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Hey, everybody, this is Razib Khan with the Unsupervised Learning podcast, and I am here today with a very special guest. I am here with author, cultural evolutionist, I think I would say evolutionist in general, Michael Muthukrishna. He's joining me from London, and he has a book “A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going” I'm going to give a quick heads up to the listeners here who are going to be reading the book, I hope, which many of you will, that this is, it's a big book. The title is a big title. And it really does describe kind of like, the book's scope and range. You know, it's quick read. So you know, I hope you guys check it out. But, Michael, before we go on, talk about your affiliations, and then work back a little bit, your biography in terms of your disciplinary background, but also, maybe a little bit about your cultural background. Because, you know, it's kind of interesting. You did put a lot of that stuff in there. And I didn't know any of it. And, you know, I think it actually does inform and color some aspects of your work. I mean, look, our background always does inform my work in some ways, but some of it was actually kind of direct, I felt so can you just get into that a little bit first.
So I'm a professor at the London School of Economics in economic psychology, but I have affiliations in developmental economics at STICERD. And in data science. I also wear a few other hats. So I'm the co founder and the technical director of the database of religious history, which I think at this point is the largest quantitative database of history. And I'm also a board member at One Pencil which is a philanthropic project that binds the research that we do with with philanthropic work in education in Namibia and Angola. And Bolivia. Yeah, sorry. Do you want me to ? Yeah, you were
A really quick question. Because I is that the, the Turchin faction or the non Turchin faction?
That’s a history we don't need to get into but that is the non Turchin faction ,
Okay. Okay, go on. Sorry, not you just triggered me. So I had to like ask. I gotta have a podcast about about that type of work at some point, because I'm super interested in that actually, too. But
I'm sure Peter doesn't mind me saying this. But I mean, the project was born out of kind of disagreements between the two factions. But I was a at the time a second year grad student who is, you know, loosely involved, though, somewhat involved in that in that split?
So, you know, you have all these affiliations. And, you know, your academic background in your academic work is quite multidisciplinary, you're associated with a lot, a lot-
Sorry- I forgot to mention one. So I'm also a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Boundaries, Membership, and Belonging group. That's for advanced research.
Okay. Yeah. So you're, so you know, I wanted to bring this up, and I want to talk a little bit also more about your, like, you know, I don't really know. How do I say this? I mean, you're a third culture kid, maybe.
Michael: That’s right,
Okay. So because I, yeah, cuz like, so just to give some context. I've never talked to Michael before, I don't know you personally, although we know a lot of people. Like, you know, I know, people who've been postdocs with you. I know your advisor. Not personally, but I've done podcasts with them. And so I was at UC Davis. And you know, I actually did, I'm an evolutionary geneticist by training, but I did sit in with Peter Richardson and when McElrath was back at Davis, so just for the listener out there, we have a lot of mutual contacts. But I didn't know like what you're not. I mean, I mean, I heard you talk you sound like an American to me, but I was like, Wait a second, like he's in England. And I think you went to grad school in BC. And so let's just talk a little bit about that. Because I also think that that that along with your educational professional training, which is not, you haven't been like a straightforward like, you know, undergrad biology or psychology and then going into grad school to study. I mean, first of all, there wasn't really cultural evolution in grad school until, like, very recently. So go on. And we'll talk a little bit about both of those.
Yeah, sure. You know, I mean, these stories sometimes make sense, in hindsight, but it does seem to me like my interests are very much shaped by my unusually diverse childhood. So my family's from Sri Lanka. And I was born there. And I left when I was two years old. And we grew up in - I grew up in Botswana. And that was really interesting time to be in Botswana, because this was in the early 90s. So you know, I really saw South Africa, for example, which Botswana is just the northern neighbor, I saw kind of pre and post apartheid. You know, I remember as a kid, all of the excitement around Mandela getting voted in and that the shift away from Apartheid and all of that hope and promise and then also kind of the the difficulties in meeting that that promise. And, of course, we know what South Africa is like today. And so then after that, we lived in Australia briefly, but then we were in Papua New Guinea. And I seem to, I seem to find myself in interesting situations, because that was we were there doing a pretty important episode in Papua New Guinea's history, which was referred to as the Sandline affair. So this was a this was a government coup, where the then Prime Minister Julius Chan, he brought in mercenaries because of a revolt basically, from the army. And this did not go down well. And so you know, we lived about 500 yards from Parliament House. And like, you know, as a kid, I'm watching like, folks in AK - carrying M 16, you know, driving down and heading to Parliament House to basically try to oust Julius Chan. So it was terrifying, but also like it shapes you. And you know, that we live in, I lived in Australia, and then I went to grad school, as you said, in at UBC, British Columbia. And then my postdoc was at Harvard, and then found myself to the UK. In the book, I kind of tell the story, because all of this, there were there were aspects of this that really shaped my, my experience. So in undergrad, I was always interested in big questions. And you know, I got, I got really good grades. And I was, I think, one of the top 500 students in the country. And so I had like, pretty much anything I could have studied. I was like, what I want to do with my life. And so I was like, Well, I want to I'd like to tackle something big, like something in physics or philosophy, or you know, human behavior, something. But I'm also I'm kind of risk averse, or at least I like to manage risk. So I'm like, you know, all of these careers are great, but they're not necessarily stable. So I should pick something that's a little bit more secure. So I'm like, I'm going to do med or I'm going to do law, or I'm going to do you know, finance, or I'm going to do engineering. And because I've traveled so much, and I intended to keep doing that I was like, well, engineering is probably the most flexible of those careers. So I ended up majoring in, I did a dual degree where I majored in computer software. And then I also basically took a wide array of other courses. I ended up majoring in psychology, but you know, I took like econ, I took biology, I sat in on like, you know, philosophy and physics and political science. And I was really just trying to try to solve a problem that I'd seen in the world. And that problem was that we didn't seem to really understand culture very well. So if you're, you know, you're a kid, a third culture kid, as you described it, you grew up in all these different places, you realize that people around the world, they are fundamentally the same and that, you know, we reproduce, we eat food, we were animals, right. But we also see the world very differently in our cultures are completely different. We are running different software. And you know, at the time you know, we left you know, Sri Lanka was in the middle of a civil war between two ethnicities that to me, like, as a kid, I didn't know there were different ethnicities, right? Like, I'm like, these are brown people. And oh, they don't like each other. I'm not sure what this is about. And I mean, like one hilarious stories, like I remember as a kid hearing that, like a lot of wars were fought over oil. And, you know, this was this was a George HW Bush, you know, that kind of time. And I was like, maybe this is what's going on here. I have noticed, like, some people seem to use oil in their hair more than the other group. So maybe this is what the fight is all about. It's ultimately about oil. And then I realized, Oh, these are like two groups from the outside. And even to me, they seem like the same people. And they they're at each other's throats the Tamils, and the Sinhalese. Why is that? And then, of course, you know, being in in Botswana, where you've got kind of South Africa, you've got all this ethnic conflict, and then you got Botswana that's like, quite stable, very successful, what's happening there. And then New Guinea where you have a place that looked like Australia in terms of its parliamentary institutions, but completely not achieving the kind of outcomes that Australia was and massive amounts of tribalism where they have like pigeon as a common language, but really, you know, even my friends at school like they they speak very tough. languages. I think it's the most linguistically diverse place on Earth. So you're trying to reconcile this. I can keep going. I can tell my life story
No its - you are, you know, you're the people you work with - that you’re are often associated with as authors - was Manvir Singh was he?
It was a it was a grad student when I was a postdoc at Harvard. Yeah.
So he's, he's been on this podcast, and they're often anthropologist, and as I was reading your book, I thought, well, he was, he was already trained as an anthropologist before he like was an adult. I mean, you were literally in Papua New Guinea where a lot of anthropologists go because of cultural diversity. Really?
Yeah. So as you know, as a kid, I remember like one of the pivotal moments or like a real moment that I remember was when I met the Bushman, like the Koisan in the Kalahari, like we used to go camping in the Kalahari all the time, and often your, your car gets stuck. One time, it was stuck, like really bad. And so we, you know, another car pass by they tried to help us out, we're like, we're gonna have to get some folks to like, help lift this thing out. And they're like, We know, I know, a community who lives nearby. So off, they went, and we had all these Bushman just come by, and they're hanging out with us, we lift the car out, well, obviously, I was a kid, I wasn't doing this, but paid them with a bottle of Johnnie Walker and whatever snacks we had, but just hanging out and realizing like, oh, man, people around the world are very different. And if you live in one place, you just don't see that. And so much foreign policy, so much international relations. All of this is based on flawed premises, flawed assumptions about the world that are that are there overlaid on other peoples who think very differently.
