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Heather. Hi, Brett Weinstein, welcome back to the show previously apart now together. Mix super excited to have you guys.
Thank you.
For having us. Thanks for having us. Glad to be
back, dude. The new book a hunter gatherers Guide to the 21st century. I loved it. It is absolutely extraordinary. And I want to begin with a quote from the book that is quite ominous. And then I want to see what you guys have to say about this bad. Boy. Here we go. This is literally a direct quote from the book towards the end. But and I quote, we are headed for collapse, civilization is becoming incoherent.
Found us. I'd love to know what you guys mean by that, and if that to you is a big part of the thread through the book because it was for
me. Well, the first thing to say is that you skipped the warning in the front of the book that it should only be read while sitting down. So, fall over and injure themselves. Yeah. Well, we are headed for collapse. That's really not even an extraordinary claim. If you just simply extrapolate out from where we are. We are outstripping. The planets capacity.
To house us and we don't appear to have a plan for shifting gears. So it's really a factual statement. Now, the question really is why and the bitter pill is that the very thing that made us? So successful, as a species is Now setting us up for disaster, that is to say our evolutionary capacity to solve problems has outstripped. Our capacity to adapt to the new world that we've created for.
For ourselves, and so, we've become psychologically, and socially and physiologically and politically unhealthy, and our civilization, isn't any better that said, if any species could get us out of this mess. It's us. Like, you know, it's exactly as Brett said, we are the most labile, the most adaptable, the most generalist species on the planet and born with the most potential to become anything else previously unimagined. So I do
You'll like in the end, the message of the book, which is explicitly and consistently evolutionary and all of its different instantiations is hopeful and yes, that that quote that you read is ominous. And I think as Brad said, you know, factual statement, but we can do this. We have, we have to do it and we need to try and in fact, in evolutionary biology. We recognize something we call adaptive Peaks, and adaptive value.
Please. And it would have to be true that to shift gears to something much better. Something that that gave humans, more of what it is that we all value. We would have to go through an Adaptive Valley and it would look frightening. And in fact, they are dangerous places to be but it's part and parcel of shifting from one mode of existence to another. All right,
I think an idea that's going to be really important to get across and this is something as a guy that only ever thought I would talk about business. And then in trying to explain how to get
The business I kept having to come back to mindset and then trying to explain mindset. I keep having to go to Evolution. It's like that. We're having a biological experience that your brain is an organ. It comes, you guys said that we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest of slates, which I think is a phenomenal way to put this idea. And I want to tie that to the title and get you guys a steak. So it's a hunter gatherers Guide to the 21st century. And so the way that I take that is that notion you have to understand that your product of evolution that
Our brain is a product of evolution. And then once you understand the forces of evolution and how we got here, then maybe just maybe we can find our way out of it. So what are the key elements to being a product of evolution that you think people miss that? We must understand if we're going to navigate our way. Well, out of this Valley of
evolution. Let me say first that, the title hunter-gatherers Guide to the 21st century evokes that sort of romanticized hunter-gatherer on.
African savanna of the Paleolithic, which of course, is a part of our human history. And does have many lessons in it, to teach us about who we are now and who we can become. But as we say in the book, we are all parts of our history. Like we are not just hunter-gatherers. We are also right now. Post industrialists. And there are evolutionary implications of that, go a little farther back, a lot, farther back depending on your Framing and we are agriculturalists go. Farther back, were hunter-gatherers go farther back.
The primates were mammals were fish all of these moments of our evolutionary history have left, their Mark in us and have something to teach us about both what our capacities are, and what our weaknesses are and what we can do going forward.
And I would add the Lessons From Evolution are both good and bad here. One thing that we realized that our students over the course of many years of teaching, this material realized was that everything about our experience as human beings, is shaped by our evolutionary nature. And that has a very disturbing up shot because we are fantastic creatures with an utterly mundane.
Mission the very same mission that every other evolved creature has two logits genes in the future and that this actually explains the nature, not only of our physical beings but of our culture and our perception of the world. So understanding that all of that marvelous architecture is built for an utterly. Mind-numbing purpose is an important first step in seeing where to go. But the other thing to realize and you referenced our
Our assertion that we are the blankest Slate that has ever existed or has ever been produced by Evolution. And what this means is that we actually have an arbitrary map of what we can change that to the extent that our genomes have offloaded. Much of the evolutionary, adaptive work to the software layer. That means we are actually capable of changing that layer, because that layer is built for change, but not everything exists in that layer. So some things about
What we are are very difficult to change. Some things are actually trivial easily changed and knowing which is, which is a matter of sorting out where the information is house. But it's all there for the same reason. It's exactly, it's all there. For the same reason. It's all evolutionary be a genetic or cultural or anything else.
Can you guys give us an example of and I found this very provocative in the book and it certainly Rings true to me, but that to say that we are in some ways fish from an evolutionary standpoint.
That we are, you know, in some ways primates from an evolutionary standpoint. What does that mean? Exactly.
Again? It's a factual claim. One that once you've seen the picture standing from the right place is uncontroversial. When we say, you know, is a platypus. Warm-blooded. We are not asking a question about its phylogeny, right? We're asking about how it works, right? When we ask is a whale a mammal. We are asking a question about phylogeny. So when
Ask the question are humans fish. If we are asking a functional question than maybe not, but if we're actually asking a question, akin to is a mouse a mammal, right? Then we are asking a question about the evolutionary relatedness of that creature to everything else and the key thing you need to understand. Is that a group, a good evolutionary group, like, mammal or primate, or ape is a group that if you imagine the Tree of Life?
Falls from the Tree of Life with a single clip, right? If you clip the Tree of Life at a particular place, all of the Apes fall together. If you clip it lower down all of the primates fall together and the claim that we are fish is a simple matter of. If we agree that a shark is a fish and we agree that a guppy is a fish. If you clip the tree of life such that you capture, those two species, you will inherently capture all the tetrapods, which is to say creatures.
Like us. So we are fish as a factual matter if the question is one of evolutionary relatedness, so let me know if I may just say say that in in slightly different words. There are at least two main ways to be similar, right? You can be similar because you have shared history and you can be similar because you have converged on some solution and so dragonflies and swans. Both fly not because the most recent common ancestor of dragonflies and swans.
Flu. But because in each of their environments, flight was an Adaptive response and that means that flying flying anus is not a phylogenetic. It's not a historical representation of what those two things are. Whereas if you say, well both Matt, both Wales and humans lactate in order to feed their babies. That is a description of something that they both.
Added from a shared ancestor, right? So the earliest mammal lactated to feed its young. If any organism on the planet today that is descendant of that first mammal. That lactated to feed, its young is a mammal. Even if some future mammal went a different way and lost the ability to elect a, it would still be a mammal. So, Brett mentioned tetrapods tetrapods. Can we do with the fish that came out onto land with four feet?
And started moving around and it's amphibians, and reptiles, and the birds and the mammals. But snakes are tetrapods, not because they still have four feet because they don't, but because they are member of those that group. So, it's a historical description of group membership as opposed to like a technological description of what we're doing. So, we're not aquatic like most fish are, but we're fish because we belong to a group that includes all the fish.
