Bonus: Dave & David (and guest Pat Barclay) Read Some Reviews
2025-07-03 12:00:00.000 +00:00

This is our first bonus content. David, what are we doing in this? We're reading a review and talking about it. Sounds good. And then uh there's actually two reviews. And with the second one, we have our special guest, Pat Barclay, along with us, which I thought was super fun. Yeah, Pat's great. And uh it's a little sneak peek for his episode, which should be coming out uh soon. Yep. So everybody enjoy and we'll see you at our regularly regular Tuesday release uh in a couple days. Uh and enjoy. Yep. You know, we do have a review. Have you read the review? No. Um, can I read it for you? Please do. All right. So it's it from first. It's pretty funny. It's somebody named Um It's okay. It's something called Kiki So Solo.

All right. Kiki Solo. Okay. And it's uh this is for Apple Podcasts. And you know, we have a 4.7 out of 5 ratings, but that's pretty interesting. I'm just gonna read this for you. Okay. Pretty boring. Giving four stars though, so it doesn't tank their ratings. That was kind of her. Yeah. Or him. I don't know, Kiki's Kiki, a boy or girl, or whatever. I'll say that both of the hosts are interesting people who are interested in interesting things. But I also have to say that this podcast is incredibly boring three episodes in. This is prior to any guests we've had. Wow. Well she made it through three episodes. Yeah, I mean, he or she. Yeah. That's pretty presumably we're doing something right. Yeah, I think they need to find a structure and home in on something specific each episode.

It can't just be that they are two guys nerding out about Evo Psych. Well, that that is this podcast. I mean, that should be our tagline. Two guys nerding out about Evo Psych. That would be better than our current tagline. That's really from the mouth of critics. Um, that will not keep an audience. There needs to be some hook to the show, like we tell you, and you're gonna love this. Yeah. Um uh there needs to be some hook to the show, like we tell you how to apply evolutionary psychology in daily life. Okay. Or we talk about how evolutionary psychology can help us make sense of something in the world. I kind of feel like we've done that a little bit. But this is and good Lord. Yeah. It was honestly a good piece of feedback.

That was constructive. It was a good idea. Prior to when we had any guests, I think I would have probably written something similar to this if I didn't know. Here's the next sentence. And good Lord. Lord is capitalized. Please invite guests on the show. Oh, well, they will be pleased to know that a torrent of guests coming up. Many, many guests. Exactly. Yeah. They might regret it. Um so far, it feels like I am reading a textbook which is teaching me a bunch of things. Okay. That's good. I textbooks are cool. Yeah. But not telling me why I should care. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It sort of assumes you care if you're listening. But yeah, maybe we should tell people care. Yeah, and we're on the penultimate paragraph here.

So this doesn't mean it has to be super deep and serious. I like when there's a type of I'll just skip over. I like when hosts can sort of goof around with each other and be silly. Uh we do get better at that. Um what we're doing right now is sort of silly. And then so even making fun of things about the world or political discourse or something would be entertaining. Um and this I agree with, but steer clear of the culture wars, that's my advice. Okay. I think we've done a pretty good job of steering clear of culture war stuff. Yeah. And then uh the last uh thing is rooting for you guys. That's nice. Yeah. Honestly, like that was of all the critical reviews that was kind of a lovely I will take

that. That's a good reviewer too, right there. Yeah. Yeah. And you know where we were at. So yeah. So thank you so much. If anybody else wants to uh thank you, Kiki, sincerely. Um yeah. We we will yeah we will take your your feedback uh seriously. Yeah, and we actually did uh prior to you even writing that because we had guests on from that point on. Yeah. So but yeah, thank you for so please leave so that that was all a long-winded way of saying um please leave some reviews and we'll read them. We will, yeah. Maybe we'll we'll have a segment where we read them on the show. That sounds great. Okay. So please so that's a great incentive for you to write a review because then you'll get to hear us read it.

Yeah. I mean we're gonna have we're gonna uh exercise some discretion, but but yeah. Great. So leave us a review um and visit our Patreon page. If you leave a bad review, then go to our Patreon page and uh um that's sways your f your feelings of guilt, yeah. Yeah. Or uh or um if you leave a good review, go to our Patreon page and that way you don't experience cognitive dissonance, which yeah. I do too too. It's a really powerful uh theory that um explains everything in pretty all of psychology and and the social sciences in general should should be subsumed by cognitive dissonance theory. I think it should I think it should be the meta the overarching theory for all of humanity. Cool cognitive dissonance theory.

