TRIGGERnometry - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying: Sex, Religion, Evolution (Live Episode)

Episode Date: September 18, 2021

Evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying join us for a live interview followed by Q&A to discuss their new book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. Recorded on 17 September '21 Get the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hunter-Gatherers-Guide-21st-Century-Evolution-Challenges-ebook/dp/B09247XVQK Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Peter Hitchens here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873620658 Join our exclusive community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I will make sure to take out on advertisement in Pravda tomorrow. A fleet of sponsored ladders will descend on the Kremlin to put. promote this wonderful event. Our great and powerful leader, Uncle Vlad, will be wearing sponsored trigonometry speedos on Whitehorse. No niece, mate. Our first show with Andrew Dahl is now completely sold out and this one will sell out just as quickly. Tickets are strictly limited and they're selling like copies of the Communist Manifesto. Greatest book in the world second only to 10 cute things you didn't know about Joseph Stalin. I love that BuzzFeed article. Anyway, see you there, guys.

Hello and welcome to a very special live episode of Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kitten. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. It does not get any more fascinating than the two brilliant guests, returning guests to the show that we have for you today. They are, of course, evolutionary biologists, Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein. who are here with us to talk about

a brilliant, fantastic book, a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century. We cannot wait to speak with them. The show is going to work like this. It's very simple. We're going to chat with Brett and Heather for about an hour, an hour and 10 minutes. We're going to have a very short break.

And then after that, it's going to be your chance to put questions to Brett and Heather. If you want to have that, all you need to do is send us a super chat on YouTube or send us a PayPal. The link to that is in the comments. section below this video well and without any further ado let's welcome brett and heather in here let's

get the conversation started guys welcome back gentlemen thank you thank you for having us both it's good to be here oh good to have you back i tweeted about this and i genuinely meant i've been like a kid on christmas morning all day today because we can't wait to speak with you the book is absolutely fantastic i really recommend everybody read it and let's let's get straight into of course in the book You talk about evolution to some of the adaptations, both physically and genetically and culturally that we've seen. And you talk about how that is compatible or not quite compatible with the modern world. But I think before we get into some of that detail, the underlying theme of the book that I

kept having in the back of my head as I was reading, it was that Facebook slogan of move fast and break things. And my sense was what you're really saying is, as a Western industrial civilization, we've moved so fast. and broken so many things that many other things you talk about in the book, whether it's advice on food, advice on sleep, advice on parenting, advice on dating. In all of those areas, we're no longer living in ways that are actually healthy for us. Well, move fast and break things might make sense if you did it well. Unfortunately, the way we have done it has caused us not to stop doing the things that are broken

rather than to learn from them and prototype our way to a better future. And so, yes, that is one of the themes of the book, is that we are now living in uncharted territory that is so different from what we are evolved to deal with that we are simply incapable of adapting fast enough to keep up. Yeah. And the idea that move fast and break things is the rule you should abide by or the rule you shouldn't abide by is part of the problem, right? Move fast and be willing to break your arm perhaps as a way to know how to navigate risk in the world.

Okay. Move fast and be willing to break your head? No. Like don't do that. That's not a good choice for a human being. It's not going to end well for you. So part of, I think you're right, I think that is one of the themes of the book. And part of it, too, is trade-offs in everything, right?

There will be no or almost no static rules with which we can live our lives. We need to understand that we are evolving, changing complex beings and so need strategies that adapt with the times and with us. And one of the rules you talked about in the book, and is something that I think we're seeing more and more in our society is avoiding simple solutions to incredibly complex problems. Well, in some sense, you want solutions to be as simple as possible, but the idea that you should kid yourself that the solution will be simple. You're not entitled to a simple solution to a complex problem, especially if you haven't even really understood what the problem is. So very frequently,

what we'll do is we'll identify a symptom as if it was a problem, and then, we'll try to treat that symptom and will create a proliferation of even further symptoms, rather than looking for the root cause and figuring out how to solve it once and for all. Yeah. Go for it. Please. Go ahead. One of the other themes, which is exactly what you, Francis, are alluding to here with the question, is the problem of reductionism.

That sometimes simple solutions are the right ones, but far too often, as Brett points out, and as we do repeatedly throughout the book, as soon as you have something that you've measured, you mistake that for the thing that needed to be measured and the only thing that needed to be measured. And so now we've got a number. We've got a thing to point to that may or may not be the key symptom of the broken system in question. But we lose our motivation to keep looking for more things when we have a number in hand. And so sometimes a simple solution will be the right one, but very often it's not. And we need to keep our brains alive and our eyes open to continue to look for the deeper truths. And Heather, very much to your point, that's actually what I was

going to ask you about it. It might sound to someone who hasn't yet read the book, that we're talking in abstract here very much. So can you put some flesh on those bones for people? What are some of the examples of the reductionism, the scienceism that you all should talk about in the book that I think you're alluding to that. Yeah, well, one example is the idea that the appendix is a vestigial organ. And, you know, almost everyone who lives in the weird, you know, that acronym, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic world knows someone who has had a run-in with appendicitis. And in some cases, it's been, you know, close to deadly.

Usually people don't die anymore, but only if you live close to a medical facility. And so the story that we've been handed for decades now is this organ has no function for us, is all cost. And so it is incumbent upon us to surgically remove it at first sign of disease. Well, that story doesn't hold up from an evolutionary perspective because we've only been living in this post-industrial world for 150 years, call it. And the idea that this organ has been just killing people off for all of this time, for, you know, for however long it is that people imagine it to have been vestigial, forgets the power of selection. So selection would have begun to produce this organ had it been entirely non-functional. As it turns out, the fact of the disease in the appendix is a result of our modern lifestyles.

And we know that because when we look at non-weird cultures, non-weird peoples, the rate of appendicitis is almost zero. and in fact it may actually be zero. I don't remember the numbers. But what you do have is an emerging story about what the value is, that in those cultures where the food is not quite so sterile, not quite so clean for our guts, and for those people who have more frequent bouts of GI distress and GI illness, the appendix effectively acts as a repository for good bacteria with which it repopulates the gut after such bouts. So in the weird world, where our appendix is a repository, where our appendix doesn't get used much because our food is so clean and probably too clean, the appendix becomes inflamed because it's not used. So it is becoming, in our very, very modern

circumstances, a hazard, but it is still not a hazard in most of the world where people don't live like we do. The error in thinking was that looking at this and because we couldn't identify the value of the appendix, assuming it didn't have one, rather than saying we can see that it obviously, must have one. Not only does the organ itself have some expense in building it, but the cost of the risk that comes from having one is substantial enough that the pressure to eliminate it would have been overwhelming. It's also true that phylogenetically doesn't make sense that it would be an organ in the process of disappearing because our relatives that would have to have it in order for that story to be true do not. So I spotted in fact in college the idea that the appendix

had to have a purpose that we hadn't identified, that the vestigial story was simply wrong, but it was decades before anybody figured out a story that was satisfying as to what it did, and we have to get comfortable with that. We are new to biology in a way that we are not to physics and chemistry, and that means that very frequently,

although we can say something about how a system works, we don't understand it well enough to be authoritative, and we have to be patient to figure out what all of the details are in order to see the full story. And Brett, yeah, go for ahead of place. Let me just add one more thing to that, which is we invoke in the book the concept introduced by G.K. Chesterton of Chesterton's fence, right? In which two people walking down a road run into a fence and it's in their way. One of them says, let's get rid of it. And the second one, the more wise one, says there's no way that we should get rid of it until and unless we can identify what its function is supposed to be.

At which point, then we can talk about it. But until you know what its function is or what's supposed to be, there's no way that you should just get rid of it. So we raised that early in the book, this parable of Chesterton's, which has come to be known as Chesterton's fence. And we basically say, look for other things in the world like this. So Chesterton's appendix, Chesterton's breast milk, Chesterton's play, Chesterton's gods, right? There are many things that we moderns are foregoing because it feels to us like we're done with that.

We've evolved beyond it. We are moderns. We don't need that thing anymore. and too often we get rid of things that still have function or are tied to things with function, and we do so because we haven't actually stopped to try to figure out what the function might be. Don't you think, Heather, that actually shows that we're arrogant as a culture. We're arrogant as a society. That we look at things, and because we can't understand them or we don't find a purpose for them,

therefore we dismiss them. Absolutely. Yes, yes, we are. And I think, you know, I think people in many cultures have an arrogance to them. But it is symptomatic of too many of the systems that have the power to drive narrative in weird cultures. The arrogance is lauded rather than skepticism being lauded too often. And we see this in evolutionary biology in particular, where there has been incredible resistance to the idea that religious traditions are in some way meaningful and important, right? They've been dismissed as mind viruses, which they obviously aren't, right?

They're just as adaptive as a wing or an eye or any other structure. And the reason that we've done that is because in some sense, they are not literally true. But the fact that they are not literally true shouldn't persuade us of anything one way or the other. What they ought to be is just like a wing or an eye. They ought to be functional, right? Functional belief systems are ones that give you an advantage. And that doesn't necessarily come from them being literal and analytic. So, yes, there is an arrogance.

and it is something we will think more clearly when we get past it and we realize just how early we are in the study of adaptive complex systems. Well, you've both preempted my question there, which is kind of the spiritual appendix of religion. As you were talking about the appendix, I was thinking about this. So is it like the appendix in that in a weird culture we don't actually need it and it's actually potentially a source of inflammation and harm? or is it that we've just taken away something out of our societies without really fully appreciating the value that it still has for us? It is both to the 10th power, and that's the problem, because what we have is a compendium of wisdom matched to past environments, and it's Chesterton's fence after Chesterton's fence.

