The Joe Rogan Experience - #1705 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

Biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are the hosts of the "DarkHorse Podcast" and authors of "A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life." Look for it on September 14, 2021.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Okay, we're up. Hi. What's up? Good to see you guys. Hey, Joe. Great to see you.

Really good to see you. Yeah. Welcome back to the land of the healthy. Yeah. It was a quick trip. Yeah. Wasn't that bad. That's amazing. Yeah. Here you are. Hail, hearty, wonderful. Yeah, that can happen, folks. There you go.

That's one of the things that can happen too. Yeah, it's kind of an important lesson because obviously, you know, you're one case and, you know, that could mean anything. But obviously, you got treated aggressively early, which doctors who have been successful with COVID tell us is the way to deal with it. And in your case, it does seem consistent with what happened. Yeah. There's obviously a lot of factors, you know, in terms of like treating it early, medication, you know, having good doctors, having access to good health care, all that stuff is very important, obviously. But just to know that there are – because I wasn't vaccinated,

so it's good for people to know that there are health care options. There are things that you can do that will get you healthy very quickly. And that seems to be left out of the conversation completely. quickly. And that seems to be left out of the conversation completely. Yeah, I worry about the fact that we now know a lot about how to treat this, how to manage the disease itself. And because this has become so politicized, lots of people who get COVID, vaccinated or not, I mean, there are plenty of breakthrough cases, people who get this disease need a doctor who will go after it aggressively early, prescribe the right medications. And when they do, what typically happens for people who are reasonably healthy is they do get better quickly. And so,

you know, how do we alert our medical system that we all need the Joe Rogan protocol at the point that we get sick. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to see the conversation that includes being healthy before you get exposed to. Right. I mean, that's part of your outcome is because you're a healthy guy who exercises and eats well. And there's nothing on that in the national conversation about COVID. No, there's no profit in that. Right.

Unfortunately, you can't sell health unless unless the government invests in a series of gyms, you know, that have some sort of incentive in terms of like weight loss, fitness gains, and they actually profit from that. We're doomed. Well, I gotta say, I don't understand. You know, let's let's take something that should be uncontroversial. Vitamin D clearly has tremendous benefits. And when people are deficient in vitamin D, they're vulnerable to all kinds of diseases, including COVID. And it's not a small difference in their vulnerability. How is it that in light of that, that we're not treating vitamin D as low-hanging fruit and just simply saying,

look, this is something you have to know. It comes from being exposed to the sun. If you're not getting enough sunlight, you're probably deficient, and supplementing is likely to be helpful. How are we not recommending this? Probably because of the same reason why we're not recommending other drugs, because vitamin D is generic. Okay. Everyone can make vitamin D. You can't corner the market. If the government comes out and says we need to make vitamin D, they're going to make a bunch of supplement companies a lot of money selling vitamin D. You can't corner the market. If the government comes out and says we need to make vitamin D,

they're going to make a bunch of supplement companies a lot of money selling vitamin D. But anyone, you guys can open up a supplement company, and it's literally not even FDA regulated. I mean, maybe I'm just being naive. You're being naive. Yeah, no matter how cynical you're being, you're being naive. We're trying to be rational and calm through this thing, but clearly we're all through the looking glass. And we see how insane the propaganda's been with all this horse dewormer talk in relation to ivermectin.

And we're just in this weird place where we almost don't want to admit how bad things have gotten in terms of the way information is distributed and manipulated. Because it's done so in the most transparent way possible. And it's spooky. It's spooky to think that these mainstream news publications have been completely captured. Completely. To the point where they're all spitting out the exact same narrative. And you're watching it in real time. You're like, like wow this is crazy

yeah yeah i want to i want to say something about horse dewormer i want to talk about her book but i want to say something about horse dewormer first i definitely want to talk about your book yeah but um i mean never before have i wanted to talk about horse dewormer but i feel like it now um so ivermectin you know the the drug that shall not be named. Sure, it works against worms in horses and other organisms, but it's literally understood. It's on the Who's list of essential medicines and has been for years. The discoverer and developer won the Nobel Prize for it in 2014-15, I can't remember. And it's literally understood to have antibacterial and antiviral qualities and works against lots of other RNA viruses like Zika

and dengue and yellow fever. And no one is talking about that. So is it not as effective as some people think it is against COVID? Maybe, sure. But is it dangerous? No, it's been given hundreds of millions of doses. And is it effective? It seems so, but given that it's safe, why are we using it? And you were explaining to me the actual dosage that you would have to take to get sick off of this in relation to all these fake stories, the ones that Rachel Maddow tweeted, saying that gunshot victims have to wait in line at the hospital, which is a full-on lie that the Rolling Stone magazine printed. Full-on lie that gunshot wound victims are waiting because the hospitals are overrun by people who have overdosed on this horse dewormer.

But what is the actual study show? Well, because I'm neither a doctor nor a toxicologist, I'm concerned about citing the result. But I did pursue this with a friend of ours who is a PhD toxicologist and said, what are the chances that these stories of hospital beds filling up with people taking too much horse paste are true. And he found it very unlikely on the basis that even a massive overdose does not seem to be destructive, even over the course of many days that he was referring to a primate study in which very high doses were given to monkeys. And so in any case, we don't know what the truth of these things. We obviously don't know anything about whether the horse paste is, you know, well produced. It's possible there's something else in it that's not supposed to be there. But the idea that the drug itself is causing a wave of overdoses that is putting people in the hospital is inconsistent with the toxicological data that we've got.

I think it's probably causing a wave of calls to poison control centers with people asking questions. Yeah, that makes sense. Right? But people asking questions is not the same thing as people being poisoned. And at the same time, one of the things that we were talking about earlier is that there is a drug being developed that mirrors the effects of ivermectin. Yeah, a protease inhibitor. Ivermectin. Yeah, a protease inhibitor. And, you know, who knows, it may work, but let's say it does work and maybe it runs into less resistance because it will be under patent and therefore profitable. One thing that it definitely won't be is something that we have enough experience

with to know what its harms are. The thing about ivermectin is because it's been in use for 40 years and has been administered something like 4 billion times, we know a lot about its consequences. And they're not zero, but it is one of the safest drugs available to us. There's this thing that's happening, too, though. And this is where it gets fascinating because there's the psychology of these drugs and of compliance and of which team you're on. Are you on team, you know, mainstream news, people that follow the news in a sort of a peripheral sense that believe everything Fauci says and don't understand how bizarre these things get when massive amounts of profits are involved.

And these people automatically want to ridicule anything that might be outside of the realm of what's being promoted in the mainstream media, which is get vaccinated, which is really all you're hearing. Yeah, we need to be we all need to be on team skeptic, right? Because, I mean, if you just simply track the stories that we have been assured are true, that have then shown themselves to be false, right? Like the overdoses that were keeping gunshot victims out of the hospital. These stories are revealing that something is just not right about our way of even doing journalism anymore. And the fact, I don't know what to make of it, but the fact that Anthony Fauci was yesterday revealed to have clearly lied to Congress

when he told them we didn't fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. I mean, that was obvious when he said these things, but everyone assumed he had defined the terms in some way that would justify that claim. No, it was just a lie. So here we have somebody who lied to us about masks, has lied to us multiple times, and was also apparently a key to conducting funds in violation of our own ban on gain-of-function research, conducting funds to the Wuhan Institute, which may well have caused the pandemic. How is the person who is in the position to have circumvented a congressional ban on this kind of research and possibly, therefore, have played a prominent role in producing the

pandemic, how is he also in charge of keeping us safe? And why are we tolerating him lying to us? So you said we all need to be on team skeptic. I think Joe's exactly right. We're all being told you're on team blue, effectively, you're on team mainstream, or you're someone else, you're persona non grata, and you're going to become a second class citizen. I was going to say we all need to be on team science. And, you know, this is, you know, this is in part why we're here with you, right? That, you know, we are approaching things scientifically. And the people who keep on adopting the mantle of science are like, no, I'm, you know, follow this hashtag, follow the science, right? All too often, hashtag,

follow the science. When you dig, it's like, oh, well, we went into a back room somewhere and concluded some things. And we're going to tell you the conclusion. But just listen to us because we're scientists. You can tell because the lab coats like no. Actually, that's not how science works. Science works by by investigating patterns carefully and really, really, really trying to falsify your cherished results. And we see very little falsification going on right now in mainstream media land. One of the grossest things from Fauci is when he said an attack on Anthony Fauci is an attack on science itself. That's right. Like that is bad guy in a movie shit.

You're right. It's cartoon villain. Third person bad guy in a movie shit. Like you're literally referring to yourself in the third person. is madness yeah it is it is madness and then somehow i mean it seems to me that were there some you know normal process running that just simply the number of lies that he has told the number of places that he has been in error his prominent role in possibly causing the pandemic, a normal era would have him fired long ago and replaced with somebody that we had reason to believe might be capable of doing the job well, might have our interests at heart. Something is very far off that this thing just keeps running,

no matter what evidence of dishonesty emerges. Yeah, it's very strange. It's very strange. It's like we lost our minds during the Trump administration and objectivity got completely thrown out the window. Tribalism got ramped up to 11. And if you're on the right team, they'll protect you.

And he's on the right team. And they got him in this slot as the expert that we go to no matter what and he's the guy jim acosta was talking to about horse dewormer yeah that's right absolutely um you know when i heard that you had taken horse dewormer i thought joe is so famous i bet the Poison Control Center called him. LOL. But no one's, again, what no one's, all these stories are focusing on is this horse dewormer shit. No one is focusing on the fact that I got better in five days. Yeah.

Literally six days later, I was working out. It would seem to be a demonstration. You know, it's an anecdote. Yeah. And, you know, it's not the only anecdote, right? Trump, who is not a picture of health, also got better very rapidly. And his doctors didn't give a damn about what we were supposed to believe works and doesn't. They gave him the kitchen sink treatment, as you got. Right.

And, you know, Pierre Corey also got COVID, also recovered very quickly. Why? Because he was capable of getting whatever he needed, whatever the right thing was. And really, the public needs to realize, vaccinated or not, you need doctors who will prescribe those things that we think have the best shot of managing this disease. And it certainly looks like this disease, which is very dangerous, if allowed to run its own course, can be managed with drugs that we happen to have already. That's a hopeful thing. And, you know, please, people should not take up a position that is going to mean that when they or their loved ones need those things, they won't be available because their doctor's too afraid to prescribe them. Yeah. And that's where we are now. One positive story that I did see actually was out of Hawaii where they were examining what I did and they were saying, are we doing enough to keep our because Hawaii has a bad situation. I believe they're number one in terms of like bad results for COVID.

And they were saying, are we doing enough to keep our patients out of the hospital? Are people who catch COVID are our citizens? Right. And, you know, even one state bucking the trend and doing the right thing would be enough to tell us how well it worked. We would see a pattern presumably like is seen in India, where you had a diversity of different approaches between states. That was the only story that I saw where they were examining all the different things that I took that I talked about. And they were saying, hey, we should probably do this. all the different things that I took that I talked about. And they were saying, hey,

we should probably do this. Yeah. I mean, certainly we should be taking that approach. And it would be the most American thing to do, right? The founders believed in the laboratory of the states that this was a way of discovering what works. And it's time for us to apply that approach. My real fear is that we've gone so far in the wrong direction that all faith in mainstream media news journalism is gone and that we're we're stuck in this position where we're going to consistently question every single story because they're going to be proven to be bullshit a certain percentage of the time and we're we're we lost then, because what are the reliable sources of news other than independent sources that you could find on YouTube and some other platforms? There's not much. Yeah, well, I think some of the problem is just as too many teachers don't

have a serious background in the things they're teaching, what they have a background in is the act of educating. And the act of educating is often not a good act as it is done. Too many journalists, even science journalists, don't necessarily have a background in science. And so they're reporting on the science. They're reading things and they're too credulous. Like they just believe what they see or they believe what the authorities wearing the mantle of science will say to them. And that passes for scientific inquiry. And it's not. And that is what we try to do in life, right, is how is it that we can help people understand what you would need to know in order to make sense of this crazy landscape, like the media landscape, the educational landscape, the health landscape, the what you should eat landscape.

All these landscapes are just decohering, right? So how can we make sense? And can we get ourselves out of this? Because we need to. We've only got the one planet, right? We're going to need to fix this at a society level and an individual level. Like, you know, you are now again healthy and hale and fit and you were before. I suspect that a lot of that had to do with the fact that you eat well and you exercise and you spend time outside. And, you know, those are some of the things that create health in a person. Healthy people tend to do better even when exposed to nasty pathogens than unhealthy people. This isn't rocket science. No.

And my real fear is that other countries are looking at this and laughing and they they are contributing to this sort of confusion. And they're enjoying the fact that we are very vulnerable as a country. We don't trust our leaders. This Afghanistan thing has been a gigantic clusterfuck on top of the covid thing. And, you know, and who knows what else is coming? Well, the Afghanistan is an interesting comparison, because in some sense, if you've been tracking our response to COVID, it looks a lot like our response to Afghanistan, right? It's not functional. It doesn't make sense even on paper. And the difference is that it's not – the failure of it is not something that you can film in the same way as our failure in Afghanistan. But you asked the question about what can we do.

You're right that the things that are supposed to work, right? Our universities are compromised by politicization. Our media apparatus is not doing the job. We do not have journalists with the resources to go chase down these difficult stories and figure out what's really going on. So we do have a lot of excellent people on Substack writing important things, but we don't have newsrooms that are capable of marshalling the kind of resources necessary to do the work. On the other hand, resources necessary to do the work. On the other hand, we have some tools that are not being well leveraged. And I think, you know, one of the reasons that you have the gigantic audience that you have and that we have the very large audience that we have is that there are ways to sort this

out that are basically low tech. And so, you know, for 15 years in the classroom, what we taught our students was something that we informally called the evolutionary toolkit. And the evolutionary toolkit actually allows you to check what you're being told in many cases and say, well, that's unlikely to be true because it's inconsistent with what we know ourselves to be built for. For example, this is really the subject of our book, is if you knew what you were and therefore what environment you were well matched to, what could you say about the environment you now find yourself in and its consequences for your health physiologically, psychologically, our collective social and societal health? You know, there's a reason that all of those things are jeopardized and it has to do with a mismatch between what we are and where and when we are. Right? Those things are in conflict now.

And specifically, we make the observation, which is not new, that we are changing our world so fast that even though we humans are better at adapting to changing environments than any other species on the planet, even we can't keep up. Like, we need to, we need to figure out how to move forward. No one should want to go back, but we need to figure out how to go forward and to at least gain control over the rate of change rather than have it just running away from us and us always playing catch up. And then there's an issue, the massive issue of tech censorship. And it's a giant one. And you guys have done a fantastic job of being fair and balanced and looking at the facts. And yet still you've been demonetized. And YouTube, fortunately we're not on YouTube right now,

right? So we can say whatever the fuck we want. But YouTube has taken this position that they can dictate what should or should not be discussed and talked about even in terms of rock solid undeniable science and when youtube has done this they've done this in a way that they've been really obviously wrong here's here's a big one the lab leak hypothesis if you discuss the lab leak hypothesis you were lab leak hypothesis, you were censored from Facebook, you were censored from YouTube, and now that's the primary theory. The primary hypothesis is that it came out of a lab. Yeah. I mean, in fact, to the extent, there's lots of evidence that could go either way.

But of the evidence that points in one direction or the other, it all points to the lab, right? That doesn't nail it completely, but it does say that the smart money is on this came from a lab, and now, you know, how much more do you need to see, right? There are those of us who were saying, look, all of the evidence that distinguishes between natural origins and the laboratory points to the lab. We had Anthony Fauci and Christian Anderson and Peter Daszak and that whole crew swearing that the evidence pointed towards nature while privately in their emails. They acknowledged that, in fact, the genome was inconsistent with the natural origin. And then we find Fauci lying about the fact that we, in fact, sent money to Wuhan for gain ofof-function research of exactly the kind that had been described as likely having created this virus. So that's a lot of dots that you can simply connect

that we all know are right, right? We've now seen the emails. We've heard the lies, right? We've seen him lie directly in Congress. So how much more would you need to see to say, actually, you know what? It just simply is the most likely explanation. Nobody in all of this time has come up with a plausible story in which it could have come from nature. But yet YouTube is still trying to attempt to get people to self-censor by making it so that it's financially detrimental to you to discuss this. They demonetize your channel. They make it so that you literally can't make any money off of your program. And the problem is that they are

doing this arrogantly imagining, or claiming at least, that what they are doing is advancing a scientific worldview, when what they really mean is the worldview of scientists that they like. But the fact is... Well, it's the worldview of fact-checkers. Yes, it's scientists they like, but it's also specifically fact-checkers who aren't even scientists. You know, another word for fact-checkers in the modern era is censors. That's just what they are. And so, you know, it's effectively science-ish for hire. It's not science.

