Lives Well Lived: The 341st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Published date: September 2, 2026

Hosts: Dr. Bret Weinstein and Dr. Heather Heying

Podcast: DarkHorse Podcast

Episode: The 341st Evolutionary Lens livestream

Transcript source: SRTX transcript file

Locals (Broadcast): https://darkhorse.locals.com/post/8176108/lives-well-lived-the-341st-evolutionary-lens-with-bret-weinstein-and-heather-heying

Youtube: https://youtube.com/live/mJBm1s4ffxI

Rumble (Broadcast): https://rumble.com/v7ezory-the-341st-evolutionary-lens-with-bret-weinstein-and-heather-heying.html

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1cPUhuXci6TaHkIlF6Xrak?si=VHgfKMfvSt6Lg1mIzeLxMw

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/lives-well-lived-the-341st-evolutionary-lens-with/id1471581521?i=1000787511807

X (Broadcast): https://x.com/BretWeinstein/status/2095219812700209351

Summary

On this, the 341st Evolutionary Lens livestream, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying record just two days after two significant deaths: their beloved Labrador, Maddie, who was put down on Monday, August 31, 2026 after a rapid decline, and the writer and farmer Wendell Berry, who died the same day at 92. Both hosts are open that they were not certain it was wise to broadcast at all, and the episode is a deliberately unhurried tribute to both.

The first half is devoted to Maddie: her final days, the choice to let the family's cats encounter her body, and the hosts' decision to bury her themselves rather than have her cremated. That leads into a wider discussion of grief as "the downside of love," the evolutionary and psychological differences between dogs and cats, the roughly 20,000-to-40,000-year domestication history of dogs, and the case that dogs, more than almost anything else, can create common ground across social and political divides.

The second half is Heather Heying's tribute to Wendell Berry: a biography covering his Kentucky farm upbringing, his time at Stanford under Wallace Stegner, a brief NYU faculty post, and his decision to leave New York for a life of farming and writing back home. She reads passages from his The Unsettling of America and his essay on "the cult of the future," and closes the episode with two of his poems, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" and "A Meeting."

About the Hosts

Dr. Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and formerly taught biology at The Evergreen State College. He co-hosts the DarkHorse Podcast with Heather Heying, co-authored A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and hosts DarkHorse's long-form interview series, The Inside Rail.

Dr. Heather Heying is an evolutionary biologist who earned her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and formerly taught biology at The Evergreen State College. She co-hosts the DarkHorse Podcast with Bret Weinstein, co-authored A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and writes the newsletter Natural Selections.

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Mentioned

• Wendell Berry, “Wendell Berry, Landsman,” Humanities (NEH), 2012

• Wendell Berry obituary, The New York Times

• The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry

• The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Wendell Berry

Episode Chapters

00:00:00 A Rough One Today

00:02:07 Sponsor: Timeline

00:06:01 Sponsor: Cowboy Colostrum

00:09:09 Sponsor: CrowdHealth

00:11:22 We Lost Maddie on Monday

00:14:01 Why Does She Love Me Unconditionally?

00:15:38 Dogs May Save the World

00:18:03 The Longest-Standing Domesticate

00:20:53 Cats See Mothers, Dogs See a Team

00:23:43 Please Wait for Dad to Get Home

00:30:50 Why We Buried Her Ourselves

00:37:26 Sun Lakes and a Dog With a Job

00:43:09 Photographs of Maddie

00:45:57 Grief Is the Downside of Love

00:48:07 What We Surrender to the Market

00:55:58 Wendell Berry, 1934-2026

01:01:02 The Unsettling of America

01:02:25 Monoculture of Crops and of Ideas

01:07:23 The Cult of the Future

01:13:53 Manifesto: The Mad Farmer

01:16:46 A Meeting, and Goodbye

Key Questions Answered in This Episode

Why did Bret and Heather Weinstein decide to bury their dog Maddie themselves instead of having her cremated?

Weinstein says the choice let their cats encounter Maddie's body and gave the family 24 hours to visit her before burial, which he calls “100% the right thing to do” even though it may strike listeners as strange. “[00:30:50] Dr. Bret Weinstein: we did allow, when Maddie was put down, we decided to hold onto her and to bury her ourselves.”

What does Bret Weinstein say pet owners give up when they choose cremation over caring for the body themselves?

Weinstein argues that the modern, medicalized, “signature and a credit card” version of pet death is easier but skips the work — digging the hole, filling it in — that he says actually helps a person's mind register that the animal is gone. “[00:54:17] Dr. Bret Weinstein: you don't understand what you have surrendered in that choice”

How does Heather Heying explain the difference between a cat's affection and a dog's?

Heying, a self-described cat person having her first dog in Maddie, says a cat's affection has to be earned and can be withdrawn, while a dog's unconditional love works on the owner in the opposite direction. “[00:15:24] Dr. Heather Heying: A dog makes you want to live up to what they already believe about you. They make you want to be what you are in their eyes.”

Why do Bret and Heather Weinstein think dogs might be able to bridge political and tribal divides in a way almost nothing else can?

Weinstein says he's told people “a Nazi and a Jew can bond over the appreciation of a good dog,” and Heying recalls first having the thought “Dogs May Save the World” while walking through a divided, decaying Portland before COVID. “[00:15:38] Dr. Bret Weinstein: dogs as the thing that is most likely to bring us back together as a people”

What surprising detail from Wendell Berry's biography does Heather Heying highlight about his decision to leave New York for Kentucky?

Heying stresses that Berry had a promising literary career waiting for him in New York — he even briefly held an NYU faculty post — before he walked away from it to return to his family's farm in Kentucky. “[00:57:01] Dr. Heather Heying: this young man from Kentucky had ended up in in the creative writing program named for and mentored by Wallace Stegner, along with like Ken Kesey, Ken Kesey and other who was actually his his classmate, is extraordinary.”

What did Joel Salatin say about Wendell Berry's view of civilization that struck Bret Weinstein?

Weinstein says the line, which he heard secondhand from farmer Joel Salatin at a recent conference, mirrors an argument he has separately made about academic fields collapsing when a single dominant school of thought crowds out all dissent. “[01:02:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Civilization can only survive if it keeps its minority perspectives alive.”

What does Wendell Berry's essay on “the cult of the future” argue is wrong with how modern life treats progress?

Reading from Berry's prose, Heying shares his argument that modern life has replaced older religious yearning with an equally uncritical faith that whatever is newest — a car, a drug, a kitchen appliance — must also be better. “[01:07:23] Dr. Heather Heying: The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind long for heaven.”

How does Heather Heying close the episode?

After reading Berry's short poem “A Meeting,” Heying pairs her farewell to Berry with one to Maddie before signing off with the show's usual closing words. “[01:16:51] Dr. Heather Heying: Rest in peace, Wendell Berry. And rest in peace, Maddie. The amazing Labrador.”

