Evolved Psychology Vs The Modern World - David & Douglas Kenrick

David Lundberg Kenrick is the Psychology Program Manager at Arizona State University and Douglas Kenrick is a Professor of psychology at Arizona State University. Our brains were designed to exist in a very different environment to the one they find themselves in. Managing modern problems with stone-age operating systems causes us to act in strange, suboptimal, silly ways. Which is why it's so important to understand how our minds developed. Expect to learn just how violent humans were ancestrally, why more people die of obesity than starvation in 2022, whether dominance or prestige is more important at getting ahead, whether ancient humans felt love the same way we do now, why human females go through menopause, the relationship between dominance and attraction and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Optimal Carnivore’s products at www.amazon.com/optimalcarnivore (use code: WISDOMSAVE10) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Solving Modern Problems - https://amzn.to/3SrnUEb Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #evolutionarypsychology #mindset #behaviour - 00:00 Intro 03:03 The New Pyramid of Human Motives 12:24 Why Society’s Issues are Becoming More Complex 17:25 Ancient Minds with Modern Problems 30:44 Why We Feel More Unsafe Today 35:51 How the Human Psyche Will Change in the Future 42:29 Purpose of Friendship 52:29 Differences Between Ancient & Modern ‘Love’ 1:04:26 Why Females Go Through Menopause 1:11:33 The Desire to Protect Family 1:19:43 Why We Should Be Kind 1:24:14 Where to Find David & Douglas - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When people were asked, would you want to date this person? For women, it mattered. They would actually prefer to date the dorky looking guy in the Wall Street clothes to the handsome guy who was working at Burger King. For men, they'd prefer the good looking woman who worked for Burger King to the less attractive woman who was dressed to the nines.

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  So you just mentioned that you'd taken two months away from working, and this is one of your first days back. Talk to me about what it feels like to take such a long break when you're used to doing so much work. Do you ever get the compulsion to go and do stuff? Do you get antsy about the fact that you're not working?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Yes, I like having a bit of fun, but there's only so much of it I can take. I actually feel better. I feel better when I'm being productive in some way. Although my work is, you know, writing books and being a college professor and talking to students. It's a, it's a pretty cushy job. And, you know, it's, it's in some ways more pleasant than actually being on vacation. Although being on vacation was fun.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  What do you think that says adaptively about humans? The fact that you can take more pleasure from doing work than from leisure?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  What do you think, Dave?

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think a lot of it is the affiliation factor, right? I know for me, one of the things I like about work is the people I work with and getting to see them. And, uh, and that feeling of sort of purpose, right? That it's like, I think we are sort of designed to want to contribute to those around us. And, uh, you know, hopefully if someone is in a job that they like, then they'll feel like, oh, I'm working with a group of people to improve the world for people. So I think, I think that's.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  I like Dave's answer because I wouldn't have pointed to affiliation right away. I would have thought of status in terms of our little, our hierarchy of motives. But I like what Dave is saying because it strikes me that in the ancestral environment, if you took two months off, the people in your group might have started to get a little annoyed at you. You know, what are you going to start to catch some fish? And what, you know, and so, you know, I like the fact that Dave connects it to people because it does, I especially like, I do like that as well. In fact, the first thing I did after having this, an interview this morning is I went to a meeting and our graduate students were there and my co-author on a number of papers, Steve Newberg,

• 2:50Speaker 00

  was there and it did feel good, felt good to be doing something with the group. And so I guess it, I guess we're sort of wired up to connect those two things.

• 3:02Chris Williamson?

  You just mentioned about your new pyramid of human motives. Why do we need a new one or what's unique or interesting about this one?

• 3:13Speaker 00

  So, two things. One is that when Maslow made his hierarchy, he didn't make that pyramid.

• 3:22Chris Williamson?

  It wasn't even a hierarchy, right?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, no, it was a hierarchy. He did actually say that there were, there were a set of goals. He was arguing against behaviorists. The behaviorists thought that everything we do can boil down to satisfying thirst and hunger. Even our social motives, the behaviorists argued, were connected to secondary reinforcement. We come to like people because our mother nursed us. And Maslow was a student of Harry Harlow, who did those classical studies with the baby monkeys that were separated from their moms and so forth. And Harlow was arguing against the behaviorists that, no, we have, we, at least primates, have other social motives.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  And Maslow just made a more complicated model and argued that developmentally, first we have to just get fed and get, you know, get warm. But then we get stranger anxiety, we have to protect ourselves. And then we want to make friends and then we want esteem, which is what we would call status. So we agree with him up to that point. Where we disagree with Maslow was that they thought, then we move to non-social things. We move above that. We want to go off and play the guitar by ourselves, or writes poetry, just for our own intrinsic satisfaction.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  And from an evolutionary perspective, it seems extremely unlikely that we would be designed, that we got here because our ancestors, once they had managed to solve those lower motives, went off and, you know, beat on the, uh, beat on a log just for their own entertainment. If they beat on a log, it was probably to entertain the other members of their groups, so that they could achieve, you know, acceptance and respect and find mates. And the other thing that Maslow skipped out on completely was the importance of mating. And he was an evolutionary psychologist before the modern day, and he didn't think about

• 5:27Speaker 00

  the fact that, in some sense, organisms are all designed to reproduce. And so at the, the top of our pyramid is not self-actualization. It's sort of what unfolds developmentally. First, after you've gotten some respect, you find a mate. After you find that mate, you need to keep the mate. And then, if you have offspring, you need to care for your family. Uh, and even if you don't have offspring, we're probably motivated to care for our cousins and the other people in our group. And so, we're not arguing in some sense that it's ideal, that it, that you're, we all, in the same sense that self-actualization, painting a beautiful painting is somehow intrinsically satisfying. What we're arguing is that, is that that's the natural course of things, is to, is to

• 6:11Speaker 00

  move on to, you know, to reproduction. Maslow had, the only time he talked about sex was as a lower physiological need. And so on that model, you could just masturbate and then be done with it, and then you can move on to playing the guitar, you know? But we, we disagree with that part of it. Um.

• 6:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it seems it seems to me that most people, when you ask them about the most meaningful stuff that they do in their lives, they talk about rearing children. And it seems as well, I don't know whether you guys would agree with this, but we are grandchildren optimizers is the nicest summary of what humans are kind of here to do that I've thought of. It's like you, you need to have some kids, then you need to make sure that those kids have some kids. And after that point, you're kind of sweet. After that point, you can, you can pretty much just let everything go.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  The great grandkids are on their own.

• 7:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  I mean, there is. So your lab did some research on that, right? Like actually asking people what gave them meaning. And it was, it was split, right? Into there was parenting, and then there was also just general taking care of family that included also like brothers and sisters and things like that. So, um, so I guess you also have to look out for like your nieces and nephews as well. So.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  So it's actually even a lot more complicated that we asked people three kinds. So there's three ways you can define well being. One of them is just hedonic well being. I feel good. There's more rewards in my life than punishments in my life. Uh, and then there's what they call eudemonic well being, which is a fancy way of saying meaning in life. Okay. And then the third is self actualization, which is a way of saying fulfilling your highest potential. So what we did in our lab, uh, some research with Jamie Krems, uh, who's at Oklahoma State and Becca Neal, who's the University of Toronto now, we asked people about each of those things. What would you be doing right now? If you were, if you were

• 8:15Speaker 00

  getting meaning in life? Okay. What would be the thing that would produce the most meaning in your life? And that's what the thing Dave was referring to. That's when they said, I'd be caring for my family, or I'd be hanging with my friends for the, for the most part. When we asked about self actualization, what would you be doing if you were achieving your highest potential? Then they talked about things like, you know, writing a book or, uh, you know, managing a business. And they connected that with status and also with affiliation. And then the one of hedonic well being. What would I be doing if I wanted to just feel good? Their affiliation still affiliation comes in across the board, you know.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  But then sex became more, you know, finding a mate rose up, especially for males. They would feel good. They'd feel, you know, hedonic satisfaction if they were in a romantic situation. But it's funny that those other kinds of well being are those they're all connected to different motives.

