It Could Happen Here - Diversity With Andrew

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

James is joined by Andrew to discuss diversity and its value as a concept, not a corporate buzzword.   Sources: In Light of Our Differences        by David Harmon The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies        by Scott E. PageSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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diversity has become so politically charged nowadays. You know, as a buzzword, as a dirty word, you know, we see it caught up in terms like the eye, in the debates around immigration and representation, and all

the culture wars that have captured so much of the world's attention as of late. But what has my attention recently, the kind of diversity that I want to focus on is the diversity that we are losing, that we are critically losing. Right now, we're living through what many scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction. Species are disappearing at a rate driven overwhelmingly by human activity. Languages are dying. Indigenous knowledge is disappearing and entire cultures

have been erased, assimilated or reduced to museum pieces. We are, in our lifetimes, witnessing a profound loss of what author David Harmon calls biocultural diversity,

the combined diversity of life and human culture. And all of this has happened at the same time that diversity itself has become so politically controversial. So the question I want to talk about today is why we should even care about diversity in the first place. Why it doesn't matter that thousands of languages exist? Why should we

care for species disappears? Why doesn't matter whether there are countless different ways for people to live and think and create and organize themselves? Typically, we speak of diversity as an unquestioned value as something that some people like or dislike are posed to or in favor of politically. But I want to make a deeper argument that diversity is one of the fundamental conditions that makes life, creativity, and freedom possible. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm joined again by James. It's great to be back. I'm excited about this one. Yes. So I suppose to start with, what would you say the kinds of diversity that come to mind, you know, when you hear the tomb and why would you see that it is something that you value if it is that

you value? I assume you do. Yeah, yeah, I do. Like, there's like a very liberal way of understanding diversity, right? And I think sometimes, even the Libs getting better at this, libs used to use the word tolerance a lot, which I despise as a way of talking about diversity, right? Like, it's like I sort of, I don't like it, but I'll allow it to exist approach. Yes, like, I'll put up with you kind of. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, it's not getting us to where we want to get, right? But, like, I enjoy that there are people who, obviously, like, who are diverse in the way

that neoliberalism wants us to think about diversity in terms of race, in terms of sexuality, terms of neoliberalism is kind of waffling on gender. But also, like, they just approaches to the way we live our lives, right? Like, our cultures, our ways of organizing, our ways of being with one another. my life is so much richer because I've been exposed to that kind of diversity, right? Like, I get to travel a lot. And seeing how people approach all kinds of issues has really helped me with ways of dealing with things, of crossing the bridges we come to in organizing in trying to live our better lives because I've been able to learn from the ways that they

have developed to doing it, which is very different from the way we do it, right? And so I think Like that kind of diversity is also super important. I agree. Absolutely. I think that a lot of times as well, the conversation is really focused on diversity as it relates to people. But, you know, even before we get to diversity within our species,

there is the diversity that, you know, transcends our species, the diversity of all the species of planet Earth. You know, the variation as a feature of the world be the event. Yeah, I think that's also like super valuable, right? Like, and in a way that we can't... I was thinking about this this morning.

I was hiking this morning. And like, capitalism lacks some means to ascribe value to that kind of thing, right? Like I was thinking about it in the US, they've proposed to rescind the roadless rule which allows you not to build roads, international forests, in certain infantry roadless areas.

And, like, there is a way of... ascribing value to timber, right? You can talk about board feet of timber. Like, there is a way of ascribing cost to roads, right? We can estimate how much it will cost to build roads into this area. But, like, there isn't a way of ascribing value that works to the forest being there, to all the things in the forest that are not commercial timber being there, right? plants, animals, the insects.

It's like the quantifiable value versus like the unquantifiable value, basically. Yeah, like they're not productive to capital, but they do give us something that is valuable. And because capitalism can't ascribe value to them, it sometimes fails to protect them, right? We've seen this, North America is a great example, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, how do you ascribe value to a view? Right. I mean, there's an extent to which we see some of that value being wrapped up in the price of, like, a house. You know, like if a house is on a hillside and has a great view of the ocean and stuff, people will say, oh, well, we could jack up its price on the market because, you know, people will pay for that view.

