← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
What Humans Must Do To Adapt & Avoid the Collapse of Civilization | Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying (Replay)
01:22:58
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- [00:00]
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- [01:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Heather Hyeing, Brett Weinstein, welcome back to the show. Previously apart, now together. I'm super excited to have you guys.
- [01:12]
Brett Weinstein
Thank you, Tom, for having us.
- [01:13]
Heather Heying
Thanks for having us. Glad to be back, dude.
- [01:15]
Tom Bilyeu
The new book, A Hunter Gatherer's guide to the 21st century, I. I loved it. It is absolutely extraordinary. And I want to begin with a quote from the book that is quite ominous. And then I want to see what you guys have to say about this bad boy. So here we go. This is literally a direct quote from the book towards the end. But and I quote, we are headed for collapse. Civilization is becoming incoherent around us. I'd love to know what you guys mean by that and if that to you is a big part of the thread through the book, because it was for me.
- [01:52]
Heather Heying
Well, the first thing to say is that you skipped the warning in the front of the book that it should only be read while sitting down. So fall over and injure themselves. Yeah, well, we are headed for collapse. That's really not even an extraordinary claim if you just simply extrapolate out from where we are. We are outstripping the planet's capacity to house us and we don't appear to have a plan for shifting gears, so. So it's really a factual statement. Now the question really is why? And the bitter pill is that the very thing that made us so successful as a species is now setting us up for disaster. That is to say, our evolutionary capacity to solve problems has outstripped our capacity to adapt to the new world that we've created for ourselves. And so we've become psychologically and socially and physiologically and politically unhealthy, and our civilization isn't any better.
- [02:52]
Brett Weinstein
That said, if any species could get us out of this mess, it's us. Like, you know, it's exactly as Brett said. We are the most labile, the most adaptable, the most generalist species on the planet, and born with the most potential to become anything else previously unimagined. So I do feel like in the end, the message of the book, which is explicitly and consistently evolutionary in all of its different instantiations, is hopeful. And yes, that that quote that you read is ominous and I think, as Brett said, you know, a factual statement. But we can do this. We. We have. We have to do it, and we need to try.
- [03:34]
Heather Heying
And in fact, in evolutionary biology, we recognize something we call adaptive peaks and adaptive valleys. And it would have to be true that to shift gears to something much better, something that. That gave humans more of what it is that we all value, we would have to go through an adaptive valley, and it would look frightening. And in fact, they are dangerous places to be. But it's part and parcel of shifting from one mode of existence to another.
- [04:03]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, I think an idea that's going to be really important to get across. And this is something as a guy that only ever thought I would talk about business. And then in trying to explain how to get good at business, I kept having to come back to mindset and then trying to explain mindset, I keep having to go to evolution. It's like that we're having a biological experience, that your brain is an organ. It comes. You guys said that we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest of slates, which I think is a phenomenal way to put this idea. And I want to tie that to the title and get your guys take. So it's a hunter gatherer's guide to the 21st century. And so the way that I take that is that notion you have to understand that you're a product of evolution, that your brain is a product of evolution. And then once you understand the forces of evolution and how we got here, then maybe, just maybe we can find our way out of it. So what are the key elements to being a product of evolution that you think people miss that we must understand if we're going to navigate our way well out of this valley of evolution?
- [05:03]
Brett Weinstein
Let me say first that the title A Hunter Gatherer's guide to the 21st century evokes that sort of romanticized hunter gatherer on the African savanna of the Paleolithic, which of course is a part of our human history and does have many lessons in it to teach us about who we are now and who we can become. But as we say in the book, we are all parts of our history. We are not just hunter gatherers, we are also, right now, post industrialists. And there are evolutionary implications of that. Go a little farther back, A lot farther back, depending on your framing. And we are agriculturalists. Go farther back. We're hunter gatherers. Go farther back. We're primates, we're mammals. We're fish. All of these moments of our evolutionary history have left their mark in us and have something to teach us about both what our capacities are and what our weaknesses are and what we can do going forward.
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Heather Heying
I would add the lessons from evolution are both good and bad here. One thing that we realized that our students, over the course of many years of teaching this material realized was that everything about our experience as human beings is shaped by our evolutionary nature. And that has a very disturbing upshot, because we are fantastic creatures with an utterly mundane mission, the very same mission that every other evolved creature has to lodge its genes in the future. And that this actually explains the nature not only of our physical beings, but of our culture and our perception of the world. So understanding that all of that marvelous architecture is built for an utterly mind numbing purpose is an important first step in seeing where to go. But the other thing to realize, and you referenced our assertion that we are the blankest slate that has ever existed or has ever been produced by evolution. And what this means is that we actually have an arbitrary map of what we can change. That to the extent that our genomes have offloaded much of the evolutionary adaptive work to the software layer, that means we are actually capable of changing that layer because that layer is built for change. But not everything exists in that layer. So some things about what we are are very difficult to change. Some things are actually trivial, easily changed. And knowing which is which is a matter of sorting out where the information is housed. But it's all there for the same reason.
- [07:38]
Brett Weinstein
It's exactly. It's all there for the same reason. It's all evolutionary, be it genetic or cultural or anything else.
- [07:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Can you guys give us an example of. And I found this very provocative in the book, and it certainly rings true to me, but that to say that we are in some ways fish from an evolutionary standpoint, that we are, you know, in some ways, primates from an evolutionary standpoint. What does that mean exactly?
- [08:01]
Heather Heying
Again, it's a factual claim, one that once you've seen the picture, standing from the right place is uncontroversial. When we say, is a platypus warm blooded? We are not asking a question about its phylogeny, we're asking about how it works. When we ask, is a whale a mammal? We are asking a question about phylogeny. When we ask the question, are humans fish? If we are asking a functional question, then maybe not. But if we're actually asking a question akin to is a mouse a mammal? Right, then we are asking a question about the evolutionary relatedness of that creature to everything else. And the key thing you need to understand is that a group, a good evolutionary group like mammal or primate or ape, is a group that, if you imagine the tree of life falls from the tree of life with a single clip, right? If you clip the tree of life at a particular place, all of the apes fall together. If you clip it lower down, all of the primates fall together. And the claim that we are fish is a simple matter of if we agree that a shark is a fish and we agree that a guppy is a fish, if you clip the tree of life such that you capture those two species, you will inherently capture all the tetrapods, which is to say creatures like us. So we are fish as a factual matter, if the question is one of evolutionary relatedness.
- [09:32]
Brett Weinstein
So let me, if I may just say, say that in slightly different words. There are at least two main ways to be similar, right? You can be similar because you have shared history, and you can be similar because you've converged on some solution. And so dragonflies and swans both fly, not because the most recent common ancestor of dragonflies and swans flew, but because in each of their environments, flight was an adaptive response. And that means that flying flyingness is not a phylogenetic, it's not a historical representation of what those two things are. Whereas if you say, well, both whales and humans lactate in order to feed their babies, that is a description of, of something that they both inherited from a shared ancestor, right? So the earliest mammal lactated to feed its young, if any, any organism on the planet today that is descendant of that first mammal that lactated to, to feed its young is a mammal. Even if some future mammal went a different way and lost the ability to lactate, it would still be a mammal. So, you know, Brett mentioned tetrapods. Tetrapods, you know, with a Fish that came out onto land with, you know, four feet and started moving around. And it's the amphibians and the reptiles and the birds and the mammals. But snakes are tetrapods, not because they still have four feet, because they don't, but because they're a member of those. That group. So it's a. It's a historical description of group membership as opposed to like an ecological description of what we're doing. So we're not aquatic like most fish are, but we're fish because we belong to a group that includes all the fish.
