The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 117 | The Dark Horses: From Campus Villains to Political Peacemakers | Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: September 18, 2021

One day, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were biology professors at Evergreen State College. The next, they were "campus villains" who dared to speak out when the school told white people to take a “day of absence.” Since then, they have become founding members of the “Intellectual Dark Web” and continued their fight for truth in a world gone woke. But with the world changing faster every day, and not necessarily in a good way, they were hit by a realization: Science and evolutionary biology haven’t changed very much. Humans have. Bret and Heather join Glenn to break down where these changes are leading us, as they explore in-depth in their new book, “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.” From climate change and capitalism to Afghanistan, our “apparently senile Commander-in-Chief,” and the evolution of sex (among flowers), Bret and Heather make the case that the key to escaping the chaos is right in front of us, if we choose to listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let me start with some good news. Life is great. Really is. Would you pick a time any time in history that you would rather live than right now and where you're living? Best time in human history. Poverty rates are lower than ever. Same with global hunger. Access to clean water.

People make more. Work less. Transportation, modern medicine, access to information, women's rights, human rights. So why does it feel like everything is collapsed? That is a really tough question to answer, but it is what lies at the center of a book called A Hunter Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. This couple is the reason I started this podcast, but they have never agreed to be guests until now. It is a husband and wife, evolutionary biologist team, who have become an integral part of our new normal. They first came prominence in 2017, I think.

When they were at Evergreen College, they were both professors. They disagreed with the college's day of absence, which demanded that all white students and faculty leave campus for a day. I thought it was crazy. The outrage was immediate and explosive. They were practically forced to resign. Well, then they went on to become founding members of the intellectual Darkweb, a group of politically homeless rebels, mostly from the left, who violated one of the left's countless holy laws.

This is going to be a fascinating conversation. I have no idea where it's going to end up. Please welcome Heather Hange and Brett Woller. Weinstein. I'm so honored to have you both here. It's really, it's great. I am big fans of yours. I have been watching you for a long time and have wanted this interview for probably over three years.

And I appreciate it. I'm a fan of yours because of your courage. In almost all things that I have seen, you are taking massive hits. And you're doing it because of your courage. you believe you are standing up for the truth. I happen to believe that too, but you're standing up for the truth and damn the consequences, I guess. So thanks for being here. Thanks for having us. Thank you. How difficult has this been, this journey of yours? It varies. I think in many ways it is its own educational experience. And each time we end up

in a new chapter we learn more, I think, you know, informally speaking, we feel that it is making us anti-fragile, which is not a fun process, but in the end, being stronger and able to withstand the slights and challenges is important. If we're going to fight for what matters, it is important that we have the skills to do it, and that's a process that's learned. How, and I want to get to the book, because I think we, We have had similar thoughts, except mine kind of resides a little bit with the Beatles, and yours is in the intellectual space. But, and it's important that we talk about the book because it is, I think people can feel the problem,

and they can name it here and here and here, but they don't really understand the scope of it. And I think you guys are really hitting the scope of it. But before we hit that, your lives have changed so much. And you believed in so much. How much? Two things. I know that I believed what I believed. And then I found out, holy cow, there's a lot of things I was absolutely certain of that are not true.

And betrayed by my own people. You know what I mean? How much of this has happened to you guys, to where you're like, I would have, that's not who I thought we all were. Yeah. That is certainly true. That's not who I thought we all were, right? But our politics, I don't think, have changed. But who we see engaging in similar thinking and truth telling has changed.

Yeah. Right. Ten years ago, you and I would have, we would have never thought of being at the same table because we're on opposite sides, but we're really not. We're really not. And, I mean, even ten years ago, it was becoming clear, you know, in the, in the milieu's where we were getting our news, that NPR was becoming harder to listen to, for instance, for us, even ten years ago. but that is obviously coming to a head even more in the last one, two, three, four, five years. And that, of course, is one of the points of the book, that the rate of change itself is changing so fast that the search for coherence is becoming ever more difficult. I talked to Condoleezza Rice 15 years ago, and I remember during the interview she said something because it was biblical what she said.

I don't know if she knew it at the time, but what she said, and it stuck out to me because of what it implies. She said, you're starting to see the birth pangs of the things to come. And when you think of that, you realize we're giving birth to something, and I'm not sure I want to see what's coming out on the other end. And birth pangs happen faster and faster and closer to closer and the stronger they get. And I think that's true. things are accelerating at such a rapid rate. Why is that happening? Why is the acceleration due to technology?

Is the acceleration, why is it happening like this? Well, there are really two reasons. And I should say this actually applies to your earlier question too. In some sense, the reason that our politics hasn't changed very much is that science and in particular evolutionary biology is our North Star. And so what we believed and what we believe now were based on a model of the universe that hasn't changed very much. Now, who we find ourselves interacting with has changed radically. Wait, wait, wait.

So explain that part for people who don't necessarily understand evolutionary biology. What are you talking about here? Well, one, so I'm sure you had something particular in mind. But one thing that I hear in what Brett just said is our understanding of the universe is based on sort of physically, reality and it's not, you know, our politics aren't dependent on the social scene. And so who it is that we're talking with and who it is that we're finding common ground with has changed. But that doesn't mean that what we think about underlying processes has because that was never a social set of beliefs for us. Right. Okay. So human beings,

we may differ here on what the best way to view ourselves is, but maybe less than you would imagine. We are creatures that have to function in the world. And our nature was built in an environment that we no longer live in. Right. Now, we humans are better than any other creature at changing our software to adapt to new habitats. But our habitats are now changing so rapidly that we can't keep up. And that is partially about technology. But it's also about the fact, in evolutionary biology, we have a metaphor that we like. We talk about adaptive land. in which opportunities are peaks. They are basically mountain ranges of opportunity.

And in order to get from one opportunity to another, you have to pass through what we call an adaptive valley. And so your trepidations about where we're headed is part and parcel of the fact that whatever else may be true, we are in transition. Our tools are not up to managing the problems that we now face. So we have to find a new way of being. Not only our physical tools,

but our mental and psychological tools. Even our tools of governance, as excellent as they are. It feels like the government feels like it's stuck in 1950. The world feels like it's headed towards scientific, not scientific, the technology field feels like it's in 2050. And we're kind of standing in between going, that world doesn't work. And I don't even know what that world means.

Let's be, you know, frank. about this. Our governmental structures are really 18th century structures, and they're brilliant, but they couldn't possibly manage a world this far from what the founders were capable of understanding. I mean, the founders never saw a train or a chainsaw. So let me ask you on that, because I would guess that we actually agree on this. The founders believed, I mean, they thought it would last 30 years. They did not think it was going to last like now. And I think, they would get here if they could time machine they're here they would look at everything and they say great how long did america last you know they would not recognize what they have done and then

i don't think they would have recognized it in 1960 you know um but they did allow through constitutional adaptation etc etc that they did allow us to adapt they did say we're not we don't see everything so just adapt and adopt you know constitutional amendments to get there it's not the framework or the mission statement, we hold these truths to be self-evident, or the framework that is adaptable, it's that we are trying to force a bunch of stuff into it that it's not meant to do. It's meant to reject that kind of stuff, right? Yeah. No, I see it very much the same way.

