Why 'Humans' Are Better Than We Think | Frankly 108

Video Description

(Recorded September 22nd, 2025) In this week’s Frankly, Nate reflects on intraspecies predation (ours) and the impact psychopathic actors have on the mean and median of human behavior – in the past all the way up to our modern society. Human evolution was shaped by both cooperative, pro-social behavior and a competitive, predatory approach for survival – resulting in a balanced distribution for most of humanity’s existence. But, as agriculture, surplus, and other factors propelled more hierarchical social structure, aggregate human behavior and culture has slowly shifted over time to express more psychopathic traits. This thread of behavior continues to run through our modern society, where a relatively small (but disproportionately powerful) segment of the human population can pull societal behavior towards anti-social and individualistic values – even if the majority of people still inherently operate from a place of reciprocity. Why might our modern society provide a more fruitful breeding ground for psychopathy than past societies did? What do chickens and eggs have to do with psychopathy and the economic superorganism? And ultimately, what strategies could we begin to think about in order to shift mean and median human behavior back towards a more cooperative, prosocial middle? Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/108-the-influence-of-psychopaths Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie: https://youtu.be/-xr9rIQxwj4?feature=shared --- Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/support Join our Substack newsletter: https://natehagens.substack.com/ Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners https://www.hylo.com/groups/the-great-simplification/join/i9jLqPmbGI --- 00:00 - Introduction 02:01 - Definitions 03:39 - Income Distribution 04:21 - Evolution and Multi-level Selection 08:29 - Influence of Psychopaths 12:10 - Nate's Hypothesis on Psychopathy Today 15:18 - Recipe for the Superorganism 17:31 - What to Do 20:30 - Conclusion