Understanding Tribal Signals: A Conversation with an Evolutionary Anthropologist

00:00 Adam

Welcome, fellow seekers of knowledge and wonder, to The Anthro Life, the podcast that takes you on a journey through the vast and vibrant tapestry of human culture. I'm your guide, Adam Gamwell, and together we're going to deep dive into the woven threads of society, exploring the why and the how of human existence. Now today we are uncovering a captivating cultural phenomenon that will make you question the very nature of social fabric. So ask yourself this. How do we identify and trust our own kind in a world full of strangers? And are we still bound by ancient ties that brought us together in the past, in today's hyper-connected age? And in a world filled with rapid advancements, technological wonders, it's easy to forget the importance of the primal bonds that we have, and the ancient art of human connection. But this is where anthropology comes in, shedding light on the complexities of our past to illuminate our present and guide us towards a brighter and better future. Joining us on this expedition today is evolutionary anthropologist David Samson. David's work has taken him through time exploring our evolutionary roots as humans, into the present with our closest relatives, chimpanzees, and exploring the future of our species alongside small-scale foragers and other societies around the world. Now with his keen insights and deep understanding of human behavior, David's going to take us on a journey through the power of tribes and tribalism. Now these are two terms that contemporary society has oversimplified and mistakenly labeled as something from the human past or as negative tendencies that we have to form group alliances. But David is going to show us how the impact of community-oriented living and the importance of intentional proximity in an increasingly isolated world is a path forward for us as a species. Here's just a few highlights that we're going to dive into today. We're going to unravel the concept of evolutionary mismatch and its effects on our modern lives. We're going to discover how our fast-paced digital world might be at odds with our ancient roots and why finding balance is crucial for our well-being. We'll also uncover the secrets of tribal signals and how they can determine trust among strangers with fascinating historical examples that are honestly going to leave you in awe. They left me with awe. They did with me. We're also going to examine the power of community and the profound impact that it has on our health, our well-being, and even our longevity. And so prepare to be amazed by the mysterious case of Roseto and the lessons that it holds for us all. This is a small town. I'm not going to tell you about it right now, but it's a really, really cool part of the episode. So I urge you to open your minds up, embrace the wisdom of the past, and join us on this captivating journey into the essence and future of our humanity. But remember, our tribe needs you too. So subscribe to This Anthro Life, leave us a review, and as we continue to bring you these fascinating stories that will help challenge your perspective, ignite your curiosity, we can't do this without you. So let's dive on in.

02:39 David

Given the fact that I grew up in a fundamentalist religion, and my father was a fundamentalist preacher for 25 years, I think that was part of the growth and development phase of my life that made me a little bit more acute to tribal signaling. I didn't know at the time, but it made me sort of a pre-cued to see the signals in my environment once I understood the theory behind it.

03:03 Adam

Yeah. I got that vibe from reading it. And also as somebody from Texas that grew up in the religious, I don't know if we were like, we didn't call ourselves hardcore fundamentalists, but we were, we were conservative, you know? And so it's like, yeah, I recognize I was like, Oh yeah. Okay. I signal with that story. Yep. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, so that may be actually a place to start, I guess, or something that we can mix in there. Because I think also that's something that a lot of folks resonate with, right? Especially a lot of social scientists came from a somewhat similar background. They're like, wait, I had this turning point at which I realized the world was not the way that I've always been told it was. I didn't know how I worked. Well, really excited to have you on the program today, David. I came across your work actually from Big Think, an article that you wrote about, you know, the kind of trust paradox that we solved as humanity. And then I was super enthused to find that there's an entire book that dives into this and then kind of to dig into your work after that. So really excited to chat with you. And thank you so much for joining me on the program today.

03:59 David

Oh, thanks for having me, Adam. I'm really excited to be here. Awesome.

04:03 Adam

So as a co-anthropologist to other anthropologists here, like one of the things that I'd love diving into as to kind of open this up is a bit about kind of your superhero origin story as it were, right? Because I think a lot of that infuses how you kind of frame some of the book and also some of your thinking. And this is an area that I definitely resonated with as well. So I'd love to kind of jump into this a little bit and tell me a bit about kind of what your trajectory is when you look back. How does the story of you shape the way that you came to think about this work and what we're going to talk about today?

04:32 David

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I guess I can start reverse chronologically. I can tell you where I am now and then break it back down to the origin story itself. So I'm an evolutionary anthropologist. I've studied wild chimpanzees for over a year of my life in East Africa. I've done work with small-scale foragers, small-scale societies all across the globe. And on top of that, I grew up in a fundamentalist religious cult, essentially. My father was a fundamentalist minister for over 25 years. And those two combined, they're not typically associated, but it was really interesting growing up in an environment where evolution wasn't even on the table. And in fact, a big part of my upbringing. In fact, one of the reasons why I actually eventually ended up likely going into evolution anthropology is my father was confronted by a prospective member in the church. This was back in the late 80s, early 90s. And this student was a graduate student at McGill University, and he was a geology student. And he asked my dad some hard-hitting questions about the age of the Earth. My dad gave him the stock answers and the stock responses he had been trained to give about a 6,000 to 10,000-year-old Earth and the universe, right? And so my dad gave him these answers. But there was something just a little bit, you know, he felt a little bit unsure about the quality of the answer. So he's like, I'm going to look into this evolution thing for a good month or six weeks and chop down the tree of evolution. And then I'll have a good set of answers for any prospective member like this individual. And that began a fascinating journey for him. which was several years in the process. And I was sort of his Guinea pig. So he would bring me up into the office and he'd be like, so David, there are these finches on this island and the Galapagos, and this is how this is playing out. And what do you think about it? And I'd be like, well, that kind of makes sense. So I actually got streamlined into evolutionary thinking as a offshoot of my father challenging his own ontology. And during the time, he would give me also more books to read, like Carl Sagan's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Stephen Jay Gould's books. And so he wanted to see how a young mind would grapple with these things. And it ended up being a co-created journey that ended up me being pretty primed for evolutionary anthropology when I got to college. And by the time I got to the point where I was writing this book, not only did I have the background in evolutionary anthropology, but I think I was also sort of pre-loaded with a lot of the experiences that one might have in a church, in a fundamentalist church, to be able to see the tribal signals in my environment, not only through experience, but through the theory that I was learning in my evolutionary anthropology classes.

