[Stone Age] - Innovation Locks: The 5 Progress Blockers for 97% of Human History

The Hand Axe Conundrum

[00:00:00]

In a glass case at the British Museum sits a slightly unremarkable stone axe. It was crafted 300,000 years ago by some of the very first homo sapiens human beings. Now this ax doesn't have a handle, so calling it an ax feels a little bit generous. It's basically a pointy rock.

What's fascinating is this. The design of the Acts is virtually identical to ones made a million years before it by Homoerectus are. early ancestors, Even more surprisingly, it's virtually identical to ones made. Relatively speaking. Very recently. In fact, only 8,000 years ago, humans finally invented handles for our AEs. And to me, that tells us a story.

We think of ourselves as these relentless innovators always pushing forward, refining our [00:01:00] tools, bending nature to our will.

But the reality is that for 290,000 years, or 97% of the time, humans walk the earth, we were pretty happy with a pointy rock

Something happened 10,000 years ago that led to a technology explosion. It took us from pointy rocks to smartphones, gene editing, quantum computing. If we had the same brains, the same hands, the same raw human potential, what the hell was keeping us frozen for so long?

And what happened to push the first domino of human progress?

Episode Goals

Welcome to How to Change the World, the History of Innovation. I'm Sam Webster Harris

in the podcast, we are [00:02:00] uncovering timeless lessons from the history of human progress, extracting systems level insights that you might use to change the world today. This is our first full feature length episode. Before we start moving chronologically through history's most important innovations, we are zooming out to understand why innovation was rare for so long, we'll, unpack five hidden forces that kept humanity. In neutral for nearly 300,000 years.

I'm starting with this topic because it's foundational for understanding all of human progress after it.

These governing laws of innovation that we'll discuss, certainly apply today and will always apply in the future.

Whilst we're here, we'll also challenge myths about caveman psychology.

Explore what innovation really requires, and ask what happened to the 12,000 generations of potential geniuses who never had the chance to shine? By the end of this episode, you'll see why innovation isn't just about smart people with good ideas.

It's about [00:03:00] braking systems that keep us stuck

and we'll see that doing that unleash the most extraordinary transformation in our species history

Before we kick off, there is one important thing to note. That is, of course, we are discussing a period before recorded history. So we are relying on two main sources of information. Firstly, the archeological record that helps us understand the activities and situations of different times. The second source is using anthropologists living with uncontacted tribes and studying their ways of life and psychology.

Of course we can't travel back in time a hundred thousand years to see exactly what was going on, and this is the closest thing we can do.

And now on that, let's dig in.

1 - SURVIVAL

Imagine Einstein. Yes, that's Einstein, but he was born 50,000 years ago in a small hunter-gatherer band. He had the same 160 iq, the same absurd hair, but our stone age Einstein wasn't [00:04:00] sketching space time equations in the dirt. He was probably just a guy with an uncanny talent for not eating the wrong berries. Genius, yes, but tragically misapplied for almost all of human history, even the brightest minds were trapped in a prison built from hunger, exhaustion, fear, and we are looking at the first lock on innovation, and that is survival.

Energy requirements

Innovation takes energy, not just metaphorically, but also literally. You need calories to fuel your brain, to gather materials, to test ideas and fail repeatedly, and then of course to teach others what you learned.

But if you're living on the knife edge of starvation, you're not building a prototype, you're building a fire and hoping you don't burn the last root vegetable by accident. Obesity is a completely modern invention. For most of human history, people survived with a 10% margin of error

on their calorie budget

if they were lucky.

Now, imagine that you are a breastfeeding mother using half of your calories just to keep a baby alive. [00:05:00] Even that margin can disappear pretty fast. A few bad days of foraging a drought and your baby's gone. That means allowing your Einstein husband to test a hair-brained foraging technique idea that might not work well.

You're not gonna let that happen.

In our modern day, we make jokes about how much we think about food, but honestly, we can't. Comprehend the amount of time humans used to put into thinking about food. Our entire day was built around food.

There's a really good quote from Jared Diamond talking about the ano Indian tribe in Bolivia. He says, the overwhelming preoccupation is with food. Two of the most commonest expressions are my stomach is empty and give me some food. In fact, the significant of sex and food is reversed between Siro and US Westerners.

The Syria's strongest, anxieties are all about food. They can have sex virtually whenever they want, and sex compensates for food whilst here in the West, our strongest [00:06:00] anxieties are about sex. We have food virtually whenever we want, and eating compensates for sexual frustration.

A fascinating quote. Jared Diamond spent half his life studying and living . With some of the last tribes of humanity and certainly has some ideas worth spending time on. So I'll use him a bit this episode,

Importantly, we can already see that, a lot of how we think about the world was flipped. These days we think money keeps the world going round, but food was the original wage earned by trading our time.

Which leads us to the next issue, which is time.

Time Scarcity

The hads of people of the Serengeti are one of the last living hunter gatherer societies. They spend about six hours and 40 minutes a day foraging. Which might sound better than your nine to five, but a somewhat tedious aspect of the job is that they have to do it every day without exception.

There aren't weekends, holidays, there isn't retirement, and then all the other jobs like making tools, fixing shelters, keeping your children alive, avoiding being eaten by a lion, [00:07:00] et cetera. That fills the rest of your time.

Also, things like food preparation takes a bit longer. At gob leaky tepe, which may or may not be the right way to pronounce it, it was one of the earliest known settlements.

We can see they had a processing technique for wild grains that would take about 14 labor hours per kilo, which is roughly 14 hours more than it takes to put a bag of flour into your shopping trolley. Researchers estimate could be wrong, , that prehistoric humans had about less than two hours of discretionary time per day, .

Which after a full day of hunting, digging for tubers, pounding grains, well you can see that some of that goes towards recovery and gossip and perhaps not innovation.

And when I compare this to myself, I think it's pretty alarming to consider that if I have all day to do a task, I can still waste. Most of it, if not all of the day, arranging folders, opening emails, not answering the emails, looking in the fridge, thinking about all the things I should have said in a hypothetical conversation that will never actually [00:08:00] happen.

Luckily for me, I don't need to spend 40 hours grinding grains. If I want a pancake, I can just have one. So it's a humbling but slightly nice realization to see what a luxurious life I live With all this time to waste. I mean, how many times have you complained about wasting time?

Probably so many. But the cool thing is you can, yet that literally wasn't an option.

you probably know what they say about good ideas coming to you in the shower or when you aren't trying.

So it's quite possible our ancestors simply didn't have much time for good ideas. Many thousands of years later. After the Gki Tepe settlement, we found some grain processing improvements in Jericho. They built the first grinding stones.

That meant processing grain could be 60 or 70% more efficient. But it took thousands of years for humans to figure out, because the first 99 experiments might kill you. Which leads us to the next issue, which is risk.

