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

The one way that countries or whatever the political institution is could address that would be doing this thing that I've previously called like domesticating the competition.

So sports teams constantly renew themselves by competing.

Firms live and die and renew themselves over time.

Like you said, companies will start off being super great and then they get too big and then they get kind of inefficient and then eventually they disappear.

Yeah.

None of them last forever.

And that seems to be true of political units.

But in principle, you could have at least some renewal processes.

So democracy potentially provides a renewal process, although there are things like the institutions that the government builds that are hard to renew.

So like one simple political idea is I think when you create a new department, it should have the same thing that cells have where at a certain time they time out.

And you got to make a new one.

And that's because just the way human bureaucracies institutions work is they kind of corrode from the interior, from the inside, just the way cancer spreads in a cell.

So you just got to kill it and make a new one.

So we could institute that.

But I guess the idea hasn't quite caught on yet.

I mean, there are bits and pieces of it around.

So it's not like it's unused.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, the Roman Empire didn't say, you know, we got to redo everything.

Why not adapt democracy and we could have a – you know, nobody does that.

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