The 10,000 Year Problem

What if play isn't just something we do for fun, but something we need in order to be fully human?

In this I'm Just Saying episode, I explore the connections between play, improvisation, and freedom. Inspired in part by a conversation on The Great Simplification, I start with an idea from statistics: averages can conceal an enormous amount of variation. I wonder whether something similar is happening with human behavior.

Our families, cultures, institutions, and economic systems reward certain ways of behaving while discouraging others. Over time, the range of behaviors we consider acceptable can narrow. We learn to conform, to be productive, and to measure ourselves against expectations—and sometimes we lose the freedom to experiment, be silly, or express ourselves without worrying about getting it right.

I explore this through children's play, my own experience with dance, and the improvisational freedom I find in playing bluegrass and jazz with other musicians.

Jazz offers a useful metaphor. We need to learn the basics and understand the structure, but within that structure, there's room to experiment, respond, and find our own way. That freedom isn't just enjoyable; the ability to improvise can also help us adapt when circumstances change.

For me, freedom means more than having permission to do something. It's having the ability to express our needs, set boundaries, and show up as ourselves without fear of negative consequences.

What might we regain if we made more room in our lives for play?

I'm just saying.

In this episode:

• Why averages can hide the range of human experience
• How cultural expectations can narrow acceptable behavior
• What children's play reveals about freedom and experimentation
• How shame and social pressure can suppress self-expression
• Why improvisation matters in music and in life
• How play can build adaptability and resilience
• What it means to feel free to be yourself

The 10,000 Year Problem explores who we were, what changed, and what we might become.

What if many of the systems that shape our lives began as solutions to problems our ancestors faced—but eventually became problems for the generations who inherited them?

In this conversation, I sit down with independent writer Joshua Wilkerson to explore human evolution, cooperation, hierarchy, power, and the systems we've built to organize ourselves.

Joshua begins with an interesting idea: we're the apes that never grew up. Our extended development, plasticity, and dependence on one another may have helped make us unusually cooperative and adaptable. But how did that cooperation give rise to hierarchy? And how did the solutions we developed become embedded in our environments, shaping the expectations and behaviors of generations who came after us?

We discuss Joshua's book, The Doctrine of Lucifer, his ideas about leadership and social organization, and his argument for replacing imposed morality with consequence-based ethics. We also explore writing as a technology that allows authority to persist across generations, and the possibility that artificial intelligence could increasingly shape the language and ideas through which we understand the world.

One of the central ideas that emerges is that the systems we inherit often outlive the problems they were created to solve. As Joshua puts it, "The living start being ruled by the dead."

This is a wide-ranging conversation about where our social structures came from, how they shape us, and whether we can find ways to organize ourselves that preserve human agency, adaptability, and community.

About Joshua and his work

Joshua Wilkerson writes about human behavior, power, leadership, philosophy, and social organization. He is the author of The Doctrine of Lucifer, a philosophical manifesto exploring self-authorship, consequence-based ethics, and alternatives to inherited systems of authority.

• Read Joshua's writing on Substack: The Doctrine of Lucifer
• Explore his book and website: doctrineoflucifer.com

Topics we explore:

• Our subjective models of reality and finding common ground
• Why Joshua thinks humans are the apes that never grew up
• Cooperation, tribalism, hierarchy, and the emergence of power
• The law of the jungle versus the rule of law
• Rethinking leadership and the idea of the trusted servant
• Human beings, not human doings
• How writing changed the relationship between authority and future generations
• AI, language, and the formation of a new social consensus
• How inherited systems evolve beyond the problems they were designed to solve
• Why adaptability and interdependence may be among our greatest strengths

The 10,000 Year Problem explores who we were, what changed, and what we might become. This project isn't about romanticizing the past, but understanding how we got here so we can think more clearly about where we go next.

The First Principles of the 10,000-Year Problem

Before we can ask what happened to humans over the last 10,000 years, we probably need to be clear about the assumptions we're making about life, evolution, and ourselves.

In this installment of I'm Just Sayin', I step back from the specific questions of the 10,000-Year Problem and lay out some of the foundational ideas I'm using to approach them.

My training as an evolutionary biologist and ecologist taught me to think across long timescales and multiple levels of biological organization. But applying that way of thinking to humans has forced me far beyond ecology, into anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, physics, and other fields.

