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

Rob Kurzban is a psychologist and an author. Expect to learn why we should view emotions through the lens of evolution, the hidden reason why humans aren’t filled with existential anxiety at all times, what happens to your brain when you don’t express gratitude often, the secret message depression might be trying to communicate to your subconscious, what the most difficult emotions to explain are, and much more… Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription to the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) How Evolution Explains Our Emotions (01:21) Why Do Humans Need Emotions at All? (03:44) How Emotions Measure and Motivate (08:09) The Hidden Intelligence of Body Maintenance (11:17) Why Humans Are So Good at Pooping (13:24) How the Body Uses Nausea as a Tactical Response (17:31) The Evolutionary Reason We Fear Small Spaces (21:21) Why You’re Not Attracted to Your Siblings (30:59) The Most Surprising Thing About Anxiety (35:46) How Much Anxiety Is Actually Normal? (39:37) Why Everyone Feels Overstimulated (40:44) Can Panic Actually Be Useful? (42:53) Are Aesthetic Pleasures Different From Sensory Pleasures? (45:10) Why Humans Love Grooming Each Other (51:57) Where Does Our Spice Tolerance End? (55:40) What Is Fun and Excitement? (58:01) Is Music Just Sexual Signalling? (01:03:35) How Hunger Can Work Against Us (01:09:44) Which Emotions Are Uniquely Human? (01:18:01) Nature vs Culture: Where Do Emotions Come From? (01:20:22) Why Jealousy Is So Unflattering (01:26:58) Is Evolutionary Psychology Accurate? (01:33:54) Is Empathy Really Investment Advice? (01:37:19) Why Gratitude Is More Powerful Than You Think (01:49:22) Does Clinical Psychology Actually Work? (01:50:55) What Depression Does to Your Behaviour (01:57:06) Contempt vs Resentment: What’s the Difference? (02:00:13) What Embarrassment Does to Your Body (02:05:22) Why Do We Feel Shame and Guilt? (02:09:28) The Personal Relationship to the Mind and Attention (02:11:45) The Emotions Robert Has Changed His Mind About (02:14:04) The Hardest Human Emotion to Explain (02:15:21) Which Emotion Causes the Most Damage Today? (02:20:57) How to Use Your Emotions to Improve Your Life (02:27:20) Where to Find Robert Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You 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 them? How did they come to be? Why is this topic interesting to you?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  So for me, feelings are everything, right? So our motivations basically come from what we feel. So if we feel hungry, we want to eat. And if we feel aroused, we want to do something else. If we feel jealous, we want to take whatever. So like, oh, 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, but could be more interesting than that.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Why is the evolutionary angle interesting or useful when it comes to looking at feelings and emotions?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  I would say the evolutionary point of view is going to be critical for studying anything that humans do. We'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?

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Why do feelings need to feel like anything at all? It's not obvious that there needs to be a phenomenology to stuff. Like, a thermometer is able to detect heat and it doesn't seem to be feeling any kind of way. So why couldn't the brain just change our behavior without giving us the subjective experience of it?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one knows. I mean, I got here today in a driverless Waymo and it sort of, in some sense, it sort of wanted to pick me up at my hotel and then it sort of wanted to make a right 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.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Functionally, at least.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's functionally. But for whatever reason, biology's 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. My 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, 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? Which is the priority?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  So it's a kind of like a way to check among the different pieces, which is, which is the biggest one.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  That's interesting. So because a thermometer just has one thing to do, the Waymo, to some degree, also just has one thing to do. It needs to get from here to there.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  They need to be less complex and they need to weight competing priorities in a 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, going in the direction that I want to, to survive and reproduce.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I need to do 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. Get 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 these different things, so you have to have a clearinghouse.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  What is the measurement and motivation language that you use when it comes to feelings?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  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, that's super deep because in psychology, we talk about all this stuff, but we never talk about the quantities. Like, 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 outside, like how close is that bear? There's no, there's no bears in this to you. But just to say, like, you'd have to measure, like, 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.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Now, it could be complicated, right? So jealousy's measuring something about, is that person a risk to me? Or maybe, you know, admiration is measuring, is that someone I should, you know, 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 better 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 your behavior, either inside or outside. So I really like this idea that emotions 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 if 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.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  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, the 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.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Are there some emotions that are more measure and some that are more motivate?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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're going to, you know, you don't know what you have to do unless you can measure something and then you have to act in the world.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  If feelings are essentially measurement systems, how often do we misunderstand what they're measuring?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I think pretty often. And I think that in the modern world, it can be especially difficult, right? So let's take envy. I think in, 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 that 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 envy system is like an overdrive, 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 be in your best interest or maybe isn't even feasible.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  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. And so you want to tell them, don't do that. I'm going to be, I might, you know, I'm going, 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.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Does it mean, the measure 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?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  I think so. There's really sad, but very interesting work 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, 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.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  You created a taxonomy of five kingdoms, five different groups that emotions go into. What's interesting about the body maintenance one? What did you find uniquely interesting about that?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I should say, I'm not a feelingist. I treat all feelings equally. I don't have favorites. I love, I love them all. But I mean, there's, 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 the, 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, you know, that's on there because there's little insects 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.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  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, I'm going to lock in. Like, 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. And 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.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  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, one. But you could feel itchy just because people are talking about.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Tens of thousands of people in unison itching themselves right now.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is kind of interesting, right? But that might even, you, look, evolutionary psychologists 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.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  What about yawning? And why is that contagious?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that's a hard one. Yeah, I, there's like, there's a, 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 critters 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 additional oxygen in there. Maybe you're getting ready to do some, I don't, I don't, I don't.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  It's a messy one.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 five or 10 people are saying, there's not enough research to answer this question or there's very little research. And I'm like, what are people going to do it?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  You're telling me that the yawning field is horribly underfunded?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  I think it is underfunded.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  We need to make yawning great again, that's what I think. Okay, what about the need to poop?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I thought you might be, I might thought you might be fishing.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Top of my list.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, super, super interesting one. I mean, as we know, everybody poops. Um, any organism that takes in, you know, stuff and then has to get rid of it, they're gonna have to poop. And so, yeah, there is this adaptive problem, which is you wanna poop, kind of, you want optimal pooping. So you don't wanna just poop anywhere, right? Especially if you're a creature that might be stalked, cause then you're leaving evidence. In a lot of species, including ours, pooping near where other organisms, their men, their group, that you shouldn't do that. Just viewers, take that, take note. So you wanna kind of poop when it's necessary, but not more often. And 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?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  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, little valve kind of thing that opens up. And so it's a really well-designed system, which isn't that surprising, cause it's ancient. Like that, there's been millions and millions of years for the pooping system to get debugged by evolutionary natural selection. So now we are very good at, at pooping.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Would that explain a little bit of the need for privacy and shame that people have around pooping? That they know they're uniquely vulnerable during the act?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're not the only critters. So there's so-called latrine behavior. There's organisms.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Latrine behavior.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Latrine behavior, yeah. Not my term, but wonderful.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  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. Like if, you know, you get a nice meal or whatever, you hang out. And those parasites are bad for you and for your, like, so you sort of wanna keep the poop elsewhere. Also, if you can, you can bury it. This is why, so those of us with, you know, with our canine friends, you see the little poop. He had a little flick, flick thing, which is a little residual behavior, but 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, I should go over there to do it, where everyone else has done, and then screwed away.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  What about nausea?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  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. Um, and so the cues that give, you know, to nausea are things that you've been poisoned. It's just 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 board, or if you've been, uh, you have a toxin on board, is it affects the vestibular system? It affects your ability.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  You feel dizzy as well.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  You feel dizzy. And so, um, 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, um, or.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Fucking nightmare.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  It's the worst. Yeah, do not try, 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, whatever, and I should get rid of it really quickly. And so, 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 system's 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.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  I remember New Year's Eve, twenty sixteen, maybe, twenty seventeen, I was working in Manchester, running one of our nightclubs. 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, twenty-four hour stomach bug. And I text him and I'm saying, how's Newcastle going? Cause he was looking after that 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, I've got Manchester, it's gone really well, we've sold out, everything's great. And then ten, ten thirty, I started being really catty and short with everyone around me.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  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 Year's Eve, if you sold out, you're in Manchester, this is a cool adventure, like, just enjoy them, what are you doing? And stop being such a dick. And then I started to sort of feel a little bit hot and a little bit sort 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 top. Oh shit, I'm a hundred and fifty 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,

