Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Heather Heying & Bret Weinstein: A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. Frogs, Family, Freedom (#186)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, guys, you're not going to want to miss this episode with Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein, authors of a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century evolution and the challenges of modern life. We got into so much stuff on this and thrilling, almost two-hour-long podcast, including my questions to them, my so-called existential questions, a thrilling three. You want to miss that. Please do subscribe to my newsletter, bryancatting.com, if you want to get those. And otherwise, you'll hear, fast, kind of motivation. Why do they write this book? Why now? Are we as a culture experiencing senescence, this degradation that is often spoken about often in the context of telomeres, which of course Brett made major contributions to? And this notion of, are there cultural

Starting point is 00:00:48 or kind of epigenetic telomeres, as he corrected my pronunciation? We talked about their so-called omega principle. We talked about the benefit of abstinence versus. is indulgence, hyper-novelty, how to raise your kids. And of course, I actually engaged in some fieldwork that you'll hear about visiting the famous Madagascar Poisonous Frog. And lastly, we concluded with kind of some takeaways as to both your audience questions, which I took on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, if you're listening to this, and also questions as to what other civilizations, maybe not even earthbound, maybe even alien

Starting point is 00:01:28 civilizations, what would they be like? And many other topics, why experiments are good and bad and the kind of notion that the internet is becoming what the campfire used to provide in ancient history. So I hope you'll pick up a copy.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Hunter Gatherer's Guide, I listen to it. It's read by the two of them, quite phenomenal. And I know you're going to enjoy this episode with none of them Heather Heying and Dr. Brett Weinstein, Dr. Heather Heying, into the Impossible. Enjoy.

Starting point is 00:01:59 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Today, we are welcoming two guests. We haven't had two guests on the Into the Impossible podcast very frequently. I was discussing with my wife, you know, how she'd like to work with me or I with her. And she said there were certain, you know, the waterfall she would like to jump off of before she would consider working with me. But today it's Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein, joining us all the, way from the northwest, I believe, right guys? That is correct.

Starting point is 00:02:32 We're in Portland, Oregon. You guys are the proprietors of the Dark Horse podcast, and this is the second Weinstein I've had on the podcast. Actually, you know the third? I've had a Zev in the background as well. He's doing some work with me here at UC San Diego. But I'm grateful to your brother, Eric, for helping to facilitate this. And I am grateful to you guys for agreeing to match the length of time that he has spent

Starting point is 00:02:55 on my podcast in the next 26 hours. Everybody, sit back and enjoy. So it's a pleasure to have you. Hopefully, that's with P. Breaks, is that, is that right? No bio breaks will be provided. Damn. So you guys have written a wonderful, really fascinating new book called A Hunter Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century subtitle Evolution and the Challenges of Modern

Starting point is 00:03:17 Life. Guys, the first thing I do with all my guess is what you're never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. But rather than read your theses, which I did do, and I will get to that in a minute, this is the first book that many of my audience members will be familiar with or have a chance to encounter. So what else can they judge it based on? So, guys, where did the title come from and where did the cover art image come from? Is that the two of you guys gathering, hunting on the cover?

Starting point is 00:03:44 Yeah, there we go. Thank you. There it is. Is that us, Brett? I wish I could claim it was us. I wish as a fallback I could claim it was actually our most recent common ancestor. But given the populations that you and I come from, I don't think that's plausible either. That person was an agriculturalist.

Starting point is 00:04:02 Yeah, no, that's presumably true. But, yeah, actually, the design, before we talk about the name of the book, the design of the cover was actually one that Brett and I had in our head. And we actually mocked it up and sent it to the excellent artists at our wonderful publisher. And this is what resulted. So, you know, we're very pleased with that. But the title, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century is, of course, a reference is Brecht's said to the ancestors that we had in the Paleolithic on the African Savannah, which is what so many

Starting point is 00:04:32 people have in their heads when they think of human ancestry, human prehistory, what it was that we used to be doing. And people even imagine that it's the thing to which we must refer if we are to live our most adapted lives. And really one of the premises of the book is we don't have just a singular, singular environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. We have many environments. of evolutionary adaptiveness. And so, sure, we are adapted to the African savannas of the Paleolithic and the coast, the African coast, but also more recently to being agriculturalists, as Brett said. Almost all modern humans are the descendants of agriculturalists for 10 to 12,000 years,

Starting point is 00:05:12 and we're also pre-industrialists. And you go farther back, the opposite direction in time from that cover, and we're all primates. We're all mammals. We're all fish. We're all animals. And, you know, we bear the mark of all. of those moments of our evolutionary history.

Starting point is 00:05:27 There's also a little wink in there to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, because, of course, there's a little analogy here, right? The argument in the book, the most central one, is that we in the 21st century, despite this environment effectively having been of our own making, are somewhat out of our depth, like an Earthling traveling the cosmos. So that's where it comes from. I think maybe we conclude that actually a towel is not going to be sufficient. useful.

Starting point is 00:05:56 Yeah. Unlike Douglas Adams, check your guide. And there's plenty of fish, and the answer to all of life's questions is also revealed in here with many, many tips from you guys, and I want to get into that,

Starting point is 00:06:08 especially parenting tips. But before we do, yesterday, Heather, in your honor, I took my clan to the world-famous San Diego Zoo. And I wanted to do some field work to kind of channel my inner Heather Heying before the interview that I knew we'd conduct today.

Starting point is 00:06:24 And so I captured an image at great danger to myself and my membership. I captured an image of this little guy. I'm wondering if you can recognize who that is, Heather. Gosh, I think that must be an amphibian. I can barely see, is it possible? It's a newt or is it a frog? Wait, wait. Wait, wait.

Starting point is 00:06:44 It's hard to see it. Yeah. You can show us one more time. Well, yeah. Kind of looked like a tomato frog. Is that? Well, it's red. It might.

Starting point is 00:06:52 Boy, yeah, it could be. a tomato fry? It's from an island. It's from an island. It's probably it's Madagascar. It's going to be a Mantella. It's going to be, no. It doesn't look like a Mantella at all. Is it a Mantella? It's not a Mantella. Very good. I was hoping to trip you up, Heather, but I couldn't trip you up. It is a tree frog. It is from Madagascar, but its name is, as Brett said, the Sambava tomato frog. It's discovered. Very good. Amazing. You guys, you haven't lost a bit since graduate school, whereas I have lost everything. Except for my hair. That's all I get to keep.

Starting point is 00:07:26 We've seen that frog in person. Yeah, I'm sure. It's poisonous. So I'm sure, Heather, you've done battles with even worse, with worse entities than this little plump fellow. He doesn't look dangerous, but looks can be deceiving, right? So I want to ask you first, Heather, what is so fascinating about frogs that could make, you know, we do our dissertations here about, you know, grand unified theories and about new cosmological models predating the existence of the Big Bang when space time didn't even exist.

Starting point is 00:07:53 What about a frog could possibly envelop a person in an entire PhD and perhaps their career as it did with you, at least early on? That's actually a terrific question. I mean, I was interested in the beginning in the evolution of sociality, evolution of territoriality, of parental care, of sexual selection of sex roles and sexual behaviors. And one thing I used to say when I was a professor to my students is you can be question driven or organism driven as an organism biologist. and many people are just driven to like, I really want to work on wolves, I really want to work on whales. And frankly, if you're driven by the organism, you are probably going to be asking less deep questions overall. So I was driven by the questions that I was interested in, and I started working on primates. And as it happened, the very first field season that I was working, which was in Central America, I had a hypothesis about what particular fruits the local monkeys would be choosing.

Starting point is 00:08:50 and they were just MIA. The monkeys were missing in action, could not find them, and what I did find instead was sort of a natural experiment playing out in front of me with regard to in Central America was the dart poison frogs, which turned out to have no relationship to the poison frogs of Madagascar. But that sent me to asking, well, there is an entire island nation, larger than the state of California, which has been closed to all VASA, all foreigners for at that point many decades, just opened up.

Starting point is 00:09:20 No one knows anything about what's going on there with regard to the behavior of any of the organisms except the lemurs. Anything I find will be new. And I know what I'm interested in. Again, you know, social systems and sexual behavior and territoriality, let's go. So, yeah, the frogs are fascinating, but it was really more about studying questions that I had a preexisting interest. And that's how, you know, that's also how we end up landing at studying humans as reflected in this book. So they're sort of a model in an interesting way, the way that you biologists use and by the way, I am not known for my biological competency or my evolutionary way.

Starting point is 00:09:57 I always say in high school when I had to dissect the frog, the frog always lived. I mean, I was not good at this job. Well, then you may not realize the most interesting thing about frogs is that they are self-assembling. Tell me more. Tell me more. How does a frog self-sense? What does that assembly mean? Self-assembly means it requires that you do this within a species, but one egg and one sperm, when they come together, causes a frog. It just all happens. No one has to put it together. There's no instructions. It just emerges from that beginning. Interesting. So, you know, I've been called a self-made man who worships his creator. So I'll be sure to use that as an example. In the book, Brett, you in the chapters, so I have the book in physical and digital and in audio form, and I recommend everybody by at least three copies so it can continue to climb from number four on the New York Times best seller list to number one as it deserves. And I want to ask you guys, at least until my next book comes out, but I don't think it'll

Starting point is 00:10:58 appear up there. But I want to ask you, Brett, in one of the chapters that you read sort of towards the end, you talk about experiments. And in the book, you might make the case that as actually the New York Times posits, you know, and they're kind of mini-blurb, you know, the evolutionary biologists posit that they, that the modern world is out of sync with our ancient brains and bodies. First of all, do you agree with that little snippet? I thought it was a little bit more nuance than that. Brett, what do you make of that? Yeah, let's put it this way. There's certainly an important, more than a grain of truth in that.

