Ep 117 | The Dark Horses: From Campus Villains to Political Peacemakers | Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Let me start with some good news.

Life is great.

Really is.

Would you pick a time, any time in history, that you would rather live than right now and where you're living?

Best time in human history.

Poverty rates are lower than ever.

Same with global hunger.

Access to clean water.

People make more, work less.

Transportation, modern medicine, access to information, women's rights, human rights.

So why does it feel like everything is collapsing?

That is a really tough question to answer, but it is what lies at the center of a book called A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.

This couple is the reason I started this podcast, but they have never agreed to be guests until now.

It is a husband and wife evolutionary biologist team who have become an integral part of our new normal.

They first came

prominence in 2017, I think.

When

they were at Evergreen College, they were both professors.

They disagreed with the college's day of absence, which demanded that all white students and faculty leave campus for a day.

They thought it was crazy.

The outrage was immediate and explosive.

They were practically forced to resign.

Well, then they went on to become founding members of the intellectual dark web, a group of politically homeless rebels, mostly from the left, who violated one of the left's countless holy laws.

This is going to be a fascinating conversation.

I have no idea where it's going to end up.

Please welcome Heather Hang

and Brett Weinstein.

I'm so honored to have you both here.

It's really, it's great.

I am big fans of yours.

I have been watching you for a long time

and have wanted this interview for probably over three years.

And I appreciate it.

I'm a fan of yours because of

your courage.

In almost all things that I have seen, you are taking massive hits

and you're doing it because you believe

you are standing up for the truth.

I happen to believe that too, but you're standing up for the truth and damn the consequences, I guess.

So thanks for being here.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

How difficult has this been, this journey of yours?

It varies.

I think in many ways, it is its own educational experience.

And each time we end up in a new chapter, we learn more.

I think, you know, informally speaking, we feel that it is making us anti-fragile, which is not a fun process.

But in the end,

being stronger and able to withstand the

slights and challenges is important.

If we're going to fight for what matters, it is important that we have the skills to do it.

And that's a process that's learned.

And I want to get to the book because I think

we've had had similar thoughts,

except

mine kind of resides a little bit with the Beatles and yours is in the intellectual space.

And it's important that we talk about the book because it is,

I think people can

feel

the problem and they can name it here and here and here, but they don't really understand the scope of it.

And I think you guys are really hitting the scope of it.

But before we hit that

your lives have changed so much

and you believed in so much how much

I

two things I know that I believed what I believed and then I found out holy cow there's a lot of things I was absolutely certain of that are not true

and

betrayed by my own people.

You know what I mean?

How much of this has happened to you guys to where you're like, I would have, that's not who I thought we all were.

Yeah, very, that, that is certainly true.

That's not who I thought we all were, right?

But our politics, I don't think, have changed.

But who we see engaging in similar thinking and truth-telling has changed.

Yeah.

Right?

10 years ago, you and I would have, we would have never thought of being at the same table because we're on opposite sides, but we're really not.

We're really not.

And I mean, even 10 years ago, it was becoming clear, you know, in the milieu's where we were getting our news, that NPR was becoming harder to listen to, for instance, for us, even 10 years ago.

But

that is obviously coming to a head even more in the last

one, two, three, four, five years, you know, with every and you know, and that of course is one of the points of the book, that the rate of change itself is changing so fast that the search for coherence is becoming ever more difficult.

I talked to Condoleezza Rice

15 years ago, and I remember during the interview, she said something because it was biblical what she said.

I don't know if she knew it at the time, but what she said, and it stuck out to me.

because of what it implies.

She said, you're starting to see the birth pangs of the things to come.

And when you think of that,

you realize we're giving birth to something, and I'm not sure I want to see what's coming out on the other end.

And birth pangs happen faster and faster and closer to closer and the stronger they get.

And I think that's true.

Things are accelerating at such a rapid rate.

Why is that happening?

Why is

the acceleration due to technology?

Is the acceleration...

Why is it happening like this?

Well, there are really two reasons.

And I should say this actually applies to your earlier question too.

In some sense, the reason that our politics hasn't changed very much is that science and in particular evolutionary biology is our North Star.

And so what we believed and what we believe now were based on a model of the universe that hasn't changed very much.

Now, who we find ourselves interacting with has changed radically.

You know, wait, wait, wait.

So explain that part.

For people who don't necessarily understand evolutionary biology, what are you talking about here?

Well, one, so I'm sure you had something particular in mind, but one thing that I hear in what Brett just said is our understanding of the universe is based on sort of physical reality, and it's not, you know, our politics aren't dependent on the social scene.

And so, who it is that we're talking with and who it is that we're finding common ground with has changed.

But that doesn't mean that what we think about underlying processes has, because that was never a social set of beliefs for us.

Right.

Okay.

So, human beings,

we may differ here on what the best way to view ourselves is, but maybe less than you would imagine.

We are creatures that have to function in the world, and our nature was built in an environment that we no longer live in.

Correct.

Now, we humans are better than any other creature at changing our software to adapt to new habitats.

But our habitats are now changing so rapidly that we can't keep up.

And that is partially about technology, but it's also about the fact, and in evolutionary biology we have a metaphor that we like.

We talk about adaptive landscapes in which opportunities are peaks.

They're basically mountain ranges of opportunity.

And in order to get from one opportunity to another, you have to pass through what we call an adaptive valley.

And so your trepidations about where we're headed is part and parcel of the fact that whatever else may be true, we are in transition.

Our tools are not up to managing the problems that we now face.

So we have to find a new way of being.

Not only our

physical tools, but our mental and psychological tools, even our tools of governance, as

they are, it feels like the government feels like it's stuck in 1950.

The world feels like it's headed towards scientific, not scientific, the technology field feels like it's in 2050.

and we're kind of standing in between going, that world doesn't work, and I don't even know what that world means.

Let's be, you know, frank about this.

Our governmental structures are really 18th-century structures, and they're brilliant, but they couldn't possibly manage a world this far from what the founders were capable of understanding.

I mean, the founders never saw a train or a chainsaw.

So let me ask you on that, because I would guess that we actually agree on this.

The founders believed, I mean, they thought it would last 30 years.

They did not think it was going to last like now.

And I think they would get here if they could, time machine, they're here, they would look at everything and they'd say, great, how long did America last?

You know, they would not recognize what they have done.

And then I don't think they would have recognized it in 1960.

you know um

uh but they did allow through constitutional adaptation cetera, et cetera, that they did allow us to adapt.

They did say,

we don't see everything, so just adapt and adopt, you know, constitutional amendments to get there.

It's not the framework or the mission statement, we hold these truths to be self-evident, or the framework that is adaptable.

It's that we are trying to force a bunch of stuff into it that it's not meant to do.

It's meant to reject that kind of stuff, right?

Yeah, no, I see it very much the same way.

And I think you're framing of

we can't go back to 1950.

Right.

We don't know what to do

and we don't want to.

And those who would claim that that was a perfect world are misunderstanding what that world was.

And those who are saying, you know,

full bore ahead to 2050, no matter what, because progress is always the answer.

And if it if it requires rejecting everything about the old, who cares?

Well, that's also a mistake.

And so, you know, progress, yes, and tradition, yes.

But we're going to have to pick and choose, and we're going to have to do so with intention.

And that's why I think we're having such, I always look at right-wing, left-wing.

It's a bird.

And if you chop off one of the wings, it ain't going to fly.

And conservatives, I don't know how conservatives define themselves, but I...

I look at conservative for the root of the word.

I'm conserving the things that do work and looking to the future on new things that might work better.

But let's not throw all of this out.

It's amazing how difficult this lesson is for both the right and left wing.