There are structures in there that are still serving their original purpose and are vitally important. There are other structures in there that may not only be useless, they can actually be harmful in our current environment. And the process of sorting which is wheat and which is chaff is going to be a very difficult one. But what we can say for sure is that it starts with the recognition that those belief systems were adaptive. That doesn't necessarily mean they were good. There were lots of things that urged people to war, things we mustn't do again, that, you know, were adapted. So what does adaptive mean for people who are not evolutionary biologists?

What adaptive means is that they are the product of selection and they enhance the chances that the creature that has these traits will have their genes lodged in the future. It does not mean good, right? To say something that something is adaptive does not mean that you are saying that it is good, either for you, the individual or the population in which that adaptive trait may be spreading. goodness is a moral assessment. And we say early in the book, as we always did in our classrooms as well, that we will not fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy, the is-ought fallacy. There is sort of a cluster of similar fallacies that philosophers recognize.

But to recognize that something is natural, which is itself a complicated term, but to recognize that something is evolutionary is not the same thing as recognizing as claiming that it is natural, which is itself a complicated term. But to recognize that something is evolutionary is not the same thing as recognizing, as claiming that it is what should be. And that, in fact, is the error that people who have abused evolutionary thinking have made. People like social Darwinists and eugenicists and such have made exactly that error. They have seen some measure of success and have decided that that thing that has succeeded in the way that they have claimed it is therefore who should be winning. And there is nothing in evolutionary thinking actually that suggests that.

It's also important for people who are bootstrapping a model for thinking about evolution to realize that you have competing strategies in which both versions or the multiplicity of versions are all products of selection. So ruthlessness is certainly a product of selection as is compassion. Rape is a product of selection as are laws that punish people who rape, right? These are competing strategies. And what that in part does is it puts the onus on us to figure out which parts of what is evolutionary we wish to retain and augment and which ones we wish to to banish. And it's really a human question. It can't be solved simply by science for exactly the reason that Heather is pointing out. The fact that something isn't the same as it being a good thing. And choosing is our

obligation. Brett, before I interrupted you to ask you to explain adaptive to us and our audience, You were talking about religion being an adaptive thing. What does that mean for us? Well, it means a number of things. One, as long as scientific folks keep wagging their finger at religious folks and saying, you're suffering from a delusion, we're never going to get anywhere. Because religious folks know that they're not suffering from a delusion, which doesn't mean that what they believe in is literal or even still relevant.

Right. We have to get to a conversation in which the scientific. folks acknowledge what religion has been and why it has characterized every important society. And the religious folks recognize that their book of wisdom may in fact be so out of date that it needs a rethinking beyond the style of rethinking that has typically characterized religion. We could, it would annoy many people, but we could draw a phylogeny of religions. And you could see that, you know, Christianity is a version of Judaism. and that Protestantism is a version of Christianity and we could, you know, increasingly divide these things.

Those are competing programs for exploiting habitats. Some of them are adapted to different places and times. And, you know, it works in an evolutionary fashion for a reason. Sectarian difference is effectively like variation in a population of creatures in which those variants that more efficiently exploit the landscape and frustrate competition between members, of the same lineage prosper and those that fail to do those things go extinct. That's how these things got shaped by selection. And it's why we have these remarkable narratives in the present. But to recognize that these are products of evolution is to say that we know that they are adapted

to the environments from which they came and not the environments that we find them in. And that puts the onus on us to figure out which portion of these things is still relevant and which portion needs an update or replacement. The part of the book that I found really interesting was where you tackled astrology, because now we're very dismissive of people who enjoy astrology. But you in fact said, look, hang on, there is merit behind this way of thinking. Yeah, which will sound astounding with just that introduction. And indeed, it did to us when we first began thinking about.

this. The fact is that modern astrology is generally bunk because it asks only what day you were born and then imagines that it can tell you a whole lot of things about your adult personality as a result, I think. It's my understanding of most modern astrology is right. But we cite in the book a study that looks at birth month at, gosh, I think it's maybe even over a million. Maybe even over a records from a hospital in the New York area over 80 or 90 years, separates these births by month, and then does this longitudinal analysis of tens, dozens, maybe over 100 different maladies that afflict human beings, and asks the question before doing the analysis, do maladies that people have an adulthood, are they predicted by the month in which they were

born. The thinking behind this being, by the month in which they were born, but remember that the difference here between this and most modern astrology is that the control is the place. All of these people were born in the same place. And so if you were born in New York in December, are you not likely to be exposed to different pathogens and different early experiences than if you're born in New York in June? That is the reason that we can begin to expect and that these, researchers predicted and then that they indeed found that there are indeed disease differences by birth month if and only if you keep track of where you were born. So most modern astrology doesn't do that and there's no reason to think that has any predictive power at all, really completely not. But

if you include place and and birth month more or less and we have evidence that disease, physical disease varies by birth month when you control for place, well, behavior might as well, because just as you might be, have more access to the outside and to exploring if you're born in one month versus another and thus get different exposures to disease, you might also be differently, differently have different tendencies to be socializing or to, you know, be inward focus versus extroverted. So I want to clear this up a little bit because I can almost hear our haters cracking the champagne open and pouring a glass. The point is an ancestral version of astrology in which a person that was resident in a location was analyzing other people resident in those same locations and noticing that the moment in the year at which you were born might have impact on your temperament or other parameters of your life. life, that person might have had predictive power, having nothing to do with the content of the stories they would tell about why you were that way, but just the simple fact that somebody born in

October meets a certain sequence in their nutrition, in the pathogens that they encounter, etc. So modern astrology, because it doesn't pay attention to where you were born, is bunk. It's nonsense. It's a con. But the point is it doesn't mean ancestral astrology was. ancestral astrology would have been a metaphorical explanation for patterns that could not have been described in analytical terms. And it is, of course, in principle, possible for somebody to resurrect such a tradition at any time. Interesting, though. One thing you just said, I think,

gives even more reason to imagine that ancestral astrology would have been more predictive than modern astrology, even if you do control for where you're born, which is that, at least in the weird world, our diet doesn't tend to differ much over the year. Even those of us, us who buy at farmers markets and try to eat seasonal produce, we all have plenty of food to eat throughout the year pretty much. And so the pattern pre-industrially and certainly pre-agriculturally of boom and bust cycles in just simply available of food and also available of particular macronutrients might have specifically exaggerated predictions, exaggerated the patterns around which you could

have predicted differences that would have come from when you were born. I also think, you know, it bears analogy to the relationship between, why am I blanking on the term, alchemy and chemistry, right? A lot of modern chemistry emerges from the wrong-headed attempt to create gold out of other things, right, a problem that is fundamentally nuclear and therefore not within the realm of chemistry, which is about electric charge primarily. But the point is the study was productive, just to be. So somebody who didn't have the tools to look into your pathogens because they existed before the germ theory of disease and didn't have tools that could even find such things might have noticed patterns, you know, that the stories that they told about it may have been useful. And our modern understanding of, oh, you know, we have a cyclic pattern of disease through

the year and it may have impacts on development, you know, there's now a legitimate scientific study of this, which is more or less displaced the prior version. But anyway, and, you know, many things are like this. You don't necessarily know what you're looking for when you set about study and you may tell yourself wrong stories. It may be that acupuncture works for reasons we don't yet know, but chi is a myth, you know, very likely that it is. Anyway. But the thing that you also talked about in the book is how important myths are in a way that we don't understand. understand and in a way how it bound us together in our societies. Well, not only are they important. I mean, you know, we sometimes drive our colleagues crazy

because our scientific colleagues love to imagine that they have no faith and that they are trafficking in facts, not myth. But this is not how science progresses. A, you need to have at least a little bit of faith in order to do science, right? The idea is to minimize the amount, but it can't be zero, right? Because you don't even know for sure that you exist, that you're not in someone else's experiment being fed data in order to see what your mind will do with it, right? You can't prove that you're not there. So you assume it. You have faith that you actually do exist and you can observe the universe and do science. Yeah, it's not useful to spend time worrying about that. Right. You can either spend your entire life on that one puzzle and never get anywhere,

or you can say, I'm going to just take that one on faith and I'm going to work on things that might matter and go forward. But as we build a model of the universe scientifically, there are zones that we understand really well, and then there are giant gaps we can't fill in yet. And very often, as you get from a zone, you know well towards a gap, you don't know anything about at all, you become increasingly metaphorical in the way you describe things. So, you know, atoms as billiard balls, right? We know that atoms are not billiard ball like now, but we didn't. And thinking that they were billiard ball like was good enough for a while. It allowed us to do certain things and not others. So the basic point is any system of comprehension involves a whole lot of myth, and yes, there is value in trying to minimize the amount that's dependent on myth, because those myths can steer you wrong, right? You don't necessarily know what's contingent on what when it's told in some narrative form. But anyway, science contains myth. The idea is to get rid of that myth. We're nowhere near doing that fully yet, and we ought to just accept it, that, you know, it's not like

are the myth people and the fact people. We all have a good deal of myth in our models. I guess it's also true though that even those of us who are highly analytical also take in information through narrative. And many people vastly prefer the narrative route for taking information, whether or not they recognize that. And since we are a narrative species, using myth to reveal truths, even if they come via stories that are, as we say, literally false, but metaphorically true is likely to be a better way to encapsulate those so that we retain them and we can use them going forward. Most people will remember a story better than a graph. It's a very, yeah, it's a very powerful way of putting it. Most people do remember stories.