• 16:10Speaker 00

  which I tried, uh, and then exploded as soon as I stepped through the door into my own house in Newcastle. But yeah, I, 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 wanna be around people and like I was being like protective of me somewhat. And then I was distancing myself and then I felt a bit hot and then my stomach felt cold and then I felt dizzy. And then I felt saying, I'm a bub, bub, bub, bub, all the way around.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, lots of interesting parts of that story. My favorite was the conversation with me, which is this 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, I might, 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 origins. 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 have this sense that there's this residual, like 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, that is a bad spot to be in. I mean, obviously, right now, when you're in a national forest, no one's gonna like throw rocks on you or something like that.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  You're not gonna 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.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  That we have to kind of figure out.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  What do you think about claustrophobia?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, I should, in many of these things, I have to say, most of this stuff comes from my own experience. So I, um, 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 where I think, and I think this is sort of supported by people like Randy Nessie and, and.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Friend of the show.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Is that right? Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  I mean, he did some of the pioneering work in, in all of.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  People should go back and listen to that episode once they're done with this one. Evolutionary psychiatry, good feelings for, uh, good reasons for bad feelings.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Great book.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Unreal.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Nice primer as well, two, two car garage with your one.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, people should definitely go out and buy, get both, for sure.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think the, 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, cause everyone's really nice? Or should you be really skeptical, cause you're in a world in which people are gonna be deceiving you? And as you go through life, you gotta 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 just get misset sometimes. I think in my case, my, 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.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Prospect and refuge.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a fancy way to say, um, I can see what's coming and I can escape, right?

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Oh, very nice.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  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?

• 18:56Speaker 00

  I'm gonna guess that a, uh, closed space that's dark would be worse than a closed space that's light.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely, cause you lose prospect, right? So that you, yeah, well done.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  A plus.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Is this why we like big vistas? But you know, the, the house that's got the beautiful view is more beautiful than the house that backs onto a gray brick wall?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  I mean, we don't know the answer, but I, I would, I would bet a wager a lot, that's right. If you look at the pictures of landscapes, just what do people choose to, to paint?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Expansive.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  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, I can, whatever, I can see them. And so the more prospect you have, that's why, I think that's why we like sort of being high up, cause 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.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  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, I'll take us on a trip, wouldn't this be lovely? And, uh, just the, 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 fifteen feet. And then very quickly, that was, that's not gonna 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 Element in it. Element is an electrolyte drink mixed with everything that you need and nothing that you don't.

• 20:34Speaker 00

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• 21:20Speaker 00

  Bottom wisdom. What about disgust? So nausea, I guess, like adjacent to disgust, but different. What's going on with disgust?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So nausea, I think, is the motivational piece. So disgust is the whole thing. So again, a path is, he feels like this is the path that you discuss. There's the, 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, it's measuring the risk of pathogen preference. Like this, think about what do you find really disgusting? Like the smell of feces, right? That's, that's where the organism, like little maggots, like that's a really good indication that there's some kind of parasites in there. The, this smell of decaying flesh, people really don't like that. And so it's measuring, what is the probability that there's some pathogen nearby? And so what's the right design, if there are, is to go away, right? So we tend to want to distance ourselves.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's going on?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  I think that's like my former colleague at Pan, Paul Rosin, I think, his idea, or it might've been Darwin, Darwin Rosin, is this idea that the tongue is sort of like, if you ingest something that might have pathogens, that has the cues that there's some whatever, you're pushing it out, you're spelling it.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  And I suppose as well, if I'm worried about maybe flies getting into my eyes, I'm closing up, it's almost as if I'm making it, distancing myself from it.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. So all these defenses against pathogens and they all, you know, act in this coordinated way. I think disgust is super fascinating. People also like disgust because there's the sexual disgust part too, right?

• 22:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Well, if the other person is closely related, it's often a bad idea, right? So the main.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Oh, Westermark.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Westermark stuff, right? So people who were raised with someone, they, they find this, the idea of sex with them, and this is Deb Lieberman's work, excellent research on this.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Friend of the show.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  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 get, you're disgusted by the thought of having sex with them.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  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, 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 window.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  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'm speaking entirely theoretically here. But yeah, that's a big hurdle to get over.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  That is a big hurdle. I am not an only child. And yes, I can tell you, it is the most disgusting, it is the most disgusting thought ever to have, that 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 kibbutz team. They were also raised together.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  The what, what?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  The, the kibbutz in Israel. So it's sort of a, a setting in which people are raised in a group of kids, the same age kids, they'll, you know, 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, eh, I don't want to, no, that's not, it's gross. No, thank you.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  No, thank you. It is, I've said this before, I said it to Deborah Lee. I think my first question to her was, why don't you want to have sex with your sister? And 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?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  I can't, 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, whoa, just a little, you've got something going on there.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  It's hard.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Impressive. But I, but if you atrophy, if you don't do it enough, then it's completely,

• 26:09Speaker 00

  that is kind of the physical equivalent of the emotional tool that I'm lacking.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I mean, I think there's a lot of that, where if you don't.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Use it, you lose it.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the development. I mean, language is kind of like that. Like, you could speak Thai or Tagalog, right? You have, but you grew up in an environment where you, whatever, whatever this language is that you, you speak.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Beautiful Queens, Kings, English. Thank you.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Yes, exceptional.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  There we go. Thank you.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  But yeah, you just didn't have the right cues as you were growing up. And I think, I think some of our emotional systems are like this, that they only start kind of coming online. I mean, I have some of that too. Like, there's certain emotions that I don't seem to experience, like particularly in the context of moral condemnation, people get really bent out of shape about a lot of different, you know, drugs. People get really bent out of shape about, for example, drug use and that. And they seem to have this very visceral reaction to it. And maybe it's part of the disgust 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, yada, yada. I'm just saying, the thing itself, I'm like, hey, guys, like I want to smoke a giant.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  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, that 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.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  I like this argument in the context of personality psychology and where people have made this, right? So yeah, it's good to have some extroverts out there or some people who are adventurous, because we need someone to go over there. But we, so, and that might retain some of the genetic variability in there, right? So it doesn't get all homogenized? Could, could be. I mean, these things are.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  I mean, not, not, not so, I mean, it's, you know, pretty interesting that there's always this sort of background level of psychopaths and, and.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  They've survived.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  They've survived.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I, I think, I mean, look, this study turned out to be false. Now, so fucking gutted when it turned out to be false. It was an episode that I didn't get to release because unfortunately it, it, 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, a, 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,

• 29:15Speaker 00

  each cohort of people had had their attachment style assessed, and you had a relatively equal mix of anxious, avoidant and secure. And 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.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  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, 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, you'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?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I think, again, going back to Randy Ness'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 it, being a bit more of a brave mouse, you know, under certain contexts. And so there, again, you could retain a certain amount of variability in the genome for this variation in 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, you know, give in terms of what the right setting is. And so you're going to see, you're going to see that it varies a fair bit.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Anxiety, kind of the buzzword emotion of the last decade or so. What surprised you in your research about anxiety?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, like everything else, this turned out to be complicated. I mean, I think, so I don't know if John Height is a friend of the show.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Friend of the show.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Yep. So he's obviously done some wonderful work on this. One thing about anxiety that strikes me about the modern moment is that social media has put us in something of a, 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, 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 stakes.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Vigilance about reputation management?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  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 have I had? So in some sense, I mean, I don't know if the anxious generation findings are going to hold up. They look.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Bro, they're in the middle.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Pretty good to me, but.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  They're in the middle of the quickest 180, 360, 540, 720. 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 going to wait for the cards to sort of fall.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Fair.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  But yeah. Get a little bit more ancestral for me from an anxiousness perspective. Like what's happening proximally? What's happening ultimately? Like what's, what's going on with anxiousness?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  So I think, so anxiety is basically this, 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 do a podcast, they often feel anxiety. Why is 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, 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,

• 33:22Speaker 01

  then it, yes, you could have paralysis. But a little, again, going back to the mouse case with the, with the cat, like a good design should be to anticipate where are the dangers about to lurk in my future? And what can I do to mitigate them should those things occur?

