The Joe Rogan Experience - #1201 - William von Hippel

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

William von Hippel is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. His new book "The Social Leap" is available now via Amazon.

All right, here we go. Four, three, two. Hello, Bill. Hi. What's going on, man? I am very excited to be here. I'm excited to have you here. Excellent. The social leap. Yes.

What's the social leap? I'll tell you all about it. Please do. Okay. So the story that I want to tell is basically how we got here, how we became human. story that I want to tell is basically how we got here, how we became human. And so that story begins about six or seven million years ago when our ancestors left the rainforest. And so the question is, why would they leave and how would they survive once they left? And that's what the social leap is. So it takes a second to get it all out there. Okay. Yeah. All right. So here's the story. So if you look back about seven million years, our ancestors and chimps, we had a common ancestor at about that point in time, six or seven million years ago. And that common ancestor, we don't know exactly what it looked like, but from all we can tell, it was awfully close to today's chimps.

at chimps today, you can get a pretty good sense of what life was like then. And chimps today are really interesting. They're basically at the top of the food chain in the rainforest. They're super fast up in the trees, super athletic. And because they travel in groups, even amazing tree climbers like leopards won't try to attack them in trees. It's just they're too dangerous too fast. But if you look at a chimp on the ground, it can't even lock its knees. It's this kind of cute little stumbling along thing. And then the question is, why would an animal that runs a show in the canopy leave the rainforest for the savanna? And then how would it survive once it did that? And that's the story of this book and then how that manifests itself to where we are today.

So really my goal, I'm a psychologist. I want to understand why we are the way we are. Really, my goal, I'm a psychologist. I want to understand why we are the way we are. And so in trying to figure that out, I said, well, let's take a look back all the way to our common ancestors and see some of the key events and how they might have had an influence on how we are today. So the first question is, why would we leave the trees, right? Here we are. We're dominant position.

We're food on the ground. Why would we ever take that risk? And the basic story there is the Great African Rift Valley. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it at all. But basically, it runs down from up at the Red Sea down to the coast of Mozambique. And you can think of it like a geographic zipper. You know, all the world sits on these tectonic plates. And sometimes they crash into each other, like how India is smashing into Asia and creates the Himalayas. Sometimes they literally tear apart. And Africa is tearing apart at the Great African Rift Valley. So that plate that has Somalia and Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya,

that's moving off to the lower right. The rest of Africa is moving off to the upper left. And I've got no idea why. It's been going on for quite a while. But one of the consequences of that is that the East Africa is starting to rise up slowly bit by bit. And when it rises up, the rainforest dry out. And so basically what you have is a situation where our ancestors were on the east side of that rift valley and it started to dry out. And now they're in a situation where they've got this great lifestyle, they're a dominant position, but now they're pushed, they're forced out onto the ground increasingly more and more

because there's more and more ground and less and less rainforest. And so how do they survive that? What do they do in order to make that work? And this is a – what period of time is this? How many millions of years ago? Six or seven. Six or seven. Does this coincide with the – when was the jump of the human brain size where it doubled? Oh, we'll get to that.

So it's a super interesting question about why that happened as well. So basically, if you track us across the next three million years, how did our ancestors survive when they're basically chimpanzees on the open savanna? And you can get a hint of how they did it because there's one chimpanzee group

that does live on the savanna in Senegal. And they show some differences between themselves and other chimps that travel in slightly larger groups. They share more nicely with each other, which is interesting. That's kind of a human trait as well. And they also avoid open space. Like they're just kind of trying to stay near the trees as much as possible.

And so, and if you look at other, not apes, but other primates that are on the savannah, like savannah baboons, they're only monkeys. So they're not as sharp as chimpanzees are. But they have a similar strategy, large groups to try to protect themselves and lots of eyes to look out for predators. And they do fine on the savanna. And so what I suspect happened is for the first few million years, basically what you've got is this chimp-like animal that's kind of skirting the edges of the savanna, nowhere near the top dominant position they used to be, and just kind of noodling around. And I suspect that takes us for about the first three, three and a half million years. And if you look at who we are then, we're Australopithecus afarensis.

So if you looked at one of them, you'd think it belongs in a zoo. It looks almost like a chimpanzee. And so a chimp brain, in answer to the first part of your question, is about 380 grams. And Australopithecus brain is about 450 grams. So 3 million years of evolution, and all we've got for it is 70 grams. So why do we get so smart? Why do we take off in the next few million years? And what is it that Australopithecus did that helped us survive? And why do I call that the social leap? That's all kind of tied together. And the basic story is that by this point, Australopithecus has become bipedal. And we can talk about how that happened if you'd like. And so because they're bipedal, their waist is

now stretched out. Their musculature, like if you look at chimpanzee pecs, they aim upward because, of course, chimps climb in all the time. Australopithecus is more lateral, like we are. We're basically completely lateral because things are side to side as far as we're concerned. It's harder to climb a tree, but it's a whole lot easier to do a lot of other things. And we have much more limber shoulder. We have much more limber wrist, all that sort of thing. And a lot of that was in place by Australopithecus. So once they became bipedal, they gained a lot of these qualities. And then the question is, why do those qualities matter? Well, if you watch a chimpanzee throw,

it's terrible at it, even though they're stronger than you and I are pound for pound by a sizable margin. When they throw, they're inept, they can't aim very well, and they typically use two hands because they're not lined up well to throw. If you watch a really good thrower like, you know, a gridiron, a football player, a baseball player, or a hunter-gatherer throw, you know, it's a full body motion. You step forward with the other leg. There's this rotation. In the very last minute, you bring your wrist through. Well, what that does is it creates an enormous amount of elastic energy

across your muscles, tendons, and ligaments. And the end of that throw for a human is like the snapping of a rubber band. So chimps can't do that. They're not lined up properly. But Australopithecus got to the point where they could probably do that pretty well. And so now, and that's purely a byproduct of bipedalism because it stretched out their whole body and they're not climbing as much anymore, so their musculature is more lateral, which would have been helped them for throwing. So now you get to a point where they have access to the single most important military invention in history, which is the capacity to kill at a distance.

So if you and I are running around the savannah and a lion attacks us and we got 50 of our best friends, we could kill it with our bare hands. But a lot of us are going to die in the process, right? Because you think 50 of us could kill a lion? Let's make it 100. You think even 100 of us could kill a lion? Let's make it 100. You think even 100 of us could kill a lion? You know, with a bunch of knives and shit. If I was a lion, I'd be super confident

I'd fuck up 100 people. You wouldn't worry very much, but even if we could, so we knew what we were doing, we were all armed with knives, whoever goes in first is screwed. Right, right. And so the capacity to kill at a distance, though,

allows a larger force of weaker individuals to easily defeat a stronger individual. And so once they gain this capacity to throw, if they were attacked by lions or something like that, whereas in the past they'd have just scattered for the trees, now they could throw stones at it and defend themselves. Now, an Australopithecus throwing rocks at a lion is going to be in the belly of a slightly annoyed lion in about three minutes, right? Right. But 50 Australopithecines throwing rocks at lions is a totally different story. And so the idea here is the throwing hypothesis, that what changed everything was throwing. And the reason it changed everything is that it caused us, it was the first reason why

we should have any effective collective action. Because it's not a good strategy when you're on your own. It's not a good strategy if I do it and the rest of the group heads for the trees, but it's a great strategy if we all do it together. And so for the first time in history, the group's goals in our history, in our line, the primate line, the group's goals aligned with the individual goals, which is let's cooperate and work together to try to drive away these predators. Now, if you look at a lion and you look at someone throwing rocks, it still seems like a really big ask, right? To drive that thing away or kill it

throwing rocks. But Barbara Isaac was one of the first anthropologists to propose this hypothesis quite a while ago, went back and looked through the historical record. And these are extraordinary stories of how effective people are throwing rocks. And so when the Portuguese went to the Canary Islands to try to subjugate it, they rock up with, you know, armor, guns, crossbows. And this is in the, like, 14-something. And all the locals were on with was stones. And despite the fact that the Portuguese are there in army, trained, you know, ready to shoot, and in their armor, they were just decimated by the locals throwing rocks at them. And this story's happened over and over again.

And when you read these accounts, they're extraordinary. I can read you some examples from here. They just, it happened in Australia, it happened in the Canary Islands, it happened elsewhere. They just throw rocks incredibly accurately, incredibly hard, and really fast. And there's accounts in Africa basically killing a zebra with one blow of a rock to the head. Hmm. So like a pitcher, a major league pitcher. Yeah, exactly.

With a good rock. Right. Who gets very accurate at it. Yeah. So do you think they must have practiced? Constantly. Yeah. And so what I suspect is that we evolved to like to throw rocks.

Wow. And so if you look at my son as a for example, when he was 18 months old, we would be walking back toward the house. If he saw a rock on the street, he'd pick it up and start trying to throw it. And my wife was like, no, no, don't let him throw rocks. It's only going to cause trouble. First of all, I'm thinking, well, maybe he'll develop a good arm. So I'm going to go ahead and let him anyway. But secondly, he freaking wants to. This is like something inherently fun for him. Right. And I think all humans enjoy throwing. And it's stunning how good you can get it with practice. So we were at the Ohio State Fair.

This was before my son was born. And I was walking by one of these stalls where you can throw in a radar gun. And so I thought, I was just starting to date my wife. And I thought, oh, here's a perfect chance to impress her, right, and how macho I am. So I said, hey, why don't I stop and I'll throw some balls here in this net? Because I had never thrown. I didn't know how fast I could. So she's like, sure.

And I play like Little League, right? So I throw the ball, and it's like 50 miles an hour. And she's pretty impressed because that sounds fast, right? And then this kid shows up next to me. He's got to be 12 years old, probably weighs 85 pounds, this total gangle, not a muscle in his body. And he just starts freaking throwing ball after ball at, like, 65 miles an hour. And I'm like, fuck. I mean, she's not going to be impressed with this, like, human twig next to me.

He's kicking my ass, right? And so I pick up the last ball. I freaking throw it as hard as I can. Hurts my shoulder. Flies off at an odd angle. Doesn't hit anything. And it's, like, 57 miles an hour. hurts my shoulder, flies off at an odd angle, doesn't hit anything, and it's like 57 miles an hour.

Now, that little guy, who's like literally the size of an Australopithecus, was thrown at 65 and hitting the target every time. And so it's obvious that it's skill, it's practice that would have made you good at this. And if your life depends on it, you're going to do it. Well, that makes sense coming from a martial arts background, like coordinated movement, where at the end of it, you snap. It just makes sense that this technique is so critical. Even though you're a larger person, someone with better technique could have more of an impact with that. So the throwing arm, I had read this. That was one of the hypotheses.

There's several hypotheses why the human brain doubled over a period of two million years. Another one was cooked meat, right? Yeah. They figured out a way to get more nutrients out of meat by cooking it over fire. Right. So that's a little bit down the road. So here we are 3.5 million years ago. And so for the first time, we put some pressure on ourselves to have an advantage to be smarter. So imagine you're a zebra.

What the hell good is it to you to be Einstein? You got hooves. What are you going to do with that brain, right? But it's a big cost. Our brains are 20% of our metabolic energy, whether we're doing math or watching TV. It's constant drain. And so what are our ancestors? Why would they pay for that drain?

Now, just recently, there was a paper that came out maybe three months ago now on a new brain expansion gene they found, or they think that's what it is, called NOTCH2NL. And it turns out, I don't know, 12, 15 million years ago, there was an accidental duplication of that gene on our genome. But it was ineffective and it just sat there doing nothing. Now, that's a great way that evolution works, where it accidentally doubles a gene. Because then you can mess with it and the old gene is still doing the job, right? So it sat there for about 9 million years in our line until about 3 million years ago around Australopithecus. And then it duplicated itself and it came online again. And what that gene seems to do is it makes our brain remain as stem cells for longer,

which means a lot more duplication before they run away and start becoming neurons. And so if I had to guess, I'd say that that probably, that gene coming online probably happened many times in the past. And every time it happened in the past, it was more cost than it was worth. And so what's a chimp going to do with a little bit more brain and just means more calories and what does he gain from it? But now that we're working together, now that we have collective action, all sorts of things open up. We could devise division of labor. I'll say, hey man, you do this and I'll do that. Because Australopithecus, they've got 70 more grams than a chimp. They can't do things like that. They can't all throw rocks at the same time. That's not rocket science. But all the

kinds of things that came next probably were enabled by that process of us coming together and deciding to work together and cooperate. So if you look at chimpanzees, they don't cooperate very well. For example, one of the activities where they sort of cooperate is when they hunt monkeys. And so they'll all gather around and they'll see some monkeys in the trees and they come in from every angle. It's not very coordinated. It's kind of a wild free-for-all. But what's interesting about it is that when the hunt's over, let's say you just sat there the whole time and watched. And I'm working my ass off chasing these monkeys.

I got one. You come up and bug me for it. I don't willingly handle it. You like keep nudging me till I share, but I'm just as likely to share with you if you helped as if you didn't. I don't make any distinction. And you'll never establish effective groups if you can't reward those who participate compared to those who don't. Even little kids, four-year-old kids, when you give them games to play and they earn stickers, if you didn't play, when you come up and ask, you don't get any. You played, even if you didn't do your job right, but you tried,

boom, you can have a sticker. So humans immediately get that, that you get rewarded for your activities as part of the group. Chimps don't seem to have that. That's fascinating. Because chimps really do have a sense of fairness though. And that's one of the issues that happened with the the captive chimp that attacked the man who brought the birthday cake do you know that story i don't know that's an awful story oh these this couple um they kept a chimp as a pet for a long time and then as it got older it got a little violent and they had to bring it to a sanctuary and they brought it to a sanctuary and they would go to visit it and the chimp would remember them and they went to visit it and it was on his birthday so they brought him a cake and the other chimps in the sanctuary

were furious that they didn't get the cake uh as well they didn't think it was fair or they were angry so they figured out somebody had left a gate open and they got out and tore this guy apart yeah because he didn't give them a cake yeah so there's a the most famous example that is actually with capuchin monkeys which aren't nearly as smart as chimps. And it's this amazing study by Sarah Brosnan and Franz DeWall. And if you want to see it in action, DeWall has it on a TED talk. It's really quite something to see. And what they do in that study is they teach these capuchin monkeys to, they give them pebble and they teach the capuchins to return the pebble and they give it a cucumber slice. And so it's learned the game for cucumber slices. So if you wanted to ask, does the monkey think that's a fair reward? The answer has to be

yes, right? Because it's doing that for cucumber. So now you and I are both monkeys and we're in our cage. I return the pebble, I get a cucumber. Now you return the pebble and they hand you a grape. Capuchins much prefer grapes over cucumbers. And so then what happens next? Well, I've been doing this behavior for cucumbers, but as soon as you get a grape, I'm like, yeah, I'm not playing anymore. And you watch this tape and the capuchin, they give you a grape, they give me the cucumber and the thing looks totally pissed. It starts pounding on the ground. It throws the cucumber back at the experimenter. It's amazing. Yeah. And so the question is, what does that mean? Why do they care about fairness in that way? And I think the answer to that question is sexual selection. And so the key to sexual selection is it doesn't matter what

everybody's getting so long as I'm getting about as much as everybody else. But the second that you're starting to get more than I have, well, then whatever females in our group, she's going to pick you before she picks me. And so everything is relative. We may think, no, why do you care so much about what other people are doing? Why don't you just be happy with what you got? But literally, the day you find out that the guy in the next studio over salaries twice yours, your salary sucks. Right. Because – and it makes sense because literally,

she's going to choose him now before she chooses you. Comparison is a thief of joy. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's a really unfortunate fact because sometimes it matters a lot. Like, for example, imagine I invent a drug and I say, here, take a dose and it'll double your IQ. Instantly, you're going to feel like a genius. But unbeknownst to you, I gave everybody two doses. You walk out of there, you're going to feel like a dumbass because people are saying stuff you can't understand, right? So then it

would matter. Right. But the killer cases are things where it's only just a residue. So, for example, there's this amazing study where they showed that people who are making minimum, just above minimum wage, are the ones who don't want you to raise minimum wage. They're the most against it. Really? Yeah. Now, why would that be? Well, right now they've got a slight advantage over people making minimum wage. The day minimum wage gets raised, now they're not

any better off than anybody else. So even though they're the most likely to benefit from it because they may lose that job they have and have to take minimum wage, they're actually against it because it gives them a slight advantage over the guy next door. Is this based on one study? Because I would think that the people that would be most against it would be the people that are hiring folks. All right, fair enough. It's only looking at income. So the boss probably feels even the more negative of all. But if you look at people's income and their feelings about raising minimum wage, the people are making minimum wage wanted to go up, the people one notch above do not. And then as the higher you go, they do again.

Really? Yeah. Wow. Up until you get to the point where you're employing people. Right. Well, and some employers want to raise it, right? I mean, and some don't. There's a huge argument about that. Now, when it comes back to the Capuchin monkeys, does the same effect happen whether it's a female or a male? I don't know. I mean, so the thing is, and people argue like crazy about exactly what this means. I don't think the monkeys have a sense of fairness like you and I have. But I do think they have a sense of, hold on, you're getting more than I am. I can't let this happen. Otherwise I'm screwed. And there's lots of great evidence that if you

let that happen, you're screwed. But do the females have that same sense of competitiveness that they need to have the exact same thing those other bitches are having? Do they get angry? Well, here's the thing. It depends on whether your mating system is going to be pair bonding or not. So if you're a frog or lots of different frogs, not all of them, a laughing tree frog, or if you're a elephant seal or something, well, all the females mate with the best male because his job is just sex. And so every female can have the best one, either in a situation where they've got no choice, like the elephant seals, he controls the rookery, or in a situation where they just listen to all the croaking and then they go, all right, you're the best croaker, you're the dad. But if you're pair bonding like humans or like lots of other animals,

birds, et cetera, then what you need is you've got competition on both sides. So she's always competing to get the best male and he's always competing to get the best female. Now there's reasons why male-male competition is always a bit more intense than female-female competition, but both of them are there. And the more monogamous the system gets, the more both sides compete for each other. Hmm, interesting. So what about in the case of bonobos, where they're so polyamorous? Bonobos are a super interesting system.

So you've got lots of polyamorous animals. Bonobos are interesting. Chimps are also, you know, so if you look at one of the great ways to look at our ancestors and what their lives were like is you look in your trousers and the size of your testicles tells you a lot about what sort of mating system your ancestors had. So gorillas have tiny little testicles. And the reason that they have such tiny testicles is they use their huge body to drive away the other males, and then all the females are in his harem. So he doesn't need big testicles because he only needs enough sperm in order to inseminate the females he's got. It doesn't take much sperm to inseminate any one female, and testicles are really expensive tissue to make.

And if you own a pair and you land on them, you know they're uncomfortable too, right? And so then you look at our testicles, and they're quite a bit bigger than a gorilla's, but they're nowhere near the size of a chimp or a bonobo, both. You know, they're basically in many ways almost the same beast, although socially quite different. And they have a system where they basically have to wash out the guy who was there before them. And so it takes really big testicles to have sperm competition. So their competition isn't by fighting each other, although there's a degree of that too. They know full well that when she comes into estrus,

into heat, there's going to be a line. And if you're fifth in line and you can wash everybody out before you, you might end up the dad. Wash everybody out is a funny way of putting it. It's not very romantic. It's, this testicle size is directly proportionate to the number of promiscuous females.

Well, that's right. The promiscuity of the mating system. Yes. And so if you look at our mating system, we clearly evolved to be largely monogamous but not entirely. Our testicles are unnecessarily large for an entirely monogamous species. And so we're a little bit on the wash the guy out ahead of us domain. But there's many people that make arguments that our monogamy is socially reinforced and

it's not natural. Look, if you look at hunter-gatherers, and so the best way that we get a sense of, well, what did we evolve to do is to look at the remaining hunter-gatherer societies, particularly if you look at what are called immediate return hunter-gatherers. So there are people who eat today what they killed today. Now, you've got a lot of hunter-gatherers. Once they left the equator, they could store food and everything changed for them. And they actually, in many of their behaviors, they look a lot like us. And we

can come back to that if you'd like. But if you look at hunter-gatherers around the equator, they're typically immediate return, kill, eat. And so those guys tend to be, there's always, of course, human differences. We're a super variable species, but they tend to be, there's always, of course, human differences. We're a super variable species, but they tend to be serially monogamous. And so some people pair up for life, lots of people pair up for five, seven years and then break apart and pair up again. And so you have sequence of children with a sequence of people. But largely monogamous, not entirely. But monogamous during those time periods. Yeah, largely. Now we know every single animal we've ever described as monogamous, when we do the DNA, we now find they're not entirely.