Yeah. You know, a similar concept with, like, the way that hotel rooms might be more expensive on the higher floors because, you know, oh, you get that kind of panoramic view of. the city or whatever, but that doesn't really capture the experience. It is a crude approximation of the experience of, you know, waking up in the morning to the sun coming over the horizon, the sea in the distance, the birds, you know, making their way out into the world. None of that is captured in the number. It's just a way of trying to capture that in order to facilitate this exchange. Yeah, exactly.

Like, it's an attempt to ascribe value to something inherently, like, doesn't fit in that system of, like, the cash exchange, which is what makes it valuable and beautiful, right? Like, but your capitalism will never really be able to protect those things. Like, even, you know, in the US, we have public lands, right? But, like, no fucking way. Even, like, Theodore Roosevelt, right? Like, all politicians now are like, oh, yeah, we're like, oh, yeah,

We love Theodore Roosevelt, blah, blah, blah. You know, most U.S. politicians, I think, would love to be compared to Roosevelt. And this is not someone who I think is a fantastic human being, like morally. But you couldn't do that today. Like capitalism is too rapacious today to ever say, like, we are taking hundreds of thousands of acres and just setting them aside because, like, they're nice. And it's nice for us to have them. So we're going to keep them that way. Like, it wouldn't function now, even in a way that was possible then, you know.

Yeah, and I mean, arguably, even that time, those things being set aside, a person who had witnessed the old growth forests of the past, when they were, you know, in more recent memory, they might even be able to say that this is such a fraction of the value that has been lost of, like, yes, we're preserving some of what's left, but, you know, I don't know if you've seen those pictures of like those ginormous, like, trees. that they just chocked down as they made that, you know, that westward expansion into the California and whatnot. Yeah. They didn't even use most of the wood. They end up having to like discard it, burn it, whatever. I didn't know that. But this is like centuries worth of growth.

It was just destroyed. Yeah. The only reason I think we protected these things, right, was because there was a sort of realization that, oh shit, we've gone way too far with this capitalist exploitation of things, right? like with this desire to impose ourselves on the world as it has been for a long time. And like that doesn't make up for that, right? It's like your analogy of zoos that you used at the start, right?

Like having the last passenger pigeon die in a zoo doesn't make up for killing all the passenger pigeons. So even while that passenger pigeon was alive in the zoo, right? Yeah. Like that's not a trade anyone would make, I guess. No one would be like, oh, I have to think about this. Like, is anyone ever going to sit around? and worry about there not being enough mines or enough roads or enough logging operations, right, compared to, like, I worry about there not being enough forests,

worry about there not being enough wilderness places, you know? Like, it's something that, yeah, we've failed future generations, I guess, in preserving that diversity. Yeah. And, you know, as we speak of preserving preservation, conservation, conservative. I think there's a tendency within those who value diversity that can lead to a sort of a misdirection or it can lead to maybe a misplaced aspiration, I would say. Because obviously change itself is not bad.

You know, change is inevitable. Extinction has always been part of the history of life. Ecosystems have always been in flux, always evolving. The borders of, you know, ecosystems have been moving throughout. deep time. Similarly, cultures have always evolved and mixed and some have faded away. So we can't necessarily reject change, right? And rejects the processes by which cultures and environments may change.

Even in response to human intervention, you know, we look at the forests of North America since we've been focusing on that example. And many of those forests were engineered. Yes. you know, by human activity, right? So the Amazon rainforest also shows some evidence of human engineering in terms of the terra preta, you know, the soils being this very rich soil that was deliberately designed by the indigenous peoples.

