Leveraging Evolutionary Thinking to Redefine Tomorrow with David Sloan Wilson #15

Hello, everybody.

This is David Goldsmith. And welcome to another edition of Redefining Tomorrow. It's here where we discuss topics that may redefine your future, that may redefine how we live on this planet or any other type of redefining you might consider. A quote that I've had since I've been about 12 years old is, you can't fix yesterday. You can only create tomorrow. And today we're going to be redefining tomorrow. We're going to be exploring the topic leveraging evolutionary thinking to redefine tomorrow. We actually have it in the title of our program Today. And we have with us today David Wilson. How are you, David?

I'm great, thank you.

David is the president of Prosocial World. He's also been a professor at Binghamton University, and he's achieved the SUNY Distinction Professor Award in doing so. David, do you have an outline for us to follow?

I do Indeed. There are 10 chapters to our conversation.

10 chapters. Okay, so can you give them to me one at a time so I can write them down?

Number one. Evolution as transcendent knowledge.

Evolution as transcendent knowledge. Number two.

Number two. Evolution doesn't make everything nice.

Doesn't make everything nice. Number three.

Number three. How to breed a psychopathic chicken.

Breed a psychopathic chicken. Number four.

Number four. The great conspiracy. Constriction.

A great constriction.

Yes.

Number five.

Number five. Back to basics.

Back to basics. Number six.

The signature. Human adaptation.

Number seven.

Our symbols are Janes.

Symbols are genes. Number eight.

What all groups need.

All groups need. Number nine.

From adapted to adaptable. Adapted to adapt.

And number ten.

Creating Gaia.

Okay, so let's start with number one. Evolutionary is transcendent knowledge.

Oh, you want me to talk.

Hey, that's the role here, Archy.

Dark. Well, I mean, everyone thinks they know.

You'Re talking to me, so we'd be sitting here otherwise doing nothing.

Yep, that's fine. So, I mean, evolution is part of everyone's education a little bit. And what bears reminding is how amazing it is at integrating knowledge. Starting at day one with Charles Darwin, who. Now, what is evolution? Not only is it one of the most powerful theories, it's also one of the simplest. Can be summarized in three words. Variation, selection, and replication. Just about everything varies. Those differences make a difference in survival and reproduction. Replication ensures that the most adapted strategies become more frequent in the population. That's it. So simple and yet for Darwin, so transcendent that when he looked at the world through this lens, it organized all of the Information that had accumulated about nature, identity by descent, the fossil record, the geographical distribution of species development, all those wonderful contrivances that adapt animals to their. And plants to their environments and the human condition. So he thought as deeply about such things as human emotions and morality as he did about the rest of life. For Darwin, how did he.

I had not heard.

How did he.

How did he tie the human condition to variation, selection and replication?

Well, he realized early on, and this is preceding, I mean, this is going to press out, one of the other chapters is that the signature human adaptation is cooperation, sympathy, morality. These were things that set humans apart from many other species. In some ways, we're just like other species. We're a product of evolution no less than other species. But if you see how much we interact in groups and how much those groups are organized by what we would call moral systems, which we will get to, then that became the signature human adaptation, the way to think about morality. Darwin was basically. He saw that very, very early on. The.

When and when with. When I think about the Darwin and I think about these variations, I'm thinking of a biological and somewhat sociological physiological orientation to the universe or to Earth. When you look at the human condition, he studied it from the perspective of behavioral sciences. Or was he just saying. He believed that all of this had to have some type of order?

Well, we have to remember that Darwin knew nothing about genes. He only knew about heredity, the fact that offspring resemble their parents. And also, he was not the only person to think about evolution. There were other people like Herbert Spencer that were writing about evolution. And part of this was a part of the Enlightenment that there needs to be some kind of science of man, as it was put by people like Auguste Compton and Herbert Spencer, the need to create a whole cosmology that was not religious, that was part of the Enlightenment project. And what Darwin added to that was the actual mechanism. For Spencer, evolution was this big progressive thing. He didn't really know how it worked mechanistically. Darwin's main insight was through these three ingredients, these simple ingredients, these assumptions, which are so realistic that they have to be true in retrospect. It simply is the case that we have variation, selection and replication, and all of that follows. So he wasn't the first person to think about evolution and to think of wanting to create a cosmology that was entirely secular. But he was the first person, along with Wallace, in order to identify these key ingredients. And then he applied that thinking not only to all living systems, but he included humans in those living systems. In some ways that stress continuity. For example, when he wrote about emotions, the expression of emotions, he saw that clearly the way we express emotions is similar to any animal. A dog which has its fur raised, things like that. You can see the same thing in humans. On the one hand, there was identity by descent, that we are merely an ape in some respects. And yet, of course, how are we also so different? Those differences include not only our ability to cooperate by having what we call moral systems, but also culture, the fact that so much of what we do is based not on our genesis, but by our symbols. And once again, I'm more or less presaging some of the things we're going to focus on as we March through our 10 chapters.

So the Origin of the Species, did that also have this whole humankind? I've never read the book. Did it also have all of the cooperation, moral systems, and everything within that book?

Only a little. And then he basically fleshed that out in his other books, such as the Descent of Man and. His other books. But he clearly had it in mind when he was 29 years old. So this was long before he published the Origin of Species. He scribbled in his private notebook, origin of man now proved he who understands the baboon will do more for metaphysics then Locke. And I love the image of a young man just 29 years of age, who's. Who's basically apprehending the explanatory power. That's why I've titled my first chapter Transcendent Knowledge, the Explanatory Power. There he was, you know, on the Beagle, just making sense of the South America and the Galapagos Islands, and. And then the Origin of Man now proved what must have been like for him to have that and to have it so private. So for that reason, the final passage of the Origin of Species, he said, there is grandeur in this view of life. It's so explanatory. He got that from the very beginning. And that is the title of my online magazine, this View of Life, and my most recent book, this View of Life. So that's the point I'm trying to make as we get started here, David, is that we have here a theory that is amazingly simple and amazingly explanatory. One way I get that across is to point to my own career as a biologist, which from the very beginning, for me, I was able to study different species. I studied copepods, which are little aquatic crustaceans, ant lions, which dig pits in the sand. Topic after topic, organism after organism, people like me, not because of my personal attributes, but because, thanks only to the theory, we can dance to any particular topic and make sense of it by applying what you can call a toolkit, a conceptual toolkit, which enables us to make very intelligent guesses about the properties of all living systems and then of course validate those guesses through the scientific process. Not every guess is correct, but nevertheless it provides a kind of an instant expertise. If you like, I could, I could tell you how I do that in a lecture, but it's up to you as to how you.

My mind is racing towards. Just as you had done, that is, has there ever been any species that has completely destroyed its own ecosystem in the development of its replication and its movement forward?

Yes, many times. And that's again when we're going to get to that next thing. Evolution doesn't make everything nice. That's one of the key difference between Christian thought, not just Christian thought, but much of the Enlightenment thought and Darwinian thought is that Christian thought envisioned the world, the cosmos, as harmonious from top to bottom, from the tiniest insects all the way up to the stars and in heaven. If the world was created by a benign and omnipotent God, then of course it must be harmonious from top to bottom. And if that harmony gets disturbed, then it must be somebody's fault, such as mankind's fault. That would be the original sin. But what Darwin's theory shows is very disturbingly different from that. What it shows is that nature can be well organized at the bottom, such as the beautiful design of a single organism, but then become chaotic and disorganized and despotic and chaotic at higher levels, even at the level of a single species society. If you look at animal societies, some of them are super harmonious, like the fabled ant colonies and the beehives. Yes, we see cooperation and harmony in nature, but much more often we find discourse societies that are so horrible, so despotic that we would. I mean, they would be nightmare societies in a human sense. And yet that's just the way life is. These are life a bitch and then you die societies. And it's also true for ecosystems. Nature is full of species that are dominated by species that more or less run the ecosystem for themselves. And everything else is collateral.

You have an example. You have an example.

Yeah, a beaver ecosystem. When beavers move into a stream, they modify the environment. They're a keystone species. Sometimes they're called ecosystem engineers. They make their dam, they flood the river. That's really bad for some species. Good for lots of others. I mean those are very diverse ecosystems, make no mistake. They eat the most palatable plants, of course, because they're smart, they're smart foragers for themselves. And so what's left? The most toxic plants, the most toxic plants, which is that due to the ecosystem processes, it slows it down and so on and so forth. So the way to understand a beaver ecosystem is in terms of what increases the thinness of beavers. That's what it is. And it's all intertwined, it's all inter dependent. But there's no way that you should be looking at the ecosystem as something like some kind of organism at large. It's not. So ecologists have abandoned the balance of nature. The concept that nature left to itself strikes some kind of harmonious balance is really a vestige of pre Darwinian thought. And we'll get there with the invisible hand in economics. Because the invisible hand in economics is nothing more or less than a kind of a balance of nature argument that if you just let people and corporations pursue their self interest, then they'll be led by an invisible hand to benefit the common good. I'm sorry, it's not true.

If we're using the same construct with and removed humans, it's often discussed that nature finds a rebalance again that's more harmonious. If, for example, the Chernobyl accident, going back years later, you're finding the ecosystem has once again thrived. If we were to remove the human. Are you saying that absent of human or with human, whatever it may be, that the Darwinian approach is to believe that chaos is, is a dominant projection.

I'm going to soften that, but only a little. David. And you know what ecologists have started to use is the term regime, ecological regimes. And if you know a little bit about complex systems theory, you know that in the first place, complex systems are often just out of equilibrium. They are not in any kind of equilibrium.

Correct.

Or they might settle into one of many basins of attraction. There's many local equilibria and a system, any complex system, including a natural system, settles into one of them. And so there's your degree of stability. By definition, local equilibrium is locally stable, but that does not mean that it's harmonious at the systemic level. The word regime is very useful here because we already have a rich intuition about human political regimes. We would not call them a regime if they didn't have a degree of stability. But calling it a regime says nothing about how well it works for the benefit of the whole system. There are despotic regimes, autocratic regimes, just as there are democratic and inclusive regimes. That's the way we should be thinking about ecological regimes or ecological systems. Often they're just plain out of equilibrium. And when they're in an equilibrium, they're simply in some basin of attraction which is stable by definition, but says nothing about how well the system works at the systemic level. David let me make a distinction that again from complex systems theorists will be familiar with. The key term complex adapted System actually has two very different meanings, which I call Cas1 and Cas2. Cas1 is a complex system that is adapted as a system. Examples would include an organism, a beehive, adaptive. As a system, Cas2 is a complex system composed of agents following their respective adaptive strategies, agents following their respective adaptive strategies. An example is an ecosystem, most ecosystem. And the great question, of course, in human life, when we get to such things as businesses or the economy or any kind of public policy, we want CAS1 systems. We want to create systems that function well as systems and hopefully have inclusiveness and equity and all of those good, good things. So the great question is, how do we evolve CAS1 systems? And a very important part of the answer is, is that no way does CAS2 system self organize robustly. Self organized in the CAS1 systems, systems composed of agents following their respective adaptive strategies do not just self organize. In the CAS1 system, there must be a deliberative product process of selection at the systemic level, if we want systems that work well, we need to select for those systems. When that takes place in nature, we get Cas1 systems, which includes not just single species like ant colonies, but also ecosystems such as our microbiomes. Our microbiomes are pretty darn harmonious in working with our genes to keep us healthy. And the reason for that is that they are selected along with our genes, because every time we survive or don't survive, our microbiomes are being selected along with our genes. So there's an example of very complex ecosystems which actually do qualify as CAS1 systems, but only because there was a process of selection at the system level. So we can say all of this for natural systems and genetic evolution, but we can also say it for human systems and cultural evolution, including what we decide to do consciously in our lives at every scale, individual, all the groups of our lives, all the way up to complex economies and ultimately global processing.

I'm going to ask two questions we can answer one at a time, and I wrote them down so I don't forget, but I want to say them so I don't forget them. One of them is the term ecosystem. It's going to be more than one question in there. The term ecosystem has in my mind always been defined a certain way. My background is a biology major. I did that was one of my dual major, so I don't remember.

I probably know some of your professors, David.

Well, one of them has gone down. An infamy in my mind. Very bad sense. Professor Waltz, he's no longer around so I could say I was a very energetic biology student. I was excited about the development, doing work and we were given an assignment to do. This is biology of invertebrates. We're supposed to go out into nature, wherever it may be and observe some creatures, some bio, some anything and then write a paper about it. And I was so excited that one of the things I did is I went into the woods. I went as far as I could in. I sat in the woods and deer came right up to me. I took a, I took a photograph of a deer and my hand touching its nose because I sat so still for so long. And I wrote a paper on that. Then I wrote another paper on another. I don't remember the second one but I was so excited that I did a third one. And I remember at the top of the paper the teacher wrote when it sounds like. When it reads like bullshit and it sounds like bullshit, then it is bullshit. And he said you didn't need to do extra work to get a better grade. So it wasn't the content, it was that I did extra. And it kind of destroyed a lot of my passion about biology because it didn't take everything away. But it really hurt for quite some time. Even today I remember it, but I don't.

David, there's so many movies about inspirational teachers. I think there needs to be more movies about soul crushing teachers.

Yeah, I saved that paper. I think I still have it, that one piece of paper because it was just I was doing the work at such a high level but I did three and he didn't like that. So the reason I asked the question about the ecosystems is I don't remember hearing anything growing up about ecosystems and the non natural selection or the negativity behind them. And even today if we use the term ecosystem, ecosystem, whether it be in climate change or mass extinction or whatever it may be, the term ecosystem is always used, I believe synonymously with this harmonious balance. So when did it. My question, this is just the first one. When did it change? Why did it change? I mean, can you explain that? The dilemma that I'm running into right now.

Well, David, I think it's, it's always been used in two senses because obviously nature, red and tooth and claw, is one of the big takeaways of. Darwin's theory. So the idea that nature is cruel and that cruelty extends to ecosystems more or less coexist side by side with the idea that nature is. And ecosystems are harmonious. Gaia. Gaia, sort of, you know, the whole earth is a. As a living, as an organism. And so these, these are incompatible with each other, but they just straight up coexist because life is not compatible. I mean, we, we try to make our intellectual systems consistent with each other. And so I could give examples that I'm searching for the Michael Lewis book on the, on the Moneyball, on the stock exchange. On the, on the new stock exchange.

Yeah, I know which one you're talking about. I just don't remember the name of it. The. So you're. I can understand nature.

Actually, David, let me just complete that thought because what he describes is this way, this little group of people that are trying to create a fair stock exchange, and they're talking about Wall Street. And one of them uses an ecosystem metaphor when he talks about the amoral stance of Wall street investors. He says, well, you know, it's not my fault that it's an ecosystem out there. You know, there's a lot of carcasses. And do you blame the vultures and the hyenas for killing and feeding on carcasses? That's just the way ecosystems are. I mean, sorry. And so I'm part of that. I'm a species in this ecosystem and I'm making a good living as a predator. So that is, you could find many such examples. And yet at the same time, to give another counter example, one of my favorite colleagues is named Victor Huang. He's written a great book called the Rainforest on Silicon Valley. What makes Silicon Valley so generative and innovative. And so he likes to use the word ecosystem in this more harmonious sense. Diversity is good, all of that kind of thing. With all keywords. David, everyone manage ecosystem. You've really got to take the time to interrogate, you know, what exactly does this word or phrase mean to you? And then proceed from there because every important word has multiple meaning.

I just had. My mind has always gone to an ecosystem forming its balance. And I guess that the, you're saying if you dissect the ecosystem from the balance within, the imbalance within the. Within the balance is a, it's not a positive or negative because those are two powerful words. It is. There are, as you said, cruel and harmonious components to every development of each one. And there is no ending of utopianism. It's an evolution that always is a yin and Yang moving against one another and towards another.

