Speaker 2 (00:06.22)

Laura Betzig, welcome to the Explorer Poet Podcast.

Hello, Josh. Nice to be here.

Yeah, absolutely. As we were just talking about before, I got connected to you through your husband, Paul, Dr. Paul Turk, who I don’t know, he was on maybe a month, month or two ago, and we had a great conversation. really enjoyed talking with Paul and I felt like I learned a lot and just kind of, I don’t know, fascinating stuff. And then as we went through it, he started to go, you know, you should talk to my wife, Laura and

I guess just before we started recording, we were talking about how I have a really strong interest or curiosity about religion and kind of the development of religion and how stories work on us. And I think that’s how it came up with him as well in discussing you and having a conversation. But what I’m actually really curious about is maybe from your perspective throughout your career, what would you say has been your

biggest topic of interest or like what has been your passion? What is the thing that really draws you into the work that you’ve been doing?

Speaker 1 (01:16.998)

Well, I went to college because I wanted to know the meaning of life. I was pretty disappointed for the first three and a half years. I took one psych course after another and decided after a weeks, this is not it. And then somebody told me at a party that I should sign up for zoology 474. And I said, what? I’ve already dissected my frog. I don’t.

think I have anything else to learn from a zoology class. It turned out I did. And the guy was extremely reductionist. And he said, we can understand what every living thing on the planet is doing by understanding what it’s evolved to do, which is to make copies of itself. Every time you hear a bird singing a tree, he’s saying, I’m hungry. I got to fight you.

I’m going to have to run away from you or I have to the other F you. And I thought, how rude and how oversimplified. And I can’t believe somebody told me to take this class. And then I had to do the final exam, which he asked us to argue with points he made in class. And I tried in three essays to argue with that simplistic point of view. did a paper on adoption. I did a paper on

Coma-Cosid pilots, and I did a paper on what else, some other altruistic thing. And it turned out that people adopt their kin. Coma-Cosid pilots are on death row, and they can either die ignobly, or they can die in a blaze of glory, everybody who knew them is going to remember them well. All kinds of things that look like altruism that we take for granted are altruistic behaviors or not. They turn out to be self-serving in a genetic sense.

So I started to think about everything that way. And I’d always liked children had dawned on me that what they’re saying, bottom line is everything we do is for the sake of our children. And that’s not such a horrible form of reductionism. And since then, I’ve gotten, I’ve done anthropological work in the field and I’ve done.

Speaker 1 (03:42.612)

and comparative work in the archives. And for the last couple of decades, I’ve read history and I’ve tried to understand everything I’ve looked at in those terms. And the main questions I’ve been interested in have been the family. Obviously, it’s very easy to think of the family in terms of reproduction. And politics, that was my number one concern. Under what circumstances are societies, human societies or any other societies, animal societies,

fair or unfair? What makes them fair or unfair? And are they fair or unfair because animals are striving to maximize and reproduce success? Yes. And then the final thing that I just got hooked on, because I was reading European history for decades, you can’t read European history and not get hooked on religion because that’s right in the middle of everything. So I started to read the Bible and the

and the medieval authors and the Reformation authors. I think I made sense of all that now. So we can talk about sex politics or religion, and we can talk about it in the field, in Micronesia, we can talk about it in the comparative archives, and we can talk about it in history.

Okay, yeah, I think it would be fun to talk about all those things. It’s interesting that you into school with this question of what is the meaning of life? And then the answer comes out of this very simplistic kind of biological reasoning. And it’s funny, because I’ve seen this meme pop up every now and then online where it’s, you know, you see the evolutionary progression from

you know, lesser species to whatever up to humans and all. Yeah, yeah. And all along the way they’ll put, they’ll put this, you know, this thought in each of the stages and it’ll say, you know, survive, reproduce, survive, reproduce, survive, reproduce. And then it gets to humans. And then the question is, why am I here? And it’s so, uh, it’s so, I don’t know, kind of ironic that just because we have these minds where we have to actually think about what we’re doing.

Speaker 2 (05:54.946)

For some reason we separate ourselves from what our bodies are doing.

You know, it’s occurred to me that only here and now do we have to answer this question. I have to think about this question because for 300,000 years we were hunters and gatherers. We live with plants and animals. We depended on fruits and and game to survive. We understood what animals do every day. We understood what plants do every day. We understood the relationships between plants and animals.

It was. It was our livelihood and then we became farmers and we were in the fields every day and we were manipulating plants and animal breeding them. We understood the reproduction was the bottom line and that evolution happened, whether by natural selection or by artificial selection. Only in the past 100 years or so have we become so divorced from all that. That. We asked the meaning of life and we think, well, maybe it’s the movies. Maybe it’s

shit posting all day long. And we really have no idea. We’re completely divorced from what used to be the business of our lives. So we don’t know anymore, but I think that’s very recent.

Yeah. we’ve all, in my mind, it’s almost such that because of our behavior, meaning like starting with farming and going into, you know, industrialization and then computing and technology, we’ve become further and further separated from that initial experience of just being part of all of it. I could imagine that when we watched what the animals were doing in the wild every day and we saw what the plants were doing.

