Heather Heying & Bret Weinstein: Culture, Consciousness, Diet, Drugs, Sleep, Dating & Evolution |#36

[Music] [Music] [Music] welcome to the mind and matter podcast i'm your host nick jacomis and today i'm speaking with dr heather heing and dr brett weinstein brett and heather are evolutionary biologists and authors of the new book a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century evolution and the challenges of modern life the book is meant to provide an evolutionary toolkit for understanding the modern human condition by understanding our past and the book examines a variety of modern issues that we all face and looks at how we might conduct ourselves better by understanding things through an evolutionary lens our conversation touched on many of these things including modern medicine dieting and health sleep and light dating and human mating systems and questions related to consciousness and the state of civilization at large this is one of the longer podcasts that i've done stretching almost three hours in length but we cover a lot of interesting ground if you find the content interesting you can find a link to the book in the episode description and as always if you enjoy the content of this podcast please support the podcast by liking sharing or subscribing either on youtube or by giving us a five-star rating on your favorite podcast directory you can also support the podcast on patreon for a small fee each month you get early access to episodes and you directly help keep the podcast going today's show is brought to you in part by docest an all-natural canvas company specializing in dose-controlled canvas products made with plant-based ingredients to learn more about docest their products and where they are available please visit their website through the link in the episode description this episode is brought to you in part by mud water a coffee alternative made with extracts from four different mushroom species and a blend of all natural herbs mud water contains around 1 7 the caffeine content of a normal cup of coffee so you can get the energy you want in the morning without the same chance for the anxiety the jitters or the poor sleep quality that can come from drinking too much coffee two-thirds of americans just about are drinking coffee every single day and the caffeine in that coffee has a half-life in your bloodstream of between five and nine hours for most people so if you're drinking into the afternoon or the evening there's a good chance that caffeine is still in your bloodstream and it can disrupt the quality of your sleep so if you're trying to drink less coffee or you think you might have a caffeine habit and caffeine is absolutely a habit-forming psychoactive stimulant drug then check out mud water it has 1 7 the caffeine content of a normal cup of coffee coming from masala chai and it also has cacao turmeric sea salt cinnamon and chaga reishi cordyceps and lion's mane mushrooms the other thing that's really cool about this company is they donate a portion of the revenue to maps the multidisciplinary association of psychedelic studies we've actually had people from maps on the podcast before talking about the research on mdma assisted psychotherapy for ptsd and their other work into research on psychedelics so if you want to support that movement this is one way you can do it if you're interested in trying mud water check out their website mudwtr.com mind matter and you can use the code mind matter all one word for five dollars off that information will be in the episode description so check it out if you think you're interested hey everyone i want to take just a minute to tell you about an app i am partnering with called read read-wise read-wise is an app that organizes and helps you get the most out of your digital highlights i use it to organize all the highlights i make in my digital books on my kindle and so if you're like me and you make a lot of highlights and you like to revisit them often to refresh your memory read wise is the perfect app you can also take photos of any physical books you've highlighted and upload those it also has cool features that allow you to share your favorite highlights and quotes from books on social media and it syncs with note-taking apps like evernote notion and rome you can tag search and organize your notes and highlights on read-wise and it helps you connect ideas in new ways and retain more of what you read so if you click the link in the episode description you can get read-wise for free for two months when you sign up for their annual plan that plan is only 7.99 per month and it's a relatively new app so they're adding new features often and if you sign up for the annual plan today you can lock in that price which will stay at 7.99 even if the price increases in the future as they add more so if you do a lot of highlighting and note taking and you want a good way to organize all that information check out the link in the episode description [Music] heather heing and brent weinstein thank you for joining me thanks for having us thank you for having us can you do a brief background for people who don't already know you on what your what is your scientific background sure where should we start i don't know why don't you start with your childhood um well okay i uh my grandfather was a chemist and he [Music] showed the scientific world to my brother and to me and made it fun and interesting and set us both on a path that uh guides us to this day i fell in love with creatures as a as a kid i loved watching animals and trying to figure out why they were the way they were and why they did the things they did i ended up following that right through college into graduate school where i studied evolutionary biology under dick alexander who is now sadly gone but was one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century actually i should say both heather and i also worked with bob trivers when we were undergraduates at the university of california santa cruz another one of the greats um so in any case lifelong love of evolutionary biology and the things that it produces i've somewhat stolen your thunder there because it overlaps no that's good um so you know you had you had a grandfather who was really instrumental in in giving you the the love of science and pattern recognition and observation and uh for me there was a similar role played by my father who um called himself a little country programmer he grew up on a farm in iowa so your grandfather provided for you a lot of the impetus and inspiration for becoming a scientist and for me that role was largely played by my father who was a computer scientist so not at all in the realm of of evolutionary biology but was very interested also in pattern recognition and observation and hypothesis so i have an undergraduate degree in anthropology where um as brett mentioned we were at uc santa cruz together already together the two of us and we studied under bob trevor's you know by some estimates the greatest living evolutionary biologist and then went to university of michigan where uh i also worked with dick alexander but my major advisor was arnold kluge so i was over in the macro macro end of evolution macro evolution phylogenetics at least in terms of who my major advisor was and i did field work in madagascar looking at the sexual selection and evolution of sociality in poison frogs one of the reasons i'm really excited to talk about this book with you this new book that you have coming out is that it's all about looking at life and looking at ourselves through an evolutionary lens and i actually got the first part of my education in evolutionary biology and one of the things that i look back on that's interesting is i started studying evolutionary biology as an undergrad purely out of interest i had no sort of practical application of that field in mind and i went on to other things to study other things but i internalized by studying within that field a lot of evolutionary principles and i just naturally unconsciously found myself looking at my own life conversations i was having interactions i was having in this evolutionary lens and will unpack what that means for people but one thing i realized you know later on in my life was how how much utility that actually had for making sense of what otherwise are very confusing things in life there's so many instances where people find themselves saying why did she say that to me why did i do that why did they do this and a lot of these things are inexplicable until you sort of learn how to think about things from this evolutionary perspective so very briefly for people what is the evolutionary lens what does that mean before you answer that let me say that one of this is a book we've been talking about writing for over 10 years and we explored we explored a lot of the ideas in it with our students when we were college professors and and developed them sort of in tandem um with them in some cases and one although the title undergathers guide the 21st century is one that we've had in our heads for over a decade another possible title and a phrase that we use a lot is obvious in retrospect because that really does describe so so many of the evolutionary insights the aspects of applying an evolutionary lens to an otherwise confusing world that it can be impossible to get there you can just feel confused by the social environment physical environment whatever it is and then you hear an explanation that with practice you could probably just begin to derive yourself from first principles and you go ah that's that makes so much sense it is in fact obvious in retrospect so i would add that the nice thing about biology is that at the end of the day it has to make sense it doesn't mean it makes sense when you look at it at first but unlike something like physics for example where quantum mechanics is under no obligation to make sense to a human mind biology adds up in some way that we can comprehend and if you can make a few assumptions assumptions that are easily defended secure ones and then approach with the expectation that ultimately there has to be a good reason for this if we can understand what evolution is uh trying to accomplish is shorthand but if we understand what evolution is trying to accomplish then we can recognize the structures that creatures have and the behaviors that they engage in as being required to contribute to that objective and if a behavior doesn't add up if you look at a peacock's tail and you think well that's actually counterproductive to that end you know you're standing in the wrong place and it may be that no one has yet figured out where to stand but really it's a question of seeking the position from which the behaviors and structures add up and when you do reach those places it's a kind of it's a special version of the aha moment when you suddenly look at a peacock's tail and stop being confused it's a huge relief it's like watching all of these factors in some very complex equation cancel out and the thing emerges in front of you and just to clarify it's not that the physics doesn't have to square with the universe it of course does but it doesn't have to square with the scale that we exist at whereas the evolutionary processes uh that we engage in especially with regard to behaviors do because they exactly exist at the scale that we live at it's you know it's almost a redundant point you know it's a circular point that those things uh that are driving how we behave must be interpretable by us at this scale and you do a great job in the book of using observations all all littered throughout the book of animal behavior but it's all in the service of helping us understand ourselves to understand human beings so one of the things i want to do early on that you guys do in the first chapter i think i think is explain a little bit the the human context that we're going to be talking about and you talk in the book about the human niche so what is a niche what would an ecologist or an evolutionary biologist describe as an animal's niche and what is the human niche and why is it unique the best way to think about a niche is it's an opportunity right and so for most creatures you can think of an ecological opportunity an ecological opportunity is just all the things necessary for you to not only persist but to reproduce for a population to exist there and there are a lot of ways that you can think about it sometimes we map these things onto what we call a fitness landscape and you know a niche is basically a peak and we argue that that peak is actually a volume that gets filled up by creatures and at the point that the volume is filled they've reached carrying capacity which is the limit of that opportunity and then it suggests well if creatures have filled up this opportunity and there's some peak that isn't filled nearby how is it that selection might move creatures that do this thing over to do that thing either instead or additionally and the thing about humans is that we are quite paradoxical if you look at us and ask well what is our niche because we do everything right we hunt marine mammals we terrace hillsides and productively farm them we climb high into caves and uh make soup out of the nests of birds all kinds of things and so if you say typically a species has a niche then human beings are very strange because human beings have so many different niches and the argument that we make in the book is that the human niche is niche switching that it is the movement from one niche to the other that is our special uh our special um advantage in the universe and that it explains why we are so many things at once and you know even beyond that so many things at once but also if you teleport back in time and look at all the things human beings have productively done it's just a it's a many dimensional matrix of of niches yeah it's almost like the derivative of a niche right it's it's niche switching allows us to uh end up doing the calculus of ecology that other organisms haven't been able to as fully explore so in some sense we're good at switching niches or adapting to new niches and other animals often have great difficulty in behaving well behaving effectively in a context for which they're not currently adapted and one of the things that you get into in the first chapter is the idea of culture versus consciousness so at one point there's a short passage i want to read you say when in the zone the conscious mind is present but as a spectator who steers clear so as not to disrupt the flow behaviors become habitual and intuitive in an individual we might call the skill or craft in a family or a tribe such habits become traditions passed efficiently from one generation to the next scale this up further and we have culture so what is that passage speaking to and why is it culture versus consciousness the the question really is how does niche switching work right if a creature exists inside of an opportunity in a niche it's because they have the programming and the structures that allow them to exploit that niche the process of moving to another niche is difficult if the other niche is sufficiently distinct and so there's a question about how do you bootstrap the tools for moving from one thing to the next and figuring out how to exploit it efficiently so that you can for example compete with whatever specialists are uh utilizing the resources in that niche so this requires an explanation and i think we have not properly looked for it what is it that human beings do that allow them to move well one thing that we clearly do is swap out the software program if you are a hunter of of marine mammals at the coast and you're going to move inland and hunt terrestrial mammals you have to change what you do some things may retain relevance and other things will have to be swapped well how do you figure out what you need to change and what human beings do is they talk to each other they talk about what they've observed and what things might be brought to bear on the question and so this looks like a mechanism for essentially software prototyping and it is that prototyping process that allows you to figure out how to do the new thing but anybody who's prototyped knows that your first prototypes aren't any good right they're not productive they're wildly inefficient they make errors they don't have to make and so you have to get to the new niche figure out what in principle you might do with it and then you have to refine that thing and once it's refined you don't want to lead newcomers through all of the steps that brought you to the the final um the final mechanism what you want to do is encode that mechanism so efficiently that it can be passed on very very quickly and with high fidelity and so our point is culture is the mechanism through which we transmit things we understand those who need to pick them up rapidly and deploy them and consciousness is the way we figure out what that we might do we are not yet doing right how we move to the new opportunity so just to add and slightly slightly rephrase uh what you just said in our by our definitions culture is that which we have been doing successfully and if things don't change if the environment doesn't change either in space or time or other you know selective opportunity we should be able to continue doing and therefore will be more efficient to keep doing it in the way that we have been doing it and consciousness is that which requires innovation requires active engagement requires no set and forget protocol no brand loyalty no this is the way we've always been doing things kind of estimations and so the conscious mind is less efficient it takes more time it's uh you know both for the individual to do things and for a group of people to get things done it has a high error rate but it is utterly necessary if as humans are we are actively engaged in switching niches and looking for opportunity and moving through space and time in ways that mean that we are exposed to things that we've never been exposed to before that said what we inherit from our ancestors from our families from from our existing culture to use the usual way that it's used is relevant in so far as when those things were encoded uh are those things are still relevant today you know that if if conditions remain the same in some way as they were when you began to do the thing you're doing now then good keep on it you don't need to think through every single thing you've ever done every time you do it you want some set and forget in your life and that's the culture side interesting so so consciousness is i mean and we've all experienced this when we're trying to solve a problem we're trying to do something new we have to pay attention we're very aware of what we're doing we're often behaving in a clunky way and it's very effortful it's very difficult but there's many things in life that don't have that property we just sort of do them we often do them according to a script and what you're saying is that certain aspects of culture stan are those scripts the the sort of stories that we bake into everything from uh fairy tales to religions and we'll come to some of that stuff and how it evolves are simply a re-re-encoding of information so that it's more easily transmissible to say a child rather than an adult who had to work through the problem and we'll come to that as well in this first chapter you also