Heather Heying Bret Weinstein: A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century

hi guys you're not going to want to miss this episode with heather heing and brett weinstein authors of a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century evolution and the challenges of modern life we got into so much stuff on this and thrilling almost two hour long podcast including uh my questions to them my so-called existential questions a thrilling three you want to miss that please do subscribe to my newsletter briankating.com if you want to get those and otherwise you'll hear fascinating kind of motivation why do they write this book why now are we as a culture experiencing senescence this degradation that is often spoken about often in the context of telomeres which of course brett made major contributions to uh and uh this notion of are there cultural or you know kind of epigenetic telomeres as he corrected my pronunciation we talked about their so-called omega principle we talked about the benefit of abstinence versus indulgence hyper novelty how to raise your kids and of course i actually engaged in some field work that you'll hear about visiting the famous madagascar poisonous frog and lastly we concluded with kind of some takeaways as to both your audience questions which i took on my youtube channel dr brian keating if you're listening to this and also questions as to what other civilizations maybe not even earthbound maybe even alien civilizations what would they be like and many other topics why experiments are good and bad and uh and the kind of notion that the internet is becoming what the campfire used to provide in ancient history so i hope you'll pick up a copy hunter gatherer's guide i listened to it it's read by the two of them quite phenomenal and i know you're gonna enjoy this episode with none other than uh heather heing and dr brett weinstein dr heather heing into the impossible enjoy any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic today we are welcoming two guests we haven't had two guests on the end of the impossible podcast very frequently i was discussing with my wife you know how she'd like to work with me or i with her and she said there were certain you know the waterfall she would like to jump off of before she would consider working with me but today it's heather heing and brett weinstein joining us all the way from the from the northwest i believe right guys that is correct we're in portland oregon you guys are the proprietors of the dark horse podcast and this is the second weinstein i've had on the podca actually you're the third i've had a zev in the background as well uh he's doing some work with me here at uc san diego but um i'm grateful to your brother eric for helping to facilitate this and i am grateful to you guys for agreeing to match the length of time that he has spent on my podcast in the next 26 hours so everybody sit back and enjoy uh so it's a pleasure to have that's with p breaks is that is that right no bio breaks will be provided damn uh so you guys have written a wonderful really fascinating new book called the hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century subtitle evolution and the challenges of modern life guys the first thing i do with all my guests is what you're never supposed to do which is to judge a book by its cover but rather than read your theses which i did do and i will get to that in a minute uh this is the first book that many of my uh my audience members will be familiar with or have a chance to encounter so what else can they judge it based on so guys where did the title come from um and where did uh and where did the cover art image come from is that the two of you guys gathering hunting on the cover making making yeah there we go thank you there it is uh is that us brett i i wish i could claim it was us i wish as a fallback i could claim it was actually our most recent common ancestor but given the populations that you and i come from i don't think that's plausible either that person was an agriculturalist yeah so that's that's presumably true but um yeah actually the design before we talk about the name of the book the design of the cover was actually one that brett and i had in our head and we actually mocked it up and sent it to the excellent artists at our wonderful publisher and this is this is what resulted so um you know we're very pleased with that but but the title a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century is of course a reference as brechus said to the ancestors that we had and the paleolithic on the african savannah which is what so many people have in their heads when they think of human ancestry human pre-history you know what it was that we used to be doing and you know people even imagine that it's that it's the thing to which we must refer if we are to live our our most adapted lives and really one of the premises of the book is we don't have just a singular singular environment of evolutionary adaptiveness we have many environments of evolutionary adaptedness and so sure we are adapted to the african savannas of the paleolithic and the coast the african coast but also more recently to being agriculturalists as brett said almost all modern humans are the descendants of agriculturalists for 10 to 12 000 years and we're also pre-industrialists and you go farther back the opposite direction in time from that cover and we're all primates we're all mammals we're all fish we're all animals and you know we we bear the mark of all of those moments of our evolutionary history there's also a little wink in there uh to the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy because of course there's a little analogy here right our the argument in the book the most central one is that we in the 21st century despite this environment effectively having been of our own making are somewhat out of our depth like an earthling traveling the cosmos so uh that's where it comes from i think maybe we conclude that actually a towel is not going to be sufficient useful yeah yeah unlike unlike in douglas adams right uh hitchhiker's guide and there's plenty of fish and the the the answer to all of life's questions is also revealed in here with many many tips from you guys and i want to get into that especially parenting tips but before we do uh yesterday heather in your honor i took my clan uh to the world famous san diego zoo and i wanted to do some field work to kind of channel my inner heather hein before the interview that i knew we'd conduct today and so i captured an image at great danger to myself and my membership i captured an image of of this little guy i'm wondering if you can recognize who that is heather gosh i i i think that must be an amphibian i can barely see is it possible it's a it's a newt or is it a frog wait it's a frog right yeah it's hard to see any chance you can't show us one more time kind of look like a tomato frog is that well it's red it might yeah boy yeah it could be a tomato if i discovered it from an island smaller from an island it's probably madagascar very good i was hoping to trip you up heather but i couldn't trip you up it is a tree frog it is from madagascar but its name is as brett said the sambhava tomato frog that's hopeless yeah are you very good amazing you guys you haven't lost a bit since graduate school whereas i have lost everything uh except for my hair that's all i get to keep actually we've seen that frog in person yeah i'm sure it's poisonous so i'm sure heather you've done battles with with even worse uh with worse entities than this little plum fellow um he doesn't look dangerous but looks can be deceiving right um so i want to ask you first heather what is so fascinating about frogs that could make you know we do our dissertations here about you know grand unified theories and and about uh new cosmological models predating the existence of the big bang when space time didn't even exist what about a frog could possibly envelop a person in an entire phd and perhaps their career as it did with you at least early on that's a that's actually a terrific question i mean i was i was interested in the beginning in uh the evolution of sociality evolution of territoriality of parental care sexual selection of sex roles and sexual behaviors and you know one thing i used to say when i was a professor to my students is you can be question driven or organism driven as an organismal biologist and many people are just driven to like i really want to work on wolves i really want to work on whales and frankly if you're driven by the organism you are probably going to be asking less deep questions overall so i was driven by the the questions that i was interested in and i started working on primates and as it happened the very first field season that i was working which was in central america i had a hypothesis about what particular fruits the local monkeys would be choosing and i they were just m.i.a the monkeys were missing in action could not find them and what i did find instead was sort of a natural experiment playing out in front of me with regard to in in central america was the dark poison frogs which turn out to have no relationship to the poison frogs of madagascar but that sent me to asking well there's an entire island nation larger than the state of california which has been closed to all vasa all foreigners for at that point many decades just opened up no one knows anything about what's going on there with regard to the behavior of any of the organisms except the lemurs anything i find will be new and i know what i'm interested in again you know social systems and sexual behavior and territoriality let's go so yeah the frogs are fascinating but it was really more about uh studying questions that i had a pre-existing interest in and that's how you know that's also how we end up landing at studying humans as reflected in this book so they're sort of a model in an interesting way the way that you know but you biologists use by the way i am not known for my biological uh you know competency or my evolutionary i always say in high school when i had to dissect the frog the frog always lived i mean i was not good at this at this at this job um well then you may not realize the most interesting thing about frogs is that they are self-assembling ah tell me more tell me more how does a frog sell what does sample assembly mean self-assembly means it it requires that you do this within a species but uh one egg and one sperm when they come together causes a frog it just all happens no one has to put it together there's no instructions it just emerges from that beginning ah interesting so you know i've been called a self-made man who worships his creator so i'll be sure to use that uh as an example um in the book uh brett you and the chapters so i have the book in physical and digital and in audio form and i recommend everybody buy at least three copies so it can continue to climb from number four on the new york times bestseller list to number one uh as it deserves and i want to ask you guys at least until my next book comes out but uh i don't think it'll appear up there but i want to ask you brett in the chat one of the chapters that you read sort of towards the end you talk about experiments and and in the book you might make the case that as as actually the new york times posits you know and they're kind of mini blurb you know the evolutionary biologists uh posit that the modern world is out of sync with our ancient brains and bodies first of all do you agree with that little snippet or i thought it was a little bit more nuanced than that bro what do you make of that yeah let's put it this way there's certainly an important uh more than a grain of truth in that but the the real lesson the much harder one what we argue in the book is that because the modern world is so different from all of the environments in which we adapted the map of what we are and how it fits the world is arbitrary there are some ways in which it just happens to remain a good fit and many ways in which it's a terrible fit and one has to look on a trait by trait basis to even figure out where we have to alter something in order to again be at home in our own world and in the book there is sort of an ominous looming you know kind of thought that is we're you know we're doing all these experiments because as we get farther and farther away not necessarily as you guys argue you don't argue in favor as i was surprised you don't argue in favor of the say the paleo diet and the keto diet so i went down to dunkin donuts and i want to thank you guys for that uh because you know i had only lost five pounds as i said i dropped five pounds from my chin to my to my backside