The jarring reality is that nearly all of our institutions, including politics, media, Hollywood, and “science” have been captured by financial incentive and will to power. This corruption has obfuscated our sense-making abilities and as a result we are not demanding better leadership with our votes. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are experts in evolutionary science, and they’ve used their expertise to analyze and question everything over the past 2+ years of this pandemic. This podcast touches on the pandemic, the paradoxes of woke culture, and some of the important principles of evolutionary biology as discussed in their latest bestseller A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide To The 21st Century.

A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide To The 21st Century | https://amzn.to/3IKohDC

AUBREY: Bret and Heather, really looking forward to this conversation.

HEATHER: We are too. Thank you for having us.

BRET: Excited to be here.

AUBREY: Absolutely. I wanted to start with a quote from your book. The quote is, "Our species' pace of change now outstrips our ability to adapt. We are generating problems at a new and accelerating rate and it is making us sick, physically, psychologically, socially and environmentally. If we don't figure out how to grapple with the problem of accelerating novelty, humanity will perish, a victim of its success." So we've talked about this on the podcast, Daniel Schmachtenberger, some different people, talking about the various existential threats that we're facing. What I wanted to ask you guys, as a way to start, and I wanted to ask each of you separately, is if you were to summarize everything that we experience with the most significant single meta crisis that we're experiencing and if you had to, I know it could be hard to maybe have a top three or something like that but if you said the single meta crisis that we're experiencing from your perspective, what would that be? 

HEATHER: Wow. You want to go first?

BRET: Sure. I'm glad you put it in the framework of meta crisis, because it's very easy to point to crises. I've got a long list of crises that I think all tell the same tale. It really is the meta crisis. It's the thing that creates all of these: Fukushima, the Deepwater Horizon, the Aliso Canyon disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, COVID-19. All of these things are really generated by the same phenomenon. We can get into some detail about what that phenomenon is and why it creates these crises but the hallmark, the way you can recognise that, yep, it's time to add another one to the list, is that you discover that humanity is doing something that you didn't know about until after the disaster has already happened. Who knew what a credit default swap was before the financial crisis? Who knew that we were pressurizing old oil deposits with natural gas before Alison Canyon? Who knew that we were drilling wells in the bottom of the ocean so deep that we couldn't plug them if the blowout preventer failed? These are all discoveries that we make too late. Just to complete the list, who knew that nuclear power plants required absolutely constant vigilance and that the disruption of the diesel generator backups created nearly instant meltdowns? And who knew that we were enhancing viruses that would have had a very difficult time infecting human beings and turning them into absolutely diabolical pathogens? These are all discoveries that we made once the horses were out of the barn. The question is what exactly has happened here on planet Earth that is now a phenomenon that has occurred six, seven, eight times in the last couple decades?

HEATHER: Well, I don't know if you want to respond to that before I respond?

AUBREY: Certainly, I think there's a lot more to be said there. And I definitely either bracket that and move over to your answer or if you'd like to, Bret, continue and describe and flush out what that meta crisis actually is because it's a meta crisis of, seems both truth and transparency, vigilance, common sense. There's a lot of things that I could point to there but I think you could probably condense that into something that is a little bit more palatable.

BRET: Sure. What we've done is we've plugged a bunch of systems into each other in ways that our protections don't anticipate. We human beings, it turns out, are biological critters. Speaking of biological critters, a cat has just landed on the desk here. But all biological critters are programmed, in some sense, by selection, to look for untapped opportunities. We human beings do this in a way that's special. We're uniquely conscious and somewhat obsessed with the little annoyances in our lives where something could be done more efficiently. In any case, that bent has been a key to human success because human beings, by virtue of our ability to exchange abstract ideas through language, can team up and we can solve really difficult technical problems and come up with solutions that really are liberating. The problem is we don't know when the problem that we are pointing ourselves towards has a solution that isn't worth the risk. This is especially bad when the risks are particularly delayed. Nuclear power, for example, that is to say uranium-based nuclear power, can look exceedingly green. It looks like a very clean technology. But the point is that's because the spilling of the nuclear waste into the environment is a rare circumstance that is very intense when it occurs. We don't anticipate it. Even if nine people out of 10 would look at the prospect of making nuclear power safe enough and conclude, actually, probably it can't be done, it only takes the one out of 10, who says actually, "I don't see the big deal; I think we can manage this," to ensure that we have a world with, as it currently stands, something like 400 civilian nuclear reactors, all of which depend on constant vigilance. That was a harder argument to make a few weeks ago. Once the Russians started shooting at the largest reactor in Europe, it became obvious that building such a thing was a vulnerability because, effectively, what you've done is put a nuclear bomb on your own territory waiting for an enemy to decide it's in their interest to blow it up. Now, the Russians were smart enough not to do it in this case, but how long before you run up against an enemy who isn't smart enough?

AUBREY: So then if you had to say, what is the fundamental drive then? Is this, basically, the marshmallow experiment where people are looking for short term profitability, short term solutions for their own greed and personal gain, but not looking at the long term consequences and delayed gratification of having a better world for themselves and everybody else? What's going on? Somehow there's a failure in our biological logic that's what's happening here, right?

HEATHER: If I may jump in, the first part of your answer, I thought that what I had written down was exactly what you were talking about. I think, as you expand on it, I'm actually hearing something slightly different. So if I may try to answer what I think, in a word, your meta-crisis is and then add my own, which, of course, they're all entangled with one another for both better and for worse. The problem is evolutionary, one. I think, at its most pristine, what you're talking about, is the problem of reductionism. The problem of not seeing complex systems and understanding complex systems for what they are, and instead taking, individually, easily measurable things, things that are quantifiable, things that can be basically debased into metrics, then the human tendency, which will be the tendency of anything that does conscious work, like humans do, is to imagine that what you've measured is the whole, and to take that most easily measured thing, which is also analogous to the short time horizon as the bigger, more complex thing, which is itself analogous to the longer time horizon. This, of course, is a theme that we explore throughout the book as well, the problem of metrics, the problem of reductionism. The answer that I came up with, as you started talking, as you first asked the question, Aubrey, was that we're outsourcing our thinking to authorities and to systems, that we are not relying on our own individual analytics and integrity to come to our own conclusions. That could sound like a very naive answer, because in a world as complex as that of the 21st century, in which we are all benefiting from so many systems that we can't possibly understand even most of the systems that we are individually dependent on, how is it that I could be arguing for something in which there is no set and forget, in which we do understand everything? We can't. Is there an answer to the problem of: all of us are outsourcing too many things, and then we are more easily led astray, because we're not accustomed to relying on our own intellect and intuition and creativity analysis? I think there is. It's doable. I think that we were actually doing this for many, many years as educators through truly personalized and bespoke education in which you engage students. You can't teach 1,000 students at a time this way. But you engage students as the individuals that they are, recognising that almost everyone has capacity, everyone comes with individual baggage and thus has ideas about: I can't do math, oh, I can't remember names, I'm not good at this, that or the other. You get to know them a little bit and as soon as they can recognise that when you push back on something that they say or you say or anyone says that you're not inherently pushing back on them as a human being, then you start pushing back and you say, "No, I don't think that's right. Here's why..." No, that's not right. Boy, do you level people up really, really quickly. Once people have been leveled up this way, they have a taste for it, they want it, they never again want to just be able to open the paper and say, "Well, if it says so, I guess it's true." It does take more work and it takes more time. The asleep way can feel like meditation, but it's not. It's a very rough sleep that actually brings with it no peace and being able to and being driven to actually do the analysis for yourself or being able to, at any moment, brings with it a much deeper sense of you know what, as much as I know I can't control a bunch of this, I can assess it at a level or I've come to understand how to figure out who else can assess it and who I can put my trust in, such that I can actually come to know some of what's going on. I think had we had those kinds of educational systems in place, many more of us would have been aware of things like the Deepwater Horizon, the potential for the Deepwater Horizon, the potential for Fukushima, the potential for SARS-CoV-2, the potential for the responses to SARS-CoV-2 than almost any of us did.

