Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life w/ Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying
EPISODE #55
Evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying share their thoughts on what happens when human evolution collides with an increasingly ‘hyper-novel’ modern world, how a greater understanding of biology can help us develop technologies that benefit humanity, and how the ability to adapt is our species’ best tool for creating a sustainable and abundant future.
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein are evolutionary biologists who have been invited to address the US Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education, and have spoken before audiences across the globe. They both earned PhDs in Biology from the University of Michigan, where their research on evolution and adaptation earned awards for its quality and innovation. They have been visiting fellows at Princeton University, and before that were professors at the Evergreen State College for fifteen years. They resigned from Evergreen in the wake of 2017 campus riots that focused in part on their opposition to a day of racial segregation and other college “equity” proposals. They cohost weekly livestreams of the DarkHorse podcast.
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Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.
On this episode, I speak to evolutionary biologists, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying.
"The fact is if we allow evolution to continue to play its game - lineage against lineage competition - it will end in disaster. We are too powerful and we are too interconnected, and there are too many of us consuming too much" - Bret, excerpt from the interview.
Bret and Heather shared their thoughts on what happens when human evolution collides with an increasingly hypernovel, modern world, how a greater understanding of biology can help us develop technologies that benefit humanity, and how the ability to adapt is our species’ best tool for creating a sustainable and abundant future.
Your new book, ‘A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century’ attempts to understand the great human mystery. But what is so special about human beings? In other words, what is the human niche?
Bret Weinstein: Well the fact is if we talk about virtually any other species that you could name and we ask what its niche is, the form of the creature and its behaviour are tightly correlated. We will typically be able to describe the niche in some sort of ecological terms. You literally can’t do it for human beings. Human beings have done so many different things across history and pre-history, and simultaneously we do so many different things. Everything from hunting marine mammals to harvesting nests from high inside caves to make soup. There’s a tremendous variety of behaviour, and it’s not just that we’re super generalists. We are specialists in many different niches at once. That’s a very unique feature of human beings.
The question is, how do we do it? How is it that without having to become some new form, we’re able to completely change what it is we do ecologically? The answer is that the genome has offloaded a tremendous amount of the work of being human to the software layer. We uniquely have a mechanism for bootstrapping a new software programme that runs on the old hardware and transforms us into something new.
Heather Heying: Not only, as Bret said, have we transformed what we do across time, but of course, we’ve done so across space as well. We now inhabit every inhabitable place on the planet. Six of the seven continents; all of the ones with plants on them. As we argue in the book, what is the human niche - to answer your question directly - the human niche is niche switching. That is in fact what we do. We are not a match for our environment. We move into environments that we then modify, or we modify ourselves so that we can inhabit them.
Mason: But this creates a paradox, doesn’t it? A human paradox. Could you explain what that human paradox is?
Weinstein: Sure. In general, people will be aware that the Jack of all trades is the master of none. This is effectively a principle written into the rules of the universe. What it says is that specialisation is actually the unfortunate downside of becoming very good at something. If you’re going to become very good at something, you’re going to have to limit how many somethings you do. Except human beings don’t. We don’t abide by this, even though it is a rule of the universe. What we do is that we get the advantages of being a specialist while being able to do many different specialists at once.
The way we break this rule has to do with the division of labour. Effectively, individuals are not capable of doing all of the things necessary to sustain a human. Through things that in modern times look a lot like trade, we pool together our specialities and get the benefits of generalism. At the same time, we are highly effective as specialists.
Heying: Other species that are social get advantages from being social which include things like being able to find mates, being able to collectively source food, being able to be better protected from predators, and being vigilant together. We originally got all of those things but we have transformed the benefits of our sociality into so much more, exactly as Bret is saying.
Mason: But what you set up in the book is this predicament that we’re currently in. This evolutionary predicament that we currently find ourselves in. Human beings have traditionally been well-evolved for their environment, but increasingly we’re finding that there is some form of evolutionary mismatch. Why has that occurred?
Heying: Because we have offloaded so much of what we are into the software layer and because we are evolving in this way which is much faster than what would be typical of almost any organism - within generations, not just between generations - we are therefore capable of making changes that are too fast even for us to catch up with. We are transforming the environment in front of us to such a degree that the rate of change itself is even outstripping our ability to keep up with it.
Weinstein: Another way to see it is there is an analogy between evolution and the development of an individual organism. Childhood allows a creature to become good at all the things it needs to be good at in order to be an effective adult. The threshold exists where the rate of change is so high that the world in which you were a child is not the world in which you are an adult. The world changes that rapidly, and your development cannot catch up. That means that evolutionarily, the process through which we adjust our software programme so it is constantly in step with our environment just simply can’t keep up with the process.
Mason: I mean it used to be that the body and the environment would control the destiny of humanity. Now it feels like humanity really wants to control the destiny, the environment and the body. As you’ve described there, the result is this weird sort of mismatch. Can evolution even operate in the age of the Anthropocene? Should we rely on evolution or have we simply stopped evolving due to science and technology? Should we accept that now, perhaps, humanity should take control over the next stage of its being?
Heying: We are evolving. We continue to evolve much less quickly at the genetic level, the physical level, the physiological level and the anatomical level, precisely because we have outsourced so much of what we need to the so-called extended phenotype. We have monitors outside of us that do the jobs that perhaps 10 or 100,000 years ago, or a million or 10 million years ago we would have needed to have on board in our wetware. We continue to evolve but it is in a way that doesn’t look like what other organisms are doing.
Weinstein: I would say if you read the book carefully, you will recognise that in some sense, we are obligated by our predicament to rebel against evolution. Now, rebelling against evolution is actually fairly easy. The problem is doing it in such a way that you are not out-competed by other members of your species who have not rebelled, which is very difficult. That’s the trick that we have to now succeed at.
The fact is, if we allow evolution to continue to play its game - lineage against lineage competition - it will end in disaster. We are too powerful and we are too interconnected, and there are too many of us consuming too much. If we are to rein in those runaway processes so that an indefinitely large number of human beings can continue to enjoy this planet into the future, it will be because effectively we have taken evolution out of the driver’s seat and we have gotten off autopilot.
Mason: Well there is that misnomer that evolution is survival of the fittest. It’s become a meme. Whether it’s correct or not, it’s become a meme. How do we reorient our understanding of what evolution is as a collective process? As something that we do together instead of something that we have to endure individually.