But they're mostly. Interesting. So have you ever read Sex at Dawn? Mm-hmm. What did you think of that? No offense, but I think it's total crap. Oh, Chris Ryan, do you hear that shit? Everybody's rocking on your book, bro.

What did you think is crap about it? I just don't think the system works that way. Explain to people that may not know what we're talking about. I haven't read that book now since it came out. So let me remind me of the thesis. Do you remember it offhand? The idea is that we evolved in these small tribes of people that essentially shared sexual partners. Oh, yeah.

That's bullshit. And so the thing is that— What makes you say that so confidently? Well, I don't know. I shouldn't say it quite so confidently. You're absolutely right. I believe that's bullshit. How's that?

Okay. Why do you believe that's bullshit? Because—so human beings have very clear evolved jealousy systems. And they're not just a product of the world that we live in today. You can see jealousy among hunter-gatherers as well. Now, the thing is they get jealous about different things because, of course, men and women have slightly different pressure on them,

but they both get jealous by infidelity. Now, that's not to say that the book is incorrect about some societies and some places because one of the interesting things about humans is our flexibility. And so you can create a system, and some hunter-gatherers have, where there's a lot of that, a ton of that.

There's some really interesting ones where literally once the woman gets pregnant, she then starts to sleep with all the other males because she thinks her baby will gain the qualities of all the men that she sleeps with. So I'm not trying to claim that we're always monogamous, because absolutely that's untrue. But I do think that the dominant system is one of serial monogamy. And the reason I think that that's the dominant system is this is kind of the deal that we made whereby the males go out and do the hunting. The females go out and do gathering. And that's basically universal. She tends to cook for him.

And that comes back to the fire point you made, which we can come back to. And so they share resources. And he's happy to share resources and do his best to kind of sort of look out for her kids. I mean, human males aren't – we don't take as much care as human females do of our kids, but we're much better than the other great apes. And so that level of investment he's going to make tends to be to the degree that he believes that he's the father of the kids. Now you have societies where he doesn't know that really all are polyamorous like that, by all means. I don't know what percentage they are, and it could even be they're more common than I believe.

But when that happens, the systems tend to change a little bit, and he's a little bit less willing to look out, try to help out kids, other than to do her a favor unless the kid looks a lot like himself. Now, what about why having a biological system where jealousy comes up? What makes you think that that somehow or another negates the idea of polyamorous relationships? Well, it does suggest that they're not our default. Well, doesn't it more likely suggest that it encourages competition, which is just natural? Well, now you think about envy instead of jealousy.

And so if I'm jealous, I'm upset that my wife slept with somebody else last night. He could be a lowlife. I don't envy a thing about him. I don't want anything he owns. But I'm jealous of her behavior. I'm protective of what she's done. And so there's a wonderful experiment David Buss has run at the University of Texas. Can I stop you there, though?

Yeah, of course. Aren't you jealous of the man as well? You're not just jealous of her behavior. You're jealous of this other male that gets to have sex with your wife. And couldn't that possibly encourage competition and encourage men to be more aggressive or more ingenious or just encourage creativity, encourage better hunting skills so you attract more women. I mean, all those things seem to be natural. I would agree with all that, but I'd phrase it a little bit differently.

So there's this wonderful study out of the Philippines where they measured a huge number of men's testosterone when they were single. And then they waited a few years and measured it again after they were still single, or now they're married, or now they're married and they have kids. And I'm sure it wasn't a psychology study because we can't afford to do that. It was probably some medical thing, but they used it to answer this interesting psychological question, which was who's most likely to get the girl by their original testosterone levels. And what happens when you do? Well, the guys who got married in the intervening few years had higher testosterone than the guys who didn't. So yeah,

you're absolutely right. We're out there competing with other males in order to get the girl. And there's lots and lots that goes on there, tons of really interesting things. But what's interesting is once we get the girl, our testosterone drops. And so once we partner up, and if we're in a monogamous relationship, not polyamorous, but in a monogamous relationship, our testosterone drops, and then it drops again if we have kids. And testosterone is a great hormone for getting out there and being competitive with other guys. It's not a great hormone for being nurturing for your children, and it's not a great hormone for being faithful to your partner. And so I think that we evolved to compete with other males in order to get into the mating game. So if you look at our

ancestral DNA, you know how you can track our male and female ancestry through mitochondrial DNA on the mother's side and why? You'll see that we have far more female ancestors than male. Not quite two to one, but I think it's close to that. And so what does that tell us? Well, lots of guys are getting left out of the mating game entirely, and lots of guys are inseminating lots of different women. So all those things that you said are absolutely true. And all that pushes us for competition. But part of what I believe goes on is part of that competition that we engaged in was in order to get the girl to get into that relationship in the first place. Could I stop you there? Because I think that if you're going to have a study on testosterone, you have to have a study on lifestyle.

I mean, if you get married and you have children, one of the things that happens is you become less active. You don't exercise as much. You don't sleep as much. All those things have a pretty radical effect on hormone production. Absolutely. And it could well be that, you know, you always have to have a proximal mechanism whereby evolution plays its game, right? So the distal cause is, as an evolved species, testosterone is super important to get us into the mating game, but it's less useful once we're in it. Well, all you have to

do is have a system whereby those things tend to downregulate testosterone, exactly like you said, because you know those things are going to happen once you get partnered up. And so, but mind you, when our ancestors partnered up, they're still out hunting every day. You know, we may be less- Right, but we don't have studies on them. We don't. Unfortunately, we don't. The issue that I'm having with this is we have studies on the general health and testosterone and hormonal health of sedentary humans.

I mean, I would like to know what their lifestyle is. I would like to know what they're doing. Yeah. And I'm sure you're right. This doesn't seem to make any sense to me because one thing that everybody knows is that you get dad bod, right? That's dad bod. What is dad bod? Dad bod is a guy who works all day, comes home, sits on the couch, probably eats food he probably shouldn't eat, hangs out with his kids, doesn't get a whole lot of exercise, works, probably doesn't sleep as much as he should.

To me, that's a symptom of poor health and fitness. Right, and it's not a symptom our ancestors ever experienced. Right, but this is not necessarily an indication of any sort of evolutionary benefit of having low testosterone because we've demonstrated for sure that when people don't get sleep and when they don't get exercise, their testosterone drops. Well, those are two things that absolutely happen when you get married and have children. Right. And the only thing I would say is the time span of this study is only over a few years.

That's even worse. The thing about having this kind of a study and making these kind of conclusions based on – I mean, see, we know these mechanisms are in place. See, we know these mechanisms are in place. We already know that there's natural effects of sedentary lifestyle, lack of sleep, and the effects are your hormone production drops, your body suffers, you become less healthy. And this is not indicating monogamy. This is just indicating poor health. This is not like an evolutionary advantage to having low testosterone because it helps you raise children. You can have high testosterone and still be a good dad and raise children and still have empathy and be a good partner.

Of course, all these things are bell curves, right? The higher T you are, the harder it gets. The problem I'm having is drawing conclusions on this one study and stating them as if they're facts. No, you're absolutely right. If I say it's a fact, it's certainly overstated because we only know, the problem with almost all of our studies is the exact one you point out. We've got them on us, right?

Right. We don't have, and so like the sex studies are a perfect example. Like things like female orgasm, what role does it play? Well, you need really good data on hunter-gatherers

to know the answer to that question. If you look at hunter-gatherers, they don't have dad bod, right? They're all lean. And whether they're fathers or not because they're out there hunting every day or gathering every day very physically active so if i if i oversold that my apologies because you're absolutely right i suspect though that you'd find the same thing i don't know it it's all we got right now yeah but how can you suspect it

i mean it just there's no data yeah there is no data it just, when you look at these guys, I have a friend of mine who, he was, was it, how do you say the name, the Yanomami in Bolivia? Well, they're in Venezuela, Brazil. Yeah, and he spent some time with them, and you see these people and the lifestyle they live, they're all barefoot, wandering through the jungle. They have these crazy looking feet where their toes splay out because they're just constantly gripping the floor with their toes. I mean, they probably could choke you with their feet, you know.

And these people just look so fit and healthy in their 50s and 60s and 70s, and they have their shirt off and they're ripped. Yeah, they're super fit. Same holds if you look at the Hadza in Tanzania, any of these groups. The Yanomamo are interesting because they're hunter-hoarder culturalists, so they're actually doing a little bit of gardening as well, but they're ripped and strong and they don't have obesity problems. And so all I would say is that the same thing holds, the one thing that we found in humans in our modern culture where we have these data is if you're married and have kids, but you're still looking around, your T hasn't gone down as much. Now you're going to point out quite rightly that, well, maybe that's a different kind of person than the person who marries and isn't looking around. And so it's

all confounded. It's super hard to do experiments on these things. And we'll be a lot better off when we've got, you know, we're losing the world's last hunter-gatherers are disappearing. And it's not easy to collect these kinds of data, but they're doing lots of genetic work with these people right now, all over Africa. Because, you know, we've got tons of genetic work with these people right now all over Africa because, you know, there's, we've got tons of genetic data now on European descent and East Asian descent, but almost none on Africans. And so that's a huge project underway. And so for all I know, they're working on hormones and other things as well. Yeah, that's, I mean, the reason why I'm asking about this is you were so readily dismissing, you were so willing to dismiss the Sex at Dawn book.

Well, a lot of the facts that are laid out as facts in the book don't really hold up. And I wish I'd read it more recently and so I could go through the details with you. There's some really good reviews by anthropologists and by people who work in, you know, sexual studies and stuff like that,

going through the details. We read it as a, we have this evolutionary center, Center for Psychology and and evolution and we read it and went through it and we weren't convinced i'm embarrassed to admit i can't remember the details of chris is a very smart guy he's a good friend of mine it's also a great book it is a great book i would love to see him debate one of those folks i'm sure he probably has he probably has and look i know that all these things that we're talking about are heavily debated, right? So my colleague, Rob Brooks, is a wonderful evolutionary biologist in Australia, loves that book.

So the fact that I think it's bullshit is obviously one person's opinion, where I dismiss that argument. Other people might say, well, look, there's a lot of cultures that do have much more, like the system I told you about, where they have sex with lots of men after they have their baby. Humans are so flexible. We can do all those things. We just change the nature of how we do things. The social leap that I'm arguing about is not this pair bonding thing. It's about how our groups came together to engage in collective action.

So in principle, I'm agnostic on this issue. I just happen to disagree with that. I happen to feel like, no, I think we made these deals. And so to come back to the study that David Buss did that I was starting to tell you about. So Buss has this, he's got, when he came along, people thought that the two sexes had similar levels of jealousy for infidelity. And David was like, well, look, insemination's internal. And so men should be a lot more worried about her sleeping with somebody else than women should be. Because men never know for sure if they're the father.

They can't see it happen. Whereas, you know, if you're a salmon, you can say, okay, I'm the dad. I just watch that. But females, insemination is eternal, but they know they're the mother. That's not their concern. They should be more concerned about things like his giving her resources to help her raise the kid and things like that. And so what Buss found is if you ask people this question, what would bother you more? Imagine your wife having sex with somebody that she just met for the first time,

having this great time and doing all these different funky things with them, and then never doing it again. Or your wife develops this ongoing emotional connection with somebody. She never touches him. He never touches her. But they talk and share their feelings and stare deep in each other's eyes. What would bother you more? And you ask men and women that question. So what would, in your case, what would bother you more?

To have your wife to know she had this one-off affair, fling, sex only, didn't care about the guy. Or she develops this sort of emotional bond with somebody, never touches him. That's a good question. I'd really have to think about that it's not an easy one because nobody likes either of them no yeah because uh it's a matter of time before that dude gets in that's a no no it's a guarantee i know but it's in this case it's a guarantee right it's a guarantee that they never never touch never touch as long as he doesn't talk shit about me that's the problem those guys they have the poison tongue. Try to wedge you away, right. Yeah, they say, well, I would do so much better.

It's just he doesn't treat you right. Right. Well, here's the thing. Those little weasels. On average, men are more bothered by sex, the one-off sex, and women are more bothered by the emotional connection because that's a bigger threat. The emotional connection could lead to him leaving her. Well, also, it's him leaving her, directing his resources elsewhere.

Yes, exactly. So mind you, every time we talk about gender differences, it's super important to keep in mind they're heavily overlapping bell curves. Right. So it's never 100% this way except like do you have this organ or something. Right. But psychologically, it's always overlapping. But this is a big effect. it's always overlapping. But this is a big effect. Men on average are much more bothered by the one off sex. And women on average are much more bothered by the emotional connection.

Yeah, that's fascinating, because I was reading something about inappropriate emotional relationships that people have at work. And that this is an issue with people that work together, they develop these, you know, office friendships that lead to inappropriate emotional relationships and i was like whoa this is a like you know i've never worked in an office so i'm listening to this or reading this rather and i'm like what a strange world that is like i get it though i get it like if there's a guy and he's married and a gal and she's married but they meet at work and they stare in each other's eyes all day and they go to lunch and maybe they even hold hands every now and then. That's where it crosses the line.

You're allowed to hug people when you hold hands. That's intense. That's skin to skin. It is. That's serious. It's going to concern you if you're a partner. But what's also going to concern you is the mere fact that you see this kind of thing, this deep conversation happening and all that. Because think about it.

If we evolve to basically partner up for a while, then there's always going to be the chance that that next person along is going to be the one who wedges yours away. Serial monogamy. And both males and females gain from not putting all their eggs into the same genetic basket. So if my wife partners up with you for a while, she'll get a certain kind of offspring. And then maybe that'll be a great thing. But maybe when the situation changes or in tomorrow's world, some smaller, wimpier guy would be handy in some way. And so maybe she's better off partnering with me next.

Interesting. Yeah. It is fascinating when you break it down that it really does become there's a biological reason for these behaviors and the motivation for the jealousy and all these things. There's a history, a biological history to all this stuff. And we don't know what hunter-gatherers, how they would answer that question. So we're only just assuming that the answer we're providing is general. But for me, those kinds of things suggest that we evolved in a lot of long-term monogamous circumstances that may have been serial and that was certainly fooling around. But if we were polyamorous, like the book says, we'd have bigger balls.

Our balls are so big, though. Compared to a chimp, they're small. Yeah, but chimps are i mean everything's big with them well no our penis is way bigger than theirs right they got a tiny little they have large balls smaller penises but penis are probably getting away right well no here's the thing about so human beings copulate for an extraordinarily long period of time and and we also have this cryptic ovulation you know where she's not showing you that she's in heat so male chimps aren't interested unless she has that enormous swelling on her vagina. And then they're

like, oh, that's super attractive to me. Oh, I see. But what about bonobos? Because they, well, they do this funky sex thing all the time, right? They have fun, right? Yeah. They're all sorts of funky, uh, orgiastic kinds of things. We use, there's a, when I taught at Ohio state university, the zoo there has a great bonobo exhibit and you bring your kids through and there's a series of orgy going on and the kids are like, hey mom, she's like, you know. Yeah, there's a lot of zoos that won't have bonobos because of that, right? Yeah, they're pretty interesting. And so the thing is that those kinds of things just show you that it's complicated, right? Any kind of straightforward answer that

it's going to have some wrinkles in it yeah yes yeah and i apologize if i gave some earlier no worries so and so anyway the um the but back to this issue so if we had a total bonobo chimp kind of system i don't think we'd evolve those systems of jealousy because what's what's to be gained by that we're not making these long-term partners why would you get these differences again whenever i bring Chris's book up by and I have to defend it because this happened a couple times of the last year I haven't read it in at least two years I'd have to go back and I read it back over five years ago but when it came out when my friend's wife got a hold of it my friend got it and my friend's wife got a hold

of it and she threw her right in a trash she read like a paragraph or two and she's like fuck this book yeah a lot of women react she threw it right in the trash. She read like a paragraph or two and she's like, fuck this book. Yeah. A lot of women react that way. And I can't remember why. Yeah. I'm sorry. I just don't have it loaded up.

Eh. Whatever. So when these chimp-like creatures from millions of years ago slowly started walking upright and started moving into the grasslands and making experiments and traveling away from the jungle. And this coincided with the development of the throwing arm, and this could be because they started walking upright. When did the cooked meat aspect come along? So they don't control fire.

So australopithecines can't do that. So now we go forward, we're now about three and a half million years ago. You've got to now go forward to about a little less than two million years ago to get to Homo erectus. So once we get to Homo erectus, we now got an ancestor that literally, if it went to the zoo, you'd say, well, that's a kind of rough-hewn guy. But you'd think it's a person and not somebody who belongs behind the glass. So a chimp brain is 380, Australopithecus 450, and Homo erectus 960.

Whoa. So you've got doubling of brain size. Now, mind you, it's a bigger being, so it's not quite as big a dramatic of a change as you think. But along with that comes all sorts of capabilities. Now, you write about this book, Catching Fire. Richard Wrangham argued that what enabled that, so if you look at the gut of a gorilla or a chimpanzee in their brain, they got a lot of gut for a little bit of brain because it takes a lot of digestion to keep the little bit of brain going. We have a tiny gut for a huge brain. And Wrangham argues,

and I think quite rightly, that the only way you can achieve that is by releasing more nutrients from your food. And the only way you can release more nutrients from your food is by cooking it. So when he made that argument, he thinks it goes back to the beginning of Homo erectus, and I suspect he's right. At this point, when he made the argument, it was only back to, I don't remember, half a million years, 350,000. It's already back to a million years ago. We found in caves in South Africa evidence of control of fire.

And so it'll probably keep getting pushed back because, you know, that crap's hard to find. Right. So this was, did you say a half a million years? No, now it's back to a million years ago. A million years. And he made that prediction when it wasn't even that far back. And a million years ago, even though they're not technically, it's not Homo sapien.

No, we're still at Homo erectus. And so they started 1.9 or so, 1.7 million years ago. And 1.9, I think. And what home erectus could now do, so now remember what the argument is, is this social leap. It's this collective action that not only protects us on the savanna but sets us on this new pathway. It creates this new niche. It's this cognitive niche, although I think of it as a social cognitive niche because it's the working together that gives you all these potential advantages to getting smarter. And so now that when that gene sitting in our head, if it kicks into gear, those and starts to work and it leads to cranial

expansion, those animals who have it will have an advantage because they can coordinate with each other better. And so they can remember, Hey man, you helped me out last time, but you weren't so yeah, I couldn't count on you. So I'm avoiding you and I'm sticking with you. They could do a lot of things with that brain power. And by the time you get to homo erectus and the brain power is doubled, we see all sorts of super interesting things. So before homo erectus, when you look at our tools, it's called an old awan tool, and it's basically a barely sharpened rock. And you never find an old awan tool very far away from where it was quarried and made. Like, you know, you look at the rock and the chips, and not far away from where it was quarried and made. Like, you know, you look

at the rock and the chips, and not far away is where it's lying on the ground. Homo erectus made a much nicer tool. It's bifacial. It took a lot of energy to make it. When we teach modern anthropologists or grad students or whatever to make them, and you put them in an fMRI magnet, where it can measure metabolism in your brain as you go, you see that it takes a lot of frontal lobe functioning in order to make one because it's a lot of planning. How am I going to hit it next to make this thing just right? Compared to an old one tool, to make those doesn't take much frontal function. I just whack it there and it'll be sharp. And so first of all, we know Homo erectus invented that tool, this Acheulean tool with this bifacial hand axe.

Second of all, and one of the coolest findings, there's some interesting work in a 1.2 million year old site in India by Kerry Shipton, where he finds that the production of these Acheulean tools is separated spatially about the place. So the first step is bashing loose a big piece of rock, and that's done here. And then 10 meters over there, somebody's doing the initial chipping on it. And 10 meters over there, somebody's sharpening up the final touches. Now, if you were making it by yourself, why would you systematically walk around the site as you made it? You almost assuredly wouldn't. But if you've got division of labor, you're the big strong guy.

You do the first thing. Then you hand it to me, and I do the finer sharpening. It makes sense that it would be spatially distributed about the site. So there's that evidence for division of labor. There's the evidence that they're bringing down some pretty fast animals like horses and potentially even bringing down elephants, which in those days were like twice the size of an elephant. And then— Were they using spears at that point?