BRET: I want to add two other things if I can.

AUBREY: Please, please.

BRET: The central theme of our book is hyper-novelty, which you hinted at here, which is really, in some sense, a related rates problem. It's not that human beings can't adapt to novel circumstances, even if they're complex. It's that the rate at which we are producing these circumstances is greater than the rate at which we are learning to manage them. That's a problem that has only spiraled out of control as the number of different topics on which we are making progress, which as Heather points out, we individuals are not in a good position to even know what risks we're facing. We have compounded the issue with a complex interaction of complex problems. There's a secondary issue, which is that the game theory that unfolds around our system because the engine of our system is competitive, which is not new. That is an evolutionary engine that has been upgraded with economic tools but because that is the engine, what it does is it sets up a situation in which people who can figure out how to profit, even as they put us at risk, tend to be rewarded by the system, even if the risks don't justify the profits that they made. So what we have is a system in which, effectively, capture evolves. All of the systems that you might use, maybe I don't have the tools to interpret the hazards that surround nuclear power or a gain of function research or something like this but I should be able to proxy to somebody who does have those tools. The problem is when almost anybody that you would proxy to has been captured by a system that has a perverse incentive, then you may do the right thing, which is to say, "Well, I don't know this topic, but that person does." But if that person is blinding themselves to a hazard because that's how they're going to end up with a second home, then that problem results in us continually facing these self-inflicted wounds.

AUBREY: It seems like, in a well functioning culture and society, you do rely on good faith actors then good faith watchdogs of those good faith actors so the media acting is in good faith watching other people who are trying to act in good faith and then the system, you get checks and balances. But what we have is now people, like yourselves, who have just taken an intelligent interest in circumstances surrounding something like COVID let's say, and are just analyzing the data and the facts that are coming out and just talking about it and presenting it. All of a sudden, you're one of the sanest voices throughout this pandemic. I'm grateful that you guys are doing it but it's actually hinting at, like you said, this massive dysfunction in both the actors themselves who are just worried about that next election cycle, or that next quarterly finance board meeting release or whatever that thing is. Everybody's just beholden to the next little milestone and then all of the media and everything is all captured, as you said, by advertisement, and all of the ways in which all of these things are influenced. We have a very broken system which is now putting the onus back on regular individuals who just want to look at things with a sober context to start sounding alarms and raising interest. Fortunately, we have the media mechanism of podcasts, which has still been relatively untouched by censorship that we can actually start to get some of these conversations out. It's certainly not the world that we hoped it was, and that we believed it was. I'm only 41 but the world that I believed existed, I thought it was a little fucked up and a little crapped in a little bit ways but now we're looking at it like, "Come on. This is not it." Now we have to take that burden, it sounds like, back on ourselves.

HEATHER: That's right. I think one of the things that the COVID pandemic has put in stark relief for a lot of people, and many people are getting glimpses of it, but still can't quite believe it, is that for years, it's been increasingly clear, like everyone knows, that politics corrupts people and that many politicians are corrupt. Increasingly, people were coming to understand that too much of the media was in lockstep with either whoever was funding that particular newspaper or with outside invisible interests. In the last few years, increasingly, there was a lot of talk about the corruption in higher ed, but it seems to be focused on the humanities and the social sciences because of the woke ideology, the diversity, equity, inclusion stuff, the post-modernist infringement on good thought. A lot of people, I think almost everyone, imagined that science, because the scientific method is itself such a remarkable process, that the people doing science must still be clean, as it were, must still be actually doing science. As we've talked about many times and many places, not just on our podcast, in fact, by the mid to late 20th century, at least in the West, and specifically, we know the best about the US, the funding of science meant that the goodies that people are offered, once they go into science in order to have a chance of making a name for themselves and having a career and being able to pay their mortgage, puts you on a track, puts you on a line off of which you cannot veer. Once you are doing that, once you are playing that game, you are forced to play more of that game. It involves getting grants from agencies that have their own political bent. That is not a scientific situation at all but it's exactly how almost all science is funded at this point. Part of what we're seeing, the falling apart of sensemaking, in political space and in media space and in Hollywood space is a shame and somewhat understandable to many people. The idea that it's happening within science for exactly the same kinds of reasons and for reasons that have been visible to those of us in science since we were in grad school in the '90s, it was visible. You could see it, you could see that many people who were earning degrees were already not asking questions for themselves. We're getting degrees having worked under someone, we're going to them, come to do work that was not particularly novel, that was in keeping with what the granting agencies wanted to be asked, and that they would train the next generation exactly the same way. So this is not brand new, but is perhaps only in the last couple of years, increasingly visible to people not within the framework of science.

BRET: It's a four-alarm emergency though. Yes, we can all talk about what's wrong with the system. People have done that for decades but I think the point is how wrong is it? Your point about podcasts makes the case very clearly. Should it fall to Heather and me to use our evolutionary toolkit to analyze COVID in real time on podcasts? Does that make sense as a way to navigate a pandemic? No, that doesn't make sense at all. The fact that we actually beat almost everyone in terms of predicting what was going to happen, and that we gave far better advice than the CDC with respect to how to understand the pandemic and protect yourself, that we were ahead of them again, and again and again that this all unfolded on podcasts that are not built for a technical audience at all, says something is so wrong with our core scientific system, our core set of watchdogs, our media, our environment, that this thing has been driven on to the fringe. That's where the only conversation that matters is happening because it has become impossible in the places that it is supposed to happen. That's a four-alarm fire. If we don't wrap our minds around it and say, "Well, what would have to happen in order for us to have these conversations where they should happen? What would have to happen so that the experts stopped giving us the inverse of good advice," which is what they did throughout the pandemic? It's not a fun question but far better that we confront it now because the longer we leave it, the worse it gets.

AUBREY: And this idea of these different agencies also being captured. Supposedly, the FDA was supposed to be this independent arbiter of what was good science and not good science but then you start to look at how interwoven they are with pharmaceutical interests, three of five of the last directors then taking significant equity-compensated board seats with the pharmaceuticals and how all of this entanglement works, you realize that the FDA isn't unbiased anymore, nor is the CDC with all of their grants and donations. You start to see how everything is being captured by this economic model and these short-term incentives. As you said, this really is an incredibly challenging situation with lots of top-down psychological techniques and pressure to scapegoat any ideas that don't agree with the consensus narrative. It's created a very divisive and strange situation where finding out actual information and having real conversations without strange words being attached like right-wing conspiracy theorists, all of these things racist, this...

BRET: Grifter.

AUBREY: Yeah, whatever it is. All of these words, trying to reduce something that's incredibly, hyper-novel, as you say. A human being, you reduce them to a single, tiny little label. Then you think you can explain all of their arguments in the entirety of that human being with this little label? It's worked a little bit, which is also alarming that these very crude propagandist methodologies are also exacerbating the uncovering of everybody going, "Whoa!" You would hope that would happen from a population standpoint like, "Whoa, hey, whoa! We get it. We get the game," but these psychological mechanisms are still effective.

