Positive Evolutionary Psychology - Glenn Geher

Glenn Geher is Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of Evolutionary Studies at the State University of New York and an author. Ancestral lifestyles are a big trend at the moment. Taking influence from our paleolithic past to inform how we eat, train and move in the modern world. But taking an ancestral approach to our psychological wellbeing is much rarer and this is Glenn's work - what can insights about our past teach us about how to enjoy the present. Expect to learn why depression and anxiety might actually be useful, why understanding the reason for emotions reduces their power over you, why it's miraculous that the education system has worked at all, why men are twice as likely to die in early adulthood than women, the danger of technology through an evolutionary lens and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on Mission’s high performance teas at https://missionuk.com (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Positive Evolutionary Psychology Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #evolutionarypsychology #positivepsychology #mindset - 00:00 Intro 02:51 Evolutionary Psychology vs Positive Psychology 14:56 Risk-taking Men 24:23 Harlow’s Monkey Experiments 28:32 Our Psychologically Unhealthy Society 37:53 Education from an Evolutionary Perspective 43:48 Kindness in Evolution 48:51 What Causes Anxiety & Depression? 56:03 Feelings & Emotions of our Ancestors 1:04:16 Reinventing the Happy Life 1:11:16 Where to Find Glenn - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Once you start thinking from an evolutionary perspective, if there's some feature of the organism that is species typical, if humans across the world have tendencies toward anxiety, especially under the same kinds of conditions, then instead of just saying, oh, anxiety feels bad, let's get rid of it. Well, why don't we step back and say, what is this? What's the function of it? What is the evolutionary function? Why is this part of our evolved psychology? And then in treating it, you have a different perspective.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  Glenn Gare, welcome to the show.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  Hey, thanks so much for having me, Chris.

• 0:34Chris Williamson?

  Something that I think is really interesting is that there's been a paleo movement around food and training, but there hasn't really seemed to be an equivalent around psychology. There's no sort of paleo psychologists, or at least people that have taken that and tried to apply it to their own lives. I haven't seen many people walking around doing paleo psychology yet.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Paleo psychology, that's a great phrase. I wish I would have come up with that myself. It's a really good question. So when we talk about the paleo lifestyle or the paleo movement, most people are familiar with the dietary component of it. And honestly, as someone who teaches about evolution and the human experience, that is the most vivid and easiest example to get across to people. It makes sense. It matches data. People can sort of see their own behavior and think about it. And just the idea of eating too much processed food leading to health problems is, you know, kind of something that we all know. And then this really puts sort of a scientific framework around it.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  So the paleo diet and the paleo solution related to exercise and nutrition, tons of sense. And it's definitely a reasonably well-established movement at this point. But as you're talking about, this broader concept of paleo psychology, which really is, I think, an interesting way of framing what I'm calling positive evolutionary psychology, using evolutionary psychology to help us lead better lives, to understand ourselves better, to lead better. Community lives and to help advance the goals of our communities and so forth in positive kinds of ways.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  It turns out that the same reasoning that you can apply to the paleo diet movement really can be applied to many issues regarding our emotional, social functioning as well. And I think that that's really very much untapped at this point. And I'm, I'm hoping to be part of, you know, maybe even just a small part, but part of the solution to sort of get, get people in a broader sense to think about how broadly applicable this evolutionary perspective is with all aspects of our lives.

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  Is there something that's missing from positive psychology, which evolutionary psychology adds in? I know that for a long time, psychology was focused on all of the malignant parts and biases and how we mess up. And then positive psychology came along and said, well, we should probably try and actually improve people's lives as well. That would be a useful thing. But then I'm, I'm trying to work out what it is that's missing from positive psych that is added into by evolutionary psychology.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Sure. It's a really good question. And if you go back to the history of the two fields, evolutionary psychology and positive, positive psychology, it's super interesting that they have, there's a lot of parallels. So they're both considered relatively new fields within psychology. They both started arguably in the nineties in a lot of ways. Positive psychology emerged when Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association and really made a, a big call to behavioral scientists and practitioners saying, you know, exactly what you're talking about.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  What, why can't, you know, why can't we study the positive features of the human experience scientifically so that we can amplify the good and the positive, which I think is, you know, I'm totally on board with that message and with a lot of the work that's been done. Evolutionary psychology really started, I mean, it started and stopped over the years ever since Darwin in a lot of ways, but the current movement started very much in the nineties with people like David Buss, Steven Pinker, Lita Cosminis and John Tooby.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  And really said, you know, we need to think about everything and when it comes to human behavior relative to our evolutionary history. So I think that field has been very powerful and successful at helping shed light on things like human emotions, human relationships, human sexuality, human aggression, social interactions, like tons and tons of fields. And when my co-author, Nicole Wedberg, and I were thinking about this idea of positive evolutionary psychology, the big insight that we had was, you know, positive psychology

• 5:13Speaker 00

  is great, but if you look at the literature in the journals, the academic journals of positive psychology, such as the Journal of Happiness Studies and so forth, and the main textbooks in the field, it's very devoid of evolutionary thinking. And it doesn't seem intentionally so. You know, I think generally speaking, behavioral and social scientists have not been trained in evolutionary thinking across the years. You know, that's a whole separate thread that I could go down. But, you know, positive psychologists that don't have that training, and so when you read their articles, their scientific work, the general theme tends to be, how can we make people happier?

• 5:57Speaker 00

  And Chris, I'm not going to say that's a bad goal at all. I'm not going to argue against that as a goal. But when you start thinking about things from an evolutionary perspective, that starts to look like a very limited, very limited approach to sort of what we should be doing in terms of trying to advance humans, advance our society, advance our scholarly work. So the idea that we came up with, well, why don't we do what we can to evolutionize positive psychology, see if we can integrate these two, these two fields. And I will tell you quickly that my, my co-author Nicole and I went to a symposium one time. It was all positive psychology research presentations.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  It was held on our campus. It was really, as you can imagine, it was a positive experience, mostly given by students. They Had really great projects, they had done some great reading, proposed and implemented a bunch of great research. And the insight that Nicole and I had after talking to every presenter and looking at every presentation was that not a single one of them mentioned or even came close to thinking about things from an evolutionary perspective. And I'm going to say that without exception, make, what can we do to make people happier seemed to be the singular goal of each and every project. And that's when we were like, you know what, we gotta, we gotta do our part to shed some