We don't know because they didn't survive, right? And nothing wood is still around. There's no sign of hafting anything. So if it was spears, it would have been a wooden point. So I think what they could do... Hafting meaning

the end of it cut in half so you could stick a spear tip into it. Yeah, exactly. And then tie it down. Exactly, strapping it on or any of a variety of way of putting...

Yeah. And so there's no sign of that yet, but there's no reason why they couldn't have a sharpened spear. In fact, we know that... Remember the...

I mentioned the chimps in Senegal that live on the savannah. They're the only chimps on earth who do this. They'll bite the stick to sharpen it and poke monkeys when they're in the hollow of a tree and stab them. Did you see that recent discovery? And it's really recent. There was an article I read one or two days ago about orangutans. When they gave them wire, they used the wire to fashion it into fishhooks.

No, I didn't. That's totally cool. Yeah, they figured out how to fashion it into fish hooks. No, I didn't. That's totally cool. Yeah. They figured out how to make a fish hook independently. Yeah. That's amazing. You've seen them like spear fish, right? Hang over trees.

That picture is actually of an orangutan who's watched fishermen do this. He couldn't do it. Remember, an orangutan, if it met, you could literally pull your arms off like that. Right. So enormous strength. But to get gearing for that strength, they got very poor motor control. Like you and I can type. They can't do that.

Right. And so that orangutan, that famous photo, never could catch anything. But it had seen it done, and it was trying to see if he could do it, too. Fair enough. It's crazy, though, that it's trying to use a tool like that. But, you know, there's these corvids, these crows and such. They'll fashion hooks too. Yeah.

So there's a lot of amazing evidence for this sort of animal ingenuity in making tools. Well, you've seen the studies with crows where they use one stick to get a larger stick to get a larger stick to get some food. Yeah, it's amazing. Now, the one thing is we don't – they can do that and then they fail some super simple tests. So it could be that their brain's tiny, though they are, dedicated to a particular way of solving a particular problem because especially these ones that live in New Caledonia do this in the wild. And so they fashion them out of palm fronds. They tear it off, and they reshape it, and then they hook insects out of the bark or trees and stuff.

And so you could imagine that they've kind of learned a specific way of problem solving, but they can't do something that to you, because you would solve that using some pretty domain general mechanisms, to you looks the same, but to them is totally different. Did you find a thing with the orangutans? It's really crazy. It's just, well, you know, I read something. Here we go.

Orangutan spontaneously bends straight wires into hooks to fish for food, which is amazing. Does it have a photo of it jamie if you scroll down a little bit there what is that photo it's just oh just him with a stick yeah yeah oh yeah that's really really cool um i had read something a few years back that said that they were agreeing that chimpanzees had uh officially moved into the stone age yeah so chimpanzees will use stones as tools so they'll crack nuts with them, but they've never been shown to modify stone tools.

And so if you want to say the Stone Age is using stones, by all means. If you want to say it's modifying stones, the oldest evidence that we have of potentially modified is 3.3 million years ago, these Lamequi tools, but there's argument about how legit those are. Right. There's argument about a lot of those sites sites too, where they believe that they find stone tools that are ancient because it could easily just been shale or things falling off. Yeah, and overwash.

It's super complicated to know exactly when it got laid down. Every once in a while, you get lucky, and the layers are super orderly. And then when you get to that layer, you know exactly what you got. But now, what's the chances of finding what you're after there, right? Yeah. Now, when they say the Stone Age, that's what But now what's the chances of finding what you're after there, right? Yeah. Now when they say the stone age, that's what they mean just the idea of consciously using a rock to like smash open a clam or something like that?

Yeah, I mean to me that does. I got to admit I'm not quite sure technically what an anthropologist would mean when they say stone age. But what we know is that chimps will do that. They'll use rocks to – they're clever enough to have an anvil basically, like a hammer, a base stone, put a rock on it, smash. Yeah. What they're not clever enough to do – so chimps have partial theory of mind. And theory of mind is this idea that I know that the contents of your mind differ from the contents of mine.

And all humans get there when they're little, around age four. And so – and you can see the penny drop because they just assume everybody knows the same things and everybody has the same preferences. And that's why when they're really little, their stories can be hard to follow because they assume what's in your head is the same as theirs. They assume you like the same things. And actually, it turns out that the ones who have siblings learn it earlier because like, oh, you like the red jelly beans?

I like the green ones. Awesome. This is a beneficial deal for both of us, right? Right. Anyway, chimps can get partial theory of mind. So I could see what you could see. I know what you could see at your angle if I'm a chimp. And I know that it might differ from what I could see.

Right. But they can't get to the point of knowing that you could represent beliefs that aren't true, that you could have to believe, et cetera. Or that maybe I don't like bananas, but he does like bananas. Yeah, they can't really get there. They don't get that. No. And so what the problem is, without theory of mind, how do you teach somebody? Because if I just assume you know what I know,

then when you're doing a crappy job breaking the nut, I'm like, what's wrong with Joe here? Right. And so chimp mothers take years to teach their offspring to break these nuts open, 10 years on average. Because first of all, they don't get a chance to do it very often. The nuts got to be in season. Second of all, it's easy to break your fingers and that kind of slows you down. But third of all, they'll occasionally make some very specific corrections

when the offspring is doing it wrong, but they don't know what the problem is because they don't know what the kid doesn't know. And so when you don't know that, you can't teach. And that's why humans are stunningly effective teachers. That's fascinating. And so when you don't know that, you can't teach. And that's why humans are stunningly effective teachers. That's fascinating. So chimps learn more just by observing? Yeah.

And what's amazing about the way chimps observe is that because we have theory of mind, we also do imitate differently. So there's this amazing experiment by Andy White and his colleagues. And what they did is they created this treasure box. And so inside this treasure box, there's something that a chimp or a kid wants, like a little piece of food. And in one condition, the box is totally opaque. So you can't see how it works. And they'll poke at the top of it. And then they'll poke in the middle and it pops open. And then they give it to the chimp, close it up. Chimp does the exact same thing. Poke, poke, poke, poke, pops open. Give it to a kid, does the exact same thing. Now they do the, they do Now they replicate that same experiment, but instead of having the box be opaque, it's translucent. And you can see well and truly the

poke in the top does nothing. The latch is actually right here. And so that initial poke was a waste of your time. This second one actually is one that opened the box up. When chimps watch that, they skip the first one and boom, they just open the box. Kids, despite being smarter than a chimp, poke it at the top first and then they poke it in the bottom. And we call this over-imitation. They're imitating clearly irrelevant actions. Now, why would anybody imitate clearly irrelevant actions? What advantage would it give you? Well, if you have theory of mind, you say, well, that's Joe's box.

He knows something about it. There may be a reason why. I can't about it. There may be a reason why I can't see, but there may be a reason why he's poking at the top first. And so I better do everything that he does. I better have the highest fidelity copying that I possibly can, because it may be valuable. And what you end up with is these systems around the world where people eat these amazing foods that you think, you know, how on earth could they have ever figured that out? Well, it's probably developed step by step, and everybody's always got this super high-fidelity imitation

because they're over-imitating. So my favorite example is in New Guinea, they ate the sago palm. I'm not sure if you've ever seen a sago palm, but it does not look like an edible tree. It just looks like a freaking tree, right? And it turns out that if you chop the tree down, take the bark off, take like an adze or something similar, grind up the sawdust, have all that sawdust.

You then wash it off in warm water because, of course, all the water in New Guinea will be nice and warm. And that causes – it's a super high-starch tree. That causes the starch molecules to separate from the sawdust because at that point it's inedible. So then they have these cloths, and the starch molecules pass through the cloth, the sawdust won't. Now they collect this cloudy water. They put it in these traditional canoes. They let it sit overnight, and all the starch pass through the cloth. The sawdust won't. Now they collect this cloudy water. They put it in these traditional canoes. They let it sit overnight, and all the starch sinks to the bottom. Then they pour the water off the top, and now they've got this flour.

But you have to dry it out in the sun really fast or it becomes toxic. So it's like this nine-step process that who on earth could ever come up with that, right? But once it's in place, once they slowly figured it out to make it work, everybody just does it the same way because even though they may understand it, but they don't need to. They just know this is how we do it. Right. Well, that's like that – what is that root that they eat? Cassava?

Yeah. Yeah, that if you don't cook it correctly, it's literally cyanide. Yeah. And they have water from it, and they have to take that water, and they have the buckets of these water that they're using to create this stuff. And they just leave it laying around. And kids are playing around it. And pigs and animals are around it. And if they drank it, they'd be dead.

Yeah. I don't know the detoxing of cassava, unfortunately. I'm not familiar with that. But there's a lot of those examples. And you're also right that in those kind of societies, they're super relaxed things that we strike that strike us as really deadly yeah exactly but that stuff it becomes cyanide right you could be right i don't know that one see if you could find this because it's on an episode of that same show it's on this show's called meat eater it's my friend steve ranella who went and spent some time with them down in the jungle of South America. It's really interesting stuff, just seeing how these people function.

And they have this big vat, and they're cooking this stuff. And he's explaining, like, right now, if you ate it, you're dead. You've got to wait a while. And they're like, how the fuck did they figure this out? Researchers to get to the root of cassava cyanide, or cyanide-producing abilities. Cassava is the third most important food source in tropical countries, but it's one major problem.

The roots and the leaves are poorly processed. Cassava plants contain a substance that, when eaten, can trigger the production of cyanide. Yeah, it kills the shit out of you. But it's weird that that thing is a major staple in their diet. Well, this is a really good example of, A, the value of human learning and this over-imitation process, right? Because the first guy, they go, okay, I'm not going to do that, right?

And then this person ate it and they did successful. Let's take a look at what they did. So I remember when I was a kid, I was trying to learn to play baseball and pitch the ball, and the person raises their knee almost up to their nipples. And I'm like, that's the most awkward pitching motion I've ever seen. But it didn't occur to me, I'm not going to do that, right do that right it occurred to me well there must be a reason to do that so what can i do to try to emulate that motion right right to hold the ball like this and then the whole nine yards there's a purpose for every one of those pieces right and as humans we say well

you're teaching me how you've got to have a reason for doing that and that's the huge difference between us and everybody else right nobody else can do that theory of mind thing to make that assumption. And that's why the chimps skip the step that they know, at least in that particular experiment, is really actually useless. And kids don't. So your concept is that as these animals that used to be monkeys start evolving and trying out new things, one thing that they learn as they enter into this new climate is that there's a massive benefit to cooperation. Yes.

Now, I would say apes, not monkeys, because technically speaking. Well, aren't all apes monkeys, but not all monkeys are apes? No. So monkeys and apes are different. They split off. But monkey's not a real word. I mean, it's not a word in terms of scientific designation, right? No, no, ape and a monkey

are two different things. Right, but there's... There's old world monkeys and new world monkeys. But all of them have the genus and species, you know, the Latin. But it's not a scientific name, right?

Well, neither is ape. Like, monkey's not, right? Yeah, no, they're primates. They're all primates. Why did I read that? See if you Google that. Google, there was a whole article that an anthropologist wrote

that not all apes are monkeys, but all monkeys. No, not all monkeys are apes, but all apes are monkeys because monkey is almost a slang term. Is this bullshit? I think it's bullshit, but we'll find out. What I would say is that all apes and monkeys are primates, and they all started from monkey ancestry, right? Right. But then the apes split off. You've got orangutans. The great apes are orangutans, gorillas, chimps ancestry, right? Right. And so, but then the apes split off. You got orangutans.

The great apes are orangutans, gorillas, chimps, and us. Right. And then you've got gibbons, which are lesser apes, which split off quite a while ago. And they're very different. They don't have the brain power of the great apes. Do you find anything like that? I read this a few years ago.

It confused the shit out of me. Because I didn't know that monkey wasn't a scientific term. Well, scientists talk about old world monkeys and new world monkeys. Right. But it's almost a slang term, right? Yeah. I mean, well, whenever you're, if you're, if you're a proper biologist and you have the species, you'll say that, you know, a chimpanzee is, um.

The thing I found isn't like a great source, but it pops up on Google. Okay. It comes up, but it's a longer, it's, there's more to it. Apes are monkeys in the same way that monkeys are primates. Humans are apes, and I am a human. It's called the nested hierarchy. That's right. This is it. It means that all apes

are monkeys, but not all monkeys are apes. Just as all humans are apes, but not all apes are humans. Okay. Yeah, zygoma. Click on that link. It's like it's someone's website. It doesn't... Yeah, this is what I read. Now,. It's like it's someone's website. It doesn't... Yeah, this is what I read. Now, is this a bullshit article?

I don't know. Sorry. Apes or monkeys deal with it, it says. I don't know the origin of the term monkey. Martin Robbins wrote a fun piece to the lay scientist the other day, the incorrect term to use monkeys to describe apes. It triggered an article by Graham Smith for the Daily Mail in Martin's words, a great crime against pedantry is in progress and it's time for someone to draw a line.

So as a pedant, how do you say that? Pedant? Pedantic? Yeah, but I never used it by itself. Yeah, I don't know. With a professional interest in the issue, I'm taking my stand to help ensure that a miscarriage of pedantic justice doesn't occur. This guy likes that word. Nested hierarchies.

Apes or monkeys in the same way that monkeys are primates. Humans are apes and I'm a human. It's called a nested hierarchy. And he has a primate nested hierarchy set up. He could be right. I just don't know. I don't know the origin of the term. Okay.

But he cares and he cares enough to put that up. Yeah, he fucked my head up, this dude. You could be right. I'm not right. If anybody's right, this dude. You could be right. I'm not right. If anybody's right, he's right or you're right. I have no knowledge. But all I mean is that, so the ancestors who moved to the savannah weren't monkeys like baboon monkeys. They're like some kind of chimp. Yeah, chimpish like guy. Ancient chimp. And so once we get to homo erectus, they're basically like us, although our brains, they're around 960.

We're around 1350. So we literally have a chimp brain added on top of theirs. So there's a big difference. And you're absolutely right. It's accelerating like crazy. And I'm totally convinced. Well, I believe Wrangham's right. I mean, we don't know for sure, of course, but I believe he's right that it was fire that played a huge role in that.

And so what you got is this process where our evolution facilitates a further evolution, right? So you get the cognitive capacities to control fire. And now that allows you to grow your brain even larger because we can store fat. We can get more nutrients from the food we eat. We can detoxify other things. Fire is super valuable. Even chimps will eat, if they go through an area where there's a forest fire, you know, speaking of what's going on locally, they'll eat like the roasted nuts first. They really like that because, I mean, you know, just you go in your kitchen, you smell a raw steak.

It's like unpalatable. You smell it when it's cooking. It's delicious. That is interesting, right? Even with no salt or anything on it. It's our nose telling us that is a great source of food and nutrients. That's not so much. That is interesting.

I've never thought about it that way. But, yeah, there's a tremendous difference in the way your body reacts to it. And it's not just based on your experience eating it. It just smells amazing. Smells amazing. And so Wrangham talks about, he argues that you can't live on a diet of raw food unless you're eating these like super fruits and stuff like that, that basically we've horticultured into existence because raw food just doesn't give you enough calories. So the example that he uses, which is a great one, his chimps literally spend something like six to eight hours a day chewing just to soften up the food enough so that they can swallow it and digest it. You know, if sushi, you hardly, you know, some of the things that we've cooked and that's raw

in that case, but you know, cooked steak, a really nice one, you barely chew it at all. Right. Down the hatch it goes. That's a great argument for gorillas as well, right? Because gorillas are just eating roots. Yeah, fucking celery. And so literally they have a humongous gut, right? Just constant chewing.

In order to make. And they've got the sagittal crest right here with the bones so that the muscles attach to it so that they can chew hard enough to get through all that stuff and make it digestible. And still their gut is enormous. Yeah, that is interesting. The chimps have those enormous chewing muscles on their head. And so we lost, that's another example where somebody along the way lost, I can't remember what that gene was, where our muscles weakened in our jaw. And that would have been a death knell if you're back before cooking.

But post-cooking, all that does is free up space, get rid of some unnecessary muscle, free up more cranial space for brains, the inside, not the outside. So is it likely that there was a bunch of different factors, that there was natural selection in play and that there was also the throwing arm and then also cooking and also this cooperative effort that led to people being a little bit more ingenious, a little bit smarter in how they hunted and how they tried to get food and then how they protected their fire, how they cultivated fire, and then all these things led to more clever behavior, which led to a natural selection of clever,

more clever chimps with larger brains, or apes, rather, with larger brains? Absolutely. And so anytime you've got something major happening, it probably doesn't have a single cause. It probably has lots and lots of causes. And so in this case, all these kinds of factors came together. Now, if you're standing at the outset and you're playing God and saying, well, let's see what happens when I dry out the rainforest. I think nine times out of 10, the chimps all end up dead. Right. But somehow we got really lucky and they went down this very particular road. and once they got their social act together and they started cooperating chimps are never going

to be very effective in groups because they can't get along they can't cooperate very well but but once these animals probably at osteolepithecus but maybe not till later of course we don't know all we can look at is what they were capable of but it fits the storyline that they would have been the ones who developed that. Once that happened, social becomes everything. So we tend to think about what are the challenges of physical life? Like, you know, that sacropom, you move into that territory and you got to freaking figure that out. It seems enormously complicated, but you have to remember that before modern travel was invented, everybody walked everywhere, which meant you spent your entire life basically in territory that you're familiar with, or the kinds of animals that live there, the kinds of problems that you

face. And so cognitively, the terrain is not really a challenge for you. And how to even making food in those really complicated ways is not a challenge for you once you've got theory of mind and you can learn how to do it. But what is a huge challenge for you is the social interactions with each other. Because as my group gets smarter, if I'm not smarter, first of all, remember we talked about sexual selection. I'm not going to get picked. I'll get left behind. Second of all, we live in a world where there's no law enforcement. And so the day that you decide that I'm more trouble than I'm worth, I go to sleep and I never wake up again.

And so I have to be able to manage some very complicated relationships. It's a little bit, in my mind, it's like every morning when you wake up, it's to an episode of The Sopranos. How are you going to find a way to get through your day without getting whacked? Right. And if you can't figure it out, that's the end of your line. Have you ever read any Terrence McKenna? I know you're familiar with something called the stoned ape theory. No.

Sorry, not. McKenna, he was an ethnobotanist. He was also a psychedelic adventurer. And he had a theory. And the theory was that what you're talking about, this climate change that also coincided with the doubling of the human brain size, his theory was that one of the things that was in play was that these apes would experiment with different food sources as they moved into the grasslands. would experiment with different food sources as they moved into the grasslands. And there was a lot of undulates in these grasslands. And that psilocybin mushrooms, which we know existed back then, would grow in these grasslands.

And that these monkeys, these apes rather, started consuming psilocybin mushrooms, and it led them to be more creative. And it also led to specific traits like the development of language. That eating mushrooms in low doses increases visual acuity, which would lead them to be better hunters or more perceptive. It also leads them to be hornier, which would most likely involve more breeding, more sexual activity, and possibly select the ones that chose the mushrooms would maybe possibly breed more than the ones that didn't choose the mushrooms

because they were more into it and were more social, more sexually active. And he has a series of, like, his brother Dennis, who's still alive, detailed it on a podcast we did, the very first podcast we did. His brother is an actual scientist and detailed it in terms of how psilocybin affects the brain and what areas of the brain, what actually takes place when you're under the influence of this. And that it could very potentially have led to the development of language. And that this, all these things in play, the throwing arm, the developing these new social networks where you need to communicate with each other, along with the harnessing of fire, along with the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms on a regular basis, because they were incredibly frequent and very edible.

That's total trip. I've never heard of that before. Fascinating. That's a really good example of some random thing. If it really did play that role, how random that is that these freaking things happen to be growing there and that they happen to be attracted to them and ate them. We know that animals like to get high. Elephants will eat these fruit that have, well, they're drunk in this case,

that have over-ripened and have become alcoholic. We know that animals will do that. You've seen jaguars that consume psychedelic plants and they lie on their back and stare at the sky. You've never seen that? No. Oh, it's amazing. Do you know what ayahuasca is?

No. Ayahuasca is a, it's a way that these people in the rainforest developed untold thousands of years ago of developing an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine. Do you know what dimethyltryptamine is? No, I'm not in this. Okay.

Dimethyltryptamine is the most potent psychedelic known to man. It's an incredibly potent drug that is just intensely hallucinatory, gives you these insane visions. And it also is – here's a jaguar. It's really crazy. And this is in the Amazon. These jaguars eat these plants. And these plants are – they have the ingredients of ayahuasca.