Each one seems to think that it has the answer and it doesn't understand that the

dynamism of our system is in the tension between these two.

Yes.

Liberals always want to improve things and they always underestimate the unintended consequences.

And conservatives, if left to their own devices, would avoid progress because of those unintended consequences.

So what we really need to do, though, is adapt our system.

I think the founders would have expected us to change it much more radically than we have in order to keep up.

You know, we've treated certain things as sacred that shouldn't have been and that they wouldn't have expected.

But what we need to do is get a system that is not so violent in the fluctuation that balances these two forces.

In other words, you mentioned up top that there's quite a bit we agree on, and this is now well established.

The Hidden Tribes report revealed that there is what they call the exhausted middle, this vast group of us that aren't extreme, that agree on most of what we want at least.

And then we differ over how close we are to it and what might be done to go the rest of the distance, but we are being shut out by extremists that are pushing us into viewing

the other side as not quite human, and that's a very dangerous process, unfortunately, with a lot of historical precedent that suggests

we should not continue down that road.

So now this has been a book that you've wanted to write for like 10 years.

Indeed.

Why now?

And let's start on the main message.

I mean

21st century hunter and gatherer doesn't seem to go together.

Yeah.

So it's it's a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century.

And as we say in it, we could have named it a number of things.

You know, an agriculturalist's guide, a post-industrialist's guide, a mammal's guide.

Like all of these things are true descriptors of what the modern human condition is and are true moments in time from our evolutionary history.

And hunter-gatherer is the moment that most people have in their head.

It's like, oh, that's what we're adapted to, right?

Like hunter-gatherers on the African savanna.

But we've been all of these things.

And so our point in the book,

using the term of art from evolution, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness for humans is not just hunter-gatherers, it's all of these points in our history.

And because humans are so flexible, are so much software compared to hardware, we are born with so much capability that isn't hardwired in more than any other animal on the planet, then we are adapted to being post-industrialists.

Not as well as we should be, and not maybe even possibly to be perfectly adapted given the rate of change.

But

why now?

Why now in part?

Because

we were talking about writing it for

10 years while we were teaching, while we were still at Evergreen.

And

we were able to now.

When Evergreen blew up, we began to have an audience.

the words of our many generations of students were still ringing in our ears.

We're still affiliated, connected with many of them who had been saying to us for years, please find a way to take the teaching of evolutionary biology and specifically what the two of you have, what the two of us have been doing,

into some kind of packaged form so that it can be delivered unto other people.

My dad said before he died, he said,

I'm kind of glad I'm not going to be around to have to see

and make the decisions that your generation and the one following you are going to have to make.

He said,

But it's going to be fascinating one way or another.

He said,

He was born in 1926 and he said, I remember as a kid, we looked up at the moon and we never thought

man could walk on the moon.

And when we started seeing Buck Rogers and stuff, that was movie stuff.

That wasn't actually landing on the moon.

He said, halfway through my life, we're on the moon.

And look at us now.

He said, all of the technology, everything that is moving so rapidly.

And I said, I know it's really exciting.

He said,

it is,

but we're missing something.

And I said, what?

And I think this is what the whole point of your book is.

He said,

read Plato.

We're struggling exactly the same place.

Read Jesus.

Same people, same problems.

We've had such an explosive growth here and really nothing here.

in many ways.

Is that the problem that we're growing so fast, part of the problem that we're growing so fast?

And yet we haven't worked on this, along with the fact that social media, we're in tribes.

It forces us back to that

tribal nature, because that's been in us for thousands and thousands of years.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, it forces us back in one way.

But I mean, really what you're saying, the reason that Plato is still resonant, and Plato is resonant.

I mean, you you see Plato's cave in the Matrix, but people don't necessarily know that they're revisiting that same puzzle.

But part of the problem is that these things aren't really fundamentally about those who first spotted them.

They are part of the underlying architecture.

They are failures of game theory that result in certain problems reoccurring in a new form until you figure out how to solve them.

And so.

Isn't that part of

one thing that I don't understand that people think that we evolve.

Well, yes, we do, but we're all born at the same starting point.

And so we have to discover that when I first read Plato when I was an adult, I was like, oh my gosh,

this is brilliant, and it's exactly what I'm struggling with.

Because isn't that a self-discovery thing?

You can't pass that information and those answers on biologically, can you?

Well, first of all, one of the things that our field has done a terrible job of recognizing and therefore conveying is that our cultural layer, our software, is biological.

You'll very often hear people say, is it cultural or is it biological?

It's a false dichotomy.

You can say, is it genetic or is it cultural?

That's a fair division.

But culture is every bit as biological as genes.

The problem is...

When you do discover the answer to a puzzle, so let's, for example, say that our rights of free expression, which the founders clearly understood very well, were in some sense a response to part of Plato's observation about what happens when the person who has escaped the cave returns and attempts to convey it, right?

So our speech rights are in effect an agreement that we have that actually we don't get to do that to the guy who comes back into the cave and says that the shadows aren't the real world, right?

But the problem is if you live in a world downstream of that discovery and you've always had these rights, you don't realize how important they are and what they are really protecting.

And so you uninvent the progress because you don't see the problem, which is, of course, one of the themes of our book.

We talk about Chesterton's fence and the idea that if you see a structure and you don't know what its purpose is, you'd be foolish to think it probably doesn't have one and therefore it can be safely eliminated until you've understood what the purpose was.

At that point, then you know whether it continues to play that role or whether that role is obsolete.

And so, you know, the reinvention of problems that were solved is a next level problem that we have to address because it will happen in every era of history where we have been successful and people suddenly see, I don't know, efficiency as dominant over the elegant solution architecture.

I remember

just a few years ago, for the very first time, I thought, no, these things are not self-evident.

They're not.

They were at one point, but they've been lost.

Freedom of speech.

I mean, wow, wow, what happened there?

I thought we all agreed on it.

What happened?

Yeah, what happened?

I mean, part of what happened, I think, is

that there's a reductionism that takes over when we are asked to understand things and we are able to measure.

And so, you know, once we can measure something and we have numbers, the numbers stick in our heads and we forget the emergent whole and we forget how glorious humans are, actually, and what emergent beings we are.

And so social media is a stand-in for social interaction.

And it's become even more so, of course, during COVID, but really since its inception, people mistook it for the entire thing.

They mistook social media for social interaction.

And the fact is we're here with you.

And that is a very different experience than if we were on a Zoom call with you, right?

Without being...

Without having any access at any conscious level to why or what exactly is being conveyed, that's more because we're actually here with you.

There's just more, right?

Because humans are more than even many of the things we have yet measured.

And as scientists, we hope we are seeking an objective, complete, accurate understanding of the universe, hoping to get ever, ever closer, more and more refined, knowing we won't ever get there, and also knowing that the tendency to reduce to a single variable will tend to exclude other things that may have just as much meaning, if not more.

Aaron Powell, I don't remember which chapter it was.

Towards the beginning, you did the

lineage of the human journey.

Can you just take us through that quickly?

Yeah.

I mean, as briefly as you can.

Well, I think we can probably cut it from 3.5 billion years.

Yeah, okay, yeah.

We don't have that much time.

At least do it faster, though.

Yeah.

So roughly 3.5 billion years ago,

life came into existence on Earth.

And

2 billion-ish, I think, if memory serves,

we have things like the evolution of sex one to 2 billion years ago.

And it's possible that in our lineage,

that has been unchanging since then.

By 500 million years or so, we had become animals.

And

we already had multicellularity.

We already had

multicellularity.

And before that, we had

that means that we, instead of a single cell moving around on its own, we're now aggregates of cells that aren't just aggregates.

We are actually combining with those other cells and their specialization between them.