07:37 Adam

Well, that that's super cool. And I didn't, I didn't get a crash course guinea pig in evolutionary theory, but I love that, like that kind of framing of. being raised to ask questions, even though the answers might be dangerous, but they're really kind of interesting to note how that can be quite formative. And that's a cool connection there. I don't hear that very often, so I like that that's a really nice way to kind of think about what pushed us forward. And then also something else that as we begin to think about this question of evolutionary anthropology, like looking at the trajectory of how we became human, in essence, and what makes humans human, I think is one of the most interesting fields of anthropology. I'm a cultural anthropologist, Biology, biological anthropology was always my favorite classes. So I'm like, I guess I closet biologist, biological anthropologist.

08:22 David 

Well, you know, these are sort of arbitrary demarcations, right? Biocultural, it's all part, they're just different layers of the predictive model that help us inform how we understand the crazy species that we are.

08:35 Adam 

Totally. And that's, that's actually super well said. Right. And so I think this idea of like, uh, we want to have some semblance of understanding of who we are. Right. And so even this actually, maybe, you know, unconsciously we're playing the tribal game right now. I'm trying to say, well, see, I'm in the cultural tribe. You're like, I'm in, I'm in the bio tribe, but actually no, they're just layers of the same thing.

08:51 David 

And see what I did there. I elevated to our shared identity and now we feel closer together as a part. That's one of the tricks.

08:58 Adam 

This is like therapy. This is great. You know, I'm good. Yeah.

09:02 David 

Anthrotherapy right on.

09:03 Adam 

Yeah. One of my goals actually is to have some, some form of more, more, uh, intentional therapeutic anthropology. And I think, I think your book actually points us to some important directions of what that could be in terms of helping us both confront ourselves and then, and then help kind of elevate and bring our conversations into new places. And so maybe as a someplace to kind of, to open up around the idea of our tribal future and the ideas you're exploring here. Part of it is the subtitle points us to where we're going, right? How to channel our foundational human instincts into a force for good. I think it's super exciting and interesting, especially as we talk about this crazy precipice today of intense political polarization. AI is coming to change how we're thinking about what it means to be human and also vice versa, what we think about computers. And then at the same time, too, we're trying to dig into really who are we as a species. And so I'd love to get a sense from you in terms of what's at stake as we're thinking about what we're exploring in this book about our kind of tribal selves and the idea of our tribe drive, as it were. For your perspective, what's at stake here? What are we trying to excavate, as it were, about ourselves?

10:07 David

Yeah, I mean, to be able to understand where we are now and where we're going, we have to understand how we got here. And I think the reason why we're in such a precarious situation in the moment that we're having this conversation is because of this existential state of what we would call evolutionary mismatch that we're in. And this is one of the most crucial concepts that I cover, especially in part one of the book, Our Tribal Future, this idea that humans, Homo sapiens are evolved for how things were, not necessarily how things are in the moment. And all species can face mismatch. In fact, they often do. It's often the precondition by which species go extinct or local populations extirpate. So a good way to like really ground this, I think, in an analogy that'll help us sort of be a guiding analogy for the rest of the conversation is boiling down the really deep amount of time that the natural history of our tribalism evolved into something that's really comprehensible. So the way I've been sort of pitching this idea is the concept of a human movie. The average movie is about 100 minutes long and we're going to boil 1.8 million years into 100 minutes and that helps us understand what the big milestones are and then the challenges that we're that we're facing as a species today because in minute one of the human movie camps of all so at this point we're we're our genus homo Likely some species called habilis or erectus. It's those are the finer details, but around this time we transitioned from being a primary primarily gallery forest inhabiting Australopithecine that spent a lot of time in the trees, probably slept in the trees. to a camp-like environment, meaning there were 20 or 30 individuals by which you had the shared project of survival, and you were on the ground habitually, and everything from aloe parenting, sharing the parenting responsibilities, finding calories, sharing the spoils of foraging and hunting, even protection at night when you're asleep. All that stuff was facilitated because we doubled down on being a social species. So within minute one, we have a radical innovation and it actually impacts our moral sense. So this was one of the first updates in our moral code from our predecessors. Here we have face-to-face morality, and this was a blessing. So the face-to-face morality was the fact that we had all this shared project of survival together, meaning things like it felt good to us. We had mechanistic dopaminergic release systems when we shared our food with each other, which is awesome, right? Or took care of each other's kids. Now, on the other hand, the curse to that moral innovation was the canceling norm. Basically back then when you cancel someone, excommunicated them or killed them. And that was the tyranny of the cousin, meaning you didn't adhere to the social norms. You were going to. you were gonna be in trouble. But this was all in one minute, right? And the rest of the documentary is kind of boring from the sense that you would need a David Attenborough to like spice up this what otherwise looks like sort of your classic Discovery Channel documentary until minute 84, in which case tribes evolve. This is 16 minutes left in the movie. And here is where humans gain a sort of a radical update to our hardware and software that differs drastically from our sister species, the chimpanzee, who we share a common ancestor with six and a half million years ago. And chimps hate strangers, okay? They can't stand them. If you rehabilitate a chimp, put them back into that community, they'll kill it. Humans, however, are really weird. We actually love strangers, but certain types of strangers, the ones that signal a form of coalitionary alliance to us by way of symbolic thinking. So here at 300,000 years, which is 16 minutes left in the movie, we have beyond face-to-face moral updating to our code. So the blessing here is that we figured out a way to scale trust amongst strangers, people that we didn't have a face-to-face ledger record with. The curse, however, embedded into the tribe drive at this moment in the human movie was the fact that if you weren't part of that group, you were part of a very easily discarded out group. So you could become prey to dehumanization. And we'll obviously, we might unpack what that is at scale later on in the conversation. And so those are the two really big moral updates in the movie. And things are going relatively slow paced until about a minute left. At a minute left, it becomes a sci-fi, action-packed, bizarre narrative where humans become the last hominid on the species. We out-compete Neanderthals. I think we out-tribalized them. I think we became masters of coalitionary signaling to the point where we just out-competed these groups. with 30 seconds left civilization agrarian society domestication that occurred and that was a huge shift because we became sedentary and with 30 seconds left for the previous 99 and a half minutes, we've been living in camps and we start messing with that system at about 10,000 years ago, which is 30 seconds left in the moon. Then 15 seconds left, you have writing, 10 seconds left, you have the religion and ideology. And we'll talk about these today because they're one of the most powerful ways that tribes amplify their coalitionary alliance signals. And so with 0.5 seconds left, that thing that had began 10,000 years ago, hit its almost ultimate final form with the Leavitt brothers creating the nuclear family. And this was basically on the, this is post-World War II, They created the McDonald's of social patterns, and we forever abandoned, in weird societies, we forever abandoned the camp life, and had this sort of nuclear neolocal system. And it really is mismatched at its worst, because it renders us really, really vulnerable. And then with a split second, the moment that we're having right now in this conversation, with a split second left in the movie, we have all the tribes of the world, the thousands of tribes that exist, boot online in social media, and you wonder why we are in the state we are today, we're in this massive state of mismatch, and Carl Sagan and Andrean put it best, Moz are unprepared for a world with Windows, and we are Moz running around a lot of Windows right now.