And these jaguars are known to eat these things and then trip their fucking balls off. They eat them and their pupils dilate and they roll over on their back and stare at the sky. I mean, they're clearly high. So this is something that you're going to say. Yeah, this is what I'm going to say. So this is what ayahuasca is, is dimethyltryptamine. Like, look, it's kind of cool watching this jaguar trip balls.

Yeah. They just stare. They see shit that's not there i mean or it is there maybe they're astral traveling it's amazing so what ayahuasca is is there's dimethyltryptamine which is this incredibly potent psychedelic drug is produced in the human body it's produced by the liver it's produced by the lungs and they also believe it's produced by the pineal gland which is literally your third eye the pineal gland in certain reptiles actually has a retina and a lens i mean it's like an eyeball

and they think and the egyptians called it the seed of the soul and they think that this is one of the reasons why they have this obsession with this uh gland in eastern mysticism is somehow or another they figured out that this is the gland that produces this incredibly potent psychedelic drug this psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine also exists in thousands of different plants the problem is when you consume it orally your body produces something in your gut called monoamine oxidase and monoamine oxidase breaks it down so what these indigenous people figured out is how to combine one plant which contains this psychedelic compound with another plant which contains a natural mao

inhibitor called harming so they brew this all together much like they did to the cassava which we have no idea how they figured that out right they brew this stuff up together and they create this psychedelic tea called ayahuasca and ayahuasca now they have all these trips where people go down to peru and take this stuff and trip their fucking balls off and this uh this the combination of these things um leads to this incredibly potent trans really transformative experience which is impossible to describe. And that this psychedelic drug, why did I bring that up? Well, we're talking about how maybe chimps or these early ancestors did something similar, which pushed them along this path of starting to communicate with each other. Right, but how did I get to DMT?

How did I get to ayahuasca? There are a couple of links in that chain. Maybe it was because of animals that get high. That's what it was. So this is what this, that's exactly what it was. It was, yeah, the jaguar getting high on DMT. That's what they think the jaguar is doing. The jaguar consuming this stuff, it's making him trip on DMT.

And DMT is, I mean, it's fun. It's a really exciting experience. And so Robert Trivers is this wonderful biologist who started a lot of the kinds of work that we're talking about going in the 70s, calls these sorts of things a phenotypic indulgence, right? So evolution gave you these pleasure centers in your brain so that you do what's in your genes' best interests and kill the animal or get the girl or whatever, and that makes you feel good. And so we tend to like the things that are good for us and dislike the things that are bad for us. We don't want to eat feces. We do want to eat a steak. Right.

So there's cases like this where it short circuits that. It goes right to the pleasure center, even though what it's doing is kind of irrelevant. But this is a case where maybe it wasn't irrelevant. Maybe it actually caused these animals to then change the way that they behave to become more sociable. It's very possible something like that played a role along the way, which is why if you replay the sequence of the vanishing rainforest 10 times, only one time does it maybe lead to anything good. And the other nine times, it leads to a bunch of dead chimps. Yeah. Well, the process is probably incredibly slow, right? Over millions of years, the climate did alter. Well, that's right. So you've got millions of years for the rainforest to disappear. So you've got these animals to slowly, slowly say, I got no

choice. Slowly figure it out. And then I think for three and a half million years, literally, they're just gulking around the edges and they figured nothing out. But there was a pressure on them to walk upright. And nobody knows for sure what that pressure is. One hypothesis that has some possible, well, there's probably a lot of reasons, right? Anytime something big happens, there's probably a lot of causes. So some people have said that you can cover ground more efficiently when you walk up, right, with fewer calories. And especially this idea of slowly running down animals.

You may have heard about this notion. Yes, persistence hunting. Exactly. Yeah, we talked about that yesterday, actually. Oh. And so the, but another reason is, so ask yourself, so why would an animal, so if we back up a little bit, remember I talked about how old awan tools, which are made even later than when we first started walking upright. So they're even after that. Old awan

tools are never carried at any great distance from where they're acquired and made. And so what you have is an animal, just like today's chimps, they can't plan for tomorrow. So a chimp can plan for needs that it currently feels. It can say, oh, I want to go get termites out of that mound. I'll break the stick off, I'll strip the leaves, and then I'll go over there and do that. But it can't plan for the fact that it might have that need again tomorrow. If it doesn't feel the need, it can't plan for it. And humans can plan for unfelt needs. And the best example of that is the notion of taking a tool with you that you've now used and saying, well, I'll want to use it again tomorrow, right?

taken a tool with you that you've now used and saying, well, I'll want to use it again tomorrow, right? So whichever Australopithecus was the first one to start walking upright was almost assuredly incapable of planning for the future, for unfelt needs. But it could plan for felt needs because a chimp can do that too. And if you think about how would you feel if you're about to walk across the open savanna and you're kind of small and leopards and lions are way faster than you, I think the primary thing you'd feel is fear. oh shit i'm gonna get attacked and so i want something in my hands to help me defend myself a spear a club a stick something right and so i what i suspect is a part of the process is my desire to hold something in my hand as i'm looking around and i'm scared and a bunch of us are doing that and so I suspect that that's what led to played a role in leading to

bipedalism. There would have been other factors at play like persistence hunting and stuff, but I suspect that came later. So whole actually holding a weapon might've led to the beginning of that. Yeah. Just because you, you don't need to be a rocket scientist.

You're scared. Now you want something to defend yourself. Do we have evidence of them sharpening sticks? Remember? So modern chimps who live on the savannah do sharpen sticks. Modern chimps do. But do we have evidence of ancient man sharpening sticks? No, we don't even have sticks left over from Homo erectus.

We know they must have used them because they're making some pretty complicated stones. Right. And so surely they were sharpening sticks, but all of it's decayed. So what year did we, so we really don't know when they first started attaching these stone tools to sticks, right? Making axes and spears. We know that that's happening very recently by Homo sapiens. We don't know if it happened before that. If I had to guess, I would say that Homo erectus did that.

If you look at the quality of other things that they've done. So for example, there's this amazing site off the Sea of Galilee. It's about 700,000 years old. So remember, homo sapiens, let's call it 300,000 years. So now we're 700,000 or so years ago, and there's this elephant skull that's been turned over so that they can get access to the brains. Yeah, I've read this. That thing is unwieldy. It's heavy as anything.

You've got to have people working together to turn that thing over. There's even a log underneath it that might have been used as a lever to kind of help plop the thing over. So what you got is people are quite capable of working together. They know what they're trying to achieve. They know how to access those things. I suspect that they knew that they could sharpen a stick or maybe even have to put a stone to make it even better. It's just that we can't find any evidence for that, at least not yet. Wasn't there some, there was certain really ancient evidence of cannibalism too because of the scrape marks inside of skulls and they think that they were scooping out brain matter.

That's possible. I haven't seen those data, but absolutely you can see where they've used those tools on like the legs of animals and things like that. So you'd see it inside a skull as well, a human skull. That, I'm sure you're aware of that little person

that was discovered just a few years ago. I think it was like a decade or so ago. On Indonesia? On the floor. Yeah. Yeah. They think that little person type thing used stone tools, right? Yes.

Those guys. So remember, so what happened about, I don't know, 1.X million years ago, we'll call it 1.7. I don't remember exactly. Homer Ectus leaves Africa, but they also stay. So you've got Homo erectus basically colonizing all of Africa, and you've got Homo erectus colonizing almost all of Europe, all of southern Asia. And so they don't go beyond that, at least not to our knowledge. Maybe they did.

But they certainly covered all that ground. So now you've got Homo erectus in Africa and homo erectus outside of Africa. And of course, then over time, both of them are going to evolve and change. The ones outside of Africa end up as Neanderthals. Those are the most recent instantiation of them. The ones inside of Africa end up as us. And so when we leave Africa, the first thing we encounter is Neanderthals in Arabia, because that's the first point of entry out of Africa. And so we probably started copulating with them there. We know we started copulating with them soon afterward. So as we left, they had evolved somewhere else. They'd evolved in Europe.

In Asia. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so they had evolved from some other type of- Well, the same ancestors. So our great uncle left and our great grandpa stayed, right? Wow. And so the ones who left, some of them evolved into those people on Flores, into those tiny little people. Some of them, we know this Denisovan from a pinky bone in a cave in Siberia. And we know that we interbred with Neanderthals,

and that's where a lot of our genes that we currently have for light skin and blue eyes and things like that come from. And they think we interbred with Denisovans as well, right? Well, not all of us. So there's evidence for Melanesians, if I remember right, having Denisovan blood. Our DNA, I don't know about us. It may turn out that we did. I don't think so, though. But there's no evidence that humans interbred with the folks from Flores, right? Not that I know of.

I've never seen that. They're tiny. They're like three feet tall. They're like hobbit-like. They're tiny. They're like three feet tall. Yeah, they're very small. They're like hobbit-like. Now, that doesn't mean that if – well, no, we would have – it's possible that we could have overlapped with them. Somebody would do it. Yeah. So like we hit Australia by 65,000 years ago, and I don't remember when the Flores people –

We hit Australia 65,000 years ago? Wow. And that was through some sort of boat traveling. Yeah, I remember. So 65,000 years ago, it would have still been ice age. And so we would have had a lot less water. And so if you look at topographical maps, then when you look at what the Pacific Islanders did and stuff, it seems ballsy as hell. But it's a little less ballsy when you can keep seeing the next piece of land not as far away compared to now where the sea is much higher and you can't see the land. Oh, OK. So when the Pacific Islanders traveled to Hawaii, you think they could see things from the water?

Yeah, they could see a lot better. Now, the very last place the Pacific Islanders settled is New Zealand. That's only 700 years ago. So that's the same as today. Right. But a lot of that discovery was done at a time where the sea was a lot lower. And so there'd be a lot more islands sticking up that we don't currently have. So 700 years ago, they had much more sophisticated boats.

Yeah, they had those awesome hot riggers and all that. Right. It is crazy when you think about, we're like little rats with the way we've scattered across this globe. Yeah, and if you think about it, it seems like it's all ballsy exploration, but I actually suspect a bigger part of it

is running away from the guy behind you who's causing problems. And so my favorite example of that is if you look at the cliff dwellings, like in the American Southwest, and you go there and you're thinking, who the hell would live like this? I mean, you know, when Junior walks out, but if the people down the valley are scarier than the risk of falling outside your cave, you're going to live up in a cave dwelling. Right. Where they're going to climb up to get you. And that's part of the, remember we talked about sexual selection as a source of people don't like unfairness. Well, people also don't like unfairness between groups

because if you and I make a deal and you know, I'm from Ohio and you're from California and the Californians benefit more than the Ohioans, even though I benefit, you benefit more. Now I'm at risk because maybe your group, you know, ancestrally is going to cause my group problems. Interesting. So when you're studying all this stuff, how does that make you feel as a person? Do you ever internalize all this stuff when you're thinking about like all the weird ape like creatures that turned into people and all the thousands and thousands of years of evolution and how it could have gone left and it did go right. And does that freak you out when you really get deep into the study of all this stuff? First of all, I do this all the time, right? So it does freak me out, but it's what I like. And it also, we can talk about all the ways that you can predict things about our modern

cells based on knowing these things in the past, right? But secondarily, what freaks me out the most probably is the enormous role of random chance in all this, right? But secondarily, what freaks me out the most probably is the enormous role of random chance in all this, right? And so if you think about the, I mean, just think about our own backgrounds, the random chance that our mom and dad got amorous the night that they did that made you and me. If they did a different position,

maybe your brother's talking to my brother, right? And so it's really which sperm wins that race is so unlikely to be us. And so every roll of the dice has to go your way. Right. And so the the role of chance and all this kind of freaks you out if you think about that. But at the same time, your brother's probably a lot like you. My brother's probably a lot like me or my sister or whatever. And so you have one child or you have more. I've got a boy and a girl.

OK. Yeah. Well, you know, then that they're so different right out of the box. Yeah, they are totally. Which is really weird. It is weird. So I don't know if you saw this book that Plowman just wrote called Blueprint. Robert Plowman, he's a behavioral geneticist. I haven't seen that. Oh, it's a lovely book.

It just came out. Just out like really recently? Yeah, like a month or two at the most. How do you say his name? P-L-O-M-I-N. Robert Plowman. And he's a wonderful behavioral geneticist over in the UK. And this book, Blueprint, talks about the role of genes in all this.

And he basically is one of these people who's been in the field almost since it got started. And what they kept thinking is that the environment was going to play a huge role. The parents were going to play a huge role. But, of course, what they keep finding over and over again, there you go. There it is, how DNA makes us who we are. And what they find over and over again, and this is what's so disconcerting, is first of all, on average, most things are about 50% genetic. But the bummer is that the other half isn't what's happening in your house and the way you're brought up by your folks. It's the random other stuff.

Like the first, we don't even know what it is. It's just, it's what we call unshared environment. Maybe that first girlfriend you had, maybe you biked into a tree and you unimproved your face. You know, a million different things that specifically happened to you that didn't happen to everybody else in your family. Right. And also the way you address those things that happened. Yeah. And that could have a factor.

And also the way you address those things that happen. Yeah. And that could be a factor in how you were raised and how you were taught to deal with stress, how you were taught to deal with situations and character development. But all the data suggests not. It suggests parents just don't matter. How you were taught doesn't seem to play a role because when we parse up all the different traits about you, there's a few that your parents actually have a big influence on, what religion you're in, for example, but not how religious you are. So the biggest role that your parents play seems to be when sperm met egg. So a friend of mine, the analogy they made when I had my first kid is he says, here's what you're going to find out, that you're handed, when the baby's born, you're handed a negative. The picture's already been taken. You can screw it up by being

in the dark room a little bit wrong, or you can help it a little bit by being in the dark room a little bit right, but the photograph is already there. And my son and my daughter are wildly different in some ways, in some ways are quite similar, but I feel like I'm along for the ride more than I feel like I'm shaping them to make them who they are. But don't you think you're shaping them somewhat? I'm trying. Look, that's what we do, right? But the data say no. Well, but how would the data know? I mean, how would you... So here's how we do it. You would have to study so many different human beings. You have to take into account

all the variables that took place during all the developmental periods of their life. Well, to do it right, you need to do all that. And we can't do that yet. And to do it right, what you want is actually to have the actual genetic markers, not just to know the genes are there. And that's all starting now. But we don't know yet. What they do do is they'll say, well, we got a bunch. There's two ways to go about this. And Plowman was at the front of both of them.

One, you look at adoptive studies versus kids who were adopted into a family versus biological. And you can compare the parents of the adopted kids, the biological parents versus the home parents. And it turns out that the biological parents predict a whole lot more of the adopted kids, so the biological parents versus the home parents. And it turns out that the biological parents predict a whole lot more about the adopted child than the parents who raised them. The parents who raised them predict almost nothing. Whoa.

I know. And then the second thing you can do is you can look at fraternal versus monozygotic, identical twins. And you find that when you then, they all share the same environment. They're all brought up by you and me, right? We're the parents of these kids.

But they also – there's a lot of unshared environment. And that's – when they differ, it's not because of you and me. We can't find any evidence that you and me – that you and I made any difference. All we can find is evidence that other things in their life made a difference. Now, to say that means what we really don't know is, well, what is that unshared environment? All we know is it's not something about your household, because that would cause fraternal and identical twins to both be more similar to each other. Right. And it doesn't.

Well, and obviously, there's not a lot of data in terms of when you're measuring someone's entire life from birth to death. No, we know none of that. But there's enough that people are starting to draw conclusions. One of the more interesting ones is when you see identical twins that were raised in different households without any knowledge of each other, and then they run into each other 30 years later, and they find out they have disturbing similarities.

Yeah, that's exactly another example. And what's also interesting about it, which Plowman talks about in Blueprint, is that your genes become more powerful as you age. So the heritability of things like IQ goes up as you get older. And so the argument is that your genes seem to be causing you to select out environments. So you gave the example, well, maybe the way that you discipline them or tell them to be resilient or whatever you do as a parent causes them to shape their environment. It doesn't seem to be resilient or whatever you do as a parent causes them to shape their environment doesn't seem to be the case. But it does seem to be the case that the genes that you give them cause them to select their environments in certain ways. Because remember, kids choose their friends,

right? You want them to play with Timmy, but they want to play with Johnny. That's the unshared environment. They're making those choices every day. It's also the case that their peers matter a whole lot more than their parents do once they get to a certain age. You know, I'm chopped liver as soon as my kids are a bit older, but when I'm young, I'm their hero. Right, right, right. Or when they're young. Yes. Now, when you say that your genes become more powerful as you get older, what do you mean by that, though? Well, they are more predictive of the outcome. And so if you look at the heritability of IQ when you're a kid, it's lower than when you're an adult, and it's lower still than when you're an older adult. And so what seems to be happening to a lot of our traits, probably almost... Are you saying that if you have children as an older person, it's more heritable?

As the kids get older, sorry. So if you look at the heritability of IQ when kids are two, four, eight, 10, 20, 60, you find that identical twins come more and more together as they age whether they're aging in the same household or not and so there's it's something about selecting your environment so like here's one kid who loves to think and do puzzles and it's identical twin loves to do the same and they kind of get smarter their whole lives here's another kid who's not interested in that they have other interest and they go in a different direction but when you're when you're the parent you can be busily pushing them to do the things you want them to do. Right.

And so their heritability is less strong. And there's lots of cool examples. It's like when totalitarian governments are eliminated and the school system becomes more fair, heritability of intelligence goes up in those societies. Because kids are now more capable of selecting the schools they want to go to and the environments that they want to be part of. Wow. We're so flexible. It's so weird when you think about all the various styles of civilization that human beings exist in and thrive in.

Right. And for me, that's the key. So when a lot of people hear about this, it sounds like genetic determinism, that your genes are forcing you to be a certain way. But for me, it's not genetic determinism. You can think of it as a genetic nudge. Part of your nudge is going to come from the DNA you inherited. But part of it is going to come from the environment and part of it is going to come from your own personal decisions.

So in my mind, we talk about it in terms of your mind because that's psychology. But an easier example is your muscles. Some people inherit genes that if they lift one weight once, they're buff. Other people's genes, they have to work out a lot if they want to gain anything but you can still decide i'm going to work out a lot or i'm not i'm going to eat these nutrients or you know a lot of protein or not um you can choose a lifestyle that leads you to be more muscular or less so it's partially choice it's partially environment it's partially that interaction between your genes and environment which would make sense if you think about how flexible we are. Absolutely.

It has to be. How adaptive that we are. It has to be because human beings have to learn how to survive in every environment on this planet. If we were meerkats or something, well, we got a certain way of doing things and your genes can basically tell you what to do. And with meerkats, there's some really interesting experiments where you can show your genes cause you to listen to one signal and just follow that. But as human beings, your genes had no choice but to give up control once we went down this cognitive pathway that emphasizes learning over inborn instincts. You know, you've had little ones, you know, they're worthless when they're babies, right? Baby wildebeest gets up and off it can go, it run away from a lion. Yeah. It's just so fantastically complicated,

the developmental process from birth to adulthood and that this is taking place simultaneously amongst hundreds and hundreds of millions of people. Yeah. And with varying results and all sorts of different levels of creativity and ingenuity and mathematical prowess and literature and all these different things that are being created by all these different weird little ape creatures everywhere. And there's so many different factors that determine what this ape creature becomes. Right. And that's one of the best things in my mind about being a person. So if like, if you're a dung beetle, you got one job in life, push a ball of poo. And if you can't push a ball of poo that sweetens your body weight, well, that's the end of the line for you, right? But if you're a human, maybe you're big and strong.

Maybe you're not. Maybe you're really smart. Maybe you're not. Maybe you're really creative. There's a million ways to skin that cat. And the great thing about being a human is that if you're good at any of those things, there's a niche for you. You will be beneficial. And because we evolved to all work together, there will be value in you.

You're my favorite barista. You're my favorite whatever. Whatever you're good at. and everybody's good at something. And so the thing is that people worry about this sort of upcoming genetic revolution that it's going to be, well, there's going to be the good and everybody else. And that's just not going to happen. Because one of the things that we know, and you'll see this if you look at Blueprint, is that you have a gazillion genes underlie every trait. There aren't five smart genes. There's like a thousand of them.