• 33:36Speaker 00

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• 34:21Speaker 00

  Right now you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/moderndwism 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 modern wisdom and modern wisdom 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 a increased likelihood of not being surprised, they're going to come across as someone that knows what, what might happen. What's the reason for not overshooting anxiety then?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I mean, the, 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 particular people, but you're, 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. Like if 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. And 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 never, 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%.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  But every, in all other cases, there's always opportunity costs. There's always something else you could be, you could be doing. And so at some point, that additional anxiety is not as useful as something else.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Do you think it would have been more adaptive to have been more anxious in the past than now?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I really 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. 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, if we, especially if we were living in a normal, everyday hunter-gatherer context. But 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

• 36:41Speaker 01

  a certain amount of background anxiety because again, like I'm around people I don't know.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  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 predatory 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.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  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 3,000 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 some 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.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Well, that's why I think the, the evolutionary view is so potentially powerful for everyday lives, because let's take something like envy and anger or two, that the, when, when you feel something, I think the first kind of reaction to that should be asked this question, what is evolution trying to get me to do and why? Like, once you understand the function of these emotions, then I think you can step back for a second and say, okay, should 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 can just ignore that. And the same thing with envy is like, oh, evolution's telling me I gotta 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 matter for me because you know what?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  I have a home and I have people who care for me and I haven't, you know, I have, you know, all the food I need. I don't need to worry about that. So like, once you understand what evolution is trying to get you to do, you can take the next step, which is saying, should I give into that or should I just sort of ignore? And then there is a challenge of ignoring it, but yeah, that's hard.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  What about being overstimulated?

• 39:46Speaker 01

  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. It's tricky when you spend a lot of time like 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, a conflict there.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Sensory mismatch.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little sensory mismatch. Yeah. Which can be certainly arbitrated very lovingly and with care and effectively, but.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  And with proper soundproofing.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  And with, and with separate rooms. Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  But you know, I think that's the thing is that you, you, one way that we learn, kind of to your point about claustrophobia is you gotta figure out what are the things that you like and what are the things you don't like? And then again, we have the luxury of manipulating our environments to accord with that.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  What about panic?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, panic is super interesting.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Again, this is another one, which was an area where there's not a lot of research on this, but there's this video of a 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, just, it's just flopping randomly. It was 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, which was just move its muscles in random different ways. You know, I suspect that when people are facing panic, the, the measurement there

• 41:34Speaker 01

  is if I don't do something, it's all over or it's going to be whatever the, 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 flush 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 with on the losing side, they say, yes, we could beat a hasty retreat or lead back to our ships or wherever it is.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  This was, I like this example, I think it was the Battle of Marathon, where, you know, the, you know, the, 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 panic psychology seems to be, if 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.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Something that's maybe a little bit harder for people to understand is aesthetic pleasures. Why do we like things that look nice?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  That is hard. I mean, first of all, aesthetics is very complicated, but there is this thing where we tend to find aesthetically appealing. Those things are so 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 of people who are healthy and 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 time, amount of time looking at them on the internet, on various platforms, so on. And those are like, I think of them as like little, kind of like fitness, little fitness landscapes or little fitness.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  What do you think that the people are trying to achieve with that cue motivation? Just observe something that's, that might encourage them to emulate that in their own lives?

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Either emulate that or, or to do the kind of thing that one does with it. So if you see a food item that meets your all the criteria, right? So it's, it looks very appealing, like a ripe apple, direct your attention to it and then it causes you eventually often to do the right thing with it, which is to, you know, 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 easy to take, take, take advantage than others. So sort of like guiding your attention to it and then, you know, causing you to exploit it.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Do you think of aesthetic pleasures as distinct from sensory pleasures?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Really, it's tough, right? To draw that distinction. I think aesthetic pleasures, the, 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 from the arc of a, 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. Yeah, fitness is 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.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  What about people that like being scratched or having their hair played with? Like what's going on there?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, grooming. So some of our relatives, of course, they groom all, you know, all the time and only some of that can be accounted for by, you know, picking little insects off or getting dirt off. My guess is, and 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 don't do it myself, these grooming, you know,

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Tens of thousands of people rubbing their head right now.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. Is this sort of this, it's very, it's a, it's kind of an appealing thing to know, oh, this is an individual who could be hurting me, but they're not. And therefore they're probably an ally of mine. And that's 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 some 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.

• 46:27Speaker 00

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• 47:10Speaker 00

  a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join dot whoop dot com slash modern wisdom. That's join dot whoop dot com slash modern wisdom. Have you seen the data around the difference in pleasure from different speeds of being touched on your skin?

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Oh, I have not.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Mark, can you try and chat GPT this for me? What does the research say about pressure and speed when it comes to the pleasure from one person rubbing, like itching another person's skin or touching another person's skin? Basically, I think the original study was done on babies and I can't remember what it, but it's something like between two centimeters and six centimeters per second, no more than this many Newton meters or whatever. And it's that if you move more quickly than that, the, whatever senses are that are on your skin, they are not detecting that you're basically paying enough attention to actually be able to pick what was needed.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  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 affective touch literature, pleasantness is strongly 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 one 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 the peak, very slow movement, 0.1 to 0.3

• 49:08Speaker 00

  centimeters and fast movement of over 30 centimeters per second are generally rated as less pleasant. 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 than rubbing someone's arm. This appears partly related to tactile afference, touch sensitive nerve fibers in hairy skin. Peak firing rate is pleasant because it corresponded 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, what's the adaptive explanation for this?

• 49:47Speaker 01

  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 pleasant, pleasant. 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 is it measured? Well, 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, the model is because particularly at the low level, you could just see it's right there. It's right there.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This isn't you having some weird preference.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Adaptive explanation. The leading adaptive explanation is that the system evolved less for detecting objects and 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 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 like has a ton of stuff around nervous system regulation. He taught me that

• 51:01Speaker 00

  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, let's go for a walk, here we, da, da, da, da, da. Like 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.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  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, there's all these things which are.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  The intonation.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Similar, yeah. The, the frequencies are similar, the intonations, even that kind of thing, like you use that for a dog, you'd also use it for a horse. 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. And yet you still get this parallel between the species.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Bingo. Yeah. Polyvagal theory, dude. It works across, across species.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  That's super cool.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  What about spiciness? Something that some people like, some people really fucking don't.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Super interesting. I mean, again, this is another one where I always have to preface it by, there's debate about this. I don't really know, but I'll tell you the, like here is 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, I love being on a roller coaster.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  I like roller coasters too.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. But are there some roller coasters you won't go on?

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Are there some?

• 52:25Speaker 01

  That are like two, that are just too much.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  It's been a while since I've been to a theme park that's had one, but certainly in the past, yes.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So with roller coasters is like, I want, 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 it gets 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 spice 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, it's 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? Where, yeah. And so the best, so spices.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Probably are important for, they all go back to pathogens. They seem to have some role in suppressing 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, because you never know, to your point about-

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Repetition crisis is going to come for us all eventually.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  It's come for all of us. But there was this finding that places were more, 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 the environment, you put more spices in there and they inhibit the growth of those-

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Does that actually work?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Apparently.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  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 if you're, 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 chemicals, put in our food, and then, so more is better. But there's also, but they're, again, in different, obviously different cultures and different individuals, there 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. So, and there's other potential effects that spices can have.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  But it does look like it's, like it's interesting that there's this drop off. So you want the most possible that you could, that you could sort of tolerate, but then-

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Without feeling it on the way out.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  I always thought, I always thought for a very long time that people who made the joke of, oh, that's going to hurt when it comes out the other end. I'm like, dude, that's impossible. Digestive tract, your stomach acid, all the rest of this stuff. And 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. Anyway, this, this had managed to hack sweetness and spiciness, and it'd 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.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  It was, it was kind of hilarious. I was like laughing on the toilet, like what the fuck is going on? And I'm like, I can't, apparently I can't cool this down. This hurt on the way in and it's hurt on the way out. So there is a limit that you can get beyond.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. And that pain is telling you there could be damage. So that's evolution's way of saying, yeah, you could be, don't do that again.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  What constitutes it? Sex can be fun, but sex can be sexy. Play can be fun, but play can be serious. What's happening with fun and excitement?

• 56:02Speaker 01

  I mean, again, usual caveat, no one knows, but it certainly looks like there's a few pieces in common, right? So like, then if you go into non-human animals, you see them sort of playing, 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, you know, 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, one, one important piece is you're sort of training. So, you know, when, when I was a kid and I played soccer, that was some of the best fun I had when I was a kid. 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

• 56:47Speaker 01

  or warfare, whatever. But 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 the 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 safety. 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 weird. I mean, 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?

