A Theory of Everyone with behavioral researcher Dr. Michael Muthukrishna
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Discover how our vibrant senior living communities can help you live your best life. Visit brightviewseniorliving.com to learn more. Equal housing opportunity.

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.

Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are some places more corrupt than others? Why do we go through some times where we seem to have tons of innovation and other times where we seem to have none? Where did religion come from? And why is Europe, for example, so different from the rest of the world? The only way to answer these questions is if you had a theory...

of everyone. And that's exactly what Dr. Michael Muthukrishna has. He is an award-winning associate professor of economic psychology from the London School of Economics. And in his new book, A Theory of Everyone, he offers some really remarkable ideas on why we are the way we are and, more important, what we can do to actually help direct our society.

This is a bit of optimism.

So I just wanted to point that out. Exactly right, Simon. It could have been bold. It could have been ambitious. It could have been everything. It was just everyone. It's just everyone. You know, walk me backwards. How does one come up with a theory of everyone? Like, walk me back to sort of how you even came up

to having a point of view that deserves to be a book? I mean, just to be clear, I don't have a theory of everyone in the sense like I didn't just develop a theory of everyone. And if you had someone on your show who was like, I single-handedly have developed the theory of everyone, you should be skeptical, right? Yeah.

I've been working on the problem of human evolution. So why is it that we're so different to other animals? And I was working on an area within that called cultural evolution. So this is the way in which ideas and entire societies and our companies and institutions evolve and change over time. This area of science actually emerges out of population genetics. It's a bunch of mathematical models that really weren't tested till the early 21st century. And as I was working in this area, I realized

This is a huge breakthrough. Like we have an ability to understand humans and predict things as we have never had before. It's this moment of alchemy turning into chemistry. And there's so many conversations happening around the world, around conflict, around business, around government and so on. And I was like, people need to know about this.

this. Like, I just, you know, they say, don't write a book because you feel like, you know, it's this moment in your career to write a book, write it when it's bursting out of you. Yeah. And that's what it felt like, Simon. Like it was bursting out. Like I just, I needed to tell people, like it was driving me crazy. Yeah. And so that was kind of what motivated me to write this all down. So what specifically was driving you crazy? What was driving me crazy was that we have questions, right? Like why are some places corrupt?

and other places not corrupt or less corrupt, right? Why does it feel like sometimes, you know, we're in these moments of innovation and excitement and the world is getting better. And in other moments, it feels like everything is coming apart. How do we design, you know, an immigration policy or a multicultural policy or handle EDI diversity, you know, in a way that recognizes that there's a duality to it, right? Diversity is divisive and it's also the engine of innovation.

There were all of these questions that seemed like they were disconnected. Like how did religion emerge? Where did that come from? Why do we have companies today where people can freely choose where they want to work? Whereas in the past it was tied to families. Why does Europe look so different to the rest of the world? So all these questions and, and,

The hallmark of a major breakthrough of the kind that we had with Newton and Einstein and alchemy to chemistry with the periodic table and Darwinian evolution is that suddenly what looks like this chaotic, confusing world comes into clarity, comes into focus. Everything suddenly makes sense. And I think that's the moment we're at. We know the rules now.

by which humans became a different kind of animal and the rules by which societies and entire companies are changing when we know how things like innovation happen in a way that we've never understood before. Okay. There's a lot on the table there. Let's start chipping away at some of it. Let's start dissecting some of this, right? So let's start with, I mean, the thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is our neocortex. We're the only animal that's got one

the homo sapien brain, we have the capacity for rational and analytical thought. It's a blessing and a curse. Okay. Right? So it is true. We have giant brains, three times as large as the chimps, three times as large as our ancestors. But that's not an explanation. That's actually part of the puzzle.

Because brain tissue is about 20 times as energy expensive as muscle tissue. And if you think like, you know, big brains are better, then you should wonder like, why don't more animals have big brains? Like, why isn't the animal kingdom filled with these big brain genius creatures like ourselves? Yeah. And the reason is that big brains, because they're so calorifically expensive, need to pay for themselves. They have to be able to engage with the environment to find calories, evade predators and so on, so that they can pay their energy bills. Right.

