35 Emotions Explained By Evolutionary Psychology - Rob Kurzban

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? so for me Feelings are everything right so our motivations basically come from where we feel so if you're hungry You want to eat and if we feel aroused we want to something else if we feel jealous We want to say what so they go the most interesting pieces I think of human behavior, which is what I study is driven by our feelings And then the evolutionary piece gives us a way to understand them so for me. It's really exciting We have a really good way to understand all of the things that cause us to do the things that we want to do What could be more interesting than that? Why is the evolutionary angle? Interesting or useful when it comes to looking at feelings and emotions I would say the evolutionary point of view is going to be critical for studying Anything that humans do we're an animal or 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 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 hmm? 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? Yeah, no one knows I mean I got here today in a driverless Ramo and it sort of in some sense it sort of wanted to pick me up Wanted to make her right on red which it did by the way very safely just to say and so I think a way mo and AI so one tells us there's something that you can get from artificial systems functionally Yeah, that's functionally, but what if for whatever reason biology is it like that you put a bunch of neurons in there? they get really complicated and Then the 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 words. 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 eat over here It has to be able to make a decision about which of those things to do now the way mo 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? So it's a kind of like a way to check among the different pieces, which is which is the biggest one. That's interesting so because a Thermometer just has one thing to do the way mo to some degree also just has one thing to do It needs to get from here to there. Yeah, you they need to be less complex and they need to wait competing priorities in Less of a complex way, especially the thermometer, right? 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. Yeah, totally I need you some common currency. Like what is three units of hunger before units of fear? How do you compare those things? Yeah, and so I think consciousness this experience we have is that common currency? It says oh, it's this important Somehow because again to get more complicated This problem becomes bigger bigger get for the way mo Its main thing is not to get into an accident and then the second thing is the edge of 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 What is the measurement and motivation language that you use when it comes to feelings? I remember when I was a graduate student, I went to a lot of different talks This was by a 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 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 bear sentence to you But just to say like you'd have to measure like what's the danger and so if you're gonna build a computational mechanism Which our brains basically are a thing that processes information the first stage has to be to measure something now could be complicated, right? so jealousy is measuring something about is that person to 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 gonna measure something And then the next part Motivation once you've got the measurement you've got to do something with it Again if from the evolution 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 word or not and if it's big enough then I should do it So I find that language really helpful I also like it because it can get everything from hunger to awe to jealousy to Contempt to the feeling that you've seen someone before so the same language 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 Are there some emotions that are more measure and some that are more motivate? Well, I think that they all have both components But for some the measurement is just very straightforward Like I said, I think thirsty or the feeling you you know, gotta 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 but all of them have both components in some sense. They can't work without both components You don't know what you're gonna you know You don't know what you have to do unless you can measure something and then you have to have to act in the world Hmm if feelings are essentially measurement systems, how often do we misunderstand what they're measuring? I think pretty often and I think that in the modern world and it can be Especially difficult, right? So let's take envy I think in Yes, you know back in the day you were around very few people right much less than today and more or less everyone around you was someone who kind of was someone who you might Be able to see as a competitor or so on But now with all the platforms the kids are on Instagram and whatever else it is You see all these people who have you know Great success a lot of friends the kinds of things so your your envy system is like an overdrive Being folded to thinking that you know It'd be a good idea for you to try to get what they have even though maybe doing that wouldn't it be in your best? interest or maybe if it isn't even Feasible, I think we often same thing again to go back to the road example, right? So we get anger angry when let's say you got caught in traffic and in the past that would have been really useful because You're probably see that person again. So you want to tell them don't do that I'm gonna be I might you know, I'm gonna might hurt you if you do that again or something But now you're never gonna see him again. So the anger doesn't do anything useful for you, but we still experience it Does it mean the measure and motivate thing? Does it mean that unpleasant feelings need to be unpleasant in order to work and that pleasant feelings need to be pleasant in order? To work the reason that they feel that way is to contribute to the motivation I think so. There's really sad but very interesting 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 un it's an unfortunate effect just of the way the nervous system is wired up You created a taxonomy of five Kingdoms five different groups that emotions go into what's interesting about the body maintenance one What did you find uniquely interesting about that? well, I First of all, I should say I I'm not a feelingist. I treat all feelings equally. I don't have favorites. I love them all But I mean there's there's all sorts of interesting stuff that 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 years and amid the kovat pandemic And so one of the things I always thought was interesting was itchiness, right? So the there's you have all these really fancy things on the surface of your skin that detect when there's something on there and for 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 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 I think itchiness is sort of one of the more interesting ones Isn't it crazy that everyone's had the experience of sitting on a plane and feeling an itch and going actually? I'm gonna I'm gonna lock in. I don't need to my body's not gonna 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 are stabbing you with something sharp But it's just as captivating with a different flavor It's kind of facet It's like crazy how smart our systems aren't able to distinguish that crazy too because it can be socially transmitted So like this conversation if people are watching it, they might start to feel itchy brother Sorry one, but you you could feel itchy just because people are talking about tens of thousands of people in unison Yeah Which is kind of interesting, right? But that might even you look evolutionist scholars 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 uh, what about yawning and why is that contagious? Oh, man, that's a hard one Yeah, I yawn 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 there. Maybe you're getting ready to do so. I don't I don't I don't it's a messy one It's a messy one I just want to say there's some one of the things I did, you know that I when I was when I was Trying to work on all of these different feelings was I'm reading all these papers and like there's so many feelings for which As you recently as 520 people saying there's not enough research to answer this question. There's very little research I'm like, what do people would do it? You're telling me that the yawning field is horribly underfunded Need to make yawning great again, that's what I think. Okay. What about the need to poop? I thought you might be I might thought you might be fishing top of my list. Yeah, super super interesting one I mean as we know everybody poops Any organism that takes them, 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 want to poop kind of you want optimal pooping? So you don't want to just poop anywhere, right? Especially if you're a creature that might be stalkers and you're leaving evidence In a lot of species including ours pooping near where other organism They're meant their group that you shouldn't do that. Just viewers take that take note So you want to kind of poop when it's necessary, but not more often So you have these cool sensory systems in the rectal area that's measuring sort of the pressure on That tube your intestinal tube and as that pressure goes up, that's what the measurement is. Basically how much pressure is there? Forcing that tube to get bigger and that pressure leads to that's a measurement and then the motivation is to poop and then You do the pooping by releasing a little Valve kind of thing it opens up and so it's a really well-designed system Which isn't that surprising because it's ancient like that There's been millions and millions of years for the pooping system to get debugged by evolution by natural selection So now we are very good at pooping Would that explain a little bit of the need for privacy and shame that people have around pooping that they know they're uniquely vulnerable During the act. Yeah, we're not the only critters. So there's so-called latrine behavior. There's organisms latrine behavior Yeah, not my term, but wonderful. Yeah where yeah, there's a spot that they go It's away from the group and then they do the thing because the thing about poop is that It attracts parasites same thing because the poop can't defend itself It doesn't have 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 you So you sort of want to keep the poop elsewhere? Yeah, so if you can you can bury it this is why so those of us would you know with our canine friends? You see the little 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 to go over there to do it Where everyone else is done and then screw it away. What about nausea? interesting one So again Pat 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 me having to go through the whole two which takes a while and so the Cues that give you know to to nausea are things that you've been poisoned It's it's interesting because a lot of people talk about motion sickness in this context and the thing is a lot of Times when you've got parasites on boards or if you've been you have a toxin on board is it affects the vestibular system? It affects your ability to feel dizzy as well. You feel dizzy and so There's a mismatch between what your eyes are seeing and what your body is feeling, right? So the same thing that happens when you let's say walk downstairs a moving boat Mm-hmm, or fucking nightmare. It's the worst. Yeah, do not try And so the one hypothesis which might not be true But the main one is that your system is saying look if my senses don't agree with each other That's a pretty good signal that I've either got a toxin on board or some like there's some parasite or whatever and I should get rid of it really quickly and Because that's what they do. They mess with your perceptual systems. And so the same thing is happening motion sickness You've got here's my visions doing this my body my vestibular system saying I'm doing that that they don't match So let's just be safe and just get rid of whatever is in there right now I remember New Year's Eve 2016 maybe 2017 I was working in Manchester running one of our nightclubs and my business partners first kid had had his first birthday party a couple of days before, unbeknownst to us, nor a virus was running rampant, 24-hour stomach bug. And I text him and I'm saying, how's Newcastle going? Because he was looking after that event I was done in Manchester. How's Newcastle going? He says, I don't know, I'm in the disabled toilet. And I was like, okay, well, unlucky for you, but I've got Manchester. It's gone really well. We'd sold out. Everything's great. And then 10, 10, 30, I started being really catty and short with everyone around me. I was like, just tuss unnecessarily brusque with everybody. And I was like, I took myself to one side and was like, I had a little word with me. And I was like, what the fuck are you doing? Like it's New Year's Eve, you sold out, you're in Manchester. This is a cool adventure. Like, just enjoy what you're doing. 