but i want to ask you guys if you have this notion that kind of reoccurs that we're doing all these experiments we're experimenting with our kids heather you talk about screens and and all you know the availability of pornography which we're not going to get into and and all sorts of you know gender selection we're not going to get into that either but that's not not my interest but the notion of an experiment i think is it shouldn't get a bad name and that's not because i'm an experimental astrophysicist i think it's experiment is pure play it's pure curiosity and i think curiosity is probably one of the most undervalued traits what do you guys say about this categorization of we're doing an experiment on our kids what's wrong with experiments well the problem is that we have two meanings for the word experiment one of them means hey this is novel let's see how it goes and the other is we'll make a change and we'll see what the consequence is and so when you say there's nothing wrong with an experiment there's a question about what's at stake right you know if you're going to put an egg in the microwave the worst thing that's going to happen is you're going to have some cleanup to do right so you can afford to run that experiment and not be overly diligent about figuring out how you're going to collect the evidence but when we're running experiments on ourselves and even worse when we're running experiments on our children and future generations it is incumbent on us to figure out what it is that we are introducing to their environment and what its consequence is likely to have been so that if it's not a good thing we can reverse it and we are not doing that we are changing so many things at once and paying very little attention to the causality of the pathologies that in effect we just keep treating symptoms and adding more pathologies to them yeah i agree with this i would say you know the book is certainly not a call to regression or traditionalism or you know a past really imagined uh history that we could return to even if we thought we should and we when we don't we don't we think neither that we can nor that we should want to um but it is a caution against simply moving forward with all possible paths because rather in favor of i would say a scientific approach to experiment in which we say here's the hypothesis what are all the possible uh predictions that follow from the hypothesis and how would we know what the outcome would be as opposed to sort of a free market driven in places where there should be more regulation approach to uh approach to you know human everything and there is very little understanding too often of you know what childhood is what our brains are what it is that we're actually losing when we open up some of the boxes that we're opening up and hopefully not finding pandora written all over it exactly again at the zoo yesterday either as i was researching uh your beloved uh amphibians and whatever they are um things that i could dissect and still live uh this um this thing came to my mind that my kids uh after seeing these exotic creatures from galapagos turtle tortoises uh to you know the most magnificent giraffes were leaving and they spent more time obsessing you know just paroxysms of joy over the american red squirrel and there's a squirrel in the parking lot and i'm like great you know did can maybe go check out that pigeon over there guys you know you could have saved me 500 bucks um i wonder what is it about hyper novelty that competes with kind of you know mundanity in a sense that why are we wired for why would we have reason to think that we're more wired for novelty rather than for familiarity i guess that's my my question heather yeah well you know it's you're absolutely right and one of the things that we find when we travel before we get into deep nature that may be the goal of where we're going is that in the cities where we are we're sitting around looking at say the grackles uh which are of no interest to the local people but they don't happen to be where we are and we actually uh you know we would be more like your children perhaps and be watching the squirrels uh because because they are fascinating and certainly there are some there are some domesticates or uh i guess just associates of humans that have become so common even um even for us that we don't spend a lot of time noticing them but uh it is it is absolutely true that familiarity need not breed contempt but it does create a kind of a background level of i know that's there i'm not going to pay any attention to it anymore and so i mean this is this is akin to our unending search for growth which is not unique to humans but of course because we have become so so dominant on the planet it is the thing that is likely to be our end and so you know we argue in the book for for a way to do an end run around growth that actually uses resources and seeking novelty that actually requires totally new things so those organisms that have sought novelty and have been risk takers have been often the ones that didn't make it back but when they did make it when they were successful they were the ones who founded new lineages so you know of course there is a long-standing you know as old as 3.5 billion years on earth a long-standing interest in exploration of which novelty is a manifestation and brett novelty as you guys talk about a little bit is you know concomitant in some level with risk or with exploration to learn something new and requires discovery to increase you know entropy is natural to decrease it is is more uh energetically uh challenging um as i was coming into to work today it's the first days of school here at uc san diego i saw uh some some young people skateboarding as is the most popular mode of transportation outside of surfboarding and they weren't wearing helmets and they were uh instagramming i could tell and but they were wearing masks and i found it very interesting this this you know incredible and we're not going to talk about covet obviously but but i want to ask you guys uh but maybe brett first but what what is this notion of of human beings are we good at assessing risks and are we good at predictive um you know behavior to predict those types of novel things as you guys so cogently argue for that'll be beneficial to us and not actually detrimental in any way to us and we tend to underemphasize these true risks of not wearing a helmet on a skateboard while you're instagramming well i would argue that in an ancestral environment in which the population had been in the same place doing the same thing for generations we would be absolutely excellent at assessing risk and in fact assessing probably isn't even the right word you would intuit risk you know the way one does while driving you can be having a conversation that's occupying your conscious mind but some part of you is paying attention to everything out there and at the point that something you know a truck swerves in front of you suddenly it captures your attention but you know exactly in that circumstance because you do have a long history of driving and you've seen a certain amount you know what to think but for a modern person what should you think about the safety of ingesting a fruit from the supermarket that has been grown with uh molecules that we have no evolutionary history with that you don't even know about that's not labeled on the apple anywhere what it was grown with so how do you assess the risk of that and how do you know whether your model is any good right if there's some danger for example that you might come down with parkinson's if you spend years eating fruits and vegetables that have been grown with these novel compounds at what point do you reassess your model and say hey i probably got that one wrong and how do you know that it was the fruits and vegetables rather than that new car smell from the vehicle you purchased or you know the way your carpet's off gassed or right we've got again this goes back to the question of experiments we're running so many experiments at once and not being systematic about collecting the evidence that we really have a very poor sense and i'll say one more thing which is we notice very frequently that our civilization has an absolute obsession with protecting you from provable risks in the short term and it is absolutely indifferent to exposing you to likely risks in the long term that are outside of the bounds of provability and this has a lot to do likely with the fact that the way the system gets good at this is through litigiousness and so anything that can't be proven is effectively treated as if it doesn't exist even if we can infer that it most certainly must which creates perverse incentives for risk to not be provable [Music] very good uh the figure of gk chesterton figures large in this book and many of my listeners will be familiar with this quote that uh does not appear in hunter gatherers guide when a man stops believing in god he doesn't then believe in nothing he believes in anything heather how do you react to that you guys are not proponents of any particular religion although i i was delighted to learn you do celebrate hanukkah in your own special way at the very end um but uh what does that mean to you what is chesterton you know can we selectively uh apply chestertonians uh quips when when uh when it suits our fancy and as in the case of the fence or what do you make of this the uh believe in nothing if uh doesn't believe in nothing he believes in everything is god some sort of connective tissue and of what purpose does evolutionary speaking does god serve well that's that's a fascinating quote and it's not one i've heard so let me take first uh the the question about whether or not we can selectively choose the thinking of of a person and not embrace their entire milieu and i would say of course we can right so let me just take a step aside from your question for a moment and say specifically the contribution of chesterton that we introduce in the book and or introduce within the confines of the book not to the world but is is chesterton's fence the idea that if you see a fence and you don't know what its purpose is you should not be allowed nor courage to get rid of it until then unless you can demonstrate that you know what is what its function was supposed to be and presumably also demonstrate that it no longer has that function or it is in fact causing more harm than good and so we then apply that more broadly and say we can we see chesterton's fences all over the modern world in the form of chesterton's breast milk chesterton's play and chesterton's religions so to get to get to your point here you know what what role does religion have in the modern world well the idea that it is uh that we're done with it that it was a male adaptation that it was a dangerous or a mind virus cannot hold up to evolutionary scrutiny right every every society that we know of has some form of religion in which the people in it the the majority of people in it until the very modern times in which we are living in you know multivariate societies multi multi-religious societies has has belief and it helps organize morality frankly and the idea that it is somehow additional to cheesecake for humans is uh just it doesn't fit and i wonder i suspect that brett has more to say on this perhaps yeah i think the problem you know we we do talk about chesterton's fence specifically in the in the context of religion but you know we have these two concepts that we discussed there's the precautionary principle and there's chesterton's fence and they're really mirror images of each other one is about the hazard of adding novel things to a system and the other is about taking away uh things that have been long-standing and again this goes back to the arbitrariness of the place we find ourselves in history because we have these traditions the traditions are clearly not up to the challenge of navigating modern hazards you know the bible has precious little to say about social media and the hazards of algorithms to our collective sense making well i would actually push back on that right because there are traits i mean you may know from your upbringing there's a sense of there's a notion of what's called lashon hara the evil speech in judaism at least which is the notion that um gossip is not something that's false in other words it's you're forbidden to lie in general so it's you wouldn't be forbidden again to tell something so it's something that's true gossip is true and yet it spreads like wildfire more than ever and the analogy that's used typically uh in in the talmud is as one of uh you know a man you know besmirches the reputation of his rabbi and says oh he's