- [11:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, I'm going to say why I think that matters and why I think you guys put that at the beginning of a book that sort of has this punchline of like, hey, we're really headed towards disaster and we have to be very thoughtful and here are some solutions. So the reason why in business you end up having to talk about evolution is because I need a business owner to understand you cannot trust your impulses because your impulses may not have the growth of your business in mind. It may not reflect an understanding of consumer behavior. It may simply be something from our evolutionary past that was like akin to it's better to jump away from the garden hose thinking that it might be a snake than it is to think that it might be a garden hose. And it really is a snake. And once you understand, okay, my mind is structured in a certain way. It has these insane biases. It tends me towards certain things. Like the one that bothers me the absolute most is that when people have a feeling, it feels so real, it. And you never translate it into logic. So you're like, that thing makes me angry, therefore it is bad and it must be attacked, assailed, whatever. And if you run a business like that, if you cannot divorce yourself from. I have an impulse. Stop that. Insert conscious control and then figure out sort of what the first principles logical buildup is. You can't solve a novel problem. And until you can solve a novel problem in an environment that changes as rapidly as our current world, you guys call it hypernovelty. If I remember correctly, you get into these crazy making scenarios. And so while it seems almost absurd to say that in some way we are fish, the key point that I take away from your book, and that just seems so powerful to recognize to me, is that you have to understand that it wasn't a perfect construction, at least not towards modern goals. Does that make sense to you guys?
- [13:14]
Brett Weinstein
Absolutely.
- [13:15]
Heather Heying
Absolutely. Now, there are. There are really two upshots to this claim that you are a fish. Right. It's very hard for people to wrap their minds around it the first time. But once you realize that this is what we mean when we say, you know, a whale is a mammal, that we are making a claim about the tree of life, then you can actually teach yourself how adaptive evolution works just by simply recognizing that snakes are the most specious clade of legless lizards. Snakes are lizards, Right. You don't think of it that way, but they are. Seals are bears that have returned to the sea. Right. So once you understand that, all you have to do is say, actually, this is a. That it's unambiguous. And that means that adaptive evolution is the kind of process that can turn a bear into an aquatic creature like a seal. Right. So that's.
- [14:02]
Brett Weinstein
Or into a snake.
- [14:04]
Heather Heying
Right. Or a lizard into a snake. The other thing that you mentioned, and you're right on the money, which is that if you use your intuitive, honed instincts in order to sort through novel problems, you will constantly upend yourself because those instincts aren't built with those problems in mind. Now, the thing that's special for us humans is that we have an alternative. And the alternative we argue in the second to last chapter of the book is consciousness. That the correct tool for approaching novel problems is to promote whatever the underlying issue is to consciousness, to share it between individuals who likely have different experience, will see different components of it clearly, and to come to an emergent understanding of what the meaning of the problem is and what the most likely useful solution may be. So in some sense, really, what you're saying is in this context, you're trying to get people to get into their conscious mind and process this as a team activity rather than go with their gut, which is very likely wrong.
- [15:07]
Brett Weinstein
Absolutely. And, you know, our capacity as humans, but that includes as a modern human who is, you know, trying to engage in business with people, to oscillate between this conscious state and a cultural state, which is one in which actually maybe change isn't happening so rapidly. Maybe the rules that we've got are good for the current situation. Let's just do this. Let's do a set and forget on this set of things over here and not. Not constantly renegotiate. Whereas in this other part of the landscape, we actually do need to stay in our conscious minds. And yes, we need to tamp down the emotion and tamp down the, you know, the quick gut response, but engage with one another and recognize that, you know, it's not Satan on the other side of the interaction. It's another human being with all the same kinds of strengths and weaknesses as each of us has.
- [16:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. There's a really interesting thing that happens when you have a team around you, whether they're employees or otherwise. Where literally just the other day I said something to my team and several of them misconstrued it. And I could see they were having a big emotional response. And I said, okay, tell me your objection in a single sentence with no commas, no run ons, no parentheticals. And what you find is that old Einstein quote of, if you can't explain it simply, you probably don't understand it very well. And so people have this emotional reaction, but they. And they then enact out in the world that emotional reaction, but they don't actually stop to take the time to be able to say it in a single sentence. And so you end up, in what my. My wife and business partner and I call, you end up having to chase them because you'll solve the. They'll say, here's my problem. You'll solve it and say, cool. So if I do something that addresses that, and they'll be like, well, it's not quite that. It's. It's this. And then you solve that. And they're like, well, it's not. And it's like when you force people to say something really simply, it forces them to interpret that emotion, to bring it into the conscious mind, and then to actually deal with it, which I find utterly fascinating. Do you guys have a method by which you do that in your own lives or that you've taught other people to do it?
- [17:16]
Heather Heying
Yeah, I would say there's a first go to move, which is let's figure out what we actually disagree about. And very frequently, you can cover half the distance or more just simply by separating an issue into two different ones. So, for example, if I talk to a conservative audience, I know we're going to disagree about climate change, but I also know from experience that I can get a conservative audience to agree that if they believed that human activity was causing substantial change to the climate and that that was going to destabilize systems on which we were dependent, that they would be enthusiastic about doing something about it. And so what we really disagree about is whether or not we are causing something sufficient that we need to take that action. Right. That's half the distance covered in a matter of just simply dividing it into two puzzles. And you'd be amazed. Almost everything that we have fierce disagreements about look like this, where you just sort of assume the other side has every defect rather than realizing we agree to a point at which point we differ.
- [18:24]
Brett Weinstein
Yeah. No, and this is different from what we were just talking about. Right. With regard to are you having an emotional or an analytical response? This is a question of, okay, we think we're talking about the same thing, but probably we are using the same words for different categories.
- [18:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
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Brett Weinstein
And can we. Can we figure out how many subcategories there are? And, you know, say, I've got five in my thing and you've got five. Maybe there's only two that overlap. So maybe we focus on those two. But maybe there's also maybe that, you know, the devil in the details is in one of those. One of those other six that is only in one of the people's brains. And when it's revealed to be like, actually, you think I believe that thing. And I don't. Like, that's not something we share between us. So, yeah, having the capability to go in and, like, zoom in and out on problems and say, actually, the problem can be smaller than you think. And also it is larger than you think and than I think. And let's constantly re. Evaluate the framing and the scale at which we're doing analysis.
- [19:27]
Tom Bilyeu
You guys talk in the book about theory of mind. And Heather, I know you've either started writing, have written, or have threatened to write a science fiction novel, which, you know, I desperately want you to do and publish. But I've started doing a game when I find myself in that situation where. And I learned this in my previous company where both of my partners are really smart guys, but every now and then we'd get in an argument and I'd be like, I think they're an idiot, but I know they're not an idiot. And they think I'm an idiot, but I'm not an idiot. And so I started approaching it as a writer and saying, okay, if I were writing this character in this scene, what would have to be true for them to be acting this way? What would they have to believe, be thinking, whatever.
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Heather Heying
And.
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Tom Bilyeu
And in my marriage, this has become an extraordinary tool of saying, for you to be reacting this way, you would have to think that I believe X, Y, Z. Is that the issue? And then by getting to that, what I call base assumptions, you can really begin to facilitate that. You guys must have encountered this a bazillion times with students. How do you unearth that? Like, what's the process of uncovering that? Especially, in fact, it is so weird to me that you two have become like the most attacked people on planet Earth. I will never quite understand how this has happened. But how do you guys tease out and not just go, they're evil? How do you find those underlying issues?
- [20:53]
Heather Heying
Well, first of all, I think we're. We're attacked because we, we look like villains.
- [20:59]
Tom Bilyeu
So much so.
