Unknown: 0:02

The cosmos is within us. We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. Carl Sagan. Welcome to the lessons from nature podcast, modeling the secrets of the bees, hosted by Mark Rubin.

Mark Rubin: 0:22

If you hear my voice, you're alive. And if you're alive, you've been playing the game of survival. This means that you must be part of a community of people who look after each other. Today on the lessons from nature podcast, we'll be discussing secret 17 from honey as money, the game of survival. It's about collaboration and sharing resources among different hives or different groups, emphasizing that despite their differences, all bees and all people are part of the same ecosystem, and the same game of survival. I like to introduce my co host, Dr. Jaime seris. Jamie is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology Maynooth University. He holds advanced degrees in social cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago with an MA and PhD, and he has completed a postdoctoral fellowship in clinically relevant medical anthropology in the Department of Social medicine, Harvard Medical School, Jamie will co host four episodes of the lessons from nature podcast with me, where we will discuss the anthropological secrets of the bees through the lens of the human business of making money, and the bee business of making money. Welcome, Jamie, is great to have you here.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 1:42

Great. Thank you very much, Mark.

Mark Rubin: 1:44

So today, before we begin, I would like to clarify something because we're talking about collaboration. And I want to make sure that I'm clear about what we're talking about in terms of the bee world in case there's any beekeepers out there watching this. Bees are a highly collaborative species within an individual hive. And they are accidentally collaborative across hives where a bee may wander into another bees hive, and may wander in and deposit some honey or some pollen or some genetic information. And that's accidental. And I'm mentioning this before we start today because we're really discussing philosophical concepts as it relates to bees, but factual concepts as it relates to people. So before we talk about these topics, what I'm going to do is read a short passage from honey is money the secrets of the bees, which is the episode we're talking about now, secret 17, the game of survival. And at this point in the book, the queen bees from the local habitat realize they're running out of honey, which means they're running out of time, because time is honey. And so they decide to call the Council of the Queen's which is when the queen bees come together and collaborate and decide what they're going to do so they can all survive. So I'm going to read this chapter. But this planning I can't do alone. Mine are not the only bees. Sometimes I summon the Queen's near other trees. It's important to remember other bees need flowers, too. We all exist in nature. And we're all just passing through. There are we bees and there's me bees, and there's bees we don't yet know, there are bees with different dances with different stripes that show but different stripes and dances don't mean we're not the same. Every hive that still alive plays the same invisible game. Because we all need nectar now, and other bees might get there. First, we plan to plan together, when we share our honey thirst. We need to design for better days and share our common dreams. That's why when all our sleeping, we call the Council of the Queen's and so what we're going to do Jamie is I'm going to read some questions here that relate these ideas to business. And really what what what I'm looking for is your ideas about just human behavior and the lens of anthropology to try to relate these concepts to what I what I'm describing in the B world to the people world. Okay. So the first topic is about collaborative decision making. And the queen bees are collaborating for the betterment of all the collective hives and the habitat. And businesses can collaborate together in a consortium or joint ventures to tap into larger markets together to go after and develop new markets. How to companies work together in strategic partnerships or mergers. And how does this collaborative approach compare to the Council of the Queen's?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 4:50

Well, I mean, it probably be easier to start with the natural world and then kind of build up I mean, you know in the natural world we see Your forms of interspecies collaboration are looks like collaboration called resource partitioning where populations, particularly populations of predators, but but also populations of herbivores specialize in different parts of the ecology. This is one of the example really of how life makes room for more life. I mean, you know, by the nature, you're going to have this, which is more than a metaphor, because it is, you know that the useful energy captured from the Sun becomes the basis for more, let's say, the myriad ways that that energy is both produced and consumed. And so at that kind of global level, there's a highly interdependent me what's now popularly called the web of life, you know, in would have not just necessarily interspecies collaboration, but you have like things like inter Kingdom collaboration, and where, you know, various fungi and trees, for example, you know, who could not be any more genetically apart and still be alive? You know, that that does, you know, those kingdoms would have broken off, you know, literally billions of years ago. So you see that now, humans have two differences. I mean, one, obviously, we evolved to be a collaborative species, you know, there's no way around the fact that we don't have a very good reason for a big brain outside of sociality. The other thing though, that humans are highly collaborative. But that doesn't necessarily mean that everything is nice. I mean, even warfare, for example, is a pre eminently social, you know, by the people and rooted in things like individual aggression, war does not come from individual aggression, it's, you know, precisely the reverse. So, you have that you so you have that broad problem, the other thing that humans do, which would be relevant to business, as humans create their own environment, in crucial respects, and so, you know, as businesses operate, they, you know, just as energy capture, you know, in early evolution allowed more complex forms of energy capture. A good example of this, I do have this, the sociology department that moved has a couple of people who are really interested in business, what they call business ecologies. And if you looked at Ireland, about 50 years ago, Ireland was a very poor country. I mean, you know, even going into the EU, there were leaders in Ireland who say, look that which was easy back then, they said, Look, Europe is a club of former colonial masters, and we have word holiday, we Irish have more in common with Tanzania, for example, you know, in emerging, and so when just down the road here, the the Irish Development Associate Association, lowered Intel, to build their Western European factory here in the 1970s, it was shocking what couldn't be produced here. Like even cardboard boxes had to be imported from England, as you started to see executives spinning off from Intel, Irish executives, starting these kinds of businesses. At first, it was cardboard boxes, you know, as there was more of a diverse business ecology, there was room for more businesses, you know, some of which were serving Intel, some of which were in partly competition, they were doing some of the same things that Intel was doing, but they had established a kind of niche by providing aspects of their production line, you know, for Intel. So, you know, you have that kind of relationship to business itself, creates business, you know, in the same way that life itself creates more space for life. So, competition, and collaboration is a kind of moving target within