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  And I think there's some new work on this. I think Ed Higan has a paper, but there's something-

• 57:34Speaker 00

  Friend of the show.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, friends are, yeah, it's a little puzzling, right? Like people just sort of coordinate their movements with one another and that, when 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, you know, whatever this kind of stuff, this could happen in the real world. So I think it's a lot of it is training, learning and practicing.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  What do you make of the music is basically sexual signaling done en masse theory?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Music is as mysterious as dancing. Yeah, so the production of music, I hear Jeffrey Miller, I feel like everyone's going to be a friend of the show at this point.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Friend of the show.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Friend of the show. You know, Jeffrey Miller's point about this, which is that you can't make beautiful music unless you are, you know, you have really good, you have to be smart, you have to be creative, you have to-

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Taste.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  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. As someone who is completely atonal.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  A-musical.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, a-musical, a total 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.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  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 videos of-

• 58:53Speaker 00

  People losing their mind.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, people lose their mind.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  I've got a guy in here 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 co-host, pretty rare in the podcasting world. Two 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 sound's too loud or whatever it is. And the screams of the girls as they came out on stage were so loud that everyone's

• 59:40Speaker 00

  Apple Watches went off, telling them that they were in a daisy, a dangerous noise environment.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a few things I like about that. I mean, a lot of, 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 measure and all this is all the time. But the other piece is, yeah, you got to measure who a good mate is. And so some, and sometimes that dial goes off the charts, right? I think, where 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, I think it's sort of like a supernormal stimulus.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  Stimuli.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? Like, I think that's what's going on again in some of the, whatever. It's hard, pornography is like this, right? So like in pornography, you get this supernormal stimulus. And sometimes it's not just one supernormal, it's like multiple. And then your evolved system is just like, that's crazy.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  You 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 de-training their penis to be able to detect the level of pressure. I think he told me, it was like XPSI is available in the vagina and 10X, 30XPSI is available in your hand.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  And it's kind of this, it's a supernormal stimuli, but just raw sensory data. Because nobody would say, hey, this, my hand is sexier than that person 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 de-training or re-training your penis for precisely that reason.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  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 I'm in female, but it's like, no, it's like the pressure that's being exerted internally. And just the mismatch, I, I'm very worried about, like, there's, 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.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Supernormal Kegel stimuli.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and so there's going to be more people who get addicted to, like if you could hit the optimal, let's just say, optimal vagina.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Sensory, yeah. Well, I mean, look, women have already, they've, they've outstripped men with regards to this, the 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. Like they really sort of speed ran finding, finding a way to pleasure women.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Right. If you go into, into the stores, there's a million pieces of equipment having to do with, you know, that-

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Referring to it as equipment is fucking brilliant.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Apparatus.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  It's right. It's entire racks of all the different, you know, they, they have certain frequencies.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  They move, they vibrate, they twirl around.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Shapes and they've got colors and textures. Like there's been some research, clearly.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

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• 1:03:21Speaker 00

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• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, well, I mean, hunger is obviously one of them. This is changing a little bit with modern technology with Ozempic and the, you know, that, that line of, of, but clearly, you know, our hunger systems have evolved in a world to take advantage of food up and we just keep doing it. And I think, you know, the, the, we've seen the effects on the so-called obesity epidemic. I don't take a position on the moral weight of that, or though I just defer on the health stuff, but like, that seems to be pretty bad. My favorite system, in a sense, that's my least favorite system is, speaking of appetites, so humans have an appetite for morally condemning other people.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Like, we just love sitting around and saying that that person, they're bad, bad, bad. People love that.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  Well, that is a difficult question. I suspect it's because a lot of times when you were part of the mob that was condemning someone else, you benefited. Yeah. You, first of all, you distracted attention from yourself, but also oftentimes you or your allies can get their stuff as 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 like, you know, it's like, um, it's like the 30th age when there was the revolution, you know, when, 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-

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  Or at the very least be on the side of the non persecuted.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. So you always want to be on the side, the big side. And so we're evolved to, I figure out opportunities, particularly when other people are making more accusations and to, to, 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.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  Blue sky.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean-

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  You know, I pulled William off of 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 of and a friend of both of ours. Hi, William. But he, uh, he was on Blue Sky and would, we would have these conversations. I'd be like, dude,

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  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 and, 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, you know?

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. That illustrates the point, right? So everybody wants to be on the accusing side. And like with these platforms, people can indulge. I think of it as like, you know, our culture, whatever, made a world in which we could indulge our appetite for food and fat and sugar and salt. I mean, and then we indulge-

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Moral condemnation.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  And then we built a world in which you could indulge your appetite for moral attacks and moral condemnation. We indulge that. And I don't, yeah, I think to, to me, that's one of the most, I mean, I have, I have some biases in this area, but like, that's one of the most toxic, unpleasant aspects of the modern world is that, yeah, no matter what platform you go on, doesn't matter what you say, for the most part, that the result is a pylon. The result is a, is a tax. And the thing about a tax is that moral attacks, and I stole this from my former grad, it was Peter Shirley, probably not a friend of the show yet.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  Not yet.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  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 was a piece in the Free Press talking about a guy who was involved in, who was served papers. And, um, but, but they got the wrong guy. So, um, 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. It's just saying nothing of whether, you know, what the actual facts are. Yeah. And so, but the, so 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. And that's what happens sometimes.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  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, uh, Andy, I think he's still doing his thing. He was an investigative reporter.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  The journalist, yeah.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Andy, dude, fucking brilliant.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  Who are you? Why the middle finger? What's your name? Who the fuck are you?

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  Who are you?

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  Why, why?

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  Hey, why are you?

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Do you think that I'm Andy Ngo? Is that what you're thinking? You racist-

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  Would you like to do my face? But I'm fucking sick of this. This is the second time this has happened to me, the third time this has happened to me at protests.

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  It's like you're doing it intentionally then. Just be, just be proud that you're not Andy.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Andy, what's wrong?

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  You see me like you're doing it on purpose.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Super proud that I'm not Andy, but I'm really irritated that you stand here and point 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.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  If you're not Andy, then you wouldn't be antagonizing. You know exactly what you're doing. You know, exactly. Fucking piece of shit. I don't think your argument has internal-

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  I don't think your argument has internal validity. Hey, guy that looks like Andy Ngo, fuck you, Andy. And he's like, what, for what? Like, I'm just being Asian?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  But look at his defense too. Also a moral attack, racism, right? That's a great thing. What they're not, he's not even wrong about that. But notice that the, the, the response to this moral attack.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  The currency.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like, I hear whatever. So like, I, I, again, I think that's why it's really a good way to think about it is that all of these attacks are like, we're 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, in that case, you just make his day shitty.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. You can say, I mean, I've said-

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  You said cuck chair.

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  I did say, I, I cuck couch technically outside. Um, all right. What are you getting into sort of the social world? I think some of the more uniquely human, uh, emotions are some of the more complex ones. Romantic love, family love, what's happening there?

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  Ten ship bias.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, they've got, so like every organism has a, I mean, for mammals, mothers and fathers, whatever. And so you would expect that adaptation to care for kids, parents and so on, the family love. That, that's phenomenology, I would guess, or who knows, is probably comparable in some.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Pretty universal.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty comparable. But, I mean, humans are weird in other respects. I mean, so, um, obviously we're pretty monogamous-ish or right.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Monogamish.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Monogamish. And so, um, there seems to be adaptations designed for monogamy, right? So this like what Dorothy Tenoff called limerence. So 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.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  You know, that might, 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-

• 1:10:57Speaker 00

  I think penguins are together for life basically as well.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Barring unfortunate incidents. Yeah.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  They're together until one of them dies.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  Of a cold, horrible death.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or a seal.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  Or a seal, which is a hungry, horrible death.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, but I think for me, some of the, some of that stuff is, um, on the human side, which is, I think understudied again is, um, I mean, there's not a lot of organisms that have kind of friends like humans do. So, 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, our friendships? People who are not in a romantic relationship with, but were 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.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  And then on the other side as well, the betrayal, perhaps the resentment, the, the enemy, frenemy, ex-friend's enemy situation that you can go through.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. A lot of friends can also be rivals and that could be specific. So they could 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 like humans have hatred, which who knows if that's something that-

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  What do you think hatred is?

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  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 harm.

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  It's kind of like social anger?

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  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 that before, my hatred is like long protracted over a, a period of time.

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  It's like anger that's cooled, but, but stayed at a, at a pretty warm temperature and kept on going.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's disgusting. 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 angry. I'm like, dude, lame. And then you'd be like, sorry. And then we'd be whatever. Whereas for hatred, I think, you know, the, the ship has sailed, right? You know, I, I like, 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've been- Murder, whatever, something horrible.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  In modern environments, it's probably different, but.

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, the delineation, it's interesting around the friend thing. I would love, there'll be some animal behavior researcher. I mean, you have, fuck, what, closest relatives on the evolutionary tree would just be basically existing in familial pods. So it's just kinship done like en masse, right?

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Well, chimps have some non-kin group members in them, but some non-humans are basically just gonna be.

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  Do you think that, does that mean that they have friends? A non-kin group members friends?

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. Like, so in the research on, for example, a little coup d'etat in chimp communities, it looks like the people who are the people.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  The couple of number three, number four, and number five get together to fuck over number one.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  Even if they're not relatives.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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. It'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.

