The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 216. Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life | Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

This episode was recorded on October 5th, 2021.Podcasters and evolutionary biology power-couple Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying join me to discuss a variety of topics related to their new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century. We explore topics like niche-switching, what Darwin got wrong, Twitter, sources for modern values, hyper-novelty, the aftermath of progress, parenthood, and sexual selection – just to name a few.Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are evolutionary biologists, former Evergreen State College professors, and the current hosts of the DarkHorse podcast. You may also know Bret through Joe Rogan, or as the twice-moderator for Jordan’s debates with Sam Harris.The couple’s book, titled “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life,” asks why the most prosperous age in history has scarcely offset suicide rates, tribal division, loneliness, and human misery.Follow Bret at:https://twitter.com/BretWeinsteinAnd Heather at:https://twitter.com/HeatherEHeyingThe DarkHorse Podcast:https://bretweinstein.net/podcastA Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life:https://amazon.com/gp/product/B08VF32DXK/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0______________Shownotes______________[00:00] Intro[00:30] Guests’ background[01:32] A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century – why they wrote it[04:30] “Values might not be [scientifically] defensible. Taken to the extreme, it might be hard to explain why existing is better than not" - Bret Weinstein[05:07] “We believe that any credible 'ought' needs to be scientifically informed" - BW[05:45] Learning to negotiate hyper-novelty in the modern world. The extremely fast rate of progress and change[06:56] “The amazing rate of change we’ve created is itself deranging us and making it very difficult to understand and remember how to be human” - Heather Heying[08:18] “It's not that progress is bad – the benefit of progress is often tremendous, but it almost always comes with important unintended consequences” - BW[09:26] Our incredible ability to adapt by “niche-switching”[15:41] Unintended consequences & modern sleeping[22:45] Twitter as a giant social experiment; what happens when you can (sort of) communicate with everyone?[25:22] “If people treated each other the way they do on Twitter, they’d get beaten up with enough regularity to stop them. So the net effect [might make us] nicer, right?” - BW[25:47] The importance of nonverbal communication; physical and chemical ways humans communicate[29:57] Small talk, gaging social skills, and nonverbal cues[31:28] “Small talk lets you take a room’s temperature–literally and metaphorically" - Heather Heying[32:35] Objections to evolutionary theory: A critique of some key Darwinian tenets[38:28] Play & Evolution[42:08] Intelligence in mate selection amongst bowerbirds[53:12] How Heather conceptualizes male/female status hierarchies[55:57] Sex, gender, and how they’re linked[01:06:44] The Hero's journey and the importance of new storytelling[01:13:42] The adaptive valley picture in evolutionary biology[01:13:46] “I'm trying to update our understanding of stories rather than the stories themselves" - Jordan Peterson[01:21:29] podcasts & collective listening[01:27:26] Parenting & Children[01:27:46] “Children will destroy your life and replace it with a better one" - BW[01:28:52] Parenting & Relationships[01:30:03] Wrapping up#Biology #Evolution #Gender #Pârenting #Darwin// SPONSORS //For Advertising Inquiries, visit https://www.advertisecast.com/TheJordanBPetersonPodcast

Welcome to the JBP podcast season four episode 73. I'm Michaela Peterson. If you want to come out and say hi I have a Q&A show in Nashville on the 20th. We'll be talking about how morons are trying to take over the world. Diet, health, politics, it should be fun. No vaccine necessary. Come say hi. You can go to Zaini's Z-A-N-I-E-S online for tickets, January 20th. We have a treat for you today. This is a huge episode. You probably know our guests,

the Dark Horse Podcast Hosts, and Intellectual Power Couple, Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying. Dad talked to them about a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century, their popular new book, that using evolutionary biology explores why the most prosperous age in history finds so many of us more lost, divided, and miserable than ever. Bretton Heather are both evolutionary biologists and former evergreen college professors. They resigned in the aftermath of the 2017 evergreen protests. Brett has been on the Joe Rogan and Sam Harris

podcast several times. He also moderated two debates between Sam and Dad. In this episode, Dad asked the wine signs about hyper novelty, science and modern values, Darwin's mistakes, niche switching, the unintended consequences of progress, parenthood, Twitter, and more. I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is sponsored by Helix Sleep, GQ and Wires number one mattress of 2020, and McKayla Peterson's number one mattress of 2022. Also recommended by leading

chiropractors and some knowledges. Do not go with any other mattress company, I'm serious. Helix Sleep has mattresses that are so good. It's like sleeping on a cloud. No top or necessary. I cannot tell you how much I love these guys. I've had my helix for years. I had one in Toronto and recently when I escaped Canada and

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and a hundred days to decide if you like it or they'll come get it free of charge. He lets mattresses come in soft, medium or firm, plus they have more specific models for people with morning pains or sweating at night, although realistically that's caused. Helix mattresses come in soft, medium or firm, plus they also have more specific models for people with morning pains or sweating through the night, although realistically that's caused by what you're eating.

Anyway, right now Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners at helixleap.com slash Jordan. Take their two minute sleep quiz and get matched for the best sleep of your life as helixleap.com slash Jordan for $200 off plus two free pillows. Hello, everyone. I'm pleased today to have some friends of mine on Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein. They're evolutionary biologists who've been invited to address the U.S. Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education. And they've spoken to audiences across the globe. They both earned PhDs in biology from the University

of Michigan, where their research on evolution and adaptation earned awards for its quality and innovation. They have been visiting fellows at Princeton University, and before that were professors at the Evergreen State College for 15 years. They resigned from Evergreen in the wake of the 2017 campus riots that focused in part on their opposition to a day of racial segregation and another college equity proposal. They co-host weekly live streams of the Dark Horse podcast and are both quite well known to many people in my audience. It's a pleasure to have you guys here today.

I just read your new book. I'm very much looking forward to talking about it. You have a copy. Maybe we could see it. It is a pleasure to be with you, Jordan. Thank you. Yes, great. Great to see you again Jordan and great to be back on your podcast. Thank you. A hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century. So let's talk about that. I've got some questions. Well, first of all, maybe we should ask why did you write it? What was your purpose?

Why did you write it? What was your purpose? Well, in the many years that we were teaching at Evergreen, we were deploying what we called the evolutionary toolkit, which was a set of concepts that allowed people to understand the nature of biological creatures and the nature of they themselves. And many of our students asked us if there was not some way, some form in which we could provide them the toolkit so that they could hand it off to people who weren't in our classes and events have conspired so as to allow us to write that book. And we've now done it. We're very excited to finally have the toolkit in the world. So there was a broad question that was popping around in my mind while I was reading this. I mean, you do state in the book that it's very difficult to derive shud, so pathways

for behavior from scientific facts and scientific data. But in some sense, the book is an attempt to, what would you say, extract out from biological knowledge, certain guidelines for behavior, guidelines for thinking. And so it looks like it's in part an attempt to bridge the ought, the is ought gap to speak philosophically. And did you, did you think about that explicitly when you were writing the book? Well, it is, you know, we do, we point out that the naturalistic fallacy is something to be avoided exactly as you just alluded to. You know, what we know to be true does not necessarily mean that that's what ought to be true, or we ought to aspire to.

But I think what we do consistently in the book and in our teaching and in our lives is try to understand what we've been, who we are, and not just what we are evolutionarily from an anatomical and physiological perspective, but from a behavioral perspective and a cultural perspective, and thus make the most meaning that we can from what we've been to what we can be. Yeah, well, you talk about human universals, for example, and you speak about them biologically, sets of emotions. We have language, the use of shelter, the fact that we all live in groups that we imitate, that status is part of our, what would you say, psychological concern, existential concern, the division of labor,

artistic production, and so, you know, you could think in some sense that if that's what human beings have always done, and that's what we are in some sense, that there's some utility and having some respect for that. And that seems to be at least a tentative bridge between the Is-Aut chasm. For what it's worth, I don't think there's really any conflict between what we've tried to do here and the obvious difficulty of extracting an ottoman is, the fact is we have values. Ultimately, they may not be defensible from a scientific perspective. In fact, if you take it to an extreme, it's difficult to establish a reason that

existing is better than not existing. In some sense, that's a subjective preference, and it's one that it's not surprising. We all share because we are the descendants of many creatures who have preferred it. But in an absolute sense, it may not be defensible. So what we do in the book is we inform the question of what ought to be with a scientific understanding. And we believe that any credible ought needs to be informed in this way, at least in modern times. And where we arrive is at the conclusion that we cannot, in fact, go back. There is no place for us to return to that would be sensible from the point of view of modern people. And we cannot go forward in a chaotic way. We have to recognize that there are many things about what we were that need to be preserved and updated. There are other things that

need to be jettisoned and that it is that re-negotiation of our relationship with each other and with the planet that is the focus of where we must go. And you talk at the beginning about the focus of where we must go. And you talk at the beginning about the new landscape that sits in front of us. And you also discuss that in relationship to the human niche. And so one of the issues you confront very early in the book is this notion of hyper novelty. And I mean, I've been very ill for a long time. And so I've sort of woken back up. And I have all this new electronic stuff around me that I don't know how to use, and it can do so much, but it's very, very hard to

figure out how to make it work. I know perfectly well that that problem is not going away. It's going to be twice as bad in a year, and twice as bad again a year after that. And so what's this idea of hyper novelty in more detail? Well, at one level, and I'll let Brett finish to you one after I answer, but at one level, the book is an invitation to consider trade-offs and all things, to recognize that so much of modernity has been amazing for humanity and has given us the level of comfort and productivity and connection that we have. And that is, we do not forget that when we also point out that the amazing rate of change that we ourselves have created is itself deranging us and making it very difficult to understand how to be human and how to remember how to be human.

to understand how to be human and how to remember how to be human. So I would add that the fact of novel technology, of course, exists in obvious forms in the types of devices that you're referring to, but it also fits well with many other things. Novel molecules that we encounter, novel ways of socially interacting. And the problem is that although we are the most flexible creature that selection has ever produced, our level of flexibility is not up to a rate of change where we literally do not mature into the same world in which we were born. By the time we become adults,

we live in some different context and what this means at an intuitive level is that we do not know what to do. Our intuitions are badly tuned for the kinds of things that we encounter. And this is made particularly bad in the context of markets where our intuitions can be hijacked to get us to engage in behavior that benefits the people producing the content, but at some cost to us. So we have to become aware of this hazard, and we have to learn to apply the breaks to it.