So what are the principles I'm taking as my starting point?

Evolution and change through time. Heritable information. Natural selection. Diversity as a response to environmental change. The possibility that selection operates not only on individual traits but on social and cultural systems.

From there, I explore two ideas that have become central to my thinking: the Uniqueness Imperative and the Evolution Paradox.

If biological systems depend on diversity to remain adaptable in a changing environment, what happens when human societies begin pushing us toward greater uniformity?

And ultimately, why am I asking any of these questions?

Because the goal of the 10,000-Year Problem isn't simply to reconstruct the distant past. It's to understand who we were, who we are, and what changed well enough that we might make better decisions about where we go next.

As always, these are the assumptions I'm working from—not a declaration that I've figured everything out. If you see something I've missed, I'd like to hear it.

I'm Just Sayin' is the solo side of The 10,000 Year Problem, alternating with conversations with scientists, thinkers, and others exploring where humans came from, what changed, and what we might become.

What happens when we stop looking at human systems as separate from the natural world?

In this conversation, I talk with Clinton Alden, a researcher and systems thinker I met through Substack. Clinton has developed what he calls the Cosmos Framework and the 7ES framework, which he uses to examine systems, feedback, adaptation, and the conditions that allow systems to remain healthy.

We start with Clinton's childhood curiosity and the unusual path that eventually led him to these questions. From there, we get into binary versus contextual thinking, feedback, cooperation, competition, and his idea that the universe can be understood as a computational system.

We also talk about one of the questions at the heart of The 10,000 Year Problem: if humans have successfully lived in much larger groups than our ancestral communities, is "there are just too many people" really an adequate explanation for what went wrong?

Clinton describes his framework as a diagnostic and auditing tool—something that might help identify where systems have stopped responding to feedback and how they might be repaired.

We also get into a question I keep coming back to: How do we change systems that seem designed to resist change?

One of my favorite moments comes when Clinton talks about being willing to discover that he's wrong:

And later:

We end with beavers, ecology, and a surprisingly simple prescription for living together:

Don't be a dick.

In this episode

• How childhood curiosity shaped Clinton's approach to learning
• Moving beyond binary thinking toward context and gradients
• The universe as a computational system
• The 7ES framework and passive feedback
• Why systems need feedback to remain healthy
• Cooperation, competition, and symbiotic relationships
• Whether population size really explains the emergence of hierarchy
• Cognitive rewilding and reconnecting with ecological reality
• Using systems thinking to diagnose institutional problems
• Testing and validating a new framework
• Why being wrong can be useful
• The relationship between biological and symbolic systems
• What beavers can teach us about living within an ecosystem

About Clinton Alden

Clinton Alden is a researcher and systems thinker developing the Cosmos Framework and 7ES framework for understanding complex systems, feedback, adaptation, and human institutions.

More from Clinton

Clinton's research, writing, and framework are available through his Substack https://substack.com/@clintonalden.

The Kosmos Framework: https://www.youtube.com/@thekosmosframework

KIST Academy: https://github.com/KosmosFramework/learning_center

About The 10,000 Year Problem

The 10,000 Year Problem asks who we were before cities, kings, borders, and ownership—and what happened between then and now.

This isn't about romanticizing the past. It's about understanding who we were, who we are, and who we might become.

10,000 years brought us here. The next chapter is ours to write.

How Did the Idiots Get the Power?

Why do so many societies elevate self-interested, grandiose, or even psychopathic leaders? In this episode of I’m Just Sayin’, we explore how human communities may have shifted from small-scale, cooperative societies to complex civilizations dominated by concentrated power.

The episode begins with a working definition of psychopathy and considers what may have happened as humans moved from prehistory into modernity. Rather than assuming that our ancestors lived in a perfect or utopian world, we examine how changes in population size, social organization, and leadership may have created conditions that reward aggressive, self-serving behavior.

A central question runs throughout the discussion: Do our systems select for leaders who are poorly suited to the responsibilities of power?

The conversation also explores how ordinary people become enablers of harmful systems, why responsibility cannot be assigned only to those at the top, and why meaningful change may require healing ourselves before attempting to change the world. Ultimately, this episode is an invitation to revisit fundamental questions about who we are, how we got here, what may have been lost, and whether we can reduce the suffering caused by destructive leadership.

