35 Emotions Explained By Evolutionary Psychology - Rob Kurzban - #1169

0:00You are at the intersection of two things that I love, evolutionary psychology and emotions, trying to work out why we feel feelings, what's the reason for. So like the most interesting pieces, I think, of human behavior, which is what I study, is driven by our feelings. And then the evolutionary piece gives us a way to understand them. So for me, it's really exciting. We have a really good way to understand all of the things that cause us to do the things that we want to do. What could be more interesting than that? Why is the evolutionary angle interesting or useful when it comes to looking at feelings and emotions? I would say the evolutionary point of view is going to be critical for studying anything that humans do.

0:53We're an animal. We're an ape. Just like every other species on the planet, we have an evolutionary history. If you want to explain and understand the behavior of any organism, I mean, it'd be weird to study an ape or a mongoose without the theory of evolution by natural selection. So I just apply, and people like me apply those ideas to humans using the same lens, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. It's not really an optional part of the analysis. You have to ask, well, you've got this brain, it's super complicated. What's it for? What's it trying to get us to do? Why do feelings need to feel like anything at all? It's not obvious that there needs to be a phenomenology to stuff. A thermometer is able to detect heat and it doesn't seem to be

1:33feeling any kind of way. So why couldn't the brain just change our behavior without giving us the subjective experience of it? Yeah, no one knows. I mean, I got here today in a driverless Ramo and it sort of, in some sense, it sort of wanted to pick me up with my hotel and then it sort of wanted to make a ride on red, which it did, by the way, very safely, just to say. And so I think a Waymo and AI and so on tells us there's something that you can get from artificial systems. Functionally, at least. Yeah, functionally. But for whatever reason, biology isn't like that. You put a bunch of neurons in there, they get really complicated. And then a miracle occurs somewhere in there and then the magic happens and it feels like that. You put a bunch of neurons in there, they get really complicated, and then a miracle occurs somewhere in there, and then the magic happens, and it feels like something.

2:07My sense is that it's just for organisms like us, and probably other organisms, there's just no other way to do it. I do want to add one piece, though, which is that we're complicated. And so if you have an organism that's kind of afraid of a bear over there, but it's also hungry because there's something to eat over here, it has to be able to make a decision about which of those things to do. Now, with the Waymo, I think there's like some number, right? But for us, it's like, how strong is the fear? How strong is the hunger? And that sort of arbitrates which one we do. So maybe the sense that we have is like a way to figure out of all the different things that we're kind of motivated, which one should I do right now?

2:38Which is the priority? So it's a kind of like a way to check among the different pieces, which is the biggest one. That's interesting. So because a thermometer just check among the different pieces, which is the biggest one. That's interesting. So because a thermometer just has one thing to do, UEMO to some degree also just has one thing to do. It needs to get from here to there. Yeah. They need to be less complex and they need to weight competing priorities in less of a complex way, especially the thermometer, right, which is a single use device. But for humans, we need to be able to work out which of this 15 things that I'm feeling right now is the one that I need to triage to the top in order to keep the patient, which is me,

3:17going in the direction that I want to, to survive and reproduce. Yeah, totally. I need you some common currency, like what is three units of hunger, but four units of fear? How do you compare those things? And so I think consciousness, this experience we have is that common currency. It says, oh, it's this important. You got to do it somehow because again, as you get more complicated, this problem becomes bigger and bigger. Again, for the waymo, which main thing is not to get into an accident. And then the second thing is to get to where you're going. And then there's some other things, make sure they got the music right or whatever it is. But we've got all of these different things. So you have to have a

3:43clearinghouse. What is the measurement and motivation language that you use when it comes to feelings? I remember when I was a graduate student, I went to a lot of different talks. This was by, I think it was a physicist. And he said, look, everything that exists, exists in some quantity. And at first I thought, oh, that's obvious. And I thought, oh, that's super deep because in psychology, we talk about all this stuff, but we never talk about the quantities. No one's talking about a unit of jealousy or a unit of hunger, really. So when I talk about the measure motivate, the first part of it is that for organisms to respond adaptively in their environment, they have to measure something, whether something inside, like how much glucose do I have in my blood, or something

4:21outside, like how close is that bear? There's no bears in this studio. But just to say, you'd have to measure what's the danger. And so if you're going to build a computational mechanism, which our brains basically are, a thing that processes information, the first stage has to be to measure something. Now, it could be complicated, right? So jealousy is measuring something about, is that person a risk to me? Or maybe admiration is measuring, is that someone I should kind of look to for advice and for guidance and so on. But it's going to measure something. And then the next part, motivation. Once you've got the measurement, you've got to do something with it. So again, from the evolutionary point of view, the information isn't useless unless it does something in terms of changing measure something in the body or outside the world, which is going to be adaptively relevant, and then get you to do something. And that makes sense, right? So there's an opportunity out there. I got to figure out if it's a good one or not. And if it's big enough, then I should do it. So I find that language really helpful. I also like it because it can get everything from hunger to awe to jealousy to contempt to the feeling that you've seen someone before. So the same language,

5:26the same measure motivate kind of system gets you from all the low level kinds of feelings to all the high level ones. And that I find very elegant. Are there some emotions that are more measure and some that are more motivate? Well, I think that they all have both components, but for some, the measurement is just very straightforward. Like I said, I think thirsty or the feeling you've got to go to the bathroom or something like that, that's a pretty simple set of measurements. Whereas other measurements, like I said, for jealousy, they're really complicated. So I'd say that all of them have both components. In some sense, they can't work without both components. You don't know what you have to do unless you can

6:03measure something, and then you have to act in the world. If feelings are essentially measurement systems, how often do we misunderstand what they're measuring? think in as you know back in the day you were around very few people right much less than today and more or less everyone around you was someone who kind of was someone who you might be able to see as a competitor or so on but now with all the platforms the kids are on instagram and whatever else it is you see all these people who have you know great success a lot of friends the kinds of things so your your envy system is like an overdrive um being fooled into thinking that you know it would be a good idea for you to try to get what they have even though maybe doing that wouldn't it be in your best interest or maybe if

6:53it isn't even feasible i think we often same thing again to go back to the road example right so we get anger angry when let's say you get caught in traffic and in the past that would have been really useful because you're probably going to see that person again. So you want to tell them, don't do that. I might hurt you if you do that again or something. But now you're never going to see them again. So the anger doesn't do anything useful for you. But we still experience it. Does it mean, the measure and motivate thing, does it mean that unpleasant feelings need to be unpleasant in order to work and that pleasant feelings need to be pleasant in order to work? The reason that they feel that way is to contribute to the motivation. I think so. There's really sad, but very interesting

7:35work on the sensation of pain. So there are people who either don't experience pain or don't experience the motivation to get rid of it when they have it. And those people, sadly, they don't live very long because they don't make the adjustments they have to do to stop whatever damage is occurring, right? If you didn't hate having your hand in a fire, you wouldn't take your hand out of it and then all your hand would burn. So I think for what, you know, I think it does. I think the way that our brains work, if it's not unpleasant, you're not going to take the appropriate action in the same thing. So it's sort of an, it's an unfortunate effect just of the way the nervous system is wired up. You created a taxonomy of five kingdoms, five different groups that emotions go into.

8:16What's interesting about the body maintenance one? What did you find uniquely interesting about that? Well, I, first of all, I should say should say I'm not a feelingist. I treat all feelings equally. I don't have favorites. I love them all. But I mean, there's all sorts of interesting stuff there. I think parasites are super interesting. Like, you know, here we are in the modern era, and yet the biggest event in our adult lives was this one parasite that plunged the world into chaos for a couple of years amid the COVID pandemic. And so one of the things I always thought was interesting was itchiness, right? So you have all these really fancy things on the surface of your skin that detect when there's something on there. And for the most part, that's on there because there's little

8:59insects that might do bad things to you. They might put holes in you or they might lay eggs in you in the case of pot flies and so on. And so you have to have little defense systems. And so there's like an interesting kind of way in which you need to defend yourself against, you know, all the things that are coming to eat you or exploit you in some way. And I think itchiness is sort of one of the more interesting ones. Isn't it crazy that everyone's had the experience of sitting on a plane and feeling an itch and going, actually, I'm going to lock in. I don't need to. My body's not going to tell me what to do. I know that I don't even need to worry this. And it just crescendos and crescendos.

9:34And sometimes it falls off. And then sometimes it doesn't. And you're like, I can't. This is so compelling. And I can't think of anything else other than my whole body screaming at me. This thing that isn't painful, right? We know that it's not pain. It's distinct from pain. It's not like someone's sticking a hot poker in the side of you or stabbing you with something sharp, but it's just as captivating with a different flavor. It's kind of fascinating. It's like crazy how smart our systems are to be able to distinguish that. Crazy too, because it can be socially transmitted. So like this conversation, if people are watching it, they might start to feel itchy, by the way. Sorry, everyone. But you could feel itchy just because people are talking about it.

10:07Tens of thousands of people in unison itching themselves right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is kind of interesting, right? But that might even, you, look, evolutionists often get criticized for telling stories or whatever, but it seems plausible to me that if other people are itching, there just might be things around that you haven't detected yet that are kind of crawling on you. Maybe this is a time to be a little more vigilant. You know what I mean? Like, could be. I don't know. What about yawning? And why is that contagious? Oh, man, that's a hard one. Yeah. There's a pretty good paper that came out a number of years ago, which listed 20 different possible explanations for yawning. I will say this. We know other

10:43critters do it. So it's not just a human thing. We do know that there's some social transmission. We do know that it gets some additional oxygen there. Maybe you're getting ready to do some, I don't, I don't, I don't. It's a messy one. It's a messy one. I just want to say there's some, one of the things I did, you know, that I, when I was, when I was trying to work on all of these different feelings was I'm reading all these papers and like, there's so many feelings for which as you recently as 5% people are saying, there's not enough research to answer this question, or there's very little research. I'm like, what are people doing? You're telling me that the yawning field is horribly underfunded. I think it is underfunded. We need to make yawning great again. That's what

11:16I think. Okay. What about the need to poop? I thought you might be, I thought you might be fishing. Top of my list. Yeah. Super, super interesting one. I mean, as we know, everybody poops. Any organism that takes in stuff and then has to get rid of it, they're going to have to poop. And so, yeah, there is this adaptive problem, which is you want to poop kind of – you want optimal pooping. So you don't want to just poop anywhere, right, especially if you're a creature that might be stalked because then you're leaving evidence. In a lot of species, including ours, pooping near where other organisms, their group, they shouldn't do that. Just viewers, take note. So you want to kind of poop when it's necessary, but not more often.

11:54And so you have these cool sensory systems in the rectal area that's measuring sort of the pressure on that tube, your intestinal tube. And as that pressure goes up, that's what the measurement is. Basically, how much pressure is there forcing that tube to get bigger? And that pressure leads to, that's the measurement. And then the motivation is to poop. And then you do the pooping by releasing a little valve kind of thing. It opens up. And so it's a really well-designed system, which isn't that surprising because it's ancient. Like that, there's been millions and millions of years for the pooping system to get debugged by evolution by natural selection. So now we are very good at pooping. Would that explain a little bit of the

12:33need for privacy and shame that people have around pooping that they know they're uniquely vulnerable during the act? Yeah, we're not the only critters. So there's so-called latrine behavior. There's organisms that- Latrine behavior. Latrine behavior. Yeah. Not my term, but wonderful. Where, yeah, there's a spot that they go, it's away from the group, and then they do their thing. Because the thing about poop is that it attracts parasites. Same thing. Because poop can't defend itself. It doesn't have an immune system. And so parasites come in there. You get a nice meal or whatever, you hang out. And those parasites are bad for you and for your group. So you sort of want to keep the poop elsewhere yeah so if you can you can bury it this is why so those of us would you know with our

13:09canine friends you see the little he had a little flick flick thing which is a little residual behavior but um that's a well-designed system it's cool it's like it's telling oh only poop when i have to and then what oh i want to i should go over there to do it where everyone else is done and then screwed away what about nausea interesting one so um again these it's all parasites right so the thing about nausea is that if you are nauseous long enough it motivates throwing up and the nice thing about throwing up or vomiting is that if you do have a lot of parasites in your digestive system that gets them out and it gets them out without having to go through the whole two, which takes a while. And so the cues that give to nausea are things that you've been

13:51poisoned. It's interesting because a lot of people talk about motion sickness in this context. And the thing is a lot of times when you've got parasites on boards or if you have a toxin on board, it affects the vestibular system? It affects your ability to breathe. You feel dizzy as well. You feel dizzy. And so there's a mismatch between what your eyes are seeing and what your body is feeling, right? So the same thing that happens when you, let's say, walk downstairs in a moving boat or- Fucking nightmare. It's the worst. Yeah. Do not try. And so the one hypothesis, which might not be true, but the main one is that your system is saying, look, if my senses don't agree with each other, that's a pretty good signal that I've either got a toxin on board or some like there's some parasite or whatever.

14:32And I should get rid of it really quickly. And because that's what they do. They mess with your perceptual systems. And so the same thing is happening with motion sickness. You've got here's my visions doing this, my body, my vestibular systems saying I'm doing that, that they don't match. So let's just be safe and just get rid of whatever's in there right now. I remember New Year's Eve 2016, maybe 2017. I was working in Manchester running one of our night clubs. And my business partner's first kid had had his first birthday party a couple of days before. Unbeknownst to us, norovirus was running rampant 24-hour stomach bug and i text him and i'm saying how's newcastle going because he was looking after

15:10that event i was down in manchester how's newcastle going he says i don't know i'm in the disabled toilet and i was like okay well unlucky for you but i've got manchester it's gone really well we've sold out everything's great and then 10 10 30 i started being really catty and short with everyone around me i was like just terse unnecessarily brusque with everybody and i was like i took myself to one side and was i had a little word with me and i was like what the fuck are you doing like it's new york if you sold out you're in manchester this is a cool adventure like just enjoy them what you're doing and stop being such a dick and then i started to sort of feel a little bit hot and a little bit

15:49sort of sweaty and then there was like a cold feeling in my stomach and i was like connected the dots and thought i was with him he feels sick his wife feels sick he's in the oh shit i'm 150 miles away from home this is now a faustian bargain of whether or not I open the taps here or try and hold it in until five in the morning once I've driven back to Newcastle, which I tried and then exploded as soon as I stepped through the door into my own house in Newcastle. But yeah, that was like so interesting to me, this weird cascade of emotions, of sensations maybe, felt a little bit short and maybe like I didn't want to be around people and like I was being protective of me somewhat. And then I was distancing myself and then I felt a bit hot

16:34and then my stomach felt cold and then I felt dizzy and then I felt sick and all the way around. Yeah, lots of interesting parts of that story. My favorite was the conversation with me, which is a very self-aware thing. Like, why am I being a dick? I think a lot of people should stop every now and then and say, huh, am I just, what's going on here? But the other piece goes back to your very first question, which is we've got this feeling, these feelings, but we don't always know exactly what their origin is. I don't know. Have you ever been like on a hike and there's like a, you're at a canyon or something and all of a sudden you sort of feel afraid. And I had this sense that this is residual,

17:05like a little thing in our head somewhere that says, man, if you're on the low ground and there's people who could see you, but you can't see them easily, like that is a bad spot to be in. I mean, obviously right now, when you're in a national forest, no one's going to like throw rocks on you or something like that. You're not going to be ambushed in the middle of Yosemite. But I'm just saying, I sometimes get this weird, like just a little bit of a funny feeling. I guess my point simply is, like there's all these different feelings. Like you're, am I sick? Am I just being a dick? I don't know. That we have to kind of figure out. What do you think about claustrophobia? Yeah. So, I mean, I should, in many of these things, I have to say most of

17:37this stuff comes from my own experience. So I started experiencing claustrophobia late in life. And I discovered that when I was inside a cave, which was not the best time to discover it. So here's what I think. And I think this is sort of supported by people like Randy Nessie and others. Friend of the show. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, he did some of the pioneering work in all of this. People should go back and listen to that episode once they're done with this one. Evolutionary psychiatry, good feelings for, good reasons for bad feelings. Great book. Unreal. Yeah, really good. Nice primer as well, Two Car Garage with your one. Yeah, people should definitely go out and get both books for sure.