Main Topics

• The death of Bret and Heather Weinstein's dog Maddie, and grief as “the downside of love”

• Why the hosts chose to bury Maddie themselves rather than have her cremated

• Evolutionary and psychological differences between dogs and cats

• The long domestication history of dogs (roughly 20,000–40,000 years)

• How dogs, more than almost anything else, can create common ground across social and political divides

• The medicalization of death, for pets and for people

• Wendell Berry's biography: his Kentucky farm roots, Stanford, Wallace Stegner, an NYU faculty post, and his return home

• Passages from Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

• Berry's essay on “the cult of the future” and society's fixation on progress

• Monoculture, in agriculture and in ideas, discussed with reference to Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm

• Two Wendell Berry poems read in full: “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” and “A Meeting”

Search Keywords

Maddie, Labrador, dog grief, pet loss, pet burial, Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry obituary, Wendell Berry poems, Manifesto The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, A Meeting, The Unsettling of America, agrarianism, dog domestication, cats versus dogs, Wallace Stegner, Ken Kesey, Joel Salatin, Polyface Farm, monoculture, grief, love, DarkHorse Podcast, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Evolutionary Lens

Transcript

This transcript was prepared from the episode's speaker-labeled SRTX caption file and lightly consolidated into readable paragraphs. The source file begins at the episode's true 00:00:00 timecode, so no timestamp offset has been applied.

[00:00:00] (Upbeat Music)

[00:00:06] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream. I think it's 341. Dr. Bret Weinstein, you were Dr. Heather Heying. Gonna be a little bit of a rough one today. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that it was smart to go ahead with today's live stream. We lost our dog on Monday. And we're gonna talk about that. I'm gonna try to hold it together. No guarantees though.

[00:00:38] Dr. Heather Heying: No guarantees. We're gonna talk about lives well lived and remembering them. Also lost to the world on Monday was Wendell Berry. So I'm gonna be talking about our amazing Labrador, Maddie. And the remarkable writer, philosopher, environmentalist, icon of agrarian values, Wendell Berry as well.

[00:01:07] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And I will just say, if we have to cut this short, I know that you all will understand there's something very strange about this environment. In general, one can sort of keep their grieving to a private moment and in public, the nature of the mind keeps it at bay, but broadcasting from a room with just a couple of people you know well in it to an audience of hundreds or thousands of people kind of confuses the whole thing. And anyway, we'll see how it goes. There's a lot to say, but it's gonna be a little bit difficult to remember where we are. Yeah.

[00:01:54] Dr. Heather Heying: So let's do the business first. All right. And speak our ads. Our awesome sponsors to whom we are grateful and then get into the conversation. Our first sponsor this week is Timeline. Timeline makes Mitopure, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone. Urolithin A. Urolithin A is found primarily in pomegranates and has been found by many scientific and clinical studies to enhance mitochondrial function. Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells. The older you get, the more likely you are to have damaged mitochondria, which accumulate in joints and other tissues. This is in part because mitophagy, the process by which damaged mitochondria are removed from cells, becomes less efficient the older you get. Age-related decline in mitophagy not only inhibits removal of and damaged, removal of damaged mitochondria, but also impairs the creation of new mitochondria, which results in overall decline in cell function.

[00:02:50] Dr. Heather Heying: Mitopure from Timeline works by triggering mitophagy. A study from 2022 found that four months of regular use of Mitopure resulted in significant improvements in muscle strength and clinically meaningful improvements on aerobic endurance and physical performance. Earlier 2016 research published in Nature Medicine found that in mice, the beneficial effect of urolithin A on muscle physiology were independent of diet or age. Take two soft gels of Mitopure a day for two months and you may see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance. Mitopure enhances your cells' ability to clean themselves up and regenerate new healthy mitochondria. In combination with regular physical activity, Mitopure can help you stay strong and healthy into old age. Timeline is now offering 20% off your first order of Mitopure. Go to Timeline.com slash DarkHorse and use code DarkHorse to get 20% off your order.

[00:03:36] Dr. Heather Heying: That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash DarkHorse.

[00:03:40] Dr. Bret Weinstein: You know, it might be my odd state of mind, but when you said that urolithin A is found primarily in pomegranates, I immediately thought of little tiny prospectors searching pomegranates and finding a vein of urolithin A.

[00:03:56] (Laughing)

[00:03:57] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I don't think that's how it works, but--

[00:03:58] Dr. Heather Heying: Probably not. No, but-- I'm reminded of that, the book I had as a kid from a series on sort of, you know, recreating historical figures and putting a little more flesh on the bones, the one about Louis Pasteur that had an army going in trying to fight off the rabies pathogen, an army of little things, little creatures that were dressed like, I don't know, I don't even know what era it would have been. They were reflecting, but I'm gonna call it like Civil War soldiers, even though that's not quite the right moment,

[00:04:36] Dr. Bret Weinstein: but-- No, no, but close.

[00:04:37] Dr. Heather Heying: But I don't know that the book was historically accurate with regard to its not historically accurate soldiers in the body seeking out the rabies virus.

[00:04:48] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Actually, Pasteur was mentioned at the Polyface conference, which we will talk about in passing here. But anyway, Joel Salatin put a little flesh on the bones of the battle between Pasteur and the guy whose name I'm forgetting, the terrain theory guy. I don't remember at the moment. Maybe it was Beauchamp, I don't know. But anyway, there's an interesting tale in there.

[00:05:18] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, we've talked about that somewhat before here, but I don't remember the details at the moment.

[00:05:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: But I got the sense that the moderns kind of lost the thread of that conversation.

[00:05:27] Dr. Heather Heying: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, I mean, this is something we've talked about fairly extensively, I think, is the idea that you have terrain theory or germ theory, choose one. It's absurd, it makes no sense at all, it never did. And Pasteur, for what it's worth, clearly understood that, at least at the end of his life.

[00:05:49] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep, and the terrain more or less guarantees the inhabitants, even if the inhabitants are real and do their thing. But anyway, we'll come back to that some other time.

[00:06:01] Dr. Heather Heying: Indeed. Our second sponsor this week is brand new to us. It is Cowboy Colostrum. As DarkHorse listeners already know, the modern world is filled with hyper novelty, and we, the amazing, adaptable beings that humans are, are still just barely keeping up with all the changes. Our newest sponsor, Cowboy Colostrum, can help. We all want to feel and look good so that we can accomplish things and move independently and confidently through the world. Many healthy-ish interventions only make you look a little better though, or make you feel better at a cost. Cowboy Colostrum is different. It can help you heal your gut, and once your gut is healthy, other systems start falling into place.

[00:06:37] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Trying to get it in focus.

[00:06:39] Dr. Heather Heying: Well, it's behind the beetle now. You got it? Yeah, more or less. Okay. There we go. Cowboy Colostrum, and it's, so I'm not gonna take it out of focus again, but this awesome, this is their new Cookies and Cream flavor, which is fantastic, and both Toby and I, when we opened the package from them, looked at this. And if it's in focus enough for you guys to see that it's like this cute white tub bin with little black speckles all over it, both of us had the reaction of like, God, it looks like cookies and cream, and it tastes like cookies and cream, but it's better for you than cookies and cream. Cowboy Colostrum is different. It can help you heal your gut, and once your gut is healthy, other systems start falling into place. Your skin may clear up, your hair gets shinier and thicker. Not only do many people have this experience when they take Cowboy Colostrum, the data from the brand's own clinical study supports this too. 83% of participants reported improved gut health, 79% experienced less bloating inflammation, 72% saw improved digestion, and 62% saw fuller, thicker hair.

[00:07:39] Dr. Heather Heying: Okay, so maybe you already sold on the benefits of Colostrum, but why Cowboy Colostrum? Their product is 100% from American grass-fed cows and is first day whole Colostrum, which is rich in immunoglobulins and growth factors. Cowboy Colostrum isn't processor stripped down, their Colostrum is whole, full fat, high in protein for ultimate nutrient density, making it the highest quality bovine Colostrum you can buy. No artificial flavors, no fillers, just real whole ingredients. And if that's not enough to sell you on Cowboy Colostrum, consider their newest flavor, cookies and cream. Here it is in their cookies and cream looking canister. Mixed with milk, it tastes like a nostalgic cookies and cream milkshake, but it's the same whole, excuse me, unstripped Colostrum, no fillers or shortcuts, it's delicious. This is a daily habit that can actually deliver results that you can see.