In this episode

• A working definition of psychopathy
• What happened as humans moved from prehistory to modernity
• Why societies may repeatedly select self-interested leaders
• How the values built into social systems influence leadership
• The idea behind a book about “assholes” causing our problems
• Changes in human population ecology and social scale
• The purpose of this broader body of work
• Taking power back from destructive or psychopathic leadership
• The relationship between leadership, human problems, and suffering
• Why our ancestors’ societies were not necessarily utopian
• Why people may still suffer far more than necessary today
• How ordinary people become enablers of harmful systems
• The tension between being trapped by a system and remaining responsible for it
• Why healing ourselves may need to come first
• The grandiosity of civilizations and their leaders
• How leadership may have shifted from tribal consultation to self-interest
• Why extinction creates an urgent reason to understand these patterns
• Alternative views that treat self-interested leadership as inevitable or beneficial
• What may have been lost in the transition to modernity
• Returning to the original questions: Who are we, and why are we here?
• An invitation to sit with the information and draw personal conclusions

Key takeaway

Our political and social problems may be connected to systems that reward the wrong traits in leaders. Understanding how power became concentrated—and how ordinary people participate in maintaining those systems—may be necessary if we want to reduce suffering and create a different future.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Jackrabbit explores his concept of the “Collapse Engine,” a term he uses to describe the metacrisis as a whole. At the center of his argument is a mismatch between the human brain we evolved with and the abstract, hyper-complex environments we have built.

Jackrabbit suggests that modern cultural and technological advances have disconnected us from the natural feedback loops that once helped regulate human behavior. Our older, visceral brain systems evolved in intimate, localized environments where causes and consequences were immediate and understandable. Today, those systems must operate within a globalized and highly abstract world—one shaped by climate change, extraction, bureaucracy, technology, and systems too complex for any individual to fully comprehend.

The conversation examines the relationship between the visceral core of the brain and the neocortex, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and the possibility that humans have become an invasive species within the larger systems that created us.

Jackrabbit also discusses climate change, human evolution, egalitarianism, religion, the myth of the “noble savage,” alternative value systems, and the challenge of facing the future without immediately trying to control or fix it. Rather than offering a simple solution, he argues for understanding the forces at work, sitting with reality, and learning to distinguish the narratives of the neocortex from the deeper motivations of the visceral brain.

In this episode

• Jackrabbit’s background and intellectual influences
• The Vital Question by Nick Lane
• The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
• The “Collapse Engine” and the broader metacrisis
• How modern environments conflict with the brains humans evolved with
• Why humans may behave like an invasive species
• The loss of natural feedback loops
• The relationship between the visceral brain and the neocortex
• Why humans live in an increasingly abstract world
• How modern complexity overwhelms older brain systems
• Climate change and the difficulty of responding to distant threats
• Why some extractive actors make destructive choices even when they understand the consequences
• Localization, attribution, and unavoidability in natural human environments
• The idea that humans are artifacts of larger systems rather than entirely self-created individuals
• Accretion and the evolutionary forces that shape us
• What life was like in small, intimate human communities
• Evolutionary theory and the persistence of ancient human traits
• Why egalitarianism may not be the central problem
• The mythologizing of the “noble savage”
• Whether the human–environment mismatch is actually unnatural
• The possibility that humans are naturally transforming—and damaging—the planet
• Why Jackrabbit does not offer simple solutions for the future
• Understanding and accepting the processes already unfolding
• Separating the neocortex’s narrative from the visceral cortex
• Alternative value systems
• Stewardship, nature, and Jackrabbit’s future work
• “Marie Curie is my housecat”

Books and resources mentioned

• The Vital Question — Nick Lane
• The Secret of Our Success — Joseph Henrich
• Jackrabbit’s essay, “Was Agent Smith Right?”
  https://substack.com/home/post/p-203992492
• Jackrabbit’s Substack
  https://substack.com/@jackrabbitrocks

Key takeaway

The problems facing modern civilization may not be caused only by bad individuals or flawed institutions. They may also emerge from a deeper mismatch between ancient human biology and the complex environments we have created. Understanding that mismatch—and the systems that produced it—may be the first step toward responding more honestly to the future.