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  They forcibly copulate.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Yes, dolphin friends are for that purpose. That's what they do. They get into gangs and then they do that.

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  That's what, they're literally walking, going around doing the like gang thing.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to be very clear. I condemn this.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  Dolphin, the dolphin behavior is.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  In no uncertain terms.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  Highly condemned.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, highly condemned. But if you ask the question, this is why I think it's interesting to say, so what are dolphins' friends for? Like, what are not what are friends?

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  It's a function.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  It's a function. That's why it's for that. Like, they're not using it to hunt. They're not using it for defense to get whatever. They're just using it for that function. That's why, again, the evolutionary analysis.

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  Specialized.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, forces you to say, what exactly function are you talking about?

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So human friends, allegiances, alliances, I'll protect you, you protect me.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  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 know, 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, a potential for accusation that comes.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  The 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 gonna win. So I guess that's part of it.

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  Collective action for war, for going 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 build tools.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  That's a pretty good list.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  It is a great list. 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?

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  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, Peter Shulley, 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, 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 gonna be on your side. Your best friend, right? Your best friend's gonna take your side no matter what, against your third, fourth, and so on. And so I think all of those things you listed, someone to play with, someone to exchange with, although those can be done with strangers, right? You can, you know, play with strangers, you can exchange food with whatever. Every day you exchange money for food.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  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 gonna be able to count on them for support when conflicts? So I think the alliance piece is the most important part of human friendship, but it's complicated.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  I guess what I would say is when I look at the emotions, they just look so obvious. To me, they look so obviously like evolved adaptations, right? So they, to your point about their design, I mean, you look at all of 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 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 it in the Bible and you see it in other things.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  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 Ten 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 do? 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.

• 1:19:18Speaker 00

  What's the difference between envy and jealousy?

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  So I, 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 a mating relationship, maybe you make yourself a better partner, you know? Maybe compose a sonnet or something like that. Whereas envy is more directing your attention to people who are doing well in some domain. So it's not really a threat to your relationship. It's just, 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.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  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? I've got a threat, gotta counter it. 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 successful? How do they build their following?

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  I guess envy in that way is at least somewhat functional, whereas jealousy, again, it's interesting, right? I always, 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? Like, if evolution apparently 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?

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:19Speaker 00

  The zero sum view of jealousy.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Yes, like if you're, you know, I don't know, I think a lot about these, you know, whatever places historically, it's the 60s, it's California, and everyone's saying, oh, jealousy is a pathology. And then the next thing you know, that guy who's saying that is like sleeping with your girlfriend because whatever, it's like.

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  You've taken your eye off the ball.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you took your eye off. 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.

• 1:21:54Speaker 00

  Cut your hair off, take more off. You're beautiful as you are. You don't need to dye it. Yeah, no, no, no, no.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  And so you're sort of undermining their defenses a little bit. And so I think the cultural dialogue, you gotta be careful about it, right? Like, it is unpleasant, but like, a lot of this stuff is strategic.

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  You're among friends here, it's fine.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. You see what I'm saying? Like, it's like a little bit.

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  Well, 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, 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 doesn't have as much place to exist. It does, this is one of the accusations that gets levied in evolutionary perspective of anything, which is that analysis becomes justification. Like, I'm not saying that because dolphins do that and that is the outcome that they get, that it is good, right?

• 1:22:53Speaker 00

  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 accused of justifying something.

• 1:23:20Speaker 00

  Results in you just being undereducated about why the landscape is what it is.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. I, first of all, I agree with the analysis. I think the, the, this issue of what we condemn is thoroughly different from what we study. And I, there's lots of people who find that difficult to separate the, the two.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  You can't study something without condemning it. And if it's condemnable, then you shouldn't be studying it.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  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. And they're sort of third rails. And so people back off from studying them because as soon as you start studying on your view to say, oh, well, if you're explaining it, then you're condoning it. I, I find that, I've always found that argument mystifying.

• 1:23:56Speaker 00

  If you're explaining it, you're condoning it. That's so lovely.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:17Speaker 00

  You might actually be able to fix it.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  You would, 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. Like, if you said, well, people who steal stuff, or they're just, you know, they wanna, they just wanna 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 wanna say, well, let's make that, 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 gonna 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 in the, I think, I, I think that's a very bad thing for society to do.

• 1:24:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, look, it does sound in some ways like a excusing of what's going on. And, uh, okay, well, is it, by understanding what the ultimate reason for this behavior would have been for evolution to keep it about, does that mean that you are giving it a, 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.

• 1:25:41Speaker 00

  It's like, oh, 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, is, looks suspiciously like Andy Ngo, you know, is able to, everyone's able to take a beat, rather than being at the mercy of these things.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I mean, I completely agree. I, I think it's, 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'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 that I don't, 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 for moral attacks has done so much harm. And one of the things it does is it, it does, I think, to some extent undermine research that could help us understand

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:27:04Speaker 00

  Going back to the, uh, 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. And we have no way of judging whether or not this is true. What do you make of that argument?

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  I'll say a few things. I mean, so for me, when I think about a story, usually the way people talk about it is it's really just another word for explanation. I mean, stories are often just explanations. And then the question is, is do you have a scientific explanation, which could be falsified or not? One of the things I did for this work was that I put all of the sources online so people who are reading can look at the evidence that I marshal for each of the different fields and just go to a particular field and look at the citations, look at the end notes. 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 mean, I think also it's important to be speculative. But the fact of the matter is that every hypothesis is a story.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  And the, the crucial piece that I think is often messed 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. So if I said to you, you know, the eye is for seeing, you'd be like, well, how do you know? Well, it's got this transparent, you know, it's got a retina, it's got this transparent lens, all these features that make it really good for that function. You wouldn't say, well, that's a story. Say, oh, yeah, that's it. That the eye is good for seeing. Psychological adaptations are the same sort of thing, like hunger. I mean, it's, look, it's got some measurement system. It makes it good at, 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?

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  And so the evidence of design is what we use as evidence for, um, 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? And 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, whatever. And the only difference is you just made your hypothesis up because you said, well, socialist, cultural, that. Sorry about, you know, I don't wanna diss anyone, so whatever. But I, 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.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  So I, I confess, you know, I've heard this story since, you know, I started in the academy in 1993, probably before that. And I, I find it, if, to be candid, quite silly. I think it's a misunderstanding of the 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 three million years ago.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  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. Like behavioral, 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 you're gonna point the finger, I understand that if you do the analysis is justification thing, if you have this anti-blanks latest approach, um, it can make you feel a little uncomfortable,

• 1:30:38Speaker 00

  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, 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, the playing landscape for everybody simply through the, 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 or whatever, because we have pretty ancient motives that you can't re-pattern with the, the correct, like scare them straight intervention or whatever.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And I think this, this, the, 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. And then here we are, you know, 25, 30 years later, and that stuff has completely fallen apart. It's like, you know, and we, at the time, we were, we shook 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, which is what they were really doing.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Like, cause, cause that was also driven by the moralistic stuff is like, you know, the stereotype stuff.

• 1:32:08Speaker 00

  This is good.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  This is, yeah, yeah, yeah, stereotypes, that's bad, whatever. And then here we are 30 years later. And I could have told them how it was gonna come out. It's like, well, my work, you know, on, on race, which was just about, you know, can, can you, um, provide place cases in which people don't sort of notice one another's race? That work has held up pretty, pretty well. I'm pretty glad.

• 1:32:26Speaker 00

  Who was your grad supervisor?

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  It was, uh, Lita Cosby's and, and the late John Tubby were, were.

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  Fuck.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  I was, yeah.

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  You, you were.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  I was so lucky.

• 1:32:34Speaker 00

  That's the Beatles of grad supervisors. Yeah, I met John at age best, 2023, I think, in Palm Springs. And, uh, 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 sort of meeting the queen, I guess. And which meeting bus is, is not too dissimilar. And he's had some really nice things to say. I've loved the show. I really appreciate you being a platform for evolutionary 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.

• 1:33:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  He was, I mean, he was a wonderful man. I consider him to be, I'll say, I think he was a genius.

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  Fucking savant.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  He was a genius. 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. And you would take a second to think about it. And then he would just, with his John Tooby sort of explain, but that was my Tooby impression with all due respect. He would, and then he would give you this answer, you're like, ah, man, he nailed it.

• 1:33:55Speaker 00

  He's master Yoda. Yeah, correct.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  He really was master Yoda.

• 1:33:59Speaker 00

  Empathy, tell me about empathy, kind of interesting.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, super interesting. I mean, empathy is kind of, it get, it, it has a lot, it's certainly got a lot written about it. Paul Bloom has done some nice work on it.

