Leadership with Zach Garfield
2025-11-11 13:00:00.000 +00:00

David, um, we have been uh away from the podcast for a little bit. So let's see if like we're better or worse at doing our our introduction here. My name is David Petrozowski. And my name is David Pinsoff. And what is this? It is a podcast about evolutionary psychology called Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. With a parentheses in it, the tagline is Actual Evolutionary Psychology. By actual evolutionary psychologists. Wow, we did it. David, uh did you ever play Follow the Leader as a kid? Uh I am familiar with the game. I'm I've I've actually forgot how how it works. Is it just you do what the person says? Is that how it works? Um it's pretty straightforward. There's a leader and a follower, and the leader just randomly does stuff, and the

follower just sort of does it um back. Oh, that's a pretty simple game. That's simpler than I thought. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I or you can draw it out. I can draw it out, I can like diagram the whole thing later. But okay. Well, it seems like um we play that game all the time, every day. And we have a wonderful uh guest with us today by the name of Zach Garfield, who is an expert in this leader follower game and why we evolved to play this game with one another. And it's not exactly uh what you might think, you know. Like I think a lot of people have this like idea of what a leader and a follower are, or like what it is. And I think this discussion with Zach is a good example of taking an evolutionary approach

to a known thing like leadership and sort of making it a little stranger than we might think. And so if you think you know what leadership is, um, listen to this, uh, stay tuned because you might not. Yes, absolutely. And Zach has a lot of um uh rich knowledge to share with us uh uh about the cultural variation and the cultural uh universality of leadership. Uh and he brings a lot of insights to what leadership is, and I I think in a in in a somewhat surprising way. I think it changed the way I think of leadership, uh, and uh I think it will change the way you think about leadership. Yeah, and there's not much more better than you can say about a scientist than they change the way you think. And uh just wanna give a shout out to um him collaborating with Luke Glocky on the Omo

Valley Research Project, which is super cool. And he'll talk more about that in the episode as well. And we'll have Luke on um in the near future too. So yeah, without further ado, enjoy Zach Garfield leadership and David, yeah, we'll we'll I'll we'll talk after this about um follow the leader. Sounds good. I will follow you. Enjoy. Uh today we have Dr. Zach Garfield. Um and Zach, where were you uh prior to where you are now and where are you now? Yeah, so I'm I'm currently in robots in Morocco at the University of Mohammed Six Polytechnic. I can tell you a little bit more about this university. But before that, I was at the Institute for Venice Study in Toulouse. So in Toulouse, France. It's an interdisciplinary institute that's housed within the Toulouse School of Economics.

And so it's sort of the brainchild of Jean Tirole, a Nobel laureate economist, who wanted to really bring this interdisciplinarity uh to to Toulouse and it's really an amazing institute. So I mean anyone who's looking for postdocs, you should definitely apply there. A lot of economists and political scientists and anthropologists and psychologists. It's really just a beautiful center. Yeah I the is IAT what is it the abbreviation? IAS T. I A S T. Yeah, there was a um a conference there. Maybe it was EB or uh one of them. And I visited Toulouse. And uh in keeping with France, my experience of France, uh I went uh with some other fellow evolutionary behavioral scientists to what looked like a a home

kitchen, which was a restaurant, and they were like, Well, we don't really have a lot, but we'll throw something together, and it was like the best meal of my life. Uh, and uh and it was like you know, ten euros or something like that for like all three of us or something. So yeah. So uh Toulouse is lovely. I highly recommend visiting. Yeah, it was a great four years. And yeah, as the as the postdocs you get to go on dinners with lots of the visiting scholars. It's just like a continuing, you know, rotation of some of the most impressive and interesting scholars across the social sciences, and you get many, you know, very lovely dinners along the way too. So it's yeah, and that's that's a that's a lovely segue into something you study, which

is cooperation, sharing of food, leadership, whether leaders are disproportionately generous compared to other members of the group. So do you think that the sharing of food plays a pivotal role in human social status or leadership? I mean, yeah, for sure. I mean, if you if you go through a lot of ethnography, um feasts, feasting, this is a huge mechanism by which people um you know build reputations and like basically build social asymmetries. And it's sort of a there's sort of two dynamics. It's generous, so it's actually a good thing. It's pro-social. Especially if you don't have food storage, you can sort of store you know your excess in the belly of your neighbor. So you expect that return maybe at some point in the future.

But at the same time you also build up this this asymmetry, this status, this capacity to to share. And it's I think this is an interesting example because it also highlights that you something like, especially in subsistence-based societies, something like physical formidability, you know, if you're able to just work harder in the field or hunt more, we often think of this as being like a capacity for coercion, which obviously it could be if you're just mightier and stronger and people are afraid of you. But it also means you can like do all these very pro-social things, generating resources, share, and you know, build this pattern of indebtedness and influence by basically making people happy.

So I think sharing and and building these surplus of calories and distributing them is a is a really interesting dynamic by how which um you know status hierarchies can emerge. Polly Wiesner has written a lot about this. There's a there's a great book called Food and the Status Quest um that brings together a lot of archaeologists and ethnographers who who focus really heavily on this topic. Hmm. So do you think, I mean, you mentioned that uh making people happy is a good way to gain status or to rise politically within a society? Um is that the only way to rise politically? I mean, you know, Machiavelli famously said that you can, you know, influence people through love or through fear, and often doing both is the best strategy.

Is there both love and fear in in the strategy of a leader, or is it is it more of the former and less of the latter? How do you view the the the trade-off between trying to make people happy versus trying to intimidate people and keep them in their place? Right. Um so I mean it really depends on the ecology and like what are the outside options that people have. Um I mean, your listeners might recall you I you know you Chris von Ruden talked about the reverse dominance hierarchy. So this is the idea that you know if people have the capacity to really resist the you know coercive propensities of any status-seeking individual or leader that changes the dynamic, um, if there's equal access to weaponry or people can you know pack up and leave.

Um, but your question I think is really interesting, and I've been thinking a lot about this uh because we often think about these sort of two opposing strategies. And I'm working on writing some stuff about this right now and have a recent paper thinking about this. And I'm not exactly sure why this is, but if you look through literature, you know, movies, film, we see a lot of these like good versus evil, hero versus villain, um, the prince versus even um Machiavelli has written about the importance of virtue and trust in some other writings. You know, Tolstoy, all these influential sort of discussions of status and leadership seem to like have this binary, diametrically opposed strategy that seems to really resonate

with a lot of our subjective thinking about leadership and status. So I don't know exactly why that is, but as I looked more at like the ethnographic record and the sort of wide range of diversity of discussions of status and leadership, we saw more and more that you could see evidence of these two different strategies, but they overlapped much more than sort of the standard sort of two styles or dual model theory would predict. And so I think your question is interesting because yes, it does often take some element of fear and love, so to speak, to use those Machiavellian phrases, or as we are kind of casting it, which isn't just our approach, but a lot of people in our field are looking at the benefit generation and cost and pos imposition.

And so if you can generate benefits via maybe making potential free riders be afraid of punishment, or generate benefits by calorie generation, calorie surplus, organizing cooperation, that is going to be an effective strategy. But it's always dependent upon what the sort of ecology is, what potential followers or other community members have as outside options, and then what your role can accomplish given the demands of the group in that particular context. So it seems like it's it's almost a sunnier view of leadership than you might expect from, say, a Machiavelli, and that the ability of leaders to gain a following through pure fear or through pure intimidation and force and coercion is really not very common or very

plausible. And that you often need to have a strong benefit conferral component to rising in status or power within any community. Would you agree with that assessment that the the dominance and fear and coercion aspect of it is overrated? I mean, I would agree in general, but it still depends on the ecology. There are certain contexts where followers just don't have outside options. They they need to be within the group. And even though they're you know subjected to lots of cost and tyranny, and there is obviously not optimal for them, they just don't have the ability to break off and leave. Um so in that context, if you can sort of maintain some equilibrium of very aggressive, domineering type leadership, and it's good for you, maybe your family, and those who are

suffering can't really do anything about it, then that might be quite stable. Um, but I think on the whole, if you look across a wide range of human societies, um, including more stratified and more egalitarian, um, a more pro-social style of leadership does seem to be the more effective in the long term. Um, because if individuals have an opportunity to band together, you know, to resist, to, if they have outside options, they're gonna be looking for those opportunities. So if you're if you're not producing net benefits for the constituents in the long run, that's obviously not going to be as stable as if if you are. So I've I have a a question that I've been pondering a lot. So you mentioned the pro-social style of leadership versus more of the uh dominance style

of leadership. What about having your cake and eating it? What about having a dominance style of leadership that masquerades as a pro-social style of leadership? That is, it is a kind of dominance or coercion or in some cases violence that is justified with an ideology, with a mythology, with a set of rationalizations, um, that uh frames the dominance as for the good of the person being dominated. Uh history is littered with these kinds of justifications, these kinds of ideologies and mythologies, uh, the belief systems, you know, I could the most common and obvious ones would be the divine right of kings, you know, karma, uh justifying caste systems. Um, but I could go on all day. So, what do you think is the role in human evolution of the fear-based strategy that

masquerades as the love-based strategy? Yeah, this is super interesting. I mean, I'm curious to hear if you have other like examples we can talk about. Um people like Timothy Earle have talked about how chiefs come to power. So if we assume that, you know, thinking about subsistence-based societies, hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, at some point there's intensification of the economic base and also of the sort of sociopolitical structure. And it seems that chiefs, so a chiefdom, is when there's sort of a hereditary institutionalized leadership structure where the leader often has like absolute authority. All the resources of the community get funneled into basically the chief who then distributes them accordingly to various norms and other obligations.

And you can have like nested chiefdoms. So you might have like a chiefdom where the chief's boss is, you know, what's called the paramount chief. Um, so these systems tend to be very hierarchical, very coercive. And if you read the ethnography, some of these chiefs are just like maniacal, megalomaniaus. They would just you know decimate followers sometimes. Like sometimes there's there's all sorts of very gruesome uh stories of their of their of their authority. But what it seems to be is that first you have to control somehow the economic base. And then what seems to happen is that they are able to leverage that control into ideological control and also controlling like the the the military, um the sort of physical

force. So if you have this sort of warrior class of young men who you have control over, you also control the economics. Then you sort of start to control this ideology too. And then I think this gives rise to you know these sort of uh state societies like you know, Incas or Mayans, where you have this sort of sun god type leader. And there hasn't been enough writing about this, how this transition occurred. If you look at more hunter-gatherer type societies, or let's say smaller scale societies, you have these distinct individuals. You have like the shaman, who is often, you know, feared because of their special expertise. They can cast a spell on you. Someone might hire them to, you know, do some bad, some do something bad to a rival.