And I think you're framing of, we can't go back to 1950. Right. And we don't know what. We don't want to. And we don't want to. And those who would claim that that was a perfect world. our misunderstanding what that world was. And those who are saying, you know, full, full bore ahead to 2050, no matter what,

because progress is always the answer. And if it requires rejecting everything about the old who cares, well, that's also a mistake. And so, you know, progress, yes, and tradition, yes. But we're going to have to pick and choose. And we're going to have to do so with intention. And that's why I think we're having such, I always look at, right, wing, left wing. It's a bird. And if you chop off one of the wings, it ain't going to fly. And conservatives, I don't know how conservatives define themselves, but I look at conservative for

the root of the word. I'm conserving the things that do work and looking to the future on new things that might work better. But let's not throw all of this out. It's amazing how difficult this lesson is for both the right and left wing. Each one seems to think that it has the answer, and it doesn't understand that the dynamism of our system is in the tension between these. Yes. Right. Liberals always want to improve things, and they always underestimate the unintended consequences. Yes. And conservatives, if left to their own devices, would avoid progress because of those unintended consequences. So what we really need to do, though, is adapt our system. I think the founders would have expected us to change it much more radically than we have in order to keep up. You know, we've treated

certain things as sacred that shouldn't have been and that they wouldn't have expected. But what we need to do is get a system that is not so violent in the fluctuation that balances these two forces. In other words, you mentioned up top that there's quite a bit we agree on. And this is now well established. The Hidden Tribes report revealed that there is what they call the exhausted middle, this vast group of us that aren't extreme, that agree on most of what we want at least. And then we differ over how close we are to it and what might be done to go the rest of the distance. But we are being shut out by extremists that are pushing us into viewing, you know, the other side is not quite human. And that's a very dangerous process, unfortunately, with a lot of historical precedent that suggests we should not continue down that road.

So now this has been a book that you've wanted to write for like 10 years. Indeed. Yeah. Why now? And let's start on the main message. I mean, 21st century hunter and gatherer doesn't seem to go together. Yeah. So it's a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century.

And as we say in it, we could have named it a number of things. You know, an agriculturalist's guide, a post-industrialist's guide, a mammal's guide. Like all of these things are true descriptors of what the modern human condition is and are true moments in time from our evolutionary history. And Hunter Gatherer is like the moment that most people have in their head. It's like, oh, that's what we're adapted to, right? Like Hunter Gatherers on the African Savannah. But we've been all of these things. And so our point in the book, using the term of art from evolution, the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness for humans, is not just Hunter Gatherers.

It's all of these points in our history. And because humans are so flexible, are so much software compared to hardware, we are born with so much capability that isn't hardwired in more than any other animal on the planet, then we are adapted to being post-industrialists, not as well as we should be, and not maybe even possibly to be perfectly adapted given the rate of change. But, you know, why now? Why now in part? because we were talking about writing it for, you know, for 10 years while we were teaching, while we were still at Evergreen.

And we were able to now. You know, when Evergreen blew up, we began to have an audience. And the words of our many generations of students were still ringing in our ears. And, you know, we're still affiliated, connected with many of them who had been saying to us for years, please find a way to take the teaching of evolutionary biology and specifically, what the two of you have, what the two of us have been doing, into some kind of packaged form so that it can be delivered into other people. My dad said before he died, he said,

I'm kind of glad I'm not going to be around to have to see and make the decisions that your generation and the one the following you is going to have to make. He said, but it's going to be fascinating one way or another. He said, he was born in 1926. And he said, I remember as a kid, we looked up at the moon and we never thought, man could walk on the moon. And when we started seeing Buck Rogers and thought, that was movie stuff.

That wasn't actually landing on the mood. He said, halfway through my life, we're on the moon. And look at us now. He said, all of the technology, everything that is moving so rapidly. And I said, I know it's really exciting. He said, it is, but we're missing something. And I said what? And I think this is what the whole point of your book is.

He said, read Plato. We're struggling exactly the same place. Read Jesus. Same people, same problems. We've had such an explosive growth here and really nothing here in many ways. Is that the problem that we're growing so fast, part of the problem that we're growing so fast, and yet we haven't worked on this along with the fact that social media, we're in tribes. It forces us back to that tribal nature because that's been in us for thousands and thousands of years.

Well, it forces us back in one way. But, I mean, really what you're saying, the reason that Plato is still resonant, And Plato is resonant. I mean, you see Plato's cave in the Matrix. People don't necessarily know that they're revisiting that same puzzle. But part of the problem is that these things aren't really fundamentally about those who first spotted them. They are part of the underlying architecture. They are failures of game theory that result in certain problems reoccurring in a new form until you figure out how to solve them.

And so isn't that part of the, That's one thing that I don't understand that people think that we evolve. Well, yes, we do, but we're all born at the same starting point. And so we have to discover that when I first read Plato, when I was an adult, I was like, oh, my gosh. This is brilliant and it's exactly what I'm struggling with. Because isn't that a self-discovery thing? You can't pass that information and those answers on biologically, can you? Well, first of all, one of the things that our field has done a terrible job of recognizing and therefore conveying is that our cultural layer, our software, is biological, right?

You'll very often hear people say, is it cultural or is it biological? It's a false dichotomy. You can say, is it genetic or is it cultural? That's a fair division. But culture is every bit as biological as genes. The problem is when you do discover the answer to a puzzle. So let's, for example, say that our rights of free expression, which the founders clearly understood very well, we're in some sense a response to part of Plato's observation about what happens when the person who has escaped the cave returns and attempts to convey it, right?

So our speech rights are in effect an agreement that we have that actually we don't get to do that to the guy who comes back into the cave and says that the shadows aren't the real world, right? But the problem is if you live in a world downstream of that discovery and you've always had these rights, you don't realize how important they are and what they are really protecting. And so you uninvent the progress because you don't see the problem, which is, of course, one of the themes of our book. We talk about Chesterton's fence and the idea that if you see a structure and you don't know what its purpose is, you'd be foolish to think it probably doesn't have one and therefore it can be safely eliminated until you've understood what the purpose was. At that point, then you know whether it continues to play that role or whether that role is obsolete. And so, you know, the reinvention of problems that were solved is a next level problem that we have to address because it will happen in every era of history where we have been successful and people suddenly see, I don't know, efficiency as dominant over the elegant solution architecture.

I remember just a few years ago for the very first time I thought, no, these things. are not self-evident. They're not. They were at one point, but they've been lost. Freedom of speech. I mean, wow, what happened there? I thought we all agreed on it. What happened? Yeah, what happened. I mean, part of what happened, I think, is that there's a reductionism that takes over when we are asked to understand things and we are able to measure. And so, you know, once we can measure something and we have numbers, the numbers stick in our heads and we forget the emergent hole, and we forget how glorious humans are, actually,

and what emergent beings we are. And so social media is a stand-in for social interaction, and it's become even more so, of course, during COVID. But, you know, really since its inception, people mistook it for the entire thing. They mistook social media for social interaction. And, you know, the fact is we're here with you, and that is a very different experience

than if we were on a Zoom call with you, right? without having any access at any conscious level to why or what exactly is being conveyed that's more because we're actually here with you, there's just more, right? Because humans are more than even many of the things we have yet measured. And as scientists, we hope, we are seeking an objective, complete, accurate understanding of the universe, hoping to get ever, ever closer, more and more refined, knowing we wouldn't never get there and also knowing that the tendency to reduce to a single variable will tend to exclude other things that may have just as much meaning, if not more. I don't remember which chapter

it was towards the beginning. You did the lineage, the human journey. Can you just take us through that quickly? Yeah. I mean, as briefly as you can. I think we can probably cut it from 3.5 billion years. Yeah, okay. Yeah. We don't have that much time. At least do it faster, though. Yeah. So roughly 3.5 billion years ago, life came into existence on Earth. And two billion-ish, I think, if memory serves, we have things like the evolution of sex, one to two billion years ago. And it's possible that in our lineage, that has been unchanging since then. By 500 million years or so, we had become animals. And, you know, we already had, we already had multisilularity. We already had, um, multisimilarity. And before that, we had, what does that mean? That means that we, instead of a single cell moving around on its own, we're now

aggregates of cells that aren't just aggregates. We are actually, um, combining with those other cells and their specialization between them. So it's, you know, at some, early on any way, life evolving is sort of increasing level of specialization. And, um, so as animals. we now begin to have, boy, what do I include? What don't I?