18:11Agreed. Yeah, so I think the challenge that evolution faces is sort of getting your dial set right. So, you know, you're born into a world. Should you be especially credulous because everyone's really nice? Or should you be really skeptical because you're in a world in which people are going to be deceiving you? And as you go through life, you've got to set these dials. How much should I feel this? How much should I feel that? And then there's some genetic noise and so on. And I think, you know, those dials get misset sometimes. I think in my case, you know, you should be afraid of enclosed spaces because you don't have so-called prospect and refuge, right? The best place to be. Prospect and refuge.

18:42Yeah. It's a fancy way to say I can see what's coming and I can escape, right? Oh, very nice. Yeah. Super interesting. And like, I would say in a box, you have neither of those, right? You can't see anything and you're not going anywhere, right? I'm going to guess that a closed space that's dark would be worse than a closed space that's light. Absolutely. Because you lose prospect, right? So yeah, well done. Interesting. A plus. Is this why we like big vistas? The house that's got the beautiful view is more beautiful than the house that backs onto a gray brick wall? I mean, we don't know the answer, but I would bet a wager a lot that's right. If you look at the pictures of landscapes, just what do people choose to paint?

19:27Expansive. Expansive. Again, the viewer can see what's coming. If there's a bear, if there's a lion, if there's a herd, whatever it is, or prey animals, whatever, I can see them. And so the more prospect you have, I think that's why we like sort of being high up because we can see all around us. We're also less vulnerable up there. It's harder to whatever. So I think we have these ancient adaptations for these two things and claustrophobia is sort of like i've got neither of those and if you if your dial is set up high enough if you then you really don't like them yeah my ex-girlfriend and me were doing the edinburgh dungeons tour and i was being a good boyfriend i thought hey i'll i'll take us on a trip. Wouldn't this be lovely?

20:06And just the description of the ticket evidently didn't portray what the experience was going to be like sufficiently. And our journey through the Edinburgh Dungeons was about 15 feet. And then very quickly, that's not going to happen anymore. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now which is a cold glass of water with elements in it element is an electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't it's a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients it reduces muscle cramps and fatigue supports brain function and helps to regulate your appetite throughout the day. I genuinely notice the difference when I take it

20:49versus when I don't, which is why I don't shut up about it and also why it's used by everyone, from Dr. Andrew Huberman to Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams, the good sniper teams, not the bad ones. Also, they have a no questions asked refund policy. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they offer free shipping in the US. Right now you can get a free sample pack of Elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What about disgust? So nausea, I guess like adjacent to disgust, but different. What's going on about disgust? So nausea, I guess, like adjacent to disgust, but different.

21:27What's going on with disgust? Yeah. So nausea, I think, is the motivational piece. So disgust is a whole thing. So again, a path is, it feels like this is the pathogen disgust. There's the world out there has all these different pathogens and we have particular spots that are vulnerable to them, right? All the different holes in our bodies. And so disgust is, does the, it's measuring the risk of pathogen preference. Like, just think about what do you find really disgusting, like the smell of feces, right? That's where the organisms, like little maggots, that's a really good indication that there's some kind of parasites in there. The smell of decaying flesh, people really don't like that. And so that's measuring what is the probability that there's some pathogen

22:06nearby. And so what's the right design if there are, is to go away, right? So we tend to want to distance ourselves. We're motivated to put some space between us or if it's on us, we very quickly want to get rid of it. Even the disgust face has that little like the tongue as if you're expelling something. Yeah, what's going on? I think that's like my former colleague at Penn, Paul Rosen, I think his idea, or it might've been Darwin, Darwin, Rosen, this idea that the tongue is sort of like, if you ingest something that might have pathogens, it has the cues that there's something. You're pushing it out. You're pushing it out, you're expelling it. And I suppose as well, if I'm worried about maybe flies getting into my eyes,

22:40I'm closing up, it's almost as if I'm making it, distancing myself from it. Exactly. That's interesting. Yeah, so all these defenses against pathogens and they all act in this coordinated way. I think disgust is super fascinating. People also like disgust because there's the sexual disgust part too, right? Yeah. People that are grossed out by sex or situations that cause you to be grossed out by sex. Typically we would think, wow, survival and reproduction. Explain to me why being ever repulsed by a sexual opportunity would be a good idea. But it obviously is. Well, if the other person is closely related, it's often a bad idea, right? So the main- Oh, Westermark. Yeah, the Westermark stuff, right? So people who were raised with someone, they find just the idea

23:19of sex with them. And this is Deb Lieberman's work. Excellent research on this. Friend of the show. Yeah, friend of the show. Excellent research showing that the people who you're raised with, even if they're not related, but as long as they were in the same spot at the same time, you're disgusted by the thought of having sex with them. Have you seen her work? Is it Thai or Filipino families from a particular religious subset that the parents of young boys would find the future wife at one or two years old and then raise the two together as a family. Hey, this is like the ultimate arranged marriage. You grow up together, you learn to be together. They didn't realize that you were going through the Westermark

23:59window. Even though you're not genetically related, you're basically reinforcing every single cue that causes that to be. I would love to see what the outcomes of those marriages were. Because I would imagine that you'd end up with a hugely declining birth rate. Even if you had all of the cultural pressure to stay together, maybe divorce isn't something that's widely accepted. Like, hey, you need to have sex with your sister who isn't your sister like that is i mean in the privacy of your own home that's a i'm an only child so i i'm speaking entirely theoretically here um but yeah that's a big hurdle to get over that is because i am not an only child and yes i can tell you you don't have sex with your sister it is the most disgusting thought ever to have

24:43that it's It's horrible. And I agree that probably the prediction would be it's very difficult to get people. And this is, of course, the same thing happened on the Israeli kibbutzim. They were also raised together. So what? The kibbutz in Israel. So it's sort of a setting in which people are raised in a group of kids, the same age kids. They all start to get put into a group and they get older together and they learn from each other. But the same thing happens. The parents want them to pair up because that would be nice. But they've been raised together and like, I don't want to. No, that's not. It's gross. No, thank you. It is. I've said this before. I said it to Debra Lee. I think my first question to her was, why don't you want to have sex with your sister?

25:21And she gave a wonderful explanation. But it really is for me as an only child it is so theoretical i understand that people have that emotion but i i can't i can't like manifest it inside of myself i wonder if other only children feel the same there's obviously situations that i could imagine having sexual disgust in, but like incest disgust. Yeah. I can't bring it online. Like, I can't think about what that would be like, because I've never had to develop that particular response. You know, like humans are able to move their ears, I think, but the muscles, you can't, just a little, you got something going on there. It's hard. Impressive. But if you atrophy, if you don't do it enough, then it's completely.

26:09That is kind of the physical equivalent of the emotional tool that I'm lacking. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think there's a lot of that where if you don't. Use it, you lose it. Yeah, the development. I mean, language is kind of like that. Like you could speak Thai or Tagalog, right? But you grew up in an environment where you, whatever, whatever this language is that you speak. Beautiful Queen's, King's English. Thank you. Yes, exceptional. There we go. Thank you. But yeah, you just didn't have the right cues as you were growing up. I think some of our emotional systems are like this, that they only start coming online. I mean, I have some of that too. There's certain emotions that I don't seem to

26:45experience, particularly in the context of moral condemnation. People get really bent out of shape about a lot of different drugs. People get really bent out of shape about, for example, drug use, and they seem to have this very visceral reaction to it. And maybe it's part of the system. I don't really know. And I just feel like I just can't make myself care if someone's getting high in the privacy of their own home. Don't get me wrong. I mean, you know, there's problems with drugs in society. I'm just saying the thing itself. I'm like, okay, so the guy wants to smoke a giant. It wouldn't be adaptive for everybody to have the same level of intensity around closed spaces. Because if that was the case in a 30-person pod of 150 Dunbar group tribe,

27:28that would mean that nobody in the entire group could ever go into the cave. But if everybody had an aversion to substance use, that would mean that everyone would be morally condemned for trying something new, and then maybe you wouldn't find a new salve or medicine or something. So this is why not only are you split testing different emotions to say, oh, maybe this one's a bit more effective at keeping you alive. This one's a little bit less effective. But also when you spread it across an entire group, you actually end up with different capacities that can be given in different portions. I like this argument in the context of personality psychology and where people made this, right? So yeah, it's good to have some extroverts out there or some people who are adventurous

28:05because we need someone to go over there. And that might retain some of the genetic variability in there, right? So it doesn't get all homogenized. Could be. I mean, these things are... A few psychopaths as well. You want to send them on a longboat to Lindisfarne to go and pillage and bring back some stuff and not have a ton of PTSD? Probably adaptive. I mean, not so... I mean, it's, you know, pretty interesting that there's always a sort of background level of psychopaths in everywhere you look for them. They've survived. Interesting. Yeah, I think, I mean, look, this study turned out to be false and I was so fucking gutted when it turned out to be false. It was an episode that I didn't get to release

28:39because unfortunately it wasn't quite right. But I learned about a, suppose it's, actually, this is probably one of the reasons that I shouldn't have fucking released the episode because the study was completely confabulated, but symbolically it's correct. So the fake study was a group of people are brought into a study area and classically the actual study began before the study began. As people were waiting in an office waiting room, a computer over the far side began slowly leaking smoke out. Just a small amount of smoke was unfurling from this particular computer. Beforehand, each cohort of people had had their attachment style assessed, and you had a relatively equal mix of anxious, avoidant, and secure.

29:26And the argument was that was put forward in the studies on average, the anxiously attached people noticed the smoke before anybody else, but the avoidantly attached people were the first ones out of the door. Oh, interesting. And the securely attached people were the ones that were last after, and sorry, were second last. And then the anxious people were like, oh, can I leave? Should I leave? I don't really know if I'm allowed to. And whether that's true or not, as a study, symbolically, I think it really gets to, huh, if you have, why would anybody want to be avoidantly or anxiously attached? Well, if you're anxious and you're sort of constantly looking, checking, working out what's going on,

30:04you're going to pay attention to things that you become an early warning system. You would make a fantastic detective, but probably quite a bad SWAT officer who needs to be maybe a bit more decisive. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I think, again, going back to Randy Nessie's view on anxiety, right? So like he uses this example of a mouse who doesn't get anxious when there's cat urine around or something like that. So like most, if you're a self-respecting mouse, you should feel afraid if you get some cue that there's a cat around, but then there also might be some advantage to being a bit more of a brave mouse, you know, under certain contexts. And so there, again, you can retain a certain amount

30:39of variability in the genome for this variation and anxiety. So yeah, I mean, that's the thing about evolution is that yesterday is probably a lot like tomorrow, but not necessarily. And so there's always going to be a little bit of give in terms of what the right setting is. And so you're going to see that it varies a fair bit. Anxiety, kind of the buzzword emotion of the last decade or so. What surprised you in your research about anxiety? Well, I mean, like everything else, this turned out to be complicated. I mean, I think so. I don't know if John Haidt is a friend of the show. Yeah. So he's obviously done some wonderful work on this. One thing about anxiety that strikes me about the modern moment is

31:22that social media has put us in something of, you know, like a fishbowl because our actions are constantly being broadcast, you know, either by ourselves or by others. And so if you're a social creature, which we humans are and you whatever, like the biggest threat for the most part for humans is our humans and what they think of us and so on. And so there is good reason to be more vigilant in a world in which you're constantly being observed because the state. Vigilance about reputation management. Exactly. Managing your reputation. So who, you know, who are you with and what am I doing and how am I spending my time and what successes I've had? So in some sense, I mean, I don't know if the anxious generation findings are going to hold up they look bro they're in the middle good to me but they're

32:09in the middle of the quickest 180 360 547 like just the replication of that every what feels like month i see something that proves it then disproves it bunks it then rebunks it and i'm like i i'm gonna wait for the cards to sort of fall fair um but yeah get get a little bit more ancestral for me from an anxiousness perspective like what's happening proximately what's happening ultimately like what's what's going on yeah so i think so anxiety is basically this um i think of it as fear for the future so like there's gonna be some danger down the road and I need to be able to address it. And the first thing I need to do is sort of measure it. So how likely is it that, so public speaking, right? So before people go public speaking or

32:53do a podcast, they often feel anxiety. Why? It's because you're about to be in a context in which for this one, millions of people will obviously be viewing it and that's going to have an effect on your reputation and other kinds of things. So it is actually useful potentially to think about, okay, well, how should I behave? What kind of hand motion should I use? What kind of questions would we ask? So it's leading me to strategies to help mitigate whatever that danger is or exploit the opportunity. And so anxiety, if it's set too high, if you're constantly afraid about everything, then yes, you could have paralysis. But a little, again, going back to the mouse case with the cat, like a good design should be to anticipate where are of magnesium, making the new formula even stronger than before. I have taken these things every single night, whether I'm at home or on the road, and it does make a genuine difference. The formula

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34:30modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Why not just have anxiety at the maximum all the time? Surely that would mean that people are prepared for the future even better. That would mean that they've got an increased likelihood of not being surprised. They're going to come across as someone that knows what might happen. What's the reason for not overshooting anxiety then? I mean, the answer to why not always for almost every single case is my favorite economic concept, which is opportunity cost. There's always opportunity costs. So every cycle that you're spending on anxiety, yeah, there's some benefit to particularly

35:09few, but there's something you're not doing, right? There's something you're not thinking about. There's some action you're not taking. And so eventually you've diminishing returns. You think about public speaking for three years before you do the thing, that's three years of life you've lost just so you could think about what could happen during the podcast. So you have to balance those costs and benefits. I mean, that's, again, going back to the consciousness thing, that's the trick is that there's all these different priorities. And so there's no, it's almost never going to be the case. I mean, unless you're literally running from your life from a bear or something like that, then literally just forget everything else, like that 100%. But in all other cases,

35:43there's always opportunity costs. There's always something else you could be doing. And so at some point, that additional anxiety is not as useful as something else. Do you think it would have been more adaptive to have been more anxious in the past than now? am a little bit of a panglossian on this as it were like i think evolution is an incredibly powerful causal process and i think we arrived at a point where our dials are set honestly pretty good for the ancestral world now again in the modern world we've got all this weird stuff so those dial settings are strange um but i i think my default is to say evolution does a pretty good job so probably we have about the right amount of anxiety under, again, especially if we were living in a normal everyday hunter-gatherer context.

