Bret Weinstein on Evolutionary Biology, Markets, Moral Progress, and More

This week on Upstream, we're releasing a conversation between me and Bret Weinstein from the Village Global Podcast in 2019. We discuss evolutionary biology, markets, moral progress, and more. Please enjoy the episode.

Hey everybody, I'm here today with a very special guest, Bret Weinstein. Bret is a former professor at Evergreen, now visiting fellow at Princeton, and is an evolutionary biologist by training. Bret, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Bret, I want to start by sort of a broad question that digs into your past a bit. I'll sort of ask it in 2 separate ways. One is, when you think about the work that you've done to date, what are sort of the, the threads that underlie it, or the threads that you keep pulling on it, if you had to sort of think about the various things you've done, the thread that ties it together? And another way of asking that question is, if someone else is creating the Wikipedia page of you and is listing the sort of unique contributions, and this is also looking forward, and you can't be modest and say nothing, what do you want your unique contributions page to have under it?

That's a wonderful question. I should say it is an odd circumstance because I've been I've become reasonably well-known, but what I'm well-known for is only tangentially related to what I think is most important about what I've been up to. And I do see people scratching their heads sometimes when they hear me talk about the things that are most central to me, trying to figure out what that has to do with free speech and political correctness on college campuses and the like. So I like the way you asked the question too. What would, you know, a good Wikipedia page about me, what would it actually say that would provide insight on how I ended up where I did? And the answer has to do with a couple of really significant threads. When I got to evolutionary biology as an undergraduate, I spent a bit of time— I would not say resentful. Resentful is not my style. It's not the way I think about things. But maybe regretful about the era that I had been born into because I felt like I had a talent for evolutionary biology, but when I looked at the landscape of questions, it seemed like all the big questions had been answered. And so I felt more or less like I'd been born too late. And then I started to realize that it only looked like the big questions had been answered because we'd stopped asking the questions that we weren't making progress on. So they weren't a normal part of conversation, but if you began to pursue certain questions about complexity, you discovered that there were giant questions left on the table in a kind of stuck form. And it would be unwise to pursue those things from a career perspective. If you were really driven to become a successful academic, it wasn't a great idea to pursue those things because to the extent that they were stuck, you were liable to find that there were good reasons that you couldn't make progress. But I was never all that driven to become an academic. I was very much driven by the underlying science, and those questions began to become a kind of healthy obsession. In other words, I looked at them and I thought, how hard could the question possibly be of why females in certain species demand that males make these elaborate and costly displays? Or how difficult could it be to figure out why there are more species more densely packed as you get closer to the equator? And my taste for these things grew, and I started studying them in an unconventional way. At first, I wasn't very successful, but then I found an on-ramp. And the on-ramp started with one question in particular. which had to do with why human beings and other creatures like us grow feeble and inefficient with age, the process we call senescence. And the evolutionary answer to that question was really well understood at the point that I started studying it, but it made certain predictions about the mechanisms that were not being reflected by the experimental part of the discipline. And when it struck me what was absent, it opened a door because the theoretical answer to why humans and other creatures like us senesce has to do with a trade-off between youthful vigor and longevity. And that trade-off was so well explored by George Williams, the great evolutionist, that it gave a kind of roadmap about how to think about a stuck puzzle. And when I started to think deeply about trade-offs in the context of senescence, what I found was that actually you could map a logic of trade-offs onto virtually every stuck question, and I couldn't find a question where you couldn't make quick progress by doing that. So what I began to realize that was that the most important project was not these individual stuck questions, It was figuring out what the laws were that govern the way trade-offs function. And so the Wikipedia page about me, if it ever were to get me right, would say that I became obsessed with the idea that there was an unknown set of rules that govern evolutionary trade-offs and that understanding those rules was the key to unlocking big puzzles, which I think of as big game hunting. So anyway, that's largely what I've been about is trade-offs and the way they interact with complexity. And that, of course, has lots of ramifications in biology, but I would point out that it also has big ramifications outside of what we typically think of as biology. And those ramifications are often not that distinct. They're similar. They just— you have to— the parts are labeled differently.

Yeah.

And now this question looking forward, as you think about the next decade, one of the Props you get is for being a real researcher as well, and you're a teacher, and you have these amazing YouTube series on some of these topics. When you look at what questions you're trying to figure out on your own, is it more of the same or more of unraveling that same puzzle? You have maybe some pieces, and now you're trying to get more. How do you think about that, or is it something different?

The answer risks sounding like hubris. So I would just ask you not to read between the lines and your listeners not to read between the lines. I'm really just speaking literally. I've spent now a couple of decades working in the realm of trade-offs and exploring different questions to which the rules of trade-off land are relevant. And I've gotten pretty good at exploring. In my mind, Actually, you may have heard of my brother's podcast, The Portal. It's funny, I didn't know that portals were important to him, and I had begun thinking of my own work as like having put your head through a manhole cover and realizing that there was a whole world above the manhole cover that you could enter and walk around and explore. So anyway, there was a portal that was important to me before Erik was publicly talking about Portals. And then he mentioned portals and it all sort of lined up. But in any case, my manhole cover leads to a place I think of as trade-off land. And in trade-off land, there are many marvelous and curious phenomena that one gets used to, just the same way if you were to travel to Madagascar or South America and begin to explore the forests, you would at first be stumped. You wouldn't know how to look at the place, and you'd, you'd get good at it. So in essence, what I think is I've got a model, it works. I personally know that it works because it predicts results. I don't expect anybody to take my word for that, right? You will have to see evidence that the model I'm talking about can actually see into future discoveries. But from my perspective, I know the model basically works. I'm pretty well aware of what its limits are, and what remains is to bring it into public and show people how it functions, what it predicts, and what we would think about evolutionary biology if we began to use this model. So the, the short version of that is we have since Darwin thought of evolution as an engine of improvement. And it is an engine of improvement, but there's diminishing returns on that perspective. The Land Beyond the Engine of Improvement is about the way selection balances competing concerns. And this is, of course, regularly discussed in biology. Trade-offs are a very common feature of the literature. But what is not well discussed is the rules that govern them. And anyway, the rules that govern them are the key insight that I think I bring to bear on these questions. And what is remarkable is how illuminating the power one gets for a relatively small number of what looked to me to be relatively secure assumptions is great.

