Why did the chicken cross the road? (E)

0:00How can you tell if a salmon has good parents? The little baby salmon is born, hangs out around the egg sacs, eats the remaining egg sacs for a little bit of extra energy, and then just at the right time starts moving its way down the river. While going down the river, sometimes in anticipation of flowing water, it will turn itself backwards and allow itself to be carried using less energy. Then it will end up in the ocean. It will then spend a year and a half to three or five years in the ocean until it's ready to spawn. And then it will go all the way back to the very place it was born and lay its eggs.

0:45Of course, this is not an example of good parenting because the baby salmon never meets its parents. It knows how to do all of this on its own. Konnichiwa! It's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

1:09Salmon, of course, have an extraordinary life cycle, and they evolved to have this life cycle. They evolved to be born with the innate knowledge, the instinct, to go do all of these steps without being taught them. No parents. Their siblings don't show them how. They just know. Most of the time, though, that's not how human beings do their stuff. A newborn baby placed in a basket left in the jungle will perish. You can't even count on a three-year-old figuring out how to make his own way through the world. Kids learn almost everything they know how to do from the adults and older siblings around them.

1:59So we don't call that an instinct. We call that learning. For a long time, we treated human beings as a completely separate entity when we thought about beings on the earth. that everybody else has instinct and we have learning. Well, it's a lot more complicated than that. Consider the case of crows. Crows, one of the smartest birds of the animal kingdom, a raven, a crow. In this case, a crow living in Japan. This breed of crow eats nuts. These nuts live inside a shell, a tough shell, like a walnut shell. So what the crows have always had to do was find a nut, then fly high up in the air, drop the nut, hope that the nut lands on a hard piece of ground and cracks open.

2:50Then they fly down and eat the nut from inside the shell. If it doesn't work, they grab the nut and they do it again. As you can imagine, this burns quite a few calories. Two things recently happened in Japan that changed the life for this crow. The first one is cars. The second is they paved the road so the cars would have somewhere to drive. And about 40 or 50 years ago, a crow stumbled on an idea. And the idea is that if they leave the nut on the ground right outside the parking garage, it's entirely possible that a slow-moving car will run over the nut and crack it. And so with almost no calories expended, that smart crow was able to eat lunch.

3:44The extraordinary thing that happened next is it turns out that that smart or lucky crow is not alone. It turns out that the other crows saw what this crow was doing and copied the idea. They learned how to do it from the other crows. Or, the author Menno Schultesen reports about the work of Lucy Applin and the blue tit, a bird common to the United Kingdom. It turns out that the blue tit cannot drink milk because the lactose doesn't agree with it. But it really likes cream. The fat in cream gives it a boost in the calories it needs to survive. Well, for a long time, Tits realized that milk was being delivered to homes in Britain.

4:38Old-fashioned milk, of course, isn't homogenized, and the cream rises to the top. So, a bird that knows what it's doing can land on the bottle, drink the cream, and fly away, much enraging the homeowner. Over time, the tits came to learn what time the milkman was coming, and they would wait, waiting for the milk to be delivered, grabbing their cream before the homeowner could show up and take the bottles away. Well, not ready to surrender, the milk companies started putting lids on the bottles. Within a matter of weeks, the birds had figured out how to take the lids off, and then they used metal lids.

5:24The metal lids were more difficult to get off, but the birds figured it out. Not only that, the birds figured out which color lid was on the full fat milk versus the 2 % or the skim milk and they only went for that one. Here's the really interesting part. Not that the blue tit is a super smart bird. The interesting part is that they started mapping which birds living where knew how to do this trick. And what they discovered was that it didn't take very long for the idea to spread across a huge range, that a bird, a blue tit, might range as far as six miles, but that wasn't enough to explain how the idea spread so quickly across the map.

6:17Lucy Applin's work demonstrated that what was happening is that some of the birds were trainers. They either were the inventors of the technique, or they were good at teaching other birds how to do the technique. These trainers would fly to other locations, do their trick, other birds would learn from them, and thus new trainers would train other birds, and the idea would spread. I know this sounds ridiculous and far-fetched, but it's true and easily verified. So what's going on here? What's going on is simple. The reason the chicken crosses the road is because the other chickens are doing it and they learned it from each other.

7:07That culture, hardwired into us culture, is the idea of seeing an innovation that's coming from another creature, copying it and then teaching it to someone else. Chickens like us do things like this. People like us do things like this. And the complicated debate about nature and nurture, about instinct and learning, is complicated because they overlap each other. The salmon will never meet its mom, but every human will. And the human that meets the person who's raising them, that human is influenced not just by the person who's raising them, but by their peers. That middle school is horrible, partly because you have to spend all your time with 13-year-olds, 13-year-olds who are in the midst of a significant change in the way their brain chemistry works.

8:10It's those peers, the ones that we are spending all our time listening to, learning from, leading, and being led by, that determine what kind of human we're going to be in this moment. And so, what we have to recognize is that it's not necessarily, In fact, it's probably not our genes that make us a good student, a good writer, a good juggler, a good leader. It's the people we've been around. It's the expectations that have been put on us. It's the information that's been in front of us and the expectations that those we look to have for us. and these expectations, this learning, this is hardwired into us.

8:59We evolved to be learning machines, to be storytelling machines, and most of all, to be hyper aware of what the people around us are doing. And so, if you go to a wedding and everyone's wearing a sport coat and you're not, you're likely to notice it. And so if everyone knows about a new movie or is listening to a certain song and you don't, you might not be the kind of person that needs to be informed all the time, but you will probably notice that you are not in sync. And so the chicken crossing the road. what we have the chance to do as changers of culture, as people who lead, is simple. We can establish what people like us are doing.