36:30But again, the modern context is weird, right? We're around strangers every day. Like in the past, I don't think we would have been around strangers every day. And so, like, I mean, for me, just walking around the streets of Philly, I'm sure there's a certain amount of background anxiety because, again, like I'm around people I don't know. Who are all of these people. I'm not sure if they've got my best interests at heart. Yeah. I think this is one of the battles that smart, reflective, you know, curious, internally curious people have, which is, huh, I understand maybe, especially after listening to you and people like Randy Nessie, I understand why these emotions exist. I also understand that the past seemingly was much more

37:12predatory and uncertain than the current moment is. And this leads to a tension because the story that we tell ourselves about our concerns and our anxieties and our fears and worries almost always doesn't come to pass. And maybe that would have been true in the past too, but like they literally could have been a fucking famine 300 years ago that could have wiped you and your area of, forget 3000 years ago or 30,000 years ago, right? So what people are kind of stuck with is almost a degree of self-judgment and shame around feeling the things that i feel like how silly for somebody to have to admit walking down the street in a perfectly civilized society mostly being surrounded by strangers or even just seeing

38:01some strangers has contributed to my background anxiety. Because rationally, you can explain to yourself, that's stupid. Like, I don't need to do that. And yet, there might very well be this need to admit, huh, you know, like living in a city kind of contributes to this feeling of overwhelm and uncertainty and vigilance. And it's not really that nice for me. And there's this tension between sort of what we think we should be able to feel and what we do feel. And the fact that we've got this weird, opulent, luxurious fucking velvet prison that we're in now compared with the horrible cave with the saber-toothed tigers that we would have had a few, you know, tens of thousands of years ago. Well, that's why I think the evolution of you

38:42is so potentially powerful for everyday lives because let's take something like envy and anger or two. When you feel something, I think the first kind of reaction to that should be asked this I give into that and so in the anger case on the road you're like oh evolution's saying oh you need to deter that guy from doing it again but I'm never going to see him again so you know what I just ignore that and the same thing with envy is like oh evolution is telling me I got to keep up with everyone who I can detect in my world because that person has access to better though you know they're going to get the good stuff and they're going to be the king and they're going to be mates but that doesn't actually

39:24matter for me because you know what? I have a home and I have people who care for me and I have all the food I need. I don't need to worry about that. So once you understand what evolution is trying to get you to do, you can take the next step which is saying, should I give in to that or should I just sort of ignore it? And then there is a challenge of ignoring it. But that's hard. What about being overstimulated? Yeah. And I think here's another case where there's a lot of individual variation. And there, I think, you know, for most, a luxury that people have these days is for the most part, we can choose our environments. And I think there, the trick really is to know thyself, figure out what is the level of stimulation that you would like.

40:09It's tricky when you spend a lot of time with your partner, because your partner might be someone who wants more or less. And so speaking completely hypothetically, one might have a partner who wants to have music on in the household, and then one might be someone who is more introverted and wants to have less music on in the household. So there might be a little bit of a conflict there. Sensory mismatch. Yeah, a little sensory mismatch. Yeah. Which can be certainly arbitrated very lovingly and with care and effectively. And with proper soundproofing. And with separate rooms. But, you know, I think that's the thing is that one way that we learn kind of to your point about claustrophobia is you got to figure out what are the things that you like and

40:44what are the things you don't like and then again we have the luxury of manipulating our environments to accord with that what about panic yeah panic is super interesting again there's another one which was an area where there's not a lot of research on this but there's this video of a um net full of fish sitting on a dock. And there's this one fish manages to flop its way out of the net. And then it flops its way. It's just flopping randomly. There's a fish out of water. And it flops around randomly. And then just by one random flop, it gets back into the water. And that fish escapes. And I want to say this fish didn't have a plan. It just did the one thing it could do when all was nearly lost,

41:24which was just move its muscles in random different ways. You know, I suspect that when people are facing panic, the measurement there is if I don't do something, it's all over or it's going to be whatever. I mean, some massive amount of danger. And oftentimes the only thing left to do is to move, to locomote, to whatever, if you're underwater, to splash around. And so I think that, and then the place where I think is really interesting is in the context of military conflict, where at certain points in history in military conflicts, it's become clear to the participants that one side was about to win and one side was about to lose. And under those circumstances, you get this kind of panic and rout psychology that sets in.

42:10On the losing side, they say, yes, we could beat a hasty retreat or lead back to our ships or wherever it is. I like this example. I think it was a battle marathon where the Greeks had an advantage and then the Persians had to beat a retreat, but they didn't beat a hasty retreat, they panicked. And so any given soldier just threw their weapons down and runs for the ships to try to escape. And that was bad overall, because that is not the best way to retreat, is in disorder. But for that particular soldier, that was the best way to avoid the worst possible outcome. And some were cut down and some survived. But this that particular soldier, that was the best way to avoid the worst possible outcome. And some were cut down and some survived. But this panic psychology seems to be,

42:50if I don't do something, bad things are really going to happen. And I'm going to do the only things I can do, which often just is random movements like the fish story I started with. Something that's maybe a little bit harder for people to understand is aesthetic pleasures. Why do we like things that look nice? Yeah, that is hard. I mean, first of all, aesthetics is very complicated, but there is this thing where we tend to find aesthetically appealing. There's things that are correlated with stuff that would be kind of good for us. So like the Prospect and Refuge is a good example where we like those pictures, right? Oh, that would be a good place for me. I should be attracted to that sort of thing. Same thing for, you know, physical bodies that are sort

43:30of people who are healthy in shape, so on. I don't know if you know this, but people are attracted to those kinds of images and they will, you know, spend a large amount of time looking at them on the internet, on various platforms, so on. And and those are like i think of them as like little kind of like fitness little fitness landscapes or little fitness what do you think that the people are trying to achieve with that uh cue motivation just observe something that's that might encourage them to emulate that in their own lives? Either emulate that or to do the kind of thing that one does with it. So if you see a food item that meets all the criteria, right? So it looks very appealing, like a ripe apple, direct your attention to it.

44:16And then it causes you eventually often to do the right thing with it, which is to consume it or what have you. So it's sort of like focusing your attention on it. And then I take advantage of that fitness opportunity if I can, right? So like some fitness opportunities are easier to take advantage than others. So sort of like guiding your attention to it and then, you know, causing you to exploit it. Do you think of aesthetic pleasures as distinct from sensory pleasures? Really, it's tough, right, to draw that distinction. I think aesthetic pleasures, I'd say they tend to be more abstract, right? So just being pet or whatever, it's a very concrete sort of a thing, whereas that's very different somehow

44:53from the arc of a beautiful play, something like that, which yields this kind of satisfaction or pleasure, but the parts of it are super abstract. Other than that, though, I think they're pretty similar. They're both sort of saying, oh, this is stuff that's kind of fitness. Good for me. Yeah, fitness good, right? This is like, somehow this is correlated with, you know, with ancestral environments, reproductive success. So I should kind of attend to it and be attracted to it. What about people that like being scratched or having their hair played with? Like what's going on there? Yeah, grooming. So some of our relatives, of course, they groom all the time. And only some of that can be accounted for by picking little insects off or getting dirt off. My guess is,

45:35and again, a lot of this is speculation, but if someone is close enough to you that they can touch you and chooses to do something which is gentle rather than hurtful, that is a really good indication that this is an ally of yours. So my sense is that these grooming, I'm doing it myself, these grooming, you know, Tens of thousands of people rubbing their head right now. Exactly. Is this sort of this, it's very, it's kind of an appealing thing to know, this is an individual who could be hurting me, but they're not. And therefore, they're probably an ally of mine. And that sort of fitness good for me. And I think, yeah, there's got to be some grooming piece in there. So ancestrally, this all started with

46:13some kind of like insect removal or parasite extraction from the from the skin or the fur or whatever. And then in the modern in humans, yeah, it turns into this, you know, this is a positive indication of, you know, some kind of good social outcome. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be. And Whoop tracks all of it. Sleep, strain, heart rate, recovery. It's like dog the bounty hunter, but instead of criminals, it's tracking down your bad habits. All of this data gets pulled into a dashboard that actually tells you what to do with the information

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47:26That's join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. Have you seen the data around the difference in pleasure from different speeds of being touched on your skin? Oh, I have not. Mark, can you try and chat GPT this for me? Um, what does the research say about pressure and speed Oh, I are not detecting that you're basically paying enough attention to actually be able to pick what was needed. So you've got this vestige of perhaps the grooming, which has created some sort of boundary in which, and you all know, like if somebody goes really, really painfully slowly, like what the fuck is going on here? And if somebody was to go like this, the surprisingly consistent findings in the effective touch literature, pleasantness is

48:44strongly related to both how fast someone moves across your skin and how much pressure they apply for speed the relationship is roughly an inverted u across multiple experiments people tend to rate gentle stroking at around 1 to 10 centimeters a second as most pleasant hey i was fucking i read this thing four years ago i'm impressed with that With around three centimeters per second, repeatedly emerging near the peak, very slow movement, 0.1 to 0.3 centimeters, and fast movement of over 30 centimeters per second are generally rated as less present. In practical terms, three centimeters per second is really slow. Moving your hand about 12 inches would take 10 seconds. Holy shit. That's much closer to the slow caress

49:23than rubbing someone's arm. This appears partly related to tactile afferents, touch sense. nerve fibers in hairy skin. Peak firing rate is pleasant because it's correspondent between CT firing. Pressure is another dimension. Soft light stroking, more pleasant than hard heavy stroking. Speak for yourself. Yeah, just we have some, can you just say, well, what's the adaptive explanation for this? Well, I mean, I just want to point something out there. I love that sentence in there. The Nature Neuroscience paper found a striking correspondence between CT firing and subjective pleasantness. That's like, that is a classic example of a measurement that is feeding into the conscious experience. Like there we have the very explicit notion of what does it measure?

50:03Well, it's measuring about how fast it's going along, how this kind of thing. And that gives rise to exactly the, that's why I like the model. It's because particularly at the low level, you could just see it. It's right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This isn't you having some weird preference. Adaptive explanation. The leading adaptive explanation is that the system evolved less for detecting objects, more for social bonding and caregiving. Discriminative touch. What touched me where? How hard and effective touch? How does this touch feel emotionally? Natural stroking, caressing, and grooming from social people. It's the speed that humans spontaneously lose when gently stroking a caressing, and grooming from social people. It's the speed

50:33that humans spontaneously lose when gently stroking a partner, child, or other person. Light pressure is affiliation rather than threat. That's exactly what you just said. Warmth identifies another living body, reinforces attachment. Infancy may be particularly important. So, I mean, one of the most fascinating things that I learned this year from Stephen Porges, the guy that has a ton of stuff around nervous system regulation. He taught me that one of the reasons that dogs and horses bond so well with humans is that the mothering frequency that they speak at to their young is the same frequency that we speak at to our young, which is why when you say, come on, here we are, let's go for a walk.

51:22Like you're in the same tonal range. You're in that same frequency. And that is why humans and horses and humans and dogs relate in that same sort of way. I did not know. That's fascinating. Yeah. So there's all this work on infant-directed speech and animal-directed speech, right, when you're talking. And there's all these things which are similar. The intonation is similar. Yeah, the frequencies are similar. The intonation is similar. Even that kind of thing, like you use that for a dog, you'd also use it for a horse. Yep. Like there is, that's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, and the cool thing about those guys, of course, is that the dogs have been artificially selected way more than the horses a little bit, way more.

51:56And you still get this parallel between the species. Bingo, yeah. Polyvagal theory, dude. It works cross species. That's super cool. What about spiciness? Something that some people like, some people really fucking don't. Yeah. Super interesting. I mean, again, this is another one where I always have to preface it, but there's debate about this. I don't really know. But I'll tell you, like, here's the thing about spiciness, which is a little bit weird. I like the analogy of a roller coaster. So I don't know about you, but there's some roller, I love being on a roller coaster. I like roller coasters too. Yeah. But are there some roller coasters you won't go on? Are there some that I won't? That are like too, that are just too much.

52:27It's been a while since I've been to a theme park that's had one, but certainly in the past, yes. Yeah. So with roller coasters, it's like I want the, if it was just a train going like this, that's really boring. But if it's going like this, that's really fun. But then once you get to some point, you're like, I'm not getting on that. Like that's one, spiciness is like this. Like we like spicy, a little bit spicy is good. Oh, this is really spicy. But then once we get past that point, we're like, oh, that's too spicy. It's not just not fun. It's painful. In the same way, that roller coaster isn't just, you know, it's terrifying. I'm not getting on that thing. Right. So there's like some drop-off point, right? Yeah. And so the best, so spices probably are important for, they all going back to pathogens, they seem to have some role in

53:10suppressing pathogens, both within the nervous system and in the food preparation. And so there's this classic work, which I think has held up. You always have to sort of like wave with old psychology work. You never know, to your point. Replication crisis is going to come for us all eventually. It's coming for all of us. But there was this finding that places that were warmer and wetter, so they had more parasites, used more spices in their food. And that's controlling for the spices that were around. So, and the idea was, well, if you're eating more meat and that meat is going to get parasites on it faster because of the environment, you put more spices in there and they inhibit the growth of those. Does that actually work?

53:44Yeah. Apparently. Apparently. Yeah. Pepper is the big one. And it's not a coincidence that everywhere you look around, people are using peppers. And in places with a lot of pathogens, they use a lot of different peppers. So the, yeah, because the plants have to defend against pathogens too. So they have, right? So the thing of being a plant is you can't run away from pathogens. So you have to have empty pathogen systems in you, and that's usually a chemical defense, right? So these plants, they have these chemical defenses. We take their chemical defenses, put it in our food, and then so more is better. But there are, again, there again, in different, obviously different cultures and different individuals,

54:15there seems to be, get as much of this spicy benefit as you can. But once you get, I mean, they can be dangerous, right? So everyone knows about these stories where people take like a ghost pepper and then they touch their eye and then they're blind or whatever. And there's other potential effects that spices can have. But it does look like it's interesting that there's this drop-off. So you want the most possible that you can sort of tolerate, but then- Without feeling it on the way out. Yeah. I always thought for a very long time that people who made the joke of, well, that's going to hurt when it comes out the other end. I'm like, dude, that's impossible. You have digestive tract, you have stomach acid, all the rest of this stuff.

54:54And Nando's in the UK, which is a chicken restaurant, released a new type of sauce that I found so tasty, but it was really hot. I'm like probably middle of the bell curve for heat tolerance, spiciness tolerance. Like some stuff fun, but as soon as you get over a limit, if I'm sweating, I'm a hot guy at the best of times. I don't want to be sweating when I'm eating but anyway this this had managed to hack sweetness and spiciness and it hidden the spiciness under the sweetness and when i ended up going to the bathroom a day later it felt like someone was holding a lighter under my ring piece it was it was kind of hilarious i was like laughing on the toilet like what the fuck is going on and like i can't apparently i can't cool this down this hurt on the toilet. Like what the fuck is going on? And I'm like, I can't, apparently I can't cool this down.

