Most people think the nature vs. nurture debate is a question of which side wins.
Professor Greg Downey says that's exactly the wrong question — and that framing it as a competition is what's been holding back our understanding of human potential for decades.
In this conversation, Paige sits down with Prof. Greg Downey — neuroanthropologist, professor at Macquarie University, and co-founder of the field of neuroanthropology — to explore how your nervous system is in a constant state of retooling based on the environment you're in, the skills you practice, and the culture you inhabit.
What you'll discover in this episode:
🩷 Why separating nature and nurture is a category error — and what to ask instead
🩷 How culture literally trains your senses to perceive things others can't
🩷 Why your "self" and consciousness are skills — not fixed traits
🩷 The neuroscience behind extraordinary human abilities (echolocation, free diving, and more)
🩷 The single most effective way to learn any new physical or cognitive skill
This isn't self-help. This is the science of what you are actually capable of.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — What is neuroanthropology?
01:43 — Why the nature vs. nurture debate is wrong
03:42 — How culture trains your senses
06:10 — What "culture" actually means
10:06 — How language shapes what you can perceive
13:08 — Neuroplasticity: how the brain rewires for skill
18:09 — Is consciousness a skill?
22:35 — Daniel Kish: the man who sees with sound
25:01 — Free divers and the outer limits of human physiology
30:02 — How to study real human potential
37:44 — Cage fighters, capoeira & exploring consciousness
41:44 — The "consciousness platter" metaphor
51:34 — Psychedelics, context & cultural transplanting
56:46 — The fastest way to learn any new skill
59:49 — What fieldwork in Brazil taught Greg about himself
YOUTUBE + TRANSCRIPT:
(00:00) So, from the perspective of your field of science, neuroanthropology, is it nature or is it nurture that makes us who we are? >> Uh you’re starting off with a big philosophical question. I think from my perspective as a neuroanthropologist, I try to combine an awareness of both. Um I think what’s impossible to ignore is that we’re pitched into the world with these bodies that have particular traits, abilities to take in information, and as from the very first hour of our birth, we are retooling the physical equipment
(00:33) that we’re using to perceive the world. It’s It’s kind of an abstraction to try to separate those two out because it’s like trying to separate the influence of light and water on a plant because both of them are contributing to its growth. And the same thing is happening with humans that our our bodies are unfolding in part by biological processes, some of which are pretty invariant, you know, that that across people, but a lot of them are not.
(00:58) And a lot of the sort of neurological resources that are growing in us inherently take in the environment and alter to make us more suited to whatever we’re encountering, whether that’s something stressful and and destructive or whether it’s something an opportunity for a nervous system. Each moment is shaped by what came before.
(01:19) So, what was nurture becomes nature, and nature sets the the parameters and the ground rules for how nurture is going to be incorporated. You know, the baby comes into the world and and adolescents and and adults seeking certain information that it needs to know how to calibrate its system. So, what do you mean by uh opportunities? Yeah, you said that the nervous system will be able to understand the difference.
(01:44) Will Can it understand the difference between opportunities and and threats? >> Um it’s hard to sort of say cuz they’re I mean, most things are a bit of both. You know, like for example, when we’re born into a into a community with structured sound interaction occurring, you know, whether that’s music or whether it’s speech, um this is a huge opportunity for a curious switched-on social animal.
(02:07) You know, suddenly it has this opportunity to get all kinds of information about interactions, to anticipate interactions, to enrich them, to to have more options than it had before. But at the same time, it’s also introducing a ton of biases into the perceptual system. You know, as you get a vocabulary, you also get a a a kind of shadow vocabulary of blind spots and of things that are hard for you to perceive.
(02:32) So, there’s sort of opportunities and threats in that enculturation. A simple trait like bipedalism, you know, walking on two legs is going to in- introduce certain stresses onto your skeleton that you’ll never get over. You know, that you’ll it’s not like our bodies were designed to do one thing. We kind of hack them into all these arrangements.
(02:52) You know, whatever exercises you grow up with, simultaneously they’re building your musculature, they’re building your flexibility, but they’re also doing damage to your joints and and your body or you know, over long term. It’s hard to sort of separate what’s an opportunity from what’s a threat because both are kind of being introduced at the same time.
(03:09) There’s no There’s no ideal environment for a human being. Um there are really impoverished environments. They’re really negative environments like being deprived of social interaction, like being malnourished and deprived of a diverse diet. But um there’s a lot of variability in what’s healthy or what’s potentially healthy for humans.
(03:26) And I think that’s one of the things that we often miss because um most of us have the tendency to look at whatever happened to us and think, “Oh, that’s normal and that’s right.” You mentioned uh perceptual tools before. What do you classify as a a perceptual tool? >> I mean, the senses are some of those perceptual tools.
(03:43) Um but the senses aren’t just passive. They’re They’re the patterns through which you, you know, are inquisitive in the environment. What you look for. A simple example, um in social interaction, do you look somebody else in the face or not? And and do you gather information about facial expression and eyes from another person? In some settings, that’s really threatening or really inappropriate.
(04:04) Um, or you might be in a society where where faces are partially covered in in social settings. And so, you get different kinds of information. There are there are guidelines to that. Do you stare? You know, I remember first time I went to someplace where somebody stared at me, um, where they didn’t have the same rules that I grew up with in the US.
(04:23) And it it’s disconcerting to be just have somebody stare at you for a long period of time. And for them, that was not against the rules of interaction, or maybe they were um, person breaking their local rules of interaction. I didn’t know enough to be able to question them or challenge them. So, so when I talk about perceptual tools, it’s not just the sort of naked senses.
(04:43) I’ll just give you a great example of that, and one of my favorites is a researcher named, um, Asifa Majid, and she has is worked with indigenous groups that have primary terms for aromas. So, just like we have primary terms for colors, red, blue, green, yellow, in English, they have primary terms for aromas in some of these languages in the highlands of Thailand in Southeast Asia.
(05:05) And these folks perceive aromas with the same consistency and stability across people that Westerners perceive colors, basic colors. So, just like you can kind of show a person a color tile, and they’ll be like, “Red.” You know, if they speak English. This in this society, if you do a scratch and sniff little thing that is, you know, a psychology test for for aroma, everybody will say the same word for that aroma.
(05:31) >> [laughter] >> Which is a level of acuity and stability we don’t have in the West because we don’t take advantage of the opportunity to develop our olfactory sense that way. One of the example, I I did a lot of field work in Brazil, and the perception of music and rhythm there is just next level.
(05:49) I went to a birthday party and they were they handed out instruments just cuz that was what we did and and they started playing happy birthday and the song went on 50 minutes. That ability to sort of understand rhythm and to produce it, you know, little kids have it. Five and six-year-olds can play drums and growing up in that kind of setting.