HEATHER: I think, even as individuals, we can both get the game and still fall prey to it. We can understand it analytically and still have the addiction, whatever it is, to the quick fix, to the quick diagnosis, the quick diagnosis of another human being, if it's another human being on social media, for instance, or the quick fix in the form of a pill, which was generated by some public-private partnership between academic scientists and pharmaceutical scientists who were looking not for a cure for something, but for something that can put the symptoms at bay long enough so that you feel good enough so that you'll buy the thing again. The market forces produce precisely the short-term time horizon, that understanding a complex system isn't optimal for.

BRET: They do that. It is also clear in the examples that you put forward that something, whatever the mechanism, I think it has to have been sophisticated and conscious, but even if it was emergent, something has set about making it expensive to listen to people who are making sense. If you listen to us, you have to face the question of are you listening to grifters, are you listening to people who are out of their depth, are you listening to people who have an ax to grind, what exactly is this? The answer is no, none of those things actually add up once you get to the material. You can see that it's not true. But you have to get past those stigmas in order to start listening. Once you get past the stigmas, you can begin to. Here's the core: the work of figuring out how we should understand something like COVID and what we should do about it personally is actually easier than you would expect. COVID is incredibly complex but there's a lot that you can do as you approach the puzzle, diminishing returns being what they are. You could notice first, vitamin D. Do you need to understand deeply how vitamin D functions and what way it is produced? No, you just need to understand that there is this basic, extremely strong connection between vitamin D deficiency and seasonal illness. You need to understand that dietary supplementation is not sufficient for most of us who live in the temperate zones to make enough vitamin D so we're almost all deficient. Once you realize that, and then you realize there's effectively no risk to vitamin D, then the point is well, the obvious thing to do is to supplement. The fact that the CDC never bothered to recommend that tells you that the CDC isn't any good at what the CDC is supposed to be good at. Now you're in a position to say, "Well, all right, are there any others? Is there any other low-hanging fruit?" The answer is, yep, there's a bunch of it.

AUBREY: That's one thing I think you guys have done a really good job of, is trying to find these things that are just simple enough that people can understand it, that will expose that there's something beyond what they're being told. Vitamin D is,  I've heard you guys go back and forth and talk about the different ones that you thought were really pertinent. That one is really quite clear. Also issues with masks and how the recent reversal of those positions, and the lifting of these mandates, even though this COVID-19 is still spreading, and all of a sudden, they're acknowledging that cloth masks don't really do anything. Meanwhile, if you said that 18 months ago, you were getting de-platformed for it and fact-checked and called a conspiracy theorist, all of this whole nonsense, but all of these things are happening. They're just happening like you're throwing something that feels like it should be this giant crash-bang grenade, like when the Navy SEALs go into a house, and it's a flashbang and there's a big light and a big explosion. Everybody's like, "Whoa! Now we get it." All of a sudden, they're throwing it into a vacuum and you're waiting for the sound and we're not hearing it. It's like the flashbang is a dud. Again, we're like, "What? This one's a dud too? No way? What are the odds?

HEATHER: Totally.

AUBREY: It's changing though. It feels like it's starting to shift a little bit. It feels like more people are starting to perk up slowly, not in that flashbang moment that I think we would all like to have seen, but it's starting to have.

HEATHER: I hope so. I think both Bret and I sometimes synchronously and sometimes asynchronously, throughout these last two years, have had these moments of, "Now it's got to happen, right?" The one that felt the most intense for me was at the point that the boosters were released. I was like, "Well, if they try to mandate boosters, a lot of people who were fully vaccinated are not going to go and get boosted. That's going to be a breaking point for a lot of people." They stepped back and never mandated boosters for the most part. There were local ones. One thing I wanted to say is, I would love to know who the really smart, insightful, deep-thinking and deeply-trained vaccinologists and virologists and public health scientists are whom I could be reading and listening to, and taking some more insight from. We have never claimed to be experts in those three things. What we are expert in is evolution. Viruses evolve. This virus seems to have evolved differently from others. We are experts in some regards in this space but there's a reason that we didn't go into any of those fields. It's not what we were particularly drawn to and it's not an area that we claim to be expert in. Obviously, we live in a world in which we need actual experts in viruses and vaccines and public health and there seems to be a remarkable vacuum.

BRET: I would also add that, yes, things are changing. There's a question about why they're changing now. I think we are in danger of losing the most important question of all. When we started talking about this, what we said to each other was that the issue surrounding the virus' origins, surrounding early treatment, and surrounding vaccine safety and efficacy reveal the problem of capture. It's almost impossible to understand, without such examples, just how deeply broken our system is and why. Maybe broken is the wrong term. Our system succeeds brilliantly at something that we do not understand to be its purpose. The problem is because of the way our attention suddenly shifted, at the point that Russia invaded Ukraine, the narrative which was collapsing... The public health authorities effectively got everything inverse, they gave us the inverse of the right advice for two years. There's no level of ineptitude that gets you to the inverse of the right advice. You could get random advice through ineptitude but you can't get the inverse of good advice. The inverse of good advice involves knowing what the right thing to do is and doing the opposite. We were about to get to a place where we were going to have a conversation: How is it that we were so poorly served by our governments at every scale? We shifted topics and it's like the squid disappearing into a burst of ink. What I would say is we're all tired of COVID? Nobody's more tired of COVID. Heather and I have been talking about it almost nonstop for two years. The key is that we not let the issue go until we finally understand what happened. The key to this never happening again, and it could be a worse virus next time or it could be a different topic that fails for the same reason, but the key to it not happening again is understanding the corruption of our system and the role that it plays in harming us.

AUBREY: It seems to me that there's an issue that people have with acknowledging that they were wrong also. There's two camps. There's the people who are like, "Yeah, I've been telling you all," and they might just be bored of it. They may be just letting off the gas a little bit and saying, "All right." You guys talk about the dangers of this idea of: Okay, the mask mandates are lifted. Fine. My own personal inconvenience is being lifted and I can still mostly do what I want. Fine, fine, fine. There's boredom from the people who got the idea. That's one issue and then another issue is people who were vehemently, vehemently, arguing against all of this common sense, everything from vitamin D to ivermectin, or whatever the issue was, or masks, everybody had their own sweet spot of what they were really zeroed in on; vaccine safety and efficacy, it seems so happy to just change the topic, and why are we even talking about this anymore instead of going, "Damn, I'm sorry. I was wrong." It seems like a fundamental issue, another meta-crisis that we're experiencing where people just don't have the stomach and the courage to say, "Hey, whoops, I was really wrong. I'm sorry, y'all. I really thought I was doing the best thing that I could, and giving the best advice I could. I really wanted to help the world, I wanted to make grandma and grandpa safe. I was doing the best thing I could and I was wrong." It seems like instead of taking that route, the easier shinier object is just, "Let's forget about that and not talk about it and put that in." As you guys talk about, there's reasons for everything. There's a reason why this is. Maybe I would just offer this: to go back into the core of your academic research and where you come from as evolutionary biologists is, where is this mechanism where we're so afraid to acknowledge, “Hey, I was wrong"? Why is that so hard for people in this day and age right now?