• 9:18Chris Williamson?

  Did you look at the mappiness study that had a ton of data done on it?

• 9:24Speaker 00

  The what study?

• 9:25Chris Williamson?

  Mappiness.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Mappiness, I don't know it.

• 9:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so this was a study done by a bunch of researchers who were using mobile phones to pop up and ask people what they were doing at that point and their subjective rating and how happy they felt. And then Seth Stephens Davidowitz, who's a data scientist, has just released a new book called Don't Trust Your Gut. And in that he looks through a bunch of this stuff and then lays it out in this really easy table. And the number one thing plus 20 in terms of happiness, the most happy thing that people were doing is having sex. Now, I couldn't, I couldn't help thinking about the fact that the only way that that's been able to work is if someone's paused having sex to check their phone, note down that they were doing it and then rate the subjective level of happiness.

• 10:10Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, I mean, this, this is an interesting distinction, I think, between Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman. Gilbert was talking about the fact that, you know, lying on a Lilo for the rest of your life, drinking cocktails might be a way to spend a life well lived. Because each individual interval of time is something that's been pleasurable. Whereas Kahneman, I think retrospectively would say a good life is one that in retrospect, you're glad you lived. It had meaning, it had purpose, it made you feel retrospectively like something is worthwhile. And I've come to believe my bro science is that that tends toward people that are more introspective and retrospective versus people that are a little bit more impulsive.

• 10:48Chris Williamson?

  That really the balance that you have between those two things, whether you lean more towards hedonic pleasure or sort of eudaimonic pleasure is mostly because, okay, what, what, what do you think about? When you think about the things that you value in yourself, do you value, you know, just time with friends, free flowing and being easy? Or do you like hard things that you're contributing to over a longer period of time?

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I like, you're raising an interesting question, I think, you know, about individual differences in those, in those, and we actually have a scale of, that measures, and Becca and Neil, who I mentioned before, we developed a scale with us that looks at the extent to which I am someone who is currently concerned with each of those motives we talked about, finding mates, or finding friends, or, you know, protecting myself from the bad guys. But what you're suggesting is interesting, that those different kinds of well-being, you know, what gives me those might vary as a function of, you know, who I am, and maybe what I'm, what my major goal in life is right now.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it could also, I imagine, have to do with sort of situational factors. If you have kids, right, you might be like, thinking more like, no, no, I need a meaningful life, because that might tie into also providing for those kids and things like that, whereas if you are younger, or you don't have kids, and you're like, no, the people around me are taken care of, then you might opt for just, you know, reading a book in the shade. So I could see how those could change throughout the life history as well.

• 12:23Chris Williamson?

  Given the fact that the modern world's more comfortable for humans, why do you think it is, then, that a lot of human problems seem even more difficult to solve today?

• 12:34Speaker 00

  What's your take on that, Dave?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, there's a bunch of things. I mean, well, one is the sort of mismatch, right, of between our instincts in the modern world. And then, a big one is, we also have, with technology, a lot of sort of things that will remind us, we have technology that's optimized to prime all of these motives at once, right, you're gonna sort of, you're gonna see pictures of attractive people that your brain will think of as potential mates, you're gonna see news about threats, you're gonna see, you know, updates from your friends, and you can get all of these things in a matter of seconds or minutes, right, if you're on your phone, and so...

• 13:20Speaker 02

  It's pretty overwhelming, right? To try to, to try to like, in the ancestral world, you can sort of focus on one thing at a time, right? If you're going out to get food, you might not even see any potential mates. You might have a few friends with you who are also there to get food.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  But these days, I think

• 13:43Speaker 02

  we've got to do everything at once, right? And we've got to compete in our minds with, if you want to compete with status, you're now competing with Elon Musk as opposed to just your actual next door neighbor, right? And same thing, you know, you see this with, with girls with Instagram is they have body image issues, right? They're competing with like these, with models all the time. And they're just, that's intermixed with their friend feed. And so I think the, the hierarchies have gotten a lot higher. Like now we're, now we're competing with, what, seven billion people as opposed to 10? And so I think, I think those all combined to make

• 14:26Speaker 02

  a pretty stressful, pretty stressful situation.

• 14:30Chris Williamson?

  So. Is there a sense, going back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but you could map it onto yours, I guess as well. Is there a sense that because so much of the bottom area of the pyramid, the immediate physiological needs, the safety, the security and stuff like that, that that's been filled? Is an existential crisis a luxurious position to be in, basically? Is it only in a world that's got so many of those safety features already filled in that you have the opportunity to think, what am I doing with my life? What should I be doing with my life? How could I contribute better to my sense of wellbeing? Am I really actualizing my potential here?

• 15:04Speaker 02

  That's, so that's interesting. That's a good. I personally am not beyond worrying about those, those base motives. You know, living in Arizona, I'm always like, reading about our water levels and our drought and things like that. Um, so.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know. I think a lot of people are still worried about these. They're, I don't, I know that we no longer have food insecurity the way our ancestors did, but you know, health is still a major concern for a lot of people. Um, and so I'm not sure, I'm not sure we're at the point where we're sort of mindfully thinking about our higher motives. So I think we just have them stacked on there.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  I wonder if an existential crisis is just a, it's an attribution for something else. It means maybe I'm, you know, I'm not achieving the goal that I really want to achieve now. I'm not finding a satisfying relationship or I'm not, you know, doing a satisfactory job, taking care of my kids or not getting respect on the job. And then I, I attribute that to something higher because I've got a college degree. And so I think, ah, well, I can't just be some sap who's screwing up. What's really happening is I'm concerned with the whole meaning of existence.

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  I see. Okay. So it's, it's loneliness masquerading as a philosophical treatise.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Maybe, maybe.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I could see it being loneliness and then also sort of status frustration. You know, if you look at people online, I think that, I think these days in the modern era, there's, I mean, there's all these sort of phenomenon of people who are like, they don't have friends, right? They're staying in their room, but they're, they're eating, they're surviving. And so there's this, there's become this big jump where it's like, okay, I'm surviving, but to get to that next level, to actually contribute, to give my existence meaning to other people seems too hard.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  And, and so that could be part of what is leading to existential crises, perhaps.

• 17:24Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the relationship between ancient fears and desires with modern dangers and opportunities then.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  So you, I mean, you've mentioned the concept of mismatch, you know, that in some sense, we're designed to live in a, in a small village, you know, people debate about what was the ancestral environment actually like, and, well, there were lots of different ancestral environments, but they were different from the modern one in certain recurring ways. They did involve being around your kin, okay? Even when I was a kid growing up in a little urban village in New York, I had my grandmother and my aunts, they all lived in nearby apartments, you know, and now we spread out so, you know, widely that we're, we're, we can be surrounded by strangers and our

• 18:13Speaker 00

  ancestors were, were not surrounded by strangers unless they're about to die, okay? Um, and that is, I think that's, that's one of the biggest mismatches and that accounts for many of these problems. The other kinds of, well, there's mismatches of different sort at every level. So the, at the low level, the one about survival, uh, we, you know, we certainly don't have to worry about getting food, okay? I mean, as, and during my travels, one of the things I was shocked at is that I could buy wood-fired pizza and find a fine restaurant with local tasty wines everywhere in the middle of, you know, in places I would have considered the middle of nowhere, there's

• 18:57Speaker 00

  this fabulous food and every little convenience store has Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Everywhere you go, I could get some really delicious ice cream. I could get a six-pack of, of India Pale Ale.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Can I, can I just say one thing though? But, but this is all contingent on having money, right? And this, this, one of the other ways that the modern world is different, you had mentioned that you weren't likely to get, you weren't likely to be around strangers unless you were about to get killed. There's also this thing of, you weren't likely to get killed unless you were around strangers. Like you're, the people around you would help you out, but nowadays, when we're traveling all over the place, if you run out of money, right, which, you know, for somebody who is like, has a good, solid bank account, may not be a risk, but for a lot of people, you're in the middle of nowhere and you run out of money. The risks are really high, right? If you try to steal food, you're gonna go to jail.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Like, you're not going to... Somebody is not going to be as forgiving as if you borrow food from a relative. And so...