I think it's worth pointing out that, you know, you can trace our lineage going forward as Heather is doing. But one of the things that stands out when you begin to think in terms of what all of these lineages, not just ours, looked like, is how many themes are actually recovered, even with creatures that don't look anything like us. So it's very surprising the first time you realize that although

we animals and plants in some sense are distinct evolutions of sexual reproduction that what we call male parts of plants and female parts of plants actually have the same biases built in them in terms of, for example, their enthusiasm for sex with partners about whom they are not choosy, right? The female parts of a plant are very choosy and male parts of a plant much less so. And the reason is exactly the same, right? So this is why we presented in the book the model of evolution that we did, which is that once you begin to realize that, yes, there are, you know, an indefinitely large number of particulars, and you could learn them all. But there's also the underlying problems that are being solved, and there aren't that many solutions.

So just as Plato's Cave, you know, continues to reoccur because the underlying dynamics are really what's being noticed rather than some specific instance of some. thing. The fact that any time, you know, if you start out with creatures that have sex, but they have identical size gametes, you will quickly get to a state in which they no longer have identical size gametes. And the one that has large gametes will become choosy. And the one that has small mobile gametes will be much less choosy. And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about a tree or a gorilla. The logic is the same. So once you get that message and you say, well, okay, maybe what I should do, instead of investing in knowing all of the creatures, of the Earth. What I should do is invest in understanding what problem they're solving and what the

themes are in those solutions, which then brings us to our problem, which is humans better than any other creature that has ever existed by far are wonderful at switching from one niche to another. When we describe virtually any other species on the planet, we are talking about a type of creature and an opportunity that it exploits. But for us, we can't name what that opportunity is that humans exploit because we do so many different things and have throughout our history done so many different things. How is that possible? Because we have a near miraculous capacity to bootstrap new programming.

We are kind of a generalist robot and we have the ability to write our own new software for opportunities no ancestor had ever addressed. That capacity gives us the ability to think our way out of the problems that I think all three of us here at the table recognize are headed towards us. But what we don't have is the ability to keep up with the rate of change. The fact that we don't even live in the world that we were born into, right? We cannot educate our children and say, here's the world that you're going to have to make a living in because none of us have any idea what it's going to look like. That's too fast. Even our amazing rate of change, our ability to change in a reasonable and coherent

way at a rapid rate is just far outstripped by that technological pace. And if we don't it in, you know. Well, that's not going to happen. Is it raining technology? I mean, Ray Kurzweil is a friend of mine. And I think he's the most fascinating guy and the scariest dude I've ever met, my life. Because he doesn't, he, you know, I said to one point about upgrading, you know, becoming

the singularity. And I said, well, but what about those people? who don't. And he said, well, everybody will want to. But what if you don't want to do that? Right. Well, why would you? And so there's this circular thinking that everything's going to be okay and to disregard what that actually means to the homo sapien, you know, and we're just moving so quickly and there's such arrogance in there. I mean, every piece of technology we have is the greatest experiment on the human species ever done. Yep.

Every piece. It just keeps going up. But let's take your question. Okay. Will we rain it in? That's a hard question to answer. Will it be rained in? That's an easy question.

We will either rain it in or it will rain us in. The processes are already unsustainable in very simple, literal terms. And what that means is either we figure out a comparatively gentle path to, some way of existing that does not continue down this trajectory or the trajectory will collapse because it is unstable. So what are the things that are fighting us, fighting the natural man, if you will, that we need to, that technology is exacerbating, that we need to, we need to recognize and rein in? I'm not sure natural versus unnatural is the right dichotomy.

because part part of what we explore in the book is the idea that this is actually this could have been predicted right that this that this the human condition is one of such software of such lability of such flexibility that of course we would end up becoming not on our worst enemy yeah but what we also need to do then is figure out how to be our our best friend right like to to recognize that we have to share the planet with everyone else. And also, that doesn't just include non-humans, but all of the humans who are here. And sure, there are probably too many of us, but we have to do what we can to live well with the

people who are here now and figure out, you know, our better angels. How do you do that in a society that is just pounding each other? You stand up and do something. I've been working to try to rescue people that, and I don't care what your sexuality. I don't care. I don't care. I understand, I think, how people must have felt trying to rescue Jews from Germans. These people mean nothing to you.

Just give them to me. I will take them. And it's just... You're talking about Afghanistan? Yeah. Yeah. And it's just this weird thing where it's just, it's not even human. The emotion.

is it's weird. And I was over there and, you know, people started saying all kinds of stuff. And my first reaction was, no good deed goes unpunished. I mean, you can do anything. And nobody is, everybody's so cynical and everything else. How do you become better angels when there's zero reward for it in society? Well, it's punishment. in part we haven't really understood the puzzle yet all evolved creatures have the same purpose

and that is a very unfortunate statement because if it's if you share a purpose with a malaria pathogen it's not much of a purpose it's not honorable it's not decent so we humans have the most remarkable capacity to do tremendous things we can be compassionate we can develop insight we can innovate, we can create beauty, all of these things. But those are all, they all came to be in the service of that mind-numbing objective. But once you recognize that this is another place that our field has not been very good, we've given people the impression, and in fact most evolutionists believe that creatures are trying to produce as many offspring as possible.

And really producing more offspring is a means to an end. The end is to lodge one's genes as deeply into the future. possible. And so the reason that you see the pattern that you're seeing is because in fact people are wired without their awareness of it for lineage versus lineage competition. And to the extent that two lineages are fighting over a limited resource like a patch of territory, the desire to rid that territory of the other lineage is extremely powerful. This accounts for the greatest tragedies of history, I think without exception. And the problem therefore is to convey the message to whatever part of the human is is listening that actually the objective getting into the future requires that we stop doing that now that's how we got here but we have to stop doing the thing that got all of our lineages to this point in history if we want this to continue and really you know philosophically speaking we have the most

glorious opportunity that any creature has ever had the earth Earth, damaged as it is, is a beautiful place, more beautiful than any other we've seen or even have reason to know exists. I contend that it is a powerful spirit that is alive that will kill us before we can kill it. It will rid itself of the disease of man if we don't. If we don't, if we don't harmonize, it's bigger than us. It will just, at least I think. we're already seeing signs of things that it's doing, but it's going to survive. Well, even if it means it kills us.

You don't think so? There's a manner of speaking in which you have to be right. But I mean, just even notice that, you know, there are 400 civilian nuclear reactors operating on planet Earth that require constant vigilance to keep them cool enough that they don't melt down and spill out all of their content. So we've even set up nature. So even if we were to do ourselves in, we would take a lot with us. Yeah.

