The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Josh Farley: "The Past, Present, and Future of Human Cooperation"

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

On this episode we meet with ecological economist and Professor in Community Development & Applied Economics and Public Administration, Josh Farley.  Farley explores the importance of human cooperation in a modern superstructure that incentivizes competition. What role will cooperation play in helping us solve our largest existential problems? Farley explains the critical social dilemma humans face: How can we grapple with the paradox that individuals are better served to act selfishly, but cooperation among individuals makes everyone better off? Additionally, Professor Farley helps us distinguish the difference between how a system works, and how we can understand and participate in changing a system. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/07-josh-farley

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Today we're going to be talking with Josh Farley. Josh is a professor of ecological economics. He's the president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He teaches in the School of Community Development and Applied Economics at the University of Vermont. He also happens to be my chair of my PhD committee 15 years ago.

is one of my best friends. We have followed parallel paths to agree that humanity is currently functioning as a mindless, energy-hungry superorganism connecting finance, energy, ecology, human behavior. And we talk a lot about these things from different lenses. Today we're going to talk about human behavior and particularly about cooperation and the evolution of cooperation and the fact that today our culture focuses on competition, but the cooperation coordination aspects of who we are as evolved hominids is very deep within us. So hope you enjoy this conversation with Josh Farley. So maybe you could start off by you are an ecological economist.

What was your path that brought you to that discipline and the way that you're thinking on how all these things interconnect over time. Can you unpack that a little bit? Yeah, I'll try to be brief because it was kind of a long path. I started out in the sciences and then did a degree, traveled around Latin America, hitched around, saw the problems with poverty, the problems with the environment. And when I came back, I decided I'd wanted to, you know, make some contribution and did a degree in international development at Columbia.

And my favorite professor suggested I go on in economics. When I did the international development, I realized how much harm you can do. if you don't know enough. I figured I get more knowledge, so I did degree in economics, but within my first semester, I realized that the underlying science was very poor quality, and the underlying ethics were even worse. So within my first semester,

I was ready to quit the degree, but I got a fellowship to go spend the year in Brazil. Down there, I discovered ecological economics, and kind of I'm self-taught in that field, never had a course in it. But I wrote to Herman Daly, and as a grad student said, I want to be an ecological economist. how do I do this?

And he said, finish your degree and call yourself one. So that's what I did. How have you, over the years, over the last 18 years since we met, can you describe the parallel path on synthesizing everything that I call the superorganism? Can you maybe give, I mean, my listeners are familiar with my paper and the way that I describe it, but maybe you could describe the way that you think of it, which is overlapping but slightly different. Yeah, I mean, the whole big picture, you know, the whole biophysical basis of the economy, I had developed that in grad school, realizing that we are part of a finite planet and clearly endless growth, especially exponential growth, is impossible with any finite system.

And that based on my own moral views, which we can talk about later, because I think moral views are actually fundamental to the social sciences. But I really, you know, pursuit, I was very interested in a socially just sustainability transition. How do we create a sustainable world that meets everybody's needs in a fair way? And once you look at that problem, you figure out what's required to achieve it. And some of the things I did my degree in economics. And in economics, we learn about markets and capitalism, where everything is based on private property rights and individual choice. And the problems I cared about, private property rights are impossible. There's no private property rights to the atmosphere, no private property rights to clean air or clean

water and individual choice. When the individual gets the benefits, the society gets the cost, individual choice is suicidal, or the very least very dangerous. And so the big thing was understanding how a system works is radically different than understanding how to change it. And what I identified just to be super brief to wrap up is I saw the problems we face are what they call social dilemmas. the individuals acting selfishly lead to the terrible outcomes for society. You need to cooperate. But no matter what everybody else does, the individual is better off acting selfishly. Society is better off and everybody cooperates.

That's a social dilemma. So I saw that problem and I said, well, what kind of system do we have to develop to address those problems? And that's what attracted me to this human behavior, the evolution of cooperation, things that I think you and I were both discovering about the same time. And so that's kind of a brief synopsis. But all the other things that you focus on the energy, the information, the new technologies, the material flows, I consider those the fundamentals of ecological economics. So intellectually, we had a simultaneous superorganism.

And, yeah. Okay. So human behavior, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there was something called the standard social science model that has kind of been discontinued now in the psychology classrooms where basically we were taught back then that humans are born as a blank slate and that culture and education dumped everything into our brains. But more and more it's been recognized and accepted that we come born with prepared learning.

We are biological organisms that are a product of all of our great grandcesters way back to before we were even Homo sapiens. Talk about why studying human behavior is critical and how what you learn from anthropology and evolutionary psychology is in stark contrast to what economics teaches students. So economics starts with this conventional view, which they call homo-economicus, that people are perfectly rational, perfectly self-interested, and insatiable. And actually, you know, right away, if you analyze that critically as any individual, you will see that their model of, you know, being perfectly rational and self-interested applies only to sociopaths or psychopaths and perhaps to some economists. And one of the things that was very interesting, though, is when I started doing my PhD, in economics, almost everybody shared my views that that was a pretty twisted view of human nature. However, by the end of the PhD, many people had actually adopted that way of thinking. And there's a lot of research showing that studying economics does change the way people think and way they behave and the way they put their interests ahead of others.

So very interestingly, knowing that how we're enculturated in a system can change, Our attitudes and behaviors towards others also reveals that there is a door to changing our attitudes and behaviors in a way that make us better adapted to solving these social dilemmas, which it's widely agreed upon across many disciplines can only be solved through cooperation. There are no competitive, self-interested solutions to these social dilemmas like climate change or pollution. Back up a second there. So cultural evolution works in the future. field of economics itself that pro-social, curious young people take classes in economics and some of them choose to major in economics. And that ends up changing their empathy and pro-social concern. Absolutely. This isn't just like there's a lot of research in economics and all the

sciences that's not widely replicated. Sensational results get published. This is a result that is widely, widely, widely replicated and is actually self-evident to people who hang out around economists and economics departments. But there's articles saying like, you know, why are economists different with the why in parentheses that, you know, we know that economists do become, and all these empirical studies show they become more self-interested. And not only that, but lots of empirical work showing that participating in a market economy or framing problems through the lens of a market economy gets people to behave more in that self-interested fashion, which is really antithetical to the problems we face.