been married and divorced or whatever and that's not you know socially a great thing for this particular man and the parishioner then feels guilty and says how can i rectify what i did to you rabbi and the rabbi says simple just go get a feather pillow and the guy goes okay i'll go get a feather pillow that's it that seems simple robert says no no cut it open my gosh all right cut it i'll cut open the pillow and he goes and shake it out check it out and the guy says all right i'll do it am i forgiven and goes no now go out and collect all the feathers the notion being that you know the ability to produce bs and and actually truth uh far outstrips the ability to do it but the notion of guarding your tongue the actual quote in the in the torah and the old testament the bible is you know you should guard your tongue it's protecting your life to choose life means to guard your tongue against this true but defamatory in some sense speech so i wouldn't say that the bible doesn't speak about it but with respect uh i i would say that it it has many aphorisms uh and the question is yeah which ones you know to take seriously i know that that's a harder problem right well no i think you've picked a great example because there's certainly a relevance if gossip is bad then the internet is an amplifier of that badness it doesn't make it better it makes it worse on the other hand there's a whole lot that isn't covered there right like what happens when it isn't people deciding to say or not say but it's algorithms decide designed to increase somebody's bottom line that result in people being fed things that flatter their preconceptions and having things hidden that would cause them to challenge those preconceptions that isn't mentioned and i'm not saying you couldn't find some analog for that in there but the basic point is come on these texts were built by evolution they were built by evolution with reference to environments we don't live in some of what they've got contained in them is still as relevant as ever some of it is upside down and backwards and much is simply not covered so when you're left with that kind of an arbitrary map the question is what do you do and you know the the atheists and the way that that's been formulated in in recent times don't have it right right chesterton's quote is relevant there the religious people who say hey this stuff is still you know the word of god and we have to take it uh as handed to us don't have solutions to some of the problems we face and so you know heather and i are not happy about the message that we actually have to confront the process of building new traditions that are up to the challenge of regulating the way we interact with each other and the world because we are bound to get many things wrong in at least our first and second attempts um but what choice do we have we live in a world for which no one knows the best rules yeah and it's kind of that that you know emerging from the cave that i find so you know instructive illustrative um but again just to not belabor the the religious point i mean a lot of what you talk about in this book both of you guys are are really making the case in some way not for religious or you know uh political conservatism you know for sure but but really for um take extracting the good thing you talk a lot about community about the campfire that's a strong metaphor we're gonna get into that and how in modern times the internet is becoming a perverse campfire in some sense but but religion is community small groups hundreds of people go to synagogues not millions of people or temples or churches or buddhist shrines you guys mentioned buddhism in the book as well as a positive example of a prudential religion that has adaptivity built within it so i guess the the gathering and hunting within the religious structure they would seem that religious life offers a lot of what you know the lacunae that your book is designed to fill in some sense um in terms of you know parenting i mean you basically talk about you know discipline but also love and and and um you know kind of having those two hands everything being this double-edged sword that the bible speaks about so i mean why not just shortcut it why why should you know why should we listen to you two brilliant you know scientists we can say this tradition has been tested for thousands of years you know a b tested group tested you know why not just pick a religion happen maybe choose the religion you were born into and and stick with it even if you don't believe it i mean i had freeman dyson on my first guest a he called himself basically what i do you know in some sense a practicing uh agnostic so why not just you know pick a system it's been group tested long time and uh instead of trying to you know kind of make the rules up as we go go along now what do you guys think about that i would say that's a great start and it gets you a long way in a lot of regards but it doesn't necessarily tell you what to eat and uh whether or not to let the led lights flash in your bedroom at night and uh what to adopt of uh what modern authorities are telling you about how you should form your relationships you know when it's possible that if what you're trying to do is simply wear your book you the religion that you've picked has an opinion if you go with that you are more likely to be right than if you had nothing to guide you at all um but having a book that is as you say a b tested you know time tested all of this with an evolutionary understanding of what we are and what we've been because what we are is far more tested than any book that humans have created you know because we are not just hunter-gatherers we are also monkeys and primates and mammals and fish we are all of these things and you make the case heather i think in the section that you read um that i loved you know you really make the case for abstinence i don't mean like puritanical it's just you should you should practice fasting in a certain sense and and many religions do that uh to very good effect refraining from you know pornography from things that didn't exist in the pre-evolutionary past and i i just want to thank you for that because i do think there's a benefit to it you know we just had yom kippur in our religion and you know my kids fasted from you know from dinner to breakfast or whatever and but but they recognize that it's good and that they wanted to do it but they couldn't do it and i think like all the more so in judaism we don't use screens we don't you know communicate on the sabbath and things like that you also advocate for that kind of the digital detox you talk about taking trips for weeks with your children that i don't know if they were what age they were at but you know you turn on the phone and all of a sudden you get riddled with with email and that suggests to me you guys do take sabbaths too thought maybe talk about the importance of that in terms of recharging the human uh you know what what the human needs either one of you is wait i want to go back and and push back on something you said earlier because it really gets to the heart of the matter here right why not just accept some time-tested religion and go with that right but how did it get that way and the implication is partially uh carried in your argument for a b testing the fact is secular sectarian disagreements are the fodder by which selection refines belief systems to make the time-tested versions that we have but the other part of that which we argue for in our book is that there is a mechanism for radical upgrade as well and you're right there's you know people will struggle if you're a conservative and you look into our book you will see conservatism if you're a radical and you look into our book you will find radicalism what the hell is that do we not know what we're doing no the argument is actually that there is a tension between these things and that when you are faced with circumstances for which you don't have the answers they're not contained in whatever book it is that you inherited from your your your your your ancestors you have to have a mechanism for figuring out what the next book is going to say and it doesn't involve sitting down to write the next book right it involves people around a campfire proposing things to each other and figuring out what the foothill might look like and then that foothill is ascended by disagreements and you know you might have two populations do you follow the shoe do you follow the gourd you know that sort of thing and those groups that have or those lineages that have a belief system that more surgically suggests behaviors that are adaptive will out-compete groups that have messier versions of these things so in any case i think the point is do you want to subscribe to the book you've been handed or do you want to subscribe to the process that created those books in the first place and what our book argues is that that process is an evolutionary process and we know where we are in that right we're at a point where where a radical transition is necessary if we're to survive so if if i may speak to the question of sabbath which strikes me as having at least two very important aspects one is that it allows you to remember who you are and who you are with and to be focused on the people both yourself your inner world and the people you are with and uh of of course we need more of that in modern in modern life and this is fundamental to what humans are but the other aspect of sabbath which you refer to and yom kippur of course also does this is is uh that it it reveals the benefit of privation and um too much of modern life is about seems to be about maximizing comfort and making sure that we are never in any way outside of the bounds which we had imagined we would be outside of and we argue at least implicitly throughout the book although i'm not sure we ever explicitly say this that actually pushing up against the bounds of what both you think is possible for your own body and brain and emotions and what is actually possible is actually itself health enhancing and restoring and so for instance uh you know obviously we should be moving our bodies some every day you know we should all be walking some amount of time every day but that's not sufficient we also should be absolutely pushing our bodies to the limit sometimes so that our bodies know what it is to be pushed and what kinds of places we might need to push it and that is going to be the thing that makes us stronger and more anti-fragile and so living a life within sort of narrow confines or even fairly broad confines where we never where we never even approach those boundaries makes us fragile yeah and i see that even in the you know kind of uh ability to identify with someone who's truly hungry i mean i've never been truly hungry you guys have probably because you've been on such amazing adventures some of which are documented in the wonderful book that we're discussing a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century authors dr heather heing and dr brett weinstein and this uh this this book talks about you know kind of the the just culturally it's it's just it's it's a true wake-up call but i came to think of it as an interesting dichotomy and what brett was just saying a couple minutes ago between like what do you choose and how do you know how to choose and i saw a fundamental dichotomy between producers and consumers so you guys are producers and consumers but your producers your youtube channel which is extremely popular dark horse podcast you can find everywhere podcasts are sold um and uh and but you're also consumers you consume voraciously um uh you know scholarly and otherwise now i started to think about uh the very first gripping opening story about rain in the mountains and i started to think well it's great that that your guide and well maybe you guys can recap the story very briefly uh how you almost weren't here to tell this story and you almost didn't have the children that you wonderfully uh are blessed to have um maybe tell that story and then i want to make the point that there's a certain amount of credit that goes to you guys for being consumers and knowing i should trust this guy this this guru uh because he is a producer of this knowledge but there's an obligation of the consumer as well and i wonder if that's not harder to act to acquire um then but maybe heather can you start off with the story about rain in the mountains and then brett can you comment on the obligations of the consumer if he or she wants to survive and thrive yeah so it was our first season as graduate students as would-be scientists in coast in costa rica we had spent a summer previously exploring uh central america so