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

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

So what we actually do is different than what would maximize innovation.

Yeah, that's something I'm really interested in figuring out.

And one thing that is, I'm still, I don't have a full answer to this question, but one thing that is clear is that there's something special about face-to-face interactions.

So something like whether, even in the 21st century, whether two cities have direct long-haul flights between them or direct flights between them increases the flow of ideas between those places.

But we know these places are connected by the internet, whereas that effect doesn't seem as good

And part of this is that people have to build trust probably before we start sharing ideas and we're more likely – and the more different someone is from us, the more you need that trust.

So some of the research suggests that this effect is even bigger when places are more culturally different.

And this is interesting because they're probably more valuable to each other when they're more culturally different.

But that's then the face time and being in the same place is even more valuable.

So that's the kind of direction I'm going.

And I also – I'm not satisfied that – I still think that there should be exactly what you said, which is that the internet should have caused more innovation.

I'm just not satisfied that we've fully determined the best way to figure that out.

Yeah.

Right.

So, I mean, I definitely, sometimes I'm interpreted as saying that there are no, like, genetic differences among individuals.

Definitely think there are genetic differences among individuals that affect their likelihood.

But I think when we take the individual, we often import into our thinking about them the person's life history.

So, for example, Einstein, when he was a patent clerk, so he wasn't succeeding as an academic, he and his friends got together in something called the Olympian Academy, they called themselves, which was just a group of like five people who would get together and they would read the interesting books at the time.

And if you look at the books that they read, and historians have done a lot of work on this, all the major ideas that go into special relativity were read and processed by the Olympia Academy before they do it.

So the idea that, you know, people think that time is relative.

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