• 20:02Speaker 00

  That's interesting, Dave. Because actually, you know, despite having a reasonable bank account, I lived petrified of losing my wallet. Because if I was in Banff, Alberta, beautiful place, but I didn't have a wallet, I would have been screwed, okay? Because I kept thinking that, what would I do? What would I do for food? What if somebody steals my wallet?

• 20:23Chris Williamson?

  So, one of my friends, a couple of years ago, we went on a stag do to Barcelona. Actually, no, sorry, it was the wedding. The stag do was wild, but the wedding was even worse. So, we went to a wedding in Barcelona, and I don't know whether you know, but Barcelona is the robbery capital of Europe.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Yes. I'd been warned when I went to Barcelona that to keep your...

• 20:41Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievably...

• 20:42Speaker 00

  ...pockets zipped.

• 20:43Chris Williamson?

  Sophisticated. These kids that can do Lionel Messi-style tricks with a football will come over and accidentally bump into you, and before you know it, they've dribbled the ball between your legs, but they've also taken your car keys, too. So, we went to this thing, one of the guys came back. Anyway, he... One of the lads had a bit too much to drink. He doesn't usually drink. He fell asleep in Barcelona train station, woke up the next morning to find out that his phone, his wallet, and his shoes had been stolen. His shoes had been stolen from him. And then he was trudging around, but he was a CrossFit coach. So, the thing that he went back to, this is a point where you basically don't have any of the no-trust-required transactional proofs of status or legitimacy, which is what

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  paper money could be seen as, right? None of that existed, but he's a CrossFit coach. So, he walked into a CrossFit gym. He knew that there was a CrossFit gym somewhere in Barcelona, walked into a CrossFit gym and said, "Hey, guys, I know that I look like I've walked a hole in my socks. I'm dressed for a wedding that was yesterday. No phone, no money, no shoes. However, if you go on Instagram, you'll see that I'm that guy, and I'm that guy that you've probably seen coaching some of your favorite athletes." So, what he did was he gravitated toward the closest thing that he could find to kin.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  That's interesting. Yeah, I like that. That's a great story.

• 22:06Chris Williamson?

  I saw a stat from your book that said more people die from obesity than starvation now, according to the UN.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that was, that was a fascinating thing to run across as we were preparing the book.

• 22:19Chris Williamson?

  That is wild.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  It is.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  And, and that's a good example of, of missfits because even Dave, even despite the fact that we do worry about, even if we're poor now, we have enough money that we can afford Twinkies and other, you know, unhealthy foods. And so I, I was amazed that I got, as I got away from the less wealthy parts of, you know, Canada and into the sticks, I would see more obesity there. It's almost like the, it's almost now, it now,

• 22:51Speaker 00

  wealthy people I think are thinner. I, I don't know if that's statistically bears out, but I feel like it does, it does hold when I.

• 22:59Chris Williamson?

  Would the, uh, how would you say, the threshold for having enough money to, in order to be able to make yourself fat is actually pretty low. You don't need, you don't need a lot of money in order to be able to make yourself fat.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  You actually need, you need more money to buy organic vegetables and fruits, you know, like blueberries cost more money than a, you know, than a, a similar number of calories uh, in a loaf of, you know, cheap bread or, uh, and some Hostess Twinkies, which I don't know if you know what Hostess Twinkies are, but they're the, they're the classical fast food of my generation. They're in the empty calories as they say.

• 23:36Chris Williamson?

  Is it true that they're supposed to be able to survive a nuclear apocalypse and they basically never go off?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Apparently. Um, so we haven't tested it, but yeah.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  I know that you guys looked at suicide here as well. Have you ever seen any data around how many people committed suicide ancestrally? Or how common it was?

• 23:59Speaker 00

  I have, I actually thought of that. Do you, have you come across that, Dave?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  I mean, I know that there are, you know, you can think about like, um, Samurai, sort of like, there are traditional societies where suicides were, were part of a thing you would do if you brought shame to your tribe. So it's, it's not unheard of. Um, I don't know that we have, I mean, I certainly don't know of statistics, the way we have modern statistics to compare. Um, I mean, I think there were also, there were a lot more ways to risk your life rather than just kill yourself, right? If things aren't going well, you could just-

• 24:39Chris Williamson?

  Beaten to the punch by, in the environment, yes.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You can go out and, and, and this is, I think, one of the things we sort of talk about is this idea that suicide might actually, that, that desire, or that lack of desire for self preservation, might come from this place of you've got your sort of basic needs met, but you're not meeting those social needs, right? And so it might actually be your brain's way of saying, "All right, go take some risks. It's time to, you know, it's time to go out there and maybe get yourself eaten by a lion or whatever, but maybe you'll find a really cool oasis, you know? And so, so that is one of the, one of the possibilities we've discussed is that this, that

• 25:27Speaker 02

  really what people are, they're feeling like these other needs are not being met, and they're sort of overvaluing survival a little bit.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  So you know what's cool about what you're saying, Dave, is that, like, I think it's, there's no doubt that people acted what we call suicidal, you know, uh, in the end. So they might not have actually gone out and, and, you know, consciously, well, they couldn't have taken pills. They could have thrown themselves off a cliff, but they could certainly have gone out and- screamed at a member of another tribe and gotten themselves killed or ended up looking good if they won the fight, you know, as we were driving through Montana, Dave, I don't, Dave was born in Montana, and as we were driving through, I got the audio tape of a book called The River Runs Through It, which is a very beautiful book. It's a sort of poetic

• 26:19Speaker 00

  depiction of this relationship between a guy and his younger brother. And if you haven't ever read it, Chris, it's one of the most beautifully written English books in English literature. And it was recommended to me by the department chair of the University of Chicago, who said he had a colleague who never did anything his whole life, and they thought, maybe we shouldn't have given him tenure. And then he wrote this book. And this guy said, this old professor said, it should have won the Pulitzer Prize, except that it came out the year of Roots. But it's a beautiful depiction. And I remember it's a beautiful depiction of the nature and of fly fishing. But a lot of it involves, these are guys in the 1930s, going out into bars, getting plastered drunk out of their mind,

• 27:02Speaker 00

  and getting into fistfights, and, you know, going out into the wilderness and doing crazy shit, you know. And, you know, the brother who ends up dead in the end, does have a, what we would call a suicidal tendency to, it isn't like he's thinking of ending his own life purposely, but he's certainly putting himself in situations where he's either going to look really good, or he's going to die, you know. And it's a true story, in fact, in the end, he gets murdered by some people who he probably pissed off.

• 27:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, the equivalent ancestry wouldn't have been death by enemies or death by cop. It might have been death by lion or something, death, death by goring from some

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  It could be death by, you know, fighting other

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Tribes, it could also be death by challenging people in your tribe, you know, um, and so although that probably would have been less likely to end in actual death, death, but, um, but yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  So the death by cop, that's a nice association, Chris, when you say that, because I actually think that that's a good, that's a nice way of capturing what I was just talking about. I think that a death by cop is probably some macho guy. There's probably an out of win, a lot of women who die by cop, but it's probably a lot of young guys with a lot of testosterone that decide they're going to show people how tough they are. Uh.

• 28:28Chris Williamson?

  That's the thing that you see as well, right? That, uh, over time testosterone decreases with a decrease in testosterone, less risk-taking behavior. When men get into relationships, testosterone drops. When they get married, it drops. When they have kids, it drops again, because the guy that continues to take tons of risks and gets death by lion is of little use to the three children that he's just brought into the world or the wife that's waiting back at the cave for him.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. The math, the math changes for what, so this, like going back to this sort of like pyramid of motives, like this is part of why I sort of always am like a little hesitant to even call it a pyramid, because it's like you've got, you know, protection, friendship, um, needs, mating, taking care of kin. That math is constantly changing, right? You have kids and then suddenly it makes less sense for you to run out and go do something super risky. When instead, if there's a way for you to just sort of find a little bit, a little bit of food here and a little bit of food there and keep your kids alive, you know, um, so, and our, our

• 29:35Speaker 02

  physiology changes to sort of accommodate that, like, like these testosterone level drops. So.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Do you know the?