Now I'm going to say why I think that matters and why I think you guys put that at the beginning of a book that sort of has this punch line of like Hey, we're really headed towards disaster and we have to be very thoughtful and here are some solutions. So the reason why in business you end up having to talk about evolution is because I need a business owner to understand, you cannot trust your impulses because your impulses may not have the growth of your business in mind. It may not reflect an understanding of consumer Behavior. It may simply be something from our evolutionary past. That was
Like, akin to, it's better to jump away from the garden hose thinking that it might be a snake than it is to think that it might be a garden hose. And it really is a snake. And once you understand, okay, my mind is structured in a certain way. It has these insane biases. It tends me towards certain things like the one that bothers me. The absolute most is that when people have a feeling, it feels so real, it and you never translate it into logic. So, you're like that thing makes me angry. Therefore, it is bad.
It must be, attacked assailed whatever. And if you run a business like that, if you cannot Divorce Yourself from, I have an Impulse stop that insert conscious control and then figure out sort of what the first principles logical buildup IS. You can't solve a novel problem and until you can solve a novel problem, in an environment that changes as rapidly as our current world. You guys, call it hyper novelty. If I remember correctly, you you get into these crazy making scenarios.
And so, while it seems almost absurd to say that in some way, we are fish. The key point that I take away from your book and that just seemed so powerful to recognize to me is that you have to understand that you, it wasn't a perfect construction. At least not towards modern goals. Does that make sense to you
guys? Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, there are there really to up shots to this claim that you are a fish.
It's very hard for people to wrap their minds around it the first time, but once you realize that, this is what we mean. When we say, you know, a whale is a mammal that we are making a claim about the tree of life. Then you can actually teach yourself how adaptive Evolution works just by simply recognizing that snakes are the most species clade of legless. Lizards snakes are lizards, right? You don't think of it that way but they are seals are bears that have returned to the Sea, right? So once you
Understand that all you have to do is say actually this is a that it's unambiguous. And that means an Adaptive evolution is the kind of process that can turn a bear into an aquatic creature like a seal, right? So that's wondered into snake, right? Or a lizard into a snake. The other thing that you mentioned and you're right on the money, which is that if you use your intuitive honed instincts in order to sort through novel problems, you will constantly upend yourself because those instincts aren't
With those problems in mind. Now, the thing that's special for us humans is that we have an alternative and the alternative we argue in the second to last chapter of the book is consciousness, that the correct tool for approaching novel problems is to promote whatever the underlying issue is to Consciousness to share it. Between individuals who will likely have different experience will see different components of it clearly. And to come to an emergent understanding of what the
Meaning of the problem is and what the most likely useful solution may be. So, in some sense, really what you're saying is in this context, you're trying to get people to get into their conscious mind and process this as a team activity rather than go with their gut, which is very likely wrong. Absolutely. And, you know, our capacity as humans, but that includes as a modern human, who is trying to engage in business with people to oscillate between this conscious state.
A cultural state which is one in which actually maybe change isn't happening. So rapidly, maybe the rules that we've got our good for the current situation. Let's just do this. Let's do a set and forget on this set of things over here and not not constantly. Renegotiate. Whereas in this other part of the landscape. We actually do need to stay in our conscious minds. And yes, we need to Tamp down the emotion and Tamp down the, you know, the quick gut response. But engage with one another and
Guys that, you know, it's not Satan on the other side of the interaction. It's another human being with all the same kinds of strengths and weaknesses as each of us has.
Yeah. There's a really interesting thing that happens when you have a team around you whether their employees or otherwise where the literally just the other day. I said something to my team and several of them misconstrued it and I could see they were having a big emotional response. And I said, okay, tell me your objection in a single sentence.
With no commas. No run-ons. No parentheticals. And what you find is that old Einstein, quote of if you can't explain it, simply. You probably don't understand it very well. And so people have this emotional reaction, but they, and they then enact out in the world that emotional reaction, but they don't actually stop to take the time to be able to say it, in a single sentence. And so, you end up in what my my wife and business partner and I call you end up having to chase them because you'll solve the Bell. Say, here's my problem. You'll solvents a cool. So if I do something that
That addresses that and I'll be like, well, it's not quite that, it's this and then you solve that and they're like, well, it's not and it's like, when you force people to say something really, simply it forces them to interpret that emotion to bring it into the conscious mind and then, to actually deal with it, which I find utterly fascinating. Do you guys have a method by which you do that in your own lives or that you've taught other people to do it?
Yeah, I would say there's a first go to move which is, let's figure out where we are.
actually disagree about and very frequently. You can cover half the distance or more just simply by separating an issue into two different ones. So for example, if I talked to a conservative audience, I know we're going to disagree about climate change, but I also know from experience that I can get a conservative audience to agree that if they believed that human activity.
Was causing substantial change to the climate and that that was going to destabilize systems on which we were dependent. That they would be enthusiastic about doing something about it. And so what we really disagree about is whether or not we are causing something sufficient that we need to take that action, right? That's half the distance covered in a matter of just simply dividing it into two puzzles. And you'd be amazed, almost everything that we have Fierce disagreements about. Look like this, where you just sort of assumed the other side has every defect rather than
I think we agree to a point at which point we differ. Yeah, now in this is this is different from what we were just talking about, right? With regard to you know, you having an emotional or an analytical response. This is a question of okay. We think we're talking about the same thing, but probably we are using the same words for different categories in our, yes, and can we can we figure out how many subcategories there are? And, you know, say, I've got five in my thing. You've got five or maybe there's only two that overlap.
That so maybe we focus on those two, but maybe there's also may be that, you know, the devil in the details is in one of those. One of those other six that is only in one of the people's brains and when it's revealed to be like actually you think I believe that thing and I don't like that's not something we share between us. So yeah having the capability to go in and like zoom in and out on problems and say actually the problem can be smaller than you think. And and also it is larger than you think. And then I think and let's constantly
We re-evaluate the the framing and the scale at which we're doing analysis.
You guys talk in the book about theory of mind and Heather. I know you've either started writing have written or have threatened to write a science fiction novel which, you know, I desperately want you to do and publish but I've started doing a game. When I find myself in that situation where and I learned this in my previous company where both my partners are really smart guys, but every now and then we get in an argument and
Be like, I think they're an idiot, but I know they're not an idiot and they think I'm an idiot, but I'm not an idiot. And so I started approaching it as a writer and saying, okay, if I were writing this character in this scene, what would have to be true for them to be acting this way? What would they have to believe? Be thinking whatever? And in my marriage, this has become an extraordinary tool of saying for you to be reacting this way. You would have to think that I believe XYZ is that the issue. And then by getting to that one?
Base assumptions. You can really begin to facilitate that you guys must have encountered, this a bazillion times with students. How do you unearth that? Like, what's the process of uncovering that especially? In fact. It is so weird to me that you two have become like the most, the tag people on planet Earth. I, I will never quite understand how this has happened. But how do you guys tease out and not just go out there?
Evil, how do you find those underlying issues?
Well, first of all, I think we're attacked because we look like, villains. Sure. It's so much. So, right, exactly. Well, you, you hinted an important issue here that I think is actually quite modern. So if you lived any sort of normal existence from an ancestor, you know, even in just a couple hundred years before the present you would find that. They pretty much grew up around the people that they ended up.