16:58 Adam 

Well, and a lot of lights, too.

17:00 David 

Yeah, and a lot of lights, exactly, exactly.

17:03 Adam 

I'm imagining back then, like, minute two, the Neanderthals and the Sapiens look at each other quietly across the savannah, you know. Yeah, some good narration could work there I think but that's incredible to kind of think about this this time frame and recognizing that for the vast, vast majority of our software and hardware creation and reproduction. It's been the same and even now like I mean, if nothing else, I think one thing that this really helps clarify is that when we feel the sense of existential angst or like the world feels crazy out of control right now, we're not wrong in thinking that there is this mismatch. And I think this concept that I found was really helpful too of evolutionary mismatch of kind of getting a sense of what has been our programming. that we're bringing along with us.

17:47 David 

Totally. Yeah, there's, there's, if we were to just for a second take it outside the human species to give a really clear example of mismatch and another species. There's a pretty. I mean it's, it's humorous on one level. I'm sad on the other. In South Africa, there's the South African jewel beetle, and it is on the precipice of extinction because one of its signaling mechanisms is being hijacked. And so the male beetle is really attracted to these pitted shells on the female, the wings. They have these big pits, and the males find these super sexy. until there's something in the environment that has bigger, sexier pits, which is beer bottles that have been made and discarded. And so you'll see like six, seven males with a beer bottle to the chagrin of the female beetles, in which case the environment just threw it a curve ball. Right. It's just all of a sudden there's, there's a signal corruption in what was previously great way to ensure survival and reproduction is now being mismatched. And it's putting this species into a dangerous precarious situation. You need an intervention. And so you need people to be like, okay, these are bad. These bottles with pits are bad for the species. We're going to change it. And it turns out the, the, um, South African jewel beetle is rebounding because they've stopped using this particular beer bottle.

19:13 Adam 

Nice. So that, then that's a, that's actually a surprisingly positive change that, but I guess shows us that we can actually, we can change the materials, you know, signals in this case, right?

19:22 David 

That the different ways we put out in the world. Exactly. Once we, so this is the most important mission we have right now is figuring out what the signals are so that we can no longer be essentially driven by a thing unconsciously, but gain a little purchase or a little control over it. So we can help get to the ends that we want.

19:42 Adam 

Hmm. No, I think that's, that's super important. And again, like such an important or essential moment now that we have this, this conversation, I mean, I think, you know, but in general too, just like, how do we bring our awareness to this? So I guess our next question with that is, of course, is like, how do we begin to figure out what those signals are? So now we have a sense of, there's a trajectory in which there were things that worked that got Homo sapiens to it today. And then now we have this kind of mismatch. And so now I think as you're saying too, like this idea of how do we know what those signals are? How do we, how do we start to think about that?

20:09 David 

Yeah. So for those in the audience who have an anthropology background, they might be familiar with the concepts of symbotypes or phenotypes or genotypes. So this is actually, I'll break this down here. A genotype is your actual blueprint, your DNA. And your phenotype is the physical expression of that blueprint. It's the product that interacted with the environment through epigenetic ways and through the kinds of signals it got in its environment to produce what you see. So I'm seeing you right now on my screen, and that is the phenotype of Adam and vice versa is the phenotype of David. So when I think of a symbol type, this is a pretty new word that has been forwarded by David Sloan Wilson. It's a really cool idea. It's basically a tribal phenotype. It's the way in which a tribe expresses itself on the symbolic level. And this manifests in its art. It's norms around sexuality, whether there are differences in class, even mixing together melanin content of the skin, body modification, individual consumer behavior, clothing, style, gait, food, like halal, kosher, vegan. These are all signals of what group you are coalitionally aligned with. So you have these essential, what we're calling tribal signals here are trust signals. And before I run away too far here into this really cool topic, it might be worthwhile just to define what a tribe is. So a tribe is an intersubjective belief network that signals coalitionary alliance so that it can bootstrap trust among strangers. It's a misnomer that it has to be homogenous, that it has to be a kin network, that it has to be in contiguous territory. It's really just, we're using these symbols to exclaim, I'm part of a team. And it's kind of like this superpower, because it's like, if you're authentically signaling this in your environment, you're part of a secret society. And if other individuals in your environment track that you're part of their secret society authentically, you gain all these rights and privileges to it. So it's really just a way to bootstrap that trust amongst people we don't know, because there is a limitation, a cognitive limitation in Homo sapiens with respect to our capacity to be able to process a lot of relationships. And this is a classic number here is Dunbar's number 150. We can at most, Really the sweet spot is being able to understand and keep a ledger of record on about 150 individuals. Beyond that, we have to figure out a cheat sheet, a heuristic, and that's what the Tribe Drive was. It was a way to be able to figure out who we can trust when we don't have a ledger of record on any one individual. So in terms of a cool example of the power of tribal signals, I can go to Gettysburg in 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg. It was one of the bloodiest in the Civil War. And you have the North and South entrenched in just a really nasty fight. Some 50, 60,000 people lost their life that day. Louis Armistead, he was a Confederate general, and on a picket charge, he was hit with a bullet and thrown off his horse, and he was lying and bleeding out on the ground. And he lifted to the heavens a sign, a signal, and somebody on the other side, an officer by the name of Hiram Bingham, who was a union officer, saw that signal. Now, I actually don't know what that signal is because it's a secret Masonic signal, and that's part of secret societies, right? You have these, basically these trust signals that bootstrap trust among strangers in a classic tribal way. And Hiram Bingham grabbed Louis Armistead, took him to the field house. He promised to take his goods back to his family after the war, which he did. He actually kept that promise. He brought back his spurs, his journal, and his Masonic necklace. And this is a such a powerful example because it shows that even entrenched enemies in a moment where they're fighting for life and death can instantaneously with one sign, with one symbol, change their identity and all of a sudden be part of the same team. And so what we're talking about here with tribal signals is anything that has that power. And this can be language. This can be music because music has a type of symbolic grammar as well. This can be ideology. This can be anything that symbols, I'm part of a team and we are working either together or perhaps in the context of competition as well against each other.