Heying: One of the problems with that phrase is that it imagines that whoever you are deciding whose survival of fittest is paramount, then you get to look around and decide what ‘fittest’ is. Everything in evolution is relative. There is no absolute fittest. It is a response to the current environment. The fact that we are changing the environment means that this is an even more intractable problem right now, for evolution and humans. What would it mean to be the fittest yesterday compared to what it would mean to be the fittest tomorrow? The usual misunderstandings of fitness like wealth or power, or strength are clearly at best very simple proxies that don’t do a complete job of understanding what fitness would be.
Weinstein: The problem, in part, is actually evolutionary in origin. We are built to be focused on our individuality. Not because individuality matters to selection, but because in the past, there was a limit to the degree to which one could exert any useful influence on things in the environment. An individual a thousand years ago, who was focused on the success of their lineage 20 generations later would have no ability to impact it. We do have the ability to impact things in the distant future. We have to in fact hack our own psychology and broaden our understanding so it’s a better match for what actually matters.
The biggest problem with the idea of survival of the fittest is that it is overly focused on the individual. The word ‘survival’ is about remaining alive, which isn’t what evolution is about. Selection is actually about the persistence of lineages. If we think about our survival or our reproduction, there’s a lot an individual can do to adjust how well they play the game. If you recognise that as you play the game in this generation, you’re ignoring the fact that future generations are in jeopardy, then you’re behaving in a way where your fitness - through the narrow, modern definition - may be high, but ultimately the persistence of your lineage may be a dead end. That’s the problem we have to confront. That’s why the book ends where it does. We have to build a new mechanism for being human because sustainability is fundamental to persistence.
Mason: It becomes a question of fit for what, exactly? Heather, you mentioned there wealth and power. It feels like we constructed these operating systems, these societies, and - as you say in the book - these cultures that we live in, and then we assume that human beings should then almost evolve for the environments of our own creation. We created a hyper technologized environment which we have to endure in the 21st century. We created these market-based capitalist systems through which we operate in the 21st century. Of course, they have some advantages, but we’re beginning to find they’re incompatible with our human biology.
The wonderful examples that you give in the book are multiple, but when we look at the medical system, for example, it does feel like we’re weakening our human resilience. Surely the game here shouldn’t about trying to deal with this environment that we’ve created. It should be about strengthening human resilience. Using that example of the medical system, what are some of the dangers of muting, for example, pain?
Weinstein: Well the example of pain is an excellent one. Our medical system and indeed, our psychologists, regard pain as if it were a malady rather than a signal that something is off. No doubt, there are instances of pain that really have no value whatsoever. If you’re feeling pain in a limb that has been amputated, that pain is not capable of informing you in some good way. If we can get rid of that pain, that’s positive. Most instances of pain are the result of the fact that you’re doing something destructive or something that is risky. They’re a part of a training programme. If you anesthetise the pain, you actually make the fundamental problem worse and not better.
Many things look like this. What I think we need to realise is that we’re not built to be fulfilled or happy. We’re not even built to be correct. All of these things are actually a means to an end. Once you spot the predicament that we’re put in by this programme, there’s a question. Human beings, evolutionarily, have the same purpose as every creature that ever evolved. That purpose, therefore, can’t be a very good one. If your purpose is the same as a bacterium that might infect your skin it’s not much of a purpose. But the mechanisms that we have at our disposal - the fantastic computer that rides around on our shoulders that is capable of great compassion, insight, and producing things of beauty - that computer is marvellous. It’s a mismatch, in fact, for this low-level programme of what it’s supposed to accomplish.
The question is, can we repurpose it? Can we say - well, we are human beings. We’re not up for a programme in which we will do anything to get our genes into the future. Genocide may be in your evolutionary interest but it is abhorrent. It is something you are morally required to reject. The point is, we shouldn’t be on board with evolution’s programme. We should rebel against it and we should take control of our purpose. In fact, we should write our own purpose and one that is actually worthy of us.
Heying: I’d like to just go back to pain for a second, and say that the modern medical response to pain being muted - medical response to physical pain, psychological response to mental pain being very very analogous, as Bret said - actually is a good indicator of exactly the problem that we’re describing in the book with regard to questions in science being focused on ‘how’ versus ‘why’. The evolutionary lens or toolkit that we’re outlining in the book tries to get at the ‘why’ of humanity. That’s not to say that the ‘how’ mechanism style questions aren’t absolutely imperative and necessary, and valuable. But when the response to “I’m feeling pain.” is “How do I get rid of the pain?” that precludes the diagnosis. Diagnosis is the ‘why’.
An evolutionary understanding of why you’re feeling pain, why you want to eat sugar or why you want to have sex with a stranger who you find hot can be understood at the ‘how’ level. “How do I accomplish the thing that I want?” Or, you can understand what it is that you are evolutionarily. You can try to. You can ask the ‘why’ question and ask, “Why is it that I have this interest in easy sex? In easy sugar? In easy pain relief? In the case of pain, what is it that my body or my brain might be trying to tell me that is actually not a good fit for the environment I’m in?” Then you get to the next order. A next level ‘how’. “How might I change the underlying thing that is causing the pain?” for instance, as opposed to “How do I simply get rid of the pain?”
Mason: That was really what I got from the book. It was this call to action to listen to your body and to realise that certain things happen for a reason. They shouldn’t be approached with either desire or aversion. Pain, as you so wonderfully described there, is a great example of that. There is this idea that human beings are separate from nature. We’ve come to see ourselves as that. In actual fact, we’re intimately tied to nature. We’re of nature. We’re from nature. We have these bipedal breathing bodies because of nature.
Then we also use the argument that we’ve come from nature as the justification to say that certain forms of human intervention into the body - or biology - are unnatural. What is the right relationship that we should have with this thing called ‘nature’? Is nature this othered thing or is nature intimately part of us? Where should we stand with or against nature?
Weinstein: It’s a question of consciousness. We are, of course, of nature. We come from nature. We have the capacity to alter nature. We have the capacity to insulate ourselves from it. The question is, given our values, what is the best relationship? There is no need to lean in the direction of our nature. If our nature is genocide, that’s something to reject. The question is, how can we live in harmony with our environment? The hyper novelty of our age is causing us to be unhealthy because our relationship to nature and to our nature is haphazard.
