In this 96th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss society, and how to have a functional one. Beginning with a discussion of 9/11, Bret then reads an excerpt from an essay he wrote after the November 2015 Paris attacks. We then share an excerpt from the final chapter of our forthcoming book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, in which ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number nine I am here with Dr. Heather Hying.
I am, of course, Dr. Brett Weinstein.
And we've got Madison Weinstein, the Labrador Retriever here as well.
Oh, I've just bonked on the nose.
She doesn't seem to care, but I feel bad.
Hello, doggie.
All right.
So we're here.
It is episode 96.
It is September 11th.
We'll be talking some about that today.
We are going to be talking about the final chapter of our book, which is due to be released in three short days.
So we're going to be talking about that some too.
We are very excited about this.
Once again, it's a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century.
We have one and only one copy.
Which we had to beg for.
Which we had to beg for, and some of the people we've been talking to about it, which we'll talk to you about having talked to them about it a little bit here today, have not received copies either.
So it's apparently scarce.
It's apparently in high demand, which is why the copies are scarce.
I do want to make one correction.
You said it will be out in three short days.
I expect them to feel like three very long days to us.
Yes, well, reality being what it is, no matter how they feel, they will be the same length.
That's a very modernist, laboratory-focused kind of approach.
Yeah, I don't see it as laboratory-focused so much as, like, reality-focused.
Clock reality.
It's definitely, there's a moment at which that's the way time starts progressing for people.
And I'm not saying it's not real, as we've talked about before, but... 72 hours is 72 hours, no matter how you feel about it.
We should put a pin in this discussion and return to it because it is both what you say is true, but it's very much a laboratory clock perspective and not so much an ancestral one.
Yes, but definitely not a postmodern one, which is what it felt like where you were going.
Never.
So we're going to be talking about all those things that we just said.
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And in Homage to the book and to this feeling like, you know, a big moment for us.
I have asked that we not do any ads today, so there are no paid ads.
Everything we are talking about today is completely from our hearts, although as we've said before, we only take sponsors for ads for products that we actually stand behind.
So before we get into talking about 9-11 and Fourth Frontier, which is the subject of the final chapter of our book, we want to mention, well, we were on Joe Rogan this week.
And as usual, he is charming and wonderful and smart and humble and all of that.
Yes?
Well, I was just going to say, so this He obviously took us to Texas, his new home, and it was a whirlwind tour for us.
Not only were we in Austin, but we were in Dallas, and we got back yesterday.
And oddly, flying in, we had flown out of Portland, where summer has been mostly lovely, except for the heat wave that we had.
But we flew in, and it was cloudy, and it looked like winter.
There was snow on the ground.
Well, not snow, but trash on the ground.
And anyway... None of this is true.
No, it's all true, except the snow part.
But anyway, it is nice and sunny here today.
I'm glad to see that that was a brief departure from our summer weather.
We're still due a few more weeks of this.
Yeah, well this is usually your role, but as you know, winter is coming.
Thank you!
Yes, this is an important point for our listeners, except those in the Southern Hemisphere, to know about and to prepare for.
And we should at some point talk about how one might rationally That's what we're here for, to introduce you to the concept of winter.
Now actually, not this week, but in a week and a half in my sub-stack, Natural Selections, I'm going to be talking about the fact of the fall equinox, fall in the Northern Hemisphere, vernal spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and a full Moon happening at basically the same moment in 10-ish days' time, and what both of those things have meant to ancestral peoples and to us today.
But I just wanted to say that before, so the Joe Rogan episode dropped on Thursday, I think, and we had, you know, the book had been doing okay for not being out and having basically no PR except for what we're doing for it.
Wait, it had been doing great enough that the copies were scarce.
Right.
We were on Amazon, top of the heap in these niche categories like human geography and cultural anthropology.
Then we got there in evolution, and then in biology, and then even science and math.
But then we slipped into the top 100, and that was pretty awesome.
Then yesterday we watched it climb, and we cracked the top 10 across all books.
This is going to oscillate around in all And this is thrilling.
This is totally thrilling for us.
We love that this book is going to be out there in the world.
We really hope that many, many of you buy it, but more to the point that many, many of you read it.
That it will be available in libraries for people who don't have the capacity or interest in buying it, but we really hope that it's very widely read.
But as it is climbing into the top 10, where it's been now moving a slot or two, We've discovered a nemesis, and there's this one other book on Amazon's bestseller list that we are swapping positions with, at least for these last many hours.
It's a fierce battle, I think.
It's not a battle between good and evil so much, but I don't know.
I had something to say here and to show, but maybe you wanted to… Well, I mean, I think… It does feel like a battle.
A personal… Yeah.
It does.
Yeah.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is the book.
We briefly surpassed it and now...
So Zach, can you show that since that didn't go as I was expecting it to?
Well, in any case, the Very Hungry Caterpillar, we briefly passed it and then there was a turnaround and the Very Hungry Caterpillar made a comeback and it has now raced past we briefly passed it and then there was a turnaround and the Very Hungry Caterpillar made a comeback and it has now raced past us, which I strongly suspect the many haters that we have picked up to Thank you.
Thank you.
Do you?
Yes, that is my suspicion.
I see.
Okay, so here we go.
I would not call this racing past us.
We have been neck and neck.
We were ahead of it briefly, and we are behind it now.
No, no.
But I do, I mean, again, I don't think this is a battle between good and evil, because, you know, we too, as apparently the entire frickin' world, were fans of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
It wasn't the best children's book out there, but it was good.
It was solid.
Look, that is racing past us for a caterpillar.
They're not known for their speed.
But I should point to all those people buying the Caterpillar book that we mentioned Caterpillars.
There are Caterpillars in our book.
Absolutely.
I'm sure they're hungry because Caterpillars tend to be hungry.
Yeah, well and I also think the title of this book was something of a warning to us and we just we read it too literally.
Yes, yes.
In fact, maybe The Very Hungry Caterpillar is the metaphor we've been looking forward to be using in, in fact, the fourth frontier chapter of our own book, which we will be talking about.
It's obvious in retrospect.
It is obvious in retrospect.
So I guess there is somehow The email I sent to our wonderful 17-year-old son and producer of the Dark Horse Podcast never reached him, but I will say we are one of, Zach you just showed briefly, one of Amazon's hot new releases as well.
So that's pretty exciting.
It is exciting.
Alright, on to more serious topics.
Absolutely.
All right, I had a couple things I wanted to say about 9-11.
