Loading summary
Transcript193 lines
- [00:00]
Brett Weinstein
hey folks welcome to the dark horse podcast inside rail i am thrilled to be sitting with returning guest jacob shockey who is the founder and director of project beaver some of you will remember that we did a prior episode on beaver ecology i've learned a ton from jacob about that amazing topic as fascinated as i was before i was stunned by what i learned we are going to talk about a bunch of new issues regarding beavers but before we get to that let me just say first thank you for joining me and welcome
- [00:32]
Jacob Shockey
to dark horse thanks for having me
- [00:36]
Brett Weinstein
there's a story before we get to the beaver ecology that i think viewers of this podcast will be fascinated by you have been doing your work in the non profit world and your organization stumbled at the point well maybe you should tell the story of what happened to the beaver coalition the initial presentation
- [01:01]
Jacob Shockey
of your organization yeah so we were the beaver coalition we i left my job doing restoration work and started this non profit and in march of twenty twenty which was a great time to start a new endeavor um but we had a lot of momentum we were doing little interviews with folks that would land in national geographic and such and and and attracting a lot of attention um and then at some point i got ahold of you guys and said hey you need to come see a beaver wetland let's was at the time you were living in portland and viewers will be familiar with that we'll drug you out into the beaver wetland afterward heather published a piece about beavers on her substack and at the very end of that piece she said something like if folks are interested in learning more about beavers there's a non profit started by a former student and friend go check it out the beaver coalition i didn't even know heather had published this piece until i saw suddenly a flood of donations coming into our nonprofit and chase them back and and it's all coming from this piece folks read her work her she writes very well and they were persuaded that maybe be worth paying attention to my some folks that i was working with folks on the board also noticed that and googled heather found her twitter and found things that she just they disagreed with and reached out to me and said basically we have to distance ourselves we have to issue a public condemnation on our website all of our social media channels and we have to do it now and i said well no we're an organization with the mission to empower people to partner with beavers and i fail to see how what anyone rights on their personal twitter page has anything to do with that and the result of that was that the organization almost collapsed and i almost lost a job we were one vote away from dissolving because when it became clear that i wasn't willing as the director to publicly condemn heather in this case or anyone i mean at the time i remember these board meetings and one of the questions that came up was like well what if it was a trump supporter that was saying stuff about us
- [03:43]
Brett Weinstein
that's a fascinating question
- [03:47]
Jacob Shockey
and when i made it clear that that doesn't matter at all then they were like but what if you were driving up to somebody's house to meet with them about beavers and there was a nazi flag on the driveway i said well you know it'd be a issue of do i still feel safe with to meet with the person and if yes i'm meeting with i mean i'm going to talk to anyone who's coming to me in good faith about beavers that's what we're here to do and at that point i was labeled hate adjacent hate adjacent yeah yeah
- [04:17]
Brett Weinstein
now was the hate adjacency about the hateful heather or was it about this thought nazi no it wasn't the thought
- [04:24]
Jacob Shockey
nazi it was heather heather was a hateful person and i was adjacent to heather and i was publicly adjacent to heather and not doing my due diligence by distancing myself once i'd been made aware of this issue fascinating hate hate
- [04:38]
Brett Weinstein
adjacent and after not distancing yourself from somebody who had brought resources to your organization through her advocacy advocacy beavers yes okay that that all about fit doesn't it track yeah yeah that does track yeah presumably this blew over quickly and there's been no yeah as these things do right yeah yeah
- [05:10]
Jacob Shockey
so i can still go to a beaver conference and people will get up and leave the
- [05:14]
Brett Weinstein
room this is six years later six years later six years later people will leave the room because they don't want to hear you about beavers they don't
- [05:24]
Jacob Shockey
want to be near me because i'm hate adjacent so then their adjacency to the hate adjacent they would be hate
- [05:29]
Brett Weinstein
adjacent adjacent if they stayed i mean
- [05:31]
Jacob Shockey
that's my hypothesis i don't actually know
- [05:33]
Brett Weinstein
they leave right they leave you can't
- [05:34]
Jacob Shockey
ask them sure yeah yeah so i said we're not going to do that we're a nonprofit that works to empower people to partner with beavers and then i said that same sentence again and again and it never really landed and i came up and did a podcast with you in the middle of it just to do a little character check you still seemed loving and nice as did heather and i glad to have fooled you again i still felt good about dying on this hill and yeah so then they called we were one vote away from full shutdown as an organization we had to rebrand that was a condition of the folks who were trying to destroy it stepping off the board so we're now project beaver still legally the beaver coalition and then they called every funder and contractor and partner that we work with and they said something to the effect and i know this because some of them reported back to me you know i thought i thought you should know that i'm stepping off the board of the beaver coalition i can't get into the details but i can't tell you that jacob has a hate problem
- [06:47]
Brett Weinstein
all right that story would be unbelievable if heather and i had not lived various versions of this same nonsense in other quadrants but it is very real and your particular story i think shares with the evergreen story the fact that it's so over the top and ridiculous that it's actually evident what it is i mean it can
- [07:11]
Jacob Shockey
kind of be funny at that point i mean it's not funny when you're living it but it's about beavers right
- [07:15]
Brett Weinstein
it was supposed to be anyway it's
- [07:17]
Jacob Shockey
supposed to be yeah yeah no i mean when you're living it it's it's humans getting kicked out of the tribe it's a very stressful thing oh it's
- [07:24]
Brett Weinstein
very stressful and the accusations i mean at least the accusations are so preposterous that you you know you can check with yourself and it's like oh this is so right you're being you're hate adjacent for not throwing your friend under
- [07:41]
Jacob Shockey
the bus correct right that's what i kept reminding myself when i'd wake up and feel just like i needed to throw up every morning as soon as i remembered this is going on and it's like no i'm i am not throwing my friend under the bus that is a worthy thing right i mean
- [08:01]
Brett Weinstein
i don't understand the people who do it right i don't understand how they look themselves in the mirror in the morning i don't understand how they sleep because you've you've just surrendered something so fundamental to being a decent person you know so at least the preposterousness of these cancellations makes what you have to do clear most people aren't up to it but what you're what you should do in such a search situation is just obvious oh it's very clarifying yeah
- [08:34]
Jacob Shockey
and you know the conversations afterward are very clarifying people who come up and say you know i mean i don't agree with what happened but for personal reasons we can't be associated anymore those
- [08:45]
Brett Weinstein
are heartbreaking people i mean they tell you behind the scenes that they agree with you but they refuse to say so publicly which then leaves the impression of you've got one person who thinks a and everybody else thinks b even though many of the people who seem to think b are just being quiet because they don't have courage i can
- [09:05]
Jacob Shockey
tell you though having survived it it feels like a gift it is and you know you can tell yourself that if you're in the middle of it and it's hard to believe but you come out the other side and the people you're working with you're focused together on the mission that you thought initially you thought everybody was focused on this and then half the people leave and suddenly i mean we've been more effective at what we were trying to do since the cancellation by just orders of magnitude because all the left right and
- [09:41]
Brett Weinstein
so i call this the painful upgrade because you lose people often people you do not expect to lose but they're people you're better off without and you know the trial by fire reveals who they are and reveals who you are and you do end up initially with this sort of edit down to the people who have have the strength of character to be decent to you and then you find other people who also have that strength of character you know you have people leaving some room in which you're about to give a talk right you can you know a lot about those people oh yeah it it
- [10:17]
Jacob Shockey
it's a gift yeah it is a
- [10:19]
Brett Weinstein
gift it it is a gift and and that is something i think you know i'm very hesitant to give people the advice oh stand up it'll be fine because i know very well it may well not be fine i mean heather and i landed on our feet but there isn't room in the world for you know lots of people changing careers based on the fact that they stood up to such absurdity and i
- [10:43]
Jacob Shockey
was one vote away from full shutdown and we lost in one day a hundred thousand dollars and people pulled out like all of our foundation grants went
- [10:53]
Brett Weinstein
away our first sponsor this week is caraway which makes high quality non toxic cookware and bakeware if you want to cook more eat better and decrease your exposure to toxins you can do all three by using caraway spring is definitely here the season of growth the season of farmers markets what are you bringing home to cook maybe it's the season's earliest berries or tender greens or locally grown meat probably you're cooking fewer stews and braises and making more lighter fare like roasted chicken and salads maybe you want to make a perfect chocolate cake or bright and chewy lemon bars with caraway all of this deliciousness from roasting to baking from a quick omelet cooked on the stovetop to a long simmered soup is easy to accomplish caraway's cookware and bakeware is functional beautiful non toxic and easy to clean what more could you want caraway kitchenware is crafted with sustainable non toxic materials like fsc certified birchwood production premium stainless steel enameled cast iron and naturally slick ceramic and caraway makes several lines of non toxic cookware and bakeware our favorites are their stainless steel line and their enameled cast iron all of caraway's products are free from forever chemicals and their enameled cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors these pots are strong and highly scratch resistant they'll last generations and caraway also offers butcher blocks to cut on glass lids for non toxic cooking with a view and a new bar set which is crafted from rust resistant three hundred and four stainless steel we're cooking with caraway and this past year zach our elder son did too in his first college apartment he says it's amazing which we know to be true and we know that he will be cooking with it for a long time to come right now you can save up to dollar two hundred thirty on their twelve piece cookware set versus buying the products individually plus if you want to include their fan favorite minis duo you can save up to three hundred and fifty dollars visit carawayhome dot com dhpod to take an additional ten percent off using the code dhpod on your next purchase this deal is exclusive for our listeners so visit carawayhome dot com dhpod or use the code dhpod at checkout our second sponsor for this episode is puree puree makes a wide array of supplements and powders from vitamin c magnesium and b complex to creatine collagen and protein powders what makes puri different is how clean and pure all of their products are all of them puri was founded in two thousand nine by two men who wanted to create the cleanest purest products to support their own active lifestyles since then their product portfolio has grown to address common nutritional deficiencies in the developed world and they have never compromised on quality from the fundamental understanding that health requires good diet physical activity recovery and balance the founders of puri reject quick fixes and have insisted on the most stringent purity testing on all of their products from the very beginning we're using puri's magnesium which is excellent like all of puri's products their magnesium complex is third party tested and certified by the clean label project against