You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 87. Heather Heying.mp3
Heather Heying: The fact is that if you actually say there is nothing new that could happen that would be good, if you're that kind of conservative, you really haven't thought very deeply. And conversely, if you are the kind of progressive or liberal who says there is nothing that has been in the past that is good and everything must be new, you also haven't thought very deeply. So aren't we all, if we are thinking in any way deeply about what humans are and what society should look like, going to be seeking a mix. And aren't the disagreements, which of course we'll have, aren't the disagreements very likely to be around like, which of the things that we've done before are still good and should we keep doing? And which of the things that we've done before are ready for change? Because certainly a lot of what we've been doing still works. And certainly some of what we've been doing doesn't work anymore. And let's figure out what those things are, as opposed to saying, oh, you're just a conservative who doesn't want any change, or you're just a liberal who wants everything to change. Anyone who is actually at one of those caricature positions isn't thinking carefully.
Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist. I could not be more excited to welcome today's guest, Dr. Heather Hying. She is many things to listeners, you're probably are familiar with her. She's many things to me as well. And so I'll include the complete bio in the show notes. But among other things, Heather Hying is an evolutionary biologist. She rose into the limelight in 2017 with the events that unfolded at Evergreen College along with her husband, Brett Weinstein, with whom she also co-hosts the Dark Horse podcast and co-authored A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution, and the Challenges of Modern Life. Heather is a writer in many places, including her blog Natural Selections on Substack, the Field Notes column for County Highway, And there's just so many things that I could say about Heather. And I'm really honored that she could join me today because listeners of the show know I'm very interested in the plight of detransitioners. And I actually owe credit to Heather for being the first person to bring them to my awareness. So it's sort of like having, I don't know, like a personal mentor here on the show. So Heather, thank you so much for joining me.

Heather Heying: Thank you so much, Stephanie. I didn't know that, what you just said. We met just before I moved out of Portland. We took a walk in the woods with my dog. And it was so lovely to get to know you a little bit. And then we had dinner with a number of people the last time I was in Portland, which is now many months ago. But it's just a very great pleasure to be talking with you here today. And yeah, you surprised me just then. I did not know that I was the person who first brought the idea of the reality of people detransitioning to your attention.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, well, I'll share sort of how you've impacted my life, which you may or may not know, but a lot changed for me in 2020. I was isolated during the pandemic lockdowns, I was very afraid of getting sick, and I had a lot of time to spend alone. Gardening was my main kind of hobby that kept me sane. And so I had a lot of time to listen to podcasts. And being a therapist, I was part of these Facebook groups of therapists that were engaging in some increasingly concerning social dynamics. So I think that that was sort of the beginning of my questioning wokeness, so to speak. And living in Portland, I was also experiencing a cognitive dissonance regarding what was going on that summer of 2020, you know, going from the lockdowns to then all of a sudden, everyone's out in the streets rioting and somehow this is okay, but socializing in other ways is not. And given some personal factors in my background, I just, I had a lot of cognitive dissonance to sort through with regard to race and notions of equity and all this kind of stuff kind of coming from my liberal background. And a friend shared an episode of Dark Horse. Actually, I believe it was when Brett did the Black Intellectual Roundtable. And I was like, well, this is a different approach to talking about these issues. And so I started avidly consuming Dark Horse podcast. And I don't know, it was like maybe June 2020. And I was listening to you and you mentioned detransitioners in the context of pressure from trans rights activists for 60 minutes not to air their special on detransitioners. And that was the first time I recall hearing, I mean it's possible that I'd heard about detransition before that, but that was like I was like, what? And I've shared this moment so many times with people because this is where I don't understand how people don't have this reaction, especially people in my field. As a therapist, I'm like, wait a minute. I've been trained in this so-called gender affirming care and yada yada, and this is what's best for trans people, people with gender dysphoria, yada yada. And there's this whole other side of the story that nobody told me about. There are people who regret this. Well, I have to learn everything I can about it. That was what happened for me. And I think that is what happens for a lot of other colleagues, but then there are colleagues who go the opposite direction, like, I can't hear you, you know, like, they don't, they don't want to know. And so when you said that, I looked for the 60 minutes interview, I couldn't find it, but I just went to YouTube. And that was where it all began for me. And now here I am, you know, interviewing D transitioners, working with D transitioners featured in a documentary about D transitioners. So I really thank you. Um, it's sort of like, I don't know, I spent a little time immersed in Indian culture in my early twenties and there's like the culture of the guru and like giving praise to your guru as your kind of direct line to God. And so like in a, in a non-secular way, you are that, that teacher for me, you are the, the reason that I became aware of things that have become so important to me.

Heather Heying: Oh, well, that's that's fantastic. Thank you. I did not know. I did not know any of that. And I mean, I think that's what that's a large part of what I'm trying to do is share what I know so that other people may take it and make of it something something greater. And, you know, you are in a position to actually do so much good as you are, as you have been, as you will continue to do by working with the transitioners. And so, you know, if if If a short comment that I made on an episode three years ago really helped spark all of that, helped open up a door that you could go through, well, that's fantastic. That's exactly the point. And I think there's a phrase that I've been using about what happened to Brett and me at Evergreen through the looking glass. You find yourself on the other side of this thing that you've always stood on one side of, and you look back, you go, Oh, actually, I can see that that world exists. I can see where I was standing. I can see how I thought the world was and what I understood things to be, but I'm on the other side now. And it's actually, there's more clarity. It's like, you know, I've cleared the vaseline off the lens. I've got, you know, the focal point looks more accurate. And also, my God, there's so many good people over here. right? And so I don't know for you if by leaving a model that was entirely about affirmative care, for instance, ended up having you lose friends. I know for sure, you know, we lost a ton of colleagues and friends, first with Evergreen and then with, you know, a number of positions where They were not taken from a contrarian perspective, from anything like that. It was a, actually, I'm interested in what the truth is. And sometimes the truth sucks. But often, it's so much better than what you were expecting. And certainly, if the truth is, and the truth is, that the affirmative care model is doing a lot of damage to people who are being pushed into making decisions that are not reversible, then it is all of our obligation who think about it all to say, actually, no. No, we're going to stand up and speak about it. And so I'm incredibly grateful to you and the others. I know there are others in the therapeutic community, I guess, if that's the right way to refer to you therapists who are seeing it for what it is and pushing back against affirmative care.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, and you met some of some of my therapist friends at the gens back conference. I've gained friends. I've lost friends and and it's surprising to see who ends up on one side or the other. I don't think I have a way to predict it because I'm the sort of person I, I make and lose friends very easily. Like I have a conversation with you once I like you, I have a good feeling, like you're my friend now, you know? And then like, I can also like go a year without talking to someone and hope to pick up where we left off. I'm kind of low maintenance friend like that. And so, you know, there's, I've, I've lived enough life that there are people from different chapters that kind of pop up years later. And I've not noticed any rhyme or reason to the pattern of who is offended by my current stance and who's grateful for it. I mean, I had an old therapist colleague from a different chapter of life who is a somatic therapist of all things and married to a woman. And she said something really nasty on Instagram out of the blue one day about how she can't believe what a despicable direction I've gone in with my life. And then I had another, you know, a former roommate from when I first moved to Portland who got back in touch years later, um, once he was a therapist and married and had kids and said that he's, you know, grateful for my stance on the issue and has been a really engaged, um, part of this community. So, yeah, I mean, there's, there's really no way of kind of understanding it, but

Heather Heying: People surprise you in both directions, don't they?

Stephanie Winn: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, so onto to the, the interview part. So, um, you have so many concepts that are like food, food for the mind. And one that I think is sort of foundational. to your work in your book is this idea of culture and consciousness. And I'm wondering if you can lay that out for people who aren't familiar, because I think it serves as a good foundation for some other things I might want to explore with you.

