Do You Think Like a Caveman? Surprising Mindset Lessons From History

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Have you ever found yourself in a meeting where you have a cool idea, but you are afraid to share it for fear that it might be thought of as silly? Do you sometimes get the feeling that you might be found out as having no idea what you're doing?

or How about this when you last paid for something that was a bit expensive, did you wonder if perhaps you should have kept the money? Well, no. You aren't fundamentally broken or paranoid. You are just human and your brain is the product of millions of years of evolution to survive in the most brilliant and deadly place in the universe, our planet earth.

Now speaking as a psychologist, biologist, and a bit of a history nut, one thing that does really frustrate me is when I hear people talking about our caveman psychology in incredibly simplistic ways. You know, they're always saying like, you're worried about being cast out by the group, [00:01:00] yada yada.

Yet they come to some conclusions about your life whilst having no real empathy behind what the actual situation was like for our ancestors or what they were doing or why they cared so much about groups in the first place. So today I thought it would be a great opportunity to go back through the pages of history and dive into what our ancestors. Were really thinking about and what they were really doing and what that means for our mindsets today with how we live and ?

What are the relics of our past that are tripping us up and how can we overcome them? , as you might have heard me mention a little bit lately. I have started a new show called How to Change the World, and in one of the first episodes I did do a giant review of the five big ancient locks on innovation that occurred over the Stone Age.

But actually when I was reflecting on it, all of those locks do boil down to mindsets. So what I want to do today is to share some [00:02:00] of that episode and.

As I go through each lock, I will jump in with my mindset hat on every 10 minutes or so at the end of each section, and I'll give you an extra piece of narration on how the topic that I just talked about can be applied directly to today and our mindsets and how we think so this will be perhaps a little bit of a different episode to what we're used to, but I promise it will have a lot of ideas that will get stuck in your brain and change how you see the world and will especially work on your scarcity and abundant mindsets and probably make you a lot more grateful for all the opportunities around you , and become more able to pursue them.

Alrighty, this is the Growth Mindset Psychology Show with me, Sam Webster Harris, as always studying the science of self-improvement and a life well lived. And today I am doing a collaboration with no other than myself. It is a really fun episode, so stay tuned.

The Hand Axe Conundrum

In a glass case at [00:03:00] 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 tools, bending [00:04:00] 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 uncovering timeless lessons from the [00:05:00] 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 braking systems that keep us [00:06:00] stuck

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

So 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 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 [00:07:00] 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. 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 [00:08:00] 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 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. [00:09:00] 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, 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 [00:10:00] 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 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 [00:11:00] 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 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 [00:12:00] 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 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 [00:13:00] 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. 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.

Survival and Scarcity Mindset

Okay, so jumping in here with my mindset hat on now, the survival lock that kept our ancestors focused on their immediate needs has evolved now into what we recognize as. The scarcity mindset. It is a pervasive belief that there isn't enough to go around. [00:14:00] If every opportunity isn't taken, some disaster might befall us.

If we're not invited to a party, we feel like we're going to actually die. Well, all these things can seem so damn important , because our neural pathways are literally designed to keep us alive through. life and death scenarios that are completely irrelevant today.

You can imagine someone that doesn't risk starting their business until they have five years of saving in the bank for fear of what going back to their old job six months later when it doesn't work and they now have four and a half years left of savings in the bank. Like it's not exactly as scary as dying. Right. Yet we can still treat it in the same way. Or how about the graduate who puts off that six month trip around Europe because their friends are going straight onto the career ladder,

as if having six months of less work experience and six months of actual life experience could ruin the rest of their life, like, no, but scarcity is hardwired into us. It's even visible in our relationship with social media and the compulsion for [00:15:00] constant comparison.

\ Every time you scroll through Instagram or whatever your app of choice is, it can look like everyone else has it better. And if you're not careful with how you interpret this, that can be a feeling that really stings our brains were wired to constantly scan for threats and deficiencies.