Yeah. The same with like I've been reading a lot on indigenous cultural use of fire for the last few weeks here since I got back from Spokane and thinking a lot about like how it's a very Western perspective, right, to be like the wilderness is the thing that humans don't touch and have no engagement with and then everything else humans use as they wish, like to create it as this binary distribution, right, of like the correct way to deal with places that are beautiful or special

is like, just fucking leave it. And the correct way to deal with everything else is just fucking pillage it. Like, there's a way to find balance that. they're, like, we struggle with it under capitalism, right? Like, capitalism has struggled to provide us with that. Yeah, I mean, one of the bases of capitalism is private property, which as defined under Roman law is the right to use and abuse one's own. Right. You know, the use and enjoyment and abuse of one's own to the limit of the law, which is a stipulation that had various interpretations over the years. But we shouldn't be surprised then that when something

comes under the purview of capitalist property that it has led to such detrimental effects. What is alarming about our current situation is not the change that is taking place. It is the speed and the scale of that change. You know, we don't know exactly how many species we are losing or have lost. We don't even know how many species currently exist. We could even talk about the definitions of species and how that taxonomic system has evolve with time, but for that discussion, I leave it to a book that I read on the subject that I quite enjoyed, which was in light of our differences by David Harmon. But regardless,

we're still talking about thousands to hundreds of thousands of species lost each year. And these are losses that are not happening in isolation because we know that every ecosystem is made up of relationships. They remove one species and you can risk disrupting everything connected to it. Thankfully, these systems are typically quite resilient, so a species lost doesn't have to lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem, but there are species that are foundational. Then the disappearance of that single species can trigger cascading effects

that threaten the entire ecosystem. It's also often a lag between our realization that a species has fallen, below its minimum viable population and the death of the final individual of that species. As you mentioned, the last passenger pigeon in the zoo, I was reminded of that. We see that also happening with human cultures, particularly with language. From what I've read, about 44% of living languages today are now endangered. Some have fewer than a thousand speakers remaining and others are spoken by fewer than 10 people. And I know from what you told me of your travels, James, that you actually have met people who spoke on some of these endangered languages, correct?

Yeah, certainly, like, I think about languages that, like, I guess I've heard people speak that are less hegemonic. Certainly, like, I can't imagine there are very many speakers of martialese, for example, in the RMI, many indigenous languages, right? I know the Embara have made a great deal of progress, educating young people in their language, right? And making sure that they keep that. I was just talking to some like Yohemi and Otam friends this morning, right? I think those languages are doing relatively well for indigenous languages in what is now the United States. But like, it's only through the concerted effort of people from that community to keep them alive. right? Like I don't think the state has attributed a diversity value to those languages.

And languages like they give us a way of understanding the world that is different. That's why I like to try and learn at least a little bit of different languages. Like they give us a way of seeing things. I think about like all the bass words for rain, right? Or I was diving the other day with like a sea lion and I was talking to a Spanish-speaking friend about like in Spanish there like wolves of the sea right not lions of the sea

it's kind of interesting they do have like a kind of a wolf like vibe to them if you ever hung out of sea lions like in terms of what their social structure yeah well yeah

and like they're like I think people see sea lions like this big cuddly kind of cute thing and like they're fucking killers you know I trust and believe I don't I don't trust those guys at all

yeah no they're like they will I don't trust any mammal that chose to live an aquatic way of life. Okay? There's something fishy about that. I love that. Pun intended. Yeah.

I love that as a athletic category. You know, they're mean. They'll come at you. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts, everyone's talking about. All in one place.