Right. We've created an inadvertent doomsday machine for no good reason. Yes. So the recognition that we have, the most beautiful planet that we know of, and that all we have to do in order to continue this indefinitely and really to provide the opportunity of being human, which is the most glorious opportunity there is, to provide it to the maximum number of people, all we have to do is solve the sustainability puzzle, right? All we have to do is figure out how to get along well enough and to not do things that undermine our opportunity. We have to not liquidate the planet. And that's really the puzzle we're trying to solve. So how do you do that when, I mean, this is a puzzle I've been trying to solve because I believe in, I believe in the free market.

I believe it is the fastest way to solve problems. but I also believe that you know you can't just read wealth of nations. You have to read moral sentiments. If the people are good, the free market will create all kinds of things. The people are not good. It will create whatever it is they desire. And there's something in, as I look at capitalism, you look at it and it goes great. and then people make a lot of money, as de Tocqueville said,

and they get a lot of power, and then they kick the door behind them, or they just get so greedy, they just, but the average person is, I've found, I've talked to Palestinians without cameras, talk to Palestinians, they sound exactly like the Jews. I just want my family. I just, all of this crap, that's the tired American.

How do you get that into the power structure? Well, okay. I don't want to get us too far afield, but I do think that this is a place where left and right need to see each other. They need to understand the part of the puzzle that the other gets and realize the part of the puzzle that they've got wrong. So I would argue markets are the best mechanism we've got. We're figuring out how to do things. They are absolutely brilliant at solving that kind of problem. they are terrible at figuring out what problem to solve.

As you point out, they discover every defect in the human character and figure out how to exploit it. And they turn us into monsters that we are not inherently. Correct. And so there are places that markets don't belong. Places like sex and music, right? Yes.

What you want to do is figure out how to take that amazing tool and point it at the problems that we want solved. And to keep it away from the problems we don't want solved. don't want it finding our defects. We want to tell it what our values are and then allow it to solve the problems of how best to reach and enhance those values. So the problem is if you're a market fundamentalist and you think, well, this is the best tool we've got for problem solving. Let's point it at everything. Then you end up creating the hazard where it solves all sorts of problems you don't want solved. And so really it's a tool. And, you know, just like a power saw,

right? A power saw is a great tool, but you don't want it running around. your shop, you know, you want to under control doing things that you need done. And that's possible. You know, on the left, though, what you hear is, you know, capitalism is the enemy, right? They don't like markets at all, right? And then on the right, you hear that markets are what we've got for solving problems, so let's get to it. And really the point is, let's figure out how to refine that tool so that it does what we need done. There remains the problem, though, that Glenn invoked, of the people who make it and kick the door closed behind them. Or try to.

Or the people who, some of them with very good intention that are working to solve problems that you're like, no, don't, no, no, what are you doing? No, no, that's a bad, but they feel it's an American, it's not an American thing. It's a human thing. There's a mountain. I'm going to cross it. And so they're breaking barriers that maybe we should hold off. I'm just let's just all talk about that before we do it.

I do and I think those are two different problems. Okay. Right? The the first one is one of sort of a willingness to dehumanize the other. Yes. So that you can excuse your own bad behavior. Correct. And that I think is easier, more easily dealt with, although we haven't seen it dealt with, than the sort of the tech utopianism of if there's a problem that can be approached,

then we will approach it no matter what and no breaks. Right. So can you tell me how do we begin to solve? If that is a problem, the first set of people, how can the average person begin to affect meaningful change there? We've begun to see, we know of some people and organizations who are explicitly working to bridge the divide, cross the divide. And it's very much like what you're talking about doing in Afghanistan,

but people working, for instance, within the U.S., to bring, you know, red voters and blue voters together into the same room and just have them meet and exchange names and eye contact and say, hey, I also have a kid and a dog and a mortgage, and I'm human too. Right. And there is, value for a very few in keeping us from recognizing each other's humanity. So how, with social media,

it's much harder to remind ourselves that we're all human. And I think, you know, basically what these sorts of conversations and as much in human contact as possible, we actually are engaging with people with kindness and generosity. But that doesn't, that doesn't necessarily get to the people who've already kicked the door, closed behind them. I want to introduce you to my Beatles' thought that I had. I was listening to, I don't remember which song it was. It might have been a revolution. And I had been listening to some John Lennon, and I thought, part of me said,

thank God they don't have that tool in their hand. because the hippie movement in the 60s, I mean, it did a lot of good. It also did some bad. But the real hippie movement was based, not in drugs or anything, it was based in love, a new kind of consciousness.

And you did have, if you listened to the music of the 60s, much of it is very inspiring, you know, and based in love, we don't have that now. We don't have a John Lennon. We don't have anybody preaching that. The songs, the culture, you said, keep, you know, business out of music, which I'd like to explore with you.

But we don't have a soundtrack that's helping us move forward in a loving way. Right. And the 60s had that. Well, all of these have been unnatural eras. And the problem is you have to track, you know, there, in some ways, we have. better music now. Because there are more bands. It's not all concentrated by the fact that you've got three stations in your area and everybody's listening to the same, you know, the same soundtrack.

You have a lot of room. But the point is it means that we're not synchronized in the way that ancestral humans would have been and that people were artificially synchronized in the 60s. I miss and, you know, this is so stupid, but I miss the fact that it was much watched, you know, must. watch Thursday night, NBC, and we all would come to work and we would talk about friends. Right. You know what I mean? I don't really miss that era, but I, there was something that bound us together that we don't have, except for the Super Bowl now.

Even if the TV was terrible. Yes. The fact that everybody was at least thinking about the same conundrum had a value. And so there's a question about how do you get the best of both worlds? How do you get the increase in quality that comes from having many more bands contributing to our sonic landscape, at the same time, you get enough synchrony that we understand each other. And, you know, again, the problem of hyper-novelty that we talk about in the book, explain that.

The rate of change that is outstripping our capacity to alter ourselves so that we are not being harmed, that we are not being made sick psychologically, physiologically, and socially by our environment. That problem is actually, it's multi-layered. So not only, you know, people our age have the experience of living in a very different world than they grew up. And we all remember, you know, at the beginning of the email era, right? We all made a mistake somewhere where we sent some email that we should have thought more carefully about and didn't realize that the bandwidth was going to be reduced and that somehow this was very different than a letter and it wasn't quite like a conversation. Yes.

Right. And the problem is, okay, we get that. but people who are young enough who have grown up online have this as their developmental environment. And I guess part of one of the many messages in the book is that there are things that physical reality will teach you developmentally so that you understand them, whether you could say what they were or not, right? If you walk into a bar and you behave the way people behave on Twitter, you'll get beaten up and you'll learn not to do it. On Twitter, you may not learn that lesson. In fact, you may get so many likes that you continue to do that because it feels like the right thing to do.

You may not understand, therefore, what human conflict is and why it should be reserved for very special circumstances. So what we are doing is we are not only creating an environment that we can't keep up with. We are creating an environment that is shaping our children in utterly arbitrary ways. And when they become adults, they will then be living in a world that isn't even that one that we created that shaped them. It will be some new world, and their toolkit will be out of phase with where they're going to be, and we can see this coming a mile away. What's it going to do to them? It's going to make them miserable and unhealthy, and the thing that we have to realize is that it's the generating function. We have to stop that process.

We have to slow down the rate of change enough that we can keep up. I guess one thing I would add is that the social media environment in particular makes us likely to choose our arguments for what we hate rather than with what we agree. and it's not that there isn't plenty to disagree with by saying, actually, I stand for this. And that other thing is something else that isn't odds with this thing that I stand for, as opposed to I hate that. I don't know what I stand for, but I hate that. And the standing primarily in opposition is, you know, de facto divisive and deadly.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm working on something now that, uh, um, I'm called, I'm calling the power of one, and it is just you recognize that you have control, not of everything else, but you. And just stand for, you know, I had a woman who saved Jews in World War II, and I had her meet with my family and tell her, she was 16 years old, she's saving 100 Jews, hiding them under her bar.