we were not new to these ecosystems or we didn't think we were but we had both grown up you know privileged kids in los angeles in the weird world it wasn't called the weird world then but um we were very much of the first world as it was called then so we were at this little tiny field station in sarapaqui in northeastern costa rica and we were done with our field work for the day it was hot the two of us chose to walk down to the river where we would swim where we would swim many days to get there you have to cross a high bridge a relatively high bridge and we were about halfway across when a man we did not know a man we we took to be a local farmer approached us our spanish was terrible at this point he spoke no english and uh he basically got our attention and kept saying there was rain in the mountains today and he would point to the mountains and we were just getting hotter and harder standing there wishing that we could extract ourselves from this conversation but feeling that we needed to you know engage with him because he was trying to engage with us but uh at some point he pointed with increasing urgency to the water and said look and in the few seconds that we had been looking away it had begun to rise and what he was telling us without you know with the very few words that we shared between us in a language that wasn't ours although we were in his home and you know in his in his home landscape uh where the language that was spoken was his was that rain in the mountains that all of us are aware of that has to go somewhere and had he not stopped us what we we stood on that bridge as that water rose and rose and rose and very soon there were trees coming down the river and the bank on which we would have been standing had disappeared under this flash flood this man saved our lives probably at least one of ours and we were young proto-scientists in graduate school you know working towards phds doing tropical biology thinking that we knew a place because we'd been there for several weeks studying you know frogs and bats but we didn't and so you know the point is that it actually takes much longer to truly know a place and all of us feel like locals now in whatever landscape we walk into but in fact it takes a lot more experience than most of us give credit for and actually you can uh you can see the very same thing in the tragic videos that emerged from banda aceh for example during the boxing day tsunami where people many of them who lived on the coast but whose ancestors hadn't been there did not know what to make of a sea that had radically receded and revealed you know sea floor that they had never seen before and many people walked out to look at the fish yeah right and uh were killed because they didn't know how they didn't understand that that water was going to have to come back so anyway yes there is something to be said about really knowing a place and that's that's what saved us in the instance of the the incident on the bridge so brett as a consumer what kinds of you know obligation there might be obligations on producers and they may get benefits uh they may have increased you know facility if they're perceived as being the repository of wisdom of local knowledge of life hacks as we call them now but didn't call them back thousands of years ago but what obligations are there on the consumer uh and what benefits accrue to him or her for being astute in their judgment of perception of which mountain guides to listen to so to speak to torture this analogy well i'm a little uh unsure of what you mean by consumer do you mean in the economic sense something no just like you're hearing the information but there is you you were astute enough uh something in you guys listen to this guide or listen to this farmer and that saved your life uh but not everyone i would have you know i would have been you know probably the former brian keating i would have um hot what are you talking about man let me let me take a dive off this waterfall to impress my girlfriend um but you didn't do that so there's some there was something in you guys that was astute enough or perceptive enough and i'm kind of asking i'm in hopes that it wasn't based on something unique to your guys intellect or you know something that we normal people perhaps can cultivate to be more perceptive consumers in that sense of wisdom of of of past traditions or or even of you know of these pretty naturally gifted you know people in our culture yeah it's an excellent question um i'll take a slight detour uh just yeah something that accidentally revealed something to me about this which is uh i'm not a believer really in dyslexia because reading and writing are so new that to say that you have a defect with respect to them really doesn't make any sense right this is some thing modern humans have chosen to do and some of us are less adept at processing the symbols but if dyslexia was a thing i'd have it in spades and it has an impact therefore on the way i read it makes it less fun more uh it's more exhausting for me i know than people who read easily but it has a positive upside which i think non-dyslexics don't necessarily spot which is because i know i can't trust my interpretation of the symbols on the page i'm constantly looking to see whether or not what i'm reading makes sense right because the way i know that i've misread something is that it doesn't make sense and so then i know i have to go back and reread it but lots of times if you if you get good at this process you're reading something doesn't make sense you go back to find what symbol you've misunderstood and there's nothing you just know it doesn't make sense and so i guess my point is i'm not a big believer i think you should really minimize the consumer part of you that even what we do that looks nominally like being a consumer like reading shouldn't be a passive activity it should be one in which your conscious mind is actively engaged in evaluating what's coming in and the profit comes when you know if somebody's telling you something and they're ostensibly an expert in the topic but they say something that doesn't match the model that you have of the universe well there's an opportunity there either they're about to learn something or you're about to learn something and that you know i think deciding to be a consumer as little as possible is probably the best advice that that we can give can i uh can i add something to that actually um yes i think all of us exist in some way outside of the mainstream you know we are all non-normies on some domain on some axis and you know it may be dyslexia or color blindness or left-handedness or you know neurodiversity you know being on the spectrum or many many other other things and you know it's become very fashionable now to identify what way in which you are request this is not that this is a how about take that as a hidden superpower by which you can stand outside of whatever the main the mainstream narrative is and use it as a way to interpret it in such that uh or rather with tools that maybe all the so-called normies don't have right and this this actually allows you to have insight and i think really if you do it with integrity and respect to um open up your arms to more of humanity and to more of the the wisdom and wealth of skills that that humans bring and you know i've said i've said before that uh the many years that we spent teaching in college classrooms at a yes public liberal arts college but a non-elite one one that had yes students from the tops of their classes but also students who had been completely destroyed by school and um students who were the first in their families to go to college and you know and veterans and you know single mothers you know all range of people what that experience taught me in part uh was that almost in a room full of 25 or 50 students almost everyone has something to teach every other person in that room and that's not to say that i was pretending that i wasn't the professor and wasn't there to teach some particular things that i had written into the curriculum and that i wanted to get to um but that part of what we were doing there was indeed to return to the earlier concept you know was building community such that we had trust for one another such that we could over time reduce the skepticism we had for one another and thus engage more and more deeply ideas that might have on the first day of class seemed polarizing or extreme well no now now that we have some trust and you can recognize that if i say something that you wildly disagree with you know it's not because i'm a monster maybe i'm wrong maybe i'm not wrong maybe you don't have the information i have maybe i don't have the information you have but let's take the time to explore yeah and i think that is of course the purpose of education the latin root is ejukari it means to pour out of not to put into i want to talk if you'll indulge me i wanted to talk about this later but i heather you just brought it up you guys were uh famously you know unemployed from evergreen state university or um and i think it's kind of a tragedy um when i look back on it and i read your writings and i know a little bit about each of you just because we're you know friends with uh brett's brother but but the point of you guys as natural educators as born educators as educators defining who you are and i remember i got my pilot's license in the 1990s and on that day i remember my flight instructor saying now your identity is forever changed you will never not have been a pilot you know and it becomes a part of who you are even if i find little tiny cessna you know that i can't fit in anymore and uh and now um but i can do that and i can go down and rent a little plane but you guys aren't professors anymore and and yet it's it's sort of like your claws or your or your uh web spinning ability or your honey making it like it's what you guys were born to do clearly it is and i i won't tolerate if you guys disagree with me because you guys are human you know incarnations of education machines i want to ask you how is it dealing with the ability with the fact that you're not teaching you're teaching you're teaching at much bigger scale your publications are read by way more people that your h index will be much higher but you're not at a university how how does that make you guys feel um it's an interesting question let's put it this way it was a tragedy but i don't think it was a personal tragedy i think what happened to us was a preview and we are all suffering this tragedy and i will say um heather and i i don't think have talked about this explicitly maybe we have but when the i mean i prefer to think of us as uh catapulted out of the academy is what happened to us when that happened to us we were asked as we were invited to speak various places how shall we introduce you right what are you now if you're not a professor and we adopted professors in exile as our um as our i don't know what it would be yeah but the point was that was actually uh yeah it was you know there was a wink involved but it was also an accurate representation it was a little bit like your pilot example the point was well we did that that's still who we are didn't change the day we resigned our positions and i think it still is and as you point out we are now not in the same milieu we are still teaching in a new way we're figuring out how to do it and uh i don't i don't feel i feel a loss surrounding something that actually isn't so easy to do at most colleges or universities we had by virtue of the way teaching was done at evergreen we taught one class full-time students took one class full-time and that class could go on for a full year which resulted in a level of understanding between teachers and students that is unparalleled and i missed that but were we to suddenly have positions as professors somewhere else that part wouldn't be restored right it would be a dim shadow of that and what we have now is quite different but uh it it has not eliminated the sense of meaning that accompanies every day and the sense of meaning is closely aligned to the one we had when we were in the classroom i i agree with that and i would say you know there are catch phrases in educational theory that people are probably familiar with and that sound ridiculous at this point things like lifelong learner and theory to practice right um and yet you know both of those things be the idea of being a lifelong learner is actually foundational and i you know my my father has been has been dead for eight years now but he was a computer scientist who didn't view himself as an educator but was a mentor to so many people and i think in the same way we sort of became accidental educators