The other thing, you know, you mentioned reason and rationality. It's true. Humans can do this. But a lot of that is actually not thanks to anything we're born with, but thanks to a cultural down mode.

that we get from our schools and societies. And we can only really see this when we go to places that haven't yet had a kind of educational revolution. Give me a real life comparison. Yeah, I'll give you. So Alexander Luria, he's this Russian psychologist. He goes out to Uzbekistan. He wants to understand there's an education revolution. And he asks people if P then Q reasoning questions. This is a classic thing. Yeah. So he says, where it snows, the bears are white. In Novaya Zemlya, it snows. What color are the bears?

He asks people with education, they're like white right now. This is a question, by the way, you immediately got it. My six year old immediately gets it. Anyone in our society would get it. He asked people who hadn't gone to school yet. Yeah. Yes. And they're like, I don't know. I haven't been to Nova. I've seen a brown bear once, probably brown. And Lurie is like, what? Just wait, what? Hang on. Let me just say this again. Where it snows, the bears are white in Nova Zimbabwe. You know, it snows. What color are the bears? And they're like, I'm really not sure.

So this kind of if, P, then Q reasoning, as it turns out, is something that we're kind of trained into. We're trained into thinking in these abstract ways. So, you know, we have the same data. I have a field site at the border between Namibia and Angola where there's another educational revolution. And we ask people, we say, you know, in this other place, they make boats out of sand. I've got a boat from this other place. What's it made out of? They're like, I don't know, wood. They're like, what? And you ask people, like, could it be made out of sand? They just laugh at you. Like, that's crazy. Because humans really think in this

Without kind of being trained out of it, think in this very embedded, real, concrete way where these abstract hypotheticals are not part of the game. The reason that humans are so different to other animals is that we move from just a reliance on hardware. So think brawn, think brains, whatever, to reliance on hardware and software.

So our societies have been culturally evolving. Ideas, concepts have been culturally evolving and getting transmitted from generation to generation. Right, right. To the point where actually humanity or our cultural corpus or whatever you want to call it, culture if you like, is more intelligent than any of us. We are like nodes in a collective brain. Right.

One of the strongest pieces of evidence that we are so reliant on this software package is that when we grew our brains, we also shrunk our guts and we weakened our jaws to the point where we can't really survive on anything other than cooked food. Our brains are so calorifically expensive. We can't sit there like a gorilla chewing on leaves. You wouldn't get enough calories. You can't do it like a cow or something. But we don't have genes for cooking. Ask any college student. It's not a natural thing. Yeah.

You know, we have genes that maybe attract us toward fire, but we don't have genes for making fire, right? It's really hard. It has to be culturally transmitted. Yeah.

So in other words, you emerge into a world where you have to have this kind of software package just simply to survive. And you were reliant on it being transmitted. So let me say it back so that I'm clear, right? Which is if I live in a fishing village and my father was a fisherman, my father's father was a fisherman, my father's father's father was a fisherman, or agrarian society where we're all basically subsistence farmers, right?

We're passing down the necessary skills of farming. And so my whole worldview is farming. Whereas if I'm in a different society where there are technological advancements, then those learnings and those ways of seeing the world are handed down. And so I have the ability to see the world beyond farming or fishing.

And so it's not the ability to accumulate knowledge. It's the ability to pass knowledge from generation to generation. So I don't have to relearn every lesson, but I can build upon the lessons of previous generations. Correct. Correct. You don't even need to understand the world. You just have to copy the ways. You know, like the other example I was going to give you, Simon, that I think is really compelling is numeracy, right?

You and I can count. Yeah. And, you know, most people you meet can count. But humans for the longest time couldn't. Right. There are some small scale societies and our ancestors counted like this. One, two, three, many. And it took a while, you know, so some societies count on their body parts. So we use 10, not because 10 is special, but we use 10 because we've got 10 fingers and other societies use, you know, 12 for the phalanges or whatever. But it was when we were using stones or body parts or notches or something that we could develop numbers. Right.

