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 investing in solving problems today. You don't need to spend more money to fix them tomorrow. This means you must be part of a tribe of people who plan ahead to reduce costs. Today on the lessons from nature podcast, we'll be discussing secret 24 money as money. It costs more later. It's about the idea that many problems get worse over time. This means that the cost of fix things escalates over time, it's wise to address expensive problems as quickly as possible. I'd like to introduce my co host, Dr. Jamie Sara's. 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 also 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 honey. Welcome. Jamie is great to have you back on the podcast. Thanks. So I'm going to kick things off with a story. Short story today. And an investment I made that paid off. I had a little tiny home built in Utah, I designed everything the way I wanted elevations, roof deck, all kinds of cool stuff propane on the roof, you have water on the roof. So I could have like a bathtub up there everything I want all this stuff. And we plugged it into water, we plugged it into power, things were looking good. And I decided before like the final connection was made to the water that I was going to get a magical switch that I could control over the internet or Wi Fi enabled water controlling thing that also had sensors, that if there was any water, like anywhere that there would be a problem. He would magically turn things off. It was like a $400 system mistake 400 hours. I'm like what are the odds? Basically, the system came and got installed, I put my sensors down same day, my wife was there, we went out to lunch, and I got drove away five minutes, and I got an alarm on my phone. There was an alarm. And I thought I was like things defective. Must be the of course, of course, the first thought is, it's defective. No. And when we got back, I looked under the sink where I put the towels, I knocked off one of the pipes, because it was only hand tight. And they drove this truck like 3000 miles across the country. And like whatever, you know, whatever bad luck, but it worked. And I had already written the honey as money. And I thought I like my wife. I said it costs more later. So I was saving this story for you know, six months for now as the example of investing today in something spending money, which takes work, which takes time, effort and risk doing something today to prevent a problem later. And that is the topic we're going to discuss today. So the first one I'm going to talk about the idea of sharing resources and knowledge from an anthropological perspective across cultures, and maybe even across time, about how knowledge can be shared, propelled into the future and different ways. And the specific example I'm going to give here is building a dam. A lot of times, I've noticed on a map, that countries are split with water, or so there's often rivers in between countries. And there's occasionally dams on those rivers creating reservoirs for electricity and for water storage. But that means there's always someone downstream. There's always someone downstream that's relying on a release of water at a certain rate at a certain time and they're scaling their empire and civilization downstream in some kind of trusted relationship with the people that operate the dam upstream, is that this creates both the potential for cooperation and collaboration, and also the potential for control and disaster. How is knowledge and resource sharing managed in different cultures and across cultures in a way that reduces long term cost? Or is it not?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 4:56

Oh, that's a simple question. Well, I mean, there's a few things. I mean, there's a kind of truism and archaeology that you know, every great civilization you see a great river, the Nile, obviously the Tigris and Euphrates, you know, the the Yellow River in China add a lot of civilizational growth is tied into the management of water resources, probably most clearly, in the great civilization of Asia, particularly China, where you know, it older anthropology, you'd use the term hydraulic Despotism, where you would actually concentrate all the water resources in one kind of central power, who would then be able to dole it out within, you know, certainly at a regional level, and therefore, would have literally a godlike ability to provide feast or famine. You see, there's even a granular level, one of my professors at Chicago, the great martial solids, work closely with an archaeologist in Hawaii was able to chart how Kamehameha the Great, the hiking that kind of unified Hawaii was pensioned off his regiments in in this one area, I think it was the big island, you could still see the evidence of the irrigation, canals, and the ability to block off one or the other, showed, you know, you could still find the evidence of that of the who had more power than you know, the other person. So you know that this is a enduring theme in civilization, probably a human civilization. Now, that takes a fair bit of forward planning. But along with that forward planning, you often see a centralization of power. And that power usually has different ideas and forward planning, you see in some of these hydraulic civilization and thinking of the career, you know, modern day Cambodia, where the hydraulic skill level was extraordinarily high. Clearly, those engineers were literally centuries ahead of anything that Europe was was at at at the time, but they push things, you know, they seem to be at the, the limit of the environmental carrying load. And when the climate change slightly, they had a lot of problems. I mean, again, that, you know, that goes down to this sort of rule, that systems that run at 100% efficiency aren't efficient, they're actually, you know, they're a hostage to Fortune. Because you know, systems don't change usually very easily, they tend to fail catastrophically. So that relationship about the forward planning to exercise that amount of control over water, and the power that comes with that is very often yoked into not necessarily short term. Because you're very often producing symbols, you're producing buildings, you're pretty you're you're you're you're producing things that are going to be around for a long time. But that production is incompatible sometimes with keeping that population together. And that's where we hit, you know, ruin cities, you know, so you, you could plan for the endurance of certain things, but fail the people who are the necessary bearers of those things. And so, you know, humans have that peculiar capacity to imagine long term ideas that to the extent they work, they make the civilization impossible.