Risk and Psychological Safety

When [00:09:00] survival margins are thin, conservatism becomes a very, very rational strategy.

The kan people of the Kalahari, . They had about 115 edible plant species in their territory, and they knew of all of them, but they regularly ate just 14 of them. And you might be like, wait, wait, wait. Why are they ignoring 88% of their potential food sources? Because trying new things is really risky when you're living on the edge. isn't like the modern day where we perhaps try the new Thai Fusion restaurant risk.

This is the, if I'm wrong, my children might watch me die in agony from poisoning risk.

As Jared Diamond says, our ancestors lived by the principle. Don't fix what isn't. Catastrophically broken, and it's a perfectly rational strategy. When you don't have hospitals, you don't have food reserves, you don't have Google to search symptoms of poisonous barriers.

It becomes a way of living. It's not just an individual caution. It was baked into the social fabric [00:10:00] through what we might call collective paranoia, taboo booze against camping near old trees weren't just superstitious nonsense. They prevented deaths from falling branches.

Some mystical food preparation. Ritual wasn't a pointless ceremony. They were time tested protocols for not dying of diarrhea now your tribe might not know why the old ways work, but they know that people who stray from them tend to die horribly.

The Ksan, ignoring 88% of their potential food sources feels a bit like Kodak's infamous hesitation to embrace digital photography despite the fact that Kodak actually invented it. But you can see the same fundamental risk calculation, the known security of established practices versus the uncertain rewards of innovation.

The film business was working just fine until, of course it wasn't.

Innovation requires not just energy and time, but psychological safety. When the cost of failure is death or even just public humiliation, caution becomes a survival trait. [00:11:00] So summing up our prehistoric Einstein's constraints. It turns out genius isn't enough genius without certainty of a good meal, without time to waste and unable to take risks

is a lost talent.

So we see that before we could reach for the stars, we had to solve the problem of tomorrow's dinner.

2 - Culture

And that leads us to our next section, let's say you've cracked the code on a brilliant new hunting technique. You think it's efficient, elegant, frankly, genius.

You expect celebration and adoration from your tribe. But no, not only do people think your ideas suck, they think you suck. Your parents disapprove. The elders give you a side eye like you've broken the sun. Even your mates are muttering that you've gotten ideas in your head.

Welcome to the second great innovation lock. And that is culture.

Originally, our culture lock was controlled by the elders. When I was young, I thought it was a good life [00:12:00] strategy to stay up all night with my mate Josh, playing crash Bandicoot team racing and eating Haribo. Sadly, my parents didn't agree.

It is human to accept the rules of your elders because they know best, even if we deeply suspect they are wrong. , however, imagine growing up seeing one of your friends convulse in a fit and die by ignoring a warning of what to eat. Or maybe another friend didn't use a chosen path to collect water and became lost, collapsed, and is found weeks later being eaten by vultures and maggots.

For kids today, Haribo are verifiably delicious and don't kill you, but you can see how our ancestors might be more accepting of culture and the practices of their elders.

Culture in New Guinea

, so let's look at some ideas of what this culture might have actually looked like.

Studying tribes in New Guinea anthropologists saw that the adoption of a new sweet potato variety wasn't as easy as saying, Hey, let's try this new one. It in fact took 25 years and seven stages of approval processes. [00:13:00] That's enough time to build the Panama Canal. Twice , at one stage of the procedure, a ritual would be performed, and if the wind blew in the wrong direction , or a suspicious bird flew overhead, then the innovation was rejected.

. Not because these people were stupid, but because they were smart. In a dangerous world, in the absence of any science, the elders were the dataset. They carried the memory of what happened, and when someone made bad call. 40 years ago

This kept communities alive through disasters that they might face once or twice in a lifetime.

in societies without writing They weren't resisting change because they were dumb. They were doing it because people who change things often died.

Results of trying ideas

Okay, but what happened if you pushed ahead anyway with one of your ideas?

Well, in the Rugged Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the four tribe has some brutal lessons for us. They go about their superstitious lives amongst the mountains and rainforests and , anthropologists have found that nine outta 10 violent conflicts in the [00:14:00] tribe start from someone introducing a new idea.

Literally,

the four's most pride possession is their pigs. They boast to each other . About how big their pig is, and all trade is done in units of pigs. Entire wars, in fact, have been started over a pig being stolen. Now, you'd think that any idea to improve the rearing of pigs, like better enclosures or feeding methods would be a good and celebrated thing,

, but statistically If you did something, anything to improve the whole pig situation. you had a one in seven chance of being killed.

One guy improved a pigpen , and quite unrelatedly.

A child then died and so the pigpen inventor was strangled to death.

You can easily imagine you have a new idea for a crop and the crop gets a blight as crops do and you get killed.

It really doesn't bode well.

Imagine today you bought a better espresso machine to your office kitchen, ,

and you ended up getting murdered for it.

. It certainly puts you off the idea of trying [00:15:00] things.

It is a funny idea until you realize that it still happens, although perhaps for different reasons. If you consider, how much money propaganda and political greasing , has been wielded by the oil, tobacco, and sugar industries , to prevent adoption of new innovations.

Or how Blockbuster kept their head in the sand. , as new technologies completely replaced their core business, we can see that culture protects itself ,

even if it ignores or kills the messenger in the process.

The Grandmother Hypothesis

However, the good news is there is a plot twist, and her name is grandma.

There is a theory out there the grandmas might have been the most , innovative member of ancient societies. They were the main holders of memories of old food sources. they were important storytellers connecting younger generations to their ancestors and relatives in other tribes.

So why might grandmothers become a source of innovation? Well, , because post-menopausal women had no risk of pregnancy, fewer daily responsibilities, more life experience, and [00:16:00] crucially less to lose. And that adds up to making them the world's first safe innovation lab.

It's certainly possible that the real startup incubators weren't in Silicon Valley, but in huts run by silver head rebels, with nothing to prove and just enough SAS to tweak the system, which I, for one think is pretty cool.

Widowhood statistics

But even in this one safer space of humanity, there are a few brutal issues as we've learned.

Lots of things could kill you a slight scratch, walking the weather, turning during an expedition, a line or a wolf. And in fact for many tribes, trees were the biggest cause of death. That is falling out of a tree, a tree falling on you, or even falling over the tree. Is all much less impressive than death by Python, but statistically more likely.

We don't even need to get started on things like violence wars, revenge killings for things like a pig knocking over someone's wall. And the issue with all of this is that it led to a lot of [00:17:00] widows.

So if we look at the K for example, , those nomadic hunter gatherers on the west of the orange Kalahari desert, they're sharing their dusty world . With hyena and wildebeest, and they are so brave. They're known to even steal kills from lions when times are hard.

But this means that a shocking 53% of women end up widowed by the age of 35.

This is certainly hard to wrap our heads around compared to modern statistics The issue for these widows is that it's not just emotionally devastating, but also an economic and survival catastrophe. Gone is your free time and relaxed social standing.