But what I don't buy is that there's one way humans behave. There are certain challenges we face that are best solved through self-interested behavior. other challenges that can only be solved through collective action and cooperation. We're very plastic. We're very malleable. Throughout our evolutionary history, we face many, many different challenges that require different ways to solve. We have the genetic plasticity to behave differently, but we've also developed cultures

that have, you know, that essentially confront challenges in different ways. And what has struck me is that we have the secret of our success is the name of a book, that talks about cultural evolution, but our ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales has given us this incredible adaptive fitness. If you'd imagine a lone human confronting any challenge in the primitive world, you know, we'd get killed by a saber-toothed tiger or, you know, die from the cold. But you bring, and so we're really frail, weak and not very smart individuals, but you bring us together as a group and suddenly we are extremely powerful and extremely intelligent.

You think about some primitive hunter-gatherer making a bow and arrow. The knowledge required to make that bow and arrow is contained, is held by many, many, many different people. So there's a story of like the Inuit tribe that got a pandemic came and it knocked out enough individuals who knew how to make compound bows. They lost one of their most valuable technologies until they gained it back from another tribe, just as evidence that knowledge is collective and you need a certain number of people to actually have a certain level of technology.

That's actually a really scary insight, or at least where my mind went with that, because we're alive at a time where we live in a just-in-time inventory system that is a product of a six-continent supply chain. So that Inuit example may apply to us on various goods in the future or to technologies or stories, et cetera. If you expand on that Inuit example, because I believe, okay, there's, you know, an example of the compound bow and the kayak needed a certain population size to develop. But we're dependent on technologies that require immense population size and immense storage of knowledge to do anything. And in fact, to the point where, you know, widely recognized one of the most brilliant people who ever lived is Einstein.

Could Einstein make a sandwich on his own? And I'm taking the big picture, making a sandwich. Would he know how to grow bread, how to grow wheat to make bread? So you have to know what? A mill wheat, grow wheat, do the metallurgy to make the metal to, you know, make your plows, and on and on and on. And even the most simple activities, feeding ourselves, doing anything, requires this, you know, a collective knowledge contained by many, many people and cooperation across the board. There is no human who can survive as an individual independent of culture. So this gets to the superorganism dynamic that I write about.

And thank you, Josh, for pushing me to write that paper because I wouldn't have written that without you constantly pestering me. But it's a product of the cooperation built on top of energy surplus because complexity of the things that you're talking about, the plows and the things to make the wheat and everything. requires energy. More complexity requires more energy. So this explosion of coordination, how does coordination different than cooperation, by the way? So again, I would look at this coordinated activity is getting people to work together towards a common end. Kind of two paths to doing that are cooperation or coercion. You can force people to do something or you can get them to do it willingly because you're also doing something for them. Cooperation depends on reciprocity.

You know, you scratch my back, I scratch yours. But even the coercion. So if you're going to coerce people to do something for you, that requires cooperation on the part of the coercers. So what is capitalism then, where everyone is getting the reciprocity is they're getting a paycheck, right? Yep. Yeah. So, I mean, so capitalism, it's weird. It's, you know, it's based on this idea that everybody acts in their competitive self-interest.

And as you and I both know, when did capitalism appear? it appeared at the same time as fossil fuels. You're looking at 18th century England. Adam Smith was writing the wealth of nations. James Watt was perfecting the steam engine that could pump water out of the coal mines to be able to mine coal. And these two things went hand in hand. So there's no capitalist system without a fossil fuel economy. And here it's just kind of conjecture.

But fossil fuels, they can easily be privately owned and, you know, so you can have private property rights. And when I use fossil fuels, you can't. If I burn a barrel of oil, you can't burn it. We're competing for access to that same oil. So the benefits are really, they're private and they're rival. I get it, you don't. The unfortunate thing is the costs, of course, of fossil fuels are collective. But the cost didn't matter as we were developing capitalism because we were so, you know, we had so little impact on the global atmosphere. So I actually think that one of the things that contributed to the rise of the capitalism was our energy source, which is absolutely essential for everything we do, was a neat fit with the market economy until the collective costs of fossil fuels became overwhelming. Well, but there's two costs, right?

There's the cost of extracting it. And then there's the cost that's not included in our environment in our decisions, which is the environmental externalities. and it's still not included. And if it was included, it was fully included, there would not be an industry on the planet that would be profitable. Well, obviously we'd have a totally different speed of industries in the planet. So we would have had developed other ways to do things. But I think you're probably right. And especially, you know, now, if you're looking at fully including the costs, you know, mainstream economics is all about marginal analysis, small changes.

Human impacts on the ecosystems are not marginal. They are, you know, they are system changing. And so actually, even the basic tools of mainstream analysis no longer make sense. So right now the cost of additional fossil fuel use are kind of immeasurable if we believe what the scientists are saying about climate change. But had we always been paying attention to those costs, we would not, they would not have reached this level of being immeasurable. But they would still be collective. and markets work when only when all the costs and all the benefits are borne by the decision maker. And that means that we suffer the consequences of our actions,

but now we see that the consequences of our decisions affect everybody. So one thing you could do is change from the individual decision maker, who externalizes all those costs to the collective decision maker that actually experiences all those costs. What's an example of a collective decision maker in this sense? Government. So we have all sorts of things that if you allow individuals to behave for their own self-interest, it undermines social welfare and profound ways. So we all agree to behave in certain ways. You know, I'd be better off if I could speed any time I wanted.

If I could, you know, if I didn't have to clean up after myself, if I could, you know, there's all sorts of things I'd be better off as an individual. if I was allowed to do it, but the government stops me from doing those things. And those are actually frivolous examples of speeding. But, you know, like the huge waste emissions and pollution, government just doesn't allow that. I can't dump PCBs or dioxins in the lake anymore. Well, just as an aside, I don't want to get into the deep maximum power principle and energy on this conversation because I want to focus on evolution of human cooperation. But regarding speeding, if we were to reduce. reduce the speed limit by 20 miles an hour, just that act alone would be a greater impact on our

emissions than going and driving all electric cars. We use so much more energy just going 70 instead of 50. And yet people choose to go 70. They don't want to go 50. And we've tried to reduce the speed limit because time is money in our economic system. We want to get to where we are going faster so we can spend time on Twitter and Facebook and whatever else. But so getting back to what we were talking about before, let me understand these two

trends. So since the dawn of agriculture, 10 or 12,000 years ago, human cultures have been gradually but inexorably outsourcing what we do to the cloud and to the cloud and to the collective because of so much complexity and formulas and recipes and knowledge that we pass on to each other now on the internet and to each generation, like you said, the Inuit. In one sense, we have become this massive collective. But in another sense, in a cultural sense, the United States and to a lesser extent, Australia