25:09 Adam 

So, I mean, that's a good point as to things like sports jerseys too, right? If you have two rival teams, for example. Another thing that came to mind as you're saying that too, is thinking about the, you know, the very famous example in World War I where they, you know, the Axis and Allies powers called, you know, armistice on Christmas to sing together, right? And this idea of like, we've been entrenched in warfare as, you know, diametrically opposed enemies, but We all want to celebrate the day of giving and gifting per our shared religious holiday, actually.

25:36 David 

That's really interesting. Exactly. You're actually bringing to bear the power of religion as a tribal signaling factor. And that was one thing that was a superordinate identity that they shared, and it was a way for them to, in the moment, elevate above the fray of competition and to cooperate in that moment. So that's a beautiful example.

26:00 Adam 

And I'm just following your Masonic lead there, because I think that's also a really great one, too. And there's some power, I think, about this idea that, I mean, one of the things that I'm taking from this is that as much as we think that our identities or something are bound up in X, Y, or Z, there can almost always be something else if the signal or the importance of another signal changes. I'm going to go towards that, right? And so this is something that you do talk about in the book, too. I think this is really interesting that It shows because we're talking about symbols and what things mean to us, meanings change over time. And so that means that we're not necessarily fixed in one specific category. And that has insanely profound implications for how we can think about ourselves today and also how we've always been. Something that I'd love to think with you further on is this idea of how we can then help make sense of who we are today. And like, why do we feel kind of back and forth between these ideas, right? So this idea of kind of tribe drive is one of these, like, we feel this need to belong, right, this need to connect. And this is something that like, I think most people won't find surprising is that like, you want to be part of a community, right? You want to have friends, you got your family, you may have a church group, you may have a religious group, I don't know, yoga class. whatever it is, like the idea of coalition was something that I think really helped spark my thinking with this. And so thinking about that idea, like this is, and it may have just been that it's new vocabulary, right? I don't think about coalitions that much. I'm like, Oh, I guess I have a coalition, a few coalitions, right? How do we think about that? Like there's, there's, we need to belong and we kind of make these coalitions around symbols. How do we kind of get ourselves in that, in that pot?

27:30 David 

Yeah. So that's, I see where you're going with it and, and it's worth just really nailing this home. The actual. value proposition of taking on this adaptation that we're calling the drive drive. The value prop was really survival. And so it was, this is how, as a social species, we can project more energy, more watts, more joules per second into the world if we sum our individual energies with each other under a singular identity, right? But as you're noting, there is a lot of flexibility within which you can do this. And there's actually a little bit of skill associated with it as well. One great example of this is Nav Bhatia. He's kind of a famous dude in Toronto. Nav Bhatia is called the Toronto super fan since 1995. He has attended every single home game for the Raptors. And when the Raptors won the world championship just a few years ago, he got a lot of press because of this. And now is fascinating because he's such an effective tribal signaler. So of course, he's in Canada. He's sporting the Nike jersey. In fact, they gave him I think he's number 99. The Toronto's gave him a jersey. He's pretty awesome. And, uh, so he's, he's got his own Jersey, but that, that the fact that he's an avid NBA fan, right, that is a certain signal right there. You're part of a, a pro capitalist Western environment. Nike is a capitalist company and. Then they were signaling we the North, right? This entire identity is Canadians, shared identity as Canadians. On the other hand, Nav is, has the Dastar Turban, the Kara Bracelet and the Kashmir, which are all prominent Sikh signals and have this really powerful series of coalitionary signals that can be emitted into the environment. And I think it's the fact that he's been so good at signaling both. It's one of the reasons why he's been so successful. So the Royal Bank of Canada named him one of the top immigrants. He's met Barack Obama. It's the fact that in the societies in the world that sort of celebrate on some level our distinct identities, he has masterfully figured out how to signal to multiple coalitionary alliances at the same time. And so we could take a page out of Nav's playbook and figure that out for ourselves.

30:07 Adam 

That's a great example. That's super interesting too. And just to even think about if we ask ourselves, like, what are the, what are the different identity markers or kind of the coalitionary symbols we're seeing there? Right. And we are seeing, we're seeing, you know, religion, we're seeing sports affiliation, you know, warrior culture almost, right. You know, we're seeing political affiliation, we're seeing economic ideas of what, you know, what economic systems can work in the world. Like my idea of identifying with, you know, capitalism, with identifying with certain brands and things like that. I think what's interesting about this, too, is because when we when we say, you know, we're talking about these kind of coalitions and symbolic, you know, connecting points that signal we can trust one another. It's like part of me. I want to jump to like, oh, religion is this big thing. But then it's like wearing Nike also is doing this. Right. So it can be something as mundane as a specific brand that I choose to wear. The fact that Barbie movies just come out the time we're recording. And I was watching a line of people wearing pink with Kenwigs, you know, just that, too, like kind of saying, hey, we're part of this tribe. And that's an interesting kind of question there.

31:04 David 

Yeah, Adam, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's kind of like the Matrix. You're sort of reading the code now of how we project ourselves as our coalitionary alliance into the environment. And it's something that we, it's mostly unconscious, it's mostly under the hood, but we're all doing all the time.

31:22 Adam 

And I think that that's such an important piece for us to recognize too, that it's something that it's part of Homo sapiens. Again, we evolved with this as a survival strategy. I think you said that really well, and that's important for us to kind of think about. And this is, I think, part of where we're seeing that kind of mismatch in terms of today, It's not that there's too many signals. You know, that's when I was kind of reading the book and I was thinking through this, I was like, oh, is it that we just have too many signals flying in our brain and that we're confused by it? But I think it's I don't think it's the number of signals necessarily. I think it's raising these interesting questions of what do we feel like we need to adhere to to survive? Because it's actually when it comes to it, like there's an existential threat that we're feeling different people feel in different ways. And I mean, if we think of political polarization as one example, right, it's like it's treated it's treated as a zero sum game. You know, I guess the U.S. context. Right. And it makes people think there can't be other ways of doing being in a certain form of political. And that has, I think, profound implications for, obviously, I mean, it explains a lot of how we're interacting today. But then what we're kind of discussing here, too, is that there are ways to move around that. It is actually mutable. We just don't, we're not, we're not told that it is, I guess.