• 7:25Speaker 00

  light on, on this situation, which is, you know, how can we look at the goals of positive psychology, but within an evolutionary framework? And maybe that'll be a more powerful way to actually try to implement some of these values and ideas.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, we derive satisfaction from life on a lot of other pathways than simply happiness, right? There's a lot of other things that contribute to living a good life than being happy all of the time.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  And I suppose, thinking at it from the reverse, thinking about what the potential holes in evolutionary psychology that are filled by positive psychology are, a lot of Eve psych consists of harsh truths and uncomfortable realities about our genuine, less than admirable motivations for the things that we do.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. Evolutionary psychology is pretty famous for studying the dark side of the human experience. And, you know, there's a general negativity bias that people have. So, you know, even if, even if a good percentage of evolutionary psychological research has not been on the dark side, you know, negative dark things tend to stand out in our minds. Just as an example, we had a great speaker on campus the other day, virtually presenting, and it was Todd Shackelford, who's a really renowned alum of David Boss, and now he oversees the psychology department at Oakland University.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  In Michigan and he's published a ton largely on facets of sperm competition and how that relates to behavior and infidelity.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. Great, great research. And he gave a talk that's the specific concept that he had multiple studies on this was the phrase he used was forced in pair copulation, which is essentially, I almost feel like after like trigger warning with something like this is essentially like rape within a, within a pairing, within a monogamous pairing. And he presented data. This is not an altogether uncommon experience. You know, and he gave fantastic and well thought out evolution based reasoning for the conditions under which this happens and how it connects with infidelity and how it connects with paternal uncertainty.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  And a lot of these things that, you know, are bread and butter in evolutionary psychology. And I'll tell you, I thought it was, I thought it was terrific. There were a few students who, who heard it that I think were, were kind of upset about the nature of the content. And, you know, I got thinking this, it was such, such a great presentation, but it, it's almost, and this is without any offense at all to Todd or people who are doing similar kind of research. I think it's important research. I think that we need to embrace and be open minded about studying any and all topics within the academy. But you can see the PR issue, you know, when you, right? Like you can see like.

• 10:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's a PR issue in everything to do with evolutionary psychology, as far as I can see. Like, look at David Buss's most recent one, Men Behaving Badly, or Bad Men, I think it was in America or in the UK.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  In the UK, right.

• 10:40Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that was, it's an entire book telling you that all of the things that you think that you value in your partner, adaptations to try and get around your own sexual defenses, that you're basically in a predator prey. It's analogous to predators and prey that we have one party that gets a new type of trick and then the other one has to learn about how the trick works to then dampen that down.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:09Chris Williamson?

  Dude, our motivations for most of the things that we do, they're not, it's not that they're not virtuous, but they're not as pure as we think that they are. They often come from a place which is significantly more zero sum. It's significantly more competitive. It's significantly less altruistic.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Sure, absolutely, absolutely. And it's funny because I know David reasonably well and I think the world of him and his research.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  But I do think that he's almost been too successful. And what I mean by that is his research on sex differences and human mating and our evolved psychology surrounding mating has been so prolific. And that's one of the things, and there's, like you're saying, there's multiple things in evolutionary psych, but that's one of the things in evolutionary psych that makes a lot of people in the modern landscape feel uncomfortable about. You know, this idea of...

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It would be nice if David Buss is looking at some of the darker aspects of human nature through an evolutionary lens. It would be nice to have somebody who is equally well known, but looking at some of the lighter sides. But I suppose you're right, it's just less, it's less attention grabbing.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  Who wants to know that you're nicer than you actually thought you were? You know, it's just not going to grab headlines. So do you think, is that one of the big hurdles? Because I'm fascinated by evolutionary psychology and constantly surprised. I'm also fascinated by the fact that it hasn't been integrated into modern society tremendously well.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Right, right. Yeah, I think that's, it's quite fascinating that way.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  I think that, you know, someone like David has been, you know, he's been so prolific. There have been, if you step back, there have been efforts and attempts to study the bright side of our experience from an evolutionary perspective. A good example is David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton, who studies and has studied altruism very extensively. And he studies religion, but from like a very evolution-based scientific perspective. And he's, for, you know, for a secular scientist, David, I think is very... Very kind to religious ideology, kind of talking about how it's steeped in our evolutionary

• 13:32Speaker 00

  history and what are the benefits and what are the communal benefits and you know, why did, why was this such a successful approach to organizing human social interactions? So, um, so I think that there actually is quite a bit of stuff on, on all sorts of things about human behavior and, and community and interactions. But, you know, I will tell you, when you ask people, what do you think about evolutionary psych? A very high proportion of people say, oh, that's the stuff that says that men and women are different and that, you know, it justifies males' bad behavior and this kind of thing. And it's like, you hear this from person after person. I'm like, no, that's, you know, this is like, it's like there's a pie and this is like, maybe a small slice of it that's kind of related to what people are talking about.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  But man, they hear that and they latch on to it. So.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  That, that's something quite interesting because a lot of the time when you bring up the fact that people who are perhaps on the left might have an issue with some of the conclusions that are drawn from evolutionary psychology. And most of the responses to that are, these people on the left are idiots, they're denying the way that we work, blah, blah, blah. But another interesting way to look at this is you could, you also are not only getting a perhaps overzealous response from the people, but you're also not showing everything from the subject area as well. There's another big bit of this which is being missed off. That's a, an interesting way to look at it.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Some of the stats that you mentioned, you have in the introduction, you have a couple of, a couple of interesting insights here. Men are more than twice as likely to experience early mortality, death during young adulthood compared with women. Is that risk-taking?

• 15:10Speaker 00

  It's related to risk-taking, yeah. This is the work of Dan Kruger and Randy Nessie. Really super interesting. And I, I'd like to present this, um, to give people a sense of how relevant and important evolutionary psychology is. Because some, sometimes people say, well, that stuff doesn't really matter, it doesn't pertain to the modern world, it's not, it doesn't address important social issues. And the stuff on male to female mortality ratio is, is huge. It's a very. Reliable set of findings. So Dan Kruger, who's an evolutionary psychologist who works in a school of public health at University of Michigan, he has access to all kinds of

• 15:50Speaker 00

  health-related data and started with his then mentor Randy Nessie, who, you know, coined the term Darwinian medicine, huge, huge scholar in the field. He said, "Well, mortality is a pretty big health, health-related issue, and I have a whole bunch of evolution-based predictions surrounding mortality." And so, so Dan was essentially empowered to start looking at this. And what he found was, you know, it's been known for quite a while that males, in terms of, in terms of simply survival and mortality, don't do as well as women. Men live shorter lives, they're more likely

• 16:30Speaker 00

  to die at different life stages than are, are women for various kinds of reasons. And that had been known, but what Dan added to in his research was he said, "Based on evolutionary reasoning, since mating is so intensive and competitive, and mating, mate selection in particular sort of starts in the late teens and, and, you know, peaks and maybe the early to mid twenties, we would expect that to be a, well, a part of life where men are particularly more likely to outdie women." You know, I can't really, that's the best I can, in terms of how I can word it. And, and what he found was exactly that,

• 17:13Speaker 00

  that, that men always, males always are more likely to die than women at every population that's been studied, at every age. But when you get to the teenage, about fifteen to twenty-five, you see a big peak, huge, like there's a huge spike in the data and then it kind of smoothes, smoothes out a little bit. And I'm like... That's relevant, you know, if you think that's not, if you think that's irrelevant to societal functioning, you know, I got news for you. If it under, if it helps us understand life and death for, you know, you know, millions of people at any given time. I'd say that's highly relevant and something that we would do better just understanding, so.