and Europe, the stories we tell are about individual. rugged individualism, and this is the way that humans are. And so we've got those two mega trends going on. Can you comment on that? So one thing is I actually think it's a little bit false to put the origins of this intense collective behavior at dawn of the agricultural age. I actually think that humans as a species are defined by our collective nature. And if you think about it, you know, on the plains of Africa, when we evolved, we evolved

this frail, you know, little creatures compared to everything else, our source of power, our secret was our ability to collaborate as a group and to have collective knowledge, which is enabled through language. So I would actually argue that our collective knowledge quite possibly predates language. I mean, even, you know, these skills to nap and arrowhead, things that had to be passed on that were collective and cumulative. So I think that humans have always been a superorganism at the level of the individual group and have become dramatically more so. And the, you know, this idea that knowledge and culture is collective and cumulative, the larger

your population, the more complex a society you can have. I also do believe, though, that there has been tremendous variation across human groups. And we've experimented with a lot of different ways, you know, authoritarian, coercedure version versus fairly hierarchical flat cooperation systems. I think there's evidence that we have more plasticity than we're often given credit for. So I don't really see this inevitable trend towards certain types of hierarchical behaviors. I see that we are very capable of experimenting and trying out different things and that what has worked in the past is unlikely to work in our wildly changing future. And that's what we have to focus on.

Let's take a big step back and look at something that is becoming less controversial, but has had some epic changes in the science over the last 40 years, is the concept of multi-level selection. And which embedded in there is the fact that each of us as part of our genome are competitive or cooperative depending on the circumstances. But could you explain multi-level selection and why it's important to understand that given what we face today? Sure. And this goes back to Darwin. I mean, his, the ascent of man, you know, he actually recognized that groups of humans that were more cooperative and collaborative were likely to leave more offspring than groups of humans in which the individuals were selfish and competitive.

So he proposed that we would select at the group level for people who cooperate and are altruistic. But at the same time, there is this, there's also selection. And there's selection at the individual level, the fittest individuals likely to have more offspring. And often you can increase your own individual fitness by not helping or cooperating with others. So if you're, you know, one of the classic examples, let's say you're on a desert island. and there's one really cooperative, altruistic person and one really selfish, competitive person, who's going to do better? So the cooperative person is going to help out the other person and get nothing at exchange, making the other person more fit. And so a lot of people said, well, in any population, those individuals who are the most selfish will outcompete the more cooperative ones until they displace them.

But what happens in reality is you had these populations dotted across the plains of Africa. And those populations that had the most selfish individuals were the most likely to die out. And, you know, they couldn't. Well, why is that? Well, so let's say that you had to defend yourself or let's say that it takes, you know, 20 individuals to take down a mammoth or whatever the equivalent might have been in the plains of Africa. And as every individual, you know, your best option would be to not. participate in that hunt and try to get some of the food afterwards because it's dangerous to go hunting.

So the group in which all the individuals cooperated to take down the big animal, we're going to have more food. And also the scary bit is that humans, while we are very cooperative within a group, we're often very hostile to other groups. And I don't know to what extent, you know, I'm not an expert in anthropology, but I read Lake Jared Diamonds, the world before yesterday. and he points out that a lot of these early tribes, you know, if you saw somebody who wasn't part of your group, you know, you would run or kill. And so the larger your group, the more protected you are against other groups. The larger your group, the more you can defend yourself against other animals

and capture other animals and maybe even manage, even in pre-agricultural times, people manage natural resources in a way that helped to be done collectively. And so there's a whole bunch of problems that we can solve as a group, but we can't solve as individuals. And if you have a lot of different groups, those groups who can't solve these problems are not going to reproduce. The key punchline of multi-level selection is that within a group,

the individual who is most selfish is likely to get benefits from the other group members without giving anything back and is going to be more fit. but the group that is more cooperative will out-compete other groups. And apparently a handful of times in evolutionary history, selection at the group level was more powerful than selection at the individual level. It doesn't mean that, you know, selfishness can't be an adaptive strategy in some situations, that selfish individuals do get certain advantages within a group, but their group is more likely to go extinct.

and the group with the more cooperative individuals will pass on their culture and quite possibly there is a genetic element to cooperation that there are genetic predispositions to cooperate. And so the group with the more cooperative individuals passes on both its genes and its culture because humans are profoundly affected by both. So it really explains a lot about the memetic tribes that we see in our culture today. that everyone kind of conforms to their own Facebook flavor, you know, whether it's far right or far left or in between or the various tribes. We are intensely tribal and defend people within our group and ostracize people outside of our group. And what you're saying is that because of evolution, both of these dynamics of competition and selfishness and cooperation within our group were both conserved evolutionarily. We experience both of those depending on the environmental circumstance we find ourselves in. And cooperation within our group often against other groups.

So all that competition and conflict can see. still take place between groups. In fact, there's, you know, some thinkers believe that war with other groups actually bonded, if you're at war with another group, and you think about this, you know, you hear about war movies like Band of Brothers, where people who are in conflict against another group, they will make any sacrifice for each other. And, you know, in competition with the other group. So in some ways, the two go together, the intense cooperation and intense competition. It's a problem, though, that we have executed our cooperative algorithms towards a cultural objective of monetary profits linked to energy, linked to hydrocarbon energy, linked to environmental

destruction. So we are cooperating towards profits as families, as small businesses, as corporations, as nation-states. And what happens when there's a phase shift away from the ability to generate profits linked to this what will soon be declining energy surplus? Then that causes a phase shift in who's in the in group and who's in the out group as evidenced as what's going on in Ukraine and Russia is one of many examples. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I actually have a lot of thoughts on this. I'm not surprised.

In my view, what we face now is, so first of all, to give a little basis about this, allegiance to groups, I strongly believe there is no human alive today that can survive as an individual apart from their inherited cultural knowledge. There's a handful of individuals who could perhaps survive, but I doubt it without cultural artifacts, like clothing, maybe in some benign population. So the deal is that, is a human, if you're not part of a group, you're dead, meaning the most rational, important thing you can do as a human is to be part of a group. And when groups identify themselves, when you're saying there's a group, there's a non-group, meaning you have to identify as the group. And you need signifiers. You need things to show you're part of that group. And very often, the crazier your belief that's shared by your group, the more you believe crazy stuff that your group believes, the more you have shown that you are part of that group. And so we have this huge

tendency to conform to our group beliefs. But what we face now is challenges that require cooperation at a much larger scale. So climate change being the painfully obvious one, we need to cooperate at the scale of the problem. Climate change, of course, is just a symptom of our overshoot, of our using too many resources to meet this, you know, the profit and consumption goals that have been determined by our society is. the correct things to pursue.

