Dr. Michael Muthukrishna is a professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. His research explores the processes that underlie culture and social change, as well as what makes humans so distinctive from other animals. Michael’s latest book is entitled A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. Michael joins the podcast to discuss the four fundamental laws of life that govern every human society and form of life.

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Tom: Welcome to the podcast, Michael.

Michael: Thank you for having me, Tom. Excited to be here.

Tom: So, in reading your book, The Theory of Everyone, you mentioned a little bit about your childhood and life growing up, and to me, it’s fascinating. You’ve lived in so many different places. Can you tell me a little bit about where did you live growing up and where did you move?

Michael: So, my family’s from Sri Lanka, and I left there when I was two years old. Then I lived in Botswana, and in both of these places, it happened to be in historical times, so Sri Lanka was going through a civil war, and that’s partially what prompted my parents to move.

We moved to Botswana, where my grandparents were already living, in the early to mid-1990s. This was pre- and post-apartheid South Africa. So, this is another very interesting moment in history. Why was South Africa going through this change?

And why was Botswana, where I happen to live, so different from other African countries?

And, you know, I also lived in Papua New Guinea. And again, I happened to be there during a pivotal moment in their history when there was a government coup; we lived 500 yards from Parliament House, and you had folks driving trucks with M16s, grenades going off. And, you know, I’m a kid watching all this happen.

But then I also lived in —Australia, Canada, the States, and now the UK—and of course, these are contrasting. They’ve got their problems as well.

There’s division in these countries, but different problems and yet somehow also the same in that, you know, there’s a common human psychology that’s playing out in different ways across these cultures,

So, you know, these, these thoughts obviously play in my mind and affect what I was interested in and what led to the book.

Tom: Yeah. Tell me about a couple of your best memories from childhood. These are places that most of our listeners have never, traveled to, and may not even know where they are. What are a couple of highlights of what it’s like to grow up in these different countries?

Michael: We lived in Gaborone, Botswana’s capital. It’s a kind of dusty, dry place. It’s a landlocked country. One of the things my parents love to do is go hunting, or we would go camping in the Kalahari Desert.

And, yeah even in Gaborone, you can see the night sky, and when you’re in the desert, you know, where you can truly see the horizon, there’s nothing but sand and a few trees, and you can hear some lions roaring around you. The majesty of the Milky Way is burned into my memories.

And I often wonder if much of humanity living in urban environments where there’s so much light pollution has been robbed of that view. And I think having that view kind of makes you realize you are insignificant. I suppose you know that there’s a vast universe out there, and we are on a small bubble of life.

It gives you a sense that we’re all in this together. Like this is our home. We don’t feel that way because you can’t see the night sky in most places. And so, all you can see is one another, and all you can see is the life in front of you.

But then, you know, I mean, even, even the places like New Guinea, the kind of life you live in a place like that is you live in an armed compound, barbed wire fences around you.

Your school is another compound with parkway fences and workplaces and, supermarkets are like that too. And like I said, you know, we were 500 yards from Parliament House.

There’s a unique bond that happens when you’re surrounded by even that kind of violence, you know, and I always find that interesting no matter where I live.

So, you know, obviously pre- and post-apartheid, in South Africa, you know, people adjust to the new norm. in Sri Lanka, where there’s a civil war going on.

You live in a place where there are bombs going off every so often because there are terrorist attacks by the Tamil Tigers in Colombo. It hits you, right?

Especially when it becomes personal, but people live normally. Like no matter what happens in the world, people kind of just accept that this is how things are now.

Tom: It sounds like you had an incredible childhood. So many different rich experiences. By the time you’re ready to go to college, what questions and topics are foremost on your mind? What did you want to study and learn and better understand?

Michael: Yeah. So, my family was in Brisbane, Australia, at the time. And so, I applied to some Ivy League universities, and I got in, but I also got into the local college. And when I looked at, the size of the student loans, I was like, okay, I’m going to go locally. I also graduated from high school in Australia as one of the top 500 students in the nation, which meant that, like, every college and every, course was open to me.