Yeah, yeah, let me um, I want to mention something really quickly. It's not part of the notes. So you know, we'll get back into it. But actually, two days before we're recording, this paper just came out, I think it's in Cell. It's titled ‘Reconstructing the population history of the Sinhalese, the major ethnic group in Sr"ı Laṅka’ And so I've been waiting for a paper about Sri Lanka for a while because we have Sri Lanka, Tamil samples are part of the 1000 genomes, a lot of listeners will know that. But we haven't had any Sinhalese forever. So just so the listeners know, Sri Lanka is multi ethnic, there's a lot of small ethnicities, which I'm not going to mention here, like the Moors and other things that are mentioned in the paper. But you know, what Michaels talking about? There's the Sinhalese, who speak an Indo European language, Indo Aryan language. They're most of the islands. They’re Buddhist mostly. And then you have the the Tamils of Sri Lanka, who've been there for a long time, as well as the Sri Lankan Tamils, as opposed to the migrant group. So let's separate that out. And these two groups have been fighting the Tamils are mostly Hindu, although some of them are Christian, too. And then obviously, there was some Dutch, you know, colonial period. And Michael, you mentioned that you've had some Dutch ancestry. So a lot of people in Sri Lanka have like, oh, a little bit of Dutch, a little bit Portuguese and stuff like that. And, you know, you're brown. You mean, I've talked to people from Sri Lanka before, especially people who are Buddhists Sinhalese and, you know, I don't get it, but like, they think they're very different than other people that look just like them from the mainland, which is fine. Like, actually, you are quite different. Like, if you look at the social, if you look at the vital stats, Sri Lanka is much more developed. Candidly, it's HDI is much higher, even though they look just - People in Sri Lanka look just like people to the north on the mainland, the HDI is much different. It's obviously mostly a Buddhist Island, Theravada, Buddhist and all that stuff, okay. But like these two groups are engaging in a pretty intense violence. You know, a prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi was killed in a suicide bombing that was fomented, or you know, under written, I guess, I would say, by the Tamil Tigers, who, you know, kind of popularized suicide bombing, actually, they were the innovators, just like Arabic numerals are actually originally from Indian subcontinent. You know, suicide bombing was pioneered by Indian people before it was taken up by other populations, you know, so there's some serious violence here. I don't want to get into the political issues. But, you know, you can say genocide, there was recent civil war that ended with a lot of conflict. So these people look look very similar to each other. So it must be a little confusing. And, you know, mainland, there was a partition, where Muslims and Hindus, you know, if you guys want to look at, like some major massive body counts, you know, we're talking millions of people might have died in the late 1940s. You know, and again, these are people, you know, Pakistan India border on both sides of the border, there are people who look pretty much the same. They're ethnically Punjabi. On the other side, there's Bengal, where my family's from, although there wasn't as much violence in ‘47 for various contingent reasons that you can watch the movie Gandhi to understand some of that. But in Sri Lanka - And particularly, I just want to say, I've looked at some of the genetic data from the Sri Lankan Tamils, and they look a little different than mainland people, Tamils from the mainland because there seems to be less population structure. So the Indian subcontinent has a lot of population structure so you can have a village in India, where people are genetically different as Finns or Sicilians, because the caste structure that doesn't seem as evident in Sri Lanka, from the tentative stuff I've seen today, this paper pretty much confirms it. There's actually very little genetic difference between the Sri Lanka Tamils, and the Sinhalese, they're almost the same people. So there's been gene flow that's been recurred and continuous for 1000s of years. But they've maintained their distinctiveness because of their language, and their religion. And actually, I think some of the kings of Kandy and the highlands like they were actually from Tamil dynasties, but they ended up becoming Buddhist and obviously, promoting that Buddhists Sinhalese identity. So that's somewhat something actually quite distinctive from the mainland, where there's a lot more population structure, and you have these jati Varna communities, and there is something like that in Sri Lanka. But you know, a cultural anthropologist will tell you that it's much more attenuated. And it's quite clear in the genetic data that's just come out right now. Also a minor separate note. There's been arguments about the Sinhalese language, and the Sinhalese people that supposedly came from North India, originally, whether they're from the east towards Bengal, or Odisha, or the West Gujarat, or, you know, the Konkan coast. And genetically, there are now IBD segments, Identity By Descent, in the Sinhalese samples that they have in this paper that indicate that they're from the Konkan coast, they're from the west. So, you know, here, you know, not to be an imperialist. But here comes genetics, solving another issue for Historical Linguistics, you know, because that's what we do here. So I just wanted to bring that up. Because, you know, you were confused as a kid about this. And I think a lot of people are like, you know, come on, like, can't we just don't get along? No, we can't. And the reason we can't get along is actually part of, I think, the topics in your book, which, you know, there is a lot of cultural evolution in there. We're a cooperative species. But the flip side of cooperation is intergroup, competition, and intergroup conflict. And I've had David Sloan Wilson, on his podcast multiple times, you know, so I think a lot of listeners, they know where I'm going with that. But this book is actually not a cultural evolution book in that traditional way. That's definitely part of the book, in the beginning. And I want to get to this, because you know, part of your background is as an engineer, and there's a lot of engineering thinking throughout this book. And there are parts of it, where I think this would not be written this way, if it wasn't written by someone who was trained as an engineer, to think in terms of trade offs, inputs, outputs, do some, like rough back of the envelope calculations as a matter of course. And so can you talk about the energy revolutions? Because this is actually a book a lot about energy. Which, you know, that might sound a little strange, you mentioned oil. So, you know, there's some like themes that are recurring here and talk about the importance of energy, because, in a way, that's the beginning and the end of the book, even though there's a lot of other details in the middle.
Yeah, I mean, first I want to comment on because it's something I've noticed that my advisor Joe Henrich was also trained as an engineer. And I really only noticed this when I, when I used to talk to him, as a scientist, you're trained to kind of think about a particular problem. But as an engineer, you can never think about a problem in isolation, like, you always have to be able to zoom in and out of the system to understand how it connects everything else, because otherwise the whole thing breaks. And I think, you know, as a scientist trained as like a scientist, both of us trained as engineers, we see the world a little bit differently. But let me get back to the energy question. So I started thinking about energy through the lens of cooperation, actually. So one of the things I work on is, is how it is that humans live in the world today, where anonymous strangers from different parts of the world can live side by side in relative peace. And, you know, as some, some listeners may know, this is this is a question that cuts across Economics and Psychology and evolutionary biology. And in 2005, Science Magazine listed it as one of its top 25 questions for the coming decade. And since then, a lot of the focus has been on identifying the mechanisms that allow cooperation to persist. So you probably know some of these like kin selection, inclusive fitness, genes that can you know, identify and favorite copies of themselves, rb > c, if you want me to, you know, get into anything, in particular, just stop me, but otherwise, I'm just gonna keep going.
Actually, really quickly, you dropped an equation in there, you should tell them what, you know, Hamilton.
So you know, so this is the E = mc2 of evolutionary biology by Bill Hamilton. And the idea is that genes that can identify and favor copies of themselves where the relatedness between individuals times the benefit is greater than the cost to the individual will persist. So for this reason, you know, a lion will come in and kill all the Cubs of the previous lion like kick them out, take the take the mate, but they won't kill their own cubs. So across the animal kingdom, we see this kind of favoritism of family let's put it that way. Love a family. Of course, you know, that limits cooperation to related individuals now you can get a little further through reciprocal altruism, direct reciprocity, peer punishment, call it what you want, you know, you scratch my back, I scratch yours, but likewise, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. So you might not like all the people you interact with with your office, but you're gonna, you're gonna swap favors because you're gonna see them again, you have repeated encounters, you swap favors, and that's the kind of cooperation, but again, it's among people who know each other and regularly interact. And then, you know, you get a little further through indirect reciprocity that the, you know, the rest of us called reputation, which is, you know, I don't know who Razib is, but you know, I know, he hangs around mutual people. And so, via that reputation, I'm like, okay, you know, I'll go on Razib’s show, that sounds good. That's - reputation still exist. And, you know, this is foreshadowing some of the stuff in the book, but not only does it still exist, but it was the dominant form of cooperation for a long time. If you've ever watched Vikings, you know, it's like, I do this for my name. Then, you know, getting getting getting going that, you know, if you ask, if you ask one of my economist colleagues, he said, you know, what is it that allows countries today to succeed, they'll say, it's institutions, you know, it's not that we're, you know, we're reputationally, punishing each other left, right, and center or going after directly, we pay our taxes to a government, a judiciary, a police force, and that's what does it for us? Problem solved? It seemed right. So one of my contributions to this literature was to say, Hang on, hang on, hang on a second. All right, you've got all these mechanisms, and the lower forms are more stable and found across the animal kingdom, but they all exist at the same time. Plus, if you've lived in these kinds of places around the world, you know, that institutions, the same institutions, like why is Australia so much wealthier, than and more successful than Papua New Guinea, despite both having Westminster parliamentary system institutions, right? Why is Botswana more successful than South Africa? Like why? And so the reason as I explained is that those lower scales of cooperation undermine the higher scales under many conditions. And we call this corruption. So you know, when a President gives a job to his son, you know, organize it, somebody will be like, oh, yeah, oh, that's nepotism. But it's also inclusive fitness or kin selection, undermining institutions. If a person gives a job to a friend or a friend of a friend, we like, oh, that's cronyism, but it can equally it's direct or indirect reciprocity, undermining our meritocracy fight. So now we're in this new situation where like, Alright, so the lower the lower scales are undermining the high schools, then how the hell are we getting to the higher scales? Like why is it that some places actually are successful. So as I kind of was, you know, was looking at the math working through these models, I was like, hang on, whenever we build these game theoretic models, we intentionally create a trade off. But it's also quite possible. And it's true that there is no trade off. And many things that we do there are win wins to be had. Sometimes when I collaborate on a paper, or build a company with someone else, I can go further together with this person, I can do more than I would on my own. So why is that? Well, the rewards are what matters are the rewards and how easy it what the probability of getting those rewards are. All right, let's zoom to the president in the present day, we live in, you know, let's take the last couple 100 years since the Industrial Revolution, the most peaceful and prosperous time any, by any metric you look at of progress, you know, size of qualities, Child child survival rates, wealth, whatever you want. There was a massive takeoff after the Industrial Revolution that as he and Maurice puts, it makes a mockery of everything that came before, like the Black Death, the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, these are these are blips, they didn't touch any of these, you know, relative to what happened after the Industrial Revolution. So the argument that I make are the only thing that could really have done this. And if you look across the history of life, you'll see this too, is energy. So what happens is, there's a key metric in the Energy Sciences called the energy return on energy investment, or energy return on investment, e ROI, right. So this is the amount of energy it takes to get some amount of energy back, it's another term for it, or you might call it just excess energy. And excess energy is what we cooperate for, it's what we're competing over. That is what ultimately, you know, we want so what happened was that during the Industrial Revolution, there was a bunch of stored sunlight in the ground in the form of coal, and oil and natural gas. And, you know, the cheap and available coal in Britain meant that they could with new technologies industrialize, and they could use that energy to become the largest empire the world had ever seen. So a little corner of Eurasia, the backwater, you know, the time of the Roman Empire, Eurasia as a nice big collective brain, that little corner, now energized by a bunch of cheap and available coal, was able to cooperate at a scale where they could out compete other civilizations without that level of energy captured without that level of cooperation as a result, and that pushed us into a brand new world. And so if you look at you know, so we've built some models on this since then, and if you look basically the level of cooperation, that is attainable is the level of which the returns per individual per person per cell, whatever is higher than it would be in a smaller group or a large group. So if we're in a market, where I can, you know, or, you know, physicists, they don't want to have 1000s of people to do physics, it would be better to win a Nobel Prize all by yourself. But if you want a Large Hadron Collider, you're gonna have to do this with 1000s of others. If you want to start a business you want, like, if you could do it all by yourself, and keep all the equity to yourself, you wouldn't do it, but you can't. So you got to work with some other people, you got to get some VCs involved, you got to, you know, align with others, you have to cooperate, in other words, but the only if the reward per founder, per employee per whatever, is larger than it would be in a smaller, larger group. And evolution is how we find this right? Like companies with too many employees go bust too few, they don't succeed, they fail, right. And, you know, in the book, I really take you know, maybe a little indulgently, please feel free to skip this, if it bores you. But, you know, I go all the way back to the evolution of life itself. This is exactly what happened. So at the very beginning, you know, you had the moon sloshing the the warm waters, you know, across the land, and back and forth. And, you know, probably I suspect, like an RNA world hypothesis, you had self replicators that eventually become life, right. And early life is reliant on the energy of the sun, and, you know, maybe volcanic heat or something like that. But over time, first you get, you get efficiencies in how you use that energy to get innovations in that kind of efficiency. And eventually, you get proto photosynthesis, turning into proper photosynthesis, where the sun the sunlight, the photosynthetic process results in little chemical batteries, little chemical sugars, ATP. And this means that there's a new thing that evolution can exploit. So new, larger organisms can not, they don't have to just worry about taking energy directly from the sun, they can eat other organisms, right. And again, it's constrained by the amount of excess energy that's available. So again, you know, this is a pattern that it applies to cells and societies, it applies to bacteria and businesses. And there have been clear revolutions in the history of our species that have pushed us forward. And they each one of them was an energy revolution. So the first of those was like fire, right? The most compelling evidence for cultural evolution in my mind is the fact that we have a bunch of physiological changes that require us to eat cooked food and reveal that we had cooked food. And we don't have any genes for making fire. Like we it's not in our like, we can't like if you just take a kid out and was like, Here, go make a fire, they can't do it. And it's hard, even once you're taught, it's kind of a hard thing to do. But our jobs are too short, sort of jobs are too weak and our our guts are too short for anything other than cooked food. So fire was an energy technology that allowed us to pre digest food, processed it in a way that made all of those calories more bioavailable to us. That was the first energy technology. And it's the energy technology that led to a larger brain. And you know, probably larger groups to the next energy revolution was a solar technologies, not a chemical technology like fire, but a solar technology. And that was agriculture. So we had the, you know, we constant instead of like walking around trying to find grain, or, you know, hunting animals, we started to, to look after animals and breed them. And we started to plant grain and harvest the energy of the sun to do it more efficiently. And this allowed us to vastly increase the size of our societies, pushing hunter gatherers to the margins where they still live, and eventually lay the foundations for the beginning of cities, increasing our collective brain. And then finally, the, you know, the last major energy revolution was another chemical revolution, which was the Industrial Revolution. And I suppose the one after that, following the Industrial Revolution was the next green agricultural revolution, where we through the haber bosch process started to synthesize fertilizer through natural gas and the the nitrogen in the air, creating ammonia.
