SPEAKER: 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: 0:21

If you hear my voice, you're alive. And if you're alive, you've eaten enough honey to keep you alive so far. This means you must be part of a tribe of people who trade honey with each other. It says everyone who's trading honey is also alive. There must be enough honey for everyone. Today on the lessons from nature podcast, we'll be discussing secret 18 from honey as money, enough honey for everyone. It's about the idea that energy is abundant on our planet, and there's enough energy for all living things to thrive. It's just simply miss allocated. I'd like to introduce my co host Dr. Jamie saris. 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 a PhD. He has also completed a postdoctoral fellowship and clinically relevant medical anthropology in the Department of Social medicine, Harvard Medical School, Jamie world co hosts 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 honey. Welcome, JB is great to have you back on the podcast. Thanks Mark. The honey bees were brought to North America from Europe hundreds of years ago. And there were other pollinators here in North America where I live at the time. And when the honeybees were brought here, they displaced some going to put in quotes, native pollinators. And to some people, this upsets the balance of energy in the habitat. And I also wanted to mention that there are at least two species of organisms that I know of, I'm sure there's many more that impacts the honeybees in North America. And these species that impact honeybees are also not native, okay to North America. And these are all the murder Hornet and also something called varroa mites. And these things come as I understand it from from different parts of Asia, and they kill honey bees. And I imagining this. This is a philosophical sort of diversions from the usual topics here is I was preparing for this podcast. And this idea of like invasive species comes up a lot. And my understand is that the definition of an invasive species is a non native organism that enters a new ecosystem and disrupts the balance of that ecosystem by out competing or harming native species, does that match your understanding of what that might be? Pretty much, like all definitions are kind of phrase around the edges, especially over time, some species are invasive, but almost like restore a balance. I mean, the example of that is that the, when the computadores, were wandering around, looking for El Dorado, and various other places to loot, approximately 500 years ago, they lost a handful of horses. And from that very small number of lost animals almost certainly under 20. All of the wild horses in America are. And so there was a niche that was still open in a geological sense. So you know, yes, the American Horse is invasive, but there was an itch for that. In other cases, it becomes you know, no one considers cats and invasive species, but in terms of damage, they are just behind us as a species, you know, kind of thing. But people worry about Burmese pythons. I know. So, you know, so there's a very odd, you know, we evasive species are a combination of not from around here, some disruption, and they get noticed. And first of all, I love the nuance of your explanations, because it's, it's there were like the genius lies and like the realities of having hard and fast definitions for things and the flexible thinking that comes with understanding how things connect to other systems and stuff. So thanks for that. I wanted to say though, by that definition, if an invasive species is a non native organism and enters the ecosystem and disrupts the balance of things are human beings and invasive species.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 4:54

Yeah, but I mean, if you imagine where we evolved and where we are now Yeah, Um, you know, species have a lifespan and the geological record the edges of that are debated hotly. But, you know, we've been a unitary species for perhaps 300,000, the timeframe that we're talking about, you know, we have moved from a homeland and displaced hominids which have gone out there before us. Yeah, as a species, we don't play particularly well with other big animals in particular, I know that it's only the, the large animals that CO evolved with us in Africa, seem to have survived us. The other thing is to the species, also, to some extent, remake environments. So we you start to sort of then, you know, what is the difference? You know, the environment itself is carried along by a species, and we have radically changed environments wherever we go humans live in a human created environment. Yeah. Which sort of puts in some quotes what nature is, but that's a whole nother, you know, matter.

Mark Rubin: 6:09

That is the matter that we're talking about. And by that,

Dr. Jamie Saris: 6:13

I mean, how people use nature as a as a concept is where they stopped seeing culture. So you know, my favorite example for this, when I talk about this in a class in Ireland is if you go in Ireland, really up the road, let's say on the train line, about an hour to Longford, outside of that, or is as a World Heritage Site, a natural heritage site called the KJ fields, which is blanket bog, but the Keita fields, if you dig a little bit into the bog, you will see you will find evidence of human habitation. And the reason why there's blanket bog in many places in Ireland was the unsustainable agricultural practices of the humans that came in the first wave about 10,000 years ago. And they cut down all the trees. Yeah, very Firstly, they did. So what is now a sort of preeminence of the natural landscape indeed, so beautiful that it serves as a heritage site for the UN, is, in fact, a result of environmentally unsustainable practices of several 1000 years ago. So that's where the shifting line between nature and culture is. And so you can, you can have very intensive forms of human habitation that look very natural when the humans disappear, because other humans don't recognize that as economic.