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[00:08:51] Dr. Bret Weinstein: All right, one correction. It's not better for you than cookies and cream, it's better for you than cookies. Cream's fine.

[00:09:00] Dr. Heather Heying: But cookies and cream is a unit. That's a unit, it's not.

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[00:10:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Take charge of your health expenses and be part of the community. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 a month for your first three months using code DarkHorse at JoinCrowdHealth.com. That's JoinCrowdHealth.com, code DarkHorse. And remember, CrowdHealth is not insurance. Opt out. Take your power back. This is how we win. JoinCrowdHealth.com.

[00:11:13] (Bell Ringing)

[00:11:22] Dr. Bret Weinstein: You want me to start? Sure. All right. So, we had to put Maddie down on Monday. I had been out of town. We went from declining over the course of years to very rapidly declining, and in fact, stopped eating all of a sudden, maybe--

[00:11:50] Dr. Heather Heying: A week and a half ago.

[00:11:50] Dr. Bret Weinstein: A week and a half ago. We would stop eating her regular food. We would find things that she would eat, and then she'd eat them once, and then she'd reject them. And then at some level, it was as if she had decided to put an end to something. And I'm sure dogs don't think about it in those conscious terms, but there was something, it seemed that she lost her will.

[00:12:19] Dr. Heather Heying: May I add here? Yeah. We were both supposed to be at Polyface in Virginia, and because she had started to fail so rapidly, we decided that we couldn't both go. And so I stayed with her. And what I saw her doing when she was able to move on her own, which was not often, I came to carry her more and more over the last few days of her life, was I was encouraging her to be outside as much as possible, as always, as she always wanted to be. But when she was able to walk, she would often walk to places that were hidden, that were obscure to me, that weren't her usual places. And it felt like she was looking for a place to die, like she was trying to find a place to be that I wouldn't impinge, because above all else, she, like all good dogs, was loyal and unconditionally loving and unaccountably concerned about us.

[00:13:31] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, this dog, you know, it's been a long time since I've had any other dog, but Maddie was seemingly obsessed with taking care of us.

[00:13:43] Dr. Heather Heying: And specifically you.

[00:13:46] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, one of the struggles at the end was that she was ever less able to do anything that felt like contributing to her, and that clearly weighed on her.

[00:14:01] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, like I think, I mean, I don't know, I've never, she's really my first dog. My brother did have a dog for a short time growing up, but I wasn't close to her and she wasn't really integrated into the family. So Maddie was my first dog, and I've always had cats. I adore cats and I understand cats more, I think. I understand their independence and their desire for solitude. And I said to you, Bret, early in having her, I don't, why does she love me unconditionally? I have done nothing to earn this. I cannot fathom this. Because dogs. Because dogs, because that's what a good dog does. And it felt, it was unearned, and it felt silly at first to me. I didn't get it, and honestly, I didn't really respect it. It didn't make sense to me. And I think what I've come to see and to feel is that, whereas you know, if you have the affection of a cat that you have earned it, and sometimes you just can't, some cats won't give it to you no matter what, but if you do have the affection of a cat, you have earned it, and they will take it away from you if you cease to be good to them.

[00:15:24] Dr. Heather Heying: A dog makes you want to live up to what they already believe about you. They make you want to be what you are in their eyes.

[00:15:38] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, and I think you and I have both come, I think, quite separately to some conclusion about dogs as the thing that is most likely to bring us back together as a people. I've sometimes said that, you know, Nazi and a Jew can bond over the appreciation of a good dog.

[00:16:05] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, no, I've written, one of the few things I wrote in my notes here today is "Dogs May Save the World." And I've had this sense, I had this thought consciously for the first time, I believe, when we lived in Portland. And even before COVID, we moved to Portland in the fall of 2018. So we were there for close to a year and a half before COVID hit in a city that was vibrant and flailing already from the vagaries and the political hatred and the division and the ideological capture and the embrace of decay. And I love that city also. And so I walked around a lot of parts of Portland and saw just so much anger and division and just like a willingness to hate people on the basis of what people imagined they believed because of what they were wearing. And the thing that I saw over and over and over again that seemed to break that down was if someone was walking a dog, that if you make eye contact with a dog or a dog's owner and make it clear that you are of a mind to appreciate the dog, you have a connection.

[00:17:19] Dr. Heather Heying: And, you know, increasingly this is becoming harder too because people have decided that, I don't know, people don't know how to train their dogs, people don't know, people have strange fears of dogs. Sometimes they're legitimate, often they're not. We're told that we must keep our dogs entirely imprisoned, basically leashed at all times, et cetera. And, you know, a good dog shouldn't require that. But so by the time we left Portland, I actually began to see even this decay. But usually when you encounter people with dogs you can reach some sort of understanding even if there's nothing else in your life about what you might agree.

[00:18:03] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I think there's something we've talked often about the fact that dogs are the longest standing human domestic by far, 30,000 years or something like that.

[00:18:18] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, I looked into it a little bit. The current estimates are widely ranging, but it's exactly between about 20 and 40,000 years. Like we have the oldest individual is aged about 14 and a half thousand years. And no one expects that that's anywhere close to the oldest domesticated dog.

[00:18:40] Dr. Bret Weinstein: All that time has created a most unusual relationship. And, you know, it's trite to say man's best friend, but it really is at the species level that the animal has adapted to us. And that enables a bunch of things. It does feel like we have genuine friendships with our cats, but those relationships are very different because if you think about the fraction of what your cat imagines about the world, it's a much harder reach than to figure out what your dog is thinking. The dog is built to be more communicative and, you know, even its facial structures have evolved in the time that it has been partnered with man to convey things. And so, you know, it's a very odd situation. You can have, you know, in Maddie's case, I spent as much time with her as I spend with anybody except you. And a lot of the time I spent with you, she was there. So it's this really intense relationship.

[00:19:59] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It's very asymmetrical. She can, of course, say essentially nothing, understands a fair amount, but I can't necessarily know what she understands. But the degree to which you are somehow on a shared wavelength, you know, just for example, Maddie always wanted to go with me places. And I'm pretty sure that she felt like there were things to be done, whether it was protecting me or whatever she thought she was doing, she wanted to go. And sometimes it just didn't make sense for her to go. And so I would tell her, you're not on this mission. She knew what that meant, right? I don't, she didn't know precisely what it meant. It was like, oh, I'm not on this mission. And she would stand down and stop trying to go through the door with me.

[00:20:44] Dr. Heather Heying: At which point she became glued to my side.

[00:20:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right, exactly. She's on some mission.

[00:20:49] Dr. Heather Heying: She's on some mission, no matter what. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the ways to consider the difference between our relationship with cats and our relationship with dogs as humans is to think about sort of how they view us. And we've said before that it feels like cats engage just as if we are their mothers. And part of the evidence for this is that in the wild, none of the wild species of cats that purr, which is the smaller bodied cats, large cats roar, small cats purr, none of the wild cats that purr, purr as adults. And so purring is one of these things that disappears with, I think with weaning really, but like, you know, with the mother leaving the cat and, you know, cats, other than lions, cats are solitary. And so obviously domestic cats purr, and they have this relationship with us that is, you know, deep and it feels fairly maternal, but they're also primed.