Yeah, and I want to emphasize here, you, you alluded to it very quickly. You actually talked about stuff before, before humans, it's actually kind of a global, I mean, in a way, it's a global history. Yeah. So I mean, you allude to like fermentation and then respiration. And so, you know, everyone out there, and I think it's gonna be a substantial number of people that took biochemistry or, you know, something like that, or at least intro biology, you know, as you guys know, there's like, dark processes like fermentation, which they can work without oxygen. And fermentation is super important because, you know, alcohol and all that stuff, but they're way way less efficient than respiration. But the issue with respiration is it needs oxygen, which as you know, in your book was originally a dangerous byproduct of photosynthesis of, you know, of cyanobacteria.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So it led to the first mass extinction the great oxygenation event and you know, people forget like oxygen is corrosive, right. It's what creates rust and turns your fruit brown like bananas and apples brown. So, you know, one of the one of the big things in the book, you know, it's a it's a it's not a, it's a very modest title, you know, a theory of everyone And alongside that are four laws of life. So these are, these are not, you know, they're not like Newtonian laws or something, they are like lenses to view the world. But there's four things that apply across multiple scales. So they are the law of energy. That, you know, this is what life is ultimately, you know, competing over and trying to capture. And it's what it's what constrains the size of organisms and societies and so on the law of innovations and efficiency. So this is the efficiency with which you can use that energy. And then the law of cooperation. So you know, the scale at which you cooperate, trying to find new mechanisms that allow you to cooperate as, for example, as an organism like you you are, you're less a single organism in more of an Amazon rainforest, an entire ecosystem. And of course, if you run out of energy, you get weak, and you get defeated by lower scales of, of cooperation, such as tumors or, or illness, bacteria and viruses. Or you get defeated by other more energetic other humans who take stuff from you, you know. And then finally, the the law of evolution, which is the cultural and genetic evolution, which walks through the space of possibility. So I refer to this kind of space that is created the amount of energy available to an organism or to a society as being constrained by a ceiling, created by the E ROI, the excess energy, the availability of energy than a floor, created by the efficiency with which you can use that energy. And all activity happens in the space of the possible. And one of the key messages in the book is that the Industrial Revolution shoved that ceiling so high. And you know, every economics, for example, came a lot later. And so a lot of the focus has been on improving efficiency, forgetting that there was a ceiling at all. And that ceiling is slowly coming down. So one of the key metrics, for example, is like, okay, look at all the metrics of things. But if you look at oil discovery rates, in 1919, one barrel of oil got you another 1000 barrels, right, a 1951 barrel gotcha, another 100. And in 2010, one barrel, gotcha, another five. So that means the amount of excess energy that's ever you know, that's what that's what drives economic growth, it's what it's what has created this positive sum world in which we all get along, that space is shrinking. And so the only way out is to kind of push that and reach that next level of energy abundance. So I, there's so much of this book, Razib. But you know, like, the other two is like, you know, how abundance and scarcity naturally follow one another. So when you get these eras of abundance, take agriculture, for example, initially, that's great, you get masses of new people turnout. And those people are great, because they can innovate new things, you know, they can out compete other groups and so on. But that also means that eventually the number of people matches the new carrying capacity. So the number that that agricultural society can sustain. And so abundance turns back to scarcity. And that's the world we're living in today, that abundance is starting back to scarcity. And we're still, for path dependent reasons obsessed with the efficiency and mate, you know, there are still some efficiency gains. But that's not where the action is. The action is in finding high E ROI energy sources and pushing everything back up. And as I point out, if you look at the numbers, there's there's like three, you know, apart from fossil fuels, which are running out, you know, if you've got, if you've got fast flowing, large, fast flowing rivers, hydro electric is fantastic, like good on your Canada. If you have, you know, solar has some possibilities, but we've got some battery issues there. But the big one is really nuclear, and nuclear fission for now. And nuclear fusion, hopefully, in the future. I mean, if we crack fusion, the E ROI is such and the energy availability is such that we would be kind of the first the first generation of a galactic civilization put it that way.
Yeah, yeah. And I want to loop back to that, near the end of the podcast, because I think you have a big vision at the end, I will say, as I'm reading the book, there are you know, the world is unit - in a way the world is interconnected, and unitary. And you know, as we're talking we're describing these laws are these models are these views, these are human reification to like break it apart at the joints and try to understand it. So you're talking about E ROI in this energy stuff, you mentioned economist, there's also there's thinking like an engineer, then there's thinking like an economist, like a lot of what you just said, we can rephrase in economical terms like diminishing marginal returns, and inputs, like land and resources and stuff like that, in terms of like increasing productivity, versus doing Smithian gains and efficiency, very similar or processes that are with a slightly different lens. And then there's also thinking like an evolutionist. So we kind of like gloss a little bit over but earlier part of the book, like you allude to endosymbiogenesis I mean, that's how we have mitochondria, which is like unleashing the energy, which is actually cooperation between some sort of different unicellular organisms that became multicellular organisms that became us. And so a lot of these processes are, these dynamics are recurring over time, over the history of, of life on Earth. And I do want to say really quickly about cooperation, and this is how I know you , your work through this whole cultural evolution field. And, you know, the the question of altruism. You talked about William Hamilton, Bill Hamilton. And, you know, Ullica Segerstrale has a really great biography of him, by the way, if anyone wants to read that, and also read his collected works, but in any case, you know, that was, you know, he developed the idea of inclusive fitness, which was also it kin selection for Maynard, you know, Maynard Smith, but, you know, the issue here is like, why do we have “altruism”, quote, unquote, altruism, and then, you know, if you read The Selfish Gene, and some of the, you know, other works, just like, okay, yeah, maybe there's some of this works like reciprocal altruism, a lot of the earlier models from say, 50 and 50, to 60 years ago, there was something lacking there. And yet, the reality is we have the civilization. We don't, this isn't a war of all against all, we're not hyper rational, in terms of, you know, you know, if you lose your wallet in a lot of places, but not everywhere, it will be returned. So the variation, there is culture. And so, you know, from the cultural evolutionist perspective, you know, culture is, is part of the story here, the dual inheritance model, which you just alluded to, and we'll get to, and I also want to say here, you know, there's multilevel selection theories, which are basically like, you know, they lace your whole field, I mean, in a way your fields built on that. So the level of selection here is that like, group or societies, and, you know, you were talking about, you know, okay, like, if you could get the gains yourself as an individual, you would, but the reality is, sometimes you have to be a group. And so, you know, I can just say, actually, I wear another hat as like, listeners know, like, you know, I'm an officer at a company where I'm a founder, and, you know, we have, we have a burn rate. And, you know, most for most companies that aren't like capital intensive, the burn rate is mostly salaries. So, you know, you're always sensitive of your headcount. But you know, you need to hire good people to actually have your company do something that can bring in more revenue. So the ultimate goal is, obviously to maximize your wealth, by increasing, you know, the money you're bringing in through revenue, but you have to spend money to make money, and it's always this balancing act that you're racing against. So it's the exact same dynamic. So as you're talking, you know, I'm thinking, you know, I'm thinking yeah, like, I mean, if you're a founder who has equity, you know, you want to minimize your headcount to as small as possible. But you have to make it as large as necessary to actually get the gains that you want. And, you know, at some point, I do have to say, and this is outside the purview of this conversation. But, you know, at some point, I think we all know that people overshoot, companies overshoot, like Google, like all the tech companies overshot during the pandemic, and they had to have massive - they had to, some of these companies deliver the first layoffs they really ever had. And so they, you know, miscalculated there partly is because you don't know what the future holds, etcetera, they made some, you know, so it's like, you modify your headcount. So all of these dynamics are going on. And it's, it's really fascinating. That's why the book is interesting. But it's also really complicated. And this is why I think you have to, you have to, like talk about so many different things to try to get at the same question. And so let's, let's, let's talk about, so you mentioned inclusive fitness. So for example, the American listeners out there will know about the Hunter Biden saga, that's inclusive fitness, that's what you can tell your friends now, you know. Why does Why does Joe, why does Big Joe, let Hunter get away with so much? Well, you know, what? Big Joe has an inclusive fitness, you calculate the number of grandchildren, you divide by one, four, et cetera, et cetera. And you get the estimate there. On the other hand, you know, Hunter has a child out of wedlock that he's not involved in, in there. There's like, there's all sorts of issues of how the grandparents treat this child. Well, that's, that's not explained by inclusive fitness, that child is as related, expected value, at least as the other children who are legitimate quote, unquote, children. Well, legitimate illegitimate, that is a cultural distinction. Right? And so, you know, you know, you know, in Game of Thrones, I'm not gonna spoil anything, Jon Snow is as much of a son of Ned Stark as his other sons, but obviously, is treated quite differently. And that's a cultural issue. That's not a biological issue. So there's, there's other levels of selection going on. And I just, I want you to talk about dual inheritance theory, because I think that this is important. That's kind of like it's kind of like the, the center of the book. You start. You start in a big macro planetary scale and you kind of do I mean, let's let's be candid, you kind of end in the galactic scale. But in the middle of the middle of the book, we're scaled to human societies which is not thinking small. but it is actually thinking small in the scale of your book. But let's talk about dual inheritance theory and cooperation, multi level selection and cultural variation. And, you know, you study, you study a lot of things, we can say you study culture, but when people say you study culture, they'll often think, oh, okay, so he, you know, figures out like stuff about like, classical music? You know, that's what when they think culture, but we're talking about culture in a very, very different way. And I want you to talk about that so that the listeners can understand.