Mark Rubin: 7:33

You know, that is a great segue into the topics today, because in those environments, that are designed by people to be circular in that way, there's enough honey for everyone. The idea is that by designing a system, either a regenerative system or a system that is imbalanced with the rest of nature, that it's possible to add population to a civilization in a way that's not destructive, if you plan for that to happen, okay, as part of the design.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 8:10

Yeah, I mean, that is the ideal very often those civilizations, though, might be circular in one way. But the reason why the collapse of classic Maya civilization is, it's still hotly debated. But one of the reasons that is put forward that seems credible. And there's some evidence is that the valuable land at the bottom of the valleys that was most productive, that population started to build on was monopolized by a kind of military priestly class as they started to build monuments. Now the same agricultural cycle was used, and it's a fairly reasonable one for the environment, but they started to push up the sides of the valley, and cutting off so you started to have it on less and less productive land, right, and that the nature of the competition between the small city states produced this sort of scaling of monumental architecture, which we still see now and are, by far the best astronomers that have ever lived, or at least eyeball astronomers that have ever lived with the possible exception of the Babylonians. Like we're building things that Europeans that a similar timeframe would have thought was all but magical, you know, we're still like, not in balance with their environment in the sense and then occasionally, you know, like, dinosaurs had dominated everything. They're not avian dinosaurs that dominated most niches for about 180 million years, you know, they inconceivably long period of time. So, you know, there is occasionally a crisis that just kind of wipes everything clean, no matter how sustainable and everything else you've been, and The whole other ecosystem, you know, a different nature kind of arises.

Mark Rubin: 10:04

So I guess what we're discussing here is the cycles of expansion, something happening. And then contraction that occurs in a habitat. And I guess one of the things in terms of this this episode, when the funding for everyone is the idea of long term planning, planning over 1000s of years planning over multiple generations ahead, and let's get into the topics related to the book on the money and the podcast, as it relates to exactly what we're talking about, but a way for bees in this fantasy world and also human beings that could potentially collaborate in different ways and make plans over long periods of time. Before we get into that, one of the things to just reflect on is the word nature as I don't separate humans from nature is that we're nature to everything we do with we destroy everything, that's nature. But a B doesn't look outside the beehive and say, Oh, that's where nature X, okay, it's like I'm in a habitat. It's called a house. And so, from that lens, let's jump into the topics of the day here, the idea of councils and meetings, humans hold meetings and conferences to discuss management, resources, sustainability, competitive threats, and so on. And the question for you is, how do human societies organize meetings and conferences to address resource management and sustainability issues? And how more importantly, how can we do a better job of scaling this, like globally in a more effective way? What do you think?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 11:44

Oh, wow. I mean, humans meet, you know, probably as part and parcel of being in society, I mean, the separation of meetings from some other part of your day is a is a very, you know, modern, industrial, bureaucratic kind of way of putting it, if you look at how different cultures reach collective decisions, then you see some interesting variation. I mean, there was the late David graver, and his colleague, Stuart Rockefeller, were very interested in that for quite some time, and then leading up to the Occupy movement, where forms of decision making rely on consensus, as opposed to ones that resolve an issue, say, even by Democratic votes, you know, which, which ultimately has some kind of exclusionary version. And then the more extreme form by bureaucratic edict, I think, anyone who's familiar with modern organizations, and sadly, I cannot exempt the university from that has felt that bizarre experience where you are called into a consultation, you know, you're being consulted on a set of ideas that have been manifestly determined in large part already, there's a wide range of that. And then there is an entire sub disciplines in anthropology called political anthropology, that spends quite a bit of time on those particular ideas, how specifically humans collaborate through meetings. I mean, I think a lot of that really does depend on how close the crisis is, to believe we live in a world the Greeks had two, you know, terms for the range of ways that humans could interact, you know, on one end was the agora. And that's where people exchanged and in the ideal form, everyone was, you know, not just mutually satisfied, but felt they were better on the other end of that is the Agon, which is the battlefield that's where in English we get a to act, not antagonism. And those kinds of add in that is a is an ultimate zero sum, kind of game. I mean, one person has to lose, yeah, and the person who wins gets, you know, kudos, some, you know, various kinds of glory. Any human interaction, I think, has a range of those things, because, as we said, last time, that humans are funny, funny creatures, they are, in fact, obligate the social, that they have to be social, that's the art survival mechanism is social. However, they are self aware, as individuals, so they often pretend that there's only functional sociality, we're social when we need to be. And so it's kind of in that gap that human peculiarities are actually worked out around, you know, those kinds of things that we sort of, have a room for forms of be human. I mean, there's a lot of this now in, you know, some management theory and critiques of capitalism that, you know, people who are natural sociopaths tend to do very well in business. And it's not because, you know, like psychopathy. sociopathy is Not a disorder of thought it's a disorder of sociality is really a lack of understanding there are other people like yourself, it's a failure of empathy, that we see very clearly that those people get rewarded in certain kinds of competitive. Yeah, social structures.

