Evolutionary Biologist Reveals How Society Is Losing It’s Grip on What Makes Us Men and Women

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here today with somebody who i am extraordinarily excited to talk about talk to heather heing thank you so much for joining me today thank you very much for having me tom absolutely so you um we were talking just before we started rolling about evolutionary uh biology which of course is your strong suit um and i want to dive right into that there's something going on in culture today where it seems like i think it was douglas murray that talks about how you know there were things that we all knew up until yesterday and now it's like we're somehow it's you know become this weird thing where there's not agreement and the one sort of taboo subject that i've become absolutely obsessed with that you talk really eloquently about is the differences between men and women and i know that like this is a hot button topic for people but i i find it very intriguing and i want to start what is it that has made this a hot button issue oh wow what is it that has made a hot button issue i'm not sure i know the answer to that framed that way um you know some of it some of it is originally legitimate concern about traditional and increasingly archaic gender roles right and you know emerging from sort of first and second wave feminism of which i'm a fan and i always identified with um you know seeing that they're seeing that there were socially imposed differences between male and female gender roles some people extrapolated i would argue wrongly that those differences were entirely socially imposed that were in the language of academia a social construct entirely right and you know the fact is that we can see by looking at other cultures by looking at non-weird cultures by looking at what babies do you know before before culture has a chance to impose itself in the weird countries or in countries that don't have the weird influences in so far as that's possible anymore you might want to define weird people that have never heard that acronym before absolutely so weird all caps acronym western educated industrialized rich democratic um so you know all the countries you would imagine you know europe japan u.s canada and you know maybe including some of you know what used to be called first world but that's no longer exactly considered the right way to describe it so you know are are the things that we see between men and women that are different typically in those weird countries entirely a social construct no they're not how do we know because uh in other cultures men and women are still different babies show differences in terms of girl and boy babies show differences in terms of what they do but there there was for sure at least you know we can think back to like the mad men era 1950s 1960s gender roles in the us and see that a lot of people clung to those in at least in the us i mean that's you know we're both americans we can stick to the us because it's what we know best and imagine that that was the way it ought to be so this was there was sort of a an error in applying what was to imagine what should be and the naturalistic fallacy it's the same error um that eugenicists make that you know that um that social darwinists make that this the the thing that is currently what is going on in culture is what nature described or what nature needed it to be and that's just not true so i think that there was truly a legitimate and good faith pushback against that error but in the modern era it's become an activist talking point and it's you know there there's so many things that activists are doing as you say douglas murray writes about this brilliantly and talks about this brilliantly um in the madness of crowds and and in his interviews since especially um it is it is remarkable how many things we appear not to know anymore that we used to know until yesterday and some of them are a little complicated and the the thing about sex with regard to are men and women actually different on average this just isn't complicated it's it is in some ways the most hot button of the topics and it's also the easiest one to to deal with because there's just so much evidence from 500 million years back right that we are sexually reproducing organisms that therefore have different strategies because we have because they're too sexist so when i think about um what you just said seems so self-evident and the way that i've always walked through it is you're willing to accept that a woman has a uterus so that's obviously different than what's going on in a guy you would think that there are areas of the brain that are going to determine what happens to that uterus so it's like we're we're comfortable i think everybody is comfortable up until a point but there's some weird moment where it breaks down where it's like well i was comfortable with that but now i'm not comfortable with this it and maybe you have already identified it which is this very sort of american ideal of the woman is staying at home and the man is going out and conquering that women are pushing back and saying no i can do more than just rear children but if i were going to put like my finger hard on a point that seems to be what creates some of the fervor around this is that there is a sense that men have had it better or easier or something and therefore to have parody of thought and action and all of that is to um do it right and that's the part that i want to tease apart and you you and brett dealt with this head-on you did a video where is it better to be a man or a woman and you guys were very playful about it but like in all seriousness do you see in in a weird society using the acronym yeah is there reason to believe it actually is better to be male and therefore that women should be trying to um posture like a guy would typically posture yeah well i think that's actually that's two different questions both of which are big and important is it better to be a male in a weird society and if so is it is it the best move for a woman to act as male as possible in order to uh you know best realize her goals and aspirations uh the first you know in in general putting aside society it is it is not right better to be male or female at just the evolutionary level uh any any time either sex becomes more valuable and that's sort of a metaphorical valuable in terms of being rare because a whole bunch of one sex has been killed off say from war or um or infant mortality that affects one sex more than another for you know any number of reasons that sex that is more rare will become more valuable and more of that sex will be produced um so you know it's easy to imagine and this this is a question i used to ask my my students when i was a college professor uh whenever i taught this which was most most programs that i taught you know what what do you think what's what's it better to be and you know usually they saw that it was kind of a trick question coming but to to some degree i could usually get um a few guys to say well it's better to be a guy and a few women to say i you know i like being a woman but of course it's not the the question the ultimate question you go far enough back and it's not like what do you prefer it's what is it actually better to be there is no better right like we imagine just at just at the reproductive success level you know just talking about the the basic evolutionary stuff of how many copies of yourself do you leave in the next generation we all have in our heads well genghis khan you know left however many it was hundreds of kids right like hundreds of copies of himself right and how many kids has the most successful woman most reproductively successful woman had it's some improbably crazy number like 67 and i don't i don't yeah right so how's that possible how is that even possible right so lots of twins about the triplets and just you know started early stopped late not a good life right like not a happy life in in any way and obviously the vast majority of women have an order of magnitude or less kids than that um but almost all women reproduce some and in a society where there's a genghis khan there's a whole lot of men who leave no kids at all who leave no who leave no mark in the next generation at the genetic level so on average you know every guy in a stable population leaves about two kids and every woman leaves about two kids but the variance as is so is this true across so many domains is much lower for women so almost all women i want to get in here though and so that's at the population level that's like an evolutionary thing i get that but like for me technically my life is sort of worthless from that standpoint i've chosen not to have kids um and but my life life like the thing that i actually do on a day-to-day basis is awesome and i love it and so when i think about so one thing i learned from having business partners so you're building a business together you get into an argument and you're like this guy's a [ __ ] and you're just like how can they possibly be thinking the way that they're thinking and what i realized was i know they're not dumb they're incredibly intelligent so when two smart people are disagreeing what i found was there was a base assumption that they had that was going unquestioned and once you get to the base assumption that's driving their their sort of surface level argument then you figure out where things are really going wrong so for instance if you were to say well it's what life is really about is how traditionally successful you are how much money you make how high you climb in a hierarchy and that's what matters prestige status and so if women buy into that and now traditionally male traits feed into that aggression um you know working insane hours and then society rewards that and we all love the praise of society now you get how if your base assumption is the highest value is that prestige climbing the hierarchy then you begin to understand why people would adopt traditionally masculine traits so at the individual personal level like here's what i really want to know and i'll give you sort of my like real secret sort of thing that drives go ahead before you say that though let me just let me just jump in and say um in other primate societies and other species of primates yes there is ev every species of primate that is social which is to say all but one or two and maybe all of them has male hierarchy for sure and it plays by some of the rules that you're talking about and no baboons don't have cars but they have other indicators of status right but females also have hierarchy and the thing that's super different about modern humans is that we are playing together in the same space men and women and having to create a mixed sex hierarchy so there's you know in baboons which have been just studied terrifically but also invertebrate monkeys also in scrum like also in every other primate society there's male hierarchy with dominance and different ways to attain rank and there's female hierarchy with dominance and different ways to attain rank it's the mixing that makes it actually pretty complicated and um and it shouldn't be surprising to us that because because men have had the political power you know have had more of the power outside of the home which is the more public facing domain that in order to mix the hierarchies uh women are finding it somewhat necessary to act in ways that look a bit more like male hierarchy male dominance attainment now let's take that and ask a really naughty question so in really trying to understand this so i think um it's going to be important to hear what you think are immutable and i will give you one that so i had um lisa feldman barrett on the show and she has a great line when talking about nature and nurture which is like my obsession i can't tell you how much i'm into this and she said look tom stop trying to untangle them she said we have a nature that requires nurture so the brain is like waiting for this feedback so if you don't cuddle a child love a child pay attention to a child it doesn't grow up developmentally correct and it will be broken in profound and just gut-wrenching ways so she said you really have to stop seeing the two as these separate entities and recognizing the interplay so i get that what i'm about to say i actually have no idea if you can like pull these things apart in my life it has been in my marriage for the first like eight years of my marriage my wife was a traditional housewife she facilitated my business career but stayed at home she cooked for me clean put out my clothes like all of it and in those years my wife worked through me she was not inert she wielded tremendous influence on me the way that she would respond to me with praise or all of the feminine wiles that one has and that notion of behind every powerful man is a powerful woman i was like that is so true like people don't understand how much my wife is shaping me and how much she's pushing me to do certain things to climb and and truly my wife has played a not insignificant role in my ambition in in cultivating that and pushing that okay i say that because when i think of possibly an immutable characteristic of women being that they use ideas that they use relationships that that's their their weapons is is a very misleading word but like if a guy sort of takes confrontation on frontally women are far more relationship oriented in how they move pieces around to chessboard yeah and when i think about what's happening in society right now this feels like a big mind game like people are [ __ ] with the mind and so it's like is this a very um useful female strategy being played out at the societal level oh god god there's like eight questions in there the final one was the one i was really trying to build towards now what you have to give me in order to answer that that's a whole other thing so the final one being is this a giant chess game um that effectively uses uh more traditional female tools than a more traditional male toolkit as it were correct um yeah i think so actually and i think you know this this thing that people say that you know the future is female and oh it's testosterone that is the problem with you know various power structures you know i don't i don't buy this i find it divisive and dangerous but is it true that an entirely male power structure has a tendency to go off the rails in a particular way with which we're well familiar from like all of history yeah of course right um would an all-female power structure go off the rails in a particular way that we're less familiar with from history a hundred percent i don't want to see that anymore than i want to see you know another world war ii which is more evocative of a typical power structure that went off the rails in part i think because they were there were very few things tempering a more male typical style of leadership and seeing relationships in the world so we we can do this together there is very little precedent um at you know there's no precedent for how many billion people are on the planet at this point you know we are we are now acting globally at every scale so we can't get it wrong given the the actual weapons that are at our disposal but the idea that we can pivot from a almost entirely male you know forward-facing outward-facing power dynamic in the world to this other thing that people are calling for an entirely female um way no it's going to be it's going to be dangerous and there's very little history and so it will in in some ways be more dangerous it would be in some ways more dangerous at first because