Right. The scientific process itself is one in, I mean, automatically when science works, what happens is it tells you that things you used to think were true aren't and that something else is true. Right. That's the progress of science. And so the idea. Or things you never imagined were true turn out to be true. Right. It's not just reversing a negative into a positive. But, you know, there's discovery, which is, you know, which is the wonderful and hopeful and amazing part of science.

Like, oh, we didn't even imagine that before. And here's a new thing. But the idea that they want to say that they actually know what, you know, the tell is in the word the before science, right? It's just so frustrating because I don't think they understand it's one of the best things about YouTube is the fact that people like you guys can put a show on where you both have this very strong scientific background. You can discuss these things in an educated way, and it's incredibly illuminating and enlightening

for the people that don't have your background to listen to you guys discuss this because there is no one like you in the mainstream media. There's no people like your show. Your show doesn't exist on MSNBC or CBS or any of these other networks. And I think it can only exist in a place where there's no one hanging over your shoulder. The two of you just discuss things based on what you understand, what you don't understand. You're so careful about it. You're so careful in pausing and saying, well, let's be clear.

We don't know this or we don't know that. Or here's what we can be assured of. And here's where the questions lie. And you do it entirely honestly. And the fact that they've decided to censor that it's one of the most disheartening things about this incredible potential of new media like what they've done by opening up these platforms for anybody to put on shows is yeah you're gonna get a lot of q anon crazy shit and you're gonna get flat earthers you're gonna get a lot of wacky stuff that's confusing.

But you're also going to get folks like you guys that find this massive audience. And the Dark Horse podcast is one of my all-time favorite places to go to for information because I know that you guys will treat each individual story completely honestly. And you'll examine it from all ends. You'll spin it around and look at it. You'll steel man it. You'll straw man it. You'll examine the arguments against and for. You'll argue against yourselves. Well, and, you know, ironically enough, you know, we ended up podcasting. It obviously isn't anything we ever thought we would do. I know the same thing. Me neither. That's what podcasting is. To you. But in some sense, we were driven out of the college where we were doing

something like that in the classroom. And the audience was slightly smaller. It was a whole lot smaller. And we knew them all individually, which was great. And we missed that. And we knew them all individually, which was great. And we missed that. But the point is, actually, there is a mechanism for doing this, right? This is biology, right? It's not high energy physics where everybody's a spectator except the tiny number of experts. You can actually understand what's taking place in biology. And there's no reason that you cannot converse with another biologist and say, here's what I see.

Here's what I would predict. And then, you know, if it turns out that what you predict is correct, then the point is, well, that suggests that maybe the underlying model that resulted in that prediction is also true. What else does it say? Or that prediction didn't turn out to be right. Maybe there's something not right with that model. What needs to be modified about it? This is all something that we can do in plain English, in conversation. And, you know, it's not bullshit. It's actually, it works. And it's really science in a way that it used to be done by the people who were best at it, right? Darwin, for example, right? Origin of species is a logical argument, right? One end to the other,

in which he says, here's how you'll know if it's wrong. If my explanation for how creatures ended up the way they ended up is incorrect, here's where you'll know because this won't turn out to be true. And here are some things that worry me, right? Things like why do ants, bees, and wasps cooperate at the level that they do if I'm right about the level of competition and its role in shaping creatures? And it turned out that, you know, 100 years later, we know the answer to the question of why it did not prove Darwinism false. But Darwin himself worried about things. He showed his work.

It's a method that functions. And we're losing track of it because we've got all this fancy high-tech science stuff. losing track of it because we've got all this fancy high-tech science stuff and people like to be razzle-dazzled and be told about, you know, the latest sequencer and what it's spitting out. But the fact is, at the end of the day, biology has to add up because creatures have to function. Yeah. Excuse me. And the new way of doing science, which is so high-tech and so expensive, tends to come with a lot of numbers. Like you end up with numbers at the end of it. And we love numbers, we people, right? Like once you have a number that you can grab onto, oh, I got a seven. I got a seven. What? What is that? As soon as you have a number, you grab

onto it and it feels more real than actually I went out into the field and I had my rubber boots on and my machete and I was out there doing science, believe it or not. And no, I don't have any numbers for you. And that's not to say that you wouldn't necessarily generate some things that were measurable and that were worthy of being measured. And you ended up with some statistical results at the end. But the actual like process of scientific interrogation and like pattern recognition and looking around, it's not about numbers for the most part. It's not about quantitative. And indeed, one of the things we talk about in the book is this sort of this oscillation between culture, the perceived wisdom, like what has worked and what will continue to work if things stay the same, and consciousness, where we expose

ourselves to new ideas through conversation. And one of the ways that we expand consciousness for humans is hallucinogens, right? And I'm not saying like hallucinogens are necessarily part of science but they can be a part of the scientific process if what you're doing is saying i don't know what to think i'm stuck how can i get unstuck like how can i get my brain unstuck i'm trying to figure something out and that's a big part of what humans do how to get unstuck doing this going out into nature taking some mushrooms this book that you guys wrote first of all we should probably tell everybody the title a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century and it comes out september 14th and i must say we should have a copy of it

with us but we don't because apparently the pre-orders are so great that the box of them they were supposed to send us went to other people. There it is. There it is. Oh, Pam. Well, congratulations on that, though. That's great news. Thank you. Did you guys read the audio book?

Yes. We did. Thank you. Oh, my God. I hate when an actor person, nothing wrong with actor people, but when they read someone's book and I know the author, I'm like, no, how dare you? Right. The problem is people are going to resent the chapters that I read because Heather's voice is extremely popular and they're going to wish she had read the whole thing. In some circles.

In some circles, it's just the opposite, I think. I doubt that. So what was the motivation to this book? I doubt that. So what was the motivation to this book? Well, basically, because we had been teaching this material to students, and actually many of them had literally tried to talk us into writing a book very like this. This had been going on for a long time where we taught them what we called the evolutionary toolkit. They found it extremely useful. For some, it revolutionizes the way it extremely useful for some. It revolutionizes

the way you see your own life. It simplifies it. It makes things much more intuitive. And so they were very hungry to have something to pass on to others so that they could say, look, here's what I learned that changed the way I see myself and my love life and all of these things. But they didn't have something that they could hand off. And so we had been discussing for at least 10 years this, you know, this very title. And at the point that we were driven out of Evergreen, we were approached by an agent and we were talking about what book we should write. And it was like, well, you know what? Now is the moment. Now we can take this book, which we knew needed to be in the world but nobody knew who we were and now was the time to produce it yeah i mean it's it's kind of the

everything book that's what our agent said he's like you know you guys are thinking about sex and gender and you're talking about health and you're talking about hallucinogens you're talking about on society-wide solutions can you put it all into one book and then, you know, maybe later turn any given chapter you want into more books? So, you know, we talk about health and medicine. We talk about food. We talk about sleep, sex and gender, relationships, parenthood, childhood, school, how to be an adult, and how to fix society. And that's a lot for a not very long book. So, you know, we don't go in depth on a whole lot of stuff. We try to provide the analytical tools, just like we do when we're talking to each other on Dark Horse,

so that you too, anyone listening, watching, could figure out how to do those same kinds of analytical tricks in their own lives. Like, what should I eat? And this was the thing. We taught at Evergreen, and we spent a lot of time in the field with students, both domestically and abroad. And so we spent a lot of time sitting around campfires and just breaking bread together and, you know, and throwing the Frisbee together. You know, it wasn't just sort of stage on the stage delivering unto students what it is that we think is true. And they would ask us these things like, gosh, you know, my love life is not working out how I wanted it to. And, you know, when I eat these things working out how I wanted it to. And when I

eat these things, I don't feel so good. Why might that be the case? And how might we have a democratic society that's actually functional and is resistant to things like tyranny? So, you know, those are three questions that, of course, any young person, any age person, but any young person should be interested in. The first two are pretty simple. Okay, go for it. The third one, I want the answer to that one. How do we avoid tyranny? Well, first of all, you have to realize why there is tyranny, right? And so one of the things that we talk about, humans, like every other creature, evolved as a result of competition. Competition is, in some sense, the tool that sculpts creatures. And in our case, what we have is lineage against lineage competition. And effectively, what you have is various levels of what we call game theory. Game

theory involves the dynamics when you have limited resources and how those resources get apportioned. So the game theory causes various different lineages to deploy power against each other. And so it is not- Let me just say that the competition between populations doesn't necessarily look like physical aggression. Like war is one possible way that that looks, of course, but it can be, you know, it can be interference competition of, you know, one population seeing a resource that they want and going in and taking it before another population has a chance. You mean exploitation competition? Sorry, I mean, exploitation competition. Yep. So, you know, essentially what you have is tyranny unfolding

because there's a conflict between the story that we tell ourselves about being a people and wanting to accomplish a goal. And there being various subgroups that have interests that are in conflict with that. Right. So ideally, a pluralistic liberal society wants to distribute well-being and opportunity broadly, right? It doesn't necessarily mean wealth has to be evenly distributed, but opportunity really should be as broadly distributed as possible in order for society to function well. Because what that does is it gives an incentive to the largest number of people to bring positive things into the world, whether those positive things are artistic or innovative or insight. Those things are things that enhance our well-being. On the other hand, if you're doing very well,

then you have a perverse incentive where you don't really want other people's children competing successfully with your children. You want to use what advantages you have accrued to give your children the ability to out-compete other people's children. So I would argue this is why we are perennially fighting over the question of how schools should work, right? Because you can't really say the truth, which is that many people who have advantages that they can provide their children, right, better schooling, don't necessarily want to provide good schooling to other people's children because that would create a level playing field which they're not after. They may not even- Do you think that's the case with people? I don't think they necessarily know. I think they often talk themselves into believing that they are

motivated by something else. But how would it not be this way? Because it doesn't really affect you. I mean, it's famine thinking. If you're talking about the entire country, right? If you're talking about like large scale implementation of education. Right. But this is in some sense, one of the points of the book is that we are living in circumstances that don't look like any prior ancestral environment. So one thing that's different here has to do with the scale. If you imagine, though, a small group of people looking at another group of people, right? Let's say that you have two neighboring populations and one population is incapable of defending the resources that it has. It can utilize them, but it cannot defend them.

How would it be that evolution would avoid the calculation being done by those who were in a position to take those resources, right? If selection is a competent, and mind you, we have to be careful here, we are not defending the idea that we should want our genes to be in the future and to drive out other people's genes. But selection clearly does. So it builds us to view the world in such a way that we properly give whatever advantages we can to our genes at the expense of whatever competitor genes are out there. And one thing that evolutionists have done poorly until this point is they have often focused too close to the individual.

And then we've gotten into fights about whether or not the group is a viable unit of selection, which it isn't. But the lineage is a viable unit of selection, right? Lineage is our effectively gene pools of related people. And a gene pool can thrive and then it can blink out if it makes an error or if some other population gets in the way. And so in effect, we have not been built to understand in literal explicit terms what we are doing, but we have been built to take on belief systems that cause us to, you know, regard some population as not worthy of the land that they are on because of the terrible way that they are behaving, right?

So then we will come up with a causes belly and go after them because the underlying genes have predisposed us to get in the road of that population and to find a way to take its resources and provide them to our own gene pool, right? That's a very dangerous pattern and it's one that we can't allow to dominate the future. It has, in large measure, shaped history to this point, but the obstacle that it presents to us continuing as a planet, right? We cannot continue to be warlike given the modern weaponry that we have, given the way that our societies are all interrelated, given the necessity of keeping certain systems running so that they do not permanently degrade the planet. Nuclear

reactors, for example, you can't have them in a war zone where somebody is going to lose control of them because suddenly they will spill out the materials that they have been loaded with and have generated. So, I mean, in some sense, this is weird because we're starting toward the end of the book where we've discussed belief systems, the fact that they are not inherently literal, that they are often metaphorical, but that they predispose us to certain ways of behaving. In the second to last chapter, we talk about the fact that human beings move. I mean, we have talked about it earlier in the book, but we talk about the fact that human beings move. I mean, we have talked about it earlier in the book, but we explore thoroughly the idea that human beings naturally,

unlike other species, move from one niche to the next, that we actually have a mechanism for bootstrapping a change in software that allows a creature, you know, that may have survived by hunting marine mammals to move into a terrestrial niche and, you know, hunt terrestrial mammals and then move into agriculture, right? That move from one niche to the next is not a usual thing for most species, but in human beings, it is the norm. And so the mechanisms that underlie that are what is under discussion here. We are now at a moment where we actually do have to change what we're doing because the very thing that brought us to this moment of success is now a threat to our continuing on this planet much longer. So we don't provide a blueprint.

There's no blueprint. Anyone who claims to know how we avoid tyranny has to be lying or confused because we can't know. But what we argue is that we can get ourselves collectively to what's known in evolutionary biology as an adaptive foothill from whence we can start to explore and hopefully ascend that adaptive peak to a place where we cannot have unadulterated growth anymore. There's just too many people, too little space, too little resource. But we are evolved to crave growth. Growth feels good, right?

It's just, you know, I want more, I got more sugar, more sex, more adventure, like more, I want more. And so how do we compel ourselves that we're getting more even when we're not actually taking more from either other people or the planet. And that's, you know, it's a trick, but we think it can be done and we think it has to be done. So, again, it's weird to be at the end of the book here at the beginning of the discussion, but we describe in the book what we call frontiers, right? And there are several different frontiers

that we describe. The first one is a geographical frontier, which is the classic, right? Some landscape that is unexplored. And to explore it is to provide growth to your group, to your lineage. There's a technological frontier in which you take some landscape that is not new, but you figure out how to do more with it. Both of these things increase population size. You terrace a hillside where before the water was just running off. Technological frontier, you increase the capacity for growth and therefore for people on that land. So the third kind is not a true frontier. It does not increase the number of resources, but it functions from the point of view of any population. It feels like a frontier and it involves basically theft. We call

it a transfer of resource frontier, where a population figures out how to take resource from another population and reappropriate it. And what that does is it causes a burst of growth for the population that took the action, right? That can't continue. And what we argue is that there is a fourth possibility, that because human beings, like every other species, craves growth or its equivalent, that you have to deliver something that feels like growth in order for people to be in any enjoying the fact that they are in an abundant circumstance. You can't generate permanent abundance. Growth is not a process that continues indefinitely. But you can engineer something that feels like growth, just the same way that your house inside feels like springtime all the time, right? That doesn't violate any laws of physics. There's no mystery to how we do it, right? We change the temperature inside by

spending energy. And, you know, as you're cooling your house indoors, you're warming your backyard and you don't notice because your backyard has an infinite volume, right? So how are we engineering something that feels like growth? Well, what you do is you deliver something that feels to the individual like growth. And in fact, we've seen prototypes of this. It wasn't the fourth frontier, but the sort of 50s view of your career, right? You join some sort of a company and, you know, at some rate your income goes up. So you have the sense, you know, you have more spending power, you have more control over how you spend your time. And basically that to the individual is the equivalent of growth, but it does not require

that the company was getting bigger. So we can do these things. If we recognize that we, the animal, are addicted to the feeling of growth, but that that growth does not have to be growth of our society, of our economy, of our population, that it can be just simply the somatic sensation of growth, then we know what we're shooting for. And so, go ahead. That's the basis of martial arts. You know, the basis of martial arts is belt progression. It's one of the main motivations. You are rewarded with a new color belt that indicates your progress.

There it is. Oh, that's good. I was going to say, and I think that's a better analogy, but there's a good analogy in food. You know, people who were consumers of fast food and have weaned themselves and now eat a diet that is better for them, if they actually persist in that, it's because they found a way to love the new food. They found a way to love real meat and real vegetables and real fruit and, you know, depending maybe grains, et cetera. But it's not that they are constantly feeling deprived.

People who are constantly feeling deprived on the diet they're on don't stay on that diet. Right. Or they cheat or, you know, whatever it is. And then they are doing this giant oscillation. So how is it that people can learn how to actually love a diet that is, you know, and I, you know, I do, we do, you know, delicious and nutritious. There is something that we are going to black box here, but we know that it can happen. So there, excuse me, there has to be the capacity to do that around other things as well. So society level solutions. And I mean, I think, I think the martial arts question is, is perfect. You know, how do you create reward without spending? With food, there's a literal change in the gut biome, right? Yeah. So that's

a big one. Like, uh, my wife has a, like a legitimate gluten intolerance, you know, and a lot of people, that's very trendy, you know, this gluten intolerance. You know, and a lot of people, that's very trendy, you know, this gluten intolerance. But she went to an allergist and actually got tested for various food allergies, and one of them was gluten. She cut it out of her diet and has had an immediate response. Like over the last four or five weeks in doing that, she feels way better.

And she said it was rough at first because she loves bread, you know, the smell of it, the feel of it, the taste of pasta. But she's completely cut it out except one time I tricked her into going to Felix in Venice, my favorite restaurant, and we ate pasta and she felt like shit. There it is. So, yeah. I mean. That was the one time.