You have less food security and less physical security, and that results in a lot more work and a lot less time for any free thinking beyond your immediate survival.

So a pretty bad retirement situation. ,

Kaulong Tribe Widow killing

but as my partner's mother likes to say, things can never be so bad that they can't get worse.

At least you weren't a member of the cow long tribe in the Hinterland of Papua New Guinea,

whilst they learn to live off the odd fish [00:18:00] fruit or snail, they somehow developed possibly the worst custom I have ever heard of. If a woman was widowed, she would immediately call for her brothers to strangle her, not murderously. She would sit calmly

and she'd often have to persuade her brothers to even do it, which is insane. As ecologist and sociologists, we try to wrap our head around some human behaviors, and the mind doesn't always compute.

So that belongs in some of the terrible family traditions,

right up there with Monopoly at Christmas.

On this topic, there is a similar and less brutal version.

Quite separately, created by the Danny Tribe in Indonesia. For them, a widow would merely cut off. All or most of her fingers upon widowhood which again seems insane. Although before you think it's just the women that have bad traditions, the men ceremoniously cut off a right finger whenever they got married, which certainly curbs enthusiasm for lots of wives at least.

On the flip side of all of this, the Danny tribe , who were also notoriously obsessed with their pigs. [00:19:00] Reportedly have the best and most elaborate pig festivals on earth, so yes, some strange and interesting ideas we've looked at, I don't want to give you the impression that these specific cultural practices were necessarily common.

I'm more interested in showing , the diversity of crazy things that we come up with

we had the one small window of society that had the best opportunity of being innovative, our grandmothers, , but they still often had the odds stacked against them and in some special cases were actively eliminated.

Catalhayuk - 1000 years of stasis

So to round this section on Culture Up, I have a fun story that shows the timescales of this effect At cattle hu one of the earliest large settlements of humans. Archeologists found 18 successive layers of rebuild houses. Each generation building exactly the same layout as before.

Same cooking, half location, same sleeping areas, same tool, storage spots, burial places for over 1000 years. Imagine if you suggested moving the bed slightly closer to the window [00:20:00] and you a shut down and outcast for violating a thousand years of tradition. it's honestly Hard to imagine how these people thought , and how ingrained conformity could be into these societies.

So all in all, we've learned that culture is weird. It's sticky, it's self-protective, and it doesn't care how smart you are. . The only people with a real shot at changing things were the ones with time tolerance , and no more kids to raise. So yes, don't trust pig farmers, but maybe do trust your grandma.

On that, we have covered the first two big innovation locks, survival, and culture.

3 - Knowledge

Now we enter the third problem knowledge

it is easy to forget that every thought ever conceived by our ancestors existed only in their minds, these fragile fleshy vessels.

Prone to forgetting things and of course, dying

Welcome to the knowledge black hole. As quickly as ideas are created, they are [00:21:00] sucked out of existence.

without writing or your preferred symbolic storage system.

raw intelligence is not the blocker, as such as an inability to record anything intelligent,

which raises a philosophical question

there's the classic when a tree falls in a forest with no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? And in this case, we could ask, did anybody have good ideas without a way to record good ideas? Well, I think we can assume they did.

Humans are natural storytellers. Before writing was invented, everything we knew was passed down orally through stories, songs, and rituals. These are so ingrained into our psyche because they were so important to us and allowed us to keep hold of these ideas. And this worked well enough for survival knowledge, good ideas, like how to find edible plants or hunt game, , but it wasn't so good for preserving very complex ideas or great works of imagination.

Like one of Shakespeare's plays. . Or Hawaiian [00:22:00] pizza. Okay. That was a contentious stance, but it's my podcast .

And

Unlike our ancestors. I can take creative risks.

Which leads us to the question, what were our ancestors doing with their creativity?

When we look at tribes, we see that some have remembered over 1000 plant species by heart. , they used mnemonic devices like songs to encode planting seasons , and rituals to pass down knowledge. , But, there is a catch learning. All of that did take years, sometimes decades. Now, let's say a play comes or some other natural disaster, the few learned scholars amongst them die and poof, all that knowledge, all that wisdom vanishes as if it never existed at all.

Losing knowledge

Well, you can imagine this happening on a global scale for tens of thousands of years, knowledge wasn't so cumulative and sticky like a snowball rolling down a hill of fresh snow. Knowledge was more fragile, like sunglasses prone to getting sat on or lost and never seen again.

If [00:23:00] just one generation became lazy or didn't need the idea for a bit or worse, they were wiped out by a disease or war. Well, the next generation had to start again from scratch. There are haunting examples of this knowledge problem from many isolated islands.

Take Tasmania, it was cut off from mainland Australia after the last ice age.

After the locals had spent about 7,000 years alone,

one generation of Tasmanians forgot how to fish. Not because they were lazy, but because the fragile oral chain broke,

and that generation lost the thread.

We don't know why. , maybe the fish just didn't show up for a few years, or maybe some people became ill. . The result was that when settlers arrived and they were eating their fish, the locals thought fish were disgusting, And that wasn't just a loss, it was also a negative cultural drift. Imagine, let's say we forgot how to use cutlery, and then we started deciding forks were a conspiracy.

, it's so strange to think, but sometimes when we look at history, it's like [00:24:00] humanity keeps building sandcastles only for the tide to wash them away.

Maths

And on that, let's talk about maths or lack of it.

Imagine you're building a pyramid, not out of ambition, but because your boss said so and he's a sun God, after all. While your first problem is you don't have Excel or a calculator or an abacus. . And the second is that you don't know how to use base 10. you're counting by tapping finger joints and shouting numbers, like 12 and three thirds. it's okay. it works for counting sheep, but not much more.

Early human civilizations didn't have things like positional notation or the concept of zero or basically anything resembling modern maths. There is a great saying that if you want to pony, you have to shovel crap. And I will extend that with my own saying, if you want a pyramid, you have to learn geometry.

Communication and Language

Right now, finally, on this section of knowledge, let's talk about communication and language. Imagine if every small town in [00:25:00] the UK had its own language, not just its own accent, like its own language. Well, that's what it's like on Papua New Guinea. It has 839 languages across an island the size of California.

, the average tribe member might speak five to eight languages just to survive, but even then, the entire world of people they could speak to was just a few hundred people wide.

The issue here is this linguistic fragmentation meant that knowledge stayed local. If someone in one tribe invented a brilliant tool or technique, or even a good song to remember it well, it might not spread beyond their immediate neighbors.

Let's say someone invents the wheel a hundred miles away, you might not hear about it. Or if you did, you'd perhaps be hearing that there's a circular demon rock that makes noises.

So, although our ancient diversity of language was beautiful, , it was a huge barrier to knowledge.

Ice Age Picasso Paradox

so that gets us back to the sad fact I started this section with geniuses , weren't necessarily rarer than [00:26:00] today, per thousand people, but it creates what's called the Ice Age Picasso Paradox.

