[00:00:00] Speaker A: Human beings are ignorant, biased, emotional, suggestible, overconfident, poor at assessing their own knowledge, and only moderately good at assessing their own abilities.
Yet humanity has sent robots to Mars, created antibiotics, built spectacular buildings, sequenced the human genome, and generated a stupefying corpus of cultural works. How do we do it?
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Hello, this is Joseph Scholz, and welcome to the Deep Culture Experience, where we explore the radical psychology of cultural difference. And I'm here with my fellow cultural being, Ishita Rai.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Hello, Joseph. It's great to be here with you again. This is the last episode of the season, and we were really excited about the topic.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: So, Ishita, the title of this episode is on the Shoulders of Culture and Collective Intelligence. It was inspired by a quote from Joseph Henrich, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard. And the quote is, we are smart, but not because we stand on the shoulders of giants or are giants ourselves.
We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: And this is from his book, the Secret of Our Success, which digs into the question, how did humans become such a successful species?
[00:01:40] Speaker B: When Henrik says we're standing on the shoulders of hobbits, he means our incredible success as a species is not thanks to brilliant individuals. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants.
It's cultural learning, our ability to accumulate knowledge and pass it on, that made us so successful.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: And we told that story in episode 55, How Culture Made us human.
And the idea that was so new for me was that cultural learning has been a driver of genetic evolution.
For example, mastering fire and cooking allowed us to develop bigger brains and gave us weaker stomachs.
In other words, culture drove genetics and not the other way around. So. So definitely check out episode 55. And we also talked about the hobbit's quote there.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: And so in this episode, we're picking up where we left off. We're going to talk about how cultural learning led to collective intelligence. This idea that human intelligence did not evolve as an individual trait. Our brains evolved to function as part of a network.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: And this is radical because we often assume the opposite. When we talk about human progress, we think of great individuals. Inventors, the trailblazing scientist, the Arctic explorer, the wise philosopher.
But the most powerful form of human intelligence is collective.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: So here's an example. We'd like to think that we understand the world around us because we figure things out for ourselves, but most of the time, that's just not true.
Humans are completely comfortable not understanding how things work.
Flying in a jet plane is a crazy thing. We strap ourselves into an enormous metal tube. We accelerate to inhuman speeds, then take off into the air with a huge roar. We can look down at the earth from 30,000ft. We cover inconceivable distances in a few hours. And. And yet we land, we yawn, and we say, yeah, it was an uneventful flight.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: And that is because flying in an airplane is a predictable part of our cultural world. It's something we feel that we understand.
We trust the people who make and fly airplanes. We trust engineering and science, and we don't think the plane will melt because it will get too close to the sun.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: And needless to say, we are oblivious to most everything that goes into making a jet fly.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: So in this episode, we'll geek out on insights about collective intelligence. We'll talk about the brain's amazing ability to participate in an intersubjective reality, this shared mental space with a larger group.
We'll hear stories from the podcast team that remind us that collective intelligence is. Is embodied within us in the cultural logics of our community.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: And we'll talk about how radical this notion of collective intelligence really is.
The idea that everyday cognition, memory, problem solving, reasoning, decision making can only be fully understood when we see how it evolved collectively.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: And that brings us to part one, the collective brain.
So before we dig into the notion of collective intelligence, let us state that this is a big topic in cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, even economics.
You find terms like the extended mind or distributed cognition, community of knowledge, or wisdom of crowds.
In fact, we found a full volume in Topics for Cognitive Science about research into collective intelligence. And we will be sharing quotes and insights from different articles in that volume.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: But before that, let's start with a definition of collective intelligence. This is from Wikipedia.
Collective intelligence is the emergent ability of groups to solve problems, make decisions, or generate knowledge more effectively than individuals alone.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: So the key term here is emergent ability.
This means that it isn't something we consciously do or even understand as individuals. Collective intelligence is a natural byproduct of human beings functioning as a group.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: And partly this is about how human beings accumulate knowledge over time. Here's a quote from the article what Makes Us Smart by Henrik and Muthu Krishna.
Human brilliance emerges not from our innate brain power or raw computational capacities, but from the sharing of information in communities and networks over generations.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: So the human brilliance in this quote is not about the Wright brothers inventing the airplane.