We need to change, obviously, change away from that focus. And there was certainly a time when we were developing, you know, our modern economy, where more consumption was critically important for our adaptive fitness. We've left that behind. We now have to really figure out new ways of developing cooperation at the scale of the problem. And the other one of these that I think, you know, you said there's like a phase change. I think the big phase change is we're shifting from reliance on fossil fuels that can be individually owned and there's individual choice over use to, so there's competition for them to alternative energy where, you know, no matter how much sunshine I capture on my home or the United States captures, it doesn't leave less for China or Australia or other places. So we're not competing for access to this new form of energy.

and to get that new form of energy, what we really need is better knowledge. We need to figure out how do we produce good solar, good alternative energy without the cobalt, without the rare earth, without these things that are environmentally harmful, and knowledge improves through use. So putting this in the context of competitive self-interest,

if I developed a clean, decentralized, cheap alternative to fossil fuels that does not require rare earth, as an individual, if I put a patent on it, I'd be a billionaire. I'd be super rich. But if I did that, then maybe people in India and China and sub-Saharan Africa couldn't afford it. They'd continue to burn coal. And where I might be super rich, my kids are going to be super screwed because we're going to get

runaway climate change. And so we're in a world where, you know, when I control and use the oil, that's to my benefit, but if I control and limit access to alternative energy technologies, that's to my detriment. So I really think we're flipping to a wildly new paradigm for an economy where competitive self-interest has become increasingly suicidal. And it's not just things like oil have a collective cost. Things like an alternative vaccine, a vaccine for COVID have collective benefits.

And we bring together all our knowledge to consider. create this COVID vaccine. And I wrote in a book chapter in 2015 that if we developed, if we had a pandemic developed a vaccine and left it in the hands of the private sector, they would patent it, sell it at the highest price the market would bear. And we would then have new variants evolving that even attacked those who had previously been vaccinated. I'm very disappointed as an accurate description of what's happening today. Well, let me push back on, on the solar example. a little bit because I agree with you on the decentralized and the knowledge and the non-rival.

The non-rival nature of the sun and the wind, but we still would be competing for the ability to afford everyone having that certain lifestyle. And not only that, but that would be the energy for our homes and our businesses, but our cultural objective would still be GDP. And so that would have to change as well, right? That would have to change wildly. So I'm not one of these people who believe we can replace fossil fuels with alternative energy. You know, you talked before about riding 20 miles an hour slower and would be better than having electric cars. I'm in favor of riding 45 miles an hour slower on a bicycle. And, you know, in my view, poor people walk, middle income people.

ride bikes and take trains, rich people fly and drive cars, we don't have a big enough planet for 7.8 billion people to be rich. I'm in favor of secure sufficiency. You know ironclad certainty. You are going to meet your basic needs every day of your life, but basic needs. Some people have more luxuries than others, but the basic needs being met, I think is really what we have to strive for. And searching for meaning, I actually think we're shocked. sacrificing our well-being when we work, you know, 60, 80 hours a week at jobs we don't like to get more money to buy crap. We don't even have time to use. And that is kind of the, you know, focus of our society right now.

Well, who was it in the 1930s? Cains or Galbraith? I can't remember. Cains, I think. Who said 100 years from now, we are going to be so rich that we only have to work 10 hours a week. Yep. And he was right. We are so rich and we're working more.

And this is the dynamic of the superorganism because we've outsourced our decisions to the market, which is based on growth. And so via downward causation, everyone is running around like little ants and not such a bad metaphor because we're stuck in this system. So building on what you just said, there are no technological. logical solutions to a collective action problem. And what we face now is a collective action problem. So what is informed by knowledge about our human phenotype and the plasticity that is in all of us, the cultural shiftability of cooperation and competition, what is the mechanism to solve these social dilemmas?

even if it's a long shot, given how cooperative we are. I mean, the superorganism has to shrivel up somehow. You know, that's another conversation. But what do you think? How could we solve these social dilemmas? Yeah. So one of the things is, you know, there's, and these are games, but they're games that have kind of been replicated in real life.

They play these games, for example, you know, I could give a group of 100 people. I say, I give you all 50 bucks. everybody returns the money to the common pool, I'll double it, and you'll each get 100. And even here, I'm using monetary terms because that's our culture. But, you know, I give everybody some good, allow them to whatever is return to the common pool is doubled. Everybody comes out twice as good. But each individual realizes that if everybody else returns their money to the common pool, it'll be doubled and redistributed equally. I'll get almost $100 out of that pool, plus I'll have my $50.

So if everybody else pitches in, I'm better off I keep my money. If nobody else pitches in, I'd be an idiot to pitch in. And so if you play a game like that, the first round, there'll be some cooperative people who pitch everything in, some selfish people who keep it all. But if you keep playing round after round after round, which real life is, round after round after round of these interactions with people, you find that in that setting, the generous people are going to look, say, I'm not a sucker. I don't want to be the one who gives up everything. So they'll gradually cut back their donations to the mean. but that drives down the mean, since they were the ones who were elevating the mean to begin with,

you end up with nobody cooperating and everybody works off. You can have a simple step in there, which is allow people to see what other people contributed and punish them for lack of contribution. And in a lot of these games, punishment is just like a minute, you know, I put in a dollar, they'll lose $3. But in real life, punishment is, if you're selfish, I don't want you to date my daughter. I don't want you to go near my family. I don't want to be your friend.

And ostracism can be incredibly powerful. So what you're getting at scientifically is the difference between reciprocity and strong reciprocity. Reciprocity being you share and cooperate and punish others when bad behavior ensues. Strong reciprocity is when you punish people who don't punish others. And it's this web of. of a social contract based on norms. Yep.

And that strong reciprocity, because you took it another step, which is absolutely true. You know, an example I gave, when you allow people to punish the defectors, and then you play that game over and over and over, you converge on much greater cooperation.

Strong reciprocity is you're saying, I punish, you know, so let's say we play this game and both of us donate, and you then punish the person who didn't, didn't donate and I don't, I'm free-riding on you. You punished that person, which makes them more cooperative, but if I free ride, you allow

somebody to punish the non-punisher, then you very quickly can emerge at cooperation. And this is why our ancestors pre-agriculture not only were egalitarian in terms of consumption, but aggressively egalitarian because of strong reciprocity. If someone was hogging too much of the antelope, there were social forces against that. And that happens today. And like the Kalahari Bushman, one of the first things a child knows is, no, they slap their hand away. This is a share. We share this.