What happened when human societies shifted from mobile hunter-gatherer communities to agriculture, cities, and increasingly complex systems of government?

This episode examines competing explanations for the rise of modernity, beginning with the limitations of the archaeological record and the assumptions built into familiar stories about prehistory. It questions whether the transition to agriculture was simply an inevitable improvement—or whether growing dependence on cities introduced new social and psychological problems.

The discussion explores population size, prosocial behavior, shame and shunning, sexual behavior regulation, female sexual selection, Dunbar’s number, anonymity, and the ways families, tribes, and governments manage group behavior. It also considers whether modern societies might regulate large groups without relying so heavily on shame, exclusion, or coercion.

Rather than accepting inherited explanations, the episode returns to a more fundamental question: What happened?

In this episode

• Definitions and assumptions about prehistory and social development
• What archaeological research can—and cannot—tell us
• The scarcity of evidence and the problem of European “caveman” bias
• Conventional explanations for the 10,000-year transition from hunter-gatherer life to agriculture
• Population growth as a possible driver of modernity
• Whether the move toward cities was intentional, pathological, or both
• How ancestors may have used prosocial behavior to manage communities
• Shame and shunning as social-regulatory mechanisms
• The regulation of male sexual and aggressive behavior
• Female sexual selection as a possible mechanism of social regulation
• Dunbar’s number, anonymity, and the challenges of managing larger groups
• How family, tribal, and governmental structures regulate behavior
• Representative democracy as a form of group management
• Why population size does not necessarily cause psychopathy
• A biology professor’s example of managing groups
• Whether large groups can be managed without shame and shunning
• Why we may need to examine the concept of “government” more closely
• The importance of asking what happened before asking why

Key takeaway

The rise of agriculture, cities, and government is often presented as a straightforward story of progress. This episode challenges that assumption, asking whether population growth and social complexity changed human behavior in ways that are not always beneficial—and whether there are better ways to organize large groups.

What happens when human beings evolved for small, reciprocal tribal communities but now live inside enormous, abstract, highly complex symbolic systems?

In this conversation, we explore the PSH and its proposed evolutionary explanation for how modern institutions, incentives, and information systems may select for certain behavioral strategies—including instrumental, manipulative, and psychopathic traits.

The discussion connects evolutionary theory, behavioral game theory, neuroscience, psychology, systems thinking, institutional design, and the problem of cooperation in modern society.

Greg's Substack

The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis book

Topics discussed

How diverse life experiences can lead to interdisciplinary thinking

The PSH as an evolutionary hypothesis rather than a theory of clinical psychopathy

Climate research, societal collapse, and evidence-based analysis

The evolutionary mismatch between ancestral tribal environments and modern symbolic systems

Natural selection, behavioral selection, and evolutionary game theory

Why cooperation was stable in small, repeated-interaction communities

Reciprocity, altruism, cheating, exploitation, and defection

The transition from tribal communities to cities, institutions, and abstract systems

How debt, credentials, mortgages, corporations, religions, and other institutions mediate survival

Why anonymity and abstraction can weaken reciprocity

How information becomes gated, controlled, and strategically valuable

Whether behaviors that were maladaptive in tribal settings can become adaptive in modern institutions

How successful actors can rewrite the rules of the systems they benefit from

Institutional mirroring and behavioral architecture

Psychopathy as a computational or instrumental behavioral architecture

The distinction between psychopathy as a clinical condition and psychopathy as a philosophical or evolutionary model

Neuroscience, heritability, and trait-level research on psychopathy

The target-autonomy problem

Coalition formation, social modeling, and predictability

Parasitism and manipulation at global scale

Whether modern symbolic environments can be redesigned

Moving from pessimism and doomerism toward practical optimism

People discussed

William D. Hamilton

Robert Axelrod

Robert L. Trivers

Martin A. Nowak

Christopher Boehm

Robert D. Hare

Christopher J. Patrick

James Blair

Kent Kiehl

David Graeber

Noam Chomsky

Edward S. Herman

Books and works mentioned

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work — Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media — Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

Research on evolutionary game theory, cooperation, reciprocal altruism, psychopathy, and institutional behavior

Research mentioned

Hamilton, W. D. — “The Evolution of Cooperation”

Trivers, R. L. — “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism”

Nowak, M. A. — “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation”

Boehm, C. and colleagues — “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy”

Rahman, T., Zorumski, C. F., and Meloy, J. R. — “ARCH: A Neuroevolutionary Framework for Behavioral Execution”

Robert D. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist–Revised

Christopher Patrick’s triarchic model of psychopathy

Key concepts

Evolutionary mismatch: The possibility that traits and strategies shaped in ancestral environments may function differently in modern environments.