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As you were mentioning, they are like, according to the ethanol, at least, 7,1, 170 living languages in. the world today. Our lowest underestimations of the amount of cultures, that is an accumulation of knowledge, values, customs, technology, social practices. Our lowest estimate of the number of cultures on Earth is like 4,000. They're definitely, certainly more than that, especially if we are using language as a proxy for cultural diversity. Right. And even within languages, there's tremendous cultural diversity. Yeah. Biologically, we have a lot of diversity as well. I think like to mention, you know, blood types, heights, hair textures, all of these have emerged across the continents we've spread out across, I mean, obviously the concentration of that diversity

is in Africa where we began. But even our adaptations to different environments is a form of diversity that is necessary, you know, to maintain us. I'll get into some of the arguments for why later on. but so I didn't know that Basque had all the different words for rain but I am reminded I think that there are different words in Inuit languages for describing snow yeah like the I think it's in Yupiac have a bunch of words for snow and ice and like different textures of it I'm trying now to find Basque words for for rain so I can remember some of them yeah Landbrowa is drizzle or mist

I know Zirimiri is like a light rain It's like the noise it makes I always thought that was a really sweet one I had a I had some fucking throwback A Cornish anarchist Who spoke Cornish right One of the languages that is not hegemonic

And it's probably relatively endangered Even as a European languages go Right I think it's probably having a better time now Than it was when I was younger But it was relatively rare to encounter a Cornish speaker Cornish, that's Cornwall, right? Correct, yeah, yeah.

It was teaching me all these beautiful words for, like, different wildlife and different, like, natural phenomena that sort of have an onomatopoeic quality to them. But, like, for some reason, just like the sort of beautiful way that they showed of relating. I don't want to, like, noble, savage, Cornish people, right? But I just thought that they showed a different way of understanding the world and our relationship with it and these animals

and, like, how they appear. and it struck me as really special that that person was like kept that knowledge and that that person shared that knowledge with me. This was at some event in Barcelona when I'm like, you know, 21 years old, 19 years old, something like that.

And it just really struck me that there was so much beauty in seeing the world through the lens of that language and it would be a real shame if we ever lost that. Yeah, and I mean that's just one key study. Every other endangered lounge which I'm sure you could point to similar novelties in, you know, how they engage with the world, how they describe and see things.

Sure, yeah. And we can extend from language to culture, you know, different cuisines, different ways of, you know, engagement with foods, you know, different forms of architecture and music and ways of telling stories. Yeah. Ways of raising children, ways of celebrating and of mourning. Yeah, definitely. Like, there's a lot that I feel like I've learned about so many of. those things from being lucky enough to spend time in different places, right? I guess I can give an

example from, if this is in my book, people want to read more about it, but like one of the things that a friend in Kurdistan said to me was that like they'd lost a friend, right? This friend had died fighting against the Islamic State. One of the things that they said was like because of this institution of Tecmill, which is like a form of Kalecuitism, it doesn't quite work in English. She'd call it Kleds of Buddhism because you think of Maoism, which is not. But because they had like shared with this person, their goals, their aspirations, their hopes. And then this person through this institution of Techmill had helped them be accountable to their own hopes for themselves. That they were a better person because of the time they had spent with this person.

And now that this person was gone, they carried him with them in their ways of being because he had helped them be a better person. They shared it with me at a time when I had like lost a dear friend. And it was a really beautiful way of me processing that. Like, I'm not a person who is like a religious person. I don't, I have that belief structure to process it. But like, that gave me a sense of an afterlife which was more concrete for me, which I could understand, which I could see. Yeah. And like, it really helped me. The afterlife of memory. Yeah. And of like, like, we are all co-created by our community, right? Like, I didn't make myself the way I am. Yeah. I was made the way I am by my interactions with people who care about me enough to help me be better. And the idea of that person

who helped me co-create the person I am, like still existing in the person I am, was very powerful to me. It's like a concrete psychological benefit I got from interacting with people who helped me see the world the way they see it. Absolutely. You know, I'm glad for all the languages that still exist and still give us, you know, these words for things. Because if nation states had their way, there would be like 10 languages left on Earth. Yeah. I mean, dramatic. But, you know, right now, most of humanity speaks are relatively small number of languages. The 23 most spoken mother languages are gone for like 4 billion people somewhere around there. Wow. And then the 200 most spoken languages are over 88.

