WEBVTT

00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:04.080
David, um, we have been uh away from the podcast for a little bit.

00:00:04.160 --> 00:00:08.640
So let's see if like we're better or worse at doing our our introduction here.

00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:11.920
My name is David Petrozowski.

00:00:12.720 --> 00:00:14.480
And my name is David Pinsoff.

00:00:14.640 --> 00:00:15.280
And what is this?

00:00:15.600 --> 00:00:20.000
It is a podcast about evolutionary psychology called

00:00:20.880 --> 00:00:23.040
Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

00:00:23.360 --> 00:00:28.970
With a parentheses in it, the tagline is Actual Evolutionary Psychology.

00:00:29.290 --> 00:00:31.930
By actual evolutionary psychologists.

00:00:32.250 --> 00:00:34.010
Wow, we did it.

00:00:47.610 --> 00:00:53.050
David, uh did you ever play Follow the Leader as a kid?

00:00:53.780 --> 00:00:56.260
Uh I am familiar with the game.

00:00:56.340 --> 00:00:58.500
I'm I've I've actually forgot how how it works.

00:00:58.580 --> 00:01:00.020
Is it just you do what the person says?

00:01:00.100 --> 00:01:00.900
Is that how it works?

00:01:01.140 --> 00:01:02.740
Um it's pretty straightforward.

00:01:02.900 --> 00:01:08.340
There's a leader and a follower, and the leader just randomly does stuff, and the

00:01:08.340 --> 00:01:11.780
follower just sort of does it um back.

00:01:12.180 --> 00:01:13.460
Oh, that's a pretty simple game.

00:01:13.620 --> 00:01:14.580
That's simpler than I thought.

00:01:14.820 --> 00:01:15.220
Yeah, yeah.

00:01:15.460 --> 00:01:15.620
Okay.

00:01:15.860 --> 00:01:17.060
Well, I or you can draw it out.

00:01:17.300 --> 00:01:19.380
I can draw it out, I can like diagram the whole thing later.

00:01:19.460 --> 00:01:20.100
But okay.

00:01:20.180 --> 00:01:24.490
Well, it seems like um we play that game all the time, every day.

00:01:24.650 --> 00:01:30.010
And we have a wonderful uh guest with us today by the name of Zach Garfield, who is an

00:01:30.010 --> 00:01:34.890
expert in this leader follower game and why we evolved to play this game with one another.

00:01:35.210 --> 00:01:38.170
And it's not exactly uh what you might think, you know.

00:01:38.250 --> 00:01:42.170
Like I think a lot of people have this like idea of what a leader and a follower are, or

00:01:42.250 --> 00:01:42.970
like what it is.

00:01:43.130 --> 00:01:47.370
And I think this discussion with Zach is a good example of taking an evolutionary approach

00:01:47.370 --> 00:01:52.360
to a known thing like leadership and sort of making it a little stranger than we might

00:01:52.360 --> 00:01:52.520
think.

00:01:52.680 --> 00:01:57.080
And so if you think you know what leadership is, um, listen to this, uh, stay tuned because

00:01:57.080 --> 00:01:57.880
you might not.

00:01:58.280 --> 00:01:59.000
Yes, absolutely.

00:01:59.080 --> 00:02:04.200
And Zach has a lot of um uh rich knowledge to share with us uh uh about the cultural

00:02:04.200 --> 00:02:07.960
variation and the cultural uh universality of leadership.

00:02:08.040 --> 00:02:12.680
Uh and he brings a lot of insights to what leadership is, and I I think in a in in a

00:02:12.680 --> 00:02:13.560
somewhat surprising way.

00:02:13.640 --> 00:02:18.840
I think it changed the way I think of leadership, uh, and uh I think it will change the way

00:02:18.840 --> 00:02:19.870
you think about leadership.

00:02:20.110 --> 00:02:24.190
Yeah, and there's not much more better than you can say about a scientist than they change

00:02:24.190 --> 00:02:24.830
the way you think.

00:02:24.910 --> 00:02:29.790
And uh just wanna give a shout out to um him collaborating with Luke Glocky on the Omo

00:02:30.030 --> 00:02:31.710
Valley Research Project, which is super cool.

00:02:31.790 --> 00:02:34.110
And he'll talk more about that in the episode as well.

00:02:34.190 --> 00:02:36.430
And we'll have Luke on um in the near future too.

00:02:36.510 --> 00:02:40.670
So yeah, without further ado, enjoy Zach Garfield leadership and David, yeah, we'll we'll

00:02:40.750 --> 00:02:43.240
I'll we'll talk after this about um follow the leader.

00:02:43.640 --> 00:02:44.280
Sounds good.

00:02:44.760 --> 00:02:45.880
I will follow you.

00:02:46.680 --> 00:02:47.480
Enjoy.

00:02:47.720 --> 00:02:49.640
Uh today we have Dr.

00:02:49.800 --> 00:02:51.320
Zach Garfield.

00:02:51.480 --> 00:02:57.080
Um and Zach, where were you uh prior to where you are now and where are you now?

00:02:58.040 --> 00:03:02.760
Yeah, so I'm I'm currently in robots in Morocco at the University of Mohammed Six

00:03:02.920 --> 00:03:03.720
Polytechnic.

00:03:04.350 --> 00:03:06.590
I can tell you a little bit more about this university.

00:03:06.750 --> 00:03:09.950
But before that, I was at the Institute for Venice Study in Toulouse.

00:03:10.030 --> 00:03:11.790
So in Toulouse, France.

00:03:12.030 --> 00:03:15.870
It's an interdisciplinary institute that's housed within the Toulouse School of Economics.

00:03:15.950 --> 00:03:21.630
And so it's sort of the brainchild of Jean Tirole, a Nobel laureate economist, who

00:03:21.630 --> 00:03:27.460
wanted to really bring this interdisciplinarity uh to to Toulouse and it's really an

00:03:27.460 --> 00:03:28.420
amazing institute.

00:03:28.500 --> 00:03:32.340
So I mean anyone who's looking for postdocs, you should definitely apply there.

00:03:32.980 --> 00:03:37.220
A lot of economists and political scientists and anthropologists and psychologists.

00:03:37.540 --> 00:03:39.700
It's really just a beautiful center.

00:03:40.020 --> 00:03:43.220
Yeah I the is IAT what is it the abbreviation?

00:03:43.780 --> 00:03:44.740
IAS T.

00:03:45.070 --> 00:03:45.790
I A S T.

00:03:46.030 --> 00:03:48.590
Yeah, there was a um a conference there.

00:03:48.750 --> 00:03:51.630
Maybe it was EB or uh one of them.

00:03:51.790 --> 00:03:53.230
And I visited Toulouse.

00:03:53.310 --> 00:03:59.150
And uh in keeping with France, my experience of France, uh I went uh

00:03:59.310 --> 00:04:03.790
with some other fellow evolutionary behavioral scientists to what looked like a a home

00:04:03.790 --> 00:04:07.550
kitchen, which was a restaurant, and they were like, Well, we don't really have a lot, but

00:04:07.550 --> 00:04:10.910
we'll throw something together, and it was like the best meal of my life.

00:04:11.150 --> 00:04:15.820
Uh, and uh and it was like you know, ten euros or something like that for like all three of

00:04:15.820 --> 00:04:16.380
us or something.

00:04:16.460 --> 00:04:16.940
So yeah.

00:04:17.020 --> 00:04:18.700
So uh Toulouse is lovely.

00:04:18.860 --> 00:04:20.220
I highly recommend visiting.

00:04:20.620 --> 00:04:21.900
Yeah, it was a great four years.

00:04:21.980 --> 00:04:25.580
And yeah, as the as the postdocs you get to go on dinners with lots of the visiting

00:04:25.580 --> 00:04:25.820
scholars.

00:04:25.980 --> 00:04:29.660
It's just like a continuing, you know, rotation of some of the most impressive and

00:04:29.660 --> 00:04:33.740
interesting scholars across the social sciences, and you get many, you know, very lovely

00:04:33.740 --> 00:04:34.780
dinners along the way too.

00:04:34.860 --> 00:04:40.620
So it's yeah, and that's that's a that's a lovely segue into something you study, which

00:04:40.620 --> 00:04:45.870
is cooperation, sharing of food, leadership,

00:04:46.350 --> 00:04:51.790
whether leaders are disproportionately generous compared to other members of the group.

00:04:52.430 --> 00:04:57.790
So do you think that the sharing of food plays a pivotal role in

00:04:58.030 --> 00:05:01.070
human social status or leadership?

00:05:02.030 --> 00:05:03.070
I mean, yeah, for sure.

00:05:03.230 --> 00:05:08.270
I mean, if you if you go through a lot of ethnography, um feasts, feasting, this is a huge

00:05:08.270 --> 00:05:14.020
mechanism by which people um you know build reputations and like basically

00:05:14.020 --> 00:05:15.300
build social asymmetries.

00:05:15.380 --> 00:05:17.220
And it's sort of a there's sort of two dynamics.

00:05:17.300 --> 00:05:18.900
It's generous, so it's actually a good thing.

00:05:18.980 --> 00:05:20.020
It's pro-social.

00:05:20.420 --> 00:05:24.660
Especially if you don't have food storage, you can sort of store you know your excess in

00:05:24.660 --> 00:05:26.020
the belly of your neighbor.

00:05:26.580 --> 00:05:28.900
So you expect that return maybe at some point in the future.

00:05:28.980 --> 00:05:34.500
But at the same time you also build up this this asymmetry, this status, this capacity to

00:05:34.660 --> 00:05:35.300
to share.

00:05:35.460 --> 00:05:38.980
And it's I think this is an interesting example because it also highlights that you

00:05:39.130 --> 00:05:42.810
something like, especially in subsistence-based societies, something like physical

00:05:42.810 --> 00:05:47.770
formidability, you know, if you're able to just work harder in the field or hunt more,

00:05:48.970 --> 00:05:53.610
we often think of this as being like a capacity for coercion, which obviously it could be

00:05:53.690 --> 00:05:56.730
if you're just mightier and stronger and people are afraid of you.

00:05:57.050 --> 00:06:01.450
But it also means you can like do all these very pro-social things, generating resources,

00:06:01.690 --> 00:06:06.250
share, and you know, build this pattern of indebtedness and influence by basically making

00:06:06.250 --> 00:06:06.730
people happy.

00:06:06.890 --> 00:06:12.360
So I think sharing and and building these surplus of calories and distributing them is a is

00:06:12.440 --> 00:06:15.640
a really interesting dynamic by how which um you know status hierarchies can emerge.

00:06:15.800 --> 00:06:17.480
Polly Wiesner has written a lot about this.

00:06:17.560 --> 00:06:22.360
There's a there's a great book called Food and the Status Quest um that brings together a

00:06:22.360 --> 00:06:27.480
lot of archaeologists and ethnographers who who focus really heavily on this topic.

00:06:27.790 --> 00:06:28.110
Hmm.

00:06:28.350 --> 00:06:33.870
So do you think, I mean, you mentioned that uh making people happy is a good way to gain

00:06:33.870 --> 00:06:37.550
status or to rise politically within a society?

00:06:37.950 --> 00:06:41.950
Um is that the only way to rise politically?

00:06:42.110 --> 00:06:45.950
I mean, you know, Machiavelli famously said that you can, you know, influence people

00:06:45.950 --> 00:06:49.390
through love or through fear, and often doing both is the best strategy.

00:06:49.550 --> 00:06:55.500
Is there both love and fear in in the strategy of a leader, or is it is it more

00:06:55.500 --> 00:06:57.020
of the former and less of the latter?

00:06:57.180 --> 00:07:01.180
How do you view the the the trade-off between trying to make people happy versus trying to

00:07:01.180 --> 00:07:03.500
intimidate people and keep them in their place?

00:07:03.980 --> 00:07:04.540
Right.

00:07:04.860 --> 00:07:10.540
Um so I mean it really depends on the ecology and like what are the outside options that

00:07:10.540 --> 00:07:11.180
people have.

00:07:11.340 --> 00:07:17.330
Um I mean, your listeners might recall you I you know you Chris von Ruden talked about the

00:07:17.330 --> 00:07:18.450
reverse dominance hierarchy.

00:07:18.530 --> 00:07:23.010
So this is the idea that you know if people have the capacity to really resist the you know

00:07:23.250 --> 00:07:28.290
coercive propensities of any status-seeking individual or leader that changes the dynamic,

00:07:28.370 --> 00:07:33.810
um, if there's equal access to weaponry or people can you know pack up and leave.

00:07:34.050 --> 00:07:38.450
Um, but your question I think is really interesting, and I've been thinking a lot about

00:07:38.450 --> 00:07:43.180
this uh because we often think about these sort of two opposing strategies.

00:07:43.340 --> 00:07:47.100
And I'm working on writing some stuff about this right now and have a recent paper thinking

00:07:47.100 --> 00:07:47.580
about this.

00:07:47.660 --> 00:07:52.860
And I'm not exactly sure why this is, but if you look through literature, you know, movies,

00:07:53.100 --> 00:07:58.460
film, we see a lot of these like good versus evil, hero versus villain, um, the prince

00:07:58.620 --> 00:08:04.510
versus even um Machiavelli has written about the importance of virtue and trust in

00:08:04.670 --> 00:08:05.550
some other writings.

00:08:05.870 --> 00:08:10.670
You know, Tolstoy, all these influential sort of discussions of status and leadership seem

00:08:10.670 --> 00:08:16.670
to like have this binary, diametrically opposed strategy that seems to really resonate

00:08:16.670 --> 00:08:20.190
with a lot of our subjective thinking about leadership and status.

00:08:20.350 --> 00:08:25.630
So I don't know exactly why that is, but as I looked more at like the ethnographic record

00:08:25.790 --> 00:08:31.320
and the sort of wide range of diversity of discussions of status and leadership,

00:08:31.560 --> 00:08:36.040
we saw more and more that you could see evidence of these two different strategies, but

00:08:36.040 --> 00:08:41.880
they overlapped much more than sort of the standard sort of two styles or dual

00:08:41.880 --> 00:08:43.800
model theory would predict.

00:08:43.960 --> 00:08:49.400
And so I think your question is interesting because yes, it does often take some element of

00:08:49.800 --> 00:08:54.520
fear and love, so to speak, to use those Machiavellian phrases, or as we are kind of

00:08:54.830 --> 00:08:58.910
casting it, which isn't just our approach, but a lot of people in our field are looking at

00:08:58.910 --> 00:09:02.590
the benefit generation and cost and pos imposition.

00:09:02.750 --> 00:09:08.750
And so if you can generate benefits via maybe making potential free riders be afraid of

00:09:08.750 --> 00:09:14.270
punishment, or generate benefits by calorie generation, calorie surplus,

00:09:14.750 --> 00:09:18.510
organizing cooperation, that is going to be an effective strategy.

00:09:18.590 --> 00:09:23.660
But it's always dependent upon what the sort of ecology is, what potential followers or

00:09:23.660 --> 00:09:28.700
other community members have as outside options, and then what your role can accomplish

00:09:28.780 --> 00:09:32.380
given the demands of the group in that particular context.

00:09:34.060 --> 00:09:39.660
So it seems like it's it's almost a sunnier view of leadership than you might expect from,

00:09:39.740 --> 00:09:45.670
say, a Machiavelli, and that the ability of leaders to gain a following through pure fear

00:09:45.830 --> 00:09:50.870
or through pure intimidation and force and coercion is really not very common or very

00:09:50.870 --> 00:09:51.510
plausible.

00:09:51.670 --> 00:09:57.670
And that you often need to have a strong benefit conferral component to rising in

00:09:57.670 --> 00:09:59.750
status or power within any community.

00:09:59.910 --> 00:10:04.390
Would you agree with that assessment that the the dominance and fear and coercion aspect of

00:10:04.390 --> 00:10:05.590
it is overrated?

00:10:06.310 --> 00:10:09.300
I mean, I would agree in general, but it still depends on the ecology.

00:10:09.380 --> 00:10:12.980
There are certain contexts where followers just don't have outside options.

00:10:13.140 --> 00:10:15.220
They they need to be within the group.

00:10:15.300 --> 00:10:20.660
And even though they're you know subjected to lots of cost and tyranny, and there is

00:10:20.820 --> 00:10:25.140
obviously not optimal for them, they just don't have the ability to break off and leave.

00:10:25.300 --> 00:10:31.060
Um so in that context, if you can sort of maintain some equilibrium of very aggressive,

00:10:31.220 --> 00:10:36.250
domineering type leadership, and it's good for you, maybe your family, and those who are

00:10:36.250 --> 00:10:40.010
suffering can't really do anything about it, then that might be quite stable.

00:10:40.170 --> 00:10:45.050
Um, but I think on the whole, if you look across a wide range of human societies, um,

00:10:45.210 --> 00:10:50.970
including more stratified and more egalitarian, um, a more pro-social style of leadership

00:10:50.970 --> 00:10:53.370
does seem to be the more effective in the long term.

00:10:53.450 --> 00:10:59.000
Um, because if individuals have an opportunity to band together, you know, to resist, to,

00:10:59.160 --> 00:11:01.960
if they have outside options, they're gonna be looking for those opportunities.

00:11:02.120 --> 00:11:06.680
So if you're if you're not producing net benefits for the constituents in the long run,

00:11:06.840 --> 00:11:10.520
that's obviously not going to be as stable as if if you are.

00:11:10.920 --> 00:11:13.560
So I've I have a a question that I've been pondering a lot.

00:11:13.720 --> 00:11:19.080
So you mentioned the pro-social style of leadership versus more of the uh dominance style

00:11:19.080 --> 00:11:20.200
of leadership.

00:11:20.520 --> 00:11:23.970
What about having your cake and eating it?

00:11:24.130 --> 00:11:29.970
What about having a dominance style of leadership that masquerades as a pro-social

00:11:29.970 --> 00:11:31.330
style of leadership?

00:11:31.490 --> 00:11:37.250
That is, it is a kind of dominance or coercion or in some cases violence that is

00:11:37.250 --> 00:11:42.850
justified with an ideology, with a mythology, with a set of rationalizations,

00:11:43.090 --> 00:11:48.740
um, that uh frames the dominance as for the good of the person being dominated.

00:11:48.900 --> 00:11:53.700
Uh history is littered with these kinds of justifications, these kinds of ideologies and

00:11:53.700 --> 00:11:59.380
mythologies, uh, the belief systems, you know, I could the most common and obvious ones

00:11:59.380 --> 00:12:03.780
would be the divine right of kings, you know, karma, uh justifying caste systems.

00:12:03.860 --> 00:12:06.100
Um, but I could go on all day.

00:12:06.470 --> 00:12:11.750
So, what do you think is the role in human evolution of the fear-based strategy that

00:12:11.750 --> 00:12:14.950
masquerades as the love-based strategy?

00:12:15.670 --> 00:12:16.950
Yeah, this is super interesting.

00:12:17.030 --> 00:12:21.750
I mean, I'm curious to hear if you have other like examples we can talk about.

00:12:21.990 --> 00:12:27.750
Um people like Timothy Earle have talked about how chiefs come to power.

00:12:27.910 --> 00:12:31.700
So if we assume that, you know, thinking about subsistence-based societies,

00:12:31.860 --> 00:12:36.820
hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, at some point there's intensification of the economic

00:12:36.820 --> 00:12:39.940
base and also of the sort of sociopolitical structure.

00:12:40.100 --> 00:12:46.020
And it seems that chiefs, so a chiefdom, is when there's sort of a hereditary

00:12:46.500 --> 00:12:52.490
institutionalized leadership structure where the leader often has like absolute authority.

00:12:52.650 --> 00:12:57.290
All the resources of the community get funneled into basically the chief who then

00:12:57.290 --> 00:13:00.890
distributes them accordingly to various norms and other obligations.

00:13:01.050 --> 00:13:02.570
And you can have like nested chiefdoms.

00:13:02.650 --> 00:13:06.810
So you might have like a chiefdom where the chief's boss is, you know, what's called the

00:13:06.810 --> 00:13:08.090
paramount chief.

00:13:08.410 --> 00:13:11.610
Um, so these systems tend to be very hierarchical, very coercive.

00:13:11.690 --> 00:13:15.450
And if you read the ethnography, some of these chiefs are just like maniacal,

00:13:15.610 --> 00:13:16.730
megalomaniaus.

00:13:16.810 --> 00:13:19.610
They would just you know decimate followers sometimes.

00:13:19.690 --> 00:13:24.760
Like sometimes there's there's all sorts of very gruesome uh stories of their of their of

00:13:24.760 --> 00:13:25.880
their authority.

00:13:26.760 --> 00:13:32.280
But what it seems to be is that first you have to control somehow the economic base.

00:13:32.520 --> 00:13:37.240
And then what seems to happen is that they are able to leverage that control into

00:13:37.240 --> 00:13:42.600
ideological control and also controlling like the the the military, um the sort of physical

00:13:42.600 --> 00:13:43.000
force.

00:13:43.160 --> 00:13:47.830
So if you have this sort of warrior class of young men who you have control over, you also

00:13:47.830 --> 00:13:48.790
control the economics.

00:13:49.030 --> 00:13:52.230
Then you sort of start to control this ideology too.

00:13:52.390 --> 00:13:57.190
And then I think this gives rise to you know these sort of uh state societies like you

00:13:57.190 --> 00:14:01.110
know, Incas or Mayans, where you have this sort of sun god type leader.

