In this 97th 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 the epilogue of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, which includes mention of the precautionary principle, not gaming good systems, the Golden Rule, society’s obligations to us, and more. We talk about Pegasus spyware. We discuss lessons learned and topics covered in recent media about ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 97 it is.
Am I correct about that, Dr. Haying?
You are correct.
Third time's a charm on the audio.
It wasn't that charmed, but it worked well enough.
No, it wasn't.
Now, that was not our wonderful producer's fault, actually.
We had asked him to turn off the audio so that we could talk beforehand, but he's now saying it was his fault.
Isn't that amazing for a 17-year-old?
That is amazing.
Unbelievable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We are not trading him out for anything.
Nope.
You can't have him.
No, he's a good one.
He's a keeper, as we say around here.
Indeed.
All right, here we are.
Man, a lot has happened.
Much has happened.
A lot has happened in the world, and a lot has happened in our world.
Our book came out on Tuesday, and we're going to be talking About it throughout the show today and some of how that feels and has landed and is going to continue to manifest.
But first, we're going to start with a few other logistics, three ads today, and then we'll launch right into the main part of the show.
So, oh, I guess I did want to say if you've gotten the book and you've read it, please consider writing a review on Amazon.
And the reviews help us with the algorithms.
And unfortunately, we are all In thrall, to some degree, to the algorithms.
Resistance is futile.
That is not the message of the book.
Resistance is not futile, but short term, we would like to not game, but accurately have the algorithms reflect what people are saying to us privately.
So if anyone has told you that resistance is futile, pick up a copy of our book to see a well-reasoned counterpoint.
Excellent.
We're streaming on both Odyssey and YouTube.
Try it out on Odyssey, that's where the chat is happening.
We've got Q&A, which will happen in the hour after this one.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We've got Patreons, which we encourage you to join as well.
Right now on my Patreon is the 48-hour period during which you can ask questions that we will try to address as many as possible in the monthly private Q&A.
That question asking period is open right now.
Maybe we'll stop there for now.
We will do Three Eyes and then get right into it.
Fair enough.
Okay.
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Scared you, didn't I?
No, that was good.
I think we're beyond you scaring me with things like that.
Yes, indeed.
Indeed.
There's much scarier things afoot in the world, frankly.
Right, which actually, this brings me to something I was going to say.
This is now a perfect segue.
You have cautioned me sometimes when I have warned that winter is coming, that maybe that's not the best thing to say to people, that it's a bit dark and foreboding.
And I believe I have come up with a solution.
Oh, good.
I think it is very important that people be warned, but you're right, that may be a little precipitous.
And so what I'm thinking is autumn is coming.
Right?
Because it is, right?
It is.
And you know, the Equinox is a frightening development and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
It's not a frightening development.
I've been thinking about the equinox.
I figured you had.
I've been thinking about the equinox and the fact that this year it comes right about at exactly a full moon as well, which is not meaningful in most senses, except it also happens to coincide with the day that I will be making my next post on natural selections, my Substack newsletter.
So I've been thinking about the ways in which the equinox is a deeply meaningful time of the year.
In terms of the days being equal length and changing very, very rapidly, much more rapidly day length that is photo period changes much more rapidly around the equinoxes than it does at either solstice.
But it would have been the actual equinox would have been very, very difficult for the ancients to identify precisely.
Right?
As opposed to the Moon, right?
So, you know, the phase of the Moon is a giant sky clock in many ways, and you know, for sure it's a giant sky calendar, and if you understand the ways that it processes Also, to some degree, a clock.
But the equinox, while very important for things like planting and harvest and such, is going to be much less precisely used by ancient people than things like moon phases.
Cloud cover will change this, but in general you can see the moon's phases and it's very hard to get precise on the equinox.
It is difficult to get precise.
There are, of course, these physical clocks installed by many cultures around the world that allow them to figure out where they are, not by calculating, but by the sun sets in this notch in the building at the solstice or the equinox.
There's an amazing one of these at Inga Perka, right?
Beautiful one.
In fact, maybe I'll dig up a photo and that can be our thumbnail for this episode.
But Ingapurka, sorry, Ingapurka being Ecuador's largest Incan ruin.
The Inca not having gotten that far north until relatively late, you know, so they were only, the Inca were only in what's modern-day Ecuador for 80 years or something?
Yeah, less than 100.
And the place that is now called Ingapurka was a place where the Quinari people lived.
And the Inca kept trying to obliterate them, and they failed.
And so what often happens in these cases, when one population does not simply trounce the other, is a royal marriage was arranged.
And this Inca perca became for, you know, the 80 years or so before the Spaniards came and changed everything.
Basically, a combined Kanyari and Incan stronghold and city, which has one of these sun clocks.
Physical clocks, yeah.
There's a primitive one of these in the Midwest where the beauty of it, I've forgotten exactly where it is, but the beauty of it is that they tripped over how to calibrate the thing.
And so they ended up having to keep re-digging it and adjusting it because it was off slightly and it would get worse and worse as the years progressed.
But anyway, this goes to this really interesting point.
I don't know this.
This is pre-Columbian people.
Oh yes.
Yeah, yeah.
But anyway, I've always sort of thought that the fact that the solar system does not work as a function of integers, that a year is not an exact number of days, for example, which causes a calendar that's really close to right to get worse and worse over time.
This is about the best proof we've got that the universe was not constructed intentionally by a loving God.
It could have been constructed by a malevolent god or no god, but a loving god.
Or a jokester god.
How about a jokester god?
Well, a jokester god who wanted your harvest to get less and less effective over time as your clock revealed its imprecision.
But anyway, yes, these celestial events are really important.
And the number of cultures who've figured out the answer by not having to calculate it and therefore not having to deal with these fractional issues – But empirically, you know, it settles in that notch and that's how we know we're back at that place in the calendar.
Yeah.
Is the right way to do it if you don't have a really sophisticated model.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Great.
Okay, so Yom Kippur was this week.
Indeed.
And it is the highest holy day in the Jewish calendar, a time traditionally of atonement often associated with a fast.
And I don't have much more to say about that except by way of segue to saying Hanukkah is not a high holy day in any way in the Jewish calendar.
But we are a secular household who come from different religious traditions, and we celebrate at a secular level both Christmas and Hanukkah in our home, and we have adopted a new tradition associated with Hanukkah which makes up the epilogue of our book, a one-page epilogue.
So while we are not going to continue to do excerpts from the book going forward, we were doing one a week per chapter for the 13 weeks before the publication, but the one-page epilogue I think will make for fodder for discussion for a little while.
Right, so we have effectively felt some license to tinker with Hanukkah, it being a lesser holiday, and our household being a non-traditional one.
And so anyway, what we've done is, in a sense, a prototype.
We have tried to make it meaningful in a way that grows with us as the years pass.
And anyway, Heather's about to introduce it to you.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I'll read through them and then we'll just talk a little bit about either each of them or whichever ones we feel like.
So epilogue to A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Tradition and how to tweak it.
In our home, one of our annual rituals is to celebrate Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights that occurs just before or around the northern winter solstice.
We light the menorah, as is traditional, and each night review an additional principle, which is not.