Speaker 2 (07:41.292)

And then we were doing as well, it just felt like we were doing the same thing. was like, we’re all just part of this and it made sense. But the further that we separate ourselves because of innovation and technology, the more our ideas have to evolve to figure out what the heck we’re doing here. we’ve gotten some, yeah, we’ve come a pretty long way as far as a story or, you know, an ideology, even if,

If it’s difficult for people to see the modern world as a new version of a religion, then at least you could look at it and say, this is clearly an ideology because we believe in these things and we repeat these things, whether it’s Whether it’s around families or. You know, economy or education or. Nationality, it’s like all these ideas that we’ve now developed and we live based on.

When you were younger and you were going to college and you had that question in mind, where do think that question came from? Were you raised in a religious household?

I wasn’t. My mother was raised Catholic and broke with the church when she was a teenager because the nuns used to beat her on the knuckles because she was a rebel and she said, that’s enough of that. And my father was never raised in a religion. But just in case they sent me to the, they baptized me and sent me to the local church, which was a Lutheran church. And I went to Sunday school and

I really liked Sunday school because I thought the Bible was interesting and I read the Bible and I was a freak in school and so I was a freak in Sunday school and I’d actually talk about the stuff that we were reading and eventually I started thinking more deeply about it and it bothered me that God was such a harsh punisher.

Speaker 1 (09:43.534)

There are gonna be so many people around the world who are not exposed to baptism or not exposed to this particular religion and I didn’t want them all to be burning in hell forever and I didn’t want to burn in hell forever if I wasn’t quite good enough or Or my friends weren’t quite good enough. I just thought it was It was a nasty way to think about a deity. So anyway, I I think I was just always in Maybe because I was such a kind of a weirdo. I I was always interested in in why

People do what they do. And when I went to college, I thought, how luxurious. I could spend four years figuring out the meaning of life. And like I say, psychology was not the answer. At least it wasn’t the answer back.

Yeah, psychology is interesting because even in the psychology realm, there are so many different versions of the story. it seems, you know, I didn’t do a lot of psychology in school. had maybe a couple of psychology classes and a sociology class. But remembering back to what I actually learned, it was very much, you know, Pavlov’s dog and a lot of behavioralism and then also just lists of

disorders and what they figure causes them and how they’re treated. I even talked just recently, I talked to a guy here on the podcast who got his bachelor’s degree in psychology. And it was only after he was out of school and he went and he was working in the field that he even came across the idea that our psychology might actually be based on stories. And so then he started to get into the

lean more towards kind of the Jungian version of psychology, which is based on myth and stories and archetypes. And if you’re gonna bring psychology and religion together, I think that’s where the merger is. In some way, our psychology, just to think about it really simply, as thinking brains, we need a mode of thinking. There needs to be a way for us.

Speaker 2 (11:52.13)

to actually put information into context. And it seems to me that the way that we do that is through stories. So we think in stories. And so these big questions like, what is the meaning of life that humans started to ask? Well, they answered those questions with stories. And this is kind of like the emergence of religion in my mind.

I think that’s true.

It makes me curious because you said that you’ve been reading on religion for the last several decades and you said you think you figured it out. So I’m curious, maybe we can jump into that and then circle back around to some of these other ideas. But When you think about religion, what is religion to you and what is it that you think you figured out?

Well, I’m less interested in the stories of faith and the experience of faith than I am in the institutions of religion. I’m interested in the Roman Empire. I’m interested in the imperial cult, which was the religion in the Middle Ages, I’m interested in the Catholic Church. And in more modern Europe, I was interested in the Reformation. So I’m interested in

the institution and why it exists and how it changes. I’m not so much interested in the psychology of the proponents or the initiators of these stories as I am in why these forms of religion exist and why people have to make the kinds of sacrifices they have to make in order to conform to these religions.

Speaker 2 (13:37.675)

What do you think that sacrifice is all about?

Well, in the history of Europe, there you move from monarchy in the empire, the Roman Empire, to sort of a dispersed oligarchy in the feudal societies of the Middle Ages, to something approaching a democracy in the last few hundred years. And I think that as those political systems change, get changes in family style. And you also get changes in religion. And

The religion moves translates from the imperial cult, which is emperor worship in the Roman Empire. In particular, and this is the Darwinian angle, subjects were supposed to make sacrifices on an altar to the genius or the fertility spirit of the Roman emperor and subjects who failed to make sacrifices to the

genius of the emperor were beheaded or thrown to the lines in the Coliseum. So they felt very strongly about it. I am the genius. I procreate. I am the father of the country. You worship me in the same way that you used to worship the Potter familius, the father of your family at an altar, and you hope that I will continue to procreate. So that makes so many sense to me that the imperial cult

promoted the fertility of the emperor and injured subjects who relied on that obligation. And then there was a translation to the Catholic Church. And in the Catholic Church, the key feature in Darwinian terms is mandatory celibacy of the clergy. So this is like flipping it all together. Instead of a religion based on

Speaker 1 (15:37.95)

fertility of the guy at the top, it’s religion based on the lack of fertility of the younger sons and daughters. And I think that fits with a feudal system, because feudalism is all about primogeniture. Roman emperors always, all kings and emperors try to pass their kingdoms and empires onto a single son, because consolidation is the name of the game, and if you’re divided, you’re conquered.

