Heather and Brett Weinstein are a husband and wife team who have become an integral part of our new normal. They first gained prominence in 2017, when they were both professors at Evergreen College and disagreed with the college s Day of Absence, which demanded that all white students and faculty leave campus for a day.
00:00:20.960Transportation, modern medicine, access to information, women's rights, human rights.
00:00:26.740So why does it feel like everything is collapsing?
00:00:31.180That is a really tough question to answer, but it is what lies at the center of a book called A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.
00:00:44.360This couple is the reason I started this podcast, but they have never agreed to be guests until now.
00:00:53.220It is a husband and wife evolutionary biologist team who have become an integral part of our new normal.
00:01:02.940They first gained prominence in 2017, I think, when they were at Evergreen College.
00:01:20.860The outrage was immediate and explosive.
00:01:25.320They were practically forced to resign.
00:01:28.380Well, then they went on to become founding members of the intellectual dark web, a group of politically homeless rebels, mostly from the left, who violated one of the left's countless holy laws.
00:01:41.000This is going to be a fascinating conversation.
00:01:44.840I have no idea where it's going to end up.
00:01:47.020Please welcome Heather Hang and Brett Weinstein.
00:03:23.960How, and I want to get to the book because I think we have, we've had similar thoughts, except mine kind of resides a little bit with the Beatles.
00:03:35.160And yours is in the intellectual space.
00:03:37.640But, and it's important that we talk about the book because it is, I think people can feel the problem and they can name it here and here and here, but they don't really understand the scope of it.
00:03:55.380And I think you guys are really hitting the scope of it.
00:03:58.800But before we hit that, your lives have changed so much.
00:04:04.000And you believed in so much, how much, two things.
00:04:11.920I know that I believed what I believed.
00:04:14.480And then I found out, holy cow, there's a lot of things I was absolutely certain of that are not true.
00:04:55.840Ten years ago, you and I would have, we would have never thought of being at the same table because we're on opposite sides, but we're really not.
00:05:04.720And, I mean, even ten years ago, it was becoming clear, you know, in the, in the milieus where we were getting our news, that NPR was becoming harder to listen to, for instance, for us, even ten years ago.
00:05:18.680But that is obviously coming to a head even more in the last one, two, three, four, five years, you know, with every...
00:05:28.300And that, of course, is one of the points of the book, that the rate of change itself is changing so fast that the, the search for coherence is becoming ever more difficult.
00:05:38.320I talked to Condoleezza Rice 15 years ago, and I remember during the interview, she said something, because it was biblical what she said.
00:05:46.960I don't know if she knew it at the time, but what she said, and it stuck out to me because of what it implies.
00:05:53.900She said, you're starting to see the birth pangs of the things to come.
00:05:59.360And when you think of that, you realize we're giving birth to something, and I'm not sure I want to see what's coming out on the other end.
00:06:08.180And birth pangs happen faster and faster and closer to closer and the stronger they get.
00:06:32.660And I should say this actually applies to your earlier question, too.
00:06:36.020In some sense, the reason that our politics hasn't changed very much is that science, and in particular evolutionary biology, is our north star.
00:06:45.520And so, what we believed and what we believe now were based on a model of the universe that hasn't changed very much.
00:06:53.420Now, who we find ourselves interacting with has changed radically.
00:06:59.780For people who don't necessarily understand evolutionary biology, what are you talking about here?
00:07:05.760Well, one, so, I'm sure you had something particular in mind, but one thing that I hear in what Brett just said is our understanding of the universe is based on sort of physical reality.
00:07:16.460And it's not, you know, our politics aren't dependent on the social scene.
00:07:52.660Now, we humans are better than any other creature at changing our software to adapt to new habitats, but our habitats are now changing so rapidly that we can't keep up.
00:08:04.400And that is partially about technology, but it's also about the fact, in evolutionary biology, we have a metaphor that we like.
00:08:11.120We talk about adaptive landscapes in which opportunities are peaks.
00:08:15.860They're basically mountain ranges of opportunity.
00:08:17.860And in order to get from one opportunity to another, you have to pass through what we call an adaptive valley.
00:08:23.360And so, your trepidations about where we're headed is part and parcel of the fact that whatever else may be true, we are in transition.
00:08:31.080Our tools are not up to managing the problems that we now face.
00:08:35.880So, we have to find a new way of being.
00:08:37.380Our, not only our physical tools, but our mental and psychological tools.
00:08:43.580Even our tools of governance, as excellent as they are.
00:08:47.460It feels like, the government feels like it's stuck in 1950.
00:08:51.220The world feels like it's headed towards scientific, not scientific, the technology field feels like it's in 2050.
00:09:00.020And we're kind of standing in between going, that world doesn't work, and I don't even know what that world means.
00:09:07.880Well, let's be, you know, frank about this.
00:09:11.700Our governmental structures are really 18th century structures, and they're brilliant, but they couldn't possibly manage a world this far from what the founders were capable of understanding.
00:09:22.360I mean, the founders never saw a train or a chainsaw.
00:09:25.520So, let me ask you on that, because I would guess that we actually agree on this.
00:09:33.680The founders believed, I mean, they thought it would last 30 years.
00:09:37.280They did not think it was going to last, like, now.
00:09:40.240And I think they would get here, if they could, with a time machine, they're here.
00:09:44.320They would look at everything, and they'd say, great, how long did America last?
00:09:48.100You know, they would not recognize what they have done.
00:09:51.020And I don't think they would have recognized it in 1960, you know, but they did allow, through constitutional adaptation, et cetera, et cetera, that they did allow us to adapt.
00:10:03.500They did say, we're not, we don't see everything, so just adapt and adopt, you know, constitutional amendments to get there.
00:10:09.500It's not the framework or the mission statement, we hold these truths to be self-evident, or the framework that is adaptable.
00:10:18.220It's that we are trying to force a bunch of stuff into it that it's not meant to do.
00:10:24.780It's meant to reject that kind of stuff, right?
00:10:34.780And we don't know what, and we don't want to, and those who would claim that that was a perfect world are misunderstanding what that world was.
00:10:43.480And those who are saying, you know, full bore ahead to 2050, no matter what, because progress is always the answer.