So it's, you know, it's some early on anyway, life evolving is sort of increasing level of specialization.

And so as animals, we now begin to have...

Boy,

what do I include?

What don't I?

I think it's worth pointing out that you can trace our lineage going forward, as Heather is doing.

But one of the things that stands out when you begin to think in terms of what all of these lineages, not just ours, looked like, is how many themes are actually recovered even with creatures that don't look anything like us.

So it's very surprising the first time you realize that although we animals and plants in some sense are distinct evolutions of sexual reproduction, that what we call male parts of plants and female parts of plants actually have the same biases built in them in terms of, for example, their enthusiasm

for sex with partners about whom they are not choosy.

The female parts of a plant are very choosy and male parts of a plant much less so.

And the reason is exactly the same.

So this is why we presented in the book the model of evolution that we did, which is that once you begin to realize that yes, there are an indefinitely large number of particulars and you could learn them all, but there's also the underlying problems that are being solved and there aren't that many solutions.

So just as Plato's cave continues to reoccur because the underlying dynamics are really what's being noticed rather than some specific instance of something, the fact that any time,

if you start out with creatures that have sex but they have identical size gametes, you will quickly get to a state in which they no longer have identical size gametes.

And the one that has large gametes will become choosy, and the one that has small mobile gametes will be much less choosy.

And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about a tree or a gorilla, the logic is the same.

So, once you get that message and you say, well, okay, maybe what I should do, instead of investing in knowing all of the creatures of the earth, what I should do is invest in understanding what problem they're solving and what the themes are in those solutions, which then brings us to our problem, which is

humans, better than any other creature that has ever existed by far, are wonderful at switching from one niche to another.

When we describe virtually any other species on the planet, we are talking about a type of creature and an opportunity that it exploits.

But for us, we can't name what that opportunity is that humans exploit because we do so many different things and have throughout our history done so many different things.

How is that possible?

Because we have

a near miraculous capacity to bootstrap new programming.

We are a kind of a generalist robot and we have the ability ability to write our own new software for opportunities no ancestor had ever addressed.

That capacity gives us the ability to think our way out of the problems that I think all three of us here at the table recognize are headed towards us.

But what we don't have is the ability to keep up with the rate of change.

The fact that we don't even live in the world that we were born into.

We cannot educate our children and say, here's the world that you're going to have to make a living in because none of us have any idea what it's going to look like.

That's too fast.

Even our amazing rate of change, our ability to change in a reasonable and coherent way at a rapid rate is just far outstripped by that technological pace.

And if we don't rein it in, you know.

Well, that's not going to happen.

Is it reigning technology?

I mean,

Ray Kurzweil is a friend of mine, and

I think he's the most fascinating guy and the scariest dude I've ever met in my life.

Because

he doesn't, he,

you know, I said to him at one point about upgrading, you know, becoming a singularity.

And

I said, well, but what about those people who don't?

And he said, well, everybody will want to.

But what if you don't want to do that?

Right.

Well, why would you?

And so there's this

circular thinking that everything's going to be okay and to disregard what that actually means to the Homo sapien, You know,

and we're just moving so quickly and there's such arrogance in there.

I mean,

every piece of technology we have is the greatest experiment on the human species ever done.

Yep, the science.

Every piece.

It just keeps going up.

But let's take your question.

Okay.

Will we rein it in?

That's a hard question to answer.

Will it be reined in?

That's an easy question.

We will either rein it in or

it will rein us in.

The processes are already unsustainable in very simple, literal terms.

And what that means is either we figure out a comparatively gentle path to some way of existing that does not continue down this trajectory, or the trajectory will collapse because it is unstable.

So what are the things

that

are fighting us, fighting the

natural man, if you will, that we need to,

that technology is exacerbating, that

we need to recognize and rein in.

I'm not sure natural versus unnatural is the right dichotomy, because

part of what we explore in the book is the idea that this is actually

this could have been predicted, right?

That

the human condition is one of such software, of such lability, of such flexibility, that of course we would end up becoming not

our worst enemy,

but what we also need to do then is figure out how to be our best friend, right?

Like to recognize that we have to share the planet with everyone else and also that that doesn't just include non-humans, but all of the humans who are here.

And

sure, there are probably too many of us, but we have to do what we can to live well with the people who are here now and

figure out our better angels, how to explore our better angels.

How do you do that in a society that is just

pounding each other?

You stand up and do something.

I've been working to try to rescue people that, and I don't care what your sexuality, I don't care, I don't care.

I understand,

I think, how people must have felt trying to rescue Jews from Germans.

These people mean nothing to you.

Just Just give them to me.

I will take them.

And it's just about Afghanistan?

Yeah.

And it's just this weird thing where it's just, it's not even human.

The emotion is, it's weird.

And

I was over there and, you know, people started saying all kinds of stuff.

And my first reaction was, no good deed goes unpunished.

I mean, you can do anything.

And nobody is, everybody's so cynical and everything else.

How do you become better angels when there's zero reward for it in society?

Well, punishment.

In part,

we haven't really understood the puzzle yet.

All evolved creatures have the same purpose, and that is a very unfortunate statement because

if you share a purpose with a malaria pathogen, it's not much of a purpose.

It's not honorable.

It's not decent.

So we humans have the most remarkable capacity to do tremendous things.

We can be compassionate, we can develop insight, we can innovate, we can create beauty, all of these things.

But those are all, they all came to be in the service of that mind-numbing objective.

But once you recognize that

this is another place that our field has not been very good, we've given people the impression, and in fact, most evolutionists believe that creatures are trying to produce as many offspring as possible.

And really, producing more offspring is a means to an end.

The end is to lodge one's genes as deeply into the future as possible.

And so, the reason that you see the pattern that you're seeing is because, in fact, people are wired without their awareness of it for lineage versus lineage competition.

And to the extent that two lineages are fighting over a limited resource, like a patch of territory, the desire to rid that territory of the other lineage is extremely powerful.

This accounts for the greatest tragedies of history, I think without exception.

And the

problem,

therefore, is to convey the message to whatever part of the human is

listening that actually the objective, getting into the future, requires that we stop doing that now.

That's how we got here.

But we have to stop doing the thing that got all of our lineages to this point in history if we want this to continue.

And really, you know,

philosophically speaking, we have the most glorious opportunity that any creature has ever had.

The earth, damaged as it is, is a beautiful place, more beautiful than any other we've seen or even have reason to know exists.

I contend that it is a powerful

spirit that is alive that will

kill us before we can kill it.

It will rid itself of the disease of man if we don't.

If we don't

if we don't harmonize it's bigger than us it will just at least i think it is we're already seeing signs of of things that it's doing but it's it's going to survive well even if it means it kills us you don't think so there's a manner of speaking in which you have to

have to be right but i mean just even notice that you know there are 400 civilian nuclear reactors operating on planet earth that require constant vigilance to keep them cool enough that they don't melt down and spill out all of their content.

So we've even set up nature.

So even if we were to do ourselves in, we would take a lot with us.

Yeah.

We've created an inadvertent doomsday machine for no good reason.

So the recognition that we have the most beautiful planet that we know of

and that all we have to do in order to continue this indefinitely and really to provide the opportunity of being human, which is the most glorious opportunity there is, to provide it to the maximum number of people, all we have to do is solve the sustainability puzzle, right?

All we have to do is figure out how to get along well enough and to not do things that undermine our opportunity.

We have to not liquidate the planet.

And that's really the puzzle we're trying to solve.

So,

how do you do that?

When, I mean, this is a puzzle I've been trying to solve because

I believe in the free market.

I believe it is the fastest way to solve problems.

But I also believe that that

you can't just read wealth of nations.