It's the way we're built. The part of the book that I found very, very interesting is where if I say so myself, you flirted a little bit with social conservatism when talking about sex and reproduction. Yeah, well, it's not really social conservatism. Well, I don't know what to say. I would say that there are elements of social conservatism which are actually correct and that the idea, you know, a libertarian view of sex does not appear to be making people happy. It does not appear to be making civilization more functional. It appears to be isolating people from each other, causing people to be taken advantage of increasing sexual violence and normalizing it. So, yeah, there's a lot wrong with the way people are engaging. But what I think is maybe a

little bit subtle is that this is a sex positive position. It is not sex positive as that term is typically used. But the idea is if you recognize what an important and valuable gift sex is, and it's an evolutionary gift, right? Evolution actually turned us into one of very few species that has sex for pleasure, right? That was not a modern invention. That was not us rebelling against our biology. That was our biology awarding us an incredibly valuable tool for bonding. And in so doing, it gave us a responsibility, which we are treating terribly. Right. We are not recognizing how marvelous it is that we were given that gift. And then we gave ourselves a gift in the form of birth control, which allowed us to control even more. And what we

started doing is treating it frivolously like recreational activity, right? And I'm not saying it shouldn't be fun. It should be tremendously rewarding. But, you know, but the point is when people think if sex is good, then easy access to sex must be great. When they think that, they're thinking something incorrect and the proof is all around us. And when you say the proof is all around us, what do you guys mean? And sorry to jump in, Heather, but what are you guys talking about? Surely, come on, everybody's having sex. That's brilliant.

People just get, you know, get together. They hook up. Isn't that the liberal brilliance of the modern society that we've all been striving for to free women from the risk of sex and now we're all liberated and everything is wonderful? I never heard you use those words, mate. No, no, I don't actually agree with them. as you know, but... Yeah, everyone is sexually satisfied now, right?

Just listen to them talk and you'll know how happy they are. That's it right there. And at the point that everyone is so clearly not sexually satisfied, what do we do? We double down and double down, double down, okay, let's push more junk sex in your face at all moments, make it apparently available to everyone at any time they want it. And let's see what happens. Well, we're just getting more dissatisfied and more and more and more. So, you know, there is also a problem with imagining that it is, I mean, of all things

to imagine that this should be a matter of personal, individual agency, sex seems like a particularly strange choice. You know, we know it was an error to go towards junk food over in food space, but at least you're only poisoning your own body. To go towards junk sex, when sex is explicitly relational, when it's explicitly about, two people, about two people coming together and exploring each other in a more deep and intimate way than, you know, than any other way that we know, to imagine that that's, that that can be driven by the market effectively and that what's in my head because I saw pictures of,

there's a video of someone doing something over here to someone not related to you. I'm going to bring that into my, into my, you know, bedroom with you and it's going to be good. That there's no relationship to anything that is rewarding or satisfying. You know, is it physically titillating? Can you actually, can you get off? Yeah, okay. But that's it. Then it's over.

Just like junk food. The pleasure is very quick and ends quickly and then you're left with an abyss afterwards, right? You don't end up with the reward that lasts a long time. Whereas you do with non-junk food and with non-junct sex and with non-junct music and non-junk everything, right? We can we can reward ourselves by training ourselves. just as those who have weaned themselves off fast food into enjoying a delicious and nutritious diet into being rewarded by, you know, sexual pleasure that is wildly sex positive, but that isn't about having your head turned and, you know, chasing down every hot thing that you

see. So I just want to add to this. I think it is important. People who read the book will know that we argue that men have two reproductive strategies and women have one. the two reaper, I mean, we divide it into three because, you know, rape is a strategy that works. It's one that hopefully we can drive to something like zero. But there's, generally speaking, a no investment strategy where a male behaves in a way that in the past would have impregnated a female and walks away.

So and go, as one of my students called it. And then there's a strategy in which males invest in a partner and that partner's offspring. right? And when men are in that mindset, they are not the same as women. They have different values, but they are similar to women in their level of choosiness and discernment. And so what we effectively have is a modern culture in which we are getting men to default to their worst mode, their non-investment mode, and then getting women to mirror that behavior. And it's not making men or women happy. That's the problem is that we have a better mode and we are defaulting away from it. There were, there were certainly some problems with first and second way feminism. I always called

myself a feminist, even though I came of age really as third wave feminism was happening. And it didn't look like it could possibly become ascendant the way it did. So I, you know, in my younger years, would call the third wave who hadn't identified themselves as third way feminists, the faux feminists, the fake feminists, because it looks illiberal. It's, looks, you know, it looks frankly kind of misogynistic and regressive, and it's going to send not just women, but all of us backwards. So this feels consistent with an actually liberal perspective on bringing equality of opportunity to men and women equally, but not pretending that we're the same, because we're not. And one of the parts of the book that I found

really interesting in this chapter was talking about how a society where there was less relationships where we were less monogamous encourages male violence. Yeah, it directly does because for reasons we don't have to go into, sex ratios tend to be about even at birth. And so what happens is if you have a system in which some men... Sorry, which just means that there are an equal number of boys and girls born absent other considerations. So any system that causes some men to have more than one wife, leaves other men sidelined. And one doesn't have to extrapolate very far to see that a bunch of sexually frustrated men either becomes a problem internal to a society or it becomes a global

problem when the elites who have more than one wife take all of those sexually frustrated young men, arm them and point them over a border at some enemy that maybe doesn't see it coming. And, you know, that's a pattern of history. And if we don't want to see that, if we don't want to see warlike, nations. And if we don't want to see violence within our own culture, monogamy is clearly the way to go. It also has other really important benefits. It increases the tendency towards cooperation. In other words, full siblings have twice the reason to cooperate. As half siblings do, it causes males to all be brought into productive activities. And frankly, the system of the coherent system of motivation that arises out of a a circumstance where all men have the prospect of finding a mate but need to be worthy in order

to impress someone to get them to accept them as a mate, that that system actually results in a tremendous amount of innovation and productivity in our society. So yeah, the benefits are many. And unfortunately, the sophistications of the moment are self-obsessed. And they are, frankly, delusional, right? We be, you know, we hear stories about polyamory being a better system for child rearing because basically nobody knows whose child is whose and so everybody participates in raising them and it'll all be glorious. And that's nonsense. Men are wired to need a high certainty of paternity before they're likely to invest. Well, but I think, I think it's true to give them their due that in a, in a situation in which no man knows whose child he has fathered, that all men,

and will contribute to parenting equally, which is to say none at all. That's what happened. That is what it will happen. I should say, again, I hear our detractors opening yet more champagne, because they will have heard us say something that argues that adoption doesn't exist. And adoption definitely does exist. But the point is there's a difference between the eyes wide open version that actually functions for good reasons.

There are reasons that people want to adopt and their honorable reasons. and the idea that people who just don't know whose children are whose are going to invest in them all at some high level, which it's not going to happen. Heather, could I take you back to when you were talking of men and women and equal, but not the same? Is that really the core of the problem here? Because I know from my own experience with my wife, how empowering and liberating it is for us both to be able to say, you know, if my wife says, why can't you be more like this? for me to be able to say it's because I'm a man or vice versa for her to be able to say, well, I'm behaving in this way because I'm a woman. It's the most freeing thing for us as a couple.

But to say that out loud in public is sexist, is misogynistic, to say, well, she's like that because she's a woman or he's like that because he's a guy. We're not allowed to do that anymore, it feels like sometimes. That's interesting. You know, I don't think I've ever said that. I don't think we've ever had those kinds of conversations. I promise you, it's great. Well, but I think we don't because it seems, I know what you mean,

and there's absolute truth in what you're saying, but there's also the risk of a conflation between the individual and the population. So to recognize that men and women are different across many domains, it's not just height and muscle mass and hip width. It's also variance in many things and interests, and the difference in interest, like for things versus people hold for neonates, for babies and across cultures. You know, this is not some, this is not the Western patriarchy informing us of how we should

behave. It's not what it is. But we are, we are, we have overlapping distributions. And so, you know, if I had a chalkboard here, I draw two, two bell curves that are largely overlapping. And, you know, that's not, that's not exactly the right description for something like, for instance, intelligence. Like intelligence, it seems that men and women have the same average intelligence, but men have much wider variance, much greater variance.

And so there's more male geniuses and more male idiots than there are women. And on average, you know, we have about, you know, the same intelligence. So that's interesting in and of itself. That said, there are female geniuses and perhaps the smartest woman, however you might want to measure it on earth today, the smartest person on earth today might be female. There is nothing in the truth of greater variance in male intelligence than in female intelligence, suggesting that there couldn't be women who were smarter than the smartest men, right? So the population level truth is absolutely true, and we are ignoring it at our peril. It's ridiculous.