The first thing I wanted to do was talk a little bit about something... For those who are old enough to remember 9-11 as adults, and it seems so recent to me, it's very hard to accept that it was 20 years ago, but in any case, for those who are old enough to remember it as adults, there was a shocking
Pattern that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the attacks and As I remember it and it's a little bit hard to document actually, but as I remember it the fact of the attacks caused A system, a very sophisticated system of journalism and all that had been captured and had become corrupt and feeble and unable to do the most basic jobs that journalism, for example, does.
That system suddenly didn't know what to do and started doing actual journalism.
It seemed almost by accident.
So this very slick product that was produced that, you know, we were told was the news on any given day.
Actually emerged as a real phenomenon briefly in the aftermath of the attacks, and I think it was actually connected.
The attacks happened, and they were such a profound shock to the system that actually ads were taken off of television.
It was understood that it was unseemly and out of place to have ads, and so suddenly what you effectively had Was everybody drafted into a kind of, um, you know, public broadcasting milieu.
Suddenly people who were reporters doing whatever corporate wanted them to report, they were all on the same story.
They had their microphones in hand, the cameras were right there already, and they did journalism because it was the obvious thing to do, right?
And it was so different from normal, right?
You don't realize how abnormal Things are under normal circumstances or how at odds the narrative is from what's actually taking place until an event like this causes people To suddenly wake up and start doing this job.
And then I remember I mean this went on for some time My recollection is a couple weeks I would have said a little less than a week.
I don't remember. - But in any case, at some point, the ads returned and normalcy returned and the narrative controlled.
- And the sky is filled again, right?
It was something I would have said a weekish where there were no planes in the sky and there were no ads on the television.
And when you walked down to the street, it both seemed quiet and for many of us anyway, more open.
And, of course, there were many people who were immediately targeted, so it was a less open time for some people immediately after 9-11.
But many of us found an ability to reach across gaps that we hadn't seen before.
Yes.
I want to point to the last chapter, which we talked about last week, because at some level... The penultimate chapter.
The penultimate chapter, yes, the last chapter we discussed, the penultimate chapter of our book, which talks about culture and consciousness and about the moment at which we shift modes when we realize that something is not accounted for in
Our software and that we have to bootstrap new routines in order to figure out how to move forward and this was very it's really I think the clearest example of this in our lifetimes that we've experienced the 9-11 was so far outside of our normal experience that suddenly we all
Kind of woke up and we saw each other for the first time that the camaraderie that was evident Everywhere as people who ordinarily might not have even spoken to each other Suddenly had the very same topic on their minds and it was impossible for them not to interact It was a very as terrible as the event was it was a very healthy response for a time and
And then whatever it is that happens doesn't recognize this as a positive change and an opportunity, or it does recognize it as an opportunity, but it's a different sort of opportunity.
And we ended up, you know, in the aftermath of 9-11 as polarized as we've been, really.
So I wanted to just call that out because having lived through it, And then I can't remember the last person I've heard mention that odd period where there were no ads on television, for example, right?
It's a very important fact from the perspective of how it felt to be, right?
But it somehow hasn't been recorded as an important part of the event the way, you know, the falling man or the, you know, the crash in Pennsylvania or any of these other things were, right?
But in some ways, It is an important story about how this got integrated into our fabric, and obviously the world is not the same world that we lived in prior to 9-11 in many ways.
I mean, some of them structural, some of them cognitive, but it changed the world, and it's a pity that we, at least in our common narrative of what happened, haven't captured that aspect of it.
I also wanted to read something that I wrote actually in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in France in 2015, right?
So this is actually a couple years before you and I emerged into the public eye.
I wrote something in the immediate aftermath of that attack and submitted it to Salon, which at the time was still a publication one could read.
And anyway, to my surprise, they immediately accepted it and published it.
And then Common Dreams picked it up, is that right?
And then Common Dreams rebroadcast it.
Anyway, I thought part of it was important.
And so anyway, I'm going to take a read and we'll put the link, it's still up on the web, and I'll put the link in the description.
Yeah, you want to show the article?
Yeah, so as always the title is not chosen by the author of the article But it's let's not get this wrong this time the terrorists won after 9-11 because we chose to invade Iraq and shred our Constitution All right I'm gonna start a paragraph in Terrorism is a tactic in which the primary objective is to produce fear rather than direct harm.
Terrorist attacks are, first and foremost, psychological operations designed to alter behavior amongst the terrorized in a way that the actors believe will serve them.
The 9-11 perpetrators killed about 3,000 people and did about $13 billion in physical damage to the United States.
That's a lot of harm in absolute terms, but not relative to a nation of 300 million people with a GDP of almost $15 trillion.
It was a massive blow to many families and to New York City, but to the nation as a whole that level of damage was about as dangerous as a bee sting.
You may find that analogy suspect because bee stings are deadly to those with an allergy.
But what kills people is not the sting itself.
It is their own massive overreaction to an otherwise tiny threat that fatally disrupts the functioning systems of the body.
And that is exactly what terrorists hope to trigger.
A muscular and reflexive response on the part of the victim state that advances the perpetrator's interests far beyond their own capacity to advance them.
The 9-11 attack was symbolic.
It was not designed to cripple us economically or militarily, at least not directly.
It was designed to provoke a reaction.
The reaction cost more than 6,000 American lives in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than $3 trillion in U.S.
treasure.
The reaction also caused the United States to cripple its own constitution and radicalize the Muslim world in a reign of terror that has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians.
The return on the terrorist investment was spectacular.
Assuming the official story is right, then Al-Qaeda got $7 million of effect for every dollar it spent on the attack.
$7 million to one.
The ratio of harm inflicted on the U.S.
targets by the 9-11 attacks to the financial harm the U.S.
inflicted on itself reflects the same amplification.
For every $1 of damage they did to us, we did $231 to ourselves.
For every American that was killed in the attack, we sacrificed more than two on the battlefield.
And that is all before we consider the instability we brought to the Middle East, the harm we did to our own freedoms, and the spectacular cost to our reputation abroad.
In any case, it's extraordinary and so prescient in unrelated realms today.
Right.
And this actually is one of the reasons I wanted to read that is because the idea that there are two things in play.
There's the threat that you face, which is obviously real.
And then there's the question of whether your reaction successfully diminishes the harm.
Does it amplify the harm?
And this is something that we always have to keep In mind, and as you point out, at this moment, we're not dealing with terrorism, we're dealing with other things, but the same question looms in a slightly different way, which is what is the best reaction to this?
And what are the chances that in an effort to fix our system, we will actually do more harm to it and possibly harm we can't undo?
Exactly.
