Innovation is a term we’ve come to celebrate it as an unqualified good. Not too long ago the word was a pejorative—indicating something frivolous or newfangled, an aberration—but today we treat it as synonymous with progress, creativity, and human genius. It has become a criterion of worth. It suggests that something that’s innovative is also beautiful.
Yet innovation is never only beautiful. It also brings disruption, dislocation, and unintended consequences. Behind every breakthrough lie the hidden costs of what was displaced, the social and ethical dilemmas of what’s been unleashed.
In this new season of Beauty at Work, we’re exploring The Beauty and Burdens of Innovation, asking what innovation means, how it works, and what it means to innovate in ways that are life-giving rather than extractive. When does innovation deepen our humanity, and when does it erode it?
My guest in this first episode is Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, one of today’s most original thinkers on the science of culture and human progress. Michael is a Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics and, beginning in 2026, at NYU. His work sits at the frontier of a growing field known as cultural evolution—the study of how ideas, norms, and technologies evolve through collective learning, much as genes evolve through natural selection. Cultural evolution helps us understand why our species is uniquely creative, how cooperation scales, and why progress is uneven across societies.
In his first book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, Michael brings together insights from biology, economics, psychology, and energy systems to offer a unified framework for human history and the forces that shape our future. The book introduces what he calls the “four laws of life”—energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution—and shows how these forces explain both our extraordinary capacities and our current crises.
In our conversation, we explore why innovation is not the work of lone geniuses but of what Michael calls the collective brain—the network of shared learning and cultural recombination that powers human progress. We explore why innovation emerges from the collective brain, how energy sets the bounds of progress, Michael’s COMPASS framework for innovation, and how a potential Second Enlightenment—which includes AI—could amplify both the beauty and the burdens of change.
You can listen to our conversation on your podcast player of choice (part 1 here and part 2 here) or watch the full conversation on YouTube, where you will also find short clips. An unedited transcript of our conversation follows below.
Brandon: All right, Michael. Thanks for joining us on the show. It’s really great to have you here.
Michael: Thanks for having me on the show, Brandon. Nice to be here.
Brandon: You’re welcome. Yeah, good. Well, let’s get started as I usually do. I ask my guests to share a story about an encounter with beauty from their childhoods that lingers with them till today. When I ask you that, what story, what image comes to your mind?
Michael: You know, you asked me this yesterday, so I had to think about it. Actually, the first thing that came to mind—I couldn’t think of it any better—was, when I was a child, we lived in Botswana. We used to go camping out in the Kalahari. Even in Gabarone, the major city, it’s not light pollution like in London, but there’s enough. But in the Kalahari, it’s just unobstructed views of the Milky Way. And as a child, I realized later that most people never actually see the Milky Way as our ancestors did. When you’re looking up at this just magnificent beauty of the sky, of the stars, you realize your own significance or insignificance. You realize all of the fights you’re having with your friends and relatives and all of the politics. It’s just happening on this tiny little planet, one of millions in the Milky Way, one of many galaxies in the universe. I’m a psychologist now. As a child at the time, I wonder how that affects like how we think of ourselves and how we think of our problems. Just the fact that in the modern world, almost no one ever sees that because of light pollution. Anyway, it’s one of the beautiful memories from my childhood.
Brandon: Yeah, I mean, certainly, it’s really sort of a textbook example of awe, right? I mean, it really pulls you out of yourself and makes you feel small in the face of the vastness of things. You lived in a lot of different countries. You’ve had such an interesting journey, even professionally, from engineering to your work now at this sort of intersection of psychology and economics. Could you talk a little bit about that journey and, perhaps, what led you to your current field of work?
Michael: Yeah. Okay. So my family is from Sri Lanka. Like I said, I spent a lot of my early childhood in Botswana. It was an interesting time, actually, while we were there. So that was the end of apartheid. It was in the ‘90s, as Mandela came into power. I remember everyone was so excited about the possibilities, which, now, if you look at South Africa were never really met. But after that, I’ve lived in Papua New Guinea. I’ve lived in Australia. I’ve lived in Canada. I’ve lived in the States. Now I live in the UK.
In terms of my intellectual journey, I guess maybe living in these different places, and I guess maybe even seeing the Milky Way, I was really interested in big questions. I was a bright kid, right? I was one of the top 500 students. I graduated high school in Australia, and I was one of the top 500 students. So everything’s open to you. So you’re like, “What am I going to do with my life? What’s my imprint on the world? How do I leave this place a better place than the way I found it?” And so I thought, you know, “Look, what are the biggest problems?” They seemed, to me, they were in philosophy. They were in theology. They were in physics, and they were in human behavior. And so I thought, I’m going to study one of these things. I took courses across all of those trying to figure this stuff out. I settled on psychology because it seemed like — my brother is a physicist. We have this joke about, “Who’s studying the more fundamental science?” What he would say to me is, “What could be more fundamental than the beginning of the universe?” He studies inflation. And I was like, what’s more fundamental than that is why you even want to know.
Brandon: Right.
Michael: So it’s not, in fact, the physicists. It’s humans. Every endeavor is human. But, you know, I’m big on risk management. I was looking at the data on, do psychologists get jobs? Are they well paid? I was like, “Ooh.” So I thought, let me study something actually useful alongside that. So I did a dual degree in engineering. I figured it’s engineering, or law, or finance, or business, or something like that, or maybe medicine. I thought the most portable of all of these was probably engineering. I’ve been programming since I was like seven years old, and so I was like, “This will be fine.” But I was mostly interested in human behavior. Then I got kind of frustrated. If I’m being honest. I got frustrated with psychology, especially taking such a wide array of subjects, sitting in on biology, physics, and so on. I was like, “This is a semblance of science?” But you can’t do science unless you’re building up a kind of theory, right? We don’t seem to have a theory of human behavior. I’m seeing a lot of advocacies placed over the actual science. So I got really frustrated, and I ended up focusing on cognitive psychology and then basically throwing myself into engineering. So I was working on smart home designs. I was working on audio interfaces for audiology. I went part time in my degree and just started working.
Then I had this kind of pivotal moment. As I tell the story in my book, A Theory of Everyone, part of it was that I watched Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. I started to think about, “Okay, is this climate change thing, like, is this real?” I’m skeptical as a person. My personality is a bit skeptical. Is this a real problem? If what he’s saying is true, we’re in deep trouble. We need to do something about it. And so I started reading the IPCC reports. I was like, okay, this is legit. But then I went to the Pentagon reports. I was like, okay, look, military defense. These guys have got to be on the money. They’re like, “Oh, okay. We’re in trouble. We’re going to see wars over water. We’re going to see mass migration with displacement.” Then I was like, okay, well, what’s the solution people have? It was like, oh, we’re going to mitigate. We’re going to get people to take — people weren’t talking about lights at the time. We’re going to get people to turn off lights. I’m looking at the numbers, and I’m looking at where energy goes. And I was like, this makes no sense. Even if we achieve everything people are claiming, we actually slowed the economy to save the planet, we’re done for. This is done. So I was like, why aren’t we focusing more on the consequences? Like, how are we going to live in a climate-changed world? And so I was like, what do we need?