Yeah, so I mean, a big premise of the book is that the human and social sciences are at a - they're in the midst of a revolution that turns them into a real science. And I use, I use examples of like other more mature sciences to show what is happening right now. So you know, like physics, for example, like we used to think like, you know, Thor is banging his hammer and capricious gods are creating world events and the weather or whatever. And then, you know, Newton and Maxwell and Einstein and other people like that come along, and they write down a bunch of equations. And now, the weather's still kind of difficult to predict. But we understand how it works. Like it wasn't Thor, it wasn't capricious gods. And as a result of that, we can also develop technologies, right? Like we can we can land a spacecraft on an asteroid, thanks to thanks to those laws. Now, although Newton is a bright guy, he's trying to turn lead into gold, right? He's an alchemist. And that's because he doesn't have a periodic table. So for a long time, like, the chemical world is confusing and chaotic to write like, you mix like an acid with a metal and you've got gas given, like what's going on there. And gunpowder seems to explode. And maybe we can turn lead into gold, I don't know. But then once you have a periodic table, Alchemy becomes chemistry. And you're like, oh, that thing that Newton was trying to do? That makes no sense. But Oh, absolutely, we can figure out like protein folding and stuff like that. And then you can develop a whole bunch of technologies is like, you can turn crude oil into medicines, and plastics. And you know, and all of the other products. Same thing happened in biology, like it was very chaotic and confusing why some animals laid eggs and others had live births, and the Peacock has a giant elaborate tail and the Peahen is a drab brown, why? Who knows right? And then Darwin comes along, and then later the modern synthesis with Wright and Fisher and so on. And it becomes a real science, you know, like, we have math, we have equations. Ecologies is still difficult to predict, but at least we now know the rules by which they evolve, they change they work. So that is what has happened in the human and social sciences. Like at the moment, the human and social sciences are alchemy. Like they're a mess, like it doesn't like what's going on in Silicon Valley seems unrelated to inflation seems unrelated to mating behaviors seems unrelated to you, no innovation, but like all of these things. Like why are some countries more successful than others? Why is there crime in some places? Like what is education, intelligence. All these things seem disconnected, but they're actually all related to each other? Only if you have an overarching theoretical framework. And that theoretical framework is the what is what you said, right? We call it different names. Dual inheritance theory. So the idea is that humans are a new kind of animal, not so much, because our brains are bigger than other animals they are, but because that those upgrades allowed us to run a bunch of software that was socially acquired. So in other words, we are smarter than our lifetime of experience should allow. Because we, when we're born, we spent, you know, the first couple of decades catching up on the last several 1000 years of human history. And that completely shapes literally how you see the world as well as how you think the assumptions you have, your values, your behaviors, your technologies and so on, you know, culture gene coevolution, is the fact that genes are adapting to the cultural environment, like, you know, like, for example, genes that can help you do better in a in a market economy are probably being selected, right? And culture adapts to genetic constraints, the fact that we are an upright ape, who lives in every corner of the earth without too many genetic changes. And it's also referred to as extended evolutionary synthesis. Because ultimately, this was not, this wasn't like a, you know, let's use the analogy of genetic evolution and apply it to culture. It was just an extension of population genetics into the cultural realm, you know, Mark Feldman and Luigi Cavalli-Sforza we're, of course, population geneticists. So yeah, that's a big, that's a big premise of the book. And now once you have a theory that you know, like that, which I lay out in part one of the book, as I said earlier, that means you can you can separate sense from nonsense, you can see the things that are more like gunpowder and the things that are more like turning lead into gold. And you can begin to develop technologies, in this case, social technologies and better policies that solve the problems that face us, you can create new solutions to to old, you know, long to old, long standing problems. So that's basically what I suggest, you know, so like, take me at my face value, just a lot of work to be done. But this is what we do know so far. Let's rethink everything you thought we knew you are one of the first people to have a periodic table of people, a theory of everyone if you'd like. Let's use it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, in a way. So, okay, one thing is that listeners that if you follow the footnotes in the book, you know, if you fall, there's a lot of different fields you could go into. So Michael just like dropped, like, dropped a bunch of words a lot of conceptual density, this book has a lot of conceptual density, that's what I'm gonna put out there, right? So, you know, now we moved from E ROI to, you know, endosymbiogenesis, inclusive fitness and, and now like cultural evolution and evolution as like a theory of the social sciences, actually, you know, this whole idea of psychology in particular in the social sciences, not having a theory, I think economics would say that they have theories, but like, that's a separate issue. But yeah, yeah, that's a separate issue. But I don't want yeah, and then there's a whole like, because we're in humans, there are actually disciplinary turf wars and conflicts about the theory. I mean, again, it's these recurrent dynamics, like why are the Tamils and Sinhalese fighting? Okay? Why are economists and evolutionary biologists yelling at each other? So, you know, you cannot you think you can escape these dynamics, you can never escape the dynamics, you know, it's the same, like, you know, tribalism.
Exactly. Right. We, you know, we fundamentally compete with each other, but then we also cooperate and we cooperate to compete, you know, that it's, it's the same thing. I mean, so you know, one thing I should mention, I didn't mention this at the beginning, because I don't want to, you know, to talk too much about the biography, but I was working, you know, I was an engineer, I was working on like, smart home technologies, I had, like, Great job offers and interviews and stuff with big companies. But I was like, Is this what I want to do with my life? Like, do I just want to make a bunch of money and die? And I was like, that's, that doesn't seem, you know, I'm gonna die one day, I want to, it's like we were talking about before, you know, before the interview, like, what matters is like, I want to do something meaningful, like, people are divided on purpose and pleasure. And I'm a big purpose guy, right? So so when I, when I decided I wanted to try to tackle some of these problems, and I was, I felt like culture was at the center of this. And I had encountered some work in, in engineering called control theory, which is the math of feedback loops. And this was a big insight to me. And I was like, this seems like is what's missing from psychology and a science of culture. I didn't know much about anthropology at the time, I thought anthropologists were people who wrote travel diaries in the field or something. So I was like, I didn't know anything about that. So I was just looking for people studying culture. And I felt like if we can understand the psychological basis of culture, and put that overlay that onto a kind of control theory framework, we can build up a science of norms, and therefore science of institutions and culture. And so you know, by chance is I explained the story in the book, but by chance, I ran into a book by Mark Schaller on the psychological foundations of culture. And Mark put me in touch with Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan , and in particular, Joe Henrich, and Joe, of course, have been already working on this kind of stuff. But again, like I never had any intention of being an academic like, that wasn't, I was like, I'm gonna go work for the World Bank, or I'm gonna work for one of these big NGOs. But then I realized that's not really a good path to do this. But even so like I wasn't, because I wasn't trying to get a job. And I was very happy to go go back to being an engineer. I, I thought to myself, this kind of undisciplined or non disciplinary researcher, I was just looking for tools to help me answer the question. So I took grad level courses, and you know, in, obviously, in evolutionary biology, and in economics and data science, and you know, at Harvard, I was in human evolutionary biology, and I was really, I don't I don't see the disciplinary divides, like, I've got questions. And I just need answers. And I'll take the tools from wherever I find them to answer those questions. And I think the book, the book reflects that. And, you know, I hope I did a good job trying to explain these different fields. But, but also, I think, this is also why some of the insights that come out of the book are missed, because of, you know, the whole the whole problem of the blind men and the elephant, right? Like, each discipline is like, I'm feeling the trunk. And have you ever heard the phrase, you know, the, the edge of one discipline? And another begins is what you consider signal and what you consider noise?
No, I haven't. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.
