Your Undivided Attention - The Race to Cooperation

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

It’s easy to tell ourselves we’re living in the world we want – one where Darwinian evolution drives competing technology platforms and capitalism pushes nations to maximize GDP regardless of externalities like carbon emissions. It can feel like evolution and competition are all there is.If that’s a complete description of what’s driving the world and our collective destiny, that can feel pretty hopeless. But what if that’s not the whole story of evolution? This is where evolutionary theorist, author, and professor David Sloan Wilson comes in. He has documented where an enlightened game, one of cooperation, rather than competition, is possible. His work shows that humans can and have chosen values like cooperation, altruism and group success – versus individual competition and selfishness – at key moments in our evolution, proving that evolution isn’t just genetic. It’s cultural, and it’s a choice. In a world where our trajectory isn’t tracking in the direction we want, it's time to slow down and ask: is a different kind of conscious evolution possible? On Your Undivided Attention, we’re going to update the Darwinian principles of evolution using a critical scientific lens that can help upgrade our ability to cooperate – ranging from the small community-level, all the way to entire technology companies that can cooperate in ways that allow everyone to succeed. RECOMMENDED MEDIAThis View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution by David Sloan WilsonProsocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups by David Sloan WilsonAtlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Galt III by David Sloan WilsonGoverning the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor OstromHit Refresh by Satya NadellaWTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us by Tim O’ReillyHard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace & Jim Erickson RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES An Alternative to Silicon Valley Unicorns with Mara Zepeda & Kate “Sassy” SassoonA Problem Well-Stated is Half-Solved with Daniel Schmachtenberger Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_

It's easy to tell ourselves that we're living in the world that we wanted. Where Darwinian evolution driving a win-lose game between competing technology platforms was destined to turn out a more addicted, outraged, polarized society. Where ruthless competition and markets between companies is destined to produce the world that we live in. Where a win-lose game between nations to maximize GDP and forget about carbon emissions is all that's possible. That evolution and competition are all there is. And if that's a complete description of what's driving the world and our collective destiny, that can feel pretty hopeless.

But what if that's not the whole story of evolution? Our guest today is evolutionary theorist, author and professor David Sloan Wilson. And he's documented where an enlightened game, one of cooperation rather than competition, is possible. His work proves that humans can choose values like cooperation, altruism, and group success. over individual competition and selfishness. Because evolution isn't just genetic, it's cultural, and it's a choice. I'm Tristan Harris. I'm Azaraskin.

And in a moment in history, where where we're headed isn't what we actually want, it's time to slow down and ask, is a different kind of conscious evolution possible? Today on your undivided attention, we're going to update the Darwinian principles of evolution using David's critical scientific lens, and find ways that we can cooperate, ranging from how small communities can do this, all the way up to potentially global technology companies. And if the world doesn't have to be this way, that gives us real reason to hope. Welcome to your undivided attention. Today, I am thrilled to be welcoming David Sloan Wilson. It's a conversation I have been long looking forward to both Tristan and I

because it's so foundational to our work to just set this up a little bit for people. I think this interview in part is to give everyone a lens to see-through called evolutionary theory. It's like competition, mutation, selection, replication. If you've been listening to this show, you know there's sort of a way that we think, and that way that we think is really built upon tools like David Sloan Wilson's work. And you might hear evolutionary theory and think, oh, that's just about biology and how animals get the number of limbs that they do. But it actually applies much more broadly. These ideas apply to culture and to technology, which technology companies win, to which features within apps win.

And sometimes I think if you listen to the show, you might seem like, oh, we're just doomed. It's just like if we don't do it, somebody else will. and the way you see past that problem is through the lens of evolutionary theory. So, David, I'm so excited to have you on the show. I figured a good place maybe to start is actually something that I've heard you do in your lectures and other things

to ask the listener about where do the things that we think of as noble, like our noble traits? Where do they come from? Where do the things we think are not to noble? Where do they come from? Are it good or are we bad? And maybe start there. Well, in the first place, thanks to both of you. I'm big fans of both of you in this podcast.