And furthermore, each one of them only accounts for a tiny, tiny bit, and they do lots of other things too. So you can't make a designer baby that has all these qualities because all you do is noodle around with five or six genes. There's a couple of disorders that work that way. But our personalities, our abilities, our proclivities are all heavily determined by large numbers of genes that do lots and lots of different things.

But we're talking about our understanding of genetics currently. Yes. And when you talk about things like genetic manipulation or the use of CRISPR or any of these maybe new tools that they're working on right now, they've already updated CRISPR. They were CRISPR 0.2, right? Yeah. When this continues to evolve and more and more innovation takes place in that world, don't you think they're going to get to a point where they're going to understand all the various factors in genetics and they're going to be able to create a person who looks like Thor? Yes and no. So in principle, yes. So you've got like, I don't know, three billion base pairs in your DNA.

And most of those, we all share all the same ones. So screw the ones that are shared. We don't care about those. All we can do is noodle around with the ones that aren't. Now, what makes it complicated is that most of the ones that differ between people are actually non, they're in what we now call the regulatory region we used to think of as junk DNA. But now we know, well, think about a company. A company that makes widgets doesn't just make widgets.

It has to have sales. It has to have marketing. It has to have management. And now we know, well, sure enough, a lot of the DNA that's not coding for proteins is working with the other DNA to turn things on and turn things off. And there's 3 billion base pairs. So the level of complexity there is outrageous, right? But let's still, someday we'll get it, right? Just not, you and I won't see it. And what we now know from these studies, GWAS studies, genome-wide association studies, is that you can look at all the base pairs that vary and you can say, all right, which one of these things are correlated with my outcome of interest? And so you say, oh, education. And they create what's called a polygenic score. And you say, let's predict how many years of education you're going to get. And sure enough,

the richer you are, on average, the higher your polygenic score is. If you're born into a rich family, you probably have a higher polygenic score. But if your polygenic score for education is lower than the average for your thing, you'll probably get poorer across your life. If it's higher, you'll probably get richer. Is it a gene for being smart, for sitting there and doing what you're told, for self-control? And there's a thousand things in there, and each one of them accounts for one tenth of 1% of the variance. But what makes it complicated is that whole set of genes also predicts how artistic you are, but in a different combination. And it predicts how friendly you are

in a different combination. And so the genes that do one set of things almost always do lots of things. And we have very few traits that don't have lots and lots of genes that each play a tiny role underneath them. The example Plowman gives in his book, which I think is great, is he says, we started out looking for gold nuggets, and we now realize we're looking for gold dust. It's just lots of tiny stuff out there. So in many ways, when you're looking at a – when you talk about the human genome and our genetic code, we're really similar to computer programs in that there's millions and millions of lines of code in computer programs. But we know how to make computer programs. So we know like what these – well, we don't.

I don't. I don't either. No, we aren't. But somebody smarter than both of us knows how to make these incredible codes that lead to operating systems and – But now we're writing codes that we don't either. No, I don't. But somebody smarter than both of us knows how to make these incredible codes that lead to operating systems. But now we're writing codes that we don't understand. So if you look at neural networks, there'll be input levels and there'll be output levels. And the freaking computer decides how to mix those things together. And we don't even know what the hell it's done.

And two of them that are learning the same thing might get there via different mechanisms. So by that idea, or with it, through that idea, wouldn't you think that artificial intelligence could lead to the mapping out of the human genome, or rather the altering of the human genome and mapping out a different type of human? Look, in principle, it could, and it may. And all I would say is that what we thought, though, is that there'd be five smart genes that really matter, and the rest are trivial. And so turn on those five smart ones. Everybody's going to want that. And there'll be five smart genes that really matter and the rest are trivial. And so turn on those five smart ones. Everybody's going to want that. Right.

And there'll be five funny genes. And we'll turn those on, you know, et cetera. But there's not. And so what that means is I've got to decide. Imagine this future world where I'm about to have a baby and I can CRISPR the whole thing. Right. And I have to decide what genes. I'll say, well, I can make him smarter, but then he's not going to be very friendly.

Right. Or whatever, right? They all trade off against each other. Right. You could get the big dick gene, but he doesn't see as good. Yeah, exactly. Give him glasses. Exactly. And so the thing is that it makes it so, yeah, we will get rid of these single gene

disorders that are awful, right? But we're not going to, I suspect we're not going to noodle around with our smarts and our personality because every single change we make is going to have a commensurate change somewhere else. Oh, I can make him smarter, but then he's going to be depressed. And he's, you know, like that. Yeah. That is a, boy, the idea of playing God like that. I mean, that's really, I mean, we are playing creator.

I don't even necessarily think we should use the word God in that respect because it's something that's already been created. But we're taking this life form and radically altering it. And we can already do that and people will start doing it soon. And like when I was a kid, when we were kids, IVF is playing God. Now it's a triviality, right? It's nothing. Yeah, that is crazy. You don't think that this is going to take place in our lifetime?

That maybe Russia or China is going to make some super person? There's too many genes that play too small of a role. And so the thing is that it's too hard to mess around with. It's too hard to create these things. There's no reason you'd be a lot better off if you just did selective breeding. And the reality is you don't even need to. People already assortatively mate. They already choose partners who are similar to themselves. if you just did selective breeding. And the reality is you don't even need to. People already assortatively mate. They already choose partners who are similar to themselves.

If they value education, the other person does too. If they value athletics, the other person does too. That works so much better than anything that we're capable of doing right now. And when you do these GWAS studies with these polygenic scores and you say, oh, look, you're born into a social class that's suggested it would probably be high and yours is kind of low, and sure enough, you get poorer across your life, you're literally accounting for 3% of the variance. You're barely explaining anything. Because even though when we look at the behavioral genetic studies,

we can say, wow, intelligence is 50% genetic. We can't come close to finding the genes that actually do that. Right. And part of the reason, we don't know, but part of the reason may be that, first of all, it's of course it's 50% environmental, and what those random things reason, we don't know, but part of the reason may be that, first of all, it's 50% environmental and what those random things are, we don't know. And second, think about how you, with 3 billion base pairs, how many things, maybe when those two are in place and that one isn't in the third, there could be interactions at really, really complicated levels where you're almost at infinite. And so that's why I don't think it happens when you and I are around to see it.

I think you're probably right. But then I just realized that things like CRISPR, which were invented by accident, came out of nowhere less than a decade ago. I believe it was less than a decade ago, right? It's super recent. It's outside. Yeah, I don't know. And then if you really stop and think about even the mapping of the human genome, it used to be an unbelievably difficult thing. And then, you know, checking your genetics was preposterously expensive.

Now you just spit into a little tube and send it to 23andMe, and they tell you, Hey, bro, you know, someone in your family is from Europe, and this guy is from Asia. And so I could easily be wrong that you and I will see it, and it's only 10 years away. Because computationally, it seems so hard right now. But things that were computationally impossible when I was in grad school, you know, the simple analyses we did with our data in grad school, it's just like a phone could do that so easily now. And we waited 24 hours for the mainframe to give it back to us. Well, Kurzweil talks about that, that we really don't see things in terms of the exponential increase in technology. You know, Kurzweil believes all this is going to happen plus more.

He thinks you're going to be able to download your brain into a computer and, you know, and he's smarter. Cyborg ourselves and all that. He's smarter than me. I don't know if he's smarter than you. He's definitely smarter than me. No, he's an awfully smart guy. Researchers just turned on the world's most powerful supercomputer designed to mimic a

human brain. Whoa. Is that the thing I was telling you about last week? That sounds pretty scary. Neuromorphic computer. Neuromorphic computer just got a big boost with a million core supercomputer that took over a decade to build. Mother.

Yeah, this is the beginning of a movie, right? Right. It doesn't go well. But here's the thing, right? This movie, in this movie, this is a whole room full of computers, just like the Apollo missions used a room full of computers that can't fuck with your phone. I know. This was really crazy. I know, it is.

That's 1965, 66, 67, right? They had a room. This iPhone buries that room full of fucking shitty-ass computers. Plus, it takes pictures. Do you remember when we were kids and everybody said, everyone will have own phone right and i remember thinking who the hell wants a phone like my mom will just reach me wherever i go but you didn't know what a phone could do in those days i used to have a bit and this is only from 2005 from a netflix special i did in 2005 which you know it's 13 years ago but doesn't seem like that long ago but i was making fun of people texting because uh i was like hey

bro why why are you making me read call me i go you're sending me text from a phone i go fucking call me it takes you four presses to get an s i know i know that was back when you had to use yeah and then that was also back when people thought it was cool to have those walkie talkies those nextel phones do you remember that yes i do that was like it was cool to have those walkie-talkies, those Nextel phones. Do you remember that? Yes, I do. That was like a big deal to have a walkie-talkie on a phone. That died out, thankfully.

But this whole change in the way we view technology, from 2005 to 2018, the world is a radically different place. And the funny thing is that you and I both make a living by observing the human condition, right? That's our job. And we both get it wrong constantly, right? Every day. So you got the texting, what the hell is that? I remember my sister showed me Facebook because she was in an NGO

and they're using it to keep track of each other. I was like, yeah, people don't want to do that shit. Exactly, right? I'm wrong every time. Every single time I'm wrong. Dude, I follow quite a few people on Facebook that are nuts. And I go to their pages just to see what kind of arguments they're getting into, like as a sociological experiment.

And there are people that are on Facebook arguing about Trump or abortion or Islam or fill in the blank, environmental concerns, fracking. And they just fucking argue all day long. It's fascinating. You look at their timeline. You look at the entries. And you're like, oh, my God, there's like 10 hours of this shit in a day. And they just do it all day long. And you just picture this sweaty person sitting in front of a computer arguing with the world.

I never would have thought that there'd be people sitting in front of their desk arguing with people that they can't see all throughout the world. Who thought that? Right. Who thought that would be fun? I don't think it is fun. I think it's an impulsive, obsessive thing that people get sucked into. And I think they're vastly healthier and happier when they're not engaged in it. Yeah. Well, I mean, the truth of the matter is, and this comes back to the past again. So we talked about all these differences. So one of the really lovely things that you can do is look for the past and then say, well, how does that manifest itself today? And one of my favorite examples is the whites to your eyes. So chimpanzees have brown eyes, the sclera around the cornea,

and ours are white. Why would you do that? Well, it advertises the direction of your gaze. Why would you advertise the direction of your gaze? Because what that says is that on average, as a human, when I look over there and see something, I want you to know that I saw it. You and I are probably going to cooperate to help us achieve whatever the goal is that I just encountered. A chimp wants to hide it from its fellow chimps because it's competitive, right? On average, whatever the hell's over there, you're not going to help me get it, right? Yeah, exactly. You're going to make it harder for me to get it. Yeah, do chimps ever do that?

Amazingly, groupers and octopi hunt together and they do that. Whoa, groupers and octopi. They work together. So the grouper will be over the Great Barrier Reef and the fish has gone in and he goes to the octopus and he goes, right there. No way. And the reason he doesn't give a shit about the octopus, of course, but if the octopus goes to get it and doesn't get it, it's going to come out and the grouper's got it. Cooperation always works better than working on your own, right?

Wow. So is there real evidence that shows that the whites of our eyes developed in order to indicate which way we're looking? Well, in all these cases, all we can do is say, let's do a little phylogenetic analysis. Who's got it and who doesn't? We're the only great ape with whites to their eyes. So 90, so the chance. Here we go. We're going to look at this.

Here's an octopus that's chilling. And is that a grouper? No. It's a weird looking grouper. It's a spotted, I guess. I don't know fish very well. It's beautiful. Look how pretty.

It is really pretty. It looks like a coral trout to me. Oh, man. But what do I know? Look how pretty that octopus is, too. Yeah, they're really something. I fucking love octopi. And they can change colors like that.

I know. Yeah, we've gone down massive rabbit holes with these things for hours at a time. Look at this. It's changing right now as we're watching them. So he's sitting there waiting, and the fish tries to get out, and the group is like, And the other fish grabs it. Got you. Yeah.

That's fascinating. And so it's really cool the way they have the good sense to work together is like, got you. That's fascinating. And so it's really cool the way they have the good sense to work together. Look at the octopus. It's mad. It's getting dark. Or happy. Look how cool his skin is, how it just changes and morphs as you're looking at it. That is so bizarre.

What a crazy – you know, I didn't know that they could do this until my friend Remy Warren came on the podcast. And he had a television show called Apex Predator. On the show they would study the various ways these animals would hunt and the way they would, all their different adaptation to their environment, all the different ways that they would use the environment and he would try to mimic those different ways. One of the things that they studied was octopus and what's that other fish that's like it the cuttlefish which is also they can do this octopus is using a clamshell

what is he doing he's lounging yeah he found that he picked it up oh my god there's a BBC yeah this is crazy is crazy. Oh, my God. The octopus is climbing inside a clamshell, and then he closes it. That is bananas. There's a BBC Blue Planet where it shows the octopus picking up all that random shrapnel when there's a shark coming after it, and it covers itself like a big ball, and the shark keeps going. Wow.

They're super smart, octopi. Well, they eat sharks. You ever see that one, there was a video where they found this aquarium was having an issue where sharks were disappearing and they couldn't figure out what was going on. And they put a camera inside the aquarium

and it turned out that the octopus was waiting, just chilling on the rocks until the sharks came by and they would snatch them and eat them. Watch this. It's really cool to watch. He's like, do-do-do-do. Who me me don't bother with me. I'm just a piece of coral I'm just hanging out here being coral bitch. I got you

Like in cuz he looks exactly even in texture like the coral which is so fascinating But when they found this they were stunned They had no idea that octopus could do that. Not only that they could do that, but that they would eat a shark. Yeah, that's a big fight. Fuck, man. It's not, though. You want to squeeze the thing's mouth shut first.

But it's an easy fight. It looks like he's... The thing about octopus, though, too, they could sacrifice a tentacle and it just grows back. Yeah, so he did. It's really no big deal. It's annoying, but yeah. Yeah, but I don't even know if it's annoying. I mean, we're just guessing, right?'s a fascinating animal there's a um a really

twisting him up there's an amazing case in australia where a cool and brown is a biologist had cuttlefish in his tank and they can signal they like an octopus they can do whatever color and in this tank he's got a bunch of females on one side a bunch of males on the other so male goes in between them and he signals two different sides of his body. He shows the females he's male, but he shows the males that he's female. So they won't attack him for sidling up to the females. I mean, how smart is that? It's weird.

It's weird that they split off from us hundreds of millions of years ago, right? Yeah, they're like as closely related as celery, basically. It's crazy. But they're so smart and their eyes are similar to ours in like in the development. Actually, it's the opposite. So our eyes are poorly designed.

Theirs are very well designed. So our eyes have all the detecting stuff is in its own way. It's backwards. And so the light comes in and has to pass all the cellular bodies before it can get picked up by the detectors.

Theirs aim in the proper direction so that the shit isn't in the way. And we have this blind spot because the big thing, the nerve connection, they don't. Theirs comes in from the back where it belongs. So what that tells you is that, yeah, we both started out with some kind of random light-sensitive spot. And theirs happened to work much better if you want to turn it into an eyeball than ours did. Because evolution can always – it only can start with what you got. Right right but does theirs work better because they can see in water i mean is that well no i mean because they're i think it's purely random that they don't we do a great job

of getting rid of the cellular bodies that are in our way so what your eye does is it wiggles all the time and so if anything's retinal stationary it's wiggling equally with your eyeball you ignore it and so you don't even know you have your own blind spot. You fill it in. Your brain does amazing things to fix the problem. So like if you have a piece of lint on your eye or something like that. Yeah, if it were literally attached, eventually it would disappear. And because your brain says, oh, that's irrelevant. And so you can't see your own blind spot unless you close one eye.

And then you sit there with a neutral background. You move your thumb across and literally your thumbnail disappears. Because that spot is just being filled in by whatever the background is. And what happens with the octopus? It doesn't have that problem because our nerve ending creates a blind spot by being on the wrong side. It comes in from the back and so the whole thing works beautifully. They don't have to deal with the blind spot.

Would that be as effective though in the world that we live in of air? It's a water-air irrelevant. It's purely a happenstance that the light-sensitive pit that they had started to get innervated properly from the back and ours didn't. And then as ours evolved into an eye, I mean, of course we don't know. But as ours evolved to an eye, we just had to find ways around the problem that all the fancy structures that we now need in front of it are in the way. Does anything have an eye like an octopus that lives on land? Great question.

I don't know. I don't think so. See, I read something about eyes that they think that, I got shit information, a bad memory. You have an amazing memory. All these shows that you still store away? Yeah, too many shows, man. I don't have any memory anymore.

It's all full. Yeah, I'm like a hoarder. My house is filled with boxes of shit that I don't need. That's how brains work, I'm afraid. That's my brain my house is filled with boxes of shit that I don't need. Yeah, that's how brains work, I'm afraid. That's my brain. It is how brains work, right? Yeah. I mean, it must be because I know that there's a lot of stuff in there that didn't used to be in there before.

But I also know it's like random people that I should remember that I don't remember. Yeah, well, the funny thing about brains is we may never forget anything, but we just lose our capacity to access it. Right. But the data suggests that it may still guide our behavior. And so every single experience you ever had may still be in there and it guides your behavior, but it's annoying for you to recall it because it gets in the way of what you want. And so when we talk about forgetting, what we're actually talking about is being able to actually retrieve it and talk about it, not to have it guide our action.

Well, also, I can retrieve things far better if i get access to the file by someone else's memory so like if you and i had an experience like 10 years ago we went on a camping trip or something like that and i forgot something that happened and you said do you remember what happened by the creek when mike hurt his foot i'm like oh yes exactly oh my god i forgot about that and then next thing you know, you have this memory. Right. And so what we've done is you've broken the access in. Yeah.

But you could literally find the sneaker he's wearing and go, holy crap, Mike is wearing this. And so that's how our brain is designed. It's annoying to retrieve. When you're looking for one thing to retrieve everything, you don't want that. If it's important or happened recently, it probably should be retrieved. If it's not, let it sit away and it'll still guide your behavior. You won't put your foot in that same hole when you and Mike go on the camping trip the next time, but you won't even remember why. Right. And likely significant lessons are important because they're seared in your memory of this is a significant point where you figured something out that you didn't know before and it changed the way you looked at the world.

So this is seared in your memory yeah and so when emotions get involved you tend to have it's much more easily retrieved later on because your your brain is saying yeah that's or evolution or whatever you want to call it is telling you that's important that should be retrievable right and and what you had yesterday for lunch i can never retrieve that right i don't know yeah that's one of the reasons why epidemiology studies on diet are so difficult because people don't remember what they eat the same thing every day. Yeah. Yeah. It's the human mind is so fascinating and it varies so much.

And there's so many different factors involved in whatever it becomes. Cultural factors and environmental factors, dietary factors. And that's all that flexibility that we evolved to put us in that special place that we are. And so we made a deal, right? So we said, all right, we're going to start going down this cognitive pathway. But that means that there's very little inborn knowledge. And that means that we're going to have to learn from people older than us and people with experience there.

And the best way to learn from them is high fidelity copying. And so if you happen to go off in a direction where they use chopsticks, well, that's how you eat. You happen to go in a fork direction, that's how you eat. There's a million ways to do things. And so we started with this sort of argument about, well, was it monogamy or not, right? And I'm arguing that by and large it was monogamy because you've got these systems in place that our testicles aren't big enough. We've got cryptic ovulation, which means that we can't tell when she's fertile, which means that we have to be available, sexually interested and available all the time so we can make sure we're the father. And so that allows her to pair bond with us. And there's some evidence that orgasm is a pair bonding experience, certainly for females, probably for males.

It works in lots of animals via oxytocin and some vasopressin, all that kind of stuff, right? So all that suggests that probably on average that we evolved to do it this way. But we're so super duper flexible that when another society says, well, hey, this works for us, off we go and we find a way to make that work. Are there studies that compare testicle size of different civilizations and different cultures? Yeah. So there's a lot of argument about this. And the problem is that the- That it's racist. It's racist, right? That's what underlies a lot of it. People get scared.