55:33This hurt on the way in and it's hurt on the way out. So there is a limit that you can get beyond. Right. Yeah. And that pain is telling you there could be damage. So that's evolution's way of saying, yeah, you could be, yeah, don't do that again. Didn't account for how tasty it was though, Rob. What about fun and excitement? I think this is, I've had a lot of debates over the last couple of years about what fun is. Yeah. I've had a lot of debates over the last couple of years about what fun is yeah what what constitutes it sex can be fun but sex can be sexy play can be fun but play can be serious like what's happening with fun and excitement I mean like again usual caveat no one knows but it certainly looks like

56:05there's a few pieces in common right so like then if you go into um non-human animals you see them sort of playing it It certainly looks like they're doing some fun things, right? So you get these monkeys, which will climb up to the top of a tower and then jump into a little water trough. And they certainly look like they're having fun. And there's, I think, a few different pieces about having fun is that one important piece is your sort of training. So when I was a kid and I played soccer, that was some of the best fun I had when I was a kid. It's something about team sports. And I think in ancestral environments, practicing, coordinating with your, you know, your group probably was training for, you know, violent activities, whether on hunting activity or warfare or whatever,

56:49but you're doing it in a context in which you can learn and you can learn safely. And so, and you really don't want to learn lessons about how to coordinate with your troop in the middle of a fight, right? That's the worst time to figure it out. So I think part of it, and that evolution wants to reward you for this learning process. And so fun is evolution's way of saying, yes, this is a good thing for you to do in the safety of your, do more of that, keep doing it, it's doing great. And I think a lot of fun things are like that, where we're either learning something or practicing something in a safe environment so you're sort of like setting it aside from whatever the real thing is it's it's complicated though i mean because some stuff is

57:22weird i mean i i when i back when i was at penn i had a graduate student we were working on dancing for a while why is dancing fun yeah and i think there's some new work on this. I think Ed Hagen has a paper, but there's something... Friends of the show. Yeah, it's a little puzzling, right? Like, people just sort of coordinate their movements with one another and that, and there's music and there's some sort of rhythm and it doesn't seem like it's practicing for something or learning anything. I guess I'm learning something about the fact that, you know, I can coordinate with this person, but I don't really know why it's fun. Games, I think, are fun because, again, yeah, they're training you to think strategically or to think about certain,

58:00you know, whatever this kind of stuff is, this could happen in the real world. So I think a lot of it is training, learning, and practicing. What do you make of the music is basically sexual signaling done on mass theory? Music is as mysterious as dancing. Yeah, so the production of music, and here, Jeffrey Miller, I feel like everyone's going to be a friend of the show at this point. Friend of the show. Jeffrey Miller's point about this, which is that you can't make beautiful music unless you have really good, you have to be smart, you have to be creative, you have to have taste. And so, yeah, there's some sexual signaling there saying, yeah, I'm pretty good at this. And it is a good signal because it is really hard.

58:35As someone who is completely atonal. A-musical. Yeah, a-musical, atonal, disaster. I could say it's hard, right? And people who do it, they're like, oh, this is really easy. I'm like, for you it is. Yeah, right. And so I think there's something to that and the way people react to musicians, right? So I think about the old videos of the Beatles and the modern modern videos are losing their mind yeah people lose their mind it's like i've got a guy in here uh this afternoon called riley green it's the closest thing to like chicks faint like elvis presley chicks fainting level stuff i have another friend of the show joe santagato he did madison square garden and he's quite rare him and his-host, pretty rare in the podcasting world.

59:13Two guys who are talking about kind of bro stuff, but with an 80, 85% female audience. And he did MSG, and I didn't know this because I don't have an Apple Watch, but apparently your Apple Watch can detect the local noise levels and can warn you if you're in a, you know, an industrial park and the sounds too loud or whatever it is. And the screams of the girls as they came out on stage was so loud that everyone's Apple watches went off telling them that they were in a dangerous noise environment. Yeah. So there's a few things I like about that. I mean, I love the story, but two things, the measurement piece. So one, the Apple watches are doing measurement, right? So in some sense, everything's always doing measuring, all these things all the time.

59:54But the other piece is, yeah, you got to measure who a good mate is. And sometimes that dial goes off the charts, right? I think you got to look at their accomplishments, their physical bodies, whatever else you know about them. So you need some sort of mate assessment system, which is, again, Jeffrey Miller's talked about. And sometimes that dial just goes, and I think it's sort of like a supernormal stimulus. You know what I mean? I think that's what's going on again in some of the, whatever, pornography is like this, right? So like in pornography, you get the supernormal stimulus. And sometimes it's not just one super, it's like multiple. And then your evolved system is just like, that's crazy.

1:00:30You know what I learned about from Dr. K, who's a psychiatrist? He taught me about death grip syndrome. So guys that are not having sex with a person, but are masturbating a lot, the ability for your fist, your hand to grip is way, way more than it is for any female human body to be able to grip in the same way. And these men are basically detraining their penis to be able to detect in the same way and these men are basically detraining their penis to be able to detect the level of pressure i think he told me it's like xpsi is available in the vagina and 10x 30x psi is available in your hand right and it's kind of this it's a super normal stimuli um but just raw sensory data because nobody would, hey, my hand is sexier than that

1:01:16person that I'm attracted to. But just the conditioning, the straight up conditioning of this has meant that, yeah, some guys are having to, he literally has a protocol for detraining or retraining your penis for precisely that reason. Yeah, no, super fascinating. And again, it illustrates this idea that you got to think about the measurement. What's the measurement? The measurement, it could have been, well, I'm with a person who looks like a human female. It's like, no, it's like the pressure that's being exerted internally. And just the mismatch, I'm very worried about, like, they're going to build things that exert the right amount of pressure for the right amount of time. I mean, if they haven't already. Supernormal Kegel stimuli.

1:01:55Yeah. And so there's going to be more people who get addicted to like if you could hit the optimal let's say sensory yeah well i mean look women have already they've they've outstripped men with regards to this as sex toys for women like you know we talk about whatever it is like the patronormal medical establishment but it's the matronormal sex toy establishment. They really sort of speed ran finding a way to pleasure women. Right. If you go into the stores, there's a million pieces of equipment having to do with, you know, that type of thing. Referring to it as equipment is fucking brilliant. Apparatus. Yeah, apparatus. It's right. It's entire racks of all the different, you know, they have certain frequencies.

1:02:32They move, they vibrate, they twirl around. Shapes and they've got colors and textures. Like there's been some research, clearly. Yeah. Catherine Salmond, where are you? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body, and that is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, kidney function, and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test 20 markers. Function runs over 160. It's huge. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives inside of a

1:03:13simple dashboard. So you track trends over time, make sure you're moving in the right direction. And this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is $365 per year, just $1 a day to actually know what's happening inside of your body. And right now you can get $25 off, bring it down to 340 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. You kind of mentioned that there's this, the mismatch thing. What do you think are some of the best examples of feelings that are functioning exactly as they're designed, but producing terrible outcomes in the modern world? Oh, I mean, well, I mean, hunger is obviously one of them. This is changing a little bit with

1:03:56modern technology with the Zempik and the, you know, that line of, but clearly, you know, our hunger systems have evolved in a world to take advantage of food opera and we just keep doing it. And I think, you know, we've seen the effects on the so-called obesity epidemic. I don't take a position on the moral weight of that, although I just defer on the health stuff. But like that seems to be pretty bad. My favorite system, in the sense that it's my least favorite system, is speaking of appetites. So humans have an appetite for morally condemning other people. Like we just love sitting around and saying that that person, they're bad, bad, bad. People love that. Well, that is a difficult question. I suspect

1:04:41it's because a lot of times when you were part of the mob that was condemning someone else, you benefited. Yeah. First of all, you distract attention from yourself, but also oftentimes you or your allies can get their stuff. There's one less competitor. In lots of cases, it's just really good to be on the same side as everyone else. It's always good to, you know, it's like the Thinardiers when there was the revolution. When bad things are happening, it's a good time to pick up the leavings. There's always going to be some kind of stuff that you can scavenge. And so I think more- Or at the very least be on the side of the non-persecuted. Exactly. So you always want to be on the side, the big side.

1:05:21And so we're evolved to figure out opportunities, particularly when other people are making more accusations. And we just love jumping onto that. And in the modern world, particularly with social media, but of course, even in the old day, like with newspapers and then with television, but it's just been metastasized with social media, people that people just love indulging their appetite. I mean, if you look at, you know, you're supposed to say X, not Twitter, but and then blue, whatever it is. Yeah. I mean, I pulled William off a blue sky for the people that are just listening. William Costello is outside, sat in the green room cock chair listening because he's a fan and a friend of both of us. Hi, William. But he was on Blue Sky and we would have these conversations. I'd be like, dude, every single time that you try and put anything that's evolutionarily adjacent on Blue Sky, you're getting pilloried and then we have a conversation about it

1:06:13and and i'm like man you're you're just voluntarily trading your own sanity here and then when i see him put stuff out on uh the equivalent post on twitter he'll be accused of being like a blue pilled like feminist or something like oh you're not pointing the finger enough meanwhile he's a full-blown eugenicist on blue Sky. That illustrates the point, right? So everybody wants to be on the accusing side. And with these platforms, people can indulge. So I think of it as like, our culture or whatever made a world in which we could indulge our appetite for food and fat and sugar and salt. And moral condemnation. And then we built a world in which you could indulge your appetite for moral attacks and And moral condemnation. part that the result is a pylon the result is a is a tax and the thing about attacks is that

1:07:13moral attacks and i stole this from my former graduate peter surely probably not a friend of the show yet not yet yeah not yet um is that you know attacks are like a kind of moral roulette you never know so there's this just this morning and this will date the episode i guess there's a piece in the free press talking about um a guy who was involved, who was served papers and, but, but they got the wrong guy. So it was, it was the Cornell seven and they got the wrong person. So it was a different name. And so they served the guy papers. And so this guy got doxxed and then got all these death threats. But it wasn't even him to say nothing of whether, you know, what the actual facts are. And so,

1:07:47so this is a case where, you know, what people want to indulge their moral attack thing and they spin the wheel and it turns out they got the wrong guy. That's what happens sometimes. You know, my favorite one of these. Mark, can you search the video? It should be on YouTube. It's person who looks like Andy Ngo being incorrectly identified. So Andy, I think he's still doing his thing. He was an investigative reporter yeah andy dude fucking brilliant who are you why the middle finger what's your name who the fuck are you who are you why hey why are you do you think that i'm andgo? Is that what you're thinking? You racist c*** Would you like to be in my face? But I'm f***ing sick of this This is the second time this has happened to me

1:08:38The third time this has happened to me at protests It's like you're doing it intentionally then Just be proud that you're not Andy You see me like you're doing it on purpose I'm super proud that I'm not Andy But I'm really irritated that you c*** stand here and put your middle fingers in my f***ing face You're a bunch of racist c*** and you gotta stop. Think about why you stand here and put your middle fingers in my fucking face you're a bunch of racist and you gotta stop think about why you're here think about why you're here i don't think your argument has internal validity. Hey, guy that looks like Andy, no. Fuck you, Andy. And he's like, for what? Like, I'm just being Asian? But look at his defense, too.

1:09:21Also a moral attack, racism. That's a great thing. He's not even wrong about that. But notice that the response to this moral attack. Yeah, it's like, I hear whatever. So, again, I think that's why it's really a good way to think about it, is that all of these attacks are like spinning the roulette wheel. You're like, yeah, maybe you're going to be going after someone who does something bad, but maybe you're not. And then in that case, you just make his day shitty. Yeah. I say shitty. You can say, I mean, I've said. You said cuck chairs. I did say cuck couch technically outside. All right. Getting into sort of the social world, I think some of more uniquely human uh emotions are some of the more complex ones romantic love family love what's

1:09:59happening there family love i don't think is unique to humans i mean to just come out and contradict you because i like all organisms you would expect them bias yeah well they've got so like every organism has a i mean for for mammals, mothers and fathers, whatever. And so you would expect that adaptation to care for kids, parents, and so on, the family level. That's phenomenology, I would guess, or who knows. It's probably comparable in some. Pretty universal. Yeah, it's pretty comparable. But I mean, humans are weird in other respects. I mean, so obviously we're pretty monogamous-ish. Monogamous. Monogamous-ish. And so there seems to be adaptations designed for monogamy, right? So there's like what Dorothy Tenhoff called limerence,

1:10:40so this like in love kind of love, I'm going to write you a sonnet and I'm going to sing for you and I'm going to do brave deeds or whatever. That could be whatever. There's other organisms who are monogamous, right? So a lot of birds are monogamous. And so maybe there's something similar with two swans when they're swimming together. They might feel pretty. I think penguins are together for life basically as well. Barring unfortunate incidents. Yeah. They're together until one of them dies. Yeah. Of a cold, horrible death. Yeah. Or a seal. Or a seal, which is a hungry, horrible death. Yeah. But I think for me, some of that stuff is on the human side, which is, I think, understudied again. I mean, there's not a lot of organisms that have kind of friends like humans do.

1:11:21So, you know, dolphins have some friends and it looks like there's chimpanzees who sort of affiliate more with some more than others. But humans, I mean, how much of our lives is dedicated to cultivating and enjoying our friendships, people who we're not in a romantic relationship with, but we're our allies and support us in tough times and help us practice and do fun things. And that phenomenology, I think, is very powerful, right? I mean, some of the, you know, you think about the most powerful kinds of feelings that we have, I think, and in humans, some of those friendship emotions are very, very strong as well, designed to find out who our friends are, to keep track of who our friends are, to ensure that we retain those friendships.

1:11:56And then on the other side as well, the betrayal, perhaps the resentment, the enemy, frenemy, ex-friend, enemy situation that you can go through. Yeah. A lot of friends can also be rivals and that could be specific. So they can be helpful in one domain and then hurt for another. But then, yeah, humans also, I don't know to what extent other creatures, I'd be interested if there's people who know about this, but that humans have hatred, which who knows if that's something that. What do you think hatred is? I think it's a design to cause you to try to get rid of or at least minimize the effect of people who really want to have to harm you or have harmed you so that they don't do it again. So it's a deterrence psychology to do it.

1:12:33It's kind of like social anger. It is like social anger. I mean, the thing about anger is it seems to me it's often very, it tends to be a bit local. Like I'm angry right now that you were, that you're whatever, you took my sunshine. But if you did something before, my hatred is like long protracted over a period of time it's like anger that's cooled but but stayed at a pretty warm temperature and kept on going exactly it's got staying and it i think it does more stuff like anger in the i could be angry even if we're friends like you could you know whatever you take my favorite sweater and you mop up some milk with it that would make me me angry. I'm like, dude, lame. And then you'd be like, sorry.

1:13:15And then we'd be whatever. Whereas for hatred, I think, you know, the ship has sailed, right? You know, that person is never going to help me. They're always going to hurt me. And I will do whatever I have to do to neutralize them. And then in ancestral environments, that might have been murder, whatever, something horrible. In modern environments, it's probably different but yeah the delineation it's interesting around the front thing i would love there'll be some animal behavior researcher i mean you have fuck what closest uh relatives on the the old evolutionary tree would just be basically existing in familial pods so it's just kinship done like en masse right well chimps have some non-kin group members in them but some not some non-humans are basically

1:14:02just going to be i mean do you think that does that mean that they have friends i think non-kin group members friends yeah i think so like so in um the research on for example a little coup d'etat in chimp communities it looks like the people who are the people the couple of number three number four and number five get together to fuck over number one exactly and it sort of looks like in the lead up to that they sort of look like they're building a friendship right maybe they're even if they're not relative yeah they're exactly so these are non-kin related. They're whatever. I mean, it's difficult. We don't always know the relatedness in chimps. But the other one is dolphins. So dolphins will form long-term associations of non-kin.

1:14:41It's male dolphins will form non-kin associations. Now, they have a particular purpose, which I'm a little reluctant to talk about on the show, but it's mating related with respect to female dolphins who are not always- Oh, they forcibly copulate. Yes. Dolphin friends are for that purpose. That's what they do. They get into gangs and then they do that. That's what they're literally going around doing the gang thing. Yeah. I want to be very clear. I condemn this- Dolphin. The dolphin behavior is- In no uncertain terms. Highly condemned. Yeah. Highly condemned. Moral hatred. If you ask the question, this is what I think is interesting to say. So what are dolphins friends for? Like, what are not, what are friends for? It's a function.

1:15:16That's what it is. It's for that. Like, they're not using it to hunt. They're not using it for defense and get whatever. They're just using it for that function. That's why, again, the evolution analysis- Very specialized. Yeah, forces you to say, what exactly function are you talking about? Yeah. So human friends, allegiances, alliances, I'll protect you, you protect me. I will share some food with you. If I have more than I need, you will therefore reciprocally, altruistically give it back to me. We can back each other up. If there is an opportunity for moral condemnation, you are on my side. You need to have a pretty big family in order to have a big enough group of people to take your side if there is this, you know, potential for accusation that comes.