Please forgive me for taking off running from the very beginning. But you said something important that I just want to affirm, all of this goes beyond genetic evolution. For so many people, when you say the word evolution, they heard the word genes. And this is genes plus more. This is genes plus culture. This is genes plus our personal evolution. So everything taking place around us, good and bad, can be understood from this evolutionary lens. And so what we need to ask the question is under what context, what environmental context do the noble traits evolve in competition with the ignoble traits? And then if we actually unlock that, then we can consciously steward our cultural evolution, and we can stack the deck in favor of

everything that we think of as altruistic, noble, and that is what we hear to talk about. And David, I think you have a story about chickens that might help explain this, starting with the question, where do the noble traits come from, and sort of the conundrum that hit Darwin, when he's like, there's a thing that my theory can't explain,

and that seems like a really gripping way to get people into these questions. Yeah, I actually use this story in my conversation with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, which was an interesting experience. And, you know, it bears directly on animal welfare. So, I mean, this is a cool example with many implications, but it's also something which is important in its own right.

So, I mean, let's say that you're a animal breeder and you want to breed a strain of chicken that lays more eggs. What do you do? So chickens have always lived in groups. Nowadays, it's cages, I'm sorry to say. but you have many groups of chickens, you monitor the egg laying of each hand, and then you select the most productive hand

to breed the next generation of hens. So that seems to make sense, except what you've actually selected is the biggest bully within each group. And after five generations, you've bred a strain of hyper-aggressive hens that are literally murdering each other, plucking each other's feathers in their incessant attacks.

And so what seems to be like a benign form of competition turns out to be pathological. So back to the drawing board, now let's say you monitor the productivity of whole groups and you select all the hens within the most productive groups to breed the next generation of hens. Now you get a strain of cooperative hens that don't bully each other.

And so now in both cases, there's competition. Competition is not a bad thing. In fact, competition is needed for change. But it's the level of competition in this case that makes all the difference. And that's what Darwin discovered way back when, and it was a gradual process for him, because at first he thought that his great theory could explain everything that had been attributed to a creator. And but gradually he realized that trace that involved doing unto others was the one thing he couldn't explain, because if natural selection is about favoring individuals that survive and reproduce better than other individuals, then it's the pro-social individual that loses that contest. But what Darwin realized was that there is the version of the second chicken experiment,

that even though selfishness beats altruism within groups, groups of altruists will robustly out-compete groups whose members cannot cohere. And so the second part of that statement is altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary. And so self-preservation is a good thing. Self-dealing is not. Helping kith and kin, a good thing, until it becomes nepotism and cronyism. My nation first, a good thing until it leads to international conflict. Strong growing economies a good thing until it leads to global warming.

And so what you find is almost everything that we see is a problem, everything pathological, is actually a form of cooperation at a lower scale. And so that is not hard to understand, but it explains so much that what we think, think we want actually gives us a world that we don't want. And this is why evolution doesn't make everything nice. It's what all creatures, all life forms, inflict upon each other unless the levels of selection are configured the right way. This is so profound that I think it's worth stopping and dwelling on because it is a root diagnosis for climate change, for inequality, every time that what's good for me is bad for a group above me or our nation or when

what's good for a nation is bad for everyone, that can be explained by seeing the world through this kind of competitive landscape and then asking at what level are we optimizing for? And when we look then through the lens of tech, you know, tech we are almost always optimizing for individuals. Individual usage, individual engagement. So would it be surprising at all that it would cause the thing above it, like groups, coherence, governance, to start breaking? Yeah, your point about the chickens, I think it's really worth pausing for people. So if I'm optimizing for what's the most producing chicken, if I just make a transplant of that metaphor to Twitter, what's the most producing attention user on Twitter? Well, it's going to be the outgrouping, aggressive, loudmouth,

cynical, commenting on everything as loudly as possible, because that's what's going to get me the most attention. And so how do we create these cooperative mechanics is kind of what the core of your whole work is? And I would you like for you to respond to the idea that cooperation is for Patsis, you know, the peaceful tribes get killed by the warlike tribes. Daniel Schmachtenberger talks about that. The, you know, extractive energy economies win over the sustainable energy economies because they just get more resources and then kill the other guy and take their stuff. What you're talking about is a flip to the logic. How do we switch from this kind of ruthless Hobbesian war of all against all individual selection into this kind of group

selection? It's here that we could begin to outline an optimistic picture about how at the end of the day we really have a blueprint, you might say, an optimistic blueprint for how to make things better at all scales, all contexts, including the global scale. But it begins with a, I need to add a new concept, which is the concept of major evolutionary transitions. And so in nature, I mean, so often we think that nature, left to itself, strike some kind of harmonious balance, so we could look at ecosystems or something, and there's wisdom for us to learn and so on. But certainly most primate societies, including chimp societies, one of our closest ancestors, you would not want to live in those societies.