I mean, it's an amazing story. and she gave me some great advice. And in a nutshell, it is you don't have to be a hero. You just have to remember what your parents taught you was right and wrong. And just don't move from that. It's right. It's wrong. No, that person is still a person and I'm going to treat that.

I don't care what everybody else does. That's what I'm going to do. And it's hard now, however, because everything is, I said to my wife all the time, I don't carry a phone. And my wife does and everybody else does. And I'm like, you know, you just, we were fine without that. We were fine without that. And we can be fine again without that.

Our life may slow down. But you're convinced that you can't live without it. And then because it brings a lot of great things to your life. But then on top of it, while you're being convinced that, you're also being convinced that you should be the opposite of what your parents taught you was right and wrong. That's absolutely right. And I think there's part of what you're saying that's perfectly straightforward and clearly right, right? What's right and wrong has not basically changed.

No. But it has in society, but it hasn't in reality. Right. But it has in society, not because the fundamentals are different, but because the particulars are. Explain that. For example, our capacity to be rewarded for behavior that creates massive harm in lives that we never see. Even just, even your investment portfolio, right? You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, right?

You are in competition with other investors. And what you need in order to stay afloat is to find the investments that pay back. But those investments may be profitable, not because they are actually. actually enhancing the world in some way, but because they successfully externalize harm onto someone who can't defend themselves. And so that's obviously immoral. But if it's, you know, if it's buried in your retirement fund, you don't know that you're harming somebody else, nor are you in a position to do anything about it. So we have to begin to recognize that, although you can't operationalize this, but just as a thought experiment.

Hang on just a second. Yeah. Because what you sound like you're saying is ESG would be a good thing. But that is, then somebody else is making the judgments on what, do you know what ESGs are? Environmental social justice and governance scores. And all companies are, banks are now starting to make loans based on, well, are you involved in social justice? What do you, good? And that's in it right now, at least for sure, it's an arbitrary number. They decide what you are or what you're not. that institutionalizing that kind of stuff scares the hell out of me.

Right. Well, this is exactly the kind of thing that conservatives correctly fear. Because if you build that system, no matter how well-intentioned you are, it is guaranteed to be gamed. And it's just the next landscape of warfare. So that's not where you go. Well, and it includes a category error, right? Like lumping in environmental with social justice causes would seem to not be aligning those of us who deeply care about the environment and see a tremendous amount of harm. in modern social justice, for instance.

So I want to go back to something that we were talking about earlier, which is what happens when you gather conservatives and liberals together. And one trick that I have learned is that the first thing you should do is figure out what it is that you actually agree on. Because very frequently, puzzles that we differ over, actually there's half of them that we don't differ over. But we recognize the other person. and we sort of figure that everything that they're saying is wrong.

This isn't the case. So, for example, if I go into a room of conservatives, I can be pretty sure that we're going to disagree over environmental sustainability and in particular climate change, right? But if I asked the question, if you believed, and human beings were causing substantial alteration to the climate that was going to degrade the capacity of the earth, to sustain people in the future, right?

Would you be in favor of doing something about it? Virtually every reasonable person will agree to that. And then it's fascinating. It's fascinating because I, I, you can't argue with global warming. You can't argue with a thermometer. Right. Amar going up or down. What's, what's happening?

You can't argue with the changes that are happening. You might be able to argue is man doing this or is this cyclical, but we could have that argument and it's a healthy argument to have. What's strange is you can't have the argument on how to fix it. That's the hardest one. Right. That's the one that we're presented with destroy the planet or destroy humanity and everything that we have. Just burn it all up at once.

That's what it seems like to conservatives. You're like, no, I don't think we should do it that way. Right. But I'm sure there are things that we could agree on, but those things don't ever really seem to ever be talked about, that everything's always pushed. Well, that's why you have to get to the place where you've agreed that if we are damaging the planet in this way, that we all agree that we should stop, right? Whether we know how to do it, whether that's even plausible, because that is a conversation that people can have and be decent to each other, right? What do we do if that's where we are, right? Can I just interrupt for a moment. This reminds me very much of a framing.

in different domains that I've been making lately, which is two people come together, and the first person says, my God, there's a problem. And person B says, yeah, there sure is. And person one says, therefore the solution is X. And person two says, well, that's a big problem, but I don't think your solution's going to do it. And the first person, and this might be team blue and team red,

or it might be reversed, but the first person says, if you don't agree with my solution, then you don't think this is a problem. and there is just a basic logical failure here, but it is the way that many of us are demonized and dismissed because we say, that solution that you've come up with strikes us as wrong or incomplete or at least how about there's other things on the table.

Or another scam to build an empire of money for something else. Right. You're like, wait, that's not. But that rejection of solution says nothing about whether or not you thought there was a problem in the first place. And that, you know, I know, conservatives they um and this is not a blanket statement conservatives especially live in rural areas they consider themselves great stewards of the land and generally they are my grandfather i remember him saying all the time he's a farmer these nuts are telling us how to manage yellowstone

and the forest in california and i remember him distinctly in the 70 saying California will burn to the ground, burn to the ground if they do this. He was a real environmentalist in my book, you know, but God no, you can't be a environmentalist if you disagree with what they're doing to save the environment. All right. So the solution here, to the extent that there is one, is actually weirdly buried in the second to the last chapter of our book, because what we describe is a pattern, an evolved human pattern that goes back. millions of years in all likelihood. Certainly it goes back hundreds of thousands in which human beings swap out their software program to engage new opportunities. And the way they do that is by

plugging their minds into each other and essentially engaging in what we would now call parallel processing, right? And this wouldn't look like anything strange. It would look like people standing around a campfire discussing what the problems are, what solutions might look like, and with their different types of expertise, they would come up with a new solution, a prototype, and then over time it would be refined, and then it would be driven into the cultural layer and handed one generation to the next.

Now, the point, though, is this implies that our minds have two ways of running. If we are in a situation that our ancestors' wisdom is applicable to, then we are wise to apply it, maybe refine it a little bit, but not to question it too much, right? That is a naturally conservative impulse. If we are in a situation that our ancestors' wisdom is inapplicable because they didn't know anything about this predicament, then we have to rise to this collective consciousness and figure out what to do about the puzzle. And the point, we are in a battle about whether or not this is that moment.

Is this the moment to double down on the ancestors' wisdom, or is this the moment to do something different, which is inherently dangerous? It's that danger that liberals don't tend to see. They want progress. They want to fix problems and they don't recognize the hazard of unintended consequences. We are facing issues that are far more, in my opinion, far more dangerous than the 1950s. That was nuclear holocaust. This is, I mean, this is just, I mean, as Stephen Hawking said, the end of Homo sapiens by 2050. You make the wrong.

And he didn't mean that we'd be extinct. We would be chipped. We'd be. Incorporated. incorporated into it. So I don't want that. I don't think a lot of people want that. If we're not careful right now,

and no one is talking about it. No one's talking about the real, true peril that is on our doorstep. Right. The peril that is actually should be uncontroversial, right? Just the simple, the degree to which the power of our tools has gone up, the degree to which we are interconnected has gone up, We are now one experiment and your population can't make a mistake and go extinct and everybody else, you know, do the next thing.