BRET: It's a great question. I do want to say that there is one silver lining here to the pandemic and the question of wrongness, which is that all of us got something wrong. I've got a little list of things that I feel damn, I should have had that earlier or I got that wrong. And we've been very good, we've been very careful to go back and say, "Hey, we got this wrong and that wrong." That's been one of the things we do. Because everybody got some of it wrong, we can now compare those lists and people who got everything wrong, we can safely ignore them with respect to their insight on future situations. Within those who got a bunch of stuff right, we can say, "Well, alright, how'd you do it," and compare notes and all of that. The answer to your question really is we have a collapse of the thing that would naturally create reasonable authority. We've got a bunch of phonies. Now, I don't know if they know they're phonies. Presumably, some of them do. Many of them probably do not. If your track record is that you got it all wrong, then, of course, you don't want to admit that you got something wrong, because then the point is well, what did you get right? If you don't have anything to point to, then the answer is then why are we listening to you, and why are we paying you, and why are you on our screens? All of the honest brokers you will find are not afraid to talk about what they got wrong, because they don't have everything to lose. In fact, it reflects well on them. It is certainly the case that for an honest audience, hearing somebody say, "You know what? I got hydroxychloroquine wrong. I assumed it didn't work, because that's what I was told by people I believed, and then it turned out that it did." To hear that, it says your model wasn't good enough to spot the error but it says that when you do spot it, you don't pretend. So that actually elevates you unless you do that topic after topic and you're always getting it wrong. When you get things wrong rarely and you correct it, the point is the audience actually increases its trust in you so it's good. The answer to your question then is isn't it interesting that there is this avoidance of that analysis? Doesn't that suggest that, basically, you have a whole cadre of experts who aren't experts at all? Therefore, they must avoid that question because it reflects very badly on them.

HEATHER: I'm reminded of a story we tell in the book, the book, which is, for those who haven't read it, it has almost nothing to do with COVID. In fact, we submitted the first complete draft just as COVID was beginning to emerge into people's consciousness and the world, early March of 2020. We went back and added a few things in and actually the couple of things we added in are a couple of things we got wrong. We were talking about masks, for instance. One of the stories in, actually, the medicine chapter is we go back and we look at what, I don't think was mainstream, but a considerable branch of medical thinking in the early 20th century was that the large intestine, the colon, doesn't seem to do any good. So why don't we just get rid of it? There were a number of these surgeries and a number of doctors and surgeons who were actively arguing for and actively doing these surgeries, they're just removing people's large intestines because they figured that that was something that should be done and was valuable. Of course, this sounds insane to people in 2022. I don't think you could say that to anyone in 2022 and have them go "Yeah, that's probably right." What we don't get from that story is what did it feel like to live then? What did it feel like to be one of those doctors but more to the point, one of those patients or a friend of one of those patients who came away from the doctor saying, "My doctor says I should have my large intestine removed"? What does the friend at the coffee shop say? What does he think? That's the world we've been living in for the last two years. We've been getting advice from people who, as it turns out, either have no idea what they're doing or are actively misinforming us. We're sitting around in coffee shops, most of us, going, "Really, he said that? Well, he's the authority; I guess but kind of doesn't sound right.” One of the things I've been trying to figure out a lot during this is what actually do these historical moments feel like in the moment? It's really easy to think back on historical atrocities or even these things that most people don't know about like the move to remove people's large intestines and go, "Ha-ha-ha. Isn't that obvious? How could you possibly have fallen for that," when the fact was large numbers of people were falling for it? Well, large numbers of people are falling for this right now. How is it that we can reach people in the moment and say, "You know what? There is no ‘follow the science’. You're following the mob? You're not a good guy here. You're not playing the role that you think you are"? How to reach people at that moment is tough. I think all three of us here have reached some people. The question for me is always how to open up more people's hearts and minds, if you will, to be ready not to be part of the mob? They don't think they're part of the mob. They're righteous. They think they're on the side of good and light and science somehow.

BRET: Well, and--

AUBREY: A couple of things come up. Real quick, Bret, let me just talk about a couple of things and I'll get right to you. One, what you're talking about with this large intestine is a perfect example of something you talked about in the book, which is the principle of Chesterton's fence. This idea that, well, we don't know exactly what the large intestine does, but we're pretty sure that we don't need it. Nature fucked up. All of these millions of years of, fuck it! Let's take it out. They didn't really get it and we still don't get it. We understand a little bit, we're starting to understand the importance of bifidobacteria and these different things that are found only in the lar. We're starting to get it but no, we still don't get it, we still don't understand the virome, the biome, the microbiome. We don't understand this shit completely. The idea that you can remove something, it's just the ultimate form of hubris and this reductionism that's reducing this hyper-novel thing, a hyper-novel, human, and then the hyper-novel functioning parts of the human, including organs, and saying, "Yeah, whatever. We can just take that out." That's one thing I think is beautifully pointed out in your book and we're seeing that in this case, especially with even something like all of these things that are happening. We're reducing things too far and having too much too much hubris and not enough respect for the fact that our body has been figuring this out in the most perfect way that a body knows how to figure it out without any bias at all, just figuring it out according to actual nature, influencing it, giving it direct feedback, and then responding through the process of evolution and epigenetics and all of these things. So that's one thing, this massive amount of hubris. Then there's also the, I think it's called the Semmelweis effect, from Ignaz Semmelweis, and they actually made another term about this. Ignaz Semmelweis, for those of you who don't know, he was telling everybody in the OB-GYN, "Hey, if you wash your hands before delivering babies, less people are going to die." The medical establishment, completely shunned him, ended up throwing him into a mental institution where he was beaten, and then died, ultimately, of sepsis largely, probably, because people didn't wash the fucking hands. Then at the end, everybody's like, "Whoops, sorry." What you're talking about is, in the moment, when he's like, "Hey, let's look at this,"wWhere are the people saying, "Okay, hey, should we listen to this guy or what's going on?"

BRET: Those two examples function very differently and, in some sense, you're underselling the issue on the large intestine, because the basic point, the argument that we deploy in the book is you're talking about an organ that carries a certain amount of risk and a tremendous amount of expense to build. If there's one thing you can be absolutely dead certain of, it's that it has a function. Unlike Chesterton's fence, if you're walking down the road with your friend and you run into a gate across the road then the question is does it have a function or doesn't? You know it originally did, but you don't know it currently does. Something as large as the large intestine clearly does, so you don't need to know anything about what it does for you to know that it's functional. You can see this because you got an intermediate case with the appendix. The appendix is the same as the large intestine in the sense that it very definitely has a function whether you know what it is or not, but you can remove it safely unlike the large intestine. Why can you remove it safely? Because you're a modern person who has plenty of food, so the role that it plays in repopulating your gut with good gut flora so that you spend as little time without your symbiome after you've been sick, as possible. That's not so necessary for you because you're not calorie-limited or nutrient-limited in the first place.

HEATHER: We say food-limited specifically.

BRET: Right, but your ancestors were. Anyway, the point is, I actually realized this about the appendix in college. What was it like to live in a world where people didn't know that your large intestine did anything? Well, we lived in a world where people didn't know your appendix did anything. It was bewildering to those of us who understood anything about evolution because it couldn't possibly be as they described it. They described it as a vestigial organ in the process of disappearing but with the number of people who experience appendicitis which would likely kill them if they didn't have a surgeon at their disposal, that's an immense cost for an organ.

HEATHER: People must be dropping dead of appendicitis on the savanna all the time.

BRET: Right, which, of course, doesn't happen. So anyway, what does it say about your doctor if your doctor tells you that your large intestine doesn't have a function? It says that your doctor hasn't thought at all about the way evolution works. The problem is, for reasons that are a purely historical artifact, we teach medicine in a pre-Darwinian form. It should be that every medical school is riddled with Darwinian thinking but they are not. We teach medicine as a non-evolutionary science, so you can get doctors concluding insane things like the large intestine doesn't have a function, which of course, really? Well, then how did it get there?