introduce something that you that you come back to a lot called the omega principle and we've alluded to it already but let's just state explicitly what that is sure the omega principle is a specification for the relationship between epigenetic phenomena especially culture and the genome and this is a place where evolutionary biology has had arguments and effectively has ended up in a kind of permanent agnostic state about what is the relationship between the evolution of memes and genes and what we argue is that this relationship is actually it's a two-part relationship it is something we can specify with precision and it is obligate so we have called it the omega principle because omega is a greek letter we we hope to call to mind pi because the fact is the relationship between the diameter of a circle and its circumference is obligate in the same way so the relationship itself in the case of omega is that epigenetic phenomena are inherently superior to genes in the sense that they are more flexible more rapidly adapting but they are inferior in the sense that they are subordinate to the objectives of the genome the genome is in a position to shut down epigenetic phenomena and to the extent that it does not shut them down that is because they are serving the genome's interests and so how do you come to that conclusion i can recall sort of my especially my college education where in many courses it was this type of thing was described you know you'd often hear this in the nature nurture dichotomy that is often used to you know contextualize whatever you're learning about in a classroom you would often hear people say well is it cultural or is it genetic and what you're saying is that's not an appropriate way of thinking about things well cultural or genetic is actually defensible what what people often say is something like is it biological or is it cultural and the point is actually culture is equally biological as genes it is a different mode of transmission of heritable information but it is equally biological the answer of how you come to it is in some sense this is one of this is one of the ultimate cases of obvious in retrospect if you think about the cognitive architecture necessary to have a huge fraction of our behavioral repertoire transmitted outside of the genome through culture you realize that's an amazingly elaborate process it's an energetically very costly process and lots of things that it does could be done much more cheaply with much less room for error to be introduced in each generation so why would the genome have offloaded so much of our behavior i mean even for example we have to learn to walk a horse does not have to learn to walk it knows how to walk from the moment it's born so what is the advantage of hobbling our children of creating this vast landscape of possibilities with respect to what the behavioral repertoire will be of introducing the possibility that two creatures of the same species won't be able to communicate because one speaks italian and the other one speaks mandarin right there all sorts of reasons not to build a creature this way what that says is there must be a very good reason to do it to overcome all those disadvantages and we know that that reason must come from the genes because if it didn't think about the cost to the genes of doing it this way if the genes were not being served by the cultural the memetic architecture then they are certainly being harmed by it because of all the things that you know to the extent that we are physical beings our time and our energy is spent on all sorts of things that are motivated by our cognition so if our cognition was wasting our time and energy then the genes could very easily limit the amount of that they could reduce the degree to which we were spending our time and energy on things we had picked up outside the genome and they would stop at the point that suddenly we were entirely occupied doing things that were in the gene's interest so the question is if you somehow created the scenario where our culture was independent of our genes our genes would shut it down until they were synonymous in terms of their objective i guess um i agree with all of that um but i would approach it a different way that a a way that just adds to your explanation which is that um if culture isn't evolutionary if it's not downstream of what all biologists understand to be the primary mode of inheritance the original mode of inheritance which is genetics what is it then and if it's if it's not if it's not evolutionary then what you have is a religious perspective and that's okay you know many many people have faith in things that they cannot explain um but one would have to acknowledge that if you don't if you don't place culture in an evolutionary uh framework the way that we do everything else that humans are about then what you are doing is saying over here i have faith i i have a religious viewpoint as opposed to a scientific viewpoint as opposed to you know what what is it goes beyond what's the most parsimonious explanation it's you know this this can be explained culture can be explained with evolutionary tools or you can say no it's not but i don't know what it is uh therefore i'm in a black box this and maybe i won't call it god but it's akin to that so yeah i think what we say in the book is something like if we look at the um the enzymes of a uh a sheep herder we understand that those enzymes are working in the service of the fitness of the sheep herder if we look at their cognition and we say anything else we've been inconsistent surely the same justification exists for the physical structures and the physiology of that person and their behavior or you're adding an epicycle you'd have to come up with some other some other cause so when on the topic of niche switching one of the things that comes up explicitly or as implicit in in various parts of the book is the fact that today at the present moment there is so much change driven by technology that effectively our niche our niche is changing faster than it ever has and in many ways there's a mismatch between you know what our brains and bodies have evolved to do and the current present day environment and we're going to explore that from some some different angles but you spend a lot of time in the book mentioning weird people so what are weird people uh weird is the acronym western educated industrialized rich democratic so weird people are those people belonging who are citizens of a residence of such countries um including i think generally you know japan uh and you know it's not necessarily clear who all is included in that but you know this this is certainly not new to us the observation that so much of what western science and western medicine thinks are true of humans universally are actually based on especially in the case of psychology for instance um you know weird undergraduates so it's not just weird people it's you know relatively privileged 18 to 22 year olds who uh probably haven't had to work for a living yet certainly have never had to struggle to figure out how to feed themselves almost i mean we you know we certainly had undergraduates who had but in general those you know the the bases for many psychological conclusions um are derived from people who have not yeah no i i meant i didn't mean yes some of some of our students struggled to feed themselves in an economic sense and very occasionally there are a few cases beyond that but the fact that so few people have actually you know struggled over the question of where food was going to come from right you know that's that's been a a dominant feature for our ancestors and is a very rare phenomenon you can live an entire lifetime and never fear that you won't have enough food as a person in a western in a in a weird country yeah and so i mean that's partially a um a temporal switch as well you know most certainly many many americans many humans still alive today do struggle to figure out how to get food but it's it's increasingly a question of can you afford the the cheap poor quality food that is available as opposed to how will i source it do i have the skills on hand to know what to dig for or how to hunt it you also introduce this idea of chesterton's fence so so what is that and maybe i mean there's a variety of things you could talk about to illustrate it i think the appendix is a really good one because you talk about in the book and a lot of people have experienced someone who has appendicitis we all sort of know or most people in my life at least know that uh the appendix is apparently this useless vestigial organ and yet it's there so so how do you explain something like this yeah so you know we just define chesterton's fence and you can go off on the appendix um so gk chesterton who is a early 20th century philosopher i guess is how he is often described um observed that if you are walking along a road and you see a fence that feels useless to you and you say to your friend i want to get rid of this your friend should say to you what is it here for until you can tell me what its function is you ought not get rid of it because you don't know enough about what what the downstream effect of its removal will be if you cannot tell me what it's here for and so this becomes reified i'm not sure by him but by others who were reading his work as chesterton's fence in general when you find something that you find displeasing to you unless and until you can explain what its function is uh even if we have we have gone beyond its function it really should be removed until and unless you can explain what that function is or was originally you want not be so hasty to get rid of it yeah it's actually a kind of precautionary principle for removal instead of a precautionary principle for the addition of something so actually this it's funny as an undergraduate the the appendix puzzled me because it did not add up that it would be a vestigial organ and the reason it did not add up that it would be a vestigial organ is because not only can we make the usual argument which is it costs something to build it therefore the pressure to make a savings by shrinking it ought to be reducing it over time but the cost of the appendix is actually spectacular well beyond the cost of building it because of all of the people who have you know an infection of the appendix that jeopardizes their life so something about the story never added up and it turns out the deeper you dig on that story the more you find out about the fact that it also doesn't phylogenetically add up this isn't something that our close relatives have that in us has become useless and is disappearing it's actually anomalous and then decades later what one finds out is actually the story begins to emerge about the likely benefit of this organ so what the real utility from the point of view of somebody trying to understand the evolutionary lens is you could have spotted a long time ago that somebody was telling you something wrong when they said this is a vestigial organ really what they were telling you was that they didn't know what it was for right it was the fence crossing the road when you look it may take a long time to go from i know it's for something but i don't know what to actually here's a candidate that's powerful enough to explain it and the candidate the best explanation is that this pocket off of our intestines captures a a microcosm it captures a sample of the beneficial symbionts in our gut so that when we become sick because we've ingested some bacterium that engages in bacterial warfare maybe you have a bout of diarrhea you lose your beneficial gut flora this allows your gut to be repopulated very quickly with already tried and true tested microorganisms now here's the irony of the story the irony of this story this is much less important for us modern folks there's a reason you can take the appendix out and it doesn't affect you and that's because you have plenty of food so the ability to instantaneously repopulate your gut isn't the difference between life and death for us but for our ancestors it very well may have been on many occasions so we can see that actually to the extent there's any argument for vestigialness at all it's a very modern argument right the actual structure itself is not apparently vestigial it is functional and you could intuit that long before you knew what it did well we can tell that uh by again comparing the weird world to the non-weird world right so you you have far fewer cases of appendicitis in the non-weird world and what you do have is much more frequent diarrhea because of the you know higher rate of bacterial pollution in the food stream at some level and what that means is with every bout of gi illness having a functional appendix one that actually does its job with some regularity both keeps that appendix functional so it is less likely to blow up on you excuse me um and uh it keeps the gut biota of the people who have those functional appendices appendixes i'm not sure um healthier long-term and i guess i would i think i slightly disagree with with something you said there which is that um to the degree that the appendix in the modern world in which our food tends to protect us from bouts of gi illness and therefore the appendix is underused and therefore it is more likely to to blow up um that maybe it's moving towards vestigiality the fact that we have enough calories is not the same thing as us having healthy microbiomes oh yeah uh and so you know to the degree that the appendix is useful for actually re-establishing a healthy microbiome which increasingly in the modern in the weird era in in for weird people our food unless we're shopping for farmers markets and you know getting our hands in the dirt and not fully sanitizing everything that we eat yes it provides enough calories and it probably provides enough macronutrients but does it get us all the micronutrients and specifically the diversity of of critters in the microbiome that we need to have a healthy gut probably not right but here is what the the disagreement between us here hinges on and i'm pretty sure it's something we don't know the answer to is does the appendix have a bias in terms of collecting the correct flora or does the fact that we are often populated by very much sub-optimal flora as a result of all of this modern influence mean that it's liable to capture an arbitrary subset and therefore the what you repopulate with might not be all that great even if for an ancestor would be ideally suited to them yeah i have no reason to expect that it is select it is selective in that regard um but if you have a healthy gut then having a healthy appendix is useful because it will repopulate um repopulation right and wouldn't it be cool if there was a system that monitored gut function and captured a sample at a moment that was likely to be a high quality sample yeah and i don't i don't we don't know and i don't know if science knows the answer to that yeah so this could be a good segue to some stuff about diet and medicine while we're talking about gi health and microbiome stuff this is something that i've covered on the podcast before with people that specialize in the biology of our microbiome but even you know even just in the general culture these are being taught these things are being talked about a lot more over the past few years it seems like everyone or many people at least are talking about the importance of gi health everyone has probably heard the term at least microbiome at this point i get ads all the time for probiotics that i meant to swallow to replenish my gut microbiome there's all sorts of cheek swab products that claim to measure microbiome and then give you personalized food recommendations to replenish it and a funny thing that i think is happening is that it strikes me that many of the people that are very health conscious and are paying close attention to health and wellness stuff including their microbiome and optimizing their microbiome are not in all cases but in many cases also going to be the same people that for example will ask their doctor for an antibiotic if they have a head cold so can you talk a little bit about the microbiome and antibiotics and how how things like antibiotics and their use in modernity is interfacing with our with our biological hardware yeah i mean the short answer is antibiotics are one of the great triumphs of western medicine and they emerged uh shortly after the germ theory of disease was understood which is also one of the great triumphs of western medicine and then it like so many other things that we have done so well as humans got over extrapolated and over generalized and applied where they have they have no place or they can actually do damage and so you produce a selective pressure for effectively superbugs um especially if antibiotics are being given to people who don't have a bacterial infection um or they're being given just prophylactically to cattle um to keep growth rates high such that you have now antibiotics you know in in the water supply such that you have again selective pressure against um exactly exactly the bugs that we currently have drugs to defend against and so we're going to create problems um and and we know this we have created such problems created tremendous problems we've destabilized systems that we didn't understand in some cases we didn't even know were there and the consequences are predictably terrible for things like health and i just would say in reference to what you initially started with there is this sense once you know that there's a microbiome and that it can be off there's a sense about well what can i do there must be things i can do to make it better and this is in its own way a problematic way of thinking because um in general with a functional system that is built out of many equilibria overlapping each other the most likely thing you're going to do is disrupt it and the best thing you can do is figure out how to protect it from things that are so novel that they they cause it to be disrupted and so for example you know you know we talk a little bit in the book about supplements supplements are you know a double-edged sword on the one hand there's a sense and a sense built on the fact that people have been deficient and been given a supplement often have miraculous increases in the quality of their health which leads you to the sense that these are indeed miraculous substances that can make you better and better when in fact the real question is are you deficient right if you're deficient then you know supplements probably not even the best way to do it altering your diet so that you pick up those things that you're deficient in is the best way to do it and a supplement is maybe second or third best but um but it does not once you get to the line of i've got enough of each of these things to be functioning functioning optimally you're in fact more likely to disrupt things by adding more um and so you know it's a delicate style of thinking that gets you to the right answer and i guess i would say this is a excellent example of a kind of scientism uh that pervades modern science and modern society and you know i think people who don't think scientifically from first principles in a hypothesis-driven way are particularly prone to looking for reductionist solutions things that can be measured things that can be counted uh you know oh