Heather Heying: Yeah, sure. So it's, I believe it's the penultimate chapter in the book, in a book in which we're exploring, um, how, what we call hyper novelty is, uh, which is, you know, the, the ever, uh, quickening rate of change itself, uh, that we as humans who are better able to deal with novelty than any other organisms on the planet, have outstripped even our ability to deal with the hyper-novelty that we are creating for ourselves in the 21st century. So we go through all of these systems, food, sleep, health, sex, gender, parenthood, school, all of these different systems, and then arrive, before we talk most broadly about society in the final chapter of the book, a model for culture and consciousness, which involves us as humans with, you know, not the only organisms on the planet that we think have some consciousness, but certainly those with the most. as effectively oscillating between these two modes. Everyone uses culture a little bit differently. I actually have an undergraduate degree in anthropology, and so I was immersed in all of these different models of what culture is. And if you've ever gone there, and I don't necessarily recommend it, you will know that like with any of these terms that are complex and that we use in common parlance, there are practically as many working definitions as there are people using working definitions of it. Uh, what we, uh, what we call culture is that part of, uh, humanity, uh, the part, the part of our understanding, uh, that has become like second nature that we can just do without thinking about it. And the consciousness, what is required as we innovate, as we go into a landscape and explore, is we discover things, we come to have new ideas. But until we are ready to basically communicate that to someone else, until we have packaged some insight that we have for communication, it is this sort of nascent, amorphous thing. And so it is the packaging for communication that is the bringing to consciousness, at which point we share. And so this model of consciousness is that it is inherently a dyadic or greater than dyadic thing, like you don't have consciousness unto yourself, just as an individual, or at least it hasn't come to full fruition. So you share things, you have ideas as they're in consciousness, and the other person says, oh, yeah, I haven't heard that before. Let's talk about it. Let's think it through. And then as that idea becomes established, becomes accepted, and then established and spreads to more and more people, it goes into the cultural layer, where people pick it up as if by magic. It's like it's in the water we drink. It's in the air we breathe. And there's a constant give and play. And I don't think we need to say struggle, although sometimes it's a struggle, between that which is cultural, which has worked until now, and that which is conscious, which are the new ideas, which may actually be ready to replace some of the old ideas and may be wrong. That which is brought to consciousness isn't inherently good or right or better. and that which is cultural isn't inherently good or right or better. But we have both in humanity. We have cultural things, cultural norms, which have worked and do work and will continue to work, and also things from our culture that are no longer working for us, and also many new ideas that which we are bringing to consciousness, which might replace some of the older ideas that are out of date and some which are really not very good, and we should not imagine that they should move into the future.

Stephanie Winn: So I'm picturing humanity as this amorphous blob like an amoeba that's moving and growing and shifting. And the center of that blob is the norm, the culture, the parts that remain relatively unchanged. And then there's the frontier, the part of the blob that's exploring into new space. And you have ideas about how These two forces relate to liberalism and conservatism, not in the left versus right, Democrat versus Republican sense that we know it in American culture right now, but more generally the spirit of, let's say, openness to ideas, the spirit of creativity and chaos as liberalism, and the spirit of sticking to what works, protecting traditions as conservatism.

Heather Heying: Yes, precisely. And, you know, again, you know, everyone who uses words like liberal, conservative, left and right have their own ideas. And I appreciate you saying, like, not in the not in the sense that we generally are using them in America right now, left and right. But, you know, conservatism, if we are to take the word at its literal meaning, it is about conserving values and cultural norms that have existed in the past. And liberalism, or to use the term that has gotten a lot of crap, but I still want to think of myself as a progressive, even though most people who identify as progressives now are making no sense at all. But progressivism, in contrast, is looking to go beyond what has been and go outside of the cultural norms. And the fact is that if you actually say there is nothing new that could happen that would be good, if you're that kind of conservative, you really haven't thought very deeply. And conversely, if you are the kind of progressive or liberal who says there is nothing that has been in the past that is good and everything must be new, you also haven't thought very deeply. So aren't we all, if we are thinking in any way deeply about what humans are and what society should look like, going to be seeking a mix. And aren't the disagreements, which of course we'll have, aren't the disagreements very likely to be around, like, which of the things that we've done before are still good and should we keep doing? And which of the things that we've done before are ready for change? Because certainly a lot of what we've been doing still works. And certainly some of what we've been doing doesn't work anymore. And let's figure out what those things are, as opposed to saying, oh, you're just a conservative who doesn't want any change, or you're just a liberal who wants everything to change. Anyone who is actually at one of those sort of caricature positions isn't thinking carefully.

Stephanie Winn: Right at that point, it's just a knee jerk reaction coming from some kind of emotional instinct, rather than the maybe the higher expression of these aspects of our humanity, which is that they they work in a dynamic tension together. And so what one of my complaints about what's happened to the medical and mental health professions, for example, is that And you've spoken to this sort of thing quite a bit, just in slightly different ways. It seems like there used to be an ethos, at least that's what I internalized as a younger adult, that in any professional field, there was a certain amount of civil disagreement welcome. And so there would be the people who are more the innovators, people who are higher in personality traits like openness and who have less of a need for certainty. Who are more the early adapters of change and drawn to new ideas and those people maybe present their new ideas and then the people. In this model, the culture, the conservative, the conscientious people who are established with what works, they say, well, how does that stand the test of time? How does that square with what we already know? And then the people who are proposing the idea say, great question. And here's how we're thinking of that. Here's how we will think of that. Here are the questions we still need to ask. And so there was a sort of sense that we didn't move all the way forward until everyone was satisfied, until the questions posed by the people who are slower to adapt to change had been incorporated. And that was how you made sure that new ideas could hold weight. And I feel like this is just kind of an ethos that I absorbed from the culture before, I mean, when I was younger, before I actually played a significant role in any professional community. And now that I'm here, now that I'm in midlife, established in my profession, It's like, what happened to that ethos?

Heather Heying: Yeah. It's hard to see how we got to a place of such incoherence, honestly, with people really seeming to argue for one or the other of the extremes, when it is the rare system where either extreme is actually the place to be. And that's not, you know, there is a very weak, weak thing that says, oh, the truth is someplace in the middle. And, you know, often that's not the case either. But save everything, change nothing and change everything, save nothing are both extremes that make no sense. And so you said liberal, conservative, left, right. These are some of the ways that we have described, that the world has described these positions that somewhat maps onto sort of consciousness versus culture. We also are, Bretz and my versions of consciousness versus culture, we also use the framing of the shamanistic and the sacred. And those terms, we use both because we think they're right, but also in part because the political terms are so polarizing now. Like, you know, maybe polarization is invented in politics, and so it should be no surprise that the terms themselves will bring up emotional reactions for people. But even people who have had bad experiences with organized religion say, generally, I think, I may be wrong about this, do not have a knee-jerk negative reaction to the concept of the Vesakrid. And even those who don't think that psychedelic experience is worthwhile and haven't tried it themselves, usually, and this may be slightly less certain, usually don't have an inherently knee-jerk negative reaction to the idea of the shamanistic. We have, I think, in American culture, a respect for both of these things. And really, you know, the sacred is that which has been understood to be true sufficiently that we don't mess with it. And the shamanistic is that which is new, maybe wrong, full of chaos, you know, high, you know, high noise, but also some pattern in there and some discovery. And, you know, the sacred does not tend to be a place of discovery. And the shamanistic does not tend to be a place of stability. Aren't we interested in both stability and discovery? We can't maximize both, and therefore we'd like to find a place. It's not going to be a static rule. There's not going to be a like, OK, we're going to go 60-40, we're going to go 50-50. We can't do it that way. We have to say, this is going to be uncertain. And I guess the need to be in a place of some uncertainty is inherently over in that more openness, more consciousness, more shamanistic side. But the fact is that there's plenty of opportunity for creativity, even among those who would say, actually, I'm really more traditional. I'd really like to maintain a lot of what has been. There are plenty among those people who are creative and could accept that actually certainty, certainty where it doesn't belong, is part of what gets us into big dire messes that we have a hard time finding ourselves out of.

Stephanie Winn: I recently told you about a group called Do No Harm, who's working to do just that. Eliminate the harm that so-called gender-affirming care for minors and political ideologies in medicine are causing. Do No Harm is made up of thousands of members across the country, from doctors to nurses to policymakers to concerned parents who see what's happening at practitioners around the country and are waving a red flag. Membership is free and you get unlimited access to information from experts, on-the-ground updates from people working in medicine or state houses to take a stand, and collaboration with other thinkers. Learn more and sign up at do-no-harm-medicine.org slash Some Therapist to learn more. That's do-no-harm-medicine.org slash Some Therapist. This reminds me of a couple things. One is when you bring up The Sacred reminds me of sanctity in Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory and the fact that according to his research, people who have more conservative temperaments and worldviews tend to place more of a value on that sense of sanctity. Whereas in my experience, being a left-close liberal for much of my life, there's very much of an interest in shamanism, an interest in direct experience of some sort of divine illumination of something that has not been revealed before. and rather a disregard for the traditions of the past. But speaking of disregard for traditions of the past, this brings us to another one of your concepts, which is Chesterton's fence. Can you explain that one?