And so, then again, as I started to think back to my life living in all these different places, I realized that culture seems to be this thing. That it’s the water you swim in. You don’t really see it until you’re in different water, or you’re taken out of the water. You don’t realize the things that are American until you’re in South Asia. You don’t realize the things that are South Asian until you’re in Africa or something. You don’t really see your house unless you’re on the outside. So I thought I want to work on this problem. One of my options was, I had a job offer from Microsoft. So that was one pathway for me. Another path was, I was going to go to grad school to work on smart home designs. I was just really interested in smart homes. But then I thought, okay, but what’s the end path here? I’m like, I’m going to make a bunch of money, and then I’m going to die. I mean, what was that all for? What’s the limit to this? Let’s say, I always think of, when you solve mathematical problems, one of the things that you try to do is you look at the edge cases. You start at the ends. You solve those cases, and then you kind of move it. I take these as conclusion. I’m like, okay, so where would this lead me to? I was like, let’s say I become the wealthiest man on earth. Then what? I’m like, okay, I want to do something. I want to actually try to solve a problem before I go. Because I’m going to die. We’re all going to die. What does it matter? King and the pawn go back in the same box.
First off, I had this realization: people don’t understand culture. It’s core to a lot of these decisions. It’s leading to bad foreign policy. It’s leading to an inability to work together on global problems. We need a better science of culture because, right now, we don’t have it. In my work on smart home design, I realized that there’s a branch of mathematics called control theory, which is the math of feedback loops. I thought this would be ideal for building up a mathematical theory of culture based on the bits of psychology that I felt like I could trust. So I ended up looking for people who were doing similar work, and I ran into Joe Henrich. He’s very well known for coining the term WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). He was the chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. I think he’s the only person on the planet who has tenure in economics, psychology, anthropology, and biology.
Brandon: Wow.
Michael: I asked Joe. I was like, “I don’t want to be an academic. I just want to solve this problem, and then I want to go apply it in the world.” That’s what I did. I accidentally became an academic. It wasn’t my intention and still not what wakes me up in the morning. It’s kind of applying this to solve problems in the world. But thank you for indulging me.
Brandon: No, no, thanks for sharing that. And for our listeners and viewers who don’t really know what that concept means, what is cultural evolution, and how does it relate to biological evolution?
Michael: So, cultural evolution, let me go back a little bit. Darwin comes up with this theory of evolution. In the turn of the 20th century, people actually are not big on Darwin. They think he’s wrong because Lord Kelvin, of the Kelvin scale, miscalculates the age of the earth, and he’s off by a couple of orders of magnitude. The reason is, we didn’t know about radioactivity keeping the earth warm. So he was doing it based on how the earth would be cooling. Eventually, Darwin comes back. We have all these problems. We don’t know how to solve it. It’s not really a science. It’s just an idea. We rediscover the Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel’s work. So we have this kind of gene stuff. People start to try to mathematicalize it. Fisher, for example, tries to develop mathematical theory. There’s a tension between what’s being measured in the world and this idea of genes, for example. There’s many different problems like that. This gets solved in the 1920s, 1930s, in what’s called the modern synthesis.
Now, people start building on this body of mathematical modeling in evolution. Then around the 1970s and 1980s, two population geneticists, Marc Feldman and Luigi Cavalli-Sforza over at Stanford, and Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson—Rob was Joe Henrich’s advisor over at UCLA. Rob’s a physicist, turned ecologist, turned anthropologist. Pete is an ecologist—they start to build models and say, “Okay, under what conditions would an animal actually start to rely on information from other members of its species?” They lay out these conditions, which I can go through. They show that social learning can evolve. So animals will learn from one another. But actually, there’s a kind of zone within that social learning that leads to what we call cultural evolution. It’s an extension of evolutionary biology built on the toolkit that says evolution needs three ingredients. You need diversity, like variance. You need transmission. Genetically, that happens through genes. And you need selection. You need variance reduction in the direction of more skin color that matches UV radiation. Not skin color is too light or too dark.
What they showed is that culture has this too. You get diversities of people doing all kinds of things. We learn from one another. Humans are smarter than we should be because we’re building on every generation that came before. And we do it selectively, right? You don’t have everybody on your podcast. You try to find people that might be interesting to other people. You are part of the cultural evolutionary system. Then just like you can have design without a designer, in genetic evolution, you can have design without innovators per se. It’s a little bit complicated. But you can have it without innovators per se at a kind a collective cognition, a kind of collective computation, that we call cultural evolution. So that’s cultural evolution in a nutshell. It’s a body of mathematical work that makes predictions about our psychology and the long run consequences at a societal level for how societies change over time and how they might change in the future. So ideal framework in my mind for solving problems.
Brandon: Yeah, fantastic. I see you bring a kind of problem-solving approach from engineering, perhaps, to this question of culture, right? Well, I mean, you have this brilliant and very modestly titled book, A Theory of Everyone, which is centered around four laws: energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution. So let’s talk about that. In what sense are these laws? Could you again walk us through each of them briefly, and then we’ll double click on it, innovation in particular?
Michael: First off, I like to joke: it is modest because it’s a theory of everyone, not a theory of everything.
Brandon: Right.
Michael: I wouldn’t be so bold. I wouldn’t be so bold.
Brandon: Well, I felt like when I was reading it, I felt like I was playing a game of civilization. It really felt like, it was like, oh, this is building all of sort of human.
Michael: For sure. If we have the time, feel free to edit this out. But the title actually comes from my brother. I mentioned he’s a physicist. The original title of the book was something more like a story of us or something like that. As we were talking about this, he’s like, “It sounds like your body of work, like what you’re working on and what you’re trying to describe, is kind of like a theory of everything for psychology.” I was like, yeah. Like a theory of everyone. And I was like, oh, that’s the title.
Brandon: Great.
Michael: I mean, these laws that I described, when you write academic papers, it’s very important that you’re very precise. You know, robustness checks, analyses upon analyses, and care about data provenance, it all matters. With this book, what I really wanted to do was to convey that to the public in a way that they could easily understand. And so, by laws, what I really mean are common patterns that we see across the biological world, all the way up to psychology and the human sphere. But they’re not like Newtonian laws. They’re more like lenses upon which you would view the world.
The law of energy is basically that energy is the ultimate ceiling on biomass. It provides a ceiling on everything that life does effectively. Energy is what makes matter move. This is something that’s so — in biology, these are called energy budgets. The number of organisms, the total biomass of their size, these are all capped based on energy, right? So if you think about the extinction of the dinosaurs: an asteroid hits the Earth, blots out the sun, suddenly the solar energy that plants need drops—which means that the herbivores don’t have as much food. Think of these energy flows, right? Herbivores don’t have enough food. Then the carnivores don’t have enough food. And so those large animals that roamed the earth, they couldn’t survive anymore. The energy ceiling, in other words, dropped—which created the age era. Now, the same kind of thing. If you go all the way back to the beginning of life, initially, the only energy that life had access to was warmth from the sun and warmth from volcanic vents, basically. So you can’t really move at a significant pace.
One of the major shifts was the evolution of photosynthesis. When photosynthesis evolved, it solved the problem. The sun isn’t always there, right? This is the same problem of solar. You have to be able to store it. What photosynthesis allowed for was the storage of solar in little sugar, basically, ATP type stuff. Then you can use it when you’re not — but you still have to move at plant pace. But this expansion of the energy budget, the ability to use that solar, meant that other organisms could begin to eat organisms. So rather than directly use solar power, they can just eat the organisms that are saving this as little package of energy. So you see the evolution of predation. You see the evolution of eukaryotic organisms that have effectively an organism within them, that they’ve eaten and they allow to survive, mitochondria. Anyway, basically, energy puts the ceiling on everything.