So I'll play that back. I agree with about 85%.

So I need to have a scorecard on the side. I'm like 73, 81.

But if, you know, I mean, if you just go back to the complex systems concept of a basin of attraction, a local equilibrium, and then say that there's a kind of harmony there, there's a kind of an equilibrium, there's a balance. If you displace a system that's in a basin of attraction, it goes. Falls back to the bottom of that bowl and there's all kinds of interdependence that takes place there. But the one thing that you cannot do is to infer that the system is working well. As a system. There's a big difference between stability and collective functioning. So if you want something which is truly harmonious, then look inside any or anything that deserves being called an organism. Look inside any healthy organism and you will see a different kind of harmony. Inside an organism, the parts are truly working together in order to achieve some kind of collective outcome. So if you want a world free of suffering. And by the way, this is the topic of a. I've written a novel called Atlas Hug, which is a sequel. An antidote to Iron Man's Atlas Shrugged. Yep. And, and that's a big theme in the. In fact, it's one of the epiphanies of the novel is the idea that if you. So the Buddha, you know the Four Noble Truths?

Yep.

Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by craving. There is a path to end suffering, and that is the path of Buddhism. But can there actually be a biological path? The epiphany is that look inside any healthy organism and you will see a world that is free of self imposed suffering. Therefore, if we want to end self imposed suffering at the global scale, we have to turn the whole, whole world into a superorganism. Yeah.

But even, even an organism within the organism has mechanisms to attack foreigners. Foreign body elements.

Oh yeah, that's part of it.

So there's, there's a violent reaction if some, if a creature becomes ill. And part of that is the body attacks whatever has infiltrated its organism. So there is an, you can call it a balance, but there's also a harshness to that balance.

Well, yes, and so I said, look Inside every healthy organism. If you look at the immune system that's working with a mind boggling symphony of cooperation in order to maintain its own integrity. So your violence is basically violence between organisms. But there's also, of course, violence of sorts within the organism. I mean, there's billions of cells are dying every day inside your body. It's not as if there's not death inside organisms, but the whole thing is organized in order for the collective to survive and reproduce. And to make it less abstract, David, also a theme of the novel, that the closest we get to a utopia in human life is a small group of people working together, doing something very meaningful for them, such as surviving or something else which is very meaningful for them. Knowing each other as individuals, knowing each other by their actions. These small groups need to have an appropriate structure. But small, appropriately structured groups doing something which is highly meaningful is the peak human experience. And that's why our fathers, certainly my father and so many other people that participated in just wars such as World War II, remember that as the best time of their lives.

They're working together towards one common, one common meaningful attainment.

And there's a kind of ecstasy that's associated with that. It's a corner of human experience that if you haven't actually experienced it, which, by the way, I haven't because I've never been in a group in a life or death situation. And so Jonathan Haidt is, in his book the Righteous Mind, is somebody who writes well about this. He calls it the hive mind. And he says we're 90% ape and we're 10% D. And that 10% B part is unleashed under those situations. Here's a story, David, that I love to tell. It's based on Stephen Crane, who you're old enough to know that he was. He got the Red Badge of Courage and he was a standard assignment in English classes. Probably not so much anymore. But he wrote a short story called the Open Boat, which was based on a true experience. He was actually on a ship that did sink off the coast of Florida. He did find himself on a little dinghy going through stormy seas towards shore with the captain and the oiler and another passenger. Four people in this dinghy basically going for their lives. They had every reason to cooperate in order to save their own skins. There was no reason to think. I mean, you could be entirely selfish in your mind and cooperate with everyone else. But that's not what he experienced. That's not at all what he experienced. He experienced some outpouring of love for These people who he didn't know at all before being thrust into that situation. And he described that as the best experience of his, of his life. So that is the way we are constructed. We are more like a social insect in their colony than most people can even imagine. Because we're steep, David, in an intellectual tradition of individualism. And this is especially true in the business world. But it's true throughout, in every sector. For the last 70 years, we've been programmed to think of the individual as the standalone unit, the fundamental unit. Everything social has to be understood in terms of the motives and actions of selfish individuals. It penetrates economics and it also penetrated my field of evolution during its selfish gene era. If you know about Richard Dawkins, what you should know is that he is the representative of individualistic thinking, that nothing in nature makes sense except in terms of our selfish genes. That's bookends with Homo economicus. Everything about economics can be explained by individuals maximizing their utilities. And what we now are learning is that to an amazing extent, we are like ants in colonies. There's many differences. You need to be careful about the metaphorical transfer. But to an amazing extent, we are built and designed to live in cooperative groups. Our brains and bodies are wired that way. That's why when you isolate individuals, when you create that standalone individual, you're actually putting people in a stress zone. And that's why solitary confinement is among the most cruel of punishments.

The second question that I had was in reference to the fact that humans, we can identify that there is a process for deterministic thinking. Okay, you did this because of this, you had this experience or you learned this, so you acted in this way. When it comes to ecosystems, how do lower, I don't know the word for non cognitive in the way that humans are. Everything from an amoeba up to algae to the next, the next, the next, the next. How do they make, how do these creatures make that selection? How does grass make that selection?

Yeah, well, David, there's so much to say about this, but it's a question.

It'S a really challenging one because you've defined, you've brought it to me a lot of the cognitive side or the actual non cognitive side, but there's a lot in between.

Yeah, well, chapter seven of our conversation, our symbols, our genes, is going to focus on that. But to preview it, that basically humans are very, very distinctive in our capacity for symbolic thought compared to all other species, including our closest relatives, the chimps and the bonobos, they don't nearly have the capacity for symbolic thought that we do. That's because cooperative thought is inherently cooperative. When we talk about cooperation as the signature human adaptation, it's cooperation in all of its forms. Physical cooperation, you know, hunting, gathering, child care, all that. But then mental cooperation, including maintaining an inventory of symbols with shared meanings, is inherently cooperative. If you live in an untrusting society, then you don't communicate with other people other than to dominate or deceive them. And that's what's so frightening about the Trump era basically, is that we went, we took giant steps in that direction by undermining trust, we basically undermined cooperation in all of its forms. And Trump only communicates to dominate or deceive, isn't that right?

Yes.

So I'm not trying to get political.

Here, but no, no, no, it is.

In front of us all.

It's a conversation that I've had in terms of how the world had evolved. And it was last night I shared with somebody who was more or less directing the conversation to America. And I said, no, no, no, the Trump era spoke to the world. And you can add to the list many countries and individuals who saw this as an opportunity to become that dominating factor. So it wasn't just an American phenomenon. It, it circle the globe.

So to return to our, to escape that black hole, David, and then return. What we can say is that one of the things that's so distinctive about us is that we are so much governed by, not directly by our genes, but directly by our symbolic meaning systems. How we act is based on what we think. And genes are indirectly. Well, they're both directly and indirectly evolved. But to think of our symbolic systems as like our genotypes, basically two streams of evolution, a genetic stream and a cultural stream which co evolve with each other, that's basically what's so exciting about what's taking place in evolutionary science. But that said, I want to make another point.

Sure.

That most organisms, even plants, almost all organisms, are impressively flexible in their open ended learning capacity as individuals. They're not just programmed by their genes, or they are, of course, but what their genes program them to do is to learn what works in their local environments. Basically what Skinner represents, when you know, the Skinner box and all of that. Most organisms behave every which way and they have a way of detecting what works, what's pleasurable, what's painful, so on and so forth. And so they are. So there's a form of evolution that takes place during their lifetime that's extremely common and that actually feeds back to the genetic Evolutionary process. The idea that that means that evolution is not blind. Blind evolution produces goal oriented organisms. And by virtue of those organisms learning how to behave, that defines the genes that are selected. There's a feedback process between learning and genetic evolution. Learning as an evolutionary process, an intra generational evolutionary process, and genetic evolution, which is blind in terms of the genes, don't anticipate anything. But learning has shaped the genes that are adaptive versus not. And that's probably accountable for what's called the Cambrian explosion. The first burst of diversity in the history of life. Might have been, it's speculation, but might have been caused by the evolution of individual learning.

Okay, so anything else to add to 1 and 2?

No, I think we've done a good job.

Okay, so let's go on to how to breed a psychopathic chicken.

Right. I'll begin with the example and you'll see how it fits right in. So this is a real experiment. There's a poultry breeder named Bill Muir at Purdue University, where else? And he wanted to breed a strain of chickens. This of course, lays more eggs. He did it in two ways. In both cases, the chickens were in groups. Chickens have always lived in groups. Nowadays they tend to live in cages in the modern poultry industry. So we had many cages of chickens. Nine hens to a cage. In one experiment, he straightforwardly selected the most productive hen within each cage to breed the next generation of hens. In the second experiment, he chose the most selective, the most productive cages. He measured productivity at the cage level, and then he used all the hens within the cage to breed the next generation of hens. And so what happened? Well, in the first experiment, you'd think that that would be the most direct way to select for egg productivity by selecting the most productive hens. But that's now how it turned out, because what he was actually selecting for was the biggest bully in each cage who was achieving her productivity by suppressing the productivity of other hens. And bullying is highly heritable in hens. And so in five generations, he actually did succeed at breeding a strand of psychopaths that basically plucked each other's feathers and murdered each other in their incessant attacks to be the top head. In the second experiment, because he was breeding the most productive groups, he was selecting the most cooperative and docile and behaviors within each, within each, the most cooperative and docile hands. And so those became the most productive groups and the strained that laid the most egg. This basically introduces the concept of within group selection, Selection among individuals within a single group. And it's disruptive outcome. It's disruptive outcome, and then the need for selection at the level of the group in order to produce your outcome for any social process. And let me just follow that, David, with another example which is so easy for anyone to grasp. It's to ask, to think about playing the game of Monopoly. You know how it goes. You know what the purpose is. To get all the real estate and drive everyone else extinct.

Yeah.

Bankrupt. So that's fun to play. So now imagine playing a different game. It's a Monopoly tournament in which the trophy goes to the team that collectively develops their property the fastest. And so imagine playing that game, and you'll see immediately that almost every decision you make as a team player in a Monopoly tournament will be different than the decisions you'd make playing the single game of Monopoly. That's the difference between trying to do better than other members of your own group versus trying to do better as a group. And go ahead.

I had Alex Landecker on, on the Age of Infinite, the other podcast series, and his expertise is sex, sexuality, and reproduction. And one of the things he shared, which I thought was an eye opener, at least for me, is prior to the agricultural revolution, where ownership and land and property and the ability to accumulate goods and services, prior to that, societies were very much different in that they didn't own anything, so there was less violence between them. They had to work together in order to survive because you didn't have a shared stock, you didn't attack others. It wasn't productive overall. And. And even in the sexuality side of it is that the. There was an openness, like the bonobo monkeys, an openness that sexuality was just. It was part of their culture, that every baby was everybody's baby and there was no ownership, that you didn't own your woman or you didn't own your man. That it was a shared group because that was the survival of all of them. And so you've kind of touched on that in the same. In a different direction, but that it wasn't about the individual, it was about the group. And the organisms were structured around survival as a total. So, yes, I could see even more clearly now what he was defining from a different perspective.

Yeah, I would. David, I would sign on to about 80% of that one. Okay.

So I dropped from 85 to 80. Okay. And I didn't say it. So he said it. And he probably said it much better than I did.

Yeah, now we'll get there. I mean, that's basically the signature human adaptation we don't have to wait because. Because cooperation depends on social control. There is a nugget of information for us. If there's not a way to suppress the bullies of the world, then the bullies will prevail. You don't need to be a scientist to appreciate that. One of my colleagues, Richard Wrangham at Harvard University, has a great book called the Goodness Paradox on this topic. And more and more it's being described as a form of self domestication. With domestication we breed for docility in other species, but self domestication is breeding docility in ourselves. And so he would describe this evolution of our own species as one of literally. And a point he makes is this has to include capital punishment. I mean, if somebody's incorrigible, you got to kill them. And that's many, many examples of that. And then of course, that's the extreme of other forms of social sanctioning. If someone is misbehaving, then there's. In the first place, their reputation plummets. And such things as gossip come in here. Gossip is like the first line of defense. If someone misbehaves, people talk about it, their reputation plummets. Reputation is everything. In a group with a high degree of social control, the only way that you can achieve high status because you can't bully your way into it, is to cultivate a reputation. And the only way to do that is to behave for the good of the group. So basically power status becomes aligned with pro social behavior. That's what it means for a group to be operating.

Yet if we were to to jump in, if we were to look at it from a global perspective, what has happened? You could say that the encourageable, the bullies found their group of bullies. And that group of bullies has a reputation score in it. And they have expanded and built that group even larger and stronger.

Yep, that's exactly right.

So that growth, that phenomenon that could be connected to the digital economy, the digital world thriving, enabled this connection. That would not have happened otherwise in a localized community, government culture. How does, how do you. That is a survival of the fittest. That is a means of creating a new environment. Is what's happening around the world then a negative or just an evolution to a different ecosystem?

So everything good at one scale becomes potentially disruptive at higher scale. Self preservation is a great thing until it becomes self dealing. Helping your canon friends is a good thing until it becomes nepotism and cronyism. On and on and on. Corruption is obeying the moral dictates of A lower order. And there's a great novel on that topic called no Longer at Ease by Tanua Kebi, who is also well known in the kind of public school curriculum. He's an African American author and he wrote Things Fall Apart, which is his most famous novel. An amazing novel at how a very strong indigenous culture, African culture falls apart at the mere touch of Christianity. It's an amazing ethnography, fictional ethnography of an African culture. And the no Longer At Ease is the grandson of the protagonist and things fall apart. So now we're fast forwarding, I think it was Uganda as a young African nation. Our hero is a very idealistic person in the civil service, full of pride for his young nation, not at all prone to any kind of corruption. But the reason that he got there is because his village scrimped and saved to send him to English England for his British education. And now his village wants him to work on their behalf and ultimately he succumbs to that. And so he's obeying the dictates, the moral dictates of a village scale society. And then that causes him to become corrupt at the national scale. And so that's, I think when you really begin thinking about multi level selection, which I've introduced with the game of Monopoly and the chicken example, and make it truly multi level, it's like Russian dolls. It's groups within groups within groups, then everything that counts as teamwork at one level and altruism and pro sociality people working on behalf of others becomes a form of higher level selfishness. And the only solution to all of that is basically to choose the whole earth as the ultimate group. Basically, that our first social identity needs to be that we're citizens of the earth, human beings and citizens of the earth. That doesn't make the lower identities go away. We need those intermediate layers, but those intermediate layers need to be coordinated with the highest level public good in mind. That would be Gaia. So actually we can stop now, David, because we've already arrived at chapter.

No, we haven't. We haven't completely arrived. So the, the reason that I, I'm digging in certain directions and you and I don't know each other well, we've met once before. I think that it's often assumed that because I have someone who I'm talking to on the podcast, that I have history with them and that I've read about them and I understand them and I don't. I think I've shared with you that I just, I don't read anything I don't listen. If I find somebody, we have a great conversation. I feel that there's value, there's a. Or they have some type of level that adds to the ecosystem. There's a few variables that I add in. I won't go into all the details.

That's right, David, you have turned ignorance into a virtue.