Acting with as adults. They didn't stray very far from home. Everything would be incredibly familiar and the language that they use to interact with everybody. They were encountering would have been shared because it would have been picked up from an immediate group of ancestors that they both knew right when we use English to talk to someone else. We have an incredibly blunt tool because the ancestor from which we picked up that shared language is quite distant. And what this does, you know,
You really have two kinds of people in the world. You've got people who more or less use the tool like English as it was handed to them and they don't question and you have people who are trying to break new ground. And what is true for everybody who breaks new ground is that they end up building a personal toolkit? They will redefine words. So that they become sharper and more refined and more useful. And then when you put to such people together, they will talk right past each other because they don't remember that.
Need to find things. So, one thing that is essential, if you are going to team up with someone else who is generative and done, their own work and arrived at some interesting conclusion. You need time. It's weeks of talking to each other before you even understand how they use language. Once you do that, you can have an incredible conversation. But if you think you're going to sit down with them and immediately pool what, you know, and get somewhere, you got another thing coming because at first, they're going to sound like, they don't know what they're talking about, right? You've got to find those definitions.
And figure out what they mean and it's actually if it once you realize that this is the job, it's very pleasurable and it's really an honor. When somebody lets you look through their eyes, you say. Oh, that's how you see the world and now I get a chance to see it that way and then let me show you what I'm seeing and you really can get somewhere, but there's no shortcut about the time necessary to learn each other's language. That's right. And that that really is a parallel for what we're doing in the classroom as well. You know, we didn't know if we were, if we were teaching
World. We were teaching freshmen. We didn't assume that they all came in as experts obviously. And yet the same logic applies that everyone has, I wouldn't say, I actually, I don't think I really agree that, you know, regardless of what language you're speaking, you either take it on on faith. As as you have received it or you act decisively to change it. I think teenagers tend to be modifying language, pretty actively. And so especially when you find yourself in a
A roomful of relatively young people in a college classroom. You have a lot of people here were using language differently than you. The professor does and then you're also in the business of introducing to them, you know, a set of tools some of which has specialized language associated with it associated, with whatever it is that you're teaching and finding the Common Ground between these like, okay, actually, all of us modify language some and let's figure out how to
Use language that we can all agree on and understand and for the purposes of communication as opposed to for the purposes of displaying group membership. Yeah. In fact, that's because that's what jargon is often is about group membership displays, and that's what you know, memes and especially. Well, a lot of them, a lot of the very rapidly changing language, that doesn't happen in technical Space. Is really about demonstrating that you're on the inside of some some joke. Well,
Really? This is a perfect case of a personal definition that must be shared. Otherwise, you can't talk, right? Because I at least distinguish between terms of Art and jargon. Most people will use the term. Jargon for both things. But the point is terms of art are a necessary evil, right? You have to add some special term because the language that your hand at the general language doesn't cover it as you need a special term to describe something. And that means that somebody walking into the conversation isn't necessarily.
The aware of what's being said, until they've learned that term. Jargon is the pathological version of this. Jargon is the use of these specially defined terms to exclude people from a conversation that they probably could understand. And that they might even realize you didn't know what you were talking about if they could understand the words that you are using. So you use those words to protect yourself and until somebody gets that when you say jargon, you're not talking about specialist language. You're talking about a competitive strategy.
They won't know what you're saying. So and you know, the difference of Heather points out is in a room full of 18 year olds, especially when you're the professor at some level you can say, look here are the terms that we need in order to have this conversation and more or less people will adopt them because that's the natural state of things rather than to peers getting together where you have to, you know, my rule is I don't care whether the definition ends up being the one that I came up with, for your set of definitions. It doesn't matter to me. What I need is a
For everything that needs to be distinguished and we both need to know what those terms are in order to have the conversation. But whose terms they are doesn't matter. Well. And yet, as I think we say, in the book, our undergraduate advisor, Bob Trevor's extraordinary evolutionary biologist when we were leaving college and applying to grad school. He gave us a piece of advice about what kinds of jobs. We might, ultimately want, if we were to stay in Academia, and he said, do not accept a job in which you were not exposed.
To undergraduates because teaching undergraduates means exposing yourself and the thinking that you are presenting to, too naive Minds, who will throw curve balls at you. And some of those curve balls are going to be nuisances and maybe they'll waste your time. But some of them are likely to reveal to you the Frailty in your own thinking, or in the thinking of the field and that is the way the progress is made. And so, you know, whom we call peers is
Up for discussion and recognizing that we can, we can all learn from almost every person that we interact with is a remarkable Way Forward and the corollary to that is. There's a lot of pressure not to reveal what you don't know by asking questions, that will establish the boundaries of your knowledge and being Courageous about actually acknowledging. What you don't know often leads to the best conversations, right?
You guys do talk about that in the book and I think that this is such
An important idea. I'd love to tie it to something else. You talk about which is
what is science.
Like you guys have a pretty unique take on what science is that? It could be done with a machete and a pair of boots out in the jungle. It can be done in a laboratory. What is science?
Science is a method for correcting for bias. And that method is pretty well known. It is had a few updates along the way but the basic idea is it is a slightly cumbersome mechanism for correcting for human bias. And the result is that it produces a set of models and a, a scope of knowledge that improves over time.
What improves means is it explains more while assuming less, and then and fits with all of the other things that we think are true maximum, right? Ultimately all true, narratives must reconcile and that includes the scientific narratives that we tell at different scales, right? The nanoscale has to fit with the macroscopic scale. Even if we don't understand how they fit together yet. So ultimately, we're sort of filling in from both sides. What?
You understand? And what we expect is that they will meet in the middle like a bridge and if they don't it means we got something wrong somewhere. Yeah, so science is not the methods of science. It's not the glassware and the expense of instrumentation and it's not the indicators that you're a scientist because you're wearing these things, you know, it's not the lab coat and it's not the conclusions of science. It's not the things that we think we know many of which things are actually true. And some of
which part science is the process and all those other things are sort of Hallmarks that may or may not be accurate. Proxies when you're trying to figure out is that person doing science is the science over here, but what science is actually process and it's worth saying that you don't need it for Realms that are not counterintuitive, right? You don't need to do science in order to figure out where the desk chair is before you sit down, right? It is apparent to you where the desk chair is because you're built to perceive it.
Directly now every so often we all have the experience of looking at something and not being able to figure out what we're seeing there. Some optical illusion. The way we are sitting, where we are in relation to the object, we're looking at, and then you will go through a scientific process, you know, if that is a so and so that also suggests this and I can see that. That's not true. So what could it be right? That that process is scientific but by and large the direct perception of objects around you because it is intuitive because it's built to be intuitive. Your
Item is built to understand it in a way that makes it intuitive. Doesn't require this. So we need science where things are sufficiently difficult to observe or counterintuitive. So you need a process to correct for your expectations.
What drives all this to me and that gets missed. Even though it's sitting in plain sight is to make progress. You must hunger to know where you are wrong and if you can derive and again, I commit everything from a business lens in business. If you can derive tremendous, pleasure and quite
Frankly, self-esteem from your willingness, to seek out the imperfections in your thinking, you'll actually make it, if you don't, and it's an ego protective game for you and your ego is built around being right. Then you're you're going under and to your point about exposing yourself to undergrad, some of the most phenomenal, like incisive questions challenging. My leadership have come from like interns who just they've never had a job before. And so they're like, oh, why are we doing x y z? And, you know, I quiet.