00:14:01.270 --> 00:14:05.990
And there hasn't been enough writing about this, how this transition occurred.

00:14:06.240 --> 00:14:12.160
If you look at more hunter-gatherer type societies, or let's say smaller scale societies,

00:14:12.320 --> 00:14:13.680
you have these distinct individuals.

00:14:13.840 --> 00:14:18.400
You have like the shaman, who is often, you know, feared because of their special

00:14:18.400 --> 00:14:18.960
expertise.

00:14:19.040 --> 00:14:20.560
They can cast a spell on you.

00:14:21.040 --> 00:14:25.760
Someone might hire them to, you know, do some bad, some do something bad to a rival.

00:14:25.920 --> 00:14:29.840
But they also might have special medicinal knowledge and ritual expertise.

00:14:29.920 --> 00:14:32.400
So they're blessing you and they're healing you.

00:14:32.880 --> 00:14:38.530
But they have this sort of supernatural leader component to their sort of social role.

00:14:38.690 --> 00:14:43.890
Then you'll have your military leader who is organizing raids or in charge of defense, and

00:14:43.890 --> 00:14:45.890
the influence might oscillate between.

00:14:45.970 --> 00:14:50.610
And then you have your sort of broader political leader, like the big man or the headman,

00:14:50.690 --> 00:14:53.730
who's kind of solving more day-to-day conflicts.

00:14:53.890 --> 00:14:57.570
But then at some point over the course of either cultural evolution or in particular

00:14:57.730 --> 00:15:02.130
ecologies, these different roles kind of coalesce into one individual.

00:15:02.210 --> 00:15:06.740
And how that exactly happens, I think this is still a big open question for sort of like

00:15:06.740 --> 00:15:09.380
the cultural evolution of of status and political hierarchies.

00:15:09.460 --> 00:15:13.220
But then when that happens, we get to exactly the scenario where you're describing, by

00:15:13.220 --> 00:15:19.220
which, you know, this acceptance of potentially extreme despotism is kind

00:15:19.220 --> 00:15:22.340
of reinforced through other norms and ideologies.

00:15:22.500 --> 00:15:26.020
And then we get to, you know, any of these examples I guess we might pick out.

00:15:26.570 --> 00:15:26.730
Yeah.

00:15:26.890 --> 00:15:32.410
Is do you think that what it is, and I mean, maybe this is just speculative, but it's that

00:15:32.490 --> 00:15:35.610
uh there's sort of a you talked about the ecology.

00:15:35.770 --> 00:15:40.890
And I think, you know, we talked about in a couple papers, uh, in like leadership quarterly

00:15:40.890 --> 00:15:42.490
and things, there's almost like a market dynamic.

00:15:42.570 --> 00:15:44.250
So it's sort of like what's being offered.

00:15:44.410 --> 00:15:49.210
And so in a world where there's a shaman for medicinal purposes, but then somebody is

00:15:49.210 --> 00:15:55.040
formidable, um, and you have to go to them, that all creates this market of

00:15:55.200 --> 00:16:00.240
if you can create a team of people who can sort of all provide that and maybe have one

00:16:00.240 --> 00:16:06.080
figurehead to coordinate, um, then all of us sort of as a team

00:16:06.160 --> 00:16:08.320
uh get the benefits of that.

00:16:08.480 --> 00:16:14.080
Um and if you look at anything um like any of these despotic governments,

00:16:14.240 --> 00:16:19.210
they're typically hugely uh unified to the people, right?

00:16:19.290 --> 00:16:20.890
Like the Nazis being a good example.

00:16:20.970 --> 00:16:25.370
But then if you look the bickering within and the status within, but everybody's sort of

00:16:25.370 --> 00:16:27.290
serving different roles within that.

00:16:27.450 --> 00:16:31.690
And so I wonder if it's just this thing of we can all do different provide different

00:16:31.690 --> 00:16:32.170
services.

00:16:32.330 --> 00:16:37.370
And I know you've talked about that, like services as leadership, but I wonder if it's this

00:16:37.370 --> 00:16:43.240
thing of individuals sort of team up on the idea that we can

00:16:43.560 --> 00:16:48.760
we can essentially monopolize the leadership market if as a unified

00:16:48.920 --> 00:16:53.000
appearing team uh we we provide all those services.

00:16:53.160 --> 00:16:54.520
What do you think about that?

00:16:55.080 --> 00:16:56.520
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.

00:16:56.600 --> 00:16:58.840
I mean, you some of your work has talked about this.

00:16:59.000 --> 00:17:00.760
Paul Hooper has also talked about this.

00:17:00.840 --> 00:17:05.880
So I think a lot of different I people are sort of converging on this idea of leaders and

00:17:05.880 --> 00:17:07.080
leadership being a market.

00:17:07.720 --> 00:17:13.370
Uh I suppose as some individuals or groups of individuals kind of get monopolies, so to

00:17:13.370 --> 00:17:17.450
speak, on different aspects of the market, their outside options become diminished.

00:17:17.530 --> 00:17:21.290
And so you end up basically having to choose the best of the bad options.

00:17:21.370 --> 00:17:26.010
I mean, I think we all can relate to that in many of our political systems today when we we

00:17:26.010 --> 00:17:31.770
don't have the option we want, but we have to choose the least of our unpreferred options.

00:17:33.620 --> 00:17:35.700
Sorry, I think that's a very useful way to think about it.

00:17:35.780 --> 00:17:39.940
And leadership in general could could use more of this type of bringing in like these

00:17:40.260 --> 00:17:43.460
economic dynamics and market-like dynamics into these preferences.

00:17:43.780 --> 00:17:43.940
Yeah.

00:17:44.100 --> 00:17:49.700
It also suggests approximate psychology of leaders being really good at identifying

00:17:49.860 --> 00:17:54.750
uh potential threats to the niche that you occupy.

00:17:55.150 --> 00:17:57.310
And I don't think there's really been a lot of work on that.

00:17:57.390 --> 00:18:03.390
So, like just understanding and anticipating ahead of time is this going to be a threat to

00:18:03.390 --> 00:18:04.910
the way our leadership is?

00:18:05.070 --> 00:18:08.910
Is this going to provide an offering to people that they're going to prefer over us?

00:18:09.070 --> 00:18:13.550
It's essentially like the leadership equivalent of sort of, you know, corporations wanting

00:18:13.550 --> 00:18:16.190
to like prevent an upstart a competitor.

00:18:16.520 --> 00:18:16.680
Yeah.

00:18:17.000 --> 00:18:17.640
Really like that idea.

00:18:17.960 --> 00:18:22.520
I mean it I mean it it reminds me of, you know, uh competitions between, say, the king and

00:18:22.520 --> 00:18:27.960
the Catholic Church, where oftentimes the the government will want to suppress the reigning

00:18:27.960 --> 00:18:32.040
religion because they view it as as providing a competing service that the government is

00:18:32.040 --> 00:18:32.920
trying to provide.

00:18:33.240 --> 00:18:37.960
And so you get uh tr you know crackdowns on on on the local religion because it's a it's in

00:18:37.960 --> 00:18:39.720
competition with with the government.

00:18:39.880 --> 00:18:43.000
Uh I wonder if there are there are other interesting historical examples of that, but I

00:18:43.080 --> 00:18:48.290
really like that idea that uh you can think of uh coercive leadership as a kind of

00:18:48.290 --> 00:18:53.090
monopoly over the various services that people are bargaining for in a social marketplace.

00:18:53.250 --> 00:18:58.850
And part of the the strategy of uh of of a leader is to suppress and shut out the

00:18:58.850 --> 00:18:59.650
competition.

00:19:00.050 --> 00:19:00.290
Yeah.

00:19:00.530 --> 00:19:05.490
I wonder if like war, a lot it sounds like this just sounds like a lot of war, history of

00:19:05.490 --> 00:19:10.450
war in particular, sometimes might be um the individual people on the ground sort of

00:19:10.450 --> 00:19:13.680
fighting possible status competitors from the leader.

00:19:14.080 --> 00:19:19.120
Again, this would be for more hierarchical, not necessarily like small-scale conflict.

00:19:19.680 --> 00:19:25.680
This might lead into Zach, you uh with Luke Gloacki, right, are sort

00:19:25.680 --> 00:19:30.320
of heading up a um uh the Omo Valley Research.

00:19:30.720 --> 00:19:32.080
Um what what is the name of it?

00:19:32.160 --> 00:19:32.640
Um yeah.

00:19:33.040 --> 00:19:34.640
The Omo Valley Research Project.

00:19:34.950 --> 00:19:35.030
Okay.

00:19:35.110 --> 00:19:36.630
I just I got uh I got all the way at the end of the year.

00:19:36.790 --> 00:19:37.670
Homo Valley Research Project.

00:19:37.750 --> 00:19:40.230
We also OVRP as our acronym.

00:19:40.710 --> 00:19:42.150
Gotta get that brand out there.

00:19:42.390 --> 00:19:43.030
Yeah, exactly.

00:19:43.110 --> 00:19:44.310
We shouldn't sell t-shirts.

00:19:44.390 --> 00:19:45.830
Um, but uh or hats.

00:19:45.910 --> 00:19:51.750
Uh but can you talk a little bit about that and sort of this um maybe to backtrack a little

00:19:51.750 --> 00:19:57.670
bit, um, you know, is your you what's your like scientific gig in terms of, you

00:19:57.670 --> 00:20:00.950
know, what what are the things that you're looking at, have been looking at, and continue

00:20:00.950 --> 00:20:01.510
to look at?

00:20:01.860 --> 00:20:02.660
Yeah, for sure.

00:20:02.820 --> 00:20:08.500
Well, we talked a little bit about leadership already, and um I got into this interested

00:20:08.500 --> 00:20:10.660
mostly in status and status hierarchies.

00:20:10.740 --> 00:20:16.180
And ironically enough, you know, when I was a undergrad, um, Chris von Ruden was a PhD

00:20:16.180 --> 00:20:16.740
student at the time.

00:20:16.820 --> 00:20:21.140
So I was like reading all of his work on status, and it was really inspiring and useful for

00:20:21.140 --> 00:20:21.300
me.

00:20:21.460 --> 00:20:26.810
Um, then at some point in time I we started emailing when I was a PhD student, And then we

00:20:26.810 --> 00:20:29.850
both sort of kind of got to leadership via similar paths.

00:20:29.930 --> 00:20:33.450
And so now we have a lot of collaborations and we work together, and Chris has been a great

00:20:33.690 --> 00:20:35.690
mentor and colleague for me over the years.

00:20:36.090 --> 00:20:38.650
So I'm interested in things like status and leadership.

00:20:38.970 --> 00:20:43.930
And then from this focus on leadership, I came to a lot of these other topics that are

00:20:43.930 --> 00:20:47.210
really common in our fields, like, for example, punishment, third-party punishment.

00:20:47.290 --> 00:20:53.130
So when do people engage in costly punishments on behalf of someone who's maybe not a kin

00:20:53.130 --> 00:20:54.090
or a friend?

00:20:54.580 --> 00:20:56.340
This also gets into conflict resolution.

00:20:56.500 --> 00:20:58.100
Leaders are often resolving conflicts.

00:20:58.260 --> 00:21:02.820
And so what I kind of saw is there's all these literatures on conflict or on punishment, et

00:21:02.820 --> 00:21:03.220
cetera.

00:21:03.540 --> 00:21:08.420
And leadership was kind of central to all these dynamics, but hadn't, and even you know,

00:21:08.500 --> 00:21:10.420
cooperation, how do individuals cooperate?

00:21:10.500 --> 00:21:15.620
Well, it often involves someone taking on a special role to punish free riders or to

00:21:15.780 --> 00:21:18.420
encourage people to invest in group projects.

00:21:18.580 --> 00:21:23.050
So I kind of saw that leadership dynamics were obviously essential to all these different

00:21:23.050 --> 00:21:26.890
domains, but hadn't quite got sufficient attention, I think, within these respective

00:21:26.890 --> 00:21:27.530
literatures.

00:21:27.690 --> 00:21:33.050
So I focused a lot on a lot of these type of sort of downstream, I think, phenomena of

00:21:33.050 --> 00:21:38.810
leadership, like conflict resolution, punishment, and also social learning and teaching.

00:21:38.890 --> 00:21:44.410
So teaching is uh, if you kind of think about it in in a in a really broad way, also a form

00:21:44.410 --> 00:21:45.290
of leadership.

00:21:45.450 --> 00:21:50.020
Um So I'm interested in these topics, and I've been doing field work and cross cultural

00:21:50.020 --> 00:21:52.820
research for well as as long as I've been in the game.

00:21:53.780 --> 00:21:58.180
But I think then all anthropologists doing fieldwork today also have this broader interest

00:21:58.340 --> 00:22:04.020
in like how do the economic and social transitions that rural communities are going

00:22:04.020 --> 00:22:07.380
through, how does that influence all the other things we're interested in?

00:22:07.620 --> 00:22:11.610
So I think basically all fieldworking anthropologists they are also interested in market

00:22:11.610 --> 00:22:12.170
integration.

00:22:12.330 --> 00:22:14.730
That's like the big question right now.

00:22:15.050 --> 00:22:20.730
And, you know, we're we're probably coming to a period in the not too far

00:22:20.730 --> 00:22:25.930
distant future where there are maybe no subsistence-based communities in the world today.

00:22:26.090 --> 00:22:30.170
Um Brett Beheim has talked about this in some of his talks, the end of subsistence, you

00:22:30.170 --> 00:22:35.540
know, and I think anthropologists have been talking about this for forever, um, but it's

00:22:35.540 --> 00:22:39.220
got to happen at some point, and it's we've got to be getting closer and closer to it.

00:22:39.300 --> 00:22:43.780
And so there are still today many communities around the world that are what we'd call

00:22:43.780 --> 00:22:44.660
subsistence-based.

00:22:44.740 --> 00:22:49.140
So, like most of their food, most of their calories are coming from food that they grow

00:22:49.140 --> 00:22:55.050
locally, or animals they hunt, or livestock they they raise, um, And that as a

00:22:55.050 --> 00:23:00.730
sort of social and economic base can have a profound impact on how we think, how we raise

00:23:00.730 --> 00:23:02.810
our kids, how we relate to each other.

00:23:03.050 --> 00:23:07.770
And so when people transition from these subsistence-based communities to market-based

00:23:07.770 --> 00:23:10.490
communities, it can change a lot of our psychology.

00:23:10.650 --> 00:23:14.810
Obviously, this happened already in many places around the world, in most places around the

00:23:14.810 --> 00:23:20.010
world, but we didn't have this interdisciplinary scientific toolkit documenting it as it

00:23:20.010 --> 00:23:20.970
was unfolding.

00:23:21.370 --> 00:23:27.120
So now what we can do is be a part of these transitions and kind of track how things

00:23:27.120 --> 00:23:32.000
like conflict resolution or leadership structures or trust and so forth are unfolding.

00:23:32.080 --> 00:23:37.600
And that's kind of like the overarching goal of the Omo Valley Research Project.

00:23:37.840 --> 00:23:42.880
So we are managing field sites, Luke and I, among different ethnolinguistic groups or

00:23:42.880 --> 00:23:45.520
different societies, different cultures, you you might say.

00:23:45.760 --> 00:23:48.800
So these are mostly agro-pastoralists.

00:23:48.880 --> 00:23:53.030
We're working with Hammer, Kata, Kwegu, and Niangatong.

00:23:53.670 --> 00:23:56.790
And what's super fascinating about this Omo Valley region?

00:23:56.870 --> 00:23:58.710
So this is southwest Ethiopia.

00:23:59.110 --> 00:24:02.390
North of Lake Turkana, there's this Omo River that flows up.

00:24:02.470 --> 00:24:06.710
And so it creates this like very broad range of varied ecologies.

00:24:06.870 --> 00:24:08.550
You've got highland and lowland.

00:24:08.870 --> 00:24:13.030
There was seasonal flooding in the past, a lot of sorghum cultivation, and lots of

00:24:13.030 --> 00:24:14.150
pastoralism.

00:24:14.520 --> 00:24:18.920
And in this region, there's more than like a dozen distinct ethnolinguistic groups.

00:24:19.160 --> 00:24:21.640
And many different language families are represented.

00:24:21.720 --> 00:24:25.800
You have Cushitic speakers, Emotic speakers, Nilotic speakers, Surmic languages.

00:24:25.960 --> 00:24:29.480
So if you know anything about linguistics, these are very different languages.

00:24:30.120 --> 00:24:34.120
The populations have a lot of social institutions in common, but they're also like very,

00:24:34.200 --> 00:24:34.760
very different.

00:24:34.920 --> 00:24:40.870
So you have in this relatively close environment just a huge array, a

00:24:40.870 --> 00:24:44.390
huge mosaic of cultural diversity, really like nowhere else in the world.

00:24:44.710 --> 00:24:48.790
If you have a truck, you can basically drive around and you can like go visit all these

00:24:48.790 --> 00:24:49.670
different communities.

00:24:49.990 --> 00:24:51.910
There's really nowhere else in the world like that.

00:24:52.150 --> 00:24:57.830
And then on top of that, as you probably know, Ethiopia was the only African

00:24:57.830 --> 00:25:01.670
country not colonized by European powers.

00:25:02.280 --> 00:25:04.360
Effectively, the colonizers were domestic.

00:25:04.440 --> 00:25:09.960
There was an Amhara kingdom, and there's a sort of history behind that, but the Ethiopian

00:25:09.960 --> 00:25:13.080
Empire was very strong at maintaining its borders.

00:25:13.480 --> 00:25:17.400
So the you know the Turks tried to invade and the Italians tried to invade also, but they

00:25:17.480 --> 00:25:18.920
they just they never really did.

00:25:20.120 --> 00:25:24.760
But this Ethiopian Empire didn't really do much in the far, far southwest of the country.

00:25:24.840 --> 00:25:28.120
They maintained the border, but they didn't develop it at all, so to speak.

00:25:28.830 --> 00:25:32.990
The Empire fell in the late in the mid-70s, then there was this communist regime that

00:25:32.990 --> 00:25:33.870
eventually failed.

00:25:34.030 --> 00:25:38.270
And now you have this new ethnic federal democracy that emerged in the early 90s.

00:25:38.590 --> 00:25:43.950
So now there is development happening in Ethiopia, but you didn't have like the sort of

00:25:43.950 --> 00:25:46.830
scramble for Africa during the colonial era.

00:25:46.990 --> 00:25:51.150
You also didn't have this like big investment across Africa that was going on with like the

00:25:51.150 --> 00:25:55.710
British and the French and the Portuguese in the 80s and 90s, because Ethiopia just like

00:25:55.710 --> 00:25:59.100
kept everything kind of under its own control.

00:26:00.380 --> 00:26:04.700
So when I talk to some of my other colleagues about what things are like now, they see it

00:26:04.700 --> 00:26:09.580
as like, oh yeah, this is what it was like in Kenya 20 years ago, or this is like in in uh

00:26:09.580 --> 00:26:12.540
Nigeria 20 35 years ago.

00:26:12.700 --> 00:26:15.820
Um so it's really fascinating for all these reasons.

00:26:15.900 --> 00:26:21.500
Uh there's these communities are still very much sort of governed by customary

00:26:21.500 --> 00:26:21.980
institutions.

00:26:22.140 --> 00:26:23.260
Certainly there's been change.

00:26:23.660 --> 00:26:27.790
Of course, there's been change, and it's happening more and more now, But it's really

00:26:27.950 --> 00:26:29.790
there's really nowhere else in the world like this.

00:26:29.870 --> 00:26:34.110
And so for this reason, I'm obviously quite biased, of course, but I think it's like the

00:26:34.110 --> 00:26:38.430
most exciting place in the world to be doing the sort of focus on subsistence based

00:26:38.430 --> 00:26:40.670
societies, because there's just nowhere else like it in the world.

00:26:40.990 --> 00:26:41.150
Yeah.

00:26:41.310 --> 00:26:45.230
From that perspective, I mean, obviously, you know, in 40 or 80 years, we'll all the

00:26:45.230 --> 00:26:48.910
science will come in and we'll know sort of market to from subsistence to market

00:26:48.990 --> 00:26:52.430
transition, what that looks like and what it does to our psychologies, hopefully.

00:26:52.590 --> 00:26:55.660
Um, assuming science is still happening in 80 years.

00:26:56.060 --> 00:26:59.020
We might be all in subsistence for for all we know in 80 years.

00:26:59.100 --> 00:27:01.820
But uh we'll need to do any anthropology, we'll be living it.

00:27:01.980 --> 00:27:02.380
Yeah, exactly.

00:27:03.260 --> 00:27:03.740
Exactly.

00:27:03.980 --> 00:27:07.100
Um but uh uh but what what's your take?

00:27:07.180 --> 00:27:11.020
Um, you know, and we can continue on, but just like you were on the ground.

00:27:11.260 --> 00:27:16.250
And so like either the difference between like you as like, you know, an American going to

00:27:16.250 --> 00:27:21.290
these places or um you know talking to your colleagues where you know it's sort of like

00:27:21.290 --> 00:27:27.050
there's you're you're experiencing this difference in the ecology or the way of living

00:27:27.290 --> 00:27:32.890
do you have sort of a representation of what day to day differs or

00:27:33.290 --> 00:27:37.850
or is that sort of too hard to tease apart from just like there's lots of other just

00:27:37.850 --> 00:27:41.770
differences that may have nothing to do with market versus subsistence?