Who had more food, better shelter, higher status, and this hypervigilance was essential when resources were genuinely guess. But now, when we are exposed to the highlight reels of thousands of people daily, we do get a very False sense of what our life should look like. , instead, we feel like there's something deeply wrong with our lives

well, the reality is that we are literally the luckiest humans that have ever existed in time, but we can fail to appreciate it because the scarcity mindset transforms other people's success around us into evidence of our own limitations . And so this zero sum thinking, which used to be a perfectly rational response, can now prevent us from celebrating the winds of others or recognizing our own abundance.

[00:16:00] So we have to try and flip the feeling to get excited for what's possible for us, and get excited for any achievements of other people. We can start thinking about the fact that we aren't facing imminent disaster. And our life is actually an endless cycle of opportunity to take another shot.

Then in terms of abundance. Think not just about your money, but also your skills, family, friends, , opportunities you can take if you wanted to like try imagining the worst case scenario if your plans do fail. While you could volunteer at a dog shelter or help build wells in Africa, maybe become a teacher, like the world is abundantly full of perfectly fine fallback options.

So we really don't need to be half as scared as we are right now, back to the Stone Age.

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 [00:17:00] 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 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 [00:18:00] 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. 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 [00:19:00] 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 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 [00:20:00] 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 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 [00:21:00] 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 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 [00:22:00] 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 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.

[00:23:00] 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 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 [00:24:00] 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. 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 [00:25:00] 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 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, [00:26:00] survival, and culture.

Culture, Social Pressure, Perfectionism and Imposter Syndrome

Okay, now let's look at this through a lens of mindsets. Longtime listeners might remember I did an episode called Social Pressure Personality Disorder, calling out the fact that we are all extremely prone to social pressure and pleasing others, or at least the idea of them.

Fundamentally, we hate rejection.

But it goes beyond that. The tribal wisdom that kept our ancestors alive. The don't fix what isn't. Catastrophically broken mentality has morphed into modern perfectionism and analysis paralysis. . We really have inherited a psychological operating system that treats any deviation from proven methods , as something that's potentially life threatening.

Even when, you know, you might just be trying to improve a work process or launch a creative project,

So, not quite a life and death scenario.

a few examples in everyday life, perhaps the graphic designer who designs the same logo 47 times because it's just not quite right yet. Or the writer who starts [00:27:00] 12 different articles but publishes none of them because they're waiting for the perfect piece. Or how about the manager who delays implementing a new system for months because they want to anticipate every possible problem first.

Now, none of this is laziness or lack of ability. It's just loss aversion in action where the fundamental fear of creating something that's imperfect overpowers the potential benefits of just creating something that's good.

We've ended up with this. Permanent sense of imposter syndrome because we are wide, to constantly be a little bit scared that we aren't good enough for our tribe, and they might cast us out.

The problem for us now in our modern context actually, is that our wiring for safety often leads to stagnation and missed opportunities , we find ourselves optimizing for avoiding small failures whilst creating much larger ones through our inaction.

It is easy to fool ourselves because this perfectionist paralysis can masquerade itself as high standards. We can be telling ourselves that we're being thorough or professional, [00:28:00] when actually we're just being controlled by fear and it just doesn't serve us anymore. So my challenge to you would be to try to embrace good enough iterations.

Set yourself artificial deadlines for decisions. Stick to them. Give yourself one week to choose between options, not one month. Practice the 80% rule, meaning when something is 80% ready, ship it, or share it or implement it. Don't get stuck in the spiral of 90% done zone because of it just never finishes. Once you start, you can always improve the version two, but you can't improve something that doesn't exist. And this really trains your brain to just value progress over perfection

and it's one of the most important things that you can do for yourself

Right? We are going to take an advert break and then I will be back to talk about our third lesson from the Stone Age.