(06:05) >> um because we’re going to talk about culture a lot in this conversation, that’s your area of expertise, let’s um maybe define what culture is and the way that you may use it throughout this conversation. Sure. Um look, culture is a sloppy term. It’s it’s a it’s a it’s a term of convenience, not of precision.
(06:24) So, when I’m talking about culture a lot of times, I’m talking about what we tend to think of as culture, which are usually linguistic national communities. So, you know, Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, even though there’s a huge amount of variety among Brazilians in Brazilian culture.
(06:37) In fact, it’s usually variable from north to south and you know, from the coast and the beaches to the the rainforest, very different. Um but also a lot of what I’m looking at is like what we call communities of practice in anthropology, which is groups of people who share a common practice. Maybe I’m not just looking at everybody in a society, I’m looking at the musicians in the society or I’m looking at people who have a particular, you know, they talk about, let’s say for example, the wine-producing community in in Australia. They may have a a more
(07:04) acute sense of taste and aroma for certain flavors and smells. It’s it’s basically the idea that there’s a community that is focused on a set of issues and shares a certain common body of language, daily practices, activities, things like that. >> to circle back on something you were talking about before, the sense of smell.
(07:24) And I guess like in this context we’re talking about a culture that has a an acute sense of smell, but they’ve also allocated certain words to that sense of smell to be able to understand it. And we’re talking about like a group of people within a country, what would be the the reason for that? Because when I think about color and the words that we have for color, I might need to scream at someone like, “Watch out for the red car.
(07:50) “ Or, you know, and then if you track that back to when we were hunter-gatherers, it would be like, “Don’t eat that red berry.” So, it’s kind of like we developed words for things to keep each other alive and reproducing. So, with smell, would it be the same thing? >> Ethnography is a study of people’s cultures in situ, like outside the laboratory, where they’re doing it.
(08:09) So, ethnographic research on these communities uh finds that they actually care about smell a lot. So, some of it’s really practical, has stuff, you know, is food safe? They have this idea that you can smell predators in the in the rainforest. And so, it’s kind of a warning system. But, they also have a whole sort of moral cosmological system that’s partially dipped in aroma.
(08:32) So, that certain times of day are dangerous, certain aromas are dangerous because you’re being exposed to spirits. It’s kind of It kind of spans from the super practical to the kind of cosmo, you know, spiritual. Something like color is the same in in English, where there’s actually been a growth in color terms. One argument is it’s coming about because people are getting more um industrial colors.
(08:54) And industrial colors tend to be stable, even like obscure colors, like chartreuse or you know, that because these um you know, Pantone colors are now stabilized and some people care about fuchsia, you know, like these are colors that are sort of being added to the basic vocabulary in certain groups of people.
(09:14) And they’re stable, and there’s a stable shared term for them, and people care about them because they’re using them in their daily lives, thinking about fashion or accessorizing. And so, ironically, they’re actually expanding their color vocabulary as a community, and becoming really exacting with color terms that maybe 50 years ago, you know, your grandparents would have no idea what that is.
(09:33) I was just giggling before as you were saying that cuz I I I want to interrupt you, but I was thinking, oh, people people know more words for colors now because everybody’s, you know, a graphic designer. Everybody’s using Canva. And so, you know, we’re like we’re we’re our culture, you know, is is developing. People are working online, so they blah blah blah, you know, the the um chain of events.
(09:55) Uh but what I find really interesting about that is that when you have a language for something, do you are you more perceptually aware of it? What does that mean for the neurobiology and then also your experience of the world? That is a great question. It’s a live question in the research. Um it’s certainly the case that there is increasing discussion about the relationship of naming to the ability to make stable, consistent distinctions.
(10:22) So, there’s even some experiments where they give people new words, nonsense words, for new concepts, and people will actually find a way so there’s some research where they use, for example, like artificially created dolls of different types and they they give them two different terms and they’re told to sort them by the terms.
(10:40) And sometimes people will use like similarities in the words. Some words sound kind of rounded and some words sound kind of sharp, and so they’ll people organize it. But over time, those terms like perceptually help people to anchor their perceptions and to create a live category. It’s very fast. It’s very dynamic.
(10:59) Um and you can do it like on the fly if you have to. Um I’ve seen it with um dancers, for example, where dancers are trying to do choreography and um somebody comes up with a term that sort of they just kind of pull it out of the air, um and then people will adopt it and actually make sense of it um and stabilize it very quickly.
(11:19) There’s a way in which language has a remarkable it enhances our capacity to do that, to stabilize distinctions in the world of our perceptions. But it especially does it when we have something that we’re anchoring it to, like a practice, um some activity that’s got good motivation because it’s not just a term. If you just make up words, they’re not going to stick.
(11:40) If you make up words about an activity you care about with other people and then you use them, then it’s going to stick. So, it’s got to have meaning. It’s got to have meaning and it’s got to have community, usually. It’s got to have interaction and it’s got to have some stake, you know, like something that actually mean it’s meaningful, but it’s also something’s at stake.
(11:57) You know, there’s a there’s a value to it. >> Yeah, yeah, it’s so interesting, actually. I have a group of friends and um and I actually do have a group of friends. >> [laughter] >> Um >> [gasps] >> and uh we have these words that we use and it’s interesting, um you know, this group of friends have been with me for 10 years and there’s like a language within that subculture or that like mini culture and when I met my boyfriend and we started living together, those words would come into our house because they would be in my vernacular and he had to
(12:32) kind of figure out what they meant by the context in which I was using them and then all of a sudden, you know, in an in a bid to connect with me or explain something to me, he starts to use those words. And I guess like maybe this is quite a tenuous example, but like more of like an evolutionary chain of events in that what might be happening to our brains? Like what’s actually happening? Um the outer surface of the brain, the sort of neocortex, has all kinds of areas that could be allocated to new tasks. When you try to
(12:59) acquire a new skill, there’s often a portion of the brain which is sort of hived off and used to help stabilize those distinctions. Sometimes it also operates in a on um it takes sort of co-opts and you know, you recruit older distinctions into the new distinction. So, for example, the kind of classic case of this is people who become obsessed with classic cars.
(13:20) And if you ask them to sort of what’s that? Oh, that’s a ‘53 whatever Ford this, they will often um you you see you perceive in things like, you know, an fMRI that there’s a lot of oxygenated blood flowing into the same area that’s used for facial recognition. So, some of the hardware that’s used for facial recognition, because you care about it, will be reallocated to identifying cars.
(13:42) It’s really interesting to sort of watch what gets caught. There’s a whole discussion about this in evolution because it doesn’t just happen on an individual psychology. It happens sort of as a species. So, for example, what parts of the brain get reused when when literacy comes in. What were they doing before literacy? Cuz they you know, it wasn’t like some part of the brain suddenly emerged.