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 toilet. Oh, shit. I'm 150 miles away from home. This is now a Faustian bargain of whether or not I open the taps here or try and hold it in until five in the morning once I'm driven back to Newcastle, which I tried and then exploded as soon as I stepped through the door into my own house in Newcastle. But yeah, that was like so interesting to me, this weird cascade of emotions, of sensations, maybe felt a little bit short. And maybe like I didn't want to be around people. And like I was being 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 sick all the way around. Yeah, lots of interesting parts of the story. My favorite was the conversation with me, which is very self-aware thing. Like, why am I being a dick? I think a lot of people should stop every now and then and say, huh, am I just what's going on here? But the other piece goes back to your very first question, which is, we've got these feelings, but we don't always know exactly what their origin is. I don't know. Have you ever been like on a hike, and you're at a canyon or something, and all of a sudden, you sort of feel afraid? And I had the sense that there's this residual little thing in our head somewhere that says, man, if you're on the low ground, and there are people who could see you, but you can't see them easily, that is a bad spot to be in. I mean, obviously, right now, when you're in a national forest, no one's going to throw rocks on you or something like that. You're not going to be ambushed in the middle of Yosemite. But I'm just saying, I sometimes get this weird, like, just a little bit of a funny feeling. I guess my point simply is, like, there's all these different feelings. Like, am I sick? Am I just being a dick? I don't know. That we have to kind of figure out. What do you think about claustrophobia? Yeah. So, I mean, I should, in many of these things, I have to say, most of this stuff comes from my own experience. So, I started experiencing claustrophobia late in life, and I discovered that when I was inside a cave, which was not the best time to discover it. So, here's what I think, and I think this is sort of supported by people like Randy Nessie and others. Friend of the show. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, he did some of the pioneering work in all of this. People should go back and listen to that episode once they're done with this one, Evolutionary Psychiatry, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Great book. Unreal. Yeah, really good. Nice primer as well, Two Car Garage, with your one. Yeah, people should definitely go out and buy both books, for sure. Agreed. Yeah. So, I think the challenge that evolution faces is sort of getting your dial set right. So, you know, you're born into a world, should you be especially credulous, because everyone's really nice, or should you be really skeptical, because you're in a world in which people are going to be deceiving you. And as you go through life, you've got to set these dials. How much should I feel this? How much should I feel that? And then there's some genetic noise, and so on. And I think, you know, those dials just get misset sometimes. I think in my case, you know, you should be afraid of enclosed spaces, because you don't have so-called prospect and refuge, right? The best place to be. Prospect and refuge. Yeah, it's a fancy way to say, I can see what's coming, and I can escape, right? Oh, very nice. Yeah, super interesting. And like, I would say, in a box, you have neither of those, right? You can't see anything, and you're not going anywhere, right? I'm going to guess that a closed space that's dark would be worse than a closed space that's light. Absolutely, because you lose prospect, right? So, yeah, well done. Interesting. A plus. Is this why we like big vistas? The house that's got the beautiful view is more beautiful than the house that backs onto a grey brick wall? I mean, we don't know the answer, but I would bet I'll wager a lot that's right. If you look at pictures of landscapes, just what do people choose to paint? Expansive. Expansive. Again, the viewer can see what's coming. If there's a bear, if there's a lion, if there's a bird, whatever it is, or prey animals, whatever, I can see them. And so, the more prospect you have, I think that's why we like being high up, because we can see all around us. We're also less vulnerable up there. It's harder to whatever. So, I think we have these ancient adaptations for these two things, and claustrophobia is sort of like, I've got neither of those, and if your dial is set up high enough, then you really don't like them. Yeah. My ex-girlfriend and me were doing the Edinburgh Dungeons tour, and I was being a good boyfriend. I thought, hey, I'll take us on a trip. Wouldn't this be lovely? And just the description of the ticket evidently didn't portray what the experience was going to be like sufficiently, and our journey through the Edinburgh Dungeons was about 15 feet, and then very quickly, that's not going to happen anymore. A quick aside. You've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Element in it. Element is an electrolyte drink mixed with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue, supports brain function, and helps to regulate your appetite throughout the day. I genuinely notice the difference when I take it versus when I don't, which is why I don't shut up about it, and also why it's used by everyone, from Dr. Andrew Huberman to Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams. The good sniper teams, not the bad ones. Also, they have a no questions asked refund policy, so if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash Modern Wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash Modern Wisdom. What about disgust? Nausea, I guess, adjacent to disgust, but different. What's going on with disgust? Nausea, I think, is the motivational piece. Again, it feels like this is the pathogen. The world out there has all these different pathogens, and we have particular spots that are vulnerable to them, all the different holes in our bodies. Disgust is measuring the risk of pathogen preference. Let's think about what do you find really disgusting, like the smell of feces, right? That's where the organisms, like little maggots, that's a really good indication that there's some kind of parasites in there. The smell of decaying flesh, people really don't like that. That's measuring what is the probability that there's some pathogen nearby. What's the right design if there are, is to go away, right? We tend to want to distance ourselves. We're motivated to put some space between us. If it's on us, we very quickly want to get rid of it. Even the disgust face, there's that little tongue as if you're expelling something. Yeah, what's going on? I think that's an ex—my former colleague at Penn, Paul Rosin, I think, his idea—it might have been Darwin, Darwin, Rosin—this idea that the tongue is sort of like if you ingest something that might have pathogens, it has the cues that there's a— You're pushing it out. You're pushing it. You're expelling it. 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. Exactly. That's interesting. Yeah, it's all these defenses against pathogens, and they all act in this coordinated way. I think disgust is super fascinating. People also like disgust because there's the sexual disgust part, too, right? Yeah, people that are grossed out by sex or situations that cause you to be grossed out by sex. Typically, we would think, wow, survival and reproduction. Explain to me why being ever repulsed by a sexual opportunity would be a good idea, but it obviously is. If the other person is closely related, it's often a bad idea, right? Oh, Westermark. Yeah, the Westermark stuff, right? People who were raised with someone, they find just the idea of sex with them—this is Deb Lieberman's work, excellent research on this. Friend of the show. Yeah, friend of the show. Excellent research showing that the people who you're raised with, even if they're not related, but as long as they were in the same spot at the same time, you get disgusted by the thought of having sex with them. Have you seen her work? Is it Thai or Filipino families from a particular religious subset that the parents of young boys would find the future wife at one or two years old and then raise the two together as a family? Hey, this is like the ultimate arranged marriage. You grow up together. You learn to be together. They didn't realize that you were going through the Westermark window. 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. Hey, you need to have sex with your sister who isn't your sister. In the privacy of your own home, I'm an only child, so I'm speaking entirely theoretically here. That's a big hurdle to get over. That is a big hurdle. I am not an only child. Yes, I can tell you. It is the most disgusting thought ever. It's horrible. I agree that probably the prediction would be it's very difficult to get people. Of course, the same thing happened on the Israeli kibbutzim. They were also raised together, the kibbutz in Israel. It's sort of a setting in which people are raised in a group of kids, the same age kids. They all start to get into a group, and they get older together, and they learn from each other. The same thing happens. The parents want them to pair up, because that would be nice, but they've been raised together. No, that's not—it's gross. No, thank you. No, thank you. I've said this before. I said it to Debra Lee. I think my first question to her was, why don't you want to have sex with your sister? She gave a wonderful explanation. It really is, for me, as an only child, it is so theoretical. I understand that people have that emotion, but I can't 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 incest disgust, I can't bring it online. I can't think about what that would be like, because I've never had to develop that particular response. Humans are able to move their ears, I think, but the muscles—you've got something going on there. A little bit. It's hard. Impressive. But if you atrophy, if you don't do it enough, then it's completely—that is kind of the physical equivalent of the emotional tool that I'm lacking. Yeah, totally. I think there's a lot of that, where if you don't— Use it, you lose it. Yeah, the development. Language is kind of like that. You could speak Thai or Tagalog, but you grew up in an environment where you—whatever this language is that you speak— Beautiful Queen's King's English. Thank you. Yeah, it's exceptional. There we go. Thank you. But yeah, you just didn't have the right cues as you were growing up. I think some of our emotional systems are like this, that they only start coming online. I have some of that, too. There's certain emotions that I don't seem to experience, particularly in the context of moral condemnation. People get really bent out of shape about a lot of different drugs. People get really bent out of shape about, for example, drug use, and they seem to have this very visceral reaction to it. Maybe it's part of the disgust system. I don't really know. 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, there's problems with drugs in society. I'm just saying the thing itself. I'm like, okay, so the guy once smoked a giant— It wouldn't be adaptive for everybody to have the same level of intensity around closed spaces, because if that was the case in a 30-person pod of 150 Dunbar group tribe, 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. This is why not only are you split-testing different emotions to say, oh, maybe this one's a bit more effective at keeping you alive, this one's a little bit less effective, but also when you spread it across an entire group, you actually end up with different capacities that can be given in different portions. I like this argument in the context of personality psychology and where people have made this, right? It's good to have some extroverts out there or some people who are adventurous because we need someone to go over there, and that might retain some of the genetic variability in there, right, so it doesn't get all homogenized. Could be. I mean, these things are— 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. Right. I mean, it's pretty interesting that there's always a sort of background level of psychopaths everywhere you look for them. They've survived. Yeah. They've survived. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, look, this study turned out to be false, and I was so fucking gutted when it turned out to be false. It was an episode that I didn't get to release because, unfortunately, it wasn't quite right, but I learned about a—actually, this is probably one of the reasons that I shouldn't have fucking released the episode because the study was completely confabulated, but symbolically, it's correct. So the fake study was a group of people are brought into a study area, and classically, the actual study began before the study began. As people were waiting in an office waiting room, a computer over the far side began slowly leaking smoke out. Just a small amount of smoke was unfurling from this particular computer. Beforehand, each cohort of people had had their attachment style assessed, and you had a relatively equal mix of anxious, avoidant, and secure. The argument that was put forward in the studies, on average, the anxiously attached people noticed the smoke before anybody else, but the avoidantly attached people were the first ones out of the door. Oh, interesting. And the securely attached people were the ones that were 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. Whether that's true or not, as a study, symbolically, I think it really gets to, huh, why would anybody want to be avoidantly or anxiously attached? Well, if you're And you're sort of constantly looking checking working out what's going on You're gonna pay attention to things that you become an early warning system You would make a fantastic detective, but probably a quite a bad SWAT officer who needs to be maybe a bit more decisive You know what? I mean? Yeah. Yeah, I think again going back to Randy Nessie's view on anxiety, right? So like he uses this example of a mouse who doesn't get anxious when there's cat urine around or something like that so like most if you're a Self-respecting mouse you should feel afraid if you get some cue that there's a cat around But then there also might be some advantage to being a bit more of a brave mouse, you know under certain context And so there again, you can retain a certain amount of variability in the genome for this variation and anxiety So yeah, I mean that's the thing about evolution is that yesterday is probably a lot like tomorrow but not necessarily and so there's always going to be a little bit of You know give in terms of what the right setting is and so that you're gonna see you're gonna see that it varies a fair bit Anxiety kind of the buzz word emotion of the last decade or so What surprised you in your research about anxiety? Well, I mean like everything else this turned out to be complicated I think so I don't know if John Hite is a friend of the show friend of the show Yeah, so he's obviously done some wonderful work on this as one thing about anxiety that strikes me about the modern moment is that social media has put us in something of You know like a fishbowl Because our actions are constantly being broadcast You know either by ourselves or by others and so if you're a social creature, which we humans are and you whatever Like the biggest threat for the most part for humans is our humans and what they think of us and so on and so there is a good reason to be more vigilant in a world in which you're constantly being observed because the Stiglitz about reputation exactly ranging reputation So who you know, who are you with and what am I doing? And how am I spending my time and what successes I've had? So in some sense, I mean, I don't know if the anxious generation Findings are gonna hold up. They look bro. They're in the middle good to me But they're in the middle of the quickest 180 360 547 like just the replication of that every What feels like month? I see something that proves it then disproves it bunks it then rebunks it and I'm like I I'm gonna wait for the cards to sort of fall fair but yeah Get get a little bit more Ancestral for me from an anxiousness perspective like what's happening proximately what's happening ultimately like what's what's going on? Yeah, so I think so anxiety is basically this 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? Questions we ask so it's leading me to strategies to help mitigate whatever that danger is or exploit the opportunity and so anxiety If it's set too high if you're constantly afraid about everything then 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? 