Our family's new Hanukkah rules.
So again, there are eight days of Hanukkah if we haven't said that.
So there are eight new Hanukkah rules.
Day one.
All human enterprises should be both sustainable and reversible.
Day two.
The golden rule.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Day 3.
Only support systems that tend to enrich people who have contributed positively to the world.
Day 4.
Don't game honorable systems.
Day 5.
One should have a healthy skepticism of ancient wisdom and engage novel problems consciously, explicitly, and with robust reasoning.
Day 6.
Opportunity must not be allowed to concentrate within lineages.
Day 7.
Precautionary Principle.
When the costs of an action are unknown, proceed with caution before making change.
And Day 8.
Society has the right to require things of all people, but it has natural obligations to them in return.
So should I go through one by one, or what do you think here?
Whatever you think.
I mean, I always like revisiting them.
I look forward to Hanukkah and the celebration of these things.
And what we do, you know, whatever dinner we're having that night, we don't have, you know, special eight nights of Hanukkah dinners, but we discuss that principle around the dinner table with our boys as well.
So, okay, the first one.
All human enterprises should be both sustainable and reversible.
And I think that that reversible word is the thing that is often missing from discussions of sustainability and is often missing in sort of more naive discussions of what it means to be a liberal versus a conservative.
You can be all in for progress but not be interested in making change if that change is going to be permanent.
Yeah, and really it's an attempt to fix the precautionary principle, which anybody who has tried to figure out a way to operationalize the precautionary principle realizes that it's very difficult to do, right?
Because, you know, what if you interpret it very strictly, it can paralyze you.
And what we don't want is to paralyze us.
We want to be able to take advantage of, you know, reasonable risks.
But we very frequently find out that risks we thought were reasonable turn out not to have been.
And so the reason to talk about reversibility is that if you make a change based on a reasonable guess that the consequence of it will be safe.
And you do something that cannot be undone if you turn out to be wrong.
You're actually taking a much bigger risk than if you've said, well, what we need to do is build up the capacity to undo this at the same scale that we have built the capacity to do it.
So the point is, You know, at the first moment that you invent an automobile that burns fossil fuels and makes CO2, you are altering the atmosphere, but you're not obligated to do anything about it at that level.
It's such a tiny alteration that it's not significant.
But at the point you ratchet up the capacity to burn fossil fuels so that you do start changing the chemical composition,
of the atmosphere you're taking a risk that you'll change the heat trapping capacity and so therefore you need to build up in tandem the capacity to undo it if need be and if you haven't done that you find yourself where we are now which is we've got to change it is out of our control and it threatens to trigger a positive feedback in in the Arctic with the frozen methane being released the so-called clathrate gun hypothesis but
If we had recognized the need to be able to undo changes to the atmosphere at the same rate that we changed the atmosphere, then the point is, at whatever point we discovered that this had been a mistake, we would already have on hand the solution.
Absolutely.
Day two is the golden rule.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Classic, of course, not something that generally shows up in a Jewish holiday, but modern Judaism obviously encompasses the golden rule, as do all moderns.
And it has been invented multiple times, including Rabbi Hillel, as a prior version of what we now call the Golden Rule.
And so the point is, societies that work have figured this out as a basic principle, and it is really important that it be understood.
Even, you know, again, the devil is in the details with all of these things about operationalizing them.
Right, and they're good.
They function as single-sentence prescriptions in which you need to understand that conditions will vary and will affect to what degree you should attempt to make these real.
Yeah.
So let's see.
Number three, only support systems that tend to enrich people who have contributed positively to the world.
And I guess I would add to that day six, opportunity must not be allowed to concentrate within lineages, right?
The idea that we should, you know, recognizing that we cannot actually achieve complete equality of opportunity because conditions vary, but we should be seeking to maximize equality of opportunity absolutely as much as possible for all human beings.
And part of the way that we will do that is to spread the opportunity across lineages and also to ensure that those who are profiting from doing ill in the world profit as little as possible.
Yeah.
The point, you know, throughout the book, basically we're pointing to the fact that we live in an evolutionary system.
And in an evolutionary system where you profit by externalizing harm onto others, that behavior will spread and be elaborated.
In a system where externalizing harm onto others is costly, behavior will dwindle, which is exactly what you want.
And really the question is you've either built a system that involves in a direction that's positive, or you've built one that evolves in a direction that's negative.
And how well you built it will adjust how quickly it moves in those directions.
But the real question is trajectory.
Which way do you want to go?
And I think, I mean, this is a good time probably to remind most of the audience, hopefully, but inform some of the ideas that to identify something as an evolutionarily stable strategy, to identify that something to identify that something has
has been promoted by selection and is thus gaining ground, is in no way to suggest that it is either a good thing or a moral thing, or that all conditions would result in that being a stable strategy.
So there will, for many things, be multiple evolutionarily stable strategies.
And when conditions change, either endogenous or exogenous, the suite of environmentally stable strategies will change as well.
And I'm reminded, actually, one of the podcasts we did this week about the book was the realignment.
And I think that's actually out now.
A really nice conversation we had.
We ended up talking a little bit about the misapprehension that so much of modern academic social science has about what evolution actually is.
Especially, I think, sociology and anthropology have actually taken the social Darwinist, the eugenics, version of what evolutionary biology is and imagine that that's what all of us who are trying to explain the world to evolution are doing.
And it's absolutely 100% wrong.
So what things like eugenics imagine is that survival of the fittest is both a stable state in which whatever is most fit right now is most fit forever and ever, and also that things like wealth are good indicators of fitness.
And of course in markets where you have things like opportunity having concentrated and lineages, the fact that you were born wealthy may have to say absolutely nothing about your ability to accrue goodness in the world, nor is wealth inherently a good indicator of that.
But more to the point is the idea that there is no stable survival of the fittest.
Everything in evolution is context dependent, and as the environment changes, so too does what the appropriate measure of fitness might be.
So I want to refine one thing here.
Wealth is not a good indicator of fitness in any meaningful sense.
It may lead to fitness.
In other words, your wealth gives you power to, you know, protect your family and things like that.
But it is not indicative of the fact that you have brought something special to the table.
But it should be.
Right?
We should want markets that cause that effect, where wealth actually is an indicator of having provided some real benefit rather than having externalized harm.
True.
So, one, you know, we've been very deliberate in constructing these principles, and so the phraseology is often precise for a reason.
And note that we say opportunity shouldn't be allowed to concentrate in lineages, right?
That is not the same thing as saying wealth.
Now obviously there's a degree to which wealth can accumulate within lineages that is very destructive in large measure because it leads to opportunity.
And so to the extent that the wealth is all concentrated and that means that people who might be able to do something useful which should be rewarded don't have the opportunity because either they don't get the educational benefits or they're too preoccupied sustaining themselves.
That's a bad thing.
And this is the wise version.
This is the informed version of what activists talk about when they talk about privilege.
Right.
And so the point is there is a real critique in there.
One needs to be really careful.
You know, the more I think about it, the less one wants a world in which the product of productivity, in which our gains are evenly distributed.
That's a desperately unfair world and it doesn't do good things.
And, you know, this is the failure at the heart of communism.
