It's All Relative Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree

What inspired the newest book it's all relative why go out and prove that all humanity is one family and kind of do this large family reunion tell us what you grabbed from this and why you even started this journey in the first place.

Yeah, this was a weird one because I did not expect to pursue this topic but it turned out to be one of the most fascinating in my life and it started because this is about three years ago I got an email from this guy and he said you don't know me but I am your age cousin.

I think it is possibly the biggest problem because it also affects every other problem because if we're all in these little separate warring tribes then we can never get together and solve the big problems which are huge and need worldwide cooperation like climate change or these pandemic diseases I do think a little bit about the AI robots taken over the world as crazy as it sounds it worked when we were paleo-lethic because you were in a small tribe and yeah you needed to protect that and keep your DNA intact so your kids and close relatives but now at days it's just spun out of control and you look around I mean tribalism in politics the red states versus blue states and rural versus city and just this increasing obsession with race and ethnicity identity politics I just think it is really literally tearing our society apart because we're all obsessed with our differences instead of focusing on the 99% of DNA that we share this idea of one big family is one way to fight it it actually there's empirical evidence that it kind of works there's a great study last year by Harvard that showed when they told Palestinians in Israelis how closely they were related they treated each other with kindness and more willingness to negotiate so it's sort of this what behavioral economists call the family bias that you are biased naturally to treat your relatives with a little more generosity so if we can take this bias and hijack it and apply it to everyone in the whole world your big family it might actually help.

I think it's good to have people confront the black sheep in their family and realize that we all have good and bad in our family it's sort of democratizes things and makes us realize we are not beholden to our ancestors we can rise above and that's why that hole I don't know if you remember this mini scandal where Ben Affleck was on one of those ancestry shows oh no oh yeah it turned out one of his ancestors was a slave owner and he lobbied the show successfully to get it censored from the show then the Sony hack happened and it came out that he had censored this and he got in a lot of trouble which I think he deserved to get in trouble because why censor it the fact that he's not racist I think that's a great educational moment I think you can teach people listen we all have horrible ancestors but we don't have to follow in their footsteps so that really drove me crazy yeah I understand a little bit why but I also think you're right it is inappropriate because it's kind of like you're trying to imply that people in your past have never done anything wrong which is ridiculous.

well thank you very much for coming on the show thanks so much for your work as well so funny and just interesting entertaining and educational at the same time.

This was a weird one because I did not expect to pursue this topic but it turned out to be one of the most fascinating in my life and it started because this is about three years ago I got an email from this guy and he said you don't know me but I am your age cousin.

So I was immediately suspicious I figure all right he's going to ask me to wire $10,000 to Nigeria but actually he was legitimate and he's one of these people who is helping the build the biggest family tree in history with literally millions of people in dozens of countries hundreds of ethnicities all connected on a single tree that just blew me away because as I said I always thought genealogy is a little stodgy maybe not so sexy but now with all these technology advances it is so relevant and it affects everything from politics to race relations and tribalism which I think is perhaps the biggest problem human space right now.

You found out you were related to your wife that's disturbing it and tells how this happened because I can't imagine that news went over really well.

Well that's right I took all of the DNA tests I took like seven of them but one of them 23 me which we can talk about later they send you a list of people who share enough DNA that they are your cousins so I get the list and I'm looking down I don't recognize don't recognize oh wait there's a name I recognize Julie Jacobs my wife I went in to show my wife ironically and I couldn't have scripted this she was watching the game of thrones and I was like hey look at this we're cousins I thought it would spice up our marriage like the forbidden fruit but no she was grossed out yeah but it actually I have a whole chapter in the book about the history and ethics of cousin marriage which is crazy if you do buy this idea that we're all related you're married to your cousin you're a cousin stupor luckily my wife is of Chinese origin so it's a very distant cousin but still yeah we're all related