It's not that progress is bad. Progress is often tremendous, but it almost always comes with important unintended consequences and being aware of them is an important feature of it. Right. So that's a permanent part in some sense of the proper political debate, right? And so you think we face a horizon of genuinely and truly unpredictable change. No one knows what's going to happen in the next 10 years at all.

And so the liberal types who think more, what do you say loosely, and with more associations and more creatively, they're gonna produce solutions hypothetically to those unpredictable problems, but the conservative types are always saying, yeah, but be careful, guys, because your damn solutions might be worse than the problem.

And so, and you can never say that one side of that argument has the floor properly. You never know because it really is unpredictable. And so, if that debate between the liberals and the conservatives isn't allowed to exist in an untrammel manner, we actually interfere with our fundamental problem solving, what would you problem solving ability both individually and collectively? And when you talked about our niche, being niche switching, you know, that we, and that's, I mean, part of the reason that I thought that the hero story in some senses at the top of the value hierarchy is because the hero story is about niche, niche switching. It's about the transformation of viewpoints. And so, well, what should all viewpoints

be subject to? The transformation of viewpoints when necessary. It's something like that. And I thought that dovetailed with this idea of niche switching being one of human beings prime. So, maybe you could explain that niche switching idea and the niche idea too, because lots of people don't know what that is. Yeah, well, so in ecology, the idea of a niche is that part of the environment to which an organism is best adapted. And most organisms have a relatively narrow set of environmental conditions, which includes both the plants around them, the soil, the climate and the weather, all of these things, the geology, to which they are best able to exist. And as they extend towards the borders of that niche,

they do less and less well. And there's some area outside of it that they don't do well. And humans, of course, as is widely understood, have managed to excel on every continent of the planet that has plants. We have explored everything successfully. And so we argue in the book that while it is well understood in ecology and evolution that every organism has a niche, the human

niche is in fact niche switching. That is what we do, that we are able to move from, you know, hunting marine mammals on the coast, inland to hunting salmon, inland further to hunting large large or terrestrial mammals. And that's just an example from a pre-industrial pre-agricultural moment, right? We can imagine any number of transformations that humans have have been involved with. And this implies that we have a mechanism for swapping out our programming, which we clearly do, if you think about what happens as a population moves through time and changes what it does for a living. There's a mechanism forgetting there. It's not a haphazard process. And we argued that this process will have unfolded very frequently

around campfires as individuals come to consciousness of a collective kind. What they do is they pool their cognitive resources. They do a kind of parallel processing, asymmetric parallel processing, where they share ideas and individuals with very different strengths and blind spots engage the same question. And the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That process allows human beings to literally bootstrap a

new software program for their population, and that is the key to human success. Okay, so when I was reading Jung's thoughts, so his conception of the self was an underlying mechanism that allowed ego frames to be transformed. So imagine at any point, it's like this niche, niche idea, at any point you're identified with your adaptation to a certain niche. But now and then the niche transforms, and so you have to transform or die. And so, but you're identified as you with that adaptation. And so that is experienced in some sense as an ego death. And then the question is, well, when that ego death occurs,

what does it collapse into? And Jung's idea was there's an underlying structure that he called the self, that is there stably across transformations of proximate identity. He also associated that, at least in part, with the voice of conscience, which was a voice that was telling you that your current adaptation, despite your identification with it, wasn't optimized, it wasn't optimized. I suppose that's the right way of thinking about it.

So, yeah. And many moderns, especially those of us who are spending so much of our time on screens and in social media now, too often conflate those two things, right? Conflate the ego identity with the self, if I'm remembering your use of Jung's terms correctly. And, you know, this is exactly the problem.

And that is exactly the problem. That's a really interesting, you wrote an essay called Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious, which is one of the most brilliant things you ever wrote that is exactly discussing that problem and it's catastrophic danger. It's brilliant, but it's very hard to figure out what it's about if you don't have this initial conception.

Yeah, and so it's exactly the problem for individuals and also for one individual assessing another. And so, you know, the way that we would, we used to frame it in our classrooms without the Jungian framing was, we're not going to conflate a person's idea that you may find objectionable with a dislike of the person themselves. That the person's idea is skating on top or skating on top of what their actual self is, but it's very easy to fall prey to that conflation. So the parallel you point out is actually reflective of an overarching similarity and analogy between developmental progress and evolutionary process. And so what Jung is focused on there

is a developmental analog of what we talk about with respect to lineage is transforming what they do. An individual coming to do something different than they did before is involved in a process that looks very much like that and will have many of the same features as they update. Well, okay, so what you could think about that too is, you know, the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex. And so what that means is the prefrontal cortex is basically evolved to abstract out patterns of action in abstraction so that they can be assessed and killed dispensed with before

being instantiated in behavior. And so that is in fact a replication of the evolutionary process in abstraction so that we can have our ideas die instead of us. And we do that in the political landscape if we're smart, right? Because part of the debate is, well, here's a bunch of good ideas we should act about. It's like, wait a minute. Some of those might kill you. And you do the lot of that kind of warning in this book, right?

Because you talk about the necessity of creative adaptation. But the book is full of cautions about unintended consequences. And so, I mean, for example, you talk about, and I hate this, all these gadgets we have around us, it's engineers, they're all autistic and obsessed with linking light. So every damn thing you have has to have a light on it. And I finally bought a router where you could shut off the lights, it's like more power to them.

But it's not trivial. You point out, for example, that we're not well adapted to sleep if there's any blue light around. And so we have these gadgets. We're very sensitive any blue light around. And so we have these gadgets. We're very sensitive to even dim light. And so we have these gadgets around that are polluting the darkness. And well, that's not nothing. And that's a good, really good example of an unintended consequence.

Yeah, it's really, it's not nothing at all. And I think, you know, we see, we have been lucky enough to live in a space for many decades now where we could make it totally dark and mostly silent night scape for ourselves, but whenever we travel. The presence of at least one blue LED blinking somewhere in the room in which you're supposed to sleep is almost ubiquitous in pretty much every other room that we have been exposed to. And that suggests that right there, we have a likely explanation for at least part of the derangement of moderns. Right there, sleep disruption, we know we need sleep. You know, we argue in the book where aliens still land here with the technology to have gotten here, they would not be confused by the fact that we spend a third of our lives in apparent dormancy because they too would sleep. Sleep is necessary.

Well, one of the first things you do as a clinician to treat people with depression is to try to regulate their sleeping because it's such a basic bio-rhythm that if it's fouled up, then your entire your emotional regulation deteriorates tremendously. And so these small, hypothetically small changes, and of course, light at night is not a small change. Night is dark, and we didn't have light except fire, and you point out in the book that,

you know, and this is Rangham's work a lot of it, which you cite, you know, that we've probably been messing about with fire for something approximating two million years, and so night time fire, that's a whole different thing. That's the right kind of light. One of the things that's interesting about your book and the way you think is that you're using biology in some sense also to point out what we should be wary of, because it's going to disrupt us our biological function in ways that might not be so good for us. So it's health advice in some sense, even though a lot of it seems to be behavioral. So well, it's health advice in the sense that we are unhealthy because of all of this hyper

novelty at virtually every scale. And so when you say that light in the middle of the night is not a small matter, we point to the possibility in the book that in some sense, wavelengths of light that tend towards day that include a lot of blue, misinformists about when we are active. And for many of us, we may be able to tolerate that if we can get past the simple sleep disruption. But for some of us, it may be activating the dream state while awake.

And the degree to which simply activating the dream state while awake would mirror the kinds of symptoms that come along with schizophrenia is conspicuously, simply activating the dream state. Simply activating the dream state. Also, there's a question about, given that we have these cycles of sleep and that we wake very differently under natural circumstances than we do under modern circumstances, it is an open question as to how much cost there is to awaken arbitrarily as a result of your alarm, suddenly triggering your ability to interrupt these cycles immediately

if there's an emergency, right? That can't possibly be good for you. And we're built not to do it. And so the idea that, oh, I'll just put an alarm clock by my bed and I'll get up at 6.30 at what cost. And I think we simply don't know. No, well, that's so interesting that so many of those technological innovations, well, this is the conservative speaking again. It's like, you think you know what that thing is, but don't be thinking you do that. The existentialists called that alienation,

taking a page to some degree from the Marxists and part, but in a much broader conception, which was, well, you're alienated from your creation in some sense because it has a life of its own because it contains way more of its own because it contains way more possibility than you thought you packed into it. And that damn possibility is going on fold across time in ways that you can't possibly predict.