But they also might have special medicinal knowledge and ritual expertise. So they're blessing you and they're healing you. But they have this sort of supernatural leader component to their sort of social role. Then you'll have your military leader who is organizing raids or in charge of defense, and the influence might oscillate between. And then you have your sort of broader political leader, like the big man or the headman, who's kind of solving more day-to-day conflicts. But then at some point over the course of either cultural evolution or in particular ecologies, these different roles kind of coalesce into one individual. And how that exactly happens, I think this is still a big open question for sort of like

the cultural evolution of of status and political hierarchies. But then when that happens, we get to exactly the scenario where you're describing, by which, you know, this acceptance of potentially extreme despotism is kind of reinforced through other norms and ideologies. And then we get to, you know, any of these examples I guess we might pick out. Yeah. Is do you think that what it is, and I mean, maybe this is just speculative, but it's that uh there's sort of a you talked about the ecology. And I think, you know, we talked about in a couple papers, uh, in like leadership quarterly and things, there's almost like a market dynamic. So it's sort of like what's being offered. And so in a world where there's a shaman for medicinal purposes, but then somebody is

formidable, um, and you have to go to them, that all creates this market of if you can create a team of people who can sort of all provide that and maybe have one figurehead to coordinate, um, then all of us sort of as a team uh get the benefits of that. Um and if you look at anything um like any of these despotic governments, they're typically hugely uh unified to the people, right? Like the Nazis being a good example. But then if you look the bickering within and the status within, but everybody's sort of serving different roles within that. And so I wonder if it's just this thing of we can all do different provide different services. And I know you've talked about that, like services as leadership, but I wonder if it's this

thing of individuals sort of team up on the idea that we can we can essentially monopolize the leadership market if as a unified appearing team uh we we provide all those services. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you some of your work has talked about this. Paul Hooper has also talked about this. So I think a lot of different I people are sort of converging on this idea of leaders and leadership being a market. Uh I suppose as some individuals or groups of individuals kind of get monopolies, so to speak, on different aspects of the market, their outside options become diminished. And so you end up basically having to choose the best of the bad options.

I mean, I think we all can relate to that in many of our political systems today when we we don't have the option we want, but we have to choose the least of our unpreferred options. Sorry, I think that's a very useful way to think about it. And leadership in general could could use more of this type of bringing in like these economic dynamics and market-like dynamics into these preferences. Yeah. It also suggests approximate psychology of leaders being really good at identifying uh potential threats to the niche that you occupy. And I don't think there's really been a lot of work on that. So, like just understanding and anticipating ahead of time is this going to be a threat to the way our leadership is?

Is this going to provide an offering to people that they're going to prefer over us? It's essentially like the leadership equivalent of sort of, you know, corporations wanting to like prevent an upstart a competitor. Yeah. Really like that idea. I mean it I mean it it reminds me of, you know, uh competitions between, say, the king and the Catholic Church, where oftentimes the the government will want to suppress the reigning religion because they view it as as providing a competing service that the government is trying to provide. And so you get uh tr you know crackdowns on on on the local religion because it's a it's in competition with with the government. Uh I wonder if there are there are other interesting historical examples of that, but I

really like that idea that uh you can think of uh coercive leadership as a kind of monopoly over the various services that people are bargaining for in a social marketplace. And part of the the strategy of uh of of a leader is to suppress and shut out the competition. Yeah. I wonder if like war, a lot it sounds like this just sounds like a lot of war, history of war in particular, sometimes might be um the individual people on the ground sort of fighting possible status competitors from the leader. Again, this would be for more hierarchical, not necessarily like small-scale conflict. This might lead into Zach, you uh with Luke Gloacki, right, are sort of heading up a um uh the Omo Valley Research.

Um what what is the name of it? Um yeah. The Omo Valley Research Project. Okay. I just I got uh I got all the way at the end of the year. Homo Valley Research Project. We also OVRP as our acronym. Gotta get that brand out there. Yeah, exactly. We shouldn't sell t-shirts. Um, but uh or hats. Uh but can you talk a little bit about that and sort of this um maybe to backtrack a little bit, um, you know, is your you what's your like scientific gig in terms of, you know, what what are the things that you're looking at, have been looking at, and continue to look at? Yeah, for sure. Well, we talked a little bit about leadership already, and um I got into this interested mostly in status and status hierarchies.

And ironically enough, you know, when I was a undergrad, um, Chris von Ruden was a PhD student at the time. So I was like reading all of his work on status, and it was really inspiring and useful for me. Um, then at some point in time I we started emailing when I was a PhD student, And then we both sort of kind of got to leadership via similar paths. And so now we have a lot of collaborations and we work together, and Chris has been a great mentor and colleague for me over the years. So I'm interested in things like status and leadership. And then from this focus on leadership, I came to a lot of these other topics that are really common in our fields, like, for example, punishment, third-party punishment.

So when do people engage in costly punishments on behalf of someone who's maybe not a kin or a friend? This also gets into conflict resolution. Leaders are often resolving conflicts. And so what I kind of saw is there's all these literatures on conflict or on punishment, et cetera. And leadership was kind of central to all these dynamics, but hadn't, and even you know, cooperation, how do individuals cooperate? Well, it often involves someone taking on a special role to punish free riders or to encourage people to invest in group projects. So I kind of saw that leadership dynamics were obviously essential to all these different domains, but hadn't quite got sufficient attention, I think, within these respective

literatures. So I focused a lot on a lot of these type of sort of downstream, I think, phenomena of leadership, like conflict resolution, punishment, and also social learning and teaching. So teaching is uh, if you kind of think about it in in a in a really broad way, also a form of leadership. Um So I'm interested in these topics, and I've been doing field work and cross cultural research for well as as long as I've been in the game. But I think then all anthropologists doing fieldwork today also have this broader interest in like how do the economic and social transitions that rural communities are going through, how does that influence all the other things we're interested in? So I think basically all fieldworking anthropologists they are also interested in market

integration. That's like the big question right now. And, you know, we're we're probably coming to a period in the not too far distant future where there are maybe no subsistence-based communities in the world today. Um Brett Beheim has talked about this in some of his talks, the end of subsistence, you know, and I think anthropologists have been talking about this for forever, um, but it's got to happen at some point, and it's we've got to be getting closer and closer to it. And so there are still today many communities around the world that are what we'd call subsistence-based. So, like most of their food, most of their calories are coming from food that they grow locally, or animals they hunt, or livestock they they raise, um, And that as a

sort of social and economic base can have a profound impact on how we think, how we raise our kids, how we relate to each other. And so when people transition from these subsistence-based communities to market-based communities, it can change a lot of our psychology. Obviously, this happened already in many places around the world, in most places around the world, but we didn't have this interdisciplinary scientific toolkit documenting it as it was unfolding. So now what we can do is be a part of these transitions and kind of track how things like conflict resolution or leadership structures or trust and so forth are unfolding. And that's kind of like the overarching goal of the Omo Valley Research Project.

So we are managing field sites, Luke and I, among different ethnolinguistic groups or different societies, different cultures, you you might say. So these are mostly agro-pastoralists. We're working with Hammer, Kata, Kwegu, and Niangatong. And what's super fascinating about this Omo Valley region? So this is southwest Ethiopia. North of Lake Turkana, there's this Omo River that flows up. And so it creates this like very broad range of varied ecologies. You've got highland and lowland. There was seasonal flooding in the past, a lot of sorghum cultivation, and lots of pastoralism. And in this region, there's more than like a dozen distinct ethnolinguistic groups. And many different language families are represented.

You have Cushitic speakers, Emotic speakers, Nilotic speakers, Surmic languages. So if you know anything about linguistics, these are very different languages. The populations have a lot of social institutions in common, but they're also like very, very different. So you have in this relatively close environment just a huge array, a huge mosaic of cultural diversity, really like nowhere else in the world. If you have a truck, you can basically drive around and you can like go visit all these different communities. There's really nowhere else in the world like that. And then on top of that, as you probably know, Ethiopia was the only African country not colonized by European powers. Effectively, the colonizers were domestic.

There was an Amhara kingdom, and there's a sort of history behind that, but the Ethiopian Empire was very strong at maintaining its borders. So the you know the Turks tried to invade and the Italians tried to invade also, but they they just they never really did. But this Ethiopian Empire didn't really do much in the far, far southwest of the country. They maintained the border, but they didn't develop it at all, so to speak. The Empire fell in the late in the mid-70s, then there was this communist regime that eventually failed. And now you have this new ethnic federal democracy that emerged in the early 90s. So now there is development happening in Ethiopia, but you didn't have like the sort of

scramble for Africa during the colonial era. You also didn't have this like big investment across Africa that was going on with like the British and the French and the Portuguese in the 80s and 90s, because Ethiopia just like kept everything kind of under its own control. So when I talk to some of my other colleagues about what things are like now, they see it as like, oh yeah, this is what it was like in Kenya 20 years ago, or this is like in in uh Nigeria 20 35 years ago. Um so it's really fascinating for all these reasons. Uh there's these communities are still very much sort of governed by customary institutions. Certainly there's been change. Of course, there's been change, and it's happening more and more now, But it's really

there's really nowhere else in the world like this. And so for this reason, I'm obviously quite biased, of course, but I think it's like the most exciting place in the world to be doing the sort of focus on subsistence based societies, because there's just nowhere else like it in the world. Yeah. From that perspective, I mean, obviously, you know, in 40 or 80 years, we'll all the science will come in and we'll know sort of market to from subsistence to market transition, what that looks like and what it does to our psychologies, hopefully. Um, assuming science is still happening in 80 years. We might be all in subsistence for for all we know in 80 years. But uh we'll need to do any anthropology, we'll be living it.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um but uh uh but what what's your take? Um, you know, and we can continue on, but just like you were on the ground. And so like either the difference between like you as like, you know, an American going to these places or um you know talking to your colleagues where you know it's sort of like there's you're you're experiencing this difference in the ecology or the way of living do you have sort of a representation of what day to day differs or or is that sort of too hard to tease apart from just like there's lots of other just differences that may have nothing to do with market versus subsistence? You mean like how life is like in the more subsistence-based context? Is that kind of your question?

