthew and Rob Boyd Studying how people think about the moral circle and what you're saying seems to be true Certainly in some populations still today that when you get to the edge of the moral circle the people on the outside It's okay to kill them basically in fact it could be perfectly fine to kill them or even encourage to kill them it could be a row up to kill them Because they're the outroop and there is source of problem and they may be the raiding you and so you know, it seems perfectly sensible They probably killed some of your relatives or ancestors So there is this moral circle where the responsibility ends sharply 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 seed now is this way of thinking so it's too much related things one is analytic thinking Which is where when you want to explain things you assign properties So if you want to explain atoms you assign charge or weight or some kind of property the atom then you go from there If you want to explain people you assign dispositions personalities and the idea is that if he's outgoing then that explains why he's so social At the party or something like that extra version so those are dispositions and putting that in a law context What you want to explain why you can't do something to somebody else or why you can you assign to them human rights And then if they have these human rights right to life liberty and property John Locke then a bunch of kind of legal deductions Followed from that 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 And it's a completely different approach in other places like China where people see things in terms of lineages families and relationships How much you're going to get punished say for striking someone really depends on your social relationship with them If a son strikes a father the punishment is different than if a father strikes a son and then you get into all kinds of more complicated things Everything you kind of listed right there like okay property So that's an abstract notion that anyone can own anything 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 say that is now officially mine. That's very bizarre Yeah in societies with intensive kinship that you know had clans or these large families property was often communal So you don't even own anything as an individual you owned it as part of an ethnic identity or a lineage identity or something like that Right, so you couldn't say like no you can't take this from me because me couldn't have this again I think we rarely think of how many layers we build up on something that's very very subtle that's foundational We take so much pride in like who we are and that we think we have a say and that really and we don't or in other societies You wanted well. Yeah, but like we're born in China.

We would be completely different people based on literally just the structure of the country It should be so surprising. I mean like in the modern world today We're getting a lot of pushback on human rights countries like China and elsewhere saying you know Oh, bother about this human right stuff. That's your way of thinking. Yeah, so I would love to hear your opinion like we're proceeding currently with this Russia Ukrainian debacle with the assumption they're thinking the way we think Or they should think the way we think yeah like oh well He wouldn't do this because it's gonna result in a loss of income and people are gonna be upset You know we're kind of trapped in what we think would be a logical next move how much variation is there even between say Russia leaving communism?

Some 30 years ago. They think differently. Can we comprehend how they think one important lesson? I must thought about writing op-ed on this is that there are these experiments looking at Russia going back to at least the 2000 so a common finding among western subjects is that if you have a public goods game so in a public goods game Do an econ lab participants are given like 20 bucks They can contribute as much of the 22 a common pool whatever goes into the common pool is increased and then distributed equally amongst the group So this is a basic cooperative dilemma and the question is what are the conditions that lead to cooperation?

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 the free riders will respond by contributing And then you can go up and you can get pretty good stable cooperation if you play the game into the future 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 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 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 and so they did counter punishment And so this diffused the cooperation inducing effect of punishment And you know met the group didn't get to full cooperation They got into a spiral of homorabi's coders A spiral of punishment and counter punishment because it was like how dare you punish me For doing what I thought was appropriate and this was done at a few different sites in Russia And you get basically the same story repeatedly And then a real world example which almost made it into the book it didn't you remember the game show who wants to be a millionaire Oh, yeah So they did a version of this in Russia and there were these lifelines where you didn't think you knew the answer You could ask the crowd and the crowd would vote in Russia the crowd would give you the wrong answer They would intentionally not pick the one thing Diffuse that lifeline and 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 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 Very finite view of everything if you have a limited number of lands, you know, if most your wealth is in land and you have fixed land That'll happen 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 And that could put them in a zero-sum mindset. So there's a few different ways this can happen I think we have it here. I think we have weirdly both 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, no, we don't want them to have any of that because it's too much for one person And I think so often again, we're insunaring you in a lot of pop culture 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 so parasilt originally the Kardashians and it's very interesting because if you think of them as just lottery winners They would not be upset 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 like It's at play in the way we feel about lottery winners and stuff. I think yeah Yeah, and so that would be interesting way to study it across societies It's looking at how people think about lottery winners.

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 So it was left upon the hundred members of their group to self-regulate And then the consequence of which was quite egalitarian, right? Because you could never have a really despotic 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 So it had this kind of natural egalitarian force to it.