Starting point is 00:11:30 But the real lesson, the much harder one, what we argue in the book, is that because the modern world is so different from all of the environments in which we adapted, the map of what we are and how it fits the world is arbitrary. There are some ways in which it just happens to remain a good fit and many ways in which it's a terrible fit. And one has to look on a trait by trait basis to even figure out where we have to alter something in order to again be at home in our own world. And in the book, there is sort of a ominous, looming, you know, kind of thought that is, we're doing, you know, we're doing all these experiments because as we get farther and farther, way, not necessarily, as you guys argue, you don't argue in favor. As I was surprised, you don't

Starting point is 00:12:18 argue in favor of the, say, the paleo diet and the keto diet. So I went down to Dunkin' Donuts, and I want to thank you guys for that because, you know, I had only lost five pounds. As I said, I dropped five pounds from my chin to my, to my backside. But I want to ask you guys, if you have this notion that kind of reoccurs that we're doing all these experiments, we're experimenting with our kids, Heather, you talk about screens and all, you know, the availability of pornography, which we're not going to get into, and all sorts of gender selection. We're not going to get into that either. But that's not my interest.

Starting point is 00:12:47 But the notion of an experiment, I think, it shouldn't get a bad name. And that's not because I'm an experimental astrophysicist. I think experiment is pure play. It's pure curiosity. And I think curiosity is probably one of the most undervalued traits. What do you guys say about this categorization of we're doing an experiment on our kids? What's wrong with experiments? Well, the problem is that we have two meanings.

Starting point is 00:13:11 for the word experiment. One of them means, hey, this is novel. Let's see how it goes. And the other is we'll make a change and we'll see what the consequence is. And so when you say there's nothing wrong with an experiment, there's a question about what's at stake, right? You know, if you're going to put an egg in the microwave, the worst thing it's going to happen is you're going to have some cleanup to do, right? So you can afford to run that experiment and not be overly diligent about figuring out how you're going to collect the evidence. But when we're running experiments on ourselves, and even worse, when we're running experiments on our children and future generations, it is incumbent on us to figure out what it is that we are introducing to their environment and what its consequence is likely

Starting point is 00:13:55 to have been so that if it's not a good thing, we can reverse it. And we are not doing that. We are changing so many things at once and paying very little attention to the causality of the pathologies that in effect we just keep treating symptoms and adding more pathologies to them. Yeah, I agree with this. I would say the book is certainly not a call to regression or traditionalism or a past really imagined history that we could return to even if we thought we should and we don't. We think neither that we can nor that we should want to.

Starting point is 00:14:28 But it is a caution against simply moving forward with all possible paths because rather in favor of, I would say, a scientific approach to experiment in which we say, here's the hypothesis, what are all the possible predictions that follow from the hypothesis, and how would we know what the outcome would be, as opposed to sort of a free market-driven in places where there should be more regulation approach to human everything. and there is very little understanding too often of what childhood is, what our brains are, what it is that we're actually losing when we open up some of the boxes that we're opening up.

Starting point is 00:15:11 And hopefully not finding Pandora written all over it. Exactly. Again, at the zoo yesterday, I was researching your beloved amphibians and whatever they are, things that I could dissect and still live. This thing came to my mind that my kids, after seeing these exotic creatures from galapagos tortoises to, you know, the most magnificent giraffes, were leaving and they spent more time obsessing, you know, just paroxysms of joy over the American red squirrel.

Starting point is 00:15:46 And there's a squirrel in the parking lot, and I'm like, great, you know, could maybe go check out that pigeon over there, guys. You know, you could have saved me 500 bucks. I wonder, what is it about hyper-novity that competes? with kind of, you know, mundanity in a sense that why are we wired for, why would we have reason to think that we're more wired for novelty rather than for familiarity? I guess that's my question, Heather. Yeah, well, you know, it's, you're absolutely right. And one of the things that we find when we travel before we get into deep nature, that may be the goal of where we're

Starting point is 00:16:19 going is that in the cities where we are, we're sitting around looking at, say, the grackles, which are of no interest to the local people, but they don't happen to be where we are. And we actually, you know, we would be more like your children, perhaps, and we'd be watching the squirrels because they are fascinating. And certainly there are some domestics or, I guess, just associates of humans that have become so common even for us that we don't spend a lot of time noticing them. But it is absolutely true that familiarity need not breed contempt, but it does create a kind of a background level of, I know that's there. I'm not going to pay any attention to it anymore. And so, I mean, this is akin to our unending search for growth, which is not unique to humans, but of course because we have become so dominant on the planet, it is the thing that is likely to be our end.

Starting point is 00:17:15 And so, you know, we argue in the book for a way to do an end run around growth that actually uses resources and seeking novelty that actually requires totally new things. So, you know, those organisms that have sought novelty and have been risk takers have been often the ones that didn't make it back. But when they did make it, when they were successful, they were the ones who founded new lineages. So, you know, of course there is a longstanding, you know, as old as 3.5 billion years on Earth, a longstanding interest in exploration of which novelty is a manifestation.

Starting point is 00:17:55 And Brett, novelty, as you talk about a little bit, is concomitant in some level with risk or with exploration to learn something new, requires discovery, to increase, you know, entropy is natural. To decrease it is more energetically challenging. As I was coming into the work today, it's the first days of school here at UC San Diego. I saw some young people, skateboarding, as is the most popular mode of transportation outside of surfboarding. And they weren't wearing helmet. and they were Instagramming, I could tell, but they were wearing masks. And I found very interesting, this incredible, and we're not going to talk about COVID, obviously. But I want to ask you guys, but maybe Brett first, but what is this notion of human beings? Are we good at assessing risks and are we good at predictive? It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

Starting point is 00:18:53 That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. You know, behavior to predict those types of novel things, as you guys so cogently argue for,

Starting point is 00:19:19 that'll be beneficial to us and not actually detrimental in any way to us. And we tend to under-emphasize these true risks of not wearing a helmet on a skateboard while you're Instagram. Well, I would argue that in an ancestral environment in which the population had been in the same place doing the same thing for generations, we would be absolutely excellent at assessing risk. And in fact, assessing probably isn't even the right word. You would intuit risk, you know, the way one does while driving. You can be having a conversation that's occupying your conscious mind, but some part of you is paying attention to everything out there. And at the point that something, you know, a truck swerves in front of you, suddenly it captures your attention. But you know exactly in that circumstance, because you do have a long history of driving and you've seen a certain amount, you know what to think.

Starting point is 00:20:09 But for a modern person, what should you think about the safety of ingesting fruit from the supermarket that has been grown? with molecules that we have no evolutionary history with that you don't even know about. That's not labeled on the apple anywhere what it was grown with. So how do you assess the risk of that? And how do you know whether your model is any good, right? If there's some danger, for example, that you might come down with Parkinson's, if you spend years eating fruits and vegetables that have been grown with these novel compounds, at what point do you reassess your model and say, hey, I probably got that one wrong?

Starting point is 00:20:48 And how do you know that it was the fruits and vegetables rather than that new car smell from the vehicle you purchased or, you know, the way your carpet's off gassed? Right. We've got, again, this goes back to the question of experiments. We're running so many experiments at once and not being systematic about collecting the evidence that we really have a very poor sense. And I'll say one more thing, which is we notice very frequently that our civilization has an abysmal. absolute obsession with protecting you from provable risks in the short term. And it is absolutely indifferent to exposing you to likely risks in the long term that are outside of the bounds of provability. And this has a lot to do likely with the fact that the way the system gets good at this

Starting point is 00:21:39 is through litigiousness. And so anything that can't be proven is effectively treated as if it doesn't exist, even if we can infer that it most certainly must. Which creates perverse incentives for risk to not be provable. Very good. The figure of G.K. Chesterton figures large in this book, and many of my listeners will be familiar with this quote that does not appear in Hunter-Gatherer's guide. When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't then believe in nothing. He believes in anything.

Starting point is 00:22:15 Heather, how do you react to that? You guys are not proponents of any particular religion, although I was delighted to learn you do celebrate Hanukkah in your own special way at the very end. But what does that mean to you? Is Chesterton, you know, can we selectively apply Chesterton's quips when it suits our fancy, as in the case of the fence? Or what do you make of this? The believe in nothing, if it doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in everything, is God some sort of connective tito?

Starting point is 00:22:42 and what purpose does evolutionary speaking, does God serve? Well, that's a fascinating quote, and it's not one I've heard. So let me take first the question about whether or not we can selectively choose the thinking of a person and not embrace their entire milieu. And I would say, of course we can, right? So let me just take a step aside from your question for a moment and say specifically the contribution of Chesterton that we introduce in the book and or introduce with the confines of the book, not to the world, but is Chesterton's fence, the idea that if you see a fence

Starting point is 00:23:18 and you don't know what its purpose is, you should not be allowed nor courage to get rid of it until and unless you can demonstrate that you know what its function was supposed to be, and presumably also demonstrate that it no longer has that function, or it is, in fact, causing more harm than good. And so we then apply that more broadly and say, we can, we see Chesterton's fences all over the modern world in the form of Chesterton's breast milk, Chesterton's play. and Chesterton's religions. So to get to your point here, what role does religion have in the modern world?

Starting point is 00:23:51 Well, the idea that we're done with it, that it was a maladaptation, that it was a dangerous or a mind virus cannot hold up to evolutionary scrutiny. Every society that we know of has some form of religion in which the people in it, the majority of people in it until the very modern times in which we are living in, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:15 multivariate societies, multi-religious societies, has belief. And it helps organize morality, frankly. And the idea that it is somehow additional to cheesecake for humans is, it just doesn't fit. And I wonder, I suspect that Brett has more to say on this, perhaps. Yeah. I think the problem, you know, we do talk about Chesterton's fence specifically in the context of religion, but, you know, we have these two concepts that we discuss. There's the precautionary principle and there's Chesterton's fence and they're really mirror images of each other. One is about the hazard of adding novel things to a system and the other is about taking away things that have been longstanding. And again, this goes back to the arbitrariness of the place we find ourselves in history because we have these traditions. The traditions are clearly not up to the challenge of navigating modern hazards. You know, the Bible has precious little to say about social media and the hazards of algorithms to our collective sense making. Well, I would actually push back on that, right?