Yeah, I mean, well, two things. I mean, you brought up that it's a different way of living, and then it also has effects on our psychology, right? Like day-to-day, and then maybe also more calibrational stuff. You know, is it clear to you, or do you have ideas or even guesses about sort of either these very more um transient day-to-day differences or the more sort of profound, maybe like, you know, if you pulled somebody out who has been in a subsistence existence and they go to a marketplace and they feel like a fish out of water, why is that? And what is that? Well, I mean, I think for sure life just moves way slower. And you you kind of feel it. And um people also people don't think of time the same way.

I'm not trying to get too like superior warf on us, but like the idea of like keeping a schedule or like that there would be some sort of governing system that's like larger than the environment, that's not really salient. Um things just move really, really slowly. If someone's gonna come, you know, they're gonna come when they're gonna come. You know, and you there would be no reason for you to expect them to be there at a particular time other than when they're gonna be there, if that makes sense. Do they have like a a time-keeping system, like a calendar or a clock or anything analogous, or is it just like it's daytime or nighttime? Well, now obviously everyone has access to clocks and has a conception of time because

they're also engaging with kind of the markets. People, these are there is m some market integration. It's just extremely low, right? So um, but the typical sort of indigenous system of time, as far as I have an idea of it, is like there's obviously seasons, um, there's months, so everyone understands like the months, um, everyone understands like the weeks. Um, so yeah, you usually talk in terms of months basically. And they'll say, like, oh, say six months, seven months, or like the seasons, the rainy season, the dry season. So when I'm talking to people, I'll be like, I'm coming back in three months, you know, and and they know they basically know that and they they'll remember that quite clearly.

And then if I come back in three months, they're super happy. Um in terms of But if you say I'm gonna come back in an hour. Is that less intuitive to them? I think at this point people understand an hour. I don't know. I mean, they've I think they've learned it, right? They've learned it over time. Um, so they can kind of get it, but I think in this context, there can also be a high degree of misunderstanding. They they'll f certainly say they understand it, but then whether they kind of respect that or whether they Whether they'll be mad if you're like an hour and a half, whether you if you're late, or whether they have like expectations and emotions surrounding it, that's probably less present.

Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. Um are there norms around lateness and punctuality or anything like that just totally uh a Western thing? Typically it's more of a Western thing. Um I mean I can think of some examples where we you know have set up meetings, and if if you're not there, then people can get upset. But uh I think in a more sort of customary way, like you wouldn't do things in a way that would be so contingent upon very tight scheduling, right? Like if you're gonna go somewhere, travel somewhere, you're gonna stay there for like maybe days or weeks. And so we're gonna overlap, um, like you know, meet if we have a meeting and I go to the coffee shop and I might wait for 20 minutes and if you don't show up, I'm gonna leave.

But the it would just be a longer scale. So if we say we're gonna meet at this village, I'm gonna go there and wait like five days. And you might come after two days, but you know, we're then we handle our business just fine. That's interesting. It's almost like it scales up. That's a very interesting idea that it might not be it seems so foreign to sort of say, well, 20 minutes doesn't matter. But you know, again, it's this thing of like, well, every hour counts because we have internal combustion engine cars moving us around and we're not traveling by days because we're on airplanes and things. So that's an interesting idea that it sort of scales to the um meaningful time units. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.

I mean, is it is it because of this analogy between time and money where your time literally is a kind of money and you can charge people by the hour? And if you're dilly-dallying, that means less cash in your pocket at the end of the day. And so participating in a market economy forces you to think about the time that you're spending and to budget it wisely for your own self-interest. You think that's what's behind this? Yeah. I think that's a very interesting hypothesis. I think that's a very intuitive way to think about this. And my colleague Damian Blasi has an idea to test this. And so from this perspective, he also thinks that the way individuals use language is shaped by this involvement in market economy.

So once you like monetize your time and you realize that this amount of time is worth this, He thinks that actually changes how you speak and people will actually kind of speak quicker. And then it's sort of there's there's many sort of downstream effects of how it impacts our behavior. And I think, yeah, showing up, managing time, travel, um, once you have a a commodification of labor and time, I think it changes a lot of aspects of our our thinking and behavior. That's interesting. I mean, even like people, there's a stereotype, and people sort of parody this on movies and things of uh somebody who's like, you know, really in business and they're just purely transactional, or it's sort of like they don't even, you know, take the time to listen to a

response, you know. And it's sort of so even I think even within individuals, there's sort of maybe the hyper commoditization of time or the transactionality. Um that must also happen over the course of development, right? Like kids are not born knowing they're in a market economy. Like I'm just thinking, like, you know, my my son right now, he's asking a lot of questions about time, you know, because we're starting school where we have to be punctual, you know, what is an hour? Um, these things. So it's sort of reminding me that the same cultural transition occurs among all of us over the course of development. Yeah. Getting my daughter out the door to to get her to appreciate punctuality and getting to

school on time is just impossible. She like cannot comprehend it. That's right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's it's really hard for her to grab like she she's at the point right now where she refers to anything in the past as yesterday and like has no concept of like how long ago something was. I can empathize with that very much. I feel like that's not so far off of most people's experience of time. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really alien. I mean, it's it's kind of hard to live like this. Uh it takes so much practice. But you know what what's interesting about this kind of cultural change is that the lever is so clearly one of self-interest. That if you are in a market economy and you and you are playing this market-based status

game where whoever is most successful and prosperous in the market economy has the highest status, uh, all of a sudden the rules of the status game become very different. And you either uh win or lose based on how well you follow these alien set of rules. And so, what what I like about this idea is that um it it it frames cultural change as this is in my personal self-interest, this is how I'm going to win this new alien status game. This forces me to develop these new skills and these new ways of thinking because that helps me uh advance in this new status game. Is is that how you're you're thinking uh about cultural change in this regard? I I personally like that way of thinking about cultural change.

It sort of demystifies it a little bit, where these are all just people acting in their individual self-interest under new under changing ecological circumstances. And what happens as an emergent result is that you get different norms and habits and ways of thinking. But it's not that these norms and habits and ways of thinking exist outside of us and and are and are shaping us. It's that this just emerges as a byproduct of people pursuing their own interests. So that's a it's a it's a way of thinking about culture that I personally like. What do you think about it? Yeah, I like that a lot. And I think I mean I think there's going to be variation among individuals, though. And I can think about different individuals who are pursuing these different strategies.

It's like there's a niche that is opened up, right? If the if the market is there and you can go there, there's some cost, but it's it's it's there. And then some individuals are more motivated to pursue that. And so some of my colleagues think about market integration at the community level. Like, okay, this town is this village is this far from town, and it's a more market-integrated village. And I think that's useful, but kind of to your point, the niche opens and then individuals kind of strategically choose how they want to invest in that potential strategy. And I've I can think of some interviews with some of the like younger kids, quote, like teenagers in these villages, and sometimes some of them have even like kind of identified

as a businessman. And they're they it's kind of like you don't you can't really tell, and they're kind of I think a little secretive about it, because we ask people questions about you know how often do you go to the market, what do you sell, what do you buy? And then I've had some sort of sort of stories of like maybe guys who are 18, 19, 20, and then they'll say, like, well, yeah, I got one beehive at the beginning, and I had this beehive. Honey is one of the most valuable uh commodities that you can get, especially if it's a it's a man's activity typically. So I got one beehive, and you know, I took all the money and I I bought two more beehives. So you can see they're very they're thinking very entrepreneurially.

Um and now I had the three beehives. And after one more season, then I took all that and I bought a goat. And they they mapped out a very clear strategy to how to get to more money. And they wouldn't have necessarily had to do that. They could have gone about it differently. They could have taken the the honey and invested it in social relationships and given it to friends. Or they they maybe could have done something else. There's but they're very clearly thinking about how to maximize the the monetary returns of their labor. Which but th then their their friend or their brother might not be doing that at all. So it's interesting to see like who uh among this community are the ones pursuing this um

this new strategy. Hmm. Do you find I mean so the way I would intuitively think about it is that the people who are more drawn to this strategy are are people for whom other types of niches or other types of status games don't look as promising to them. And this particular status game, this market based status game, looks particularly promising. Maybe they have a particular set of aptitudes that are well suited to it. Maybe they are better at quantitative thinking. Maybe they're more socially alienated from people who are not in this community. And maybe this will be a better opportunity for them to rise up and acquire resources and influence. Do you see these kinds of considerations happening where people are evaluating all the

different uh potential paths they can pursue and strategically picking the one that's gonna work out best for them, whether it be more of a market-based route or more of a you know per local uh community-based route. I mean, that's kind of an empirical question we're trying to answer. Um there are also people who do seem to be more do seem to be more culturally conservative, And that's a really cool feature of these pastoralist societies because if you're a pastoralist, like a s if you're if you're a man, for example, um, it doesn't really pay off until you're older. And if you leave the pastoral community and you, let's say, go to be even more market specialized, like you want to actually get a job and work in town, you immediately go into

this like very, very low marginalized class of society. You you look different, um, you might not speak the the language that everyone's using at the market like quite fluently. Um so it's it's a very difficult to just completely jump in that that world. But if you stick around and you, you know, go through all the the difficulties of being a young man, you might be gone for many months or years herding the cattle and then eventually you get enough wealth to um pay for bride price and and get married, which usually doesn't happen until you're much older. By the time you get to be like fifty, um, maybe even fifty five or so, you can kinda live a semi retired life. Where now you just you chill out, you talk about ritual stuff and you solve conflicts and

you drink a lot of, you know, the local beer and it's a it's a pretty easy life. And so the incentives are to sort of stick around and to not get too involved in the market world, but yet to maintain enough cattle and keep the sort of the the sort of traditional cultural economic strategy going. And so that sort of, I think, in turn leads a lot of pastoralists to really kind of double down on all the sort of the sociocultural package of pastoralism, the the ritual, the myths, the ways of adornment, and all these other things. Whereas like forger horticulturalists or more hunter-gatherers, I've I've done some research also during my PhD with what we'd call forger horticulturalists or more recently

hunter-gatherers. But for them, once the subsistence base kind of dwindles, there's there's no real incentive to sticking around and trying to be a a hunter-gatherer now when you're in your 50s. Um you're more incentivized to transition quite quickly. Uh whereas the pastoralists, because the livestock are still doing fine. Now, this is a side point in that I think because of clim climate change and environmental pressures, the pastoralist regime is going to be much less sustainable in the next 20, 30 years. And we see this actually right now. There's a huge um cattle death in East Africa. Uh it's been the worst drought in in history, it's been going on for a few years, so there's been like a huge drop in cattle.