And when you talk about the rules that govern them, is this your Four Frontiers talk or is it another talk you've given or? Is there a sort of snapshot preview?

No, the Fourth Frontier talk is really about what happens when you take that model and you point it at human history, right? The Fourth Frontier is actually speculative. It's about what we might do going forward. But the 3 frontiers that I describe in that talk early on are about what has happened and what has brought us here, which to a shocking degree, is both very different for human beings than other creatures and not at all different. We are using a very unique toolkit to engage in the same game that all creatures engage in, and the degree to which our story is an evolutionary story right up to the present is quite dramatic.

Can you say perhaps maybe a couple minutes about those rules and then some of the biggest implications that they have for how we think about— like, are you envisioning that they would have implications for how we think about economics, governance?

Yeah, they have implications for everything. And so I think the key way in is this. If I ask you, is it possible to maximize 2 characteristics of an organism or a mechanism at the same time, you may at first be befuddled by the question. And in fact, I got into an argument repeatedly with a guy who came back to graduate school to get a biology PhD after he got a physics PhD named Scott Peikur. And Scott used to give me a hard time when I would say you can't maximize 2 characteristics of a mechanism simultaneously. And he would say, why can't I have the bluest car and the fastest car? Seems to me I can maximize those 2 things. And at first that stumped me. But then it turns out you can't have the bluest car and the fastest car. And the way to see it is this. If you had a car and you did everything you could to maximize how quickly it accelerated, for example, then you attempted to maximize the blueness, whatever you defined ultimate blue to be, and you said, I want it to be that. Well, you're going to have to get some paint that's ultimate blue. And that paint is going to have mass to it. And it is also going to have characteristics that are going to interact with the laminar flow of the air over the car as it drives, right? Now, you'll, of course, think, well, those costs are bound to be pretty small. It can be pretty darn fast and pretty darn blue. And the answer is, yes, it can, but you can't maximize them. Now, if you say this kind of thing to an engineer, they look at you funny. It's like, well, you didn't discover anything. We know that. Right? There's a function, and you can ask the function what its maxima is, but you can't seek 2 maxima simultaneously unless the function happens to have those 2 peaks. So, in any case, part of what I discovered in venturing into trade-off land was that some of the things that were unknown in biology were well known elsewhere, right? So, engineers tend to understand things about biology that biologists don't. They just don't realize that they're biological things as well as mechanical. But in any case, once you get to the idea that you can't maximize 2 characteristics simultaneously, or 2 desirable characteristics— and believe me, I know all of the loopholes that you might think you could go through, and if you explore each one, you discover why it actually doesn't work— but in any case, when you accept the idea that the function that governs how evolution takes place or how design takes place in an engineering context can't have multiple characteristics maximized simultaneously, what you realize is that there's actually a matrix that specifies the nature of the trade-off between every 2 characteristics that a mechanism or a creature may have. And that matrix has to contain certain information about the Essentially the shape of the efficient frontier between the 2 characteristics in question. And the fact is, the reason that our intuition doesn't immediately tell us you can't maximize 2 different characteristics simultaneously is that many of these trade-offs are biased in the direction of one outcome. In other words, if you're trying to maximize the fuel efficiency of your car, At the same time that you're trying to maximize how safe it is, you're in trouble, right? Because to a certain extent, those things that make the car safer are going to— well, to every extent, they're going to be heavy. The safest car is probably a tank, right? But a tank is a very inefficient creature. But if you start moving in the direction of efficiency and you say, well, maybe I don't need a tank, Right? You're going to get to a place eventually at the other end of this trade-off line. You're going to get to a place where you're confronted with your seat belts and your airbags. Now, can you make your car faster by— or more fuel efficient by removing your seat belts and your airbags? Of course you can. Is it a good idea? No. Now, so not only does the law require you to have them, but if the law didn't require you to have them, you'd be a fool to take them out, even though they're costing you a little something almost every trip.

Right.