Starting point is 00:25:26 Because there are traits, I mean, you may know from your upbringing. There's a notion of what's called Lashon Hara, the evil speech in Judaism, at least, which is the notion that gossip is not something that's false. In other words, you're forbidden to lie in general, so you wouldn't be forbidden again to tell something. So it's something that's true. Gossip is true, and yet it spreads like wildfire more than ever. And the analogy that's used typically in the Talmud is one of a man, you know, a man besmirches the reputation of his rabbi and says, oh, he's been married and divorced or whatever. And that's not, you know, socially great thing for this particular man.

Starting point is 00:26:01 And the parishioner then feels guilty and says, how can I rectify what I did to your rabbi? And the rabbi says, simple, just go get a feather pillow. And the guy goes, okay, I'll go get a feather pillow. That's it. That seems simple. The rabbit says, no, no, no, cut it open. And I'll cut it open the pillow. And he goes, and shake it out, shake it out.

Starting point is 00:26:18 And the guy says, all right, I'll do it. And am I forgiven? And he goes, no, now go out and collect all the feathers. The notion being that, you know, the ability to produce BS and actually truth far outstrips the ability to do it. But the notion of guarding your tongue, the actual quote in the Torah and the Old Testament, the Bible, is, you know, you should guard your tongue. protecting your life. To choose life means to guard your tongue against this true but defamatory in some

Starting point is 00:26:42 sense speech. So I wouldn't say that the Bible doesn't speak about it, but with respect, I would say that it has many aphorisms. And the question is, yeah, which ones do you know to take seriously? That's a harder problem, right? Well, no, I think you've picked a great example because there's certainly a relevance. If gossip is bad, then the internet is an amplifier of that badness. It doesn't make it better, it makes it worse. On the other hand, there's a whole lot that isn't covered there, right? Like what happens when it isn't people deciding to say or not say, but it's algorithms designed to increase somebody's bottom line that result in people being fed things that flatter their preconceptions and having things hidden that would cause them to challenge those preconceptions

Starting point is 00:27:27 that isn't mentioned? And I'm not saying you couldn't find some analog for that in there, but the basic point is, come on. These texts were built by evolution. They were built by evolution with reference to environments we don't live in. Some of what they've got contained in them is still as relevant as ever. Some of it is upside down and backwards and much is simply not covered. So when you're left with that kind of an arbitrary map, the question is, what do you do? And, you know, the atheists and the way that that's been formulated in recent times don't have it right. right Chesterton's quote is relevant there. The religious people who say, hey, this stuff is still the word of God and we have to take it as handed to us don't have solutions to some of the problems we face.

Starting point is 00:28:14 And so, you know, Heather and I are not happy about the message that we actually have to confront the process of building new traditions that are up to the challenge of regulating the way we interact with each other and the world because we are back. to get many things wrong in at least our first and second attempts. But what choice do we have? We live in a world for which no one knows the best rules. Yeah. And it's kind of that, you know, emerging from the cave that I find so, you know, instructive, illustrative. But again, just to not belabor, the religious point,

Starting point is 00:28:51 I mean, a lot of what you talk about in this book, both of you guys are really making the case in some way, not for religious or, you know, political conservatism, you know, for sure. But really for extracting the good thing. You talk a lot about community, about the campfire. That's a strong metaphor. We're going to get into that and how in modern times the Internet is becoming a perverse campfire in some sense. But religion is community, small groups, hundreds of people go to synagogues, not millions of people or temples or churches or Buddhist shrines.

Starting point is 00:29:19 You guys mentioned Buddhism in the book as well. As a positive example of a prudential religion that has adaptivity built within it. So I guess the gathering and hunting within the religious structure, it would seem that, religious life offers a lot of what, you know, the lacunae that your book is designed to fill in some sense in terms of, you know, parenting. I mean, you basically talk about, you know, discipline but also love and, and, you know, kind of having those two hands, everything being this double-edged sword that the Bible speaks about. So, I mean, why not just shortcut it? Why should, you know, why should we listen to you two brilliant, you know, scientists? We can say this tradition has been tested for thousands

Starting point is 00:29:57 of years, you know, A, B, tested, group tested, you know, why not just pick a religion, happen, maybe choose the religion you were born into and stick with it, even if you don't believe it. I mean, I had Freeman Dyson on, my first guest, he called himself basically what I do, you know, in some sense, a practicing agnostic. So why not just you just pick a system, it's been group tested, long time, and instead of trying to, you know, kind of make the rules up as we go along now, what do you guys think about that? I would say that's a great start, and it gets you a long way in a lot of regards, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what to eat and whether or not to let the LED lights flash in your bedroom at night and what to adopt of what modern authorities

Starting point is 00:30:42 are telling you about how you should form your relationships. You know, when it's possible that if what you're trying to do is simply where your book, the religion that you've picked, has an opinion. If you go with that, you are more likely to, be right than if you had nothing to guide you at all. But having a book that is, as you say, A-B-tested, you know, time-tested, all of this, with an evolutionary understanding of what we are and what we've been, because what we are is far more tested than any book that humans have created, you know, because we are not just hunter-gatherers. We are also monkeys and primates and mammals and fish. We are all of these things. And you make the case, Heather, I think, in the section

Starting point is 00:31:26 that you read, that I loved, you know, you really make the case for abstinence. I don't mean like puritanical. It's just you should, you should practice fasting in a certain sense. And many religions do that to a very good effect, refraining from, you know, pornography, from things that didn't exist in the pre-evolutionary past. And I just want to thank you for that. Because I do think there is a benefit to it. You know, we just had Yom Kippur in our religion. And, you know, my kids fasted from, you know, from dinner to breakfast or whatever. And but they recognize that it's good and that they wanted to do it, but they couldn't do it. And I think, like, all the more so in Judaism, we don't use screens.

Starting point is 00:32:00 We don't, you know, communicate on the Sabbath and things like that. You also advocate for that, kind of the digital detox. You talk about taking trips for weeks with your children that, I don't know if they were, what age they were at, but, you know, you turn on the phone and all of a sudden you get riddled with email, and it suggests to me you guys do take Sabbaths too. Maybe talk about the importance of that in terms of recharging the human, you know, what the human needs, either one of you is. I want to go back and push back on something you said earlier, because it really gets to the heart of the matter here, right?

Starting point is 00:32:29 Why not just accept some time-tested religion and go with that, right? But how did it get that way? And the implication is partially carried in your argument for A-B testing. The fact is sectarian disagreements are the fodder by which selection refines belief systems to make the time-testings. versions that we have. But the other part of that, which we argue for in our book, is that there is a mechanism for radical upgrade as well. And you're right. People will struggle. If you're a conservative and you look into our book, you will see conservatism. If you're a radical and you look into our book, you will find radicalism. What the hell is that? Do we not know what we're doing? No, the argument is

Starting point is 00:33:17 actually that there is a tension between these things and that when you are faced with circumstances for which you don't have the answers, they're not contained in whatever book it is that you inherited from your ancestors, you have to have a mechanism for figuring out what the next book is going to say. And it doesn't involve sitting down to write the next book, right? It involves people around a campfire proposing things to each other and figuring out what the foothill might look like. And then that foothill is ascended by disagreements. And, you know, you might have two populations. Do you follow the shoe?

Starting point is 00:33:50 Do you follow the gourd? you know, that sort of thing. And those groups that have, or those lineages that have a belief system that more surgically suggest behaviors that are adaptive will outcompete groups that have messier versions of these things. So in any case, I think the point is, do you want to subscribe to the book you've been handed or do you want to subscribe to the process that created those books in the first place? And what our book argues is that that process is an evolutionary process. and we know where we are in that, right? We are at a point where a radical transition is necessary if we're to survive. So if I may speak to the question of Sabbath, which strikes me as having at least two very important aspects. One is that it allows you to remember who you are and who you are with and to be focused on the people, both yourself, your inner world and the people you are with.

Starting point is 00:34:47 And of course we need more of that in modern life. and this is fundamental to what humans are. But the other aspect of Sabbath, which you refer to, and Yom Kippur, of course, also does this, is that it reveals the benefit of privation. And too much of modern life is about, seems to be about maximizing comfort and making sure that we are never in any way

Starting point is 00:35:14 outside of the bounds which we had imagined we would be outside of. And we argue at least implicitly throughout the book, although I'm not sure we ever explicitly say this, that actually pushing up against the bounds of what both you think is possible for your own body and brain and emotions and what is actually possible is actually itself health-enhancing and restoring. And so, for instance, obviously we should be moving our bodies some every day.

Starting point is 00:35:40 We should all be walking some amount of time every day. But that's not sufficient. We also should be absolutely pushing our bodies to the limit sometimes so that our bodies know what it is, to be pushed and what kinds of places we might need to push it. And that is going to be the thing that makes us stronger and more anti-fragile. And so, you know, living a life within sort of narrow confines or even fairly broad confines where we never, where we never even approach those boundaries, makes us fragile. Yeah. And I see that even in the, you know, kind of ability to identify

Starting point is 00:36:11 with someone who's truly hungry. I mean, I've never been truly hungry. You guys have probably because you've been on such amazing adventures, some of which are documented in the wonderful book that we're discussing, a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century, author's Dr. Heather Heying and Dr. Brett Weinstein. And this book talks about, you know, kind of the, culturally, it's just a true wake-up call. But I came to think of it as an interesting dichotomy in what Brett was just saying a couple minutes ago between like, what do you choose and how do you know how to choose? And I saw a fundamental dichotomy between producers and consumers.

Starting point is 00:36:47 So you guys are producers and consumers, but your producers, your YouTube channel, which is extremely popular, Dark Horse podcast. You can find everywhere podcasts are sold. But you're also consumers. You concern voraciously, you know, scholarly and otherwise. Now, I started to think about the very first gripping opening story about rain in the mountains. And I started to think, well, it's great that your guide, and maybe you guys can recap the story very briefly, how you almost weren't here to tell this story and you almost didn't have

Starting point is 00:37:19 the children that you wonderfully are blessed to have. Maybe tell that story. And then I want to make the point that there's a certain amount of credit that goes to you guys for being consumers and knowing I should trust this guy, this guru, because he is a producer of this knowledge, but there's an obligation of the consumer as well. And I wonder if that's not harder to act to acquire. But maybe, Heather, can you start off with the story about rain in the mountains? And then Brett, can you comment on the obligations of the consumer if he or she wants to survive and thrive? Yeah. So it was our first season as graduate students, as would-be scientists in Costa Rica. We had spent a summer previously exploring Central America, so we were not new to these ecosystems or we didn't think we were.