But there is an enlightened version of, well, what do you want to equalize?
And the thing that I think separates these two things is, if you're a believer in markets, right, as we are, if you're a believer in markets, then they work best when everybody has access to them, right?
Meaningful access, not just theoretical access.
But when everybody has the tools to actually innovate and bring things into a market, then the things that... Not just access at the consumer level.
Right?
Right.
It's that.
Not just access at the consumer level, which all Americans have pretty much, but access potentially at the producer level as well.
Right.
That's the most important thing.
And so if you have a market that rewards things that are actually positive, that actually create meaningful wealth rather than transfer wealth, then the reward arising because you've innovated, the opportunity has to be spread most widely because then we get the maximum That's right.
of opportunities to evaluate and the good ones rising then results in a reward and that's how you get a system that evolves to meet the values that we claim to hold rather than one that is constantly running up against those values.
That's right.
Let's see, don't game honorable systems.
Maybe we've done that already but we haven't gamed the honorable systems.
No, we don't Maybe we've talked about it.
Yeah, I will just say sometimes with customer service you have to be ruthless.
Customer service, there's a really good chance customer service is not an honorable system.
That's why it's written that way.
Yeah, exactly.
But I mean, this is one of the things, and we have this in the epilogue, not in the end of either the childhood or the parenting relationship chapter, but this is one of the messages that we were teaching our children very, very early.
And you know, all of these we were giving to our children every year, you know, with Hanukkah.
The idea that, for instance, we as their parents have rules that they may not understand, but they are honorable.
They are intended to be good, and sometimes we will make errors.
And when we make errors, we are expected to figure it out and change them, or to respond to them when they figure it out and change them.
The idea that they would game us, and this is true for any parent-child relationship, if the parent is a good parent, is a good and loving parent, as all parents should be, but of course not quite all are, their systems, their rules that they have in place, no matter how good they are, if they're honorable, should be refinable over time.
And that is much, much harder if the child is simply reacting to, oh, it's a rule, I don't like it.
And this is unfortunately a place where we have lost nuance in the modern world, especially some on the sort of what I call the pseudo-left.
The idea that if it's a rule, if it's a law, if it came from the before times, whatever that means, it must be bad.
is absurd.
And, you know, some of what we're being handed down right now is bad and is dishonorable and is not worthy of being protected.
Things like customer service, maybe, in some cases.
But the idea that, for instance, the founding principles on which the United States were based, they're to some degree outdated, they're not as up to the task as they should be anymore, but they are deeply honorable and they have been deeply functional.
Actually, it strikes me.
So in the book, we talk about the precautionary principle and Chesterton's fence, which turned out to be inverse of each other.
And I'm thinking, actually, that there's another one of these about how one addresses A dishonorable system, a system built to do harm or to give control where it doesn't belong.
And that it's the flip side of what we say about immoral orders.
You have an obligation not to follow immoral orders and you have no obligation to treat a dishonorable system as if it were an honorable one.
Yeah, this is good.
Civil disobedience and immoral orders are the flip sides of each other, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
Or the response to immoral orders.
Yeah, exactly.
Day 5.
One should have a healthy skepticism of ancient wisdom and engage novel problems consciously, explicitly, and with robust reasoning.
So this is a twofer, really.
It is both a that which came before has worked if it's been persistent and complex and long-lived.
Persistent and long-lived being synonyms here.
But that doesn't mean that it's up to today's challenges.
But that also doesn't mean that you throw that out and just take whatever is new as an appropriate response.
Yeah, and so the second to last chapter of the book is really about this puzzle.
It's not that we don't like ancient wisdom.
We love ancient wisdom.
But the point is, the more rapidly your situation is changing, the less likely that wisdom is to apply.
And so the skepticism isn't like, it's not cynicism about ancient wisdom.
It's a, you have to evaluate each of these parameters and whether they fit our current circumstances.
Because, you know, how do you apply You know, the moral tenets of the Bible to Twitter, right?
You know, with bots and multiple anonymous accounts and de-boosting.
I mean, you know... Yeah, the Good Samaritan gets slaughtered.
Right, so we have to think about these things and, you know, very frequently the formulation that we arrive at Is you've got a value which motivated a prescription from the past.
The prescription goes out of date, the value doesn't.
And the question is, well, how can you do, how can you protect that value in the present circumstance without obligating yourself to a prescription that's inadequate?
Absolutely.
Very good.
Okay, we already did the next two, so the final one is Day 8.
Society has the right to require things of all people, but it has natural obligations to them in return.
This is one about which people will disagree.
I mean, people may disagree with all of them, but I think the idea that society actually has a right to require things of us is something that many find anathema.
But it is true, as long as the contract is a good one.
Yeah, let's put it this way.
It has to be true.
There are too many of us.
You can't all decide to go hunt and gather and say, I reject being part of civilization.
I'm going to go back and do what I was born to do.
If you do that, right, the Earth will not be able to sustain our population.
It'll crash.
So the point is, we've actually signed you up For civilization and you can't opt out of it, right?
You can't go claim territory or whatever else you might have done in the past.
We pay taxes and we get licenses in order to drive and such.
Right.
However, the point is that naturally comes with the obligation that the society that robbed you of your right to go do what you feel like doing has to protect you from certain things, right?
It has to protect you from the predatory behavior of powerful entities, you know, for example.
Well, if it's an intact social contract, it's not theft.
It's not having been robbed.
Right.
Right.
Well, the point is, you didn't have a choice but to sign it.
You were born into a society and you're obligated to be part of it.
But that comes with obligations.
And the problem for us moderns, typically, is the thing is in breach of contract.
Right?
The systems that are supposed to protect us and are supposed to provide the opportunity that was the thing that we got in exchange for giving up our right to go hunt and gather.
Right those that capture is now predatory and it takes advantage of us And so the problem is the society is in breach of contract and that changes our obligations to it That's right You wanted, if that wraps up that little section, you wanted before I had some more stuff to talk about, you wanted to talk about Pegasus Spyware.
Yes, I do.
Which I know nothing about.
I only knew enough to say it.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about it.
So Pegasus Spyware has been in the news.
You may have just had your Apple iPhone update itself.
Pegasus Spyware is apparently a spyware program that was loaded onto my understanding is virtually every iPhone, iPad, Mac, iWatch in existence.
When?
Well that's, I'm gonna get there.
Okay.
So this program was essentially a backdoor, and it was a zero-click exploit, which means in the past you might have gotten an email that you would have to open an infected file in order for your computer to be infected so a person could be careful and not click things from people they didn't know or files that looked funny.
In this case, that was not true.
The file could land in your computer or your iPhone and the exploit could be delivered.
And this exploit, which was created by an Israeli company, the NSO Group, a very cryptic entity, allowed access to your email, your phone calls, your text messages, could apparently allow your camera and microphone to be turned on without your knowledge.
Now, I would just point out, if your neighbor figured out how to do this to your phone or your computer, right?
Your neighbor was just curious about your life, and they figured out how to use your computer in order to spy on you.
They looked through your email, your text messages, and all of that stuff.
You would be beyond irate, right?
This is such an incredible invasion of privacy.