00:10:53.300And if it requires rejecting everything about the old, who cares?
00:10:59.140And so, you know, progress, yes, and tradition, yes, but we're going to have to pick and choose, and we're going to have to do so with intention.
00:11:06.560And that's why I think we're having such, I always look at right wing, left wing.
00:12:01.040So what we really need to do, though, is adapt our system.
00:12:05.300I think the founders would have expected us to change it much more radically than we have in order to keep up.
00:12:11.320You know, we've treated certain things as sacred that shouldn't have been and that they wouldn't have expected.
00:12:15.680But what we need to do is get a system that is not so violent in the fluctuation that balances these two forces.
00:12:25.400In other words, you mentioned up top that there's quite a bit we agree on, and this is now well established.
00:12:31.320The Hidden Tribes report revealed that there is what they call the exhausted middle, this vast group of us that aren't extreme, that agree on most of what we want at least.
00:12:41.680And then we differ over how close we are to it and what might be done to go the rest of the distance.
00:12:46.860But we are being shut out by extremists that are pushing us into viewing, you know, the other side is not quite human.
00:12:55.620And that's a very dangerous process, unfortunately, with a lot of historical precedent that suggests we should not continue down that road.
00:13:05.020So now this has been a book that you've wanted to write for like 10 years, right?
00:13:22.100So it's a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century.
00:13:24.860And as we say in it, we could have named it a number of things, you know, an agriculturalist's guide, a post-industrialist's guide, a mammal's guide.
00:13:32.980Like all of these things are true descriptors of what the modern human condition is and are true moments in time from our evolutionary history.
00:13:43.700And hunter-gatherer is like the moment that most people have in their head.
00:13:46.940It's like, oh, that's what we're adapted to, right?
00:13:48.640Like hunter-gatherer is on the African savannah.
00:13:53.200And so our point in the book, using the term of art from evolution, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness for humans, is not just hunter-gatherers.
00:14:02.860It's all of these points in our history.
00:14:04.940And because humans are so flexible, are so much software compared to hardware, we are born with so much capability that isn't hardwired in more than any other animal on the planet, then, you know, we are adapted to being post-industrialists.
00:14:19.820Not as well as we should be, and not maybe even possibly to be perfectly adapted, given the rate of change.
00:14:40.180You know, when Evergreen blew up, we began to have an audience.
00:14:45.600And the words of our many generations of students were still ringing in our ears.
00:14:50.360You know, we're still affiliated, connected with many of them, who had been saying to us for years,
00:14:54.760please find a way to take the teaching of evolutionary biology, and specifically what the two of you have, what the two of us have been doing,
00:15:02.960into some kind of packaged form so that it can be delivered unto other people.
00:15:12.260I'm kind of glad I'm not going to be around to have to see and make the decisions that your generation and the one following you are going to have to make.
00:15:22.700He said, but it's going to be fascinating one way or another.
00:15:28.740He said, he was born in 1926, and he said, I remember as a kid, we looked up at the moon, and we never thought a man could walk on the moon.
00:15:41.380And when we started seeing Buck Rogers and stuff, that was movie stuff.
00:15:45.160That wasn't actually landing on the moon.
00:15:46.900He said, halfway through my life, we're on the moon.
00:16:19.900We've had such an explosive growth here, and really nothing here in many ways.
00:16:25.840Is that the problem, that we're growing so fast, part of the problem, that we're growing so fast, and yet we haven't worked on this along with the fact that social media, we're in tribes.
00:16:40.260It forces us back to that tribal nature, because that's been in us for thousands and thousands of years.
00:16:52.060But, I mean, really what you're saying, the reason that Plato is still resonant, and Plato is resonant.
00:16:57.720I mean, you see Plato's cave in The Matrix.
00:17:00.260People don't necessarily know that they're revisiting that same puzzle.
00:17:03.440But part of the problem is that these things aren't really fundamentally about those who first spotted them.
00:17:11.100They are part of the underlying architecture.
00:17:14.080They are failures of game theory that result in certain problems reoccurring in a new form until you figure out how to solve them.
00:17:22.040Isn't that part of, that's one thing that I don't understand that people think, that we evolve.
00:17:30.700Well, yes, we do, but we're all born at the same starting point.
00:17:35.800And so we have to discover that when I first read Plato, when I was an adult, I was like, oh my gosh, this is brilliant, and it's exactly what I'm struggling with.
00:17:45.500Because isn't that a self-discovery thing?
00:17:47.920You can't pass that information and those answers on biologically, can you?
00:17:54.640Well, first of all, one of the things that our field has done a terrible job of recognizing and therefore conveying is that our cultural layer, our software, is biological.
00:18:06.280You'll very often hear people say, is it cultural or is it biological?
00:18:15.800But culture is every bit as biological as genes.
00:18:19.580The problem is when you do discover the answer to a puzzle.
00:18:23.560So let's, for example, say that our rights of free expression, which the founders clearly understood very well, were in some sense a response to part of Plato's observation about what happens when the person who has escaped the cave returns and attempts to convey it.
00:18:41.060So our speech rights are, in effect, an agreement that we have that actually we don't get to do that to the guy who comes back into the cave and says that the shadows aren't the real world.
00:18:50.640But the problem is if you live in a world downstream of that discovery and you've always had these rights, you don't realize how important they are and what they are really protecting.
00:19:00.800And so you uninvent the progress because you don't see the problem, which is, of course, one of the themes of our book.
00:19:06.700We talk about Chesterton's Fence and the idea that if you see a structure and you don't know what its purpose is, you'd be foolish to think it probably doesn't have one and therefore it can be safely eliminated until you've understood what the purpose was.
00:19:20.480At that point, then you know whether it continues to play that role or whether that role is obsolete.
00:19:27.160And so, you know, the reinvention of problems that were solved is a next-level problem that we have to address because it will happen in every era of history where we have been successful and people suddenly see, I don't know, efficiency as dominant over the elegant solution architecture.
00:19:44.120I remember just a few years ago, for the very first time, I thought, no, these things are not self-evident.