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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 might happen What's the reason for not overshooting anxiety then? 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 produce you 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? 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 no it's almost never going to be the case I mean unless you're literally running from your life from a bear or something like that Then literally just forget everything else like 100% but everything in all other cases. There's always opportunity costs There's always something else you could be you could be doing and so that some point that additional anxiety is not as useful as something else Do you think it would have been more adaptive to have been more anxious in the past than now? I mean, I really am a little bit of a Pangolossian 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 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 a certain amount of background anxiety because again like I'm around 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 ha 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 attention because the story that we tell ourselves about our concerns and our anxieties and our fears and worries Almost always doesn't come to pass and maybe that would have been true in the past too But like they literally could have been a fucking famine 300 years ago that could have wiped you and your area of forget 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 and yet There might very well be this need to admit Huh, you know like living in a city kind of contributes to this feeling of overwhelm and uncertainty and vigilance and it's not really that nice for me and there's this tension between sort of what we think we should be able to feel and What we do feel and the fact that we've got this weird opulent luxurious Fucking velvet prison that we're in now compared with the horrible cave with the saber-toothed tigers that we would have had a few You know tens of thousands of years ago well, that's what I think the the evolution of you 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 And evolution saying oh you need to deter that guy from doing it again, but I'm never gonna see him again So, you know what? I just ignore that and the same thing with envy is like Evolution is telling me I got to keep up with everyone who I can detect in my world because that person has access to better Though, you know, they're gonna get the good stuff and they're gonna be the king and they're gonna be mates But that doesn't actually matter for me because you know what? 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 we're 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 art. What about being overstimulated? Yeah, and I think here's a good 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 right 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 or so there might be a little bit of a Conflict sensory mismatch. Yeah a little sensory mismatch. Yeah, which can be certainly Arbitrated very lovingly and good care and effectively but and with proper soundproofing and with her and and with separate rooms. Yeah 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 got to figure out what are the things that you like? What are things you don't like and then again? We have the luxury of manipulating our environments to accord with that. What about panic? Yeah panic is super interesting Again, there's another one which was an area where there's not a lot of research on this there's a 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, there's a fish out of water and it flops around randomly and then just by one random flop It gets back into the water and that fish escapes and I want to say this fish didn't have a plan It just did the one thing it could do when all was nearly lost Which was just move its muscles and random different ways you know, I Suspect that when people are facing panic the the measurement there is if I don't do something It's all over or it's going to be whatever I mean some massive amount of danger and oftentimes the only thing Left to do is to move to locomote to whatever if you're underwater to 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 route Psychology that sets in with all on the losing side. They say yes, we could beat a hasty retreat Orally back to our ships or wherever it is. This was um, I like this example I think it was a battle marathon where you know The you know the Greeks had an advantage and then the Persians had to beat a retreat But it didn't beat a hasty retreat that 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 gonna happen and I'm gonna do the only things I can do which often just is Random movements like the fish story. I started with mmm something That's maybe a little bit harder for people to understand is aesthetic pleasures. Why do we like things that look nice? Yeah That is hard. I mean first of all aesthetics is very complicated But there is this thing where we tend to find aesthetically Appealing 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 a little fitness. What do you think that the time these 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 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, so it's it looks very appealing like a ripe apple It directs 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't write so like some Fitness opportunities are easy to take it take take advantage than others So sort of like guiding your attention to it and then you know causing you to exploit it Do you think of aesthetic pleasures as distinct from sensory pleasures? It's really it's tough right to draw that distinction I think aesthetic pleasures the I'd say they tend to be more abstract. Mm-hmm, 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 good, right? This is like, somehow this is correlated with ancestral environments, reproductive success. So I should kind of attend to it and be attracted to it. What about people that like being scratched or having their hair played with? Like what's going on there? Yeah, grooming. So some of our relatives, of course, they groom all the time. And only some of that can be accounted for by picking little insects off or getting dirt off. My guess is, 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 to myself, these grooming- It's tens of thousands of people rubbing their head right now. Exactly. 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 insect removal or parasite extraction from the skin or the fur or whatever. And then in the modern, in humans, yeah, it turns into this. This is a positive indication of some kind of good social outcome. This episode is brought to you by WHOOP. 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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.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. Have you seen the data around the difference in pleasure from different speeds of being touched on your skin? Oh, I have not. Mark, can you try and chat GPT this for me? 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 is, 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 sensors 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. So you've got this vestige of perhaps the grooming, which has created some sort of boundary in which, and you all know, like if somebody goes really, really painfully slowly, like what the fuck is going on here? And if somebody was to go like this, the surprisingly consistent findings in the effective touch literature, pleasantness is 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 centimeters and fast movement of over 30 centimeters per second are generally rated as less present in practical terms. Three centimeters per second is really slow. Moving your hand about 12 inches would take 10 seconds. Holy shit. That's much closer to the slow caress than rubbing someone's arm. This appears partly related to tactile afferents, 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, well, what's the adaptive explanation for this? Well, I mean, I just want to point something out there. I love that sentence in there. The nature neuroscience paper found a striking correspondence between CT firing and subjective 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 does it measure? 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 model is because particularly at the low level, you can just see it. It's right there. It's right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This isn't you having some weird preference. Adaptive explanation, the leading adaptive explanation is that the system evolved less for detecting objects 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 has a ton of stuff around nervous system regulation. He taught me that one of the reasons that dogs and horses bond so well with humans is that the mothering frequency that they speak at to their young is the same frequency that we speak at to our young, which is why when you say, come on, here we are, let's go for a walk. You're in the same tonal range. You're in that same frequency, and that is why humans and horses and humans and dogs relate in that same sort of way. I did not know that. That's fascinating. Yes, there's all this work on infant-directed speech and animal-directed speech, right, when you're talking. And there's all these things which are similar. The intonation is similar. Yeah, the frequencies are similar. The intonation is similar. Even that kind of thing, like you use that for a dog, you'd also use it for a horse. That's fascinating, yeah. The cool thing about those guys, of course, is that the dogs have been artificially selected way more than the horses way more, and yet you still get this parallel between the species. Bingo. Yeah, polyvagal theory, dude. It works across species. That's super cool. What about spiciness, something that some people like, some people really fucking don't? Yeah, super interesting. 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, here's the thing about spiciness, which is a little bit weird. I like the analogy of a rollercoaster. I don't know about you, but I love being on a rollercoaster. I like rollercoasters too. Yeah, but are there some rollercoasters you won't go on? Are there some that I won't? That are just too magical. It's been a while since I've been to a theme park that's had one, but certainly in the past, yes. Yeah, so with rollercoasters, if it was just a train going like this, that's really boring. But if it's going like this, you'd be like, that's really fun. But then once you get to some point, you're like, I'm not getting on that. Spiciness is like this. We like spicy, a little bit spicy is good. Oh, this is really spicy. But then once we get past that point, we're like, oh, that's too spicy. It's not just not fun, it's painful. In the same way, that rollercoaster isn't just, it's terrifying. I'm not getting on that thing. So there's some drop-off point, right? Yes. And so spices probably are important for, they all going back to pathogens, they seem to have some role in suppressing pathogens, both within the nervous system and within the food preparation. And so there's this classic work, which I think has held up. You always have to wave with old psychology work, because you never know to your point. Replication crisis is going to come for us all eventually. It's coming for all of us. But there was this finding that places that were warmer and wetter, so they had more parasites, used more spices in their food, and that's controlling for the spices that were around. 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. Does that actually work? Yeah. Apparently. Apparently, yeah. Pepper is the big one. And it's not a coincidence that everywhere you look around, people are using peppers. And in places with a lot of pathogens, they use a lot of different peppers. Because the plants have to defend against pathogens too. So they have, 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. So these plants, they have these chemical defenses. We take their chemical defense, put it in our food. And then, so more is better. 