How did that change and what were the outcomes of that? Probably the largest change in a movement away from relatively more egalitarian societies occurs with the origins of agriculture So you begin to get larger scale societies and Social structures where one clan for example can put itself above other clans 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 It's 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 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 stratification occurs when say the ruling clans stop intermarrying with the lower clans really a kind of people are breeding with and where the All-spare come 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 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 marriage We kind of assume as monogamous by nature or probably always was and that of course isn't the truth 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 the oldest and Human institutions is really the family But most weird people don't think of the families being all that important because if you're from an monogamous nuclear family Maybe you got a couple of siblings you might know a few of your cousins But it's really not that big a deal whereas over most of human history men would have been polygynous They would have been half siblings people would have been enmeshed in these kin-based societies kin-based networks They would have been the main source of security the group that works together for production So they're both production security redistribution would have occurred there if you get injured That's the people are gonna take area if you get old those are the people are gonna take area So you're really depending on this family network And then you're kind of distrustful the further you get from that family network and 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 and monogamous marriage of the kind that you were mentioning is really comes about with Christianity I mean the kind of pure monogamy that we have today So 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 And then there is this other thing that people need to recognize which is you're living in a group of hundred people He related to most people so there has to be a migration be it petrolocal or matrolocal where you're sending away either the boys Or the girls very rare that they send the boys away But it's generally the women to prevent genetic uniformity and deformation There has to be this constant training of humans to keep the genetics healthy in your group So tell us what that does to the mindset and how reversing that how that affects the mind So the interesting thing about weird families is that we have what anthropologists call the local residents where the new husband and wife Set up family independent of either the other families across human societies typically it was what you said Which is one of the other so one sex is coming into a new community and then building new social relationships And whatnot and then being together helps build the kind of social and emotional bonds without people So how that movement pattern works affects who bonds with who 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 sons and grandfathers who are all part of the same lineage community Whatnot that have these really strong bonds and often you get patch of local stuff when you have violent threats Right because you can find together as males to defend the group right you send your son out and hope that you guys can make some peace Right Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare Why did Christianity emphasize monogamy? Yeah, please walk us through so monogamy and the dwelling away from your family of I recall correctly both happened as projects I was mentioning the Athenians case technically Rome also had monogamous marriage But they had publicly from the brothels and sex slaves and of course many members of the Roman Empire were not themselves under Roman law So like all the barbarian tribes would have also had pollution as marriage So in part the church gets some monogamy from the fact that Rome was monogamous But then it adds these taboos on cousin marriage it ends sex slavery it gives women the choice So the notion of saying I do for the bride is introduced they're trying to end arranged marriage and there's a big debate So part of it is that Christianity was very concerned with sex And so if you look at saying Augustine and whatnot he's sort of obsessed with well not having sex and this kind of comes into Christianity and affects it But it's also beginning to expand the incest taboos which are being placed on these more distant cousins So there's all this concern in Christian writings about say plagues hitting cities due to incest and they don't mean brother sister sex They mean sex amongst cousins and they think that God hates that and you know, it's kind of punishing them Well that one's kind of fear derived but there's also some kind of strategic Power plays by the Catholic Church Well, they figure out ways to monetize these things so later in church history they begin selling dispensations So Europeans still want to marry their cousins, but they have them pay So you can marry some person paying the church and getting special permission So they also sell annulments so the church does away with divorce because what happens is if you don't let rich powerful men be Polygynous then what they do is they do sequential marriage So the married one woman divorces when she gets a little bit old and marry another one They keep doing that but so the church ends divorce to stop that But again, you can pay your way out of that if you want And how about the family dwelling am I writing that there was a big push for both people to leave and start a new home?

What was that all about? Like lots of societies lots of European societies had had a bride price or dowry and so in bride price you pay the bride's family for her essentially Still common in Latin African societies and elsewhere and then dowry is when the woman comes with money into the men's house And the church wants to stop that and it's not totally clear to me why they wanted to stop that But they didn't think there should be all these marriage transfers and you shouldn't be buying women and stuff like that So they just say okay What you should do is give that and help the couple set up a new household You know if you get married you get off and get all these gifts that are supposed to give you your pots and pans and stuff like that Well that goes back to this tradition of trying to help the couple set up a new household independent of the others Because if you're moving in with your mother-in-law, you can just use her pots But if you're setting up a new household, then you need all the gear. Oh my gosh, okay Let's talk about the marshmallows the spoils go to the marshmallows to those who wait or however It's raised but let's introduce delayed gratification and when we plot it globally what it predicts So one of the things that psychologists and economists are interested in is economists call it temporal discounting You can just think of it as patience So if I give you a choice between you know a hundred dollars today or a hundred and sixty dollars in three months Which one you're gonna pick well if you're patient you'll go with 160 and get the more money But if you really want your gratification now and you want to go out drinking tonight You'll just take a hundred bucks and go out tonight We can measure that using that kind of approach in different societies and there's quite a bit of variation Of course there's variation within countries among individuals within the same country But also between countries and it seems to be associated with another thing that psychologists have measured in children Which is this marshmallow task and this is kind of like way to torture young children You put them in a room with a marshmallow and you tell them they can eat the marshmallow But if they're willing to wait till the experimenter comes back they'll get to marshmallows And then the experimenter goes out and just waits until the kid caves in and the girls are so cute They're like covering their eyes right and so some kids have strategies Which is if you just sit there look at the marshmallow you definitely lose for sure Yeah, so the smart kids figure out ways to like sing a song or look away from the marshmallow and do you on their sleeve? Right 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 kind of things at least in the modern West we associate with you know prosperity and longevity and things like that Well, right so on this spectrum sweet and this like apex patients Oh and Rwandans are very low on the opposite end of the spectrum and then of course the outcome of it is a much bigger economy higher pay higher Education, but I think well minimally they question why that is right and then the worst assumption would be like something guns, germs and steels Address which is like populationally speaking they have some different brain structure that is preventing them from being that way But my favorite example is it's in Africa somewhere I can't remember exactly where but they're offering people kind of food right and they would play along so you can get this much food Today and go away or you can come back to my own you this much food or you come back in a third day There's an enormous amount of food so walk us through that because I was like that's so much more logical what this person does in that society So are you thinking of the I think they were soup cubes if you took more of the soup cubes and you waited for the more soup cubes You were gonna end up giving them all the way anyway And this I think is one of the main things that can help us understand this variation So where I work in Fiji I do ethnographic field work in this island in Fiji 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 and they could almost never keep it because some cousin would get sick or you know Need a medical procedure or what have a wedding or something like that and suddenly, you know all the relatives get tapped for resources And your little cash would go away 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 in a sense because you have obligations to all those people and then even conceptually the soup cubes won't kind of like this I think it was like she could take these soup cubes back and then she would have enough for herself Finally did she could bring some back and it would basically she would be able to share with everyone in her group But then the third option is she would be bringing some back just a stockpile She would have already shared it 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 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 gonna Have anyone to step in and help us right ever well And I also would imagine if you live in a more dangerous society You don't even know what your life is gonna be three weeks from now You don't know if you'll be alive So why wouldn't you just take what you can get immediately right?

So there's consume now But the other thing it's like so they do this experiment that I talked about in Liberia with men and they would start to save and then Something bad would happen they would get their money stolen 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 Otherwise eventually someone's gonna you know find your cash and take it you're inviting marauders really yeah You're making yourself a target yet this little principle would be completely maladaptive there And again we would take that for granted that that's what a quote smart person or logical person or whatever how we think about it 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 world's we confront and those worlds are affected by whether we have secured banks or whether we have to store for the future in social Relationships so the one of the things that lots of interviews tell you is that people get stuff one of the reasons They're giving it away to others rather than stockpiling it is because in some sense They're storing future security in the goodwill of others right? That's the investment is having been a great share and you will then receive a love at that's in a world where it's all about social relationships right? Institutions 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 the spectrum of Life you're born makes all the differences to who you are well I think it'll definitely predict a range of outcomes quite well, but I also think you still have free will What do you think about that Joseph? 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 is not found other places because a lot of the moralizing religions have an ocean of free will but you get a real big push for the idea that individuals can make free choices and Some of the experiments suggest 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, but that's probably because their circle is broader, right?