It's about how we have accumulated the knowledge to build airplanes and the systems to fly and repair them.
So it's sharing Information and organizing it. That is our superpower.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: And this works because our brains evolved to be networked with other brains, what Henrik calls the collective brain.
And there are so many things that relate to this Short pregnancy, long childhood, even menopause, which are evolutionary adaptations that accommodate our ability to learn and transfer that learning.
[00:07:53] Speaker A: That's right. Babies are born before their brains are fully developed. We learn social cues and norms during childhood. Our belief systems are formed as we grow up.
Women live for decades after they stop giving birth so that there can be grandmothers that tell stories to their children.
So one way of thinking about it is that we are not born fully formed. We are born teachable.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: And when we take this as a starting point, it really shifts our understanding of human intelligence.
It reminds us of something that we often don't realize, that our experience of reality is collective. Our perceptions are networked.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: Let's hear how Henrik explains it.
Cultural evolution can turn mindless mobs into wise crowds by facilitating and constraining cognition through a wide variety of epistemic institutions, political, legal, and scientific.
These institutions process information and aid better decision making by suppressing or encouraging the use of different cultural epistemologies and ontologies.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Well, let's digest that a bit at a time.
Collective intelligence turns, quote, mindless mobs into wise crowds. I love that.
This means we evolved the ability to take coordinated action, to have a shared purpose, to collectively solve problems, even when the individuals involved aren't consciously aware of this process.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: But how does this happen?
First, collective intelligence constrains cognition. In other words, our thinking, our psychology, is shaped by our social environment.
What Henrik calls cultural epistemologies and epistemology
[00:10:05] Speaker B: relates to how do we know something is true, why do we believe this and not that? And Henrik is saying that, for the most part, we don't use reason to find truth.
We believe what is collectively accepted as true.
For example, you accept that the earth goes around the sun without needing to confirm it.
But a thousand years ago, that was blasphemous.
[00:10:30] Speaker A: And cultural ontologies are assumptions about what the world is made up of. For example, is human existence fundamentally material, or is it spiritual?
We organize societies around these shared ideas.
Certain institutions are prioritized over others, like families or churches or schools or the government.
They create collective intelligence by promoting certain ways of understanding reality.
And a society that prioritizes family over all else is organized very differently than a society that prioritizes institutions like courts of law.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: But the tricky part is that we don't notice this collective nature of intelligence in a way we evolved to not not notice because we are playing our part in the superorganism.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: And that is something that podcast team member Sane Bozma has been noticing in her everyday life. Let's listen.
[00:11:39] Speaker C: Sometimes I stop myself when I am holding or using something, something as simple as a spoon or the sound system. And then it hits me. I do not really understand this.
How does a remote control work?
How do they even make plastic? And what is Bluetooth? I don't even understand how electricity works.
It's scary somehow, because I can feel how dependent I am. But I am also comforted by the thought that we are all connected and supported by by this vast body of collective intelligence.
I thought of this when I picked up my then 2 year old daughter Liz from preschool.
I noticed one of the staff members preparing a pile of blankets and pillows.
She took them outside to little wooden boxes that looked like hen houses.
She put the bedding inside and I realized she was preparing for children to take an afternoon nap outside.
And it was only 5 degrees Celsius, so I was shocked.
She explained to me that these hen houses are actually called lcpoche, literally little child in a dialect. In the north of the Netherlands, where this custom originally comes from.
It has been spreading throughout the country and it is being used in daycare facilities.
Personally, I don't know anyone who has their babies sleep outside, but when I asked my parents, they told me this was common practice when they were young and for the generation before them as well.
Some in my family actually used hen houses.
Fortunately, the baby and chickens were not in the same hen houses at the same time.
But here's the thing. I do have a feeling for the thinking behind this.
In fact, I often sleep with the windows open, making the room as cold as possible.
Growing up, I always heard that cold air is healthy, especially when you are sleeping.
I have even seen research which concluded that fresh cold air helps optimize sleep.
So I shouldn't be surprised.
The idea that being outside, that sleeping in the cold is normal and even healthy, is a form of collective wisdom developed by societies that survived and thrived despite the harsh cold.