Humanity may have had the brains, , but not the infrastructure to make those brains count.

Let's imagine Shakespeare wasn't born 500 years ago, but instead 50,000 years ago.

He imagines a brilliant play. He shocks his tribe with tragic stories of widows being killed before they could share their brilliant idea. He has them rolling around in stitches with well timed jokes about pizza and sunglasses. Well, one, one can dream at least

. But his pesky and persistent issue, of course, is that there's no paper, no printing press, and there isn't even an audience beyond his tribe that understands him. So his works die with him unsung and forgotten. Thus, without knowledge systems and transfer systems, humanity wondered through millennia fragmented, not because of a lack of brilliance, but because a lack of bridges between our minds.

They were lonely islands [00:27:00] separated by space and time.

Okay, three out of the five locks down,

4 - Mobility Constraints

so imagine now that you've broken the first three barriers, , you are well fed. You've had an idea that your tribe likes and they still like you. And maybe something about it is recorded, but now you've hit the next immovable wall. You can't build anything or take it anywhere.

WhyMobility problems.

The first of which is because they were too damn busy moving about.

For most of our human history,. We wondered, not aimlessly, but purposefully as nomads following the migrations of animals. The ripening of fruits and the occasional whisper of more hospitable weather movement was how we survived. But movement also made it hard to settle in every sense of the word.

to move lightly is to live lightly,

to carry. Little is to [00:28:00] create little

and to wonder. Daily is not always to wonder deeply.

Hadza Nomadism

I'll give you an example. The Hadza people of Tanzania were one of the last surviving hunter gatherer societies, they carried their entire worldly possessions on their back, which was on average 6.8 kilos per person, or 15 pounds that is less than a carry on suitcase.

Thus, any tools that they might have were light and multipurpose.

So if you call back to the issue about it, taking 14 hours to grind a kilo of grain,

anything bulky that might help you with that, sadly gets left behind. Remember, in Jericho where they had the first grinding stones, those were immovable objects that weighed over 70 kilos or 200 pounds, , but having them made processing grain 10 times more efficient.

. The issue is that you can't drag a 70 kilo stone through the forest on the off Chancey, fancier quick porridge. No, you need a house. [00:29:00] You need roots and you need to stop moving.

These sorts of tools only exist when you stay in one place.

Thus, what could not be carried could not be created.

Digital Nomads

In fact, even today, mobility can kill momentum. Digital nomads, they travel far and wide, but they do give up having their own car or being able to see friends and family. , in 2017, for example, I co-founded a startup that was funded by an AI accelerator in Hong Kong. Very exciting. For some reason, the CEO decided we should move to a beach in Thailand. we were ahead of the curve on many things, building AI tools for software development. Before it was cool, but the mobility factor hit us hard between the facts. Like only one of us had a phone with a connection, which was our wifi hotspot, it made things like calls a nightmare.

in fact,, at one point a monitor lizard moved into my shower . And declared its territory. And it also turns out I have a slight intolerance to tofu and eating it every day made my bowel movements as [00:30:00] temperamental as our Skype calls,

So yeah, that company failed, surprisingly. , who'd have thought?

Um, but I digress. The point is, even in the age of portable technology, the cost of movement still taxes, creativity, even with all our modern solutions. , so you can only imagine how much harder it hit our ancestors.

Limited Travel Distance

But you might think surely being nomadic means that they could explore widely and have many trading partners learn from many sources. Well, simply put no, uh, despite traveling lightly, they also didn't travel that far. Most people spent their entire lives within a small radius of their birthplace. You could look at the Danny Tribe that I referenced earlier who treat their pigs better than their fingers. Studies show that 93% of D individuals never travel beyond a three day walk in any direction. Their world was a few valleys wide and if they went beyond that, they would find strangers, other [00:31:00] gods new dialects, and probably someone who wanted your pigs.

And I'll remind you just how many languages there were. If New Guinea is representative of the old world, then that's a new language every 15 kilometers. , so sure most people were multilingual. That allowed them to speak with the neighboring tribes to navigate family alliances and trade.

But even that wasn't enough to travel more than one or two tribes away.

Racism and war

To add to the language problem was that people were also deeply suspicious and somewhat racist towards their neighbors. Everyone outside your kin was essentially a threat. in Fact, children even grew up playing, shooting their hated enemy.

Neighbors , and family Feud could last for decades, often turning into wars. These wars could be slightly formal battles where two groups faced each other, , but the most likely tactic was raids and ambushes.

there was even the recording of the Ymo tribe inviting a neighbor to a feast, and after their weapons had been laid down, they'd simply slaughtered all of their neighboring tribe. . the treacherous [00:32:00] feast tactic a little like the red wedding in Game of Thrones. Simply put, this means that suspicion ran deep.

Limited Trade

And that leads us onto the topic of trade. Considering the last point, trade routes between tribes were understandably fragile. In most cases, tribes had some form of agreements for rights to walk a path through each other's land for the sake of meeting on peaceful terms or to trade something. Or maybe one tribe needed access to a water source, et cetera.

But if any neighboring tribe member was caught leaving the official pass, it was assumed that they were trying to steal something and trust was quickly lost.

. So this adds up to the result that exchanges did happen. And valuable items like obsidian could travel even hundreds of miles, . But that might even take a few hundred years. Surprisingly, for us these days, it was rare to see exchanges of food or day-to-day items, and no tribe was actually specialized in one thing as every member inside it was a generalist.

So there's little need to go [00:33:00] to one tribe to get your arrow shafts and another for your favorite tea.

, unless one tribe genuinely had a monopoly on some resource, it was more likely that trade might happen to simply cement some alliances. But all in all, it was very low key. And sadly everyone else didn't really trust you, didn't like your language and assumed you were probably cursed.

So a blocker on exchanging ideas and innovations.

No Stockpiling

That leads to the final issue for our nomadic lifestyle, which is the inability to stockpile. You ate what you had, you shared what you got, and you moved, So what might that look like? Well, no storage, no granaries, no cupboards, no stockpiling for winters, just moving on. Then no capital accumulation resources were consumed and not saved or reinvested.

That meant hand to mouth living with no long-term thinking.

And this led to the third principle of communal sharing. Ownership was actually a collective thing for a tribe, and it wasn't such a personal thing. Anyone that did hoard was considered deeply antisocial ,

and probably kicked out the tribe. [00:34:00] Which does all sound like kind of strange principles,

Feasting examples

but it makes sense. , I'll share a few of my favorite anthropological stories. To set the tone,

Daniel Everett, who lived with the Praha people of the Amazon, described how they adapted to scarcity.

The praha enjoy eating. Whenever there is food available, they eat it all. But if a praha visits the city, they are confused by western eating habits for their first meal outside the village.