3 - Knowledge

Now we enter the third problem knowledge It is easy to forget that every thought ever conceived by our ancestors [00:29:00] 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 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 [00:30:00] 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 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 [00:31:00] 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 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 [00:32:00] 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 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 [00:33:00] 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 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 [00:34:00] 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 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 [00:35:00] 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 separated by space and time.

Okay, three out of the five locks down,

Knowledge and Cognitive Tunneling

Alrighty. Now let's look at this through a modern lens of our mindsets. Well, you might not think that the knowledge lock applies to us today. After all, we have abundant knowledge and writing and universities and. The internet, but firstly, you would be forgetting how blind we are to most of the information out there when we make our decisions.

But what I want to talk about however, is cognitive tunneling because knowledge used to be so scarce for our ancestors that it was jumped on and worshiped and celebrated as the way.

And despite actually having lots of other options now today, we can still fall into this trap. We might fit into an ideology , and [00:36:00] actively start dismissing all other ways of thinking. , or we can become so focused on one piece of information. Like let's say we're told our website SEO isn't good enough that we start to ignore all the actual essential parts of our business.

Another form of cognitive tunneling is basically just distraction. You get sucked into watching TikTok videos or checking your email. Perhaps you go to post something on LinkedIn, but you discover a friend started a new job , as an ecologist, and they have a blog about butterfly migrations.

Then you find yourself searching ticket prices to Mexico and so on. It is wild. ,

well, for our ancestors, focusing on an obsessive way on available information following where it might lead was actually quite valuable.

But now it can become an incredible distraction for our mind, ' cause our mind was designed for a much lower information environment. When we do get obsessed about an idea, like a founder that decides this product must be one way, or a student who researches all the different explanations for one theorem, , well then we are [00:37:00] failing to step back and look at the bigger picture of what else the world might be telling us or what else we should be thinking about.

So something that we all need to practice much more often is stepping back from our zoomed in lifestyle, maybe taking a walk, asking, what it all means. Perhaps listening to silly history podcasts , when you think they have nothing to do with self-improvement.

Um, lol plug there

but really you should go for more diverse sources. . Let's say you read the news, you should try to have a diversity of sources for them. If you always read nonfiction, I would recommend reading some fiction books because it will genuinely change the way you think and open your mind a bit.

, then, if you want to be more analytical, if you get stuck on a problem, , try to get out of your head. Maybe try inverting the problem completely and work backwards, or perhaps spend 10 minutes writing everything you know about it and everything you don't know about it.

Or maybe try explaining it to someone as if they were five years old. We find ultimately, so often the answer we are looking for is there. If we can step back a bit instead of [00:38:00] just panicking and trying to solve everything right away.

Wrap Up

Okay, if you are enjoying the episode so far, well you will love the second half of the episode, which is available over on Minu Show, how to Change the World, the History of Innovation There. You will also find other great episodes just as geeky and fact filled as this one in regards to this specific episode in the second half.

Not only do I cover the final two locks of innovation. I also talk about the danger of innovation cycles themselves. , how humanity has a tendency to get ahead of itself and face plant itself into dark ages.

And also what are the current innovation locks in the modern day that affect all of us?

And yes, sure. I know it sounds like it's a history and technology podcast on the surface, but hopefully you have realized today it is definitely also a psychology and philosophy podcast as well for anyone that does [00:39:00] have a curious mind. And yeah, if you have made it this far, I am sure you will love it.

And if I haven't sold you on it yet. The second part of this episode does have some great llama jokes , and everyone's told me that just how great they are. So I don't know what's stopping you at this point. Alrighty, I hope this gave you some fun things to think about. If you do enjoy my show, a good rating is always appreciated

if you are able to share this episode with a friend to tell them how they clearly act like a Neanderthal and maybe need to sort their Stone Age mindsets out. Well, that would be a fantastic help for me, I'm sure it would be for your friend as well. It is summertime,

so don't forget to hug a tree and have some fun. Remember scarcity mindset. You certainly don't need to be working every week this summer. Make sure you do have a holiday booked,

and on that catch you next week