Those societies would be despotic in human terms. Naked aggression is over a hundred times more frequent in a chimp community than in a small-scale human community. And so in most species and ecosystems, you see some cooperation, but you also see a lot of disruptive, self-serving behaviors. But sometimes what happens is you get a shift. in the balance so that basically altruistic groups beating selfish groups is what prevails. And when this happens, the higher level unit, the group, actually becomes the new organism.

And that explains what makes our species so special. Unlike so many animal societies where there's a little cooperation and a lot of competition, our ancestors evolved mechanisms to suppress bullying behaviors so that between groups group selection became the predominant evolutionary force. And so that's a major evolutionary transition. We're selected to cooperate originally in small groups, of course, just very small groups. But nevertheless, that cooperation caused the group

to be the organism to a large extent. So cooperation is required to explain our nature as a species. And I think it's become clear. It's a guarded form of cooperation. It's not just that we've all to be nine. is that we evolved to be vigilant and capable of defending ourselves against within-group disruption. And so if human history is a process of cultural evolution

leading to every larger scales of cooperation. So you can't just say the cooperation often loses. Absolutely not. Cooperation wins much of the time, and we need to cause it to win more so on at larger scales. when you talk about evolution is the problem not the solution and conscious evolution is where we need to go there's a sense that if I just tune into what listeners might be feeling I look out in the world I see that there's a sense that we're on a dangerous path as a civilization and hey we're letting

just markets rule the world and we're letting what people click on the most rule the world and if markets determine the world we end up in and if you know what people click on the most is just a reflection of what people want, then why should we be sad about the world that we're getting? Because this is evolution that's just selecting for the best possible world that we could be living in. But I know that you would be shaking your head and saying, well, that's not true. And that's kind of what you're speaking about in terms of the need for conscious evolution. Technology had a poor selection mechanism using your language. That in the evolutionary view, the social media world has created this new evolutionary environment

in which bad ideas, you know, fake news spread six times faster than true news, outrage and outgrouping political language, massively out-competes non-outgrouping language. And if we make the mistake to say, we are just selecting for what we want, I think the premise of this show is that that's not what this is all about and that you have a more optimistic view of human nature if you can see through the mirage that this is not conscious evolution as it is.

And in that lens, we can ask, well, what is Twitter doing? We now go back to variation, selection, replication. Twitter has sort of replaced a whole bunch of the gatekeepers. There are a lot more people, so there's a bigger variation, there is less of a selection, and a greater rate of replication. And if we ask, what would that look like in the human body? Our cells are dividing. They're mutating.

Many of those mutations, if they're not selected for, can lead to cancer. And if those replicate, your body dies. Well, that's actually a pretty good analogy. to what things like Twitter do to the body of society. Cancer is just the right metaphor. I said earlier that a major transition is never complete. So if you look at multicellular organisms ourselves, what you find is most of the way we are

is based on individuals or their groups who are going to be producing better than other groups. Cancer is an exception of that rule. Cancer is natural selection taking place among cells within our bodies. It's the chicken experiment within our, bodies. A mutant cancer cell is the mean chicken. And it's proliferating at the expense of the cooperative cells. Evolution has no foresight. So the cancer cell is adaptive at that level.

And of course, the fact that the whole body, including itself, might die, is beside the point. So against that background, if you just frame shift upward, and if we think of disruptive, self-serving traits in a social group is like cancer, which is spreading, at the expense of the cooperative strategies, then we can see something like what's taking place at Twitter. And really a whole laissez-faire economy, the concept of laissez-faire is what is revealed as being profoundly untrue.

The idea that the pursuit of lower-level interests robustly benefits the common good is profoundly untrue. Now, the good news is, is that we have examples of the few actually look at successful change efforts, what you find is that people have pragmatically arrived at that goal. Without anyone thinking of it formally, an evolutionary terms, if you look, for example, at the famous Toyota lean methodology of continuous improvement, if you look at how a Toyota assembly plan is organized, you see they're actually selecting the

practices on the assembly line in terms of the efficiency of the whole operation. And so this is not brand new. This is something actually that us humans have converged upon, again, and again and again, because it's frankly the only thing that works, and we can begin to think about the common denominators of what all groups need is to cooperate and to be adaptable. That's true for all contexts, all scales, and seeing that in its general form is just tremendously useful. This is now why I can be both realistic and optimistic. The premise of the solution space we want to explore is the idea that there is a way to have a means of selecting for a pro-social future. So I would love for you to talk about your work with Nobel Prize