because what we were were children who were becoming adults with a curiosity about in our case largely you know the natural world and the human world uh that didn't stop you know any day that uh you learned something new and this was something that my father used to say to me any day i learned something new was a good day right and it doesn't take very much from there to then want to share not just the thing that you learned but how it is that you can open yourself up to a personality of learning yeah and of course you guys make the strong case that tools are more important than facts you say that in the book and i wonder you know one one uh very old tradition in weird countries and maybe heather can you define weird really quickly please yeah just uh those those people living in countries that are western educated industrialized rich democratic or at least aspire to be democratic small d but um i wonder one institution that's quite old and i'm wondering and i'm curious if it is not a chesterton's fence is the university system which dates back in its current incarnation of a guy or a gal i guess lately uh with a piece of rock you know scraping on another piece of rock you know behind their bodies um in front of you know these bewildered and bemused young people uh that day dates back to at least 1089 in the city of bologna in northern italy and i wonder that's been there a long time it hasn't changed uh and yet brett you just mentioned a few minutes ago i might preview what happened to you might be a preview could it happen to me should it happen to me not not exactly what happened but is academia a chesterton's fence should we should we not respect it it's been around for so long why advocate to change it or what are would you advocate to change about it uh yeah this is a tough one because my sense is uh if the academy didn't exist it would be necessary to invent it and it doesn't exist so it is now necessary to invent it um no it's it's become the malignant version or you know i you know i realize who i'm talking to but at some level the the argument that i make is it's like your cherished family dog having caught rabies right you're vaccinated against that yes we are but but the basic point is look at the point your family dog has caught rabies it's time to grow up and realize that's not exactly your family dog right and the university system is like this now i think that's tragic and i think it's crazy obviously most of the resources you need to build a great academy exist in what we currently call the academy but it's not functioning that way and the worst part about it is that the population of people that staff the academy have lost track of what it is they're supposed to be doing right they just don't do the work and you're using that sense you locked you're talking about the faculty largely yeah it is the faculty i mean uh there's also a lot to be said about the uh the bloating of the administration and its role in this but the point is the university has begun to see itself or beyond begun to be to see itself it sees itself as a business or it sees itself as a dispenser of truth not a place in which vigorous challenges are dealt with in a responsible way so that we can discover the truth and until it either returns to its roots or gets replaced by something that is capable of doing the job civilization's in serious trouble because you know this this isn't the 14th century right we have problems that are serious and require very careful analysis and you absolutely need at least a scientific apparatus that is capable of telling you what you need to know rather than what you want to hear and in a context where we have markets plugged very directly into our research system that's not what we get right we get some product that interfaces with our collective well-being arbitrarily at best more often than not it might be predatory and you know that's just that's that's a dire situation to find ourselves in you see things in commonality just to push gently back with respect um you see things that are sclerotic that don't change you know healthcare you know construction of low-income family housing and education these can't be exported at least in their you know an exact incarnation that i'm sitting in this university um are they not anti-fragile are they not i mean what is it what is the been around for a thousand years almost in and more or less his current state and except back then they had a barbaric tradition i don't know heather and brett if you know this but they had a barbaric tradition that the students could go on strike and then the professor wouldn't get paid and thank god they've abolished um but uh but is it not anti-fragile you guys talk about this uh resiliency as a model heather are these universities that i'm a part of at least currently so um so entrenched and so part of culture as it is that they're effectively resilient to further perturbations and change well i think sclerotic can look antifragile and it can persist in in appearing to be effective for a long time after it actually is so um i you know we're already seeing some of the smaller places fail around the edges right uh the elite institutions and the large state institutions especially the r1s are likely to last for longer and um you know maybe maybe they can reform the places that were once exactly where undergraduates at least were most likely to get a really inspired and exciting and serendipitous liberal arts education the you know the elite private uh liberal arts colleges are most likely to fall first uh they just you know they they are they are less sclerotic um and more likely to be taken over so you know the idea that the entire system is anti-fragile no you know just as brett said do we need do we need higher ed yes we do but that doesn't mean that the system we've got now is what will persist but i also think uh that nasim tuleb formulated this concept so brilliantly that it covers this right the academy is robust it's very hard to displace it that's not the same thing as anti-fragile right basically it survives by preventing challenge it does not grow stronger with challenge and i think that's one of the strongest indicators that it has in its current form outlived its usefulness so maybe sclerotic is robustness not anti-fragility yeah an indicator of robustness interesting um one of the many uh neologisms you describe in the book uh is the omega principle and i want to read to you from amazon um the omega principle is a brilliant and engaging book that works on many levels as a rousing environmental manifesto of seafood and the quest for long life is that what you're talking about brett no omega-3s no that's no no what is it my friend tell me i don't know okay so uh there's a book called the omega principle you should know you might get it you might hear from their publisher now we do yes well we've been playing with this concept for a long time i'd be curious how old that book is but in any case the idea is that there is a fundamental question if when you consider the evolution of humans of our species everybody understands since roughly 1976 when richard dawkins first introduced the concept of cultural evolution in a rigorous form that we have culture and that it evolves by rules that are similar to genetic darwinism what the field has never fully resolved is what is the relationship between the evolution of things at the cultural layer and the evolution of things at the genetic layer and dawkins himself argues that the cultural layer is effectively he calls it a new primeval soup right effectively it is a new evolution of stuff a place where adaptation is uh happening in a novel form we argue that that cannot be right right most creatures do not have culture we are adapted to have a tremendous amount of culture we make the argument that human beings though not a blank slate are the blanket slates that selection has ever produced and that there's a reason for that and that's because being the blanket slates we end up doing the bidding of the genes far better than we would if the genes hard coded our behavior to a much higher degree and so the omega principle specifies the relationship between epigenetic phenomena including culture and the genes and the reason that we've chosen omega is that as a greek letter it evokes pi pi specifies the exact relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle in the same way that the omega principle specifies the exact relationship between epigenetic phenomena and the genome and that relationship says part one epigenetic phenomena are more flexible and more rapidly adapting but part two they are obligated to the objectives of the genes and once you make that once you realize why that logically has to be the case it makes evolutionary analysis of human beings tractable because in some sense you do not need to know where the information is housed in order to know what its objective is and this is crucially important in the case of something like let's say human language where the capacity for language is clearly largely generated by genetic programming which creates a brain of a certain uh that is hospitable to language but it does not encode any of the content of the particular language you will learn right it's housed in both places well how do you factor that to figure out what what it's supposed to do well the answer is it doesn't matter what the admixture is in terms of where the uh the hereditary information is and how it is passed it's for the same purpose either way and i want to ask you a famous question posed by erwin schrodinger but not answered in his famous monograph what is life heather what is life and then i want to add another monograph suggestion to you brett uh what is culture along those same physical lines perhaps so heather what is life to you what is life um life is self-organizing and replicating with hereditary information that i think self-correcting hereditary the the hereditary information has to be uh have error correction in there too i have to think about that to make sure that has to be part of life but i think so i actually like john lennon's formulation somewhat better life is what happens while you're making other plans other plans that would have been a simpler answer yes that's right so just just like you said the frogs were self-organizing right yes that's your point early on yeah all you were doing was saying it's alive it is alive um so now you want uh culture culture okay well so this is the part where i'm gonna tangle myself in knots to avoid a tiny little exception that i'm aware exists and is going to force me not to say something very simple and intuitive but culture is information it is adaptive information pass outside the genome and the caveat it would be very easy to say something like between members of one species but that does not have to be the case and in the particular thing i'm worried about has to do with the evolution of domestic dogs where we have a very asymmetrical relationship but there is a certain amount of culture transmitted between people and dogs and vice versa and miraculously the dogs have adapted to this in ways that actually have physical hallmarks right their ability to exchange uh facial expressions right the ability to control their faces in ways that convey things the amazing ability that they appear to have to understand human language to parse a large number of different words uh all of these things suggest a long-standing relationship in which there is transmission of a kind but anyway the general case for culture is members of a species transmitting information uh outside of the genome and for human beings this is elaborated far beyond even our closest relatives because we have language which makes it very efficient and opens the possibility to what is uniquely the case in humans the ability to transmit abstract ideas between individuals now in our book we divide two kinds of transmission of information right what we call consciousness is about novel ideas that are parallel processed between minds right what we call culture in the narrow sense in the book are things that come from ancestors who generated ideas consciously and then those ideas get driven into an efficient cultural package that is passed on one generation to the next and provides the substrate with which new members of the population are brought into the fold and trained in how to behave brett i want to ask you another question uh which has to do with your famous research in telomeres i came to ask the question i guess in the following sense is there an analog of a cultural telomeres are there analogs of cultural telomeres um i'm going to have to think more deeply about whether the telomeres themselves are