percent of the world's population. That's crazy. And this is, of course, due to nation building, due to economic pressures, you know, globalization, basically everywhere, the pressures of the status quo have led to indigenous and regional languages, minority languages, disappearing. And if not for the concerted efforts of these language communities to maintain the way of speaker and to pass it down, we would have lost so many more as it is. Yeah, definitely. As you mentioned, by the way, the words that you've picked up over, over the years from different

languages and your attempts to explain those words to me, I was reminded of a work of fiction that I'd read, I think about two years ago, it's a book called Babel by R.F. Quang, and it's kind of like a fantasy historical fiction. where a Chinese student goes to this school in England, and the magic of that world is translation. The sort of energy that gets picked up the magic that they're able to wield is through the translation from one language to another, and the fact that because translation is on a one-to-one process,

the kind of nuances and meanings and subtexts and connotations that they get lost or gain in the process are potent. And so for people who are interested in linguistics and fantasy fiction, I always recommend that book to them. Yeah, might try that one. But what I was alluding to just now was some of the reasons we've begun to lose our world's biocultural diversity. As I said before, there have been changes across time, across generations,

all the way even prior to humanity. We're not to blame for everything, but there are a lot of historical processes that have reinforced each other that have led to what has been unfold in these past few centuries. Yes, we might have hunted some species to extinction in our prehistoric past, but clearly this skill of our impact is quite different here now. Monocultures, for instance, and fast pastelands have completely replaced ecosystems in in areas. We've trained wetlands, we've leveled forests, we've fragmented habitats. And that's another thing that when we speak of habitat loss isn't always spoken about. But, you know, we have

places where a lot of the habitat was left alone, quote in quote. But when you have like six lane highways cutting through a forest, that is still a fragmentation of that ecosystem. Oh yeah. That's still a disruption of the flu of plants, animal life and fungal life. Yeah. Can I make a podcast about this? But one of the issues that are endangered wildlife faces here in Southern California, right, is that it's fragmented both by freeways and the border wall. So, like, the border wall in particular, people can listen to natural causes if they want to learn more about this.

But the border wall in particular, right, is being built at such a speed that they're not even building wildlife gates into it. Now, they don't care about it. about killing people with the wall. Why would they care about killing wildlife? Right? But it means, for instance, our peninsula big horns, which we have like 750 in the United States. One of the Rams actually died in the border war wire recently.

And their ability to have like a healthy breeding population would be significantly limited to this to the extent that like the intangible value of me seeing a big horn in a hike in the desert might not be something that everyone gets ever again, right? Like the mountain lions actually have some weird little genetic anomalies because of the divisions that are created by these big freeways and how dangerous it is to cross them. There's like a thing you can observe in some of their tails. Wow. So there actually are mountain lions in the Peninsula Range are listed in the California Endangeredged Species Act, even though as a whole overall, they're not particularly endangered.

California has a shit-town lions actually it's because these specific lions despite the fact that they're conditions for them to thrive, right, in the United States the intrusion that has divided these populations has made it very hard for those populations, not just to thrive

but to continue to be healthy. Yeah, that's the thing, right? Like a species doesn't necessarily have to be endangered or on the brink of extinction for it to be experiencing the extremely negative effects of, you know, our industrial civilization. Right.

I would add also the pressures of invasive species through global trade, you know, the impact of pollution in the waterways and in the air, climate change, you know, all of these have placed a tremendous amount of pressure on the natural world. When it comes to cultural diversity and its losses, which, you know, coincide with the losses of biodiversity, we see the impact of colonialism, destroying societies through conquest and genocide and assimilation and the very same environmental changes. We see Netnician-Belan building tried to forge a single national identity at the expense of regional and minority cultures. And then, of course, with globalization, not in the sense of cultural exchange across distances,

as that has always existed, but specifically the kind that has been driven by capitalist markets and state power and industrial efficiency, which enforces standardization across places. You know, it's easier for these capitalists, for these multinationals, to manufacture the same products

and market the same brands and basically flattened language and flattened cultural expectations across places. So they even would, manufacture consumer tastes in a way that benefits their bottom line. You know, now you get to pick between streaming services or, you know, you have all a bunch different varieties of cereal in your supermarkets, and that is what is counted as economic freedom.