Heather Heying: Yeah, not ours, of course, but the fence of G.K. Chesterton, a, I guess, early 20th century, boy, an economist, a philosopher, an intellectual, a generalist intellectual. who provides the following parable. And he says, there's two people walking down a road and they come across a fence. And one of them says, this is in the way, let's get rid of it. And the other one says, until you know what it's for, you should not get rid of it. There is no reason that you, there is no way that I should tolerate you getting rid of something because you currently find it irritating if you cannot tell me why it is there in the first place. And so we generalize in the book, Hunter Gatherer's Guide, and say, you know what? There's Chesterton's fence as this parable. And we humans have made this error over and over again. We run into these fences, and we don't know what they're for. And they're irritating to us in our drive towards progress. And we get rid of them. And then we go, wait a minute. It's going to be hard to get back, isn't it, now that we've gotten rid of it? So we talk about things like Chesterton's organs, where, you know, we can talk about the appendix, we can talk about tonsils, but the favorite example, because it's so obvious and because it's in the past, we can all see it for the foolishness that it was, that I came across in doing research for the book was that about 100 years ago, there was a move among American doctors, some American doctors, who did not see the value in the colon, the large intestine, to simply remove large intestines from healthy people because it seemed like it was in the way. Now this is patently- In the way of what? I didn't even know. I did not dig deep into what problem they thought they were solving. But these sorts of moves have been made over and over and over again. And so Chesterton's gods, the same way. I don't have a god myself. I don't have faith. But religion has been a part of humanity for a very, very long time. And the idea that we would be better without religion, as many in the secular community would argue, doesn't make a lot of sense to me, even though I myself don't have religion. Chesterton's breast milk. There are many, and I'm shocked still that this is still the case, who would look at breast milk and say, oh, that feeds the kid. Therefore, all we need to do is find a replacement thing. to feed the kid, and that will be sufficient, ignoring that there is much in the connection between mother and baby, in the immune information being passed through breast milk, in so many other things that we have not begun even to imagine. that when we look at something with our reductionist, sort of, I'm not going to say pseudo-scientific, because there's real science there, but it's this reductionist scientific perspective as opposed to a holistic scientific perspective that says, I know what that thing's for, and we don't need it anymore, let's get rid of it. That's making the error of Chesterton's fence, and we're doing it way too much.

Stephanie Winn: When you start to talk about Chesterton's breast milk, I start thinking about those ecto-life pods and the fact that there are transhumanists who want to grow babies in artificial wombs and thinking, I ask the question, is that baby Human, and I raised this question with a bioethicist, Samantha Stevenson, who comes from a Catholic perspective. And yes, she argues, yes, it's human. And of course it's human, it has human DNA. Like I get it, it's human, it's human. But what makes us human is we start off in the womb, right? That bond between mother and infant. And to think of a baby growing up without a mother's heartbeat, So, speaking of Chesterton's- Let me just interrupt for a second.

Heather Heying: I don't tend to engage in arguments like, is it human? Right. But my initial reaction there was, I'm not sure, actually, because why did we decide that the arbiter of humanity is the DNA? Like this itself is a reductionist perspective and you know it's Darwin was an innovative genius. And he didn't think, in part because he existed at the same time as Mendel and didn't know Mendel's work, and so didn't have the concept of gene. So he did not invoke genetics in any of his work. But I would argue, and in fact, I think we argue in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, that had he somehow been doing his work 50 years later, which wouldn't have made sense because the world was ripe for what he was doing and Wallace was coming up with the same ideas at the same time in the mid-late 19th century, but had he been around somehow for what came to be known as the modern synthesis in the 1930s-ish, of really putting together, you know, before the discovery of DNA itself, but after we came to understand genes, would he have said genes are the thing, that they are the mode of inheritance, and they are the thing that makes us what we are? I don't think he would have. Are they one thing? Yeah, for sure. Are they at base? For sure. But we are, we humans, are so much more than that. We are so much more software than than anyone else. And yes, we're built on the hardware, we're built on the genes, but that doesn't mean that that's sufficient. Necessary? Yeah. But I don't think, I'm not sure that I would say it's sufficient.

Stephanie Winn: It's like we can't be broken down into our parts. Well, so this raises the question of what it is that makes us human, which you explore beautifully. And there are so many things that I would argue, make us human, or have been a part of humanity for such a long time that we have already almost entirely given up, and they're Chesterton's fence issues. So one that you talk about a lot is fire, and specifically campfire, the role that the campfire played for most of human history. This is dear to my heart because for several years I had a wood stove and it was such a nourishing tradition for me to tend that fire. It's the heat, it's the warmth, it's the light, and it's also the act of tending the fire that's so meditative that I miss and I can't wait to get back into a situation where I can have a wood stove again. Uh, one thing I wanted to ask you is sort of, uh, with regard to this Chesterton's fence view of the role of campfire, what do you suppose we have given up or sacrificed about our humanity when, just to take one example, when we no longer have a daily relationship with the element of fire?

Heather Heying: Oh, that's amazing. Um, I will say I actually had a fire in my wood stove last night for the first time in, since last winter. I had my younger son, 17, make it, and then we tended it together. And it was glorious, because up here in the north, I'm a bit farther north than you, but it gets dark early now. And it's not that cold yet, but it's the darkness, too, that you're holding at bay with fire. So a wood stove does this for sure. A campfire would would do it even more because a wood stove is going to be in the side. We are already protected from the elements, from the wild that might be empowered at night against humans who are who are because of our eyes being so primary and how we navigate the world are better off during the day. Fire. Fire does so many things. in addition to the obvious. The obvious being things like warmth and light and the ability to cook. And the ability to cook itself, so much is downstream of that. Not just that now we're spending less time simply masticating every day, like that seems ridiculous, but it's like actually being able to get more calories out of our food and spend less time chewing gives us more time to talk. honestly, and to explore. And then once we are cooking food, then we begin to develop cultural traditions of cuisine. And breaking bread, it doesn't have to be bread, but that's the term we use in English. Breaking bread is so important to what we do as humans. So the campfire, which often does also involve food, allows, especially because it will tend to happen after dark, a place for everyone to come together, a place where the focus is the fire, where the rules of conversation, which in modern times it's not even clear that anyone knows what they are anyway, It can be so uncomfortable. And if you're out to eat in a restaurant, it's probably too loud to really hear very well. If you're in a smaller conversation, then maybe you feel urgency to make sure that you have something to say as soon as the other person stops talking. There's all of these ways that it can be uncomfortable. even as you're trying to just be human with one another. And a campfire can really alleviate those concerns in a way that frees people. So it's also often true, of course, that around a campfire, there's maybe a bottle being passed or a joint or people have maybe taken a little bit of psychedelics. But even without any of that, even without any of that, you're sitting around a campfire. Your faces are sometimes in shadow, sometimes not. Anytime you want to fall silent, you can. And the flames themselves are not static. There is both work to be done in terms of tending the fire, and there are a lot of other people. So if at any moment you don't want to be doing the work, you want to go into your own thoughts, you can do it. And at any moment that you want to go back into the conversation, you can do it. You don't have to excuse yourself when you need to go use the bathroom or just want some time to yourself. You can re-enter. And so it is a space that is unique in terms of our ability. And I'm sort of imagining a group of 6, 8, 10 people. And it could be smaller. It could be more. I've been in campfires when I was at Evergreen with 50 people. And by the end of the night, it's just two of you. And then you have to agree on who's going to really put the thing out before you both go to bed, right? But it's the ability to not be forced to be fully present as a participant in the vocal part of the conversation at any moment, to the welcoming nature of it. Anyone can squeeze in next to the fire. Anyone can contend it. And then I guess the piece, the additional piece, besides food and altered states that I haven't brought up, and I think the fire itself alters our state, is music. That very often there will be someone or many people who have an instrument and who will begin to play, and sometimes it's in the background, sometimes everyone starts singing for a little while, and that too is a way to go in and out of this explicit space, like language is so explicit, even though we are, man, almost all of our language is metaphorical, even that which we do not think is, but it is so explicit, it's inherently formal, it's inherently something that can be said back to you, you said this. as opposed to, we had that night, remember? We had that night together around the fire, and she played this, and he said that, and we had this to eat, and we explored some things. And yeah, you did say, and I wonder if you still think that, or on the heels of you saying that, I came to think this. And so I feel like it allows for further exploration where the stakes are low. And that's, we could all use a lot more of that. Being able to explore where the stakes are low and people aren't going to hold us to account for a thing that we said in a moment of passion or confusion or sleepiness or