• 29:43Chris Williamson?

  Go ahead.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  I was just gonna refer to, there's a study that you may know, Chris, by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. They did a paper on the young male syndrome. And it was about, it was about the tendency to, like, die in homicidal conflicts. And what they found is that, in fact, it's very high for young guys of mating age. And, you know, and in subsequent research, they found it's especially guys in situations of desperation. Okay, like, upper-middle-class kids who went to college, they don't go out and do this kind of thing. But if you don't have any other way to prove that you're, you know, that you're, you've got something

• 30:24Speaker 00

  special about you, then you take these desperate acts. And so, in fact, it fits with all of what we've been talking about, that the, that it's young desperate men that are, in fact, we talk about in the book, they're the people that you want to watch out for. And if you're one of them, you kind of want to watch out for yourself.

• 30:44Chris Williamson?

  Just how violent are humans evolutionarily?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Compared to what? Like, compared to how we are now?

• 30:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, I think now is the most peaceful time, pretty much, in human history, right? And like, what we have, we have statistics of the murder rates of, do you know those off the top of your head, Dad?

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Well, so, there's this big debate, because some people, you know, like to argue, oh, no, it was, you know, that it's exaggerated. But I talked to Kim Hill, who's one of the world's prominent anthropologists, who's done studies of, like, the Ochre. And what he found in one of his studies of a South American group is the homicide rate was like 40, 50%. And then people came in and said, oh, no, that's only because they got killed by the Spanish agricultural people around. But I went and re-looked at his data. When you took out the murders by the, by the non-native groups.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  It was still a 25 or 30% homicide rate. And so that's a high. And but even amongst the Eskimos and the Bushmen, Steven Pinker talks about this in a couple of his books. But you know, particularly the one, The Better Angels of Our Nature, where he compares all of the known data on violence in, you know, in hunter-gatherer groups. And the least violent hunter-gatherer groups, the Bushmen and another group whose name I'm forgetting. Their homicide rates were about similar to the city of New Orleans, which is the most violent city in the United States, which is the most violent

• 32:24Speaker 00

  developed country in the world. And so it was, yeah, it was dangerous.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  Why is it then that we feel so unsafe day to day? If the world is objectively safer than ever before?

• 32:41Speaker 00

  I'll let you take that.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Well, well, part of it is, I mean, it's it's advantageous to feel unsafe, right? It's it there's a advantage to just looking for threats and to being hyper aware of threats. And there there hasn't been enough time

• 33:00Speaker 02

  evolutionarily for that to go away, right? Because you don't want to miss a threat. Um, and

• 33:07Speaker 02

  and then beyond that, there are these sort of, because we don't want to miss a threat. You know, I think you can certainly see with news and things like that, there there are things that command that attention for profit or for views or whatever. And so we still we hear about probably more, well, certainly more murders, because we hear about more murders than our ancestors would hear about people. Right? So we're constantly aware of things like, you know, like, I mean, the war in the Ukraine, which is a very serious thing. But it's it's also very far from me right now, but I'm paying attention to it. Right? Because I want to know what's happening. And so I think.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  So that there's that interplay between our evolved mechanism and the technology that taps into that.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  So let me just back to what the concept of mismatch that, you know, we're designed to look for threats in a world where there aren't that many people. And even though there were homicides, they weren't every day. But the the news media, capital, we have that powerful motive that David was just referring to. I want to know if there's a threat. And so if I'm even the New York Times, you know, which is the sort of the liberal media, or if I'm Fox News, which is the more conservative media in the US, it's like, they're both gonna want to give us some bad news. They're gonna want to talk about threats. Why? Because we want to know about it. We, you know, we may say, oh gee, why don't they put more good news? We don't click on the good news links.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  We click on the Ukraine. We click on there was a murder in Chicago, you know. We, you know, it's like, I know about murders in Africa, you know, and it's like, we would have never known about murders in the, in the, you know, in distant places. So it seems like, holy crap, what a dangerous world we live in. But now I ask the question of, you know, well, it might be different from you, Chris, but, you know, I doubt it. Do I know anybody who was murdered? I do not know a single person. I grew up in New York City around lots of people. And I knew I know more people than most of my ancestors ever knew. I don't know any, I did know people who went to war.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Okay, um, but I don't know anyone who was like murdered in a kind of violent, you know, urban or suburban. Do you know anybody who was murdered, either one of you guys?

• 35:39Chris Williamson?

  No, not me.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Uh, I had my, my neighbor's brother was murdered. Uh, I didn't know him personally, but that's, that's the closest I could, I could think of. So.

• 35:50Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about the fact that we've got this evolutionary mismatch and uh, how do you say, vestigial negativity bias perhaps that carries over from our ancestral past, I'm sure that you guys must have thought about what happens in future if humans continue, if we were able to keep around about 2022 ish uh, as the level of environment that we're going to be in for the next hundred thousand years. What sort of changes do you think we would see to the human psyche? Have you got any idea about what would be adaptive? Obviously, the problem that we have and the reason I need to keep us at 2022 is that technology's going to move more quickly than our evolution can catch up with it. But if we were to hold ourselves where we're at now, would that, would the negativity bias come down? Would

• 36:34Chris Williamson?

  there be other changes that you might expect to see?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  I would think you probably would, that there probably would be, because I imagine it takes resources to, I mean, it definitely takes resources to be on alert, right? And so being less nervous would have, I think it would have enough of a evolutionary benefit. This is not really a thing that we've ever, I think, discussed before, but just thinking about it right now, I mean, we would, yeah, we would, we would redirect that part of our brain to figuring out how to get it more likes and how to, how to program better, probably, like.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  It is, it is possible we'll use the technology. I actually don't think there's going to be enough of a selection pressure.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Against it.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Because technology changes so quickly, but I do think we could use the technology. I mean, Dave, you and I have talked about this, developing apps, for example, that, you know, that are much, much more effective at preventing us from spending too much screen time, you know? Uh, and I know that I personally will turn off my New York Times. They used to give me, you know, they would give me uh, Daily reminders of the news, okay? And political parties who asking for my money will give me daily reminders of all the dangerous stuff that the other side is doing out there. And what I do is I close those apps, I, I, you know, I disconnect from them.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  But I think in the future that there maybe we'll be able to get some executive control, you know, sort of IA working where I can say, how much of this shit do I want to hear? And I don't want to hear about it more than once a week. Uh, and maybe, I mean, you guys are younger and you, you may have a different opinion, but do you think we, there might be a market for that kind of technology?

• 38:35Chris Williamson?

  And I, in my, in my opinion, I think we're going to look back hoping, I hope this is the case, that people in about 50 to 100 years are going to look back on what we do with technology now, or more accurately, what technology does to us in the same way as when we can generate our own meat in a lab, people are going to look at factory farms. I think they're going to see it as a complete aberration. What on earth were they doing? Look at all of this wasted time and focus and attention. Look what they did to young girls and their body image. Look at the levels of anxiety and self harm and all of these perverse incentives that we had. I wonder as well, because one of the constraints that you had around psychopathy and Machiavellianism was the fact that your group was so small that you could only get away with a small number of those people per group.

• 39:20Chris Williamson?