32:28 David 

Yeah, one way I, just hopping off of what you're saying here, one way I like to think about this is, what is my identity stack? And this was one of the most profound questions I asked myself during the writing of the book, and it's something I talk about in the last chapter of the book. And it's really fascinating because I've, this was the first time I taught in my summer course. I taught the content from a lot of our tribal future. Yeah, it was such a blast. And I had my students go through this exercise. And basically what you do is you do what social psychologists do when they're trying to measure identity. And you ask yourself questions like, what group am I proud to belong to? What group am I proud to identify with? And then you rank it by weight. So I had all my students rank it by like, you know, a one through six kind of a Likert scale thing. So they could get a relative measure of what groups they were identifying with. And this was fascinating. And it was a little bit scary when I saw the first pass of the student responses. Because one thing we need to really keep in mind here when we talk about things like political tribalism, which I think of as weaponized versions of tribalism, Really tribalism is that beyond face to face. So it, when it starts playing with these abstract massive groups, like political tribes. if you don't have any sort of counterbalances on the sub-tribal area where you have strong groups that you identify with that are actual face-to-face groups. So the way I think about it is the difference between walking down the street to your local church and that group itself versus like, say, the Roman Catholic Church writ large, right? One is tribal, one's sub-tribal. And what I was finding with these students was so remarkable. Some students were coming in and literally all the groups, it was like, all the groups that they were identifying with were beyond face-to-face groups. There were these abstract, big, massive political tribes. And one of the arguments I make in the book is if we want to get out of this state of mismatch, We need to be very mindful of the kinds of scales and reweight the number of groups that we identify with that are face-to-face. The more that we can put a lot of that weighting of our identity into face-to-face groups, into smaller groups where we actually have a sweet spot, a human optimum of interaction, That is the way to, I think, get our species and get individuals out of an extreme state of mismatch. Being conscious of what that identity stack is and what the proportion of actual abstract tribes, big sort of power tribes, versus the number of community tribes that you belong to. And I think being conscious of that is super critical.

35:17 Adam 

That's super important. Yeah, no, I love that idea too, because it's something else as I was reading the book, I was thinking about a lot of this is this question of how are we dealing with the scale, right? Of the number of people, because I mean, as you rightly point out, we're a weird species that we're cool with strangers, cool with the right kind of strangers, you know? Um, and like, and of course what the right stranger is, is related to the symbols that we have in the coalitionary alliances that we identify with. But in this regard, like thinking, yeah, like how, how much do I really lean into a bigger abstract idea of, again, just to use an easy religion example where it's like identify with the Catholic church versus identify with my parish where I go every Sunday. Right. And I know people that go there are in, in, in, I think it's a good point to like, if we stop and think about that, how often do I conflate those two together, you know, identify with the Boston Bruins hockey arena that I go to versus like the NHL or like, you know, US versus Canada, you know, Canada's better. Like, you know, these ideas are just these interesting questions, you know, to think about. And so I think that the face-to-face piece is really important for us to be able to plug ourselves into, especially because I think also as we live our lives so much online and in digital space, like a lot of this is also just abstracted, you know, it's like my Reddit community, which can also then be I guess digitally face to face. I'm curious your thoughts on that. But can that also feel more distant because I don't, I may not see. the people or I've never physically met them, I suppose. Yeah. As part of that too.

36:37 David 

Yeah. It brings to mind a little bit I have in the book and especially opening the second part of the Rosetta mystery. And it really was remarkable. I came across this in Malcolm Gladwell's book and Malcolm was writing about outliers. It's a super famous book. And when I read this book and I read the Rosetta mystery, I'm like, not only is this an extreme outlier, but it's a perfect example of being in sync at the camp level was something which I think we would be, basically it would behoove us to all try and seek more realignment and more synchronization on the community level. And so the Rosetto mystery was this doctor in the 50s by the name of Stuart Wolf, he was invited to a conference in the small town of Rosetto in Pennsylvania. And there was a big claim made there by the residents who were also the two or three doctors that were there said, look, we we haven't had nearly the levels of heart disease and communicable diseases that were really kind of like cropping up in the US post-World War II. Things like heart attacks, for example, were significantly less. And Stewart thought, well, this is interesting. Let's just let's deep dive this a little bit. And what he discovered is that Individuals that were living, they were basically living a life almost free of many of the diseases of affluence that have been taking root in most of the United States. And so he had a couple of hypotheses. He thought, well, maybe it's the genes. And he ran some analyses, discovered that even other Rosettans that were living in other geographical locations, they were suffering from the same things. He thought, well, maybe it's sort of geographical. the neighboring towns were still suffering from the same things. He thought maybe it's diet and exercise, but these Rosettans were Italian immigrants, and they ate a lot of fats and oils, and they didn't really exercise that much, and they had the occasional cigar. Also, weird things in the society itself, like crime was almost non-existent. There was no suicide. So it was this big profound mystery. And what Stuart kind of concluded after excluding all these and testing these hypotheses was that it wasn't any of these other things. It was actually the Rosettian social network itself. It was the fact that in 1950, and this has basically stayed stable since they started the census from 1930, there were about 1600 people in the town. And this is so fascinating because literally the numerical value of the average small scale forger hunter gather. And I was like, man, that's when you see these numbers pop up, you're like, how is that even a thing? how can it be that predictive, right? And he also discovered that they had lots of civic organizations. And in anthropology, we call this a sodality. So typically you get like a lot of men's groups or women's groups that are coming together. They're coming together for purposes of altruism, to contribute to the community, to work together. And 77% of the entire residence, they shared the same religion. So they had the same shared intersubjective belief network, the same interpretation of the world. And they had a very active priest at the time. It was steeped in, the whole town was steeped in Catholic religion. So they had ritual. They came together and they actually practiced ritual together as a community, which one of the things I talk about in the book is the power of ritual to be a cohesive for groups because it's basically a way to standardize social norms and practice them and then export them, right? As what are our sacred values as a group? How do we exercise them and how do we export them to new people in the group? You could see an incredible amount of cohesion in the actual living environment themselves, that a lot of the families were intergenerational. So you'd have grandma, you'd have grandkids all living in the same house. 75% of the population was living with a spouse. 55% lived there in that home their entire lives. 70% were living with children. And 70% said that they turned to family when they had problems. And if you think about our society today and how it incentivizes basically from the moment you go to college and you get your education, which I imagine a lot of the listeners here to your podcast would identify with as a force compelling them, you are incentivized to break away from this Rosetta-like structure in your community and to basically do the Levittown strategy of find your own nuclear family and try and survive in the wild, so to speak, on your own, in which case our species was simply not evolved to have the mind and the body to cope with that kind of level of isolation. And so I think thinking about tribes, good tribes, as sort of organic Rosetta-like tribes, that could be a good guiding light for the 21st century what the goal is to try and find that realignment outside of being desynchronized from the state of mismatch that we're in.

