255 | Michael Muthukrishna on Developing a Theory of Everyone

0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Probably everyone listening has heard the phrase 'a theory of everything', right? The origins of this phrase are actually a little bit murky. It's not such a weird collection of words that it hadn't appeared in the literature a long time ago. People have talked about the idea of a theory of everything, but the context in which we currently usually talk about it is either superstring theory in physics or some other competitor to superstring theory. As far as I can tell, that coinage came from John Ellis who is a theorist at CERN. He wrote a little article in the early days of the superstring revolution, 1980s, called the The superstring: A theory of everything, or of nothing? So it wasn't completely triumphant. He was actually talking about whether or not this possibly could be a theory of everything.

0:00:54.8 SC: It was immediately pointed out by non physicists and even some physicists that the idea of a theory of everything in this sense is actually very, very restricted to a certain reductionistic way of looking at the fundamental constituents of nature. The idea being that, nevertheless, those fundamental constituents make up everything else. But there's no sense in which that idea of a theory of everything would be the final theory that we ever need in science, because we do have higher level emergent things. We have biologic organisms, we have economies and societies and we have people and psychology, all of this stuff that is certainly not covered, not to mention easy questions about astrophysics or chemistry or so forth. So, the root from that kind of theory of everything to many other scientific questions is a complicated one, therefore we still have room for other theories of large grandiose scope.

0:01:53.2 SC: And today's guest is Michael Muthukrishna who has a book coming out called A Theory of Everyone. That's an intentional play on words from the Theory of Everything idea. The subtitle is The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going. Obviously an ambitious book trying to synthesize many kinds of ideas. Michael is at the London School of Economics. He's sort of, I think his official title is a Professor of Economic Psychology. So there's both economics in there and psychology. He's actually collaborated with some of our previous Mindscape guests, Joe Henrik and Edward Slingerland. So he thinks about the grand scope of human history and how we are influenced by biology and evolution, cultural evolution, how we pass down ideas from generation to generation. And a big thing, as he'll say in the episode, a big thing for him is the fact that human beings, unlike other animals, do have this distributed cultural knowledge that we can pass down.

0:03:04.0 SC: Human beings have schools, have an educational system in a way that other animals don't. Other animals do teach their young. Some of them do. I don't know, lions, I am told, teach their cubs to hunt by pretending to be in pain when their cubs bite them a little bit. So they're teaching them like, "Oh yes, that's the right thing you should do." But they don't have a curriculum. They don't have a syllabus. They don't have it quite as organized and systematized as human beings do. So that plays a large role in the exceptionalism of human beings. And of course, it's tied to other capacities; our brains, our languages, things like that. So we'll talk about all of that. But then Michael wants to go much further. He talks about, not only economics, but the technological side of economics, the importance of different ways we have of harnessing energy; from just burning wood, to burning fossil fuels, to solar energy, and how these allow for expansions of the economy and therefore of human opportunity in a very clear way.

0:04:09.5 SC: And then he brings it back or brings it down I should say to the current era, our political polarization, our stagnation of innovation, if that's true, and what we can do about it, how we can do better. There are parts of this long elaborate story that I am 100% on board with, other parts that I will wait to see, let's put it that way. I'm not 100%, but I'm open to it. I think it's fascinating stuff. And Michael's very clear and very well educated on a whole bunch of things, so I think it's a very good listen. With that in mind, let's go.

[music]

0:05:02.2 SC: Michael Muthukrishna, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:05:03.6 Michael Muthukrishna: Thanks for having me, Sean.

0:05:05.0 SC: So, you've written what sounds to the average reader of titles like an ambitious book. It's called A Theory of Everyone, and I like that you're kind of making fun of the physicists there.

0:05:15.9 MM: It's a modest title. It could have been A Theory of Everything, right.

0:05:21.4 SC: Yeah, exactly. Just people.

0:05:23.8 MM: Yeah, no it's a play on a theory of everything of course. But the title hints at the central claim of the book, which is that we are... I'm sure your listeners know already, but the theory of everything in physics is this grand unifying theory, general relativity meets quantum mechanics, whatever. The idea or the central premise of the book is that we have reached this point in the human and social sciences where we have this overarching theoretical framework that unifies things that make sense of an otherwise chaotic and confusing world and turns it into a real science. And so, I tell the story of how this happened in the more mature sciences to illustrate how this has happened for the human in social sciences. So like in physics, we used to think that Thor was banging his hammer and the physical world was the result of capricious gods. And then folks like Newton and Maxwell and Einstein come along and they write down equations. I mean, Maxwell's crazy. At a time of like whale oil and horse-drawn carriages, he's writing down equations for like magnetism.

0:06:29.5 SC: It is. It's amazing. Yeah.

0:06:30.9 MM: But suddenly, the world is less chaotic and confusing. The weather is still difficult to predict actually, but we know that it's not caused by capricious gods. It's caused by these rules. We have the rules. And once we have those, we can also turn them into technologies. Like we can eventually land a spacecraft on an asteroid. And the same thing happened to chemistry. Now, Newton's not a dumb guy, as we just said, but he's trying to turn Lead into Gold. And again, it's not because he is a dumb guy. It's 'cause he doesn't understand collusion theory. He doesn't know the world is made up of elements that fit into a periodic table. But once you have a periodic table, then alchemy becomes chemistry. So you can do stuff before you have a periodic table. Like we got to gunpowder, for example.

0:07:15.9 SC: Sure.

0:07:17.2 MM: But why is it that when you pour this acid on a metal, you're creating this gas and it's bubbling away? What's happening there? And can we turn Lead into Gold? Maybe. It seems like another chemical reaction. But once you have a periodic table, you can be like, "Yes, we can make gunpowder." It's like, "Okay, yes, we know what's going on here. But no, we can't turn Lead into Gold. Those are different elements." The world is less chaotic and confusing, and eventually, you make your way not only to chemistry, like turning oil into plastics or whatever, but even eventually to things like protein folding. And of course, this happened in biology too. So, it was a chaotic and confusing world. Why do some animals have live ones and others lay eggs? And why does the peacock have this giant elaborate tail and the peahen doesn't? And then along comes Darwin, and later on, the modern synthesis with Fisher and Wright and Hamilton and so on. And suddenly, the world is less chaotic and confusing. It's still difficult to predict the trajectory of species or the behavior of ecologies, but if you're trying to do that without the rules that underlie the system, you're running blind.

0:08:23.2 SC: So yeah. In other words, what I hear is that this underlying theoretical perspective on what's going on can be helpful at a higher practical level, and let me guess, you wanna extend this to human beings?

0:08:36.1 MM: Exactly. I mean, the claim I'm making is not that I have extended it to human beings, but actually we are in the midst of a revolution on the scale of Newton and Maxwell and Einstein, on the scale of the periodic table, on the scale of Darwin and the modern synthesis. That is, we know the rules. We know why humans are different to other animals. We know the rules by which humans acquire and synthesize information. We know the rules by which societies are changing over time. And that should allow us to build the equivalent of technologies, like do a better job of public policy, for example, by applying that. So part one of the book is kind of laying out that theory of everyone, that theory of human behavior, and then part two is like, okay, well, take me at face value and assume that I'm correct about what I'm saying. Here's what this means about inequality and innovation and how we design the internet and what the future of education should look like, and how we get past energy transitions, and so on.

0:09:31.0 SC: And how many pages is this book? Like 5000?

0:09:32.6 MM: I'll say like 480 pages or something. I mean, I lean heavily. It's a book for the public. So what I try to stay away from, you'll read some behavior books and it's like, in this study we showed X, Y, Z. I mean, the studies are there, but what I'm really trying to say is like, there's a tapestry. There's a world that everything is connected up. It's like once I explain the periodic table to you, everything makes a lot more sense. And so I rely heavily on like, let me explain it to you so you can check it against your own life. You should have new insights that allow you to see the world as you never saw before, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

0:10:05.1 SC: So, maybe a good starting point then is the classic question of what makes human beings so special? What makes us different than the rest of our animal cousins, even though we're actually very similar at the DNA level, right?

