Heather Heying details her and Brett Weinstein's forced departure from Evergreen State University, citing a "culture of fear" driven by progressive dog whistles that silenced dissent and stripped them of tenure. She argues that far-left identity politics now pose a greater existential threat to Western democracy than white nationalism due to their cultural dominance and rejection of scientific fact-checking in academia. Heying further warns against the "digital assault on consciousness" fueled by addictive algorithms, linking this to harmful parenting trends like helicopter parenting and pharmaceutical overuse that leave young adults unprepared for reality. Ultimately, her account of a mugging in Quito illustrates how direct physical risk builds essential resilience, contrasting sharply with today's sheltered existence. [Automatically generated summary]
I think both of us are both eager to leave the Evergreen story behind, but still heartbroken that an institution that we loved, and still believe in the educational model that it offered, and still believe in the students who got great educations there for many decades.
We would love to see it resurrected, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen.
So this is, it's a little crazy to me that this is the first time that we've met, because obviously our circles have been sort of closing in on each other for quite some time.
So when the whole evergreen thing happened, and I only want to spend a little bit of time at the top talking about it, and then I want to do all sorts of evolutionary biology stuff and the other things that you're really passionate about.
The story obviously was more focused on Brett, and then he was sort of thrust into the media and all that, but this was a direct...
attack on you as well, and as you said, the institution that you loved and all that.
Can you just give me any sort of recap, or just pieces of it that maybe we don't know that well,
or just your perspective on what was happening there?
I was on sabbatical most of the year before this broke out.
It's part of why I disappeared from the story.
I said as I went on to sabbatical, Brett, I will continue to read everything you want to send out to these lists, but I am not engaging.
I am doing my own work now.
So, about a year, actually a year to the day before the protests broke out, the first announcement of the new plan came live, and then and there, and for the next year, Brett was, I was a little bit, a couple of other people were a little bit, standing up and saying, this doesn't smell right.
This feels like this is actually about something that we're not talking about.
And furthermore, if we're actually interested in improving the fate of various demographic groups, these processes are not going to be the way to accomplish them.
And when, in fact, when Brett used the phrase, culture of fear, on campus, what came back at him was, you have to prove that there's a culture of fear or else there's not one.
And show me the people who aren't standing up or else I will know that they don't exist, which is baffling, right?
It is obviously an unprovable statement to say there's a culture of fear and I'm not going to out the people who have come to me and told me they're scared because I actually am going to honor their privacy.
But if everyone who had come to us privately and said, this is nuts and it's got to stop, had stood up, it would have been a totally different outcome.
Well, that's the culture of fear summed up right there, right?
Okay, so without rehashing the whole thing, can you just tell me just a little bit about sort of how your life has changed throughout this and sort of, you know, look, you and Brett, you guys did settle.
It wasn't for a ton of money, at least in my humble estimation, but I think you probably wanted to just put some of this behind you, but you guys are professors in exile.
You have kids and family and all that stuff, and just sort of sum up kind of where you're at at the moment.
Yeah, so we'd been living in Olympia for 15 years.
The college was an amazing place to really do a deep dive in community with students.
And so Brett and I had done one and I had done several long study abroad trips in Panama and in Ecuador with pretty large groups of undergraduates, taking them through the Amazon, through Galapagos.
We spent time in the field.
In Washington state, in the San Juans in eastern Washington, took people places where not only were we studying evolutionary biology and animal behavior and field techniques and statistics and philosophy of science, but also coming to know each other such that after you break bread with people for days and you play ultimate with them and you sit around a campfire, You come to understand that when they disagree with you, it's not inherently coming from a place of hatred or personal animosity.
And so that trust that we were able to create in our classrooms, which both of us loved doing, allowed us to effectively then rip the intellectual rug out from under people when they made claims that weren't falsifiable or couldn't be You know, it couldn't be justified once you started to ask them what the assumptions were that were underlying their claims.
That was an amazing gift, and I don't know that really almost any other educational model out there allows for that, because it required the time to build community with students, which was wonderful.
So, yes, we lost two tenure-track jobs along with our health insurance and our retirement plans and all of that, and have two kids still in school.
So that's alarming.
But some of what we were doing in the classroom, we have begun to do on larger stages.
And that is promising.
It seems clear that the world is interested in hearing how to understand systems from an evolutionary perspective.