And so, when you’re a smart kid, you ask, what do I want to do with my life? And so my feeling was that I wanted to try to tackle a big problem. And so, I looked, and I was like, well, the most significant problems to me are maybe in physics.

They are in maybe philosophy or theology and in human behavior. So, I thought this is what I wanted to study,

So, I decided to pair it with something that was more employable. So engineering is what I, is what I paired it.

Tom: Very sensible. Was there a pivotal moment, conversation, experience where you thought, I’m going to go all in graduate school and beyond because I want to go deep and do these questions.

Michael: So, I got kind of frustrated with psychology. I felt like there wasn’t a good underlying theoretical framework. And so, I thought I’d go all in on engineering, even though that was the backup career. And I had this path in front of me, so I had, this offer from Microsoft and then I thought to myself, I don’t, I guess I don’t want to make a bunch of money and die.

I still do want to solve these problems. And then, you know, in 2007, I watched Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. And I’m like, whoa, that was wild. Is Gore, right? Is this true? So, I go read the IPCC reports and I’m like, okay, this sounds scary, but look, it’s the IPCC there.

They have an incentive. So I go, who would tell the truth about this? The Pentagon, so I read the Pentagon reports and I’m like, yo, we’re talking about mass migration. We’re talking about places underwater. We’re talking about wild weather. we’re talking about wars over water.

And I thought to myself, like, the plan is mitigation. Wait, your plan is to slow the economy to save the planet. I’m like, maybe that’s going to happen. But what if, what if it doesn’t? And you know, that’s when my childhood came into this. So, I’m like, people don’t understand how different people are around the world or their similarities.

And when you have a million Bangladeshis underwaters streaming into India and then into Pakistan and Europe, what does that mean for our ability to govern? And that’s exactly, I think the world that we live in today. So, I switched paths, and I thought, look, I’m going to give this a shot.

I want to try to develop a science of culture here. I happen to be working in an area of engineering called control theory, which is the math of feedback loops, which, to me, seemed like the ideal framework for doing that.

Tom: Okay. Now were there mentors or certain people that gave you encouragement along the way to really cut against the grain?

Michael: You know, I think there’s a few things. So, one is when you’re trained as an engineer versus a scientist, if you’re a scientist, you can afford to. Look at this one problem. You know, you can spend your life on bromeliads and, the ecosystem within that or something. But if you’re an engineer, you can’t do that.

You work on a problem, but you must consider how it connects to the bigger system. You must be able to zoom in and zoom out of a problem. I didn’t really appreciate this training until I met Joe Henrick, my advisor.

So, Joe, was the chair of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. and he, is also an aerospace engineer by training who did a degree with anthropology.

Michael: And so, we naturally had a kind of way of thinking about Problems that was, I recognize as being very similar and really, I think came from our engineering training

Tom: It’s starting to come together for me. So, you wrote a book recently called A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. I want to dive into a couple different spots in your book that really inspired me. One of them is how you explored this notion of human intelligence, which we often take as a given. There are smart people, average people, and not-so-smart people. But you pointed out that being considered intelligent really depends on the kind of culture that you live in and what a culture values. So, then I started thinking. What are going to be the

markers of human intelligence in an artificial intelligence perfused world? We think we know what it means to be intelligent today, but what is it going to look like to be intelligent just a few years down the road? Is that going to change?

Michael: So, one prediction that I would have been that IQ tests, as they are now, are going to become less and less predictive of the things that they’re quite predictive of right now. So, success in the workplace and, and educational outcomes, they’re going to become less and less predictive. And the reason is because, as you said, the skills that are required over time have shifted.

In the past a doctor or a lawyer had to memorize reams of knowledge. And so, if you had good memory, that made you good at one of these. Now, if that knowledge, through writing, and of course more recently through the internet and search, becomes instantly accessible, now the value of, of just memorizing goes down relative to parsing through that knowledge, you know, separating the signal from the noise, seeing that bigger picture.

