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Okay, David, let's do that all again really quick.

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Damn it.

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At least I didn't do that with the episode.

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Um Yeah.

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All right, yeah.

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This is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

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Actual evolutionary psychology.

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By actual evolutionary psychologists.

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David, um do you ever tell stories?

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I do, uh, all the time.

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In fact, in pretty much any conversation, I'll probably insert one story or another into

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the conversation.

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And don't you?

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Um uh I'll try to.

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Um I'm not that uh I I'm not that good of a storyteller.

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Oh you don't give yourself enough credit, Dave.

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Oh thank you, David.

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Um why are we why are we even talking about this though?

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Uh well that is the subject of today's podcast, among others.

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We're here with Michelle Sugiyama, uh an expert on the evolutionary

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psychology of stories, why we find them interesting and memorable, what

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social purposes stories are tailored to.

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This is a really fun and wide-ranging conversation.

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Not only did we talk about stories, we we also talked about the various things that they

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touch upon, like language, communication, cooperation, politics, um,

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even uh nomenclature and our names for things and why they might correspond to the

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practical affordances of those things.

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Yeah.

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And uh I like how Michelle was even from the outset, sort of qualified that what she was

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doing was not storytelling per se, but uh but using that as a vehicle into cultural

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transmission.

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But but uh yeah, we proceeded to shoehorn her anyway into mostly about stories.

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But yeah.

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Totally.

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But uh but also, you know, uh as a gateway for understanding how people gain knowledge

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about their local ecology and all the different strategies people use for gaining uh and

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transmitting knowledge.

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Um so you know, I touched on, you know, song as as well as stories and mnemonics and

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pedagogy, uh all the all these as you know, different ways uh for people to transmit

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important knowledge.

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Yeah And in some cases, manipulate people.

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You know, there's always that too.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Well, on that note, uh, here's a little song and then you'll hear a story.

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Yep.

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Enjoy.

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I understand your work in uh several different ways, but

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one way to approach it is just very very simply.

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You study storytelling.

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Um and is that a fair characterization or is that a gross abuse

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in characterizing what you do?

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Um, I would say that's probably how I'm best known, right?

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Because that's what I started with.

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But I actually studied cultural transmission, um, what I characterize as the logistics of

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cultural transmission.

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So how um hunter-gatherers actually um maintain and

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transmit the communal knowledge base over time because these are oral cultures, right?

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So they they use oral means.

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And so storytelling is the first one that I looked at, and it's what most of my research is

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on.

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But I also look at other means of knowledge and skill acquisition, so

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song, dance.

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I haven't I haven't done so much work on dance, but I've looked at song um and then also

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games and sports um as a means of you know physical skill acquisition and also teamwork,

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you know, coordination um of of effort.

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Um and so I I my view is that the a lot of the

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behaviors that Western scholarship characterizes as arts and leisure in

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hunter-gatherer societies, these are basically forms of pedagogy.

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They're they're strategies that enable people to acquire um requisite knowledge and

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skill sets um in you know in their local environment.

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Oh I've also started looking at nomenclature.

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Sorry.

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Um this is the new rabbit hole that I'm going down.

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Um so basically I look at these behaviors in terms of the the skills that they enable

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people to develop or the knowledge that they encode.

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And um A lot of names um in hunter gatherer societies are

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um they they encode ecological knowledge.

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So they they reference, so for example, animal names, they reference something about that

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animal's behavior or its morphology, something that's distinctive about that animal, unique

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to that animal.

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Um, and place names encode information about you know what the site looks like.

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Um And then oh the I just did a study on the the names of the months

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in um so foragers use lunar calendars.

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Um they they don't call them month months, they call them moons, right?

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So they have different names for the moons of the year.

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Um and uh these moons, these names encode information about

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um resources that are used at that time of the year, you know, the main resource, or

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um weather conditions that constrain economic activity or make certain activities possible.

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So I mean there's there are moons that are called snowshoe moon.

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Okay, so that's when when you're hunting, you gotta go hunting on snowshoes, right?

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And um and this is it's widespread um cross-culturally.

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So in the study I just looked at the calendars of I can't remember how many I think it was

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about 80 cultures.

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And I made predictions about what kind of information the names would encode.

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And sure enough, it was there.

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So again, you know, plant and animal resources, weather conditions, and also like modes

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of travel to to get to the resources.

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So information about um, you know, the the the ice um icing up or the

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ice melting, because that affects whether you can travel by canoe or, you know, things like

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that.

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So that's that's my new thing.

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That's really cool and interesting.

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Do you think that's just a byproduct of the of communication in general?

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And that the goal of communication is to put s an idea in my head into your head.

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And if we don't have a pre established sound to designate that idea, um, the best

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I can do is to point to other things related to the idea.

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So if there's this I'm trying to get you to think of a bird and we don't have the word bird

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that's been pre established, I might say, Oh, it's the thing that flies, the flying thing.

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right?

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Or if I'm if I'm talking about a particular bird, I might say it's the blue flying thing,

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right?

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Or if I'm trying to, you know, point to a particular place and we don't have a

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pre-established word for that place, I'll say, oh, it's the place with the water, right?

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And so could it be that this nomenclature has simply arisen out of the need to

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communicate and coin new words for things that will be recognized by the listener, or is

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there something more to it than that?

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No, I think that sounds plausible, right?

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That you the names are basically descriptive.

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Um I haven't looked as closely at animal names and um place names as I have at the moon

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names.

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Um but yeah, so that that place thing you know and some like Athabascan languages, they

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have really detailed descriptions of a place.

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Um and the ethnographers who study this say that yeah, it's so you can identify it.

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When if you haven't seen it before and you're out, you know, traveling and you come across,

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it's like, oh, that's the place where the water falls over the rocks and go whatever.

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You know, it's it's very, very descriptive.

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So when you're there, it's like, ah, yeah, that's that's the place that they talked about

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in the story, or that the name, you know, references.

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Um yeah, so it probably started like that.

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Yeah, just just descriptive.

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Um I would bet that it also makes the words easy easier to learn.

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So if you don't already know know the word and you're trying to guess at what it it means,

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you have a much easier time guessing if the word itself conveys information about the thing

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it's describing.

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And so that might aid in the uh ease of of transmission of of the word itself.

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Well, I mean they do double duty, right?

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You get the name of the animal, but you also get some information about the animal or the

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place or whatever it is.

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It's I think it's efficiency because of course these are oral cultures.

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And so um you have to remember the knowledge.

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And the more efficiently you can remember it, then you know that's less taxing on your

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memory.

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That that frees up space in memory, basically.

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Um so there's a lot of that going on.

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I think efficiency is a good way to put it.

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Cause I was also thinking, like, it'd be really weird if we all came upon a rock and I was

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like, this is Larry.

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Like you'd all be like, well, why are you giving this specific rock a name at all?

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And I think like the reason why that's funny, of course, that you know, obviously it's not

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an agent, but it's also that when we name something, we have an implicit model that the

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reason why we're doing that is for functional affordances, communicative reasons.

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And so we're not expecting that we will ever make an inference or learn anything about this

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rock specifically.

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Right.

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And so I think like in a in a modern Western scientific perspective, we have

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names for places that know that that are more multifunctional than

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than anyone ever gets used.

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So like a particular river, if we name it like, I don't know, David, the David Pinshoff

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River, that might be for some scientists to study the hydraulics of it, for some people to

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fish on it.

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And we give it that name because that's a one-size-fit-all label for it.

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But if we're all just fishing for it, then maybe we just call it and we all we only get

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around by like canoe.

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We might just say like the river that requires a canoe to cross it.

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And from a hydrological perspective, from a scientific perspective, that might seem like

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trite and simple.

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But if if if the three of us only have our fish and it's useful to know about the

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affordances of a canoe, that label is a maximally efficient, Michelle, as you say.

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So like I actually wonder, um, sometimes when I hear uh names

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of places that are very unifunctional, like the place where the buffalo are, for example,

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it sounds almost uh like primitive and like the very icky colonial way, like even to my

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ear, which I you know I admit, like I'm just like, oh, that seems really weird.

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But it actually makes sense if you're thinking from uh uh a group of people who are trying

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to efficiently communicate the level of detail that's relevant for their purposes of

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dealing with that river, right?

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Exactly.

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I have an example that sort of makes that point.

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So, um, and I forget what group this is, but there's an Aboriginal Australian group that

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they don't classify emus as a bird.

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They don't put them with birds.

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And um they they classify them with kangaroos.

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Well, why is that?

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Well, it's a large game animal, delicious.

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Um, it's terrestrial, It's locomotion is basically on two legs.

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They have really powerful legs, right?

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And so it's a very practical organizational schema, right?

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It's you you don't really need to know from you know from a hunter-gatherer perspective,

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you don't need to know that the emu is genetically related to the cock two or um you know

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some other you know bird.

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What you need to know is um you know what animals are good for hunting and what are their

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morphological traits that interfere with you, you know, that of that constrain your ability

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to catch them.

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And so um it's it's not an inferior system to the Western system.

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It's a different system.

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Um and it's based on economic need, right?

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Or economic constraints.

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Yeah.

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In the same way a tomato is a f a vegetable, right?

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Yeah.

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Yeah, it's it's functionally not sweet.

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Yeah, it's actually, of course.

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It's it's plant food.

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Right.

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That's interesting.

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Yeah.

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And also by getting back to nomenclature, by naming a place, you are implying that it's

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important, right?

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So um getting back to the bird example that or animals, um, some animals, and I

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think this uh the same I this is Aboriginal Australia, um, but it's probably true all over

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the place.

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Some animals aren't they don't name them, they don't bother because it's not important.

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It's not important, you know, in the diet.

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It's not important as a cue of you know some other resource.

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It just has no function for them economically.

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So it's like, oh yeah, that's just you know a gray bird or a brown bird or whatever, you

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know, but it's uh it doesn't have its own name.

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It's closer to the it's a thing, end of the perspective.

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Yeah, it's something out there.

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Yeah, yeah, we don't care.

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Yeah, interesting.

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It reminds me a lot of um Tom Scott Phillips's perspective on language.

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Uh uh we had him on the podcast uh a while ago, and he has basically argued that uh there's

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this kind of outmoded view of what language is, where it's a code that you send, and then

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the code gets uh you know deciphered by the recipient, and we have different codes that

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stand for different things.

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Uh, and that in reality, uh communication is much more social and grounded uh in

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folk psychology and the informative intentions that we uh expect other people to have,

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uh, and the possible reasons for communicating that other people might have, or the goals

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that they might have uh in changing the mental states of the speaker.

