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

And if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you're much more likely to patent in general, but you're probably going to patent in computers.

But if you grow up in Boston, it's going to be biotech.

So having a father or mother who did biotech and then growing up in Boston, it's an increasing – you're even more likely in biotech.

And this is true even if you move to New York.

So if you look at people in New York who are from Silicon Valley and from Boston, the Bostoners are more likely to patent in biotech and the Silicon Valley kids are more likely to patent in computing.

So all the same rules apply.

Well, I guess I was thinking, so the model here is what to focus your efforts on.

So it's the throwing model.

Yeah.

So if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you focus your efforts on learning how to code or whatever.

Yeah.

And so that means that's where you're likely to make the innovation.

Yeah.

So that's definitely something I've thought about and I wrote about in Secret, which is that as the rate of cultural change gets faster – and we sort of talked about this with environmental change –

The value of older and older members of the previous generation declines because the world that they grew up in and that they honed their skills to is quite different from the current world.

So you would expect the degree to which, I mean, optimally, you would look less far back or you would look to relatively younger individuals to get your inspiration from because the world they adapted to is closer to the world you're going to need to adapt to.

Yeah, no, I mean, I definitely think it's pretty interesting and holds great potential for expanding the collective brain.

There are little things in there which might make one worry.

So if you study the history of innovation, you find out that, for example, serendipitous meetings are super important.

So there's a great paper on Silicon Valley showing that companies will cross-reference each other's patents more likely when the people at those companies tend to frequent the same coffee shops and they track people on their cell phones and stuff to figure this out.

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