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. So everyone knows about these stories where people take a ghost pepper and then they touch their eye and then they're blind or whatever. And there's other potential effects that spices can have. But it does look like it's interesting that there's this drop-off. So you want the most possible that you could sort of tolerate, but then- Without feeling it on the way out. Yeah. I always thought for a very long time that people who made the joke of, well, that's going to hurt when it comes out the other end. I'm like, dude, that's impossible. You've digestive tract, 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. Some stuff fun, but as soon as you get over a limit, I'm like, if I'm sweating, I'm a hot guy at the best of times. I don't want to be sweating when I'm eating. But anyway, this had managed to hack sweetness and spiciness and it had hidden the spiciness under the sweetness. And when I ended up going to the bathroom a day later, it felt like someone was holding a lighter under my ring piece. It was kind of hilarious. I was laughing on the toilet, like what the fuck is going on? I'm like, 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. Right. Yeah. And that pain is telling you there could be damage. So that's evolution's way of saying, yeah, don't do that again. Didn't account for how tasty it was though, Rob. What about fun and excitement? I think this is, I've had a lot of debates over the last couple of years about what fun is, 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? 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 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 important piece is your sort of training. So when I was a kid and I played soccer, that was some of the best fun I had when I was a kid. It's something about team sports. And I think in ancestral environments, practicing, coordinating with your group probably was training for violent activities, whether on hunting activity or warfare or whatever, but you're doing it in a context in which you can learn and you can learn safely. 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 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 and 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 complicated though. I mean, because some stuff is weird. I mean, back when I was at Penn, I had a graduate student. We were working on dancing for a while. Why is dancing fun? And I think there's some new work on this. I think Ed Hagen has a paper, but it's a little puzzling, right? People just sort of coordinate their movements with one another and there's music and there's some sort of rhythm and it doesn't seem like it's practicing for something or learning anything. I guess I'm learning something about the fact that 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 whatever this kind of stuff that just could happen in the real world. So I think a lot of it is training, learning and practicing. What do you make of the music is basically sexual signaling done on mass theory? Music is as mysterious as dancing. Yeah. So the production of music and here, Jeffrey Miller, I feel like everyone's going to be a friend of the show. 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 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, a musical, a total disaster. I can 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. 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 are losing their mind. Yeah, people lose their mind. 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 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 an industrial park and it sounds too loud or whatever it is. And the screams of the girls as they came out on stage was so loud that everyone's Apple Watches went off telling them that they were in a dangerous noise environment. Yeah, so there's a few things I like about that. I mean, I love the story, but two things, the measurement piece. So one, the Apple Watches are doing measurement, right? So in some sense, everything's always doing measuring all these things all the time, but the other piece is, yeah, you got to measure who a good mate is. And sometimes that dial goes off. the charts, right? I think you got to look at their accomplishments, their physical bodies, whatever else you know about them. So you need some sort of mate assessment system, which is again, Jeffrey Miller's talked about. And sometimes that dial just goes, and I think it's sort of like a supernormal stimulus. I think that's what's going on again in some of the whatever. Pornography is like this, right? So like in pornography, you get the supernormal stimulus. And sometimes it's not just one supernormal, it's like multiple. And then your evolved system is just like, that's crazy. 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 detraining their penis to be able to detect the level of pressure. I think he told me it was like X PSI is available in the vagina and 10 X, 30 X PSI is available in your hand. 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, straight up conditioning of this has meant that, yeah, some guys are having to, he literally has a protocol for detraining or retraining your penis for precisely that reason. Yeah, no, super fascinating. And again, it illustrates this idea that you gotta think about the measurement. What's the measurement? The measurement, it could have been, well, I'm with a person who looks like a human female, but it's like, no, it's like the pressure that's being exerted internally. And just the mismatch, I'm very worried about, like, they're going to build things that exert the right amount of pressure for the right amount of time. If they haven't already. Yeah. Supernormal Kegel stimuli. 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. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, women have already, they've, they've outstripped men with regards to this as sex toys for women. Like, you know, we talk about whatever it is, like the patron normal medical establishment, but it's the matron normal sex toy establishment. They really sort of speed run finding, finding a way to pleasure women. Right. If you go into, into the stores, there's a million pieces of equipment having to do with, you know, that's it. Referring to it as equipment is fucking brilliant. Yeah. Apparatus. It's right. It's the entire racks of all the different, you know, they, they have certain frequencies. They move, they vibrate, they twirl around. Shapes and they've got colors and textures. Like there's been some research clearly. Yep. Yeah. Catherine Simon, where are you? 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Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. You kind of mentioned that there's this, the mismatch thing. What do you think are some of the best examples of feelings that are functioning exactly as they're designed, but producing terrible outcomes in the modern world? Oh, I mean, well, I mean, hunger is obviously one of them. This is changing a little bit with modern technology, with the Zempik and the, you know, that line of, but clearly, you know, our hunger systems have evolved in a world to take advantage of food. And we just keep doing it. And I think, you know, we've seen the effects on the so-called obesity epidemic. I don't take a position on the moral weight of that, or though I just defer on the health stuff, but like that seems to be pretty bad. My favorite system, in the sense that it's my least favorite system is, speaking of appetites. So humans have an appetite for morally condemning other people. Like we just love sitting around and saying that that person, they're bad, bad, bad. People love that. Why? 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. First of all, you distract 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 think, you know, it's like, it's like the 30s when there was the revolution, you know, 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- Or at the very least be on the side of the non-persecuted. Exactly. So you always want to be on the side, the big side. And so we're evolved to figure out opportunities, particularly when other people are making more accusations and we just love jumping onto that. And in the modern world, particularly with social media, but of course, even in the old day, like with newspapers and then with television, but it's just been metastasized with social media. People that people just love indulging their appetite. I mean, if you look at, you know, are you supposed to say X, not Twitter, but and then blue, whatever it is. Blue sky. Yeah. I mean- 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 cockchair listening because he's a fan of and a friend of both of us. Hi, William. But he was on blue sky and we would have these conversations. And I'd be like, dude, every single time that you try and put anything that's evolutionarily adjacent on blue sky, you're getting pilloried. And then we have a conversation about it. And I'm like, man, you're just voluntarily trading your own sanity here. And then when I see him put stuff out on 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. Yeah. That illustrates the point, right? So everybody wants to be on the accusing side and like with these platforms, people can indulge. So I think of it as like, you know, our culture or whatever made a world in which we could indulge our appetite for food and fat and sugar and salt. I mean, and then we built a world in which you could indulge your appetite from rural attacks, moral condemnation. We indulge that. And I don't, yeah, I think to me, that's one of the most, I mean, 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 tax. And the thing about a tax is that moral attacks, and I stole this from my former graduate, Peter Shirley, probably not a friend of the show yet. Not yet. Yeah, not yet. 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, but they got the wrong guy. So it was, it was the Cornell seven, and they got the wrong person. So it was a different name. And so they served the guy papers. And so this guy got doxxed and then got all these death threats. But it wasn't even him to say nothing of whether, you know, what the actual facts are. 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. You know, my favorite one of these, Mark, can you search the video? Should be on YouTube. It's person who looks like Andy Ngo being incorrectly identified. So, Andy, I think he's still doing his thing. He was an investigative reporter. Yeah. Andy, dude. Fucking brilliant. What the fuck are you? Do you think that I'm Andy Ngo? Is that what you're thinking? You racist. Would you like to see my face? Sure. 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. Yeah. It's like you're doing it intentionally then. Just be proud that you're not. Andy, what's wrong? You see me like you're doing it on purpose. Super proud that I'm not Andy. But I'm really irritated that you stand here and put your middle fingers in my fucking face. You're a bunch of racist and you got to stop. Think about why you're here. Think about why you're here. If you're not Andy, then you wouldn't be antagonizing. You know exactly what you're doing. And you wouldn't be in this body. You know exactly. Fucking piece of shit. I don't think your argument has internal validity. Hey, guy that looks like Andy Ngo. Fuck you, Andy. For what? I'm just being Asian. But look at his defense too. Also a moral attack. Racism, right? That's a great thing. He's not even wrong about that. But notice that the response to this moral attack. Currency. Yeah, it's like I hear whatever. So again, I think that's why it's really a good way to think about it is that all of these attacks are like 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 that case, you just make his day shitty. Yeah, yeah. I said shitty? Oh, you can say. I mean, I've said. You said cuck chair. I did say a cuck couch technically outside. All right. What are you getting into sort of the social world? I think some of the more uniquely human emotions are some of the more complex ones. Romantic love. Family love. What's happening there? Family love, I don't think is unique to humans. I mean, to just come out and contradict you because like all organisms, you would expect that. Friendship bias. Yeah, well, they've got so like every organism has a I mean, for mammals, mothers and father, 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. Yeah, it's pretty comparable. But I mean, humans are weird in other respects. I mean, so obviously we're pretty monogamous ish or monogamous. And so there seems to be adaptations designed for monogamy, right? So there's like what Dorothy Tanoff called limerence. So there's 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. 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. I think penguins are together for life basically as well. Barring unfortunate incidents. Yeah. They're together until one of them dies of a cold, horrible death. Yeah, or a seal. Or a seal, which is a hungry, horrible death. Yeah. But I think for me, some of that stuff is on the human side, which is, I think, understudied again is, I mean, not a lot of organisms that have kind of friends like humans do. So, you know, the dolphins have some friends and it looks like there's chimpanzees who sort of affiliate more with some more than others. But humans, I mean, how much of our lives is dedicated to cultivating and enjoying our friendships, people who are not in a romantic relationship with, but we're our allies and support us in tough times and help us practice and do fun things. And that phenomenology, I think, is very powerful, right? I mean, some of the, you know, you think about the most powerful kinds of feelings that we have, I think, and in humans, some of those friendship emotions are very, very strong as well, designed to find out who our friends are, to keep track of who our friends are, to ensure that we retain those friendships. And then on the other side as well, the betrayal, perhaps the resentment, the enemy, frenemy, friends, enemy situation that you can go through. Yeah. A lot of friends can also be rivals and that could be specific. So they could be helpful in one domain and 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. What do you think hatred is? I think it's a design to cause you to try to get rid of, or at least minimize the effect of people who really want to have to harm you or have harmed you so that they don't do it again. So it's a deterrence psychology. It's kind of like social anger. It is like social anger. I mean, the thing about anger is it seems to me it's often very, it tends to be a bit local. Like I'm angry right now that you're whatever, you took my sunshine. But if you did something before, my hatred is like long protracted over a period of time. Anger that's cooled, but, but stayed at a pretty warm temperature and kept on going. Exactly. It's got saying, and 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 ship has sailed, right? You know, I, 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. Yeah. In modern environments, it's probably different, but. 