you're deficient in in vitamin b12 well then all we have to do is increase that and this this imagines that we are engineered systems as opposed to evolved systems and imagines that the thing that can be counted is the thing that matters and sometimes it is and sometimes it's not and so really the evolutionary lens in part is about recognizing the emergent beings that we are the complexity of the systems that we are and not making the mistake of simply measuring and counting and basing solutions on those measurements and counts this is reminding me of some episodes from my own life and you talk about this in the book every time that i go to get a physical so i go get a physical once a year i go see my doctor and inevitably what the doctor tells me in fact he or she will tell me that we don't even need to measure it because i live in seattle and it's cloudy much of the year and virtually everyone is already vitamin d deficient so i need to be supplementing with vitamin d because i'm lacking it and so i need to be putting extra vitamin d into my body that's that's not quite what's interesting to me what's interesting to me is usually in the same conversation in many cases i will then be told in the same breath that i should also be putting on sunscreen to every exposed part of my body every single time i go outside all year round and so i would like you guys to sort of comment on the vitamin d sunlight thing in the context of what we're talking about here but also tie that to what i think is the larger issue of this sort of lack of evolutionary thinking in medicine generally yeah what a great counterpoint that's that's fabulous um i will say actually um you know we have a little bit in the book about vitamin d supplementation it's one of the very few places that i feel like our thinking has evolved since we finished the book and i and you know we would write it a little bit differently now vitamin d being one of very very few things that there seems to be a fair amount of evidence for super low cost and super high benefit um especially with respect to immunity and covet for example yeah um so so that said um yes dermatologists hate the sun and tell us that we absolutely 100 need to reduce our exposure to the sun and uh because they have they have one very particular set of downstream bad effects that they focus on right and it's true that the more sun exposure you get the more likely you are to get skin cancers but there is plenty of other frankly more holistic research and i don't say that in like a woo holistic way but research that actually looks at more than just the one downstream effect of sun exposure being skin cancer way which finds that actually the health benefits of having real actual sun exposure and not through sunscreen on your skin actually provides so many health benefits that being locking yourself away from the sun either from being totally covered up through sunscreen and clothes or never going outside actually has a health cost akin to being a regular smoker that we actually need sun exposure in order to the host of benefits are extraordinary from immunological to um you know anti-cancer you know on you know heart heart effects they're just a tremendous number of now increasingly understood benefits from sun exposure but um but yes the the kinds of litanies that we get from people who we are supposed to trust with our health tend to have these kinds of inconsistencies in them you must take vitamin d because there's no chance you could possibly get enough and you must slather yourself with sunscreen because otherwise you'll get skin cancer well you know it's true that the farther north or farther south the farther away from the equator you live the greater the chances are that during your winter you aren't getting enough sunlight and one of the things that we're getting from sunlight although not the only thing is vitamin d the idea that you also need to be protected from that sunlight at the same time is obviously inconsistent and anyone giving both of those kinds of advice should should throw an error like there should be a cognitive dissonance present in their own head such that they can at least try to correct at least say to you actually i have both of these pieces of advice i'm supposed to give to you and both can't be equally true there there has to be a trade-off here there's also this uh it goes back to your earlier point about reductionism there's this leap for a very simple answer and in fact all of the things about this story with respect to our relationship to the sun are so imprecise as to be raw right so yes sun exposure causes cancer but it's not all sun exposure that causes cancer it's sunburns and it's not all sunburns it's disproportionately sunburns you get when you're young for reasons we could go into but there's also things that we talk in the book about what we call the laboratory of the self the experimentation on oneself the tuning into your own thought processes that allows you to figure out how things actually work and um here's a couple of things that one can detect in themself that sunburns can be avoided even with intense sun exposure by spending brief periods of time out of the sun so even if you're going to be in the sun for 30 minutes a 5 minute break seems to be very useful why that is is not so clear at least to us but that it is true is something you can demonstrate and so just to interrupt for a moment if you are embodied like if you actually have some connection to your own body as opposed to living entirely in your head you can feel this and this isn't perfect and you know we're not we're not medical doctors but you can feel as your sun begins to turn crispy right as your skin yeah did i you said son well i i think it's already there as as your skin begins to begins to go over into that edge and into that space of like now i may not be able to recover this without a burn and just as you say stepping into the shade and you know there are some activities you might be doing where that's not possible but stepping into the shade for even five minutes allows that to cool down and when you go back out uh your skin feels like there's been a reset and indeed um anecdotally but empirically we found this to be true for ourselves and for our children as well and you know if you can't step into the shade you can certainly turn the other side you know um so there's there's no meaning of turning the other chair there is an entirely different meaning i mean there's also the fact that uh your ability to endure intense sunlight is something that ratchets up with uh seasonality right so your vulnerability is higher at the beginning of the season so in any case these are things that once you have the model in your mind and then you find yourself out there under too much sun and danger of getting a sunburn you've got tools at your disposal rather than you know somebody has told you to take a tube of something and to slather it on yourself not only is that going to interrupt your ability to produce vitamin d but it's also very likely to cross at least partially into your blood and do who knows what and of course your dermatologist isn't focused on the who knows what so again there is a there is a bias that we should have in terms of not disrupting things that work and this is not you know this can be easily overdone there's a kind of a paleo mentality where the pleistocene is the place we need to get back to as much as possible and it's not like that but it is a question of disrupting as little as possible and taking things that work and just letting them do what they do whether or not you understand how they function yeah so chesterton's sun exposure in this case before we move on to diet stuff and and what our ancestors ate and what we should or should not be eating i did want to stay on this topic of of reductionism this this idea that you know there's there's a big difference oftentimes between you know one component of something and the larger soup of things or the larger context that thing is embedded in the example i want to talk about is thc because this is going to be a subject familiar to many listeners and it's sort of in my wheelhouse but i'm just going to pose the question to you because you pose it in the book and i think you put it in a really nice way is thc the same thing as marijuana yeah of course not and your listeners will will understand that right but um we isolated it uh you know western science isolated it and found it to be the interesting molecule from a psychoactive perspective in marijuana and so focused on that and it was possible to even do you know selective breeding that encourages it but of course the plant has many many molecules in it and your listeners will be able to name a few others as well including cbd and those of course in the original plant interact in a way such that in this in this particular case cbd seems to temper some of the not so much the psychoactive effects but the possibly psychotic inducing effects of too much thc and that's not to say that thc is a psychosis drug but that imagining that the one thing that we find in a complex organism is the thing that we want to encourage at the expense of everything else can lead us to a place where you know with marijuana now we have um you know we have we have plants with a lot less nuance than the plants from the 70s 80s even 90s had yeah i would say even marijuana isn't marijuana because market forces have caused the uh the exciting molecule to be augmented and not just market forces but the way we penalize the drug for so many years right so not just thc being concentrated but the whole plant being concentrated because of you know having to cross borders and such right so you know um the original version of marijuana was a very different plant and it's the experience of it was very different and so we have to be wary of the entire thing even even the plant that contains the the many molecules and you know we could draw an analogy here to sex too that basically the isolation of one desirable component from all of the things that usually or ordinarily are carried along with it is very distorting right so um you know sex obviously under almost any ancestral condition was tied up with all kinds of other essential stuff of human existence right it's tied up with obviously reproduction healthy relationships so in other words it's playing a role in a complex system and if you offer somebody hey there's a way we can do sex without commitment right it's called tinder or we can get you an orgasm without having to deal with an actual person it's called porn or whatever right these things they are hard for people to resist because the um the motivating component has been delivered in a concentrated form but when you do that sort of thing you always distort the system right you know coca has a very bad reputation because it becomes cocaine and distorts people's lives but of course coca has been used by people for thousands of years who live at high altitude in order to hack their own physiology to be able to function under those conditions so this instinct to distill the thing that was tied up with many others and isolate it is almost inevitably going to be destructive going back to food you mentioned you know the romantic notion that many people have that you know our ancestors used to before that before they were contaminated by modernity human beings used to eat the diet and what's kind of funny about this is there's different camps of people who have different views on what the diet is um you know there's the raw food thing that we shouldn't be cooking things because cooking came later and it's not the original way we're supposed to eat food there's the literal paleo diet where i'm not sure how literal some of those people get but the idea is paleolithic humans were eating a diet and because that's what they were eating and that's who we evolved from that must be the best diet so something high in fat and protein and carbs is what you should be eating can you comment on some of those diet trends and just the general notion that there is a optimal diet for people yeah um well one of one of the errors in the thinking and you know many of these diets actually have some some value in them for some people um but paleo diet in particular be just it's easy to pick on it because of the name and it it does a low carb high protein high fat diet will work for some people quite well not all people um the name makes the error of imagining that there is one moment in our past to which we are notably and singularly evolved and adapted to and that we have done no changing since then and we are monolithic and of course neither of those things is true humans you know continue to evolve and there is no moment in the past to which we are singularly adapted so we refer in the book not to the standard environment of evolutionary adaptedness which is a term of art and evolution but to our environments of evolutionary adaptedness right so yeah the savannah of the paleolithic is a moment that our hunter-gatherer ancestors existed in and to which we have some adaptations um but there were also at the same time people living along coastlines and 10 12 000 years ago most humans um whose descendants are alive today discovered convergently across many places on the earth agriculture so we are also adapted to an agricultural diet and lifestyle and long long long long before that all humans all human all modern human cultures all all human cultures that have been looked at by anthropologists um have had fire and so we've been we've had fire and we've been cooking food it seems for a very very long time indeed so the idea that a raw diet is the best for us no it's not and in fact many of the people eating raw diets are undernourished because one of the things that cooking food does for us is it allows us to extract more nutrition from that food um yeah maybe that's that's it just for now yeah i i think um there are a few principles that are probably worth uh thinking about heather and i have been talking on our podcast about the importance of supply chain length of food this is sort of a hidden parameter in in food and it may just be a proxy but to the extent that your food has had to endure travel over very long distances it has probably been stabilized or bred into a form that is optimized for that rather than your health and so there's something to be said for an obsession with uh you know locally grown food does it have anything to do with your locale maybe not but if the food was grown locally and got to you immediately there's a good chance that actually it's less stable and therefore if you get it quickly better for you yeah terroir is real you know this french concept that's usually invoked with regard to wine you know exactly what was the soil of the um of the vineyards where the grapes that the wine was made from were grown and how does that affect the flavor of the wine so in that in that context it seems like it might just be frivolous but terroir is real and the particular soil you know health makeup microbiome if you will is going to be particular to individual places and you know you want the healthiest the healthiest soil possible i guess to your original point about you know will there be a best diet for all humans which is the question that we i think start the food chapter with um no of course not and just you know to make it to make it obvious think about people who have the longest history in the arctic the inuit as opposed to people who have a history in um you know in the the increasingly desertified sub-saharan africa so say the maasai there they have very different diets and that exists because of what was available to them and the climate that they were dealing with but imagining that you know a paleo diet a paleo diet that is low in carbs and high in fat and protein is equally appropriate for an inuit for whom that diet is probably quite native already and maasai is misunderstanding how variable and diverse human physiology anatomy and experience are so is the general direction that's appropriate here the move towards personalized diet dieting and medicine i'm seeing a lot of products and services out there and i'm not sure how good all of them are but in general is it better to think about it things that way that instead of a diet that is the best for everyone we should we should look at what our own biology is saying potentially by taking a cheek swab or getting a genome sequence or whatever and using whatever we can ascertain from that to determine an optimal diet for me as an individual is that is that the right direction because that is that is the direction we do seem to be moving probably probably not um maybe eventually but it's it's like the appendix right the recognition that it's got to be for something is a long way ahead of figuring out what it's for and in this case ultimately we might be able to figure out how to tailor things to you they're probably things that we can do that about already but in general it's probably much more useful to follow the kind of logic that michael pollan uh deploys where you know he uses various rubrics shop the outside of the supermarket because that's where the fresh food is don't eat things that your grandmother wouldn't recognize i would add as food right i would add to his list i think um a coherent diet is probably more important than a tailored diet in other words one of the things that we've done uh as modern western cosmopolitan folks is we've got such a wide variety of things that you might eat and we think mostly in terms of what do i want to eat now rather than thinking about well if i teleport myself back 500 years and i tune into any of those diets that i would have found eaten you can say by definition it contains everything you need right so we don't have that right we don't have coherent diets and so reassembling something that is inherently complete in some regard is probably more important than the tailoring that said if you come from a population whose ancestral diet was very different than uh the main the average diet of of humans across the world there may be things to which you are particularly susceptible deficiencies that you will need to to match but um by and large a coherent diet that hasn't been heavily modified by long supply chains or something like that is probably number one and then to the extent that you have deficiencies that are left because of the difference between the coherent diet that you've picked and your ancestry then you might need to supplement in one way or another to get there and supplement doesn't mean a pill it could mean add a food to a consistent to a coherent diet but you know somehow somehow that's probably the rubric and if 100 years from now we know enough about your genes to read them and say you know you need a little bit more of this a little bit less of that um so be it but we're not there we're not that's it's it's effectively genetics snake oil salesman at this point whether or not people know it but we just we're not we're not there yet and so it's in further service of reductionism rather than actually mostly helping people get healthier and i guess the the translation for shop the edges of the supermarket which again is michael pollan's observation and suggestion is um eat food that you can recognize with regard to the organism it came from and that doesn't mean don't create you