Yeah, 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. It's broader the experiments that I have in mind or they've been done mostly with college students or others like that around here and what they do is they give someone a philosophical argument that tries to persuade them of greater free will or less free will and When people are reminded or persuaded that there's free will is more real than they give them some kind of charity giving tasks or something The same person would be more likely to get to charity when they've been a little bit persuaded that free will is more likely to exist Well, that is interesting to extrapolate from that Which is like if determinism is real then I don't really need to do anything so I can alter the future in some sense, right? It makes you powerless, right? 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 or grab one I'll go up and I'll give money to a stranger and I will walk out trusting I can eat that without dying so tell us how that is evolved economically now We have these impersonal transactions and yeah, so across so many societies, you know exchanges old and humans But this idea of just freely exchanging with a lot of trust 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 and you had no way to verify quality? So you tend to not to make many exchanges and there was just a lot less exchange in the world 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 could have more exchange have more economic growth You can have more specialization So I make the case that this shift towards monogamous nuclear families and away from these kinship structures where people were forced into Communities of strangers like what became occupational fields 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 That's when you get the cultivation of trust and guilt to 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 So then you've got to be kind of trusting and fair with strangers because the other members of the guild are monitoring you 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 And so that seems to kickstart this market integration you get more trust and more fairness among strangers and then more commerce And you get the commercial revolution. Okay, I think maybe this would be the time now What am I absolute favorite? Aspects is first evolution is like everyone did everything probably sex separated So you were gathering if you were female and you're hunting what not if you're male But as we become a grarian 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 early modern periods I think 13th 14th century people are becoming obsessed with time So you get the spreading of clocks towards the end of that period But before that people are using hour glasses and candles and other kind of techniques to measure time and there begins to be this equation Between time and money and first it's used for overtime only But then people begin paying hourly rates or piece rates or things like that 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 a save time the more time But we also think time is money so that of course races to Ben Franklin But it seemed like before Ben you know he had a way of crystallizing things It was in his like guys and people were thinking about time and money together in a way that you don't see in other societies were in the past Well, yeah, when you think of it the most simple terms Yeah, you imagine that originally it was like hey, I'm gonna give you a sheep if you build this fence It's task oriented. I will give you X when you complete Y and now that's off the table 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 again We take it for granted that's how it works 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 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 Candleholder 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 I think the root of so much of our anxiety as humans is we just live in too big of a group We don't know where we're innately obsessed with our we alphabetic gamma and then without that clear distinction We are left to try to cobble together that in a very abstract way So people just start accumulating these knickknacks and being willing to work longer so that they can be perceived as somewhat higher class Have I done justice to that point? Yeah, and just make one additional connection to what we talked about at the beginning was we talked about how Westerners are we're people are very individualistic they're focused on themselves their own attributes and accomplishments But consuming was kind of a way of signaling who you are and your uniqueness and your values So pocket watches were so important because merchants and carpenters and craftsmen and lots of people who engage in a 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 so if I'm wearing a watch You know that's signaling that to you and servants want to have a watch because the master wants me to come in at 2 o'clock And clear the food right and so I got to be in there at 2 o'clock If you don't have a watch we tend to think it works around it by time everything But you know imagine a world with many fewer time pieces or you know you got to go by the Sun or something It's almost impossible.

It sounds liberating. I know I'm jealous and you recognize immediately that nothing could get done Right like we couldn't have this conversation how on earth would we know like I don't know I'll hang out for a few hours and hopefully that'll overlap Hopefully you'll show up yeah Oh, and that's what it feels like sometimes when you're doing ethnographic field work 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 drive will show up at 9 30 or something like that By the way you can experience that even in a micro level when you just go between Western countries like when I film movies in Italy It is way more loosey goosey. Yeah Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare We are so over scheduled here even last night in the middle of the night I woke up to check the time in the middle of the night. I woke up to check the time Yeah, you have to check and my phone was dead.

I thought it was doing its software update But I was like oh my god Oh my god, it's dead and I spent like 20 minutes trying to revive it I was like how am I gonna wake up how am I gonna wake up on time? How am I gonna make sure I get here on time like I was panicked? That's how obsessed we are 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 This was before digital clocks were everywhere and they look to see how much they were off And so in some places, you know in Greece or whatever the clock was like 10 minutes off Oh, wow in Switzerland, you know is 30 seconds off or something. Oh, oh, okay So we're part of the problem here.

So we're obsessed with the social sciences 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 and you point out all we really know about is the thinking of graduate students That's all we've pretty much learned in the social sciences. Tell us how yeah most of this data or knowledge is gathered and what it says Yeah, so I mean I began critiquing this in 2010 with the paper version of the weirdest people in the world And there we just reviewed the available psychological evidence and we showed all this interesting variation But what we came across as we were putting all that together This is what two collaborators Steve Hine and Argo and Zion we found out that 96% of all psychological experiments are done with weird subjects Mostly at the time with University undergraduates So psychologists would just bring their kids from their university into the labs and that's the basis of the textbooks So there are all these grand claims made in the textbooks at least until recently when completely unqualified They were assumed to be things about human psychology, but it was actually things about American undergraduates So I mentioned 96% that would be Westerners, but 70% of all subjects at that time were American undergraduates So you know thrown out the Brits and the Australians and the Canadians That's kind of this thin slice of this highly unrepresentative sample It was also true of behavioral economics at the time in the last 10 years economics has made a lot of changes and I think improved this Psychology has made fewer changes because they've gone to the internet now So a lot of experiments are run on this service that Amazon provides called Emterk where you can get people online to do your experiments But that's still almost entirely Americans and it's Americans willing to work for a sense of question online So that's some other strange thin slice of humanity Well, right you could almost say all of the studies thus far are conclusions about kids who waited for the marshmallow Right right because they went to college and all that sort of thing 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 began the behavior So it's like oh we found this out. Well, we found that out about the people that are successful in our society So that's now a benchmark or that's an attribute We should circle and nurture and then that leads to this prosperity and this kind of runaway train of our Accomplishments what are we losing? What is the cost?