I mean, your seatbelts and your airbags are only useful when you crash, which is almost never. And so the rest of the time you're just carrying around this dead weight. But nonetheless, my point is, in biology, we don't see creatures that make stupid exchanges in trade-off land. We only see exchanges that make sense. And so we don't understand that the other exchanges are possible. It's just that any creature that's experimented with them is absent from our sample. And so anyway, it gives us a wrong impression about the theoretical landscape in which creatures are evolving because we only see that portion of the landscape that makes sense, which makes the paradoxical creatures really interesting. You know, why is it that, for example, a peacock would accept the terrible-seeming bargain of having this elaborate, hard-to-take-care-of tail? Well, in the case of the peacock, we know the answer. It's simple, which is that peahens won't mate with a peacock that doesn't have a fancy tail. But why the heck are the peahens inflicting that tail on their own male offspring? That's an interesting paradox. Now, my claim is that whereas that has been dealt with in some sense dismissively by biologists who imagine that it could have the explanation Of simply making the sons of the peahen in question attractive to future mates. My bet is those females actually have to be engaged in a wise trade. And the fact that that wise trade appears to inflict costs on their male offspring that are outsized, we have our work cut out for us. We should be investigating that question. Now, I don't want to caricature the field. Certainly, most evolutionary biologists would agree that good genes are part of what a female is seeking in looking at this tail. And good genes can mean a lot of different things. It could mean resistant to parasites, for example. But there is at the bottom of this something called the lek paradox, which we have to confront. And the Lek paradox involves the observation that if females are choosing a small number of males every generation to mate, and in these species with these elaborate displays, that's what's happening, is males are contributing only genes and they are being chosen for these elaborate displays. If females are choosing something like, let's say, 10% of males from all of the males available and mating with them, and they're doing so on the basis of acquiring good genes for their offspring, then bad genes are going to have a very hard time getting from one generation to the next. So that should mean there shouldn't be very many bad genes available, which then raises the question of why females have to continue spending so much effort choosing and why they would choose to inflict these heavy survival costs on their male offspring. So I won't go any farther down that road. The point is there's a certain set of logical puzzles that one encounters as you make more and more progress on this question. And my claim is that at the end of that road, What you understand is that there is a, a set of trade-offs and rules that govern them that explain virtually every important paradox that I'm aware of in biology, including that one.

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And so I'm curious, and this is a big question, but if we could paint a picture of what the world would look like if everyone truly, if we all truly understood what you just described, those rules, would we understand things like, hey, you need to, there's a trade-off between sort of liberty and equality, that we're gonna have to be, certain men are gonna have a really hard time and we need to design sort of fallback options for them, or that people would be non-authoritarian, or what are some of the biggest— Implications of what would change if people truly understood and internalized what you've been talking about?

You've come very close to the biggest one, which is once you realize you're in trade-off land whether you like it or not, and there are rules that govern these things, and there's nothing you can do to beat them because these are laws of— these are laws of emergent nature rather than fundamental laws of nature, we would be able to dismiss anybody who was a utopian. I don't care what kind of utopian you are, if you're a libertarian, if you're a communist, any kind of utopian is automatically, in my opinion, not welcome at the adult table to discuss what we're to do about civilization because they haven't understood the most basic fact, which is that you can't have 100%, whatever value it is, no matter how sacred it is to you, you cannot have 100% of it. You might be able to get 85 or 90% of it, but if you're not willing to settle for that, then you're going to put us all in danger because in pursuing 100% of liberty or justice or equity or whatever it is you think you're pursuing, you're going to crash every other value on the table, right? The costs are going to go through the roof. And so you may be obsessed with the good you're going to do by maximizing liberty, for example, but you are going to cause massive— suffering and misery that doesn't need to be there. So the adult table, in some sense, are people who maybe are ambitious with respect to what desirable state we can reach, but are not childish in pursuing individual values and misunderstanding their connection to everything else.

So I want to talk about one of the biggest discussions in trade-off land, and that's sort of markets and the environment. So I'll take a few different perspectives, and then I'll ask you who's closest to accurate. Jeffrey West, in his book Scale, says that the economic system is sort of this treadmill and it's inherently unsustainable. Tyler Cowen responds back and says, yeah, but I'll take a few thousand more years of it. It's great. Some people quibble on what that number is. Some say much sooner, some say it's later. Then Andrew McAfee just came out with a new book, More from Less, where he says, Actually, economic growth has become decoupled with resource extraction, so we could just keep doing everything we're doing. Then there are other people who say, actually, we need to rethink the whole thing. The whole thing is rigged. Then some say, no, just with a carbon tax, some things we can stay within the existing system. Who's closest to accurate here?

Well, let's put it this way. I think the answer, the general answer is relatively straightforward. The particulars are Very sensitive, and I think our effort ought to be in figuring out the particulars because we are vulnerable to small errors having large impacts. And I can come back to how I think that works in a second. But the basic answer is markets are the most powerful tool we have, but we don't understand to what they should be applied and to what they must never be applied. And there is a distinction that I think is fairly clean, and I describe it this way: markets are excellent at telling us how to do things. Markets can find improvements on the way we accomplish something much better than sitting down and trying to write out the solution on a piece of paper, for example. But markets are terrible at telling us what we should want. In other words, if you set up a system in which you tell markets what problem you want them to solve, and then they solve it and they give you an answer that's better than you could have come up with yourself, you're maximizing the value of that mechanism. On the other hand, if you let markets discover every defect in human character that can be used to generate a profit and to explore it and figure out where your blind spots are and how to hide from you and all that, You're guaranteeing a dystopian outcome. And so it's not the markets that are doing this to us. The fact of markets are— it's just a tool. Is your circular saw a lethal danger or a valuable asset? Well, it kind of depends whether or not it's being used in a fashion that makes sense, that properly cuts things down to size in a good way, or if it's just sort of— somebody's turned it on and it's running loose in bouncing around the shop. And at the moment, what we've got is a kind of mythology about economics that misleads us. So basically, people are telling us about their own confirmation bias, right? If you have seen the power of markets, if you really understand it deeply, you tend to be in love with it because you see what it can do. And so people who have, for example, seen An immature market may be fascinated and obsessed with the discovery process that leads to the building of solutions that we couldn't have foreseen. But as these markets mature, they mature— if you don't do anything about it, they mature in a direction of ruthlessness. And what you get is an evolution effectively of rent-seeking. You get A process in which something that— it's not even very like evolution. An evolutionary process itself explores the landscape and looks for every rent-seeking opportunity. And whereas the opportunities for innovation in a particular quadrant may well dry up because the quadrant has been explored, the arms race for new and better and more effective ways at seeking rent are ever-present. And so— I think one of the conflicts in our national and increasingly global psyche with respect to economics is that we tend to extrapolate from what markets do in their best phase, their early phase. We extrapolate and we expect that to continue on, and we don't anticipate the endgame, which is the market matures. The innovation opportunities, you know, all of the easy ones get found first and increasingly they are out of reach. And at the point innovation opportunities are not widely distributed, what you're left with are rent-seeking opportunities and the market starts exploring those because the market, just like evolution itself, is an amoral process.