have an analog but there is a very disturbing analog to the process of senescence that we have fairly long understood in evolutionary biology right this is the process that causes creatures like us to grow feeble and inefficient with age and we have known since roughly 1957 when george williams published his excellent paper on the evolution of senescence why it occurs why it evolves the short answer being that your genome isn't very big which means that the genes in your genome tend to do more than one thing and anytime a gene does something good for you early in life it will tend to be accumulated by selection to be enhanced and passed on even if it does something harmful to you late in life the reason being many individuals don't live long enough to suffer the late life costs they get away with it and even for individuals who do live long enough to suffer the late life cost much of their reproduction is already behind them and so the selective disadvantage is small okay so that's the reason we have a genome full of genes that do two things they give an early benefit at a late life cost the problem is that our civilization has an analogous process to it it's almost uh almost beyond the level of analogy and the basic point is when we invent a new process that prov that produces some benefit to us initially it creates political and economic power that makes it impossible to undo that process if it turns out to have a much later cost and so in exactly the same way that the body suffers all of those late life costs after a number of years civilization is built in its current instantiation it is built to senesce by virtue of us suffering all of the costs for the economic activity that produced profits long ago and if we are wise we will recognize the degree to which that tells us where we're headed and we will figure out how to unplug that system and replace it with something that doesn't have that characteristic very good yeah that kind of um kind of presaged my final question to the both of you which is is america experiencing senescence uh and i do see some yeah potential uh maybe over torturing of that analogy but it does seem in certain sense maybe heather you can you you read a passage in the book you talk about how to avoid it and you talk about liberation anti-fragility and uh the the propensity for for things that aren't resilient or don't to resist competition um maybe talk about that in the final minutes and then i'm going to turn to my patented final thrilling three existential questions that i'm going to ask both of you separately i've never done this before but we'll use the remaining minutes to do that is america experiencing it and if so how can we avoid it it it does it does appear that way uh and i guess what i was gonna ask you brett as you were talking um something i'm not sure we've ever even talked about before um is individuals experience senescence senescence for the reasons that you lay out and uh within a species we will we can we can extend average lifespan but we have very little chance of extending maximum lifespan but i don't think there's any reason to think that a societal level that there needs to be a maximum lifespan right and so we talk in the book for instance about the maya as an example of a civilization uh that was so long-lived and so um so long horizon thinking that they actually have a unit of time the baktun which is over 400 years right so uh you know and they had an enlightenment of their own and they introduced the concept of i mean they invented the concept of zero and astronomy and farming and written language and you know they had so many of the things that the european enlightenment in fact did and um and yet they were failing before the spaniards arrived right it was not it was not the spaniards who took out the maya although they certainly helped but you know finished them off so you know what they lasted longer than america has so even if there were a maximum lifespan of civilizations we're certainly not there and depending on how you count uh china has certainly been going for longer um although you might argue that it's not the same it's not the same civilization right um so are we are we in the death rows well it seems like it but maybe there don't need to be death rows no i i think i think biology just has answered this question and we've become so petty that we don't understand that it's an answer right and i think we need to look to the biological solution to this and then look for its analog in uh in the space of civilization the way selection has solved this problem is that it has treated the body as a temporary vessel and in fact the very model that we present in the book where we pass on a tremendous amount of adapting evolving information outside of the genome means that you have children they can pick up that fraction of what you know that is still relevant right they can discard the fraction that has become outdated and they can advance the ball and that effectively they are you but they are not exactly you right they are an edit on you that then keeps the process developing through time they are the the anti-fragile solution to the senescence problem and in essence what we need to do with respect to the united states for example is recognize that the founders absolutely nailed it with respect to the values they came up with a solution that was actually in all likelihood much more durable than they expected it to be but it is now not surprising that people who had never seen a train or a chainsaw or an airplane or the internet that they could you know they couldn't have built a structure that was going to be robust to this and it is time for the 2.0 version something that honors what they accomplished but does not treat it with religious devotion treats it as something that now needs to have its offspring that's where we need to go and i don't think it's a sad thing i think it is a natural transition and we should embrace it actually if i can just um put a cap on that uh we don't talk in the book about species concepts and how it is that we name species and how different types of biologists think about what a species is but one of the things that is certainly true is that um as species change over time absent branches coming off of them where we can absolutely say yes that's different now we we still tend to paleontologists still give different names to those lineages over time because they are what is found is fossils and fossils get different names and when if we think about political systems the same way america is changing we have these unchanging founding documents uh but as it changes over time just because it doesn't change names doesn't mean that the thing itself can't can't evolve interesting okay uh i lied that i only had a couple questions because i actually have my audience questions but i'm gonna do those in rapid fire if you guys will play along um i will read a question you could say yes or no or restrict it to a one sentence question it could be both of you guys either one of you guys they're not directed at either of you individually but as a group first from lj do you have any thoughts on the origin or purpose of music is it merely a social tool meant to strengthen bonds within or between groups or do you think it's a bond that can be separated from evolutionary history one sentence ago music passes the adaptive test which we present in the book with flying colors it has no choice really but to be an evolutionary adaptation modern music has many purposes the question is what is the original purpose that caused the thing we call music to evolve and it's a great question uh it can't be answered in one sentence good okay daltou asks explorer modes what are they and how important are they for the process of evolution most explorers fail and we never hear from them again absent explorers we don't have lineages branching and we have a very low diversity and expansion into diverse habitats on the planet so i will add evolution seeks modes and forms that function that get genes into the future it is much less efficient to search all of the possible design space for modes that work than to limit one search to things that are likely to be functional selection over time will develop mechanisms that reduce the search space those are the explorer modes the heuristics of space yeah and then combined with survivorship bias that we tend only to hear from the ones that survived uh results in some quite prejudicial uh outcomes supposedly okay the next question comes from blair james ryan he has a question similar to the one i wanted to ask your thoughts on how the modern diet and processed foods like seed oils and sugars have created obesity and diabetes heart disease and dementia and i wasn't familiar with dementia but maybe one of you can take that and then i have a follow-up question about allergies uh absolutely they have and there is increasing evidence uh for their role in dementia as well including some of i can't remember the name of a few of the molecules involved in shelf stability that absolutely are involved in things like alzheimer's and parkinson's i had a question about uh allergies um so i'm only allergic to one thing which is not uh which is stopping eating i get i break out when i stop eating uh but uh i never remember you know gluten-free and peanut allergies when i was a wee lad 40 50 years ago uh what do you guys make of this is this a byproduct is it why are we hitting this you know hockey stick moment with where it seems to be so prevalent you can hardly go to a restaurant which isn't like all these symbols and they're not like kosher symbols yeah what does it make of the exponential increase of these of these uh allergies well i think there are two things that are likely in play one of them allergies are typically mediated by the ige system and the ige system is a system that would have been busy with things like parasitic worms in a past environment things that we've been very effective at eliminating which is a good thing it has immunoglobulin e yep it's a class of of antibody and in any case there is substantial evidence that suggests that this system left idle targets things that it shouldn't right it won't target pollen grains or whatever else but then there's also hold on which is very much the argument we make with regard to the appendix in the book as well right another biological fence right yeah so the other thing is that there is there are various factors that are causing the immune system to either be overactive or to see things that it is not supposed to for example most of the immune system is not supposed to see the contents of your gut and the reason that's not supposed to see the contents of your gut is that when you are very early in development the system looks at every molecule that you yourself make and it eliminates the subset of cells that react to it and what that produces after you're past the stage of development is a very elegant system that sees every invader but does not see you and this system can screw up right if this system sees things it shouldn't it can react to things that are a normal part of life like foods that you eat and it can react to them as if they are potentially pathogenic it can also react to your own cells creating an autoimmunity and so allergies to things that we eat appear to be the result of a mistake by the self non-self recognition system that causes the equivalent of an autoimmune disorder not to you but to your food right why are the contents of our gut being seen by the immune system and therefore recorded as likely pathogenic that is an open question there are many possible answers but i think we need to be looking in this uh this realm and we need to say well it may be too late for some of us i have a severe wheat allergy there's nothing i'm likely to be able to do about that but what we can do is we can figure out what causes this and then prevent young people from encountering whatever those influences are so that they don't develop these in out of these allergies in in future generations uh next question comes from jm uh what types of adaptations would you expect in populations that are chronically vitamin d deficient well um i feel like we know the answer to this and i just i'm not remembering it's it's it's rickets it's weak bones it's short stature it's deformed bones that's the question there's more than that there's there's intellectual stuff as well and i can't remember exactly what but the question was what adaptations do you expect to see yeah so i think the answer is um because of the nature of trade-offs and that there are certain to be trade-offs involved in um the production of vitamin d what you would expect to see is things that