And so like, you know, for a lot of people, they're like, I'm focusing on the trunk. The rest of that is noise to me. And, you know, in other words is like, no, no, it's, it's what matters here is the is the body. No, no, it's the legs. It's the tail, you know. And so they think it's like it, you know, the world looks like a snake or it looks like a tree or it looks like a wall or it looks like a rope depending on what they're touching. But only if you step back and you see how the pieces fit together. That's when you see the elephant in the room. Right? And as a result of that, I think, my hope is that once you read the book, like once you see that tapestry, you can't unsee it, like it's hard to get to somewhere, but once it's explained to you, then you're like, Oh, I see, you know, and the book is written so that I might, you know, particularly the female hip field of human behavior is I would say untrustworthy. We've had some Big high profile fraud cases a bunch of just more scientific practices. And so I'm not, you know, I really stay away from like, you should believe this because this study said so, and I lean more on, here's the studies, but let me explain to you how it connects and how you can check it against your own life, and then what you can do with it to double check it.
Yeah, let me um, I mean, we have a little time. So I just want to bring that up. There's new podcast. The Studies Show, with Stuart Ritchie, I think, you know, Stuart, Stuart's a friend of mine, too. But, and Tom Chivers, and everyone should check it out, listen to it, you know, it's part of the cognitive toolkit, we need to be more skeptical. You know, especially in the age of Google, you need to have a little bit more epistemological hygiene, you know, you can find a study that says anything, really. So how do we figure this out? It's a whole thing. You know, as you're talking, and we don't want inclusive fitness, and, you know, you want to make a difference in the world, I want to make a difference in the world. I mean, that's why that's why, you know, I do a start up, you know, because like, you know, how are we going to like, change things and stuff like that. But real talk, I just want to be rich and famous, no. So, you know, there's different ways, there are stories we tell ourselves, and, you know, academics will tell certain stories of, you know, you want to increase your H index, because you want to make a difference, actually, you want to increase your H index, because, you know, everyone wants a bigger H index, you know, and so I was actually recently reading, rereading, it's been a long actually, it's been a long time. The Iliad, the Lattimore translation. And, you know, as, as most listeners know, Achilles is given a choice, a long life, or a short and brutal one. And he chose the short one, and why did you choose it because you know, everlasting glory, He wanted fame. And that's how that's how Gilgamesh found was the only way to get immortality. So I think this is actually in a way, an illustration of dual inheritance theory, because if Achilles wanted, wanted to have maximized his inclusive fitness, he would have stayed in Skyros. And, you know, lived as long as Nestor and had many sons, as it is, the only son, I think we know of is Neoptolemus. He probably had other sons. So, but anyway, but but, you know, for the, from the dual inheritance perspective, you know, people, in particular men to be candid, I think, want to be the big guy and have glory and have your name last, your name, your name, literally your name, you know, my last name is Khan. You know, and so I think Chinggis Khan managed do both. I'm just very exceptional, right? He got his inclusive fitness out there, and like, you know, the cultural influence. And so this is kind of looming over, I think, a lot of human behavior where, oh, we're not maximizing our short term, you know. So yes, evolution is always obviously, it's kind of a tautology, we're maximizing our fitness. But you know, how we get there differs. And, you know, we've stepped into kind of a box that's pushed us in a direction. That's really strange. EROI is part of it, you know, we've, we've tapped energy. How do we tap energy? Well, we cooperated? Why do we cooperate? Well, you know, there's a whole story that goes into that. And you were talking about, you know, disciplinary boundaries. So in the middle of the book, you know, you kind of transgress some boundaries going between like psychology, anthropology, cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, behavioral genetics. And I want to talk a little bit about that. And I think one of - if I'm gonna, like, remember, there's, there's a couple of things I will say that I will remember from this, but one of the things that we'll remember is, and I kind of know a little bit about this, but you illustrated very, very starkly. We are, we are actually more ape like than apes talk about that experiment. Because that's, I think that's like something that'll shock people.
Yeah. So in order to get this, the second line of inheritance, right culture, and not just a second line of inheritance, but one that's evolving beyond our understanding, or our need to understand, you needed to have the three ingredients that every every evolutionary system needs to have. So in genetics, or a genetic algorithm, whatever, you have diversity, like variation, and you have some transmission of that information over time without too much loss of the information. Genes, do that for genetic evolution. And then you have to vary, you have to have some kind of variation reduction. And if it is adaptive, it's going to be selection in the direction of something that's better over something that's worse. So the good stuff persist, and the less good stuff is less likely to persist. So cultural evolution works like this too, right? Like, diversity is easy. People do all kinds of things for all kinds of different reasons. There are personality differences between us different access to information, different motivations, incentives, whatever. There's all kinds of reasons why people do stuff, the magic of cultural evolution. motion is in the transmission and in the selection. So the transmission is what you're referring to here. And that is that humans copy things without really understanding. And there's lots of evidence of this. But I point to an experiment done with by Andy Whiten and Victoria Horner, where they compare the behavior of young Scottish children with some young chimps. And what they do is they've got this box, right, and this box has a hole on the top and a hole on the side. And then the experimenter will take a Stick and poke it through the hole in the top and then poke it through the hole on the side. And by poking at you, they retrieve a reward. So for the chimps it’s piece of fruit, and for the children, it's a it's a sticker. So the experimenter pokes a hole through the top pokes a hole through the side, hands it to the child. So he hands it to the chip, what does the chimp do, pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the site, retrieve it happy Chimp, again, the experimental pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the side, hands it to the child, what does the child do, pokes a hole through the top, pokes holes through the through the side and gets a sticker, happy child. Now, in the key variation, the box is now identical, but it's transparent. It's not you know, it's not a black box, it's a transparent box. And you can see that that first action of you know, poking the hole through - poking the stick through the top, it doesn't do anything, there's like a floor or ceiling, all of the retrieval is just in that side hole, right? But again, the experimenter you know, takes a stick and pokes a hole through the top box to all of his side. Now, you hand it to the chimp. Now if you've ever, you know, watched a chimp doing like a working memory task or like, you know, scrolling Instagram like chimps are smart man. And so what does the chimp do? He ignores that top action and goes straight to just poking through a hole through the side, and retrieving its reward. But again, with the child - the experimenter, pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the side hands it to the child, what does the child do? Pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the side, the child apes better than an ape does, it copies exactly what's going on. Now, later experiments reveal that, you know, children will do this when there's uncertainty like they don't know why the adult is doing it. But they assume that the previous generation now they're learning selectively like they're not learning at random. So they're more likely to copy adults, they're more likely to copy adults who other people they're copying, who are successful, whatever, they've got all these social learning strategies, but the point is, they copy without understanding. And so you have a head full of recipes, a handful of ways of thinking that you've never really questioned that are the secret to your success. You're building on the previous generation, and you just need to tweak and adapt based on that. Some of that stuff might be wrong, some of that stuff might be right. But it's still in there. So for example, some of its you brush your teeth, probably twice a day. Why? If I asked you well, you'll say something about, I don't know, plaque or, you know, tartare if I ask you more about that. So well, how does that form? What it was? Like? I don't know, has it happened to us? Like, sometimes I guess, but it's because your dentist told you to do that. And in actual fact, you know, that takes takes about 48 hours, I think for the bacteria to lay down. So you could brush your teeth, if you did really well, once every two days, and you'd be okay. But you don't have any of that causal modeling. And you have actually what's called the illusion of explanatory depth, which shields you from it that is that you have an illusion that you understand the world better than you do. And that causes you not to question these things, right? Like if my book like think about, you know, even epistemic things like if my book was like, the reason that everything happens, you know, the the reason that the world looks at the reason the right wing is rising, and everything seems like it's more difficult for our children is because of evil spirits. You be like, Ah, I know what section I'm gonna put this book into right? Now. It's not because you've like checked all the evidence for evil spirits. You live in a society that has goes, you know, that's not that's not what's going on. Energy, that's plausible, right? Take aliens, like you live for a long time in a society where aliens were definitely off the charts. And then the people that seemed like they knew what they were talking about, we're suddenly talking about UFOs and aliens, like it was a real thing. And you're - you can see it, you should be able to see it happening to us like, is it? Is that really a thing? But you you know, you live in a world where you believe like, hands down, you accept things that violate your everyday experience, like you will swear up and down that you know, you live on a spheroid rotating around a star, one of many stars in the Milky Way, right. And every day you see a sun tracing the sky from east to west and a flat earth. And you're like, Nope, that's not what it is. Depending doesn't matter. Because the smartest people around you most people are at you believe this, right? You believe that Germs are what make you sick, right? Invisible germs that you've never seen. And maybe you saw a picture or under a microscope, you saw something wiggling you're like, that's what's going on. Right? If you lived in a in another world, you would you would just as readily believe that it was spirits making you sick. And you would just as readily point to the evidence of the person who ate the wrong thing and pissed off the spirits or the the rustling at night, you'd have all of the evidence to back it up. But the point is simply that your intelligence your ability to think is a result of the socially acquired software. That is what allows you to surpass your short lifetime of experience and your short lifetime of acquiring knowledge or building on the previous generation. So yeah, and we do it because we're apeing better than apes do. See, that's the irony. We're smart because we're stupid.
Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the big insights of, well, I mean, other fields as well, but of cultural evolution of social cognition, you know, we have this like, distributed network of information and some of it, you know, you know, so you said the secret secret of our success, you know, Joe Henrich has a book, you know, read the book, everybody, I've done podcasts with him. On one of my one of my previous podcasts, it's great. And, you know, it talks about distributed information , you know, there's a lot of it's like, we have information that's distributed, there's information. And well, there's information in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brain, you know, and that was that really helped the group of Americans with information Wernher von Braun has brain that really helped the Germans. Luckily, there wasn't too much information in Heisenberg's brain or not enough, we went that actually, there was a stochastic element, they went the wrong way. But whatever, right, it's not all deterministic, right? So you know, when you break it down, it kind of makes sense. And, you know, this also comes back to anthropology because when you look at another culture from the outside, it all makes sense. Not it all makes sense. But there are things that are revealed about your culture that you don't realize, because you take your own culture for granted because it’s the water you swim in. And so, you know, Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion, he talks about cargo cults and cargo calls have a Savior figure called John Frum this isn't Melanesia. And, you know, John Frum was an American GI during World War Two. And there was a conversation between I think it was a Catholic priest at one of the local headman who's a big cargo cult guy. And the Catholic priest is like, you know, like, why do you guys believe in this John Frum guy, and you know, the head man has like a whole theory about it. And the Catholic priest is like, so have you? Have you ever met John Frum? And he's like, Well, no, John Frum was like, you know, that was like a century ago and stuff like that, and the priest is like . Well, how do you even know John Frum exists? And the head man looks at him, he's like, Well, have you ever met Jesus? So that was like, that took the Catholic priest aback. Because, you know, the, the priest was using a, you know, kind of like a toolkit that he wasn't flipping around to himself. And, you know, this reminds me of, you know, this like a famous thing. There's, there was this Muslim guy who was sharing Bertrand Russell's why I'm not a Christian, to a bunch of Christian friends. They just they just pointed out, like, you can just make like a trivial Search and Replace. That's a it's a general argument. And the guy was like, oh, and then he stopped sharing the book, because he hadn't realized it, you know, and it just goes to show yeah, we're really smart. But we're also really dumb, right, you know, as a species. And it's because on an individual level, we don't really understand all of these things. We're just good at kind of reassuring ourselves, we do.
