Joe Rogan Experience #1201 - William von Hippel

All right, here we go. Four, three, two... (hands thwack on desk) Hello, Bill.

Hi.

What's going on, man?

I am very excited to be here.

I'm excited to have you here.

Excellent.

Um, The Social Leap.

Yes.

What's The Social Leap?

I'll tell you all about it.

Please do.

Okay. So, um, the story that I wanna tell is basically how we got here, how we became human. And so, that story begins about six or 7 million years ago, when our ancestors left the rainforest. And so, the question is, why would they leave and how would they survive once they left? And, and that's what The Social Leap is. So it takes a second to get it all out there, okay?

Yeah.

All right. So here's the story. (smacks lips) So if you look back about seven million years, our ancestors and chimps, we had a common ancestor at about that point in time, six or 7 million years ago. And that common ancestor, we don't know exactly what it looked like, but it was... from all we can tell, it was awfully close to today's chimps. And so there... if you look at chimps today, you can get a pretty good sense of what life was like then. And chimps today are really interesting. They're basically at the top of the food chain in the rainforest. They're super fast up in the trees, super athletic, and (stutters) because they travel in groups, even amazing tree climbers like leopards won't try to attack them in trees. It's just... they would-... it's-... they're too dangerous, too fast. But if you look at a chimp on the ground, it can't even lock its knees. It's this kinda cute little stumbling along thing. And then the question is, why would an animal that runs the show in the canopy leave the rainforest for the savanna, and then how would it survive once it did that? A- and that's, that's the story of this book, and then how that manifests itself to where we are today. So really, my goal, I'm a psychologist. I wanna understand why we are the way we are. And so, in trying to figure that out, I said, "Well, let's take a look back all the way to our common ancestors and see some of the key events and how they might have had an influence on how we are today." So the first question is, why would we leave the trees, right? Here we are. We're dominant position. We're, we're food on the ground. Why would we ever take that risk? And the basic story there is the Great African Rift Valley. I'm not sure if you've-... if you're familiar with it at all. But basically, it runs down from, um, up at the Red Sea down to the coast of Mozambique. And you can think of it like a geographic zipper. You know, all the world sits on these tectonic plates, and sometimes they crash into each other, like, uh, how India's smashing into Asia and creates the Himalayas. Sometimes they literally tear apart, and Africa's tearing apart at the Great African Rift Valley. So that plate that has Somalia and Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, that's moving off to the lower right. The rest of Africa is moving off to the upper left. And (smacks lips) I got no d- no idea why. It's been going on for quite a while. But one of the consequences of that is that the... East Africa's starting to rise up slowly bit by bit, and when it rises up, the rainforests dry out. And so basically, what you have is a situation where our ancestors were on the east side of that rift valley and it started to dry out, and now they're in a situation where they've got this great lifestyle, they're a dominant position, but now they're pushed... they're forced out onto the ground increasingly more and more because there's more and more ground and less and less rainforest. And so how do they survive that? What do they do in order to make that work?