Tom, you just got back from vacation. I noticed your Instagram feed is just bursting the vacation shots. Why? Why are you putting your family's vacation on the internet for everyone to see? What I like about it is that I can go back in the future and look, it's a sort of edited version of pictures that I can look at. So the fact that they're public is sort of incidental to it.

It's really, these are the pictures that represent that holiday for me.

Sure, but does the fact that they're going to be on the internet for public consumption,

does that shape the kinds of pictures you take or how you pose the pictures or how you edit the

pictures?

I probably does. I don't know. I mean, I posted this picture of, you know, spices at a market in Sicily. And, you know, the caption is Instagram cliche because it's just like complete.

And then another picture was... You knew what was expected of you, right? You knew it was the kind

of picture that people would like. Probably the

silliest one is this picture of my wife sitting next to a swimming pool doing this kind of 80s modelling pose. It's like the saxophone solo is about to come in. And this is in fact the house we were staying in, the web page that, you know, from the travel company where we saw it, has this woman sitting in front of the, you know, they've got a model to go and sit there.

And so we thought we would recreate this because obviously we're living the dream that they've sold us. So we did this. And then the travel company saw it and liked it. And, you know, we're just being silly. But so the sort of like false dream vacation shot, you then recreated this, this false thing, but it was

sort of real, but it was sort of fake, but then you put it on Instagram for people to see in order

to give them some kind of image of the kind of vacation you take in, which was actually like a

copy of a copy that never existed. We're going down rabbit holes. There's so many games and

entire games going on here, but this is, you know, it's silly. It's fun.

This is what social media has done to us. It's created these incentives, these expectations about reality and false reality and constructed reality. That's what we bathe in these days. The truth is, though, the camera is a liar, and it has always been a liar.

So this is where the story of Edmund Carpenter comes in. He's an anthropologist. His friends

called him Ted. It's 1969, and Ted Carpenter has taken a professorship at the

University in Port Moresby, which is the capital of Papua New Guinea. And Ted has a special assignment there.

At that time, huge parts of Papua New Guinea were almost entirely undeveloped. And the plan was for him to

trek deep into the interior and to have interactions with these Papuan tribes

there that have basically never encountered the modern world.

I then went to New Guinea and spent about a year there.

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