00:27:42.250 --> 00:27:46.260
You mean like how life is like in the more subsistence-based context?

00:27:46.340 --> 00:27:47.060
Is that kind of your question?

00:27:47.220 --> 00:27:48.340
Yeah, I mean, well, two things.

00:27:48.420 --> 00:27:52.020
I mean, you brought up that it's a different way of living, and then it also has effects on

00:27:52.020 --> 00:27:53.060
our psychology, right?

00:27:53.220 --> 00:27:56.660
Like day-to-day, and then maybe also more calibrational stuff.

00:27:56.900 --> 00:28:02.740
You know, is it clear to you, or do you have ideas or even guesses about sort of either

00:28:02.740 --> 00:28:08.500
these very more um transient day-to-day differences or the more

00:28:08.500 --> 00:28:13.110
sort of profound, maybe like, you know, if you pulled somebody out who has been in a

00:28:13.110 --> 00:28:17.910
subsistence existence and they go to a marketplace and they feel like a fish out of water,

00:28:18.070 --> 00:28:18.630
why is that?

00:28:18.710 --> 00:28:19.350
And what is that?

00:28:20.710 --> 00:28:24.630
Well, I mean, I think for sure life just moves way slower.

00:28:24.790 --> 00:28:26.470
And you you kind of feel it.

00:28:26.630 --> 00:28:29.750
And um people also people don't think of time the same way.

00:28:29.830 --> 00:28:33.990
I'm not trying to get too like superior warf on us, but like the idea of like keeping a

00:28:34.150 --> 00:28:39.180
schedule or like that there would be some sort of governing system that's like larger than

00:28:39.180 --> 00:28:41.500
the environment, that's not really salient.

00:28:41.660 --> 00:28:43.420
Um things just move really, really slowly.

00:28:43.580 --> 00:28:46.620
If someone's gonna come, you know, they're gonna come when they're gonna come.

00:28:46.780 --> 00:28:50.300
You know, and you there would be no reason for you to expect them to be there at a

00:28:50.300 --> 00:28:52.940
particular time other than when they're gonna be there, if that makes sense.

00:28:53.500 --> 00:28:58.860
Do they have like a a time-keeping system, like a calendar or a clock or anything

00:28:58.860 --> 00:29:02.460
analogous, or is it just like it's daytime or nighttime?

00:29:02.890 --> 00:29:07.850
Well, now obviously everyone has access to clocks and has a conception of time because

00:29:07.850 --> 00:29:10.490
they're also engaging with kind of the markets.

00:29:10.730 --> 00:29:12.970
People, these are there is m some market integration.

00:29:13.050 --> 00:29:14.410
It's just extremely low, right?

00:29:14.490 --> 00:29:20.410
So um, but the typical sort of indigenous system of time, as far as I have an

00:29:20.410 --> 00:29:24.490
idea of it, is like there's obviously seasons, um, there's months, so everyone understands

00:29:24.570 --> 00:29:27.690
like the months, um, everyone understands like the weeks.

00:29:28.000 --> 00:29:31.600
Um, so yeah, you usually talk in terms of months basically.

00:29:31.680 --> 00:29:35.840
And they'll say, like, oh, say six months, seven months, or like the seasons, the rainy

00:29:35.840 --> 00:29:36.960
season, the dry season.

00:29:37.120 --> 00:29:40.720
So when I'm talking to people, I'll be like, I'm coming back in three months, you know, and

00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:43.680
and they know they basically know that and they they'll remember that quite clearly.

00:29:43.760 --> 00:29:46.160
And then if I come back in three months, they're super happy.

00:29:46.400 --> 00:29:50.790
Um in terms of But if you say I'm gonna come back in an hour.

00:29:50.950 --> 00:29:53.030
Is that less intuitive to them?

00:29:54.150 --> 00:29:57.190
I think at this point people understand an hour.

00:29:57.430 --> 00:29:57.910
I don't know.

00:29:57.990 --> 00:29:59.350
I mean, they've I think they've learned it, right?

00:29:59.430 --> 00:30:00.630
They've learned it over time.

00:30:00.790 --> 00:30:06.710
Um, so they can kind of get it, but I think in this context, there can also be a high

00:30:06.710 --> 00:30:08.310
degree of misunderstanding.

00:30:08.550 --> 00:30:12.070
They they'll f certainly say they understand it, but then whether they kind of respect that

00:30:12.150 --> 00:30:17.400
or whether they Whether they'll be mad if you're like an hour and a half, whether you if

00:30:17.400 --> 00:30:21.240
you're late, or whether they have like expectations and emotions surrounding it, that's

00:30:21.240 --> 00:30:22.840
probably less present.

00:30:23.480 --> 00:30:24.440
Yeah, that's for sure.

00:30:24.600 --> 00:30:25.080
That's for sure.

00:30:25.640 --> 00:30:31.160
Um are there norms around lateness and punctuality or anything like that just totally uh a

00:30:31.160 --> 00:30:31.880
Western thing?

00:30:32.360 --> 00:30:34.040
Typically it's more of a Western thing.

00:30:34.200 --> 00:30:38.680
Um I mean I can think of some examples where we you know have set up meetings, and if if

00:30:38.680 --> 00:30:40.840
you're not there, then people can get upset.

00:30:41.080 --> 00:30:46.750
But uh I think in a more sort of customary way, like you

00:30:46.750 --> 00:30:51.630
wouldn't do things in a way that would be so contingent upon very tight scheduling, right?

00:30:51.710 --> 00:30:55.070
Like if you're gonna go somewhere, travel somewhere, you're gonna stay there for like maybe

00:30:55.070 --> 00:30:56.110
days or weeks.

00:30:56.270 --> 00:31:00.670
And so we're gonna overlap, um, like you know, meet if we have a meeting and I go to the

00:31:00.670 --> 00:31:04.110
coffee shop and I might wait for 20 minutes and if you don't show up, I'm gonna leave.

00:31:04.190 --> 00:31:06.060
But the it would just be a longer scale.

00:31:06.220 --> 00:31:09.820
So if we say we're gonna meet at this village, I'm gonna go there and wait like five days.

00:31:09.980 --> 00:31:13.580
And you might come after two days, but you know, we're then we handle our business just

00:31:13.580 --> 00:31:13.740
fine.

00:31:14.060 --> 00:31:14.540
That's interesting.

00:31:14.620 --> 00:31:15.900
It's almost like it scales up.

00:31:15.980 --> 00:31:20.140
That's a very interesting idea that it might not be it seems so foreign to sort of say,

00:31:20.220 --> 00:31:21.820
well, 20 minutes doesn't matter.

00:31:21.980 --> 00:31:25.260
But you know, again, it's this thing of like, well, every hour counts because we have

00:31:25.260 --> 00:31:29.390
internal combustion engine cars moving us around and we're not traveling by days because

00:31:29.390 --> 00:31:30.430
we're on airplanes and things.

00:31:30.510 --> 00:31:35.950
So that's an interesting idea that it sort of scales to the um meaningful time units.

00:31:36.510 --> 00:31:38.110
Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.

00:31:38.430 --> 00:31:42.750
I mean, is it is it because of this analogy between time and money where your time

00:31:42.750 --> 00:31:45.870
literally is a kind of money and you can charge people by the hour?

00:31:45.950 --> 00:31:49.630
And if you're dilly-dallying, that means less cash in your pocket at the end of the day.

00:31:49.710 --> 00:31:54.460
And so participating in a market economy forces you to think about the time that you're

00:31:54.460 --> 00:31:58.700
spending and to budget it wisely for your own self-interest.

00:31:59.100 --> 00:32:00.460
You think that's what's behind this?

00:32:00.620 --> 00:32:00.780
Yeah.

00:32:01.180 --> 00:32:03.420
I think that's a very interesting hypothesis.

00:32:03.580 --> 00:32:05.740
I think that's a very intuitive way to think about this.

00:32:05.900 --> 00:32:09.820
And my colleague Damian Blasi has an idea to test this.

00:32:09.980 --> 00:32:14.300
And so from this perspective, he also thinks that the way individuals use language is

00:32:14.300 --> 00:32:16.620
shaped by this involvement in market economy.

00:32:16.700 --> 00:32:21.500
So once you like monetize your time and you realize that this amount of time is worth this,

00:32:21.990 --> 00:32:25.590
He thinks that actually changes how you speak and people will actually kind of speak

00:32:25.590 --> 00:32:25.910
quicker.

00:32:25.990 --> 00:32:29.590
And then it's sort of there's there's many sort of downstream effects of how it impacts our

00:32:29.590 --> 00:32:29.910
behavior.

00:32:30.070 --> 00:32:36.070
And I think, yeah, showing up, managing time, travel, um, once you

00:32:36.070 --> 00:32:41.910
have a a commodification of labor and time, I think it changes a lot of aspects of our our

00:32:41.910 --> 00:32:42.710
thinking and behavior.

00:32:43.120 --> 00:32:43.520
That's interesting.

00:32:43.680 --> 00:32:47.840
I mean, even like people, there's a stereotype, and people sort of parody this on movies

00:32:47.840 --> 00:32:53.360
and things of uh somebody who's like, you know, really in business and they're just purely

00:32:53.360 --> 00:32:56.960
transactional, or it's sort of like they don't even, you know, take the time to listen to a

00:32:56.960 --> 00:32:57.680
response, you know.

00:32:57.760 --> 00:33:02.800
And it's sort of so even I think even within individuals, there's sort of maybe the hyper

00:33:02.960 --> 00:33:06.400
commoditization of time or the transactionality.

00:33:06.560 --> 00:33:09.690
Um that must also happen over the course of development, right?

00:33:09.770 --> 00:33:12.730
Like kids are not born knowing they're in a market economy.

00:33:12.890 --> 00:33:16.890
Like I'm just thinking, like, you know, my my son right now, he's asking a lot of questions

00:33:16.890 --> 00:33:20.650
about time, you know, because we're starting school where we have to be punctual, you know,

00:33:20.810 --> 00:33:21.930
what is an hour?

00:33:22.090 --> 00:33:22.810
Um, these things.

00:33:22.890 --> 00:33:28.810
So it's sort of reminding me that the same cultural transition occurs among all of us

00:33:28.810 --> 00:33:30.330
over the course of development.

00:33:30.970 --> 00:33:31.130
Yeah.

00:33:31.540 --> 00:33:36.980
Getting my daughter out the door to to get her to appreciate punctuality and getting to

00:33:36.980 --> 00:33:38.260
school on time is just impossible.

00:33:38.420 --> 00:33:39.940
She like cannot comprehend it.

00:33:40.420 --> 00:33:40.820
That's right.

00:33:43.860 --> 00:33:44.100
Exactly.

00:33:44.180 --> 00:33:44.500
Yeah, yeah.

00:33:44.740 --> 00:33:48.500
It's it's really hard for her to grab like she she's at the point right now where she

00:33:48.500 --> 00:33:54.100
refers to anything in the past as yesterday and like has no concept of like how long ago

00:33:54.170 --> 00:33:54.890
something was.

00:33:55.450 --> 00:33:57.210
I can empathize with that very much.

00:33:57.370 --> 00:34:01.770
I feel like that's not so far off of most people's experience of time.

00:34:01.850 --> 00:34:02.010
Yeah.

00:34:02.330 --> 00:34:02.490
Yeah.

00:34:02.650 --> 00:34:03.450
It's a really alien.

00:34:03.690 --> 00:34:06.410
I mean, it's it's kind of hard to live like this.

00:34:06.490 --> 00:34:08.250
Uh it takes so much practice.

00:34:08.330 --> 00:34:13.290
But you know what what's interesting about this kind of cultural change is that the lever

00:34:13.290 --> 00:34:15.290
is so clearly one of self-interest.

00:34:15.450 --> 00:34:19.940
That if you are in a market economy and you and you are playing this market-based status

00:34:19.940 --> 00:34:24.660
game where whoever is most successful and prosperous in the market economy has the highest

00:34:24.660 --> 00:34:29.140
status, uh, all of a sudden the rules of the status game become very different.

00:34:29.380 --> 00:34:34.900
And you either uh win or lose based on how well you follow these alien set of rules.

00:34:35.060 --> 00:34:40.510
And so, what what I like about this idea is that um it it it

00:34:40.510 --> 00:34:44.350
frames cultural change as this is in my personal self-interest, this is how I'm going to

00:34:44.350 --> 00:34:45.950
win this new alien status game.

00:34:46.030 --> 00:34:50.910
This forces me to develop these new skills and these new ways of thinking because that

00:34:50.910 --> 00:34:53.870
helps me uh advance in this new status game.

00:34:53.950 --> 00:34:58.510
Is is that how you're you're thinking uh about cultural change in this regard?

00:34:58.750 --> 00:35:01.630
I I personally like that way of thinking about cultural change.

00:35:01.710 --> 00:35:06.030
It sort of demystifies it a little bit, where these are all just people acting in their

00:35:06.030 --> 00:35:10.280
individual self-interest under new under changing ecological circumstances.

00:35:10.360 --> 00:35:16.040
And what happens as an emergent result is that you get different norms and habits and ways

00:35:16.040 --> 00:35:16.680
of thinking.

00:35:16.920 --> 00:35:21.800
But it's not that these norms and habits and ways of thinking exist outside of us and and

00:35:21.800 --> 00:35:22.760
are and are shaping us.

00:35:22.840 --> 00:35:27.160
It's that this just emerges as a byproduct of people pursuing their own interests.

00:35:27.720 --> 00:35:30.680
So that's a it's a it's a way of thinking about culture that I personally like.

00:35:30.760 --> 00:35:31.800
What do you think about it?

00:35:32.200 --> 00:35:33.160
Yeah, I like that a lot.

00:35:33.240 --> 00:35:36.360
And I think I mean I think there's going to be variation among individuals, though.

00:35:36.440 --> 00:35:40.730
And I can think about different individuals who are pursuing these different strategies.

00:35:40.810 --> 00:35:42.490
It's like there's a niche that is opened up, right?

00:35:42.570 --> 00:35:47.290
If the if the market is there and you can go there, there's some cost, but it's it's it's

00:35:47.290 --> 00:35:47.610
there.

00:35:47.770 --> 00:35:50.730
And then some individuals are more motivated to pursue that.

00:35:50.890 --> 00:35:55.610
And so some of my colleagues think about market integration at the community level.

00:35:55.770 --> 00:36:00.330
Like, okay, this town is this village is this far from town, and it's a more

00:36:00.330 --> 00:36:01.290
market-integrated village.

00:36:01.370 --> 00:36:05.960
And I think that's useful, but kind of to your point, the niche opens and then individuals

00:36:05.960 --> 00:36:10.200
kind of strategically choose how they want to invest in that potential strategy.

00:36:10.360 --> 00:36:14.600
And I've I can think of some interviews with some of the like younger kids, quote, like

00:36:14.600 --> 00:36:18.600
teenagers in these villages, and sometimes some of them have even like kind of identified

00:36:18.600 --> 00:36:19.960
as a businessman.

00:36:20.360 --> 00:36:24.040
And they're they it's kind of like you don't you can't really tell, and they're kind of I

00:36:24.040 --> 00:36:28.770
think a little secretive about it, because we ask people questions about you know how often

00:36:28.770 --> 00:36:30.930
do you go to the market, what do you sell, what do you buy?

00:36:31.090 --> 00:36:36.930
And then I've had some sort of sort of stories of like maybe guys who are 18, 19, 20, and

00:36:36.930 --> 00:36:40.130
then they'll say, like, well, yeah, I got one beehive at the beginning, and I had this

00:36:40.130 --> 00:36:40.530
beehive.

00:36:40.690 --> 00:36:44.930
Honey is one of the most valuable uh commodities that you can get, especially if it's a

00:36:44.930 --> 00:36:46.530
it's a man's activity typically.

00:36:46.770 --> 00:36:51.250
So I got one beehive, and you know, I took all the money and I I bought two more beehives.

00:36:51.330 --> 00:36:54.690
So you can see they're very they're thinking very entrepreneurially.

00:36:54.900 --> 00:36:56.660
Um and now I had the three beehives.

00:36:56.740 --> 00:36:59.460
And after one more season, then I took all that and I bought a goat.

00:36:59.700 --> 00:37:05.060
And they they mapped out a very clear strategy to how to get to more money.

00:37:05.540 --> 00:37:07.060
And they wouldn't have necessarily had to do that.

00:37:07.140 --> 00:37:08.340
They could have gone about it differently.

00:37:08.420 --> 00:37:13.620
They could have taken the the honey and invested it in social relationships and given it to

00:37:13.620 --> 00:37:14.180
friends.

00:37:14.580 --> 00:37:16.820
Or they they maybe could have done something else.

00:37:16.980 --> 00:37:22.500
There's but they're very clearly thinking about how to maximize the the monetary returns of

00:37:22.500 --> 00:37:23.220
their labor.

00:37:23.540 --> 00:37:27.470
Which but th then their their friend or their brother might not be doing that at all.

00:37:27.630 --> 00:37:32.750
So it's interesting to see like who uh among this community are the ones pursuing this um

00:37:32.990 --> 00:37:34.270
this new strategy.

00:37:34.510 --> 00:37:34.830
Hmm.

00:37:34.990 --> 00:37:39.310
Do you find I mean so the way I would intuitively think about it is that the people who are

00:37:39.310 --> 00:37:43.950
more drawn to this strategy are are people for whom other types of niches or other types of

00:37:43.950 --> 00:37:46.620
status games don't look as promising to them.

00:37:46.780 --> 00:37:50.300
And this particular status game, this market based status game, looks particularly

00:37:50.300 --> 00:37:50.700
promising.

00:37:50.780 --> 00:37:54.140
Maybe they have a particular set of aptitudes that are well suited to it.

00:37:54.300 --> 00:37:57.900
Maybe they are better at quantitative thinking.

00:37:58.060 --> 00:38:02.620
Maybe they're more socially alienated from people who are not in this community.

00:38:02.700 --> 00:38:06.620
And maybe this will be a better opportunity for them to rise up and acquire resources and

00:38:06.620 --> 00:38:06.940
influence.

00:38:07.500 --> 00:38:12.540
Do you see these kinds of considerations happening where people are evaluating all the

00:38:12.540 --> 00:38:17.130
different uh potential paths they can pursue and strategically picking the one that's gonna

00:38:17.130 --> 00:38:21.370
work out best for them, whether it be more of a market-based route or more of a you know

00:38:21.530 --> 00:38:24.570
per local uh community-based route.

00:38:25.130 --> 00:38:28.170
I mean, that's kind of an empirical question we're trying to answer.

00:38:28.490 --> 00:38:33.770
Um there are also people who do seem to be more do seem to be more culturally conservative,

00:38:33.940 --> 00:38:37.540
And that's a really cool feature of these pastoralist societies because if you're a

00:38:37.540 --> 00:38:42.180
pastoralist, like a s if you're if you're a man, for example, um, it doesn't really pay off

00:38:42.180 --> 00:38:43.460
until you're older.

00:38:43.780 --> 00:38:47.860
And if you leave the pastoral community and you, let's say, go to be even more market

00:38:47.940 --> 00:38:52.100
specialized, like you want to actually get a job and work in town, you immediately go into

00:38:52.100 --> 00:38:55.780
this like very, very low marginalized class of society.

00:38:55.940 --> 00:39:00.690
You you look different, um, you might not speak the the language that everyone's using at

00:39:00.690 --> 00:39:02.450
the market like quite fluently.

00:39:02.610 --> 00:39:07.010
Um so it's it's a very difficult to just completely jump in that that world.

00:39:07.250 --> 00:39:11.330
But if you stick around and you, you know, go through all the the difficulties of being a

00:39:11.330 --> 00:39:15.410
young man, you might be gone for many months or years herding the cattle and then

00:39:15.410 --> 00:39:20.840
eventually you get enough wealth to um pay for bride price and and get married, which

00:39:20.840 --> 00:39:22.440
usually doesn't happen until you're much older.

00:39:22.680 --> 00:39:27.880
By the time you get to be like fifty, um, maybe even fifty five or so, you can kinda live a

00:39:27.880 --> 00:39:28.840
semi retired life.

00:39:28.920 --> 00:39:33.960
Where now you just you chill out, you talk about ritual stuff and you solve conflicts and

00:39:33.960 --> 00:39:38.440
you drink a lot of, you know, the local beer and it's a it's a pretty easy life.

00:39:38.670 --> 00:39:43.870
And so the incentives are to sort of stick around and to not get too involved in the market

00:39:43.870 --> 00:39:49.390
world, but yet to maintain enough cattle and keep the sort of the the sort of traditional

00:39:49.390 --> 00:39:51.470
cultural economic strategy going.

00:39:51.630 --> 00:39:57.070
And so that sort of, I think, in turn leads a lot of pastoralists to really kind of double

00:39:57.070 --> 00:40:02.750
down on all the sort of the sociocultural package of pastoralism, the the ritual, the

00:40:02.750 --> 00:40:06.110
myths, the ways of adornment, and all these other things.

00:40:06.350 --> 00:40:11.120
Whereas like forger horticulturalists or more hunter-gatherers, I've I've done some

00:40:11.120 --> 00:40:15.920
research also during my PhD with what we'd call forger horticulturalists or more recently

00:40:16.000 --> 00:40:17.120
hunter-gatherers.

00:40:17.440 --> 00:40:22.720
But for them, once the subsistence base kind of dwindles, there's there's no real incentive

00:40:22.720 --> 00:40:27.520
to sticking around and trying to be a a hunter-gatherer now when you're in your 50s.