(14:04) Like there’s no new part of the brain that’s that’s arising. So, what’s happening? What was that What was that part of the brain doing before? And there’s a whole discussion about, you know, really interesting discussion about like letter formation and was it an area of the brain that was used previously for things like tracking or for seeing small highly detailed things in nature that were important to our ancestors that later gets sort of repurposed into the reading part of the brain.
(14:34) Cuz it turns out that in with most languages when you learn to read it’s the same part of the brain that becomes really active in letter perception. >> I wonder about like how that’s how the brain is doing that on the fly in our lives. Re- reallocating space for different things. Like you said that with the classic cars, you know, someone might forget what the face of their great nephew looks like, but they’ll know when their car they’ll know if they see [laughter] their stolen car on the street, you know.
(14:59) But I wonder, you know, how else that’s that’s affecting us as we move throughout our life and we have to develop new new skills like the skills that we both choose to develop and then the skills that arguably are part of evolution, but like quite a steep learning curve like parenting for example. I know that a lot of big changes happen in the brain.
(15:15) >> Neuroplasticity has a number of different mechanisms. Some of them are quite micro, just synaptic changes between individual neurons. Some of them are more like whole repurposing of areas of the brain or even changing of the size of something, you know, a task like uh again, classic research was done on on uh London cabbies, London cab drivers who have to learn >> the map of London and it actually leads to a change in the size of the hippocampus of the brain, you know, where spatial information is stored.
(15:43) That it’s just such an and it’s it’s probably the case that if a task is really difficult and it takes a long time, one of the reasons is because the brain has to do more large-scale remodeling. If something happens quick and you can pick it up on the fly, odds are that’s a pretty minor adjustment. So, if something is hard, it takes time, you know, a skill is difficult, maybe you you dream about it, you know, your brain is is actually running the circuits in its off time.
(16:12) It’s like trying to lay down the new linkages it needs to make. Um so, I I think it’s one of the sizes sides of skill that we don’t focus on so much is that even something like a physical skill, it’s also requiring neurological change. Like when you’re weightlifting for the first time, part of what’s happening, the reason you sort of get stronger faster, is your brain actually gets better at it.
(16:36) It’s not just your muscles getting larger. >> Mhm. Your brain gets better at like pulling all the resources together that it needs to, you know, stabilizing all of the joints it needs to stabilize and it’s getting better at sort of orchestrating how your body functions. So, the I think the general rule of thumb I would say is the longer it takes to learn a skill, the more change is actually needing to occur.
(16:56) Some things you can learn, you know, very quickly, like first time you see them, you can memorize a number for if you’re one of those kinds of persons, you can learn a new name, for example. It’s it’s a minor reallocation of resources. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That feels like intuitive, you know, the less the the less um hefty the load, like the the lighter it is for the brain to lift it in a sense.
(17:18) I’ve heard you talk about the fact that um in different cultures people have a different idea of what the self is. >> Mhm. >> [clears throat] >> And when we think about consciousness and and I you know, it’s it’s hard because there’s no real consensus on what consciousness even is. It depends on the field of research the person you ask comes from.
(17:39) >> Right, but if we think about consciousness as being the the um you know, like experience of having [snorts] subjective subjectivity and and that being kind of linked through there being like a unity of that across time and that’s what this idea of the self is. How how do other cultures perceive that with their different brains and their different um perceptive tools? I would say that um the current way we understand psychology in the West is very much a kind of ethnocentric and normatizing way.
(18:16) Which is that we tend to think that uh and if anybody’s different to us, they’re they’re not as good or it’s not as advanced. Um and if anybody is doesn’t have a consciousness like um you know, everybody else or like people who’ve written about it, then they’re not they’re not normal. And what I’d say is that’s the more you the more you should do do what I do, the less you’re convinced that there is a normal, you know, that there’s actually quite a bit of variety and that the current consciousness that we see around us in a media-saturated,
(18:47) consumerist, Western world, highly individualized, you know, very focused on personal is not even the same as it was two or three generations ago. You know, that we’re seeing a lot of change. People are worried about, for example, the effects of, you know, mobile phone use and how is that affecting consciousness? Is that changing people’s ability to pay attention to things? And it makes sense because if you think of consciousness not as a trait, but as a skill, then whatever you’re practicing you’re going to get good at. So if you’re
(19:16) practicing being highly wired, you know, and quickly switching from one stimulus to the next you’re going to get really good at that. And it’s not so much again I don’t want to make it a normatizing. It’s not that it’s a deficit cuz that’s the way it’s usually understood. Like kids these days are getting getting damaged by mobile phones.
(19:34) That’s the assumption. When I grew up I carried around a science fiction novel and that’s a kind of attention where you know, I would clock out of whatever setting I was in when it was not interesting and read. And and I’d pick up a narrative. That’s a that’s a cool skill to have but that’s a weird and quirky skill too.
(19:52) So I think we have to focus on the idea that whatever we are with our consciousness is itself probably a weird it’s it’s part of the envelope of what’s possible with a human nervous system. My grandmother for example was was very religious and she prayed a lot. You know, like when she was older she prayed the rosary almost non-stop when she was doing other things.
(20:14) And that’s like almost a form of internal chanting. So she was engaged in this kind of wild you know, practice with her consciousness that is completely alien to me even though I’m in the same culture. There are other people out there who are walking around, you know, influenced by the manosphere thinking everything is an evolutionary psychology battle and you know, and thinking about how they’re, you know, negging or or, you know, mogging on they’ve got a completely different mindset, you know, someone else is is walking around in a consumerist frame of
(20:43) mind and and what what we’re seeing is the the human capacity for enskillment, I think. It’s just that we don’t recognize those things as skills, you know, if you’re a if you’re a, you know, a media influencer you’re walking around with an eye towards possible videos. You can actually learn to see the world you you know, we know that.
(21:04) We know cinematographers get really good at this, photographers. They can see things in a scene and you’re like, “Holy [ __ ] how did they get that photo?” You know, like And again, the the problem is we tend to normatize. So, everything is better or worse, you know, and and I think there’s a real kind of a moral panic about what’s happening with consciousness right now.
(21:24) So, like when I go to Brazil and I see people who are just completely submerged in Afro-Brazilian music. I work with Capoeira practitioners. Mhm. You know, they are they’re cultivating abilities that are just, you know, they’re it’s amazing to watch. You guys who can perform in Olodum, these blocos and drummers, they play for 6, 7 hours during Carnival.
(21:44) And you just think, this is almost an out-of-body state that they achieve through this. Or, you know, going to China seeing something quite different. Um, my wife’s people are they’re they’re from Sichuan, China. And so, food is so important to what they’re doing and they have flavors that I’d never had before. And amazing cooks.
(22:04) And again, they’ve cultivated a whole sensibility. So, I think when I approach other cultures, I see them as a as kind of like experiments in the obsessive pursuit of different things that they care about, whether that’s religion or, you know, perceptual skill or athletic ability. I I just think about way people walk around worried about food, for example, if they’re worried about diet and body culture.