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And so he views language as much more of a uh uh a technology for uh social cooperation and

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coordination than it is an explicit code where X stands for Y, you know, Z stands for

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Q or whatever.

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It's more, you know, what does this person want?

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What does this person likely believe?

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What are their uh uh likely expectations about uh the situation we're in, and how can I

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sort of uh triangulate on what they're trying to get me to think based on all of these

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cues?

238
00:13:40,370 --> 00:13:45,970
It's kind of like an inference to the best explanation uh uh uh view of

239
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language rather than a a deciphering a code um view of

240
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language.

241
00:13:52,500 --> 00:13:57,540
I'm curious if you if you buy that way of thinking uh and if that uh fits in with with your

242
00:13:57,540 --> 00:13:58,340
perspective.

243
00:13:58,900 --> 00:14:02,100
Well that this might be an indirect answer, but I was reading something this morning that I

244
00:14:02,100 --> 00:14:03,220
think speaks to that.

245
00:14:04,100 --> 00:14:10,100
It's a um it's the an interview with a blackfoot elder who was

246
00:14:10,180 --> 00:14:15,700
um who had you know knew the lore of the people and he was interviewed in I think 85.

247
00:14:15,940 --> 00:14:18,950
And so um it starts with their creation story.

248
00:14:19,110 --> 00:14:20,950
So I need to grab the book real quick.

249
00:14:21,030 --> 00:14:24,710
Um but um I there's just like a couple sentences that I think get at this point.

250
00:14:24,870 --> 00:14:25,910
Okay, I'll be right back.

251
00:14:26,150 --> 00:14:26,390
Yeah.

252
00:14:27,190 --> 00:14:32,150
And David, while we're waiting for my show that was very well, that was very oh wow, that

253
00:14:32,150 --> 00:14:32,870
was much faster than I expected.

254
00:14:33,030 --> 00:14:33,910
I was just reading it this morning.

255
00:14:34,070 --> 00:14:34,630
So this is the book.

256
00:14:34,790 --> 00:14:36,390
I don't know if you can the sun came down.

257
00:14:36,710 --> 00:14:37,350
The sun came down.

258
00:14:37,510 --> 00:14:37,750
Yeah.

259
00:14:37,910 --> 00:14:38,070
Okay.

260
00:14:38,310 --> 00:14:44,080
Um so so their creator being is Sun, he's called Sun Creator, And so he

261
00:14:44,080 --> 00:14:46,640
creates a mate for himself, the moon.

262
00:14:46,720 --> 00:14:49,600
And then they have children who are the big dipper.

263
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Um, and so um, let's see, I gotta find the page.

264
00:14:54,240 --> 00:14:54,480
Sorry.

265
00:14:54,560 --> 00:14:56,960
Okay, go ahead and have your conversation while I find the page.

266
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I was gonna say, just while Michelle's looking for the page, I think for me, David, too,

267
00:15:01,680 --> 00:15:07,680
the Tom's uh emphasis is also just then relevant to like what we focus when we

268
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study, Because if you focus on the code, then you think that the the

269
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study of language primarily is what is the code and how does the code work.

270
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Whereas if you emphasize the social nature, the hard part of language is what are the

271
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representations that are being exchanged.

272
00:15:28,270 --> 00:15:34,030
And the code, in some sense, takes a back seat to what what

273
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is the Instead of worrying about the grammar structure, you worry about, well,

274
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what consequence does that statement have on my representation of events, for example?

275
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And it changes sort of the shift in what part of the psychology you focus on.

276
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Right.

277
00:15:49,760 --> 00:15:53,680
And it and it strays away from this idea that there's like a one-to-one mapping between

278
00:15:53,680 --> 00:15:59,520
word and definition or phrase and meaning that is fixed rather than a constantly

279
00:15:59,520 --> 00:16:05,370
evolving uh uh use of different communicative strategies that will uh depend very strongly

280
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on the communicative context.

281
00:16:06,970 --> 00:16:11,210
And one word can mean a very different thing in one context compared to another context.

282
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And one utterance could can be interpreted very differently dependent depending on the

283
00:16:15,770 --> 00:16:18,890
nature of the situation we're in, my facial expressions, my tone of voice.

284
00:16:19,050 --> 00:16:23,290
That can all dramatically change the inferences that get made about what my informative

285
00:16:23,290 --> 00:16:24,170
intentions were.

286
00:16:24,330 --> 00:16:27,540
Uh uh but anyway, we're we're we're back to to Michelle now.

287
00:16:28,340 --> 00:16:29,460
Okay, I found the passage.

288
00:16:29,940 --> 00:16:34,180
So okay, so you know, Creator Son has, you know, created a mate for himself, Moon, and then

289
00:16:34,180 --> 00:16:34,900
the children.

290
00:16:35,140 --> 00:16:38,500
And so the story says, Creator Son became a teacher now.

291
00:16:38,660 --> 00:16:42,260
He taught the mate what she had to do in her job as a maker of their place.

292
00:16:42,340 --> 00:16:43,380
He taught the little one.

293
00:16:43,540 --> 00:16:44,980
They only have one child at this point.

294
00:16:45,220 --> 00:16:48,740
He taught the little one to help the both of them in whatever the work was.

295
00:16:49,220 --> 00:16:53,380
Um so you know, they're basically teaching them what their role is, you know, in in the

296
00:16:53,380 --> 00:16:54,660
world in which they live.

297
00:16:54,900 --> 00:17:00,890
Um and he's then it says mostly he had to pull each one along and make motions to show

298
00:17:00,890 --> 00:17:06,490
what it had to do as there wasn't any language just at that particular time and then

299
00:17:06,490 --> 00:17:11,130
language emerges and so um i think this sort of speaks to the point of you know what is

300
00:17:11,130 --> 00:17:17,020
language for right it's it's to show people what to do um and um and do that in a

301
00:17:17,020 --> 00:17:18,300
very efficient manner, right?

302
00:17:18,380 --> 00:17:18,940
What's your role?

303
00:17:19,100 --> 00:17:20,220
What what do we need?

304
00:17:20,380 --> 00:17:21,820
Um how can you help?

305
00:17:21,980 --> 00:17:23,740
Um what's your contr contribution?

306
00:17:23,900 --> 00:17:28,940
Um how do we make this group work right efficiently um economically?

307
00:17:29,180 --> 00:17:33,660
Um anyway that just sort of blew my mind when I read that to think of language as oh it's

308
00:17:33,660 --> 00:17:34,700
for teaching.

309
00:17:35,260 --> 00:17:35,740
Yeah.

310
00:17:35,970 --> 00:17:37,250
Yeah, it's super cool.

311
00:17:37,410 --> 00:17:43,170
Um i it seems like there's a parallel there between the information efficiency

312
00:17:43,170 --> 00:17:49,010
of nomenclature and how it tries to help the listener triangulate on the informative

313
00:17:49,010 --> 00:17:50,290
intentions of the speaker.

314
00:17:50,450 --> 00:17:55,890
And uh story storytelling, which you argue is a similar kind of uh efficient mode of ins

315
00:17:56,290 --> 00:17:57,170
information transmission.

316
00:17:57,250 --> 00:18:02,370
So in what way is storytelling um a more efficient way of transmitting, say,

317
00:18:02,560 --> 00:18:06,880
ecological knowledge to you than just uh listing the facts to you?

318
00:18:07,600 --> 00:18:12,560
Um look the the structure of of stories is uh it's called narrative, right?

319
00:18:12,720 --> 00:18:18,320
Narrative structure is um it it maps really neatly onto the agency

320
00:18:18,320 --> 00:18:19,200
detection system.

321
00:18:19,360 --> 00:18:24,240
And I think actually that it probably is part of the agency detection system.

322
00:18:25,120 --> 00:18:30,250
It's the part, it's the it's the part of the system that organizes information about events

323
00:18:30,250 --> 00:18:32,810
and actions in the world and represents them.

324
00:18:33,130 --> 00:18:38,170
So it's probably a really, really ancient cognitive faculty that we share with other

325
00:18:38,170 --> 00:18:38,810
animals.

326
00:18:39,530 --> 00:18:43,450
And so if you look at a story, what is it consider what do you what are the ingredients of

327
00:18:43,450 --> 00:18:43,770
a story?

328
00:18:43,850 --> 00:18:45,530
What do you need in order to make a story?

329
00:18:45,690 --> 00:18:51,210
You need characters, events and actions, setting, sequence, and conflict and

330
00:18:51,210 --> 00:18:51,770
resolution.

331
00:18:52,330 --> 00:18:56,440
Characters are agents, you know, they're they're entities capable of goal-directed action.

332
00:18:56,680 --> 00:18:58,600
Um, events and action.

333
00:18:58,680 --> 00:19:03,880
Well, actions are um are of happenings that are performed by agents, so they're

334
00:19:03,880 --> 00:19:04,760
goal-directed.

335
00:19:05,000 --> 00:19:10,920
Events are non-goal-directed happenings, things that happen like tsunamis, floods, right?

336
00:19:11,160 --> 00:19:13,000
Um, there's no agency involved.

337
00:19:13,160 --> 00:19:18,120
Um, setting is the set of ecological conditions under which the happenings take place.

338
00:19:18,360 --> 00:19:24,090
Sequence is the causal and temporal relationships between happenings, and

339
00:19:24,090 --> 00:19:29,130
conflict is obstacles that agents encounter in the course of trying to pursue their goals,

340
00:19:29,370 --> 00:19:35,210
and resolution is the outcome of the strategies that they use to try and solve those

341
00:19:35,210 --> 00:19:35,610
problems.

342
00:19:35,770 --> 00:19:39,370
And that's basically what our agency detection system does for us, right?

343
00:19:39,450 --> 00:19:45,080
We can identify agents, make inferences about their goals, and understand their

344
00:19:45,080 --> 00:19:47,400
actions in terms of oh, they're trying to achieve this goal.

345
00:19:47,480 --> 00:19:48,680
Oh, look, they ran into a problem.

346
00:19:48,840 --> 00:19:51,320
Oh, what solution did they come up for that with that?

347
00:19:51,480 --> 00:19:54,680
Um, and so it's it's essentially the same thing.

348
00:19:54,920 --> 00:20:00,600
Um, so that makes stories a story a very memorable format because it's how we

349
00:20:00,600 --> 00:20:06,520
process information about agents and actions and events in the world and the and the

350
00:20:06,520 --> 00:20:12,330
ecological conditions that constrain um goal-directed action and events

351
00:20:12,410 --> 00:20:17,690
too, because if the story is set in outer space, then it's highly unlikely that a flood is

352
00:20:17,690 --> 00:20:18,650
going to occur, right?