But we only got to, you know, for the purposes of trade, we only got to natural numbers above one. So the reason for that is that zero is a really difficult concept to understand and it's not well represented. And I don't need it, right? Like,

I have one sheep, I have two sheep. If I have zero sheep, I don't need to conceive of zero because I've got no sheep. Exactly. It's nothing. I've got zero sheep is zero everything. I have nothing. Zero sheep is zero everything. What I don't need to think about it. Yeah. Got no sheep. Exactly. Okay. Okay. Let's move on here because as interesting as this all is, it is just that. Interesting. Right? Let's get into some of the deeper stuff here because you raised a lot of interesting questions. Like why is one society corrupt and another is less corrupt?

Let's uncover that. I love where this is going, but I need to take a quick break and then we'll get back into it. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up.

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For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living has been dedicated to creating an award-winning company culture so residents and families receive best-in-class services. Across our 50 communities, Brightview associates help deliver peace of mind, safety, security, transportation, daily programs, delicious food, and high-quality care if needed.

Discover how our vibrant senior living communities can help you live your best life. Visit brightviewseniorliving.com to learn more. Equal housing opportunity.

For decades, the Mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end, sparking a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the most powerful crime organization in American history. It sent the message to them that we can prosecute these people.

Discover how a group of young prosecutors took on the mafia and with the help of law enforcement brought down its most powerful figures. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcast, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System.

Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why is one society highly corrupt and one culture, it doesn't seem they can get out of their corruption way? And some are, you know, reasonably functional. Though there is corruption, we would call it low-level corruption. Yeah.

While I didn't create all of this theory, this is one of my contributions, the understanding of corruption as scales of cooperation competing with one another. Cooperation is a big puzzle for economists, for biologists or whatever. In 2005, Science Magazine actually laid it out as one of the top 25 puzzles. And the reason for that is often it's I'm better off being selfish. Yeah. I'm better off taking for me than I am to help other people. Right.

And so you need a mechanism that allows you to scale up beyond yourself into larger and larger groups. And we've identified all of these different mechanisms. So one mechanism is that many people may have heard of kin selection or inclusive fitness. This is the idea that genes that can identify and that favor copies of themselves will spread at the expense of genes that don't. So across the animal kingdom, this is the reason we love our families. Mm-hmm.

A lion comes in, it kills the cubs of another lion and then replaces it with its own cubs, but it doesn't kill its own cubs. And that's because it has genes, it recognizes in its own cubs and it goes, we need to favor those cubs. Right, which is why dictators look after their children.

You've jumped ahead of me. So yeah, we have other mechanisms like direct reciprocity. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Indirect reciprocity, reputation or whatever. So all of these mechanisms exist at the same time. Now in societies that are less corrupt, what's going on is that we have securitized trust or securitized cooperation via well-functioning institutions like governments and police forces and judiciaries and courts and so on, right? And so it's not like, if you steal some stuff from me, I'm not going to be like,

we're going to come get you, Simon. I'm going to come. No, I'm going to like call the police or something. Right. Corruption is not the puzzle to be explained. The puzzle to be explained is how the hell are some societies like that? Yeah. Because favoring your family is inclusive fitness. Right. Favoring your friends is direct reciprocity. Or, you know, when a manager gives a job to a friend or a friend of a friend, that is it's absolutely natural. And most animals engage in similar behavior. Right.

So how is it that some societies, and now we have an answer to that, what you have to do is undermine these smaller scales and create incentives where it is better to work together in a larger group than it is to work together in a smaller group.

So think of a company, right? Like if I could start a company all by myself, keep all the equity, I don't need any funders. I'm going to bootstrap this whole thing. I'm going to do that. You know, if I can start a unicorn all by myself, you don't think I'm going to do that? Of course I'm going to do that, but I can't, I need to get other people. And that is because the potential payoff, even when it's divided up by all of the people who have equity is higher than what I would get working by myself. So that's step one. Yeah. Go on, go on. The second half is you want to undermine. So we used to have companies for a long time, but there were family firms.

People could only trust those that they were related to. And this idea of a Western style non-family corporation is a very Western idea. And what happens? So my collaborator, Joe Henrich, has this very nice paper in Science where he shows that the Catholic Church bans cousin marriage.