But um overall, like you know, goats and sheep, they're quite resilient. You can have cattle and goat and sheep, and um it it pays off to kind of keep this system going. It's gonna pay off when you're older. So I think it it definitely could be that there are individuals who see that long term strategy as being less viable, and maybe that's in incentivizing them to pursue market based opportunities. I think that's a good way to think about it. But these are exactly all the types of things we're trying to measure empirically and track. Very cool. I mean, I I it's another way of of demystifying uh culture, I think, is to view it in terms of the material and ecological differences between different ways of life and what

the local incentive structures are. If you're in a place where uh hunting and gathering just isn't going to allow you to a comfortable retirement, um uh then, you know, a market-based life is going to be more appealing. But if you're in a place where, you know, you know, cattle uh can live a long time and uh help you retire comfortably, uh, the incentive structures are going to be different just because of the nature of what cattle are, the you know, the the nature of what the hunting and gathering lifestyle is like, you know, the distribution of the local flora and fauna within the the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, you know, the lifespan of of of your cattle or what what it requires to raise them, these material considerations are what are ultimately

going to shape the uh the cultural norms and ideas. And I think that's another uh cool way of of um explaining airy notions of of of cultures and norms by by the material constraints in a particular society. Yeah, I also really like that. You, I mean, it sounded like a little bit Zach that you were saying to put it in David's language is almost sort of the people are playing status games and trying to anticipate the future. And sort of so if you are the if you are already sort of locked into the pastoral status game or that's you know you're going to do well, you're doubling down on the accoutrements, the cultural trappings and the traditions and all the lore and whatever rituals um and probably clothing and rules and everything and diet restrictions of the pastoral uh

lifestyle. And I think that also that also feels very human to just sort of be like, you know, it's hard to predict the future. We're all just trying to like figure out like what's going to be the best path for me. There's some risk, there's some uncertainty. And you're just like, am I going to be happy? Which might mean like, you know, I have enough stuff. I can be the retired pastoralist. And you know, there's sort of the um, and then it also feels very human to look at people who are choosing different paths and sort of for there to be conflict. I imagine there's some conflict between the pastoralist who wants to keep that way of living going because they're benefiting from it, or they're anticipating it from maybe the

young upstarts who are sort of like going to the market. Or maybe, I don't know, maybe they're not around each other. Um, no, there's some conflict. I mean, I can think of you know one family where you know the father who's an older, an elder man, uh, has this sort of social role. This is in a hammer society. Um, it's called Parko, but he's sort of like the supernatural keeper of this community. And he's an amazing guy. And you know, every so often he's doing all sorts of stuff. I most of the time don't know what's going on, but he it's very complex, like blessings and behaviors that are ritually significant. And it's sort of a part of his sort of protection of the community. And he has a couple sons, and one of the sons is very much the market strategy guy.

Um, and he's actually now one of the sons has since left the community, and there's a lot of conflict there because his father is so important to the community, so well respected. And normally the the sons should be supporting them, um, but they're not. And so for this particular family now, it's it's kind of hard for him and his wife, and they're sort of um, they're kind of like my adopted uncles and aunts in a way, or whatever, they're part of my my sort of adopted family, and their kids aren't really doing the the job that they should be doing following the traditional way because they've really pursued this market strategy and now they're left. And so it's really a burden now on the community because other people have to help out and

help them. And they have an incentive to, but there's also a cost there because they actually shouldn't be the ones to do that. We've we've you guys have talked a lot about this and know a lot about these you know interdependencies but conflicts of interest. And so yeah it does create tensions um when people deviate from their prior expectations. Yeah. It reminds me there's a Monty Python skit where the family, the parents are like theater people, and the son, the son, I think, wants to work in a coal mine and they're very upset with him, right? It's the just but that that trope of, you know, the kids want to do something different than the parents. I think that's a very universal sort of experience.

Yeah, I've seen that before too. Even when the in the the hunting and gathering community, the forage horticulture, this Chabu I worked with. I remember one of the big guys, the kind of the one of the leaders of the community, he had a bunch of sons and um, you know, the the one son, the oldest son, was had just killed like a monkey in the forest recently. And he was like a small guy, like maybe eight or nine with like a a wooden spear. And everyone was like praising him, how he was gonna be this big hunter. And he was telling me, no, I don't want to be a hunter. I want to go to school. So even this guy at like eight who didn't really know much, this is quite a remote loc community, had never really seen bigger cities.

He had seen some, you know, there'd been missionaries and some people would come to the community, but he had very early on decided that he did not want to be a hunter. He wanted to go to school. And so, you know, why people, what are the sort of environmental cues that allow them to make those decisions at such a young age is a very interesting question. Yeah. Yeah. One one thing we've tiptoed around, and maybe this is a bit of a transition, maybe not, is, and I know you and I have talked about this, Zach, is when we talk about leadership, and I think a lot of listeners, especially just outside, when they think of like the science of leadership, it's very much like business school model of, you know, like there's a single

leader and it's like a single person talking in front of a big group of people. And you know, my reading and my understanding of sort of the anthropology and evolutionary sciences of leadership is: I think we all sort of as Westerners sort of start with that idea. But, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like the literature is sort of moving towards this idea that leadership is actually a lots of different things. And I almost wonder if that as a category or kind. I have ideas about why we might have this archetype, this entry for like a leader. Um, but I'm just curious, like what your thoughts are of do is it correct? Do you would you characterize it as being correct that sort of as you study this idea of

leadership, that the idea of what it is itself sort of becomes more interestingly distinct. And maybe that our initial intuition about what a leader is, it's a big, strong, you know, person who's sort of domineering. That maybe there's a grain of truth to that for some respects, but in other respects, it sort of assumes away what the the point of a lot of what leadership is for is doing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, leadership is one of these topics that we're so familiar with. And I think to your point, there could be a bit of like instinct blindness on the part of like much of leadership studies up to this point. Um, so I've I've given some lectures and some presentations for like executive education

type programs where I talk about leadership from a very um unique perspective. I I even had the opportunity to give the Prince of Morocco um in a classroom a lecture about the evolutionary social science of leadership. And the people are usually very interested to hear about this, but I often ask them at the beginning, like, so what is leadership? And people have like very strong held opinions about what it is. Um leadership is inspiration, or leadership is and they'll have you know sort of the the business model phototrope of what a leader is. And I have to bring them back and like explain that, okay, well, that's perfectly fine. I'm not disagreeing with you, but if we're going to take this psychological scientific

approach, let's operationalize leadership. Is it a set of behaviors? Is it a set of qualities? And then if we do that, where can we apply that and where can it where can we find it? And obviously, then we find leadership as a behavior or as a psychological phenomenon in many different domains. And we have to kind of then identify what's the limits of it. Obviously, if a if a baby is crying, it's it's influencing the parents, but is that leadership? Well, probably not. There needs to be probably some bit of agency. Um, but yeah, you find that leadership as a phenomenon, as like a psychological process, is occurring all over the place. Um and that's what we want to understand because the the sort of business world of

leadership or the political world of leadership is building up from that psychological foundation. But talking to my my colleagues in like political science and and other other fields, it's uh getting them to think about leadership as a phenomenon rather than like a role or an institution, um, I think is a has been a big conversation. But I think people, like you said, are are more and more converging on this more holistic, kind of multifaceted um way to think about leadership. Yeah, I mean just to say as a oh sorry, just as a quick funny slight, well, maybe not funny thing, but like, you know, kids who are crying on the playground or at a toy store uh and their parents do something different because of it are definitely leading.

Uh yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely I feel like my my daughter is often dominating me uh uh but uh it seems like what you're saying is that leadership is actually a much broader phenomenon that is tip than is typically appreciated. that you know we we think of it as you're either the CEO or you're the politician. Uh but that those are just very unique local instances of leadership of of a much broader category that encompasses what we do uh in virtually every social interaction. Would would you be advocating for that kind of definition? And I would then segue into the question of how do you define uh leadership? How can we pick it out from other kinds of social phenomena? Yeah, exactly. So anytime there's like a group of individuals, there's depending upon the structure of

that group, there's probably going to be some individuals that have disproportionate influence in some particular context. And so that's sort of the working definition that folks, I think, in the evolutionary social sciences are often using. Then that allows you to first define the group. Is it a nation? Is it a school? Is it a playgroup? Is it a family? And then how do you want to measure disproportionate influence? And there's different ways you can go about that as well. Is it um is it speaking? Is it having attention? Um is it is it physically coercing? Um and I think one of the things I've been thinking and talking about more recently is like the benefit generation cost and position. And a lot of people have talked about this.

Um, I mean, Dave, you've talked about this. Patrick Durkey has also written a lot about this with status hierarchies. Um, So this kind of makes it a bit more concrete to see that what are the actual outcomes that this disproportionate influence is producing? Are they doing something good for the group? Are they imposing a cost on someone? Trying to break it down to really concrete, simple ways to think about the outcomes of the disproportionate influence. So yeah, then you can define, you know, maybe the uh the parents are the leaders of the family, um, or the the more outspoken person on the captain of the basketball team is the captain of the team. So for any social group, you can identify what the influence who has disproportionate

influence. In some cases, it might be kind of institutionalized, like you're the captain, so you have an agreed-upon role. But in other cases it might be non-institutionalized, but it should emerge from who can provide benefits for us in this particular context. So maybe they have some special knowledge. Um, they're not normally the leader, but all of a sudden, hey, you're the expert on this domain, so tell us what to do. Um, yep. So it's almost like it's yeah, for example, yeah. So you're what you're saying is leadership is kind of chimerical in that in that there there isn't, you know, uh we think of a leader as being one person, but what you're saying is that we're constantly morphing in and out of leadership roles all the time.

