Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we react to the recent research into how much culture, as opposed to genetics, has driven humans rapid spread all over the world.
Hello, welcome to the Call I See it podcast. I'm James Keats and joining me today is a man whose takes are edgy but still has one principle. Don't be cruel. Tunde. Ogunlana Tunde, you ready to show us why some call you the king of the stage?
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Yeah, man, but I thought cruelty was the point, wasn't it?
Wasn't I?
[00:00:47] Speaker A: I guess if you're coming from a certain perspective, that is true.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Was that the different the other show I was invited on? So this is the nice show. Yeah.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: There you go.
Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe like the show on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. And we're recording on October 13, 2026 and Tunde The premise that cultural evolution, as opposed to genetic evolution has been what has allowed humans to adapt to different conditions and spread all over the world is not necessarily new.
For example, when we did the show on the book on sapiens a few years back, the benefits of how much faster culture can evolve as opposed to genetics was discussed extensively. And how that has given humans a leg up and particularly Homo sapiens, as opposed to other human species that have lived throughout the history of the world.
But we saw an article recently that tried to quantify this. It said that it only took Homo sapiens 300,000 years to spread out all over the world the way that we did. But it would have taken 88 million years and necessitated a split into over 2000 distinct species to do the same thing spread all over the world. If we wanted genetic evolution to do the work, Tunde to get us started, what stood out to you in the research that's attempting to quantify this concept, so to speak, and that has allowed humans to adapt and thrive all over the world. And it being about culture, not genetics.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Yeah. I think what stood out to me was exactly that as humans as a species, we seem to be the only known species to have conquered the world.
Not through evolutionary biology like you're saying that we didn't evolve, let's say thicker hides or more fur and hair to live in colder climates versus those humans that live in the desert.
Humans generally are the same all around the world, but yet we were able to conquer all these different environments and terrains and climates through transferring knowledge and cultural knowledge, and I would say maybe institutional knowledge, but really in that sense, from an Ancient humanity. Humanity thing, I would say institution is in the environment, knowing your environment and really adapting to the environment as a human.
So that to me is the fascinating part, James, because the part in the article that that really stuck out to me was that based on his assessment and his scientific research, it would have taken a species like humans 88 to be able to do this. And we would have broken out into 22, he estimates 2200 separate but distinct Homo type of species.
And so the fact that we did that in only 300,000 years and we're still one species is pretty amazing.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: So, yeah, yeah, I mean, like, that is. I mean, that sums it up, so to speak. I mean, to me, I thought that.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Say what I said, show's over.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: What really stood out to me in this was one when they had like the counterpoint, you know, a good article, give you some counterpoints and so forth. And it was mentioned that cooperation and language, you know, and language to be able to communicate like that goes, which are related, you know, being able to cooperate in large numbers and it depends on language to some degree. You need more than just sounds and so forth. When you're talking about large and large numbers of people, again, these are concepts that were touched on extensively in the book Sapiens, you know, and it was actually more interesting to me in there because it talked about humans and their comparative advantage versus other Homo sapiens, I should say, versus other human species that existed at the time of early humans, whether it be Neanderthals or Denisovans and so forth. So this. But. But the real. Trying to actually quantify this one, I mean, it's there. He's guessing to some degree, he's using some type of scientific method to say 88 million years and so forth. But for humans to be about the same, but yet can live in the desert and can live in colder climates and so forth, can figure out way to get food in all these places. Because a lot of the adaptations you'll see will be about being able to get food or survive the elements. Well, we figure out ways to fish, you know, and you can fish. As long as there's water, you can fish. Or to agriculture was a big jump, you know, 10,000 years ago and so forth. And then these things can be transferred. So I think when the person's pointing at cooperation and language, they're actually talking about ways that culture is then spread and then culture is that these are the tools that are used by culture. I didn't feel like that was really a con in this whole thing. That was just like, okay, yeah, the culture quote unquote. It's not talking about one specific culture itself. It's talking about the ability to learn things and then apply those in different contexts. Or when you start trying to cross, go from Asia and cross a land bridge, go up into the north into Siberia and then cross a land bridge into the Americas, that you figure out what to do with these hides to keep yourself warm and so forth. You don't need to wait generation after generation after generation for another, for. For your. Your descendants eventually to have thicker skin or, like you said, hides, you know, or. Or, excuse me, fur and so forth in order to go into these different areas. So I think they, they mentioned that gray wolves cover about half the land that, that humans do, and they're the next.