It stops you from marrying your cousins. Yeah. And it does a bunch of other things to marriage where it basically says, look, you can't marry your goddaughters. You can only marry one person. It's going to be for a long time. You don't get to divorce or whatever. It changes family structures. Yeah. Now, in most of the world,

Even today, people marry their relatives, right? Like in Afghanistan, it's about 40, I think it's 47 to 50% of people are marrying their cousins. Now, what does that do? What it does is it ramps up cooperation via kin selection or inclusive. So my uncle,

He isn't just my uncle. He is related to me by this line and this line. You have family webs, not family trees. And by undermining that lower scale, you destroy the ability of kin selection or inclusive fitness to rise up and create tribes that would otherwise undermine governments. Okay, so the Catholic Church...

bans the marriage of cousins, not because they care about incest. It's because they recognize that kinship bonds are so strong and so powerful that they fear that any family could become more powerful than the Catholic Church. This is interesting. So we don't know why exactly. So, you know, it could be incest aversion. It could be there's a good financial... But the logic has to be that by weakening kinship bonds...

it ensures the strength of the church. Correct, correct. So it's also via finances, right? So normally, if you've got a big family, land stays within the family. If you don't have descendants or you have fewer, it goes to the church. So there's a variety of different reasons why the church may have done this, but it removes the competitor. But the church is, they're breaking these kinship bonds for self-preservation. Destroying European tribes. Destroying European, right. And flash forward a few hundred years, what ends up happening is because the kinship bonds have been broken...

We learn to build groups, tribes, companies, cooperations that are beyond our families. So we've been forced to learn how to build trust, which allows us to build companies that are not kinship based. You got it. You got it. So in Italy, this ripple has a massive impact on European business.

That may not be seen, for example, in the Middle East or in the Near East or something like that. That's right. That's right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Honestly, people should go read the paper. It's a beautiful paper by Jonathan Schultz, Jonathan Bocamp, Dumont Radd, and Joe Henrich. So what happens then is these companies,

First off, it creates individualism. It creates the ability to move away into other towns. And so ideas start to flow around. You're laying the foundations for, you know, the enlightenment and so on. But then what happens is that we discover things

We discover stored sunlight in the ground. A little backwater of the Roman Empire, Britain, where I currently live, that backwater has cheap and available coal. Now, when you combine that with these ideas flowing around, this individualism, these non-family corporations, you can use this coal to out-compete other companies. You can create the East India Trading Company, for example. You can start the process of colonialism through these European tribes.

And so you empower everything you do thanks to millions of years worth of peat turned to black rock that we call coal. And later, you know, zooplankton and algae turned to oil and natural gas. You can empower your ability to do anything by cooperating and working together to outcompete those less energetic civilizations and steal all their stuff. And your companies, your civilization, your groups are going to outcompete everybody else. Right.

the cultural evolution of all of this discussion, you have to have a very, very long point of view to look at these things. And you see a lot of them weren't done prescriptively. They were done reactively.

There's just the one example of the Catholic Church banning marriage of cousins. They had no conception of what could happen. It was done for self-preservation in the moment. And so what I find fascinating is the motivation for self-preservation accidentally, in some cases, has created group preservation.

That's right. And different civilizations or different people around the world have gone down different paths, not because they were thinking about it, but because for whatever reason they started to think about the world in this way, even ideas like the world is ordered, there are laws to be discovered. If we study the world, we might understand the creator, whatever. These kinds of ideas lead us down one path versus a different path. And then these different paths are competing with one another.

So in the same way that natural selection and genetic evolution can create complexity with three simple rules, you know, variation or diversity, transmission and selection, cultural evolution is doing the same thing. There's a variety of different ideas. There's a variety of different societal organizations. There's a variety of different ways you can run your company. There's a variation. They're getting transmitted because we're learning faithfully and we're learning selectively. Like we don't copy anyone off the street. We're like, who are the billionaires? What are they doing? You know?