I knew that was true from the 25 or 50 students that I had doing the deep dive for every quarter of a year for years.
It's not that surprising, but it is heartening to see that that is the response of many, many people out there.
In a weird way, does it almost feel right then that this happened?
I mean, I know it's kind of sucking in again with the salaries and tenure-track positions and all that, but that the message that you guys are talking about seems so relevant right now.
You guys are now doing more public speaking gigs.
I'm dragging bread on stage with me to do stand-up.
That's right.
All sorts of crazy things are presenting themselves and then the sort of the rise of this new alliance
of whether you wanna call it intellectual dark web or whatever you wanna call it at this point.
But there is this sort of interesting crew of people with a lot of different feelings
on a lot of different issues with all sorts of different disciplines coming together.
And maybe if you guys were still at university in a traditional sense,
you wouldn't be able to be dealt in the way that you are now.
I think there is both a way in which having gone through the looking glass,
having gone through the direct, to borrow a phrase from the far left,
but the lived experience of actually being at the center of a mob, at the center of riots,
and then watching as the world, the mainstream media and others
tried to do a public relations spin on it and tell a totally different story.
To live that and to watch the institution that you loved become totally disloyal to you and to watch many people whom you respected hide.
You can't unsee that.
It's valuable.
And the fact that we're sitting here talking together and that many of us in the Intellectual Dark Web and in this bigger group are speaking and saying, actually, the culture of fear that is society-wide is real.
And so I'll say, the first time I met my students after the November 2016 election, after Trump was elected, Evergreen is a very left place.
Olympia is a very left place.
Pretty much everyone on campus had that glazed-eye, slack-jawed look that people in most progressive enclaves will be familiar with from that time, from those few days, right?
Myself included.
Even though, you know, I was no Hillary fan, but I didn't see that outcome coming, and I certainly didn't vote for Trump.
We got to class and my co-faculty, whom I admire greatly, just proceeded with her lecture on horse evolution.
And I'm looking around the classroom going, no one here cares about horse evolution.
So she ended a bit early and we had lab a couple hours later.
And before she let them go, I said, hold on, if anyone wants to stay, this is no longer class, but if anyone wants to stay, I would be happy to lead a conversation about what just happened, what just happened to our country.
And about 40 of our 50 students stayed and skipped their lunch hour.
We went right to anatomy lab that afternoon from this conversation.
And what I said to them was, do not for a minute believe that racists and sexists elected Trump.
Think about how many times you have had to censor yourself on this campus when you had an opinion that was even slightly different from the accepted dogma.
And that conversation not only brought life to the room, but afterwards I had several students come up to me, some of them in tears, telling me stories about one of them had lost a job on campus for speaking an opinion that was not accepted.
One of them had another story of another friend who'd lost a job.
Others talked about their self-censorship.
And all of these people, again, were far left.
Not that it should matter, but these weren't even people who were conservatives, or who held conservative views.
So that is the larger culture of fear that is hardly restricted to Evergreen, but is society-wide, that we are speaking about, and that people are responding to, because at Google, At Starbucks, in cubicles, in campuses, but far beyond campuses across the country, and across the weird countries at least, this is a problem.
Well, the irony to me is that I think that all that I'm doing is talking about these things, often with people who have a much better pedigree than I do, but by me talking about it, it's giving room for other people to talk about it, and that's all that they want.
Well, you're also providing ways into the conversation, I think.
So there are a lot of people, when confronted with, you're not allowed to think that, say, oh God, I'm not actually sure how to respond.
I don't know.
I don't have the linguistic skills.
I don't have the analytics behind me.
I don't know what I'm supposed to say here.
And so just listening to you and to Sam Harris and to Jordan Peterson and to Brett and to Eric and to me and to many, many others, I believe begins to give people a sense that not only is this doable, these are good, reasonable, smart people who are being respectful in what they're saying, but also it's not just tools, it's actually like phrases.
You know, this is what you can say.
These are the sort of things that you can say in response that are still respectful and don't reject the humanity of the person on the other side, but do reject the argument.
It's interesting, it almost shows that What you guys obviously were doing so well at a university level, that's exactly what's needed at a societal level now, talking about the language, the language to get these ideas across is so important.
I wonder, is there a evolutionary explanation for a little bit of what has happened here with the left, like the way they've sort of closed off ranks and then purge everyone.
Because just as I sit here with you, it's like the idea that you and Brett wouldn't be enough of whatever it is that they want is so bananas and yet it is true.