Yeah, no, I mean, so what you know what you've what you've what you're alluding to, is this kind of idea of a collective brain. So when humans did was we moved the computation for figuring this stuff out to the population level, by like, selectively learning and copying the things that work better, and avoiding the things that work less well. We filter, every generation, the good stuff, and you know, for the most part, we make mistakes, we get rid of the stuff that doesn't work very well. Right. And this is, this is the this is the big thing, like like science, for example, doesn't work. You know, Dawkins also has a story of like, you know, there was a scientist, and he was presented with, with the evidence that knocked down his entire lifetime of work. And then he goes, my mind has changed and everybody clapped. That's not normally what happens if it ever happens at all right? Like, scientists don't change their minds, because, you know, the evidence changes, they change their minds, or at least we discover truth, we slowly converge on truth, because we are incentivized to show other scientists that they're wrong. And we have common standards for evidence and theory and whatever. And as a result of that, over time, science works as a community, not as a result of individual scientists running you know, A/B control, you know, RCT randomized, controlled trials. So that collective intelligence perspective, again, offers comes out of this theory of everyone cultural evolution, dual inheritance, and it gives you new levers for thinking about how to increase innovation rates, because if it's not happening at an individual level, then it's not about finding the 10x engineers or the 10x scientists who are 10 times better. That's part of it. But what you really want are like individuals that can be turned into 10x teams, or potentially a bunch of 10x engineers that can be turned into 100x. Team. So you're thinking about how do we increase things like sociality, like size and interconnectedness? And how do we increase it improve the flow of information between people? How do we get rid of the things that are holding the flow of information between people? You know, how do we manage diversity because diversity is a double edged sword, right? It divides people and it is fuel for recombination for new innovations. Yes, I mean, this is you know, you mentioned start ups. So you know, I run a service line at the LSE Culturalytik, where I, I basically offer this for companies doing this. But the population level, you know,
I don't think I'm gonna talk about because I, you know, we have finite amount of time. The book has like a lot of different elements. So this is an energy book. It's an evolution book. It's also a business book. So there's like a whole section about your consulting. And I don't, I'm not gonna talk too much about that. Because again, like, there's a finite amount of time. And obviously, I think most of my listeners are more interested in the evolution and the energy part than the business part. But you know, industrial psychology, that's a whole field and you want to optimize and, you know, if you're in business, if you're in a firm, you're trying to maximize some things. But you know, I want to talk about we've been talking about cooperation, increasing complexity, and all that stuff. But one of my actually, I'm not sure if my first but the first paper on cultural evolution I read was actually Joe Henrichs paper about Tasmanians. And I actually got to this paper because I was thinking, I read Richard Klein's book on the origin of modern humans and the punctuated equilibrium origin of culture and language and all this and, you know, I don't, I don't wanna say, I don't believe in punctuated equilibrium. I'm skeptical of it. Anyway. So I was like, ah, like, could could culture like emerge, like in such a punctuated fashion? And then I stumbled on the Tasmanians, who had a very simple culture. But we pretty much know that they were, I mean, not we pretty much we know, they were modern humans. And we know they're descended from the out of Africa migration 60,000 years ago, but their culture was, was quite quite primitive to the point where, you know, European, physical anthropologists were like, you know, are these archaic humans? Are they primitive, like a offshoot of homo? That's not homosapiens? All these questions, we know that that's not true. But the reason that they came to those inferences is because the way they lived, was considerably more primitive than, say, the aboriginals of the mainland. And can you talk about why they were so primitive?
Yeah, so just just to re emphasize that, you know, they rather than boats they were kind of pushing rafts through the water, you know, they would rub fat on their bodies to stay warm, you know, they had lost some firemaking abilities, like it was, it was bad. And what was interesting is, it wasn't just that they had like a less sophisticated technological toolkit than their cousins on the mainland, but also then their own ancestors. And this was a big part of, you know, the big part of it. And this was actually my first, my first paper was experimentally demonstrating how this happens. So as you rightly said, you know, so Henrich has this model. And there's, there's really two models out there to explain what was going on. One model is, is a cultural drift model. So the idea is simply like when a population shrinks, you lose stuff, you know, like, just by chance, in the same way that you lose genes, if you're, if you're a small population, and you've got one person with blue eyes or something and over, you keep losing the blue eyed people, eventually, there's no more blue eyes left, right? The same way, if you have a small population, and one, you know, three people know how to make a fire, and by chance, three of them die or over a couple of generations, then you lose that ability. Joe's explanation was slightly different. He said, well, actually learning is lossy. That is because remember, the light of knowledge has to be passed out. Like we have to teach the fire making skills and the computers and the spacecrafts and everything to every successive generation. And if you break that line somehow, in some way, because you don't have written text or whatever, then you are going to substantially reduce the cultural corpus, you're gonna reduce the technological sophistication. And as well as that, because part of that software is running your operating system for thinking, you're going to be less bright as a result of that, too. So that's basically what happened. So Tasmania, so this is, this is what we call this a treadmill model. And the basic idea is that if learning is lossy, it means that a particular population size can sustain a particular level of cultural complexity. In the absence of other things, as I said, like writing that where generation by generation, you can reliably have at least one other person to replace each person carrying each different skill, each generation. So it's not, things are lost at random, it's the things that are more complex, that need to be transmitted are more likely to be lost, and so on. So I pitted these two models against each other in an experiment and what happened in Tasmania. Oh, sorry, I fitted these two models against each other experiment, it was pretty clear, holding population size constant. If you lose interconnectivity, then the you just can't transmit that stuff, generationally, you can't pick the best models to learn from. And that's what happened with the Tasmania when they got cut off with rising sea levels from the Australian mainland. They didn't have a sufficiently large population to sustain their toolkit, their cultural complexity. So they began to lose it generation by generation.
Yeah. So let me let me let me like bring some interdisciplinary like, the this is like, it's just I think, a lot of great ideas in the book. This is something people need to think about. We are you know, we are modern people here like we're using magic to talk over , talk over flat screens across, you know, many time zones with magical spirits and stuff like that. And, you know, I just, I was recently on a flying ship that somehow, you know, it's like, we live in this, we live in a world of wonders and a world of miracles. And you know, I have a supercomputer in my pocket. When I was a kid - You know, I have like, more computing power than the world when I was born. All of these things okay to have happen. So we imagine and like, we have like shale oil and all this stuff, nuclear, and we'll talk about that in the end of the podcast, I want to get to that nuclear especially. But, um, you know, so I think we have like a Whiggish view of like, increased complexity and stuff. And, you know, we forget in the past stuff, you know, from economists perception, endogenous growth theory, productivity growth was much slower with the Malthusian world, a Malthusian trap. You've talked about that in the book, too. And, you know, people thought that there were, you know, great ages in the past golden ages. And, you know, as a kid, you know, I was like, Ah, so it's weird, because, you know, the past always sucks, you know, compared to the present. But, you know, that's actually a very recent thing. The ancients weren't wrong, they were actually correct. Sometimes the past was better. And, you know, if you read ‘the human web’, one of John McNeil's last books, the historian and the macro historian, he talks about the Eurasian web, a network of cultural centers that increase redundancy over time. So there was a collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, which caused like a massive rupture. Okay, and it did, it turns out that the what the Greeks recorded in their mythology was a recollection of the Citadel culture of the late bronze age. And there are some arguments that the that the early Polis, in the early Iron Age were actually smaller than the citadels because the what basically the economic system that required the the forging of bronze had to be larger scale than iron. So in some ways, early Iron Age Greece was a smaller scale society, even though they're advanced in other ways. So you know, they remember these times where they're these Anaxes, these kings that they didn't have in the early Iron Age, okay, so they had a Gold Age, and now they're an Iron Age. And then there was a collapse, actually, you know, in the fourth fifth century of the Greco Roman world, and there was a dark age. And for a while, it was fashionable to say, Oh, well, there really wasn't a dark age. And I love you know, I love you know, Browns work on late antiquity. And it's great. But it turns out there was a dark age for a materialist perspective, almost for sure. What you know, Brian Ward Perkins and other archaeology, archaeological historians have shown this. And, you know, material well being dropped coin hoards increase, to greatest that literacy disappeared. So I just had a podcast with Eric Cole, who's a neuroscientist, and he did a lot of reading of literature. And he talked about how one graffiti disappears from the Mediterranean. So even if literacy was low, in the Greco Roman world is probably an order of magnitude higher than it was in the, quote, Dark Ages afterwards. So graffiti disappears. Also, the writing transforms were the writing during the Greco Roman period, some of it is quite personal. So like Augustine, St. Augustine's confessions, something like that was not produced during the, you know, early medieval period in Europe. These are the same people biologically, mostly outside of England, you know, but their culture had totally transformed. And, in a way, they had kind of reverted to Bronze Age modalities of using literacy as basically accounting, instead of exploring kind of life of the mind and interiority, which had occurred during the Greco Roman period. So today, you know, we're just like, oh, like, why did they admire the Roman so much? Well, I mean, you know, Ward Perkins talks about the fact that in England, or the level of pollution in the ponds, and this is like something you can, like, analyze materially, the amount of lead in the ponds did not reach late Roman magnitudes until the 18th century. So it took it took 1500 years after the collapse for the economic activity of like consumption and production of energy, which is on the cusp of one of the revolutions that you're talking about in the book, to come back. And so our own civilizations have regressed, and collapsed. And our social complexity has decreased. Just like you see what the Tasmanians are just like your model. And part of that is clearly having to do with so you're talking about interconnectedness? Well, if the literacy rate drops, you know, all the great there's far fewer great minds. In Carl Sagan’s but Cosmos he talks about, you know, you can quantitatively demonstrate the decrease in the number of minds well, is that because people were dumber? Probably not. It's all of a sudden, you know, you know, Plato called Aristotle the nickname was the brain, bro was genius, you know, or like, I mean, let's like, you know, let's have more of an engineer Archimedes. You know about Archimedes if the listeners, they know a little bit about Archimedes, so the lever, that guy did integration with the mathematical tools he had, okay? Like, if Archimedes was alive in the, in the 17th century, I'm going to be guaranteeing that he's gonna be arguing with Newton and Linus. Okay, like this was like, this was like a world historical genius. But he could only do so much in his time because of the cultural tools yet, which to be fair, were some of the greatest tools for 1000 years because Alexandria are not what she studied in Alexandria. And then he went back to Syracuse, which is one of the biggest cities in the Mediterranean at the time. You know, he was supposedly killed by a Roman soldier by mistake. They didn't want to kill them, like this, that he was like, like a precious, he was a human, he was literally a human resource. Like they wanted to capture Syracuse, but they wanted to get him, because arguably, he would have been one of the biggest, like, plunder the booty that they could have captured, right, they knew the value of this guy. And so it just shows that yes, the cultures change over time. And between cultures, and that what you're talking about what the Tasmanians, it applies to us. You know, I do have to say, with the internet, you know, we were both old enough to remember before the internet, and I thought, like, oh, there's gonna be so many great minds chattering on the internet. And mostly people are screaming at each other, or they're watching porn. So you know, there's limitations on that. On the other hand, you as an academic, you put preprints out there, you have way too much email. So there's a lot of noise, but there's also a lot more signal. So knock on wood, hopefully, we're actually increasing the rate of innovation somewhat there. And so that's illustrating that principle. Now, I want to talk though, about you have a whole section on IQ in there. And I want to talk about that, because I know a little bit about that topic. And it's like, you know, it's controversial or whatever. So you're, actually you just explain it, you explain, like, what your thesis is, for the listener? Because they'll they'll know a little bit of it, I think, but sort of what was it just in terms of like, how IQ expresses itself within a culture? And, you know, like, how the phenotype emerges? And how we can kind of understand it better.