Who are the successful people? Like, I want to copy their way of speaking. I want to copy their way of dressing. I want to live in the same city as them. You know, I want to do what the celebrities are doing. That psychology combined with the transmission, combined with the variation is sufficient for the system to evolve beyond conscious awareness. And that's why we didn't think about it. Like we had to reverse engineer what was going on with our species. And that is a theory of everyone. We have to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living has been dedicated to creating an award-winning company culture so residents and families receive best-in-class services. Across our 50 communities, Brightview associates help deliver peace of mind, safety, security, transportation, daily programs, delicious food, and high-quality care if needed.

Discover how our vibrant senior living communities can help you live your best life. Visit brightviewseniorliving.com to learn more. Equal housing opportunity.

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end, sparking a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the most powerful crime organization in American history. It sent the message to them that we can prosecute these people.

Discover how a group of young prosecutors took on the mafia and with the help of law enforcement brought down its most powerful figures. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling, as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words. Yeah.

That I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I have a theory that I need to share with you. Cultural evolution, I think for the pejorative, which is we live in this

Very divided society. It seems more selfish than ever. We're quick to stab each other in the back. And if we go back to the Second World War, the stories of young men who committed suicide because they weren't drafted, because they weren't called to action was significantly higher than the opposite. Right.

And for our generation to even hear that, that's insane, right? The shame of not being called to serve was overwhelming. And then after the Second World War, we get into the Cold War, where you have this great power competition. And one of the advantages of great power competition is it helps us understand what we stand for because we can clearly see what we stand against.

And so even though we still have our political divisions, at the end of the day, what we have in common is we're against that and we fear that external existential threat. The Soviet Union collapses and goes bankrupt.

falls out of the game, and we are left without a great power competition, our values start to become fuzzier because values are ethereal, where enemies are tangible, and we can no longer, quote unquote, see what we're against. And everything that you're talking about starts to blossom. In other words, self-preservation is still the driver, whether it's cooperative or not cooperative. We're all in self-preservation mode. But now, because of the external existential threat being gone,

Self-preservation, now I don't have to cooperate with you. I can fight against you. And we start to see a change in business theory. So you see the rise of Jack Welch. You see the rise of Milton Friedman economics. You see the rise of shareholder supremacy. You see the rise of short-termism. And all of a sudden, in the name of business, quote unquote, we see a massive rise in selfishness that then ripples business.

Throughout our society, into our politics, and into almost everything we do. And now we are where we are, this incredibly selfish society where we put ourselves before anyone else. We're now much more tribal, to your point about not so bad as kinship, but highly politicized ship are becoming the new tribes. And I can't trust anybody outside of my narrow politics. And this is on both sides of the aisle.

So we've evolved into this pretty awful sort of group of people. The cultural evolution that is afoot in the United States, we've lost our moral authority in the world. We're no longer viewed as the example of what democracy could look like or should look like. In fact...

In places like China, they're using our own democracy as evidence, like, "That's the society you want to live in? Really? You want that?" So we're starting to see that the Western ripples that may have begun with the Vatican, at least this version of it that we're talking about, are now starting to crack and break. And the theory I have is, and I'm uncomfortable with this theory, and I keep coming to the same conclusion, which is you need an enemy.

in order to develop a cooperation system. Because if you don't fear something or someone, there is no need to cooperate. An absence, an external existential threat...

I will look inside to find an enemy to help me define what my tribal barriers are, what the sides of the sandbox are. And those sandbox sides will get much wider and more inclusive if the enemy is outside the borders. I'm curious to get your point of view. I mean, let's unpack this. So, I mean, the first thing is absolutely true.

The scale of the competition affects the scale of cooperation, right? Like if you are at war and it's existential. I want to say that again. That is a very important line. The scale of the competition affects the scale of the cooperation. And if the competition has become local or regional, but definitely not international.

then there's no need for national cooperation. - Then it's inter-elite competition with, yeah, exactly, exactly. The other half of it is also that not only is there greater latitude for diversity, but we don't have common sources of information, right? So if you think about software being written,

People used to call it the Walter Cronkite effect where everybody watched the news. It was Walter Cronkite. He was talking to everybody. And then the next day, you chatted about what Walter Cronkite told you. And now there isn't just one Walter Cronkite. There's like a million stations and a million podcasts and a million places to get your information from.

from. And so, you know, as a result of that, there's a lot more diversity. There's also cultural diversity. There's a whole bunch of division that exists within a society. Now, that isn't a problem if the scale of competition is higher, because you band together across your differences because you've got this common enemy. But when that's not there, those fractures that are always there in society crack and come apart. Yeah. Can you help me understand

Why, at a biological, on an evolutionary level, cultural evolutionary level, why is it that we fear each other more than we do the threat of the complete inability for human beings to survive on the planet, which is climate change?