And so that's wonderful because everything is so deep and mysterious because of that. But it's also, it's like, that's a genie. And you can't put the genie back in the bottle and you don't even know where the damn things are. It's amazing. We've actually managed to survive all this technological revolution. And it's really something that we've been able to adapt to it so far. It's not only knows what Twitter is doing to us, for example. And it points to the hubris that we have, right?

The arrogance of all of us, not just creating, but accepting all of the hyper novelty into our world. As if we already have a complete understanding of what humans are and what we need. And we point, as you know, in the book to many past examples, that now look laughable, you know, to doctors at in the early 1900s deciding that not only was the appendix unnecessary, but so was the large intestine. Let's just cut those out of people, right? This is going to be a little more space in there. A lot of space. Yeah, we probably need more space in our guts.

Right. What could possibly be doing? Now, so this is easy, right? It's easy with a hindsight of 100 years. But we have to ask, are we so certain that we've attained God-like knowledge now that we're not making any of these mistakes? Well, it's also God-like ethics.

And the fact that we're so damn powerful means we better be better because look out, you know, in this we just have no idea what's coming. I was talking to a good friend of mine who's brilliant computer engineer and he's working on this damn thing that he thinks is more revolutionary than the internet and he isn't someone who just says that and he's already done this like five times. I thought, oh my God, do we really need something more revolutionary? And then I thought, he is a wise person and he's careful, thank God.

And you know, don't, no doubt there's 10 things coming that are more revolutionary than the internet. You know, I heard about like about three of them this week. And it's really something. And I hope we're bloody well up to it. And you know, one of the things I hate to like ramble on about Jung, but one of the things he did say back in the 1950s, which really, this was in relationship

to thermonuclear weapons. He said that most serious crisis facing us in the future will be mass psychosis, essentially mass delusions. It'll be psychological instability because we can't afford that and be this powerful. So you were talking about your friend and his idea and you said something akin to, I hope he's up to it. He's at least, you know, okay, while I'm seeing the hazards, but the problem is there's no level of wise

that covers this. None. No. For, you know, you mentioned Twitter, it's early with Twitter. We don't really know its full effects, but I think we can be pretty sure it's not making us nicer or better informed, even if that seemed like it might be a consequence. But if you imagine, I mean, I remember, you know, it wasn't so long ago that Twitter was a novel idea. And can you imagine saying, well, what will be the effect if suddenly everybody

can, you know, say 140 characters at a time, anything they want, everybody, the ideas, well, what's the harm in that? Yeah. Right. Well, so we could talk about that a bit. I mean, because we don't know much about our linguistic function, we have no idea what the combination of a 140 character limit, no censorship or social scrutiny at the moment does to the emotions we're likely to manifest when we communicate in that manner. We have zero idea. And by the time we figured out, Twitter will be something else, so it won't matter.

Right. And add to that, add to that the fact that we're not engaging with whole human beings, right? That it's entirely behind a facade. Some of those facades are real people. You know, I know when I see a tweet from you that it's actually you who is behind that. There are other people who might know entirely online, and I think I think they are who they say they are. There's other accounts that are actually anonymous and they're consistent, And I think they're going to be consistent, but who really knows. And of course, there are far more that may not be people at all, right? Right. And now to be a bigger and bigger problem, right? I'd be hired and are actually real people, or they're just not even people. So

we are I think 60% of the internet traffic is bought something like. Yeah. So you were pretty much it's going to be just. Yeah. Yeah. We're learning to conflate real people with fake people. I think we have no way to tell the difference. Think about this too. So you're driving around in your car and it's a shell. It sort of looks like a beetle because the engineers hide the complexity from you because that's what you want. And then you see these other people in their shell, beetle shells. And you curse and swear at them like you never would if they were right in front of you. And that means that just putting that facade on them

dehumanizes them to the point where you're much more aggressive than you would otherwise be. And so we have no idea how that works out in the social sphere, even conversing like this, which seems like the real thing. You know, and maybe it's close enough, that we don't know what that does to the likely emotional tone of our interactions. No, that's right.

It's arbitrary is the answer. And I agree with you exactly. Your example of cars is a great one, but one thing that we can be pretty sure is that if people treated each other in person, the way they treated each other on Twitter, they would get beaten up with some regularity, which would stop them from doing that. And so the net effect might be that, we would be nicer, right?

And so the suspension of the actual violence may cause us to become much more dangerous as we were trying to problem solve and navigate. Well, yeah, and then we could talk about that for a minute too, because you might think, well, violence is no solution. And it's like, no, but one of the things that you do see in interactions between men is that there is an underlying threat of physical violence that's always there. And you think, well, that's a terrible thing.

Those those demonic males, that's rang up spoke, right? That's a terrible thing, those demonic males, that's rang up spoke, right? But by the same token, you can signal a tiny increase in the potential for that violence in a variety of ways by frowning, by changing your voice tone. So you just have to hint at it if it's a civilized discussion

and it keeps it within bounds. And that's one of the things that I don't see so characteristic of linguistic interactions between women, for example. Yeah, it's not. And I would just add to pick up on a point that you made earlier, you said the prefrontal cortex is barring from the motor cortex. Well, it's also specifically in mammals. The cerebral cortex is borrowing from what used to do our smell processing. And so as primates for much more visual than the rest of mammals, which are much more focused on smell with this increase in the

size of the telencephalon, but what are we missing when we're doing something that feels very much in person, like what you and we are doing right now, but we're not smelling each other. And you know, yeah, that's your sexual interactions. That's got to be crucial. Right. And it's mostly not conscious. Like humans, you know, we supposedly don't have hormones. Well, let's see. Yeah. Right. Sure. Yeah. Right. But we know that we're in person with one another. There's little things about body language, about movements, about little gestures and facial movements that don't convey even ever screens, and certainly don't convey otherwise. When I was in college, I lived with like six narrative wells

and a couple of pretty decent women. And one of the women had this, she had her moods, and I swore that I could tell if she was in a frozen mood when I walked into the house. I thought, I know something's up here. And that happened like six or seven times. And maybe it's superstition or whatever. But I really think it had something to do with smell.

And I also had this very strange experience when there was someone in my house that was pretty much homicidal and ready to go off that night in a very not good way, a very person who was very disturbed, a good friend of mine who eventually committed suicide. And I woke up at like three in the morning and I thought, no, something's seriously wrong and I went into his room and he was sitting there

up on his bed and I knew what he was thinking. And I swear and my brother was sleeping. He was visiting me from Western Canada, a couple thousand miles away. He was in the other room, completely different room. He told me the next day, independent of this interaction I had with my friend who was staying with us, that he said, what the hell was going on last night?

I couldn't sleep at all. And I really think it was smell associated. So it could be, it could be, but it also, you know, one of the things about human beings is that we have really no idea what most of our minds are up to. And so you don't know what you're tracking. You could be tracking that when somebody is in a mood that they walk across the floor in a particular way where that board doesn't squeak or it does squeak or something about

their pattern of behavior has just been recorded as a precursor to something bad. And so it might as well be smell or that might be a metaphor. I can just smell some's coming. Well, just think about dogs. Try taking your dog to the vet without him knowing. It's like, what the hell is that dog figuring out? It's nonverbal clearly. It's like you think let dog can't understand language and get some of it. But man, dogs, they know. And that's probably because you're not, you're not in verbal behavior isn't exactly the same as it usually, isn't there extremely attuned to that partly because they're not actually blinded by their linguistic

ability, right? Because our linguistic ability actually inhibits some of that non-verbal decoding, at least our conscious awareness of it. Yeah, we make them stay up thinking if we're using language we're being purely analytical. And we forget all of the things that underlie the analytical. Yeah, like all the musical tone.

Yeah. In fact, this is, this is my hypothesis for why we have these greetings that carry zero content in them. Is this is very hard to hide from somebody who knows you that, you know, there's something on your mind. If you say I'm fine, right? But you just don't get the tone color exactly right. They're fine. Right. Exactly. Right. But there's an awful lot that's communicated and well, you see that with small talk too, you know, when I've talked to a lot of hyper intellectual people and I was kind of like this at one time, it's like small talk, you

know, who's got time for that? It's like no you probably don't want to be around anyone who doesn't have time for small talk and because small talk is well first of all it isn't Energy requiring and that's really actually really quite nice And it's also an indication that the person has some social skills You know, they know how to just have an introductory conversation and not jump right into what's dead serious. And all those things we do to smooth the waters that, well, a technology like Twitter just eliminates. And we also don't know how Twitter samples people.

Like Twitter may only allow people who are irritated about something to talk. That's right, that's right. And to your point about small talk, I too have dismissed small talk in the past as something, you know, not worth my time. And I think I've come around as you have it sounds like, to the idea that it's actually much like you maybe could smell or you heard the floorboards or something with your friend who was in an apparently homicidal mood that night, or you heard the floorboards or something with your friend who was in an apparently homicidal mood that night. Small talk allows you to take the temperature metaphorically,

literally, maybe of the mood, of the interaction. And get a sense for, okay, how am I, as we go deeper, how should I play this? Like, do I go and guns blazing? Do I take it a little easy? You know, what kinds of things is the person that I'm interacting with likely to be able to engage, able and willing to engage right now? Well, it's probably a form of play.