Most eat greedily large quantities of protein and starch and salt, but for the second meal, they eat the same. By the third meal, , they begin to show frustration. They look genuinely puzzled, often asking, are we eating again back home? They would feast madly during abundance, eating until the food was gone.

Then shrugging off the next few days of hunger. The idea of having a regular meal just felt bizarre. They didn't plan for the future. They adapted to it. Telling Lee the oranges tribe of the Anderman, who during seasonal pochard runs, they would [00:35:00] run madly into the sea, drag back fish, roast, and eat as many of them as they could in cycles and repeat it.

Day after day until a week or two later, the fish were gone and the feast was over. There was no Tupperware, no freezer, no saving some for later, no awareness that saving was even an option.

The long story here is that mobility prioritizes short term adaptability , to survive, but sacrifice the possibility of long-term investment in thriving. So it's hardly a surprise when we look at our human nature to reactively worry about today and tomorrow. We rarely think in terms of decades and centuries, which is where the bigger cycles of world change operate.

Eurasia vs America Development

So whilst we're thinking big, I this is a good chance to zoom out and look at a fascinating natural experiment that will tie up the lessons we've learned in this section and leads us nicely to the final section. Why did civilization develop faster in Eurasia than in the Americas?

, Eurasians domesticated crops 2000 years earlier and they built cities [00:36:00] 4,000 years earlier.

So what the hell was stopping America? The land of the free home of the brave,

why lagging a casual 4,000 years behind on human development? Well, it wasn't culture or religion or even intelligence. No, the difference was geography. Eurasia runs east to west 12,000 kilometers of roughly similar climate.

That means crops, animals, technologies could travel horizontally with ease. If you domesticated a kumquat in China, it could thrive in Persia, Greece, or Italy.

And in case someone decides to fact check me, I should note that kumquats actually didn't leave China until the 18 hundreds, but the principle remains true. I just like the word kumquat Anyway.

In contrast, in America,

the continent runs north to south across jungles, deserts, mountain ranges. So if you try to move a tropical maze from Mexico to Canada, it dies. If you try to herd your llamas from Peru to Arizona, it would be a catastrophe. Or should [00:37:00] I say Armageddon? okay.

Terrible joke, but also a sad reality because llamas are awesome and who doesn't want Lama, especially when you have no way of carrying your stuff or pulling a plow and you are stuck 2000 years behind Europe.

All because of geography on that. If I had a llama, I'd call it Kendrick, Kendrick Lamar, Enough Willy thinking, let's thread this together. So far we've seen that innovation wasn't delayed because of stupidity. I.We had the brains and possibly terrible Lama jokes, but we were too hungry to think, too tribal to accept change, too forgetful to remember progress and too nomadic and stuck in the short term to store or spread the things we learned.

5 - Population Density

Now we can move on to the final innovation lock that kept our ancestors in relevant stasis for such a mind boggling, vast expense of time, even if everything we spoke about wasn't an issue, humans were still bound by the invisible hands of [00:38:00] demographics and population density.

For most of human history, human groups hovered around 50 to 150 people. Even after the Neolithic Revolution gave us, farming communities still rarely grew beyond that threshold. tiny tribes, tiny villages, tiny worlds. when you look into those tight-knit communities, Everyone knew everyone else. Inhabitants stuck with the program.

They were fanatical for a good rule, kind of like the Germans, but maybe worse. And as we've already covered, change, threatened survival, yada yada.

But the other reason this blocked innovation , is that they were too small to specialize . Everyone in the tribe was a generalist, a hunter, gatherer, cook cleaner, child minder, goat herder, whatever.

No one had the bandwidth to become just a potter or just a tool maker, let alone being just an ideas guy , who mostly sits around thinking

archeologists have estimated that true specialization only emerges when a [00:39:00] population crosses 500 people.

If you're below that, everyone's just too busy staying alive, That does feel like madness in our modern day where all our systems push us blindly into an individual role.

but it makes so much sense to think of our past. When you think about life in general, things just have to start more self-sufficient before they can specialize.

Evolution of Multicellular Life

A perfect example is that it took biology 3 billion years to solve a very similar problem.

Life on Earth began as unicellular organisms so small, you'd probably struggle to see them with your own eye. Each cell was a self-contained multitasker doing its own breathing, moving, pooping, replicating, et cetera, , and they did this for 3 billion years.

. These little individual cells were the universe's answer two? What is life?

It wasn't exactly the most thrilling stuff. Then one day there was a little miracle. The mitochondria, a specialized energy factory, evolved [00:40:00] to live inside some cells, allowing life to begin to scale.

Cells could now team up and specialize. They formed little teams and became organs.

These organs form bodies, and suddenly you get the weird and wonderful visible animals that leap and bite, breathe and mate, these sweaty, smelly, shouty, whiny emotional creatures, which are a bit more exciting to look at than an individual cell. And that's all because

of specialization in teamwork. Well, the same thing happened with humans, just like the mitochondria. Once we grew crops to develop a surplus energy resource, then humans hypothetically could scale up. Villages could become towns, people, could become the doctor or the builder or the woodworker, or for most people a farmer.

But crucially, systems emerged. And just like in biology, these early human organs markets, governments, temples were useless on their own, but very powerful [00:41:00] together,

. So that raises the question that why with crops wasn't this all solved instantly? Well, you might remember our old friend, the cattle Houk, who despite having crops and tools, they were the ones that rebuilt the same houses in the same layout for 18 generations, which is weird on many levels.

Not just the fact that these days we change our minds every 10 years on how a kitchen should be laid out, but more importantly that our towns and cities are constantly growing. We just don't stop building more and more houses. Yet they didn't have a single extra house for a thousand years.

Here they are with crops, tools. It's just so hard to imagine centuries passing by without a single change. Well, just like it takes evolution, time to make progress, it also takes culture. Time to evolve,

Dunbars Number

so this is a good point to use some systems thinking after a millennia of existing in a certain way, there were some inbuilt and powerful forces against us.

If you think of a tribe or [00:42:00] village, the small gathering of souls.

It is not merely a collection of people, but a delicate organism unto itself.

The tribe and village size limit of 150 people should sound very familiar to you because it is Dunbar's number, the theoretical limit of how many meaningful relationships a human brain can manage.Even today, modern companies still take it very seriously. Gore-Tex caps offices at 150 employees. Startups groan when they reach 50 employees and all their systems completely break when they get to 150. And why is this? Because coordination collapses beyond that point. culture fractures , and in the modern day, the email threads become unbearable

and most people in a meeting shouldn't even be in the meeting. However, unlike startups, ancient villages weren't necessarily trying to scale. They were just trying to not die. Remember the ethos if something isn't catastrophically broken. Don't try to fix it. Well, to grow a village would need structure, hierarchy, planning, power [00:43:00] centers.

But remember, this is a world where suggesting a new potato takes 25 years and possibly gets you executed so you don't casually introduce mayors and magistrates into that willy-nilly nearly.

