Michael: What if the smartest thing about humans is how spectacularly stupid we are? We build rockets to Mars, but lose them because a team of geniuses forgot to convert inches to centimeters. Kevin: That actually happened, didn't it? The Mars Climate Orbiter. A hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar rounding error. Michael: Exactly. We invent miracle pesticides to feed the world, only to discover decades later they're giving our grandkids cancer. It’s the ultimate paradox, and it’s the explosive core of a book that’s been rattling my brain all week: Not Smart Enough: The Failure of Human Cognition by Alex Taylor. Kevin: Alex Taylor... isn't he the dolphin guy? The one who studies animal minds? Michael: That's him. He's a research psychologist specializing in animal cognition. And that's what makes this book so potent. It's not a philosopher in an ivory tower; it's an animal expert looking at us, the supposedly 'smartest' animal on the planet, and basically saying, 'I'm not impressed.' The book has been pretty polarizing for that very reason, because it challenges our most fundamental belief about ourselves. Kevin: I love that. It’s like a veterinarian judging a dog show and giving the Best in Show ribbon to a squirrel. It completely upends the rules. So where does he even start with an argument that big? Michael: He starts not with data, but with a story that’s almost too tragic to be real—the complete mental collapse of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Kevin: Right, Nietzsche. The guy who famously said, "God is dead." You can't get much more intellectually heavy than that. Michael: And Taylor argues that very heaviness is what crushed him. The story is haunting. It’s January 1889, in Turin, Italy. Nietzsche is walking through a public square and sees a coachman brutally whipping a stubborn horse. Kevin: Okay, a sad but unfortunately common sight for that era. Michael: But Nietzsche doesn't just see it. He feels it. He’s overwhelmed, rushes to the horse, throws his arms around its neck to shield it, and then just… collapses in the street, sobbing. His friend finds him and takes him home. He spends the next few days in a catatonic state, and after that, he's institutionalized. He never recovers his sanity and lives out his last decade in silence. That moment with the horse was the final trigger. Kevin: Whoa. So the weight of his own massive intellect, his profound empathy, literally broke him? He saw this simple animal suffering and it just shattered his reality? Michael: That's Taylor's opening salvo. Our intelligence, this constant, nagging need to understand and ask "why," can be a crushing burden. Nietzsche himself wrote about it. He pitied animals for their simple, blind existence, but he also deeply envied them for it. He saw cattle grazing and wrote about how they’re "fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored." They don't have the anxiety of yesterday or tomorrow. Kevin: They're not up at 3 a.m. worrying about their life choices or the heat death of the universe. Michael: Exactly. And this leads to Taylor's first big, provocative idea. He calls human intelligence a "MacGuffin." Kevin: A MacGuffin... like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction! It drives the whole plot, everyone's chasing it, but we never even find out what's inside. It's just a plot device. Michael: You nailed it. Taylor argues that for humanity, "intelligence" is our MacGuffin. We've built our entire species' story around pursuing it, proving it, and celebrating it. But it's a distraction. It's so distracting, in fact, that we can't even agree on what it is. Kevin: What do you mean? Surely we have a definition for intelligence. Michael: You'd think so. But Taylor points to a survey of hundreds of leading AI experts. They were given a pretty solid definition: "the principle of adapting to the environment while working with insufficient knowledge and resources." Sounds reasonable, right? Kevin: Yeah, that sounds like my entire adult life. Michael: Well, only a slim majority, about 58%, agreed it was the best definition. Over 40% of the world's top AI scientists thought, "Nope, that's not it at all." If the people literally building artificial intelligence can't agree on what intelligence is, what hope do the rest of us have? Kevin: That's a fantastic point. We're obsessed with a concept we can't even define. And if it can lead to a genius like Nietzsche having a complete breakdown, maybe it's not the prize we think it is. Michael: And it gets worse. The pursuit of it can be twisted into something monstrous. After Nietzsche's breakdown, his sister, Elisabeth—who was a virulent anti-Semite—took control of his work. She edited, forged, and repackaged his complex philosophy into a book called The Will to Power and presented it to the rising Nazi party as an intellectual justification for their ideology. Kevin: Come on. So his ideas, a product of his incredible intellect, were weaponized to support one of the greatest horrors in history? Michael: That's the dark side of the MacGuffin. Our great intelligence can be used to build cathedrals, but it can also be used to build concentration camps and the philosophical arguments to justify them.