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It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at shit. nail, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Twelve seats, those are moving south.

So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Richard Pryor. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archive.

We're talking iconic moments in broadcast history. I'm not just a boxer. I'm educating. I can talk all week on millions of subjects. And forgotten interviews that change how we see these giants of our culture. Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary. We're here for the messy, the best of the world. Brilliant, the human version of our heroes.

I mean, when I go on stage, I like to dress as slutty as possible because it makes me dance a bit for some reason. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Right. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts. Hey, what's up? I'm Tony Gonzalez. And I'm October Gonzalez.

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There's such a thing as D. No, no, no. I mean, like... I can't even get on the C-list. Like, I'm not even an average. I'm not even passing. I'm failing. Listen to No Safe Words with October and Tony Gonzalez.

as part of my culture podcast network. Available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Michael and Perioli. I want to tell you about my new podcast, Underground Zero. It's about what happened in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. We're looking at the opportunity of a lifetime for us and the other families. While the world was mourning, five powerful New York families saw an opportunity. The debris supposed to go.

go to the city on salvage yard, and some of it will. They would go on to make millions of dollars. What's in the tunnels? Call boss of Engitz. It could be worth half a billion. And they would have made more if it hadn't been for one courageous cop. No, Dad, don't. You're going to need all of us.

I'll call you when I can. Frank, be careful. Underground Zero, starring Steve Sharipa, Rea Brutzo, and me, Michael Imperioly. Would you be willing to see your family go to pieces? Some ways it already has. Listen to Underground Zero on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The NFL never stops and neither does its newest podcast. The NFL Report hosted by me, Andrew Siciliano.

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Listen to the NFL report podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, I had a question for you about this subject, because you are admittedly a bit older than me. It's true. And sadly. Right? But I'm curious, have you witnessed, like, in real time, the loss of this kind of diversity through globalization? So, I see, like, for me, I remember having, like, copies of older magazines. And I could see through those that, you know,

know, the world was, the places generally felt very different, very unique. And as, you know, I've come up with social media, I've seen places of kind of marginalized, everything was starting to look the same. And let's not even talk about the impact of like AI slop. Oh, yeah. But, yeah, what have you seen? Yeah, like, it's one of those things that, like, you do see the, like, the impact of the smartphone is huge, right?

At a second level, the impact of Starlink is massive, much more than I think most people living in the colonial core would realize, right? Like, more people have access to the internet through smartphones than have electricity in their homes. And, like, the internet is a very hegemonic place, right? Like, there are probably seven or eight languages the internet's really good in that, like, you could really access the internet in. and that really has made a difference with the way young people engage with the external world, right? Right. I guess I've also seen like a reclamation of some, and it's a thing that's gladly happened like within the colonial core to the greatest extent, right?

Like the so-called the Europe of Nations hypothesis, right? like one of the languages I can speak and read and write in is Catalan. And like this is an example of a language that like was ruthlessly suppressed by the Francoist regime. Same with Basque. Same with other like non-Spanish languages in Iberia. Right. And like now that is a primary language of instruction for most Catalan students.

Like in my lifetime, my time spending time in Catalonia, I see infinitely more. people speaking in Catalan than I used to. I remember. There's like an anecdote about this in my dissertation, but some young Syrian kids who would always speak to me in Catalan. They played football outside my archive, right? So we'd be kicking the football around. And it's cool that this language that had once very nearly been destroyed, it's now like hegemonic. It was cool at the time Catalan nationalism, but like every other nationalism has some qualities which I don't like. But like it was cool that at the time there was an acceptance of people, and especially like these kids who spoke Catalan,