The. The next species down that as far as just one species. But I think a real good illustration of this is just. I was thinking about bears, you know, and how you have all these different bears that live in different places depending on their adaptation to allow them to work out in the. Like a polar bear. You put that in, you know, a climate that's not polar, and then they struggle. And polar bears are struggling right now as Arctic regions are receding. So we see that versus a brown bear, you know, or something like that that is more versatile.
So I think that trying to quantify this concept just allows us to. It really shows how close we as humans all are because we look at humans who look differently or from different places and be like, oh, well, that person is very different from me. But actually, no, that person is the same as you. Much more so than a polar bear and a brown bear even, you know, which is crazy to me.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that, that was very interesting. The idea that we have much more genetic diversity than, you know, or, sorry, the one chimpanzee troop has more genetic diversity than all of humanity.
So I found that to be a very fascinating point. And just to piggyback on what you're saying, I think it's very interesting because as you're saying it about the gray wolf and the polar bear, I think the same thing. We live in South Florida, and a lot of people don't know this. There's black bears in South Florida, in the Everglades, not in our neighborhoods.
And so obviously there's not a lot left because they've been hunted and all that, and their habitats have been, you know, ruined by us.
But there's. There's Florida panthers, which is basically a mountain lion. There's a lot of different species of these type of, like. It's a good point you make, because I'm thinking about the Everglades is a total opposite to where a polar bear lives. So if a polar bear were to be stuck in the Florida Everglades, it wouldn't last long. And if the black bear was taken into the Arctic, it wouldn't last long. And so that's the point that we're making here in this discussion, is that humans, we did not evolve separately. All humans are generally the same.
It's our cultural evolution and the passing of knowledge. And also things that you and I have discussed privately, like cognitive offloading, the ability for a human to be able to put something down in writing so that other humans can read and learn from that, maybe even in future generations. And so it doesn't take this reinventing the wheel every generation on certain things. And also to the point we've been making about the hides and all that humans didn't need to wait for natural evolution and natural selection to allow us to go into these different climates and different regions of the world and survive. And that was the point of the mathematical equation. That's why, James, this is an interesting article because it kind of puts a mathematical meat on the bones of the sapiens concepts, you know what I mean? Because it was like, all right, now this guy's actually quantifying what Harari, the author of Sapiens was telling us from kind of a esoteric and conceptual level that this guy's kind of like, I did the math, and it would have taken humans 88 million years to be able to conquer the world this way. But instead, we did it in 300,000. I guess Harari would argue maybe that most of that would have been done in the last 70,000 years, because that was his argument about the cognitive revolution happening around 70,000 years ago. But either way, I mean, in terms
[00:09:34] Speaker A: of what we know, that is relatively true. But I think this guy's trying to date it back to first appearance of Homo sapiens, as opposed to this switch that Harari talked about, that when humans became cognitively like they are now, which allowed them. But that is what set the stage for the cultural evolution for that growth to happen.