Cognitive dissonance the podcast? I mean banger. This thing this thing writes itself. I know um we could even have some dissonant music going in the intro. Wow, that's yeah. Um or not, and then we can just sort of explain that away by um um I mean the history of that is that uh I think there were people who were in doomsday cults and the people who, you know, the next day after the end of the world was predicted, it was like the study of like how do they justify that. So it's not a crazy idea, but no. No, no, yeah. But um Yeah, but that that the the best way to understand that is in terms of analogizing the human mind to an orchestra and a belief that makes you feel uncomfortable as a dissonant note.

Right. Um maybe not the most perspicuous way of understanding the the cognition behind uh doomsday holes. Right. Or the idea that people can't hold two conflicting ideas at once and have a problem with that is I would say possibly naive, bordering on dangerous view of human nature given the h history of political and alliance based machinations in the world. Yes, could not agree more with that. Wow Dave, I can't believe we're still going we're going here. This is a really long outro. This might be a short bonus moment here. We'll see if Naomi edits this or not, or if she has the gall to keep all of it. Yeah. But maybe we can just have it as a bonus. We read our reviews. So David, uh, good to see you.

Good to see you too. Um, so this is a sort of special bonus thing. Uh does my mic sound okay? Um sounds good to me. Okay, I'm all I'm all worried about it. Okay. Uh so David, we have a second review on Apple Podcasts, and we have our our interview with us, Pat Barclay. Pat, you want to say hi? Hi. Um you're welcome. And so we're gonna release your episode probably later than this particular part's coming up, but we're gonna read um this second review. Okay, so David, because we David and I read our first review, and now we're gonna read our second one. So, David and Pat, are you guys ready? Yeah, Okay. Um, so the one thing to say is this is although it's our second review, um, it's actually by the same person who left the first review.

They actually took the first review down, oh, uh, which was in response to our first three episodes, uh where which was prior to us having any guests. God one of the the bottom line things they said was you should really have guests on. God it. Subsequently, we've had guests on. Interesting. So this is Kiki. This is Kiki So Solo. Okay. And this is a shorter. All right. Yeah. Cool. I think it's Khaki so so. It's really hard to read. It's really hard to enunciate. I mean, I have hard enough trouble enunciating normal words. It's hard to enunciate uh usernames or screen names. So okay. Okay. Again, four out of five stars. Okay. The title of this review is Skip 40 Minutes. Um okay. Every episode they then Pat, we're gonna sort of preview this for you.

We're gonna you're gonna be spoiler alert. Every episode, they spend about 40 minutes going on the life journey of each guest, most of whom the audience does not know. Intros for guests should either be absent or like three minutes. Okay. That's unfortunate because I I planned a 40-minute spiel on exactly how I got to where I am. Well now I've got to scrap it. We're we're going to if you can do it in three minutes, but otherwise. No, I mean I I take the point, but um well, I don't I I I'll I'll uh I'll read the rest and then we can maybe talk about it. Because in Pat, I I also, you know, we're biased, but you're a fairly objective third party, even though you know us. So maybe you can give some thoughts about this.

Okay. So there's just two paragraphs. That was the first one. The second one is they should also practice holding the audience's hand throughout the conversation rather than just name dropping and jargon dropping. I don't disagree with that. Um also for podcasts, it is it's it's better to talk less about the research and more about the implications. I don't, I don't, unless it is a dedication article slash lit review. Okay. I mean it maybe more or less the same sort of general note as the previous one. You know, talk more about the implications, avoid the boring stuff about you know academic journey. Pat's life, yeah. Sorry, Pat's a boring life, you know. No, I I'm sure that's not true. No, I I mean I think that's fair.

I mean we're probably more interested to learn about the origin stories of of um people we respect and admire in the field than probably the average uh person is. Yeah. Um what what do you think, Pat? I I can understand wanting to keep the the personal stories, you know, n not from being too too long, like a short overview. Somebody might have a fun uh an anecdote or two. Um you know, I I I can I agree with a bit about um uh you know dropping like the names and and and jargon. I mean I enjoyed it. You know, when you you can you can mention that, but I'm in the field, right? I know these names, I know the ideas. Yeah. Um, so it depends on who you're speaking to. If you're trying to speak to people outside the field, then the more that you can do to

bring people on board helps. Um, as for the question about do you want to talk about the implications or about the research itself, uh I might disagree with that review on that one. I mean, because you know, to hear about the research, that's the fascinating part. And you you can't talk about implications unless you talk about the research first to make sure that both the ideas are clear, but also to have a good idea. Well, how strong is that conclusion? What evidence is that based on? And you know, if it's one study and you realize, oh, okay, it's based on you know one particular study, to what extent do we want to dictate national policy based on one study? Well, maybe this is more of an idea of something we might want to follow up on.