You have to read moral sentiments.

If the people are good, the free market will create all kinds of things.

The people are not good,

it will create whatever it is they desire.

And there's something in,

as I look at capitalism,

you look at it and it goes goes great and then people make a lot of money as de Tocqueville said and they get a lot of power and then they kick the door behind them, or they just get so greedy, they just but the average person

is, I've found, I've talked to Palestinians without cameras, talk to Palestinians, they sound exactly like the Jews.

I just want my family.

I just all of this crap, that's the tired American.

How do you get that into the power structure?

Well, okay.

I don't want to get us too far afield, but I do think that this is a place where left and right need to see each other.

They need to understand the part of the puzzle that the other gets and realize the part of the puzzle that they've got wrong.

So I would argue markets are the best mechanism we've got for figuring out how to do things.

They are absolutely brilliant at solving that kind of problem.

They are terrible at figuring out what problem to solve.

As you point out, they discover every defect in the human character and figure out how to exploit it.

And they turn us into monsters that we are not inherently.

Correct.

And so there are places that markets don't belong.

Places like sex and music.

Right?

Yes.

What you want to do is figure out how to take that amazing tool and point it at the problems that we want solved and to keep it away from the problems we don't want solved.

We don't want it finding our defects.

We want to tell it what our values are and then allow it to solve the problems of how best to reach and enhance those values.

So, the problem is: if you're a market fundamentalist and you think, well, this is the best tool we've got for problem solving, let's point it at everything, then you end up creating the hazard where it solves all sorts of problems you don't want solved.

And so, really, it's a tool.

And, you know, just like a power saw, right?

A power saw is a great tool, but you don't want it running around your shop right now.

You want it under control, doing things that you need done.

And that's possible.

On the left, though, what you hear is

capitalism is the enemy, right?

They don't like markets at all, right?

And then on the right, you hear that markets are what we've got for solving problems, so let's get to it.

And really the point is, let's figure out how to refine that tool so that it does what we need done.

Aaron Powell, there remains the problem, though, that Glenn invoked of the people who make it and kick the door closed behind them

or try to make it.

Or the people, some of them with very good intention, that are working to solve problems that you're like, no, don't, no,

no, what are you doing?

No, no, no, that's that's a bad but they feel it's an American, it's not an American thing, it's a human thing.

There's a mountain, I'm going to cross it.

And so they're breaking barriers that maybe we should hold off on.

Let's just all talk about that before we do it.

I do, and I think those are two different problems.

Okay.

Right.

The first one is one of sort of a willingness to dehumanize the other

so that you can excuse your own bad behavior.

Correct.

And that

I think is more easily dealt with, although we haven't seen it dealt with, than the sort of the tech utopianism of if there's a problem that can be approached, then we will approach it no matter what, and no breaks.

Right.

Okay, so

can you tell me

how do we begin to solve?

If that is a problem,

the first set of people,

how can the

average person begin to affect meaningful change there?

Aaron Powell,

you know, we've begun to see,

we know of some people and organizations who are explicitly working to bridge the divide,

cross the divide.

And it's it's very much like what you're talking about doing in Afghanistan, but people working, for instance, within the U.S.

to bring red voters and blue blue voters together into the same room and just have them meet and exchange names and eye contact and say, hey, I also have a kid and a dog and a mortgage, and I'm human too.

And

there is

value for a very few in keeping us from recognizing each other's humanity.

So, how

with social media, it's much harder to remind ourselves that we're all human.

And I think, you know, basically what these sorts of conversations and as much in-human contact as possible, where you actually are engaging with people with kindness and generosity.

But that doesn't necessarily get to the people who've already kicked the door closed behind them.

I think this, I want to introduce you to my Beatles thought that I had.

I was listening to, I don't remember which song it was, It might have been Revolution.

And I'd been listening to some John Lennon, and I thought,

part of me said, thank God

they don't have that tool in their hand.

Because the hippie movement in the 60s, I mean, it did a lot of good.

It also did some bad.

But the real hippie movement was based not in drugs or anything.

It was based in love, a new kind of consciousness.

And you did have if you listen to the music of the 60s much of it is very inspiring you know and based in love

we don't have that now we don't have a john lennon we don't have anybody preaching that the songs the culture you said keep you know business out of music which i'd like to explore with you but um

We don't have a soundtrack that's helping us move forward in a loving way.

And the 60s had that.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, all of these have been unnatural eras.

And the problem is you have to track, you know, in some ways, we have

better music now because

there are more bands.

It's not all concentrated by the fact that you've got three stations in your area and everybody's listening to the same, you know, the same soundtrack.

You have a lot of room.

But the point is, it means that we're not synchronized in the way that ancestral humans would have been and that people were artificially synchronized in the 1960s.

I miss, and you know, this is so stupid, but I miss the fact that it was much watched, you know, must-watch Thursday night, NBC.

And we all would come to work and we would talk about friends.

Right.

You know what I mean?

I don't really miss that era, but

there was something that bound us together that we don't have, except for the Super Bowl now.

That means that there was value in the Super Bowl.

It was

The fact that everybody was at least thinking about the same conundrum had a value.

And so there's a question about how do you get the best of both worlds?

How do you get the increase in quality that comes from having many more bands contributing to our sonic landscape?

At the same time, you get enough synchrony that we understand each other.

And, you know, again,

the problem of hypernovelty that we talk about in the book.

Explain that.

The rate of change that is outstripping our capacity to alter ourselves so that we are not being harmed, that we are not being made sick psychologically, physiologically, and socially by our environment.

That problem

is actually, it's multilayered.

So not only, you know, people our age have the experience of living in a very different world than they grew up, and we all remember you know, at the beginning of the email era, right?

We all made a mistake somewhere, where we sent some email that we should have thought more carefully about and didn't realize that the bandwidth was going to be reduced and that somehow this was very different than a letter and it wasn't quite like a conversation.

Yes.

Right.

And the problem is, okay, we get that, but people who are young enough, who have grown up online, have this as their developmental environment.

And I guess part of one of the many messages in the book is that there are things that physical reality will teach you.

developmentally so that you understand them, whether you could say what they were or not, right?

If you walk into into a bar and you behave the way people behave on Twitter, you'll get beaten up and you'll learn not to do it.

On Twitter, you may not learn that lesson.

In fact, you may get so many likes that you continue to do that because it feels like the right thing to do.

You may not understand, therefore, what human conflict is and why it should be reserved for very special circumstances.

So, what we are doing is we are not only creating an environment that we can't keep up with, we are creating an environment that is shaping our children in utterly arbitrary ways.

And when they become adults, they will then be living in a world that isn't even that one that we created that shaped them.

It will be some new world, and their toolkit will be out of phase with where they're going to be.

And we can see this coming a mile away.

What's it going to do to them?

It's going to make them miserable and unhealthy.

And the thing that we have to realize is that it's the generating function.

We have to stop that process.

We have to slow down the rate of change enough that we can keep up.

I guess one thing I would add is that the social media environment, in particular, particular makes us likely to choose our arguments for what we hate rather than with what we agree.

And it's not that there isn't plenty to disagree with by saying, actually, I stand for this, and that other thing is something else that isn't odds with this thing that I stand for, as opposed to I hate that.

I don't know what I stand for, but I hate that.

And the standing primarily in opposition is

de facto, divisive, and deadly.

Yeah.

i'm working on something now that uh

um

i'm call i'm calling the power of one and it is just

you recognize that you have control not of everything else but you

and just

just stand for you know the I had a woman who saved Jews in World War II and I had her meet with my family and tell her, she was 16 years old, she's saving 100 Jews, hiding them under a bar.

I mean, it's an amazing story.