[00:21:56] Dr. Heather Heying: They're like, they're programmed to expect that at some point this will end. And so Fairfax, our epic tabby, does have this in him. I mean, he was recovered.

[00:22:06] Dr. Bret Weinstein: When you say this will end, they're programmed

[00:22:09] Dr. Heather Heying: for-- The relationship, that the relationship will end. Yeah, and we, you know, every cat has a different response to having its people go away and then come back. And sometimes they punish you and sometimes they, you know, there's usually they punish you in some ways. They give you the cold shoulder for a couple of days. But Fairfax in particular clearly has, like he's just triggered into this like, oh, damn it, it came, it happened. I guess I'm on my own. And he starts fending for himself and he amps up the hunting and he starts spending more time outside. And then, you know, comes back into sort of full, as full as a cat can be domestication after we get back. Whereas dogs do not view us as mothers. We are part of the team, we're part of the pack. And that isn't supposed to end, right? That is, you know, the team lasts as long as the team lasts, as long as there are any members standing.

[00:23:08] Dr. Heather Heying: And then it is every team members, every pack members responsibility to keep the team robust and intact and healthy and safe. And so that is what we do for our dogs and that is what our dogs do for us.

[00:23:20] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, I have a couple of things I want to enter into the conversation there. One of them is the thing that I say to other people when they're grieving the loss of their animal, especially when you've had to put the animal down, which is just an excruciating choice to have to make. And I don't think we had any choice here other than the exact timing, but--

[00:23:43] Dr. Heather Heying: And I just interrupt here and say, you had said earlier that you don't, we don't know of course how much she understands, but I said to her two days before you were due to be back when I thought, she's, I don't know if she will make it. And I asked her, I said, please, please, wait for dad to get home. And then the day that you were coming back, it was so hard for her. And I told her, you can go, you're free, you can go. And she didn't, but she was so close. So in the end, we did have an amazing bet come to our house and help her go, which I hate that we ever have to make that choice, but the choice was for her. She was ready and she was in pain and not telling us.

[00:24:40] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, and that at least allowed us to be right there with her. If we had let nature take its course, you step away, who knows when it happens. So I don't love that these things are medicalized, but they're, these animals deaths are so unnatural anyway because in the wild, don't get old and feeble. It just doesn't happen. Nature is the margins are too thin, the predators are too many.

[00:25:10] Dr. Heather Heying: Nature is red in tooth and claw.

[00:25:11] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, so the idea of being a feeble old animal is novel in and of itself and taking a novel approach to it, I think is reasonable. But anyway, when I often tell people who are grieving, there's a lot of grieving online, people post that they've lost their animal and then people publicly post and I never know what to make of any of this. I suppose you could argue that we're doing this here. It's not our intent. We had this broadcast on the schedule and decided to keep doing it and it's hard to focus anywhere else. But anyway, I typically respond to people privately. I don't post publicly about this. But what I will say is that there's something beautiful about the life that you give a well-loved animal, that you take care of their needs from one end of their life to the other and it's torture when you lose an animal under some circumstance where you can't take care of the end.

[00:26:16] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Cat gets hit by a car, gets eaten by a coyote, something like that. That leaves a wound that never heals. Both of which we've experienced. Yeah, but when you do end up taking an animal to the very end and then deciding how it ends, that's the bookend on essentially a perfect life.

[00:26:40] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:26:42] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And there isn't any better thing to be.

[00:26:46] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, that's right. To be able to have a deep unconditional love with a deep, somehow complex but uncomplicated being, I think at least the relationship is uncomplicated.

[00:27:08] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It's just-- Yeah, I know what you mean.

[00:27:10] Dr. Heather Heying: I don't know that that's possible given the ways that we define complex and complicated, but the relationship, there's no relationship you can have a real relationship with a human being other than just something that's transactional that's not complicated. It's always complicated. But, and there are ups and downs with the dog and there's burdens and there's concerns and such, but ultimately you just know that your dog loves you and you love her or him and you're gonna be there for each other and go on adventures if that's what you wanna do and know that you have each other's back.

[00:27:55] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Have each other's back through the end. And the idea that you don't have to worry, it's not gonna be easy for us, but we're gonna make it easy for you. Most creatures don't have a deal anywhere near that good. And it's important to remember as tough as it is that given an animal, essentially a perfect life and whether it's a long one or a short one or somewhere in between, that is an amazing gift. As you said, nature is red and tooth and claw and life is nasty, brutish and short for most creatures. And it is an amazing gift to be able to give an animal a life that everything is, all the big stuff is taken care of by you and the pain of their loss is shouldered by you, not by them.

[00:28:51] Dr. Heather Heying: That's right. It's interesting too to see the cats responding. We have two long-term viewers now, we have Tesla. So Maddie was 13 and a half. It was old for Labrador. Well, Tesla is older by two years, 15 and a half. And Fairfax is younger, seven and a half. Tesla and Maddie were very, very close and Tesla was there sitting outside with us, with her all day on the last day of her life. And he, very concerned. And stoic as cats are, but more snugly than usual. And Fairfax, I feel like reacted like, like a 13 year old boy who had suddenly lost something, perhaps a person that had no idea how to deal with what he was feeling or communicate it. He was angry and snippy and didn't wanna be touched. And then would be very, very close and wanted all the affection. And then again, just get away from me, I can't deal with this, which is normally not his personality at all.

[00:30:18] Dr. Heather Heying: And I think, considering in general, how much more similar dogs are to people than cats are to people, observing this sort of emotionally stunted as young teenagers are of both sexes on this Ryan Riemann. This reminded me more of a male response than a female response. It was interesting to see in a cat because cats are nothing if not emotionally stunted and dogs are not.

[00:30:50] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, I will say just in the interest of sort of completing the picture, we did allow, when Maddie was put down, we decided to hold onto her and to bury her ourselves. And part of the reason that we decided to do that, I think it was 100% the right thing to do as much as it will strike people as strange, I guess. It is exactly the opposite and I will defend it vociferously if not today than some other day. I think it's really important and I think we have broken our relationship with death very profoundly in our suffering greatly for having done so. But in keeping Maddie and burying her ourselves, it also gave us the opportunity to let the cats encounter her. All animals have to have some understanding that this other animal in their life is gone and is not coming back and they have to be able to update. And you can imagine, again, I have no idea how cats think about this.

[00:32:03] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I would have a much better guess for dogs. But you can imagine you drive the dog off one day like you do any other day and then the dog doesn't come back and the cat is left to whatever version of wonder a cat does. What happened? What does that mean? You know? And one thing I've seen in Fairfax is that sometimes Fairfax is not he's a great cat, but he's not the best behaved cat I've ever had. You know, he'll decide to wake you up in the middle of the night either because he's bored or wants to go out, even if he has access to go out and doesn't need to wake you. But then he has some version of Kitty guilt where he will come up to you and sort of check whether or not you and he are still cool. Right. He does not want to sour the relationship. And he sort of knows that he's at fault for something.

[00:33:02] Dr. Heather Heying: And yeah, he knows he's a punk sometimes. Yeah, he hopes that's OK.