over two hundred contaminants and at any time you can scan the qr code on your bottle for the test results for your particular batch heather's mom is expecting her first shipment of multivitamins and fish oil from puri day and is excited to finally have products that she knows are safe and contain exactly what they say nothing more and nothing less and our son toby has been making protein enriched smoothies for a couple of years but has had a hard time finding a protein powder that he liked most of them are strongly flavored and gritty but he wanted one that would disappear into his shake letting other flavors shine now at nineteen he's found his protein powder puri's grass fed whey protein powder bourbon vanilla flavor toby says out of all the protein powders i've tried this is the best the flavor flavor is mild it doesn't intrude on the other flavors it's smooth going down and is full of great whey protein most protein powders aren't just gritty and artificial they're actually toxic several studies including those done by consumer reports show that a significant fraction of protein powders on the market contain lead in amounts that are known to be dangerous you shouldn't be eating lead at all much less in a supplement you're taking to improve your health not only is puree whey protein powder free of lead it also delivers a whopping twenty one grams of whey protein in each serving and is free of gmo's pesticides and exogenous hormones toby loves the bourbon vanilla flavor but they've also got a dark chocolate flavor made from organic cocoa powder whether you're looking for magnesium or a multivitamin collagen or protein powder you can't go wrong with puree use code darkhorse at puri dot com darkhorse to get thirty two percent off puri grass fed whey protein when you start a subscription in addition you get a free shaker worth twenty five dollars on your first subscription order which brings total savings to forty nine dollars go to p dash u dash o dash r dash i dot com darkhorse and use the code darkhorse at checkout for this exclusive offer you know we still
- [15:47]
Jacob Shockey
haven't financially recovered as an organ we're more effective but we're leaner right you know and i mean that gets into what the the niche that non profits inhabit you're selling a product that's not necessarily your mission in the world right
- [16:07]
Brett Weinstein
ultimately explain what that means well i've
- [16:10]
Jacob Shockey
been fascinated by the fundraising gala it's a it's a phenomenon in nonprofit world i don't know if you've ever attended one of these but they're they're a gala where people get together and they raise money for a nonprofit and as a small nonprofit you don't have the donor base especially locally to you to put these on but you're kind of gay like curious you know you're like watching because as a nonprofit one of the struggles is how do you raise money for the daily costs it's it's easier to raise money for a project but the daily costs of running an organization are hard people don't necessarily want to give to that and fundraising galas often cover those costs so an organization will hold a an evening of fundraising and then they will be set for the rest of the year that's the promise right and yet sometimes they'll you know it's twenty thousand dollars in catering costs and that's event event facilitation and venue rental and all these things and so i've never i've never been quite sure like why are the donors okay with the opulent spending at the event right when they're not okay with like bookkeeping costs right yeah it's a good question it's a good question so i was recently traveling i was in a major american city and i was talking with a fellow who runs a large production company audiovisual production company for nonprofits and he'd recently purchased a theater i was like that's interesting choice i mean isn't most of your work you know videos that go on the internet yes but the nonprofit gala is such an important component and he was sick of mobing and demoing big teams and lots of logistics from theaters that they bought their own historic theater they retrofitted one hundred eighty degree screen on the back of the stage and we got talking about this because i've i've participated in these and that i've been the keynote speaker at a fundraising gala and it's like you're playing a role so i was asking him about this and he said well the fundraising gala is a very important thing that has a very specific story arc so you're gathering together a group of people called the list the list capital l you have a position nonprofits have a position called a development director which is code for the person who manages the list year round these are your people who are going to keep your organization open and the development director's job is interfacing with those folks learning who they get along with who they don't who they prefer to sit at a table with in a sense as far as funding into your organization that might be the most important position because the product that you're selling is actually the the the room of
- [19:05]
Brett Weinstein
these people together it's a networking phenomenon
- [19:08]
Jacob Shockey
it's a networking phenomenon i was recently talking with stuart parker los altos institute and he was like it's all about currency exchange which i thought was a lovely way of phrasing it it's currency they're presenting usds and they're getting different currency back social currency a social currency and so you've got all the tables arranged you have a have a light dinner or you know finger food fair whatever everybody mixes mingles that's the kind of beginning maybe there's a silent auction that they're cruising or not and then at some point you have the keynote speaker the ed executive director gets up and does a little housekeeping or somebody else sometimes there's master of ceremonies sometimes they even wear a hat and then you have a keynote speaker that's the entertainment that's that's the one i find myself in let's get the beaver guy right but it could be like somebody just got back from the olympics whatever yep and then say you're a religious charity or maybe like a school you'll have an alumni speaker right and then at some point speakers are done you have a the film that screen house lights down we have a film the end of the film you know four minutes six minutes at the end of film everyone's kind of gazing at the horizon with mist in their eyes i mean we're here for a good reason right yeah spotlight stage director comes out all right folks it's been fun now we get to the part of the evening where the serious work begins right house lights up everybody can see everybody and you have your paddle raise and your paddle raise is when people raise the bidding paddle to give money to the organization and it's really important that you've seeded money or you see you've you've pre worked out that at whatever level you start this paddle raise you have donors who are ready to raise you've already established you've already established right two at least so paddle raise goes up you know who here let's let's let's start the paddle raise at a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars whatever your organization is raising right and everyone looks around because who's going to give one hundred thousand dollars for nothing this is the paddle race right yeah and you've got your two or three people and they put their paddles up everyone sees it right and that's the product you're selling and you you you thank them from if you're the director you thank them from the stage by name round of applause i get it
- [21:52]
Brett Weinstein
and so you've you've established a temporary social network inside of this room yep and now somebody donates and everybody else is looking around the room to see who follows suit the pressure is pretty high you've been there you've enjoyed the festivities you've gotten your networking out of it and now it's time to pony
- [22:14]
Jacob Shockey
up yeah and the and the secret is that many donors reneg really yeah but guess what if you're the director of a non profit yeah you're going to keep their secret sure because you want them to show up again and
- [22:27]
Brett Weinstein
you don't want you don't want the idea of reneging to spread exactly oh that makes such terrible sense so because
- [22:37]
Jacob Shockey
i'm obsessively focused on helping beavers and i don't want my product to be currency exchange event yeah you know we we're down to the nerdy folks that are just into beavers right and don't care that i'm also friends with heather right but you will never show up to an event where there's a whiff of controversy because it just needs to be vaguely good yeah it doesn't actually matter what you're doing any organization that's effective enough to be pissing people off will never be effective in the fundraising
- [23:12]
Brett Weinstein
gala space that's interesting so it tamps down all of course all intrigue which means that a lot of work is just simply off the table because it would create some sort of controversy yeah
- [23:23]
Jacob Shockey
i mean it's it's i haven't read any of his work but there's this guy pornelli he is a late science fiction writer and mathematician i think and he coined this term ponelli's law of bureaucracy or it's not the term people call it the law of it's not a law of in the sense that you think law as soon as i say law what he said was any bureaucracy will eventually be taken over by the administrators and you can look at everything from schools to nonprofits to governments anytime humans clump together right and you see this in the in the environmental nonprofit space right you have edgy people like paul watson founding sea shepherd or dave foreman with earth first right all all these organizations that are funded by somebody who's kind of leading with their heart they love this thing redwood trees or whales or beavers or whatever and and they start attracting the attention like let's save this grove of redwoods and and they get a little bit of momentum behind them but at some point there needs to be some administrative help right and your first hire whoever that is they're probably into redwood trees but not as much as the founder right and they're also into a job right right and pretty quickly you get to the point where there's more people into a job than into and then pretty quickly the person leading with their heart is a liability because they're going to say something embarrassing and you're going to lose out on funding because of it and you see funders kicked out all the time like the two guys have mentioned right and it's called you know we you can think about it as like the life cycle right right oh
- [25:02]
Brett Weinstein
it makes perfect sense and it explains why when you encounter these things any of them whether it's universities or any other bureaucracy you walk into it and you try to figure out what the people are doing that actually contributes to the mission and often it's very remote and for many of the people it's nothing at all and it feels like why this looks like a cryptic jobs program right disguised as something with a purpose and it's very frustrating because you know i think all of us naturally believe hey there's certain things that should be accomplished in the world and wouldn't it be great if there was an organization that was actually dedicated to that and then lo and behold it springs up and then you check in on it later and it's like what destroys every single thing that's functional i was
- [25:53]
Jacob Shockey
trying to come up with an example of one that hadn't right been destroyed i was like you know heifer international i remember as a kid we would buy chickens for somebody you know and they had this model where it was like you know here's these villages we've gone into folks need livestock you can buy livestock it's a real cow to a real person and and it was really fun as kids we'd like save up money and then buy chickens for somebody or whatever bees so i google heifer international and i didn't spend a lot of time on it but i couldn't find any way to sponsor a cow anymore like the buying livestock was gone it's all vaguely you know bringing education to underserved communities and you know it's the same kind of boilerplate that you'd expect and i couldn't find their pragmatic niche anywhere so there you go i don't actually know of one i
- [26:44]
Brett Weinstein
know of one i think i will not name it here so get targeted destroyed but it functions as a benevolent dictatorship makes this not happen right right so the point is an organization that is under one person's direction does not change mission as long as the person stays true to it because it's not you know the emergent part of the organization doesn't take it over yeah i
- [27:11]
Jacob Shockey
know of one like that too y yep interesting yep but but as a nonprofit you're supposed to have a large and diverse board and that's the that's the toehold into that's the cannot be
- [27:22]
Brett Weinstein
a benevolent dictatorship yes a diverse board that cannot tolerate diversity diversity of opinion
- [27:28]
Jacob Shockey
apparently yeah yeah i need to be better about my board yes well you
- [27:33]
Brett Weinstein