- [21:00]
Heather Heying
Right, exactly. Well, you, you hinted an important issue here that I think is actually quite modern. So if you lived any sort of normal existence from an ancestor, you know, even just a couple hundred years before the present, you would find that they pretty much grew up around the people that they ended up interacting with as adults. They didn't stray very far from home. Everything would be incredibly familiar. And the language that they used to interact with everybody they were encountering would have been shared because it would have been picked up from an immediate group of ancestors that they both knew. Right. When we use English to talk to someone else, we have an incredibly blunt tool because the ancestor from which we picked up that shared language is quite distant. And what this does, you know, you really have two kinds of people in the world. You've got people who more or less use the tool, like English, as it was handed to them, and they don't question it. And you have people who are trying to break new ground. And what is true for everybody who breaks new ground is that they end up building a personal toolkit. They will redefine words so that they become sharper and more refined and more useful. And then when you put two such people together, they will talk right past each other because they don't remember that they redefined things. So one thing that is essential, if you are going to team up with someone else who is generative and done their own work and arrived at some interesting conclusion, you need time. It's weeks of talking to each other before you even understand how they use language. Once you do that, you can have an incredible conversation. But if you think you're going to sit down with them and immediately pool what you know and get somewhere, you got another thing coming. Because at first they're going to sound like they don't know what they're talking about. Right. You've got to find those definitions and figure out what they mean. And it's actually if once you realize that this is the job, it's very pleasurable and it's. It's really an honor when somebody lets you look through their eyes, you say, oh, that's how you see the world. And now I get a chance to see it that way. And then let me show you what I'm seeing, and you really can get somewhere, but there's no shortcut about the time necessary to learn each other's language.
- [23:13]
Brett Weinstein
That's right. And that, that really is a parallel for what we were doing in the classroom as well. You know, we didn't, you know, if we, if we were teaching 18 year olds, we were teaching freshmen, we didn't assume that they all came in as experts, obviously. And yet the same logic applies that everyone has, you know, I wouldn't say, actually, I don't think I really agree that, you know, regardless of what language you're speaking, you either, you know, take it on, on faith as, as you have received it, or you act decisively to change it. I think teenagers tend to be modifying language pretty actively. And so especially when you, you know, find yourself in a room full of, you know, relatively young people in a college classroom, you have a lot of people who are using language differently than you, the professor does. And then you're also in the business of introducing to them, you know, a set of tools, some of which has specialized language associated with it, associated with, you know, whatever it is that you're teaching and finding the common ground between these like, okay, actually all of us modify language some and let's figure out how to use language that we can all agree on and understand and you know, for, for the purposes of communication as opposed to, for the purposes of displaying group membership.
- [24:31]
Heather Heying
Yeah, exactly.
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Brett Weinstein
That's because that, that's what jargon is often is about group membership displays. And that's what, you know, memes and especially. Well, a lot of the, a lot of the very rapidly changing language that doesn't happen in technical space is really about demonstrating that you're on the inside of some, some joke.
- [24:50]
Heather Heying
Well, actually this is a perfect case of a personal definition that must be shared, otherwise you can't talk. Right. Because I at least distinguish between terms of art and jargon. Most people will use the term jargon for both things. But the point is, terms of art are a necessary evil. Right? You have to add some special term because the language that you're handed, the general language, doesn't cover it. And so you need a special term to describ something. And that means that somebody walking into the conversation isn't necessarily aware of what's being said until they've learned that term. Jargon is the pathological version of this. Jargon is the use of these specially defined terms to exclude people from a conversation that they probably could understand and that they might even realize you didn't know what you were talking about if they could understand the words that you were using. So you use those words to protect yourself. And until somebody gets that, when you say jargon, you're not talking about specialist language, you're talking about a competitive strategy. They won't know what you're saying. So, and you know, the difference, as Heather points out, is in a room full of 18 year olds, especially when you're the professor, at some level you can say, look, here are the terms that we need in order to have this conversation, and more or less people will adopt them because that's the natural state of things. Rather than two peers getting together where you have to, you know, my, my rule is I don't care whether the definition ends up being the one that I came up with or your set of definitions. It doesn't matter to me. What I need is a term for everything that needs to be distinguished. And we both need to know what those terms are in order to have the conversation. But whose terms they are doesn't matter.
- [26:28]
Brett Weinstein
Well, and yet, as I think we say in the book, our undergraduate advisor, Bob Trivers, an extraordinary evolutionary biologist, when we were leaving college and applying to grad school, he gave us a piece of advice about what kinds of jobs we might ultimately want if we were to stay in academia. And he said, do not accept a job in which you are not exposed to undergraduates, because teaching undergraduates means exposing yourself and the thinking that you are presenting to naive minds who will throw curveballs at you. And some of those curveballs are going to be nuisances, and maybe they'll waste your time, but some of them are likely to reveal to you the frailty in your own thinking or in the thinking of the field. And that is the way that progress is made. Whom we call peers is up for discussion. And recognizing that we can, we can all learn from almost every person that we interact with is a remarkable way forward.
- [27:29]
Heather Heying
Yeah, and the corollary to that is there's a lot of pressure not to reveal what you don't know by asking questions that will establish the boundaries of your knowledge. And being courageous about actually acknowledging what you don't know often leads to the best conversations. Right?
- [27:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, you guys do talk about that in the book. And I think that this is such an important idea, I'd love to tied to something else you talk about, which is what is science like? You guys have a pretty unique take on what science is, that it could be done with a machete and a pair of boots out in the jungle. It can be done in a laboratory. Yeah. What is science?
- [28:08]
Heather Heying
Science is a method for correcting for bias. And that method is pretty well known. It has had a few updates along the way. But the, the basic idea is it is a slightly cumbersome mechanism for correcting for human bias. And the result is that it produces a set of models and a, a scope of knowledge that improves over time. And what improves means is it explains more while assuming less and fits with
- [28:44]
Brett Weinstein
all of the other things that we think are true maximally.
- [28:48]
Heather Heying
Right. Ultimately, all true narratives must reconcile and that includes the scientific narratives that we tell at different scales. Right. The nanoscale has to fit with the macroscopic scale, even if we don't understand how they fit together yet. So ultimately we're sort of filling in from both sides what we understand and what we expect is that they will meet in the middle like a bridge. And if they don't, it means we got something wrong somewhere.
- [29:16]
Brett Weinstein
Yeah. So science is not the methods of science. It's not the glassware and the expensive instrumentation and it's not the indicators that you're a scientist because you're wearing these things. You know, it's not the lab coat and it's not the conclusions of science. It's not the things that we think we know, many of which things are actually true and some of which aren't. Science is the process. And all those other things are sort of hallmarks that may or may not be accurate proxies. When you're trying to figure out is that person doing science, is this science over here? But what science is, is actually the process.
- [29:51]
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- [31:21]
Heather Heying
And it's worth saying that you don't need it for realms that are not counterintuitive, right? You don't need to do science in order to figure out where the desk chair is before you sit down, Write a desk is apparent to you where the desk chair is because you're built to perceive it directly. Now, every so often, we all have the experience of looking at something and not being able to figure out what we're seeing. There's some optical illusion, the way we are sitting where we are in relation to the object we're looking at. And then you will go through a scientific process. You know, if that is a so and so, that also suggests this, and I can see that that's not true. So what could it be, right? That that process is scientific, but by and large, the direct perception of objects around you, because it is intuitive, because it's built to be intu. Intuitive, your system is built to understand it in a way that makes it intuitive doesn't require this. So we need science where things are sufficiently difficult to observe or counterintuitive. So you need a process to correct for your expectations.