The point is if we recognise that mismatch and we decide to go about structuring our environment so that it’s not at odds with us, and structure our development so that it fits those environments - so that our intuitions will actually lead us to be healthy - then we will be far better off in terms that virtually anyone would recognise. That really ought to be the objective of the exercise. Not toward or away from, but what is best relative to the values that we hold.
Heying: And the more we understand about what we are being of and from nature, the better we can understand which of those things are actually immutable and which are not. To pick one example that we discuss in a fair bit of detail in the book: sex and gender. We are from at least 500 million years back, possibly closer to 2 billion, a sexually reproducing species with two and only two sexes. Our gametes, our sex cells, eggs and sperm are of two types and of only two types. There are no intermediate forms and there are a lot of good and robust theories explaining why.
Pretending that sex is on a spectrum or that you can change your sex is a fool’s errand. It reflects a really fundamental misunderstanding of what our evolutionary history is. That said, gender is - and Bret and I speak of this in somewhat different terms. He says the ‘software to sex’ and I tend to say ‘the behavioural manifestation of sex’. Although in plants it doesn’t work, so his framing works better. If gender is the behavioural manifestation of sex, it’s no less evolutionary, obviously, but it is much more fluid. It’s much more labile and it’s not going to be binary. Can we reject traditional gender norms which were built on, call it hundreds, thousands, tens of hundreds, hundreds of thousands, millions of years of evolution? Yeah. Yeah, we can. Can we pretend that males and females aren’t real and that men can get pregnant and have babies? Well, we can but that is delusional. That makes no sense. It’s not reality.
The idea that men can do what has been traditionally women’s work aside from that which is anatomically and physiologically mandated and that women can do what has traditionally been men’s work, while recognising that there are some things that men, on average, are going to be better at and there are some things that women, on average are going to be better at; different interests as well - that is the way forward. Of course, we can reject much of what has been traditional, even if it’s been evolutionary. But some of those things - male and female, and whether or not you have the capacity to produce sperm versus eggs - that’s not going to be changeable.
Weinstein: There’s a very good example of this in the question of how we engage in family planning. We all understand that selection is interested in our reproduction. It is therefore somewhat paradoxical to realise how trivially easy it is for people to decide to delay the production of offspring or to forego it entirely. Why is it that we’re capable of doing that? The answer is that evolution did not make the production of babies pleasurable. It made sex pleasurable. Technology allows you to divorce the two things from each other, which is actually, in some sense, an extension of something that evolution built into us.
Human beings, almost uniquely, have sex for fun or for bonding. In order for that to happen, the fertility of females has been hidden, even from them. Women do not know when in their cycle they are fertile, at least not with precision. Selection has produced a creature with a desire for sex when offspring production is not likely. Technology has allowed us to take complete control of this.
What it has not allowed us to do is take complete control over our sexual desire. That mapping - the fact that the production of when you produce children is entirely under your control but the question of whether you’re going to be attracted to somebody is not entirely under your control - shows us what the landscape looks like more generally. The fact is, we have an arbitrary map of those things that we have control over, don’t have control over, or fall somewhere in between. The important thing is to be cognisant of that arbitrariness and not try to change things that can’t be changed. When something can be changed, try to change it in a direction that’s productive and useful.
Mason: I mean, the question, in that case, becomes, what is the purpose of having children? Now there are practical reasons from a hunter-gatherer standpoint to propagate the tribe and to have useful workers on the farm. But in the 21st century, are there reasons for children? If anything, we’re constantly told there’s an overpopulation crisis. Surely the cultural trend towards not having children, maybe there is some evolutionary advantage there. Fewer people to harm the planet, for example.
Heying: So yes there is, and I know Bret has a lot to say on this. Let me just say first, one of the books we cite as recommended further reading, actually, in our childhood chapter, is ‘The Anthropology of Childhood’. The author has gone through…and it’s hard to do the anthropology of children because most cultures that anthropologists walk into don’t reveal what it is that is going on intimately with their families as easily to anthropologists.
He finds that sure, what you just described as a sort of function of children, is one that shows up in cultures all over the place. But there are many other understandings. This is just like the overlay of what humans have decided children are for. Are they to do work on the farm? Is it that yes, there are more mouths to feed, but actually it’s more useful. They do more work than they require in input and therefore it’s valuable. Are they precious little things to be protected from all trouble until they get to a certain age? There are a number of ways of framing what childhood is, but that’s what it is. It’s framing. The actual evolutionary reason to have children is larger than that; larger than any anthropological understanding of what children are and can afford.
Weinstein: Yeah. I’m struggling with this a little bit. I don’t even really understand the question. What is the purpose of children? The problem is, if you’re going to pursue it to philosophical bedrock, there’s no purpose to children. There’s also no purpose to living. There’s no purpose to taking your next breath. The fact that all of these claims are simultaneously, obviously true and completely unpersuasive is because we descend from a 3-and-a-half billion-year unbroken lineage of successful reproducers, livers, breathers and all of that.
The point is, we’re confused about the underlying philosophy which is exactly what you would want to be. I don’t want to tune into the idea that there really is no point to living at all and that satisfaction, pleasure, insight, beauty and compassion - all of these things - are really meaningless and obviously ephemeral. What I want to do is recognise that life feels delightful and insight seems worthwhile. Compassion is laudable within my framework. I want more of those things.
Here’s the problem. You die. The way we get around that is we produce offspring. We humans don’t just produce offspring as other creatures do. We produce offspring and the most important inheritance they will get, arriving outside of the genome. We have a nifty trick. We take the content of our cognitive apparatus and we pass on a small fraction to them. Hopefully, we pass on the fraction that is most meaningful, useful and insightful, and your kids don’t pick up the stuff about you that’s stupid and self-defeating. This is an evolutionary process in the truest sense of the word; in the most important sense of the word. The fact of the edit that happens between generations is how we become better.
In some sense, we moderns don’t understand this. Our kids are screwed up just the same way we were screwed up. The reason that we’re screwed up - I really believe it’s obvious in retrospect but almost impossible to see until somebody states it - is entirely about the mismatch between where we live and what we’re built for, even at the generational level. If humans have a purpose and if we’re to ignore the existential reality of the pointlessness of everything, then our purpose ought to be to provide as many human beings with a life that liberates them as we can do. This means making our way of living on the Earth sustainable so that it can go on indefinitely.