0:10:19.5 MM: Yeah. So, humans are a different kind of animal that have a third line of information or a second line of inheritance, and this is really fundamentally what allowed us to build the world that we have today. So, we not only have a genetic inheritance like hardware that we get from our parents, and we not only have a lifetime of experience where we learn things, but we have cultural software that has accumulated over time and is literally running on our brains, allowing us to think new thoughts, see the world in richer new ways, and understand the world as no other species ever has. And that cultural line isn't just learned. It is evolving. It is a true... It's not an analogy to genetic evolution. It is an extension of population genetics into the world of culture. We call this cultural evolution. And it's evolving beyond conscious awareness.

0:11:12.7 MM: So we have a set of behaviors and values, and sometimes technologies, that are not only... The world is not only more complicated than the smartest among us could ever recreate, but often we don't really understand why it is that we do the things we do, certainly at an individual level and sometimes at a population level. Like you probably brush your teeth twice a day, and if I ask you why, you'll tell me something about plaque and tartar or something like that, but you don't really have a good causal model of that. Or you probably finish your course of antibiotics to avoid superbugs, and you probably have a causal explanation for that, but you have an illusion of explanatory depth that stops you from checking further. Like if I were to say to you, it's like, obviously Sean, not every one of those bacteria are gonna die.

0:11:57.4 MM: And so surely, if not all of them die, surely finishing your course of antibiotics would have the most resistant bacteria left. That's what would create superbugs. And now you're like, "Oh, wait a minute." But you don't have to worry about antibiotic kill curves, or the optimal dosage, or anything like that. You have just acquired the interfaces to interact with the world. You check your emails on a device that may as well be magic. So the book is about how we evolve to have that, how it is that we became a different kind of animal, how that connects everything up, and what that means about how we should study ourselves and think about our future. If you wanna understand the secrets of PivotTables in Excel, if you wanna understand how chatGPT works, you don't look inside the CPU and GPU. It's not in the brain. It's not in the neuroscience, actually. It's in the software that's running on that hardware.

0:12:47.8 SC: So the difference, in other words, obviously other kinds of animals and so forth do have behaviors that are passed down from generations, but they're not through learning, right? It's always a worry when you talk about vast generalizations to other species, that there's gonna be counter examples. Are there any counter examples of things that are not genetically encoded, but are knowledge that other animal species pass down from generation to generation?

0:13:17.8 MM: Yeah. So this area is called dual inheritance theory, or gene-culture coevolution, or the extended evolutionary synthesis, and particularly the extended evolutionary synthesis, it is about like these other transmission. So environments are transmitted, right? An earthworm can inherit the environment created, that more moist environment created by its ancestors. There's also information being transmitted, just not to the degree that humans do. So like chimps, for example, learn from their mothers, and they have traditions of wading up leaves into sponges and sponging up water, or using sticks for tick and termites or whatever. Those do seem to be... Or cracking nuts is another example of this. They're entering the Stone Age, if you like. They do have that.

0:14:00.1 MM: But humans, for reasons I explain in the book, and maybe I can say a little bit about that now, rely on that social information and agree to use that information if you like. We use that information at the expense of our own everyday experience. And chimps do not do that. Let me give you an example. And you're the worst person to give this example to, but I'm gonna give it to you anyway. You'll see in a moment why that is. If I ask the average person, or the average person will swear up and down that we are on a spheroid, rotating around a star, one of many stars in the Milky Way, one of many galaxies in the universe. They will swear that up and down. And every day, they look outside at a flat earth with the sun tracing the sky from east to west. Now, you're among a handful of people who have checked.

0:14:46.0 SC: I can give you the argument.

0:14:46.1 MM: But for most people, they don't; they just believe it because the smartest people in their society, most people in their society, they believe that. For the longest time, UFOs were in the realm of the flat earth, and maybe they still should be, but at the moment, because the reliable sources are talking about, what do they call it now, UAPs or whatever and aliens, now people are like, "Wait, is that actually a thing? Should I be reconsidering my model of the world?"

0:15:15.1 SC: We should go back to the previous consensus understanding, I think there. But this is interesting because you're saying two things, one of which I was expecting and one of which is a little bit, I've heard it before, but it's unexpected in this context. The expected thing is, we not only have knowledge, we have some kind of symbolic knowledge. So we can package the knowledge and spread it more efficiently between ourselves, and that's obviously some kind of phased transition in human behavior that we can talk about. But you're putting more emphasis than I would've guessed on our limitations, which I think are very important. But it's interesting to hear, in this context, we're finite. We don't have infinite ability to do our own research, as in current parlance. So we kind of have to rely on our social networks a bit.

0:16:02.9 MM: That's right. And so it's actually because of those limitations that we ended up with this cultural evolutionary system. It's because of those limitations that we deferred the calculation, the computation, the innovation to the population level. So, because we couldn't fit all of that in our heads, we ended up selectively learning and copying without really understanding, that we were able to surpass it. So I'll give you... There's an experiment I talk about in the book that really illustrates this, what humans do compared to other great apes. So, this was an experiment done with young children and young chimps. And so, the experimenter has a box, and the box has a hole on the top and a hole on the side. And the experimenter takes a stick and pokes it through the hole in the top and pokes it through the hole on the side.

0:16:47.7 MM: And when they do this, they poke it through the hole on the side. They get a piece of fruit, which the chimps love, and they get a sticker, which the kids love. So the experimenter pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the side, hands it to the chimp. What does the chimp do? Pokes a hole through the top. Pokes a hole through the side. All right? Experimenter pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the side, hands it to the child. What does the child do? Pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the side. Now, in the key variation in the treatment, you have the same box, but it's no longer a black box. It's transparent, you can see into it. And you realize that that first action doesn't do anything. There's actually a ceiling or a floor where it's just hitting that. To retrieve the fruit and the sticker, you just need the second action. But again, the experimenter takes the stick, pokes a hole through the top, pokes a hole through the side, hands it to the chimp. Now, if you've ever watched a chimp doing a working memory task or spinning through Instagram, chimps are smart, man.

0:17:39.0 SC: Very good. Yeah.

0:17:39.7 MM: And so what do they do? Ignore that first action, go straight to the second action, and they retrieve their fruit and they're a happy chimp. What does the child do? Experimenter pokes a whole through the top, pokes a hole through the side, hands it to the child. What does the child do? Pokes a whole through the top, pokes a hole through the side. So children, you have a head full of recipes that you don't fully understand...

0:18:00.8 SC: Interesting.

0:18:00.9 MM: That you've accumulated and you acquire from the smartest people since you were a child around you. Some of those, you've checked, many of those you haven't, and if your life is going well, you've never had a need to check some of the beliefs that you hold and the behaviors you engage in. But we're smart 'cause we're dumb. We're smart 'cause we ape better than apes do. And because we are willing to defer to that body of information culture, we don't sit naked in the rain like they do. They wanna figure everything out from first principles. They want to understand it before they do it. And so they're stuck. They're stuck at a particular limit by their brains.

0:18:36.0 SC: That's a wonderful example. I love that experiment because the cynic might've said, "See, the human children are not as smart as the chimps 'cause they can't figure it out." But your spin on it is, whether or not they're smarter, they're relying on a whole thing that the chimps don't have access to, this collective knowledge that gets us through the complicated social environment we're in.

0:18:57.8 MM: That's right. But you see, that collective knowledge isn't just about behaviors and beliefs. It's also about mental tools, like literal upgrades to our cultural software for thinking. And we know some of this through history, thanks to history, which is the cultural fossil record, if you like. So if you take something like numeracy, some small scale societies still count 1, 2, 3, and then many, and our ancestors probably counted like that too. We were able to get further using a metaphor. So, many societies would use stones 'cause, think calcium, calculus, maybe stones pressed into clay, so you've got notches as well, or cut into wood. Many societies use body parts. So we have a decimal system, which is super annoying, to be honest. It doesn't translate well to binary. It's the worst of all systems. And other societies use phalanges. So they count 12 with their thumb, the finger bones, and various other body parts. I wish we landed on 16, but here we are.