I’m talking about biology, but what I’m most interested in is humans. And if you look at just about every metric of human progress you can imagine—child mortality rates, size of polities as an indication of cooperation, lifespan, even war-making capacity, any of these kinds of things, GDP per capita, if you like—it’s kind of like it goes up a little bit over time because there were these early energy innovations. So one was the ability fire, right? Fire lets you digest calories outside of your body to make them more bioavailable, thereby reducing the need to sit there like a gorilla chewing leaves all day or like a cow munching on it. You can just cook this high-density food once you hunt it, and then you can grow your brain. We traded off the need for these long guts for a bigger brain effectively. So fire happens.
The next innovation is probably agriculture. So a solar technology where, again, we’ve expanded our usage of energy to produce. Instead of hunting and gathering, we’re harvesting and grinding, right? We’re saying, okay, we’re going to grow this stuff intensely in this region. Then you can expand the population, where biomass increases, right? Number of humans goes way up. But mostly, everything’s kind of flat. Everything’s kind of flat through all of the things that you learned about as being very important, right? The Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, everything, all those metrics kind of flat. Then we discover a tremendous source of energy that puts to shame all of the agriculture stuff, all of the innovations there, the fire stuff. We discover stored sunlight. We discover fossil fuels. Think about what fossil fuels are. Coal is peat, like plant matter, which has been pressure cooked over millions of years into this black rock. It’s a highly transportable, high source of energy. Oil and natural gas are produced by algae and zooplankton, again, kind of pressure cooked by millions of years. When we took that stored sunlight and put it to use, every metric goes way up. We are suddenly living in a brand new world. Our energy ceiling, in other words, increases. Everything we do today is in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution.
Brandon: Right.
Michael: In fact, even we eat our fossil fuels. At least 4 billion people are alive today because of the Haber-Bosch process, which is the second agricultural revolution, if you like—the Green Revolution, where we were able to take nitrogen from the air, use the natural gas and produce ammonia, which we then use on our plants which allows us to grow vastly more plant matter, which, again increases our biomass. Right? So that’s the law of energy.
The law of innovation is kind of — so if you call energy the ceiling on all the life can achieve, innovation is kind of the floor. So it’s like it’s digging deeper. It expands the space of the possible by creating new ways to do more with less. Through innovations, we can use that energy, put it to work, outcompete other members of the species, outcompete predators, seek out and prey far better. Now, these innovations, so if we go back to photosynthesis — again, why am I calling them laws? Because they apply at every scale. They apply from cells to societies, bacteria to businesses. Going all the way back, photosynthesis started to use oxygen in the process. This was a tremendous innovation that led to what was called the Great Oxygenation Event. As a byproduct using carbon dioxide, you were suddenly producing all of this oxygen in the air, which most organisms couldn’t deal with. And they collapsed. They all went extinct. This was an innovation, but it was something like nine times more efficient and vertical.
Other efficiencies. So a lot of what happened after the Industrial Revolution wasn’t necessarily like — yes, we had a higher energy return on investment on a lot of these things, the amount of energy it takes to get some amount of energy back. Agriculture has a higher EROI, energy return on investment, than does hunting and gathering because you don’t have to go out. You don’t have to expend energy, as much energy, to get that back. But a lot of what we’ve done is through engineering and economics. We’ve just used that energy better. We have more efficient cars. We have more efficient heating, more efficient lighting. We went from incandescent light bulbs, which was like 2% efficient or something, all the way to LEDs, which approach 100% efficiency. Right? So you can do more with less through these innovations, and they expand the space of possibilities.
Within that space of possibilities, we’re competing for all of the resources, all of the stuff that we’re making. One of the ways that we compete is through cooperation. You know, whenever people think about evolution, they think about competition, survival of the fittest. In fact, it wasn’t Darwin who suggested it. He didn’t come up with that term. It was the other guy, Spencer. The idea of survival of the fittest. But in reality — I love this. Because one of the big criticisms of Darwin made when evolution by the natural section came out was that he was so focused on competition. Because it was such a male view of the world, such a Victorian male view. People like Clémence Royer, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, they were like, “You’re a guy. That’s why you’re so obsessed with competitions.” We work together. We work together. And they were totally right. Because it’s such a male-dominated field, we didn’t really discover until the 1960s the importance of cooperation. But there are various ways that we work together, and we do that —
Cooperation and competition are two sides of the same coin. We cooperate to compete with one another. So you think of yourself as a person, as an organism. You’re an ecosystem. You are the Amazon rainforest, made up of differentiated cells and a microbiome that exceeds the number and all of this stuff. You do that because that organism can outcompete other organisms better than, say, a bacterial version of you can. So bacteria is always there. But you can enhance. You can grow. Competition leads to this increase in cooperation up to the limit of the energy ceiling and the efficiency. So that’s what limits the level of cooperation. Because if you think about it, in equilibrium, for it to be sustainable, a level of cooperation, your return in working in this larger group—be it a larger organism, or a larger company, or a larger country—your individual level return at every scale, from each cell all the way up to the individuals and onward or in subunits, it needs to be higher than what you will get if you cooperated at a lower scale—let’s say a smaller company, a smaller country—and what you would get if you cooperated at a higher scale in a larger company, a larger country. But that is limited by how much goods and services are there to go around, how much resources. That is limited by our energy control.
So there’s various mechanisms that allow for cooperation. A lot of my work has been on how did humans begin to cooperate at the scale of millions, if not billions. There’s various mechanisms for inclusive fitness, genes that can identify and favor copies themselves to reciprocal altruism. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. And reputation, even religion as a way of cooperating with one another, all the way through to institutions and large units like United States of its 50 countries, or the European Union with its many countries, you know.
Brandon: Yeah, and it seems there’s an interesting tension between cooperation and competition, as you’re outlining your work as well, right? I mean, we don’t completely outdo the need for that kind of competition.
Michael: Always. Competition drives it. And also, competition keeps it in place. So in actual fact, competition is part of what sustains cooperation. If you think about it, people often say like humans would all get together if aliens came. They’re kind of right.
Brandon: Yeah, Independence Day.
Michael: Yeah, Independence Day. Or there’s an argument that one of the reasons that African countries are able to sustain this kind of autocracies is because of foreign aid and because foreign national companies—multinational companies like Shell, BP, and so on—are accessing their resources by a larger level of cooperation, cooperating with a local group of elites who thereby control the resources and outcompete the rest of the population. If you let African countries just compete with one another again — when you’re in competition with one another, you need the best person at the helm. If you’re at war, you want the best person to be the general. I want Churchill in charge. But when you’re no longer at war, maybe your brother-in-law can be in charge. Why does it matter? You know what I mean?
Brandon: Right. Yeah.
Michael: Actually, competition and cooperation, it’s not only two sides of the coin. They sustain one another. If you lower that competition, then you actually drop the level of cooperation. Then the final law is basically the law of evolution, which is to say that we don’t design these units. Evolution doesn’t design. Even we don’t really design. We talk about the design of, let’s say, the US Constitution, the Magna Carta. What we don’t talk about is all the failed attempts, the dead ends, like all of the Magna Carta attempts to constrain the king that came before. We talk about the US Constitution because it actually worked. We don’t talk so much about the Brazilian Constitution, right?