00:20:03.600I mean, part of what happened, I think, is that there's a reductionism that takes over when we are asked to understand things and we are able to measure.
00:20:16.320And so, you know, once we can measure something and we have numbers, the numbers stick in our heads and we forget the emergent whole and we forget how glorious humans are, actually, and what emergent beings we are.
00:20:26.780And so, social media is a stand-in for social interaction and it's become even more so, of course, during COVID, but, you know, really since its inception, people mistook it for the entire thing.
00:20:40.100They mistook social media for social interaction and, you know, the fact is we're here with you and that is a very different experience than if we were on a Zoom call with you, right?
00:20:49.860Without being, without having any access at any conscious level to why or what exactly is being conveyed that's more because we're actually here with you, there's just more, right?
00:21:00.520Because humans are more than even many of the things we have yet measured.
00:21:05.840And, you know, as scientists, we hope, you know, we are seeking an objective, complete, accurate understanding of the universe, hoping to get ever, ever closer, more and more refined, knowing we won't ever get there.
00:21:18.400And also knowing that the tendency to reduce to a single variable will tend to exclude other things that may have just as much meaning, if not more.
00:21:28.060I don't remember which chapter it was.
00:21:29.300Towards the beginning, you did the lineage of the human journey.
00:21:35.060Can you just take us through that quickly?
00:23:14.560It's very surprising the first time you realize that although we animals and plants, in some sense, are distinct evolutions of sexual reproduction,
00:23:24.060that what we call male parts of plants and female parts of plants actually have the same biases built in them in terms of, for example,
00:23:33.940their enthusiasm for sex with partners about whom they are not choosy, right?
00:23:40.200Female parts of a plant are very choosy, and male parts of a plant much less so.
00:23:44.580And the reason is exactly the same, right?
00:23:47.040So this is why we presented in the book the model of evolution that we did, which is that once you begin to realize that, yes,
00:23:55.580there are, you know, an indefinitely large number of particulars, and you could learn them all,
00:23:59.900but there's also the underlying problems that are being solved, and there aren't that many solutions.
00:24:04.920So just as Plato's cave, you know, continues to reoccur because the underlying dynamics are really what's being noticed rather than some specific instance of something,
00:24:14.340the fact that any time, you know, if you start out with creatures that have sex but they have identical-sized gametes,
00:24:21.640you will quickly get to a state in which they no longer have identical-sized gametes,
00:24:25.720and the one that has large gametes will become choosy, and the one that has small mobile gametes will be much less choosy,
00:24:31.800and it doesn't matter whether you're talking about a tree or a gorilla, the logic is the same.
00:24:38.220So once you get that message and you say, well, okay, maybe what I should do, instead of investing in knowing all of the creatures of the Earth,
00:24:45.180what I should do is invest in understanding what problem they're solving and what the themes are in those solutions,
00:24:50.680which then brings us to our problem, which is humans, better than any other creature that has ever existed, by far,
00:24:59.240are wonderful at switching from one niche to another.
00:25:03.260When we describe virtually any other species on the planet, we are talking about a type of creature and an opportunity that it exploits.
00:25:10.680But for us, we can't name what that opportunity is that humans exploit because we do so many different things
00:25:15.920and have throughout our history done so many different things.
00:25:20.400Because we have a near-miraculous capacity to bootstrap new programming.
00:25:26.500We are kind of a generalist robot, and we have the ability to write our own new software for opportunities no ancestor had ever addressed.
00:25:35.480That capacity gives us the ability to think our way out of the problems that I think all three of us here at the table recognize are headed towards us.
00:25:44.460But what we don't have is the ability to keep up with the rate of change,
00:25:48.860the fact that we don't even live in the world that we were born into, right?
00:25:52.320We cannot educate our children and say, here's the world that you're going to have to make a living in
00:25:56.400because none of us have any idea what it's going to look like.
00:27:30.860The processes are already unsustainable in very simple, literal terms.
00:27:35.860And what that means is either we figure out a comparatively gentle path to some way of existing
00:27:42.520that does not continue down this trajectory, or the trajectory will collapse because it is unstable.
00:27:47.020So what are the things that are fighting us, fighting the natural man, if you will, that technology is exacerbating,
00:28:01.360that we need to recognize and rein in?
00:28:05.420I'm not sure natural versus unnatural is the right dichotomy, because part of what we explore in the book is the idea that this is actually—this could have been predicted, right?
00:28:19.680That this—the human condition is one of such software, of such lability, of such flexibility, that, of course, we would end up becoming not only our worst enemy.
00:28:33.600But what we also need to do, then, is figure out how to be our best friend, right?
00:28:38.980Like, to recognize that we have to share the planet with everyone else, and also that that doesn't just include non-humans, but all of the humans who are here.
00:28:48.620And, sure, there are probably too many of us, but we have to do what we can to live well with the people who are here now and figure out, you know, our better angels, how to explore our better angels, which are—
00:29:06.180How do you do that in a society that is just pounding each other?
00:29:10.800You stand up and do something—I've been working to try to rescue people that—and I don't care what your sexuality—I don't care.
00:29:41.820And I was over there, and, you know, people started saying all kinds of stuff, and my first reaction was, no good deed goes unpunished.
00:29:53.340I mean, you can do anything, and nobody is—everybody's so cynical and everything else.
00:29:59.760How do you become better angels when there's zero reward for it in society?
00:30:07.660Well, in part, we haven't really understood the puzzle yet.
00:30:15.180All evolved creatures have the same purpose, and that is a very unfortunate statement, because if you share a purpose with a malaria pathogen, it's not much of a purpose.
00:30:41.900But those are all—they all came to be in the service of that mind-numbing objective.
00:30:46.820But once you recognize that—this is another place that our field has not been very good.
00:30:52.540We've given people the impression, and in fact, most evolutionists believe that creatures are trying to produce as many offspring as possible.
00:30:59.940And really, producing more offspring is a means to an end.
00:31:03.840The end is to lodge one's genes as deeply into the future as possible.
00:31:08.820And so the reason that you see the pattern that you're seeing is because, in fact, people are wired, without their awareness of it, for lineage versus lineage competition.