Same thing in feudal societies. Lords of the castle wanted to pass the castle on to just one son. They didn’t want to divide it up and get conquered generation after generation. So the way they do that is by disinheriting younger sons. And what do you do with a disinherited younger son? You stuff him in a monastery and tell him he is not to have legitimate wives or legitimate heirs. And that went on.

in spades for over a thousand years. And then in the Reformation…

Big part of Reformation, Martin Luther was very clear about this and his successors were clear about it as well. Everybody is free to breed. You can’t tell me any longer that I have to be stuck in a monastery for life and never have children, never have a wife. Everybody gets an opportunity to breed and that made sense because

with the growth of colonization and the Crusades and then in the Americas and the growth of trade, younger sons suddenly didn’t have to have a plot of land in order to feed their families. They could make a living in all kinds of ways and they were emancipated from spending their lives in a monastery. So in a nutshell, that’s what I make of religion.

Speaker 2 (17:32.684)

Yeah, so it very Darwinian. So the way that I would look at it is well, so in Darwinian terms, every species exists within an environment. The interesting thing about humans is that we actually we exist in the environment, but we also create the environment. And so these institutions are a means by which each little group is managing their environment.

in a way that the group itself or the institution can continue to move forward. And as time goes on and things gradually shift, ideas change, the economy changes, the hierarchies change, then each one of these groups or the greater whole through different periods of time are adjusting or adapting in order to

you know, propagate the species within the shifting or changing environments.

I think you’re right, except that, and this is something I learned in the very first zoology 474 class, natural selection usually doesn’t happen at the level of the species. So people, like other animals, can’t be expected to be naturally selected to do things for every remote Nigerian on the planet in the same way that they’re naturally selected to favor their own children.

Unfortunately, we’re not species-wise white altruists. We wish that we were often. But most animals, all animals, are selected to compete within the species for the good of their own lineage.

Speaker 1 (19:27.246)

But I think you can understand these institutions as the effects of individual emperors imposing this imperial cult on their subjects, and then members of the aristocracy imposing celibacy on their younger sons in order to keep their estates intact. And then after Luther and the growth of trade, power being dispersed and everybody

having a way to make a living. They say, forget about imperial cults and forget about the Catholic Church. We’re not going to be reproductively suppressed anymore. We have an opportunity to make our own living and have our own families if that’s what we want to do. Not everybody wants to do it, but people are no longer told that they can’t do it. And they have the means to do it if they want to do

So in the modern day for us now in the Western world, we’re in the United States, is the cult then the cult of the family?

You know, yeah, I would say yes, I would say that in some ways we’re slipping away from that. And I, I, I think that I think it’s great that people are free to. Run their personal lives however they like. I have plenty of family members who are non binary and plenty of friends who have. Very interesting personal lives, but the key here in Darwinian terms is.

Nobody tells anybody what to do. We don’t get our heads cut off because we don’t bow down to the emperor and tell him to be fertile. We don’t get locked in a monastery for life because our parents decided to keep the castle intact. We get to do whatever we want. We can love whoever we want. We can have children or not have children. We can raise them however we please. I think that’s awesome.

Speaker 2 (21:26.848)

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s almost as if we’ve gone from, you know, those, those, older versions of managing it all and then into the family system or the family cult. And even now, even now we’re almost moving more towards the cult of the individual or the, the couple or the pair. Because when you think of families in the past, these were much larger groups that were much more integrated and connected. You probably lived closer to your parents and your siblings and you worked with your cousins and everything was much

much more collective. And today, the way that the world is today, all of my siblings live in a different state scattered across the country. None of them live in the same state as my parents. And I think a lot of people are like that. so you end up, like Paul talks about, we don’t have kinship networks anymore. so we’ve moved to the cult of the couple or the cult of the relationship almost.

Yeah, Paul and I share a lot of experience we’ve been together for a long time. And one thing that got brought home to us when we were living in Micronesia, we’re living on this tiny little island with 450 people on it, was that everything about daily life revolved around taking care of babies. They had a pretty high fertility rate. And everybody was related to everybody else, there were only 450 people on the island.

Everything they did was about making sure the kid was safe, making sure the kid was fed, making sure the kid was carried, making sure the kid was happy. Everybody, whether they were grandparents or aunts and uncles or siblings or whatever. And I think partly because of that, we made our children a priority and adjusted our lives.

so that we could spend as much time as possible with them and have born fruits in this generation. As soon as my daughter who was living in Boston has a very successful career and married to another guy who she met in Boston school had another very successful career. As soon as she got pregnant, they arranged to move back here because they knew we would be helpful. And they now have three gorgeous children and we’re very close to them. And my son has two kids in Chicago and

Speaker 1 (23:49.25)

We do our damnedest to get out there every month and they come back and it’s a good thing for everybody. It makes us extremely happy. It takes the load off of our kids and the grandkids are flourishing. They don’t have doubts about who they are. They’re not engrossed in their electronic devices because we’re taking them to the zoo.