To have a private entity set up the conditions for this and then, apparently, sell access to the data of individuals to their enemies and competitors, right?
They sold access to the devices of, for example, activists to the governments that opposed them.
Right this is such an asymmetry right the activists would have had no mechanism for buying the same information about government officials.
This is just a completely asymmetrical mechanism for preventing change right.
So this exploit existed.
They got it onto the majority of Apple devices.
They then sold access to enemies of people.
I would point out, the reason I wanted to raise this is that I think we have to start asking the question, How much effect has this had on recent history?
How much effect does this have on what we think is true?
Right?
How many of the people who might have been telling you some uncomfortable truth have been unable to do so because their enemies knew all sorts of things about them that prevented them from reaching the position they would otherwise have ended up in?
It's a very difficult question and we don't know the answer.
What we know is And how is the answer even knowable?
I don't think the answer is knowable.
The answer is not knowable, right?
In fact, we got a patch that just got delivered over the air that eliminated this malware, but okay, so we know.
Maybe.
Maybe is one thing, but also how many others are there?
So we know about Pegasus.
Are there other exploits like this that are lurking in our devices?
If you said, well, my goodness, I can't believe that Apple allowed this to happen.
I'm going to get a different phone.
Well, OK, now you're in Google's universe, right?
So.
There doesn't seem to be an escape, right?
There are ways that you can do other things.
There are phones that have been de-googled and things.
How good a protection is that?
It's a little hard to say, but we're stuck in this paradigm where the exact things that we know are necessary for progress, the ability for people to talk with each other, the things that are protected in our Constitution for exactly this reason, They can't stop you from gathering with other people and talking to them and saying what needs to be said.
And it doesn't mean that what's said is necessarily good or right.
But you have to protect that right in order for history to work.
And so we're losing this and it's barely noticed.
So what I discovered in researching Pegasus in advance of this podcast is that apparently Pegasus isn't even new.
Malwarebytes reports, you want to show the Malwarebytes link that I sent you?
Malwarebytes, which is an industry group, they sell anti-malware products, says that this isn't even new, that they've known about this since 2016.
So I can't see the data on this article.
This article is new and responsive to the current wave.
The current wave, which was triggered by a privacy group having analyzed the phone of a dissident who had had his phone infected.
Or not just infected, because apparently they were all infected, but exploited, right?
How does a person come to know that their phone has been exploited?
Well, that's just the thing.
Apparently there's some group of 50,000 phone numbers that have had special access gained.
Maybe 10,000 have been actively surveilled, but we don't know what those numbers are.
It isn't easy.
I did encounter that there's some mechanism that an infected phone, there's a mechanism you could back it up to a computer and then do some command line work with a tool to see if the files that would be generated in the functioning of this exploit are present, right?
But that's, first of all, that's not a simple thing to do, right?
So most people will just simply not know.
Likely your phone got updated without you even knowing what was going on.
So the evidence may be gone but for God's sake this is just this is an incredible moment where we I mean for one thing look we all have this person in our life or we are this person who says if we're going to talk about important things maybe the phone shouldn't be in the room maybe we should put them in the fridge maybe we should go take a walk right we all have that person and we all think that's probably just it's got to be unnecessary right?
It's true.
We now know that that thing is there.
And if you're talking about stuff that doesn't change the world, it probably doesn't matter.
And if you're talking about stuff that does change the world, then you got to ask yourself the question, is somebody going to listen in?
Are they going to figure out what I do understand and what I don't understand?
Are they going to figure out who I suspect and who I trust and play us off against each other like a fiddle?
I mean, I think getting back to your point about the neighbor.
If a neighbor did this, it would be clear to everyone why this is totally unacceptable.
And the idea that it's an anonymous company that may or may not be doing it should, in fact, give us no comfort.
I would say it's quite the opposite.
At least a neighbor is a real person who could be talked to, whatever nefarious purposes they might be up to.
But there's no reasoning with an abstract entity that has made a move on, it sounds like, at least tens of thousands, if not well more than that, of people and their devices.
And there's no accountability.
And there is no, to go back to our earlier point, Reversibility in that once this thing has been breached, as Malwarebytes is saying has been true for a long time, now that this capability exists, it will continue to exist.
There's no going back to a world in which this capacity does not exist.
Right, you would have to you would have to build for it and you know, yeah, there's no question.
Well, that's a possibility if you if you Compare the neighbor having done this to you to some anonymous murky security corporation in some Foreign state there's no question that the neighbor is a far better scenario as infuriating as that is right to have a An economic entity gain access to your phone and then be able to sell it to your enemies is just so troubling.
Yeah well I mean at some level this is also consistent with a theme that we've heard ourselves talking about over and over and over again with regard to the benefit of engaging with physical reality and physical space over entirely social reality or in this case abstract reality where I think it may not have ever been said by whoever it was attributed to, but the idea that good fences make good neighbors, somehow that's apocryphal, but good fences might make good neighbors.
It's not apocryphal, but the poem means roughly the opposite of what people think it means.
Oh, that's right, yeah.
But the fact is that fences are a reality, and fences can be built.
And if you do have a neighbor who is spying, you can actually erect physical things and you can talk to the person.
Whereas there is neither nothing to erect except with similar tools, which most of us don't have access to, nor is there anyone to talk to.
In part, you know, see your earlier point about customer service, right?
You know, that itself is a dishonorable system, even largely in companies that are themselves trying to be honorable.
Right.
Look, the first step to solving this problem is admitting that we have a need for a constitution-like entity that declares our right not to have this happen to us, right?
And that we are therefore, we are entitled to devices in which this is impossible and those who breach it are So, by the way, those who would say, well, this doesn't apply, the Constitution doesn't apply here, so what are you complaining about?
Well, then we have discovered the reason that the Constitution or something like it needs to apply, needs to be invented, needs to be widely deployed immediately, because we are clearly in need of it.
Right, which is why the principle, our Hanukkah principle, says that you need skepticism of ancient wisdom, because the point is our Constitution is effectively ancient.
It did not envision the technological world we would live in.
It did not understand the possibility of corporations that would be more powerful than nations.
It was incredibly forward-thinking, like such amazing predictive power, and yet it's just too old to be fully up to the task of right now.
Right, the values are right, but the prescription is not wrong, but it's inadequate to the full scale of the problems.
I would also point out, though, that something I haven't really seen explored is for there to be a corporation that generated this very expensive and highly effective exploit, which can be obliterated apparently in a single update of the iOS software, there has to have been a market.
That is to say, the kinds of people who have enemies apparently know that they can buy access to their phones enough that it happens.
Either that or the NSO group is approaching people and saying, we have information on people who don't like you.
Would you like it?
And here's the price.
Somehow, there's a world of people that is effectively trafficking in our private information and doing so on the basis of our political perspectives or our scientific viewpoint or who knows what it might be.
But it's a very frightening world, and they… Once they have the data, they can parse it however they like.
Right.
And the fact that this is not… that this is a news story among many, rather than a, hey, what effect is this having on what news I even know about, right?
That's the level we need to think about this.
How has this affected the world that I live in?
What would the world look like absent this force?
To what extent has Apple eliminated one such entity, and there are others still playing this role?
These are all important questions.