And she gave me some great advice.

And in a nutshell, it is,

you don't have to be a hero.

You just have to remember what your parents taught you is right and wrong.

And just don't move from that.

It's right.

It's wrong.

You know, I'm, no, that.

person is a still a person and I'm going to treat that.

I don't care what everybody else does.

That's what I'm going to do.

And

it's it's hard now, however,

because

everything is, I say to my wife all the time, I don't carry a phone.

And

my wife does and everybody else does.

And I'm like, you know, you just, we were fine without that.

We were fine without that.

And we can be fine again without that.

Our life may slow down, but you're convinced.

that you can't live without it.

And then,

because it brings a lot of great things to your life.

But then on top of it, while you're being convinced that, you're also being convinced that you should be the opposite of what your parents taught you was right and wrong.

That's absolutely right.

And I think there's part of what you're saying that's perfectly straightforward and clearly right, right?

What's right and wrong has not basically changed.

No.

But it has in society, but it hasn't in reality.

Right.

But it has in society, not because the fundamentals are different, but because the particulars are.

Explain that.

For example, our capacity to be rewarded for behavior that creates massive harm in lives that we never see.

Right.

Even just even your investment portfolio, right?

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, right?

You are in competition with other investors, and what you need in order to stay afloat is to find the investments that that pay back.

But those investments may be profitable not because they are actually enhancing the world in some way, but because they successfully externalize harm onto someone who can't defend themselves.

And so that's obviously immoral.

But if it's, you know, if it's buried in your retirement fund, you don't know that you're harming somebody else, nor are you in a position to do anything about it.

So we have to begin to recognize that, although you can't operationalize this, but just as a thought experiment.

Hang on just a second.

Yeah.

Because what you sound like you're saying is ESG would be a good thing.

But

that is, then somebody else is making the judgments on what, do you know what ESGs are?

Environmental, social justice, and

governance scores.

And all companies are, banks are now starting to make loans based on, well, are you involved in social justice?

What do you good?

And that's an.

Right now, at least for sure, it's an arbitrary number.

They decide what you are,

what you're not.

That institutionalizing that kind of stuff scares the hell out of me.

Right.

Well, this is exactly the kind of thing that conservatives correctly fear.

Because if you build that system, no matter how well-intentioned you are, it is guaranteed to be gamed, and it's just the next landscape of warfare.

So that's not where you go.

Well, and it includes a category error, right?

Like lumping in environmental with social justice causes would seem to not be aligning those of us who deeply care about the environment and see a tremendous amount of harm in modern social justice, for instance.

So I want to go back to something that we were talking about earlier, which is what happens when you gather conservatives and liberals together.

And one trick that I have learned

is that the first thing you should do is figure out what it is that you actually agree on.

Because very frequently, puzzles that we differ over, actually, there's half of them that we don't differ over.

And then, but we recognize the other person.

We sort of figure that everything that they're saying is wrong.

And this isn't the case.

So, for example, if I go into a room of conservatives, I can be pretty sure that we're going to disagree over environmental sustainability, and in particular, climate change.

But if I asked the question, If you believed that human beings were causing substantial alteration to the climate that was going to degrade

the capacity of the earth to sustain people in the future, right?

Would you be in favor of doing something about it?

Virtually every reasonable person will agree to that.

It's a fascinating.

It's fascinating because

you can't argue with global warming.

You can't argue with a thermometer.

Hey, is a thermometer going up or down?

What's happening?

You can't argue with the changes that are happening.

You might be able to argue, is man doing this or is this cyclical?

But we could have that argument and it's a healthy argument to have.

What's strange is you can't have the argument on

how to fix it.

That's the hardest one.

That's the one that we're presented with, destroy the planet or destroy humanity and everything that we have.

Just burn it all up at once.

That's what it seems like to conservatives.

You're like, no, I don't think we should do it that way.

But I'm sure there are things that we could agree on, but those things don't ever really seem to ever be talked about.

Everything's always pushed.

Well, that's why

you have to get to the place where you've agreed that if we are damaging the planet in this way, that we all agree that we should stop, right?

Whether we know how to do it, whether that's even plausible, because that is a conversation that people can have and be decent to each other, right?

What do we do if that's where we are, right?

Can I just interrupt for a moment?

This reminds me very much of a framing in different domains that I've been making lately, which is, you know, two people come together and the first person says, My God, there's a problem.

And person B says, yeah, there sure is.

And person one says, therefore, the solution is X.

And person two says, well, that's a big problem, but I don't think your solution is going to do it.

And the first person,

and you know, this might be team blue and team red or it might be reversed, but the first person says, if you don't agree with my solution, then you don't think this is a problem.

And there is just a basic logical failure here, but it it is the way that many of us are demonized and dismissed because we say, that solution that you've come up with strikes us as wrong or incomplete, or at least how about there's other things on the table.

It's another scam to build an empire of money for something else, right?

You're like, wait, that's not.

But that rejection of solution says nothing about whether or not you thought there was a problem in the first place.

And, you know, I know conservatives, they,

and this is not a blanket statement, conservatives, especially that live in rural areas, they consider themselves great stewards of the land.

And generally, they are.

My grandfather, I remember him saying all the time, he was a farmer, these nuts are telling us how to manage Yellowstone and the forest in California.

And I remember him distinctly in the 70s saying, California will burn to the ground, burn to the ground if they do this.

He was a real environmentalist in my book, you know, but God knows you can't be an environmentalist if you disagree with what they're doing to save the environment.

All right, so the solution here, to the extent that there is one, is actually

weirdly buried in the second to last chapter of our book.

Because what we describe is a pattern, an evolved human pattern that goes back millions of years in all likelihood.

Certainly it goes back hundreds of thousands, in which human beings swap out their software program to engage new opportunities.

And the way they do that is by plugging their minds into each other and essentially engaging in what we would now call parallel processing, right?

And this wouldn't look like anything strange.

It would look like people standing around a campfire discussing what the problems are, what solutions might look like, and with their different types of expertise, they would come up with a new solution, a prototype, and then over time it would be refined and then it would be driven into the cultural layer and handed one generation to the next.

Now the point though is

this implies that our minds have two ways of running.

If we are in a situation that our ancestors' wisdom is applicable to, then we are wise to apply it, maybe refine it a little bit, but not to question it too much, right?

That is a naturally conservative impulse.

If we are in a situation that our ancestors' wisdom is inapplicable because they didn't know anything about this predicament, then we have to rise to this collective consciousness and figure out what to do about the puzzle.

And the point, we are in a battle about whether or not this is that moment.

Is this the moment to

double down on the ancestors' wisdom, or is this the moment to do something different, which is inherently dangerous?

It's that danger that liberals don't tend to see.

They want progress, they want to fix problems, and they don't recognize the hazard of unintended consequences.

We are facing issues that are far more, in my opinion, far more dangerous than the 1950s.

It was nuclear Holocaust.

This is

just,

I mean, as Stephen Hawking said, the end of Homo sapiens by 2050.

You make the wrong, and he didn't mean that we'd be extinct.

We would be chipped.

We'd be

incorporated into it.

So I don't want that.

I don't think a lot of people want that.

You know,

if we're not careful right now

we're and no one is talking about it no one's talking about the

the real true peril that is on our doorstep right the peril that is actually um should be uncontroversial right just the simple the degree to which the power of our tools has gone up the degree to which we are interconnected has gone up we are now uh one experiment and your population can't make a mistake and go extinct and everybody else will you know do the next thing we're all in it together at this point.

But the key to getting people out of their autopilot cultural mode and into their conscious, how do we solve this new problem mode, is the recognition that the old program, when you run it, creates errors.

