Joseph Henrich

speaker

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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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Hidden Brain · The Past is Never Dead · 25 May 2026 podcast

But that's not something that automatically happens.

Yeah.

So it increased people's ability to coordinate, but it also began to affect other things like payment schedules.

So once you have clocks, you can pay people by the hour.

And then at the same time, you get the spreading of piece rates.

So people begin manufacturing, markets are spreading across these towns.

And then if you pay a piece rate, so per horseshoe that you're making, then people begin to think about, and if they have a clock, they can figure out, well, how many horseshoes can I make in an hour?

Maybe I can make five.

Well, what if I could make six?

Then you'd be in

think about the world like that.

Yeah.

So I was starting a project and I was hiring some students from the University of the South Pacific, excellent research assistants, were assisting me in this village and we were doing interviews and observations on daily life.

We were doing some behavioral experiments, all kinds of different things.

So I was kind of running the project in the style I was accustomed to, which meant we had morning meetings and certain appointments and I would give people a certain amount of time to finish things.

And initially, I wasn't having much luck.

Although the research assistants were excellent in many ways, they didn't seem to be very tied into the clock the way I was.

And so then I bought everyone watches.

So I figured, you know, maybe I can solve this with technology.

And of course, I was paying everyone.

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