winner Eleanor Ostrom's core design principles for how do we kick ourselves out of this win-lose rival-risk game into a pro-social game. So the reason that Lynn Ostrom is so important is that she actually solved that problem at a certain scale and a certain context, which is groups that attempt to manage common pool of resources. We're talking about the famous tragedy of the commons, the idea that the only way to regulate, first of all, the tragedy will always occur unless you privatize the common or unless you regulate it from above, there's your top down regulation. And what Lynn showed was that actually, not all, but some common full resource groups are able to self-regulate, but only if they implement certain core design

principles, which I'm about to list. And my work with Lynn, I'm blessed by the way, of just working with such towering figures. I mean, who could be more lucky than me to work with Ed Wilson and Lynn Ostrom and many others? But what we did together was we generalize the core design principles. These principles are needed, not just for common full resource groups, they're needed by all groups. Any group where people are trying to get something done together need these core design principles. And why is that? It's because they accomplish a major transition for the group. And I list them. And as I do, I want our listeners to keep some group in mind. Think of a group that you know well. And then ask yourself how well the group implements

the core design principles. So number one, a strong sense of identity and purpose. A group needs to know that it's a group, know that it's doing something important, know who's a member. If you don't see it as a group, then it's hard for that group to do well. Number two, benefits proportional to cost. Not sustainable for some members of the group to get the benefits and other members of the group to do the work. Must be some calibration where what you get from the group is proportional to what you give. Number three, fair and inclusive decision making. Not sustainable for some memories of the group to call the shots and for other memories to have no say. In the first place, that's a recipe for unfairness. In the second place, it doesn't make use of the wisdom of every

group member. Number four, monitoring agreed upon behavior. Unless we know what we're doing, unless there's transparency, then of course all bets are off. Number five, graduated sanctions. If you're not doing what you should, there has to be some corrective. But it doesn't have to start out mean, can start out friendly, and then escalate if necessary. And while we're correcting inappropriate behavior, let's reward good behavior. So abundant praise and reinforcement for good behavior, coupled with mild punishment for bad behavior, which escalates when necessary. Number six, fast and fair conflict resolution. Conflicts will occur. They need to be resolved quickly. And in a manner that's regarded as fair by all parties, in a dispute, most people think

they have a point of view. Number seven, local autonomy. A group has to have the elbow room to manage their own affairs. And then finally, number eight, appropriate relations with other groups, which reflect the same core design principles. And so here we have this tremendous conceptual simplification that the same principles are needed to govern relations among groups in addition to within groups. And so we can use these principles to study a small group, a very small group, or nations in the global village. That's how general the principles are. And so I think that you can see that in a group that strongly implements the core design principles, it's just hard to be a cancer.

It's hard to behave in a disruptive self-serving fashion. It's like the second chicken experiment, not the first. And groups where those principles are lax, then, of course, you could be the mean chicken or you can be the cancer cell, and the group will suffer as a result. And what you find, just as Ostrom found, not that all common full resource groups do this, no, they varied, only some did it. And so there's so much room for improvement. We've done studies that show that all groups need these core design principles and business groups

need them most of all. Business groups are most efficient in them. Why? Because they're the ones that are most brainwashed by the shareholder value model by the neoclassical economic model. You can demonstrate that on average, business groups. groups are deficient in all eight of the core design principles. That's why, you know, the meaning system that we know of is neoclassical economic theory is just motivating the

wrong suite of behaviors. And we have to change the theory in order to substantially change the practice. And so one of the things that this calls for is paradigmatic change in economic theory, which is one of the things that we're doing. I want to break down just so everyone's following along. You know, we give this metaphor actually in the social dilemma, so long as a tree is worth more dead than alive and a whale is worth more dead than alive, we're going to keep cutting down trees,

we're going to keep killing whales. And then if we run out, the problem that Ostrom was sort of became known for was how groups are managing common pool resources, common pool forests, pastures, fisheries, irrigation systems, and how common pool resources are vulnerable to over-exploitation. And then just to link that to the work on social media, we have this new commons that we never even thought was a resource or commons before,