  I also found out that psychopathy is actually adaptive on a group level, but not necessarily on an individual level, because if you're a Viking tribe, it's pretty useful for you to have a few psychopaths that you can send over to Lindisfarne to go and sack it, kill everybody and come back with a ton of gold. But you don't want too many so that it actually makes the group unstable. My thinking being that because we're no longer as, uh, at the mercy or as visible and people can bounce around, you know, the snake oil salesman can go from town to town now, um, that you may have more incentives, more adaptive pressures that allow people to take advantage of Machiavellian or, or psychopathic traits.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  So the world is certainly set up, you know, we talk about this in the book, even the automobile, right, does allow for.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  It makes Machiavellian strategies more effective, right? And so actually, just to tie this real quickly back to what you were just asking about, how we would evolve, I could see countermeasures to those sorts of things. Countermeasures to cheater detection, like becoming more salient, you know, like, and also, we've been talking about this sort of, I think, from the perspective of guys, being worried about other guys. I think for women, there's still a lot of the same sort of threats that they faced, threats of sort of, you know, pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy and things like this. Those might be getting worse because of some of this technology.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  And so those sorts of things, I feel like those countermeasures are going to, we're going to become more and more aware of, wait, is this person, is this person going to rip me off, you know, like, not necessarily they're going to beat me up, but they're going to convince me to engage in a pyramid scheme or something like this? Or, you know, is this person who is approaching me as a potential mate, are they really trustworthy? So I think those sorts of risks are possibly even higher than they've ever been.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  And I think that's more like cultural evolution than biological evolution in some sense. So I know, growing up in New York City, I learned not to trust strangers in a way that, you know, my mother-in-law, who grew up in a little town in Delaware, you know, when she moved out to Arizona, she would leave her doors unlocked, she would leave her keys in her car, you know, and, you know, one of my cars got stolen from her parking lot, you know. But for me, I, it was very easy for me to be suspicious because I'd grown up around strangers.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  And so some of it might simply be that we, you know, we pick it up, we basically use those old mechanisms and just set them to a lower threshold than we would have. And that may continue. What did you learn about how friendships work?

• 42:35Speaker 00

  In the, in the book, you're, okay, yes. So.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Well, I, I'm gonna just jump in here, because I think one of the things, sort of thinking about how friendships work in the ancestral world, is they're, they're very goal oriented, right? They're, this sort of affiliation motive is, it can be designed, it can be based on sort of, not quite altruism, but like, kin care and like, care of people around you, like sharing food, but it can also be based on teaming up to either, you know, like, take down a mammoth, is sort of the, the classic idea. And so, um, that is the thing that, you know, in modern days, we have a lot of competitive

• 43:22Speaker 02

  activities. And some of those are sort of team-based, right? Sports, right? If you're playing sports, you are still with your team against the other team. But, uh, one of the things we sort of discuss a lot is this idea that working together, working together is a good way of matching that. That's what our ancestors used to do, right? It's like, instead of getting together to play board games, you get together to, to build a hut. And so.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Or to fish.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so that, I think, is something that we, like, you know, it's kind of fun, writing in this book, because it's like, you'd think, a lot of this stuff would come automatically, right? But, uh, I don't think it did, because our ancestors didn't need to think about it, okay? They would wake up in the morning and their, you know, cousins would say, "We're going fishing today, and you're coming," you know? And that doesn't happen. So in, in the modern world, I think sometimes when we think about making friends, we think, "Oh, all I have to do is just go talk to people and then I'll," you know? But in reality, I think we do have to do something significant with them, you know? Like, it's much easier to maintain friendships when you have common goals to accomplish. And.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and we're skipping the big, the biggest difference in recent modern times, which is that these days friendships are often virtual, right? Um, which was obviously never the case. And, and there's data showing that spending more time online, like, actually makes people less happy versus spending time in person. So, so one of the most simple things is just.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  We need to be hanging out with real people in real life. So.

• 45:03Chris Williamson?

  I certainly think that for men, bonding through shared effort seems to deepen friendships in a pretty profound way. I had a guy called Max Dickens, who's just written a book called Billy No Mates about why men have a difficulty with friendships at the moment. And he seemed to come across the same, the same conclusion, which is that women are really good at maintaining friendships over time. Men's friendships peak around about 18, the maximum amount of time that they spend socially. And then that just gets frittered away and frittered away. And one of the reasons is that men need to see other men making effort, not only for them, but with them. You know, they need to be

• 45:44Chris Williamson?

  contributing. And that kind of makes sense. Like, think about what the friendships would be ancestrally. The men would go out, they would hunt, they would do something hard together, they would bond over the fact that they were doing the hard thing together. But they wouldn't get quite as attached as a woman would to her friends, because that guy that you're out hunting with might get killed. You're out on a hunt, it's pretty likely that they're gonna, it's certainly more likely that they're gonna die than one of the other mothers that's back in the cave. So I think it's called, is it allo parenting, where you kind of do shared, shared care of children and stuff like that?

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think even on top of the guys dying, there are other aspects of female friendship. There's sort of like an information economy, you know, that like in female friendships where knowing somebody, they can help you, they can help you assess potential mates, right? They can help you raise kids, as you were saying. And so I think it could also be partly for guys, the skill set to get somebody to come and help you, right? If you see a guy who can throw a spear and you're like, hey, you can throw a spear, I can throw a rock, let's go hunt a thing. Whereas if you want somebody to say, hey, can I trust you to tell me who else I can trust around here? Knowing them for a long time really adds value to that. So.

• 47:04Chris Williamson?

  What about dominance? You looked at the difference between dominance and prestige when it refers to being effective at getting ahead and becoming statusful in life. What did you learn there?

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Well, so people like prestigious leaders, right? Dominant leaders are, they're appealing like if you're thinking about going to war. But if you're thinking about just working together as a group, people prefer prestigious leaders. People also often when they conceptualize their ideal boss will prefer a female leader. And so it really depends on the situation at hand. But often, if you're talking about getting along or a thing where resources are going to be shared, a workplace environment, things like that, prestige, you know, which is the idea that they can teach you skills

• 47:58Speaker 02

  and help guide you is pretty key.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, let me, let me just expand on what you just said, Dave. Let's define those terms. A prestige leader is someone who, as Dave just said, it's somebody, uh, there was a, a paper by Joe Henrich and Francisco Gil White that made this distinction and said that, um, as far as they could tell, at least, among chimpanzees and most other mammals, uh, leader, the, the, the top of the status hierarchy is occupied by an aggressive, competitive individual who you won't mess with. You don't want to go near them because they'll bite your, you know, they'll bite your head off, you know? Um, and, uh, we do have that.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  We have that kind of, you know, the tough schoolyard bully type of thing in human beings as well. And that individual, if they want to take something from you, you know, they're in a better position to do it if they're the big tough bully. Um, and, uh, a lot of times, for a long time, people would read evolutionary literature like chimpanzee politics. Uh, there was the head of the, um, Newt Gingrich used to give it to incoming Republican, uh, representatives and say, this is the way it is, man. It's all about blood, you know, and, you know, take what you can, don't give, don't, don't give in, bond together to kick ass on anybody who gets in your way. Uh, and that's one view of things.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Um, it may be why the American Congress doesn't do so well, you know, getting anything done. Um, but another, another thing that's unique to humans is that we share information with one another.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  And so a prestigious leader is someone who is given status because we want them to be in the decision-making, we want them to be at, you know, driving the car because they've got the skills. And you get prestige if you deliver goods and if you can train other people. And so that's the, just to kind of clarify that distinction. And so as Dave was saying, the research evidence suggests that we, we do like the bullies as leaders if we're about to go to war. And that's, Mark Von Voet did a lot of that research. He's at the V Free University in Amsterdam. But we've done a lot of research here and

• 50:28Speaker 00

  a number of people who've, like Henrik's colleagues and John Maynor have done research suggesting that, that we really do like prestigious leaders. You know, if, if I'm going to work for you, if you're going to be my boss, I don't want you to be the big bully. Okay. I want you to be somebody I can get close to who can, you know, take me and show me the ropes and how to get things accomplished and can lead me in a, you know, lead me in a direction I'll trust.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  So our preference for leaders responds to the local demands of whatever situation or ecology or environment we're in?

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and most of the time in the modern world, we're not at war. And if you're running a corporation, I think it's probably better not to think of yourself as, you know, a dominant alpha male chimp, but to think of yourself as a prestigious human being.