What is the price of this again? It's just to be pointed out objectively these weird people have created way more shit They have stockpiles of everything they're the wealthiest of all time They have access to the most knowledge of all time so it has what we would probably call some benefit But what are the blind spots of all this? Yeah, I mean I try to really highlight the blind spots as I go along So I have different subheadings in the book like missing the forest and that's a section on analytic versus holistic thinking So one of the things we really see emerging strongly is an emphasis on analytic thinking So focusing on objects assigning them properties thinking about things is moving linearly through time as opposed to cyclically through time But folks that are more holistic tend to focus on relationships and background and the connections between things So one of the things that science has had to do is deal with the fact You know first we broke everything down big reductionism get it down to its small parts We have atoms and genes and molecules and things like that But then we got to figure out how they fit together and so then later you get work in social networks or collegey Things where you try to put together stuff and networks and whatnot. Oh they interact with one another Yeah, and the other thing that's interesting is innovation So if you look at the sort of collective intelligence of groups It's not that analytic thinkers are the best 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 way and focus Now really on the small parts you're reminding me of a great part of the book It's been about six months since I read it So some of it is just completely vanished into the ether But you're reminding me there's a whole section on how it's changed our education and our thinking 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 Yeah, 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 So what we do is experiments and we have what's called a transmission chain So some person has to solve some difficult problem It could be tying a complex system of knots or it could be learning to use a difficult to use image editing program And then they can each pass what they learn onto a next generation and then on the next generation for 10 generations And then each generation can look back at the previous generation and sometimes we restrict them to just learning from one teacher So everybody can learn from dad right their cultural dad or they can learn from anybody So they have a community and they just can go to the best person and when we let people learn from the best person We get rapid accumulation of knowledge where people get better and better And so this is core to this notion that we really need trust and strangers and whatnot because the more we do that the more we can share ideas Create novel recombination and drive innovation and tap into different ways of thinking like holistic versus analytic thinking What we found so in one case we would train up the first round of experts And so they'd be really good at the task before they started down the transmission chain And we found that when you could learn from anyone you would maintain most of the knowledge that the first person had But if you can only learn from one person you can actually lose knowledge 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 So the British regenerated cement and pain glass and all that kind of thing Oh wow, there was a whole technological set that disappeared Yeah, so Europe gets disconnected and lost some technology that the Romans had generated And then you know they recreated later But there's a period of time when people were living amongst the ruins that they themselves could not build Because none of the knowledge was passed down to them They had lost key knowledge 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 So in my previous book the secret of our success I look at how there were these inuit So this Arctic farge is living in northern Greenland and an epidemic hit and killed their master canoe makers Which left them stranded in northern Greenland and they gradually began to lose invaluable technologies because they were disconnected from the larger Collective brain of the other inuit and then when things started to get 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 and they got all the knowledge they had lost That was stored in the minds of the other rest of the population 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're down to two or three people that could have figured out How to fix these and then they had to start a whole program to re-teach people this kind of arcane way of dealing with masonry And that was kind of real time in our society One of my favorite examples is the US military has these tried-and-submarines and there's a catalyst for the tried-and-submarines for the nuclear weapons called fogbank It's super secret and they made a whole bunch of this catalyst in the 1970s and 80s And then the engineers all retired and then in the 2000s They ran out of fogbank so they had to make more so they got out the recipe book You know that's what you need right, but they couldn't recreate it 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 Oh, and when they recated they had better technology So there were fewer impurities and it prevented them from recreating it So when you have secret programs you can lose knowledge too because the engineers who knew had retired right and the way had doing it had changed subtly Do you think the internet in some sense is gonna safeguard us from any future loss? Yeah, I mean potentially I think it certainly can help 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 I worry a little bit about that things like YouTube videos can help preserve more tacit knowledge Which is something new things you can't write down but you could show in a video could be preserved that way and that could be a big benefit 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 Sincerely if 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 I'm gonna send it back. Oh shit. Oh, if you use this stick, you know, whatever it is And I think oh my god, I would quit couldn't be done we get an arguments all time I'm like if I were to post the video Monica I could do a feeling you're doing it is a pneumatic drill I have on What do we do?

I magic Yeah, no, that's super cool 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 And there is a point which you can be too interconnected So imagine you have a hard problem and there's a bunch of solutions But some of the solutions aren't too good if you have a big group That's not very connected different parts of the overall group may end up with different solutions And then finally whatever the best solution is can spread to everybody else But imagine that everybody goes for one of the suboptimal solutions and then that's the only thing around other people might try and their Initial efforts aren't going to be as good as the existing solution So they might not ever find a really good stuff. There is a worry about being too interconnected You always want to be kind of only loosely connected 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 people be offended 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 if early on you could have said Well, that's the solution to pandemics, you know, everyone should behave the way that population did 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 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 we need a world where all those different varieties exist and we benefit from each of them when the time is right 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 and cities that are most innovative are also most likely to spread diseases sure Interacted they pass ideas around and they pass pathogens around 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 so like a lot of us here didn't have the same level of fear because we could be in our house by ourselves 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 gonna 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 gonna be able to make some conclusion about us humans and what the right Orongue is it's like no there's gonna be some really adaptive strategies over here that come with a price and vice-versa And we shouldn't aim to completely homogenize all of us because we'll lose all of those Yeah, 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 so you really got to take advantage of variation selection So you want a lot of different groups trying different stuff So you can use those as mini laboratories and then take what works best because we just don't have the cognition to like okay This is what's gonna work best, you know, right? And even by the way boy I just happen to want to talk about algorithms and I think I understand algorithms in a different way that I did And which is like an algorithm in its simplest sense is you're gonna have a data And then you're gonna have some definition of success and then the algorithm's gonna look at all the data and see which combination Produces this thing but implicit in labeling success. You might fuck the whole thing up So if our success was just stopping transmission that somehow might have counteracted the innovation I don't know, you know It's like you got to be really careful that you think you want success to be this or that even the best success is unknown Okay, again, I fucking love your book.