[00:33:06] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. And so, you know, you can imagine in the case of, you know, the dog is gone. I don't know that they think, I mean, I'm sure they think of dogs as different than cats in some way. They know this dog is the one who lives here. And presumably, as soon as they know the dog is dead, they know it won't be back. They don't know. They don't know the other implications, but I think it's it is important, even just for us. To have the cats be given the tools to reconcile this themselves. It's hard for us to reconcile it. They have to do their own version of that. And the mysterious you drove off and the dog didn't come back thing has got to complicate the puzzle greatly. So, you know, having the dog around after she was gone, I know it will strike people as weird. It is the opposite of weird. It was important, I think.

[00:34:07] Dr. Heather Heying: But yeah, we left her above ground for 24 hours so that we could visit the body.

[00:34:13] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. And, you know, I must tell you, it's weird that I'm talking about this here, but I remember as a kid. I woke from a terrifying dream about being buried alive. And I remember it was one of the few times that I like got out of bed and my parents were downstairs, they had friends over. And I was like not in good shape. And I told them what I had experienced. And I remember being told that's not a thing. You don't have to worry about it. And I was like, OK, it's good that that's not a thing, but I don't really understand how that's never a thing. My guess is it's not perfectly not a thing. That's right. And and I've had a terror every time we've put an animal down that the combination of drugs could mask an animal that's not really gone. You know, the the actual fact of death is actually a little subtle, as we've talked about. Yes. And what a terrible thing it would be for an animal to be put down and then wake up in a bag full of dead cats and not and feel betrayed and abandoned and all of that.

[00:35:26] Speaker 3: So terrified.

[00:35:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Anyway, that little. Trauma has existed in me forever, and this is the first time because we just took over Maddie's. Body and took responsibility for it. It gave 24 hours to visit her. She looked. Healthy for that 24 hours, she looked like she could get up at any moment, but she felt cold to the touch and stiff and it just was so reassuring to know for sure.

[00:36:06] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah. That she was not just sleeping.

[00:36:09] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yep. And you know, if you've done it the normal way, even in this case, one of the options was, yes, the vet came to our house, but we could surrender Maddie's body and she could be taken away and come back as ashes. But. The closure that one gets from that isn't anything like the experience of preparing the body, digging the hole and filling it in, which was rough, I have to say, but. Very healthy, I think.

[00:36:43] Dr. Heather Heying: Very healthy. Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a lot more to say about the joy of of her and of having such an amazing dog who went on all these adventures with us and lived. Lived in all three of the houses that our boys ever lived in, in Olympia and in Portland and here on San Juan Island. She she helped raise them. She built. She was with them when they built forts in the massive forest across the street from our house in Olympia, and she went to Sun Lakes with you and your classes and the boys so many times and she learned how to canoe.

[00:37:26] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about the Sun Lakes thing. I wish I had pictures, but I don't know. They're somewhere. But when when our kids were little. Evergreen was a very weird place among the beautiful things about it. You could have a field trip because students took one course at a time and you were only teaching one course at a time. You could take that course into the field and nobody had other obligations. So we would often go for a week. And

[00:37:57] Dr. Heather Heying: most most quarters, you and I both spent a week in the field with students.

[00:38:01] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, and I probably for you to certainly for me, favorite spot was Sun Lakes in eastern Washington, which is this geologically absolutely amazing and also stunning place.

[00:38:16] Dr. Heather Heying: We talked about it last week when we were talking about the flood in Nepal.

[00:38:21] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right, exactly. So that place allows you to do something wonderful, which is there are trails, but you don't need to stay on them because the geology up above you allows you to dead reckon you can see where you are. And so anyway, I would take my classes. We would take our classes when we taught together. You would take classes and very often the kids would go with me and the dog when I was going alone and.

[00:38:52] Dr. Heather Heying: Along with your class rather than.

[00:38:54] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, alone with the class. And, you know, so I have two little kids. A whole lot of college kids and

[00:39:03] Dr. Heather Heying: I mean, they weren't tiny, tiny because we got Maddie in 2013, so they were nine and seven when we got her. Yeah. But but yeah, you'd have a bunch of college kids, some of whom were maybe older than you because Evergreen was a different kind of place and your own two sons and your own dog

[00:39:22] Dr. Bret Weinstein: and a dog kind of, you know, would run back and forth. You know, the kids might be out of sight and the dog would run back and forth and kind of keep track of the kids. And I never worried terribly much about them. It seems sort of frightening now to think about it, but it all worked really well because the dog wanted a job. She was very good at her job and that, you know, the kids loved her. And so it worked really well. And we were just talking to Zach last night about this. You know, it's a very unusual and profound experience to have had growing up, and it's something he can't really convey to his friends because, you know, they've had dogs, many have lost dogs, but it's not the same as having sort of been in the wild with the dog, you know, it's much more like the ancestral relationship with dogs than it is like the modern one. And she was perfect for it.

[00:40:22] Dr. Bret Weinstein: The reference to canoes. She's a Labrador. They love water, but they don't know that at first. And Maddie, we took her to Sun Lakes and there's a beautiful lake called Deep Lake on one end of the park, and it's a very long, very narrow lake. And one of our students had a aluminum canoe, which I put on the top. Our car dragged it out to Deep Lake and. We wanted to take Maddie in the canoe and canoe down the lake and back. And Maddie had no, she did not trust that we knew what we were doing. All seemed rather insane. And so she was sort of like, she wanted to join us in the canoe, but quite bring herself to do it. And then she finally managed to get into the canoe. I can't remember there are two incidents. One of them, she actually fell in the water and then realized, Oh, I'm actually good at water and became a good swimmer and loved water every, every day after that.

[00:41:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: But in the canoe case, she got into the canoe finally, and we canoed down the lake. And there's this place in the middle of the lake is uncanny. Where there is a sheer wall, not even very tall, like maybe 30 or 40 feet of basalt rock, but a very flat at one place in the lake. And if you so much as tall.

[00:42:00] Dr. Heather Heying: And across from, across from that, there's also cliff.

[00:42:03] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, there is, but there's one, you know, you're.

[00:42:07] Dr. Heather Heying: But you need both for the story to make sense.

[00:42:09] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, she, we're going down the lake and if you even so much as talk, you hear it come back and it sounds undiminished. It's not like echo, echo, echo. It's like echo, echo, you know, it's, it's exactly what you said. And it sounds like nothing has been lost. Um, and I remember we were going by this thing and we started talking and the dog is like, what, where are those people? Right. And, uh, so then we started playing with it and shouting things at the wall and they would come back and, uh, I don't think she ever figured out what was going on because the explanation is actually a little subtle.

[00:42:47] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah. It takes some physics and dogs are great at physics, but not explicit physics.

[00:42:51] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah.

[00:42:52] Dr. Heather Heying: They're, they're, they're good at the implicit physics.

[00:42:54] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I tried diagramming it on a chalkboard, but

[00:42:56] Dr. Heather Heying: not now they prefer whiteboards among other things.

[00:43:00] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I guess. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so that's, uh, that's that little piece of, of her, of her story.

[00:43:09] Speaker 3: Yeah. Um,

[00:43:12] Dr. Heather Heying: I don't know. We miss her. We always will.

[00:43:17] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I don't want to show a picture or two.

[00:43:18] Speaker 3: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. We have, we have some pictures to show.

[00:43:27] Dr. Heather Heying: Here she is on San Juan Island. Before we lived here, we'd come to visit very near a spot where we ended up buying. Um, happy dog.

[00:43:37] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. So she was actually, uh, Zach reminded us of this. She was actually born not on the Island we live on, but on a different Island.

[00:43:45] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah. She came full circle.