there's there's experimentation that would be happening in real time and frankly some of the conversation that i that i hear from you know again it's a mix of activists who were just confused and some some good faith people who really believe this and some people who um just want power for themselves just want to reverse power and we see this across all of these all of these current um culture war fights um but the idea that women in power is the solution is ridiculous and the idea that men resting power back from women and taking it all back for themselves and going back to some mad men era looking thing is also ridiculous and that doesn't mean it's a clear way forward that doesn't mean that it's going to be easy and that we should pretend that we can all just you know in work be unsexed and then you know and go home to our private lives and have whatever sexual relationships you know with undertones with undercurrents there are no it's not possible so one thing you know one thing that's illegitimate in what is being claimed in the current moment i would say is the idea that women i mean this is actually i was i've been reading the badness of crowds so douglas murray's book um and you know his point about about women in part is there was a claim being made that we are exactly the same exactly as good as men and yet also somehow better right it and when you put it that way and this this is one of his his geniuses uh you go ah yes well that that is exactly that is exactly the problem no we we are different and in some ways women are better at at a population level at seeing some kinds of problems than men are and men are also better at a population level at seeing some kinds of things than women are and there will be some men who may be better than any women currently alive at whatever those female typical things are and vice versa right so you know this doesn't say anything about the limitations of you or me as a man or a woman listening to this speaking this right this is about population level differences and then saying okay can we extrapolate then to what it is that you know you you as a little girl you as little boy should be aspiring to no can we extrapolate to what does it mean when given full freedom of choice boys are more likely to choose jobs that allow them to work with things and numbers and given full free choice girls are more likely to choose jobs that allow them to work with people and relationships right that's that's the thing with with full free choice we still see those differences and that difference does not inherently suggest patriarchy or oppression or misogyny or sexism or any of it it might but i see very little evidence for that in the modern era frankly so that's a great annunciation of one of the often talked about sort of immutable characteristics of men and women and and i i i will take it um as self-evident that you very much agree that for the most part we overlap and we're really talking sort of about at a population level or at the edges um and so i just want to say that so for anybody um building a case against your argumentation that that be stated um now one thing i'm curious about are there other immutable characteristics or or maybe immutable is the wrong word that that are um just so correlated caused by i'm not sure what the right word is but that that we would expect to see so if you have men go for things women go for people are there other things yeah um so one of my one of my favorite this is this is not from weird countries but one of my favorite pieces of research that i talk about uh when i'm talking about sex differences is a review of the work that men versus women do in across 50 pre-industrial cultures so it's work that was published in 1973 so from cultural anthropo anthropological work from before that um at the moment you know in 2020 when we're talking it's really hard to find really any hunter-gatherer people for instance that aren't affected by by the modern world but in 1973 it still was and they were looking at at research that had been done um throughout the 20th century with you know i can make all the caveats about a lot of ethnography wasn't done very well um and it was done with sort of a culturally imperialist attitude sometimes but put all that aside and imagine that all of the error was hopefully somewhat random and not systematic in terms of looking at for they looked at 185 activities these people who were viewing all the anthropological literature from you know weaving to water getting to um basketball basket making to fishing to hunting of large marine mammals to iron smelting right to gardening and for these 50 cultures they said okay um is it a male-only activity is it a female-only activity is it really whoever ends up at the place where they need to do the thing or is it mostly male or is it mostly female so they sort of you know this this scale of you know how gendered is the activity and if it's gendered which gender does it there is and of course it excludes the things that are anatomically and physiologically mandated we're not talking about gestation we're not talking about lactation right but gestation and lactation are exactly the things that end up causing these sex differences at the behavioral and the cultural level to sort of cascade right that if you are you know eight months pregnant or have a three-month-old baby who is not weaned because three-month-old baby shouldn't be weaned yet um it is not a good idea for you to be going out on the open ocean hunting whales right like that's not something that women are going to want to do is that could be good for them they're going to put the other people at risk you know all of these things so sure enough there are a few activities uh that these researchers found that are just exclusively male like hunting of large marine mammals iron smelting these things you know smelting of oars these things are male activities in all of these prisons is it stuff specifically to do with high risk of death that's what it looks like to me and that you know the analysis it's hard to do the analysis to know the answer to that for sure but high risk and um and also you know high it's not that women aren't strong but having like high burst strength right like being able to move really quickly as soon as you need to and you know women have that but not at all points of our reproductive cycle right like you know when you're pregnant when when you're when you've got a baby on the breast you can't do that as much so are there things that are not anatomically and physiologically mandated that are really female only gendered across all cultures kind of not like there are things that are that are in most cultures that have been looked at more likely to be women's activities things like um cooking of vegetable foods and gathering of vegetable foods right whereas cooking of animal meat uh is is more likely to be male so i mean we see this in our backyards right that's so true i literally never thought of this why well um you know i think and again this is not part of part of this research but because men are mostly doing the large game hunting and you know women in hunter-gatherer societies this is going to be this is going to vary across what kind of ecosystem you're in and such but women are doing small game hunting but men are doing large game hunting and you basically need to butcher and prepare to some degree in order to get the thing home because you don't hunt the thing right next to where you live and so in order to to get it home in such a way that it's not already rotten uh you probably have to be skilled at doing some of the prep out in the field and you know once once they have those skills that get them home and um and you know it also then is a is status and you know this plays out differently in different cultures but um you know who who actually uh did the killing gets to decide in some cultures to what degree the meat gets distributed and to who and sometimes the meat gets attributed to the females of the family and sometimes it gets distributed to the men and you know all of these things are variable and it would be it would be ridiculous to say oh in those cultures where the men distribute the meat to men that's the patriarchy because there are other cultures where the men distribute the meat to women and the fact is that families feed each other right no matter you know no matter how how it works within family units it doesn't it no family units that persist into the future starve out one of the sexes and that's not to say that there haven't been terrible you know terrible instances of babies right babies of one sex or another being preferred but once we're talking about adults you know women women get meat and men get meat and how it gets distributed varies by culture and that's you know that's interesting but um one last thing about this this piece of research that i think is fascinating is there are a lot of highly gendered activities like um well i didn't pull it up and for this um i think like uh i think basket weaving is one of them and loomwork that are oh and ceramics pottery making that are highly gendered but it depends on what culture you're in which gender it is and so there is utility so there's utility in having an activity be like okay that's man's work or that's woman's work but there's nothing inherent about the activity that makes it more more likely that men or women should be doing it there's nothing in our brains or our bodies that are differently capable of working with clay or with fabric or with or the yarn but there does seem to be some utility across almost every culture looked at such as other than weird cultures where we're just mixing it up and we're all doing to some degree all of the work if we want to of saying okay that thing is man's domain that thing is woman's domain and you therefore know if you're doing that thing you know what sex you are and if you're holding that thing you know you know something about the person who made it so you know there's there's sort of cultural meaning there's something here that i i don't understand so um why would it become gendered like why would the society who i'm sure isn't sitting down you know with like uh a council saying all right we should gender this stuff you know what do we do where it just sort of comes out why would you gender something why like if if if across cultures we see men can basket weave women can basket weave then why do cultures gender it yeah so so another way of asking that question would be what is the value of division of labor right like why why do we have this specifically by sex well um i would say because it is this category sex you know almost nothing about what the differences between men and women are are what i would call immutable but sex is right like sex is ancient it's hundreds of millions of years old and um and that you know intersex exists you know all of that we can go into all the caveats but the fact is the vast vast vast majority of human beings who have ever lived are male or female and the gender roles that come from that is to say the behavioral manifestations of sex are something that are also um also old within cultures and so there are often also division of labor between age groups right like so old people in some cultures do the child care leaving the able-bodied parents of young children to do the more physically demanding labor so that you can you can argue with regard to that okay in fact i just i just gave you an example that looked like well it's because older people can't do the physically demanding labor so they're going to do the parenting that then when their children grow up to become grandparents they you know they will do the parenting why divide things by sex when there's nothing mandating it at the biological level because it is a a category that is real and division of labor is valuable and division of labor is not inherently divisive or oppressive i mean i think that's that's maybe the the key point for me here is that just because you have difference just because you have division of labor even if that difference is somehow brought about by cultural norms and enforced by cultural norms that does not mean that the work is either better or worse based on what sex you are or what group is doing it often you get this overlay often i would say it's afterwards of ah well then that's woman's work therefore we're not going to value that as much therefore to some degree you know the economic model that um that reveals the work that is more outward facing is going to pay more and so women's work is literally devalued because it's not paid as much right but that i would say is a later overlay that the value of division of labor is actually far older than anything having to do with oppression or patriarchy or any of these you know modern lenses through which we tend to be viewing gender roles so there's two ways to look at that you've got the notion of categories being very useful and i want to talk about that in a minute um and then you also have uh which to me seems uh a necessary question to ask which is how much of this has to do with the act of sex complicating things or that you begin to create different norms or ways of communicating so for instance um this is i've never articulated these things out loud so bear with me as i sort of fumble through this but um i have worked in groups that were exclusively men and i've worked in groups that were mixed it is much easier to work in groups that are exclusively men for me as a guy but it is more productive to work in mixed groups because you get heterogeneity of ideas and it's it's just we'll talk about the friction of that in a minute which goes back to this notion of categories which are useful and i think anyway we'll get to that in a minute but um the ease with which you can communicate because you can come up with rules of engagement very very easily among guys where it's like look i'm gonna call you a [ __ ] an idiot a [ __ ] whatever just go [ __ ] do it i'm not gonna worry about your feelings the number of times where i've had because my wife and i are business partners yeah and the number of times where i've like i don't have the [ __ ] time right now to think about your feelings and and she like gets it but i don't like i don't value my way of doing that like when i do that to her i'm like ugh like because i get from her perspective that's not helpful or useful and yet i'm like oh but when when you're with guys in my life modern context i have no idea how much of this is innate but it's just easier in my experience to come up with rules of engagement how much of that do you think is playing a role in the fact that ah whoever does basket weaving doesn't matter but we're going to isolate it it's going to be all men are all women yeah no i think that's huge i think that's a tremendously apt observation and just like i said you know primates have been doing this these separate social hierarchies for tens of millions over 100 million years and here we are mixing it up mixing it up between the sexes and pretending that it's no biggie and of course it is of course it's going to be tough of course there are going to be challenges and you know also it is true that um because men are bigger and more powerful on average women tend to use power that is more covert um and that goes around behind and and uses language and whispers and and such and that is harder to shut down than the traditional male kinds of power traditional male kinds of power when it hap you know what happens in front of you you're like wow dude that wasn't okay you can't do that and it's because