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 old evolutionary tree would just be basically existing in familial pods. So it's just kinship done like on mass, right? Well, chimps have some non can group members in them, but some, not some nonhumans are basically just going to be, I mean, do you think that, does that mean that they have friends? I think non-kin group members, friends. Yeah, I think so. Like, so in, um, the research on, for example, a little coup d'etat and chimp communities, it looks like the people who are the people. Couple of number three, number four, and number five get together to fuck over number one. Exactly. And it sort of looks like in the lead up to that, they sort of look like they're building a friendship, right? Maybe they're grooming. Even if they're not relative. Yeah, they're exactly. So these are non-kin related or whatever. I mean, it's difficult. We don't always know the relatedness, um, in chimps, but the other one is dolphins. So dolphins will form, um, 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. Oh, they forcibly copulate. Yes. Dolphin friends are for that purpose. That's what they do. They get into gangs and then they, they do that. They're literally walking doing going around doing the like gang thing. Yeah, I want to be very clear I condemn this dolphin the dolphin behavior is no uncertain terms. 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 not what are friends? It's a function. It's a function. That's what it's for that Like they're not using it to 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 evolution analysis specialized. Yeah forces. You just say what exactly function are you talking about? Yeah, so human friends Allegiances alliances i'll protect you you protect me. Yep Um, I will share some food with you if I have more than I need you will therefore reciprocally altruistically give it back to me uh, 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 uh, Accusation that comes yeah, um 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 it's i'm always gonna win. So I guess that's part of it uh 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 That's that's a pretty good list. It is a great that's bad It's a fantastic list, but it means that you need like even the tool building thing Like I need to where where's the good sticks? Where are the good rocks? Have you got a the sharp thing that I can sharpen my unsharp thing with? Yeah social learning totally and I think For friendships all of those functions are part of it for me the thing that stands out most and again this is work with my former student peter shirley is that One thing that's I find interesting about human friendships and we have some research on this is that we order our friendships like you probably Could say who you're you won't say it out loud, but you know who your best friend is You know, you probably know who your second third best friends are you've got like a list and that's really helpful um If conflicts break out because then you know who's going to be on your side Right, your best friend's going to take your side no matter what against your third fourth and so on And so, um, 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 but the thing about human friends is that Knowing where I sit in their friendship queue like how close I am to them Tells me am I going to be able to count on them for support when conflicts emerge? So I think the alliance piece is the most important part of human friendship, but it's complicated He's used the word social learning there What do you make of some of the explanations around emotions that they're socially constructed rather than evolved? I guess what I would say is when I look at the emotions They just look so obvious to me. They look so obviously like evolved adaptations, right? So they to your point about their design, I mean you look at all these feelings They look excruciatingly well designed to execute their functions Many of them have all the hallmarks of adaptations. You see them cross-culturally you see them 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 in the in the in the classics not to mention the ancients you see in the bible and you see another thing 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 does? Well, it causes you to strive a little bit harder so that you can get whatever it is that they've got So they have all and they look again. They're excruciatingly well designed jealousy. I mean here we are in austin david What's the difference between envy and jealousy? so I I think um jealousy is specifically designed around Threat to a relationship either a friendship relationship or a romantic relationship So it's designed to detect the threat and then take steps to undermine that threat So if it's an amazing 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, 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 got a counter right envy is like a little bit more. Okay opportunity. Okay, this guy's doing better Um, maybe it's a threat but more more importantly I can learn something maybe about that person. How do they get? How do they build their following I guess envy in that way is at least somewhat functional whereas jealousy again, it's interesting, right? I 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 where we feel a lot of shame around our jealousy? What do you think's going on there? I mean, it's complicated my senses though Jealousy is interesting like in some sense Like suppose I did manage to persuade other people that jealousy was a bad feeling In some sense i'm causing them to drop their defenses I mean as long as I keep my jealousy and I maintain, you know, whatever like I actually think that might be true Is like some of this more, you know that jealousy moralizing it the zero-sum view of jealousy 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 you've taken your eye off the ball Yeah, so so I think in some cases some of these cult whatever are like causing other being 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 Take more off. Yeah, beautiful. You're beautiful as you are. You don't need to diet. Yeah, no, no And so you're you're sort of undermining their defenses a little bit And so I think the cultural dialogue gotta be careful about it, right? Like it is unpleasant, but like a lot of this stuff is strategic. You're among friends here. It's fine Yeah, okay. I'm saying like it's like a little bit but it's very unflattering and I think that one of the problems of taking a non-evolutionary view Is that analysis looks a lot like justification? If you don't have the evolutionary perspective when we're talking about stuff like this if you have the evolutionary perspective You can almost say okay Um, this is something that exists and it's something that I feel and this is why Without saying and that's good, but the naturalistic fallacy basically doesn't have as much place to exist It does this is one of the accusations that gets levied at an 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? 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 Results in you just being undereducated about why the landscape is what it is. Oh, totally I first of all, I agree with analysis like I think the the 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 you can't study something without condemning it and if it's condemnable Then you shouldn't be studying it exactly and so you see this in the context of the touchy issues of our time mostly to do with sex and race those are the two big ones and that are sort of third rails and so people back off from studying them because as soon as you start studying on your view does Oh, well, if you're explaining it, then you're condoning. I find that i've always found that argument mystify. Am I explaining it? You're condoning it. That's so lovely I just don't understand that and I think that The other piece is that if you are serious about trying to stop something that you think is bad Like if that's 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 people's motive to do x y or z um, then You might actually be able to fix it 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 want to they just want to exert their power over another person Then you know as opposed to they just want the valuable thing You might yeah, I don't know you you might not think to lock up your valuable things anymore You might want to say well, let's make that that let's make that seem less powerful somehow, whatever that would look like i'm, just saying the explanation tells you what the what you're going to do to stop it and and I 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. Yeah. I mean look it does sound in some ways like a Excusing of what's going on and 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 pass in order to happen? No, that's obviously not the case Jimmy carl's got this line about saying that something is too sensitive of a topic to joke about is like saying this is a disease That's too serious to treat And I think you know the more callous or Morally repugnant the behavior the more that we should be looking at it. It's like look 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. No, you know is able to Everyone's able to take a beat rather than being at the mercy of these things. Yeah. No, I mean I completely agree. I I think um, it's it's an unfortunate consequence of the car moment and I think this goes back to the point about How this appetite people have for moral condemnation and moral attacks is that um 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. 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 of I think to some extent undermine research that could help us understand Humans our motives and so on which ultimately would have to be helpful I think for organizing ourselves and making the world a better place going back to the 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 uh constructing a very Believable but largely confabulated narrative in the present to explain something from the past We have no way of judging whether or not this is true. What do you make of that argument? I'll say a few things. I mean so for me 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 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 are reading can look at the evidence that I marshal for each of the different fields and just go to the particular field and look at The citations look at the 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 the matter is that every hypothesis is a story and the the crucial piece that I think is often Mess is that my hypothesis 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 Oh, yeah, that's it that the eye is good for seeing psychological adaptations are the same sort of thing like hunger I mean look, it's got some measurement system. It makes it good at its job, which is figuring out Do I need calories? Is my stomach full? Has it been a long time since my meal how much blood is and whatever and so the evidence of design is what we use as evidence for um supporting a particular proposal hypothesis no different from what anyone else says the only difference in the evolutionary approach is that we say Can we use what's known about human's 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 want to diss anyone So whatever but I but I used a theory and I used that theory to develop a plausible Evolution evolved hypothesis and then I looked at the data to see if they support that particular proposal So I I confess, you know, i've heard this story since you know 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 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 time, they end up being right. It's fascinating to me that in a world of replication crises and the social science is 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 going to point the finger, I understand that if you do the analysis is justification thing, if you have this anti-blank slatist approach, it can make you feel a little uncomfortable, especially if you've got a worldview that suggests inequality is something that we need to get rid of. I think everybody wants to try and have an equal society. Wouldn't that be lovely? But it sort of reminds you that shit isn't fair and that the world is not infinitely malleable, that the right social policies can right all wrongs and that you can flatten the playing landscape for everybody simply through the correct interventions. There is going to be mean, nasty people. Some people out there are going to misbehave regardless of what you try to do with rehabilitation or schooling or whatever, because we have pretty ancient motives that you can't re-pattern with the correct, scare them straight intervention or whatever. Yeah, totally. I think the question is always compared to what, right? So for evolutionary psychology, I think your point is really well made. When I was in grad school, 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. They did a lot of stuff on stereotype threat. They did a lot of stuff on the implicit association task, all this implicit racism. They were sitting there and telling us that we weren't doing science because we are evolutionary people. Then here we are, 25, 30 years later, and that stuff has completely fallen apart. At the time, to ourselves, not to them, we'd say, well, at least we're not just doing advocacy, but with some veneer of science, which is what they were really doing, because that was also driven by the moralistic stuff, the stereotype stuff. This is good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, stereotypes, that's bad, whatever. Then here we are 30 years later, and I could have told them how it was going to come out. It's like, well, my work on race, which was just about, can you provide place, cases in which people don't notice one another's race, that work has held up pretty well, I'm pretty proud. Who was your grad supervisor? It was Lita Cosby and the late John Tooby, where I was. Fuck. Yeah. I was so lucky. It's the Beatles of grad supervisors. Yeah, I met John at HBES 2023, I think, in Palm Springs. I was horribly underqualified and was part of a symposium. I think I was the only guy at the symposium. That was cool. I got up and I got to talk in front of all of you guys and a ton of people that I didn't know. Then John came up, and it felt a little bit like meeting the Queen, I guess, which meeting us is not too dissimilar. He's had some really nice things to say. I've loved the show. I really appreciate you being a platform for evolutionary psychology. I think that you've done some great work. It's a shame that you didn't get to do a degree in it and a few other things. The fact that he's passed is a real shame because he would have been a friend of the show. He can be a friend of me if not a friend of the show. He was a wonderful man. I consider him to be a genius. I would say, for me, the comparison was like speaking of the Oracle of Delphi. You would come to him with a question and then something you'd be thinking about. You'd take a second to think about it, and then he would just, in his John Tooby sort of way, explain it. That was my Tooby impression, with all due respect. Then he would give you this answer. You're like, ah, man, he nailed it. He's Master Yoda. He really was Master Yoda. Empathy. Tell me about empathy. Kind of interesting. Yeah, super interesting. It certainly got a lot written about it. Paul Bloom has done some nice work on it against empathy. I'm going to have to find out who an enemy of the show is. Oh, I've got enough. They'll be in the comments. We'll see them in the comments. 