9:52We can celebrate and elevate the role models. We can flash a light, a bright light, on the people who are doing the work we think is important. and as parents, as influencers, as bosses, what we get to do is make sure that we've got the right co-workers or co-students at the kitchen table because when they're sitting around the kitchen table or the table in the cafeteria or the table in the break room, that is where culture is established. My old friend Ellie, when he was a teacher, refused to spend time in the teacher's lounge because all that happened in the teacher's lounge at his school was teachers bad-mouthed the system and their students.

10:40That says a lot about their school. It says even more about their principal because what's happening in that room is the establishment of norms, is deciding who's going to cross the road and who's not. So if we want to make a change in a team, in an organization, what we can do is change who decides who a peer is. What stories do we tell each other about our peers? How do we determine if we're acting inbounds or out of bounds? Because we get what we tolerate. And if a manager or a leader or a boss tolerates certain behavior from someone who is acting as a peer leader, you can bet that behavior will be repeated.

11:26not just by the first blue tit who opened up a bottle of milk and drank the cream, but among all the birds that that bird taught how to do that trick. The two problems with the chickens point to two problems we have in our society. The first one is that we hesitate to accept the mechanics of how evolution works. gradual drip-by-drip change, a simple process that inexorably creates the world we live in. We focus on the short-term emergency instead of understanding that it's the long-term grinding that leads to the future we're going to inhabit. But the bigger challenge we have is this. In the face of the extraordinary power of genetic evolution, we erroneously come to the conclusion that people are born fully baked.

12:28We treat people like salmon. They are who they are. They're going to make it through the river, they're going to live in the ocean, and they're going to somehow, by instinct, find it all the way back to their spawning grounds. The alternative is to realize that mimetic evolution, the culture that we live in, is plastic, it's changeable, it's fast-moving, and it's powerful, and that we have the power, if we're willing to be bold and patient, to create ideas that spread, to surround people with opportunities to learn and to level up and to make a difference. That we can find the instructors the way there are blue tit instructors and crow instructors and human instructors who will find the others and tell the others.

13:22That now, with all of the technology we've built, we have the chance to reach more people than ever before and to make a stand. And that stand is simple. People like us do things like this. And what makes you people like us is simply that you want to be people like us. Not that you were born that way, not that you look like this, but that you've chosen to enroll in a journey, that you've chosen to level up, to make a difference, to cross the road. Thanks for listening. I'll be back in a minute with answers to your questions from last time.

14:28We truly love getting your questions. and I'd like to say that the caliber of what we're hearing from you keeps going up. So thank you for that. If you've got a question about this episode or anything that you've heard on Akimbo, please visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K and press the appropriate button. Works best on Android or your desktop. Also, I'd like to point out that there are show notes for each and every episode. Sometimes you'll even find something interesting there. I got fewer nitpicks about evolution than I feared this week. One was about epigenetics, which is the idea that something can happen to us after we are born that will affect our DNA and be passed on to our ancestors.

15:21And yes, this is true. Whether it's the legendary impact on our chromosomes from LSD or something that could happen in the environment. But the fact is, Lamarck was wrong. That giraffes that stretch their necks do not make it more likely that they have kids with long necks. Anyway, here's a question from Zoe. The second was your last episode about what to do with the fear when embarking on something new. Part of your premise was if we could just put the fear somewhere, we could free ourselves to do great work. And to use your phrase, go and cause a ruckus. However, what do you do with fear if it's not a fear of failure stroke being picked but an economic fear as a 51 year old single mom my fears are real intangible if i start something new and have sunk costs like your godiva project it will have a direct negative impact on my life the thought of putting my children or their home in jeopardy prevents me from pushing through and taking financial risks i'm stuck i know i'm stuck but i'm not sure where to put a fear that feels so all-consuming I love your work, Seth.

16:26You're awesome. Thanks, Zoe, for giving me a chance to distinguish here. The point I am making about risk is that there's something fundamentally different between today and when my dad started his fiberglassing company in 1959. Then in 1959, when my dad started fiberglassing boats, trying to build a business as an entrepreneur on the edge of Long Island Sound, he had to bet everything. And it turned out that the boats leaked and he ended up failing and having to go get a job. That the stakes of quitting your job, building a company, finding the assets, going into the world, putting it all on the table, were extreme.

17:14Today, the risk most of us face in our side hustle, in our spare time, in the generous work that we do when we're not on the clock, is not the risk of cataclysmic financial failure. It is the risk of being ignored, of being ridiculed, of haranguing ourself about missed opportunities, that it is cheaper than ever to publish our ideas, to connect the others, to lead, to put ideas into the world, to organize an event, to be the one who chooses instead of being the one who waits to be chosen. We hesitate on all of those fronts, not because cash flow is the issue, but because the narrative, the voice in our head is making us afraid.

18:11It's amplifying that fear, even though the stakes couldn't be financially lower than they are. When we look at the numbers, people are spending seven or eight hours a day checking their phones, watching Netflix, and not doing much productive. If we spent an hour of that time every day organizing, coaching, leading, connecting, provoking, teaching, it's probably not going to work until it will. And when it does, we'll look at what we built and we'll be glad we did. Maybe we made money doing it even, but that's not why we did it. We did it because we could, because we had the chance to do it. We did it because dancing with the fear is better, more productive, more generous than fighting with it.

19:12Thanks for listening. Thanks for the ruckus you make. We'll see you next time.