Like, you know, for m my daughter, for example, you know, if we're at home and she throws a tantrum, it's not that big a deal. But if we're in a public place that's very nice and formal and she throws a tantrum, that imposes a huge cost on me. And so she has way more bargaining power in in the fancy public place than she does at home. And she likely knows this. And I'm more willing, she has more influence over me. You know, I'm more willing to placate her and let her, you know, watch videos on my phone or whatever to make sure that she doesn't throw a tantrum. Whereas at home, she's gonna have much less influence over me. And so she might, you know, move a little further on the leadership continuum, you know, in

a in a in a nice fancy place, and then move, and then I might rise a little bit when we're, you know, at my home. Uh and and what you're saying is that we're constantly sliding in and out of uh along, we're sliding along this continuum of more or less influence, more or less leadership, depending on the context and what the needs of the different parties are in the situation. Is that what you're is that is that accurate? Yeah, exactly. Did you have something to add to that, Dave? Oh, I was just gonna say, um uh well I was gonna just say uh like the example of the um uh um uh navigation, but uh the but I mean the way I think about it almost is that I mean to answer the substantive thing is that I actually think like

leadership roles and events, like for example, you know, we're all in a group together, and you know, maybe one of us has better knowledge of like where where to eat. And so in that moment, they're like essentially the leader, but then somebody knows somebody else knows how to get there, right? And like they're the leader too. And I think in a in a funny way, like our folk concept leader probably doesn't tag those as leadership per se. And I actually think it's biased towards what, and I think this is a word used by like people like Aaron Lukashewski or other things, where it's almost like a leadership manifold, where there's certain attributes that are uh recurrently and repeat repetitively useful.

So, like, you know, being a good communicator, being formidable. So, sort of, I think our our idea, our folk idea of what a leader is, doesn't look at leadership instances at all, but what it does is it looks at the aggregate, like what's the throughput or what does a person afford. And so I think like half of leadership or three quarters of leadership isn't even seen by our intuitive idea of what a leader leadership is. And what our intuitive idea of what leadership is is looking, is doing the job of individuating between people and seeing what what kinds of leadership instances they're good at and ranking them in that way. So it's like very much like it's this, it's we're not designed to do the science of

representing leadership. We're actually just doing the evolved thing of sort of picking who's good for doing certain things. And that's what our folk psychology is completely focused on. Yeah. And then there's sort of like a meta leadership and identifying who should be leaders in what context. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you know, just this like really emphasizes the market dynamics we were talking about before. So the context shapes who can provide benefits or impose costs. There's variation among all the individuals involved in the group. And then also you have the pool of competing leaders too. And so kind of to bring this back to like adaptive psychology, there's potentially either

either adaptations or there are mental structures that facilitate this process by which we can see what groups are we a part of, what are the challenges we face, and should I solve those groups? Excuse me, should I solve those problems? Am I equipped to do that? Or should I defer to this other individual who clearly has more knowledge or formidability or the right combination of of capital, so to speak, um, in this particular market? Yeah. And I think this gets into like one of my students, Clara Lavador, is really interested in like niche niche occupying niches in groups. And I think like the psychology of sort of what's my role? You know, like in movies, there's always like, you know, you're the dri you're the getaway

in a heist movie, you know, like what's your expertise? I think that idea of sort of every group has this role and this role and this role, and people value being that role. Uh, and it's a threat when somebody else comes and might be better at you. I think that happens a lot more in in that dynamic is sort of what we're also talking about here. Yeah, that's like the the dominance hierarchy within the the roles that assemble together to form like a cohesive, functioning, interdependent group. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Hmm. It's interesting. So within the heist group there's a dominance hierarchy about who's the best getaway driver. Right. And right and maybe one who's who's widely recognized by the group as the best getaway

driver, you could consider them the alpha. And then maybe the second best would be the beta. And then if someone else is showing their chops at being a getaway driver, well, the alpha might feel threatened by that and try to act against that person. But that's just a little micro status hierarchy within the larger group of, you know, w what what they're trying to do, which is, you know, rob banks or whatever. Uh and then you have different status hierarchies happening there. I mean, it's all extremely complicated. But of course, once you zoom out, you see that this is just a niche within a niche within a niche. Because you know, choosing to rob banks versus, you know, do brain surgery is itself a a

huge complicated decision of which niche I'm going to pursue and then, you know, which niche I'm going to sho pursue within that niche. Um so it's it's a really it's a rich way of thinking. Uh and it helps you carve nature at the joints and and and and think about what the little micro decisions are within the the fractal nature of all these different status games and all these different niches. Anyway, I'm I'm ranting. But uh but it's Yeah, I like that. But it unifies like the the like Congress person who's threatened by another congressperson, and that's the same underlying logic as the kid who's a good skateboarder and a c the best kid skateboarder in class and there's a new kid who's a better

skateboarder. It's the same uh expression at a deep level of the same phenomenon. Yeah. I mean I think it explains a lot of political phenomena. I mean you could think about you know uh antipathy toward immigrants as you know I uh provide the service of you know working for this factory and here comes this this new group of people who seem to be doing this this this work or providing this service at a lower price than than me and that could uh to my evolved psychology feel like a threat and I might try to act against that that upstart or those those newcomers coming in to try to uh overshadow me or you know if I am a a cultural well-educated uh uh elite uh and I have and I want to have lots of influence over the culture and I see these you

wealthy corporate CEOs who have disproportionate political influence, they're a threat to me. And I might be uh attracted uh by political parties that try to take take down those corporate fat cats. Right. And so you see these kinds of uh status conflicts happening uh uh in in all different parts of a society and at different levels of social hierarchies and in different social hierarchies. And these are some of the raw material uh for uh creating political coalitions that are attractive to people and uniting different alliances together. Anyways, I'm getting into uh uh my uh hobby horse, which is thinking about politics. But I'm curious if you if you if you think uh I'm onto something in this in this direction.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And there's a there's another layer of complexity to this in that as let's say a would-be leader or a potential leader, you can also manipulate people's perceptions of the environment to promote your own capacities at the expense of your rival. And this is like a classic thing that authoritarian would-be leaders do is emphasize the outgroup threats or the external threats. And we've, you know, we've seen Donald Trump do this in many of his campaigns. Um, but we don't have uh an enemy, so to speak, you know, coming in our border or in our territory, except like immigration. So that's been a very salient message for him. It creates this out-group threat, And there's a lot of evidence that suggests that when

there is this intergroup threat, we're more likely to prefer these more domineering, strongman, authoritarian type tendencies. It might be a cost for us, but it's a cost we're willing to pay if that threat is real. And if the threat is real, then you want that leader who can protect our border and keep us safe and provide those benefits to us that we think are going to outweigh the costs of their potential coerciveness. But if you have a rival who is, let's say, less authoritarian or or less co less has less capacities for coercion, but they're going to provide all these other benefits. They're going to solve all the problems, and the economy is going to be great, and the social system is going to function well, the benefits are going to be great from that

individual. Well, you might not be able to compete with them in benefit provision, but you can compete with them in some other domain if you sort of tweak the perception of the ecology to favor your capacities rather than theirs. So there's you can compete in these on both sides of the coin, so to speak. And I think you see this in political rhetoric quite quite clearly. And I I don't know that I don't know that politicians have like evolutionary social scientists on their staff. I don't think they do, but um it's almost as if they do. And I think that's an indication that the psychology underlying this is so salient that someone like Donald Trump doesn't have to be coached to say, oh yeah, you want to emphasize

the outgroup threat to play into your strength. It's just like a natural process, a natural outcome of our psychologies. And you could think of it as a market. I mean, you see you you have a bunch of competing politicians with competing uh uh agendas and platforms and and uh uh beliefs. And some of those beliefs are just more attractive and compelling to the human mind. And the ones that win out are the ones that, you know, uh demonize uh you know an outgroup or you know, frame some group as being a free rider that needs to be punished. These kind these kinds of narratives that fit uh our evolved psychology very well are the ones that win out in the political marketplace and then trickle up to form the contents of

our ideological belief systems. Yeah. This is why we can't have nice things. Yeah. People are terrible and wonderful, but also terrible. Yeah, they're both. Yeah. Um, Zach, uh what uh we've so we've been launching into sort of leadership. Um, you know, you you there's this thing about like services, like cognitive services. I don't know if you want to talk about that at all, or is there some other part of your research? Like, are we missing anything? Because we sort of launched right in. Um, are we missing, you know, a good swath of what you're doing or thinking about? Um Well, yeah, we've talked a little bit about some of this stuff. I guess on the on the services side, so this is like some work I I've done with Ed Hagan,

who you who you both talk to and know well. Um, this is the idea that you know part of what leaders are doing are providing these services, often cognitive services, in our in our in our model. And I guess a lot of my work is kind of it's been very inspired by the sort of dominance prestige framework. This I read this paper, you know, the the seminal paper here is Henrik and Gil White 2001. I read this as an undergraduate when I was working with Ray Haymes. He turned me onto this, and that just like blew my mind. And I mean I think I still have my PDF copy of that that's like you know, it's all highlighted and has coffee stains on it. And so I I spent a lot of my work as a graduate student trying to understand what this

dominance prestige model was, how we could test it, what it would look like in different different contexts. And you see tons of ethnographic evidence that this is going on. And there's been a lot of different ways to think about prestige. Is it respect? Is it competition in these symbolic domains? Instead of competing with physical aggression, we can compete by being a guitarist or being a good hunter or a basketball player. So is it analogous to physical competition, but in non-physical ways? That's sort of the Jerome Barco model. Um, or is it like an opportunity to identify the important model to learn skills from? That's sort of the Henrik cultural evolution model. And so once we really dug into a lot of the ethnography, um, it led us to think about

uh how the sort of um social selection models of learning and and and finding the ideal individual to to learn important skills from also relates to this very clear pattern that high status men and leaders have much enhanced reproductive success. You know, the Chris von Ruden has talked a lot about this and um we s we sa we see this a lot in the ethnographic record. So there's clearly like a a sexual selection and a social selection process going on. And so this led us to think about: well, what is it that prestigious leaders are really good for? Why would you want to sacrifice your autonomy to someone else? And the social, the sort of cultural evolutionary story, the social learning story probably

explains a big chunk of it. Like, yes, you wanna identify who you can learn from, but there's some issues there we we think are are not fully explained. For one, like if that is the case, if prestige is a mechanism to identify someone who has important skills from, so that then you can learn those skills, you might expect that prestige would go down as a function of that individual sharing that information. Um and that's obviously not how prestige works. I mean, if if I if I want to learn how to you know shoot a three-point shot because you're the best and you teach me that shot and I mimic your technique exactly, now your prestige doesn't go down. Um so there's more going on than that. And then, you know, why would you defer to someone who is prestigious once you have already

sort of acquired whatever knowledge that you could potentially acquire from them? Um that doesn't seem to happen either. Um Why would prestigious people be like sexually attractive to the opposite sex? Or if you're in an arranged marriage situation, which characterizes a lot of humanity, why would you want your son or your daughter to be partnered with a prestigious individual? So there seem to be a lot of gaps in this. And our our solution is this idea of computational services. So prestigious individuals have special knowledge and they have intelligence. And we kind of use this term neurocapital. Some of my colleagues don't like this so much, but for us, it's like it's a it's a catch-all. So it's whatever intelligence is, you know, whatever uh expertise is and knowledge is and

also personality, just all the stuff that's in the in the brain that's variable. And in this sense, it's kind of like physical formidability. You can't fake it. And to some extent, you can build it up over time, but you can't just overnight increase your neural capital, just like overnight, you can't become physically formidable. And so there's natural variation. And if you're high on this neural capital, then it puts you in a position to provide input into other individuals, solve problems for them, resolve conflicts, and offer services. And it's beneficial for the altar, the other individual, because they don't have the information that you do. And imagine a scenario where you have one individual who has a big problem.