- [32:21]
Tom Bilyeu
What drives all this to me and that gets missed, even though it's sitting in plain sight, is to make progress, you must hunger to know where you are wrong. And if you can derive. And again, I come at everything from a business lens. In business, if you can derive tremendous pleasure and quite frankly, self esteem from your willingness to seek out the imperfections in your thinking, you'll actually make it. If you don't. And it's an ego protective game for you. And your ego is built around being right, then you're. You're going under. And to your point about exposing yourself to undergrads, some of the most phenomenal, like incisive questions challenging my leadership have come from like interns who just. They've never had a job before. And so they're like, oh, why are we doing xyz? And you're like, why are we doing that? And if in that moment you're like, I must you know, present myself and have a reason for why we are doing that, you actually talk yourself into something. And because the market, much like evolution or reality, which is something I want, definitely want to talk about how there's a weirdness that we're living through now where people feel like if they can convince you through language of something, that it actually somehow affects the underlying truth. But in business, the market does not care. Like, you can convince your team that you're right, but if the market doesn't embrace it, you're going to fail. And there's something wonderful about that.
- [33:44]
Heather Heying
Well, I want to, I want to push back slightly. Admittedly, this is not an area of expertise, but it seems to me that there are two things that business needs to be divided into, two things in order to really understand what you're getting at. The business where the market is actually in a position to test your understanding of what is true and what will work and what people want and things like that is one thing that's real business. And then there's a kind of rent seeking in which it may be about a company that does not have a functional product, that is selling the idea that it will have a product that no one else will have, and its stock price rises up as a matter of speculation. That may well be a realm in which it is, it is deception. And in fact, this, this is beyond the scope of the book. But wherever perception is the mediator of success, you have deception as an important evolutionary force where physics dictates whether you've succeeded or failed. You don't have that problem. You can't fool physics. So I don't know what the two words for the two kinds of business are, but the rent seeking part of business and the actual production of superior goods or the same goods at a cheaper price, that's a different kind of business structure.
- [35:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, here's what's interesting, really fast on that point. I think that they do fall under the same category. So when I say that the market decides. So if your pitch is, hey, boys and girls, we have to deceive the market and we have to, you know, game it, and here's how we game it. And so everything is a function of your goal. So if your goal is to deceive and to, you know, create a pump in your stock price, there is a way to do that that will work, and there is a way to do that that won't work. And now getting into honorable goals versus, you know, dishonorable goals, that, that is really fascinating. But I think that they they do fall into the same category of either the thing you do moves you towards your goals or it does not.
- [35:51]
Heather Heying
Yep. I mean, I still think there's room for a division because there is, you know, the mythology of the market is that it pays for value, and rent seeking violates that. Rent seeking effectively is a failure of the market. And so I don't know, I don't know where the definitional split needs to be. But it does seem to me that although you're right, the, you know, whether. Whether what you are doing is assessing what you believe the psychology of the market to be, or whether you are assessing what might be physically in terms of a product, those are both real systems that you are either correct about or not. But there does seem to me to be a distinction between rent seeking and the production of actual value.
- [36:33]
Brett Weinstein
And there's a perfect analogy to be made to academic science, of course. And so in academia, if you are a scientist, you are supposed to be seeking an understanding of reality. But the way that modern science is done involves a lot of requesting of grants from most of the federal government. And just as I imagine in business, although definitely not my area of expertise, the bigger you are, the harder it is to change course. And in academia, in part, that means the later in your career you are, the harder it is to change course, and therefore the harder it's going to be to do something like embrace that you were wrong. Actual, honorable, good scientists will always, will always fess up and talk publicly about when they were wrong. But. But if your entire lab is contingent on a model of the universe that is turning out to look ever less likely, it's going to be much more difficult for you to do that, for you to embrace the wrongness of, you know, what might be the livelihoods of not just you, but many of the people who are working under you.
- [37:40]
Tom Bilyeu
How would you handle it?
- [37:42]
Heather Heying
Well, you have to restructure things so that what actually matters is being right in the long term. And what we have is an epidemic of corruption inside of science, which has more or less been spotted first with respect to psychology. Now, psychology is difficult to do because you're inherently looking into the mind and you don't have a direct ability to measure most of what's there. But the p hacking crisis, basically the abuse of statistics to create the impression of discovery, which then resulted in the inability to reproduce a large fraction of the results in psychology, is actually the tip of a much larger iceberg that basically, science as a process is excellent, but science as a social environment is defective. And especially defective, where we have plugged it very directly into market incentives. And we've put scientists at an unnatural level of competition for a tiny number of jobs. We produce huge numbers of applicants, which means that the incentive to cheat is tremendous. And those who stick to the rules probably don't succeed very well. So basically what we have is a race to discover who is best at appearing scientific and delivering those things that the field wants to believe rather than those things that the field needs to know. So the short answer to your question, which isn't especially operationalizable, is you need to put a firewall between market forces and the scientific endeavor. Because although science is an incredibly powerful process, it is also a fragile process that needs insulation from market forces or it cannot work.
- [39:30]
Brett Weinstein
So I would say just in brief, again, not particularly operationalizable, but reward public error correction, right? You know, no matter, no matter at what stage you are and what the nature of the error was, unless there was intentional fraud, which of course does exist, public error correction should be rewarded without shaming, without, you know, loss of, of priority in other things and the ability to do science. Because not only do we need people to be able to see that they've made mistakes and actually course correct, but we need people to be taking enough risks early on that they are likely to sometimes make errors. And so in the current environment, where any error can be considered like the death knell for a career, we have ever more timid scientists and that is making us less good at science as a society.
- [40:25]
Heather Heying
And in fact, it almost seems implausible that people would go around acknowledging their errors. But it wasn't so long ago that this was fairly common. In fact, I used to study bats, and there's a famous example of this. Not so long ago, a guy named Pettigrew had advanced a radical hypothesis that suggested that the old world fruit bats, the so called flying foxes, were in fact not part of the same evolutionary history as the bats that we see here in the New World. For example, the microbats, he argued that they were in fact flying primates, which was a fascinating argument. It was based on their neurobiology looking more like monkey neurobiology than it does like bat neurobiology, which turned out to be the result of the fact that they use their eyes rather than echolocation. So it was wrong. And what he said at the point that it was revealed by the genes that he had been wrong was if it is a wrong hypothesis, it has been a most fruitful wrong hypothesis, which was absolutely right. The work that was done to sort that out was tremendously valuable. And so anyway, nobody who has had to course correct and admit an error finds it pleasant. But we have to restore the rules of the game where the longer you wait, the worse it is so that the incentive is as soon as you know you're wrong, owning up to it so that you are on the right side of the puzzle as quickly as possible, that that has to be the
- [41:56]
Tom Bilyeu
objective as you guys look at society and where we're at now. So one problem you've obviously just very eloquently laid out, you've got incentives around admitting that you're wrong is could be the death knell of your career. What else is going on that makes you guys have that quote that we started the episode with around, you know, sort of the. You didn't use the word disintegrating, but that there's, to put my own words to it, there's a crazy making that's happening at the societal level. What has led to that? Like what are three or four factors that are causing that breakdown?
- [42:32]
Brett Weinstein
Well, you know, in part, you know, the, the bias that we have as evolutionary biologists is that we see a failure to understand what we are as producing short term reductionist metric heavy, pseudo quantitative answers to questions that warrant a much more holistic and emergent approach. And so what are some of the things that modern humans have embraced or have been told to embrace, and some of us have and some of us haven't, that have helped produce problems for modern people? This is not new with us. But the ubiquity of screens, the change in parenting styles to protect children from risk and unstructured play, and the drugging of children legally with anti anxiety and antidepressant meds, more likely if they're girls, and the speed if they're boys, those three things in combination, all of which were sort of on the rise in the 90s and hit fever pitch in the aughts and early teens, helped produce a generation that became in body adults, but with minds that had not had a chance yet to actually learn what it is to be human. And some of that is reversible. And you know, really we just by by chance, we were college professors. We were college professors for basically the entire period of time during which millennials were in college. So we taught millennials from, from beginning to end and almost to a person, our students were amazing and receptive and creative and capable. And if you, you know, when, when we talk about the generation of millennials, it's those people who Were drugged and screened and helicopter and snowplow parenthood, Right? So with individual attention, people can be pulled out of the tailspin. But as a societal level, that's exactly what we're in as a tailspin.