(22:28) We’re all psychological experiments. One of the guys I work with right now, um, is a guy named Daniel Kish. He’s blind and he can echolocate. So, he does like sonar. He clicks his tongue. He can perceive the doors, the the hallway out of a room by the echo that comes back. Yeah, that’s incredible. Um, what was his name? Daniel, did you say? >> Daniel, yeah, Daniel Kish.
(22:49) And he’s an American, uh, he’s he’s he’s blind. He wasn’t born blind, but he had, um, cancer of his retinas very young. Mhm. And he learned how to he basically call he calls it flash sonar, where he takes a sound flash of the environment and hears the environment. And he teaches this around the world.
(23:09) He’s taught it in more than 30 countries. He teaches blind people how to perceive using sound. He was part of a mountain biking team and and like, you know, it’s kind of amazing. But it’s the same nervous system that you and I are are born with. It’s just that he he didn’t have visual perception and he focused so much on sound that he learned how to extract spatial information from it.
(23:33) >> that’s amazing. Um I What comes to mind for me is is when we were talking earlier in the conversation about the reallocation of resources in your brain. It’s kind of like you’re if you have visual perception, you have your two eyes and that’s what creates depth. Whether or not you believe that depth is actually a thing that exists, but that’s another conversation entirely.
(23:55) Your eyes perceive um that and and so when you don’t have your eyes, yeah, like the image sense that there there would be uh an opportunity to reallocate resources so that your ears could perceive depth. >> That’s the thing is it takes that obsessive, you know, that that drive that and and like not every video game player becomes an becomes like a highly competitive video Not every skateboarder learns that.
(24:19) So it’s it’s partially I’m fascinated by obsessives. I’m fascinated by people who go out to the limit. So another bit of my research is with free divers. You know, people who hold their breath for very long periods of time. What does it take to be able to have that much control over your you know, all of these systems that are supposed to be kind of autonomous and not controlled by consciousness.
(24:40) Well, these folks do that. They, you know, they dive to 100 m deep in the in the ocean with no scuba tanks and stay underwater for, you know, five, six, seven minutes. So that those people who are pushing the limits to me are really fascinating because they’re showing us what’s possible. >> You know, there there is only a certain amount of time in the day and then and like you could spend it doing whatever you wanted to do mostly.
(25:06) Like I think I that’s there’s more nuance to that than the statement, but um if you were going to spend eight hours a day listening to the difference between middle C and middle D, you would eventually be able to recognize that that difference in pitch over and over again unless you had some like I don’t know, unless you were fully tone deaf.
(25:27) It’s It sounds to me like that’s what Daniel’s done is he’s gone and dedicated and that’s what these dedicated his his the most important resource we have, which is time, to Mhm. um learning that skill and that’s kind of what these free divers do. But I guess with the free divers, from my limited understanding of what happens in the sport based on like the two Netflix documentaries I’ve watched, it’s you’re training your body um out of doing what it would normally do to protect you from death, right? That feels like a crazy thing to do.
(25:58) >> There’s a lot of things that humans do that feel really crazy. >> Yes. >> what the free divers will tell you is it’s very safe. They they the first instruct I did a I did free diving a little bit. Uh not to a high level. And the first thing they tell you is never dive alone because as soon as you dive alone, you create the possibility of passing out.
(26:17) That’s how you get hurt. Mhm. Um you have to have somebody there who can rescue you because you need support. And so they have a And I think that those that limit pushing that they’re doing is only possible because they have this social safety net around them that’s built up over decades of practice where they actually learn, “Okay, if we’re going to do this, you have to have a line.
(26:40) You know, you’ve got to be clipped onto the line so that if you stop moving, we hit the button on this, it’s going to pull you in. We know how to, you know, revive you.” Like there’s there’s a whole sort of social structure so they can push close to that. But you’re right in the sense that it it’s seems crazy to somebody who’s not done it, but it’s also really interesting because in some ways what they’ve actually done is they’ve taken the survival mechanism, which is the dive reflex, which even infants have.
(27:07) If an infant falls in the water, it will automatically hold its breath and its heart will slow. It’s the same mechanism that is in fish. If you take the fish out of water, same thing will happen to a fish. If a If an animal, like a dog, goes in the water, it will have a dive reflex. There’s It’s like a cross It’s not just humans.
(27:24) It’s across like all vertebrates. And what they do is that by pushing to the edge of what that reflex will do, they make the reflex stronger and stronger and stronger. So, your and my heart might drop 20%. Our heart rate might drop 20% when we go in the water. Some of these divers, their heart rate will drop 50% when they go in the water.
(27:41) So, there It’s funny, they’re actually like using the safety rails to go further and further into this ability by making the safety rails stronger and stronger, but also making them more dramatic. You can’t get as good as like a a seal. A seal’s dive reflex is even more pronounced. But humans have Human divers who do this a lot will have the same dive reflex or almost the same in terms of intensity as something like a manatee or an animal that lives part of its life in the water.
(28:10) So, again, it’s it’s like a culture explores the limits together of what the human body can do. And the same thing for, you know, sports, like distance runners, they’re discovering what’s possible with the human body or, you know, um yeah, any Virtually any sport is doing that. A lot of activities are doing that. Gaming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, gaming. Extreme gaming.
(28:29) Sitting Sitting on your ass for 12 hours straight. And consuming like processing visual information. I mean, one of the things that I find so fascinating is how they learn to work with the nervous system. So, I was watching gamers and they actually sit so close to the screen because in part the distance from the screen actually affects the speed at which they perceive.
(28:47) They’re They’re kind of figuring out how the nervous system works, but by back engineering it, not by having like any sort of scientific tools, but just like how can I get faster? How can I get faster? >> Mhm. Yeah, I think that’s the the um amazing thing about um embodiment or like being in the experience actually doing something as opposed to sitting in the corner and intellectualizing it.
(29:08) Like when you think about trying to um get used to anything that gives you the heebie-jeebies or anything that that that feels uncomfortable, whether it’s like telling someone you love them, whether it’s like getting up on stage and speaking in front of a crowd. Like you can read all the information that you want about it, but you have to actually do it in order to train the body.
(29:29) >> it’s such a great point. And something I made like there’s a famous philosopher who wrote a paper on you know, what is it like to be a bat, for example. Thomas Nagel. Yeah, Thomas Nagel. He tries to write what does it mean to be a bat. He never asked Daniel Kish what it’s like to be a bat, you know? He like it it was a thought experiment.
