July 6, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
59:28
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me is an evolutionary biologist, formerly of Evergreen State University, | ||
| who is now a professional professor in exile. | ||
| Heather Hying, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me, Dave. | ||
| Professor in exile, I believe that is in your Twitter bio? | ||
| It is. | ||
| I believe it is in your husband, Brett Weinstein's, Twitter bio. | ||
| Yeah, we generated it together. | ||
| Is that gonna be the title of the co-authored book when the dust settles on all of this stuff? | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, alright. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, as briefly as I can, leaving out many, many relevant pieces, | ||
| we got a new president, and the new president very quickly got rid of a provost | ||
| who was going to get in his way, and spoke publicly about his desire to turn Evergreen | ||
| into a social justice college. | ||
| That was actually on the record early in George Bridges' tenure. | ||
| at the point that the protests broke out a year ago now-ish, he had been president for about two years, | ||
| and a year before that had broken out an equity, a desire to bring equity and inclusion to the forefront, | ||
| which is code words, it's dog whistles for the people on the far left | ||
| who are actually interested in a reversal of power, not an end to oppression, | ||
| but an actual reversal of historical oppression. | ||
| Did you guys recognize those things as dog whistles at the time? | ||
| Because as Brett said at the time, he considers himself, or at least at that time did consider himself, deeply progressive. | ||
| You just said to me right before we started, you still consider yourself progressive. | ||
| So did you realize those buzzwords and what they actually meant at the time? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So we were saying that. | ||
| Brett mostly was saying that. | ||
| A few others of us were saying it. | ||
| Was there any sort of understanding of that point of view? | ||
| Privately, yes. | ||
| Privately, yes. | ||
| People were scared. | ||
| 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 that's possible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Today is not the day. | ||
| Today is not the day. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, I think this is not going to be a particularly deep point, but it's basic in-group, out-group dynamics. | ||
| And we will always, we will not get rid of tribal thinking, we will not get rid of our sense of, you know, you and I are aligned, right? | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| There's a way in which there's a kind of tribalism there, even though we just met for the first time today. | ||
| And we definitely have political differences, for sure, which we can talk about if we want. | ||
| Right, but that isn't the main thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They've long since been, almost no one thinks that way anymore. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But what do you think is the best argument for, well, you're not focusing on that one enough? | ||
| Because I see that a lot now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think two things. | ||
| One, it's not as big a group. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The white nationalists, to the extent that they exist, and they do, are better armed, by and large, than the far left. | ||
| But numerically, they just don't exist in the same numbers. | ||
| And they don't have the kind of play, they don't have the kind of cultural reach that the far left does. | ||
| And so that's the second, well, I guess there's three points. | ||
| A secondary point, then, is Everyone can mock white nationalists. | ||
| That is completely acceptable and in fact demanded that you do when those sorts of ideas come up in conversation. | ||
| Whereas the stuff on the far left, increasingly it is demanded that you not disagree. | ||
| That's a key right there. | ||
| Right, so we are saying no, actually we must. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Except now. | ||
| Except this crew of purged! | ||
| 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. | ||
| Heterodox? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, well, this was Heterodox Academy's first conference. | ||
| They and FIRE are really at the forefront, institutionally, of defending viewpoint diversity on campuses. | ||
| FIRE from sort of more of a legal perspective, and Heterodox at the faculty administrative perspective. | ||
| And it was, boy, it was an intense conference. | ||
| It's the only conference I've ever been to where I thought, this should have been longer. | ||
| I wanted it to be longer. | ||
| Is it all academics in the audience as well, or did they open that up to the public? | ||
| I think there were probably non-academics there. | ||
| I know there were a lot of journalists there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| At an ideal level, why would it be that conservatives would be less inclined to be doing academics? | ||
| I guess it depends on what our definition of conservative is. | ||
| One stereotype that comes to mind that I may regret saying is that liberal types take some odd pride in not caring about making a good living. | ||
| about making good money. | ||
| Faculty positions tend to fit that, right? | ||
| Certainly Evergreen did. | ||
| So, if one of your primary goals is not only to make a good living for yourself, | ||
| but potentially to leap out of the living you're making and really hit it big, | ||
| you're unlikely to do that in academia. | ||
| So there's a sort of a risk aversion, I think, to the prospect of making it big financially | ||
| that academics tend to have, that maybe conservatives would be less likely | ||
| to go that way. | ||
| Do you think it could also be that conservatives were just self-selecting out? | ||
| Like they realized the hostile atmosphere, so they were just like, why would I do this? | ||
| 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? | ||
| That is at least one of the foci that I have seen as well. | ||
| There are many new fields, many of which end in the word studies, like gender studies, that are made up. | ||
| They are based in post-modernism, and not just post-modernism, because at its base, originally, there's some stuff of value there, believe it or not. | ||
| But the new manifestations in critical theory and such are basically free of any fact-checking apparatus. | ||
| So they are anti-science, they are anti-enlightenment. | ||
| And they're quite willing to say things like, reason is a tool of the patriarchs. | ||
| Yeah, this is the new one. | ||
| This one started popping up in the last six months. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And there's no method over in gender studies. | ||
| Yeah, so how have you seen that way of thinking leak into the harder sciences? | ||
| Because this seems to be the next frontier here. | ||
| 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 | ||
| to be focusing on is increasing diversity. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| So, two problems with this. | ||
| What are your measures of diversity? | ||
| It's the stuff that you can see on first pass. | ||
| 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, | ||
| all of which provide your brain without us ever being conscious of it, | ||
| some different way of approaching the world. And that kind of diversity in a | ||
| group of people adds adds actual intrigue and nuance to conversations. | ||
| I'm a lefty with a little dyslexia actually. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| I'm a lefty, too. | ||
| Are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, you know, we've got this really big spread. | |
| Well, now I can see that there's really two options for your future. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| All right, let's talk about consciousness a little bit. | ||