So is there some way that you can explain that coming from the discipline you come from?
We're aligned, and I feel walking in here like, you've got my back, and you've got my back.
I think people, especially raised without much experience with the physical world, and raised often in situations where they're being given a number of pharmaceuticals early on that are disrupting development, arrive at what should be the cusp of adulthood and aren't sure how to navigate, aren't sure how to navigate the waters.
And so, when told, oh, if you just agree with everything, if you just become an ideologue and go in lockstep with us, You can be with us.
So, you know, identity politics is appealing because it provides an instant in-group if you will only subjugate yourself.
And, you know, identity politics on this side begets identity politics on this side, of course, because anyone who shows up here and is told, no, you don't have enough of what the progressive stack tells us you need, either you can totally subjugate yourself or go over there, well, of course we're going to get a rise over here and back and forth.
When people criticize us, whoever this is, for not focusing on that identity politics enough, the secondary one that you're talking about here, which is the identity politics of the right, which is based in actual racism, or there's a white ethnostate, or ideas that are so the antithesis of the American experiment.
To me, they're ridiculous and have no real-world traction.
It's almost like we've created this boogeyman because we need it.
No, well, so what's your best argument against that?
Well, people say, well, you're not focusing on that enough, because everyone wants everything to be equal all the time.
So if you're focusing on the identity politics of the left, which clearly many of us see as, I mean, I truly see it.
I've been saying this, and I really believe this.
I view it as the greatest existential threat to Western democracy that there is.
I believe that if there's something that would cause us To be on the streets, like, killing each other, I think it's that, where we'll have broken off, and all of the commonalities will disappear.
We must disagree with this just as much as culturally we now know.
It's a norm to disagree with what's on the far right.
It should become a cultural norm to disagree with, frankly, the cryptic racism and sexism and everything else that's happening on the far left.
It comes packaged as if it's anti-racist and anti-sexist and all.
It's racist and sexist against the other group.
It's a flipping of the tables of oppression.
So I would say the third point is, for me anyway, as someone who has been on the left my whole life, this has changed, this experience, this going through the looking glass in the last year, has not changed my values, but it has changed what I understand about Yeah.
how people are using language to make other people out to be things they're not.
And so I no longer believe in a massive alt-right, for instance, right?
And the boogeymen that are out there that you're not supposed to do things like talk to Fox News.
Sorry, no.
Actually, we should all be exposing ourselves to the media across the entire range.
And for me, on the left, it's actually my job, much more so than to go after people who I have nothing in common with, to go after the people who claim to have values that are similar to mine, but I see that they are actually achieving goals that are different.
Yeah, and that's why I love this conversation, and I don't get tired of it, because we're all in on it at different levels.
We all have different realizations at different times along the timeline.
And it's like, for me, for two years, I kept saying, I'm of the left, and that's why I want To fix this.
I don't think realistically anymore I can honestly say that.
I think I have more in common certainly with libertarians and I find an intellectual openness with conservatives that I just don't find anymore on this other side.
And I know there's, yet I know there's some people.
You just spoke at Hetero Docs.
Yeah, look, you just spoke at Heterodox.
Jonathan Haidt's been on the show.
I think he's doing wonderful work.
There's obviously people like Brett and like Eric and Steven Pinker and plenty and Sam and plenty of other that exist still as sort of a sane left, but I see that just being whittled and whittled and whittled away, and that doesn't mean the fight's not worth taking.
Maybe it means it's the most worthy fight, but I just see it as like an increasingly untenable position to hold I think, I think there are actually many, many, many people out there who are not, who don't have public platforms, who are waiting, who've been waiting for this.
Who are watching, you know, most of these people would consider themselves Democrats, as I always did.
I don't, I don't want to identify as a Democrat anymore given what they now stand for.
But most, I think that, and this, you know, as evidenced by my inbox, so it's anecdotal, but it's a lot of anecdotes, And also my Twitter feed, that there are a massive number of people out there who are on the left, who have values on the left, and who find no one out there who is making sense.
And it has taken this To this fever pitch that we've arrived at for a number of people, I really think, and like I said, you know, Google, Starbucks, but it's not just those big stories.
There are people writing to me and to Brett from just average workplaces saying, I'm in fear for my job because I cannot speak anything that doesn't fit the dogma.
We just hired an equity advisor.