know stews or baked goods or such but at the point at the point that you really can't figure out whether or not this food grew or was created in a lab there's a good chance it was created in the lab and avoiding that as much as possible not because all of the things that are created in labs are bad for you they're certainly not but a carrot you know just like marijuana is going to give you a more complete experience than just taking these separated out thc molecule eating eating a salad will give you the more complete experience than taking the multivitamin that is supposed to replace that salad moving on to the chapter on sleep there was a lot of interesting stuff in this one uh you start out somewhere you you go through this thought experiment of aliens visiting planet earth and you sort of ask you i think you pose the question to the reader if aliens did visit earth on a spaceship would they be puzzled to observe that we spend you know a third of the day more or less immobile not doing anything vulnerable would that be would that be puzzling to them and you say that the answer is no so unpack that for us well the there's a certain amount built in with respect to assumptions what uh sentient beings capable of space travel would have likely had on their home planet but very likely they would have had day and night and day and night would have forced an optimization of their perceptual apparatus around the availability of light and if you build an eye that's really great uh in the day it's not very good at night and vice versa so what you tend to get boxed into is you build a creature that makes its profit in either the day or the night and then is hobbled by the other period and then there's a question of what you do with a highly capable cognitive apparatus capable of processing uh information such as visual information when it's not in its element and you could just take it offline completely and save energy or you could put it to some sort of cognitive use that would enhance the functioning of the creature when they were actually out and about and so uh the dormancy makes sense from the point of view of savings and then further the use of the mind in that dormant state for basically pseudo perception and processing is also likely to have evolved in such creatures so you're saying there's actually a dissociation between the dormancy per se saving energy by not moving around and some of the what we'll just call optimizations that are happening to the nervous system during sleep i wonder if you could talk about and i didn't think about this ahead of time an interesting example of that dissociation i think are certain cetaceans or seals i believe at least some species where there's actually an interesting sleep behavior there that sort of illustrates that do you do you know what i'm talking about you're talking about the sleeping half a brain at a time yeah yeah yeah well if you think about the environment they're in right there's something to be said for uh dormancy and there's something to be said about the vulnerability um so i actually don't know about this in seals yeah because seals haul out and so they can effectively insulate themselves from their greatest dangers but tooth dwells dolphins but yeah cetaceans especially dolphins have a good reason to do this which is basically you know i mean it's almost the literal description of sleep with one eye open right um you know because the the vulnerabilities that come from you know being attackable from so many different directions at once and you know a large predator being able to uh loom up out of the deep with with no warning yeah what i what i don't know um and i'm curious if it is known is to what degree the body of the half-brand sleeping dolphins is getting the regenerative effects of sleep that are you know that our non-aquatic mammal bodies do when we sleep i i don't know the answer to that i'd be curious i have an entire episode where i talk to professor bob stickel about sleep so people can check that out if they're really interested in sleep per se but can you say just a little bit more about what we think might be happening during sleep what what is actually what is the brain doing to prepare for the next waking day well i mean there are a couple first of all the uh i think we are still early in the study of what the cognitive processing during sleep actually is and as we pursue this further we're going to find finer and finer gradations but we know that certain things happen for example during rem sleep we are engaged in these uh complex narratives that we are all so familiar with and yet seem to be um in general invisible to the waking mind every so often you become very aware that you've had a dream with with a certain kind of content but in general um you wake up and you may be aware that you have dreamed but don't have a lot of information about what it was and so at some level this is very much like many of the other puzzles we discuss that's not a cheap process right running yourself through fictional scenarios while you sleep is expensive and you know psychology has been quick to dismiss this as random firings or something like that which of course makes no sense for the same reason it makes no sense to have an appendix if it isn't doing you some good so the question is all right why do this right why have effective movies playing on the insides of your eyelids in which you are an active participant the obvious answer is that this has something to do with um scenario building in ways that might be relevant to your waking life so if you imagine for example a complex social situation you might want to have been through a few trial runs right before you get to the job interview or before you ask somebody out on a date or whatever it is so that you can field what's going to come back to you so of course that makes predictions about the content of rem sleep uh being relevant to puzzles you are likely to face it makes predictions about the accessibility of that your conscious mind has to the movie generating apparatus so if there's some part of your mind generating scenarios to test you and train you it doesn't make any it won't work if the conscious part of your mind that is experiencing the dream has access to the script right you have to be challenged by it and be befuddled and frankly i don't know if your dreams are like mine but that's pretty much the experience it's a very confusing landscape it's not a straightforward uh amusement park it's puzzle after puzzle um and you know it's full of uh you know all of the consternation and uh and um confusion that would be necessary in order to get your mind to really think through stuff so one of the things we do know um from from neuroscience is that synapses uh are regenerating during sleep and so we find a need for and you know the conscious mind says i really need to sleep so desire for more sleep at those times uh in life when there is more demand for more synaptic connections and so that is consistent with the observation that sleep declines with age to some degree and that there are throughout childhood uh periods you know babies babies and toddlers obviously sleep a ton and then through the sort of uh elementary school years they sleep somewhat less and then puberty hits and suddenly these these young adults these these teens are sleeping a ton more again and yeah our modern environment would have us wake them up and you know yank them out of their sleep and get to school already so they can better themselves but the fact that across cultures this is a time of again more sleep where given left to their own devices people are sleeping more tells us that there is a need for that sleep and that probably has to do with brain growth and structuring and that pulling people out of sleep is going to be destructive yeah the one extra thing i would add to all of that is that the while we're sleeping there's definitely a lot happening with respect to memory consolidation and the strengthening of some synapses but somehow the brain knows how to do that despite the fact that the net effect is actually to uh decrease or even get rid of most synapses and the idea is synapses are expensive takes a lot of proteins and a lot of stuff metabolically speaking to make a synapse but most of the information throughout our waking day is extraneous we don't need to remember every single little detail in fact if we did we would be handicapped you'd fill up in a day yeah the pruning is absolutely necessary and indeed somewhere somewhere in the book we refer to this one of my favorite uh jorge luis borges uh short stories uh called funes the memorials in which he specifically he's borges has created this fictional protagonist uh who can forget nothing and who speaks you know 18 languages uh and you know the in his case the map is the territory right it actually is and he is able to make no sense of his world and so this is this is just a thought experiment which reveals the truth of what you just said that we need you know we need the you know what would be equivalent of apoptosis over in neuronal space we need we need the loss in many ways more than we need the growth i loved uh that that little nugget that you put in because it immediately so so that writer would have written this well before kim peak lived and the movie rain man existed but he was literally describing i mean he was he was spot on and so if if you're listening you don't you haven't seen rain man that was a movie that came out in the 80s or the 90s and it was based on a real life person named kim peek and you can google that name and see a very fascinating movie or movies on it documentaries but essentially imagine someone who can literally remember every single thing he sees hears and reads and that sounds maybe exciting at first but this person is severely handicapped um i want to since we're talking about sleep now and pruning and and getting into brain stuff they're i want to start talking about light and hallucinations uh these things all tie together an interesting part of the book so i'm going to read a short passage and you know as many people have said before in neuroscience and other fields you know we think about drugs causing hallucinations but in some sense every experience we have is a controlled hallucination when we're awake that hallucination is just highly constrained and ordered by incoming sensory information when we're dreaming it's more disordered but it's still constrained in some sense and when someone has say schizophrenia they're just having a different kind of hallucination that's one way to think about it but you say in the book a list of symptoms of a person with schizophrenia actually has a suspicious overlap with a person asleep and dreaming we do not regularly draw this parallel because in our dream state we are usually paralyzed and and we have amnesia any confrontations with reality are blissfully hidden from us until we have our morning coffee how surprising then that organisms that do not appear to have had our best interests in mind such as slaspy mushrooms and peyote cactus seem to have accessed these very same tendencies so there's a few things here i want to touch on but let's talk about maybe the last part first why these organ why would an organism like a mushroom or like a cannabis plant or like anything produce a psychoactive compound that has that is psychoactive for a mammalian nervous system so can we can we go back and uh i want to adjust one thing you said before we get to the heart of that question um you were talking about this view apparently in neuroscience about our hallucinations are effectively highly constrained during the day and they become more chaotic at night that sounds off actually there's one way in which it's quite right you could say that our hallucinations during the day are constrained by reality right that the edges of objects have to line up with the edges of our paint by numbers world inside of our minds but that leaves the false impression that when you remove those constraints that what you have is noise when in fact the prediction of what we say in the book is that what you have is every bit as signal rich as the environment you walk around in but the signal isn't so much about keeping you from busting your shin the signal is about other things that matter a great deal and so in effect your movie making apparatus is your visual perception apparatus borrowed by a problem-solving mind that has a different problem a different scale of problem that it's interested in so still highly constrained so yeah i i think that is a really good way of putting it i think an experimental neuroscientist would probably restate what you said in the following way which would be that when you're waking in the waking state your hallucination your perception is highly constrained by feed forward sensory information about the external world that's coming in and it also gets integrated with what you would call feedback information coming from your memories and things like this when you're asleep you sort of shut off or at least turn down that feed forward sensory information coming from the outside but you still have as you said brett constraints coming from the feedback direction so it's it's better to say a different set of constraints i suppose well i will say again a laboratory of the self and i know because when i when i was a professor heather and i were both professors for quite some time i used to talk to my students about what the content of their dreams was like and i never failed to be shocked at how different people's dreams are from each other this is a very interesting phenomenon but in my dreams i know that the visual information is very incompletely rendered right so the stuff that matters a great deal the other person's face maybe is pretty well rendered the wall not really rendered well at all because it would be a waste of time to do it so for the same reason that a computer doesn't render necessarily the things that are out of the character's view the mind doesn't do it either it focuses on the things that where there's potentially uh proxy value to be one but you're so in your dreams you would definitely miss the gorilla on the basketball court oh man the girl he's there every time and i never see him yeah um but uh the question about why let's say a mushroom would trigger basically the model that we present is that the mushroom chemically triggers the dream apparatus during a waking state and not to put too fine a point on it the reason that a mushroom might want to do that is to freak the crap out of the creature that had eaten the mushroom and the idea is a freaked out creature is actually better than a poisoned creature if you poison a creature the nature of ecology is such that that creature will then be replaced by a naive creature who might eat the mushroom next time well if you given that it's impossible to titrate the poison right like that that you may inadvertently kill the creature you're poisoning even if even if it would be to your benefit to merely leave it um ill whereas uh the titration issue isn't so much one if you're talking about an ethiogen right and the training program is spectacular you know if you found yourself with no explanation if you let's say that you had no exp exposure to anthogens and you found yourself uh waiting for the train and suddenly hallucinating things that weren't there it would be good and spooky um and to the extent that a a deer for example might ingest a mushroom and have a good and spooky experience and you know certainly there's a program in the deer that says did you do anything different that might have caused what happened because you'd like not to have that happen again it makes you more likely to be eaten by a predator whatever it's a good training program the difference between the deer and us being that the deer who just had the psychotic break that it didn't want is likely to try to figure out unconsciously presumably what it did differently and never go there again and many humans have the opposite response oh that was interesting let's see if we can repeat that right in fact we use it as a as a hack in order to tap into parts of our psychology that are ordinarily barred from or our conscious mind is barred from connecting with them and so it can be you know among the most useful tools that we have or we can do other things like some cultures would you know have a shaman who would tap into that state one way or the other and the shaman therefore [Music] would allow a culture to hack its own belief structure in a relatively safe way because if the shaman is saying things that are particularly off one can ignore them or dismiss them in some way and if the shaman is saying things that are insightful uh one can incorporate them but there's a there's a kind of compartmentalization in that structure well and this is exactly and we get to it later in the book but you also already invoke the culture and consciousness that we introduce in the first chapter the the shaman is the conscious voice and the sacred the the reified the this is how we've always done things is the is the cultural voice so you know shaman is to sacred as consciousness is to culture but in essence what you've said is that from the mushrooms perspective there's a defensive function being played here the mushroom doesn't want its reproductive apparatus eaten and destroyed so it produces something that will hopefully prevent that from happening in the future and actually right there's a lot of examples of this in the plant world in the fungal world in most cases that i'm aware of where there is any clear evidence the psychoactive component of a plant whether it's caffeine whether it is thc or cannabinoids and cannabis it is playing some kind of defensive role it might just be killing insects for example but the plant doesn't want you to eat its reproductive organ basically yeah it's a secondary compound is the the term for it secondary compound means that the molecule doesn't have a physiological function inside the plant it's waiting there for some creature on whom it will have its effect and that effect is negative and then the twist in humans is that the uh hallucinogenic effect is not always negative well but i mean secondary compound doesn't require that the effect be negative and with regard to caffeine for instance there's you know caffeine is uh to some degree a memory enhancer and it is actually demonstrated that caffeinated flowers uh that bees visit um produce a better ability for those bees to you know return to the same flowers okay but so i this is this is interesting and it it extends the question of what a secondary compound is but if i'm to be that annoying student who um pushes things then even further what do we do with something like sugar in a an apple right that sugar is in the apple as a reward for an animal in order to distribute the seeds is that a secondary compound yeah i don't know but i mean caffeine appears to be a secondary compound so i guess maybe maybe this is just a semantic argument you're saying we don't call it a secondary compound unless it's got a negative understood to be negative i'm wondering no i like your point about um caffeine being an enhancement of the capacities of a creature to return to a flower where the where the um the flower is has got a symbiont yeah um but i'm wondering if uh well the the unifying