It throws errors like a computer program that runs into some sort of an input it doesn't expect.

And so

what are those errors that the old programming

conservatives need to see?

The fact that, you know, for example, that we have a situation in which

the most productive and dynamic nation that has ever existed, which has become a model for the West, right?

People have rightly adopted what the founders got right, and they've employed it across the world to good effect.

That we would endanger that by failing to recognize the humanity of other participants in that system in some sort of team sport mentality that jeopardizes the whole project is obviously insane.

Just the simple fact that we seem to be coming apart at the seams, despite the fact that whatever our problems are, the system is still functioning.

So let me,

amazingly so.

Amazingly so.

I thought we would be gone.

10 years ago, I thought we'll never, this thing is resilient.

It's crazy.

But the ancient wisdom would come from George Washington who said, don't do the two-party thing.

Don't.

Don't.

Because you'll do tribal and then one person will realize they can milk it and become more popular and then the other one will up their game.

I mean, that's that, there's your founder's wisdom.

Well, we did it.

So now how do you undo it?

First thing to do, I would say, is you need to recognize we need to separate effectively the founder's values from their mechanism.

Right?

Their mechanism was great, but it's run its course.

It cannot solve these problems, right?

First past the post is a lethal hazard now, and it's part of what's causing this, you know, team against team mentality inside of our system that threatens us.

But the way you get to the conscious mind engaging the puzzle rather than the autopilot mind is you recognize the errors.

And so if you get these puzzles really well refined, the thing that you see very often sounds like a riddle, right?

Or it sounds like a paradox.

That's the indication that there's something here that needs to be thought about carefully rather than just doing what we all have learned must be done.

So I like to say the following thing.

I'm a liberal.

In fact, I'm a reluctant radical.

I don't want to be a radical because radical change is dangerous, but I don't think we have a choice.

We have to engage radical change as frightening as that is.

That's one riddle.

But the other side of it is, I want to live in a world that is so good that I get to be a conservative.

I'm not a liberal because change is my objective, but we do need to get somewhere that the point is actually from here, change would be a mistake, right?

Change isn't worth it.

What we're upending is so successful at doing what we say we want to accomplish.

So don't you think, though, that

I could be wrong.

I think the average person would agree with you on that, both sides, right?

That this isn't working.

But, you know, when you say, because you scare me when you say, but the founder systems aren't working.

We're not using the founder systems.

We haven't been for over a hundred years.

We've upended all of the because as you're saying, you know, we have to have these conversations, us standing around a campfire.

What's happening to us is everything is global.

And so only the elites get to make those decisions around their campfire at Davos.

Yep.

And we're left out.

The real change comes, real meaningful change comes.

For instance, I'm not against universal healthcare.

When you can show me it works and can sustain itself, otherwise, I hate this system too, but it's the best one we got.

So let's keep doing it.

We should be 50 states instead of one country, 50 little experiments.

Try it.

Do this.

See what works.

Take the best of that and work.

But you have to break them down to the family, to the community,

to the state before it goes global.

Everybody now is trying to solve the problem for the world.

And

it immediately goes there.

Immediately.

Immediately.

The problem is you've got a tension between two truths here.

And, you know, the tension is a very real one.

On the one hand, the idea of the laboratory of the states is a very good one, right?

Prototype something and figure out how to get it to work before you globalize it because that's the only sane thing to do.

On the other hand, you have game theory puzzles that will call, you know, let's say, for example, you had a rational system of taxation.

And then, let's say, Oklahoma decides, well, you know what, we would like to attract some businesses.

And so we're going to create a very hospitable business climate by lowering taxes in Oklahoma.

Businesses start flooding to Oklahoma.

Every other state notices, hey, there are businesses are leaving and they're going to Oklahoma.

They all lower their taxes.

And now your irrational across-the-board tax structure has triggered a race to the bottom.

Break it down.

I understand.

Break it down even smaller, though.

I'm using the 50 states as the biggest it should be.

I'm saying

all of these things,

the single, and Eisenhower talked about this in his farewell address, and it's brilliant.

If we would have listened to just that one address, we would have fixed a lot of this stuff.

The man, the single scientist working in a laboratory that is doing it because he has an idea and says, I think this might work He might work his whole life on it.

That's pretty much gone.

It's now white coats in a laboratory working for somebody that's getting grants from somebody else.

So we're losing the individual spark.

That's the key to Western society is the individual spark.

Well, it's the environment that frees the individual to have the spark and to act on it.

Yes.

Right.

So, you know, it's both things.

And this is.

Yeah, I was going to say just just that.

This feels like a different level of the problem, which you may be right.

It may then fall into the right solution that's more global.

But

we've talked a lot about the problem with modern science, which is exactly as you describe.

That at this point, individuals...

have a very hard time saying, I want to be a scientist.

I'm going to train to be a scientist.

I'm going to go do science.

You immediately get pulled into someone else's lab with someone else's grants, with someone else's questions that they've already asked.

And questions that you don't ask.

And lots of questions that you are precluded from asking because

what kinds of questions are getting funded by NSF and NIH and DOD right now is a question of fashion.

And who's deciding what's fashionable?

It is, in fact, the elites, be they in science or politics.

And it's very, very difficult.

This is one of the reasons actually that we were at some apparently po-dunk little college in the Pacific Northwest for so long was that it actually provided the opportunity to ask whatever questions we wanted.

It was one of the very rare institutions of higher ed, and it's not anymore, but it was one of the very rare institutions of higher ed in the modern world where you could actually investigate what you were interested in investigating.

That said, you couldn't do so if you were trying to do high-tech science.

Anything high-tech still requires the big grants,

and the universities want that because they get a big chunk of the overhead, and that is how they are running.

So So it's the business model that is the flaw.

So isn't this

the exact same situation that our pilgrims, the founders, whatever, came here for?

That model is broken.

It just doesn't work because it's now so corrupt that she can't work.

Except there's no place to go.

I mean, this is one of the things I like about Elon Musk.

Let's get off planet before this thing explodes.

You know, there's no place to go.

We have to

reboot without losing

the important

framework.

Right.

Well, we are,

ironically enough, doing exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.

We should be recognizing that we are in the same boat and that noticing each other's humanity is the first step and then figuring out what we agree on is the second step.

And from there, we can begin to engage the stuff that we disagree over and figure out where to go.

And I would point out

the solution to your puzzle, or at least the prototype for it with respect to the laboratory of the states, is actually a concept that comes out of Catholicism of all places called subsidiarity, which means everything should be governed at the lowest effective level.

But it has to be the lowest effective level.

And we have some global problems, right?

Those problems have to be governed at a global level, right?

Not having the oceans governed by anybody is a recipe for disaster.

Right.

But having the oceans governed by a group of people that are just on the take and are all afraid of China or all afraid of us or whoever is also not a solution.

Right.

That's a band-aid that looks like it's going to heal, but it's festering underneath.

Well, you have two problems tangled together there.

So you've got the how are we to govern ourselves issue, and then what are we to do about the corruption, right?

Because we can say, look, certain things have to be governed at a global level and other things, you don't want

your local parks governed by the

global structure, right?

So we have to have that thing.

But even if you had a system that governed everything at the lowest effective level, if it's corrupt, then

it may be worse than the problems it's built ostensibly to solve.

So we have to solve the corruption issue as we address the let's make sure everything important is governed.

And this is one of these places where the founders missed it because they hadn't seen sufficiently dangerous technology to intuit what a global problem of this sort would look like.

There was no such thing as a manager or middle manager when they were around.

The one thing I think they really truly missed was

they didn't see that corporations could ever be more powerful than a government.

They missed the questions of scale, right?

And they just could not

imagine it.