And we're seeing other countries around the world begin to say, I believe Germany, I believe Denmark, I believe Ireland, begin to say, you know what?
Terrible disease, awful virus.
We're going back to life.
We're going back to normal life because we feel that we've done what we can do.
We will hopefully continue to treat and you know I think because of laws in Europe things like planes are still you know still have people with masks on them and such but for the most part life is going back to normal even in countries You and I, I think, slightly disagree at this point.
Back when we published the Substack piece that we did at the end of July, laying out what we understand to be science's current understanding with regard to things like off-label use of repurposed drugs for treatment and prophylaxis of Of COVID and the vaccines and how universally effective a response that can be.
We said, and I think even the title of the piece was, you know, we have to get rid of this virus.
We have to eradicate it.
Drive it extinct.
We have to drive it extinct.
And I'm no longer convinced this is possible.
I am convinced and I think I will remain convinced that it was possible, that it was possible and it was possible for a very long time and that we didn't do it.
And it's not because some part of the population refused to comply, it's because our policies were bad.
But given that, it looks like it is an ever more impossible target to actually eradicate this thing and that we do live.
With far worse pathogens, things like rabies, things like yellow fever.
And it's not that those... I'm not saying I like those things, right?
Or that I think that we should encourage them, but that we live with them, with plans in place to prophylax if we can, and to treat, and to vaccinate if it's possible.
And, you know, the countries that are saying enough is enough are, you know, let's see how it works for them.
But so far, so good.
Yeah, I think in some sense the question about whether it is possible to drive it extinct has become politicized.
Like it's not even possible to know the answer because the data stream is so dirty?
Right, and you know, I'm not saying I'm convinced it's possible.
I am convinced it was possible.
I have seen nothing that tells me it isn't possible.
In general, the arguments that people marshal that suggest it isn't possible are not good arguments.
And I think the real important point is it actually doesn't matter, because if it is not possible, then the obvious objective is to control it as well as, for example, we control rabies, right?
Rabies is still with us.
We have no mechanism for getting rid of it.
However, how many people die of rabies every year, you know, within the U.S., for example?
And, you know, of course, there's a massive difference in that, you know, rabies has a case fatality rate close to one.
It is one.
I think there may have been one case.
There's like one case of someone surviving rabies.
Surviving rabies without getting treatment very quickly.
Surviving rabies with onset of symptoms.
You can treat rabies having been Yeah, so it's not going to be the CFR, but yes.
At the point that you show symptoms, it's basically a death sentence unless you've gotten treatment.
So it's a totally different disease and yet we have figured out how to live with it and have decreased mortality to close to zero.
Now we're going to take a lot of crap for analogizing the two because obviously they're very different diseases transmitted in a very different way, but nonetheless the point is complete control of the disease has to be the objective if extinction is out of
Range and I don't think anyone actually knows that extinction is out of range And you know, it's a discussion that we should be having unfortunately because this is a politicized question depending upon whether Various parties are interested in pretending that they have a plan to drive it extinct or Thwarting those who would point out that their plan is no good.
You'll hear both answers.
So in any case It is what it is, but maybe unless there's more to say on this topic, we should move on to what the future might hold if we, in fact, figure out how to bring ourselves into it in a useful fashion.
Let's do it.
Yeah, so again, this is a 13-chapter book, and there is an epilogue and an afterwards, so we may come back at you next week again with more, but the 13th chapter is called The Fourth Frontier.
And indeed, on Rogan this week, we talked about this some.
So you, in fact, summarized the frontiers that we were talking about having existed before and what the Fourth Frontier might be.
But I'm just going to read the section.
I'm starting a couple pages into the chapter.
Again, the final chapter of our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Humans thrive in almost every terrestrial habitat on Earth.
We are a broadly generalist species with highly specialized individuals who have shape-shifted and niche-shifted into nearly every environment on the planet.
This has meant interacting with frontiers over and over and over again.
Here, we describe three types of historical frontiers – geographic, technological, and transfer of resource.
Then, we will propose a fourth.
Geographic frontier is what we tend to think of when frontiers are invoked.
The vast unspoiled vistas, the abundant and yet uncounted resources.
All of the New World, North and South America, the Caribbean and every island near the coasts, was a vast geographic frontier for the Beringians.
The frontier of the New World was fractal, so the descendants of the first Americans discovered even more.
To the Awanichi Indians, Yosemite Valley was a geographic frontier.
To the Taino, the Caribbean was a geographic frontier.
To the Selk'nam people of far southern Chile, Tierra del Fuego was a geographic frontier.
Technological frontiers are moments when innovation allows a human population to make more, or do more, or grow more, than they did before the innovation occurred.
Every human culture that has terraced hillsides, decreasing runoff, and increasing crop production, was confronting technological frontiers.
From the Inca and the Andes, to the Malagasy on the Ope Plateau of Madagascar.
The first farmers in China, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica were doing so, and the first ceramicists, who dug clay, formed it into useful shapes, and fired it in coals, were doing so as well.
Finally, there are transfer-of-resource frontiers.
Unlike geographic and technological frontiers, transfer-of-resource frontiers are inherently a form of theft.
When people from the Old World came across the Atlantic and landed in the New, they may have at first imagined that they had stumbled upon a vast geographic frontier, but they hadn't.
In 1491, the New World is estimated to have had between 50 and 100 million people in it, with uncountable distinct cultures and languages.
Some people were living in city-states, among astronomers, craftsmen, and scribes, others as hunter-gatherers.
To Francisco Pizarro, the Inca Empire was a transfer-of-resource frontier.
To the instigators of the rubber boom in western Amazonia at the end of the 19th century, the Saparo Territory was a transfer-of-resource frontier.
And once the Saparos were thus weakened, their long-time competitors, the Waorani, moved in as well.
In modern times, transfer-of-resource frontiers are everywhere.
Oil drilling, fracking, and logging in ancestral lands.
Predatory lendings with subprime mortgages and much student debt.
The Holocaust.
One symptom of transfer-of-resource frontiers is tyranny.
Geographic frontiers represent the discovery of resources heretofore unknown to humans.
Geographic frontiers are inherently zero-sum.
There is a finite amount of space on this planet of ours, and we will reach the end of it.
Technological frontiers are the creation of resource through human ingenuity.
Technological frontiers are temporarily non-zero-sum, specifically positive-sum, and this can appear to be a permanent state.
But there are physical limits.
A single electron is the theoretical minimum needed to flip from one state to another in a transistor, for instance.
Transfer of resource frontiers are theft of resource from other human populations.