Yeah.
Okay.
Total change of topic, unless you're not done.
Well, I just want to, again, emphasize that autumn is coming.
Today it sort of seems like it's here, but we're actually getting summer back next week, so I think the equinox may actually bring summer-like weather.
Yes, by the way, if you are confused by what I just said, you are probably in the Southern Hemisphere, and this will make a lot more sense six months from now.
So, we've been doing a lot of media.
Nothing mainstream except, you know, four minutes on Tucker Carlson, you were two nights ago, I guess.
But entirely podcast space, really.
And have been having a lot of fun with just these highly variable conversations, but we're doing a lot of them.
And there were three in particular that we either did this week or came out this week, all of which prompted some thoughts that I think are relevant to the kinds of things we talk about here, which, you know, is to say, it could be anything, right?
Let's talk about Michael Shermer first.
Okay.
So Michael Shermer is, I kind of should have looked it up, but he's the founder of Skeptic Magazine and I think there's a Skeptic Foundation too as well.
And the podcast is actually the Michael Shermer podcast but it's all sort of of a type.
And he is famously skeptical of, you know, bad thinking and pseudoscience and such.
And we had a very nice conversation with him.
I think we actually had the conversation maybe a couple weeks ago, but it came out day of publication, maybe Tuesday of this week.
And just his announcement of it, of our conversation, which I think he even announced it before the conversation itself was out.
So no one could even see what it was that we had talked about.
A number of people who came at him with, how dare you talk to these two, they are quacks, scientifically illiterate, doing damage, all of these things.
Grifters, all the usual tropes.
All the usual tropes from that section of the internet that seems to get off on hating us came after Michael Shermer for having had a conversation with us.
And it revealed, in part, go on, you clearly want to say it.
Yeah, I do.
We are watching a phenomenon that we are so familiar with unfolding in a novel place, right?
And so what this looks like from our perspective is cancel culture, pure and simple.
And the tropes are the same, right?
What they do Is they inflict costs on people for certain crimes that decent people realize aren't really crimes, right?
Like talking to people that you don't agree with, right?
So you will be stigmatized for what's called platforming, for having a discussion with people about with whom you don't completely agree.
And frankly, who do you completely agree with, right?
Or for going on someone's show whom you don't completely agree with.
Right, exactly.
So I think actually right now, Glenn Beck's show is actually streaming.
We had that conversation in person with him a little over a week ago.
And I mean, he begins the conversation with, we wouldn't have been in the same room together 10 years ago, right?
We thought we were complete opposites.
And the fact is that we can come together as human beings and see our shared humanity one another.
And how is that bad for anyone?
Right, it's necessary, and smart people know that it's necessary.
And so we watch, they just drive your costs, you know, they're trying to drive up Michael Shermer's costs for even talking to us.
And part of the point is to punish him, so he won't do it again.
And part of the point is to warn others, so they will see what happens to Michael and think, I don't want any part of that, it's easier for me just not to talk to them, right?
So this is about shaping the discussion.
It is the thing that creates the walls between these echo chambers and makes it impossible to solve problems because you really don't understand the thing on the other side.
You see it as a caricature.
So it is the thing that facilitates bad thinking.
And it's obnoxious, but I want to draw a distinction, right?
So you mentioned our haters, of which we have some very dedicated ones, right?
There are some, you know, People like Michael Shermer, who's not a hater, but he is an influencer and the haters have gone after him in order to shift the conversation so it doesn't contain uncomfortable truths that they cannot field and so that we cannot navigate our way to a better synthetic understanding.
And then there is this vast group of people who feed each other, right?
And they are constantly posting things to each other.
And I've begun to think of them as the Wankenphile.
Oh dear.
Yep, that's just how I file them in my mind.
The wank and file.
The wank and file.
So they know who they are.
Oh sure.
And we know who they are.
But anyway, we need to pay attention because what's surprising about this moment from our side of the camera Is the degree to which things that two years ago all sorts of smart people would have agreed were absolutely obnoxious and had no place in discourse.
The heterodox community of people understood that guilt by association was a dangerous trope that prevented the kinds of discussions we needed to have.
Well, some of those heterodox people are now engaging in this behavior.
And so anyway, Everybody who is needs to step back and think, wait a second, have I become that thing that I hate?
Yeah, basically, if you are engaging in the cancel culture du jour, it is no doubt because you are certain that you are on the right side of history.
But if you have previously decried the idea of cancel culture because it is clear that you can't ever know if you are on the right side of history, Well then, you are acting hypocritically, and you are probably stuck somehow in your own thinking.
You may be just dead wrong on exactly the topic on which you are proclaiming so loudly, and you might not be, but you are at the very least not honoring the very principles that you have in the past said that you would be standing by.
Yeah, it is not safe to cancel in the middle of a pandemic, I would point out.
That's just a dangerous thing to be engaged in.
And anyway, many people ought to know better.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I also wanted to say, and I don't know that you will be able to say much about this because you weren't part of the conversation, but a friend of yours for a long time, Jim Rutt, had me on his show, The Jim Rutt Show, to talk about the book because he likes to have one-on-one conversations.
And I know him a little bit, but not very well.
And you and he were really kind of, you know, along with Jordan Hall and Jordan Greenhall and, you know, a few other people whose names might be familiar to some listening, were really present to help form Game B.
I mean, it was an informal, small group of people.
Gosh, I want to say 10-ish years ago now.
I think it was 2013.
Okay, so eight years ago.
And so you and he, and indeed the very first, I think, the very first paragraph of the acknowledgements in the book, we acknowledge Jim.
We acknowledge some of the many evolutionary biologists whose shoulders we stand on, and Some of whom we work with directly and some of whom we just know from their written work.
But then we also talk specifically about Game B and Jim Rutt.
And that was really work that you did together.
And so he has me on his show to talk about the things that are most interesting to him in the book.
And it's of course right in his wheelhouse is the theory.
And that's much more, you know, to the degree, you know, you and I are both evolutionary biologists.
This is our book.
These are our ideas.
But to the degree that there are some that are, you know, that started one place rather than the other, the theoretical stuff is more often likely to have started with you, and in the case of many of the things that Jim brought up in those conversations with him.
And so, having me be the person on the receiving end of these questions was fascinating.
I admit that at first, when it became clear that's where we were going, I thought, okay, let's see.
We were writing it together, and we were thinking it together, but it's not as native to me.
And it was wonderful.
I actually have listened to part of the conversation now, and I recommend it highly.
We've got a lot of these out, but I really recommend the conversation that I had at the gym because it does go deeper in the theory than almost any of the other conversations we've had.
You know, it doesn't go into any of the applied stuff.
It doesn't do sex and gender or sleep or food.
But the reason I bring it up specifically is the benefit of Flying solo sometimes.
You know, we talk a lot about how necessary it is to have someone who you know will be honest with you no matter what, with whom you can develop ideas, who will have your back, all of that.
And it's also utterly necessary to step aside sometimes and say, okay, well, I'm on my own.
You know, no one's got my back here.
There's no net underneath me.
And let's see what I do.