need to make your adjacency to hate a more distant adjacency yeah i would hope all right so this leads us back to the central question that has motivated you and just as a recap i would advise people who are interested in in this conversation maybe after you' heard a few more minutes of it to go back and listen to our initial discussion but the the elevator pitch version of it is that beavers were an absolutely dominant feature of the landscape at let's say the conquering of the americas by europeans beavers had shaped the landscape itself in ways that were tied into all sorts of processes such that their near extermination as a result primarily of fur trapping and as a result of land management by people who did not want beavers altering their landscape changed what the us for example is the us was a different place and those of us who live here now don't understand how important the beavers were to the ecology of the land that we now live on so even when we are out in nature we are seeing something that has been dramatically altered by the radical reduction in beaver populations so do you want to just say anything about what has been changed by the absence of beavers or the near absence of them our final sponsor is timeline thymeline makes mitopure which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone urolithin a found primarily in pomegranates urolithin a has been the subject of hundreds of scientific or clinical studies many of which find that it enhances mitochondrial function and cellular energy and improves muscle strength and endurance but how does it work your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells but like everything living they can decay or get damaged the older we get the more likely we are to have damaged mitochondria which accumulate in joints and other tissues this is in part because mitophagy the process by which damaged mitochondria are removed from cells becomes less efficient the older we get the age related decline in mitophagy not only inhibits removal of damaged or excess mitochondria but also impairs the creation of new mitochondria which results in an overall decline in cell function mitopur from timeline works by triggering mitophagy quoting a research article published in cell reports medicine in twenty twenty two targeting mitophagy to activate the recycling of faulty mitochondria during aging is a strategy to mitigate muscle decline we present results from a randomized placebo controlled trial in middle aged adults where we administer a postbiotic compound urolithin a a known mitophagy activator at two doses for four months the data show significant improvements in muscle strength twelve percent with intake of urolithin a we observe clinically meaningful improvements with urolithin a on aerobic endurance and physical performance but do not notice significant improvement on peak power output furthermore research published in nature medicine in twenty sixteen found that in mice the beneficial effects of urolithin a on muscle physiology were independent of diet or age take two soft gels of mitopur a day for two months and you may see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance mitopure enhances your cells ability to clean themselves up and regenerate new healthy mitochondria in combination with regular physical activity mitopure can help you stay strong and healthy into old age timeline is now offering twenty percent off your first order of mitopure go to timeline dot com darkhorse and use the code darkhorse to get twenty percent off your order that's t i m e l i dash n dash e dot com
- [31:22]
Jacob Shockey
darkhouse dark horse maybe we'll just do a little bit about what beavers are themselves for folks who don't want to go back and hear us talk about it before they're vegans and there's sixty pounds of slow moving protein when they're on land but in the water they're very graceful and so beavers build dams to flood land to stay safe from predators and because they've been doing that for millions of years everything else that needs fresh water at some point in this life cycle is co evolved with beavers stewarding waterways of the northern hemisphere right all fresh water was under beaver management and you know in a in a river system while they live in the banks and they move literally tons of material into the river as they're eating it they're eating woody debris like or leaving woody debris they're eating plants shrubs trees they they strip the cambium off of sticks and you'll find these little skin sticks and so those become these tangled reefs of sticks that are the bottom of the food web for life in these river systems and then as you get into the tributaries they're building dams and that water is slowing and spreading and sinking around the recharging aquifers and they're creating these functional systems that it's the it's the the deepest sort of wealth that you can have
- [32:50]
Brett Weinstein
on the land right so it's detaining water that would wash into the river higher up in the watershed yep it's changing the nutrient cycling and thereby altering everything even the forest around it that isn't right on the shore of one of these beaver ponds is being affected by that change in the distribution of of water and nutrients yeah i mean
- [33:14]
Jacob Shockey
you can measure any aspect of it you want like like biomass of insects you know around nutrient cycling that's huge a big wetland versus a small incision in the land i mean a stream in the sense of water streaming off the land is a thing humans have created since we killed beavers like these were in north america our waterways were basically toe slope to toe slope these slow moving complicated you couldn't even really tell which way the water was going because these were just green verdant sponges in my area that called it the place of the beaver and when you read the old trapper journals they would look down on these valleys and they'd spend sometimes days trying to figure out how to get across them because they were just these complex beaver marshes what that was doing for millions of years in my area was well it was also collecting all the heavy metals that eroded from the hillsides and so this dude peter skin ogden came through wiped out all the beavers for that sin bay company and twenty years later they found gold in these mud flats that had grown up with grass and they called them the gold fields because if you're mining gold you run your your sediment through a sluice box and basically the heavy metals settle out behind the ridges and you had beaver dams catching gold for millions of years so i mean beavers drove the gold rush even after the beaver rush was over but the classic abe lincoln style top hat that was an homage to the past that was like a almost two hundred year old style choice that he made but these european hats were all the rage and yeah pilgrims all the way through western word expansion were funding that based on beaver trapping wow millions and millions and millions of animals and you just can't really overstate the change that happened on our land after that was
- [35:12]
Brett Weinstein
a totally different place totally different place and what are some of the negative consequences that we modern folks experience due to the absence of beavers well so
- [35:23]
Jacob Shockey
beavers were this resource to be extracted right and then for last hundred or so years they've been seen sort of as a pest species and so we there's a negative connotation to beavers that's not actually true to what they're providing for us but but a lot of folks see beavers negatively they mate for life and they have these little tight knit families they're a rodent but they don't produce like rodents it's two babies a year and they stick around for two years i mean this is like more case selection right if we're going to talk about parental involvement and and beavers don't ask permission when they're making land management decisions and so many people have noticed we notice that and we get upset they cut down trees you know we have this habit of building dams across waterways which we call a road base and then we leave one little hole in it which we call a culvert and then the beavers plug it yeah and it makes a lake and humans get really excited really quickly
- [36:23]
Brett Weinstein
excited not in a good way not
- [36:24]
Jacob Shockey
a good way yeah so anyway there's been this neg negative connotation and so beavers have been it wasn't just the hats i mean beaver populations have been kept at a very low level because they've been seen as this pest species in fact in oregon they were actually legally a predator until very recently even they didn't know vegetarian as they are yeah they didn't know that right to make it easy to kill them right however when you have a waterway that's under beaver management and then the beavers are gone the process that happens to that waterway that's happened across our country and across the northern hemisphere is that that water consolidates and it collapses and then you get the stream that looks like a ribbon which is not something that existed and it goes like this and the water races out and all that soil that you're standing on when you look down is now dry right and it leaves and it creates a novel niche because the riparian trees the trees that grow along waterways were used to really wet feet and they were used to this complex thing now suddenly you have land adjacent to water but the water is way down there you see specialization happening with often imported species like himalayan blackberry whatever where they're taking over that niche because it's a novel niche one example would be in meijer there's this stream called bear creek it's now a stream i use that word on purpose because it used to be a waterway that was branching across and now you can draw lines and say this is these are the banks right and on the banks then there's blackberries because it's this dry strange place that none of the native plants know what to do with we got a wildfire and those blackberries acted like a wick and burned down two cities i mean the cities of phoenix and tallinn i don't know how much of the town burnt but it was a lot of it i was out all night with search and rescue and it sounded like a war zone propane tanks exploding all the fire you know same with la like fire hydrants are dry and yet if beavers had still been in control of that stream it would have been a buffer to fire rather than a wick i mean because water doesn't burn and when you look at wildfire behavior through areas with beaver the fired behavior drops down and often it stops right and so there's just one little example of like the downstream consequences but we we're losing wildlife that all requires that beaver stewardship we're losing all the benefits to water quality the quantity of storing water in our watersheds later in the year you know beavers sequester carbon so if you're into talking about that they do it better than any of the schemes that i've seen right yeah these are all billion dollar industries where you can draw a line very specifically in the papers to back it up the beavers do it better because it's an involved complex system yep an evolved complex
- [39:28]
Brett Weinstein
system that traps water in these systems humidifying the entire thing i mean presumably when beavers are trapping large amounts of water by conducting it this way and that way it's increasing how moist the plants are you know if you've ever tried to start a fire i know you've started many of them but ever tried to start a fire the difference between doing it with you know wet wood versus very dry wood is night and day and so the whole habitat is being kept wetter by these animals which were you know filling these valleys and it's hard to imagine it i now think about all the time i spent you know in the wilderness when i was younger and it's funny to think you know i felt like i was out in nature but even that was just so radically distorted from what it had once been yeah which we just can't appreciate yeah and i mean
- [40:25]
Jacob Shockey
you bring up the humidity the vegetative transpiration when you are measuring riparian by acreage not by linear feet is hard to overstate let alone the water itself and you've got work like professor meyon mian the late professor from spain showing that you know rain clouds follow moisture sure right and so every parking lot you build becomes a dry area that breaks that rain pathway and every beaver wetland it's a stepping stone for that and when it's not wind driven how do those rain clouds come in well it's often chasing that moisture into the
- [41:07]
Brett Weinstein
land so this brings me to one of the things that i think we should highlight which is we are making a classic mistake imagining that we are technologically sophisticated that much is true and that therefore the way to make the world function better for us is to go in there and change things i
- [41:28]
Jacob Shockey
mean we will spend a lot of time at evergreen right my progressive training
- [41:33]
Brett Weinstein