00:40:27.680 --> 00:40:31.280
Um you're more incentivized to transition quite quickly.

00:40:31.440 --> 00:40:34.950
Uh whereas the pastoralists, because the livestock are still doing fine.

00:40:35.030 --> 00:40:40.150
Now, this is a side point in that I think because of clim climate change and environmental

00:40:40.150 --> 00:40:45.670
pressures, the pastoralist regime is going to be much less sustainable in the next 20, 30

00:40:45.670 --> 00:40:45.910
years.

00:40:45.990 --> 00:40:47.350
And we see this actually right now.

00:40:47.430 --> 00:40:51.030
There's a huge um cattle death in East Africa.

00:40:51.110 --> 00:40:54.470
Uh it's been the worst drought in in history, it's been going on for a few years, so

00:40:54.470 --> 00:40:56.310
there's been like a huge drop in cattle.

00:40:56.550 --> 00:41:00.080
But um overall, like you know, goats and sheep, they're quite resilient.

00:41:00.240 --> 00:41:04.800
You can have cattle and goat and sheep, and um it it pays off to kind of keep this system

00:41:04.800 --> 00:41:05.040
going.

00:41:05.120 --> 00:41:06.560
It's gonna pay off when you're older.

00:41:06.800 --> 00:41:11.600
So I think it it definitely could be that there are individuals who see that long term

00:41:11.760 --> 00:41:16.560
strategy as being less viable, and maybe that's in incentivizing them to pursue market

00:41:16.640 --> 00:41:17.760
based opportunities.

00:41:18.000 --> 00:41:19.440
I think that's a good way to think about it.

00:41:19.600 --> 00:41:23.040
But these are exactly all the types of things we're trying to measure empirically and

00:41:23.040 --> 00:41:23.680
track.

00:41:24.810 --> 00:41:25.370
Very cool.

00:41:25.690 --> 00:41:31.610
I mean, I I it's another way of of demystifying uh culture, I think, is to view it in

00:41:31.610 --> 00:41:36.250
terms of the material and ecological differences between different ways of life and what

00:41:36.250 --> 00:41:38.090
the local incentive structures are.

00:41:38.250 --> 00:41:43.690
If you're in a place where uh hunting and gathering just isn't going to allow you to a

00:41:43.690 --> 00:41:48.640
comfortable retirement, um uh then, you know, a market-based life is going to be more

00:41:48.640 --> 00:41:48.960
appealing.

00:41:49.040 --> 00:41:53.680
But if you're in a place where, you know, you know, cattle uh can live a long time and uh

00:41:53.680 --> 00:41:57.600
help you retire comfortably, uh, the incentive structures are going to be different just

00:41:57.600 --> 00:42:02.560
because of the nature of what cattle are, the you know, the the nature of what the hunting

00:42:02.560 --> 00:42:06.960
and gathering lifestyle is like, you know, the distribution of the local flora and fauna

00:42:07.120 --> 00:42:11.550
within the the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, you know, the lifespan of of of your cattle or

00:42:11.550 --> 00:42:16.110
what what it requires to raise them, these material considerations are what are ultimately

00:42:16.110 --> 00:42:19.390
going to shape the uh the cultural norms and ideas.

00:42:19.470 --> 00:42:25.230
And I think that's another uh cool way of of um explaining airy

00:42:25.230 --> 00:42:29.790
notions of of of cultures and norms by by the material constraints in a particular society.

00:42:30.580 --> 00:42:31.940
Yeah, I also really like that.

00:42:32.020 --> 00:42:35.220
You, I mean, it sounded like a little bit Zach that you were saying to put it in David's

00:42:35.220 --> 00:42:40.500
language is almost sort of the people are playing status games and trying to anticipate the

00:42:40.500 --> 00:42:40.900
future.

00:42:41.060 --> 00:42:46.900
And sort of so if you are the if you are already sort of locked into the pastoral status

00:42:46.900 --> 00:42:52.340
game or that's you know you're going to do well, you're doubling down on the accoutrements,

00:42:52.420 --> 00:42:58.150
the cultural trappings and the traditions and all the lore and whatever rituals um and

00:42:58.150 --> 00:43:03.270
probably clothing and rules and everything and diet restrictions of the pastoral uh

00:43:03.270 --> 00:43:03.910
lifestyle.

00:43:04.070 --> 00:43:09.590
And I think that also that also feels very human to just sort of be like, you know, it's

00:43:09.590 --> 00:43:10.950
hard to predict the future.

00:43:11.110 --> 00:43:15.640
We're all just trying to like figure out like what's going to be the best path for me.

00:43:15.800 --> 00:43:17.880
There's some risk, there's some uncertainty.

00:43:18.040 --> 00:43:19.800
And you're just like, am I going to be happy?

00:43:19.960 --> 00:43:21.960
Which might mean like, you know, I have enough stuff.

00:43:22.120 --> 00:43:24.120
I can be the retired pastoralist.

00:43:24.280 --> 00:43:28.840
And you know, there's sort of the um, and then it also feels very human to look at people

00:43:28.840 --> 00:43:31.720
who are choosing different paths and sort of for there to be conflict.

00:43:31.800 --> 00:43:36.840
I imagine there's some conflict between the pastoralist who wants to keep that way of

00:43:36.840 --> 00:43:41.650
living going because they're benefiting from it, or they're anticipating it from maybe the

00:43:41.650 --> 00:43:44.370
young upstarts who are sort of like going to the market.

00:43:44.450 --> 00:43:46.770
Or maybe, I don't know, maybe they're not around each other.

00:43:47.330 --> 00:43:48.450
Um, no, there's some conflict.

00:43:48.530 --> 00:43:53.170
I mean, I can think of you know one family where you know the father who's an older, an

00:43:53.170 --> 00:43:56.290
elder man, uh, has this sort of social role.

00:43:56.450 --> 00:43:58.050
This is in a hammer society.

00:43:58.130 --> 00:44:03.760
Um, it's called Parko, but he's sort of like the supernatural keeper of this

00:44:03.760 --> 00:44:04.400
community.

00:44:04.640 --> 00:44:06.320
And he's an amazing guy.

00:44:06.480 --> 00:44:08.720
And you know, every so often he's doing all sorts of stuff.

00:44:08.800 --> 00:44:13.920
I most of the time don't know what's going on, but he it's very complex, like blessings and

00:44:13.920 --> 00:44:16.320
behaviors that are ritually significant.

00:44:16.400 --> 00:44:19.200
And it's sort of a part of his sort of protection of the community.

00:44:19.360 --> 00:44:24.640
And he has a couple sons, and one of the sons is very much the market strategy guy.

00:44:24.800 --> 00:44:29.830
Um, and he's actually now one of the sons has since left the community, and there's a lot

00:44:29.830 --> 00:44:34.550
of conflict there because his father is so important to the community, so well respected.

00:44:34.630 --> 00:44:40.230
And normally the the sons should be supporting them, um, but they're not.

00:44:40.470 --> 00:44:44.390
And so for this particular family now, it's it's kind of hard for him and his wife, and

00:44:44.390 --> 00:44:49.110
they're sort of um, they're kind of like my adopted uncles and aunts in a way, or whatever,

00:44:49.190 --> 00:44:53.440
they're part of my my sort of adopted family, and their kids aren't really doing the the

00:44:53.440 --> 00:44:56.960
job that they should be doing following the traditional way because they've really pursued

00:44:56.960 --> 00:44:58.880
this market strategy and now they're left.

00:44:59.040 --> 00:45:02.960
And so it's really a burden now on the community because other people have to help out and

00:45:02.960 --> 00:45:03.760
help them.

00:45:04.160 --> 00:45:07.680
And they have an incentive to, but there's also a cost there because they actually

00:45:07.680 --> 00:45:09.120
shouldn't be the ones to do that.

00:45:09.520 --> 00:45:12.320
We've we've you guys have talked a lot about this and know a lot about these you know

00:45:12.560 --> 00:45:15.040
interdependencies but conflicts of interest.

00:45:15.200 --> 00:45:21.110
And so yeah it does create tensions um when people deviate from their prior

00:45:21.110 --> 00:45:21.830
expectations.

00:45:22.150 --> 00:45:22.390
Yeah.

00:45:22.550 --> 00:45:28.470
It reminds me there's a Monty Python skit where the family, the parents are like theater

00:45:28.470 --> 00:45:32.390
people, and the son, the son, I think, wants to work in a coal mine and they're very upset

00:45:32.390 --> 00:45:32.870
with him, right?

00:45:33.110 --> 00:45:36.870
It's the just but that that trope of, you know, the kids want to do something different

00:45:36.870 --> 00:45:37.430
than the parents.

00:45:37.510 --> 00:45:40.790
I think that's a very universal sort of experience.

00:45:42.150 --> 00:45:43.590
Yeah, I've seen that before too.

00:45:43.670 --> 00:45:49.120
Even when the in the the hunting and gathering community, the forage horticulture, this

00:45:49.280 --> 00:45:50.160
Chabu I worked with.

00:45:50.240 --> 00:45:54.720
I remember one of the big guys, the kind of the one of the leaders of the community, he had

00:45:54.720 --> 00:46:00.480
a bunch of sons and um, you know, the the one son, the oldest son, was had just

00:46:00.480 --> 00:46:03.040
killed like a monkey in the forest recently.

00:46:03.120 --> 00:46:06.160
And he was like a small guy, like maybe eight or nine with like a a wooden spear.

00:46:06.320 --> 00:46:08.960
And everyone was like praising him, how he was gonna be this big hunter.

00:46:09.040 --> 00:46:10.640
And he was telling me, no, I don't want to be a hunter.

00:46:10.720 --> 00:46:11.680
I want to go to school.

00:46:12.400 --> 00:46:16.950
So even this guy at like eight who didn't really know much, this is quite a remote loc

00:46:17.110 --> 00:46:19.750
community, had never really seen bigger cities.

00:46:19.910 --> 00:46:22.950
He had seen some, you know, there'd been missionaries and some people would come to the

00:46:22.950 --> 00:46:26.550
community, but he had very early on decided that he did not want to be a hunter.

00:46:26.710 --> 00:46:27.670
He wanted to go to school.

00:46:27.830 --> 00:46:32.310
And so, you know, why people, what are the sort of environmental cues that allow them to

00:46:32.310 --> 00:46:35.190
make those decisions at such a young age is a very interesting question.

00:46:35.510 --> 00:46:35.830
Yeah.

00:46:35.940 --> 00:46:36.260
Yeah.

00:46:36.500 --> 00:46:41.620
One one thing we've tiptoed around, and maybe this is a bit of a transition, maybe not, is,

00:46:41.780 --> 00:46:45.860
and I know you and I have talked about this, Zach, is when we talk about leadership, and I

00:46:45.860 --> 00:46:50.820
think a lot of listeners, especially just outside, when they think of like the science of

00:46:50.820 --> 00:46:55.780
leadership, it's very much like business school model of, you know, like there's a single

00:46:55.780 --> 00:46:59.380
leader and it's like a single person talking in front of a big group of people.

00:46:59.620 --> 00:47:05.390
And you know, my reading and my understanding of sort of the anthropology and evolutionary

00:47:05.390 --> 00:47:11.150
sciences of leadership is: I think we all sort of as Westerners sort of start with that

00:47:11.150 --> 00:47:11.710
idea.

00:47:11.950 --> 00:47:16.270
But, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like the literature is sort of moving

00:47:16.270 --> 00:47:21.070
towards this idea that leadership is actually a lots of different things.

00:47:21.230 --> 00:47:25.120
And I almost wonder if that as a category or kind.

00:47:25.280 --> 00:47:29.600
I have ideas about why we might have this archetype, this entry for like a leader.

00:47:29.680 --> 00:47:34.080
Um, but I'm just curious, like what your thoughts are of do is it correct?

00:47:34.320 --> 00:47:39.280
Do you would you characterize it as being correct that sort of as you study this idea of

00:47:39.280 --> 00:47:44.000
leadership, that the idea of what it is itself sort of becomes more

00:47:44.330 --> 00:47:46.010
interestingly distinct.

00:47:46.090 --> 00:47:52.090
And maybe that our initial intuition about what a leader is, it's a big, strong, you

00:47:52.090 --> 00:47:54.650
know, person who's sort of domineering.

00:47:55.130 --> 00:47:59.850
That maybe there's a grain of truth to that for some respects, but in other respects, it

00:47:59.850 --> 00:48:05.370
sort of assumes away what the the point of a lot of what leadership is for is doing.

00:48:05.850 --> 00:48:07.050
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:48:07.210 --> 00:48:11.130
And you know, leadership is one of these topics that we're so familiar with.

00:48:11.290 --> 00:48:16.160
And I think to your point, there could be a bit of like instinct blindness on the part of

00:48:16.160 --> 00:48:19.120
like much of leadership studies up to this point.

00:48:19.440 --> 00:48:25.120
Um, so I've I've given some lectures and some presentations for like executive education

00:48:25.280 --> 00:48:29.920
type programs where I talk about leadership from a very um unique perspective.

00:48:30.080 --> 00:48:34.320
I I even had the opportunity to give the Prince of Morocco um in a classroom a lecture

00:48:34.320 --> 00:48:36.400
about the evolutionary social science of leadership.

00:48:36.560 --> 00:48:39.760
And the people are usually very interested to hear about this, but I often ask them at the

00:48:39.760 --> 00:48:41.680
beginning, like, so what is leadership?

00:48:41.840 --> 00:48:45.330
And people have like very strong held opinions about what it is.

00:48:45.490 --> 00:48:51.170
Um leadership is inspiration, or leadership is and they'll have you know sort of the the

00:48:51.170 --> 00:48:54.210
business model phototrope of what a leader is.

00:48:54.450 --> 00:48:58.610
And I have to bring them back and like explain that, okay, well, that's perfectly fine.

00:48:58.690 --> 00:49:03.890
I'm not disagreeing with you, but if we're going to take this psychological scientific

00:49:03.890 --> 00:49:05.970
approach, let's operationalize leadership.

00:49:06.220 --> 00:49:07.420
Is it a set of behaviors?

00:49:07.580 --> 00:49:09.100
Is it a set of qualities?

00:49:09.500 --> 00:49:13.660
And then if we do that, where can we apply that and where can it where can we find it?

00:49:13.740 --> 00:49:18.380
And obviously, then we find leadership as a behavior or as a psychological phenomenon in

00:49:18.380 --> 00:49:19.820
many different domains.

00:49:20.140 --> 00:49:24.460
And we have to kind of then identify what's the limits of it.

00:49:25.500 --> 00:49:30.290
Obviously, if a if a baby is crying, it's it's influencing the parents, but is that

00:49:30.290 --> 00:49:30.690
leadership?

00:49:30.850 --> 00:49:31.730
Well, probably not.

00:49:31.890 --> 00:49:34.370
There needs to be probably some bit of agency.

00:49:34.450 --> 00:49:39.330
Um, but yeah, you find that leadership as a phenomenon, as like a psychological process, is

00:49:39.330 --> 00:49:40.850
occurring all over the place.

00:49:40.930 --> 00:49:45.090
Um and that's what we want to understand because the the sort of business world of

00:49:45.090 --> 00:49:49.810
leadership or the political world of leadership is building up from that psychological

00:49:49.810 --> 00:49:50.210
foundation.

00:49:50.370 --> 00:49:56.020
But talking to my my colleagues in like political science and and other other fields, it's

00:49:56.100 --> 00:50:01.220
uh getting them to think about leadership as a phenomenon rather than like a role or an

00:50:01.220 --> 00:50:05.380
institution, um, I think is a has been a big conversation.

00:50:05.540 --> 00:50:09.380
But I think people, like you said, are are more and more converging on this more holistic,

00:50:09.460 --> 00:50:12.660
kind of multifaceted um way to think about leadership.

00:50:13.060 --> 00:50:17.380
Yeah, I mean just to say as a oh sorry, just as a quick funny slight, well, maybe not funny

00:50:17.380 --> 00:50:22.020
thing, but like, you know, kids who are crying on the playground or at a toy store uh and

00:50:22.050 --> 00:50:25.970
their parents do something different because of it are definitely leading.

00:50:26.050 --> 00:50:27.890
Uh yeah.

00:50:28.290 --> 00:50:32.450
Yeah, no, absolutely I feel like my my daughter is often dominating me uh

00:50:35.010 --> 00:50:40.770
uh but uh it seems like what you're saying is that leadership is actually a much broader

00:50:40.770 --> 00:50:44.210
phenomenon that is tip than is typically appreciated.

00:50:44.420 --> 00:50:48.500
that you know we we think of it as you're either the CEO or you're the politician.

00:50:48.580 --> 00:50:54.020
Uh but that those are just very unique local instances of leadership of of a much broader

00:50:54.020 --> 00:50:58.180
category that encompasses what we do uh in virtually every social interaction.

00:50:58.260 --> 00:51:00.260
Would would you be advocating for that kind of definition?

00:51:00.340 --> 00:51:04.180
And I would then segue into the question of how do you define uh leadership?

00:51:04.340 --> 00:51:07.380
How can we pick it out from other kinds of social phenomena?

00:51:07.890 --> 00:51:08.770
Yeah, exactly.

00:51:09.010 --> 00:51:13.890
So anytime there's like a group of individuals, there's depending upon the structure of

00:51:13.890 --> 00:51:17.330
that group, there's probably going to be some individuals that have disproportionate

00:51:17.330 --> 00:51:19.490
influence in some particular context.

00:51:19.730 --> 00:51:23.890
And so that's sort of the working definition that folks, I think, in the evolutionary

00:51:24.050 --> 00:51:25.650
social sciences are often using.

00:51:25.810 --> 00:51:28.130
Then that allows you to first define the group.

00:51:31.730 --> 00:51:32.450
Is it a nation?

00:51:32.610 --> 00:51:33.490
Is it a school?

00:51:33.650 --> 00:51:34.690
Is it a playgroup?

00:51:34.840 --> 00:51:35.960
Is it a family?

00:51:36.360 --> 00:51:38.760
And then how do you want to measure disproportionate influence?

00:51:38.840 --> 00:51:40.440
And there's different ways you can go about that as well.

00:51:40.600 --> 00:51:42.600
Is it um is it speaking?

00:51:42.840 --> 00:51:44.520
Is it having attention?

00:51:44.680 --> 00:51:48.520
Um is it is it physically coercing?

00:51:48.600 --> 00:51:54.200
Um and I think one of the things I've been thinking and talking about more recently is like

00:51:54.200 --> 00:51:56.520
the benefit generation cost and position.

00:51:56.600 --> 00:51:58.040
And a lot of people have talked about this.

00:51:58.120 --> 00:51:59.560
Um, I mean, Dave, you've talked about this.

00:51:59.720 --> 00:52:03.080
Patrick Durkey has also written a lot about this with status hierarchies.

00:52:03.240 --> 00:52:08.730
Um, So this kind of makes it a bit more concrete to see that what are the actual outcomes

00:52:08.730 --> 00:52:11.370
that this disproportionate influence is producing?

00:52:11.530 --> 00:52:13.210
Are they doing something good for the group?

00:52:13.370 --> 00:52:16.010
Are they imposing a cost on someone?

00:52:16.250 --> 00:52:21.210
Trying to break it down to really concrete, simple ways to think about the outcomes of the

00:52:21.210 --> 00:52:22.570
disproportionate influence.

00:52:22.650 --> 00:52:27.930
So yeah, then you can define, you know, maybe the uh the parents are the leaders of the

00:52:27.930 --> 00:52:33.700
family, um, or the the more outspoken person on the captain of the

00:52:33.700 --> 00:52:35.300
basketball team is the captain of the team.

00:52:35.540 --> 00:52:39.620
So for any social group, you can identify what the influence who has disproportionate

00:52:39.620 --> 00:52:39.940
influence.

00:52:40.020 --> 00:52:44.340
In some cases, it might be kind of institutionalized, like you're the captain, so you have

00:52:44.340 --> 00:52:45.780
an agreed-upon role.

00:52:45.940 --> 00:52:50.900
But in other cases it might be non-institutionalized, but it should emerge from who can

00:52:50.900 --> 00:52:53.380
provide benefits for us in this particular context.

00:52:53.590 --> 00:52:55.510
So maybe they have some special knowledge.

00:52:55.590 --> 00:52:59.030
Um, they're not normally the leader, but all of a sudden, hey, you're the expert on this

00:52:59.030 --> 00:53:01.110
domain, so tell us what to do.

00:53:01.270 --> 00:53:01.990
Um, yep.

00:53:02.630 --> 00:53:05.430
So it's almost like it's yeah, for example, yeah.

00:53:05.750 --> 00:53:09.350
So you're what you're saying is leadership is kind of chimerical in that in that there

00:53:09.510 --> 00:53:14.150
there isn't, you know, uh we think of a leader as being one person, but what you're saying

00:53:14.150 --> 00:53:18.400
is that we're constantly morphing in and out of leadership roles all the time.

00:53:18.640 --> 00:53:23.040
Like, you know, for m my daughter, for example, you know, if we're at home and she throws a

00:53:23.040 --> 00:53:24.480
tantrum, it's not that big a deal.

00:53:24.560 --> 00:53:28.160
But if we're in a public place that's very nice and formal and she throws a tantrum, that

00:53:28.160 --> 00:53:29.520
imposes a huge cost on me.