0:19:58.3 MM: And so, as a result of this, we now had a metaphor for thinking that we no longer had to use, we can just store it in our heads, represent it in our heads, and now we could count the natural numbers above one. But stones and fingers and whatever, they don't make zero obvious because zero stones is nothing, and nothing, well, it's nothing. And so it took centuries before zero was recognized as a number, and centuries... It was actually the 17th-18th century that negative numbers became more obvious. And again, it was an upgrade thanks to a the number line. So we moved away from objects to position. And there's this quote I have in the book from a British mathematician, Francis Maseres, and it's something like, "Negative numbers darken the very fabric of reality." It's like way melodramatic, and he's right. But once you have a number line, it's simple enough that you can teach it to young children, which is what we do.

0:20:51.1 MM: But it's given us a new ability, 'cause obviously once you can count, you can count to do anything. And then the number line itself gets extended, so it's like, what if you have another number line that is orthogonal to the other one? It's like, oh, a complex plane emerges. And so, you can't see this because we live in a bubble, a very big bubble. So I don't mean like you and I in our ivory towers, I don't mean like coastal elites in a rural small town. I mean, every person we ever meet went through education, through school. And school has become, since the Industrial Revolution, the primary means by which we download a cultural package to the next generation. Because we are a species that relies on socially transmitted information, every child has to catch up with the last several thousand years of human history, and we try to do it more efficiently, because if we lose that link, we'd literally become dumber. We'd literally lose a bunch of technology, We have to transmit that every generation.

0:21:46.3 MM: But as a result of that, many of the things that we think of as being human are in fact endowed by us by accumulated cultural knowledge, and you can't get it by measuring it. So the Stroop test, I don't know if you've ever seen the Stroop test. Basically, you've got words, the color words, and they're written in the color, like red written in red, blue written in blue.

0:22:03.9 SC: Oh, yeah, I do know what you're talking about, but go on. Keep going.

0:22:05.9 MM: Or mismatched. And you ask people, don't read the word, just say the color. So, even though it says red, it's written in blue, so say blue, and people struggle. Reading has become an instinct that overrides color perception. Now imagine a psychologist from Venus, like the anthropologist from Mars, the psychologist from Venus comes down and studies these crazy apes on the planet, and they give them the Stroop test and they're like, oh it appears that humans have an innate ability to read but no innate ability or it overrides any kind of color perception, which would be wrong, of course, right?

0:22:39.8 SC: Yeah.

0:22:40.2 MM: But because these culturally endowed skills have become part of our thinking, and they're ubiquitous at this point, you can't measure it. All of experimental psychology, even IQ tests were developed after the advent of truancy laws and compulsory formal education. So even something like the ability to reason, so I talked about it in some of my own work, right? So Alexander Luria, we were replicating some of his work. So Luria goes out to Uzbekistan. He wants to understand how education is changing people's psychology, and he uses if P then Q reasoning. So, this is actually one of his questions, he says where it snows, the bears are white. In Novaya Zemlya, it snows, what color are the bears? Now you didn't say it, but you're thinking white, like the Uzbeks with education, white, my 6-year-old, white. But what happened to the Uzbeks who didn't have education? How do they answer? They're like, I think probably brown, I've seen brown there once.

0:23:36.6 SC: Never been there. Yeah.

0:23:36.8 MM: You're like, "What? Listen to what I'm saying." And you're like, "Well, I don't know what color the bears are. I haven't been to Nova Zemlya." So it's not that humans can't reason, of course we can, but it's a grounded cultural reality based reasoning, and it becomes an ability and a hypothetical ability to reason through our education system. And then the whole world becomes more complex. A new baseline is achieved. So if you think about TV shows, like think of like Wham Bam Batman from the 1960s versus the Dark Knight from the early '90s. Even the most lowbrow television has more convoluted storylines, more characters than what our parents and grandparents watched. So, that is the central premise. And so the book is all about, well, how does that software get written and how do we write better software for the future? Because although IQ test results have been going up, they have now stagnated and so have our schools.

0:24:33.5 SC: Let me ask the sort of chicken-and-egg problem here because when we talk about human exceptionalism, there's a whole bunch of things that happen and maybe they're all related, there was some kind of phase transition. Some people will emphasize language and symbolic manipulation of information. Some people, I had Adam Bulley on the podcast who is a part of a group that likes mental time travel, the ability to hypothesize the future and speak counterfactually as something that is uniquely human, and you're, like other people, emphasizing this communal aspect, the sort of offloading certain cognitive tasks to the collective. Which came first? Is there some causality there or is it a package deal?

0:25:14.7 MM: Absolutely. So actually, the book tackles this very problem. So people who pause at things like, so I know Adam, and I know the language people, I'm not sure who you spoke to, but people who pause at language as an explanation are wrong because language is part of the package of humans. It doesn't explain anything because in evolutionary biology, you have a startup problem, right? So let's say I'm the first person with some genes for language. Well, that's useless because nobody else speaks. So you've got a startup problem, and language only works if you've got something worth transmitting.

0:25:53.4 SC: Fair enough.

0:25:53.9 MM: So language isn't an explanation and a lot of the other features of our cognition are also this part of this package. So here's what a mix of the models and evidence and what you can piece together tells us. So the first thing that happened was that there was a transition across the animal kingdom, but certainly for humans, because of our generation length, toward relying on social information. And if you look at the models in population genetics, these are the models where you can branch off into a world of social learning. So, when the environment is highly stable, then genes do the best job of adapting to that environment. So even among humans, skin color is a genetic adaptation that is well predicted by latitude because of UV radiation. You don't want so much UV radiation that you get cancer, but you don't want so little that you have vitamin D deficiency, which also leads to cancers and other diseases, right?

0:26:48.7 SC: But the timescale is very long for those adaptations to happen. So a stable environment is where it works.

0:26:53.8 MM: That's right. They're fairly long, but they happen, for the human generation length, which is not the last several 100,000 years. Sometimes, if selection is strong enough, it can be quite fast, and if there's variation in the population. And so, by the way, remember, humans, part of this puzzle is that humans, when most animals encounter a new environment, they're forced to genetically adapt. And we did a little bit like human skin color, like more fat for the arctic, more proteins to process the local plants. We, as hunter gatherers, before physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, all of this stuff, and even before agriculture, we marched across the planet and we figured it out in each stage. We figured out how to process the proteins using new techniques and so that we could eat them. We didn't get much more fat and fur. We hunted the local animals and avoided prey and wore sometimes the predators skins as our own.

0:27:58.6 MM: So this is what we need to explain. This is what we need to explain. So, genes do a great job if the environment is highly stable. If the environment is highly unstable, then genes are not a good solution because today the red berries are edible, tomorrow it's the blueberries, and the water is here, the water is there, whatever. Instead, evolution has to rely on trial and error learning across the lifespan to figure it out. You got to have a big brain to do that, and you got to do a lot of trial and error, and it's really inefficient. And so, these key models developed mostly by Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson, and also by Kelli Schwartz and Mark Feldman over at Stanford, there's an intermediate zone of environmental variability where it is matched to generation length such that your parents and grandparents have some knowledge worth paying attention to.

0:28:44.1 MM: And it is at this point that we begin to rely on the information they have. So imagine something like a cyclical drought. Maybe you've never experienced one, the the lag is too long. Maybe your parents haven't either. But grandma remembers that when she was a child, there was a drought and they left to the forest, past the mountain and she leads her tribe to safety. And I was recently talking to an anthropologist. She's like, that actually happens.

0:29:10.9 SC: Oh yeah.

0:29:11.0 MM: This is a real thing. Kim Hill was telling me from his group, the object. So now, in this zone, so this was a nice model developed in the 1980s, 1981, 1985, these models were developed. And everyone was like, "Oh, that's cool that maybe that's what happened." And what happened was in the late '90s and early 2000, we actually got Ice Core data, so we could see climatic variation. What did we find? Massive amounts of variation followed by a moderate zone, as in exactly the moment when humans evolve. Now, you should have to... You should pause for a second and be like, well, wait a minute. All those animals, surely they all experience. There is a link to generation length for the first half, but you also need something else to kick this thing off. You've got this bootstrap problem. So I suspect, in the book, this is going a little... We don't have a model of this. By the way, theories only become theories if you can write them down.

