You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist 87. Heather Heying on What Makes Us Human: Culture, Consciousness, Campfire, and Chesterton’s Fences
Today’s guest is very meaningful to me and probably requires no introduction. Dr. Heather Heying is the reason I know about detransitioners and am doing half the things I’m doing. An evolutionary biologist and animal behaviorist, world traveler, podcast co-host, writer, mentor to many, mother of two, agreeable contrarian, and all-around interesting person, Dr. Heying can easily be considered one of the greatest thinkers of our time.
It was tough to narrow down what to focus on in a conversation with someone so influential, so I selected a few of the recurring themes that form the foundational principles for much of her work. We discuss the concepts of culture and consciousness, and how they shape our understandings of progress and tradition, liberalism and conservatism.
We delve into the metaphorical idea of Chesterton's fence, which represents the importance of understanding the purpose and value of something before discarding it. And we examine several “Chesterton’s fences” in modern life that have been impacted by what Heather often calls “hyper-novelty.” What do we lose when we stop sitting around a campfire together, telling stories and making music?
Heather Heying is an evolutionary biologist who earned her PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan, has been a visiting Fellow at Princeton University, and was a tenured professor at The Evergreen State College. She has been invited to speak about science, higher ed, the evolution of sex and consciousness, and the culture wars, in venues as varied as the U.S. Department of Justice, the Krishnamurti Institute, Joe Rogan, and Oxford University.
Her first book, Antipode, is based on her life in Madagascar while studying the sex lives of poison frogs. Her second book, co-authored with husband Bret Weinstein, is A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. A New York Times best-seller, the book provides an evolutionary toolkit for living a good and honorable life as a modern ape. She also writes Natural Selections on Substack, the Field Notes column for County Highway, and co-hosts with Bret a popular weekly livestream on the DarkHorse podcast.
Heather's books are available in my bookshop or via the embedded Amazon affiliate links. Thank you for purchases that support the show!
Bands mentioned:
00:00 Start
02:10 Detransitioners
04:46 Detransitioners and cognitive dissonance
07:39 Losing friends, gaining friends
11:10 Consciousness and culture
17:38 Seeking a mix
19:05 New ideas and adaptation
24:39 Chesterton's fence
28:13 Chesterton's breast milk
32:21 The role of fire in our humanity
36:40 Music around the campfire
40:34 Participating in a foreign culture
44:58 Cultural appreciation vs. cultural appropriation
49:05 Online culture and low context communication
52:19 Writing a book
57:39 What is actually real
01:00:23 Human interactions behind barriers
01:04:29 Mentorship and its changing dynamics
01:07:43 Mentorship in the trades
01:11:40 Changing the culture and connection
01:16:24 Cats as pets and toxoplasmosis
01:22:05 The crazy cat lady trope
01:24:38 Endocrine-disrupting chemicals and gender dysphoria
01:30:05 Endocrine disruption in water supply
01:32:21 Fixing exposures and finding answers
01:37:02 Transhumanism and its subsets
01:41:33 Wrap up
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Show notes & transcript provided with the help of SwellAI.
Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude and permission.
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