That actually separated us from the complexity of information that could be transmitted, the ability to work in larger and larger numbers. That is what separate us from the. Because that, to me, is what the most fascinating part is. There used to be other humans running around here with. With Homo sapiens, there used to be other. We go. You go to another, you know, part of the world. And there'd be some other people there that weren't. They weren't Homo sapiens. They were. They were Neanderthals or just Sovians or they, they're discovering them all the time, you know, and so it's kind of like, you know, you think of the Lord of the Rings type of thing world where like, you show up and there's these elves and it's like, yo, what's going on? You know, but they, you know, they walk and talk like you. But what under the premise of the cognitive revolution the humans went, or Homo sapiens went through was that the other ones didn't do that. And so after that, like, we were just one of them for a few hundred thousand years, and then we became something different. And a part of that is what allowed us to develop the complexity and, and the robustness of our culture that then allowed us to spread out. One of the stories from sapiens I remember is that the first time the Homo sapiens tried to leave Africa, they got beat back by the Neanderthals. Before the cognitive revolution, the Neanderthals were like, nah, y' all gotta get back outta here. And so humans had to, you know, put tail between. Well, they didn't have tails, literally, but they had to put their tail between their legs and go back into Africa, like, all right. But then when they came back out, they just wiped right through them. But something had changed, you know, that's that cognitive revolution. I know one thing this piece looked at, this ability, you know, for, for cultural evolution as opposed to just genetic evolution, which happens on a much longer scale. And I mean, I think that's part of the 88 million years, is that it takes generation after generation after generation after generation for adaptations to happen, for them to be proven beneficial, and then to. To the, for the other stuff to fade away while this becomes a normal thing for the people in that area. But the piece looked at this from a positive light. But do you see downsides and humans ability to kind of use culture to fast track the ability to evolve and to. To do new and better and, well, conceivably better or just more impactful things over time?
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Yes. So I would say there's a few more modern examples that I'll give real quick, but I want to focus on what the article said about some of the ancient stuff. So the modern ones I'm thinking of would be like our foray right now into AI Right, like we seem to be. And you, you made this comment on various recent shows, whether it Be just this kind of race.
We're being told that AI is going to kill humanity in five years, but we still continue to plow money into it and act like it's going to also save everything.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Almost, we could talk about it almost like that's the goal. The way, the way that we just keep running towards it is like, hey, this might turn out bad for us. Okay, let's keep going.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: You know, if these guys are so good that I've given up and I may just like fall into the confidence men's, you know, just, just selling us all this BS because it is too hard to figure out what's real and what's not at this point with some of this stuff. But you know, I think about that, I think about things like climate change and I think that's why I say that the modern thoughts I would have would be that stuff along with maybe the last, maybe 200 years of the industrial age and because of the technologies created from it, the damage that the human appetite for profit and the potential for greed and all that have done to the planet and to our health and all that kind of stuff. So that's one example of where it
[00:13:21] Speaker A: could go that, that, that's for that greed and that, that bottomless appetite as we, you know, what was one of the Yanis Varoufakis books, you know, the invention of the, the Prophet motive and all that. That's something that's not inherent to humanity, but that's something that was brought into culture at a certain point. That.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And think about like for the last few hundred years.
Yeah. And when we discussed, we did this show about how the Dutch invented capitalism and the kind of. And again going back to sapiens and Hariri's concept of an imagined order. Right. This new imagined order of a joint stock company and what that did to the appetite for those exploring new lands that could go get commodities, bring them back and sell them refined to their own public and their own citizenry that created different realities and incentives. And that's what I'm saying. And so the last 200 years of human culture to me has some negative side effects as much as I enjoy the positives as well. But what the article stated, which I found interesting too because I hadn't, I, when I read it, it made sense, but I just had never been educated or thought of this, which was part of the difference to me in reading this of Homo sapiens versus these other maybe homos as well as. Or other sapiens maybe and, and, or other.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: No, sapiens is the other Homo species.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Correct. Yeah, sorry. Other Homos, then other human groups and other animals, Homo erectus. Natural selection, like there's a bunch of them now. So natural selection usually causes the weak in, let's say the prey animals that the herd. The weak in the herd, or the weakest fishes. Right. Or the smaller ones to kind of get culled by the predators. But with humans, we are the first species to really go after the most dominant. We like the male deer with the biggest antlers, or we go after the alpha male lion because we know that he is the threat to us. Or we began to kill not just for food, but to also have the hides and the leathers so we could do all the roaming around in colder areas. And then as the cognitive revolution, I'm going to assume, continued and took hold, we started having things like vanity and hierarchies in society. So people started wearing animal bones as jewelry and the deer antlers as maybe that the shaman wore it for the. For the rain dance next to the fire at night or something.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: But.