He brings it up all the time I can't imagine how many people have to hear my version of your book and these are people that have their own great books One other thing I just want to touch on and then I want to ask you a couple of because you ultimately you teach human evolution and biology at Harvard So I have some really sacrilegious thought recently about evolution I want to hit you with but before that I guess I'm curious to you Have you read dopamine nation or the molecule of more either of those? No, okay There are also a lot of biological differences dopamine being the chemical that says stand up go look for more food in essence 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 And so when you measure the US population for rate of bipolarism I want to say and don't quote me But I want to say it's around 3% and then if you look at Japan which is at virtually zero Immigration there are very homogeneous population that were there and they stayed there and no one came in there It was like a point zero seven bipolar There's been a bunch of bizarre unnatural selections that have happened even within these different countries or populations that are really fascinating again Change your psychology we Americans were abnormally high Dopomogenic people so is the argument that that's due to the genes because there's lots of cultural factors that could affect that as well I buy these selection arguments I think they're plausible the argument goes that we have a genetic predisposition to dopamine baseline levels 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 the sea for a month They already had a really high rate of dopamine a baseline dopamine 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 So yes, I imagine there'd be a lot of trauma nurture aspects to bipolar But just as far as a genetic baseline argument is ours is much higher than some of the more homogenous non-migrating countries Okay, I mean I have to take a look at the book in the argument 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 since women began entering a labor market in the 1970s And then especially since online dating has occurred people are better able to select me to share their traits So for example imagine two engineers or two economists getting together married and then having babies they have baby economists and baby engineers So we think that's gonna be pushing out some of these distributions and adding more variance to the distributions But I mean we want polygenic scores. We want to know exactly what genes are doing this Yeah, that's interesting you say that because I was on a show that was all about autism for six years 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? 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 and then their social skill sets happen to match up beautifully And so that was one of the explanations of the explosion in autism, right?

Yeah, and you know now with online, you know, people can match all kinds of characteristics 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. It shouldn't change the mean but it should change the variance. Mm-hmm. Yeah, wow That's fascinating.

This isn't the hairbrank question I want to ask you, but it just makes me think I 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 cuz I was someone who is interested in all this variation among humans That's why I want to go into it Do you worry about this kind of uni cultural possibility that this interconnectedness would create? Well, I mean I do worry about that although I think that the variation is just gonna be different and it's gonna keep regenerating itself So if you look at say Japan and China, they've adopted lots of Western institutions I mean beginning of the 1880s Japan was hopping Western laws and adopting forms of government But the society that they seem to be forging doesn't look like the West it has some similarities But it's actually a third thing that's neither traditional Japan nor a Western society So it's just making something new Japanese legal codes look awful like American legal codes But Japanese don't sue each other the way Americans do it operates differently even though the formal institutions are the same Okay, so you believe kind of in the strength of the culture Yeah, I think that we're just gonna get new variants They'll look a bit more Western because they've adopted some Western institutions But it's gonna spawn off in a new direction essentially So I don't think we need to worry 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 so you resist your analytic thinking inclination to think of everything We are grain. Yeah, okay.

Here's my hair brain theory that I've like launched once or twice on here I can't do it justice the way it is in my head, but you would be perfect to answer this 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 What's just floating above the DNA and really deciding what we're gonna turn on and turn off and that in fact that Epigenome can be passed on and be hereditary and that trauma could be hereditary am I in good standing so far? Yeah, okay, 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 the bunk 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 stretch 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 And of course this was debunked by Darwin 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 and the epigenome really is combining what we need to survive in our environment And that it's ultimately in charge of our DNA and doesn't that in some way challenged our winning evolution one of the things that I work on is related to this it's called gene culture co-evolution and it's the idea that cultural practices construct the environment that our genes respond So I've made the case that lots of our genetic traits are actually responses to culturally built environments So a simple example would be sometime I would guess around a million years ago humans start using fire And if you look at our length of our colons and our teeth and stuff, it looks like we're a cooking species So we break down and sort of pre-digest our food so we don't need very big guts like a relis and chimpanzees have We don't need big teeth We don't need like all the musculature that they have for grinding up things because we cook it and we soften it up or we cut it up or something like that So it looks like our cultural technology and our genes for our digestion have co-evolved over long periods of time I mean I think our brains have all to be able to acquire all this cultural information 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 And the epigenome can play a role in this because that just creates opportunities to take advantage of any flexibility that epigenetic markers Methalation things like that can do yeah, but genome is kind of like the playbook is that fair to say 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 right what AC's g's and t's They're gonna put together right which proteins are gonna be made way in and how much yeah, and I feel like with that variety I don't know but it seems challenging to our original Understanding yeah, and I think people are modifying their thinking the way we can respond phenotypically through learning other kinds of plasticity does create New opportunities, so not just waiting for the mutations we're getting some variation some adaptation through these non genetic processes once they exist And the genes can respond genetically yeah And then it's also working in concert with mate selection which is now our culture has determined this is advantageous so that somehow heavily impacts Mate selection which heavily impacts the DNA yeah, it just seems like it's a lot more back and forth than maybe we ever want to do a Knowledge yeah, I think a lot of evolutionary biologists especially people who study humans are thinking along these lines Okay, I'm not novel in this you're right up there you're right up there with us. Okay, okay great Well, dr.

Henrik, this has been awesome, man I hope everyone read your book if you don't walk away with a huge dose of humility you need to pick it up and read it again 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 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 So thank you so much keep working and if you ever want us to come sit in on your class wink wink harbor We love to okay great Thanks a lot guys. It was good fun. Take care And now my favorite part of the show the fact check with my soulmate Monica Batman I'm almost exclusively gluten on the trip. Oh, you decided to talk it England, right?

Yeah, lean a stores favorite restaurant of all time I mean man those artichokes. Mmm. You remember those little delicate little artichokes. They're so good.

Yeah, that plays is incredible Oh, I had a really great moment. Okay. I wonder if you remember this so you and I were there yep Elina stores and we met a server. Yeah, male server.

Okay. Wait hold on back some but you and Chris and we're in London We're in London town last week. Yeah, and so the server comes over. I look at her and I'm like, mm I recognize her I say I recognize you as a dude.