Brandon: Right.
Michael: So what we’re seeing is the endpoint of an evolutionary process, a cultural evolutionary process. Evolution, this variation, transmission, selection, and a lot of nuance around that, that is the means by which we innovate new efficiencies. That is the means by which we find new ways to cooperate with one another. It is the means by which we even unlock this kind of energy within this what I call the space of the possible. So those are the four laws.
Brandon: That’s fantastic. I mean, like I said, it really felt like such a helpful, comprehensive picture of the human story. I’m really interested in innovation. That’s sort of the theme of this season of the podcast. And so I’d love if you could say a little bit more about how you’re defining this term and how it’s fundamentally related to energy. Because I think your understanding of innovation is fundamentally dependent on your concept of energy.
Michael: Yeah, so an innovation is — what I’m particularly interested in are innovations in efficiency, really—ways of doing things, brand new or better, in some manner. The reason that Jeff Bezos is super wealthy is not because he bribed a bunch of people. It’s because he made retail commerce way more efficient. He aligned the supply chains. He created these massive factories, one-day shipping. People might not like it. But people choose to shop at Amazon because it is just more efficient than your high street, your mall, your local mom-and-pop shop. And as a result, just like a new organism, a new apex predator emerges and wipes out the others, he just wiped out the malls across the country. Right? This is a kind of innovation. I like it. But it’s a kind of innovation in efficiency, right?
There are other innovations in efficiency. Obviously, people think of technologies. They are all about doing the things you want to do better, faster, stronger, to quote Drucker. When I say better, it’s not always like better for you. It just seems it will outcompete. We are talking to one another over a worldwide communication network, that is also in some ways harming maybe young people, if John Hite is right about that. Nonetheless, this conversation wouldn’t have taken place if not for this technology. This exchange of ideas would never have taken place if not for this technology. So if we’re being technical and if we go with what economists would call an invention, when an invention spreads, that is an innovation. I tend to call the invention the innovation and diffusion the spread. Whether something spreads is, again, it’s a matter of these cultural evolutionary forces. Does it enable you to outcompete others better? Gun spread, steel axes outcompete stone axes. Because they’re just better technologies for killing people or for chopping down trees.
Now, the process of innovation from a cultural evolutionary perspective, I think, is very interesting and important. I’d be meaning to write a piece about how this is really part of what AI researchers are getting wrong about intelligence. So it seems that when you think about innovation, you think of the innovator. You think of the person who’s kind of sitting down and just coming up. They’re coming up. They’re the Einstein. They’re just sitting there in their loneliness, maybe reading some stuff, talking to a few people, and they’re coming up with some new ideas. That’s what pushes people forward, right? That doesn’t seem to be what we see, either looking at the historical record—which is kind of the cultural fossil record, if you like—or what the models are suggesting. Instead, what innovation is — Joe Hendrich and I call it a collective brain hypothesis. It’s a collective process, where really the computation that discovers new solutions isn’t happening in here. It’s happening by people picking up ideas from one another and recombining them in the head of a particular innovator.
Let’s say we didn’t have Darwin. Darwin came up with evolution. We can see how he came up with it. He recombined several ideas. He was a breeder, right? He was a pigeon breeder. He understood artificial selection. The genius in evolution and by natural selection isn’t in the evolution. It isn’t even in the selection. It’s in the natural. How did he know that nature could select? Because he had read Thomas Malthus. He knew that the pace at which plant matter grows is polynomial, because it’s limited by land, and the pace at which animals grow is exponential, like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on. Those two lines will meet. At that point, the plant matter will be less than what is required for the amount of animals around and onward to carnivores. That means they’re going to compete with one another. He realized that, in that competition, it wasn’t random. Some are going to be better suited to that competition than others. Then he traveled to this diverse island archipelago, and he recombined that idea. Because he saw evolution to work. He saw these finches famously that match the nuts on the different islands. He read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. He saw that, over history, we can see this kind of small changes. So he saw artificial selection. He knew that we could turn a wolf into a puppy. He knew that we could turn pigeons into all these magnificent creatures. He recombined and came up with evolution.
Now, here’s the thing. If we didn’t have Darwin, if a time traveler goes in and shoots Darwin when he’s a kid, we would still have evolution because of Alfred Wallace. Alfred Wallace had the same experience—also a breeder, also traveled to this island archipelago. He came up with the same time, and he is the reason that Darwin published. Because Alfred was like, “I’ve got this idea. I think this is how it works.” Darwin was like, “Oh, crap. I came up with the idea five years earlier.”
Brandon: Right. There’s an interesting tendency, I think, with a lot of these innovations, too, that they seem to sort of emerge simultaneously, right?
Michael: Exactly.
Brandon: I’m looking at Matt Ridley’s book on innovation. It sort of maps out a range of different things, where different people in different parts of the world have the same idea around the same time.
Michael: How does that happen, right? Of course, it’s not everybody, right? Sometimes when I say innovations aren’t by the innovative, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, but not everyone is Newton.” You’re right. Not everyone is Newton. But you know what? Leibniz also came up with calculus. Not everybody comes up with calculus. But Newton and Leibniz, because they’re reading the same material, they’re exposed to the same ideas, they’re recombining in the same way. Thousands of years, no calculus. Suddenly, boom. Two guys, calculus. What’s going on? Right? I think if you really look, if you’re an entrepreneur or you’re an academic, if you stop and think for a second, we are somehow convinced of our own genius but also terribly afraid of being scooped. There’s a tension there. If you think you’re seeing so far ahead of everyone else, what are you worried about? No one’s going to catch up with you, right? But you are, because you know everyone’s reading the same stuff, so you’ve got to come up with similar ideas.
Brandon: But it also seems there’s a tension there in relation to diffusion. Because if your idea is so far out that no one can even understand it, it’s not going to travel, right? And so I imagine there might be a lot of potentially successful innovations that just don’t get picked up anywhere.
Michael: Totally.
Brandon: Because the time isn’t right, or the kind of legitimacy structure isn’t there.
Michael: That’s right.
Brandon: There really seems to be fragile.
Michael: Edison came up with the light bulb. Also, simultaneous invention, Joseph Swan came up with the light bulb at the same time in Britain. They formed a company together to avoid the patent battle called EdiSwan. But at the same time, there were 22 other light bulb patents. It wasn’t like just Edison and Swan. It was 22 others, at least 22 others. Now, they just had a better, like, the Edison screw, which we still call the Edison screw light bulb. That was an innovation that led to his light bulb being favored over some of the other light bulbs. It was one of the innovations. Of course, you’re right. I had a Palm Pilot back in the day.
Brandon: Sure.
Michael: But you know, only geek said Palm Pilots or a Blackberry. It was waiting for this moment for the internet to be fast enough and the iPhone to bring — really, the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. But it struck at the right time. So you’re right. You’re totally right.
Brandon: Well, you do touch on this in your framework for innovation, the sort of compass model that you provide when you talk about adjacent possible zone. Could you very briefly walk us through that model?
Michael: Sure, yeah. So I got to tell you, I try to be a good science communicator. I really do. But I could do better. What I was really going to do was like, how do I distill all of this research on innovation into something that’s like you can use as a kind of framework? I put these letters together. I’m like, “Oh, God. What do I turn this into?” Actually, it was my assistant, Zoe, who was like, “I think I can make it COMPASS.” I’m like, beautiful. Let’s do that.