How do we tell markets what to do?

How do we tell evolution what to do?

It's a great question, and I think in some sense it's the question. And the answer is, it isn't all that hard, right? In a sense, my wife and I talk about gardening in a particular way. Gardening is a matter of intervening in the competition between organisms. If you think of yourself as growing organisms, gardening is a very hard process. But if you think of yourself as intervening in the competition between the organisms in your garden, eliminating some that you don't want to see, introducing others and therefore solving their dispersal problem, making life hard for the creatures you want to eliminate, facilitating the growth of others, then the point is it's a much simpler game, right? Maybe this analogy isn't quite right, but the same could be said of a tennis player.

Right.

If you think of yourself as driving the ball around the court, it's a very difficult game. If you think of minimizing the amount of motion that you need in order to reflect the ball back in a direction that serves your interests on the court, then it can be a much more elegant game. So I think the biggest obstacle to using— to telling evolution how to behave in the context of humans and to telling markets how to behave in the context of economics, the biggest problem is a political one, which is that people who have seen the horror of bad regulation, people who've seen bad governance, tend to be reflexively antagonistic to the idea of regulating things. And they're not entirely wrong. Bad regulation is appalling, and it creates unintended consequences that we would be wise to understand and to anticipate the next time. And we don't do it. We don't learn the lesson. But if you have a system that can be freed from, let's say, the feedbacks of corruption and can explore the question of what regulations— can dispassionately explore the question of what regulations actually work, what consequences they produce that we didn't expect, how they might be altered so that they work better in the next iteration of the game— if you can do that, then really the question is, well, are you Are we willing to regulate in order to improve the return on our collective investment? If you're not willing, then again, you don't really belong at the adult table. If you are willing to regulate, then the first thing you need to do is sit down and say, well, what are the values that we are trying to achieve or maintain? What is their priority to us? In other words, if we have to make a choice between liberty and safety. To what extent will we prioritize liberty, for example? How unsafe are we willing to be to make gains on liberty? And there's a point at which the bargain no longer makes sense. So that conversation, I don't think, is all that difficult. What makes it possible, though, is you can't be having that conversation with utopians, whether they understand that that's what they are or not, and you have to have a basic willingness to map out the values in play and their priority, and you may differ over them, right? Reasonable people can disagree over whether or not safety or liberty is the higher value. I think every reasonable person should agree that they are both very high values, and that discussion, in my experience, is one you can have. If I come up against somebody who has the opposite ordering of those 2 priorities, it doesn't tend to be a very difficult discussion, and once we recognize that that's actually what we differ over, there's a lot of progress to be made. But until you get there, the conversation is all but impossible.

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And you named 2. What are the other just most adult trade-offs that we have to wrestle with on the values front?

Well, let's, let's come at that a different way. For one thing, I would just I would be remiss if I didn't point out that I have become persuaded by my more libertarian-minded friends. I've become persuaded that liberty actually is a special value, right? And the reason that liberty has taken that sort of precedence in my thinking is that it appears to be integrative. If you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, for example, just as a basic model, Then the question is, well, if we separate the idea of real freedom, things that you actually are in a position to do, versus theoretical freedom, things that you're allowed to do but you can't in practice pull off, and we say, I don't really care so much about theoretical freedom as much as I care about what you're actually empowered to do, but once we get there, then the question is, well— You're not very free. if you're preoccupied with not starving to death or preoccupied with the possibility that you will get sick and your family will be economically wiped out. So to maximize your realized freedom, we have to solve all sorts of other problems. So to me, there's a reason to put liberty in a separate category, to make sure that we instantiate it as a practical concern rather than a theoretical one. And then once we've done that, we say, well, We could shoot for realized liberty, and how close does that get us to a world that we all like the sound of, right? Okay, so that's one answer to your question. Second answer to your question is I think we need to get over the idea that we are going to actually blueprint a society that works. I don't think we can. I don't think it's possible. But I do think that we can prototype and that the 2 things that you want are the ability to intelligently prototype and then to algorithmically improve. This is what markets do, and we can do it more intentionally than they do. So, in essence, the point I'm trying to make is if we say, well, here are our values, maybe liberty is the integrative one that tells us that we're getting the other ones in the ballpark. Then we say, well, here's how we want to realize a highly liberated state of being for the maximum number of people. So it's some— I'm not a utilitarian, but it's some analog of that. And then you instantiate it and you discover, oh goodness, these characteristics that we thought were gonna produce realized liberty over in some quadrant are actually producing the opposite. You're getting a paradoxical impact. And you try to figure out what alterations might improve it, and then you bring them into the world. Maybe not everywhere at once. Maybe you experiment, you know. I'm not a huge fan of the idea of the laboratory of the states. I think it gets used as an excuse for a lot of stuff. But nonetheless, you could try out modifications of a plan and see which ones actually increase the realized liberty on the other end. So as you do that, what you're doing in effect As an alternative metaphor to blueprinting is navigating, right? So if we think about— many of your listeners will know about fitness landscapes, which is a metaphor we use in evolutionary biology. It's used increasingly in economics as well. But if you think about the opportunities that we have as undiscovered peaks on a fitness landscape, then the point is we really are in a process that is analogous to navigation.

Right.