00:31:18.840And to the extent that two lineages are fighting over a limited resource, like a patch of territory, the desire to rid that territory of the other lineage is extremely powerful.
00:31:30.480This accounts for the greatest tragedies of history, I think, without exception.
00:31:34.560And the problem, therefore, is to convey the message to whatever part of the human is listening, that actually the objective, getting into the future, requires that we stop doing that now.
00:32:46.040There's a manner of speaking in which you have to be right.
00:32:48.960But I mean, just even notice that, you know, there are 400 civilian nuclear reactors operating on planet Earth that require constant vigilance to keep them cool enough that they don't melt down and spill out all of their content.
00:33:09.500We've created an inadvertent doomsday machine for no good reason.
00:33:13.480So the recognition that we have the most beautiful planet that we know of, and that all we have to do in order to continue this indefinitely and really to provide the opportunity of being human, which is the most glorious opportunity there is, to provide it to the maximum number of people, all we have to do is solve the sustainability puzzle.
00:34:13.840It will create whatever it is they desire.
00:34:17.540And there's something in, as I look at capitalism, you look at it and it goes great.
00:34:25.540And then people make a lot of money, as de Tocqueville said, and they get a lot of power and then they kick the door behind them or they just get so greedy.
00:35:41.200What you want to do is figure out how to take that amazing tool and point it at the problems that we want solved and to keep it away from the problems we don't want solved.
00:36:28.380You know, on the left, though, what you hear is, you know, capitalism is the enemy, right?
00:36:32.400They don't like markets at all, right?
00:36:34.340And then on the right, you hear that markets are what we've got for solving problems, so let's get to it.
00:36:39.160And really the point is let's figure out how to refine that tool so that it does what we need done.
00:36:45.000There remains the problem, though, that Glenn invoked of the people who make it and kick the door closed behind them or try to.
00:36:52.820People who, or the people, some of them with very good intention that are working to solve problems that you're like, no, don't, no, no, what are you doing?
00:37:03.980No, no, no, that's a bad, but they feel it's not an American thing.
00:37:35.320And that, I think, is easier, more easily dealt with, although we haven't seen it dealt with, than the sort of the tech utopianism of if there's a problem that can be approached, then we will approach it no matter what and no breaks.
00:37:51.200Okay, so can you tell me how do we begin to solve, if that is a problem, the first set of people, how can the average person begin to affect meaningful change there?
00:38:11.400You know, we've begun to see, we know of some people and organizations who are explicitly working to bridge the divide, cross the divide.
00:38:22.120And it's very much like what you're talking about doing in Afghanistan, but people working, for instance, within the U.S. to bring, you know, red voters and blue voters together into the same room and just have them meet and exchange names and eye contact and say, hey, I also have a kid and a dog and a mortgage.
00:38:43.160And there is value for a very few in keeping us from recognizing each other's humanity.
00:38:53.400So how, with social media, it's much harder to remind ourselves that we're all human.
00:39:01.500And I think, you know, basically what these sorts of conversations and as much in human contact as possible, where you actually are engaging with people with kindness and generosity, but that doesn't necessarily get to the people who've already kicked the door closed behind them.
00:39:17.700So, I think this, I want to introduce you to my Beatles thought that I had.
00:39:25.160I was listening to, I don't remember which song it was, it might have been Revolution, and I'd been listening to some John Lennon.
00:39:34.560And I thought, part of me said, thank God they don't have that tool in their hand.
00:39:43.600Because the hippie movement in the 60s, I mean, it did a lot of good.
00:40:48.260It's not all concentrated by the fact that you've got three stations in your area that, and everybody's listening to the same, you know, the same soundtrack.
00:41:56.340The rate of change that is outstripping our capacity to alter ourselves so that we are not being harmed, that we are not being made sick psychologically, physiologically, and socially by our environment.
00:42:08.320That problem is actually, it's multilayered.
00:42:12.660So not only, you know, people our age have the experience of living in a very different world than they grew up, and we all remember, you know, at the beginning of the email era, right?
00:42:24.880We all made a mistake somewhere where we sent some email that we should have thought more carefully about and didn't realize that the bandwidth was going to be reduced and that somehow this was very different than a letter and it wasn't quite like a conversation.
00:42:36.880And the problem is, okay, we get that, but people who are young enough who have grown up online have this as their developmental environment.
00:42:46.660And I guess part of one of the many messages in the book is that there are things that physical reality will teach you developmentally so that you understand them, whether you could say what they were or not, right?
00:42:59.000If you walk into a bar and you behave the way people behave on Twitter, you'll get beaten up and you'll learn not to do it, right?
00:43:05.400On Twitter, you may not learn that lesson.
00:43:07.320In fact, you may get so many likes that you continue to do that because it feels like the right thing to do.
00:43:12.340You may not understand, therefore, what human conflict is and why it should be reserved for very special circumstances.
00:43:20.080So what we are doing is we are not only creating an environment that we can't keep up with.
00:43:24.560We are creating an environment that is shaping our children in utterly arbitrary ways.
00:43:30.020And when they become adults, they will then be living in a world that isn't even that one that we created that shaped them.
00:43:35.440It will be some new world and their toolkit will be out of phase with where they're going to be.
00:43:39.260And we can see this coming a mile away.
00:43:50.720We have to slow down the rate of change enough that we can keep up.
00:43:54.160I guess one thing I would add is that the social media environment in particular makes us likely to choose our arguments for what we hate rather than with what we agree.
00:44:05.980And it's not that there isn't plenty to disagree with by saying, actually, I stand for this.
00:44:11.740And that other thing is something else that isn't odds with this thing that I stand for, as opposed to I hate that.
00:44:17.600I don't know what I stand for, but I hate that.
00:44:19.240And the standing primarily in opposition is de facto divisive and deadly.
00:44:29.520I'm working on something now that I'm calling it the power of one.
00:44:39.020And it is just you recognize that you have control, not of everything else, but you.
00:45:52.240But you're convinced that you can't live without it.
00:45:57.320And then, because it brings a lot of great things to your life.
00:46:01.060But then on top of it, while you're being convinced that, you're also being convinced that you should be the opposite of what your parents taught you was right and wrong.