Brandon: It works.
Michael: It kind of works. I use it with companies. They seem to like it. But I’m sure it can be done. So the COMPASS is really trying to give you some insights, especially on things that you might not think about innovation. C is, basically, innovations come through the collective brain. It’s not just about finding 10x engineers. It’s about finding 10x engineers who can work with one another in a collective manner, so you get 100x teams. It’s about collective cognition. It’s about finding ways to bridge gaps and make ideas more inclusive so that they flow through one another.
O is off the beaten track. A lot of the ideas are not doing the same thing. They’re trying to do something a little bit different, right? What do they say? Like, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Right?
Brandon: Right.
Michael: Companies, often, they don’t think about the fact that actually—let’s take AI—business as usual is not going to work.
M stands for the magpie strategy. Magpies in folklore are known for going out and looking for things and then recombining them, right? Sometimes I call this intellectual arbitrage. So the quickest way to be creative—I know Joe Henrich does this, I certainly do. Lots of smart people I know do this—is you basically are looking for solutions in a different discipline, in someone else’s head. The solutions to your problems are spread across the heads of many people. If you look across the history of innovation, we see this constantly? Vulcanized rubber, Charles Goodyear. How does he know? That vulcanized rubber, if he burns a bit of rubber, notices it changes in its composition. It’s now hard. How does he know that that’s useful? Because he was hanging out at the India Roxbury company. He’s got these misshapened rubber. He’s like, they need to be harder. I don’t know how to solve it. Like, how many people burn rubber? Probably tons. But you have to have a prepared mind for it. You have to have intention. You do this intentionally. How many Nobel Prizes in economics have been won by taking some idea from psychology?
P is the paradox of diversity. There’s an elephant in the room. There’s a lot of discussion in London around diversity. Look, the truth is diversity is fuel for innovation because a lot of innovations are through recombinations of different ideas into something new. But diversity is also divisive by definition. If you and I didn’t speak the same language, we’re not going to be able to spread ideas and learn from one another, right? If I came to the UK, the drive on the left-hand side of the road, I’m like, “You know, the right way to drive is the right-hand side of the road. I bring my culture, and I demand that I do it this way.” It’s not going to work, this coordination problem. So this is the paradox of diversity. There’s different ways to solve it. You can solve it by finding a common path, but also through translators and bridges, people trained in multiple fields, people trained in different areas, things like that.
A, as you said, is the adjacent possible. In evolution, evolutionary systems can’t often make these massive leaps. Now, cultural systems can, to some degree, often through serendipity or recombination. But that’s because you can have horizontal transmission, like the way bacteria does. With humans, so if we needed wings—like something changed, we needed wings suddenly to survive, no bueno—we’re not going to get wings because they’re just too far away. But if you need to adjust skin color, if you need to adjust eye shape, hair type — even number of fingers is possible. These are adjacent possibilities for humans, right? It’s the same if you look, Cesar Hidalgo has this nice work on what he calls a product space. He shows companies and countries that go into industries that are kind of just adjacent to what they already do, that’s what tends to happen and that’s what tends to work. You already are making wood chips. You can move to paper. You already do garments. You can move to high-end garments or maybe other kinds of fabrics for the insides of aircrafts or something. So that’s adjacent possibilities.
The last two S’s are that, because of these forces, it’s often better to be social than it is to be smart. Certainly, for a society, it’s better to be social than it is to be smart. So what I mean by that is high IQ is great. But a high IQ that isn’t exposed to the problems of the day, that isn’t exposed to potential solutions, it’s not going to spread those ideas. It’s like what you said. It wouldn’t know. It’s too far ahead. It doesn’t know how to bridge that gap, right? The social aspect of understanding the people is very important. Then the final thing is that the sharing is essential, that you create a culture where ideas can flow, and then you’re sharing those ideas with one another. If people are preserving the whole thing, the collective brain doesn’t work.
Brandon: Yeah, it’s very helpful. It’s a really helpful framework for innovation. One of the other things I was struck by was the very clear evidence that humans tend to be—at least in comparison to chimps— more imitators than emulators. I wonder if there’s a relationship between imitation and innovation. At least, it seems like there’s a tension there. Because if we’re such a fundamentally mimetic kind of animal, then how is it that we are capable of innovation? I wonder if you might be able to walk us through that Horner and Whiten experiment on chimps and humans, and then say a little bit about the relation between imitation and innovation perhaps.
Michael: Yeah, so the first thing is, the Horner and Whiten paper is a lovely demonstration of how we just have a bunch of recipes that we acquire from other people. We copy them without a real understanding. We feel like we understand it—what’s called the illusion of explanatory depth—but we don’t. So what Horner and Whiten did was they took some young chimps and some young children, and they gave them this box. The box has a hole on the top and a hole on the side. The experimenter pokes a hole through the top and pokes a hole through the side and, in doing so, is able to retrieve a piece of fruit for the chimps and retrieve a sticker for the kids. 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, gets its piece of fruit, happy chimp. Then the experimenter does the same thing. Hole through the top, hole through the side, hands it to a child. What does the child do? Well, holes through the top, holes through the side, happy child. He’s got a sticker.
Now, in the key variation, they use the same box, but now, instead of a kind of opaque box where you can’t see what it is, the box is clear. It’s completely transparent. You realize that that first action is a kind of ceiling. It’s a top compartment. It doesn’t do anything. The only action that retrieves the fruit and the sticker is that second action: the side hole. But again, what the experiment does, they poke the hole through the top. They poke the hole through the side. Now, when you hand it to a chimp—chimps are smart. I don’t know if you can watch them scrolling on Instagram or solving working memory, but they’re smart—they’re like, “Forget that first action. I’m going straight for the second action. I’m going to get that piece of fruit.” They get their fruit, and they’re super happy. But when the experimenters poke the hole through the top, poke the hole through the side and hand it to the child, what does the child do? Pokes their hole through the top, pokes their hole through the side. Kids are not stupid, like completely stupid. But they often assume, unless they have other reason to think otherwise, the adults know what they’re doing, and they want to do it the same way. Because the world is way too complicated. You walk around engaging with technologies that may as well be magic to you. Like, how does a computer work? How does it talk to the router? How does this thing produce an image on the screen? How does it happen in real time? Like, who knows? Right? Who knows?
Brandon: Right.
Michael: But you know how to use it. You do it because you’ve copied a bunch of recipes. You brush your teeth in particular way. You eat three times a day. You sleep for eight hours. You do all these things because that’s how it’s always been done. And you don’t realize it, you don’t notice it until someone else does it. But here’s the thing. Remember what I said about evolution? Three ingredients: variation, transmission, selection. You have to have faithful transmission for an evolutionary system to work. Otherwise, it’s too noisy. If mutation rates are way higher, as they are if you’re doing your own thing, or genes were suddenly mutating, it wouldn’t work. So that’s an essential component of the cultural evolutionary system, that we copy without fully understanding.
Now, to get to your second question, which is, well, then where do the innovations come from? That leaves kind of three ways. One is accidents. When you copy things, you don’t copy them exactly. Sometimes you serendipitously discover something brand new. Lots of innovations. Velcro, vulcanized rubber, as I said before, artificial sweeteners, Teflon.