And this wisdom is alive in me as I sleep with the windows open in winter.
And it's also being passed on to the next generation in boxes that look like a hen house.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: I love how Sanne's story shows a contradiction about collective intelligence. On the one hand, there's all this stuff we don't know, like how plastic is made, we are so ignorant. But on the other hand, there's all this Stuff that somehow we do know or we feel we know. Like that sleeping in the cold is
[00:14:53] Speaker A: healthy and sane has never seen these boxes or hen houses, but she did have a feeling for the cultural logic behind it.
But imagine if the employee had said, oh, and we'll do a little ceremony to help the children have pleasant dreams.
That would be very different. Something she does not have a feel for.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: And this shared understanding, this intersubjective reality, it's a form of collective intelligence. And Sanne can draw from this pool of understanding in order to make sense of her experiences.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: And that brings us to part two. We think, therefore I am.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: So here's another way to think about collective intelligence as collective solutions to the challenges that a society faces. How to produce food, how to organize ourselves politically. How to work together, how to care for the sick.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: But of course, societies may have very different solutions to the same challenges.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: And that's something that podcast team member Albert Mangami has been giving some thought to.
[00:16:15] Speaker D: When I think of collective intelligence, I think of how families work in Zimbabwe.
Here's one example. Traditionally, the concept of an orphanage did not exist in Zimbabwe.
That doesn't mean there weren't children who lost their parents through illness, conflict, or other hardships. But the solution wasn't to create a separate institution to care for them.
Instead, care was woven into the fabric of the family itself.
In southern Africa, family extends far beyond parents and children.
It naturally includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, older siblings, and often close family friends and neighbors.
If a parent dies, these relationships aren't simply optional sources of support.
They carry an expectation of responsibility.
A child who loses their parent still belongs to a family, a wider network of relationships that provides care and a sense of identity.
Although orphanages are a foreign insertion into Zimbabwean culture, they are part of a global, contemporary response to a colonial, neoliberal view of government and the individual.
Current society must systematically answer the same question as traditional societies.
How to make sure vulnerable children are protected and continue to belong.
Traditionally, that answer rested with the extended family, and today it still does.
But now there is also a newer, broader notion of family, the state.
These are different organizational principles solving the same human problem.
The most powerful human intelligence is concerned with the survival of the group.
Collective wisdom emerges from generations of cultural learning and produces resilient ways of solving recurring challenges.
Societies may arrive at different answers, but each finds ways for human beings to thrive by thinking beyond the individual.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: This is a great way to think about collective intelligence. I love Albert's example of vulnerable children. It is a fundamental challenge that every society faces. A community that can't take care of its children will not thrive.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: I like the phrase resilient ways of solving recurring challenges. I normally think of resilience as an individual quality, but humans need to be collectively resilient to our social structures, the wisdom we pass on.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: And I totally relate to families being the primary source of resilience. I think most Indians have a deep embodied feeling for that and we learn
[00:19:13] Speaker B: resilience from our society. We call it wisdom and it's something that podcast team member Emre7 has has been reflecting on. Let's listen.
[00:19:25] Speaker E: In Turkey and many countries with Muslim populations, the idea of kismet is a powerful form of collective intelligence.
It can be literally translated as once allotted share or the portion that is yours.
But more generally it refers to a belief in destiny, and yet it does not lead to passivity.
On the contrary, I see Khzmet as a practical intelligence.
We Turks believe that we can find quick solutions, we can navigate through the established rules, do things in our own way against the odds.
So Khmet as fate and Khmet as practical intelligence reconcile each other.
We do everything we can, even knowing that the outcome is not in our hands.
In 2010, after I came back from the US and graduated college, I saw a call for a lecturer position in a private university in Istanbul. I directly jumped into it.
My father had to pay my expenses for my trip to apply and take the exam.
I took a bus from Ankara and slept in my friend's house, far away from the university.
I had only a bagel to eat to save money and not to be a burden for my dad.
I took the cheapest transportation with many transfers instead of paying for a taxi.
I didn't care.
I wanted this job very badly and I was confident that I would be selected so I was ready for the challenge.
I did well on the written exam and indeed the next day I was invited for an interview.