Mark Rubin: 8:38

And that's a well said As always, I have a question. Isn't there a dam on the Nile River? Is it the Aswan Dam is

Dr. Jamie Saris: 8:45

the swan hideout? Well, for the most part, it's I mean, it's from what the Egyptians took water away from Egypt, because obviously, you know, the river flows a south to north. Add, yeah, what the what they ended up doing, though, was flooding. Some of their major archaeological sites, you know, the Anthro, hijab only took away a certain older style agriculture, away from Northern Egypt. Now, that was a Soviet inspired but that was, you know, if you think about the 20th century, the early 20th century was the century you know, was dam building. Yeah. The highest example of the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, in Ireland are the crusher, which dabbles the Shannon, which becomes the basis of rural electrification in Ireland. These are big state projects where, you know, the, the nation state sort of both deliver services to its people, but also represents itself at the same time, you know, symbolically, but you are seeing that the ability to control water I mean, right now, the war in Israel is obscuring other things, but there have been very talks about you know, dabbing the Jordan there's very toxic between Syria, Iraq and the various countries that rely on the Tigris and Euphrates, you know, the various countries, you know, have up to and including threatening war, or the for those kinds of things, because that is one of the obvious differences. Now, the reach of populations downstream are much further than they used to be well,

Mark Rubin: 10:19

of So, so I think I want to close this one out with the idea that if a big dam is built in Egypt, and long term planning is not implemented as part of the design, then the people that are in denial,

Dr. Jamie Saris: 10:39

so,

Mark Rubin: 10:41

that was it, I was saving that for like, five minutes. That was the best I could do. Okay.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 10:48

I like it, I like it. If you're, if you're gonna talk about the hijab, talk about these sorts of the via denial, probably probably the best joke you'd be able to make out of it. So okay,

Mark Rubin: 10:59

let's talk about collective decision making especially collective decision making across cultures and organizations. And we could frame this like around the UN, but like, I don't know enough about those structures to even know if this is a real representation of anything. But here we go. So humans can use collective decision making and gather different perspectives from other cultures and societies and make informed decisions together. Can you think of some examples of how collective decision making about fixing problems today, versus waiting until we're forced to do something have been successful?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 11:38