which is the shared attention commons, or the shared reality commons, or the social trust commons. And as you start over-exploiting for attention, just like one tribe might be over-exploiting the number of fish in an area, and then suddenly there's no fish left for anybody, Ostrom was sort of exploring, hey, there are ways in which, without a central government, some top-down force with the monopoly of violence to tell, hey, both tribes knock it off, stop, you know, going for the fish, so we can make sure that they grow back. what she found was this is a protocol, if you have these eight design principles, in which many tribes, so long as they're operating according to these principles, could actually self-govern this multipolar trap around a limited number of fish or a limited amount of trees in the forest. If I don't do it, I'll lose to the guy that will. If I don't, you know, so you get the idea. So it's a profound solution to one of the most fundamental problems, because if you zoom that all the way up, we have a, you know, if I don't mine the oil and fossil fuels and get cheap energy and you do, if I stop doing that and you keep going with that, you know, I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to, you know, to stop climate change, but you're willing to do the thing that's good for the short term to

keep your economy running and growing, I'm going to lose to you. And so we're seeing a kind of an exponential version of these tragedy of the commons. And now with our work on social media, we're seeing that same thing. And so what I'd love to do is now apply that framework that you're outlining to what would we do? So now we have TikTok, which is one tribe. We have the Facebook, Zuckerberg tribe. We've got the Twitter tribe. And they're all mining for this shared resource of attention. And they've been over-exploiting it for a while. And society's waking up. that fact. And so we, you know, one solution is to take this some kind of global governance and say, we're going to shut each of your companies down if you keep mining for attention and ruining

democracies. But then you're saying, hey, is there some way at this larger scale in which there can be cooperation or pro-social behavior that is self-negotiated among the members? I know it's a huge question, but that's kind of the bullseye of the big problem that we've been dancing around for the last many years here. Well, one point it's important to make is that everything needs to be coordinated with the global good in mind. So in some sense, what's needed is a whole earth ethic. I think that we need to be thinking my primary social identity is I'm a human being and I'm a citizen of the world. And even though that was like beyond the imagination until a couple of centuries ago, now it is just the only thing that makes sense, given all

the forms of globalization that have taken place. Then we need to go to the opposite extreme and we need to have a cellular level of society. This is the level of the small groups where people are actually working, our schools, our neighborhoods, our businesses, our volunteer activities of all sorts. Everything we do in small groups, it's not that small groups are good per se. They need to be appropriately structured. But when they are, basically, then it's the best thing that you can do for an individual as a function in the context of meaningful and appropriately structured groups. And so that's something that anybody can do. So here's a bottom-up component to this. Before we get to anything large-scale like Twitter and TikTok, anybody can basically work at this

cellular level. And there'd be a tremendous benefit right then and there. And I think there's examples of middle-level entities. Any entity that's actually capable of influence can become benign if it adopts the right meaning system. And an example of this has just come to my attention is Microsoft under its current CEO, Sachin Adela. And his book, Hit Refresh, is a story basically about you have Microsoft, everyone knows about that, Bill Gates, hard driving, Steve Ballmer, the second CEO, even more hard driving. There was a humorous org chart that got published on the internet of the Microsoft org chart with every unit pointing guns at every other. unit. It was like the first chicken experiment, run amok. But then the third CEO, by virtue of who he is

as a person, nothing I learned in business school, but who he is as a person, his cultural heritage in India at his background, he had a special needs child and so on, just had a holistic ethos and was quite amazingly able to propagate that through one of the largest corporations in America. And Tim O'Reilly, in his book, WTF, What's the Future, and Why It's Up to Wuss, make some of the same point that if only you could get these Leviathan, these corporate leviathens, to just get it and set their sights higher in terms of what they should be doing, basically to convince them that if you're working on getting your packages is there in record time or maximizing clicks or whatever,

how disruptive this is going to be? And the impeccable arguments on that, anyone who gets that at that point can become part of the solution, not part of the problem. I would love to make this more concrete for our listeners because I think we sort of quickly moved through the set of core design principles, And it would be wonderful to see it in action. One way I might set this up is, all right, you, David Slim Wilson, have managed to convene all of the engagement companies.

You have the CEO of TikTok and of Microsoft and LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. And they're all right, we're here. What do we need to do together so that we could protect like the comms, which is, you know, the epistemic commons, or cultural commons, reality commons, engagement commons. How do we do it? How do we start thinking about it? And if this one's too hard as you haven't thought it through, feel free to replace it with a example that you have thought through or have more touchpoints.

Well, the only thing I'll do is scale it down. I've already said that the principles are scale independent. So what we do all the time is just that at the scale of small groups. So just imagine that we have a much smaller group and we bring them together. and we ask the question, why are you a group? What's important about doing something together? When you build up a common sense of purpose, that's the first core design principle.