41:58 Adam 

Yeah, I think that's such an important, and it's such a great example too. Cause it's, it's, it is funny how it's like both this outlier, but then it gives us, I think like almost exact recipes, right. To think about what, what most closely resembles the kind of camp community, you know, band tribal structure in terms of scales of groups that like mirrors what we are most commonly done for most of our evolution. And so interesting, it's that there's kind of this, the contrast of the Rosetta's Rosetto style, let's say Rosetta stone, right. Rosetto style to the Levitt, you know, kind of suburban single nuclear family home model. And so since, I think since most of us live, I mean, there's probably very few, I'd be curious if any listener is, is from Rosetta, let us know. But if you're not, if you're from the, you know, a typical either, either kind of urban or suburban or came from like, you understand the Levitt model of kind of a single family home, single family apartment. How can we think about that? Because if a lot of us are there, then some of the challenges that we run into is like, well, I would love to live intergenerationally, but I went to college and I moved away. And if we kind of see that piece that there is this like startling and strong evidence that like being in face-to-face community where we I'm just going to add another piece here that something else that struck me is like you asked a couple of questions at one point in the book that was like, how to think about like, are you in a Leavitt model, you know, Rosetto? And it's like, do you feel like a financial insecurity? Are you not sure who to turn to if something happens? Do you do you know your neighbors, you know, and these kind of questions point towards this, like how much community do we have kind of in our in our doesn't have to be right next door, but you know that I can I can kind of walk to as part of it. So I'd love to break down this because this is something else that has, you know, been on my mind. I've talked about it with friends and it's like to see co-housing models and other like alternative forms of, you know, kind of hearth in, in what's HTH, right? It's kind of hut.

43:44 David 

Yeah. The heart to hearth ratio is something we could, yeah, we can disentangle that. No, that's, that's a really good, a really good thought to play with here. So I, the term I use in the book is intentional proximity. So this is anything that fights social drift, anything that can bring you intentionally by even the smallest degree closer to a community by which you are actually invested in each other's survival and happiness and wellness. And the reasons are varied to do this. We know that social connection improves your health. In fact, we're finding that isolation itself is deadly. It's really bad for growth during adolescence. We see now some really terrifying stats coming out of colleges where 60% of individuals that are going to college right now feel a sense of hopelessness. 50% are feeling overwhelmingly anxious. 10% are experiencing suicidal ideation. And all this has doubled since 2009. So it's not a problem that's going away. It's really actually kind of scary. And we know that in adults, loneliness is straight up deadly. You basically, this is Cohen's social baseline theory. What's going on is under the hood, you're burning hot. Your metabolism is literally working overtime when you, feel isolated, because if you think about it, when we evolved in the Paleolithic, there was always another set of eyes to be mindful of a predator or some type of hostile in the environment. When you're alone, you know you're the only person, right? And so your metabolism is constantly never relaxing. It's always burning super hot. And it's leading to things like impaired cognition in men, lower immune systems. Males are particularly vulnerable to losing friendships over time, because a lot of times males make their friendships early on in life. Geoffrey Grieve calls this shoulder-to-shoulder friendships. Women have a little bit better time at this because they have more face to face rapport relationships that can kind of withstand the test of time. So it's really important for guys to be especially aware of how many friends they have, especially in adulthood. But it can have really, really powerful consequences on long term downstream health outcomes. Also, social connection strengthens romantic relationships. So this is sort of counterintuitive. The Chicago General Survey has noted that marriages have done really well. They've withstood the test of time in the past 50 years, but it's been at the expense of all the other relationships. And in fact, that can have negative downstream effects on the marriage itself and on pair bonding relationships, long-term romantic committed relationships. So typically you might have a thing where pair bonds, they'll cocoon. And so they'll sort of, it's like the self isolation for couples. And what happens is you lose witnesses, you lose the performative aspect of being a couple in front of other people. And what also happens is that your sense of loss, imagining the loss of that pair bond, your sense of loss is overestimated, because In that pair bond, you have what is fulfilling the function of what used to be an entire camp. Alloparenting, you have romantic relationship, you have a provider for calories. All those things used to be offloaded to an entire camp. And when one person is an entire camp, that's really unfair to that person. It's unfair to you. And so the underlying anxiety you might feel at the sense of loss of that person can be overwhelming. Another cool reason is because of child development. So we know scientifically Kids with more alloparents, meaning parents that aren't directly genetically related to the offspring, actually end up having better theory of mind, they have lower anxiety, they have better attachments, their amygdalas are smaller, so they're not in this constant fear state. We know that social connection can reduce consumption and improves quality of life. So if you get together in a group, right, and you say invest in a couple properties together that are closely related or closely located geographically or the same property itself, you can actually leverage your shared resources to be able to live a higher quality life that also uses overall less resources. For example, Co-housing groups typically use about 40% less utilities and they drive 30% less. So there's all these things going on as well. Social connection can boost your odds of personal success. So via human capital, say if one of your buddies is like a project manager, right? You don't have to spend thousands of hours learning how to be a project manager because you have access to one that will help you out. And then there's the social capital of the group, the shared combined resources that you can put towards actually getting towards your goals. And then one of the last reasons is meaning and purpose. You have exponentially more meaning and purpose when you do it with respect to how this affects a group of people as opposed to how it affects me individually. And so we see people that have greater social networks, higher number of confidants. basically it should be your target goal should be around four to five confidants, people you can tell almost anything to. If you're under that, you might be batting a little bit below average and you might wanna start working on your confidant game. I like to call this a fire team, right? Because typically four to five people are really, really good measure of the number of confidants that will allow you to give meaning and purpose in your life. So there's all these reasons to come together and group together and think about life in a more sort of communal frame.