AUBREY: Right. In the human optimization realm, and in the ways in which I've explored, in the building of the company Onnit, and just exploring things and running some clinical trials on our supplements and trying to understand, just a cursory knowledge, of how things work and also my own explorations in psychedelic medicine, and the understanding that energy is a real thing, that all of these people who are talking about qi and talking about prana weren't just completely woowoo, nonsense, idiots for thousands of years, there's something really there and I felt it and I have a gnosis, I have a gnosis of these things, it makes me then also wonder just how much more information is going to come out? I think you just have to have the humility to say, "Maybe." I'm not deep into the science of water, and how water could be alive or structured in these different ways but I can watch my cats and I know my cats like water that's freshly coming out of the faucet a lot more than water that stale in a bowl. There's something about that that makes me wonder if maybe they know something about water. Maybe they know something about the energy of it, maybe they know something about the energy of food and we can't just register it on all of our machines quite yet. But maybe we should just open our mind to the possibility that there's going to be an overlay of an entirely different, systematic way that we look at everything that we intake and let's see. Let's see what ultimately happens. Let's start to put probes in and start to have some humility about hmm, maybe there's more to it, maybe even with all of this debate about veganism or carnivore or whatever, maybe that's also a little reductionist. We could start looking at the actual lifeforce energy of the food that we're having that is not easily measured in grammes of protein and grammes of fat and different micronutrients, just opening the mind to the possibility that we haven't figured it out all all yet, because of course, we haven't. We never have and it's going to be a long fucking time until we approach that.

HEATHER: They're like nested layers of understanding. Each of them can contain truth and yet as you move to the next layer, you may realize how much harm you did by understanding the one layer. The particular example you were just talking about, we have thought that the cat's preference for running versus still water is about running water being more likely to be clean, to be clear of fungal and bacterial and viral contaminants and such. That may be it and there may well be more. The germ theory of disease from which that understanding emerges, has saved so many lives and is so important. Antibiotics, which emerge from the germ theory of disease, are so freaking important at so many levels. It was, I don't know, the 1980s or '90s, before the idea that, actually, we contain multitudes at a microbiome level came to be understood, and we still don't know, we still don't know exactly as you say, but we have come to understand that actually, just killing it all off is not going to be a successful approach to being a human. It was, again, the hubris of thinking, "Ah, we got it! Germ theory of disease, antibiotics. We are there. We have arrived. We know what it is." Really? Can you just try to go back in history and imagine what it was to be at any of these other points rather than reading that as, oh aren't we so smart now that we have that to look back on and laugh at those foolish people? No, we're them too. There will be people in the future who look back on us. Are you sure you want to be part of the one who's so certain now? You sure? Because if you're that certain, you're probably wrong.

BRET: We also need to be open to the way things actually work. Very often, there's a simple explanation for something that may not be in the place that we're prone to look at. It may also not be something very fancy that we don't have the technology to understand yet, either. If I can give an example or two, this example is a little bit grotesque, but it's funny enough to be worthwhile. I did my first research gig in Jamaica. There were all of these Jamaican kids who used to follow me around because I was from elsewhere and I had interesting stories to tell about what the rest of the world was like. Anyway, I got hiccups one day, and the Jamaican said oh, we got a cure for this. This is going to be good. The cure involved, you had to get a loogie on your tongue and then spit it into your hand, and then you took your finger, and you took some of it and you painted an X on your forehead. Works beautifully every time. Never misses. Now what they don't tell you is that drawing the X on your forehead has nothing to do. You can stop at the point that you've put the loogie in your hand, because that's the thing that does it. It's the exercising of this muscle that gets things firing in the right direction again.

AUBREY: So they're just a little flirt. Somebody was just laughing at the--

BRET: Oh, right.

AUBREY: They know that that works and they're like, "What a joke! We're going to get this person to put that loogie on their phone.”

BRET: Exactly. Exactly. It's so delightful. This is a perfectly mundane explanation but there's a feint built into the instruction set. Back when we were kids, there was a period in which, I kid you not, The New York Times and everybody else was busy discussing whether or not talking to your plants actually helped them grow? It turns out it does. So there was speculation about the CO2 that you were exhaling, was that good for your plant? No, of course not. What's happening is that you're actually setting yourself the task of looking at your plant and talking to it like a creature. You're empathizing with it. So you're going to notice when it needs some water, and if it's not--

HEATHER: Those leaves look a little yellow. Let me figure out what to do to help that. Does it need nitrogen, who knows.

BRET: Right. So there are lots of these explanations where there's something. I would argue I don't know how qi works but my guess is, qi isn't a physical thing but it's a metaphorical thing and there's something about paying attention to the body as if there was this thing,  I could be wrong about this, of course, but the point is, you have an ancient tradition, it's long-standing and expensive. That tells you that it's functional, but you don't know how it functions. One very likely way is that it gets a person to pay attention to your physiology in a way that they have some, it may be that the acupuncture stimulates nerves in a way that contracts, that breaks connections in your connective tissue that have otherwise frozen. That would be analogous to osteopathy, right? But it isn't the flow of qi. It's something that if you think of it as the flow of qi, and you behave in this way as if there were qi, and as if you were interrupting it, it has these meaningful, measurable physiological effects that are positive.

AUBREY: It's a beautiful way to really think about this. Two parts of this. One, these ideas can actually be understood in ways that make sense and also just taking the premise that they've existed for a reason. They're expensive in time and occupy the mind. They're expensive. They've existed for some adaptive reason, so let's just take that as the principal thesis with which we're going to operate and then understand how it might work but also, even in your language, just the open-mindedness to yeah, maybe they were actually saying the exact thing. It requires both. Let's understand it to the best of our abilities right now and then let's just be open to the possibility that new information will enlighten us in the future, and we'll understand it in a deeper way, or in a more nuanced way, or even a slight shift in perspective. This is the fundamental idea, another meta-crisis that we're experiencing is this idea that science is fixed. There's all these signs that you'll see around science. Well, of course, when someone is saying science is real, what they're really saying is believe what the news is telling you about science and take that as gospel. It's really a religious claim, not a claim about science, because of course, science is real. Of course it is. But that's not what they're actually saying. It's a religious claim. It's the same as putting one of the fish on your car and announcing yourself as a Christian. It's like identity politics type of thing is really what they're saying but they're using terminology to somewhat justify their case, the case being that everything that we need to know about science is understood and good faith actors are presenting that information to the best of their ability without being captured and without bias. It's just fucking not true. It's just not true. Even if they were, they might find out some new shit later. There's also pressure within academia. When I was researching my book, I looked at a study that showed when the top person in any academia died, new citations with other different critical theories flourished and expanded exponentially. When they were in the dominant position then there was far, far less. It's like sometimes it's just hard for things to change, even within science, but it must. It always does and it always will. This idea that science is fixed and that we don't need to constantly be open to new ideas is just utter nonsense.

HEATHER: It is. There's utility, no matter what field you're in in being able to stand in, at least, two different places to look at it from two different perspectives. I'm reminded specifically of an acupuncturist whom I have seen, actually, who has training. He himself is ethnic Chinese and has training in the Eastern tradition. He has an MD from one of the top medical schools in the United States. He practices acupuncture primarily, even though he is also able to practice Western medicine. What that allows him to do is move back and forth between the language and the approaches and the understandings of the two systems. That helps not only his patients, some of whom may be more familiar with a Western approach, and able to grok better when he's speaking the language of Western science, but also to say, "Oh, this problem that you are presenting with, I think the toolkit that I have from over on the East or over on the West is more appropriate." I can go back and forth between them. I can look at any given problem from both perspectives. When those two perspectives align, one set of methods is likely to be better than the other for any given problem but when the answers that they produce align with one another, then I have an even better reason to think that the answers I've come up with are the right ones.