353
00:20:18,810 --> 00:20:23,690
So the setting constraints the possible actions that can take place.

354
00:20:24,330 --> 00:20:25,610
So that makes it memorable.

355
00:20:25,690 --> 00:20:31,530
But then humans use all sorts of tactics and techniques to make stories

356
00:20:31,530 --> 00:20:37,260
more engaging, more emotionally arousing, and therefore more memorable.

357
00:20:38,060 --> 00:20:43,580
They use there's a lot of so in oral culture, storytelling is a

358
00:20:43,580 --> 00:20:44,380
performance.

359
00:20:44,940 --> 00:20:46,780
It's a very active thing.

360
00:20:47,340 --> 00:20:53,020
And performers use various tactics, like I said, to you know engage the

361
00:20:53,020 --> 00:20:53,740
audience.

362
00:20:54,860 --> 00:21:00,170
This is in FSYC, it's known as extensive communication, or

363
00:21:00,650 --> 00:21:02,330
some people use the term mother-ese.

364
00:21:02,890 --> 00:21:05,610
I think that's I think ostensive communication is better.

365
00:21:06,090 --> 00:21:09,770
Linguists call it the paralinguistic features of language.

366
00:21:09,930 --> 00:21:15,610
So things like modulation of the voice, the use of facial expression, and

367
00:21:15,610 --> 00:21:17,370
gestures, things like that.

368
00:21:17,530 --> 00:21:19,450
And so storytellers do this.

369
00:21:19,930 --> 00:21:23,530
And it it makes the story a lot more exciting.

370
00:21:24,580 --> 00:21:28,180
It holds people's attention and it makes it more memorable.

371
00:21:28,420 --> 00:21:33,700
Also, a lot of stories in hunter-gatherer societies have rather

372
00:21:33,700 --> 00:21:36,420
graphic elements.

373
00:21:37,060 --> 00:21:42,900
You know, very violent things will happen, and those are very salient too, both

374
00:21:42,900 --> 00:21:44,180
emotionally and attentionally.

375
00:21:44,340 --> 00:21:45,220
We remember them.

376
00:21:45,540 --> 00:21:51,380
I came across an account a while back of an Aboriginal Australian person who said, Yeah,

377
00:21:51,460 --> 00:21:55,150
our stories are all about you know rape and murder and all this because it makes it them

378
00:21:55,150 --> 00:21:56,110
easier to remember.

379
00:21:56,270 --> 00:21:57,870
But I can't remember where I read it.

380
00:21:57,950 --> 00:21:59,470
Um, and I forgot to mark it.

381
00:21:59,710 --> 00:22:04,830
Um, but um, but yeah, they're that that's obviously very emotionally engaging.

382
00:22:04,910 --> 00:22:08,910
So still you know, stories about the ancestors have them doing all sorts of atrocious

383
00:22:08,910 --> 00:22:09,310
things.

384
00:22:09,470 --> 00:22:11,710
Um, the San people talk about this too.

385
00:22:11,790 --> 00:22:15,550
That oh yeah, you can't you can't behave like the ancestors did, you know, they did

386
00:22:15,550 --> 00:22:16,590
horrible things, right?

387
00:22:16,750 --> 00:22:18,910
But the story, but you remember the stories.

388
00:22:19,150 --> 00:22:24,880
Um I could go on, but um anyway, so there's yeah, I can have a question about that.

389
00:22:24,960 --> 00:22:26,080
Yeah, so sorry, go ahead.

390
00:22:26,320 --> 00:22:27,040
No, go ahead.

391
00:22:27,280 --> 00:22:29,200
Um uh do you think it's a byproduct?

392
00:22:29,360 --> 00:22:35,360
So I mean, do you think the proper domain is I need to tell you, Michelle, about things

393
00:22:35,360 --> 00:22:39,600
that have happened, or at least when we can talk about things, there's this cool

394
00:22:39,600 --> 00:22:43,600
opportunity where I can tell you about things that you didn't personally experience.

395
00:22:43,840 --> 00:22:49,600
And the proper domain is the things that are violent or have high

396
00:22:49,600 --> 00:22:55,530
costs or benefits are really important to you because they're about real things.

397
00:22:55,930 --> 00:23:01,530
Is it that stories that are fictional, the ones that are memorable

398
00:23:01,770 --> 00:23:07,690
and stick, they're they're remembered because the proper domain of that is the

399
00:23:07,930 --> 00:23:12,890
real life cost benefit, and when it's higher cost or benefit, that's um,

400
00:23:14,000 --> 00:23:17,040
you know that so you did you see what I'm saying?

401
00:23:17,120 --> 00:23:23,120
So it's sort of that the um you're registering, oh yeah, this is a good story, not

402
00:23:23,360 --> 00:23:29,280
because it's entertaining, it's that entertaining is derivative of this is an

403
00:23:29,280 --> 00:23:35,120
important real life thing to know about or pay attention to, and what entertainment

404
00:23:35,120 --> 00:23:40,410
is is uh a byproduct of um the

405
00:23:40,410 --> 00:23:46,250
registering of the um evolved reaction to information that if it were

406
00:23:46,250 --> 00:23:48,410
true, how important would it be?

407
00:23:48,810 --> 00:23:50,970
Um, if that makes sense.

408
00:23:51,450 --> 00:23:54,090
Um yeah, and I think that's that's partly true.

409
00:23:54,250 --> 00:23:58,820
Um store hunter gatherer stories are about things in the local environment.

410
00:23:58,900 --> 00:24:01,060
Um, so things that you would naturally be interested in.

411
00:24:01,140 --> 00:24:06,980
So for example, etiological animal tales are about animals, important animals in the local

412
00:24:06,980 --> 00:24:07,460
environment.

413
00:24:07,620 --> 00:24:13,620
So so you and they identify distinctive traits of, you know, the animals,

414
00:24:13,700 --> 00:24:18,820
um, their diet, their habitat, uh, their behavior, life history, you know, how many

415
00:24:18,820 --> 00:24:21,380
offspring they produce, these sorts of things.

416
00:24:21,540 --> 00:24:26,530
Um, but also children are told, you know, pay attention to these stories, right?

417
00:24:26,610 --> 00:24:27,250
They're important.

418
00:24:27,490 --> 00:24:28,610
They'll teach you.

419
00:24:29,090 --> 00:24:31,010
So there's both things going on.

420
00:24:31,410 --> 00:24:37,090
You know, the stories are about things that, yes, we are biased to be interested in.

421
00:24:37,970 --> 00:24:41,570
But the children are also, you know, I mean, you know how little kids are.

422
00:24:41,650 --> 00:24:43,250
Sometimes they can't sit still, right?

423
00:24:43,650 --> 00:24:44,610
They have all that energy.

424
00:24:44,690 --> 00:24:49,490
And so, you know, you you get the scolding from you know, parents and and elders, you know,

425
00:24:49,650 --> 00:24:51,570
you know, sit still, pay attention.

426
00:24:51,800 --> 00:24:55,000
Um, so yeah, so both things are I think are at play.

427
00:24:55,240 --> 00:24:59,000
Yeah, and it's certainly not I mean to to counter what I'm saying, it's certainly not true

428
00:24:59,000 --> 00:25:04,920
that um the system is for reality in the sense of a very bland version of the

429
00:25:04,920 --> 00:25:09,560
prediction would be if you know a story's false, you just you just dump it.

430
00:25:09,720 --> 00:25:12,520
And obviously that's not true at all.

431
00:25:12,680 --> 00:25:17,320
We're very interested in things we know, quote unquote, we know to be fiction, we know to

432
00:25:17,320 --> 00:25:17,960
be made up.

433
00:25:18,040 --> 00:25:20,600
In fact, that's often what makes a good story.

434
00:25:20,840 --> 00:25:25,210
So that at least simple version of that account is not correct.

435
00:25:25,450 --> 00:25:27,210
So it's this really interesting thing.

436
00:25:27,290 --> 00:25:30,810
And I think, you know, there are many people have written about or questioned this question

437
00:25:30,810 --> 00:25:34,890
of why are we so interested in things we know at the outset?

438
00:25:35,050 --> 00:25:37,610
I'm going to tell you a story that's not true, right?

439
00:25:37,770 --> 00:25:43,690
Um, on a very simple pass, you would imag you could one could imagine a prediction where

440
00:25:43,690 --> 00:25:48,970
an evolved organism would not be interested at all and not even want to hear about a

441
00:25:49,080 --> 00:25:52,840
fictional story, yet we seem to be designed completely the opposite way.

442
00:25:54,600 --> 00:26:00,360
Yeah, well there are um yeah that the fiction is really a

443
00:26:00,360 --> 00:26:02,200
big it's complicated.

444
00:26:02,360 --> 00:26:08,360
Um but um but one strategy I don't know if it's a strategy might be not the

445
00:26:08,360 --> 00:26:08,760
right word.

446
00:26:08,840 --> 00:26:14,690
I don't know if this is conscious or unconscious but um In hunter-gatherer culture, and not

447
00:26:14,690 --> 00:26:18,610
just hunter-gatherer cultures, but oral cultures, but I'll just focus on hunter-gatherer

448
00:26:18,610 --> 00:26:18,930
cultures.

449
00:26:19,090 --> 00:26:24,210
There's this widespread belief in what the anthropologist Richard Nelson calls distant

450
00:26:24,210 --> 00:26:24,290
time.

451
00:26:24,530 --> 00:26:27,010
That's his translation of the Quayukon word for it.

452
00:26:27,170 --> 00:26:29,410
Other anthropologists call it myth time.

453
00:26:29,650 --> 00:26:30,690
There's various names for it.

454
00:26:30,770 --> 00:26:32,850
In Aboriginal Australia, it's the dreaming.

455
00:26:33,380 --> 00:26:34,500
That's their word for it.

456
00:26:34,980 --> 00:26:39,700
Other people call it the time of the ancestors, the time of the animal people.

457
00:26:40,100 --> 00:26:45,860
So this is an indistinct period, you know, long, long ago, when the world was different

458
00:26:45,860 --> 00:26:46,580
than it is today.

459
00:26:46,740 --> 00:26:48,660
So that's it, that's a premise, right?

460
00:26:48,980 --> 00:26:51,460
And things happened that are no longer possible.

461
00:26:51,620 --> 00:26:53,940
Things like talking animals, right?