(29:45) And and this is the same thing for so many things like, you know, people philoso- existential philosophers who write, “What is it like to face death?” Well, go ask a freediver, you know? Go ask And and in fact, what I the point I would make is I’m an anthropologist, and so what I think is that we can sit in our in my office, uh you know, a philosopher can sit in there, you know, their university classroom, seminar room, and like try to think about what’s possible and try to think about what life is like. Or there’s a very famous
(30:13) anthropologist named David Graeber who wrote um the first uh Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He wrote uh he we worked with the Occupy Wall Street movement. And what he said instead is anthropologists think that the way you study the human potential is not by having thought experiments, it’s by going out and seeing if there’s an example in the world already of the question you have.
(30:36) So in in Graeber’s case, he was interested in in um anarchy. He was interested in societies that have no government. So he went out and found one. The things that are possible are things that you know, you can’t even imagine unless you’re doing it. You write a paper, what is it like to be a bat when in fact there’s somebody out there in the world who’s teaching kids how to do it. Mhm.
(30:54) And I that that to me is so important. And same thing with consciousness, you know, people are asking like, “What is consciousness?” Well, there’s so many cool people doing experiments on their own consciousness, whether that’s through psychedelics, through meditation, through endurance sports, through different forms of I’m really about pop psychology.
(31:13) Pop psychology as an experiment in like learning how to restructure your consciousness. If it’s going on, you know, Oprah helped millions of people restructure their awareness of themselves. And we’re doing that all the time. And it it’s a really interesting example. And right now, for for my own research, I’m interested in what’s happening to men and how men are conducting experiments on what it’s like to be conscious of masculinity in a world in which like it’s suddenly problematic the stuff that your grandparents, your grandfather, and
(31:43) your your great uncle they did. Can’t do that anymore. So, okay, what does that mean? And what’s going to replace it? So, I think there’s a lot of, you know, um there’s a lot of real out of the laboratory experiments being run. And that I want to go to those places and see how they’re changing consciousness in the process.
(32:04) So, that’s like my evangelical call for more fieldwork. And you know, more of what you’re doing, Paige. Actually, like going out talking to people who are trying to do cool stuff. And instead of seeing it as like I mean, they’re all options on the table, you know? These are options for us to cultivate in ourselves.
(32:21) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me you’re an anthropologist without telling me you’re an anthropologist. >> [laughter] >> Oops, I’ve given away the game. No, it sound like you sounds like your job is incredibly fun. But but just back to what we said before about the Thomas Nagel paper because I do I think this is an important piece is is what his paper was really trying to um get at was that we we didn’t we don’t really have a description or an understanding of what we mean when we say consciousness.
(32:46) It’s sort of this word that’s been thrown around and his idea was that consciousness is is that it’s like something to be something. So it’s like something to be me. There is a unique subjective experience that it is to be Paige, a unique subjective experience that it is to be Greg, and a unique subjective experience that it is to be Daniel the blind man who can echolocate.
(33:07) I think that that’s the best, you know, it’s the most agreed upon definition that I’ve heard people talk about for when we say the word consciousness because often that word gets thrown around in conversation and really what we’re talking about is mindset or really what we’re talking about is awareness, you know, like the what is what is it to be aware of a particular thing.
(33:26) When you talk about the manosphere, men are all of a sudden becoming aware of these limitations. Mhm. And so their their experience of what it’s like to be them all all of a sudden includes this like new information that then has to change how they weave through the world. Um I’m interested when you think about consciousness, are you thinking about minds mindset because you do have that background in studying psychology and criticizing psychology? Are you thinking about it like that or are you thinking about it more as just the the phenomenon of even
(33:57) being aware, not of being aware of something specific, but being aware in general, having subjective experience? >> Wow, that’s You’ve just dropped like a huge question. That’s great. Um And I’d say No, no, don’t don’t be sorry, please. It’s it’s fantastic. So I work with a lot of people who do sort of study of consciousness in animals.
(34:17) Mhm. And and so they’re always like pushing me on the fact of like you’re all talking about minor variations of the same thing and we’re looking at an octopus Yeah, honey bees and you know, like like that’s It’s really a challenge to think about. And and you know, somebody like um Andrew Barron who does research on animal This will say that, you know, to his way of thinking every living thing has a form of consciousness.
(34:41) You know, that it perceives. It seems that’s one of the qualities of being a living being, whether or not it has any kind of self-awareness. It may have zero self-awareness. Like, you know, it may not have no sense of that it’s a an organism. It just may have a world. But, what I would say is that the the the example of language is really interesting because it shows that even though it’s each person is unique, we live towards each other in ways that our languages are not mutually unintelligible, nor are they identical.
(35:10) So, you may say something and I might say, “Uh that’s not how it feels to me.” You know, so there is a way in which like we approach each other’s experiences and there’s overlap of all sorts. And and sometimes the lack of overlap will surprise you. You know, somebody will say something like, “Whoa, that’s not what I experienced.
(35:26) You know, that’s not what it’s like for me.” But, sometimes it it’ll actually resonate in a really deep way and you’re and you listen to somebody talk and you’re like, “Holy [ __ ] that’s really good. You know, I I never thought of it that way, but in fact this person is is really saying something that as I sit with it and listen.
(35:42) “ So, for me, consciousness I’m not I’m I’m not a philosopher and I don’t have to define it. So, that gives me an out. Um and and the kind of classic anthropology cop-out is, you know, “I’m That’s an open question and the way that I study it is by going and talking to other people about what they think.
(36:00) “ You know, like it’s kind of great cop-out, right? Anybody ask you a Anybody ask you a hard question it’s like, “Oh, I’ll do that work and I’ll do the research. I’ll go study somebody else who thinks about that, too.” >> Totally. That’s exactly what I do. Yeah, but but I think in a sense that is the way in which it’s that’s the natural way you learn.
(36:18) You know, the the fact is that when you’re a kid, you grow up with like one or two or three or four examples. They’re close to you. And the more you get out in the world and the more you encounter other people, the more your horizons get pushed back, and the more you start to think about other possibilities. And every once in a while, you run into a transformative other person who shows you a dimension of say, for example, something like consciousness and your ability to be aware that you didn’t have before.
(36:44) You know, you run into a therapist, you run into a guru, you run into a deep thinker who like, you know, you know, mind’s blown. What am I going to do with that? And it can take you years to digest what somebody gives you. And to me, that’s not surprising. That is the nature of learning, you know, that that I encountered ideas when I was 19 at the University of Virginia that I’m still like grappling with um is part of what makes it so interesting that philosophy is not a and and theory they’re not these sort of distant abstractions. They’re actually
(37:21) stuff that you may struggle with every day. I’m really glad to be here in part because um I want to encourage folks not just to go on a journey like you’ve done, but to include you in these kinds of conversations in their own exposure to expand their horizons. I’m approaching my 60th year, and I still feel like I’m learning so much about these kinds of questions.
(37:44) And that’s part of what keeps me going. You said it’s great to have a job like yours, and that’s exactly how I saw it. When I first became an anthropologist, I was like, okay, I’ll do this for a while, and then when I have to get a real job, I’ll get a real job. I’ll do this as long as I can cuz it’s really fun, and I never had to get a real job, at least not yet.