We just hired an inclusion advisor.
And it's hateful.
It's hateful rhetoric that we are being told to adopt.
This is what's happening across corporate America now.
Of course most Americans are not going to appreciate that.
Yeah, it's like it existed at the universities for a long time, and finally it started bubbling out of there, and those kids took those ideas and started entering the workforce.
That's why it's so worth, you know, people say, oh, you're focusing on college students too much, and it's like, you do realize they get out of college at some point.
Usually, right, if they're supposed to.
So tell me a little bit more about sort of what you're doing now.
I know you just spoke at Heterodox, and let's start with that.
And most everyone I met were students or faculty or admin or journalists.
So I don't know.
I don't know what the entry rules were.
But the panels were, as Jonathan Haidt said at the end of the day, I, Jonathan, count only three people who are on the panels of, I guess, 28 people who might be conservative.
So he himself pointed out, you know, we're striving for viewpoint diversity, but the fact is it's an uphill battle.
You know, we're not going to get, just like we shouldn't expect a 50-50 sex ratio among software engineers between men and women, we're not going to get a 50-50 ratio of liberals and conservatives on college campuses.
It's not necessarily the kind of work that conservatives flock to in the same numbers as liberals do.
So I think we need to be careful about imagining what equity would look like, as in all of these arguments.
Absolutely, that is one of the explanations, for sure.
And certainly in some fields, the less human-focused the field, the more conservatives there are.
We know this.
So in engineering, for instance, in the more physical sciences, mostly people don't speak their politics on college campuses if they are on the right, because they're not welcome there.
But those fields do have higher representations of conservatives than liberals.
But most of the social sciences and humanities were always tended liberal, but are even more so, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but even more so now than they ever have been.
And that's a problem.
To have a field that is trying to understand the nature of humans, any of the social sciences, psychology or anthropology or sociology, to be entirely limited to people on the left side of the political spectrum.
Maybe you're missing something in your explanation of what humans are if you don't have anyone who's willing to speak to a different political position.
So when I've talked to Jordan Peterson, who you referenced, and my friend Peter Boghossian, and a couple other people who are professors, I think a lot of their argument is based around that gender studies and these sort of new fields basically have a completely separate set of standards that have virtually nothing to do
with any of the standards that you, as an evolutionary biologist, had to,
had to and have to prescribe to, to do your work.
Is that really the crux of it, sort of at the institutional level at schools?
And you just have to know you're dealing with people who are not going to be playing in good faith and willing to have an actually viable argument at the point that they say that.
So it's that there has been capture, pretty solid capture in a few of the more traditional fields.
Not entirely.
In fact, I met several people at Heterodox who are sociologists who are fighting this from within.
But sociology is one of the captured fields.
Anthropology, geography, and cultural anthropology in particular.
So, the fact that there are fields that students can go into and basically never be exposed to the idea of, you're going to generate as many possible explanations for the thing that you've observed as possible.
We're going to do hypothesis generation first, and then we're going to try to figure out what would have to be true if each of those individual hypotheses were true.
And then we're going to try to figure out how to test between them.
That's the scientific method.
And it's inefficient, it sometimes gets things wrong, but it is the only tool we have to, over time, get to a better and better understanding of the universe.
There are some schools now that when positions come open in science disciplines, at most schools, this wasn't true at Evergreen, but at most schools, the hiring apparatus is within department.
So if someone in physics retires and physics gets to decide, the physics faculty and department chair and such, get to decide what kind of physicist they're going to hire next.
Somehow, increasingly, science educators are being hired rather than scientists themselves.
And science educator is a code word for people coming out of ed schools and education schools have this pathogen very badly.
So science educators being hired into positions that should have been scientists means that now you have a weakening of scientific voice and scientific method in science departments.
you have a, I mean even, what was it, just recently Nature I think published, you know, one of the two big science
journals published, I don't remember if it was a letter or an
article, arguing that one of the primary things that science needs
It's these immutable characteristics and has nothing to do with actually all the other kinds of diversity that are interesting and that we can change.
Things like political belief and some things that we can't change, but things like being on the autism spectrum or even like, you know, color blindness or dyslexia or left-handedness,
So, you know, lefties, like many other members of these groups, but I happen to know the lefty one because I've done some research on it, lefties are overrepresented in the National Academy of Sciences and in mental institutions.