In order for that life to truly be liberating, human beings cannot continue to be at odds with their environment. Your ancestors, 10,000 years ago, wouldn’t have been at odds with their environment, which means their intuition of what to do, how to spend their time and what to focus on would have been well-tuned. They would not have felt constantly out of sorts. We need to bring into the modern world that same harmony between critters and the environment. We need to restore it. We’re going to need to build it. If we do that, then the life we provide to our generations who will experience it will be truly marvellous.
Heying: It’s a serious challenge though, because for the average person 500 years ago - the work that needed to be done - whether they viewed themselves as a scholar or intellectual philosopher still largely created physical demands in front of them. The work that wasn’t their core reason that they saw themselves on the planet involved things like getting food on the table and either sourcing or perhaps buying or repairing clothes, cleaning them and such.
In modernity, so many of the daily logistical chores of life reflect these abstractions that we know we need to do in order to not have the power turned off on us. In order to get the washing machine fixed because customer service didn’t show up when they said they would so now we’re stuck on some infernal phone tree. These things have no reflection in physical reality. They’re completely banal and frankly utterly hateful. The physical banal work of yesteryear brought with it - as much as it was, yes, banal - a reward in that you knew when you’d accomplished it. You could see as you were going forward, I am likely to actually get this thing done, or I am likely to be able to need help, or I am likely to need help doing it. This is opposed to so much of the work now that is in a virtual, abstract space for which it is really hard to figure out where you are in the process, whether or not you will be successful, and even sometimes whether or not, sometimes, you have been successful. This is part of the existential problem of today.
Mason: It becomes a question of, what is the environment? We’re so divorced from what we understand as the environment, the outside, the out-there, the thing under the sky. The environment that we live in is one that we’ve constructed for ourselves, whether it’s our physical homes with rooves and artificial lights or our technologised environments where we’re interacting through these shiny glowing rectangles that we have in front of us - even right now - or this capitalist environment of markets and commerce that requires us to act and operate in certain ways.
We’ve created the prison and then put ourselves into it. By being in the prison, all we’re learning is how to be more effective criminals. That’s driving a lot of our desire about what we think about the future and what the future human might look like. The word that I was searching for in the book was ‘cyborg’. Should we take full control of our evolution? Should we take seriously the idea that we could become intelligent designers? Should we start constructing our bodies for these environments? Or, and I think you tease it in the book, should we realise that because we’ve constructed these environments, it doesn’t necessarily make them good environments to be in? There’s a way in which we can change the environment, have a more embodied connection with the ‘out there’, and not drive these narratives whereby the only way we can be competitive in the market is to implant a chip in our heads so that we can compete with AI.
Weinstein: The problem is that the constructed environment has an almost totally arbitrary relationship with us. What you’re saying is right but you’re focused on the part of it that just sucks. The part of it that you know isn’t working because you’re doom-scrolling on your phone. You’ve got the phone in your hand. It really couldn’t be a more concentrated piece of technology. Some person or a collection of people who you will never meet have figured out how to addict you to drugs that are produced inside of your mind rather than fed to you through some other mechanism. This is a glaring defect.
On the other hand, were you to hop on your bicycle - maybe there’s a beautiful Rails-to-Trails near you, and you could fly almost like a bird through some beautiful landscape and be freed to think really remarkable thoughts because what you were doing didn’t require your conscious mind, it just required you to do something that was almost effortless - that’s the opposite. It’s highly technological. It’s such an improbable device that it didn’t even have an inventor. It was hundreds of years of little insights stacked on top of each other before Dunlop finally added the inflatable tyre which made it practical. That object frees you. It is the opposite of your cellphone. It doesn’t enslave you. It is liberating.
What I would argue is we are faced with a question. Is there a mechanism for just simply filtering the technology and built environment that we encounter so that it’s all like the bicycle and not at all like the dopamine traps that arrive through your phone? What we’re really discovering is that if you ask the market, “What do we want?” it’ll give you both things. The ones that will dominate your environment will be the ones that make the biggest profits. They will drive out the others and so the world begins to look like more and more duplicates of your phone. The world is less and less hospitable to people on bicycles.
We have to choose. We have to go off autopilot and we have to say, how do we leverage technology so that it liberates us to do the stuff that matters, rather than allow it to enslave us? That’s really the choice. I don’t think it’s as hard as it sounds. Really, spotting the problem is the first step and then saying, well, given that we understand that we are partially slaves and partially liberated, can we choose?
Heying: So here’s another comparison, if I may. I hope I’m not talking out of school here, but before we went on air here, I said that I had remembered so fondly the conversation that you, Luke, had on stage with Bret in 2018, in London. You said you weren’t sure that we would remember. Of course, we both did. Not only because you actually are just a terrific interviewer and it was a wonderful event, but because we were there in person. The entire event was embodied. This conversation is terrific and I think in part it is easier and warmer, precisely because we have interacted in person before, albeit three or three and a half years ago, and on one night, at one event. It was preceded by cocktails, which of course is also enhancing. The conversation itself was wonderful, but it was in person.
What all is gained by having a live audience of people responding in real time to a conversation between the two of you? We don’t know all of the answers to that. We may at some point. That is the promise of science, but good scientists recognise that while we aspire to understand everything that is true, we may never get there and we may also never know exactly how close we are. But it is also true that there are things that are ineffable about the physical experience in real space with one another. Smells and just perturbations in the air that are not necessarily things that are measured and are not necessarily what we are focusing on. Because they’re not easily measured, they don’t tend to be what’s tracked, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable.
Weinstein: Yeah, it’s a marvellous example actually. If you think about it, on one hand, it was an ancestral gathering of people face to face. On the other hand, we were there by virtue of an aeroplane and I believe we signalled an Uber. The beer was made with an ancient technology of using creatures to make alcohol out of sugars.
Heying: You were mic’d.
Weinstein: We were mic’d. I remember several of the conversations after the event. The point is, it is neither one nor the other. It was very natural in one regard. It was technologically enhanced in other regards, but it worked. That’s really the point.
Heying: It was a modern campfire, which is what we call for in the book. It was a kind of campfire.
Weinstein: It was a modern campfire. I think, really, you could understand the book as a caution about technological progress, but that’s really not what it is. It’s really an argument for renegotiating the deal with modernity, at every level.