• 17:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's when men are getting into gangs, that's when men are doing antisocial behavior, it's when their testosterone levels are highest. And then it starts to taper off toward the end of their twenties. It's when they're getting into prison, it's when they're causing most violent crimes, it's when they're most likely, I'm gonna guess probably to be killed or to kill someone.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Both, both, and physical causes, um, so, so Dan divided things into what he calls internal versus external causes of death. And these effects were, were big for both kind, but they were particularly exacerbated for what he called external causes. So that is, um, fights and murder and homicide, um, and things that he calls like, like, um, risky kinds of things.

• 18:34Chris Williamson?

  Car crashes, driving fast.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. The reason that, that men are paying higher, you know, young men are paying higher insurance rates than, than young women is.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  It's boy races.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's all tied into the same exact thing. There's a phrase, um, to capture this, put forward by, uh, Daley and Wilson, other, um, some other folks who sort of, uh, carved out the field, and the phrase is young male syndrome. Um, and the idea is that, you know, young men who engage in risky behavior to the point that it can be dangerous and lead to all kinds of adverse outcomes, including premature death, um, that's, that's a natural feature of the male experience. Um, you know, in other words, when we see this kind of stuff, it's not like, oh, that guy's an idiot, you know, it's, it, what it is, is that that's part of the male developmental experience and it's so.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Common, those kinds of things are so common. And then if you think about like shows like, I remember I used to watch the show Jackass. So I don't know if you remember like that, it's just guys, you know, it's guys being stupid. It's young men being stupid. Um, and, and risky and.

• 19:46Chris Williamson?

  It was young men being stupid, but Johnny Knoxville's in his late forties or fifties now. And they've come back and done Jackass three and Steve-O's back in it and everyone else is.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 19:55Chris Williamson?

  And that's just come out. So I think they might be outliers that just haven't learned their lesson. But you're totally correct. What, what's adaptive about that risk-taking behavior for you? Or what would have been adaptive about that super high risk-taking behavior for young men?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Sure, well, you know, as is true in, in most sexually reproducing species. Um, not everyone gets to reproduce, you know? And from an evolutionary perspective, reproduction is what I like to call Darwin's bottom line. Um, and being shut out of reproduction from an evolutionary perspective is something that you would totally expect any and all kinds of adaptations to emerge to prevent being shut out of reproduction. Cause any of our ancestors that didn't reproduce, didn't become ancestors. So the ones who did reproduce had whatever behavioral and physical adaptations that ultimately cultivated reproduction.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Um, so I think, you know, then you step back and be like, well, why are men like, young men like this? And, and mathematically, the answer essentially is that it's a risky strategy under some conditions. It's going to lead to early death or adverse outcomes, but it's also likely that the benefits, the reproductive benefits on average over large periods of time likely outweighed.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  The survival-related costs, you know, the same same reason that the peacock's tail emerged, you know, a lot of peacocks died at the at the teeth of tigers, you know, but the ones who reproduced on average, you know.

• 21:39Chris Williamson?

  They had the they had the house edge equivalent.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 21:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dude, it's so, I mean, that's a really good way to look at it. And I suppose this sort of summarizes one of the key issues that you find with the modern era, which is this mismatch, right?

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:54Chris Williamson?

  Which is that we are designed for one particular type of environment, and now we're living in another, and this mismatch causes us unhappiness or trauma, or just a suboptimal approach to the way that we live.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. I feel like the the idea of mismatch is so powerful, and it's it is something that we've only scratched the surface. I feel like it is so relevant, it's so powerful. And what I like about it from a from a PR perspective is it's very different. Like, once, when you start talking to students or other academics about a lot of the stuff, like the male female differences, that kind of stuff, people start getting, they politicize it and start going down all kinds of rabbit holes. But when you start talking to people about, you know, generally speaking, if you look at the human mind and our experience, and the conditions under which our ancestors evolved, it's night and

• 22:52Speaker 00

  day. There are so many obvious and important mismatches between the modern world and the world that we evolved to live in. And I feel like people, people across, you know, all kinds of ideologies and backgrounds can really connect with this particular message. I like to to think about it as, a very simple way to think about it is the fish in a fish that gets out of the fishbowl. I was teaching for a few years, it was a great experience. I was teaching evolution-based classes in China, and they were all second English as a second language learners. And I remember I gave a whole, what I thought was a really great lecture on mismatch. And a very bright student came up to me, um, her name is Vicky, and she said, "Professor, we don't understand what you just said."

• 23:37Speaker 00

  And I was like, after an hour and a half of lecturing, I was like, "Oh, man." So I went back to my hotel room, I thought about it, I came back the next day, and I'm like, "Raise your hand if you ever had a pet fish," you know, half the kids raised their hand, I'm like, "You ever see the fish, you ever have that experience where you go in your room and it's on the carpet, dead?" And I'm like, because students made a face, like a bunch of them, you know, gonna raise their hand at that, I'm like, "Well, that's because the ancestors of the fish were completely aquatic, and all the adaptations of the fish are completely designed for a fully aquatic experience kind of thing, and you know, so I use that as an example of, now think about, um, then I think, I, I talk about the, the monkey in the, the cage and, and, um, all the work by Henry, Harry Harlow.

• 24:22Chris Williamson?

  What's the story there?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Well, so he, you know, he's, he's famous for showing how, um, infant monkeys, he's kind of famous for traumatizing young monkeys, so he did research in, in labs at, I think it was one of the UC schools years ago, and if you take a monkey away, a little baby monkey away from its mom, these were rhesus monkeys and macaques he was using, um, and you give it a choice of a mother, a fake mother, that's either like a stuffed animal, kind of like a fluffy monkey-like, um, stuffed animal versus, um, a fake mother that's wire, like made out of metal and, but has milk on it, um, like, the, the monkeys are torn because they, they feel the comfort of the one,

• 25:08Speaker 00

  and, but they need the milk from the other, eh, but a secondary, you know, so that's a lesson on like, on, on natural impulses regarding need for, for maternal care kind of thing, but a secondary thing is all the monkeys that were in his research, um, who were taken away from their mothers for experimental purposes, when they were released with the rest of the colony that he had, they were messed up, and they weren't able to, um, engage in regular, appropriate mating behavior, or friendship behavior, or coalitional behavior, they really showed just a deep set of problems, and-

• 25:47Speaker 00

  You can think about as well, their experiences were completely mismatched. Under ancestral conditions, little baby monkeys weren't taken out of their natural environment for several years and then, sorry, my light goes off automatically. Modern technology, right? You know, and so, and this is the reason, in New York, the Bronx Zoo, when I was a kid, I would go to the Bronx Zoo all the time and they had this great place called The Monkey House and The Monkey House was like this big old building and had maybe fifty cages and the cages just had random monkeys, sometimes they were with the same species, sometimes not, sometimes there was like a log in there kind of thing to try to make it seem a little bit natural-ish.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  And in 2012, the Bronx Zoo closed The Monkey House and worse, they turned it into administrative offices. But, you know, from a mismatch perspective, you can totally see it, you know? At some point, zoologists figured out, wait a minute, this is, we're torturing these animals. They're, we're putting them in mismatched conditions, they're showing stress responses, they're showing anxiety responses and so forth. And it only makes sense when, once you start to think about things from the evolutionary perspective and from the mismatch perspective in particular. So, the next step is, well, let's take a look at, at the modern human experience and

• 27:13Speaker 00

  look at us, you know, engaging in like a Skype conversation, look at us, you know, sitting in our chairs, you know?