• 1:34:10Speaker 00

  Against empathy.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  Against empathy. And I mean, again, for, for the show, I was a friend of the show. I'm going to have to find out who an enemy of the show is.

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  Oh, I've got enough. They'll be in the comments.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Okay, 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.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  So like theory of mind type stuff?

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  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, that, that Paul has identified. So one thing that's nice about empathy is that if you're, you know, 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 is that we know what's going to hurt, both mental and physical. Right? So, um, you know, if I know that you are, let's go back to jealousy, the jealous sort.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  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, 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, in the sense of helping, right? Because empathy usually leads to.

• 1:35:42Speaker 00

  Pro-social.

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, care.

• 1:35:44Speaker 00

  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 be unusually overly appreciative of any assistance that I give them?

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  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 I, that I think about is I'm walking along a stream and I'm, I happen to be carrying a life preserver. And Elon Musk is drowning, right? And so at relatively minimal cost, I can send in the life preserver and then he's, you know.

• 1:36:20Speaker 00

  In your pocket, yeah.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  And now like, so, and the reason I was able to, because I know that 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 Philly, going back to Philly, you know, the fact is people go by, um, people who are currently experiencing homelessness, as they say these days, and they don't.

• 1:36:44Speaker 00

  It's the people of color of the unhoused.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  People experiencing being unhoused.

• 1:36:50Speaker 00

  People experiencing no roof over their head.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Right. And so there's a person in need, but you don't help them. Why? Because they're on, 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.

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  They're so far off the bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  Let's go right back to the, the stuff we saw on caressing. Like there's, there's a U-shaped function. 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, which 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.

• 1:37:22Speaker 00

  Banker's paradox. Yeah, that's lovely.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:25Speaker 00

  What about gratitude?

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:37:33Speaker 00

  Thank you for being here. I want to do nothing else. 11:37 AM, 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.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So thank you for that. So I do, and I think, you know, going back to the point that humans are, are social. When people do nice things for you, which is usually the antecedent, no granted, you want to signal, okay, I acknowledge that. And this is going to increase the 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 is 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 then you're, 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.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  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 benefits and potentially the 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 going to help that guy again. Cause he didn't acknowledge that I delivered this benefit to, to.

• 1:38:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Right? So you, you're sort of upping the, the psychological little bookkeeping.

• 1:38:48Speaker 00

  Did even know that I did it?

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Speaker 00

  Did even notice that I helped him in this way? Yeah, I think, so I, and 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 wrangle 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, um, my housemate, for instance. Like he might have, he might leave something out or like he leaves his hoodies around.

• 1:39:29Speaker 00

  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 attention 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. Well, I did this little thing and isn't that cute?

• 1:40:14Speaker 00

  Like what's, it's great. You do some grand gesture. Obviously you organize a, a surprise for your friend. For instance, my business partner in New Tonic, he, 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 trip to Lapland. Full thing that, you know, 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 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 it 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. He's got, we did it at the approximate, the appropriate time before. He's got four months to like owe us before actually having to cash in the favor, so to speak.

• 1:41:00Speaker 00

  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. And I got, 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?

• 1:41:45Speaker 00

  I'm like gratitude is 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, a cuddle, a fucking dinner, you know, 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. Cause 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,

• 1:42:29Speaker 00

  publish that thing or whatever, like, and everyone else did it on my behalf and I'll do it for them. So 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 is 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.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  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 I seem to have gotten right, which is that added 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's sitting there and it is rewarding you for like, we wouldn't feel the 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 case, I don't do it often enough, but my partner loves having,

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  she just loves having flowers in the kitchen, like where she's.

• 1:43:47Speaker 00

  Dude, chicks love flowers.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  They love flowers.

• 1:43:49Speaker 00

  They chicks, I'm yet to meet a woman that doesn't have a day made by a nice flower delivery.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  And the sort of like points that I get for remembering to refresh the flowers. And again, I don't, I know I don't do it enough. So there's the, the other thing I just want to mention on that front is that I think, I think, you know, the psychologists have underappreciated how much work economists have already done. So like back when I was at Arizona, a million years ago, 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. And then they signaled to that other person, hey, I've just upped your little like goodwill account. So they literally talked about it is 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 mine

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  for some of the interesting social stuff.

• 1:44:43Speaker 00

  So true.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  Right. And it's sort of an underexploited resource.

• 1:44:46Speaker 00

  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. Like Russ Roberts is a fucking animal. His entire sort of thesis around like while, I think it's called wild decisions. Was that the book or like big decisions, something like that? Friend of the show, he was, 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. But I'm going to guess trust is a prediction of how much I can rely on someone and distrust is the opposite.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's funny you pair those too, because back when I was with Vernon Smith, who, you know, 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, you know, believe whatever this person is doing or saying they're going to do and so on. And it's sort of a measurement of that probability. And then there's probably some other stuff in there about magnitude. Whereas distrust is exactly, it's a measurement of the reverse. And so you've got a sort of, you know, on the, on the one, and they, and it can be very helpful, right? So trust can lead to gains and trade, right? If, 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.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  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. And those, and depending on the details, the stakes can be very big, right?

• 1:46:24Speaker 00

  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, lots of reasons. But on the other side, you've got way more mobility.

• 1:47:09Speaker 00

  Like people can up and leave and go to another town or 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, it's a, there's, the stakes have been both lowered and raised at the same time.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. I think those are really good example. I guess there's all sorts of cultural ways that we have to enforce trust. I like, I like those examples, police and courts and the law and so on. But they're not, 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, you know, say that all.

• 1:47:45Speaker 00

  On a podcast.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do on a podcast or something. And then they whatever sell that to TMZ or whoever would be interested. Well, the courts, they're going to say, you know, they haven't, they don't care like.

• 1:47:56Speaker 00

  Going to prosecute you for breaking my trust.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, so you've trusted them by, within this communication, but you're not supported. You're not backed up by the instruments of state or the whatever.

• 1:48:06Speaker 00

  Isn't it interesting that in certain situations, you talk about like a 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.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that's what I'm, I mean, I think this is one of the coolest things about, you 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 a clinical psychology therapist relationship, but without that, it would be undermined completely. I mean, you have to, you have to bind that person to silence and in that, in that context. Or yeah, you're not going to get the disclosure that, 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.

• 1:49:09Speaker 00

  You don't do it on the pulpit.

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:49:10Speaker 00

  The entire congregation.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's sort of held and, and then of course there's the additional thing, which is yeah, it's not just on pain of whatever prosecution's pain of, you know, hellfire or whatever. You can't disclose whatever happened. So you need some kind of cultural.

• 1:49:23Speaker 00

  Hellfire, a reliable enforcer.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Reliable, yeah.

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you've mentioned a couple of times clinical psychology. What's your perspective on that? What's your opinion?

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  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 Zlatkis, future friend of the pod. He works with me on, on living fossils. He's a clinician who's becoming.

• 1:49:45Speaker 00

  By the way, everyone needs to go and subscribe to living fossils on Substack. I'm a subscriber and it absolutely rules.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  Thanks. I'm expressing gratitude. But he has, he has a up close seat that I don't have. I mean, when I was a pen, I saw clinical psychology among my colleagues. Some of them were clinicians, but he's been in the clinic and he was, 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. But I mean, CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy seems to be the front runner right now. And then he says, look, it looks to me and that the, you know, 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, like the pharmacological stuff that's helped people with psychiatric conditions.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  There's no denying that that has, 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?

• 1:50:46Speaker 00

  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, I'm there as well. Okay. Depression, talking about psychology and interventions like that. We've talked about anxiety. What's interesting about depression?

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, disclaimer, depression is horrible. And so this is going to be an explanation for it that might not be right. And in no ways should minimize the condition. 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, it's hard for someone who hasn't experienced 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 just feel happier. Okay.

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  It's very unpleasant.

• 1:51:38Speaker 00

  Hey, diabetic, why don't you just produce more insulin?

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  More insulin, please. Whatever. So a lot of this goes back to Ed Hagen's work, Friend of the Pod.

• 1:51:46Speaker 00

  Friend of the Pod.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  So depression, it doesn't seem like it's just sadness. And I think the other, another piece of it is recently in the news, postpartum depression, something that occurs often after pregnancy. So 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 from the, think about the perspective of the people around them, right? In some sense, losing someone who is close in your, potentially your mate or your daughter or your whatever, that's a big cost.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  And so one proposal that people have made is that it's basically saying, 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. It's sort of interesting, 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's.

• 1:52:55Speaker 00

  So the burden is now increased on you, which means, hey, I really could do with some fucking help here.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  I'm in need. And so.