precisely because um women's kinds of power has been less obvious it's harder to point to and it's harder to shut down and we really ought to be you know looking to shut down all of the illegitimate uses of traditionally gendered power of any sort when we come together to try to work together and um you know the thing that you said about all male teams are easier to work with but the mixed sex teams are more productive that is that's beautiful and um i have i have an anecdote that isn't exactly analogous to that but i think also we'll add something here which is i used to play ultimate frisbee a tremendous amount and um you ruptured your achilles heel oh i know this story yes yes um and i was i mean i played i actually played on the traveling team at university of michigan when i was in grad school there and um and i and i captained a lot of summer league teams so like i really for a while was playing you know practically every day for several years and i loved it and i went to a lot of tournaments where i got to watch all men's you know men's games and i played on a women's team and then i captained a lot of co-ed teams and played pickup with a lot of in a lot of co-ed situations and watching a men's game was not all that interesting i love watching male athletes but it just wasn't all that interesting because these long ultimate frisbee is um kind of like i don't know what it's like it's kind of like soccer but with a frisbee like you can't that's i don't even know what it's like but for those who don't know you're trying to move a frisbee down the field to the end zone and the the all men's games tended to be a long hawk with a long run into the end zone and a catch and these points were brief and there was glory for like two people and the rest of the players like okay i didn't get to play right and the all women's games either when i was playing them or watching them by contrast i found relatively uninteresting for like the opposite reason they were more careful and you know these are athletes like we are we are skilled athletes we're not you know we're not wall flowers we're not unable to handle the disc but there were very few long hucks and like i like a long hawk i like to run for them but there was a whole lot of short passes and also just like you say a a tendency to try to make sure that everyone handled the disc right like that everyone gets play and that's great in a pickup game but when you're in competition that's actually not what you're supposed to be doing whereas the the co-ed teams for me anyway had this mixture of both so you had coming from sort of the female side an impulse to actually not not never throw it to those two people because they might be more likely to drop the disc but actually there are teammates and we're all playing this game together and what are you trying to do just win or actually have a good a good game for everyone and there was the sort of the pressure coming from the men like okay let's make it faster let's throw it long let's get some high energy let's get really excited when we do this and you know celebrate the guy or the woman who caught the pass in the end zone and had to lay out so you know you have both of those things coming together in a single team and uh and it was it was beautiful and yet there was never any pretense that we weren't different right so on a just one more thing about ultimate um you know it's seven people on a side and on a co-ed team you always tried to match the sex ratio because if you had four three on one side if you had four guys and three women on one side and five two on the other who's the woman who's playing against the guy on the other side and you ever ever you you line up i mean you don't always but like you line up against who you're going to be defending against and the guy a can see that he's going to be up against a woman and so that affects how he views himself and the woman can see okay i'm up against this guy and maybe he's the slowest guy on the team but he's still a guy he's still going to have better you know higher burst speed probably and he's probably a little taller than me and so can reach higher and you know there's going to be differences that aren't inherently true for all individual men versus individual women but at a population level men are faster men are taller men are stronger men have higher birth speed all of these things so um the mixed teams in ultimate were amazing to play in and we never ever ever pretended that there were differences between us and i mean i think that's what we're shooting for in in life right yeah see that to me brings this to where i would love to see the conversation get where it's not pathological and people can get to what is useful so my obsession in life is what is useful you have a goal and what's the thing that moves you to that goal and so i just always default to that now we can talk if you have a goal that's pathological now we've got a whole different problem but once somebody can clearly articulate this is my goal then use the scientific method to go well is this thing you're doing getting you to that goal or not it's what i call the physics of progress and there just there is a nature to getting closer to a goal you try something did it work yes or no you look at the data you're honest about it and then you try again now more intelligently and one of the things that seems when i think about out of society going to a place that leads to more fulfillment for everybody okay so that's my goal i want fulfillment not not just momentary happiness but like deep profound fulfillment doing hard things to serve not only yourself but to serve the collective as well okay so that's what we're aiming at what's going to be the thing that gets us there categories seems to be a very useful part of that and the reason for me is um i read a study or heard and read an article somewhere that basically said there's there are cultures that can't see certain shades of blue because they don't have a concept for it they don't have a name for that color blue and therefore you just try to take all the different shades that you see and crush them into the the same little boxes like us and snow right yeah it's snow maybe we have hail sleet snow but that's sort of it and then you hear the joke whether it's true or not i don't know the eskimos you know have 300 words for snow because there's so many different types and textures and therefore they're able to discern between those things okay i read this book called rocket fuel in the book rocket fuel it talks about how you actually for a company to be successful you need two types of leader you need one that's a visionary and then you need one that can execute on the vision and the book hypothesizes it's actually very rare that one person can do both and so you need this sort of dynamic duo and one of the ones that they give is a great example is disney you had walt disney visionary you had roy disney the one dealing with the banks and making sure that they could actually pay for things and if you read the biography on walt disney you realize whoa without roy this never would have gone anywhere so now when i think of men and women as categories i think it's actually pretty important to be able to figure out like what these categories are so that we can find this what i call the productive friction so in a business like my wife for instance is the executor i'm the visionary and i have worked with partners in the past that had that same dynamic but they resented each other and i remember watching it going this doesn't make sense like you're both extraordinary people but until you understand and you and brett actually talked about this if the bird thinks that the wind is holding it back from flying faster and imagines that it will fly faster in a vacuum but in reality of course that bird will plummet to the ground that's what i'm talking about so to me men and women as categories the the friction of thinking differently of approaching the world differently of saying in this case to my wife as a business runner even though i don't pick up on the things you pick up on and honestly sometimes i find them very frustrating because they slow me down or whatever i acknowledge that if it is just it like if i were to indoctrinate everybody on the team or only hire people that think like me we won't get as far as if you and i acknowledge that the friction between our world views and the way that we approach things creates a healthier company and so while we at times get frustrated with each other in recognizing that we are different in recognizing and putting a finger on these are the ways in which we are different and now we understand why that's valuable we're able to make more progress and so when i see people trying to no there is no difference i'm like whoa you're you're getting rid of these categories of usefulness yeah now i i think i think there's a lot true there the one thing and i've heard you talk about before about the sort of difference between the visionary and what was the second category that you called it the executor the the executor yeah somebody who who the operations officer is usually the role it becomes there it is okay so like the operations officer versus the um the visionary the one the one way that i hesitate about endorsing this this view is that because it's a dichotomy because it's a binary um it would appear to map onto the male female dichotomy and um and something very deep in me resists that quite strongly and that's not to say that um for instance i think our modern understanding of things like executive function of being able to you know organize and schedule and plan and sort of think into the future and figure out well if this is happening thursday then this other thing can't happen until friday is i think more likely to be highly capable in the minds of more women than than than men right um but and in fact there's some there's some really interesting research um that calls this um detail versus just and finds indeed that women are more able across a lot of domains to do detailed details sort of work and men just sort of work and so that that seems again like a little bit of a map for what you're talking about sort of um operations officer versus visionary just so you know and i don't know if it matters i don't map them that way yeah no i i i hear you not mapping it that way and i and i appreciate that i think i think others will and i think um that is part of the legitimate push back that we are seeing in society from people who then go on to make extraordinary and ridiculous claims about there being no differences because will will the visionary nature of women tend to look different from the visionary nature of men tend to yeah it probably will and will some well some female visionaries have visionary natures that look very much like male visionaries have in the past yes but it's more likely that it will come looking a little bit different and will therefore be a bit harder to recognize perhaps by a cultural and economic system that has made it more difficult for women visionaries to to have their visions be be revealed and i also suspect that um so there's this result that i haven't been able to track down but i used to report out on a lot i i hope still stands uh which is so we have we have a left and a right brain right so we have we have a cerebral cortex that is bigger in primates than any other mammals and bigger in humans than any other primates and it's where our memory happens and our reflection on the past and our imagining of what's going to happen in the future in our analysis and our abstraction and it's they're split between left and right but we have this band of fibers the corpus callosum that connects them and so you can ask and it's a question that i find endlessly fascinating so you know what's what's the advantage of splitting it in the first place and then what's the advantage of reconnecting it like if if you wanted it reconnected why did it split in the first place well sometimes you want to hide some things from yourself you want to be able to do something over here that this part of your brain needs to just like keep walking or something and that's a ridiculous example but that you know you don't want to be disturbed by and women are one of the demographics that actually have a larger corpus callosum um and so it's they're also um if memory serves and again i haven't been able to find this research so i hope i'm not wrong but it's women it's homosexuals and it's also left-handers so have a larger corpus callosum than men straight people and right-handers so is having a big corpus callosum good well that's like asking is being male good is it better no under some circumstances yes so you know what kind of work do you want to do that actually makes the connections that connects all the parts that's going to be part of what at just a gross neurological level your corpus callosum is for what kind of work do you want to be able to do where you dive deep and you unitask and you are not at all disruptable even by the people who want to be disrupting you to tell you that your house is on fire or whatever it is well there are times when that's going to be the better thing right so you know which is the evolut the naive evolutionary question which of these things is better is exactly that it's naive so you know is is a male style of being more likely to be able to be focused to be hypertuned to one thing to emerge days weeks months years later saying aha eureka moment i've got it probably but that doesn't mean that it's not totally possible within you know within women as well well this this is really interesting um and that gets to the article that you wrote about toxic femininity and how if we're going to talk about toxic masculinity then we have to be willing to look at the flip side of that coin jordan peterson also talks about that in a way that i find very interesting which is look um sort of the male way of being when taken to the extreme becomes tyranny and the female way of being when taken to a extreme becomes chaos and i thought that's really interesting i don't know how you feel about that before you answer that i will say um one of the things i love about conversation is you show me how i'm coming across versus what i think i'm presenting so on the um the dichotomy between a visionary and an executor i actually don't think that has anything to do with sex i think you're gonna find that there are let's say it's equally distributed 50 50. you're going to get 50 of women are visionaries 50 are executors 50 of men or visionaries 50 or executors even though and i have no reason to believe that's actually true i'm just saying right my experience is not borne out that that's a male female divide only that it is a category and the category is useful and that i think that there is similarly the categories of male and female are useful and so what you're just saying here is a true statement about my life i i much like you and brett got together very young lisa and i got to gather very young and i don't know who i would be without lisa and when i think about from an evolutionary standpoint evolution just saying oh we're these two sexes are going to co-evolve and so they're going to influence each other i'm and nature blind watchmaker totally buy into that but just for way of analogies so people get where i'm going here if you think of nature as saying i'm not interested in these species or sorry these sexes in isolation i'm not going to design them in isolation i am going to design you entirely assuming that the other one is there and so now if you strip away