Kevin: Okay, so our intelligence is an undefinable, potentially dangerous MacGuffin. That's a pretty bleak starting point. Where does he go from there? Michael: He builds on it with something he calls the "Exceptionalism Paradox." The paradox is that our unique human cognitive skills—our ability to reason, to create complex moral codes, to understand what others are thinking—often produce the most irrational and horrific outcomes. It's where our supposed moral superiority completely falls apart. Kevin: You're going to need to give me a powerful example for that one. Michael: He gives one of the most powerful I've ever read: the Canadian residential school system. In the late 19th century, the Canadian government, working with Christian churches, decided it was their moral duty to "civilize" the Indigenous population. Kevin: I've heard about this. It's just awful. Michael: It's beyond awful. Taylor quotes the first Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John Alexander Macdonald, speaking to Parliament. He argued that to solve the "Indian Problem," children must be "withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence" and put in schools where they would "acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men." This wasn't a hidden, evil plot. It was a public policy, debated and justified with moral and rational arguments about progress and salvation. Kevin: They were using the logic of "helping" to justify cultural destruction. Tearing families apart. Michael: Cultural genocide. Over 150,000 children were forcibly taken. They were forbidden from speaking their languages, abused, starved, and thousands died from disease and neglect, buried in unmarked graves that are still being discovered today. A government official, Duncan Campbell Scott, even wrote a memo acknowledging the high death rates but said it didn't "justify a change in the policy... which is being geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem." Kevin: The 'final solution.' The language is just chilling. And this was all a product of our advanced, human moral reasoning. Michael: Exactly. Now, contrast that with a story Taylor tells about stump-tailed macaques. In their world, a young male might overstep his bounds with the alpha. The alpha smacks him. Conflict. But what happens next? The young male presents his hindquarters in a gesture of contrition. The alpha then grabs and holds the young male's bottom for a few moments. Kevin: Wait, he hugs his butt? Michael: He hugs his butt! And that's it. Relationship restored. All is well. Both animals knew a rule was broken, and they have a simple, effective, non-lethal way to fix it. Kevin: That is just... a brutal comparison. Humans use elaborate moral frameworks to justify genocide. Monkeys resolve a power struggle with a butt-hug. Michael: It's a shocking juxtaposition, and it's meant to be. Taylor's point is that animal "norms"—a sense of fairness, empathy, reconciliation—are often more functional and less destructive than human "morality." He brings up the famous experiment with capuchin monkeys. One monkey gets a cucumber for a task, sees another monkey get a delicious grape for the same task, and what does it do? It gets furious. It throws the cucumber back at the researcher. Kevin: Right, a pure, unfiltered sense of "that's not fair!" No monkey ever wrote a 500-page manifesto to justify why it deserved the grape more. It just gets mad. Our 'why specialist' brain is what allows us to build these monstrous, self-serving justifications for inequality and violence. Michael: We are the only species that is homophobic. We are the only species that commits genocide. These aren't animal behaviors. They are uniquely human ones, born from our supposedly superior minds. That's the Exceptionalism Paradox.