But you can now, you can trick your gut bond not trick you can train your gut train just get it healthy food and your body craves healthy food like if if you give your body a lot of salads and and like lean meats and you've you want that that's what you want like when you're hungry you'd like a fresh salad you'd like a nice piece of steak. Well, so there are a couple of puzzles there. First of all, I should tell you, I have a wicked wheat allergy, right? I discovered this 10 years ago, something like that. And the tiniest amount of wheat is trouble for me. Like breadcrumbs on a piece of fish? Oh, yeah. Oh, a breadcrumb can do it. Even whiskey, which isn't... Really? Right. Oh, you want to hear a good one? Bombay

Sapphire Gin, which I didn't think had wheat in it at all, and it's certified gluten free, is made with wheat, and it triggers me, which I discovered. So what is the trigger? What happens? All kinds of things, which I didn't realize were symptoms of anything. I just thought they were part of life. Right? So I got all kinds of gastrointestinal

stuff. My hands fall asleep when I'm sleeping. Migraine headaches. Asthma. Like you wake up with numb hands? Yes, all the time. But with no wheat in my diet, this goes away completely, as have my migraines gone away. It's amazing how many things it was messing up.

Let me just add before. I know you're going somewhere. But I think gluten allergies, gluten sensitivity, is a really great example of how confusing the modern landscape is because for reasons that we could get into, there are a growing number of people with legitimate gluten sensitivities now. And then it's also true that it's become fashionable not to eat gluten. And there are a lot of people who don't eat gluten as a choice, as a fashion choice, that have no reason not to be eating gluten. And the fact that that is true has meant that those people, like your wife, like Brett, who actually have a real issue and they can feel it immediately, practically, I mean, within hours, and you're just a different human being, that's for real. And yet much of the generic human response, if you don't

know anyone with this wheat sensitivity, is like, for God's sake, it's just another fad. It's like kale. It's the thing that you're supposed to do right now. And isn't that cute that you're off gluten? It's like, actually, this is going to have a very real effect for some number of people. I have no idea if that percentage of people in the US is 2% or 20%, honestly, at this point. But it's very real. And then there's also a lot of people who are, frankly, you know, playing at it. Right. You know, that's... It's hard to tell who's who, though.

Oh, yeah. It is, unless you're on the inside. And like, unless... Probably not that great for everybody. Well, I don't know about that. Yeah? Let's put it this way. Modern wheat, I would say. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Maybe that modern wheat is a problem, although I should say my reactivity doesn't distinguish,

which doesn't mean that modern wheat wasn't involved in causing it. But I do think for all the amount of pathology that is evident, you can even see it standing on a street corner in a major city and watching people pass by. They do not look like wild creatures. Many of them you can detect that they are unhealthy, right? Really not. That's such a great statement. They do not look like wild creatures. They do not. You can see the pathology, right? And for many of them, where the pathology isn't apparent, you couldn't, if I walked down the street while I was eating wheat, you wouldn't necessarily know that I had a wheat problem. I didn't know, right? But the thing is, it is conspicuous.

There's no reason that I should have an allergy to wheat. My ancestors have been eating wheat for thousands of years, right? So there's an obvious question. One is, what do you do if you have such a sensitivity? That has gotten fairly clear. Right. doesn't have these sensitivities. And yet what we really have is, you know, a puzzle that we don't focus too much on. Why are so many people, why are so many kids allergic to peanuts, right? Why honey? Why wheat? What is going on that is effectively causing the contents of our guts to become a focus of our immune systems, right? And there may be several different layers of explanation. It may have to do with the fact that the fraction of the immune system that causes allergies

in a past environment had something else to do. So, for example, the IgE system, immunoglobulin E, is the primary antibody group involved in allergy. And in a past environment, it would have had an interrelationship with parasitic worms. But we don't have parasitic worms at a very high rate in the developed world, right? We've dealt with them successfully. And so you have this part of the immune system that has nothing to do, and it may overreact to things that it shouldn't be reacting to at all. But there's also a question about why it's able to see them, right? So we should be looking at the root cause of these things. And although those of

us who have these sensitivities can't do anything about them except avoid the things that trigger us, those who are young and don't yet have these sensitivities, we can protect them. But we have to understand that this is not, you know, just as we are told that, you know, the epidemic of children's teeth not meeting correctly in their jaws and needing to be moved around by orthodontists is the result of bad genes. That's nonsense. That doesn't make a whit of sense. Right? It can't be bad genes.

Right? It's too rapidly progressing. Something else. Look at skulls of people from pre-industrial revolution and you don't have malocclusion. You don't have people with jaws and teeth that look like our modern jaws and teeth. They think it has something to do with soft food, right? Right. Exactly.

So I believe Mike Mew, who I actually had on my podcast. Yeah, Mewing, exactly. Mike Mew, I think, has cracked the case, but you should also look at what has happened. Can you explain to people what? Yeah. I think has cracked the case, but you should also look at what has happened. Can you explain to people what? Yeah. Dr. Mew, who is actually second generation on this topic, his father, I think John Mew,

first started to innovate the study of the interrelationship between diet and the development of our jaws. And what John and Mike Mew have discovered is that because we have effectively made the diet for very young children very soft, that what we have done is caused a collapsing of the palate. So effectively what we don't intuit is that it's not that our genes describe a skull shape that we then get and are stuck with. Our skull shape is dynamic, and that skull shape is responsive to the forces that you put on it, right? Just like you can make muscles larger by stressing them. Your jaw responds to what you chew on as a baby. And if it ends up chewing on things that are too soft, it gets narrow, which creates a large number of pathologies that actually have nothing to do with teeth. But what we all come to understand is, oh, my jaw isn't big enough for my teeth. Maybe my wisdom teeth need to be pulled out because there's not enough room for them. That should set off alarm bells.

You have a jaw that doesn't have room for teeth. Selection doesn't work that way, right? If your jaw wasn't big enough for your teeth, selection would have eliminated the teeth or it would have made the jaw bigger. The fact that something has got these things mismatched tells you you're doing something. There's something novel in your environment that's causing this. And in this case, it appears to be the change in diet that we have inflicted on very young children, which also the good news is that means if you stop doing that, you can stop harming these kids. They won't need to go to the orthodontist. But the punchline of the story is that Mike Mew is in danger of being

driven out of orthodontia because his heterodox view of malocclusion is at odds with the central narrative around which all of orthodontia is based. Does he have clear evidence that his methods work? Yes. I've only seen it discussed online. I'm pretty ignorant about the method. It has to do with something like pressing your tongue against your palate and eating like beef jerky or something. Well, there are two things.

Chewing gum. Okay, here, young Jamie on the ball as always. Here it goes. Keep your mouth closed and your teeth gently touching and move your tongue to the roof of your mouth and lightly press. Your tongue is resting at the top of your mouth. Be sure to not block your airway as you breathe. So you're supposed to do that and breathe? Yes.

Yeah, and this is a response to not having had sort of the right developmental environment in the beginning. Oh, look at all these results. Yeah. So, you know. Oh, look at that lady's jaw. That's crazy. Babies who are breastfed and who are then given hard things to chew on and who aren't

given binkies or pacifiers, whatever you want to call them, don't tend to need this. Right. But if you were given an artificial nipple to suck on a lot as a kid and you were only given basically very soft food for a long time there's a good chance that your jaw is smaller and less well sorry yeah well so i mean actually i wanted i feel like this is the right moment to talk about hyenas look at this lady like that is crazy is that real yes yeah she had like this little tiny ass jaw and then she developed a real normal one. Because, I mean, we think we know that muscles grow with use, right?

We don't feel like bones do. Why? Because they're like hard. They seem like once your bones are what they are, they're just going to stay what they are and where they are. But here's an example from hyenas. going to stay what they are and where they are. But here's an example from hyenas. So hyenas eat meat, and they have big-ass sagittal crests on top of their heads by which the muscles, the masseter, is attached. And that allows them to shear meat with their teeth. Hyenas raised in captivity actually do not develop those sagittal crests. And therefore therefore they do not end up with the big masseter muscles and they end up basically unable to do the kinds of meat eating that wild hyenas do. All it takes is a different development environment and you have literally different bone development in what is basically equivalent genetic starting points.

So part of what we're talking about here is, yes, obviously genetics is real, genes are real, but of all the species on the planet, we humans are the most flexible. We're the most software when we're born. And even other animals like hyenas, which are, you know, plenty, you know, mostly driven by their genes, all you have to do is give them a different environment early on in their life, and they actually don't even become, they don't even look like wild hyenas anymore. Their skulls don't have those sagittal crests, and they can't do what hyenas do. So I want to make two points about this. One, it is interesting to find an entire field,

orthodontia, telling one story, and then a couple of renegades saying, that story isn't right, And then a couple of renegades saying that story isn't right and here is my track record of fixing people who have an obvious pathology, right? It would seem like it doesn't make any sense to bet on the couple of renegades. The problem though, I knew that there was no defense for the orthodontic explanation for malocclusion. It has never made sense to me that there's suddenly an epidemic of bad genes that is causing our teeth not to fit in our jaws. I didn't know what the explanation for this change was,

but I knew it was going to have to do with novelty. Mike Mew has done an excellent job not only figuring out what's causing this and how to treat it, but he's also done the work anthropologically. He's gone through the anthropological record and made the case, and it is rock solid. It is evolutionarily totally coherent. And he has looked at comparison with other animals. Also, his argument is evolutionarily coherent. So with the evolutionary toolkit, you can look and you can say, look, I don't care how many orthodontists are saying that Mike Mew is crazy. He's saying something

coherent and they aren't. Exactly. Science is not done by consensus. It's not a democracy. It's not majority rule. Right. There's an underlying reality. Sorry, you may like it, you may not, but it is what it is.

Right. He may not be. I'm sure there's imprecision in what he's saying. There must be little things that aren't quite right. But overarchingly, he's saying something that makes sense. It adds up, and evolutionarily adding up is something it must do. And if you think about what you also know, you can tell that our sense of like, you know, the genes give you a shape of your skull can't possibly be right because your genes are a composite of two people's half genome, right?

You can put any two people together and you can get a coherent skull. That means that the genes can't describe a blueprint for a skull. What they do is they describe rules by which a skull that makes sense emerges, right? It's a feedback with the environment. And you know this is true because- Yeah, again, not a blueprint, but a starting place and sort of very loose instructions. It's instructions that- But then involve feedback. but a starting place and sort of very loose instructions. It's instructions that cause things to work. And actually Heather can describe, I want to come back to the skull thing, but Heather can describe she did these laboratories in which people would dissect animals.

And so there would be, you know, 20 versions of an animal open on the tables at the same time. And you would think there's a description of, you know, this artery goes from this starting point to this endpoint through this path, but that ain't so. Yeah. So, I mean, I taught comparative anatomy as part of what I did. And we, comparative anatomy refers to comparison between two species. So we had sharks and we had cats, and every pair of students had a shark that they were dissecting over the course of 10 weeks and a cat that they were dissecting over the course of 10 weeks and a cat that they were dissecting over the course of 10 weeks. And what we were supposedly doing, again, was like going like, OK, jaws and sharks, jaws and cats, homologous to one another.

But look at how different, look at how many different muscle groups there are in cats, et cetera. But for me, exactly as Brett says, some of the most interesting insights that we had were on a day when we only had the cats out, say. We would go around and look at everyone's cats, so a room with like 13 cats in it or so, and say, okay, what doesn't vary? Is there always a femur? Are there always two femurs in a cat? Yes, yes, there are. Are they always the same length relative to the tibia and fibula? No, not necessarily, but they're always in the same orientation. Are the muscles always attached to the same places? Yes. Are they always the same size? No. Okay. That's not that surprising.

But things like circulatory structures were wildly variable. And so even the shape of the aortic arch, which is super important, it's the first branch off the heart, would sometimes have another branch off of it very soon. Sometimes it would take a while. And these were all functional cats that were euthanized late in life. These weren't cats that died because they had improper aortic arches. So the point is there's so much diversity, even in something as important as the aortic arch, that is actually functional. And that tells us, okay, as long as, with regard to blood,

as long as it gets where it's going, it's probably going to be okay. And there's going to be people with better and people with worse, cats with better, cats with worse. And, you know, not so much with a femur. You know, if your femur is not actually in your hip socket, it's not going to do a functional job as a femur. But if you're, you know, if one of the arteries or veins that's running alongside your femur takes a slightly more circuitous route, you might be a little less efficient. You might not be the marathon runner. But you're probably going to be okay. So the amount of variation that's possible and that's actually not just possible but normal in a healthy functioning population of humans or other animals is extraordinary. Which implies that what's in the genes is a rule rather than a description of a

structure, right? The rule causes the blood vessel to find its target and it may travel an unusual route based on some parameter of development. But the way to really see it is to think about domestic dogs, right? The variance within that one species is absolutely gigantic and you can mate any two of them. Yeah. Right? So if you can mate, you know, a Great Dane and, you know, a toy poodle or something, right?

And the developmental program can figure out how to do that, right? Which it can. The way it's going to do that is not based on the fact that it has, you know, a design of a large dog and a small dog and it has some calculator that figures out how to average them or something. It's going to be based on rules and those rules actually have to be set so that they do not kill the mother, right? If you have a small dog gestating a large, you know large fetus, that's not going to work. So the whole thing has to be rule-based, which we see actually across all complex creatures, including plants.

We see, you may have seen descriptions of Fibonacci sequences, these mathematical sequences in the shapes of plants. And you think, oh, Fibonacci sequences are written into the genome. But they're not. What's written into the genome is a rule that says place the next leaf at the place where the concentration of two hormones from the last couple of leaves is at lowest concentration. Why? Because it tends to get the leaves out of the way of the shade of the leaves that are already there. And if you think about what leaves do, they work best when they're not in the shade. And so what you have is a rule that's so simple and so good that if you reorganize the plant,

it will still put the leaves in the right place. You can come up with a totally new shape of the plant and a rule that says, put this next leaf where it doesn't detect the last couple of leaves at a high rate, that will move it to the optimal position. And you'll be able to basically stretch and pull and reorganize the plant and get something coherent, which is the same for dogs. And it implies, again, about our skulls, that our skulls are really a dynamic system. And what we've done is given them bad info that results in malocclusion and other pathologies, but we could just simply stop doing that, right? We could figure out what the good information is. We could let children

gnaw on things that would properly strengthen their jaws and would result in their face shape being correct rather than collapsed. And this new fellow, what's happening with him? I haven't checked in with him recently, but the last I checked in with him, which might have been just pre-COVID, he was in jeopardy that he was being threatened with having his license eliminated. But what do they look at when they look at the results? What is their response to all these positive results? They think these people are faking it. They think there's like. Well, but I mean, us this seems crazy, right?

He's obviously – we can tell you he's telling an evolutionary story that makes sense and his detractors are telling one that doesn't. And he's got results. But you've got an organization. Yeah. The accreditors and those who are preserving the status quo are not on his team. So what does their actual argument sound like? I don't know. I don't think Brett knows.

But we've all seen cases of the status quo telling a story that actually doesn't make sense, but it doesn't matter because they have the power to tell whatever story they want. So the people that are dishing out braces are very unhappy with his new methods. Believe me, they're unhappy. And in part, I can't say what their conversations with each other sound like. But if you think about what, if Mew is right, and it sure looks like he's going to be right, then effectively what he's providing is a mechanism to prevent braces from being needed for almost anybody. That's a huge threat to this industry. And I will also tell you, I'm now speaking from personal experience,

we are all harmed in many ways by a modern environment that is giving us inputs that don't make any sense. But we also benefit, right? Yes. As we talk about in the book, like the three greatest successes of Western medicine, antibiotics, vaccines, and surgery, right? Amazing. Also, all of them used sometimes where they don't have a place, right? Just to say that, oh, are we living healthier lives in part due to these modern advances? Yes.