0:30:00.8 SC: Fair enough. [laughter]

0:30:01.8 MM: So this what I just said, we've got good models for a good empirical evidence. What I'm about to say, we don't have as good models except when it comes to brain evolution, which is some of my own work. So I suspect bipedalism actually did a lot for us. And the reason for that, so we probably were bipedal for completely separate reasons. This is kind of an early adaptation. And by being bipedal, it did two things. One, it freed our hands for you for making tools and carrying them around. So you can invest in that stone axe 'cause you can carry it to the next location and use it again. Whereas if you're a quadrupedal ape, like a chimp, or a orangutan, or a gorilla, or whatever, you don't wanna carry this big ass rock around, so you don't. You have to reuse it. So cheapen the cost of tools. The second thing that it did is what I'm doing with you right now, that unfortunately audio listeners can't see, which is talking with my hands.

0:30:52.1 SC: We both do that. Yeah.

0:30:53.6 MM: It's not just Italians. We all do it. I saw you do it. We talk with our hands. And so that opened up a new modality for communicating with. So now we can begin to solve that language problem, which as I said, is not an explanation. It's part of that package. So imagine, I should say this more. So, information begins to accumulate because cultural evolution becomes a second line of inheritance. And that happens because of what I described there. So, any evolutionary system needs three ingredients. Variation like diversity, easy to solve for culture, people do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons; different information, different personalities, whatever. Transmission, so you need reliable... You don't want too much information to be lost during the transmission process. So for genes, of course, it's because genes are not mutating at a very high rate. And you need variation reduction. And if you want it to be adaptive, you need selection where more of the good stuff sticks around and less of the bad stuff.

0:31:49.7 MM: And if you meet those criteria, you have an evolutionary system. It's how genetic algorithms work. So genes, we know how that works. For culture, I just gave you the transmission. We copy without understanding, and so we don't lose too much information, and we do it selectively. We copy people who are more successful. We copy people who other people are copying. We copy people who are experts. We have a psychology that leads us to, for example, if a celebrity says, I'm drinking this drink, you're like, "I want that drink." We do it instinctively. Why? It's got nothing to do with their success. But we don't know. It's a black box. I don't know why Beyonce is such a great singer, so I'm just gonna wear her perfume and I'm gonna dress like her. I'm gonna do everything. If I'm trying to copy the best hunter, maybe it's 'cause of the shoes he wears or his weapons or where he goes hunting, but equally it's 'cause of his kick ass beard or the fact that he shaves his head or the gods he worships. So a little hunter copies everything about them.

0:32:42.3 MM: Now, if you have that system, you've already deferred to the population level and information begins to accumulate. Now, we have evidence for early accumulation of information because, one of the best pieces of evidence, in my view that this is absolutely why humans evolved, is the fact that we rely on cooked food. Our jaws are too weak for chewing like a gorilla on leaves all day, and our guts are too short to process that food anyway, even if we could. So that means we were cooking food. We had fire. Now, I don't know if you've ever tried to light a fire.

0:33:13.1 SC: I have. [laughter]

0:33:13.3 MM: But it's hard, man. It's hard.

0:33:14.7 SC: It's hard. [laughter]

0:33:15.1 MM: Even once you're taught, it's hard. And so, that meant that we needed fire to survive and we don't have any genes for it. It's got to have been culturally transmitted. You couldn't have figured it out. So that's a very early bit of information, and maybe the stone tools too. And probably before the stone tools, the bone tools and the wooden tools that didn't survive the passage of time.

0:33:36.5 SC: When you say very early, what years are we guessing?

0:33:38.3 MM: So, we're talking like millions of years.

0:33:41.2 SC: Millions of years ago? Okay.

0:33:42.3 MM: One and a half, yeah. Yeah, so this is like very early on. So before modern humans, yeah. And we have evidence for this. We have little bits of evidence for it. And so that meant while we were bipedal, we had information worth transmitting. And so that means you can get what's called a Baldwinian process in evolution. So a Baldwinian process is one where you can get to a place through learning, but if you can get there through genes more efficiently, those genes can be selected. So in this case, there is a bunch of gestures I can give you so you can build the tool or light the fire or know that... I can have guttural utterances and I can wave my hands in a particular way, and you can learn that that means, just through reinforcement learning, figure out what I'm talking about. But now, if you have cognitive changes that allow you to acquire that bit of language, you can do it more efficiently. And that means, the next generation, you can do a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. Now you have the ratchet to get up in the presence of an accumulating body of knowledge. You see where I'm going?

0:34:42.0 SC: Yeah, I do. Go ahead. Keep going there.

0:34:45.5 MM: Yeah, so you can begin to accumulate this knowledge. And so some of the genetic changes, by the way, made us more susceptible to choking. So as I say in the book, we were literally dying to speak to one another. And so this did a few things. So, one, now we had all this knowledge. We had language begin to evolve. Language continues to evolve by the way. So, for example, it becomes more efficient, some of my research, and our brains grew. So they tripled in size compared to our last common ancestor 5-7 million years ago with a chimp. Our brains grew to the point where, if you look at the medical literature today, once you hit about the 85th percentile, so doctors used to think it was like big babies were difficult to birth. Turns out it's not big babies, it's big heads. Once you hit about the 85th percentile, it hockey sticks up in terms of emergency cesareans and emergency forceps. So basically, you need these innovations.

0:35:37.7 MM: So that means, for our species, it was kind of the curse of Eve. We had all this knowledge, big brain, it's painful and dangerous childbirth for mother and baby. So we did other things. We began to, for example, extend our childhoods. So one change that seems to have happened for us is we had a self domestication and we became neotenous, which is an easy change for revolution to make. I mean, we turned the magnificent wolf into a poodle. So we neotenized dogs into permanent puppies, and the same thing happened for us, we are permanent youthful apes able to learn for a very long time. So we had a longer childhood, a longer juvenile period, and we created an adolescence, which is the period from when you could reproduce to when you actually do, which has been growing and growing as the body of knowledge has begun to grow. It used to be that like a high school degree was enough to get a good job. Then it was a high school degree plus any college degree, then a STEM degree, then also a master's degree and an unpaid internship.

0:36:33.6 MM: And so when now we're actually hitting a new limit. So before the primary selection was on being able to give birth to these bigger heads, now it's like about giving birth at an older age. All of this completely changed our societies in a variety of ways that puts the whole human package together. It's what created grandmothers, it's what created the difference between men and women, like it created dads very unusual among great apes. Yeah, I mean, the division of labor, the division of information, all of this emerges. So, the theory of everyone isn't like, so I make fun of what I call, I love this genre of book, by the way, the one thing that explains everything, the TOTI kind of books. It's like, let me show you why my little bit of research that I just love happens to explain the whole damn world. This this is a TOTI adjacent book, like TOTI is like an acronym for that, it's adjacent, for sure.

0:37:26.2 MM: But I'm not doing this one thing. Like I've got... I kind of talk about the role that energy, like the big theme of the book is the role that energy and particularly excess energy has played in all of life and certainly in our civilization. And I talk about the fact that there are kind of four laws, and you're gonna hate this as a physicist, but I don't mean Newtonian laws, I mean, kind of lenses upon which we can view the world. The law of energy, which is fundamentally life is competing over excess energy. The law of innovations and efficiency, so life is evolving new ways to use that energy more efficiently. The law of cooperation, that the scale of cooperation to the level at which the individual unit be the cells or individuals or in a society or employees in a business, is the level at which the per person, per unit return on energy is not gonna be higher in a larger or a smaller group. And the law of evolution, which is that both through genetic and cultural evolution and the interaction between these, we find the space of how to cooperate, how to innovate at a population level, and how to unlock new bits of energy, which thanks to the fossil fuel revolution with the industrial revolution, we now live in that world.

0:38:32.2 SC: Well, let's talk about energy a little bit 'cause the story that you just painted reminds us of this idea that history is basically a search for calories. Food calories back in the day, and then when we invent industrial technology, we need even more calories in the sense of an energy source. And part of the theme of your book is how much of a central organizing principle that is for human history.