462
00:26:54,180 --> 00:26:55,380
And so that's understood.

463
00:26:55,540 --> 00:26:57,940
Okay, this is not necessarily true of the world today.

464
00:26:58,100 --> 00:27:00,250
This is true of the distant time, right?

465
00:27:00,730 --> 00:27:04,650
But nevertheless, the descriptions of animal behavior, the descriptions of the land, the

466
00:27:04,650 --> 00:27:07,850
hydrology, the topography, those are accurate, right?

467
00:27:08,090 --> 00:27:13,770
So the only fictional thing is that, okay, the animals talk like humans do.

468
00:27:14,170 --> 00:27:19,610
They may engage in you know behaviors that humans engage in that you know that in real life

469
00:27:19,690 --> 00:27:21,050
that animal doesn't do.

470
00:27:21,690 --> 00:27:27,530
But on that point, I think a lot of what we Westerners perceive as fiction

471
00:27:27,840 --> 00:27:32,000
or counterfactual reasoning might actually be analogical reasoning.

472
00:27:32,160 --> 00:27:36,400
So, for example, in one of these, you know, distant time stories, if they talk about, you

473
00:27:36,400 --> 00:27:39,040
know, beaver getting married, beaver looking for a mate.

474
00:27:39,200 --> 00:27:40,880
Well, beavers do mate.

475
00:27:41,440 --> 00:27:46,160
They, I mean, and so when you talk about them getting married or being married, maybe

476
00:27:46,160 --> 00:27:47,760
that's a metaphor, right?

477
00:27:47,920 --> 00:27:49,440
Not it's not a fiction.

478
00:27:49,600 --> 00:27:54,160
Um, and so that's something that I sort of want to, you know, explore more.

479
00:27:54,320 --> 00:27:59,650
Um, uh, but um, but it seems possible that that's possibly what's going on in a lot of

480
00:27:59,650 --> 00:28:00,450
these cases.

481
00:28:00,610 --> 00:28:05,410
Um and if you think of it that way, then fiction really isn't as fictional as as we think.

482
00:28:05,490 --> 00:28:09,490
Um, you know, these so-called myths and and you know, fictional tales.

483
00:28:09,650 --> 00:28:15,090
Um the amount of fictional information in there is is not that large and it's

484
00:28:15,090 --> 00:28:15,730
quarantined.

485
00:28:15,810 --> 00:28:19,300
It's like, oh, this this was true in the distant time, not true today, right?

486
00:28:19,860 --> 00:28:25,140
Um, yeah, so and then the other the other thing about fiction, because it's you know, I

487
00:28:25,140 --> 00:28:28,740
think your comment begs the question, well, well, why tell fictional stories in the first

488
00:28:28,740 --> 00:28:29,060
place?

489
00:28:29,300 --> 00:28:32,980
Um, and I think that's because um it offers flexibility.

490
00:28:33,220 --> 00:28:38,980
So if your group's um you know combined uh personal experience

491
00:28:38,980 --> 00:28:44,150
doesn't have an exemplar that addresses a particular teaching need, you know, you have the

492
00:28:44,150 --> 00:28:45,590
need to teach a lesson, right?

493
00:28:45,830 --> 00:28:51,110
Well, then you can, you know, based on your understanding of your local environment, you

494
00:28:51,110 --> 00:28:54,550
can construct a story that will, you know, serve that need.

495
00:28:54,710 --> 00:29:00,390
Um, or you can modify an existing story, you know, personal experience story, um, to tailor

496
00:29:00,390 --> 00:29:05,430
it, you know, better, make it more suitable for teaching the lesson at hand.

497
00:29:05,590 --> 00:29:07,750
Um, so it gives you that flexibility.

498
00:29:07,910 --> 00:29:13,140
Um, yeah, And then again, you can also include then things that um you know violate our

499
00:29:13,140 --> 00:29:15,380
expectations, like you know, talking animals, right?

500
00:29:15,460 --> 00:29:16,420
That that's salient.

501
00:29:16,500 --> 00:29:21,940
Um, you know, Pascal Boy's work on um, you know, why religious ideas, you know, stick

502
00:29:22,020 --> 00:29:25,620
because of, you know, there's a few counterfactual elements that violate our natural

503
00:29:25,620 --> 00:29:26,980
ontological categories.

504
00:29:27,140 --> 00:29:29,940
So it so that serves as a mnemonic device as well.

505
00:29:30,100 --> 00:29:35,860
Um, so it just offers you lots of opportunities, um, you know, the the ability to create

506
00:29:35,860 --> 00:29:36,340
fictions.

507
00:29:36,630 --> 00:29:36,790
Yeah.

508
00:29:36,870 --> 00:29:42,870
I mean, I think uh even as simple as a motor command, in order for me to move my arm

509
00:29:42,870 --> 00:29:46,710
and not hit my computer, there's actually a lot of counterfactuals running in my head.

510
00:29:46,950 --> 00:29:51,270
And so those counterfactuals are all things that aren't even being done, but they're just,

511
00:29:51,350 --> 00:29:54,070
you know, models of what would happen in the world.

512
00:29:54,150 --> 00:30:00,150
And one can argue that a lot of what fiction is, is it's false in the sense of it

513
00:30:00,120 --> 00:30:05,000
didn't happen, but it's a description of a counterfactual world that you can still learn a

514
00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:08,920
lot from or get an inference out of, in the same way, my brain is getting an inference,

515
00:30:09,000 --> 00:30:12,280
don't move my put my arm here, because if I do, I'll hit the computer.

516
00:30:12,600 --> 00:30:18,520
So the the I think the naive view that we only listen to things that are true is clearly

517
00:30:18,520 --> 00:30:22,840
wrong because you can still learn a lot from something that didn't happen.

518
00:30:22,920 --> 00:30:28,890
And in fact, in order to even relate to the world effectively, even at

519
00:30:28,890 --> 00:30:34,650
a very simple motor level, we must at some level represent possible

520
00:30:34,650 --> 00:30:40,330
states of the world that haven't yet happened or that, and consequently model what would

521
00:30:40,330 --> 00:30:42,250
the consequences be if that happened.

522
00:30:42,410 --> 00:30:47,930
And one could view fiction as its representations that are rich

523
00:30:48,250 --> 00:30:54,060
for these inferences that have some implication for setting my own s uh

524
00:30:54,300 --> 00:30:55,580
cognitive system, right?

525
00:30:55,660 --> 00:30:59,740
Like you're gonna tell me something that I'm gonna learn a lesson from to put it simply.

526
00:30:59,820 --> 00:31:04,380
Um and I think that's intuitive, but I but I think it's worth explicitly sort of saying

527
00:31:04,540 --> 00:31:10,460
that it's something can be false or maybe that's even the wrong way to put

528
00:31:10,460 --> 00:31:10,700
it.

529
00:31:10,860 --> 00:31:13,180
Um it it can't happen.

530
00:31:13,340 --> 00:31:14,060
Yeah, exactly.

531
00:31:14,140 --> 00:31:14,300
Yeah.

532
00:31:14,540 --> 00:31:17,660
The you can learn a lot from something that is hypothetical.

533
00:31:18,050 --> 00:31:18,690
Yes, yes.

534
00:31:18,770 --> 00:31:19,250
It's yeah.

535
00:31:19,330 --> 00:31:23,170
So um, you know, stories, fictional stories have been characterized as thought experiments,

536
00:31:23,250 --> 00:31:23,410
right?

537
00:31:23,490 --> 00:31:27,330
They they a lot of fictional stories address the question, what might happen if?

538
00:31:27,730 --> 00:31:30,690
And and and if that happened, how would I deal with that, right?

539
00:31:30,770 --> 00:31:31,970
What's a possible solution?

540
00:31:32,370 --> 00:31:36,210
Like the example I like to use in um my class is Jurassic Park.

541
00:31:36,530 --> 00:31:40,130
What might happen if humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs, right?

542
00:31:40,210 --> 00:31:41,330
What problem would that lead to?

543
00:31:41,810 --> 00:31:47,420
Um and you know, unlikely to happen, but but still, you know, we do encounter um ecological

544
00:31:47,420 --> 00:31:52,540
problems i mean new developments in the um animal kingdom that we have to deal with right

545
00:31:52,620 --> 00:31:58,140
that that cause trouble for us um I was just learning about the um the lone star tick you

546
00:31:58,140 --> 00:32:03,500
guys heard about this no oh it's a it it causes um

547
00:32:03,900 --> 00:32:09,660
one of its it's it's horrific um so it causes people to have allergies

548
00:32:09,660 --> 00:32:14,690
to meat Um, I mean, really, yes, I've heard of this, yes.

549
00:32:15,010 --> 00:32:17,890
And um, yeah, and and it's spreading due to climate change.

550
00:32:18,050 --> 00:32:23,090
It used to be, I think, just in the south in the real real humid climates, but now it's

551
00:32:23,090 --> 00:32:27,170
spreading uh as far as Maine and as far west as Iowa.

552
00:32:27,490 --> 00:32:33,260
And um, yeah, so um it's Lyme disease is nothing compared to this this

553
00:32:33,260 --> 00:32:34,700
tick, um what it does to you.

554
00:32:34,780 --> 00:32:40,060
And and I mean and not just it doesn't make it doesn't just cause a a profound, you know,

555
00:32:40,140 --> 00:32:46,060
really intense allergic reaction to meat, but anything like if you have beef tallow in your

556
00:32:46,060 --> 00:32:47,500
lotion, you can have a reaction.

557
00:32:47,580 --> 00:32:48,460
You know, things like that.

558
00:32:48,540 --> 00:32:50,380
It's just um yeah.

559
00:32:50,460 --> 00:32:51,020
So anyway.

560
00:32:52,860 --> 00:32:54,300
Not dinosaurs, but ticks.

561
00:32:54,380 --> 00:32:54,540
Yeah.

562
00:32:55,710 --> 00:33:00,030
I can imagine, you know, um someone for the people for the ethical treatment of animals

563
00:33:00,190 --> 00:33:00,590
spreading this.

564
00:33:00,990 --> 00:33:05,710
I was gonna say vegan, vegan uh bioterrorism or whatever.

565
00:33:05,870 --> 00:33:06,030
Yes.

566
00:33:06,110 --> 00:33:08,030
Um, but yeah, no, that's right.

567
00:33:08,110 --> 00:33:09,630
There's a lot of lessons in Jurassic Park.

568
00:33:09,710 --> 00:33:13,310
Like your scientists were so worried about doing thinking about if they could, they didn't

569
00:33:13,310 --> 00:33:14,510
stop and think about if they should.