I was fresh back from the US so my English was really polished and I was not stressed at all. The jury liked me. They complimented my English fluency and remarked that I was a very positive person.
They even asked me where in Istanbul I would live if I was selected.
When I left the room, I was quite sure that I got the job.
On my way back to Ankara, I called my dad and gave him the good news.
I was already planning where I would rent a flat.
However, it wasn't to be.
When the results were announced, I saw that I was not selected.
They said I didn't have enough experience teaching at a university.
But I learned that in fact the position was given to specific somebody.
I was very disappointed.
I told my dad I regretted making him spend money for nothing.
But he looked at me and said, Never mind, son. It was not meant to be.
A feeling of relief washing over me when I heard those words.
I had done my best.
It was all I could do.
It was Kismet.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Wow, there is so much to unpack here.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: I was really moved when Emre says that hearing his father's words, he felt relief wash over him. There's this moment of cultural wisdom being passed from parent to child.
And one thing that fascinates me is that Kismet has its roots in Islamic traditions.
Your destiny is written by God, so to speak.
But the psychological power of Kismet doesn't depend on being a religious believer. This is not about religious belief, right?
[00:23:33] Speaker B: Kismet helps solve a natural psychological tension. On the one hand, it's important to make effort, even for things that may not work out in the end. But it's also important to be able to move on when they don't.
So let's regroup a bit and talk about what this means for cultural bridge people.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: We have an intuitive feeling for the collective intelligence systems that we share in. They reassure us.
But what happens when we visit a foreign country, encounter other forms of collective intelligence?
We are not just learning some etiquette rules and trying out new food. We are required to adapt to a whole new cultural super organism.
And people within a society are often not consciously aware of the cultural logics of that society.
They take so many things for granted.
And that's something podcast team member Vanessa Eisenberg got to experience firsthand.
[00:24:41] Speaker F: Living in Tokyo, there are still things that catch me off guard.
The other day I was on the train when it suddenly slowed to a stop.
Almost immediately, everyone's phone wailed with an earthquake warning siren.
But no one rushed to check their phone.
No one panicked.
They sat calmly while the train attendant spoke over the intercom.
This is a form of collective intelligence.
Years of scientific research, government agencies, transport systems, and telecommunications all work together to issue the warning. And the public knows how to respond accordingly.
As someone with very little experience with earthquakes, my instinct would have been to panic.
Instead, I found myself calmly following the behavior of everyone around me.
Collective intelligence, indeed Sane talked about how there are many objects that we use every day, and yet we have no idea how they work.
It made me think that technology is a good example of how quickly collective intelligence can evolve.
Things that my parents struggle to understand. When Using technology I find intuitive.
Sometimes they say, but how did you know to press that button or to swipe the screen in that way?
But things like pinching to zoom or swiping right to go back are second nature to me.
No one taught me.
They are part of the collective knowledge of people my age.
They were absorbed unconsciously and spread within a single generation.
It makes me wonder, though, how soon will collective intelligence leave me behind?
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Well, I have to say, I totally relate to Vanessa's parents. I can feel the world moving on.
Pinching and swiping is not my native language.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: So again, there's this contradiction.
Being local doesn't mean you know everything, but you have a feel for how things work, how people think.
[00:27:05] Speaker B: And there is a word for this in Japanese, joshuki, which is typically translated as common sense. But that doesn't quite capture refers to the shared knowledge that you are expected to have to function properly, like how to be polite, how to get things done. And the point is that you're supposed to just know.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: But what is difficult is adapting deeply to a society with a very different joshiki.
And this is something that podcast team member Leah Torhild Liana Hars Karnes understands deeply.
She grew up in Norway and moved to the Philippines, worked hard at becoming a fluent Tagalog speaker, lived very locally.
She has experienced very different collective intelligences.
Let's listen.
[00:28:00] Speaker G: In Norway, being connected to nature is part of our collective intelligence.
For example, how we deal with snow and frost.
I remember being in Japan with Filipino friends.
We happened to be walking on ice and they all held on to each other.
I tried to explain that this wasn't a good idea. If one person slips, they bring everyone down.
To me, this is second nature, something I've always known.
In Manila, there is collective intelligence around periods of heavy rain.