00:53:29.680 --> 00:53:34.240
And so she has way more bargaining power in in the fancy public place than she does at

00:53:34.240 --> 00:53:34.560
home.

00:53:34.720 --> 00:53:35.840
And she likely knows this.

00:53:35.920 --> 00:53:38.080
And I'm more willing, she has more influence over me.

00:53:38.160 --> 00:53:41.680
You know, I'm more willing to placate her and let her, you know, watch videos on my phone

00:53:41.760 --> 00:53:44.000
or whatever to make sure that she doesn't throw a tantrum.

00:53:44.160 --> 00:53:47.280
Whereas at home, she's gonna have much less influence over me.

00:53:47.690 --> 00:53:52.250
And so she might, you know, move a little further on the leadership continuum, you know, in

00:53:52.250 --> 00:53:57.210
a in a in a nice fancy place, and then move, and then I might rise a little bit when we're,

00:53:57.290 --> 00:53:58.810
you know, at my home.

00:53:58.970 --> 00:54:02.970
Uh and and what you're saying is that we're constantly sliding in and out of uh along,

00:54:03.050 --> 00:54:07.530
we're sliding along this continuum of more or less influence, more or less leadership,

00:54:07.610 --> 00:54:12.970
depending on the context and what the needs of the different parties are in the situation.

00:54:13.610 --> 00:54:15.480
Is that what you're is that is that accurate?

00:54:15.720 --> 00:54:16.360
Yeah, exactly.

00:54:16.520 --> 00:54:18.280
Did you have something to add to that, Dave?

00:54:18.680 --> 00:54:24.600
Oh, I was just gonna say, um uh well I was gonna just say uh like the

00:54:24.600 --> 00:54:30.600
example of the um uh um uh navigation, but uh the but I mean the way I think about

00:54:30.600 --> 00:54:35.000
it almost is that I mean to answer the substantive thing is that I actually think like

00:54:35.000 --> 00:54:40.490
leadership roles and events, like for example, you know, we're all in a group together, and

00:54:40.650 --> 00:54:44.410
you know, maybe one of us has better knowledge of like where where to eat.

00:54:44.570 --> 00:54:48.170
And so in that moment, they're like essentially the leader, but then somebody knows

00:54:48.170 --> 00:54:50.090
somebody else knows how to get there, right?

00:54:50.250 --> 00:54:51.690
And like they're the leader too.

00:54:51.850 --> 00:54:57.850
And I think in a in a funny way, like our folk concept leader probably doesn't tag those

00:54:57.850 --> 00:54:59.840
as leadership per se.

00:55:00.080 --> 00:55:05.680
And I actually think it's biased towards what, and I think this is a word used by like

00:55:05.680 --> 00:55:09.040
people like Aaron Lukashewski or other things, where it's almost like a leadership

00:55:09.040 --> 00:55:15.040
manifold, where there's certain attributes that are uh recurrently

00:55:15.040 --> 00:55:17.360
and repeat repetitively useful.

00:55:17.520 --> 00:55:20.400
So, like, you know, being a good communicator, being formidable.

00:55:20.640 --> 00:55:26.590
So, sort of, I think our our idea, our folk idea of what a leader is, doesn't

00:55:26.590 --> 00:55:32.110
look at leadership instances at all, but what it does is it looks at the aggregate, like

00:55:32.190 --> 00:55:34.910
what's the throughput or what does a person afford.

00:55:35.070 --> 00:55:41.070
And so I think like half of leadership or three quarters of leadership isn't even seen by

00:55:41.070 --> 00:55:43.710
our intuitive idea of what a leader leadership is.

00:55:43.870 --> 00:55:48.270
And what our intuitive idea of what leadership is is looking, is doing the job of

00:55:48.270 --> 00:55:54.180
individuating between people and seeing what what kinds of leadership instances they're

00:55:54.180 --> 00:55:56.500
good at and ranking them in that way.

00:55:56.660 --> 00:56:01.140
So it's like very much like it's this, it's we're not designed to do the science of

00:56:01.140 --> 00:56:02.100
representing leadership.

00:56:02.260 --> 00:56:06.820
We're actually just doing the evolved thing of sort of picking who's good for doing certain

00:56:06.820 --> 00:56:07.060
things.

00:56:07.220 --> 00:56:10.260
And that's what our folk psychology is completely focused on.

00:56:10.820 --> 00:56:10.900
Yeah.

00:56:11.140 --> 00:56:15.730
And then there's sort of like a meta leadership and identifying who should be leaders in

00:56:15.810 --> 00:56:16.290
what context.

00:56:16.530 --> 00:56:17.730
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

00:56:18.130 --> 00:56:21.650
And you know, just this like really emphasizes the market dynamics we were talking about

00:56:21.650 --> 00:56:22.050
before.

00:56:22.210 --> 00:56:26.290
So the context shapes who can provide benefits or impose costs.

00:56:26.370 --> 00:56:28.930
There's variation among all the individuals involved in the group.

00:56:29.330 --> 00:56:32.050
And then also you have the pool of competing leaders too.

00:56:32.130 --> 00:56:38.050
And so kind of to bring this back to like adaptive psychology, there's potentially either

00:56:38.260 --> 00:56:43.060
either adaptations or there are mental structures that facilitate this process by which we

00:56:43.060 --> 00:56:48.020
can see what groups are we a part of, what are the challenges we face, and should I solve

00:56:48.020 --> 00:56:48.580
those groups?

00:56:48.980 --> 00:56:50.420
Excuse me, should I solve those problems?

00:56:50.500 --> 00:56:51.540
Am I equipped to do that?

00:56:51.700 --> 00:56:57.460
Or should I defer to this other individual who clearly has more knowledge or formidability

00:56:57.540 --> 00:57:03.060
or the right combination of of capital, so to speak, um, in this particular market?

00:57:04.410 --> 00:57:04.650
Yeah.

00:57:04.810 --> 00:57:08.410
And I think this gets into like one of my students, Clara Lavador, is really interested in

00:57:08.490 --> 00:57:11.210
like niche niche occupying niches in groups.

00:57:11.370 --> 00:57:14.170
And I think like the psychology of sort of what's my role?

00:57:14.330 --> 00:57:17.610
You know, like in movies, there's always like, you know, you're the dri you're the getaway

00:57:17.610 --> 00:57:19.930
in a heist movie, you know, like what's your expertise?

00:57:20.090 --> 00:57:25.690
I think that idea of sort of every group has this role and this role and this role, and

00:57:25.690 --> 00:57:27.690
people value being that role.

00:57:27.770 --> 00:57:31.050
Uh, and it's a threat when somebody else comes and might be better at you.

00:57:31.130 --> 00:57:36.580
I think that happens a lot more in in that dynamic is sort of what we're also

00:57:36.580 --> 00:57:37.780
talking about here.

00:57:39.460 --> 00:57:45.300
Yeah, that's like the the dominance hierarchy within the the roles that assemble together

00:57:45.300 --> 00:57:48.020
to form like a cohesive, functioning, interdependent group.

00:57:48.100 --> 00:57:48.980
That makes a lot of sense.

00:57:49.140 --> 00:57:49.700
Yeah.

00:57:50.020 --> 00:57:50.420
Hmm.

00:57:50.580 --> 00:57:51.540
It's interesting.

00:57:51.780 --> 00:57:56.390
So within the heist group there's a dominance hierarchy about who's the best getaway

00:57:56.550 --> 00:57:56.950
driver.

00:57:57.030 --> 00:57:57.190
Right.

00:57:57.270 --> 00:58:01.190
And right and maybe one who's who's widely recognized by the group as the best getaway

00:58:01.350 --> 00:58:03.270
driver, you could consider them the alpha.

00:58:03.350 --> 00:58:05.270
And then maybe the second best would be the beta.

00:58:05.350 --> 00:58:09.030
And then if someone else is showing their chops at being a getaway driver, well, the alpha

00:58:09.030 --> 00:58:13.110
might feel threatened by that and try to act against that person.

00:58:13.270 --> 00:58:17.670
But that's just a little micro status hierarchy within the larger group of, you know, w

00:58:17.830 --> 00:58:21.620
what what they're trying to do, which is, you know, rob banks or whatever.

00:58:21.700 --> 00:58:23.940
Uh and then you have different status hierarchies happening there.

00:58:24.020 --> 00:58:25.380
I mean, it's all extremely complicated.

00:58:25.540 --> 00:58:28.980
But of course, once you zoom out, you see that this is just a niche within a niche within a

00:58:28.980 --> 00:58:29.380
niche.

00:58:29.460 --> 00:58:33.940
Because you know, choosing to rob banks versus, you know, do brain surgery is itself a a

00:58:33.940 --> 00:58:37.060
huge complicated decision of which niche I'm going to pursue and then, you know, which

00:58:37.060 --> 00:58:39.300
niche I'm going to sho pursue within that niche.

00:58:39.460 --> 00:58:43.110
Um so it's it's a really it's a rich way of thinking.

00:58:43.190 --> 00:58:48.870
Uh and it helps you carve nature at the joints and and and and think about what the little

00:58:48.950 --> 00:58:53.590
micro decisions are within the the fractal nature of all these different status games and

00:58:53.590 --> 00:58:54.390
all these different niches.

00:58:54.790 --> 00:58:55.910
Anyway, I'm I'm ranting.

00:58:56.070 --> 00:58:57.910
But uh but it's Yeah, I like that.

00:58:57.990 --> 00:59:02.870
But it unifies like the the like Congress person who's threatened by another

00:59:02.870 --> 00:59:08.120
congressperson, and that's the same underlying logic as the kid who's a good skateboarder

00:59:08.200 --> 00:59:12.120
and a c the best kid skateboarder in class and there's a new kid who's a better

00:59:12.120 --> 00:59:12.920
skateboarder.

00:59:13.080 --> 00:59:18.200
It's the same uh expression at a deep level of the same phenomenon.

00:59:19.000 --> 00:59:19.240
Yeah.

00:59:19.400 --> 00:59:22.440
I mean I think it explains a lot of political phenomena.

00:59:22.600 --> 00:59:27.080
I mean you could think about you know uh antipathy toward immigrants as you know I uh

00:59:27.240 --> 00:59:31.400
provide the service of you know working for this factory and here comes this this new group

00:59:31.400 --> 00:59:36.130
of people who seem to be doing this this this work or providing this service at a lower

00:59:36.130 --> 00:59:41.570
price than than me and that could uh to my evolved psychology feel like a threat and I

00:59:41.570 --> 00:59:46.690
might try to act against that that upstart or those those newcomers coming in to try to uh

00:59:46.850 --> 00:59:52.690
overshadow me or you know if I am a a cultural well-educated uh uh elite uh

00:59:52.770 --> 00:59:56.450
and I have and I want to have lots of influence over the culture and I see these you

00:59:56.660 --> 01:00:00.980
wealthy corporate CEOs who have disproportionate political influence, they're a threat to

01:00:00.980 --> 01:00:01.140
me.

01:00:01.300 --> 01:00:06.100
And I might be uh attracted uh by political parties that try to take take down those

01:00:06.820 --> 01:00:08.260
corporate fat cats.

01:00:08.340 --> 01:00:08.580
Right.

01:00:08.740 --> 01:00:14.660
And so you see these kinds of uh status conflicts happening uh uh in in all different

01:00:14.660 --> 01:00:18.500
parts of a society and at different levels of social hierarchies and in different social

01:00:18.500 --> 01:00:19.140
hierarchies.

01:00:19.300 --> 01:00:24.340
And these are some of the raw material uh for uh creating political coalitions that are

01:00:24.340 --> 01:00:26.950
attractive to people and uniting different alliances together.

01:00:27.110 --> 01:00:32.070
Anyways, I'm getting into uh uh my uh hobby horse, which is thinking about politics.

01:00:32.150 --> 01:00:36.470
But I'm curious if you if you if you think uh I'm onto something in this in this direction.

01:00:36.950 --> 01:00:37.910
Yeah, definitely, definitely.

01:00:38.070 --> 01:00:41.910
And there's a there's another layer of complexity to this in that as let's say a would-be

01:00:42.070 --> 01:00:45.750
leader or a potential leader, you can also manipulate people's perceptions of the

01:00:45.750 --> 01:00:51.560
environment to promote your own capacities at the expense of your rival.

01:00:52.040 --> 01:00:57.240
And this is like a classic thing that authoritarian would-be leaders do is emphasize the

01:00:57.560 --> 01:00:59.320
outgroup threats or the external threats.

01:00:59.400 --> 01:01:02.520
And we've, you know, we've seen Donald Trump do this in many of his campaigns.

01:01:02.680 --> 01:01:08.120
Um, but we don't have uh an enemy, so to speak, you know, coming in our border or in our

01:01:08.120 --> 01:01:09.800
territory, except like immigration.

01:01:09.960 --> 01:01:12.520
So that's been a very salient message for him.

01:01:12.680 --> 01:01:17.830
It creates this out-group threat, And there's a lot of evidence that suggests that when

01:01:17.830 --> 01:01:22.390
there is this intergroup threat, we're more likely to prefer these more domineering,

01:01:22.710 --> 01:01:25.350
strongman, authoritarian type tendencies.

01:01:25.830 --> 01:01:29.430
It might be a cost for us, but it's a cost we're willing to pay if that threat is real.

01:01:29.510 --> 01:01:33.910
And if the threat is real, then you want that leader who can protect our border and keep us

01:01:33.910 --> 01:01:38.550
safe and provide those benefits to us that we think are going to outweigh the costs of

01:01:38.550 --> 01:01:41.750
their potential coerciveness.

01:01:42.480 --> 01:01:48.320
But if you have a rival who is, let's say, less authoritarian or or less co less

01:01:48.480 --> 01:01:52.000
has less capacities for coercion, but they're going to provide all these other benefits.

01:01:52.080 --> 01:01:55.920
They're going to solve all the problems, and the economy is going to be great, and the

01:01:55.920 --> 01:01:59.600
social system is going to function well, the benefits are going to be great from that

01:01:59.600 --> 01:02:00.080
individual.

01:02:00.240 --> 01:02:04.800
Well, you might not be able to compete with them in benefit provision, but you can compete

01:02:04.800 --> 01:02:10.530
with them in some other domain if you sort of tweak the perception of the ecology to favor

01:02:10.770 --> 01:02:12.530
your capacities rather than theirs.

01:02:12.690 --> 01:02:16.930
So there's you can compete in these on both sides of the coin, so to speak.

01:02:17.250 --> 01:02:20.130
And I think you see this in political rhetoric quite quite clearly.

01:02:20.370 --> 01:02:24.450
And I I don't know that I don't know that politicians have like evolutionary social

01:02:24.450 --> 01:02:25.490
scientists on their staff.

01:02:25.570 --> 01:02:28.130
I don't think they do, but um it's almost as if they do.

01:02:28.210 --> 01:02:32.610
And I think that's an indication that the psychology underlying this is so salient that

01:02:32.610 --> 01:02:36.440
someone like Donald Trump doesn't have to be coached to say, oh yeah, you want to emphasize

01:02:36.440 --> 01:02:38.360
the outgroup threat to play into your strength.

01:02:38.600 --> 01:02:43.160
It's just like a natural process, a natural outcome of our psychologies.

01:02:43.640 --> 01:02:44.680
And you could think of it as a market.

01:02:45.080 --> 01:02:49.320
I mean, you see you you have a bunch of competing politicians with competing uh uh agendas

01:02:49.320 --> 01:02:51.640
and platforms and and uh uh beliefs.

01:02:51.800 --> 01:02:54.920
And some of those beliefs are just more attractive and compelling to the human mind.

01:02:55.080 --> 01:02:59.870
And the ones that win out are the ones that, you know, uh demonize uh you know an outgroup

01:03:00.030 --> 01:03:04.110
or you know, frame some group as being a free rider that needs to be punished.

01:03:04.270 --> 01:03:08.110
These kind these kinds of narratives that fit uh our evolved psychology very well are the

01:03:08.110 --> 01:03:12.110
ones that win out in the political marketplace and then trickle up to form the contents of

01:03:12.110 --> 01:03:13.950
our ideological belief systems.

01:03:14.350 --> 01:03:14.990
Yeah.

01:03:15.390 --> 01:03:17.230
This is why we can't have nice things.

01:03:17.550 --> 01:03:18.190
Yeah.

01:03:19.840 --> 01:03:22.640
People are terrible and wonderful, but also terrible.

01:03:22.880 --> 01:03:23.760
Yeah, they're both.

01:03:24.000 --> 01:03:24.320
Yeah.

01:03:24.560 --> 01:03:30.000
Um, Zach, uh what uh we've so we've been launching into sort of leadership.

01:03:30.160 --> 01:03:35.040
Um, you know, you you there's this thing about like services, like cognitive services.

01:03:35.200 --> 01:03:38.400
I don't know if you want to talk about that at all, or is there some other part of your

01:03:38.400 --> 01:03:38.800
research?

01:03:38.880 --> 01:03:39.920
Like, are we missing anything?

01:03:40.080 --> 01:03:41.760
Because we sort of launched right in.

01:03:41.920 --> 01:03:46.080
Um, are we missing, you know, a good swath of what you're doing or thinking about?

01:03:46.800 --> 01:03:51.290
Um Well, yeah, we've talked a little bit about some of this stuff.

01:03:51.370 --> 01:03:56.490
I guess on the on the services side, so this is like some work I I've done with Ed Hagan,

01:03:56.570 --> 01:03:58.490
who you who you both talk to and know well.

01:03:58.650 --> 01:04:03.130
Um, this is the idea that you know part of what leaders are doing are providing these

01:04:03.370 --> 01:04:06.970
services, often cognitive services, in our in our in our model.

01:04:07.450 --> 01:04:12.780
And I guess a lot of my work is kind of it's been very inspired by the sort of dominance

01:04:12.860 --> 01:04:14.140
prestige framework.

01:04:14.220 --> 01:04:19.340
This I read this paper, you know, the the seminal paper here is Henrik and Gil White 2001.

01:04:19.500 --> 01:04:22.620
I read this as an undergraduate when I was working with Ray Haymes.

01:04:22.700 --> 01:04:25.580
He turned me onto this, and that just like blew my mind.

01:04:25.660 --> 01:04:29.180
And I mean I think I still have my PDF copy of that that's like you know, it's all

01:04:29.180 --> 01:04:31.100
highlighted and has coffee stains on it.

01:04:31.260 --> 01:04:36.790
And so I I spent a lot of my work as a graduate student trying to understand what this

01:04:36.790 --> 01:04:40.790
dominance prestige model was, how we could test it, what it would look like in different

01:04:40.950 --> 01:04:41.670
different contexts.

01:04:41.750 --> 01:04:45.910
And you see tons of ethnographic evidence that this is going on.

01:04:45.990 --> 01:04:48.710
And there's been a lot of different ways to think about prestige.

01:04:49.910 --> 01:04:50.790
Is it respect?

01:04:50.950 --> 01:04:53.590
Is it competition in these symbolic domains?

01:04:53.750 --> 01:04:59.110
Instead of competing with physical aggression, we can compete by being a guitarist or being

01:04:59.110 --> 01:05:00.950
a good hunter or a basketball player.

01:05:01.190 --> 01:05:04.870
So is it analogous to physical competition, but in non-physical ways?

01:05:05.030 --> 01:05:07.240
That's sort of the Jerome Barco model.

01:05:07.400 --> 01:05:13.080
Um, or is it like an opportunity to identify the important model to learn skills from?

01:05:13.240 --> 01:05:15.880
That's sort of the Henrik cultural evolution model.

01:05:16.280 --> 01:05:22.200
And so once we really dug into a lot of the ethnography, um, it led us to think about

01:05:22.360 --> 01:05:28.360
uh how the sort of um social selection models of learning and

01:05:28.440 --> 01:05:34.310
and and finding the ideal individual to to learn important skills from also relates to

01:05:34.310 --> 01:05:39.830
this very clear pattern that high status men and leaders have much enhanced reproductive

01:05:39.830 --> 01:05:40.150
success.

01:05:40.230 --> 01:05:44.550
You know, the Chris von Ruden has talked a lot about this and um we s we sa we see this a

01:05:44.550 --> 01:05:45.830
lot in the ethnographic record.

01:05:45.910 --> 01:05:51.660
So there's clearly like a a sexual selection and a social selection process going on.

01:05:51.820 --> 01:05:55.580
And so this led us to think about: well, what is it that prestigious leaders are really

01:05:55.580 --> 01:05:55.980
good for?

01:05:56.140 --> 01:05:59.980
Why would you want to sacrifice your autonomy to someone else?

01:06:00.220 --> 01:06:04.940
And the social, the sort of cultural evolutionary story, the social learning story probably

01:06:04.940 --> 01:06:06.220
explains a big chunk of it.

01:06:06.380 --> 01:06:12.330
Like, yes, you wanna identify who you can learn from, but there's some issues

01:06:12.330 --> 01:06:14.570
there we we think are are not fully explained.

01:06:14.730 --> 01:06:20.570
For one, like if that is the case, if prestige is a mechanism to identify someone who

01:06:20.570 --> 01:06:25.290
has important skills from, so that then you can learn those skills, you might expect that

01:06:25.290 --> 01:06:30.410
prestige would go down as a function of that individual sharing that information.

01:06:30.650 --> 01:06:32.890
Um and that's obviously not how prestige works.

01:06:32.970 --> 01:06:37.880
I mean, if if I if I want to learn how to you know shoot a three-point shot because you're

01:06:37.880 --> 01:06:42.200
the best and you teach me that shot and I mimic your technique exactly, now your prestige

01:06:42.200 --> 01:06:42.920
doesn't go down.