570
00:33:14,590 --> 00:33:16,830
You know, that comes up, that gets that meme is everywhere.

571
00:33:16,990 --> 00:33:20,030
So yeah, no, no, you you can learn a lot from a fictional story.

572
00:33:20,110 --> 00:33:20,270
Yeah.

573
00:33:20,590 --> 00:33:20,830
Sure.

574
00:33:20,910 --> 00:33:21,070
Yeah.

575
00:33:21,150 --> 00:33:25,020
I mean it reminds me um to bring back another episode of the one we had with Tay Deg

576
00:33:25,180 --> 00:33:31,100
Quillian, where he's basically arguing that um counterfactual reasoning is at the core of

577
00:33:31,180 --> 00:33:35,820
uh causality or judgments of causality in general, that we literally cannot understand what

578
00:33:35,820 --> 00:33:38,460
causes what without counterfactual reasoning.

579
00:33:38,540 --> 00:33:43,980
And and what causality is at its core is just a correlation between two things across

580
00:33:43,980 --> 00:33:45,740
counterfactual worlds.

581
00:33:45,900 --> 00:33:51,740
Um, and so if we need to have any understanding of what causes what, which is obviously

582
00:33:51,900 --> 00:33:56,510
uh crucial for any kind of you know uh uh biological fitness related goal.

583
00:33:56,670 --> 00:33:58,830
Uh you need counterfactual reasoning.

584
00:33:58,910 --> 00:34:03,550
Uh uh it's you can't uh tie it apart from from uh causal thinking in general.

585
00:34:03,950 --> 00:34:04,350
Right, right.

586
00:34:04,590 --> 00:34:07,870
Hypothesis formation is you know involves counterfactual reasoning, right?

587
00:34:08,030 --> 00:34:08,270
Yeah.

588
00:34:08,510 --> 00:34:10,830
This this might possibly explain, right?

589
00:34:11,150 --> 00:34:11,470
Yeah.

590
00:34:11,950 --> 00:34:13,630
So you have to test it to find out, yeah.

591
00:34:13,880 --> 00:34:14,040
Yeah.

592
00:34:14,680 --> 00:34:14,920
For sure.

593
00:34:15,160 --> 00:34:15,320
Yeah.

594
00:34:15,400 --> 00:34:20,840
The little engines in our head that are modeling the world, the reality is poor

595
00:34:21,160 --> 00:34:22,360
to populate it.

596
00:34:22,440 --> 00:34:27,960
And so something you've experienced or a story or a hypothesis I generate from it

597
00:34:28,200 --> 00:34:32,920
can very easily correct what otherwise might be overdetermined, right?

598
00:34:33,320 --> 00:34:38,310
Um, so like if I'm a kid and I drop something, I don't know if it's that every time I drop

599
00:34:38,310 --> 00:34:41,830
something, it falls straight down, or if there was an art that was an artifact of a

600
00:34:41,830 --> 00:34:43,510
particular moment in time.

601
00:34:43,750 --> 00:34:48,870
But if I have a model that pits those two apart, then I can test it and then I can be more

602
00:34:48,870 --> 00:34:52,550
confident my inferences going forward that, oh no, it actually wasn't that the wind was

603
00:34:52,550 --> 00:34:53,350
blowing straight down.

604
00:34:53,430 --> 00:34:57,030
It's that more or less every time I drop something, it'll fall straight down, unless

605
00:34:57,030 --> 00:34:58,630
there's countervailing things.

606
00:34:58,790 --> 00:35:01,990
That's hard to do because the world's complicated and overdetermined.

607
00:35:02,070 --> 00:35:05,200
So if you have a model that can make it's like science, right?

608
00:35:05,280 --> 00:35:09,120
This is the Allison Gopnick point that like there is a sense in which our internal

609
00:35:09,120 --> 00:35:13,440
representational causal systems are like scientific hypotheses.

610
00:35:13,520 --> 00:35:15,040
There is a kernel of truth to that.

611
00:35:15,120 --> 00:35:21,120
Um the in the sense of um getting the model right in part involves figuring

612
00:35:21,120 --> 00:35:26,800
out how what are the con what how you test that with the stuff you have at hand, like

613
00:35:26,880 --> 00:35:28,720
drop the rock again, see what happens.

614
00:35:29,600 --> 00:35:30,160
Right.

615
00:35:30,870 --> 00:35:31,190
Yeah.

616
00:35:31,350 --> 00:35:36,950
Um, so we we've talked a lot about you know what the receivers of stories might gain from

617
00:35:36,950 --> 00:35:37,830
the stories themselves.

618
00:35:37,990 --> 00:35:42,310
That is, the stories might contain useful ecological knowledge, it might help them learn

619
00:35:42,310 --> 00:35:47,990
about important causal relationships, uh, it might contain uh threat relevant

620
00:35:47,990 --> 00:35:50,550
information that captures their attention.

621
00:35:50,710 --> 00:35:55,590
Uh so these are all reasons why receivers might be interested in listening to a story.

622
00:35:55,800 --> 00:36:00,040
But uh I I'm I'm kind of interested in the other side of the equation, which is what the

623
00:36:00,040 --> 00:36:01,800
producers of the stories benefit.

624
00:36:01,960 --> 00:36:05,240
Because I think this is an increasingly important perspective that's being taken in

625
00:36:05,240 --> 00:36:06,440
cultural evolution research.

626
00:36:06,520 --> 00:36:10,120
We talked about this in the episode with Pascal Boyer, is that it's important to understand

627
00:36:10,120 --> 00:36:15,160
what the producers of a of a cultural variant uh gain from its production as well as what

628
00:36:15,160 --> 00:36:16,840
the uh consumers of it gain.

629
00:36:16,920 --> 00:36:20,200
So so why should I bother telling you a story at all?

630
00:36:20,280 --> 00:36:21,960
What do I get out of the deal?

631
00:36:22,610 --> 00:36:25,970
Yeah, I think I characterize storytelling as a form of cooperation.

632
00:36:26,050 --> 00:36:27,890
It's an information exchange.

633
00:36:28,130 --> 00:36:31,010
And the storyteller benefits in lots of ways.

634
00:36:31,570 --> 00:36:35,570
First of all, if you're telling stories to your kin, your children, your uh nieces,

635
00:36:35,730 --> 00:36:39,410
nephews, whatever, you're increasing their chances of surviving, right?

636
00:36:39,650 --> 00:36:45,410
Um, if you're telling stories to um people who aren't um you know that

637
00:36:45,410 --> 00:36:49,860
closely related to you, you're still establishing a cooperative relationship, right?

638
00:36:50,020 --> 00:36:51,620
You're you're doing a favor for them.

639
00:36:51,780 --> 00:36:55,620
So that's going to motivate them to you know be inclined to do favors for you.

640
00:36:55,860 --> 00:37:01,860
And um and then you're also establishing um uh your reputation as a cooperative person.

641
00:37:02,020 --> 00:37:04,900
This person is generous, they share their knowledge with others.

642
00:37:05,060 --> 00:37:10,820
Um so I basically I think cooperation explains it um, you know, on on pretty much, you

643
00:37:10,820 --> 00:37:12,020
know, multiple levels.

644
00:37:12,450 --> 00:37:12,850
Interesting.

645
00:37:12,930 --> 00:37:17,250
I mean, might it also serve a signaling function that I'm I'm the type of person who's

646
00:37:17,410 --> 00:37:19,250
number one, like a good communicator.

647
00:37:19,410 --> 00:37:20,450
I'm I have a good memory.

648
00:37:20,530 --> 00:37:22,130
I can remember useful bits of information.

649
00:37:22,290 --> 00:37:25,970
I can communicate the most relevant bits of that information to you, which makes me a more

650
00:37:25,970 --> 00:37:27,410
useful conversation partner.

651
00:37:27,570 --> 00:37:31,410
I mean, we we frequently get in conversations where the person talks about irrelevant

652
00:37:31,410 --> 00:37:35,650
things that aren't of interest to us, and we uh judge that person as a poor conversation

653
00:37:35,650 --> 00:37:39,760
partner and might might want to uh not have a cooperative uh relationship with that person

654
00:37:39,760 --> 00:37:42,080
and favor someone else in the social marketplace.

655
00:37:42,240 --> 00:37:46,720
Um exactly yeah it makes you valuable as a put you know cooperator.

656
00:37:46,960 --> 00:37:47,280
Interesting.

657
00:37:47,520 --> 00:37:48,720
Yeah as an alliance member.

658
00:37:48,800 --> 00:37:49,040
Yeah.

659
00:37:49,120 --> 00:37:50,880
Yeah I want to work with that person, right?

660
00:37:51,280 --> 00:37:53,120
You know, he or she knows a lot, right?

661
00:37:53,200 --> 00:37:54,400
Or they know a lot.

662
00:37:54,560 --> 00:37:57,840
Um and um so they're you know a useful source of information.

663
00:37:57,920 --> 00:37:59,520
You know that's it's a benefit to me.

664
00:37:59,600 --> 00:37:59,920
Yeah.

665
00:38:00,240 --> 00:38:00,400
Yeah.

666
00:38:00,640 --> 00:38:01,440
I like that David.

667
00:38:01,520 --> 00:38:06,480
And I also like I often when I hear those hypotheses, I used to think they were kind of

668
00:38:06,480 --> 00:38:11,710
silly because uh and I don't anymore, but I want to clarify a counter uh

669
00:38:11,870 --> 00:38:16,030
understanding of it that I think is wrong, which is sort of the idea is that the reason why

670
00:38:16,030 --> 00:38:21,070
they're storytelling and the reason why you communicate is because there's this benefit to

671
00:38:21,070 --> 00:38:26,510
doing it where if you're good at it, then you you get some benefits.

672
00:38:26,670 --> 00:38:31,620
But I think uh a more sophisticated version is the

673
00:38:32,820 --> 00:38:38,660
opportunity to communicate in this way opens up more

674
00:38:38,900 --> 00:38:42,180
opportunities for all of the above, right?

675
00:38:42,420 --> 00:38:48,100
Where you get agents get the benefits of hearing about things that they didn't

676
00:38:48,100 --> 00:38:54,100
directly experience, but then all the costs of being bad at that or the benefits

677
00:38:54,100 --> 00:38:56,990
of being good at it then subsequently follow.

678
00:38:57,150 --> 00:39:02,030
And then there's like con uh there's partner selection effects as well, right?

679
00:39:02,110 --> 00:39:06,270
In the in the sense of it's analogous to sort of like, well, why do we have arms?