It's reality denying. It's getting in the way of a tremendous amount of not just progress at the societal level, but progress for individuals who are pretending that, that these differences don't exist. But that doesn't mean that any individual cannot achieve something because of the sex they were born to, with a few exceptions, of course. Things like gestation and lactation are simply, you know, are simply getting problematic here. Well, I actually would love to have a conversation where I could say, you know,

I'm this way because I'm a man, but she won't put up with it. That's because she's a woman. That's right. Exactly. But the book was fascinating right the way through. I just want to touch on pornography very, very quickly because it seems to me that, and this is coming from a former teacher, that this is a ticking time bomb. And what people don't seem to understand is, especially online pornography, has found a way to hack our lizard brains. and essentially just get addicted to dopamine hit after dopamine hit after dopamine hit.

It's terrifying, isn't it? Or am I exaggerating? No, you're not exaggerating. I think ticking time bomb is a weird analogy because it seems to have already gone off. I mean, it's distorting the way people are interacting and it is making them much, much worse. The number of things that are wrong with it and the reasons are pretty obvious, right? So for one thing, if we define pornography as erotic content that's generated for profit, which I really think is the best way to define it. And the point is, well, we know what an entity trying to make profit off of sex is, you know, we know what puzzle they're trying to solve, which is they need to gain attention in, you know, and they need to displace competitors who are trying to gain attention with the very same ancient good, right?

They need to gain attention with images of people having sex. So how do you distinguish yourself? Well, you're going to move in the direction of the extreme, in the direction of taboo, in the direction of things that aren't good, like sexual violence. And the problem is that human beings are not, we don't arrive in the world knowing how sex works, right? It's something we have to learn. It's something, in fact, you're supposed to learn with a partner, which is an amazing activity to be engaged in.

But the first kind of information that humans tend to have, at least in an ancestral environment, is people sleeping in the same hut. The parents may have sex. The children may be pretending to be asleep. They get some sense of what sex actually looks like, right? Well, if that part of your mind

that's looking to figure out what sex is, is seeing pornography in which people are choking each other or whatever else, right, it begins to think that that is normal. And so now we have this situation where somehow men and women are supposed to work side by side, treat each other as equals, and then go into the bedroom and choke each other. That's not going to work.

So then we get into this situation where, you know, consent is something that has to be sought every two minutes or I don't know what people are doing, right? No. That, you know, that seeking of consent thing, it's actually pretty unsexy, right? The moaning is supposed to be the indicator of consent, right? At some level, there's an ancient system there that we've displaced in favor of some modern thing that's so market-driven that it can't help but distort our view. Well, and in this, as in so many things, and many of the systems we talk about in the book, part of the problem is that we've cleaned up the childhood environment so much that the first exposure that children will have to sex is, my God, from porn, right? from complete strangers doing things for a market as opposed to, you know, maybe, you know, maybe stumbling across adults or playing, you know, playing doctor or whatever the hunter-gatherer

version of that was, you know, exploring sexually as children in, in interesting, reasonable ways. And thus coming of age already with some sense of what bodies are, what their bodies can do, what feels good, what doesn't, as opposed to, nope, childhood is a time for, for none of that. That's not what's supposed to happen during childhood at all. And therefore, we're going to let the screens do it for you. Like, that's an insane way to teach children about sex. And that's exactly what we're doing. So, yeah, ticking time bomb?

Absolutely. How do, you know, how can we allow children to actually be children and to do, to play in schoolyards and skin their knees and to look at each other across a classroom and make eye contact and do a little flirting at, you know, at younger ages, then we are currently imagining is possible and say, okay, as long as no one is crying foul, as long as no one is actually getting hurt in a real way, this is actually how we learn to be adults. And instead, we cocoon them. You know, we put the children in little boxes and we keep them from all risk and we drug them and we give them screens and, you know, we do the other things as well. But the helicopter parenting and

the schools that do the same thing that keep, you know, that keep referees in all sports and free play isn't possible means that, of course, people arrive at the cuff of adulthood with the bodies of adults with the brains of children. And just coming back to porn for a second. And, And let's keep the kids being exposed to a side, although we don't seem to be able to do that in our society. But for the sake of this argument, let's try and separate the two. Isn't there some evidence that societies which do have pornography, A, have less sexual violence and also that you might also describe the existence of pornography as adaptive?

I mean, I remember visiting Greece, and they have these like 5,000-year-old little clay models of pornography on them and stuff like that. So no? You're shaking your head, Brett? Maybe they were painted in 1974, but you know what I mean. No, I know what you mean. I just disagree with your terminology. That was not born, okay? That was erotica.

And we draw this distinction quite clearly. There's nothing wrong with erotica, right? It's not all good. But the point is if somebody has something to say sexually, that's completely valid. It's a very ancient process. It is the market that is distorting this. It is the idea that you want to see something sexual and then somebody wants to meet that need and they have some competitor that they have to overwhelm. And that is going to result in, you know, incest being the subject, right?

Incest is bad for a biological reason we now well understand, but didn't, right? We knew it was bad. But we didn't understand the problem of deleterious recessive genes coming together when siblings mate, for example. So it was taboo because selection caused us to view it that way correctly. And now it is being explored in porn because it's a way to differentiate some porn from others. So there's nothing wrong with the erotica. It is ancient. Yes, you'll find sexuality represented in virtually every culture.

But it is the immediate gratification that comes from the market's desire to get you to spend money you would not spend that is so destructive. it is also incredibly destructive to have it so easily available that it replaces your mind's sexual creativity, right? You become a consumer of sexual narrative rather than a generator. And this is kind of uncomfortable stuff to talk about. But there's a reason that human minds are obsessed with sex in the way they are. And men are different in this regard. They are differently obsessed, but they are obsessed with sexual content. and the point is you are supposed to obsess over details.

You are supposed to obsess over real people. It actually affects how you move through the world what you want and what you'll do when you get in range, right? You're supposed to be generating scenarios that have relevance to the real world, not fantasizing about the hunky pizza guy, right? Right? So the point is we are denying kids that landscape

and we are turning them into sexual consumers rather than people who will participate in some relationship that will be likely the most important one in their lives with some toolkit that's ready to handle it. Brett and Heather, I know we've had what seems like a fairly negative conversation, but actually the book is full of recommendations

and ways that advise you in terms of food, which is something and sleep, which is things we have. really talked about. Maybe this is a good chunk as we get towards the end of the interview part to talk about that. Talk to us about some of the new adaptations that we can make at the individual level and also the societal level to start to address some of the problems that we've created for ourselves. Well, I mean, you know, to pick up on the conversation we've been having, we have some new tools at our disposal. Birth control, for example, allows women to choose

if and when to reproduce and how much, that means that we have a whole new set of opportunities with respect to careers that women can enter and participate in in different ways. So we have all of these opportunities that are the result of a technology, but that technology has downsides as well. It is causing people to treat sex in a frivolous way that is causing them to be less kind to each other, to prioritize the building of meaningful, permanent relationships, at a much lower level. And so the question, as with all of these things,

is how do we take the advantages that come from novel technology and separate them from the costs that happen when we deploy those technologies arbitrarily? So that was not a suggestion. That was staying negative. I've got to pause. That sort of that brings together some of the things you've talked about, the sex, relationship, and sleep.

which is to say, anyone who's had a newborn in the weird world has thought in advance at any rate about how it is that they're not going to be sleep deprived for the first many months of their life with that newborn. And one of birth control is an incredible modern invention that has freed women and the opportunities available to us and therefore couples as well greatly. And of course, it comes with costs too.

Similarly, the ability to express breast milk and to save it for later so that the mother does not have to be on hand at all moments that her baby might need that breast milk is a wonderful modern invention. But as actually one of our students back at Evergreen began to wonder with regard to why are there so many sleep problems in newborns in the weird world, she began to wonder if given that we now know that breast milk is not just nutrition, just like food is not just nutrition, and not just even immune. information, but possibly other things as well. Maybe it is helping to entrain the sleep cycle. Maybe it is helping to establish a circadian rhythm for the baby. And therefore, it is hypothesized, and we do have

this in the book, that if you are in the position where you are a new mother and you have a partner who is willing and able to help feed your child and your child is only getting breast milk, that when you express milk, putting not just the date but the time on it, so that if the baby gets up at two in the middle of the night and it's dad's time to feed the baby, if you pull a bottle from the freezer that is from two in the afternoon, there is a good chance that you have just sent that child the signal, it is daytime, it is time to wake up and play now.

And that baby may now be well fed and well awake and not ready to go back to sleep. You know, it is time to rock and roll. you want to send, the signal is you are now well fed. It is still the middle of the night. We are all sleeping and so should you be. And the simple, you know, the simple fix to the modern wonder that is the ability to control our reproduction and our feeding of our babies of time stamping breast milk that you've expressed may well help with the sleep deprivation that so many new parents experience. So that's just, you know, that's kind of involved. But there are a lot of things.

like this where okay it's not the modernity is bad modernity is fast it's too fast changing for us to keep up very well but if we think evolutionarily there is often something that we can just add to what it is that we're doing in order to get some of the coherence back and what about some of the stuff that if you hadn't just written this book we'd normally be talking with you guys about on the show which is, I mean, I can, I'm trying to make it less negative than it's going to come out. But, you know, I'm tempted to describe it as the slow or rapid breakdown of society, depending on how you see it. But you know what I mean, right? And you're kind of alluding to it with the impact of the sexual revolution, the impact of the hookup culture and all of that.