And to emerge out the other side intact and saying, oh yeah, okay, did it, got it, nailed it, mostly, you know, sometimes not, sometimes yes, is incredibly, well, it's kind of revelatory, and it's also empowering in a good way.
And I was reminded of actually the first field season that I did in Madagascar that you weren't with me for.
I did have a field assistant.
She was 10 years my junior and I was in my 20s.
She was fabulous, Jessica, but she was not a peer in the way that you were.
I was teaching her evolution and we were learning about the sex lives of these poison frogs together.
But doing hypothesis generation and prediction and experimental design and formal observational design and figuring out how to do the actual fieldwork, all of that on my own without a peer.
Without that field season, there might still be a piece of me that wondered, Could I?
You know, could I do it without, you know, just being able to throw ideas back and forth?
Well, I can.
I did.
And I would say that everyone, no matter how expert you are in your domain, should look for those opportunities to explore things that you have typically done with someone else alone as well.
Yeah, it's a really important point and it also fits with what we discuss about the way ideas get passed between people and then parallel processed and that's really the whole point of the exercise in the first place.
It makes thinking better and it's really, you know, it's very cool to have you interacting with Jim.
Jim is somebody I Tremendously value.
I think it took a little while for us to understand each other.
He sort of comes from a conservative background.
Actually, I didn't say anything about who he is.
Yeah, he's the former director of the Santa Fe Institute, right?
And didn't he invent the word?
Snail mail.
Snail mail, that's Jim Rutt's eponym.
It is unfortunately the thing for which he is most famous.
Oh, I should have said it then.
No, no, I was going to say it myself.
Yeah, he invented the concept of snail mail.
Well, he invented the name, obviously, yes.
No, the mail had existed for some time.
It was originally delivered on horseback.
It's just not that old.
Right, it's just not that old.
But anyway, Jim is a great guy, and he's somebody I frequently go to to talk complex systems stuff.
And continue to talk Game B, right?
I mean, we need something, we need this, right?
Well, you know, what I sometimes say is that the thing about Game B, which was effectively a small group of people who met and then Disbanded is that for many of us once we had seen the idea of Game B and understood what it was and why it needed to exist, then we never got over it.
There was no getting over it.
The point is it's Game B until until we figure out how to do it or die trying, right?
Because The system isn't sustainable.
It's going to be fatal to us if we don't replace it.
And once you spot why a better world is not only possible, but that there's a mechanism for getting there that doesn't involve wishing it into existence, you know, the question is what version of it?
And so, and you know, it only has to be one version.
Our version is described in here.
Fourth Frontier is the view into it.
But everybody who is of a Game Bee mindset has some version of it, and only one of them needs to work.
And so far, as people I've met, everyone who has an idea of what Game Bee might look like recognizes that prescribing a blueprint won't work.
And so there are various routes and plans and ideas, some of which will be inconsistent with one another.
But at least I haven't seen a bunch of maps of the territory to which we're going that are inconsistent with one another, because the people who are thinking Game B style are not mapping out the future.
They're trying to figure out how we can get on our way to a future that is sustainable and productive for all.
Well, I believe... Jim will tell me if I'm wrong about this.
He has a very good memory for these things.
But I believe that that was an insight I introduced into that discussion, was that we need to give up on the idea of a blueprint.
It's impossible.
What we need to do is think in terms of prototyping and navigating because that's the only way to solve a puzzle like this.
And anyway, to the extent that that has caught on, I think that's good.
It makes all of the efforts more likely to work.
Yeah.
But anyway, yes, Tim's a great guy.
I have not listened to your conversation yet, but I'm excited to hear it.
There's a lot to do.
There's so much going on.
No, and really, there were just a number of questions he asked me that if we had both been on camera, we both would have just defaulted to you answering.
Not because either of us think I couldn't, but because it's more natively the kinds of things that in your downtime, that's what you think about, and I'm more likely to think about lizards.
Right, exactly.
I'm not against lizards.
There's not actually a lizard back here, much to my chagrin, but there's a book on lizards.
There's a couple books on lizards, right?
Yeah, snakes, tadpoles.
Yeah, and Brett made this pile.
I was just saying some of the other things.
Brett has made this pile in order to—Zach, show the screen again.
For those listening, there's a pile of books behind me, and Brett made the pile, but as usual, put the books on bats on top.
Yes, I did.
I actually just took the pile of books that was sitting by my side of the bed.
Uh-huh.
Good one!
Light reading on tadpoles.
Yeah.
No, you didn't know.
You probably did not know that there was an entire book dedicated to tadpoles, but if you had known that, you might have imagined that I would own it, and in fact I do.
Yeah.
I think my next book might be dedicated to tadpoles.
Dedicated to tadpoles, but not on tadpoles.
Right.
No, it's definitely not going to be.
I don't know that much.
All the tadpoles of the world, future and past.
Yeah, I don't know that much.
I know a little bit about tadpoles, but not enough for a book.
Yeah, I think we probably will not do a future episode dedicated to tadpoles, although I could fill an hour.
You probably could.
Oh, for sure.
For sure.
All right.
And finally-ish, in terms of things that I was prompted to think about from some of the other media we're doing about our book, yesterday we did a live conversation with the awesome guys at Trigonometry, Konstantin – is it Kissin?
Kissin?
Kissin, yeah.
And Frances Foster.
We've both talked with them before.
I had a great conversation with Jordan Peterson with them early in the summer, and we went on to talk about the book and other things, and I was struck at one point.
It was fabulous, and I'm sure it's available now.
It wasn't just live and then disappeared.
No one does that.
We were talking about the state of higher ed, higher education, and we were talking about the state of the West, and specifically the Enlightenment and Enlightenment values, and there was a moment at which you said something that struck me as, I get exactly why he's saying that, but that may sound inconsistent to those who are not as familiar with what we're talking about, which is to say, one moment you said we cannot fix, excuse me, we cannot fix the existing institutions of higher education.
We're going to need to reformulate something.
And then you said we must fix the West, and by which you meant enlightenment values.
There is no burning enlightenment values to the ground, whereas institutions of higher ed appear to be unsavable.
And how is that not an inconsistency?
Yes, I said something more colorful about the Academy effectively being like our cherished family dog that has caught rabies, and there being only one reasonable thing to do in that case.
You did, yes.
I blotted that from my head.
You had blocked that out.
Too colorful.
Well, so it's like this.
We don't have an alternative to the West.
We can upgrade it, but we don't have an alternative.
And if you abandon it, you're creating a vacuum into which the alternatives to the West will flow in.
Right?
If you think you're going to make racial equality flourish by destroying the West, no, you won't.
Because what will flood in are things that are backwards with respect to racial equality and have not made the gains that we have very clearly made in the West, right?
Have we done perfectly?
No.
But we have done well, and what's more, we have understood the principle to which we must aspire, right?
A colorblind society is the objective.
Do we have a colorblind society?
No.
Are we a lot closer to a colorblind society than we were in 1950?
Yeah, we've made great progress.
Let me just add here, and this is a clarification you made actually in the conversation on trigonometry.
When you say colorblind, you don't mean pretending that race isn't real.
You don't mean pretending that people don't have different colors that they're reflecting on their skin and that people don't treat them differently as a result, right?