thing here is right correct me if i'm wrong is that the secondary compound is it's sort of acting in another organism on behalf of the first one the caffeine might be enhancing the memory of a bee it's not doing anything else so far as we can tell for the actual flower other than that exactly exactly and i i guess that's that's how i understand um the the definition that it's most basic yeah it doesn't have a value uh it doesn't have a value negative or positive right yeah so in some sense uh what we're saying is these plants or these fungi can produce compounds for for a defensive purpose they don't want to be eaten that is almost the opposite of this other thing that a lot of people have asked me about actually just in in my life but i've never really uh are had someone like you articulate there's this idea that comes originally from terence mckenna called the stoned ape hypothesis i'm wondering if you've heard of that and how as an evolutionary biologist you would look at that way of thinking um yeah i think frankly i like it but i think it's unlikely to be true is is what i would say for one thing if if what we're trying to explain is the spectacular growth of the human brain and the mind that comes along with it we actually do have a pretty good idea of why that happened and it has to do with something called ecological dominance where human beings at some point become their own biggest ecological influence in other words most creatures face a a a dominant factor of uh for example the ability to find food but for human beings at some point ecological dominance causes the success of one group to be most uh most affected by its competitors for resources and so what you get is an ecological and evolutionary arms race and that arms race is won by people who figure out more clever solutions to problems and this of course leads very directly to the evolution of language because the way to escape the linearity of intellect basically if you you know don't want to just add more and more brain but you want to get more and more power out of the brain you've got the way to do it is to get brains to plug into each other in some literal sense and to get emergent cognition where you know the sum of two people's cognition is exceeded by what happens if you allow their brains to exchange ideas which you know we don't think about it as the miracle that it is but the ability of one person to vibrate the air molecules between them and another person and for some membrane in the ear to wobble back and forth and for an abstract idea to actually be successfully transmitted by that process from one literally one brain into another is remarkable but what that allows us to do is it allows us to problem solve in a uniquely human way so does um does the existence of entheogens play any role in that story it does we know that um most cultures have some mechanism for accessing what we are arguing is the dream state in order to uh open doors of perception as it were but is it that these enthusiasts were the driving force almost certainly not almost certainly it was the fact that the arbiter of evolutionary success is suddenly the cleverness of competing groups uh that creates the arms race that causes the brain to be elaborated and then causes brains to plug into each other to get emergent cognition one of the things i want to go back to is the idea that if we disrupt our sleep in various ways we can get an encroachment of the pseudopsychotic dream state into the waking period one of the things i just want to describe an anecdote from the past year of my life that i think speaks to this a little bit i live in seattle major american city as with most cities perhaps more so than others we have a major mental health and homeless issue so over the five years i've been here and definitely over the past year i've seen literally seen as i go for a walk every day this problem get worse and worse and you know what you see oftentimes in a homeless person who has severe mental health issues is uh basically they're talking to themselves they are saying out loud the kinds of things that we're constantly saying inside our own heads all the time we just learn over the course of normal development to not articulate them to the external world much of the time so you see this type of behavior a lot when you walk down the streets of seattle if you are familiar with schizophrenia and the symptoms of that there is also in that type of state a kind of disinhibition right where people are just vocalizing things that we would other people would normally keep to themselves one of the things that i believe i have started to observe in the past few months and this is presumably to do with the whole general code situation and the stress stressors that has introduced in the people's lives and perhaps and this is the tie-in to light the fact that you know over the past 12 to 18 months we spent even more time staring at screens and not exposed to natural light cycles and things but i have observed two or three or four times i think and it's not always crystal clear someone who's not homeless who's actually on the street engaged in this behavior so for example i was walking down the street a few weeks ago and i saw a gentleman talking out loud as is not uncommon to observe but i was struck by the fact that he seemed fairly well dressed and as far as i could tell he was finishing a smoke break and he sort of you know threw his cigarette butt and it looked like he was going back into the building he worked in as if he was just outside for 10 or 15 minutes but he was not speaking in a normal way let's say and i wonder if that was the sort of encroachment that you mentioned in the book of the dream state into our waking life that is perhaps due to the general stressors in life a big one being the artificiality of the light we're exposed to these days so can you speak a little bit about light hold on i want to ask you one question first um and actually i have a personal anecdote related to this but are you absolutely sure that he was not on the phone by some small bluetooth there was no no i'm not absolutely sure it could have pretty sure i did not see earbuds of any kind okay all right um you want to uh share your anecdote well now it's uh early in the iphone era i was um waiting out a rainstorm i had ridden my bicycle to downtown and i was waiting out a rainstorm so i could ride home and i was talking on the phone but it was not it was before this was a familiar sight and uh anyway some police decided that i was uh apparently not well and um anyway we got into a thing about it them not realizing that it was actually just the future they were seeing but um [Music] yeah um are the the encroachment of electric lights uh into our normal photo period is definitely deranging us and we are you know this is not new with us we we know that we are borrowing from research that has finally begun to be done in this regard and you know increasingly just as you say with regard to uh people wanting to come in and and give you cheek swabs to figure out exactly what your personalized diet should be there's increasingly recognition for instance that blue light is not particularly healthy to be exposed to at night and that the redder shifted your light is at night the more likely you are to be able to fall into appropriate sleep more quickly and more deeply so you know we we see this anecdotally you know everyone who camps ever sees their sleep get better no matter how good their so-called sleep hygiene is at home when they're out in a place where they can't really derange themselves with artificial light you know no matter how many lanterns or headlamps they might have when you are when you are responding to the sun coming up and the moon as your primary sources of light you you hit a cycle that keeps you saner it just does yeah and so there's a question i mean at some level we could trace back why it is that blue light has the the capacity it does but one thing we can just say is that it is a dominant piece of the spectrum that is present during the day and absent at night and so it's not strange for the brain to have cued on it as an indicator of what time of day it is and so the intrusion of blue light when you are not supposed to be seeing any is seems to be disrupting the brain's ability to regulate when it does what kind of cognition and so one thing that uh we suggest is that the intrusion of dreamlike hallucinations into the waking period is likely to be increased by the presence of blue and therefore confusing light into uh one's night period and that because our ancestors have such a long history with fire light that fire light is not taken it is discounted by the mind as an indicator of time and therefore it is safer to engage with and so this matches certain observations in uh other cultures things like schizophrenia tend to be a single event rather than a chronic condition and so there's some question about how much of the mental health crisis that we see is actually the result of our having availed ourselves of all kinds of artificial lights that confuse our minds about what time it is and cause hallucinations which are really dreams to emerge and confuse our our waking selves which for most of us is presumably not that big a problem but for some people uh may well be yes one more piece of of nuance here and i don't actually remember if this ends up in the book or not but it's not just when we should be exposed to the different kinds of light you know blue light in the morning is associated with which you know is the kind of light that you get if you walk outside in the morning you're exposed to the sun blue light in the morning is associated with better productivity better health you know everything from sort of lower bmi to better ability to get get your work done and red light at night is as i said associated with being able to sleep better and sleep has all of these all of these benefits only a few of which we've talked about here but there's also the issue of light level and so you know because most of our most of our artificial lights you know yes many of us have dimmers but it's like it's on it's off be it 9 a.m or 9 p.m or midnight or noon it's either on or off and the fact is that indoor light for almost everyone is far lower in level than outdoor light would be and so not only are we getting an inappropriate type of light at different times of day but we're not for most of us who spend you know who have office type jobs or you know spend time in front of screens we're not getting enough light and so we're also not only do we get too much blue but we don't get enough light in general so you know this is just one of many this one we can quantify but there are presumably many more unquantifiable benefits of spending time spending some time outside uh where you know the full spectrum of light at whatever is happening for you in the place you are in at that time of year is is available to you it has has benefits that will go beyond what we can currently pinpoint do you guys have any habits that you've built into your own life related to this oh we're pretty careful about um blue light i would say especially the unbearable proliferation of blinky blue lights on on devices i know i mean we have we have a totally dark we don't we don't let any lights shine in our house except there's one or two in the kitchen i guess where no one sleeps um but you know nothing nothing in any of the rooms where we or our children sleep and and when i read in bed at night i do so with a redhead lamp so you know never any either incandescent or fluorescent bulbs at all and um you know no screens before bed in the summer you know for those of us in in the north um you know we're we're in portland just uh 100 miles 160 miles south of you in seattle uh in the summer it's really easy to get out early i've been spending a lot of time out on the river on the water early in the mornings and it's fabulous and i do feel absolutely more productive throughout the day on those days that i do so um in december when the sun doesn't come up until 8 30 and it's cold out and rainy uh it's it's harder to pull that off but certainly spending some some time outside every day no matter the weather is is beneficial yeah i would say um no level of obsession is too great with respect to the little light leaks though um that i know i've accidentally tested the hypothesis about blue blinky leds that a single confrontation accidentally with a blue led in the middle of the night makes it very hard to go back to sleep and um the difference is so stark that one realizes really you can't afford if you have these things you know if you have a modem somewhere with blue lights on it and it's blinking and you have to walk through a hallway where you're going to look into that room as you go to the bathroom or something you may be messing up your entire sleep cycle so i would say whatever you have to do whether it's black these things out with uh tape or paint or unhook them take the device apart and unhook them or put them all in one room in the house you can fully close the door on right whatever you have to do you you might be shocked at just how much you can do for your own ability to sleep by policing them and then i would also say when we have traveled it's amazing how uncareful the world is about light pollution that you know we we have occasionally rented a place somewhere and it will turn out that their smoke detector or their uh wi-fi uh hotspot will have a blue ring on it and it's like well that's the difference between being able to sleep and not right so um or or the amount of light we're lucky to live in a place that gets really dark at night but the number of people who can't even keep the world's lights from pouring into their windows and you know it's no wonder that we you know have such ubiquitous sleep problems because basically it's like you know it's like the world is drenched in some kind of uh you know coffee that flows in from everything at all hours of the day no it's depraving us yeah yeah and i think most people intuit this you at least come to appreciate it at some point in your life that if you're not getting good sleep you know everything basically is going to fall apart from that so sleep is really really critical and that's certainly a true for uh maintaining relationships you know there's nothing nothing more uh nothing more difficult than dealing with a sleep derived deprived person and you spend uh multiple chapters directly or indirectly talking about relationships you guys are also sort of unique in that when you're on podcasts and things like this you're almost always in a pair and so you guys have had a relationship for a long time and i wanted to talk about that chapter next so you start off one of these chapters defining love as a state of the emotional mind that causes one to prioritize someone or something external as an extension of themselves and you also observe that much of human mythology is centered on inducing people to extend their concept of self so can you elaborate on that definition and also tie it to the observation that you make that love probably evolved sequentially for different pairs of people starting first with mothers and infants well i'll start with that i'll start with that second part and then you can ex further define love if you like um the evolution of milk basically with the origin of mammals makes obligate an ongoing relationship between mother and offspring beyond the birth or hatching of that offspring live birth obviously being one of the hallmarks of very early mammals although not all you know most people are familiar with the duck bill platypus the echidnas which are egg laying but barring those early basil mammals all other mammals have live birth and all mammals provide milk and so that milk from mother to offspring is yes it's nutrients but it's also information it's immuno information it's all sorts of information and it provides also touch between mother and child and once you have that once you have that it's an it's an easy sort of obvious evolutionary place to go that you have a relationship form excuse me um between mother and child that is emotional beyond what simply the transmission of liquid from mother to child would be and so with that you have the evolution of of love and we also have instances of love elsewhere in the animal kingdom almost certainly but it becomes obligate with the evolution of milk and so once you have once you have mother child love then you have relatively quickly the possibility for love between other organisms that wasn't necessarily obligated between between siblings between pair bonds between between mated partners and a pair and then from that to other members of your family to friends to then uh you know to your to your to your colleagues to your to your fellow soldiers anyone with whom you have shared fate to use the term of art and evolutionary biology and from that it can become abstract you can have love of country you can have love of city of team of ideas of you know of freedom of justice of truth and um it all it all begins with a relatively simple but terribly important transmission of just life-giving fluid from mother to child yeah i mean in some sense you can think of it as the willingness to sacrifice for someone or some thing right to prioritize that other at a symmetrical level itself and you know it comes it's obviously hugely costly and the reason that we prioritize it the way we do is because that the benefit of it exceeds the cost and you know you can understand a lot about um the way we function just based on really mapping it you know everything from what we feel uh towards our pets and um those we care about and those for which it's just a pro forma it's not real these things are they're fundamental to the way human beings function so i want to transition to talking about mating systems what do so first can you define for people the term sexual dimorphism and can you talk about the levels of sexual dimorphism we observe today in humans and what that might tell us about the common mating strategies that our ancestors would have taken yeah so sexual dimorphism just means that in a sexually reproducing species of which we are we are one and all plants and animals um are with a very few exceptions um there are there are two sexes and the dimorphism simply means that there are two different morphs one for each sex so uh in general when you are looking for evidence of what kinds of sexual selection has been enacted on a species because of the environment that they have lived in one of the clues is what degree of sexual dimorphism is there the more similar males and females are to one another in terms of size and shape and behavior you know plumage and song and you know nest building tendencies and territorial tendencies the more similar they are the more likely you are to have a monogamous mating system so mating system just refers to in general how many partners does each how many reproductive partners mates does each sex tend to have monogamy it's it's one to one cheating notwithstanding which yes happens but in a monogamous system you tend to have individual females meeting with individual males and in a polygamous system uh one of the sexes tends to have multiple mates and that leaves the other sex um having lots of individuals who have no mates and so polygamy is the is the general