That has downstream consequences, which we see on the streets, which we see, you see in your former college, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. How are we going to fix that? Well, okay, how can I say? I don't know that we are going to fix it. But if we were going to fix it, the first step would be recognizing what the process is that is creating all of the dysfunction and recognizing that as incoherent

as a lot of the complaints about Western civilization have become, that the frustration is actually about something. right we have an incredibly productive society that does not distribute things well it does not protect people from for example the consequences of bad luck which we absolutely should do right protecting people from the consequences of bad decisions is a mistake but protecting them from the consequences of bad luck is our obligation and it's good for all of us to do it so the first step is recognizing what we're doing wrong one thing we're doing wrong is we are letting markets decide what we should want rather than just simply deciding how best to solve problems that we have handed to them.

And then the second thing is to recognize that on our current trajectory, we know that the resources of planet Earth will not continue to support us, that we are actually headed into great danger, that that is not a situation that is totally novel. Many past populations have faced situations like that, but that in order to get out of a trajectory that is likely to be fatal or at least extremely destructive, the right thing to do is for us to rise to what we call collective consciousness and get serious about the question of how else we might exist so that we don't have this. And what we have is a civilization that has been a fantastic prototype. But the structures, you know, 18th century solutions to how we will govern ourselves just simply aren't adequate to our

modern problems. It's time to figure out how to take the things that they discovered that do work and the values that they correctly focused on and build them into a system that is capable of dealing with modern problems. So anyway, that's the last chapter of the book is about that. And you touch upon that this idea and that in our society, we're addicted to growth. And we believe that growth is always good, but in the sense, growth is slowly destroying us.

Well, and really, life is addicted to growth. All evolved beings are addicted to growth. So that, again, it's not. is not just about the weird societies. It is what we are. So we argue in the book without pretending to provide a blueprint because we argue that we need to get to the beginning of an adaptive foothills so that we can climb from there and explore what the future can look like that is maximally productive and fair for all. But the growth itself is, yes, an addiction, but we do crave it. So how can we create the sensation of growth,

without actually using more stuff. So we need to grow with things that are non-zero sum, things like creativity and innovation and, you know, lasting contributions rather than the throwaway junk culture that we have now, which is accelerating the rate at which growth is killing us. And this may sound like a nonsense fantasy, but it's really, we're invoking something that's actually got plenty of precedent, right?

Spring is delightful, right? the idea that you should always want it to be spring may seem fanciful, but we make it spring all the time in our homes, and we don't violate any rules of physics to do it. The fact is you've got a steady state, and, you know, as you're cooling your house, you're warming the backyard, and that's just simply how it works? So the question is, how can we do that same trick with our human senses so that our growth is not eroding the world out from under us, and so that each generation leaves a world as intact as the one it inherited? That ought to be our goal. It's really our obligation. And it is possible, but it's not going to happen automatically. The market's not going to find this. The market is, in fact, caused the problem because we've given it hegemony over not just how to solve problems, but what problems to address. You were almost positive there for a second, but you went back to there is no solution.

You didn't quite say that. You know, the key to a meaningful positivity is staring into the abyss until it's freaking you out. Well, on that... Sounds scary. Yeah. On that very positive note, we are going to take a short break for questions. Remind it, guys, if you want to send in a question for Brett and Heather, do so using the superchats. Anton has been collating them or the PayPal link is in the description.

We're going to take about a three-minute break. We'll come back with questions directly from you for the guys, and we very much look forward to that. We'll see you in three minutes. Hey, Constantine. Do you love trigonometry? Of course. incredible interviews, hilarious live streams, hard-hitting satire, plus my handsome jawline. Whatever takes away from your hairline.

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We've got a bunch of questions. Guys, the first is actually two questions from two separate people, but very much the same subject. I'm going to merge them into one. Don John says Jonathan Haidt, who you both know, states that woke universities are here to stay. The other institutions of learning should be established to counter them. And FM, very much on that subject, says, would you consider organizing a new university, one without illiberalism, or what recommendations would you make on current universities in the U.S.? Oh, boy.

Yeah. Big, necessary question. Can the existing institutions be saved, or do we need new systems entirely? Maybe some of them can be saved, kind of, but we definitely need a new system because we need a functioning system of higher ed. We did spend a little bit over a year working on a project to try to bootstrap a new kind of higher ed based on some of what we learned at Evergreen. Because despite what, you know, despite what everyone knows about how Evergreen blew up and, you know, how we came to the public eye at all, that really did have some extraordinary foundational principles, which allowed for education in a way that doesn't happen elsewhere. You know, the full-time interaction with students really getting to know people well. the problem is that's hard to make scale, right? And so, you know, what you're doing and what we're doing

with with podcasts, with trigonometry is a kind of education, but it doesn't, for the most part, allow for a back and forth. So you can't get to know the people. And that is, you know, that is definitely a restriction on how far you can go with it. So yes, Brett and I both individually and together have considered and are considering ways in which we might think about new models of higher ed. But it is, there are many challenges. Leave it in that, I'll let you riff. All right, a couple of things.

I don't think these institutions can be saved. I think it's more or less the point where your dog has rabies and the idea is that's not really your dog anymore, right? That's an animal with rabies. and it's got to go. I do think alternative institutions are the way to go. There's a reason that it will be difficult to create them. The first question that you have to ask yourself at the point you decide to set up such a thing is will you seek accreditation? If so, you have one failure mode. You will turn into

exactly the same thing that you're trying to replace, or will you not seek accreditation, in which case you will be hobbled by all of the obstacles that will have been placed in your path in order to keep the stranglehold on education that the current accredited system has. So at some point, people are going to realize, actually, I don't want the students from the accredited institution because they're all crazy, right?

I want the students from the institution that makes sense that isn't accredited and isn't crazy because it's not accredited or that allowed for it not to be crazy. And because of that, there will be a massive attempt to stamp out any new types of instance, stamp out or capture any new institutions

that aren't accredited and show signs of being able to do this. So that's really where the battle is going to be. And as soon as you've got one established, others will grow. So the battle will be over the first one, right? Will somebody be able to stabilize an alternative university, let's say, that effectively educates while not participating in this woke nonsense? And if they can get one, then that'll be a model and we'll get a new system. And, you know, the fact is the other system will collapse because who's going to hire the graduates?

Yeah. So let me just add one thing. In the U.S., I don't know the system in the U.K., but in the U.S., being accredited gives you access to federal grants, and the federal grants come into large categories, many more than this. But the two that are the most concerning are the grants for low-income students. So without things like Pell Grants in the United States, most students could not go to college. And if you're not accredited, you can't get Pell Grants, therefore you can't attract low-income students. And the other big category is grants for research. And because, again, of the problem of the market forces driving so much of what has happened

in higher ed for the last many decades, most science now is big science, which is to say expensive science. And the value of big science to institutions is hopefully sometimes, yes, the science itself. But unfortunately, much of the value is that institutions get a tremendous percentage of the overhead on those grants. And so if you are not accredited and therefore your big science, science faculty cannot apply for funds from in the U.S. or BNSF, N-H, DoD, even if they can get grants, even if there's somehow, you know, massive philanthropic money through which they can get grants to do their work, it will be very hard to move back and forth between that system and one which

is accredited because they will have no history of grant getting the likes of which all of their peers do. So what we don't want is two still functioning systems that work side by side but can't interact with one another of higher ed. We need a way for all communication to happen, for science to work across boundaries, for education to work across boundaries, and it can't work if there is this still struggling with its last breaths accredited system, which is holding on to all of the federal money and an unaccredited system, which may have philanthropic money, but will not allow either students, as Brett alluded to, or faculty to move back and forth between the two. And also a more societal level worry that I think ought to be included in this conversation

and tell me what you think about this. We just interviewed Vivek Ramaswami, who's written a book called Woke Inc. And one of the things he was talking about was that if you go down the path of creating two markets, essentially. You have, you know, woke people shopping, buying their coffee only from Starbucks and everyone else buying their coffee from Black Rifle. Eventually, you get to a point where you are actually going to get to Civil War

because the interests are just so diametrically opposed. There's nothing holding you together. And is it not then, I mean, is it not then desirable to at least to try and reform these institutions or maybe to just wait until the next generation who are desperate to push back against their millennial parents, to get in there or or do you not see that happening right well i don't think civil war is all that likely in the next few weeks i would say uh sorry again he's not in a good mood what you've been feeding him

in a great what are you talking about no yeah this this is good man look here's the problem okay i don't disagree that if you have two separate systems that they point us in this direction on the other hand we have been watching and trying to call attention to the growth growing dysfunction in the academy for decades. Right? It does not listen. It will not rescue itself. There is no level of obviousness that is sufficient to get it to wake up.