You working here in October in November. Yeah, yeah, great She walks away. She's across the restaurant and all of a sudden I remember I'm like she has some tattoo She has a valentino Rossi tattoo. I go do you have yellow 46 on your wrist and she turned and she was like oh my god Yes, it was a beautiful moment.

I do remember that I do yes I do it was so weird. I was like I like I knew anywhere face then she walked away and I was like kind of looking at I'm like something really immemorable about her Wow. Oh, it was wonderful. I was high on that for like 10 minutes I guess it goes to show you remember people who you have something common well.

Yeah, yeah, like maybe I imprinted her as an in-group So consciously primitively. Oh, it is this is Joseph Henrik. Oh my god. Yeah, so you were in London town We were both in New York town.

Yes, how long was your trip to New York town? I last saw you on Monday Right, I got in on Saturday and I left on Wednesday Oh, so you had two more days that are unaccounted for what happened? So we saw Chris and perform at Carnegie Hall She sang at Carnegie Hall. She did an incredible job.

It was just outstanding. It was beautiful and also I've never been to Carnegie Hall I don't think I have either it was amazing. I was like oh gosh. I get it like there's just a feel in here sure some history And seeing an orchestra perform is magical.

I think I think it's enchanted. It's a cliche, you know, it's like it just sounds so unified It's beautiful, but then when you start looking and you see everyone's doing something completely different, but it all sounds Yes synchronization is a really appealing thing So then okay, I have a story. I have a New York story New York minute first of all I was at Burgdorf's and there was a picture of Mary Kayne Ashley. I posted it.

Oh, I saw that post of yours I just want to be them so bad. Yeah And it is generational because when I 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 Mary Kayne She's like oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can yeah. Are they your generations and a one tour and a one tour is still anno one tour But like Audrey Heparin like I can't say their names The hepherds of fucking thing I would put in my pick line to flush out before I put my antibiotic Yeah, I think it's a I think it's like a diabetes drug or something. Oh, maybe a anticoagulate or a Okay, so I have a New York story besides my okay.

Actually. I'm a little like anxious to tell the story Those are your best ones. No, there's one type of part that I think you might hurt your feelings. Oh great And I and but then I think ultimately you'll like it.

Okay, let's see. I hope you do. Yeah, I was at a bar Yeah, and there's a guy about your drink. No, okay.

This is another bar. I'll say that shout out and you know in New York Everything's so small. So you kind of have to sit at the bar if you're by yourself. Yeah, yeah Yeah, so I was at the bar.

There was a person next to me and he was started talking to me and she was like Where are you staying? And I said oh the Carlisle and he was like, why are you staying there? And I was like, oh, I mean, it's just it's really nice and that's And he was like yeah, but what's around there's like nothing there's like yeah, but I'm just I'm on vacation So I'm fine with walking and like exploring the city where's this bar located in the villagers? So that okay, really quick sidebar.

So I walked there. Oh, wow, you know what I do. Yeah, I walk Yeah, I walk I was supposed to go to this bar my chef recommended I obviously reached out to my chef beforehand and I was like what do I need to go to right now anywhere? I'm some stuff one of them was a smart teeny bar So I was like I'll go there and I googled it and the walk was an hour and four eight minutes.

Whoa, that's a monster Yeah, so it's like I do it. Yes. Oh, wow. I did it.

I did it. I walked all the way there of course I was faster than I was far from you as a part of the ridiculous and then I get there in their clothes for a private party Oh Bomb-mer when she told me that I had true panic. Yeah. Oh my god I literally just lost an hour and a half of my time and then she was like we're still setting up and I was like well Can I have a drink while you're setting up?

I look like I was like I needed it in my veins or something. Yeah, you're going into dt's or something Yeah, she said no, so then I left and I was like I'm gonna find something around here So then I went to him and yeah, huh now we pick up back at the store. Yeah, we're back in that was a flashback Yeah, yeah, yeah, he says Carlisle blue and then I was like what's really nice and then the bartender comes up And he's like he's staying at the Carlisle. Oh my god.

So they're not they're both No, he is still trying to shame me. Oh, okay to the bartender. The bartender's nice It's just like like he doesn't know how to respond. Yeah, so then he says like okay.

So what do you do? Hmm. I co-host and produce a podcast. What is it called?

I don't like this guy the way you're doing his voice You're gonna hate him. Okay. This is not a good guy. Yeah, but he's nagging.

Yes. He's like text book nagging It's actually for me a little fascinating everything. I say he's doing it. Yeah, and so okay, what's it called armchair expert?

Okay, immediately picks up his phone great just start looking it up and I was like it's exclusive to spot And so then he's like looking it up and he's like what is it? Oh Jesus God bless you. I wanna 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's expensive Yeah, 13 dollars. Yeah, so he was like oh, it's just like a long-form interview show and that's what's at Shepherd and he was like oh That's Shepherd. I know him.

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 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. Oh good And then he was like would he say you're his best friend. Oh God.

He's trying to act like you're low status And I was like what you just said he's your best friend, but would he say you're his best friend and I was like yeah Oh my god, this guy's a fucking troll. I'm like troll. He's on Twitter Yeah, so that part ended and then he was like trying to teach me about the comedy so I'm like I know about the comedy seller and He was like you should come with me and I'm like I'm not uh-huh. Yeah, it's like no I'm I'm going to do other stuff.

Yeah, this thing you tried doesn't work to see you Exactly. Yeah, and he was like no, but really like you never know who's gonna stop by and that yeah Cuz I was saying something about a Z's and I or no no no maybe I said something about a Z's and he was like yeah He's you know, okay. You don't like him. Yeah, I don't like him.

Oh my god You're miserable that he hasn't done anything and he hates everyone who's done So he's a core to stay at the carlion me to really mad exactly at one way he did say that well good for you for being successful He was like really trying to get me to go with him Yeah, he wanted to take you out couldn't just say I like you and I'd like to have a conversation with you So I'm gonna insult you yeah, and then he was like well if you were if you were staying another day I'd take you blah blah blah and I was like no you wouldn't that requires me to go yeah, yeah, oh boy I eventually left thank God. Oh, but it was nuts. I've never experienced that in real time the real nagging approach Yeah, now here's an interesting thing. It's fun to be playful and challenging in the conversation.