They don't know what to do. They lack the information, they lack the experience to solve this problem. So they go to someone who is known for having this expertise, having this prestige. And they there's you know situation A, B, and C, and they have no idea what to do. Uh the prestigious individual, because of their expertise, because of their sort of theory of mind capacities, maybe just even their cognitive capacities, their intelligence, they might know that option A is clearly bad for this individual, so they can like take it off the table right away. Option B and D, excuse me, B and C might be equally good for the for the requester, but option C might be great for the leader, the prestigious individual.

So then they can recommend option C. And both parties get a benefit here. it's easier for the follower in this scenario because all they have to do now is compare the proposed option to whatever they might do on their own. So just a sort of binary comparison. The leader, on the other hand, had a quite a complex set of scenarios and a lot of information processing going on. And that means that now most decisions will be a benefit to the leader. So that's why it's attractive to be married to this individual, to have your close kin married to that individual, to be partners to that individual, because outcomes are usually going to be in their favor. So it's they're a good social partner to have.

So that's sort of the idea of computational services in a nutshell, in a sense. If I could break that down, because it's a it's a cool idea and I want to break down like the the mechanics of it. So within any decision, uh there are decision costs. There's time, energy, uh uh uh uh et cetera, that it takes to evaluate all the different possibilities, conceive of all the different possibilities, map out how they're gonna work out in your head, uh, and that takes time and energy. Um, and what a leader does is it uh saves you that time and energy. You you uh provide the service of reducing that decision cost for the person that you're helping. And so you get a benefit, and that, and then I'm saving you some cost, I'm saving you some

time and energy in making the decision. And I'm getting a benefit too, because I'm going to guide you toward decisions that benefit me more. So we're each benefiting from this. You get a lower decision cost, and I get a better outcome. And through that mutual benefit, uh this kind of this kind of leadership uh dynamic emerges where a person who is better at reducing decision costs for people tends to reduce more decision costs and have more influence over the group. And in exchange for providing that service, they get more favorable outcomes. Is that a good way of breaking it down? Yeah, exactly. And in the in the paper, we call this joint utility improvement. So we actually both get a better outcome of this.

And so leadership is costly as well. So I need to get some, if someone's leader, they need to get some payoff and make it worth their while as well. A lot of people in these, especially smaller scale societies, they don't want to be the leader because the costs are quite quite high. Opportunity costs, potential reputational damages. But in the end, it makes sense exactly given the dynamics you just explained. Cool. It's a really interesting model. I like it a lot. Yeah. And just in defense of your sort of agnostic about like what intelligence or the neural underpinnings are, the there's this idea of a difference detecting mechanism. I have a paper that's hopefully going to come out pretty soon, and it's based on it's an

idea from David Buss and people like Aaron Lukashewski and other people and Patrick Durge in personality, looking at um it's this idea that it's what we talked about before for leadership, which is what we're evolved to do is look for differences in something not necessarily the full causal story. So for example, like if you're trying to predict like what's a good restaurant, you're not going to go through like, well, do they cook food? Um, you know, do they have a wait staff? Like that's held constant. So what you're gonna do is look for like, is there like a line out the door? You know, like how hard is it to get in? Does like the upkeep look, you know, like is it being kept up? Like these are all cues to predict among the variants that of the choices that you have.

And so in intelligence, for example, there's this long literature and like there's a paper by Denny Borsboom about how people have looked for like the underpinnings of what intelligence is forever, and it doesn't map onto any like single thing. And that's in part because, you know, like the mind is not domain general and there's not like the thinky part of the mind. But it's also because this idea is that really what intelligence is a third-party representation of somebody who's better at something than somebody else. And the source of that variation is always different. So in some cases, it might be like we're in a high pathogen environment, and the person who's just got faster processing speed for this particular task is the one who has like the

lowest pathogen load. But what that produces or why that's there is very different from another situation where it's like, who's the best guitarist? And like, why did that, you know, that particular combination of things and what makes the best guitarist isn't what makes the best accountant or most like, you know, and so what people have discovered is what unifies these difference-detecting concepts like leadership or intelligence is not the um the thing in the head that corresponds to it, but it's the perception of a difference. But what causes that difference is always the same. So the fact that you're being agnostic about it, I just want to like as a side as a side here, um, it's vindicated in the sense of there's these many categories that are really

part of our intuitive evolved folk psychology, where it's really we're designed to detect differences, but what causes those differences is very opaque and might even be heterogeneous across the situations. Okay, that's really cool. Yeah, that fits perfectly with uh this sort of framework. Yeah. Yeah. I I like that a lot too, Dave. Um, and uh incidentally, uh, it relates to I think a lot of uh panic about artificial intelligence is because we import we import this folk concept of intelligence as just sort of being generally awesome. And then that leads to these uh wild thought experiments. What if we what if the computer just gets more and more generally awesome at everything? And then it'll be better at everything than us, and then it'll it'll kill us all.

Um and I so I think a lot of fears about AI runama come from this kind of folk psychology um that that we're just letting run wild. Um I have a blog post called AI Dumerism is bullshit that you might enjoy, Dave, that that basically makes this argument. Yeah. Um but yeah, no, I I I I love this idea of neural capital, Zach. I think it puts the focus where it ought to be, which is not on this like mental substance called intelligence, but thinking of it in economic terms as a as a s as a thing that you accumulate over a lifetime. You know, just as I, you know, eat lots of food and I, you know, and that, you know, it gets converted into um, you know, physical capital, you know, bigger muscles or or you

know, larger size or whatever, uh, I, you know, uh forage for lots of pieces of valuable information in my environment. And I learn lots of valuable lessons and I accumulate that in my nervous system. And that allows me to provide lots of value to other people. And some just as some people might be better at hunting and foraging and better at accumulating food, some people might be better at accumulating valuable pieces of information, valuable insights, valuable lessons. And those people will just tend to have more neural capital and be able to provide more benefits, which in turn allows them to have more bargaining power in the social marketplace and have more social influence and rise to leadership positions.

So I think it's a it's a beautiful uh model. And I I yeah, I like it. Cool. I uh also want to tie it back to, I think people listening might also recognize uh this in another context. And I know you've also thought a little bit about this, is that um is parenting, right? Where like a lot of this dynamic, again, uh it sounds like it's almost really starts with sort of parenting. You can almost imagine that as if if you wanted the first set of selection pressures, it's this thing of there's this helpless organism in my control system is not only controlling this body envelope, but it has to do the services for this other body envelope that's totally helpless, doesn't know anything. And so this thing of like the choices A, B, C, uh, that really sounds also like parenting,

where like A is really bad for the kid, B and C are equally good for the kid, but like C is better for me. So I'm gonna suggest C. Yeah, exactly. But I mean that's sort of the tongue in cheek version. But then, I mean, how seriously should we take the metaphor? And is it that this thing of like, you know, the original evolved psychology is really a parenting psychology that's been sort of tweaked and co-opted to then do other things? Or how are you thinking about that? Um, you know, and it certainly seems like a lot of this is happening within the family too. So, you know, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, that's that's exactly kind of our thinking. I don't remember if Ed got into this in his conversation with y'all, but um, if we kind of

extrapolate back and kind of to take a Dave Petrazuki approach, think about the adaptive problem first. We come to this idea of it all starts in the in the family. So the mother is the first leader of all of us. And you know, a mother's offspring are her followers in this sense. We think about disproportionate influence and decision-making. And so kind of a consequence of this line of thinking that started with like thinking about dominance prestige, looking at the ethnographic record, seeing this overlap, coming this idea of neural capital and sexual selection. An outcome is that it seems that the cognitive demands of motherhood would have been the strongest selection pressure over a long period of hominin evolution.

And so this is sort of also like a it's a sort of social intelligence, a Machiavellian intelligence kind of explanation for encephalization or the evolution of the brain. Because it seems like every woman is the at least the leader of her children, and probably also the leader of her family in a lot of ways. Optimizing decisions, resolving conflicts, and all these cognitive demands that we see as being associated with leadership more broadly is what every mother is doing basically from her first, or maybe especially her second offspring, but even her first, all the way through the rest of her life, effectively. And so this suggests that you know a lot of the phenomenon of leadership behavior might be

more women-specific. And so this psychology might have that might have been the selection pressure for it. And then when you have two individuals who are both good at this, it's it's even better, right? So if you have a good joint utility improvement cognition of a mother and a good joint utility improvement cognition of a father, then there's gonna be a really stable pair bond. They're able to resolve all these conflicts because they necessarily have lots of conflicts. You do you invest in the paternal line or the maternal line? Or what if someone had some other children with another mateship, now you're together? So in order to make it work, you have to resolve conflicts. And anyone who's been in a a a partnership obviously knows that good relationships are not

the ones that avoid conflicts necessarily, but the ones that resolve them more effectively. And so if the cognitive demands of motherhood were a strong selection pressure, if you resolve those conflicts, you're going to have more surviving offspring. And you know, many children are dying in before the age of what, before six months, even before one year, in the subsistence-based context. So keeping your kids alive is not, it's not easy exactly. So you have to have, um you have to be thinking very carefully. There's lots of threats out there. Um and so then if if all mothers are doing this, then you only need like one or two or maybe a few guys who aren't doing as much in the home that can then provide these similar

services that mothers are providing for their children within the house at the community level. It's a ri I I I wanna um make this connection between conflict resolution and what you call joint utility maximization because it's uh I I love how elegantly it maps on uh one maps onto the other. So the original model is that I save you decision costs, uh, and in exchange I get a more favorable outcome. The that same logic applies beautifully to to an instance of a conflict. So if you and Dave are in conflict, um, you have a variety of possible ways of resolving that conflict, a variety of different courses of action. It takes a lot of time and energy to evaluate all those different options and those

different possibilities. So right off the bat, you have a lot of time and energy that's being spent in you and Dave figuring out what you're gonna do about this conflict. But on top of those time and energy costs, you also have the costs of potentially fighting with one another, physically perhaps, or you might have the costs of foregone cooperation if you decide to not be friends anymore. So th there are there are these huge costs that you and Dave are now facing. And me as a potential leader, I have the benefit to save you those huge costs. I can save you the decision costs by making a clear uh outcome that both of you can agree to, and you don't have to spend time squabbling and fighting over it.