And so again, here's the problem. Maybe you've got a dog sled team and your dogs have rabies. Right. Now the argument might be, well, we can't very well shoot the dogs because they're our dog sled team, right? We'll be stuck here. But you have to shoot the dogs because they have rabies. That's where we are. And my point is, that's not the fault of those of us who have tried to explain that this was happening, that it was a lethal danger.

I mean, we started making this point in the 90s, right? They won't listen. And because they won't listen, they've got a system that can't be rescued. So, yes, we have to rescue it, and it's not going to work. It's time that we stop kidding ourselves about that. And, you know, it's possible if you generate the parallel system and it demonstrates value that some of those, institutions will say, hey, we're going to get left in the dust. Let's abandon this trajectory and let's reboot the university. Great. Let's bring them along, right? After all, they have

beautiful campuses. They've got libraries all stocked with books. They've got everything you need in order to run a university except for a staff that knows what they're doing, right? Or maybe the staff does, but the faculty largely doesn't. Right. So that's the problem. And we could re-infuse them with competent people. But, you know, I'm not arguing that the situation is healthy if we have to start from scratch. It's a terrible waste. But, you know, having watched how we got there, I don't think there's a lot of hope for them waking up. And I guess there's another dimension along which we're dividing, which maybe it won't be surprising, given that what we're talking about is sort of woke versus not woke. But in the U.S. anyway, the sex ratio of college students is becoming

ever more skewed. It's like 60-40 now women to men and the prediction is that within not too much time, it's going to be two to one. And this means that there are a whole lot of young men who are doing something that's not college who would otherwise have been going to college. Therefore, we're already getting this system. It's not that there aren't always going to be many people who don't go to college and that's fine and many people are incredibly productive and do wonderful things without that. But for those people who intended to go to college, who wanted to go to college, who thought that they would benefit from it, if men more than women are saying, not for me, not that kind, not with education looking that way, then we are exactly moving towards

chaos because that won't last. And this question is actually loosely tied in to what we're talking about. And it's from Mackie McKinney. Can you explain what critical race? series and what is so dangerous about it. My girlfriend is getting her PhD and claims it's all overblown nonsense. And I don't understand what it is exactly. Love you both. Nice finish there. Yeah, it was. Full stop and love you both. Yeah, I mean, we could. You know, James Lindsay would do a better job as with Helen Pluckrose or Peter Bogosian. But, you know, critical race theory began with a honorable study into structural biases in the court system, of which there are structural biases that resulted in a person having different prospects given a case with the same evidence based on the color

of their skin. This is decades ago. It's like late seven years or so. Yeah, decades ago. But it evolved into an obsession with race that effectively assumes that any difference in outcome is inherently the result of oppression. And this becomes perfectly absurd. In fact, some of the jokes that we once made about conclusions that would ultimately be reached have now been reached and broadcast. So, for example, you know, the idea

that there is something about the modern system of national parks that must be racist because the races are not equally represented there. Well, that's not true. You can go to a national park, and you can demonstrate the fee is the same. Nobody looks twice at you, no matter what you look like, if you pay the fee you're able to go in.

This has something to do with preferences. And now those preferences may ultimately be traceable to disparities. In other words, populations that haven't had access to the national parks in the past, for various reasons, may be less likely to find value in those things now, just because the tradition of going there hasn't been passed down.

But that's not the same thing as saying, the system is currently white, supremacist, and that is the reason that we find different color people here than there, right? Bike lanes aren't white supremacist, national parks aren't white supremacist, colleges aren't white supremacist, and the assumption that they must be or everything would be dead even is absolutely illogical. And the fact that this has now spilled out of colleges into all of these structures, that it's, in fact, moving through corporations of all places and taking over their approach to managing relations within their staff is evidence that somehow the conclusion

is sacred and it is immune to reason. Yeah. So it's viewing the world entirely through a racial lens without any ability to consider other factors, which, you know, there will be those who say, okay, intersectionality is trying to encourage all, you know, us to think about all of these factors. But of course, it's just the demographics that are fashionable of the moment that we're supposed to be talking about. As Brett alluded to, cynical theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay does a terrific job of

describing what this is and where it's gotten to. But the fact is it's being used as an ideology, which is to say something that you must accept and shall not question in institutions of higher learning and in K through 12 schools, in the earlier schooling as well. And it's indoctrinating rather than educating. You are told to accept this and accept that you're, skin color is both your fate and describes whether you are oppressed or oppressor. And that feels like the very opposite of what anything claiming to be a world arts education should be teaching.

Actually, I want to amend my answer for succinctness. It is the inverse of the colorblind society. Right? And colorblind society has been falsely portrayed as a myth because people aren't colorblind. But colorblind society means that the court needs to be colorblind to you when you come in. It needs to treat you with indifference to your race, which is true as we do need to as employers or educators or anything else. And so critical race theory is the idea that we have to be racially obsessed rather than work towards being indifferent to race in the distribution of well-being. Without pretending that it doesn't exist. Right. Well, as you say, Peter Bogosian, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckros and Christopher Rufa, who we had on the show recently, all do a pretty good job

explaining this and we've had them all on the show. We've got a question from someone who wants to be kept anonymous, which I don't know why, because their question really isn't particularly in Cendary. They're asking why people believe in utopias. Why people believe in utopies? I think actually there's a pretty good evolutionary explanation for this. And that is, if you think about what creatures ought to be wired to do, they ought to be wired to solve problems that are accessible to them. In other words, if a creature is moving through its landscape inefficiently in the pursuit of food, then moving through it more efficiently is the equivalent of finding more food, right?

Because it wastes less. So we have an obsession with problem solving that doesn't have anything to do with us being humans. But we humans do it in a human way. Now, the problem is if you're obsessed with problem solving, right, and it troubles you as it troubles me, that my refrigerator puts heat into my kitchen in the summer, right? I want my refrigerator actually outside of the wall of my kitchen so that it puts heat into my backyard and doesn't heat my house when I don't want my house heated, right?

That's a solvable problem. So if you get into that mindset where you spot all the little things that are wrong and you try to think about how we would do them in a way that's better, then you will at some point arrive at the idea that this could all be perfected. But you won't at first understand what perfected would have to mean, right? You won't understand what tradeoffs are. And you will imagine that you could solve every problem simultaneously. and wouldn't that be marvelous?

You can't because those problems are in tension with each other, right? There's a reason that the refrigerator isn't on the outside wall, and it has to do with the efficiency of building homes. And you have to decide which is the priority or at what level you will balance them. So basically the idea is a naive problem solver that looks into society and sees all of the problems, but doesn't understand what the downsides of the solutions would be or how they would interact, arrives at the idea, aha, I know what we should do. and they end up trying to maximize something that is their focal obsession,

and everything else crashes as they try to maximize it. So effectively, it is the intermediate level of understanding. Yes, there are lots of problems to be solved, but you need to be sophisticated about how you do it rather than naive. So the person asking the question doesn't seem to think that Utopia is a desirable endpoint or a possible one, but one of the other errors in those who do strive for Utopia, is imagining that we live in a static world, right? Like not only do tradeoffs preclude utopia, as Brett just suggested,

but in evolution, everything is context-dependent, and the reason that there is no fittest state to be in with any permanence is because environments change. So what it is that you want today is not necessarily going to be the thing that you want in a week. And it also, the concept of utopia also forget, or never understands that actually the striving itself is part of where we derive our pleasure from. So just, you know, actually to go back to one of the things we were talking about in the first hour,

one of the reasons that people aren't sexually satisfied now, even though sex is available all the time at every moment, is that the chase is gone, right? That there is, that there isn't that period of, oh, I wonder if I could, I might, I'm not sure. Oh, that's felt like a setback, but maybe I'm now moving closer. That is actually part of the fun. That is part of what feels like productivity and joy and allows you to be driven to be creative or analytical or whatever it is that is your particular toolkit

with which to make progress in the world. And so getting to the state where in everything is fine, well, it's guaranteed not to feel fine for more than a little while because your brain will then continue to seek growth. Let me follow up on that, Heather, because as you were talking, it was actually quite interesting because I was thinking how what you're saying about evolution, and I've heard this phrase obviously a billion times, it's the species most adaptable to change, that blah, blah, blah. But I was thinking about it on an individual level.

In our society, we tend to teach people, you know, you go to school, you get your grades, then you go to college, you get your degree, then you get a PhD, then you, and you train increasingly specialized to do one thing and you get more specialized and more and by the time you're 50 hopefully you're like the one person in the world that can do that thing right the problem is in our society by the time you're 50 that thing might not need to be done anymore so on a personal level what advice i think young people watching this or people who are kind of in limbo perhaps what ought to be a useful attitude at the individual level to how you develop as a human being so that you as an individual are adaptable to change?

One of the answers is exactly in your question, right? You know, explore lots and lots of domains. Anything that you think you might be interested in, explore that. And don't ever assume that you're too old, but also recognize that there are developmental periods during which it will be easier to learn another language, pick up a musical instrument, that sort of thing, right?