is right yeah you go in and you make the parameter better let's fix it right and the problem is of course these are complex systems and anything you do is guaranteed to have unintended consequences and it's probably going to fall far short of what you imagined you know when you were sitting down there with your fresh sheet of paper however what we have here is many of the problems we have are downstream of a change most of us don't know about and the solution to that problem is an elegantly evolved entity that does this by its very nature right everything from reducing the rate of and intensity of fires to increasing the amount of nutrients available to changing the very weather patterns that make land arable so to the extent that you're pulling a huge amount of water out of some giant river and you know transporting it to farmland there's a question about how much rain should actually be falling on that farmland and how much is that being affected by the fact that you've exterminated this terraforming climate altering rodent from a habitat you're not even thinking about while you're down on the farm so it's an amazing question right can is the solution to many problems that we recognize that we face actually staring us in the face in this case because the animal is there it hasn't gone extinct it's not you know it's not a giant ground slot they still exist they're resilient they're still here and so anyway i think that that's an amazing question could could we solve many of these problems in the most elegant way conceivable which is to say bring back something that knows how to take care of it itself you don't have to engineer it it's already done yeah yeah for
- [43:15]
Jacob Shockey
free in an evolved complex way in
- [43:19]
Brett Weinstein
a way that naturally works because it worked for millions of years without before
- [43:24]
Jacob Shockey
we emerged from the fossil record right beavers had been doing that i mean we emerged and met a fellow mammal who was already building structures out of
- [43:34]
Brett Weinstein
mud and it was already terraforming and making climate better by a byproduct of what it's doing to take care of its own lineage and you know we
- [43:45]
Jacob Shockey
knew we used to know that right i mean most of our most of our history as a species we were living and relying on beaver managed waterways and in fact this archaeologist archeologists and britain briny found human middens on ancient beaver lodges as in we were living upstairs really beavers were living downstairs and why wouldn't we they've just created a moat right full of fish right of course all the ecological wealth you could
- [44:16]
Brett Weinstein
ask for right here they create a little garden of eden it's a garden of eden yeah and it really is if you've ever if you if you have never spent time on you probably have seen beaver ponds and wetlands and not realize that you were looking at them but if you've never really spent time walking out onto a beaver dam and appreciating exactly how much work goes into creating one of these lakes and what it does to the ecology of the surrounding habitat the you know the huge amount of wildlife that you find at one of these naturally self regulating ponds is just stunning also i guess as long as we're talking about this the fact that these things are persistent it's not that you know a beaver finds a stream dams it creates stream creates a pond you know and that's the end of the story right the story that you began to tell about the very slow reproduction of these creatures is integrated in you know the animals are looking for habitats that will last because part of what they're passing it's not that they're passing on the knowledge of how to be a beaver to their offspring and the offspring always disperse this is a this is a prized possession a beaver pond that gets passed down legacy a legacy right and so you know and actually just even understanding how that fits that the beaver is passing down its genes it's passing down its skill set to its offspring and it's passing down an asset right and that those things travel together through time in this remarkable way that we've just utterly disrupted is you know sad yeah now before we started talking you were mentioning to me something that i think is a change in your perspective since the last time we spoke you were talking to me about how your view of individual beavers has changed based on your interaction with them you want to talk about that a bit i mean
- [46:27]
Jacob Shockey
it's embarrassing to admit to some level because i worked with beavers for eight nine years and i saw them as you know an adult male a juvenile female and you know even some of the words that i learned from your
- [46:43]
Brett Weinstein
class conspecific apologies yeah that's a clinical
- [46:48]
Jacob Shockey
word for you oh man and and then i met beverly so beverly was a beaver who is she's still around who was caught in a at a snare or a leg hole trap this snap trap snap trap this particular trap shut at exactly an eighth of an inch and locked with two auxiliary bombs
- [47:11]
Brett Weinstein
an eighth of an inch between the
- [47:12]
Jacob Shockey
jaws between the jaws so her bone was pulverized and she'd been in the trap for over twelve hours when i when i got her the she had been trapped because she was in an irrigation ditch and the landowner didn't even know that she was being trapped on their land because you know ditch companies have easements to maintain their ditch but the landowner found beverly trapped and started calling around and they were going to come shoot her and eventually someone got a hold of me so i collected her she was pregnant and a local vet donated his time and we nursed her back to health um and i spent a lot of time with beverly because she was getting antibiotics and she would she would lift up her leg every time she saw me coming and i'd put the little mason jar of epsom salt down and she'd stick her wrist down in the and then stick
- [48:03]
Brett Weinstein
her own wrist you're not putting her
- [48:04]
Jacob Shockey
yeah yeah and twenty minutes later you know when it starts to cool she'd pull it up and hold it and then i take the jar away yeah and and at some point i realized oh she's an individual and it's embarrassing it's like but individual like dogs are individuals and and then ever since that that thought right every single beaver i hear we have a small refugee program as part of what we do so so when beavers are being trapped out for some area and there's lots of ways to live with beavers but you know sometimes folks aren't willing to even try stuff so we'll move them and so i meet a number of beavers every year even though this is kind of the last resort thing we do end up meeting each other and they're all so very different once you see it i mean i've had beavers with personalities that are snarky i mean i've had i've had a beaver we named him houdini because i put him so i move beavers in a if you go elk hunting you'd be familiar with these these game bags they're very breathable very washable cotton bags and the folks that taught me to move beavers were like hey don't put them in a big open scary kennel or anything where the wind is on them and just put them in a bag and they feel safe and that has been my experience they feel very safe just that swaddle thing right so i put this beaver in a bag after we caught him in the live trap and i put him in the passenger seat of my truck and shut the doors and went to go reset the trap and halfway through resetting the trap i hear my horn honking and and i go over i'm by myself out here well the the ditch rider was there luckily i have a witness to this but we were both right there we go back and the beaver's out of the bag and he's up on the horn of the truck and he's managed to lock all the doors like hit the door lock somehow yeah and he's leaning
- [49:59]
Brett Weinstein
you're lucky you didn't leave your key in there exactly it would have been
- [50:03]
Jacob Shockey
gone and you know we laughed it off as a one off sort of and then you know eventually i was able to get in my passenger door doesn't work and he was leaning against my driver so it was a bit of a negotiation to be like let me back in um i rebagged him and over the course of driving him to the little halfway house we have he escaped eight times on me wow and none of the other beavers have ever figured this out but he would do this kind of big muscular move and just pop the little not holding the bag together every time so eventually he ended up riding on the console and i was just like you don't get in my feet because i need these for driving and he was he was happy there every beaver is different and when you see it and you see that they're like dogs that they're they're absolutely distinct personalities then it makes sense that they're mating for life and they're having these really long term relationships and that they have an amazing non human intelligence about what they're doing well
- [50:58]
Brett Weinstein
that often goes with what you've referred to here as k selection but the you know slow reproductive cycle especially long investment in individual offspring is generally coupled with there's an awful lot to convey and you can imagine in the case of something like beaver where you know in the best case you're you know you're a beaver and you're born into a lodge that has a pond already established and a dam built there's the question about you need to know how to maintain this because the parents are going to be gone at some point and it's going to be yours and so how would you construct an animal to have the depth of understanding not just of basically how to be a beaver but how to be a beaver here in this place right so there's a lot of culture that has to be transmitted to get that to work and of course that's very closely tied to the degree of intelligence which is of course going to make them idiosyncratic right right so anyway and you were you were saying earlier that you had encountered at least one beaver seemed to have kind of a sense of humor
- [52:09]
Jacob Shockey
yeah yeah i don't even have a good story to point to you can just tell i mean that's when my conspecific biologist wants to hide under the table because i'm like oh boy you know he was just funny yeah no
- [52:25]
Brett Weinstein
you know i get like i mean look i love all three of my pets only one of them has a sense of humor they all have strong aspects of their personality but one of them has a sense of humor you know you can just tell that he's sort of calculating like what he can get away with and he's going to see what your reaction is that kind of thing exactly so anyway i find this amazing and you know once again you've taught me something i i didn't know maybe i should have thought to expect it but i didn't and i have to say that that has got to make your work all the much more important to you but also the amount of you know dead beavers involved in the work you're doing just encountering people who couldn't tolerate beavers on their property and have shot them or killed them in other ways that it's got to add to the level of tragedy that you have to somehow metabolize yeah
- [53:21]
Jacob Shockey
up the ante yeah you know it
- [53:23]
Brett Weinstein
does because you know i mean it's it's a little bit if you're a cat lover and you you know you go to the the shelter it's very rough to just realize yeah a lot of these animals aren't leaving here and you know some of them might be unrecoverable but there are animals here that you know are perfectly lovely they're just they've been abandoned by somebody they're too old or whatever and so you know each one becomes a tragedy to you
- [53:48]
Jacob Shockey
and i mean last week i moved a beaver who's dead i mean it's it's right now babies are being born and the human involved smashed in the den with an excavator and everything would suggest that mom and babies perished in that and the dad was still around and so i i trapped the dad in a live trap off of this site and i moved him and i i did my best like i dug into the old den there's there's no surviving this we left the live traps hoping that somebody nobody's left and when i was a little more impartial i guess it would have been like well you know we have a single male that will find another family in the unit yeah but you know this guy he hung out and he wouldn't eat right like we were we were putting the good veggies and the apples in with him and he just wouldn't eat yeah and we we relocated him three days later because you know he was just gonna he was just gonna starve in the halfway house and we knew that nobody was there i mean this was last week and those are just they feel a little more real when you it's you get out of your brain saying oh it's just a single male and it's a logistics problem because i'm not using i'm not moving a family unit anymore you know oh i
- [55:16]
Brett Weinstein