When you consider this, , you can see how in many cases, if a population grew over 150, things naturally broke down.

in the cases where a village maybe did install chiefdoms, that could oversee population growth without falling apart, well, of course that leads to bureaucracy . With those at the top, wanting things to stay the same and with the odds ever in their favor. That of course, meant that they often stifle innovation that they should have been protecting, which then leads to some systems breakdown in the future instead of allowing them to overcome the next barrier

and so on.

Mortality Rates

Okay, so obviously a pretty big barrier there, but let's say Dunbar's number wasn't an issue and Einstein wants lots of little babies for his city of Einstein's. Well, the odds still weren't in your favor. In the first year of life, infant mortality was [00:44:00] roughly 25%, which is a lot. Then childhood mortality in general under the age of 15 was still 45 to 50%.

, so basically half of your kids die before they become reproductively active. If they do make it and survive to adulthood, then the world is just one big risk assessment. Nightmare diseases, you can't cure famine, wild animals, warfare, falling outta trees. For women, childbirth was a big risk. So the mass of all of this meant that every woman needed to have at least six children just to maintain population stability.

That's not even population growth, that's just not going extinct. So essentially a woman needed to have a child every two or three years from their teenage years to their thirties, which as any parent will tell you, , is a lot, especially when you haven't got nappies or painkillers.

A raw part of life was that in many tribes, infanticide was a practical, harsh reality. If food was low, you can't [00:45:00] raise a child. , if a child had a defect, the tribe might not have the resources to care for it.

, in fact, in many places, it was the same for the elderly. Some elderly had revered status, but in . They would be abandoned or put to death by a younger son with an ax.

Systems Feedback effects

So bearing this in mind, let's use our systems thinking. Nature teaches us that ecosystems have delicate balancing forces that keep populations in check.

Whenever human populations tried to grow a cascade of new problems emerge, like nature, slapping our wrist and saying, easy tiger. Not so fast. If we ever did get to build density, that created two more problems.

The first is resource depletion.

If a village grew to a city, people had to walk further and further to fields and foraging spots. Eventually it became easier to just move somewhere else and start a new village than walk two hours to find your currents. .

In Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent , early cities built complex irrigation systems to push back against nature.

, it created bigger yields and the biggest cities that had ever existed. But over [00:46:00] time, the land degraded, the crops failed, and the first cities and civilization completely collapsed.

The second issue from population density is disease. More people equals more poop, which equals more problems.

Cities became Petri dishes. A single epidemic, even if it's every a hundred years, could wipe out an entire generation and often did. When you don't have science, sanitation, or vaccines, the only solution , was to run and live in the countryside or die.

So urbanization came with major caveats. The bigger you got, the harder it was to survive.

Historical demographics

So putting all these factors together means that growth was hard. In fact, for most of human history, the population was under a million people.

There have even been theories that we may have collapsed to just 1000 individuals at one point after a super volcano 70,000 years ago, which would be insane if true. A lot of people don't agree with that theory and think it was more like a hundred thousand, but still crazy [00:47:00] considering today's numbers

you can definitely be safe in the fact that population was patchy, in, averaged about a million people across the entire globe, , which slowly grew to about 5 million people by 10,000 years ago in time for the agricultural revolution. After that, things really picked up the pace to an astounding weight for it.

North Point North 4% growth a year. For the last 10,000 years, which feels barely noticeable by today's standards. But compound interest is a wondrous thing, and it meant that the entire population doubled about every thousand years or so.

, which meant that , those 5 million people turned into a billion people that were alive on the planet 200 years ago, and that's when things went crazy with the industrial revolution. A population took off with 20 times faster growth rate. . Instead of doubling every thousand years, we doubled every 50 years.

, I'm only saying this because of everything we currently consider as normal is basically based on our recent memory of the [00:48:00] past 200 years, but those were the weirdest phase of humanity that has ever existed.

So wrapping that up for 97% of human existence, we really struggle to create density of 500 individuals in a town, , which is what you need to begin any form of specialization and innovation.

Lessons - How we beat the locks

So there we are. We have covered the final of the five big locks on innovation.

Which as I researched this, I found truly fascinating and lots of modern lessons for us that we can apply

in a few minutes, I want to look at those as well as asking questions about the cycles of progress and setbacks. But first, let's go through the systems that we did build over time to beat each of these locks that we've covered.

1 - Beating survival - energy requirements

Firstly, survival. The risk aversion of our ancestors was hardly a personality flaw, as we've seen.

It was a rational response to systems without safety nets. Innovation became possible once we developed agricultural system to create [00:49:00] food surpluses. Then we built storage systems that buffer against crop failures and finally, trade systems that distributed resources across regions.

, those systems don't necessarily make humans smarter. They change the consequences of a potential failure from being death to hey, why not try again? For example, people don't learn to swim in rivers that have crocodiles in them. It doesn't mean they can't swim. If you have a nice kid friendly swimming pool and armbands, humans can learn to swim fine.

2 - Beating culture with records

Next culture. Social conservatism . Wasn't just stubbornness or stupidity, it was a knowledge preservation strategy. Innovation could only accelerate once we developed writing systems

That bypass the elder approval processes and suspicions much later, we then developed the printing press that democratize knowledge , and now digital systems that enable instant global sharing. These systems don't just make humans creative.

They change how ideas spread and who could access them.

3 - Creating Knwledge Systems

which might sound like I'm talking about the next issue, [00:50:00] knowledge systems, Which wasn't about memory capacity, it was about knowledge, architecture, innovation really flourished. When we developed libraries to centralize knowledge universities , that could systematize learning, and finally the scientific method, so we could verify discoveries.

Imagine every time that you put down your keys, . They were hidden in some insanely long escape room. That's what it used to be like, trying to find any idea that might already exist. Creating these systems of knowledge didn't increase human intelligence.

They just changed the entire way we organize and validate information. I think it's really poignant. When you look at Google's mission, for example, it states we should organize the world's knowledge and make it universally accessible and useful.

It sounds like they've been listening to some history podcasts to me.

4 - Nomadism + transport

Right. The fourth issue. Nomadism and transportation systems. Well, mobility constraints weren't just about physical strength to take things with you. They were also about infrastructure. Innovation exploded once we developed road networks that connected [00:51:00] communities, shipping technologies that moved heavy goods around.

It's hard to express how magical the Roman Road network was

for creating an economy and knowledge sharing that just didn't exist beforehand.

5 - Population density and urbanisation

And finally, urban systems population density wasn't simply just about numbers. It was about organization

to build the innovation clusters we needed. They could only emerge once we developed things like governance that managed large groups of people, as well as things like sewage systems irrigation and town planning to stop the thing from collapsing in on itself. These systems completely changed how people interact and collaborate

so that cities could flourish and the right individuals could meet other individuals like them to do great things. , like imagine the difference between trying to start a band in a village of 10 people versus a city of 10 million.