There are more examples that I could think of a be forced to do something. I think that is part of the At what point do you recognize a crisis? You know, are we at crisis now? Yeah. And you know, one of the things about climate denialists now is, you notice that there's funding for a new kind of denialism, which starts to concede where the crisis, but it's too late to stop the crisis. Now we have to talk about resilience, which, again, means we don't really have to change very much examples of collective decision making across cultures and dates that work. Some of the big development projects, post war might fit some of that. I mean, people forget about the successes. It's very popular. And I'm quite willing to critique those, because they were unsustainable as we have kind of understood it now. But if you looked at say, that high moment of technocratic optimism, you know, say in the 1950s, you saw, you know, massive gains made against malaria with, you know, much maligned DDT, people forget that, you know, Sri Lanka spent some time malaria free because of that. Now, when malaria came back, the population had lost any residual resistance. And it was, you know, it was almost worse in a way, but there was this idea that we could work together to do that now, very often was indifferent to certain kinds of problematic political groups. But that would fail on the long term kind of planning, because it never really had occurred, you know, to people that mosquitoes were as resilient. As you know, they turned out to be DDT was so devastating to insects, you know, a duck could skim on a pod that had DDT on it, and then you know, settle for a minute and fly off. And if it dropped in, another pod just sat down in another pod, the residual DDT was sufficient, before mosquitoes had resistance, that every mosquito larva in that pod would be killed. People say, Wow, geez, you know, what's real, a few mosquitoes becoming extinct, they're responsible for more human deaths that are in our lineage than every other cause combined through malaria most likely. But, you know, it turns out that there are a lot of the, you know, in the web of consequences of pulling an entire species out, you know, but the faking of the planning that humans were had available to them, at that time, at least, Western white males, elite science, etc, had a very linear kind of understanding of causality. And you know, well, you break that vector chain, you stop this horrible disease, many, many more people live dignified lives, it turns out to be much more complex. And indeed, it's only sometimes when one intervenes in a system, that the complexity of that system becomes apparent to the person intervening. And sometimes that could be you know, you come to catastrophe or near catastrophe. Before you know, you actually see that this is a problem. I think climate change is very different. We've known this now for more than a half a cent nearly 70 years and there's just been a strong Economic short term economic motive not to deal with the problem,

Mark Rubin: 15:04

you know, and that that really is an important thing to explore and back to climate deniers, I saw somebody post something about where people die from cold, then heat, because the statistics don't cover like floods, famines, or wars, or whatever. They're just talking about the thermodynamic idea of freezing to death versus having too much heat to survive. That's an example of something being true. It's true that that is true, but it is not the broad context of what we're talking about. And that's the exact exact way of faking that this this episode of the podcast is trying to address is that there is truth in what that person said I it's not Ibogaine, I don't dispute the definition of where the system starts and stops too narrow.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 15:56

We can step one step back, because I know that stat very well. And I've been involved in several videos, there's a very day compare the differences between dying of hypothermia and dying of heat stroke, right? Which is it not even tendentious. It's mischievous, because you know, if you went to an undergraduate public health course, at said something similar, every undergraduate in the room would laugh at you, like if you were going to really chart the deaths of heats, and this is what the UN does. And this is what every credible public health body does, you'd have to talk about your morbidity, mortality for heart attacks, your reading difficulties for when you combine those which are directly heat related. I see even within that narrow frame, he winds, you know, by a country mile. So at this point in time, if you're using that statistic, you're being mischievous, or

Mark Rubin: 16:52

you're being funded by somebody that, you know, is, you know, gains from this. Well, that's like, say, there's only one cause of death for mammals. And that's the lack of oxygen to the brain. So, so basically is like, so I mean, that's true. Okay, but like, but, but it doesn't help basically, it's like things could either help or hurt. Okay, and if longevity, and long term thriving, this is we talked about this earlier, is that there's not an agreed upon, like goal of like, like, is the goal like I would think like I just I'd make this up because I have kids. But like one reasonable goal seems to me that future generations live longer lifespans than present generations, all things consider not just health, but like war, disease, like, well, everything, everything, everything. And we see in the US that lifespans are shrinking for different reasons. And that includes everything different epidemics of drug abuse, and different everything combined create these situations. And if I think I guess the idea that it costs more later, if we if we could define what it is that we're trying to maximize, which the problem I think, is quarterly profits driven by stock markets, instead of lifespans or like you said, dignity, or like defining defining things in a way that we can agree upon across cultures across everything that we want everyone to be educated at a certain standard when everyone I have opportunities, and we will measure this success by lifespan, okay, like, like, just because that's like the, like the metric that like combines everything else. I think that without doing that, that we have the short term thinking or special interest thinking that hurts the world. So what do you think about that?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 18:43