1:15:59The opportunity to play, I suppose, as well. That, you know, especially if you're part of a family, the likelihood that you have somebody that's at your stage of development, unless you're a twin, is quite low, right? You know, I guess maybe you could have a sibling that's a couple of years younger than you or whatever, but especially as you're growing up, you need to be with people, other humans that are around about your age, because that's where you work out, where am I in the hierarchy? How strong am I? Can we do rough and tumble play? I do rough and tumble play with my sibling that's three years younger than me. I'm always going to win so i guess that's part of it uh collective action for war for

1:16:35going and getting food i mean it makes sense it also makes sense because humans are not particularly great at anything when compared with most of the animal kingdom other than our ability to persistence hunt coordinate and, and build tools. That's a pretty good list. It is a great list. It's not bad. It's a fantastic list, but it means that you need, like, even the tool building thing. Like, I need to, where's the good sticks? Where are the good rocks? Have you got the sharp thing that I can sharpen my unsharp thing with? Yeah, social learning, totally. And I think for friendships, all of those functions are part of it. For me, the thing that stands out most, and again, this is work with my former student,

1:17:17Peter Shirley, is that one thing that I find interesting about human friendships and we had some research on this is that we order our friendships. Like you probably could say who you're, you won't say it out loud, but you know who your best friend is. You know, you probably know who your second, third best friends are. You've got like a list. And that's really helpful if conflicts break out because then you know who's going to be on your side. Your best friend, right? Your best that's really helpful if conflicts break out, because then you know who's going to be on your side. Your best friend's going to take your side no matter what against your third and fourth and so on. And so I think all of those things you listed,

1:17:42someone to play with, someone to exchange with, although those can be done with strangers, right? You can play with strangers. You can exchange food with whatever. Every day you exchange money for food. But the thing about human friends is that knowing where I sit in their friendship queue, like how close I am to them, tells me, am I going to be able to count on them for support when conflicts are more? So I think the alliance piece is the most important part of human friendship, but it's complicated. You used the word social learning there. What do you make of some of the explanations around emotions that they're socially constructed rather than evolved? I guess what I would say is when I look at the emotions, they just look so obvious.

1:18:19To me, they look so obviously like evolved adaptations, right? So they, to your point about their design, I mean, you look at all these feelings, they look excruciatingly well designed to execute their functions. Many of them have all the hallmarks of adaptations. You see them cross-culturally. You see them have all the hallmarks of adaptations. You see them cross-culturally. You see them historically. They're the same ones. I mean, when I started doing the research on this, I was in Greece. And part of the reason I wanted to write about emotions is I'm looking at the myths and I'm reading about the stories and the plays, and you see the same emotions, right, in the classics, not to mention the ancients. You see

1:18:50in the Bible and you see in other things. So like through time, humans have had jealousy and they've had envy. I mean, it's not a coincidence that, you know, it's in the 10 commandments, thou shalt not covet. It's like, I don't, you know, we didn't independently invent envy a million different times in human culture and they look well-designed. So what does envy do? Well, it focuses your attention on an individual who's doing better than you. And what does it does? Well, it causes you to strive a little bit harder so that you can get whatever it is that they've got. So they have all, and they look, again, they're excruciatingly well-designed jealousy. I mean, here we are in Austin, David. What's the difference between envy and jealousy?

1:19:20So I think jealousy is specifically designed around threat to a relationship, either a friendship relationship or a romantic relationship. So it's designed to detect the threat and then take steps to undermine that threat. So if it's an emmating relationship, maybe you make yourself a, oh, that guy's doing, he's doing really well. He's got a big house. He's got a very well-viewed podcast, whatever it is. I should do what they do so that I can enjoy that success. Or maybe I could undermine them if it's something like that. But it's directing your attention to sort of like opportunities to do better because there's somebody who is doing really well as opposed to, so jealousy is like defense, right?

1:20:12I've got a threat, got to counter, right? Envy is like a little bit more, okay, opportunity. Okay, this guy's doing better. Maybe he's a threat, but more importantly, I can learn something maybe about that person. How do they get so successful? How do they build their following? I guess envy in that way is at least somewhat functional, whereas jealousy, again, it's interesting, right? I've had this line for a long time at one of my old live shows, which was envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good. It's kind of interesting, right? Sloth can feel good, that gluttony can feel good, that lust can feel good. Why does jealousy have such a terrible reputation? If evolution

1:20:46apparently considered it useful enough to preserve, why does it feel so shitty? Why do we condemn not only each other, but ourselves for having it? We feel a lot of shame around our jealousy. What do you think's going on there? I mean, it's complicated. My sense is though, jealousy is interesting. Like in some sense, like suppose I did manage to persuade other people that jealousy was a bad feeling. In some sense, I'm causing them to drop their defenses. I mean, as long as I keep my jealousy and I maintain, you know, whatever, like I actually think that might be true is like some of this more, you know, that jealousy moralizing it. The zero sum view of jealousy. Yeah. It's like, if you're, you know, I don't know, I think a lot about these, you know, whatever

1:21:25places, uh, historically it's the sixties, it's California and everyone's saying, oh, jealousy is a pathology. And then the next thing, you know know that guy who's saying that is like sleeping with your girlfriend because whatever it's like you've taken your eye off the ball yeah you took your eye so so i think in some cases some of these cult whatever are like causing other and you see this a little bit in the intersexual competition literature as well where you're you know there's there's an increasing through line now about you know women telling other women about oh you know your short hair looks great on you cut your hair off take more off yeah beautiful you're beautiful as you are you don't need to dye it yeah no no no and so you're sort of undermining their defenses

1:22:01a little bit and so i think the cultural dialogue gotta be careful about it right like it is unpleasant but like a lot of this stuff is strategic you're among friends here it's fine yeah okay you see what i'm saying like it's like a little bit, it's very unflattering. And I think that one of the problems of taking a non evolutionary view is that analysis looks a lot like justification. If you don't have the evolutionary perspective, when we're talking about stuff like this, if you have the evolutionary perspective, you can almost say, okay, um, this is something that exists and it's something that I feel, and this is why, without saying, and that's good. Like the naturalistic fallacy basically

1:22:38doesn't have as much place to exist. This is one of the accusations that gets levied at an evolutionary perspective of anything, which is that analysis becomes justification. I'm not saying that because dolphins do that and that is the outcome that they get, that it is good, right? I'm not making some sort of a moral claim around this. And I can also say that even though we do have these compulsions as humans, that we can have them and say that it's bad, say that we don't want that inside of a modern society or inside of any society, like lovely. But if you don't have the evolutionary explanation, that evolutionary angle, you don't ever actually understand why the fuck it's there. And I think that that hiding from analysis for fear of being

1:23:17accused of justifying something results in you just being undereducated about why the landscape is what it is. Oh, totally. First of all, I agree with the analysis. I think the issue of what we condemn is thoroughly different from what we study. And there's lots of people who find that difficult to separate the two. You can't study something without condemning it. And if it's condemnable, then you shouldn't be studying it. Exactly. And so you see this in the context of the touchy issues of our time, mostly to do with sex and race. Those are the two big ones that are sort of third rails. And so people back off from studying them because as soon as you start studying on your view, well, if you're explaining it, then you're condoning it. I find that view, it is, oh, well, if you're explaining it,

1:23:53then you're condoning it. I find that, I've always found that argument mystifying. If you're explaining it, you're condoning it. That's so lovely. I just don't understand that. And I think that the other piece is that if you are serious about trying to stop something that you think is bad, like if you're serious about that, then the first step ought to be to understand it with every possible tool you have. So if you understood people's motive to do X, Y, or Z, then- You might actually be able to fix it. You would think you're in a better position. And to the extent that you're making up reasons that people do X, Y, and Z. If you said, well, people who steal stuff or they just want to exert their

1:24:30power over another person, then as opposed to they just want the valuable thing, you know, they want to, they just want to exert their power over another person, then, you know, as opposed to, they just want the valuable thing you might, I don't know, you, you might not think to lock up your valuable things anymore. You might want to say, well, let's make that, let's make that seem less powerful somehow, whatever that would look like. I'm just saying the explanation tells you what the, what you're going to do to stop it. And, and I do genuinely believe that kind of suppressing people's study of these things that we don't like, I think that's a very bad thing for society to do. Is it by understanding what the ultimate reason for this behavior would have been for evolution

1:25:16to keep it about, does that mean that you are giving it a pass in order to happen? No, that's obviously not the case. Jimmy Carr's got this line about saying that something is too sensitive of a topic to joke about is like saying this is a disease that's too serious to treat. And I think, you know, the more callous or morally repugnant the behavior, the more that we should be looking at it. It's like, is aesthetic beauty something that's cool to study or whatever? And could it give us really fascinating insights? Yeah, absolutely. But hatred, moral condemnation, you know, these things, looking at why they exist, I can immediately see that if people had a better understanding of this, that might lead to maybe reducing it where it's not needed or people being able to regulate when it happens or somebody that gets served papers looks suspiciously like Andy Ngo, you know, is able to, everyone's able to take a beat

1:26:14rather than being at the mercy of these things. Yeah. No, I mean, I completely agree. I think it's an unfortunate consequence of the current moment. And I think this goes back to the point about how this appetite people have for moral condemnation and moral attacks is that, you know, if you can attack someone for studying a touchy topic, and it's interesting that people don can attack someone for studying a touchy topic, and it's interesting that people don't get attacked for studying diseases. I mean, can you imagine if, and maybe there were historically cases where people were attacked for trying to, you know, cure cancer or something. I don't know, but like, right? It's sort of interesting. Like, so this is, again, feeds into this point about, I just feel like this appetite

1:26:49for moral attacks has done so much harm. And one of the things it does is it does, I think, to some extent, undermine research that could help us understand humans, our motives, and so on, which ultimately would have to be helpful, I think, for organizing ourselves and making the world a better place. Going back to the social constructed theory of emotions thing, one of the common accusations that gets thrown at evolutionary theorists is this is a just-so story. You know, you're constructing a very believable but largely confabulated narrative in the present to explain something from the past. We have no way of judging whether or not this is true. What do you make of that argument? I'll say a few things. I mean, so for me,

1:27:32when I think about a story, usually the way people talk about it is it's really just another word for What do you make of that argument? sources online so people are reading, can look at the evidence that I marshal for each of the different fields and just go to the particular field and look at the citations, look at the endnotes. I think in the future, people are going to be doing that more. So I guess what I'm saying is like, I want to be very careful and clear about what empirical support I use to back the claims. I think also it's important to be speculative. But the fact of the matter is that every hypothesis is a story. And the crucial piece that I think is often a mess is that my hypotheses, people in evolutionary psychology, we're not saying something about the past per se. We're talking about the design of some particular mechanism. transparent, you know, it's got a retina, it's got this transparent lens, all these features that

1:28:33make it really good for that function. You wouldn't say, well, that's a story. Oh yeah, that's it. The eye is good for seeing. Psychological adaptations are the same sort of thing like hunger. I mean, look, it's got some measurement system. It makes a good at its job, which is figuring out, do I need calories? Is my stomach full? Has it been a long time since my meal? How much blood is in whatever? And so the evidence of design is what we use as evidence for supporting a particular proposal or hypothesis. No different from what anyone else does. The only difference in the evolutionary approach is that we say, can we use what's known about humans' evolutionary history to guide our guesses about what the functions are?

1:29:07And then we test those. So I've always found this critique weird because I feel like they have guesses. They have hypotheses. I have hypotheses. They have data. I have data. I have whatever. And the only difference is you just made your hypothesis up because you said, well, social this, cultural that. Sorry, but I don't want to diss anyone. So whatever. But I used a theory and I used that theory to develop a plausible evolution of all hypothesis. And then I looked at the data to see if they support that particular proposal. So I confess, you know, I've heard this story since, you know, I started in the academy in 1993, probably before that. And I find it, to be candid, quite silly. I think it's a misunderstanding of

1:29:44the way science works and what is happening in the field of evolutionary psychology, which is hypothesis generation and testing about function, not some story about, well, what happened 3 million years ago. Well, also, let's not forget that a lot of the hypotheses, like if you've got pre-registered research, a lot of the time they end up being right. It's fascinating to me that in a world of replication crises and the social sciences basically just eating shit over the last decade and a half, two decades. Two of the fields that haven't had that happen all that much have been the two that are the most controversial to talk about, evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. Those have actually stood up really nicely. So if

1:30:23you're going to point the finger, I understand that if you do the anti-blank slatist approach um it can make you feel a little uncomfortable especially if you've got a worldview that suggests inequality is something that we need to get rid of i think everybody wants to try and have an equal society wouldn't that be lovely but it it sort of reminds you that shit isn't fair and that the world is not infinitely malleable, that the right social policies can right all wrongs and that you can flatten the playing landscape for everybody simply through the correct interventions. There is going to be mean, nasty people. Some people out there are going to misbehave regardless of what you try to do with rehabilitation or schooling

1:31:13or whatever, because we have pretty ancient motives that you can't repattern with the correct, like scare them straight intervention or whatever. Yeah, totally. And I think the question is always compared to what, right? Like, so for evolutionary psychology, I think your point is really well made. When I was in grad school, you know, the people who were looking at human social behavior, which we also were, but without the evolutionary point of view, all they did was stuff. And all they did, they did a lot of stuff on stereotype threat. They did a lot of stuff on the implicit association task, all this implicit racism. And they were sitting there and telling us that we weren't doing science because we are evolutionary people.

1:31:49And then here we are, you know, 25, 25 30 years later and that stuff has completely fallen apart it's like you know and we at the time we were we to ourselves not to them we'd say well at least we're not just like you know doing advocacy but with some veneer of science too which is what they were really doing like because because that was also driven by the moralistic stuff is like you know the stereotype stuff this is good this is yeah yeah stereotypes that's bad whatever and then here we are 30 years later and I could have told them how it was going to come out. I was like, well, my work, you know, on race, which was just about, you know, can you provide place, cases in which people don't sort of notice

1:32:23one another's race. That work has held up pretty, pretty well. Who was your grad supervisor? It was Lita Cosmides and the late John Tooby were, were, were. Fuck. I was, yeah. You, you were. I was so lucky. That's the Beatles of grad supervisors. Yeah, I met John at HBEST 2023, I think, in Palm Springs. And I was horribly underqualified and was part of a symposium. I think I was the only guy at the symposium. That was cool. And I got up and I got to talk in front of all of you guys and and and you know a ton of people that i didn't know and then john came up and it felt a little bit like uh sort of meeting the queen i guess and which meeting bus is is not too dissimilar um and he's had some really nice

1:33:11things to say i've loved the show i really appreciate you being a platform for revolutionary psychology and i think that you've done some great work and it's a shame that you didn't get to do a degree in it and and a few other things and that you know it's a the fact that he's passed is like a is a real a real shame because he would have been friend of the show he can be friend of me if not friend of the show uh he was i mean he was a wonderful man i consider him to be a i'll say i think it was a genius fucking savant he was a genius i i would say for me the comparison was like it was speaking like the oracle delphi because you would come to him with a question and then you know something you'd be thinking about

1:33:44and you would take a second to think about it and then he would just with his john to be sort of explain uh but that was my to be impression with all due respect um he would and then he would give you this answer, you're like, man, he nailed it. He's Master Yoda. Yeah, correct. He really was Master Yoda. Empathy. Tell me about Empathy. Kind of interesting. Yeah, super interesting. I mean, Empathy is kind of, it has a lot, it's certainly got a lot written about it. Paul Bloom has done some nice work on it. Against Empathy. Against Empathy. And, I mean, again, for the show, everyone's a friend of the show. I'm going to have to find out who an enemy of the show is. Oh, I've got enough. They'll be in the comments.