Stephanie Winn: And you've written about the role of the fire in sort of setting the rhythms of people coming together and going apart and having different experiences and then coming and sharing notes on their experiences. Now another element that you described around the campfire is music, and that's, I think, another one of these sort of Chesterton's fence, like, and we're not even necessarily deliberately tearing that fence down. It's more like there are fences that are rotting and decaying and where nobody's like, hey, we should really go rebuild that fence, right? So, and especially the last several years where we've been doing so much online. And I've thought about this because I listened to a lot of ambient music And I also listened to indie folk singer songwriter stuff. And one of the best performances I've ever seen is this British band called Blanco White. I don't know if you've heard of them. Such an incredible live performance. And the musicians are all so in sync with each other. It seems like a meditation. They even trade off instruments fluidly. I've seen them a couple times now, and I've had the fortune of speaking with them. They're very down-to-earth people. But I contrast the experience of seeing a band like Blanco White, where these musicians have been playing together for years, with when I'm getting a massage or doing some stretching in the evening and I'm listening to Synthetic music, I'm thinking this was produced by one person with a keyboard, some electronic instruments and a loop pedal and a computer. And it just has a different feel when one person is planning, how am I gonna layer this sound over that sound compared to when a musician is listening in that acute way to exactly the cadence and the buildup of what another musician is doing. And you talked about your recent experiences in Prague, where everyone knows these songs, and they all burst out in a song. And again, going back to a time in my early 20s where I was really interested in Indian culture, that was one of the draws for me. I was doing Indian devotional music. And I think it was because it gave me a culture, even a culture very foreign to my own American upbringing, a culture foreign to my genetic background, but a culture nonetheless to participate in where when you're part of that culture, someone can burst out in song and you can join them because you know that song too.

Heather Heying: Yeah. Absolutely. I actually trained as a classical pianist. For most of my childhood, I practiced two hours a day, six days a week. 50 weeks a year, like that was the regime. I got up at 5.30 and practiced an hour before school and came home after school and practiced an hour. And that was not sufficient for me to become the professional that some in my life hoped that I would become, nor was it ever my passion. But I certainly became more than competent with that much time spent. And there are a number of things that I have thought over the years about why it was never really my thing. And some of it was that I was always playing music that someone else had written. And I came to love some of it. You know, I particularly loved some of the romantic composers like Chopin, where there's a little bit more freedom to explore, where sometimes they would just stuff so many notes into a measure that you could just kind of do what you wanted as opposed to the, you know, the stricter, timing of, say, the Baroque and some of the classical composers. But I think also, and I hadn't really quite put this together until you were just talking, part of what never felt fully enriching, like fully what I wanted it to be for me, was that I was doing it all alone. I went to the maestro who I learned from once a week or twice a week, and yes, he did concerts. All of his students were required to play in these concerts, and I did a couple of public concerts. There was an audience in that case, or there were other people playing. um I was oh and yes piano there is piano music written uh with uh you know that's orchestral and and that has other instruments um but that was never what I was doing and so it was entirely I am here producing music for you and that's lovely like some of some of what I played was was lovely and I don't um I still occasionally listen to some of the music you know, other people playing some of the kinds of music that I played. But it was never, it never sort of reached me at a really deep level. The way, for instance, I don't have as much familiarity with Indian music as you do, but when I was still at Evergreen, I taught with an ethnomusicologist. who had done a lot of work in Bali and in Ireland and other places as well. But she specifically was bringing Balinese music and Irish music to the class. And also samba, with which she had less experience, but there is a troupe, a group, I don't even know what they're called, a drumming group in Olympia, Washington, called Samba Oliwa, that she brought to class and they played, and it's all drums. And I had never heard anything so magnificent. And I've, you know, I've, I've been at plenty of live music and, and have adored it. But this in part, because it was entirely drums, you know, there was nothing harmonic to it. It just gets you at this deep level. And in fact, I was, I just remembered the other day, I had been wanting to go and join them at the point that Evergreen blew up on us and we moved out of Olympia. And that was not that was not going to happen. I was not going to end up joining a musical group in a town that had so turned on us. But the opportunity to just get together with people and drum using the rhythms and traditions of a culture that, yes, was not mostly ours. Like, I don't I'm not Latin American, but samba, like like all of this music, that we've been talking about comes from a particular culture and its universality means that all humans should be able to enjoy it and partake of it and even create it. That's what being human is.

Stephanie Winn: It's reminding me of a really fun class I took in college, an Afro-Brazilian dance, and we studied not only samba but the Oh, I'm forgetting the names of the Afro-Brazilian deities, the orisha. We studied the traditional dances that were used ceremoniously. I think it was the Sylvester method, where they studied the rituals that people would have as part of their religious tradition. And there are some pretty incredible stories that, in their tradition, they consider like possession by the gods, where each member of the society has their own personal deity that they have a strong connection to. when they're worshiping that deity and they're playing that particular beat, you'll see these like fragile old ladies busting into, you know, the dances of like a 20 year old male god. And that was so much fun. And you talk about this, this teacher who is bringing together traditions from Bali and Ireland and Brazil. And it reminds me of another really incredible band dead can dance and dead can dances. Are you familiar with them? They are there. I mean, they Gosh, how old are they? I think, I don't know if they started in the 80s or 90s. I think they're still going. Brendan Perry, Lisa Gerrard, but basically everyone in that band like traveled the world and spent time in different cultures and then brought all these influences together. And it was like the golden age of when Western people could unabashedly enjoy other cultures without being accused of cultural appropriation. And I remember when this started to decline for me. I mean, I remember shortly after moving from California to Oregon, I was at an event, there was a campfire. I was at a social gathering around a campfire. And people were sharing songs, and I wanted to share a song from my time spent in Indian culture. And there was, I don't think I thought of this at the time, but I will just call her a woke progressive, who said, I don't feel comfortable with this song because I, there's something about like, but you know, I don't know that people of this tradition have like authorized me to, I don't know. It was something like that that just shut it down. And, and it was so different because having spent time around Indian people. Um, you know, Hindus believe in reincarnation. So when they saw this little white girl, this 20 year old white girl who was really interested in their culture, they were like, Oh, you must have been one of us in a past life. You know, it was like, there was no judgment from them. So it's, in a way, it's very ironic. It's like this white Western progressive idea that you're not supposed to be interested in other cultures, that it's somehow insulting, rather than flattering to take an interest in other cultures.

Heather Heying: That's so interesting, actually, the idea of reincarnation as an end run around cultural appropriation. And race. Well, actually, you're good. You're here now. Who knows where you were then? Let's dance. Let's do what we're going to do together and find our shared humanity.

Stephanie Winn: If you're looking for a simple way to take better care of yourself, check out Organifi. I start every day with a glass of their original green juice powder mixed with water. It contains moringa, ashwagandha, chlorella, spirulina, matcha, wheatgrass, beets, turmeric, mint, lemon, and coconut water. 100% organic with no added sugar. It's the best tasting superfood supplement I've ever tried. It's super easy to make, and it makes me feel good. Organifi also makes several other delicious and nutritious superfood blends, such as red juice, immune support, protein powders, a golden milk mix, and even superfood hot cocoa. Check out the collection at organifi.com sometherapist. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I dot com slash sometherapist. And use code sometherapist to take 20% off your order. So earlier you mentioned the rules of conversation when we were talking about the campfire. And something that's been occurring to me a lot lately is how online culture, where admittedly, I spend a lot of time online, is a very low context form of communication compared to, I mean, you have this background, extensive background in anthropology and evolutionary biology. And so respective to how we've spent almost all of our time conversing with one another as human beings, online culture is about as low context as it can get. So you're missing the context of facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, also how you're positioned in relation to each other, and what your background is with other people, and who it is you're talking to and in what situation. And normally, those are things that influence how you speak to someone. So in the around the campfire, you have some sort of rules of conversation that are that are implicit, that you described earlier where the stakes are low, which is another important component of being able to innovate and explore. But here we have low context, communication where paradoxically, though, the stakes can feel very high, because of how things get amplified on the internet because of how people can dogpile and defame and things like that. So I wanted to ask about your thoughts on how is the internet like a fractal campfire? And what has your experience been of low context communication, as well as your experience of fame? Because I don't know how well known you were prior to 2017. You had this, your background was you had deep relationships with your students while you were working at Evergreen. You traveled the world, including some remote regions where you spent large periods of time with small groups of people really getting to know each other very well in particular contexts. And now you're this public figure. And I don't know if it's still there, but for a long time you had a pinned tweet that was something about like, please talk to me like a human being. And I can relate because nobody knew who I was prior to 2021. And a lot of my life has also been much higher in context, like therapeutic relationship, any personal relationships are higher context. And now I'm having this experience of micro-celebrity and being an internet figure and these low-context situations where it just feels ripe for things to go wrong. Talk to me about all that.