I think that for much of human history, population lifespan was a pretty fair proxy for the population doing better. What we're seeing now is a really kind of unprecedented beast from started to take, you know, statistics, which is states that we're starting to see in the wealthiest places on the globe, a flattening are the some of the wealthiest places on the globe, a flattening of life expectancy, that's highly correlated to inequalities. And it's highly correlated to societies that have chronic problems that they don't about for a long time have just stopped, you know, fixing them or not even pretending that they're problems you know, and and so, then you're involved in a kind of question about politics and and, you know, really philosophy or at least worldview like, what's the point? Why do we get out of bed in the morning, but I think with respect to an invest that you one imagines that one one's children will live better than they will Yeah, better, is probably a defining modern worldview. The idea that at a generational level, people will do better. For a lot of human history. There was an entire or infrastructure and multiple industries built around horses, there was talk about horse management, and there were fines for your horse shitting in the street and dock, you know, at about 20 years, from or less than 20 years for Henry Ford, just about in that period of time I post World War one kind of interrupts that a bit, you have that entire industry disappeared, it doesn't disappear by planning, no really disappear at all those horses disappear to the to the effectively sort of, I guess, leisure, maybe, you know, you have to go out of their way, your little little side tracks, you know, at a stable and you could ride a horse, perhaps at some point, I mean, those are the technological disrupter kind of phase that, you know, a credible power source that can be put in a car, we'll leave the turtle the combustion engine, or at least you know, in its modern form, add a lot of the oil infrastructure in the same kind of way. And this is, some of the guys who run the oil industry kind of know this, you didn't leave the Stone Age, because you ran out of stones. It's just there are other things that became available. And that stones, you know, there are masons, you still built with stones. But when bronze became widely available, you know, flintknapping suddenly became a kind of specialty thing. But those things change. Oftentimes, without planning in the sense that we're using it here, I think that that's where this sort of the a certain kind of technological optimism is looking to, you know, either hydrogen or a better battery, at that granular level for cars, and probably fusion, you know, at that answer, like, oh, yeah, we

Mark Rubin: 21:52

need clean, low class, energy production and clean, low cost, energy storage. And we also need to improve energy density. So things are later. And if we can do that, then then the problem is largely sub least that part of the problem is large exam, but I'm sure a lot of people will enjoy just burning gasoline in trash cans, for whatever reason that, you know, they like, they like to smell, they like to smell. So I was like, whatever it is.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 22:19

And you will probably have, I mean, you know, before that, when self driving cars become a more viable option, where it will be obvious that they make better decisions about driving than not just some people are most people that everyone that you will probably have people who will gravitate to these racetracks where you can drive your own, you know, because I don't know, you know, somehow I've been by masculinity is invested in my car, and that's been stripped to me by which I'm sure people felt that way about their horses that would hurt us, you know that riding a horse was a more masculine an activity, that simply sitting down and expending no energy, you know, except for shifting a couple of gears and moving a wheel. You know, that seems kind of cheating, particularly for the distances that you cover. That of course, you know, sure you have to maintain a car, sunbed do scarcely have relationships to their car. But you know, it was nothing like the relationship would had to have with a horse.

Mark Rubin: 23:24

It's funny you say that? Because first of all, I have a horse. And secondly, yeah, and I have a car and the exit from this podcast is talking about exactly what you just said, which I'm not going to give it away. So I guess we're gonna leave it leave it to you just for like, a couple minutes. What wisdom can you share about things that you've either seen or read about or heard about? where human beings made decisions today, they invested in things that were hard to overcome challenges like what what can you leave us with an optimistic way that there's hope for our species?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 24:00