So when kids get together on, say, two kids of roughly the same age get together on the playground and decide if they're going to play, they start with little and play that's below their developmental level. And then they both ratchet it up to their own developmental level. And if they match, then they're good play partners, but they start with something that's actually quite beneath them. And then they also tend to evaluate if they're dealing with someone who is developmentally much delayed in comparison to them, they'll tend to find another play partner. And of course, we do that as adults,

as we make our progress through the social interactions. So. Hey, it's Michaela again. I know you guys like learning or you wouldn't be listening to my dad's podcast. Wondrium is a fantastic platform that allows you to learn almost anything you could be interested in.

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If your life isn't stressful enough, try that. Or you could try more relaxed stuff like my first toe-up socks quilting essentials. That one should appeal to this audience. Kidding, there's a ton of philosophy physics. You name it. Whoever's listening to this podcast is smart. So I thought this would appeal to you. Right now, they're offering a special deal, a free 22-day trial to celebrate the new year, exclusive if you sign up at onedream.com slash Peterson. Again, go to won.

drium.com slash Peterson and start learning today. This episode is sponsored by Green Chef, the number one meal kit for eating well with dinners that work for you, not the other way around. They're the first USDA certified organic meal kit company, meaning you can enjoy hand-picked organic veggies and premium proteins without having to worry about where they came from. We, in this strange family, exclusively eat meat due to a host of rare health conditions that actually aren't really that rare, everyone's sick nowadays. Anyways, I wouldn't advertise a meal block service if it weren't healthy. Green Chef has options I can actually get behind. Their meal

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You know, you biological essentialist types, you know? So let's also talk about objections to evolutionary theory. You know, you biologically senseless types, you know? So how do you respond to those sorts of—and there is a danger, right? Look, there's a real danger that we should address here. We hear, follow the science a lot, and we hear these unthinking claims that, well, the science will just tell us what to do without any intermediation of such pesky things as politics. And so when people are criticizing evolutionary theory as psychology, they are to give the

devil his due. They're also going after what might be a too fastile tendency to say, well, this is, and since it is, I can make it should. And it's science that's allowing me to do that. And that's not good. That's not good for science or everyone else. So how do you handle that philosophical problem, let's say, when you're trying to write a book like this?

Two points, which are really probably facets of the same point. One, we are very early in the study of biology, unlike things like physics and chemistry. And we are also in a different kind of scientific realm. Complex fields function very differently than simple fields. And unfortunately, our model of Hessian works is built on the places where we succeeded early. And we're going to have to revise the way we do science for biology and psychology and all of the related disciplines. And I would say a couple things. One, I think there's a perception in certain camps. Very frequently they are

non-academic camps in which there's a recognition that there's something missing for an evolutionary theory. And what I would say is we agree there's something missing from evolutionary theory. What we tend to disagree about is what is there. And from our perspective, there is a missing layer of Darwinism. In other words, the Darwinian story we tell about how a creature like a human being arises through this process is an incomplete story. And many people detect that incompleteness. The question though is, is that an indicator of some divine force of force outside of physics, something like that? Or is it an indicator that there is a Darwinian process that has yet to be described?

Okay. So I really want to ask you guys about your opinion about this, because that's a real crucial issue as far as I'm concerned. So as far as I know, Darwin outlined both natural selection and sexual selection, and he put a fair emphasis on sexual selection. But when biologists started to unpack Darwin's ideas for about seven decades, eight decades after he wrote his great books, most of the emphasis was on this like blind natural selection. And the thing that's so interesting about sexual selection

and I think this is true as organisms become more complex is that it implies in a very non-trivial manner that consciousness is directing selection through mate choice. And so this idea that we have that spirit compels matter to emerge towards complexity has something going for it that seems to me to be deeply rooted in Darwinian theories of sexual selection. And you see this emerging in very weird ways.

So I'll give you one example that you may know of. I don't know if you've seen that YouTube video. I think it's from a BBC Nature documentary. If that damn pufferfish making a Mandela sculpture at the bottom of the ocean. It's like it's like 20 feet across this thing. It's about eight inches deep. This pufferfish is like this big.

He spends four days making this incredible sculpture. And this is a bloody pufferfish. Then the females come and take a look at his sculpture and think, he's kind of a creative artsy type of pufferfish, and he's pretty practical from an engineering perspective, and so he might make a good mate. That's a pufferfish. So, well, then in the Bauerbirds, which are also extremely interesting examples of that, obviously, they are being selected by the females in particular for high levels of creative intelligence and practical engineering skill. And so there is a role of conscious choice, so because you keep hearing about the blind

forces of natural selection. It's, yeah, fair enough. But what about sexual selection? And then what does that say about what consciousness is doing? And I don't think, I can't, because that's not mechanistic in some way. Well, that's all I have to say about that. I don't know where you think about all that.

You're exactly right. Your sacrilege is dead on. And you know, you can detect that this is the error with the following version of the same puzzle, right? We swear that evolution does not look forward, right? On the other hand, we also swear that we are the products of evolution and we certainly look forward, right? We can project forward in time. So if it is true that selection can build a creature that can model the future, then is it true that evolution cannot model the future? That seems wrong. Right? So anyway, we could parse

the details of that. But the basic thing is, look, we are not dealing with Darwinism 1.0. We're dealing with Darwinism 10.0 or something like that where the original crude haphazard process has built refinements that allow it to function much more effectively than otherwise would, which is exactly why we say there's a missing layer. And as a placeholder for that, the terminology which I've used, which has gotten me in a ton of hot water, is explorer mode, right? The idea is how does evolution 10.0 explore design space in something other than a half hazard fashion, because of course, a lineage that explores in a half hazard fashion is a terrible disadvantage.

I got to say something. I got to say something about that. So I had this vision of play. So, and I first saw that the fundamental role of the patriarchal spirit in a household was something like the provision of a safe place for play. And then I could see children as experimenting with different manifestations of their physical being, that's in play, and that's relevant epigenetically as far as I'm concerned, because what they're doing is modeling potential ways of being in their play,

and then they instantiate those physically. And I don't know how deep into the biology that goes, but it's not trivial. Because they are playing with alternate forms of being in play. And of course, we are in the autonus, adult human beings, and we play a lot. And so we've retained that ability into adulthood. So take what you just said about play and epigenetics and extrapolate it to birth order effects, right? Birth order effects, which are either a failure of selection because if there's some best way to be, then where you are in the birth order shouldn't affect it.

But there's another way of interpreting it, a much better way of interpreting it that says, depending upon what has come before you, what you should be, we will have been changed, and there may be predictable patterns in the way it will have been changed. And so your point about a child exploring your child is effectively exploring developmental niche space, which is altered by the siblings that came before. Yes, okay. And so now you have built into your genetics. This is maybe a discussion of something like human potential. So, you know, when you go into a new environment,

new proteins are coded for by genetic structures. So partly you think up new ideas in a new place, but that isn't all that happens is that when you go into a new place, there is new biochemical potential that's being unlocked within you. And that's part of the reason why going many places makes you more than you were. And so that's deeply coded all the way down to the molecular level by the looks of things. That's right. And that's to your earlier question about, doesn't an evolutionary interpretation of what

we are faked us to a preordained conclusion. Well, no, it doesn't. And part of the answer to why is this concept of reaction norms, where you can start from a very similar starting point, you and someone else, and end up in a very different place because of the environment to which you were exposed. And so some of the examples from non-human space of this

would be tadpoles of some species that if they are raised among kin, they become sort of docile vegetarians with small mouths. And if they are raised among non-kin, they become carnivorous cannibals who eat. I got to tell you a story about that if you don't mind. So when my daughter was very little, we went to a pool, a swamp, you know, on someone's farmland and she collected about 50 tadpoles and brought them home, put them in an aquarium. And one tadpole lived and it ate all the others. And then it turned into a frog which she had for about three years, but I had no idea tadpoles were carnivorous, but apparently if you adjust the

niche properly, then there you go. So I didn't know it was only non-kin. It's, well, it's different in different species, but it's a density dependent response to the environment, density dependent and kin dependent response to the environment. And this suggests that, you know, just to say that we are evolutionary beings does not fate us to one particular thing. We have to be paying really close attention to what our environment is. And just one more story that's a bit similar here with regard to the bowerbirds that you brought up and play and explore at modes is that in one species of bowerbirds, where the males build these beautiful bower, you know, much like palaces for the females to come by and assess, the males know as they build them, which direction the females

are going to come through. And in fact, they, in some cases, sort of build the pathway. So the females always come from a particular direction. And they actually build forced perspective, just like human artists, forced perspective into their bowers, such that from the place of the females will first view them, they look bigger and grander than they actually are. And you know, this again is the way that males can modify what females will think of them and enhance their chances. So let's think about that really seriously. Let's just talk about the birds.