those categories it sort of breaks how we've come together and going back to that sort of magic friction of it is in the difference that the magic happens and that once if culturally we try to beat the difference out it will actually cause problems yeah no i i absolutely agree with that i um it is it's not only a denial of the real differences um but that denial is itself going to cause giant problems exactly as you say um to your point about what jordan peterson said i have not heard that before so i'm a big fan of him of his work excuse me um but what you said was basically male power taken to its extreme tends to tyranny and female power taken to is its extreme tends to chaos that's what you reported that he said yeah so the the way that he so me putting words in jordan's mouth is a very dangerous game when i say that that man is magnitude smarter than i am whoa um so i will say in his book um the 12 rules for life i think the subheading is an antidote to chaos now if you've read maps of meaning and you get where he's going in terms of the female being essentially nature itself because it leverages sexual selection and that the male must do things to please the female in order to have their you know progeny move forward um and i forget the exact reason why he refers to oh it's it's the unknown so chaos to him is the unknown not oh they're all over the place just that there is this sense of the new the unknown that you must sort of venture out into and there's and i'm doing a terrible job of explaining this so i really wish he could speak for himself here um but that notion of nature itself being the element of chaos of you of change um so we we should we should have him in this conversation right yeah question uh so i'm gonna i will try i'm gonna try to respond without responding to what he may have may have said i i have heard so many renderings of what he's said by other people and i know you're not trying to do this but in which people intentionally misrepresent him and he comes across as some misogynistic crank and he's not you know he's he's neither he totally agrees what he says in the book is it feels so right and doesn't feel disparaging in either direction yeah so i have not um truth in advertising here i've i've not read maps of meaning i have read 12 rules um and i've spent a little bit of time with with the man myself and with his wife and um they're both just you know wonderful people before before all of the current unfortunate medical problems they've been having um at first pass the idea of male power taken to its extreme leads to tyranny would appear to be borne out by history but it's not clear to me that that's the only way it can go and female power taken to this extreme leads to chaos that that doesn't quite that i can't quite make that match what i what i think would happen i think um you know we haven't seen an entirely female powered system um but i think it would just as equally lead to territy and it might in some ways do so faster precisely because the kinds of ways that women have been able to affect change in the world have been more covert and so um there would be more covert ways to um to change rules in a in a purely in a purely female system i honestly i can't even i can't even quite imagine what it looks like but i think unfortunately unchecked power of any sort male female any other sort that we might want to categorize it as will ultimately lead to to tyranny um so maybe i'll just stop there rather than dig a hole trying to try trying to guess at what what he meant because my my impression is even worse trying to guess at what he meant after hearing me bastardize it and describe it probably wildly incorrectly um but it is interesting to think about what um female tyranny would look like and the reason i asked my earlier question about do you think what we're seeing now is basically that that's my hunch in in no way disparaging women whenever something goes the you know my thing is the friction us working together with good faith like that's the magic the magic is is recognizing oh i could go wrong as much as it all feels right like every time i'm in the middle of you know doing something that i just have all this like massive certainty and conviction about i'm always checking myself with hey it always feels right until like the [ __ ] hits the fan and you realize whoa i've been going the wrong way for a terrifyingly long amount of time so i'm so i'm always so skeptical of that that i want the checks and balances but having said that and and i will assume the same is is true on the female side there's no ill intent i don't i don't think on mass i don't think that there's anybody trying to do anything wrong but it's like and this will be interesting i have never thought this before or said this out loud i'm merely thinking of this in real time and i've heard you speak very warmly of people that are willing to sort of risk you know looking stupid by floating something when it's early stages caveat caveat caveat um but when i think of communism that feels more feminine to me like hey everybody should get the frisbee for an equal amount of time everybody should feel good about you know playing like i get it where is that has not borne out when you get like a masculine group which is the sort of tyrannical i get all the women and you get nothing i get all the money and you get nothing right so i'm not pitching either as a good idea right um but the the covert to use your words was i think is very apt movements that we're seeing now where it's like you can tear somebody down they they later got sort of proven innocent but ah nobody pays attention to that headline right that headline didn't get any news and there's what they call whisper networks in the comic book industry where it's like so which by the way we have to talk about you write science fiction i don't want to derail where we're going right now but i'm so keen to hear more about that but you hear about these whisper networks where people are trying to erode somebody's credibility that feels distinctly feminine to me yes um yeah i think uh you know how do you erode status in a male hierarchy it tends to be right out in the open like every everyone knows that uh dude a has come to dude b and said you know i want your position and i'm going to tell you that and we're going to do it and if it's again if it's baboons it tends to be about fighting you know it tends to involve teeth and biting and people don't do it that way but um you know we we have other tools we have other weapons or tools and um you know it's it is notable that women don't engage in physical fights in the same way and when and when we do you know that is we have special words for it right like it's a cat fight it's it's a different sort of thing so how is it that the changes in status happen it's it's not it's not by those same rules which also means that it's just this this won't be easy it won't be easy to have say a team of eight people in which you know half-ish are men and half-ish are women and all are ambitious and hard-charging and beyond competent and super smart and have different things they bring to the table and also the men have a way of going about things that is going to be more direct and that will sometimes be more likely to hurt the feelings of the women at the table and the women are going to are more likely to couch things in terms of well i think or don't you think that or would it be okay if and those kinds of even even just linguistic couchings make it easier for the women to be ignored by the men when they're like focused on a thing oh well she just asked if i could but i can't like no actually i was telling you you needed to and that was just my way of saying it because this sort of morph this female way of interacting is maybe more likely to be thinking about your feelings and actually i'm not supposed to be thinking about your feelings i just needed to say it but you know both of us you know both of us all of us need to somehow be engaging with okay there's not just there's not just the one way of interacting right now and i mean i think what you said earlier is just exactly right and i've never heard anyone say it before which is that when you have been on all male teams it's easier and when you've been on mixed sex teams uh it's more productive and you know i just i so hope that anecdote holds across everything it's what i'm sort of banking on and then then the thing is how do we make the more productive thing which is actually more fair and allows for everyone not just half the population to actually come to come into our own in whatever way it is that we want to be creative analytical productive healing in the world do so with as little friction as possible like how do we do it how do we do it heather i asked you well i i actually have ideas so running a business you find that you have to navigate this um you have to find a way so i i am again my obsession the only thing i think about is i have a goal now if my goal is exciting and honorable then everybody should be cool with me going hard after that goal now if it's not honorable then okay cool i get it but my goal is fulfillment for as as many human beings is absolutely possible and when i think about how we get there i need to be able to hire the best person for the job right so whatever and obviously the way i'm trying to get there is as a media company so putting out ideas uh which my audience probably has heard me say this a bazillion times but so you sort of get a sense of where i'm headed um i when i was like 19 i ended up big brothering this kid in the inner cities for eight years and it was it planted a seed as the only true answer i was too young to sort of make sense of it and to understand like what the hell is going on um and then 15 years later i end up having 3 000 employees a thousand of them grew up just like this kid in the inner cities with a broken mindset so to me it it seems in this you want to talk about controversial positions it seems self-evident to me that poverty is a mindset there's nothing genetic about it so if you took a kid that was about to grow up in poverty and it will destroy his mindset and he or she will think in a way that is not useful and you put them in a place where um affluence is sort of the norm then they'll grow up with a mindset towards that jeffrey canada i think sums it up the best he said the biggest difference between inner city kids and kids who grow up middle class is the number of words they hear by the age of five and the ratio of positive to negative he's like is that simple it just it does something to the communication circuitry of your brain which will be so required for you to be successful later in life okay so i'm looking at that and i'm saying all right fulfillment's my goal how do i help these people think in a certain way and the punch line becomes to build this media company all right i really believe in that i think it's honorable i think it definitely excites me and now if you're saying if if i pull it off then you know there's not only personal glory but it has this positive impact in the world but if i fail i go to business so now i'm just like okay i need the best people for the job i could not care less what they look like whether they're a male or female none of that matters are they going to help me to that thing so now it's like well if i know i'm going to have a mixed group because mixed groups give you the best outcomes in terms of being productive and that i'm willing to sort of couch the ease that i would get from working you know just with people who are like me there's this great quote in business if you and your business partner think of like one of you is useless so it's like i i can't have people who think like me i already bring that to the table so now it becomes a game of rules of engagement so i've actually created a document that says this is how we [ __ ] deal with things and one of the questions that i ask in the interview is when was the last time you were offended and i want to know what offends people because i have a threshold if you're [ __ ] easily offended i can't deal with you like the odds that someone is going to offend you whether intentionally or not borders on 100. and so if you're dialed to 11 on that it's going to be destructive to the group so the john wooden idea if i don't look for the best players i look for the best fit on the team and then write it down what are your rules of engagement oh that's good um so what you just said you don't look for the best players uh john wooden you don't look for the best players you look for the best fit on the team so to me so i'm flipping the tables on you a little bit here i'm curious i i used to build teams in a different way when i when i was a college professor and i would take students on study abroad so i would i would get to know some larger group of students and then i would call the group to choose the people who i thought were mature enough capable enough you know team players enough also yes intellectually up to the challenge but really that was the least important thing to take on some you know four six eleven week journey through panama or ecuador into the amazon you know really remote places that required that we were all we all saw each other as human beings worthy of respect for whom every single other member of the team would actually go out of their way to help but at the same time i also was looking for people who um when they had a problem their first question was not who do i ask for help but how do i solve this myself right and this you know this there are environments when you actually do want people to be asking for help because that's going to increase group cohesion right but if you are if you're literally in the rain forest if you're literally in the jungle and uh you know you lose a boot um you you know you may well need help from other people but your first thought shouldn't be you know where's my professor where's you know where's the person in charge you know understand that you yourself are the person in charge first um so i'm i'm i know that my rules to my my students in advance after i had chosen them from among the people who thought they would be a good fit and said okay now we have to create this coherent unit i was really talking to them all as individuals and the part about um like who like how the team actually came together i kind of still black boxed i'm i'm not sure i have that part written down so i'm i'm wondering what what you understand about the dynamics of the team itself as different from the individuals that you choose to put on it like is it just about skills i think it's probably not i think it's about personality too it's more about personality than it is skill set you explained it perfectly so you may just have better words for exactly what i'm doing which is i do look at who they'll be working with admittedly and saying like okay are they going to get along with these specific people but because i am so gung-ho about nobody feeling like all right if you're the copywriter don't think of yourself as a copywriter like look what are the problems this company faces can you help like help anywhere that you can help and i've moved people around because it's like oh you were hired for like we had this one guy i was hired from marketing he was this extraordinarily talented artist and so he's now on our art team it's just amazing um and and had no idea that you know that was the skill set so i think about who they're working with in particular but more it's what you're talking about the layover test do i want to be around this person yeah