So. Well, I love to learn. So there's a. When I select a guest, I'm actually saying I want to learn from this person. That's the first level of development or selection. The second one is will that help achieve something that's further out there? And the third one is maybe somebody else can learn something from this. So in one of the initiative that's on the other podcast, it's called the Age of Infinite, it's Project Moonheart foundation, there's a whole area of governance and governance models. And what does that mean? What does it mean moving forward? And one of the analogous positions is if we go into space, and I'm not a space lover, I mean, I'm involved in the space industry heavily, it appears, people tell me, but if we move into space and we live in the International Space Station, where there are individuals from all over the world being there, or we go to another rock, whether it be the moon, which is our focus, what type of structure is brought with us? What abiding principles are we going to live by? How are we going to reshape reform as a society? And so while many of these questions come down to on Earth, how do we paradigm shift and get individuals on Earth to see that there is a new possibility of a new governance structure that could be more meaningful for the entire globe? And we call it mirth, Moon and Earth, and that it would be. I don't know if the word is positive. Again, I'm using the wrong word. It would be beneficial for all species on this planet to have this new structure. So when I'm asking these questions and you're talking about corruption and you're talking about multilevel selection, and the questions I was asking about ecosystems being bad and good, I'm trying to frame the title Redefining Tomorrow as a globalist, what would the world look like and how would it get there? And how do we shift? Can we shift the biological temptations, or is it policy that does it, or is it economics that does it? So I'm wrestling in my mind that you can't hear in with questions that you can't hear, but I'm trying to get to that Redefining Tomorrow in My head as to what are those levers that need to be pulled. And this whole thing about bullying and the world allowing that to happen. And I don't say allow meaning yes, let's please do it. But it was given to an individual who then changed the way the world views this structure. That's why I'm going as deep as I am.

I don't know if that's makes perfect sense.

Did I get it like a 92 on that one?

No. I'll give you an A plus and a couple gold stars. What do you think of that?

Well, thank you. The Project Moon Hut just so you can hear the title might help as we. Not that I want you to solve for it because I want to hear what you've got to say as it is said. But is Project Moon Hut Foundation. Its directive is to establish a box of the roof and a door on the moon. We call it a Moon Hut. It was named by NASA Project Moon Hut. And through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. So means to accelerate the innovations, accelerate the technology, accelerate the governance. All the things that are necessary to make us get there. And as a result we take those innovations, that paradigm shifting those endeavors and turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species in the construct. There's a lot of hype that tomorrow meaning in five years we'll be in what's called an O' Neill Station or 10 years, which is an orbiting entity that people can live. There'll be 500 people or 1,000 people or a million people living on the moon in 10 years. These things won't happen in that timeline. But yet we're faced with challenges. Climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion, displacement, social and physical. There's political or there's unrest that is coming out of it and then there's this exponential use of our resources, such as overfishing that are really damaging. We call them the six mega challenges that are going to make it difficult as we move forward. So my take, and one of this is where it came from is if we can get individuals who are living on Earth to unlock and think about what it could be, they have to learn something new. If I use something on Earth we already know air, gravity, motion transportation, we know about housing. But if you have to rethink the whole construct, you might learn something enough that will change your behavior on Earth. And that's kind of a piece of the pie. So that's where these this whole rethinking to the globalist or this all species on the planet comes into play. So that was the added. And I won't go into anything more, but I like, I love this. Yet it's making it more challenging for me because I'm not finding the levers.

Well, lots to say there, David. And one thing I learned during our one and only conversation preceding this one, I learned about Moon Hut. And so it's awesome in some respects. I think one of its strongest point is actually artistic, that something about creating sustainable society on the moon is so dramatic. I mean it's like movies like the Martian and so on. You basically feel it more than the messy. The same problem that exists in a much messier form on Earth. So I think that's one of the reasons why it's so compelling, which is a good thing. But there's one thing about that project and any other one like it that actually, although it can come up with a lot of insights, there's one thing that it cannot address by its nature, which is the problem of scaling up. Because of course what gets built on the Moon is going to be very small scale society, isn't it? Yep. It's going to consist of how many individuals? Very, very small or on any kind of a spacecraft, it's going to be a small group. And so when we ask the question, how are we going to make teams work at that scale? We have very solid answers to that. That's going to get to our chapter what all groups, what all groups need. We have lots to say about that. And they. And a key figure there is Eleanor Ostrom, who everyone should know about if they don't. She wants.

How do you spell that?

O S, T, R, O, M. Ostrom.

Okay.

And no shame if you haven't heard of her. Despite the fact that she won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, she was not an economist, she was a political scientist. She is still a very little known. But what she did, just to jump right to it, is she studied the famous tragedy of the Commons. We all know about that. That's the tendency of individuals when they're drawing upon a common pool resource, such as a forest or a pasture, or fisheries or groundwater, to take more than their share. Eleanor studied common poor resource groups around the world. And what she showed was that some, not all, are able to avoid the tragedy of the Commons. They're able to manage their own affairs. They did not need to privatize the resource or they did not require top down regulation. They were actually able to manage their own affairs, but only if they possessed certain core design principles, as she called them. And that was the work that won her the Nobel Prize in economics. Turns out that can be generalized. And I worked with her. So we wrote together to show that that's what all groups need, is not just common core resource groups. Any group, including in fact especially a group on another planet or on a space station. If they don't have these core design principles, then forget about it and we have all the science we need in order to make that, make that point. And we can decide whether you want me to list them?

Well, I do want to list them because what again, if we think of it as a construct that there are going to be 10 billion people on this planet within the next 40, 50 years and we are not going to be shipping off world. The biggest aspirational project on this planet today is Elon Musk with a million people on Mars in 40 to 100 years. So it could be in 100 years, not 40. And that's the biggest. That means there'll be 10 billion minus 1 million still on this planet. And so it's not that everybody's going to go to space, but what could be learned pre this happening to adjust for the challenges we're facing. So what would be those core principles? I'm interested in knowing? I don't know them. And I'd be interested in having Eleanor on the program too, because it sounds interesting, but I'd like to hear them from you and your perspective on them.

Well, she passed away, so that's unfortunate.

I'm probably not going to get her then.

But I'm the guy you want. I can channel.

Sure, channel for us.

But before I do, I want to focus on the, the problem of scaling up, which is the entire problem. And I want to go back to an earlier part of our conversation when you describe the work of your colleague on hunter gatherer societies, which I.

And I didn't do it justice, but I.

Okay, go ahead. Well, so the. I've already. We've already. I'm trying to organize my thoughts here. We've already emphasized the need for social control, for cooperation. Cooperation in all its forms is inherently vulnerable. Any form of pro sociality. Pro sociality is anything oriented towards the welfare of others or one's group as a whole. And pro social behaviors are inherently vulnerable to more self serving behaviors. It's baked into the definition of pro sociality. You cannot extend yourself towards others or one's group as a whole without placing yourself at a potential disadvantage compared to the person who doesn't do anything that's the free rider or actively exploits your prosocial behavior. That's the psychopathic chicken problem. And so unless there is a way to solve that problem, just forget about it. So social control, and this is true of all moral systems, has two dimensions. There's a voluntary dimension and there's a obligatory dimension. The voluntary dimension is the genuine desire to help others motivated by a emotions such as sympathy, empathy, love, friendship. It's just I love you, I want to help you. Okay, so that's one dimension of morality. The other is compulsory. We have norms, this is what's right, that's what's wrong. We expect everyone to do what's right. If they don't, well, there's consequences. And those consequences don't have to start out harsh. Typically a friendly correction is friendly reminder is enough to keep us all in solid citizen mode. But there's bad actors out there, there are social predators. And we also do things we don't intend that end up being. It's not just a matter of intentions. And so therefore there has to be a compulsory obligatory dimension to a moral system that is symbiotic with the voluntary dimension. Once the obligatory dimension is strong, really strong, then it's safe to be pro social. Then it's safe to express your love and your pro social emotions to the highest degree because you will not be exploited. The signature event of human evolution was the development of the obligatory dimension of a moral system that allowed the voluntary dimension to flourish. That became the species that we are is baked into our brains and bodies. And it's reflected in the kind of egalitarianism that your friend described, your associate described, which is for the most part true. And then here I'm going to give a. This is why I didn't give full marks for it. Okay. There's plenty of hunter gatherer societies in which that kind of egalitarianism was more or less confined to the men and did not extend itself to the women, for example. So it's not the case that there was was not ideal in a modern sense. In a modern sense we want full equality. But if you go back to hunter gatherer societies you find typically find full equality among all the men and a lot of equality shared. So it's just not quite as Rousseau in and utopian as your friend described. But nevertheless it's good enough. I mean the one take home point is that hunter gatherer societies have this kind of egalitarianism which is vigilant, that's sometimes called reverse dominance. So domination occurs but it's like it's the rank and file dominating the would be, the would be dominators. I mean a moral system, the norms and the compulsory part of the, of the, of a moral system is a form of domination. When we regard something as sacred, we willingly subordinate ourselves to it. We allow it to dominate us because we regarded a second, it's more important than us, we'll die for it. And so that's part of the human experience. And of course a more mild form would be in any group, including a business group is just basically, we're trying to do something together. It's important for us, it's important for me, and it's important for us. And so we'll subordinate ourselves to that and we'll structure all of our interaction in order to make sure that that happens. And Ostrom's core design principles are basically a manifestation of that. They're the compulsory part of the, of a moral system for their groups. So to list them quickly, these are basically the ingredients that cause groups to work. What all groups need, we can get right here. And as I list them in the first place, don't want to disappoint you, David, they're going to be really familiar to you.

Well, just because you can, you can, you know them by heart. So I'm going to ask, I'm going to tell you what I've been thinking and you tell me if this sounds right or wrong and then we can come back.

Okay?

The While building the foundation, I often get a lot of pushback in a few areas. Individuals who will say, you've got to bring everybody on board. Everybody's got to agree, everybody's got to do, everybody's got to get along. In the development of this. I knew exactly that didn't have to work. We have five groups of individuals. I'll call them avatars. So an avatar representing groups. We have people who are involved in space. They're in the space industry. They know about space, they love space. It's been their world.

Go.

We have individuals who work for space companies. They're not space people. They could work in an accounting department or finance or HR and not really love space, but they could be involved in it because that's their job, that's their future. They enjoy the activity, the camaraderie, the technology. Bleeding edge. Okay, there's a group called Enthusiasts. Then we have two others. One is the opportunistic group. And then we have the social purpose group. And in all of them I will share with individuals. And it's okay, if someone is just opportunistic, they just want to make money, they just want to grow because they might invent the engine or the air filtration or water filtration or a technology that's necessary. The United States in 2011 discontinued the running of the Space Shuttle. So I didn't know this. This is something new to me. In the past six years I've been doing this. But I learned in the past few years, how did everybody get to the International Space Station if in fact the shuttle was no longer running? Do you know the answer?

No. Tell me.

They've been flying on the Russian Soyuz rocket.

Oh, yes, I knew that much. Yes, that's right.

We've been using the American and the Russians. And I'm not using them because I'm an American. I'm a person of the world. Lived in Hong Kong, lived in Luxembourg. So I'm not using that as an example in terms of who I am. It's that the American scientific and space community needed to get to the International Space Station. So did the Europeans, the European Space Agency and the Japanese Individuals had to get up. And the only real trustable rocket that is flown so many thousands of times up the rocket itself, but used for space was the Russians. So they worked together in collaboration. While the politics was, was being fought at a very high level. The individuals had a pragmatic need to get to the International Space Station. So in my mind, in my mind when I look at what you just said is that I am kind of ignoring or understanding that there will be bullies, there will be opportunistic people, there will be individuals who will be bad actors. But on a global scale, these are some people who are very driven, they're very single minded in their approach. And that one water filtration system could theoretically change and improve the lives of billions. It's an acceptable risk in my mind to say, let's stop worrying about a lot of the socioeconomic, the behavioral, the country specific behaviors and let's look at it as a totality. And there will be a curve of individuals who fill the full gamut. And that is okay with me. And so I kind of move that forward and say that's not the conversation. The conversation is about the desired outcome in 40 years or 30 years, addressing climate change and mass extinction and the six mega challenges. So to get to where we need to be, we have to allow the actors and their own cultural beliefs to, to preside. And that's okay. Does that sound interesting? Different?

Yeah. Well, it's Interesting and different to some people. What different is completely contextual, of course.

Well, yeah, and I meant it in the form of what we're talking about, the evolutionary thinking and where.

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. I want to bring out a number of points with it. One is that. We all operate in multiple groups simultaneously. And that has always been the case all the way back to our hunter gatherer ancestors have participated in many different groupings, and we have a genius for identifying the particular grouping that we're in at any particular moment and then behaving according to the dictates of that of that group. And that's for that reason that we could simultaneously be in a cold war with Russia and cooperating with them in the context of building the International Space Station, which is truly international. It's not just binational, it's truly international. It's probably the single most outstanding example of global cooperation that we have. And so nations which are not coordinating in any other respect and are sometimes even at war with each other or edging towards it are still able to operate in cooperative mode for that one endeavor. And you have to be equally contextual in how you analyze that endeavor. So forget about all the other aspects of life just in the context of the International Space Station. Then let's run down the core design principles in that context. Is there a strong sense of identity and purpose? Does the group know what it's trying to do, who's involved, and so on, and that it's important and so on? Is there unity at that scale? And the answer is yes. They know exactly what they're trying to do. And because it's in space, it has that marvelous kind of concreteness which I think, which is what gives power to the moon, hud, and I mean everything else that's, that's done in space. One of my favorite favorite novelists is Joseph Conrad, who wrote a lot of books about the sea. And of course, back then it was sea. It was like the exploration on Earth that had the glamour of space exploration today. And one thing that Conrad said, why he loved to write novels about the sea, is that there was a moral simplicity to what takes place on a ship that doesn't exist in most other aspects of life because the purpose is to stay afloat.

Right.

And it's the same as with, as with space. And so when it's the International Space Station, there's a kind of a clarity as to what we're trying to do together that, that, that scores high on CDP1. A strong sense of identity. Okay, Purpose, you Know, in the context of a common pool resource, there could be a gang of lobster fishermen that, that basically own a bay. So you know, there's a bay. Anyone potentially could trap lobsters on the bay. But that's not how it works. The bay is owned by, by informally owned by a gang of lobstermen and they then manage the bay for themselves. So that's a strong sense of identity and purpose in the same.

What you're saying here is because we have a strong identity, strong directive that individuals of multicultural environments, from Kazakhstan to Argentina, Argentina, Israel to Denmark wherever it may be, these individuals see that there's a larger overarching umbrella. So we will allow certain norms, behaviors to exist to achieve that desired outcome and we form this new structure and that allows it to continue to thrive.

Yep, the group identity trumps the other identities for the purposes of the group. We don't shed the other identities. We might take great pride in them. I'll bet you anything that the nations involved in the International Space Station are competing with each other in order to get honors for contributing their part. That's a bit more basically status competition that's coordinated with to benefit the purpose of the group. So it's competitive. Bet you anything. But it's a managed competition. That excludes disruptive behavior. So that brings us to the second core design principle. Benefits proportional to costs. Not sustainable for any group for some members to get the benefits and others to do the work. So there has to be some sense in which you get from the group is proportional to what you give to the group. Pre writing is not obviously will be disruptive, not to speak of other forms of subterfuge and so on and so forth. So the groups that work basically manage to calibrate benefits with cost. That's the definition of suppressing disruptive self serving. Basically preventing people from playing the single game of Monopoly or being that psychopathic chicken. That's.

Kind of translated in ours. The reason there were five avatars created, there are actually multiple players and they've all been defined whether a teacher, a business owner. We've, we've created what their outcomes would be. But in the five is that the, when they are a social purpose and they can see that their outcome is being achieved, it doesn't matter about the others. Maybe the space doesn't matter to them. But if they could achieve their social purpose, they're willing to put aside other people's beliefs or thoughts and say I will contribute because of the self serving nature or the community serving nature. That I believe will be the desired outcome out of this. So therefore I am part of that stronger cause. And, and the cost is something I'm willing to overcome.