• 27:21Chris Williamson?

  Artificial light on a nighttime, yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Sure, and engaging in interactions, a lot of times with strangers. So, you were just saying before, you're in New York City, I mean, the number of strangers that you see, if you walk down a block in New York City on a busy day. Hundreds or even thousands and you don't think anything of it, but under ancestral conditions, we didn't experience strangers regularly. And when we did, it usually meant that there was some danger or some kind of problem. So, you know, modern evolutionary psychologists have really started thinking about how many, in how many ways are our modern conditions mismatched from the environments that we evolved to be in? And maybe we're

• 28:08Speaker 00

  kind of like, like the fish in the fishbowl. Maybe it's like, we're so surrounded by these conditions and have been our whole lives that it's hard to question it, you know? So I feel like the evolutionary perspective gives us like the tools, the infrastructure to actually question some of these things. And I think that's, that's really very, very powerful and can lead to a lot of positive changes.

• 28:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, the question here is which of the new adaptations, which of the mismatches are actually beneficial? The fact that I don't need to go and go to a stream to get water, I've just had it in a bottle here, or the fact that I can be cooler when it's warm or warmer when it's cool. You know, those, those are good things. What are the things that we have as a part of society and specifically for you that are making us psychologically unhealthy? So what would be some of the big, the big problems that you've got? Or what would be the main, the main enemies in terms of mismatch?

• 29:05Speaker 00

  That's such a great question. And as you know, I've thought about this quite, quite a bit. Over the past several years, a lot of the research in my lab has been on this question. We've demonstrated that modern public education is mismatched in a whole bunch of ways that can have adverse effects. Modern politics is mismatched. We've done research showing that humans are not really good at processing large scale politics, you know? So if you see like, why is the political world such a mess these days? You know, a part of the reason is because our minds evolved for small scale politics and not large scale politics. And, and the one that I've focused on quite a bit of late that

• 29:47Speaker 00

  I'm really interested in is, I guess what we'd have to call like social media or like modern communication systems. Under ancestral conditions, if you were going to communicate with someone, it was going to be face to face, and that was it. You know, that was the only choice for.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Lion's share of human evolutionary history. And if you're face to face with, with someone that you know, your interactions are going to be very different than if you're anonymous and you're dealing with a stranger. And if you're anonymous and dealing with a stranger and you're communicating through a screen, you know, suddenly like the number of mismatches that creep into it are enormous. So when I teach about this, I'll ask my students, I'll say, what percentage of your, just write down what percentage of your communications with other people in the last week has been of the non-face-to-face variety? And on average, we usually see about set, they'll say 70, 80%.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  You know, and I've, I've got to tell you, you know, that's, it's for, for my generation, that's, that's starting to, to be true as well. You know, we used to sort of laugh at the young kids and their cell phones. And now everyone, you know, grandmas, grandpas, everyone's addicted to their cell phones. And, and it's such a problem because, you know, like you're saying, Chris, there, the number of benefits that come from this are obvious. You know, the way, the simple way to think about it is, you know, with this, with this simple thing right here, I can ask and answer any question in the entire history of the world within one second. You know, like every, at, at any moment, at any time, it's, it's crazy.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Um, the, the power that that has, I can communicate with people immediately. If, if I have a family member that, that is in, in trouble, I can immediately provide kind of financial or some other kind of help. So the benefits are all, I think, very obvious. And we think quite a bit about those benefits. What we don't see, because again, because we're the fish in the fishbowl, what we don't see is the problems associated with it. And when you start thinking about it from a mismatch perspective, man, there are problems. So I'll give one example, anonymous communication. Um, under ancestral conditions, there wasn't anonymous communication.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  And in fact, we kind of evolved to be a little, a little skittish about anonymous communication. So, you know, when you go to the grocery store, someone has their, their name badge on. When a student comes into my class, I say, hi, I'm Glenn. You know, what's your name? Your, your name's on the roster. Um, doctors introduce themselves by name. If you think about the professions where anonymity is part of what they're doing, it's really rare. I like to give the example of clowns. You know, I wrote a whole piece about why clown phobia is pretty common. Like, well, clowns are like, that's like the only job where you're hiding your identity. You know, they have a made up name, they

• 32:49Speaker 00

  got this, they're in a mask, they're in a costume, they don't break character. Like, that's creepy, you know, but it's partly creepy because under ancestral conditions, we were only dealing with people in a face to face variety. On top of that, when you look at research on antisocial behavior, the best way to get people to do bad things is hide their identity. So.

• 33:13Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you did a Halloween, there was a Halloween experiment about this.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 33:18Chris Williamson?

  What was that?

• 33:19Speaker 00

  So, this is a study done by Deener in the 1970s where they brought kids, kids were trick or treating, and so the kids were going to this one particular house where they were videotaping the kids. And they measured whether the kids were wearing a mask or not. You know, some Halloween costumes have masks and some don't, of course. And they looked at whether the kids were in a group or not, because when you're in a group, your own identity kind of gets diffused. And then they did the classic where they put out the bucket on the front porch, and that bucket, almost without fail, will have the frieze, you know, on a yellow post-it saying, "Take one." Like, you know, everyone knows the

• 34:03Speaker 00

  rule. And so, of course, kids are kids, and they're not going to always take one. And what they found was that both of those variables, if they were in a group, kids, each individual kid was more likely to take a whole handful. And if their identity was hidden, if they're, if they were wearing a mask, people couldn't tell who they were, if they were Darth Vader or this kind of thing, under that condition, they were also more likely to engage in antisocial behavior and just like snag, snag a whole bunch.

• 34:32Chris Williamson?

  What do you think the effect on the group says? Is that just diffusion of responsibility?

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So diffusion of responsibility is a phrase that a lot of behavioral scientists will will use for that where, you know, it's it's an ironic finding. And the finding essentially is that when there's more people and there's a bigger group of people, each individual has less feels and experiences, less responsibility for whatever's going on. So people are more likely to do the wrong thing, especially if other people are doing it. They're less likely to help someone in need and this kind of thing. One ironic thing on that is that if you need help, you want fewer people around rather than more people around.

• 35:17Chris Williamson?