So what exactly is it, do you think, that the Bauer bird male is demonstrating and what is it exactly that the female is looking for? Because you might think, well, what the hell does nest Building Artistic Creativity have to do with a Bauer bird? But there's some analogy to human beauty, because they actually make beautiful things these birds, and they look beautiful to us, which is kind of peculiar, all things considered. What are they selecting for? It's a very good question. I'm a little bit, in some sense,

this is part of the subject of the next book. But I will maybe preview you that a little bit for you since you asked such a good question. The problem, so this kind of behavior is very common amongst birds, right? And birds create a special hazard, the female's face, a special hazard in choosing a mate, because birds can fly. So let's say that a female is selected to find a male who's in very good condition. If he's only going to get gametes from him and therefore genes, then his very good condition might indicate that he has very good genes.

That's standard evolutionary theory. But the problem is, what does good genes mean? Does it mean some general good genes, or does it mean good genes that will be good for her offspring, where her offspring will exist? And so if a male has gotten well fed in a remote location and then flies in and demonstrates that he is well fed, it may indicate nothing at all or it may even be counterproductive

from the point of view of her searching for genes that will be well matched to her own in the environment in which her chicks will grow up. So one thing she may want to assess is, did you get well fed here? And the thing about power birds, we could go on for hours about this. But the thing about these powers, which have no function whatsoever, they are not necessary, don't provide shelter.

They just simply are these structures that demonstrate something is that males will steal from each other. So a male who is not present will lose materials and his bower will degrade as a result of theft from neighboring males. He will also typically have a behavior like a dance, right? And when he will perfect in the exact location, he will dance around the objects of his bower. And so if a female, let's say that a male does the worst thing. Want to see my etchings?

Want to see my etchings? Let's say that a male flies in, right? Or a well-fed male flies in from somewhere where food is abundant. And then he, because he's a big brood, he vicks a local male who's built a beautiful power, right? And then a female comes and she assesses the power. Looks great. Then she assesses the dance. Won't look great, because he hasn't practiced it there, right? And then a female comes and she assesses the power. Looks great.

Then she assesses the dance. Don't look great because he hasn't practiced it there, right? He just flew in. He's a faker, right? She'll detect that. Okay. Whereas if he's... You're a thief and you're a thief from far away furthermore. Right. Now, let's say that he flies in and he gets the power and but he has to stick around long enough to learn the to dance around this power that he didn't build. Well, he's going to have to spend a lot of time for reaching away from the power, right. And so he may look well, but the power may be degraded, even if his dance looks good also in no go. How about a male who's again done the worst thing and he's evicted the local resident and he flies in, he evics the local resident, he manages to feed himself but spend enough time at the power that he can defend it and practice his dance. Well, then even though he's stolen the power, the female is getting a proper indication that

his genes are well suited to the local environment. He's feeding himself well here. He's been here long enough that he's learned the dance. He's defended his power probably a good bet. So even in the case of the power isn't his construction, it might be an honest indicator of his genetic quality. So one of the things when I was reading evolutionary psychology and trying to parcel out, you know, the differences in sexual attraction markers between men and women. I'll tell you a brief story as an intro to this. So when I was an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, I had some success with women, but not much. And then I went to McGill and I was a graduate

student. And nothing changed really in the couple of months between when I was a senior undergraduate in Alberta, and when I was a low-level graduate student in Montreal, but how attractive women were to be changed a lot. And I thought, well, that's not you, that's something about status. And I already knew that the evolutionary theory there, and that women are more affected by, let's say, social status in relationship to sexual attractiveness than men are. But then I thought that through to, and I thought, no, no, women use status as a marker for

the ability to gain status in novel environments. It's something like that. An expense of watch or something like that, or a nice suit, shows that you have acquired resources and hints that you have acquired resources and hints that you still could, even if things fell apart. So it's not mere power or even resources, which it's often parodyed at,

and sometimes understood as, it's a proximal marker for something much deeper, which is somewhat akin, I think, to what you're talking about with regards to the male Bauerberg. Is that way offer? No, that's very much the case. I'll let you continue afterbred, but status is exactly an honest indicator of the ability to have, and, you know, most evolutionian biologists would have us discussing this that is quite unnerving and rather actually disrespectful because

it imagines that female choice, that the females doing the choosing and all of these species, including usually humans, are just being frivolous. That they just, it doesn't matter. It's simply about status and what does status matter anyway, whereas exactly what you've done here is tying it to the just being frivolous, that it doesn't matter. It's simply about status and what does status matter anyway, whereas exactly what you've done here is tying it to the reality of how good a potential mate is it's going to be. And the answer to that is going to depend on whether or not

your potential mate is going to be an active father or just provide gametes and then disappear. What quality of mate, what the qualities are that you're looking for will vary depending on what kind of creature you are. But the idea that females are just being frivolous is that we can talk about status for a minute too. And so like if you look at human social hierarchies, and this is true across the animal kingdom, and then you rank order individuals in terms of their relative status, even in relatively non-social creatures that have to occupy the same territory, those that have the best local niches have offspring that are much more likely to survive. They have much lower mortality rates, and then there's something else too that psychologists have figured out that I think is right. It has a biological interpening, which is that your serotonin system

is that your serotonin system is more effective at modulating your negative emotion, given as a certain level of stress, the higher you up are up in the social hierarchy because you're actually safer. And so part of what that implies, and this just blew me away when I sorted it out, was that when you go after someone's beliefs, and they've used their beliefs

to stake a claim to a position in a hierarchy, you're attacking the structure that modulates their sensitivity to negative emotion. And if you're hypersensitive to negative emotion, you hyper-preparaphyzologically so much that you die way earlier. So this isn't trivial. And it isn't like the terror management theorists think that, you know, your beliefs somehow regulate your anxiety directly. It's no.

You have a set of beliefs that gives you a stake to a claim in a status hierarchy. And that's what we do as professors, right? We say, well, well, we have this knowledge. And that's why we do as professors, right? We say, well, well, look, we have this knowledge. And that's why we get this niche. Well, then you attack the validity of your knowledge then I make you out to be one of those fly in power birds that just ripped off the status hierarchy. And well, I'm not interferes with your emotional regulation.

That's like, well, that's what we're thinking about for about 10 years, I think. Yeah, well, I think one thing that is true is that our modern environment and our mismatch, our evolutionary mismatch with it obscures all of the elaborate logic that undergirds the relationship of a normal creature in its environment or would have characterized our ancestors in any of the environments from which they came. And so it's very easy to look, for example, at modern human females and see that there's a preoccupation

with the level of wealth and status of potential mates and to read something superficial into it. But the point is, no, this is about deadly serious stuff, and it may not be deadly serious stuff in the modern environment. But the point is the sensitivity to those things has everything to do with females in a past environment, sussing out small differences that had large evolutionary implications for their lineage going forward. You want, I think that your notion of niche transformation, niche switching there. So imagine that partly what the woman is trying to do is use markers of proximal success as an indicator of niche

switching capacity. Now, they're in adequate markers, and that's partly why they can be criticized, you know, and they're no more accurate than the claim that just because you're rich, you're good. But status is not exactly wealth, although wealth is a proxy for status. Status is more subtle. And, but symbols of wealth are pretty good

instantaneous proxies for status. They're subject to all sorts of flaws and they're not sufficient, but you have to screen most people out, so you need simple markers to begin with. Heather, let me ask you, how do you view both as someone who's female and someone who's an evolutionary biologist, how do you conceptualize the as someone who's female and someone who's an evolutionary biologist? How do you conceptualize the difference in status hierarchies in human females and human males? I'd really be interested to hear that. Yeah. Well, this too could go on for 10 years. We are one of very few species that has hierarchies and females and hierarchies and males.

Other species tend to have one or the other. There may be a couple, maybe Japanese, the Macax, if memory serves that have both, but in those few species that have both and in all of the species that have one or the other, the hierarchies are created and maintained via different means. And there's variation, of course, but in general, there's variation, of course, but in general, the hierarchy in males in other species and men in humans is through overt means, through fairly direct claims. Sometimes it's physical, but usually the physicality is under the surface, right? It's there as a possibility, maybe you want to call it a threat, but usually things don't get physical as men are deciding what the hierarchy actually is.

But there's direct confrontation of a linguistics sort of a gestural sort of a, oh, you're doing that. I wouldn't do it that way. Or here, let me, you know, we're together. That's all I've been couched in a joke too. Oh, and, right. And so maybe that could be seen as sort of an end run around the direct provocation, but there's very rarely with men,

and you know, maybe this is changing in modern times, but if man A is interested in critiquing man B, he's very unlikely to say, I'm gonna take this to man C first. I'm gonna go talk to our joint friend, and before I take it directly to the guy and who, with whom I have an issue. Whereas, so that's, you know, that tends to be overt and female hierarchies tend to be covert in nature. And, you know, this probably originates in part through

the fact that even though we seem to be moving more and more towards a monogamous mating system, and we are therefore losing our sexual dimorphism in humans, we still are sexually dimorphic and are still on average, smaller and less muscular and less powerful. And so, you know, the ability to back up disagreement with the threat of physicality would have been less successful, certainly engaging with men, but also with other women. And so we're more likely, women are more likely to use social signals and covert signals and less direct signals to assess and to change what the hierarchy is. And there's a ton more to say, but maybe I'll leave it at that for the moment. So let's switch. You have a chapter on sex and gender, and that would be fun to talk about.