Mason: It’s an argument for integration. Realising what’s been left in the standing reserve and what we potentially have to lose, not just gain. To return to what we have lost, and to understand why it was historically or traditionally so important. You look at some of that ancient wisdom in the book. It was so wonderful to see you both end up with the chapter that was looking so beautifully at the nuances of how things like ritual can actually inform us on how to live as human beings, and how that shouldn’t be rejected so easily as we do.
Religion, as well. Religion, as you say in the book, is a useful way to efficiently encapsulate past wisdom. The problem with re-engaging with things like nature and past wisdom is that they’re not very useful to the market. No, they’re not very useful to extractive corporate capitalism. If anything, they may actually go against the growth imperative - at least the economic growth imperative.
The question is then, how do we amplify the advantages of reengaging with things like chronobiology? Instead of looking towards cybernetics as the way in which we’re going to deal with our new technologised environment, how do we realise that in actual fact, human beings don’t need to strap on tools and technologies? They have innate superpowers, and those superpowers can be understood through things like taboos, through relationships with lunar cycles and the moon. We know, intuitively, these things, and yet we’ve chosen to amplify scientific knowledge over intuitive knowledge. Yet both have extreme value. I guess, how do we integrate the two?
Weinstein: First thing is the toughest, which is compelling people that the ill-at-ease sense - the dysfunction - is not normal. This is hard in some sense because of the Stephen Pinker problem. Pinker is not wrong that we live in the best of times. We do. We are also in tremendous danger. We are living longer, but we are not healthy. We are out of sorts.
I think most people - and in fact, you’ll find entire fields - are compelled by the idea that somehow selection has failed. The entire field of orthodontia is founded on the idea that there is something about our genes that doesn’t get our genes into the right place. It’s total nonsense and that’s not what happened. What happened is we changed the way we interact with food as children. Our jaws don’t get the right physical feedback for our teeth to come in the right place. Our jaws literally collapse, and then we move the teeth separate from the jaws and get them into an organisation that looks right but it can’t be right because the jaw still isn’t the right shape.
The point is…look, the right thing to do about the fact that your teeth aren’t in the right place might be to move them. The more important thing is not to do that to another generation of kids. You can’t even make the argument, because it would require expert orthodontists to admit that what we are doing requires them to move our teeth. Their entire industry is built on us feeding on the wrong stuff.
Heying: Giving kids hard things to chew on increases the chances that their jaws will become strong. Their musculature will become strong and their jaws will have space for their teeth to grow into.
Weinstein: It’s not even just their jaws. It has to do with sleep apnea and perhaps ADHD. Lots of things are downstream for this single error. The point is if you don’t know very much about creatures because, let’s say, you’re not a biologist who has spent lots of time with them, you may think that selection is a crude process that just isn’t very effective at making a really excellent critter. That’s why you’re constantly out of sorts with your environment. Selection just didn’t do the job properly.
Nope. This is a developmental error. The fact is, your ancestors were beautifully designed for their environment. Once you spot that and once you recognise that the out-of-sort-ness is something that we continue to build into each new generation, then the question is, is there a way to just simply undo that process so that we can again feel like critters that are well designed for our environment?
What would that feel like? I’ll just point out - let’s take something that isn’t totally natural. Let’s take the stairs in your house. Walking downstairs is a really complex problem. Ask a robot engineer about the problem of getting a robot to properly walk downstairs and they’ll give you an earful. It’s very difficult to get a robot to walk down the stairs. But you’re a robot, you walk down the stairs all the time and you don’t give it a second thought. I mean, when was the last time you fell down the stairs?
Mason: I live in a ground-floor apartment so I haven’t had the opportunity to fall down the stairs, but it’s been a long long time, Bret, since I tripped.
Weinstein: I walk downstairs every day. I literally have never fallen down, and I don’t think about it. My point is, the stairs are completely intuitive. In part, because the stairs are no different to the stairs I grew up with.
Heying: Right, but to this point - and I’m not sure exactly where you’re going with this so I’ll let you finish in a moment - but to this point, I also grew up with stairs. I shot up quickly at some point and became athletic but I was gangly. I started reliably falling upstairs. I wanted to take them three stairs at a time and race up the stairs. One time in ten, I would faceplant on the stairs. They were carpeted and it was fine, and I was fine, but it’s not intuitive until it’s become intuitive. That’s what development is about. It’s what the learning process is about.
Weinstein: Right, but think about this. It was intuitive to you to fall up the stairs every time, which is definitely the better direction. Ask anyone who has fallen downstairs and they will tell you that cognitively, you were on it. But no, you’re right. It is a developmental puzzle. The point is, if it was a changing puzzle…you know, what we don’t realise is that there is actually a law and code that says exactly how tall a stair has to be. There’s a range. Stairs become very familiar.
The point I want to make about them is that they don’t change from one generation to the next. Having learned stairs, they’re not easy when you learn them. You may fall down the stairs as a tiny child, but you do learn them. Then you stop thinking about them. Stairs become so intuitive that frankly, I know it’s stupid but it’s not all that rare that I find myself in a hurry putting on my shirt as I’m going down the stairs. I still don’t fall. It’s so intuitive that my conscious mind is unnecessary to the process. I just automatically walk down the stairs.
The point is, everything else can be like that, too. Riding a bicycle is not intuitive at first but it is learnable and then it becomes so intuitive that you couldn’t even explain how you do it to somebody. You would have to strain to think about what it is that you’re actually doing. Do you realise that as you ride a bicycle, you’re constantly falling off and steering very slightly in the direction that you’re falling which is why you don’t fall? No, you don’t think it.
Heying: But that is exactly the tension that we introduce in the first chapter of the book and return to near the end, between culture and consciousness. When you’re fully in your conscious mind, learning how to do something - whether because you’re a child and you’re learning how to do everything or because you’ve decided to branch out into a new way of thinking or doing as an adult - you’re in your conscious mind and everything has to be thought through. Sometimes, explicit directions are helpful and sometimes they’re really not.
In our teaching, we used to play frisbee with our students. The idea that you can exactly describe what it is, how you stand and how you hold the frisbee - for some people that works but by and large, a few pointers and then it’s practice. Then they have to do it, and do it, and do it, until it becomes subconscious. Then it goes into what we are calling, in the book, the ‘cultural layer’. That’s where you are in flow. That’s where, if you do get asked explicitly, “Tell me what it is that you’re doing.” then you’ll lose it. You may be more likely to have a bad throw or come off your bike in a way that you weren’t intending. That being pulled out of the flow - back into a beginner’s mind, as it were - is really challenging.