Yeah, no, I definitely agree that there is an over-eagerness to um apply the uh meager insights from our uh you know shoddy research um to policy to the world to overstate their implications. For better or for worse, right? For better or for worse, yeah. I I think we ought to humble ourselves more. But you know, I do take the point that uh if you're a general listener who is not in our weird field, you want to know why this matters. Um and I, you know, of course, it's good to get to the research and state the evidence clearly and and all that, But also, you know, if someone's listening outside of this field, they want to know what's in it for them. Why should why they should care. And we should spend some time talking about that.

I think that's that's a valid uh yeah. Yeah. I and I I don't want to spend too much time navel gazing and we'll we'll and we'll start the Pat episode in a second. But Pat, thanks for for being with us. Um I also want to say like I think that uh there's I have two thoughts. One is, well, yeah, I mean, I agree with what the reviewer is saying to some degree, but I also agree with Pat that I disagree. It's very confusing. I shouldn't have said that. But um one thing is the people who are typically out there presenting themselves as representing evolutionary psychology are not the people that we often recognize as people actually doing the work. And Pat is like a lovely example of somebody who's like who I think is

doing, you know, has done so much of the backbone work on cooperation and solving the the the puzzles of cooperation. Um and and so one of the reasons to introduce people is to actually like introduce the people because like how are you going to get to know them if you don't hear something about them? Um so I agree that you know, maybe maybe we can cut it down from like an hour to like 40 minutes, but I don't think it should just be like three minutes. Um and there's just different ways to do it. Um, there's there's a middle ground there. Yeah. Um and and and certainly we've been trying to you know we're trying to get better at you know defining jargon and making sure that you know stuff is you know properly accessible.

Yeah, it's done better at it. These are the early days. So uh but yeah, no, for sure. In in um when we have our guests on, um we're we're trying to sort of hang hang on, what does this mean? But um but you can also look things up too. So, you know, and I do think there is a problem with sort of overhand holding to the point of sort of exactly as Pat said, exploiting. So I think there's a problem of sort of I tell my kids in my classes that like be careful of like high production value things. Like I always tell them if somebody came up to you who's very attractive, well dressed, and they say, Hey, do you have a moment? Do I can I have a moment of your time? What do you immediately think? They're they're selling you something, right?

And so this is just falls out of signaling where like if the things that are in your interest are not going to be things that come at you loud or that spend a lot of effort on um on you. So like be careful of high production value stuff, right? Uh and be careful of things people trying to sell you stuff in in this context, like you know, it's a hundred percent the case that we're not always talking about the implications or why you should care. And maybe we can spend more time doing that. But that's also something for you to think about. And we're our job is to sort of be careful about the science. And I think there's too much stuff that doesn't understand the science and just is trying to sell you an implication that doesn't even fall out.

And so it's it makes sense that these are issues. And I think this person's also probably coming from a place where if you've been fed implications and interest to the point where it's actually even problematic, then it feels sort of like you're getting something you're not expecting. Yeah. No, I totally buy all that. But I would I would say that you know that point itself is an implication that should matter to a general audience, that it's good to, you know, avoid being manipulated by people who are exploiting, you know, one shoddy study and overstating its implications that this is a thing we should all be conscious of as consumers of information. Um so that is is potentially relevant and interesting to to people that aren't in our

field. That's right. Uh wear red and be confident a hundred percent. Um you know if you wear red you'll be more confident. So wear red and you'll get the job and the mate you want, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. That kind of stuff will yeah, try to avoid that. Um, okay. Uh thank you, Pat, for being along for this. Do you have a final thought, Pat? Uh no, I guess I'm ready to uh ready to get going. All right, also thank thank you to Kiki sincerely. Yes, it's for yeah, we really do care about uh these reviews and take them seriously. And please, uh if you have other comments, please let us know and we'll we will try to incorporate them as much as possible. Um and uh and read them again w while practicing discretion.

So thank you again. Um and uh yeah we'll we'll see you see you Pat in a moment. Okay.