Yeah. Are we also living unhealthier lives in part due to the modernity that we are all being forced into? Yes. Unquestionably, right? Yeah, unquestionably. Well, both. I mean, you can see our longevity, our maximum longevity hasn't changed, but our average longevity has gone way up, right? our maximum longevity hasn't changed, but our average longevity has gone way up, right? Clearly, we are getting benefits from the modern environment, but we are also paying needless costs, right? So the ability to move teeth in order to get them organized well is actually borrowing, you know, like all of our best medical tricks, it borrows from an evolutionary system

that's already there, right? Vaccination borrows from an immune system that's ready to learn a molecular formula for a pathogen. In the case of teeth, your teeth have the ability to, you will have hit a tooth and felt it loosen and then it tightens back up. That's because it's sitting in ligaments that actually monitor forces. And when you loosen it, it can tighten back up because your teeth are built to constantly adjust their position, right? As your face shape changes with age, your teeth are readjusting where they're supposed to be. So what orthodontists do is they take advantage of this and they basically exert forces on the teeth, which cause them to move through the jaw, which is really cool that you can do that, right? So the bone actually breaks down in front of the tooth and it builds up behind the tooth

and the tooth literally moves horizontally through the jaw, right? That's awesome. Problem is, it's not free. You're borrowing from your lifetime capacity for your teeth to adjust where they are. And in my case- And for your bone to reabsorb and to grow. Right. So in my case, I had the following awful experience. As a kid, I had orthodontia, and I assumed it was over and done with. And then as an adult closing in on 50, I started having issues. In fact, I had a tooth shatter. And when I went to the dentist to have this dealt with, they did x-rays, and they said,

well, the roots of your teeth are short. And I said, why is that? And they said, probably because your orthodontist moved your teeth too fast, right? And I've lost multiple teeth and had to have implants to replace them. So, you know, this thing that seems so marvelous is actually, you know, it's like a comedy of errors. We had a diet that caused my face shape not to be right, which caused my teeth not to meet up the way they were supposed to, which caused an orthodontist to move them, which caused those teeth to prematurely fail, which then caused me to have to get some new novel technology. What's the consequence of implants?

I don't know, but I do know it's tied into all kinds of systems that have implications, right? But I do know it's tied into all kinds of systems that have implications, right? Among other things, they're not moving with your jaw in the same way that the remaining original teeth are. So, you know, can we avoid this? To a large degree, we can. You know, like some people will need orthodontia for sure no matter what it is that they eat, no matter how awesome their early developmental period is. But can we limit the kinds of people who have stories like Brett just said? Yeah, yeah, we can. So we should. And that's, you know, that's, that's really, you know, the lesson, especially if like the early chapters of the book, where we're talking

about individuals, we're talking about health and medicine and food and sleep, like, okay, how is it that we can actually be the healthiest and, you know, thus be, for instance, the most resistant to disease and then, you know, and then go forward and have the best relationships that are the most, you know, not just amazing in terms of productivity, but fun and unexpected and full of joy. Which, you know, one of the lessons of the book is it's not like we're saying, do what the ancestors did. And it's not like we're saying intervene to fix things. It's a mixture, right? What we should do for children is we should figure out what diet it is that results in healthy face shape so your teeth don't need to be moved, right? So that's a case of restoring

something historical in order to get to proper health. On the case of vitamin D, it's actually kind of the opposite. If you live in a place or you're wearing clothing that is going to prevent you from producing vitamin D in sufficient quantities on your skin in exposure to the sun, which is the way it naturally happens, supplementing is a really good idea. And in fact, many cultures have done that, whether they knew that that's what they were doing or not. In fact, most of them did not. What were they supplementing with? Fish oil. Cod. Cod for the Vikings. Cod liver. What were they supplementing with?

Fish oil. Cod. Cod for the Vikings. Cod liver. So, you know, everything in our system that is unhealthy is going to require a mixture of what harm can we just stop doing so that the pathology is not so pronounced and what interventions are necessary to correct for what harm remains. And the fact is we can be much healthier and we can live lives that are much less impeded by these things if we recognize, you know, we should be looking for that way of living that minimizes the interventions necessary. It won't be zero, but that minimizes them and allows us to basically not live in conflict with our environment, but live in harmony with it, which is going to require us to alter the environment. The mewing thing is fascinating to me because how does one guy

figure this out when we've been doing millions and millions and millions of braces. How many people have gotten braces? And how does this one guy go, you know, I think, let me just take your tongue. I mean, isn't that, that is insane. There's so many of these individuals like that throughout human history where one person goes, I think I have an idea. And then everybody else goes, you're fucking crazy. This is not going to work. This is preposterous. It's not that simple. You're oversimplifying. But it turns out they're correct. One of the things about Mew, as Brett said, is that his dad was doing this as well.

So Mike Mew was actually second generation. And the reason I think that's relevant here is that very often those one-off brilliant geniuses who saw things that nobody else could see and were vilified for it had someone or someones, but at least someone who they knew would be totally honest with them and would say sometimes, you know what? I think you're making no sense. I think you're off here. I don't think this is right. And I think you need to sit down and shut up for a little while and rethink this. And who would also say, yep, I know you're being yelled at. And I know the rest of the world appears to think that you're on the wrong track. But walk me through what you're saying. Okay, I'm going to add to that. And I'm going to correct this little thing here. And here we go.

I think we can do this. So, you know, the power of partnership, of relationship is part of what makes humans so unique as well. And I think most of those extraordinary innovators from history and discoverers will have had someone with whom they were actually sharing many deep insights. Yeah. In fact, Darwin's an interesting one because his grandfather Erasmus really began the logical inquiry that resulted in the origin of species. And they didn't even meet, right? So effectively Darwin, Charles picked it up from I believe Erasmus' journal. But anyway, the point is, yes, it does take time. Some ideas take generations actually to mature.

point is, yes, it does take time. Some ideas take generations actually to mature. But I will say there's another point in the question you asked about why Mike Mew, right? If you look at the video of him interacting with his colleagues, there's some early video where he began to explain what it was that he understood what the logical basis of the story was, the evolutionary argument that got my attention. And he is, you know, you've heard Jordan Peterson, among others, talk about disagreeableness. Mike Mew is disagreeable. And I don't mean he's not a nice guy. I really like him as a human being. But you can see in the way he interacts with his colleagues that he is unafraid to say, actually, you have it wrong, right? Now, it happens that the people who dominate these fields will very often be people who were way more diplomatic than that.

And that meant that when it was time for them to say, no, you have it wrong, they probably didn't. Well, and I think, I mean, so just to, neither of us are psychologists, as I think you were not, Joe, is that right? Nope. But so, you know, at considerable risk of getting the actual definition wrong, this question of agreeableness versus disagreeableness that Jordan Peterson talks about

is one of these traits in like the big five personality trait assessment thing that interestingly has a prediction around sex, that women are much more likely to be high on the agreeableness scale than men are. And as we move farther and farther towards a like agreeableness at all costs, civility, which, you know, I think we need to be civil to one another, but often that is a stand-in for if you disagree that wasn't civil, which is not what that's supposed to mean. Then we have a breakdown of sense-making, frankly, because what that does is it sends all the people who actually do disagree underground. And they're just kind of mumbling to themselves and they're in the corner going like, oh, that was a ridiculous meeting I just had to sit through. I didn't agree with any of it. But everyone who spoke up because it was understood that the only

reason to speak, the only conditions on which you should speak is to say rah-rah, that presents this sense of consensus, right? It leaves people who didn't speak with the sense of, oh, I guess everyone agrees. And no, like there's so much now that people are agreeing to because they have the sense that everyone else is on board with this. And even though there's something in my brain, I got some spidey sense here thinking this isn't right. Well, if everyone who spoke up said that they agreed, I guess everyone must agree. No. So, you know, we need more disagreeableness. We need more disagreeableness now. And it's being vilified in part because, you know, male typical ways of doing things are being vilified.

And to all of our peril, you know, science doesn't work with agreeableness and we won't get good progress that's actually good for everyone if all we have is people agreeing with things that have already been said. And that's a very dangerous thing if people believe one thing but publicly espouse something else because they're worried about criticism or they're worried about being ostracized. We're seeing that a lot today. It's a big issue. And it's also like the difference between agreeableness and disagreeableness with men and women might be the most sexist thing we have in our culture, right? Because women who are disagreeable are like widely hated. Like women who are assertive and aggressive, like a lot of people don't like them.

But it's common with men and celebrated. Like men who are assertive and men who are disagreeable and men who are mavericks and carve their own path. Like, oh, we love them. Yeah. It's not just our culture, right? Like this isn't a creation of our culture. This is this idea, this finding that men on average are more agreeable than women.

No. No. Women are more agreeable than men crosses cultural boundaries. So this isn't a creation of the of the weird world. Right. The Western educated, industrialized, rich, democratic world. What do we think the origin of it is? Well, well, the hierarchies, the way that hierarchies in men are often created and and defended are with pretty overt tells. You know, sometimes it's physical, but usually not. It's, you know what, dude, no. Like, I don't think that was the right thing to do. And the ways that hierarchies in women tend to be created and then deployed are much more

covert. And that's probably both because men are smaller than, women are smaller than men. And so in interactions with men, women can't just use overt physicality. That wouldn't work. But also that the social structure, the need to have social co maintaining hierarchies in women and much more overt forms in men. And so overt forms of hierarchy assessment looks like disagreeableness. And I would say that in some ways this women aren't disagreeable finding is both true and not true. Women just do it a different way.

And it doesn't look like the way it does in a boardroom meeting when a guy says, actually, no, I think you're wrong about that. A woman is less likely to do that. But it's not that she doesn't have her ways of perhaps achieving the same goals. But this is another one of the themes in the book, is that because human beings, what we say is we are not blank slates, but we are the blankest slates that selection has ever produced, by far, actually. And what that means is that what we are

and how we function has been offloaded to an unprecedented degree from the genome into our cultural cognitive layer. It's effectively become software. So the software we point out is no less biological than the genes. People often talk about, is it genetic or is it cultural? That's not a real dichotomy. You can say, is it, I mean, they say, is it cultural or is it biological? The correct dichotomy is, is it genetic or is it cultural? Those are two different ways that information can be stored. But the point is, it may be true that women are more agreeable across cultures, and that suggests that evolution has favored that trait. It does not mean it is immutable.

If it's in the software layer, we can actually alter it. And so, you know, you asked why it was immutable. If it's in the software layer, we can actually alter it. And so, you know, you asked why it was this way. And I would point out that lots of things that men have done, the province of men in times past is a province in which disagreeableness is valued for a reason, right? If you are trying to get to the moon, if you are trying to build a machine that can take people to the moon and return them from the earth safely, you need to be able to say that idea of yours will not work and here's why. Right? Nobody likes hearing that, but a culture in which saying that is supported and in which it is hearable and that you can actually have the dialogue and figure out whether the thing makes

sense is very important. That has been true in places that were the province of men. Those places don't need to be the province of men. Women are just as capable of doing that kind of work. But what may be necessary is that the culture that men have developed in the laboratory and in an engineering environment needs to be democratized so that it is shared and that everybody has access to this kind of disagreeableness in order to do those things. And it may be that the kind of more agreeable realms of women need to be democratized in the same way. So again, this is a place, going back doesn't make any sense. We can't go back. There's nowhere to go back to. But in order to go forward, we can't just throw out

the rule book. What we have to do is figure out, okay, these things may have been the province of men. How do we democratize them? Right? That would be the logical process. So many people became aware of the, like, men are interested in things, women are interested in people. Finding. I know a lot of girls who are interested in things. Well, exactly. So, but, you know, James Damore, the Google memo, you know, he's talking about that and suddenly everyone's like, oh, that's insane. There's no way that's true. Yes, there's lots of women who are interested in things. There's lots of men who are interested in people. Obviously, this is a broad brush finding with lots of overlap between

those distributions, but it does hold up. And it holds up cross-culturally. And it holds up for babies. Like you expose newborns to pictures of things versus pictures of faces. And boys hold their gaze on the things more for longer than they do on the faces. And girls, it's the reverse. Baby girls hold their attention on the pictures of faces longer than they hold their attention on the things. Okay.

Do we know why? on the pictures of faces longer than they hold their attention on the things. Okay. Do we know why? Well, again, I would say this is about the kinds of ways, the kinds of work historically that men have been doing versus that women have been doing. And this maybe becomes a little circular here, but men doing work that is in the physical world is also work that, exactly to return to to use, you know, to return to the example Brett was using, if, you know, if what you're doing is trying to get to the moon and you've

got a wrong calculation in there, it doesn't serve anyone for you to be polite about it, right? It's like, you know what, dude, no, that number's wrong. Like you've done, you've made an error here. And so if you're working with things, if you're working with like literal things that have physical reality in the world, it's more important that you not be agreeable when the outcome is potentially going to be messed up because you didn't say anything. Whereas the domain of the social, you know, the domain of people can be changed potentially. And maybe it is more effectively changed if you hold your fire and you talk to someone behind the scenes and you see if you can massage the people's egos a bit.

So, you know, the social landscape can be more effectively dealt with with a kind of agreeableness sometimes. But the physical landscape doesn't care what you think. It doesn't care at all whether or not you're nice about it. It is what it is. And so a direct, a direct response makes more sense. It's going to be more effective. I would think that there'd be some benefit as we become more aware of all these different effects and of psychology, there'd be some benefit in the strength that's exhibited by recognizing what's correct.

You would think. Yeah, because I feel like that's a character strength. The ability to recognize you being incorrect and to admit that is actually a strength. Unfortunately, there are many processes that are very powerful that are not robust in the face of economic influences. And I don't think this subject has been well explored yet, but science is maybe the perfect case, right? It used to be in the age of gentleman scientists, right? People wealthy enough to have the luxury to pursue the questions on their minds rather than sustenance effectively,

pursue the questions on their minds rather than sustenance effectively, that the incentive to tell a wrong story that you could support but would ultimately give way didn't exist, right? If you were a gentleman scientist, you were trying to figure out what was true and therefore your incentive to fool yourself was pretty low. In the current environment where in many ways it's much better, science is now a career that people who don't come from means can take up, and it is hospitable to women, not just men. Those are no question that's an improvement. The problem is that we have now plugged that scientific apparatus very directly into the market. And so, for example, many people don't realize that universities are largely fueled by what's called overhead in the grants that their professors bring in. And in order, so overhead can be 50% or more of the grant money.

That's what all the time. What they do in order to free their professors from teaching is they bring in graduate students who instead of paying them in money, they pay them with a degree, which devalues the degree. And it means that we produce a huge number of PhDs for which there simply are no jobs. And when you do that, it means that the incentive to cheat in order to get one of those very few jobs is much, much greater. And so what we effectively have is what we've seen in psychology, for example, is a culture of cheating, even if people didn't know that that's what they were doing. That p-hacking reproducibility crisis is about people using the fact that statistics has to be treated very carefully and abusing the assumptions and coming up with results that aren't true, but that are good enough to get published, that result in your CV being impressive and result in people getting jobs. And that's going

to be a problem across science, right? Because we plugged the market into this process, the process doesn't work. It looks like science, but it doesn't function like science because the economic incentives to cheat your way into a position are too great. And when you have rooms full of people who did that, their ability to call each other out is pretty much nil. Yeah. So that's unfortunately part of the answer to why would you go into science at all if you weren't interested in truth-seeking? Why would you go into medicine at all if you weren't interested in healing people, right?

And hopefully still the original reasons that people go into these fields are those honorable ones, but the market grabs us all. are those honorable ones, but the market grabs us all. And that leads us to, in a lot of ways, what Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, who just stepped down today, right? Yep. Yes, he did. I was just going to raise this. Please do. So I think the connection here is that Peter is somebody, and I should say he's a good friend of ours.

He's a great guy. He's a wonderful guy. And he has been courageous and steadfast in calling out the woke nonsense that is taking over the entire academy. For people who don't know what we're talking about, could you just explain their studies, like the poke studies? Yeah. Well, they get recognized and celebrated celebrated which is what's fucking bizarre but it speaks to what you're talking about about money right so um peter uh peter bogosian is a philosopher who uh has engaged in two major hoax projects the first one was the conceptual penis project with James Lindsay, in which they wrote

a paper arguing, if I'm remembering correctly, something like the penis is a social construct that results in global warming or some nonsense like that. And anyway, they got the thing published. Let me just say that that came out just before Evergreen blew up. But we had long since seen The Writing on the Wall, and we read that paper. And I just felt so much better about the world knowing that that was out there. We didn't know Jim or Peter yet. Okay, The Conceptual Penis has now been published, and some people are taking it seriously. But there's a lot of people who can see The writing on the wall because this paper is out there.

So somewhat later, he and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay published a series of papers on absolutely absurd. The dog park. The dog park in which issues of consent amongst canids were. It's contributing to rape culture was the hypothesis, I think. So in any case... And they claim to have inspected some impossible number of dog genitals in the course of that research. Right, right. And so, you know, basically they just revealed that there was some

phony quadrant of the academy in which people were pretending to scrutinize papers that claimed to have done studies that didn't make any sense. And in any case, so they, you know, they pulled back the curtain, as it were. And, you know, so they got they, they didn't actually do any of this research, but they but they wrote these papers that were exactly in the style of existing papers, and they submitted them to journals, which is what you do in academia. And they got a surprising number of them not just accepted, but published. And one of them even won, as I think you alluded to earlier, one of them won some award for the journal that it was in. And then, of course, there was a reveal. A Wall Street Journal reporter actually figured it out, and it was revealed before they were really quite done.

And so they didn't even get as many published as they would have. They could have probably done this for years. Well, right. And the thing is, the point is that their work, crazy as it was, didn't stand out in a world of other work that was nonsense. Against critical theory and some of the other – Yeah, critical theory and some of the other – But in any case, Peter is an excellent professor. You guest lectured in his? I did, yeah.