- [44:31]
Tom Bilyeu
What is the tailspin exactly though? What is it about those things that what does it create in people?
- [44:38]
Heather Heying
I want to address that as part of a, a slight reorientation of the question. So one of the things that is causing the dysfunction is, you know, it's not just the fact of the screens, but it's what they imply, that virtually everything that people know is coming through a social channel, right? So it is all open to manipulation, augmentation, distortion. And what people generally do not pick up in the normal course of an education, even what we consider to be a high quality education, is interaction with systems that allow you to check whether or not that which sounds right actually comports with logic. So for example, if you interact with an engine, you can't fool an engine into starting. You either figure out why it isn't starting or you don't. And so we advocated for students that they dedicate some large fraction of their education to systems that are not socially mediated, in which success or failure is dictated by a physical system that tells you whether or not you've understood or failed to understand.
- [45:50]
Brett Weinstein
And I mean, this can be mechanics or carpentry, but it also can be, you know, baking frankly, or learning to
- [45:57]
Heather Heying
play the guitar, right, or, or parkour. Anything where success or failure is non arbitrary. What you don't want is an education built entirely of. I succeeded when the person at the front of the room told me I got it. Because if the person at the front of the room is a dope, which unfortunately happens too often, you may pick up wrong ideas and feel rewarded for believing in them. And that can result in tremendous confusion. I would just finally say that the book really is about what we have informally called an evolutionary toolkit. And that evolutionary toolkit, the beauty of it, what we saw and what students reported to us in their picking it up up. That toolkit allows, with a very small set of assumptions, the understanding of a large fraction of the phenomena that we care about. Almost everything we care about as humans is evolutionarily impacted. And the ability to go through what you are told about your psychology or your teeth or anything like that and say, does that make sense? Given the highest quality Darwinism that we've got, does it make sense to be told that our genomes suddenly went haywire and that's an ever increasing fraction of young People need orthodontia. Nope. Not for a moment does it make sense that we have a piece of our intestine called the appendix that is no longer of any value, and yet a huge number of people have this thing become inflamed and burst so that their lives are placed in jeopardy. Nope, it does not. The ability to check what you're being told against a set of a toolkit for logic that is so robust that you can instantly spot nonsense is a very powerful enhancement. And it does not involve knowing more. It involves knowing less and having that little bit that, you know, be really robust.
- [47:53]
Brett Weinstein
That's terrific. I would just say it doesn't necessarily involve you knowing less, but being certain of less.
- [48:00]
Heather Heying
It requires that you rest what you know on less. The foundation is more robust and less elaborate.
- [48:09]
Tom Bilyeu
I was just about to ask what it means to know less. So thank you for that. Yeah, that is very interesting when I think about. I forget the exact quote, but as the island of your knowledge grows, the shore of your ignorance grows too. You know, whatever the famous quote, but it's a really interesting dichotomy. So, all right, we've got this generation that's growing up, they're looking at screens. You guys make a pretty interesting assertion in the book about what screens do in terms of, of you're getting emotional cues from a non human entity and that it may play a part in the rise in autism. I found that incredibly interesting. What I want to better understand is what's going on in our brains. That. So helicopter parenting or snowplow parenting, for instance, like, why does that trap us in a perpetual childhood? You guys talk about rites of passage in the book. I'd be very curious to hear, like, how do we begin to deal with some of these things, whether it's screens, whether it's snowplow parenting. You know, if I find myself a 19 year old and I realize I've been done dirty, I've been on drugs for ages. I was raised essentially by a screen. I'm, you know, having trouble connecting, having trouble relating. And my parents have taken care of everything for me. What are the symptoms I need to look out for and then how do I push forward?
- [49:31]
Heather Heying
Well, in terms of symptoms, this is more or less a. It's a self diagnosing problem. You either. None of us feel perfectly at home in modernity because in fact, we are not at home. We can't be even, you know, the, the world that we live in is not the world of our grandparents. It's not even the world that we were born into. We live as adults in a world that just literally didn't exist when we were born.
- [49:57]
Brett Weinstein
And that the world even that our children were born into, unless they were literally born yesterday. Yesterday.
- [50:02]
Heather Heying
Right, Exactly. It's changing so fast, it can't be. But that said, you either are feeling constantly confused about what you're seeing and hearing and you don't know what to think, or you've found something that allows you to move forward. And even if you can't fully manage what it is you're confronting, it should surprise you less and less. And so we provide a couple of tools in the book. We talk about the precautionary principle and we talk about Chesterton's fence, which are really two sides of the same coin. And if your life has been built around the idea that whatever the newest thing is, the, you know, the latest wisdom is what you were brought up on, then in all likelihood you are, you know, taking various drugs to correct for various things which may very well be the symptoms of the last drugs you, you took. You, you know, you may be engaging in all kinds of behaviors to fix mysterious problems. Maybe you can't sleep and, you know, so you're, you're taking some aggressive mechanism to deal with that. The basic point is back away from that which is novel and untested and in the direction of that which is time tested, and it will result in a decrease in anxiety and increase in your control over your own life. And the way you'll tell is that you will feel less confused more of the time.
- [51:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Can you guys define Chesterton's fence? I thought that was a really great part of the book.
- [51:35]
Brett Weinstein
Yeah. So G.K. chesterton was a 20th century political philosopher. Maybe. I'm not sure exactly how he would have defined himself, but of the many contributions that he made, I think he was a conservative. But one of the many contributions that he made was imagining two people on a walk together and coming across a fence that appeared to be on their way. And person A says, let's get rid of the fence. And person B says, well, what's it here for? Person A says, I don't care, it doesn't matter, I just want it gone. And person B, Chesterton, I suppose, in my telling here, says, there's no way that I should let you get rid of the fence until and unless you can tell me what its function is. If you can tell me what its function is or was originally here for, then maybe we can talk about whether or not it's time for it to go but until you can explain to me what the function is or was, then there's no way that I should allow you to get rid of it simply because you see it as an inconvenience. So, you know, the appendix that Brett already mentioned is a perfect example of this. And we talk about in the book things like, you know, Chesterton's breast milk. You know, we should, you know, we should be abandoning breastfeeding. You know, we are abandoning breastfeeding to the degree that we're doing so at our, per Chesterton's play. Not letting children have long periods of unstructured play in which adults are not monitoring them and are not telling them not to bully each other, even though bullying is bad. Yes. But allowing children to figure out for themselves in mixed age groups how it is to navigate risk themselves, that is how those children will grow into competent young people. And if you do arrive at 19 having been drugged into submission and having had your parents clear all of the hazards out of the way for you, the thing you can do is start exposing yourself to risk. And risk is risky. You know, this is, you know, this is both a tautology and also shocking to people because, you know, wait, you're, you're telling me I need to expose my children to risk? Well, if you want to guarantee that your child will make it to their 18th birthday alive, then sure, put them in a cocoon, right? That's the way to make sure that their body will get to 18 is to reduce all risk from their lives and protect them from everything. But will they have the mind of an 18 year old at that point? No, they will not. So you trade a little bit of security that your child will survive. And every time I say anything like that, I get chills. We have children, they're teenagers now, and the idea that one of them would die and that they would die taking a risk that we had implicitly or explicitly encouraged. I don't know how you go on, right, and your parents do, but I don't know how you go on. But the bigger risk is that they get to 18 and they're incompetent, they can't think, and they don't know how to navigate the world, especially now, where the world in the future will look nothing like it did in the past. They need to be able to problem solve. And the way to do that is to be exposed to as many situations in which they are navigating on their own as early as possible.