So first of all, I'm really curious about if you think those terms are importantly different and if they are why and what they both mean if they're different. So let's start with that. All right. They are different, but the way in which they relate actually you can deduce from the omega principle, which we haven't talked about yet, but essentially the way of conceptualizing it is, Heather and I say this slightly differently, but I would say that

gender is the software of sex. And I tend to say that gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex. And what this means is that these things are housed at a different level. What it does not mean is that they are pointed towards different objectives. So the Omega principle, which is one of the important principles that undergirds the logic of the book, is that epigenetic phenomena, including culture and all of the important principles that undergirds the logic of the book is that epigenetic phenomena, including culture and all of the software layer, is more flexible than genes and therefore more rapidly adapting, but it is also subordinate

to the genes in terms of objectives because genes are in a perfect position to shut down anything behavioral or cognitive that does not serve their interests, which it won't do instantaneously, but over generations it will. So what we find is gender has to be serving the interests of the genes, and therefore sex and gender should be pointed in the same direction. Now there's a lot of variation in the gender layer, but it is not a completely independent

phenomenon. It is not superior to the underlying genetics. So, let me ask you about that in terms of personality, then, because I've been thinking a lot about the sex and gender issue. You know, the idea that there's an infinite number of genders. And, you know, I like to give the devil his due as much as I possibly can. One of the things you do see in the personality literature in psychology, which is reasonably well developed, right?

I mean, we have a pretty good model of human personality. Five basic personality traits, maybe they're subdividable into two sub-trades each. So that's 10. It's five dimensions of variability. That's a lot. Reality only has four dimensions of variability, that's a lot reality only as four dimensions of variability. So, so what you see is that there are reliable differences between men and women in aggregate in personality and one of the big differences is that women are about half a standard deviation, more sensitive to negative

emotion. And they're about half a standard deviation, more agreeable, so more compassionate and polite. And it's not that hard to point out that while that might be a logical consequence of sexual dimorphism, so women should be a bit more sensitive to threat because they're a bit smaller, but also that they have to, I don't think human adult female personality

is adapted to human adult females. I think it's adapted to female infant diets and a female infant dot because here's why you don't see those personality differences emerge to puberty. Now that's also when you get sexual dimorphism but boys and girls under 12, 11, they're not different in terms of sensitivity to negative emotion, but then puberty hits and the transformation seems permanent. And so it makes sense to me that a creature that has an infant is going to be more sensitive to negative emotion and also what has to be more agreeable, more compassionate, because well, it's an infant, right? And compassion is the right emotion for someone under nine months of age. It's just compassion because, well, they're born so young, right? We have a very short gestation period, and so they're completely helpless.

So, of course, it's compassion. Okay, so now having said those differences exist, and there's some other ones, but they're more trivial. There are lots of women who have male personality patterns. So you find women who are low in negative emotion and low in agreeableness. They're quite masculine that way. And they're men who are quite feminine in their personality characteristics. And then you could also say, well, in so far as personality is associated with gender,

well, there is tremendous 10-dimensional variation. And so the idea that gender is fluid in some sense and that it's not exactly tied to the underlying sexual structure, when it's not pushed too far, when it's not political and it's intent, there's some validity to the claim. So what do you think about that biologically? Yeah, I think this is exactly right. I would, before I answer that though, I would say that no woman who would ever brought a child to term

would claim that gestation was short in humans. But I do know what you mean. I get your point, but it feels interminable when you're actually undergoing it. With regard to sex versus gender, and the sort of, you know, gender is way more fluid than sex. It is.

You know, sex is binary. We have, you know, we are a binary sexually reproducing species with two and only two types of gametes. The intermediate type of gamete, which has a little bit of cytoplasm and kind of moves around a little bit, you know, a little bit eggy and a little bit spurmy, doesn't work. There's lots of good reasons for this, but the evolution of anisogamy,

the two different types of gametes, is well understood from both a theoretical perspective, and it just manifests in plants and animals, right? So that is true, sex is binary. And then the expression, the software to use breads framing or the behavioral manifestation of sex to use mine. Of course, behavioral manifestation only works for animals. It doesn't work as well for plants, but we see the same

kinds of cultural behavioral manifestation of sex, even in plants, even with regard to eggs being more choosy than pollen in plants with regard to who to mate with. So, of course, there will be a greater manifestation of ways to engage the world when you're talking about, say, the behavioral manifestation of what you're underlying sexes, then there will be for what your actual sex is. And I say that as someone who was gender-nonconforming and who was never confused about whether or not I was a girl.

You know, this is the conflation these days, right? The idea that gender disordered. Yeah, it's weird how it's flipped around too because there's an infinite number of genders, so let's say. And well, but if you're kind of acting girly and you're a boy when you're three, well, then your sex is wrong. So wait a minute, I thought that gender was fluid.

And it's that it isn't binary. It's like, how come it's linked to sex so tightly all of a sudden when we're talking about, you know, non-stereotypical manifestations of behavior? It's super regressive, too. Right? I mean, the idea, you know, we growing up in the 70s, I was a girl who didn't like dresses and the idea that that made me a boy would have been considered completely anathema to the second wave feminists among whom I was growing up, right? I was just a girl who liked to get my get myself dirty and play on the dirt and go look for salamanders. That didn't make me a boy, of course not. Right? So, you know, being interested in things that are maybe more likely to be things that boys are interested in is awesome. And it is a hallmark of modernity that we can embrace such children and same thing for

boys who are interested in things that have traditionally been more likely to be things that girls were either natively interested in or encouraged to be interested in. But it doesn't change the underlying sex at all. When my son was young, three years old, that about that, my daughter, who was about four and a half and her friends used to get together and they dress him up as a princess or a fairy, and then he'd prance around the house. He's quite a masculine boy, by the way, and this actually bothered me, you know? And so I sat down and thought about it for a long time because, well, I didn't know why

it bothered me exactly. And then I came to the conclusion that, wait a second, you know, because I didn't want him to get confused, maybe it was something like that. And some of it was probably like arbitrary, Northern Alberta prejudice or who the hell knows. But what I realized was that if I interfered with this in any way, that's raised eyebrows or any of that nonverbal stuff, I would be sending a message to my son that playing at being a girl is wrong. And what that meant was that I was telling him

that embodying and understanding what it meant to be female was unethical. And that was a very bad idea. And so when you see that sort of gender crossing play, take place with kids, especially at that age, you should take somewhat of a hands-off approach and understand that they are one of the ways I know who you are is to act you out, to play you out,

and to imitate you. And it's easy to shut that down. And then you get the kind of divisions between the genders, let's say, or the sexes that aren't good. You can interfere with that very young. But so it goes to your earlier point about children effectively exploring epigenetic space and discovering who they are and the fact is you can start with a perfectly random approach to that, right? I'm going to try being anything at all and the point

is certain things land somewhere where there's something useful to be done and other things don't land at all and some things are fun for five minutes. And Heather points out, I think it's a lovely point that we don't rush to get the child who declares themselves a dinosaur to the transition clinic, right? We just maybe think that will pass. And the fact is, we know enough, or know, as Douglas Murray might say, we knew until five minutes ago that kids should be allowed to try out different gender stuff and usually it just works itself out. My, my granddaughter, she watched Pocahontas a lot and she, and she had a

Pocahontas stall. And she insisted for about a year and a half when she was, I think, three, that she was poke, if you asked her if she was Pocahontas or Ellie, she has two names, Ellie or Scarlett. She would insist that she was Pocahontas for a long time. And I thought that was remarkable, you know, that she'd caught something out of that movie

that attracted her so much that she was trying to embody that spirit. And while that is the point of these sorts of animated movies, is to put that spirit forward. Exactly. It was remarkable how committed she was. If you think about that over a year at that developmental stage, she's not poke-a-hontas anymore, by the way.

But I tested it for a long time. And so that play, that's really deep. That's a really deep phenomenon. So. And it gets to the human imperative to create story, to create meaning through narrative. And you know, there is, we've talked about this a little bit, there is not, uh, the heroes journey is extraordinary and universal. And in modernity, I think it can just almost just as easily apply to many

female journeys, but there aren't as many universal stories for girls and women. And the beauty and the beast is pretty good. It's I think it's the best Disney animated film. And like beauty's really smart because she doesn't pick Gaston. He's got all the markers, right? Right. She actually wants a beast who can be civilized. That's right. And he's the one advantage that he said, Gaston is all persona. So he's all the fake power bird. Now he's a

big guy and all that, but even that's fake. And she's wise because she doesn't fall for the status markers. And he's completely non-plussed by this because he's devoted his whole life to just developing the status markers. And so I think it's beauty in the beast is there's a hero's journey in that. That's that's very deep. And you know, these ferry some of these fairy tales, some of them have been traced back like 12 to 13,000 years. And so you know, if it's that old, it's like a hundred thousand years. Right.

Right. But this actually goes to a point that you and I have been dancing around forever, to a point that you and I have been dancing around forever, which is the point about to which level, to what level are these very ancient things effectively timeless and to what level are these things in need of change because we now face an environment for which they were not built. And so the hero's journey, I would argue, just painting with a broad brush. The hero's journey is timeless. What does the hero's journey look like? Well, it can look like Odysseus, or it can look like the fellowship of the ring, right? Those are very different versions of the hero's journey. And in fact, at the moment,

one of the things that we need are stories that are not built by the market to fill some need, but that actually reflect the transition in what males and females do in the world. That in some sense, one of the positive things that has flown from birth control is that women, because they can now engage in family planning that works, are freed to compete with men in every realm that isn't physical. Yeah, well, one question we're wrestling with is, well, are women just men then?