Starting point is 00:38:06 But we had both grown up privileged kids in Los Angeles, in the weird world. It wasn't called the weird world then, but we were very much of the first world, as it was. called then. So we were at this little tiny field station in Sao Piqui in northeastern Costa Rica, and we were done with our fieldwork for the day. It was hot. The two of us chose to walk down to the river where we would swim, where we would swim many days. To get there, you have to cross a high bridge, a relatively high bridge. And we were about halfway across when a man we did not know, a man we took to be a local farmer approached us. Our Spanish was terrible at this point. He spoke no English. And he basically got our attention and kept saying, there was rain in the mountains

Starting point is 00:38:50 today. And he would point to the mountains. And we were just getting hotter and hotter standing there, wishing that we could extract ourselves from this conversation, but feeling that we needed to engage with him because he was trying to engage with us. But at some point, he pointed with increasing urgency to the water and said, look. And in the few seconds that we had been looking away, it had begun to rise. And what he was telling us, with the very few words that we shared between us in a language that wasn't ours, although we were in his home and, you know, in his home landscape, where the language that was spoken was his, was that rain in the mountains that all of us are aware of, that has to go somewhere. And had he not stopped us, what we stood on that bridge, as that water

Starting point is 00:39:36 rose and rose and very soon, there were trees coming down the river. And the bank, on which we would have been standing had disappeared under this flash flood. This man saved our lives probably, at least one of ours. And we were young proto-scientists in graduate school, you know, working towards PhDs, doing tropical biology, thinking that we knew a place because we'd been there for several weeks, studying, you know, frogs and bats, but we didn't. And so, you know, the point is that it actually takes much longer to truly know a place, and all of us feel like locals now.

Starting point is 00:40:11 in whatever landscape we walk into, but in fact, it takes a lot more experience than most of us give credit for. And actually, you can see the very same thing in the tragic videos that emerged from Banda Aceh, for example, during the Boxing Day tsunami, where people, many of them who lived on the coast but whose ancestors hadn't been there, did not know what to make of a sea that had radically receded and revealed, you know, sea, floor that they had never seen before. And many people walked out to look at the fish flopping around and were killed because they didn't know how they didn't understand that that water was going to have to come back. So anyway, yes, there is something to be said about really knowing a place. And that's what saved us in the instance of the incident on the bridge. So Brett, as a consumer, what kinds of obligation? There may be obligations on producers and they may

Starting point is 00:41:09 get benefits. They may have increased, you know, facundity if they're perceived as being the repository of wisdom, of local knowledge of life hacks, as we call them now, but didn't call them back thousands of years ago. But what obligations are there on the consumer and what benefits accrue to him or her for being astute in their judgment of perception of which mountain guides to listen to, so to speak, to torture this analogy? Well, I'm a little unsure of what you mean by consumer. Do you mean in the economic sense? No, just like you're hearing the information, but there is, you, you were astute enough, something in you guys, listen to this guide or listen to this farmer, and that saved your life.

Starting point is 00:41:50 But not everyone, I would have, you know, I would have been, you know, probably the former Brian Keating. I would have, I'm hot. What are you talking about, man? Let me take a dive off this waterfall that impress my girlfriend. But you didn't do that. So there's some, there were something in you guys that was astute enough or perceptive enough. And, I'm kind of asking in hopes that it wasn't based in something unique to your guy's intellect or something that we, normal people, perhaps, can cultivate to be more perceptive consumers in that sense of wisdom, of past traditions, or even of, you know, of these preternaturally gifted, you know, people in our culture. Yeah, it's an excellent question. I'll take a slight detour,

Starting point is 00:42:32 just something that accidentally revealed something. to me about this, which is, I'm not a believer really in dyslexia because reading and writing are so new that to say that you have a defect with respect to them really doesn't make any sense, right? This is some thing modern humans have chosen to do, and some of us are less adapted processing the symbols. But if dyslexia was a thing, I'd have it in spades. And it has an impact, therefore, on the way I read. It makes it less fun, more, it's more exhausting for me, I know than people who read easily, but it has a positive upside, which I think non-dyslexics don't necessarily spot, which is because I know I can't trust my interpretation of the symbols

Starting point is 00:43:24 on the page, I'm constantly looking to see whether or not what I'm reading makes sense. right? Because the way I know that I've misread something is that it doesn't make sense. And so then I know I have to go back and reread it. But lots of times, if you get good at this process, you're reading, something doesn't make sense. You go back to find what symbol you've misunderstood. And there's nothing. You just know it doesn't make sense. And so I guess my point is I'm not a big believer. I think you should really minimize the consumer part of you, that even what we do that looks nominally like being a consumer, like reading, shouldn't be a passive activity. It should be one in which your conscious mind is actively engaged in evaluating what's coming in. And the profit comes when, you know, if somebody's telling you something and they're ostensibly an expert in the topic, but they say something that doesn't match the model that you have of the universe, well, there's an opportunity there. Either they're about to learn something or you're about to learn something. And that, you know, I think deciding to be a consumer as little as possible is probably the best advice that we can give.

Starting point is 00:44:35 Can I add something to that, actually? I think all of us exist in some way outside of the mainstream. You know, we are all non-normies on some domain, on some axis. And, you know, it may be dyslexia or colorblindness or left-handedness or, you know, neurodiversity, you know, being on the spectrum, or many, many other things. And, you know, it's become very fashionable now to identify what way in which you are addressed. This is not that. This is a, how about take that as a hidden superpower by which you can stand outside of whatever the mainstream narrative is and use it as a way to interpret it in such that, or rather, with tools that maybe all the so-called normies don't have. Right. And this actually allows you to have insight. And I think really, if you

Starting point is 00:45:31 you do it with integrity and respect to open up your arms to more of humanity and to more of the wisdom and wealth of skills that humans bring. And I've said before that the many years that we spent teaching in college classrooms at a, yes, public liberal arts college, but a non-elite one, one that had, yes, students from the tops of their classes, but also students who had been completely destroyed by school and students who were the first in their families to go to college. and veterans and, you know, single mothers, you know, all range of people. What that experience taught me in part was that almost in a room full of 25 or 50 students, almost everyone has something to teach every other person in that room.

Starting point is 00:46:18 And that's not to say that I was pretending that I wasn't the professor and wasn't there to teach some particular things that I had written into the curriculum and that I wanted to get to. But that part of what we were doing there was, indeed, to return to the earlier concept, you know, was building community such that we had trust for one another, such that we could, over time, reduce the skepticism we had for one another, and thus engage more and more deeply ideas that might have, on the first day of class, seemed polarizing or extreme. Well, no, now that we have some trust and you can recognize that if I say something

Starting point is 00:46:54 that you wildly disagree with, you know it's not because I'm a monster. Maybe I'm wrong. maybe I'm not wrong. Maybe you don't have the information I have. Maybe I don't have the information you have, but let's take the time to explore. Yeah. And I think that is, of course, the purpose of education. The Latin root is educari. It means to pour out of, not to put into. I want to talk, if you'll indulge me, I wanted to talk about this later, but Heather, you just brought it up. You guys were famously, you know, unemployed from Evergreen State University. And I think it's kind of a tragedy. When I look back, on it and I read your writings and I know a little bit about each of you just because we're

Starting point is 00:47:33 friends with Brett's brother. But the point of you guys as natural educators, as born educators, as educators defining who you are. And I remember I got my pilot's license in the 1990s. And on that day, I remember my flight instructor saying, now your identity is forever changed. You will never not have been a pilot, you know. And it becomes a part of who you are. I'm flying little tiny Cessna's that I can't fit in anymore. And now, but I can do that. And I can go down and rent a little plane. But you guys aren't professors anymore. And yet it's sort of like your claws or your web spinning ability or your honeymaking. It's what you guys were born to do. Clearly it is. And I won't tolerate if you guys disagree with me because you guys are human incarnations of

Starting point is 00:48:23 education machines. I want to ask you, how is it dealing with the ability, what the fact you're not teaching. You're teaching at much bigger scale. Your publications are read by way more people that your H index will be much higher, but you're not at a university. How does that make you guys feel? It's an interesting question. Let's put it this way. It was a tragedy, but I don't think it was a personal tragedy. I think what happened to us was a preview, and we are all suffering this tragedy. And I will say, Heather and I don't know. I don't. think have talked about this explicitly. Maybe we have. But when the, I mean, I prefer to think of us as a catapulted out of the academy is what happened to us. When that happened to us, we were asked,

Starting point is 00:49:11 as we were invited to speak various places, how shall we introduce you, right? What are you now? If you're not a professor and we adopted professors in exile as our, as our, I don't know what it would be. Title. Monarchar. Yeah. But the point was that was actually, yeah, it was, you know, there was a wink involved, but it was also an accurate representation.

Starting point is 00:49:36 It was a little bit like your pilot example. The point was, well, we did that. That's still who we are. It didn't change the day we resigned our positions. And I think it still is. And as you point out, we are now not in the same milieu. We are still teaching in a new way. We're figuring out how to do it.

Starting point is 00:49:52 And I don't. I don't feel, I feel a loss surrounding something that actually isn't so easy to do at most colleges or universities. We had... Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th.

Starting point is 00:50:31 U.S. only exclusions apply. See homedepot.com slash price match for details. By virtue of the way teaching was done at Evergreen, we taught one class full time. Students took one class full time, and that class could go on for a full year, which resulted in a level of understanding between teachers and students that is unparalleled. And I missed that. But were we to suddenly have positions as professor somewhere else, that part wouldn't be restored, right? It would be a dim shadow of that.

Starting point is 00:50:59 And what we have now is quite different, but it has not eliminated the sense of meaning that accompanies every day. And the sense of meaning is closely aligned to the one we had when we were in the classroom. I agree with that. And I would say, you know, there are catchphrases in educational theories that people are probably familiar with and that sound ridiculous at this point. Things like lifelong learner and theory to practice, right? And yet, you know, both of those things, the idea of being a lifelong learner is actually foundational.