We're all in it together at this point. But the key to getting people out of their autopilot cultural mode and into their conscious, how do we solve this new problem mode, is the recognition that the old program, when you run it, creates errors. It throws errors like a computer program that runs into some sort of an input it doesn't expect. And what are those errors that the old programming, the conservatives need to see? The fact that, for example, that we have a situation in which the most productive and dynamic nation that has ever existed, which has become a model for the West, right? People have rightly adopted what the founders got right and they've employed it across the world to good effect, that we would endanger that by failure. that by failing to recognize the humanity of other participants in that system in some sort of team sport mentality that jeopardizes the whole project is obviously insane. Just the simple

fact that we seem to be coming apart at the seams, despite the fact that whatever our problems are, the system is still functioning. So let me, amazingly so. Amazingly so. I thought we would be gone. Ten years ago, I thought we'll never, this thing is resilient. It's crazy. It's crazy. But the ancient wisdom would come from George Washington who said, don't do the two-party thing. Don't. Don't. Because you'll do tribal.

And then one person will realize they can milk it and become more popular. And then the other one will up their game. I mean, that's that. There's your founder's wisdom. Well, we did it. So now how do you undo it? First thing to do, I would say, is you need to recognize we need to separate effectively the founder's value.

from their mechanism, right? Their mechanism was great, but it's run its course. It's, it cannot solve these problems, right? First past the post is a lethal hazard now, and it's part of what's causing this, you know, team against team mentality inside of our system that threatens us. But the way you get to the conscious mind engaging the puzzle rather than the autopilot mind is you recognize the errors. And so if you get these puzzles really well refined, the thing, the thing that you see very often sounds like a riddle, right, or it sounds like a paradox. That's the indication that there's something here that needs to be thought about carefully rather than just doing what we all learned. It must be done. So I like to say the following thing. I'm a liberal. In fact, I'm a reluctant radical. I don't want to be a radical because radical change is dangerous, but I don't think we have a choice. We have to engage radical change as frightening as that is. That's one riddle. But the other side of it is, I want to live. in a world that is so good that I get to be a conservative. I'm not a liberal because

change is my objective, but we do need to get somewhere that the point is actually from here, change would be a mistake, right? Change isn't worth it. What we're upending is so successful at doing what we say we want to accomplish. So don't you think, though, that I could be wrong. I think the average person would agree with you on that, both sides, that this is a working, but, you know, when you say, because you scare me when you say, but the founder's systems aren't working, and we're not using the founder's systems. We haven't been for over a hundred years. We've upended all of the, because as you're saying, you know, we have to have these conversations, us standing around a campfire. What's happening to us is everything is global.

And so only the elites get to make those decisions around their campfire at Davos. Yep. And we're left out. The real change comes, real meaningful change comes. For instance, I'm not against universal health care. When you can show me, it works and can sustain itself. Otherwise, I hate this system too, but it's the best one we got. You know, so let's keep doing it.

We should be 50. states instead of one country, 50 little experiments. Try it. Do this. See what works. Take the best of that and work. But you have to break them down to the family, to the community, to the state before it goes global. Everybody now is trying to solve the problem for the world. Can't. Well, and it immediately goes there. The problem is you've got a tension between two truths here. And you know, the tension is a very real one. On the one hand, the idea of the laboratory of the states is a very good one, right? Prototype something and figure out how to get it to work before you globalize it because that's the only same thing to do. On the other hand, you have game theory puzzles that will call, you know, let's say, for example, you had a rational system of taxation. And then, let's say Oklahoma decides, well, you know what, we would like to attract some businesses. And so we're going to create a very hospitable business climate by lowering taxes in Oklahoma. businesses start flooding to Oklahoma. Every other state notices, hey, our businesses are leaving and they're going to Oklahoma.

They all lower their taxes. And now your rational across-the-board tax structure has triggered a race to the bottom. Break it down, I understand. Break it down even smaller, though. I'm using the 50 states as the biggest it should be. I'm saying all of these things, the single, and Eisenhower talked about this in his farewell address. And it's brilliant. If we would have listened to just that one address,

we would have fixed a lot of this stuff. The man, the single scientist working in a laboratory that is doing it because he has an idea and says, I think this might work. And my work his whole life on it. That's pretty much gone. It's now white coats in a laboratory working for somebody that's getting grants from somebody else. So we're losing the individual spark. That's the key to Western society is the individual spark.

Well, it's the environment that frees the individual to have the spark and to act on it. Yes. Right. So, you know, it's both things. And this is, yeah, I was going to say just that. This feels like a different level of the problem, which you may be right. It may then fall into the right solution that's more global. But, you know, we've talked a lot about the problem with modern science, which is exactly as you described.

that at this point, individuals have a very hard time saying, I want to be a scientist, I'm going to train to be a scientist, I'm going to go do science. You immediately get pulled into someone else's lab, with someone else's grants, with someone else's questions that they've already asked. And questions that you don't ask. And lots of questions that you are precluded from asking,

because what kinds of questions are getting funded by NSF and NIH and DOD right now is a question of fun. fashion and who's deciding what's fashionable. It is, in fact, you know, the elites, be they in science or politics. And it's very, very difficult. This is, you know, one of the reasons, actually, that we were at some apparently, you know, podunk little college in the Pacific Northwest for so long was that it actually provided the opportunity to ask whatever questions we wanted. It was one of the very rare institutions of higher ed, and it's not anymore, but it was one of the very rare institutions of higher ed in the modern world where you could actually investigate what you were

interested in investigating. That said, you couldn't do so if you were trying to do high-tech science. Anything high-tech still requires the big grants. And the universities want that because they get a big chunk of the overhead and that is how they are running. So it's the business model that is the flaw. So isn't this in the exact same situation that our pilgrims, the founders, whatever, came here for. That model is broken. It just doesn't work because it's now so corrupt that you can't work, except there's no place to go.

I mean, this is one of the things I like about Elon Musk. Let's get off planet before this thing explodes. You know, there's no place to go. We have to, right. We have to reboot without losing. The important framework. Right. Well, we are, ironically enough, doing exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.

We should be recognizing that we are in the same boat and that noticing each other's humanity is the first step. And then figuring out what we agree on is the second step. And from there, we can begin to engage the stuff that we disagree over and figure out where to go. And I would point out the solution to your puzzle, or at least the prototype for it. with respect to, you know, the laboratory of the states is actually a concept that comes out of Catholicism of all places called subsidiarity, which means everything should be governed at the lowest effective level. But it has to be the lowest effective level.

And we have some global problems, right? Those problems have to be governed at a global level, right? Not having the oceans governed by anybody is a recipe for disaster. Right. But having the oceans governed by a group of people that are just on the, the take and are all afraid of China or all afraid of us or whoever is also not a solution. Right. That's a, that's a band-aid that looks like it's going to heal, but it's festering underneath.

Well, you have two problems tangled together there. So you've got the how are we to govern ourselves issue, and then what are we to do about the corruption, right? Because we can say, look, certain things have to be governed at a global level and other things. You don't want your, you know, your local parks governed by the, you know, the global. structure, right? So we have to have that thing. But even if you had a system that governed everything at the lowest effective level, if it's corrupt, then it may be, you know, it may be worse than the problems

it's built ostensibly to solve. So we have to solve the corruption issue as we address the let's make sure everything important is governed. And this is one of these places where the founders missed it because they hadn't seen sufficiently dangerous technology to intuit. what a global problem of this sort would look like. There was no such thing as a manager or middle manager when they were around. Right. You know what I mean? They didn't.