[00:43:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: We knew, we knew her father. Um, he was named Sailor. Yeah. He was a marvelous dog in his own, right? Um, and so anyway, she did come full circle. No, no, she's buried here and there's something poetic about that.

[00:44:00] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:44:02] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah. We can, we can just go through these somewhat quickly. I don't have a particular story for all of them, except this is, uh, here she is mid yawn while Tesla appreciates her yawn. And they were, Tesla always wanted to sleep on Maddie. Yeah. I'm not sure Maddie was always this as a puppy. This is, this is very, very early. Yeah, it sure is. This is right after we got her. Um, she was born, we didn't know her yet, but she was born right after my father died and we got her a month, month and a half later. And it always felt to me like she continued my father in some ways. Is he had a dog whom he loved when he was a child on the farm in Iowa.

[00:44:46] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. And she and your dad were both similarly a few words. It's true. He didn't bark as much.

[00:44:53] Dr. Heather Heying: No, he did not bark. He did not bark. Um, here we have Zach with our, with his pup just a few years ago. And Maddie again with Tesla out in the sun, very near where she spent her last day. Here she is again on San Juan. Oh, this is an Olympias at McLane Creek. Wow. Yeah. That's younger, a younger pup here, younger pup again, Olympia with Toby, who was very young then. And again, that first summer I was in the middle of the summer. And that first summer, I think this is Zach who would have been nine at the time. Uh, immediately having gotten over his fear of dogs upon, upon meeting her, um, or had decided to, to get over it and throw out a fris before her. And here she is again as a puppy right after we got her with, with Tesla, who was, who was a young guy himself then at two at our house in Olympia.

[00:45:57] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. All right. Well, um, I guess, I guess the last thing, maybe there are other things to say, but, um, you and I in our book mention that grief is the downside of love. That's right. And we mean that very, very literally. Right. You love something and then it becomes enmeshed in who you are. And at the point that you lose that something untangling it is not a simple process. And so the process of grief is, uh, one of the more remarkable behaviors that we can observe and the way that it is observed in different creatures who in retrospect are the ones that have the same problem, which is that they apparently love things that then have to be mourned. Yeah. Um, but that unwiring process, you know, I would argue that the, that tears are basically your brain going offline to do difficult work. And, um, you know, you can put it off. Obviously you don't want to lose your best friend on a battlefield and be incapacitated by grief on the battlefield.

[00:47:24] Dr. Bret Weinstein: You have to get off the battlefield before you can grieve. You know, if you're in that flash flood tsunami that we recently witnessed, you can't take the time to consider all of the people who didn't make it and who you won't see again, you have to get out of danger, deal with your injuries, whatever it is. So the body is very good at putting that off. But eventually the processing has to happen. And, you know, it's not that it's good to be beside yourself, but you know, I mean, the saying is so trite, but it's really not wrong. It's better to have loved and lost and never to have loved at all. Love is this valuable thing, but it comes with this unavoidable price. And the fact that our traditions around death and burial have, they've done the same thing that we've done everywhere else where we've, uh, we've regularized it and we've turned over every aspect that we can to the market and we've sanitized it and, you know, it always strikes me that like the one, no, there are two parts of a like normal funeral that would make a lot of sense to me.

[00:48:53] Dr. Bret Weinstein: One of them is the, you know, the bearing of the casket to the grave side, like the feeling, the weight of this person. And the other is, it's obviously not a part of every ceremony, but the, you know, the ceremonially taking a scoop of dirt and putting it in there so that in some sense, I buried this person. Those things are not, they're not optional. I mean, obviously they are, you don't have to do them, but because they are tied up in the way that we do process, you know, I spent, oh, it was probably three or four hours digging the hole. And those were not the hardest three or four hours, but they were super contemplative. Right. They were, I was not beside myself doing that work because the work was hard, but I was very focused on why I was digging the hole and then putting her in and filling it back which you and I did together was among the most emotionally powerful experiences I think I've ever had.

[00:50:08] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. It was rough.

[00:50:10] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah. Oh, you need, we need tributes and rituals of endings and not to, as you say, sanitize. And this is exactly one of the themes from Wendell Berry's life as well as teachings. We don't need a sanitized world. We don't want a sanitized world. It is not something that we should be desiring nor is it possible. The messiness, the stickiness, the unexpected nature of grief in this case is part of what our brains will use to scaffold the story, to create the story and assure us she's gone. He is gone. Now what do I take forward? What I take forward is not going to be so useful if I keep wondering for a long time if she's actually gone. And not that we don't all do that. You and I have both imagined her still.

[00:51:16] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Oh, yeah.

[00:51:17] Dr. Heather Heying: And after my father died, I thought I saw him several times. And I think, especially when you're living with someone or near someone, it is much more likely to happen. Because you keep like they're in the fabric of your life. And so putting a number of things into that experience as it's over, the equivalent of sitting Shiva, of being able to visit the body and lay hands on and cleaning the body as you did with Maddie and carrying the body and burying the body are all incontrovertible. And together, they become the bookend that you can then use to remember an amazing life well lived.

[00:52:08] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. I think I will save this for another day. But I also think that there is a discussion that we are overdue for about the end of life for people. I think it's a little different with animals. Yeah. You know, in other words, I think you and I would both strongly have preferred as we've only had happened one time with all the animals we've lost. We lost one animal who was scheduled to be euthanized and died in your lap.

[00:52:40] Dr. Heather Heying: He crawled into my arms an hour before we were going to the vet. And I had enough time to call you and the boys to me and he died there.

[00:52:47] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. And it was, you know, it's definitely the best way to go. But worse than the animal expiring, maybe frightened alone somewhere on their schedule. And, you know, as you mentioned at the top of the thing, the fact of being so old that you expire of natural causes is not a normal thing for an animal. So, you know, we're sort of compensating for one abnormal thing with another and you could make the same argument for people. However, the inclination to medicalize and schedule human death is I believe it is naming of the human psyche, that it is denying us things about our humanity that only a fool would disrupt. And anyway, I would like to come back to what I think that looks like some other day. But one of the lessons of the last, you know, you can pick your time period, the last year, the last five years, the last decade, the last 25 years, is that where we have disrupted normal biological complexity, we have done so at our peril.

[00:54:17] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And that as much as, you know, the rituals surrounding death arriving and the aftermath may seem archaic and primitive and not modern, that's really an indicator that there is something about them that is important that we probably have not written down. So it's very easy to bypass it. You know, of course it's tempting when the vet says, so you'd like cremation then, you know, see, it will take the body right away. Of course, everything is easier about that. And you think, OK, I guess it's all taken care of. It's just a signature, a credit card. And then, you know, I can have my ceremony when the ashes come back. But you don't understand what you have surrendered in that choice and not it, you know, not everybody can bury their animal in the backyard. I'm not saying it's possible, but thinking about how you're going to deal with convincing your own mind that the animal is really gone or the person figuring out how you're going to prompt your mind to do all of the recalibrating of what your life now is.

[00:55:44] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Those are not small matters. And I would just counsel people to be very conscious about traditions that we have now abandoned.

[00:55:58] Dr. Heather Heying: Well, that's an excellent segue, actually, to talking a bit about Wendell Berry. I want to, we've talked about Wendell Berry a few other times on the podcast. He died the same day as our beloved Labrador did, August 31st. I want to just give a bit of a bio and then share some readings of his. And maybe that's sufficient. We'll see. So Wendell Berry was, he died at 92. He lived a full, good, amazing life. He was an environmentalist, a writer, a philosopher and defender of the land and a philosopher and defender of traditional ways of being and doing. He died at home in Kentucky, 92. He was raised on a farm in North Central Kentucky in the area where his ancestors had lived since 1803, fifth generation, not just Kentuckian, but from that area. And he went on to study English at the University of Kentucky, where he met his soon to be wife, with whom he was for the entire life.