like are they fun are they open-minded um and then the the um the lose-a-boot thing where it's like are you self-directed are you self-reliant do you are you what i call an unrelenting problem solver so if you give me an unrelenting problem solver and say but they don't know like you let's say you need a director of marketing and hey this person they don't really know marketing but they're an unrelenting problem solver would you consider them absolutely now i'd rather have somebody who's experienced as a director of marketing and they're an unrelenting problem solver but if they are easily offended um they are you know they hit an obstacle and they stop but they have like a great pedigree i'd still be like ah like i just don't know where i'm gonna be tomorrow business changes too fast and so just because you're good at something today doesn't mean that thing will be necessary tomorrow like so i have this thing called impact theory university where i teach people how to be good at business or just normal life and i keep getting pressed to create like these really narrow courses like teach a copywriting course or teach a marketing course i'm like you don't understand this stuff changes so quickly whatever i teach you today will cease to be interesting in six months for sure so i could walk somebody point by point how i built my last company which ended up being a billion dollar company's crazy nut it would seem so dumb because none of it would work now and so getting to the what you're calling a black box of like there is a lot of sort of mystery to that but there are fundamentals to how a person approaches like talking to um brett when i had him on there's no question if brett and i sat together long enough i'd be like oh we actually really disagree sort of violently about these things but because you're so open-minded and i just want to know what's true it's like we can get along so well and so i'm always looking for people that have that sort of openness they want to know what's true they're not dogmatic i'm so terrified of dogma in my own life that you know finding people who think like that i'll take that all day oh yeah so i'm reminded of another anecdote many years ago brett and i were hanging out with my dad who's dead now but he was a computer engineer he was born in 1938 so he was an early computer engineer and he basically he he spoke hardware and he spoke software and he in large part did the interface between the two so he was basically the translator between the hardware guys and the software guys and women he had a lot of female programmers actually that he worked with and one of his jobs was hiring hiring programmers and he was describing at one point the what he looked for in programming in in in people who were going to be programming for him and you know he said a lot of the things that you've said here and that i've said and at some point brett said you know aren't you forgetting something you know they obviously need to know how to program and he said oh no no i can teach him to code that's not the important thing at all so i mean i think i think this is what the best a i think team leaders and you know successful entrepreneurs and business people are educators whether they know it or not so they're they're they're creating environments in which you know the guy that you hired into marketing and turns out to be an amazing artist presumably he knew that but no one else had ever been able to see it and also have the power to help him realize it so that's that that is a big role that i see as an educator like yes there is an opening up of horizons because you reveal things that the person that this would be student has never seen before but a lot of it is just getting out of their way like opening opening it's like opening up a highway being like you can go now like you you can you can go as far as you want and my job is to to show you the various off-ramps and to see which ones you actually do a good job on and you know your your artist who's more an artist than a marketer you know that that story is is wonderful in part two because it's clear in you telling it that there's nothing in you that's saying and that's better you know or and that choice is inherently a better choice it's a better choice for him and you know this this also is the mistake that people who naively think about evolution make what is best you know this is this is the theme that i keep coming back to in our conversation here like no art isn't better than marketing you know like i may have a preference for it many people might have a preference for it but it is not inherently better for that human being with passion for and skill at art it is a better choice for him that does not mean that is a better choice for every human being some people will be better at and have more passion for and and skill in marketing and therefore that's a better choice for them totally absent any moral judgment about marketing and art in the abstract this may seem like a random question but um something you said just triggered this one i am surprised that you left unperturbed you'd still be a college professor just given that my value system which is not better it is just different i'm so obsessed with scale i am so glad that you are now doing things on the internet otherwise i never would have encountered your mind and the way that you think and approach things um what made you so good you were the um i don't know for how many years but you were rated the number one teacher at evergreen before you departed what was it that made you so good well i i appreciate i appreciate that um first let me respond to the first thing you said which is for a few years before evergreen blew up brett and i were were looking around going how do we how do we scale this like is it possible to do what we do in these classrooms and in the field for 25 or 50 students um because we had it was just a 25 to 1 student faculty ratio and so if you were teaching alone you had 25 students if you're teaching with someone else you had 50 and you know very occasionally a group of 75 but that is both more students than most people could really form relationships with but we managed but it's also a tiny tiny number of people and it did feel like as much as those jobs had such tremendous freedom the other the thing that they had was such tremendous freedom with security and it turns out the security was false so um so what they weren't they weren't great jobs after all but what they allowed was a freedom to explore uh relationship space with um in con in the context of education with like almost no resources like this is a public liberal arts college with almost no resources um so it was always shoestring budgets but like what where can you take people that they don't imagine was even on option so i i love i'm like simultaneously an extreme introvert and i love connecting with people and i just loved creating these communities where a lot of students felt i believe and i was told by many of them seen for the first time and we had a tremendous number of first generation students students eligible for pell grants which means very low income students with no support from their families non-traditional age students veterans um just you know people who had been um homemakers and were now coming back to school so you know tremendous diversity actually of across most of the demographics you would expect and put all those along with a certain number of traditional age you know k-12 straight to college students in a room together and especially take them out into the field together and start showing them things that are real regardless of whether they care or they know or they understand regardless of what they think you know that lizard is sitting on that log bob in his head because he that is a territorial display and he is telling males stay away this is mine and he is trying to lure females and that story that i just said on top of the observation we can talk about to what degree it's true here and now and the species and all but the observation is real and enduring and nothing that anyone else says you know you might have a different angle on it say oh well he wasn't bobbing as long as you thought he was fine the physical reality is out there right like the physical reality happened history happened once regardless of our interpretation of it now let's come together break bread together cook together sit around a campfire play frisbee together right so we're gonna do the the intellectual stuff and it's gonna be hard and challenging and i'm gonna tell you things like yeah genocide evolved and rape evolved and they're terrible and we need to do everything in our power to minimize these things going forward in human history but pretending that they're not evolutionary outcomes is not going to help so let's talk about all this difficult stuff and you know lead you through stuff most people don't want like i'm going to teach a bunch of math phobe statistics and that's going to enable you to try to reduce the bias in your thinking and i'm going to walk you through you know in one quarter you're going to go from seeing a pattern hypothesizing why you think it's true creating an experimental design to try to explain to try to address whether or not your hypothesis is true collect the data analyze the data the statistics i taught you write up a report which references the primary literature and speak that speak your research to the class like an entire the entire actual gamut of scientific research which frankly even a lot of people with phds don't end up doing because they walk into someone's lab and they get handed a little piece they get they get told ah this is the question we're working on um you're gonna collect these data and then we're gonna talk about what it means so i had i assumed i assumed that my 18 year olds and my 25 year olds and my 30 year old students were totally capable and a few of them weren't it turns out or just not in that time or not with me or whatever but the vast majority of them could 100 do it could rise to the challenge and the idea that you know what this is day one at the end of week 10 you're all going to have done a complete piece of research most of it will have failed most of it will be banal most of it won't matter but you will have done a complete piece of research and you will have that forever after you will be able to see and know and go i did that well [ __ ] if i did that who knows what else i can do so that that's part of that that's that's so powerful so um given the work that i have done so in manufacturing you end up in the inner cities a lot and then now that i sort of go around speaking um there's my message is look i used to be um i would go home every night from my remedial job and i would lay on the floor of a cheap unfurnished apartment i could i can still remember how it felt and what it looked like to have the cheap nylon carpet like pressing against my face and when you get up and it like leaves little marks because i was just like what am i doing with my life and so my story is one of going from sort of broken hopeless lost afraid to oh actually like from an evolutionary lens if you think about the brain you understand why you have a negative voice you understand how you can like use it as a habit loop trigger like there's just these things that you can do that then prime you to be an unrelenting problem solver to understand how the acquisition of skills works to understand that the human animal has chosen a strategy of letting culture influence it so basically it can learn and grow and adapt even you know after it's born even after it's an adult it's like so cool hey take this like and now go do your thing and so the the kinds of people that that um are drawn to that message it's really interesting and the thing that i'm always trying to get them to do is what you just talked about which is just try the [ __ ] you're going to blow yourself away if you go do something i know you don't think you can i get it you have a view of yourself you're me lost scared broken uh just convinced that you're not good enough smart enough whatever but if you go do it like it can be such an intense paradigm shift for people yeah and just getting people to take that first bit of action um and you've talked a lot about helicopter parenting and i feel like oh my god that we're living through this nightmare of people are so afraid to try things they actually conflate language with violence right you're never going to try anything like that that's a level of like paranoia so if i were to have let's say taken one of your kids who i know you did not raise this way but i took them when they were very young and i helicopter snowplow whatever the you know parenting term is and then i handed them back to you at 26 brain is done developing yeah but you now your heart aches to help them how do you break them out of that mode of thinking oh that's wow what a great question somehow not something i had ever considered before what what if i were meeting my zach or toby now 16 and 14 10 years from now having been raised in a very different more typical i think now parenting family well probably a also it is true that they you know one or both of them would have been given drugs for their activity right you know because they would have been diagnosed with adhd and would be again would it be given speed so that's a whole other rabbit hole that we can go down but so you know i meet them at 25 26 um they are you know kid's totally capable but hasn't lived and hasn't had to solve problems for himself and i like yes i also did academic things and for a kid like that for a young a young man like that often those young male students at first had a very difficult time turning in assignments on time um they you know or they were just rule followers but they did it sort of to the letter and never expanded beyond and never showed me what else they could do and how where they could take it that was more interesting but i think week two of almost every class that i taught we did a five-day field trip somewhere just domestic somewhere um until the very last couple of years somewhere where there was no internet or cell service that became more and more difficult to find um in 2016 2017 but from 2002 through 2015 or so uh when i when i was teaching it was it was pretty easy so you go to eastern washington scab lands of of eastern washington or up to the san juans to uh moran state park on orcas island or or uh even to the oregon coast and yes there's academic work and you know largely i would be teaching them the beginnings of how to be animal animal behaviorists how to observe and once you can you know take the observer out as much as possible you know and observe without bias how to take data that is that is careful and that doesn't include your interpretation in the data that's the academic part it's not the main reason to go spend five days you know with a group of 25 or 50 people in you know rustic cabins where they are they have been broken into groups they've chosen their own groups before we go they're food groups and every food group has is taking responsibility for one or two meals um to feed everyone and we have access to a commercial kitchen and you know i give them i give them i give them my little spiel in advance and i say you know we've collected enough money i'm giving you enough money back that you can buy real food i want you to buy you know i want you to buy real vegetables and real grains at real meats and you know organic when you can and all of this and you know don't buy the canned stuff i don't want to see you know blue