Like all frontiers, transfer of resource frontiers are ultimately zero-sum.
Theft has its limits.
Even thieves must obey physical laws.
What choice do we have but to continue seeking new frontiers and more growth?
If our addiction is just a special human case of a pattern that characterizes all species that have ever lived, are we not simply condemned to ride this destructive trajectory to the end?
We have written this book in part because we believe the answer to that question is no.
Humans are obsessed with growth because it engenders bigger populations that, if nothing else, have farther to fall before going extinct.
But large populations also pose a hazard to themselves if the resources that enlarge them are finite or fragile.
In such cases, moderation is the key, but it only works if our drive for growth, our individual perception of it, is sustainably satisfied.
We have run out of geographic frontiers, or nearly so.
Technological frontiers, by turns dazzling and disappointing, come with risks, beware Chesterton's fence, and are ultimately constrained by available resources.
Transfer of resource frontiers are immoral and destabilizing.
What then are we to do?
Where to turn to find salvation?
In simple terms, consciousness.
Consciousness can point the way to a fourth frontier.
Once again, the human niche is niche-switching, and consciousness is the answer to novelty.
Living sustainably on a finite planet is a hard sell, but we can and we must find a way.
We have no choice.
These problems of novelty require humanity's urgent attention and cannot be solved by the goodwill or hard work of individuals.
We moderns have become a threat to our own persistence.
We are built to figure out how to move between modes of being.
It is time to rise to collective consciousness and prototype a way out of this.
We face some significant obstacles.
Humans, like other creatures, are obsessed with growth, and we are capable of driving ourselves extinct in the pursuit of it.
Even though it is logically obvious that we must accept equilibrium, we are not built to be satisfied with it, because being unsatisfied has been an excellent strategy for the last several billion years.
There is a character trait of individuals that may be critical to finding the fourth frontier, or rather, its adaptive foothill that could lead to a society-wide solution.
That is, pride in craftsmanship.
An artisan who takes pride in the quality and durability of their work is enacting some portion of a fourth frontier mentality, one in which the lifespan of a product is as important as its function.
A table or sideboard made by a local craftsperson is not beloved merely because it is more beautiful than what can be assembled from a box bought at Ikea, but also because the person in possession of a lovely and functional piece has a chance of handing it down to their children, or other kin, or friends.
So, too, would we like to be able to deliver unto the next generations a lovely and functional world.
The Fourth Frontier is a framework, therefore, that can be understood with an evolutionary toolkit.
It is not a policy proposal.
The Fourth Frontier is the idea that we can engineer an indefinite steady state that will feel to people like they live in a period of perpetual growth, but will abide by the laws of physics and game theory that govern our universe.
Think of it like the climate control that allows the inside of your house to hover at a pleasant spring temperature as the world outside moves between unpleasant extremes.
Engineering an indefinite steady state for humanity will not be easy, but it is imperative.
I have one more to share about the Maya before we end today, but we've ended up We've done a fair bit of media so far, most of which is not out there about the book, and I thought we'd end up talking a lot about the sex and gender chapter, and there have been a few podcasts that we've done, and we'll be talking about all of these, that have specifically focused in on that.
But it's been interesting how many of them have ended up being about this, about the society-level decoherence and how it is that we can find our way out.
Well I think it's a mirror actually for one of the errors that we point to about evolutionary theory as we find it today.
And I guess I need a little leeway here, but the idea is That one has the sense, based on what evolutionists typically say, that evolutionary success is synonymous with reproduction, that producing more offspring is better.
And of course, we can back that off slightly, but in general, that is the conventional wisdom.
And it's the conventional wisdom for a pretty good reason, which is that The real thing that selection is trying to accomplish, it's not really trying to do anything, but if it were, it would be trying to lodge genes as deeply into the future as possible.
And one way, so zero is what we call an absorbing boundary.
If your population goes to zero, it doesn't rebound from it.
One way to not hit zero and therefore fail to get into the entirety of the future is to have a lot of individuals right so Reproduction is very closely tied to many of the things that make you evolutionarily successful, but in and of itself.
It's pointless so the point here is There are a lot of problems that we face, right, that are in some way downstream of our perceptions that selection has awarded us in order that we can navigate.
But the purpose of it is all the same.
The purpose is to get into the future.
And so the reason that many of the things that we have talked about really ultimately point to this question is no matter what problem you solve, it doesn't much matter if you don't solve this one.
Right?
We have an obviously unsustainable trajectory.
The hazard we now pose to ourself is so immense that if we don't solve it, there is nothing to do, right?
You could turn hedonistic and you could say, all right, let's just have a party because there's nothing to be done about this.
And you know, there's a reasonable argument to be made.
But I think again, as with the question of, can you drive this pathogen to extinction?
We don't know.
There is nothing that has been provided yet that tells us we can't get out of this.
And in fact, one of the major themes of the book is that what we do, what our species does, what it is built for more than anything else is getting out of jams and figuring out what to do in the new situation that nobody knows anything about.
That's our niche.
We're so good at it, even when the jam is one that we ourselves have created.
But we have now created a series of jams, to use your word, that we have not only created but are modifying at such a rapid rate that it's really hard to see our way out.
And we've done some things that make it less likely.
So...
The problem that we have is we have now taken what we have as tools and we've put them in a system that has its own evolutionary dynamics.
Our political and economic system causes, for example, those who have done something that has created, let's say, a technological frontier and have therefore become very wealthy, Have the power to prevent change and so we talk about this need to rise to collective consciousness in order to begin problem-solving to figure out how to get out of the pickle we find ourselves in but the problem is we now have an opposing force which is for anybody who succeeded brilliantly
Change is frightening, right?
Because unless that change is under some kind of control, if you're a winner, change can turn you into a loser.
So there is this natural tendency to frustrate change.
And the problem is, it won't make—it's of no value to anyone to preserve things in this state if this state is self-terminating.
But there's a game theory problem where those who oppose change actually retain and concentrate their fraction of our collective, or their disproportionate fraction of our collective well-being.
And, you know, cynically speaking, even if the world must be saved from these processes, somebody who opts not to participate in that saving phenomenon Right?
They actually end up better off, right?
So the game theory, the free rider problem applies even within the category of elites who might group together and decide to point us in the right direction.
So anyway, our final chapter is really about, you know, what does this puzzle really look like if we free ourselves from the narratives that we are handed that in large measure frustrate our ability to see where we are and where we might go?
And part of what you were just alluding to is that the stable state will not be static.
That it is easy for people to conflate stable with static.
