This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Alder, and this is Clear and Vivid, Conversations about Connecting and Communicating.

What we're good at is humans is creating and establishing traditions,

and we're slower coming up with new ideas.

But a fertile source of new ideas is someone who has a different set of traditions,

a different perspectives, different approaches, different sets of skills.

Not only are they good at generating novelty and innovations and stuff,

but they make the people already living there better at those things too,

because of this recombinative process.

That's Joe Henrik.

He's fascinated by how culture has shaped our evolution,

not only changing our bodies and expanding our brains,

but even expanding our ability to cooperate.

Thank you for being here. This is really great.

Oh, it's great to be with you.

Your theme is for noting that a number of us, including you and me, are in a sense weird.

That's right.

Weird is short for what?

It stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

Which is not everybody in the world, right?

12% of the world, 12% of the world roughly.

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