drinks on the table um it but you know do do what you know to do and then watch what everyone else is doing they cook together we all eat together we all have opinions about the food that we've eaten by this group and that group and we sit around the campfire together and at each meal i sit with different groups and yes there's academic work on these field trips but i make myself available without ever saying it really you know it's not office hours i'm having office hours now so if you want to talk to me you can come no that's terrifying to people and people only come to office hours you know if it's called office hours they come to office hours if they know they have an academic question right but if you sit around on the grass after frisbee game or after a meal and you say okay the next academic thing is it two it's now one i haven't said anything about where i'll be but i'm just sitting here and i look approachable and that 26 year old young man or young woman it's easier for me to imagine because i've got two boys a young man comes to me and just starts talking then it's easy it's it's it's downhill from there because as soon as they start talking and saying well actually i do kind of want to do x oh really what why well because i you know i once saw it on in a movie or my friend did it but i wasn't allowed to because my parents didn't didn't let us do that or you know more often in the case of what i would see was we just didn't we just didn't have the money you know like i said we had we had a tremendous number of low-income students um and so i'd say okay we let's let's figure out how to make this happen without the resources but by let's what i mean is i want to clear as many hurdles from your road as possible but this is you this is you doing this such that when you are done with this process you can look back on it and say i did that and therefore i can do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing so that's that's definitely an incomplete answer but it's part of it it's just like sort of being open letting can there be a space like on a field trip where there is nothing expected of anyone else in terms of what they're doing at the moment and maybe they're off smoking a joint and maybe they're off showering and you know maybe like who knows right um and you know i hope not they weren't supposed to but like i'm sure that was going on um and maybe the fact that i'm sitting there and they're sitting there and there's there's a possibility for some relationship to happen that's serendipity and leaving ourselves open for serendipity is one of the big pedagogical things that i started to do with intentionality probably for the second half of my being a college professor when i realized that that was actually that that's something that you can't then quantize you can't count how much serendipity did i allow like no you have to leave white space you have to leave the open space and then be open to what happens that is uh this may be the the sort of most stereotypical male versus female response to that so if i was in the same position and you said tom look zach or toby this is what happened i need you now to get them you know in line with this set of values let's say that you handed to me i'd be like all right rad you cool if i kidnapped them because i'm going to take them for a year onto an island and i'm going to take seven or eight people that are exactly that i'm going to put them on this island with those people and just because those are the only people around they're gonna want their respect so much that whatever the values are of that group they're going to conform to the values of those people and there's a great quote i forget who said it but when you go to a company do not for a second think that that company will conform to you you are going to conform to that company i thought oh man that's so important for people to think about when they're taking a job or whatever it's like man you might think that you were just this killer agent of change but let me tell you like you will very rapidly conform to the norms of that little group that you're in and that to me like when i think about the isolation that happens in social media is beyond terrifying yeah but whatever ecosystem you create for yourself you're going to conform to the norms of that group and that [ __ ] is so scary to me and you you and brett talked about and i thought whoa one of the reasons heather that i am not a parent is i don't think i could put my kids in a situation where they might break their arm and you gave your kids rules about not getting hurt that i was i was so impressed but equally shocked do you remember the rules that you gave your kids yeah um and yeah we ended up formalizing some slightly different rules for our students on study abroad as well um yeah the rules for the boys were take risks take physical risks and you cannot break your head or your back or your sense organs you know your your eyes in particular those those don't heal those won't those don't grow back but you can break an arm and you can break a leg and it's better if you don't um but you can do it and you know better if you come real close a couple times and not end up breaking anything but it's not a disaster given where given when and where we live that is not a disaster there are disasters that are possible and those are the ones that we've laid out so you know so this this it trains them for all sorts of things it trains them to actually learn how to fall and you know our younger son actually became became known in the elementary school schoolyard as the boy who bounces he would jump from the craziest high things and he would always get up and run away and people like my god i wouldn't let my kid jump off something half that tall like well this is what he's inclined to do and he's not the one who gets hurt you know it's the kids who aren't ever allowed to explore who at the point that they do finally take the risk and jump off something much shorter they jump as if their legs aren't aren't springy and then yes they do get fractures because they don't know how to use their bodies they don't know what their bodies are capable of so yeah i mean both of our boys have um have had injuries that have been you know not great but they've they've never hurt their heads or their backs or you know or their sense organs or their eyes and you know they're these you know how you how you end up raising kids the environment in which you raise them is what they know how to do so we we took them to the amazon when they were boy 12 and 10 i think i'm not sure exactly maybe 11 and 9 and they because we spent so much time in nature with them in uh in north america we trusted them and they were wearing the appropriate gear like you always have to wear rubber boots up to the knees for you know to to to defer to um to deflect snakes should they come at you um and and you know they look they never had that happen but we we trusted them enough that they could run ahead of us on the trail in the amazon and once toby came running back and said giant snake and he had found this huge coral snake which is a which is a deadly snake that we were then able to run ahead and see and certainly there was a moment there of oh my god what have we done you know like what did we let this child do this is i don't remember he was you know seven or eight at the time i think and um you know maybe a little older than that i just can't remember exactly when it was um but when we were in quito which is a massive latin american capital with um latin american driving uh we were watching the cars go around some roundabout and we watched a little kid maybe three years old come out of an apartment building and navigate the traffic and go into old tienda and come out with a bag of something and navigate back and go back like wow we don't trust you guys to do that we trust you in the amazon and that little boy probably is not trustworthy in the amazon because he's probably never left quito um so like you you know what you know because of what you experience there's just because that little kid was ecuadoran doesn't mean he can do amazon he's an urban kid whereas our boys had and still have more experience in deep nature than they do in urbanity so the thing is yes we get more flexible as we ate less flexible as we age for sure our brains get less plastic we get more you know canalized into our particular ways of thinking but continuing to expose ourselves to more and more experiences that are different from anything we imagined is how to keep that flexibility and it's god it's part of why this you know this this year 2020 and covet 19 and all of the restrictions on mobility um that have been imposed on us as a result are i am really concerned are just going to further further the mental health crisis uh that is that we are experiencing in our youth and especially the children who just couldn't spend any time exploring making new relationships jumping off jungle gyms you know for a while there even those things were were locked down because it was considered unsafe my god kids especially just need to explore and you know the younger you are the more everything you run into is new so it's easier to have things be new when you're young yeah i'm uh when i think about kids that are in a developmental phase right now being locked down for this long man yeah that is super unnerving what have you guys done in fact your kids are like smack bang were you guys already homeschooling them or has this been a total shake-up for them yeah it's hard and i think it's hard for everyone there i don't i haven't talked to anyone who says this is great my kids love vegetable school this is fabulous you know i've heard a few stories like well you know we're getting more time together okay good but um now our kids are at two different schools and it's they're neither of them has seen the inside of a classroom since march and it's we're talking in mid-november and um they're 16 and 14 exactly at an age when peer groups and sociality and thinking about the opposite sex um is all happening and it's all virtual uh and it's not you know the schools are actually in many ways doing a much better job than i was expecting but it's an impossible job to do really really well it's just it's not what humans do you know this this conversation that we're having um i'm really enjoying and i really want to be able to have it in person with you right like i am this this makes me want even more than i already did to you know sit down with you and you know and and your wife hopefully too and you know and just and just and just talk right and this is great this is a you know this is a really good second best but it's definitely second best that's not even close think about crazy like the number of cues that we pick up on when you're sharing space that you can't do over the um over skype like you said look i'm so glad that this didn't happen in the early 90s where whoa it would have really been deranging and you'd be so isolated and have no way to like connect with other people especially because i live in a different state than most of my family yikes that would be super gnarly but still like not being able to share space is is a huge disadvantage yeah not being able to share space and not being able to travel and you know this is this is just one of my my passions not just for me but for other people so another thing that i that i did um which i um i implied earlier but some of my students who i took on study abroad so i ran four or five study abroad programs the last of which was this long one that brett and i've talked about that he and i did together but i did several earlier and i helped students who had never left like a 100 mile radius of their birthplace get passports and i took them to the jungle and i took them to the andes and i took them to coral reefs and i blew their minds and it was amazing and you know these were mostly kids who you know who loved lizards or who loved you know just loved nature who loved who you know who were who were into the idea of the kinds of things we were studying but again the academics wasn't necessarily the main thing so actually just to return you know you said you would take um a kid and put him on an island with eight other eight other young adults and you know create a culture to which they create a culture that was admirable to which they then wanted to conform and i would say that was also that was also part of what i was doing um just at the you know part of what creating the community creating the culture in the program the classroom the field work whatever was precisely about um you know the professor has the authority and it was very useful to walk in and say do not trust me because i have the authority because i have the degree because my salary is being paid by the university to whom you pay tuition and i'll be writing your evaluations at the end uh i must earn your trust i must earn your respect and your trust and at some point it will get exhausting for you to question every single thing i say so you know hopefully i earn your respect and trust sooner rather than later but um at least at first don't assume that i know what i'm talking about so that's one way of giving away authority that i think is very useful but the fact is that the professor still has the authority to set the tone and to set the culture and to say no actually um we aren't going to be offended by everything i'd like that's that's not a useful way forward and no you're not gonna you're neither gonna tone police nor language police but we're going to be respectful and always and we're going to be discussing difficult things and i will tell you what kinds of topics we're talking about but i'm not offering up trigger warnings this isn't a safe space like none of that we're not doing that but look around and if there if there are people here who you feel like you just can't be in a room with think about that but also if that's really where you are you need to find a different place to be because i'm not changing them because you've got something in your head that tells you that you can't be here that is literally part of our document we're saying earlier you have to write down your rules of engagement one of the things it says is this is not a safe space like this we're gonna challenge the life out of you and what you just said about giving away power a what a sign of tremendous confidence that but i have a feeling it's not only confidence in that i know my [ __ ] it's confidence in i actually want to know if i'm wrong like there would be no greater joy than to be surrounded by people who can elevate my game and help me like get to a better place and that in business yes you know i told my staff i said look i just spent the last almost 20 years fighting to become a ceo and now that i'm ceo and i'm the one signing your paychecks like i want i'm now giving all of that away i'm not asking you for deference so the only way that this becomes like i sort of step into the ceo role is we may get to a point where i cannot convince you you cannot convince me we need a final arbiter i will be that final arbiter but up until that point like i i assume the vast majority of the things that i think are wrong and that my current skill set has already taken me as far as it's going to take me and the only way for me to get where i want to go is if people can show me where i'm wrong help me get where i'm going and also i don't scale so i need other people to come in and be amazing and the only way to get the best out of people is like you said you give them that space to try something so i