01:06:43.080 --> 01:06:45.080
Um so there's more going on than that.

01:06:45.240 --> 01:06:50.200
And then, you know, why would you defer to someone who is prestigious once you have already

01:06:50.200 --> 01:06:53.720
sort of acquired whatever knowledge that you could potentially acquire from them?

01:06:53.800 --> 01:06:55.880
Um that doesn't seem to happen either.

01:06:56.120 --> 01:07:01.390
Um Why would prestigious people be like sexually attractive to the opposite sex?

01:07:01.950 --> 01:07:07.790
Or if you're in an arranged marriage situation, which characterizes a lot of humanity,

01:07:07.950 --> 01:07:13.310
why would you want your son or your daughter to be partnered with a prestigious individual?

01:07:13.550 --> 01:07:15.310
So there seem to be a lot of gaps in this.

01:07:15.470 --> 01:07:19.230
And our our solution is this idea of computational services.

01:07:19.470 --> 01:07:23.840
So prestigious individuals have special knowledge and they have intelligence.

01:07:23.920 --> 01:07:26.320
And we kind of use this term neurocapital.

01:07:26.560 --> 01:07:29.760
Some of my colleagues don't like this so much, but for us, it's like it's a it's a

01:07:29.760 --> 01:07:30.320
catch-all.

01:07:30.480 --> 01:07:36.320
So it's whatever intelligence is, you know, whatever uh expertise is and knowledge is and

01:07:36.320 --> 01:07:40.160
also personality, just all the stuff that's in the in the brain that's variable.

01:07:40.640 --> 01:07:44.110
And in this sense, it's kind of like physical formidability.

01:07:44.670 --> 01:07:45.710
You can't fake it.

01:07:45.870 --> 01:07:50.510
And to some extent, you can build it up over time, but you can't just overnight increase

01:07:50.510 --> 01:07:54.190
your neural capital, just like overnight, you can't become physically formidable.

01:07:54.510 --> 01:07:56.110
And so there's natural variation.

01:07:56.270 --> 01:08:01.870
And if you're high on this neural capital, then it puts you in a position to provide

01:08:01.870 --> 01:08:07.150
input into other individuals, solve problems for them, resolve conflicts, and offer

01:08:07.150 --> 01:08:07.790
services.

01:08:08.030 --> 01:08:14.000
And it's beneficial for the altar, the other individual, because

01:08:14.000 --> 01:08:16.240
they don't have the information that you do.

01:08:16.560 --> 01:08:21.680
And imagine a scenario where you have one individual who has a big problem.

01:08:21.840 --> 01:08:22.800
They don't know what to do.

01:08:23.040 --> 01:08:25.680
They lack the information, they lack the experience to solve this problem.

01:08:25.840 --> 01:08:30.320
So they go to someone who is known for having this expertise, having this prestige.

01:08:30.480 --> 01:08:34.480
And they there's you know situation A, B, and C, and they have no idea what to do.

01:08:34.560 --> 01:08:38.350
Uh the prestigious individual, because of their expertise, because of their sort of theory

01:08:38.350 --> 01:08:43.790
of mind capacities, maybe just even their cognitive capacities, their intelligence, they

01:08:43.790 --> 01:08:48.750
might know that option A is clearly bad for this individual, so they can like take it off

01:08:48.750 --> 01:08:49.550
the table right away.

01:08:49.790 --> 01:08:55.390
Option B and D, excuse me, B and C might be equally good for the for the

01:08:55.390 --> 01:08:59.870
requester, but option C might be great for the leader, the prestigious individual.

01:09:00.030 --> 01:09:02.030
So then they can recommend option C.

01:09:02.350 --> 01:09:04.510
And both parties get a benefit here.

01:09:05.100 --> 01:09:09.820
it's easier for the follower in this scenario because all they have to do now is compare

01:09:09.820 --> 01:09:12.460
the proposed option to whatever they might do on their own.

01:09:12.620 --> 01:09:14.940
So just a sort of binary comparison.

01:09:15.340 --> 01:09:19.260
The leader, on the other hand, had a quite a complex set of scenarios and a lot of

01:09:19.260 --> 01:09:21.260
information processing going on.

01:09:21.580 --> 01:09:26.220
And that means that now most decisions will be a benefit to the leader.

01:09:26.380 --> 01:09:31.260
So that's why it's attractive to be married to this individual, to have your close kin

01:09:31.260 --> 01:09:36.990
married to that individual, to be partners to that individual, because outcomes are

01:09:36.990 --> 01:09:38.350
usually going to be in their favor.

01:09:38.510 --> 01:09:40.590
So it's they're a good social partner to have.

01:09:41.310 --> 01:09:44.510
So that's sort of the idea of computational services in a nutshell, in a sense.

01:09:44.910 --> 01:09:48.430
If I could break that down, because it's a it's a cool idea and I want to break down like

01:09:48.430 --> 01:09:49.710
the the mechanics of it.

01:09:49.870 --> 01:09:53.310
So within any decision, uh there are decision costs.

01:09:53.470 --> 01:09:59.300
There's time, energy, uh uh uh uh et cetera, that it takes to evaluate all the

01:09:59.300 --> 01:10:03.380
different possibilities, conceive of all the different possibilities, map out how they're

01:10:03.380 --> 01:10:06.740
gonna work out in your head, uh, and that takes time and energy.

01:10:06.900 --> 01:10:12.340
Um, and what a leader does is it uh saves you that time and energy.

01:10:12.500 --> 01:10:17.890
You you uh provide the service of reducing that decision cost for the person that you're

01:10:17.890 --> 01:10:18.450
helping.

01:10:18.850 --> 01:10:23.170
And so you get a benefit, and that, and then I'm saving you some cost, I'm saving you some

01:10:23.170 --> 01:10:24.770
time and energy in making the decision.

01:10:24.850 --> 01:10:29.410
And I'm getting a benefit too, because I'm going to guide you toward decisions that benefit

01:10:29.410 --> 01:10:29.730
me more.

01:10:29.810 --> 01:10:31.170
So we're each benefiting from this.

01:10:31.330 --> 01:10:34.210
You get a lower decision cost, and I get a better outcome.

01:10:34.450 --> 01:10:40.210
And through that mutual benefit, uh this kind of this kind of leadership uh dynamic

01:10:40.300 --> 01:10:45.260
emerges where a person who is better at reducing decision costs for people tends to reduce

01:10:45.260 --> 01:10:47.580
more decision costs and have more influence over the group.

01:10:47.660 --> 01:10:51.340
And in exchange for providing that service, they get more favorable outcomes.

01:10:52.300 --> 01:10:53.580
Is that a good way of breaking it down?

01:10:53.900 --> 01:10:54.540
Yeah, exactly.

01:10:54.700 --> 01:10:57.820
And in the in the paper, we call this joint utility improvement.

01:10:58.380 --> 01:11:00.380
So we actually both get a better outcome of this.

01:11:00.460 --> 01:11:01.820
And so leadership is costly as well.

01:11:01.900 --> 01:11:05.340
So I need to get some, if someone's leader, they need to get some payoff and make it worth

01:11:05.340 --> 01:11:06.140
their while as well.

01:11:06.390 --> 01:11:09.750
A lot of people in these, especially smaller scale societies, they don't want to be the

01:11:09.750 --> 01:11:11.990
leader because the costs are quite quite high.

01:11:12.390 --> 01:11:15.830
Opportunity costs, potential reputational damages.

01:11:16.310 --> 01:11:20.470
But in the end, it makes sense exactly given the dynamics you just explained.

01:11:21.270 --> 01:11:21.590
Cool.

01:11:22.070 --> 01:11:23.030
It's a really interesting model.

01:11:23.110 --> 01:11:23.830
I like it a lot.

01:11:24.150 --> 01:11:24.390
Yeah.

01:11:24.470 --> 01:11:28.790
And just in defense of your sort of agnostic about like what intelligence or the neural

01:11:28.790 --> 01:11:34.500
underpinnings are, the there's this idea of a difference detecting

01:11:34.500 --> 01:11:34.900
mechanism.

01:11:35.060 --> 01:11:38.500
I have a paper that's hopefully going to come out pretty soon, and it's based on it's an

01:11:38.500 --> 01:11:43.940
idea from David Buss and people like Aaron Lukashewski and other people and Patrick Durge

01:11:44.260 --> 01:11:49.540
in personality, looking at um it's this idea that it's what we talked about before for

01:11:49.540 --> 01:11:55.220
leadership, which is what we're evolved to do is look for differences in

01:11:55.460 --> 01:11:58.660
something not necessarily the full causal story.

01:11:58.820 --> 01:12:04.030
So for example, like if you're trying to predict like what's a good restaurant, you're not

01:12:04.030 --> 01:12:06.270
going to go through like, well, do they cook food?

01:12:06.430 --> 01:12:08.190
Um, you know, do they have a wait staff?

01:12:08.270 --> 01:12:09.550
Like that's held constant.

01:12:09.710 --> 01:12:13.310
So what you're gonna do is look for like, is there like a line out the door?

01:12:13.470 --> 01:12:15.310
You know, like how hard is it to get in?

01:12:15.470 --> 01:12:18.510
Does like the upkeep look, you know, like is it being kept up?

01:12:18.750 --> 01:12:24.110
Like these are all cues to predict among the variants that of the choices that you have.

01:12:24.350 --> 01:12:29.500
And so in intelligence, for example, there's this long literature and like there's a paper

01:12:29.500 --> 01:12:34.620
by Denny Borsboom about how people have looked for like the underpinnings of what

01:12:34.620 --> 01:12:39.020
intelligence is forever, and it doesn't map onto any like single thing.

01:12:39.100 --> 01:12:42.620
And that's in part because, you know, like the mind is not domain general and there's not

01:12:42.620 --> 01:12:44.060
like the thinky part of the mind.

01:12:44.300 --> 01:12:50.030
But it's also because this idea is that really what intelligence is a third-party

01:12:50.030 --> 01:12:54.270
representation of somebody who's better at something than somebody else.

01:12:54.510 --> 01:12:57.470
And the source of that variation is always different.

01:12:57.630 --> 01:13:02.270
So in some cases, it might be like we're in a high pathogen environment, and the person

01:13:02.270 --> 01:13:06.910
who's just got faster processing speed for this particular task is the one who has like the

01:13:06.910 --> 01:13:08.270
lowest pathogen load.

01:13:08.510 --> 01:13:12.750
But what that produces or why that's there is very different from another situation where

01:13:12.750 --> 01:13:14.350
it's like, who's the best guitarist?

01:13:14.430 --> 01:13:18.320
And like, why did that, you know, that particular combination of things and what makes the

01:13:18.320 --> 01:13:22.720
best guitarist isn't what makes the best accountant or most like, you know, and so what

01:13:22.720 --> 01:13:28.560
people have discovered is what unifies these difference-detecting concepts like

01:13:28.560 --> 01:13:34.160
leadership or intelligence is not the um the thing in the head that

01:13:34.160 --> 01:13:37.840
corresponds to it, but it's the perception of a difference.

01:13:38.080 --> 01:13:40.110
But what causes that difference is always the same.

01:13:40.190 --> 01:13:44.350
So the fact that you're being agnostic about it, I just want to like as a side as a side

01:13:44.510 --> 01:13:50.350
here, um, it's vindicated in the sense of there's these many categories that are really

01:13:50.350 --> 01:13:55.550
part of our intuitive evolved folk psychology, where it's really we're designed to detect

01:13:55.550 --> 01:13:59.470
differences, but what causes those differences is very opaque and might even be

01:13:59.470 --> 01:14:01.710
heterogeneous across the situations.

01:14:02.430 --> 01:14:03.390
Okay, that's really cool.

01:14:03.550 --> 01:14:06.590
Yeah, that fits perfectly with uh this sort of framework.

01:14:06.840 --> 01:14:07.080
Yeah.

01:14:07.320 --> 01:14:07.560
Yeah.

01:14:07.640 --> 01:14:09.880
I I like that a lot too, Dave.

01:14:10.040 --> 01:14:16.040
Um, and uh incidentally, uh, it relates to I think a lot of uh panic about

01:14:16.040 --> 01:14:21.000
artificial intelligence is because we import we import this folk concept of intelligence as

01:14:21.000 --> 01:14:22.760
just sort of being generally awesome.

01:14:22.920 --> 01:14:25.480
And then that leads to these uh wild thought experiments.

01:14:25.720 --> 01:14:29.480
What if we what if the computer just gets more and more generally awesome at everything?

01:14:29.560 --> 01:14:32.760
And then it'll be better at everything than us, and then it'll it'll kill us all.

01:14:33.050 --> 01:14:38.890
Um and I so I think a lot of fears about AI runama come from this kind of folk psychology

01:14:38.970 --> 01:14:41.290
um that that we're just letting run wild.

01:14:41.370 --> 01:14:45.370
Um I have a blog post called AI Dumerism is bullshit that you might enjoy, Dave, that that

01:14:45.370 --> 01:14:46.410
basically makes this argument.

01:14:47.130 --> 01:14:47.210
Yeah.

01:14:47.530 --> 01:14:51.770
Um but yeah, no, I I I I love this idea of neural capital, Zach.

01:14:51.850 --> 01:14:56.520
I think it puts the focus where it ought to be, which is not on this like mental substance

01:14:56.520 --> 01:15:00.760
called intelligence, but thinking of it in economic terms as a as a s as a thing that you

01:15:00.760 --> 01:15:02.200
accumulate over a lifetime.

01:15:02.360 --> 01:15:06.280
You know, just as I, you know, eat lots of food and I, you know, and that, you know, it

01:15:06.280 --> 01:15:11.160
gets converted into um, you know, physical capital, you know, bigger muscles or or you

01:15:11.160 --> 01:15:16.600
know, larger size or whatever, uh, I, you know, uh forage for lots of pieces of valuable

01:15:16.600 --> 01:15:17.880
information in my environment.

01:15:17.960 --> 01:15:22.360
And I learn lots of valuable lessons and I accumulate that in my nervous system.

01:15:23.310 --> 01:15:27.150
And that allows me to provide lots of value to other people.

01:15:27.230 --> 01:15:30.350
And some just as some people might be better at hunting and foraging and better at

01:15:30.590 --> 01:15:35.470
accumulating food, some people might be better at accumulating valuable pieces of

01:15:35.470 --> 01:15:37.550
information, valuable insights, valuable lessons.

01:15:37.870 --> 01:15:41.550
And those people will just tend to have more neural capital and be able to provide more

01:15:41.550 --> 01:15:45.630
benefits, which in turn allows them to have more bargaining power in the social marketplace

01:15:45.710 --> 01:15:49.470
and have more social influence and rise to leadership positions.

01:15:49.550 --> 01:15:52.110
So I think it's a it's a beautiful uh model.

01:15:52.880 --> 01:15:54.560
And I I yeah, I like it.

01:15:54.800 --> 01:15:55.200
Cool.

01:15:55.600 --> 01:16:01.600
I uh also want to tie it back to, I think people listening might also recognize uh this

01:16:01.600 --> 01:16:02.640
in another context.

01:16:02.720 --> 01:16:07.920
And I know you've also thought a little bit about this, is that um is parenting, right?

01:16:08.080 --> 01:16:13.280
Where like a lot of this dynamic, again, uh it sounds like it's almost really starts with

01:16:13.280 --> 01:16:14.160
sort of parenting.

01:16:14.240 --> 01:16:19.280
You can almost imagine that as if if you wanted the first set of selection pressures, it's

01:16:19.280 --> 01:16:25.050
this thing of there's this helpless organism in my control system is not

01:16:25.050 --> 01:16:29.850
only controlling this body envelope, but it has to do the services for this other body

01:16:29.850 --> 01:16:33.450
envelope that's totally helpless, doesn't know anything.

01:16:33.690 --> 01:16:38.810
And so this thing of like the choices A, B, C, uh, that really sounds also like parenting,

01:16:38.890 --> 01:16:43.450
where like A is really bad for the kid, B and C are equally good for the kid, but like C is

01:16:43.450 --> 01:16:43.850
better for me.

01:16:43.930 --> 01:16:45.130
So I'm gonna suggest C.

01:16:46.650 --> 01:16:47.210
Yeah, exactly.

01:16:47.290 --> 01:16:49.290
But I mean that's sort of the tongue in cheek version.

01:16:49.500 --> 01:16:53.340
But then, I mean, how seriously should we take the metaphor?

01:16:53.420 --> 01:16:57.660
And is it that this thing of like, you know, the original evolved psychology is really a

01:16:57.660 --> 01:17:01.820
parenting psychology that's been sort of tweaked and co-opted to then do other things?

01:17:01.900 --> 01:17:03.500
Or how are you thinking about that?

01:17:03.660 --> 01:17:07.340
Um, you know, and it certainly seems like a lot of this is happening within the family too.

01:17:07.500 --> 01:17:09.420
So, you know, can you talk a little bit about that?

01:17:09.740 --> 01:17:11.900
Yeah, that's that's exactly kind of our thinking.

01:17:12.060 --> 01:17:17.180
I don't remember if Ed got into this in his conversation with y'all, but um, if we kind of

01:17:17.180 --> 01:17:22.070
extrapolate back and kind of to take a Dave Petrazuki approach, think about the adaptive

01:17:22.070 --> 01:17:22.550
problem first.

01:17:22.630 --> 01:17:27.030
We come to this idea of it all starts in the in the family.

01:17:27.190 --> 01:17:30.470
So the mother is the first leader of all of us.

01:17:31.030 --> 01:17:34.870
And you know, a mother's offspring are her followers in this sense.

01:17:35.110 --> 01:17:37.830
We think about disproportionate influence and decision-making.

01:17:37.990 --> 01:17:42.580
And so kind of a consequence of this line of thinking that started with like thinking about

01:17:42.580 --> 01:17:47.140
dominance prestige, looking at the ethnographic record, seeing this overlap, coming this

01:17:47.140 --> 01:17:49.220
idea of neural capital and sexual selection.

01:17:49.460 --> 01:17:54.100
An outcome is that it seems that the cognitive demands of motherhood would have been the

01:17:54.100 --> 01:17:58.340
strongest selection pressure over a long period of hominin evolution.

01:17:58.500 --> 01:18:03.140
And so this is sort of also like a it's a sort of social intelligence, a Machiavellian

01:18:03.140 --> 01:18:07.380
intelligence kind of explanation for encephalization or the evolution of the brain.

01:18:07.970 --> 01:18:13.410
Because it seems like every woman is the at least the leader of her children, and probably

01:18:13.410 --> 01:18:15.970
also the leader of her family in a lot of ways.

01:18:16.130 --> 01:18:21.410
Optimizing decisions, resolving conflicts, and all these cognitive demands that we see as

01:18:21.410 --> 01:18:26.610
being associated with leadership more broadly is what every mother is doing basically from

01:18:26.610 --> 01:18:30.610
her first, or maybe especially her second offspring, but even her first, all the way

01:18:30.610 --> 01:18:32.770
through the rest of her life, effectively.

01:18:33.040 --> 01:18:38.400
And so this suggests that you know a lot of the phenomenon of leadership behavior might be

01:18:38.400 --> 01:18:40.320
more women-specific.

01:18:40.880 --> 01:18:44.480
And so this psychology might have that might have been the selection pressure for it.

01:18:44.880 --> 01:18:49.120
And then when you have two individuals who are both good at this, it's it's even better,

01:18:49.280 --> 01:18:49.440
right?

01:18:49.520 --> 01:18:55.290
So if you have a good joint utility improvement cognition of a mother and

01:18:55.290 --> 01:18:59.130
a good joint utility improvement cognition of a father, then there's gonna be a really

01:18:59.130 --> 01:19:00.010
stable pair bond.

01:19:00.090 --> 01:19:04.250
They're able to resolve all these conflicts because they necessarily have lots of

01:19:04.250 --> 01:19:04.890
conflicts.

01:19:05.130 --> 01:19:08.730
You do you invest in the paternal line or the maternal line?

01:19:08.810 --> 01:19:12.410
Or what if someone had some other children with another mateship, now you're together?

01:19:12.650 --> 01:19:14.890
So in order to make it work, you have to resolve conflicts.

01:19:15.050 --> 01:19:19.530
And anyone who's been in a a a partnership obviously knows that good relationships are not

01:19:19.530 --> 01:19:24.540
the ones that avoid conflicts necessarily, but the ones that resolve them more effectively.

01:19:25.180 --> 01:19:30.060
And so if the cognitive demands of motherhood were a strong selection pressure, if you

01:19:30.060 --> 01:19:33.420
resolve those conflicts, you're going to have more surviving offspring.

01:19:33.580 --> 01:19:39.020
And you know, many children are dying in before the age of what, before six months, even

01:19:39.020 --> 01:19:41.740
before one year, in the subsistence-based context.

01:19:41.980 --> 01:19:45.020
So keeping your kids alive is not, it's not easy exactly.

01:19:45.180 --> 01:19:47.820
So you have to have, um you have to be thinking very carefully.

01:19:47.900 --> 01:19:49.340
There's lots of threats out there.

01:19:49.490 --> 01:19:55.250
Um and so then if if all mothers are doing this, then you only need like one or two or

01:19:55.250 --> 01:20:00.210
maybe a few guys who aren't doing as much in the home that can then provide these similar

01:20:00.210 --> 01:20:04.210
services that mothers are providing for their children within the house at the community

01:20:04.210 --> 01:20:04.610
level.