BRET: There's a defect in the way we teach science in the West, right? Almost every scientist you talk to, will be of a mindset that their practice of science is a faithless practice. They are confused into thinking that what they know of their field is factual. The answer is, it is the pursuit of factual knowledge, it is the pursuit of a reduction in the amount of faith that is the core of science. If you look at even a textbook from when we were in college, and you look at what it says about biology, the textbook is not accurate. It describes cells, for example, as a bag of fluid in which these various important compounds diffuse around. Of course, there are some that do but there's also a whole system of microtubules, and molecular motors that take things from one place to another. The textbook says that a gene is the sequence that goes from a start codon to a stop codon and then it makes a single product. We now know that you may get an average of five edits to the thing between the start and the stop codon, and that there's a whole system of logic there. The point is if, as a scientist, you look at what you think and know and you say that is actually a stand-in for what we will ultimately know, it's not an arbitrary standard. Hopefully, it's true. Hopefully, it's not false. Hopefully, it's crude and it can be refined rather than being wrong, which is all too often what it actually turns out to be. The simple recognition that what I know is a model and that there is something real, and that what I'm trying to do is push the model closer to the real, and that that is an increasingly difficult process, but that I'm inherently somewhere midstream within it, even just reminding yourself of that is the key to not being blinded by the textbook. It's amazing how frequently the textbook has trained because the picture is so clear and makes so much sense. It's trained you to believe something that isn't even real.

HEATHER: What you just said is the assumption at the basis of all science, which is there is an objective reality out there. The scientific method is the best route we found, wildly inefficient though it is, to getting ever and ever more close to that reality. That's not to say that we will ever get there fully or that we will know we have gotten there. That's the hubris of the current moment, of any current moment, no matter what moment you live in. You assume you're there. This feels like we know more than we did, therefore, we must have arrived. We've now brought up two of the revolutions in our understanding just in our lifetimes, which is epigenetics, and microbiome. Both of those have revolutionized our understanding of all of life, really, but specifically human health and wellness. I'm sure there are many, many more, but those are just two that we happen to have ended up talking about here. Even at the point that you were young and we were teenagers, we're a bit older than you, there was no one talking about these things. It's a much more static understanding of what, yes, okay, evolution, sure. But once you're an adult, and your cells are doing what they're doing, you're there. Actually, you're not just one being. You're all of these other bacterial beings as well, and oh, by the way, the editing and the methylation and all of these things that happens at every gene and almost every tissue of your body, at all points throughout your life, that's also true, even though your genome is what your genome is. Yes, you're born with it yes and yes, your gametes, your eggs or sperm have something that is static. But all of the possible ways that it can be presented and can manifest is very much an active process.

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. Here's another interesting phenomenon that's happening. That same person, and I'm making a generalization, and this generalization may be true in this specific or not. But in this generalization that I'm imagining, at the very least, the person with the science is a real bumper sticker, then is also going to be the most radical proponent of the pregnant man emoji existing on the iPhone. This seems to be an inherent contradiction to me.

HEATHER: Yes, it does.

AUBREY: It's like science is real. However, let's show this image of a pregnant man. Of course, you guys have gotten attacked for proposing real science about these things. Then all of a sudden, you just shift one click over and then science is like no, fuck science. Men can get pregnant too. Very strange

HEATHER: It is so strange. I do think it actually does come back to this idea: do you believe in an objective reality or not? One step above that is, okay, if objective reality, evolution, yes or no? Of course, most of the people who have the science are real bumper stickers and the pregnant-male emojis think that they believe in evolution. Even though they couldn't really tell you what that means, they might be able to try out a couple of catchphrases. The fact that we've been sexually reproducing with two, and only two, sexes in our lineage alone for, at least, 500 million years and it may be closer to two billion with a B, you can dress up however you like and act however you like and that doesn't change the fact of biological sex. It just doesn't. It's a conflation of what's in your head. What's in your head and how you behave is the gender version, but gender follows sex and are there sometimes mismatches? Sure. But does that change the underlying sex that you are? No, it does not. That's a scientific proclamation based on a lot of research and a whole lot of time.

BRET: I would also point out that Heather and I spend a fair amount of time on our podcast, probably to the annoyance of our audience talking about the philosophy of science, which is one of these fields that seems dry. I think we could just skip and get straight to the science, but no, philosophy of science is really important. You can do something that uses all of the terminology and all of the technology involved in science, something that follows the form and if you don't get the philosophy of science, it doesn't work. What does work mean? Is that some vague thing that we can't possibly define? No, it's perfectly definable. Work means an increase in predictive power. It means being able to explain more and/or assume less over time, which means that we do not need to do some deep analysis of what went on inside the CDC during COVID.

HEATHER: God help us.

BRET: We can look at CDC, we can say, "That is a black box. I don't know how it works." Here's what I do know: it didn't predict anything right? Is it in a position to tell those of us who did predict things correctly to follow the science and to instruct others that they must listen to the CDC and not to those of us who predicted right? One of two things has to be true: either what's in that particular black box called CDC isn't science and that's why it didn't predict anything correctly or it's science so badly done, that it doesn't make any progress. In thinking about this, science is not what the thing looks like. Science can be a grubby person with no degree in the hills who gets the philosophy part and can predict things about the world based on their observations over time. The person in the lab coat with the glassware and the jargon may not be doing science. They just look like it. That's perfectly consistent with what we know. 

HEATHER: The unspecified, geographically, culturally, temporarily person in the hills, their life may depend on them being able to actively predict whether this rocky soil or this sandy soil is more likely to produce the plants that will feed the family from this seed versus this seed. Whether or not they have the names that Western science has given to those species doesn't matter. Whether or not they know exactly when the solstice or the equinox is doesn't matter, so long as they can accurately and with, hopefully, ever better precision, but most importantly, accurately, understand seasonal change, predict what the weather is meaning about what's going to happen next, and observe and repeat and observe and hone the predictions about whether or not seed A grows better and the sandy or rocky or loamier, clayey soil. Whereas, the person in the lab coat in the modern environment, given that it's about getting grants, and the grants are about political things rather than actually how good are you at predicting, your ability to actually do good predictive science may have nothing to do with whether or not you're able to pay your mortgage? That tells you that the incentives are exactly aligned the wrong way. The guy in the hills trying to grow something out of hardscrabble soil in order to feed his family, his life depends on it. He's going to get it right or else he's not and we're not going to hear any more from him. The scientists who don't get it right, we hear a lot more from them, because of the way the systems are set up now.

BRET: I hope my affection for the guy in the hills is clear. Not only do I like the grubby guy in the hills, but I've been the grumpy guy in the hills.

AUBREY: Indeed. We're in a world now though where it's almost like this elitism towards all of the sciences, social sciences alike, to have a philosophy, you need to have whatever credentials a philosopher has. To do science, you need to have all of these credentials to do science, all of these things where we're just saying, "Oh, well, how dare you even say that?" Even to talk about anything to do with race, you must be participating in that race, you can't look from a meta perspective and then offer your own analysis. Everything is like we're excluded, it's this exclusionary model of who can talk about what, based upon the credentials they have which, of course, sometimes is effective. If the system is working correctly, then these people should be the best of us. Oftentimes, they're not only potentially captured but also potentially entrained in a system that is actually incorrect. So their entertainment is actually preventing them from reliably getting to the better answer. We completely disregard that. And anybody without a medical degree, I think that bubble has burst a little bit now, there's still this appeal to this elitist idea of: okay, you have the right to talk about this, but everybody else doesn't. I think it's time to really democratize thinking again and say: "Okay, let's go back. Let's go back to the old academy here." Let's just talk about things. Let's make things make sense. How about that? How about we can all sense-make? I'll give everybody right now a fucking master's degree in making sense. Go for it. No? Can we all talk, please?