overarching type of which the two types are polygeny multiple females and polyandry multiple males so polygyny which is the most common type of mating system across mammals involves males often having reproductive monopoly over multiple females which also then leaves lots of males unmated entirely and polyandry which is very very rare involves one female having reproductive monopoly over multiple males leaving presumably um some females unmated although that's it's it's very hard to end up arriving there because females bring um the egg which is the you know cytoplasmically rich gamete and so having females unmated is very rare in nature and so polyandry is very rare as well so what we see in human beings is that human beings have a small amount of sexual dimorphism males are bigger than females which suggests that there is a long history of mild pollution but the interesting thing if you think back to the earlier part of this conversation what you'll realize is that human beings are a generalist hardware platform a robot effectively with a plastic software program a software program that can be swapped out as circumstances demand and so while it is true that human beings have a history of polygeny that is somewhat general it is also true that the majority of people alive on earth today belong to cultures that are monogamous and so the question is why did the software program get swapped out and there is uh good reason to believe that this is adaptive that in effect monogamy has certain advantages that manifest under certain conditions and the most obvious of them is that when a population is going to expand it benefits from having the maximum number of adults brought into the process of child rearing the limit on because human babies are so expensive with respect to the investment that has to be put into them having more adults contributing to child raising increases the rate at which a population can grow so it is likely no accident that as human beings have expanded around the globe and increased their numbers by increasing the success with which they farm that cultures that have been monogamous and therefore matched males to females one to one and brought all adults into child-rearing have out-competed populations that don't do that and anyway we are now in a situation where we may have come to the end of that process the planet simply cannot continue to exp to endure an expanding human population and there's some question as to what should happen i would say we have to have some caution because although it might be very natural at a moment like this where the human population plateaus to default back to uh polygony that would be a very bad thing because monogamy actually has many other advantages it's a much fairer much less prone to violence system it creates more reason for cooperation for example amongst siblings that is to say a family that is composed of full siblings is more um more cohesive than a family that is composed of half siblings so there's lots of benefits that our conscious minds forget evolution for the moment but the values that we seem to hold are a better match for monogamy and so figuring out how to stabilize monogamy in spite of the fact that at this moment evolutionary pressure may go in the other direction is a question that should be on our minds why would a monogamous mating strategy widely adopted by a group decrease the amount of violence within that group because it does not leave sexually frustrated males with no prospect for uh mating other than um rape or warfare in effect what you want is everybody to have a path towards a good life a life that meets all human needs and to the extent that polygamy may deliver an excess of well-being to some males it sidelines an equal number of them or more and in so doing it creates literally sexually frustrated males with uh no good option and uh many bad ones yeah i mean the unfortunately relevant examples from from non-humans are things like lions and baboons which have um strongly poliginous mating systems and you can see that in the sexual dimorphism of male lions and female lions and male baboons and female baboons in which males are not just larger but they have longer canines and um and they have greater ferocity you know they they tend to anger more easily and be willing to get into violence with one another more easily and in in both of those cases what you have are basically bands of of bachelor males and that's that's the term of art and animal behavior of of bachelor males that are always looking for an opportunity to topple an alpha who has again a reproductive monopoly over some number of females so there's no there's very little opportunity for social stability in a poliginous society and no the evidence from lions and baboons isn't sufficient to get us there but we can there's plenty of evidence from human history as well to suggest that a polygenous system in which a few males effectively have access to um have have reproductive monopoly over many of the young women is not a stable system and will soon fall one of the things that i think is noteworthy here is if you contrast say the norms that what we call traditional society let's just think about the major monotheistic religions of the world they tend to have extremely in many cases extremely strong norms around monogamy and you can contrast that with say the incentives and just sort of the landscape that comes from the way some new technologies are affecting mating strategies so for example you can think about mating apps and i don't know what the precise numbers are here i don't remember them precisely but i know for example that when you look at things like tinder and i think this is true across all of the different dating apps there are that you tend to get like basically an 80 20 outcome where a relatively small number of males let's just say 20 percent are getting 80 of the attention from women and apparently it's true that something like five percent or so of males never get any matches at all on any of these things so is there kind of a tension there is some of the technology we've developed actually helping promote some of these other mating strategies that for better or worse are going to lead to different kinds of behavioral outcomes oh absolutely absolutely and this is a disaster made even worse by the fact that effectively all of the elements are being commodified right so in a in a prior world and heather and i would not argue that we have any hope of nor should we want to go back to a prior world but in a prior world i specifically don't want to go back we're not traditionalists right but there are lots of elements of a prior world that we have um foolishly not learned the lesson of chesterton's fence and so for example in a world prior to birth control women tend to be very very careful about who they have sex with and the reason is obvious which is that if you have sex with somebody who has not shown a willingness to participate in child rearing that one may end up rearing children alone which is incredibly expensive the children are less likely to be successful and so in any case much of the ritual around romance and uh and love is really about a it's a test to see whether somebody is um up to the challenge whether they really do bring the strengths to the table that they seem to bring to the table and on the flip side so women are very choosy and men um would work very hard to be worthy of a sexual relationship and those things gave coherence to the world now is birth control a good thing it is a good thing it's especially good in the sense that it liberates women by not causing them to be arbitrarily burdened with children but be able to plan when they have their families but the the fact is it's uh it's got a serious downside which is that it removed the coherence from civilization and caused men to have much less motivation to accomplish things and it took the the need to invest heavily in a relationship in order to make it work and removed it by allowing people to um to scratch their itch relatively cheaply because the stakes were lowered and so in any case again i know that this will be heard as prudish but the the basic point is that the system that we evolved with was not inherently fair but it was inherently coherent it had to be and the system that we've replaced it with where we have uh rampant access to pornography in which those who make pornography compete with each other for attention and therefore drive sexuality into ever more extreme uh and unwise forms all of this has caused a derangement of our interactions with each other and frankly i think it has caused people to become much less decent to each other and the question is how can we restore the decency without going backwards that's really the the issue i'm um in listening to you talk i'm actually recognizing one of my biases that i'm not sure i i had thought of before just now which is maybe by chance but really because of my native interests in sexual selection in mating systems in social behavior and territoriality and parental care and all of these things i ended up studying for as you know um for my my dissertation research the the sound bite that i give is the sex lives of poison frogs in madagascar and you know the vast majority of amphibians have no relationship with their children they don't even have any relationship with the with their mates you know they have external fertilization they meet in some giant aggregation of their temperate frogs and leave fertilized eggs behind and they go about their business the particular species that i was was studying mantilla levogada have such i've discovered have such an elaborate courtship that the females you know utterly require of the males and if he is to skip uh any of these parts where he's leading her around the potential of a position spots and he does what i was calling chinning where he he alters his vocalizations and lays his chin on top of her back and she can feel the vibrations through her if he doesn't do those things i found there's no chance there's no chance of him getting mated and so it's not that all vertebrates need this but that time and again including even in such basal vertebrates as these poisoned frogs when you have a system that actually requires an elaborate courtship and elaborate interactions between the players because the offspring actually matter because they are you know relatively case selected because they have few offspring and both male and female in the case of these frogs both mom and dad end up doing parental care you can't just skip all the other stuff and assume that the rest of the system is going to be functional because it won't yeah it's amazing i mean it's it's chesterton's fence all over the place right the the number of components that do not in isolation seem to be fundamentally important but if you remove them disrupt the coherence is is many and we keep learning this lesson and it's painful the relationship between young people and elders one thing that i want to talk about here is you know we've talked about the importance of narrative and the difference between culture and consciousness and why it can be adaptive to compress a bunch of information into something like a narrative that can be passed to say a young child who can't understand it some other way and it will be very intuitive to people that for almost all of human history when we learn a skill whatever it is making a hand axe making a bone arrow whatever it may be up until literally more or less the present moment you would have learned that from an elder in your group an older person who had been doing that for years or decades was extremely skilled in that particular thing would teach it to you and it was you know obvious every step of the way why would you why you would want to learn that why they have the expertise to teach you it and there's a kind of bond that many of us will have experience between an elder and a young person that comes from downloading the cultural information from old to young through learning how to use technology let's say so it was always the case historically that the elders were better at using the technology than the young ones but today that has seemed to be completely broken in modern society right it's virtually guaranteed that grandma and grandpa will have little or no experience with how to use the latest greatest piece of technology so what has that what do you think that change is going to do in terms of relationship building between the young and the old and how cultural information is therefore going to propagate through groups it's so important yeah um i i would say i mean it's a very insightful question but i think we can um we can turn it around a little bit in order to see the answer to it which is human beings are very unusual amongst animals in having adults that persist after reproduction is or direct reproduction is over right and the reason for this pretty clearly has something to do with the value of what those adults know in other words a culture why would a culture invest food resources when all ancestors are likely to have been food limited why would a culture continue to spend food on adults that are no longer contributing to reproduction well imagine that you face a periodic drought situation where there's a condition every 100 or so years that results in there not being enough water and what are the chances that somebody knows the story of where to go or how to behave or or what it is so if we think about the fact that being an elder is about having wisdom and insight and memory that is relevant to the problems that recur and then we look at modern times and the point is we don't even live in the world that we were born into it's changing so quickly that we are constantly adapting to a new world we are all novices and a this again removes the coherence of of existing because at what are old people for if not to be you know repositories of wisdom and to give advice and things like this so we've already sort of decoupled things it causes young people to view the old as feeble and incapable of even basic functionality so i mean in some sense i think i think you're just right it's it's uh it's going to wreck the relationship between uh the young and the old and for no benefit we are wrecking it even as the pace of technological change is jeopardizing uh our health our capacity to interact with each other um our psychological well-being um so anyway yes i think you're right to be to be concerned about yeah and i think um you know elders are not just repositories of culture they're also uh because they've been around for longer potentially have had more moments of consciousness of innovation of new things as well and we expect that you know in most domains the conscious innovation declines somewhat with age whereas uh the accumulation of received wisdom of cultural wisdom can continue to increase but in a hyper novel world in a world in which the rate of change is itself accelerating then both the repository of culture becomes less relevant as as you both have said um but also the ability to innovate in a meaningful way in a world that resembles um certainly not the world of 80 years ago very much but maybe even the world of yesterday uh the elders become less clearly valuable to those who are mostly tuned in to what happened yesterday as opposed to those with a deeper sense of history yeah and uh you know as i'm listening to you speak i'm realizing that both the young and the old have been basically forced into the role of consumer so regularly that part of the reason that it doesn't strike us is odd that the relationship between the young and the old has broken down is that nobody's doing much innovating and so the relationship of the old to the young in innovation has been just sort of quietly lost because nobody knows what they're doing other than just thinking about what they want and how to get it talking about childhood a little bit more one of the lines that i loved in this section was humans are not blank slates but of all organisms on earth we are the blankest so that's just a great sentence um because it carries it's just a great pithy way of putting this and i think this sort of the question of what one's belief is around how blank the slate is i think is one of the arguably the most fundamental your answer to that is very fundamental in shaping your politics how you look at the world and and things like that so you know you can imagine the extremes here on one extreme of some political spectrum that we can imagine you know people are completely mutable they're completely modifiable by the environment and therefore we can build a society that will make some kind of utopia let's say sort of the other extreme or a other extreme i'm not sure it's it's just a linear axis here is that that's basically not true we're minimally modifiable and not only that there are inherent differences between groups that can never and will never be overcome and we should build society around that so the question is simply how blank is the slate let's just start there well one thing yeah it is a great question uh one thing that has to be said up front is that the blankness of the slate is arbitrary all right and this is um it's really vital to understand this we have obviously no trouble whatsoever changing our rate of reproduction we can decide not to have children we can decide to have them late we can decide how many it's not a conflict at all we are not so flexible when it comes to sex right selection did not build human beings to be obsessed with baby production in the same way that it built at least males to be obsessed with sex because that was a good enough proxy when the two were not decoupled by technology so the point is how flexible are we well we're very flexible with respect to when we reproduce and not so flexible with respect to focus on sex that pattern exists across the map right the level of flexibility is high in some places it's non-existent in others and that's something we have to get used to but the the reason that we've said that though human beings are not a blank slate they are the blankest slate is it the recognition that what we are good at comes from the ability to swap out our software program which is about the blankness of a slave um is fundamental we are much we are i believe very likely to find that between cultures we are largely software based and therefore interchangeable and we see this if you transport a baby from beijing and raise them in manhattan they don't have the slightest hint of an accent they have no difficulty um learning the language as somebody who was native to the continent would and in fact the language itself is an import but uh the differences between males and females for example are of a different nature right that there are actual reasons that one body plan versus another would require different um uh biases and that those biases might be more durable does it mean any of it can't be addressed in some way probably only a very little bit cannot be addressed but is it going to be more of an uphill battle if you decide something in the sex landscape needs to be changed because it may be written in more directly that's highly likely i mean human cultures are relatively new the sexes that we are go back hundreds of millions of years and so anyway there there is a logic to it it is a logic that as far as we know