I can perhaps save your relationship and and the benefits of future cooperation. I can prevent you from fighting with each other and incurring physical uh costs. I can provide all those huge benefits to you as a leader and as someone with a lot of neural capital who knows you both and knows what might be a favorable outcome to you both. And in exchange, I get to resolve that conflict in a way that might benefit me. You know, maybe maybe if you know if you're both my allies, I'm really going to want you guys to get along. And so it benefits you if it benefits me if both of you guys are getting along. Uh, but if you know, if Dave is my brother, I might you know favor an outcome to the conflict that benefits Dave more than you, but that still might be make you better off if

at the end of the day you're saving these huge decision costs. And so I I really love how elegantly this model maps on to the to this idea of conflict resolution and explains really insightfully why conflict resolution uh is such an important part of leadership. Um and and it's and intuitively, and uh from a Western mind, it's not a very important part of leadership. We when we think of a leader, we don't really think of them as being like a mediator or like you know, mediating conflicts between people or like being an impartial judge or something like that. And yet, if you look cross-culturally, what you find is that that actually is the most common and enduring feature of leadership, which I think is a really surprising and

interesting empirical finding. Yeah, exactly. That was, I was just going to mention that. We we did the work and went through the ethnographic record and identified all these different functions of leaders. And it was kind of overlooked. And I was first sort of looking for theories to operationalize to see what I could test in the ethnographic record. There wasn't like a really clear theory saying conflict resolution is what leaders are doing. Um but in the end, when we did like a kind of an exploratory study, we found that conflict resolution was by far, well, not by far, but it was among a few very common functions that leaders are providing. And in fact, it was the most common function that leaders are providing across like a wide

range of societies and also different contexts. Yeah. There's also a common knowledge element too. So just to continue the metaphor or the example, like if Zach and I are in conflict and David, you resolve it, it's also that if Zach and I are already in conflict, we already have our worried about the other getting more status or having more control in the relationship. And if we all have common knowledge that David, you have made the decision, we're both more comfortable going forward because the precedent isn't, well, Zach just called the shots now, and I would be reluctant to do that. So even if there was an agreement that we could both live with, I might just not want to go along with it because I don't want the precedent being that Zach is the one who I who got

listened to. So like we both know that you, yeah, yeah, you did the allows both of you to save face. Exactly, exactly, and not get status in that other way. And then it also means like we know that we're both being monitored in the sense of like, I know that now David knows that this issue exists, but I also know that Zach knows that David knows. And so it really is like a beautiful feed uh forward cycle of can increasing common knowledge, saving face, and um and also just your unique perspective, David, and solving all of our problems. When we stop recording, Zach and I are gonna um talk to you, David. Yeah. I I'll sit you down on my couch and you can hear it. That sounds great. Um I I think Dave that brings up another interesting point of like the temporal dynamics

that leaders must be sensitive to, which is another layer of the cognitive complexity. So sometimes it might just be kind of arbitrary and you might not have the sufficient information to really make a uh a justified decision. But let's say you already have that influence because of past decisions you've made and it's agreed upon that you have some authority in this context. So you just have to say, okay, stop it. You take the toy or you take the resource and we're done. But then the next time, the person who got the short end of the stick, you have to remember that they might have a turn now in this sort of the randomness or the noise of imperfect decision making. And if you if you remember it the next time, okay, now things are fine.

This kind of gets into the idea of welfare trade-off and is someone taking you your outcome sufficiently into account consistently enough. You can maybe short someone once in a while, but you can't short the same person too much, or you're going to risk that um the influence for that individual. So leaders have to be mapping all of this stuff and temporally as well. Yeah. That's cool. Do you find that there is a preference for impartiality in a leader? Because you would imagine if if leaders are playing such a a strong role in resolving conflicts, it would uh really be in everyone's interest for that leader to not play favorites. So if you if you and Dave are in conflict, uh you're not gonna want me to be Dave's best

friend. That's that's very bad for you. Or even if I am Dave's best friend, you're gonna want me to have some kind of distance, some kind of impartiality to make uh a fair resolution of the conflict without being biased by my allegiances to Dave. And so to me, that suggests a uh an underlooked aspect of leadership, which is that we might want leaders to to have a kind of impartiality, a kind of objectivity that allows that prevents them from, you know, pi playing favorites uh or or you know helping out their buddies. Do you is that an aspect of leadership that you've seen? Have you thought about that? Yeah, I think that there that is an aspect of leadership that makes me think of two things. In the cross-cultural data I've I've done, the cross-cultural using the ethnographic record

to build quantitative measures of like conflict and leadership and conflict resolution. We do see some evidence of fairness being associated with leadership and conflict resolution. So I do think that is a very clear signal in the ethnographic record. Leaders should be fair, they should have a record of impartiality. I mean, that's like a desirable characteristic in someone who has influence who you're deferring to regularly. But I also think about like I've done some studies on conflict resolution among pastoralists, among the hammer. This is work with Luke. And we also see that kin groups play a big role in who's going to help you resolve your conflicts. And so if you know if uh me and Dave have a conflict, we might both recruit like one of our

close friends, like an institutionalized sort of friend to come to our behalf. So in that in that sense, there's equal subjectivity or there's equal impartiality. And we each like have kind of our almost our our lawyer, so to speak, who is going to represent our perspective, not us. So there's there's sort of an idea that they're relatively impartial because they're kind of removed, but they're also clearly representing our interests. And as long as we both have someone who's going to advocate on our behalf, it removes like some of the emotion or the passion, and it removes that direct conflict. But now it allows the negotiation to happen with a slight degree of what let's say equal subjectivity or equal um partiality, so to speak.

Which uh in in turn creates a massive incentive to have people who will who would be willing to advocate for you, to to form alliances with people who will have your back should you ever get into a conflict. Um and and signalling about about loyalty and you know, whether you get in a fight with someone, whether they take your side uh automatically or not, is a is a huge feature of of social relationships. It's it's a fascinating topic. Um yeah. So I'm I'm I I also I wanted to pick your brain. So this idea of impartiality and the importance of it in resolving conflicts. Um so there's this really cool idea uh from Pascal Boyer, who we will I imagine we'll probably have on at some point, where he thinks that the function of divination is to is is

to basically provide this kind of impartiality where it cannot otherwise be obtained. So if if I cannot be trusted to make an impartial decision about how to resolve your conflict, um maybe the only way to resolve it is just to say, let's just, you know, uh uh throw something in the water and see if it sinks or floats, or let's look at some tea leaves, or or let's do do some random ritual that that produces a random outcome. And in that case, randomness is actually preferable to the judgment of another human being if if that j if that human being cannot be trusted to be i uh uh impartial. Um and so what these these rituals do in these divination is that they provide uh common ground, they provide common knowledge to coordinate the group, uh resolve disputes, get

everyone with a common set of expectations without the corruptive, the corrupt influence of any particular person making the decision. Do you buy that model? And does it uh uh fit with the way you're thinking uh about these issues? Um yeah, I think there's something to that, or a lot to that for sure. But at the same time, you need to have kind of the neural capital, so to speak, or the expertise to perform that ritual. But it does give those individuals like sort of plausible deniability in some sense or the capacity to say, okay, well, we're gonna go to the Oracle now. Um, and I have the authority to make that decision, but now I'm putting that responsibility outside of myself. And it's also a really good strategy from the perspective of said leader or high status

person because it now limits the cost. Um of the biggest costs for leaders are status loss. Um and so we if you look at we've kind of quantified this in the ethnographic data we've collected, there still are more, there's more evidence in our data set of benefits than costs, status benefits than status costs. But it's not as much as you would think. There's tons of status costs. Um, they're outweighed by the the benefits, but it's very costly. Like I see leadership as being a really high risk or high high high reward strategy. It can pay off big, but it can also really cost you. So I think the divination element gives leaders the opportunity to sort of strategically not go into very risky territory um and use some strategy.

Um in in Hammer there's like a a throwing of shoes sort of strategy that individuals can use. You have two shoes. I don't exactly know how it works because it's not really done very much, but you have the two shoes and you kind of hold them a certain way and you throw them and the angles they make uh you know can be interpreted to provide some insights. So you haven't you haven't needed it yet. I haven't needed it thankfully but yeah I think Pascal has a has a very really great point there. It's it's advantageous for the individual. And then also like it's kind of flipping a coin, you know, so it's people can't argue with that. I wonder if like the uh the the cultural evolution of like larger scale religions and like

monotheistic or even like other agents is just the passing, it's a reflection of passing the buck of the responsibility. So it's sort of like if I'm doing divination and it goes wrong, um, well, like maybe that's a problem with me. But if if there's another person who I was talking to, then they were wrong. Or like I can just say, well, they can't be wrong. We we we must be wrong. It's not me. I'm not saying I'm infallible. So like I like the idea that maybe like all of all of the like elaboration of beyond divination is just sort of like passing the buck and it's not my responsibility. And like that's why we have like agents as gods and multiple gods and things like that. Yeah. That's a good idea.