BRET: What you've got to do is you've got to purge the system, whatever fraction of the system it is that you want to have that discussion in, of the perverse incentives. If you get the corruption out, then it almost doesn't matter where you start. People will get smarter over time. The corruption prevents that process from happening. We are, unfortunately, in a jaw-dropping moment in which that corruption has taken over essentially every institution. People's normal instinct to defer to the experts is now being used against them. Those experts are not experts, they say things that are not the result of analysis. It is so reliable that, if you follow the experts, you will do the wrong thing because the experts are either phony or--

AUBREY: So how do we do this? We now know and I think, hopefully, we've done a reasonable job establishing the system must change. There's problems with the system, system must change and the stakes are fucking high, highest they've ever been. So how do we participate in this revolution of the system? What can we do? And what can the people that we elect do, potentially, to solve this problem?

BRET: We have a problem at the election level. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds here. This is why the Unity 2020 proposal was what it was. We have a system that basically trains you in corruption before you get to power. You have to demonstrate that you're highly capable of being corrupted before you have any power. It should not be a surprise to us that our system is riddled with people, whether they're happy about it or not. Some of them may be reluctant about being corrupt, but they're good at it. We need to get people into those positions, who will actually tell us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear, who will do the right thing, even if it is not the thing that advances their personal cause. That is important. Scientifically speaking, we could look now at the people who did have, a single prediction doesn't do it, but a track record of predicting the future. We could say: you know what? Peter McCullough has done an excellent job throughout COVID. He has been way ahead of the so-called other authorities. Let's go to him, and let's say: look, to the extent that X, Y or Z impinges on the functioning of the heart, what do you see? What are your concerns? What do you think we're more worried about than we need to be and who else do you trust? You could do that then you could say: okay, as far as vaccines go, Robert Malone is the inventor of this technology, himself vaccinated and vaccine-injured. He is telling us that these vaccines are not ready for primetime; my term has been that they are prototypes. Here's the thing, I would not be inclined to take a vaccine that Robert Malone hasn't looked at and said this one is based on sound science and the likelihood that it is more beneficial to you than it is harmful, is high. Now, the problem is that in these cases, we have one or a couple people in a position to play that role. But that is far better than nobody. So what I would say is if we can use predictive power to figure out who's making sense and we could, again, figure out who they trust, who makes sense to them and you can begin to build a system that way. But, of course, you have to get past the stigma which is that all of these people have been demonized and derided from the same corrupt origins as our broken public health authority.

AUBREY: To get past that stigma, though, we still have to then deal with the capture and the corruption of our media, which is then driving the narratives that are stigmatizing individuals. It was really shocking to me when I brought up the issue of the Canadian truckers and the trucker convoy, and somebody who I thought really had a good handle on things and was making sense a lot, was like, "Oh, yeah, they were infiltrated by right-wing Nazi extremists." And I'm like, "What? What do you mean?" Somehow that narrative was able to land home. It landed home. Of course, Putin is trying this as well, calling everybody in Ukraine a Nazi. He's looking out to the West like, "What works super good? Well, with the truckers, it worked by calling them Nazis. Obviously, people hate that. So let's just do that and see if we can get away with this Ukraine thing." It actually kind of worked a little bit, I don't know. I don't know who actually has Nazi sentimentality or not, but I have my doubts that the world is filled with all of these secret Nazis. I know they do exist and I know they're the most vile and despicable myth of separation involving participating, violent, potentially in their thoughts. If nothing else, I get despicable. Nonetheless, there seem to be these ghosts that we're chasing around like a modern day witch-hunt that people are throwing around. But it's being fueled by this massive fucking structure that's just using these cheap, dirty low tricks. It seems like we have to solve that in order to actually look and appeal to the right authority, and then elect people who will sponsor the right authorities. It's happening on the local level like Ron DeSantis from Florida, getting the Surgeon General was like, "We're done with fear." I just love that. It was a beautiful moment when I heard him give that speech. I was like, "All right, fucking A." Before this podcast started, we were saying that a few states in our union, potentially the freest places in the world, because there's, at least, some flexibility in state governance, where we can elect a governor who can then stand for something that's reasonable. But it seems like this revolution has to be totalized from media, to politics, to dissemination of information. It has to touch so many different vectors, maybe a little bit at the same time, maybe it's one domino than the other. I don't know. I don't think in that system's perspective to that depth. It's interesting, it feels like we're in a time where it must be a total, total revolution.

HEATHER: I agree. I appreciate you bringing up the truckers convoy. For people like us, who were paying close attention and who were watching a lot of the livestream footage of people on the ground walking around, it was so obvious. It was also such a hopeful moment. After almost two years; at the end of January, beginning of February of this year; of COVID pandemic lockdowns, all of these things, to have real honest people with boots on the ground and skin in the game to say, "Enough. We are doing this. We're going to go and we're going to be honorable, and we're going to protest in the way that we are allowed to, that we need to, that we are absolutely honor-bound to. To have them smeared in the way that they were and to have the evidence in the form of just I think, at least, tens of hours if not hundreds of hours of livestream footage, not just an Ottawa but Coutts and at the Ambassador Bridge as well, three different places; well, two at the US-Canada border, and then in Ottawa, in the National Capital of Canada; which revealed so much relief and humanity and compassion and just tears and hugs and new friendship among a people that, even more than in the US, have been just separated from one another for this, in that situation, where there was so much actual evidence and still, the mainstream media narrative seems to have stuck with a lot of people, that was a moment when I had the most hope that I've had in a lot of time, and then also the least. It felt like, if we can't win this one, if we can't win this media game, of course, we haven't won on lab leak, and early treatment, and vaccine safety and efficacy and vitamin D, being outside, all of the obvious things, some of which shouldn't be politicized at all. With regard to the truckers convoy, the evidence was available to all, for everyone, and there just weren't any Nazis there and yet.

AUBREY: I think there was hope that, in the Arab Spring moment, for example, there was footage on the ground, and the footage on the ground just went everywhere everybody's like, "Whoa, this is what's really happening!" People just accepted that and because there wasn't a top-down narrative that was debasing the actual visual evidence and gaslighting people from what they're actually seeing, then I think there was a hope that social media will actually be the answer here. In classic game theory mode, they were, "Oh, I see. People have this new tool. Well, we'll just apply another solution to this new tool, and just disclaim the entirety of all this visual evidence. Now, it's like: all right, in this classic red-queen game that we're playing, it's like: Well, what's our what's the next move? If visual evidence is no longer sufficient? What are we going to do now?

BRET: Well, in part, what you're dealing with is, again, the corruption at the heart of the dysfunction of our system, the people who decided to stigmatize the trucker convoy with the notion of Nazis who didn't appear to exist at all. This is something one must never do. One does not abuse that particular connection because it is so vital that when it is necessary to invoke it, that it is there and fully functional. But the point is, it's just so useful. The fact is, who's going to stare down the idea that there's Nazis? It's a hot potato. Nazis took evil to 11, to the extent that you think there's a very tiny chance of something that's infinitely bad. Most people don't have the wherewithal to make the calculation. It is exactly the problem of what's taking place in Ukraine. That is why we must not ever do what was done to the trucker convoy. I don't know, I'm not an expert on Ukraine, I have the sense that there is a Nazi problem, or at least an ethno-nationalist problem with Nazi sympathies there. Am I being played? Maybe. I'm certainly not in a good position to know. I need to be able to separate the fact that my recent experience, knowing that I was being played in the trucker convoy situation, is not then predisposing me to miss the fact that there is actually something going on inside of Ukraine, which is that there are sympathies which have persisted there, which are very dangerous and they may be abused by Putin, because it's the same useful thing, but it may be predicated on something in this case, rather than fiction.