You're saying that just as under the law, men and women are equal, under the law and in all of its instantiations, people of different races need to be entirely equal.
Right.
And I don't understand why this is even a hard concept.
How did the woke manage to convince us that there was some problem with colorblindness, right?
The colorblindness is actually... Well, I mean, I think it is a conflation of those two points, honestly.
I think it's a... It is, but it's a willful one, right?
Because it is effectively an allusion to this metaphor, blind justice, right?
She's not actually blind.
It's a blindfold, right?
The point is, it is an object that keeps her from paying attention to these details that she must not pay attention to because they are not germane to the rights of the person being tried, right?
So the point is, yes, we want a colorblind society, which doesn't mean We don't talk about think about notice race.
It means that it doesn't play a role in our decision making process.
It doesn't count for you or against you.
That's the objective, right?
So in any case, I guess my point would be.
We know that, and I am not in any way okay with the failure of the Academy, but I guess the point that I made to Constantine and Francis was you and I have been fighting that beast since the 90s, literally since we were college students, right?
Yeah.
They didn't listen.
Yeah, we faced the postmodernist Yep, we faced it before we had graduated college.
People knew it was a problem, but they didn't deal with it at the appropriate level.
They coddled that insane worldview and they gave it department after department and it finally took over the Academy.
It's not the only problem with it.
You've also got markets having effectively wrecked the capacity of the research apparatus to to tell us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear now is that universal probably not probably it doesn't apply to you know radio astronomy or whatever but where there's money to be made the corruption has i have i have no faith that it's that anything is immune yeah i know i don't mean it's Good guess.
I don't know how that's gone haywire, but I'll bet it has.
But it probably has gone.
I mean, if math is having trouble agreeing on what 2 plus 2 equals, then probably radio astronomy is not immune.
But the point is, look, the thing didn't get this way overnight.
If it did, we could say, well, let's set it back to where it was three weeks ago and try not to make that error again.
This has been going on for decades, and the point is, the system has not shown a capacity to immunize itself.
It has breached every department that we know of.
And so, the thing that we do know... And now it lives in HR, which means it's a cancer that probably can't be cut out.
Right.
It's the rabies.
Now here's the point.
Which, no, we don't think it's cancer.
Just to be clear.
Right.
I like rabies because... I don't know, because... No, you don't.
Yeah, no, I like rabies as an analogy here, because the point is the diagnosis, you know, it's not the case where your doctor is going to tell you a nice story about how we have lots of waves.
To treat this, right?
There isn't a way.
Yeah, once you start showing symptoms, it's a death sentence.
You're done.
So, right.
So all I'm gonna get at is this.
We actually know what the problem is with the university system.
There is nothing that stops you from booting up a new university, except for the obligation to plug it into the same thing that wrecked the university system that we've got.
Accreditation, grants, student loan system.
So that system is the conduit through which the epidemic of stupid will flow into your new institution.
So you have to boot up an institution that doesn't have that conduit and then you're gonna suffer the cost.
That conduit was built for a reason.
It was built to keep people from creating institutions that would threaten you.
It's basically a I don't know that.
I don't know that it was originally created, but it has become that.
And you know, go back to our conversations on zero being a special number.
The point is, it is the accreditation system and the grant system that means that you can't just say, well, everybody should want to send their kid to a university that isn't suffering.
From an epidemic of woke because those kids will come out more capable and therefore they will succeed in the job market.
And that's what I want for my child.
So where is that institution?
And you know, if it doesn't exist, surely the pressure to build it must be immense, right?
So the thing that prevents that is, but you won't be able to, you know, award PhDs because you'd have to plug into this other system in order for those PhDs to be recognized.
And you won't be able to get money from NSF or from Pell Grants or from anything else.
Right.
And my point is, that's a bad problem.
But it's not an unsolvable problem, right?
At the very least, in some sense, the recognition that a PhD has a meaning because it comes from an accredited institution, that agreement can break down when people realize, hey, the people I'm seeing with these PhDs don't actually know anything.
And maybe I want people with these other degrees that don't have familiar letters in them, but when I talk to those people, they're not crazy.
So… Yeah.
No, I mean, anecdote after anecdote flows into us.
And, you know, just yesterday, I guess, we had a very smart, very successful… Scientifically-minded entrepreneurs say that he is seeing applicants to his company with all of the relevant degrees from MIT and such, and is having a hard time wanting to hire many of them.
Right.
Because they do not have the ability to problem solve, among other things.
And how could it have been otherwise, right?
Of course, if you're going to load all of this ideological nonsense into the analytical content of curriculum, you're going to come out with people who can't think straight.
Even in engineering at the elite institutions.
Maybe especially at the elite institutions, but even in fields where they should not have been able to encroach at all.
So, in some sense, the answer to your question of why my two different positions are not inconsistent is that the things that are being compared are of a different nature, right?
It's like saying, you know, if you were a hedonist and it turned out that it didn't make you happy, Right?
Being a hedonist.
Being a hedonist.
You could swap out your ideology for a different one, the way we can swap out this academy for a next-gen academy, right?
That's different than the West being a problem, where effectively the West is like your body, right?
And the answer is, you know, I'm not happy being a human.
And it's like, well, you're stuck with that, right?
There are some who would disagree.
They may disagree all they want, and they may even disagree with fancy PhDs that don't mean anything because they came from institutions that taught them to think crazy.
And corrupt doctors who are willing to do surgery on them.
Right, but no, but my point is we don't have a choice with the West, right?
We can disagree over how Functional or dysfunctional it is but the objectives that it lays out are More or less correct to the extent they are not correct They can be improved and to the extent that it doesn't achieve its objectives We can fix the underlying mechanisms, but the alternative to it is a Going backward right it is going backward into a world that meets those objectives less.
Well, it doesn't honor those values and Anyone who has seen the comparison I think would have a hard time preferring the alternative and so it is This naive desire to tear down the West because you think something better is going to emerge and it you know what it is It is exactly like the comparison between, well, the Earth is in trouble, but there's Mars and we can terraform it, right?
It is always going to be massively harder to make Mars habitable than it is to fix Earth, no matter how broken it is.
Yeah.
So, you know, we have to fix the West and address the problems, but we also have to recognize how amazingly successful it has been, not only in generating productivity But improving the quality of life even for people who are unfairly treated by in Obliterating the bigotries of the past it has been amazingly successful, and yeah, it's not done, but that's hardly an indictment of Absolutely.
All right.
We wanted to say a little bit about what this week has felt like as our book launched.
It's been amazing.
And so last week, we were still a few days out from launch, but our episode with Joe Rogan had aired, and so we'd already made it onto the Amazon bestseller charts.
We were at like number 15, 16, something like And we were neck and neck with that very, very, very hungry caterpillar.
He remains insatiable, I believe, as far as I can tell.
And I know you guys have been waiting for the update on how the caterpillar is doing.
We've been in conversation with some of the caterpillar's people.
Actually, we can't tell if it was the caterpillar's people or his butterflies.
They wouldn't go on.
I don't think caterpillars have people.
I know, but they wouldn't go on video call with us, so we don't know.
But we're tentatively moving towards a detente with the Caterpillar, and we're even hoping for a collaboration in the future, possibly.