  There's those stories about blocks of flats and somebody being attacked downstairs and nobody calling the police because everybody presumes that somebody else is going to call the police.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's happening ancestrally with that effect there? Is it the fact that reciprocal altruism and sympathy and empathy and kindness and giving and stuff like that are less necessary if you're in a group because you already have support of other people? Therefore, giving away something when you already have that support to an extra person doesn't make as much sense?

• 35:52Speaker 00

  That's that's super interesting. I had never thought about it quite that way, but I think that certainly might contribute partly to this. So this idea of reciprocal altruism came from Trivers, who's a huge, huge renowned figure in the field. And essentially said that we evolved a lot of adaptations around the fact that humans engage in reciprocal altruism, and that's a very basic feature of of who we are and what we do. So I help you, you help me. And and our species fits a lot of the criteria of that, which is we generally live in stable groups. So we see the same individuals over and over. We have good memory for individual faces and voices and that kind of thing.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  And we live relatively long lives, so there's like a long, you know, arc of time to sort of pay people back, but but that gets screwed up when we're dealing with strangers. Right? Because reciprocal altruism evolved under conditions where we were surrounded by members of our clan, you know, small clans where you knew every individual.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  It's a long term game, yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, once we're dealing with strangers, everything gets, a lot of our evolved psychology wasn't designed for that. So, things like reciprocal altruism, like if I'm in a group and we're all a part of a team and we know each other and we're gonna see each other tomorrow, and then there's someone who needs help who's outside the group, I'm like, well, that's a stranger who's never gonna help me and might even be dangerous for me. So, so many of these things that we might get outraged about, and I can't believe people did this or that or didn't help, a lot of it can really be understood by this idea that so many of the modern situations we might run into are outside the bounds of what our minds would have evolved to experience.

• 37:39Chris Williamson?

  That's just in-group, out-group mentality, but I suppose if you're part of a group, it's easier to find an out-group, as opposed to if you were on your own, if there was just two of you, then you might behave in more of that sort of reciprocally altruistic way. What did you learn about education?

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that was a really fascinating area to get into. So, you know, we have obligatory public education, and that's true in so much of the modern world these days. And I had a student named Katie Gruskin, who was, she was in my evolutionary studies seminar and became super interested in, she just started thinking about education. She was an ed major and she was thinking about education from an evolutionary perspective. So, I pointed her toward the literature of Peter Gray, who's at Boston College, who's written extensively about education from an evolutionary perspective. The skinny of what he finds is that modern

• 38:40Speaker 00

  public school systems have very mismatched and unnatural ways of educating young kids. This idea of... Sitting, you know, having kids in the same age, so like age stratification is one problem. Everyone here is 10 and there's 30 of you and there's one 30-year-old woman over there. You're gonna sit there for eight hours every single day and listen to what that person says. And the knowledge that you're gonna get is what we might call secondary instead of primary knowledge. So instead of like, learning how to do something, which is under ancestral conditions, what education would have looked like, we're like, writing about it and instead of like, you know, throwing a ball and seeing what happens, we're like, writing about the physics of it and arcs and the math of it.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  That stuff, you know, it's important, but we have such a, such a focus on that kind of secondary knowledge. There's less time for play, there's, there's less time for natural interactions, there's less time for mixed-age kinds of groups. And, you know, one of the outcomes associated with that is you tend to see tons of kids, and it seems to increase every year, are diagnosed with attentional kinds of problems and are given prescriptions for, for pharmaceuticals. And, you know, maybe the problem's not the kid, maybe the problem's the situation. So my student Katie did a whole study that really took this approach of thinking of schools as a, as derivative of factory mindsets.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  And so when you look at, at when public schools were started, largely in the UK actually is, is where her research took her. It was, you know, the bell rings at the factory and everyone's gonna start working and the bell rings again and it's, it's lunchtime and this kind of thing.

• 40:23Chris Williamson?

  I heard that they used the same bells in schools as they did in factories.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  That's what Katie had said, yeah, yeah.

• 40:30Chris Williamson?

  The same bells, I mean, if that's not showing the hand of the ruthless capitalists that are trying to compromise the proletariat's labor, I don't know what is.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And, you know, there's so, so many mismatches, so that's like the entire idea. And now we don't even question it, you know, it's like I was saying, I think that whole thing about like, we're so much of, of what we have is just, you don't question it. You know, most of us don't, like, public school's public school, you gotta go to school, you gotta do this, you gotta learn that, because that's, because that's what we do. But if you step back and be like, wait a minute, where did this come from? You know, why is it like this? And what Peter Gray did, and Katie leaned a lot on his research for her work. What he did was he looked extensively at what does learning and education look like in pre-Westernized societies or nomadic societies, of which there's, you know,

• 41:22Speaker 00

  lots of examples of nomadic societies in Africa, in the Pacific Islands, in South America, you know, lots of places. And the common theme he found was there's not a single thing that looks at all like public, like public education, that kids, that the word "learning" and "playing" and "education," none of those concepts are teased apart in these pre-Westernized groups. And regularly, kids are learning from other kids, that the main teachers in pre-Westernized nomadic societies aren't adults, but they're kids that are usually slightly older. So, an eight-year-old might learn from a 12-year-old,

• 42:07Speaker 00

  and a 16-year-old might be teaching something to a 15-year-old or a 14-year-old. And they're learning while they're playing and while they're just kind of out for the day and interacting. Wow, that is wildly different than sit down and take this standardized test and use number two pencil, and if you can't do it, take this pill, you know, and we're gonna have to talk to your mom and dad because there's something a matter with you. And, you know, it's, I feel like this mismatched perspective really forces us to step back and just look at the problems we have, and just step back and think about them from this deeper level. And I feel like it's powerful. And what Katie found, the

• 42:47Speaker 00

  short version of her work, and she published it in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, was that she asked people, she gave a whole list of things that are typical of nomadic education, nomadic learning contexts, learning in groups, learning in mixed-age groups, less, more project-based kinds of experiences. And what she found was people who reported a higher proportion of those experiences in their own elementary school experiences liked school better later, and did better at school at all levels later than that. So, to the extent

• 43:28Speaker 00

  that we can like step back, and this kind of goes to your original question about like paleo-psychology, like how can we use this perspective, not just for what we eat and nutrition? And that kind of thing, but for sort of our broader.

• 43:42Chris Williamson?

  Paleoeducation.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Paleoeducation, exactly, exactly. And there's, you know, there's something to it.

• 43:48Chris Williamson?