680
00:39:06,430 --> 00:39:08,990
It's because we can like, you know, pick fruit.

681
00:39:09,230 --> 00:39:13,870
But once we can pick enough fruit to share it, you're going to prefer people who are better

682
00:39:13,870 --> 00:39:14,990
at it or worse than it.

683
00:39:15,150 --> 00:39:18,270
But it's not that you have arms to pick better people or worse people.

684
00:39:18,430 --> 00:39:24,060
It's that you can pick arms and the fact that you've got and you want to pick good people

685
00:39:24,060 --> 00:39:25,820
and bad people and you put those two together.

686
00:39:25,900 --> 00:39:31,580
And I think the same thing is true for like telling stories, um, which is that it it

687
00:39:31,580 --> 00:39:37,340
creates opportunities for everybody when it goes well, when it's in a beneficial way.

688
00:39:37,580 --> 00:39:42,620
But then consequently, if you're bad at it, that's an uh uh um a cost as well.

689
00:39:43,270 --> 00:39:43,430
Right.

690
00:39:43,590 --> 00:39:46,230
And not everybody tells stories in hunter-gatherer societies.

691
00:39:46,310 --> 00:39:48,070
There are people who specialize in it.

692
00:39:48,310 --> 00:39:52,470
And um, and there though it tends to be people who are good at it, right?

693
00:39:52,710 --> 00:39:56,550
Um, but um it's it's a recognized social role.

694
00:39:56,710 --> 00:40:00,070
Um, and so a person who's not good at it, well, they might specialize in something else,

695
00:40:00,150 --> 00:40:00,310
right?

696
00:40:00,390 --> 00:40:04,310
Oh, I I I can't be a good storyteller, I can't remember all that knowledge, but but I can

697
00:40:04,310 --> 00:40:06,310
be a good um healer, right?

698
00:40:06,390 --> 00:40:07,670
So I'll, you know, I'm good at that.

699
00:40:07,750 --> 00:40:12,060
I I understand, you know, plants and their medicinal properties, so I'll do that, right or

700
00:40:12,140 --> 00:40:16,300
okay I'm a I'm a good hunter okay I will just focus on that and you know providing food for

701
00:40:16,300 --> 00:40:22,220
my my people be very generous um and um yeah no I've recently I've been reading a lot of um

702
00:40:22,220 --> 00:40:28,220
what I call um emic ethnographies so accounts of culture by you know people members of

703
00:40:28,220 --> 00:40:33,740
that culture um and um and what's one of the things that I'm

704
00:40:33,740 --> 00:40:39,350
learning is that um I thought everybody who was old was considered an elder, but elder is

705
00:40:39,430 --> 00:40:43,670
is like a role, and not everybody you you're not considered an elder just because you're

706
00:40:43,670 --> 00:40:44,070
old.

707
00:40:44,230 --> 00:40:46,230
Um, it's because you know things.

708
00:40:46,470 --> 00:40:50,870
Um, and you know, you're in some sort of leadership role because of your knowledge.

709
00:40:51,030 --> 00:40:55,110
Um, there might be other elders who, you know, specialize in other things, like probably a

710
00:40:55,110 --> 00:40:58,310
healer would be considered an elder um at a certain age.

711
00:40:58,390 --> 00:41:02,630
Um, but it's really a reference to um this role that they provide.

712
00:41:02,790 --> 00:41:07,520
They're um they're they're basically knowledge keepers they're the people they're the

713
00:41:07,520 --> 00:41:13,280
librarians and the teachers and the scholars all rolled into one they take on the

714
00:41:13,280 --> 00:41:18,240
responsibility of um maintaining the communal knowledge base and seeing that it's

715
00:41:18,240 --> 00:41:24,160
transmitted to the next generation so it doesn't get lost right um so um so

716
00:41:24,240 --> 00:41:29,110
yeah it's storytelling is one of many things that you know a person can specialize in in

717
00:41:29,110 --> 00:41:29,830
their group.

718
00:41:29,990 --> 00:41:34,390
Um and so the trick is to find what you're good at and make yourself useful in that way,

719
00:41:34,470 --> 00:41:35,750
right, to your group.

720
00:41:36,070 --> 00:41:36,310
Yeah.

721
00:41:36,470 --> 00:41:40,870
I think there's like a kind of implicit thing in our evolved psychology that people feel

722
00:41:40,870 --> 00:41:44,870
reluctant to, for example, publicly speak or they feel shy.

723
00:41:45,190 --> 00:41:50,070
Um and I think that, and I don't think you just get that in like a context where there's a

724
00:41:50,070 --> 00:41:51,910
race stage in like a PA system.

725
00:41:51,990 --> 00:41:56,640
Like I think, you know, even kids become shy when they have to speak in front of groups of

726
00:41:56,640 --> 00:41:56,800
people.

727
00:41:56,880 --> 00:42:00,960
Like I don't think it's restricted to Western electronics, right?

728
00:42:01,120 --> 00:42:06,960
Um and that I think implies that, among other things, that there's a

729
00:42:06,960 --> 00:42:10,320
representation of am I publicly speaking right now?

730
00:42:10,560 --> 00:42:15,840
And there's an acknowledgement of the possible benefits and costs of doing so, where it's

731
00:42:15,840 --> 00:42:19,730
very much a a David Pinsafian point of it's coordination, right?

732
00:42:19,810 --> 00:42:24,530
It's like there's going to be very possibly high benefits, but possibly high cost if this

733
00:42:24,530 --> 00:42:28,930
goes wrong, because I've got joint attention on me, multiple people.

734
00:42:29,330 --> 00:42:35,090
And there clearly seems to be a slot in our brains for am I speaking,

735
00:42:35,250 --> 00:42:39,570
you know, even right now, like Michelle, if we were it was just the three of us in the Zoom

736
00:42:39,570 --> 00:42:44,100
call, we might be acting a bit differently than we are, knowing that this will be

737
00:42:44,100 --> 00:42:45,780
represented by other people.

738
00:42:46,100 --> 00:42:51,620
Um so there really seems to be this slot for public presentation mode

739
00:42:51,780 --> 00:42:54,180
that's different than um than not.

740
00:42:54,420 --> 00:42:59,780
And that really suggests that this has been an enduring part of our EEA in a in a way.

741
00:43:00,100 --> 00:43:00,580
That's interesting.

742
00:43:01,380 --> 00:43:01,700
Yeah.

743
00:43:01,780 --> 00:43:07,730
Um yeah there's a um in uh in the ethnographic record there are accounts of

744
00:43:07,810 --> 00:43:13,570
like what makes a good leader, like a good headman, and um oratory skill is one of the the

745
00:43:13,570 --> 00:43:14,770
big, big ones, right?

746
00:43:15,010 --> 00:43:16,770
Being a a good public speaker.

747
00:43:16,850 --> 00:43:17,890
Um, rhetoric, right?

748
00:43:17,970 --> 00:43:19,650
Being able to persuade the people.

749
00:43:19,970 --> 00:43:25,960
Um, and um and yeah, no, I've I've come across accounts of like um elders who um you know

750
00:43:26,040 --> 00:43:30,920
an anthropologist or linguist or whatever wants to interview them to um or invite them to

751
00:43:30,920 --> 00:43:35,640
speak you know at some sort of gathering about you know the traditions and they're hesitant

752
00:43:35,640 --> 00:43:37,320
to do it, they don't want to do it.

753
00:43:37,480 --> 00:43:42,360
Um and so it's that that shyness, that um you know, fear of public speaking or whatever,

754
00:43:42,440 --> 00:43:43,720
you know, what what's gonna happen to me?

755
00:43:43,800 --> 00:43:44,840
What if I say the wrong thing?

756
00:43:45,000 --> 00:43:46,600
What if the I'm not convincing?

757
00:43:46,680 --> 00:43:47,800
What if people don't like me?

758
00:43:47,960 --> 00:43:50,360
There's all that you know at play as well.

759
00:43:50,520 --> 00:43:56,390
Um, and so um, so yeah, um being able to yeah, speak in in front of an audience is

760
00:43:56,390 --> 00:43:58,310
a real gift, a real skill.

761
00:43:58,630 --> 00:43:59,190
Yeah, interesting.

762
00:43:59,270 --> 00:44:02,390
Yeah, I mean i there's there's the risk of yes saying the wrong thing or offending

763
00:44:02,390 --> 00:44:07,430
somebody, uh, but there's also the more banal risk of just being boring, of just wasting

764
00:44:07,430 --> 00:44:09,190
people's time and attention.

765
00:44:09,590 --> 00:44:13,190
Because when you think I mean, time is a limited resource and attention is a limited

766
00:44:13,190 --> 00:44:13,510
resource.

767
00:44:13,590 --> 00:44:17,670
You know, cognitive scientists say that we can hold and working memory around seven

768
00:44:17,670 --> 00:44:21,920
different concepts or seven different ideas or pieces of information, which means that um

769
00:44:22,160 --> 00:44:28,080
if I take more of the collective resource of attention, that is uh uh inflicts opportunity

770
00:44:28,080 --> 00:44:32,560
costs on all of the other potentially more valuable things we could be paying attention to.

771
00:44:32,800 --> 00:44:36,640
We have all sorts of pejorative terms for people who take too much attention, you know,

772
00:44:36,800 --> 00:44:39,760
show-offs, attention whores, crybabies, whatever.

773
00:44:39,920 --> 00:44:45,120
And I think that i uh is analogous to a kind of greed, where if there's, you know, a a

774
00:44:45,120 --> 00:44:49,790
communal resource, let's say food, uh, and I'm already pretty well fed and I'm just

775
00:44:49,790 --> 00:44:53,230
hoarding it and taking it a lot of that food and not leaving enough for other people.

776
00:44:53,310 --> 00:44:54,910
I'm kind of greedy and selfish.

777
00:44:55,070 --> 00:44:57,310
The same is true of attention as a limited resource.

778
00:44:57,390 --> 00:45:02,430
If I'm taking too much uh of the communal resource of attention without providing any

779
00:45:02,430 --> 00:45:06,910
offsetting benefits to other people, I could be viewed as a greedy, selfish person.

780
00:45:07,420 --> 00:45:12,940
And so there's just the reluctance, I think, to take this communal resource of attention

781
00:45:12,940 --> 00:45:17,820
without being confident that one can provide offsetting benefits to it.

782
00:45:18,220 --> 00:45:18,460
Yeah.

