 Let's say I'm a cultural pessimist and try to talk me out of this But here would be my worry if your theory implies cultural evolution speeds up as you have more parts more people more interconnections I Worry that social evolution will bring us further from the point of what our genes can handle So think of there being an increased variance of the match between society and our genes Most things do in fact work better because cultural evolution carries a lot of useful knowledge But just a few things stop working like maybe electoral politics Believe it or not or the diets we eat or a few things in society go wrong And if you think of everything needing to work fairly well in society for it to sustain itself Should we then be cultural pessimists? Well before I get to the cultural pessimist question I think that a key insight is that we've been in that situation for probably over a million years so You know human human cultural products like tools and food processing abilities have been shaping our guts and our teeth and our hands for a really long time and Culture was always pushing up against these things and the slow process here is the genetic evolution It takes the genetic evolution a long time to respond to expand our brains and Make them be able to deal with all that the new world that's being created by cultural evolution So the world we're facing now is just just more the same As far as cultural pessimism Things could get better things to get worse I don't have any predictions now. We have the internet. So that's very rapidly multiplied the number of combinations and connections Over a 20-year period much quicker than almost anyone had forecast. So if we apply that to your model What is your model predict if only in broad terms? What effects will the internet have on society given that genetic and cultural evolution are interacting and the number of Permutations has gone up a lot quicker than we expected Is this a train wreck waiting to happen or the greatest thing since sliced bread well thousand times better? Certainly in the short term it should should increase the rate of innovation because it's easy to exchange ideas amongst very diverse minds now The productivity growth is falling in most countries. This baffles me. You mean why? Productivity growth is right Japan US Western Europe productivity growth is lower than it was say before the 80s I don't blame the internet for that, but it doesn't seem to have helped very much Well, I mean I think you I'm a cultural evolutionist So I want to see this on a much longer time scale. Okay, ask me in 200 years. Okay 200 years We'll have you back for a second episode