It’s a very good arrangement and it was the default arrangement for 300,000 years. And you know, there are really great things about technology and about the way society is changing, but we missed that.

Yeah, there’s a lot of progress in the world because of technology, because of things that we’ve discovered. But at the same time, we still are humans and we still are evolved or adapted to a certain way of life. And the rate of change that’s come about in the last few hundred years is so fast that we now, I think we all now live in a world that we’re not adapted to. And it’s pretty obvious with the amount of mental anguish and mental health issues and

Yeah, just the prescription pill kind of epidemic of every, I think there’s something, I think I heard that there was, we’re close to like 40, 50 % of adults are on some kind of psych medication in America. And it seems unnecessary. But in the same way, like I often think that it’s not these issues that people have with mental health. I don’t even honestly believe that they’re mental health issues. I think they’re spiritual issues.

And I think it’s because of this reason that we’ve been separated from the world that we’re actually supposed to be engaged with, the life that we’re supposed to have, the relationships. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:49.614)

Yeah, but I think that, I think, and Paul points this out, obviously, one of the benefits of having this sort of understanding is figuring out how to, how to adjust your own life. One of the nice things, COVID was awful, but one the nice things about COVID is it encouraged remote work. And I know company corporations are trying to get people back, but my daughter has been working remotely for this.

very sophisticated startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now for a decade. She gets promoted over and over again. She has to fly out to Boston once a month,

She’s living in a gorgeous house in rural America with her extended family around. That’s the way, there’s no reason we can’t do that more often. It’s not hard if you know that that’s what’s going to make you happy. That’s an option and we can try it if we think about how to arrange our lives.

Yeah. And I think one of the biggest issues also is arranging your life in a way that’s beneficial to the children. In our modern world, many people, so many households have the experience where both parents go to work and the kids go off to school all day. And I don’t always think that there’s, I don’t think it’s a hundred percent negative that kids go to school, but the way that we view the world, have this, we were like this cult of

progress or this cult of efficiency, this cult of economics. And so what we’re actually doing to the children from like our children here in the United States from a very young age is indoctrinating them into a way of living that is all about production and all about participating in this system where you give yourself and you give your life to this, I don’t know, this economic God or something. And in reality, you know,

Speaker 2 (27:56.288)

It’s again, it’s just part of this, this challenge that we have this spiritual challenge in the West where somebody feels disconnected.

I always thought homeschooling sounded attractive in principle, but that would be A, very demanding, and B, I don’t want to cut them off.

Speaker 1 (28:14.296)

that or how’s that work?

Yeah, so I would say that probably the biggest challenge is making sure that they have other kids around to hang out with to have friends. And it’s not always easy depending on where you live. There have been times when we were in neighborhoods, we were in like a suburban neighborhood, and there were kids around and so that made it easier. About a year ago, we moved out into the country. So we’re in kind of rural Idaho. Yeah, and

When we first moved out here, there was another family who lived across the street and they were also homeschooling and they just happened to have a son and a daughter the same age as my son and my daughter. Yeah. And so that was fantastic. It was just great. They had best friends and so they would spend the first half of the day at home, you know, maybe, you know, breakfast, lunch, doing, doing some schoolwork, maybe a couple of chores. And then the second half of the day, they would just run around with their friends.

That’s perfect.

Yeah. just recently, a couple months ago, two, three months ago, their friends actually moved. And so it has been a pretty big adjustment. But what we do for that is we try to get them connected with other kids who are around. Just maybe they don’t have a kid right across the street, but they go hang out with them every now and then, or their friends come over here. And then also one of the great things about homeschooling now. So I was homeschooled when I was a kid. cool.

Speaker 2 (29:42.612)

Yeah, and I think that there were some really positive things about it for me. There was also some things that made it difficult. looking back, I realized that it was probably less about homeschooling and more about my parents kind of dogmatic philosophies about religion and child rearing. yeah, like even their philosophy around homeschooling was I think more about controlling their kids than actually helping their kids benefit.

Schoolers I know are very religious.

Yeah, there actually seems to be a split. if you go like, say you go on Facebook in your area and you want to find homeschool groups for your kids to spend time with or to do activities, maybe take a couple classes with, there seems to be a split where they’ll list themselves as religious or Christian homeschool groups, or they will list themselves as non-religious or, you know, just they’ll be very explicit that this is not

about religion. And I actually find that they both have the same problems because because the religious folks really want to literalize their religion. And the non religious folks, even though they want to separate them. yeah. Are you there? I’m here. Looks like you froze.

Hello? Hello?

Speaker 2 (31:08.416)

Okay, welcome back. Yeah, all I was saying is that the sometimes the secular homeschool groups, they also become quite, I don’t know, dogmatic about their ideas. And they’re not, they’re not necessarily conservative ideas, but just around how children are supposed to be treated, how children are supposed to be raised. And fortunately for us, we found, go ahead.