Mark Rubin: 9:08

that space. Fascinating. So I'll relate that back to honey as money is there's there's competition for energy. specialization is the key to making honey, because it improves efficiencies. But collaboration is the only way to trade the honey. And that's because you can only build wall so tall. So if at some point, if you think of the human evolution, we're a village and you're growing your food inside the walls. At some point, the population will exceed the capacity either you have to move the walls to get more space or trade. You know, what you're describing is with with the executives spinning off companies that support the industry that they built in the first place because they saw a better opportunity for themselves. That's like you're inside the village and the walls are big, and then you're like, Okay, if I put another village over there, but I just focus on the one thing and supply it to the village, then it's the same concept from the perspective of biological systems.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 10:04

I mean, if you look at how, you know, the bees are what are called us social insects, you know, there are highly derived, you know, kind of parts of a family have Optra, which are almost, you know, you're really termites, ants and bees, another wildly successful and if you look at the range, diversity, it's a stupidly successful strategy, you know that that term collaboration and competition really needs to be picked apart because they're, they're so commonly used, especially in English, the complexity of both those things like we compete only collaboratively and much more collaboration has forms of competitive you know, whether the whites a certain type of psychologists, sociologists, that social groups are these spheres for individual competition for human beings, I mean, what the Greeks called kudos, you know, I want I want some glory attached to my name. You know, but, but the nature of kudos is it's highly social, but it's also, you know, it becomes a significant source of, of individual competition, and anthropologists spend a lot of time on this, the tools that social theory in the West provides for thinking of these things is actually pretty crude. And so a lot of the training in anthropology is to sort of train people up in that social theory. And then kind of say that, look, anthropology is the sort of bastard child of the Enlightenment, you know, we wouldn't be there without this stuff. But we're sitting, we completely rewrite it. Kind of so same time.

Mark Rubin: 11:44

This is such a fascinating philosophy. I've never talked to an anthropologist before. This is fascinating. You got me thinking about flocking behaviors and schooling behaviors, and her behaviors and tribal behaviors. And so I want to ask you a question, because it's going to lead into the next question that I'm gonna ask you about defensive behaviors, like a flock of birds reacting together in I don't know what it's called, but like how they move, school of fish does the same thing. And, and a herd of deer do the same thing. And humans do it with their beliefs and stories. And sort of like, I don't know what the words would be for this, but like, the way people act, in the same way that a flock of birds acts, you can see this on the internet as social thing as like something like a viral viral thing takes hold and moves through. To me, it reminds me of birds reacting and fish reacting. So before you answer that, I will ask you the next question. And then maybe you can combine them in some magical, brilliant way. That would be it's about cultural exchange. And the question is, it says different highs have different dances and stripes? And they do they have accents, they have slightly vary individual movements. And this represents diverse cultures. And in business, Understanding these differences is key to global expansion. Because if you do business outside your walls, then you have to understand how your potential customers are going to react. The question is how to businesses tailor their marketing strategies to respect and resonate with different cultures. And maybe this is more about just information sharing across diverse groups of people in light of this flocking behavior. So let's see what you can do with this Well,