So we both guest lectured in his programs. He's exactly the kind of professor you want, right? He's absolutely dedicated to, you know, revealing things to his students. He does it the right way. He's well loved by his students. from his position because the pushback for his calling out the woke nonsense at Portland State has been incredible, including investigations of him, Title IX investigations, in which he had no ability to defend himself or even see the evidence. What is Title IX? Title IX is the legal provision designed to protect women in the context of education.

Yeah, it's originally about creating space for women's sports at some sort of equity with men's sports, but it's been expanded to vast effect. Just leave it there. But, you know, I think the punchline is there's no question that in an era where what is believed or argued to be true about race or sex or gender or any of these other hot and button issues is rapidly changing inside the university, you have to have people who are pushing back and saying, wait, how do we know that this new wisdom is even right? And why does it not add up on these several fronts? Even if the wisdom was right, you would want people pushing back so that it was well done. In this case, the wisdom isn't

wisdom at all. It's ideological. But the idea that a guy like Peter who has dedicated himself to teaching students and has been excellent at it to revealing the phoniness in academia that effectively he can't even survive within academia, that his honorable disagreeableness can't be tolerated inside the academy tells us that the academy is increasingly, you know, a Potemkin educational structure. It's not real anymore. And it's very sad to see, you know, to see him driven out. He hung on a long time, but it's just become intolerable. So I'm sorry, what was the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of like what what made him resign? I don't know. I don't know for sure. His letter is published. His resignation letter is

published on Barry Weiss's sub stack. It's quite good, but I don't think it covered the straw that broke the camel's back. And, you know, maybe there is something or maybe it was just after years of being, you know, investigated and demonized and punished for his. It just represents reprehensible accusations made against him in terms of, I mean, even just like that he was engaged in domestic abuse, just completely fabricated claims, which, you know, in any normal universe, the person making such accusations that they completely made up would themselves be punished. But no, none of that ever happened. So, I mean, I do think, Brett, you just said honorable disagreeableness cannot be tolerated. That feels like a perfect catchphrase for 2021 at some level, right? I would also point out, I mean, of course nobody can know the complete truth of anybody else's home life,

but we've been in Peter's home. We've broken bread with him. We've sat with him and his children and his wife. This is not plausible. Who is making these accusations? Well, that's just the thing. In the context- Not the wife?

No. Oh, no. It's some random student. Well, that's ridiculous. Right. So a random student. Well, that's ridiculous. Right. So a random student that doesn't know him? Well, I don't know that we know who made the accusation. I would say read Peter's resignation letter.

It describes this event. Again, it's on Barry Weiss's sub stack, Common Sense. And, you know, it's a beautifully written letter, as you would expect from a guy like Peter. Yeah. And, you know, it's a beautifully written letter, as you would expect from a guy like Peter. And, you know, it describes the position beautifully. And I think anybody who isn't horrified by what he describes and saddened and shocked by the fact that the academy apparently can't find a place for this excellent human being, they're missing something. Yeah. So we need a functional system of higher ed. We need a functional system of media.

We need functional science there's a lot of things that we need that are becoming super dysfunctional very fast do you think that maybe like what's happening with media where things that are independent are emerging like your podcast and and many others and like uh breaking points which is a fantastic news show. There's all these independent avenues that are – do you think that this could happen with higher learning? Yeah. Well – I think it can. I want – you know, the model that you just laid out for media, of course, by most measures, you spearheaded that, right?

Like you're at the forefront of that. by most measures, you spearheaded that, right? Like you're at the forefront of that. So, you know, if something analogous could happen with higher ed, does it mean, does it take, you know, the Joe Rogan equivalent of a new university and then others can follow, you know, in order to sort of like cow catch out of the way, you know, all of the... Someone could do that in the form of a podcast. and I would argue that Dan Carlin has with history. Many things are possible, but I think we're in an analogous spot that we are with journalism, right? So in journalism, you've got great people, and they seem to have accumulated on Substack, right? And they are writing brilliant stuff.

The model is crazy right like there should be some way that you can subscribe to a bunch of people rather than as one-off in other words somebody effectively needs to reinvent the magazine but well and that's I mean I think Barry and some of the other big names on sub stack are doing that but certainly you know Barry is using her platform to also, you know, she's also working as editor on that platform, not just writer. Right.

Yes, she is doing something unique with her particular Substack where she has lots of guest-written stuff and lots of stuff of her own. And you pay? Is that how it works? You do. You do. And, you know, it's well worth it. Hers, as many of ours, I mean, I have a sub stack at this point, too. Many of us do put out almost all of our work for free, and then you get some additional benefits for paying subscribers. So you have to have a big enough audience to begin to make a living at it. On the other hand, what we're all trying to do, those of us with ideas and an interest in having voice, is spread the word.

Get the thinking out there such that more and more people are sharing it. And that is what you were so successful at doing. How long have you been at this? Eleven years. Eleven years, which is both nothing and a lifetime. Yeah, it's very confusing. I'd rather not talk about it. Okay, fair enough.

I don't know how it happened. So I just wanted to point out, you can have, you know, Glenn Greenwald and Barry Weiss and Heather Hying and Andrew Sullivan. Matt Taibbi. Matt Taibbi, right. You can have Matt Taibbi, right? You can have all of these really remarkable voices on Substack free from, at least for the moment, free from any force that, you know, limits what they can say. What you don't have is the equivalent of the newsroom, right? You need something with a budget. You need somebody who says, wait a second, that news story doesn't make sense.

We need to send somebody there to find out what happened. And without that, what you have is the very best people, but what they are putting out isn't replacing the thing that it comes closest to. Nothing has replaced the resourced newsroom that can actually sort out what took place in some complex story. And, you know, maybe that can happen. Maybe somebody will figure out how to do it. Then they have to figure out how to protect it from what it is that happened to the newsrooms. And then your question about higher ed, sure, you could do the same thing. But Heather and I for a year were participating in a project that was seeking to produce a

replacement, basically Higher Ed 2.0. And immediately the question arises, do you want your new institution to be accredited? If the answer is yes, you've just plugged yourself into the same thing that is coordinating all of the institutions that are collapsing. If the answer is no, then you are hobbling the institution that you're creating. Because if you're not accredited, you can't get federal grants and neither can your students. Right. And so immediately all the scientists who have been trained in an era when high expense research is the kind of research they do and therefore they need grants, you're not going

to be able to attract those people. And many low-income students who might be relying on things like Pell Grants can't come because they won't be able to get those grants. So accreditation, which comes with an incredible set of restrictions, or no accreditation, which comes with an incredible set of costs. So at the same time that we create a new kind of higher ed, we need a new accreditation system. And how do you co-create those things at the same time? It's tough. Yeah, or it may not be. There's a cryptic way in which established things like higher ed

prevent competitors from arising, which is important because it would not be hard to out-compete the modern university telling itself all of these lies about factual matters, right? It would be relatively easy to put together a college in which people simply attempted to figure out what the truth was and help their students see how that process works. So they have to use accreditation to exclude, which means that to the extent that people like, for example, employers were to start recognizing, actually, I don't want a traditionally accredited institution because those institutions are now so corrupt as to be useless. They're miseducating people. What I want is some new accreditation system, which may not be recognized

by the federal government, which will be unfortunate, but that does tell me that this institution is not part of that corrupted system. And it does tell me that it is aspiring to certain things, it is meeting certain targets. So just like I would use the example of organic food, right? Organic food is at an artificial disadvantage because in order to be officially organic, one has to jump through all sorts of hoops, right? And so many of us who shop at like farmer's markets, for example, will recognize that no spray may get you 90% of the way to organic, right? The requirements for the purity of your soil may be worthy ones, but the accreditation that forces you to demonstrate this over time is very expensive,

and it drives up the price of that food. Whereas if the thing hasn't been sprayed, and therefore I'm not likely to ingest the pesticide when I eat those grapes or whatever it is, that may be good enough for me. Unaccredited or higher ed may be like uncertified organic. Uncertified organic needs to rise. And to some extent, we now have GMO-free, which isn't quite organic. We have no spray. But somebody needs to say. And to some extent, we now have, you know, we have GMO free, which isn't quite organic. We have no spray. But somebody needs to say, yes, unaccredited or uncertified organic means these things. And it does not mean this other thing. And you could do the same with higher ed.

It seems like what it would take is very well-respected professors to step out en masse mass like to have some sort of a coordinated group effort but you know who is that respected and you know we you're when you're dealing with like public intellectuals you know you have your Cornel West's you have your your few people that are very publicly respected and well-known because they've done a lot of television programs and you know things along those lines But it would it would take like a group of folks along those line the current Cornel West is a great example right because he's such a I guess people would say in Some of his perspectives are controversial. He didn't get tenure through Harvard and he had to leave Harvard which was

shameful in a lot of people's eyes that this guy who's this brilliant man who's so well spoken and beloved and that he didn't get 10 a lot of people didn't even know until this controversy hit the mainstream but someone along those lines people along those, along the lines of Noam Chomsky, along the lines of, you know, public intellectuals and professors that are very well known. There's not a lot of them. But if they could coordinate some sort of a group effort and do things in a same sort of a similar situation as a substack. Oh, exactly. You you know and at some level you're right that there aren't all this you know there isn't a long list on the other hand everybody who is good enough at the job is going to be driven out of their official position or they're gonna comply and not be good

enough anymore if they're complying you don't want them and so you know I think I think the point is hey Peter Pag Boghossian is free. So there's a start, right? Does Peter have a clear plan? I don't know. I don't know. And I guess one thing about higher ed is that there, it's, it's kind of three jobs wrapped up into one and different institutions prioritize different things, but it's research and it's teaching and it's so-called governance, which is just sort of like participating in the running of the university by being on committees and such, which is, you know, no one's favorite job. Those few people whose favorite part of the job that is are the ones who become administrators. You know, they become the deans and the vice presidents and such. So research versus teaching, those are both a little bit, they're both important

and they're a little bit in conflict with one another. So, you know, the big names that you just mentioned, I think, I actually don't know anything about Chomsky, his reputation in the classroom, but I think Cornel West, you know, is, you know, doing amazing, he's an amazing thinker, and he's doing amazing research, but he's also, you know, very popular in the classroom. And that's pretty rare, right? That's pretty rare. And, you know, the place where we were for 15 years, Evergreen specifically, was about prioritizing teaching. And we turned that into like, OK, well, we're going to develop our ideas in process with students. trying to work on be something that they can do that with undergraduates. So, you know, what will a higher ed, what will a new kind of higher ed look like that both recognizes the necessity that people are developing new ideas and going against orthodoxy if that's what needs to happen with regard to their research, but also have a capacity to communicate real things with clarity to

students while understanding that their students are fundamentally human beings just like themselves. The irony about this whole YouTube censorship issue is that would be an amazing platform for something to branch off of if it wasn't so captured. Yeah. And the fact that I don't know quite how to explain it, but the platforms appear to be behaving in a way that is ideological, that one does not expect, right? The fiduciary responsibility to shareholders would seem to indicate that platforms should be expected to do that which makes money irrespective of whether or not it's right. But here they seem to be doing things that they naively believe are right, which are actually not right, in spite of the fact that, of course, they are setting up their undoing. I don't think they believe they're right. I don't think they've looked into it that deeply. I think they're listening. I think they've been given instructions and they're

listening. I just can't imagine listening to your show and seeing the conversations that you guys have had that have been demonetized. I cannot imagine that anybody's listening to those and they think they're right. I don't believe that's true. Well, I appreciate your saying that, but I also think that there is a zombification that if you're if your filter bubble is sufficiently narrow right if you if you're not encountering people who aren't rah-rah team blue right then you're not hearing the things that allow you to discover that we are actually making sense. I mean, we're not always right, but we're certainly trying to make sense. We're showing our work.

And you're right. It shouldn't be threatening to anybody. But to the extent that you have been sold a very narrow, self-consistent story, and you have maybe voluntarily blocked off all of the information that would tell you that that story isn't true, then you hear us. And then I think what you do is you say, oh, that must be the enemy I've been warned about because they don't seem to agree with these points that I know are facts. So you have to be sufficiently diverse in what you have already looked at to recognize that in fact we are making sense and that there are alarming things that we need to pay attention to and that neither of the mainstream

narratives are correct, right? That's, in fact, what we are doing is we are forced to try to cobble together a narrative that is at least consistent with the evidence because none of the narratives that we've been handed add up. And this is a place where YouTube can't replace actual interaction with real flesh and blood people. Because you start to have a conversation, whether or not you call it a lecture or not, in a classroom with students.

And if you're the kind of professor that actually recognizes that they're real people, and that there's a really good chance that all of them have something unique to offer and are there to learn. When hands start going up, you engage the questions. And it may mean that the conversation goes someplace you didn't expect and you didn't plan and you're going to have to get back on script at some point later if you want to cover your material, right? But it means that you get to actually engage, you get to learn something about the brains of the other people in the room with you. And you see where what you're saying, say, has landed flat, where, flat where oh wow I really did not mean to communicate that but that's

apparently in like a bunch of years your heads okay let me go back and clarify what I meant or oh no no actually I was clear and I was assuming that you also knew something else that I didn't say so let me fill that in you can't do that you can't do that kind of error correction in this kind of landscape right like we can do that with each other but we can't do that. You can't do that kind of error correction in this kind of landscape, right? Like we can do that with each other, but we can't do that with your audience. Right. Also the vetting process of the students, like you could have literal crazy people if you had a group meeting. It's like, say if you had this open platform and then you had a group meeting of your students, you have no idea like what brought these people to your class. And then you have people yelling out nonsense and it's like and yet I mean like you know evergreen students

got a really bad rap obviously whenever green blew up because there was a group of you know 40 ish people who were who were making no sense in our classrooms almost to a person people were receptive and honorable and truth-seeking. And that doesn't mean that they all showed up with skills or equal capacity. Of course they didn't. We all have different capacities and we have different skills. We have different interests. And some of them left after a quarter saying, thanks, not for me. Cool. Very few people left right away, said, oh, no, no, no way. I don't want to hear this. And yet to hear people talk about what's going on in higher ed right now, to hear what people say about what college

students sound like, you would think that our classrooms would have been filled with people. I mean, we were talking about sex and gender and evolution of war and rape and territoriality and things that you're not supposed to be allowed to talk about. But we did so with care. And we didn't make the naturalistic fallacy, which is to say, just because we're talking about what has evolved doesn't mean we're saying that it's good, right? We're not saying that this is how it ought to be. We're saying that these are some things that are, and now that we know what is true, let's try to figure out how we might make the world better in the future. So it's amazing how receptive people are to that, right? Like it's actually remarkable and it's nearly universal,

but the media seems to assume that most people aren't smart enough to handle the truth. And unfortunately, I think most professors assume that most students aren't smart enough to handle the truth. And what, you know, what you do, what we do, what we try to do, and what I think a growing number of people are trying to do is say, you know what, I'm going to assume my audience can handle it. I'm going to assume my audience is smart and capable and they don't have my background. So I'm going to explain things when I think I need to. And let's see. I think one of the things you're saying that's undeniable is that there's no substitution for an in-person discussion. True.

There's an energy that you have when you're in a room of people and you're looking at each other in the eye and discussing these ideas that's infectious and it you know it also engenders a feeling of community as well as just an opportunity to learn things well there's one more aspect which I want to highlight so evergreen had a lot of crazy to it the founders. The founders basically threw out every normal structure and replaced it with something. And in some cases, they did brilliantly. And in some cases, they missed the mark. And the problem with Evergreen is that it never fixed the places that they missed the mark. But the fact of teaching students full-time, where a professor teaches one class full-time, students take one class full-time, and that class can go on for a full year, really means that you can know everybody in the room well.

And so even a small class in which you don't really know people, you're teaching four credits and you're standing at the front of the room. And yes, it's different than being online and anonymous, but it's not the same thing as knowing the person as a human being. So, you know, people frequently ask Heather and me if we want to return to the classroom. And I think the answer is that because we had the experience of teaching somewhere that we were entirely free to rewrite the rule book of how one teaches. And we had this experience of getting to know our students so well that we could actually tailor teaching to the room and to the individuals in it, right? That that experience was so powerful and revealed so much about what's possible in education that it doesn't make sense. I wouldn't want to be teaching, you know, a room of 100 people or I'm standing at the front and I don't know who these people are.

That doesn't sound fun or interesting or rewarding at all. Yeah. Actually, one of our best students, Drew Schneidler, was also our research assistant on this book. And we did a lot of meeting together and talking before COVID sort of put a stop to that while we were writing the first draft of the book. And one of the things he said to us when we were talking about the school chapter, we originally had two chapters on school and we collapsed into one. And he, like Brett, got a diagnosis of dyslexia when he was young and was dumb-tracked by school, like Brett was, and just had a terrible, terrible educational experience.