And that's the first

miss that I've seen that they had all kinds of little safety mechanisms all over.

That one, nothing.

Nothing.

And too many conservatives are like, well, it's a corporation.

They got no, no, no, no, no.

This is a different ballgame.

This is a different ballgame.

Right.

We are de facto governed by these entities that we have no protection.

No protection.

And they are merging with the governments of the world.

And I mean, I have always mocked, oh,

you know, these dystopian movies were like, oh, yeah, well, he works for the corporation.

And it's like, oh, stop it.

Don't laugh.

That is exactly the right or the left was right about that.

The right was wrong.

And now it seems like very few people even want to talk about that.

It's like, wait,

major area.

Suddenly talking about the problems of the corporations is not something that's on the table anymore.

Right.

Right.

Yeah, which goes to a sort of overarching issue, which is, you know, the founders, of course, didn't know anything about evolution because it hadn't been described yet.

What they effectively did was they created an evolving system.

And so what we are living in is the consequences of the fact that they built a system that has all of the characteristics necessary to create adaptive evolution.

creatures have evolved or as if creatures have evolved in it and many of them are predatory, and they're extremely difficult to rein in.

Because they, I mean, one of the things, again, they had an evolving system, but it was evolving in structure.

So if you want to evolve because it becomes outdated, amend it, okay?

Which required the council to come together.

And so you weren't getting these little teeny changes that all of a sudden, 100 years later, amount to something that doesn't recognize anything constitutional.

You know what I mean?

No, we are effectively on a craft hurtling through a dangerous landscape, and there's no one at the helm.

No one at the helm, and

nobody even, they'll give lip service to the Bill of Rights, but they don't actually stand for the Bill of Rights.

Nobody does stand for the Bill of Rights.

You're like,

can we just get, can you give me eight of those?

I'll get on board with you.

Can you give me eight of those rights that you're willing to stand for right now?

No, it's all I mean, it's very frightening.

There's almost literally nobody at the helm in the U.S.

at the moment, right?

We have an apparently senile commander-in-chief who was effectively the choice of the DNC, which is not an elected body.

I don't know who's really actually running it.

Right.

I mean, in fact, I think if If you were in on those conversations, it would be even more frightening because I don't think anything's really running it, right?

It's you know, it's a corrupt entity and it is doing what corrupt entities do, which is serving very narrow short-term interests.

And, you know, the consequences for

us as Americans and for the planet are

absolutely arbitrary.

Aaron Powell, this is very different

than what humans have ever experienced before,

but it's very similar, isn't it?

In some ways.

Yeah.

I mean,

we make a call for more campfires in in the book.

And

as things are scaling up, there are, as you alluded to earlier, the equivalent of campfires that are happening outside of the reach of everyone else.

Yes.

Whereas used to be, you know, we have always had hierarchy.

All of our groups, all of our tribal groups have always had hierarchy.

Often male hierarchies are separate from female hierarchies and then to some degree, some familial-level hierarchies.

But

there was an ability, these like fission-fusion groups, were able to move in between each other and say, oh, I'm here now and you're here.

And

sometimes they would war, but more often they would meet and maybe sometimes exchange people, you know, in marriage, whatever.

There wasn't the possibility of one of those groups simply owning everyone else.

And in part, it was because people really did come together in a way that was equalizing.

Campfire.

Breaking bread.

I see the whites of your eyes.

And the power amplifiers.

It's the power amplifiers of modernity that are making this very much unlike anything that came before.

But it also, and I don't know which came first, the technology or the loss of this belief, but it is, we didn't just come together to come together.

We came together because in the end, I could see the whites of your eyes, but I truly believed

you believed at the core,

fundamentally, the same kind of things that I believed.

All men were created equal, you know, you have a right to free speech, all this stuff.

When we lost that,

I don't know how to get together with somebody who says, no, the Bill of Rights, no, that's occasionally you can speak.

You can speak if you have that.

How do you?

Because it feels like the media, the amplification, feels like half the country believes, half the country doesn't, or a third, a third, and then crazy, crazy, crazies on both sides.

What is the truth?

Well, I mean, there is a long history in humanity of othering those

that are a threat to your own resources, right?

In so many languages, those who are not you,

the person

who is naming themselves are the chosen people, and everyone else is someone else.

So it's not like that's new, right?

But upon being able to come together, crossing those borders between tribes, generally there is a recognition of humanity.

And I think, A, the scale problem, right, that we just, we have power amplifiers, we have too many people, and we have too little opportunity to actually engage.

And this is where the screens are actually doing an incredible amount of damage that everyone talks about screens, but

no, we don't have the measurements for all of the sensory stuff that is being

interchanged when we're actually in person with one another.

But there is value in that that no one has named, no one has even attempted to measure, or a few people have.

And as we spend less and less time actually like in vivo with one another, it's going to be easier and easier to go tribal in this way that seems permanent.

I would argue in the U.S.,

we have to take ownership of the piece of

the equation that our side got wrong.

And each of us.

Well, sure.

I mean, I went on the, they called it the Glenbeck Apology Tour, and they said it was for something.

No, I, you can't be human,

really truly human, if half the country says they hate you and not go,

gosh, do they have a point?

I mean, am I that person at all?

And I did apologize for things that I thought, you know, I shouldn't have said that or I shouldn't have said it this way or whatever.

We have to start here.

And then our side.

And then the world.

You know what I mean?

Right.

Well, it may not even, I mean, I agree.

The hallmark of an honest broker is that you go back and clean up what you've got wrong.

And that is fundamental.

And there aren't enough people doing that.

But in this case, we have a tension.

People detect something is wrong.

Frankly, everybody knows the system is rigged, and for most people, the system is rigged against them.

They detect it.

And so the question is, is that because the fundamentals are wrong?

Is that because

the society that we have described is incorrect?

Or is it because it is not working?

And what we are seeing on the left, the

collapse of reason that we are seeing on the left, is really

lots of people who know that things are wrong, who know that they have been taken advantage of and been mistreated, misunderstanding what the source of that is and not realizing that the right thing to pursue is a repair of the unfairness of the system.

It is not the dismantling of that system because the system is the best thing that we have in terms of producing fairness.

It just, we never got there.

And this is where the right, I think, has made an error, which is that the right imagined the system worked better than it did.

It imagined.

I think that's changed a lot.

I think it's changed a lot.

I know 20 years ago, I was...

Golly, gee, you know, great and red, white, and blue.

And now you're like, well, this, you know, and that, but that's the problem is

after you're done, if you have time, I'll take you over to our vault across the walkway here.

I collect everything

that I can to preserve American history, but I collect a lot of the dark stuff about American history.

I can outdo any liberal professor on the dark side of American history.

It's important to remember that, you know, but I think there's a lot of people like I was 20 years ago

that are just like no that's well you we didn't make what I mean no we did some horrific things horrific things that need to be addressed and set right and just talked about and like don't ever do that again that'll leave a mark

but now

now I think because the GOP

10 years ago so betrayed the Tea Party people, and I don't mean all the Tea Party people, I mean the people who actually believed in the Constitution.

It betrayed them.

They went, ooh, that's one of the first questions I asked you, your own side.

Have you gone, oh my gosh, that's not who I thought we were?

That's what we went through, many of us.

It depends what you mean by your own side.

If you mean the Democratic Party, absolutely.

The thing is,

you know, it's metastatic, right?

It is not.

But it went beyond the GOP.

It was the whole system that we thought we knew what it was

to trust.

And it's like, no, that's dirty too.

It's all dirty.

I mean, Occupy on the left is to Tea Party on the right.

And I think very similar things happened for those of us who

were hopeful that that could have been an answer and to see it decay both for external and internal reasons.