And there can be no stable state for humanity in which humans are actually feeling a sense of purpose and progress and happiness and productivity which is static.
Also true that it therefore cannot be defined in advance and that that definition will remain the same.
Right, and in fact, you know, it will be subtle to many readers, but what we say about the fact that this state cannot be blueprinted, we literally do not know enough to say what the state will look like, what it must be is navigated towards, right?
That we will learn, we will bootstrap, we will prototype our way to this new state, which also implies some other things, and this, you know, this may be unsettling to people, but This is a multi-generational process of navigation, right?
The amount of change necessary to reach a steady state that truly does fulfill the human desire for growth without needing to find new sources of growth, right?
That process Let's say it takes three generations, right?
That means we're not likely, those who are old enough to be paying attention to this podcast, we're not likely to be in that world, right?
On the other hand, the process of going there, we have been falsely told, would be a matter of austerity, right?
Oh, you want the world to function better and be safer?
You're going to have to give up a lot of stuff.
I think this is complete nonsense that actually we lack meaning and useful things to do and that a world in which we actually set about trying to figure out how the future should be would be a world in which there was plenty to do and lots of meaning and you know the fact that you don't live to see the final state doesn't make any difference because it actually would be a better world almost immediately upon our setting about this journey.
Yeah, and asking people in the West, asking people in the weird world to embrace a policy of austerity from here on out would seem like an obvious ask, given the relative wealth that we enjoy and the resources that we have.
But it is also true, and we write about this in the book and I've written about it elsewhere, that the meaning that we find in life is mostly not in our stuff and our relative wealth.
And that it is therefore not in the weird world where you tend to find the people who have the most sense of purpose and meaning and, you know, devotion to people and love and ideals that do provide meaning.
Giving up stuff feels really hard for people right now, not because we're a bunch of selfish, greedy jerks, but because most of us are actually recognizing in our heart that no matter how much luxury and comfort we may be surrounded with, there's actually something real missing.
So we can do this, you and I argue, Brett, without giving up A lot of the trappings, but also argue that it's not the trappings where we're actually going to find the meaning.
And what we need to do is create a way for people to re-find the connection and the meaning.
And of course, you know, the last, I have to update my calendar, but you know, the last 18 months, 19 months now has taken away so many of the opportunities that people did have.
You know, some of what you were talking about last time.
The experiments and the opportunities for collective joy, the parties and the festivals and the carnivals and the sporting events and the intimate gatherings and the chance meetings on the sidewalk that turn into a long walk that turns into an evening.
That turns into a relationship, right?
Like, these things are much harder to accomplish in an era of restrictions and lockdowns and requests for compliance with rules that have just been handed to us without an explanation for their justification, honestly.
And so what we have had are meaning taken from us, and that's hardly new, but it did accelerate over these last 18-19 months.
And before that, as we talk about in the book, some of the accelerators are, you know, the usual suspects.
The screens and the junk everything, the junk food, the junk sex, the junk entertainment, the ability of advertisers to hook into our short-term endocrinological systems and give us our dopamine hit or serotonin hit,
Rather than us being able to resist the dopamine hit and the serotonin hit and look towards the joy and deeper pleasures to be found in the non-junk versions of food and sex and entertainment and meaning making and adventure and creation and discovery and all of these things.
I wanted to maybe refine one aspect of that, because I do believe that part of our problem with sustainability has to do with the amount of material and energy necessary to make the world work.
And we are going to have to cut back.
But the point I want to make is that is not going to feel like austerity if done well, right?
So I want to raise this issue.
Buckminster Fuller had a very ironic way of making this point.
He had this term that he coined, ephemeralization, and his definition for it was the process by which you can do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.
Which, you know, it's a beautiful fullerism.
But in any case, the point is, think about something like... It almost sounds like homeopathy, though.
Well, the point is, the very last bit is an ironic twist because it is not absolutely nothing that you can do it with.
But the point is, it can be minimized.
You know, a nanomaterial can have great strength with almost no atoms in it by virtue of geometry, right, of the structures.
And so, anyway, I would just point out, this is an evil, dangerous device.
We all know that, right?
At a technological and material level, it is a marvel, right?
How many objects?
What does this weigh?
It weighs, you know, three quarters of a pound or something, right?
And it's a rather marvelous camera.
It's a video camera.
It's a telephone.
It's a map book.
It's a compass and a wayfinder.
It's a library like none that has ever existed on Earth, right?
It's a lot of things that actually don't even have a name separate from it.
Right.
Or separate from the revolution that it accompanied.
Right, and so the point is, it's not all the way to ephemeralization, it's not a heads-up display that emerges out of no material that you're carrying around.
Thank God.
Well, right, but my point is, the number of atoms in this thing is many, but it's not many relative to the number of objects it replaces, and so... It's a lot fewer atoms than an ENIAC, which did a hell of a lot less.
Yeah, did effectively nothing.
Right, I mean, it calculated things like trajectories for bombs and stuff that, you know, it's a trivial calculation by modern standards.
That's the question, is how do you deliver the animal, which is what we are, how do you deliver it the somatic sensation of this is a good, safe, functional world in which I am liberated to do the things that actually make a difference to me and allow me to make the world better, which is really what the objective, you know, we have this Cruddy system, where if it makes a profit, then we sort of imagine that you probably created wealth.
There's value in that, if it made someone some dollars.
Right, you made it better off.
But there's so much market failure, where your profit was made, and it really wasn't that you made the world better, you just externalized harm onto somebody else.
I was going to say, its externality is all the way down, too often.
All the way down, right.
So many negative externalities.
So the question is, well, you know, You may not be able to instantiate it, but ideally what you'd like is an economic system in which you got paid when you made the world better, when you actually did create wealth and you didn't get paid for creating negative externalities or any other exploiting market failure of any kind.
And so the real, I mean, we have two levels of question.
In fact, I won't go into it, but I do think it's important to separate out the question of what structure would make the world function from the question of is there any way to get there?
Because the answer to is there any way to get there could be no.
It could be that the obstacles that those who oppose this because they find it threatening are too strong and you can't get there, but it doesn't change the importance of the question about what would a functional system look like.
And so anyway, we need to recast this in the public mind, so that people understand that they are not being told that they need to live like monks in order for us to get into the future, because that's not it.
They need to...
Retool their expectations a bit and, you know, what we say in the book about the fact that it's always spring in your house and that that's really what we're talking about.
We're not talking about either anything that violates any known law.
The spring in your house doesn't violate any known law because when it's hot out, we cool your house with an air conditioner that slightly heats your backyard, right?