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. If they're an ally and they're feeling sad— It's like theory of mind type stuff. It's a little bit of theory of mind, but it's not just their mind. I think of it as I'm measuring what you're trying to measure. It is a little bit of a meta thing. If you're sad, I'm trying to measure how sad are you and how sad are you while you're trying to figure out how bad things are. That can help me in both directions. I think this is one thing that Paul has identified. One thing that's nice about empathy is that if you're sad, then I can comfort you and that's good for me because you're my friend and I can make you feel better and maybe help you think about how to feel better. But if you're my enemy and I have a certain amount of empathy, that is, I know what you're feeling, I can make you feel worse. This is why torture is so effective. We know what's going to hurt, both mental and physical. If I know that you are, let's go back to jealousy of the jealous sort and I say, well, your girlfriend or partner or whatever it is—Cindy or John or whatever it is, no judgment—I saw them with another person, then I can make you feel bad because I know that that's going to hit your own measurement system. Empathy is a pretty useful thing because it helps us figure out both how to help and hurt others. Mostly, we think about it in the sense of helping because empathy usually leads to care. Pro-social. 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? I like to think about the question sometimes, what is the best possible thing that could happen to me in my day? One of the things that I think about is I'm walking along a stream and I happen to be carrying a life preserver and Elon Musk is drowning. At relatively minimal cost, I can send in the life preserver and then he's saving his life. The reason I was able to—because I know that drowning is bad and I sort of have that whatever psychology. It is good investment, but think about other cases that we don't invest. In Philly, going back to Philly, the fact is people go by people who are currently experiencing homelessness, as they say these days, and they don't. It's the people of color of the unhoused. People experiencing being unhoused. People experiencing no roof over their head. Right. There's a person in need, but you don't help them. Why? I think the psychology is saying, well, they're unlikely to help me back either because they're never going to be able to or because I'm not going to help them enough to get everyone. Oh, they're so far off the bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fascinating. The stuff we saw on caressing, there's a U-shaped function. There's optimal caressing in 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. Oh, that's great. So you've got this U-shaped thing. Banker's paradox. Yeah, that's lovely. Yeah. What about gratitude? Yeah, so first of all, really should have more of in our lives and I want to say thank you for having me on the show. Thank you for being here. I don't want to do nothing else. 11.37 a.m., I don't want to be anywhere else other than talking bullshit with you. That's it. That's such a great conversation. I don't want to be anywhere else. Yeah. So thank you for that. So I do—and I think, you know, going back to the point that humans are social, when people do nice things for you, which is usually the antecedent of granted, you want to signal, okay, I acknowledge that and this is going to increase the extent to which I am potentially going to deliver benefits to you down the road too. Because the person who's giving you benefits, it's good—one of the things they're probably going to get out of it. I mean, if we're friends and I help you, then that's good for me because then you're better off and whatever. But another thing is there's going to be potential help down the line. So gratitude, you want to make sure you signal, look, I recognize that A, you've just helped me and B, more importantly, you generally—you're saying, I know that you go around the world thinking that I'm someone who you want to help, not someone you want to hurt or just ignore. And so you're reinforcing the cycle of reciprocal benefits and potentially alliance. And 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 because he didn't acknowledge that I delivered this benefit to him. Right? So you're sort of upping the psychological little upkeep. Did he even know that I did it? Did he even notice that I helped him in this way? Yeah. 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 my housemate, for instance, like he might have—he might leave something out or like he leaves his hoodies around. And I'm like, I'll tend to like fold the hoodie and just put it on the desk personally because I like the environment to be tidy, but also because I'm like, huh, like if he puts it on and it's usually a modern wisdom hoodie, like if that looks a bit shitty, it's not going to be cool for him and it's bad rep for the brand. But because he pays attention, he notices. So there is this sort of balance between how much 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. I did this little thing. Isn't that cute? It's great. You do some grand gesture. Obviously, you organize a surprise for your friend. For instance, my business partner in Nutonic, 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. 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. We did it at the appropriate time before. He's got four months to owe us before actually having to cash in the favor, so to speak. But I think what's really cool when it comes to gratitude is, oh, this person came around to my house for dinner and they know that I like this particular flavor of soft drink. And I got just one can for them in advance. Oh, isn't that cool? And I think that the small elements like that, continuing to lower your threshold for what you believe is worthy of celebration and gratitude, I think that is something that everyone can do. And one of the pieces of advice that I get asked for a lot at the live shows is, I don't feel my successes emotionally, even though I achieve them quantifiably or objectively. What do you think I should do to try and bring more of this in? I'm like, look, gratitude is great, but it's kind of hard to do. But what you can do is celebrate your friends when they achieve basically anything, no matter how small it is, is worthy of an achievement. Some balloons, a cake, a cookie, a cuddle, a fucking dinner, a big party or whatever. One of my friends at the start of this year had his first album launch, and I was like, I'm going to organize an album launch for you. Isn't this great? And it's actually kind of a vicious reciprocal gratitude practice, because if I make it plain that I'm prepared to celebrate you for something small, we're horrible at celebrating ourselves, but we're great at celebrating others. So even if we can't do it for ourselves, if we do it for others, they might start doing it for us. And you end up with this, huh, yeah, I did complete that tour or write that book or publish that thing or whatever, 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's important, but it's kind of hard to do for ourselves, but it's easy to do for other people. And if you pay attention, you have small things, you can create this positive feedback loop, a boom loop rather than a doom loop of, I'm going to do more for other people. That's one of the ways that tactically I've tried to put some of this stuff into practice. Yeah, totally. And I think this is an area where I'm typically pretty critical of clinical psychology, which I'm not sure how much it's done for us. But this I seem to have gotten right, which is that adding gratitude to your life really does at least my read of this literature, holding aside, replicate, whatever. It seems like this does make people happier, more content, calmer. And probably, I mean, so evolution's sitting there, and it is rewarding you for, like, we wouldn't feel the warm glow of gratitude if it wasn't doing something for us. And I think to your point, yeah, you got to figure out the right amount. But there's something really deep in there about relationships, which is figuring out, and this goes back to empathy, 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, she just loves having flowers in the kitchen, like, where she can see them. Dude, chicks love flowers. They love flowers. They, chicks, I'm yet to meet a woman that doesn't have a day made by a nice flower delivery. And the sort of, like, points that I get for remembering to refresh the flowers, and again, I know I don't do it enough. So the other thing I just want to mention on that front is that I think psychologists have underappreciated how much work economists have already done. So they, 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 signal to that other person, hey, I've just upped your little, like, goodwill account. So they literally talked about it as how much goodwill do I have for you because of the things you did for me. And I just want to say, I think there's lots of, like, work in economics, which could be mine for some of the interesting social stuff. And it's sort of an underexploited resource. I think economics has got bad branding, because when people think economics, they think about numbers and the way that the fiscal policy should work. But behavioral economics is one of the most robust and fascinating. Russ Roberts. Is a fucking animal like his entire sort of thesis around like while I think it's called wild decisions Was that the book big decisions something like that? Good friend of the show. He's fucking great. Like he's absolutely fantastic. And um, yeah that I Completely agree. So I guess this plays into trust and distrust that I'm gonna guess trust is Prediction of how much I can rely on someone in distrust is the opposite exactly It's funny you you pair those two because back when I was with Vernon Smith who you know It 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 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 in trade right if if I trust that you're gonna give me your whatever Car when I give you this check today, you're gonna be the car tomorrow then we can have whatever but of course there There's you always risk exposing yourself to being taken advantage of to losing and so on. So you need to have It's a very it's tricky right and people make these mistakes all the time they have too much trust when they shouldn't and not enough when they should and Those and depending on the details the stakes can be very big right? Yeah, I think I've been kind of fascinated by advice hyper responders, so people that take popular or commonly held Wisdom tactical suggestions to heart and It doesn't distribute the problem with advice is that it doesn't distribute evenly the people who already have the predisposition Tend to take it to heart while the ones that really need to hear it probably blow past it unchanged and It's kind of interesting when it comes to the trust thing because you can see many situations where the modern world would say well look You've got the law. You've got police. There's a legal system. There's mediums of exchange You've got lots of lots of reasons But on the other side you've got way more mobility that 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 uh, there's the stakes have been both lowered and raised at the same time. Oh totally I think there's a 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 Are you you know say that on a podcast? Yeah, you do on a podcast or something and then they would ever sell that to TMZ or whoever would be interested Well, the courts they're gonna say You know, they haven't they don't care like gonna prosecute you for breaking my trust. 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. 