Now with AI, we have not only the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, but a, a thinking agent. to help us parse through that knowledge, make brighter decisions, see connections that we might not see. So, I think, you know, being optimally specialized, like knowing enough about different things so you can optimally engage with this sum of human knowledge that we’re designing, is going to become more valuable as well as a bunch of other skills.

So just being able to focus, right? So, school teaches you to defer gratification. Sit down now for exams that are coming later. but we live in a highly distracting world. And so just, just knowing how to parse that and, have that kind of discipline I think will, will feed into IQ tests, but there’s many other things that will change. It’s a way of thinking about what intelligence really is.

Tom: Yeah, you mentioned IQ tests. I’ve read that IQ tests given over a century and all else being equal on average, IQs are getting higher over time. Now, is that a feature or a quirk of the testing procedure itself? Like something about the measurement? Or do you think humans are getting smarter over time?

And I mean, over a very short amount of time, say in the past century.

Michael: Yeah, so my take on this is that we are getting smarter. And that is because human intelligence isn’t just kind of genetic hardware. It’s also kind of cultural software that endows us with new skills. So, what you’re describing is called the Flynn effect. James Flynn noticed that, you know, we’ve been giving people IQ tests for a century and people are getting better and better at this.

So, people thought, what’s going on? Are they just getting better at taking tests? is it nutrition? Could it be genetic? My take is this that first off, we’re building higher quality brains simply because we have higher nutrition, lower diseases and less pollution in the environment.

But more than that, our world has become more complex. So not only are we teaching more to Children at an earlier age and trying to pack more into the education system, but also, media. For example, if you compare TV shows. You know, think of like, I love Lucy versus, you know, even the trashiest television today,

There are more characters today. The tropes of the past wouldn’t fly. It’s more confusing to track, who’s doing what. Everything has become more complicated, more complex. And in part, that’s because the baseline has gone up.

Tom: I want to turn now to the core of your book where you put forth that there are four laws of life that govern, human society, wherever you find it.

Why don’t you tell me what each law is and maybe just a one sentence definition so that we’ll have all four in our mind and then we’ll go through each one. So, start me off. What are these laws of life, Michael?

Michael: So, these laws of life apply, you know, to all of life, not just humans. So, all the way from single celled organisms to, businesses and societies.

Tom: The laws of life are, first off is the law of energy.

Michael: And that is that energy is what makes matter come alive, if you like. it is what life is competing over. And the ability for any life to do anything is a function of excess energy. So, you know, when, photosynthesis, first evolved, our earliest ancestors were able to store the energy of the sun in chemical form, and that allowed them to have an excess.

It also allowed for the evolution of organisms that didn’t rely on photosynthesis, moving at plant pace but instead eating other organisms.

So that the law of energy is basically that the excess energy is a ceiling on the total biomass and complexity. of a society of all of life.

Yep. Okay, we’ve got energy. First law.

So that’s energy. So, energy is anything that you can do by, like imagine building an Ikea bookshelf, you can do it with a manual screwdriver, but if you have an electric, you can do it better. That’s the law of energy. the law of innovation is that life competes over that energy by figuring out ways to do more with less.

Tom: Mm hmm.

Michael: So, in technology, you can, you know, the, the efficiency of a candle to turn a chemical energy into light is very low. There’s a lot of heat being released and incandescent light bulbs, not great either. Right now, if you’ve ever heard, you know, in terms of climate change, you should turn the lights off to save energy.

These days, don’t bother if you have LEDs because they’re approaching a hundred percent efficiency in terms of very little heat and a lot of light.so the way that anyone makes money in the marketplace is by finding efficiencies, now animals do this as well, right? So, for the same amount of energy, if you can use it more efficiently to chase down the prey, you will outcompete the animals that are doing it less efficiently

So that’s the law of innovation that what ultimately is going on is that there is a pressure on doing more. with less energy given the amount of space. the law of cooperation is that the optimal scale of cooperation is the one where at every level.