It all makes sense.
You just keep the coolness on one side of the wall.
And as we talked about on Rogan, when you change your diet to something that is better for you, your physiology and the gut microbiome that you have on board actually changes so that you come to appreciate the thing better.
And what he raised, which hadn't occurred to me, but the way of marking progress in martial arts being a change of color in the belt that you have, It adds value without coming with much of a cost.
Those are the sorts of solutions and the same thing with pride and craftsmanship that we also talk about in that section that I read from.
Finding value, not just in the minimalist reductionist version of what the thing is.
Well, all I need is a chair and therefore I need something that holds me up when I try to sit.
Okay.
Are there other things that a chair could offer you that would provide more value and the construction of which would therefore also provide more value for the person constructing it?
Of course there are.
We've all sat in garbage chairs and better chairs regardless of how, you know, of your surroundings.
You've sat in variable quality chairs and the quality isn't just about the comfort.
It's also about the level of construction and you can intuit something about what the thought was that went into it.
Yeah, whether it's garbage chairs or garbage trucks.
I mean, you know, the fact— Some of us have not sat in garbage trucks, except by that use of the term garbage, I guess.
Right.
Yeah.
One way or the other, we've all— I had a—it wasn't a garbage truck, but I had a not-too-awesome truck there for a while.
Yeah.
Yeah, back in grad school.
It was okay.
It was all right.
It was—yeah.
But, yeah.
It went from here and off and got to there.
It usually did, yeah.
F-150 for those of you who wonder.
Anyway, an old one though.
People used to say friends don't let friends drive forwards.
I do, and so we actually...
I have no idea whether that still applies.
Well, we started hearing that after we were literally in a Ford Bronco that caught fire in the middle of Nebraska in a snowstorm, and we had to abandon it there, which is a story for another time.
But then much later, I ended up with this Ford F-150 that was old and rusty and Michigan and all this, but it got me from here to there.
And it often got my bike there too, so it was fine.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about the Maya.
The Maya Beringians, the original Americans, are a recurring theme throughout the book, and in fact we open with it the very first chapter, the Beringians and the original people of the Americas.
And the Maya loom very large in our thinking and are not as frequent players in the book as originally.
We cover a lot of ground here and this isn't that thick a book, but here's a little section on the Maya from this final chapter.
In many regards, the problems we are facing now are ones we have faced before.
Every culture in human history has engaged in both cooperation and competition, and behaved both in ways that ought to make us proud to be human, and in those that make us ashamed.
Both glorious and ghastly actions have been widespread.
When looking back on history, we have the responsibility to recognize that truth, and also to recognize when our ancestors' wins, legitimate or very often not, have provided us advantage that we did not ourselves earn.
It is not, however, our responsibility to subjugate ourselves to those histories.
Europeans indeed stole land from Native Americans in often gruesome and despicable ways.
The Native Americans, who were thus subjugated themselves, had a history of warfare and conquest in the New World, taking land from one another.
And of course, none of this was new.
They brought it with them to the New World when they crossed over from Beringia many thousands of years earlier.
Let us not romanticize any people or period.
Let us instead understand humanity holistically and work to provide opportunity equally to everyone going forward.
In this book, we have shared an evolutionary toolkit with which to understand the human condition, not to justify it.
We are not served by ignoring what we are, brutal apes by one measure.
We are also not served by pretending that brutal apes are the only thing that we are.
We are also generous, cooperative beings full of love.
We have arrived in the 21st century with evolutionary baggage and a fair bit of intellectual confusion.
Let us understand the baggage in order to reduce the confusion and increase our odds of moving forward with maximal human flourishing.
As an aid to this end, let us consider the Maya.
The Maya thrived for over two and a half millennia in Mesoamerica, surviving droughts and enemies and other unpleasant extremes.
In the now-ancient city-states of the Maya, including not just Tikal but also Ekbalam, Chachaban, and so many more, stone pyramids and temples are still visible above the tops of the trees.
On the forest floor, footpaths run between ancient buildings, as do agoutis, lizards, and the occasional ocelot.
More substantial roads, Sockbays, connect city-states.
Most of the Mayan city-states emerged as political, economic, and cultural forces to be reckoned with long before the Roman Empire existed.
Wholly unaware of the other's existence, the Maya and the Romans were at their peak at the same time, in the early part of the first millennium, and both were in obvious decline by the beginning of the second.
The Maya had an enlightenment of their own, long before the European Enlightenment.
We will never know its extent, as the vast majority of their books were destroyed by Europeans.
The Mayan civilization was spread widely across the Yucatan Peninsula, extending south through modern Belize and Guatemala and just barely dipping into Honduras.
The Maya were dominant in these landscapes for 2,500 years, but they were not monolithic, and their successes waxed and waned over both time and space.
City-states collapsed, droughts caused the abandonment of once fertile lands, and while some areas were repopulated by the Maya, others never were.
The Maya were intensive agriculturalists who farmed on poor tropical soils but managed to maintain soil fertility for a remarkably long time through successful land management.
They dealt with the hilly slopes that were ubiquitous throughout much of their range with at least six types of terracing systems.
They used complex reservoirs to conserve water during annual dry seasons and during less predictable longer dry spells.
It is also true, however, that where they cleared forests, the land was generally degraded and soil quality fell.
By the time the Spaniards arrived, the Maya were already in decline.
They had had a long run, and what exactly precipitated their collapse is up for debate.
While the Mayan culture largely disappeared, the Mayan people persist.
They were not a fragile people or culture.
They were robust and long-standing.
Long-lasting.
One indication of just how long a run they had is that they had a unit of time, the bak'tun, equal to 144,000 days, almost 400 years.
They were so long-lived as a people and so accustomed to thinking across long time spans that they used the bak'tun to help keep track of time.
The durability of the Maya suggests that the potential exists, That the potential exists for conscious, directed enlightenment, in which we take ownership of our own evolutionary state.
Like the Maya, we moderns need to find ways to flatten the boom-bust cycle that has plagued all populations across time.
We hypothesize that the Maya did this by creating a mechanism for not turning excess resources into more people or ephemeral things.
Instead, they invested in giant public works projects.
Many of these public works projects are visible today as temples, as pyramids.
They grew them like onions, building more layers in times of abundance.
In years of plenty, we posit, when excess food could easily have been turned into more people, which would have expanded the population, making hunger and conflict inevitable in lean years, the Maya instead turned the extra food into pyramids, or into bigger pyramids.
They created glorious and useful public spaces, enjoyable by all, and when agricultural boom years inevitably ceded to bust years, the temples required no nourishment, and the population could withstand the leaner times.