Yeah. Though I think I want to actually pause here since this is an open ended conversation, we could easily do so. And to say that so for one thing, it's important to bring these different stakeholders because they all have something to offer. So there's basically there's a, there's an appropriate diversity. Diversity per se is not necessarily good, but appropriate diversity is good. And that's why we bring different stakeholders to a problem such as this. Now, even though they have their individual, every stakeholder has their own interest. What dominates orthodox economic theory is to assume that each stakeholder is entirely self interested. And so in order to do something as a group, then you must align the self interest of the stakeholder with the interest of the group through compensation and stock options and all of these other things. The assumption is that every participant is entirely self interested. It's true that every stakeholder is partially self interested. But what actually happens in real groups, and I'll bet this is true for in this particular case, is that when you bring these stakeholders together who are initially up for themselves in some sense and you actually bring them for this project and so on, then this kind of hive mind is going to, is going to kick in. They're actually going to become more aligned in terms of some kind of common purpose. CDP 1 yeah, and the and and so will not be entirely, you know, I have my objectives, it differs from yours. And the only reason I'm taking part is because we perform some kind of, of alignment. And from a pure efficiency standpoint, I think it's easy enough to appreciate that if you do have the stakeholders develop some kind of common purpose, then they will coordinate themselves more easily than if you have to do this kind of alignment of self interest.

And the reason that it's a foundation, there's a reason it's nonprofit, is so that in the beginning it immediately is a weeding out of the individuals who don't see the cause as a reason to participate. They can have their individual work or societal desires, yet they have to come together without the financial outcome saying I just want to make money out of this. Which does happen. And I've had many, many people volunteer to do a lot of work until once I pay them. And so that's one of the weeding parts of this as okay as a society, and I'm going back to the notes that I've written, is that we're layering this with one of those. I don't know how to say it. You can't be a part of our community unless you at least believe in some of the things that we're doing. There will be a positive for you, and you could find that in the future. But today, this is the cause. Are you. Are you engaged in it? Do you see the future? Do you. Do you understand the possibilities? And I think when we're talking about societies or groups or communities and when you shared with me the different sets that we have. I want to go out to. I want to go out dancing tonight with a group of people. I have to abide by that set of norms with those people. I want to go to work tomorrow, and I want to work with a group of people. I have to abide by that construct of rules and. And norms that have been established. I want to live in a community, lived in Hong Kong. I had to abide by those laws, and the constructs were there. So I did have multiple, multiple. Multiple levels of groups and positions that I had to take, and each one was different. So this is just one of those filters. Do you want to live in this country? Do you want to participate? You can have your own life in it, but you still have to abide by some of them. And I think that's one of the reasons. I know that's one of the reasons that I had to make this challenging decision in a world where everybody wants to. Not everybody. Individuals would like to be able to go IPO and make a fortune is to say, no, no, no, no. Let's talk higher first. Let's talk a different conversation.

Yep, Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we're definitely on the same page. Okay, David. And the. The ease with which we participate in all of these groups is something that even though we do it every day of our lives, it bears reflecting upon. There's a great sociologist named Irving Goffman, and one of his great books was called the Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. And it was based on his thesis where he was actually studying a small hotel, I think it was in the Shetland Islands. And it was just basically observing everyone in the hotel. And he observed that all of these different contexts. So it was such a small hotel that the owner and the staff had egalitarian relations when there were no guests about. But as soon as a guest walked in the door, then they all fell into the role of the, you know, the subservient bellboy and the. And the. And the dominant owner. And then the part that I always Remember. Is that if you took a waiter and you observed the waiter as he went back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, that person changed his Persona. He was deferential to the customers in the dining room and then would make fun of the very same customers in the kitchen. Back and forth, just passing. Passing through the door.

It's almost like two different worlds.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that they'd walk in and they could be arrogant. They could say, I need my meal. I need this being done right now. My. But the walk out there, oh, hi, how are you? Everything's perfect.

Yeah. And it's. And I find when I go to a different culture where I'm. I'm not practiced. This happened to me when I started to spend a lot of time in Norway. How hyper vigilant I've become. Because I don't know the moves. Yeah, I just become hyper vigilant. I look around to see what other people are doing. This is called conformance bias. You know, running Rome, do as the Romans do. But because I didn't know the moves, I was just petrified of making some kind of mistake in the social round of life and just looking around at what other people were slavishly conformist because it was unfamiliar to me. And then gradually I, I became more relaxed after I learned.

Once you understood the norms, what, What's.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm. I'm racing. The first time I landed in Russia, first time I landed in Indonesia, first time I landed in Bangladesh, first time I landed in South Africa. In each one of those, I was saying, okay, what's safe, what's not? What are people doing? What are they not? So, yeah, you didn't.

You.

You were. You're very quickly trying to adapt to the norms so that you are not. You could. You could survive. Thrive in that environment.

Yeah. And so that's where we are as a species. We've all hypervigilant of multiple.

Yeah.

Of multiple groups. It's so fascinating to. To reflect upon now. There is also, I think, a comparison between contexts. And this brings us back actually, that if you get people to cooperate in the context of the International Space Station and it turns into a great experience. Look at what we built together. They're going to look then and say, well, exactly why are we competing in other contexts? Why aren't we doing this? There you go.

That's the paradigm shift ways.

And then. And of course, that's the whole virtue of the Peace Corps and all, you know, student exchange programs. To bring somebody there and just have them Participate in a cooperative context. They prefer that to conflictual context. They say, why can't we do this in other contexts? Let's. And so, and so there is, obviously there's coordination among contexts in addition to. They're not total separate islands. So I think that also needs to.

Be that crossing of that divide, which is we don't like each other or we, or we don't know each other and we think we don't like each other or we don't know enough to know how they live, work and play. We make assumptions about that society. And when you merge them together, there's a realization. What do you mean? We're just like you. I have two daughters. You have two daughters. I actually have two sons, but I'm using daughters. I work in engineering. You work in engineering. I mean, we have so much more in common as compared to what we don't have in common.

Yeah. And so now often when we're not cooperating, it's for the best of reasons because it's in a social environment that is, that actually do not have these core design principles. Therefore it's the bullying strategies that have succeeded and we're interacting with bullies, or maybe we are the bully. So. And we're fully capable of being the bully in one context and the anti bully in another context. That's part of what comes with talking about all of these different, all of these different contexts. So if you're in a exploitative, despotic, non cooperative social environment, it's dangerous to be a cooperator. You can't actually, you can't actually, in order to implement cooperation, you have to implement these core design principles. You have to create that social environment which is safe to cooperate. If that social environment doesn't exist, then it's unethical to counsel someone to be altruistic. We call this the alley cat problem. You don't take an alley cat and declaw the alley cat and put it back in an alley. You've not done it a favor. You have to be just that smart about creating the social environment that allows pro sociality to win the Darwinian contest than just counseling people to be nice. Oh, if you're nice, it'll be work for you. It's in your self interest to be enlightened. Self interest to be nice. Well, no, actually, very often it's not. We have to be smarter than that in the construction of our social environments. And doing it on the moon just brings it into more dramatic focus. But it's what we have to do in every single group of our lives on Earth.

And that's where this conversation is very valuable, because with the 10 billion people, very few of them will make it to space. But if they're working, involved in a project that gives them an insight, has them questions, how would this actually play out? And then they look at their own norms, their own beliefs, their own actions, and say, would I survive or how would I act this way? It gives a person a shove in a different direction.

And that's the main benefit. That's the benefit that's larger than the benefit of actually creating the correct.

That's it. I haven't been able to articulate it in that way, but I like that this conversation is happening because it's exactly that. That's the benefit. Is that okay? I didn't think that way.

So let's continue through the court of number three. So number one was a strong sense of identity and purpose. Number two, benefits proportional to cost. Number three, fair and inclusive decision making. If there's a group in which some people get to make the decision, not others, then that's not going to work well for two reasons. One is it's inherently unfair and so you know what's going to happen in that situation. And two, it doesn't make use of the wisdom of the people that are there. So decision making has to be not necessarily strict consensus. And actually decision making is extraordinarily complex. David, as you know as a business person, that there's a very, very steep trade off between participation in decision making and just sheer efficiency. You have to manage that, such things as time constraints and so on. There's a whole giant scientific literature on group decision making. But the bottom line is there's some sense in which has to be transparent and open for purposes of fairness and also for purposes of making use of the information, the wisdom of every member. And what Eleanor Ostrom found empirically was that the groups that scored well on that design principle tended to work well as groups. So there's CDP3. Maybe you should comment on that. And then I want to take a little break to refill my coffee cup.

Okay.

But go ahead and comment on CDP3 if you want.

Yeah, no, I'm thinking about it. But my first question is, does this also happen in all other species besides humans or many other species besides humans?

It does. I can tell you stories of honeybees and water buffalo and fish schools and in which this does take place. Honeybee democracy, how honeybees make joint decisions about where to forage, where to locate the next nest and next colony and things like that. Just amazing work on collective intelligence and decision making and other species.

So begs to differ how much. How much of a communication. How much communication actually happens. I laugh because we teach dogs to understand our words and our commands. How often do you hear the owner saying, I'm going to learn dog language and I will spend my life trying to make sure that I speak in the dog's language. That's not how we operate. And so my. How much of that communication and how is that communication delivered to make this joint decision as a honeybee? I think that humans today cannot truly ascertain the true evolutionary changes that enabled that to happen. I don't think we're cognizant of the. What other levels of interaction are actually happening.

Well, again, David, I think if I understand you correctly, we're handicapped by the individualism of the last 70 years and especially the dominant narratives in the business world, which is very top down and command and control oriented, which makes it difficult to see how much natively, in other words, without any kind of training or school or what just takes place, we participate in it every day without knowing that we're doing so. That decision making actually is a group process, more like honeybees and not often not conscious. The degrees to which we are making decisions in groups and often cultures oriented around it. One of my most respected colleagues is named Christopher Boehm, and he's an anthropologist and he wrote a paper in which he looked at the anthropological literature. For cases in which there was an emergency. An anthropologist was there to describe exactly what happened. Two of these emergencies were warfare emergencies. One was a natural disaster, a hurricane that struck and basically stripped all the food resources on a Polynesian island. In all three cases, this initiated a process which was essentially a group decision making process that was not command and control. These societies often did have chiefs, but the chiefs operated in what, in business terms would be understood as a moderator of group processes. And we know, I mean, there's this whole literature, this is your home territory, David, on different kinds of leadership and so on, and how a good leader actually functioned as a moderator of group processes soliciting information. There's a phase and a decision making process for every person, and this is often every man. So once again, the idea that egalitarianism confined to men required to state their opinion, and if they disagree, they're required to state their. Their disagreement. During the early phase of the decision making. Speak now or forever hold your peace. There's rituals that in order to engage in the ritual you must air your grievances here. This is the variation phase of a selection process. And after all of the options are out in the open, then there's a discussion as to which of these do we choose. And that's a group discussion also. And hopefully there'll be a convergence. If there isn't, then there has to be a discussion about what happens if, given the different outcomes, who's going to share the benefits and the cost. For example, if the decision is to go to war and there's a faction which is never going to agree to that, then there's a discussion as to, okay, well if we do go to war and we win, then ups next you don't get the booty. If we don't, if we lose, then upsniks don't have to suffer the consequences. That's back to CDP 2. The degree to which decision making takes place is it's almost never the case that individuals operated as free agents in our entire history as a species. And that continues today even though we forced that upon ourselves with individualism. So that that's true more now than it ever has been in the past. When we make decisions, we are just so much consulting social resources in addition to our own research, a huge literature on brainstorming which ask a question, you know, get individuals to make some. Any decision and then get groups to make the same decision. Who does better? Who does better, the group or the individual? And, and very often it's only a small group that does better. A bigger group would not do better. So there's such a thing as optimal. It's too large group size. Yeah, but I mean, almost. If you take. Here's another important point, David, that it's not that groups are always better and doing things in groups has coordination problems which you want to avoid if at all possible. If it can be done as an individual, please let it. But for any problem, as that problem becomes more and more complex, then it's going to tax the resources of an individual very quickly. And then it's at that point that social resources have to come into play. That's going to happen very, very fast. And in any business environment, you're operating in a zone where decision making must be a good process. And then CDP3 becomes helpful in terms of exactly how that would go. And it's very, very contextual. That's another point to make that Eleanor Ostrom made again and again that these core design principles are functional principles. And so everyone needs them because they're necessary for cooperation. But how they're Implemented is highly contextual. So.

I've used examples when I'm trying to demonstrate how groups change, but not in the context that you're talking about. Is in an emergency with a reasonably small group of people that while there could be a leader who is running the group, if the emergency happens and speed is of an issue, you see individuals rise up to the occasion very differently. And oftentimes the leader itself is pushed out of that decision making because they don't have the skill sets to make those decisions happen. For example, let's say someone, something is rolled on a person. There's a car on somebody. You'll see an individual step as, no, you grab this, you're bigger than them. You do this. Not the leader who's doing it, but individuals. Their talent comes out very quickly and there's less time for that. Group think doesn't mean they'll always solve the challenge. The second one is in a nonprofit, you change the entire dynamics. Because in a nonprofit, the enticement tends is not an economic one. So I have written and said that if you want to see the quality of a leader, the talent of a leader, see how they work when no one's being paid. It's a very, very different dynamic. You can't just say, well, then you do it. And the person says, yeah, I need the food for the weekend, or I'm to going. Going away, or this is the only way I'm going to survive. You have to. You have to come at it from a completely different perspective. Because they can walk.

Yeah. And so all true, David, we're on the same, on the same page. And if you look at some of the more enlightened business methods, you see that they bottled that, that emergency situation. Are you familiar with a business change method called rapid results?

No.

So it's a wonderful story. And it begins with an emergency. So I think the guy's name is Charles Schaefer, if I'm not mistaken. He was a business consultant, I think, like you, and he was advising a chemical plant, a big one, that the employees went on a wildcat strike that lasted for like four months. And the middle management found themselves running this plan that was typically was run by several thousand people. Now it was like 400 people. And do you know, they did it well. And they had some kind of peak psychological experience in the process. Back to what we were talking about earlier, and Schaeffer was amazed. And he said, how can I bottle this on an average day? How can I get this kind of zest and intensity? How could I actually make that happen as part of the day to day operation of the other company. And so he developed a method called rapid results which very simply involved the creation of small teams. Assigning those teams are really challenging job. I mean, something that would require a huge effort, like double the product sales or something like that. Cut them all kinds of slack, gave them elbow room, made sure the groups were composed of the appropriate people, including the frontline workers in addition to the management. A lot of egalitarianism within the group, heaps of praise when they succeeded. Damned if it didn't work. These groups sprung to life. Basically. He'd manufactured an emergency situation and then all of the kind of zest that we've been talking about with real emergency situations came to life. I mean, they couldn't do it often, but they don't need to because you could be, basically, you could be growing your company through the use of these teams again and again and again. So not only were they accomplishing their specific goals, but it became the whole method of change for the group as a whole.

You could even take it, not just the, you can. Throughout history you could see how these situations have changed societies and industries. The one that comes to mind is in the early 2000s, and I don't remember when, I don't remember the dates, there was a writers strike in Hollywood. And I remember saying to my wife, this is dangerous because the management will figure out a way to do something where the writer will not be as involved. And I didn't know what the outcome would be. And within six months of that statement, we saw the first reality show. And low cost, low budget, no writers, no whatever. Because the leadership had to come up with a way to keep the, the operations going. And they said, why don't we just make a show? And I don't know, I wasn't a fly on the wall, but I'm assuming someone says, why don't we do something like this? And it became reality shows. Now look at the, how prevalent reality shows are, which could also be the evolution into TikTok and the evolution into Instagram. Yeah. And these short vignettes, they came about because you didn't need a writer and the, the ecosystem learned that you didn't have to have that person to thrive. To me, that's somewhat of an example of a similar type of an emergence that came out of a change in society's position or an environment.