Heather Heying: Yeah. Well, that's a lot. I'm sure I won't get to all of it, but remind me if you want me to go back to something. I wasn't particularly well-known before Evergreen blew up. Brett and I had begun to make forays out into the world. We had actually given a talk for the Leakey Foundation and a few other things about our model of human evolution, some of which is very much present in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide. We had been wanting to write that book, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, since at least 2013, I think. I remember actually talking to my students in an anatomy lab I was teaching about some of the ideas. that he and I were having for it, and there being a lot of excitement for it. In fact, the book was in part a response to students saying to both him and me, we taught separately, we taught together for many years, saying, okay, this is amazing, but I want to be able to share this with other people who aren't in your classes. Can you write something that I can then share? Can you basically package this up, consciousness style, and share it so that I can share it with other people? I and we both were looking for an avenue to spread ideas more widely. Because as much as I, as you say, had just adored spending time in these pretty intimate settings, you know, 25 to one student faculty ratio at Evergreen. So I would come to know students very, very well. Still, it felt like, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot that I and Brett and the two of us together and both of us separately really wanted to share with the world that we thought We were beginning to get intimations that the world wanted to hear, but it was hard to get out into the world. So in that way, the fame part of my life now has been wonderful. I really feel so gratified that since I was little, even while I was sort of supposed to want to be a classical pianist, and then I thought I wanted to be a mathematician, and there are all these other things, Basically the thing, the through line through all of that was that I wanted to write and have my words reach people and make a difference to people. Like that was the thing that was consistent throughout. And I now write every week and tens of thousands of people see what I say and that feels amazing, right? It also feels amazing to be approached by strangers who say, thank you. Thank you for what you're doing. You made a difference. You helped me make this decision, and it was the decision I was having a hard time making, and it was the right one. That is incredible, and that feels like, okay, then it's worth it. That's the job. That's what I was doing for students 25 at a time, and now both with the podcast and the writing, I'm doing at much broader scale. That said, I, at heart, am an animal behaviorist. And I observe. And I observe not just seals and woodpeckers, but people. And it's much harder to be an animal behaviorist when I don't know if I'm anonymous, when sometimes I want to go to a coffee shop and write, but also listen, and just take in how people are living. And it's very much harder to take in how people are living if some of them are sort of looking at me going, I know you, don't I? right that's just that's a much harder thing to to accomplish and um and i explicitly and specifically was never on social media until Evergreen blew up, I refused. And I was never like, I didn't have Facebook, I didn't have Twitter, Instagram, none of it, because I knew that it was not for me, that I didn't want it. And about a week and a half after, or a week maybe after Evergreen first went public and blew up, I looked at Brett and I said, I'm going to have to get on Twitter, aren't I? And he's like, I think so. Like, can I stop there? Do I have to go? No, I think you can stop there. So sure enough, I think like June 1st, 2017, like, okay, I'm setting up the Twitter account because there's a lot that I'm seeing. that other people aren't seeing. And Brett and I are this united force in responding with care and respect, but honesty in the face of so much dishonesty and so much lack of care and so much disrespect. So let's do this. And there has been a lot that has been good about being on Twitter, actually. surprised at how well, mostly, I've been treated. And I think that that is in part because I treat people well, but also in part because I don't go there. When I feel like, you know what? I don't know what you are, but I'm not interested. I allow myself to say, nope, not interacting. And I almost never block, but I'll mute and just like, nope, you can go and spin your wheels over in that space, but I'm not doing it. That said, it's obviously addictive. Everyone who's on it knows that it is. Whether or not they themselves can pull themselves away and do something else most of the time, as most of us can, it's still an addictive force. And it's still… How can we tell? through social media, what is actually real. Around a campfire, all those people, they're real human beings. And maybe they're not being totally honest with you about what they're feeling right now, what they just experienced, what they said. Maybe they're actually lying flat out, but you know they're a real person. And if they're sitting around a campfire with you, you probably have some shared experience with them a little bit, even if it's only for the last half an hour. But these accounts that show up online, and even if you've been like, oh yeah, I remember this one. This one showed up a month ago. This one, like this one again. You don't know if they're real. You don't know if they're part of a sock puppet campaign. Like you just, you don't know often. And how many of the arguments that we're getting in are with non-human or either non-human entities or paid human entities. And that effectively means we're arguing with advertisers. We're arguing with things with perverse incentives. And often, I try not to do this, but I know that most people, many people do. And I think I probably have too. I'm waiting in line. I'm waiting for the water to boil. I'm waiting, like I'm waiting. And the time is better spent just letting your mind wander. But Oh, I've got two minutes. What's going on online? Right? Oh, that thing. I'm going to tap out a response right now. Well, this, this mode of like, I'm going to tap out a response right now while I'm frustrated. Cause I'm waiting for the cashier to deal with the person in front of me is not the usual place where you would be having a conversation. with someone with whom you're disagreeing, you would wait. You would wait until you're in private. And so this also, I think, is explaining part of why our in-person interactions are getting more and more frustrating. And not all of them. Like if we reach out, I find, and I think I've maybe even said this to you directly before, like actually in in-person interactions where I'm willing to say, yeah, I'm not sure I buy the, you know, whatever it is that we're talking about. Like, I'm not sure I'm buying into COVID policy or, you know, affirmative action for affirmative, affirmative care for, for, for kids. Like, I don't know that that's actually right. Very often the person on the other side of the interaction, the dry cleaner, the, you know, person that kinkos, whatever will say, oh yeah, you know, I've got a story and I just don't, I just am not sure that we're doing the right thing. Like people will actually respond. But unless you make that effort to reach out, So many of our interactions now are themselves, our actual human interactions, are as if behind barriers. And of course, what happened early in COVID, we were literally behind barriers. We literally had plastic put up between us. And we could see each other. But now we're protected from the horror of each other's physical being. This just made it even easier to treat almost every interaction like it's those interactions you're having online and those interactions you're online, unless it's with someone you actually know. Like, you know, if, when, if you show up in my timeline, I know you're a real person and I know you're who you say you are. And yeah, you may be having a good day, a bad day. I don't know, but I know who you are. How many of the people that we see online, can we say that about? And that, that is both. The fact is we have greater reach and that could be amazing, but there are so many minds to avoid and we can't possibly avoid all of them. I don't think we can possibly avoid all of them.