happened to have been born in Syria, right? But like they were Catalan as much as anyone else. Like it wasn't an ethnic definition of nation, right? But at the same time, yeah, I've definitely seen that diversity lost. In terms of so many things, like foods. Yeah, I feel like there has been a harmonization of palates as well. 100%, right? especially with the proliferation of fast foods.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like fast, cheap, high-calorie food that stores easily. I mean, the example, I guess is like, look at what they've done to bread for the time of my life, right? Like, look at how, like, sliced white, what we would have called American bread is now like the global standard, right? But like all those other bread products that people used to make. Like, it could be very hard to get, like, freshly made tortillas. it's possible where I live, right? But it's not, I imagine, if you live in, like, Minnesota,

just like the little moments of beauty that they gave you in your day that are gone. But, yeah, also the big things. Like, I, you know, I watched kids watching TikTok in the Darien Gap. That wouldn't have been possible seven or eight years ago. Right. Wow. I don't quite know when Starlink was widely distributed, but, like, that makes a difference to people. Right. Like, their cultural world is, they're now,

engaging with the external world, not just through their own culture, through the internet. And I want those people to have everything I have to be clear, right? Like, I want them to be able to see the whole world. Yeah, you don't want to like seal them, vacuum seal them in some kind of museum exhibit of what once was. Exactly. Yeah. But like, I also wish that they could have it the way I have it, which is like I am,

I was born in England and I engage with the world in English. I wish they could engage with the world in Embra. I wish, you know, Kurdish people can engage. with the world in whichever type of Kurdish they speak, you know, which they didn't have to go through the English way of speaking and seeing the world to engage with the external world because we all lose when we don't have that diversity, right?

Yeah. And I mean, we're talking about what is lost, I think, when things get homogenized. But there is, like, I think, another effect or another, I suppose, response that, you know, global capitalism has the diversity, which is to package it, to market it, to sell it. You know, I referenced those magazines that I read, but those magazines might even be an example of that because it is a capturing and commodification in a sense of another culture for distribution

and consumption. Yeah, definitely. You see as well, people's traditional dress becomes a less of a traditional address and more of a traditional costume as they put it on to perform for consumption for tourists. Yeah, like the commodification of diversity. You get that idea that like that diversity is a thing to sell the marginalization of people such that their identity which has been marginalized by the state in capitalism is what they have to sell to exist under the state in capitalism, I guess. Yeah. We've already sort of hinted at some of the reason why I think we should care about this loss of diversity. You know, and I could even spot off a few more.

And diversity makes our living systems more resilient, I think is a very key one. In an ecosystem, every species has its niche, and they can compete and cooperate and recycle nutrients, and everything is just part of one larger network. And the more diverse that network is, the more it has to respond to disruption. Diversity gives ecosystems,

options. We see that in comparison to the monocultures, the monocultural approach to farming that has dominated much of the world and the conominy inputs that approach requires. We look at how vulnerable that approach is to disease and changes in climate conditions. In terms of genetic diversity, we can point to the fact that if every human immune system works in exactly the same way, a pathogen that evolved to bypass one person's immune system could bypass everyone's. And so our biological differences create the variation in how diseases spread and keep us as a whole safe, keep our existence as a whole secure. Even within my own family, I've noticed that some people are more susceptible and others are more resistant to different diseases.

Yeah. You know, when a virus passes into my household, some people who get sick and some people don't and it changes each time despite the fact that we are so close genetically. And so again, we see the diversity creates resilience. And even if we want to take it from a coldly utilitarian perspective, that resilience is a value. It has utility. You know, and an individual instance of a species or of a culture might have value in a way that we don't realize until it's gone. Yeah. We become poorer as a whole.

We lose possibilities when we lose languages, when we lose cultures, when we lose species. Every culture represents literally thousands of experiments accumulated over generations in what it means to live as a human being. We may like some more than others. You know, I'm not a relativist in the sense that I will turn a blind eye to things that I find morally objectionable in Sydney cultures. But I can recognize that every culture has something that adds to our library of experiences. And I would rather have that full library than a single shelf of books.