49:37 Adam 

Such, I mean, such, such important like litany of areas for us to think with. And I think what's really powerful about the way you're breaking this down and also you do in the book is that recognizing that there's, basically we have a lot of the tools and we have solutions. Like, yes, there is, I think you're also a hundred percent right that contemporary society disincentivizes certain living structures, right? We've all been, we've all been moved towards suburban and single family urban dwellings in the Western world and most urban spaces. But then the idea of also this, right? Of having like, are you intentional? Are you aware of how many confidants you actually have is also incredibly important. Like whether you live near them or not, you know, it's better if you can live near them. But even just thinking about that, I think it's really helpful. Even as again, as I read the book and thinking about this too, it's like, oh yeah, okay. Who could I count on in my fire team, on my hand? Who's my five fingers, you know? And like, why that would be devastating. And it's also this funny thing that, you know, when we begin to look at these pieces, you know, again, you said before, it's like, as we start to see it, we can't unsee these things. And I was reflecting on a couple of things. One is, there was a great podcast episode of Ezra Klein show with Dan Savage, the love columnist out of California. And one of the things that he was talking about, he goes, it's really funny that like the premise, the importance that we put on to romantic relationships now, especially for hetero relationships, is that it's very much the one, it's like the one partner, my best friend, the everything. When you put it in this camp context, it's like that shows the weight of what we're actually asking those relationships to do. And then, you know, what we then tend to do is, Dan Savage says, he goes, it's funny that Um, you know, a, especially marriage, like especially a hetero marriage typically is like the only thing that we do that we demand like 100% likes, you know, the only like way that we can succeed is, is if, if you like cheat or do anything like not quite once, then it's like, Oh, he never loved me. He was a terrible person. Like it never worked. The only thing that requires like until death is the success rate. And that's crazy to think about that. Right. We've totally like put so much on it.

51:28 David 

It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible this level of stress we put on that one relationship. I actually have a sub stack that goes into a lot of the do-it-yourself on what I call camp craft. And a lot of it derives from some of the experiments I've had in my own life, which have been really fulfilling. And the idea here is that there's the paradox of dependency. And so we really only feel are our best version of ourselves. And we can go out and explore the world when we have those really powerful relationships and those confidence that we we know will be there no matter what. And typically, these are same sex friendships where you don't have sort of the The complication of the potential of reproduction, right? Because reproduction itself is so complicated and there are so many varying forces on what the end goals are for that product. Friendship, I think, is the place to start because if you're situated within a really good set of friends, You're not processing all this stuff alone and you are the best version of yourself for to be an attractive romantic partner. So I think the order of operation is get your fight, figure out your fire team first, then start worrying about a mate. Because not only are you going to be stronger as an individual, but you're also going to be a more attractive mate to any potential mate out there because you're just a better version of yourself.

52:53 Adam 

Yeah, I think that that's a, that's such an important point. And, and I, I love this too, because it's like, I don't know if you, if you see unsubstack on podcasts, you know, YouTube, it's like, there's just such a fire hose of like romantic relationship advice, how to be attractive, you know? And it's like, I've never seen, have good friends.

53:10 David 

I've got a series of articles coming out that are basically going to try and make that point. So that's all in the sub stack.

53:17 Adam 

I love it. I love it. Friendship is actually the best dating advice.

53:20 David 

It's pretty good. And if you're about to make a disastrous decision in terms of your potential mate. good friends will let you know. Yes. Also true. Right. Yeah. So be mindful. Cause the way I think about it is, you know, you're a single processor. Why not leverage multiple processors to an incredibly complex problem? Right. Yeah.

53:40 Adam 

That's a great idea. I mean, I think that's, I mean, both that also about the personal productivity piece too. I think it's such an important thing for us to pause and think on, right. Is say, okay, we actually, as complex as our individual brains are, right. We have the most complex brains, as far as we know in the universe. which doesn't mean that they are, but you know, as far as we can tell.

53:59 David 

As far as we know.

54:00 Adam 

As far as we know. But nonetheless, like one of the actually the superpowers is our outsourcing ability with others, right? And we can actually then do this symbolically. Obviously, we're talking language as a symbol, a group of symbols, right? Is really, I think, important for us to realize too, because the other thing I'm thinking about, like for college students, you know, and that there's a lot of Uh, you know, as you noted, like feelings of hopelessness and confusion. And I mean, I wonder if part of this too is like, and even, even for folks that are post college, maybe even postgraduate school, you're thinking about a career change or you're just asking like, what do I do next? AI seems to be changing the work that I can do, or I'm afraid I won't have a job in 10 years. Like the advice we also get told here is like, well, you know, be flexible, be ready to learn and keep upscaling. And it's like, but that's all individualist, right? I'm just, it's got me thinking about like, what if we. build better coalitions of like, let's actually just get a team of us to like, you know, them to kind of have a skillshare. Cause something else I think, I think it's in the co-housing section, like there's this notion you talk about roles, right? When people's roles are clearly defined, that also helps like both the sense of purpose and clarity of like who it is that I'm trying to be. Um, and people respond to that. So there's, I don't know, there's something about, I'm not sure it's nascent, right. But, but there may be something to substack about that too, in terms of like career advice that we keep getting told. It's not just about us, I think.

55:12 David 

Yeah, definitely. And I don't want to scare off too many of the listeners by thinking what I'm proposing here is like join a commune, right? Like that's not, that's not, you know, if you want to, there are actually some examples in the book that I talk about that were really pro-social and ended up standing the test of time to the past, I would say 30 or 40 years. So there's some great examples in the book of communes that actually work. Most fail because they don't adhere to some of the classics of the social suite that Nicholas Christakis talks about within with respect to how, what is the blueprint of a good society? And we dive that a little bit in the book, but really anything that edges you closer to just a little bit more community can really improve your situation. So some of the models I talk about of sort of camp crafting in the book, They focus on a couple dimensions like urban-rural gradient. So if you're in a more urban environment, obviously the trade-off there is you have greater access to sort of cultural resources, to higher paying jobs. The issue is cost, right? And the expenses associated with perhaps getting a lot of property or a lot of land. And then you have cohabitation versus co-location. So this is what are the costs and benefits and trade-offs of living in the same house, specifically, versus maybe just living in the same neighborhood. And that's where this heart-to-huth ratio comes into play. So this is the idea that, for example, if you have one hearth, this is one food preparation station, right, and one, like, kitchen area, If you have one hearth and say four huts, then your heart to heart ratio would be a 0.25. Anything that is approaching one where you have like one food preparation station to one hut, like one group of people or one individual, that will reduce stress versus anything where you start compounding lots of people onto one that will compound stress. But within these constructs, there's a lot of ways you can do this. So one urban example, I'll give an urban example, then I'll give a rural example. So one urban example is Mount Dennis in Toronto, actually. It was during the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. The Truaxes and the Dailies, they were best friends as families. They went to the same church and they were in kind of the same neighborhood, but when COVID hit, they had to sort of self-quarantine and they chose each other as like their quarantine mates. And during this time they realized, man, we really, really are cohesive together. What if because in Toronto, it is insanely expensive to buy a home. It's like for what you would think of your your normal 1500 square foot home in North America. It's like over well over a million dollars, right? Yeah. So they're like, what if we go in on this project together? And they've actually got a blog going and they're talking about their shared experience doing this and like the pluses and the minuses. But that's one potential model. One really cool rural example is Besties Rose in Castile and Llano, Texas. And basically these four or five best friends, who are also, they're couples, and they've just gotten along really well most of their adult lives, they decided to go out on the Llano River in Texas, buy a little property, and they made these small, super efficient, smart homes of like, we're talking like 600, 700 square feet for each family. And so there's four of those, and it cost them $40,000 a piece to build these homes. And then they have, yeah, yeah, it's really cool. And then they have a 1300 square foot shared communal space where they do all the cooking, all the food prep and the partying. And when they want to be social and communal, they go to this space. It means, hey, I'm here. I want to hang out with my people. And when they want a little privacy, they go into their hut. And like, I actually think of this when I see this model and you can check this out, you can Google it and check out the whole property. And I look at it. I've lived with hot 100 gatherers. I see that and I'm like, holy crap, that's a 21st century hunter gatherer camp. And it's awesome. And they're like their whole exit strategy. This is right now kind of like their side hustle, but they want to retire there and just do it full time once they're done doing the grind in a more isolated state in where they're at now.

