#598: Primatologist Isabel Behncke on Play, Sexual Selection, and Lessons from Following Bonobos for 3,000 Kilometers in the Jungles of Congo

Brought to you by LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim electrolyte supplement, Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Headspace http://headspace.com/tim easy-to-use app with guided meditations. Isabel Behncke (@IsabelBehncke https://twitter.com/isabelbehncke) is a field primatologist and applied evolutionary ethologist who studies social behavior in animals (including humans) to understand our urgent challenges with each other and the planet. Isabel grew up at the foothills of the Andes mountains in Chile, where she developed a life-long love for nature and wildness as well as culture and the arts. An explorer-scientist, she is the first South American to follow great apes in the wild in Africa. She walked more than 3,000 km (~1864 miles) in the jungles of Congo for her field research observing the social lives of wild bonobo apes, who, together with chimpanzees, are our closest living relatives. Isabel documented how bonobos play freely in nature and has extended this research to study how human apes play—at Burning Man, other festivals, and in everyday life. Isabel has observed how play is at the root of creativity, social bonding, and healthy development, findings that have relevance in education, innovation, complex risk assessments, and freedom. Isabel holds a BSc in Zoology and an MSc in Nature Conservation, both from University College London, an MPhil in Human Evolution from Cambridge University, and a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from Oxford University. She has won several distinctions for her public communication and knowledge integration, which range in formats from TED, WIRED, the UN, BBC, and Nat Geo to rural schools in Patagonia and traveling buses of schoolchildren in Congo. She is a senior fellow of the Gruter Institute, a TED fellow, and currently advises the Chilean government, working on long-term strategies in science, technology, innovation, and knowledge for Chile’s president. She can be found in Chile and New York City. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim! What is LMNT? It’s a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix http://drinklmnt.com/tim. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this and usually use it 1–2 times per day. LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or Paleo diet. If you are on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. LMNT came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. LMNT http://DrinkLMNT.com/Tim came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can get a free LMNT http://DrinkLMNT.com/Tim Sample Pack with any purchase. This special offer is available here: DrinkLMNT.com/Tim http://DrinkLMNT.com/Tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim! Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations https://www.headspace.com/tim in an easy-to-use app. Whatever the situation, Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim can help you feel better. Overwhelmed? Headspace has a 3-minute SOS meditation for you. Need some help falling asleep? Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim has wind-down sessions their members swear by. And for parents, Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim even has morning meditations you can do with your kids. Headspace’s approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. Go to Headspace.com/Tim https://www.headspace.com/tim for a FREE one-month trial with access to Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim’s full library of meditations for every situation. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * [08:11] Baco and Jiro [13:05] What is an applied evolutionary ethologist? [15:43] Lorenz vs. Skinner [18:23] The brilliance of consilience [19:11] Humboldt vs. Darwin and the origins of evolutionary thinking [29:42] Recent revolutionary thoughts about evolution [36:16] Complexity and niche construction [41:33] What’s more fun: a barrel of chimpanzees or a barrel of bonobos? [49:19] Chimpanzee geography [59:29] Magnificent bonobos [1:02:11] Female mammal problems and solutions [1:09:17] Sexual dimorphism [1:12:18] Avoiding naturalistic fallacies [1:13:52] How accurate is it to call the Congo the Heart of Darkness? [1:18:24] Why are the Japanese so interested in animal behavior? [1:21:23] Potato-washing monkeys [1:23:28] Why do breakthroughs seem to come in clusters? [1:28:29] Animals at play: the adaptive joker hypothesis [1:38:59] The overlap between flow states and play [1:41:39] What the natural world can teach humans about optimizing play [1:43:43] The everlasting tango between energy and time [1:47:19] Post-pandemic play [1:50:09] How much do we understand about the way animals communicate? [2:03:05] The drunken monkey hypothesis [2:04:07] Parting thoughts * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike. And I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita, but for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked and bam, company was born.

• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams, as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. For a limited time, you can get a free Element sample pack with any purchase. It's the perfect way to try all of their flavors.

• 2:13Tim Ferriss?

  Or if you're feeling generous, sharing with a friend who might enjoy. This special offer is available here at this link, drinklmnt.com/tim. That's drink Element, again, drinklmnt.com/tim.

• 2:31Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy to use app. Now, you might ask yourself, very reasonably, there are 2,000 plus apps for meditation. Why would I use Headspace? Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research. Headspace is backed by 25 published studies on its benefits, 600,000 five-star reviews, and more than 60 million downloads. So if people keep telling you to try meditation and you're like, when would I do that? When would I possibly have time? You should check out Headspace. If you have 10 minutes, Headspace can change your life.

• 3:10Tim Ferriss?

  Headspace offers a really light lift and a lot of features to keep you going, which is part of the reason that I've used Headspace for years now. So whatever the situation, Headspace can really help you feel better. Overwhelmed? Headspace has a three-minute SOS meditation for you. Need some help falling asleep? Headspace has wind-down sessions their members swear by. And for parents, Headspace even has morning meditations you can do with your kids. Headspace's approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. And it really starts with very, very simple practices. And if you look at my case, for instance, I just went through one of the basics today

• 3:53Tim Ferriss?

  with the co-founder, Andy. I think it's Puttacom, could be Puttycomb, I'm not sure. But former monk turned into co-founder of Headspace has the most soothing hypnotic voice imaginable. And I did a three-minute meditation, something like that. It's easy, it's fundamental, and it always puts me in a better space. So I'm going through the basics. Even though I've meditated for years, I'm going through the basics once again. And I would suggest to anyone that they consider starting there. Headspace makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you, on your schedule, anytime, anywhere. We all want to feel happier, we all want more peace, and Headspace is meditation made simple. Go to headspace.com/tim. That's headspace.com/tim for a

• 4:39Tim Ferriss?

  Free one month trial with access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every conceivable possible situation. You can break glass in case of emergency in almost any situation and find something on Headspace. This is the best deal offered right now for Headspace. So check it out. Go to Headspace.com/Tim today.

• 5:02Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. I'm very excited about this. We're going to be talking about a whole slew of different topics, a wide spectrum of my personal interests, but not expertise. My guest today is Isabel Bencke. Let me spell that for you, per her Twitter handle, @Isabel, I S A B E L, last name B E H N C K E. Isabel is a field primatologist, an applied evolutionary ethologist who studies social behavior in animals, that includes us humans, to understand our urgent challenges with each other and the planet. Isabel grew up at the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Chile, where she developed a lifelong

• 6:06Tim Ferriss?

  love for nature and wildness, as well as culture and the arts. An explorer scientist, she is the first South American to follow great apes in the wild of Africa. She walked more than 3,000 kilometers, for us Yanks, that's roughly 1,864 miles, quite a few, in the jungles of Congo for her field research observing the social lives of wild bonobo apes, who, together with chimpanzees, are our closest living relatives. Isabel documented how bonobos play freely in nature and has extended this research to show how human apes play at Burning Man, for instance, other festivals, and in everyday life. Isabel has observed how play is at the root of creativity, social bonding, and healthy development, findings that have relevance in education, innovation, complex risk assessment, freedom,

• 6:49Tim Ferriss?

  and many, many other places. Isabel, we'll see how I can screw up these titles. Of course, degrees, which is always a challenge. Isabel holds a Bachelor's of Science in Zoology and a Master's of Science in Nature Conservation, both from University College London, a Master of Philosophy, an MPhil in Human Evolution from Cambridge University, and a PhD, although I think it's a Dr. Dr. Phil, that's not Dr. Phil, as in the daytime show host, something like that, PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from Oxford University. She has won several distinctions for her public communication and knowledge integration, which ranges in format from TED, which was also most recently on the grand stage. So congratulations for that.

• 7:32Tim Ferriss?

  Wired, the UN, BBC, where I think she won, or was nominated as having one of the most interesting interviews of 2020. I think she ranked number three. And Nat Geo to rural schools in Patagonia and traveling buses of schoolchildren in Congo. She is a Senior Fellow of the Gruter Institute, a TED Fellow, and currently advises the Chilean government, working on long-term strategies in science, technology, innovation, and knowledge for Chile's president. She can be found in Chile and New York City. You can find her on Twitter, like I mentioned, at Isabel Behncke, and on Instagram, Isabel underscore Behncke, B-E-H-N-C-K-E. Now we can get into it. Isabel, nice to see you.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Hello, Tim. Very nice to see you.

• 8:17Tim Ferriss?

  So we're going to bounce all over the place, and we've met before. So I am excited to dig into all sorts of different stories, all sorts of background, and cover a lot of things that we have not talked about. So let's start with Baco and Giro. Who are Baco and Giro? Maybe you could paint a picture for us.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  I love this question. It was August 2010, and Baco and Giro are two males, and they were, one of them was kicking the other in the nuts.

• 8:53Tim Ferriss?

  Where I like to start all my interviews.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Gently, gently. There was no harm done. And don't do this at home. I should have started saying that. There was also some biting and other forms of physical touch, which may have looked to an entrainer like fighting. But Bakwo and Jiro were not fighting. They were playing. And Bakwo and Jiro were in the depths of the jungles in Congo. And they are, they were not humans, but bonobo males.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  And this observation of these two males playing was to me really extraordinary. Because, let me give you some context after the kicking in the nuts comment. Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, are living closest relatives. And we have many other evolutionary relatives, but they're dead, they're extinct. So for us primatologists, it's really amazing to be able to observe the naturally occurring behavior of apes in the wild. It's difficult for many reasons, but they are still some alive, which is great.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  And I was following this wild group of bonobos for a long time, for many months. And of course, they don't usually meet other communities. And we can get into that, why is it that typically interactions are within a community? And then suddenly, the study group, you know, they have this way of traveling, which seems very, very intentional. And you can tell it when you observe it. They suddenly kind of switch onto, okay, we're going somewhere. And they crossed the river, which typically demarcates their territory. And I was like, oh, God, where are they going? These guys are going somewhere, like very intentionally. And they went into the territory of the neighboring community.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  So I was like, wow, something's gonna happen here. Because it doesn't happen very often. And in chimpanzees, when chimpanzees meet other communities, typically they try not to. Because it's aggressive and you can have neighboring males that patrol the territory and they will kill a male of the other territory, of the other community, sorry. And sometimes not only kill, but also maim. For instance, they will take out their genitals. It's very, very... That's why this bonobo observation, I think, is poignant. Because there's this joke I can... Okay, I'll ask you. What's the most vulnerable part of the male anatomy?

• 11:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think that...

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Well, it's a leading question.

• 11:46Tim Ferriss?

  It's a leading question, yes. I would imagine, you know, having a bonobo pull and poke my genitals would make me feel very vulnerable.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Yes, right. But that's the point. Brilliant. And I think that's the take home of this story. It is an extremely vulnerable part of the male anatomy. And it's actually used that as such in aggressive interactions. So that you actually use it in playful interactions. It's, I think, playing with a line of trust vulnerability and real life risk. That's extremely interesting. It gets at the root of what play is. And so these males were playing and they were males from different communities. So what kind of trust do you need to build in order to have this kind of interaction

• 12:40Speaker 03

  between males that don't usually live together or are related?

• 12:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a very, be a very unusual greeting among humans, right? To take a trip to Kansas City and walk up to a stranger and grab him by the balls.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  I... Please do not do this at home.

• 12:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I don't recommend.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Or anywhere. Yeah. Least of all outside home. Yes.

• 13:05Tim Ferriss?

  So we're going to come back to Bonobo Land because we're going to talk a lot about Bonobos. But this, suffice to say, genital play comes up a lot. And you have matriarchs holding on to males by the genitals, walking them around in circles. You have lots and lots of this type of play. And this is not a prescriptive recommendation to anyone out there, but it is interesting. So we're going to come back to it. I thought I would just rewind for a second because we mentioned a lot of things in your bio. We mentioned "applied evolutionary ethologist", for instance. Let's start there. What is an evolutionary ethologist? And what is an applied evolutionary ethologist?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Ethology is the study of behavior. I might have as well just used behavioral sciences. But I use ethology because it's my own particular field of training. People might be familiar with the work of Conrad Lorenz.

• 14:04Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not, so.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. So Western ethology, animal behavior, comes from a group of people that were in Europe studying animal behavior. And when they were studying animal behavior, they went, you know, there are pressures and adaptations in other animals that are interesting in themselves, but they also help us think about our own behavior. And so for them, it was very important to observe behavior as naturally occurring in habitats where animals live. So of course, we can still observe behavior in cages and in zoos and inside homes, and that has its own value.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  But as ethologists, we try to observe behavior as well in the wild. Because when it's interacting with ecology, I think it tells us something very important about the environment in which animals have evolved and what does this tell us about their behavior today? So that's ethology. And then the word "applied", I use it in the sense that I was trained and worked as an ethologist, but almost without... Wanting or thinking about it, I can't help but think about the world and the problems that we have today. So whenever you think about, say, cooperation, competition,

• 15:28Speaker 03

  play, aggression, obviously, your mind goes, okay, what does this tell us about war and creativity and innovation and so on. So Applied is really trying to cross that bridge between science and society.

• 15:42Tim Ferriss?

  Great answer. Very helpful. Thank you. All right. So now would Lorenz, I'm thinking, I don't know this particular name, but would BF Skinner have been a, an overlap in terms of timing, or would Skinner have come much later on in terms of looking at, I guess, classical and operant conditioning and things like that?

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's a great question. I think not only in timing, but also in terms of approach. So Lorenz, let me tell you an anecdote about Lorenz, and we'll go to Skinner.

• 16:16Tim Ferriss?

  What was the full name of Lorenz?

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Conrad.

• 16:20Tim Ferriss?

  Conrad Lorenz.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Conrad Lorenz.

• 16:23Tim Ferriss?

  Great name.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. He was observing birds, and he's most famous for having brought up geese. So he had these incubators with geese eggs, and he discovered imprinting, namely that when the eggs hatched, the first thing that the chicks look at, if it was him rather than the female, the chicks would imprint on him. So he effectively, this is not quite what ethologists would do today, right? But we're talking about the origin story. And so he started walking, basically, the chicks would follow him, and he learned the vocalizations.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  So he learned to communicate with them and go like, and then they would follow him, and he became like the mother geese. I love that because, of course, again, don't do this at home, and we wouldn't want to do it today as scientists. But I think there's something about Really putting literally yourself in the feet and the wings and the mind of another animal as much as you can as the other animal rather than as a human that help you become a better scientist. And so I think Lorenz had that genius and he tried to look at the animals in themselves.

• 17:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And then I guess Skinner in contrast was like, we can't understand the inner life of animals. So we're just going to look at observable behavior. Please correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong, but like stick them in a box and then shock them and do various things. And we're just going to like clinically take notes on it. So very different, very, very different.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Yes, very, very different.

• 18:05Tim Ferriss?

  Very different approach based on very different assumptions, right?

• 18:08Speaker 03

  Yes, very different assumptions and actually completely understandable because of course Skinner was trying to do science and he was trying to isolate variables and to do controlled experiments, which is, you know, an essential part of science. So of course Conrad Lorenz did things that today wouldn't be considered proper science either. I think these guys were experimenting in different ways and today we have a concilience, an integration of the experimental side of of behavior and the naturalistic observations that is kind of exciting.

• 18:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. And I want to give you credit for a great word, concilience. I just wanted to find this for people. That is a fucking great word. Now, an agreement between the approaches to a topic of different academic subjects, especially science and the humanities. There's also a book by E. O. Wilson called Concilience that people might check out. It's a bit dense, but concilience is a great word. So thank you for that.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Thank you for supporting that. I love that.

• 19:09Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And I think the contrast of Conrad and

• 19:15Tim Ferriss?

  BF Skinner is interesting on a whole bunch of levels and it's something that has fascinated me for a long time. For instance, I watched a documentary, I believe the name is NIM or Project NIM, and it spoke to, I want to say, let's just say, a field experiment, also with laboratory experiments that was conducted in perhaps the 60s or early 70s. And the premise was attempting to raise a baby chimpanzee as a human. And spoiler alert, it ended up being quite a train wreck. But what they observed, and when I say "they", I should be very specific, the, let's just call it, field adoptive parents of this chimpanzee, is that the chimpanzee would exhibit all of these incredible behaviors outside of

• 19:59Tim Ferriss?

  the lab, but as soon as you brought this particular chimp into the lab, they just refused to cooperate, or at the very least, didn't exhibit these behaviors. So when I'm having conversations with any number of folks, and I love science, I'm very involved with with funding science, and they say, "Well, do they have randomized controlled studies related to X in a laboratory?" My answer sometimes is, "You can't really do it", or "It's very, very hard", particularly with, in this case, maybe an obvious example of of animal behaviors. So let's, let's jump from there, back in time further, to Darwin and Humboldt. Now, I expect a lot of people listening will recognize Darwin, but they

• 20:43Tim Ferriss?

  may not recognize Humboldt. So if we really rewind the clock, can you just give us some of the history, the early history of evolutionary thinking? Because this is also something I don't know a lot about, but it just came up last week in conversation with someone named Noah Feldman, who's been on the podcast, very smart guy, and he raised a couple anecdotes that I had never heard. So, take it away.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Origins of evolutionary thinking. If you think about evolution, you will picture an old Darwin, old Charles Darwin with a long beard, correct? So like the lone genius that had this great idea, which by the way, the philosopher Daniel Dennett says, "The best idea I ever thought was evolution." And so let's define what is this like such amazing idea? The simple idea that all life is related. So evolution really is about how all life is related and how all life evolves. Everything has an origin. And like King Lear said, "Nothing comes from nothing." So Darwin himself was the grandson of this extraordinary man,

• 21:55Speaker 03

  who was called Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was a polymath. He was a doctor. He was creative. He was a poet. He is one of the biggest influences on the Romantic poets, on Byron and many others. So Darwin inherited first of all these, you know, strange influences. And Erasmus Darwin used to hold these meetings in his home. They were called the Lunar Society, when they were trying to find out basically about life and creativity and, you know, as polymaths do.

• 22:37Tim Ferriss?

  The polymath happy hour.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  The polymath, exactly.

• 22:41Tim Ferriss?

  Let's get to the bottom of all knowledge.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, this is actually is a big point. The Lunar Society was called like that because they would meet once a month in full moon. And of course, drinking and food sharing was involved. And they had to ride back home. And so a full moon would actually be a very practical thing to have.

• 23:04Tim Ferriss?

  Good call, good call. Nothing mystical about it. It's just like, no, we're gonna be drunk. We're gonna be drunk off our asses. We need to be able to see the sidewalk.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Reality empiricism. And so Erasmus Darwin had in his chariot an emblem called "Econcia Obniae", in Latin, "Life comes from the sea". And the point what I'm trying to make here is that Darwin himself had ancestors, both intellectual ancestors, but also family ancestors that were thinking about evolution. Often, you know, ideas are in the environment. So that's the family side of Darwin. Equally, or if not more important, I think for Darwin was the influence of Alexander von Humboldt. Von Humboldt is a Prussian aristocrat

• 23:56Speaker 03

  who was born the same year than Napoleon, I think, 1769. And he died, by the way, on 1859, which is the date that Darwin published The Origin of Species. So there's like an interesting evolutionary contingency there. And von Humboldt, he was an explorer, a genius, another polymath scholar. And I think above all, which is the point that I want to link between Darwin and Humboldt and the origins of how we think about nature and how we think about evolution, neither of them were white coat lab scientists

• 24:39Speaker 03

  or just scholars that live within four walls. They were both explorers and they were both adventurers and they were both naturalists. And this is super important because I think it's a tradition of thinking that basically has given us the most important ideas that we have today on evolution and nature. And let me synthesize those ideas. Humboldt? Leaves Europe and embarks in this extraordinary trip to South America. And of course, I'm not biased, but they were both in trips in South America. Yeah, of course. Let me point that out.

• 25:20Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not biased, but let me tell you.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  Exactly. But let me tell you how you.

• 25:25Tim Ferriss?

  Where in South America?

• 25:27Speaker 03

  So, well, all over the place, but not quite. Humboldt goes to Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. And he climbs Chimborazo. And basically, he does an Andean route. He never got to Chile, unfortunately. But Darwin spent around three years in Chile. The Voyage of the Beagle, that we can talk about separately. But the five-year Voyage of the Beagle, three years-ish were in Chile, which I think is super important. Basically, he spent a lot more time there than in Galapagos. I need to say that.

• 25:59Tim Ferriss?

  Quick question. Why did von Humboldt choose to go where that expedition ended up going?

• 26:07Speaker 03

  First, the New World, in a nutshell. The excitement of the New World. First of all, he needed to get out of Europe because his mother had very high hopes for him as a civil servant. So when his father died, he had an inheritance and he decided to spend it funding his own adventure.

• 26:28Tim Ferriss?

  Mom must have loved that.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, right. Because she was like socially, I don't want to say snob, but ish.

• 26:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, she was high society, right? Aristocrat.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 26:42Tim Ferriss?

  Old world, like Brahman. Yeah, it's no joke.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  No, exactly. So it's like, you, you're gonna give me grandchildren that have, you know, a certain position, right?

• 26:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  And he was like, oh.

• 26:55Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to Venezuela, mom. See you when I see you.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Exactly. I have my own funds. But I mean, it's a longer story and if you want to read about this, I would really recommend the most fantastic book I've read in the last few years by Andrea Wolf. It's called The Invention of Nature. And there are several books about von Humboldt, but in Andrea Wolf's research, she brings together the adventure, the naturalists, and also the influences. So what I think to me is amazing as a scientist is that we all know about Darwin and we can see his image immediately. You go like, oh yeah, old guy with beard.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  But who is Humboldt and why we don't actually know more about him? Humboldt was the direct intellectual father of Darwin. Darwin was reading Humboldt's diaries of his explorations in South America. And when Darwin gets invited to go on the Beagle, he was actually thinking of Humboldt. And in Patagonia, when he's actually, he's called, he's a very bad sailor. He hates being on board, which is another topic.

• 28:11Tim Ferriss?

  This is Darwin?

• 28:12Speaker 03

  This is Darwin. He would puke and you know, get seasick and which I think it was good because then it meant that he had to go inland. That's a different topic. But the point is that he's writing his voyage of the Beagle diaries and citing her Humboldt, saying, "Thank you. If it weren't for you, I would have not taken this voyage." Which is amazing, how this kind of lineages and of influence. So you have on one hand Humboldt that invents, inverted commas, the modern concept of nature because he really invents the concept of ecology, how things are interrelated. So the field of complex systems, the field of ecosystems as complex systems, I really

• 28:57Speaker 03

  think takes a lot from Humboldt because, and this is important, see, the British tradition is about taxonomy and organization in boxes, Linnaeus.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  But whether it was because he was German and also Humboldt as a young man had spent time in Jena with Goethe and with the creatives and poets of the early Romantics. And so I think that experience really opened his mind to the future scientist that he would become.

• 29:28Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, just casually hanging out with Goethe. Man, what an era.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  I know, I know.

• 29:37Tim Ferriss?

  Just going out to coffee with Goethe. Oh, my God.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, as one does.

• 29:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, as one does. I wanted to read a letter from Letters of Note, which I recommend to everyone. They have Instagram, they have a website, they have books. Letters of Note, which are copies of old letters, generally older letters, from people of note to other people. And there's a, there's an excerpt of one letter from Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, I believe it is, L-Y-E-L-L, from October 1, 1861. And it reads, "But I am poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything." So he didn't always have good days.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:16Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  I love that letter so much. Yes.

• 30:22Tim Ferriss?

  This is incredible. So how has, when you think about, let me really make a large leap here to, to a question that might seem strange, but a lot has happened, a lot has been observed, a lot has been studied, a lot has been found since Humboldt and Darwin's day. As it stands right now, what are some of the most interesting theories, or let's just call them theories, or findings related to evolutionary biology? And I'd love to know if there are any newer, let's just say in the last 10, 20 years, theories related to evolution that people might find interesting or surprising.

• 31:06Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm going to keep talking for a second, just to also buy time. And part of the reason I'm asking, this is as someone who really has not studied evolutionary biology. I would like to think I have a basic understanding, but that's probably humorous. I've had two different dinners recently in the last few months with two incredibly smart people who granted come from religious families, so I want to grant that. But both of them have also extremely strong mathematics backgrounds. And in effect, after a couple of glasses of wine, they raised a couple of names and they said, "Well, we're not sure if it seems probabilistically that sort of the original,

• 31:48Tim Ferriss?

  let's just call it, description of evolutionary thinking per the era of, say, Darwin and so on, can't really account for all that we've observed to date." And I don't know if that's nonsense. I don't know if there could be anything to it, but I would love to hear any and all thoughts. It doesn't have to relate to that specifically, but certainly it planted a seed. And they were like, "Well, go check out this person who's a credible scientist who agrees with me, but I haven't actually done that homework." So, any thoughts?

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Of course, I don't know what these mathematicians specifically are referring to, so I would need to, as I said, but I would mention one thing. I think the most exciting revolutionary aspect of the last, let's call it 50 years, is a sort of integration between Darwin and complexity. So, you know, Santa Fe Institute meets Darwin, meets Humboldt. And let me explain why. Because Darwin, as a naturalist, described the mechanisms by which new species arise, namely natural selection.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  He also described sexual selection. And then you might say, "Well, what's the difference?" I remember a teacher saying, "Look at nature, look at any structure that seems useless." And then typically that will be a result of sexual selection. Peacock feather versus a wings. Anyway, so Darwin described both, sexual selection, natural selection.

• 33:23Tim Ferriss?

  Could you actually just take a second to expand on that? So sexual selection is something that doesn't have a utility per se, but it could be a, I think you said a feather, like a particular...

• 33:35Tim Ferriss?

  I guess a mating dance would be too obvious.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Yes, it's selected, say, Tim is funny and Tim gets to reproduce because he's funny. So it's right.

• 33:46Tim Ferriss?

  You know, one can hope, a boy can dream.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Sorry, that was an awful.

• 33:52Tim Ferriss?

  That was perfect, that was perfect.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 33:57Tim Ferriss?

  Jury's still out, TBD.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  We are a lonely species and males have some advantages in that respect. Yeah, although technology also brings other possibilities, but it's actually, now that I think about it, it's not such a bad example because you would say, what advantages would being funny actually bring? You know, you're spending cognitive energy in something, you're being silly, you're spending time and maybe you're distracted, maybe if you're too distracted, a predator will get you. But if females like it, well, that trait will get selected. And that works for feathers, you know, cleverness, there are many traits that you can go with.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  This looks like expensive and annoying and inordinately colorful, but there are traits that evolve and get selected again and again because mates choose them.

• 34:56Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi mineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes and adaptogens. You get the idea. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one

• 35:39Tim Ferriss?

  formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your. Your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 36:16Tim Ferriss?

  So I pulled you off topic in part just to explore the sexual selection piece. You're saying, all right, so Darwin covered natural selection, right? Like too slow, you get eaten by saber-toothed tiger kind of thing. Sexual selection, which would be, say, the colors of the feathers, not for flight purposes, but for, say, mating purposes, humor, you give another example. But you're going to explain how Darwin plus complexity is something else. Now, in this case, I don't actually know what complexity refers to. So I would love to, love to hear more.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  I don't want to get in trouble with mathematicians. I think a broad way of describing complexity is how things interact with other things. So is in a way the, the study of structure. And that's why complexity combined with evolutionary theory is important, because they are not only genetic information being passed, but organisms exist within structures, namely societies, but also ecosystems. And these structures impose dynamics of their own. In turn, that influence the organisms.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Let me give you a specific example on how these two domains combine, the two domains being complexity and evolutionary thinking, which is going back to your question of what do I think is most interesting as a development today? It's niche construction. The concept of niche construction. Are you familiar with this?

• 37:52Tim Ferriss?

  I know those two words separately, but I'm not sure what they mean in this context.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Okay, great. Fantastic. Fantastic. So.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Niche construction is basically to construct a niche. Okay, what does that mean?

• 38:05Tim Ferriss?

  So far, I got you. I follow.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  So far, yes, exactly. Great. So Darwin described how worms, earthworms, are not only adapted to their environment, but also in the process of living, they modify the environment they're in. So a worm travels, creates burrows, eats, defecates. In doing so, changes the organisms that are available, changes the frequency of these organisms, also changes the pH of the soil, and so on. Namely, the activity of an organism modifies the environment in which the organism is in. And I mentioned the example of earthworms

• 38:49Speaker 03

  because it's a very basic, simple example. This is most obvious when we think about humans. Every organism on Earth is a niche constructor. Organisms are not passive things that just adapt to their environment, which I think was the old way of seeing things. Like, an organism is a thing that basically has to respond and adapt. And the revolution, I think, is that in niche construction, you go, organisms are also agents of their own change. Because by the process of living, they modify themselves, each other, and their environments. So if you think about the other animals, say, humans, we not only modify our environments physically,

• 39:34Speaker 03

  but also we are cultural niche constructors, which means that we live in worlds that are also cultural. By creating these worlds, then you have to adapt to them. If you have to adapt to them, that changes the feedback loop on your own existence. So that's why traits that 10,000 years ago would have not been very useful for survival, now they might be very useful, and the other way around. So that's why I think that's a longer conversation. But the notion of cultural niche construction, I think it's exciting. It combines elements of mathematical complexity theory, although I don't want to get in trouble with the mathematicians. I'm very scared of them.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Go talk to the Santa Fe Institute people about this.

• 40:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no problem. And what I'll also do, do any names come to mind, researchers, scientists, mathematicians, or otherwise, who comment or have investigated and studied the intersection of, say, Darwinian thought with complexity? Do any names come to mind? Or we can certainly do some homework.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  The original book on this was published by John Odlin Smee and Kavin Leyland, two mathematicians and naturalists broadly understood. And today I would point out to David Krakauer, who is the president of the Santa Fe Institute, and I think he himself, in his thinking and just the work he does, kind of embodies this.

• 41:09Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  They have a lot of great applied work. Santa Fe Institute, for instance, I would suggest reading what they published in relation to understanding the pandemic from this point of view. I think this approach is incredibly enlightening.

• 41:24Tim Ferriss?

  All right. We'll link to all of those in the show notes, so people will be able to find everything that we just mentioned, or I'm using the royal we, everything that you just mentioned. And what you said about niche constructors, modifying their environment, which in turn creates this feedback loop, reminds me of the Winston Churchill quote, "We shape our tools and then the tools shape us." And it applies all the way from the earthworm to, for instance, large herbivores in Africa. If you look at hippopotami and the paths that they create, which affect water flow and a million other things, it's just incredible how interconnected all of it is and how many feedback loops exist. So you do need some

• 42:07Tim Ferriss?

  mathematics to begin to try to evaluate how these many hundreds and thousands and millions of feedback loops might interact in any way that we can comprehend. So I'll check out David Krakauer. That's a great lead. How many bonobos are there in the world at this point, roughly speaking?

• 42:30Speaker 03

  It's very difficult to have an exact number, but they would fill out a small stadium. Maybe, hopefully, more than 10,000 and probably less than 60,000.

• 42:43Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And how many, just for comparison purposes, how many chimpanzees are there? Is it a multiple of that? Is it roughly the same?

• 42:50Speaker 03

  Yes, oh, for sure. It's at least one order of magnitude more. No, not two orders of magnitude. But if you sum the three subspecies, I want to say around a million or less. But actually, let me get back to you with the latest count.

• 43:07Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, no problem. Now, those two, bonobos and chimpanzees are contrasted because they seem to have so many differences of not just styles, personalities, behavior, their societal structure, right? And I do want to talk about all of these things. Why is there such a discrepancy in the number of bonobos versus chimpanzees? Is it due to the state of affairs in Congo? Is it because they're, for whatever reason, not naturally selected as well? Could that be a plausible vote in favor of aggression? I don't know. How would you describe the discrepancy? And I'm not fishing for a yes answer to the latter.

• 43:52Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just saying it's, I hadn't thought about this until I prepared for this interview. And I was like, why are there so few bonobos? And I didn't have a good answer to that.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  I think the word is contingency, evolutionary contingency, namely, probably the evolutionary event that led to the speciation of these two species. Speciation meaning what happens when you have an ancestral population of an ape that was the grandfather of chimps and bonobos? Something happens and later, down the river of time, you have two distinct populations. One is bonobos, one is chimpanzees.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Was prob- this event was probably, but we're still discussing about it, the formation, the geographical formation of the River Congo. The River Congo is an enormous river that, in order for you guys to picture, don't think of a river, think more of like a moving lake. If anyone has visual images of the Amazon, the Congo is only second in size to the Amazon. It's really the Congo Basin and the Amazonian Basin are equivalent there. Both of them are the lungs of our planet. So you have this enormous river, and north of the River Congo, you have the distribution of chimpanzees. And south of the River Congo, you have bonobos.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Which means that at the time, and both species adapt and niche construct with their environment. Bonobo environment is a lot more wet and tropical jungle than chimpanzees. Having said this, there's a huge variation in chimpanzee habit that chimpanzees are probable, but, I mean, I say this with so many caveats because bonobos also have ability to exist in somehow drier environments. But as a gross overgeneralization, chimps exist in a more varied array of landscapes. They can be in like tropical forests, but also in a, in drier environments.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Which probably, you know, it's a chicken and egg thing. Can they be there because they're better at adapting? Or is it because they were north of the river that they actually adapted that way? What we know is what we find today. And so I think it's contingency. And, you know, sometimes they hunt, sometimes they don't. In depending whether they're in dry environments, they hunt more depending.

• 46:20Tim Ferriss?

  This is chimpanzees.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, sorry, chimpanzees. And, and so I think they're, both species are incredibly flexible. But chimpanzees have a wider distribution. And perhaps in terms of the dietary adaptations, they might be more flexible.

• 46:37Tim Ferriss?

  On the dietary side, just because I'm extending our conversation that we had many months ago, and I'm just curious, so I'm going to follow my curiosity. So apologies to everyone who's expecting a really well-constructed 60-point sequential set of questions here. But on the dietary side, do bonobos hunt? Has that been observed? Maybe you could speak to chimpanzees, because, I mean, my very, very minimal understanding of chimpanzees is that, you know, not only do they hunt, but they also kind of sport hunt, in a way. Or do they go on raids of sorts? Could you just maybe speak to both and contrast? And I would just love to know, because I've never asked anyone, and you're the person

• 47:20Tim Ferriss?

  to ask, if bonobos have ever been observed to hunt?

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Both species hunt. Chimpanzees hunt more than bonobos. That's the summary. And now let's dig into this. For years, the archetype was that chimps were, you know, main aggressive hunters, and bonobos were like the nice vegan-loving...

• 47:42Tim Ferriss?

  Orgy lovers.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Exactly. Thank you. Sadly, I became coy, but I don't know why.

• 47:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, what was that all about? You just got so shy all of a sudden.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  I was like, what?

• 47:56Speaker 03

  Yes. But yes, thank you. I think that's what's so cool about studying animals and about science, that things are always more complex and have more variance and nuance. And as you understand more the animals, particularly when you're dealing with large-brained, intelligent animals, like, duh, of course they're plastic, of course they change, of course not all the populations do the same stuff, of course there's a huge variation according to which environments they're in. So then you can start making predictions and saying, well, if they are in wetter environments, if they're in richer environment, how does this drive behaviors like hunting and aggression and so on? But that's the domain of socioecology,

• 48:40Speaker 03

  which is the study of how social behavior changes according to environmental pressures. So having said that, I mentioned that because I think... It's important to understand that we are also animals subjected to the same pressure. I guess what, our environment changes, we change. So for chimps and bonobos, it's the same. We can even even speak of, say, western chimpanzees have been said of having a more bonobo strategy in the sense of females are, you know, have stronger bones and they can be nicer and hunt less than eastern chimpanzees that hunt more and there's more events of aggression, etc.

• 49:19Tim Ferriss?

  And geographically, could you just place us, where would the range of the western chimpanzees be in the versus the eastern? And I know there's probably not a super clear demarcation down the middle, but geographically, where are we placing those groups?

• 49:35Speaker 03

  The eastern chimpanzee would be the chimpanzee that most people know because of Jane Goodall studies. So your gombet chimp

• 49:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  is your eastern chimp. And I think that's, thank you for asking that question because, of course, for Jane, when she started studying these chimps and the things she observed, including the four year war, Jane Goodall, after a while, she thought that chimpanzees, to begin with, they were like a nicer version of us. So I think this is inserted in a broader context of, of course, we are looking at ourselves by looking at these animals. And when she makes this amazing discovery, when she observes them using tools, and there's a famous anecdote, she writes to Louise Leakey, who hacked the idea of her going there and

• 50:26Speaker 03

  saying, "Look, I know that the definition of human is we're the only animal that uses technology, but I've observed these animals, namely chimpanzees, using and creating technology. So we have a problem, basically, we either..."

• 50:42Tim Ferriss?

  How are we gonna handle the PR on this one? Dr. Leakey?

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Dr. Leakey, we have a problem, Dr. Leakey. Either we widen the definition of who is allowed to use technology, or we change the meaning of being human, right? I hope that's in letters of note, by the way. I don't know if it is, but it should be. That telegram.

• 51:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it might be. It might be. I mean, they've gathered some incredible letters. And people also, I mean, can hear quite a bit about some of these earlier experiences that Jane Goodall had in my conversation with her. So we explore that quite a bit. And they can also find documentaries like Jane Online, which will give you quite a view into this four-year war, as you mentioned. I mean, just as different tools, obviously, different weaponry, but just as horrifying as human war. I mean, ongoing protracted war, which is not isolated chimps, right? I mean, we look at certain ant populations.

• 51:43Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, if my memory serves me correctly, I mean, there are like decade-plus-long wars going on. I want to say somewhere in the American Southwest or near Mexico. And then we get to the West. Do you can comment on any of that? At some point, would love to know where the Western chimps are.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Look at Africa, Central Africa. Note where the Congo River is, which is on kind of on the upper third bit of DRC, talking very broadly here. And then look west. And so Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire and all that area that is north of the river on the west.

• 52:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm going into Google Maps and looking at this right now. You know, it's interesting. It says Gombe. I'm looking at Gombe. Oh, I guess I got pulled into the wrong place because...

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Gombe is in Tanzania.

• 52:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. But Gombe, there's also a Gombe in Nigeria. So people should be aware if they pull it up on a map. Gombe is in Tanzania, in the context in which we're using it.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if you, again, look at the map of Africa, and if you look at the heart of it, literally the heart of it, that is Zaire DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo. To the right of that, you'll find Gombe, Tanzania, and Eastern Africa.

• 53:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  So that boundary, and Lake Tanganyika is in that boundary. So when you actually, when you climb the hills of Gombe, which are steep... And it's hardcore. One reason to study Bono's is that the Congo Basin is flat. But anyway, when you climb Gombe, yeah, and they're like killer beasts on the Tanzanian side. When you climb Gombe and you look down at Tanganyika, then you can see Congo.

• 53:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  That is kind of the line that I'm trying to draw.

• 53:32Tim Ferriss?

  May I just mention real quickly to describe for folks? So I'm looking at a map here. So DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo is kind of smack in the middle of Africa. And if you imagine that country, this is going to sound kind of funny, but as the United States, DRC, Congo is the United States, there's actually a little hook in the southeast that kind of looks like Florida. If you were to look at where New England is, right on that border, let's just say going into the ocean, that would be Uganda. And then below that, say around where New York, New Jersey would be, you have Rwanda, Burundi, and then you have Tanzania covering pretty much everything down to Florida.

• 54:14Tim Ferriss?

  And there is this gigantic lake, as you mentioned it, which I'm not going to be able to pronounce properly, that forms the border, basically, between DRC and Tanzania. What was the name of this lake again?

• 54:29Speaker 03

  Tanganyika.

• 54:30Tim Ferriss?

  Tanganyika, right.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:31Tim Ferriss?

  So that gives you a bit of an image. So the Western chimps, where does that group begin? This is going somewhere, folks, so don't worry. I'm not getting like totally Where's Waldo with geography forever, but do they start west of that lake?

• 54:46Speaker 03

  So Lake Tanganyika goes north, south. It's like a very long and actually very deep lake. I think it might actually be one of the deepest lakes in the world, only after Baikal. I'm not sure. But west of that, you have gorilla populations. So the Western chimpanzees are north. Again, think of DRC as this heart of Africa.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  And then the river, the Congo River is on the upper bit.

• 55:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right, yeah.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  As Conrad, the writer, the author of The Heart of Darkness, described it, because he sailed there. That's the origin of Heart of Darkness, in fact. He described it as a coiling snake. So, think of the Congo River as this coiled, enormous coiled snake that kind of goes, it's at the head of DRC, and DRC, for context, is the size of Western Europe. It's an enormous, enormous country. So, Western chimpanzees are northwest of that.

• 55:50Tim Ferriss?

  I see, yep.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  You see what I mean?

• 55:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I do.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  So, you were talking about your conversation with Jane and the four-year war and aggression in chimpanzees. The person to read and listen and follow about that work, kind of the, who is the modern Jane Goodall in the sense of following chimpanzee behavior and working on aggression, which is of course, and the origins of war, which for very obvious reasons is a very topical issue today, is Richard Wrangham. He is a British primatologist who has been at Harvard directing the PAN Lab for many years. He has many books, he's an incredibly creative.

• 56:37Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell Richard's last name?

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Wrangham, W R A N G H A M. Wrangham. And his last book is called The Goodness Paradox. Namely, why is it that humans are relatively good if we should, in inverted commas, given what we see in chimpanzees, be a lot more aggressive? And so, I think all things that Richard covers about this topic are incredibly useful, and he has been observing chimpanzees, well, he worked with Jane, and so I can't recommend him more thoroughly. That was one, and then the second you mentioned war in ants.

• 57:20Speaker 03

  I think the recommendation there would be, and you had also mentioned E.O. Wilson. E.O. Wilson, the author of Concilions, he-

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Naturalist, ant naturalist, and very famous for sociobiology in 1964, namely combining social sciences and natural sciences, and creating a bit of stir in the process. But he, his favorite student, he's alive today, the student, because Io died

• 57:50Tim Ferriss?

  Very recently.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  A couple of months ago, very recently, yeah. I would invite everyone to, to read the work of Mark Moffett. Mark Moffett is also an ant biologist, the favorite student of Io Wilson. And Mark, an explorer, another person in this tradition of doing theoretical work, thinking about animal and human societies, but combining exploration, science and theoretical thinking. He published a book called Swarm. It's basically about human societies. And he makes this wonderful point that in many respects, the dynamics of ants inform us about our sociality, including war, a lot more than we can see in other animals.

• 58:35Tim Ferriss?

  Very cool. Swarm, great name, great book title. If you look at the, let's just say, contrasting behaviors of Western chimps and Eastern chimps, and then bonobos, do you think it's primarily a function of food scarcity versus abundance, or something like that?

• 58:54Speaker 03

  I think that definitely plays into it. But I also think that you have the niche construction element there, namely that cultural animals have dynamics of their own that are perhaps put in place in first place because of ecological conditions. But once they get going, they have their own weight, like a culture.

• 59:22Tim Ferriss?

  And their own sort of durability also, even if the, the initial conditions are not the current conditions.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 59:29Tim Ferriss?

  As you mentioned, I mean, you have Genetics as we understand it, I mean, we, I'm giving myself a lot of credit there, but genetics in terms of DNA and the code that gets passed down as we understand it, environmentally largely unmodified DNA, meaning you have these random mutations that sometimes lead to better fitness and then natural selection, but we don't have to go down this rabbit hole because it's also a rat hole, it gets co-opted by a lot of new agey stuff, but epigenetics also, these more acute effects on progeny and their behavior and so on. Please continue, you're saying that the niche construction, so by cultural weight, could you give an example of that, the impact of that?

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  Selection pressures that work on behavior of social animals. So let me give you an example. So when you observe bonobos, immediately females, they stand out as being very, as we would call them, empowered, and they seem to make decisions and to kind of have the upper hand in the sense, not that bonobo males are in any way, and let me make this super clear, bonobo males are magnificent, strong, amazing males.

• 1:00:42Tim Ferriss?

  They're not like spider males who get eaten after procreation?

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  No, exactly. They are beautiful, magnificent males. This is not an example of like a war of the sexes where you have, okay, females won the war of the sexes and these guys are like puny little guys on the outskirts of society. No, I can show you pictures, videos, they're magnificent. And I think also they have fun, they're playful, they're strong, but going back to the example you asked for, immediately this difference between kind of bonobo females being empowered, they don't get raped, for instance, so female choice, well, female choice exists throughout nature, but rape can happen in some societies and some species. In bonobos, we have not observed rape.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  The males make like an invitation to mate, which is kind of a fun head bob.

• 1:01:36Tim Ferriss?

  It's like tango.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  Gesture.

• 1:01:38Tim Ferriss?

  Capaceo.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  Right. Right.

• 1:01:42Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, inside joke, guys. This is how males invite women to dance from like across the room. Anyway.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  No, but this is correct. I had not thought about this.

• 1:01:52Tim Ferriss?

  Same, same, same.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  No, I failed as a dermatologist and a South American. This is like staring.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  So the males do this head bobbing thing as the invitation?

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  As the invitation that the point I want to make is that you can ask, why is this happening in bonobos, say, as opposed to other species? And the thinking is that the environment, the wealth in the environment, it played a very important role in the development of bonobos. Because let me backtrack a little bit into sociology 101. Think, what are your main problems if you're a mammal? If you're a female mammal, typically female mammals are constrained by resources. Because being a female mammal is expensive calorically. You have to travel if you're lactating, if you're carrying babies. There's a lot of investment

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  that female mammals have to do with procreation and carrying babies for sometimes a very long time, because mammals have large brains, which are in turn expensive to maintain. And babies can be useless.

• 1:03:05Tim Ferriss?

  And they're born before they're ready to go.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:03:08Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, in order to pass through the birth canal, or to be born properly, they're born kind of helpless.

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  That is most extreme in the case of humans.

• 1:03:16Tim Ferriss?

  In humans, yeah.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  In humans, yes. But broadly speaking.

• 1:03:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, I'm sorry. I was, I was thinking mostly of, of kind of higher primates and, and humans. To be clear, like when a giraffe drops out, it's got to be ready to run, or it's lion food. So, yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's a great point, actually. Just think, observe giraffes or any. Large herbivore. The relative period of uselessness in an infant between this kind of animals versus us or gorillas, chimps, bonobos. Herbivores, whether it's a giraffe or a horse or a deer, they get up and they start walking. They're still protected by the mother and of course fed by the mother. But our babies are useless for a very long time.

• 1:04:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's expensive to be a female mammal. It's expensive.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  Exactly. Thank you. It's expensive to be a female mammal. So female mammals are typically constrained by resources. And so if you have an environment where there aren't enough resources, female mammals, the most basic thing is that they have to be on their own because there isn't enough food for everyone to gather, right? So, you know, not enough supermarkets can only feed, say, one female and her two babies. You're stuck on your own. If there is enough food, ah, now you can go to a party. You can hang out with other females, right? And this is really important because I think what like the social revolution for bonobos was that female mammals were able to hang out together. In order to form a bond,

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  you need a very basic thing to happen. If you are a primate that doesn't bond online, you need to be in the same physical space because mammals bond through physical interaction. And so if an environment allows for females to be in the same place, you can afford that possibility. Not that it will always happen, but we think that in bonobos, the fact that they were in a relatively wealthy environment, wealthy meaning a forest, a tropical forest with a lot of fruit and fruit has, you know, high in calories, then you can be in the same place. And this is where you get into the multiple feedback loops. Females in the same place, females hanging out with each other, social proximity, social proximity bonding,

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  bonding alliances, alliances. We advance our own interests. What is our interest? Female mammals have two problems. Well, there are many problems, but one of them is being energetically expensive. And the second one is infanticide. So infanticide exists. It's relatively widespread. And so if you think I'm going to sound like a horrible person without a heart, but if you think of like your genetic investment, taking away love. What a terrible thing to say. Obviously, for a female mammal, your child being killed is an awful thing. And so purely because of the time and energy invested in creating and maintaining

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  this infant. So what I'm trying to get at is that the adaptations for female mammals that have to do with avoiding infanticide are important. So in that sense, choosing males that are nice males and not choosing males that will probably be infanticidal is an important thing.

• 1:06:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, interesting. Okay, so I have a question. Can I jump in with a question about this? So when I hear, this is probably not a sentence I use very often, but when I hear infanticide, what I think about is cases with, say, lions, bears, it's very, very common in the natural world where a, let's just call it a challenger male will come to a pride, kill a resident male, and that male lion will want the female lions to go into estrus. So if they're lactating, that won't happen, therefore, he will kill the cubs. And this happens amongst bears, is my understanding. But you're saying in this case, there's also infanticide where

• 1:07:20Tim Ferriss?

  the actual biological father will kill the infant?

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  Not typically. No, no, not typically. I meant, I'm sorry, I should have been specific about that. What I wanted to say is that infanticide, as you're pointing out, happens in nature. And avoiding infanticide, the only thing that I'm saying is that avoiding infanticide, it's important for females.

• 1:07:41Tim Ferriss?

  It's important. Yeah, totally.

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So what I'm trying to get at is that I think you asked about the contribution of a wealthy environment, you know, why are bonobos so nice?

• 1:07:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  Is it because they have more fruit? I think that plays into it, but I also think it's a cultural niche construction, but also...

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  You have multiple levels of selection. I think what we see is that females have been selecting nice males and nice males get rewarded for being nice because females choose them. So what you see is that multiple feedback loops. The way of summarizing this better, I think, was done by the rapper Baba Brinkman. And when he was, yeah.

• 1:08:24Tim Ferriss?

  Didn't see that coming. All right. I don't, but, but please continue.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, he is a great lyricist and he rapped the original species. When he was rapping about how sexual selection works and these processes of basically female choice, and he was showing gangsters and you're kind of a rap culture being all aggressive. And she said, girls, you are selecting traits in males. So in order to create a better world, don't sleep with mean people.

• 1:08:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, good advice. Good advice.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  I'm obviously saying it as a joke, but what I'm trying to illustrate here is that females' sexual choice is important than in bonobos because of what was possible for them to happen, given that they were able to form coalitions. Perhaps we see it more clearly.

• 1:09:17Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask a couple of kind of housekeeping questions that may go nowhere. So I apologize to everyone if, if this goes nowhere. But if you look at, say, bonobo versus chimpanzee populations, is there a different gender split? So if you look at a given cohort, I don't even know how you would define that. It's probably not a single troop. It's probably a little wider than that. But if you look at bonobos, is it like 50 50 male, female, and chimps roughly the same? Is it 60 40? Is it 80 20? And second question is about body size discrepancy. So between males and females in bonobos, is the discrepancy the

• 1:09:57Tim Ferriss?

  same as in chimps? And I'm trying to think of other factors aside from food scarcity or abundance that might contribute to different social dynamics.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  Both species have the same sex ratio, around 50 50. And in terms of, Tim is asking about dimorphism. So sexual dimorphism is if you look at males and females, if roughly the body size and other traits kind of similar, or whether you see big differences.

• 1:10:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  One example of like huge dimorphism would be gorillas, like the males, think of a male silverback, big, enormous guy, and females much smaller, or say a stag, a deer, red deer. So as a rule of thumb, again grossly overgeneralizing, dimorphism indicates lack of monogamy. So again, maybe we shouldn't get into this because there are many nuances here. But in chimpanzees and bonobos, the male-female size, females are a little bit smaller in both species, and dimorphism might be a little bit more in chimpanzees. Namely, you don't see this huge body size difference,

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  but there is a body size difference. In humans is evident as well, in the sense of like most males, if you think of averages, are taller, heavier, stronger than females. And obviously, there are exceptions, but we're talking statistically.

• 1:11:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and so if we come back to what you said about dimorphism, that that is reflective or indicative of a lack of monogamy, is that right?

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  Typically.

• 1:11:37Tim Ferriss?

  Could you elaborate on that?

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  Let's think about animals that have most dimorphism. Again, let's pick the stag deer or gorillas. Typically, that indicates a harem social structure in the sense of one male and several females. And that will, of course, is not as simple as that with time we have learned that gorilla social systems are a lot more flexible than we thought. I mean, that's another rule of thumb. It's always more complicated than you think. I think Oscar Wilde has a great quote about that. "The truth is rarely simple." No, what's that quote? I forgot.

• 1:12:15Tim Ferriss?

  I'll look it, I'll look it up, yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. But it's a rule of thumb. But bonobos and chimpanzees are similar, I think, in much more ways than we think they're different. In the past, I think, because we were coming out of, or we still are, in a kind of thinking of evil and goodness. So chimpanzees were like the bad guys and bonobos were the good guys. And chimpanzees are technological, machiavellian politicians and, you know, male rapists. And then bonobos are the feminist, like, peace-loving. And again, their life is a lot more complicated.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  And so I would just really like to stress that we should try to get out of this kind of sharp contrast. Both species have undergone their own paths. I don't think it's correct to say good guys and bad guys, or there are no angels, bonobos are no angels. There is conflict at every level of organization and nature. And also, I think we should be careful about the naturalistic fallacy. Naturalistic fallacy meaning, oh, if this happens in nature, it means that this is okay for us to do the same in human societies, or this ought to be the way. Sorry, I said a lot there.

• 1:13:36Tim Ferriss?

  I don't learn very much when I'm talking, so I prefer you to talk. The Oscar Wilde quote, although, you know, half the quotes on the internet are attributed to Oscar Wilde, but I believe that the quote is, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple." Yeah, that's the one.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  That's it, thank you.

• 1:13:52Tim Ferriss?

  For people who don't have the context, when you talk about heart of darkness Congo, could you describe the land in which these bonobos live from a human perspective? What does the Congo look like? What are some basics that we should know about the Congo? Just so people have an appreciation for what it means to walk more than 3,000 kilometers on foot in the jungles of the Congo.

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  Congo is historically, you will hear about the two Congos Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa. When we're talking about Congo, we mean Congo-Kinshasa, meaning DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, what was known before as Zaire. So again, picture Africa, literally picture the heart of it, this enormous big central middle, and that is Congo DRC. Congo is the size of Western Europe, as we were talking before. Given that it's so large, there are many biomes. But I went to the tropical jungles, literally in the heart of Congo, namely about 100 miles

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  south of the river, just on the line of the equator, so my GPS would mark 0000, about 600 kilometers, 400 miles, from the nearest town. This means that first of all, you have logistics that are complicated, that are the logistics of any tropical rainforests. There are dangers that are inherent in tropical rainforests, such as trees falling, in fact, that's one of the most dangerous things. If you're following a group of large-bodied animals that are arboreal, and you are a biped, and these guys are traveling on the trees, and this is a primary forest, namely they're

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  old and dying and dead trees, many times entire pieces of, whether or not sometimes a tree, but a huge branch, sometimes the size of a table would fall a few inches from you. And so that has caused injury, permanent injury, and actually a death in the group of people that live in the study site. There are other obvious dangers, like snakes, there were, green mambas, black mambas, Congo vipers. We couldn't have antivenom, because for antivenom, you need electricity in order to have a fridge and to store it. Refrigeration. Refrigeration, so we didn't have...

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  Electricity or any form of public sanitation for that matter. So I think for me, I was always thinking, you really shouldn't get bitten by a snake. That's the bottom line.

• 1:16:31Tim Ferriss?

  Don't get bitten by a snake.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:35Tim Ferriss?

  Good advice.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  One on one. The most obvious danger, I think, with Congo for a woman would be physical violence from people. Congo is the rape capital of the world, but this pertains to the chronic conflict that Congo has. But I was quite far from that conflict. That conflict happens mostly in the east. Of course, it could erupt any time and it was a concern. But I think I was more in the kind of dangers of the forests, I would say. Then there's disease, tropical disease. You think you can control many things, but I took this book called The Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine.

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  I did not read it beforehand, and I think if I had, would have read it beforehand, it maybe it would have been. There's a small degree of ignorance that sometimes is helpful. I'm not advocating. Actually, I should take that back because of course I'm all about knowing and knowledge.

• 1:17:39Tim Ferriss?

  Play with the snakes. Play with the snakes.

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  No, no, don't play with the snakes.

• 1:17:43Tim Ferriss?

  Kidding, kidding.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  But the chapter in this book about infectious disease in tropical areas in Central Africa is quite scary. And that's the only thing I'm going to say about that.

• 1:17:56Tim Ferriss?

  So you have, I mean, certainly in the urbanized or less remote parts of Congo, you have warfare. You have violence, you have rape, as you mentioned, disease also, right? I mean, sort of urban disease. Birthplace of Ebola and HIV, is that correct?

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  Correct, yes.

• 1:18:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So you have a lot going on. You talked about the dangers. So the remote dangers, you're navigating all of this in the course of doing fieldwork. Just to shift gears for a second, because you mentioned the death by tree. Why is it that the Japanese, I think University of Kyoto, has such a dominant role, it would seem, in vinoba research? How did that happen?

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

  We were talking about Western ethology and Conrad Lorenz. So animal behavior studies in the West come from that line of animal behavior in Europe, whose origin is in biology. Okay? The Japanese have a different tradition in ethology that for them comes broadly speaking from the social sciences. And let me explain, I think this is really interesting because you see two cultures coming at the same broadly speaking area of study with different approaches.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  The book for more on this is by Frans de Waal, the Dutch ethologist, and it's called The Ape and the Sushi Master. In which, it's a great title, in which he asks this question, like, why, where and are the Japanese so interested in animal behavior? The Japanese came to animal behavior with the kind of questions we're asking today earlier than the West, probably for two reasons. One of them is a contingency, an evolutionary contingency, namely habitat. In Japan, there are primates. You have Japanese monkeys. So people, I would invite your audience to Google Japanese monkey hot tub.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  And what you will see, right?

• 1:20:08Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know the proper name, but the snow monkeys.

• 1:20:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:20:10Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible, in the hot springs. Japanese macaque, also known as a snow monkey.

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so the reason I'm mentioning that is because I'd like you to imagine what it means for a culture to live in a place where you have these animals nearby. And so that means that for the Japanese primates, monkeys, were part of the mythology and of their stories. So think of the mythologies and the stories that we have in the West and our intelligent animals. They're mostly, say, ravens or foxes. Think of like German fairy tales. Who's clever? Oh, it's the raven. And why? For obvious reasons, because those were the animals that were available in our environment. So we think and interacted with them. We didn't have monkeys.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  For the West to look at monkeys, we had to go to Africa or to Asia. So that's the first reason that I think it's evolutionary contingency, namely the Japanese. As a culture, co-evolved with primates in the presence, and they were part of the mythology and the story. I think also their religion, Shinto, so you know more about Shinto than I do, but basically interrelationships. I think that predisposed cognitively the Japanese to be much more prepared to think about continuities and discontinuities between humans and other primates. So the combination of these two factors made that in the 1940s, already you had a tradition of Japanese primatology.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  First, there was this guy who was looking at horse behavior, and then he started looking at other primates' behavior. And very famously, he discovered the innovation of potato washing. And so this female that, you know, they were eating potatoes that had sand and, you know, everyone, you couldn't go, oh, that's kind of annoying, but still food. And she learned to wash them in the water, and her friends and family learned from her. So it became a very well-known example of innovation, and also who innovates and how innovations spread through social networks.

• 1:22:20Tim Ferriss?

  So a question for you, where was that potato washing? Do you recall?

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  Yes, in an island. Oh gosh, I just forgot the name of the island. Emo. The, the name of the female is emo and I'll get back to you with the name.

• 1:22:34Tim Ferriss?

  Emo, that's funny because it means potato. So there's a joke in Japanese, this is not going to mean anything to anybody, but "Hotta emo iziruna" is a, is a joking way. It kind of sounds like, "What time is it now?" "Hotta emo iziruna." But it means, "Don't touch the potato I've just picked." But emo is a way of saying potato, or I think you can also use it to mean like country bumpkin in Japanese, but that's funny. So emo.

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:23:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so emo monkey.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Tim Ferriss?

  Potato washing. I'm just pulling it up really quickly. So I want to ask you a question about this. All right, Sweet Potato Washing Revisited, 50th Anniversary of Primates article. So this is something I'm looking at on Springer.com. Talks about Koshima monkeys, so I'm guessing it's on Koshima.

• 1:23:26Speaker 03

  Koshima Island.

• 1:23:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so Koshima almost certainly means little island. Ko is like "Kochigari" for those judo people out there. Koshima, and then "shima" is like, you know, Hiroshima, wide island. Koshima, so Koshima. Now, I had heard, I would love to, the reason I'm asking specifically is, I wanted to ask you, is it true, and it may not be at all, but let me back up and say, it seems to be true that there's this phenomenon of people and humans in disparate geographical locations having similar or identical scientific breakthroughs around the same time, which is bizarre and raises a lot of questions.

• 1:24:11Tim Ferriss?

  Could just all be coincidence, but it seems to happen on a reasonably regular basis when you read these biographies of scientists. It's like, it's, it's like, you know, nothing happens for 200 years and then it's like neck and neck down to the week, right? And I believe something like that also happened with Darwin.

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, Darwin and Wallace, yes.

• 1:24:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so Wallace kind of beat him to the punch and he wrote a letter to his friend complaining, like the other letter. And then his friend was like, Charles, you gotta get your ass on this. Get after it. And then he pushed forward and then no one remembers Wallace, right? So it's like, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then flash boil all of a sudden. And I remember someone telling me that this was also true for the sweet potato washing in the sense that, I guess in this case, Emo learns to wash these potatoes. And then around the same time, monkeys of the same species on other nearby islands began washing sweet potatoes. Do you know if this is even as a story, something that exists, putting aside,

• 1:25:11Tim Ferriss?

  maybe they travel from island to island. I mean, they must have gotten there somehow to begin with. So I suppose they do. But do you have you heard this this story at all?

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  I've heard the on the Whakere side of that, there are some explanations, like morphic resonance.

• 1:25:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, morphogenic fields and all that stuff. Right. So I mean, you know, I don't want to drag you into the mud here. But yeah, what are your thoughts on any of this?

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  I think if I may remain empirical about it, I think also thinking as an ecologist, I think it's first of all, it's attention bias.

• 1:25:46Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Given that I'm trained as someone who looks at nature and I'm astounded at our own blindness of like, how many times can I pass through a place without saying something until I go, oh, what about this? And then I see it everywhere.

• 1:26:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's like buying a new car and then you see that car everywhere. It's like, no, no, it's not like everyone bought it the same day. You just didn't notice it before.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, amazing. So there's that effect. But that's not all. I think there's also an ecosystem effect, namely that inventions don't quite, I mean, this view of like the lone person, whether it's a Japanese macaque female or Darwin alone, like old man in his studio. We think in ecosystems, in environments, through interaction with the world. So we are picking up stuff that it's already it's fruit that is in our forest, so to say, so that other people start picking it is not incredibly surprising.

• 1:26:43Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anyone you are aware of who is a credible scientist, who would even entertain the notion of morphic resonance or is interested in alternative or complementary?

• 1:26:56Tim Ferriss?

  Theories for how some of these things manifest? Or is that just universally thought to be bullshit?

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  I know Rupert Sheldrake personally and I really like him.

• 1:27:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Speaker 03

  And I think the work his son Marilyn, you probably know, is doing is fantastic on Fangji. And so he's such a great guy.

• 1:27:16Tim Ferriss?

  He's a fascinating character, fascinating character. I've never met him, but fascinating guy.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  You should meet him and go, go for a walk with him. He was originally a botanist, so he knows everything. Just to go for a walk with him outside is wonderful. So let's leave it there.

• 1:27:35Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Go for a walk with Rupert. All right, on the list. Thank you. Okay, so how did we get on to sweet potato washing in the first place?

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, you asked why the Japanese have a field side in Congo, which is a great question.

• 1:27:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, yes. Because when I'm looking at, for instance, the network of play interactions in Wambabanoos and I'm looking at the names, right? And it's like, Natsuko, Yukiko, Nachi, Kyoto, Yume, right there. Fuku, Kitaro. Or in the very beginning, we talked about Jiro, I think it was. And that is most certainly a Japanese name. Like Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Same, same. Super, super fascinating.

• 1:28:16Speaker 03

  I love hearing the names of the E1 Bonobos group pronounced properly.

• 1:28:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they have some good names. They have some good names. Kiku, Hoshi. Yeah, they've got, they've got some good names.

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Tim Ferriss?

  I will ask about where you think humans are getting it wrong or maybe making mistakes when it comes to sex, play, gender. I am gonna ask you about that, but I'm planting a seed so that it'll just gestate for a little while. But first, let's talk about, or rather, let me ask you about, and I just saw it pop up here, the adaptive joker hypothesis.

• 1:28:54Tim Ferriss?

  What is that?

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  That is the name I gave to my theory on play behavior, basically. I did for my masters and for my PhD, I studied play behavior. And the question you ask yourself as a evolutionary biologist, as a sinetology, is that what's the function of behavior? And so, play has typically, and continues to, very rightly, thought as developmental scaffolding. Namely, something, a behavior that is expensive and risky, but young animals do, in order to build up the organism. So, play prepares you for the future, play trains skills, all of that is true.

• 1:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  Play fighting in leopards, or something like that?

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  Play fighting in leopards, wordplay in young humans. As a rule of thumb, you will observe how the young of a certain species play, and you can have inferences on what they do as adults, and, you know, play is training for adulthood. So, all of that is true. But if you think of the word scaffolding, to me was puzzling, because it's like developmental scaffolding. So, maybe it's because I come from a family of architects, but I keep thinking, a scaffold is something that is used to build a building, and then when the building is done, you remove the scaffold, i.e. the scaffold is useless, it's just aiding you in constructing something. And when the thing, the building, is ready,

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  you take the scaffold away, and the object is the thing, i.e. the building that is ready. And if play is a scaffold for building adult organisms, it means that play should finish when somatic growth finishes. I, you turn seventeen, eighteen, you stop playing. I think, again, this is roughly true in many species. It's not very common that adult animals play. But if you start looking around again with this question of like, hon, ask the question, and then tell me, which animals play as adults? And so, what would come to mind? Let me ask you that question.

• 1:31:08Tim Ferriss?

  Which animals play as adults?

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  Play as adults, yeah.

• 1:31:11Tim Ferriss?

  Dolphins would come to mind?

• 1:31:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:13Tim Ferriss?

  Although, I do thi-

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  Humans, obviously.

• 1:31:16Tim Ferriss?

  What was that, second one?

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  Humans.

• 1:31:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I thought you said Cubans. I was like, maybe Cubans, yeah, sure.

• 1:31:23Tim Ferriss?

  They do like salsa. I mean, that's kind of looks like that.

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, and great music.

• 1:31:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, great, great music. I'm sitting in Austin, Texas. There are actually a lot of amazing Cubans here, which is why maybe that's I talking about the sort of attention bias.

• 1:31:38Tim Ferriss?

  But humans, although, I mean, one would need to, I think, perhaps take a second to define play. So if play is not this, I can't remember the exact modifier used, but this scaffolding, if it is not that, then what is play, right? It seems like something that doesn't serve an obvious functional purpose that entails some degree of positive emotional display. I mean, I don't know if that's me struggling for a definition, but.

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

  No, you're correct. We're mixing two definitions there. So I want to make a distinction when you ask this question. Tim Bergen, another famous ethologist, defined the four questions. When you think about a behavior, what, why, and from where? So the question I was asking is, what's the evolutionary function of the behavior? Which is different from defining it, how does it look today? Okay, so if you want to define it, and when you observe something and you want to study it, you need to define it, how does it look today? So you can define it broadly as a behavior that appears cooperative in the sense that it doesn't look forced.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  Animals are not doing it under constraint, duress, or obvious aggression. And there might be a sense of enjoyment, and it appears not having an obvious force purpose. It has repetitive elements, but these repetitive elements also have variation. And so the element of enjoyment and recombination of elements is part of it. And so appearing to having fun, but of course, you know, that's easy when you look at humans, but like you look at reptiles and it's like, how do you know the snake is having fun? It's like, well.

• 1:33:21Tim Ferriss?

  I don't have, you know, deep exposure to a lot of animals. I would say canids, certainly. You see something resembling play in dogs, in fox.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  Wolves.

• 1:33:33Tim Ferriss?

  Et cetera. Yeah, wolves certainly. You know, cats, I mean, there seems to be some type of tailing off in almost every species I think of in terms of play. I mean, maybe you have like old dudes, you know, like 70 year old humans playing chess in parks and so on, but the types of play change certainly over time. You know, one of the coolest things I've ever seen was video captured by a trail camera in the US of a coyote playing with, it certainly looked like play with a badger.

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  Yes, I remember that.

• 1:34:09Tim Ferriss?

  They hunt together and it was jumping around, wagging its tail, dropping into kind of this downward dog like play position, just as a domestic dog, domesticated dog would. And I don't want to take us too far off track, but this is directly mapping from some northern American Indian mythologies, or what were thought to be mythologies that had largely never been observed by sort of Western field biologists. And it was kind of thought to be this nonsensical mythology. And then low and behold, it's actually right there in front of you on camera. It's pretty cool. But I had never observed, I don't think

• 1:34:50Tim Ferriss?

  I'd observed much in terms of non combative interspecies play in that way, right? See, like a cat playing with a mouse, but the mouse isn't having a great time.

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  No, that would be, there's one animal there having fun and playing, the other one is not.

• 1:35:06Tim Ferriss?

  So those are a few examples that come to mind. What other examples come to mind for you?

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  The family of corvids, so ravens, crows are very playful birds, parrots as well. It's not a coincidence. If you look at brain to body size ratio, both these groups of birds, namely parrots and corvids, are kind of equivalent, if you will, to cetaceans and great apes.

• 1:35:34Tim Ferriss?

  Cetaceans, including dolphins.

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, dolphins and whales. So in that, these are animals that, don't think of immediate genealogical relationships, but think of the niche again. What niche, what do these animals have in common? They are highly social, they live in complex societies, they have to deal with complexity, they tend to be long-lived. And just if you add the dimension of time, if you're social and are long-lived, it means you have to deal with uncertainty. Because who's your friend? Will they be your friend two weeks from now? You haven't seen them. With whom to cooperate, with whom not to cooperate? Social life is complex. And so, all of these groups of animals have these things in common.

• 1:36:19Speaker 03

  Elephants is another group of animals that also play, and they fall in this broad group of, generally speaking, large-brained, intelligent animals that live for a long time. They're very innovative, but also extremely social. So you have a relationship between sociality and intelligence. And I think the third element there is that play when it's possible. Because now we get into the sociology of play. Play is not always possible, particularly for adults. Many things need to happen for play to make sense. Play has costs and risks, and it's more important for the young. So the scaffolding is still true.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  But my question was like, why do you see this behavior in adult animals? Where it's risky and expensive in time and energy? And this brings us to, I've been thinking a lot, Tim, about time budgets and energy budgets at a personal level. I think because you are Mr. Optimization.

• 1:37:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sometimes.

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well.

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  Actually, time budgets. You're all about time budgets, namely how you organize your time, right? Okay, can I actually tell you something what a friend said yesterday was very funny? I follow, I mean, I'm part of a literary club. I attend a workshop every, every week here in Chile. And, you know, we are Latin and it's a country of poets and we have, I'm coming from that explanation of the Latin poetry tradition.

• 1:37:59Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:37:59Speaker 03

  And I told them we were going to speak today and they said, oh yeah, I know that guy. I studied him with my son because he has a method for only working one hour a week. Anyway, and then I said, yeah, kind of like before, they were also referring to the four hour week. And then in a very kind of Latin poet, yeah, I thought it was interesting. I was initially compelled by this idea of working less, but then I thought he works a lot in order to work less.

• 1:38:31Tim Ferriss?

  The paradox. We live in paradox.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:38:36Tim Ferriss?

  Ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  But basically, yeah, time budgets. So actually that led us to a very interesting discussion on the use of time and what is to optimize and not to optimize.

• 1:38:46Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:38:47Speaker 03

  And play behavior, I think, has several insights in that use of time and use of energy and at what level do you put the optimization goal?

• 1:38:58Tim Ferriss?

  I have some thoughts on this in the sense, and I should point out for people who are not aware, most listeners will recognize the name Pablo Neruda, but some may not associate Neruda with Chile. And so Chile has this incredible literary tradition. Of course, that's only one example, but I would say part of why play fascinates me. And then I want to come back to like, what worries you about humans right now? Based on what could we use more of? What would you encourage people to perhaps think about? That could take any number of different forms, right? So I'd love to hear you speak to that, but I will say that play is very interesting to me because I think.

• 1:39:45Tim Ferriss?

  It overlaps with what we might describe as flow states quite a lot. And certainly if we include sports in play, although sports can become very violent in some cases. But if we include that, then I find that there is, time is a construct, right? We don't have time to get into that right now, which is an intended pun. But for those interested in getting into the really strange aspects of kind of time space as a user interface, listen to my conversation with Donald Hoffman. But not every hour is created equal, right? You can have the experience of passing an hour, sitting in an airport waiting for something, and it seems like 10 hours. You can have the experience of being stuck in your inbox and doing various types of

• 1:40:30Tim Ferriss?

  work, and the entire day passes and you can't remember a single thing that you accomplished. And then you can have this time dilation when you play where you're kind of getting more hours per hour, if that makes any sense. The perception of time changes. In my experience, part of my reason for being so interested in play is you can kind of buy more time from a perceptual perspective.

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  Completely. I think that your point of the overlap with flow states is correct. I think play is broader than that. Flow states are a subcategory of play, but certainly I think they're best understood through the lens of play. Flow states are perhaps more goal oriented than play necessarily is on the play. If you distinguish between play and games, games are typically more goal oriented, have clear outcomes. So a contest obviously has an outcome. And say if you're just like played fighting with words or dancing, that the reward is the activity itself. It's intrinsic reward. So I would draw that distinction.

• 1:41:38Tim Ferriss?

  What can we learn from what you've observed in the natural world? Maybe what you've studied of earlier human civilizations or ways of organizing, ways of playing? And why is it important? I know that's a huge question, but I'm just thinking of the people who are listening to this podcast. And this is, you can speak to me as if you're giving me the advice, because I would like to hear it too. And if it makes you twitchy to think of it as advice, you can just describe it as an observer slash adventure scientist. A lot of people listening to this. Are probably listening to this podcast by and large to certainly learn from disparate

• 1:42:21Tim Ferriss?

  fields and different types of experts, but also they probably work a fair amount. I would imagine most people who listen to this podcast work a fair amount. And if you were to give them two glasses of wine and ask them if they would like more play in their lives, they'd be like, yeah, for sure, for sure. And then that Saturday night, they get back to Monday and that conversation disappears and is long forgotten. Right? So, yeah, what do we do?

• 1:42:45Speaker 03

  I would say as an animal, and I say this, I think hopefully by now you realize that I say this in the best possible way, you're constrained first by two things. So I want you to think about your energy budget and your time budget. Your energy budget is for you, basically your financial budget. So I think you obviously have covered this extensively on, you know, how to manage and create and energy budgets. I define energy in the physics way of energy, ability to do work. So for organisms, energy available is, comes in the form of metabolic energy. For humans, I think a good proxy is financial energy.

• 1:43:30Speaker 03

  Financial energy can increase. You can win the lottery and you can follow team's advice and earn more money. Right?

• 1:43:38Tim Ferriss?

  God save, God save us. Good luck, everybody.

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  There you go. Right? So that's a great thing because thanks to people like team actually that you can increase your energy budget. Fantastic. Your time budget, however, you can't. Time is an incredibly democratizing force because you and an earthworm have 24 hours in the day. So that's a fixed budget, which means that there's this constant interplay, you know, tango or martial art, if you want, between your energy budget and your time budget. How you buy time or you use time is in interaction with your energy budget. The most obvious thing is that if you increase your energy budget, you have more money, you can buy your time, right?

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  So the first observation that I had with Bonobos was that kind of sociological question. When they have more wealth, i.e. there's more fruit, what will they invest it in? It's kind of an investment question. Because they could become fatter, for instance, namely storing that metabolic energy. Or they could spend it in grooming conversation, so to say, for Bonobos. It was really interesting to me to see that in terms of investment decision, Bonobos, when there was more fruit, they played more, which tells you several things. The first one is that play is expensive. Not always you can play, that's fine.

• 1:45:04Speaker 03

  You know, first of all, you should have sufficient metabolic energy to eat and travel and feed your kids and so on. Play is, in that sense, especially for adults, it's true that it's a luxury. But here we come into the adaptive joker, expensive, a hypothesis. There are some things in nature and in human cultures that when you can afford them, they create more luxury. Investment in education, living in a city like Austin or New York. In places that might be expensive to live, but you are putting yourself in a particular ecosystem that feeds into you the possibility of creating something further. The development of the human brain is another example.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  Something that is very expensive to grow, but if you can afford it, it also affords new possibilities. So what I'm trying to say that is, I think, that frame of thinking where you're trading off time budgets and energy budgets, any investor would know this, but at a personal level, it has helped me to look at it much more clearly, because your time is fixed, but your income can grow. And so how do you become like an adapted animal, changing your time budget accordingly?

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  Not only to your income, but also to your context. Context is the context, stupid, right? Paraphrasing Bill Clinton, obviously. It's the economy, stupid, but it's the context. Context is incredibly important in this sense. So I think there are ways that you can describe your context. How much risk is there? How much uncertainty is there? So I think if there's a lot of uncertainty, you can actually develop ways to become more flexible. That's why I was trying to study with the adaptive joker hypothesis. What is a joker? In cards, a joker is the card that adopts the value of the moment, right? It's a trump card. But that value is given by context, which means that play is making you very good at reading context.

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  It's really all about assessing context. So and then it changes. It grows, it decreases, it becomes more intense, less intense, more aggressive, less aggressive. Do you see what I'm trying to say?

• 1:47:15Tim Ferriss?

  I think I do. Could you give an example of that?

• 1:47:19Speaker 03

  So for example, ways of playing change form. Like a joker shapeshifts. The name comes from, it's a pretend behavior. It's a shapeshifting behavior according to what's happening. So today, after the pandemic, well, sorry, we're still not after the pandemic, but we're kind of entering that.

• 1:47:41Tim Ferriss?

  Largely, yeah. Hopefully, fingers crossed.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Yes. I think ways of playing that are increasing in frequency are obviously face-to-face play. There's a hunger for in-person I R L, in real life events. You go like, well, it's kind of obvious. But it's not obvious, if you will. We have amazing technology. We, you know, the entire world has learned to Zoom. Why are we actually willing to still travel long distances and pay for plane tickets and suffer ridiculous queues and stuff? Like going to Burning Man? Because this kind of play is important. We have this necessity for in-real-life meetings.

• 1:48:27Speaker 03

  Direct contact for humans is a very important form of play. It's not the only form of play. So that would be a very, a very obvious example that I think I might predict. We will see a lot of demand for that.

• 1:48:39Tim Ferriss?

  You said earlier, if I may interject, that you've only recently started implementing or applying some of these learnings related to play into your own life. So how have you applied these to your own life? Or what are some ways that you explore play?

• 1:48:55Speaker 03

  The literary workshop is one. So I do this weekly. Uh, my teacher is called Matthias Rivas. He's an editor and a poet. And that kind of intellectual play, allowing myself to like, oh, well, I will spend time not only in science stuff, but actually actively pursuing artistic endeavors has been, I think, really life changing. And I had to kind of learn my own lesson. Well, guess what? Play is important at so many levels. Literature has become, I mean, it was when I was a child, but I had kind of left it. I think it's useful if you think of the ways you played as a child. There's something very true there.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  Some play people talk about this. I look at your pictures. What were you drawn? What kind of play did you do? Was it literary play? Was it play with animals? Social play? Play finding? Construction play? People that did Legos? I think there's a deep truth on personal development that has to do with what are we drawn in our kind of purest forms of play, so to say. And so to recover that, I think is like lesson number one.

• 1:50:09Tim Ferriss?

  Let me jump back to Bonobos for a second. Had a book recommended to me. I can't remember the book nor the author. I'm a bit embarrassed about that, but it related to chimpanzees. And it was the story of a particular, I want to say zoologist who had taught, this is going to be very broad strokes, a particular chimpanzee, something like 200 signs from American sign language. And that chimpanzee then had offspring and taught the offspring something like 70 or 80 signs. So it was a language, it was a vocabulary. Really, I guess, a language more than just vocabulary that was passed from this chimp to offspring, and it was the story of this. And I found myself wandering-

• 1:50:53Speaker 03

  Was it pampamisha?

• 1:50:55Tim Ferriss?

  It might have been. It might have been. I'm blanking on the name. But in this case, it was chimpanzee. But the question that came to mind for me was, because I've become very interested in animal communication, not necessarily people who are like horse whispers and so on, although that is also interesting to me. It's more so animal to animal communication, right? So within a wolf pack, how do they communicate? Let's say, birds in flight, how do they maintain formation when they're actually taking micro sleeps and the way that they rotate through this formation? I mean, the whole thing is just incredible. But how do they communicate if they communicate? Or how do they know if they don't communicate, for instance, right? A lot of these types of questions. And so I was looking at this book summary, and I thought to myself, I wonder if this is a

• 1:51:40Tim Ferriss?

  step up for the chimpanzee or a step down for the chimpanzee to have this like surrogate language. In other words, isn't it an augmentation, or is it replacing something that actually has much more subtlety and nuance to it? And so, I know this is a big shift of gears, but it could affect how one looks at the play they choose to engage in. How do bonobos communicate? And how nuanced is their communication, right? Is it just like four, five, 10, or 12 different kind of screeches and grunts that they get the rough gist across with? Has that been in any way distilled or identified by field biologists?

• 1:52:21Speaker 03

  Thank you. We are learning, obviously, and we're still learning, and a lot more will come. But the first thing that I think is very important to know is that communication is multimodal. So it's comprised of gestures, hand gestures, but also body language, posture, proximity. You are sitting next to whom? You are in which location? Just the physical location is also a part of communication. It's also vocal. There are utterances. The utterances have different meanings, and they sometimes can be combined in different ways. Their communication is flexible. It's not, their vocal communication is not as, obviously-

• 1:53:07Speaker 03

  Flexible as human languages, we have really taken vocal communication to an extreme. But so we have vocal, we have hand gestures, we have body language and other cues. Smell is also important. So if you take this as a whole, they have different meanings depending how you combine it. The other thing that is important to understand, I think, in relation to your question and the chimpanzee example, is that it's very difficult for us as humans, given that we exist in language, to not define intelligent communication from a human perspective. I, given that I do language, how good are you at doing language?

• 1:53:50Speaker 03

  Oh, language, a spoken word, right? If you're not as good as doing language, it means that your communication is inferior. So you're defining the ability to swim if you're a fish, according to how you swim. So that is kind of a little bit inevitable perhaps, but I think today we try to think of it from the point of view of the animals in relation to the problems they have to solve and in relation to the environment they are in. Notice, oh, can they solve puzzles because we're so good at solving puzzles? So that's in general terms. And the other thing that I think is important to think when you think about animal communication is, again, their environment. Bonobos live in the jungle.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  One of the obvious problems when you're in the jungle is that there's a lot of trees. So seeing, visual cues are sometimes difficult. I learned if you talk to birders, you are birding in a forest, you start listening. Basically, you bird by listening to calls, not by visually recognizing. And I realized that I started, I shifted perceptual modes. So to say, I was following play and I would get super tuned to. It would sound weird, but temperature, which is, I call it a temperature, but it's really a combination of things.

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  I, the time of day, the place, where you, your body knows what's likely to happen. And then auditory cues, namely laughter, very distant, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And then you follow that and then you see them. The reason I mention that is because it gave me a very obvious insight into Bonobo communication. Namely, they can't always see each other. Therefore auditory communication is important.

• 1:55:42Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm, yeah, I've only recently really, really come to appreciate how discreet different animal calls can be. And, you know, I hesitate to use the word nuanced because I'm not really sure in this context what that would mean. But for instance, you can train your ear to identify, say, a wildebeest alarm call for a lion versus a leopard. They sound different. Or a squirrel alarm call for certain types of predators that are stationary versus same predator when it's moving.

• 1:56:15Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:56:16Tim Ferriss?

  So there's, even for animals, we would consider perhaps very, again, this is kind of anthropomorphizing and judging them by our capabilities, but simple, right? Still have a wide range of ability to communicate. And I have to imagine that we've only scratched the surface. I know there's been some very interesting research done with dolphins, but if, we could talk about this for hours and hours and hours, which we won't, but if you had to hazard some theories that you think are worth examining, say, over the next five, 10, 20 years, maybe we'll have more technology that will assist in this.

• 1:56:59Tim Ferriss?

  But as it relates to field biology and animal communication, do you have any theories you'd like to posit as, as worth exploring? Or do you think there are any insights that perhaps you've observed? Not insights, any phenomena that you've observed that you think, well, this isn't really something I can, I wouldn't go so far as to say this exists and I've proven it exists, but there is a hypothesis. Kind of worth disproving here, that is interesting. Does anything come to mind for you?

• 1:57:34Speaker 03

  Many things, which are mostly questions. Following bonobos in the jungle, we tried to predict their daily movements. I just a question, where are they going and why? And we couldn't. We couldn't, not even the most experienced trackers. Because we wanted to know where they were going for a very practical reason, because that would allow us to sleep for longer and find them, right? And we couldn't. And they seemed so... The mental maps in their heads, their cognition, how do they know where to forage? It's a very basic question. And a lot of animal behavior people with a particular species have very good answers about this.

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  Whether you're talking about migratory birds, amazing. I mean, migratory birds, how do they know? Have you seen the distances that these birds travel?

• 1:58:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's bananas.

• 1:58:28Speaker 03

  Little guys, I mean, it's amazing, yeah. So then the world of cetaceans or bats, Austin and bats, and echolocation, another huge topic. But to stick with bonobos, in the jungle, the jungle is in many ways like the sea in the sense of that this particular jungle is flat. You don't have perspective, not like Chilean forest where you're in the mountains and you can see far. So for my own perspective, I was like, this is just like a sea of green. Obviously, I'm not attuned to the nuances that they are attuned. Also because it's not temperate environment, but tropical, the fruiting patterns, it's kind of weird.

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  Some trees fruit once a year, some trees every two years, some trees you go, I don't know, a few months. So what I'm trying to say, that the environmental uncertainty, the fluctuation in fruiting patterns is...

• 1:59:26Speaker 03

  To my human entrainer, very large. And they seem to have this map that basically they know. They know where, when the bombambo tree has ripe fruit. They were like, okay, we're shifting across the whole territory. And I'm like, how do they know? These basic questions about travel, I find fascinating. But maybe that was my own like geek thing because I look at GPS endlessly. So I haven't worked it out yet. That's one answer. But that is actually compounded by, actually, the second part of the answer to your previous question about play in my personal life.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  For the pandemic, I was in Chile and I discovered not only like this old way of literary play, but also started climbing again and being a lot more, spending a lot more time in the mountains. And so that is, that opens an entirely new chapter in terms of physical exertion and risk. And I'm not like a martial arts guy, but still, you know, I like to.

• 2:00:31Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you and I both know Jason Neimer, the co-founder of AcroYoga. So you have no excuse not to do Acro.

• 2:00:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna try to get out of it as much as I can.

• 2:00:44Tim Ferriss?

  Which is probably, I mean, one of the most similar forms of play if we map between sort of bonobos and chimps and humans, right? I mean, that would seem to be, I'm not gonna say completely, but copy and pasted from these primates. And I mean, it definitely seems to scratch some type of itch. I've never, with the exception of maybe some weird injury, never had an AcroYoga session where I'm like, wow, I really wish I hadn't done that session. Like you always feel better afterwards. Checks so many boxes. So I want to give him credit, Jason, where credit is due, since he's the one who also introduced us. You know, to come back to that travel question, or how they know where to forage, you know,

• 2:01:29Tim Ferriss?

  two things come to mind for me. One that is equally mysterious. In some respects, which is a story told in a book called Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, which is a spectacular book. And he talks about traveling with field biologists and at multiple points observing, say, a wolf pack that would get up, point in one direction, and just head off. And they would trek for, this is in deep snow too. I mean, this is calorically, energetically expensive, right? This decision has consequences. And they would travel for multiple days and then intersect perfectly with a migrating caribou herd that happened to be traveling sort of the opposite side of this triangle. And you

• 2:02:14Tim Ferriss?

  just have to ask yourself, okay, how does that happen exactly? And there are, you know, maybe it's a seasonal thing, maybe the caribou are doing that constantly. So it's really just like intersecting with a highway, although by the story and the description, it didn't seem to be the case. I find it very exciting that there are so many open questions, right? Because it seems like at every point in human history, we more or less thought we had it all figured out. I mean, this is true during like the Alexandrian periods. This is true with the Egyptians. It's true for hunter gatherers. I mean, by and large, like, we had it figured out. Maybe our explanatory model was gods and this and that and the

• 2:02:55Tim Ferriss?

  other thing. But one has to assume that, as one doctor said to me, 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don't know which 50%. The other hypothesis that comes to mind as you're talking about bonobos and foraging behavior, and we don't have to get into this, but people should look it up on Wikipedia at the very least, is I believe it's called the drunken monkey hypothesis. And the drunken monkey hypothesis is a hypothesis that humans are predisposed to alcoholism and ethanol abuse because we were rewarded for being highly attuned. From an evolutionary perspective, to fermenting fruit.

• 2:03:40Tim Ferriss?

  And that that was one olfactory cue that we use to locate food sources. And that that is one partial explanation, or maybe complete explanation, for why we are so predisposed to alcoholism as humans, which I thought was pretty interesting. I haven't gone too deeply into it, but it face value seems to make some sense to me. And I know we have gone a lot longer than planned, Dr. Isabel, so I want to be respectful of your time. And also, I think both of us probably need a little bit, speaking of something calorically expensive, this conversation, I think, is probably calorically expensive, so we could

• 2:04:25Tim Ferriss?

  use some food and blood glucose. But is there anything, and we'll do a round two at some point, this has been so much fun, and I didn't even get through 5% of the notes I have in front of me. So, no shortage of things to discuss. Is there anything that you would like to mention before we come to a close for this round one? People can find you online on Twitter, @isabellebehnck, we'll link to that in the show notes, instagram.com/isabelle_benk. And we will include all of these in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast, with links to all the resources mentioned. Anything else that you would like to bring up?

• 2:05:09Tim Ferriss?

  Any other comments, complaints, requests of my audience, anything at all, before we bring this to a close?

• 2:05:15Speaker 03

  Thank you, Tim. Two things. One, the comment on the Instagram and Twitter. It's basically, I love feedback, because I think nature evolves through feedback. I'm not very big on Twitter, I think I'm being publishing more in Instagram. Mainly through a form of play because I discovered for myself that taking pictures is fun. So they're not necessarily great, but it's a way of playing. So anyway, if anyone wants to kind of interact there, that's a, and I welcome the good, bad and the ugly. So that's fun for me. I love to learn. And then the second point was in relation to your comment about the drunken monkey hypothesis.

• 2:05:56Speaker 03

  I do think it's a partial explanation because as you will know by now, my bias is to go back to origins and take you a little bit further back in time. The reason why we have, ask yourself, why would we have the machinery for being drawn to fermentation in first place? Think about that. I think the answer of that is play because play is about the machinery for a kind of biological excitement and intensity seeking. And so the overlap of abuse, substance abuse, but also creativity and risk taking. I think a lot of these reward mechanisms are linked.

• 2:06:38Speaker 03

  And this is a huge topic and it's complicated because we go both on the light side and the dark side of things like creativity, which should not be spoken lightly. But let me just leave that maybe for the next time.

• 2:06:54Tim Ferriss?

  We'll save that for chapter two and for people who, you bring up a great point, actually, which is, I mean, many great points. The assumption that our ancestors sought out fermented fruit as a food source may be off base. Because there are tons of animals or solely as a food source might be misplaced. Because if you look at many different species throughout the animal kingdom, you find examples of seeking inebriation, right? You find tons, tons, all over the place. So, you know, reindeer and lapland like to have fun too. People can look up that story in the origins of Santa Claus if you want some extra credit reading.

• 2:07:39Tim Ferriss?

  But Isabel Behncke, so nice to see you. It is so lovely to spend time together and to have a chance to explore all these things. You have so many other stories. You have so many other interests. We didn't even get to your photographing of dead animals.

• 2:07:58Tim Ferriss?

  Gonna leave that, leave that as a teaser. There are so many, so many interesting side alleys to take and we will share that with, with everyone in round two at some point, but thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:08:13Speaker 03

  Lovely. Thank you so much for leading such a wonderful dance.

• 2:08:18Tim Ferriss?

  Hasta la próxima. And for everybody listening, thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, be a little kinder than is necessary and take care.

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

  Hasta la próxima. Gracias.

• 2:08:31Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric

• 2:09:16Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 2:09:41Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy to use app. Now, you might ask yourself, very reasonably, there are 2,000 plus apps for meditation, why would I use Headspace? Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research. Headspace is backed by 25 published studies on its benefits, 600,000 Five star reviews and more than 60 million downloads. So if people keep telling you to try meditation and you're like, when would I do that? When would I possibly have time? You should check out Headspace. If you have 10 minutes, Headspace can change your life. Headspace offers a really light lift and a lot of features to keep you going,

• 2:10:26Tim Ferriss?

  which is part of the reason that I've used Headspace for years now. So whatever the situation, Headspace can really help you feel better. Overwhelmed? Headspace has a three-minute SOS meditation for you. Need some help falling asleep? Headspace has wind down sessions their members swear by. And for parents, Headspace even has morning meditations you can do with your kids. Headspace's approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. And it really starts with very, very simple practices. And if you look at my case, for instance, I just went through one of the basics today with the co-founder, Andy. I think it's Puttacom, could be Puttycomb, I'm not sure.

• 2:11:08Tim Ferriss?

  But a former monk turned into co-founder of Headspace, has the most soothing hypnotic voice imaginable. And I did a three-minute meditation, something like that. It's easy, it's fundamental, and it always puts me in a better space. So I'm going through the basics. Even though I've meditated for years, I'm going through the basics once again. And I would suggest to anyone that they consider starting there. Headspace makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you on your schedule, anytime, anywhere. We all want to feel happier, we all want more peace, and Headspace is meditation made simple. Go to Headspace.com/Tim. That's Headspace.com/Tim for a free one-month trial with access to Headspace's full library of meditations

• 2:11:53Tim Ferriss?

  for every conceivable, possible situation. You can break glass in case of emergency in almost any situation and find something on Headspace. This is the best deal offered right now for Headspace? So check it out. Go to Headspace.com/Tim today.

• 2:12:10Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike. And I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 2:12:54Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low, but suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita, but for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer, things clicked, and bam, company was born.

• 2:13:38Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded, there's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends, three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their Master Chief, marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting, and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. For a limited time, you can get a free Element sample pack. With any purchase. It's the perfect way to try all of their flavors.

• 2:14:23Tim Ferriss?

  Or if you're feeling generous, sharing with a friend who might enjoy. This special offer is available here at this link. Drink LMNT.com/Tim. That's Drink Element, again, Drink LMNT.com/Tim.