It's a really good way of saying it. Having that full library gives us more raw material to think with, to create art with, to do science with. If you like the arts, you know, you would like diversity because that innovation in the arts and in the sciences emergence from everything that came before. There is a foundation for future creativity and innovation. If everybody approaches the world with the same assumptions, and categories and ways of thinking,

and our capacity to imagine alternatives will shrink. And then just really from a deeply philosophical perspective, I appreciate diversity because I believe that when you are given a gift, you should meet it with gratitude. You know, we are born in the world. We happen to be born into a world that is overflowing as different forms of life, different landscapes, different cultures, different ways of thinking.

That is a fast, rich inheritance that I believe we should appreciate. That is my value. I'll add that, you know, we were speaking about biodiversity and cultural diversity how it, what Harmon goes, biocultural diversity,

but there's also the value of cognitive diversity. You know, we have different opinions, but we might also perceive and categorize and solve problems in generally different ways. And having different perspectives, different interpretations, different heuristics,

different predictive models, what Scott E.P. Page calls cognitive toolboxes in his book The Difference. You know, these give us an opportunity to solve problems in unique ways. You know, we're not all going to have the same tools and what tools I may lack another person may have. And it's not always necessarily a requirement that you just get the smartest person to solve the problem.

In fact, as Page's research suggests, getting a group of people who approach a problem differently will outperform a group of people who are made up of individually brilliant people who all think in roughly the same way. Now, Pages make the bold claim that cognitive diversity is always the best approach because he does distinguish between, you know, routine, regular tasks and tasks that require that more experimentation and creativity and multiple competing ideas. So in those cases, where you need that diversity of ways of thinking to solve, complex problems in transportation, in dealing with climate change and developing medicines.

You know, we don't want everybody to be thinking alike. Another thing that page points out is that while cognitive diversity and identity diversity are not one to one, there is overlap between the concepts because people who grow up in different environments and have different experiences and opportunities and social positions are more likely to develop different ways of seeing the world. So if we recognize that cognitive diversity is valuable for solving complex problems, then prejudice is a practical failure as well as a moral failure. One of the thing that I wanted to address, and I kind of alluded to it earlier when I said that I'm not really a relativist, is that while I do value diversity, I definitely don't think that every form is worth

celebrate. You know, I believe our healthy society should have space for different ways of thinking and living and organizing ourselves, but that does not mean these kind of liberal tolerance that would put up with mindsets and practices or domination that would eliminate that very freedom. At the end of the day, though, I want to retain the capacity for diversity because I think it gives us a capacity for freedom. And I want, as, you know, subcommandante Marcos put it, a world where many worlds exist.

Yeah. Even as I reject certain forms that the world has taken and certain manifestations of diversity. Any closing thoughts? Like, the world where many worlds can exist is, I think, the perfect way of looking at this, right? Like, we therefore don't want people who would create a word where the worlds cannot exist, right?

But we gain so much from having and respecting and cherishing diversity rather than treating it through that tolerance framework, which we both talked about. Tolerance seems to imply like, well, we're doing it best, but we'll let you do it your way, as opposed to, like, genuinely cherishing diversity. Yeah. And yeah, I hope we can all see that. Agreed. And as always, all power to.

all the people. Peace. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey, everyone, it's the Jonas Brothers with the Hey Jonas Podcast.

We've been catching up with some great friends, Paul Rudd, Michael Boubley, Seth Myers. And making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters like Alex and Ashton Earl. She likes to control everyone and tell everyone what to do. Okay, well control is a harsh word. Plus, we've been taking your calls, listening to your voicemails and giving advice. Listen to Hey Jonas on America's number one podcast network

IHeart. Follow Hey Jonas and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. Hey Jonas is sponsored by Edible Arrangements. Order yours today at edible.com. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement

agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download

Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Every case has a story. Every victim has a voice. But will it be heard? I mean, is he Grace on crime stories, we go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed,

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Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author, Patra Mathers, and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honies, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Why did they do it?

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