- [54:45]
Heather Heying
Selection has really given parents the job of both managing risk and not fully managing Risk. In other words, it's not that you don't protect your children, but you want to protect them at a level where they do make mistakes, and those mistakes do come back to haunt them, and it causes them to be wise adults who are capable of managing risk when the risks, when the stakes are much higher. And that's really the question. It's not, do you want your child to be safe? Of course you do. But you want them to be safe across their entire life. And if you protect them too much when they are young, they will not be able to do it when they are older. And the risks are, frankly, much larger.
- [55:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. One of the things that I find most intoxicating about you guys, your book, your podcast, is nuance complexity. Like recognizing that by being reductionist, by boiling things down to make them simple but no further, whatever the quote is, that there is a point at which you can reduce something so far that you lose what's really going on. And finding our way through all of this complexity, though, is incredibly difficult. So as it comes to your own parenting style, how have you guys employed this? The idea that I'm most interested of yours is the idea that the magic happens in the friction. So whether it's male, female, whether it's right, left, it's understanding or safety and risk, it's understanding that. That it's either side is problematic. How have you guys navigated that complexity?
- [56:21]
Heather Heying
Well, we gambled. Neither of us knew particularly much about rearing children at the point we ended up with them. And we more or less gambled on the idea.
- [56:32]
Brett Weinstein
It wasn't that much of a surprise to me. At the point that we ended up with them. No, no. That carried them for months.
- [56:36]
Heather Heying
No, no. Certainly we knew they were coming for months, for many months. But. But from the point of view of what one does to raise children, well, we hadn't had a lot of experience with young kids. They just hadn't been in our lives. And we gambled on an idea that. I still think it's not entirely obvious why it works at all, but if you treat your children more or less, at least cognitively, you just shoot way over their heads. Right? You talk to them like. Like adults from very early on, and they cannot respond in kind, but they get much more than you would think based on what they can say in response. And so we have been extremely open with our children about the hazards in the world that they face. And the hazards in our family have been, frankly, greater than. Than most children would be confronted with,
- [57:30]
Brett Weinstein
at least in the weird World.
- [57:31]
Heather Heying
Now, we have been honest with them. We, you know, we have an explicit rule in our household, and the children could recite it without thought, right? You are allowed to break your arm or your leg. You are not allowed to damage your eyes. You're not allowed to damage your skull. You're not allowed to damage your neck or your back. Right? Now, when you say that to a kid and they realize, actually, it's not that I'm being told, no, no, no, no, no. I'm being told I am actually allowed to break my arm. And nobody is going to necessarily, you know, be concerned. You know, yes, we'll take care of you no matter what. And if you damage your eyes, we'll take care of you then, too. But the basic point is there's just a fundamental distinction between damaging things which repair pretty well and damaging things which don't. And that ought to exist in your mind, you know, every time you leave the house, understanding that there are certain things, you know, that it's not that you want to avoid bad things and go towards good things. It's that there's a whole spectrum of bad. And you may need in an instant to navigate. You know, if you're driving down the highway, yes, the first job is don't crash, right? Don't crash is a good rule. But you can't always not crash. And sometimes you've got a choice about what you crash into or how you crash. And, you know, if you've just got everything filed as a binary, then you're. You're in much more danger. So being clear with kids about the subtleties and the nuance and frankly, about the bind that you're in, our children know that we have made a conscious decision that in order that they can manage risk as adults, they have to face risks as children that could potentially cost them their lives. We took our kids into the Amazon, for example. That's not a safe place to be. But they're also the kind of kids who can handle it now.
- [59:16]
Brett Weinstein
So one of the things that was very important to us was that our children literally learn how to fall. That when they were climbing up on things, on trees or in jungle gyms, that they would launch themselves intentionally so that they would learn how to fall safely. But metaphorically, learning how to fall is the other thing that you learn once you are engaged in literally learning how to fall. And maybe that is the kind of risk that we are, in fact, trying to prepare our children for. And that we are arguing that parents everywhere should be preparing their children for how to fall safely so that you get up and can live to maybe not fall again, but if you do fall again, live to get up again another day.
- [59:55]
Heather Heying
Yeah. Actually it occurs to me right now that engineers know this backwards and forwards, right? Fail safe. That's what you want. A system that fails safely and building that into your kids is, is an essential, an essential skill.
- [60:12]
Tom Bilyeu
So one of the things you talked about in the book that I was like, whoa. Was when your son broke his arm. I think he was older because I know when the one broke it going down the stairs, that one required immediate medical attention. But there was a time where he broke his arm and it was like a couple days, I think, before you actually went and had it looked at. And there's like an actual principle behind strengthening the bone that you guys go through. And I was very impressed. Talk about that. Including the notion that as a society like you guys have overcome. One of the reasons that I didn't become a father was it seemed so self evident to me that you had to do things like let your kids take care of, take risks, you know, within confines, that you had to make things hard for them within confines. And I wasn't sure that I would enjoy that process. So it was obvious I would have to do it and not obvious that I would enjoy it. And when you guys talked about like how we sort of over coddle things, which I could immediately empathize with. I get why people do it, why you want to wrap a broken arm in the thickest cast you can possibly find, but that even that that isn't always the right answer.
- [61:19]
Brett Weinstein
Yeah, no, it's, it's really not that we, our brains are antifragile and our bones are antifragile and they, they become stronger with stressors. And society seems to be imagining that what we all are is fragile. And by imagining that we're fragile, by creating conditions that imagine that we're fragile, that becomes the reality. We become more and more fragile and less antifragile. So in the case of our, our older son, or it was our younger son, but when he was older, who bro arm. In the last day of camp, we did get him to an emergency room that day. It was several hours, but it was that day. And they told us that at the point that we got back home to Portland, which was several hour drive and it was going to be many days before we got there, that we should go see an orthopedist to have a cast put on. To have a cast put on. So we spent several days splinted he spent several days splinted and with some, with some pain medication before we ended up going home to Portland and where
- [62:20]
Heather Heying
we did not get a cast. But the important thing is this is not an experiment we ran on our child before I had run it on myself. Right. So evolutionarily speaking, there is a logic to what one does with broken bones, and it's a very different logic. Lots of creatures don't heal so well. Horses famously don't heal very well. And the reason for this is fairly obvious. A horse, a wild ancestral horse, that had a broken limb wasn't going to recover. That is to say, once an animal was hobbled by a broken limb, it was going to be picked off by a predator. So the selection that creates the capacity to repair wasn't there. On the other hand, sloths, which fall out of trees fairly regularly, but don't depend on their ability to get away from predators through speed, actually survive very frequently. And when we look at sloth carcasses, they very regularly have breaks that have healed. So creatures that can heal have that capacity.
- [63:19]
Brett Weinstein
Our arms and humans are such creatures.