And I'm a terrible hunter. I don't deserve to do this. Self-deprecation is a part of their culture. In contrast, our culture, United States, circa 2022, is still tells stories. about how an individual can conquer the world. And when you lectured my class a few years ago, you brought up the example of the iPhone. Would you like to describe that briefly?

Yeah. And again, this is not just the iPhone. This is technology in general. But in this case, the iPhone, this comes from Mariana Mazakato's work. And she has shown, you know, we have this idea in the United States as the lone individual inventor who is, you know,

who is Apple who developed the iPhone. therefore they're entitled to private property rights to it. And if you look at the technology in the iPhone, you actually see that most of it was developed by the U.S. government. So the miniaturization, the touch screens, the internet, the almost every technology in that phone was not developed by Apple, but rather by the government. But this actually brings up a bigger issue is we still have this bizarre idea

that it's the lone inventor that's responsible, but look at any big technological breakthrough. So a recent one is, you know, CRISPR Cast 9, the ability to edit genes, kind of like cutting and pasting. And that technology was developed by a team in Japan, a team in France, a team in California, all at approximately the same time. You know, when Isaac Newton developed calculus,

Libnitz developed calculus at the same time. When Darwin developed the theory of evolution, Wallace did at the same time. meaning that the way science really seems to progress is we have this collective effort generating more and more knowledge. And at that point, any knowledge just past the current frontier is very likely to be developed by somebody. And it relies on the collective efforts of billions of people over thousands of years. I mean, that's all how our science works. And then we have this bizarre story we tell ourselves, no, it was jobs, the genius.

You know, when, no, he just happened to be the guy. You know, if he hadn't developed that stuff, somebody else would have a few months later. And Mark Zuckerberg, if he hadn't done Facebook, somebody else would have a few months later. How can we use this knowledge to potentially short-circuit what's coming in coming decades into a more benign path? This is kind of interesting because I think for most of human history, within the group, we had very strong norms for sharing. and cooperation. And you look at almost any religious text. It talked about how evil it was to take more for yourself.

A camel will go through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man will go to heaven. And we've somehow changed our culture to say that self-interest and competitive behavior is the ideal. So really, we are the anomalous age. We have to go back to what we had for a long time. And part of it is also this idea that satisfaction in life comes from consuming more stuff, which is just fantasy. Satisfaction in life comes from having more friends and more interaction with people. A friend of mine just gave me the book Flow.

I don't want to pretend to try to pronounce the guy's last name. Very complicated, I think to check last name. But in it he says that one of the things that give you most satisfaction in life is flow. When things are just going, you know, it's this combination of different. difficulty and skill that merges to give you this fantastic feeling. And one of the greatest producers of flow is cooperating with your friends to overcome or with cooperating to overcome a common challenge. So as I tell my students, you know, you can have so many opportunities for a rich and

meaningful life because we're going to need to cooperate like hell to overcome all these challenges. And I do believe that makes us happier and just feel better. I totally agree with you, not only intellectually, but practically and experientially. And I miss hanging out with you and our group in Vermont because you're really walking what you teach in the fact that you have so many parties at your house and you invite all your neighbors and everyone comes and brings a dish or drinks or whatever. and you bike to work and you teach your students about dumpster diving, which is the modern equivalent of hunting and gathering. And seriously, I mean, after basic needs are met, the best things in life are free. The problem is that we've built all our expectations on fossil surplus continuing at this scale,

and that's not going to manifest. So I agree with you that social capital and cooperation and friends is going to be one of biggest great things in our future, but it's going to be coupled with those people that want to hang on to and avoid loss aversion with our current, you know, 200 to or 100 to 1 exosomatic surplus. Just as an aside, one of the projects we're working on is an organization called How Are We .org. And we've interviewed, eventually we want to interview hundreds of thousands of people, but so far

were about at a thousand in Wisconsin. And there's a battery of questions on what well-being means to people and you prioritize all these categories. And out of the thousand people, only two people categorized luxury items and things of convenience as very important. Almost everyone doesn't really care about living a luxury life. style. So this is where we get back to the human behavior thing of comparing ourselves to others based on the cultural metrics of our current lifetime. We don't need all this stuff to be happy.

Part of the reasons we think we need all this stuff is we're looking around and we're getting this marketing and advertising that you suck. But if you buy this extra little toy or gadget or Xbox or whatever, you're going to be cool. So I'm just wondering how much. of our problems go away when energy surplus goes away. But coupled with that is also as energy surplus goes away, so does some of our technology, our complexity, our interconnectedness, and our food supply. So there's that. What do you think, Josh? So this is going to get me off on a little one of my pet interests is, you know, the relationship between abundance and cooperation. And this is just kind of anecdotal, but I'm very, very interested in slime molds,

which is a little, you know, it's a little amoeba-like organism that in conditions of abundance, they all go around hunting on their own. But when things get scarce, that individual hunting strategy no longer works. And they come together in what's called a slug mass, and they can send out little pseudopods looking for food sources. And they're so efficient at this, that they've taken like a topographical map of Spain and put food on the map in a proportion to the population of different cities. And you put one of these slug masses there. And it will recreate the transportation infrastructure of Spain as this more efficient way of getting food through cooperation. And that is only that cooperative mechanism is induced entirely by resource scarcity. Leading to this kind of

perhaps Pollyanna-ish view that as resources become scarce, we really come to depend on each other much more and cooperate much more. And it's interesting that if you look at, you were talking about, you know, early cultures, and most of them that I know of, they, you know, individuals never starved. Either the group starved or nobody starved. You had much more egalitarian distribution. I would say, though, that, you know, you talked about, there were some, uh, groups with resource abundance who did develop, I mean, like, you know, the Northwest Indians in America

had slaves and hierarchies, pre-agriculture. So I think that plasticity is intense in humans. We can evolve different paths. But I think that the conditions we face dictate what cultural approaches are likely to be most successful. And I think it's painfully obvious. The conditions we face now do require cooperation at a global scale and massive reduction in consumption. Economists say that we are inherently insatiable, but the last I looked at this with got the data, it was like early 2000s. We spent equivalent to the GDP of Canada on advertising, convincing people that they're insatiable. If we were insatiable, you wouldn't need to spend that much to convince us we are. Getting rid of advertising could be an enormous, play an enormous role

in reducing our expectations of, you know, how much we should consume and how much we should work. It's interesting. I don't have a TV. I gave my TV away in 1999. Five years before I met you. I have a screen, which I watch Netflix things and Green Bay Packer games and things like that. But very infrequently. And when I do, I'm just shocked at the stupidness of current advertising.