00:46:34.960For example, our capacity to be rewarded for behavior that creates massive harm in lives that we never see, right?
00:46:44.940Even just, even your investment portfolio, right?
00:46:48.600You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, right?
00:46:51.080You are in competition with other investors.
00:46:54.160And what you need in order to stay afloat is to find the investments that pay back.
00:47:00.840But those investments may be profitable, not because they are actually enhancing the world in some way, but because they successfully externalize harm onto someone who can't defend themselves.
00:47:13.400But if it's, you know, if it's buried in your retirement fund, you don't know that you're harming somebody else, nor are you in a position to do anything about it.
00:47:20.500So we have to begin to recognize that, although you can't operationalize this, but just as a thought experiment.
00:47:27.800Because what you sound like you're saying is ESG would be a good thing, but that is, then somebody else is making the judgments on what, do you know what ESGs are?
00:47:40.200Environmental, social justice, and governance scores.
00:47:45.680And all companies are, banks are now starting to make loans based on, well, are you involved in social justice?
00:47:52.440What do you, and that's an, right now, at least for sure, it's an arbitrary number.
00:47:57.620They decide what you are or what you're not.
00:48:00.920That, institutionalizing that kind of stuff scares the hell out of me.
00:48:15.900So that's not, that's not where you go.
00:48:17.860Well, and it includes a category error, right, like lumping in environmental with social justice causes would seem to not be aligning those of us who deeply care about the environment and see a tremendous amount of harm in modern social justice, for instance.
00:48:32.580So I want to go back to something that we were talking about earlier, which is what happens when you gather conservatives and liberals together.
00:48:41.520And one trick that I have learned is that the first thing you should do is figure out what it is that you actually agree on.
00:48:52.060Because very frequently, the puzzles that we differ over, actually, there's half of them that we don't differ over.
00:48:57.820And then, but we recognize the other person.
00:49:00.520We sort of figure that everything that they're saying is wrong.
00:49:04.420So, for example, if I go into a room of conservatives, I can be pretty sure that we're going to disagree over environmental sustainability and, in particular, climate change, right?
00:49:18.120But if I ask the question, if you believed that human beings were causing substantial alteration to the climate that was going to degrade the capacity of the earth to sustain people in the future, right, would you be in favor of doing something about it?
00:49:35.620Virtually every reasonable person will agree to that.
00:49:37.900It's a fascinating, it's fascinating, because I, I, you can't argue with global warming.
00:49:46.260You can't argue with a thermometer, right?
00:50:35.880Well, that's why you have to get to the place where you've agreed that if we are damaging the planet in this way, that we all agree that we should stop.
00:50:44.620Whether we know how to do it, whether that's even plausible, because that is a conversation that people can have and be decent to each other.
00:50:55.400This reminds me very much of a framing in different domains that I've been making lately, which is, you know, two people come together and the first person says, my God, there's a problem.
00:51:05.500And person B says, yeah, there sure is.
00:51:07.780And person one says, therefore, the solution is X.
00:51:11.420And person two says, well, that's a big problem, but I don't think your solution is going to do it.
00:51:15.460And the first person, and, you know, this might be team blue and team red, or it might be reversed, but the first person says, if you don't agree with my solution, then you don't think this is a problem.
00:51:26.740And there is just a basic logical failure here.
00:51:29.620But it is the way that many of us are demonized and dismissed because we say that solution that you've come up with strikes us as wrong or incomplete, or at least how about there's other things on the table.
00:51:42.280Or another scam to build an empire of money for something else.
00:51:48.820But that rejection of solution says nothing about whether or not you thought there was a problem in the first place.
00:51:53.400And, you know, I know conservatives, they, and this is not a blanket statement, conservatives, especially that live in rural areas, they consider themselves great stewards of the land.
00:52:08.780My grandfather, I remember him saying all the time, he's a farmer.
00:52:12.660These nuts are telling us how to manage Yellowstone and the forest in California.
00:52:18.900And I remember him distinctly in the 70s saying, California will burn to the ground, burn to the ground if they do this.
00:52:26.680He was a real environmentalist in my book, you know, but God, no, you can't be an environmentalist if you disagree with what they're doing to save the environment.
00:52:39.040So the solution here, to the extent that there is one, is actually weirdly buried in the second to last chapter of our book.
00:52:47.700Because what we describe is a pattern, an evolved human pattern that goes back millions of years in all likelihood.
00:52:55.500Certainly it goes back hundreds of thousands in which human beings swap out their software program to engage new opportunities.
00:53:04.140And the way they do that is by plugging their minds into each other and essentially engaging in what we would now call parallel processing, right?
00:53:14.760And this wouldn't look like anything strange.
00:53:16.500It would look like people standing around a campfire discussing what the problems are, what solutions might look like.
00:53:23.140And with their different types of expertise, they would come up with a new solution, a prototype.
00:53:27.960And then over time it would be refined and then it would be driven into the cultural layer and handed one generation to the next.
00:53:33.760Now, the point, though, is this implies that our minds have two ways of running.
00:53:41.220If we are in a situation that our ancestors' wisdom is applicable to, then we are wise to apply it, maybe refine it a little bit, but not to question it too much, right?
00:53:50.840That is a naturally conservative impulse.
00:53:52.780If we are in a situation that our ancestors' wisdom is inapplicable because they didn't know anything about this predicament, then we have to rise to this collective consciousness and figure out what to do about the puzzle.
00:54:05.520And the point, we are in a battle about whether or not this is that moment.
00:54:11.960Is this the moment to, you know, double down on the ancestors' wisdom or is this the moment to do something different, which is inherently dangerous?
00:54:19.460It's that danger that liberals don't tend to see.
00:55:10.260The peril that is actually, should be uncontroversial, right?
00:55:14.300Just the simple, the degree to which the power of our tools has gone up, the degree to which we are interconnected has gone up.
00:55:20.880We are now one experiment, and your population can't make a mistake and go extinct, and everybody else will, you know, do the next thing.
00:55:29.460We're all in it together at this point.
00:55:31.060But the key to getting people out of their autopilot cultural mode and into their conscious, how do we solve this new problem mode, is the recognition that the old program, when you run it, creates errors.