Rather than trying to figure out by some theoretical means where exactly a peak will be and what its nature will be, and then trying to teleport there. So by prototyping and then navigating, we can discover the nature of an opportunity that we have that we can't name from here. And one of the things maybe people will recognize from the earlier part of this conversation is that that doesn't sound utopian.

No.

Right. Discovering the opportunity you have, that's the kind of thing a market does, right? It discovers what opportunity is there. Whether that opportunity is honorable or not is a different question, but we know markets find these opportunities and exploit them. So we collectively, at the level of civilization, are also looking for opportunities that we don't know we have so that we can exploit them well. And I guess the final point would be In doing that, we— again, this reflects the trade-off style of thinking, but it is not enough for a civilization to make great returns on liberty in the present if it does it at the expense of liberty of people in the future. So we have to build in— you're cheating if you increase your realized liberty at massive cost to those who will live in the future. So, I would argue that at the end of the analysis, some sophisticated version of sustainability pops out. And if you're not abiding by that in some relatively secure way, you're probably cheating.

Yep. And I want to talk about something you popularized in your episode with Joe Rogan, this concept of Game B. What I sort of would posit, Game B is saying, hey, the mechanisms by which we organize our economies and our governments, while they may have worked, even the best ones may have worked in Game A, the point up till today, market capitalism and democracy, aren't going to work in the future. They're not going to help us solve these global problems that we have. What got you here won't get you there. And Game B is sort of design space to figure out what's next. And what's next has to be positive-sum, omni-win-win. And even if markets were positive-sum between people, they may not be at times positive-sum with the environment, or they might not be win-win-win for all sides. And maybe the future Game B solutions need to look more like the human body, which is self-correcting, regenerating in some sense. So one is, would you edit anything or add anything to that Game B description or what it means to you? And then 2, more importantly, what must the initial conditions of Game B be for it to evolve into the niche?

Very good questions. So it's sort of puzzling to hear descriptions of Game B in the world, although what you just put forth was very close to what I would say, which is that Game B is a design space. It is not a particular plan. And it never was. So the way I think about this in my own life is that, you know, Game B was the shorthand name for an organization for a while. That organization failed in, I think, a predictable way. But for some of us, it didn't change the fact that we were searching for the door to the Game B design landscape. The fact that there were or weren't other people working on it at the same moment is immaterial. In fact, nobody could be working on it and there's still an opportunity out there that's untapped. So anyway, I feel like the best way to think about it is it's not an organization, it's not a club, it is a concept, which is that there may be mechanisms for doing the work of humanity.

Mm-hmm.

That are accessible without— well, the phrase I've used for Fourth Frontier, which is my version of Game B, is revolutionary change without revolution. Now, that's a prerequisite. Obviously, you could have revolutionary change of a bad kind, but revolutionary change in the way that I'm invoking it would be in the direction— of sustainability. And one of the things that we focused on when there was a Game B group that met was that it was very important that what it did was liberate people to engage in meaningful, rewarding activity. In other words, we did not want to produce a world that was decadent. We wanted to produce a world that caused people to be interested in bringing things of real value to it because they had the opportunity to do so and because it would be rewarded. So Game B is a design space. In order for that design space to be anything other than an abstraction, It must be true that the path to it is competitively superior to the Game A alternatives. And this is where the rubber meets the road as far as I'm concerned. It might be the case that we could specify some other way for humanity to be organized. Maybe we could even figure out what a refinement of it would look like so that we could come up with something like a blueprint. But if you can't get there, from here without picking up weapons and forcing people to embrace your new plan, it's not a plan as far as I'm concerned. Those mechanisms for bringing about positive change are now so dangerous that we can't contemplate them. Now, the alternative, I would argue, is actually staring us in the face. We all have cell phones in our pockets that do amazing things. Now, these cell phones in our pockets are not Game B phones. In fact, they're parasitic, right? The business model that underlies most of what's on your phone is highly destructive of productive human interaction, and that ought to concern us. But what we should notice about these phones is that they change civilization. They They revolutionized the way we live. Literally, they revolutionized it, and they did so without anybody having to force anybody to buy one, right? You bought one because, you know, initially you wanted to stay in touch with the people in your life, and then you realized it was really cool to have a camera with you everywhere you went, and then you realized that it's great to be able to navigate a foreign city without having to break out a map and figure out— where to look at it and how to refold it and all that. And so it really does offer values to us that were enough to get us all to embrace it, but it came at an unacceptable price. Now, were you in some way able to have offered a phone to people from the pre-smartphone era that had those characteristics but was not predicated on a business model that forced the businesses in question to parasitize its users, then it still would have spread, right? In other words, it is conceivable that the same thing could be done on a different basis. It may not be easy to understand how, but we have certain examples of this. Wikipedia is far from perfect. It's not as immaculate as it appears, but nonetheless, it does appear to be the greatest encyclopedia ever created by many orders of magnitude, and And it's not built on a profit model, yet it still exists. It hasn't been driven from the landscape. We could say the same of the open source movement. We could say the same of the Git universe and GitHub. These are examples— Oh, and actually, maybe the best example is the massive amount of knowledge that people are giving away almost for free, and in many cases for free on YouTube, right? I can't tell you when I interact with people in, uh, in the universe of carpenters and tradesmen, the amount that is taught by individuals to other individuals over YouTube. And, you know, most of them are not on monetized channels. It's spectacular. It's changed the way It's changed mentorship. So anyway, all of these are stubs of a Game B world that might exist. How do we build those stubs out so that what's possible in one of these spaces can be broadened into other places where it hasn't been able to reach? That's a real question. But I think we have enough examples of these things in the world today that we know This is not an empty set. And the real question is, if we had a way to look at the whole picture, is there something that fits in every space that does these jobs as well or better than the Game A entities we have today without the incentive to parasitize us?