That's a big idea. I mean it harkens back to what we were talking about at the beginning, you know, masquerading fear-based strategies with, you know, with a kind of rash rationalization or moralization. So th there's a cool study, I think, by the name by a guy named Watts, where he looks at ritual sacrifices cultures, and he finds that um cultures with these ritual sacrifices last longer. They're more stable. They're less likely to have rebellions and so forth. And the hypothesis is that it's a way of scaring and intimidating a subordinate group of people with plausible deniability and with passing the buck on to someone else. So it's not that we're just terrorizing you to dominate you and put fear in you.

It's that we're just following orders from the big guy in the sky. Don't blame us, you know, blame blame him. Right. Uh so it's a it's a way, it's a narrative that justifies the dominance relationship in precisely the ways that that we were talking about. Um and and that might explain why it has, you know, uh appeared uh so often in the historical record. And we see this in a lot in in ethnography as well. There's all sorts of, I guess sort of socially constructed systems that allow elites to sort of suppress even like the reproductive interests or the opportunities of people lower in the social hierarchy. And in Hammer, where I'm doing a lot of field work, there's lots of rituals individuals

have to do before they can get married or before they can get pregnant, and then while they're pregnant. And there's sort of not always clear opportunities to prove that you did everything that you had to do ritually. Now, that gives the sort of burden of trust on many other people in the community, but it also allows very high-status people to accuse you of not having followed through with, let's say, X ritual or X step. And that gives them a sort of this sort of religious domain to potentially punish you that they can use strategically and opportunistically for maybe their own self-interest or for some other political interest. Interesting. Interesting. Well, um, Zach, I know a lot of what we're talking about, you know, people who might not

know your work, you know, you're talking about the summary of it, but you've just been collecting an incredible amount of data and going to the field. As we're wrapping up here, can you just talk a little bit about like what you're I know you're collecting lots of social network data. Can you just talk a little bit about sort of you know the you're not just talking off the cuff here and you've got a lot of data and you've taken a lot of effort to collect data all these places. Can you just talk a little bit about like what what that is? Yeah, yeah, with pleasure. I mean that's really why I'm I'm in the game. So Luke and I, you know, have this, like I talked about, this collaborative field-based

project, the Omo Valley Research Project. And now we've assembled a small army of research assistants and collaborators and colleagues. So we have many other people on board. Maud Mujineau is a postdoc working with us who's collecting a lot of data right now. We have a guy, Temechin Bira, who's finishing his PhD at WSU in anthropology, who's also on board. Ashetu Uwentu, another Ethiopian anthropologist, is collecting data from us. Another uh anthropologist doing her PhD at WSU, Tigis, is probably going to be collecting data with us pretty soon. And so we've assembled this team of people that have different interests, different backgrounds, but all collecting this these diverse data but piping into this centralized

cross-cultural database. And so actually during COVID, uh Luke and I spent a couple years really thinking about okay, how can we collect these data just mechanistically? Like what's the process? And so we built our own application with a firm and a very amazing software developer who's working with us to solve a lot of the problems that we've encountered over the years. So, for example, in in many of these Omo Valley groups, people change their name. Like it changes over your life course. If you have a kid and you're a woman, your name changes. It basically becomes like the mother of, you know, Dave. And people have many names too. They have like a a bull jumping name, a ritual name. And then the name that they would tell me in an interview when I ask them what their name

is is not necessarily the name that their best friend would call them by. So it is very difficult to ask people about other people in the community. So everything has to be like based on faces. But now if you have a community of hundreds, you can't carry around all these photos all the time. And so one of the key features of this application we built is to have a record of everyone, all their names, their faces, and then be able to query that using a fuzzy phonetic search to identify people by their faces, to then have people say, Yes, that's the person I'm friends with. And so we've built this sort of social network construction sort of form to collect these social network data. And we collect a lot of data on demographics, kinship, reproductive histories, all the sort

of standard human behavioral ecology type data suite, a lot of data on market integration, you know, things you buy and sell at the markets. And now a lot of our work is focusing on social networks and networks that people have with other community members. And that's really a key focus of our work now, is because friendships cross these cultural boundaries. And so there's a function of distance in the relationship and also the different ethnic group. And these different ethnic groups have different territories, different regions, slightly different uh economic or subsistence specializations. And as it turns out, as we're finding, there are lots of friendships crossing these ethnic borders. And this is probably really important over evolutionary history.

Um, if you think about, I mean, if the OMO is any sort of model, and there's been other work, other anthropologists have shown that people have like really wide-reaching networks. And so people are going to have friends in other cultural groups, and we think that these relationships are going to serve specific functions. And so we're mapping how these networks exist now and then how they're changing over time. So we'll have like multiple waves. We've already collected um, I think two ways. We'll have a we'll increasingly have more waves of these network cross-cultural network data to see you know what are the outcomes of having friends of other ethnic groups. So that's that's a lot of what we're doing now, um, and across these different villages,

across these different ethnic groups. So it's a longitudinal and also cross-cultural, um biological and social database. Amazing. Yeah, super cool. And you know, the big vision of this is to be able to do also cool collaborative work with people from all different types of disciplines. So, you know, people like Luke and Moe and I are sort of, you know, gluttons and passionate about being in the field, but not that's not everyone. Um, so our hope is that by you know building this infrastructure, having this database, we can collaborate with, you know, an economist or political scientist who has a question that we would never have thought to ask, or some other methods that we you know aren't experts

in and they can leverage our data leverage our infrastructure and you know do some really interesting science. It's fantastic. Yeah no I mean it's like there's always you you you and your projects and you and Luke and other other people it gives me hope for our current generation of science that we're we're not just uh mothballing um you know uh yeah we're not just mothballing period yeah yeah Uh this is the time for the question. Should we have asked you anything? Um well I didn't talk about the sort of philanthropic components of the OVRP, which is really exciting. Um, you know, all anthropologists, you have to be doing something for your communities, for the people you're working with to maintain those relationships.

You become like a family member, um, you have lots of obligations, and you any anthropologist can talk about this for hours. But what Luke and I wanted to do was really formalize that in a way to which to where it could could scale. So our organization is also a 501c3 in the US. So it's a you know tax-exempt nonprofit organization. And in addition to supporting like our scientific aims, we also have these philanthropic aims. And right now, what we're mostly focusing on is supporting students who come from these rural villages to go to university. And so we have like a grants committee. We take applications and we review them. And then for the students that we that we fund, we pay for their tuition, we pay for their

room and board, if they have dependence or if they have special, let's say medical care they need. We try and cover like all their expenses so they can go to school. And these students are like super remarkable because they usually come from like a like one big region. So let's say there's a like a kind of like the county or the department. And there there will be some schools in that department, but they're often like difficult to access or kind of far away. So these students that are especially motivated, like might be walking for hours every day to go to school and by some miracle they managed to like complete high school. Like how they did that, I have no idea. And there might be like one student from like a whole population of let's say 5,000 people

or hundreds and hundreds of households. There's one guy or girl who finished high school. And so those are the types of students that we like we search for and we find, and then we basically support their education. And part of our philosophy here is that a lot of these students want to pursue education to like do something for their community. They want to study veterinary medicine because the cows are getting sick, or they want to study business because their community is transitioning to market economies, but they don't understand the systems. So they're just really inspired and and noble and amazing individuals. But then they they get to the university and now like they either don't have the money or

there's now systems they don't understand. So we we fund their education, we host um digital skills workshops and training. And yeah these students are just remarkable. Now I'm we're really happy that we have like kind of a pretty equal gender parity as well because norms are very different for men and women, for boys and girls. So girls are especially disadvantaged. So if anyone wants to support our cause, we can accept your tax deductible donation. You can go to our website, omavalli researchproject.com, or you can reach out to Luke Rai. We can just about support one student for like a whole year of university for like, I feel like it's not more than like a a thousand bucks or one thousand five hundred bucks.

So like even like a ten dollar donation goes like a long way. And a lot of our donations are just like people giving us 10 bucks here, 20 bucks there. And um, it allows us to put a lot of students through through education through university. That's great. We'll put a link uh on the show notes. That's fantastic. That's really, really cool. What an amazing thing to be able to sort of see that and see those people. Yeah, it's you know, it's um not why I got into doing field work, but at this point, and I know Luke would agree with me, it's like um it's more rewarding than uh any of the science stuff we're doing. So it's really been a lot of fun. Yeah, that's that's amazing. So um yeah, David, uh any any final thoughts?

No, I this very cool stuff you're doing. It was uh you know wonderful talking to you, Zach. Uh, you know, you're full full of insights, doing it really uh fascinating uh and important work. Uh and uh yeah, I look forward to chatting with you again at some point in the future, either on uh this podcast again or at a conference. Yeah, yeah. And thank you both. I mean, you guys are doing a great service for the field of evolutionary social science, and uh your work is also super impressive and inspiring. So it's an honor just uh to be here and have the chance to chat. Thank you so much, Zach. Uh we'll we'll put your links uh in the show notes. And yeah, we'll definitely have you back maybe sooner rather than later.

Uh uh in in different in different um uh capacities uh here on the podcast. But uh but thank you so much. Yeah, and again, everybody, I really encourage you to look at um Zach's work and and we'll have Luke on soon too. So um I'm looking forward to that and uh just fantastic, lots of cool stuff. And yeah, thanks for coming on. Thanks, guys. David, you just uh spent quite a bit of time talking to Zach Garfield and myself. And uh what are you doing right now? Uh I'm sitting here uh talking to you, recording the outro for for the episode that happened. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, yeah. Uh so can you continue doing that? Yeah, so um if you're still listening, uh that means that you enjoyed listening.

You're here now. Presumably. You're here now, so you must be a fan. So maybe just consider telling people that you're a fan, you know, talking about us on social media, maybe maybe writing a kind review. Uh if you're really a super fan, you might consider checking out our Patreon page and supporting us there. We should you should wear a t-shirt, but that me saying that out loud makes me realize that it would involve you designing and printing a t shirt, uh, which is seems like a big ask. Maybe we should get t-shirts. That's that's a that's a good idea. I can see that working out. Um but if you're not thinking about it. Or fanny packs, yeah. We we we had that bit in a in a previous episode. Uh, didn't we send you a fanny pack yet?

I think we had a fanny pack bit. No, no, no. Did you did somebody send you a fanny pack, David? Oh, I've not received a fanny pack. Oh, that's another way you can support the podcast. Please send David a fanny pack. He really needs one. That's true. I'm I'm in the market for a fanny pack. Uh so uh thank you so much for listening and uh I'll see you next week, Dave. Sounds good.