Brandon: 3M.
Michael: Yeah, all of these things, these are all accidental innovations. But there’s also recombination, right? Yes, we’re copying faithfully, but we have different sources of information. We study different disciplines. Rob Boyd was able to solve some of the math in evolutionary biology because of his training as a physicist. He knew how to handle certain types of reciprocal equations, because you have to be able to do that in physics, right? But then of course, we do develop. The collective brain makes the individual brain more intelligent. We are smarter because we have a bunch of tools and ways of thinking that make each of us brighter. It’s not just our genetic capacity. Yes, there are individual differences between us for a variety of reasons—not just genes, but exposure to your prenatal environment and pathogens and lead and all those kinds of things, and also just your home environment. But also, simply because, over time, we have a bunch of new skills that make each of us more intelligent. And that gives us partial causal models of the world that allow us to operate and make things better. So when you kind of understand how your router works or your stove works, if you turn it on and off again, that often will fix it. Right? Because you have a partial causal model of the world. I can give you examples of how it makes us more intelligent. Reading, obviously, but also counting, these are cultural skills, not human skills.
Brandon: Right. Yeah, that’s very helpful. That was great. There’s a lot to say I suppose about the beauty of innovation. Let’s talk about the dark side of burdens of innovation. Maybe a good test case might be AI, which I think you talk about as a kind of second industrial revolution. The possibilities of progress are immense, and yet there are also immense challenges in terms of inequality, the energy use, and how resource intensive these are. Could you talk about your sense of both the promise and pitfalls of AI, at least as you’re seeing it, and sort of prospects for the future there?
Michael: Yeah, of course. The first thing to say is that, actually, people talk about the one, two, three, fourth industrial revolution. From my perspective, there was really one industrial revolution. Yes, there were other advances. But it was really the first, and the others are kind of shadows of it. What preceded the Industrial Revolution was the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. What I argue is that what we’re in is not the Second Industrial Revolution but, actually, the Second Enlightenment. So remember, the Enlightenment was a swapping of ideas at an unprecedented scale, through coffee shops and these networks of pamphlets being spread around. Today, it’s happening on X. It’s happening on LinkedIn. It’s happening through podcasts. It’s happening on Substack. We’re living through a Second Enlightenment, where the old ways are being challenged, and we’re coming up with new — our cultural revolution is on steroids at the moment. Now that might lead to a second industrial revolution if we crack the next energy barrier. Specially, if we invest more in nuclear, that’ll be part of it. If we crack fusion, we’re going to the stars, baby.
Brandon: Right.
Michael: So that’s, I think, the kind of moment we’re in. I agree with a lot of people who think that this is probably the most important century in human history. Because this is the century where we either destroy ourselves, or we head to the stars. There’s two paths in front of us. And so that’s the thing. Once the scale of cooperation hits a certain level, our capacity for destruction just goes up with it. Right?
There’s been a decline in violence. Pinker wasn’t the first one to say it, but he’s most noted about it. There’s been a decline in violence. But there was also been blips, World War I and World War II. From my perspective and from the perspective of I think cultural evolution, these are not blips. They’re part of the same process. As we cooperated a higher scale within those cooperative units—within, let’s say, the United States, within the European Union, within the UK, whatever—people are less likely to kill one another, right? There’s not lot of wars going on within the United States. But if a war breaks out, it’s now between two larger units or multiple larger units. So that’s one part of it. But also, as technology advances, our capacity for good and our capacity to just destroy everything has gone — our tech, our weapons.
Brandon: We can obliterate ourselves immediately, yeah.
Michael: So going back to AI, AI is an example of this, right? First off, there’s enormous — we’re making a big bet. We are putting a whole bunch. Thankfully, we’re investing in a lot more energy as well so that’ll be great. We’re really starting nuclear reactors. We are grabbing solar where we can. We are doing all firing and all cylinders because the training of these models. So one of the things about human brains versus these AI brains is that, first off, training and inference is one and the same for humans. Although the neurons in our head, which are still about a hundred to a thousand times as large as even the most advanced GPT model, they are quite energy efficient. It’s about 20 watts that you’re using, 12 to 20 watts that you’re using, as we have this conversation. AI uses megawatts, perhaps gigawatts, in training. Actually, in inference, it’s about the same level. It’s about 10 watts or so. When you start talking to ChatGPT, it’s not actually a huge energy inefficient process, but the training is. And so we need these vast amounts of energy, vast amounts of compute. We taught sand to think. How amazing. We need the silicon. We need the chips and so on. But it requires a lot. That’s a big bet, and it has environmental consequences.
Now, the bet is that it leads to an age of abundance. It gives us more energy, more technology, more ability to repair the damage that we are doing. But it’s a bet humanity is making. Overall, I’m hopeful. I think it’s a good bet. I don’t know if this generation of AI is the right move. Because like I said, I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that intelligence works, which is an ongoing conversation I have. But I think once we crack a few of these things, we are going to see there’s no principled reason for why, or at least we have not discovered a principled reason for why wet computing in our brains is fundamentally non-recreatable in Zilliqa. However, what we currently have, the models that we currently have, are very different. We have differentiated neurons that do different things. What we have looks more like a rainforest ecosystem. The kind of intelligence that AI have is like grid rows of crops, very, very limited ecosystem. Now, there might be things going on there that mean that AI architecture needs to change. Remember the transformer architecture and the very famous “Attention Is All You Need” paper? That’s very recent, right?
Brandon: Yeah, and I don’t know if we’ve even begun to scratch the surface of how much whatever intelligence is, is related to embodiment, to everything, like microbiome, and then, of course, the big question of consciousness, which we still have no idea what it is. Right? And so I think we have a long way to go sorting this out, but it’s very clear that there are challenges — not sort of, I mean, there’s, of course, big threats to wiping out humanity. But also, we’re seeing, in terms of some of the fundamental issues around human dignity — I mean, this is a similar problem to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution around exploitation and, really, the benefits not accruing sort of uniformly, right? And so I think there is a sense in which innovations create winners and losers. I wonder if you might comment on just the extent to which that sense of fragility of humanity could maybe exacerbated or amplified in ways that could be really destructive. Because I think that’s a critical issue to sort through.
Michael: I mean, actually, right in front of me is a report that I’m producing for the UNDP on this exact topic between and within inequality of AI, specifically in Asia-Pacific. So you’re absolutely right. It is also what happened during the Industrial Revolution. We put the shoemakers and tailors out of work, and they were real upset about it. Some of them tried to burn the factories down. There will be new opportunities, right? You got to remember, like, 6 out of 10 jobs — it’s been estimated that 6 out of 10 jobs we do today did not exist before 1940. Computer used to be a job. If you watch the movie Hidden Figures, they were computers. Then came along the electronic computer, and now the only computer we ever talk about is the electronic computer. We dropped the electronic because it’s the only computer. Right? So there’s going to be this reshuffling.