[00:57:01] Dr. Heather Heying: Then he studied creative writing at Stanford, where his mentor was the great philosopher writer of the American West, Wallace Stegner, one of my heroes. One summer, he and his wife, Tanya, returned to Kentucky and spent it in, quote, an old two room cabin on the Kentucky River at Port Royal in Henry County, where his ancestors had lived since 1803. The cabin had been built in the 1920s by a great uncle. That's from the New York Times, a pechure of him. It was a place where he had spent many summers as a child. And Berry said in a later essay about that place and about that summer. In the life we lived that summer, we represented to ourselves what we wanted. It was not the headlong pilgrimage after money and comfort and prestige. So for those who don't know Wallace Stegner, the idea that this young man from Kentucky had ended up in in the creative writing program named for and mentored by Wallace Stegner, along with like Ken Kesey, Ken Kesey and other who was actually his his classmate, is extraordinary.

[00:58:01] Dr. Heather Heying: Like this was a man who had a great literary future ahead of him. And in fact, he does. But as we'll see, he stepped away from what was expected. After Stanford, he and his growing family spent a year in Italy in the south of France on a Guggenheim fellowship before landing. He landed a faculty job at NYU. New York City was considered then as now the just the home of everything literary, the beating heart of literary life in America, the place that you tried to get to. And if you made it, you didn't leave. NYU faculty, English, NYU. After two years, he left. After two years, Berry left with his family, returning to rural Kentucky to make a life on the land where he had grown up. In a 2012 interview, Berry said, I don't think I had a single literary friend who thought I'd done the right thing by leaving New York and coming back here to live.

[00:58:52] Dr. Heather Heying: But after I did, I understood Wallace Stegner a lot better than I had before. When I read Wolf Willow, one of Stegner's pieces, I began to realize how responsible he had been to his region. That mattered to me immensely. And I began reading his books with a better understanding. When I first went to Stanford in 58, I thought that I would move the way a lot of writers have done from university job to university job. My education had implied over and again that you couldn't amount to anything in a place like this. Speaking of his home in Kentucky, I grieved over that. I liked the work of the farms. I liked this country, this place. But at Stanford, I thought I was the commencement of some kind of an academic vagabondage that would carry me. I didn't know where. I was in no position yet to understand Wallace Stegner's commitment to the West and to his long endeavor to understand the implications of aridity beyond the 100th meridian.

[00:59:43] Dr. Heather Heying: I began to accept the influence of Kentuckians who had brought their education home. My father, of course. And after we moved back here, I understood that my subject was here and that wherever I might have gone, I would still have been drawing on this country because it was what I knew. I was in an interview with the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2012. And speaking six years later in 2018 to The New York Times, he had said of this decision again, this decision to move, to leave the beating heart of the literary world in New York City and to go home to Kentucky. He said returning to his New York Times rights, that he had said that returning to his home was a place to write for the rest of his life, was a way to ensure to himself that he would always be bound by the truth. And here, a direct quote from him in 2018, as reported by The New York Times, it made a permanent connection between me and my native place and with its landscape.

[01:00:40] Dr. Heather Heying: The landscape was there to chuck me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. So we've spoken before of Wendell Berry. I read poems of his in February of 2022 in episode 116 and prose in April of 2023 and episode 170. And I'm going to read a little bit more now. He was prolific. He was an extraordinary writer and he was prolific nonfiction fiction poetry. Perhaps his most famous book is The Unsettling of America, Culture and Agriculture. You probably can't see, but this book is as book darted up as any book that I have. And so I chose a few passages to share, but really every page of this book is important and and as unexpected things. And nowhere now is there a market for minor produce, a bucket of cream, a hen, a few dozen eggs. One cannot sell milk from a few cows anymore.

[01:01:47] Dr. Heather Heying: The law required equipment is too expensive. Those markets were done away with in the name of sanitation, but of course to the enrichment of the large producers. We've always had to have a good reason for doing away the small operators. And in modern times, the good reason has often been sanitation for which there is apparently no small or cheap technology. Future historians will no doubt remark upon the inevitable association with us between sanitation and filthy lucre. And it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.

[01:02:23] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It's interesting. Obviously, you didn't get to go to Polyface this year, which is too bad. It was amazing.

[01:02:31] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, I was doing more important work, though.

[01:02:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: You were doing more important work. But while you were doing that work, Joel Salatin actually spoke, gave an incredible talk, as he always does. And he mentioned Wendell Berry. And the thing he said struck me, never heard it before. It mirrored something that I've said in a very narrow context. And I have been unable to come up with the quote. But he said, in effect, that Wendell Berry had stated that a civilization must. Civilization can only survive if it keeps its minority perspectives alive. Now, I've said in the academic context that every field must have at least two schools of thought alive, and that the reason that the entire academy has gone insane is that the school of thought that's making the biggest progress at the moment kills off all of its competitors. And when it runs its course during diminishing returns, nobody remembers how to think any other way.

[01:03:32] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And so all fields get grounded. And it sounds like Wendell Berry had made the same argument for civilization generally, but I can't find the quote.

[01:03:42] Dr. Heather Heying: Monoculture, be it agricultural or actual culture, is not good for the landscape.

[01:03:48] Dr. Bret Weinstein: A hundred percent. Yeah. And this is one of the things I ended up talking to Joel about, is the the conference had a theme, I think accidental almost. Where we had a bunch of farmers at sort of different stages in their development. You know, Joel Salatin is one of the few famous farmers on Earth, really. And, you know, Ryan Cole is a doctor, an artisan and a farmer, a scientist. Thomas Massie is a an engineer and a congressman and a farmer.

[01:04:30] Dr. Heather Heying: And these are three totally different regions, too. We have Virginia and Kentucky and Idaho in that order.

[01:04:36] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. And then Robert and Jill Malone, doctors, scientists, farmers. And so anyway, there was sort of this accidental focus on the fact that these realms, you know, I started to think about it in terms of when I hear Joel Salatin speak, I hear there's a kind of wisdom that comes from the very practical, tangible side of what he does, that he has come to understand some deep philosophical truths and he's come to them through managing the land in a way that few farmers even do. You know, you have people who are very good at farming the land who don't know nearly as much about it as as Joel does. But it is, I think, not surprising that, you know, the monoculture is a bad idea, whether you're growing stuff or ideas. That's right.

[01:05:35] Speaker 3: That's right.

[01:05:37] Dr. Heather Heying: A competent farmer is his own boss. He has learned the disciplines necessary to go ahead on his own, as required by economic obligation, loyalty to his place, pride in his work. His work days require the use of long experience and practice judgment for the failures of which he knows that he will suffer. His days do not begin and end by rule, but in response to necessity, interest and obligation. They are not measured by the clock, but by the task and his endurance. They last as long as necessary or as long as he can work. He has mastered intricate formal patterns in ordering his work within the overlapping cycles, human and natural, controllable and uncontrollable of the life of a farm. Such a man, upon moving to the city and taking a job in industry, becomes a specialized subordinate, dependent upon the authority and judgment of other people.