So the thing is that the genetics that explain why one animal or one species would have large testicles and another would have small testicles are not the genetics that would explain why two different individuals in the same species would be that way. Because the only way to make that latter one work is you have to inherit a constellation of traits. So if I'm going to inherit the genes for big balls and for impulsiveness and for having lots of kids and not caring much about them and all the things that are supposedly go with that, that do when you look between species, there's no way for that constellation of traits to be inherited together. Because remember, I was talking about how polygenic everything is. And so they'd all literally need to sit next to each other on the chromosome if they've got any chance of being

passed on as a package, and they don't. And you also get all this shifting around during meiosis. I can't even remember the term for it off the top of my head, but where the pieces of genetic material move around. And that virtually guarantees that you're not going to inherit this huge constellation of traits within a species. Between species is dead easy. You know, your species inherits big testicles and inherits impulsiveness. It inherits, you know, whatever, uh, in our strategy, just reproduce a ton and ignore them. You know, all that kind of stuff's dead easy. And so chimp fathers don't pay any attention to chimp babies to speak of because, well, that's their mating system, right? Whereas, um, you've got pair bondedbonded gibbons and things,

and now parents start to play a much bigger, even male parents start to play a bigger role. But there's no studies that show that human beings with archer testicles tend to ignore their children. Well, so this is just it. People have tried to show that, but here's the problem. They've tried to show that in studies? Yeah.

So lots of people make that argument, and it's called life history strategies, where you say, well, you're going to develop one life history strategy in these circumstances and another in these other circumstances. The problem is that you end up with ethnic differences in testicle size, which we know exist. And you also have ethnic differences in the kinds of lives that people currently lead. The difficult thing is it's super easy to look at the world we are in right now. And this is what tripped me up earlier as well. You look at the world that we are right now and assume, well, that's the way things have always been. And they haven't. And so right now, you know, the mathematics used to, for a while there,

the best math in the world was taking place in the Arabic world. Now it's not anymore. And so if you don't know that past, you'd say, well, look, people in the Arabic world aren't as good at mathematics and they have these qualities and that you'd make an inference. Right now, the ethnic differences in testicles, I believe, but I can't promise you that some different West African groups happen to have the largest testicle size on average. Those West African groups tend to be poorer right now. There's lots of things about life that go with being poor that look like an R strategy, having lots of kids and paying less attention to them. But what you're probably looking at is a coincidental association between some biology and some way that your people happen to live that didn't exist a while ago and that won't exist a while from now. And so it's really easy to try to use this research, which people have,

to say, well, you've got some primitive people who have big testicles and low parental effort, and you've got some more sophisticated people with smaller testicles and high parental effort. But that's genetically super naive. One of the things that I learned when I was in Rome, we took a tour of the Vatican by this guy who was a professor. It was really interesting. It was cool because we—to have a really enthusiastic guide who could explain a lot of things to you. And he was really excited that me and my family were very curious about these things too. But one of the things that he said that was really interesting, I said,

okay, I go, why do all the dudes have little dicks? Like, what's going on with that? And he said that they believed that if you had a large penis, that large penises were a symbol of barbaric behavior, and that these were cruder people, and that to be thought to be a sophisticated person, you wanted a smaller penis. So they actually accentuated smaller penises in their gods, and smaller penises in their statues. And that's funny. I mean, you can see these kinds of things all the time.

and smaller penises in their statues. And that's funny. I mean, you can see these kinds of things all the time. So early pre-Western contact, if you look at Japanese women, they're painted with their eyes as narrow of a slit as possible. Post-Western contact, now the women want more almond-shaped eyes,

and so they start painting them with the beautiful women have bigger eyes. These things can change all over the map. I personally suspect that large penis size is also a product of sexual selection. So it's more fun for her if he's got a larger penis. They're having sex for longer and more regularly because ovulation is hidden. So he has to be available all the time.

So she has to be available all the time or the system doesn't work. And that's what creates pair bonding. So humans copulate for a very long period of time if you compare us to the other primates, with the single exception of bonobos. And we have way bigger penises than any of the other great apes. And I suspect that that's something that is female. I mean, women always say, why are men so obsessed with their penis size? But I suspect that they're the creator of it, and that's why we're so obsessed with it.

Women who say that are playing games. They know. That's ridiculous. I don't know. They're definitely playing games. That's like men who are saying, why are women so obsessed with big breasts? We don't even care. I've never met a guy who said that.

Some asshole out there that's playing games. Okay, possibly you're right. Yeah, it is fascinating when you think about all these different things that lead to natural selection and the fact that there's so many variables that are in place and that we're trying to find out what is better and what is not. And if you have a study and the study finds genetic differences and ethnic genetic differences, there's a lot of blowback and a lot of pushback against that. There will be. And one of the interesting things that we do know is if you think about how Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, then a small percentage

of us left, which means the majority of us didn't, right? I mean, there's a few randoms who lived up in the top right-hand corner were available to go, which means that all the rest of the earth comes out of a few small percentage of the population that could have left. And so we now know there's enormous genetic variation within Africa, way more genetic variation within Africa than outside of Africa or than between any two people like a Chinese person and a Norwegian person are much more closely related to each other genetically than an African guy who lives in the next village over. And so because most of the genetic variability never left the continent. And so we have this idea of race as if it has genetic meaning and it doesn't. But ethnicity does have genetic meaning, right? So an ethnic group evolved in a very certain spot to deal with very certain problems and their body shape will vary. And you've got these West

Africans who are really jacked with these big muscles, a lot of quick muscle. You don't see that over on East Africa very much. You've got tall people in Denmark. You don't see that in other parts of Europe, etc. So people are … Or the adaptation like the Inuit to deal with the cold climate. Yeah, exactly. And lots of that's adaptation and a lot of that's just random genetic drift of founder population, other causes that aren't evolved but nonetheless have a big impact on what the population ends up looking like. It's just so amazing to consider that this entire species, essentially, except for the times that we interacted with,

interbred with Neanderthals, came from one part of Africa. Yeah. You know, that's one of the reasons why racism is so preposterous, because we're essentially all African. Yeah, we are all African. And all of us who are out have a little bit of other stuff in them, us but just a tiny bit. We're so weird, though.

We're so much like dogs. You know, like a Great Dane can breed with a poodle, and they don't look anything like each other. If you were from another planet, you'd go, well, that's definitely two different things. That's not going to happen. It's like if you looked at LeBron James and, you know, Tracy Lourdes, right? They look like two different things.

They really do. And I suspect that when we ran into Neanderthals, we're like, oh, she's kind of interesting looking, sort of hot, sort of different. And so, you know, first of all, we know humans will copulate with almost anything that holds still, right? And things that aren't even alive. Yeah, things that aren't alive, things that they probably shouldn't be, et cetera. But the Neanderthal ones are interesting because really they are cousins. They're cousins separated by a million years and some change.

And we don't know too much about them either, which is really weird. interesting because really they are cousins. They're cousins separated by a million years and some change. And it still worked. We don't know too much about them either, which is really weird. We know they had larger brains than us, but we don't really know how smart they were. And why did we replace them? Yeah. Like, did we, was it diseases we carried that wiped them all out? Was it we were better organized, so we

got rid of, we out-competed them, we killed them on purpose? You know, if there's a million branch species, we happen to know a lot about nandothals because they are existed till very recently but what we there's all sorts of branching that took place early on lots of different australopithecines etc almost all those are dead ends yeah and you know the fact that we're the only one that comes out of that could mean well we got lucky or we're mean as shit and we took care of all of our cousins who didn't, you know, we wanted what they had. I think the latter.

Yeah, probably a bit of both, right? We're so mean. I mean, doesn't it make sense that we were mean as shit a million years ago? We're mean as shit now. Exactly. And what's so interesting is, you know, this is something that, coming back to the point I was making earlier about us cooperating. So we evolved to cooperate with each other.

But the key is we did not evolve to cooperate across different groups. So once you get to homo erect, and now you've got division of labor, and you've got the capacity to plan for unfelt needs, right, where they're carrying these Acheulean tools with them over great distances, etc. Well, now, who's your most effective predator? You know, the occasional mammoth or saber tooth tiger will kill the occasional one of us, but they can't possibly take us on in the same way we can take them on. There's only one other thing on the planet that can take us on, and that's ourselves. So other groups of homo erectus would have probably been a major threat. Certainly by the time we're homo sapiens, other groups would have been our only major threat. And so we evolved to be kind

to each other within our group, but we did not evolve to be kind outside our group. That doesn't mean we evolved to be mean. We evolved to be neutral. So let's see if you're going to be kind outside our group. That doesn't mean we evolve to be mean. We evolve to be neutral. So let's see if you're going to be friend or foe. And that neutrality is super important. It has the potential for cooperation across group boundaries. We can change. Women and men can mingle so we don't interbreed too much amongst ourselves.

We can trade with each other. Lots of good things can happen. But the second you guys get a little bit aggro with us, you know, now we're in a position to just go all out and try to exterminate you. And so Wrangham has these great data, Richard Wrangham, same catching fire guy, shows that if you look at the rates of violence within human groups compared to chimps, they're like 500 times more violent, physically aggressive than we are. You look at the rates between human groups, equal. They're the one to one ratio. So we tend to think about, well,

how could it be that we're both so nice and so mean? But we have to remember that we evolved to cooperate and to be nice to each other, to be more effective killers. It wasn't because let's make a hippie paradise. It's like, shit, these lions are going to eat us. You and I got to have to get together to sort out these guys. And so our cooperative nature is literally the flip side of the coin of our competitive, violent, killing nature. Also, the undeniable history of unbelievably ruthless tribal warfare would indicate that we have a long history of fighting against others that are like us that we don't know. Absolutely.

When hunter-gatherers meet each other and they do come into conflict, which is a huge percentage of the time, they literally fight to the death. Because if you capture me, you're going to torture me to death. If I'm female, you're going to incorporate me into your system and then it's going to be okay. Not great, but okay. But if I'm male, I'm going to die. So I might as well die fighting you now because I'm going to die unpleasantly later. And that's super common. That's everywhere we see it. And there's tons and tons of bodies that are healthily perforated that are clearly the consequences of this kind of warfare. It's crazy that that is thought to be, even in 2018, an inevitable part of being a human being. I mean, warfare, even to this day, is thought to be inevitable because there's no—

I mean, we would all love that one day there would be no warfare, but there's no indication whatsoever that that's taking place. We're not almost there. And I actually—I think Pinker's got the best answer to this question, which is basically, well, what structures do you need to put in place to make the world a safer and less violent place? And I don't know if you've talked to him about his book, Better Angels of Our Nature. I know you've talked to him about more recent ones. But Better Angels is a great example. It's a great book.

It's a great example of how we become less and less violent and even over our lifetimes and and part of that is undoubtedly better governance structure and all that but part of that i think it cycles on itself so when i was a little kid and this kind of thing probably happened to you i was on when i was in kindergarten the guy who drove our carpool was a cop so this cop is driving me home in the back of his car now he's got no seat belts seatbelts because this is 1969 and cars don't have seatbelts, right? Big bench seat in a Buick or something. And we come around a corner and they all slide up against me to the edge of the car seat. And I'm trying to push back, but I'm this little guy, right? And I can't and I hit the – I must have hit the elbow against the door and it flies open.

I roll out of the car. Oh, my God. And I go bouncing across the street, right? So he's – you know, he's not going to arrive home empty-handed. So, of course, he goes and retrieves me from the ditch. And he brings me home and shows my mom. And I'm bleeding and bruised and torn shirt, you know, like you'd expect from bouncing out of a car. And my mom, who's a pediatrician, so she could tell I wasn't badly damaged, looks at me over and says, ah, he looks fine. Don't worry about it.

Now, can you imagine if somebody brought your kid home and said, hey, man, really sorry, Joe. Your daughter fell out of the car and bounced across the freaking street? You'd A-throttle them and be freaked out. And that's not that long ago either. No, this is 1969 when you and I are both on this planet. And so what I think is part of what Pinker is documenting is as the world gets safer, we start getting used to a no mayhem world. And these mayhem events stand out in our minds. And so it actually self-perpetuates where the safer it gets, the safer we need it to be.

Because every little thing that goes wrong stands out in sharper relief. That's a very fascinating way of looking at it. You know, what's interesting to me about Pinker's work is how much pushback he gets. And particularly about the world being a safer place. the world being a safer place like people want to keep putting pointing towards violent episodes and and and and racism and and crime and all these different things is different factors as if it's some sort of evidence against what he's saying when he's incorporating that those current events into this large database and he's saying yes it's not that we don't live in utopia, but the world is vastly

safer and better now than it was a thousand years ago or 10,000 years ago, or even a hundred years ago. But why is there so much pushback against this? Well, so the thing is, I think what's going on is that people worry that it doesn't look like a problem to be solved anymore. So when you and our kids, we both have lots of gay friends, but we didn't know it because they're not telling anybody because someone's going to kick their ass if they knew that they were gay. Now, yes, gay people are still discriminated against, but it's so much better than it was then. What you don't want to what I think people are advocates don't want to say is, well, there's no problem anymore, because then you can allow them to still run into troubles in various circumstances, even though the trouble they run into today is a thousand times less than the trouble they ran into when we were little. Same thing holds for racism. Same thing holds for sexism. They've all

gotten so much better. And sexual violence is a perfect example. This is in Pinker's book. If you set rape and homicide to, you call it both of them, whatever level they are in 1972, 100, and then you track them through to the early 2000s. Homicide is in the U.S. Homicides dropped down to like 50. Rapes dropped down to like 25. But if you listen to women's advocacy groups about campus sexual assault and stuff, you'd never know that. And the reason you wouldn't know it is because people worry, well, if you think the problem is getting better on its own, then you won't keep doing anything to help fix it. And that's a really unfortunate part of our psychology because it makes people feel like there's been no progress.

And when you feel like there's no progress, then you think, well, maybe we need to completely overturn the whole system and try something new. And that's, of course, the point of Pinker's newest book, Enlightenment Now. No, things are going freaking great. Anarchy and all those things are really bad ideas. Voting for somebody like Trump's a really bad idea, because things are actually running along really nicely. It's just that we tend to forget it because every advocacy group who's all worried about whatever their particular issue is, doesn't want the word to get out that things are a lot better than they used to be. Because I think at some fundamental level, they think, well, 25 rapes a year isn't bad enough. We better say that there's 100. I'm

not saying they do this consciously. But of course, 25 rapes a year, whatever the number is, is bad enough, right? It doesn't have to be the numbers that it used to be when I was a child to be a problem. It all has to be as a number above zero. Well, there seems to be people develop this vested interest in promoting an idea and they want to exaggerate that idea, whatever it is, whether it's the idea that the world is a safer place than it actually is, or whether it's the world is an idea of a more dangerous place than it really is. And for whatever reason, once we have it in our mind that this is the thing we're married to, we're married to this concept of polyamorous life and that this is a natural way to live,

or that violence is inevitable and this is just a part of who we are, we tend to promote that and we tend to have massive confirmation bias. I think it's because we personally associate ourselves with ideas. We don't look at ideas as being a thing. If you think that something is one way and then you're pointed towards evidence that you're incorrect, pointed towards evidence that you're incorrect, you feel like personally you've been slighted or somehow you're being diminished by your lack of being correct, by your incorrect assumptions and notions. You're absolutely right.

That is a weird part of being a person. It's a very weird part of being a person. It's the hardest part about being a scientist because every good scientist is wrong all the time. I've been wrong already on your show, right? And so it's super hard to admit it because by human nature, you just want my immediate reactions to fight against it and not to say, well, hold on. What's Joe saying? No, he's right.

I overstated that. Let's back off, right? And so there's this really lovely paper that came out in 2011 by Mercier and Dan Sperber. And what they argued is I think they nailed it. And they said, here's what it is. Our brain actually, we evolved our logical processing abilities not to find out the truth of the world, but to convince you of my point of view. And so our logical abilities evolved

in service of persuasion, not in service of seeking out the truth. Because of course, if I can persuade you that the world is the way it would, in a way that benefits Bill, that the world is, you know, something about the way Bill wants the world to be is true, then the world's going to be a little kinder to me, it'll fit my worldview, and others will give me the things I want. And so I go through life trying

to persuade you of my worldview, rather than trying to find out what's actually out there. And so that's why you think, oh, well, smart people aren't going to fall for that. No, smart, doesn't matter how smart you are. You're using whatever brainpower you have, not to find the truth, but rather to find evidence for your particular point of view. Well, I think it's also a byproduct of ignorance because for the longest time, you could tell me something and there was very little way that I could find out whether or not you're right or not. I really couldn't know you're correct unless I went and started doing research and read some books. And whereas now I could just pull up my phone and say,

hey, Bill just said this. Is that right? And then the phone will go, no, there's been 100 different studies. And you go, oh, look, motherfucker. I got the stats. I Googled this shit. That's true. And that definitely matters a lot.

It's this awesome democratization of knowledge. But if that really were all that it was, then everybody would agree on their politics. Everybody would agree that the fake news was fake and the real news was real. Well, not necessarily because this is a fairly recent invention. But what I'm getting at is that I think that the ability to be deceptive was perhaps there was an evolutionary advantage. Oh, absolutely. So that's one of the very first things that happens when you have theory of mind.

So that's one of the very first things that happens when you have theory of mind. Because as soon as I realize the contents of your mind differ from the contents of my own, I say, oh, I can plant something in Joe's mind that will help me that ain't true. But if he believes it is, life will be better for me. Right. And so as soon as kids learn theory of mind at age four, they start to lie. And prior to theory of mind, they tell the truth when it's like, where are you? You know, plain hindsight, I'm right here, Dad. Right, right, right.

You're supposed to keep quiet. But they can't because they don't understand that you don't know the same things they know. Right. Yeah. And they also understand that they could perhaps change the way you feel about them by manipulating the truth. Manipulating information. Yeah. What's weird is having kids and seeing kids that grow up in troubled homes. One thing you see almost universally is that those kids lie a lot you know

um because you're in the no choice condition right yeah you're in a bad spot and like one of my daughter's little friends is constantly lying but you know she has a broken home and the situation's not good and it's just it's unfortunate but this little kid is tormented because of it she's always making stuff up. And all the other little girls roll their eyes and they know she's a liar. And it's sad. about certain particular aspects of your mind or your past or what you've accomplished or what you're capable of doing, that you will have a better place in the social chain. No, that's absolutely right. And so the way I think about it is think about the difference between conspecific conflicts, conflicts between members of the same species and conflicts between

predator and prey. So every time predator and prey interact, eventually one of them is going to die. Predator is going to starve. Prey is going to get eaten, right? But when conspecifics, members of the same species interact and we're competing over something, even if it's a very subtle level of competition, we don't want to come to blows. Because if I'm trying to size you up, be it physical blows or mental blows, there's suffering on both sides if we have to duke it out. And so I want to sell myself as being a little more than I really am. I want to be Bill plus 20%. And you want to sell yourself as a little more than you really are, because we know that we're not fully going to test each other, because there's negative consequences for testing. And whenever there's negative consequences,

even for the winner for testing, there's a lot of posturing that's going to go on. And that posturing is something that's literally built into our psyche. And we go through life trying to self-inflate on average, not everybody does this, but on average, trying to self-inflate as much as we can in order to gain the things in life that we might not get if we are brutally honest about what our capabilities actually are. That is so fascinating that we cling to all of these ancient structures that are in place when it comes to the way we interact with each other and how important it is, like the social exchanges that we have. And I think this is one of the reasons why we cling to ideas so much, that these ideas, if you can push an idea through, you've got some sort of

points on the board. Yep. You've got points on the board and probably your ideas on average are going to benefit you and my ideas on average are going to benefit me. And so if I'm happily married in a monogamous relationship and I'm not looking around, well, then monogamy is the great thing and sleeping around is a sin. But if I'm single and I've got opportunities, well, then I probably hold alternative views. So on average, our views, not perfectly, but on average, our views serve as well. And if I can plant my views in your mind then i've benefited yeah i've i saw that a lot i mean god you see that a lot with everything but i guess when we're talking about people that

don't want to admit like with about when it comes to like pinker's data about the world being a better place because they have almost a vested interest in stirring up fear and they're committed that in their mind they're committed to constantly studying studying the wrongs of the world and the evil of the world and that any sort of diminishing of that is actually going to cause harm to the people that are suffering. So I think they have a good – in their mind, there's good intention. I totally agree. And the data are consistent with their strategies because on average, fear appeals and anger appeals work a whole lot better than, hey, man, things are great. Donate to this cause and we'll keep them great.

That doesn't work at all. That doesn't work at all. And so when Viagra was invented in 1989, my little brother and I were chatting about it. And we thought, you know, this will save some animals because there's a lot of animals that are consumed for their presumed potency effects by like traditional Chinese medicine consumers and things like that. And so we thought, boy, Viagra actually works. Prior to Viagra, nothing is out there that works. I'll bet this will have an impact. And so we wrote this little letter off, sent it to a journal and said, you know, that this is going to save certain animals like seals, which they could be harvested to eat their penises. Canadian seals.