I mean, it's probably, to do this right, we would need to agree on a definition, and I'm not sure that that's... Any definition that we choose will immediately antagonize some amount of your audience in a not productive way.
So maybe rather than that, are humans the only conscious beings on this planet?
I don't think so, but we are the most conscious.
We are the most fully conscious.
And we have better access to our own consciousness, obviously, than we have access to the consciousness of, say, dolphins or elephants.
Or other apes?
Or maybe wolves?
Any of these long-lived social organisms with long childhoods and generational overlap who lived sometimes with three generations together at a time, so there's transmission of cultural information, organisms that have theory of mind and can imagine, can put themselves in the other individual's position and think, what do they think is going on right now?
Even though I understand that that's a different thing than what I think is going on right now.
There's a beautiful book called Baboon Metaphysics by the husband and wife team Chaney and Seyfarth that basically explores theory of mind in baboons.
And it's not the only one.
They're not the only species.
But how do we as humans find our consciousness best.
There are ways that we can hack into what has sometimes been called flow states, or that's the most common one, but we can do so through, well, through deep conversation, through meditation, through music, sometimes through producing it, but sometimes through experiencing especially live music, dance for some people, Hallucinogens, sex, sport, intense physical or physiological or emotional experience in which we are just moving with others, usually.
And there are those of us, like myself, a very strong introvert, who will find some of my deepest flow states, access to consciousness, alone.
Alone in the Amazon when I can sit and watch monkeys and write.
So when I talked about this with Sam, the way he was defining it, which I think is sort of similar to what you're saying here, it strikes me as just like an extreme ability to maintain presence in the moment.
That that really, sort of when a basketball player, so if we use the sport analogy, like a basketball player when they're in the zone, you know, and Jordan scores 20 points in five minutes and he just, he always says, well everything I threw up just went in.
That they hit that level of consciousness, or for you to be outside, enough out of yourself to be able to write in that perfect moment, or whatever it is.
It always seems about being present more than anything else to me.
There is a kind of time stopping, both time stopping and disappearing on you at the same time, which I think is part of why entheogens, hallucinogens, can capture that as well, because the sense of time just disappearing on you is remarkable.
So, you both don't care about time, and time passes usually in ways that seem quicker than you were expecting them to.
With, say, sports or meditation.
That's not one that I do, but Sam has a lot to say about that, of course.
I remember when I was doing Mushrooms, at least, so I was in college age somewhat consistently, maybe every six months or something, I would always want the clocks to be covered.
The kinds of consciousness-enhancing activities that we can engage in, including hallucinogens, are very different if you're inside in a room like this where you have no access to what is going on climatologically or weather-wise outside, as opposed to if you are out and you can watch as the sun sets And as the moon comes up and you can think again, oh right, it's a waxing moon and it'll be full in four days.
Or you're at a coast and you can watch the tides and think about the shifting time.
So for me, thinking about time that is clearly being revealed by the planet we're on, as opposed to coming at me through a clock.
is more meaningful.
And I'm willing to think about time in that way, but definitely not through clocks.
When I'm writing, hallucinogens sport any of that, right?
It's one of the key pieces for sure, and I think that phrase is brilliant.
A digital assault on consciousness.
This is something Tristan Harris, whom I don't know, but... Yeah, I've had him on the show.
Yeah, talks about a lot.
He has been ringing the alarm bell for years about the algorithms that are being put into our devices that are creating addicts.
out of us. But more broadly, the digital assault on consciousness is, it's increasingly hard to
find a space where you're just actually free and clear. And this is part of what I do for myself
and what I used to do for my students, was take them to places not only that were remote and where
they could explore nature, but where there was no cell signal, where there was no internet.
So, you know, the deepest part of the Amazon that I took students to, there's just, there's no email, there's no internet, there's no Wi-Fi.
We are, you know, a plane ride over the Andes and then a boat ride and then a truck ride and then another five hours down a tributary of the Amazon to a place with no roads, no airstrips, nothing.
And boy, does time feel different.
And you're sleeping in little cabins that are screened, and so you wake up when the
insects and the birds and the monkeys wake up and they start talking at you.
They're not talking at you, they're talking to themselves.
But getting a sense of the rhythms of the planet that we're on can return people, I
think, to a real sense of self and also to a sense of what they value, what their passions
are.
And this is a big thing that I think is missing in many of the—to return to what we were
talking about earlier, the far-left activists, the control left, mostly, I think, lack another
passion.