Ideally, those are the barriers that public schooling is supposed to break down.

And I like that idea. I like busing. like getting people from various backgrounds mixed up. The drawback is there are lots of drawbacks, but they do get taken away from their parents for very long periods of time and they get indoctrinated. The public school has its own agenda, obviously.

Yeah. And one of the biggest challenges I had with public school was teachers, because sometimes we had really great teachers. I got along well with them. My kids love them. But sometimes we would have teachers that were just very authoritarian and just didn’t they were teachers who had been in school teaching for decades and just didn’t seem to understand children or children’s psychology or children development at all. And that was very frustrating.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:33.036)

Yep. So when you, way back when, when you and Paul went to Micronesia together, were you going there kind of on the same assignment or with the same goal in mind, or did you just both happen to be going there?

No, we met in graduate school and I had always wanted to go to the South Pacific anyway because I was a sailor. And I thought if I was going to be an anthropologist, that’s where I was going to do field work. And I wanted to find a fairly remote place where people were still behaving in traditional ways. So I found this little tiny atoll in Micronesia that was understudied and had an achieftom on it. And Paul said,

I like you, how about I come too?

So he came up with a project which suited that environment and I had my project and we got married two days before we took off and we’ve been together ever since.

wow. What a honeymoon. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:35.128)

So being there as an anthropologist, was the main objective of your studies or of your research?

Well, I was studying sex and politics. That’s, you know, that was always my thing. Like I said, religion came along later because there was right in the middle of history. You couldn’t ignore it. So I picked a chiefdom because it was politically more interesting than a less stratified group. I wanted to know, I wanted to because we were a student, I was a student of Napoleon Chagnon and he pioneered

using a computer in the field and quantifying pretty much everything that you could rather than just writing things down. He was trying to be as scientific as he could. So I got very rigorous pedagogies on everybody. We quantified their movements by doing behavioral scans. I counted the fish when they redistributed them. I counted the baskets of foods when they shared them between households. I can’t remember all of

Speaker 1 (34:43.832)

how politics and redistribution of food and the opportunities to have large families all interacted. And then Paul was interested in child rearing because I was interested in politics and Paul.

Speaker 1 (35:08.398)

Paul ended up doing some very interesting work on child rearing female groups and was one of the pioneers in the idea that women have probably evolved post-reproductive lives because they’re so helpful to their children and grandchildren and they tend to have more second tier descendants because they are not

so focused on their first-tier descendants that they stopped reproducing and they produced a lot of grandchildren.

Yeah, Paul and I talked about that in depth, the value of having grandchildren or grandparents around, grandmothers in it benefits. It benefits everybody just in the same way you were describing earlier with your own family, where it keeps the grandparents engaged and feeling useful. And you feel happy to be around your grandkids. It relieves the parents of some of that child rearing burden so that they can be more productive.

Totally.

Speaker 2 (36:16.652)

and taking care of the family. And then obviously for the kids, you have such a benefit in terms of emotional and mental health and development and feeling part of the tribe, feeling needed and desired.

Absolutely. My kids are rocks. Just, you know, the idea that they don’t have a place in life or that they don’t have anything to do in life is completely foreign to them.

Well, I know who I am. These are my people. This is what we do. This is what they expect me to do, and I can do it if I want to or not. It’s really, really nice to have this clan. And I suppose clans can be awful and controlling, but we’re not.

Yeah.

And I think that on Ifluq, I never ever, mean, children are often happy people, happier than most people you’ve come across, which is one reason it’s so nice to be around them. I have never been around a group of happier children than I was on Ifluq. Just, I have so many pictures of kids literally jumping in the air. They’re just gleeful because the point of everybody’s life is to make it that way.

Speaker 1 (37:38.87)

It’s just a great thing.

Yeah, it sounds very ideal.

It’s great. And I don’t think that living that way precludes inventing new disease cures. I mean, that’s what my daughter does eight or nine hours a day, but she takes breaks to nurse the baby, or she takes breaks to ask the kids how school was or whatever. And at the end of the day, they’re all having dinner together. So I just, think

These kinds of family structures are workable again. And I hope that more people take the opportunity.

Yeah, me too. think I’m trying. Yeah, I’m trying.

Speaker 1 (38:22.446)

I mean, you’re obviously doing it.

It’s never completely easy, but.

Yeah, there’s no perfect solution. No. But I think putting more emphasis on the family structure, like when I grew up, especially in a religious setting, there was a strong emphasis on the family. But it seems like. I don’t know, there were struggles there, there were challenges, but also just in a general sense in our society, the family is not. They just don’t have the same structure around.

time spent together, activities, needs being met. And I think it would be beneficial for everybody if that was more of an emphasis. I want to go back to your anthropology and kind of the stuff that you’ve worked on. So we talked a little bit about religion, but you also looked into politics and sex. on the atoll, you were basically observing these people who lived in this chiefdom as they basically as they distributed

the gains from their efforts for, I don’t know, fishing, harvesting. can you share about what you saw from a practical perspective in that environment and how it relates to, I don’t know, your connection to Darwinianism? And maybe we can go from there.