And specifically explore, like generate skills, generate expertise or even just some facility. You need not be expert in lots and lots of things, but the more things in which you have some facility, the more broad thinking you're likely to be and the better of problem solver you are likely to be and make sure that some of those things live in the physical world, such that the outcome that you create cannot be negotiated away,

such that you either did or did not build a table that holds the weight of the plates on it. You did or did not bake a cake that other people say, yeah, this tastes good, and it doesn't poison them, right? Things need to, you will be best taught to recognize the actual feedback that the world can give you by making things in it, wherein the world is giving you the feedback as opposed to the people in it, and you can always coerce the people. So I think the line in the book is something like you can, oh boy, you can't trick a tractor

or a tree, but you can fool another person. I didn't get the line right, but it's something to that effect. You can fool another person, but you can't fool reality. Yeah, I would say two things. One, invest in tools, right? Knowledge is free and the domain may change, but if you've invested in tools that can be adapted to whatever new domain emerges, you'll be better off.

And if you've engaged with physical systems, then you will have a good, intuitive idea of how things actually work, Whereas if you've invested in abstractions that the person at the front of the room told you you were being smart about, the person at the front of the room may be a fool. And so they may have miseducated you, but an engine won't do that, right? Gardening won't do that. The stuff either grows or it doesn't. So those two things.

We have a question now from a very passionate supporter of ours called Eli Munios. And he said, I've heard physicists talk about sensing the divine. in deep math. Have you discovered anything like that in deep biology or in jungle slash forest studies? Yeah, I mean, I think we all have our version of this. I call mine the cosmic joke, right? The cosmic joke can be told a thousand ways. And every so often you watch a creature do something and suddenly you understand what must be going on inside of that creature's mind, for example, right? And suddenly you realize Well, isn't it fascinating that the universe generated a creature that could solve a problem like that? And that that would be true whether there was anybody here to notice at all.

If humans had never evolved, that squirrel would still be doing that thing, right? With no one there to appreciate it. Right. So, yeah, there's the marvel of biology that exists. I was thinking the other day about even a housefly. Right? We look at a housefly and mostly we feel disgust because of a housefly. housefly may have walked on feces before it walks on your lunch, right? So they are grotesque in one way.

But if you think about the mechanism of a housefly and even the structure, it's a beautiful creature. It really, you know, gorgeous eyes that are almost like multifaceted jewels. This incredibly sophisticated flight architecture. It's an amazing creature. And these things fly by us and we don't give it a second thought. So yeah, there is something about just looking at what selection has produced and thinking what a gift it is to be the kind of creature who can even understand what that object is, how it must work in some regard, and appreciate the process that created it. I think what you're describing, I would call awe, right? Very often being in the Amazon, in nature, in Portland, everywhere in between, I am filled with awe.

For me, I don't use the language of the divine. And I remember actually being in high school and searching for meaning as I think all human beings do unless they have it drugged and bad parented and bad education out of them or something. But we all do a lot of active searching for meaning and purpose, especially during those teenage years. And I was dabbling here and there. I was thinking about Buddhism. I was thinking about various ways of approaching. What is the meaning of all of this? And actually, it was you, a couple of years into college.

Brett and I had been friends throughout high school. And about halfway through college, we got together. And you gave me a Richard Dawkins book, gave me the blind watchmaker and said that I might find some things in there that I would find interesting. And for me, that was the moment. It just opened up and I thought, this is going to turn out,

this way of understanding the world, an evolutionary understanding of the world, and this doesn't contain everything, but this has the seeds in it, will turn out to hold so much of the meaning I've been looking for, and also it will enable me to still have a sense of awe and mystery about the universe.

When we used to teach, Heather and I talked privately about what was minimally necessary to convey in a program, you know, for it to be worth the students while. And we used to talk about the keys to the kingdom. And the idea was they need to walk away from the program with enough that if they got the message and it means something to them, that they can then go forward without us being there to direct them, right? They need enough of the tools to say, aha, here's what these questions are. Here's how I might go about answering them.

Here are the kinds of people who have insight that actually contributes to my ability to do that. And, you know, for many of them, it worked. Many of them demanded that we write some kind of book that would allow them to pass the thing on to their friends. And this book is in large measure the result of that process. Do you ever stop and think, you know, like you described the housefly, you'd see certain animals you'd get confronted by awe-inspiring vistas, is that there must be a God, that this simply can't have been created, you know, organically, that there must be some kind of divine creator.

Did you just ask two evolutionary biologists in seeing evolution and action they think of God? Yeah. Does that what happen? I dig it. I like the question, actually. And there are evolutionary biologists who would say yes, actually. And I will tell you that I check in with that explanation frequently. And I ask myself, have I yet seen something that can't.

not in principle be explained by the process that we are studying. And I will tell you, the result of checking in with that idea very frequently is that I know for sure there is a missing level that the process in the evolution textbook does not explain the creatures that we see. And that's not because there is a divine influence. It's because we have fooled ourselves into imagining that random mutations being selected is sufficient to change something that's like a shrew into something that's like a bat. And it's not. There's an amplifier in there that we have not described well. And I think if you watch, assuming civilization hangs together, we're going to discover that layer.

And that layer is going to make it a lot easier to understand how the creatures emerged in the marvelous form that we find them. Well, that is spicy indeed. it is spicy. All right. Well, then you understood it because that's the point is, yeah, you've been given a description of a process that's too crude to have done the things that you see, and that's not your mind playing tricks on you. But there's no reason to think, we can't rule out a divine influence, but I don't think it's going to be necessary because there are Darwinian processes that will fill in that gap. Some of which we begin to outline.

in the book. Yep. That's great. Well, it's a question about human beings now. Wintermute says, I think that's from Switzerland, says, I always assumed history repeats itself because human nature doesn't change. We fall into the same traps over and over again because our brains haven't evolved much for about 200,000 years.

Is there a remedy stroke, am I wrong, he or she says? Right and wrong. there is a tendency for problems to be very similar and therefore us to fall into the same traps. There's a very sad pattern where we solve a problem and then having solved that problem, people forget that it was a problem and they dismantle the solution and reinvent it. So that's awfully frustrating. Whatever could you be talking about? So many things.

Yeah, I mean, dismantling the West because it isn't working. fairly is absurd, right? Let's fix the unfairness about it. Let's diagnose it correctly and fix it. But so there is that, but then there is also the possibility of, you know, I think people don't know enough about game theory. And the reason that I hit this drum frequently is that game theory nicely takes all of these very specific problems and gives us a general name for, failure, right? So a tragedy of the commons or a collective action problem. The point is you can have 100 versions of that, but they're variations on a theme and the solutions will look alike, as Eleanor Ostrom's Nobel Prize winning work tells us that ancient cultures figured out

solutions to these things. And in fact, their solutions were presented in narrative, metaphorical form because they had to be, right? They didn't know the game theory. So anyway, that's a hopeful sign. because what it means is if we can study these things correctly, we can actually generate solutions that we can apply each time the problem reemerges, and we should be shooting for that. Fantastic. The next question is from Casey Kunn. And this person asks, can you talk about the evolutionary utility of whistleblowers?

Are there any examples of proto whistleblower protections asking for a friend? So was that proto whistleblower protection? Is that what the same part? Yes. Are there any examples? I think the problem is almost turned on its head because the point is in an ancestral circumstance. If we go sufficiently far back, the lineage, right?

The tribe or the band would be united in wanting to spot the problems because they were bad for the long term prospects of the people involved. And so what has happened is by generating these very large systems. in which one group effectively does oppress another, whether that's, you know, one race oppressing another or management oppressing workers or whatever it is, there becomes a need for somebody who can endure the mechanisms that are built to frustrate the process of correcting and injustice, right? So the need for whistleblowers is new, and so the search for the ancient solution is probably wrongheaded. But yeah, you want to enhance the quality of the world,

figure out how to make people safe for pointing out the uncomfortable true things that describe what jeopardizes us. Yeah, I think this is right. I think this is one of the relatively rare situations where it might almost be a step function. Like there was there was a scale of organization below which whistleblowing wasn't necessary because it was all done by people who knew one another. And so as we scale up, we become more anonymous and, you know, people effectively become commodities such that whistleblowing is the necessary, sometimes the only way to fix the wrongs, whereas you could have done it by more ancient human interaction before. And that's not, there's nothing actionable in that. But I'm afraid that that fascinating question. But I think, I think that's where I'm going to land. Well, I would take the example of what banking used to be versus what it's become. If you imagine some, even just a couple hundred years ago, you know, the banker who was going to actually carry the loan that they were giving you needed to really make sure that you were in a decent position to pay it back, right? They had no interest in lying to themselves about that.

The subprime mortgage crisis involved a lot of people who knew that they were going to make a loan and then sell it and therefore wouldn't be there. when things went bad and it created a whole system of perverse incentives. So what happened? That problem-solving modality couldn't figure out why we shouldn't, you know, allow you to bundle mortgages and sell them as a package, right? And, you know, it's hard to describe why you shouldn't be able to. Now we've seen what happens if nobody can figure out how to explain the problem. But we have to recognize that we're doing that to ourselves all the time.

There are lots of things we shouldn't do, but it's very hard to explain why. And isn't part of the problem as well that when you whistleblower, you automatically expel yourself from the group? And as primarily tribal creatures, that goes against our very instincts, does it not? Well, but that's the, so not here, but elsewhere, I've talked about a process I call cultivated insecurity, where the system of your life, the fact that your mortgage, your insurance, your retirement, all depend on the relationship with an employer, places you in a very awkward position because you may be doing well, but it can all go south all of a sudden. This is, of course, somewhat different in the UK.