1:34:20OK, in the comments. Great, yeah. We'll see them in the comments. Yeah, I mean, I think for social creatures such as us, it's pretty important to kind of be able to measure what other people are feeling, because that helps you with your own strategy with respect to them so if they're an ally and they're feeling sad it's like theory of mind types it's a little bit of theory of mind but it's not just their mind it's it's all of these so i think of it as i'm measuring what you're trying to measure so it is a little bit of a meta thing so like i'm if you're sad i'm trying to measure how sad are you and how sad are you well you're trying to figure out how bad things are. And that can help me, right? Because in both directions, and I think this is one thing that Paul has identified. So one thing that's nice about empathy is that if you're sad, then I can comfort you. And that's good for me because you're my friend and I can make you feel better and maybe help you think about how to feel better. But if you're my enemy and I have a certain amount of empathy, that is, I know what you're feeling, I can make you feel worse, right? This is why torture is so effective

1:35:13is that we know what's going to hurt, both mental and physical, right? So, you know, if I know that you are, let's go back to jealousy, the jealous sort, and I say, well, your girlfriend or partner or whatever it is, Cindy or John or whatever it is, no judgment, I saw them with another person, then I can make you feel bad because I know that that's going to hit your own measurement system. So empathy is a pretty useful thing because it helps us figure out both how to help and hurt others. Mostly we think about it in the sense of helping, right? Because empathy usually leads to- Pro-social. Yeah, care. What do you make of the theory that empathy in some ways is investment advice, that this person is so down on their luck that they will

1:35:54be unusually, overly appreciative of any assistance that I give them. Yeah. I like to think about the question sometimes, what is the best possible thing that could happen to me in my day? And one of the things that I think about is I'm walking along a stream and I happen to be carrying a life preserver and Elon Musk is drowning. Right. And so at relatively minimal costs, I can send in the life preserver and then he's, you know, in your pocket. Yeah. And now like, so, and the reason I was able to, cause I know the drowning is bad and I sort of have that, whatever psychology. So it is good investment, but think about other cases that we don't invest. Right. So if Philly going back to Philly, you know, the fact is people go by people who are currently experiencing homelessness, as they say these days, and they don't.

1:36:44It's the people of color of the unhoused. People experiencing being unhoused. People experiencing no roof over their head. Right. And so there's a person in need, but you don't help them. Why? Because they're, I think the psychology is saying, well, they're unlikely to help me back either because they're never going to be able to, or because I'm not going to help them enough to get everyone. Oh, they're so far off the bottom. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. The stuff we saw on caressing, like there's, there's a U-shaped functions. There's optimal caressing. And just the same way there's optimal helping. I want to help the people. And by the way, this was, again, going back to John Tooby, sort of a banker's paradox,

1:37:16which is you want to give loans to those who need a loan but are going to be able to repay it. You know, right? So you've got this U-shaped thing. Banker's paradox. Yeah, that's lovely. What about gratitude? Yeah. So first of all, really should have more of in our lives. And I want to say thank you for having me on the show. Thank you for being here. I want to do nothing else. 11.37 a.m. I don't want to be anywhere else other than talking bullshit with you. That's it. I don't want to be anywhere else. So, thank you for that. So, I do. And I think, you know, going back to the point that humans are social, when people do nice things for you, which is usually the antecedent of granted, you want to signal, okay, I acknowledge that. And this is going to increase

1:38:00the extent to which I am potentially going to deliver benefits to you down the road too. So because the person who's giving you benefits, it's good. One of the things they're probably going to get out of it. I mean, if we're friends and I help you, then that's good for me because you're better off and whatever. But another thing is, there's going to be potential help down the line. So gratitude, you want to make sure you signal, look, I recognize that A, you've just helped me. And B, more importantly, you generally, you're saying, I know that you go around the world thinking that I'm someone who you want to help, not someone you want to hurt or just ignore. And so you're reinforcing the cycle of reciprocal

1:38:33benefits and potentially alliance. And this you're reinforcing the cycle of reciprocal benefits and potentially alliance. And if you, this thing about what happens if you don't express gratitude, you're like, well, I'm not sure I'm gonna help that guy again. Cause he didn't acknowledge that I delivered this benefit to him. Yeah, of course. Right, so you sort of upping the psychological little bookkeeping. Did he even know that I did it? Yeah. Did he even notice that I helped him in this way? Yeah, I think, so I don't know, I think a lot of the people that listen to this show are in a category of people that pay attention maybe more than on average. And that can be a real blessing because you notice things. If you don't

1:39:08wrangle it correctly, then that can turn into anxiety, rumination, intrusive thoughts. But one of the sort of challenges there is if you don't have a good set point for gratitude, what you can do is pay a lot of small benefits to somebody like my housemate, for instance, like he might have, he might leave something out or like he leaves his hoodies around and I'm like, I'll tend to like fold the hoodie and just put it on the desk personally, because I like the environment to be tidy, but also because I'm like, huh, like if he puts it on and it's usually a modern wisdom hoodie, like if that looks a bit shitty, it's not going to be cool for him and it's bad rep for the brand. But because he pays attention, he notices. So there is this sort of balance between how much

1:39:50attention you pay and then how much gratitude. And this is on both the giver and the receiver. And I think that your goal should be to have the level of gratitude and show the level of gratitude at the level of attention that you pay. Because if you have a mismatch with that, what you can end up doing is feeling like there's an imbalance in the resolution that you're looking at things. I did this little thing. Isn't that cute? It's great. You do some grand gesture. Obviously, you organize a surprise for your friend. For instance, my business partner in Nutanix, it was his 40th birthday in the UK a couple of weeks ago. And me and a couple of the other guys got together and decided that we're going to buy him and his family with his kids a

1:40:33trip to Lapland. Full thing. The kids are not going to go to Kingston upon Thames to go and see Santa. They're going to go to fucking Finland. And we've sorted the whole thing and flights and hotels and a reindeer sled and all the rest of it. And we gave it to him and he cried and it was really, really beautiful. That wasn't lovely. That's obviously going to be something which is worthy of gratitude. He's going to go. He's going to have these memories. We did it at the appropriate time before. He's got four months to owe us before actually having to cash in the favor, so to speak. But I think what's really cool when it comes to gratitude is, oh, like this person came around to my house for dinner and they know that I like this particular flavor of soft drink.

1:41:11And I got just one can for them in advance. Oh, isn't that cool? And I think that the small elements like that, continuing to lower your threshold for what you believe is worthy of celebration and gratitude, I think that is something that everyone can do. And one of the pieces of advice that I get asked for a lot at the live shows is I don't feel my successes emotionally, even though I achieve them quantifiably or objectively, what do you think I should do to try and bring more of this in? I'm like, gratitude is great, but it's kind of hard to do. But what you can do is celebrate your friends when they achieve basically anything, no matter how small it is, is worthy of an achievement. Some balloons, a cake, a cookie,

1:41:57a cuddle, a fucking dinner, a big party or whatever. One of my friends at the start of this year had his first album launch and I was like, I'm going to organize an album launch for you. Isn't this great? And it's actually kind of a vicious reciprocal gratitude practice. Because if I make it plain that I'm prepared to celebrate you for something small, we're horrible at celebrating ourselves, but we're great at celebrating others. So even if we can't do it for ourselves, if we do it for others, they might start doing it for us. And you end up with this, huh, yeah, I did. I did do that, complete that tour or write that book or, you know, publish that thing or whatever, like, and everyone else did it on my behalf and I'll do it for them.

1:42:33So I think that's kind of a way to hack this system that you can use. And this is what's great. If you understand, well, this is why we have friendships and this is why alliances are important and this is why reciprocal altruism exists. And gratitude's important, but it's kind of hard to do for ourselves, but it's easy to do for other people. And if you pay attention, you have small things, you can create this like feedback, positive feedback loop, a boom loop, rather than a doom loop of, I'm going to do more for other people. And that's one of the ways that tactically I've like tried to put some of this stuff into practice. Yeah, totally. And I think this is an area where I'm typically pretty critical of clinical psychology, which I'm not sure how much it's done for us. But this,

1:43:09I seem to have gotten right, which is that adding gratitude to your life really does, at least my read of this literature, holding aside, replicate, whatever. It seems like this does make people happier, more content, calmer. And it probably, I mean, like, so evolution sitting there and it is rewarding you for like, we wouldn't feel the warm glow of gratitude if it wasn't doing something for us. And I think to your point, yeah, you got to figure out the right amount, but there's something really deep in there about relationships, which is, you know, figuring out, and this goes back to empathy, you know, what does that person care about with respect to how I think about them? So in my own particular particular case i don't do it often enough but my partner loves having she just loves having flowers

1:43:46in the kitchen like where she's chicks love flowers they love they chicks i'm yet to meet a woman that doesn't have a day made by a nice flower delivery and uh the sort of like points that i get for remembering to refresh the flowers again i don, I know I don't do it enough. So the other thing I just want to mention on that front is that I think psychologists have underappreciated how much work economists have already done. with Vernon Smith and those guys at the Economic Science Laboratory, they talked about goodwill accounting, which was basically a forerunner of some of this measurement of gratitude. So they basically said, yeah, so people sort of keep track of the good that they did for someone else.

1:44:30And then they signal to that other person, hey, I've just upped your little like goodwill account. So they literally talked about it as how much goodwill do I have for you because of the things you did for me. And I just want to say, I think there's lots of like work in economics, which could be mined for some of the interesting social stuff. So true. Right. And it's sort of an underexploited resource. I think economics has got bad branding because when people think economics, they think about numbers and the way that the fiscal policy should work. But behavioral economics is one of the most robust and fascinating. russ roberts is a fucking animal like his entire sort of thesis around like wild i think it's called wild decisions was that the book or like

1:45:07big decisions something like that uh good friend of the show he's fucking great like he's absolutely fantastic and um yeah that i completely agree so i guess this plays into trust and distrust that i'm gonna guess trust is a prediction of how much i can rely on someone and distrust, I'm going to guess trust is a prediction of how much I can rely on someone and distrust is the opposite. Exactly. It's funny you pair those two, because back when I was with Vernon Smith, who was one of the co-founders of behavioral economics, they were talking about the trust game all the time. And basically that was this measurement of to what extent should I believe whatever this person is doing or saying they're going to do and so on. It's sort of a measurement of that probability. And then there's

1:45:45probably some other stuff in there about magnitude, whereas distrust is exactly, it's a measurement of the reverse. And so you've got to sort of, you know, on the one, and it can be very helpful, right? So trust can lead to gains in trade, right? If I trust that you're going to give me your whatever car, when I give you this check today, you're going to be the car tomorrow, then we can have whatever. But of course there there's, you're always risk exposing yourself to being taken advantage of to losing and so on. So you need to have, it's a very, it's tricky, right? And people make these mistakes all the time. They have too much trust when they shouldn't and not enough when they should. Um, and, uh, those, and depending on the details, the stakes can be very

1:46:23big, right? Yeah, I think I've been kind of fascinated by advice hyper responders. So people that take popular or commonly held wisdom, tactical suggestions to heart, and it doesn't distribute. The problem with advice is that it doesn't distribute evenly. The people who already have the predisposition tend to take it to heart, while the ones that really need to hear it probably blow past it unchanged. And it's kind of interesting when it comes to the trust thing, because you can see many situations where the modern world would say, well, look, you've got the law, you've got police, there's a legal system, there's mediums of exchange. You've got lots of reasons. But on the other side, you've got way more mobility. People can up and leave and go to another town

1:47:12or another city or another country. You've got a variety of ways that people can be slippery with what they do and don't take and stuff like that. So yeah, the stakes have been both lowered and raised at the same time. Oh, totally. I think that was a really good example. I guess there's all sorts of cultural ways that we have to enforce trust. I like those examples, police and courts and the law and so on, but they're not going to be relevant in lots of different circumstances. So for example, you have a private chat with a close friend and maybe you make an off-color joke or something like that, or you say that- Or you do it on a podcast. Yeah, you do it on a podcast or something. And then they would ever sell that to TMZ or whoever

1:47:51would be interested. Well, the courts, they're going to say, they don't care. They're going to prosecute you for breaking my trust. Yeah, exactly. So you've trusted them in this communication, but you're not supported. You're not backed up by the instruments of state or whatever. Isn't it interesting that in certain situations you talk about client-patient confidentiality, which is essentially litigiously enforced trust? This is, I'm going to be telling you things that in the wrong hands would be potentially ruinous to me. We understand that there is a limit to trust. Therefore, we have to enact trust. We have to encase it in law in order for you to feel that you can open up fully. Exactly. And that's what I mean, I think that's one of the coolest things about,

1:48:37you know, the modern world, right, is that we have these contracts that we can enforce, which then allow a lot of transactions that to take place, which never possibly could. I mean, that is, you know, you could argue about the value of the clinical psychology therapist relationship, but without that, it would be undermined completely. I mean, you have to bind that person to silence in that context, or yeah, you're not going to get the disclosure, right? So the antecedent of that was the religious context. Right. So it's not a coincidence that those confessionals were private. Right. That it's on the corner over there and no one else can hear. You don't do it on the pulpit. Exactly. To the entire congregation.

1:49:11So that's sort of held. And then, of course, there's the additional thing, which is, yeah, it's not just on pain of whatever prosecutions, pain of, you know, hellfire or whatever. You can't disclose whatever happened. So you need some kind of cultural penalty. Hellfire, a reliable enforcer. Reliable, yeah. Yeah. You've mentioned a couple of times clinical psychology. What's your perspective on that? What's your opinion? I think clinical psychology has probably helped a lot of people. I should say in this context, I've been heavily influenced by my relationship with Josh Zlotkis, future friend of the pod. He works with me on living fossils. He's a clinician who's become- By the way, everyone needs to go and subscribe to Living Fossils on Substack. I'm a subscriber

1:49:49and it absolutely rules. Thanks. I'm expressing gratitude. But he has an up-close seat that I don't have. I mean, when I was a pan, I saw clinical psychology among my colleagues. Some of them were clinicians, but he's been in the clinic and he was trained as a clinical psychologist. And he's directed my attention to a lot of this literature that says, look, there's a lot of different techniques out there. As far as anyone can tell, ain't none of them better than the others. I mean, CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, seems to be the front runner right now. And then he says, look, it looks to me and all the good that's done is kind of, to your point, is the trusting relationship itself, not the technology of clinical psychology. Again, don't get me wrong. Some stuff has been important,

1:50:32like the pharmacological stuff that's helped people with psychiatric conditions. There's no denying that that's an advance and that's real science, that's whatever. I'm skeptical about clinical psychology, particularly now because as far as I can tell, the training has been politicized, right? Yeah, I think you have a somewhat disproportionate cohort of people that are doing it as well that maybe have a particular worldview. Yeah, hey, I read the Contra CBT three-part series on living fossils. I'm fucking there as well. Okay, Depression, talking about psychology and interventions like that. We've talked about anxiety. What's interesting about depression? Yeah. Again, disclaimer, depression's horrible. And so this is going to be an explanation for it that might not be right and in no way should minimize the

1:51:17condition. This is another one where I will self-disclose and say, I can say from firsthand experience, there's almost nothing, that's almost nothing that's worse than genuine depression. I mean, it's hard for someone who hasn't experienced it. It's a little bit like what you were saying with the incest case. Like, you know, I remember when I was depressed and people said, well, I'll just feel happier. You're like, okay. It's very unpleasant. Hey, diabetic, why don't you just produce more insulin? More insulin, please. Whatever. So a lot of this goes back to Ed Hagen's work, Friend of the Pod. So depression, it doesn't seem like it's just sadness. And I think another piece of it is recently in the news, postpartum depression, something that occurs often after pregnancy.