- [63:22]
Heather Heying
We are such creatures. So one wants to be very careful, right? If a bone is misaligned, you then want to utilize medicine in order to get the healing process to work correctly so it doesn't heal in a misaligned way. But if you've got, got a fracture and you haven't misaligned something, there's a whole other logic that takes over. Immobilizing the arm isn't what we're built for. In fact, what you're built for is to have pain and inflammation do the job. And the result, when I broke my arm and I just said, you know what I've thought for my whole life, why is it that we rush to get a doctor to, to immobilize this and then we atrophy and have it removed and we have to rebuild our strength? Maybe that's not how it's supposed to be. Logically, evolution has prepared us for this. Let's see what happens. When I broke my arm and I was certain that it was not misaligned, and I let it go. What I found out was a one has to be very careful for the first day or two until you learn what it is that you're capable of doing. But your capacity begins to return very, very quickly. And the degree to which I was better off, the time that I broke my arm, that I fractured my arm and did, did nothing medical than the time that I fractured my arm and did the standard medical thing and had the cast was night and day different. And the fact is we talked to Toby, our younger son, when he broke his arm and we told him what we were thinking. And he had watched me go through the experiment and he elected to go through it himself. And lo and behold, the same logic applied in his case.
- [64:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that's really interesting. And feels like there's a lot that we can extrapolate from that in terms of our real lives. One idea that I find really enticing, and I'm sad that I didn't go through it when I was a kid, are rites of passage. Do you guys think about that
- [65:11]
Heather Heying
all the time? We have dispensed. So this is a classic Chesterton's fence issue, where it used to be that there were these hallmarks of having passed through a certain developmental state. And at some point I think people started to feel that these things were primitive and they dispensed with all of them. And much to our peril, because it, you know, what you are is a creature that starts out utterly helpless and ends up incredibly capable. But there are moments at which you take on new responsibility. Right now it's arbitrary. Is an 18 year old really an adult? In many ways, yes. In some ways, no. It's not really a moment at which you become an adult, but you do need a moment moment at which we say, actually at this point, these responsibilities are ones we believe you can handle. And going forward, that's what they are.
- [66:09]
Brett Weinstein
And the ceremony itself instantiates it. The ceremony helps make it real. And maybe it's at 18, maybe it's at 15, maybe it's at 13, depending on the tradition, maybe it's counting in a different way. In cases where perhaps adherence to the calendar is not the thing, but you know, the moment, now you are a man, now you are a woman, is has got to be an empowering one. And it's one of the things that is almost universally lost for us weird people.
- [66:37]
Heather Heying
And you know, it may well be the case, just as is the case with something like follow through in sport, what you do after you hit the ball actually does not matter. But it is very important that you intend to follow through. And in that same way, going through your life knowing that at this moment I'm going to be expected to do this thing, whether it's a vision quest or whatever it may be, knowing that that moment is coming and that on the far side of it you will be a different person, is a developmental process in and of itself. So it's very likely the thing that happens as you anticipate this rite of passage that is really the important developmental thing. But we've just dispensed with them all.
- [67:19]
Tom Bilyeu
So we've talked a lot about evolution and all the different things and ways that it manifests in our life. And I want to bring now people back to where we started in the book that, that we're at. If instead of a nuclear clock coming towards 12, you guys would say that from just a societal standpoint, we're edging up somewhere in there. Talk to us about the fourth frontier. But to understand the fourth frontier, I think we have to understand the first three frontiers. So if you can walk us through that. It was a really interesting idea. It was the part of your book that I had to read twice because I was like, whoa, there's really something fascinating here. And it hints at a very complex answer to a very complex problem. Was entirely novel for me. I've never heard this idea explored before. And I think that it'll be really helpful for people to see that you've thought not just through the problem, but through potential solutions.
- [68:19]
Heather Heying
Well, the first thing to realize is that that all evolved creatures are effectively in a search for opportunity. And that opportunity looks like for an average creature, under average circumstances, if it's a sexually reproducing creature, the average number of offspring that it will produce that reaches reproductive maturity themselves will be two. It doesn't matter if they produce 100 babies or three. The average that will reach that number is two. And the reason is because the population isn't growing or contracting. So. So two parents will end up replacing themselves and no better. At least on average. When you have succeeded evolutionarily, you find some opportunity that allows that rule to be broken, right? A creature that passes over a mountain pass and ends up in a valley in which it has no competitors may leave 100 times as many offspring as it would have if it had remained in its initial habitat. And so these places where creatures discover an unexploited or under exploited opportunity and their population can grow are frontiers. And the feeling of growth is the feeling of evolutionary success. The problem is all of these things are limited, right? No matter what opportunity you've found, the population will grow until that opportunity is no longer underexploited, at which point the zero sum dynamics will be restored.
- [69:44]
Brett Weinstein
But let's just lay out the first three types of frontier before perhaps you expand on what the fourth frontier is. So the first type of frontier being the one that most people think of when you hear the word when they hear the word frontier, which is a geographic frontier. So we begin the book by talking about the Beringians, the first Americans who came over from through Beringia, across what is now the Bering Strait, from Asia into the New world, something between 10 and 25,000 years ago. They were coming into two continents that had never before been inhabited by humans, and that was a vast geographic frontier. The second type of frontier might be called a technological frontier, in which you innovate something that allows you to make use of resource that you heretofore had not had access to. For instance, the terracing of hillsides to allow water to be held and agricultural systems to be done where previously all the water would have run off, taking the nutrients in the water with it. That would be an example of a technological frontier. And then the third type of frontier, which is ubiquitous throughout human history, is a transfer of resource frontier. And this is really not a frontier. It's, it's just, it's theft. Right? And so the Beringians coming into the New World for the first time, again, 10 to 25,000 years ago, we're experiencing a geographic frontier. Thousands of years later. When Europeans came to the New World from the other direction, from, from the east, they landed in a space that already had had tens of millions of people in it and basically took over. And that was a transfer of resource moment and a transfer of resource frontier, basically theft. So geographic frontiers and technological frontiers are not inherently theft. Transfer of resource is. And so we are proposing a fourth frontier.
- [71:37]
Heather Heying
So I just say transfer of resource is the explanation for almost all wars and genocide. From the point of view of some population, the resources of some other population that cannot be defended are as if a frontier. But the idea, the overarching idea, is that all creatures are seeking these non zero sum opportunities, that they are experienced as growth, that they are inherently self destabilizing, that they cause the growth of populations that then restores the zero sum dynamics, restores the austerity, which doesn't feel so good. And the population is then in the cert for the next non zero sum growth frontier. The problem is we can't keep doing that. That process made us what we are and we've been tremendously successful at it. But there are no more geographic frontiers on Earth. We've found it all technologically. We've done an excellent job of figuring out how to exploit the world. In fact, overexploit the world. Transfer of resource is a world destabilizing. Not only is it a Despicable process. But it is a lethal process from the point of view of the danger it puts us at. We simply have weaponry that is too powerful. We are too interconnected. And so in a sense, our fates are all now linked. And we have to agree to put that competition aside. And then the question is, well, what do we do we do. Do we face. Do we accept the zero sum dynamics and live with austerity? That doesn't sound like a very good sales pitch, even. Even if it was what we had to do. So what we propose in the book is that there's actually an alternative to this, that one can produce a steady state that feels like growth to the people who experience it without having to discover new resource. And that may sound preposterous, it may sound utopian. We are not utopians. We regard utopia as the worst idea human beings ever had, or at least very close to the top of that list. But there's nothing undoable about a system that feels like perpetual growth. In the same way, there is nothing utopian about the idea that it's always springtime inside your house. Right? It's always pleasant inside your house. House. That's not a violation of any physical law. It's just a simple matter of the fact that we can use energy to modulate the temperature with a negative feedback system and we can keep it very pleasant in your house all the time. And the point is, can that be done in our larger environment such that human beings are liberated to do the things that we are uniquely positioned to do. To generate beauty, to experience love, to feel compassion, to enhance our understanding of the world. All of those things are the kinds of things that are worthy of us as an objective. And what we need in order for more people to spend their time pursuing those things is a system in which we are freed from competing one lineage against the others for a limited amount of resources, so that we are condemned to violence against each other in order to pursue these things.