[01:06:26] Dr. Heather Heying: His disciplines are no longer implicit in his own experience, assumptions and values, but are imposed on him from the outside. For a complex responsibility, he has substituted a simple dutifulness. The strict competences of independence, the formal mastery, the complexities of attitude and know-how necessary to life on the farm, which have been in the making and the race of farmers since before history, all are replaced by the knowledge of some fragmentary task that may be learned by rote in a little while. Such a simplification of mind is easy. Given the pressure of economics and social fashion that has been behind it and the decline of values that has accompanied it, it may be said to have been gravity powered. The reverse movement, a reverse movement is necessary and some have undertaken it, is uphill and it is difficult. It cannot be fully accomplished in a generation.

[01:07:11] Dr. Heather Heying: It will probably require several generations, enough to establish complex local cultures with strong communal memories and traditions of care.

[01:07:18] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Wow. That is profound.

[01:07:23] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah. One more piece of prose from Wendell Berry. What has drawn the modern world into being is a strange, almost occult yearning for the future. The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind long for heaven. The great aim of modern life has been to improve the future, even just to reach the future, assuming that the future will inevitably be better. One of the oddest terms of praise in our language is a futuristic. Far out as a term of universal approbation is perhaps a lineal descendant. Such terms are used to identify the signs and landmarks that confirm that we are indeed on the right road to the future, that we are getting there, that at any moment we may at last arrive. And this is no elitist obsession. It is commonplace. Politicians understand very well the power of the promise to build a better or more prosperous or more secure future.

[01:08:16] Dr. Heather Heying: Parents characteristically strive and sacrifice to make a better or more secure future for their children. Workers work toward a secure future in which they will retire and enjoy themselves. Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us. The future has been envisioned, dreamed, projected, painted for us by prophets of every kind. Scientists, comic book writers, novelists, philosophers, politicians, industrialists, professors. And of course, by ourselves, the cult of the future has turned us all into prophets. The future is the time when science will have solved all of our problems, gratified all our desires. When we will all live in perfect ease and an air conditioned, fully automated womb. When all the work will be done by machines so sophisticated that they will not only clothe, house and feed us, but think for us, play our games, paint our pictures, write our poems.

[01:09:03] Dr. Heather Heying: It is the earthly paradise, the other shore, where all will be well. And if we are living in the future, no, and if we are living for the future, then history is on our side. Or so we are at liberty to think, for the needed proofs are never at hand. That there has for some time and growing a cult of dread of the future testifies not only to the innate silliness and frivolity of this vision, but to its power. The adoration of the future may be beginning to falter, but it is still dominant, still available and useful to the exploitive mind. There is no aspect of our life as a people that is not now under the dominance of this industrial dream of the future as paradise. All our implements, automobiles, tractors, kitchen utensils, et cetera, have always been conceived by the modern mind as in a kind of progress or pilgrimage towards the future.

[01:09:49] Dr. Heather Heying: Forms. The automobile of the future, the kitchen of the future, the classroom of the future have long figured more actively in our imaginations, plans and desires than whatever versions of these things we may currently have. We long ago gave up the wish to have things that were adequate or even excellent. We have preferred instead to have things that are up to date. But to be up to date as an ambition with built in panic, our possessions cannot be up to date more than momentarily unless we can stop time or somehow get ahead of it. The only possibility of satisfaction is to be driving now in one's future automobile.

[01:10:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Oh, that's so good. Why do we fetishize the future the way we do, especially in light of the evident trajectories?

[01:10:39] Dr. Heather Heying: Why can we not find beauty and salience and satisfaction, if not static satisfaction, in what is here and now? It's Buddhist. There are many traditions which ask us to be present and to be satisfied. We can still strive. We can still yearn, but we can also be satisfied and find the beauty and the joy in what is.

[01:11:09] Dr. Bret Weinstein: In fact, if you think about it. Because there are there are these zones where the newest thing, you know, this is the fastest laptop Apple has ever built.

[01:11:24] Speaker 4: The right.

[01:11:25] Dr. Heather Heying: OK, the technology making them slower. Right.

[01:11:28] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Of course, it is. The latest one is going to be the fastest. So fast is something that matters. Then, of course, the latest will have that characteristic. This is the, you know, the newest drug for managing headaches. OK, but in the case of managing headaches, it is not obvious that I want the newest drug. In fact, there are very strong reasons I should want a drug that's well understood rather than the newest drug, which carries dangers that may not be known for, you know, 25 years, if at all. Yes. So the at some level, there needs to be an art. We are all trained by the zones in which, you know, cars really are better than when you and I were kids. They just break down less. They go farther. Same amount of fuel.

[01:12:13] Dr. Heather Heying: But they're also more fly by wire.

[01:12:16] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah, they're fly by wire. You can't fix them yourself.

[01:12:19] Dr. Heather Heying: You can't fix them yourself. You don't. There are circuit boards that weren't present before, and that has made them more reliable, but it has also made them impossible for a human without other tools, technological tools to work on them fully themselves.

[01:12:36] Dr. Bret Weinstein: True. But you could be forgiven for thinking that given the trajectory of the last 50 years, the newest cars are likely to be better just because cars have gotten better. But that is actually the exception, not the rule. Right. You know, certain technological zones, if it has a battery, it's probably way better than it was 20 years ago.

[01:13:01] Dr. Heather Heying: Batteries are better.

[01:13:02] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right.

[01:13:03] Dr. Heather Heying: Batteries are new.

[01:13:04] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. But most things you should there should be a fairly high bar to.

[01:13:11] Dr. Heather Heying: Well, the older it is, the more likely you are to have reached the plateau, the asymptote, whatever, already. And incremental changes, changes are likely to be incremental and may even go in the opposite direction.

[01:13:25] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yes. Often there will be downsides you don't know, like, you know, the refrigerator of today looks fancier, but, you know, it lasting 10 years is not guaranteed. So anyway, the argument should have to be persuasively made that this is a place where progress is desirable, not if there is if there's a new version, it's better than the old one. That's you know, you're a fool if you think that that's obviously true.

[01:13:53] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah. OK, I want to finish with two poems by Wendell Berry. One I read in February twenty twenty two. It's perhaps its most famous poem. Manifesto, the Mad Farmer Liberation Front. Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something, they will call you. When they want you to die for profit, they will let you know. So friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord, love the world, work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love somebody who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

[01:14:49] Dr. Heather Heying: Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance for what man has not encountered. He has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion. Put your ear close and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself, will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?

[01:15:37] Dr. Heather Heying: Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary. Some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

[01:16:07] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Amazing. I wish we had met him.

[01:16:09] Dr. Heather Heying: Yeah, me too. The last poem is very short and I want to end with it and my parting words of the podcast. So if we want to talk anymore before we go there.

[01:16:25] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Oh, I think we're there. Thanks for for joining us and considering the end of Maddie's life. I know that seems like a small thing, probably, but it is a window into many, many things that are profound.

[01:16:46] Speaker 3: Indeed.

[01:16:51] Dr. Heather Heying: Another poem by Wendell Berry. A meeting. In a dream. In a dream, I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far. And yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask how you been. He grins and looks at me. I've been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees. Rest in peace, Wendell Berry. And rest in peace, Maddie. The amazing Labrador. And all of you in our audience until you see us next time, which is going to be in only two days. Be good to the ones you love. Eat real food. And get outside.

[01:17:49] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Be well, everyone.

Credits

Music: "Marble Machine" by Wintergatan. This track can be downloaded for free at www.wintergatan.net. Free license to use this track in your video can be downloaded at www.wintergatan.net.