Yeah. And this points out, David, something which is important to point out because sometimes cultural evolution has a highly managed form of the kind that we're talking about. But there's also a huge unintended consequence element evolution in all its forms, genetic plus plus cultural. You know, like when the first mammals evolved, nobody. I mean they were just little teensy tiny creatures. Who would have thought that they would have replaced the dinosaurs, things like, things like that. I mean anaerobic, I mean aerobic bacteria generating oxygen. Who would have thought that that would have, you know, alter the atmosphere? So evolution has a sort of micro component, but then it has a macro component that is totally unforeseeable. Opens up whole new areas of adaptive radiation, the first birds, things like that. But there's a cultural equivalent of that. And Tim O'Reilly is pioneer of the Internet age and I have a conversation with him that I can can direct to you on just that topic. And the whole Internet age is like that. Who could have predicted TikTok, for example, you know, after it happened? You can trace its origins back perhaps to what you just said. There was the writer strike and then that led to TikTok. You couldn't have predicted that beforehand and yet you can trace it backwards. So all of that is.

One of the tools I like to use as a mind map structure. And in terms of work that I'm doing, and I'll use the interview series as one of them is I not only list the person that I'm putting onto the interview, I also list the individuals or circumstances that got me there. I can't go back too far because I can go back to being born. In theory, everything started at that point. But I might say I met this person through this person at this event because this person told me that this would happen and I should be there because I was at this event or I was at this place at this time. And some interviews that I've had, I can trace back 10 generations. And it was, and it could have been happenstance where I bumped into somebody I was sitting. Well, there actually is one. There is a person working on Project Moon Hut that I met in a cafe in Hong Kong. I was working five other people around. They asked me what I was working on. And five years later, that individual who has now left Hong Kong because of COVID and. And the political unrest, they're in London. We connected because of the WhatsApp signal. Individuals leaving WhatsApp because of privacy. Her name showed up on the list of people moved to signal. I reached out and said, it's been a long time, we've had a conversation and she's fully engaged. So we could relate it to a non, non important, an actual mistaken situation to today's activities that we could never have planned.

Yeah, so this is getting to the from adapted to adaptable part of our conversation. And I want to go back to Victor Wong.

We've got, I think we're on number. We have four and five. Do you want to give me the quickly because we had fair and inclusive decision making.

Well, I'll take another detour first because I mentioned Victor Hunter earlier and his book the Rainforest, which explains why certain areas like Silicon Valley become so productive and creative, whereas everyone wants to create the Silicon. I mean, there's so many innovation parks and efforts to create innovation zones. Why do so many of them fail? And it's just little islands of creativity that form not just Silicon Valley, but that's one of the main ones. And what Victor says is that what they combine, what these successful innovation zones combine, are two things that seldom go together. Number one, a high degree of cooperation. Number two, a high degree of diversity. And the reason that those typically don't go together is that typically we cooperate only with our own kind. But what takes place in some place like Silicon Valley, and it's always not entirely inclusive. There's groups that are excluded from all of this, make no mistake. But nevertheless, there is a kind of social identity that forms, that is highly inclusive in terms of a diversity of talent. So within Silicon Valley, there's so many different skill sets that get brought together and an impressive range of ethnicities. And it's very highly cooperative at an informal scale, just like a hunter gatherer society. So cooperative that one lawyer said if you're a really good businessman, you don't need a lawyer at all because you're just good for your word. And it's a small enough community so that if you're a bad actor, then it just becomes known and no one wants to do business with you. So a very hunter gatherer like social structure, except anyone can become a member of that group. So diversity plus cooperation is what's needed. And I think that you described that in your own experience just now, where you're just interacting with so many different people and who can predict when you come together in any particular context, who's going to, who you're going to draw upon. But you do have that pool of variation.

In the Silicon Valley example. Mark Grosser, who's a good friend of mine, he was, he's 89 years old. I think today he's part of a family that all lives over 100 years old. He's an amazing Individual. And he was there, he's been through the journey of Silicon Valley. And he said, look, you had this, this campus that was Stanford. And what Stanford did is they allowed the only place in the entire world, it allowed all the teachers to put up their home residence on Stanford campus. So even if you retired, you were still on campus. You were constantly being called upon. And he said there were thousands of individuals who became part of this ecosystem. That never would have happened otherwise. But because Stanford said you could be on the campus, you ended up having this very eclectic group of individuals. And you had classes where you can call on someone who's just down the street, they could come. But it was even more so that these individuals were very much into a different type of structure that you'd often be in a class and the teacher would say, well, you're smarter at this than I am. Why don't you teach for the next 20 minutes? And that structure, the Berkeley and the Stanford structure, has not been duplicated in a way anywhere else around the world today. So that think tank, that immense group of diverse individuals with very different thinking methodologies from a global draw, has created this place called Silicon Valley. So while individuals do leave and they're leaving for places like Austin, I am talking to individuals who have gotten there and then left. They've said, no, no, no, this is nothing like, yeah, the shared system that was created in this one little dot that if you were in space, it's only about miles, 25 miles from, from San Francisco to Santa Clara, somewhere in there that within a half a mile, left or right of the main road that goes down, it's one of the wealthiest dots on the planet.

Exactly, yeah. And so when we think about this more explicitly as an evolutionary process and the three ingredients, variation, selection and replication, then first, this rich variation that we're talking about is one of the things that's needed and only exists in some places, not others. And when it does exist, it's inadvertent. Right. People didn't plan that. It just happened in that particular place. Israel is said to be an innovation nation. And one reason, according to Victor, is because of the draft. The draft throws all Israelis together. They meet a diversity of people they never would have met otherwise. And then when they leave, they all do business with each other. Of course, the Palestinians are cut out. That's that combination of, you know, only partial inclusion, but.

And it ties back to you. It ties back to your example. These people are living in threatening environments on a daily basis in the military, so that there is that camaraderie, that when you leave, you had a much stronger bond than you would if you were in a non combative environment.

Well, a great example I've been wanting to work in, David, and it's again, it also enters the business world. General Stanley McChrystal, in his book Team of Teams, he's now a business consultant, but he was the general in charge of US Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan when Al Qaeda was the problem. And so he was faced with this paradox of the greatest military machine on earth who was able to just steamroll its way into Iraq, and then once it got there, found itself being beaten by this other enemy, this new enemy in the form of Al Qaeda that it couldn't beat with its current organization. McChrystal helped to develop something that he called a team of teams. The teams were like the Navy seals and so on. But the point is that just as you were saying earlier, David, they were given authority to make decisions on the ground as it was happening. When something erupts, you can't just go up a chain of command to get permission. You have to do something right then and there. And these teams were authorized to do that. The rigorous Navy SEAL training, according to a crystal, it's not to make you physically fit, it's to bond you. I mean, it's creating exactly that situation so that you become a band of brothers, because it's just forcing you to rely upon yourself. And so they're not selecting for Rambos or anything like that. The individualists get washed out of that system. And what you end up with are groups, hardened groups, that are truly interacting as organisms. They know each other's moods so well that they don't even have to speak to each other in an emergency. That's how well coordinated they are. But that wasn't good enough, because when those teams operated underneath the standard hierarchical military command structure, then you've just pushed the inefficiency higher up the higher up the scale. And so McChrystal, by his own account, actually created, it's amazing to think of it, an open, transparent structure where he would actually get these larger units to interact with each other in a team like fashion. And one way he did that would be by taking, for example, a Navy SEAL and embed them in another elite group in the army or something like that. I don't remember the details, but he had a way of basically stitching together at a higher scale. And that brings us back to something that we need to emphasize more than we have already. The entire problem is how to scale up? How do we scale up? How do we scale up? How do we scale up? We know what works at a small scale. We have many, many examples. We can understand it with more theoretical precision than ever before. And so kind of we've got that down. At least we can. And of course, we need to spread that more widely because if you look at all the groups that exist, the many billions of them, what you'll find, as Eleanor Ostrom did, is they vary. There's a bell shaped curve, any kind of kind of group you can identify, then if you were to study them, you'd find that a bell shaped curve. Some work spectacularly without needing to be coached. Others are meltdowns. Most muddle along somewhere in between. And so one thing we can do is we could cause all groups to function better at that scale, and then we need to scale up. So there's our agenda. There's our agenda.

Yeah. The one model that I've used since having built three nonprofits in certain roles, some in leadership, none not extremely fast and extremely large, is that in the beginning, everybody works with me, I don't put them into the group. Kind of the bad apple destroys the group. So if they only stay for a week or two or three, and then they leave because they're non profit, they can't. What happens is they destroy the camaraderie within the group. But if they work with me for a period of time, they get to know me, they get to have a singular message. They understand what we're talking about with a new language, a new identity to what their role is and how they can participate. And then I bring them into groups where there already is a foundational understanding of what we're doing and how we're getting there. Because they're often not simple constructs. And the groups tend to stay very long. And we've had 15,000% growth. And I'm trying to look at this team of teams, and to some degree, I then cross over, I cross pollinate. Well, you're working in this area. This one person will be very helpful to you. And then I'm still in that group for a period of time. Now I pull back, I do less, but there's already a common language. So I'm more like the soccer player just giving a little Taps app instead of now directing the group. And I. And then I. I'm always saying, hey, you know, this is your decision. Well, David, what do you think? No, no, I'm okay. Whatever you want to decide. But they've already Been. They've already traveled some of the distance together as nonprofit and I. And so if we're thinking on a global scale, and I'm trying to imagine how that would happen is how do you create. You need to create groups. Going back to your team of teams, you need to create groups that are cross cultural, cross position, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross. So that there is an understanding that happens and a purpose that is driven. That's not uniform, but uniformly accepted. 73% there. I know.

Yeah, you got an A plus on that too, David. And let me just comment on two parts of it. One is the need to be selective and to get someone who starts out well oriented as opposed to that orientation taking place after they join the group. I mean, we want that other thing to happen. But if we can start with someone who's well oriented. Please, let's. I'm reminded of an eco village that I studied called Dancing Rabbit, one of the most successful eco villages and their process for admitting a new member. Lots of people want to join that village, but they're very selective. And so there's a whole screening process, and it ends up with, you know, before we really admit you, we want you to come live here for a month and then we'll decide.

Right.

So there's. So that's what you're doing, which is the same thing.

We're a nonprofit. You're coming here just for money, which you'd be surprised how many people come and they say, well, I want to help, I want to help, I want to help. They'll talk for three weeks and they'll say, yeah, but that's going to cost this. Okay.

So the other thing I want to focus on is that when you describe what you did as a leader of that, I would describe it as an enlightened form of top down. So there was a lot of top down stuff you were doing, but it was not in the form of just like, do this. You were not imposing your own decision. Instead, you were orchestrating a process. You were creating a social environment in which the decisions that got made were not your decision. You made it happen in this more indirect sense by appropriately structuring the social environment. When we generalize that, we can say that we need to function in two capacities. Number one, as designers of social systems, and number two, as participants in the systems that we design. Two capacities. And in one capacity, of course, we have to have the whole system in mind. But in the second capacity, functioning in the context of being participating in the systems that we design, we actually do not have to have the whole system in mind. The system has been constructed so that we can pursue some lower level of self interest. It doesn't have to be entirely selfish, but it's just attending to some local concern, not needing to have the whole system in mind, thanks to the fact that the system has been constructed that way. And it seems to me that when you describe what you did, you were behaving in that first capacity as the designer of a social system.

It's very, very much thought out because I know that I'm not the smartest guy in the room. And I. Or person in the room, not guy, just person. And so the only way that I could see getting individuals to do be high performance is that we have a common bond. There's an understanding between us, there's an understanding of what we're doing. And then the evolutionary side is, and I share this with individuals is I actually make a chart and I say, in the beginning you'll hear a lot of me, not so much you because you're learning. But my expectation is that I will disappear. You won't hear my voice and your voice will be prevalent. And I share with him that over time you'll see that I step back. I don't want to make all the decisions. I want you to make the decisions, but I have to get you to a point where you know how to ride a bicycle. That's my job. Get you on the bicycle and get it riding. But once you're riding, go wherever you want.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I want to give a one of my favorite examples, David, which has to do with the smart city movement. And it touches on quite a few of the points that we've been discussing. And it centers on the 3 digit 311, which is the 3 digit telephone number that you call not to report an emergency, that's 911, but to report any little dysfunction in the city where you live. A pothole, failed trash pickup, street lamp where the bulb is out, any little thing that needs to be fixed, you can call 311. And then that information gets relayed to the service departments and they allocate their resources accordingly. 311 began as a cultural mutation in the city of Baltimore in order to handle inappropriate calls that were inappropriate for 911. But soon enough they realized that it was important in its own right and they began to use language such as the eyes and ears of the city. They began to think of 3, 1, 1 as a kind of a perceptual organ that could gather information Just like our sensory organs. And then that could be. That could be processed. It took on a life of its own. But when you think of it, if you really want 311 to function in that capacity, it's going to require a lot of work. It's not going to happen all by itself. There's only some demographic categories are going to use it. There's going to have to be equities that you have to correct for all kinds of stuff like that. In the process of constructing the system and addressing those biases, they discovered that when real people use 31 1, they're motivated, most of them only to do it in their neighborhoods. They actually don't care about the city, they only care about their neighborhood. The average 311 call takes place within 9 meters of your home. And they discovered something else. Some people were motivated to report, like natural dysfunctions, like a pothole. Other people were motivated to report social transgressions, like somebody double parking on your street or something like that. There were two motivations, which in game theory terms, if you've heard the concept of altruistic punishment, some people are, you know, moralistic punishers, not everyone. And you need those moralistic punishers. And so actually that what we would call a polymorphism, individual differences, was reflected itself in, in this data. The bottom line was a lot of work was required to create this perceptual organ for the city. And the people who did that were functioning in the first capacity with the welfare of the whole system in mind, of the city in mind. But once it was constructed, then the individual participating within that system, all they had to do Is to punch P1 1 when they noticed some disorder within their.

And if we tie this to the world of AI and we've had AI for quite some time, I always tell people, look, if you've been on Amazon and you and it's recommended a book, and you read the book, your world was changed because of AI. That's AI. It's that simple. But now with the sensor tech that we have and the combination of tools, Waze, which is the Israeli GPS system for your car for traveling, Waze enabled you to punch in if there was a pothole or an issue. So now I'm assuming it's out of the nine meters. But at the same time, there is now tech that can identify that a road does have an issue. And you don't have to have human interaction because there are cameras who see a crack or something develop and the AI identifies it and can create an order without any Human interaction. There is a pothole. Schedule it for being done and it's put on the punch list of the Department of Transportation or whomever is responsible for it. So, yeah, yeah.