It turned out not to have any possibility of success.

Aaron Powell, that's what's sad about the Me Too movement.

That's what's sad about BLM.

Because I've talked to people who marched in Black Lives Matter here in Houston where there was a shooting.

And

we all were huddling behind a car.

And it didn't matter what color you were.

And we all were like, okay, this is bad.

And we started talking.

And a lot of people were involved in that because they had real problems and real issues.

But that's not what the system

was made for.

You know, that's not Black Lives Matter, Inc.

Right.

That's right.

Total difference.

Right.

This is exactly where we landed.

Black Lives Matter as a slogan, as a belief, of course.

Right.

Right.

Absolutely.

It's too bad that it even needs to be said.

On the other hand, once you look at the fine print of what the organization was interested in, it's like, well, who even was running?

I mean, the global thing is like, whoa, these are a bunch of white people.

What are you doing?

What is that?

Right.

Well, and, you know,

from defunding the police to attacks on the family, the point was it had nothing to do with black lives mattering.

It was a very bizarre

ideological agenda that was a lethal hazard to what does work about our system.

Well, and the same arguments can be made without exactly the same corporate structure behind it for me too.

Like Me Too had the potential to be

an awakening, to actually reveal to the vast majority of good men who are out there that the vast majority of women have unfortunate to really intolerable and horrible experiences as young women.

And most men don't know that because most men aren't those sorts of men.

That's what it should have been.

Instead it went off the rails because it was

maybe because it was designed to, I don't know, but it went off the rails.

But we've, you know, I said at the end of the Barack Obama administration, he made me a better man.

I didn't like him at all.

I didn't like his policies at all, but he made me a better man because he pushed me against the wall all the time.

And I had to go, wait, is that right?

Or am I wrong?

Or

what's happening?

We are learning a lot.

There was a lot of good that came out of Me Too and Black Lives Matter, even if it wasn't directly related to their goals.

A lot of people did step back and they didn't necessarily join in.

They were just like, you know, they have a point on that and that and that.

And that's good.

Yeah.

It's good things.

I mean, to get back to an earlier point, you know,

I think

liberals had so many successes in the 20th century, right?

You know, the women's emancipation and civil and gay rights and

worker protections.

And

these became values that almost everyone holds in common.

And I think because of that momentum, it now seems to many on the left that change must always be necessary.

And as you said earlier, Brett, you know, change isn't inherently good.

Change isn't inherently bad.

Change will sometimes be necessary.

And change isn't always necessary.

And if we're actually moving in the right direction, upending the system that's moving in the right direction is clearly going to be a betrayal of the values that you are claiming to have.

Are you guys optimistic?

Occasionally?

Well, if I can return to the idea of

an adaptive valley, things are very dark

and

that doesn't necessarily mean one shouldn't be optimistic because in some sense they would have to be in order for us to accomplish what we need to accomplish now.

So dark is before the dawn.

Right.

And so the problem, if you think about, you know, the adaptive landscape I was describing, the problem is if you have to move on from the opportunity that you've been exploiting and to find a new one, it is very easy to head in a direction where that opportunity does not exist.

It's very easy to pass into that valley and to not arrive somewhere.

So what you really need is very careful thinking about where that next opportunity is.

And whatever the explanation for it,

if I could get one thought into the mind of Americans generally, it would be that something has us divided for reasons we may never know.

There may not even be reasons.

It may just be some process.

But the key to us getting out of this is the recognition that most of us agree on the values to be pursued.

We agree on what a good society would look like.

We may disagree on how close we are and what might be done to get us the rest of the way, but we agree.

We don't want a system that is rigged in favor of one race and against another, for example.

We don't want a system that bars people from doing whatever job they want to do because of the sex they were born into.

We want a fair system in which opportunity is broadly distributed.

Now, once you recognize that virtually everybody you meet can agree to that much, and then you realize that we've all been led to believe that there's another team and that those people don't agree.

They don't agree with you on anything, right?

That they're bad people who want bad things, then the point is: well, all right,

wouldn't the right thing to do be to recognize we know what the objective of the project is, we all understand something has gone awry, and the correct thing to do is to talk to each other about how we might get ourselves out of this and get back on track where we can fight about the details of how to get there, not where we're going.

Historically, you guys are on exactly the right path, one that wasn't necessarily taken the last time we had a horrible, horrible world war

in my research over the years on the Holocaust,

the biggest thing that happened was

nobody knew Jews.

The Jews that were saved were generally saved by people who said, yeah, the Jews are like that, but not this one.

I know this one.

And when you understand that, you realize we better start talking to each other.

That's right.

Because, oh, I'll save a conservative or a liberal because I know this one, but the rest of them are like that.

No, that's not true.

That's not true.

I call it the comic bookification process.

Yes.

We believe that we have the capacity to be superheroes, and we believe that there are supervillains on the other side of the screen or out there in the world.

And it is the very, very, very rare human being who is either.

Just look within yourself and see no matter how remarkable you are, what your weaknesses are.

Or if you are in the you're in the opposite camp and you feel that you're not doing well, find the strengths that you have and recognize that that mixture in different amounts, in different relative amounts, is going to be present in every single other human being.

Yep.

You know what stops us from wheeling

gallows in front of people's houses.

That's right.

Right.

Which of course is returning into fashionability.

I'll tell you something funny.

We live in Portland, which is almost a cartoon of

liberals.

You know, Texas exists.

Right.

And there are liberals here.

We have met them.

Yes.

But even in Portland, where you would imagine that there's just simply no reason to be accessed, a funny thing happens.

For me, at least, and I know for Heather, when we are open about our doubts about the conventional wisdom of the left,

which is that people who would espouse all of the usual slogans, as soon as they hear that you're actually, you have your own doubts and that you're willing to voice them, it is amazing what people will volunteer.

Why do you think they work so hard to silence people who have just a little bit of courage?

They need to silence that courage.

They need to

crush it.

Courage is contagious.

Courage is contagious.

You're absolutely right.

And this is where this impulse to authoritarianism comes from, right?

Because they need to control the conversation in order that the doubts don't emerge and restore us to a conversation that might actually stand a chance of putting us back on track.

Yeah, and it is remarkable how many conversations both Brett and I have had with UPS drivers, cashiers, waitresses, whatever, or just overheard while

or sitting in a park, and then sometimes talking with the people, and sometimes just eavesdropping.

But it's Portland, it's mostly liberals.

And the number of people who are saying this thing is coming, it's authoritarian, it's dangerous, and

we need to stand up is high.

It's still quiet, but it's a lot of people.

My guess is

it's coming from the left faster than it's coming from the right, but it will come from the right, too.

We're passing all of the exits where you're getting to such, I mean, this is the way revolutions happen, communist revolutions happen.

You sow the seed of discontent, you overload the system, you get it so nothing's working, there's no safety anywhere, and the people will cry out, help us, and they will, and they'll crush that.

And it'll be either side that does it if we don't change our way soon.

Yeah, it's imperative.

And,

you know,

we are prevented from doing it by being told that, you know,

you will be guilty by virtue of your associations if you talk to people on the other side.

And those of us who have talked to people on the other side,

you know, have paid a price for it.

On the other hand, it's quite clear that that is the road forward.

It is.

It is.

Anybody who can't manage it is not going to be of help.

I started this podcast three years ago, and you were the number one target to put on this show

because I wanted this show to be a model where people can disagree, and we go away friends.

We can see each other going, you're a normal person, I'm a normal person, we don't hate each other, and we don't hate the country, and we don't hate freedom.

We just disagree.

Right.

That's right.

Let's not conflate the ideas with the person.

I'm glad that you're both here.

I hope you come back.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.