00:55:45.080It throws errors like a computer program that runs into some sort of an input it doesn't expect.
00:55:49.760And what are those errors that the old programming, the conservatives need to see?
00:55:57.200The fact that, you know, for example, that we have a situation in which the most productive and dynamic nation that has ever existed, which has become a model for the West, right?
00:56:10.800That people have rightly adopted what the founders got right, and they've employed it across the world to good effect.
00:56:16.940That we would endanger that by failing to recognize the humanity of other participants in that system in some sort of team sport mentality that jeopardizes the whole project is obviously insane, right?
00:56:30.220Just the simple fact that we seem to be coming apart at the seams, despite the fact that whatever our problems are, the system is still functioning.
00:56:36.640So let me, amazingly so, amazingly so, I thought we would be gone.
00:56:44.420Ten years ago, I thought we'll never, this thing is resilient, it's crazy.
00:56:50.340But the ancient wisdom would come from George Washington who said, don't do the two-party thing, don't, don't, because you'll do tribal and then one person will realize they can milk it and become more popular and then the other one will up their game.
00:57:05.840I mean, that's, that, there's your founder's wisdom.
00:57:08.840Well, we did it, so now how do you undo it?
00:57:11.820First thing to do, I would say, is you need to recognize, we need to separate effectively the founder's values from their mechanism, right?
00:57:20.880Their mechanism was great, but it's run its course.
00:57:23.580It's, it cannot solve these problems, right?
00:57:26.260First past the post is a lethal hazard now, and it's part of what's causing this, you know, team against team mentality inside of our system that threatens us.
00:57:35.440But the way you get to the conscious mind engaging the puzzle rather than the autopilot mind is you recognize the errors.
00:57:43.240And so, if you get these puzzles really well refined, the thing that you see very often sounds like a riddle, right?
00:57:53.440That's the indication that there's something here that needs to be thought about carefully rather than just doing what we all learned must be done.
00:57:59.860So, I like to say the following thing.
00:58:15.400But the other side of it is I want to live in a world that is so good that I get to be a conservative.
00:58:22.380I'm not a liberal because change is my objective, but we do need to get somewhere that the point is actually from here, change would be a mistake, right?
01:00:10.640The problem is you've got a tension between two truths here, and, you know, the tension is a very real one.
01:00:17.560On the one hand, the idea of the laboratory of the states is a very good one, right?
01:00:21.220Prototype something and figure out how to get it to work before you globalize it, because that's the only sane thing we do.
01:00:26.420On the other hand, you have game theory puzzles that will cause – you know, let's say, for example, you had a rational system of taxation, and then let's say Oklahoma decides, well, you know what?
01:00:39.280We would like to attract some businesses, and so we're going to create a very hospitable business climate by lowering taxes in Oklahoma.
01:00:46.200Businesses start flooding to Oklahoma.
01:00:47.700Every other state notices, hey, our businesses are leaving, and they're going to Oklahoma.
01:00:51.680They all lower their taxes, and now your rational across-the-board tax structure has triggered a race to the bottom.
01:02:34.300And lots of questions that you are precluded from asking because what kinds of questions are getting funded by NSF and NIH and DOD right now is a question of fashion.
01:02:52.160This is one of the reasons, actually, that we were at some apparently, you know, podunk little college in the Pacific Northwest for so long was that it actually provided the opportunity to ask whatever questions we wanted.
01:03:04.000It was one of the very rare institutions of higher ed, and it's not anymore, but it was one of the very rare institutions of higher ed in the modern world where you could actually investigate what you were interested in investigating.
01:03:16.120That said, you couldn't do so if you were trying to do high-tech science.
01:03:20.560Anything high-tech still requires the big grants, and the universities want that because they get a big chunk of the overhead, and that is how they are running.
01:03:29.840So it's the business model that is the flaw.
01:03:32.700So isn't this the exact same situation that our pilgrims, the founders, whatever, came here for?
01:04:12.520Well, we are, ironically enough, doing exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.
01:04:17.900We should be recognizing that we are in the same boat and that noticing each other's humanity is the first step,
01:04:24.780and then figuring out what we agree on is the second step, and from there we can begin to engage the stuff that we disagree over and figure out where to go.
01:04:33.580And I would point out the solution to your puzzle, or at least the prototype for it, with respect to, you know, the laboratory of the states,
01:04:42.720this is actually a concept that comes out of Catholicism of all places called subsidiarity, which means everything should be governed at the lowest effective level.
01:04:52.580But it has to be the lowest effective level.
01:04:54.540And we have some global problems, right?
01:04:56.960Those problems have to be governed at a global level, right?
01:05:00.220Not having the oceans governed by anybody is a recipe for disaster.
01:05:04.980But having the oceans governed by a group of people that are just on the take and are all afraid of China or all afraid of us or whoever is also not a solution.
01:05:15.800That's a Band-Aid that looks like it's going to heal, but it's festering underneath.
01:05:20.320Well, you have two problems tangled together there.
01:05:23.280So you've got the how are we to govern ourselves issue, and then what are we to do about the corruption, right?
01:05:30.040Because we can say, look, certain things have to be governed at a global level, and other things you don't want your, you know, your local parks governed by the, you know, the global structure, right?
01:05:43.520But even if you had a system that governed everything at the lowest effective level, if it's corrupt, then it may be, you know, it may be worse than the problems it's built ostensibly to solve.
01:05:54.780So we have to solve the corruption issue as we address the let's make sure everything important is governed.
01:06:00.480And this is one of these places where the founders missed it because they hadn't seen sufficiently dangerous technology to intuit what a global problem of this sort would look like.
01:06:11.720There was no such thing as a manager or middle manager when they were around, you know what I mean?
01:07:32.460Yeah, which goes to a sort of overarching issue, which is, you know, the founders, of course, didn't know anything about evolution because it hadn't been described yet.
01:07:42.220What they effectively did was they created an evolving system.
01:07:45.900And so what we are living in is the consequences of the fact that they built a system that has all of the characteristics necessary to create adaptive evolution.