get this viscerally i remember when i was first starting out working with bats you know i got into working with bats because i saw a really great presentation by biologist named jay cho who had studied tent making bats and i was so fascinated by what he was saying and it's like maybe that's what i should study cool and so then i started you know researching it and i got a a an opportunity to work in the field with them but then i started interacting with these animals as individuals and you know you would think this is a tiny little animal it doesn't have a large brain like what are the chances that you're going to see those kinds of patterns and oh my goodness the things i saw and what they suggest about you know your tragedies aren't different than their tragedies yeah right yeah so i remember just the first time i saw a live mother bat tending her offspring you know her prevalent offspring which she carries with her or sometimes leaves in the roost you know and then flies out on a foraging run and then comes back and the baby comes and suckles and she cleans its wings you know just so carefully and you just think you know bats have this terrible reputation right people think they're creepy and weird right you watch a bat mother take care of its offspring it's like oh i totally get this right yeah and then once i'm slightly hesitant to even tell this story it throws other people less than it throws me because i've now gotten very used to bats but i was experimenting i wanted to see a bat make a tent because nobody had ever seen it and a friend of mine john cooley suggested hey you know maybe you should make some infrared illuminators and use bank surveillance cameras which see in the infrared which i didn't know so this potentially a great solution because yeah it wouldn't disturb the animals it would be dark to them but i would be able to see it on a on a video which i did ultimately i still think i'm the only person who's seen it but anyway i was preparing i was building illuminators in my room on barrier colorado island at night i was soldering together these infrared leds from television remotes bought in ungodly numbers ultimately i thought i was going to start with like three or four of them and it was like oh that's not nearly enough light i ended up with a so you're in panama
- [57:50]
Jacob Shockey
city just buying to oh i got
- [57:52]
Brett Weinstein
very good at into panama city going to the electronic shop buying he's here
- [57:56]
Jacob Shockey
again yeah he's here again how many
- [57:58]
Brett Weinstein
tv's could this guy have but anyway so i i was soldering these things together ultimately it took two hundred forty seven leds to get enough light to actually see but it worked cool okay so anyway i was experimenting with this and putting the illuminator under tents whose location i knew where there were animals there at night and one night i put this thing out under this tent and i was just kind of watching bats do their thing fly out forage come back all this stuff and there was this pair male and a female and the male flew out on a foraging run and i start detecting you can't quite see it because the camera's under the tent but i start seeing another animal circling the tent and the animal in the tent starts freaking out the female and the animal who's flying around like makes a couple of passes at landing it's not his tent so he doesn't know well enough to land he finally lands and well in scientific speak we would say that there was a forced copulation the male bat rapes this female bat while i'm watching on this infrared camera and then he leaves as the other male returns and it's like this scene of pandemonium in this tent and it's just heartbreaking it's like you know i didn't even want to know that this was happening and of course it's important to know that it's happening and of course why wouldn't it be right right this is this is a same dynamics same evolutionary dynamic oh the female had called she had tried she tried to call her mate back during this thing and i think he had arrived but too late and you know so anyway point is you were
- [59:50]
Jacob Shockey
watching this real time yeah yeah yeah
- [59:53]
Brett Weinstein
it's yeah it's rough it's very hard when you understand that actually outside your door there are animals experiencing the same sorts of tragedies that humans experience it's not less important to them it's not less emotional they're not more mechanical right it's the same stuff without the names you know and without anybody ever knowing this happens so anyway yeah fascinating that beavers apparently are this individual and have these personality characteristics that you readily recognize i don't think it's embarrassing that it took you a while to figure that
- [60:35]
Jacob Shockey
out i mean isn't it interesting though i mean now in the age of cancellation were used to getting canceled over really silly stuff but at the time if you would have gone out and said i just witnessed rape that would have potential had the potential to get you canceled in the realm of like there's there's this funny pressure if you're looking at something with the lens of science you're never supposed to dip into humanizing or naming or oh that's why
- [61:05]
Brett Weinstein
you say forced copulation that makes sense
- [61:06]
Jacob Shockey
and that's why you say conspecific yeah
- [61:08]
Brett Weinstein
that's why you say these things and you know but there's an argument for it but but it is important to realize when we say those things that there is a direct translation for a
- [61:18]
Jacob Shockey
reason yeah but we do a disservice to the folks who didn't see it yeah because they don't know the translation
- [61:24]
Brett Weinstein
right no they they don't know the translation that's true i think well there's a reason i said both terms here right is i think it's very important to recognize that there is a you know a objective description of this event and then there's the actually it's not wrong to anthropomorphize here because this is important to these yeah i guess that's my point for the same reason right yeah yes all right let's move on to the question of what might be done if we have on the table the idea that beavers potentially hold the solution to many problems that we regard as important things like fire regime fires that are more common that burn more intensely that destroy human lives and homes solution to problems like that solution to making to solving the ecological crisis that we have created is at least potentially addressed at some substantial level by the reintroduction of beavers there's a problem with reintroducing beavers which is everybody's first reaction even my first reaction would be if i was buying a piece of land on which there were beavers if those beavers were remote from where i was doing my activity i would think that was freaking fantastic right and if they were a threat to my they're flooding
- [62:56]
Jacob Shockey
brett habitat right if they were if
- [62:58]
Brett Weinstein
they were a danger to my house or my driveway i wouldn't be you know i wouldn't want to see them killed but i would be i would think i would think twice about the wisdom of allowing that to continue so in light of all that what can be done to a educate people whose initial reaction is beavers that's bad news and b what can be done to make the relationship between beavers and people one that is peaceable enough well i
- [63:32]
Jacob Shockey
feel like i've got something but i'm also conscious of i'm coming to this as the progressive that's got something and yet i've been working with beavers and people for over a decade and if you're a farmer and you've got any kind of crop say say you're farming fescue right for seed it's going to go it's going to create lawns across america and beavers move into what used to be a waterway but now it's a collapsed into this little ditchy stream that runs typically even along property boundaries because humans just put it somewhere the beavers start very quickly creating the whole system we've been talking about well when they do that they destroy your crop right and as it floods out well suddenly i don't have an acre of fescue productivity now i've lost two acres of fescue productivity and and you know all the virtues we just extolled and and the the rationale behind it doesn't matter if you're trying to make a mortgage payment mm and you've just lost more and more ground that is ground
- [64:44]
Brett Weinstein
that pays so i would just point out for for our listeners who are well familiar with this discussion this is a classive collective action problem yep we would all benefit from widespread beaver activity but that doesn't do anything for the farmer who's losing acres of their productivity to the fact that the beavers have decided to set up shop adjacent to
- [65:06]
Jacob Shockey
their property yeah and you talk to any of those folks and they're like that's great that you all want that yeah but no one's showing up to help me right i'm the one stuck with all the cost and you just want me to bear that for the good of society and the world and
- [65:22]
Brett Weinstein
until you until you've been in this person's shoes you you're in no position
- [65:25]
Jacob Shockey
to judge you're in no position to
- [65:26]
Brett Weinstein
judge it's it's a collective action problem and collective action problems are genuinely difficult
- [65:33]
Jacob Shockey
to solve yeah yeah and and you've got different aspects of it in that whatever the beavers are doing there's there's a whole suite of tools like the apes have been able to outsmart the rodents for you know pretty well on this we can we can put in a thing called a pond leveler that'll maintain the dam at a certain height it's basically hiding the leak where the beavers don't think to look for it
- [65:56]
Brett Weinstein
so wait wait that's going to require some unpacking okay you can manage the level of the pond then it doesn't flood the field so you can protect
- [66:05]
Jacob Shockey
the field so you could have the beavers and the field okay now you
- [66:09]
Brett Weinstein
do this by draining water from the pond above a certain level like the little i don't even know what you call it but the thing in many sinks that if you yeah exactly close the drain you get to the overflow bathtub and it goes down the drain
- [66:24]
Jacob Shockey
yep okay do not exceed line yeah
- [66:27]
Brett Weinstein
the do not exceed line okay so you do that to a piece of beaver pond to a beaver pond you put a some sort of regulator that you know takes in water as it overtops and then drains it out presumably the dam yep okay yep makes sense except you're dealing with a living system managed by pond makers what do they think if you just put in a
- [66:54]
Jacob Shockey
standard pond leveler well that's where you know if you get greedy and you try to take away all their habitat they might not outsmart the pond leveler but they realize their dam isn't working because your pond leveler is the leak you're hiding the leak way out in their pond where they don't think to look for it you know and the water is leaving so if you just
- [67:17]
Brett Weinstein
put a pipe through their dam above a certain level right what would they
- [67:22]
Jacob Shockey
do typically they would find the inlet because they'd swim past it and they'd feel water rushing out and they'd plug it immediately okay so a typical pond leveler is a is a pipe and then it has a big cage around it where the water goes in so that's typically like forty feet out into the beaver pond and then the the pipe itself is your do not exceed line so wherever you set that in the beaver damage that's the level you're controlling the water at if you make it too low you get greedy and you say basically you have no habitat beavers the beavers will just build a downstream dam and back flood everything of course so they figured that out yeah so a lot of the work i do is helping it's like marriage counseling it's like well i hear your needs and the beaver has these needs and so let's kind of come to an agreement and i'll often point out like here's their underwater entrance so if we go lower with the water level than their entrance that's a big deal for them right reveal that'll trigger your downstream dam yeah yep and if you can come to a happy medium these things can be in work for decades right beavers have learned how to outsmart some of these so i recently invented a new one that i'm into and it's it's like the first reusable one that doesn't involve mesh and but that aside there's this tool right that works and we've been using these for over twenty years however when we put that tool in we diminish the thing that everybody wants like we're actually artificially constraining the good work that beavers are doing so the beavers are not dead but their good work is being constrained yeah and so i've and we've been talking about how beavers are contributing all of this wealth this ecological wealth and if you're a landowner beavers are just creating true wealth on your land but you don't see it that way often landowners see it as an encumbrance like you're creating a wetland on my property there's a real estate agent in my area and she insists if she's going to list your property that you trap all the beavers first it's like on her list like clean the you know wash the carpets trap the beavers yeah you know it's seen like it's not seen that you have wealth on the land it's seen that there's a there's a pest infestation yeah and so there's there's this issue where for most of our history as a species we've seen it as wealth and now we think of it as pests and and you can talk talk talk talk about how it's great but the people who are dealing with it are still dealing with plug culverts and flooded croplands and yet you've got a lot of people who would love to see more beavers and they don't have land right right so what i'm trying and to my knowledge this is the first time it's been tried anywhere in the northern hemisphere where beavers are i was just presenting on this idea in scotland last fall and no one's tried it is simply could we sponsor a beaver family to live and work on that piece of land so say you're a farmer right you've got two acres being flooded out i come to you as a nonprofit and i say hey we think beavers are really groovy for all these reasons we get that they're causing you a headache could we could we pay you to host the beavers and it's an idea i've been exploring for a number of years i ran a little survey out to like market research see if there was any there there because why hasn't anyone it's like peer to peer subsidy basically and the signal i got back was oh people would love to sponsor beaver families i was also asking them like you know how much would you spend per acre of land the beavers were flooding and you're asking the farmers no no the the potential sponsors like i wanted i wanted to see like is there a market for people that would people actually want to sponsor would people donate