increase the productivity of vitamin d so vitamin d is produced by the skin in response to sunlight the ability to produce vitamin d will exist in a trade-off relationship with other things so for example you might expect to see a reduction in melanin in populations and that reduction in melanin is not going to be free it comes with the cost like the more likely to produce tumors but i would expect to see a shift in the trade-off between the production of vitamin d and resistance to other things where the body accepts more vulnerability in some other regard in order to reduce the cost of insufficient vitamin d maybe similarly paler hair and thinner hair right and one other thing is i would also expect that what we've so far talked about are things that are likely to be wholly transmitted in the genome but you would also expect behavioral compensations right so you might imagine that the traditions of people who are chronically low in vitamin d might involve pursuing sunlight when it is available in spite of the cost to retention of heat for example you might expect traditions to include things in the diet which contain vitamin d we in fact know this to be the case and so anyway basically the point is you would expect selection to find every alteration of belief behavior structure that will cause an increase in the production of vitamin d or a preservation in vitamin d that's already been produced and would otherwise be destroyed you would expect selection to find all those things over time and accumulate them uh okay the last one of these well one uh so someone named j sarge 499. that was actually the name i was going to choose for my first kid what is the future of biological inquiry are there still major gains to be made in terms of evolutionary theory do you see things taking a major molecular chemical turn there are massive advances yet to be made and largely unfortunately we've stalled out in part due to the the financial model of the modern university which encourages very expensive research over theoretical research which tends to be far cheaper i also think that there's a cultural bias you know we're very early in the study of biology and it's a very complex topic it is the most complex topic really and so we should expect ourselves to still be fumbling around with some basics but the degree to which biologists you know if you look at the bio 101 textbook it reads just as encyclopedically as the chemistry 101 textbook right and that's an indication that something has gone wrong and if you listen into the you know the the intro series to biology you don't hear a lot of here are 47 things we don't know the answer to yet they don't include the black boxes just with like gloss which is crazy because if you want to train the mind that's the place to do it let's hang out inside this box for a while and see if we can figure our way out yep all right uh next question is about a spin 14 generalization of uh unification of quantum mechanics and relativity that's for heather um no that's the wrong weinstein brother here sorry about that sean g uh next last question i'll take from the audience uh this guy has a lot he wants you guys to have noam chomsky on past guest on the into the impossible podcast because he claims and we're making finger puppets of you guys but he claims that chomsky finds convincing this communication is not even a secondary function of language uh he goes on to other questions but he asks five other questions i'm gonna ask just one simple one heather do peacocks use their sons as decoys to shield their daughters as decoys to shield their daughters that's his question no uh i'm not sure i even understand the framing do you know do you know what is being yeah i kind of i kind of get it but um do you want to translate it for me and i'll just uh it's not the right term but the idea the idea is if you were to um if you were to go straight handicap right as a hobby handicap principle um then the point is from the point of view of a male offspring that puts on this tale to demonstrate he could deal with the handicap yes he demonstrates awesome genes because he's got the handicap but he also suffers from the handicap and so in order for that to be the opposite then well in order to seems like the opposite of what is true for it to pay the benefit to females who get the benefit of the good genes but don't pay the cost of the tail has to be effectively twice more than twice in order to compensate for the loss of their son so it's not really decoy but are they sacrificing their sons yes to enhance their daughters and the answer is no well the answer is no but it will not be obvious why the answer is no i'm very much looking forward to presenting that analysis at some point in the future if you guys have a few more minutes i know you have a pretty hard break coming up but uh i found very interesting and of course my audience will be expect nothing less than your thoughts on aliens and you make a statement in the book i forget which one of you reads it but that aliens will sleep when we encounter when we encounter alien not if we encount but when we they will be um you know kind of nocturnal diurnal entities as well as we what basis do you make that on uh first of all heather do you believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings and brett if you think so why do you believe that they will have diurnal and nocturnal behaviors like we do yes and i really hope that we find them and it's it'll be a very good thing if they do also sleep because then if they come by while we're asleep they'll know to wait until we're we're up because we wouldn't want to miss them right that's right no that's right that would be embarrassing yeah and maybe they can help me sleep train one of my kids that would be nice right if you want to know why yes yeah well the argument is like this in order for creatures to be sophisticated enough to engage in this kind of travel there are certain things that are very likely to be true of the planet that they evolved on a day and night is a highly likely phenomenon should they have a day and night it is likely that just as the creatures of earth are biased towards activity in one or the other period because there are trade-offs in the building of things like eyes for example so if you have a really great diurnal eye it tends not to collect enough light for night and if you have a really great amplifying uh eye then it tends to not be so acute during the day and so those things will cause a highly intelligent creature to have faced a period of time over which it was not highly productive and simple dormancy is a huge opportunity cost because if you've got the kind of computer that can do really careful thinking and it's offline because you can't be productive because your eyes aren't adapted to either day or night that the selection will inevitably discover that it can borrow that apparatus and so its sleep is liable to have some of the characteristics of ours including possibly things like dreaming let me just say that you alighted what may be the most interesting uh part but maybe the most obvious to an astronomically interested audience which is that the intelligent aliens that land here and wonder and don't wonder why we sleep are likely to have day and night because the tidally locked planet is unlikely to have allowed for the evolution of such complex life that's right and that actually comes to mind last question which has to do with uh the potential danger then of a future space force colony on the moon which uh does not is tidally locked to the earth and therefore doesn't experience diurnal uh fast forward you know many thousands of years in the future um you know i often say like we live in an amazing age you talk about the campfire etc my grandmother guys i mean she grew up with the horse and buggy she grew up you know in the shtetls of of eastern poland and and lived to see men walking on tick tock but i want to ask you if if we do go to the moon will there be will there be um detriment you know will it be kind of too popular two cultures that will arrive you know those that kind of had the whatever benefit perhaps of growing up in a diurnal non-totally locked system or whether it be you know detrimental to people living on on the moon it will have anatomical and physiological effects it will uh and we don't know what all of them are just as as much as we tried to figure out before the space race was a thing uh what all of the effects would be of those very short periods um in in you know in in spaces without gravity for instance would have we still could not begin to actually fully understand it but wait i'm a little bit lost here because if we put a colony on the moon it will have day and night they'll be two weeks long two weeks long right but i mean biotically speaking the moon is not a high productivity environment can we just all agree on that no no the objectives is zero productivity that's right so you know it's all going to come by amazon or something right it's going to be shipped there and therefore the idea of a productive period during the day is going to be off the table right you're going to be productive we're going to create a day and night cycle that is however long is optimal for humans likely something like 24 hours although when we put people in caves it doesn't turn out to be 24 hours but it doesn't matter 25 um but nonetheless we'll just build an artificial environment i mean i'm not advocating for hanging out in the moon that doesn't sound like a ton of fun to me but right but i mean i think i mean i think maybe part of what the question that you're asking ends up getting at is one of the one of the big themes of the book we haven't really talked about is a tendency towards reductionism in modern science and you know imagine that the thing that you can measure that the metric that you've got in hand is the most important thing about the system and so in order to survive in a colony on the moon we will figure out those basic things you know people are not going to find themselves as fixating because we got that thing wrong but we will not have gotten to a lot of the emergent necessary truths that humans will need in order to live like we do on this planet and lucky for elon as he says he wants to die on mars as lord martin reece past guest on the show said yes but let's hope he doesn't die on impact uh mars has a 20 almost 24-hour cycle so that would a diurnal nocturnal cycle okay guys i'm going to ask you to do something i've never done before if you'll indulge me which is one of you guys is gonna answer my thrilling three existential questions about advice to your former here are the three questions and i'd like you to unplug your headphones one of you at a time so i can have the other one be uh ignorant of the other's answer and i'd love to hear you guys answer independently if that's okay okay but the problem is whoever takes off their headphone is going to hear the answer to the question so it's not a i mean you want one of us to leave or maybe you could leave yeah maybe one of you could leave or put on some heavy metal music uh who's leaving no you go first i mean i'm gonna speak first you gotta go do the leaving and uh okay i'll see you shortly okay good thanks guys it never happened before all right and into the impossible podcast okay heather these are basically either far future questions or far past questions i like to ask all my guests to kind of bring out the humanity and all of my guests uh not that you guys need any but um but they involve around kind of questions of legacy which is prominent in this book i want to ask you first what you'd put in your ethical will which is a concept from judaism called the zava ah it's a type of wisdom or value system that you most would like to articulate to near-term generations as their inheritance sort of a a will for your ideological errors not necessarily your only or biological errors so a you know a set of instructions or wisdom or compilation of value system that you live by sort of you know relatively brief yeah i i guess this is going to sound like it's cheating but i think uh i think it's this book that we just wrote and um if i have to encapsulate it more it's perhaps the epilogue which is the eight eight things eight principles that we say during the eight nights of hanukkah and i won't be able to to say them off the top of my head here do it anyway we want the audience to buy the book yeah great and the next one goes a little bit farther into the future now a billion years into the future and you've probably seen the movie 2001 a space odyssey based on arthur c clark where i am the associate co-director of the arthur c clark center for human imagination