Right. There are distinctions. But I guess the point is the cultivated insecurity makes it very hard to do something like a whistleblower. And the remedy is a system that, actually not only protects whistleblowers, but if you spot something that's actually a hazard to lots of people or threatens to destroy a great deal of public wealth or whatever, you should be rewarded for calling attention to it. So you want to cultivate security. You know, you're right. Britain is going to be better, at least with respect to something like health care, which is not dependent on your relationship with your employer. So cultivating security so that people are free to describe what they see and to call attention to bad patterns is the key if you want those

kinds of problems solved. And the fact that we are so desperately insecure and so dependent on our relationship with the people we would be blowing the whistle on is the reason, you know, from the point of view of the public, it's a bug, but from the point of view of the people who don't wish to have the whistle blown, it's a feature. I guess one of the things is recognizing actually that we all belong to multiple tribes and imagining that the group that you're whistleblowing against may feel like your home group, your home team. But as those of us who have experienced cancel culture can attest, it turns out that there are many, many people out there who think many things and who are interested in coming together into what might be seen as tribal affiliation, you had no

access to before, for instance, or whom by some descriptors might appear to be of a very different tribe entirely. And so we can, you know, we can use demographic characteristics or political ideology or, excuse me, or, you know, teams that we vote for or places that we live as the ways that we describe the tribes to which we belong, but really trying to identify as many as possible of these things by which we might group ourselves and then finding others in those groups such that, yes, were tribal, of course. In-group, out-group dynamics are real and they never go away. But the more groups to whom you feel a sense of belonging and feel like you're on the in-group there, the less fraught being whistleblowing, being a whistleblower will be, and also the more secure you will actually

be and more capable of actually standing up and being courageous when it's called for. Guys, I should say we've got a lot of messages flowing and which aren't questions, but just people appreciating you coming on the show and are spending this time talking together. And of course, we appreciate that as well. And we appreciate your appreciation of their appreciation. The mutual appreciation society is in session. But speaking of cultivated insecurity, I caution you about this question. Important, John, we did say we'd take a COVID question or two.

And by the way, for everybody watching, we will do another 10 minutes or 15 minutes if you guys are happy to stick around. So if you want to send in a superchower of PayPal, I'll go ahead and do that. But here's important John. And he says, drum roll, please, if you had a choice between taking the vaccine or waiting to get COVID and then take an Ivermectin, which would you personally choose and why? Okay. This is a dangerous question for us. And it's not that analytically speaking, we shouldn't be able to address it.

Are you indicating that you can't hear me? No, no, I can't hear you. I've just got this thing in my ear. That's all. It's a bit irritating. Okay. You go for there are no hidden signals or anything like that. No, no.

I thought. Yeah, no, it's because they're uncomfortable in my ears. Cut, can't. Cut, Anton, cut the, yeah. Go for. All right. So the problem is, first of all, it must be said, we are not doctors. We are not in a position to advise people about this.

I do think people need to be aware that the information that they have at their disposal is quite noisy and compromised by propaganda of various kinds. We don't know about all of the consequences of having had COVID, right? You could say, based on what we know now, does it make sense to allow yourself to get COVID and treat it very aggressively, which seems to be possible? We see cases like Joe Rogan, like Pierre Corey, where very aggressive treatment seems to turn the disease around right away and apparently generate natural immunity, which is highly desirable, much better than the immunity generated by the vaccines. Here's the problem.

We don't know for sure that COVID doesn't do something like hide in, well, herpes viruses, for example, hide in neurological tissue where they're shielded from the immune system and then they reemerge. We don't have the evidence that COVID does that, but could it do that? And therefore, or if one got the disease thinking that I'll get it and I'll treat it, would they be in danger of having a recurring disease that might, you know, chickenpox become shingles. So diseases change in their manifestation over time. So we can't rule that out, right?

That's a very serious problem if it's there. And it changes the answer to the question that we've been asked. So it's very hard to make these decisions. What we desperately need is a group of people, who are well informed on this topic to be completely insulated from the political and economic environment that is so destroyed our ability to talk about it. And we need them to talk about what actually is the best approach because it is true. We see again and again the immunity that comes from the disease is far in a way better than the immunity that comes from the vaccines

for two different reasons. One, it's broader because it's to the entire virus, not just one subunit of one protein and two because it doesn't fade in the same way that the immunity generated by the vaccines does. So it's a complex landscape. I don't want to give an answer because the fact is if we give an answer it might affect what people do and we might have an instinct but the point is what we know for sure is that we are operating on incomplete information about the consequences of the vaccines and the consequences of COVID. Thank you very much. Brett. So the last question is nowhere near as controversial. It's from Jonti speaks. And he asks, what's the evolutionary role of laughter?

It's, yeah, you want to start? It is communicative as so much of what humans do. And it is, it gets back to exactly what you were just talking about, Francis, with regard to establishing tribal boundaries. And, you know, there is laughter that feels wonderful and laughter that can feel wonderful, but even as you're doing it, you know, is exclusionary. And that both of those functions exist for laughter and that therefore, you know, maybe to go back to the very beginning of our conversation, it's not, laughter is adaptive. It's present in all the cultures of all human beings. And that doesn't mean it's good. You know, laughter almost always feels good to us, but there are examples when it is malicious,

when it does harm to those who are being laughed at. And so saying that it is adaptive as a way of effectively increasing social cohesion does not mean that that social cohesion is necessarily a wonderful thing because some forms of social cohesion are actually doing great damage. So I would say years ago I was working on a project about, this question, not on laughter specifically, but on humor. Obviously, laughter is an indicator of humor, but

roughly speaking. Not anymore, prayer. Not with what I have on comedy shows on TV. Actually, it reminds me there was an interview with one of the writers for the, I never saw the show with the show Alf, Alien Life Farm,

who described that in the writing room they had a thing that they called humor-like substance. where, you know, it was a half-hour show and they needed a certain number of jokes, and sometimes they didn't have enough jokes, and they would put in something that had the form of a joke, and then the laugh track would make it sound like a joke, but it just didn't have the content. So anyway, to your point. That sounds like a horseman of the apocalypse right there.

It was a horseman of the apocalypse where we did not recognize it. The point was the argument that I made in my prior project was that humor was a mechanism, And in fact, the exercise of humor is a mechanism of exploring things that hover at the edge of what we are conscious of. And so if you have a room full of people, when you tell a joke, they're erupting in laughter is a recognition that they are all suddenly aware of the same truth that they had not formally understood they were all aware of. So a good humorist is searching that landscape for things everybody knows, but people don't say. And if you say it, we can get into why timing might be important here, but if you say it correctly, the point is there's a sudden dawning of recognition. And it serves to cement the tribal belonging. It serves to both cement the tribal belonging and to exclude because if you think about the person who doesn't get the joke, right?

If you're the only person in the room who doesn't laugh, that's a thoroughly uncomfortable feeling. Or if you are going to pretend to get it and you laugh inappropriately at the joke, you laugh. and it's not the punchline yet or whatever. You reveal yourself to be an outsider. And it's, so there's that element of the thing. But anyway, I was talking to somebody about this, and they alerted me to a quote that I didn't know, which was Tom Stoppard, who says,

laughter is the sound of comprehension, which I thought was excellent. Oh, of course, that's Stoppard. Yeah. That's great. That's wonderful. Well, speaking of stopping, thank you both for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. We are both, and all of us here at Trigonometry, wish you all the very best with the book tour and promoting the book.

It's really a book worth promoting. We speak to a lot of people. It's one of those that I really thoroughly recommend to people. And it's a rare. It's a rare. There it is. This is our only copy there, sold that we had to beg for this copy. That's our only one.

Well, when, if it ever happens that we can visit you over in the US or you can visit us over here, we're going to beg you for another copy and sign. please please please uh but in the meantime thank you so much for joining us has been an absolute pleasure thanks thank you guys it's been a pleasure thank you thank you very much okay guys uh thank you for tuning in uh as you would agree that was a wonderful episode if you want to watch any other trigonometry episodes they always go out on wednesdays and sunday 7 p m british standard time 2 p m eastern standard. We also do raw shows which go out Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday at the exact same time. Thank you so much for tuning in. Take care and see you soon, guys. Hey, KK, do you like

trigonometry? Yes. Do you like live shows? Yes. Then you're going to love the next Trigonometry Live show on the 2nd of November at the Leicester Square Theatre in London. It'll be with one of our all-time favorite guests. Peter Hitchens. This is very exciting news. I will make sure to take out on advertisement in Pravda tomorrow. A fleet of sponsored Ladders will descend on the Kremlin to promote this wonderful event. Our great and powerful leader, Uncle Vlad, will be wearing sponsored trigonometry speedos on Whitehorse.

No niece, mate. Our first show with Andrew Dahl is now completely sold out, and this one will sell out just as quickly. Tickets are strictly limited. limited and they're selling like copies of the Communist Manifesto. Greatest book in the world second only to ten cute things you didn't know about Joseph Stalin. I love that BuzzFeed article. Anyway, see you there, go.