- [71:11]
Brett Weinstein
if they had the opportunity to to
- [71:13]
Jacob Shockey
keep a beaver family alive and doing all this good work yeah and would a farmer accept a donation from somebody they've never met to flood their farmland and create a crop that was sort of non consensual yeah right right there's two questions and what i got back from the little market research was a resounding yes from the farmers if it was paying more than my crop makes and yes from people like we would love to sponsor beavers they didn't like it when i started talking about how many acres and it was just like just tell me about the families right and so we're trying this approach we've
- [71:52]
Brett Weinstein
but isn't it going to be ungodly expensive to take an acre of farmland
- [71:57]
Jacob Shockey
productivity so i was talking we've tried this now once again this is fully in pilot mode but we've been kind of very i've been trying to be very slow and systematic in developing it it's been in the hopper a couple years now and i met with a farmer whose fescue crop was flooding and i asked them what their profit margin was for that acreage and that landowner was making one sixty two dollars an acre per year what yeah per acre per acre oh my god so an acre of land was generating one sixty two dollars and i thought well i think i can compete with that i came from the restoration industrial world the complex that's been built out around things like mitigation wetlands and the number you start if you're going to go build a mitigation bank wetland you know somebody's developing a real wetland and you build this fake one and there's this shell game you start at a million you're
- [73:00]
Brett Weinstein
talking about those awkward little ponds yeah the little part and they're in the
- [73:06]
Jacob Shockey
fenced in yeah full of weeds and they're not an evolved complex system yeah but they've officially replaced the one that you took away yeah those those projects often started one million dollars an acre and and here i am with a farmer telling me at one hundred sixty two the minute you cross that threshold i'm making more off of beavers managing my land so we came up with a simple three page agreement is kind of one of these high trust low risk landowner agreement and we're basically leasing land for the beavers and i asked the landowner to name the beavers they named them the nausons as in gnawing on a stick and the naossen family because they're party to the lease you know we need them they're on the lease and we're basically saying hey you agree not to kill the nausons if you want to lower one of their names you work with us so we can do it well and in trade we're going to give you one thousand dollars a year to host the nansen family on your land plus five hundred dollars an acre that they flood per year so the naasins are costing us two thousand dollars a year and for that we're getting two acres of evolved complex system under management in the way that it needs to be under management and not only are we getting all the benefits of that but instead of this being a black hole in the beaver population where beavers are getting trapped every single year at this property well two to four dispersing beavers are going out of this property every year you know so we got producer it's a net producer so you've got all the local benefits and you've got the curve coming out and it's for budget dust compared to what we spend and yet there is no program to do this there's no official anything all right i
- [74:55]
Brett Weinstein
just you've said it very clearly i just want to recap it because it's so beautiful right you could spend what did you say a million dollars creating a phony yeah artificial gross wetland that doesn't work because it's not an evolved system it's just a series of check marks you could take the tiniest fraction of that for a couple thousand dollars you can host a beaver family to do a much better job of creating a wetland than any human is ever going to do and this has never been done and nobody's angry at you because the people who were making money from the farmland are making more money from being stewards of the land using beavers i mean it's it's beautiful i
- [75:46]
Jacob Shockey
love that you think that because when i came up with this i was like i need someone to test the game theory on this and i was like i need to i need to shop this with brett i mean look feels it feels like it will work
- [75:57]
Brett Weinstein
i think the game theory the game theory is not the problem that the thing the place that i would have said hey i think that idea is probably not going to work is that i would have imagined that the amount that you would have to pony up yeah take an acre of farmland out of out of production would have been orders of magnitude higher now i'm sure there are crops for which it is sure but you know how many acres of farmland are producing the most marginal of profits and and actually costing us environmentally because you're washing topsoil into the stream you're putting pesticides on it so i don't know this those with those numbers it obviously makes sense the numbers
- [76:44]
Jacob Shockey
are pretty crazy yeah yeah i mean
- [76:47]
Brett Weinstein
and you could just take take one of those million dollar phony wetlands i mean how many how many acres of farmland could you turn over to beavers and everybody wins except the the phony
- [77:01]
Jacob Shockey
wetland well so one of the things in this three page agreement which would need to be built out into a bigger thing if we ever did this but the farmers i've talked to are completely happy if project beaver wants to make money selling credits off the work that's being done on their land so one of the things they do is they agree to let us play in the carbon market or the wetland market if we so choose we're too small and those markets are too captured right
- [77:32]
Brett Weinstein
oh i would they'd be ruthless and
- [77:34]
Jacob Shockey
protected ruthlessly captured but the thing is my product is going to out compete all of their products in that if i have twenty acres under beaver management as a little non profit those acres it doesn't matter what you measure the beavers are doing it better right of course so maybe someday there's some way where the the powers that be will acknowledge hey beaver stewardship that is actually
- [77:56]
Brett Weinstein
a higher version yeah well this is where you're up against what happens to the bureaucracies right all of the bureaucracies whether they're federal or state or ngo that say they care about ecological restoration but have become a cryptic jobs program for people who want to virtue signal but aren't really that interested in getting the job done cornelli's law right yeah that you can't be allowed to succeed because of all the little fiefdoms that this would interfere with but the glorious
- [78:32]
Jacob Shockey
thing is we don't even need them and we don't need the government it's literally humans donating the usd tokens to something that i have yet to find a better use of funds if you want to do anything good for the
- [78:46]
Brett Weinstein
environment yes now i should just point out when you say usd tokens you're using a clever euphemism for dollars oh
- [78:54]
Jacob Shockey
yeah i'm sorry i feel somewhat autistic when i try to think about no
- [78:57]
Brett Weinstein
no i don't really understand i get it i just all of all of us folks who are so worried that the the cage is going to be composed of a central bank digital currency are like oh my god you didn't is he in on it yeah but but yeah no i love it it doesn't require any of that architecture to participate on the other hand if that architecture wasn't so damn corrupt the tiniest fraction of budget on these stupid wetlands
- [79:26]
Jacob Shockey
could just produce yeah or a little tiny item on the farm bill right
- [79:30]
Brett Weinstein
you know no it makes perfect sense and i will tell you just in passing i have to say it i've been wondering about those stupid little wetlands for like my everyone adult life i see it and i think that's the worst piece of real estate i've ever seen right you you've put in a wetland apparently to attract birds and it's like in the middle of one of those you know a cloverleaf on ramp to a something and it's like how little do you understand about nature to think that that is going to work or is a good idea and it gives essentially all almost no aesthetic benefit right it's like okay so you've got an artificial pond that would otherwise you know be rocks or concrete or something it's a little better but it's not enough better to justify what it obviously
- [80:25]
Jacob Shockey
takes to produce it well and you know habitat is the product of a process yes and you have no process there you've built this sort of thing that looks like a wetland because you went out and measured a real wet and then you're like it's wet it's wet and it's kind of flat and bumpy yeah and like it has these plants so we're going to grow these plants in a nursery we're going to shove them in there and give them
- [80:45]
Brett Weinstein
drip tape it's yeah it's potemkin nature i mean like almost literally right it has the look of a wetland enough to satisfy some very superficial desire for nature right but it's so shallow yeah right so i'm i'm thrilled about this and i'm very hopeful that people across the political spectrum you called yourself a progressive before i don't think you were speaking politically i think you were referring to what we often talk about here where when people think they're going to solve a problem exactly don't anticipate the unintended consequences and so you're aware that you're talking about solving a problem no
- [81:26]
Jacob Shockey
in this sense i'm coming into it very conservatively yeah right in the other sense of the word conservative literally like this is a complex evolved system right
- [81:36]
Brett Weinstein
but i think you're actually protected from the the caution that you issue about you know wide eyed progressivism because you're not instituting a novel solution true right there are novel aspects to what you're doing but the part that has to actually function as it interfaces a complex system evolved to do exactly that job
- [81:59]
Jacob Shockey
the only thing the humans are doing is drawing a line around the evolved complex system and saying here this many
- [82:06]
Brett Weinstein
acres well all right so years ago i as a graduate student i started you know now i was interfacing with all of these biologists in different areas of the field and i was realizing that there was this unfortunate aspect to the way people ended up in ecology in my opinion ecology contains some of the most interesting questions in biology but the work in ecology is atrocious right the trying to answer those questions is done poorly with the wrong assumptions and so it's a very disappointing field even if the questions are in principle very interesting ones and important so the what was i going to tell you in
- [82:52]
Jacob Shockey
grad school meeting people oh yeah ecology
- [82:56]
Brett Weinstein
what i realized was that there was something that brought people into ecology unlike the other fields and what it was was a desire to make the world better which i think is totally honorable and i like it right but it's not a proper scientific motivation and when you get there if you were actually doing the scientific part right which you would realize is ecology contains hugely important questions that are almost immaterial to conserving things right right what you need to do to conserve things is protect them and allow them to do what they are built to do without your needing to understand it on their own already yep right so protecting habitat recognizing the difference between a habitat that looks intact and one that's actually intact and figuring out what the minimum necessary parameters are to keep the habitat actually functioning yep so you have seen i know you have empty forests especially empty tropical forests you know you go by it on the boat looks perfectly healthy because all
- [84:05]
Jacob Shockey
the trees are there right instagram worthy
- [84:08]
Brett Weinstein