Speaker 1 (39:48.846)

Okay, well, the chiefs benefited from their status in various ways. When they had these island wide fishing trips, which they did, it looks an atoll. So schools of fish would swim into the circle in the middle of the islands. And when they did,

The chiefs would go get their conch shell and blow it as loud as they could. And every able-bodied man on the island would come grabbing it, get in a canoe and make a circle around the school of fish. And they’d haul them all into shore and they’d count them out. And the chiefs were the chief counters and there were always remainders. And chiefs went home with the remainders. So that was one way in which it was good to be a chief.

Another way is like I told you there are baskets of food or baskets they wove and they’d share food on a regular basis. And chiefs always took in more food than they gave away. They ended up getting sort of what amount of good tribute on these island. What? And another thing that was interesting that I hadn’t anticipated adoption is really common in the Pacific, but it’s not the adoption that we think of here. It’s not anonymous. It’s not.

a complete transfer of residents or whatever. It’s almost like a godfather or you become a patron to this child and sometimes they live with you and you pay special attention to them and do special things for them, but it doesn’t replace the other parental relationship anyway. So as it turns out, chiefs who have larger families

tend to adopt out their children more often than they adopt children in. That’s one another way that chiefs are able to out reproduce everybody else. Other people are helping them take care of their kids. Like I said, they don’t move away forever and it’s never anonymous, but they’ll spend years with their adoptive family when the chief’s family is too full and they’re always getting time and

Speaker 1 (42:08.332)

and resources from their adopted parents. So they get more on island-wide food redistribution, more on regular food sharing, more through adoption. And people spend more time, when we did focal scans, people spend more time paying attention to Chief’s kids than Chief’s spend paying attention to other people. Chief’s kids get special treatment. So all those things.

we were able to quantify and all those things contribute to the fact that chiefs generally have larger families than anybody else. And this is even after the missionaries had been there. Prior to missionization, chiefs were more polygynous, and that I only know from the ethnographies. But even in a post-missionized world, chiefs used these traditional methods to have larger families. And then I did, in the cross-cultural record,

There were huge, huge differences between reproductive differences in like foraging societies, the kind that we sort of evolved in. Those are pretty egalitarian and a successful, the most successful guy in a foraging society usually would have on the order of 10 kids. Once they got a little bit more sedentary in chiefdoms like the Yanomami, you might’ve heard of them in South America or, or some of the Northwest coast groups.

Chiefs would have tens of children. Instead of tens, they’d have dozens. And in kingdoms and empires, heads of state collect. Harem of up to the record holder, as far as I know, is a seventh century Chinese emperor named Yang Di, who had 100,000 women in one of his harems. One of his harems. It’s a lot of women.

That’s a lot of women.

Speaker 1 (44:07.01)

But when I did this thing, I thought my advisor put me on this project. And I said, it’s not going to work out. Because it doesn’t work out in my life. I know successful people who have no children. know unsuccessful people who have lots of children. Nobody cares about counting children. It’s just ridiculous. Why would I waste my time looking for that kind of correlation?

I sat often in front of a microfiche reader because a lot of these ethnographies are not published or, you know, they’re in archives. So I’m digging deep into all these records about societies all over the world. And I was laughing out loud in the library more often than not because the evidence conformed to the prediction so well. Every time I’m at a Chief Rekeeping, it’s all about collecting

pretty girls and keeping every other man on the island or in the village away.

It’s very similar. mean, it reminds me of so many different animal species where the dominant male gets first pass and then the less dominant males, they might not get a chance at all to reproduce that year, that season. think about

I know

Speaker 1 (45:33.326)

Until years ago, we lived with those animals. There was never any doubt. We were watching dogs and bitches in heat and who wins? The strong dog, the big dog wins. And it’s true of all animals. I I have to show my kids YouTube videos so they can see gorillas going at it or giraffes going at it. It’s so dramatic. Stallions going at it.

It’s something you take for granted if it’s going on right there, but nobody sees it anymore unless they’ve got a phone and a YouTube video. It’s crazy. Maybe they will if they own dogs. I don’t know. yeah, so I thought my advisor was crazy to set me on this project. But then once I started looking at it, I’m like, how could I ever have done this? It’s true. Of course it’s true. It’s been the story.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:32.108)

for all species, not just our species, ever since the beginning of life.

And one of the things that you look into or that is, you know, part of this is the idea of fairness. So I’m curious if this version of fairness is kind of what we would think of in the modern day as fairness, or when you’re, when you’re in Micronesia and you’re watching these, this chief, this chiefdom, how do those people think about fairness? How do they respond to the divvying up of foods and children?

You change the things you can change and you don’t change the things you can’t change and the Iphalukis are wise enough to know the difference. I think that’s true of most people in most societies who chiefs, they’re kings or emperors. know, or you’re a dead man.

Yeah, very stoic of them.