0:38:58.2 MM: Correct. Yeah, that's exactly right. So for us the first... This is an ancient thing, what you just said about calories, and I put it in terms of jewels or watts. This is fundamentally what matters. The first organisms, whenever we turn from RNA into the first self replicators or whatever... Sorry, other way around, with the first self replicators into RNA and eventually organisms, the only energy we had is the fact that we got a large moon, which was closer to the earth, sloshing the water back and forth over the land and the seas. So you got some gravitational energy there, but some of it's the sun falling. We have the earliest proto photosynthesis, which didn't use any oxygen. And then we had a mutation, which led to a more efficient photosynthesis, which polluted the world, a great oxygenation event, mass extinction.

0:39:52.1 MM: But there was also new opportunity. Once we had photosynthesis, turning solar energy into chemical energy in the form of ATP and little sugar cubes basically, it meant that other organisms could begin to find a new niche of not directly converting the sun into organisms and moving at plant pace, but eating other organisms and moving a little faster. They were like a little bundle, just, it's a story of colonialization actually. An energy rich little corner of Eurasia creates the largest empire of the world has ever seen out-competing other less energy, less cooperative societies in devastating ways. And so the same pattern happens throughout life. You've got Prokaryote getting eaten by Eukaryotes, Eukaryotes being eaten by multicellular life, complex multicellular life, and eventually all the way to you who is more like an ecosystem, an Amazon rainforest of a microbiome and interacting differentiated cells more than you are a single organism.

0:40:46.6 MM: And if you run out of energy, you're going to get defeated by the lower scales, by the bacteria, or you're going to get your stuff stolen from you by the bigger scale. Same pattern across everything. So, for humans, in terms of our calories, the first unlocking of energy was the one I described before, which is fire. It was a chemical energy technology that allowed us to predigest foods and make those calories more bioavailable, which allowed us to grow those brains and shrink those guts, occupy a new niche. The next major revolution was agriculture, which was a solar technology, where now, rather than expending all that energy, walking around, searching, hunting and gathering, trying to find plants and small animals or large animals in a group, you domesticate and look after animals and you grow food more efficiently.

0:41:35.9 MM: It was the law of innovation, if you like, and the law of energy. And you grow your population to the point where you outcompete the hunter gatherer groups to the margins that are not suitable to agriculture, which is still where they live today, and those larger groups are able to innovate more, and you lay the foundations for the beginnings of cities as massive nodes of collective intelligence. This continues, and we live in a Malthusian world because the pattern in this story, across every scale, is that when you get this unlocking, you get an era of abundance. And that would've been that first era of abundance. And then, because carrying capacity has gone up, the number of individuals meets that carrying capacity, and you once again enter an era of scarcity, where the per person calories or energy is lower.

0:42:18.6 MM: The next major unlocking that is most relevant to us was the industrial revolution, which if you look at any metric of progress, the size of our polities, the child survival rates, anything you care about, it just shoots up into the sky. And as Ian Morris puts it, it made a mockery of all the world's earlier history, scientific revolution, Black death, Renaissance, blips in anything we care about. And that's because we exploited stored solar energy in the form of peat turned to black rock coal, and algae, whatever, turned to oil and natural gas, and we unlocked that. In a matter of centuries, we began to burn that down, and using that excess energy, we multiplied ourselves and our efforts. We had another agricultural revolution, the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, where we synthesize through the Haber-Bosch process.

0:43:05.8 MM: We synthesize fertilizer with Nitrogen in the air and natural gas, and this allowed us, like four billion people, half the population along our lives today, thanks to that process, we're literally eating our fossil fuels. We use them to develop new technologies. Now, here's where we transition to part two of the book, which is that the energy return on investment, which is a key metric I care a lot about, is decreasing. So the excess energy is shrinking, and economics, and a lot of what we do, we've focused on efficiency because they all developed long after the industrial revolution or after the industrial revolution. And so, if you look at one metric like oil discovery, and all the metrics look like this, in 1919, one barrel of oil found you another 1000 barrels. Massive return on energy. By 1951, a barrel of oil found you another a 100. And by 2010, one barrel found you another five.

0:43:56.9 MM: So the level of cooperation is governed by this, if you like, the space of the possible created by an energy ceiling and an efficiency floor, and that is shrinking. Our ability to innovate new efficiencies is decreasing, the rate of that is decreasing, and the ceiling is rapidly falling on us. And so our societies, all of the fractures are cracking. We're falling back to lower scales of cooperation as a result of this.

0:44:18.2 SC: Let's actually...

0:44:19.1 MM: And so, how do we get out of this is the question now.

0:44:20.6 SC: Let's pause and dwell on this 'cause I think this is an important thing. First, let me just sort of summarize this point, which I'm going to be very much in favour of as a physicist, that the progress in the sense of just change, not necessarily improvement, of human society is a story of transitions. It's more punctuated equilibrium than gradual improvement. We Innovate...

0:44:44.3 MM: Something like gradual and occasional punctuated. Yeah, sure.

0:44:47.3 SC: Yeah. But the idea that we do innovate, we find some new mode for doing something, whether it's producing energy or technology or whatever, and then that gives us space. We can then grow into that. But you're saying that as we do grow into that, as we sort of reach what might be a new equilibrium, we also, because there's less spare excess wealth in various forms to go around, things get squeezed a little bit. Our social fabric gets a little bit harder to maintain.

0:45:18.0 MM: That's right. So I mean, not only has population grown, and so that alone is, but that's a good thing for the most part, because it means more innovation, more people, more... Insofar as everyone is able to access all of that cultural knowledge and opportunity matches talent and all of that stuff, which as we both know isn't often... It's not always...

0:45:34.4 SC: Not always true. Yeah.

0:45:37.0 MM: But yeah the other side of it is simply that the space itself is shrinking, because not only is abundance turning into scarcity for the usual reasons, but we're reentering a Malthusian world simply because our excess energy is decreasing. It doesn't matter how fancy your gadgets and technology are if you can't charge them. Our ability to access energy isn't just price. It's a proxy for it that's affected by a bunch of other things. It's literally how much energy do I need to get some amount of energy back? Ideal world, you want a small energy sector. It's like 5% of the economy at the moment. That's great. But because it means that the returns on that energy allow you to do everything else that makes life worth it. Like traveling on flights across the planet and hanging out with your friends and eating great food, that it requires ingredients drawn from all around the world. All that stuff relies on abundant energy.

0:46:23.4 SC: And I guess, yeah, I think you're here to convince me of this one a little bit more. Because I can imagine, the same kind of general story, but then saying, well, once we reach some equilibrium, once we have some steady flow of energy in and things out, then we can figure out a way to organize our society that fits in to that equilibrium. The moments of change, in a different telling than what you just gave, the moments of change are the scary ones where we're not sure what's going on, but once everything is a steady flow, we might reach a happy equilibrium. But you seem to be saying that's not empirically what happens.

0:47:02.9 MM: So that's a very physicist answer, Sean.

0:47:05.5 SC: Yeah [laughter]

0:47:05.9 MM: No, in biology, regardless of our evolutionary game theory, there are no equilibrium. And the reason for that is because, in a world... So, I tell this story in the beginning of the book, like why I got into this. I'm trained as an engineer, originally, and I switched fields. And the reason that I did that is I got really concerned around climate change and I got concerned about a lot of... I lived in a lot of different places like Africa and New Guinea and things like that, and I was concerned that people don't understand culture, first off, and second, climate change, we're all focused on mitigation, but as the world changes, we're also gonna have to figure out how to live in a climate changed world. And some of that we get like carbon capture and those kinds of technologies. But how do you deal with a million Bangladeshis underwater coming into India? How do you like not have civilization come apart? What does that mean for the Middle East and then for Europe?

0:47:52.6 MM: Like the Syrian migration crisis is the first example of that. You had climate change, probably induced droughts. You have a bunch of people coming into cities, there's no enough jobs to go around, no enough infrastructure to support them. Eventually they start to... And then the geopolitics kicks in, eventually you have a difficult problem at Europe's doorstep. That's what I wanted to work on. So the thing is that, in a world, I remember watching Al Gore's documentary in 2007, and I was like, Gore... And I started reading the IPCC reports. I was reading the Pentagon reports and I was like, Gore is absolutely right about the problem, but he's crazy. Are we gonna slow the economy to save the planet? If we do amazing, I'm happy. But I just don't believe that. Because in a world where every country is trying to outcompete every other country, every company is trying to outcompete every other company, and every individual wants more than their neighbors, you're not going to get this equilibrium sustainable, whatever.