It's night and day,

Conclusion - Innovation isn't about Geniuses

, so looking at all of that, what is the lesson here? If you want more innovation, don't necessarily focus on finding just geniuses. Focus on building systems that allow people to do extraordinary [00:52:00] things As humans, we do love stories about lone geniuses who changed the world through sheer brilliance.

Steve Jobs inventing the iPhone. Einstein discovering relativity during his spare time as a patent clerk, or Newton inventing gravity because an apple bonked him on the head. Well, these stories are mostly myths, a bit like believing that Storks deliver babies or that your cat actually likes you.

Innovation simply doesn't happen that way.

Think of Neil Armstrong. He was the first man on the moon. Now we know that systems got him there. The American economy, nasa, the rocket. He obviously didn't build any of those. But let's say if we think of Julius Caesar, we often forget to think about the rocket ship that had already been built for him by the Roman Empire with their Rhodes Army and communications network that made it possible for him to do the things he did. Of course, it doesn't take away from Caesar's tactical, brilliance and tenacity, but without all of those things that [00:53:00] Romans had already built, there is no Caesar.

In fact, a perfect demonstration of this point is that throughout history, major innovations have been invented simultaneously by multiple people. . Calculus was invented by both Newton and Libin as separately, who then spent years arguing about it. Evolution was invented by Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

Wallace in fact, sent his paper on Evolution to Darwin,

which actually gave Darwin the confidence to finally publish his book a year later. Then there's the telephone oxygen, the light bulb, the polio vaccine. They all have contention over their first discoverer , and none of that is coincidence. It's evidence that innovation emerges when conditions are right, regardless of who happens to be there.

It's like how mushrooms pop up all over the forest floor after it rains. You wouldn't point to the first mushroom or the biggest mushroom and say, wow, what a genius mushroom. You recognize that the conditions created the mushrooms and not [00:54:00] the other way round. Look at today, when the Covid pandemic happened, it wasn't surprising at all to us that several companies created a vaccine within days.

Now we have all the systems for virus sequencing and vaccine creation. Thus, it was merely erased to get them tested, authorized, and manufactured . Now that we have the right systems, something that previously seemed magical, like creating a vaccine seems completely normal.

So that concludes the point that our ancestors weren't less capable. This in intelligence. They were trapped in systems that made innovation nearly impossible,

which is why so little happened

REFLECTIONS - Innovation cycles

right now that we are thinking about systems. This leads us nicely into a new topic, which is that of innovation cycles. If there is one thing that history keeps teaching us loudly, rudely, and on repeat it, is this. Progress is [00:55:00] not a straight line.

Innovation unlocks possibilities, but it also introduces vulnerabilities

population density creates hubs of creativity and incubators for pandemics. When we consider the bad effects of our inventions, it's easy to see how like inventing a bomb , will lead to destruction.

It's less obvious to see that inventing the printing press will lead to conspiracy theories and witch hunts and even wars.

Who would've possibly guessed there are modern improvements of gender equality, , longer lifespans, better education, and the internet would result in record breaking levels of loneliness, anxiety. People voluntary calling themselves celibate against their will. We are now the richest humans that have ever lived, yet for the first time, we can't afford to have children.

It's the great paradox of systems. The better they get, the more complex and fragile they become. In other words, every solution sows the seeds of the next problem.

The noble ascent of [00:56:00] human progress is more like a rollercoaster with violent jerks to the side or loop the loops that make us bring up our breakfast.

And this is all over history. The Greeks and Romans gave us roads, democracy, aqueducts, libraries, a pretty decent concept of philosophy. Only to be followed by a thousand years of darkness, feudalism, and a widespread belief that bathing might so in demons.

When a society breaks through an innovation , lock, it doesn't mean that that lock disappears forever. It just means the door is open. For now, but if it's left unattended, the hinges can rust.

The systems break down and the door can swing shut again.

It's really worth thinking of innovation. Like a New Year's resolution in January. You're crushing it. Green smoothies, cold showers, new ideas. Then February, you are binge watching. Love is blind. You're Googling how much ice cream is too much ice cream and Duolingo is sending you death threats .

Sadly, progress is not [00:57:00] a victory march. It's a system one that needs constant care and recalibration.

the next great leap forward might be followed by the next great collapse unless we really study the patterns across time and learn from them. This is why I think this topic is so important and worth both my time to create this show and your time to listen.

The Navy Seals say that you don't rise to the level of your capability, but fall to the level of your training. Well, here in the Chronicles of innovation, we might say that you don't rise to the level of your innovations, you fall to the level of your systems.

So we will certainly learn more about the potential risk to humanity of face planting into another dark ages in the show. Don't worry.

Modern Innovation Blockers

But now for this episode, let's move into the modern day and consider what we've learned and take a look at a few modern systems that exist to block innovation and what you can do about it for yourself.

[00:58:00] It might sound like we've sold everything. Now we have the energy education networks. We've got 8 billion brains able to exchange data with anyone in the world at quite literally the speed of light.

But let's not move too quick. As we've learned, innovation is like Hercules fighting the Hydra. He cuts one head off and two grow back. So as if I planned it, which I honestly didn't, after our five prehistoric innovation blocks, we now have

10 modern innovation blockers

that I'd like to very briefly complain about

1 - Information Overload

first information overload. We went from too little knowledge to way too much. Over 2 million scientific papers are published each year.

Even if you read a science paper every 15 seconds forever, you still wouldn't keep up. let's not even talk about the millions of hours posted onto YouTube every single day.

2 - Discipline Fragmentation

Second problem is that disciplines are fragmented. Da Vinci, he explored painting, sculpture, anatomy, architecture, geometry, [00:59:00] mathematics, astronomy, biology, geology, optics, cartography, and he had many ideas cross-pollinating each other.

But now, if you want to be considered valuable and get a job, you need a four year degree on just one of those things, which to me is a bit sad and I am all for interdisciplinary thinking, as you should know.

3 - Institutional Blocks

Thirdly, institutions actually still rule as Max Plank once said, science advances one funeral at a time.

In fact, getting funding often relies on approval from the people whose theories you are challenging. . Then of course there's the issue of corporations paying to keep things as they are, like the sugar industry or tobacco, et cetera.

4 - digital divides

Number four, digital divides

most cutting edge research lives behind journal paywalls If you do get hold of a paper, then you face the issue That half of science is written in gobbly gook. That may as well still be written in Latin.

We should be teaching scientists how to communicate. Instead, we teach them how [01:00:00] to complicate.

5 - Memorization

Number five, memorization. You really don't learn to bike by memorizing the physics of bike riding. You learn by getting on the bike and falling off. Sadly, we don't teach people to wrestle with ideas and challenge what is known. We instead teach them to obey what is known to memorize instead of question,

6 - Dismissal Culture

which leads directly to number six, dismissal in both science and society.