783
00:45:18,700 --> 00:45:24,620
On that point, in hunter gatherer societies, there are rules for when the

784
00:45:24,620 --> 00:45:29,900
most important cultural stories are told, what we would call myths, the foundational, the

785
00:45:29,900 --> 00:45:33,580
things that are considered really important for people to learn and for you know to pass on

786
00:45:33,580 --> 00:45:34,700
to the next generation.

787
00:45:35,100 --> 00:45:40,930
And in temperate climates where you have harsh winters and long winter nights,

788
00:45:41,090 --> 00:45:42,610
that's when those stories are told.

789
00:45:42,690 --> 00:45:47,810
And it's very practical because economic activity is really low, right?

790
00:45:47,890 --> 00:45:52,210
People can't go out hunting because of the animals are hiding or they migrated.

791
00:45:52,370 --> 00:45:53,970
Plus, it's difficult, right?

792
00:45:54,050 --> 00:45:57,330
The air and ground conditions are very harsh.

793
00:45:58,690 --> 00:46:00,930
And people tend to gather indoors to keep warm.

794
00:46:01,010 --> 00:46:02,770
And so you have all this leisure time.

795
00:46:02,850 --> 00:46:05,820
And so that's used for education, right?

796
00:46:06,060 --> 00:46:10,540
Um, people have the attention to spare, they have the time to sit and listen to stories.

797
00:46:10,620 --> 00:46:16,380
And and stories, I mean, there are story um like epics um that took

798
00:46:16,380 --> 00:46:18,780
multiple nights to recount.

799
00:46:18,860 --> 00:46:23,100
I mean, some people say like a week or two um to recount the whole story.

800
00:46:23,260 --> 00:46:26,860
Um and the storytelling would go all on all night and then they would just pick it up the

801
00:46:26,860 --> 00:46:27,500
next night.

802
00:46:27,660 --> 00:46:30,940
Um so yeah, it takes a lot of a lot of attention, a lot of time.

803
00:46:31,100 --> 00:46:34,140
Um, and so um hunter gatherers manage that efficiently.

804
00:46:34,630 --> 00:46:35,590
Lord of the Rings.

805
00:46:35,670 --> 00:46:36,150
Yeah.

806
00:46:36,390 --> 00:46:36,710
Yeah.

807
00:46:37,830 --> 00:46:38,230
Right.

808
00:46:38,470 --> 00:46:38,870
Right.

809
00:46:39,110 --> 00:46:43,830
Michelle, I just want to ask a meta question, which is like the science of storytelling is

810
00:46:43,910 --> 00:46:48,710
and I know you've been again, you do more than that, but you're we're we're we're talking

811
00:46:48,710 --> 00:46:52,390
about cultural transmissions for this vehicle of storytelling, at least for now.

812
00:46:52,630 --> 00:46:58,630
Um is the cognitive science of stories or storytelling respected

813
00:46:58,790 --> 00:47:01,190
or even an area of research?

814
00:47:01,460 --> 00:47:07,380
um kind of proper because uh one can imagine sort of

815
00:47:07,380 --> 00:47:13,380
like play kids kids and women's stuff sort of gets poo-pooed from a from like a uh

816
00:47:13,380 --> 00:47:15,140
historical perspective.

817
00:47:16,900 --> 00:47:22,260
Does the psychology of storytelling get its due attention and

818
00:47:22,260 --> 00:47:26,260
deference from the perspective of this is a really important thing?

819
00:47:27,060 --> 00:47:28,820
Do you mean now, today?

820
00:47:29,230 --> 00:47:33,870
Uh yeah, now now, currently, and also, you know, in your in during your career, like was it

821
00:47:33,870 --> 00:47:34,270
difficult?

822
00:47:34,510 --> 00:47:40,190
Are there a lot of people who are studying storytelling from a cognitive cognitive science

823
00:47:40,190 --> 00:47:41,070
perspective?

824
00:47:41,470 --> 00:47:47,230
Do cognitive scientists who are who are more um traditional or psychologists

825
00:47:47,310 --> 00:47:51,630
uh understand that there's even something to study, that that kind of a thing, yeah.

826
00:47:52,120 --> 00:47:53,160
Um there are a few.

827
00:47:53,320 --> 00:47:57,800
Um uh Raymond Maher comes to mind and and Keith Oatley, but I think he's retired now.

828
00:47:57,960 --> 00:48:01,240
Um they look at um storytelling from a theory of mind perspective.

829
00:48:01,400 --> 00:48:05,320
Um, but no, generally, no, there's actually not a lot in Ev Psych.

830
00:48:05,800 --> 00:48:10,520
Um and I I often think I'm regarded as oh the the the little lady who studies storytelling,

831
00:48:10,600 --> 00:48:11,720
isn't she cute?

832
00:48:13,160 --> 00:48:19,080
Um but um but back in the 60s and 70s, and I think going into the 80s,

833
00:48:19,370 --> 00:48:22,810
there was a ton of research on narrative in cognitive science.

834
00:48:22,970 --> 00:48:27,050
And that's where when I was talking about the structure of narrative, it's interesting,

835
00:48:27,210 --> 00:48:31,770
literary scholars and cognitive psychologists agree on the basic structure of narrative,

836
00:48:31,930 --> 00:48:32,250
right?

837
00:48:32,810 --> 00:48:36,410
But I literary scholars are completely unaware of this body of research.

838
00:48:36,490 --> 00:48:39,530
And I think you know, cognitive psychologists who study narrative don't really pay

839
00:48:39,530 --> 00:48:41,130
attention to literary studies.

840
00:48:42,170 --> 00:48:45,240
But um, but but then it kind of died out.

841
00:48:45,320 --> 00:48:47,560
I don't I don't think there's a lot of people doing it now.

842
00:48:47,720 --> 00:48:53,320
Um but anyways, it was it was um the research was focused on um sort of outlining story

843
00:48:53,320 --> 00:48:56,840
grammars, that's what they call them, but basically the the structure of narrative.

844
00:48:57,080 --> 00:49:02,760
Um but um yeah, I don't know of a lot that's going on um nowadays um

845
00:49:03,240 --> 00:49:05,080
you know in cognitive science.

846
00:49:05,320 --> 00:49:05,720
Yeah.

847
00:49:06,120 --> 00:49:11,210
Um do uh humors often contain jokes and humor and laughter?

848
00:49:11,370 --> 00:49:15,850
Uh I know I I'm I'm personally interested in uh the evolutionary psychology of humor.

849
00:49:15,930 --> 00:49:18,330
I have a working paper uh that's under review.

850
00:49:18,410 --> 00:49:22,170
I'm curious um what the role of humor is in storytelling.

851
00:49:23,050 --> 00:49:24,330
It's demonic, right?

852
00:49:24,490 --> 00:49:26,250
If a story's funny, you remember it.

853
00:49:26,410 --> 00:49:30,860
Um so to give you an example, because I've been researching the you know the Blackfoot

854
00:49:30,860 --> 00:49:33,900
Nation because I just you know went to some of their sites.

855
00:49:34,060 --> 00:49:38,940
Um and um there's this story I've I've encountered four different versions of it you know

856
00:49:39,100 --> 00:49:45,100
collected by four different individuals um and and the stories it's the same basic story so

857
00:49:45,100 --> 00:49:50,850
their um one of their important um story beings is called

858
00:49:50,850 --> 00:49:51,490
old man.

859
00:49:51,570 --> 00:49:55,170
It's Nappy in in Blackfeet um in their language.

860
00:49:55,810 --> 00:50:00,450
But he's sort of a trickster and a creator, well not a creator figure, like a transformer

861
00:50:00,450 --> 00:50:00,770
figure.

862
00:50:00,850 --> 00:50:02,690
So he he made changes to the world.

863
00:50:03,090 --> 00:50:05,330
The world existed but then he changed it in certain ways.

864
00:50:05,410 --> 00:50:10,000
And he and he's credited with teaching the people how to make a living in, you know, in in

865
00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:11,200
the on the plains.

866
00:50:11,440 --> 00:50:17,200
Um anyway, so one day old man is walking along stream bank and he sees um some berries in

867
00:50:17,200 --> 00:50:17,920
the water, right?

868
00:50:18,000 --> 00:50:18,560
Berries.

869
00:50:18,720 --> 00:50:20,640
So he dives in to get the berries.

870
00:50:21,120 --> 00:50:21,840
No berries, right?

871
00:50:21,920 --> 00:50:26,320
So he just keeps diving in, diving, and finally he ties a rock around like his neck or some

872
00:50:26,320 --> 00:50:31,040
part of his body so he can stay down longer and he just he exhausts himself and and you

873
00:50:31,040 --> 00:50:32,960
know, you know, no luck, no berries.

874
00:50:33,170 --> 00:50:35,890
And so um at this point he's really pissed off.

875
00:50:35,970 --> 00:50:39,730
And uh so he climbs out of the water, he lays down on the bank, you know, in the shade to

876
00:50:39,730 --> 00:50:39,890
rest.

877
00:50:40,050 --> 00:50:44,690
He lays under under this bush and he looks up, and there are the berries.

878
00:50:44,850 --> 00:50:49,490
And so now he's super, super pissed off, and he takes a stick and he just starts whacking

879
00:50:49,490 --> 00:50:50,850
away at the bush, right?

880
00:50:50,930 --> 00:50:52,290
And the berries fall off.

881
00:50:52,370 --> 00:50:56,370
And the story ends with, and that's how Nappy taught us how to harvest berries, right?

882
00:50:56,530 --> 00:51:02,360
So it's this funny image, right, of this this and one of his incarnations is a coyote

883
00:51:02,600 --> 00:51:06,760
he you know he can transform himself so I get this visual image of you know like the coyote

884
00:51:06,920 --> 00:51:12,760
and roadrunner cartoons do you guys know those yeah um of you know the coyote just um

885
00:51:12,840 --> 00:51:17,320
you know and taking the stick and beating this poor bush um and then just ironically it

886
00:51:17,320 --> 00:51:22,360
turns out to be the most efficient way of harvesting the berries um anyway so trickster

887
00:51:22,360 --> 00:51:24,370
stories typically use humor.

888
00:51:24,530 --> 00:51:29,170
Um, the trickster, you know, his plans back just like the coyote, you know, his plans

889
00:51:29,170 --> 00:51:34,290
backfire, um, and he ends up being humiliated um or punished in some way.

890
00:51:34,370 --> 00:51:35,490
And and it's funny.

891
00:51:35,570 --> 00:51:38,930
Um, and it kind of balances the darkness because some of the things he does are really

892
00:51:38,930 --> 00:51:39,250
dark.