That part's fun That's what he thinks he's like if you said all right. Let's start from on the guy, okay? Okay, what are you saying? The Carlisle.

Oh my god, Mr. Belvedere there The Romans you haven't seen him in the lobby. Yeah, no, that's kind of fun Yeah, that is like I make a joke about the Carlisle, but I'm not gonna like make me feel shitty. Yeah Yeah, but I bet it's getting closer.

Oh god that makes me think of something so I was on the flight home, okay I'm excited well first of all I met a wonderful Barbara. She was the percer on my flight. She's big arm cherry Uh-huh she's coming to show they're in charge everything. Oh, they run the whole staff So there are like the boss of all the flight attendants Oh, okay, the percer and she's coming to show that's so nice And she's with her daughter and some other flight crew members.

Hi Barbara So Barbara shout out love you secondly and God. I hate for Barbara to hear this. Oh, no, but I have gas and Here's where I got lucky I had a blanket Uh-huh, 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 Okay, like most people use a blanket to cover themselves or they leave in the bag But I open my up and I put it on my chair This is what they're thinking at this point. They're thinking oh, he's like scared of germs or he likes an extra layer of comfort between The leather or whatever.

Sure. Luckily, I had my Danny Rick year on my Danny Ricardo, so what's it? It is a very thick. It is very thick.

It's very thick. It's good quality You got a least a half inch of cotton there. Mm-hmm then this blanket Thank God was a good size kind of pilted down deal and I was blasting and it never smelled great My Danny Rick pants and that part blanket I laid down did a perfect job and then another funny thing about farts on that plane Several different times 11 hour flight. Yeah, you're gonna have farts.

Well, not just me And that's where this is going so I'm regularly walking up there to get chips And that more die-coke whatever and when you're walking the full length of the cabin which was huge on this flight You're walking by it imagine 20 rows. Okay, and every three. I'm smelling a unique fart because people are sleeping in the flight is so long that like everyone's in their sleep Like they don't even know yeah, they don't know as you're walking through one cloud every other of unique farts And then I would of course glance at and try to figure out what person I thought which is ridiculous You can't judge a part by the cover, but of course I can see an old man on my lips is You basically I hate to say this you basically pick the least attractive person No, I'm farting the most I fell 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 can't control himself He doesn't have practice controlling itself. It's him But it wasn't me because of the Danny Rick pants and the blanket if it was us we would see right through that a blanket Like if we were on that fight we would know oh if I saw someone laying out the blanket I'd be like thank you bro good looking out you gas and you're gonna try to do your best to smell it Because it is my deepest desire that no one ever smell a fart of mine should know that but also What's gonna happen my intestines explode they would have yeah Yeah, I had all that gluten in there for all those meals and I just had several cubic meters of gas I mean that just passed beautifully into the filter.

Here's the thing That wasn't an anomaly that when I walked through the cabin there was little fart clouds everywhere that's doers is no it The crew knows that for them. Mm-hmm. This is what I could be honest the masks helped Oh my god, I'm gonna put this out there as a question for flight attendants about far. So it would be a great story like what's the worst one ever do people complain This is good.

Let's go make for a great story. Okay. All right. Forget that though given that it's so obviously a problem Yeah, why don't they hand out little cushions?

Far below but like engineered everyone gets one. They would clean up the whole thing on sanitary. Why? Because in the next person sitting on someone else's old fart No, it goes where the blankets go where however they get cleaned the far below is every flight get picked This would be a great gift to everyone who flies internationally everywhere everywhere.

Yeah, but the longer the flight the worse it is That's true. I've been on some flights in New Zealand. Oh, God. Yeah, seven people are eating three meals Everyone woke up too early so they didn't get there.

That's right. That's right. Oh gross My heart goes out to all the people. I mean look when you're sleeping, you don't know like I mean I slept pretty much the whole flight there and back and I'm sure I let some it's inevitable.

It's inevitable You don't you have your guard down. Yeah, and you have you relax everything on there as what's happening every other seat was You know especially the old-timer ageism as ageism I think well they really can't control themselves. Yeah, that's why there's different products in the marketplace to help with the incontinence and Look the other thing is just to be harsh on rich people. Yeah, there kind of comes some entitlement Like you know, I'm a first-classer 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 honest a little bit But I think it could be a little more gracious about it, which is one they're in a pod.

Yeah, okay, so they think there's an illusion of privacy So they're a little bit you know, but that's like that's choosing to be ignorant It is and it isn't like I have them on where I'm like, I don't like this out. I bet it stays in this little box. Yeah, let's just say willing Ignorance The second thing is yeah, you go, uh, this was in the case for me But there are some of those first-class tickets to like England and back like 12 grand Yeah, for the people who spent 12 grand they're like you bet your ass I'm farting like I spent 12 You spent 12 grand and you don't want to sit there uncomfortable for nine hours or whatever Testions potentially on the verge this can't be what Henrik was hoping for in his fact. Yeah, he's an anthropologist Maybe he would be interested in like how western this is of us.

Yeah, but there's not just western Because there are Asian countries who fart a lot well some of them as we read think it's a sign a good sign that the food was good Did we read that yeah, remember I read it out loud. I know I'm not gonna say the source was right. Okay That's my I was trying to remember there's a little like a limerick I can never did find that about if you burp it's an insult to the chef But if you toot your rear end, I think I might you know it is I know exactly where it is now I can't believe I didn't remember 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 let me look at that Austin Powers Proverb About farting part of me for being rude.

It was not me. It was my food It just popped up to say hello, but now it's gone back down below. Yes I guess it's not really what I thought it was but it's still a cute little Same more time okay, probably me for being rude. It was not me.

It was my food. Oh, I love that It just popped up to say hello, but now it's gone back down below. Oh wonderful Okay, so that actually makes way more sense when you said similar to shell silver scene and you said Austin Powers That felt like a big stretch, but this does sound like shell silver Big time right but comedic playful really playful. Okay onto an antarache.

Yeah global literacy today. Oh 86 percent literacy rate. That's good. Oh planet.