So basically coordinating this whole Internet of things, big data, all of this, you gave a great example of it, David, with the more human element, consulting people in their everyday lives and making it fully participatory is the great challenge. And I think that a lot of the smart cities movement is tech heavy. Yes. But really the appropriate balance is well within reach and I think that's trending in that direction. So all of this gives me optimism, by the way, to cut to the bottom line, I think that we have wonderful solutions right around the corner and that really it's a matter of looking at it through the appropriate lens, which is not the lens of individualism, not the lens of orthodox economics, but this more multilevel lens. The more we actually think of this as we are consciously evolving our futures and that evolutionary science has something to say about that. We don't have to use words like evolution and adapt in the vernacular. We could actually employ what we know scientifically about it then. And there's a huge added value in doing that. So number four is monitoring agreed upon behaviors. If we can't monitor what we're doing, of course the misbehaviors can, can occur. And so that's a kind of a no brainer. And then number five is graduated sanctions, which means if somebody misbehaves, doesn't do what they should, obviously it needs to be corrected. But need not start out harsh, need not start out mean spirited, should start out friendly. And Lynn Ostrom's favorite example of that was back to the lobster gangs of Maine. So imagine there's a lobster fisherman, they own the bay. Imagine that somebody comes in and they, they put a trap down. And those colorful lobster buoys, which are emblematic of Maine, they're distinctive for a purpose because they're colored in a way so that you could recognize the individual lobstermen. So the lobstermen immediately know if there's traps out there that are not their own. And so now what do they do about it? And Lynn loved telling this story. She used to laugh and laugh. They tie a bow around the buoy and she used to say, just imagine those big burly lobstermen tying a bow around the buoy of the interloper. And so there's your graduated sanctions. A gentle reminder that really, sir, you should not be here. And of course, if they don't take the hint, then, you know that it's going to escalate. So there's the example of graduated sanctions. And if you look at religion, study religions as I do, I've made a very serious study of religions, you find that they beautifully, beautifully handled graduated sanctions. I mean, if you're misbehaving in a church, well, it begins with brotherly admonition and that it ends with exclusion, with many gradations. You cannot partake in the supper and things like that. And so, and so and most enduring cultures, David, by virtue of the fact that they're enduring, exemplify. I mean, they implement these principles. Well, that's why they're still with us. So these principles are both old and new. I mean, they're ancient because they work. And all we're doing, all Eleanor Ostrom did, was basically discover these principles which have been culturally evolved in a thousand different forms again and again and again. So.

I'm assuming there are many cultures that have had these challenges where the extremism starts much earlier. Then you're describing where a punishment becomes go to prison immediately. And I'm referencing the incarceration of the United States and how many people are incarcerated for crimes that some individuals believe should not have been and others do. I can see having lived in Asia, and I won't name countries that have this high degree of punishment at a very, very early time, even to the impact of if you go into a country with a piece of fruit that is not acceptable, it could be. Or carrying something, you could be in really serious trouble. Very quickly. How has that played out over time?

That's a great question, David, and let me just think about that, because you're absolutely right that there's context in which the punishment, the punishment for transgression is extremely severe and very early.

I mean, there's no second chance. Talking about the stoning of individuals for having an extramarital affair, it could be your first one, but you could die.

Yeah. And so I think that I'm trying to think, and I don't want to come across as if I have all the answers. I.

By no means it's just a conversation.

But I mean, part of these are highly repressive cultures. And so it's a form of. It's not a form of like a cooperate, maintaining cooperation in an equitable group. It's a form of. Of suppression that typically there's a minority group that you're holding under your thumb and the slightest transgression merits punishment. I think also when a group, even when it is cooperative as a group, there's a lot of solidarity and so on. If it's an extreme existential threat, then there really has to be rigid policing. I have a wonderful colleague named Michelle Gelfand who is a cross cultural psychologist and she studies a continuum of spectrum of cultural variation that's called from loose to tight. And so in a tight culture there's strong norms strongly enforced. That's the kind of culture that you're drawing attention to. A loose culture provides so much more latitude for individuals to do what they want, much more tolerance for individual differences. It turns out that this spectrum of cultural variation maps onto an environmental gradient of existential threat. If the whole culture is threatened, it's so important for them to work in lockstep step, then the slightest deviation brings down the hammer, basically. Whereas in a looser culture then it's, it's so much more, so much more tolerant. America's among the loosest of, of cultures and we see that playing out, of course.

Is it looseness of cultures for all societies within the culture?

Well, there's playing plenty of variation within America of course. In fact, you know, you can, this is so interesting. As a nation, America is as loose any culture can tighten up in a day. I mean 911 was a tightening event for America. And then if you look at geographical variation within America, for example the 50 states, then you find plenty of variation. Mississippi is tighter than New York and so on. So. And it's, and it's practical, it can just go down to any scale. Oh, you know, basically one of the things I did was study all the religious congregations in my city of Binghamton, A tiny city, but there's still 100 religious congregations. And you get that continuum within any, any denomination. That's the spectrum from conservative to progressive.

But I guess I'm getting to is historically do you find one over the other being able to thrive as longer duration, higher mass, higher attraction rate or, or is there really no order? It's just a selection process that individuals have to maintain themselves?

You find that because. It depends on the environment. So the more existentially insecure you make things, then the more you basically favor the conditions for tight, tight cultures and the more existentially secure things become, then the more cultural evolution drives in the direction of looseness. So you can take for example, Europe several centuries ago. Christian religions look more like Islamic religions today in terms of their, you know, converting at the point of the sword. And Calvinism for example, in Switzerland you couldn't, you know, there were rules about what clothes you could wear when you could Dance things like, things like that. That was the Protestant Reformation. But as Europe became more secure then all of those cultures loosened up and you got very loose forms of religion and so on and then secular life altogether to be non religious was, was. But then you get the Middle east and so on which are existentially insecure. That's the home for fundamentalism in all of its, all of its, all of its forms. And so basically the cultural form that you get is responsive to the environment. Part of that is based on a. Just a psychological response. That's why in fact there's a whole literature that if we prime you for death, like a word scramble exercise in which you're unscrambling the word funeral as opposed to unscrambling some other word, then that actually just invokes a psychology of existential threat. You will then vote for a more conservative candidate after the words bramble funeral.

So it's still. You look at the Roman Empire, you look at the Genghis Khan's empire, you look at Napoleon, you've got the. In the Middle east there is the country of Israel which runs very differently than the other countries. You've got the Chinese Empire, the Japanese Empire, the. These have lasted and have very different loose to tight correlations that I'm not and I probably could have named 20 others taking South America, the Incas and others. I don't know if there's a correlation to time, survival, growth, all, all of those factors that there might just be. These are, these are norms that are accepted that allow this culture to grow until it no longer can function anymore.

Yeah. So I want to take note, David that on my first chapter, evolution is transcendent knowledge. Our conversation is demonstrating that we began with Darwin, Darwin's theory, genetic evolution, the study of non human species. We've covered so many different topics, religious business of course, which is we're getting to. Now we're on macro human history, the rise and fall of empires, all of that basically being seen as evolutionary processes of one sort or another. And the go to person on the last 10,000 years of human history is Peter Turchin who is a biologist by training. He's at the University of Connecticut, written a book called War and Peace and War and the Rise and Fall of Empires. Another book called ultrasociety how 10,000 years of war Made Us the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. And then a book called the Ages of Discord which is a detailed history of American history, the roller coaster of American history of being. Of alternating between being highly equitable and democratic to highly inequitable, the first guild of age. And so the basically cycles of equality and inequality that's taking place during our own. During our own history. And to focus on just one part of that, David, the Axial Age. So here back up more, back to this. What happened with the agricultural revolution. We've got hunter gatherer societies which as we've seen are impressively egalitarian, even if it wasn't extended always to women, for example. And then with the advent of agriculture, then the scale of society grew to a point where it actually outstripped our genetically evolved ability to regulate each other, to control bullying and so on. And so there was a period of human history which became largely despotic, more like a chimp society than small scale human societies. And then that in turn because. Because between group selection was taking place. And it is the case that the more cooperative societies do function better in between group competition. Despotic societies don't work well above a certain scale. You just can't bully people into doing your bidding above a certain scale. They will resist. And so societies that offered a better deal for their citizens did prevail in between group competition. The whole efflorescence of democracy and classical Greece is an example of that. There's a lot of scholarship on that. But then the advent of the major religions during what historians call the Axial Age, this was Christianity and Buddhism, all of the major Confucianism, all of the major religions can be seen as somewhat independently. They were coupled to a degree, but somewhat independently, providing a social glue at a still larger scale. But by basically subordinating the emperor to the gods. Now gods became moralistic in a way that was more than before, but always in the context of competition, competition and warfare at a still larger scale. And so the Axial Age religions, they did unite societies at a larger scale. That's the good news. Caused them to become more cooperative, but it was still in the context of warfare at a. Still at an even larger scale. That's the goodness paradox that Richard Wrangham refers to in the title of his book that within group cooperation between group competition are just joined at the hip. We're geniuses at both.

So let's take that jump to the great constriction.

Now let me dash through the other core design principles. So we're up to five.

Oh, there, I think. How many did you say there were? I thought there were five.

Nope, there's eight.

Okay, sure, keep on going.

Yeah, Number six is fast and fair conflict resolution. That goes without saying. Number seven is local autonomy. Basically, groups have to be given the elbow room to manage their own affairs. If they're being micromanaged from without, then all bets are off. And number eight is appropriate relations among other groups which reflect the same principles. So these principles are scale independent. They're needed to govern between group relations, no less than within group relations. And if you drop in on conversations about such things as the European Union, Brexit, You name it, with large scale, basically interactions among Leviathan units such as corporations and the economy and so on, the very same principles are, are operating.

There's a common. What you're saying is there's a commonality that allows them to be able to transcend each group, yet there is an independence and an autonomy that allows them to be who they are individually.

Yep, yep, that's right, that's right, that's right. And so, so, so basically, the blueprint for the global village is a real village. And we're back to the scaling up. If you look at the most successful nations on earth, such as the Nordic countries, and we've made a very detailed study of Norway, what you find is that they've managed to scale up this village scale of governance. They've managed to scale it up to the national scale. We call it social democracy. But what it means is a balance of power among the major sectors. The state is strong, capital is strong. These are very capitalist nations, make no mistake. And labor is strong, and so nobody can be pushed around. And they interact in a collaborative fashion with the welfare of the whole nation in mind. And it's thanks to that that Norway was able to take its oil reserves. And many, many nations have oil reserves. Norway is by no means special in that, but they turned it into the world's largest sovereign fund. Tiny nation of Norway is the world's largest sovereign fund. But of course they invest with Norway in mind, and so their investment decisions are often bad for the planet. So there's your game of monopoly. We've wrapped it up all the way up to the national scale, but not yet up to the international scale.

I think that challenge for the English language, which has become the prominent language. Actually Chinese is the most used language on the planet. But as a global tool, the English language has had a lot of. I'm going to use yours, maybe a symbol. This symbol of social has become socialism. But socialism is not the same as social democracy and the same thing as liberal. A liberal democracy does not mean it's liberal in the same context as the way it's being used. So I think the term social democracy would immediately be taken by many countries around the world. Not just the United States, but many countries around the world as well. That's got to be socialism. And it's not. It is a decision making structure the way you're making it sound. It is a collective cultural positioning and it's for the benefit of all who live in that community. Did I say that right?

Yeah David, I said earlier that every important word has to be interrogated. And don't blame the English language. The English language has plenty of flexibility in order to frame things correctly. But you're right that in our current moment the word social has been linked to socialism. And here's what's important to say is that the critique of socialism is a fair critique. That every nation that has called itself a socialist nation has failed spectacularly. And there's two reasons that we can point to. One is centralized planning. Centralized planning doesn't work. The world is too complex for, for that. And the other of course is the concentration of power. Whenever power gets concentrated into the hands of elites, then it begins to be governed for the benefit of the elites. It doesn't matter how well meaning the whole thing started out. There's many examples of socialist efforts that actually did start out with the best of intentions, but they all went down the same road. First of all, centralized planning which didn't work and then the formation of elites which ended up. And we see the same thing what we just said about socialist nations also hold for any corporation that relies on command and control top down planning. I mean many corporations are run like socialist nations and no matter how well intentioned they start out like Google during the early days, do not no evil. They're just gonna, they're just gonna evolve into self serving. It's interesting unless you don't have the governance those core design principles operating.

I would bet you if you asked a thousand individuals about their corporate structure and what is it more symbolic of in governance? They're not going to go to governance. They're not are going to say it's capitalistic which is not the same type of governance structure that we're talking about. And I would bet you the majority of individuals do not know they operate under this socialism construct. They would believe that they do not.

Right, Right. But they do.

I think that's the biggest, I think that's for me that's the aha is that I could go to a company and you can name it from Caterpillar to Huawei to Ikea and say how do you operate the Word socialism. If it is in that structure, I can't name that they are in that structure. They would say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not. We're a capitalist organization. We run by. We're democracy. And I question so often individuals when they say they run like a democracy. And I will say, this is how I normally do it. This I will say, let me ask you a question before we talk about democracy. How do you run your household? Oh, it's a democracy. So your children have the same vote as you do? Well, no, David, come on, be serious here. I said you and your wife vote on everything. Well, no, she just think so.

You.

So let me ask you again, what type? Well, it's probably more like authoritarian. Okay, okay, so at least we know what you run at home. Authoritarian rule. So now let's take where you go to work. Now, you're a manager, you're a leader, you're this, you're that. How is that run? Well, that's a democracy. So the Receptionist can spend $7 million, come up with an idea, and his votes on the $7 million acquisition or expenditure? Well, no, David, come on, let's be serious. I'm asking you. You just told me it's a democracy. So explain to me how. How it's a democracy. Well, I guess it's also authoritarian. And then I could do that for the local school. I do it for the community. And I say, wait, wait, wait. So you wanted to live in a pure democracy, which is by definition, no. Pure capitalism is no rules, no. No tariffs, no child labor laws. None of that would exist in pure capitalism. And you're now saying you're pure democracy, you want that, but nowhere in your life do you live that. So what do you mean by you want to be a democracy? And I try to get them to realize that there are other, better definitions to describe what really is happening. And I love how here you've kind of brought it to. Well, you are actually acting as a socialist.

Yeah.

I don't know if the phone.

Will be hung up, the zoom call be closed.

I am not a socialist. No, no, no, you are. You're acting like one.

Well, Charles. Charles O'Reilly, I think I have the right guy. He's a Stanford business professor, and he has a. He studies the basically survivorship of corporations. And it's astonishing how many companies in the Fortune 500, for example, are only there for a very short period of time. Companies, no matter how successful and powerful they are, have a profound incapacity for change. The Change that does occur is good old Shapater's creative destruction. The innovation occurs elsewhere, not within the major companies. And then, then that ends up being disruptive and you get that creative turnover. And he has a book called the Ambidextrous Organization, which makes the following wise point, that, that if you look at the companies that actually are adaptable here, we're at their chapter nine here, from adapted to adaptable. Yeah, companies that are not nearly adapted to their current situation, which is why they're dominant and profitable, but are capable of also adapting, then in the first place, there's very, very few. When you look at them, what you find is they've actually partitioned their operations. Because what it takes to do a current operation, well, is different. It requires a different social organization than to evolve new. The next best, the next best thing. It simply requires a different kind of organization. One is a process of doing something that has been perfected, so quality control is paramount. The other is a process of deliberate variation and innovation, which means that we have some target, something we're trying to do, we don't know how to do it, therefore we must have abundant variation and then we must be able to identify what works and we must invest in that. And so that is just different, just plain different. And so the corporations that manage to do both actually require being ambidextrous. There's not a hybrid. They just have to have some part of their operation is doing one, another part of their operation is doing the other. That's how they manage to stay.

To.

Be adaptable in addition to being adapted.

And I'm thinking about the future and redefining the challenges that we have. There's a. There's a picture of that was taken from space and don't quote me on the years, I think in 1970s that the Earth was very blue and very green. And about 10 years later, there was another probe that took another picture of the Earth and it was still very green and blue. And there was one in the 2000s that was taken and you could see the browning of the Earth. It's dull. And the United nations just put out this past week, the 75th anniversary, by a woman. And I would have to look up her name. She had done some graphics of what she sees is the perspective future. And in that she shows what. How brown the Earth has become, what it could be in 2050, what it could be in 2083. And the world is dying in these images. And so when I'm to say that what we're working towards is we don't want the Earth to die. I would assume that would be a case for most individuals on the planet. The localized autonomy and the individuality that has been the existence of humanity, that's a country or a society, is that we have to still embrace that while at the same time creating a collective. So I think there's a fear when we say Norway has done it and they've leaped over, they've still been able to give those individual regions and individual people in their own communities, their own decision making and values that culture collectively create. We have to do that on a global scale. And it's a, as I say, a mirth scale. It's a huge undertaking in a short period of time. Yet we do have this, I hate the word existential threat, but we have a threat that goes back to solving challenges very quickly because of an existence of a condition that is life threatening that we spoke about earlier.