Now, the concern is that that reshuffling is not random. It’s not just opportunity. It is going to be, if you think, what it may lead to is another great divergence. So when industrialization took place, it gave Europe an unprecedented capacity for growth and expansion, which fueled colonialization. When I talked about every metric going up, it first happened in Europe. All of those metrics ran away in Europe on the back of industrialization. Prior to that, you wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that it was going to be Europe. China had a good shot at it. The world is still going through a great convergence in part due to the shipping container, as I described in my book. Suddenly, China and South Korea could take advantage of their cheaper manufacturing and ship it to the United States with all kinds of economic and geopolitical consequences. Now, AI, potentially, if it really is as revolutionary and as industry altering as some expect it to be, there are going to be massive winners and losers. Those models are concentrated in the hands of a few. Not just a few countries, but in fact a few companies.
Brandon: Exactly, yeah.
Michael: United States, China are the two biggest players. There’s not a lot of other foundation models out there. Other countries are consumers. So we really have to think very carefully about strategic investments and policies that allow for countries to solve their problems with access to these models. There’s massive leapfrogging potential here. It’s an overused term. For the longest time, we waited for electricity to spread across the African continent. Solar panels are potentially closing or helping closing the gap. Or a better example is perhaps telephone lines. We waited the longest time to give telephony and internet to remote areas of the globe. Thanks to the cell phone, and now I suppose Starlink, we have access to the internet in the most remote regions, right? It’d leapfrog the need for all of that infrastructure that happened before.
Today, there are teacher shortages in a lot of places I work in, where, yeah, it’d be great if we could just train more teachers and invest more. But maybe teachers supported by everyone having their own AI tutor is a way to enhance education across the globe. Traffic and corruption are a serious problem in various parts of Southeast Asia, in South Asia for that matter. AI might be able to help with the traffic management and also help track corruption, right? But only if we deploy it like that, it’s not going to happen. This is what this report actually for UNDP is all about. It’s like, let’s talk to APEC, let’s talk about this. One of the mistakes we make is just looking at the past. The past is only a guide when it comes to a new technology, right? This isn’t the same as the Industrial Revolution. It’s not the same as electricity. It’s not the same as computers or the internet. In fact, it has new capacities because it is a thinking agent that ranges from augmenting human capacities to completely automating and replacing them. That means that there are going to be people who are left behind. We have to think very carefully at a systems level about how we approach that problem without distorting incentives to a dangerous degree, and I need another podcast to do that with you.
Brandon: Right. Yeah, to solve all of the world’s problems. I mean, perhaps one more big question then is, I mean, you talk a lot about sort of the cultural software in your book that’s driving us. I wonder if you see any innovations in, one might call, sort of the fundamental orientation of these softwares. What I mean by that is something like our propensity to really value each other as human beings, or what I call sort of a spiritual intelligence or something along those lines. You have this other project on the sort of database of religions. I mean, do you see innovation happening there at the level of human — not consciousness in a simple sense, but in the kind of one might call moral sensibilities. Is there moral progress, or moral innovation, or spiritual innovation, perhaps?
Michael: Yeah, I mean, progress is relative, obviously. I mean, I have my opinions about what constitutes progress, but I also recognize that I’m coming from a very specific, largely Western Christian tradition. That’s what I impose on the way I think about these problems. But there has been. The major world religions have a lot of similarities compared to smaller religions, because that is what enables a religion to become a major world religion, right? Like, have large families. Be there for at least co-religionists. Look after one another. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These things emerge. Because if you think about it, Quakers, they have kids at about the same rate as the US population, which is not amazing. Now, there was an offshoot of the Quakers called the Shakers. Do you know any Quakers, Brandon?
Brandon: No. Quakers? No.
Michael: No Quakers. Okay. I have a few Quaker friends. Nobody has Shaker friends. Because the Shakers believed in celibacy for everyone. The only growth were adoption of children. That is not a strategy. Now, if you contrast the Shakers with the Mormons, the Mormons were also an obscure cult. But when you’re practicing polygamy in large families, you’re making the big leagues, baby. And they did, right?
They did. Now, these are examples of traits that religions possess that allow them to grow. Now, that’s the baseline. Now, within the major world religions, there are differences. There are differences in what is believed, and there are differences in how society gets structured on the back of that.
I’ll give you two examples. Now, obviously, it’s not always practiced this way. But most of the time, two claims really led to the spread of Christianity as a major world religion. Two claims. This offshoot of Judaism. Judaism is not a major world religion. We care about it a lot in part because of its link to Islam and Christianity. But one rabbi, son of God, he comes along and he says — I mean, first innovation comes from Judaism. That innovation is, it’s not — before, remember, is your God better than my God? Nobody knows. It’s not that I don’t believe in your God. I just think my God’s better. And you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to head to the battlefield, and we’re going to see whose God is better. That was how it worked. And if you want to be like, oh, turns out I’m worshiping Zeus now. But Judaism makes an interesting claim from monotheism. They say, it’s not that your God is better than my God. My God is better than your God. Your God doesn’t even exist. Here in Israel, God is one. And if you look, there’s two books of Genesis, right? You’ve got Adam and Eve story, and then you’ve got the seven-day story. The seven-day story is written during the Babylonian exile. Because they want to show that all those Babylonian gods — the sun and the moon, no, no, no, our God made all of those. They’re not gods. They’re just things that our God made in his spare time. It took him a day, just built it, you know?
Brandon: Right.
Michael: So that’s the first thing. The second thing is the idea of spreading that religion beyond. So it doesn’t have to be through birth. To be Jewish, you got to have a Jewish mother. It’s not so much about the conversion. There’s a spread in part by Paul, spreading around, and this is a major shift. And it goes alongside a few really radical innovations. Love your enemy. You don’t find that. You don’t find that in many religion. Kill your enemy is what you find more common.
Brandon: Right. Exactly.
Michael: Love your enemy? That’s bizarre. That’s wild. That’s crazy. It’s one thing. Now, the other thing that happens in Christianity—Jonathan Schulz and and Joe Henrich had done some really great work on —is the banning of cousin marriage and the restructuring of European families. Around the world, people married their cousins, some at very high rates, right? Pakistan, rates are like 50%, 60%. In some communities in Britain, rates are 90% marrying their cousins. At that point, by the way, you’re approaching the marriage of half siblings really. It’s not great for genetics. But actually, it’s not just the genetics. That actually seals off communities from one another, right? If you’re only marrying, first off, endogamous—or only your co-ethnics—that seals off the community. But ethnicities can be large. When you’re marrying only your cousins, there’s only a limited number of family members to marry. It cuts you off from the rest of the world. It cuts you off from the rest of the world. It leads to tribalism that undermines states.
So what happened in Europe, the idea of a traditional family, there’s nothing traditional about it. Most human societies have family webs. Your uncle is related to it in a variety of ways because two sisters got married to two brothers, and their kids got married, and some wild stuff going on, right? Whereas in Europe, because of the banning of cousin marriage in the restructuring, we get mom, dad, aunts and uncles, grandparents. You get this kind of family tree instead. Now, what happens? What happens is that European tribes disappear. Now I live in the UK. Where are the Angles? Where are the Saxons? Where are the Vikings? Where are the Norse? You know? I’ll tell you where they are. They’re all married to one another. They’re gone. The tribes are gone. They’re all married to one another, right? Europe destroys that. And that is the basis. So remember, I was talking about scales of cooperation. Those lower scales undermine higher scales. If you’re favoring your friends and family and undermine states, that’s what we call cronyism. That’s what we call nepotism. That’s what we call cronyism. So in these other places, democracy often doesn’t work because tribes dominate as the optimal scale of cooperation. Europe destroys those, and it leads to all kinds of other beliefs that are not found around the world.
One example of this is impartial application of the law. That is not what we find. Other countries try to replicate this. But in practice, it just doesn’t happen, right? There’s a psychologist Fonz treponel, and he has this really interesting set of data. He asked people around the world. He says, you’re driving in a car with your — replace it with cousin. Let’s say your cousin, right? It could be a brother. It could be a friend. You’re driving the car with your cousin. Now, let’s make it a friend because it makes a story. You drive in a car with your friend, and he hits somebody. The lawyer comes up to you and says, “Listen, you’re the only other witness.” If you lie, the friend gets off. Questions are these: should you lie for your friend, cousin, family member, whatever. Does your friend have an obligation, an expectation that you can lie for? Does your friend have an obligation, and would you actually do it? Now, if you ask a lot of Scandinavians, for example, across Scandinavia, they’re like, “Of course not. I would never. It doesn’t happen. It’s my brother. They did something wrong. They have to face the punishment.” Latin America, the opposite, you know? In Africa, this is like, “What? The law? Who cares about the law? That’s my friend. That’s my cousin. That’s my brother. That’s my whatever. Of course, I’m going to lie. I want to tell them any story they want, so they don’t have to go to jail.
Now, is that spiritual progress? Is that moral progress? It’s tricky, right? From my perspective, yes, it is moral progress. It has led to higher scales of cooperation. And from my perspective, working together at a higher scale is both a secular and religious goal that is shared, right, our ability to cooperate and coordinate with one another at a higher scale. In order to do that, you have to do away with some of these lower things. But it comes at a cost. I think we need to mitigate some of those, like loneliness. But of course, it makes you a worse friend, right? European, Scandinavians, are worse friends. They are worse family members because they’re not going to practice loyalty under all circumstances. Okay? We often also think — remember the tensions we talked about during this call. We also think about being there for family and “la famiglia è tutto, tutti.” Family is everything. We think of this as a virtue. Yes, it is a kind of virtue. But when expressed against the competing—let’s say, the state or institution or higher scale of humanity—it is, in fact, the source of corruption and the source of poverty in many places around the world.
Brandon: Yeah, loyalty and corruption are deeply — yeah.
Michael: Yes, we have made spiritual progress and religious progress. But I think one of the things, remember when I said competition is part of this, I would love to reignite the competition between religious world views. I think there’s a moment right now. I think we need to be able to talk to one another about what we really believe and think through the consequences of that. Obviously, no, we’re not coercing one another.
Brandon: Without the wars.
Michael: Without the wars. Exactly. Without the wars. An intellectual discussion. Because in the Vatican, for example. You’re not over there. I don’t know. We met each other there at one point.
Brandon: Right.
Michael: No, actually, I wasn’t with you. It was a different time at the Vatican. While I was there, I had the chance to talk to some of the bishops. I said, look, as a church, we look backwards so much. We want to know what Augustine said. We want to know what Aquinas said. We want to know what the doctors of the church said. No, what we should care about is what the Aquinas’ and the Augustines of today have to say about today. They were not God. They were just smart men and women of their age trying to make the best of what happened in the world. If you want to be relevant, we need to think, okay, what would Augustine or someone like Augustine say about today? How would they project for it? It requires a kind of confidence that this is the truth. Reveal truth of the world in order to be able to say, actually. Because otherwise, based on what Augustine said, we’re arguing over history. Based on what Augustine said, blah, blah, Augustine was talking about, how do I reconcile the fact that God has foreknowledge of the future with the fact that I have free will? He didn’t have anything at his disposal. He didn’t have Einsteinian space-time understanding, right? He says God must be outside the timeline, such that his memory of the future is no different to our memory of the past. Just because I have a memory of the past, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a choice there. Just as God’s memory of the future means, it doesn’t mean I don’t have choice there. But he doesn’t know that actually space time is a thing, right? He doesn’t know any of this stuff. I don’t know if this is the direction you want to go in. What did Saint John Paul say? He said faith and reason are the two wings with which we fly. We seriously need to bring those back together. Science and faith once more are kind of reunited. I want to say that across world religions, because if we cannot criticize other religions, if we cannot criticize these things, we make no progress. Going back to the collective brain, innovations in any domain only happen in the free flow of ideas.
Brandon: Yeah, and it seems that it’s really incumbent on us to figure out how to create a kind of more positive sum approach to all of these things rather than the kind of scarcity mentality that we’re caught up in reinforcing our sense of tribalism. Michael, we’ve gone past time, but I want to maybe ask you if you could point us to anything you’re working on that you’re really excited about, where our viewers and listeners could learn about your work? Anything else you want to share with us as we close?
Michael: Yeah, of course. So a couple of things. One is, although I’ve got the LSE banner in me, I will continue to be a professor at the LSE, but I’m moving to New York. Maybe it’s NYU. So I’m going to kind of be a joint professor across that. I’m doing that for a variety of reasons. But in part, I am setting up a Center for Human Progress. So I’ll be at Transatlantic Center for Human Progress—one in New York, one in London. We are partnered with the Global Solutions Initiative as a pathway to policy in Europe and, hopefully, partnered with UNDP as a pathway to policy in the United States and the world as well.
Brandon: Fantastic.
Michael: And in part, it’s because, like I said at the beginning of this call, I never meant to be an academic. Sometimes it feels like, as an academic, we’re in the comments section. There’s stuff happening in the world, and we write stuff about it.
Brandon: Right.
Michael: I don’t want to be in the comments section. I also think that it’s incumbent on us. Decisions are being made whether we like it or not. And if we feel like there’s a better way to make decisions that are better for more people, and less tribal, let’s say, then I think we should do that. I think we should do that. And so part of the Center for Human Progress, again, we’re not writing about just stuff. We’re just going out there. We’re building things. I’m still an engineer. We’re building things out there in the world.
One of our projects is that we have a new city that we’re developing in Zanzibar, Fumba City. The reason is we don’t have a good model of development. We just don’t, right? At the end of USAID and all of these, we do need a new model of development. Why do we need a new model? A few reasons. One, Africa is one of the few places still producing human beings. Two, we talk a lot about immigration and the challenges that mass immigration bring, illegal immigration across the southern border in the United States, across the Mediterranean in Europe. These are issues, but they’re two-sided issues. They’re supply and demand, right? They are two-sided because people are coming in part for the social welfare systems and the economic opportunities, but they’re coming because their countries of origin suck. Right? They don’t have the opportunity.
One of the things that keeps me up at night is that there is a major gap between talent and opportunity in the world. There are people of immense capability who are unable to express that capability for the betterment of humanity simply because of the happenstance of their birth—be that in a lower class of society, be that in a country that has limited options. Passport privilege is a major thing on this planet. We need a model of development and, I think, startup cities, commerce—like creating Hong Kong, creating Singapore, creating Guangzhou, Shenzhen in East Africa—and then using it as a model that might spread around. That’s one of the things that’s most exciting. But more broadly, we have the Center for Human Progress. We’re trying to solve these problems. If you’re interested, if your value aligned, get in touch. We’re at the ground floor of a lot of this stuff.
Brandon: Fantastic. Well, we’ll put links to everything in the show notes. Hopefully, people can follow up with you. Michael, it’s been such a delight to have you on the show. Thanks again for taking the time.
Michael: Pleasure, Brandon. Great conversation. Thank you.
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