Are we doing that? And if in that moment you're like, I am must, you know, present myself and have a reason for why we were doing that. You actually talked yourself into something and because the market much like Evolution or reality, which is something I want definitely to talk about how there's a weirdness that we're living through now, where people feel like if they can convince you through language of something, that it actually somehow affects the underlying truth, but in business, the market does not care. Like you can convince your team that you're right, but
If the market doesn't embrace it, you're going to fail and there's something wonderful about that.
Well, I want to, I want to push back slightly admittedly. This is not an area of expertise, but it seems to me that there are two things that business needs to be divided into two things in order to really understand what you're getting at the business, where the market is actually in a position to test your understanding of what is true and what will work and what people want and things like that.
Is one thing that's real business and then there's a kind of rent seeking in which it may be about, you know, a company that does not have a functional product that is selling the idea that it will have a product that no one else will have and its stock price Rises as a matter of speculation that may, well be a realm in which it is. It is deception. In fact, it's this is beyond the scope of the book.
But, wherever perception is the mediator of success. You have deception as an important evolutionary Force where physics dictates whether you've succeeded or failed. You don't have that problem. You can't fool physics. So, I don't know what the two words for the two kinds of business are, but the rent-seeking part of business and the actual production of superior Goods, or the same Goods at a cheaper price. That's a different kind of business structure.
Sure.
Well, here's what's interesting, really fast on that point. I think that they do fall under the same category. So when I say that the market decides, so if your pitch is, hey, boys and girls, we have to deceive the market and we have to, you know, game it and here's how we game it. And so everything is a function of your goal. So if your goal is to deceive and to, you know, create a pump in your stock price, there is a way to do that that will work. And there is a way to do that, that won't work. And now getting into on,
Rebel goals versus, you know, dishonorable goals that that is really fascinating but I think that they do fall into the same category of either. The thing you do moves you towards your goals or it does
not. Yep. I mean, I still think there's room for division because there is, you know, the mythology of the market is that it pays for value and rent-seeking violates that rent-seeking effectively is a failure of the market and so, I don't know.
No, I don't know where the definitional split needs to be, but it does seem to me that. Although, you're right, the, the, you know, whether whether what you are doing, is assessing what you believe the psychology of the market to be, or whether you are assessing, what might be physically possible in terms of a product. Those are both real systems that you are either correct about or not. But there does seem to me to be a distinction between rent-seeking and the production of actual value. And there's a Perfect Analogy to be made to
Science, of course, and so, and Academia. If you are a scientist, you are supposed to be seeking an understanding of reality. But the way that modern science is done, involves a lot of requesting of Grants from most of the federal government and just as I imagined business, although definitely not my area of expertise, the bigger, you are, the harder it is to change course. And in Academia, in part that means the later in your career. You are the harder.
It is to change course and therefore the harder it's going to be to do something like Embrace that you were wrong. And you know, actual honorable good scientists will always will always fess up and talk publicly about when they were wrong. But if your entire lab is contingent on a model of the universe, that is turning out to look, ever less likely, it's going to be much more difficult for you to do that for you to embrace the wrongness of, you know, what might be the livelihoods of not just
You, but many of the people who are working under you. How would you handle it?
Well, you have to restructure things so that what actually matters is being right in the long term. What we have is an epidemic of corruption inside of science, which has more or less been spotted first with respect to psychology and psychology is difficult to do because you're inherently looking into the mind and you don't have a direct ability to measure most of what's there. But the P hacking crisis, basically, the abuse of
Six to create the impression of discovery, which then resulted in the inability to reproduce a large fraction of the results in Psychology is actually the tip of a much larger iceberg that basically science as a process is excellent, but science, as a social environment is defective. And especially defective, where we have plugged it, very directly into Market incentives, and we've put
Scientists at an unnatural level of competition, for a tiny number of jobs. We produce huge numbers of applicants which means that the incentive to cheat is tremendous and those who stick to the rules. Probably don't succeed very well. So basically what we have is a race to discover who is best at appearing scientific and delivering those things that that the field wants to believe rather than those things at the field needs to know.
The short answer to your question, which is an especially operationalize herbal is you need to put a firewall between Market forces and the scientific Endeavor because although science is an incredibly powerful process. It is also a fragile process that needs insulation from Market forces or it cannot work. So I would say just in brief again, not particularly operationalize Ebola, but reward public error, correction, right? No matter, no matter what stage you are.
What the nature of the error was, unless there was intentional fraud, which of course, does exist public error. Correction should be rewarded without shaming without loss of priority in other things and the ability to do science. Because, not only do we need people to be able to see that they've made mistakes and actually course correct, but we need people to be taking enough risks early on that. They are likely to sometimes make errors.
And so in the current environment where any error it can be considered like the death knell for a career. We have ever more timid scientists and that is making us less good at science as a society. And in fact, it almost seems implausible that people would go around acknowledging their errors, but it wasn't so long ago that this was fairly common. In fact, I used to study bats and there's a famous example of this not so long ago, a guy.
I'm Pettigrew had Advanced a radical hypothesis that suggested that the old world fruit bats. The so-called flying foxes were in fact, not part of the same evolutionary history as the bats that we see here in the new world. For example, the microbats. He argued that they were in fact flying primates, which was a fascinating argument. It was based on their neurobiology looking more like monkey neurobiology than it does like bat neurobiology, which turned out to be the
Result of the fact that they use their eyes rather than Michael. Okay ssion. I'm so it was wrong. And what he said at the point that it was revealed by the genes that he had been wrong. Was if it is a wrong hypothesis. It has been a most fruitful wrong hypothesis, which was absolutely right. The work. That was done to sort that out was tremendously valuable. And so anyway, nobody who has had to course-correct and admit an error finds it pleasant, but we have to restore.
The rules of the game where the longer you? Wait the worse. It is. So that the incentive is, as soon as you know, you're wrong, owning up to it so that you are on the right side of the puzzle, as quickly as possible, that that has to be the objective.
As you guys look at society and where we're at now. So one problem, you've obviously just very eloquently laid out. You've got incentives around admitting that you're wrong, is it could be the death knell of your career. What else is going on? That makes you guys.
I have that quote that we started the the episode with around, you know, sort of the use of were disintegrating but that there's to put my own words to it. There's a crazy making that's happening at the societal level. What has led to that? Like what are three or four factors that are causing that
breakdown?
Well, in part, you know, the bias that we have as evolutionary biologists, is that we see a failure to understand what we are as producing short-term reductionist metric, heavy, pseudo quantitative answers to questions that warrant a much more holistic and emergent approach. And so what are some of the things that modern humans have embraced or have been told to embrace and some of us have in some of us, haven't that have
Helped produce problems for modern people. This is not, this is not new with us. But the ubiquity of screens the change in parenting styles to protect children from risk and unstructured play and the drugging of children. Legally with anti-anxiety and anti-depression meds molar likely if they're girls and was speed, if they're boys, those three things in combination all of, which were sort of on the rise in the 90s and hit fever.
Pitch and he in the odds and early teens helped produce a generation that became embody adults, but with Minds that had not had a chance yet to actually learn what it is to be human and some of that is reversible and you know, really we just by by chance. We were College professors.