And he said something to the effect of, and correct me if I've got this quote wrong, when I walked into your guy's classroom, it was like I had rediscovered an ancestral moat. And I'm so flattered that he thought that and that he said it and that he meant it. But I, you know, I think really what he was saying was, here was a place where I could talk about anything and ask any question. And the fact that I had some belief was never going to be conflated with whether or not I was fundamentally a decent human being. Disagreeing with a person is not the same as disagreeing with an idea that a person has. Like, I'm not telling you that you're a bad person if I say I don't think that idea is correct.

Right. And it's my job as, you know, certainly as a professor and certainly as a parent, but also as a friend, frankly, if you say something that I think is nuts to be like, I don't think so. And so there we're back to this disagreeableness, right? Like, is I don't think so a disrespectful thing to say? It shouldn't be. I'm not saying, I don't think you're right about that. And therefore, I think you suck. Like, no, that's not what anyone should mean when they say I don't think so. But we do seem to have done a really good job of conflating those two. I think we have, and I think that can be resolved. I think just in general, overall, as a culture, we can make a concerted effort to not be married to our ideas.

Yes. And to not attach a person to their ideas and to recognize that people often adopt faulty ideas and that there is a general inclination to stick to those ideas once you've espoused them because you identify with them and because you conflate an argument against those ideas with an argument against you as a human being. ideas and and just being comfortable with the idea of being wrong and being comfortable with the idea of an idea that you have sort of accepted and you're you're working with it as if it's correct but it's incorrect like be comfortable with that and we we have to be able to do that and we have to not be ridicule people for just being incorrect for having bad information i mean if you're consistently doing it over long having bad information. I mean, if you're consistently doing it over long periods of time and you're, you know, you're, you know. But that's it. I mean, that's the important thing right there. It's like, if you have a track record

of being incorrect, probably we shouldn't be listening to you. If you have a track record of being correct, there's a good chance we can be a little less skeptical going forward. And if I don't know yet, I'm going to retain my skepticism kind of actively until I see what's your track record. And especially if you have a track record of being incorrect, but then you defend those incorrect actions when it's been established that they're incorrect. It's one thing if you're just a wild person who just takes these crazy ideas and runs with them and then goes, whoops, you know, over and over and over again. Well, that one's wrong. Well, look at that one. That one sucked. Yeah. And in fact, you know, over and over and over again. Well, that one's wrong. Well, look at that one. That one sucked.

Yeah. And in fact, you know, really garbagey styles of thought work like this. They'll predict a whole bunch of stuff and then occasionally get something right just out of luck and they'll highlight that and obscure the rest. But I think we are not necessarily good at explaining to people what it means to do this honestly and to be comfortable with being wrong. Because frankly, being wrong is not a comfortable experience. But what, A, you are not a set of beliefs or you shouldn't be. Your thinking should be built on a model, right? And even if that model starts out very crude, if what you do is you correct it as

you discover where it predicts things incorrectly, it gets better over time. It almost doesn't matter how crude it starts out. It will get better over time. And as you begin to discover that pattern, you will get better at improving it faster and faster. And so the thing to realize is not, will it be fun to make a correction if I get something wrong? Nope. It never, it's never fun. What is, what should drive you is that continuing to be wrong has a huge debt, right? It incurs a huge debt.

Whereas as soon as you realize that you're wrong, getting on the right side of that issue, being honest about what has taken place so that your model going forward is unencumbered by it, that actually does feel good over time. And the thing that you don't necessarily realize is that people respect it, right? You don't want to be wrong all the time, right? You want to work really hard to be right. But when you're wrong, being honest about it is something that people will actually spot, and they will track that. Well, they know they can trust you now.

Yeah. Right. And you're not going to just defend yourself with this idea. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And you want to shoot to be right, of course. But if your goal is to never make a mistake, you're probably not thinking far enough outside the box.

Right. You're not going to come up with new things if you never, ever make an error. Yeah. It's the conundrum of our time. outside the box. You're not gonna come up with new things if you never ever make an error. Yeah, it's the conundrum of our time. And especially, we've never been more ideologically divided than we are now in my life that I've recognized. We've never been more tribal than we are now. And oftentimes that goes along with this adoption of ideas

as if they're a part of you as a human being. Yeah. Well, and the problem, I don't know what the right way to describe it is, but it's possible to be divided over which way civilization should go, for example, without there being a discontinuity between the two sides. But as soon as there's effectively no overlap, right? And as soon as anybody who says, wait a second, this part is right from that, and this part is right from the other side, as soon as that becomes impossible because it's been punished, so there's no middle, then it becomes very easy to say, ah, those other people aren't even deserving of basic rights,

right? This is where things go wrong. This is historically where people dehumanize each other before they do terrible things to them, right? This is how you end up at gas chambers, is you stop respecting the humanity of the people who disagree with you. And I have to say, I'm concerned that we are actually headed this direction, that if you look now at what each side says about the other, it does sound very much like, you know, that side is not quite human. They are the source of disease. It is all of these kinds of familiar historical noises that precede great great tragedy. And I guess I don't know whether there's a good example of people beginning down

that road and reversing course. But even if there's no example, we have no choice, right? We do not have time for a great historical tragedy. We have a civilization that does work. tragedy. We have a civilization that does work. Is it fair? It is not fair. But there's nothing about the civilization that couldn't be fixed if we focused on what the real problem was. You know, it's very much like the orthodontia issue. There are some basic underlying issues, and then there's a whole slew of symptoms. And if we focus on the symptoms and we start blaming other people for them, and we don't look at the root causes, we won't fix it and we will end up with some tragedy and maybe worse, right? Maybe we'll be displaced by China as we fail to monitor the processes that actually keep us robust and we effectively open the gates of the city to an antagonist that would rather displace us and own the next century,

which doesn't hold our values, right, is explicitly racist, right? We don't want to allow that to happen. And the way to avoid it is to recognize, flawed as our civilization is, it does aspire to the right things, and it has made great progress towards those things. The right thing to do is to fix it and make it better, not to upend it. And unfortunately, we are headed in the opposite direction. Yeah, this acceptance of dehumanization, you see it play out with vaccinated versus unvaccinated. I've seen intelligent people say terrible things about unvaccinated people that, you know, they're not deserving of care. They're not deserving of treatment. They're not deserving of just basic needs and goods

with no recognition about the people that from March or whenever they got infected of 2020 to today, when, you know, in January January when vaccines were first rolled out, how many of those people were infected and gained natural immunity? Millions, millions and millions of people who have superior immunity to the people that are vaccinated. But yet there's this narrative that these, you know, I've literally seen people call them plague rats, right? Discuss human beings that may have natural immunity that probably don't want to get a shot on top of that. Yeah. I mean, at least the idea of the unvaccinated is wrong because it's at least two categories.

Right. There are people with natural immunity and people without. So any model that pretends those are the same thing is obviously about something else. And you have people with vulnerable immune systems that can't afford the impact of it, and they've just been forced to isolate. There's a lot of different variables that you can take into consideration. But what's unacceptable but yet very prevalent is this concept that these are less than human. And you see it on Twitter all the time,

and you see it as if all the time and you see it like as if people were throwing it out there to see where their position in the Klan is. They're like throwing it out there. Maybe we should throw them into the fire! You know what I mean? It's like literally in these, the weakest minds and the most cowardly amongst us are espousing these ideas with no irony, no recognition of historical events that have led to people literally turning on each other. If you go back to... I mean, there's so many cases throughout history where people have chosen to dehumanize groups.

For whatever reason, you can come up... I mean, everybody wants to go to Nazi Germany. It's one. There's a lot of them throughout history where people have chosen to dehumanize specific groups, and it's been incredibly effective, and they've turned on them and done horrific things where they thought they were in the right. And that's a terrifying aspect of humanity that repeats itself over and over and over again. And we're seeing these little echoes of that today, unironically from these people,

and it's disturbing as fuck. It really is. And so one small thing that gives me hope here is, and I've talked about this a little bit on our podcast, but not all of the instances that I've overheard, is we live in Portland, Oregon, which is a bastion. How dare you. It's a bastion of liberalism and progressivism.

And you might imagine that it's only those people who belong to that tribe who are making any sort of public statements at all. And yet I have overheard people ranging from sort of middle-aged liberal women to young people heading out on the water to go paddleboarding, talking amongst themselves. And I was positioned such that I could hear them saying, what is being, what is coming down the pike at us is a liberal and it feels totalitarian and it's not okay. And how do we resist? And in some of these cases, what I heard, and in some of the cases I then interacted with the people, some of them are vaccinated, some of them are not. This is not just people who are in the targeted tribe, if you will, who are concerned. There are a lot of people who are not represented

by what we were seeing in the mainstream media and on Twitter and such. A lot of people who, for a number of reasons, said, okay, just pick the particular example we're talking about right now. Because of my age, comorbidities, status interacting with someone else, whatever, I need to get vaccinated. And the idea that anyone who didn't is somehow other, is somehow less, I find that despicable. There are a lot of people who still think that, who still say that. And I feel like it's probably majority. I hope. I hope I'm not deluding myself there.

But then how do we make those people feel that they can speak? I think it is the majority because I think it's been really demonstrated pretty clearly that the majority of people on Twitter are not the majority. Right. So when you're dealing with a percentage of the people on Twitter that are the most vocal about these things, you're dealing with a very small percentage of the population. It's a confusing group of people. There's still a healthy center in this country of people that have had life experiences, do understand the tendencies that human beings have,

and are very disturbed by this. Well, I think it's important to recognize what is actually taking place. You have a completely novel environment in which we are figuring out what we think. We are engaging in an ancient behavior in which we talk to each other and we shout at each other and look askance at each other. But the platforms on which we are doing this have changed the dynamic and they have actually empowered something that wishes to control the narrative. And it's leaving a false impression about a consensus, right? By punishing certain points of view, by deplatforming them, it creates the impression that there is a great deal of agreement about things that there isn't.

And the real tragedy here, I mean, if you think back to the model I was talking about a little bit earlier, that effectively when there is no growth, people get antsy to figure out what they can substitute for it. And they very often substitute things that belong to other people. So the creation of a group of second-class citizens is one way that people who have stagnated can jumpstart the feeling of well-being in their life. And so there's sort of a competition about who is going to be the group of second-class citizens. Who can we all agree to go after? And the tragedy here is that if our understanding of the evidence is accurate, we actually have the tools to get us all out of this mess together. We could actually

address this pandemic effectively at this point with what we have at our disposal. What we probably can't do is address it while, you know, leaving big pharma's sacred cows untouched, right? We would have to agree that big pharma's rights do not trump the rest of our rights. And we would have to agree that it was time to deploy the best tools we had and that we need to get the people who understand what's taking place most accurately in a room where they are free to say whatever they need to say to each other, that nobody's going to be penalized for wrong think in order to figure out what to do. And that is not going to come from, you know, leaving Anthony

Fauci where he is. It's not going to come from the blue team. It is going to come from a recognition that we are putting ourselves in a much worse situation by using business-as-usual tactics and that it is time to step out of this and get humanity out of the pickle that we have created for ourselves. How do we do that, Heather? Well, Joe, I guess one thing is we tend to be reductionist, we humans. It's very easy to say, oh, there's this big complex system. I'm going to say it's that thing that we need to fix. And so, you know, the story with COVID is too complicated to really do this about.

But take COVID and schools. How about? Children have a very low rate of bad outcomes from COVID. And once they have had it, unless that they were one of those very, very, very rare cases where they had a bad outcome, they now have the natural immunity to which you have alluded, which is better than the immunity granted by vaccines. Given that, and given what humans are, given that we are these sensory, tactile, emotional people, you know, things in the world that are not just about our eyes and our voices, having children masked in schools during the period when they are developing their most important understanding of what other humans are, important understanding of what other humans are. Except early in the pandemic, when we really didn't know how this thing was progressing yet, it probably doesn't make sense. I think the concern is the teachers and the staff, though.

So it's different in every state. The states that I'm paying attention to anyway, the teachers and the staff are, you know, to hear them tell it, protected because they're vaccinated. Yeah, but we know that's not the case anymore. You know, I mean, some of my friends that have been hit the hardest have been vaccinated, unfortunately, because they weren't healthy to begin with. So the vaccine, whatever protection it offered them initially, you know, it's definitely better than not being vaccinated in that regard, but it's not enough. If you're obese and you eat terrible food and you don't exercise at all, you don't have a robust body. And your body does not deal with an intrusion in a healthy and effective way.

Right. So, you know, what then are schools for? I mean, maybe that's the question then that we have to be asking. And, you know, is in-person schooling with masks better than completely remote schooling? Where how many, you know, well over a million, maybe well over many millions of children just sort of disappeared from the school rosters during Zoom schooling last year? And how many of those were low income kids who may never get back into a system that could have helped them a lot. So is in-person schooling better compared to that? It would seem to be. But pretending that not seeing people's faces doesn't have developmental effects is just that.

It's pretending. Every human being knows that we have to see each other in order to know what we're thinking and feeling. Especially little kids. Especially little kids. The younger they are, the more important. Yeah. Right. So enough with the pretense, enough with the like the single factor thing that that's the only thing we're allowed to talk about right now. And if you try to talk about anything else, well, then you're the evil person. And also enough with the pretense where, you know, when things are said that those of us who are human, which is to say all of us talking about this can go, wait a minute, really?

Putting a mask on little tiny children isn't going to have any effect on their linguistic development? That can't be right. Well, of course that can't be right. And yet we saw exactly that pronouncement by, I don't remember what, the American Association of Pediatrics or something. Yeah, it's clearly got an effect. But I feel for the teachers. I really do. And I feel for the teachers that are obese.

And there's a lot of them and they didn't know that this was coming and they really haven't been preparing. And to say, hey, you should have made better lifestyle choices. It's like, yeah, maybe they definitely should have, but they didn't. So here we are. Maybe these are excellent teachers, but they focus on educating children. They don't focus on taking care of their own health. So we have this problem. And to ask them to make this massive adjustment to completely change your entire life and develop this robust physical body at age 49. And you can't do it overnight. Right. You can't. And, you know, yeah, they've had 18 months, but whatever. They didn't

think they did. They thought they were going to get vaccinated and that would be it. Then they'd be protected. I mean, people got fucking Pfizer tattoos and they started singing Pfizer songs. And it was wild. They thought this was it. We're done. We're out.

And turns out, no. And we found out fairly recently. I mean, I was doing these shows with Dave Chappelle in July, and we all thought it was over. Yeah. In July. In July. Here we are in September. We know it's not over.

That's just happened. Yep. I would say that what one does in that circumstance is one says, did anybody see this coming? Right. And in fact, it was seen coming. Right. Garrett Vandenbush said this is going to become a pandemic of variants. And he talked about immune escape. And that has been very controversial. But did you explain that to people? Sure. What he argued. And let's just say. Could you explain who to people? Sure. What he argued, and let's just say... Could you explain who he is to? Sure. He is an immunobiologist. His training is veterinary. He has training in the relevant

area of vaccination technology. He was a guest on Dark Horse. People can look up my discussion with him. It is many people regard it as a very good way to understand what he's saying because often he speaks about matters that are quite technical. And anyway, I did my best in that podcast to make it non-technical so that people could understand it. In any case, what he argued was that the fact of these vaccines being very narrowly targeted, right? These vaccines contain a single subunit of a single protein, and they are being deployed in a way that is unusual. They're being deployed into an active pandemic, right? When we immunize against something like measles, the expectation is you will develop your full immunity with almost no chance of encountering measles, right? In this case, what we have are vaccines that are leaky, in which they do not provide full sterilizing immunity. They are narrow. And we are effectively creating an intense evolutionary pressure to cause the spike protein, of which this one subunit is what is contained, the information for it is contained in the vaccines. We are putting intense evolutionary pressure on it to change so that the antibodies and other immune cell recognition mechanisms that are trained by the vaccines are incapable of finding the pathogen when it gets in. This is what

causes a breakthrough case is that the immunity that's been created is evaded by the pathogen. And if the pathogen changes, that is more likely. And so what he said was, if you vaccinate into an active pandemic with vaccines like this, what you will get is a evolutionary pressure for a radiation of variants, an evolutionary radiation of different molecular signatures, changes in the spike protein, that will then cause the vaccines to be less and less effective at producing immunity, which is exactly what we see. So he predicted this? Absolutely. He did predict it. Accurately. Accurately predicted it. Now, is every component of his model correct? That's a much harder question to answer. But what I would say is anytime somebody succeeds in predicting better than the so-called experts, you want to know how they did it. And he was making absolute evolutionary sense, right? His concerns

were very well honed, and he was making sense, and then the world that he predicted emerged. And it is now incumbent on us to say, okay, have we learned anything from this, right? Do the vaccines need to be modified such that they don't produce this effect? There are conceivable ways you could do that, right? But if we don't do it, if we just say, well, more of the same, have a booster of the same thing, it's not going to solve the problem. So in effect, what I would say is these vaccines are a spectacular achievement, but they are a prototype, right? They have achieved something that had never been done before. are a prototype, right? They have achieved something that had never been done before.