• 1:53:02Speaker 00

  What about the behavior of depression? Okay, I understand. If you get to the, you know, the, the end, the

• 1:53:10Speaker 00

  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? They're 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. Like we're drawn to people that are 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?

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  So I, first of all, again, I don't know, but my sense of the 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.

• 1:53:56Speaker 00

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, I'm not just with, yeah. So I take your point about, you know, the.

• 1:54:02Speaker 00

  Functionally, socially might be quite bad, but like from a utility perspective, you're actually taking yourself out of the, hey, where's Rob? Rob, oh, he's over there. Why is Rob not wanting, hey, we need to, Rob, come on, you need to come and play.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can't play pickleball. Only got three people. I like 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 from you.

• 1:54:36Speaker 00

  What about the reduction in energy, being a little bit more sort of low energy? And, and why, why feel so bad? Why does it need to feel, what's it motivating?

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that last piece is so interesting. Why does it feel so bad? My, I have a couple of ideas about this. I do think part of that really sadly does have to do with the fact that you've got a credibly signal that you're potentially suicidal, because removing yourself from other people's world completely, that is a huge cost for people to bear. I mean, imagine, I mean, I can't even imagine. I've never lost someone under those circumstances, but it's got to be, it's, 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.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  So the feeling of, of the badness is part of the motivational 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, that sort of would be my guess.

• 1:55:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  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

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  it is true that when you're withdrawn, you, 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, giving 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.

• 1:56:18Speaker 00

  Nobody cares about your work.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  No one cares about you. You're like, you're the bottom of the totem pole. And it'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, 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. You'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 in to 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?

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:57:12Speaker 00

  Interesting. Okay. So we've talked anger, jealousy, envy. What about contempt?

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Good one. Contempt's so interesting. I use this analogy about, not 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, that 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 in, 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.

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  I have a limited number of friendship slots. I have a limited number of partner slots in virtue of whatever it is you did or whoever it is you are. I'm just not interested in affiliate. So it's sort of measuring, you know, 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 soccer, they soccer, whatever it is. 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 in video games. We can only affiliate with so many people during the day. And so contempt is basically guiding us away from that and saying, yeah,

• 1:58:42Speaker 01

  this is not an individual with whom you want to associate.

• 1:58:45Speaker 00

  And then resentment, is that similar to contempt?

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  I think resentment is more with respect to an act that has occurred as opposed to a person. So resentment is something like, hey, that person was promoted because they have a relationship with a 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.

• 1:59:13Speaker 00

  Okay. So it's about fairness in some ways.

• 1:59:15Speaker 01

  There's a lot of fairness in there. So contempt is low status. Whereas, you know, yeah, I would, I would say

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  resentment is much more associated with this sort of violation of an exchange principle.

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  What is the behavior and what is the behavior trying to motivate in the other person?

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  So yeah, I mean, I think in contempt is a little bit fear that it's sort of an 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 want to say that person got a thing to which they weren't entitled. My guess is what they're trying to do is motivate one of these moralistic attacks that we've talked about. 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 morally? Well, that's a good example, right? Well, if I can displace that injustice, well, then maybe I can get the promotion.

• 2:00:18Speaker 00

  How about embarrassment?

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  Another good one, and also tough. I mean, it seems to be something like, 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, like Seinfeld, The Office, or whatever. And one of the things that we haven't talked a lot about is all is like facial stuff when it comes to emotions. So embarrassment has this interesting, flushy bit to it, which is involuntary. So my guess, 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. There's other cases, right? So sometimes it's a little bit different from that. So like, the group

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:01:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you, 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.

• 2:01:23Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. How could I?

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  What am I doing? And then what's an honest signal? An involuntary flush? Because then you're like, oh, they didn't even have to say that they, whatever, I can see that they know they violated it because it was involuntary reaction. Now I'm sure, because it'd be easy to say, oh, I didn't know you weren't supposed to actually. But with the blush, he's 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 would be following them. I'm always going to have my fly up. I'm not going to 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.

• 2:02:00Speaker 00

  Is it, embarrassment has to be as well due to perceived loss of social status?

• 2:02:06Speaker 01

  I think that's what happens. So it's like, if you, if you're seen as a non norm follower, you're definitely 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 about 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 your stranger, strange land and, you know, so I'm eating in the subway or something like that, which of course, and you know, I kind of noticed people were looking, but of course, you're, there's other reasons people be like, and then later on, you realize, oh.

• 2:02:33Speaker 00

  I shouldn't have been doing that.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  That was wrong. I did not.

• 2:02:36Speaker 00

  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 relatively innocuous, morally neutral way to be embarrassed. But if you trip over when you're on your own, what's the emotion then? It 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. It's, this is how it could have caused me to lose status and I did it and no one's around and ha, ha, ha. Isn't that funny?

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:27Speaker 00

  It's a first date, very different.

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that, well, there's not going to be a second at that.

• 2:03:31Speaker 00

  I, it's true. Depends how much you play it off. I was in Bali, maybe 10 years ago, and was driving a 50 center day moped through the streets of Changgu. 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 was renting from the hotel that I was staying in. Back brake didn't work, front brake did work.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  So you went tumbling.

• 2:04:01Speaker 00

  The back tire came out from underneath me. 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, am 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, ah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm okay. I must be.

• 2:04:29Speaker 01

  I'm fine, I'm fine.

• 2:04:30Speaker 00

  Exactly. Straight away. What's the I'm fine reflex? What do you think that is?

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  Super interesting. I don't, that one is puzzling.

• 2:04:36Speaker 00

  The minimization.

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  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. So 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 sounded like there was equipment failure. But you're sort of signaling, I get the, the entire tableau, what happened. It was, you know, I, I know how to operate these things. I am a, I'm a.

• 2:05:02Speaker 00

  I wonder if, I wonder if I didn't do it because I did blame it on me. But a lot of the time, people are like, 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. Well, if only I get a better bike. If I don't ride such a stupid bike in future, or I'm, 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?

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, super interesting. Again, moral emotions, 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 why people are trying to 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, I, I broke a norm and maybe I didn't intend, shame might be, I broke a norm and I, 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, you have to grovel. You have to say something like, I knew the norm, I intentionally violated it, but in

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  the future, I, I am telling you in the future, I am not going to do that. And I will accept a certain amount of costs in the form of whatever it is, social censure, whatever, for having, for having broken it. It's interesting though, because you see shame not just in cases where it is an intentional violation. So in some cultures, people will experience shame, like, so if they're the victim of a, of certain kind of assault, you know, people experience shame.

• 2:06:43Speaker 00

  What do you think's going on?

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's sort of interesting. I, I, 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 face 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.

• 2:07:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a kind of vulnerability. It's an acceptance of the vulnerability, the injustice that's happened. Yeah, that's, that's strange.

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're acknowledging there's been a switch in the hierarchy, the rules, the whatever, the values. And, sorry.

• 2:07:27Speaker 00

  People might, people might judge me otherwise as well.

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. In some cases, it would be worse not to acknowledge it, right? And, and also you've got to sort of start thinking about what my life is now that the, this, this change has occurred.

• 2:07:39Speaker 00

  I wonder if some of it is people front running the, their estimated opinions of others about themselves to, like, oh, I 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 would, they, they might be. Seen as unself aware, full of themselves, not sufficiently, um, what do you say?

• 2:08:20Speaker 00

  Like, giving up what they should in order to be readmitted into normal social fabric?

• 2:08:27Speaker 01

  Totally. And, 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.

• 2:08:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  Right? So, I mean, I just was talking to, I think it was Robin Hanson about

• 2:08:43Speaker 00

  Friend of the show.

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  Friend of the show, about, um, you know, survivors of, not to darken things after whatever, but like, because there you also feel, you, 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 could 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 is it measuring?

• 2:09:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:09:33Speaker 00

  What's interesting about the mind and attention? Cause 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 others. What's, what's interesting now?

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I find this fascinating. So I, you know, sort of early in my career, I was doing the social stuff. And then later in my career, I started moving to stuff like the sense of mental effort. So this is the kind of thing you have, I mean, I don't know, you're doing the SATs or maybe you're, you know, persisting on some problem, maybe have a job, uh, 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, and I, it's so interesting. I think it's 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?

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  And so I think that's an interesting one. Um, and my sort of response to that, which might not be right is again, to 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 you working 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. Like, 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?

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  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 to 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?

• 2:11:19Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  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. So try to manufacture the circumstances such that you are. So, and again, it's one of these interesting cases where the mind is sort of monitoring what we're doing with our own minds. I kind of find that cool.

• 2:11:47Speaker 00

  It's fascinating. What, uh, which feeling did you understand most differently from pre and post research, do you think?