Yeah, I mean, so the, the take that I that I have is basically, if you think about IQ as a, there's a lot in this section, if you think about IQ as like a measurement of intelligence. And so I'm going to use them interchangeably, but we know the difference their IQ test results are going up. Because our technologies, our ways of thinking, our education, our software has been improving. Right? That's, that's what's going on with the Flynn effect. And it's not like, you know, when people talk about like IQ tests are culturally biased, it's actually a much deeper issue than that. It's not that like IQ tests are culturally biased, is it there's really no such thing as culture free intelligence. So you can see this, if you look at a few, you know, like, for example, numeracy, some societies today, and certainly our ancestors counted like 123, and then many, right, they didn't have a full blown number system. But eventually we got there, we got natural numbers above one. And we did it with a metaphor that we then represented in our brains. So some of those metaphors were like stones. So you know, calculus think, calcium, like limestone. Some of its like stones pressed into clay. So like notches, or body parts, so we use the decimal system, which is an awful system, because it doesn't translate well to binary. But that's because we have 10 fingers and other other societies counted on the 12 phalanges, you know, each of the finger bones with their thumb, and you know, others count on different body parts. That's great for numbers above one. But even once we got there, it took centuries before the idea of zero as a number. And that is because we didn't have a good metaphor for understanding zero, right, like, zero stones, is nothing. And that means it's nothing of everything, right. And so it took a long time, and certainly negative numbers. You know, this quote from like Francis Maseres, British mathematician in the 17th 18th century was like, you know, negative numbers darkened the very, you know, the very fabric of reality or something along those lines. And that's really, because it needed a new metaphor for thinking that would give us new intelligences, right. And that was the number line. So we moved from objects to position. And this allowed zero to become obvious, and also the negative numbers and then to so obvious that we can begin teaching it to children. And of course, once you can count, you can do all kinds of calculations that you couldn't do with just your fingers. Now, you might think that just by measuring, measuring things out there in the world, you'll get some insight into intelligence or something, but it's not true. Because we all live in a bubble, right? Not like East Coast elites, and, you know, academics in ivory towers. I mean, we all live in a bubble where everyone went through education through school, which is a primary means by which we download a cultural package onto the next generation as efficiently as possible to try to avoid the Tasmania problem. And by the way, this is also, you know, I think this is how we also mess things up and enter the new Dark Ages, because we're messing up with our schools. But there is a section of the book on that. But if you look at if you look at this kind of transmission that's that's taking place all of experimental psychology, obviously, IQ tests, and everything emerges long after the advent of school and truancy laws. That meant that everybody got this baseline of knowledge. And all of that stuff has now become instinctual to the point where we think all humans have these abilities. So take reading, you know, the Stroop test is what really reveals this, right? Like the Stroop test, you've got color words like red, blue, orange, whatever, and they're either matched to the color like the ink text is the same, or it's a different color. So like read written in blue ink, and you get somebody to, to say the color of the text and don't read it, right. And people struggled to do this. So if you imagine like a psychologist from Venus, you know, the anthropologist from Mars, the psychologist from Venus, turns up and starts measuring humans, just taking a database approach. Now the theory base, no theory of everyone or anything, they'd be like, All right. So humans have, you know, a fundamental innate ability to read, but they don't have any innate ability of color perception, at the very least it gets overwritten. And you would be mistaken. And we are mistaken the same way about many other aspects of our intelligence. So the ability to reason is another example. Right. So we talked about some work that we have, so we replicate some research that was done by the psychologist Alexander Luria, the 1920s in Uzbekistan. So he wants to understand how education is changing cognition, and he goes out there and he does all kinds of tests including like if p then q reasoning. So he says something like, white actually uses this very question. He says, where it snows the bears are white, in Novaya Zemlya it snows what color are the bears educated Uzbeks white, if I asked you white, if I asked my six year old white, the people who hadn't received education, we're like, I think brown I've seen a brown bear once. I don't know, you know, like, it's like, what, let me just repeat the question to you, I don't understand what you're not getting about this. So it's obviously not that humans can't do this. Like we by the way, we replicate the same thing in Namibia and Angola with a much cleaner natural experiment than than what Lauria had access to. But the point is that, like these are, these are proclivities and entire new cultural abilities created by software upgrades, you know, new apps running in our head, that give us brand new abilities, new ways of thinking. Now, that is not to deny like that there are individual, you know, like, there are genetic differences between people, you know, there are like Terry Taos of the world, you know, John von Neumann to the world, it's not even, you know, it's not to deny the role of, of nutrition or the role of lead in your water, like a problem that we have here in the UK. It's not to deny, you know, pollution or your prenatal environment, whether your mother was drinking and smoking while you were, you know, while she was carrying, you. It’s not to deny any of those other things, those are all important for developing good hardware. But across time, certainly, and probably across sections of society and between societies, the software is doing far more than the hardware is in another way to think about this is like, if you want to send pivot tables in Excel, or you want to understand like, you know, chat GPT it's not - it is in the CPU and the GPU, but that's actually not in the CPU or the GPU, like studying the brain isn't gonna give that to you. Sure. It’s software an so you have to think about how it's written and what software people are running.
Yeah. So I mean, I think I'm gonna, you know, I think you bring up a very interesting, well, I mean, so, so obviously, intelligence, quantitative trait. So just like, height, we know what's heritable. And like, we actually have another, you know, one of my earlier podcasts with Alex Young and James Lee, we talked about it like both of them study intelligence, you know, Edu, you know, stuff like that. And obviously, it's heritable. It segregates within families as well, a polygenic indexes can actually, like predict rank order within families. You know, one sibling is smarter than the other and it's not because, you know, so it's genes. But, you know, if you think about height, there are some populations like, you know, my family's from Bangladesh, you know, Bengalis are just short, okay? And this isn't because of nutrition. Like, you're tall like you attributed possibly to your Dutch ancestry Dutch are tall, like different groups are different heights, even though they overlap. But Bengalis are shorter than like, say, Punjabis, you know, and, you know, people used to say, oh, it's because of like nutrition. But if you go to England, there are people whose ancestors are from Bangladesh, and people whose ancestors from Pakistan, and in England, they all kind of eat crappy English food, no just joking. But nutrition is not an issue. And these are both also two groups that tend to eat meat as well. And Bengalis are short. And actually, if you do a polygenic index prediction on height, the Bengali Bangladesh samples in 1000 genomes are shorter. Okay, so there's a group difference, but there's also overlap, right? And, but this only also totally realizes with the heritability in a western nutritional environment because there's a lot more noise, lower heritability of height in third world countries and developing nations, because nutrition is actually a constraint. And so it's this is one of the things like, can you chew gum and walk at the same time? Can you juggle all these different variables at the same time? So what you're saying is not, oh, there's a blank slate, but there's still the Archimedes, the von Neumanns Oppenheimer's of the world, but that expresses in a certain cultural context.
Yeah, I mean, it's, I guess the argument is even is perhaps a little even stronger than, you know, than that, like, so I have a paper on this called the cultural evolution of genetic heritability, which I think you might have read, and it makes us in detail, it's got a nice model to back it out. But the I mean, the idea is this, right? If we all lived in a perfectly equal cultural environment, this is obviously true. Like, you know, we all have the same parents, the same, you know, educational environment, the same resources, the same nutrition, the same avoidance of insults, like disease, and, and whatever pathogens, then genes would be 100% heritable to explain, you know, intelligence, right. That's not the world we live in. And what's more, it's not clear like so take someone like Newton, it's not clear. So one question some people ask me is like, Where have all the geniuses gone? And my answer to that is, it's not that they're geniuses have gone like, it's, it is statistically unlikely that Newton at a time when literacy was so low, happens to be the person with the most genetic or, you know, the most potential in England. No, the guy was like, the, the top of a small molehill and Einstein to on a slightly on a larger hill, right. Or, to put it another way, the reason that there are no geniuses today is there's so many geniuses that none stand out, right, you have to be like, several orders more, you know, higher and sigma, like way out there on the tail to be noticed. And even then, it's not clear that that that genetic difference in hardware is going to result in better outcomes for you, because most of us are smart enough. And the constraints on innovation are no longer about like having more intelligence. It's like when you go to grad school, right? Like, you're there, it's not necessary, like people are so like to get to that point, you're thinking intelligence, intelligence, intelligence, it gets to a point where everyone is intelligent enough and now other factors like hard work or you know, the what you're reading or you know, how you socially network or whatever, those things are gonna affect your
Yeah,
Like take a tech engineer or you know, finance, bro, whatever, take them back to like England. And they would probably redirive, rewrite Principia, probably with more stuff.