0:48:47.4 MM: All you're gonna do is encourage a zero sum Malthusian world where your success means my loss because there's a limited pie from which we're taking stuff. Unless you can somehow equalize everything and people don't like that. So, any theory of change or any theory of society that requires a complete shift in human nature, and not just constraining in some way, is broken. It's broken from the beginning. Is broken before you got there. So this is an example. There isn't... So like ideas like degrowth or just pure sustainability and stagnation are dangerous because they will shove us back into a zero sum environment.

0:49:21.1 SC: Is that what it was like back in the hunter-gatherers?

0:49:24.3 MM: Yeah. So hunter-gatherers are really interesting. So we have some new work where we're trying to... So hunter-gatherers are... Oh, well, some hunter-gatherer groups are known for their egalitarianism. They do equalize. If you move to pastoralists and chiefdoms, you start to see a bit more inequality and things like this. And so people sometimes interpret that as the ancestral state was an... Humans are by nature egalitarian. No. That is probably an adaptation to those zero sum conditions where there's weak property rights. Why? Because in a world that is zero sum, and that means your gain is my loss and vice versa, if you start a pizza business, and I'm like, you start a pizza business, you took a piece of that limited market. I'm got to burn your business down or take from you. That's what it incentivizes. It incentivizes destructive competition.

0:50:09.8 MM: In a world that's positive sum, you start a pizza business, I'm like, "Yo, I got to start my own chain of the pizza". Obviously the pizza business is booming. Very different psychology, productive competition. So hunter-gatherers are in a world of destructive competition, and there's two equilibria that emerge of the model. One, they just kill each other to extinction 'cause of these destructive cycles, or two, they managed to flatten. But the consequence of that flattening is a decrease in productivity 'cause what is the point if you can't rise higher? It's a decrease in production and it is a stagnation, if you like, that eventually gets you out competed by the pastoralists, by the agriculturalists, by the larger societies that are not engaged to that. And so that's the central problem with I what I think the solution you're alluding to.

0:50:53.0 SC: Well, it's not even a solution. I'm just wondering what the space of possibilities is. But you're pointing out that, to put it in the harshest possible terms, inequality can be a driver of innovation.

0:51:03.7 MM: Correct. And an evolution, like life is competing. Now you could get cycles, if you like, like predator prey model type stuff, where it's like you get a nice bird and the rabbits go up and then the hair go up and then, the foxes catch up, and then you get a lie. So you can get these kind of equilibrium emerge, but it's a Malthusian world that most animals inhabit. We escape the Malthusian trap simply because we got a little boost. So the question is, so my view is that in order to tackle these very real problems around sustainability, climate change, and not destroying ourselves in our planet, we need the next era of abundance. Not an era of scarcity. Because the countries that are...

0:51:47.7 MM: First off, it's easy to be nice to people when there's plenty to go around, and second, the countries that can invest in looking after their environment and preserving blocks of land and wanting to live in a clean environment are those that are wealthy enough, energy rich enough, that they're not worried about simple things like food and having enough resources for hospitals and education and other infrastructure. Those are the countries. I was in Australia recently. I'm an Australian citizen, actually. So I was at the Great Barrier Reef. I was there as a teenager. And I remember, oh my God. I was in these areas. It was so bleached. This was in, I don't know, early 2000s or something. And I was back again last year and I was astonished.

0:52:26.6 MM: I was talking to people like, how did you manage to restore the reef? They have money, they have resources, and they care about it enough because they have the highest household wealth in the world and the only country in the world that has positive migration from America. So they were able to invest in it if they want to. You do that in a world of abundance, not scarcity.

0:52:47.0 SC: Yeah, I mean, and I don't want to disagree 'cause I don't know enough to be able to disagree, but I'm curious about the possibilities, like I said. That story you just told is compatible in my mind with an equilibrium zero sum game where everybody has that level of wealth. I mean, I haven't quite seen the connection to inequality and competition.

0:53:10.0 MM: It's just exactly what you said. So there is no baseline. There's no, like now I'm satisfied. Like I have enough. Progress and... Like we want more than our neighbors, and there's always problems to be solved. And even if you as a society, even if you as an individual decide, you know what, I have enough, we as a society, you're gonna get out competed by the mutation, cultural or genetic, where that says, actually, I want a little more. It's not in equilibrium. In other words, it's invadable by that other mutation.

0:53:41.5 SC: Okay. I'll make one more stab at utopian egalitarianism, and then we can move on. Even if we bought the idea that inequality is going to happen unless we enforce some kind of rigid equitability, that everyone is unhappy. Can we imagine that we are in a world of such abundance now that we can have some equality, some competition, some motivation for innovation and yet the worse off people are still much better off than they are today in the actual world?

0:54:15.5 MM: Yeah, I mean, I think the issue is... So I kind of survey the energy technologies available to us and I really, apart from solar, if we solve the battery problem and hydro which is fantastic if you've got fast flowing rivers, please use them, good on Canada. It's really nuclear as having the right numbers apart from fossil fuels, and the fact that those are decreasing, we're in real trouble. And you can have a society that's more redistributive and it comes at a cost, or look at the top 100 European companies. They're old. Very few were invented, created like this century, if you like. Look at the top 100 American companies, how many of them. Europe redistributes a lot, and so it squashes... It's good. It's like I live in Europe. I live in the UK, somewhere in between. It squashes things. And so productivity is lower, production is lower.

0:55:10.9 MM: And so you end up with America doing a lot of the innovation and there's a little bit of free writing where you get to benefit from all of those drugs and all of those technologies. You get to use the iPhone, you get to use the internet. You get to use all of these different technologies. But it's being driven by this creation of inequality in America driven... So I talk about Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is a... People think of it as like a bastion of success. No, man, it's a graveyard of failure. Right?

0:55:39.7 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:55:41.0 MM: And that's what America... America says, "You do you. Everybody, go try. You can do this too." It's terrible at an individual level. The Asian model, like the Asian tiger mom, Japan, whatever is, you know, you don't do you, you do me. You do this, you follow the script. And everyone is better off, but it leads to incremental innovation. Like you have to believe, in a crowded market, where everybody also thinks this, and most people still fail, that you are gonna make it. And a society that encourages that in a large enough marketplace, with enough energy, results in finding the few apples, what we call unicorns, for a reason, right? The Apples, the Amazons, the Alphabets, the whatevers, right? And the graveyard of failure is forgotten because America is richer as a result of this.

0:56:24.6 SC: And you draw... Good, I'm gonna give up on the utopia there, the egalitarian. I'm actually not highly committed to it.

0:56:32.3 MM: We can play this offline. I would enjoy this actually.

0:56:33.5 SC: Not highly committed to it, but I wanna learn. But you then take this picture, I know we've given it a very short shift 'cause it's a deep book with a lot of things going on, but you take this picture of human nature and the development of history through these transitions and getting the energy and you apply it to current issues that we have. Climate change is one of them, of course, but also political polarization. What about the growth of populism and authoritarianism and so forth, how do we understand that through this lens?

0:57:06.6 MM: So, the first thing is, ideally, you wanna predict, you wanna explain, but then you wanna be able to do something about it. So I see the rise of, there are always fractures that exist in a society, There are always fractures. They are the class divisions, ethnic divisions, regional divisions. There's all these fractures that exist. But in a world where there's plenty to go around, people just mumble and grumble. So, I have this analogy, imagine the buses coming along. That's the rate of economic growth. And people are waiting for the buses, and you've got some people who have special passes. The 1% get to the front of the line first. And you've got groups that favor their ingroup and they're like, "Come on, you can come in front," and then you're waiting there. But if the buses are coming every five minutes, you mumble, you grumble, but you put up with it 'cause you're gonna get a seat, just wait five minutes more. But if the rate of buses slows down, one an hour, one a day, it's like driving around a car park where there's plenty of spaces versus only one and now some asshole... Sorry, can I say that on your podcast?