Yeah. And that's an opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors listening to sort of a call to arms, so to speak, to come up with more solutions like Bitcoin and Wikipedia.

Yes. On the other hand, I mean, and this is probably the central issue for your listeners, one thing must be true in order for that to be the answer. And that is, on timescales that matter, investors that focus in that way cannot be outcompeted by those that focus in an entirely amoral and ruthless way. To the extent that the amoral and ruthless outcompete those with a better vision, we won't end up with the better vision in the world. And so the real question for us is, how can we explore this space such that those who are inclined towards the solutions that would be most favorable to us are actually also most rewarded by this process. So I have sometimes said, no matter what system you build for civilization, it will be on one side or the other of the following line. Either the people who pay to keep civilization running and to clean up its messes will be the benevolent people, In which case the system will evolve towards ruthlessness, or the people who pay for cleaning up the messes of civilization will be the ruthless people, in which case it will evolve towards benevolence. And so when I walk into one of these discussions, there's always a part of me that's thinking, well, which side of the line are we on? Because if we're on the side that evolves towards ruthlessness, there's nothing else to talk about really. We can Adjust the rate at which we will move towards ruthlessness. But if you're on that side of the line, where we end up is a foregone conclusion. On the other hand, if we're building a system in which the assholes pay the price and the benevolent people actually come ahead— come out ahead through some mechanism, then we also know where that system ends up. And again, we have some control over how quickly it goes there, but the endpoint is a matter of—

Right.

It's a matter of whether there's an opportunity and whether or not the path there is rewarded enough for us to find it. And our central concern ought to be making sure that the systems that we build are on the side of the line where the costs are paid for by people who have broken things rather than by people who feel the most moral obligation Towards their fellow man.

Yeah, this also relates to a mutual book that we, we read, and you went on Robert Wright's podcast, called Nonzero. And the main idea I take from Nonzero is that the history of humanity in the past and going forward is sort of— is told by sort of a rise in— an increase in complexity. Humans need to morally progress, or to have moral progress, to meet that complexity. Is that sort of the main idea you take from that book? And then you also When you went on Robert Wright's podcast, at the end, you talked about sort of an evolution off of his book. I didn't quite understand it. I was curious if you could try to re-summarize or capture if you remember sort of where that book took you and how you advanced the thinking in that.

Well, I think I did get something from Nonzero. I do think that the central point of the book is on the COVID right? to the extent that the book is successful, it's because it makes a fairly cogent argument. And basically what— it's been decades since I read it, but the argument is that in some sense, selection is pointing us in a direction. What is it, the direction it's pointing? The discovery of non-zero opportunities. Now, the meaning of that, I think, Robert and I disagree over a little bit. In other words, it isn't quite as hopeful as he would put it. We discover non-zero opportunities because they tend to be gateways to profit that are unmatched elsewhere, and we find them. But they also, as I mentioned earlier, they get exhausted, which leaves you with parasitism and zero-sum or negative-sum. solutions as well. So I see both those dynamics in play. The question is, can we— and this is really the core idea of the Fourth Frontier— can we produce a steady state that feels like positive sum? In other words, we as creatures are built to detect opportunities that are productive. So, in economic terms, we're essentially built to detect growth and to find it delightful for very simple reasons, really. That can't go on forever. There is no indefinite path to growth. And what that means is we are condemned to suffer boom and bust cycles, and we're condemned to have a mythology that talks too much about growth and doesn't talk so much about the downside of the pursuit of growth. But I believe that there is a— somewhere in Game B design space, a mechanism for stabilizing, in other words, creating a steady state that feels like growth to individuals. And that's really the key thing, is that we need to hack our programming so that we stop pursuing that which cannot be attained, but we can't do so in violation of our nature. In other words, the computer that rides around on our shoulders can only be satisfied by certain things, and it needs to be delivered those things enough that it stops pursuing that which is extremely destructive and places us all in peril.

Yeah, Game B has also mentioned that, I think, or some people within it, that we need to rise above game theory as our major decision matrix. Is that the wrong way of thinking about it, or—

Yes, it's the wrong way of thinking about it. And I've settled on a formulation here, which is, in order to be compassionate, one must be willing to engage in dispassionate analysis. And so I think the problem for those in the Game B universe who Went the other direction on this is I think they begin to hear these kind of game theoretic discussions as if they were tantamount to listening to people lose their humanity. And I think it's quite the opposite. Let's put it this way: we are condemned to be the stewards of the planet that our descendants will inherit. That is a sobering responsibility if you realize, you know, we're not talking about grandchildren. We're talking about indefinitely many generations if we play our cards right. And if we play our cards anything but right, then we are denying all of those generations the ability to exist and to have the experience that we have had here. So in order to serve their interests, we cannot afford to be sentimental in our analysis. It does not mean that anybody should give up their sentimentality, their belief in rewarding narratives as a human being. But I guess the point is, when you live day to day, You're a human being. When you consider policy, the heuristics that go into being a human being on short timescales are not adequate when the impact of what you do has implications that extend indefinitely into the future. So, I think the thing is, yes, I get why people don't want to hear an overly analytical discussion when human suffering is on the line. On the other hand, if you're really serious about preventing human suffering, Then you got to get the sentimentality out of the room so that you can do your job right.

I think one of the things you've talked about us needing, if I'm correct, is something— is more of the shamanic type. You know, in a different podcast, on my podcast, a different episode, Jordan Hall mentioned that his big critique of the entrepreneurs or Steve Jobs archetype is that they are shamanic, but they did too much hill crossing— sorry, hill climbing, and not enough valley crossing. How would you sort of respond to the need for the shamanic type, and maybe where would you point that?