(38:02) Um so in the process, when I first started doing it, I was interested in sports and Vodou, the Haitian religion. I was interested in Afro-Brazilian culture and Santeria, Umbanda, and then became interested in Capoeira, and then sort of over time I interested in cage fighters, what cage fighters were. Cuz I was really interested perceptions of pain and what pain meant.
(38:29) Um you know, cuz in fact, there’s this idea in some of social science and humanities that pain is like world destroying. That pain just sort of makes people like if you’re in pain it’s sort of like you’re you’re isolated and your your world is being torn apart if you’re in pain. But I knew cage fighters and they trade pain back.
(38:49) >> [laughter] >> Yeah, well, like they opt for it and then they and when they’re training they trade it. You know, like like I I do a choke on you and you go, “Oh, yeah, yeah, that that hurts like hell.” You know, and then let’s switch. Now I do it to you and you tell me when it hurts the most.
(39:03) You know, and like, “Oh, that’s not working. That’s not working. Oh, yeah, that hurts like crazy. You got it.” You know, like we’re we actually give each other the pain in order to understand how the body works better. And so they were using pain as a kind of like a way in to understanding the way their bodies worked. In some ways it was quite beautiful because to be good at it you had to be willing to be the victim as well as the you know, you had to be willing to lie there and let somebody twist your arm and then say, “Oh, that doesn’t really hurt that much. No, no,
(39:28) no, you haven’t got it.” You’re trusting this person so much. Cuz you’re trusting them and it with your vulnerability. You’re trusting them with your health. You’re trusting them with your consciousness. Mhm. Yeah. Literal literal like your your your awakeness. Yeah, your awakeness. So So to me I was fascinated by this.
(39:48) It actually I was quite moved by it. You know, people looked at this sport and they saw violence and I looked at it and I saw these projects of learning about our limits. So I end up doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu and that too. But yeah, this is just to sort of say like consciousness, I think we’re all exploring consciousness whether we realize it or not.
(40:07) Some of us are not exploring it very aggressively. We’re we’re sort of repeating the same experiment day after day without really pushing it. And other folks are out there looking for teachers, looking for um gurus, looking for new experiences that can take them to new places. Um Well, I guess in that there’s like a new definition of what consciousness could be.
(40:28) It’s like um I don’t know if it’s if it’s new, but like it’s a working thing It’s something that we’re working on in this conversation that it is like your um experience it it is like a almost like a platter and you can put lots of things on it, you know, and it’s just some people are interested in putting more things on that platter and interested in like, you know, really just seeing how they can make all those things balance and like how what’s the how how how many grapes can we get on this corner of the platter before they topple over and maybe that’s kind of
(40:59) what the Brazilian the cage fighters are doing is they’re thinking like, you know, how much maybe they’re not they’re not conscious like they’re not thinking about it in this way, but just how how much can we balance on this plate before it topples over fully and then other people just don’t you know, other people prefer for the experience if we go back to Thomas Nagel, like it is like something to be something they they prefer for that to be more narrow.
(41:22) And then you think about when when like with your work in moving into other cultures cuz I do also have like a I do hear myself there’s a lot of cultural relativism in the things that I say because I’m white middle class from a you know, developed country looks a certain way and then somebody from another culture is going to Yeah, like that their plate their platter is going to have different things on it.
(41:42) I think that the platter is a great is a great metaphor cuz also this idea that maybe I don’t want to eat the same thing I’m always eating if I don’t pay attention to what I’m serving myself. You know, where there’s a definition for consciousness. I would say whatever definition you’re going to have it’s going to have layers.
(41:57) And one of the the sort of higher forms of conscious is just awareness that it doesn’t have I don’t have to be thinking the way I’m thinking. Just the fact that I know, oh, my language, my upbringing, my family’s background, they’re all limiting what I can do. Um and it’s not limiting in a sense of actively stopping me. Just they’ve given me one meal on that platter.
(42:19) It’s up to me whether I choose to eat that meal every day for the rest of my life or not. And and I think for me one of the things that’s really exciting about living in a multicultural society is you’re kind of always around people who’ve got something else on their platter. I think that we are not in so much homogeneous societies where everybody is basically doing the same thing.
(42:43) I I grew up in a very homogeneous time and place. You know, I didn’t know people who didn’t go to the same church. I didn’t know people who didn’t you know, believe the same things. People voted the same way. And you know, they had a set of professions were fairly narrow range. So one of the first things I want to do was get out of there.
(43:00) And I didn’t even know for sure where I wanted to go. But I think it was that sense of like I can tell if I stay here my capacity to experience is going to be limited. One thing about being in a multicultural society, I’m in Australia in Sydney, highly varied, is that it’s the nature of our society that we’re constantly exposed to alternatives.
(43:21) Sometimes really uncomfortable alternatives, sometimes really persuasive and interesting alternatives. And and I think that that some people get very nervous from that. And they react politically. And we know from psychological studies that some people are really made anxious by the fact that their neighbors are not the same as them.
(43:37) If your neighbors are not from the same political party or they don’t go to the same church. How do you feel about that? And some people are fine with it. Some people actually think oh that’s cool. And some people are like no I don’t like that. I want to be next door to somebody who shares this with me.
(43:51) And we know that those folks tend to have a kind of negative reaction to for example diversity around themselves. You know, they they meet somebody who’s gay or if they’re not gay or if they meet somebody who’s got a different kind of gender expression makes them uncomfortable. And I think anthropology is the discipline that most um, tries to push against that tendency and say, “No, no, no. Pay attention to what’s different.
(44:17) “ >> When you were saying that I was thinking of like the the um, amount of things that you can hold in your in your head and sometimes when you’re in your head {quote} {unquote}, you know, like in your um, perceivable awareness um, and how that like affects how you move through the world. If you’re somebody like me, for example, who is always sort of the things that I’m saying because I have some, you know, I have this like desire to be perceived in a certain way.
(44:43) It’s like a control mechanism that means that if I’m tracking and making sure that I have like an extra couple of liters of of brain fuel on policing what I say, then I can control the external world and how they um, and how it’s sort of like uh, relates to me. And that um, level of like having to hold so much stuff in your in your brain is so exhausting and then you look at other people that just open their mouth and speak and they’re not they’re not, you know, and they’re just like sometimes they’re saying really like poetic and
(45:13) profound and like almost like they’re channeling and then other times they’re just talking absolute um, [ __ ] and you’re like, “Wow, you should maybe think more about what you say.” Um, but I guess in terms of like but coming back to the metaphor of that platter of of like you hold all of these experiences on your platter and that makes up what it it’s like to be you.
(45:34) And I guess when you think about experience, you could also put it in the category of memory. Mhm. So you have all these memories of these experiences um, or desires to have new experiences and that’s all on your platter and your conscious awareness, but then you’ve kind of got all the meta stuff going on as well.