So, the individual and the cells within one’s body, working with a particular number of other people, I will be better off in expectation. So, I can work with these people to get some kind of reward. So just to make it more concrete for people, imagine starting a business. So, to capture a particular market share, I need, could I do it by myself?

Do I need a co-founder? Do I need 10 people, a hundred people, a thousand people, whatever that might be.

And that is largely a function of that excess energy. So excess energy allows us to do more, and it incentivizes higher scales of cooperation.

The final law is the law of evolution.

So, it is not the case that, we’re just very, very clever and we are able to figure out The U. S. Constitution. We’re able to figure out the Magna Carta. Instead, the world that we live in is the product of millions of experiments.

We talk about the Magna Carta, but we don’t talk about all the other, uh, previous attempts to constrain the king that didn’t work. And so, there’s a kind of evolutionary process by which there is diversity, there is variation, different experiments being run, there is transmission of the stuff that’s working, and there’s selection by some mechanism where the stuff that works sticks around at the expense of the stuff that doesn’t.

And that is how we traverse, you know, the optimal scale of cooperation. That is how we discover new innovations in, business, in technology, or, or in biology. And that is how we also discover new energy sources and thereby raise the ceiling and allow us to, to go from simple, single celled organisms to complex multicellular organisms, and eventually animals, and how we go from small bands of humans all the way to societies of nation states and even unions of nation states, like the United States or European Union.

Gotcha. Okay. I want to dig into each of these four laws a little bit more on energy. when you talk about comparing different forms of energy production in our contemporary society, you have a term You call it energy return on investment.

Tom: Can you explain for those who haven’t heard of that? What is this term and how does it help you understand? energy production.

Michael: Yeah, so there’s many ways to evaluate energy in terms of availability, in terms of power, and so on. But I find energy return on investment a very intuitive way for people to think about this. And what it is, is it’s just like an ROI, like a return on investment. So, it’s the amount of energy it takes, to get some amount of energy back.

So, if a cheetah uses more energy in chasing down prey than they get in the calories from eating that prey, that cheetah is going to die.

Tom: Mm hmm.

Michael: Now if we look at our energy technologies, they also have an energy return on investment.

So, coal, started the industrial revolution, is peat. which is photosynthesis plant matter turned to black rock. So, pressure cooked by millions of years into dense, batteries that we could burn in a matter of centuries. oil and natural gas or, algae and zooplankton turned to this oil and natural gas.

Again, pressure cooked by millions of years into these dense stored batteries. you know, there’s different ways to measure energy return on investment. But if you look at something like discovery rates, they all kind of correlate.

So, the amount of energy it takes to discover more oil, say. So, in 1919, one barrel of oil was enough to find another thousand. By 1950, one barrel of oil was enough to find another hundred. And by 2010, one barrel of oil was enough to find another five.

Tom: Wow.

Michael: you know, this is the problem with a lot of renewables.

So, if you take something like a windmill. there’s a lot of energy invested in that, you know, Vaslav Smil, you know, he says, when I see, wind power, I see fossil fuels. I see the fossil fuels needed to plant that, power source.

I, I see the, the forging of the steel. I see the lubricant in terms of, the oil that’s starting to lubricant to keep that thing going, that’s the energy return. And it’s going to have some return over time to get it back. Solar panels are a bit better because the price has come down. So, the amount of material resources has gone down.

But if you look, the highest. return on investment comes from nuclear, and it comes from hydro. So hydro, if you’ve got big rivers, they’re always flowing. you build the dam once and then you’ve got tons of power for a very, very long time.

The thing is that we, we haven’t had to think a lot about energy because the sciences of economics and our understanding of growth came well after the industrial revolution. And so, the ceiling was so high that engineers and economists could focus entirely on efficiency. You know, efficiency was the way to do more with less, we still have just to be very clear, we still have plenty of energy.

the era of cheap energy is, is ending, and if we don’t use the energy that we do have, then cooperation collapses alongside it, because, you know, Excess energy is what makes life worth living.