And it just makes me really squeamish because I've had 20. years without that advertising. And now, contrary to when you and I met, but now all the big ad agencies have evolutionary psychologists, PhDs on staff to, you know, really hone in on what we need to trigger these people to buy stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the people are, so who is adopting these ideas, revolutionary psychology, is the market sector. And, you know, because of the government, we still have this myth of liberty. itarianism, you know, the government should intervene in our lives. Where's the private sector?

And I actually think that social media plays one of the biggest roles in shaping our behaviors and attitudes. You know, the whole goal of social media, of course, is to get people to see more ads. And as it turns out, the way you get people to see more ads is staying online longer is sending them highly polarizing information. So at a time we need reduced consumption and greater questions. operation, the biggest players in the market economy are focused on polarizing people as a means to get them to see more ads and buy more stuff. And I really wonder what future generations, how are they going to look at these people, if they're going to look at them as the equivalent of Adolf Hitler or something, you know, when they know the problems we face and how they're using these brilliant technologies and amazing knowledge of, you know, human psychology.

Well, the polarization and the groups on Facebook are just a perfect demonstration of our tribal minds in the modern era because people do feel they're cooperating because they're supporting their group. Yeah. But Q&N or whatever it is. And so this is like almost predictable that if you have the technology and the artificial intelligence, that that would be the result. In addition to advertising, what if we got rid of social media? How would that change our cooperative, competitive structure in our brains, just hypothetically? I don't think we should get rid of social media. I think we should choose the goals for which social media is used.

Right now the goal is to increase consumerism. And so I'm actually a huge advocate of a knowledge commons where all knowledge is free. And I actually think it should be the role of universities to start such a knowledge commons. And they should be the ones we should have these social media like a public utility. It's free. There's no advertising. And the algorithms, instead of triggering people to be polarized or to buy more, you know, stay on and buy more stuff, the algorithms be, you know, created to get people to actually buy less stuff to maybe see the commonalities we share across different groups. So the social media is an amazing tool.

I can use a hammer to bash somebody's head in, which makes it a terrible tool, or a hammer to build houses to shelter the homeless, which makes it a great tool. Social media is an amazing tool. We just are using it for the wrong ends. Because the algorithms are optimizing the wrong thing. They're optimized for clicks, which leads to profits. But you could change the algorithms towards pro-social ends. But this gets back to the superorganism.

is all at universities. The university that you're in is a miniature superorganism. It needs funding and more students to pay for the deputy dean of academic affairs and, you know, the sports and everything else. So to make decisions that are for a collective action result are economically against the interest of these entities. So do you have any insight on how. the things that you would like to see in the next 50 years could come about.

And so one of the things I would like to say about universities, I'm at a land grant university. The idea behind land grant universities was if you read Adam Smith, you know, he says patents are horrible. The antithesis of free markets. We created patents to give an incentive for inventors to hand over their knowledge, the patent so that after the 14 years of the patent, it would be publicly available. And, you know, patents were designed to make,

knowledge publicly available. Once our government had enough of a tax base, enough of resource base, we created land grant universities where the government would essentially directly pay academics to develop, not only to develop the ideas, but to go out there and educate the farmers, do extension. That was the original goal. So that's the path we need to be on now. I see the future. Right now at my university, we interviewed, because I did a course on this,

knowledge commons with my students. They interviewed the university. We spend $500,000 a year trying to get intellectual property rights from which we make on average $400,000 in revenue. In other words, we're spending $100,000 of student and taxpayer money to deny the public access to the knowledge we produced for the common good. Oh my God. So I really do see. And we also, the university pays me to rate journal articles, which I then publish in journals that the university has to buy. The university can't afford to buy the journal I publish it most now because the price is too high. So they pay me to create the content and can't afford access to it.

Meaning, though, that for universities, it would actually be in their financial interest to stop it with the intellectual property rights and to, you know, the most important input into any new technology or new idea is an old technology and an old idea. And universities, I really think we need a transnational cooperation. So there's no national interest. It's another sector of the economy that represents the knowledge commons. It creates the knowledge we need. Right now the market is going to generate knowledge that makes profits.

We need to generate knowledge that protects ecosystem that provides public goods. We need to generate knowledge that protects things that can't generate a profit. And we have no good mechanism for doing that. So let's expand on that, but let's throw in two other aspects of human behavior that are fighting in opposing directions from what you're envisioning. Number one is we are optimal foraging creatures. It's why we like to invest a little and get a lot. It's why in that ultimatum game and where you cooperate and share money and you share a little or do. donate a little or are selfish a little, but you're still trying to maximize a return on something.

We don't like to give stuff away. So to what extent is more or growth embedded in who we are as a biological species? And then the second part is the climate and future generations and other species and all those things are in the future. And as biological organisms, we have steep discount rates and prefer the present moment over next week and next week over two weeks from now and two weeks from now over 10 years from now. And so emotionally, the future isn't real to us. So how do you merge those two constraints with your hope for a collective action and future response like you were describing? I'm actually not so convinced we always do want more.

We want enough. The optimal foragers, when you look at hunter-gatherer bands, they didn't like try to get more and more and more. They tried to get enough as quickly and easily as possible. Well, because they couldn't store it. If he killed five mastodons instead of one, it would rot. And or is it because they couldn't store or also because there's more fun things in life? Although speaking, actually, I think hunting and gathering can probably be really fun. Oh, well, you and I do it with mushrooms and other things.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. It's, it's rock, leaf. mushroom and it's like a big dopamine fest. Finding mushrooms near Burlington is is not too mentally dissimilar than slot machines in Vegas. It's a lot healthier.

I totally agree that. You know, I think this idea of insatiability and even, you know, when I first studied international development, it was interesting reading about early development workers going to like Africa, helping them develop more productive farming systems. What was the response? Great, I get to work less.