Yeah, so I have a model. I think Jordan is actually echoing my model here, so some of this will be old hat to people who heard him discuss it. But in any case, the shamanic impulse— so I contrast essentially the shamans with the priests, right? The priests are delivering the you know, the orthodoxy. The shamans are exploring for possibilities that are unknown, and the shamans are not the right tool when things are going really spectacularly well, and they are the right tool when you're at a dead end. And so let's put it this way: there's a reason that there is this bias even among the shamanic types in our market structure Towards hill climbing. And it's because this is evolutionarily as true as it is economically. Hill climbing is easy, right? Once you've found the foothill, going uphill is not hard. Going downhill is tough because, A, it's hard to distinguish between taking an opportunity and screwing it up, like, you know, the way Kodak screwed up its opportunity by not realizing what digital was.

Right.

So, was Kodak visionary because it was willing to go against the grain? No, it was suicidal. But the point is, those of us who understand what a peak is, and that it is an exhaustible resource, and that in order to stay alive through time, one has to get from one peak to the next, realize that intelligent valley crossing is a requirement. That means going downhill. And the way I have described it is we have a wrong understanding of what an adaptive landscape is because when we draw them on the board or project them, they are, you know, a visible set of peaks. And so you totally misunderstand that, A, the peaks aren't as close together as you probably think. They're an archipelago in which peaks stick out of vast swaths where you can't profit. And that archipelago is shrouded in fog. So you're trying to get from your island to some island that hasn't been discovered. And if, you know, those islands are 100 kilometers apart and you're off by 2 degrees, you could miss the island entirely and end up, you know, starving or drowning out at sea because you were just slightly wrong. So that's a very frightening prospect. As between moving from one peak to the next and risking that fate, risking looking like an idiot even though you were very close to being a genius, would you rather maybe climb hills where you've already found the foothill and keep delivering people new things and have them herald you for your insight in how to make them better and better? Well, it's just a better bet. So, people choose it, and, you know, it's a hazard for all of us. And so, I mean, maybe— you asked at the beginning of this conversation what I wanted ultimately the Wikipedia page on me to say, and maybe the thing that would be most pleasant for me to see there is that my colleagues were obsessed with going uphill in evolutionary theory, and I became obsessed with going downhill and seeing where it could go, which can look like a stupid move if you miss, or it can look like a very clever move if you find it. But nonetheless, the instinct to go downhill is not as widespread as we might hope. Yeah.

One thing I think about in my own personal life, but then I'm curious how we should think about it societally, is when to sort of rise above my evolutionary instincts, to accept they are evolutionary instincts, and when to sort of design for them. So classic example would be a relationship or friendship and you're feeling jealous. Is that something you just overcome or do you say, hey, we're likely to feel some jealousy, so let's incorporate mechanisms to design for that? How do you think about that on either micro or macro scale? What's the right way to think about that?

It's a great question, and it's one my wife and I are, are writing a book that will focus here in detail. But in any case, it's a great question. And what I would say is we are caught in a predicament as human beings, as modern human beings. The predicament is we, like every other creature, are evolved for functioning in the habitats from which we came. We're not evolved for the habitats that we are headed towards, or the one that we live in, and our problem is worse than any other creature pretty much on this front. We have created an environment for which we are not well adapted. The question about whether or not to trust your adaptations or try to overcome them depends on whether or not they are actually serving the interests that you actually hold. And so I think to answer your question well, you have to start by exploring your own values, not just assuming, yeah, you know, I like freedom, I like justice, that sort of thing, but really figuring out what, what you believe and what your highest values might be, and then figure out whether the instincts in question are pointing you towards those things or whether they are costing you in moving that way. Now, I would say I don't believe we are under any obligation to do evolution's bidding going forward. And what's more, I think once you understand what it is that natural selection has built you to do, no honorable person could possibly want to do it. That said, it has equipped us with tools That are unmatched, that allow us to effectively take over. I've talked about it as shutting off the autopilot, where evolution is the autopilot and it has certain objectives for you. You are a means to its end, and its end is spreading genes through time. If you give up on the idea that you are obligated to take your particular genetic spellings and spread them far and wide, And you start thinking about, well, what do I actually care about? Maybe you care about ideas. Maybe you care about people, right? Maybe you've got some hybrid between those things that spells out a philosophy for you. Well, you can take the machinery that you've been handed by selection, and you can apply it to that consciously arrived-at philosophy. And you can Tell evolution to go fuck itself, which, you know, I really think, as crass as that sounds, once you understand that evolution is a means to a mind-numbing end, and that the warfare and the genocide and the torture, all of these things were evolution functioning properly. Now, that's not the only thing evolution does, so compassion is also evolution functioning properly, but— Really, we are left with no choice but to confront the map of products of evolution and decide which of these things we like and want to amplify, and which of these things we are repulsed by and wish to see eliminated, and to do our best to move in that direction. So, you know, your point about jealousy is a good one. It sounds to us like jealousy is That's just bad. It's you being petty, right? And sometimes it might be. On the other hand, it is very easy to look at lots of things like jealousy or pain or obsession and think of them as strictly bad. On the other hand, all of those things are clearly products of evolution, and they serve particular ends. If you dispense entirely with your jealousy, then you may end up finding yourself a sucker in relationship after relationship. You may actually end up becoming sustenance for bad actors who wish to take advantage of the fact that you're one of the few people in their life who doesn't punish them for certain transgressions. And so I wouldn't be so quick to get rid of something like jealousy to the extent that what it may be doing is policing honorable interactions and causing you to cut short relationships in which people take advantage of you and to invest more in relationships where people behave honorably.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I'm going to ask the last question, sort of a couple of sub-questions, and you can answer any or all of which are interesting to you. So this is a big one. One is, Lineage selection versus group selection. Is one more genetic and the other more cultural? And then the last question I'll ask, I'll name 3 thinkers that you've had debates with, and if you can summarize in a bullet the crux of the different opinion or different assumption that you have about how the world works. So one is Dawkins, the other is David Sloan Wilson, and the other is Paul VanderKlay, who I get this, you know, you tweeted this morning. you're not religious and you're a heretic compared to the Dawkins New Atheists, and you're not religious, you're not fully appreciating religion enough for Paul Vanocles?

Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting question. I've been thinking a lot about this. I think the fascinating thing for me with respect to Dawkins and the other scholars who've recently come after me is that I'm pretty sure that what happened— I mean, I think the history reflects this fairly clearly— is that they tolerated me in the space of talking about natural selection until I came to the question of atheism, in which I take a different stance than most of my colleagues. And I've said, look, I don't believe there's anything supernatural going on in the universe, but— We are being absolutely inconsistent to look at something like a religion and declare it to be a mind virus, whereas we look at something like an eye and understand it to be an adaptation. They're both clearly adaptations. And so at the point that I started to say this in more and more public forms, the atheists had kind of an allergic reaction. To me, which I find extremely puzzling. And in my interaction with Dawkins last October, it became clear that there were really 2 things getting in his way with respect to seeing this perspective. One of them is that although he is the inventor of the concept of memes, that is to say, units of cultural evolution that are the analog of genes, That he sees them as more or less trivial and operating in parallel to genes. In other words, he sees it as a very powerful analogy to genes, but he doesn't see a relationship. He sees— in fact, he says in The Selfish Gene, where he advances the concept of memes for the first time, he says that this is He's British, so he doesn't say primordial soup. He says it's a new primeval soup, meaning that effectively the landscape of culture is this new realm in which new kinds of creatures will evolve. Now, that's a very appealing idea. It just happens to be wrong. It's not a new landscape. What it is is a new tool on the old landscape. So culture is the mechanism by which genes are doing their bidding. Now that's a very odd phenomenon for creatures who are as cognitive as we are and as culturally programmed as we are. It's a very jarring realization to understand that the genes actually set this new way of functioning in motion For the same old reason that they, you know, invented, you know, enzymes. But nonetheless, that's where logically we end up. And Dawkins, A, doesn't see that yet, and B, I think, is frightened by what lies down that road. He said to me very clearly in our debate that he was concerned about what would happen if we did explore human history. In this context. And so, anyway, it's at the point that I think, although new atheists sometimes use the term new atheist, somehow I hit some raw nerves by using that term and it resulted in several people, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne, all coming after me simultaneously. And they came after me on— On evolutionary grounds. They didn't mention the atheism, but it was basically— I think they decided it was time to shut me up. And I have to say, my reaction to that is probably not the one you would expect. On the one hand, one could be dismayed to have all of that intellectual power publicly broadcasting that they dismiss your view of evolution. On the other hand, that puts me in a pretty interesting spot because what it means is they are all granting that the position that I'm advocating is quite different from the one that they see, and they're saying it's wrong, which means if I'm right, then they, they can't say they saw it coming. Right. So anyway, there's a— I sort of feel like, well, I guess it's game on.

That's a good place to wrap. I would even ask, though, if there's one quick follow-up. Does evolution biology suggest that we are more likely to have— there's this book, Sovereign Individual, which talks about how what the agricultural revolution did to the church, namely discredit it, the internet is going to do to governments as we understand them today, and governments will look like startups or charter cities. And you talked about a little bit earlier the need to Or to have experiments. Does evolutionary biology suggest that we are more likely to have a, you know, global government or global governance, or does it most likely suggest we're gonna have thousands of Israels and Singapores and Hong Kongs? And it's really a question about diversity versus homogeneity or unity.

Well, this is great because it turns out that the concept that you're looking for, in light of the last answer, is one that I discovered— somebody pointed me to this— actually The name comes from Catholicism, of all places. And the word is subsidiarity, which I'd never heard before. Subsidiarity essentially is a term for governing things at the lowest appropriate level, right? So it was used in Catholicism for basically church governance. But the point that I would make is that we have some problems that can only be navigated, uh, at the scale of global governance. I mean, the tragedy of our oceans, for example, is something that we have to reverse, and obviously nothing short of global action is capable of doing it because the externalities that have caused the problem are, uh, you know, national-scale, uh, free rider problems and the like. But I don't want to see— I'm just as frightened as the next libertarian over the prospect of global governance of my local park or road system or whatever. So, what I want to see is elegant governance. So, I want to see governance that has the lightest touch possible necessary to accomplish the goal. Ideally, I want governance so efficient that you can't even detect it, right? That it is out of your way such that you go through life feeling that it has no influence, when in fact what it's doing is simply eliminating the externalities and hazards that can be addressed by that mechanism and leaving you otherwise free to choose your level of risk aversion, for example.

You've been very generous with your time. I won't resist to do it. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast. My guest today has been Bret Weinstein. For people who want to learn more, you could check out Bret's— follow Bret on Twitter. Bret on YouTube has a fantastic series on Patreon. Anything else you'd point listeners to?

Yes, I think people, if you want regular updates, my handle on Twitter is @BrettWeinstein. Brett has one T. And you might sign up for my YouTube channel on which there are video versions of Brett Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast. That podcast is also available on all the podcast distribution modes. But it's on YouTube, and sign up and have a listen.

I highly recommend it. I've enjoyed the first few episodes. Brett, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Well, thanks for having me, Erik. I've had a really good time.

Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry-leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co.