Stephanie Winn: I think that's a big part of why I keep finding myself using the words charitable and uncharitable when I'm talking about my own frustrations with online dynamics is because there's so much context missing and so little relational context that you have to make a choice to either be charitable or uncharitable. And a lot of people are just deliberately making the choice to be uncharitable. And so that's something that I want to learn from you about over time, too, is how to keep your head above the water and stay focused on what's important when there's this constant temptation of distraction of getting pulled into projections and all of that kind of stuff. But I want to come back to this idea that we just stumbled upon where and talking about Chesterton's fence, for every Chesterton's fence that people are arguing should we tear it down or not, there are probably dozens more that are just fences that are rotting and decaying in the woods and nobody's thinking to repair them. So things we've lost like fire or I don't know. I was really into, did you ever see Poldark, the PBS masterpiece series? No. It's so beautiful. And it takes place in the late 1700s in England. And so it's so visceral, which is part of what I love about it. It's really elemental. And you don't see a single piece of plastic. There's no artificial lighting. It's just everything is really elemental. Everyone was working with their hands and really affected by nature. And, um, pull dark. Yeah. It's, it's a great story. Um, true, true tragedy, which by the way, we don't have so many tragedies, true tragedies anymore. Um, what was I going to say though? Um, so, I mean, there's so many elements of that old way of living that are just this, this rotting, decaying fence that nobody is tending. Like what happens when we, um, you know, we don't see the stars anymore and how are we affected by artificial light? Um, but one at one of these rotting fences is mentorship, right? And that's kind of, kind of that, that bridge that I want to build to your prior experiences in being a mentor to so many people in this intimate way. And now that you are a teacher to so many, do you still have the experience of remaining in that mentor relationship on a more personal level? And then what do you think more broadly about the sort of the missing role of mentorship? Because I've been thinking about it a lot lately. And I've been thinking that not to sort of lead where I want this to go, because please go wherever you want with it. But I've been thinking that part of the nature of the mentor relationship is that uh the mentor sees potential in their mentee and they take responsibility for having for cultivating that potential for bringing out the best in someone and i feel like that's relatively lacking the spirit of i see not only who you are but who you could become and how i treat you has an impact on who you become. And so I'm going to take responsibility for treating you in a way that brings out the best in you. And I see that as being like the opposite of what we see with some of the more toxic dynamics of online culture. So I'm curious, what do you think has happened to mentorship? Is it one of Chesterton's fences? Does it still exist anywhere? And maybe we're just not seeing it because it's not being paraded in public. I mean,

Heather Heying: Yeah, God, it's an amazing question, and it's so, so important. I'll go first to the personal part of it that you asked about. I don't really have that anymore, and it's one of the things I miss the most. And I think that it is in an inherent trade-off relationship with reach, though. Right? You can't mentor thousands, tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people, right? And if you choose to mentor a small number of people, time is zero sum and attention is maybe not exactly zero sum, but closer to it than we might want. And you just, you can't have, you can't try to both have as much reach as possible and actively mentor. some large number of people, or even maybe some small number of people. So I did not choose that. I certainly never wanted what happened at Evergreen. But having been sort of cannonballed out of that world, I see this as a different phase in which greater reach means less personal impact on individuals. I had to write a letter of recommendation yesterday for a former student. And my younger son was like, isn't that something you don't do anymore? I remember you used to do that all the time. And I said, yeah, very occasionally now. I still have students from the last few years of when I was teaching who are now going into grad school and want letters. And it allows me to go back into all the things I wrote about them, all their work from before, because I still have all of it, and think again about how I did you know, what it was to have the time, which is really not something available to almost any college professors, right? Like the evergreen model with its full-time programs and, you know, me insisting on almost every quarter I taught, week two of every 10 week quarter, like we're going into the field. We're going somewhere where we can do campfire, like quite literally. And hopefully there's no cell service or internet connection. And yes, we're going to be learning some basics about, you know, animal behavior methods and theory and such. We're going to cook together and break bread together and have campfire together and come to know something about each other, me about you and you about me as well. And then I can start to have a model for each, every single one of you of where you are and where you could be. And that's something that's not possible online, obviously. I mean, there's a way that a piece of that could be, but it's just not going to be the same. So, you know, real connection with real people in real physical space is something that I think mentorship requires. And I hope that to some degree mentorship still exists in some of the physical trades, sort of the artisan physical trades and apprenticeship, right? And it's, we give it a different word, but it's the same thing. uh, ish, you know, maybe mentorship feels a little bit less bounded, um, by the task. Maybe it's more in the liberal arts arena rather than the, um, this is what the job is arena. Like I'm going to teach you a series of tasks. Um, but I've certainly heard from people who've been in apprenticeships that, um, their brains were expanded, their, their, their worldviews and their minds were expanded. Um, even though what was officially taught was just, you know, the joinery or the electricity or, you know, the whatever it was, right? So, yes, we do. So, you know, how is it that we can both encourage more mentorship while while social media beckons, like while an audience that is infinite beckons. And it feels like, well, mentorship or, you know, mentor or influencer. An influencer is super weak tea by comparison. But it brings the dopamine hits that the mentorship doesn't. It doesn't bring change, or if it brings change, it's not the good kind of change. Right? Like it just brings you back your attention back and back and back over and over and over again to the same shallow, not interesting, not expansive, not exploratory stuff. But we have to make active choices away from that. And then there have to be people who might be mentors who are making active choices away from that as well. Um, and I don't know, I don't know how we do that.

Stephanie Winn: It's too bad you don't know how we do that, because I was going to ask, how do you think we do that? How do we change the trends of the culture? And people ask me, because I have a lot of consulting clients, not just counseling clients at this point. And part of the consulting relationship is I'm a lot more open. You want to pick my brain about something? You want to know what I think? You can pay me for my opinion on your situation, whereas with counseling, I'm a lot more careful about offering advice. Oh, that's an interesting distinction. That's good. And I have people ask me, like, how do we fix this or that problem? And it's like, wow, that's a problem in the culture. And my domain is mostly one-on-one relationships, and then also this flip side of, yeah, having this broader influence. But I'd be really curious if at any point any thoughts do occur to you on how do we encourage a cultural shift toward people resisting the temptation to engage in distraction and diluted influence to really you know, make make a more profound influence, maybe on a smaller number of people, but still, those relationships, you know, because and I mean, the evidence is there, like we know from the research on longevity, for example, that the two greatest factors influencing longevity are not related to diet, exercise, or even whether you smoke or drink, but they're related to your social relationships. One is whether you have that one person you can call in the middle of the night with anything and one just being like, do you have a friendly chat with the cashier? Um, and those two factors together of having, excuse me, some relationships that are potent and deep and meaningful and others that give you a general sense that you belong to a safe and welcoming and robust community. Um, they, they have a profound influence on our lives.

Heather Heying: Yeah. I guess I would, I was going to say, almost exactly what you just said about, you know, having a conversation with a cashier. There are, I guess there are two ways that this might be relevant to help changing the culture or at least, and my bias too is towards the individual rather than, you know, the population level solutions. But, you know, feeling like, oh, I recognize you and you recognize me because I've been into the co-op three times this week and this is where I shop. Like, that does feel like, well, that's because I live here. You live here, and I live here, and therefore we live here together, even if this is the only context in which we ever see each other. So that is reifying. But there's also, and this, I think, is maybe more relevant in a bigger population center like Portland than on an island like where I live right now, is actually starting conversations with strangers. and starting conversations with strangers in environments in which there is an interaction that's expected, but no one is necessarily expecting there to be a conversation beyond what is necessary for the business to happen. And don't do this when there's a line behind you. But I find it's not my instinct. Again, I tend towards the animal behaviorist. I want to sit quietly a bit cryptic in the corner and observe people. But asking people to say something more about an offhand comment or making an offhand comment yourself and seeing what the response is and pursuing it with people with whom there is no obligation or expectation that you have such conversations can make a connection almost immediately and can also reveal to other people, oh wait, I thought I was the only one who thought this way. I thought, especially in Portland, where I used to live and you live now, people have become convinced that everyone thinks the way of, frankly, the maniacal few. The people who were rioting nightly throughout three months of 2020 and who are still present in much of the media in Portland and on the streets, They're the few. They're not just a minority. They're a small minority. And there's a lot of people who, if asked by someone that they think agrees with them, will be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I agree with them. But I think that it's actually a strong majority who thinks, what is going on? Why are we letting this happen? Well, we are letting this happen. So the more of us who are willing to say to even strangers, I don't think that's right. I don't know why it's cool to defund the police and then blame them when they can't answer 911. We defunded them. How about we fund them back? Let's do that. Let's start that.