  Going on to the emotions that you looked at, what did you learn about kindness? I find this quite an interesting, um, an interesting thing to think about evolutionarily because kindness is one of those. It's quite bizarre why you would decide to give away some of your time or feel a compulsion to help another person. We're told, you know, survival of the fittest, that evolution is this sort of ruthless tool. Kindness appears to be a little bit of a, an interesting dynamic in that.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. So kindness from an evolutionary perspective is, is super interesting for all the reasons that you just pointed out. And, uh, you know, one of the things about kindness is we like it in mates. You know, let me just kind of start there. I'll sort of unpack things a bit more from there. But when David Buss, you know, probably the, the best known figure in the field, or certainly one of them, and he's a great guy and a great researcher. You know, when he did his famous research in the late eighties, early nineties about what do people want in mates? What got famously amplified from that was how men and women want different things across lots of cultures.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  And that's true, but the, the headline that, um, that really got sort of dismissed is that kindness and mutual love were for both men and women across pretty much all these cultures, number one.

• 45:17Chris Williamson?

  That was ubiquitous. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and you know, there's something very, um, it's not as sexy, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's. You know, people are like, well, that's, that's fine, but wow, men like this and women doing it, women like this.

• 45:31Chris Williamson?

  It's much easier to say, oh, men are after youth and fertility and women are after resources and status. Then both of them are after kindness. And I saw a recent study on this, uh, that just came out, uh, last month. And, um, humor is up there for both, both men and women.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Absolutely. For, for lots, yeah, for lots of good reasons. So, you know, one of the reasons that kindness exists is. You know, if it's effective in securing a mate and if it's effective in maintaining an effective mateship, then it's going to be selected. You know, that's kind of evolution 101 in a sexually reproducing species. So even though that didn't get a lot of airtime with the findings from what Boss and his colleagues found, you know, it's really, really critical and it makes a lot of sense. You know, if you have a kind mate, then that means that that's someone that you can trust your feelings with, you can be vulnerable with, you can expect that person to help you and to provide you benefits. Then it

• 46:31Speaker 00

  becomes a reciprocal altruism kind of thing where, you know, you're providing benefits back and forth and that kind of thing. So, and again, kindness doesn't exist in every species, but we're a species where we evolved to be surrounded by the same individuals over long periods of time. And that social ecosystem has to be considered strongly when we think about our evolved psychology. So, under that kind of condition, it makes sense that kindness would evolve because individuals need to get along with one another. And if someone gets a reputation as exploitative or, you know, stealing from others and not

• 47:13Speaker 00

  putting in their fair share, they're going to be outed by others, you know, and they might end up being ostracized or punished in various kinds of ways. So I think that the importance of kindness as essentially an adaptation that helps make people attracted as mates, as friends. We're doing a study right now about leadership and there's multiple paths toward leadership. Some leaders become leaders because they're ruthless and intimidating and selfish and scary. And some people become leaders because they're so kind and genuine and other oriented that people trust them and like, yes, this person has my interests

• 47:57Speaker 00

  in mind. So I think that kindness certainly has a place in the human evolutionary story for lots of different reasons.

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  I suppose that you can see quite easily here how the evolutionary mismatch is at play because

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  In the modern world, we can live on our own in an Airbnb, getting food delivered to us, and we're safe because the police have the streets, and we're warm because there's electricity and heating, and we don't need other people. You know, if you have sufficient resources, you can go through your entire life, basically not interacting with other people, and apart from maybe over the internet at your remote work job. But the difference is, we would have never been able to survive on our own previously, and that kindness would have engendered other people to want to help us. It would have meant that we would have been less likely. Speaking of that, actually, what, I know this isn't specifically what you looked at, but I'm fascinated by the evolutionary explanation for depression and anxiety.

• 48:59Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever looked at that?

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's something else that we cover a bit in the book. It's really interesting, because from a positive psychology perspective, generally speaking, eradicating negative affect, negative emotional states, seems to be a paramount goal, you know, and trust me, I don't like anxiety or depression as much as the next guy. But, you know, there's a great anecdote that I include, I included in part of the book by Randy Nessie. So Randy coined the term Darwinian medicine, has published extensively, including several

• 49:39Speaker 00

  books on Darwinian psychiatry, and how all the mental and physical health fields will benefit from being Darwinized and evolutionized. And his background's as a psychiatrist, and he had this great anecdote that led him to thinking this way, which was, he was working at the University of Michigan, and one of his, he was doing therapy in addition to his faculty position, and he had a client, who was also a professor in a different department, and the client said he was pretty anxious, and so...

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Randy talked to him and then prescribed him some anti-anxiety pills, you know, the equivalent of Xanax at the time and said, "Come back in a month and talk to me." And the guy came back and he said, "All right, well, how you doing?" He said, "Well, I feel, I feel good. I'm not anxious anymore." And so Randy's like, "All right." And he said, "But there's still a problem." He's like, "Well, what is it?" And he's like, "Well, I got a pile of papers this big on my desk and I don't care to grade them whatsoever." And the students are knocking on my door and "How come you're not doing your work?" And "What's up with you?" And apparently that motivation to sort of get that stuff done went away with the anxiety, which gave Nessie the insight of, "Wait a minute, maybe the negative affective states such as anxiety, as unpleasant as they may be,

• 51:01Speaker 00

  have a very important evolutionary function." And, you know, once you start thinking from an evolutionary perspective, if there's some feature of the organism that is species typical, if humans across the world have tendencies toward anxiety, especially under certain kinds of, the same kinds of conditions, then instead of just saying, "Oh, anxiety feels bad, let's get rid of it," you know, well, why don't we step back and say, you know, "What is this? Why, what's the function of it? What is the evolutionary function? Why is this part of our evolved psychology?" And then in treating it, you have a different perspective. You know, you can step back and say, "We don't want to just get rid

• 51:42Speaker 00

  of anxiety. We want to keep it controlled so it's not like running someone's life." But this idea of making everyone just as happy and free of anxiety and so forth as possible, that doesn't make any evolutionary sense.

• 51:56Chris Williamson?

  What about depression?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Depression's, I'd say, very similar, very similar. There's a guy, Matt Keller, who I think, I know he was at the University of Colorado. I think he may still be there. Very bright scholar.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Published research a while back, really extensively looking at depression from an evolutionary lens. And it was, he was asking the same questions. He was like, well, instead of just getting rid of depression, which obviously, you know, depressions can be debilitating and have all kinds of adverse outcomes. It's like, but what, what might be the evolutionary function of depression? It's essentially the question. And what he found was even though the DSM, which is the main book that's used for diagnosing mental psychopathologies and mental health issues on a large global scale, the DSM at that time, when it talked about depression,

• 52:54Speaker 00

  it did not take, and it still doesn't, it didn't take an evolutionary approach. So it just had all these symptoms. And if you've had these symptoms over this amount of time, then, you know, we're going to call you depressed. And what, what Matt Keller found was that depression can actually come about by multiple pathways. And probably the best way to address depression is to think about the pathway that led to it. The two specific contrasting examples he gave, one was the loss of a loved one. So loss of a loved one is a classic catalyst for depression. People might become depressed depending on the closeness of the, of the relationship and so forth

• 53:34Speaker 00

  for extensive periods of time. And when people lose a loved one, they tend to reach out to others and try to form social connections. So a common thing that's found in people who have depression caused by loss is a reaching out to others. Whereas another catalyst for depression is an error, a major error. You messed something up. There was something that was your fault. You failed at something.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  Cheat on a partner.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. Messed up. You can't take it back. It becomes public. This kind of thing. And with this kind of thing, with depression that follows from that, people don't reach out to others. People withdraw. People stay, stay in bed late. People stop eating. People like, I don't want to talk to anyone. They really, and the way he puts it is, and you also see a lot of obsessive thinking. And he says, people are like, it's like your mind goes into overdrive of. Let me replay that and let me figure out what can I do in the future to not do that again. So a lot of the symptoms will look the same, but they're actually very different kinds of experiences.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  And the specific patterns that go with those two different forms of depression seem to be adaptive, given the sort of context under which they each came about.