01:07:54.360And creatures have evolved or as if creatures have evolved in it.
01:07:58.640And many of them are predatory and they're extremely difficult to reign in.
01:08:03.520Because they, I mean, one of the things, again, they had an evolving system, but it was evolving in structure.
01:08:11.600So if you want to evolve because it becomes outdated, amend it, okay, which required the council to come together.
01:08:21.060And so you weren't getting these little teeny changes that all of a sudden, a hundred years later, amount to something that doesn't recognize anything constitutional.
01:09:19.040I mean, in fact, I think if, if, if you were in on those conversations, it would be even more frightening because I don't think anything's really running it.
01:09:26.680Right. It's, you know, it's a corrupt entity and it is doing what corrupt entities do, which is serving very narrow, short term interests.
01:09:35.340And, you know, the consequences for, for us as Americans and for the planet are, you know, absolutely arbitrary.
01:09:43.940This is very different than what humans have ever experienced before.
01:09:55.620Yeah. I mean, we, we make a call for more campfires in the book.
01:10:01.020And as things are scaling up, there are, as you alluded to earlier, the equivalent of campfires that are happening outside of the reach of everyone else.
01:10:10.720Whereas used to be, you know, we have always had hierarchy, all of our groups, all of our tribal groups have always had hierarchy.
01:10:18.600Often male hierarchies are separate from female hierarchies.
01:10:21.780And then to some degree, some, you know, familial level hierarchies.
01:10:24.420But there is, there was an ability, these like fission, fusion groups were able to move in between each other and say, oh, I'm here now and you're here.
01:10:34.320And, you know, sometimes they would war, but more often they would meet and maybe sometimes exchange people, you know, in marriage, whatever.
01:10:41.360However, there wasn't the possibility of one of those groups simply owning everyone else.
01:10:49.660And in part, it was because people really did come together in a way that was equalizing.
01:10:55.900Campfire. Breaking bread. I see the whites of your eyes.
01:11:01.560It's the power amplifiers of modernity that are making this very much unlike anything that came before.
01:11:05.860But it also, and I don't know which came first, the technology or the loss of this belief, but it is, we didn't just come together to come together.
01:11:15.860We came together because in the end, I could see the whites of your eyes, but I truly believed you believed at the core, fundamentally, the same kind of things that I believed.
01:11:31.860All men were created equal, you know, you have a right to free speech, all this stuff.
01:11:35.860When we lost that, I don't know how to, I don't know how to get together with somebody who says, no, the Bill of Rights, no, that's occasionally you can speak.
01:11:47.780How do you, because it feels like the media, the amplification, feels like half the country believes, half the country doesn't, or a third, a third, and then crazy, crazy crazies on both sides.
01:12:02.760Well, I mean, there is a long history in humanity of othering those that you, that are a threat to your own resources, right?
01:12:11.900In so many languages, those who are not you, you, the person who is being, who is naming themselves are the chosen people, and everyone else is someone else.
01:12:23.860But upon being able to come together, crossing those borders between tribes, generally, there is a recognition of humanity.
01:12:31.560And I think, A, the scale problem, right, that we just, we have power amplifiers, we have too many people, and we have too little opportunity to actually engage.
01:12:41.260And this is where the screens are actually doing an incredible amount of damage, that everyone talks about screens, but no, we don't have the measurements for all of the sensory stuff that is being interchanged when we're actually in person with one another.
01:12:56.620But there is value in that, that no one has named, no one has even attempted to measure, or a few people have.
01:13:03.600And as we spend less and less time actually, like, in vivo with one another, it's going to be easier and easier to go tribal in this way that seems permanent.
01:13:13.060I would argue in the U.S., we have to take ownership of the piece of the equation that our side got wrong.
01:13:27.060I mean, I went on the, they called it the Glenn Beck Apology Tour, and they said it was for something, no, I, you can't be human, really, truly human, if half the country says they hate you, and not go, gosh, do they have a point?
01:14:35.620And what we are seeing on the left, the collapse of reason that we are seeing on the left, is really lots of people who know that things are wrong, who know that they have been taken advantage of and been mistreated, misunderstanding what the source of that is.
01:14:55.300And not realizing that the right thing to pursue is a repair of the unfairness of the system.
01:15:01.760It is not the dismantling of that system, because the system is the best thing that we have in terms of producing fairness.
01:15:22.340I know 20 years ago, I was, golly, gee, I'm gray and red, white, and blue.
01:15:28.600And now you're like, no, this, you know, but that's the problem is after you're done, if you have time, I'll take you over to our vault across the walkway here.
01:15:38.740I collect everything that I can to preserve American history, but I collect a lot of the dark stuff about American history.
01:15:47.300I can outdo any liberal professor on the dark side of American history.
01:15:52.160It's important to remember that, you know, but I think there's a lot of people like I was 20 years ago that are just like, no, that's, well, we did make, what, I mean.
01:16:04.680No, we did some horrific things, horrific things that need to be addressed and set right and just talked about and like, don't ever do that again.
01:16:15.060But now, now, I think because the GOP 10 years ago so betrayed the Tea Party people, and I don't mean all the Tea Party people, I mean the people who actually believed in the Constitution, it betrayed them.
01:16:34.060They went, ooh, that's one of the first questions I asked you, your own side.
01:16:38.440Have you gone, oh my gosh, that's not who I thought we were.
01:16:41.800That's what we went through, many of us.
01:16:43.700It depends what you mean by your own side.
01:16:45.320If you mean the Democratic Party, absolutely.
01:16:47.480The thing is, you know, it's metastatic, right?
01:17:05.220I mean, Occupy on the left is to Tea Party on the right.
01:17:08.780And I think very similar things happened for those of us who were hopeful that that could have been an answer and to see it decay both for external and internal reasons.
01:17:18.780That it, you know, it turned out not to have any possibility of success.
01:17:23.520That's what's sad about the Me Too movement.
01:18:22.360Well, and, you know, from defunding the police to attacks on the family, the point was it had nothing to do with Black Lives Mattering.
01:18:31.360It was a very bizarre ideological agenda that was a lethal hazard to what does work about our system.