I know. Wait a minute. What? I know. People that you're allowed to kill a certain number. You can't kill seals in America. They're protected. seals. Whoa, wait a minute. What? I know. People that you're allowed to kill a certain number. You can't kill seals in America. They're protected.

But in Canada, U.S., but in Canada you can. There's a hood seal allotment and a harp seal allotment. And so people are killing up to their allotments and selling.

You could do it solely for the penis and sell the penis for enough money to make your money back. Now what purpose does a seal's penis have beyond the seal's

original purpose? The zilch, right? Right. But they eat it because it's supposed to make you more potent. Now, what purpose does the seal's penis have beyond the seal's original purpose? The zilch, right? But they eat it because it's supposed to make you more potent. Well, the saddest one is the rhino horn, right? Rhino horn is an example. That's used for lots of different things, so it's less likely to be helped. But the seal penis is only, you know,

people basically only using it for its potency. And then when Viagra comes along, like literally you're shopping in the supermarket. What are you going to buy? You're going to get, I'll have some seal penis or I'll take a Viagra. Well, we just said people are going to switch. If you're greedy, you throw both of them supermarket. What are you going to buy? You're going to get, I'll have some seal penis or I'll take a Viagra. Well, we just said people are going to switch. If you're greedy, you throw both of them together.

Right, try them both. And people did actually. But we made this argument and we literally were attacked by the World Wildlife Fund. Government looking at plan to revive seal penis sales. How funny is that? What? Hold the fuck on. Is this recent?

It was published in 2015, but it was updated this May. What? The government is looking at a plan. Go back up. To revive seal penis sales. Okay. This must be a plan was brought to the government. This must not be.

The worst way of looking at that headline is that the government's thinking, man, we've got to fucking revive these penis sales. No one's buying seal dicks. Well, they may because they actually may be thinking that because you've got some relatively impoverished people who are hunting for them and no one's buying them anymore. What? Is that real? The report drafted by the Fur Institute of Canada is aimed at creating new markets to support an earlier proposal to kill 140,000 gray seals over five years in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence.

70% of gray seals that frequent the area. So what they want to do is they want to diminish that. Okay, here's what it is. They have long complained that the growing population of gray seals is to blame for eating too many commercially viable fish, which has resulted in repeated calls for a call. Okay, so they want to kill the seals to save the fish market, so they're going to get people to buy dicks. Right, so they make it financially viable. Look at this.

This is racist. The penises of juvenile adult animals may be dried and sold as sexual enhancement products, particularly to Asian buyers. Wow. Well, that's because it's not meant to be racist. It's because in traditional Chinese medicine, the seal penis was used as a potency product. I understand. But to target those Asians, those poor fools. Well, they're not poor fools anymore because you know what? They switched.

So we write this paper and literally the World Wildlife Fund attacks us. And I did not see that coming, right? I thought, boy, the World Wildlife Fund is going to be psyched because here's some good news for a change. Right, right. But they don't want good news. They only want bad news because people pay and they do what they can to fix things when it's bad news. And they forget that you've got to have some good news along the way or people give up. Look at what it says here.

Asian consumers, particularly athletes, also consume a beverage called, how do you say that, Dalishen, athletes also consume a beverage called, how do you say that, Dalishen? Oral liquid that is made from seal penis and testicles, which they believe to be energizing and performance enhancing. How about some studies, motherfucker, before you start eating seal dicks? You want to get any and

try it? No, I'm good, bro. I don't need that. Why would you take that when you can get fucking Viagra? Exactly. I guarantee you Viagra's better. It is. I mean, if it's not better, it's good enough. Like, what are you trying to do? So we actually, because we got attacked by the World Wildlife Fund, we sent one of my, I had a graduate student from Hong Kong.

We had to send him to go back to Hong Kong for the holidays. They attacked you? The World Wildlife Fund, because they said that we're wrong. People won't switch. How did they phrase it? Well, they wrote an article. They rebutted us, and they said that we're wrong. People won't switch. How did they phrase it? Well, they wrote an article. They rebutted us. And they said, no, no, no.

Our data show, when we tried to get people to switch from rhino and tiger horn to aspirin, they wouldn't. Aspirin? Yeah. So they won't switch to Viagra. And I'm like, look, I think Viagra is different from aspirin. I got a headache. I take an aspirin. I say, yeah, I think my headache got better faster than it would have otherwise.

A little bit vague. You need a Viagra. You take it. You're like, yep, that sucker worked, right? There's visual evidence. And so we argue that it's different. And so we actually went into these clinics and we asked people in traditional Chinese clinics in Hong Kong, what do you take for headache?

What do you take for gout? What do you take for erectile dysfunction? And that was the one case where they'd switched. So consumers all over the world, they know when a better product comes along. They know when they've got no options, like, well, you might as well eat a seal's penis because that's as good as anything, or because nothing works. Maybe you'll get a little bit of a placebo effect, or you know, oh, hey, look, there's something that actually works. That's what I'm going to buy. What I read about one of the issues with rhino horn with some Asian buyers

is that also it's a signal of affluence of affluence that's exactly right yeah it's prestige purchase that's so sad it is super sad saddest shit ever because that is such a crazy animal but bizarre creature that almost seems like a living dinosaur it looks like and we're losing them left and right because people are killing them for their fucking horn which is basically just collagen right now it's fingernail. Yeah. It's bananas. It just doesn't make any sense to me that that is still, that they haven't realized that there's no value in it, that there's no physical value.

It doesn't really give you erections. What else is it supposed to do? Fever. Fever. It's got a long list, unfortunately. I know. And they're still buying it. And they're buying it again for affluence.

Like they get a kick out of it. Exactly. It's like buying a Maserati. Wow.'re still buying it. And they're buying it again for affluence. They get a kick out of it. Exactly. It's like buying a Maserati. Wow, that's so crazy. That's so sad. Oh, my daughter's outside the door. Hi. Get out of here.

You're bothering us. Yeah, it's so strange to me that there are these specific cases, right? Like, it's not like people are looking for giraffe horns. Yeah, it is funny, isn't it? They're looking for rhino horn. Do you think that they made an association like, damn, if I was jacked like a rhino, those chicks would like me. I need to get that horn and eat it and my dick would get hard.

I do think so because if you look at the long list of products, they look pretty phallic. And mostly people eat phallic things in order to gain potency. Is there something crazy about seal dicks? Like what's going on with- They're decently sized. Decent's a good word for that.

I like that. And so, you know, you think, oh, I eat that sucker, I'll get big too. Right. We're so weird. But it's so weird that in the face of new evidence that people haven't adopted, you know, this new evidence and they still cling. At least some people cling to those old ideas. They do, but here's the thing. So our pre-modern ancestors didn't understand germs at all, right?

There was no way they could have. It's such a bizarre idea that something that small could kill you. But they did know that if I touched you when you were sick, I might end up sick too. And that seems almost like a magical transference. And if you accept this, and they all know that. They'll shy away. We all evolved. Chimpanzees will shy away from disgusting stuff and open source and and people yeah yeah absolutely if

you get the right kinds of illness that that that manifests that you're seriously outwardly sick and contagious people find it disgusting and so that kind of magical contagion it's super easy to see well then to make you think that well rhino Warren will make my dick bigger too yeah I guess I mean are there any instances where that stuff is real where it does actually work that way not that I know I can't think of any but it is the case that you being sick will make me

sick no question but nothing that like you eat an animal's thing you consume no but if it is the case imagine that like after you and I chat you say hey bill here have my jacket and now i go out with your jacket on and people go oh man he's got joe rogan's jacket he's cool and i've got a little bit of your cool and now the girls are like me too and that does happen like when hercules put that lion's head on yeah yeah the head over and the lion's thing on

his body it's a sign that you that you you kicked some ass to have that thing. That's true. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. You know, it's just, we're so weird. You know, just the human animal itself is just such a strange thing. And the more you study it, the more you go deeper and deeper into the layers of weirdness that we are. Yeah. And psychology is pretty good about finding out our average weirdnesses. We're not so good at finding out the really unusual weirdnesses because we can't predict that one out of a thousand behavior very well. We can predict what people tend to do and the bell curves tend to split.

We can't say what some random psycho or genius or artist or whatever will do under those circumstances because that's not what our models are designed for. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting when you think about our interactions also with all the various animals that we've come across all throughout our life as human beings. And that people have chosen some to cherish and some to take on as food sources and some to worship. Right. And often it makes good sense. So dogs are great because we have great vision, but our noses and ears don't work very well. If we could have somebody around who could hear and smell well and is on our side, that's a huge plus, right? It's worth feeding that thing or at least tolerating it and it eats the scraps. And some of them, cats, they're annoying.

They don't like you, but they're good at killing rats and other vermin that would have, once we were agriculturalists, those kind of vermin would have been a real problem. They'd have been largely irrelevant when we were still hunter-gatherers. So we had dogs. We domesticated those while we were hunter-gatherers. But cats, the best I know, is like ancient Egypt and these societies that are now storing grain and things like that. So those ancient systems make good sense. You're making a deal with an animal that can achieve something that you can't achieve. And, of course, you're living in a world without chemicals and machines and all that kind of stuff. But tons of them are just totally random.

And in this culture, that thing is worshipped. In this culture, it's eaten. And that sort of stuff is super hard to predict. Now, in studying all this stuff and writing this book, how much has this changed the way you just see humans? Like as you're just going to the mall, right? It does change it. Right. So you see, like, I remember being proud of my son when he told a lie. Cause I was like, Oh, good on you, mate. And so we're, we're in the, we're in the playground and this little boy is playing with him. And my son doesn't have a lunchbox at all.

He doesn't own one. And the little boy says, I got a Spider-Man lunchbox. And my son is like four, four and a half and he looks at the kid and he doesn't know who Spider-Man is because he hasn't seen the show yet. But he knows,

the kid's bragging, it's obviously something good. And he goes, yeah, I got a Grassman and a Leafman lunchbox. So he's Grassman and who's Leafman? Nobody.

He just made the shit up, right? Because spiders, right? The Spider-Man, there's a Grassman. He's looking around for other things. And so I was actually proud of him because it showed, A, he's got theory of mind down. He knows what the kid can and can't know.

And B, he knows that telling these stories are going to be important for his place in the social hierarchy. So the kid looks at me and I'm like trying not to laugh, right? Because I got to support my son. Right. And he's like, really? And I'm like, damn right, kid. And so you can imagine that without this background, you might say, look, we should discourage this kind of line. But it gives you a little bit of a different perspective on it.

It's also probably weird because your kid realizes, yeah, my dad's got my back. Well, that's good, too. I don't have a grass man and a ham hop. Thanks, bro. Exactly. And then you should always have your kid's back. Yeah. But grass man and leaf man, you've got to pull them aside.

Like, dude, you've got to come up with an animal that's like a thing. Right. Try to do something that's got— Like a wolfman. What could Grassman actually do besides photosynthesize? And get eaten by cows. Exactly. That's what he does.

But he was on the spur of the moment, and he's only four, so I decided it was good enough. Yeah. And then also cattle worshiping is very fascinating, too. worshiping is very fascinating too. The Hindus and all these different tribes and different cultures that worshiped cattle where other people just thought of them as food sources. Right. And so again, I don't know the origins of that, but you can imagine a system whereby, well, if you keep cattle and you benefit from them rather than eating them, you're going to get some gains from that. And we do know when you shift from being a hunter-gatherer to basically killing and eating stuff, to being a pastoralist, so you have cattle or sheep or whatever, or to being a farmer, you suddenly have to start taking on the long game.

So humans are perfectly capable of envisioning unfelt needs no matter what kind of society they're in. But hunter-gatherers are living for today. And so it's kill it, hunt it, share it out amongst all of us, and then we eat it, and then we'll worry about tomorrow when it comes along. Well, once you shift to having herds or having land, that psychology doesn't work anymore. And so what's super interesting is it took literally like 10 or 20,000 years. We've got the implements in place to be agriculturalists, but we're not planting. And we're just grinding stuff that we gather. And why did it take so long to plant? Well, maybe it was weather, maybe it was a bunch of things. But part of it is you have to shift your psychology over and say, all right, I've got to stop thinking about eating, killing and eating it today.

I've got to say, well, all right, well, would it be beneficial to me to keep this beast around and have it for tomorrow and drink its blood or its milk or whatever? And one way to get there might have been, well, let's create a religion that says we can't eat them today because that will solve it immediately, right? That's one way to look at it. But have you ever looked into some of the other hypotheses on the origin of cattle worship? I think it, again, has to do with psilocybin because the psilocybin mushrooms grow on cow shit. And that would be totally cool. And not only that, but because it has benefits. So like societies can do anything they want, right?

And there's some crazy systems that they do. And a lot of those are really bad ideas. They're sources of infection and disease and death. And those societies tend not to grow. But societies that do things that happen to be good ideas, even if they got it from mushrooms and things like that, those are going to really pass along. And so you've got a lot of people on this planet who worship cows, which suggests that whatever got that started actually probably had a benefit because those societies grew. And because worshiping cows is not something like when you come to me and say, hey, man, I worship cows. And I'm thinking, okay, I'd rather eat them, but fine, right?

It's hard to imagine being persuaded, but it's easy to imagine growing up in that system over imitating, right? We talked about that. You automatically just copy. Dad worships cows. Things are working out well for him. I'll do the same. And then you've got, and that's a good thing for your society to do because you can drink its blood or its milk or whichever, your lactose tolerant, whatever you do. And then

that allows your society to grow. Was there anything surprising to you in writing this book and researching it and putting it together? Was there anything that really just had made you step back and go, wow, I didn't see that one coming? Look, there's a lot of things that I didn't see coming. And a lot of times where I thought I had an idea of how it all worked and then I thought I would read a lot of more papers and I'd go, oh, that's not even possible. They didn't have that capability or whatever. What surprised me was that a big part of where this book comes from is that then colleagues would say they would know I'm working on this and they'd say, well, come give a talk at my conference on leadership. And I'd say, well, I don't know anything about leadership. And they go, well, surely something, it must have implications for

that. And every time they asked me to do that, you know, I'd say, okay, I'll give it a try. And then literally you sit down and you think about it and you realize, wow, there are important implications for leadership or innovation or happiness or sociality. And I never saw them coming. And so it was literally friends of mine kind of forced, I had one goal, which is to just understand social intelligence and how to become so socially intelligent. And that was where I started. And friends just kept asking me to look at other things. And every time I did, there was an answer. Sometimes it was an answer that was easier to find and sometimes harder to find, but it was always there. And what that tells me is that there's really a lot of value

in taking the anthropology and the biology and putting them together and saying, all right, where do we come from? And now what can that tell us about who we are today? That's an interesting sort of intellectual exercise too, right? A different perspective on the material that you're going over is somebody forces you into a little box. Like, tell me you know what

what hat you know what's the influence on or what the impact on creativity yeah what's the impact on leadership or all these different yeah yeah yeah just to give you a different view let's look at it from the left let's look at it from the top let's look at it from below and that's what's so fun about science is you can say all right well let's see if it tells us anything that either we already know is true and now we could get new things that we would know about it, or if it tells us something that we don't even know but that might explain the way the world is. And both of those are valuable because then you can run off and try to test them,

and a lot of dead ends. I mean, that's what science is all about. But some of them will hopefully not be dead ends, and you'll run off and test them and say, holy shit, now I understand innovation. Now I understand whatever. What's interesting about this kind of material is that it gives you, me as an individual, it gives me insight into my own behavior. And I think it would do a lot of people, do all of us some real good if we had a better understanding of what our motivations are

and how we got to this point in civilization and what we actually are. You know, I mean, maybe it will or won't change your behavior, but at least it'll give you some insight into. Oh, I totally agree. And the thing is that when I find myself getting upset because you disagree with me about something trivial or even important, like politics or something, and it takes a second, you've got to stop and say, hold on, I don't have any privilege access to the right way to do things. Right. And so the fact that you care more about X and i care more about y doesn't mean that you're like an evil person and must be overcome it means that probably we ought to be talking to each other and trying to find a compromise solution that makes things work best but there's this automatic instinct to think that you are evil because you

disagree with me and so the beauty of this kind of the more you know about this stuff in the past and our evolution our origins the more you know that literally we've evolved to do that because if we didn't do that we were screwed but now we don't need to anymore and so now we can say well hold on i'm a lefty and you're you know in my example you're a righty and we disagree about this particular president but fine let's see if we can both agree on a goal that will make both of us happy rather than no you're evil and all i have to do is overcome you. One of the things that I've really tried very hard from doing this podcast is to not be attached to ideas and to do that as an exercise. And I think over the course of the years I've been doing this,

I've gotten way, way better at that. But it's just so fascinating when I encounter it in the raw form. Like when I go to a party and I just run into some guy who's a dad and he brings something up and I tell him, well, that's not totally true because of this and then you see this like the blood starts pumping and the heart starts beating and they're trying to look at some way you're wrong and it becomes a personal thing it gets very very heated and it's easy for all of us to do that and my job and your job is the same it's to say okay is it time to abandon this idea is there a time to defend it

and when I was young and an academic there was no way I was abandoning. That was loss. All I was going to do was defend. So you attack me and I marshal everything I can and I try to attack you back. And it was some of my colleagues were like, hey man, when you're wrong, it's cool. That's what science is. And I'm like, you're right. You're right. I've got to start. And so now, even though I love the give and take of academics and I love to argue about stuff, I try really, really hard to keep in my mind, well, what if what you're saying right now is right? Rather than trying to just attack it, which is my automatic instinct to say, well, what of it that you're saying now might be a value that I should actually be incorporating and not trying to stomp on? Yeah. And also just the ideas aren't you. You're you and these ideas are just something that you're tossing around like a beach ball. Yeah, exactly right. And that's super hard to keep in mind because everything that we come to own, we get attached to.

And if I tend to have my ideas because they tend to make the world a more hospitable place to build, then in a way I kind of do need to defend them. Because if you convince me, no, the way the world should work is whoever's strongest gets everything while I'm stuffed. And so I need to try to fight against a lot of alternative views. And I have to overcome that in my effort to find what the right answer is as well. So it makes good sense that our ideas are like possessions, that we have attitudes toward our ideas, just like we have toward the objects that we own, that mean something to us, to our family, to our group, et cetera. That all makes really good sense. And the other side of that coin is if we're talking about the way things used to be, in a pre-medical world, the chances of you carrying different pathogens than I carry is reasonably high. And if you infect me, I'm screwed.

Now, if you do things differently than I do things, so you eat this food and I eat that food, what's different could actually be wrong from my perspective because if I do what you've done, I might get myself sick because you've adapted to that thing. And so we literally, probably for good evolutionary reasons, came to view cultural ways of doing things that are different as if they're wrong, because that saved us, that protected us from the kind of pathogen vectors that you've gotten adapted to, but that I haven't. That's fascinating. So this is almost like ingrained in us. Well, we've evolved to be this way. And so it's hard to undo that. Do you think that with the access to information that we're currently enjoying,

that because there's so much information now, and it's so easy to get to, that perhaps there'll be more instances of people not becoming attached to their ideas and recognizing that they are separate, that you are just a thinking organism and what the facts are and what reality is, is just something that's happening. And you don't have to be personally attached to it. It's not a part of your identity. Yeah, I hope so. Because in an ideal world, we could have the things that we're attached to that don't really matter. I'm an iPhone guy and you're an Android guy. Who cares, right? We could argue about it and be silly and have a good time.

Exactly. We could still be friends and all that. And then we could, when there's something that mattered and, no, this political strategy will make everyone poorer or sicker or whatever, then we could be willing to change our minds. Because in the end, I think we've got this evolved desire to latch on to these things, these ideas and values and products even and all that. And so it'd be nice if we could do it with the trivial and let the stuff that really matters guide us by its accuracy. Well, it'd be also nice if the stuff that we do with trivial, it stays actually trivial because there's so many people.

Well, I guess it goes with sports teams but it also goes with brands of cars I've heard people say I've always been a Ford guy I love Fords it probably reminds you of the Ford your dad drove I guess I would never buy a Chevy

really? never? it's funny isn't it what if the best fucking car ever is a Chevy and you have the opportunity to buy it? You're like, no, no, I'm a Ford guy. Right, right. What benefits you? It's some strange reason. There's some weird motivation to stick to your initial statements.