Starting point is 00:51:35 And, you know, my father has been dead for eight years now, but he was a computer scientist who didn't view himself as an educator, but was a mentor to so many people. And I think in the same way, we sort of became accidental educators because what we were, were children who were becoming adults with a curiosity about, in our case, largely the natural world and the human world

Starting point is 00:52:00 that didn't stop. You know, any day that you learn something new, and this was something that my father used to say to me, any day I learned something new, it was a good day, right? And it doesn't take very much from there to then want to share not just the thing that you learned, but how it is that you can open yourself up to a,

Starting point is 00:52:21 a personality of learning. Yeah, and of course, you guys make this strong case, the tools are more important than facts. You say that in the book. And I wonder, you know, one very old tradition in weird countries, and maybe, Heather, can you define weird really quickly, please? Yeah, just those people living in countries that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, or at least aspire to be. Democratic, small D, but...

Starting point is 00:52:48 That's right. I wonder, one institution that's quite old, and I'm wondering, and I'm curious, if it is not a Chesterton's fence, is the university system, which dates back in its current incarnation of a guy or a gal, I guess, lately, with a piece of rock, you know, scraping on another piece of rock, you know, behind their bodies in front of, you know, these bewildered and bemuse, young people. That dates back to at least 1089 in the city of Bologna in northern Italy. And I wonder, that's been there a long time. It hasn't changed. And yet, Brett, you just mentioned a few minutes ago. It might be a preview. What happened to you?

Starting point is 00:53:22 It might be a preview. Could it happen to me? Should it happen to me? Not exactly what happened, but is academia a Chesterton's fence? Should we not respect it? It's been around for so long. Why advocate to change it? Or what would you advocate to change about it?

Starting point is 00:53:37 Yeah, this is a tough one because my sense is if the academy didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it, and it doesn't exist. So it is now necessary to invent it. invent it. No, it's it's become the malignant version or, you know, I, you know, I realize who I'm talking to, but at some level, the argument that I make is it's like your cherished family dog having caught rabies, right? So you're vaccinated against that. Yes, we are. But, but the basic point is, look, at the point your family dog has caught rabies, it's time to grow up and realize that's not exactly your family dog, right? And the university system is like this. Now, I think that's tragic,

Starting point is 00:54:19 and I think it's crazy. Obviously, most of the resources you need to build a great academy exist in what we currently call the academy, but it's not functioning that way. And the worst part about it is that the population of people that staff the academy have lost track of what it is they're supposed to be doing, right? They just don't do the work. And you're using that sense you locked it. You're talking about the faculty largely. Yeah, it's not. It's not. It is the faculty. I mean, there's also a lot to be said about the bloating of the administration and its role in this. But the point is the university has begun to see itself or beyond begun to be to see itself. It sees itself as a business or it sees itself as a dispenser of truth, not a place in which vigorous challenges are dealt with in a responsible way so that we can discover the truth.

Starting point is 00:55:10 And until it either returns to its roots or gets replaced by something that is capable of doing the job, civilization's in serious trouble because, you know, this isn't the 14th century, right? We have problems that are serious and require very careful analysis. And you absolutely need at least a scientific apparatus that is capable of telling you what you need to know rather than what you want to hear. and in a context where we have markets plugged very directly into our research system, that's not what we get. We get some product that interfaces with our collective well-being arbitrarily at best. More often than not, it might be predatory. And, you know, that's just, that's a dire situation to find ourselves in. You see things in commonality, just to push gently back with respect.

Starting point is 00:55:59 You see things that are sclerotic that don't change, you know, health care, you know, a construction of low-income family housing and education. These can't be exported, at least in the exact incarnation that I'm sitting in this university. Are they not anti-fragile? Are they not? I mean, what is the whole? This has been around for a thousand years almost in more or less its current state. And except back then they had a barbaric tradition.

Starting point is 00:56:24 I don't know Heather and Brett if you know this, but they had a barbaric tradition that the students could go on strike. And then the professor wouldn't get paid. And thank God they've abolished that. But is it not anti-fragile? You guys talk about this resiliency as a model, Heather. Are these universities that I'm a part of, at least currently, so entrenched and so part of culture as it is, that they're effectively resilient to further perturbations and change? Well, I think sclerotic can look anti-fragile, and it can persist in appearing to be effective for a long time after it actually is.

Starting point is 00:57:02 So, you know, we're already seeing some of the smaller places fail around the edges, right? The elite institutions and the large state institutions, especially the R-1s, are likely to last for longer, and, you know, maybe they can reform. The places that were once, exactly where undergraduates, at least, were most likely to get a really inspired and exciting and serendipitous liberal arts education. The, you know, the elite private liberal arts colleges are most likely to, fall first. They just, you know, they, they are, they are less sclerotic and more likely to be taken over. So, you know, the idea that the entire system is anti-fragile, no, you know, just as Brett said, do we need, do we need higher ed? Yes, we do. But that doesn't mean that the system we've got now is what will persist. But I also think that Nassim Taleb formulated this concept so

Starting point is 00:57:55 brilliantly that it covers this, right? The academy is robust. It's very hard to displace it. That's not the same thing as anti-fragile, right? Basically, it survives by preventing challenge. It does not grow stronger with challenge. And I think that's one of the strongest indicators that it has, in its current form, outlived its usefulness. So maybe sclerotic is robustness, not anti-fragility? Yeah. An indicator of robustness. Interesting. One of the many neologisms you describe in the book is the Omega Principle. And I want to read to you from Amazon.

Starting point is 00:58:37 The Omega Principle is a brilliant and engaging book that works on many levels as a rousing environmental manifesto of seafood and the quest for long life. Is that what you're talking about, Brett? No. Omega-3s? No, no. No, no. What is it, my friend? Not at all.

Starting point is 00:58:52 Okay. There's a book called The Omega Principle. You might hear from their publisher. Now we do, yes. Well, we've been playing with this concept for a long time. I'd be curious how old that book is. But in any case, the idea is that there is a fundamental question. When you consider the evolution of humans, of our species, everybody understands since roughly 1976 when Richard Dawkins first introduced the concept of cultural evolution in a rigorous form that,

Starting point is 00:59:25 We have culture and that it evolves by rules that are similar to genetic Darwinism. What the field has never fully resolved is what is the relationship between the evolution of things at the cultural layer and the evolution of things at the genetic layer? And Dawkins himself argues that the cultural layer is effectively, he calls it a new primeval soup, right? Effectively, it is a new evolution of stuff, a place where adaptation is happening. in a novel form. We argue that that cannot be right, right? Most creatures do not have culture. We are adapted to have a tremendous amount of culture. We make the argument that human beings, though, not a blank slate, are the blankest slates that selection has ever produced, and that there's a reason for that. And that's because, being the blankest slates,

Starting point is 01:00:15 we end up doing the bidding of the genes far better than we would if the genes hard-coded our behavior to a much higher degree. And so, The omega principle specifies the relationship between epigenetic phenomena, including culture, and the genes. And the reason that we've chosen omega is that as a Greek letter, it evokes Pi. Pi specifies the exact relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle in the same way that the Omega principle specifies the exact relationship between epigenetic phenomena and the genome. And that relationship says part one, epigenetic phenomena are most. more flexible and more rapidly adapting, but part two, they are obligated to the objectives of the genes. And once you make that, once you realize why that logically has to be the case, it makes

Starting point is 01:01:08 evolutionary analysis of human beings tractable because in some sense you do not need to know where the information is housed in order to know what its objective is. And this is crucially important in the case of something like, let's say human language where the capacity, for language is clearly largely generated by genetic programming, which creates a brain of a certain that is hospitable to language, but it does not encode any of the content of the particular language you will learn, right? It's housed in both places. Well, how do you factor that to figure out what it's supposed to do? Well, the answer is it doesn't matter what the ad mixture is in terms of where the hereditary information is and how it is passed. It's for the same purpose either way.

Starting point is 01:01:52 And I want to ask you a famous question posed by Erwin Schrodinger, but not answered in his famous monograph, What is Life? Heather, what is life? And then I want to add another monograph suggestion to you, Brett, what is culture along those same physical lines, perhaps? So, Heather, what is life to you? What is life? Life is self-organizing and replicating with hereditary information that I think self-correcting, the hereditary information has to be, have error correction in there too. I have to think about that to make sure that has to be part of life, but I think so. I actually like John Lennon's formulation somewhat better. Life is what happens while you're making other plans. That would have been a simpler answer. Yes. That's right. So just like you said, the frogs were self-organizing, right? Yes.

Starting point is 01:02:51 That's your point early on. All you were doing was saying, it's alive. It is alive. So now you want culture. Culture. Okay, well, so this is the part where I'm going to tangle myself in knots to avoid a tiny little exception that I'm aware exists and is going to force me not to say something very simple and intuitive.

Starting point is 01:03:11 But culture is information, it is adaptive information, pass outside the genome. And the caveat, it would be very easy to say something like between members of one's species. But that does not have to be the case. And the particular thing I'm worried about has to do with the evolution of domestic dogs, where we have a very asymmetrical relationship. But there is a certain amount of culture transmitted between people and dogs. and vice versa. And miraculously, the dogs have adapted to this in ways that actually have physical hallmarks, right? Their ability to exchange facial expressions, right? The ability to control

Starting point is 01:03:58 their faces in ways that convey things, the amazing ability that they appear to have to understand human language to parse a large number of different words. All of these things suggest a longstanding relationship in which there is transmission of a kind. But anyway, the general case for culture is members of a species transmitting information outside of the genome. And for human beings, this is elaborated far beyond even our closest relatives because we have language, which makes it very efficient and opens the possibility to what is uniquely the case in humans, the ability to transmit abstract ideas between individuals. Now, in our book, we divide two kinds of transmission of information, right?