Symbolic systems: Abstract systems—such as money, law, institutions, credentials, debt, corporations, and ideologies—that organize behavior and access to resources.

Behavioral architecture: A system describing how an individual processes information, evaluates risk and reward, generates strategies, and takes action.

Reciprocal altruism: Cooperation based on repeated interactions and the expectation that benefits may be returned.

Institutional mirroring: The idea that institutions may reproduce or preserve the behavioral strategies that succeed within them.

Target-autonomy problem: The difficulty of maintaining individual autonomy when behavior, information, and resources are controlled by larger systems.

Important clarification

The conversation uses “psychopathy” in more than one sense. At points, it refers to the clinical and psychological literature on psychopathy; at other points, it refers to an instrumental behavioral architecture or philosophical model. These uses should not automatically be treated as equivalent to a formal clinical diagnosis.

The PSH and related claims discussed in this episode are presented as hypotheses and interpretations connecting several fields of research. They should not be understood as established consensus across evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, or sociology.

In this short biweekly monologue, I examine how humans decide what is true—and whether modern science is the only reliable way of knowing.

Science is an extraordinary tool, but it can be misunderstood, misused, or treated as more definitive than the evidence allows. This episode explores the limits of reductionist science, the assumptions built into statistics and scientific methods, and the danger of mistaking incomplete evidence for complete knowledge.

From Einstein’s work to the knowledge systems of our ancestors, we consider alternative explanations, pre-scientific human survival, plant medicine, shamanic traditions, and the role that curiosity and speculation may have played in human evolution. The goal isn’t to reject science, but to recognize that we may need more than one tool to understand a complex world.

In this episode

• What I’m Just Sayin’ is and why it features short biweekly monologues
• How modern people determine what they know
• The limitations of reductionist science
• The difference between proof, truth, systems, evidence, and facts
• Why we often act as though we know more than we do
• The failure to recognize alternative explanations
• How statistics and assumptions shape scientific conclusions
• Why findings from the benchtop don’t always scale well to the real world
• What Einstein actually contributed to our understanding of reality
• Whether science is the only way of knowing
• How human beings survived and learned before modern science
• Why existence is only partial evidence of persistence
• How traditional knowledge may have contributed to human evolution
• Why limited evidence shouldn’t stop us from asking important questions
• How science has shaped—and sometimes skewed—our view of prehistory
• Shamans and plant medicine as examples of alternative knowledge systems
• Why we should give ourselves permission to speculate
• The importance of using every tool in the toolbox

Key takeaway

Science is one of humanity’s most valuable tools—but it may not be the only one. Understanding the world requires intellectual humility, openness to alternative explanations, and a willingness to ask meaningful questions even when the evidence is incomplete.

Dr. Andrew Schmookler's ideas arose during the counterculture movement, sparked by a spontaneous vision in Golden Gate Park. That spark evolved into The Parable of the Tribes—a body of work that has crystallized over the last 50 years.

The Core Idea: The Parable suggests that Modernity was inevitable for any organism in any universe, and that humans created a system that breaks all the rules of evolution. In this interview, Dr. Schmookler walks us through this vision and explains why this message is so urgent today.

Much like the pivotal movements of the late 60s—from the Clean Air and Water Acts to the first warnings of climate change and the fight for civil rights—Dr. Schmookler’s work remains partially understood and ahead of its time.

In this conversation, we explore:

• The origins and evolution of The Parable of the Tribes.
• The intersection of evolution, social structure, and human nature.
• A unique 80-year perspective on how much the world can change.
• A reason for true optimism regarding our future.

I am honored to share this interview and this important work. I hope you enjoy the conversation with Dr. Andrew Schmookler.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Read the first chapter of The Parable of the Tribes
• Explore Dr. Schmookler’s extensive body of work