Or why do we fear each other more and the policy, the political policy of each other more than the threat of a pandemic that could, you know, annihilate populations? Like, why do we fear each other more than natural threats? Yeah.

Because it's not in the cultural corpus anymore. It's not in our spectrum of ideas anymore. You know, everything... What does that mean? What does that mean it's not in our spectrum of ideas? So when the pandemic happened, right? For a lot of people, it was unbelievable. They'd never heard of, you know, even our leaders, right? Like...

They vaguely heard about something called a pandemic, an epidemic in high school or something. They didn't know what that actually meant. They hadn't read about the 1918 Spanish flu or something like that. They had no idea what to expect. The places that were actually better prepared, at least initially...

with those that experienced SARS, which was a kind of proto version of that. The same with climate change. It's too difficult to imagine the kind of world that's being painted by these simulations and models and scientists. It's just not part of what we can think of.

Cultural evolution and genetic evolution and even a human relies on feedback in order to learn. And the lag and the delay on the feedback from our actions and what happens in the world is too long and delayed for us to learn from. So it's like, you know...

Control theory describes these feedback loops. So if you imagine like you're trying to adjust a shower or something, and you're in a hotel, it's got one of these old showers, and there's a delay on the hot water adjusting when you move the tap, what do you do? You oscillate. You're like, because it's hard for the system to learn because the delay is too long. Now imagine it's decades, right? Like in a couple of centuries, we burned up millions of years worth of stored sunlight, re-releasing all of that carbon.

We depleted those batteries in a couple of centuries. Your analogy is an uncomfortably good one. I call it the temporality, the personality of a shower, which is every shower has its own temporality and you have to learn the temporality. I know my own shower's temporality. I know exactly where to put the knobs and it's perfect every time. But when I go into a new place like a hotel, I have a steep learning curve.

And sometimes it's a very good shower where the learning curve is quick because it's so reactive. Like the hot is the hot, the cold is the cold. I know where to put it. But to your point, sometimes it takes like four or five or 10 seconds for the temperature of the water. And if I overcompensate and I go in one direction and then it's incredibly hot and I've burnt myself.

Because the reaction, the delay is slow. Not only is the learning curve slow, but the potential for damage is high. And so now instead of eight seconds on a shower, it's 30 years on an environment and we turn the dial too far one way and now we burn ourselves and you're like, ah, shit. And the question is, do you have another 30 years to try the dial back again? Michael, as an

As an expert in all of this stuff, how do we modulate in a manner? How do we allow the culture to learn in a manner where we may not have the time to learn the ripples? Because everything you and I have been talking about are very long ripples of unintended consequences, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, usually for both.

So, you know, the great thing about the scientific process is that it speeds everything up because we don't have to just rely on cultural random, you know, figure this stuff out. We start to build models of the world that allow us to act on the world.

Obviously, physics has been one of the most powerful demonstrations of this. You don't have to shoot the rocket this way and that way and eventually you get there. You can write down equations that tell you where that rocket is going to go. And most of the time you can land it on the asteroid. You remember I said this book was bursting out of me? It was bursting out of me because I do think we have the tools now.

to understand where those switches are, what we should be wiggling and what we should be doing. So what should we be doing? Well, look, I mean, I'm an engineer by training actually. And the reason that I decided to turn my eye on taking those models from engineering and apply them to the human and social sciences was because I was concerned that everybody in terms of climate change was worried about mitigation. And I'm like, hey, listen, maybe we'll slow the economy to save the planet. Maybe. Wouldn't that be wonderful? But if we don't,

Let's look at what the world looks like in a post climate change world. And are we prepared to not end civilization? Can we buy ourselves a little bit more time by investing in the tools for adaptation? Yeah.