Starting point is 01:04:46 What we call consciousness is about novel ideas that are parallel processed between minds, right? What we call culture in the narrow sense in the book are things that come from ancestors who generated ideas consciously, and then those ideas get driven into an efficient cultural package that is passed on one generation to the next and provides the substrate with which new members of the population are brought into the fold and trained in how to behave. Brett, I want to ask you another question, which has to do with your famous research in telomeres. I came to ask the question, I guess, in the following sense. Is there an analog of cultural telemeres? Are there analogs of cultural telomeres?

Starting point is 01:05:32 I'm going to have to think more deeply about whether the telomeres themselves have an analog, but there is a very disturbing analog to the process of senescence that we have fairly long understood in evolutionary biology. This is the process that causes creatures like us to grow feeble and inefficient with age. and we have known since roughly 1957 when George Williams published his excellent paper on the evolution of senescence, why it occurs, why it evolves. The short answer being that your genome isn't very big, which means that the genes in your genome tend to do more than one thing. And any time a gene does something good for you early in life, it will tend to be accumulated by selection to be enhanced and passed on, even if it does something harmful to you late in life. The reason being many individuals don't live long enough to suffer the late life costs. They get away with it.

Starting point is 01:06:34 And even for individuals who do live long enough to suffer the late life cost, much of their reproduction is already behind them. And so the selective disadvantage is small. Okay. So that's the reason. We have a genome full of genes that do two things that give an early benefit at a late life cost. The problem is that our civilization has an analogous process to it. It's almost beyond the level of analogy. And the basic point is when we invent a new process that produces some benefit to us initially,

Starting point is 01:07:09 it creates political and economic power that makes it impossible to undo that process if it turns out to have a much later cost. And so in exactly the same way that the body suffers all of those late life costs after a number of years, civilization is built, in its current instantiation, it is built to senes by virtue of us suffering all of the costs for the economic activity that produced profits long ago. And if we are wise, we will recognize the degree to which that tells us where we're headed and we will figure out how to unplug that system and replace it with something that doesn't have that characteristic. Very good. Yeah, that kind of presaged my final question to the

Starting point is 01:07:54 both of you, which is America experiencing senescence. And I do see some potential, maybe over-torturing of that analogy. But it does seem in certain sense, maybe Heather, you can, you read a passage in the book, you talk about how to avoid it, and you talk about liberation, antifragility, and the propensity for things that aren't resilient or don't to resist competition. Maybe talk about that in the final minutes, and then I'm going to turn to my patented final thrilling three existential questions I'm going to ask both of you separately. I've never done this before, but we'll use the remaining minutes to do that. Is America experiencing it? And if so, how can we avoid it? It does appear that way. And I guess what I was going to ask you, Brett, as you were talking,

Starting point is 01:08:38 something I'm not sure we've ever even talked about before is individuals experience senescence for the reasons that you lay out. And within a species, we can extend average lifespan, but we have very little chance of extending maximum lifespan. But I don't think there's any reason to think that a societal level that there needs to be a maximum lifespan, right? And so we talk in the book, for instance, about the Maya as an example of a civilization that was so long-lived and so long horizon thinking that they actually have a unit of time, the Bactun, which is over 400 years, right?

Starting point is 01:09:17 And they had an enlightenment of their own, and they introduced the concept of, invented the concept of zero and astronomy and farming and written language. And, you know, they had so many of the things that the European Enlightenment, in fact, did. And yet they were failing before the Spaniards arrived, right? It was not, it was not the Spaniards who took out the Maya, although they certainly helped, but, you know, finished them off. So, you know, what, they lasted longer than America has. So even if there were a maximum lifespan of civilizations, we're certainly not there.

Starting point is 01:09:56 And depending on how you count, China has certainly been going for longer, although you might argue that it's not the same civilization, right? So are we in the death throes? Well, it seems like it, but maybe there don't need to be death rows. No, I think biology just, has answered this question and we've become so petty that we don't understand that it's an answer,

Starting point is 01:10:22 right? And I think we need to look to the biological solution to this and then look for its analog in the space of civilization. The way selection has solved this problem is that it has treated the body as a temporary vessel. And in fact, the very model that we present in the book where we pass on a tremendous amount of adapting, evolving information outside of the genome means that you have children, they can pick up that fraction of what you know that is still relevant, right? They can discard the fraction that has become outdated, and they can advance the ball, and that effectively they are you, but they are not exactly you, right? They are an edit on you that then keeps the process developing through time.

Starting point is 01:11:16 They are the anti-fragile solution to the senescence problem. And in essence, what we need to do with respect to the United States, for example, is recognize that the founders absolutely nailed it with respect to the values. They came up with a solution that was actually, in all likelihood, much more durable than they expected it to be, but it is now not surprising that people who had never seen a train or a chainsaw or an airplane or the internet, that they couldn't have built a structure that was going to be robust to this. And it is time for the 2.0 version, something that honors what they accomplished,

Starting point is 01:11:57 but does not treat it with religious devotion, treats it as something that now needs to have its offspring. That's where we need to go. And I don't think it's a sad thing. I think it is a natural transition and we should embrace it. Actually, if I can just put a cap on that, we don't talk in the book about species concepts and how it is that we name species and how different types of biologists think about what a species is. But one of the things that is certainly true is that as species change over time, absent branches coming off of them where we can absolutely say, yes, that's different now.

Starting point is 01:12:33 We still tend to paleontologists still give different names to those lineages over time because they are what is found is fossils and fossils get different names. And if we think about political systems the same way, America is changing. We have these unchanging founding documents, but as it changes over time, just because it doesn't change names doesn't mean that the thing itself, can't evolve. Interesting. Okay.

Starting point is 01:13:07 I lied that I only had a couple questions because I actually have my audience questions, but I'm going to do those in rapid fire if you guys will play along. I will read a question. You could say yes or no or restricted to a one sentence question. It could be both of you guys, either one of you guys. They're not directed to either of you individually, but as a group. First from LJ. Do you have any thoughts on the origin or purpose of music?

Starting point is 01:13:29 Is it merely a social tool meant to strengthen bonds within or between groups? Or do you think it's a bond that can be separated from evolutionary history? One sentence. Go. Music passes the adaptive test, which we present in the book, with flying colors. It has no choice, really, but to be an evolutionary adaptation. Modern music has many purposes. The question is, what is the original purpose that caused the thing we call music to evolve? And it's a great question.

Starting point is 01:14:00 It can't be answered in one sentence. Good. Okay. Dal Tzu asks, explorer modes, what are they, and how important are they for the process of evolution? Most explorers fail, and we never hear from them again. Absent explorers, we don't have lineages branching, and we have a very low diversity and expansion into diverse habitats on the planet. So I will add evolution, seek. modes and forms that function that get genes into the future. It is much less efficient to search all of the possible design space for modes that work than to limit one search to things that are likely to be functional. Selection over time will develop mechanisms that reduce the search space.

Starting point is 01:14:56 Those are the explorer modes. The heuristics of space. And then combined with survivorship bias that we tend only to hear from the ones that survived results in some quite prejudicial outcomes, supposedly. Okay, the next question comes from Blair, James Ryan. He has a question similar to one I wanted to ask. Your thoughts on how the modern diet and processed foods like seed oils and sugars have created obesity and diabetes, heart disease, and dementia. And I wasn't familiar with dementia. But maybe one of you can take that, and then I have a follow-up question about allergies.

Starting point is 01:15:30 Absolutely, they have. And there is increasing evidence for their role in dementia as well, including some of, I can't remember the name of a few of the molecules involved in shelf stability that absolutely are involved in things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. I had a question about allergies. So I'm only allergic to one thing, which is stopping eating. I break out when I stop eating. But I never remember gluten-free and peanut allergies when I was a wee, Lad, 40, 50 years ago. What do you guys make of this? Is this byproduct? Why are we hitting this hockey stick moment where it seems to be so prevalent? You can hardly go to a restaurant, which isn't like all these symbols and they're not like kosher symbols.

Starting point is 01:16:14 Yeah, what does it make of the exponential increase of these allergies? Well, I think there are two things that are likely in play. One of them, allergies are typically mediated by the IGE system. And the IGE system is a system that we're. would have been busy with things like parasitic worms in a past environment, things that we've been very effective at eliminating, which is a good thing. Just as immunoglobulin-e. Yep.

Starting point is 01:16:40 It's a class of antibody. And in any case, there is substantial evidence that suggests that this system left idle targets things that it shouldn't, right? It will target pollen grains or whatever else. But then there's also... Hold on, which is very much the argument we make with regard to the appendix in the book as well. Right. Another biological fence, right?

Starting point is 01:16:59 Yeah. So the other thing is that there is, there are various factors that are causing the immune system to either be overactive or to see things that it is not supposed to. For example, most of the immune system is not supposed to see the contents of your gut. And the reason it's not supposed to see the contents of your gut is that when you are very early in development, the system looks at every molecule that you yourself make. and it eliminates the subset of cells that react to it. And what that produces after you're past the stage of development is a very elegant system that sees every invader but does not see you. And this system can screw up, right? If this system sees things it shouldn't, it can react to things that are a normal part of life like foods that you eat.

Starting point is 01:17:53 And it can react to them as if they are potentially pathogenic. It can also react to your own cells, creating an. autoimmunity. And so allergies to things that we eat appear to be the result of a mistake by the self-non-self recognition system that causes the equivalent of an autoimmune disorder, not to you, but to your food, right? Why are the contents of our gut being seen by the immune system and therefore record it as likely pathogenic? That is an open question. There are many possible answers, but I think we need to be looking in this realm, and we need to say, well, It may be too late for some of us.

Starting point is 01:18:31 I have a severe wheat allergy. There's nothing I'm likely to be able to do about that. But what we can do is we can figure out what causes this and then prevent young people from encountering whatever those influences are so that they don't develop these allergies in future generations. Next question comes from JM. What types of adaptations would you expect in populations that are chronically vitamin D deficient? Well, I feel like we know the answer to this, and I just am not remembering. It's rickets. It's weak bones, short stature, it's deformed bones.