01:20:05.490 --> 01:20:11.330
It's a ri I I I wanna um make this connection between conflict resolution and what you call

01:20:11.330 --> 01:20:17.020
joint utility maximization because it's uh I I love how elegantly it maps on uh one maps

01:20:17.020 --> 01:20:17.660
onto the other.

01:20:17.820 --> 01:20:22.380
So the original model is that I save you decision costs, uh, and in exchange I get a more

01:20:22.380 --> 01:20:23.340
favorable outcome.

01:20:23.580 --> 01:20:27.180
The that same logic applies beautifully to to an instance of a conflict.

01:20:27.340 --> 01:20:32.700
So if you and Dave are in conflict, um, you have a variety of possible ways of resolving

01:20:32.700 --> 01:20:35.100
that conflict, a variety of different courses of action.

01:20:35.180 --> 01:20:38.620
It takes a lot of time and energy to evaluate all those different options and those

01:20:38.620 --> 01:20:39.500
different possibilities.

01:20:39.660 --> 01:20:43.470
So right off the bat, you have a lot of time and energy that's being spent in you and Dave

01:20:43.470 --> 01:20:45.790
figuring out what you're gonna do about this conflict.

01:20:45.950 --> 01:20:49.630
But on top of those time and energy costs, you also have the costs of potentially fighting

01:20:49.630 --> 01:20:54.190
with one another, physically perhaps, or you might have the costs of foregone cooperation

01:20:54.190 --> 01:20:56.110
if you decide to not be friends anymore.

01:20:56.270 --> 01:20:59.630
So th there are there are these huge costs that you and Dave are now facing.

01:20:59.790 --> 01:21:04.780
And me as a potential leader, I have the benefit to save you those huge costs.

01:21:04.940 --> 01:21:09.100
I can save you the decision costs by making a clear uh outcome that both of you can agree

01:21:09.100 --> 01:21:11.900
to, and you don't have to spend time squabbling and fighting over it.

01:21:12.060 --> 01:21:16.540
I can perhaps save your relationship and and the benefits of future cooperation.

01:21:16.700 --> 01:21:20.780
I can prevent you from fighting with each other and incurring physical uh costs.

01:21:21.020 --> 01:21:25.660
I can provide all those huge benefits to you as a leader and as someone with a lot of

01:21:25.660 --> 01:21:29.180
neural capital who knows you both and knows what might be a favorable outcome to you both.

01:21:29.410 --> 01:21:32.690
And in exchange, I get to resolve that conflict in a way that might benefit me.

01:21:32.770 --> 01:21:35.650
You know, maybe maybe if you know if you're both my allies, I'm really going to want you

01:21:35.650 --> 01:21:36.450
guys to get along.

01:21:36.610 --> 01:21:40.370
And so it benefits you if it benefits me if both of you guys are getting along.

01:21:40.450 --> 01:21:44.050
Uh, but if you know, if Dave is my brother, I might you know favor an outcome to the

01:21:44.050 --> 01:21:48.450
conflict that benefits Dave more than you, but that still might be make you better off if

01:21:48.450 --> 01:21:50.930
at the end of the day you're saving these huge decision costs.

01:21:51.460 --> 01:21:56.420
And so I I really love how elegantly this model maps on to the to this idea of conflict

01:21:56.420 --> 01:22:01.620
resolution and explains really insightfully why conflict resolution uh is such an important

01:22:01.620 --> 01:22:02.660
part of leadership.

01:22:02.820 --> 01:22:07.460
Um and and it's and intuitively, and uh from a Western mind, it's not a very important part

01:22:07.540 --> 01:22:08.180
of leadership.

01:22:08.340 --> 01:22:12.020
We when we think of a leader, we don't really think of them as being like a mediator or

01:22:12.020 --> 01:22:15.460
like you know, mediating conflicts between people or like being an impartial judge or

01:22:15.860 --> 01:22:16.500
something like that.

01:22:16.660 --> 01:22:21.730
And yet, if you look cross-culturally, what you find is that that actually is the most

01:22:21.970 --> 01:22:25.730
common and enduring feature of leadership, which I think is a really surprising and

01:22:25.730 --> 01:22:27.730
interesting empirical finding.

01:22:28.210 --> 01:22:28.850
Yeah, exactly.

01:22:29.010 --> 01:22:30.450
That was, I was just going to mention that.

01:22:30.610 --> 01:22:35.250
We we did the work and went through the ethnographic record and identified all these

01:22:35.250 --> 01:22:36.210
different functions of leaders.

01:22:36.290 --> 01:22:37.330
And it was kind of overlooked.

01:22:37.410 --> 01:22:42.920
And I was first sort of looking for theories to operationalize to see what I could test in

01:22:42.920 --> 01:22:43.960
the ethnographic record.

01:22:44.040 --> 01:22:48.280
There wasn't like a really clear theory saying conflict resolution is what leaders are

01:22:48.280 --> 01:22:48.600
doing.

01:22:48.760 --> 01:22:54.200
Um but in the end, when we did like a kind of an exploratory study, we found that conflict

01:22:54.200 --> 01:22:59.640
resolution was by far, well, not by far, but it was among a few very common functions that

01:22:59.640 --> 01:23:00.440
leaders are providing.

01:23:00.520 --> 01:23:04.200
And in fact, it was the most common function that leaders are providing across like a wide

01:23:04.200 --> 01:23:07.320
range of societies and also different contexts.

01:23:07.670 --> 01:23:07.910
Yeah.

01:23:08.230 --> 01:23:10.070
There's also a common knowledge element too.

01:23:10.150 --> 01:23:13.670
So just to continue the metaphor or the example, like if Zach and I are in conflict and

01:23:13.670 --> 01:23:18.390
David, you resolve it, it's also that if Zach and I are already in conflict, we already

01:23:18.390 --> 01:23:22.230
have our worried about the other getting more status or having more control in the

01:23:22.230 --> 01:23:22.870
relationship.

01:23:23.030 --> 01:23:28.150
And if we all have common knowledge that David, you have made the decision, we're both more

01:23:28.150 --> 01:23:32.550
comfortable going forward because the precedent isn't, well, Zach just called the shots

01:23:32.550 --> 01:23:34.390
now, and I would be reluctant to do that.

01:23:34.470 --> 01:23:38.360
So even if there was an agreement that we could both live with, I might just not want to go

01:23:38.360 --> 01:23:43.000
along with it because I don't want the precedent being that Zach is the one who I who got

01:23:43.000 --> 01:23:43.560
listened to.

01:23:43.880 --> 01:23:48.200
So like we both know that you, yeah, yeah, you did the allows both of you to save face.

01:23:48.440 --> 01:23:51.400
Exactly, exactly, and not get status in that other way.

01:23:51.480 --> 01:23:56.120
And then it also means like we know that we're both being monitored in the sense of like, I

01:23:56.120 --> 01:24:00.600
know that now David knows that this issue exists, but I also know that Zach knows that

01:24:00.600 --> 01:24:01.480
David knows.

01:24:01.750 --> 01:24:07.510
And so it really is like a beautiful feed uh forward cycle of can

01:24:07.750 --> 01:24:13.750
increasing common knowledge, saving face, and um and also just your unique perspective,

01:24:13.830 --> 01:24:15.830
David, and solving all of our problems.

01:24:16.470 --> 01:24:19.990
When we stop recording, Zach and I are gonna um talk to you, David.

01:24:21.190 --> 01:24:21.510
Yeah.

01:24:21.830 --> 01:24:24.630
I I'll sit you down on my couch and you can hear it.

01:24:24.950 --> 01:24:25.990
That sounds great.

01:24:26.310 --> 01:24:31.640
Um I I think Dave that brings up another interesting point of like the temporal dynamics

01:24:31.640 --> 01:24:35.640
that leaders must be sensitive to, which is another layer of the cognitive complexity.

01:24:35.800 --> 01:24:40.440
So sometimes it might just be kind of arbitrary and you might not have the sufficient

01:24:40.440 --> 01:24:43.960
information to really make a uh a justified decision.

01:24:44.120 --> 01:24:47.320
But let's say you already have that influence because of past decisions you've made and

01:24:47.320 --> 01:24:49.480
it's agreed upon that you have some authority in this context.

01:24:49.640 --> 01:24:52.090
So you just have to say, okay, stop it.

01:24:52.250 --> 01:24:56.170
You take the toy or you take the resource and we're done.

01:24:56.410 --> 01:25:00.970
But then the next time, the person who got the short end of the stick, you have to remember

01:25:00.970 --> 01:25:06.490
that they might have a turn now in this sort of the randomness or the noise of imperfect

01:25:06.490 --> 01:25:07.530
decision making.

01:25:07.930 --> 01:25:10.970
And if you if you remember it the next time, okay, now things are fine.

01:25:11.370 --> 01:25:17.130
This kind of gets into the idea of welfare trade-off and is someone taking you your outcome

01:25:17.210 --> 01:25:19.210
sufficiently into account consistently enough.

01:25:19.370 --> 01:25:24.480
You can maybe short someone once in a while, but you can't short the same person too much,

01:25:24.640 --> 01:25:27.680
or you're going to risk that um the influence for that individual.

01:25:27.920 --> 01:25:31.520
So leaders have to be mapping all of this stuff and temporally as well.

01:25:31.760 --> 01:25:32.160
Yeah.

01:25:32.320 --> 01:25:33.040
That's cool.

01:25:33.440 --> 01:25:37.600
Do you find that there is a preference for impartiality in a leader?

01:25:37.760 --> 01:25:41.840
Because you would imagine if if leaders are playing such a a strong role in resolving

01:25:41.840 --> 01:25:46.410
conflicts, it would uh really be in everyone's interest for that leader to not play

01:25:46.410 --> 01:25:46.810
favorites.

01:25:46.970 --> 01:25:51.530
So if you if you and Dave are in conflict, uh you're not gonna want me to be Dave's best

01:25:51.530 --> 01:25:51.770
friend.

01:25:51.850 --> 01:25:52.890
That's that's very bad for you.

01:25:53.050 --> 01:25:56.410
Or even if I am Dave's best friend, you're gonna want me to have some kind of distance,

01:25:56.570 --> 01:26:01.290
some kind of impartiality to make uh a fair resolution of the conflict without being biased

01:26:01.290 --> 01:26:03.370
by my allegiances to Dave.

01:26:03.530 --> 01:26:09.400
And so to me, that suggests a uh an underlooked aspect of leadership,

01:26:09.480 --> 01:26:13.320
which is that we might want leaders to to have a kind of impartiality, a kind of

01:26:13.320 --> 01:26:18.200
objectivity that allows that prevents them from, you know, pi playing favorites uh or or

01:26:18.280 --> 01:26:19.480
you know helping out their buddies.

01:26:19.640 --> 01:26:21.720
Do you is that an aspect of leadership that you've seen?

01:26:21.880 --> 01:26:22.840
Have you thought about that?

01:26:23.320 --> 01:26:27.080
Yeah, I think that there that is an aspect of leadership that makes me think of two things.

01:26:27.320 --> 01:26:32.130
In the cross-cultural data I've I've done, the cross-cultural using the ethnographic record

01:26:32.130 --> 01:26:36.690
to build quantitative measures of like conflict and leadership and conflict resolution.

01:26:36.850 --> 01:26:42.130
We do see some evidence of fairness being associated with leadership and conflict

01:26:42.130 --> 01:26:42.530
resolution.

01:26:42.610 --> 01:26:45.730
So I do think that is a very clear signal in the ethnographic record.

01:26:45.890 --> 01:26:49.010
Leaders should be fair, they should have a record of impartiality.

01:26:49.170 --> 01:26:53.090
I mean, that's like a desirable characteristic in someone who has influence who you're

01:26:53.090 --> 01:26:54.770
deferring to regularly.

01:26:55.330 --> 01:27:01.220
But I also think about like I've done some studies on conflict resolution

01:27:01.220 --> 01:27:03.940
among pastoralists, among the hammer.

01:27:04.180 --> 01:27:05.460
This is work with Luke.

01:27:05.700 --> 01:27:11.700
And we also see that kin groups play a big role in who's going to help

01:27:11.700 --> 01:27:12.900
you resolve your conflicts.

01:27:12.980 --> 01:27:18.820
And so if you know if uh me and Dave have a conflict, we might both recruit like one of our

01:27:18.820 --> 01:27:22.100
close friends, like an institutionalized sort of friend to come to our behalf.

01:27:22.180 --> 01:27:27.050
So in that in that sense, there's equal subjectivity or there's equal impartiality.

01:27:27.130 --> 01:27:32.010
And we each like have kind of our almost our our lawyer, so to speak, who is going to

01:27:32.010 --> 01:27:35.850
represent our perspective, not us.

01:27:36.010 --> 01:27:39.370
So there's there's sort of an idea that they're relatively impartial because they're kind

01:27:39.370 --> 01:27:42.010
of removed, but they're also clearly representing our interests.

01:27:42.090 --> 01:27:46.090
And as long as we both have someone who's going to advocate on our behalf, it removes like

01:27:46.250 --> 01:27:50.650
some of the emotion or the passion, and it removes that direct conflict.

01:27:50.730 --> 01:27:56.680
But now it allows the negotiation to happen with a slight degree of what let's

01:27:56.760 --> 01:28:01.560
say equal subjectivity or equal um partiality, so to speak.

01:28:02.360 --> 01:28:06.520
Which uh in in turn creates a massive incentive to have people who will who would be

01:28:06.520 --> 01:28:11.000
willing to advocate for you, to to form alliances with people who will have your back

01:28:11.080 --> 01:28:12.600
should you ever get into a conflict.

01:28:12.760 --> 01:28:17.240
Um and and signalling about about loyalty and you know, whether you get in a fight with

01:28:17.240 --> 01:28:22.130
someone, whether they take your side uh automatically or not, is a is a huge feature of of

01:28:22.130 --> 01:28:22.930
social relationships.

01:28:23.010 --> 01:28:24.770
It's it's a fascinating topic.

01:28:25.010 --> 01:28:26.450
Um yeah.

01:28:26.690 --> 01:28:29.490
So I'm I'm I I also I wanted to pick your brain.

01:28:29.730 --> 01:28:34.290
So this idea of impartiality and the importance of it in resolving conflicts.

01:28:34.450 --> 01:28:40.280
Um so there's this really cool idea uh from Pascal Boyer, who we will I imagine we'll

01:28:40.280 --> 01:28:45.480
probably have on at some point, where he thinks that the function of divination is to is is

01:28:45.480 --> 01:28:50.040
to basically provide this kind of impartiality where it cannot otherwise be obtained.

01:28:50.280 --> 01:28:55.400
So if if I cannot be trusted to make an impartial decision about how to resolve your

01:28:55.400 --> 01:29:01.070
conflict, um maybe the only way to resolve it is just to say, let's just, you know, uh uh

01:29:01.310 --> 01:29:04.910
throw something in the water and see if it sinks or floats, or let's look at some tea

01:29:04.910 --> 01:29:09.070
leaves, or or let's do do some random ritual that that produces a random outcome.

01:29:09.230 --> 01:29:13.950
And in that case, randomness is actually preferable to the judgment of another human being

01:29:14.030 --> 01:29:18.910
if if that j if that human being cannot be trusted to be i uh uh impartial.

01:29:19.070 --> 01:29:24.350
Um and so what these these rituals do in these divination is that they provide uh common

01:29:24.350 --> 01:29:29.060
ground, they provide common knowledge to coordinate the group, uh resolve disputes, get

01:29:29.060 --> 01:29:34.900
everyone with a common set of expectations without the corruptive, the corrupt influence of

01:29:34.900 --> 01:29:36.660
any particular person making the decision.

01:29:36.820 --> 01:29:37.860
Do you buy that model?

01:29:37.940 --> 01:29:42.580
And does it uh uh fit with the way you're thinking uh about these issues?

01:29:42.980 --> 01:29:46.740
Um yeah, I think there's something to that, or a lot to that for sure.

01:29:46.980 --> 01:29:50.900
But at the same time, you need to have kind of the neural capital, so to speak, or the

01:29:50.900 --> 01:29:52.660
expertise to perform that ritual.

01:29:52.900 --> 01:29:57.590
But it does give those individuals like sort of plausible deniability in some sense or the

01:29:57.590 --> 01:30:01.750
capacity to say, okay, well, we're gonna go to the Oracle now.

01:30:01.830 --> 01:30:07.270
Um, and I have the authority to make that decision, but now I'm putting that responsibility

01:30:07.270 --> 01:30:08.070
outside of myself.

01:30:08.150 --> 01:30:12.230
And it's also a really good strategy from the perspective of said leader or high status

01:30:12.230 --> 01:30:14.230
person because it now limits the cost.

01:30:14.630 --> 01:30:18.870
Um of the biggest costs for leaders are status loss.

01:30:19.190 --> 01:30:23.990
Um and so we if you look at we've kind of quantified this in the ethnographic data we've

01:30:23.990 --> 01:30:28.940
collected, there still are more, there's more evidence in our data set of benefits than

01:30:28.940 --> 01:30:31.420
costs, status benefits than status costs.

01:30:31.740 --> 01:30:33.900
But it's not as much as you would think.

01:30:33.980 --> 01:30:35.660
There's tons of status costs.

01:30:35.740 --> 01:30:38.860
Um, they're outweighed by the the benefits, but it's very costly.

01:30:39.020 --> 01:30:44.940
Like I see leadership as being a really high risk or high high high reward strategy.

01:30:45.100 --> 01:30:47.420
It can pay off big, but it can also really cost you.

01:30:47.580 --> 01:30:52.380
So I think the divination element gives leaders the opportunity to sort of strategically

01:30:52.850 --> 01:30:57.250
not go into very risky territory um and use some strategy.

01:30:57.410 --> 01:31:02.770
Um in in Hammer there's like a a throwing of shoes sort of strategy that individuals can

01:31:02.770 --> 01:31:02.930
use.

01:31:03.010 --> 01:31:03.490
You have two shoes.

01:31:03.570 --> 01:31:06.450
I don't exactly know how it works because it's not really done very much, but you have the

01:31:06.450 --> 01:31:10.770
two shoes and you kind of hold them a certain way and you throw them and the angles they

01:31:10.770 --> 01:31:13.890
make uh you know can be interpreted to provide some insights.

01:31:14.130 --> 01:31:16.050
So you haven't you haven't needed it yet.

01:31:16.290 --> 01:31:21.040
I haven't needed it thankfully but yeah I think Pascal has a has a very really great point

01:31:21.040 --> 01:31:21.200
there.

01:31:21.280 --> 01:31:23.200
It's it's advantageous for the individual.

01:31:23.360 --> 01:31:27.120
And then also like it's kind of flipping a coin, you know, so it's people can't argue with

01:31:27.120 --> 01:31:27.360
that.

01:31:27.680 --> 01:31:32.480
I wonder if like the uh the the cultural evolution of like larger scale religions and like

01:31:32.480 --> 01:31:37.120
monotheistic or even like other agents is just the passing, it's a reflection of passing

01:31:37.120 --> 01:31:38.880
the buck of the responsibility.

01:31:39.120 --> 01:31:44.080
So it's sort of like if I'm doing divination and it goes wrong, um, well, like maybe that's

01:31:44.080 --> 01:31:44.800
a problem with me.

01:31:44.960 --> 01:31:49.350
But if if there's another person who I was talking to, then they were wrong.

01:31:49.430 --> 01:31:51.510
Or like I can just say, well, they can't be wrong.

01:31:51.670 --> 01:31:53.270
We we we must be wrong.

01:31:53.430 --> 01:31:54.070
It's not me.

01:31:54.150 --> 01:31:55.590
I'm not saying I'm infallible.

01:31:55.750 --> 01:32:01.030
So like I like the idea that maybe like all of all of the like elaboration of beyond

01:32:01.030 --> 01:32:05.670
divination is just sort of like passing the buck and it's not my responsibility.

01:32:05.830 --> 01:32:10.710
And like that's why we have like agents as gods and multiple gods and things like that.

01:32:11.670 --> 01:32:11.910
Yeah.

01:32:12.320 --> 01:32:12.800
That's a good idea.

01:32:12.960 --> 01:32:13.440
That's a big idea.

01:32:14.800 --> 01:32:16.880
I mean it harkens back to what we were talking about at the beginning, you know,

01:32:16.960 --> 01:32:22.240
masquerading fear-based strategies with, you know, with a kind of rash rationalization or

01:32:22.240 --> 01:32:23.040
moralization.

01:32:23.280 --> 01:32:27.840
So th there's a cool study, I think, by the name by a guy named Watts, where he looks at

01:32:27.840 --> 01:32:33.360
ritual sacrifices cultures, and he finds that um

01:32:33.590 --> 01:32:36.550
cultures with these ritual sacrifices last longer.

01:32:36.630 --> 01:32:37.350
They're more stable.

01:32:37.510 --> 01:32:40.950
They're less likely to have rebellions and so forth.

01:32:41.430 --> 01:32:47.270
And the hypothesis is that it's a way of scaring and

01:32:47.270 --> 01:32:51.910
intimidating a subordinate group of people with plausible deniability and with passing the

01:32:51.910 --> 01:32:53.350
buck on to someone else.

01:32:53.590 --> 01:32:58.950
So it's not that we're just terrorizing you to dominate you and put fear in you.

01:32:59.030 --> 01:33:01.830
It's that we're just following orders from the big guy in the sky.