doesn't contain any really unfortunate truths right the degree to which we can actually achieve something that's a level of equality between people is presumably very high the degree to which we will be the same as each other once we do it is uh we're not going to be the same nor should we aspire to it so it is that kind of landscape there's a tremendous amount of flexibility it is not perfect flexibility and it isn't necessarily distributed in the way you would want it but um but there's there's a lot to be done great school so we've talked a lot we've talked a little bit about uh transmission of information from the old to the young the things that come to mind here are you know obviously we have formal schooling today that is quite a new structure in evolutionary terms somehow even though most of us may be unaware of how this happened people were getting by and learning how to transition from childhood to adulthood without formal schooling in any way could you speak a little bit about that how how recent in evolutionary innovation is formal instruction and how did kids grow up before we had that yeah school is incredibly new and indeed um although teaching certainly happens in in other cultures so much of learning doesn't even involve instruction doesn't involve teaching it involves uh through observation and trial and error and um learning from doing and learning from watching rather than an explicit and formal i am the one who teaches and i'm the one who learns relationship it's explicit teaching is not just rare in other animals although it does happen some but it's rare in other cultures and other moments in time so formal school is uh you know just within the last few hundred years depending on how you count you know you could you could you could go back to the greeks and say well there was some formal schooling there but uh in terms of the expectation that children shall learn how to be adults by sending them away from their parents for x number of hours a day and um you know especially the modern model of of age segregating them is incredibly novel and almost certainly an error uh that this is separating children not just from their their family and their existing friends but from anyone else who isn't exactly their developmental stage in order to teach them how to be adults is sure to fail and indeed there are many there are many alternative educational models which yes are still in the model of school of it's time to learn and it's time to teach that mixed age groups which have you know just just doing that just just allowing children to spend time with people who are both older and younger than them increases the chances that education will work because you can you may be too young to do the thing that someone three years or elder can do when you're five but you can see and you can aspire and the two-year-old when you're five maybe too young to be taught effectively by you everything that you know but you can learn how it is to modify what you do to include that person and so you know having mixed age groups who are learning together is is one of the things that we have moved away from very recently and that is part of what makes school really so barbaric now for so many people i think it's important to understand what the legitimate role of school is in order to see just how over extent that it has become and the way to understand this is think about language if you have properly hooked up ears and a properly hooked up brain nobody has to teach you how to speak right you will learn to speak and in fact parents are wired to behave in such a way to train you to speak this is almost certainly what the compulsion to babble back at children what you've heard them say is about right because you don't sound the same to yourself as the outside world hears you and so having somebody repeat what you said part of a feedback especially with corrections like babble back with grammatical correction that's that's instruction right and with um emotional content on the face that you know says something about what it sounded like or who knows but okay so we can't stop you from learning to speak this is something ancient in humans and therefore you are wired to learn it with no instruction whatsoever not true for writing and reading right why because they're new and the point is if we had them long enough you'd probably pick them up automatically that's a very long way off so what we have to do is we've got to supplement right likewise you can be an expert in physics from uh you know using a bow and arrow but you're not going to be an expert in explicit physics you're not going to learn calculus by using a bow and arrow so to the extent that these things are necessary and useful we have to go into the supplemental mode to educate you but what we don't do is recognize that that's the exception and not the rule that most of what you do in life should absolutely be learned by doing and in fact we're very good at it it's very rewarding and it doesn't produce this crazy phenomenon that heather and i saw as college professors very regularly where somebody's capacity to do something requires a person to tell them when they've succeeded or failed and requires a person to incentivize them to do it right if you're learning because you like it when the teacher says you've succeeded then you remove that teacher and you don't know what to do right and so that teacher very easily gets replaced by a boss and you you know you become a cog in a system when in fact what you are is a fantastically capable creature who can innovate and bring new things to the world and that's really what you should be angling to do um but the way we the way we teach just sort of drives it out of people yeah i mean to use i i don't know if this is legitimate psychological language or if it's just psychobabble but i think the thing that i've been hearing recently that sort of maps onto what you're saying is this idea of locus of control and that school effectively um and you know we could argue a long time we could discuss a long time about whether or not this is intentional or not going back you know how far but school effectively moves the locus of control for children with regard to motivation from internal to external and in so doing it makes children easier to control by that external locus of control which is the teacher or the school system and then the boss and you know it's a handing off and you know john taylor gatto um now now dead who's an excellent educator and thinker on education tracks the history of compulsory schooling in germany and then the us and just does a fabulous job of this but um you know it's possible that compulsory schooling was exactly about that right whether or not that is understood now to be desirable that you would want to take agency away from children and make it such that their motivational structures hinge on getting carrots or sticks from external authorities whether or not you think that's what we should be doing it is de facto what modern schooling mostly does and there are some of us who manage to thrive in modern schooling despite not being mostly driven by external authority but most most people find themselves broken at least somewhat if not to a large degree by the repeated insistent efforts to standardize humans i want to talk a little bit about and this is still on the theme of becoming adults advertising and theory of mind stuff before leaving us enough time to talk about religion and civilizational senescence so i'm going to read a short passage and then and then talk for a minute and then i want you guys to riff on this but there's this passage that i found interesting where you say the ability of advertisers to create dissatisfaction is facilitated by the fact that our natural human obsession with narratives is being addressed by a narrative generating mechanism in which stories have not stood the test of time and i just want to mention something from another podcast here it just feels right to mention it even though i don't know exactly what the time is going to be but i was speaking to an old friend of mine from graduate school and he now works at google he's a very high level machine learning expert and i was asking him more or less you know about ai and the differences between the human mind and the artificial minds that we are building today and what some of those key differences are what are the things that are lacking in our artificial systems that are not lacking in our own brains and you know we don't know the answer to that fully but he said you know i think it has something to do with the question of what is a story because you know our best natural language processing algorithms our best ai today they can they can put together a pretty damn good paragraph but they can't string together paragraphs in a cohesive way that creates a narrative and so i want to ask you guys about uh this dissatisfaction that's being manufactured through advertisers use of narratives and i'm hoping you can tie that into theory of mind stuff i i'll just say that i loved the uh the explanation of capuchin monkeys um well there's uh there's a lot to be said here i think one thing that should probably be unpacked is this question about what has stood the test of time is a an evolutionary question wholly over in the cultural side and the idea is you can write a narrative you cannot write a myth right a myth is a product of selection the myths that we have right odysseus stringing the bow to regain control of the manner and rescue penelope this is an enduring story for a reason right almost every story that was written at the same time is gone and has left no trace and so what we have in sacred texts in famous stories is things that have been reinforced over time for some reason that we don't necessarily know again you know these are these are chesterton's narratives in some sense some of them may no longer be relevant it may be that we live in a world where the lessons of one story or another are no longer relevant it may be that the hero's journey um you know has to become the fellowship of the ring because something about the world has changed and now we don't have a hero anymore what we have is a team or something like that but but nonetheless what you find is that certain things are reinforced and what hollywood and the other narrative creation engines do is not the exploration of this space to figure out what stories they can write and then selection will choose the ones that were wonderful there's sort of a hybrid process where you take the matrix you know is the matrix a great narrative yeah it is you know it's a modern plato's cave but it's also polluted by the fact that somebody was focused on box office right and so how good a narrative is it and if it makes it into the deep future will it be marred in some sense by the fact that you know somebody's obsession with box office caused the story to carry less meaning that it would otherwise have carried and i don't think we know what to do with this but what we did is we just took a a process an ancient process that didn't come with an instruction manual and replaced it with a modern process that has an obvious corruption to it and you know the danger is severe yeah and it and it decreases our ability to engage in theory of mind of course it does and i you know i'm not sure i'd thought about it in these terms before but you know just take social media please right um but you know most of the people if you engage in social media at all most of the people that you engage with you don't know and therefore you know nothing of them except that you hope and presume that they are humans and of course even that is an assumption which may not be borne out but one of the first things that i ask people when i'm first engaging them is like where are you like just just tell me something about what your current situation is so that i can i can map myself into your space and imagine what you're experiencing right now and that you know that helps me engage in theory of mind and there is no expectation and indeed no capacity for that uh when we are being advertised to when we're seeing totally receptive entertainment where we have no ability to interplay with it nor is it really the expectation of social media and so i think the um the study you're referring to with the capuchins of memory serves is one uh with regard to a study of fairness um so the the background on this which won't necessarily be intuitive to everyone is that these monkeys uh universally like both um was it celery and grapes i think cucumbers and grapes cucumbers and grapes there it is um but the universally like both but they universally favor grapes and so if you have two monkeys in cages next to each other where they can freely see uh one another and smell and all of this but they can't but they can't directly engage and you have an experimenter giving both monkeys cucumbers they're both perfectly pleased and um and this is a it's an exchange thing so the monkeys have to give them rocks or something it's like we give me a rock i'll give you a cucumber sure they'll go at this all day and if you start giving one of the monkeys grapes instead the monkey who continues to receive cucumbers is not just displeased has not just observed that even though their state is literally exactly the same that they were that they had before but by comparison to their compatriot it is now worse they not only show their displeasure by um by you know asking asking for grapes which they don't do they literally hurl the cucumbers back at the researcher so they they take their status which remained exactly the same except relative to their to their kind specific and they actually worsen their own situation in order to demonstrate that they see that this is no longer fair right which um you know seems bizarre and petty in one way but only and yet not it's clearly not and so one important interpretation of this is to the extent that the monkey is getting cucumbers and is happy with it because his compatriot is also getting cucumbers there's no evidence that there are grapes and so in some sense the evidence that there are grapes and the one monkey is not getting them is evidence that this is sub-optimal for the niche that it finds itself in that little cage well it's it's monkey hedonic treadmill at some level well but what i'm saying is one of the things you know we've discovered over and over again that human beings are very focused on what their neighbors have and it always sounds petty when it's presented this way but to the extent that you and your neighbor are farming similar pieces of habitat and your neighbor is comes home with twice the harvest for the same amount of investment of time that tells you you're doing something wrong and so well he's stealing from you well it tells you but then what you're doing is you're not protecting your stuff well enough so to the extent that there is evidence that somebody else is out competing you in the same habitat yeah it actually makes sense to become focused on this and to try to figure out what they're doing the problem is for us this doesn't work right your neighbor may live in a house that looks like yours and they may have a much nicer car in the driveway but they also go to a different line of work right so there is no evidence that you're in the same habit that you can't use it to judge so people do become petty and for no reason yeah keeping up with the joneses actually is the beginning of the recognition of the d coherence of this model right and you know and so the fact that we don't live in a coherent way we just sort of decide where to where in town do i want to live and what town do i want to live in and your family isn't there and the people you grow up with aren't there and by and large when you're making a decision about where to move who your neighbors are rarely play a central role right and it really should you would think it would be dominant and in some sense what strikes me is um you know jeff bezos is all of our neighbor now so no matter how much we have these days we can go well look at that guy so it's sort of like this this hyper awareness of discrepancies between people and this is just omnipresent now in society so it's like you know it's like the capuchin you know there's always a bigger juicier grape to see that someone has yeah why does bezos get all the grapes that doesn't seem right so many grapes yeah um i wanted to add one last thing though uh you're in your initial question you were talking about the issue of narratives and theory of mind and one completely arbitrary consequence of the way the market has interfaced with deep needs like for music and narrative is that it has fed us a diet of these things that is in some sense kind of good right the range of music that you can get to pour into your phone right is amazing and i must say i actually feel better about the quality of the music i listen to now than the music i listen to back in the era of lps right where we all listen to the same thing but i don't feel better about the fact of it because we don't have a shared culture anymore right when the shared culture was hey led zeppelin 4 just came out led zeppelin 4 may or may not be a good thing but the fact that everybody was hearing the same stuff had a kind of uh communal nature to it and it brought us into a shared mindset and we all heard stairway to heaven the first time i mean this is a little before our time you're getting yourself wrong that's true but but let's just say the the pieces of music that everybody heard whether they liked it or not because they poured out of the three radio stations that people listened to in your high school right that had a communal aspect to it irrespective of what the quality of the music itself was now we have a tremendous amount of choice and that means we can get better music but it means that you may not have heard the song that's so meaningful to me and that has a very destructive disjointed consequence and likewise you know not only are the narratives that we pay attention to distorted by the market you know even more so than music where these narratives may be telling us what we want to hear rather than what we need to know but we don't even all pay attention to the same universe of narratives and so we may learn very different moral lessons and we may find ourselves incompatible when we find when we you know come into contact in the work environment and you know again it's like you know do you want to be the person wagging your finger at somebody who really likes this band and not that band no but the fact that our culture isn't the culture anymore because you can have the thing that you know you know tweaks your mind just so and so can your neighbor and they may have no overlap with them there's a danger in that and i think we're we're living downstream of it one of the things so it's almost like culture has been unbundled and one of the things i didn't anticipate talking about here but but it is a good time to where we go next which is religion is you know in the technology space a lot of technologists out there are having really interesting conversations and making various observations around how the development of new technologies has then this has been a recurring pattern in different sectors it's led to an unbundling and then a rebundling right so music for ex music is is a is an obvious