Starting point is 01:19:12 But there's more than that. There's intellectual stuff as well, and I can't remember exactly what. But the question was, what adaptations do you expect to see? Yeah. So I think the answer is because of the nature of trade-offs, and that there are certain to be trade-offs involved in, the production of vitamin D, which you would expect to see is things that increase the productivity of vitamin D.

Starting point is 01:19:41 So vitamin D is produced by the skin in response to sunlight. The ability to produce vitamin D will exist in a tradeoff relationship with other things. So, for example, you might expect to see a reduction in melanin in populations, and that reduction in melanin is not going to be free. it comes with the cost, like the more likely to produce tumors. But I would expect to see a shift in the trade-off between the production of vitamin D and resistance to other things where the body accepts more vulnerability in some other regard in order to reduce the cost of insufficient vitamin D.

Starting point is 01:20:18 Maybe similarly paler hair and thinner hair. Right. And one other thing is I would also expect that what we've so far talked about are things that are likely to be wholly transmitted in the genome. But you would also expect behavioral compensations, right? So you might imagine that the traditions of people who are chronically low in vitamin D might involve pursuing sunlight when it is available in spite of the cost to retention of heat, for example. You might expect traditions to include things in the diet which contain vitamin D. We in fact know this to be the case.

Starting point is 01:21:00 And so anyway, basically the point is you would expect selection to find every alteration of belief, behavior, structure that will cause an increase in the production of vitamin D or a preservation in vitamin D that's already been produced and would otherwise be destroyed. You would expect selection to find all those things over time and accumulate them. Okay, the last one of these, well, so someone named Jay Sarge 4999, that was actually the name I was going to choose for my first kid. What is the future of biological inquiry? Are there still major gains to be made in terms of evolutionary theory? Do you see things taking a major molecular chemical turn? There are massive advances yet to be made, and largely, unfortunately, we've stalled out in part

Starting point is 01:21:50 due to the financial model of the modern university, which encourages very expensive research over theoretical research, which tends to be far cheaper. I also think that there's a cultural bias. We're very early in the study of biology, and it's a very complex topic. It is the most complex topic, really, and so we should expect ourselves to still be fumbling around with some basics. But the degree to which biologists, you know, if you look at the bio 101 textbook, it reads just as encyclopedically as the chemistry 101 textbook, right?

Starting point is 01:22:26 And that's an indication that something has gone wrong. And if you listen into the, you know, the intro series to biology, you don't hear a lot of, here are 47 things we don't know the answer to yet. They don't include the black boxes, just gloss right over them. Which is crazy because if you want to train the mind, That's the place to do it. Let's hang out inside this box for a while and see if we can figure our way out. All right.

Starting point is 01:22:51 Next question is about a spin-14 generalization of unification of quantum mechanics and relativity. I assume that's for Heather. No, that's the wrong Weinstein brother here. Sorry about that, Sean G. Next, last question I'll take from the audience. This guy has a lot. He wants you to guys to have Noam Chomsky on, past guest on the end of the Impossible podcast, because he claims, we're making finger puppets of you guys,

Starting point is 01:23:17 but he claims that Chomsky finds convincing this communication is not even a secondary function of language. He goes on to other questions, but he asks five other questions. I'm going to ask just one simple one. Heather, do peacocks use their sons as decoys to shield their daughters? As decoys to shield their daughters? That's his question. No. I'm not sure I even understand the framing.

Starting point is 01:23:40 Do you know what is being? Yeah, I kind of, I kind of get it. Do you want to translate for me? And then I'll try to answer you. Decoy is not the right term. But the idea, the idea is if you were to, if you were to go straight handicap, right, as a hobby handicap principle, then the point is from the point of view of a male offspring that puts on this tail to demonstrate he could deal with the handicap, yes, he demonstrates

Starting point is 01:24:06 awesome jeans because he's got the handicap, but he also suffers from the handicap. And so in order for that to... It seems like the opposite then. Well, in order for... The question seems like the opposite of what is true. For it to pay the benefit to females who get the benefit of the good genes but don't pay the cost of the tail has to be effectively twice, more than twice in order to compensate for the loss to their sons.

Starting point is 01:24:27 So it's not really decoy, but are they sacrificing their sons to enhance their daughters? And the answer is no. Okay. Well, the answer is no, but it will not be obvious why the answer is no. I'm very much looking forward to presenting that analysis at some point in the future. If you guys have a few more minutes, I know you have a pretty hard break coming up, but I found very interesting, and of course my audience will be, expect nothing less than your thoughts on aliens.

Starting point is 01:24:52 And you make a statement in the book, I forget which one of you reads, but that aliens will sleep when we encounter, when we encounter alien, not if we encounter, but when they will be, you know, kind of nocturnal, diurnal entities as well as we. What basis do you make that on? First of all, Heather, do you believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings? And Brett, if you think so, why do you believe that they will have diurnal and nocturnal behaviors like we do? Yes, and I really hope that we find them. And it'll be a very good thing if they do also sleep because then if they come by, well, we're asleep,

Starting point is 01:25:29 they'll know to wait until we're up. Because we wouldn't want to miss them, right? That's right. No, that's right. That would be embarrassing. Yeah. And maybe they can help me sleep train one of my. kids. That would be nice.

Starting point is 01:25:39 Right. But you want to know why? Yes. Yeah. Well, the argument is like this. In order for creatures to be sophisticated enough to engage in this kind of travel, there are certain things that are very likely to be true of the planet that they evolved on. A day and night is a highly likely phenomenon.

Starting point is 01:25:57 Should they have a day and night, it is likely that just as the creatures of Earth are biased towards activity in one or the other period because there are tradeoffs in the building of things like eyes, for example. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Starting point is 01:26:19 Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Starting point is 01:26:37 Hilton for this day. So if you have a really great diurnal eye, it tends not to collect enough light for night. And if you have a really great amplifying eye, then it tends to not be so acute during the day. And so those things will cause a highly intelligent creature to have faced a period of time over which it was not highly productive. And simple dormancy is a huge opportunity cost. because if you've got the kind of computer that can do really careful thinking and it's offline because you can't be productive because your eyes aren't adapted to either day or night, that the selection will inevitably discover that it can borrow that apparatus. And so its sleep is liable to have some of the characteristics of ours, including possibly things like dreaming. Let me just say that you alighted what may be the most interesting part, but maybe the most obvious to an astronomically interested audience, which is that the intelligent aliens that land here in one day.

Starting point is 01:27:33 and don't wonder why we sleep, are likely to have day and night because the tidily locked planet is unlikely to have allowed for the evolution of such complex life. That's right. And that actually comes to mind the last question, which has to do with the potential danger then of a future space force colony on the moon, which does not, is tidily locked to the Earth and therefore doesn't experience diurnal. Fast forward, you know, many thousands of years in the future. You know, I often say, like, we live in an amazing age.

Starting point is 01:28:02 You talk about the campfire, et cetera. My grandmother guys, I mean, she grew up with the horse and buggy. She grew up, you know, in the Stettles of Eastern Poland and live to see men walking on TikTok. But I want to ask you if we do go to the moon, will there be detriment, you know, will it be kind of too populate, two cultures that will arrive, you know, those that kind of had the whatever benefit perhaps of growing up in a diurnal non-tidalil-lock system or whether it'll be, you know, detrimental to people living on the moon. It will have anatomical and physiological effects, it will.

Starting point is 01:28:39 And we don't know what all of them are, just as much as we tried to figure out before the space race was a thing, what all of the effects would be of those very short periods in spaces without gravity, for instance, would have. We still could not begin to actually fully understand it. But wait, I'm a little bit lost here, because if we put a colony on the moon, it will have day and night. There'll be two weeks long. Two weeks long, right? But, I mean, biotically speaking, the moon is not a high productivity environment.

Starting point is 01:29:14 Can we just all agree on that? No, right? The fact is a zero productivity environment. It's all going to come by Amazon or something, right? It's going to be shipped there. And therefore, the idea of a productive period during the day is going to be off the table, right? you're going to be productive. We're going to create a day and night cycle that is however long is optimal for humans likely, something like 24 hours, although when we put people in caves,

Starting point is 01:29:41 it doesn't turn out to be 24 hours, but it doesn't matter. It's like 25, right? But nonetheless, we'll just build an artificial environment. I mean, I'm not advocating for hanging out in the moon. It doesn't sound like a ton of fun to me. But I mean, I think maybe part of what the question that you're asking ends up getting at is one of the big themes of the book, we haven't really talked about is a tendency towards reductionism in modern science. And, you know, imagine that the thing that you can measure, that the metric that you've got in hand is the most important thing about the system. And so in order to survive in a colony on the moon, we will figure out those basic things.

Starting point is 01:30:12 You know, people are not going to find themselves asphyxating because we got that thing wrong. But we will not have gotten to a lot of the emergent necessary truths that humans will need in order to live like we do on this planet. And lucky for Elon, as he says, he wants to die on Mars. As Lord Martin Rees, past guest on the show, said, yes, but let's hope he doesn't die on impact. Mars has a almost 24-hour cycle, so that would have a direnal nocturnal cycle. Okay, guys, I'm going to ask you to do something I've never done before if you'll indulge me, which is one of you guys is going to answer my thrilling three existential questions about advice to your former.

Starting point is 01:30:47 Here are the three questions, and I'd like you to unplug your headphones one of you at a time so I can have the other one be ignorant of the other's answer. And I'd love to hear you guys answer independently if that's okay. Okay, but the problem is whoever takes off their headphone is going to hear the answer to the question. So it's not a, I mean, you want one of us to leave? Maybe you could leave, yeah. Maybe one of you could leave or put on some heavy metal music. Who's leaving?

Starting point is 01:31:10 No, you go first. I mean, I'm going to speak first. I'll go do the leaving and I'll see you shortly. Okay, good. Thanks, guys. Never happened before. All right. On the Into the Impossible podcast.

Starting point is 01:31:20 Okay, Heather, these are basically either far future questions or far past questions. I like to ask all my guests to kind of bring out the humanity. and all of my guests. Not that you guys need any, but they involve around kind of questions of legacy, which is prominent in this book. I want to ask you first what you'd put in your ethical will, which is a concept from Judaism called the Zava-a. It's a type of wisdom or value system that you most would like to articulate to near-term generations as their inheritance, sort of a will for your ideological errors, not necessarily your only or biological errors. So, a set of instructions or...