[00:15:44] Speaker B: So the idea is that part of the reality is by doing this, we also change the environments because just like we're talking about trying to conserve endangered species today that might be at risk of extinction because we're killing all the rainforests to make land for cattle and to fell trees for wood. We were doing the same thing back then, maybe not as at the industrial scale that's happening today. So that was something I felt interesting from the article, which was pointing out that that's a big difference with Homo sapiens, is that we targeted animals not just for food, and we also targeted not just the weak ones that were easier to catch, but we went after the big ones for sport and also to make sure that the biggest predators were not within our vicinity to try and scare them off. So I found that, you know, to be an interesting revelation from the article as well.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I think that I would say, broadly speaking, it was. That was kind of what I observed, like the, the Even, you know, in books that we've read, they talk about how when humans would. When Homo sapiens would spread to a area, whether that area had other human species there or not.
Once humans would spread, Homo sapiens would spread, I should say, all the large mammals would disappear. Like the Australia one, I think, is the. The.
The most notable one, because that one was untouched. And then humans, Homo sapiens, figure out how to cross that sea, they get to Australia, and all the large mammals or marsupials down there are gone. Like, we don't see them anymore. There's just bones, you know. So I think essentially part of the piece with the biological evolution is that because it takes time, the animal allow. Is allowed to. And then it gives time for the prey and the animals that goes after everything is allowed to adjust over time to create kind of a homeostasis in the environment.
But with cultural evolution that moves so fast that it wipes through like a hurricane, it'll just come through. And before there's any chance, any time for everything else to adapt to the fact that humans, Homo sapiens have shown up, they're gone, or they've. It's just been irrevocably changed in a way, you know, and so. And that continues to this day. But that's most notably. And you, you, you touched on this as well.
That was. That's not only Industrial Age humans, like Industrial Age humans do it at a faster pace, but humans going all Homo sapiens going all the way back when we show up, particularly after the cognitive revolution, once we had the power of culture to update our behaviors, to modify, to optimize our behaviors and to share those around with people, we could wipe out stuff pretty quickly without the environment ever getting a chance to, to, to maintain any balance and everything else getting a chance to adapt to us, you know. So I think that that ends up creating a situation, as we've observed, basically, that humans, our culture makes us operate in the planet right now as it's set up and as it has been more like a virus than other animals, where we go in and we destroy parts of the host in order to replicate and so forth. But interestingly enough, because of that same logic, it seems like the only way for us to not do that would be through culture as well, which is where you get the people and things like environmentalism and so forth. Like, if those people are trying to make part of our culture being, hey, let's not wreck everything so that it's unusable in 100 years. Like, that's, that's trying to. That's trying to create a cultural change that will give things a little bit more longevity, you know what I'm saying? And so there's one other thing I want to touch on though, before we, we.
Before we get out of here. And that is. You've talked a lot. And when I read this, I was like, oh, this, this goes right into something that, that you. The Tunde talked a lot about. And the unification theory, you know, like. And I think we've seen it in a few of Our books, but it was one of the Harari books, actually talked about it as well, or. No talk about it as well. But the idea that in present times and has been, you know, pretty much since humans could traverse the globe in one lifetime or in one, you know, few years or now, you know, in a few days or a few hours, cultures have been converging, you know, so whereas if you go back a thousand years, you go to different parts of the world and cultures were very different in terms of how they operated. Now, they may have clothes everywhere, things like that, certain things may be everywhere, but how cultures operated were very different and distinct. And that has been. We're in a process of that converging now and cultures becoming more unified.
1. I'm going to ask you, do you buy this? So do you buy this? But how do you think an idea like that affects what we've learned about how cultural evolution can supercharge how humans interact with their environment? And. And then if everything converges into one culture or is heading that direction, what do you think the effects of something like that would have on the planet?