And...
And I've said before, the prediction I would make is that you have very few rock climbers or skiers among the radical left activists.
People who have something that they can engage in, that frees them from time and devices, from a response to time, I need to be here then, or my thing just pinged at me, I need to look at it, are better able to center themselves, to find their own consciousness and discover who they are and what they want to be in the world.
To me, there's something there about if you really believe in the self and the individual and your ability to overcome things, you don't need all these external processes to help define the world because you're sort of defining it yourself.
Why would you broadcast to the world that you would be helpless?
This doesn't make any sense to me.
There are plenty of situations where I wouldn't know what to do, and I would know what to do in situations that most people wouldn't, just because of where I've traveled and where I've lived.
But the idea that you want to be self-sufficient requires a concept of self, I think is important here.
So using the discipline that you're an expert in, is it possible that we're in a unique position right now because of technology that our brains are actually evolving now?
Evolving or I guess devolving, depending on which way you look at it, at an extraordinarily high pace or something like that.
And what is going on with technology is completely untested.
And so this is a place where, you know, why am I so certain that I'm still on the left even though most of the people who say they're on the left publicly, I don't have any interest in continuing to talk to them because they don't seem to be making any sense?
I look at systems that are evolved, that are in stable state, because they've evolved over millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years.
And my instinct is, don't mess with that until you really, really understand what you're doing.
And so, for instance, I, unlike many scientists, am not feeding my children GMOs.
I give them and myself organic food, and when we eat meat, which we do a lot of, I want that meat to have been fed the food of its ancestors.
What exactly is the harm?
We now know a little bit of this, but 20 years ago, if you had asked me, what's the harm in feeding cows grains?
I said, I have no idea.
But I know that messing with a system that was working is more likely to interfere with something in that animal than not.
Why would you mess if you could not?
And of course there are economic reasons to mess, but don't mess with systems that are working until you really have a solid understanding of what the effects are going to be.
The use of the precautionary principle pretty widely is what puts me pretty far on the left.
But systems that we've created that are evolutionary, but people don't know that, we need to regulate in order to get them under control because nuclear energy isn't gonna regulate itself.
And habitat loss throughout most of the world is not gonna regulate itself.
So there are some problems that we've created and that are bigger than individuals can do anything about.
Right, and this is where I think we have, I get it.
I don't know that if you just leave everybody to do whatever the hell they want all the time that everybody isn't going to be doing all sorts of awful things.
I think generally the market does fix some of that, but I get what you're saying.
These systems are, I suppose, often precarious in nature, too, to the point where anything could be tilted one way or the other and then we've got bigger problems.
So how do we fix some of this stuff?
How do we actually scale this back?
I mean, I get it, you know, most of my audience will get, okay, well, we have to keep talking about it, sure.
We have to wake more people up, sure.
But what can you do using the knowledge you have and the study you've done?
Yes, also it's true that I'm not going to wade into, for instance, what we should do about our economic system here and now.
I might do it later, but it's not going to happen today.
But with regard to, for instance...
Most people, I think, have never thought about what childhood is.
And if you don't have children yourself and you're an adult, OK, maybe you don't have to.
It doesn't matter.
Maybe it just doesn't matter to you.
But if you're a parent, you need to think about why it is that we have literally the longest childhood relative to lifespan of any organism on the planet.
This is a feature.
This is a way for us to learn how to become humans.
We are not, and this is a point that Brett has made very often, we're not blank slates,
but we are the blankest slate of any organisms on the planet. We are more software than hardware.
And so what we're doing for these first, I don't know, 11 to 25 years of our lives, right?
But depending on culture, you know, when do you start calling yourself an adult and all this?
What we're doing is learning how to be human. And we're learning how to be human
by direct, we're supposed to be learning how to be human.
through direct instruction by our parents, through observing our parents, through observing our siblings, through interacting with including fighting with our siblings and having them smack us down both sometimes literally but definitely metaphorically when we do stupid things and better yet if our parents have lots of adult friends around and they have lots of kids and there's a whole mess of humanity that we are learning from and then we're also in that very long developmental period supposed to be learning from direct physical experience of the world.
So, the example I like to go to here is the Roadrunner cartoons, when Wile E. Coyote scoots his way off a cliff, and he doesn't fall until he realizes there's nothing below him.
It's funny, right?