HEATHER: It's a useful excuse, regardless of whether or not it's based on zero or something. The based on zero or something is nearly impossible to tease out, given the information environment we're in.

AUBREY: Yeah, the news that cried Nazi is just another update of the boy who cried wolf.

BRET: It is exactly that.

AUBREY: All of a sudden, there's: oh, shit, there's a real wolf. There's real Nazis here. All of a sudden, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've heard wolf a million times, we've heard Nazis a million times, then all of a sudden, we're not alerted to the actual real danger that exists. That's the hazard that you guys aptly pointed out there that I think is really landing for me here. So as we're wrapping towards the end, there's a bunch of other stuff that I would love to talk to you guys about but I think one of the things that I wanted to wrap up with is, it seems that humans have a very potent ability to adapt to serious threats that happen. Whether this is a volcano that erupted or whether this is, I think there was, and I don't know what you think about this theory, but the genetic bottleneck theory where there's volcanoes erupting and plant life was dying, and then people were forced to go to the coast and the cleverest of them and the most social of them banded together and were able to survive on the coastlines, fishing and through these difficult situations you see it in other examples, even in Sebastian Junger's tribe. He gives a lot of examples of the Blitzkrieg and bombs falling and shits going, then there's this emergent thing that happens both in culture, potentially epigenetically, adaptation comes from stress. We're now reaching a point of escalating stress. If you were going to paint the potential for a case for optimism that built in to who we are is something else is going to emerge and be called forth by the dangers that we're experiencing, that is going to be hyper-evolution in preparation for, and in response to the hyper-threat level that we're experiencing, do you think that that's a viable case for optimism to say, “All right, we inherently have this ability to have something emerge that's greater than what would normally be possible based on acute existential threat like we're facing?”

BRET: 100%. In fact, the way we describe this around our dinner table and sometimes on our podcast is that one has to pass through what we call an adaptive valley to get to a higher peak. So the fact that things are very, very bad is not inherently an indicator that they're only going to get worse. It may be that we have to go through this phase to get somewhere. The problem is that the exact thing you point to, the tendency of human beings to put aside their differences and to be their best selves in crisis, is under threat from a propaganda environment that misleads us as to what the challenge actually is. We are, in some sense, in a phase of history, in which you would expect tremendously high levels of unity and camaraderie based on the seriousness of what we face. Instead, what we find is polarization, which is the exact opposite of what you would see. It's what you see when somebody is manipulating you in order to do their bidding at expense to you. What I would say is, I hope that people will retain enough focus, leaving COVID, to learn the lesson of it rather than to embrace the relief of changing the topic. Because if you can see what happened during COVID, if you can see who was demonized, who had predictive power, and then you could say well, what does it say about the system that was in charge of our well being and how did that system get upside down; which is really what it was, it gave us the inverse of good advice; how could that possibly have happened? If you answer that question, and you continue to follow the thread, you will encounter the real problem, which is that we have a basic corrupt mode that is now structuring our governance. That has to end if we are to move forward. And as difficult a problem as it is now, it only grows more difficult. The best time to deal with it was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. We're in that situation but the hopeful thing, and this is the other lesson of where Heather and I have been over the last couple of years, is the huge number of people who have become awakened to the fact that you can't just simply turn on your television or go to your mainstream sources and accept what they say as basically right but that there is a way to do thinking in a crisis like the one we've been facing. That has been heartwarming and encouraging to see this new political movement effectively emerge out of nowhere.

AUBREY: Both of your fondness of George Orwell comes to mind here. He almost gave the model for how dystopia and this totalitarian dystopia can come to be. It is the actual backwards-ization of inversion of different truths. The classic from 1984, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. This is what they're putting out at all times, which is flipping our ability to make sense on its head entirely. So instead of the reality, like in the Blitzkrieg example, there's real bombs going off and there're real planes with swastikas, dropping those real bombs. There's no way that you can pretend that it's something else. So it naturally causes the adaptation that human beings do best, which is come together, figure it out from a million different perspectives and create an emergent solution by the bonding and the coming together. If you insert this divisiveness and start to flip everything and all the sensemaking upside down, where you don't know what the actual bombs are, and who the planes are, and everything is backwards, then it actually prevents that from happening. That's the danger and the opportunity of what we're seeing but it seems like, just to sum it up, we have to avoid that inversion, the upside down world that's being created, so that the natural instinct of humans will take hold, which is come together, and bond like the movie "Independence Day". There's aliens, clearly aliens, it's clearly a spaceship, we can all see it, and they're fucking us up. So let's come together everybody and figure it out, with a little bit of help from all of us, and maybe even some unseen help, from a little bit of luck, or fortune, or whatever other forces you believe in, your cosmology, let's allow that to come through, we must be really vigilant, of all of this divisiveness and then just allow people to bond together to find the solution to these hyper-novel problems.

HEATHER: Beautifully said.

BRET: Very well said. Very well said. I must say I tried to be very careful about conspiracy theories, but I'm beginning to think Orwell was trying to warn us.

AUBREY: I feel the same way. I like to always say that this is just micro-decisions based on self-serving bias and short term game theory and maybe some unconscious system that's built in, I just did a podcast with a guy named Fabio Vighi who is an economist by trade, he's a professor at the University of Cardiff and he's looking at how the economic system itself actually has a set of rules and a set of drivers that, if people aren't aware of, is actually causing a lot of these actions. Whether somebody is at the top of that being, "Ha, ha, ha, here we go," or whether they're just participating in a system that they just can't see through the lens of that system, either way, something is happening. I don't know what's better. I don't know if it's better if there's people who actually have come together and are planning it or if it's emergent. I don't know what the better option is but I think, at this point, we have to be open to looking at, "Well, one way or another, there's a problem and we have to figure it out.

BRET: Well, hopeful note then, as between whether it's better to have people consciously colluding or an emergent property doing the same work, there will always be a bit of both. But to the extent that some of this is definitely emergent, that gives us the upper hand, because those emergent properties are, effectively, adaptations. And adaptations only work in the circumstances in which they evolved. So the point is, to the extent that the Goliath force that is putting us in so much danger is the product of evolution, we can beat Goliath by behaving in a novel way. He won't see it coming.

AUBREY: Yeah, yeah. And if there are bad faith actors who are colluding, they might be short-sighted. 

BRET: Yeah!

AUBREY: That also could be true. So let's end with this thread of optimism before we go down another rabbit hole, leaving people completely without hope. I think it's important to hang on to that in these challenging times. I really want to thank you guys so much for the work that you have been doing, continue to do, your willingness to take arrows, to take criticism in everything that you're talking about, your willingness to acknowledge your wrongs and also not back down from the areas and the things that you know. I think this is an important model for how we can all behave better and help support each other through these challenging times.

HEATHER: Oh, thank you for that. It's really been a pleasure. 

BRET: It sure has.

AUBREY: Yeah, it has. Thank you, everybody makes sure to tune in to their DarkHorse Podcast and all of the other cool gems they have, Patreons and Substacks. I'll put it all in the show notes. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. Much love.