(45:49) So the stuff that’s not just external, but the internal like, “Oh, I’m I’m aware of the fact that my like at some point I’m going to have to get up and go to the toilet.” And then I’m aware of the fact that I’m going to have to switch the position that I’m sitting in whilst we talk for 90 minutes. And then I’m also aware of what I’m saying to you, and then I’m trying to be aware of you.
(46:05) >> I think that the more you make yourself responsible, especially for other people’s experiences, the more you probably overburden yourself that way. Because certainly as a teacher, what you find is that you have no idea how your students are actually taking what you teach them. You know, what you think you’re trying to teach them and what you’re actually teaching them.
(46:25) Unfortunately, there could be such discontinuity. And I used to try to micromanage more what the student experience would be. And I I wasn’t that good at managing it. And I wasn’t that good at deciding what they really needed. And I And I think back on my own days when I was at university, for example, and I have a lot of sympathy for that stupid 19-20-year-old who was, you know, drinking too much and doing too many things and having you know, like I have a lot of I have a lot of cuz he he didn’t really know what he was doing. And I’m I’m not any more
(46:52) convinced that at my age now, I’ve got it all figured out. So, I think for me, um when I think about like the meta level, I’m more and more interested in like how do I perform to have a good impact? And by good impact, I don’t mean one that necessarily reflects well on me, but that gives them something that’s useful to them.
(47:13) Otherwise, I think you get wrapped around the axle worrying too much about the levels of like, are they going to like me? Wait a minute, am I overcompensating and being too obsequious? You know, am I not saying the hard thing that needs to be said? You know, the confrontational thing that needs to be said. Um when you know, I think a lot of us, especially those of us who watched what’s happened in the US, were we too worried about protecting people’s feelings and let a kind of political, moral cancer grow in the US.
(47:42) It’s sort of like actually seeing the enemy so clearly, which to me is not a person. It’s an ethos of your religion must be like my religion. You know, you must proclaim loyalty to the same ideas I proclaim loyalty to. Realize actually all this right thinking was just we weren’t focused on the big picture and how there is so much depression, so much fear, so much lack of motivation.
(48:07) And it has nothing to do with how we talk to them in the classroom. It has to do with the condition of the world. You know, it has to do with the economy and and the concentration of wealth and the big issues. You’re right. You get meta, but then also I think going up to that higher level and think of what are we really after in this world and what are we really What’s the influence we’re trying to have? And for me, one of the reasons I’m sorry I keep coming back to anthropology.
(48:33) One of the reasons that I push this is because once you start thinking about how each person is an experiment and each way of living is has something to teach us, there’s a real generosity in that. You know, there’s a real there’s a real like like I want to listen to other people. And And And on the other hand, you’re not responsible for having it all figured out.
(48:55) You know, it it takes the pressure off because yeah, you don’t have to have it all sorted, you know, we’re all trying to do our part. And And so one of the things I can do most most important that I do is to listen. You know, I realize now that my job is not so much just to do my own research and just keep hammering out things.
(49:13) It’s actually to encourage people to talk to, you know, their own family, their their elders and and to talk to their you know, to explore their own cultures and the things they care about. Yeah, that’s like if any if if people listening take one thing away from this podcast, it is yeah, you don’t have to have it you don’t have to have it all figured out.
(49:33) It’s actually like impossible to do that. I always am reminding myself of that every day that it’s you know, the the the further away you can get from feeling like you need to have the answers. And maybe that’s why I’m attracted to these questions around consciousness, too, is that I don’t feel like they have answers. And so when I’m asking those questions, there’s so much nuance.
(49:54) It’s like, ah, there’s a lifetime of things to chew on here without ever getting to a binary about Yeah. >> right and wrong. Yeah, I mean it’s it it means that there’s it’s more of a creative process than a truth process. You know, like you would nobody’s going to write the song that makes all future song compositions obsolete.
(50:12) You know, nobody’s going to write the song that makes song writing stop. Like, right? That would be terrible. So, nobody is We don’t want that. And I think consciousness in a in a way is is similar. You know, nobody’s going to live the life that makes other lives not worth living. You know, if anything, you know, some of these the the the lives that are possible today are not weren’t all possible 30 years ago, 40 years ago.
(50:35) And that’s really interesting, you know, but but I think it means we’ve got to really relax a bit about worrying about normality, worrying about, you know, like what’s right. It’s certainly it’s huge relief to me cuz I I was so worried about like the effects of mobile phones and the effects of, you know, online gaming and the the rise of gambling and and how it’s affecting young people and oh my god, their attention spans and and you realize, wait a minute.
(51:00) Like the the achievement of the attention span I had was itself a weird aberration, you know, like maybe this is just an experiment of a different kind of attention, you know, and so there’s a whole way in which we’re constantly trying on new things. Now, um I do think there are there are these bigger things like we have to live on the planet in a way that’s sustainable and consciousness I think has to take that into account.
(51:24) >> Let’s uh circle back to your research cuz I’m interested to know um your perspective on taking things, taking practices out of their context of culture and re um allocating them or or or putting them into the context of new culture for better or worse. And what I’m what I’m really thinking about like the specific example that I’m thinking about here is uh the boom of psychedelic um assisted therapy.
(51:52) The um scaling of and it’s not really happening yet, but you can kind of see that it’s going to happen in the future, the scaling of of psychedelic medicine. >> Yeah, there’s huge cautionary tale right now in the United States with the legalization of marijuana. Um which arguably is not having great effects.
(52:09) Um because it’s leading to high incidence higher incidence of schizophrenia manifestations, mental health problems. It’s not You know, there was assumption that when you legalize marijuana, you’re going to get less incarceration, you’re going to get less social problems. The problem is you’re introducing marijuana into society without other supports, you know, that if you don’t have good medical care, then people are turning to what’s available as an alternative to medical care.
(52:32) So, people with chronic injury, with trauma, with cancer, so when you introduce these things, whether it’s legalization of drugs or you know, or it you have they have to recognize that they’re being introduced in a particular context without necessarily the safeguards they have where they’re coming from.
(52:48) You know, so if you just introduce psychedelics in an environment in which there’s not other a lot of alternatives, in which um people are using them recreationally and they’re trying to use you know, sort of use this route to get to them recreationally. The classic example this is is handguns in Canada and the US. You know, they’re guns in Canada and the US where they have a very different effect, you know, whereas um in the US it there’s incredibly high rate of of homicide and suicide with guns, whereas in Canada you don’t. So, what’s going on there? Well,
(53:16) one, you know, you’ve got different racism, you’ve got different social problems, you’ve got different um lack of of alternatives in terms of medical care, uh diseases of depression. So, what I’m trying to say is that it’s not just introducing psychedelic drugs, it it’s not just like you can port over the ceremony into Australia for example, where I where I am, and and and you’re going to get the same effect.