They are not. Right, since the birth control pill, well, that's, well, but they are in some way, which is just what you said. They're way more like men than they were before 1950. We have a pre-defence. Because they have a control. Yes, exactly.

And so part of what we are trying to sort out in our culture is, well, to what degree are they just men, or better men, either? And I mean, look what's happening to university enrollment, for example. And so we don't know. And that issue of universality. So a student once asked me in one of my classes at Harvard,

it's like, well, if these stories are archetypal, why don't we just tell the same story over and over? Like exactly the same story. And I thought, that's a really good question. And then I thought, well, there's actually an answer to that in Christian symbolism. So one of the things that's really strange about Christian thinking is, well, there's God, you know,

so he's the sum of all good. A very abstract though. Maybe he's a father, but he's way out there. And who knows what to do with him? But he's really abstract. Well, you have to take that abstract to make concrete. You have to make it embodied, right? You have to make it incarnated.

And so I'm speaking psychologically about the story, not religiously. So to bridge that gap between the ideal image, which is archetypal and universal, and the particularity, the way the Christian imagination solved that problem, was to say, well, that ideal was embodied in a particular time and place, which seems extremely arbitrary. But that's us, right? Because we are arbitrary embodiments of that, whatever that abstract humanity is. And we have to particularize the universal to our time and place. And that's why we need new storytellers

all the time. Right. You need new storytellers and you need effectively a process of selection. It may or may not be affecting the storytellers, but it affects which stories resonate. And so tellers, but it affects which stories resonate. And so a perfect example of your, what we do instead of telling the same story over and over again is we tell a story in a way that is relevant to the current moment. The allegory of the cave is the perfect example of this. The matrix is the allegory of the cave. Arguably the Truman show is the allegory of the cave. And the point is there are ways in which this needs to be, you know, we probably need an updated version of 1984 because we're living it again. And apparently 1984 isn't good enough to get us to recognize that at a level that will

stop, right? So in any case, there is a sort of need. And actually, maybe this is the way this intersects with the book, is hyper novelty is the out of control process by which the acceleration of change outstrips the capacity to adapt. That suggests that the pace at which the stories that we need must be updated is accelerating and probably too fast for us to get those stories out. Well, you know, it's something here's something that's worth thinking about too in that regard.

Okay. So what drives innovation in computer hardware? It's the attempt to tell stories in, to portray stories realistically, because that's the most technically demanding. And I mean this economically, I've talked to people who've designed these chips. Why do we need more and more powerful chips given that our computers are already too fast for us? It's like, well, we keep building these virtual worlds, and we build them because narratives think about the game market are so unbelievably compelling, and that provides the economic rationale for making our machines more and more intelligent.

And so we are hyper-motivated to solve that problem in some real sense. Now, how successful that is, that's a whole different issue. But, you know, it's worth taking seriously. After all, we've all been told that politics is downstream from culture. So by certainly, like your point about, it's the desire for the realism and the narratives that's actually driving technological process, although if you complete that story at the moment, it may be alchemy, right? It's the mining of digital gold that is actually driving the hardware.

It's in fact, yeah, well, that's a very strange thing too. It's a very old sort of wish. Yeah, it certainly isn't. God only knows how revolutionary that is. So I talked to a lot of the Bitcoin thinkers now and I have a better sense of what it is. And I can't believe how smart the person was that made it. It's really, and the story is just beyond belief.

The, you know, the Skype pops up. He makes this thing, he disappears, no one even knows who he is for sure. It's like, who could make that up? Right. If he's even a person. Well, and I'm, you know, what I'm trying to do, yeah, if he's even a person, I'm trying to update our understanding of stories, you know, that's that rather than the stories

themselves, I suppose, and also to point out how important they are. That hero archetype, I really do think that that's the story of niche switching. Right? Because let's see, this is why I want to do a series on Exodus. Now, I really like Exodus and you think about it in terms of the story about adaptations to niches. Okay, so an old adeptation gets tyrannical, it gets cast in stone, that's Egypt, It's all stone symbolism. It worked once, but now it doesn't. Well, that's an adaptation because the niche keeps changing underneath it. Okay, so then you have to switch the adaptation. Well Moses is the king of water and it dissolves stone.

He's the master of water. Well, what happens when you lose the adaptation? Well, the tyranny disappears. Hooray, but then where are you? Well, you're in this terrible space between adaptations. You're in a space between adaptations. That's the desert. Yes, that's the desert.

Yes, between adaptations. Yes, the desert. We call it the adaptive valley. And you're very right that a desert is a perfect analog for the adaptive valley. It is not a productive place. It is someplace one must cross and frankly, it has the same problem as the adaptive valley on the evolutionary landscape, which is you have to cross it in the right direction or you're cooked.

To elaborate on that a bit, I don't know the, I don't know the valley. So, theory that we have this very interesting. We have to get out of the book. Yeah, we have this very old metaphor and evolutionary biology originally penned by a guy named Soule Wright in the 1930s. In the 1932, I think. Anyway, it describes basically niches and opportunities as peaks and the obstacles to moving from one opportunity to the next as valleys. This metaphor doesn't work as it was initially instantiated because we didn't really know enough about genus and epigenetics

for it to work, but it can be easily updated. And the basic idea is, well, I would argue it has to be updated again that to think about a mountain range with valleys between peaks doesn't quite get it because if you're really in a mountain range with peaks, you can see where the other peaks are, but that's not how selection works. You cross into a valley because your opportunity is no longer good enough. You guys have to talk to Jonathan Pausio about the religious symbolism of mountains because it's dead relevant to your biological theorizing. Well, it wouldn't be so. Because because the perceptual landscape, in some sense, is predicated on the symbolic notion of a divine mountain. So you imagine at the center, it's like the fovee of the vision.

Right? Everything's clear there. It's closest to the center of what would you say, mastered territory. And so pyramids are a representation of that. And that's partly why they're sacred. And so this is this idea. It's not fluke that that metaphor sprang to mind for the biologists, and it's dead relevant

for a study of religious symbolism. Right, it could be convergence, or it could be that it's all right somewhere lurking in his mind and had religious stories that hinted at this and basically preconditioned him to see that meta for his particularly resonant. Well, I mean Brett actually is being too modest here. You have actually updated the model in your dissertation to shifting landscapes of dunes, ridges, and plateaus, where the selective pressures can yield lines along which you might be in most adapted form or an area that can fill, you know, also a volumetric and understanding where you can fill a space where in late comers

maybe less adapted, not because they themselves are any different, but because they're late to the game. So, you know, there's a lot to be said. There's a whole lot to be done, but suffice to say. Yeah, because Pazzo has always been mapping out the relationship between the mountain symbolismio has been mapping out the relationship between the mountain symbolism in religious thinking and also the relationship between that

and perceptual categories and cognitive categories. He's the only person I know that's done that. He did that part because he spent a lot of time talking to John Verveki, who's an expert in the cognition of perception and also interested in religious ideas. But there's a biological under. So then back to the knee switching idea. So imagine these mountains and valleys

in the adaptive landscape in some sense. Well, you want someone who is at the top of the mountain, but more importantly, you want someone who can travel from one mountain peak to another. And even more than that, you want someone to travel from a lower mountain peak to a higher one. Well, so, boy, there's a whole lot here. One thing is that the skills that allow you to

ascend a mountain tend to be in a trade-off relationship, an important trade-off relationship with the skills that allow you to cross these valleys, right? And so in some sense, those who are good at starting up businesses aren't necessarily the people who should manage them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, yeah, openness versus conscientiousness, that's what that boils down to basically. I once heard a very good discussion about whether or not this is why God kept Moses out of the problem is wrong. I'm a slant exactly. Yeah, because that was going through the

back of my mind. The Valley Crosser. Right. So there's a lot, there's a lot to be said for that. But the other thing is that human, maybe he wasn't Christ. That's why he couldn't get to the promised land. Yeah, that's the Christian version of that. And so and and it's related to this, it's related very much to the idea that you just put for different skill set in some sense. Yeah, I mean, he wasn't David most fundamentally, but yes, yes, well,

set in some sense. Yeah, I mean, he wasn't David most fundamentally, but yeah, see as well. But let's just say that if all creatures are caught in this adaptive landscape issue where you can't see the other peaks and crossing happens as a result of some process, human beings are in a special condition. And this is exactly what we talk about in the second allow us chapter of our book, which is the consciousness, the collective consciousness process actually allows us to effectively debate and discover the probable location of future peaks without having been there, right? Yes. To know that a peak ought to lie in that direction and to move in that direction in some coherent way.

This is a uniquely human capacity. It is why niche switching is our special gift. And, you know, it's dependent on the free exchange of ideas, which is no different than thinking. And we do it collectively. Yes, we do it. That's the thing that not every free of exchange of ideas works this way. It is a collaborative free exchange of ideas where people who are agreed that what we need to do is get into the future, how best to do that is the question around the campfire. Yeah, this collaboration involves ideas being exchanged, which can be altered by the exchange. Yes. As opposed to read only, you know, receiving information.