What does that world look like? Well, how are you going to deal with mass migration when a million Bangladeshis or people in the South Pacific are underwater? Can India or Australia cope with that many people flooding into their country? These are people with a very different culture. Can your governance structures operate under that kind of infrastructure pressure? There's not enough space in schools and hospitals anyway. And now you've got all these new people. Are people going to be at each other's throats? Are we in trouble?

How do you build a society that works? - Isn't that ironic that the most anti-immigrant policy you can come up with is the most pro-climate change? Like if you really hate immigrants, you really wanna protect the environment.

Right, right, right. No, oh man, this is a bigger thing, by the way. One of the best ways to keep people from coming to your place is make their place better. Right. Make their place good and they don't want to come to your place, yeah. Exactly. I mean, it's easier to be nice when there's more to go around. Based on the work that you've done, what is one change that we can change in our lives to help move our society back to something that's more cooperative and less...

self-preservation in the pejorative sense, like not us-preservation, but me-preservation. How do we get more to an us-preservation and less to a me-preservation? And by us, I mean the bigger us, the us including people I disagree with.

Yeah. We talked about how evolution is this kind of population level process. There are attempts at creating alliances within a country or within a society that then try to compete with others. And I think that there are actually a large, reasonable, silent majority or, you know,

People who are not extreme on the political side, they're just less noisy. Yeah. They're just less noisy. They don't have time. They're busy, you know, looking after their kids and working their lives or whatever. They don't have time to be like engaging in this way. And I think returning us to normalcy, if you like, you know, a coalition of the normal, the coalition of the middle, the silent majority reaching across the aisle, because actually the distance in the middle isn't that far. Yeah. Right. It isn't that far. It's far at the extremes. Yeah.

But it's not in the middle. Like there is a reasonable position on any political topic you might care about in the middle. And if those individuals and groups that sit squarely in the middle were to find one another and form a block, a radical centrist or whatever you want to call it, they could try to compete with these smaller, noisier extremes that we are otherwise kind of forced and dragged into. There's one of my favorite...

in my view, under-recognized models within economics, describes how intolerance for a diversity of views actually creates polarization.

If you allow people to express more views and you only punish people at the extremes, like when they're calling for genocide or something, right? Then people will occupy this middle block. Whereas if you say any deviation from the accepted line is going to be punished, then what you do is the only people who will bother to speak up are those people who are already at the extremes. And they're just like, look, in for a penny, in for a pound. This is what I believe. And so then the next generation...

only hears these extreme views rather than that middle that you wanted to encourage. So another part of this is free speech, the importance of tolerance and steel manning rather than straw manning the opposition in the pursuit of truth. Like when we argue with one another, I'm not trying to win the argument.

You and I are fellow truth seekers trying to get at the truth and you've got a piece of it and I've got a piece of it and I should be helping you to make your argument as best you can. And you should be helping me to make my argument as best I can because we're not perfect in doing that. And in the recognition that what we want to get to is the truth, not to win the argument. The word that strikes me through this entire conversation is irony. All of this stuff is fraught with irony, which is the more we try and create tolerance for

It's creating intolerance. Just like in this drive for self-preservation to the extreme, we're actually destroying ourselves. And we talk about silent majorities, which is how dare we allow our society to be dictated by people who occupy the minority on either sides? Like, how dare we? My feeling is exactly. And how do we come together in civilized fashion, brother and sister, arm and arm, to say, I may disagree, but...

I want to hold space and I love you and I care, you know, and I want you to do the same for me. The world is complicated. The world is complicated. And we don't make progress by, you know, bullying other people into believing that they're bigots.

We made progress by finding out what people think and why they think it. Yeah. And, you know, and assessing that against what we think and why we think that. And just to put a bow on it, where the hell are the idealists? Where are the leaders we need in the times not to take advantage of our divisions, but to bring us together? And it sounds corny and idealistic. And I think that's the point. I think we need more corny idealism. And it sounds like

evolutionarily, culturally evolutionarily, we need it more than ever. I couldn't agree more, Simon. I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me on the show. That was fun. That was a lot of fun. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenic.com for classes, videos, and more.

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