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  Who was that guy that ended up in a ton of different marriages? Giovanni?

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Giovanni, yes. Yes. So, and this was, this was before dating apps, right? But he just would do this. He had a car. And so he would go from town to town. And he met women at things like antique shows and would sort of.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Get them to fall in love with him and also get them to lend or give him their, their assets, their car, their, you know, their bank accounts and went around and did this to over a hundred women, was married to them, I think, and was like, and stealing their stuff. Oh, so, right, this was the ultimate sort of like Machiavellian dating strategy, right?

• 52:18Speaker 00

  Which could not have happened in the ancestral environment because you would have had some brothers come hunting you down and killing you. But he was able to drive to another state and start again.

• 52:29Chris Williamson?

  How much evolutionary evidence do you think there is for humans feeling love and thinking about love in the way that we conceive it now in the modern world?

• 52:41Speaker 00

  So, the myth in my field of psychology used to be, well, in the social sciences used to be that love was something that was invented in the Middle Ages. And, you know, it's like about romantic love and chivalry and so forth. And before that, love didn't exist. That turns out to be BS. There's an anthropologist, Jankowiak and Fisher, they did a study, they actually did a meta-analysis, sort of a thing, where they got a whole, they looked at all the societies they could find, and they were anthropologists, looked at the anthropological reports, and looked at, are there ever powerful bonds between, you know, romantic partners in this society? And what they found is that, and I'm going

• 53:24Speaker 00

  to make this number up, but in the, say, 120 that they could look at, they found that the answer was definitely yes in 110 of them, and we don't really know in the other 10. And so they guessed that powerful bonds are something that happened even in hunter-gatherers. And so, I would argue that they are part of human nature, the bond between, you know, between lovers.

• 53:50Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference between strong pair bonding and love?

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Is it just a semantic difference?

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  That's what I mean, yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  That's what I would say, yeah.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  I agree. It's just the words we're using.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think love is a sort of common term that we use that is primarily used for sort of pair bonding and then also sort of parental familial love.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  But...

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is that distinction. Yeah, no, I'm actually just agreeing with you, Dave, that there is... There's actually studies that have been done where they ask people to think of someone you're in love with, and they do think of people in two categories. They think of romantic partners. And for that kind of love, they talk about feeling passion and arousal and longing. And then they talk about familial love or, you know, affiliative love. And then there they just talk about bonding and being close. So there are two... Those are two different ways we use the word love. But I think what you were referring to, Chris, was romantic love. It's not passionate.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  It also sometimes, I think, is used to refer to that sort of initial feeling of euphoria at a sort of early stage of a relationship. Oh, and so... Which whereas pair bonding includes that, but also includes the sort of longer term.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  Well, yeah.

• 55:24Chris Williamson?

  I remember...

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Romantic.

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  I remember hearing Jonathan Haidt talk about passionate love and companionate love as being too... Like a life cycle that you go through.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Well, yes, romantic relationships do shift to those companionate relationships. So we have the companionate love with our family members where we never felt any passion for them. Okay? But romantic, as Dave just pointed out, romance tends to peak at the beginning of a relationship. And you really wouldn't want to go on for years with this pounding of heart and sweating palms and anticipation every time you see, you know, your wife. Okay, because you'd die of a heart attack, you know. And so turns out that in fact, it does go away and gets replaced with that more kind of familial, you know, what you

• 56:19Speaker 00

  might call brotherly love, you know, just this is a person who's my mate in the sense that you used the term before as a friend.

• 56:27Chris Williamson?

  Doug, did you do some work on the relationship between dominance and attraction at some point?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Yes, many, many years ago. It was one of the, one of the first studies that was published in our major journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psych, from an evolutionary perspective. And it took us 10 years to get it published because people didn't like the idea of comparing us to other animals. With Ed Sedala, did some research where we actually just, we had been, you know, Ed had been reading sociobiology and I'd been reading a book by Jane Lancaster called Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture. We thought, well, let's start to apply this to humans. And so we did some, what we're now seeing, very simple studies where we showed people, potential partners

• 57:15Speaker 00

  who were either dominant in the sense of they'd go into an office, they'd sit upright, they'd lean in towards the person in the desk, or they'd sit meekly over in the corner. And we did it a number of ways. We had, sometimes we had a psychologist describe you as dominant. And what we found in all of those studies is that for women judging men, they judged the guy as sexier when he was dominant. Not when he was domineering, incidentally, not when he was pushy and aggressive, you know, and nasty kind of dominant, but when he was confident and, you know, that kind of dominant, you know. Men didn't care one way or the other. Was she, they asked the question of was she attractive?

• 58:04Speaker 00

  I don't know if you know the study by John Marshall Townsend, I think his name is. He did a study where he brought people into the lab and showed them potential. I think maybe it was like a simulated dating study and I'm not exactly sure of the context, but you would look at a photograph of, if you're a man, you would look at a picture of a woman who either looked gorgeous or who looked average. And she was either wearing a Burger King server's outfit, okay? Or she was wearing a, you know, dress to the nines, Wall Street, you know, fancy suit and, you know, Rolex watch, the female guy. Or the guy, same thing.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  You see a guy and he either looked like a movie star or he looked like a dorky guy, but he'd be dressed for Wall Street or for the Burger King server. And it turns out that the, when, when people were asked, would you want to date this person or have, you know, amorous relationships with this person? For women, it mattered. They would actually prefer to date the dorky looking guy in the Wall Street clothes to the handsome guy who was working at Burger King. For men, they didn't care what, you know, if she was good looking, they'd prefer the

• 59:32Speaker 00

  good looking woman who worked for Burger King to the less attractive woman who was dressed to the nines.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  Something else that I learned in Seth's book was about the difference in mate value, in perceived mate value of men by women, based on the amount of money that they earned related to the job and the type of job that they had. And what, a lot of the time, men say that because women are hypergamous and they're resource seeking creatures, that it's hard because I need to climb up the corporate ladder and I need to get myself to $160,000 a year before anyone is going to look at me. And the data doesn't seem to suggest that. What it suggests is that you can actually pivot from one career into another career and that women value a cooler job a lot more than they value a high paying job.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  In fact, they found that a man who works in hospitality and was being paid $200,000 a year would be equally attractive as a fireman who was getting paid $50,000 a year.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  So that's interesting. Well, the fireman still, that's a protective sort of job, right? That's a, that, and whereas I guess hospitality, it's, it's still, there's a way in which it's like you're, you're helping other people. So

• 1:00:50Chris Williamson?

  For one reason or another, it's just not seen as statusful.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So huh.

• 1:00:56Chris Williamson?

  I always remember this example. I think it's in Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, which is what? Like 30 years old now or something, nearly.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's still spectacular. And um, he was talking about why do women fall in love with the starving artist? You know, the guitar singer that plays acoustic sets on a night but sleeps on his friend's couch? And his justification for that was that it's basically buying a penny stock, that it's a future projection of potential make value over time. And I think that, you know, if you were to look at the fireman and the value, not in terms of monetary outcome, but in terms of status over time, you would think, right, that guy is probably going to accumulate a ton of goodwill. Everyone's going to be really altruistic toward him. You know, if he saves a cat from a burning building, that's, the people are going to owe him. Whereas the hospitality industry, that being

• 1:01:48Chris Williamson?

  said, lawyer was the highest rated in terms of category. And I don't think that many people see lawyers as being super altruistic creatures either.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  But dominant, right? They, they, they will fight. So that could be part of it. Um, and so there's that, because both of those have the, this person has the ability to protect me, which I think is a, you know, an attractive

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  Legally and from a fire, those are the two ways that women primarily need

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  But why, why the rock, why the rock star?

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  Why the, why the local rock star? Because, uh, you know, Jeffrey Miller would argue, he had, he wrote a beautiful book called The Mating Mind.

• 1:02:36Chris Williamson?