People don’t want energy. They want a warm shower and a cold beer. And its excess energy that allows them to have that.

Tom: Yeah, so let me recap here. So. As you’ve described, it sounds like historically fossil fuels have had a high energy return on investment, but now there’s diminishing returns as it becomes more and more costly to find what’s left, right. Renewables have appeal for many reasons, particularly, you know, pollution related, but the upfront investment in materials, cuts into sort of the benefits and sort of energy production that generate.

So, in the tell me a little bit more what makes nuclear power appealing from an energy return on investment perspective?

Michael: Yeah. Nuclear power is off the charts because, these are massively, massively energetic reactions that create these very, very large and unstable elements.

And when they break down, they release a bunch of energy and that is basically just free heat. And there’s so much nuclear material available to us

Yeah, okay, So, for energy return on investment, nuclear kind of carries the day. Okay, let’s turn next; we talked a lot about energy, turn to innovation, and maybe to kind of combine and synthesize different laws, maybe just looking historically; I love the big picture; what are some of the biggest energy innovations?

Tom: Maybe in the last, you know, few millions of years, or even among humans, where are those pivot points with energy innovation?

Michael: Yeah. So, for humans, you know, one of the biggest energy innovations was fire. fire allowed us to predigest food and make it more bioavailable outside of our bodies. Fire is the reason you don’t have to sit there like a gorilla chewing all day because you’re, breaking it down early.

And in fact, our physiology reveals that. cultural evolution, and it reveals the need for fire because our jaws are too weak for raw foods, and our guts are too short to process that. And so, your entire physiology is designed for a world that assumes that people can cook. And what’s fascinating is that, of course, we don’t have genes for making fire. Let alone for cooking. So, it reveals that we are born into a world expecting the cultural transmission of this thing. That’s required to keep us alive.

The next major energy revolution from my perspective was agriculture.

So, this was, again, it was a kind of solar technology where instead of using if you think of energy return on investment, instead of walking around using calories to gather yams and, you know, and berries and try to hunt down animals, we started breeding them in one place. So, we weren’t wasting all this energy.

We were concentrating the sun into growing things reliably. And this massively expanded our populations and allowed us to outcompete the hunter gatherer groups who was still using it. hunting and gathering while we were now harvesting and grinding the next major revolution was an energy revolution where we discovered fossil fuels. And it multiplied human effort. You know, it allowed us to create factories and live in an age of abundance that, you know, the kings of the preindustrial era couldn’t have even imagined. And we’re all living in the shadow of that.

Tom: Let’s turn next to cooperation. I think this is, you know, in the society as we look at today, we see a lot of competition and divisiveness. What leads agents, whether humans or any other kind of entity, what leads to cooperation instead of competition?

Michael: So, competition and cooperation are two sides of the same coin in that we compete to cooperate, and we cooperate, with others to compete with other, you know, groups. sometimes when we think about cooperation, we think about, do I do things by myself, or do I do things with the group?

It’s, do I do things with my smaller group, like my family and friends, or do things with a larger group, like my country or, you know, maybe all of humanity.

So, what would you see as the keys to promoting high-level cooperation? We want to tackle big problems that will benefit everyone. We want to tackle pollution, climate change, injustice, and all kinds of other big things that require millions or hundreds of millions of people to cooperate.

Tom: What are the keys to the, too, if they’re all happening at the same time, how do we push upwards to high level cooperation?

Michael: So, there’s two sides to this. One is, create the potential. for higher scales. So that means, you know, economic growth, basically. It’s easier to be nice when there’s more to go around.

There’s some nice data in, Uganda, when refugees come into a place, people are very upset about it.

You know, the already pressed hospitals, the already pressed schools are now under more pressure. And if you’re giving favors to the newcomers, people are going to be even more upset. You see this in Europe, you see this in America, but if they come with resources, like there’s investment in the places that the refugees come so that you’re expanding.