So I spoke, yeah, so to note the progress that's made there, which is why I think that there can be a realistic form of optimism of how many people are converging upon a whole Earth ethic. Of course, it includes environmentalists, Gaia and all of that. And also includes the major religious leaders such as the Pope and. And his Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote a book called Beyond Religion and Ethics for the Whole World. I actually had the honor of a one hour conversation with the Dalai Lama that was sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute. He never loses an opportunity to say, look, there's 8 billion people on the world and 1 billion aren't religious at all. So we need some vocabulary to provide an ethics for the whole world. We have the Pope and is our common home always now, the Pope speaking on behalf of the whole world. Contrast that to what we said earlier with Christianity forming in the context of warfare. So it's actually not hard, strange as it might seem, to embrace a whole Earth ethic, to make that your primary identity. And so. But where does science fit in? Where does economics fit in? And there we have, I think, a opportunity to replace old theories and old narratives with newer ones that are much, much more compelling and compatible with the whole Earth ethic. In other words, we can say science tells us we have strong, strong scientific reasons for the necessity of basing our policy decisions on the welfare of the whole Earth. That's the system. That's the system. And everything lower than that, from our nations to our international corporation, everything lower all the way down to the little groups that we love and partake in in our lives. Those Social identities remain strong and the smaller they become, the stronger they they become. That's where life is, is fulfilling. But all of that, all of those layers upon layers upon layers of groupings and their respective social identities have to be calibrated, coordinated with the welfare of the whole earth and mind. We have a scientific justification for that.

I'm looking at this on a global scale and one example that I will take is the $20 million was only 20 was offered to the rainforest and it was turned down by Balocero because he had a challenge with the things that were being said from this country. I think was prime Minister. If the timeline doesn't work, if you break something so far that while there is a movement in this direction, you can't fix the egg once it's broken, can't put it back together as an original egg. And do you feel based upon what you're saying, that the timeline that is being drawn out by many groups and the anti science individuals who believe none of this is true, and there is a large population of individuals around the world and 67 or 70% of the world's population is in Asia. And having lived in Asia, I have seen the behaviors and participated in the behaviors as to how they live are unsustainable and, and they're not changing to the degree in which they need to be. For example, Hong Kong, when I first arrived there, had on the front page of the scmp, the South China Morning Post, a big picture of the globe. And it said that if we don't, that if the rest of the world used the resources that Hong Kong does, we'd need 13 additional worlds. I use this one example of an individual who lives in Xiamen in China, good friend of mine, and she said to me during this great conversation that I got to talk to you after my shower. And I said, okay, what about 20 minutes, 25 minutes? She said, no, no, no. I take a 20 to 50 minute shower every day. And I said 20 to 50 minutes. And I don't know if I've said this on other podcasts, but when she said that, I jumped into righteousness mode, if you want to call it, I don't know what the word right term is, is.

Well, what about.

And she with within seconds slapped me through the screen. Don't you tell me that you. We can't take our showers. I love my showers. And you've had this your entire life. You're not in a position to tell us when we can't live this way. Whoa. I mean, I was floored because she was right and rapidly went through my mind is lifestyle is rich and famous Hollywood movies, the propaganda that has come out of tier four countries and that could be anywhere in the world that has been putting out content and showing how a lifestyle could be. How do we come into the. The Indonesians, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Not Singapore as much, but China. How do we go into these countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and say, you can't have what you've seen the rest of the world have? And it becomes. It's a challenging question.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And so basically you have to walk the walk and. And nobody's walking the walk economically, especially not the most advanced nations. And Norway is no different than the others. They have a very high quality of life that would take 13 Earths or whatever for everyone to everyone to have. And so, yeah, there's a reckoning. If you look, if you look throughout history and you find that periods that were a healthy form of globalism basically took steps towards a healthy form of globalism. Or you could roll it back. I think that. Trying to think of how to structure this conversation, David, because it could go in so many directions. But Tocqueville, the French social theorist who visited America and wrote Democracy and America, talked a lot about self interest and self interest, rightly understood. And the idea was that with the passing of the aristocratic forms of governance and the emergence of democratic forms of governance, he said that more and more will have to be justified in terms of self interest. You can't get anything done in a democratic nation without appealing to the self interest of your constituents. But at the same time, what he saw as the genius of American democracy was that that feeling of self interest was actually related to the republic. That actually Americans thought about self interest in a way that caused them to cooperate with each other for the common good of the republic. So there were actually two polls, not just one. It wasn't just self interest. It was self interest in a way which led to cooperation for the common good. And William James wrote a book called the Ethical Republic, which was the same, which was the same way. And so when you have those two poles, then it leads you to do such things. And people thought about America then as the beacon for the rest of the world. Everyone and every nation in the world should strive to emulate what was taking place in the United States. And just as 13 colonies had begun to cooperate with each other, then all the nations of the world should. Let's have a League of nations, let's have a United Nations. There's a Framing there. Let's have a European Union. There was a framing there that I think, although it's only partially succeeded, is something that we can. Something that we can build upon. But only of course, if you walk the walk, if you're.

Which is. I was on the call with Hannah Strong, whose husband was Marie Strong, United nations, very involved in the World Economic Forum. There's a lot of history there. And she said, I've been to all the meetings around the world. We have 25 people show up, say they're going to solve all the challenges. They write and agree to everything. And then 24 and a half of them do nothing. They go back and they do their own thing and we are not moving forward. And then we have. In the United States, we've just had this new era, the Trump era and the disassociation with the rest of the world. A lot of challenges. Let's get. Because I know you said that you have a one o' clock and I. And I want to make sure of timing. We have number four, the Great Constriction. Let's see if we can hit these and go down them.

Yeah, I will do it real fast, David, because we have covered a lot of these, the Great Constriction.

And I've found whenever someone gives a very long list, and this is considered to me long, that because the way I think and it's not about me, but the way I think and ask questions, we end up covering most of the. The things that happened in the past in the later chapters or outline. So that's fine. I just want to make sure that if we have some other great points, we have the time to go over them. So the Great Constriction.

So even though Darwin included all aspects of humanity, in this view of life, there is grandeur in this view of life, all things human. The study of evolution became constricted to genetic evolution. That's the great constriction. So now around the world, if you say evolution, most people hear the word genes as if the only way that offspring can resemble their parents is by sharing the same genes. It wasn't until the last quarter of the 20th century that evolutionists went back to basics. Now I'm going right to chapter five here to define an evolutionary process is any process.

Just one question before you hit the five. So when did this happen? The Great Constriction in terms of timeline and are we moving in back to this other view of evolution on a global scale?

Yeah. So I mean very quickly.

Yep.

Because Darwin did not know Anything about the mechanisms of heredity. And everyone back then, they were just thoroughly muddled. And then the work of Mendel, which Mendel was a contemporary of Darwin, but the significance of his work was not appreciated until the early 20th century, then at last provided a mechanism for inheritance. And so the science of genetics was started, then population genetics. And then that led to what's called the modern synthesis, which was took place in about the 1940s. And so because that was the only. And Mendelism has this algebraic quality to it, if you remember the, you know, the Mendel's Ps and exist in frequencies, you could build a mathematical theory around Mendelian, Mendelian genetics. And so against that background, the idea that culture is an evolutionary process, that behavioral flexibility is an evolutionary process that takes place within the lifetime of an individual that didn't go away, but they just got pushed way into the shadows. Evolutionary scientists had essentially nothing to say about culture that was seeded to other disciplines and that didn't begin to reverse itself. As I said in the late 1970s, which is when I entered the field. So back to basics means is that any process that combines the three ingredients of variation, selection and replication counts as a Darwinian process. That includes genetic evolution. It includes epigenetic evolution, which is huge. The idea that there can be changes in gene expression, not gene frequency, the turning on and off of genes can also be inherited. It's almost Lamarckian when something can happen to you that can result in the up and down regulation of your genesis. And that up and down regulation can be inherited by your offspring. So that's in a sense a mechanism for Lamarckian.

Do you have an example in that's not human?

Well, one of the. Yeah, well, so. I'm tempted by two and I could we have enough time. A famous example is a famine that the Nazis imposed on the Dutch at the end of World War II. And so there was a famine that lasted seven months. And everyone that was in utero during that famine, when they became adults, they had a different metabolism than people that have just been well fed. The idea here is that organisms have evolved by genetic evolution to be prepared either for food abundance or food scarcity. There's a signal that is transmitted early in life and that basically triggers developmental trajectories where you either have a thrifty metabolism and you hoard every calorie or you have a more wasteful metabolism. Basically you're developmentally adapted to your nutritional environment. When something like this happens, where the organism receives a signal that it's a food poor environment and then they're born into a food rich environment, they become mismatched, developmentally mismatched, and then that results in health outcomes, heart disease problems and obesity and things like that.

Oh really? So it ended up causing challenges that they couldn't. That their body reacted by eating and doing.

Yeah.

And they became larger and had health heart conditions.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. And then another example in a non human species is the when rats, female mother rats, are raising their pups, they lick them to varying degrees. And the amount that they lick them actually acts as the mechanism that causes the rat pups to develop very different life history and sexual strategies. If they're not licked much, then they mature early, they become more aggressive, they become more sexually receptive early and early in life. This is called a fast life history strategy. When life is precarious, there might not be any tomorrow. You have to get going fast. Basically, if they get licked a lot, then they develop into the opposite suite of traits. It's a slow life history strategy. Life is good, you're likely to live a long time, you can take longer to develop, you can build more cooperative relationships. It's a less competitive environment. So once again you have these different suites of adaptations and then they're triggered. The organism is flexible, but the trigger point takes place early in life and in this case mediated by this licking behavior.

If I was to say this properly, the behavior of the species around the individual society, culture, whatever, to this one biological organism, I don't know if that's a way to say it turns on or off other mechanisms that help them to thrive or survive. Is that then. So that's one. Is that then passed on meaning, does the next generation to the human famine situation, are the children of that group also going to be have a propensity for being the mismatch?

In some cases, yes. And it can even go to the grandparental and the great grandparental generation. And so. And so, you know, google epigenetics, that kind of thing and you'll get the actual study. It even extends to such things as telomere length, so that you could actually that you could measure quite easily. So yeah, that's epigenetic expression being transmitted not just to offspring, but to grand offspring and great grand offspring. So that's one of the exciting discoveries. But it's the study of cultural evolution that of course becomes and also personal evolution. To think of our open ended capacity for change as a variation selection replication process and then transgenerational cultural evolution, which brings Us to. We've already talked about cooperation as the signature human adaptation. And we've also talked a little bit about symbolic thought as a form of cooperation. But the idea that our symbolic meaning systems are like our genes. Let me just slow down a little bit. Each and every one of us is a collection of genesis. We call that our genotype. You remember this from college. Those genes influence everything that could be measured about us. We call that our phenotype. There is a genotype, phenotype relationship. That's typically all there is for many species. But in the case of humans, each and every one of us is also a collection of symbols. Some symbolic system is inside our heads. Let's call that our symbotype. That symbotype influences just about anything that might be measured about us. The very same phenotype that's influenced by our genotype. Now, our symbotypes have co evolved where they have a life of their own. And of course they're attached to the larger symbrotype. Our personal symbotype is, is very much a piece, part of the fabric of the larger cultural meaning system. And our whole ability to have symbolic meaning systems has been co evolving with genetic evolution for our entire history of a species. But there is an amazing metaphorical transfer in thinking about our symbolic meaning systems as like our genes. As like our genes. And we've just actually covered the fact that.

Give me again, just give me an example of a symbolic or a few different types of symbolic. Symbolic types.

Well, orthodox economic theory is a symbolic meaning system, okay, that structures the way we look at the world and therefore how we behave. Christianity is a meaning system. Every flavor of religion is a meaning system. It's a collection of beliefs and practices that organize your experience and therefore influences how you act. Every human has a meaning system, but.

They'Re not inherently in us. These. I would have thought, the way you would say it, that we could also take migration of a species to be a symbolic component that is transferred to us as a, hey, we're all going this way for some creatures. Would that be not. Would that be under the first two?

There's nothing much symbolic about that particular example that you gave. If it's sufficient of school for birds in a flock and their movement is influenced by the movement of their closest neighbors, then that happens. But there's nothing symbolic.

So are humans the only one with symbolic?

Maybe yes.

Well, that's, that's what I was getting to because I was trying to expand the definition to all species on Earth. And the way you were describing it kept on constricting me to this one group called humans. So.

Well, I mean, the most outstanding exception of the honeybees with their famous waggle dance. So when, you know, bees are in the hive and they're doing their dance, that dance is actually communicating the location of a food resource, the direction, the distance, all of that. And so there's a correspondence between the behaviors and something out there.

They're going to do it. They probably. There's a genetic component which says you, you do this dance. It wasn't. It's not an outside. You don't learn it. When you get in to the society, it's probably. You go from every species of bees, you're going to see something similar to this.

Oh yeah, that's all genetically programmed.

So you're really saying, when you're saying these symbols, and I wanted to make sure that. Why I kind of pushed the question outside is you're saying these are the norms, structures, beliefs that we inherit once we get onto the, into this planet. And we then use them as references, whether they're cognitive or not, to make decisions and to adapt, live, learn and.

Grow only in humans as symbolic thought become a full blown inheritance.

Okay, that's what I was just making.

Including the combinatorial diversity. You know, every one of us is a unique genetic. Because you take 10, 10 genes with two alleles at each gene, at each locus, there's over a thousand genetic combinations. That's the combinatorial diversity. If you take a symbolic system with 10 elements and all their interconnection, you get the same kind of combinatorial diversity. And when you think that every one of those combinations results in a different suite of behaviors, then we get this relationship between what you think, the way that your mind is structured by your meaning system and how you act, and the infinite combinations of meaning systems that there might be. And then of course, an evolutionary process is winnowing them, winnowing them so that the connection between the meaning system and the real world is not a direct connection. There's not a. And any more than there is with our genes. There's no direct connection between a gene and. No, it's only in terms of what those symbols cause us to do, what they cause us to do. And so that basically brings the need to evolve our meaning system into sharp relief. If we want to change the way we act. Every given symbol type for every person, just with their genes, allow for a certain degree of plasticity. As we've just talked about, every person's symbolic system allows for A certain repertoire of behavioral change in response to their environment. But if you really want to change the way people act on the outside, you have to change their symbolic systems on the inside. There's a need for inner work in order to accomplish outer work. That's the main.

So let me toss one out which has had some meaning and I'm going to tie it back to the Project Moon. Hut we use this term called mirth. And it's amazing. And I want you to tell me if this is in line with it. It's amazing that people who are very interested in the space industry when I say we have this construct called mirth, Moon and Earth. I don't like lunar and sister lunar, they're too complicated. But a nine year old can get it. And the minute I, the first time I used it was the National Space Society presentation. And at the end of the conference, what was the most meaningful, what was the most changing? The people had to stand up. Out of about 45 people, there were eight, I think was eight who used the word mirth in a sentence. And during our interviews that I've done, mirth becomes a common tool in a word because what it does is defines for individuals, especially in the space industry. But even if you're not, it defines a certain geographic region which when you talk to space people before that, they talk about moon, Mars, Jupiter and onto galaxies and beyond. There's, there's never a limit. But when we say the mirth economic system and the mirth ecosystem, it now changes their, their symbol of where we do live. As I define it, we have the moon impacts our climate, it impacts the, the, the, the tides, it impacts biological activity around the world. Is that, would that be a symbolic representation of a change, a symbol, symbol, type that changes?