Well, I'll start with the less optimistic way because, you know, humans have thought about this for a long time, there's the parable of the sibling books, which goes like an old woman is carrying a big set of books, that has all of human knowledge. And, and she goes to a very wealthy city, and says, you know, I will sell you all of human knowledge for you know, 100 gold pieces. And this will be future proof, you know, every everything that do you could possibly imagine. They're quite comfortable and they're trying to explain to the woman you know, 100 gold pieces, that's a pretty fair bit of money. You know, these books are, you know, they look great and everything but I don't know, we're don't have enough time to read them in there. And she goes, Okay, could I borrow some kindling and sticks from you? And they go, yeah, grand and she burns half of the books because she doesn't want to carry it around. 10 years later, She comes back. City's doing a little less well, you know, the crops is not as good as it used to be the weather's a little worse. And she goes to says, you know, you can have half a human knowledge. But the price is now 200 gold pieces, I got Jesus, it was only 100 You know that we don't really have the same amount of money. I know, the ad the process repeats, you know, and it repeats and repeats, atrocities has one book, and it costs 1000s. You know, so, you know, this is humans have told themselves stories that they've been unaware of. And at one of the things about being long lived, allows at least some members of the population to have that memory and of course, language and culture allows these things to be passed on. So it's not like we're a particularly venial example, of our species in this time and place there are venal examples among us. And they have, you know, there, there are bad people, but this is something that we have kind of struggled with. Now, the flip side or the other side, the more optimistic side, our species has weathered, like ridiculous crises, you know, not just recently, but in our evolutionary career, we've been shrunk down to a couple 100 You know, breeding before we were human, 900,000 years ago, 70,000 years ago, we had another, you know, massive, massive bottleneck. And we came through those. So, that question about, you know, we have certainly been able to resilient ly rebuild. A question about the Anthropocene. And this is where I think is often miscast. I think if we taught it more that it is not the world that is at stake. It's the conditions of possibility of eight to 10 billion naked monkeys surviving with a minimal level of dignity that is at stake. So yes, there are some creatures that we have probably queued up on the execution box that are ahead of us, nearly all the big predators that we like, we might finally be able to get rid of them, you know, down to probably the size of coyotes, but we tried to get rid of coyotes and failed utterly. Yeah. Just behind them. Is us. Yeah, you know, and like, even if us survive, you know, the numbers that we're survived and the quality of life that will survive, are simply not enough. And it's that change of consciousness, that kind of needs to happen. I see that much more in younger people, I think we're going to actually be quite shocked in the United States, with the group of people who are coming online to vote. Now, they have no memory of the Cold War. You know, it never happened. They are digital residents, not digital nomads. And more than that, they're much more centrally involved in social media kind of thing. A lot of things are spectacularly not interesting to them. They might like their country, but the idea of a patriotic mission, or you know, but they are interested passionately in things like the environment, you know, we are likely to see a tectonic shift in voting behavior. In places like the United States, I certainly expected to this election coming up next year in Ireland, where environmentalism becomes less a preserve of worried middle classes. And a central feature of how governance is thought through. And it will probably have far less of a hangover of conservation, and a kind of the deficit paternalism towards nature, good at a healthy about of terror, that we live on a set of interconnecting systems that we are just coming to understand at the point that we are threatening their balance in such a way that we can make our form of life impossible. I think that that's going to be where a lot of these questions are going to be sorted out. So I'm not an optimistic for the generation of humans that are coming. But I think it's an open question, whether our ingenuity, and generalized goodwill is up for the challenge that is in front of us. Well

Mark Rubin: 29:35

said, Jamie, I appreciate that. And that as a great way to end this I want to add one thing is that the first episode of Barney as money and also the podcast is called Life is lucky. And it starts with the idea that the conditions that support life are rare in the universe, as far as starts with me looking through a telescope and looking at the universe and not seeing all these amazing things and not seeing one other living thing unless I looked around where I was As, and I thought, life is lucky. And so no. So basically when the end this one with the idea that life is lucky, and that the generation that's coming through now can lead to change to improve things both through this sort of benevolent idea that we're part of a living system, and that they are afraid of what might happen if they don't take corrective action. And then maybe they won't play the game of it costs more later, cross your fingers, all living things that cooperate follow principles of anthropology. If you did any work today to prevent expensive problems in the future, you're investing in solving problems that cost more later. And that reminds me, it's almost time to get an oil change in my car. Investing in preventative maintenance is less expensive than fixing broken stuff in the future. It will be wise to do some preventative maintenance on our planetary social systems, so you don't have to solve expensive problems in the future. If you enjoyed this discussion about anthropology and the way bees and companies and people and civilizations are similar, subscribe to the lessons from nacer podcast where we're modeling the secrets of the bees. On the next episode of the podcast I talk with David who David is a catalyst for creative thinking and creating a better tomorrow. He's a futurologists, a big thinker, and a great communicator. Visit projects emulate that life for more information about living in harmony with the rest of nature. Thank you, Jamie.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 31:30

Hey, she bark