Starting point is 01:32:01 Wisdom or compilation of value system that you live by, sort of, you know, relatively brief. Yeah, I guess this is going to sound like it's cheating, but I think it's this book that we just wrote. And if I have to encapsulate it more, it's perhaps the epilogue, which is the eight things, eight principles that we say during the Eight Nights of Hanukkah.

Starting point is 01:32:26 and I won't be able to say them off the top of my head here. We wouldn't do it anyway. We want the audience to buy the book. Yeah. Great. And the next one goes a little bit farther into the future, now a billion years into the future. And you probably have seen the movie 2001, a space odyssey based on Arthur C. Clark, where I am the associate co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination.

Starting point is 01:32:48 Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. In the opening scenes, there are these primates in the savannah of Africa. and they come upon one of these ominous monoliths. And I want to ask you, we don't know what they're for. They could be a time capsule to be discovered by humans or some of their civilization, betokening our existence. So I want to ask you, what would you put on your monolith, something destined to last

Starting point is 01:33:10 billions of years? It has some similarity to the famous question that Richard Feynman asked, you know, what scientific knowledge, in his case, would you, encapsulates the most knowledge in his field of physics in the fewest words. So I want to ask you what kind of information or statement about things that you've learned in your life, would you most want to put on a monolith, a time capsule, to betoken our great achievements as a human species? I guess it depends on whether or not these are our descendants undisturbed, and therefore they are proceeding apace from here, or if life has disappeared, and this is a new evolution.

Starting point is 01:33:46 you know dissent with modification is the simplest definition of evolution and it is the encapsulation of what explains what we are so if I have to go very very simple I think I would do that dissent with modification great and the last question of my thrilling three final questions has to do with going back in time not a billion years but just 20 30 years I want to ask you sir Arthur C. Clark he had many laws, one of which is every expert. There's an equal and opposite expert. He said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. And I actually have his voice reading that phrase when I open every podcast. But Heather, one of his questions is actually how I got the name for this podcast. And he said, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. So that's the name of this podcast. But I want to ask you, Heather, what thing about life mystified you as a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old, what advice would you give to that former self to give you the courage to do as you've done

Starting point is 01:34:51 to go into the impossible? Well, it's a little earlier, but there's a way in which, you know, I like all teenagers, I think, was searching for meaning and searching not just for, you know, what my place was in the world, but really explicitly searching for what was this all about. And, you know, again, this will seem single note, but to me, it's, you know, it's all explanatory except for really your domain and the domain of the very, very tiny and abiotics. So, you know, quirks and rocks and quasars are off the table, but pretty much everything else is

Starting point is 01:35:26 evolutionary. So, you know, I was experimenting with Buddhism and other religious traditions, and actually Brett handed me a book by Dawkins when I was, you know, 19 or 20 and said, I think you will find things herein that you will find explanatory. And it certainly wasn't complete, but it revealed to me a way of framing the world that I keep with me to this day. And also part of what it promises is that we will never know everything. That, you know, of course, the act of science is to try to discover what's true. And we are aiming to get to an ever more accurate refinement of our understanding of reality. But we're not going to get there in our lifetimes. And that's part of what is so marvelous about it. Wonderful. Well, if you would indulge me and go and get your other half.

Starting point is 01:36:16 I'll do so. Hold on just a second. Okay, Brett, I asked your lovely wife, Heather, these three questions that I've asked your brother and all of my guests. Did they get the answers right? There's going to be homework at the end of this, Brett. You know that. Always. Okay. All right. So these are existential questions, two of which will go deep into the future, your own personal future, when you spring forth this mortal coil at the biblical age of 120 or more. Perhaps you can extend your life and your telomeres. But I want to ask you first what you'd put in your Zava-a, your ethical will, that is, what wisdom or values would you like to inculcate or articulate to future generations biological, but mostly your ideological errors that come after you?

Starting point is 01:37:07 Yeah, I mean, I think the answer here is actually simple. And it's very biological, but I believe that if one extrapolates from what I'm about to say, that one recovers all of the important moral and ethical stuff. The idea is we are obligated to try to provide the experience of a liberated human, existence as liberated as possible to as many people as we can. That the marvelousness of being a human being is so special and unique that given that what we do affects how many people will get to experience it, we have an obligation to behave in a way that maximizes that number.

Starting point is 01:38:03 And the reason that I think that all the proper moral and ethical stuff that needs to flows from extrapolating from that principle is that A, it forces you to behave in ways that are maximally sustainable. Those maximally sustainable ways, therefore, involve the discovery of the various steady states we will need. And in order for the human life that we deliver to those in the future, for it to be truly liberating, we will have to have addressed there many concerns. That is to say, to be meaningfully liberated rather than just nominally liberated, you have to have your mundane concerns addressed. So we would end up, I think, if we really worked on this puzzle, we would end up protecting people from things like bad luck.

Starting point is 01:38:59 We would end up connecting them together in ways that caused flourishing when people discovered insights or created enhancements to human well-being. They would end up needing to suffer some sort of a penalty when they externalized harm onto others. And I think that this would cascade all the way through the social architecture such that even to interpersonal relationships, it would cause the right values to be enhanced. Very good. Although slightly awkward because Heather just extolled your virtues for about five minutes straight. And now I can say you didn't reciprocate. Okay, next up, no, she didn't do that. Next, we're going to go deep into the future, and you probably are undoubtedly familiar with Arthur C. Clark's famous book, The Sentinel,

Starting point is 01:39:53 which led to a space odyssey, in which there are these monoliths that the prehistoric creatures in Africa, these hominid like figures encounter, and they hit it with a bone, and later it appears on the moon, and Clark doesn't really reveal what these things are. And of course, I am the associate co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination here at UC San Diego, so it's near and dear to my heart. I want to ask you, if these are thought of as time capsules, as sort of monoliths that are meant to encapsulate or betokin things that humanity has learned or achieved, what would you put on your monolith? And it's sort of similar to Feynman's cataclysm question in which he said, if in some cataclysm, all of human knowledge were

Starting point is 01:40:30 destroyed and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures. What statement contains the most information in the fewest words? I want to ask you in your field. He put forth the atomic hypothesis. What you think would encapsulate the most knowledge that we've acquired in the fewest, most condensed, compressed form of a statement on a billion-year lasting time capsule? Wow. That is, so I'm stuck here. I must say 2001 is one of my favorite. stories and I've done a lot of thinking about the monoliths, but I've never thought about them as time capsules at all. They seem to me more like triggers, but okay, so if you had to preserve one concept, you know what

Starting point is 01:41:18 it would be? It's actually, it's in our book. It's a figure. And the figure is stacked diminishing returns curves. because every complex system in which there is an objective will show a pattern of diminishing returns. And the key to success at whatever the objective might be is knowing when you've hit the inflection point and would be foolish to keep investing in the same way. And what you need to do is seek the next face, the next bargain phase of the next curve,

Starting point is 01:42:00 in the stack. And if people understood this, I believe, you know, I think it's right up there potentially, wow, I shouldn't say such a thing. It is a dim shadow of yin yang, right, which I find a very compelling concept, the idea of a symmetry that is about compatibleness rather than sameness, right? And I believe if one understands the implications of the stacked diminution, returns curves, one is in a better position to maximize whatever is sought. Very good.

Starting point is 01:42:41 Okay, now we're going to go back in time, not billions of years, not millions of years in the future. We're going to go backwards in time and quote Sir Arthur C. Clark, his famous third law, which states the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of my podcast. I want to ask you, Brett, what mysterious aspect of life perplexed you as a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old even?

Starting point is 01:43:08 But what advice would you give to that young man to give him the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? Well, I'm not sure exactly how to answer the question. I certainly believe in this principle, and I have advocated that while arrogance is a bad thing, we can all agree, that if one has to err in one direction, or the other, it's far better than humbleness, because humbleness, if you feel obligated to view yourself as less capable, then you will fall short of what you might be able to achieve. Whereas if you believe beyond your actual capabilities that you might be capable of something,

Starting point is 01:43:52 you'll at least find out what you can do and you won't leave anything on the table. So I believe in the principle that you have to go beyond in order to figure out what is what is within range. You know, I had the telomere experience was transformative. It was very early for me. It was, you know, as a young graduate student. And the experience of having correctly predicted that wild mice would have short telomeres, even though the literature said many, many times over, that mice have long

Starting point is 01:44:30 telomeres. It even in some places said rodents have long telomeres. Discovering that I had been correct about that, that I had done the logic well enough that it could predict a result in a laboratory was very freeing because after that point, it didn't really matter if people, you know, doubted my capability. I knew that at least once I had succeeded in that and I never had to worry too much that, you know, I was fooling myself or something along those lines. So I would, I would advise people. And in fact, I have advised my own students to seek an experience that frees you in that way, right? To set objectives for yourself scientifically and otherwise that even if it takes many such attempts to find something in which you discover the limits

Starting point is 01:45:29 of what you can do, that it at least allows you to tune out the doubters because you know they can't possibly be right. And you need that confidence in order to succeed, especially in a very cutthroat field like academia. I always call it the academic hunger games and conversations past and present with your elder brother. I want to thank you so much for coming on the Into the Impossible podcast for having your courage to produce this work. There are about 50 other questions I could have asked, but

Starting point is 01:46:01 time does not permit me, nor does discretion do so as well. But I want to recommend everybody, please do pick up a copy of a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century. I'm looking forward to the bonus guide that comes with a poisonous tree frog. That would be a delight. And I just want to thank you for sharing your honesty, your courage, your candor with myself and my audience. And I hope we can meet up again someday. It has been a terrific pleasure. Thank you. This was great. Thanks, Brian. Thank you guys. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Starting point is 01:46:46 Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating. his website and sign up for his informative newsletter at brian keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination

Starting point is 01:47:17 in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. First Citizens Bank.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Heather Heying & Bret Weinstein: A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. Frogs, Family, Freedom (#186)

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