Technologically, that's remarkable, but they were not ready for prime time, and they have failed to produce lasting immunity. They have produced very narrow immunity. It does not compare to the natural immunity that people get from having had and beaten the disease. And what's more, we have learned an awful lot about how the disease can be managed so it's much less lethal, right? That combination suggests that we need a rethinking of our approach. And, you know, it is impossible to prove, but based on what people who have successfully treated the disease and have successfully predicted events like the proliferation of variants are telling us, it does seem that we now have the tools at our disposal to manage this crisis and do away with it, which I don't know

why we don't do that, but it is at least worth noting that were we to successfully manage it, it would interrupt a huge flow of revenue into this brand new pharma market. Is that the reason that we don't do it? I don't know. But we, the public, need to recognize our interests are not being served by the public health apparatus. It is making errors that it doesn't need to make and that that has implications for all of our individual health and our collective well-being that require a rethink. The narrative that we keep hearing is that these variants are coming from unvaccinated people. Right. This is not true. I know I've seen that deployed.

It's industrial strength propaganda. And I know some of it's been directed at you in particular. But, A, logically, that doesn't make any sense. To the extent that these vaccines were very effective at preventing people from contracting COVID, and they were, and that number is dropping, that cannot be the product of a random walk through evolutionary space. That is the result of selection for evasion of the immunity that the vaccines successfully created. And there are multiple ways that we can see that it was, in fact, selection, right? So the convergence, for example, of variants created in different places suggests that selection is pushing in the same direction because the vaccines are the same everywhere.

So there is plenty of evidence. I know that many people have been led to believe, you know, that this, I'm sure whoever it is who came up with the idea of pandemic of the unvaccinated was thoroughly rewarded. It's a brilliant idea. It's totally inconsistent with evolutionary theory. Well, I mean, that's the thing, is that this is hardly the first time that medicine has proclaimed something that actually reveals a total lack of understanding of evolution. And I'm reminded, and actually we talk about this in the book, the idea of the appendix. It's vestigial, right? It has no value whatsoever, except that's completely patently untrue. And having honed your ability to think evolutionarily, the idea that there's some relatively big, therefore costly to grow and maintain organ in our body that has no benefit at all, but clearly has a cost because everyone in the weird world knows someone who's had some run-in with appendicitis.

Well, probably it's got a function to it, and we can talk about what that function might be, but not only has medicine largely misunderstood what the appendix is, but 100 years ago, doctors in the West thought, you know what, not only is the appendix an error, but the whole large intestine can go. The colon is actually completely redundant. We're going to start cutting people's colons out because clearly we don't need that. It's really easy to see the hubris and anti-evolutionary thinking of just having people cut out completely healthy large intestines on people from 100 years ago. But we have to ask, do we actually think that

we've arrived at godlike status now, and that everything that's being handed down to us right now is 100% true when we know that it's not? So what errors are we making today? And which of those are similarly sort of a evolutionary in nature that we can't see yet, or many of us can't see, but maybe with hindsight of 10 or 20 years, we will? And which of them could we just correct now and with hindsight of 10 or 20 years, we will. And which of them could we just correct now and save a lot of people the, you know, the horror of the illness that they're going to get as a result? Yeah, and, you know, it's not more complicated than this. If you don't know what to think, pay attention to who is able to tell you what is going to happen before it does.

Right? Just check people's track record, whether they have correctly predicted what's coming. And people who predict well are worth paying attention to. And people who don't predict well are not. And what that tells you is that this is not an impossible story to understand. And somehow, you know, I don't know. We are facing a tremendous amount of propaganda. You should ignore it. You should pay attention to people who have models that work and successfully predict phenomena in the world because that's the hallmark of insight. The problem is it's very difficult difficult as you would think. Now, what we really need is a – we need a collective that navigates this puzzle together rather than everybody being set to the task of searching the vast internet for people who correctly predict things.

That's not going to work. Well, just like you were talking about with media, right? We need collectives. We need collectives. We need to combine forces, join our human ingenuity and inventiveness and creativity and analytical skills and just, you know, humaneness to one another and figure out together what we need to be doing. Yeah. I mean, you know, let's put it this way. I'm always interested to hear what the people who have successfully predicted things, who are they paying attention to? That's often a very good method for figuring

out what is worth your time. And I will say behind the scenes, there are groups of people meeting, trying to figure out how to jumpstart a proper public health response to the pandemic rather than continuing down this road on which we have obviously not succeeded. If someone is listening to your podcast and they, how do you pronounce his name? Geert Vanderbush? Vandenbush, yes. Vandenbush. When he described this scenario taking place that we currently see now and he accurately predicted it, there was no one else that was saying this, right?

Not publicly. I think not publicly is the answer. Some of what he said was actually well understood inside of immunological circles in places where people talked about this. And in vaccinology, it was well understood. And there was a reluctance to talk publicly about it because it ran afoul of the public health messaging. And we have to get past that. There's arguably a reason that public health messaging needs to be insulated from...I don't believe this, but there's an argument to be made that in order to get people to function in a coordinated way to accomplish something like driving a pathogen extinct, that the message needs to

be simple. We're not there. We have a complex problem in which the public health apparatus is obviously not functional. There's no explanation, none, for why we are not pointing out the problem of vitamin D and recommending that people who are likely to be deficient this winter supplement. There is no defense of that, right? Something has gone wrong if we're not even picking that low-hanging fruit. So in that world, forbidding people from critiquing the public health apparatus is absurd. The public health apparatus is failing.

And there are people out there who know better who are being marginalized. And frankly, people who have paid attention to our podcast have had a pretty good model of how to avoid COVID. We did not tell them that COVID was not a problem. We told them it was a very serious problem. And as our understanding of how to avoid it got better, we upgraded the model in real time in front of them. We told them why we thought X, Y, and Z were useful. And for instance, right, like I think it was April of 2020, I mean, for instance, right, like I think it was April of 2020 that the first big paper came out of China showing that across, boy, I can't remember, tens of thousands, maybe more than 100,000 cases of COVID where they were able to track how did that person get it. There was one, one case that had been transmitted outside. And that told us right there, and the authors of

that paper wrote into it, this is a disease that transmits inside. And not to say, and we kept saying like, okay, but it's evolving. Like it could evolve into something that can transmit outside. It certainly could. But what that means is, especially when we've had so many of our institutions shut down and we can't do what we wanted to do. And we don't have schools and we don't have businesses and everything. Get outside. Like get outside while the sun shines and move your body and have social experiences with a distance enough that, you know what? When you're breathing out in effectively infinite space outside, the likelihood of you getting this disease is incredibly low. So, you know, we were saying that at the point that California beaches were being shut down.

This is back when you still lived there. This is ridiculous at the level of public policy. And yes, people were scared and yes, people were confused and we didn't have a good model at all. We still thought we could get it from touching surfaces. But we've known a few of these things for a very long time, and public policy has not kept up. Not only that, but think about how harmful it is. And I should say, we need to be cautious. There is some reason to think that this outdoor transmissibility is

changing. As we warned that it would, we said, it doesn't seem to transmit outside. You should still be careful outside so we don't lose the advantage of the outside world being safe. Right? That was clear. And we may now be losing it. But what makes you say that? There are several incidents in which outdoor events have been super spreader events. And it's always possible that it's something like an indoor bathroom at an outdoor festival. But there, A, you would certainly expect, given the opportunity that the virus would gain

if it could figure out outdoor transmission, that it would eventually discover that trick. It's also been conspicuous that it doesn't transmit outside, given that this virus ultimately, through the Wuhan lab or not, has to have come from a wild creature. So it's not likely to be a very difficult process for it to regain the ability to transmit outside. The idea being wild creatures spending remarkably low amounts of their time inside. Right. Now, there are various arguments you could make about it. But let's just say lots of viruses do transmit outside. There are at least two components to this one not transmitting outside. There's UV light, which clearly destroys it. But the fact that it

doesn't seem to transmit outside, or at least didn't originally at night, means it's not just the UV light. But in any case, when it didn't transmit outside, and maybe we're still there, but maybe we're not. But when it didn't, we were in a situation where some tiny fraction of the world was dangerous and some huge fraction of the world was safe, because most of the world is outside. To tell the public that it's dangerous everywhere, right? That you need to fear people outside in the case that that's not the fact. And in many cases to literally give stay-at-home orders. They're still doing that in Australia.

Right. Stay-at-home orders when actually it's indoors where you are going to get this. And presumably if you aren't inviting anyone new into your home, you're not going to get it because it can't create itself from scratch. But locking people inside to protect against a disease that only transmits inside, when said that way, what could possibly be the explanation for this policy? Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. And obviously, there's untold psychological harm, right? To the extent that people are feeling closed in the idea that all you have to do is go outside and you're safe for the moment, that you can have a social interaction and not worry about it. You know, that was a tremendous advantage. So anyway, people who

were paying attention to what we were saying knew that very early, right? And then later on, there was sort of this dawning recognition, very slowly dawning, that maybe outside we didn't need to be wearing masks and maybe it was pretty safe out there, but there was no reason for it to emerge so slowly. It was totally knowable quite early in the pandemic. So is this a problem of policy being made by politicians and by government rather than by infectious disease experts? I think it is a problem of corruption at many different levels. That you have corruption in the academy that results in people not being very good at scientific thinking or not being willing to publish what they know because of its implication for their careers. You have capture of the regulatory agencies, capture of the public health apparatus.

You have all kinds of places where economic forces have overwhelmed the structures that allow us to do our collective bidding. And what we are now suffering is an emergent phenomenon, a disease that suddenly emerges and has all kinds of challenges associated. And every system that is meant to address such things is failing because of its own endemic kind of corruption. And there's this desire to make one-size-fits-all rules, right? Like, OK, just don't go outside. Then you'll be safe. rules, right? Like, okay, just don't go outside, then you'll be safe. Now, it's not true, but at least everyone can hear that and know what they're supposed to do if that rule makes sense. And,

you know, again, to go back, and we talk about this in the book, we already talked about it here, how about we assume, actually, that most people are capable of doing some thinking for themselves, and not only that, but desire to do some thinking for themselves and become more empowered and more capable, in fact, the more thinking that they are allowed to do for themselves. So if you're going to go outside, don't hang out in really, really tight groups with people and yell at them, right? Like it's the yelling and the singing is when the thing gets transmitted. But if that's not what you're doing, by all means, go out, you know, play sports, like be in the sun, make vitamin D, do these things. But that's not a

simple bit of messaging. So how do you encapsulate that and also get all the media to say that? Like if it feels like this really just needs to be a simple message, it's not going to work. We have to give enough nuance to allow people to go, okay, let's do like a model of what's actually going on here, of how this thing is transmitting. And again, not, you know, from, you know, March, April of 2020, oh my God, maybe you're getting it from surfaces, definitely sterilize your Amazon boxes before they come in. Don't let, you know, like, okay, none of us knew what was going on that I think none of us did, right? But we've had an increasingly good model, or at least we could have had an increasingly good model for a long time, but not if you listen to most of what is coming out of the public health agencies.

Yeah, they're still not recommending vitamin D. I mean, I think I would just watch that parameter, right? At some point, they're going to have to recommend it because the glaring fact of their failing to recommend it will not be tolerated any longer. But we're not even picking the low-hanging fruit. And that is evidence that it's time for somebody to pull the emergency cord and stop this train and get us started up again in some reasonable direction because this is just incoherent. And I think the public is actually perfectly capable of following along, thinking well enough to get us out of this if we would give them information that was actually, you know, truth first. If we told them, here's what's really dangerous. Here's what's safe. Here are some tools that work. Here are some things that don't seem to, right? Also, here's what we don here are some tools that work here are some things that don't seem to

right also here's what we don't know yeah you know that actually i i believe uh that that actually breeds confidence when people say here's what we do know here's we don't know yet here are the things that we actually don't think we're ever going to know but here are some things that we actually would like to know and we don't know yet and And we'll get back to you. But, you know, we've been advocating, I don't know how many months now, for the idea of composite herd immunity. The idea that vaccines produce an immunity to the transmission of disease that's declining with the evolution of these variants, but it's still true. People who have had COVID and recovered have the best immunity possible. There are several drugs that seem to provide prophylactic protection. And what you need is a composite of those categories of people who that composite needs to be large enough that when

somebody gets sick, it's very difficult for the pathogen to find a next victim because everybody's protected by something. That's the route out. And it's heartbreaking to watch us go month after month with, you know, at best delusional authorities pushing a single answer that can't possibly do the job. That's really the tragedy, is the tool that we are being told is the answer is not capable of controlling the pandemic. And it is not clear that there was ever a plan that was. There was the implication of a plan, but it is not clear that there was ever a plan that was going to control it. You would have to have a composite strategy in order to do that, especially in light of the fact that there's a large fraction of the

world, even if these vaccines were really as good as we had been led to believe they were, they still can't reach the whole world. And until you can reach the whole world, you can't control this pandemic. We need a composite strategy. There's also this thing that seems like we're set up to fail in this way that we have a popularity contest to decide who creates the rules. Popularity contest to decide who governs us and who tells us what to do. And in times of crisis, that's when these types of people who enjoy these positions of power flex it. And they oftentimes flex it illogically. And that's what we're seeing now.

And they also don't apply the same rules to themselves. This is the reason why Gavin Newsom is in the middle of a recall right now. Because they caught him at that restaurant with no mask on and he's been hypocritical about many things. because they caught him at that restaurant with no mask on and he's been hypocritical about many things. These types of people, it's so – because we have this massive scrutiny, right? Like if you want to run for governor, if you want to run for mayor or president, like they look up your ass with a microscope.

So intelligent people don't want that, right? So you only get these sort of delusional, egomaniacal, crazy people that want that job. And then once they got that job, those are the type of people that love telling people what to do. Those are the type of people that love, like if you look at the ones that have enforced the most draconian laws, and you listen to the way they talk and the way they describe this event, what we have to do, what the people are going to have to do, especially in light of what we've been discussing today, that they're wrong about many of these things and many of these methods, but they like telling people what to do. And that's a danger. It's a really dangerous aspect of human personality,

that people that enjoy being in positions of power also like using that power. They do. I don't know. It's a difficult point to make. But at the point that this election came down to Trump versus Biden, it was obvious that there was some deep problem. it was obvious that there was some deep problem, right? This was not a pair of people that one wants to have to choose between to solve difficult problems, right? This was an acknowledgment that the system was comfortable with handing us a choice between two non-viable candidates. And that's apparent now. But the— To everybody.

It is to at least many people who thought the adults were back and suddenly now realize that those of us who said, oh no, you may like that flavor better, but that's not an adult, right? The fact that that is obvious now, the next step is to realize, oh, this is what the system does, right? The DNC gave us Joe Biden. There actually were good Democratic candidates, but they were driven out because presumably they couldn't be controlled by the things that own the Democratic Party, right? That tells you, you can't have that level of corruption and then navigate something like a pandemic or a withdrawal from Afghanistan well, right? That level of corruption is going to cause you to screw everything up. And at the point you realize that your political parties are effectively colluding to prevent you

from having a reasonable choice because they only want things that they control, it is time to look at those parties and say, no more. control, it is time to look at those parties and say, no more. Well, that leads me to the Twitter account that you guys created for Unity 2020 that was also banned. Yeah, still banned. It's still banned. That was one of the most egregious and disgusting examples of censorship I have ever seen in my life, because there was nothing wrong with anything

that was tweeted from that account. The account was simply an idea. Let's get people from both sides that are effective, viable leaders, and let's try to figure out a way to create some sort of alternative to this two-party system. And they just banned it. Yeah. I mean, they banned it. And, you know, it's funny, nobody has put this together, I think. But looking at the appalling withdrawal from Afghanistan, I just keep thinking, you know, Tulsi Gabbard and Dan Crenshaw would not have allowed that to happen. No. Right?

And that was the candidates who had won. Those were the candidates that were chosen by the unity movement. Was there any rationalization? Was there any explanation as to why that Twitter account was banned? Oh, there was an explanation. It just was wrong. There was a cover story. Right. So the explanation was that the unity movement had used some kind of inauthentic, meaning robotic or mechanized retweeting apparatus to try to get

a hashtag to trend. Not true. We actually did an internal investigation because it was an all-volunteer organization. We actually said, well, is there any truth in what they're accusing us of? And we did a full investigation. We submitted a report to them showing that what they had accused us of had never happened. Didn't make any difference, no response. The account is suspended to this day., the moral of the story is we were told you can't do this, right? The danger of Trump is too big, right? We, you know, Joe Biden, he may not be perfect, but he's good enough. Well, do you still think so? I mean, I think lots of stuff was visible back then that is now, you know, we did a good job of predicting, yes, neither of these candidates are viable. It is time to do something extraordinary because we

don't really have an alternative. And if one thing turns out to be true, it was that. Yeah, it was disgusting. Like watching that. And that's something they've used before with people, the idea that there's some sort of a bot running or there's some sort of concerted effort to manipulate hashtags and trending, you know, like your machine's broken. Yeah. No, what there was was a bunch of volunteers who were frightened enough of the major party candidates to try to get another message into Twitter, which is, you know, nothing wrong with that. So there was a hashtag that began to be successful that was trending because real people are concerned and were interested in having that hashtag succeed. And effectively what came down, the cover story was, we don't think this hashtag is valuable. Therefore, there's no way anyone else could have. Therefore, this must have been done by a bot. The whole hashtag thing.