stole this idea from ray dalio he said i allow my part or my employees to dent the car just never total it i was like oh my god it's a genius so we talk a lot about that like hey go make mistakes you're going to cost me money i get that i'm all for it i'm super happy to invest in that don't do anything like you said don't break your head don't break your back don't damage your sense organs it's like there are certain things i don't want you to do but at the end of the day like i want you to challenge me i want you to say i think that's stupid so i tell people um in my company that i want my feedback aggressive and in public and the reason i want it aggressive and in public is not because i think everybody is ready for their feedback to be aggressive and in public you know with other people be much more thoughtful but i said i want you to see even if somebody comes to me and says tom you're an idiot this is the dumbest idea i've ever heard one i'm gonna be like first of all thank you because so many people are afraid to speak to power so i'm just already grateful that you're not afraid to say what's on your mind let me hear your argument and maybe you're right and if you are then i will immediately adopt your way of thinking because it's going to get me to my goal which again is my obsession and if i have a good idea and you're wrong then that idea will be able to withstand that criticism if it can't withstand the criticism it wasn't a good idea in the first place that's right and so there's like a a sobriety that comes when your house is on the line in a business where it's like i'm no longer worried about being right i just need to make sure i don't lose my house and go out of business yeah so that has always been tremendously clarifying for me oh that's and that's i've heard you talk before about having sort of discovered by accident the scientific method having realized that some of the principles that you had written uh were in fact a description of the scientific method and you've just you've just described it again right um at some level that exposing our ideas to our friends and our enemies is the only way to help us get better at thinking and to know if our ideas are actually legitimate and you know our enemies are more likely to give us really crap feedback because they're also motivated um to you know to to be mean to you know to not be nice to us but mean or nice doesn't change whether or not the actual thing is true and so the enemies may actually also be more motivated to find the flaws and um and to say the flaws when they find them so trying to strip and you know this is i think this is a more male typical way of receiving feedback so that you know this is a challenge that being open and you even if you can't accept it in the moment being open to feedback that comes in on a channel that you find offensive that you find tainted that you find ugly or gross or whatever stripping away all the tone and being left with that nugget of whatever it actually was if there was one and that you know in in the modern especially in the social media environment so often a lot of the critique just has nothing inside of it you strip it you strip it strip it there's nothing there and so it was a waste of your time and i think it makes people more resistant to hearing critique but you know honest critique even when it comes coded in something ugly okay maybe in the moment i'm not going to be able to to calm down to lower my temperature to take away the tone that you're saying it in and to consider whether or not you've got the true thing but it is a hundred percent incumbent on me to at least go away go private and go okay i've calmed down now i don't like how he said it and like what his motivations were but is the thing true okay it's true well then now what do i do one thing i at least owe is to tell that person no matter no matter how hateful they may be you know what about that thing you were right and i was wrong and you know we we owe that to you know frankly the whole the whole universe and this is i mean this is another rabbit hole that we won't go down i'm sure but one of the problems for instance in in science now is that academic publishing effectively the peer review allows for these little cabals to self-congratulate each other and so it's peer review is exactly supposed to be the exposing of ideas to all sorts of diverse opinions who will tell you know you or the publisher that of of the journal that you want to publish in oh that's not a good idea this shouldn't be published or you need to go back and do an experiment with a different design instead because people are more and more and more specialized you get like a group of i don't know 6 8 20 30 people who tend to peer review each other's articles and if you want to get a positive peer review next time even though they're anonymous they're not really anonymous then you're more likely to give a positive peer review now even if the work isn't all that good and so you end up with lower and lower quality of work because you don't actually have outside opinion coming in and saying actually no heather this is something i am uh i'm obsessed with so i had a moment of crisis in my early 20s where um long story but at the time i just wanted to get rich and so my obsession was getting rich rich rich rich i showed up every day that's all i wanted and i um also was telling everybody that um you know i wanted to get rich so i had this tremendous amount of pressure to sort of live up to that and i got into this fight one time with the people who were at the time my bosses and i i started arguing for an idea that i knew was dumb i knew that it was not effective but because they were smarter than me and i kept hitting this sort of moment of sort of um identity crisis where they were smarter than me and i didn't understand it at the time but i valued myself for being smart so here i was constantly running into this like oh my god this makes me feel so badly about myself and so i needed to win this argument because it would make me feel smart if i could get them to do what i wanted and i remember i had this voice in my head just screaming you know you're wrong shut up like you know this won't work what are you doing and they finally probably just acquiesced and we're like fine we'll you know we'll do it that way and i walked away from that going what is it you actually value do you want to be rich or do you want to be right do you want to feel good about yourself and i realized i need to feel good about myself but man to get out of this weird like conundrum of like fighting for bad ideas just because they're my idea it's not moving me towards my goal now i don't think that my goal was exciting or honorable at the time but just that i was seeking a goal and it was moving me away from that goal and so i had this crisis which has since served me incredibly well which is i can choose to value myself for something different so i can choose instead of valuing myself or in this case getting published it's like you've created a pathological value chain where you're you are incentivized emotionally to have people like your stuff even if it isn't moving the world forward so they have unintentionally created this i value myself for my peers acceptance but they've never articulated it like that in their head either because they've never hit that moment of crisis which i'm grateful to have encountered in my early 20s or they hit it and worse they just like ah like shuffled it off and i'm not going to think about that right and the biggest breakthrough in my life was be goal oriented now be very very careful about what you set as your goal because you can take yourself down some horrifying paths but once you have a goal that's honorable and exciting to you like you're just even if i fail at this thing i'm having a great time and it would elevate not only me but elevate other people now it's like okay well if you become a servant to that goal you're seeking truth you're trying to get better you can own that i'm not yet good enough to achieve that because you don't value yourself for that you value yourself for the sincere pursuit of that thing and so when i see groups like that i want to pull them aside and go you're only [ __ ] up yourself like history is going to judge you first of all and then some part of you knows that this is a very fragile existence that any moment somebody could come in and like burst that bubble i've just never understood people that want to stay in that like it it is i lived there for a long time so no judgment that people get there but it felt it was so anxiety provoking because it was like i'm going to be found out somebody's going to figure out i don't know what i'm doing you know and i value myself for that so much just a horribly vulnerable position no it's it's super vulnerable and i think unfortunately academic science has become so much about it that it's very difficult to escape it and so you know you presumably people mostly go into science because they're interested in seeking truth in figuring out what is actually real in the universe whether or not they like it or agree with it and you know maybe in some of our cases so that they can understand what's real in order to make a better world in order to know what is what is true at base so that we can change those things that are changeable and um the the publishing system which seems like this arcane little branch but is actually the singular measure um along with grant getting that scientists are most judged on is so is is such is such this little cluster this little cabal that i described that you just described in a different in a different domain that it's it's hard to see how excellent science is actually being done right that um excellent science is not to some degree actually discouraged it's actually discouraged but it's also um there's no check on it there's no outside force in a lot of cases that saying you could have done better like this this this really could have been done better and you know like you you made a point earlier i can't remember exactly what it was about but you once once you have a paper out there that's the thing that gets known if it gets known at all if you end up having to retract it because it wasn't true wasn't right very few people hear about that the paper is the thing people hear about so i think it was you were talking about an accusation you know random false accusations are made and if they turn out to be false it's the person's reputation against whom the bad accusation was made is still affected it never goes back and so the sort of flip side of that is you get papers out and people know you had papers out oh having to quietly go oh actually the you know the statistics weren't good or the you know the methods could have been better to actually demonstrate my point this is not the thing that is uh encouraged by the by the way that academic science works the thing in the culture wars which by the way i never thought i would talk about ever in a million years um and what started drawing me in is how i think it's self-corrosive that people are not setting themselves up for success and remember my definition of success is fulfillment so that thing that is resilient to failure but makes you feel good about yourself yeah i mean i've always summed it up saying all that matters in life it's not success money fame notoriety nothing it is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself there's no one there to hype you up or tear you down like what do you think you think you're on the right path you're doing good and honorable things like that that matters a lot and so i see people moving in a way that i think will be counterproductive to them achieving that end and in all of this the thing in the culture war that scared me the most is hashtag shut down stem and that's why i was like i'm sorry what like there there is an assault on being logical that i find particularly bizarre as somebody who looks at things from an evolutionary lens do you have a sense like what are they doing what are they doing um it's it's a full-on assault as you said it is it is both amazing and surprising and not surprising at all when you take a bigger picture and see the various um the various lines of attack that they're taking it is it's the same activism that emerges from the same confusion about reality honestly which is you know depending on how you view it you know it's sort of emerging from post-modernism it's this intersectionality it's critical race theory it's you know it's all of these sorts of ways of thinking about what humans are that one of which has as its foundation the idea that we create our reality that there is i mean the most extreme form of it is that actually the reality reality doesn't exist absent are um our sense of it and um the the sort of the weaker forms are there is no judgment free or moral free assessment of things and therefore the very scientific method is flawed because it imagines a possibility for objectivity so i'm trying to steal man what what you guys gonna say what what's the flaw then in that what's the flaw in that is that the scientific method is exactly the you know if you do it once if you make an observation and try to pause as many possible hypotheses as you possibly as you can for what might have caused that and you actually have a complete solution set of hypotheses and then you create a good experimental design that actually can allow you to delineate between those hypotheses and then you collect good data and then you do the appropriate analysis on those data then what comes out at the end is still just one result right it just tells you that under these circumstances at this time with you know a flawed human being doing the work this is what i this is what i found and yes we use statistics but you know you know every at every step in the process there's the possibility for error and the thing about the scientific process that is not as often talked about is that it is inherently cyclical you have to do it and do it and do it and do it again and the modern the way that science gets funded now there's almost no impetus to redo work right to have some other lab across the country across the world do the same kind of work that you just did unless it honestly unless it has medical implications right unless there's sort of money and lives on the line so for most work it gets done once um if it's if it's good and you know depending on what that means it'll get published and then no one ever goes back and looks and and looks at it so there's a lot of i'm sure 100 that there are a lot of results out there that are published that people are basing other research on that aren't actually true that don't hold simply because even though the original research may have been completely well intentioned and the people doing the work tried to do everything right there was just some error some problem that they couldn't see and because the work because no one ever tried to replicate it we didn't see that it wouldn't replicate so it's the replication part of the scientific process that is what protects us from the idea that we that we can't be objective no individual humans can't be fully objective we have to recognize our biases are you know we are of course seeing the world entirely through our senses but you take my biases and your biases and that guy's biases and her biases and you all come together and you you apply your different biases to the same problem if you come up with the same answer over and over and over again you have a good sense that the asymptote that you're approaching is truth is