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 and we understand that there is a limit to trust Therefore we have to enact trust We have to encase it in law in order for you to feel that you can open up fully exactly and that's what I mean I think there's 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 the clinical psychology, but 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 gonna get the disclosure the right so the antecedent of that was the religious context, right? So it's not a coincidence that those confessionals were private, right? That is on the corner over there and no one else can you don't do it on the pulpit exact the entire congregation Yeah, so that's sort of held and but and and then of course, there's the additional thing which is yeah It's not just on pain of whatever prosecutions pain of you know, hellfire or whatever. You can't disclose whatever happened You need some kind of cultural hellfire a reliable enforcer rely on. Yeah. Yeah Well, you've mentioned a couple of times clinical psychology, what's your perspective on that what's your opinion I Think clinical psychology has probably helped a lot of people I should say in this context I've been heavily influenced by my relationship with Josh's latkes future friend of the pod. He works with me on on living fossils He's a clinician who's become by the way, everyone needs to go and subscribe to living fossils on sub stack I'm a subscriber and it absolutely rules. 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 pan I saw clinical psychology among my colleagues Some of them were clinicians, but he's been in the clinic and he was recently 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 could tell Ain't none of them better than the others I mean CBT kind of behavioral therapies seems to be the front-runner right now and then he says look it looks to me and you know that the 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 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? 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 yeah, I'm there as well. Okay depression talking about Psychology and interventions like that. We've talked about anxiety What's interesting about depression? Yeah Again disclaimer friends horrible And so this is going to be an explanation for it that might not be right and in no ways Should minimizes the condition. This is another one where I will self-disclose and say I can say from first-hand experience. There's almost nothing That's almost nothing. That's worse than genuine depression I mean, it's it's hard for someone hasn't expressed a little bit like what you were saying with the incest case Like, you know, I remember when I was depressed and people said well, I'll just feel happier. Yeah, okay like It's very unpleasant diabetic. Why don't you just produce more? Yes more insulin, please? Whatever so a lot of this goes back to Ed Hagen's work friend of the pod friend of the pod 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 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. And so one Proposal that people have made is that it's basically saying I'm gonna do the things that Kind of look like I might tell 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 in case of postpartum depression. When do you suddenly need much more support? Well now you've got another organism who you have to care for right? There's no one else who so the burden is now increased on you Which means hey, I really could do with some fucking help here. I'm in need and so what about the behavior of depression, okay? I understand if you get to the you know, the the end the Yeah 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? Yeah, they're making themselves small because 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 gonna see people as much Well, how are you gonna get the attention of people if you don't see people so much? So I first of all, I don't know But my withdrawal is basically saying I'm not gonna play your reindeer games and you need me to you know You need the fourth for monopoly. You need the second for chess The tenth to go hunt that peccary over there or whatever it is. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, so like I'm not just with yeah so I take your point about Exactly, you know the functionally socially might be quite bad. But like from a utility perspective you're actually taking yourself out It's a but hey, where's Rob? Yeah, Rob. He's over there. Why is Rob not one? Hey, we need to Rob Come on, you need to come and play. Yeah, we can't play pickleball I'm gonna have three people I 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 of gaming out the way the podcast whatever it is And I'm not gonna be back until you pony up and you you know, you do whatever it is that I need What about the reduction in energy? Being a little bit more sort of low energy and and why why feel so bad? Why does it need to feel? So what's it motivating? I mean, I think that last piece is so interesting Feel so bad that my sis 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 worlds 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 and under those circumstances, but it's got to be it Just it's dumb. 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 saying yeah, I'm really gonna withdraw I'm literally not motivated to play pickleball with you. I don't want to do that. That's not my thing right now so the feeling of the badness is part of the motivational system causing the withdrawal which is causing the Imposition of costs on other people. I don't know that Obviously, no one knows that for sure. But that that sort of would be my guess Is there something around the conservation of energy? I don't know if I'm going to even be able to get enough calories to be able to move forward Therefore I should reduce my expenditure I don't know if it's caloric again my sense is that there's other pieces to withdraw that I think are interesting which is that 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 to be 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? You write that he has about your work you know one cares about you you're like you're at 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, he the the most common thing that John ever said to me was, you know, Rob you could be replaced Wait, so I mean that's one charitable. 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 public publications And if you are it's like one see 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 and so when you're withdrawn and low energy and so on Yeah, you're not doing pickleball, but you can Introspect you can think is this the way I want to go? So maybe there's a little bit of that going on interesting Okay, so we've talked anger jealousy envy. What about contempt? Yeah, good one contempt so interesting I use this analogy about Not that I play a lot of video games because that's obviously not very appealing 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's 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. 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 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 to usually There's some communicative thing which is to say, you know You soccer they suck Which is maybe signaling? Yeah, I recognize that that particular individual is beneath my contempt or whatever and I think this is important for a social creature Look, we have we do have limited slots just like limited inventories and video games We can only affiliate with so many people during the day. And so contempt is basically guiding us away from that and saying yeah This is not an individual with whom you want to associate and then resentment. Is that similar to contempt? I think resentment is more with respect 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. Okay, so it's about fairness There's a lot of fairness in there so contempt is low status Whereas, you know, yeah, I would I would say Resentment is much more associated with this sort of violation of an exchange principle and What is the behavior and what is the behavior trying to motivate and the other person? 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 again, I don't know is it seems like most people when they're experiencing what they do is they want to talk about it I'm 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 unjust injustice Well, then maybe I can get the promotion. Mm-hmm. How about embarrassment? Another good one and also tough. I mean it seems to be something like So what causes people to be embarrassed it's like it's usually they violated some social norm right here fly is down or Burped at a wedding or I don't know pick your favorite embarrassing things watch Seinfeld of 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 emotion So embarrassment has this interesting flushy bit to it, which is involuntary So my guess doing yeah, good question. So what is it measuring? So embarrassment seems to be measuring something like did I just violate some social norm? Because I think that usually is what it is there's other cases, right? So sometimes it's a little bit different from that So like the group project is done and I only did a bit of it, but I get all the credit I'm like sort of embarrassed about that. It's kind of like violating a norm. Yep. Yeah. 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 where you want it your intention was to obey it, but it was an accident. Oh my god I'm so sorry. I how could I? Why 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 see but with the blushings 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 gonna have my fly up. I'm not gonna burp or whatever This was a one-off thing don't have to worry and here's the signal Definitely. I knew it and I and I recognized it as a as a mistake Is it to take embarrassment has to be as well due to perceived loss of social status? I think that's what happened. So it's like if you if you're seen as a non norm Follower, you're definitely reliable. You're unreliable. You're like, well, yeah, this guy doesn't even follow the rules I mean just I don't know I see right for some reason see by the time and I went the first time I went to Japan, you know when you've tried you don't know what the norms are and in particularly or stranger strange land and you know So I'm eating in a subway or something like that Which of course and you know, I kind of noticed people were looking but of course you're you there's other reasons people be late And then later on you really oh, I shouldn't have been doing that was wrong. I did not it's interesting. I wonder whether I had an interesting Realization I wonder whether people who Do something that would be embarrassing that you trip over tripping over 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 might even be funny. 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, right? Totally. Yeah I mean exactly and you can see this because if you walk to a glass wall when you're alone You just bounce off and you're like, I'm not saying right But the first thing you do if you are is like I'm fine, you know, and then you make sure the first date Oh my gosh. Yeah. Well, there's not gonna be a second at that. I uh, it's true depends how much you played off I was in Bali maybe ten years ago and Was driving a 50 cent a day moped through the streets of Canggu and I was there with two Australian traveler guys and we were going to a beach club and Truck pulled out in front of me 20 yards away slammed on the brakes and classic dog shit Scooter that I was renting from the hotel that I was staying in back brake didn't work front brake did work. So you and Tommy the Back tire came out from underneath me and I was in swim shorts and a vest and I came off Nothing was broken but I lost a lot of skin on the left-hand side of my body on Balinese Road the Balinese Road won the fight and The first sensation that I had wasn't am I okay the bikes on the floor? I'm in the middle of a road in Bali half of the left-hand side of my body is Currently embedded in the tarmac a couple of yards behind me. It was oh, no, I'm okay. I must be Fine straight away. What's the I'm fine reflect? Yeah, I think that is super interesting. I don't that one is puzzling I don't know. Yeah, I think there's something positive about that. I think part of it is something like I recognize. I just made a mistake It's also interesting sometimes people say I meant to do that, right? That's almost like a comedy line is what I meant to do that And there's some again you're sort of saying look I understand the proper way that one is supposed to operate Although in your case, it sounds like there's equipment failure, but you're sort of signaling I get The the entire tableau what happened it was, you know, I I know how to operate these things. I'm a time a There was I didn't do it because I did blame it on me Yeah, but a lot of the time people make a fucking bike the bike, you know, 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 What if only I get a better bike if I don't ride such a stupid bike in future or I'm okay. I'm okay Yeah, I'm aware that this thing has happened I'm aware that this is ridiculous, okay, so that's embarrassment and then taking it up a notch What about shame and guilt? Yeah, super interesting again moral emotions 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 or so people are saying they 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 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 Rubble you have to grovel. You have to say something like I knew the norm. I intentionally violated it But in 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 experience shame like so if they're the victim of a certain kind of assault, you know People experience shame. What do you think's going in there? Yeah, it's sort of interesting. I I Think it's an acknowledgment 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. 