The one thing I think they really truly missed was they didn't see that corporations could ever be more powerful than a government. Yeah, they missed the questions of scale, right? And they just could not, they could not imagine it. Right. And that's the first miss that I've seen that. They had all kinds of little safety mechanisms all over. That one, nothing. Nothing.

And too many conservatives are like, well, it's a corporation. They got, no, no, no, no, no. This is a different ballgame. This is a different ballgame. Right. We are de facto governed by these entities that we have no protection. No protection. And they are merging with the governments of the world.

And, I mean, I have always mocked, oh, you know, these. dystopian movies were like, oh, yeah, well, he works for the corporation. And it's like, oh, stop it. Don't laugh. That is exactly, the right or the left was right about that. The right was wrong. And now it seems like very few people even want to talk about that. It's like, wait.

Right. Major error. Suddenly talking about the problems of the corporations is not something that's on the table anymore. Right. Right. Yeah, which goes to a sort of overarching issue, which is, you know, the founders of course didn't know anything about evolution because it hadn't been described yet. What they effectively did was they created an evolving system.

And so what we are living in is the consequences of the fact that they built a system that has all of the characteristics necessary to create adaptive evolution. And creatures have evolved or as if creatures have evolved in it. And many of them are predatory and they're extremely difficult to reign in. Because they, I mean, one of the things, again, they had. an evolving system but it was evolving in structure so if you want to evolve because it becomes outdated amended okay which required the council to come together and so you weren't getting these little teeny changes that all of a

sudden a hundred years later amount to something that doesn't recognize anything constitutional you know what I mean no we are we are effectively on a craft hurtling through a dangerous landscape and there's no one at the helm. No one at the helm and nobody even, they'll give lip service to the Bill of Rights, but they don't actually stand for the Bill of Rights. Nobody does stand for the Bill or any. You're like, can we just get, can you get me eight of those? I'll get on board with you. Can you give me eight of those rights that you're willing to stand for right now? No, it's all, I mean, it's very There's almost literally nobody at the helm in the U.S. at the moment, right? We have an apparently

senile commander-in-chief who was effectively the choice of the DNC, which is not an elected body, and I don't know who's really actually running it. Right. I mean, in fact, I think if you were in on those conversations, it would be even more frightening because I don't think anything's really running it, right? It's, you know, it's a corrupt entity, and it is doing what corrupt entities do, which is serving very narrow, short-term interests, and the consequences for us as Americans and for the planet are, you know, absolutely arbitrary. This is very different than what humans have ever experienced before,

but it's very similar, isn't it? In some ways, yeah. I mean, we make a call for more campfires in the book, and as things are scaling up, there are, as you alluded to earlier, the equivalent of campfires that are happening outside of the reach of everyone else. Yes.

Whereas, it used to be, you know, we have always had hierarchy. All of our groups, all of our tribal groups have always had hierarchy. Often male hierarchies is separate from female hierarchies and then to some degree, some, you know, familial level hierarchies. But there is, there was an ability,

these like fission, fusion groups, were able to move in between each other and say, oh, I'm here now and you're here, and, you know, sometimes they would war, but more often they would meet and maybe sometimes exchange people, you know, in marriage, whatever. There wasn't the possibility of one of those groups simply owning everyone else. And in part it was because people really did come together in a way that was equalizing. Campfire, breaking bread. I see the whites of your eyes. The power amplifiers. It's the power amplifiers of modernity that are making this very much unlike anything that came before.

But it also, and I don't know which came first, the technology or the loss of this belief, but it is we didn't just come together to come together. We came together because in the end, I could see the whites of your eyes, but I truly believed you believed at the core fundamentally the same kind of, things that I believed. All men created equal. You know, you have a right to free speech, all this stuff. When we lost that, I don't know how to, I don't know how to get together with somebody who says, no, the bill of rights, no.

That's occasionally you can speak. You can speak if you have the, how do you? Because it feels like the media, the amplification, feels like half the country believes, half the country doesn't. or a third, a third, and then crazy, crazy crazies on both sides. What is the truth? Well, I mean, there is a long history in humanity of othering those that you, that are a threat to your own resources, right? In so many languages, those who are not you,

you, the person who is naming themselves are the chosen people, and everyone else is someone else. So it's not like that's new, right? but upon being able to come together, crossing those borders between tribes, generally there was a recognition of humanity. And I think, A, the scale problem, right, that we just, we have power amplifiers, we have too many people, and we have too little opportunity to actually engage. And this is where the screens are actually doing an incredible amount of damage that everyone talks about screens. But, no, we don't have the measurements for all of the sensory stuff that is being, interchanged when we're actually in person with one another, but there is value in that that no one

has named, no one has even attempted to measure or a few people have, and as we spend less and less time actually like in vivo with one another, it's going to be easier and easier to go tribal in this way that seems permanent. I would argue in the U.S., we have to take ownership of the piece of wheel, the equation that our side got right. wrong. And so... And each of us. Well, sure. Yeah. I mean, I went on the, they called it the Glenn Beck Apology Tour and they said it was for something. No, I, you can't be human, uh, really, truly human if half the country says they hate you and not go, gosh, do they have a point? I mean, am I that person at all?

And I did apologize for things that I thought, you know, I shouldn't have said that or I shouldn't to set it this way or whatever, we have to start here and then our side and then the world. You know what I mean? Right. Well, I mean, I agree. The hallmark of an honest broker is that you go back and clean up what you've got wrong. And that is fundamental. And there aren't enough people doing that.

But in this case, we have a tension. People detect something is wrong. Frankly, everybody knows the system is rigged, and for most people, the system is rigged against them. They detect it. And so the question is, is that because the fundamentals are wrong? Is that because the society that we have described is incorrect? Or is it because it is not working? And what we are seeing on the left, the collapse of reason that we are seeing on the left,

is really lots of people who know that things are wrong, who know that they have been taken advantage of and been mistreated, misunderstanding what the source of that is and not realizing that the right thing to pursue is a repair of the unfairness of the system. It is not the dismantling of that system because the system is the best thing that we have in terms of producing fairness.

It just, we never got there. And this is where the right, I think, has made an error, which is that the right imagined the system worked better than it did. I think that's changed a lot. I think it's changed a lot. I know 20 years ago, I was, golly, gee, gray and red, white, and blue. And now you're like, no, this, you know, but that's the problem is after you're done, if you have time, I'll take you over to our vault across the walkway here.

I collect everything that I can to preserve American history. But I collect a lot of the dark stuff about American history. I can outdo any liberal professor on the dark side of American history. It's important to remember that, you know. But I think there's a lot of people like I was 20 years ago that are just like, no, that's, well, we did me. What, I mean, no, we did some horrific things, horrific things. horrific things that need to be addressed and set right and just talked about and like, don't ever do that again. That'll leave a mark. But now, now, I think because the GOP 10 years ago

so betrayed the Tea Party people, and I don't mean all the Tea Party people, I mean the people who actually believed in the Constitution, it betrayed them. They went, ooh, that's what the first questions I asked you, your own side, have you gone, oh my gosh, that's not who I thought we were. That's what we went through, many of us. It depends what you mean by your own side. If you mean the Democratic Party, absolutely. The thing is, you know, it's metastatic, right? It is not, it went beyond the GOP. It was the whole system that we thought we knew what it was. Yeah. Trust. And it's like, no, that's dirty too. It's all dirty.