Weinstein: Another way to say this is, the conscious mind is the most uniquely human thing that we have, and it is a gift. The problem is, a world that we are ill-suited to occupies the conscious mind on nonsense. On the font that you’re making some proforma communication on behalf of your employer to some person that you don’t wish to be communicating with. That is a pointless waste of consciousness. The question is, can we structure our environments so that our conscious minds are free to engage in things that are worthy of them, rather than having to be used on the mundane puzzles that we are constantly faced with because technology has changed the world out from under us?
Mason: The idea of being pulled out of the flow; it feels like that’s what needs to happen to us. Some sort of rug-pull to make us realise, hey, make this strange again. See it as something that is odd and other and weird, and non-natural. As you both wonderfully describe, we’re born into these cultures and environments, and we never question the operating system that underlies our lived reality. It was our parent's generation who went through the same struggles to get a job, to pay rent and to pay taxes - these inevitable things - and then they went through and died.
There are wonderful things about having a capitalist system that at least ties nation-states together so that war doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Also, there are terrible things about having a capitalist society that doesn’t allow, as Bret was saying, for individuals to truly thrive and use their consciousness in ways they should and could. Will it ever be possible without some form of collapse to be able to escape the environment that we’re currently in? Do we have to go to the extremity and not just potentially destroy some human beings in the process but also the process through which we’re creating the environment that we’re currently in?
I had a beautiful thing recently which was about the Fermi paradox. T Fermi paradox - as you guys know - is the discussion of whether aliens exist. It’s possible that we’ve never interacted with aliens because aliens never get past the state where they survive the technological advances that are required to get off planet Earth. They basically destroy themselves before they develop spaceships. I had a wonderful inverse argument for the Fermi paradox, which was that perhaps the real reason we haven’t met aliens is that they realised that creating an extractive corporate capitalist environment was the most terrible thing that they could possibly do. They don’t have any billionaires to go to space and they’re quite happy living in a relationship with nature, so they never developed the desire to get off the world, because the world that they exist on is a heavenly one. Why would they want to go anywhere else?
Do we need to get to that stage? Do we actually need to realise that actually, maybe this is as good as it’s going to get? Perhaps stepping back a little might not be such a bad thing.
Heying: I’m a huge fan of the Fermi paradox and I’ve considered a number of the possible reasons that Fermi and others have proposed. I think the issue I would take with this new possible framing that you introduce is that it’s a conflation of two things. It’s a conflation of an extractive…let’s just stick with ‘extractive’, because capitalism will happen everywhere that you end up with complex social economic systems on any other planet. But the level of extraction that we’re doing which is unsustainable is, on Earth at this moment, certainly tied up in many of the attempts to get off the planet.
That need not be. The desire to get off the planet and the desire to know what other worlds might look like will be, I think, inherent in any complex lifeform. That is exploration. That is what Bret has called, a number of times, ‘the explorer modes’ that all evolved life experiences, certainly, the desire for discovery and the desire for exploration - which are different but related. Many scientists - I would hope that all scientists - have that desire for discovery and that many of us, regardless of whether scientists or not, have the desire for exploration. We need not tie the desire to know what else is out there and to actually have a better understanding of the huge universe - or at least the galaxy - that we live in, with extractive processes that happen to be the instantiation that we’re living with.
Weinstein: I do think it’s a conflation. I also think that we need to tease apart something. If we call our system ‘capitalist’ and we recognise that it is extractive, exploitative and ultimately extremely dangerous, we may miss the fact that it is also the root of prosperity. That ultimately - if we do figure out how to liberate ourselves - we will all benefit from it.
I think the way to view it is, markets are very good at certain things. They’re absolutely appalling at other things. What you want to do is point them at those things that they’re uniquely positioned to accomplish. I would argue that, basically, markets are the best mechanism we have ever found to figure out how to accomplish something, but they’re terrible at telling us what to do. What they do is they explore our defects and they sell us stuff we don’t need. They cause us to be dissatisfied in order that we are motivated to buy. If you can shut down one part while leaving the other part intact, it’s the best of both worlds.
Again, the toughest lesson of the book is that it’s neither one nor the other. One does not want to reject markets. That would be a devastating error. On the other hand, one does not want to embrace them as the solution to everything, because they are so good at solving certain problems. You want to point them at those problems that they are capable of addressing and not others. The question is, do we have the collective will to do it? I would also just point out that this desire to explore - what a shame it would be if we did become perfectly satisfied to live here on Earth and not know. Especially if there is biology out there in the universe, to not know what another instance of biology looks like would be tragic. If we had the capacity to see it and we just didn’t bother, that would be an indictment of our species, I would argue.
Heying: Yeah, no, just to respond to that. There is nothing in our solar system that we should be shooting for. There is nothing of interest there. Not to say that people won’t try to make colonies on Mars or the moon. When Bret and I are talking with joy about the possibility of finding other complex life in the universe and other places to be, we’re talking about much further afield, with tools that we do not yet have. Imagining other planets that have entirely different evolutions of life that may in fact be very likely to use all of the same elements - of course, because that’s what elements are - and also evolving via natural selection because that also is going to be a law of the universe. The particular instantiation of chemical formulations - whether, even, carbon is the backbone? Maybe not. Finding out what’s out there and desiring to move there and make a living for ourselves there are actually different questions.
Weinstein: They are. I would also point out that there is an argument to be made. My brother makes the argument that maybe, access to different physics puts these very remote places in proximity on a short timescale that we can imagine. But given what we understand, we’re not talking about anything that we expect to live to see.
Mason: Of course.
Weinstein: But the question is one of humanity giving up on the idea of finding out what other life would even look like. Let’s put it this way. If you just simply compare the mammals of most of the world with the mammals of Australia, it tells you something about how different things can be. That’s within mammals. The question is, what would an entirely other tree of life - or multiple trees of life - could conceivably exist on the same planet? What would that look like?
Heying: Kangaroos are foreign enough.
Weinstein: Yeah.
Heying: This uses all the same stuff.
Weinstein: Kangaroos are funny deer, that’s for sure.
I love how you two are so wonderfully comfortable with contradiction. It’s great to hear how the reason to go to something like outer space is because of this desire for discovery that humanity has. But also, it can be seen as a continuation of the sort of frontiers that you warn against in the book. It’s a continuation of the geographical frontier. Basically, humans have been everywhere on this planet, Earth. There’s nowhere else to colonise, so I guess we’ll colonise space.