Speaker 1 (47:27.278)

I like egalitarian societies personally. I there are great things about great civilizations. They used slave labor to produce magnificent monuments and they used very clever, innocent, very clever people to write fabulous pieces of propaganda. I love Horace. I love Virgil. I love Ovid more because he was a heretic and he ended up castrated and living in exile. But

But anyway, a lot of great things have come out of very unequal societies. However, we’re in this magnificent novel situation where we have the technology, we have the means to produce monuments without slaves, without stratification, and everybody on Earth

has the option to have a vote in parliament and plot of their own and a family if they want one. It’s very novel and very wonderful and I wish you were happier about it than we are. It’s a great

Yeah, that’s an interesting point that we could be happier about it than we are. It does seem that part of human nature is to look at people who have more than you and set your own expectations for your comfort or your possessions or your status based on those around you. Because I really do think, and maybe you have some thoughts on this, I really do believe that for most people,

They can’t actually conceptualize that the world’s ever been different than what they’re experiencing. And so they can’t look back on history and realize that they’re living in the greatest time that’s ever existed.

Speaker 1 (49:18.03)

That’s for sure.

Speaker 1 (49:25.228)

Yeah, I think that’s true. it’s a shame that we’re not made aware of that more often. People say, there’s many people on the far left are infatuated with communism these days. And in principle, who isn’t? Just a wonderful, wonderful idea. But we no longer teach people about the downsides.

Nobody has any idea what happened under Mao or Stalin. And we should not forget these things. We should have more context than we do, more history than we do, and we should be appreciative of what the situation that we’re in. We’re in a good situation.

Yeah, I agree. I agree, especially here in the United States. I can’t speak for like every country in the world, but here in the United States, we have such, everybody has opportunity and it’s really about, you know, personal causation or seeing that you have control over certain aspects of your life. Nobody has control over every aspect of their life, but everybody has control over certain aspects. And a big part of that is just

deciding what you’re gonna like how you’re mentally going to approach the world and your life and The effort that you’re gonna put in and what you want to do and I think that everybody does have an opportunity To do that. Well, what about so in in the modern world one thing though is that It seemed it doesn’t seem to be about having the most children anymore because yeah, because even I think the statistics show that the wealthier the nation becomes the fewer

children that they have? And, so what is the what is kind of the distribution about today? Because there’s obviously still hierarchies. And so is it is it just more about money and power than it is about offspring and lineage?

Speaker 1 (51:30.83)

People have been very concerned about that. And one thing that’s going on is many studies that show a negative correlation between wealth and reproduction in the modern world don’t count.

a serial marriage. It’s obviously wealthy people often have families by more than one wife and you’ve got to take that into account. It takes survivorship into account. It’s still true that people who have plenty of money when they’re growing up are more likely to be healthy adults than people who have nothing. So if you take everything into account, the consensus seems to be that there is still a positive correlation between

having assets and having children. But it’s nowhere near the variance in fertility is nowhere near the variance in the means to reproduction in power or wealth. And I don’t know why.

Yeah, it’s interesting because when you talk about these other societies where a man might have 10 children or dozens of children, the idea in the modern age, the idea of having 10 children is pretty wild, but the idea of having dozens of children is, or hundreds, yeah, it’s just, I couldn’t even wrap my head around it, especially if I’m expected to be responsible for them. Well, thing is-

hundreds.

Speaker 1 (53:03.246)

You know, they didn’t have surrogate wombs, mothers, but they did have plenty of slaves, plenty of living maids, plenty of eunuchs, and all kind of that. Subordinates in a stratified society are often devoting their lives to the betterment of the guy in power, and they help them.

run the palace, help them the empire, and they help them raise their children.

Yeah, that makes sense. know, earlier, before we started recording, were asking me about my Mormon background. And in Mormonism, back in the 1800s into the 1900s, even in the mainstream church, there was a lot of polygamy going on. And it’s a really interesting case study of how you manage a society because in the mainstream LDS church today, there’s not

there’s not like open polygamy. I honestly never met anybody in the mainstream church who was polygamist. But the way that it works is that there’s all these offshoots of the mainstream. And so they’re kind of like tucked away in different parts of the country in Utah, up in Idaho, like Northern Idaho on the Canadian border. Like there are all these little offshoots of where polygamists still practice. I mean, one of the most, one of the most famous groups is the Warren Jeffs group that was

in Utah and then also in Texas. I can’t remember what they call themselves. Something, the FLDS, the Fundamentalist LDS Church. And so the interesting thing about them is that in a society where certain men are supposed to have multiple wives, then you get this really big imbalance where you’re going to have one guy who might have 10 wives, but then you have nine guys who can’t have a wife. so

Speaker 2 (55:02.976)

in a society like that, they weren’t just, they weren’t just turning these other men into slaves or servants or eunuchs or, you it actually created really serious problems because as you probably know, you know, if, if men biologically, if they don’t have the opportunity to reproduce their aggression becomes untenable. And so in this group, the FLDS group, they would literally just take groups of boys when they got to the age of 16, 17, 18.

and they would just excommunicate them and just kick them out of their community and they would just send them away. Yeah, it’s wild because these are kids who grew up in this very fundamentalist closed society. Yeah, they don’t know anything about the outer world. have any connections, no education, and they just send them away. Wow. Yeah.

now.