Stephanie Winn: You can now watch No Way Back, the reality of gender-affirming care. This medical ethics documentary, formerly known as Affirmation Generation, is the definitive film on detransition. Stream the film now or purchase a DVD. Visit nowaybackfilm.com and use promo code SOMETHERAPIST to take 20% off your order. follow us on Twitter at 2022affirmation or on Instagram at Affirmation Generation. force for breaking down gender ideology. And then they ask me how I influence people in real life. And well, in real life, it's like slow, careful testing of the waters, just like with, with any real life conversation you're going to strike up with, you know, and I've had, um, you know, a few conversations with people at the gym where, you know, you're just offering a little bit of give and take here and there. And then, you know, 15 minutes into the conversation, something happens where I can say, well, I'm not woke. And then they're like, oh, good for you. Or you drop some little reference, and then half an hour into the conversation, I'm like, yeah, you should really watch my documentary, No Way Back. It's about what happens with the so-called gender affirming care model. But it's a lot more organic, right? And I think that's how influence really takes place in a meaningful way. But I want to shift gears, and this might sound like a total non sequitur, but I'm going to go into some random questions that I wrote down for you, as well as a question from our locals community. Cats. Oh, awesome. I know you love to talk about cats. I don't have cats. I don't want cats. And I will tell you one of the reasons. So you don't want cats? I don't want cats. I know you love cats. And so here's my question for you about cats. Why do you advocate for cats as pets when they carry risk of toxoplasmosis?

Heather Heying: Mm. They do. And I'm not sure that I advocate for cats, for other people to have cats as pets. But I adore having cats as pets. And many of my favorite people also enjoy having cats as pets. Not all of them, but many of my favorite people do. And those who, I have also known people who thought they hated cats and who ended up having a cat adopt them as happens, right? They lived in a place and there was a cat who came around and they reached down to pet it at one point and the cat kept coming back. Who say, both the people who are sort of lifelong lovers of cats and the people who thought that they hated them and have come around have said, it's the two things together. It's both the domesticated part and the wild part. together in one animal, where we just… Brett says, we're not really done. Give them another 4,000 years, then they'll make great pets. I mean, he loves them too, but he… Say again?

Stephanie Winn: Well, what's the timeline to domesticating raccoons? Because that's what I'm really interested in.

Heather Heying: That's going to be a while.

Stephanie Winn: I would really love a pet raccoon, but A, it's illegal, and B, it would destroy my home.

Heather Heying: Yeah, no, they're not. That's going to be a long time because we haven't started with them, right? They coexist with us, but we haven't started domesticating them at all. And so, you know, for me, again, as an L behaviorist, I love being able to have something that is part wild live with me, but who also responds to me and I have a relationship with them. So taxoplasmosis is real, for sure. And I actually do not know the extent to which the number, I've heard so many different numbers about the degree to which cats do or do not carry it. And if they do carry it, the degree to which an owner is likely to get it or not. So I have not tried to track that down because it seems like a mess, but it's definitely a real thing. And I guess I would say in response to that, if you're not in love with cats and you're hearing about toxoplasmosis and it's avoiding toxoplasmosis is important to you, I don't know why you would force a love of cats, right? I'm not sure why. So you don't think everyone should have a cat? No, certainly not. Certainly not. But having come to love having cats from a very young age, toxoplasmosis is a risk, just like eating goat cheese is a risk, and raw salmon. What's the problem with goat cheese? Don't take away my goat cheese. What is it? I can't remember what it is. It's another one of these pathogens that if you're pregnant, you definitely don't eat it. Sheep's cheese, goat's cheese, anything unpasteurized. I don't remember the name of it at the moment, but it's another one of these things. It's a risk. If you already love goat cheese, you accept that as a risk. If you don't love goat cheese yet and you're concerned about this particular risk, you probably don't start eating goat cheese. So, you know, the point is we mitigate risk all the time. And if what we're aiming to do is have no risk at all in our lives, then we probably don't have much of a life. But we all make the choice ourselves. Right. So, you know, which which of these things do you care about? And, you know, is there if someone if someone whom you loved said actually and, you know, you want to live with them and they were absolutely diehard cat lover, you might end up reconsidering your position in order to live compatibly with them. But if you don't find that as something that comes up, why bother? Why force yourself into a position? I love raccoons, too. Several houses ago, we had a family of raccoons that came in through our cat door and terrorized our cats. So I'd rather they not use the cat door. But they're a lot farther from domesticated. So I think they mostly, as long as they stay outside, I'm happy to watch them. We have foxes on this island, and they are extraordinary. I came face to face with one on my bike yesterday. She, I don't know, she, he, I took her for a shake. Gorgeous red fox, just sitting right in the middle of the road, right in front of me, didn't move. And so I just stopped the bike. I'm like eight feet from her. She's just looking at me and Oh, this, this I love so much. This is this wild animal who is not scared of me. Maybe she should be a little bit more scared than she is. Uh, and who ultimately just got up and walked, trotted off the road to do whatever it is that she was doing with the rest of her day. So, um, that's, I get a little bit of that from interacting with my cats. Oh, what have you been doing today? You just had a day and I don't know exactly what it was and now you're back and you could just snuggle with me. That's great.

Stephanie Winn: Kind of like the campfire. Yeah. I actually did love cats when I was little, and then I randomly developed a cat allergy when I was like 10 or 11. All of a sudden, my eyes were itchy and watery and painful. Based on what you know about the effect of toxoplasmosis on humans' brains and behavior, do you think that the sort of crazy cat lady trope comes from people whose behavior has been significantly altered

Heather Heying: It's possible. I don't, I, I guess, again, I'm not, um, I don't trust the data to the extent that I've seen it on, um, on prevalence and, um, either in terms of prevalence in cats or likelihood of transmission once, once your cat has it. But it's real. And so are some of the crazy cat lady experiences perhaps a result of toxoplasmosis? I would say that's almost certainly true. What number of those? I don't know. I wouldn't even want to guess in terms of putting a number on it. It's also true that if you are alone living with cats, it can probably allow you to become even more insular than you already were. And if the only individuals you're talking to are cats and they cannot talk back, you may end up sounding a bit crazier when you try to talk to other humans than you would have otherwise.

Stephanie Winn: Something I forgot to bring up earlier, um, but I might, you know, better late than never is that, uh, I appreciate you are one of the few people in the gender critical community, which by the way, there is no community. I mean, it's like, there's as much of a gender critical community as there is a community of people born on Mondays. Like it's, it's, we are a very diverse crowd from all walks of life. We share one thing in common, which is that we have. Taken some degree of issue with the gender insanity. And I think that explains why things are so contentious in that non-existent community of diverse people. But out of all the people who are saying something about the gender insanity, you are one of a relative few who is saying something about endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, and how they might have something to do with this rising rates of gender dysphoria. Now, of course, bringing that up does not negate the social contagion factor, the follow the money issue. You know, it's a complex system, which, you know, that's one of your refrains, right? Welcome to complex systems. But I guess to me, this was kind of a no-brainer because I have a background in environmental studies. My undergrad is in environmental studies, and then I went into psychology. And so I learned about endocrine-disrupting chemicals a long time ago, and also happened to be aware that some of the same chemicals that can cause endocrine disruption also are implicated in autism. And we know that autistic people are especially vulnerable to, uh, identifying as trans. So, um, I guess, can you say a little bit about this and why do you think more people are not looking into this or talking about this?