  I was with, I was with Jeffrey and Diana last night.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  Oh, were you? Okay, great. Um, so you know about The Mating Mind then? And what he would argue there is that in some sense, if I can show off my, you know, my brilliant mind, uh, it indicates that I have good genes. So even if I don't currently have resources, uh, if you mate with me, your kids will be peacocks too. Your kids will be the human, the human version of a peacock is someone who can speak eloquently, uh, or who can play the guitar and, you know, he'll be able to charm women even though he doesn't have money in the next generation.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  I, I'd be curious, have they ever looked to see how much more or less attractive a guy is with a guitar versus being in a band? Like, does the actual, the, the ability to sort of put together a band and work as a group? Seems like it would add an extra level.

• 1:03:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, maybe, but maybe it dilutes down where the success is coming from. Perhaps it's less to do with you and perhaps it's more to do with, I don't know, sort of Machiavellian, uh, I don't know, coordination and stuff like that. Because by that virtue, maybe the guy that's the agent of the band or the manager of the band should be the one that's the most important because he's the guy that puts them all together. And yet he's not. So, yeah, I would be.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  Well, you don't see him doing that, right? Like, when you see the, I'd be really curious to see whether a single guy, like a guy up there with a guitar by himself, how he does compared to a guy with a band. Um, and, and I would bet on the guy with the band, actually.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  It's an empirical question, Dave. You can probably talk a couple of the graduate students into running that study.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Chris Williamson?

  Easy work. Um, I had, I had a question, actually. Why is it that human females go through menopause? Because I don't think that many other animals or most other animals do.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Hardly any, hardly any. There's, I heard of one, uh, One cetacean, in other words, some sort of a dolphin goes through menopause. That's the only other species I've ever heard of. The theory is that at some point, a woman reaches an age that humans, over time, began to become more and more long-lived. And at a certain age, it's more dan... If a woman, if we live in social groups, we take care of the members of our group. And if the mother is taking care of her children, and then her grandchildren,

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  her bearing another child, there's the danger she'll die in childbirth, or that she'll die when that child is young. And so, it actually is an economic sense that our genes making an economic, like, you know, like Dawkins talked about in The Selfish Gene. It isn't like that our genes actually make decisions, but we can think of them as saying, "Click, now let's switch to this strategy, where it's better off me being a grandmother than dying in childbirth, or dying while I have a very young child." And so, better to just invest.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  I think the reason that it's sort of unique to humans comes from, because of our brains, pregnancy is particularly dangerous for moms, right?

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  Big head.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Labor, labor is dangerous. And also, we just need a lot of, like, or we benefit a lot from long-term social support, more so than most other animals, so.

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  Back, we've talked about this, I think, Dave, but Kim Hill also did some data where they actually, you know, Kim Hill and Hillary, Hillary Kaplan, a number of people have analyzed things like the calories that are brought in by people over their lifespan in these kind of horticultural, you know, groups living... Sort of close to the ancestral circumstances, living in the jungles of South America. And they, one of the things that they tell me is that, uh, first of all, the average couple, uh, doesn't really bring in enough calories to care for themselves and their children. They're so busy taking care of the kid, they can't bring enough calories. And so they need their relatives to help them out and their neighbors to help them

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  out. Uh, and the average male doesn't bring in enough calories until he's like 20 years old to really, to be a guaranteed source of protein. And so, because we're so incredibly dependent, in ways that most other animals were so incredibly dependent on that risk pool group, that, you know, that, that's what makes us the special species in which it pays for the female to, to stop reproducing because she's still in this group, she's still caring for, she's still sharing calories and time and resources on the, uh, on her, you know, second generation offspring.

• 1:07:41Chris Williamson?

  But she's no longer continuing to produce more mouths that need feeding.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  Right. Exactly. Right.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  And, and she's, yeah, and she's no longer, she's not taking the risk because if a woman has a kid three years before menopause, right, and she would have died three years later, that, that young three-year-old is going to be essentially helpless, right? So.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  So those younger kids, especially, the more recent the kid was born compared to menopause, if, if there was a risk of death, the better.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:18Chris Williamson?

  Does this mean, does this mean that, uh, menopause would have only emerged after a time when human females were growing up to be on average older than 40 years old or 45 years old or something like that?

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  Would have to, well, there would have to have been selection pressure operating at that age for it to, because it's a universal feature of humans. So there would have had to been some. Selection pressure. I guess one other theory is there could have been a weird bottleneck where there was only a small number of human beings and there was a genetic switch and one of the females, the only one that survived, that'd be the other possible theory and it was an accident.

• 1:09:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that is cool. But I guess that that could potentially explain a whole bunch of phenomenon that we can't really come up with an explanation for, that there's adaptive explanations that are sometimes contested. Wasn't there, there was a period that we got to where there was less than 10,000 Homo sapiens on the planet, right? And everybody was in Indonesia or something?

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  I don't know that, but that, that, that's interesting. If that were true, it would have led to a lot of bottlenecking and some, we might have some unique characteristics that we don't really have to have.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  I mean, it's also possible, I don't, I don't know the like anthropological literature on this, but it's possible that, say it was a mutation that worked in a small group and then it just sort of lived among humans until we got to the point where by and large, women tend to live past 40, then it suddenly becomes incredibly advantageous and then that's when it spreads, right?

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  Yes, that's

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  That's when it sort of becomes.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  That's a good point, Ted. That's the way it works. If it had a cost, you know, then it would have been selected out at some point. But if it actually had an advantage, you know, that advantage could have, could have been magnified.

• 1:10:24Chris Williamson?

  It's like a latent benefit almost that sort of sat idling away and then becomes significantly more beneficial at some point. And it's the, the fortunate timing of both of those things coming together, that you have the genetic mutation, perhaps at a time when there's an explosion of that genetic mutation being advantageous. But I suppose that's what all mutations are at, right?

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  That's the name of the game. Random variation and selective retention. That is evolution.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it also, but it's, it's kind of wild to think that. That still happens, you know what I mean? Like that these sorts of things, I think even as we've been discussing this book of like our evolved brains, like I think it's almost, it's easy to imagine, oh, back in the day, everyone had our current brains and those current brains were perfectly matched. And it turns out, well, that wasn't true because there were other people whose brains were not matched to then and they died off. And then even now, there's so many different variations on sort of human genes out there, you know, that there are different things that could, in a relatively short number of generations, become very advantageous.

• 1:11:31Chris Williamson?

  What was that, what was that story about the guys who had brothers that were on the FBI's most wanted list?

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah. So, sure, sure. Whitey Bulger, right? And his brother, and then the Unabomber. So we talk about this, these sort of two stories of brothers with a very similar choice. And you want to tell us a little bit about it, Ted?

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Sure. So, Whitey Bulger was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list, but his brother was the, he was the president of the University of Massachusetts. And he was also the president of, he was a lawyer, law professor. So he was the president of the, of the Massachusetts State Senate for some period of time, or the state representative, House of Representatives, I forget which, but a very prestigious, very successful guy. And his brother was a very successful mobster in Boston, killing people. And the question came when the FBI, they went to Whitey and said, do you know where your brother is? And he did, but he refused to speak to them.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  He lost his job because of it, you know, and it took 20 years for them to find his brother. And the other one is David Kaczynski, who was a guy who studied English and was a, you know, I don't know if he ever, what he did for a living, he was a teacher or something, but he, he had a brother who was just brilliant, okay?

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  Ted Kaczynski, Ted Kaczynski was a professor at Berkeley, which was, you know, in the US, one of the most prestigious universities, probably in the world, one of the most prestigious universities. But he kind of cracked up and he went to live in Montana. I just drove through by there the other day. It's really beautiful where he was, where he chose to live, in Lincoln, Montana. But he, uh, he became, he started sending bombs to people who he thought were destroying nature, you know? And, uh, his brother turned them in.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  Right, and so this was, I think this, I really like this dilemma and these two stories of these, because these are two, if you think about the, each of these guys' brothers, right? They're in a similar situation of you're sort of trying to live a law-abiding life and you, assuming they both knew, I mean, I know with Ted Kaczynski, there was a point where David's wife was like, I feel like these letters are written like they were written by your brother, right? And he's like trying to figure it out.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  So, no, no, he first wanted to deny it. No, no, that's not my brother. And he said, yeah, you know, and then she found some exact passage. And so, so then he went and showed it to the FBI.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's a really interesting question of, of trade-offs, right? This trade-off between sort of getting along with society and kin care, right? Of sort of protecting your family, um, and...