example we've sort of unbundled the way we used to package music and we're rebundling it into spotify playlists and it completely changes the landscape by which we consume things in that medium and you've sort of just said that we've sort of unbundled culture in some sense we no longer have one unified cultural narrative that all or most of us are attending to and religion has been the vehicle that has historically done that i think and i wanted to talk about religion not only because it's in the book but because this is a subject that not only fascinates me but i've done various 180s on in my life and one of the 180s i've done that i think you guys speak too well is okay i'm not a religious person nor have i ever been but i used to be of the mind that religion is this sort of artifact it's this thing from the past we need to rid ourselves of it because it's blurring our vision it's getting in the way of seeing the world clearly but you guys have a sort of different viewpoint that comes back to some of the things that we've been talking about so can you speak a little bit about the adaptive function of religion historically sure so we in the book deploy a test for whether something is an adaptation and the truncated version of it is that things that are complex and expensive and last over evolutionary time are definitely paying their way somehow and religion passes this test with flying colors right religions are tremendously expensive and very complex and very long-lasting and so we know that they pay their way or at least logically we can virtually guarantee it well it's also true that religious cultures um have outperformed those cultures that aren't right you know until the very modern moment there we can point to no cultures that have been without religion right even though within every religious culture there's variation in how devout people are and so there's the opportunity for selection to reduce the religiosity and yet it's the religious people who win so why is that well this is a mechanism for creating adaptive creating and transmitting adaptive behavior at a level that we evolutionists don't tend to talk about it's the level of lineage and so there's been a long-standing debate in evolutionary biology you'll be well aware of it given your history between the kin selectionists and the group selectionists and um in effect the group selectionists have latched on to something that is true but they've got a mechanism for it that doesn't add up right groups can't be selected unless those groups are also lineages and the fact is lineages pass on not only genes you effectively have a gene pool but they pass on coherent sets of traditions and within those traditions there is sectarian difference over what to believe and what to discount and those sectarian differences get selected those versions of a religion that are more efficient relative to the problems in a given habitat will out-compete that so you have kind of a clade of christians for example and within christians you have catholics and then you have uh you know greek greek orthodox and church of england right those are close relatives of each other the difference primarily being whether they take the pope seriously or not and then you have uh martin luther is the most recent common ancestor of the protestants right and you have a bunch of different protestant traditions and these things are basically suites of adaptive behaviors they're coherent packages of adaptive beliefs and behaviors that overlap different locations on the earth for the most part and that process is staring us in the face we haven't figured out how to talk about it but it's an adaptive evolutionary process that has given rise to things that we moderns initially look at and say wait a minute the the earth wasn't created in seven days and it isn't six thousand years old so everything in this book is wrong this starts with a lie it's wrong no that's not what it is it's not a literal description of the universe it is an efficient packaging of a set of beliefs um that causes the people who ascribe to it to out-compete those who issue it right and specifically the phrase that that we use is much of what is contained in these religious texts which hold ancient wisdom is that they are literally false metaphorically true and that does not mean that what was extraordinarily functional 500 a thousand 2 000 years ago remains so to the degree that it was then i mean given that we live in this rapidly changing world with all of this hyper novelty of course some of even the literally false metaphorically true truths will be out of date now and in need of restructuring and and modernization but again that doesn't mean that therefore therefore the structure of religion or the entire text should be thrown out yeah i mean in a sense uh if we're to deal with the conundrum of religion in the 21st century the first thing we need to do is own up to the fact that it isn't a parasite on people it is a key to human success that may to some extent have outlived its usefulness on the other hand those who will bridle adhering that description um will recognize that we don't know you know we do not live in the environments that this thing came from and so in fact and we also don't live in circumstances where we're surrounded by people from our lineage anymore so there are multiple issues here one we now live on one earth rather than in many different places right that earth is so interconnected that we have to have shared values or we're going to tear each other up right so how do we get there some values are shared across religions okay those are liable to be contained in whatever are cohesive packages for uh all earthlings but then others are in conflict so we do have a reckoning coming and it's about time that we stopped pretending that religion was a distortion and we start recognizing it as a you know it is a huge basket of chesterton's fences right we do not know how it works or what it does or what problems it was aimed at no question there are elements of it which are anachronistic and out of date other elements function in ways we don't understand and it's a puzzle we need to take very seriously i think we can basically uh guarantee that that's the first time that has been uttered religion is basically a huge basket of chesterton's fences that's what you said right yep it doesn't quite roll off the tongue then yeah it works so this is the second time that this name has come up and i didn't actually plan it this way um a lot of the things that we've been talking about some of the things that you say in the book remind me of something that stuck with me i don't know why exactly this stuck with me from terence mckenna and if people are unfamiliar unfamiliar with him i'll just let them google the name but you know he was active in like the 80s and 90s he he died quite a long time ago and he said so many things that were interesting but also seemed crazy that i i often didn't pay close attention to them but at a couple different points in the last few years of my life i stumbled upon an old lecture or something that someone posted and i remembered listening to it before but in listening to it the second time i found myself saying things like wow i used to think he was just kind of out there but maybe he was actually so far ahead of some of the other people that were his contemporaries that it sounded crazy but it was actually pre-shunt and as we talk about civilizational senescence and in what you described in the last part of your book i'm remembering this phrase that he introduced that stuck with me he talked about and this is again i think late 80s early 90s when he's saying these things he talked about how technology and the way that culture was evolving was leading to what he called a balkanization of epistemology that instead of having this one shared narrative that we all cohere to you could walk down the street and you might run into someone who's you know a quantum physicist and he looks at the world through the lens of physics and the other person standing next to them on the street is channeling archangels and believing you know things that he would describe as very unscientific the point being that everyone walking around it seems has this different epistemology this different way of analyzing and knowing what they think is true about the world and it's leading to this kind of decoherence that he would say was causing everyone to consciously or subconsciously look look towards the past for a solution to and so i'm hearing echoes of this throughout your book and our discussion you know things like the paleo diet people are like okay we're unhealthy and i need to eat better i need to look back to to some past that that had the answer um you know obviously there's the golden age fallacy that many people might be familiar with where you know you constantly look people want to look back to a golden age they want to rebuild there's been you know many movies based around this idea and i'm wondering if you can start talking about the concept of senescence what does that mean in terms of biology and then how do you tie that to the civilization level analysis that you have in the book sure um so let's start with the basics senescence is the process that most people would call aging specifically it is the process by which biological organisms grow more feeble and inefficient with age so a diamond ages but it doesn't get less diamondy a person ages and they get less persony um so that's the process we now have a really good idea why it happens because george williams one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century outlined a very elegant argument that made wonderful predictions that allowed us to test it in 1957 and the short answer is you have a genome that is too small to do all of the things that are necessary to make a critter as complex as you so almost everything in the genome does more than one thing that's called pliotropy and the implication of pliotropy is that there will be some subset of genes that do something that is beneficial for you early in life at some cost late in life and the key insight is that selection cares much more about the early benefits than the late costs and the reason a short version of the reason is that many people don't live long enough to experience the late costs and so the early benefits are a bargain right so if you imagine that you had a gene that you were carrying around a gene that would cause your heart to explode on your 111th birthday chances are that thing is going to cost you nothing because you're not very likely to get to your 111th birthday so if it was coupled to some early life benefits selection would see it as a smoking bargain so selection collects all of these plyo trophies that function this way and the cost is that as you get older you expose more of these late life harms and eventually they cause you to decohere enough that you can't continue all right so let's just say that that idea has been tested very thoroughly and it turns out to be right and disturbingly predictive okay now the reason that this is connected into civilization is that we have unwittingly built almost exactly an analogous process into our civilization and it works like this we incentivize you to innovate stuff we reward you if you've done it well through profit and what this means is that if you come up with some process that's spectacularly awesome right then you will be heavily rewarded and so there's a a race to find all of the spectacularly awesome stuff that we don't know how to do yet and to bring it to the market but the problem is each of those things that you bring to the market comes with downsides right when we first innovated the internal combust connection it you know on its own was a miraculous thing it allowed you to take um a flammable substance and use it to do almost any kind of physical work you would want to do from transporting yourself to running a factory whatever it's a great thing but it carried within it the capacity to alter the atmosphere in a way that could make the earth much less habitable right but that cost is very delayed and here's the tricky part in our system we award economic gains for these kinds of innovations those economic gains then translate into political power right so profit becomes political power and that political that political power means that once we discover what the downsides of these things are there's no way to go back you can't undo these things because the industries that generate them are so powerful by the time you discover why the consequences are intolerable that there's no there's no halting it so we keep accumulating these processes that have an early benefit right and a late cost and we are now as a civilization suffering the collective harm of all of those late costs just like a feeble old person right so what what we've now done if there's nothing wrong in that analysis what we've now done is said you've got a process that is going to result in the death of that civilization by virtue of the fact that you have structured economic profit in a way that generates political power and makes it so you can't undo things that turn out to be net harmful right and that is either a problem that we can solve or it isn't and then i'm afraid our fate is sealed final question related to that directly two opposing viewpoints on how you would view this problem of civilizational senescence one perhaps the optimistic view is somehow someway we can come up with new a new narrative or new narratives that re-cohere society and get rid of the chaotic path that you might argue that we're on the more pessimistic view is no such narrative can be constructed and so we need to let things run their course before something new comes the next generation so the question is almost to use the biological analogy can you make the senescent individual young again or do you simply have to let nature do its thing and wait for the next generation to to rise up is there a way to to construct a new narrative to recohere society that you can even imagine i'm not so sure that those are different answers i think those are the same answer what we have to do is recognize that we this society is going to die right it can't continue because it's just it is unsustainable in the clearest possible terms that does not mean that the lineage that underlies it has to go with it right if that lineage is wise it will understand that it has to give birth to a next system right and and i very specifically argue that there are many things about our system that should be preserved into that next one so just exactly as we humans and our all of our mammalian and vertebrate ancestors have done this we need to give rise so i guess this is more mammalian but we need to give rise to that next civilization and we need to imbue it with the values the characteristics from our civilization that worked really well and we need to free it from the ones that were flawed that were fatally flawed well we need we need to unhook the societal antagonistic plyotrophies right but that does require recognition of what all of the early benefits that we are that we are reveling in to varying degrees are actually tied to late stage costs and there will be disagreement of course over which of the early benefits are actually tied to late costs and therefore disagreement as to what things need to be unhooked and this i mean that to some degree that is sort of a classic you know in in you know that golden era of sort of political discourse from 20 or 30 years ago when it seemed like all was chaos but it was certainly better than it is now that's sort of a classic disagreement between liberals and conservatives right like you know to what degree do you need to you know hold on look to the back you know look look to the past and um try to keep things as they are as opposed to um you know let go of the reins and just you know plummet ahead and you know we're arguing for we as as liberals are arguing actually neither of those at this point neither of those is the right move we certainly can't go back that's just not an option there are things from our history that are still relevant and valuable and beautiful and necessary um but there are many things yet undiscovered that we will need to discover in order to proceed yeah and uh i know you're leading us here but the final chapter of the book is really about this process and we make the argument that we do not know enough to blueprint that next civilization we have to navigate to that next civilization we have to prototype and we have to move towards the thing that i think is actually pretty easy to define in terms of what it should accomplish right we need a non-utopian sustainable system that liberates people which doesn't mean frees them to do everything it means engages in enlightened regulations so that people are liberated to do things that matter meaningfully liberated not just technically liberated and um you know again we don't know enough to say how that society would work and i think it's fair to say that the three of us are not going to live to see the project completed but were we to begin that process things could get better pretty quickly right if we could we could be living in an era in which there was plenty of meaningful work to do if we understood that we were actually headed somewhere that because this that we are doing is not sustainable and we need to get somewhere that is sustainable right there's a lot that we could do to move in that direction and it would immediately give us purpose that at the moment i think we're just simply lacking one last time for people what's the title of the book what's your one or two sentence summary and when does it come out it's a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century uh it provides an evolutionary toolkit for understanding our modern condition uh with an understanding of the past and where we can go from here and it comes out on september 14 2021 and where can people find you guys generally speaking uh we have we have websites we have twitter's uh the dark horse podcast the dark horse podcast uh you know brett weinstein's darquar's podcast where we do weekly live streams which we call the evolutionary lens and boy i don't know where else yeah i'm not prepared for that question yet well thank you guys for your time i will link to all that stuff in the episode description and show notes and if you haven't read the book check it out it is very interesting i think it's accessible and very well written even if you don't have a specific background in evolutionary thinking and in some ways that's maybe it's maybe a book for that person if you don't have that background so uh congratulations on the book and thank you for your time thank you so much [Music] you

Channel: Mind & Matter Podcast

Views: 5,253

Keywords: Biology, Evolution, Evolutionary Biology, Evolutionary Lens, Darkhorse, Darkhorse Podcast, Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, Nick Jikomes, Science, Diet, Dieting, Sleep, Mating, Dating, Sex, Drugs, Psychedelics, Magic Mushrooms, Psilocybin, Cannabis, Marijuana, THC, CBD, Civilization, Culture, Consciousness, Religion, Shamanism, Sunlight, Human Evolution, Hunter Gatherers, Behavior, Human Behavior, Language, Brain, Brain Evolution

Id: GOZ4m202OYQ

Length: 169min 2sec (10142 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021