01:33:02.840 --> 01:33:04.840
Don't blame us, you know, blame blame him.

01:33:05.160 --> 01:33:05.400
Right.

01:33:05.480 --> 01:33:10.200
Uh so it's a it's a way, it's a narrative that justifies the dominance relationship in

01:33:10.360 --> 01:33:12.440
precisely the ways that that we were talking about.

01:33:12.520 --> 01:33:16.680
Um and and that might explain why it has, you know, uh appeared uh so often in the

01:33:16.680 --> 01:33:17.880
historical record.

01:33:18.760 --> 01:33:21.160
And we see this in a lot in in ethnography as well.

01:33:21.240 --> 01:33:26.990
There's all sorts of, I guess sort of socially constructed systems that allow

01:33:26.990 --> 01:33:31.710
elites to sort of suppress even like the reproductive interests or the opportunities of

01:33:31.710 --> 01:33:33.310
people lower in the social hierarchy.

01:33:33.390 --> 01:33:38.030
And in Hammer, where I'm doing a lot of field work, there's lots of rituals individuals

01:33:38.030 --> 01:33:41.630
have to do before they can get married or before they can get pregnant, and then while

01:33:41.630 --> 01:33:42.510
they're pregnant.

01:33:42.750 --> 01:33:48.720
And there's sort of not always clear opportunities to prove that you did everything that

01:33:48.720 --> 01:33:50.240
you had to do ritually.

01:33:50.560 --> 01:33:55.440
Now, that gives the sort of burden of trust on many other people in the community, but it

01:33:55.440 --> 01:34:00.480
also allows very high-status people to accuse you of not having followed through with,

01:34:00.560 --> 01:34:02.960
let's say, X ritual or X step.

01:34:03.760 --> 01:34:09.750
And that gives them a sort of this sort of religious domain to potentially punish you

01:34:09.830 --> 01:34:13.750
that they can use strategically and opportunistically for maybe their own self-interest or

01:34:13.750 --> 01:34:15.750
for some other political interest.

01:34:16.230 --> 01:34:16.950
Interesting.

01:34:17.590 --> 01:34:18.550
Interesting.

01:34:18.870 --> 01:34:24.150
Well, um, Zach, I know a lot of what we're talking about, you know, people who might not

01:34:24.150 --> 01:34:28.150
know your work, you know, you're talking about the summary of it, but you've just been

01:34:28.150 --> 01:34:32.710
collecting an incredible amount of data and going to the field.

01:34:33.190 --> 01:34:37.980
As we're wrapping up here, can you just talk a little bit about like what you're I know

01:34:37.980 --> 01:34:39.740
you're collecting lots of social network data.

01:34:39.900 --> 01:34:44.860
Can you just talk a little bit about sort of you know the you're not just talking off the

01:34:44.860 --> 01:34:49.980
cuff here and you've got a lot of data and you've taken a lot of effort to collect data all

01:34:49.980 --> 01:34:50.860
these places.

01:34:51.100 --> 01:34:54.060
Can you just talk a little bit about like what what that is?

01:34:54.700 --> 01:34:55.900
Yeah, yeah, with pleasure.

01:34:55.980 --> 01:34:58.620
I mean that's really why I'm I'm in the game.

01:34:59.420 --> 01:35:03.730
So Luke and I, you know, have this, like I talked about, this collaborative field-based

01:35:03.730 --> 01:35:05.730
project, the Omo Valley Research Project.

01:35:05.810 --> 01:35:11.250
And now we've assembled a small army of research assistants and collaborators and

01:35:11.250 --> 01:35:11.730
colleagues.

01:35:11.890 --> 01:35:14.210
So we have many other people on board.

01:35:14.770 --> 01:35:19.490
Maud Mujineau is a postdoc working with us who's collecting a lot of data right now.

01:35:19.740 --> 01:35:25.500
We have a guy, Temechin Bira, who's finishing his PhD at WSU in anthropology,

01:35:25.580 --> 01:35:26.380
who's also on board.

01:35:26.700 --> 01:35:30.940
Ashetu Uwentu, another Ethiopian anthropologist, is collecting data from us.

01:35:31.660 --> 01:35:37.580
Another uh anthropologist doing her PhD at WSU, Tigis, is probably going to be collecting

01:35:37.580 --> 01:35:38.460
data with us pretty soon.

01:35:38.620 --> 01:35:41.820
And so we've assembled this team of people that have different interests, different

01:35:41.820 --> 01:35:47.650
backgrounds, but all collecting this these diverse data but piping into this centralized

01:35:47.650 --> 01:35:49.250
cross-cultural database.

01:35:49.330 --> 01:35:53.410
And so actually during COVID, uh Luke and I spent a couple years really thinking about

01:35:53.490 --> 01:35:57.250
okay, how can we collect these data just mechanistically?

01:35:57.330 --> 01:35:58.210
Like what's the process?

01:35:58.290 --> 01:36:03.970
And so we built our own application with a firm and a very amazing

01:36:03.970 --> 01:36:09.090
software developer who's working with us to solve a lot of the problems that we've

01:36:09.090 --> 01:36:10.290
encountered over the years.

01:36:10.530 --> 01:36:14.420
So, for example, in in many of these Omo Valley groups, people change their name.

01:36:14.500 --> 01:36:16.580
Like it changes over your life course.

01:36:16.980 --> 01:36:19.780
If you have a kid and you're a woman, your name changes.

01:36:19.860 --> 01:36:23.300
It basically becomes like the mother of, you know, Dave.

01:36:24.260 --> 01:36:25.620
And people have many names too.

01:36:25.700 --> 01:36:28.500
They have like a a bull jumping name, a ritual name.

01:36:28.660 --> 01:36:31.860
And then the name that they would tell me in an interview when I ask them what their name

01:36:31.860 --> 01:36:35.620
is is not necessarily the name that their best friend would call them by.

01:36:35.930 --> 01:36:39.450
So it is very difficult to ask people about other people in the community.

01:36:39.610 --> 01:36:42.090
So everything has to be like based on faces.

01:36:42.570 --> 01:36:46.810
But now if you have a community of hundreds, you can't carry around all these photos all

01:36:46.810 --> 01:36:47.130
the time.

01:36:47.290 --> 01:36:52.250
And so one of the key features of this application we built is to have a record of

01:36:52.250 --> 01:36:56.570
everyone, all their names, their faces, and then be able to query that using a fuzzy

01:36:56.570 --> 01:37:00.970
phonetic search to identify people by their faces, to then have people say, Yes, that's the

01:37:00.970 --> 01:37:02.170
person I'm friends with.

01:37:02.330 --> 01:37:08.120
And so we've built this sort of social network construction sort of form

01:37:08.200 --> 01:37:10.440
to collect these social network data.

01:37:10.680 --> 01:37:16.440
And we collect a lot of data on demographics, kinship, reproductive histories, all the sort

01:37:16.440 --> 01:37:22.040
of standard human behavioral ecology type data suite, a lot of data on market integration,

01:37:22.440 --> 01:37:24.520
you know, things you buy and sell at the markets.

01:37:24.600 --> 01:37:30.190
And now a lot of our work is focusing on social networks and networks that people have with

01:37:30.190 --> 01:37:31.230
other community members.

01:37:31.390 --> 01:37:37.310
And that's really a key focus of our work now, is because friendships

01:37:37.310 --> 01:37:39.230
cross these cultural boundaries.

01:37:39.630 --> 01:37:45.390
And so there's a function of distance in the relationship and also the different ethnic

01:37:45.390 --> 01:37:45.550
group.

01:37:45.790 --> 01:37:50.190
And these different ethnic groups have different territories, different regions, slightly

01:37:50.190 --> 01:37:53.400
different uh economic or subsistence specializations.

01:37:53.960 --> 01:37:58.920
And as it turns out, as we're finding, there are lots of friendships crossing these ethnic

01:37:58.920 --> 01:37:59.480
borders.

01:37:59.720 --> 01:38:02.840
And this is probably really important over evolutionary history.

01:38:02.920 --> 01:38:07.160
Um, if you think about, I mean, if the OMO is any sort of model, and there's been other

01:38:07.160 --> 01:38:11.400
work, other anthropologists have shown that people have like really wide-reaching networks.

01:38:11.480 --> 01:38:15.960
And so people are going to have friends in other cultural groups, and we think that these

01:38:15.960 --> 01:38:18.040
relationships are going to serve specific functions.

01:38:18.120 --> 01:38:22.910
And so we're mapping how these networks exist now and then how they're changing over time.

01:38:23.070 --> 01:38:24.270
So we'll have like multiple waves.

01:38:24.350 --> 01:38:26.270
We've already collected um, I think two ways.

01:38:26.350 --> 01:38:30.430
We'll have a we'll increasingly have more waves of these network cross-cultural network

01:38:30.430 --> 01:38:35.870
data to see you know what are the outcomes of having friends of other ethnic groups.

01:38:36.110 --> 01:38:40.990
So that's that's a lot of what we're doing now, um, and across these different villages,

01:38:41.150 --> 01:38:42.750
across these different ethnic groups.

01:38:42.910 --> 01:38:48.830
So it's a longitudinal and also cross-cultural, um biological and social database.

01:38:49.200 --> 01:38:49.760
Amazing.

01:38:49.920 --> 01:38:51.440
Yeah, super cool.

01:38:51.760 --> 01:38:56.560
And you know, the big vision of this is to be able to do also cool collaborative work with

01:38:56.560 --> 01:38:58.320
people from all different types of disciplines.

01:38:58.560 --> 01:39:04.160
So, you know, people like Luke and Moe and I are sort of, you know, gluttons and passionate

01:39:04.160 --> 01:39:06.720
about being in the field, but not that's not everyone.

01:39:06.800 --> 01:39:11.120
Um, so our hope is that by you know building this infrastructure, having this database, we

01:39:11.120 --> 01:39:14.880
can collaborate with, you know, an economist or political scientist who has a question that

01:39:14.880 --> 01:39:19.170
we would never have thought to ask, or some other methods that we you know aren't experts

01:39:19.170 --> 01:39:24.130
in and they can leverage our data leverage our infrastructure and you know do some really

01:39:24.130 --> 01:39:25.090
interesting science.

01:39:25.490 --> 01:39:26.290
It's fantastic.

01:39:26.370 --> 01:39:32.290
Yeah no I mean it's like there's always you you you and your projects and you and Luke and

01:39:32.290 --> 01:39:37.250
other other people it gives me hope for our current generation of science that we're we're

01:39:37.250 --> 01:39:43.090
not just uh mothballing um you know uh yeah we're not just mothballing period

01:39:43.170 --> 01:39:48.360
yeah yeah Uh this is the time for the question.

01:39:48.520 --> 01:39:50.440
Should we have asked you anything?

01:39:51.400 --> 01:39:57.240
Um well I didn't talk about the sort of philanthropic components of

01:39:57.240 --> 01:39:59.800
the OVRP, which is really exciting.

01:39:59.960 --> 01:40:05.240
Um, you know, all anthropologists, you have to be doing something for your communities, for

01:40:05.240 --> 01:40:07.480
the people you're working with to maintain those relationships.

01:40:07.560 --> 01:40:11.790
You become like a family member, um, you have lots of obligations, and you any

01:40:11.790 --> 01:40:14.030
anthropologist can talk about this for hours.

01:40:14.270 --> 01:40:18.430
But what Luke and I wanted to do was really formalize that in a way to which to where it

01:40:18.430 --> 01:40:19.230
could could scale.

01:40:19.390 --> 01:40:22.990
So our organization is also a 501c3 in the US.

01:40:23.070 --> 01:40:26.270
So it's a you know tax-exempt nonprofit organization.

01:40:26.430 --> 01:40:31.390
And in addition to supporting like our scientific aims, we also have these philanthropic

01:40:31.390 --> 01:40:31.630
aims.

01:40:31.710 --> 01:40:36.190
And right now, what we're mostly focusing on is supporting students who come from these

01:40:36.190 --> 01:40:38.350
rural villages to go to university.

01:40:38.510 --> 01:40:40.960
And so we have like a grants committee.

01:40:41.200 --> 01:40:43.760
We take applications and we review them.

01:40:43.840 --> 01:40:48.320
And then for the students that we that we fund, we pay for their tuition, we pay for their

01:40:48.320 --> 01:40:51.920
room and board, if they have dependence or if they have special, let's say medical care

01:40:51.920 --> 01:40:52.240
they need.

01:40:52.320 --> 01:40:55.520
We try and cover like all their expenses so they can go to school.

01:40:55.760 --> 01:41:01.520
And these students are like super remarkable because they usually come from like a like one

01:41:01.520 --> 01:41:02.080
big region.

01:41:02.160 --> 01:41:05.610
So let's say there's a like a kind of like the county or the department.

01:41:05.850 --> 01:41:10.090
And there there will be some schools in that department, but they're often like difficult

01:41:10.090 --> 01:41:12.170
to access or kind of far away.

01:41:12.410 --> 01:41:18.170
So these students that are especially motivated, like might be walking for

01:41:18.170 --> 01:41:22.410
hours every day to go to school and by some miracle they managed to like complete high

01:41:22.410 --> 01:41:22.650
school.

01:41:22.730 --> 01:41:24.170
Like how they did that, I have no idea.

01:41:24.410 --> 01:41:28.490
And there might be like one student from like a whole population of let's say 5,000 people

01:41:28.570 --> 01:41:30.170
or hundreds and hundreds of households.

01:41:30.330 --> 01:41:33.520
There's one guy or girl who finished high school.

01:41:33.600 --> 01:41:38.480
And so those are the types of students that we like we search for and we find, and then we

01:41:38.480 --> 01:41:40.080
basically support their education.

01:41:40.240 --> 01:41:46.000
And part of our philosophy here is that a lot of these students want to pursue education to

01:41:46.000 --> 01:41:47.440
like do something for their community.

01:41:47.600 --> 01:41:52.080
They want to study veterinary medicine because the cows are getting sick, or they want to

01:41:52.080 --> 01:41:56.880
study business because their community is transitioning to market economies, but they don't

01:41:56.880 --> 01:41:58.480
understand the systems.

01:41:59.450 --> 01:42:04.090
So they're just really inspired and and noble and amazing individuals.

01:42:04.250 --> 01:42:08.810
But then they they get to the university and now like they either don't have the money or

01:42:08.810 --> 01:42:10.810
there's now systems they don't understand.

01:42:11.290 --> 01:42:17.050
So we we fund their education, we host um digital skills workshops and training.

01:42:17.210 --> 01:42:19.370
And yeah these students are just remarkable.

01:42:19.530 --> 01:42:24.090
Now I'm we're really happy that we have like kind of a pretty equal gender parity as well

01:42:24.330 --> 01:42:28.180
because norms are very different for men and women, for boys and girls.

01:42:28.340 --> 01:42:32.340
So girls are especially disadvantaged.

01:42:32.500 --> 01:42:37.860
So if anyone wants to support our cause, we can accept your tax deductible donation.

01:42:38.020 --> 01:42:42.740
You can go to our website, omavalli researchproject.com, or you can reach out to Luke Rai.

01:42:43.540 --> 01:42:49.540
We can just about support one student for like a whole year of university for like, I

01:42:49.570 --> 01:42:54.370
feel like it's not more than like a a thousand bucks or one thousand five hundred bucks.

01:42:54.450 --> 01:42:57.250
So like even like a ten dollar donation goes like a long way.

01:42:57.330 --> 01:43:01.490
And a lot of our donations are just like people giving us 10 bucks here, 20 bucks there.

01:43:01.570 --> 01:43:05.730
And um, it allows us to put a lot of students through through education through university.

01:43:05.970 --> 01:43:06.370
That's great.

01:43:06.450 --> 01:43:08.130
We'll put a link uh on the show notes.

01:43:08.210 --> 01:43:08.930
That's fantastic.

01:43:09.010 --> 01:43:10.210
That's really, really cool.

01:43:10.290 --> 01:43:13.890
What an amazing thing to be able to sort of see that and see those people.

01:43:14.540 --> 01:43:19.660
Yeah, it's you know, it's um not why I got into doing field work, but at this point, and I

01:43:19.660 --> 01:43:24.300
know Luke would agree with me, it's like um it's more rewarding than uh any of the science

01:43:24.300 --> 01:43:24.860
stuff we're doing.

01:43:24.940 --> 01:43:26.220
So it's really been a lot of fun.

01:43:26.460 --> 01:43:28.540
Yeah, that's that's amazing.

01:43:28.780 --> 01:43:33.500
So um yeah, David, uh any any final thoughts?

01:43:34.300 --> 01:43:35.900
No, I this very cool stuff you're doing.

01:43:35.980 --> 01:43:38.710
It was uh you know wonderful talking to you, Zach.

01:43:38.790 --> 01:43:43.030
Uh, you know, you're full full of insights, doing it really uh fascinating uh and important

01:43:43.350 --> 01:43:43.590
work.

01:43:43.670 --> 01:43:47.910
Uh and uh yeah, I look forward to chatting with you again at some point in the future,

01:43:47.990 --> 01:43:51.350
either on uh this podcast again or at a conference.

01:43:51.670 --> 01:43:52.150
Yeah, yeah.

01:43:52.230 --> 01:43:52.790
And thank you both.

01:43:52.870 --> 01:43:56.710
I mean, you guys are doing a great service for the field of evolutionary social science,

01:43:56.790 --> 01:43:59.430
and uh your work is also super impressive and inspiring.

01:43:59.510 --> 01:44:01.830
So it's an honor just uh to be here and have the chance to chat.

01:44:02.200 --> 01:44:03.400
Thank you so much, Zach.

01:44:03.480 --> 01:44:05.880
Uh we'll we'll put your links uh in the show notes.

01:44:05.960 --> 01:44:09.880
And yeah, we'll definitely have you back maybe sooner rather than later.

01:44:09.960 --> 01:44:15.480
Uh uh in in different in different um uh capacities uh here on the podcast.

01:44:15.640 --> 01:44:16.680
But uh but thank you so much.

01:44:16.760 --> 01:44:21.320
Yeah, and again, everybody, I really encourage you to look at um Zach's work and and we'll

01:44:21.320 --> 01:44:22.680
have Luke on soon too.

01:44:22.760 --> 01:44:27.560
So um I'm looking forward to that and uh just fantastic, lots of cool stuff.

01:44:27.640 --> 01:44:29.160
And yeah, thanks for coming on.

01:44:29.410 --> 01:44:30.610
Thanks, guys.

01:44:34.290 --> 01:44:40.050
David, you just uh spent quite a bit of time talking to Zach Garfield and myself.

01:44:40.130 --> 01:44:42.210
And uh what are you doing right now?

01:44:42.530 --> 01:44:47.410
Uh I'm sitting here uh talking to you, recording the outro for for the episode that

01:44:47.410 --> 01:44:47.730
happened.

01:44:48.210 --> 01:44:49.090
Okay, that makes sense.

01:44:49.250 --> 01:44:49.890
Okay, yeah.

01:44:50.130 --> 01:44:53.330
Uh so can you continue doing that?

01:44:53.740 --> 01:44:59.340
Yeah, so um if you're still listening, uh that means that you enjoyed listening.

01:44:59.580 --> 01:45:00.140
You're here now.

01:45:00.380 --> 01:45:00.940
Presumably.

01:45:01.100 --> 01:45:02.940
You're here now, so you must be a fan.

01:45:03.100 --> 01:45:07.340
So maybe just consider telling people that you're a fan, you know, talking about us on

01:45:07.340 --> 01:45:09.660
social media, maybe maybe writing a kind review.

01:45:09.820 --> 01:45:13.820
Uh if you're really a super fan, you might consider checking out our Patreon page and

01:45:13.820 --> 01:45:15.110
supporting us there.

01:45:15.590 --> 01:45:19.750
We should you should wear a t-shirt, but that me saying that out loud makes me realize that

01:45:19.750 --> 01:45:25.030
it would involve you designing and printing a t shirt, uh, which is seems like a big ask.

01:45:25.110 --> 01:45:26.390
Maybe we should get t-shirts.

01:45:26.790 --> 01:45:28.070
That's that's a that's a good idea.

01:45:28.150 --> 01:45:28.950
I can see that working out.

01:45:29.030 --> 01:45:29.830
Um but if you're not thinking about it.

01:45:31.190 --> 01:45:31.910
Or fanny packs, yeah.

01:45:31.990 --> 01:45:34.630
We we we had that bit in a in a previous episode.

01:45:34.710 --> 01:45:36.870
Uh, didn't we send you a fanny pack yet?

01:45:37.270 --> 01:45:38.460
I think we had a fanny pack bit.

01:45:38.620 --> 01:45:39.100
No, no, no.

01:45:39.180 --> 01:45:41.820
Did you did somebody send you a fanny pack, David?

01:45:42.220 --> 01:45:43.580
Oh, I've not received a fanny pack.

01:45:43.740 --> 01:45:45.500
Oh, that's another way you can support the podcast.

01:45:45.660 --> 01:45:47.900
Please send David a fanny pack.

01:45:47.980 --> 01:45:48.860
He really needs one.

01:45:49.100 --> 01:45:49.580
That's true.

01:45:49.740 --> 01:45:51.900
I'm I'm in the market for a fanny pack.

01:45:52.060 --> 01:45:55.420
Uh so uh thank you so much for listening and uh I'll see you next week, Dave.

01:45:55.580 --> 01:45:56.460
Sounds good.