instagram worthy and yet there's nothing in it right and so you you can't do that what you need to do is actually figure out you know what is it that causes the animals to be emptied from a forest which then causes the processes that maintain the forest to be degraded and once you figure that out what you're doing is you're protecting habitat when something goes extinct it's telling you that you failed at that job right so anyway point being the project you're talking about is the right kind of intervention it's like imagining that the intervention for your health involves eating real food grown in a safe way that's not an intervention really it's the removal of all of the interventions that got in the way of that process likewise you know putting beaver somewhere or encouraging them seems like an intervention and at one level it is on the other hand it's basically you interrupting the processes that eliminated the beavers in the
- [85:07]
Jacob Shockey
first place so well in any of the ancestors of any of the people that we're talking about owning land and stewarding land now you go far enough back and they would recognize that you want that ecological wealth on your land right just like they would recognize you
- [85:20]
Brett Weinstein
want to eat real food well actually to switch subjects entirely for a moment there's a a tragedy i think that's unfolding with young people people my kids age there in their early twenties where they are being sold a an idea of what their romantic life should be for example and they have no it's long enough ago that romantic lives worked properly that they don't even understand what they have given up in exchange for the freedoms that they've obviously gotten right and so if you don't know if you can't you know if you could take a five minute tour in your alternative life if you didn't do that and did do this instead you might think oh there's no comparison i'm happier i'm safer it's better in every way but if you can't take that five minute tour you can spend your entire life doing what seems like the rational thing and basically harming yourself and it seems to me you know the person who understands the beavers as a destroyer of their wealth and doesn't understand well actually you know the quality of your day to day existence the health of your land you know the desirability of it to others all of those aspects would be enhanced if you had the natural relationship between but because it's been hundreds of years since that relationship existed we don't even have the cultural knowledge that that's true we see these as
- [86:58]
Jacob Shockey
nothing but pests yep yeah yeah i mean it's interesting when the hudson bay company came to north america and there was other companies too they showed up with a bunch of trinkets and they showed up and said hey folks if you bring in beavers we'll give you these trinkets these are really cool trinkets and there was a split those human populations that were in water rich areas were much more likely to accept the trinkets and start trapping beavers those human populations like the blackfeet who were in drought prone areas had a mythic structure in place warning them not to mess with the beavers oh that's fascinating and they wouldn't trap the beavers they weren't above killing some other trapper who's got a bunch of beaver pelts and turning in his pelts sure naturally but you didn't actually trap the beavers right and it's like i may have mentioned this last time i was here one of the early texts out of iran beavers were the water dogs and you know there's this cycle of reincarnation and so if you're a good human well maybe someday you get to be a dog and if you're a really good dog maybe someday you get to be a water dog really yeah and the water dogs were so sacred that if you were to kill a water dog you had to pay this fine you had to do community service in this case it was like you had to go kill a bunch of snakes which they're disrupting some other complex system guaranteed but you know community service and fine yeah and the problem was that you would anger the gods and drought and crop
- [88:37]
Brett Weinstein
failure would follow gee i wonder what that mechanism was yes exactly so you
- [88:43]
Jacob Shockey
know we've lost that that mythic and cultural this is just what you're pointing to right it was there one of the things we thought to write down first in iran it was that important
- [88:54]
Brett Weinstein
right oh of course i mean and you know i think i've mentioned to you that i've been doing a lot of work at sort of the interface between the materialist scientific worldview and the religious worldview and those myths are architected by whatever force to contain the counterintuitive wisdom that you need and to embody it in stories that even when there's no human penalty encodes a penalty within you that will cause you not to do the thing that unhooks you know
- [89:31]
Jacob Shockey
that kills the trinket is there but you're still not going to do it
- [89:33]
Brett Weinstein
right you still wouldn't do it because the mythological structure is bigger and more important and you know it's wonderful when you have a myth that is so readily readable in the modern context and it's like oh well we see exactly what we've done yeah right we're the
- [89:47]
Jacob Shockey
beaver wetlands in iran yeah exactly we
- [89:50]
Brett Weinstein
did the thing yeah all right that's really interesting before we close this out you mentioned to me that you were thinking about fourth frontier stuff and i was surprised to hear you mention the fourth frontier but do you want to draw a connection here between your beaver work and fourth frontier or do you want me to lay out what that
- [90:14]
Jacob Shockey
is well let me lay out what i remember from two thousand nine two
- [90:19]
Brett Weinstein
thousand nine my god a lifetime ago
- [90:22]
Jacob Shockey
you can edit great and then because i came to this approach from remembering your lectures on the fourth frontier so from what i remember and this will be however successful it is i think
- [90:38]
Brett Weinstein
i think you'll be fine there are
- [90:40]
Jacob Shockey
three frontiers that humans have evolved to feel we feel sparkly and successful in our brains when we feel like we're pursuing a frontier and there are three frontiers that over our our lineages as humans have been the sparkliest frontiers to pursue and really kind of the the main and only frontiers and those are land the conquest of more land but more like land for the taking you know land that you can move into this is the pressure that helped us develop clothing right to move into these habitats that we were uncomfortable now we're comfortable enough to land the second is technology everything from farming to then oh look we can pull nitrogen out of the air now our farming is way more successful to the technology that we think of today you can make rich building a data center son i think
- [91:37]
Brett Weinstein
i'll put that off but okay right
- [91:39]
Jacob Shockey
so this this idea of a frontier and then the third is while you get stagnation in either of those you get economic stagnation and it's we'll go take their stuff
- [91:52]
Brett Weinstein
yeah you're doing very good let me just fill that in so please the frontier is a place that allows you to generate more wealth geographic frontier hey we found a continent nobody's seen before obviously that's a huge increase in the number of people from our lineage who can exist so that's a giant geographic frontier where the term obviously comes from technological frontier you go from hunting and gathering to farming the very same piece of habitat the number of people who can live on it jumps that's a technological frontier and then the third one isn't a real frontier but from the population's point of view it is you get the same burst of growth if you can figure out a justification for attacking those people and taking their land or their stuff and so we see that pattern in history again and again and again it's it's a theft of niche frontier effectively yeah
- [92:49]
Jacob Shockey
yeah and so the idea that i remember you putting forward is okay this is reality deal with it and what if a fourth frontier were possible what what if there were a thing an activity a thing that that humans can apply their brains to a puzzle that we are rewarded with wealth from the perception that our lineage will do better that is just as satisfying but it doesn't end in all the things that extractive land use you never know if the technology is going to stagnate and war resultant this idea of is there is there something else that that because it's a because it's a thing that we just we're obsessively captivated by this this this feeling could you could you turn somebody onto a feeling that same feeling that would reward them in the
- [93:54]
Brett Weinstein
same way yeah that would satisfy our desire for that yeah growth it's a
- [94:00]
Jacob Shockey
life well lived you've done better than your parents kind of that that that
- [94:04]
Brett Weinstein
feeling yeah or i would point to it's not true fourth frontier but the same idea if you look at a like a classic japanese corporation where you come in at a particular level and if you do the job correctly you climb at a particular rate right and the point is even if the company is not growing from the point of view of you as an employee it feels like growth your liberty gets bigger every year and so the point is it satisfies that human desire for things to get better and so the question of the fourth frontier you know and there'll be lots of conspiracy theorists who think that i'm arguing for some dictatorial way of organizing humans there he goes again yeah exactly but but the real question well that's just the thing is it has to for a fourth frontier to be to exist in a meaningful sense it has to be it has to be self sustaining and desirable enough that people want it you can't impose stuff on people and it can't even
- [95:14]
Jacob Shockey
smell fake right it has to be
- [95:15]
Brett Weinstein
authentic and it and it you know effectively it has to it has to create such a good deal for people who participate in that if people want
- [95:25]
Jacob Shockey
to opt in yeah yeah so that's been rattling around my head and the result that i feel like we should go for is a growth of wealth and the growth of wealth rather than than taking from the land how could you how could you have a game where where the the land you know it's this idea of regenerative agriculture in a sense like how do you have a game where the land is you're you're profiting more and the land is profiting more at the same time and that's where i then came to this idea of well could we could the game be evolve complex systems like that the game is to grow evolve complex systems and it's and it's fun because it's like square meters under beaver management is a really easy or families of beavers doing work it's a really easy thing to track and if you have a system where folks are rewarded for tolerating beavers on their land such that it's the most profitable piece it'll it'll i mean i grew up rurally nothing spreads through a community like oh they're make they've got a new way to make money off the land everyone's always trying to figure it out sure right i mean we survived the green rush everyone put in greenhouses cut down trees and grew cannabis for freaking eight years because it was like the thing that you could just make a little money at yeah and so if you could if you could set that piece in motion and all the people the collective action problem all the people who realize that they would benefit from beavers and want to feel that there's beavers and have extra dollars that they want to be effectively spent right could be the engine driving a game where you know you're you're you're just seeing a growth of wealth tied to it it's like a it's like a retraining humans to recognize the thing that we've lost yeah using the thing that we're used to now the the dollar being the the stand in for wealth but using that to retrain humans to to growing wealth and and it you know it's not perfect for the fourth frontier but it is inspired by that lecture and it feels like it fits in that model in that there's the farmers making more tokenized money they're making more dollars but they're actually growing wealth on their land too the people donating their devaluing currency are seeing it currency converted over into something that's real wealth that's growing wealth collectively too and so it's reliant on you know folks wanting to play that game but everyone's seeing a benefit well
- [98:30]
Brett Weinstein