It’s mindboggling to me that people actually find the idea of colonising space almost offensive in this day and age. I think you’re not allowed to use the word ‘colonisation’ when you refer to space. That was a new one on me recently, where someone kicked back on the podcast to say, “Hey, you’re not supposed to talk about colonising space.” But the idea is -
Weinstein: Were they aware there is no one there?
Mason: That’s a really good point. What if no one’s there? We’re not colonising anybody, we’re just borrowing the resources of another planet. A little bit of this space argument does fall into those three frontiers that you talk about in the book - the geographical frontier, the technological frontier, and the transfer frontier - which are all driven by human beings’ desire and almost obsession with growth. The sort of growth we’re really talking about is economic growth. When we think about these growth imperatives, they do inform the bedtime stories we tell ourselves about the future. If we believe that growth is tied to those three things that Adam Smith talked about - land, labour and capital - we can see those expressed in the memetic desires for certain sorts of futures.
When it comes to the geographical frontier being limited - i.e. there’s no more land - we start talking about virtual reality and, as we have been talking about here, space. We go, “Oh no, we can digitise land and create infinite land inside of a server rack somewhere.” When we talk about the limitations of labour, we go, “We can just create robots. We don’t need human labour anymore. We’ll have robots do all the labour.” When we talk about capital and there being a limitation of capital, we go, “Oh no, no, we’ll digitise that, too. We’ll create bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. We’ll create infinitely growing forms of capital.” All of those stories don’t allow us to divorce from those three frontiers - the geographical, the technological and the transfer.
You argue in the book that in actual fact, we should, at least slightly, pump the breaks with our obsession with growth and move towards something called the ‘fourth frontier’. Why the fourth frontier, and why should we not look for exponential growth as a thing that’s going to take us into the future?
Heying: That was a great setup, incidentally. It was fabulous.
Weinstein: Yeah it was a great setup. I do want to adjust one thing about it, though.
Mason: Go on, please.
Weinstein: Human beings are obsessed with growth, no doubt about it. So is every other living creature.
Mason: Right, okay.
Weinstein: This is an important thing to understand. If you have a sexually reproducing creature, on average that creature can expect to produce two offspring that survive to reproduce. On average, that creature will live in a population that is neither growing nor shrinking. It’s hovering around carrying capacity and so replacement is what they can expect. Imagine a creature in a population where two was the number of offspring that they would expect to produce, who flies over a difficult mountain range and finds a hospitable valley on the other side, on which there are no creatures of their type. That creature might leave a thousand offspring. The point is, growth in population is an evolutionary success. That’s what it looks like. It feels very positive. The creature that finds the valley on which it has no competitors has had a stunning success.
The human version of this, where we get obsessed with economic growth, is a special case of something biologically general. One way to get there is the geographical frontier. Next way to get there is the technological frontier, where one takes something geographical and makes more of it. A certain number of individuals can live as hunter-gatherers on a given piece of territory. If they engage in farming, the number of individuals might go up by orders of magnitude. They didn’t find any new land but it is as if they did. The third frontier is transfer, where a creature addicted to growth can’t find any new place to go and doesn’t have access to some new technology that would allow them to make more with less. So they steal it from someone else. We label this frontier, more-or-less, as a warning. The idea is that tragedies of history mostly look like people faced with austerity who figure out who has resources that they can’t defend. They go after them and they come up with all sorts of excuses for why they do it. The point is, it’s the way to bootstrap something that feels like growth where there’s no growth to be had.
Our point about the fourth frontier is that once you recognise that we are addicted to growth for evolutionary reasons that are truly ancient and that that’s not going to go away, there’s a question of, do we want to have tragedy after tragedy, and atrocity after atrocity? Or do we want to engineer a system that satisfies our desire for growth without having to find anything new? This is conceivable. It may sound utopian. It is not. We are anti-utopian. But if I describe a state of permanent springlike weather, I sound like I’ve described something utopian. Yet that characterises the building you live in. We don’t violate any laws of physics. There is nothing mysterious about how we do it. The point is, we create permanent spring inside your house because that’s the desirable way to live.
The question is, can we create something that feels like growth, that satisfies human beings and liberates them to do the things that are truly worth our time and conscious effort while freeing us from having to think about where we’re going to extract the next resource that we can turn into stuff. This is possible but it’s not automatic. We have to recognise that this is a puzzle that needs to be solved. We don’t know enough to solve it. We can’t blueprint it. We make the argument in the book that we will have to navigate and prototype our way there.
The bad news is that that’s going to be a long process. Nobody alive today will live to see the fourth frontier realised. On the other hand, as soon as we start navigating there, things begin to get better. It will feel like growth right away as we approach this. We see lots of things that lean in this direction. Cryptocurrency does suggest a way of liberating us from the horrors of fiat currency. Electric cars do liberate us from having to fight wars and extract mucky resources from deep beneath somebody else’s territory. We are seeing hints that we have the kind of capacity to build the fourth frontier, but we have to recognise it as a problem first.
Mason: Is it a uniquely Western problem? Should we start realising that in the West, the partisan nature of our Western democracy, this tie that we have to whether we’re on the left or right - it basically mutes our value system and makes our value system purely about policy. It stops our ability to think truly about the future. China has a 10 or 50 year plan. Western democracies such as Britain and America have a four year plan at best. I almost look at China with some form of envy. They’ve almost got it right. We’re so tied with fighting with eachother over the stupid situations of identity politics or whatever it is, that we spend our time weakening our democracies internally, without the impact of any external nation. Should we accept that the future you’re talking about is one that won’t be built by Western civilisation, but will be built by the East?
Weinstein: Well that’s -
Heying: We don’t need to accept it, but it is possible.
Weinstein: Yeah. I think China is clearly engaged in what you’re talking about. I wish somebody had founded a new nation rather than us being relegated to calling it China. China is obviously a very ancient civilisation and it had the exact opposite instinct for literally thousands of years. In fact, as I understand it, it dismantled its own fleet of sailing ships rather than going to colonise the New World.
Heying: I mean at some level, the US is to the UK 250 years ago what China is to the West now. It looks like it’s doing something different but it’s just doing the same thing with modern tools. It’s obviously an imperfect analogy, but there are ways in which these transfer of resource frontiers are engaged, throughout history, in ways that look different but are actually, simply, when it comes down to it, transfer of resource frontiers.