| I just had Sam Harris on. | ||
| We've talked about it quite extensively. | ||
| I think you have some thoughts on consciousness, the nature of consciousness. | ||
| Indeed, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is like defining truth, which seems to be tough these days as well. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, which we now know that certain monkeys and apes do that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yes, Theory of Mind. | ||
| 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. | ||
| For me, that's one of them. | ||
| But sport is also. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And the mirrors. | ||
| I hated the mirrors. | ||
| Mirrors are no good. | ||
| I definitely did one trip, like, five hours in a mirror. | ||
| Forget that. | ||
| But I always wanted the clocks to be covered because the idea that time was passing while I was in this state was very scary to me. | ||
| Scary, or I just wanted nothing to do with it, I guess. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Maybe it doesn't matter what that distinction is. | ||
| Scary or just not interested. | ||
| So it's very different. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And yet we have all of these devices now that are meant to suck our time, that are meant to take our attention, that are literally designed this way. | ||
| Do you sense that there's actually a digital assault on consciousness? | ||
| Because maybe that really does explain so many of the other problems we're having in society right now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What does that say about the self, do you think? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I do think, for me, self-sufficiency is one of my highest values, personally. | ||
| And I have a very hard time understanding anyone who says, oh, if you leave me on my own, I wouldn't know what to do. | ||
| I just don't get this. | ||
| I don't get why you would want... Maybe it's a lefty thing. | ||
| I'd be fine, too. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, maybe just that. | |
| Yeah, and if you give that up, well then, boy, you're giving up a lot. | ||
| You give up so much, and the devices, as Tristan Harris has argued, are addicting us. | ||
| It's no accident. | ||
| We should not view ourselves, actually, as weak. | ||
| when we get addicted to the things, we should wean ourselves, we should as much as possible | ||
| to provide ourselves zones, periods of time when we have no access to those things and | ||
| so we are actually free and clear to let our minds do what they will. | ||
| Because when they have access to our brains, they are designed to addict us. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, the rate of change across almost every sector in the economy and in human experience right now is higher than it's ever been. | ||
| Could you say that about any moment in history? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But the rate of change itself is changing as well. | ||
| Right, so that's the important distinction. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's why I'm not a libertarian. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I have less insight right now, at least to answer in this amount of time, for the adult systems. | ||
| But I think I have a fair amount of clarity on what we should be doing with children and with parenting that we're really, really not doing. | ||
| When you say the adult systems, you mean like economic systems? | ||
| Well, and more specifically, how do you get adults who are already who they are to behave differently? | ||
| It's less clear to me what we can do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so we'll shelve them for the purposes of this. | |
| 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? | ||
| Now into the 40s, I think. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right, how did this happen? | ||
| And we can point to pharmaceuticals being given to kids to make boys less boy-like and to some degree to make girls less girl-like. | ||
| Let's give speed to boys so they'll sit and face forward and learn what? | ||
| So they'll calm down. | ||
| So they'll calm down and not do rough and tumble play. | ||
| I mean, that's insane. | ||
| And at the same time, let's give anti-anxiety meds to girls. | ||
| and SSRIs, and just the model of schooling is ridiculous. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I didn't want them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a learning experience for you. | |
| 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? | ||
| Was that a uniquely evergreen type of teaching? | ||
| Was that something that you and Brett really brought there? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| I mean, that's part of how we get there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's apt. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and then you toss in the internet. | ||
| And you toss on the internet. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I bike. | ||
| You play basketball. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So maybe with basketball it's going to be different. | ||
| For me... I like video games, too. | ||
| Is that better? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's probably the opposite. | ||
| Yeah, probably the opposite. | ||
| So I used to play a lot of Ultimate Frisbee. | ||
| And you could, like, any time there was a pickup game, I'm there. | ||
| I was playing five, six times a week for a while. | ||
| and then I ruptured my Achilles tendon playing on an Oregon beach with students | ||
| a few years ago. I'm not doing that anymore. | ||
| But biking, which I love and I find meditative, I have a very hard time convincing myself to get on my bike. | ||
| Even though while I'm doing it, I love it. | ||
| And after I do it, I feel better, and I'm more productive, and I'm more creative, and I'm just more in love with life. | ||
| But it's a pain in the ass. | ||
| And it's a little bit physically uncomfortable. | ||
| And all of these things are true. | ||
| We prioritize the pleasure of now over even something that, for me, I know, it's not even that I'm going to feel better after I did it. | ||
| I actually love the activity itself. | ||
| But getting over that sort of activation energy to do the thing, and I suspect that sports, like actual team sports, is a little bit different. | ||
| It's a little different. | ||
| Like, you're ready to go. | ||
| You're ready to go. | ||
| Like, oh, people are there. | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It feels like a chore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yet you know it's good. | ||
| So we're always fighting our nature, sort of. | ||
| We are. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, there are a number of things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Where's Quito? | ||
| The capital of Ecuador. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I thought, how did that happen? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Not that it was the purpose of the story, but how did this all end? | ||
| It ended, we got the stuff back. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| We got the stuff back and as soon as the student Jeremy and I traced these guys and got the stuff back, then the police showed up. | ||
| Then the police dopplered up from behind and the whole neighborhood... They were waiting, they were watching. | ||
| It was remarkable, actually. | ||
| There was no one on this walk. | ||
| We'd seen no one. | ||
| These two guys run up to us, mug us, run off, we give chase, and then the entire neighborhood comes alive. | ||
| Suddenly there were hundreds of people there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, where were you guys? | |
| There's some sort of study to be done on that. | ||
| 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. |
Export Selection