Like, it's really funny, but of course, it's funny because we know that gravity doesn't really work that way.
Increasingly, I suspect that a lot of kids, and now into iGen and some of the younger millennials, kind of aren't sure.
Like, they were protected so much by their helicopter parents, and they were behind screens rather than having real experience, and to the extent that they played sport, it was totally regulated and overseen by adults.
And they didn't have any free time to go and get themselves into trouble, and maybe even burn something down, or hurt themselves, or break an arm, or whatever it is, and learn from it.
That they arrive at the cusp of what should have been adulthood, totally unclear on what that's supposed to mean.
Does this absolutely to you, because as I'm hearing you say, the bell going off in my head, man, I've been on Torrey Peterson for the last six weeks, everything that you just said there, is basically what he is saying.
He is trying to, I sense, that what he's trying to do at the most personal level, yeah, he talks about society as a whole, but at the most personal level, he's trying to retool young people, it's not even retool, he's trying to give them the tools in the first place that they clearly should have gotten before.
So that's what's so fascinating to me, because it's like, how did this happen?
We have schools that have gotten rid of recess because recess is dangerous.
And everyone who has ever been in school, even if, like me, you happen to have been a good fit for the model of schools
that you were in, which I think is pretty rare, actually,
knows that you also need to have time to get out there and play
and move your body and experience it and not have it being overseen
some adult who's decided in advance what is and is not safe for you to experience.
So one of the things I used to say to my students in advance, I did a lot of team building and like actual team building and planning with them in advance of these long study abroad trips.
We would have spent weeks together on campus in advance of going on these trips.
But what I wanted to do Before we left was establish with them.
What's your relationship with risk?
How do you how do you view yourself your relationship with risk and we would do this in round like and I would answer the question to and you know, I would say to them actually I happen to love risk.
I will I am the leader on this trip.
But I will keep all of you safe, but then I'm going to go do things.
I am going to walk alone in the forest a lot and do things, because it happens to be one of the ways that I find my consciousness, that I find my truest self.
And I don't expect any of you to do that also, but you need to be comfortable with the fact that your leader is going to be doing that sort of thing.
And one of the other things we would talk about was, you know, what's your relationship with comfort?
You're going to be uncomfortable.
Just because you can say in advance you're okay with the bugs and the mud and the not having a phone doesn't mean you actually will be when you're faced with it.
But maybe most important is we are going to leave ourselves open to serendipity.
I cannot tell you everything that we are going to do or learn on this trip.
If I could, what would be the point of going?
We're going to go, and some interesting things are going to happen.
I've had a couple of near-death experiences on these trips.
There's a learning experience, and frankly, on the most recent one, on a boat in the Galapagos with eight students, in which the only thing that didn't survive was the boat, but it was really touch and go.
I really did almost die.
Those eight students and I are friends for life.
There's some of them that I'm not in active contact with, but I know where they are, and that bonds you.
And no, I'm not going to pitch a trip with, and you might die!
That's not what the goal is, but the idea that it could happen.
And you should have the tools on board.
The physical tools, the psychological tools, the emotional tools, the intellectual tools.
To figure out in real time, as your boat is being flipped by a 15-foot wave, and now you're trapped under it, what do you do?
That was a uniquely me kind of teaching, and then this last trip Brett was there with me as well.
There was a way in which I think, you know, what I said about childhood, which I, you know, my interest originally in evolution was about the evolution of parental care and territoriality and social systems and sexual selection.
And long before I ever had kids myself, long before I wanted kids.
But I thought, you know, once Brett and I did have kids, and I'm watching these amazing creatures begin to grow up, okay, let's think then about what is the best way to do this.
And we could put them in little boxes and make absolutely sure that they survive till the age of 18.
And then we open up the boxes and we let them out, and they have basically no chance of being adults.
Or even of knowing how to be adults.
Or we could expose them to ever greater risk.
Having first made absolutely sure that they know that they are loved and that we have their backs and that we will do anything to come in and get them and to protect them, if we can.
But that they are going to start going out into the world pretty early, you know, biking at two.
And, you know, we took them to the Amazon at seven and nine the first time.
And, you know, something could have gone wrong.
And I don't know, I've known parents who lost kids and I don't know how you survive that, but you need to be willing to take risks such that when your kids do hit 18 or 20 or whatever, you know that they're actually already on their way to being adults.