So that there are enough spaces in schools, there are enough spaces in the hospital, then people welcome them. They’re quite happy to have them there. So, in other words, it’s easy to be nice when there’s more to go around. Now, that’s the hard thing, you know, like to say, okay, we just need to grow the economy. That’s a hard answer. The other thing that often happens is

But the other thing, of course, is that, sometimes the potential for positive sumness is there. But people don’t recognize it or realize that their zero sum, beliefs have been triggered and that creates a zero-sum reality because they start to undermine one another, they start to favor there in groups, you know, their political groups, their ethnicities or whatever.

So, I think that’s where we do have a lever of action is to reveal, selectively amplify the examples where when people cooperate across party lines and cooperate across ethnic lines and cooperate across any other cooperative group lines, they’re actually better off for it.

I want to ask, uh, one question about our last, fourth law of life evolution. We talked before that this fourth law of life is very much in this iteration game. Energy, innovation, cooperation, repeatedly. And so, I want to turn back to this, this fundamental law of energy, the evolution of energy production.

Tom: We currently have a kind of a broad portfolio of energy production, like coal, oil, gas, solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear, at least nuclear fission. from what you take from your four laws of life, where do you see this evolution of energy production heading next?

Michael: So, in the book, I, I, I argue, alongside many other thinkers that, uh, the 21st century might be the most important century in human history. And that is because we are finally in the shadow of that first industrial revolution because of the situation we find ourselves with.

However, there’s also all these possibilities. So, there’s kind of two futures ahead of us. One is we, restart our nuclear reactors as we finally seem to be doing. we figure out how to have scalable small modular reactors. We build solar where we can find it and we find ways to store it so that it can be used when the sun isn’t shining.

That’s one future. The other is, and this is what concerns me, is that it’s not that the technology isn’t there. It’s a governance problem. It’s a social problem in that we’re being so torn apart.

We’re so at each other’s throats—or at least it feels that way at the extremes—that we don’t take advantage of that cooperative opportunity to rise in our, you know, what I see is almost like a secular and sacred aspiration to higher scales of human cooperation, where we feel more at one with the rest of our species.

So, if, instead of, building and growing and, uh, investing and looking after the least of us, we instead create a world that is highly unequal,

And we eat reach this kind of level of stagnation, then we start slipping back into that kind of Malthusian reality, the world of tooth and claw where, you know, all the agriculturalists of Europe are constantly trying to steal each other’s land repeatedly, the world before the industrial revolution.

So, those are the two futures ahead of us. I’m optimistic on the energy side of things. The U.S. is now a net energy exporter, for example. I’m optimistic that we can heal the fissures in many societies around the world. However, as we always have, there is a lot of variation across the globe in the ability to do that and the investments being made there.

Tom: Mm hmm. I want to turn, with the time we have remaining, to some personal questions. We have talked a lot about studying human behavior on these big scales, time spans, high level society. I’m wondering whether your Four Laws of Life, the insights you found, and are they applicable to you on a personal level?

Do you see, now that you’ve studied this, ways in which it can apply to your life and my life?

Michael: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. So, in seeing this, you realize things that people know are obvious, but you know, when you see it in the math, you see it in the science itself. So, nothing is done alone, right? What you can do with the right other people. Like our greatest achievements and our worst atrocities.

We’re always cooperative

Tom: Mm

Michael: So, building the relationships, the right team around you is incredibly important for innovation. It’s, it’s clear that innovation is a collective process where ideas are meeting.

And that means you want to be surrounded by people you disagree with. And you want to have norms of freedom of speech and, and psychological safety. So that people say what they really think, and you have common ways of evaluating what is true. So, you know, talking to people you disagree with, having the humility and willingness to be wrong, because when you’re wrong is when you learn.

That’s incredibly important. You know, I’ve got three children as well. And it’s not clear that our schools are preparing children for the world as it is today, let alone the world as it will be, you know, in the age of AI.