Western civilization has been dominant for nearly as long as the Maya were.
Their culture unraveled, accelerated at the end by a hostile enemy from across an ocean.
Our culture is unraveling as well.
We need a new steady state, an evolutionarily stable strategy.
We need to find the fourth frontier.
And then we talk about obstacles.
And I should say before, I know you have things to respond to in that, the obstacles that we talk about to the fourth frontier come from both the left and the right.
And this is an explicitly apolitical book in which we identify ourselves as politically liberal, but liberals who can identify the types of errors that liberals, the people on the left side of the spectrum are more likely to make, and also identify the types of errors that people on the right side of the spectrum are more likely to make.
And point out, as has been pointed out by many at other times, but many modern seem to have forgotten, that we need the tension, that we need people on both sides of a divide as long as we share basic fundamental values and a belief in each other's humanity.
The disagreeing about exactly where we are and how to get to a better future makes for the possibility of progress, whereas tamping down all dissent does not.
Yes, and in fact, I think it makes sense.
I still don't know how to make the point so people hear it, but we are liberals, but that is a measure of where we believe we are in history.
It's not a fundamental characteristic or a belief that progress is inherently good, right?
It's a question of where we are and a recognition that we cannot possibly stay here.
Just an even simple extrapolation of how much resource we are using and how many of us there are and what that implies about the near term tells us this is not an evolutionarily stable strategy that we are currently engaged in.
And therefore, we have no choice but to change.
But the point is, and as you point out, this is something enlightened conservatives agree on, which is that it is the tension between the impulse to solve problems and a healthy fear of the unintended consequences of solution-making that results in a society that functions and does not constantly upend itself with naive errors.
So, you know, are we at the place where we should all be progressives because progress is absolutely required?
I think so.
And maybe that's something, you know, it will be interesting to see whether that message from the book lands, whether people see that necessity.
But those who would misunderstand you intentionally might hear that any progress that is happening is therefore good, which of course is absurd.
And we could, I think, accurately argue that so much of the change that is happening now certainly does not look like what happened before, and therefore could be semantically called progress, but is not actually progressing us to anything like a better future.
Yeah, it's like progressing through time isn't the same thing as progress in the way we mean it.
And unfortunately, I think narrative plays two roles that we haven't really separated yet.
You and I both agree that the way you move people forward, the way history moves forward in the positive sense has to do with compelling narratives, not compelling analyses.
Nobody pays attention except for, you know, a small number of people to Orwell's political philosophy, right?
We pay attention to 1984 because it makes the point of that political philosophy in a way that's very visceral.
And it's easier to confuse people with analysis and numbers and graphs precisely because it's not native for many people.
Many, especially intellectual elites, media elites and such, actually seem to agree with the widespread sentiment that just most people are dumb, most people can't take it, most people aren't interested, and so you just need to hand them pre-digested pap.
We don't we never have.
And that was evident in our classrooms.
But what I do do believe and did see is that most people do not really think quantitatively very well.
They don't think with numbers very well.
And I believe that having that as a weakness runs hand in hand with therefore being more easily confused and lied to with those sorts of tools.
Right.
People, I think they, you know, if you're talking to an honest broker who knows what they're talking about and they present an analysis where you can't quite follow the math but you understand what the conclusion of it is, You're not in no danger, but you're in less danger.
But the problem is when you have no idea who it is who's constructed the analysis.
I mean, this was the point of how to lie with statistics, which is for people who aren't in a position to check the underlying logic, statistics are a place that you can bury a lot of bodies.
So anyway, narrative on the one hand is the way you would move things forward positively, but we also live in a landscape where everything is basically subject to official narratives that do not appear to have our interests at heart.
You know, surrendering to the idea that narrative is perhaps the most important thing, but that it is also a landscape that is ripe for abuse, is maybe part of the tension of our moment.
Did you have more to say there?
Well, it did occur to me as you were reading that section of the book that maybe one way to move at least one of our attentions forward is to write a sequel called something like The Caterpillar Who Is Unknowingly At Fault For His Own Hunger.
That that book might actually bridge the divide between these two narratives and we might be able to move forward from there.
Mmm.
Pick up some of the, uh, uh... What is it?
I even forgot what the Caterpillar book is called.
Um, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Like, picking up some of that audience?
Well, I just don't think that this caterpillar is entitled to be freed from all responsibility for his predicament.
You think his insatiability is his own doing?
In one way or another, I feel certain of that, yes.
I actually do not remember the plot of the book, so I can't really know that that's... I mean, the plot is just that he eats everything, but I don't remember the conclusion.
All right.
Yeah, I have the feeling... I think it's kind of thin on plot, which is, you know, true for a certain style of children's books.
It's still on plot.
Okay.
I'm pretty sure it's going to end with him turning.
I mean, I'd prefer it if it was a moth, right?
Why?
Because it's more surprising.
But I have the sense that the caterpillar probably turns into a beautiful diurnal butterfly and lives happily ever after for the next two weeks or something like that.
Yes, it's true.
Actually, I don't know.
This is definitely the moment to get into what we do and do not know about Lepidopteran biology, right?
You and me, or science?
No, us.
Oh, we, yes.
I don't know if any adult butterflies or moths, Lepidopterans, live a long time, or even if they will tend to live as long as they spent as larvae.
The larval form is often longer than the adult form.
Yeah, it varies a lot because the larval form has so much resource accumulation to make.
I think certain things like sphingid moths are actually fairly long-lived.
You know, we know a guy.
We'll ask our expert friend.
Absolutely.
Actually, we should do a thing on sphingid moths.
Sphingids are really, sphingids are sphinx moths.
They're gorgeous.
Yeah, they're beautiful, sometimes mistaken for hummingbirds because of their flight agility.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm stinking for hummingbirds.
Sure.
I think I may even have done it once or twice, you know?
Okay.
Something flies by.
But anyway, they're nocturnal, so it's not so easy to confuse them, but there are moments in the day when it can happen.
Yeah.
And there is actually, as I mentioned at the top of the hour, a section in the book in which we ask if a butterfly remembers being a caterpillar, and the answer is presumably not, and there wouldn't be much value in that.
Presumably not, because there would be so little value.
Exactly, exactly.
So I guess I wanted just to Finish, maybe finish, by reviewing just, you know, repeating.
We've spent these last 13 weeks going, you know, doing a little bit from each chapter and saying what they are.
And then also mentioning just this week, I think I've got an almost complete list of the various media appearances that are going to be dropping this week that I think people might be interested in.