01:18:39.480Well, and the same arguments can be made without exactly the same corporate structure behind it for Me Too, right?
01:18:45.380Like, Me Too had the potential to be an awakening, to actually reveal to the vast majority of good men who are out there that the vast majority of women have unfortunate to really intolerable and horrible experiences as young women.
01:18:59.700And most men don't know that because most men aren't those sorts of men, right?
01:19:03.300Like, that's what it should have been.
01:19:04.960Instead, it went off the rails because it was maybe because it was designed to.
01:19:48.720I mean, to get back to an earlier point, you know, I think liberals had so many successes in the 20th century, right?
01:19:56.580You know, the women, women's emancipation and civil rights and gay rights and worker protections and this, these became values that almost everyone holds in common.
01:20:09.300And I think because of that momentum, it now seems to many on the left that change must always be necessary.
01:20:17.060And as you said earlier, Brett, you know, change isn't inherently good.
01:20:22.160Change will sometimes be necessary and change isn't always necessary.
01:20:26.520And if we're actually moving in the right direction, upending the system that's moving in the right direction is clearly going to be a betrayal of the values that you are claiming to have.
01:20:40.640Well, if I can return to the idea of an adaptive valley, things are very dark.
01:20:48.640And that doesn't necessarily mean one shouldn't be optimistic because in some sense, they would have to be in order for us to accomplish what we need to accomplish now.
01:21:00.700And so the problem, if you think about, you know, the adaptive landscape I was describing, the problem is if you have to move on from the opportunity that you've been exploiting and to find a new one, it is very easy to head in a direction where that opportunity does not exist.
01:21:18.400It's very easy to pass into that valley and to not arrive somewhere.
01:21:22.260So what you really need is very careful thinking about where that next opportunity is.
01:21:28.400And whatever the explanation for it, if I, you know, if I could get one thought into the mind of Americans generally, it would be that something has us divided for reasons we may never know.
01:21:45.040It may just be some process, but the key to us getting out of this is the recognition that most of us agree on the values to be pursued.
01:21:55.300We agree on what a good society would look like.
01:21:57.440We may disagree on how close we are and what might be done to get us the rest of the way, but we agree.
01:22:01.700We don't want a system that is rigged in favor of one race and against another, for example.
01:22:06.360We don't want a system that bars people from doing whatever job they want to do because of the sex they were born into.
01:22:11.460We want a fair system in which opportunity is broadly distributed.
01:22:15.900Now, once you recognize that virtually everybody you meet can agree to that much, and then you realize that we've all been led to believe that there's another team and that those people don't agree, they don't agree with you on anything, right?
01:22:29.460That they're bad people who want bad things.
01:22:31.840And the point is, well, all right, wouldn't the right thing to do be to recognize we know what the objective of the project is, we all understand something has gone awry, and the correct thing to do is to talk to each other about how we might get ourselves out of this and get back on track where we can fight about the details of how to get there, not where we're going.
01:22:53.140Historically, you guys are on exactly the right path, one that wasn't necessarily taken the last time we had a horrible, horrible world war.
01:23:04.100In my research over the years on the Holocaust, the biggest thing that happened was nobody knew Jews.
01:23:16.040The Jews that were saved were generally saved by people who said, yeah, the Jews are like that, but not this one.
01:23:43.460We believe that we have the capacity to be superheroes, and we believe that there are supervillains on the other side of the screen or out there in the world.
01:23:51.620And it is the very, very, very rare human being who is either.
01:23:58.080Just look within yourself and see, no matter how remarkable you are, what your weaknesses are.
01:24:06.160Or if you're in the opposite camp and you feel that you're not doing well, find the strengths that you have and recognize that that mixture in different amounts, in different relative amounts, is going to be present in every single other human being.
01:24:19.380You know, it stops us from wheeling gallows in front of people's houses.
01:24:44.020But even in Portland, where you would imagine that there's just simply no reason to be accessed, a funny thing happens, for me at least, and I know for Heather, when we are open about our doubts about the conventional wisdom of the left.
01:25:00.680Which is that people who would espouse, you know, all of the usual slogans, as soon as they hear that you're actually, you have your own doubts and that you're willing to voice them, it is amazing what people will volunteer.
01:25:15.000So, why do you think they work so hard to silence people who have just a little bit of courage?
01:25:32.220And this is where this impulse to authoritarianism comes from, right?
01:25:36.020Because they need to control the conversation in order that the doubts don't emerge and restore us to a conversation that might actually stand a chance of putting us back on track.
01:25:48.120And it is remarkable how many conversations both Brett and I have had with, you know, UPS drivers, cashiers, waitresses, whatever, or just overheard while paddleboarding or, you know, sitting in a park and then sometimes talking with the people and sometimes just eavesdropping.
01:26:05.540But, you know, it's Portland, it's mostly liberals and the number of people who are saying this thing is coming, it's authoritarian, it's dangerous, and we need to stand up is high.
01:26:19.760It's still quiet, but it's still quiet, but it's still quiet, but it's still quiet, but it's a lot of people.
01:26:22.680My guess is it's coming from the left faster than it's coming from the right, but it will come from the right, too.
01:26:31.280We're passing all of the exits where you're getting to such, I mean, this is the way revolutions happen, communist revolutions happen.
01:26:41.040You sow the seed of discontent, you overload the system, you get it so nothing's working, there's no safety anywhere, and the people will cry out, help us, and they will, and they'll crush that.
01:26:55.380And it'll be either side that does it if we don't change our way soon.
01:27:01.280Yeah, it's imperative, and, you know, we are prevented from doing it by being told that, you know, you will be guilty by virtue of your associations if you talk to people on the other side.
01:27:15.680And those of us who have talked to people on the other side, you know, have paid a price for it.
01:27:20.720On the other hand, it's quite clear that that is the road forward.
01:27:24.860You know, anybody who can't manage it is not going to be of help.
01:27:28.660I started this podcast three years ago, and you were the number one target to put on this show because I wanted this show to be a model where people can disagree, and we go away friends.
01:27:43.180We can see each other going, you're a normal person, I'm a normal person.
01:27:46.400We don't hate each other, and we don't hate the country, and we don't hate freedom.