[00:20:41] Speaker B: So that's a good question with several moving parts. So I'll say the first answer is yes, I do ascribe to the universe unification theory as, as described by Yuval Harari in the book Sapiens. So I like.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: So that was not like Sapiens. Okay. I couldn't remember if that was from
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Nexus, which one that was Sapiens. And. And that's where I first learned it. And as I read it, yeah, this actually makes a lot of sense. And here's why. I'll explain my why. Why I think it's accurate. If you look at the history of, let's say, Christopher Columbus finding the Americas and then the hundred years after that, if you read and watch any documentaries about the Spanish conquistadors, what they wrote about meeting with the Aztecs and Incas and the other native population here. What. What you realize is this is such a clash of cultures that are so different. It might have. It might as well have been like a human meeting other people from an alien planet in terms of just the cultures.
And we could say, like, if you think about the last thousand, two thousand years or whatever, you know, just historically, like you said, when humans somehow got to Australia thousands of years ago, then they settled there and no one else showed up for a very long time.
So their culture just became unique over time. And then when the British had the technology to show up in James Cook In 1798, again, these Aboriginals that Were there were totally foreign to the British and the British way of life and systems and all that was totally foreign to the aboriginals.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Well, we're just real quick. Specifically though, but in line with this content, though not genetically, but culturally. So that's. Yeah, it was genetically they were closer in. They were closer than a one troop of chimpanzees. But culturally they might as well have been from different galaxies.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: Yeah, and you're right. And partly what we could probably assume is that maybe in a few thousands of years of. Of or tens of thousands of years of humans splitting up, the only maybe physical changes that were kind of happened in that shorter period of time was things like melanin. So the aboriginals were darker because they lived in Australia, and the British were lighter because they were in northern Europe. But that was the only changes that took place over that time. But to the point we're making with this discussion is, is that the cultural changes zoomed. Right. And so I think if we Fast forward. That's why I found this interesting when he explained it in the book Fast forward now to 2026. Think about because of the swath and the of land and people that the British Empire kind of oversaw 100 years ago, you know, peaked in 1914. The British Empire and it oversaw 25% of the world's population. So if we look today, once that empire receded, it still left a lot of remnants of its culture. So countries like India, Nigeria, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Right. What do they all share? Parliamentary government, a British style of legal system, secular government or not. Theocracies. Right. So this is just one example of how Britain as a small island nation over a few hundred years spread a global culture that has still retained itself in these other parts of the world that would have been so different. I mean, imagine the island of Jamaica 500 years ago packed with Taino Native American Indians compared to the nation and the Empire of India with those people, totally different cultures. And now they can all recognize each other because of the British influence. I think the Internet is helping us even unify more social media. Everyone gets to see each other around the world.
We could all kind of imagine what other countries might look like now versus 500 years ago when you heard about China, if you lived in Europe or vice versa. So I think that I'll get off my high horse, but yes, that's why I believe it.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: So you explain why you think it's real.
Now I'm gonna get in to more so why I like, I think that it's inevitable, you know, diff. Cultural diffusion oftentimes does lead to, you know, it can go both ways. You know, cult, different parts of cultures. We living in the United States, we see this, you know, how, you know, there, there can be pockets of culture that then become adopted more in the general culture and so forth. Some people are very uncomfortable about that. But over time it happens, you know, like if you look at music culture in the 50s versus music culture now, things have, you know, come together more. So I mean, so I think that with exposure it happens. And exposure now is, as you pointed out with the. It took a step with navigation and so forth, but now it's like taking, you know, 10 million leaps with the Internet, you know, and then being able to be instantly interacting with people and with their own way to do things all over.
To me, what's interesting about this though is, is I think it sets us up for a negative outcome, at least in the short term, because of how fast culture can change the way that people operate. And the reason I say this is because we think of evolution as survival of the fittest, so to speak. But generally speaking, survival of the fittest, when you're talking biologically is over a longer period of time. It's not over a short period of time. So the animal, you know, like the gazelle, that may be necessarily the fastest in the short term, but doesn't have the endurance or that is less equipped to find the best food or anything like that, or less equipped to mate and so forth. Over time the fittest is going to be found and is going to survive. And that's the line that's going to continue not in any very short term situation, but how fast culture goes. Actually the cultures like it's almost a competition amongst cultures and the cultures that will prevail. A lot of times in that competition, the way culture moves are going to be the cultures that are optimized for short term results, short term success.