59:25 Adam 

Interesting. I like, I like the idea that like camp crafting is a side hustle. Um, but you know, I mean, you can work towards it though.

59:30 David 

It's just small increments. You just, you just dedicate a certain amount of time to it and just really ritualize the process with your campmates and make, you know, weekly meetings, sort of monthly meetings, whatever you need to do to make sure that you're feeling that sense of forward progress.

59:48 Adam 

And I mean, importantly, just, you know, plugging your book, like you do break down really good, the things to think about if you're contemplating the idea of co-housing, whether it's an urban context, right. And like an apartment complex or it's in like, you can buy property. And I mean, it gave me hope. I'm not going to be going to buy a home anytime soon. I live in Boston, right? It's like it's Toronto crisis.

01:00:08 David 

And it's just so yeah. So Adam, do you have a do you have some a fire team and a camp in mind for the project?

01:00:14 Adam 

That's a good question. I do. I do. I got some folks. I got some fire team in mind. Yes. Nice. Because we've definitely like, we've nerded out over the idea of the Baugruppen, right? Like the kind of like co-housing Danish-German model. And so, yeah, it's like figuring out what is those, what's the practical, how do we pay for it? And it's funny, like, as we've been talking about this with a few friends for years, like another one of our friends just went and did it with two other people. Like he bought a property in Vermont with three folks and they have a house, they've been restoring it. And it's like this. I was like, OK, actually, I now know someone that's doing this.

01:00:42 David 

And it's very cool to see it happen, you know. Have you noticed any sort of like change in their wellness or their sense of meeting your purpose?

01:00:50 Adam 

I think so, yeah. I mean, I feel like he's, I mean, he's always been a very centered dude, but now I think he's even kind of more centered, you know. And it's like, because there's always the place to go, but then it's like the place that we're building together. Like that's always part of the story now. And like, that's really powerful.

01:01:05 David 

Yeah. For, for me on a totally personal note, I, my wife and I just found out that she's pregnant and we found out we're going to have a little boy soon in several months. Yeah. We're, we're really excited. And, uh, one of the things that was, I think sort of paralyzed me for most of my adult life, cause I'm 41 now. One of the things that paralyzed me was this, this idea of knowing that for 99 and a half minutes of the human movie my ancestors had like aloe parents you know and i was terrified to do this alone i knew what the science was and i and i knew from personal testament friends of mine who you know moved away had a kid and they were in this 700 square foot apartment and like I just, it just didn't seem right. It seemed mismatched. And so that was sort of the big hurdle I had. I think I had to get over was who find my, find my camp and feel like we are on that, that camp crafting project together. And as soon as I got forward momentum in that, all of a sudden that fear disappeared and I was totally ready to be a father. Wow. And so I'm like super excited to see how this all works out. Right. The experiments ongoing and it never stops.

01:02:17 Adam 

Oh, I love that. I mean, huge congratulations. I'm so excited to hear that. And it's like, it's good because I think also, I mean, just say it's like, yeah, I think for for also many, many of us who are contemplating kids, it's like, what world we building? It's like, I think this is this helps us give the antidote to that fear, right? It's like, we build it together, actually, is what it is. We build it together with our fire team. Love it. Love it. So yeah, this is I mean, maybe it's a good place to wrap up. And then we'll have to come back when number one is born. And then we can see what what's how that how that world is going. But I think it's super exciting. But David, this has been such an awesome journey. And I feel like your book is a journey to I mean, I went through time, I went through space, I was visiting different places. So thank you for putting out in the world. And I'm really excited to share it with the listeners as well. So yeah, keep doing keep doing the good stuff.

01:02:59 David 

Thank you so much, Adam. I love your work here. You're doing the good stuff, too. So keep at it. And also, yeah, don't be a stranger. Keep me posted on your can crafting project. I'm happy to provide any insight I possibly can. Cool. Yeah, thank you. Right on.

01:03:13 Adam 

Once again, a huge thank you to David Samson for joining me on the podcast. I really enjoyed chatting with you, and I learned a ton from this conversation. It was really fascinating to delve into the importance of community, tribal signals, and evolutionary mismatch. Now, as we reflect on today's discussion, it's clear that community and meaningful social connections are at the heart of our well-being. You know, we learned that our tribal nature shaped us as a species, and while modern society may have shifted our living structures, the fundamental need for connection remains the same. Now, as you think about the ideas we explored today, how does the notion of community resonate with your own life? Have you experienced the power of face-to-face relationships or the challenges of contemporary society's focus on individualism? We'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences, so you can get in contact with the comments below or over on our webpage. So in closing, I also just want to, as always, express my gratitude to you all for joining us here on the pod. Your support is invaluable and we are grateful to be a part of your listening or watching routine. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to the podcast and leaving us a review. Your feedback helps continue to create engaging content. Your feedback helps us continue to create engaging content and to reach more curious minds like yours. And if you're hungry for more anthropological insights, we invite you to check out our Anthrocurious Substack blog. We're going to explore these ideas and further topics and expand on these ideas that we see in the podcast. It's a really, really great extension of what we explore here. You can find more about that in the show notes and or visiting the website thianthrolife.org. Now, before we say goodbye, I just want to leave you with a thought-provoking question. How might you incorporate the principles of organic tribes or tribal signals and intentional proximity into your own life? We'd love to hear your ideas and experiences, so don't hesitate to share them with us. Your insights might just inspire others to create a more connected and fulfilling future. And hey, we need you for that. So thank you again for joining us today. Until next time, stay curious and keep exploring. I'm Adam Gamwell, and this is The Anthro Life.