You know, some of them will appeal to some and some to others.
Yeah, and I think you and I sort of agreed about a couple of them seeming particularly insightful.
I think one thing that has been interesting is how different they've all been.
There haven't been two that have been alike.
That's right, yeah.
Which is a good sign, I think.
Yeah, and so this list that I'm going to read is not all the ones that we've done.
It includes some we haven't yet done, but it's just the ones that I understand will be released this week or already have been.
So, Joe Rogan is out.
We were in Dallas meeting Glenn Beck, and I believe he is putting that out today.
And tomorrow, our conversation with Derek Jensen of Deep Green Resistance is going to be out.
And then on launch day, Mind & Matter with Nick Jacomes.
I do want to come back to those three, because those three were really remarkable conversations.
Glenn Beck is obviously on the right, famously conservative, and Derek Jensen is a radical environmental leftist.
We've just got this sort of gamut.
of political ideology represented among people whom we are interested in talking to.
You know, our politics are closer to Derek's, but we find all of these people just extraordinary to talk to.
So, also Megan Kelly on launch date.
We'll be live with her.
The Unspeakable Podcast with Megan Dahm will be out this week.
I believe you're going to be very briefly on Tucker Carlson on launch date.
The Michaela Peterson podcast we've got this week, The Federalist, The Skeptic with Michael Sherburn, that was also a very good conversation.
Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, also a really good conversation.
We'll be live with Trigonometry.
And the Deborah So podcast, very good conversation.
And there's going to be a lovely interview and excerpt published in Root Quarterly in their forthcoming issue.
So, did you want to say anything about Glenn Beck, Derek Jensen, or Nick Jacomes with Mind & Matter?
Three very different venues.
Well, I think, you know, your grouping is an interesting one, and I think it… We enjoyed all of them, and they've all been very different, but I thought those three… They were all excellent conversations.
And, you know, there was no there was no sense with, you know, Glenn Beck was very clear about what the political distinctions between us likely were and how little it matters in light of the kinds of questions that we are faced with.
And, you know, he did give the sense of being a very genuine, deep, caring person, feels bad for certain features of His history and is very interested in making the world better as he sees that possibility.
So anyway, I think people are going to enjoy that conversation.
Even though I wildly flubbed his question about our deep history chapter.
So this was this I just say before you go on talking about the other two.
The chapter that actually we wrote first, and that I just loved.
I loved writing the deep history chapter, which basically says, okay, here's where life started, and let's do a quick run through the human lineage back from 3.5 billion years ago.
And it was, you know, 6,000 words isn't much to write that history.
And then he basically said, you want to You want to summarize that?
And I was like, oh, I promise not to take three and a half billion years to summarize it.
But I sort of got lost around animals, and then you picked it up and started talking about something else.
So we never got back to it.
We didn't even get to talk about the origin of bones and heart and brains.
But anyway.
It was a very difficult question, which it's a little bit like, yeah, could you summarize what happened at Evergreen in five minutes?
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
OK.
Anyway.
I'm not sure how much there is to say.
say I think people should listen to these conversations.
Well, so Derek Jensen, it's an hour-ish long conversation and he, you know, he like, you know, Glenn Beck, like I think they have very little in common at one level except I think that both of them could actually talk to each other just as we can talk very easily to both of them, appreciated the like I think they have very little in common at one He appreciated the book.
He's got a background, I think an undergraduate degree in physics and is an active environmentalist, but he doesn't consider himself a scientist.
And he reported that he felt like we really went deep on important scientific theories and principles and explained it in a way that he could understand and relay them.
So I really appreciate that.
And then Nick Jacobs is himself a scientist.
And we had like a three-hour conversation with him.
In which he went almost point by point, you know, obviously you can't do all the points in the book, but we did really a sort of a thorough review of many of the salient points in the book.
Yeah, it was great.
And yeah, I think that that is a good point, sort of a continuum between a technical exploration of the book and a generalist survey.
And, you know, one thing that we were shooting for in writing the book was A book that was accessible at all these levels that actually does contribute new ideas that are significant and change the way we should view ourselves and our evolutionary nature, but that is accessible to people who don't have any background and want to dive in and You know, figure out what the toolkit that we generated and taught to students really allows you to see.
And, you know, it has very practical advice about how you should change your approach to various things.
So anyway, it's a little early to know whether we've succeeded, but those conversations are suggestive that maybe we did.
Yeah.
And there will be more.
So I intend to say who, you know, where else you can see conversations about the book as, as it continues.
And, you know, as it is, as it comes out this week, um, maybe just these last three paragraphs.
Sure.
Of the final chapter.
Before the epilogue, before the afterword, before the acknowledgments, glossary, etc, etc.
From the moment when our ancestors achieved ecological dominance, competition between populations has been our dominant selective force.
Millions of years of evolution have refined our circuitry for such competition, and it has become the default at the human software level.
Now, though, three things conspire to make the inclinations that brought us to this moment an existential threat to our future.
The scale of the human population, the unprecedented power of the tools at our disposal, and the interconnectedness of the systems on which we depend.
Global economy, ecology, and reach of technology.
The importance of understanding human software is urgent.
The problem we face is the product of evolutionary dynamics.
All plausible solutions involve awareness of those dynamics.
The problem is evolutionary.
So is the solution.
All right.
I think we are there.
Next time we return on our next live stream, the book will be actually out in the world.
Yeah, so please consider buying it and definitely consider reading it.
And we look forward to continuing to talk about this for a long time to come.
There may even be an opportunity to have in-person events in which we discuss this at some point, although that's not going to happen this fall.
Obvious American COVID reasons.
So, we're going to take, for those of you watching now, if you want to stay tuned, we will take your questions, as many of them as we can get to, in about 15 minutes on a separate stream on both Odyssey and YouTube.
You can ask those questions at DarkHorseSubmissions.com.
Mostly, please consider getting the book and reading it this week.
But we also, of course, have Patreons.
We have stuff at store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
I have a Substack in which I'll actually be having an excerpt, a very small excerpt, from the book this Tuesday at naturalselections.substack.com.
You can email logistical questions to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com, including we've been getting requests for, hey, you know, the audio book doesn't seem to be available in New Zealand.
Hey, is it going to be published in French?
This sort of thing.
And we are forwarding those things to the relevant people so that hopefully we get answers soon.
And please consider subscribing to the channels, both on Odyssey and on YouTube, the main channel, Bret Weinstein, and the Clips channel, Dark Horse Podcast Clips.
Anything you want to end with?
I don't think so.
Alright, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