• 54:59Chris Williamson?

  So the grief depression, that is, I've lost somebody that was close to me. Presumably this person would have provided me with support and maybe food and maybe attention and status perhaps also. It is in my interests to reach out to other people because I need to become more integrated into the tribe, the group around me, and I'm going to do that by reaching out more. Whereas if I'm out on a hunt and I mess up and somebody gets hurt, or I cheat on my partner and I get found out, reaching out to other people in the tribe, when they might think of me badly, is probably not going to be tremendously effective. So something that I can do is keep myself to myself, reduce my energy expenditure,

• 55:44Chris Williamson?

  try and overthink whatever it is that's just gone on in a desperate attempt to try and drill that lesson into me, and then move forward. Dude, that's so interesting.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:53Chris Williamson?

  That's so fascinating that I didn't think about the adaptive effect of depression in that way.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  Here was one thing that I thought.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 56:04Chris Williamson?

  What emotions do you think we would have felt in ancestral times that are more rare now in the modern world?

• 56:13Speaker 00

  Interesting question. I know there's a guy who passed away recently, unfortunately, John Montgomery, neuroscientist who became super interested in evolutionary psych. Moved to New York at some point from California and was doing research in my lab actually for a while. And he wrote pretty extensively about.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Affect of states and emotional states across nomadic versus westernized kinds of societies. And his main claim, it's probably overstated, but he essentially made the case that what we call mental illness and things, especially emotional based mental illness, severe depression, severe anxiety, mood stability issues. What his claim was is that these are relatively rare in pre-westernized societies. So getting, it's kind of like, in a somewhat roundabout way, getting to your question of what emotional states would we have experienced in different proportions.

• 57:21Chris Williamson?

  Less of the extreme depression, anxiety, loneliness.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And I think part of it is that we now have these contexts, these social contexts where we're not constantly surrounded by support, we're not constantly surrounded by family, we're not constantly surrounded by secondary family or friends that we've been connected with over and over again extensively. Like, we're now running into all kinds of situations where we run into people that are non-relatives, we run into people that are strangers. So we have all these environmental conditions that are, especially socially, that are so different from ancestral conditions.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  And what you find is anxiety and depression are way more common in urbanized areas than even in suburban areas or rural areas, or certainly in nomadic kinds of environments. And I feel like, from an evolutionary perspective, we can totally understand this. You know, so people are like asking like, "Why? Well, maybe we need more psychiatrists in large cities, maybe we need better pharmaceuticals, you know, this kind of thing, maybe we need more group therapy." And I'm not saying that these are bad things and certainly could, you know, could be beneficial. But again, the evolutionary perspective really encourages us to step back and say, "Wait a minute, let's, let's take a big picture look at this and see why is this happening in the first place."

• 58:46Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, I wondered whether awe would be an emotion that we might feel a little bit more ancestrally, just that, you know, people try and chase that down now by...

• 58:59Chris Williamson?

  Going to a movie and seeing really cool special effects. But I think our, um, all radar has been tuned down a little bit because of what we can have delivered to us by technology. And also a detachment from the natural world. It's very rare that you would see a beautiful night sky. And yet the times when you do, or at least for me, I look up and I think, oh, God, I need to do this more. I have, I must spend more time staring at the night sky. And then you don't, and I think, well, why? What is it about that? The same as a, a big field, a beautiful wide open space. Why is it that I like the look of that? Well, probably because I could see predators and prey from an absolute mile off.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  And yet, for the most part, I, my vision is constrained by walls or buildings or the pillars of my car. And yeah, I, I felt like awe would be, would perhaps be one of them.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's a great question. You know, there's this concept of a supernormal stimulus and a supernormal stimulus is something that an organism evolved to respond to. And it's like it, for some reason or another, usually artificially by human means, there's a, um, an expanded or amplified version of the stimulus is, is made. And a lot of times, you know, we can think of, of companies as, as making all kinds of products that are just like, like amplified versions of things that we gravitate towards. So you like food that's high in carbohydrates and, and sugar and salt? Well, here's McDonald's, you know, and it's, and it's cheap on top of that kind of thing.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  So I feel like, um, in the modern world, we have things that are just like, like would have been unbelievable under ancestral conditions would have been, you know, a McDonald's milkshake. 20,000 years ago would have been by far and away the sweetest thing anyone on earth would have ever experienced. And now you can get one every single day for like $2. Um, you know, and so we get a little bit desensitized to it, you know? And then the other part of what you're talking about, Chris, and I'm a huge advocate of, of the outdoors.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  And you know, I lead hikes on our campus. We have great mountains right here in New Paltz and try to get outside as much as I, as I can. That it, there's something to it, you know, there really is. And I know E.O. Wilson, who passed away recently, unfortunately, um, huge.

• 1:01:18Chris Williamson?

  Posthumously canceled as well. Passed away and then got posthumously canceled.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  It's, it's, it's too easy. He'll, he'll come back though. He'll come back.

• 1:01:26Chris Williamson?

  Um, yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  But he, um, you know, he wrote about biophilia, which is essentially what you're, exactly what you're talking about, which is we have an inherent natural love of the living world and we do because our ancestors needed that. We needed to know flora and fauna. We needed to know where, where the water was and when the water was going to be at a high point versus a low point. You know, and eventually we became very sensitive to solar events and knowing, okay, the sun's rising here. That means the days are going to get longer. The days are going to get shorter. Um, and I feel like the experience of awe, because it's funny at, at, at 52, I feel like I find myself chasing those kinds of experiences. And I had this insight the other day. I was talking with a good friend about the sun, you know, and it's, it's, it's funny because like

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  where I live, I can actually watch the sunrise right over the Hudson River, which on mornings where I catch it, it's just like magical. Like there's nothing that beats it. And I can track it. I can see now it's starting to come northward every morning, just a little bit more and a little bit earlier. And like, these things are so like, imagine if you had never seen or experienced the sun and at some point just someone unveiled it and it's like, there's the sun. Like nothing in the world could be that amazing. You know, it's so beautiful, so powerful. And when you think about so many like nomadic groups and ancestral groups that were like sun worshippers.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Like, yeah, cause that thing, that's, that's the energy for all of us. That's providing everything for all the food that we're going to need for our sustenance. Um. Following that is something that of course our ancestors would have been highly attuned to. So, you know, getting ourselves, the real short message, I guess, if there is a message, is step back and think about how can I make my life more similar to what it would have been like under ancestral conditions, eating natural foods, being surrounded by people who I feel real genuine loyalty toward and friendship with and kinship with. Finding, let's see if that works, finding, you know, finding real love where there's someone

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  that you actually really appreciate in a very deep way and connect with in a deep kind of way, getting into the out of doors, you know, eating natural foods. It's so easy to just kind of look at your phone and just, you know, eat fast food and and get into these habits. The modern world, you know, makes it so easy to sort of just sit on your butt and do nothing. But there's, there's costs associated with that that are, I think, very hard for us to see. So this evolutionary perspective really, I think, gets us to sort of step back and open our eyes and think about liabilities of modern technologies and modern living, but also think about, well, what can I do to sort of really live a richer life today?