yeah in the opening scenes uh there are these uh primates in the savannah of africa and they come upon one of these ominous monoliths and i want to ask you we don't know what they're for they could be a time capsule to be discovered by humans or some other civilization you know be tokening our existence so i want to ask you what would you put on your monolith something destined to last billions of years it has some similarity to the famous question that richard feynman asked you know what scientific knowledge in his case would you uh encapsulates the most knowledge in in his field of physics in this fewest words so i want to ask you what kind of information or statement about things that you've learned in your life would you most want to put on a monolith a time capsule to be token our great achievements as a human species i guess it depends on whether or not these are our descendants undisturbed and therefore they are preceding a pace from here or if if life has has disappeared and this is a new evolution um you know descent with modification is the simplest definition of evolution and it it is the encapsulation of what explains what we are so if i have to go very very simple i think i would do that descent with modification great and the last question of my thrilling three final questions uh has to do with going back in time not a billion years but just uh 20 30 years i want to ask you uh sir arthur c clarke he had many laws one of which is in every expert there's an equal and opposite expert he said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and i actually have his voice reading that phrase when i open every podcast but heather one of his law his questions is actually how i got the name for this podcast and he said the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible so that's the name of this uh podcast but i want to ask you heather uh what thing about life mystified you as a 20 year old a 30 year old what advice would you give to that former self to give you the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible well there's it's a little earlier but there's a way in which you know i like all teenagers i think was searching for meaning and uh searching not just for you know what my place was in the world but really explicitly searching for what what was this all about and uh you know again this this will seem single note but to me it's you know it's it's all explanatory except for really your domain and the domain of the very very tiny and abiotic so you know quarks and rocks and quasars are off the table but pretty much everything else is evolutionary so you know i was experimenting with buddhism and other religious traditions and actually brett handed me a book by dawkins um when i was you know 19 or 20 and said i think you will find things herein that you will find explanatory and uh it certainly wasn't complete but it revealed to me a way of framing the world uh that i i keep with me to this day and also what it part of what it promises is that we will never know everything that you know of course the act of science is to try to discover what's true and we are aiming to get to an ever more accurate refinement of our understanding of reality but we're not going to get there in our lifetimes and that's part of what is so marvelous about it wonderful well if you would indulge me and go and get your other half hold on just a second okay brett i i asked your lovely wife heather these three questions that i've asked your brother um and uh all of my did they get the answers right there's going to be homework at the end of this brett you know that always okay all right so these are existential questions two of which will go deep into the future your own personal future when you spring forth this mortal coil at the biblical age of 120 or more perhaps you can extend your life and your telomeres uh but i want to ask you first what you'd put in your zaba ah your ethical will that is what wisdom or values would you like to you know inculcate or articulate to future generations of biological but mostly your ideological errors that come after you yeah i mean i think the answer here is actually simple and it's very biological but i believe that if one extrapolates from from what i'm about to say that one recovers all of the important moral and ethical stuff the idea is we are obligated to try to provide the experience of a liberated human existence as liberated as possible to as many people as we can that the the marvelousness of being a human being is so special and unique that given that what we do affects how many people will get to experience it we have an obligation to behave in a way that maximizes that number and the reason that i think that the all the proper moral and ethical stuff that needs to flows from extrapolating from that principle is that a it forces you to behave in ways that are maximally sustainable those maximally sustainable ways therefore uh involve the discovery of the various steady states we will need and in order for the human life that we deliver to those in the future for it to be truly liberating we will have to have addressed their many concerns that is to say to be meaningfully liberated rather than just nominally liberated you have to have your mundane concerns addressed so we would end up i think if we really worked on this puzzle we would end up protecting people from things like bad luck we would end up connecting them together in ways that caused flourishing when people discovered insights or created enhancements to human well-being they would end up needing to suffer some sort of a penalty when they externalized harm onto others and i think that this would cascade all the way through the social architecture such that even to interpersonal relationships it would cause the right values uh to be enhanced very good although slightly awkward because heather just extolled your virtues for about five minutes straight and uh now i can say you didn't reciprocate okay next up no she didn't do that no okay next we're going to go deep into the future and you probably are undoubtedly familiar with arthur c clarke's famous book the sentinel which led to a space odyssey in which there are these monoliths that the prehistoric creatures in africa these hominid like figures encounter and they hit it with a bone and later it appears on the moon and clark doesn't really reveal what these things are and of course i am the associate co-director of the arthur c clarke center for human imagination here at uc san diego so it's near and dear to my heart i want to ask you if these are thought of as time capsules as sort of monoliths that are meant to encapsulate or be token things that humanity has learned or achieved what would you put on your monolith and it's sort of similar to feynman's cataclysm question in which he said if in some cataclysm all of human knowledge were destroyed and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures what statement contains the most information in the fewest words i want to ask you in your field he put forth the atomic hypothesis what do you think would encapsulate the most knowledge that we've acquired in the fewest most condensed compressed form of a statement on a billion-year-lasting time capsule wow um that is so i'm stuck here i i must say uh 2001 is one of my favorite stories and i've done a lot of thinking about the monoliths but i've never thought about them as time capsules at all um they seem to me more like triggers but okay so if you had if you had to preserve one concept you know what it would be it's actually it's in our book um it's a figure and the figure is stacked diminishing returns curves because every complex system in which there is an objective will show a pattern of diminishing returns and the key to success at whatever the objective might be is knowing when you've hit the inflection point and would be foolish to keep investing in the same way and what you need to do is seek the next um face the next bargain phase of the next curve in the stack and if people understood this i believe you know i think it's right up there potentially wow i shouldn't say such a thing um it is a dim shadow of yin yang right which i find a very compelling concept the idea of a symmetry that is about compatibleness rather than sameness right and i believe if if one understands the implications of the stacked diminishing returns curves one is in a better position to maximize whatever is sought very good okay now we're going to go back in time not billions of years not millions of years in the future we're going to go backwards in time and quote sir arthur c clarke his famous third law which states the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible and that's the origin of the name of my podcast i want to ask you brett what mysterious aspect of life perplexed you as a as a 20 year old 30 year old even um but that what advice would you give to that young man to give him the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible well i'm not sure exactly how to answer the question i certainly believe in this principle and i have advocated that while arrogance is a bad thing we can all agree that if one has to air in one direction or the other it's far better than humbleness because humbleness if you feel obligated to to view yourself as less capable then you will fall short of what you might be able to achieve whereas if you believe beyond your actual capabilities that you might be capable of something you'll at least find out what you can do and you won't leave anything on the table so i believe in the principle that you have to go beyond in order to figure out what is uh what is within range you know i had the telomere experience was transformative it was very early for me it was you know as a young graduate student and the experience of having correctly predicted that wild mice would have short telomeres even though the literature said many many times over that mice have long telomeres that even in some places said rodents have long telomeres [Music] discovering that i had been correct about that that i had done the logic well enough that it could predict a result in a laboratory was very freeing because after that point it didn't really matter if people you know doubted my capability i knew that at least once i had succeeded in that and i never had to worry too much that you know i was fooling myself or something along those lines so i would i would i would advise people in fact i have advised my own students to seek an experience that frees you in that way right to to set objectives for yourself scientifically and otherwise that even if it takes many such attempts to find something in which you discover the limits of what you can do that it at least allows you to to tune out the doubters because you know they can't possibly be right and you need that confidence in order to uh to succeed especially in a very cutthroat field like academia i always call it the academic hunger games and conversations past and present with your elder brother i want to thank you so much for coming on the into the impossible podcast uh for having your courage uh to produce this work there are about 50 other questions i could have asked but time does not permit me nor does discretion do so as well but i want to uh recommend everybody please do pick up a copy of a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century i'm looking forward to the bonus uh guide that comes with a poisonous tree frog that would be a delight and i just want to thank you for sharing your honesty your courage uh your candor with myself and my audience and i hope we can meet up again someday it has been a terrific pleasure thank you this was great thanks brian thank you guys any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic [Music] if you enjoyed this episode with heather heing and brett weinstein you may not like this episode with dr eric topal who spoke with me earlier this summer about the delta variant and some of the controversial solutions that have been proposed to combat it click here for my other interviews that you might like

Channel: Dr Brian Keating

Views: 9,656

Rating: 4.8660712 out of 5

Keywords: Dr Brian Keating, brian keating into the impossible, into the impossible, lex fridman, sabine hossenfelder, brian keating, michio kaku, neil degrasse tyson, evolutionary biology, bret weinstein, a hunter-gatherers guide to the 21st century, darkhorse podcast, bret weinstein heather heying, bret weinstein evergreen doc, bret weinstein sam harris idw, bret weinstein richard dawkins, bret weinstein jordan peterson, heather heying

Id: Ax64XtvR2mk

Length: 105min 37sec (6337 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021