1:51:57So one way to look at depression goes something like this. It sees it as a way to bargain. So people who are depressed, they withdraw from whatever they're doing, including childcare, if it's postpartum depression. And they show signs that they might kill themselves, right? They have suicidal ideation. They might make movements in that direction, right? So they might get tools or whatever. And think about the perspective of the people around them. In some sense, losing someone who is close, potentially your mate or your daughter or whatever, that's a big cost. I'm going to do the things that kind of look like I might kill myself or take myself out of the social world, which is bad for other people, as a way to get them to invest more in me, to support me.

1:52:46It's sort of interesting in the case of postpartum depression. When do you suddenly need much more support? Well, now you've got another organism who you have to care for, right? There's no one else who. So the burden is now increased on you, which means, hey, I really could do with some fucking help here. I'm in need. And so what about the behavior of depression? Okay. I understand if you get to the, you know, the, the, the end, the, uh, you know, finality of it, which would be a suicide or a suicide attempt. What about when we come back a little bit more, this sort of withdrawal to making themselves small? Cause it seems to me like if you were to try and motivate behavior that would encourage other people to want to spend time around you you'd be more fun

1:53:27like we're drawn to people that are a sunny disposition in some ways i guess you're triggering the empathy in some forms but like you're not as social so maybe you're not going to see people as much well how are you going to get the attention of people if you don't want to see people so much so i first of all again i don't know but my withdrawal is basically saying i'm not going to play your reindeer games and you need me to you know you need the fourth for monopoly you need the second for chess you need the 10th to go hunt that peccary over there or whatever it is oh that's interesting yeah so like i'm not just with yeah so I take your point about, you know, the- Functionally, socially might be quite bad,

1:54:05but like from a utility perspective, you're actually taking yourself out of the- Hey, where's Rob? Yeah. Rob, oh, he's over there. Why is Rob not one of- Hey, we need to, Rob, we need to come and play. Yeah, we can't play pickleball. We've only got three people. I want to play doubles, whatever. And so the withdrawal is sort of like an honest signal. No, it's not just that I'm going to withdraw from my social i have withdrawn from the social activities i'm not i'm not at lab meeting i'm not doing the whatever i'm not in the green room talking to gaming out the way the podcast whatever it is and i'm not going to be back until you pony up and you you know you do whatever it is that i need what about the reduction in energy being a little bit

1:54:40more sort of low energy and and why why feel so? Why does it need to feel so? What's it motivating? that you're potentially suicidal because removing yourself from other people's worlds completely, that is a huge cost for people to bear. I mean, I can't even imagine. I've never lost someone under those circumstances, but it's got to be, I mean, it's horrible. So my suspicion is that those horrible, that motivation, that sensation is part of the honest signal of that motivation to say, I am ready to do this thing. But moreover, I think it is causing you to withdraw. It's saying, yeah, I'm really going to withdraw. I'm literally not motivated to play pickleball with you. I don't want to do that. That's not my thing right now. So the feeling of the badness is part of the

1:55:32motivational system causing the withdrawal, which is causing the imposition of costs on other people. I don't know that. I mean, obviously no one knows that for sure, but that sort of would be my guess. Is there something around the conservation of energy? I don't know if I'm going to even be able to get enough calories to be able to move forward. Therefore, I should reduce my expenditure. I don't know if it's caloric. Again, my sense is that there's other pieces to withdrawal that I think are interesting, which is that it is true that when you're withdrawn, you more or less could spend more of your cycles kind of thinking through stuff. I mean, again, going back to John Tooby, he talked to me about graduate school

1:56:09giving all of the signals to an organism that something's wrong because you're low status, you've got no money, you're getting no signals that you're doing anything right. Nobody cares about your work. No one cares about you. You're at the bottom of the totem pole. And he's like, and then he's like, and so John's like, what's not really surprising that all of you were depressed all the time is because you have no signals that you're doing great. I mean, you know, the most common thing that John ever said to me was, you know, Rob, you could be replaced. So, I mean, that's uncharitable. He was a wonderful advisor, but I'm just saying like, you're getting a lot of signals from the world that you're low status,

1:56:43you're not doing anything and you know, you're not getting publications. And if you are, it's like one, so you have one good thing and then a million bad things. And so is it crazy to think that natural selection built the system into say, if you're not doing well, if everything's going kind of bad, maybe just step back and think about your life choices. Like, is this the right way to go? And so when you're withdrawn and low energy and so on, yeah, you're not doing pickleball, but you can introspect. You can think, is this the way I want to go? So maybe there's a little bit of that going on. Interesting. Okay. So we've talked anger, jealousy, envy. What about contempt? Yeah. Good one. Contempt's so interesting. I use this analogy about,

1:57:22not that I play a lot of video games because that's obviously not very appealing, but if you are going through a video game and you've got a lot of magic items and so on and you see some, you know, whatever, a cudgel or some tool or whatever, you just ignore it because it's not worth picking up or whatever. And I think contempt is basically measuring, is this a person who, by their very nature or in their history, has done something which makes them unworthy of my friendship, alliance, relationship, whatever. So contempt is sort of saying, look, I have a limited amount of time in my day. I have a limited amount of time in my life. I have a limited number of friendship slots. I have a limited number of partner slots.

1:58:00In virtue of whatever it is you did or whoever it is you are. I'm just not interested in affiliation. So it's sort of measuring the fact that you've got a person or a thing, which is just not very valuable. And then what does it motivate? It motivates usually avoidance a little bit. It's got some other motivations too. Usually there's some communicative thing, which is to say, you know, you suck or they suck, which is maybe signaling, yeah, I recognize that that particular individual is beneath my contempt or whatever. And I think this is important for a social creature. Look, we have, we do have limited slots, just like limited inventories and video games. We can only affiliate with so many people during the day. And so contempt is basically

1:58:40guiding us away from that and saying, yeah, this is not an individual with whom you want to associate. And then resentment, is that similar to contempt? I think resentment is more with respect that person was promoted because they have a relationship with the boss not because they excelled at their job so they got some benefit to which they weren't entitled and so that measures the extent to which some benefit has been gotten that wasn't or the reverse okay so it's about fairness in some ways there's a lot of fairness in there so contempt is low status status. Whereas, you know, yeah, I would say resentment is much more associated with this sort of violation of an exchange principle. And what is the behavior and what is the behavior trying to motivate in the other person?

1:59:37So, yeah, I mean, I think in contempt, it's a little bit fear that it sort of avoidance or something. But in resentment, it's interesting. First of all, again, I don't know. It seems like most people when they're experiencing what they do is they want to talk about it. Not always, but often they want to identify. They're trying to say, you should, look, I didn't get the promotion and you should be irritated because they did and they didn't deserve it. They didn't actually meet the requirement. So let's all condemn the person who did that and maybe I can revert. We were asking earlier, what's the use of moral, well, that's a good example, right? Well, if I can displace that injustice, well, then maybe I can get the promotion.

2:00:19How about embarrassment? Another good one and also tough i mean it seems to be something like um so what causes people to be embarrassed it's like usually they violated some social norm right your fly is down or burped at a wedding or i don't know pick your favorite embarrassing things watch seinfeld the office or whatever and one of the things that we haven't talked a lot about is like facial stuff when it comes to emotion. So embarrassment has this interesting flushy bit to it, which is involuntary. So my guess- What's that doing? Yeah, good question. So what is it measuring? So embarrassment seems to be measuring something like, did I just violate some social norm? Because I think that usually is what it is.

2:01:00There's other cases, right? So sometimes it's a little bit different from that. So like the group project is done and I only did usually is what it is. There's other cases, right? So sometimes it's a little bit different from that. So like the group project is done and I only did a bit of it, but I get all the credit. I'm like sort of embarrassed about that. It's kind of like violating a norm. Yep. Yeah. But I think what it is is something like this. You want to make sure other people know for sure that you normally would violate the norm and it was an accident. So you know the norm or you want it, your intention was to obey it, but it was an accident. Oh my God, I'm so sorry. How could I? Why am I doing it? And then what's an honest signal? An involuntary flush, because then you're

2:01:30like, oh, they didn't even have to say that they, whatever, I can see that they know they violated it because it was an involuntary reaction. Now I'm sure, because it'd be easy to say, oh, I didn't know you weren't supposed to actually say, but with theushings like oh yeah they knew and they and then and then now i've got this honest signal so my guess is you're basically saying yeah i'm a norm follower i get the rules in the future i wouldn't be following them i'm always gonna have my fly up i'm not gonna burp or whatever this was a one-off thing don't have to worry and here's the signal definitely i knew it and i and i recognize it as a as a mistake. Is it, embarrassment has to be as well

2:02:02due to perceived loss of social status. I think that's what happens. So if like, if you're seen as a non-norm follower, you're definitely- Unreliable. You're unreliable. You're like, well, yeah, this guy doesn't even follow the rules. I mean, just, I don't know. For some reason, I think by the time and I went, the first time I went to Japan, you know, when you try, you don't know what the norms are and particularly you're a stranger, strange land. And, you know, so I'm eating in a subway or something like that, which of course, and, you know, I kind of noticed people were looking. But of course, there's other reasons people would be looking. And then later on, you realize, oh. I shouldn't have been doing that.

2:02:34That was wrong. I did not. It's interesting. I wonder whether I had an interesting realization. I wonder whether people who do something that would be embarrassing, that you trip over, tripping over might be some frustration. It might even be funny. And I think what's funny about it is that you see how status damaging it would have been. You almost get to play in the sandbox. This is how it could have caused me to lose status. And I did it and no one's around. And isn't that funny? Right. Totally. Yeah. I mean, exactly. And you can see this because if you walk into a glass wall when you're alone you just bounce off and you're like i'm right but the first thing you do if you are is like i'm fine you know and then you make sure the first date very different

2:03:29oh my gosh yeah well there's not gonna be a second at that i uh it's true depends how much you play it off i was in bali maybe 10 years ago and was driving a 50 cent a day moped through the streets of changu and i was there with two australian traveler guys and we were going to a beach club and a truck pulled out in front of me 20 yards away slammed on the brakes and classic dog shit scooter that i was renting from the hotel that i was staying in back brake didn't work work. Front brake did work. The back tire came out from underneath me and I was in swim shorts and a vest and I came off. Nothing was broken, but I lost a lot of skin on the left-hand side of my body on Balinese road. The Balinese road won the fight. And the first sensation that I had wasn't,

2:04:18am I okay? The bike's on the floor. I'm in the middle of a road in Bali. Half of the left-hand side of my body is currently embedded in the tarmac a couple of yards behind me. It was, oh, no, I'm okay. I must be- I'm fine. I'm fine. Exactly. Straight away. What's the I'm fine reflex? What do you think that is? Super interesting. That one is puzzling. The minimization. Yeah, I think there's something puzzling about that. I think part of it is something like I recognize I just made a mistake. It's also interesting because sometimes people say I meant to do that, right? That's almost like a comedy line. I meant to do that. And there's some, again, you're sort of saying, look, I understand the proper way that one is supposed to operate. Although in your case, it sounds like there's equipment failure, but you're sort of signaling, I get the entire tableau of what happened. It was, you know, I know how to operate these things.

2:05:02I am a competent person. I wonder if I didn't do it because I did blame it on me. But a lot of the time people are like, a fucking bike, the bike. You can't believe the bike. Again, it's outsourcing. The norm violation that you've just done is not your fault. It won't happen again. If only I get a better bike, if I don't ride such a stupid bike in future or I'm okay, I'm okay. Yeah. I'm aware that this thing has happened. I'm aware that this is ridiculous. Okay. So that's embarrassment and then taking it up a notch. What about shame and guilt? Yeah. Super interesting. Again, moral emotions, um, having to do with yes or past behavior. So, I mean, you know, if you look at something like shame, again, it has the kind of avoidance thing, which is when people are ashamed,

2:05:45they put their head down, they try to be small. And that does seem to have to do with the fact, so what is it measuring? It's measuring something like I did or people think I did something, which again, violates a norm, right? Think about the difference between shame and embarrassment. The embarrassment is I broke a norm and maybe I didn't intend. Shame might be I broke a norm and maybe I intended to, or people think I did. And then you got to repair that, right? So how do you repair that? You sort of have to- Grovel. You have to grovel. You have to say something like, I knew the norm, I intentionally violated it, but in the future, I am telling you in the future i am not going to do that and i will

2:06:22accept a certain amount of cost in the form whatever it is social censure whatever um for having for having um broken it it's interesting though because you see shame not just in cases where uh it is an intentional violation so in some cultures people will experience shame like so if they're the victim of certain kinds of assaults, you know, people experience shame. What do you think's going on there? Yeah, it's sort of interesting. I think it's an acknowledgement that under those circumstances, because of the rules that govern the culture, that person really has lost some social value. And they're sort of acknowledging that and trying to figure out what to do about it. Now, to some extent, you're also trying to evade it. Like, again, the hiding your

2:07:04face or whatever it looks like, it's sort of a hiding thing. But it does look like you're acknowledging the loss of social value, even though it wasn't your fault. Yeah, it's a kind of vulnerability. It's an acceptance of the vulnerability, the injustice that's happened. Yeah, that's strange. Yeah, you're acknowledging there's been a switch in the hierarchy, the rules, whatever, the values. Sorry. People might judge me otherwise as well. Yeah, in some cases, it would be worse not to acknowledge it, right? And also, you've got to start thinking about what my life is now that this change has occurred. I wonder if some of it is people front running the their uh estimated opinions of others about themselves too like oh

2:07:51i know that i am that you see me in this sort of a way because if somebody has done something that's shameful or if something has happened to someone that they think other people are going to see as shameful and they sort of walk into the room and they're sort of full of beans, as we would say in the UK, that they might be seen as unselfaware, full of themselves, not sufficiently, what do you say, like giving up what they should in order to be readmitted into normal social fabric. Totally. And this signal that they're going to change in the future given the new situation. And I think it is important to remember all of this, all of, you know, shame is to do with people's beliefs about other people's beliefs, right?