• 1:04:17Chris Williamson?

  It's something that I think about a lot. I think it's something that everybody thinks about. Everybody knows that the things that they do on a daily basis are probably not all the best for them, right? We constantly have this tension inside of our minds, this, whether it be productivity guilt or connection with family guilt or overwork guilt, whatever it is, right? There's some sort of shame or resentment that we have for the way that we've spent the last 24 hours because we could have got up earlier and seen the sun, or we should have gone out for a walk more, or we should have called our parents, or we should have done whatever. And, you know, previously, there wouldn't have been anything else to do that wasn't that. It would have been, the majority of your life would have been spent outdoors with your family, eating natural foods, because there was no alternative.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  That was it.

• 1:05:03Chris Williamson?

  And it very much is. Increasingly, I'm thinking about this, that We are kind of trying to reinvent a happier version of life. That's that's generally what modern, the modern world is, right? We've tried to create a happier, safer, more convenient version of life for us. Because otherwise, we'd just still be living on on fields and plains. And it is very much the job, I think, of the modern human to try and think, right? What has the world thrown out? Which which part of this bath with bathwater was baby? And which bit of it should I have held on to? And, you know, that's the sort of the perennial challenge that everybody has at the moment, you know? How much am I supposed to?

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  How much is it worth me chasing down this new job role? Or this new bit of status? When I don't need any more status? When I genuinely might take more pleasure from just getting home an hour earlier? And spending it with my kids? Or I might, I genuinely might prefer to just get a job that is five minutes down the road? Because I already have enough money. I already have enough, whatever else it is. And it means that I can spend my time training or doing whatever else it is that I really, really enjoy to do. Which is, again, more naturalistic. People that choose to spend, I've been spending a bit of time around people in New York who have some very, very expensive apartments, one of them in Tribeca.

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

  And I thought, for this sort of money, you could probably have a house and the flights to be able to get there on three different continents in some small, little place. And which one's going to give you more satisfaction? And it really is. And that's not to say that there isn't value in having a beautiful apartment that's convenient in downtown and your kids can have good education and all that stuff. But we do get lied to, both by ourselves and by what the people around us do and by what culture tells us that we're supposed to do. And, yeah, very much the the most effective people that I know aren't people that are going out and seeking new information. They're ones that are fantastic at filtering the information that they get.

• 1:07:12Chris Williamson?

  They're the ones that are able to really discriminate the signal from the noise. And they go, OK, this is something that I need. This is just, this is horse shit. I don't need this. This is pointless, doesn't add anything to my life. And, um. That convenience is the final sort of nail in the coffin that when you mix hypernormal stimuli with always on availability, it's really different. I'm walking down the street, I was going to the gym earlier on, I walked past the Krispy Kreme in Times Square. I thought, I'm on my way to the gym, why am I looking at this Krispy Kreme place as if I want to go to it? I'm literally going to offset it, well, it's because it's there. It's because it's directly in front of me and because there's basically no benefit in the here and now for me doing it.

• 1:07:51Chris Williamson?

  The big benefit, there'll be a pain, sorry, for me to pay tomorrow or in a couple of weeks' time when I'm not as lean as I want to be. But yeah, man, I think, I really hope that paleo psychology becomes more of a more of a field that people pay attention to because I genuinely do think it's probably got a lot of the answers to questions that people feel are super existential and are actually just mismatches between what their system is used to and what they're doing now.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I appreciate, I think you've articulated that really well. And, you know, certainly a lot of the work that I've done in the last few years has really been trying to advance exactly this. One, one angle that, you know, I've thought about quite a bit has to do with government and business organizations where especially like producers of technology. So you can imagine, you know, the companies that are social media companies or Apple or companies that are making these technologies, wouldn't it be great if they had trainings or personnel or something, some structure that connected with, explicitly connected with, an evolutionary approach?

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Wouldn't it be great if Snapchat and Instagram had people at a very high level with an understanding of, you know, this stuff can be addictive, this stuff can be problematic. And what can we do, understanding human evolved psychology? What can we do with this product to help minimize those? Those unforeseen liabilities.

• 1:09:22Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think what they're doing, what these people are doing, they do understand the evolution, or at least in part, they understand it, but they're using it to further magnify the revenue and the time on sites that they do with these apps. So yeah, I think first off, you would need to have a change of philosophy. And if you give these people a deeper understanding of how the human brain works, to me, that just seems a lot like you're giving them more leverage to be able to take people's time away. But dude, I think that you're right with that as well. It'd be fantastic if these technology companies could use the insights around how our minds work to make our lives better because they have, it's their choice. What we do with our devices, they could make the apps less addictive, they could make

• 1:10:07Chris Williamson?

  the time that we spend on them more meaningful to us, they could connect us with stuff that makes us feel better rather than more outraged and blah, blah, blah. And I wonder whether we're going to look back in 50 years' time at this period in the same way as us looking back at those ladies that used to lick the nibs of the paintbrushes that had radium on them and think, what were you doing? Or the people that worked in, next to factories that were spewing out smoke and just see it as, you know, this was a perhaps necessary cost en route to finding a more refined version of something that would later be a completed product, but God, I'm glad that I didn't live through that time.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Wow, that's a very powerful idea. And to be honest, I think what you're painting is almost a best case scenario.

• 1:10:55Chris Williamson?

  Or that it gets better. That's presuming that it gets better. Right, right. With VR and Metaverse and augmented reality and Neuralink and stuff like that. Yeah, when you can't escape it anymore, if we don't fix the philosophy problem around this misalignment between what we want and what the apps do, yeah, it just gets deeper, right? It just gets more embedded.

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. I think you're absolutely right on that.

• 1:11:16Chris Williamson?

  Glenn Gair, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the work that you do, where should they go?

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  Well, I've got my website, glengair.com, and I also have a Psychology Today blog called Darwin's Subterranean World, and I would be more than happy to connect with people who have questions or want to engage in discussions.

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  So, thanks, Glenn.

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  Yep, thanks so much, Chris. Appreciate being on the show.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

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