0:58:02.9 SC: Go ahead. Yeah. It's late in the podcast.

0:58:05.1 MM: Someone then tries to take your place, right? It's a very different psychology. And it doesn't even have to be a reality. The perception that that is happening, the created perception can create the reality. Or if you're looking at... If we have a psychology that's sensitive to rate of change, and you feel like things are slowing down a little bit, that alone is enough to trigger those fractures becoming something more. And so then you can have the rise of the Right Wing, you end up with more ethnic fractures, you get political polarization, you get all of those fractures becoming something more. And the solution to that is, one, if you've got the resources invest. You can't have a million people turn up at your door if you don't have enough food and water and prepare for those guests.

0:58:52.6 MM: So you need to invest in infrastructure so that already stretched schools, the good schools, the hospital lines, people are not waiting and waiting and now they're annoyed 'cause you're giving things to newcomers. That's a recipe for ethnic conflict. But if you're investing and you're like, alongside this new group of people, we're gonna put in all this money so that there's enough space for everyone, that's a good thing. And if you don't have that, you need to be investing in energy technologies that allow us to raise that ceiling. So I talk about the umbrella model of multiculturalism as really fussing all of these solutions into something that would work in a way that current melting pots or mosaics or no hyphen French models really just don't.

0:59:31.3 SC: So just to try to rephrase it, 'cause I do think this resonates with something that I have believed for a while, one of the things, the major factor that... What is the acronym you use, the one thing that explains everything?

0:59:44.2 MM: TOTI.

0:59:45.2 SC: When it comes to populism, etcetera, is the idea that people who are not well off, which you might think are gonna go for leftists who want to spread the wealth, but they really are feeling powerless, both in the sense that their political voices aren't heard and that their lives are getting worse. And then that combination pushes them toward appealing to a strong figure who can shake things up.

1:00:12.9 MM: Yeah. Look, as I pointed in the book, I don't think there's good evidence that people don't inequality. What people don't like is...

1:00:20.5 SC: That's a double negative. So you're saying that people like equality.

1:00:25.7 MM: No, I'm not saying that people like equality or inequality or whatever. What the people want is fairness.

1:00:29.9 SC: Yeah. Okay.

1:00:30.9 MM: People want the outcomes to be matched to the input. They want a return. They don't want necessarily the handout, maybe some people do. But people want the opportunity so that what they do, their hard work, if they choose to wake up early and get to the front of the line at that bus stop, they will get at their seat. And when that stops happening, no matter how early they wake up, or because of where they're born, or who they're born to, they just never get that seat, that is the problem. That's when society starts to come apart, and that's what we need to resolve. So, in the section on inequality, I differentiate between wealth creation versus wealth appropriation. Wealth appropriation is rent seeking. It's monopolistic behavior. It's land, holding onto land for centuries as in the country I live in, where you're just taking a rent on the land, providing no additional value.

1:01:26.2 MM: This is why we need land value taxes as a way out of this. It's a huge thing that I talk about in the book. Whereas wealth creation is like, you created Apple, or you created Windows or you created Amazon. Yeah, you put a bunch of high streets and malls out of work, but you made things more efficient that consumers and you created wealth in some sense, either through efficiency, the law of innovations and efficiency or because you've found some new energy technology or something. You've literally created a new... You've increased the space of the possible and you are allowed to keep a part of that space, and you are allowed to make other bets that we hope will continue to expand the space. But the issue is that unearned intergenerational transmission of wealth that entrenches that inequality, slowly over time, having the remaining people fight over smaller and smaller scraps. That is when society comes apart and that's what we need to solve.

1:02:16.6 SC: So you'd be in favor of larger estate taxes?

1:02:19.8 MM: Would be great, as I pointed out in the book, that would be great, but it runs up against a few issues. One is, smart estate planning, wealth flight, where people take their money out of the country.

1:02:28.7 SC: Yeah, you talked about that there.

1:02:29.8 MM: And it also goes against instincts about provisioning for your children and working harder later in life. It's a nice. It would be great. Here's the outcome you want. You want to create a world that is, every generation has a fairly fair playing field to start with, so that the best and brightest of every generation can push forward our species to where we need to go. And over time, things accrue that prevent that happening. So what I actually... So there's an open secret within economics where across the political spectrum, people agree that most taxes are distortionary, they affect your behavior in negative ways. Like your income tax, if you are afraid you're gonna earn a little bit more and move into the next income bracket, you're like, that marginal gain is not worth it for me. So now it's distortionary on your productivity, your production. Sales tax, like, I'm not gonna buy that because of the sales tax. It's distortionary on commerce.

1:03:22.6 MM: There's one tax that is non-distortionary and it, and there's a moral case for it and it is fair, and it would do away with the need for the other taxes. You could get rid of income tax, you could get rid of sales tax, you could get rid of capital gains tax and you could still pay for the US military and Medicare, and in this country, many other things. So that is land value taxes. So the one asset that people own that they did not create, the one asset that stands above all others, is land. And I don't mean what you do on the land, you shouldn't be taxed for your buildings or anything you do on the land, but the land itself is common.

1:03:58.6 MM: And there's a moral case, it's almost slavery, where we really need to get rid of this ability to own land, or at the very least, those who take that land should be taxed for use of that land, for its most... And this does all things, so it's non-distortionary. It leads to the most productive use of that land. It solves a lot of the housing issues. And the only barrier to it that people agree is, is gonna require a revolution. Unless, I guess, the middle class realize that because we all... I own land, you own land, we own land. But what you don't realize is how little you own relative to many others. 25,000 Brits who own half of the country, or the 10% of Americans who own I think 60% of the country.

1:04:38.4 SC: But just to point out, this is very radical as a proposal, and there's probably unanticipated consequences here, but...

1:04:48.2 MM: The difference between utopia and a better world are constraints, and, well, to your point, there are real constraints on this. And so what I suggest, I suggest pathways out of this. So the path dependence leads us into a world. Like, it's hard to rewrite the Constitution. It's hard to change the tax code overnight. But what you can do is do what... For example, last week I was in Estonia, 'cause I wanna understand how they are the top of the PISA tables in the Western world, beaten only by a handful of East Asian countries, and they do it while spending less per student than the OECD average, and certainly less than the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and they have better outcomes. How do they do that?

1:05:27.1 SC: And sorry, explain what these tables are that you're talking about.

1:05:29.2 MM: Oh, sorry. Yeah, sorry. The OECD's PISA tables test students around the world on mathematics, on reading, and on science.

1:05:36.4 SC: Good. Okay.

1:05:37.1 MM: And Estonia tops that table, their students top the table, apart, as I said, from a couple of a few East Asian countries. How do they do that? So I went there to understand. I spoke to the former education minister. I spoke to the person who founded what was called the Tiger Leap Foundation. So after the fall of the... Well, after the Soviet occupation ended, in 1991, only half the country had a telephone. So, when Estonia became it's own country, they were like, "Okay, if we wanna leap ahead, we're gonna have to do something different. We're not like super wealthy. We don't have like a bunch of resources. We just have our people. That's it. We got to invest in our people." And so, you can see why the people who did this thought of it because of their own experiences, but they decided to really invest in technology.

1:06:16.8 MM: So they created what was called the Tiger Leap Foundation, where they overnight gave it the access to computers for every student, they internet-connected everybody, they trained the teachers and so on. They were able to do this because they have radical decentralization. Every school has autonomy over what they do. Every municipality has autonomy. And the central government can't just say, let's do this, they have to incentivize. So teachers were incentivized to share knowledge through this teacher social network called School Life. They gave them opportunities and incentivized, by sharing that knowledge, they increased their pay. They gave them opportunities to travel to other places, to borrow the best things from around the world, creating a brand new curriculum. And they tested a bunch of things at a local level, and when it worked, it got spread to the rest of the country.