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 yeah, you're acknowledging the sort of there's been a switch in the hierarchy the rules the whatever the values and Sorry, people might people might judge me. Otherwise as well. Yeah, in some cases it would be worse not to acknowledge it, right? And also you've got to sort of start thinking about what my life is now that the this this change has occurred I wonder if some of it is people front-running the their Estimated opinions of Others about themselves to total 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 Shameful and they sort of walk into the room. Yeah, and that's sort of full of beans as we would say, okay that they would they might be Seen as unselfaware full of themselves not sufficiently What do you say? like Giving up what they should in order to be readmitted into normal social fabric totally and and of this signal that they're gonna 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 Yes, right. So I mean I just was talking to I think was Robin Hanson about the show About You know survivors of not to darken things after whatever but like because there you also feel you see Sometimes it's guilt and sometimes it looks more like shame but most I think it's guilt and again those are people who they've done nothing all they did was happen not to be the whatever I've survived in some horrible thing and It's again. It's super interesting because they haven't intentionally violated the norm. They have intensely 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 does it measure? Well, it's measuring not. What did I do? It's measuring what do other people think has happened or how do other people now value me and that gives rise to the strength of The feeling what's interesting about the mind and attention because I think when people think about feelings They're kind of thinking about the sweet 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 And what's what's interesting now? I I mean I find this fascinating so I you know sort of early in my career is 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 you have a job which causes you to do the same thing over and over Or you're trying to multiply three-digit numbers in your anything, you know You can mental effort and and I it's so interesting. I think it is a not obvious question They why does it feel like anything? Why does that feel like something and particularly? Why does it feel negative to your point about the bad feelings? and so I think that's an interesting one and my sort of response to that which might not be right is Again, the opportunity cost point which is that when you're doing something effortful You're using these really fancy parts of your mind that are good at you know Like you working memory or have you and working memory can be doing lots of different things And could be you know, you're 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 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 yeah, 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 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 is one of these interesting cases where the mind is sort of Monitoring what we're doing with our own minds. I can't find that cool. It's fascinating. What uh Which feeling did you understand most differently from pre and post research? Do you think oh, that's a tough one Well, I mean I hadn't thought about a lot of these feelings before me some of the little ones like itchiness I never really thought about Why we itch and then do there's this whole literature on bugs crawling on you and they stimulate your reference in exactly the right way And then you're like, oh, there's a bug on there. I thought was pretty pretty cool I mean contempt I hadn't really thought about either for for a long time We just discussed and I didn't really know where that Came from. I mean one feeling that is I think wildly understudied But I got to read a little bit more about having I did a little bit of work on that But is going back to jealousy but of friends So like this thing 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. I think they get jealous I might be losing it. I or at least I might be demoted like I might be demoted in the position number one But yeah, I might be position. I love them. I'm like two or three and I remember feeling that as a kid Yeah, I remember as a kid too like I was you would even bar you say I'll be best friend and didn't really mean it 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, right? Yeah, because you're really building those alliances I think part of it also is this you don't when your kid you you're a little bit less strategic You don't think you're just not inhibited my friend. 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 up, 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 have thought that the urge to breathe that sensation was to do with how much oxygen is still dissolved in your blood not enough oxygen you breathe heavy it turns out as 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 they're you know their carbon dioxide is not in increasing in the in the way it would if they were in 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're measuring? There's all sorts of fun and everything's fascinating. It's all cool. Which human feeling did you find that was the hardest to explain? Evolutionarily, well, there's some way you're like what the fuck is the adaptive reason for the one that was perhaps more weak or less strong 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. They didn't have a they didn't have a nucleus. I'm like wait, you don't mean so I just called that Monera and there's a lot of stuff in there that some of those are pretty frickin Weird. I mean deja vu I think is pretty weird like the sense that you you know that you've seen something before they definitely haven't I imagine that's a some sort of side effect. But that one's like That's pretty strange. I I think I think there's other like nostalgias and these other temporal ones he's having to do with 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 are state remain mysterious and there's not you know a lot of cases where there's not much consensus which one do you think causes the most havoc in modern life 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 think the other the second candidate would be the one I mentioned early being judgy they're both condemnation yeah they're both pretty bad but I mean the thing about envy is that man again being exposed to just all the stuff in the world if the unpleasant feelings that have I mean judginess more condemnation that's bad too for all the reasons we discussed I mean those are those are two pretty bad ones right what which emotion do you think society would collapse the fastest without oh interesting 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 you know history 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 enforcement is way more bottom-up than it is yeah exactly you don't need the courts and stuff like that because people right they don't have you ever been on the phone to a friend in Japan when they've been traveling on the subway it's hilarious so I have a friend that I'd call from time to time and we would be talking and he would say okay it's 30 seconds until the tube gets here and I would know that he would need to be completely silent from the second that he walks on even if he's got headphones he couldn't whisper so the conversation he'd be like it's gonna be about seven and a half minute and obviously would be clinically precise as well because it's fucking Japan right and he would be replying to me on whatsapp as I was talking to him what do you mean by that oh right okay so what I did but and I'm like monologuing away as I'm getting text responses to my verbal output it's kind of interesting yeah no it's super just in case and I think illustrates the point which is that like this this the trust is a fulcrum I mean to look at societies that don't have trust in them and you know you that suppresses all kinds of you know coordination and mutually transaction all transactions resting point around obviously I'm going back to the UK in a couple of weeks and one of the big talking points there at the moment is immigration mass immigration that seems to be happening and it's kind of interesting that a lot of the discussion is around trust actually I think we get to the root of it it's one group of people saying I'm concerned that if we let people in that are not from this culture that don't adhere to our norms I am NOT going to be able to trust that the typical levels of safety and community that I'm used to will continue and another group is saying actually the trust and distrust that you have around this group is unfounded and you don't need to be that concerned because the level of cultural homogeneity or similarity should not be indicative of how much trust you have of this so it really does come down to a discussion around trust and that is I mean one of the keystone topics of the last US election it's certainly the flashpoint that's happening in the UK at the moment so yeah trust trusts fundamental I think it's fundamental I mean as you say I mean if all of a sudden people lost that I do think that yeah I think it societies climbing and you can see it because when they do and so I to your point about yeah it's really just a question to what extent people abide by the norms when they come to and in some cases they do right we have people assimilate and they adopt norms than in other cases they don't but the way that society's work turn completely extremely on the whether or not people are following the local norms because it's hard to coordinate and so yeah if you have this norm that says you know you should comply with the appropriate government regulations idea 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 fool if you don't well then you get a very different set of outcomes I'm not saying what's happening in this country or Britain I'm just saying if you run the thought experiment it doesn't matter about whether it is happening it's whether or not people think it will happen 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 were doing both of those situations are your interpretations of where you are versus where you think you should be a way you think you are versus where you think you should be and neither of those are necessarily actually related to reality yeah all that much 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 is that they're comparing themselves they think it's unfavorable because of their beliefs not because 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 bear in that thank you John to be 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 well what the fuck 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 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 we'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 you're bad for me or good for the people around me bad for people around me so I think there's a certain amount of yeah you just gotta get comfortable the fact that you're gonna feel the feelings whether you want to or not I mean envy is gonna happen it's just a guy 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 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 so well okay so I can think about envy's trying to get me to whatever but I already am so that's fine so I think that's sort of the the thing is to come just to come to terms with yeah I'm just gonna feel those feel I don't think you can be the Buddha and have no experience of whatever it was that the but maybe you can I can't then you have no lust in your heart and have no envy in your soul I think those are just things that Darwin gave us and that's it I think you're allowed to feel the way that you do is a lovely synopsis I send it to my friends an awful lot I sent 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 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 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 meditators practice of I'm sitting down there meditating and then I notice that my mind is wandered because I'm thinking about something to do with work and then I get frustrated at the fact that my mind is 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 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 at this thing still arises and I really pretty it's not your time right now it's that you've a welcome participant at the party but you need to you know it's not quite right and then look at that bit of me that bit of me that wants to do things well I'm so glad I have that part of me that wants to do things that wants to try that wants to be successful look at how much you're just like a 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 he's cleaning stuff and he gets stuck in the 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 I do come here like I really appreciate your trying so hard you want me to do you want me to be good at meditating you want me to have a better quality of life and so on and so forth like come here wouldn't that be lovely and like bring it in bring it to myself and I like that I like that idea I think it's really really cool and when you think about I have these emotions and I've got this tension and I shouldn't be feeling this thing and you go well okay well what if you just said I didn't choose to feel this way I am feeling that thing it's got a reason it's got a purpose it's trying to keep me safe it's trying to get me to bond with other people it's trying to ensure 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 yeah so interesting and it makes me wonder a little bit about you know as you were saying earlier your guests are often evolutionist psychologists because that kind of point of view is very modular it has this very party kind of as you were saying that was Robert writes why Buddhism is true when I first learned about that modules of the mind 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 model and I also think that resonates with this kind of approach to emotions like others 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 guys oh some enemy just creeped 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 these different things are competing look at them I'm going to try and triage which is most important yeah yeah it's cool Rob Curzman friend of the show dude thank you for coming on well thanks for having me where should people go to check out everything you got going on yeah so the sub stack is living fossils the book is called all the fields the website is all the fields of book comm check them out and you on the website you can read a sample feel see if it's for you thank you appreciate you man until next time thank you goodbye my beauties dude I think that went all right oh epic