- [74:57]
Brett Weinstein
Things.
- [74:58]
Heather Heying
So in essence, the fourth frontier is a steady state designed to liberate people, we should say. It is not something we believe we can blueprint from here. We know enough to navigate our way in that direction, but we cannot blueprint it. It is something we will have to prototype and navigate to. But the good news is, although we here probably would not live to see the final product, things would start getting better immediately upon our recognition that pursuing the fourth frontier was the right thing to do. That suddenly there would be a tremendous amount of useful work to be done in discovering what the various Mechanisms of that new way of being are.
- [75:43]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, you guys are going to have to give me a little more than that. In the book you talk about, you give an example. And it was the thing that really allowed me to begin to understand how we could achieve a steady state that gave us those things. I don't know if you remember the example that you gave in the book. I do. So if you don't, let me know and I will refresh your memory.
- [76:02]
Brett Weinstein
But you're going to be talking about the Mayans, is that right?
- [76:05]
Tom Bilyeu
In the book you specifically talk about craftsmanship. But if you've got something for me on the Mayans, I'll take it.
- [76:11]
Brett Weinstein
Yeah, well, I think we do both. Right. And, and let's see. Well, maybe remind us of exactly what we say about craftsmanship. I remember that we talk about it, but I'm not sure exactly what the context is here.
- [76:24]
Tom Bilyeu
The idea was basically that, so we have this inherent desire for growth, but it isn't necessarily growth itself. It's sort of the. Now I'm using my own words, it's the neurochemical state of feeling. This deep sense of satisfaction at having something of import is probably the easiest way to think of it. It. And that gave me something to grasp onto because I. So I often get asked the question. I've had financial success in my life and the irony of my life is that I'm constantly going around trying to convince people that money is not going to do for you what you think it will. It's very powerful, but it isn't what most people think. They think it will make them feel better about themselves and money is just absolutely incapable of doing that. And so when you realize the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself, you start playing a game of neurochemistry. And so this idea of craftsmanship felt like that to me.
- [77:15]
Brett Weinstein
Yeah. So, you know, recognizing the long term hormonal glow that you get from producing something of lasting value and beauty and meaning in the world as opposed to only being exposed to short term stuff. You know, the difference between buying something at IKEA and putting it together with Allen wrenches on your floor and of either making yourself or coming to know a craftsman who really builds things with care and knowledge, with the intention that you will be able to pass this on to your children or your friends or whomever later on. This is a piece with, with lasting beauty, lasting function that was built with someone who knew something about the wood or the metals or whatever the materials are. This is a way into finding the kinds of meaning that a fourth frontier mentality.
- [78:11]
Heather Heying
Yeah, I think the distinction is one between the satisfaction of life coming from consuming, which is inherently empty, versus producing. And producing doesn't necessarily have to mean stuff. It can be meaning or insight or any one of a number of other things. But what we say about the Maya in the book, what we argue is that they very conspicuously, this is an extremely long lived civilization, thousands of years of remarkable success. And they had, as one of the things that they produced in all of their city states, they produced these incredible monuments which are actually not what they appear to be. We have spent a lot of time in Mayan territory and these things look like pyramids in the sky, sense that the Egyptians produced them, but they are not. They are in fact growing structures. So these things got bigger and bigger over time the longer a city state existed in the same place. And then there's the hidden version of this, which are an incredible network of roads, stone roads that exist between the city states called Sac bays. In any case, the point is the Maya were producing things that stood in for population growth. They were taking some fraction of their productivity and they were dedicating it to these massive public works projects. And the thing about a massive public works project is that it brings a kind of reality and cohesion to the people involved. I mean, imagine yourself living in one of these amazing cities and the public monuments made of stone that speak to the power and the durability of your people are part of this public space case. These things allow the following process. If it's not just a pyramid that you, you know, you, it's a line item on a budget. You build the pyramid, it's done. But in fact, what you do is you augment it well, then in good years you will have that to augment and you will take some fraction of the productivity that might be turned into more people, which would then result in more austerity. You can invest it in these public works projects. And then in a lean year, instead of having not enough to go and feed all of the mouths that have been created, you can just simply not augment the public works project. That is a natural damper for the kind of ebb and flow, the boom and bust that we have suffered so mightily under, under modern economic systems. So the production of meaning, the production of shared space, that actually augments the ability of people to interact with each other. These things are models of what we should probably be seeking as a society, a system that tamps down the fluctuations, that provides liberty to people. That's really the key thing, right? We want realized liberty for individuals that they can pursue what is meaningful rather than satisfying themselves with consumption. That's sort of a rough outline of what a fourth frontier would look like.
- [81:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Nice. I love it. In the book, I can't remember if it was liberty that you were talking about specifically, but you talk about it's an emergent property. I assume you mean the same with liberty. How do we create the bed from which liberty will emerge?
- [81:33]
Heather Heying
Well, what we argue in the book is that liberty is a special value. And the reason that it's a special value is there are really two ways to delineate it. You can be technically free, but not really free, right? If you're concerned about being wiped out by a healthcare crisis, or you're concerned that you may lose your job and have to find another in a different industry, you're not really free. Even if technically you could go out and start an oil company, it's not going to happen. So what we argue is that real liberty, realized liberty is liberty you can act on. And in order for a person to be liberated, their more mundane concerns, their safety, their sustenance, all those things have to be taken care of and therefore we can know that we have succeeded. When somebody has real liberty that they are capable of acting on, it's a proxy. And what we argue is that the objective ought to be to provide real liberty for as many people as possible. Hopefully, ultimately everyone would be be liberated to do something truly remarkable rather than only elites having that freedom.
- [82:46]
Brett Weinstein
I guess I would just say as high a fraction of the population as possible. If we say as many people as possible, it might sound like we're also interested in maximizing population growth, and of course we're not. I think we will peak hopefully at some point soon, and then population may start going down through attrition. But that at every moment in, in human history going forward, the vast number of the greatest number of people possible who have maximum liberty will be a success.
- [83:21]
Heather Heying
And let me just refine that slightly. The objective is the maximum number of liberated people, but not living simultaneously. Ultimately, the way to grant the, the marvelous liberated life to the maximum number of people is to get sustainable at the level that humans can live indefinitely on the planet, rather than having a clock ticking where we just simply don't have the resources to continue doing what we're doing.
- [83:51]
Tom Bilyeu
I love it. Guys, thank you so much for coming on the show today. The book was phenomenal. Your podcast is phenomenal. Every moment I've ever got to spend with you guys has been absolutely wonderful. Where do you want people to follow along with you? Where's the best place to get the book?
- [84:07]
Brett Weinstein
Wow, that's a question we should have an answer to. The best place to get the book is hopefully just about anywhere. It's obviously available on the big sellers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but I know it's available in many independent bookshops as well, and I'm a big fan of independent bookstores. So if you ask for it there, whatever your favorite one is, that's probably a terrific move to help to help support your local economy.
- [84:36]
Heather Heying
It will also be available as an audiobook, which we read.
- [84:39]
Brett Weinstein
Yep, that's absolutely true. And you can find us at the Dark Horse podcast. We do weekly live streams, the two of us. And Brett also has guests on every now and again. I also am doing a newsletter called Natural Selections. You can find that on naturalselections.substack.com and yeah, maybe, maybe that.
- [85:02]
Tom Bilyeu
That sounds perfect. Guys. Thanks again for joining me. This was absolutely wonderful. And to everybody out there, trust me when I say the book is amazing. The podcast is extraordinary. You guys will love it, so be sure to subscribe there. And speaking of places you should, you should subscribe if you haven't already. Hit that subscription button there. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [85:21]
Heather Heying
Peace.