• 2:11:56Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a tough one. Um, well, uh, 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, uh, you know, why we itch. And then there's this whole literature on bugs crawling on you and they stimulate your affluence in exactly the right way. And then you're like, oh, there's a bug on there. And that was pretty, pretty cool. Um, I mean, contempt, I hadn't really thought about either for, for long, but when we just discussed, and I didn't really know where that, um, came from. I mean, one feeling that is, I think wildly understudied, which I got to read a little bit more about having, I did a little bit of work on that, but is, uh, going back to jealousy, but of friends.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  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. Like they, they get jealous of that.

• 2:12:42Speaker 00

  Losing him.

• 2:12:43Speaker 01

  I, or at least I might be demoted. Like, hey, I might be demoted in the queue.

• 2:12:46Speaker 00

  I was position number one, but now I might be position.

• 2:12:48Speaker 01

  Now I'm, now I'm like two or three and I

• 2:12:50Speaker 00

  I remember feeling that as a kid.

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember as a kid too. Like I was, you would even bar, you say, be a best friend and didn't really mean it.

• 2:12:56Speaker 00

  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 and maybe perhaps even more important than they are as adults, until we get to the point when we have kids again.

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Cause you're really building those alliances. I think part of it also is this, you don't, when you're a kid, you, you're a little bit less strategic. You don't think, you're just not inhibited.

• 2:13:18Speaker 00

  He's my friend.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So I think there's part of that, but I don't know. I mean, one of, one of the joys of writing about all the different feelings was being able to read the literature on all the different feelings. And so for me, I mean, a little step, 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 dissolved in your blood, not enough oxygen you breathe out. It turns out it's carbon dioxide. And, you know, I have a little story about, you know, a disaster that occurred because people in a nitrogen environment. And so their, you know, their, um, carbon dioxide is not increasing in the, in the way it would if they weren't in it.

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  And, and so that was sort of interesting. I mean, that's the thing is you, once you get into the guts of these little systems and you ask this question, what's, what are they measuring? There's all sorts of fun insights in there.

• 2:14:07Speaker 00

  Everything's fascinating.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all cool.

• 2:14:09Speaker 00

  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? Or the one that was perhaps more weak or less strong?

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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 like, wait, you don't have a nucleus. So I just called that Monera. And there's a lot of stuff in there that some of those are pretty fricking weird. 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. Um, I imagine that's some sort of side effect, but that one's like, that's pretty strange. I, I think.

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  I think there's other, like nostalgia is, uh, these other temporal ones, he's having to do with this, 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? So I think, I don't know. The biggest thing I found was just how under researched all these different things were, but the many of them, many of them remain mysterious and there's not, you know, there are a lot of cases where there's not much consensus.

• 2:15:26Speaker 00

  Which one do you think causes the most havoc in modern life?

• 2:15:30Speaker 01

  Envy, almost without a doubt. I think, I don't, I mean, I don't know. I mean, there's probably other ones too. I, I think the other, the second candidate would be the one I mentioned earlier, being judgy. They're both.

• 2:15:41Speaker 00

  Condemnation.

• 2:15:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:15:56Speaker 00

  Right. What, which emotion do you think society would collapse the fastest without?

• 2:16:00Speaker 01

  Ooh, interesting. Um, I mean, to your point earlier, trust is, that feeling of trust is a pretty important one. I mean, societies that have a lot of trust in them, whether because they have good institutions or just because of some, um, you know, history of, of trust. I'm thinking about, again, like just going back to Japan. I mean, they have similar institutions to what we do, right? I mean, they have police and they have courts and so on. But man, do they have a high trust society.

• 2:16:26Speaker 00

  The enforcement is way more bottom up than it is top.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. They don't need the courts and stuff like that because people, right? They don't.

• 2:16:32Speaker 00

  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, 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 obviously it would be clinically precise as well, because it's fucking Japan.

• 2:17:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:17:00Speaker 00

  And he would be replying to me on WhatsApp as I was talking to him. What do you mean by that? Oh, like, right. Okay. So what I did, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like monologuing away as I'm getting text responses to my verbal output is kind of interesting.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  No, it's super interesting case. And I think it illustrates the point, which is that the, this, this, the trust is a fulcrum. I mean, so look at societies that don't have trust in them. And, you know, you, that suppresses all kinds of, you know, coordination and mutually transact, all transactions.

• 2:17:29Speaker 00

  That's an interesting, uh, point around, obviously I'm, I'm going back to the UK in a couple of weeks and one of the big, um, Talking points there at the moment is immigration, mass immigration that seems to be happening. And 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

• 2:18:13Speaker 00

  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 US election. It's certainly the flashpoint that's happening in the UK at the moment. So yeah, trust, trust's fundamental.

• 2:18:33Speaker 01

  I think it's fundamental. I mean, as you say, I mean, if all the sudden people lost that, I do think the, the, 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 societies work turn completely extremely on the whether or not people are following the local norms, because it's harder to 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

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  in this country or Britain. I'm just saying, if you run the thought experiment.

• 2:19:21Speaker 00

  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. Like, this is the whole discussion. And I've got, I keep putting my foot in it, and I need to come up with a way to like, 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

• 2:20:04Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:20:18Speaker 01

  Totally. People are, I mean, people 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? Because then they, and then they want to blame someone, usually a government or a policy 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 a better than that.

• 2:21:01Speaker 00

  Thank you, John Tooby. So after studying all of these emotions, thinking about this stuff, tactically, have you or how have you integrated this? Because there is a kind of burden that I felt, and I actually asked Jeffrey Miller 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,

• 2:21:44Speaker 00

  well, what the, like, where are my way markers for how I should relate to my own emotions? But tactically, have you found a way to integrate this sort of learning to improve your own emotional life?

• 2:21:56Speaker 01

  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? So I think there's a certain amount of, yeah, you just gotta get comfortable with the fact that you're gonna feel the feelings whether you want to or not. I mean, envy is gonna happen. It's just, yes, if I could get rid of it, I would. I don't think it's a particularly productive emotion. And I'm blessed, you know, I have a wonderful partner, I have a wonderful sister, I have

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  a wonderful family, I have wonderful circumstances. And there's, but there's always opportunities to feel envious, right? So someone was on the pod three times or something like that, right? And so, but then I do step back, I say, oh, well, okay, so I can think about envy's trying to get me to whatever, but I already, so that's fine. So I think that's sort of the, the thing is to come, just to come to terms with, yeah, I'm just gonna feel those. I don't think you can be the Buddha and have no experience of whatever it was at the, but maybe you can, I can't. And, you know, 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 it.

• 2:23:15Speaker 00

  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. I 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

• 2:23:57Speaker 00

  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, like, 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 that'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,

• 2:24:37Speaker 00

  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. Come 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. It's, you've, a welcome participant at the party, but you need, you're not, it's not quite right. And then look at that bit of

• 2:25:22Speaker 00

  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, I had this vision in my mind throughout my entire retreat I did recently of a Roomba, like slightly ungainly, but very overly enthusiastic Roomba, going around, and he's cleaning stuff, and he gets stuck in a corner, and he's cleaning an area that's already being cleaned, and he doesn't know he needs to redock and just chill out and recharge. I'm like, dude, come here. Like, I really appreciate you're trying so hard. You want me to, 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? Ta, ta, ta, ta. 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,

• 2:26:05Speaker 00

  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 that 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.

• 2:26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so interesting. And it makes me wonder a little bit about, you know, as you were saying earlier, your guests are often evolutionary psychologists, because that kind of point of view is very modular. It has this very partsy kind of, as you were saying.

• 2:26:43Speaker 00

  That was Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True, when I first learned about that, the modules of the mind.

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  But yeah, so, yeah, this idea that you've got these different 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 gonna get in there when I'm trying to just be. And I'm gonna be like, oh, actually, it's kind of, okay, yeah, guy throws some envy, 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, maybe not in this moment. I mean, I think, I think that your, your practice resonates with the modular view of the evolutionary approach in a very interesting, kind of interesting way.

• 2:27:21Speaker 00

  These different things are competing, look at them. I've got to try and triage which is most important. Yeah, it's cool. Rob Kurzban, friend of the show. Dude, thank you for coming on.

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks for having me.

• 2:27:29Speaker 00

  Where should people go to check out everything you've got going on?

• 2:27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the Substack is Living Fossils. The book is called All the Feels. The website is allthefeelsbook.com. Check them out. And you, on the website, you can read a sample feel, see if it's for you.

• 2:27:42Speaker 00

  Heck, yeah. Appreciate you, man. Until next time.

• 2:27:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:27:44Speaker 00

  Goodbye, my beauties. Dude.

• 2:27:47Speaker 01

  I think that went all right.

• 2:27:48Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  Epic.