Mark Rubin: 15:16

The topic here is about, you know, better meetings, basically, could we use a better meeting idea to improve collaboration across countries or cultures and I have learned in the past maybe five years, six years, different meeting frameworks. And what I learned from from these frameworks is that I was never taught how to have a good meeting. I've never had a good meeting until I studied meetings, like there's like a way to have a meet, there's an order, the first thing is you say something fun and nice. And then you review all like the magical things you were measuring last time and what the issues are like, there's a structure to it. And if you use the structure, at the end of the meeting, everyone's seen, heard, understood, and the knowledge is captured for the next meeting. And prior to learning this meeting framework and implementing, I hired somebody to come in my business for six months and teach us this. Prior to that I just said my only experience with meetings as they were awful, then nothing ever occurred to happened. And it was a waste of time. And the evidence of awful meetings is is emails with lots of CCS. Anyway, the point I'm trying to say is, I believe in my, in my experience, from my experience, and in my heart, that human beings could organize meeting structures to better collaborate across cultures, and, and organize like, the way that we get like the storyline of a meeting has to match the style of meeting that it is there's different meetings, there's meetings for status, there's meetings for like emergencies, there's all these storyline architectures that we see play out in language, through storytelling frameworks, also exist in meetings. And the other thing I wanted to say is in business, relating it to the business of the bees in the business of people 99% of business is just talking. It's just like, it's a bunch of people, you moving words through the air, the doing of the work. And so we could do better is the point of this one is I think

Dr. Jamie Saris: 17:16

it's interesting, because that exchange of talk right marks marks the agora, you know, going way back, right. And I know that a lot of that is the nature of bargaining. And setting price point that's done more backroom kind of now, but it's exchanging kind of think, but even, you know, the Ag on the battlefield has that. So if you look at the Iliad, for example, you know, before people kill each other, they have long speeches, about why and what will happen if they win, and what will happen if they lose. And so, I mean, it's just another way of kind of saying that this peculiar ability that humans have, which is the symbol is their primary, really the only way they interact with the world conditions, all of the other kinds of discussions that we have, and one of the things that does is that symbolic reproduction can come at the expense of biological, you know, like, if the symbol system demands you sacrificing yourself, many humans will willingly do that. I mean, not just extreme cases of martyrdom, you know, suicide used to be a form of moral instruction in the West, whether you Masada through Cicero to you know, whatever. Now, it's a little bit harder to talk about like that.

Mark Rubin: 18:35

For some Bessie, for so messy, you have a

Dr. Jamie Saris: 18:41

it's just funny. It's, it's a funny thing. I mean, self consciousness, we highly value it as human beings. But it is probably a rarity in evolutionary terms, maybe even a handicap. I mean, termites build amazing structures without sentience. Yeah, we talked a little bit about, you know, Goddard, and those folks have a baby, there's a mind in the hive. But we have yet have no way of getting our heads around how one would actually communicate senses, or anything else. But all that we do know that the termites themselves clearly don't know that they're termites, you know, they know a lot of other things and they could do a lot of other things. So, you know, we're what we're most fascinated about ourselves is exactly that, which allows us do amazing things, to be sure is one of the most problematic aspects of being human.

Mark Rubin: 19:31

You know, another, there's two examples of that. And to just riff on that for a minute is the first person that ever used tools created and use tools to Starfire what that person did is they unleashed an energy bank, because the energy in the wood was in the sun and they came here and was stored and our ability to leverage this bank energy which later became coal and like steam engines and gasoline engines, and all like burnt like converting energy and sunlight Get into useful work, which reduced the amount of work human beings had to do. So humans 1/10 of one horsepower, but my car is like three or 400 horsepower, I have no idea. Like I can do a lot, I can get places faster than walking, because I'm able to leverage the energy from the sun in this way,

Dr. Jamie Saris: 20:19

and that actually, is going to be etched in the rocks themselves. So you know, well beyond where an alien archaeologists will dig up an artifact, you'll be able to find in rocks evidence of two things, an increase in available carbon in the atmosphere, which is going to be sequestered in the rocks through various kinds of chemical processes, and a drop in the oxygen levels of the oceans. You know, it's one of those classic, you know, kind of the beginnings of mass extinction. How precise is that quality? We look back, you know, and find evidence of that in history, it usually is because of volcanic, you know, activity, massive volcanic activity, you know, we're we're even writing a legible record in geological time, assuming there's someone who will be able to read it, you know, well, after we as a species are long gone.