The local government declares walangpasok, which means no entry or no school.
So schools close some offices too.
Heavy rain and flooding is something people simply know how to deal with.
It's still a struggle, but everyone does their part. In the Philippines, they have earthquake drills like we have fire drills in Norway.
The word dug nat in Norwegian and bayanihan in Tagalog both refer to a community effort to solve problems.
For example, in Norway, the entire neighborhood might come together to clean common areas, or the soccer team and parents will organize an event together.
Baenihan is similar. Like when an entire community comes together to move a house, they put it on poles and carry it on their shoulders.
Collective intelligence is reassuring.
In Norway, ambulances have special chains they put on their tires to deal with snow.
I have no idea how to put them on myself, but that's okay. I know how to walk on ice, layer my clothes and that I should take vitamin D during the winter.
And I trust that with Duke Nut and Bayanihan that collective intelligence can solve challenges that we have to face together.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: Full disclosure, if I was walking on ice, I would totally want to grab onto the person next to me.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: Well, me too, but you're from West Bengal, I'm from Southern California, so that's what you get. We have other skills
[00:30:28] Speaker A: and I was really struck by these words. Dougnad in Norwegian and Bayanihan in Tagalog. Hard to translate into English.
Leah says community effort to solve problems. It really captures an important aspect of collective intelligence.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Leah said that a connection to nature is part of Norwegian collective intelligence, and I love how that relates to Sanne's story about children sleeping outside this shared joshiki about the cold.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: And that brings us to part three. Radically Collective.
[00:31:14] Speaker B: So what I find the most radical about collective intelligence is that thinking about human beings as a collective organism, a cultural superorganism, rather than a bunch of individuals who are each smart, requires rethinking so many things.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: In fact, we came across this idea in an academic article, Radical Collective Intelligence and the Reimagining of the Collective Mind by Nathaniel Rab and Stephen Sloman.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: And their main argument is that we're used to talking about the mind at the individual level, but cognitive function did not evolve to work on its own. You could even say that sometimes being stupid individually is part of being smart collectively.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: And here's a quote from the article which gets at this Human beings are ignorant, biased, emotional, suggestible, overconfident, poor at assessing their own knowledge, and only moderately good at assessing their own abilities.
[00:32:20] Speaker C: Human.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Yet humanity has sent robots to Mars, created antibiotics, built spectacular buildings, sequenced the human genome, and generated a stupefying corpus of cultural works. How do we do it?
[00:32:37] Speaker B: So why is it that biased individuals accomplish so much?
[00:32:42] Speaker A: The short answer is that we are looking at it wrong.
We might call those biases failures in individual reasoning. But when you think about cognition evolving collectively, the so called biases can turn out to be part of a larger intelligence.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: So let's take an example, something we talked about in part one. To survive, we need good information.
But for the most part, humans do not come to their beliefs through individual rational analysis. Instead, we tend to adopt the beliefs of of the people we trust.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: And this is a bit of detour, but it helps us understand how Conspiracy theories work when there's a high level of distrust. People find communities with a different truth and then they can go down a rabbit hole.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: So collective intelligence allows a community to accumulate knowledge without having to confirm every little detail, which in the case of conspiracy theories may be maladaptive, but in the end, what we tend to think of as a lack of rationality is actually part of a larger intelligence.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: And this is a paradigm shift. It opens up whole new areas of research and insight. Here is a quote from Rab and Sloman. Again, it will be profitable to reconsider long studied human cognitive processes as mechanisms that generate cues for coordination rather than self contained procedures of reasoning and decision making.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: So this requires a real rethinking of all kinds of things. Memory, metacognition, representations, belief, updating, reasoning, problem solving.
These things are being studied through game theory, group minds theory, collective problem solving, social learning, group decision making.
So let's just take one example.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: If I have to choose one, it's memory.
And I have to say, it was so cool to come across this term nemesity, this idea of what becomes a memory.
[00:34:51] Speaker B: Can we spell nemicity? M, N, E, M, I, C, I, T, Y. Manicity. It is a really cool word.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: And here's how researcher Johannes Marr puts it.