Kevin: Okay, so our intelligence makes us miserable and our morality makes us monstrous. This is a cheerful book. Is there any flaw he missed? Where does he go from there? Michael: Oh, he saves the deadliest for last. A cognitive flaw he calls "prognostic myopia." Kevin: Prognostic myopia. Sounds serious. Break that down for me. Michael: It's our unique human ability to think about and plan for the distant future, coupled with a near-total inability to emotionally care about that future. We can see the train coming from miles away, but we can't be bothered to step off the tracks because the danger doesn't feel real yet. Kevin: That sounds... disturbingly familiar. It's like knowing you have a final exam in a month, but choosing to binge-watch a series tonight because the stress of the exam feels fake and far away. Michael: That's a perfect analogy. And he uses a brilliant, everyday example to explain it: the American lawn. Kevin: The lawn? How is a patch of grass a fatal flaw? Michael: It started in 18th-century England as a status symbol for aristocrats who could afford to waste land that could have been used for farming. It screamed, "I'm so rich, I don't need to be practical." Then it came to America, and with the invention of the lawn mower, it became a suburban obsession. A monoculture wasteland. Today, lawns in the U.S. cover an area the size of Florida. They consume insane amounts of water, fertilizer, and pesticides, and lawnmowers are a significant source of pollution. Kevin: And it's all just for show. A collective, unspoken agreement to maintain a useless green carpet. That's a great, dumb example of this myopia. Michael: It's the perfect dumb example! It's a small, seemingly harmless decision made by millions of individuals for short-term social status, which adds up to a slow-motion environmental disaster. Now, apply that same mental flaw to the biggest threat we face: climate change. Kevin: Oh boy. Here we go. Michael: Taylor cites the history of the fossil fuel industry. As early as the 1960s, oil companies' own scientists were presenting them with reports on the dangers of carbon emissions. In 1978, a top scientist testified before the U.S. Senate about it. They knew. They had the data. They could see the future. Kevin: But the short-term profits were just too good. The consequences were too far away to feel real. Michael: Exactly. An ExxonMobil lobbyist was caught on tape in 2021 admitting it. He said, "Did we fight aggressively against some of the science? Yes... we were looking out for our investments." It's prognostic myopia on a planetary scale. Kevin: So we're all collectively choosing to stay up late for one more song, like in his personal anecdote, even though we know we'll be a wreck tomorrow. Michael: We are. And Taylor quotes Greta Thunberg's famous speech: "I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day... I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is." She's not just presenting data; she's trying to bridge that emotional gap that our myopic brains can't cross on their own. We know the house is on fire, but we don't feel the heat, so we just keep arranging the furniture.

Kevin: So, after all this, what's the takeaway? That we're doomed because our big brains are fundamentally broken? That we should all just give up and go hug a horse? Michael: Taylor's conclusion is surprisingly… humble. And a little weird. He doesn't offer a five-step plan to fix our brains. Instead, he points to a tiny, obscure creature: the sea squirt. Kevin: A sea squirt? What does a blob in the ocean have to teach us? Michael: In its larval stage, the sea squirt is like a tadpole. It has a rudimentary brain and a spinal cord, and it swims around looking for a good place to live. But once it finds a suitable rock to attach to for the rest of its life, it does something incredible. Kevin: Let me guess, it writes a philosophical treatise on the meaning of existence? Michael: It eats its own brain. Kevin: It... what? Michael: It digests its own brain and nervous system because, as a stationary filter feeder, a complex brain is just a waste of energy. It's an evolutionary success story based on getting rid of costly, unnecessary cognition. Kevin: Wow. That is... a statement. So the ultimate intelligence is knowing when to stop thinking so much. That's a tough pill to swallow for a species that defines itself by its intellect. Michael: It is. And the book leaves you with a profound and unsettling question: If our vaunted intelligence is the problem, what is the solution? Taylor suggests it might lie in valuing something else entirely—not cleverness, not progress, but consciousness itself. The simple, shared miracle of being alive, something we share with the horse, the macaque, and even the slug on the sidewalk. Kevin: Maybe the first step is just admitting we're not as smart as we think we are. A little intellectual humility could go a long way. Michael: A perfect place to end. This is Aibrary, signing off.