Cultures that are optimized to survive and thrive over a long term will lose if faced with cultural competition for resources or for anything in the moment with a culture that is optimized for short term success. But the problem with that or the concern with that is if the entire globe adopts culture or moves towards cultures that is only optimized for short term success and can't pick up long term success practices, then it seems like humans will walk off a cliff and be unable to stop. We'll be looking at impending doom and won't be able to stop moving towards it. If there's a short term benefit tied to that. And so my concern, anytime, you know, people who want absolute efficiency all the time, and it's like, well, redundancy has a purpose. You know, redundancy, having more than one way of doing things has a purpose because if one of the ways becomes unavailable or becomes undoable for some reason, then you have other, other arrows to shoot, so to speak, other ways to go about things. Well, if we put all of our eggs as human beings, if we converge all of our eggs into cultures that are optimized for short term success, then if those avenues get cut off, then we may be cut off from survival in that sense. Or we'll have to take a huge step back from a survival standpoint because optimization for long term success will have been out competed from a cultural standpoint because again, it goes so fast.
[00:28:03] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I agree. And it's interesting you say that because humanity's already seen this. You know, you and I have been intrigued personally in conversations about things like the Sahara Desert.
And there's a lot of evidence that it was very lush and green, you know, probably three to 5,000 years ago and further back.
And one of the explanations of what happened was that the area that we now call biblical lands, because some in the modern world don't want to acknowledge it's Africa, the areas of Egypt and remember I was in Israel last year. And if you think about areas like Petra and Jordan, these places today are so arid and so dry that it's hard to imagine that they would support the type of societies that could build those things under current conditions. Because clearly for humans to live in those places now we've got global supply chains that get them what they need. They have desalination plants all over the place in the Middle east to make sure they have drinking water and all that.
Those areas were so lush, but were taught by the anthropologists and the historians and all that is that they farmed those regions to death, in a sense, and that the land eventually gave way to desert.
Let me see if I can say this correctly. Desertification over time and it became a place where humans couldn't live in abundant ways anymore. So I think you're right, James, is that as we make short term decisions, we affect the environment. Whether the physical environment, like the Sahara example, or whether we extinct too much food, where my concern right now is,
[00:29:36] Speaker A: or become too reliant on certain types of food and unable to produce other types. Or forget, culturally, forget how it's done.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think, you know, your point to Culture, having this ballast, like this counterweight, right? You've got the culture of destruction, but then in a slower, more measured way. That takes collective ability and teaching people stuff and all that. That's why it takes a lot of effort. You can have a cultural situation where you do conserve things and things like national parks and endangered species lists and all that. And I think that another example to the point you're making about these short term interests, think about the idea of global conflict. And I think after a lot of pain, by the end of the Second World War, 1945, 1946, the world decided, hey, maybe this culture of short term to everybody got to fight each other for the next win over here a year or two from now, that's going to collapse us all, especially with the modern technology of things like nuclear weapons. How about we create a new culture by having global treaties and alliances and developing things like the United nations and NATO and eventually, you know, European unions and all these other things, which again, I know that everyone can criticize those things and all that. And that's not to say they're all perfect, but the spirit of that culture of saying let's create alliances so that we all kind of have an incentive not to think short term and not to destroy ourselves in that way. And so, you know, it's, that's why to me, this is interesting because it's unlike, I guess, natural selection and evolution. The way we understand it, there's a little bit less maybe control for a species like ours to really understand and deal with it. Because it's such a long period of time. This cultural thing is something we can somewhat control. And I think that's the example, can
[00:31:27] Speaker A: control it, but it takes time and it takes things to happen. I mean, because people didn't just decide in 45 and 46, there were people that were pushing for a more cooperative.