(53:46) You’re going to get a lot of other collateral effects. Do I believe that it’s possible in a controlled setting with therapeutic support that psychedelics will probably be useful? Absolutely. I think the evidence is very clear. To give you an example, when we moved Capoeira to Notre Dame where I was teaching in the states, um and I brought up a master from Brazil.
(54:06) He’d been living in the United States. I brought him to Notre Dame to teach. He had to create new exercises that he never used for the Brazilians because the the kids he was working with were nothing like the children he was starting with in Brazil. And the only reason we were able to do it is because this guy was so savvy and he could see the problems and he could say, “Wait, this environment is missing something that we have back home.
(54:32) I’ve got to inject I’ve got to invent something new or else these people are going to get hurt because they don’t have the their bodies aren’t ready for it. So, I I I think there is a there’s like it’s not a a rule where I’d say don’t do it. It’s a rule where I’d say do it carefully and see what’s missing. If you’re looking for example for therapeutic effects from psychedelics and you bring it to society where people aren’t ready to spend three or four days in a forest, you know, with animals and away from the pressures of daily life.
(55:05) Maybe you’re going to need to in create retreats which you didn’t have before. Maybe you’re going to have to create you know, new ceremonies to go around it that are going to help people stay in the right frame of mind so they don’t become anxious or worry. Classic case of this is um alcohol. When people get drunk in different societies, they have very different outcomes.
(55:25) You know, if you get drunk in one place, everybody wants to, you know, hook up. If you get drunk in another place, everybody wants to fight. You know, you get drunk in another place, they all want to sing, you know? Um like it very much depends on the culture where the alcohol lands what effect it will have on the people who are taking it.
(55:41) >> You see that in like the way that Australians drink versus the way Europeans drink. >> Mhm. And the way that uh you know, Australians tend to take their drinking behaviors uh to [clears throat] other parts of the world and you know, they’re looked at as if like that’s not that’s not how you do that drug.
(55:58) That is not like that’s not the correct use, the correct dose. Um yeah, the correct way to enjoy that particular altered state of consciousness. Then and again, it just shows it’s not just a chemical interacting with the brain, you know, nature versus nurture. It’s it’s the environment. It’s this dynamic, you know, and um yeah, we we all know that cuz you know, when I I like to drink in some settings more than others because I don’t like myself in some settings drinking, you know, it’s not even it’s not even I don’t like the setting. It’s
(56:29) I don’t like the what I become in that setting, you know. That’s part of being conscious, I suppose. >> [snorts] >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can relate to that. Um I I want to talk to you about before we wrap up, I want to talk to you about learning. Um what would you say is the the the best way to learn a new physical skill? >> I mean, the simple thing is time on task, obviously, that you know, you got you got to spend time.
(56:53) But I think I mean, motivation is just the key and this is not just physical, but like motivation is a key even in academic subjects I teach. And one of the hardest things we’re doing right now is we are stripping out social motivation from so many of our activities. So, why did you learn to play a certain sports previously? Well, I learned to play a sport because I wanted to be in that social setting, you know, I liked I I learned to play tennis cuz I enjoyed hanging out with the tennis players and you know, and I
(57:19) picked up stuff from people and like trying to learn online by yourself is such a heavy lift. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a sport or a skill or a craft or an academic thing. And that’s one of the reason why I’m sort of dismayed by the move to like online education. If somebody’s highly motivated, absolutely they can learn, you know? But the problem is most of us aren’t.
(57:42) And most of us really learn through those interactions. We stay on task through those interactions. So, if you want to learn a physical activity, join the club for that activity. Just be with the people who do it. And what you’ll find is that it becomes more much almost almost effortless. Um so, I really wanted to learn to salsa dance.
(58:05) I was trying to um I was trying to hook up with a girl, and she was into Latin dancing. And so, I found out they had free lessons every Wednesday night. And free free snacks at one of the clubs. And so, I would go there and we’d have an hour-long lesson, and then I would try to dance. And first when I got on the floor, I was so bad that I’d get stressed out like halfway through a song and have to stop.
(58:26) You know, I’d be like, “I’m sorry. I can’t I can’t keep dancing. I’m I’m so like stressed out.” Um but I really like the more I was there and the more I ate the food and the more like people knew me, um I I became I eventually became a salsa instructor, you know? And it was primarily just because I wanted to be in that social world, you know? I just wanted to have a place there, and then people would show me stuff, and people would help tell me to relax.
(58:50) And they would say, “You’re doing great.” And you know, “You don’t need to be so nervous.” And all of that just helps. It just like they were trying to get me to be part of their group. And in the end it worked. But it’s letting that group work on you. So, if there’s something you want to learn, my advice is find a group, let the group pull you in, and and let them help you to become one of them.
(59:11) >> I think that’s really sage and timely wisdom, you know, cuz things are changing rapidly in this world. And and we’re going to have to all adopt new skills. You know, particularly as the workforce changes. So, I think that’s a Yeah, if if any motivation is good enough, you know, the fact that you might find yourself with a whole lot of free time on your hands and need to pivot careers feels like a good one.
(59:38) I can recommend salsa. No. >> [laughter] [gasps] >> No, it’s it’s funny cuz I think the other thing too I’d say and I’ll I I know we’re getting to the end is that when I did my fieldwork in Brazil, I went down there to do my PhD, but what I discovered was a dimension to myself at the same time. And I think that’s the thing about being around other cultures is in the process of of of like learning about them.
(1:00:02) I I never became Brazilian. Nobody ever would mistook me for a Brazilian. I I I never went native. I I I never passed, you know, but I I learned about dimensions of myself that were never going to develop back in St. Louis where I grew up, you know, and so by exposing myself to another culture it wasn’t just like I gained knowledge about them.
(1:00:22) I at the same time parts of me got exercised and got stronger. And you know, I I would I was singing by the time I left Brazil, I cried when I left. I mean, it was so sad to go. I I sang in public. I danced samba, you know, and and like I did capoeira on the stage. I all the stuff and I never I lectured in Portuguese.
(1:00:41) None of that stuff was on my plan. It was all just because once you’re there, once you’re in that in that in that group in that culture that everybody wants to help you and people want you to be part of it. And same things happen to me as I go to China right now with my wife is I mean, they desperately want me to speak Mandarin and I’m going to try.
(1:01:00) And I bet as soon as I have 10 words, they’re going to want to give me my 12, 13, 14, 15th word. And let yourself be swept into things. That’s what I would say is probably the the if there’s like a core personal lesson from anthropology, it’s let people teach you how to be more like them and what you’ll find is that you grow in the process. Well, great.
(1:01:22) Danny, you have had a very colorful life. Um, thank you so much for sharing some of that with me today. Thanks, Paige. It was a pleasure.