That's impressive. That's really good global literacy. Yeah, I think that's great Although again just in the vein of what he is exploring which is like we all conclude That's a good thing like that. It would be good to be able to read because you could get knowledge right Dot dot dot dot dot, but you lose facial recognition, huh?

It's all it's just interesting. I just say priorities are cultural 100 percent. Yes, um, I do think though as we are becoming more globalized Some of the priorities are becoming less cultural like in order to You know deliver goods from one country to another like you have to share Kind of be able to read you have to probably Yeah, okay, so percentage Us bipolar an estimated 4.4 percent of us adults even higher than I think I said on here Yeah, I said 3 percent. I think you did 4.4.

That's huge in relative to japan That's okay. So the lifetime self-reported bipolar. So you know in japan, this is 2019 was 0.6 0.6 versus 4.4. That's like fucking 100x difference big big big dip I also do wonder though self-reported like here.

We are also a little more open. I'm sorry. I just got to correct myself That's 10x. That's not 100x.

Okay. Yep. Sorry. I couldn't correct it for you because I know but there's a listener I'll be like you did that wrong and maybe right to say so yeah still 10x of any disease would be like what?

Yeah, we got cancer 10 times the rate is Japanese. Yeah, 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 I agree with you like I could see someone saying well culturally they'd be less likely to admit it But I will say that this isn't something somebody admits or not. This is someone takes the DSM and they are diagnosed as well But this is but the japan one is self-reported. It's not like the psychiatrists are reporting it.

Oh, so Okay, Hammurabi's code. Hammurabi. Hammurabi's code and in case people don't know what that is I have to hear but would you like to tell yeah Hammurabi? I believe was an early king in Mesopotamia like you know in the Euphrates region and it was on Babylon, right?

Okay, which is in there in between the Tigris and Euphrates 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 And most of biblical law is based on Hammurabi's code Did I did it? Did I? Okay, 1755 to 1750 BC Babylonian legal text longest best organized and best preserved legal text from the ancient near east 282 rules established standards for commercial interactions and set fines and punishments to meet the requirements of justice Carved onto a massive finger shaped black stone steel that was looted by invaders and finally rediscovered in 1901. Oh my god.

I'd exist That's an artifact. Where does it live? I let's see Come on history calm trusted round the kimart Or museum Like where you enter it's just there yeah People with their gum on it as they pass Packed up and shipped to the Louvre in Paris, but this is a long time ago Within here it had been translated and widely publicized as early. Okay, that was when they first found it Is a ridge I try one search to do a search.

I'm gonna do one search because I'm just reading on history.com Who currently owns Hammurabi's code? It is Mesopotamia present day Iraq. I think it's gonna move It's so yeah Shit, we should have thought we were there. Oh, damn.

I know I'm pissed I was sitting there looking at Mona Lisa. I'd rather seen how Rami's code Mona Lisa's code Mona Lisa has my initials Yeah No, her last name is actually Patrick. Oh my god. Mona Lisa Patrick.

Yeah, Lisa can't be your last name or is it Mona of Lisa You know these Italians. There's always from a town. Is there town Lisa? Oh my god, Lisa Mona of Lisa.

Okay, hold on Wow, it is Art is crazy. Are you gonna get a photo of it? Yeah, like yeah, it's just crazy because it's like why is it the most famous painting Yeah, best known most visited most written about most song about most parody work of art in the world And that's just an average photo of somebody. I guess that she smirks and that wasn't common She is Playful.

It's the first capture of playful. Well, and that is worth that would be you're right in fact I'm glad I saw that said how Ravi's code painting is probably the Italian though a woman Lisa Garadini Oh Garadini Lisa Garadini can I call your mom? Hi, I'm Ceasey. I'm on my mommy.

I'm not papa Pia Baby gonna die Ria's uh, it's a no problem. Oh, okay. Yeah Lisa. Go there.

Oh Lisa. Do you know um Garadini Garadini Garadini. Yeah father of a go bomb It's just the revolutionary Oh, Lisa's her. Oh, okay.

Mona being a vulgarity an Italian. Oh Interesting it was vulgar Lisa Well, that's why she's smirking she is a playful. Oh my gosh Wait, Mona and Italian is a polite form of ad oh, I'm getting mixed messages Mona and Italian is a polite form of address Originating as ma Donna similar to ma ma ma ma lady in English. This became a Donna.

It's my damn Lisa Yeah, that makes sense. Although the title of the painting though, traditionally spelled moa in english is spelled in Italian as monna Lisa so okay mon a in Italian is vulgarity. Okay, but it's spelled actually monna Oh my gosh Um, okay. I was just looking up good careers for people with autism.

Oh interesting. Wow and not based at all in Mona Lisa No, I've pivoted no because we talk about autism in the episode so some good careers animal science. Oh sure researcher Accounting shipping and logistics. Okay art and design right many people with ASD are very visual oriented and accelerating 2d or 3d images Okay, manufacturing computers.

We're not getting any that's okay So that's actually why I wanted to do this because you kept saying computer science over and over and then I wondered like is that Particularly I know but I just don't think I mean I'm sure but it's hard to find out. Yeah, it's hard to know how many actual people are Well, right. Well, I would imagine the vast majority of people is it ASD or saying yeah, okay that our ASD are undiagnosed So I think the younger people in our culture are diagnosed, but not the older people correct So we have to wait to get this info, but okay, um information technology. That's and then engineering.

Okay, I just don't think it's just relegated to that area Oh, surely not 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 if you're a logistics person you run the logistics The point that had been made to me is that you have coworkers for the first time Like many coworkers that are similar to you. Yes, and then now there there's a lot of dating opportunities. It is interesting Yeah, what he said also about like online dating and stuff where you can just match up exactly to who you are right? It is interesting makes everyone accessible in some ways.

I do wonder though I guess like a knee jerk assumption would be that autistic folks would do better with other autistic folks 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 But again, that would be such a guess. I don't know if what makes a better couple is an autistic person or not autistic person There's just so much variation amongst people on the spectrum that it's hard I never watched this show but people love it love on the spectrum. Yes.

Yes people really really love it And it does explore that I think yeah, um, that's all okay. Well great great updates great updates. Okay. Love you