Nemesity is likely a uniquely human capacity that both serves collective functions and has been shaped by collective norms.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: And again, this was new to me. I'm used to thinking of memory in terms of encoding information in an individual's brain.
You know, like short term memory, long term memory, episodic memory.
[00:35:35] Speaker A: But the radical idea is that how our memory works is not simply to serve the needs of the individual. It is deeply cultural.
And here is another quote from the same article.
How the distinction between memory and imagination is drawn is likely sensitive to cultural norms about what remembering is, when it is appropriate to claim to remember what can be remembered and what remembering entails.
As a result, how individuals determine whether they remember or imagine is bound to be deeply enculturated.
[00:36:17] Speaker B: Well, that is a mouthful. So let's break it down.
Humans have the ability to distinguish whether we remember remember something, or whether it's something we imagined.
It allows us to communicate to others that something comes from our direct experience and therefore can be trusted in a way that things that are imagined cannot.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: And this creation of memory is collective. It evolved to serve a collective function, and we need to look at it that way in order to really understand it.
[00:36:49] Speaker B: And you found research into this that involved some collective memory activities?
[00:36:55] Speaker A: Yes, and it was so fascinating. Lab experiments showed that people were better at recalling unrelated words at a group level than at an individual level, not only in how much they remembered, but also how they organized information and the group in ways that allowed them to to remember later and longer.
Essentially, we naturally create networked understanding.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: Well, I can't say that I fully understand this, but I hope we have a chance to go into this more in another episode. For the moment, I will say that this topic was so much deeper than I realized when we first started looking into this.
[00:37:38] Speaker A: For me, it relates perfectly to something that Cultural bridge people are always discovering that human beings are radically more cultural than we realize, and encountering foreignness is more than just meeting people with different customs. It is bumping up against a whole cultural superorganism.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: But we are blind to this precisely because each of us is only one small part of this larger collective organism. Like ants, each ant has only a limited mental program, but one working together. Ant colonies create very complex adaptive behaviors, and ants are, along with humans, one of the most successful species on earth.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: And that is both humbling and impressive. Something for all cultural bridge people to ponder.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: And that's about all we have time for today. If you want to dig deeper into collective intelligence, there are great open source articles in the series Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 16, Issue 2, How Minds Work the Collective in the Individual, edited by Stephen Sloman and Nathaniel Rabb. We quoted some of them in this episode. The collective intelligence quotes in part one came from what Makes Us Smart by Joseph Henrik and Michael Muthu Krishna. We learned about the notion of radical collective intelligence from Radical Collective Intelligence and the Reimagining of Cognitive Sciences by Nathaniel Roger Rabb and Stephen Sloman. The notion of mnemicity and collective memory comes from the article how to Become a the Individual and Collective Aspects of Mnemicity by Johannes Marr. The reference to the lab experiment about collective memory was from Collaborative Recall and the Construction of Collective Memory Organization the Impact of Group Structure by Greeley et al.
The Deep Culture Experience podcast is sponsored by the Japan Intercultural Institute, an NPO dedicated to intercultural education and research. I am the director of jii. Do you want to dig deeper into the radically cultural nature of human beings? Then sign up for the Deep Culture Approach Masterclass series. It is a blended learning community facilitated by Ishita and me. It's a great, great way to meet other people who are looking to dig deeper into these topics. Just do a web search for the Japan Intercultural Institute.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: This podcast is completely non commercial, no ads. Nobody gets paid to support this kind of learning community. Become a member of jii. For a small yearly membership fee, you can join our regular learning circles, our book club, learn about our research.
We are an NPO and it costs very little to support what we do and connect with others. If not that, take a minute to share this episode on social media and you can get in
[email protected] Special thanks to Podcast team members Vanessa Eisenberg, Sanne Bozma, Leah Thorhild, liana Hars, Karnas Emre S7, and Albert Mangami for sharing their thoughts on collective intelligence. Thanks also to Yuto Aki, sound engineer Robinson Fritz, JII's administrator Ikumi Fritz, and everyone at JII.
[00:41:02] Speaker B: And thanks to you, Ishita. This was super fun.
[00:41:05] Speaker A: Thank you Joseph. It was really fun. Geeking out.
[00:41:08] Speaker E: Collect Sam.