Dr. Jamie Saris: 13:33

okay. Well, they're the two are connected. On one pivot, and that pivot is how large a theoretical weight you assign to what seems to be a unique human ability, which is actually both language and culture. There's a distinctive quality of human culture. One is that it's transmitted linguistically, as well as in terms of, you know, showing people how to do something like in two years or something like that. So if you think that humans have something different than nearly all other animals, that question of collaboration and interrelationships becomes more difficult, okay. And so, that question about, you know, how do these collaborate, these don't actually imagine their society there isn't a worker bee revolutionary, who dreams of you know, a world without queens, you know, where, you know, so, so humans have that level of complexity, and that's where that's where I was talking about that we're, we're nearly obligate social creatures. That is we cannot live without society. But we think of ourselves only as functionally obligate that. Yeah, we could if we wanted to, and that That's really where your second question of business and difference, how does one manage this idea of difference? The more granular that analysis of difference becomes, the more challenging communication actually is. Now fortunately, most of it doesn't work on that. That's a problem that bees collaborating between hives don't have. But that's a very distinct human problem. Because, you know, a lot of human culture, at least the critical parts that people fight about, is like, what's it all mean? You know, what's a good life? Why do I get out of bed? Yeah, in the morning, what's the relationship between my GI here and might not be here, ultimately, that's the other thing that humans have, that we're pretty sure B's done, we're pretty sure nearly no other but maybe big brain, social creatures have the knowledge of our own temporality? You know, there was a moment before you arrive. Yeah. And you know, that you are time limited kind of be, like certain forces, you know, kind of pretend that isn't, you know, the techno humanism. And, you know, Elon Musk is no doubt figuring out a way to live forever, you know, by dripping something into his head, or, you know, whatever. But it's a distinctly human concern, that doesn't exist, to the best of our knowledge, you know, in the animal kingdom. And that's, you know, if you're going to talk about thinking about moving goods, across cultural kind of barriers, those are one of the questions and depending upon what the goods are, that barrier can be a big one, or maybe a relatively trivial one, you know, Google Translate could probably manage most of the stuff. Yeah, but you get to one of those things, and there's a mountain there that you didn't expect to see,

Mark Rubin: 16:47

you know, I'm gonna, this is that was a fascinating, like, I have so many thoughts on what you said, and I'm gonna try to put them in order that will make sense, which starts like this is I imagined, If I lived in a part of the world where there was 127 different words for different kinds of rain, there would be a lot of variation in the umbrellas I would be selling if I was in the umbrella selling business, which I'm not. Second thing, I wanted to dive a little deeper with you on be communication, because I do have a chapter called Honey talks, which is in the psychology section of this podcast. And I would like and I thought, you know, in reflecting on what you said, because if there's there's a, there's a, there's a gap between the way the bees communicate, and the ideas of language, but it is communication. And this subtle area that you that you hit on like three or four times of like, what is it that is separating us? I want to explain the way the bees do it. And then maybe this is like a really fascinating philosophical like sliver of humanity that like I have, now that I have you here, you though they like they said, it would be fascinating to understand it. So here we go. There are only six perspectives of cognition. And they are, who are what am I looking at? How many are there? Where are they in relationship to me? When is it in relationship to me? How did it either get there? Or how do I move to it. And the last one is y, which is a multivariable plot, all six of those things can be represented by pictures. And there's only six pictures that represent them. And fortunately for me, I have a model of that in my mind. And that is how I think and I navigate my way through those six perspectives all the time in a dynamic model. That's more about me. So but the bees communicate this information with their vibrations and movements, and also pheromones when a forage or B is in the field flying around and it spies 20 Flowers clustered together, and it can smell that there's nectar in those flowers. That bee will come back to the beehive and do a little waggle dance on the beehive that will tell the other bees what it saw. How many were there in the intensity of the waggle. Okay, so a scale version of a number I spatial number. Yeah, yeah, more or less. You know, you talked about the pheromones and in terms of communication. And did you know that bees vote through pheromones? There are bees that monitor the performance of the Queen and the Queen's job is to lay eggs at a rate so that in 21 days, there's enough worker bees to go gather as the maximum amount of resources and if she's doing a good job, everything is good. So what happens is there's these that monitor her called the attendance to the Queen's and they monitor her performance just like a board of directors in a business. They're just not monitoring the CEO. And they have the same sensing capabilities as the Queen they just can't lay eggs. Okay. And what they're doing is when everything is good, they emit the good vibe pheromone in the hive. And basically that good vibe pheromone does two things key keeps the worker bees calm. And it also signals them that everything is good. And what happens is one of them will sense that the queen is not keeping up that that one will lower its pheromone count. And the average amount in the parts per billion in the hive will start to go down. And then another one will sense it, and another one will sense it. And when it gets below a certain threshold, that's the signal that the worker bees need to create a new queen, it is a form of voting, because the beauty of it is because it's measured in a way that's blended together, the average parts per billion, the average vote is adjusted for poor, it's a fascinating, you know,

Dr. Jamie Saris: 20:45

vote, by vote by smell,

Mark Rubin: 20:49

democratic, it's democratic, because it's proportional.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 20:53

The fact that one can talk about something like a bee society or an ant society on one level, but then create evident absurdities that would make perfect sense in a human society. You know, there is no be revolutionary, you know, there is no, you know, AD AD, there'll be streams of a future where B is no longer exploited by B, you know, that is the anthropological question, because you, you know, you cannot do any work in another culture, even with another person in a great length of time, without confronting this question of human difference.