Absolutely. And it has the, it has the added benefit of its everyday meaning. Mirth is a wonderful word. Mirth just puts you in a jolly mood, doesn't it? And so. No, I'm not being serious, Dave.

I know you, I know you are, I love it.

And so basically there's, there's, you can just imagine this network of associations and all of metaphors are like this, all of, all metaphors are like this. Metaphors are basically a collection of relationships that we're already familiar with in one context. Then you move over to another context and then that, when that's apropos, then it automatically changes your behavior. That's how tightly calibrated our behaviors are to the way we think about them in terms of word use. So when you do mirth you do two things. First of all, you identify a system that there wasn't a good vocabulary for just the earth and the moon. And secondly, you do it with a word that triggers an emotional response that is a beautiful emotional response. Not only do you see this, it's not emotionally neutral at all. And of course, marketing is all about this. Marketers are the, are the natives, the indigenous people of this kind of workplace.

Okay, so that symbolistic component, you can alter behavior by redefining that word, those words. The title of this is called Redefining Tomorrow. The other podcast series is the Age of Infants. In it we have many types of constructs we're building into an a vocabulary for an individual to say, I hadn't thought about it that way, which changes the behavior. And if you can get it out marketing wise, you then have that leg up on the situation.

Yeah. And if you look at the most successful form of therapy and training, either at the individual level or the group level, then what you find is that they've actually converged upon a form of managed evolution of our symbrotypes. If you think back to metaphorical transfer, we know with gene therapy that you can make a single alteration in your genes and that can actually change your phenotype with respect to diseases and the like. A surgical change, if you know enough about it in your genome, can result in an important phenotypic change. We can also do the same with our symbotypes. We could make a surgical change in how you think about the world and that can importantly change how you behave in that world. And it doesn't have to take a long amount of time.

No, it doesn't.

In fact, it could happen. And so the idea that therapy is always like lengthy and requires understanding your past and no, actually it requires the right kind of change in your symbol type.

And so yeah, I've always proposed that there are. While individuals sake, it takes forever. No, there are things that happen instantaneously. The minute you realize it, the minute you hear it, the minute you see it, you say hadn't thought about that way. And you cannot get rid of that new construct.

This is the book that you read that changed your life. The passing thing on the subway, the. It makes sense of. It makes sense of that. This is why religion is so much a matter of metaphors. It's a huge grab bag of parables and metaphors and so on that we bring out to be apropos to the occasion. And so this provides a, I think as we try to accomplish change in the World. It highlights the need to do inner work, something like therapy and training. No matter what the context, no matter what the scale, we need to change the. It highlights the importance of the theory that we employ, that if you actually employ standard economic theory that will limit your repertoire. There will be things that just become invisible or appear wrong to you, when in fact they're just what we should be doing. And so we can't importantly change our economies unless we change the theory underneath.

It's funny because I don't know why I'm not talking the other side of our business as well, what we do, but we have. Another thing that we say is that during my lifetime, I learned very little bit about space. My entire life, I learned very little. Even though some countries have a little bit more than others, it's not prevalent. And I say to teachers, academics, could you teach a little bit of space? So what do you mean? I said, well, you teach a psychology class, could you take. You have. You teach in blocks?

Could you.

Could you take two, three days and talk about space? I mean, is space influential? And they say, yeah, I mean, space is important. I said, okay, so what space? And I said, you haven't even learned anything. What would you teach in a psychology class? Well, I would teach about living in confined quarters, living away from home, living in groups, living in dynamics. Okay, so you could teach a little bit of space. What if you're in textiles, could you do a little bit of space? Music in space, sports in space, health and space. And then they. What do you. I said, could you teach literature? Has literature been an important part of history? Space, literature and. Or movies? And you hear teachers say, I never thought about it, I could teach a little bit of space. So one of the initiatives is. Is to change that dialogue that you're talking about in a different type of therapy. It's not, you need to learn about space, but if a teacher was going to be teaching about literature, could they take a day or two and talk about the impact of space literature? If you were gonna teach a course about, you could take any field and you could talk about the influence that space has had on it and just that dialogue. You have 10 students per semester, 20 students per year in a university setting at the end of the year. That's if you then multiply it times. In the United States, there's 5.2 million schools in the world, but in universities, there's 4,000. In the United States, it's 80,000 students learning a little bit of space. What would their lives be like if they had that knowledge. And almost every teacher says, oh yeah, I could do that, that wouldn't be an issue. So that's an. To me, the way you're saying it is, it's a therapy. But not in the sense of sitting down, laying on a couch.

Yeah, I have a mixture of feelings about that. David, I don't know you well, but just on the basis of our brief exposure to each other, I see you as an agent of hypervariation, that what you're really good at is, is kind of sparking ideas, bringing in all these different contexts. And if you if the focus of space as it is with your moon hut, for example, I could well imagine you approaching all of these different sectors, psychology, literature, everything, and getting them to think about space. And in that fashion you would be producing an explosion of ideas that would not have been elicited otherwise. And then based on that, then that provides so much raw material for you to select some of the gems, some of the best ideas.

Actually I don't select, and that's the fun of it, is that the world will then do what you're saying. Because I think there's a data point that if you get 20% of a population to be able to believe, think, do and act a certain way, the rest of the population tends to shift. Well, our construct of this one is a billion hearts and minds. So if you take these 80,000 students in the psychology class, 44,000 times the 20% per year, you have 80,000 people who will talk to their friends, who will talk to their parents, but when they go to lunch and they talk with their other friends, the other student took biology of space and somebody else had little bit that was a biology of music, space and music. And next thing you know they're having a conversation about new constructs that they can self form without us choosing anything.

Yeah, that's where I respectfully disagree, Dave, because I think that if there's not a focus that you're basically not only you're producing this variation, but that you then gathering it, then it might happen spontaneously, but only to a degree. And I think in most cases what's going to happen is, is that there's going to be that little tiny bit of space thinking that takes place. And because it's not in any context, then a person is likely to forget it. That kind of recombination and bringing it up and so on is so if, so if it's not going to happen.

So if it's tied to mirth, it's tied to improving Life on Earth for all species if it's tied to the six mega challenges.

Yeah. Now you're providing the context, my friend. You're doing. That's.

That would be all part. That's because of timing. I didn't want to go. But it's all connected to even governance.

Now you're providing the context. Right.

It's connected to governance. How would we like to in this new world be able to thrive if we have mirth? And it creates this new economic system, this new ecosystem which I.

Now you're not just. Now you're not just creating variation but you're selecting upon it, with it, with it, with a goal in mind.

Okay. So the word selection was something that I felt like, ooh, I don't want to be that person.

You don't want to be the. You don't want to be the top down manager. But actually, yeah, that's great. But what you've constructed the system is to select it. You can take yourself out of the process. Which is exactly what you want to do. Correct.

That's exactly the mod, the module of. It's not about me, it's. It's about Project Moonhunt and the amazing people we have working with us.

Yeah.

Their and their development of their ideas that go out into the world and make the change.

Yep. And then, and then there's going to be a testing. I mean if something works then it's going to have to replicate.

Right.

That's going to have to be sensitive to context. And so there. What you've done is you've built a process, an evolutionary process, cultural evolutionary process that did not exist before, would not exist otherwise. What you've done is you produce an inheritance system that includes those three magic ingredients. Variation selection and replication targeted towards a goal. And that goal is a pro social goal that contributes to the global common good. That's what you've done.

Yes, that's. And that's. I have so much fun in these interviews.

It's hard for.

I don't people. If you could see my face, I'm smiling on all these interviews because there's connections, there's threads and yes, that's our intention is that because we have the five avatars, these five different groups is that I'm not a space person. My family doesn't have anybody that I know as a space based person. But there's a social purpose side of it and then there's opportunistic. Within that same environment, some people could just be, look, I want to make money. That's fine, but it allows a larger pie. There's the age of infinite. There is a. When you have mirth, you have a larger landscape to play and more opportunities to be able to. But it also gives us this age of infinite infinite resources and infinite possibilities, so that if it doesn't have to be about ownership, it's about feeding individuals, it's giving them the opportunity to learn and grow. And it's. I hate this fourth industrial revolution because they talk about IOT and 5G and I say, no, no, no, that's part of the information age. It's just faster. It's just more information being processed. But the age of infinite means that we've taken that and we've converted into lifestyle and opportunities so that we don't have to be on treadmills all day long. We can grow, learn, and develop as a society into a potentially better place so that all species on earth can thrive and not just the select few.

Yeah, so basically, we've converged. David, I want to spend just our last bit of time on 8, what all groups need, if you don't mind.

Yeah, keep on going you where we'll get to wherever you want to stop.

We'll end well, we're done 9 and 10, so, I mean, 8 is the one thing I want to say more on and then we're done as far as I'm concerned. So I've already made the point that these core design principles are very general. They're what all groups need. But then I did a study with my colleagues that actually demonstrates that and makes a specific comparison between business groups and any other kind of group. This is, of course, important for our audience. The study was very simple. It was a survey. The participant was asked to provide information on two groups that they know well. One is a workplace group, some place of employment that they know well, and then any other group of their choice. And so over 500 people took part in this study. And so we had a diversity of business groups and then we had even greater diversity of other kinds of groups. And for each of these groups, they provided information on how well the groups implemented those eight core design principles. You could well imagine survey questions which went down the list just as we did, and also how well those groups performed in terms of such things as cooperation, trust, commitment, and pretty obvious group performance variables. We found that study was published last year and produced the following results. So in the first place, a very strong correlation between implementation of the core design principles and those performance outcomes. That's point one, point two business groups no less than other kinds of groups. They all fell upon that same line. So business groups need to cooperate even more, really in a competitive environment. So in retrospect, no surprise that business groups would fall upon the same line. Point 3 On average, there was a deficit. Business groups did a worse job implementing all eight core design principles. There was an average deficit in workplace groups in all eight core design principles. And the biggest deficits were local autonomy. CDP7 in other words, many people in their jobs aren't allowed to do their jobs as they see fit. CDP3 decision making. Many people in their jobs are not part of the decision making process. And CDP1, many people in their jobs don't find their work very meaningful. They don't get a lot of meaning out of their, out of their work. But all eight were deficient. Now, that said, there was plenty of variation among business groups. And so some business groups scored high in their implementation of the core design principles and high in the performance outcomes. And so when we ask the question, why is it that workplace groups have this average deficit? More research is needed to answer that question. But a very excellent bet is on the entire ethos of the business world, which is so dominated by contemporary economic theory. Back to this idea of our symbols, our genes, that when you see the world through the lens of the Milton Friedman shareholder value model, then it's going to cause you to behave in ways that result in deviations from the core design principles. And that brings us back to why symbols are genes. If you really want to change business practice, we really have to change the philosophy and the theory of business. And so that's part of what we need to do. We need to basically center it on Eleanor Ostrom and not Milton Friedman. And that is in the process of taking place. Unless it's catalyzed, it will be decadal. And that's not fast enough. And so the idea, I should have put it on as a separate chapter here, the idea that catalysis, which is familiar in chemistry, here's my final metaphorical transfer, that in chemistry, a catalytic agent is a substance that when added in small amounts, vastly increases the rate of a chemical reaction and is not used up in the process. Can there be cultural catalysis? Is there a way that we can speed up the rate of cultural evolution, maybe even by orders of magnitude, accomplishing in years what otherwise might take decades or not take place at all? Let's work on that possibility.

Yes, there is. Yes, there is. And I won't go into it now, but that's, there's A whole mechanism to do that. So yes, there are. I'll give you it's. We have these negative perceptions of platforms when we use them in a generic term because of some of the challenges we've been facing over the years, whether they be the Facebook phenomenon or individuals sitting and looking at their phones and not looking at the world around them. So we can define platforms of having very negative approaches, but there are platform capabilities that have leveraged and made individuals much more powerful. And purpose aside, they have enhanced and accelerated the means by which transformation has happened. It could be as simple as a scientific platform that allows individuals like yourself to be able to collaborate with others. And to your definition, it has the, the catalyst catalysis in that it never gets used up. You, you get on the platform, you share. And I at NYU, when I taught there, was there 12 years, there was no, there were no forums, there were no groups. And what I did is I created this website that allowed individuals to talk to one another so that outside of the class they had just as much participation as they did inside. And we had 309 students over 12 years. But many people took classes twice. They're still in touch with one another today. They go to weddings, they're communicating, they're doing projects together, they've invested together. And it never got used up because it was a platform, it was a mechanism for them to be able to participate. So I think one of those leveraging tools today, if we look at it scientifically or chemistry wise, as platforms never.

Get used up totally, we're really. You get AAA on that one, David. And my next call actually is on digital governance with people that you'd love to be. Loved to include you in that.

I'd love to be included in these because our entire Covid has been very bad. I'm not going to downplay it at all. But I was.

You're going to talk about a big silver lining.

And I was, I was traveling 300,000 miles a year. I did not have the opportunity to sit down and define certain things. I didn't have the opportunity to speak with individuals. In 2015 I wrote a paper and 2017 it was finished, a new one. On a platform that can accelerate the Earth and space based ecosystem. That in turn the outcome would be innovations and paradigm shifting. That in turn would change how we live on Earth for all species. I was able to spend six months, not every day, but I spent a tremendous amount of time building a mechanism that would not require or would never run out. It would just amplify with Metcalfe's law and Metcalfe's law of connection, that the amplification of it would accelerate. So an example would be, is if I'm a student in Berkeley and I've come up with an idea and I'm working on it, but I can't find something, and it takes a year for me to find something, that network, that the whole structure collapses. But what if you could in one day or one hour, achieve that connection?

Yep, that's right, David. The Internet age allows us, allows cultural evolution to take place thousands of times faster than it did before. That's what catalysis is all about. But digital social interactions obey the same rules as any other kind of social interactions. And so unless you structure the Internet so that it includes the very same design principles, plus more, plus principles of adaptability in addition to just plain adapted, unless you provide that structure, then it results in problems, not solutions.

And so that was the six months was how do you make it so that it is purposeful, it's directive, it fulfills mirth, it fulfills these things. Absolutely. This is fantastic.

So basically we're one step away is the way I see it. If we get people to adopt the right lens, then we're one step away from making this. We're basically steering the Internet age towards what Pierre Tilde Chardin called the Omega point. A real global consciousness that futurists love to think about actually could take place, but only if we see the world through this lens. Otherwise cultural evolution will take place anyhow. It'll be very fast and it'll result in problems, not solution.

So that's why it's called the age of infinite. It's a transition away from the yin and yang of scarcity and abundance. The age of infinite and infinite could be awareness. I'm reading right now, I'm reading Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen. Yep, I know that part and so brilliant. I think he did an excellent job of stripping away a lot of the extras, the clothing, the activities are engaged and just tried to focus on the core. So yeah, this was fantastic.

Well, I agree. I had a ball.

We traveled in a variety of different places, which I love and I appreciate you taking the time very much so thank you, David.

My pleasure.

And I want to thank all of you out there taking the time in your day days to listen in. I do hope that today you've learned something that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Now, David, what's the number one best way for individuals to connect to you.

You know, I want to say my new novel Atlas hugged, go to Atlushugged World www.atlushugged.world and that's the best portal to reach me through a fictional universe that I've created in which this world changing event takes place in 100 days. And the idea that this could be communicated through fiction and then there could be a whole scientific parallel universe is so very exciting. So the one thing would be, would be that you can get to me if you're that route.

Okay, thank you. I, I'd love to connect with anybody here who's listening on. You can reach me@DavidGoldsmith.com you can reach me at Twitter oldsmith. I am on LinkedIn, I'm on Facebook and even Instagram. If you click on the pictures that are about traveling around the world, there's a story under each one of them so you can connect with me in that way. That said, I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening.