Joseph Henrich

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1,282 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 25 May

Joseph Henrich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · 12 Mar 2025 podcast

But the DNA of the expanding group suggests a larger population.

So those would have been two different collective brains there as well.

Right.

So, I mean, one of the things we know, even in young children, there's a tendency to preferentially learn from healthier, more successful individuals.

And so if you're processing it better, so something like bitter cassava, which has cyanide in it, if you just eat bitter cassava, it won't taste great.

So if you then rinse it somewhat, it'll taste better, and maybe you could eat it, but you're going to accumulate cyanide over the long run, so it doesn't kill you right away.

Right.

And – but if you do this whole long process that the populations in South America developed, then you're totally fine.

You never get any accumulation.

So you can imagine that initially this is going to be very strong and people are going to sort of do sensible things to – but then it gets a little more mysterious.

And we know this because bitter cassava gets transported to Africa and Africans immediately begin eating it improperly processed and getting goiter and the cyanide processing that goes along with it.

So then that's going to be a slow evolution where groups that do this are going to be more successful and individual families are going to be more successful.

So, for example, you might have a household where they process the cassava more seriously than another family.

And they're going to have more kids and they're going to be like, oh, that family is really good.

And then people copy what they do in all kinds of ways.

But one of them could be copying recipes.

But I think if you go back to a world where...

You know, there's a lot of improperly processed meat.

People don't have refrigerators.

And the leading cause of death in children is diarrhea.

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