Mark Rubin: 21:29

That was fascinating. And our lead into just one final question for you, in this context, so the bees emphasize the we, and community in honey as money, just as businesses need to build a loyal customer bases and communities. And so how to companies foster a community building, with either their marketing message or their behaviors or your school even? And how does this reflect in their customer behavior? Like let's talk about commute I, how does this ideas related to differences in communication, individual differences, knowing that I'm a separate person than you then you have needs? How does all this roll together and human beings? Because there are communities, and some are more successful than others? So like, what are the what's the magic here,

Dr. Jamie Saris: 22:14

you look at the business theorists who actually are most respected. That's what they spend a lot of time with. This too, but one is humans are all you all humans are born into multiple communities that are unreflectively, they develop as part and parcel of being human, even at the basic basic level a term like family, if you explore that, you know, even within one culture, never mind, you know, within the grand sweep of ethnographic variation, that's an enormously complex topic and very large books, you know, and very hot ink has been spilled on it. And so there's that kind of community. And that is, again, a kind of unique aspect of humans is that our understanding of community can stretch to maybe only one person all the way to billions? So what you're asking is how do these communities of affiliation voluntary communities become more or less successful? That's, that is a big, big question. And, I mean, part of it is a practical one for me, like, you know, the, the anthropology Association of Ireland had some problems during COVID and completely broke down. And so, you know, I've been trying to put that together, you know, with not all the positions are filled, and everything else. So you would think that kind of anthropologists should be able to do this a bit better than other people, because at least they study this, you know, they might be wrong, I

Mark Rubin: 23:39

can run off and it's okay.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 23:42

I'm totally wrong. So communities that are flexible, and give people a stake in them do better. And sometimes that is with styles of communication, you know, things that have that have contextual appropriateness, people feel they have a stake in it? Well, I think it's time and luck. Certain kinds of communities tend to work. You know, I think anybody who wants to build this kind of community has to kind of be aware of what tools are there and what people care about, you know, people make a good living, be hideous on Twitter and YouTube and whatever. And you know, the more contacts they have, I don't know if they build communities, they build their influence or status. They Yes. Yeah.

Mark Rubin: 24:35

I'll turn on each other in the end. So and you were talking earlier about that people that are working side by side to build something together? Yeah, talk more often than not, because they're working on the same objective or goals or vision. And so there's frameworks for sharing vision so we don't we've forgotten how to dream and I think I think the printing press did this to us. Is that the printing press remove images from the communication because the movable type, but we dream and pictures, I don't know what person that dreams by reading words when we dream we reconstruct our reality and images but we communicate our dreams with these words because we're wiggling our fingers because the printing press that removed this ability from the educational system because it was cheaper to deploy words this way. And so I think the bottom line is we've lost the ability or lost, I guess the the knowledge of dreaming together around the campfire. One way to improve a community is to dream together. And by sharing a common vision. Now what happens if you don't do this, which is the administrative layer, if you don't do this, you don't submit your TPS reports, you don't get reimbursed. The anyway, so that's as a side thing.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 25:53

I like that ability, I guess, to create a narrative that people can visualize. Yes, you know, and there's work on that in anthropology about shared stories and narratives and you know, dialogue, a lot of the best moments in the field where you feel that you've connected to someone are very dialogic, you're starting to slightly get into their version of the world, but also they're starting to see where you're coming from much more seriously and say, Yeah, this is the best door to enter here, you know, and you've been trying, you know, you've been knocking at that door, that's just not how this thing works. You know,

Mark Rubin: 26:32

it's like dreaming. See, the hive mind is only connected by shared stories. Yeah, it's so hot. So intentionally creating a framework where people feel that they're part of the story because they've shared what they imagined. Then they're connected to the story of the community that they're creating together. Otherwise, it's just one person's version of what they think the best case scenario is. And they like and so like, that's never so basically, it's singing together is a community in different ways. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 27:06

I think that's the I think there is, you know, no small amount of wisdom.

Mark Rubin: 27:10

Okay, excise as well as whipping it up as I go. All living things that collaborate to gather energy, follow principles of anthropology. If you traded money for food that you ate today, you're playing the invisible game of energy transfer. And the fact that you're alive means you have progressed through an anthropological framework over a long period of time. You must play by the rules of work, the rules of money, the rules of teamwork, and the rules of Barger, congratulations on your collaborative skills. If you enjoy this discussion about anthropology and the way the bees and companies are similar, subscribe to the lessons from nature podcast, modeling the secrets of the bees. On the next three episodes of the anthropology series, Jamie and I will discuss the abundance of resources. The idea that cooperating costs less than fighting, and the idea that most things cost more later, so it's better to make decisions today. Visit project honey Lake dot life for more information about living in harmony with the rest of nature. Thanks a lot for watching this