Well, there were people that were pushing for a more cooperative approach. Approach in terms of how international relations were happening after World War I, you know, after the Great War, so to speak. And that had been the whole time. But societies at large hadn't suffered enough to kind of be receptive to that, so to speak. It's all, it's just more people became receptive to that after you got atomic bombs being dropped. And you know, we, we run back to the tens of millions of people getting killed, you know, 20 years after it happened the first time. And, and so more people were receptive to that, you know, so. And that's always the concern is that it oftentimes you know, there are people who have what. Inevitably there are people with all kinds of messages. So some people out here with the right message right now and some people out here with the wrong message. But oftentimes it seems like we need tragedy for people with the messages that may get us through over a long period of time for those people to win out, so to speak. So you have that one and then two. I mean, the thing also that concerns me about this is that I don't think people are really bad at recognizing culture as a driving force for things as opposed to other things. Like, like people. I feel like people constantly mistake culture for like race, you know, or ethnicity. And it's like they may have an issue with a culture, a culture, like a way a culture is going about something or, and something. And they'll be like, okay, well, that's just. That's a race issue or that's an ethnicity issue. And then also I think even more significantly, and I think in terms of this discussion, people have a hard time separating out something like an economic system from a culture. You know, the capitalist capitalism, for example, or socialism, whatever. People tend to assign not just the actual nuts and bolts of the economic structure, but also the culture that is brought, that is predominant or that we see in the given moment. Like a lot of the. I see a lot of people, and I'm a person that thinks that capitalism is a great system that can work, but also can lead to ruin. But. And it's really about the culture that is. That is enacting the capitalism, the culture around it. It's not the actual capitalist system. It is the idea, if you have a quote, unquote, capitalist culture, which is very short term, very internalized profit, externalized costs. Like, if you, if that's a cultural way to that you approach the same economic system, it's going to be very destructive. But we've also seen that same type of economic structure with a more cooperative approach in the culture, deliver a. The world's largest middle class in the history of the world, you know, like a socialist system has never done that, you know, so. And there are things we can learn. These are economic systems. So you're talking about the nuts and bolts. There's things we can learn from all of them. But a lot of times I see people mistake the economic system as, you know, for the actual culture that's underlying it, that's driving at the moment, because you can change parts of the culture that are driving it. You can put, you know, kind of guardrails on certain things. And, and treat things a certain way, do things a certain way that can deliver you to the kind of results that you want. But I just don't. I think people are oblivious to this. You know, it's just like, oh, okay, well, if it's this, then that's the economic system. It's like, well, no, that's not necessarily the economic system. That's. That's the culture that. In the cultural values that are being accepted or promoted in that sense. So. But I do want to wrap here, man. You got anything else, man? I know I threw a few economics at you at the end, which I risk keeping the show going another 30 minutes with that.
[00:34:55] Speaker B: No, well. And because as I'm listening to your rant there, I just. It's a reminder to me why nihilism is fun. Cause I'm like, yeah, long term, all this long term thinking, man, I just want to be short term. Let's just go break the bank and blow some stuff up and just call it a day, man.
So. But now, man, this is good stuff. That's why it's very interesting. And I think that you make a good reminder about things, the distinctions between things like race that we've created as a culture. Right. As our Western culture has defined it, and actual culture. And I've always been intrigued. As I finish this, I'll just say this.
African Americans generally come from the same area as places like Nigeria, but in the United States.
It's interesting that Nigerians as an immigrant group have the highest stats in multiple categories of positive things like education, income, all that kind of stuff, while African Americans are still by many seen as the bottom caste in the society. So that always intrigued me that genetically this is a very similar. You know, this is kind of the same people, but culturally there's. That's what people look at. But they. But they think it's race. That's why it's a weird.
[00:36:14] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what I mean.
[00:36:16] Speaker B: It out. Yeah.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: Culture is driving, though Cult. The differences in the cultures are driving
[00:36:20] Speaker B: those out, driving the results.
[00:36:21] Speaker A: But we all have a hard time seeing that. We think that what's driving those outcomes are. Is some nebulous concept of skin color.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: You know, or ethnicity in that sense. So, you know, like, because we can't identify culture when we see it, it's like, well, man, how are we going to be able to try to use this to our advantage? That's my concern. So we can wrap from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. Like, I see it subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:36:49] Speaker B: I'm Tunde.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk soon.