We were College, professors for basically the entire period of time during which Millennials were in college. So we taught Millennials from from beginning to end. And almost to a person, our students were amazing, and receptive, and creative, and incapable. And if you, when we talk about the generation of Millennials, it's those people who were drugged and screened and helicopters snowplow Parenthood, right? So with individual,
Attention people can be pulled out of the tailspin, but at a societal level, that's exactly what we're in is a tailspin. What is the tailspin
exactly that? What is it about? Those things? That what does it create in people?
I want to address that as part of a slight, reorientation of the question. So one of the things that is causing the dysfunction is, you know, it's not just the fact of the screens, but it's what they imply that virtually.
Everything that people know is coming through a social channel, right? So it is all open to manipulation augmentation Distortion and what people generally do not pick up in the normal course of an education. Even what we considered to be a high quality education is interaction with systems that allow you to check whether or not that which sounds right actually comports with logic. So for example,
Well, if you interact with an engine, you can't fool an engine into starting, you either figure out why it isn't starting or you don't. And so, we advocated for students that they dedicate some large fraction of their education to systems that are not socially, mediated in which success or failure is dictated by a physical system that tells you whether or not you've understood or fail to understand, and this can be mechanics or carpentry, but it also can be
Baking frankly or learning to play the guitar, right? Were or park or anything where success or failure is non-arbitrary. What you don't want is an education built entirely of I succeeded. When the person at the front of the room, told me, I got it because of the person at the front of the room is a dope, which unfortunately happens too often. You may pick up wrong ideas and feel rewarded for believing in them and that can result in tremendous confusion. I would rather just finally say,
That the book really is about what we have informally called an evolutionary toolkit and that evolutionary toolkit, the beauty of it. What we saw and what students reported to us in there, picking it up that toolkit allows with a very small set of assumptions. The understanding of a large fraction of the phenomena that we care about, almost everything we care about us, humans is evolutionarily impacted and the ability to go through.
Do what you are told about your psychology or your teeth or anything like that and say, does that make sense? Given the highest quality Darwinism that we've got? Does it make sense to be told that our genomes suddenly went haywire and that's why an ever-increasing fraction of young. People need orthodontia. Nope. Not for a moment. Does it make sense that we have a piece of our intestine called the appendix? That is no longer of any value and yet
A huge number of people have this thing, become inflamed, and burst so that their lives are placed in Jeopardy. No, it does not the ability to check what you're being told against a set of laws. A toolkit for logic that is so robust that you can instantly spot, nonsense is a very powerful enhancement and it does not involve knowing more it involves knowing less and having that little bit that, you know, be really robust. That's terrific. I would just
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I was just about to ask what it means to no less. So thank you for that. Yeah, that is very interesting when I think about how I forget the exact quote but as the island of your knowledge, grows the shore of your ignorance grows to, you know, whatever the the famous quote, but it's a really interesting dichotomy. So all right, we've got this generation that's growing up there. Looking at screens. You guys make a pretty interesting assertion in the book about what screens do in terms of you're getting emotional.
Emotional cues from a nonhuman entity and that it may play a part in the rise in autism. I found that incredibly interesting. What I want to better understand is what's going on in our brains that so helicopter parenting, our snowplow parenting. For instance. Like why does that trap us in a Perpetual? Childhood? You guys talk about Rites of Passage in the book? I'd be very curious to hear. Like, how do we begin to deal with some of these things? Whether
It's screens, whether it's snow plow parenting, you know, if I find myself a nineteen-year-old and I realize I've been done dirty, I've been on drugs for ages. I was raised essentially by a screen. I'm, you know, having trouble connecting having trouble relating and my parents have taken care of everything for me. What are the symptoms? I need to look out for, and then how do I push
forward?
Well, in terms of symptoms, this is more or less. A it's a self-diagnosing problem. You either. None of us feel perfectly at home in modernity. Because in fact, we are not at home. We can't be even you know, the world that we live in is not the world of our grandparents. It's not even the world that we were born into we live as adults in the world that just literally didn't exist when we were born and that the world, even that our children are born into unless they were
We born yesterday, right? Exactly. It's changing so fast and you can't be. But that said, you either are feeling constantly confused about what you're seeing and hearing. And you don't know what to think or you found something that allows you to move forward. And even if you can't fully manage what it is, you're confronting. It should surprise you less and less. And so we provide a couple of tools in the book. We talk about the precautionary principle.
People. And we talked about chesterton's fence which are really two sides of the same coin. And if your life has been built around the idea that whatever the newest thing is, the, you know, the latest wisdom is what you were brought up on. Then, in all likelihood. You are, you know, taking various drugs to correct for various things, which may very well be the symptoms of the last drugs. You you took you, you know, you may be engaging in all kinds of behaviors to fix mysterious.
Plums, maybe you can't sleep and, you know, so you're taking some aggressive mechanism to deal with that. The basic point is back away from that, which is novel, and untested, and in the direction of that, which is time tested and it will result in a decrease in anxiety and increase in your control, over your own life. And the way you'll tell is that you will feel less confused more of the time. Can
you guys Define?
Chesterton's fence. I thought that was a really great part of the book.
Yeah. So, g k Chesterton was a 20th century, political philosopher. Maybe I'm not sure exactly how he would have defined himself. But of the many contributions that he made to. You know, I think he was a conservative but of one of the many contributions that he made was imagining two people on a walk together and coming across a fence that appeared to be on their way and
Person a says, let's get rid of the fence and person B says. Well, what's it here for person? A says, I don't care. It doesn't matter. I just want it gone and person B Chesterton. I suppose in My Telling here says, there's no way that I should let you get rid of the fence until and unless you can tell me what its function is. If you can tell me what its function is or was originally here for then maybe we can talk about whether or not it's time for it to go. But until you can explain to me, what the function is or was.
Was then there's no way that I should allow you to get rid of it, simply because you see it as an inconvenience. So, you know, the appendix that Brett already mentioned is a perfect example of this and we talked about in the book things. Like, you know, chesterton's breast milk, you know, we should. We should we should be abandoning breastfeeding. We are abandoning breastfeeding to the degree that we're doing. So at our Peril chesterton's, play not letting children have long periods of unstructured, play in which adults
Are not monitoring them. And are not telling them not to bully each other. Even though bullying is bad. Yes, but allowing children to figure out for themselves and mixed age groups, how it is to navigate risk themselves. That is how those children will grow into competent young people. And, you know, if you do arrive at 19, having been drugged into submission, and having had your parents, clear, all of the hazards out of the way for you. The thing you can do is start exposing yourself to risk and
Risk is risky, you know this is you know, this is both a tautology and also shocking to people because you know, wait, you're telling me I need to expose my children to risk. Well, if you want to guarantee that your child will make it to their 18th birthday alive. Then sure, put them in a cocoon, right? That's the way to make sure that their body will get to 18 is to reduce all risk from their lives and protect them from everything. But will they have the mind of an 18 year old? At that point?