And this is when we did have the means to store. And so it wasn't just a storage thing. They realized that if you wanted to get the people to work, you'd to produce more, you had to go in and create new watch. You had to say, hey, wait a minute. If you produce more, you get a TV. You get a radio. You got to create these wants. And it's really hard to separate. You know, I actually see myself in academia, people work really, really hard, long hours. I tell my students, actually, that, you know, quality of life is super important. And that's why a lot of like to work with me. But, you know, really my job and the job of most professors advising PhD students is to select those people who work 80 or 90 hours a week, sacrificing everything else for their

job and their career and their promotions. When I actually think that's exactly the wrong way to be doing things, it does take a process of inculturation and indoctrination to make people work that hard to buy stuff. Could we have grass tops from the bottom-up cultural revolution where people started to recognize that. And maybe it started a little bit with COVID. Of course, a lot of people that work from home and use Zoom are kind of privileged to be able to do that. But are we reaching a point in our culture where all this gadgets and technology and

material consumption is truly being recognized as a dead end path, not only for climate and environmental reasons, but just for personal fulfillment reasons. We're the richest culture in the history of the world, and we're fucking miserable. I wasn't sure I could swear on this, but this is what I'm going to talk about is after the 2008 crash, Herman Daly sent me a picture of some guy standing outside one of the Wall Street skyscrapers holding up a sign that said, jump, you fuckers. and the idea was that here are the people who had been solely focused on getting wealth for themselves, screw everybody else, don't care about everybody else, and there is a social reaction to ostracize them. Well, it's a strong reciprocity that is a conserved from our tribal times. Yep.

And I do think that that will be a big part of the path forward that I already see, like, you know, with a lot of the students on university campuses and stuff, you know, there's this huge social pressure to absolutely accept anybody's gender preferences or sexual preferences and to, you know, not discriminating against race and everything. And this was a sea chain. What I see is a sea change towards the way people treat others. And you would be ostracized. If you said negative things against my daughter, she's 14, she comes home and tells me she's

not sure she can be friends with somebody who, you know, discriminates against gays or a race. be friends of the racist. I mean, and already this ostracization is taking place on this issue of, you know, discrimination and privilege. And I don't think it's a big step to recognize these people who are consuming too much are the ones that, you know, once we get that same movement to where you're ashamed to be seen consuming that much or behaving in that way. Where do you draw the boundary there? Because the average American are the people on the earth. that are consuming too much. And again, there's a big difference between median and mean on that, obviously.

Yep. And so, and this is super, super difficult. You know, at the University of Vermont, we have all these, you know, kind of ecologically aware students. But when I tell them they got to write these policy briefs to explain how to solve a problem, and they'll say, oh, we'll write about how we can get everybody in electric cars. And I'll say, is that sustainable for the planet? And they'll say, oh, but, you know, we got our cars.

I mean, there's certain things that just are non-negotiable. we're extremely plastic. This is the huge thing. I do not know how to shape cultures. I mean, clearly the media is phenomenally powerful, social media. I look at Fox News, which has so shaped the dialogue around like democracy and COVID, incredibly powerful. They understand pretty damn well how to, you know, how to change people's minds. I think that, you know, the social media, they're doing these experiments.

all the time. They really know what, you know, they did the one to get more people to vote. They actually, you know, did one where they could get people to be happier or more depressed by changing their feed. They've done thousands of experiments we don't know about. They probably have a lot of the answers that I don't have. So some of the things I think are the most harmful are like, you know, social media and, you know, this corporate, corporate manipulation of our data. But it's the wrong ends. So in my view, it's all a question. of, you know, tools or tools, you have to evaluate them according to the desirable ends. To date, our desirable end has been, you know, I mean, recent history has been ever more

consumption. We now realize that's insane. Not everyone realizes that's insane. People in yours and my tribe do, but I think that is still the cultural goal. Yep. And even people who know better still, you know, as I was telling my students, I was supposed to, I was supposed to fly down to Brazil to see family because I promised my wife we'd see her family. I love her family.

And I was willing, you know, I was looking at the individual benefits to me were immense. The cost of the world were huge. Somebody who knows all these things, I was going to fly there. Except my daughter got, they, as we were walking out the door, got a call from Department of Health. To my daughter, COVID. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's given the breadth of and depth of knowledge that you have about the human predicament What are you most worried about in coming decades and what gives you the most hope?

Great question. You know, I'm definitely most worried about business as usual. I'm one of these people who tends to be fairly hopeful by nature. And you probably have some of this too that, you know, if the shit really gets bad and hits the fan, I don't think humans, you know, civilization is going to profoundly be altered. But humans prior to modern technologies, you know, populated the world. They're very adaptive. will survive. There will be pockets of people that will survive for sure. You know, I'm afraid of the huge die-off and loss of biodiversity and loss of human populations and cultures.

But I think over time, all that comes back. I'm very much, you know, you talked about how we discount the future. In the long future, you know, nature will rebound from whatever we do. Probably pockets of humans will survive. But I look at the short future. I'm trying to think. To be honest, there's so many things that have me worried right now.

Well, you're, I mean, of all the people in my network, you're among the smartest and wisest. But you're also coupled with a super gregarious, positive personality, which is why you're such a popular teacher.

So, you know, I've been talking about these risks since I met you. And you kind of, uh, Nate, you're kind of overly gloomy. I think that X, Y, and Z.

But now reality is kind of caught up to this story. But you're such an optimistic human. I just wondered, you know, what is it that you really worry about and what is it that gives you hope? Yeah. In some ways, they're the same. Like right now, what I see is, you know, there's this talk about, you know, our conflict with Russia and our conflict with China and this threat of war. And so that is this, you know, competitive. anti-cooperation approach that gives me the most fear.

But at the same time, I think the solution to those problems would be Biden going to Putin and to China and, you know, Iran and saying, look, we got this global climate change problem. It's much more serious. If we pool our intellectual forces, you have brilliant scientists. You know, so I actually do look at cooperation is something that when you do something nice to somebody, they have an instinct. sensual obligation to do something nice to you. It's reciprocity.

They've done these studies to show that if somebody you don't like gives you something you don't like, you still want to reciprocate and be nice to that. Well, that was the whole model of the Harry Krishna's in the 70s and A's. They would come and bring you a flower. And then a minute later, they would ask for a dollar and you felt compelled to donate. Yep. And so what I see is the solution. So all these crises we face now, if we had a real leader who could come and recognize

the big challenges. And, you know, and I think these are like dinosaurs. All, you know, all the big countries. They're ruled by, you know, the leaders are people who are stuck in the last, you know. They're self-selected for sociopathic type of people to get at that level, aren't they? There is a, yeah, the one thing that should disqualify you from being president is wanting to be president. Right, exactly. But like, could we get someone like you as president because you would have the,

intellectual ideas and the personality and the charisma to do these things, but you would never make it up in the polls because you're not telling people what they want to hear. Yeah. But I think that increasingly it's obvious that if we pool, the only way we're going to be able to solve these global challenges is to pool our resources. And I think that cooperation is a positive feedback loop. And this is one of the reasons why I'm, what I'm actually trying to push for now, what I, what I think that I could possibly contribute to is we're writing with my students, we're writing

an article about how knowledge improves through use and how a knowledge commons, a transnational knowledge commons, we could start sharing knowledge, even it was just about COVID or about green technologies, just painfully obvious that sharing knowledge increases its value. As we start to do that, we develop more trust in the other people with whom we're working. And as we develop more trust, It allows us to cooperate at a larger scale, which therefore helps develop more trust, which helps develop to cooperate at an even larger scale. So that cooperation, you know, and they seem to lab whatever you might think of them. He makes this point that we've already passed a lot of critical ecological boundaries.