I think that's why the ancient Egyptians worshipped the eye, Horus's eye, because it's open. They weren't worshipping intellect. They were worshipping attention. It's different. It's really different. Intellect, that's Milton's authoritarian demon. Attention is different because when I pay it,

and I really learned this in therapy, the best way to help someone move forward is to listen to them, is to listen because then they can talk and then you respond non-verbally and that helps them figure out where they're clear and not clear. And then you can ask them questions like, well, you said that a minute ago and then you said that and they seem to be contradictory or maybe I'm just stupid, can you clear up that contradiction? And they unfold, their possibilities unfold as a consequence of talking, but you have to listen and that's attention. And so it's the listening is that it's such an important part of that collective transformation of ideas, right? To podcast work this way. of ideas, right? To podcasts work this way. Well, look, this is cool, man. You think about this. So, I'm stunned at how positive the YouTube comments are on the dialogues we have like this.

It's, they're so positive, it's just ridiculous. You can't believe it. And so, they work like that when they work, right? And you know when they work, because you're in the flow state. And that flow state. And that flow state is an indication of being possessed by that niche switching capacity. And there's a religious dimension to that. Because it's so important to our survival that it's associated with our deepest values. And we fall into that and love it. People love that. And that's where education takes place too. On that edge, that's that edge of transformation. And being there is way better than being right. Yeah, it is. And play better.

Play requires attention, right? You aren't successful in play with someone else if you're distracted. It's a dance. The ball, you mean exactly. It's a dance. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with this. And it's funny. We hear often about the terrible fact

of what people experience on Twitter and YouTube comments and all of this. We have very often existed in a state that just didn't mirror people's description of how terrible these things were. And then sometimes the narrative shifts on you. And so it is almost like a flow state that you reach and the audience resonates

and the comments look a certain way. And then something happens, sometimes something intervenes from the outside to disrupt it. And I guess I fear more and more that there is so much at stake in the sense making that goes on in these forums that something is intervening for economic reasons or reasons of power that in other words, it doesn't. Well, that could easily happen. Yeah. I mean, hopefully it won't, but because I think it's already happening.

That idea is. It's always it's look. And we have to fight against look. We have that, that's part of the eternal battle, right? That the, the imposition of what's right against that flow state, that's there forever. I mean, the ancient Egyptians do that. They had O's seris.

Their grotto's seris was a representation of that totalitarian proclivity. That's the evil uncle in the Lion King. And it is the existential psychologists who I like a lot. One of the things they did was lay out thrownness, is right, well, what are we always contend with? Well, we always contend with the evil uncle. That's the tyrannical face of history.

And it's always something against which, well, the hero battles, for example, and then often incarnates in his old age, unfortunately. But I mean, I'm optimistic about this, and it is play. And so people love to be invited. That's what's cool about this too is you invite people into this, you entice them into this, you don't tell them they have to do it. And then they're so happy, it's so cool, it's so wonderful to be able to do this. And then you also think you just you want to have someone you actually disagree with to talk to because you can actually play with them more deeply if they're being honest, partly because

they're way more unexpected than someone you already agree with. And that also means that flow state can be deepened because you get farther, right? You get more novelty that gets incorporated than understood. And so that's really, that's fun too. But you just said it reminds me actually of advice that we got from Bob Trivers, who's one of the greatest living evolutionary biologists and who was our undergraduate advisor. When we were looking to go to grad school,

he said, if you end up going on to being academics, to going on to being professors somewhere, you should find a place where you will be regularly exposed to undergraduates, because it's by engaging with the minds of people who do not already think they know something about your field where you will learn the most. And for him, although we didn't say it as part

of what he was telling us, it was also part of the sense of play. He was just an extraordinary lecturer. He had a ton of fun up there. And we first met him as undergraduates and watching him play indeed. with questions that came at him from people who were engaging in good faith, but didn't know what they were supposed to ask was extraordinary.

And of course, that's where we learn the most and where we can also have the most fun. Yeah, I was really interesting to hear that Trevor was like that because I know of his reputation. I mean, he's very well regarded by psychologists as well, particularly for work on self-deception among other things. So I guess I knew that you guys were his students, but it didn't quite sink in. That was quite the privilege, eh? It was very much a privilege and he was a marvelous lecturer.

I mean, just the man in a piece of chalk in front of a board was something else. But I should also point out that Bob is a good friend of ours and he was the officiant at our wedding. So anyway, that was an interesting experience and one I think we're both thrilled to have had. And interesting actually, he's a man of faith. He has some...

Did he talk to me on my YouTube channel? Very likely. Hey, that'd be great. Let's do that. So maybe you could introduce us, because I'd love that. I really like to talk to him about self-deception while among other things. He's extraordinary.

But he asked us the day before he was to marry us up in the mountains of California and the Sierra Nevada. Some questions just like a clergy person would. He really took this role on very seriously. This isn't something he'd ever done before, nor I think since. But he specifically wanted to know if we intended to have children. We were in our late 20s at the point we got married. We'd been together for a long time, and we'd ever said anything to him about our intentions or not.

And he knew that he would be giving a different wedding for us if we said no. I don't know if you have children, do you have children? Oh, yeah. Two teenage boys. Well, good, because you should have. And so, hooray. Well, I see, I've seen very many couples

that decided not to have children. And I thought you could have had some remarkable kids, and you would have been remarkable parents, and it's really too bad that that happened. And so... Well, I think the right way to say it is that children will destroy your life and replace it with a better one. Yeah, yeah, right.

Well, one of the things I love about kids is, well, first of all, they're ridiculously funny and playful. Ridiculous, they're ridiculously funny and playful. Ridiculous. They're little clowns. That's so mind-boggling. They have since a humor like at seven months. And I don't understand that.

And that's so funny. And they're always playing weird tricks. And then the other thing that's cool, and I think this is part of the theory of mind issue, is that, so you look at the world through a layer of latent inhibition, right? So mostly what you see is memory. You don't actually see what's there because your brain wants to take visual shortcuts because it's so god damn complicated to look at things. And so, you know, by the time you're 50, you've seen a million houses. So you don't see any anymore. But then you go

for a walk with a two year old. And because you can adopt that frame of reference, the world re-navigalizes like a little-year-old. And because you can adopt that frame of reference, the world re-navilizes like a little mini psychedelic trip. And that's something that the infants, children can, you know, that's part of the reward they bring you for having to take care of them. Humor, play, that re-navillization. And then the other thing I loved about having kids is you can have the best relationship

you've ever had if you're careful. Yeah, absolutely. It is, it is a unique relationship because I mean, obviously, parenthood is very, very ancient and has nothing to do inherently with human beings. But the degree of what it is to be a human being that is transmitted after you are born through interaction and not even explicit analytical interaction, but by modeling what it is to be a human being and them extrapolating and then throwing out the stuff that maybe is no longer relevant or wasn't that useful as a mechanism for you and replacing it with something else. It's really an amazing privilege to be part of an ongoing transmission of adaptive information down past the generations. Spoken like a true evolutionary biologist. I think it's really funny that you got married by Robert Trivers. That's just exactly right. That's very cool.

So look, I think that's a really good place to stop. We've been going for an hour and 45 minutes and it zipped by. We did stay on your book pretty good. So hooray for us, and it was really fun. I would like to talk to Bob Trivers. That would be great. I wish you the best with your book. How has the book been doing? And tell them about the book again, hold it up again.

So because I don't want people to forget. The book has been doing spectacularly well. In fact, so well that it is now a victim of its own success. It's sold out in three days back on September It's sold out in three days back on September 14th. And people are getting them, but they're struggling to keep them in stock. Yeah, that's a terrible problem that you've got there. It's like, oh my God, we were too successful. But so you can buy it on Kindle and you can get the audio version.

And so when you say, I think you said Barnes and Noble still has something stock. So that's a good deal. And then you hit, you said it hit the four, number four in the New York Times bestseller list. Yep. We shared it.

It sure did. So we're very pleased with that. And just love that people are reading it and having conversations about it. And, you know, this, this conversation with you is fabulous. And we are grateful for it. And for all of the conversations that we are hearing that the book is for. And it's really exactly what we're hoping for. Great.

Great. Well, it's really nice to see both of you. You look great younger, even, I think, maybe. So that's a good economy. We are. We are getting that's the third book. We're going to write about how we want to get younger. Yeah.

If we aren't dead by then. Right. Yeah. Well, all you need is like social isolation and, you know, pressure on your job and the collapse of your life and all that. And hey, you're rejuvenated. So if you're lucky, there you go. Yeah. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes. All right. Well, thanks so much. Jordan. It's been great talking with you too. Yep.

More and I would say talk to Jonathan Pazzo, man. He's deep. And here, there's these, there's this linkage of ideas way down there under the surface that's really worth investigating. He's something. So you'd have a good conversation. Yeah, he and I are overdue for a talk. We've been talking about having a talk for something. Yeah, I think. And to concentrate on this issue of the Sacred Mountain, that would be unbelievably. I just saw a talk he did to the Union Society in Montreal that was just bloody brilliant. I'm going to put it on my YouTube channel. And so I think that could be a killer discussion, the mountain idea and its role in biology.

And yeah, that would be something cool. All right. Wonderful. Ciao, guys. Thank you, George. Hopefully we'll see you again soon. Yeah. Wouldn't that be nice?

All right. Bye, George. you