1:07:01.0 MM: So, in this case, for example, robotics is taught. They were the first country to teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and now algorithms to like elementary school students. They trialed, Conrad Wolfram's, I don't know if you come across Conrad Wolfram's criticism of math education, where he says, math education recapitulates history for some reason. Like, we're gonna learn numbers, now the Greeks and Pythagoras, for some reason, and eventually get to algebra and then eventually calculus. Many students never get to calculus. And we don't learn any 20th century math in high school, let alone 21st century. We're missing huge swaths. Why? Is that really the most efficient way to do it? So Conrad, obviously wanting to sell some Wolfram products, but he argues, well, in the real world, you and I do math on computers. We're not back in the envelope calculations. That's not where the hard stuff gets done.

1:07:54.8 MM: And so, what you want is for kids to understand what it means to take a derivative, what an integral actually is, and how it can be used, and maybe some stats. You want them to mental models and work alongside computers, and you can teach that before you... What's hard about calculus is not the derivatives and integrals, it's the chain rule, it's the mechanics, the quadratic. It's those that are difficult.

1:08:16.9 SC: I agree with you there.

1:08:17.6 MM: That's not what's important. That was built for a world before... My middle school teacher was like, "Make sure you learn how to do mental math. You're not gonna carry a calculator in your pocket." He didn't foresee the iPhone. So they were able to trial that, and now they're trialing this really radical new education system, where the learning happens at home, where homework and schoolwork are swapped basically. Like how can a teacher teach to 20-30 kids of different abilities? They can't. So the lower end get left behind, the upper end are ignored. And so, in order to do that, what happens is, when you're at home, you get educational material, you get teachers and whatever, you get this from the best minds, and then you come to school to practice that, you do the homework where the teacher is not the deliverer of knowledge, they're the facilitator helping you to use the internet and AI to practice your skills in a very kind of practical real world focus. And you do that through radical decentralization.

1:09:08.8 MM: So the US works the same way, by the way. Justice Brandeis referred to each state as a laboratory for democracy. "Arizona, you wanna try something? Go try it. If you fail, you fail it at Arizonan level. And if it works, we bubble it up to the top." Satya Nadella converted Microsoft from a monolith to a series of startups using the same principle. It's like, "You're gonna try different things and we're gonna bubble it up to Microsoft and it works." And that, they invested in ChatGPT and OpenAI. Great moves, and the shares have been soaring. The Catholic church works this way by the way. It's like lasted for so long because they're like, "Well, we got a central authority, but Jesuits, you go do your weird thing and we're gonna laugh at you for most of it. Oh, now we have a Jesuit Pope. 'Cause that worked out." You have to have space to explore these possibilities, to get out of that trap. Why am I talking about all this? Because land value taxes are something you can do in what I call startup cities.

1:10:00.8 MM: Like, cities are the place where we all live, and countries are increasingly untenable in some ways. Like, how do you get that? But if you empower cities, give them more autonomy, allow them to learn from one another, have a more startup ecosystem around that, this is a way out. This is the engine of development that Hong Kong represented for China. This is why Singapore is at the top of the PISA tables. It's how Guangzhou works. And now there's a bunch of startup cities or charter cities sometimes in Africa. But this is a way past current democracy and eventually may be programmable politics, but I don't have time to explain that. It's in the book.

1:10:33.0 SC: It's in the book. I think there's a lot in the book, and we've covered a lot of it, but I do wanna encourage people to check out the book because it paints a much fuller picture. But maybe we can wind things up by returning to something that we talked about right at the beginning, the children learning from the adults rather than using their reasoning. That we rely on our cultural transmission of knowledge. I wanna feed that back into what we were just talking about in terms of inequality and fairness and innovation and things like that. How much of a problem is it that, in the modern era, we're able to get that cultural knowledge in a quite fine-tuned or at least quite differentiated way even within one culture? In your bus analogy, if I am constantly told that the buses come very rarely and discriminate against me, even if it's not true, that becomes a problem for how society works.

1:11:34.3 MM: Yeah, people talk about this as like the Walter Cronkite problem. Once upon a time, we all got our news... Well, not me. I'm too young for...

1:11:41.4 SC: Yeah, us too.

1:11:41.5 MM: Yeah, Walter Cronkite was on the evening news and now we all read different... We read Breitbart and Huffington Post and New York Times, we're all getting it from like different places. So I think the internet is interesting in that... So I argue that the internet is actually creating... We are not in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution or fifth industrial revolution. We are in the midst of a second enlightenment. One driven not by coffee shops and pamphlets and books, but by tweets and shared articles on social media that piss you off. And they piss you off because they expose you to ideas that are not in your ingroup. Now, alongside that is a countervailing force, which is that we are also able to assort in smaller and smaller groups, and those groups can compete with one another.

1:12:27.6 MM: In other words, the internet creates new tribes. So, there's a show here, Little Britain, and there's a character, he is like, he's, "I'm the only gay in the village." It's not true. Actually, there's lots of other gays in the village. And once upon a time, you might've been... If you were a small minority in a small village, you did not have a critical mass to do anything. But the internet enables you to find... So, I point to a couple of examples. So, are you into carrying sand in your pocket, Sean?

1:13:00.3 SC: I am not. Never have I done that.

1:13:00.8 MM: No?

1:13:01.2 SC: No.

1:13:01.3 MM: Well, 30,000 people on a Reddit subreddit on pocket sand talk about all the benefits of carrying sand in their pockets. But that's actually a niche interest unlike stapling bread to trees. Listeners, go and Google bread stapled to a tree. It is a hobby held by around 300,000 people. So yeah, you get these different groups, but it's very hard to generalize whether that is silo. It's an empirical question, whether we are now in silos or actually exposed to more information, and both are true. I think what is actually the case is it's not about the information. It was never about the information. It was never about misinformation. It was about whom we trust. And what has happened is that our trust in our institutions, and to some degree as a result of that, in each other, has decreased. And that is resulting in selective access to that information in greater assortment. And the ultimate issue here, the ultimate level of problem needs to be solved, and that is, it's an energy problem, actually.

1:13:58.6 SC: Sorry, you made a leap there that I need to figure out. I agree that the trust in institutions has waned. It seems to me in some ways that's an outcome of the same game theoretic analysis of different groups jockeying for space and things like that. And of course, with the caveat that some institutions are super untrustworthy, so it's correct to not trust them. But so how do you bring it back down to energy?

1:14:27.8 MM: So, sorry. So, why I say that it's about the information is like, there were always people, always, calling for the end of the world, or saying that we live in a racist society, or that we live in a society where you're getting screwed over, or there's always a bunch of people saying everything, but whom people listen to depends on circumstances. And so what I'm arguing is there is a both a perception and a reality, and yes, they can like feed back on each other. And the reality is that truly, our space of the possible has indeed shrunk. The amount of excess energy available to each of us has actually shrunk, and around the oil crisis, 1980s, 1970s, it was around, what the fuck happened in 1971, 1973. This was when it all happened, the American dream died around then because you suddenly had a 50-50 probability of being better off than your parents. That has truly happened.

1:15:23.6 MM: And so that is fundamentally an issue of excess energy, which ultimately drives GDP growth. So 50% roughly of GDP growth is energy and 50% is about innovations and efficiency.

1:15:34.7 SC: Okay. I do get it now. So it comes back to this shrinking distance between the ceiling and the floor, basically, in our society.

1:15:41.8 MM: That's right. The amount that we have to all live in together, the scale of cooperation that is incentivized.

1:15:48.8 SC: And I will let you, close these sets of thoughts with your optimistic spin on how we're eventually going to work our way out of this.

1:15:56.3 MM: Well, so as I said, part one of the book lays it all out, lays out the science, lays out the problem, but then part two is exactly about how do we... The chapter titles are like, how do we reunite humanity? How do we create new forms of governance for the 21st century? How do we shatter that glass ceiling of inequality? How do we trigger a creative explosion that maybe gets us to fusion and becoming the first generation of a galactic civilization? How do we improve the internet? How do we as individuals become brighter? And because, like imagine you are the first generation to have the periodic table. We can stop doing alchemy and we start doing some chemistry. And there are actual solutions, given the constraints that we face, real life solutions that are possible for tackling each of these problems, and that means that a brighter future is possible if we so choose.

1:16:49.6 SC: I cannot close on any better sentence than that. So Michael Muthukrishna, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:16:55.4 MM: Thank you so much for having me, Sean. I loved it.

[music]