Weinstein: We can’t afford to wait. We can’t afford the descent into tyranny that’s coming. In some sense, we have to shut China down. My concern is that China has actually discovered or evolved the solution to a problem that used to reign in totalitarian states that look something like China does now. That’s probably a discussion for a different time.
Mason: Another time.
Weinstein: But you can’t have a world of fourth frontier nations and other nations.
Mason: Yeah.
Weinstein: On the other hand, because a fourth frontier would satisfy the insatiable desire to find new growth, it would be in some sense like the way the cellphone has taken over the world. Nobody needed to dictate to anybody that they needed to get a cellphone. The cellphone did so many things for you that everybody adopted because it enhanced their life. Of course, they invited the wolf in, because the business model behind the cellphone is predatory. The same idea. It has to spread because it is desirable to participate in a fourth frontier world rather than be something that is imposed on anybody.
It is unclear whether we are even willing to recognise the problem that is posed by China. I wonder if the conversation we need to have globally is one about, what has China discovered. Has it discovered a mechanism? I’m not sure that it is even right to call China communist, even on the inside. That’s not really how it functions, but it is authoritarian. It has engaged in a kind of planned economy authoritarianism inside its borders while behaving in a ruthless capitalist fashion pointed outwards. That may indeed be a magic formula from the point of view of accruing and wielding power. It is not a magic formula from the point of view of liberating human beings to do what they are actually good at and what is worth their time. In some sense, that’s the argument we have to make. It’s not that China is incorrect. Obviously, it’s quite correct about certain things. It’s quite correct about how to accomplish something. It is, in some sense, philosophically in breach of contract with our species because it subjugates as a matter of course.
Heying: I mean, this kind of brings us full circle, right? If what China is doing is successful and therefore an evolutionarily stable strategy, that is not the same thing therefore it’s good.
Mason: Yeah.
Heying: There are plenty of evolutionarily stable strategies out there, like genocide, rape, and being predatory outside of your own borders in order to accrue more and more for the people inside your own borders, of which there are many examples throughout history which have been functional. That doesn’t make them right.
Mason: No. We must have evolved a moral compass for a reason. There is one last question that I have. Like the new atheists, I’ve always considered you both to be new progressives. New atheists are not ‘in Vogue’ anymore, but new progressives, on the other hand - folks like you - are very much ‘in Vogue’. How does one be truly progressive in the 21st century? How do you balance conservative and liberal positions and how do you integrate both modern and ancient wisdom? What is your advice for an audience who wants to live in the comfortable contradictions that both of you two live in?
Weinstein: I would say a couple of things. First of all, I would say that this new progressivism -
Heying: I love it.
Weinstein: Well…
Heying: No?
Weinstein: I’m going to argue there’s a better way.
Heying: A better term?
Weinstein: A better term. ‘Your other left.’
Mason: Oh right.
Weinstein: Your other left.
Mason: Well if you keep taking lefts, you end up full circle. I’ve always liked Professor Steve Fuller’s idea of moving away from left-right politics towards up-down politics. Perhaps that’s a more comfortable place to be. Technoprogressive versus technoconservative. In your case, precautionary versus proactionary. You need both of those tensions to live in a prosperous society. Left and right just end up with us arguing with each other over silly things.
Weinstein: Yeah, no, I’m being -
Mason: Facetious
Weinstein: Ironic. Yeah. You know? Not that left. Your other left.
Mason: Oh, okay.
Weinstein: It just strikes me as right based on the modern insanity that one finds on the mainstream left. Anyway, the short answer to your question is that there are a couple of things that have to be recognised. Literally, two. One is the dynamism and productivity of the West, who have been so spectacularly successful at liberating human beings - which really ought to be the objective of the exercise. That dynamism does not come on one side or the other. It comes from a tension between two opposed forces. This is the way biology works, too. You have muscles that extend your arm and muscles that retract them. The magic isn’t on one side or the other - it’s both. We have the desire to solve problems. That’s a progressive desire. We have the unintended consequence that comes along with solution making and the desire to resist those unintended consequences is fundamentally conservative. Right? The conservatives aren’t right. The progressives aren’t right. At the moment, conservatives are defending the gains made by progressives of the past who were correct. The radicals of the past were correct about many things and now conservatives are defending those insights against modern left-ists which is a modern feature of history. The point is, this isn’t a victory for conservatism. It isn’t a victory for liberalism. It’s a victory for the system that balances those two things.
The question - the thing that we have to settle - is, where in history are we? Are we at a moment where things are so good, Stephen Pinker style, that the right thing to do is to conserve the system that we have? Or are things messed up enough that we have no choice but to change them, to fix them? The problem is -
Mason: We don’t know. We just -
Weinstein: I’m afraid we do know.
Mason: We do?
Weinstein: The reason that we are on the left and the reason you’re calling us progressives is that the fourth frontier is an argument for absolutely radical transformation of the way we live. Why? Is it because we don’t recognise how good things are? No. It’s because we can’t stay here. This isn’t safe. It’s not a long-term plan. So the point is, look, we are arguing for radical change. We are not unaware of how dangerous that is. That is, I think, the hallmark of the modern progressives that you’re going to be discovering. It’s a question of needing to change, not being hungry for change for its own sake, right?
What we have is an excellent prototype. It tells us many of the things that work. We can also see many of its defects, but we also just don’t have a choice. Radical change is coming whether it is imposed on us by the limits of the planet or we decide to take control of it and move forward in a rational way. But, you don’t want to do that without conservatives playing their role, too, and being eagle-eyed in looking for the unintended consequences that will arise as a result of the radical change we have no choice but to engage in. Hopefully, we can find the adults in both camps who are ready for that job, because neither one is going to do it alone.
Mason: What I love about you both is that you can playfully engage with the contradictions between culture and consciousness, East and West, left and right, liberal and conservative, modern and ancient. You both represent not just a way of being human, but fundamentally doing human. For that, I want to thank you both for being on the FUTURES Podcast.
Heying: Thank you so much.
Weinstein: Thank you so much. It was marvellous and I look forward to the next one.
Mason: Thank you to Bret and Heather for revealing ways to combat the incompatibility between consciousness and culture. You can find out more by purchasing their new book, ‘A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution, and the Challenges of Modern Life’, available now.
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Recorded, Mixed & Edited by Luke Robert Mason
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