And that is going to require Backing off and letting them do some of their learning on their own, and knowing that that's going to result in some harm coming to them.
And it's going to be physical harm, it's going to be psychological harm, it's going to be intellectual harm.
But frankly, the lack of any kind of harm that a lot of kids are experiencing is part of why they're now saying speech is violence.
Is some of this an extension of the success of the West, in a way?
Because if you take this set of kids, however old they are, let's say we go from, although now there's a lot of studies that are showing that the generation younger than millennials is actually leaning more conservative, but let's say we take 16 to 30, roughly, so Generation Y-ish.
That most of their parents were baby boomers who were the most successful, at least financially, generation ever.
Most of the baby boomers' parents all went to war and lived through depression and all sorts of stuff.
But because the baby boomers basically were the biggest middle class and because there was such upward mobility, they had it so well, they kind of got their eye off the ball, started focusing on things that didn't matter as much.
Protecting kids from things that a kid would have used to have to have done, and that is sort of what led us here.
So it's almost like an economic backing for what ended up happening psychologically.
You know, there's so many things feeding into this, and yes, the wealth of America post-World War II, and the fact that those are most of the parents of the generation that seems the most confused, I think definitely there's a causal link there.
Which, you know, we can't go back, obviously, but we need to understand that it's an evolutionary system and that it's going to run away from us and that we are all prone to be addicted to dopamine hits.
We're going to seek the quick likes rather than, you know, even Okay, so take internet out of the picture for a moment.
If you... I don't know what you do for physical activity.
Let's Yeah, but going to the gym I would like into that.
I know that when I work out I like doing it and I feel great after, but it's like, oh I gotta get in my car, I gotta drive over there, I gotta park, and blah blah blah.
We're always fighting our nature, and it shouldn't surprise us that we're going to need to fight our nature with regard to responding to the internet, and responding to especially the little computers we carry around in our pockets, and learning to restrict our access to those.
Training ourselves to restrict our access to those.
I think anyone with the ability to train themselves to meditate or to do anything on a regular basis should be able to train themselves that same way with regard to devices.
Well, we've done about an hour here, and I'm going to demand that you come back, because I know we can do way more of this, unfortunately, just because my schedule is so nuts at the moment.
We have to kind of stop.
But can you give me one more thing that you're just really excited about right now that you've been thinking about or working on, or anything else that's really just giving you a little bit of juice at the moment while you're in this interesting space for yourself?
I guess there's a piece I wrote a number of years ago that is supposed to be out in a literary magazine just about now-ish, about having been mugged at knife point in Quito on one of these study abroad trips, which prompted... I was with three students.
So it was before the first day of one of my six-week study abroad trips.
I was with twenty students.
It was just me.
Brett wasn't there on this one.
And the experience in which the three students and I have been together all day, we come to the top of the stairs, and suddenly two guys with knives run around the corner and pin me and my female student up against a wall and do this sort of knife dance in front of us.
And then relieve, I didn't have anything on me because I know how to walk around Latin American cities and one of my students didn't, but two of my students had all of their stuff taken off them, including this really nice DSLR that Michelle, my student, had.
And they run off.
And the next thing I realize, I am on one of these guys in the middle of the street pulling on the backpack he's stolen from another one of my students.
Another one of my students has chased down the other guy.
And why is everything now so loud and so colorful?
And I thought back immediately, I thought, wow, the entire experience that I just had was somehow in black and white and was without sound.
And so it's an interesting long story that I basically explored in this essay by going and doing a dive into the literature on the nature of memory and the nature of sensory memory in particular, and what it is that we can and cannot perceive in the moment, what our brains take in, why time seems to slow down.
So just to go back to our early conversation about time, why time seems to slow down in periods of intensity.
It's not that time slows down, but basically our frame rate increases.
And not only our frame rate increases, but the amount that we remember and move into short-term memory and then, in this case, into long-term memory increases.
So this is one of the things that I've been thinking about lately, sort of how memory and the senses and, in fact, how all of us are a little bit of synesthetes, are experiencing our world in ways that we don't usually have language for.
Well, I'm sure they've done studies on that, you know, when people see the bad thing happening, but nobody calls the police and all that kind of stuff.
Well, listen, it's been an absolute pleasure.
I'm so glad that we finally got to do this in person, and we will do it again.
And you guys can follow Heather on the Twitter.
She does tweet a decent amount, but not a unhealthy, addicted amount, I would say.