No, they will not so you trade a little bit of security that your child will survive. And you know, every time I say anything like that, I get chose, you know, we have children, there are teenagers now and the idea that one of them would die and that they would die taking a risk that we had implicitly or explicitly encouraged. I don't know how you go on, right, and your parents do. But I don't know how you go on, but the bigger risk is that they get to 18 and they're incompetent. They can't
I think and they don't know how to navigate the world. Especially now where the world in the future will look nothing like it did in the past. They need to be able to problem-solve and the way to do that is to be exposed to as many situations in which they are navigating on their own as early as possible. Selection has really given parents a the job of both managing risk and not fully managing risk. In other words. It's not that you don't protect your children, but you want to protect them at a level where they
Make mistakes and those mistakes do come back to haunt them and it causes them to be wise adults who are capable of managing risk when the risks when the stakes are much higher. And that's really the question. It's not. Do you want your child to be safe? Of course you do, but you want them to be safe across their entire life. And if you protect them too much, when they are young, they will not be able to do it when they are older and the risks are frankly, much larger.
Yeah, one of the things that I find most intoxicating about you guys, your book, your podcast is,
Is nuanced complexity like recognizing that by being reductionist, by boiling things down to, you know, make them simple, but note, no further. Whatever the quote is that there is a point at which you can reduce something so far that you lose what's really going on and finding our way through all of this complexity though is incredibly difficult. So as it comes to your own parenting style, how have you guys
To this, the idea that I'm most interested of yours is the idea that the magic happens in the friction. So whether it's male female, whether it's right left, it's understanding, or safety and risk. It's understanding that it's either side is problematic. How have you guys navigated that complexity?
Well, we gambled with, neither of us knew particularly much about rearing children. At the point. We ended up with them and we more or less.
Less gambled on the idea. Which surprised me at the point that we ended up with them. No, no, that carried the months. No. No, certainly. We knew they were coming for the many months. But, but from the point of view of what one does to raise children. Well, we hadn't had a lot of experience with young kids. They just hadn't been in our lives and we gambled on an idea that I still think it's not entirely obvious. Why it works at all, but if you treat your children,
More or less at least cognitively. You just shoot way over their heads, right? You talk to them like like adults from very early on and they cannot respond in kind, but they get much more than you would think based on what they can say in response. And so we have been extremely open with our children about the hazards in the world that they face in the hazards. In our family have been
Frankly, greater than most children would be confronted with, at least in the weird world. Yeah, we have been honest with them. We, you know, we have an explicit rule in our household and the children could recite it without thought, right? You are allowed to break your arm or your leg, you are not allowed to damage your eyes. You're not allowed to damage her skull, you're not allowed to damage your neck or your back right now. When you say that to a kid and they realize actually, it's not that. I
Being told no no, no. No. No, I'm being told. I am actually allowed to break my arm and nobody is going to necessarily, you know, be concerned, you know, yes, we will take care of you no matter what and if you damage, your eyes will take care of you then to. But the basic point is there's just a fundamental distinction between damaging things which repair pretty well and damaging things, which don't and that ought to exist in your mind, you know, every time you leave the house, understanding that there are certain things, you know, that it's not that you want to avoid bad things and go towards good.
Things. It's that there's a whole spectrum of bad and you may need in an instant to navigate. You know, if you're driving down the highway. Yes. The first job is don't crash, right? Don't crash is a good rule, but you can't always not crash and sometimes you've got a choice about what you crash into or how you crash. And, you know, if you've just got everything filed as a binary, then you're in much more danger. So being clear with kids about the subtleties and the nuance and frankly about the
Find that you're in our children, know that we have made a conscious decision that in order that they can manage risk as adults. They have to face risks as children that could potentially cost them their lives. You know, we took our kids into the Amazon, for example, that's not a safe place to be, but they're also the kind of kids who can handle it now. So, one of the things that was very important to us was that our children literally learn how to fall that when they were climbing up on things on trees or in Jungle Jim's that
They would launch themselves intentionally, so they would learn how to fall safely. But metaphorically learning how to fall is the other thing that you learn, once you are engaged in literally learning how to fall and maybe maybe that is the kind of risk that we are. In fact, trying to prepare our children for in the, we are arguing that parents. Everywhere should be preparing their children for how to fall safely so that you get up and can live to maybe not fall again. But if you do Fall Again, live to get up again, another day, yeah, actually.
It occurs to me right now, the engineer's know this backwards and forwards, right? Fail-Safe. That's what you want a system that fails safely and building that into your kids is, is an essential and essential skill.
So, one of the things you talked about in the book that I was like, whoa was when your son broke his arm, and he was older. So I know when the one's broke it going down the stairs, that one required immediate medical attention, but there was a time where he broke his arm, and it was like a couple days I think before you actually went and had it looked at and there's like an actual principle behind, strengthening the bone that you guys go through and I was very impressed, talk about that including the nose.
That as this is like, you guys have overcome. One of the reasons that I didn't become a father, was it seemed so self-evident to me that you had to do things. Like, let your kids take risks, you know, within confines that you had to make things hard for them within confines. And I wasn't sure that I would enjoy that process. So it was obvious. I would have to do it and not obvious that I would enjoy it. And when you guys talked about like, how we sort of over cuddle things, which I could immediately empathize with, I get why people do it. Why you
You want to wrap a broken arm and the thickest cast you can possibly find but that even that isn't always the right answer.
Yeah. No, it's really not. That we are brands are anti fragile and our bones are anti fragile. And they they become stronger with stressors and Society, seems to be imagining that what we all are is fragile and by imagine that we're Fragile by creating conditions that imagine that were fragile, that becomes the reality, we become more and more fragile.
Unless anti fragile. So in the case of our older son or it was our younger son, but when he was older, who broke his arm in the last day of camp, we did get him to to an emergency room that day. It was several hours, but it was that day. And they told us that at the point that we got back home to Portland which was several several hour drive and it was going to be many days before we got there that we should go see an orthopedist and to have a cast, put on have a cast, put on. So we spent several days, splinted he
Split. He spent several days splinted and with some, with some pain medication, before we ended up going home to Portland and where we did not get a cast. But the important thing is this is not an experiment. We were Grant on our child before I had to learn it on myself, right? So evolutionarily speaking, there is a logic to what one does with broken bones and it's a very different logic. Lots of creatures don't heal. So, well horses, famously do.
He'll very well. The reason for this is fairly obvious, a horse, a wild ancestral horse that had a broken, limb wasn't going to recover that is to say, once an animal was hobbled by a broken limb. It was going to be picked off by a predator. So the selection that creates the capacity to repair, wasn't there on the other hand sloths which fall out of trees, fairly regularly, but don't depend on their ability to get away from predators through speed, actually survive, very frequently. And when
When we look at sloth carcasses, they very regularly have breaks that have healed. So creatures that can heal have that capacity. Our arms and humans are such creatures. We are such creatures. So one wants to be very careful. Right? If a bone is misaligned, you then want to utilize medicine in order to get the healing process to work correctly. So it doesn't heal in a misaligned way. But if you've got a fracture and you haven't misaligned something, there's a whole other logic that takes over immobilizing the arm.
What we're built for. In fact, what you're built for is to have pain and inflammation, do the job and the result, when I broke my arm, and I just said, you know what, I've thought for my whole life. Why is it that we rush to get a doctor to, to immobilize this and then we act Rafi and have it removed. We have to rebuild our strength. Maybe that's not how it's supposed to be logically. Evolution has prepared us for this. Let's see what happens when I broke my arm, and I was certain that it was not misalign and I
let it go. What I found out was a one has to be very careful for the first day or two, until you learn what it is that you're capable of doing. But your capacity begins to return very, very quickly and the degree to, which I was better off the time that I broke my arm, that I fractured my arm, and did nothing medical than the time. That I fractured my arm and did the standard medical thing, and had the cast was night and day different, and the fact.