So, with AI, what we want to do is train children how to safely and effectively use these technologies to empower their learning, because the fact is, in classrooms around the world, one teacher cannot. meet the needs of the high performing students in a class of 25, 30 plus. You can’t meet the needs of the high performing students to let them go as far as they can.

You can’t lift the bottom to make sure they’re keeping up and teach the middle. There simply is enough time. But AI has new possibilities. I could keep going, Tom, but,

Tom: ha. Um, you mentioned your family, you’ve got three kids. Um, you know, one of the cooperative units of social organization is family. So, you’re married, you’ve got three kids.

Have you gained some insights into cooperation within families, things working better with your spouse, with your Children? Mm

Michael: You know, there’s a, uh, one of the more eccentric bits about me, I guess, in the book is that I’m obsessed with efficiency. You know, it’s like, how, what is the return on investment? Like, how much time do I need to allocate to be a good Scientist, a good entrepreneur, but also a good spouse and a good father.

Um, and you know, you’re looking for efficient ways to be there for your spouse and be there for your kids and trying to keep everyone on the same page. I mean, I’ve always, this is just incredibly personal, but you know, I’ve always, I’ve always treated my children with respect they are humans that happen to be born a little later than me.

And they are discovering the world, and they have their wants and needs, and they are their own people really and so I’ve always you know, whenever they’ve asked me a question I’ve always answered it as on I’ve never lied to my children I’ve always given them honest answers

As per the law of cooperation, a good marriage is one where what you can achieve together is more than you could achieve by yourself.

Tom: Yep.

Michael: And finding that right other person where, for both of you, that is correct. That you are better off with this other person. And the things that you can do in life and the adventures you can have, as you grow together, when that is greater than what it would be by yourself, or, you know, the alternative other that you might have married at the same time, then that’s a good basis for marriage.

And a good basis for marriage is a good place to, you know, to be raising children.

Tom: Yep.

Michael: We have discussed some of, you know, there are episodes of studying history of some of the best cooperative human behavior, but you’ve also noticed that cooperation has led to some horrible, horrible outcomes.

Tom: kind of knowing those flip side of the good and the bad with cooperation, even with also innovation, what gives you hope about the future moving forward?

Michael: Fundamentally, you know, when we, look at the, the kinds of battles that we see on social media or in the news or whatever, that is not most people in our everyday lives. When we look at around us. There are people who, love one another, who love their families, who love their children, and if given the right set of options, want a better life for as many people as possible, if that includes them.

So, you know, I, I think the silent middle. I hope is a lot less silent in the future. there is a, a middle that’s kind of sick of the fights between, you know, the extremes and the very vocal noisy parts of society who, like, you know, I want a well-running government.

I want, you know, a meaningful job. I want to be able to afford a house and put food on my table. And I want my kids to have a better life than I did and find purpose and meaning in their own way. And. If you give them the right set of options, and I, you know, I think that’s part why I wrote this book. It’s that people recognize the problem, but they don’t know what to advocate for.

And I wanted to make the case for, here’s what we need to be doing in terms of energy. Here’s what we need to be doing in terms of innovation. Here’s what we need to be doing in terms of education, in terms of inequality, in terms of corruption, and so on. And here’s why. And we can talk about it, and we can talk about Why I’m wrong or why I’m right, but here’s a theory of everyone, the closest we’ve come to a kind of grand overarching theory of human behavior and cultural evolution that helps us put the pieces together because otherwise we face what’s called the poly crisis where each discipline is like the blind men and the elephant, you know, the, the economists are feeling, and they’re like, I think it’s a wall and, you know, the political scientists are feeling the tail.

And they’re like, I think it’s a rope. And the politicians are feeling, it’s like, no, it feels like a spear. Cause I got the tusks, you know, or maybe it’s a snake. It’s like, it’s only, when you step back and you put all those pieces together that you see the elephant in the room, and it’s only when you see the elephant in the room that you can drive it.