We quickly dismiss things we don't understand often. Labeling them as conspiracy theories or nonsense. We ignored things like psilocybin and MDMA as a therapy for 50 years because we labeled it as a stupid hippie waste of time. Then think of Kodak versus digital. Hoover versus Dysons.

Physicists versus Einstein. Time and again, humans dismiss the things that challenge them.

7 - Chasing Value

Number seven, chasing value. . We have a lot of expectations of what is valuable economically or scientifically. When I started my biology degree, I had a admittedly silly idea in my spare [01:01:00] time to document how much tomato is wasted a year by the issue of when you put a whole cherry tomato in your mouth and you bite it, it usually explodes and like half a tomato shoots out your mouth somewhere.

, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. And I made a plan to just test like 20 different people, give them each a pack of tomatoes and see how much the average gram of wastage per person was. Just create some rough estimates of possibly how many tons of tomato globally a year is lost.

And then when you're at a dinner party and someone accidentally shoots tomato across a table, you can wow them with a fact of just how many tons a year of tomato are lost due to exactly , that occurrence. So I was excited full of beans.

I asked my tutor , for any advice on my silly side project. And he told me to stop being an idiot and to do some extra reading instead. He genuinely treated me like I was just an annoying toddler that didn't know what science was.

And now that I'm old, I can see that he didn't know what [01:02:00] science was and was just stuck in the official trope of papers published paradigm that forgets that science is about curiosity. His feedback wasn't how you encourage anyone to be scientific.

And we should place more value and encouragement on curiosity.

8 - Risk Taking

, this leads right into my next point, number eight, which is risks. We don't take enough risks. We fund research into adding specificity or micro improvements to things we already understand.

Meanwhile, we ignore the elephants in the room. We don't need 1% sweeter oranges when we have 80% unexplored oceans. Do I need slightly better contact lenses when no one has a clue what consciousness is

number,

9 - Legal environment

, number nine, legal issues. Adding to our risk aversion is our legal and regulatory systems that are increasingly hostile to experimentation.

The Wright brothers would've had huge issues getting their airplane off the ground today. They'll be buried under environmental impact statements or liability insurance requirements. We might have the ethos of [01:03:00] move fast and break things for small software startups, but for most of society it's actually the opposite.

10 - Inequality

Then number 10, another issue is inequality. And don't worry, I'm not gonna go full communist on you or lecture you about creating completely equal opportunities.

I'll certainly agree that we don't have the slavery level of inequality in our history,

but we do have widespread and rising inequality, which presents two issues. Firstly, inequality breeds unrest, resentment, and commonly gets out of hand in our human cycles leading to wars and collapses, which we don't want.

Secondly, inequality makes the act of innovation a luxury. After my first business, I ran the innovation incubator for a university where I worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs who were all incredibly different.

From bold leaders to charitable huggers fashion startups to new types of battery cathodes.

The two most consistent traits that I Were that they had enough money to not need a side job while studying. And [01:04:00] secondly, they often already had an entrepreneur in their family. And this is a classic repeat of both the first issue of survival, where you need psychological safety and time to innovate, paired with the second issue

of growing up in the right culture.

I certainly believe that we do live in the best time ever to be an innovator, but we can still create more entry points. By encouraging funding for science and innovation instead of taking them away and prioritizing tax systems that don't punish the youth.

11 - short term thinking

And that leads us to the final point, which is short term thinking.

Yes, we have transcended our very short term need to survive to tomorrow. But politicians, CEOs, they are still focused on surviving. This year. They prioritize quarterly performance over long-term strategy

Now, this is actually a really big danger when you couple it problems like instability on our systems, such as the fertility crisis, a changing economic climate, aI disruption, shifting world powers.

You can see how if just one quarter of [01:05:00] upset can lead to short-term interventions that could build up bigger long-term problems, creating a bigger downward spiral of more problems. So yes, I'm not saying all of that to be a massive doist.

More to just make the point of what this podcast stands against and the things that we can learn and think about going forwards

as we try to build better systems to change the world.

The observant amongst you will have noticed I gave you one extra point free, and I think it's good to overdeliver and give 110% on things that you care about. So that's my free gift to you.

Pulling those 11 points together, it's of course tempting to blame it on individuals, lazy scientists, risk averse CEOs or cynical politicians. But it's not actually a people problem. , it is a systems problem and the only way out of it is to build better systems.

, I'd like to stimulate open discussion on how we can protect the world from sliding backwards and hopefully prevent our race from tripping over ourselves, catastrophically, which is what usually happens [01:06:00] as we move forwards.

What can you do

Okay, so I think we have learned a lot today. We have walked through 290,000 years of stasis, and we've briefly discussed the systems of the last 10,000 years that have been unshackling progress.

Lastly, we've looked at the gnarly feedback loops of modern innovation and the relics of our difficulties that still exist in society today.

So where does that leave us?

Howly with agency

innovation isn't just for startups and TED Talks or lone geniuses. It is for all of us, and here's how you could start.

Firstly, take intelligent risks. Nothing is going to kill you. You will survive pitching a weird idea or apply to that job that you didn't feel ready for.

Secondly, think in systems not hacks. The problem is rarely one thing. It's the relationship between many things. So learn to zoom out.

Third, protect your long-term thinking at all costs. Set goals beyond your lifetime. [01:07:00] Build things you might never see finished. The most meaningful work is often the least urgent.

. No one asked me or told me to take 10 to 15 years out of my life to study the chronological history of innovation. But it's a mission that I actually feel is worth doing

Number four, cross pollinate your knowledge. Learn some weird stuff. Combine ideas across fields. Don't just be the best person in your lane question why the lanes are even there in the first place.

And finally, number five, be a door opener. Support others. Share ideas. Encourage curiosity. I really believe that the more doors you open for people, the more doors you'll find for yourself.

, I am building this podcast to be the kind of education I wish that I'd had one that explores

what it actually takes to change the world and what's really in the way. And also what is it like to live through the biggest changes of everything humans think and know?

Because it is pretty clear that an event like that is coming for us soon.

So if that [01:08:00] resonates, subscribe, stick around,

if you want to look at any references, you can check the episode notes, but Jared Diamond's book the World until yesterday is a great place to start to get a vibe of stone Age living.

So it is been a joy putting this together and I'm delighted to have you here as we are just starting our journey.

This was the prelude, if you will, for our next interlude. In between episode, where we explore a short mental model. We will be covering the technological innovation Richter scale. That helps us, define the level of impact of a given innovation.

, and I thought I should cover this early, is it's the decision raiser I'm using for what content goes on the podcast. So it seemed like a great place to start. As we build our mental models going forwards,

Now, if there's one thing that we have learned today, I think you might be more aware that we do live in a world of opportunity, but there is plenty more to do after all,

what we know is a drop, but what we don't know is an ocean. So stay weird people and I'll see you in the next episode.