Is we talked to Toby our younger son? When he broke his arm and we told him what we were thinking and he had watched me go through the experiment and he elected to go through it himself and lo and behold the same logic applied in his case.
Yeah, that's really interesting. And feels like there's a lot that we can extrapolate from that in terms of our real lives. One idea that I find really enticing and I'm sad that I didn't go through it. When I was a kid, our Rites of Passage. Do you
guys think about that?
All the time we have dispensed. So this is a classic chesterton's fence issue where it used to be. That there were these, you know, Hallmarks of having passed through a certain developmental State and at some point I think people started to feel that these things were primitive and they dispensed with all of them and much to our Peril. Because it, you know, what you are is a creature.
It starts out utterly helpless and ends up incredibly capable, but there are moments at which you take on new responsibilities right now. It's arbitrary is an 18 year old. Really an adult in many ways. Yes, in some ways. No, it's not really a moment of what you become an adult, but you do need a moment at which we say, actually at this point. These responsibilities are ones. We believe you can handle and going forward. That's what they are. And
And the ceremony itself instantiates it, the ceremony helps make it real and maybe it's at 18. Maybe it's at 15. Maybe it's a 13. Depending on the tradition. Maybe it's counting in a different way in cases where perhaps that here into the calendar is not the thing. But, you know, the moment now you are a man. Now, you are a woman, is has got to be an empowering one. And it's one of the things that is almost universally lost for us, us weird people and you know, it may well be the case.
It's just as is the case with something like follow through in sport. What you do after, you hit the ball actually does not matter. But it is very important that you intend to follow through. And in that same way, going through your life. Knowing that at this moment. I'm going to be expected to do this thing. Whether it's a Vision Quest, or whatever. It may be, knowing that, that moment is coming. And that on the far side of it, you will be a different person is a developmental process in and of itself. So it's very likely the thing that happens as you.
Anticipate this rite of passage that is really the important developmental thing. But we've just dispensed with them all.
So we've talked a lot about Evolution and all the different things in ways that it manifests in our life and I want to bring now people back to where we started in the book that you know, we're at if if instead of a nuclear clock coming towards 12, you guys would say that from just a societal standpoint, we're edging up.
Somewhere in there, talk to us about the 4th Frontier, but to understand the 4th Frontier. I think we have to understand the first three Frontiers. So if you can walk us through that, it was a really interesting idea. It was the part of your book that I had to read twice because I was like, whoa, there's really something. Fascinating here, and it hints at a very complex answer to a very complex problem was entirely novel for me. I have never heard this idea.
Lord before. And I think that it'll be really helpful for people to see the. You thought not just through the problem, but through potential Solutions.
Well, the first thing to realize is that all evolved creatures are effectively in a search for opportunity, and that opportunity looks like for an average creature under average circumstances. If it's a sexually reproducing creature, the average number of offspring, that it will produce that reaches reproductive maturity themselves will be two doesn't matter if they produce a hundred babies or three. The average that will reach that number is 2. And
The reason is because the population isn't growing or Contracting. So to parents will end up replacing themselves? And no better, at least on average.
When you have succeeded evolutionarily you find some opportunity that allows that rule to be broken, right? A creature that passes over a mountain pass and ends up in a valley in which it has no competitors. May leave a hundred times as many offspring as it would have if it had remained in its initial habitat. And so these places where creatures discover an unexploited or under-exploited opportunity and their population can grow our Frontiers, and
The feeling of growth is the feeling of evolutionary success. The problem is all of these things are limited. Right? No matter what opportunity you've found. The population will grow until that opportunity is no longer under exploited at which point the zero-sum Dynamics will be restored. But let's just lay out the the first three types of Frontier before. Perhaps, you you expand on what the 4th Frontier is. So the first type of Frontier being the one that most people think of, when you hear the word when they hear the word,
Tear, which is a geographic Frontier. So we begin the book by talking about the beringian is the first Americans who came over from through beringia across what is now the Bering Strait from Asia into the new world. Something between ten and twenty five thousand years ago. They were coming into two continents that had never before been inhabited by humans. And that was a vast Geographic Frontier.
The second type of Frontier might be called a technological Frontier, in which you innovate something that allows you to make use of resource that you heretofore had not had access to. So, for instance, the terracing of hillsides to allow water to be held and agricultural systems to be to be done where previously, all the water would have run off taking the nutrients in the water with it. That would be an example of a technological Frontier. And then the third type of Frontier.
Is ubiquitous throughout human history is a transfer of resource Frontier. And this is really not a frontier. It's just it's theft, right? And so, the beringian is coming into the new world for the first time again, 10 to 25, thousand years ago, it re-experiencing a geographic Frontier, thousands of years later when Europeans came to the new world of from the other direction. From from the East, they landed in a space that already had tens of millions of people.
People in it and basically took over and that was a transfer of resource moment and a transfer of resource Frontier, basically theft. So Geographic, Frontiers and technological. Frontiers are not inherently theft. Transfer resource is and so we are proposing a 4th Frontier. So I just say transfer of resource is the explanation for almost all wars and genocide from the point of view of some population, the resources of some other population that cannot be defended. Our
Zephyr front here, but the idea of the overarching idea is that all creatures are seeking these nonzero-sum opportunities that they are experienced as growth that they are inherently self. Destabilizing that they caused the growth of populations. That then restores the zero-sum Dynamics, restores the austerity, which doesn't feel so good. And the population is, then in the search, for the next nonzero-sum growth Frontier.
The problem is we can't keep doing that. Alright, that process made us what we are and we've been tremendously successful at it. But there are no more Tech, Geographic Frontiers on Earth. We've found it all technologically, we've done an excellent job of figuring out how to exploit the world. In fact, over exploit. The world transfer resource is a world destabilizing. Not only is it a Despicable process, but it is a lethal process from the point of view.
The danger. It puts us at we simply have weaponry. That is too powerful. We are too interconnected. And so in a sense our Fates are all now linked. And we have to agree to put that competition aside. And then the question is well, what do we do? Do we face? Do we accept the zero-sum Dynamics and live with austerity? That doesn't sound like a very good sales pitch even even if it was what we had to do. So what we
Proposed in the book is that there's actually an alternative to this. That one can produce a steady state, that feels like growth to the people who experience it without having to discover new resource. And that may sound Preposterous. It may sound utopian. We are not utopians. We regard Utopia as the worst idea human beings ever had, or at least very close to the top of that list, but there's nothing undoable about a system that
Tools like Perpetual growth in the same way. There is nothing utopian about the idea that it's always Springtime inside your house, right? It's always Pleasant inside your house. That's not a violation of any physical law. It's just a simple matter of the fact that we can use energy to modulate the temperature with a negative feedback system, and we can keep it very pleasant in your house all the time. And the point is, can that be done in our larger environment? Such that human beings are liberated to do the
Things that we are uniquely positioned to do to generate Beauty to experience, love to feel compassion to enhance our understanding of the world. All of those things are the kinds of things that are worthy of us as an objective and what we need in order for more people to spend their time pursuing. Those things is a system in which we are freed from competing, one lineage against the others, for a limited amount of resources.