And I was thinking, I mean, we haven't actually talked about this, but something along the lines of maybe the Caterpillar who feels like he's growing but isn't, and that's better for everyone, maybe.
Or Chesterton's Caterpillar, why skipping the squishy phase and going straight to flight is an error.
Yeah, that's all I got at the moment as a possible collaboration between- Those are very Hunter-Gatherer's Guide lessons for caterpillars.
To the hungry caterpillar, yes.
Alright, cool.
I'm going to have to mull that over.
I had not actually thought to- Oh, maybe you weren't present on those calls.
No.
No, okay.
I wasn't.
It was just me trying to figure out if those people are butterflies I'm talking to.
Right.
Yeah.
Now I'm done.
Okay, so here's the thing.
Amazing stuff happened since last we spoke.
The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century on day of launch.
We don't have a screenshot of this.
It's on my phone actually.
But Zach, do you want to show the screenshot of the present status of the book?
There it is.
Number three on Amazon's all-around bestseller list.
Yesterday it spent almost the entire day at two, as it did on day of launch.
Now this is amazing.
I don't think that's true.
It reached number two late on day of launch.
Briefly, yes.
Briefly, and then spent all of yesterday, or almost all of yesterday, at number two.
In any case, obviously the particular number doesn't matter very much.
What's really interesting though is that the book has done this well despite the fact that the mainstream outlets have not been interested in discussing it, which tells us something.
It tells us something really important if we read those tea leaves correctly.
Because what has driven this is...
Podcast world, right?
That's where this book has been talked about, and it has been really interesting enough to people that they have ordered it in large numbers.
In fact, Amazon is out of them.
There are more coming.
They're sold out, yep.
But we know that there are more coming because... Yes, because we have a relationship with our publisher.
Our publisher is fabulous, and they assure us that they are scrambling to get that second print run done.
It should be there soon, but in any case, something is afoot.
Right?
That legacy world, right?
The legacy world, which is usually the place in which books have been discussed and in which books are made and broken and all of that stuff.
That world has, in this case, been bypassed by the unofficial podcast, lower production values, real conversations that are unscripted between people that can go on for hours and hours.
With much more time to, you know, make errors, but also expand on ideas and give you a sense of what the thinking might be like in the book, right?
Right.
And so some episodes back, we talked about the fog machine of war.
And the fog machine of war was about the fact that in order to prevent progress from being made, it is important to keep you from knowing how well you're doing, right?
In other words, if you're succeeding, In changing things, but you don't know it.
You won't navigate very well.
And so in any case, this is, I think, a demonstration that the podcast world, which, you know, we joined sort of late.
But anyway, that world has incredible power relative to the mainstream world.
And, you know, there's a question.
I do wonder what will happen.
This book is clearly a bestseller.
There's a question about whether that will reflect in the official world.
And if it doesn't, then that's clearly an indication that bestseller doesn't mean bestseller.
Well, let's hope that it does.
We don't know the answer to that yet.
We don't know, but it will be interesting to see.
I think there is a place for highly scripted, high production values media, but there is clearly also a place.
Maybe just take the production values thing out of it because some podcasts are extremely high production values.
But there is also a place where, for that kind of media, where there is time for unscripted conversation.
And yes, it is certainly true that our lives now allow for, you know, many of our lives allow for us to listen to long conversations in a way that might not have been true 20 years ago or 50 years ago.
And so the technology has happened at the same time that lifestyles have allowed for people to listen, but it also absolutely reveals that there's a hunger.
That there's a hunger to listen to people talking off script, making errors, saying you know, as I just did, but thinking through real thorny problems in real time and not simply using talking points.
This is, I mean, this I think is the big message.
People are just, you know, exhausted maybe, fed up maybe, but just done with being fed talking points all the time.
People are actually capable and smart and able to take in information that sometimes disagrees with one another.
That's what you're supposed to be getting in school, right?
Like multiple sources of information that aren't in agreement with one another and then you figure out what it means and how to make sense of it.
That's what critical thinking is.
That's what a liberal arts education is supposed to give you.
That's what a high school education is supposed to give you.
So the idea that we do, and we don't do that in school much anymore, but then to have the media say, we know that you all are too dumb and not interested anyway in thinking for yourselves, so we're going to give you the idiocracy version.
Well, no.
Most people don't want that.
They don't.
And I think that's what's being revealed by the fact that the non-mainstream media is actually able to draw in enough people that our book, of which we are incredibly proud and we would love if the mainstream media would talk about it as well, but is near the top of the charts on Amazon after less than a week and nearly no mainstream media mention.
Yep, I think it's almost an exact analog to the point about the Academy, right?
Because what happened, and you know, we know some of the early pioneers in the podcast space, but what happened was people who were fed up with the garbage that was coming over their screens
We're bold enough and visionary enough to put something onto those screens that they knew couldn't compete and you know I'll say again it's the production values and even the high production value stuff that we see the discussions because they're free flowing aren't scripted as you point out shows up all the time people make errors they go back it's not like.
You know, the evening news on the teleprompter, right?
It's not like the, you know, the edited book review in the Times.
It's a different kind of mechanism.
It's much more human and authentic, almost by definition.
You know what it is?
It's a bit closer to campfire.
It is campfire.
And, you know, it's not, the point is, it's new campfire, right?
Campfire was an actual physical thing around which people gathered, right?
It had a glow.
This glow is different.
And the way we interact with each other is different.
And best not to fall asleep to it.
Right.
But, you know, I guess the point is, A, It's a little bit Game B, isn't it?
And B, it's a lot like what has to happen with the Academy.
And it's a pity, because the Academy is so, you know, so many of the elements, even still, of the Academy are top-notch.
The production values are great, right?
They've got marvelous real estate.
It sends exactly the right message.
Their libraries are full of books, some of them even good, right?
You know, so...
The point is, yeah, it would be great if the Academy would wake up, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
And what we have to do is the equivalent of what podcast world has done to legacy media world with respect to education, because frankly, no one's coming to save us, right?
We have to educate ourselves.
And what that means is we need a new Academy.
Yeah, excellent.
Well, is that it?
I think so.
All right.
That I think is it for the week.
We will be, for those of you watching, if you want to stick around for a little longer, we'll be taking a break as close to 15 minutes as possible.
Whatever the tech will let us do.
And then we'll be back with our live Q&A.
And you can ask questions at, it's not up there, is it?
We should put that on the screen.
It's at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
And I guess maybe, and please like the channel on both Odyssey and YouTube, both this and the Dark Horse Podcast Clips channel.
And maybe instead of going through the rest of the stuff I usually go through here, I would say, if you haven't Please get yourself a copy of the book.
We've heard that there are waits at libraries, but if you can't or don't want to buy it, get a copy from the library and read it, and we are interested to start hearing.
We have already begun hearing what people are thinking, and that's what we want.
We want these ideas out in the world more than anything.
All right.
Before you get to our sign-off, I will say Autumn is coming.
Make sure your leaf blower is in good condition.
You do not want to be caught off guard.
Even if you live in an eighth floor walk-up.
Especially because even a few leaves can mess that up.
For sure.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