Mark Rubin: 21:18

Well, patterns repeat. Okay, let's get into this next one, which is in the book, the queen bees all go to this dome, the dome of dreams, and they hatch their survival schemes to try to extend their babies genes. One thing that I think is important in planning and collaboration is a shared vision, I think that most people have, which is better lives for their kids, if they have kids. Healthier habitat. Okay, cleaner air, like I think we could all I think, I don't know. But I think most people would agree having a clean habitat Live, which is like clean air, clean water available food for people, and that their children have the opportunity to live longer than they lived due to advances in whatever like harmonious whatever. I think most people on the planet, whether they have kids or not, would agree that at least those things are good as an objective vision for a better future. And what happens is, by not stating a common shared vision for what it is that we're doing, we end up fighting over territory. So we're fighting over over these, you know, Ariat lines in the sand, how can we do a better job of collaborating through shared visions than we're doing now?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 22:37

I think not all human visions are as how should we say benign? It's an interesting challenge, not just to theoretical stuff, but that is what the liberal order throughout the world is under assault, that had various kinds of, you know, either it doesn't live up to its own standards, and it's hypocritical. And there's a bit of that there for sure. But other folks who say no, no humans are here to suffer. Yeah. And you know, that suffering has some kind of reward, you know, in the next life,

Mark Rubin: 23:11

I think if collaboration requires a shared vision, and we can't get on the same page of what the vision is, because of the stories that propel through space and time, what can be done from an anthropological perspective, to improve our chances of long term survival by either creating a shared vision, or some other system or process that you've seen, that works over long periods of time? What can we do?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 23:43

I think have anthropologists had that they would be selling themselves as consultants in the corridors of power. I think there's some things that you know, have shown to work when humans feel that they have some control over their lives, when they share something between themselves in that sense of sharing, but also feel they have a share of something that sense of collective ownership, they tend to do better. And you can chart that. We know what is bad. If your society is hierarchical, excludes lots of people, shows people that, you know, some people for an accident of birth lived very well and others die for no good reason that feeds into lack of trust. If he said to Houthis, we can say those sorts of societies fail. And they often fail spectacularly. Yeah. How to, you know, it's a set of processes rather than some specific things that I think move a society in the direction that you're kind of interested in, I think comes much in this sort of frame of agency ownership, some sense of control A lot of things that are just, you know, would be called human dignity. And when those are taken from people or from a population, you see them look for other things at an individual level, why do people do drugs? You know why, you know what, what constitutes a separation from reality under a, an umbrella diagnosis of some kind of mental illness, but at a collective level, certain kinds of stories that promise you better things in the next life, start to look a lot more attractive, certain kinds of things and say, Well sacrifice your children, because you're not worth much, and they're not worth much. But you might get some advantage, you know, or you know, that that this is for a cause there is an ontological evil, there's a lot of bad people. But even most bad people aren't bad all the time, just as much as good people aren't good people all the time. And that's when you get into the boring quotidian qualities of a liberal order, like how would rearrange all of these messy people in a space that they're mostly happy, and they can be decent? Yeah, all the time. There's elements of that, that we know how to do. The political will for it is often generally lacking, because a lot of people do well, often in decent society, and they don't see much of a reason, you know, to make it more decent, because, you know, hey, that's where you get it as ugly part. Yeah, that, you know, I kind of bracket enough that there is a certain, you know, joy and others misery.

Mark Rubin: 26:30

As you said, there are people that benefit from the status quo of environments, because they've, they've designed their lives around maximizing their own personal benefit through these things. And the idea is that there's resistance to change, because the people that are benefiting wouldn't don't really see a reason to change things. And the people that are struggling, are not in positions of power to make changes often, for various reasons. And so there's a situation where it's a self perpetuating system, in another episode of this podcast is called cooperating cost less than fighting. And the idea there is if we can agree that that disruptions like war, or social chaos, or the shutting down of governments, or like road systems that don't work or lack of fuel, because no truck drivers will, like move it around, are expensive and bad, reduce trauma of society by investing money, not in fighting and defense and weapons. But in peace, weapons of peace, I have a video I'm making now called weapons of peace, you know, and talking to you, I really appreciate the perspectives of the nuances of of human behavior, and long term thinking, basically, the evolution of behaviors over time, and also the repeating behaviors over time of how we are as a species. So thanks for sharing your insights. All living things that collaborate to gather energy, follow principles of anthropology, if you were paid for doing work today, you're trading energy with people in your habitat, all living things or doing work to trade for energy, humans tokenize this energy in the form of money, and this abstracts us from the fact that all living things are playing the same invisible game of survival. It would be wise to recognize the idea that there's plenty of energy for all living things on our planet. We're simply miss allocating our energy collection resources at the cost of habitat, ecosystems, conflicts and war, it will be smart to recognize that our survival depends on the survival of all living things around us. If you enjoy this discussion about anthropology and the way bees and companies and businesses and people are all similar, subscribe to the lessons from nature podcast, where we discuss modeling the secrets of the bees. On the next two episodes of anthropology series. Jamie and I will discuss the idea that cooperating costs less than fighting, and that most things cost more later. So it makes sense to invest in solving problems now. Visit project honey late dot life for more information about living in harmony with the rest of nature. Thanks. See you next time.