i think it is liable to be the hard part is seeing it at first before it's been demonstrated in a way that is visible actually no one's tried this right yeah so once it has been demonstrated you can imagine you know a particular a particular municipality and the surrounding habitat you can imagine somebody saying hey actually that sounds pretty good to us and trying it and then the town not burning down in some fire that burns down surrounding towns because it solved its hydrology problem you can imagine real estate prices going up in a place where people are doing this because there's more wildlife it feels better to be there you know droughts aren't severe whatever it is so i think it would catch on if it got over the initial phase of demonstrating itself so that people could actually look at it yeah right yeah because you know i had a an excellent professor heather and i both learned from a guy named george esterbrook at michigan and he was a very different thinker he thought differently about a lot of things and he taught this what he called practical botany which was a program in which he actually told you to how to do things and he taught you how to make wine with yeast and fruit juice and you know how to deal with various plants and how to think about the landscaping around your house and one of the things that you know his point was was your lawn why do you have it right i was like well because it's nice he's like it's not really nice it's good for one thing if you want to walk on it or lie on it it's the right plant and if you don't it's kind of a waste of your space there's a lot of other stuff you could do that's nicer right so i thought that was pretty interesting and he went into sort of why we have these lawns yeah right and it's like oh this comes back to some english idea about you know conquering nature and formalizing the garden so that it feels very much under control you know the box hedges and these sorts of things anyway so all right and our
- [100:51]
Jacob Shockey
eye likes to rest on something that looks recently grazed by a big ungulate because hadn't occurred to me oh yeah think about it a well grazed area you you know somewhere there's meat right
- [101:04]
Brett Weinstein
okay maybe that i mean that makes
- [101:06]
Jacob Shockey
sense to me it's not my idea but i like it this idea of you know the meadow or the the
- [101:12]
Brett Weinstein
grazed well i always like i mean know i grew up hiking in yosemite i like a an unruly meadow you know i like a diverse meadow grass has always seemed weird to me but
- [101:24]
Jacob Shockey
well that's too big a tangent to get onto this there's a whole world of yosemite and and maybe we just need to get into it a little bit okay so you got john muir scottish right he comes over from scotland scotland's gone through the highing clearances so you had like the early versions of what it meant to be colonized were practiced on scotland and ireland and wales right and you had marshall clans and you had british come in and say basically like you know who's your leader well i don't know there's multiple people here and well or they pick a yes man and it was called the baronetization of scotland they they bring this guy up as a baron and he gets a castle right and and here's the tax structure that keep your castle going and you know you want to keep your castle so better say yes better say yes and you better do what we say when we ask for it right you know but the key thing is you're taking someone within the community and raising them to an aristocracy class and then it's the trinkets again they don't want to let go of the castle sure right so down the line you have kings who realized like they scottish they're just too much of a pain in the butt and i just know this because i was recently at a beaver conference in scotland and we we camped for five weeks the whole family we went over i've got four nice we put up a tent for five weeks scotland has this crazy right to roam law so you can there's no public land but you can put your tent anywhere on an estate and i think it's how they keep people from rebelling you know because it's like yeah there's wide open space it's not owned by you but you know you can which was fantastic as as the person who came from rural america where you get shot for crossing a fence line yeah it was crazy yeah it's wild open a fence go put your tent yeah so we were camping having all these conversations at laundromats and such and this is such a visceral history for the people i was meeting so there's a baronetization if you're a mccrae or a wallace or a mcdonald's you get a crest at this point this is when the crest gets awarded to you right with the castle and then at some point the british king is like these scottish guys are just too much we need to do a little ethnic cleansing but how are we going to do it well they came up with the british highlanders so we're going to go use them as cannon fodder and that so outlawed traditional dress traditional music and traditional weaponry and if you're a young man that grew up in a marshall clan and you want to sing and fight and wear your kilt well you could join the british highlanders we've got all that there for you right and the problem with that plan was that the british highlanders started pulling off victories where they were supposed to all die and so then the king was like okay i guess i've got something here and this is this story i'm telling you is the story that's told to me at laundromats okay so just caveat right but it's true in the sense it might be perfectly true but it's true in the sense of the working class of scotland this is the story they tell when an american shows up and wants to wash laundry with them or whatever i heard it multiple times so then king of england it's like i got something here we're actually going to celebrate these guys so he gets a hold of the barons he says okay collect your three most fierce warriors and we're going to do a parade at stirling castle and i'm going to show up and it's going to be this thing but you need to send in your your swaths of your plaid to go on record and so that's when you know before that yeah everybody kind of wore the same pattern but it changed with weavers over time and that's when everything got really standardized like this clan it's this plaid for this this parade king shows up he wears a kilt he's in scotland everyone's amazed he wears pink tights because real men don't show their legs
- [105:28]
Brett Weinstein
and but they do wear pink tights i did not know that and they
- [105:31]
Jacob Shockey
parade around sterling castle right jump forward the next thing that people tell you the highland clearances i own clearances were when you needed disposable cheap labor down in the industrial revolution kicking off in london liverpool and everywhere get a hold of all the barons and say okay you need to clear all the people off the land and so if you were a mccrae you were cleared by a mccrae in the castle it was your own clan clearing you it was a portrayal at a deep level it wasn't britain that cleared the land and that's when the sheep and that's when the fences came in because until that point people were seen as belonging to the land just like any other wildlife right and so if you were elevated to this lord blah blah blah there was still an understanding that people had an inherent right to be on the land and the clearances were the were the uprooting of the humans from the land and i mean you talk to scottish folks and they talk about it like irish folks about the potato famine i mean this thing happened a very long time ago and it's like viscerally there right and that's when the the idea of a of a landscape came into our vernacular and this idea of a landscape you know landscape in the dutch painting sense where you've got a this was another thing i was talking to stuart parker about the landscape is a very specific idea it's a vista it's a panorama that you rest your eyes on and you feel a sense of peace and there's important components like well grazed meadow and human habitation in disrepair which back to our fourth frontier what does that tell you that's like oh there's nobody here right i like it yeah and that's what that's the scotland we go back to as tourists to go see the ruins in the beautiful vistas right and the the thing that i heard back from to tie it up with scotland the thing i heard back when i was talking with folks was oh yeah you crazy tourists you know you come back and you're like oh you know i've got wallace big deal you go to the you go to the you know mccrae castle and you buy the crest you spend money on the entrance fee and you buy all the kilt stuff you're buying the paraphernalia that drove your family off the land like you are the diaspora you were forced off the land and now you're going and you're spending your tokens with the yes man in the castle okay so so anyway john muir came from scotland he's a scottish guy and he sat at the edge of yosemite fire adapted landscape where humans are burning on a regular cycle and there's beautiful wildflower meadows very little brush big trees right beavers have managed water for millions of years predictably everything co evolved well here humans were managed especially in the dry places humans were managing fire predictably for long enough that everything evolved
- [108:29]
Brett Weinstein
that
- [108:31]
Jacob Shockey
he's like this would be a better vista if the humans weren't here yeah humans were forced out and now we got a national park and then the national park you know had a brush and the meadows were falling apart but the meadows were falling apart because the keystone element of humans and fire had been taken out just as the
- [108:49]
Brett Weinstein
beast interesting humans were playing the role
- [108:51]
Jacob Shockey
humans were playing the role and and you can look yosemite's meadows have just over time since it was made a national park because like a beaver dam
- [109:01]
Brett Weinstein
all right you're breaking my heart no that's all right you had to bring it up i did have to bring it up well no this is your this is your role you keep educating me about stuff that i thought i knew something about but all right so let's close the loop on this here you have some sort of british or maybe more broadly european impulse to take nature and tame it and that gets built into the aesthetic of you know the colonists and the settlers and the population that grows has picked up this ideal that you know the well manicured the well manicured property is you know beautiful yep but that happened in a context where there was so much nature right you were surrounded by nature so the well manicured garden was in contrast to nature which you were not starved for because it was everywhere right at some point the population gets big enough and successful enough and technological enough that nature is now utterly remote and we are starved for it even if we don't know that we are and so the point is in that context you know just as the passenger pigeons were killed off because they seemed inexhaustible right the land being managed by beavers there were so many of them that eliminating the ones that were in your way didn't seem like a big deal inexhaustible and yet you know when's the last time you saw one you've seen them you know this week but you know even me who goes looking for stuff like this it's been years since i've seen one so anyway the point is in this sort of nature starved moment the idea that the thing that might attract your attention that might feel healthy and invigorating to you wouldn't be the well manicured garden because they're everywhere it would be the surprising patch of nature that's alive for reasons you may not entirely intuit when you see it so i do think it's a contagious idea for that reason and then even just a few examples where people had made this leap would cause a change in how people began to see this process and whether it might be something that they want so i'm hopeful about that
- [111:27]
Jacob Shockey
i love to hear that you're hopeful
- [111:28]
Brett Weinstein
about that great yeah all right well this has been a fascinating discussion i hope people have once again had their eyes opened to what we are missing for lack of beaver management of habitats all around us and maybe maybe this will reach somebody in a position to
- [111:51]
Jacob Shockey
help catalyze this yeah it's a lot of fun we're playing and it seems like a good good game to be working on so all right folks are
- [111:59]
Brett Weinstein
interested reach out where can they find
- [112:02]
Jacob Shockey
you projectbeaver dot org and i'm incompetent at social media so go through the
- [112:08]
Brett Weinstein
website you are too competent for social media probably how that works pointed out
- [112:13]
Jacob Shockey
to me a number of times that the instagram leaves something to be designed
- [112:16]
Brett Weinstein
all right maybe we'll fix that all right well it's been a pleasure jacob shockey i always love seeing you and it's great to see what you've become and what you're becoming and how you're managing your family life and how seriously you take your stewardship of the world around you so thank you well thank
- [112:37]
Jacob Shockey
you and thank you for all that you did for me as a student and you know when you started doing live streams and such my first reaction was well when you got kicked out of evergreen my reaction was sadness because i knew how important the work that you and heather did was and i was like they're taking something really important away and then to see you just grow it to a broader audience and i feel like you're still doing the same thing but you've been able to scale it and so you changed how i see things and so congratulations and thank you for still doing that good
- [113:17]
Brett Weinstein
work that's lovely to hear yeah maybe it is that we're doing the same thing just a little more hate adjacent
- [113:27]
Jacob Shockey
stay on the other side of the
- [113:28]
Brett Weinstein
screen folks yeah that's right it's dangerous all right well everybody it's been fun thanks for joining us