Yeah, yeah. And I want to mention, I want to, I want to, we're running out of time now. So I do want to move to nuclear and environment and all that stuff. So the last thing I'll say on this is the average measured IQ in Japan is actually higher than in Northern Europe by about five points. And it's always been a paradox or a mystery. I mean, Japanese are productive, intellectually, Japanese science and other things. But people have always perceived the punch a little bit lower than maybe they should be based on that IQ and what's going on. And like the standard explanation is like, if you look at anthropologists who studied Japanese science, it's extremely hierarchical. And so the famous population geneticist Motoo Kimura, he went to the United States, because he couldn't like, really publish his theories as a young young researcher in Japan, because you have to defer to the elders. And then once he got enough status, he went back to Japan and then acted just like them to be candid. I mean, this is well known, the irony of Motoo Kimura, he acted just like his, his, his mentors in Japan, when he got that position, but you know, this hierarchical system, it might be efficient, it might actually keep using your terminology, keep the floor higher. But the problem is, it limits the ceiling. Right. So that's just just an explanation that I'm gonna throw out there
I just want you know, like so take IQ tests performance, right in our at our site, those without education on ravens coloured progressive matrices, which is about as cultural free as you get. eight year olds perform, like 18 year olds, like IQ tests are measuring what education gives you an end because of the shift thanks to the internet, which we didn't really get into. And I talked about the second enlightenment that the internet is creating, because of the internet. The future IQ tests, like the stuff that's going to matter aren't going to be the same skills that we're measuring today. Right, like the ability to focus in a distracted world or parse through for signal and noise or work with AI. That's the stuff that's gonna matter. Our education systems haven't kept up in the way we even think about intelligence hasn't kept up.
Yeah, so there's a lot of there's a lot of controversial ideas in this book, which to me is not a bad thing. If you're listening to me, you probably don't think it's a bad thing. So I want to like end this podcast with like, a little bit of controversy. You know, you started out with like, you know, big evolutionary like paleontological, whatever. And you know, energy is a big, big issue and you talked about nuclear. You know, you live in England. You live in Europe, England, still part of Europe, even if you're not the EU degrowth and all this stuff is big there. And you know, in like, you know, professional managerial class, kind of like you know, I'm a liberal lefty. Ah, you know, cultural milieu, there's certain certain assumptions about renewables, and everyone should do solar. And scientists are a little bit off the rez on this. But, you know, nuclear is like, oh, that's dangerous and et cetera, et cetera. I think things are changing maybe a little bit with Oppenheimer movie. culture matters, you know, it's seeming sexy. Again, I'm one of the top top selling books is now biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer, cuz he was a womanizer. So you want to know about him now? Not? You know, I don't know, I don't know why. I think it's like, you know, you know, his, he was not a boring guy. But um, you know, in the book you're talking about, we are running up against, you know, limits to growth, to use 1970s terminology, and some people think that's good. They think Degrowth is good. You have it the whole wait, Did I just trigger you? Did I just trigger you?
You did I mean, degrowth is, is such a, it's such a dangerous idea. I mean, you know, talking about like, positive seven zero sum ideas, the idea of like, like, let's put a ceiling on this, let's like an organism grows, and then it stops, organism grows, and it stops, and then it starts to decay, right? Like, you, by creating a world of degrowth, you create a zero sum world where someone else's win is your loss because the pie is fixed. And that is, you know, what we want, if we want to say, if we want to get out of this climate mess, we don't do it through degrowth or scarcity by encouraging that we get there by entering the new level of abundance, right? The countries that are looking after their environment, are the countries where there's enough money to do so, you know, they're the ones that can rebuild the Barrier Reef, like if you're Australia, or plant a bunch of trees, give off a bunch of land, because you're not poor and worried about like, you know, just like feeding your people and making sure there's enough enough resources for hospitals and so on. So by entering that new era of growth, like it's night, it's easier to be nice when there's more to go round. And it's easy to look after and want to live in a clean environment, when you have enough resources and have enough energy to do that to do so.
Yeah, and so for the listeners out there who don't know, I mean, degrowth is not just a generic term, it's a new field. I'm gonna say it's a heterodox field to be like neutral about it. It's outside of conventional economics, environmental science and stuff like that. And the whole idea is, we kind of live in like a zero footprint world, and we get okay with just kind of economically stagnating, maybe in declining population, declining economic growth, like, you know, less resources, just less to go around. And I don't study it too much, because candidly, like stepping outside the neutral box. It's pretty hackish. And it's one of those things you see, like these viral memes go out. And, like, anyone who knows economic history knows that that chart is just a lie. Like, I see that all the time, or degrowth. I'm just like, all right, like, No, I'm not gonna comment on this, because it's a lie. Like, you know, it's like the whole field. I mean, I'm trying to I'm being like, really polemical, here, but like, the whole field is like a lie. It's like, lie after lie after lie. It's like, it's like Cargo Cult Science. It's not real anyway. But like, you know, you really promote nuclear. And one of the things I have to say is you also promote, you know, to be controversial. It's like, okay, nuclear is kind of seems anti left, but you also promote world government, which, you know
I don't promote world government
but you bring up well, there's an implication there that we need to coordinate on the global scale.
Yeah, but you can coordinate without, like governance. I mean, a big part of what I you know, what I advocate for is this, like, distributed, radically decentralized approach. So it's the opposite of world government. In fact, the approach for example, in you know, I was in Estonia last week to understand how they're like, how they reached the top of the PISA tables. And again, it's radical decentralization. You know, it's, it's this idea of, like, each state of the United States as laboratories for democracy, as Justice Brandeis put it, startup cities like Hong Kong or Singapore, or trying trying many different things as a way out of out of path dependence.
Okay, okay. Okay. Okay, I connected the dots there inappropriately, obviously, I maybe I read a little too fast at the end. And it's like, where's this going? But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, we have a coordination problem, right? And how to get out of that coordination problem. So, for example, for the nuclear, you know, Libertarians will often say, libertarians, and invite this is where environmentalist bring up libertarian arguments is the startup cost of nuclear and there are some like small nuclear reactor, you know, actually like it some people in Austin invest in some of this. I actually know some of that some of this. But, you know, nuclear power requires social complexity and coordination and capital inputs. And it just might be a situation where it requires state investment initially, to get it going before you get to the positive sum aspect of it.
I mean, energy wise thing, because it's such a high E ROI, it pays for itself pretty quickly. You know, and we know that we can build these fast because in other regions, the Koreans have been able to build it in the Middle East, under budget very quickly. The Chinese have Like 228 reactors in deployment, and as you as you mentioned, you've got small modular reactors, SMRs and micro reactors, you got reactors, you know, the size of a couple of football fields all the way down to reactors the size of a, you know, shipping container or car. And then we've used these for a long time, that's what's running, you know, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, right? These are not these are, these are established technologies that will already get us where we need to go, and more investment in that area. So what I what I basically say, if you look at the technologies available to us, the ones that have the numbers are like better, better harnessing of the, of the fusion reactor in the sky via solar, if we can solve the batteries solution, and, and nuclear in the interim for baseload and for a variety of other reasons. Now, there are issues with that, that I get into the book. And, you know, hint, it's not, it's not like the nuclear waste. It's more to do with things like diffusion of these technologies. But but you know, this, and, of course, as I said, fusion ultimately, and we have a startup ecosystem around fusion for the first time, so I am quite hopeful.
Yeah I mean, we have we have, we have decades to go maybe. But, you know, that's, that's how it works. I mean, things happen really slowly until they happen really fast. I think as we're ending ending with, you know, I like,
Michael: I think this century is fast. But
yeah, that's fair. So I feel like, you know, in some ways, the end of the book, you know, we could be a galactic species or our civilization, even if we're not embodied. I mean, I have a note in here, transhumanism. I don't really want to get into that now, because we're running out of time. But I mean, I think, in some ways, this book has a huge window, like, huge horizon. And it's about an idea of increased complexity of like, you know, innovation technology, kind of a big picture, optimistic vision, I feel, which I, you know, hopefully, you'll have a lot of sales in America, we're an optimistic country, this kind of stuff we like, you know, and that's what I got, like at the end of the book. I mean, what would you say to that?
I agree. I mean, ultimately, it is, it's a hopeful book. It's an optimistic book, I've had, you know, somebody reviews offline says, It's too optimistic. We're not that good. Like, we're humans suck, and we're gonna beat each other up. No, I disagree. I think, for the first time, if we really, if you buy what I'm saying that we have a theory of everyone, a periodic table of people, whatever, we can do something about the problems that face us, we can understand them as never before. And we can know what we as a species should be advocating for and where we need to go. So I'm hoping many people read this book. And by all means, argue with it, tell me where I'm wrong. But hopefully, if you realize, you know, if you see that, that you agree with it, know what we need to do next.
All right. All right. I think that's that's a good place to end. It was great talking to you, Michael. Everyone, check out the book. I'm gonna read the whole it's this long. “A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going” And honestly, like, as I said, there's an aspect of the book where you talk about your business consulting and your experience there. There's there's dimensions in this book that I didn't get into, because we have finite amount of time. But, you know, there's a lot of things in here. It's a quick read. Luckily, Michaels, a good fluid writer, which like, that's one of the many skills you have. So, you know, and you're also tall, so you're a big guy for big book, like, let's like, keep the analogy going. Yeah, so I really enjoyed this conversation. I enjoyed the book, and I will talk to you later, Michael.
Yeah, thanks very much Razib I really enjoyed it. Great interview.
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