2:08:40So, I mean, I just was talking to, I think it was Robin Hanson about- Front of the show. Front of the show, right? Front of the show. About, you know, survivors of, not to darken things after whatever, but like, because there you also feel, you see sometimes it's guilt and sometimes it looks more like shame, but most I think it's guilt. And again, those are people who, they've done nothing. All they did was happen not to be the whatever, have survived in some horrible thing. And it's, again, it's super interesting because they haven't intentionally violated the norm. They haven't intentionally done anything wrong. I mean, at least in these cases, but what, but I think they're having some beliefs. They have some beliefs about what other people

2:09:16could think about them. And that seems to be triggering the emotion. That's why it's so interesting, I think, and important to start, like, ask this question, what does it measure? Well, it's measuring not what did I do? It's measuring what do other people think has happened or how do other people now value me? And that gives rise to the strength of the feeling. What's interesting about the mind and attention, because I think when people think about feelings, they're kind of thinking about the suite that we've gone through so far, But there's a whole host of your relationship to your own mind, to your own thoughts and to the thoughts of mental effort. So this is the kind of thing you have, I mean,

2:10:02I don't know, you're doing the SATs or maybe you're, you know, persisting on some problem, maybe you have a job which causes you to do the same thing over and over, or you're trying to multiply three digit numbers in your head, anything, you know, mental effort. And it's so interesting. I think it is a not obvious question. Like, why does it feel like anything? Why does that feel like something? And particularly, why does it feel negative to your point about the bad feelings? And so I think that's an interesting one. And my sort of response to that, which might not be right, is, again, the opportunity cost point, which is that when you're doing something effortful, you're using these really fancy parts of your mind that are good at, you know, like

2:10:39working memory or what have you. And working memory can be doing lots of different things. It could be planning, it could be, you know, multiplying, it could be solving problems, it could be remembering. And so every time you're using it for one thing, you can't use it for another thing. And in order to figure out what to use it for, you have to somehow measure what that cost is. What is the benefit of the next best thing I could be doing? And so effort is the felt sensation of, is there something else I could be doing right now with those, not physically, but with those mental systems that would be more beneficial to me? And I find that kind of interesting that your mind needs to keep track of itself. Like there's got

2:11:14to be one part of your mind that's figuring out what the other part of your mind is doing. And at the same time, trying to figure out what could it be doing, which I think is just a miracle i mean i think boredom is a little bit like this which is why do people feel bored which is sort of like measuring you know how rewarding is my current thing usually not very if you're bored and then it's measuring sort of like well what could i be doing right um something better than this and so boredom is like saying yeah you could be doing something better uh so try to manufacture the circumstances such that you are. And again, it's one of these interesting cases where the mind is sort of monitoring what we're doing with our own minds.

2:11:46I kind of find that cool. It's fascinating. Which feeling did you understand most differently from pre and post research, do you think? Oh, that's a tough one. Well, I mean, I hadn't thought about a lot of these feelings before. I mean, some of the little ones like itchiness, I never really thought about why we itch. And then there's this whole literature on bugs crawling on you and they stimulate your reference in exactly the right way. And then you're like, oh, there's a bug on there. That was pretty, pretty cool. I mean, contempt, I hadn't really thought about either for a long time. We just discussed and I didn't really know where that came from. I mean, one feeling that is, I think, wildly understudied,

2:12:28which I got to read a little bit more about having, I did a little bit of work on that, but is going back to jealousy, but of friends. So like the saying where if you, if we're friends and you start hanging out with another person, especially kids, but also adults, they find that very irritating. They get jealous of that. I might be losing him. Or at least I might be demoted. Like, hey, I might be demoted in the cube. I was position number one, but now I might be position number two. Now I'm like two or three. I remember feeling that as a kid. Yeah, I remember that as a kid too. You would even bar you, say, I'll be your best friend. And you didn't really mean it. I wonder whether we feel it more as kids because we are less agentic and less capable of looking after ourselves, that our allegiances as children are maybe perhaps even more important than they are as adults until we get to the point when we have kids again. strategic. You don't think you're just not inhibited. Yeah, exactly. So I think there's part of that, but I don't know. I mean, one of the joys of writing about all the different feelings

2:13:25was being able to read the literature on all the different feelings. And so for me, I mean, little stuff, I mean, this might not be exactly what you're getting at, but I didn't exactly know how breathing worked beforehand. I mean, I know how breathing works. I do it every day, but it, you know, you might've thought that the urge to breathe, that sensation was to do with how much oxygen is still dissolved in your blood, not enough oxygen to breathe. It turns out it's carbon dioxide. And I have a little story about a disaster that occurred because people are in a nitrogen environment. And so their carbon dioxide is not increasing in the way it would if they weren't. And so that was sort of interesting.

2:14:00I mean, that's the thing is you, once you get into the guts of these little systems and you ask this question, what are they measuring? There's all sorts of fun insights in there. Everything's fascinating. Yeah, it's all cool. Which human feeling did you find that was the hardest to explain evolutionarily? Were there some where you're like, what the fuck is the adaptive reason? One that was perhaps more weak or less strong? Yeah, well well one of the things that i did was i have kind of like an end chapter which is just all the random ones i call it monera because when i was growing up there were five kingdoms this keeps changing and the fifth kingdom was monera which was just weird stuff like they didn't have a they didn't have a nucleus i'm

2:14:36like wait you don't have a new so i just called that monera and there's a lot of stuff in there that some of those are pretty freaking weird i I mean, Deja Vu, I think is pretty weird. Like the sense that you, you know, that you've seen something before that you definitely haven't. I imagine that's some sort of side effect, but that one's like, that's pretty strange. I think. I think there's other like nostalgia, these other temporal ones, he's having to do, this sense of time's gone by. You can't like go back in time and get this thing back. So what is nostalgia exactly up to? Is that like a whole, is that just another side effect or what's going on with that? The biggest thing I found was just how under-researched all these different things were. But many of them remain mysterious, and there's a lot of cases where there's not much consensus.

2:15:26Which one do you think causes the most havoc in modern life? Envy, almost without a doubt. I think, I don't know. I mean, there's probably other ones too. I think the second candidate would be the one I mentioned early, being judgy. They're both condemnation. Yeah, they're both pretty bad. But I mean, the thing about envy is that man, again, being exposed to just all the stuff in the world, the unpleasant feelings that have, I mean, judginess, more condemnation. That's bad too for all the reasons we discussed. I mean, those are, those are two pretty bad ones. Right. What, which emotion do you think society would collapse the fastest without? Ooh, interesting. I mean, to your point earlier, trust, that feeling of trust is a pretty important one. I mean, societies that have a lot of trust in them, whether because they have similar institutions to what we do, right?

2:16:21I mean, they have police and they have courts and so on. But man, do they have a high trust society. The enforcement is way more bottom up than it is top down. Yeah, exactly. They don't need the courts and stuff like that because people, right, they don't. Have you ever been on the phone to a friend in Japan when they've been traveling on the subway? It's hilarious. So I have a friend that I'd call from time to time and we would be talking and he would say okay it's 30 seconds until the tube gets here and i would know that he would need to be completely silent from the second that he walks on even if he's got headphones he couldn't whisper so the conversation he would be like it's going to be about seven and a half minutes and

2:16:57obviously it would be clinically precise as well because it's fucking japan right and he would be replying to me on whatsapp as i was talking to him what do you mean by that oh right okay so what i did and i'm like monologuing away as i'm getting text responses to my verbal uh output it's kind of interesting no it's super interesting case and i think illustrates the point which is that the the trust is a fulcrum. I mean, look at societies that don't have trust in them. And, you know, that suppresses all kinds of, you know, coordination and mutually transactions. That's an interesting point around, obviously, I'm going back to the UK in a couple of weeks. And one of the big talking points there at the moment is immigration, mass immigration that seems to be happening.

2:17:39And it's kind of interesting that a lot of the discussion is around trust. Actually, I think if we get to the root of it, it's one group of people saying, I'm concerned that if we let people in that are not from this culture that don't adhere to our norms, I am not going to be able to trust that the typical levels of safety and community that I'm used to will continue. And another group is saying, actually, the trust and distrust that you have around this group is unfounded. And you don't need to be that concerned because the level of cultural homogeneity or similarity should not be indicative of how much trust you have of this. So it really does come down to a discussion around trust. And that is, I mean, one of the keystone topics of the last U.S. election.

2:18:27It's certainly the flashpoint that's happening in the U.K. at the moment. So, yeah, trust is fundamental. I think it's fundamental. I mean, as you say, I mean, if all of a sudden people lost that, I do think that, yeah, I think society is – I mean, you can see it because when they do. And so to your point about, yeah, I think society's, and you can see it because when they do. And so to your point about, yeah, it's really just a question to what extent people abide by the norms when they come to it. And in some cases they do, right? We have people assimilate and they adopt norms and in other cases they don't. But the way that society's work turn completely, extremely on the whether or not people are following the local norms because it's harder

2:19:00to coordinate. And so, yeah, if you have this norm that says, you know, you should comply with the appropriate government regulations, yada, yada, yada, then one thing happens. If you have a norm that says, look, if there's any way to exploit the government and those regulations, then you are a fool if you don't. Well, then you get a very different set of outcomes. I'm not saying what's happening in this country or Britain. I'm just saying if you run the thought experiment. Well, it doesn't matter about whether it is happening. It's whether or not people think it will happen or whether or not people think it's happening. This is the whole discussion. And I keep putting my foot in it and I need to come up

2:19:32with a way to communicate this more succinctly. A lot of the time, people's issue is not with the thing. It's with what they think the thing is. So for instance, intergenerational competition theory. So like that sense, how do I feel like I am doing at my stage of life compared to how I think that my parents were doing at my stage of life? Both of those things, how I think I'm doing, not how I'm doing compared to how I think my parents were doing. Both of those situations are your interpretations of where you are versus where you think you should be or where you think you are versus where you think you should be. And neither of those are necessarily actually related to reality all that much.

2:20:18People are confused about this too, because, you know, every generation is basically the best generation when it comes to, you know, their material circumstances, their safety, how much food they get, their longevity, of course, that's an oversimplification, but more or less that's the case. Like, it's just not true that your grandfather bought a three bedroom house with a quarter and had 20 cents left over. I mean, like, you know, and the other piece about that is to go back to envy is that it's not just that people are comparing themselves, it's that they're comparing themselves. They think it's unfavorable because of their beliefs, not because of the facts, and then they get angry, right?

2:20:52Because then they want to blame someone, usually a government or a set of policies and so on. And as, you know, Yoda said, you know, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. I mean, can't put it better than that. how he deals with this. When I first started learning about sort of proximate and ultimate reasons for behavior, evolutionary explanations, I found myself feeling more and more like a puppet and less like an agentic individual. I was able to blame other people less for their actions in some ways, but that also made like culpability and congruence and affinity and stuff. It all got very complex. And I think that when people learn about this, there can be a sense of like, okay, well, what the,

2:21:45like where are my way markers for how I should relate to my own emotions? Like tactically, have you found a way to integrate this sort of learning to improve your own emotional life? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think part of it is just come in terms of the fact that you're gonna feel what you're gonna feel. And that's almost out of your hands. I mean, not completely, but more or less. The part that you can change is what you do based on those feelings. And I think there's some help in the evolutionary point of view. Again, going back to the earlier point, which is like, what is this trying to get me to do and why? And is that something that's good for me or bad for me or good for the people around me, bad for the people around me?

2:22:23So I think there's a certain amount of, yeah, you just got to get comfortable with the fact that you're going to feel the feelings whether you want to or not. I mean, envy is going to happen. Yes, if I could get rid of it, I would. I don't think it's a particularly productive emotion. And I'm blessed. I have a wonderful partner. I have a wonderful sister. I have a wonderful family. I have a wonderful sister. I have a wonderful family. I have wonderful circumstances. But there's always opportunities to feel envious, right? So someone was on the pod three times or something like that, right? But then I do step back and say, oh, well, okay. So I can think about envy's trying to get me to whatever, but I already am. So that's fine. So I think that's sort of the thing is to come

2:23:00to terms with, yeah, I'm just going to feel those feel. I don't think you can be the Buddha and have no experience of whatever it was that the, but maybe you can, I can't, then you have no lust in your heart and have no envy in your soul. I think those are just things that Darwin gave us. And that's just it. I think you're allowed to feel the way that you do is a lovely synopsis. I send it to my friends an awful lot. I send it to my girlfriend and whether it's good or bad, but typically when it's bad. And a lot of, when you hear people talking about their emotions, what they're saying is they're, they're kind of battling with the, this is a sensation that I'm going through and I don't know if I should be.

2:23:42I don't know if I'm allowed to be. And getting rid of that judgment, like you're allowed, it's okay for you to feel that way. And maybe this is a meditation practice that I do called jhana. One of the interesting things about that compared with mindfulness, classic mindfulness is with classic mindfulness, a thought arises and then you purposefully notice it and let it go. So in some ways there is a kind of distancing, which if you take a CBT informed lens, isn't necessarily great because that can reinforce why I can't deal with this. I shouldn't deal with this. And you're doing it in a much more gentle way. It's like an opening of the hand as opposed to a pushing. But there is still a degree of distancing

2:24:24that's occurring in there, even if it's more due to inertia than sort of deliberate action. But with the jhana approach, what's cool, you have a thought that arises inside of you. Let's say like a classic sort of meditator's practice of I'm sitting down, I'm meditating, and then I notice that my mind has wandered because I'm thinking about something to do with work. And then I get frustrated at the fact that my mind has wandered. You go, okay, so there's kind of like two orders of emotions that are going on. And as opposed to I've noticed and then I've noticed that I'm noticing and I release it and let it go. With Jhana, you actually try and welcome that in. You see that part of you. It's similar to like internal family systems or parts work. So you'll see, oh, there's that part of me that's thinking about this thing.

2:25:05Come here. I'm so glad that I have something I care about so much that even when I'm supposed to be meditating, this thing still arises. And I really, it's not your time right now. You've a welcome participant at the party, but you need to, you're not, it's not quite right. And then look at that bit of me, that bit of me that wants to do things well. I'm so glad I have that part of me that wants to do things that wants to try that wants to be successful. Look at how much you're just like, uh, I had this vision in my mind throughout my entire retreat. I did recently have a Roomba, uh, like slightly ungainly, but very overly enthusiastic Roomba going around and he's cleaning stuff and he gets stuck in the corner and he's cleaning an area that's already being cleaned. And he

2:25:43doesn't know he needs to re-dock and just chill out and recharge. I'm like, oh dude, come here. Like, I really appreciate you're trying so hard. You want me to do, you want me to be good at meditating. You want me to have a better quality of life and so on and so forth. Like, come here, wouldn't that be lovely? And like, bring it in, bring it to myself. And I like that. I like that idea. I think it's really, really cool. And when you think about, I have these emotions and I've got this tension and I shouldn't be feeling this thing. And you go, well, okay, well, what if you just said, I didn't choose to feel this way. I am feeling that thing. It's got a reason. It's got a purpose. It's trying to keep me safe. It's trying to get me to bond with other people. It's trying to ensure

2:26:15that I enforce my boundaries where I should do. It's making sure that I don't waste my time. I'm bored. I'm spending my time appropriately. All of these things like, thank you so much for sort of looking after me. And now you've at least got rid of the shame, right? You've got rid of the self-judgment and you can deal with the emotion a little bit more cleanly. Yeah. So interesting. And it makes me wonder a little bit about, you know, as you were saying earlier, your guests are often evolutionist psychologists because that kind of point of view is very modular. It has this very partsy kind of, were saying that was robert writes why buddhism is true when i first learned about that the modules of the mind but yeah so yeah this idea that you've got these

2:26:49different modules but kind of the piece you're adding is and they're all okay and i'm okay with the module and i also think that resonates with this kind of approach to emotions like oh there's these different modular emotional systems and they're going to get in there when i'm trying to just be and i'm gonna be like oh actually it's kind different modular emotional systems, and they're going to get in there when I'm trying to just be. And I'm going to be like, oh, actually, it's kind of, okay, yeah, okay, throw some in, we just creep cut in there. And what you're saying is don't just think about its function, think about the fact that, hey, that's actually a useful function. Maybe not right now.

2:27:11Maybe not in this moment. I mean, I think that your practice resonates with the modular view of the evolutionary approach in a very interesting, kind of an interesting way. These different things are competing. Look at them. I've got to try and triage, which is most important. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. Rob Kurzban, friend of the show, dude, thank you for coming on. Oh, thanks for having me. Where should people go to check out everything you got going on? Yeah. So the sub stack is Living Fossils. The book is called All the Feels. The website is allthefeelsbook.com. Check them out. And on the website, you can read a sample feel. See if it's for you. Heck yeah. Appreciate you, man. Until next time.

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