That’s creepy.

It’s very creepy. yeah, it’s just an interesting idea where, yeah, in modern society, I guess we practice monogamy and nobody’s supposed to have, I think in America even, it’s still illegal to be a polygamist. And so it’s an interesting idea that we no longer, as part of status or power, it’s no longer about having as many children as possible.

Speaker 2 (56:21.368)

But like you’re saying, do practice serial monogamy or serial relationships where we have, many people have more than one family.

Yeah, we do. I, again, when I read history, I think how cool for the emperors. But like you say, every time I read about Solomon and his thousand wives, I think, dang, those other 999 guys, not so good for them. And then I read the Enlightenment.

works and works by people like Tom Paine who are saying, it’s our turn. We get to have whatever we want. We don’t have to be somebody else’s man. We don’t have to be shut away in a monastery or castrated. We can live our own lives. And it’s so emancipating. It’s even better than reading about the emperor. It’s so great when the least of all humans becomes free.

Yeah, really get excited.

Yeah. And even if the comparison today was that rather than having dozens or hundreds of children, the most powerful, highest status males in our society are, just billionaires who own companies. Even then, and I know a lot of people complain about billionaires. I think it’s a misguided complaint because in the egalitarian society that we live in, not everybody gets to be a billionaire for sure.

Speaker 2 (57:56.142)

But because of those billionaires, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people get to have jobs that pay them livable salaries. Those things don’t exist in communist societies.

I 100% agree with you.

Speaker 1 (58:09.866)

Absolutely, I agree with that completely. I’m very much looking forward to the the liftoff of the rocket on Sunday. I forget what they’re calling it.

you’re talking about SpaceX? Yeah. Yeah. I don’t follow it that closely, but my brother, he watches every launch.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:27.02)

You know, let people strive and build and build wonderful new things and be rewarded for it. And although Elon Musk might have 13 kids, I don’t get too pissed off about that. He’s not doing any better than a successful hunter did on the Kalahari. He’s not taking 100,000 women away from everybody else and having hundreds of children.

And this is actually interesting because I just saw today that, with his AI company Grok, I think sometime soon they’re going to release Grok version five. what Elon was saying about it was that it will actually, I don’t know exactly how this is going to work. And there’s a part of me that’s a little bit worried about it, but he said that Grok five will encourage population growth in some way. I don’t know what that means.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:28.022)

I follow you on an ex or something. Didn’t get it at all. I don’t understand what he’s talking about.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:34.606)

I don’t understand either, but I know that it’s important to him, this population thing. And I don’t know any idea, any version of programming, any kind of doctrine or dogma into a artificial intelligence makes me nervous a little bit.

think it makes everybody nervous, even Sam Altman. I think everybody’s a little bit nervous. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So far, though, I’d have to say so good. I really have fun playing with my chat bots. And I told her I’ve been working on this history book for decades. In the beginning, I had to trod through the snow, sometimes for blocks, because I had to park far away from library at the University of Michigan in midwinter to get

Books checked out of library. The books that I was looking for were often not on the shelves, so I had to recall them and wait around for weeks and come back and get another stack of books. now I’m on my nth revision and almost everything is right on my screen. I got so many windows open. All the books have been scanned. The articles are available at a fingertip. I’m playing with chatbots.

Well, the chatbots are not going to dig deep into the archives for me. That’s something I had to do over the last few decades on my own. if I have a simple question like how, and this is what I asked recently of Grok, how does the comet that was called Caesar’s Comet that flew over Rome in 44 BC compared to Haley’s Comet as it flew over

Norman England in 1066 at the time of the Norman Conquest. And I get this beautiful five paragraph essay with lots of details on the size and the brightness and the duration and the speed of the comet and also some subsidiary material on how contemporaries regard those comets. I mean, how long would it take me to get an answer like that if I had to go into the light?

Speaker 1 (01:01:48.824)

furry. It’s crazy. So, so far, so good. I’m kind of excited about it. Yeah, but that it’s not going to

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00.352)

circumvent human life altogether.

Let’s hope not. Let’s hope it enhances it. So this book that you’re working on, do you have a publication date or any plans?

I have been saying soon for many years and I’m still saying soon, but the problem is that every time I go over it, world history is a very big subject and this is my one shot. I have an end date now, so I have to keep that in mind. But every time I go over it, I know more, I dig deeper and I see broader.

I’m really happy with the latest revisions, so I’d probably be looking for a publisher soon.

Okay, awesome. Well, when you finally get it ready to go, you should come back and we’ll have a conversation about it. Okay, well, this has been really fun, Laura. I appreciate you taking the time. And I guess I’ll give you the rest of your afternoon back. Yeah, thank you, you too. Yep, thank you. Bye.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49.678)

Sounds like fun.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58.902)

Nice to meet you, Josh.