Heather Heying: Yeah, that I don't know. Um, I think maybe in part because people want to And again, this is a problem with social media. People want to have one thing. There's one cause. And social contagion is real. And to the extent that you can address social contagion, that might turn things around more quickly than, what are we going to do about endocrine disruption in the water and air? Or maybe not the air so much, but certainly the water. At one level, it feels like, okay, we know that we've got runoff in our streams, in our water supply, that are full of things that we should not be ingesting. We know this for sure. if we turned it around, we would likely have all sorts of beneficial health and other effects. But that's huge. Where do you start? What can I do as a human being? Whereas if my kid comes home saying, oh, you know, her friend is now trans and maybe she is too, the problem is immediate. I see a social contagion thing going on. Maybe I can do something about that. Whereas I can't exactly clean up my own water. We have famous examples of whistleblowers who have managed to turn some things around in terms of water safety and detoxifying it, but it's tough. It's a giant problem. It's a global problem. There's a way in which I, as a scientist, feel like That's a thing. That's a thing we could do. That's the thing we should be doing. It's got impacts. As you say, if you've ever thought about environmental studies, if you've ever thought about the environment, you know from way before trans was on anyone's radar that we've got a problem. And so just to use, for me, one of the most famous examples, atrazine, which is a herbicide, I guess, I think, an herbicide that's widely, widely used. and sticks around. It's one of these, I don't know if it's technically a forever chemical, but it sticks around for a long time and it shows up in water supplies even far outside of the agricultural context in which it was originally used. And in those places where atrazine levels are high, and in the United States that is a huge huge percentage of our water supplies. In those places where atrocine levels are high we know that in frogs, we're not frogs, but that in frogs there's a really high rate of non-functional hermaphroditism and demasculinization. And I say non-functional because just as with humans, there are no functional hermaphroditic frogs. There aren't frogs that have both sets of gonads simultaneously and can actually fertilize themselves just like with humans. It's a disorder of development, not a functional state, just like intersex for humans. But then also the fact that atrazine is seen to demasculinize. And what does that mean? It means that they have They have less active gonadal function, and they behave in ways that are less typically male. My line here is gender is what we call it in humans, sex role is what we call it in all the other species. And gender is effectively the software of sex, which is the hardware. And gender is downstream of sex. And in humans, there's all sorts of ways to act male or act female. And we, more than any other species, can act kind of in whatever way we want, almost, even if those were traditionally female gender norms or traditionally male gender norms. Other species, not so much. And so if a male frog who's been exposed to atrocine starts acting demasculinized and therefore doesn't end up mounting females when it's the breeding season, he's not going to end up leaving copies of himself the next generation. And he's not going to have been as successful as a frog. Again, we're not frogs. Frogs are much more susceptible, for instance, to pollution in the water than we are because they breathe through their skin in part. But it is naive. It is incredibly naive to imagine that if atrazine has those clear, known extreme effects in frogs, and we know that our water supplies are polluted with atrazine, and atrazine is one of I don't know, 30, 60, 300? I don't know. endocrine-disrupting and endocrine-mimicking chemicals that we have in our water supply, including the actual hormones themselves, that are being peed out by all of us who were or are on hormonal birth control. We are disrupting our water supply, and we have a moment, practically, a moment when suddenly so many people are declaring themselves trans. And yes, social contagion. Yes, follow the money. But also, endocrine disruption. Certainly. I mean, I don't know to what degree. I wouldn't say certainly it's 40% or 80% of the explanation. But is it part of the explanation? Yes. Absolutely.

Stephanie Winn: Do you think that people, especially parents, are concerned that if they were to acknowledge this, that they would be acknowledging that maybe there's something actually happening on a biochemical level, and that therefore they would be giving some kind of credence to this idea of being born in the wrong body. So they feel like they can't afford to acknowledge maybe there's something physical going on with you to their kids.

Heather Heying: Yeah, I think that is the bind that people are in, actually, whether or not they're conscious of it. But I do feel like acknowledging that our children are not the children of 30 years ago or 60 years ago, because the environment, the actual physical environment, is not the environment of 30 years ago or 60 years ago, is terrifying. And also, exactly as you say, it may be taken then as further reason by some, and I would say this would be erroneous, but as further reason to say, well then see, I am in the wrong See, then I am the other thing. It's like, no, you're still not. But yes, God, I'm so sorry that I and we, the entire world, let this happen to you. But we can still fix some of it. Those exposures, they're not the end. Those exposures that you've got and that we're all getting still, let's work to fix that now. The answer is not to say, ah, well then, the fact that you've been assured that you're the sex that you're not is the answer, because that's not going to be the answer.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, I mean, it makes me wonder what would happen if instead some parents or doctors or therapists were to say, I'm very sorry to hear that you don't feel completely male or female, and I want to unpack What all is contributing to this? I think there's definitely a narrative element that you've gotten from your social environment. Where else would you get it? But, um, you know maybe there is something happening with you on a biochemical level we know that this is happening in the environment now we think the solution to endocrine disruption is not further endocrine disruption right like this is not a fight fire with fire situation just because you are let's say a female with pcos we know females with pcos That's an endocrine disorder, and we see more PCOS in girls who identify as trans, right? But if you say to a girl with PCOS or a boy with, I forget what that, the one that Dr. Shanna Swan talks about where like phthalate syndrome, and it can actually be measured with a certain genital measurement. Anyway, like if you were to say, you know, it concerns me to know that you might have a hormonal imbalance, And I want to work with you holistically to see if there is anything that we can do nutritionally, supplementation-wise or anything like that to help correct that imbalance.

Heather Heying: Yeah. I think that sounds like the kind of doctor every parent should want their child to be with. Exactly. And I mean, I think you're, I don't know, it's not an analogy, but what you said about like, let's not fight fire with fire. we don't treat an endocrine imbalance with more endocrine imbalance, that's not going to be the right move. And I don't know, you know, I'm hesitant about chemical intervention to treat medical problems in general. I mean, I don't, I hardly ever take anything for pain even, right? But an endocrinologist who actually has as much of a sense as any endocrinologist possibly could at this point, because we just, it's not a mature field, like we don't know everything that we think we know, but an endocrinologist who is really good, who is doing your levels and looking and would be great if they could do them for long enough to see if they're stable or fluctuating and say, you know what, maybe at your age, I mean, also we've got the issue of puberty. Everything is changing, right? So there is no stable baseline really to expect, because who knows what different little phase you're in at whatever particular point the levels have been taken. But an endocrinologist who is careful and who's saying, let's try to figure out what else might be going on, rather than let's shove more hormones down your throat or into your veins, sounds like the doctor we should all want for those children who are presenting as gender dysphoric.

Stephanie Winn: Now, I am sorry to put you in this position because I'm going to ask you a complex question and give you very little time to answer it because I'm realizing I have to set aside my question for you about supplements. Scratch that because we're out of time. But I do have a question for my locals community that I feel obligated to ask you and it's a big one. You have three minutes. Sorry. Curious about Heather's thoughts on the opinion that transgenderism is a form of transhumanism and that transgenderism slash humanism is a natural point of our evolutionary trajectory.

Heather Heying: Yeah, so I first ran across this in a piece by Libby Emmons, who I have great respect for, and kind of the penny dropped for me then. I was like, oh, yes, I do think so. I do feel like this, and you know, trans all of it, like transspeciesism, transracialism, like all of this. feels like a subset of transhumanism, or a subset, I'm not sure exactly a subset, but certainly related to. And I think it's all wrong. I think all of it, all of them. And not that there aren't going to be techno-optimists, techno-utopians who are pushing for a transhumanist existence forever and ever and ever, as long as there are humans. But it misses the bigger, more holistic, less reductionist point, which is that, you know, just as I push back a little bit against like, actually, it's not the DNA only that makes us human. That's necessary, but not sufficient. The transhumanist thing, and I am not expert on this at all, would seem to suggest that there's something ineffable in our mental state that makes us human, and the body is the surplus. That's a superfluous thing. And nope. Not right. We are embodied, and our very embodiment and our experience of the world helps make us, helps create what we think is true, and it in turn helps create the reality that we then bring into the world, and then that others interface with. And if we take our bodies out of the formula, we are lesser, we are different, we are not indeed fully human. So I could go on and on and on.

Stephanie Winn: I think I did. Thank you for the condensed answer. I'm sorry. Sorry to do that to you. And, and you've also talked about sort of the, the fallacy of the idea that if it is natural, that means it is good, right? That it's putting a value judgment. And so there's a lot in this question that, that, that is a natural point of our evolutionary trajectory. Like, even if it were, does that mean it's right? Yeah.

Heather Heying: No, and I think there are those who are going there for sure, who want to go there. I don't think we can go there. I certainly don't think it's good for us to go there. And is something in some I guess there's a framing around a natural point in our evolutionary trajectory, which I'm not sure quite fits for me with how I understand evolution. Every moment is a branching point, or at least at the genetic level, every reproductive event that produces a baby is a branching point. And at the cultural level, every conversation that we have is a branching point. And will there be those who push for a transhumanist future? Yes. But that certainly doesn't make it right. And I don't think it will ever, I hope, will ever be a majority perspective such that more and more people start pushing for it.

Stephanie Winn: And it would certainly be full of Chesterton's fences.

Heather Heying: Yes, indeed. Indeed.

Stephanie Winn: To summarize. OK. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you. Where can people find you?

Heather Heying: People can find me at Natural Selections, my substack, so it's like whatever that is, substack.naturalselections.com, and on the Dark Horse Podcast, and I am indeed on Twitter at Heather E. Hying, H-E-Y-I-N-G.

Stephanie Winn: Dr. Heather Hying, thank you so much.

Heather Heying: Thank you, Stephanie, so much.

Stephanie Winn: I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit SomeTherapist.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at SomeTherapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Parenthood, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to my producers, Eric and Amber Beals at Different Mix, and to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.