I mean, Occupy on the left is to Tea Party on the right, and I think very similar things happened for those of us who were hopeful that that could have been an answer, and to see it decay both for external and internal reasons. That it turned out not to have any possibility of success. That's what's sad about the Me Too movement. That's what's sad about BLM, because I've talked to people who marched in Black Lives Matter here in Houston where there was a shooting. and we all were huddling behind a car and didn't matter what color you were and we all were like, okay, this is bad and we started talking and a lot of people were involved in that

because they had real problems and real issues but that's not what the system was made for. That's not Black Lives Matter, ink. Right. That's right. Total difference. Right. This is exactly where we landed. Yeah. Black Lives Matter as a slogan,

as a belief, of course. Great, right? Yeah. Absolutely. It's too bad that it even needs to be said. Yeah. On the other hand, once you look at the fine print of what the organization was interested in. Right.

It's like, wait a second. And who even was running? I mean, the global thing is like, whoa, these are a bunch of white people. Like, what are you doing? What is that? Right. Well, and, you know, from defunding the police to attacks on the family, the point was it had nothing to do with black lives mattering.

It was a very bizarre. ideological agenda that was a lethal hazard to what does work about our system. Well, and the same arguments can be made without exactly the same corporate structure behind it for Me Too, right? Like Me Too had the potential to be an awakening, to actually reveal to the vast majority of good men who are out there, that the vast majority of women have unfortunate to really intolerable and horrible experiences as young women. And most men don't know that because most men aren't those sorts of men, right? Like that's what it should have been. Instead, it went off the rails because it was, maybe because it was designed to, I don't know.

But it went off the rails. But we've, you know, I said at the end of the Barack Obama administration, he made me a better man. I didn't like him at all. I didn't like his policies at all. He made me a better man because he pushed me against the wall all the time. And I had to go, wait, is that right or am I wrong? Or what's, what's, I mean, we are learning a lot. There was a lot of good that came out of me.

to and Black Lives Matter, even if it wasn't directly related to their goals, a lot of people did step back and they didn't necessarily join in. They were just like, you know, they have a point on that and that and that. And that's good. Yeah. Some good things. I mean, to get back to an earlier point, you know, I think liberals had so many successes in the 20th century, right? You know, women's emancipation and civil rights and gay rights and worker protection. Worker protection. protections. And these became values that almost everyone holds in common. And I think because of that momentum, it now seems to many on the left that change must always be necessary. And as you said earlier, Brett, you know, change isn't inherently good. Change isn't inherently bad. Change will sometimes

be necessary. And change isn't always necessary. And if we're actually moving in the right direction, upending the system that's moving in the right direction is clearly going to be a betrayal of the values that you are claiming to have. Are you guys optimistic? Occasionally? Well, if I can return to the idea of an adaptive valley, things are very dark. And that doesn't necessarily mean one shouldn't be optimistic

because in some sense, they would have to be in order for us to accomplish what we need to accomplish now. darkest before the dawn. Right. And so the problem, if you think about, you know, the adaptive landscape I was describing, the problem is if you have to move on from the opportunity that you've been exploiting and to find a new one, it is very easy to head in a direction where that opportunity does not exist. It's very easy to pass into that valley and to not arrive somewhere. So what you really need is very careful thinking about where that next opportunity is. And whatever the explanation for it, if I, you know, if I could get one thought into the mind of Americans generally, it would be that

something has us divided for reasons we may never know. There may not even be reasons. It may just be some process. But the key to us getting out of this is the recognition that most of us agree on the values to be pursued. We agree on what a good society would look like. We may disagree on how close we are and what might be done to get us the rest of the way. But we agree. We don't want a system that is rigged in favor of one race

and against another, for example. We don't want a system that bars people from doing whatever job they want to do because of the sex they were born into. We want a fair system in which opportunity is broadly distributed. Now, once you recognize that virtually everybody you meet can agree to that much,

and then you realize that we've all been led to believe that there's another team and that those people don't agree, they don't agree with you on anything, right? That they're bad people who want bad things. And the point is, well, all right. Wouldn't the right thing to do be to recognize we know what the objective of the project is. We all understand something has gone awry. And the correct thing to do is to talk to each other about how we might get ourselves out of this and get back on track where we can fight about the details of how to get there, not where we're going. Historically, you guys are on exactly the right path, one that wasn't necessarily taken.

The last time we had a horrible, horrible world war in my research over the years on the Holocaust, the biggest thing that happened was nobody knew Jews. The Jews that were saved were generally saved by people who said, Yeah, the Jews are like that. But not this one. I know this one. And when you understand that, you realize we better start talking to each other. That's right.

Because, oh, I'll save a conservative or a liberal, because I know this one. Well, the rest of them are like that. No, that's not true. That's not true. I call it the comic bookification process. Yes. We believe that we have the capacity to be superheroes, and we believe that there are supervillains on the other side of the screen or out. there in the world. And it is the very, very, very rare human being who is either.

We just, you know, look within yourself and see no matter how remarkable you are, what your weaknesses are. Or if you're in the opposite camp and you feel that you're not doing well, find the strengths that you have and recognize that that mixture in different amounts, in different relative amounts, is going to be present in every single other human being. Yeah. You know, it stops us from wheeling gallows in front of people's houses. That's right. Right.

Which, of course, is returning into. Yeah. Passionability. I'll tell you something funny, right? We live in Portland, which, you know, is almost a cartoon of liberalism. You know, Texas exists. Right. And there are liberals here.

We have met them. Yes. But even in Portland, where you would imagine that there's just simply no reason to be accessed. A funny thing happens, for me at least, and I know for Heather, when we are open about our doubts about the conventional wisdom of the left, which is that people who would espouse, you know, all of the usual slogans, as soon as they hear that you're actually, you have your own doubts and that you're willing to voice them. It is amazing what people will volunteer. So why do you think they work so hard to silence?

people who have just a little bit of courage. They need to silence that courage. They need to crush it. Courage is contagious. Courage is contagious. You're absolutely right. And this is where this impulse to authoritarianism comes from, right? Because they need to control the conversation in order that the doubts don't emerge and

restore us to a conversation that might actually stand a chance of putting us back on track. Yeah, and it is remarkable how many conversations both Brett and I have had with, you know, UPS drivers, cashiers, waitresses, whatever, or just overheard while paddleboarding or, you know, sitting in a park and then sometimes talking with the people and sometimes just eavesdropping. But, you know, it's Portland. It's mostly liberals. And the number of people who are saying, this thing is coming. It's authoritarian. It's dangerous. And, you know, it's Portland. And. we need to stand up is high. It's still quiet, but it's a lot of people. My guess is it's coming from the left faster than it's coming from the right, but it will come from the right too. We're passing all of the exits where you're getting to such, I mean, this is the way revolutions happen, communist revolutions happen.

You sow the seed of discontent, you overload the system, you get it, so nothing's working there's no safety anywhere and the people will cry out help us and they will and they'll crush that um and it'll be either side that does it if we don't change our way soon yeah it's imperative and um you know we are prevented from doing it by being told that uh you know you will you will you will be guilty by virtue of your association as if you talk to people on the other side and those of us who have talk to people on the other side, you know, have paid a price for it. On the other hand, it's quite clear that that is the road forward. It is. You know, it is. Anybody who can't manage it is, is not going to be of help. I started this podcast three years ago. And you were the number

one target to put on this show. Because I wanted this show to be a model where people can disagree and we go away friends. We can see each other going, you're a normal person. I'm a normal person. We don't hate each other and we don't hate the country and we don't hate freedom. We just disagree. Right. That's right. Let's not conflate the ideas with the person. I'm glad that you're both here.

I hope you come back. Thank you. Thank you so much. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.