You mean among the actors that are these tech companies as an example, right? So you're not asking each one, why is TikTok, TikTok? You're saying, why is TikTok and Facebook and Instagram, what makes all of us together a group as opposed to why is just one of the companies a group? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah, although I scaled it down. So imagine that it's a school. or a neighborhood or a business.

And then we can scale it back up. So basically, if you build up the sense of identity and purpose, so now the whole reason to be in the group has been sharpened. And now you ask the question, okay, what would we do in the service of those things? How do we act? We're agreeing that this is what we want to do. So we're tamping down differences of opinion. We're articulating the behaviors that will actually get us towards that goal.

begin to see this as a form of managed evolution. And now we have to visit some of the things that caused us not to do that, what are the that pull us away from that sort of thing. And then we have to make sure that we have to come up with some kind of contract or agreement or something like that. So if something goes wrong, then we notice it in the first place. And then we point it out, and then we try to correct it. And that can take place at the national scale or at the corporate scale just as easily as the, not just as easily, I take that back. But all the time when I write about this, I say it might be more difficult, but the problems are not different in kind. One of the big transitions I've heard you really articulate is the phrase that I have for in my

sort of internal encyclopedia repertoire of ideas is if might makes right, that world breaks because power leads to the full exercise of just these win-lose rival risk games, which then breaks society, just get to the chicken aggressive society. And you talked about the need to switch to an earned reputational view, that we don't view those who are powerful as being the best, or we don't look up to those. We look up to those who've earned the reputation through the high ground, through the moral high ground. And I think we're seeing that. I just want to give people a little bit of micro-optimism, at least, which is that, you know, there's New York Times article saying that people don't want to work at Facebook and Twitter and TikTok, right? And it's

because they don't want to work at the places that even though the most powerful companies in the world, they know that it's starting to carry a little bit of a social stigma. I think things like the social dilemma have increased that inversion of what we used to think of is it's cool to work in tech. It's cool to start your next billion dollar social media company. And now it's like, oh, you're another one of those guys that's ruining the world. And, you know, and so that is shifting the currency, the cultural currency of what we look up to. And I do think that one of the things that stuck out for me and what you've shared is being able to change the currency of success that we are valuing. You know, selection only works if you have values. Unconscious selection is just

basically fitness without saying, well, what's the world that we actually want to create for our kids? And I think that more and more people, especially as they see the metacrisis, you know, mess of problems that we face from economic crises, culture wars, ecological crisis, social media that emergency, trust crisis, that people want to focus on and work at the places where they can actually feel purposeful. And I think the price tag of not feeling purposeful is going up and up and up and up, and more people are going to opt for meaningful, purposeful work. I can only say that from the messages that we see and we hear from people, that increasingly seems to be the case. And that's where at least some hope can lie for us. And the idea that our meaning systems are like our genes

really consolidates that. It clarifies what it means to change the way we think. That's not superficial. That's no small matter. That's like changing our genes. And I think that the more these behaviors that are taking place all around us are properly seen as cancerous, and there's no real defense against that,

then that puts the actors in a much more morally precarious position certain things that are defendable because, indefendable. Then at the practice level, I think it's encouraging to know that if an agent, let us say a company, really puts this into practice. It really is the case that altruistic groups beat selfish groups. And so if you do have a corporation, let us say that truly practices these principles of caring and a stakeholder value model rather than a shareholder value model. And really sincerely does that. It turns out that they perform. I'm very, very well.

They beat the competition. David, thank you for joining us on your undivided attention. It's been great having you. Yeah, real pleasure. Thank you. David Sloan Wilson is a prominent evolutionary thinker and biologist. He is State University of New York's Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology Emeritus at Bingampton University.

And he's president of the nonprofit organization, pro-social world, a training platform whose mission is to consciously evolve a world that works for all. His most recent books are This View of Life, completing the Darwinian Revolution, pro-social using evolutionary science to build productive, equitable, and collaborative groups, and his novel Atlas Hugged, the autobiography of John Galt the Third. Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology, a non-profit organization working to catalyze a humane future. Our senior producer is Julia Scott.

Our associate producer is Kirsten McMurray, Mixing on this episode by Jeff Sudakin. Original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday and a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making this podcast possible. You can find show notes, transcripts, and much more at humanetech.com. A very special thanks to our generous lead supporters, including the Omidio Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies,

and the Evolve Foundation, among many others. And if you made it all the way here, let me just give one more thank you to you for giving us your undivided attention.