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  The question is, Dave, what would you do if you found out that I was a modern Unabomber? Which route would you go?

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Well, the answer, I think I'd sort of, I mean, I hate to be like, yeah, I would go the, the Whitey Bulger route, you know? Like, but there is, there is a sort of feeling of like, oh, do you work it out internally, right? Do you keep, is it, is it as a family?

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  Do you keep your family in check rather than turning to the outside world?

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have a debt to society. It's another interesting case of where our genetic interests are one thing, and then there's our obligation to society, which isn't completely independent of our genetic interests. Because if we, you know, if our brother was discovered to be a murderer, it would hurt our social standing too. So it isn't like they're completely, it isn't like genes versus culture. But, you know, in both cases, there's a decision to be made. What's the best, what's in your best interest and what's in the best interest of the rest of society? And I think it's a fun question of why did the Unabomber's

• 1:15:44Speaker 00

  brother turn him in, but why, why did Bulger's brother didn't turn him in? What do you guess on that, Dave?

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Well, part of it might be they didn't live in the same place, right? The, like, Ted and David Kaczynski, when people move away, those sort of, that feeling of being part of the same tribe gets harder to maintain. And so, which is one of the things we actually discussed, not, not just so that your family doesn't turn you in for crimes, but we do sort of talk about there's a lot of benefits to staying geographically close to your family. And so, and I think that that, a lot of that comes down to you guys help each other out, right? When, when they're nearby. So.

• 1:16:30Chris Williamson?

  I wonder as well whether the fact that in the modern world, status is probably held in higher regard, but any of the actual physical fallout and consequences of your brother being the Unabomber or whatever are less. So previously, you said that there's this sort of cohesion between genetic interest and environmental interest or community interest. But let's say that your brother was a dangerous murdering psychopath. He, if you're in a group of 150 people, he may threaten one of your children. He may threaten your, your wife or one of your brothers-in-law or something like that. That is no longer, that sort of fallout is no longer a concern. But the statusful side of things is potentially even more of

• 1:17:12Chris Williamson?

  a concern, because that is one of the commodities that we're playing about with now.

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, although, although I think a lot of times, people who are. Aggressive in nature are still less likely to be aggressive, or at least murderous to biological relatives. So it actually may be that if you have a murderous sibling, you who lives nearby, you reap the benefits. Sort of as we're going back to this idea of sort of having a dominant person on your team. There may be some advantages to having an aggressive person.

• 1:17:50Chris Williamson?

  Is there not a potential risk here that most murders of partners are committed by, the first place that they look is the spouse? I wonder whether you would be safe, but your immediate, non-biological to them, but biological to you, genetic relatives maybe?

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, no. Again, back to Martin Daly and Margot Wilson, who I mentioned before. They wrote a book called Homicide. And one of the counter, people always used to say, oh, well, if genes are the thing, why is it that people always kill their relatives? And what it turns out is that they don't kill their relatives. They kill their spouses. Okay. And they kill people who they live with, who are not related to them. But they hard, even though their relatives piss them off more than anybody else. You know, we're doing some research now, which indicates that people are more likely to get hit and even hurt by their brothers and sisters as they're growing up. But they don't kill one another. They almost never, despite the opportunities and despite the annoyances,

• 1:18:54Speaker 00

  killings between siblings are so rare as to be, you know, an anomaly when they do.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  And what about, what about like in-laws? Are, because I know killings between stepparents and kids are less rare, right? But I've never, I've never actually heard this question of do people kill their? Brother-in-law or not?

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. That's a good, I bet you Martin Daly knows the answer. My prediction is yes, that's, that's a dangerous position to be in.

• 1:19:23Chris Williamson?

  If you're in a, if you're in a house, if a child's in a house with a parent that is non-biological, there's a hundred times risk that that child is going to be, is going to be killed. And I think that that shows just how hard it is to raise a kid. And the fact of the matter is that a lot of the reason that you put up with raising them is because they're yours.

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  Exactly, right?

• 1:19:42Chris Williamson?

  So rounding all of this out, you guys come up with an evolutionary justification for being kind, which, given some of the areas that we've gone into today, might seem averse to a part of our nature. What, give me the evolutionary justification for being kind?

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Well, I think the justification is that it will help you solve your, it will help you meet your evolved needs in the modern world. All right. And so, and one of the ways that I think that we're immediately mismatched is often our selfish desires ring really loudly, right? In our heads. And we don't really necessarily need people out there saying, oh, you should really look out for yourself, right? Like, we'll generally do that. But

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  there are a lot of ways that by helping other people meet these needs, you really benefit. And this is a thing that was true in the ancestral kingdom. You know, we've talked about this with status. You know, one of the things I think people see all the time these days is status is how big your boat and your house are. But really, those are signs of status that generally in a, in a, in a system that works, those will come from your contributions to the group, right? And that is what, even when you think about animal kingdoms, when we've talked about like a dominant, like ape or something, they still can contribute. They still can protect

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  the other members of the group. They can still, you know, and so.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  By thinking about how you can help the other members of your group and the people around you achieve their fundamental motives, that turns out to be a really good way to achieve yours.

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, we're not saying to be totally unselfish. That's an important... In fact, I was just re-listening to the book, The Selfish Gene. And one of the things, and Dawkins had a 25th anniversary edition in which he defended himself and said, "You know, I didn't say that selfish genes produce selfish people. Selfishness itself is not a good thing in a whole human being. It's, but it's, it's there in our genes. But our genes may instruct us to be cooperative in order to promote their survival. Okay? And in fact, if you're living in a social group, the, you know,

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  there's reasons to be nice to other people. And it's sometimes it is hard. The reason, part of the reason we put that in there is that about when Dave's younger brother was 10 years old, I asked a bunch of my colleagues, some of whom are, you know, famous biologists and positive psychologists. And I asked them, if you had one piece of advice for a 10-year-old kid, what would it be? And none of them said, even though they're biologists, they know the theory of evolution. They didn't say, "Go out and, you know, conquer, you know, and do the best for your genes. Find them, feel them, and forget them, and I'll skip the third F in there, you know." And none of them said that. All of these people who are very successful,

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  they said, most commonly, be nice to other people. Yeah. And my colleague, Mark Schaller, said it best. He said, "Look, you know, being nice to other people is actually, in some level, being nice to yourself. Because if you're nice to other people, they'll trust you. They'll be your friends. They'll give you things. And so, in some sense, it's the best way to be nice to yourself."

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  So, so I do, I do want to just sort of qualify one last thing because we keep using the word "nice." And I think throughout the book...

• 1:23:34Speaker 02

  Because there's ways that you can be nice that allow you to be taken advantage of, right? And I actually think the word that I would use instead of nice is helpful, right? Like if you if you find ways to be, so it's not always like you don't want to agree with every bad idea somebody suggests to you because that's a way you could be nice. That's not necessarily gonna gonna help you or help them, but consciously thinking about how to be sort of useful to your friends, useful to your coworkers, useful to your partners, useful to your family. That, I think, is the key.

• 1:24:14Chris Williamson?

  Doug and Dave, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the work that you do and keep up to date with stuff, where should they go?

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  I'd say check out the book.

• 1:24:24Speaker 00

  Read the book. And I would say, based upon what Dave just said, buy a copy of the book for your for your sons or your fathers or your brothers or your mothers.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that I think that's that would be great. And we would appreciate people buying it. It's solving problems with the Stone Age brain, solving modern problems with the Stone Age brain. So.

• 1:24:46Chris Williamson?

  Gentlemen, I appreciate you. Thank you for today.

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  Good talking to you. Thank you.

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd, causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:25:14Speaker 00

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.