What a bizarre point of contention that we have to deal with. You know, like that someone could write a hashtag. Right. And that is like, oh, look at this. There's too much attention being put to this one idea. We have to stop that. Like what is so dangerous about this fucking idea? Like even if it was the case, and it's not the case, but even if it was the case,

that you had some sort of mechanized bot-type situation that accentuated this one hashtag, what is the problem there? Like, what is this hashtag, what are they asking for? Right, I mean... Yeah, I mean, they're asking for real people. A better candidate?

No, I don't even think it's that coherent. No. I think the they're asking for real people. A better candidate? No, I don't even think it's that coherent. No. I think the idea is they want – the whole thing runs through selective enforcement, right? They want rules. You don't understand them. They're not clear. You can't therefore follow them, and that gives them discretion to enforce them against people they don't like and not enforce them against people they do. And so in this case, what they did was they set up a system that allowed people who didn't like the unity movement to report it, which then gave them an excuse to ban the account. And it didn't matter that the actual explanation

for banning it wasn't true, because the real point was, well, people reported it, we've got processes, this caused it to be banned. What more do you expect? And the answer is actually, no, you're messing with history, right? The unity movement was quixotic, to be sure. On the other hand, it was making a point, which is that you've got two major parties, which are marshalling candidates who are old and decrepit and incapable of doing the job, and nothing could be more dangerous than that. Well said. Yeah, it's amazing that both YouTube and Twitter have achieved this position where there's no viable competition. There's no real viable competition. I mean, other than Facebook, I guess, but you could

be so verbose on Facebook and Facebook. I just never got into Facebook. I, I, I'd read some of those things and I'm like, Oh, and I go into the comments. I'm like, these are just different humans or they're just into different shit than me. I'm not into that. I can never got into it, but Twitter kind of makes sense. You know, it's, you're limited. You have to kind of like use a certain amount of words. I kind of see how information can be shared very readily. Links are shared very readily. It's a good way to get information in that regard.

But then it became this thing where it accentuates negativity in such a powerful way. a powerful way that is and it accentuate it it whatever the algorithms are or whether or not it's just a human nature thing that people like to argue more than they like to discuss ideas and people like to be negative more than they like to pursue truth and it's especially easy to do that behind a screen yeah well it's it doesn't seem like it's a real human being that you're arguing with. Right, which, you know, we haven't even mentioned the term, but the central theme of the book is something we call hyper-novelty. And the idea is humans are built to deal with novelty. It's what we're good at. But that we're dealing with levels of novelty that are so fast.

I think Heather said that we have outstripped our capacity to change fast enough to keep up with them. And this environment, all of those platforms, yeah, Twitter made sense to me for a while too. There was something nice about the fact that you couldn't be verbose and that it forced you to think carefully about how you said things. But it radically distorts your sense of who you're dealing with. Anonymous accounts make it even more troubling. And there is no question, it is not making us more reasonable. Even though it is possible to deploy a reasonable, elegant argument over Twitter, the overall effect of Twitter is one that is clearly

contributing to our derangement, as are the other platforms. The YouTube one is particularly unusual because you would imagine there's multiple places where people can upload videos. You would think one of those would catch on. Yeah. But no. One of them is so overwhelmingly popular. I mean, YouTube is immense. And I can't imagine being a person that is in any way, shape, or form responsible for editing or containing misinformation or controlling what people say or do not say on YouTube. And I got to imagine that part of the problem is managing at scale and that it's too difficult.

There's too much coming at you. The amount of sheer information that gets uploaded to YouTube on a daily basis is staggering. Yeah, I certainly don't envy the job. No. But the reason that there is one has to do with the fact of network effects,

which make it impossible to displace one of these entities once it has taken over, right? Because that's where the audience is. It doesn't matter if you produced an alternative to YouTube that was even better. What it doesn't have is the audience, which is almost everything. alternative to YouTube that was even better. What it doesn't have is the audience, which is almost everything. Well, that to me was, um, it was part of my decision to go to Spotify because Spotify didn't seem like when I had to take a chance, but they didn't seem like they were going to censor me in, in any way. And they didn't seem like they had any, they were more interested in being a partner than they were in me just being another person on the platform. So they have an interest in the show succeeding. Whereas the show on YouTube, like, there was a percentage, maybe 25% of all of our shows that would get demonetized.

And it didn't necessarily make sense. that would get demonetized, and it didn't necessarily make sense. And you had this impression that you have some people, some, I don't know who they are, in a room going, that one, no, this one, yes, I don't know. And they can't possibly be exposed to all of them, just as you say. It's simply too much material. So, yeah, in the wake of our demonetization, we've begun streaming also to Odyssey, but no one's heard of it.

How many people do you get on Odyssey? God, I haven't looked in a little while. How do you even spell that? It's not O-D-Y-S-E-E? I think it's two S's. I'm not positive. But so there are problems. One, it is difficult for another platform to generate what YouTube has. One, it is difficult for another platform to generate what YouTube has.

In other words, the network effects have created a set of servers that allows YouTube to deliver something in a way that is hard to bootstrap until the audience shows up. To your point about Spotify, at the risk of dragging you somewhere that I know makes you uncomfortable, you're one of few phenomena on earth big enough to actually compete with the network effects that keep people on YouTube right your presence on Spotify is a different kind of phenomenon than somebody else who looked at Spotify and said it looks like a good bet because they don't seem inclined to censor and it's capable of doing the job right so you know you pioneered something in your move there and I think it did actually open the world to the possibility that we weren't forever condemned to YouTube, that there might be other possibilities. And we just haven't agreed on where that is yet. You know, it could be Spotify. It could be Rumble. Rumble's making a play to escape the pigeonholing as a right-wing place. It's brought in some left-wing folks. And I've seen the criticism labeled or levied against these left-wing folks. Yeah.

It was crazy. People leave YouTube because they do not want to be censored. And so who is being censored right now? The censors are coming after mostly uh mostly right-wing people and then some of us who are iconoclasts on the left yeah and therefore what accumulates in these alternative platforms places like odyssey and rumble looks at first pass like it's about being right-wing when that has nothing to do with why you know what your ideas are and why you might might want to share them there.

And is what kind of platform is Rumble? Is it a video platform as well? It is a video platform. Is it just video? I'm not familiar enough with Rumble. I think it's a YouTube analog. Odyssey is certainly a YouTube analog, and I think Rumble is. And they're paying people to do things over there?

Okay. Well, they've made some kind of an arrangement with Glenn Greenwald. Right. And Tulsi Gabbard. But see, there's people that like you see like right, what's that guy's name? Joe, oh, Dan Bongino. He's a prominent right wing commentator. So people see like Steven Crowder, they see that, and then they immediately say,

oh, Glenn Greenwald, you've managed to go join the Trumpers, right? And then they attack. Right. We've got guilt by association. This is what we need, an open platform that will accept ideas from both the left and the right. And then I saw they were criticizing Glenn Greenwald of getting paid. Like, Jesus Christ, do you know how many people get paid off of YouTube? Like, what are you saying? Right. I mean, and how do they expect people to live? I mean, the fact is if you want people to be courageous enough to step out of the mainstream offerings and to carve out some new mechanism for delivering content that's worth watching. They have to get paid somehow. And so I think it's just a generic go-to attack that when somebody makes money doing something because the

audience is actually glad to have them, you can say, oh, you're doing it for the money. Especially if you're going after Glenn Greenwald. At this point, it's pretty clear. Glenn Greenwald is all the way left and fearless. And he's not going to compromise for anything. I mean, he left the intercept. He founded it. He's not leaving because he's been compromised. It's the opposite. He will not be compromised.

So when a guy like that goes to a place like Rumble and they're paying him, that's it? Rumble? Yeah. Oh, I'm thinking of Bumble. They're dating out. When a guy like that goes over to something like that, that should give you hope. That's it? Rumble? Yeah. Oh, I'm thinking of Bumble. When a guy like that goes over to something like that, that should give you hope. That should say, okay, well, maybe we have an alternative platform that's not going to censor people,

and it is willing to be uncensored with a guy like Glenn Greenwald. Yeah. I mean, again, we don't know where the network effects are going to go, but I do think it's, it'd be very smart for those of us who, you know, the problem isn't really right left. The problem is you've got the corrupt mainstream orthodoxy stamping out every competitor that might arise anywhere. And to the extent that the competitors start categorizing themselves as right or left rather than trying to make sense

in a world that is chaotic, the enemy will win. Right. But I don't, I mean, I know much less about Rumble, but Odyssey certainly has not attempted to characterize itself in any way. No, it hasn't. It is absolutely open.

I mean, in fact, you know, it's to the degree that it has an ideology. It's about blockchain. Yeah, it's a blockchain ideology. Oh, well, that's great. I love all that. Yeah. This concept of hyper-novelty is fascinating to me, and I have a major concern. My major concern is that you're right and that the only way we are going to keep up

is if we integrate with technology, like physically integrate with technology. And I think that's the demise of the human race. I think that's the future of the human race. I think we are the electronic caterpillar that will give birth to the butterfly of technology. And we don't even know why we're making a cocoon. We're just there. Oh, that's brilliantly said. We don't know why we're making the cocoon, but making it we are. Well, I don't think if you talk to a caterpillar, like, what the fuck are you doing, man? Like, they don't have any idea why they're doing it. They're just doing it.

Actually, we have a little section in the book called, I think, something like, does the butterfly remember being the caterpillar? And the answer is no. No. And there's no reason to have, right? Yeah, we don't know that they don't, but we know they have no reason to. It doesn't help them. Right.

And, you know, the point in part is about laying down so much evidence of childhood in the form of social media for people who are developing. That, you know, the 16-year-old who's looking back at their 14-year-old self in social media is actually harmed by having these highly curated, highly perfected images of themselves from a slightly earlier stage. But to your point, man, I hope you're wrong. I hope you're wrong that it's inevitable. Yeah, I think you're wrong that it's inevitable. I don't know that it won't happen. Well, it's going to happen. And then to keep up, you're going to have to do it. Because when I talk to Elon about his Neuralink concept, it's one of the most terrifying conversations

I've ever had with somebody because he's going to do it. He's going to stick wires into people's heads and it's going to enhance your ability to interface with information. It's going to change the amount of bandwidth that you have for interfacing with ideas and information, and that's going to give you a massive advantage. And the gap between the haves and the have-nots is going to swell accordingly. And you are going to have to do that to compete with these people. Well, I must say, I have not looked deeply into this question, but at a neurobiological level, I suspect we're farther out than it sounds, right? There's a lot of cool stuff you can do

where you look at a pattern generated in a brain and infer what it means, right? That's very different than being able to feed information back and forth in a precise way. In other words, when your brain thinks of a cat, right, there's just some set of things that fire. And we can look for that set of things to fire and say, ah, he just thought of a cat. But we didn't really read your mind. What we did was we looked for a pattern that is a proxy for this thought, and then we found it. for a pattern that is a proxy for this thought. And then we found it. So the question is, at what point can you actually integrate with a brain informationally sufficient to do what you're talking about? And while there's nothing, you know, to the extent that, you know, one of the

things we argue in the book is that human beings do this. We plug our minds into each other all the time. We just don't do it with a direct physical connection. We do it by vibrating air molecules between two people and a little membrane in the side of your head wobbles and it gives you a very good sense of what's being conveyed. That's a very sophisticated non-technological solution to that problem. Can you do this with true machines plugged directly into the mind? That's a much more difficult problem in part because of the idiosyncrasies that go along with the way each brain works. So just like we were talking about your skull being the result of rules that produce a reasonable skull rather than a blueprint of a particular skull, your mind, your brain and the mind, which is the product of what your brain does, is the result of an idiosyncratic developmental process.

And in fact, there's even extraordinary evidence from post-encephalic babies. These are babies who have had a large part of their brain destroyed very early in life due to a blockage of a valve that causes fluid to build up and destroy parts of the brain, who then have it surgically reversed, who end up with brains that don't look like anybody else's. They'll have a visual cortex arise somewhere where a visual cortex isn't supposed to be because what's written into the genome is not put a visual cortex in the back of your skull. It's find the inputs and place a visual cortex in such a way that it arises. So anyway, what I'm getting at is our physical brains look very different from each other.

And therefore, the process of plugging them into each other in a physical way is a very, it's a difficult goal. So I don't know exactly whether Elon has some trick to get around that, but my guess would be that this, because it's technically possible, it seems closer than it actually is. So I, and that indeed is sort of a theme of our thinking in general and the book. is sort of a theme of our thinking in general and the book. And I want to believe that you're right. And yet I also think back to, you know, the 1990s and imagining a world in which everyone is plugged in to their little hand computers constantly in the way that we are.

And it seems impossible. So there's an adoption of our psychology by our tech already that is far beyond what we could have imagined even 25 years ago. Oh, but this is exactly it. If you think about the way the phone does succeed, I mean it is us being plugged into a device. But it goes through the meaning layer, right? And so the reason that Apple became what it was was not because of the brilliance of its algorithms. It was because the people at Apple realized that the metaphor layer, that the idea that the human mind knew how to handle a folder. Oh, I can put things in a folder. Oh, I don't want this anymore.

I'll put it in the trash can. You know, the metaphor layer allowed the thing to integrate with our sense of a world of things, of folders and trash cans and things. And so the phone, as terrifying as it is, and I'm not saying it's not terrifying, doesn't accomplish the goal of plugging directly in because that's a very different problem. So you're saying the AI apocalypse is going to be rife with metaphor. Well, the AI apocalypse is really on us already, and it's algorithms and not robots. What I'm worried about is young kids developing a visual language that's different from English or Chinese or anything else, that they get taught this at an early age, and it surpasses all of our problems that we have with trying to understand people's sounds that they make. Mm-hmm.

problems that we have with trying to understand people's sounds that they make and that this is done through this electronic interface and that they change what it means to communicate one of the things that elon says you're going to be able to talk with no words i was like oh fuck because that could be how it's done i mean we're already having like jamie point this out one time he was like aren't emojis kind of like hieroglyphs and I'm like yeah they kind of are and now if something could be far more complex but in a similar way develop a visual language that people can communicate with where you don't need the the established sounds that mean Chinese or you know Hindu or whatever it is that you're speaking. Yeah, unfortunately that is more plausible than what I was imagining.

And I think there would be a first. Go ahead. I think there would be a first historically to have something have very precise meaning with only a visual and not an auditory component that passes for language. We could have an auditory component that goes with it that's a new language. Yeah. You know, that people adapt. I want to take back what I said then. I need to look more into what Elon is saying because, first of all, twins, identical twins

often do create their own language. Between each other. Between each other. Yeah, yeah. And there's also, it's been a long time since I studied dolphins in any way, but there was early on a thought about dolphins potentially being able to, because they use echolocation to see the world, there was a question about projecting things beyond, you know, projecting shapes, for example.

And I don't know whether or not that panned out or not but maybe there's something to this we already did three hours wild yeah it's 4 13. believe it or not not crazy that is crazy time flies with you joe time flies with you guys right i i have to thank you because uh your your podcast is uh one of my go-to things that I enjoy when I want to be educated and entertained. And it's just fantastic. And I'm so happy that you guys started it. I'm so happy that you guys have continued to do it through the censorship and the demonetization. And I hope YouTube comes to their senses and recognizes that not only are you guys right, but you're extremely valuable.

Well, thank you. And I should also say thank you for leading the way. You may not realize it, but Dark Horse was your idea. Yeah, that's right. Four years ago or so, a little over four years, when Brett first came on your show, right as Evergreen was blowing up, afterwards the three of us had a conversation. And you said to him, you should start a podcast.

Yeah. You told me not to name it that. But I told you to name it. You told me to name it the Brett Weinstein podcast because people wouldn't be able to find it if I named it something that wasn't my name. Well, glad you didn't listen. Dog Horse is a good name. Awesome.

Thanks, Joe. And your book's a great name, too. Tell People One More Time. September, glad you didn't listen. Dog Horse is a good name. Awesome. Thanks, Joe. And your book's a great name, too. Tell people one more time. September 14th, it comes out. September 14th, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution and the Challenges

of Modern Life. And we take on all the systems. All right. Well, always a pleasure. And I hope we get to do this more often. Great. Thanks, Joe.

Thank you. Thank you, guys. Bye, everybody.