You know, resilience, bouncing back to where we were might no longer be possible. We do need to think about the next system, what's going to replace it. And so he talks about anti-fragile, systems that grow stronger as you hammer on it. them. And I do think that cooperation is fundamentally anti-fragile. The more you use it, the stronger it gets, and the more likely you are to use it again. And even in your own lives, it's like lifting weights, tears down the muscles, and then they grow back stronger. So is doing cooperative, altruistic things in your neighborhood, et cetera, right? Yep, my neighbors. Like, you know, I got up the other morning and we'd had snow. My neighbor had shoveled my driveway. And the first thing I'm thinking is, okay,

what am I going to do for him now? And in the summer, he getting eat out of my garden. But in the winter, I get it. So next time, I'm going to get up before him in a shoveler driveways. No, it's a very healthy dynamic that our culture, you know, 50, 60, 100 years ago, we were like that. And now we're so rich, quote unquote, that we just order stuff from Amazon and don't need our neighbors. I totally agree with you that we're going to need our neighbors again. One huge difference just to add to this is if you order stuff from Amazon and you get an amazing deal, you pay very little, you get a lot, you think, I scored.

If my neighbor does something for me that's more than I did for him, I don't think I scored. I think, oh man, I better reciprocate. So within that kind of reciprocity cooperative economy, every economic interaction deepens your social ties. Within a market economy, you know, I go pay for something. no rest of process. You know, my money exactly measures how much I was supposed to reciprocate. There's no social ties. I'm not writing thank you notes to the store when I go buy groceries, even if I got a good,

you know, I got a great deal. I'm not going to write a thank you note. I mean, it's a wildly different relationship. The economic system deemphasizes or constrains cooperation. Yep. Absolutely. Because, so in my view, actually, this is the power of money that, you know, humans evolve their intelligence and minds to understand cooperation and reciprocity. You had to attract all the people in

your group. If I help them, will they help me or will they help my brother? Tit for tat. And then we had we had many iterations. We would know that we would see those people next week, next month, next year. But it's very cognitively demanding to keep track of all that reciprocity. Along comes money. You did something for me. I immediately reciprocate by giving you money. So my view is that actually money kind of captured our evolved capacity for tracking reciprocity and hijacked it is you talk about a supernormal stimulus. It's the most powerful supernormal stimulus there is money. We've parsed all of our ancestral rich tapestry of traits into this one unit.

Absolutely. Let me just ask you this. See, you're very fluent in these things and you teach a lot of these things to your students, as I know, because I come in and do closing lectures to your class. What do you generally give as your advice to these 19, 20, 23-year-old humans that are suddenly, you know, they're aware of climate and polarization and social media risk, but the larger limits to growth, resource depletion, they get a little more of it from your class. What do you recommend to them?

How do you send them out into the world after graduating university? What sort of advice do you give your students? And how would you change that? Or is it the same advice you'd give on this podcast to the listeners? Yeah, I mean, I think it's about the same. And what I tell them actually is that these challenges he face, the ecological and social challenges, are actually far more difficult to overcome than we commonly see. So like the Stern review said, you know, if we spend 1% of GDP, we could, you know, reduce the chance of catastrophic climate change. I think he's raised it to 2% of GDP, which when you think about it, if GDP is growing at 3% per year, he's saying we could address climate change if we accept our living standards from eight months ago.

There's no freaking way. You know, it's going to take a huge amount of resources and it's going to be huge changes in our levels of consumption and our lifestyles. But I also say that most of, you know, many of these things in our culture that, you know, get us to consume more and work crazy hours to consume more. actually are not, you know, that we're sacrificing our welfare on the altar of excess consumption and actually moving towards a more sustainable society where we slash our consumption. And I'm not talking electric cars for everybody. I'm talking electric bikes for everybody. Once you start going down that path, you will realize that, you know, work less, consume less, do the other things that make your life rich and fulfilling. So I actually think that, yeah,

We're going to have to slash consumption by way more than most world leaders dare tell us, but that the impacts of that are going to be way, you know, and I think for the first bit, it's actually going to be positive. And even in my own life, my most fulfilling and rewarding times were not when I was consuming the most, but really when I was working with my friends to solve some problem or to overcome, you know, hard work. But you do it, you know, building the house with a family doing these things. and it makes you feel really good.

And so I just tell my students that, you know, the things they think make them feel good, it's because they've been indoctrinated from birth with all these advertisements and everything else. But the things that really are likely to make them feel good, we can still have an abundance, even as we're dramatically slashing our levels of consumption and material, I won't say material welfare, but just material throughput. A couple of my top 20 best experiences of my life were in your living room, actually. So, yeah, exactly. That's what I teach my students as well.

And I think the superorganism is firmly in the driver's seat. And so we're not going to, as a culture, voluntarily choose to consume less until we're forced to. But as young people to have that mindset that you just described doesn't necessarily save the planet, but it's going to make people more flexible, more resilient when we are going to have to consume, have a smaller material throughput. So any other closing words, Josh? And I guess just getting back to some of these things that, you know, the superorganism, what makes us a super organism is the messages we constantly receive together that makes us believe certain ways. And if those are controlled for the for profit motive, advertising and social media for profit,

our superorganism in this, you know, ever-expanding consumption way, if we change the goals towards which we use those technologies to focus on, you know, finding meaning through other things, I think that would be a huge part of changing the superorganism. So we're like so many ants with the little pheromones that we're running around little emojis on growth and memes and things like that, but we need to change the pheromones. towards different messages. Yep. Excellent.

Josh, thank you so much, my friend. I do miss hanging out in Burlington, and hopefully we will see each other in person instead of on Zoom. Thank you for your time today. And we will talk soon, my friend. I definitely value the friendship and appreciate the chance to share ideas. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more.

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