Yeah, so I think it's like Oliver Wendell Holmes or someone who said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin to small minds, right? But we all have these foolish consistencies. Because part of the problem is if I move around with the wind, you look at me as I'm a nothing. If I can't stand by what I believe in, then you have no respect for me. But what if what you believe in is incorrect? Right. That's when it becomes a problem. Are you supposed to cling to that? Right.

I mean, that's where it gets real weird, right? Right. And so what you obviously, what you ideally want is here's my value structure and it's unchangeable and unnegotiable. Yes. And yet when you show me that my attitudes are impeding my own goals, then I'm willing to change them to achieve that value structure. And I think the best politicians and scientists and artists and comedians and all the rest are the ones who can do that.

Yeah. I like what you said. Like, here's my value structure. These are my ethics. These are my morals. This is how I treat people. This is who I am. But all that other stuff is just information.

Yeah. It's all means to an end. And so some people care a lot about loyalty. Other people care a lot about fairness. Other people care a lot about sanctity and purity, right? There's different values that are important in all of the world. We all care about them. But some people weight one set more than another

set. John Hyde, I don't know if you've had him on your show, but he does this work and he's one of the first people who pushed these ideas. And you can predict them by people's politics and stuff like that. And so if we all agree they all matter, but the problem is then we get into an argument where you tell me loyalty is more important

than I tell you fairness or harm is more important. And then we're never going to see eye to eye in all probability. You know, with two humans that are healthy, that's an interesting discussion because why do you think fairness is more important? Why do I think discipline is more important than fairness or education is more? Whatever it is. I think that when someone clings to this idea that this is the most significant aspect of human civilization, that's always weird too. And it's hard when they can't acknowledge other possibilities, right? And again,

all these things are, I hate to say it, but they're like 50% genetic, right? Some of us are more open-minded and some of us are more closed-minded. And there's probably good reasons to be that way that made you successful under one set of circumstances versus another. Because extroversion, for example, almost all people prefer extroverts over introverts. But extroverts are all sorts of risk for disease because they're constantly up in everyone's face. And so in ancestral environments, it was probably pretty costly to be extroverted. And you paid a price that introverts didn't have to pay when you got sick. But it's also like we gained so much creativity and insight from introverts.

Of course. But at a social level, extroverts benefit. Introverts might benefit by then running Microsoft and being the greatest artist and all that. And that's, again, we talked about this earlier. The beauty about being human is how many different ways you can achieve the same goal. Yeah. What are your thoughts on the influence of epigenetics? Look, it's super interesting.

So I know little about it, very little about it. My behavioral genetics colleague insists that there's no good evidence among humans for multigenerational epigenetic effects. We know that they exist now in some animals. You can do the experiments pretty easily to get these multigenerational epigenetic effects. Can you explain to people what we're talking about? Yeah. So epigenetics is basically you can turn genes on and off in the simplest sense. And so environmental factors will matter. Like maybe when you're in utero, there's a famine, and that's a common thing that's looked at. We'll look at that in rats, for example. We'll

underfeed the mother when the baby's in there. And that causes the baby's methylation of some of the genes. I don't understand the science of it at all. But it turns some genes on and some genes off. And so a baby of a mother rat who was raised, who was in utero when the mother was underfed, will mature more rapidly. It'll eat everything that's not nailed down. And it'll have sex with lots more rats than a regular, than a rat that didn't have its mother starved.

And the key thing is, that makes good sense because it's a way to respond to times of famine. Grow as fast as you can, reproduce as quickly as you can, because reproduction is a currency of evolution. The fact that you exist and live is trivial. The fact that you passed on your genes, that's what evolution works with. So it's a great way to change with the local environment. And there's some very interesting evidence that then those effects are even in the next generation. So the child of a rat that was in a mother who was underfed

will also have some of these strategies. I believe they find that in humans as well, people that have suffered from famine. That's the argument. But none of the data, my behavioral genetics colleague says none of those data are robust enough. It's sort of like some of the criticisms

you made of what I've said. And you're right. The data suggests things that might be, but there's lots of alternative explanations. So we don't yet know. What I've read is about longevity, that there was some sort of evidence that points to the descendants of people who survived famine, they live longer. Right. And so the question might be why. And so we know, for example, that if you're in utero during famine, males are more likely to be aborted than females when it gets really bad. Female fetuses are probably more robust.

But if you ignore that gender effect, in all probability, those fetuses that could survive in a mother during famine might just be the more robust specimens, right? And so you might just be culling out the people who wouldn't have lived as long. Right. And so it's super hard. You know, you don't do experiments on these things in humans. You can do experiments on mice and rats and try to find these things out. The downside is, you know, if you've read about a million cancer drugs that are really going to help us and then they disappear, it's because it works in a mouse and it doesn't work in us. And the downside of these things is even mice and rats differ from each other. And so,

and we're a long way from either of them. And so the epigenetic effects that they show, there may be good reason why we don't. Yeah. There's some real ethical questions in regard to running studies like that on human beings. Of course. Yeah, exactly. We're going to have to develop headless humans in a lab that have no soul that we could do tests on. Well, we could. But I actually think that what we'll get really good at is the issue you raised earlier. And that is, I don't know everything that's ever happened to you. But someday, it'll be possible to know a ton of that stuff. And I'll be able to rule out all sorts of alternative causes. And diet is a perfect example. You guys talk about that a lot in the show. Well,

how do we know that this particular collection of foods will actually do you any good? How do we know how well people are sticking to it? And a big part of those effects are actually the psychological effects. So protein is a really good example that, you know, Steve Simpson argued in the early 90s that if you, he started with locusts, that animals are motivated to eat as a function of how much protein that they've consumed. And so the Atkins diet was the right idea, but a misunderstanding of the cause. It's just that protein, we evolved to feel full when you get protein. We didn't evolve to feel full from carbohydrates. And there's a host of reasons for that. And there's a host of other effects that are going on at the same time. But the consequence of

that is then when people's diets move around, you say, oh, look, this diet has this effect and that one doesn't. But you don't actually know what they've been doing because some diets are harder to maintain and they're cheating more or whatever. Someday we'll have much better evidence than all of that. You'll be wearing a device. I'll know what you consumed. I'll know an accelerometer. I'll know everything that happened to you. Well, that's another interesting aspect of genetics, right? There's one thing that we absolutely know is that some people respond differently to diets than other people do. And for some person, a particular type of diet is like beneficial and perfect

and just locks in. And the other person, it would be horrible. Yeah, absolutely. That's weird, you know, across the species. I know. You don't find that with dogs or... But at an ethnic level, it makes perfect sense because the people who've been eating different foods for a long period of time have to adapt to that, right?

And of course, agriculture is only 12,000 years old total, although we've been eating cereals before that. And lots of societies didn't have it at all or only had it very recently. And so it's super hard for some people to eat grains compared to other people to eat grains because they haven't adapted either diabetes-wise or all the other kinds of things that can cause it to go wrong. Certainly with alcohol, that's a giant factor. Yeah, exactly. And alcohol gets invented every time someone invents agriculture because all you do is you accidentally leave it there too long and it ferments, right? Right.

And there's an argument that we actually evolved to have a tolerance for beer rather than a distaste for it because once we're in early agricultural settlements, for the first time ever, we're crapping where we're drinking. We're not moving on. And so we foul our own drinking water. So beer is literally safer to drink than water low beer and wine low grade alcohol and so what the data suggests what people argue is that we evolved to actually have a taste for it but but a tolerance to it rather than a distaste for which makes sense evolutionarily because getting

drunk with hippos running around can't be a good idea also if you think about wine or wine or any booze, the first time you drink it, it's disgusting. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to drink. You develop a taste for it. That's exactly right. And lots of things are that way. Tabasco, you know, lots of these spices have antibacterial effects. And so the mothers are giving it to the kids where it's like my mouth would be on fire

if I ate what some six-year-old can eat in India or something like that. Wasn't that initially why they added wasabi to sushi? That's what a lot of people argue. And in fact, as you work your way from the poles to the equator, you get more and more spices. Because of course in Sweden there's six pathogens and you've got salt and pepper. In India and in jungle and in Africa, you've got a gazillion spices

to deal with. Garlic, all these things are super powerful antibacterials. Oh, that is a really interesting way of looking at it. Yeah. I'm sure, right? Like Mexico, very hot, spicy food, warm climate. Totally makes sense. Yeah, exactly. And the same thing happens with the profusion of religions and languages.

The closer you get to the equator, the more languages you have and the more religions you have. Because people start saying, you know, on the other side of the valley, literally you could have a pathogen that makes me sick. And so I'm going to stay away from you. And by staying away from you over time, we develop different languages, different religions. Again, back to Sweden, whatever you got, I got. There's three things to have, right? And so you're not a risk to me and we share the same language. We intermingle much more readily.

And there's more ethnocentrism as you go close to the equator. Wow. Keeping apart makes good evolutionary sense under those circumstances. But we live in a world where no one's keeping apart. Exactly. Now we live in a world where no one's keeping apart. Exactly. Now we live in a world where it makes it much, much more difficult. And you don't necessarily, at least in our blessed industrialized democracies where we've got good medicines, at least for now, they still work.

You don't need to anymore. Right. But we also have these crazy factory farming setups that lead to the kind of horrible super bugs that could kill a million people. Yeah, we do. I remember when I first found that out, that most of the major flus, like avian flu, swine flu, I didn't know why they were calling it the swine flu. And then I found out, no, it's from domesticated pigs, and then it somehow morphs and jumps to humans.

Like, what? And that was the cost we paid with agriculture. For the first time, we were cheek by jowl with a bunch of animals. And agriculture, I mean, hunter-gatherers eat them. The animal never lives long enough to give you the flu, right? Right. Wow. So everything, you know, there's always pluses and minuses when you change how you do things. And we, you and I are really lucky. We live in a time where all these great medicines exist and they haven't become worthless yet. And now it's really a race against the evolution of the bacteria and us devising new medicines that can continue to defeat them. Because everything's becoming treatment resistant,

right? That's how evolution works. And that's just starting to happen. And so now scientists have to work double time to keep inventing new drugs to stay ahead of the game, with the exception of some things that just, for whatever reason, bacteria don't seem to be able to evolve resistances to them. Well, what's fascinating to me is not just scientists creating these vaccines and all these different medicines to deal with these diseases, but the potential of shutting off genes, the potential of altering the human genome

and using things like whatever the future version of CRISPR is going to be. I mean, they've already figured out a way to stop certain diseases. Right. So those single gene things are great. Yeah. Remember, with everything being so polygenic, you don't just want to shut shit down willy-nilly. Right. And so then really what you're at the advantage is the point you made earlier.

So my diet should be 60% protein and yours should be 15% or mine should have more leafy vegetables than yours, whatever. And we'll be able to know that. We'll know how my gut's going to respond to it and how your gut will respond to it. Well, that's one of the things that 23andMe actually does. They do show like what foods you'd be more likely to be allergic to and what things you'd be most likely to be attracted to. And that's a great start. But what we really need is the polygenic scores that tell you how do you process leafy vegetables, how do you process fats, how do you process all that stuff. Yeah.

And so because genes account for most of our weight. That's most of the variance in whether we're obese or not. But nobody was obese when you and I were kids. Right. And tons of people are obese now. So what those genes really are is genes to sensitivity to something changing in our environment, either activity levels or the foods we're eating or how processed they are or how much carbs or whatever. We don't know, but that's what we're actually genetically sensitive to

because all of us have the same underlying problem that evolution didn't really worry about obesity because the problem was the opposite, starving. And so we're not really good at telling when we're full. And there's interesting evidence that suggests some really lovely studies that show that really one of the key guides of appetite was variety. When you eat a lot less variety, that's when your stomach tells you you're full really much more reliably. But as you add variety to your diet, which everybody on earth can do now, well, everybody who's got any money on earth can do now, that actually you short circuit the best mechanism we had to tell us to stop eating. Yeah, that's interesting.

And that was an argument that people who are experts on nutrition are making about one of the more recent diet plans that people are using. The carnivore diet is that just eating only meat. There's a lot of people that are doing that, and they're finding that they're having all of these really rapid decreases in autoimmune diseases and rapid recoveries from eczema and seborrhea and psoriasis. And a lot of people are saying, oh, it's the meat. Meat's great for you. Meat's great for you. And some nutrition experts are saying, eh, more likely this is a calorie, like you're at a calorie deficit. And by putting your body into a calorie deficit, you're almost like in a state of fasting. And you're decreasing your body weight because almost universally all these people that are talking about the positive benefits of these diets, these elimination diets and just eating one thing.

One of the things that they're showing is they lose a shitload of weight. Right. And so the thing is that I suspect you're right, that either they're cutting out what for them is the perpetrator, and who would ever know out of the 4,000 things you eat, right? Or it's literally the losing weight, and then hopefully they're taking multivitamins to make up for all the stuff that they're not getting, right? Yeah, I don't think they are. A lot of them are not doing that. It's really interesting. I've been following it pretty closely, and I've had quite a few people on the podcast, including really intelligent guys like Jordan Peterson is on this, and all he does is eat meat and salt. Right, and for me that wouldn't work, although I eat meat and fruit, basically, and then very little else.

What about leafy green vegetables? Well, I know I should, but I don't like them. Really? You don't like them? No, I don't like them. So I tend to avoid them. You don't like broccoli? Broccoli's edible. I know I should, so my wife makes them

and I'll eat a little bit of it. You're like a little kid. I know, I know. But in my way, it's like. That's the arguments I have with my eight-year-old.

I know, I know. And your eight-year-old's right. Now, by the way, it turns out there are genes that make people find broccoli more disgusting

and more bitter versus less bitter. Really? So some people really have, their tongue says no, broccoli is really nasty. It's called the being a little baby gene. But the one thing I would say, there's this really lovely study done with amnesics. And what they did is they fed people a couple different foods. And you try a few and then you eat one until you're full.

And then when you come back to – I don't know if you know this work like Paul Rosen started with amnesics. If you're densely amnesic, so I talk to you, I leave the room, I come back five minutes later, you don't know who I am because you've got brain damage. When I come back with lunch, literally you'll eat a second lunch. We have such poor mechanism that tells us we're full. We think we do. We think, oh, I've had a great dinner. I'm really full. What we don't realize is that's really driven a lot by the knowledge that we just ate.

Wow. And so what Rosen found when he went back and he had eat lunch till you're full He goes back in and says, oh, time for lunch. And literally they all eat it again. And so what's amazing about these studies is then this follow-up study, what they did is they served amnesics or control people foods that they sampled and food that they ate till they're full. So you sample potato chips and then you eat a tuna sandwich. And now I come back to you and say, if you're a normal and I say, do you want to eat a potato chip? Do you want to eat a tuna sandwich? If you're normal, you say, well, I just had lunch. I'm not really that keen to eat either of them anymore. If you're amnesic, you say, I don't want a tuna sandwich, but yeah, I'll have some potato chips.

And so you don't even need to know you ate it. And so your hunger mechanism is still there. But the fact is you've had a lot of tuna sandwich and that's controlling your appetite. It's making you feel like you don't want to eat it anymore. And so in the same sense, you go to a steakhouse, you think, well, I love this. My favorite steak. I could eat it forever. And then you finish it or not. And then you think, oh, I'm stuffed. And somebody goes dessert. You're like, actually, yeah, that does sound good. Right. Because now you're shifting and you're eating something else. And so I suspect that what guided our ancestors was the fact they had no variety. What's for dinner was not a question you ever asked. Whenever dad killed him, whenever mom dug up, there's two things there, right? And so you're going to gorge on the meat. There's not a vegetarian

hunter-gatherer on the planet. When you're hungry every day, everybody loves meat. It's not only whatever you can, everybody loves it. In every hunter-gatherer society, meat is a big deal. Someone comes home with a big kill, it's a big deal. When you can afford to be very well fed, suddenly you can start to think differently and even have different preferences, but you don't if you're a hunter-gatherer. And so literally, if dad killed a giraffe, you're just stuffing as much giraffe meat down the pipe as you can. And it makes sense of you to then evolve, okay, you're going to get nothing new out of the giraffe you eat other than you're going to poo it out the back end. It's time to shut this dinner down, right? But if you told me, oh, look, we've got this other thing, that's how,

well, there's nutrients in that I don't already have. And so you could imagine getting hungry again. That's what the data suggests. Well, it's interesting because that's kind of the argument that these carnivore diet people use is that that is the most beneficial food because that's the food that you look forward to the most, the protein. Right. but don't forget, you only need to do this within every meal. So if you sit down for your favorite lobster dinner, just have lobster, and then that doesn't mean you have to eat it for lunch or for breakfast tomorrow.

Now you can have pancakes, whatever it is. The key is within every meal, minimize your variety because that's where the effect is having itself. It doesn't have to carry over time. It doesn't mean you eat lobster every single meal. You know what's interesting? That's actually the Gracie diet. There's a jiu-jitsu family called the Gracies that started the UFC and world-famous Brazilian jiu-jitsu family, but just a family full of killers.

And one of the founders, I believe it was Carlos Gracie, invented this. He invented a diet that was basically you shouldn't mix foods together. If you're eating fruits, you should eat fruits by themselves. You eat meat, you shouldn't mix foods together. If you're eating fruits, you should eat fruits by themselves. You eat meat, you should eat that by itself. And that in combining all these things together, your body produces a variety of different enzymes. You don't get as much nutritional absorption. Now, that may be.

I have no idea. I don't know either. I don't understand the underlying bioscience. But what I do know, the psychology suggests that you'll stop eating sooner if within any one meal you have less variety. So purely the psychological level, we appear to have evolved to not want that anymore when we've had enough of that, be it a taro root our mom dug up or a giraffe our dad shot. So these sort of evolutionary traits that are inside of our bodies, they would sort of encourage us to eat much more if we have a variety of different foods like if you're eating at a buffet in vegas yeah versus if you're just eating chicken that's exactly right chicken you'll eat as much chicken as

really you need and then you'll stop i don't want any more chicken but if there's chicken and mashed potatoes and corn on the cob you'll keep going and then coleslaw and our ancestors never faced that problem so they we don't know how to deal with it. Right. And the other side of that coin, so what Steve Simpson did, this guy who did the early study on protein and locus, he took his biology students on field trips, and he would doctor the food to increase the protein in the food or decrease it in the food. But it's the exact same foods. Like you're eating the same rolls and the same sushi, but he's increasing the levels of protein in those foods. And then it's a buffet. And all he does is weigh the food

when it starts and when it finishes across all the students eating it. And he found that as the protein levels go up, the amount of food that people eat at the buffet goes down. So there's these two parallel mechanisms. One, we're made of protein. And so that seems carbs do drive appetite, but not nearly as strongly as proteins do. So the tolerance in how much carbs you'll eat is huge. The tolerance in how much proteins you'll eat is very narrow. And he finds that, of course, and he finds that in crickets and now he finds it in humans. And then I think the other side of that coin is this variety. And the bad luck for us right now is we live in a world where, especially if you're poor, proteins are expensive and hard

to get. So you're going to have these high-carb diets, and then everybody can have variety. And variety is probably a really bad thing. That is so fascinating. Is that our good fortune is our demise? Yeah, exactly. In so many ways. I mean, you know, we evolved to seek out fat, sugar, and salt because they were in short supply. And now they're everywhere.

I know. And now if you eat them every time you see them, you're stuffed, right? They're everywhere, man. I mean, everything you eat is fat, sugar, and salt. Yeah, exactly. And it's not just what you eat them every time you see them, you're stuffed, right? They're everywhere, man. I mean, everything you eat is fat, sugar, and salt. Yeah, exactly. And it's not just what you eat. We also evolved. So if there's a novel person of the opposite sex who comes along, boy, what a rare event that was.

They are fat, sugar, and salt. Exactly. You should jump on that train, right? Because that will give you new genetic opportunities. But you look out the door. There's novelty everywhere. It's super hard. It's harder to stay married in a city than it is in the country.

It's harder to stay married if you're a celebrity than if you're a nobody because those people are just have novelty constantly they have variety constantly and the rest of us well you know there may be variety out there but they're not interested in me so it's kind of irrelevant anyway right bill thank you so much totally my pleasure i can't wait to read your book excellent for everybody It's available right now. As of today. Go get it, you fucks. This is awesome. Thank you so much.

Thank you. This was really fun. A lot of fun. Thank you. Bye, everybody.