is reality right and so that doesn't pretend that we're objective but it does say the foundation that if you don't agree with this i don't know what kind of conversation we can have there is an objective reality out there there is how close are we to discovering it in some places we're really close in some places not at all in some places i'm sure i think we're closer than we actually are and something will get turned on its head i would put a tremendous amount of money on you know the theory of natural selection not being overturned ever anytime right but there are a lot of other things even you know within within biology that we probably think are true that aren't that doesn't mean the objective reality changed it means that our understanding of what it was changed so shut down stem is terrifying because it's coming from people who are credentialed in and practicing as scientists which means that they either really don't understand what science is in which case what are they right what are they doing or this is a bad faith effort it's a power grab and you know the the all the language of post-modernism is about power so that wouldn't surprise me but it's it's disingenuous is the kindest word i can put on it in that case yeah the the word that i want people to develop a nice healthy obsession with is utility and utility again it comes down to your goal so what's your goal and if their goal is power then hey maybe there really is a lot of utility in what they're doing and shut down stem and all that but then we need to put the goal out on the table and to me the only way to navigate the quote-unquote culture war is to put our goals on the table and now we can talk about the goals right so the goal that freaks me out is equity or equal outcome right i'm all about equal opportunity i i have literally given my life my wife and i could have bought an island and retired and never worked again and yet we stepped back to the table before all this kicked off and said what we care about is look there are these people in the inner cities they're really [ __ ] struggling and their zip code is the number one predictor of their future success not even their iq their iq would already bother me but the fact that their zip code is more predictive of their future success than even their iq i was like that is a world i can't live in so what's the thing and i already talked about it earlier but it's like getting people to think in a way that's going to be useful for them to hit their goal and i'll shorthand that to what carol dweck calls a growth mindset like if you have a growth mindset you're in that relentless problem-solving mode and you know you're going to go about as far as a human with your hand that you were dealt in terms of intellect and stuff like that you're going to maximize that or get to as close to maximizing that as possible and so when i think about all right if we put that goal on the table now we can assess like what does that look like how do you have to get there and we can just debate the realities of okay one is at a desirable end state two if we even agree that that's a desirable end state then how do we go about getting it that sidesteps tyranny right so cause the earliest discussions are gonna be oh you can get there authoritarian like rule clamp down on everybody take away from people that achieve too much give to people that have achieved too little like we could talk through exactly what you'd have to do and we can ask has this experiment been run in that case yes it has what if the outcomes have been you know so there it it becomes a game that can actually be played but when we won't like state okay i am trying to achieve this state and make people say it in a sentence because man people will waffle and it's like one thing that i've trained my team to do is nobody is more prone to waffling than i am but i when i have something that matters i can give it to you in a sense and when you can state something that clearly now we can aim to it and we can measure whether we're making progress on it or not and that's why i feel like we're in this [ __ ] death loop of like yeah people talking around each other changing words it's like oh my god what is happening yeah what is happening um it's not entirely good faith is is a big part of it that um i think i do think that there are germs of good ideas and reasonable critiques at the foundation of pretty much all of this culture war stuff but it is cloaked and in and driven by uh abusive power seeking at this point and you know the thing the thing that both brett and i have said a number of times is that it looks very much like there is not people are not seeking some the bad faith actors who are largely driving the conversation and yelling the loudest they're certainly the loudest and so they get they get more of the airspace than they deserve are not actually trying to end oppression they're trying to turn the tables they're trying to reverse the direction the polarity of the oppression that has historically existed and and also define define all of these uh power relationships in as simple as terms as possible often and often these are wrong right they or they just ignore a tremendous amount of nuance of where power actually lives so um yeah part of part of why it's hard to fight back against is that people want to assume that when someone says something even on social media even from anonymous account or a non-anonymous account but it's a person you don't know and you're never going to meet in real life they want to assume that it's coming from a place of honesty and increasingly that's not true so how is it i mean i think i think interestingly you and i probably did very similar things in your you know team in our team building uh work actually and you know team building for business team building within educational programs academic programs for the undergraduates on a team in real life with 10 20 30 40 people you can see and you don't always see it early on and they can hide but you can see when someone is not doing what they say they're doing when they're up to no good right and i'm not talking about lazy or slacking i'm talking about like sociopathic behavior right these people are rare but they exist and it's you you never the reason it's effective is that you never assume that someone is going to be coming from that place we assume that we look into people's eyes and they see us the same way we see them and a very few people in the world don't i think that lacking the real life interchanges such as exists on social media allows more and more people to act that way to basically have a facultative which is just as opposed to obligate but like i can i could take it on i could put it on i could take it off a facultative sociopathy in which they regard other people these other accounts that they're interacting with as if they're not quite human right and so we have this like dehumanization where we're treating people like they're like like we're parts like you're white and you're male and you're cis and you're straight and you're successful and you know okay those are all true but is that is that the best description of you that i could give in that many words no in no way right and yet those things that i just said about you for instance will be the categories that these these bad faith players and that many people in the culture wars right now want to use to entirely define you not just start not just as a starting place but just like and that's it we're done now i know everything i need to know about you really like that's never been the case in human history before that though the five demographic descriptors were sufficient because we're all we're all individually amazing and distinct very very very well said um i have to ask you write science fiction why aren't you publishing science fiction well um so when i started college i wanted to write science fiction that that was my goal that was when when you were um lying face down on the carpet with the nylon imprint on your face uh with with a goal i had a goal which was i'm gonna write science fiction i love science i love writing is writing is one of the things that that brings me the most joy in the world and um and has for since i was a teenager that's what i wanted to do um so i was a literature major and i was taking astronomy and geology and i was driven pretty crazy this would have been the late 80s early 90s i was driven pretty crazy by the literature classes and the writing classes that i was in because they had what i didn't have the words for then but sort of the kernels of this new this post-modernism that has now taken over the academy and has now taken over the media and tech companies and is moving out into the world um it was we weren't allowed and you know this this is just one particular way of approaching literature and so i was just in one little bubble but we weren't allowed to just read the texts and focus on the texts we had to bring in all of the truth about the author's life and um and interpret it through his usually politics and the and and such and i thought you know i i see a value in that but i also want to be able to experience the art the product the you know whatever it is as it is because if it can't stand on its own then it's really not worthy of being called literature or art or whatever it is and then over in my writing classes i was told literally on the first day of college i walked into my creative writing class and there was a list of genres on the board and it was like detective fiction romance sci-fi fantasy and the teacher went up to the board and put an x through them and said we don't do that here we don't we don't do genre fiction yep we don't do that here and i thought god why not okay maybe i have something to learn um i mean i had i had been taking as a high school student i had been taking some classes at ucla and sci-fi i was like i think we do do that in college you know i'm pretty i'm pretty sure we're allowed to do that um but this teacher wanted very staid very sort of generic in my mind easy to predict sort of boy has dog boy loses dog boy gets dog back stories and you know i'm i'm i'm up for a good tear jerker every now and again but it's hardly the only kind of story i want to read right and i've heard you also talk about narrative excuse me and you know changing people's minds through narrative is one of absolutely my my passions i love narrative i deep i delve into narrative tremendously and my sense was i know science i speak science and i love to write i can affect people how people view possibility how how people view what is true or what the possible is through narrative through science fiction so within a couple of years i thought you know what this is not this is not working for me this literature major thing at least in this in this climate isn't working for me also i see that i'm going to need to live in order to have things to write about that just identifying as a writer just being a writer sort of training as a writer doesn't inherently give you the experiences to write about so um long long story short which you know like i can tell you over drinks at some point or something i ended up pursuing a phd in biology and evolutionary biology which also allowed me to travel and to you know i spent over a year over a few field seasons living in a tent in madagascar and i did work in central america and um you know i got i got all the experiences that i was hoping for and you know and and still crave and and want more of and then took a job in academia because this job at evergreen seemed amazing and knew then okay what i want i i still do want to be writing the science fiction and our kids came along pretty quickly and i was basically i was i was teaching i was being an educator of evolutionary biology and i was being a mom and that's what i did and then literally my first sabbatical in 15 years of teaching came the last two quarters as it turns out that i was at evergreen in early 2017. and i had it i had it all planned out like i'm gonna i'm gonna see if this thing that i've had in the back of my mind that i wanna have wanted to do forever is actually something i can do or am i deleting myself because maybe i am i don't who knows i know when i'm distracted when i'm in the heads of 25 or 50 undergraduates so fully i cannot take myself out of that and take myself out of parenting and delve into character development and and write narrative so while i'm on sabbatical i'm going to write a science fiction novel and i did and i wrote it i wrote the first draft in three months and i literally finished the second draft the day that the riots broke out at evergreen literally on may 23 2017 and i had you know i already had some of the agents i was go i had i was contacting i was going to try to start sending it out and then everything in our world fell apart and just became a totally different whirlwind of experience so i am super grateful i have this i have this book that i'm still very interested in getting back to that i love actually the idea is it's a it's humans searching for other evolutions of consciousness in the galaxy and um i will i will not tell you whether or not they find it um and so you know my pitch in what i wrote to agents was most great science fiction gets the physics right but gets the biology wrong this gets both right so you know i created another planet in which i you know i i had great fun i went downstairs at one point where i was writing it to brett i said okay i got my spreadsheet i know exactly what the size is and how far it is and what kind of star it is and it's like you know you can't put a spreadsheet in a novel like i know but i now know exactly what this planet looks like from like the astronomical and physical perspective and now from that i can build the life on it i can i can create what the life on that planet could potentially have looked like given you know even just like what spectrum of light the star was emitting and therefore what kinds of sense organs the life on that planet might have might have evolved so that's i've really only written this one this one thing which is in you know fully drafted but would require me to go back and spend real time with it again before i send it out to anyone at this point man well as somebody who is um i mean the whole reason impact theory exists is ultimately to create fiction content um and uh sci-fi is our sort of core genre that we play in we only do genre fiction uh so we're the exact opposite of your teacher um i really hope that that makes it into the world someday um heather this has been a tremendous pleasure your mind is extraordinary if your science fiction story is anything like you direct to camera it will be an amazing read so i really really do hope that it makes it out there someday and if i can be useful to you by the way in any way shape or form with that let me know i would do it in a heartbeat but thank you so much for spending this time with me today thank you so much tom it's been a tremendous pleasure absolutely phenomenal guys if you aren't watching the dark horse podcast which she co-hosts man get on it it's amazing check out her patreon by the way which is a has a bunch of really interesting information on there um and the deeper you go into her world the more you are going to come away with profound insights realizations uh a bigger heart i mean it's really really incredible um somebody at her intellectual level and with her sort of spirit of compassion is pretty extraordinary and speaking of extraordinary things if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take [Music] care [Music] you