Horses. And and the so that, you know, we are condemned to violence against each other in order to pursue these things. So in essence, the 4th Frontier is a steady state designed to liberate people. We should say it is not something. We believe we can blueprint from here. We know enough to navigate our way in that direction, but we cannot blueprint. It is something. We will have to prototype and navigate to, but the good news is, although
Though we here probably would not live to see the final product things. Would start getting better immediately Upon Our recognition that pursuing the 4th Frontier was the right thing to do. The suddenly. There would be a tremendous amount of useful work to be done in discovering. What the various mechanisms of that new way of being are.
All right, you guys are going to have to give me a little more than that in the book. You talk about, you give an example and it was the thing that really allowed me to begin to understand how we could achieve a steady state that gave us those things. I don't know. If you remember the example that you gave in the book, I do. So if you don't let me know and I will refresh your memory,
but I'm talking about the Mayans. Is that right in the
book? You specifically talk about craftsmanship, but if you've got something for me on the Mayans, I'll take
it. Yeah. Well, I mean I think
We do we do both, right? And let's see. Well, maybe maybe remind us of exactly what we say about craftsmanship. Remember that we talked about it, but I'm not sure exactly what the context is here.
The idea was basically that. So we have this inherent desire for growth but it isn't necessarily growth itself. It's sort of an now, I'm using my own words. It's the neurochemical state of feeling this deep sense of satisfaction at having something of import is
Probably the easiest way to think of it. And that gave me something to grasp onto because I so I often get asked the question. I've had financial success in my life. And the irony of my life is that I'm constantly going around. Trying to convince people that money is not going to do for you. What you think of? Well, it's very powerful but it isn't what most people think. They think it will make them feel better about themselves and money is just absolutely incapable of doing that. And so when you realize the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself, you start playing a game of neurochemistry.
And so this idea of craftsmanship felt like that to me.
Yeah, so, you know recognizing the long-term hormonal glow that you get from producing something of lasting value and beauty and meaning in the world as opposed to only being exposed to short-term stuff, you know, the difference between buying something at Ikea and putting it together with Allen wrenches, on your floor and of either making yourself or coming.
No, a Craftsman who really builds things with care and knowledge, with the intention that you will be able to pass this on to your children, or your friends, or your whomever later on. This is a piece with with lasting Beauty lasting function. That was built with someone who knew something about the wood or the metals or whatever. The materials are. This is a way into finding the kinds of meaning that a 4th Frontier mentality can provide. Yeah. I think the
distinction is one between the satisfaction of Life coming from consuming, which is inherently empty versus producing and producing doesn't necessarily have to mean stuff. It can be meaning or Insider or any one of a number of other things. But what we say about, the, the Maya in the book, what we argue is that they very conspicuously. This is an extremely long-lived civilization.
Thousands of years of remarkable success and they had as one of the things that they produced in all of their city states. They produced these incredible monuments which are actually not what they appear to be. We have spent a lot of time in in Mayan territory and these things look like pyramids in the sense that the Egyptians produce them, but they are not they are in fact growing structures. So these things got bigger and bigger over time the longer a city-state.
Stood in the same place. And then there's the hidden version of this, which are an incredible network of Roads, Stone roads that exists between the steady States called sock based. In any case. The point is the Maya were producing things that stood in for population growth. They were taking some fraction of their productivity and they were dedicating it to these massive Public Works projects. And the thing about a massive Public Works project. Is that it brings a
Kind of reality and cohesion to the people involved. Mean imagine yourself living in one of these amazing cities and the public monuments made of stone that speak to the power and the durability of your people are, you know, part of this this public space, these things allow the following process if it's not just a pyramid that you you know you it's a line item on a budget you build the pyramids done. But in fact what you do is you augment it. Well,
Then in good years you will have that to augment and you will take some fraction of the productivity that might be turned into more people, which would then result in more austerity. You can invest it in these Public Works project. And then, in a lean year, instead of having not enough to go and feed all of the mouths that have been created. You can just simply not augment. The Public Works project, that is a natural damper for the kind of ebb and flow the boom-and-bust that we have suffered so mightily under under modern.
Economic systems. So the production of meaning, the production of shared space that actually augments the ability of people to interact with each other. These things are models of what we should probably be seeking as a society. They system that tamps down the fluctuations that provides Liberty to people. That's really the key thing. Right? We want realized Liberty for individuals that they can pursue. What is Meaningful.
Rather than satisfying themselves with consumption. That's sort of a rough outline of what a 4th Frontier would look like
this. I love it in the book. I can't remember if it was Liberty that you were talking about specifically, but you talk about it's an emergent property. I assume you mean the same with a liberty. How do we create the bed from which Liberty will
emerge? But we argue in the book is that Liberty is a special value. And the reason that is a special value.
Is there really two ways to delineate it? You can be technically free but not really free. All right, if you're concerned about being wiped out by a healthcare crisis or you're concerned that you may lose your job and have to find another in a different industry. You're not really free. Even if technically, you could go out and start an oil company. It's not going to happen. So what we argue Is that real Liberty realized, Liberty is Liberty, you can act on and in order for
Person to be liberated. They're more mundane concerns, their safety, their sustenance. All those things have to be taken care of. And therefore, we can know that we have succeeded when somebody has real Liberty that they are capable of acting on. It's a proxy and what we argue is that the objective ought to be to provide real Liberty for as many people as possible. Hopefully, ultimately everyone would be
Hated to do something. Truly remarkable rather than only Elites having that freedom. Yes, I would just say as much as higher fraction of the population as possible. If we say as many people as possible. It might sound like we're also interested in maximizing population growth. And of course, of course, we're not, you know, we think we will, we will Peak hopefully at some point soon and then population may start going down through attrition, but that every moment in human history,
Going forward. The vast number of the greatest number of people possible who have maximal Liberty will be a success and they just refine that slightly. The objective is the maximum number of liberated people but not living simultaneously. Ultimately the way to Grant the marvellous liberated life to the maximum. Number of people is to get sustainable at the level. That you mean,
Ins can live indefinitely on the planet rather than having a clock ticking where we just simply don't have the resources to continue doing what we're doing.
I love it guys. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. The book was phenomenal. Your podcast is phenomenal. Every moment of every got to spend with, you guys have been absolutely wonderful. Where do you want people to follow along with you? Where's the best place to get the
book?
Wow, that's a, that's a question. We should have an answer to. Yeah, the best place to get the book is hopefully just about anywhere, you know, it's obviously available on the big big sellers like, Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but I know it's available in many independent book, shops as well. And I'm a big fan of independent bookstores. So if you ask for it there, whatever your favorite one is, that's probably a terrific move to help to help support your local economy. It will also be available.
Double as an audiobook, which we read. Yep. That's absolutely true. And you can find us at the Dark Horse podcast. We do weekly live streams, the two of us. And Brett also has guests on every now. And again, I also am doing a newsletter called Natural Selections. You can find that on Natural Selections dotsub stack.com., And yeah, maybe maybe that
That sounds perfect,
guys. Thanks again for joining me. This was absolutely wonderful and to everybody out there. Trust me when I say the book is amazing. The podcast is extraordinary. You guys will love it. So be sure to subscribe there. And speaking of places. You should you should subscribe if you haven't already. Hit that subscription button there. And until next time, my friend's be legendary. Take care. Peace.