893
00:51:39,410 --> 00:51:40,770
Um, you know, the trickster.

894
00:51:41,010 --> 00:51:46,610
Um, and um, and so it just increases the salience, right, of of the story.

895
00:51:46,690 --> 00:51:50,130
It is funny, so you remember it, and you want to tell it to other people to make them

896
00:51:50,130 --> 00:51:51,010
laugh, right?

897
00:51:51,730 --> 00:51:53,340
Um super interesting.

898
00:51:53,500 --> 00:51:58,700
I I think it's it's consistent with my model of what humor is, which is it's about um

899
00:51:58,860 --> 00:52:03,260
mix-ups between two things that are costly for the person who mixed them up.

900
00:52:03,420 --> 00:52:07,020
In this case, it would be a mix-up between actual berries and a reflection of berries in

901
00:52:07,020 --> 00:52:11,740
the water, or a mix-up between a way of expressing anger and an effective way of harvesting

902
00:52:11,740 --> 00:52:12,220
berries.

903
00:52:12,300 --> 00:52:16,110
And these mix-ups are humorous because they're very costly for the person that's uh

904
00:52:16,110 --> 00:52:17,070
undergoing them.

905
00:52:17,150 --> 00:52:21,550
Uh and what we laugh to signal that there's been a mix-up and that I know that you know

906
00:52:21,550 --> 00:52:24,270
that there's been a mix-up, and you know that I know that there's been a mix-up, so we can

907
00:52:24,270 --> 00:52:25,950
diffuse uh its costs.

908
00:52:26,030 --> 00:52:30,590
And it's um it's cool to know that there's at least some ethnographic support for it.

909
00:52:30,750 --> 00:52:35,470
I know there's uh other uh cool support for it in that uh classic story uh from Napoleon

910
00:52:35,470 --> 00:52:41,220
Chanyon, where uh he tries to gather a genealogy of all the people in the community

911
00:52:41,620 --> 00:52:43,620
and he tries to get everyone's name and how they're related.

912
00:52:43,780 --> 00:52:47,860
And then and they and they give him all these hilarious uh profane names on blanking on

913
00:52:47,940 --> 00:52:49,300
what the specific ones were.

914
00:52:49,540 --> 00:52:49,860
Yeah.

915
00:52:50,260 --> 00:52:52,900
Full of like bestiality and you know stuff like that.

916
00:52:53,380 --> 00:52:53,540
Yeah.

917
00:52:54,020 --> 00:52:54,340
Uh-huh.

918
00:52:54,660 --> 00:52:54,900
Yeah.

919
00:52:55,540 --> 00:52:55,940
Yep.

920
00:52:56,180 --> 00:53:00,340
Um yeah, and it's and another element to trickster stories is um you know the humor is

921
00:53:00,340 --> 00:53:06,310
often ridicule, right um the trickster is is ridiculed um and that's um a s

922
00:53:06,550 --> 00:53:11,750
a social sanctioning tactic it's a it's a uh it's a strategy used to um

923
00:53:11,990 --> 00:53:16,630
keep people from you know breaking you know violating social norms or um getting you know

924
00:53:16,710 --> 00:53:21,190
too high opinion of themselves right becoming overly dominant um it's it's a leveling

925
00:53:21,190 --> 00:53:26,630
mechanism yeah um and so trickster stories also teach they have lessons about proper and

926
00:53:26,630 --> 00:53:31,360
improper social behavior cool All right.

927
00:53:31,600 --> 00:53:32,240
Very interesting.

928
00:53:32,400 --> 00:53:35,280
Um, I'm kind of curious about your take on songs.

929
00:53:35,440 --> 00:53:37,040
Is it the same as the story take?

930
00:53:37,120 --> 00:53:41,040
Is it that music is an effective way of transmitting information?

931
00:53:41,200 --> 00:53:45,040
But then, you know, if so, it sort of leads to the question of why do we often like music

932
00:53:45,040 --> 00:53:47,520
that has no uh w words in it?

933
00:53:47,680 --> 00:53:50,480
Um so I'm curious what what your take is on on song.

934
00:53:50,880 --> 00:53:52,000
Yeah, I don't study music.

935
00:53:52,160 --> 00:53:54,080
You know, I I I've only looked at song.

936
00:53:54,240 --> 00:54:00,030
Um so I got interested in song because um a lot of um uh stories, particularly etiological

937
00:54:00,030 --> 00:54:04,510
animal tales, um have the the animals have a song that's associated with them.

938
00:54:04,590 --> 00:54:10,190
They sing a little song, and the song references um some distinctive you know feature of

939
00:54:10,190 --> 00:54:13,710
that animal, um its habitat, what it eats, something like that.

940
00:54:13,950 --> 00:54:17,310
And um the song serves kind of as a catchphrase.

941
00:54:17,390 --> 00:54:19,630
Um, and the analogy I like to use is the Simpsons.

942
00:54:19,790 --> 00:54:22,750
Someone pointed out that all the characters, all the main characters on The Simpsons,

943
00:54:22,990 --> 00:54:26,670
except for um Lisa, um have a catchphrase.

944
00:54:26,750 --> 00:54:28,440
All right, so Homer's is though.

945
00:54:28,840 --> 00:54:32,760
Marge's is not really a phrase, but um uh Mr.

946
00:54:32,840 --> 00:54:34,840
Burns is excellent, right?

947
00:54:35,000 --> 00:54:36,520
Um and so it's a mnemonic, right?

948
00:54:36,600 --> 00:54:40,120
It's a it's a way of remembering something distinctive about that character, right?

949
00:54:40,520 --> 00:54:40,680
Mr.

950
00:54:40,760 --> 00:54:43,000
Burns is, you know, the he's greedy, right?

951
00:54:43,640 --> 00:54:44,600
Excellent, right?

952
00:54:45,080 --> 00:54:50,510
Um and um and and these songs um they're um they they serve a similar function, right?

953
00:54:50,590 --> 00:54:55,070
They they um they enable you to remember something really salient, really, really important

954
00:54:55,070 --> 00:54:56,030
about that animal.

955
00:54:56,270 --> 00:55:01,870
Um and um and so these songs, the the animal, when it you know comes onto the scene, it'll

956
00:55:01,870 --> 00:55:04,830
sing its little song, and and this occurs several times in the story.

957
00:55:04,910 --> 00:55:09,230
So, you know, it's repeated, right, to make sure you learn, right, what what that animal

958
00:55:09,390 --> 00:55:10,110
song is.

959
00:55:10,270 --> 00:55:16,100
Um, but then also in some cultures, um, most notably Aboriginal Australia,

960
00:55:16,660 --> 00:55:18,740
they have these things called the song lines.

961
00:55:18,900 --> 00:55:24,340
And these are songs that they're really short and really compressed, but they

962
00:55:25,380 --> 00:55:31,220
they recount, recount is probably too strong a word, but but they reference an episode

963
00:55:31,220 --> 00:55:33,620
in an important story in that culture.

964
00:55:34,020 --> 00:55:37,060
And people will sing them as they travel, as they walk along.

965
00:55:37,620 --> 00:55:42,690
And so it's kind of a shorthand way of encoding information.

966
00:55:43,170 --> 00:55:45,330
And it's something that's really easy to do, right?

967
00:55:45,410 --> 00:55:46,610
You can sing the song.

968
00:55:46,930 --> 00:55:48,690
And you know, we like to sing.

969
00:55:49,250 --> 00:55:52,770
And so that encourages repetition, right?

970
00:55:53,010 --> 00:55:55,410
And that supports memorization, right?

971
00:55:55,570 --> 00:55:58,210
Retention of the information that's encoded in the song.

972
00:55:58,610 --> 00:56:02,210
Rituals also have songs in them, and the songs reference.

973
00:56:02,530 --> 00:56:08,300
So there's again Aboriginal Australia, there are women's ceremonies that involve certain

974
00:56:08,300 --> 00:56:10,060
plants that you know that are important.

975
00:56:10,460 --> 00:56:16,460
And the songs reference some aspect of like the processing the processing of that

976
00:56:16,460 --> 00:56:18,060
plant or the harvesting of that plant.

977
00:56:18,140 --> 00:56:23,820
So they the songs encode information about basically how to how to find that

978
00:56:23,820 --> 00:56:27,580
resource, how to harvest it, how to process it, what it's used for.

979
00:56:27,900 --> 00:56:33,870
And they also have dances that act out the pro the actual physical process of of

980
00:56:33,870 --> 00:56:34,910
harvesting the plant.

981
00:56:34,990 --> 00:56:37,630
So you know encoding that in muscle memory.

982
00:56:38,750 --> 00:56:42,030
So that's that's sort of as far as I've gotten with song.

983
00:56:42,510 --> 00:56:46,350
I think it bears oh oh no one more Aboriginal Australian example.

984
00:56:46,750 --> 00:56:49,550
That there's little songs that um adults sing to children.

985
00:56:49,630 --> 00:56:54,560
They teach the children that basically tell about the animal, um, you know, some important

986
00:56:54,560 --> 00:56:57,360
thing about the animal, what it what it eats, where you can find it.

987
00:56:57,520 --> 00:57:02,000
Um, and so children go around singing these songs and they they they're learning

988
00:57:02,000 --> 00:57:04,400
zoological, you know, information.

989
00:57:04,800 --> 00:57:07,440
Um That's uh that's really fascinating.

990
00:57:07,520 --> 00:57:10,320
Um and it and it mirrors a lot of educational practice as well.

991
00:57:10,960 --> 00:57:11,280
Right, right.

992
00:57:11,600 --> 00:57:16,160
Very easy for kids to remember stuff if you if you put it in into a song or into a story.

993
00:57:16,320 --> 00:57:19,440
Um it's just a it's a provenly proven effective strategy.

994
00:57:19,840 --> 00:57:20,000
Right.

995
00:57:20,050 --> 00:57:21,410
Like advertising jingles, right?

996
00:57:21,570 --> 00:57:23,570
I mean you just can't get them out of your head, right?

997
00:57:24,050 --> 00:57:24,210
Yeah.

998
00:57:24,370 --> 00:57:24,450
Yeah.

999
00:57:24,690 --> 00:57:30,370
So I'm curious, like in light of this, do do you view storytelling and song, do you view

1000
00:57:30,370 --> 00:57:36,290
these as as proper adaptations, where the the function is to effectively transmit uh

1001
00:57:36,450 --> 00:57:42,280
information about, say, the ecology or about relationships or threats, um or or

1002
00:57:42,360 --> 00:57:46,440
or to signal you know qualities about the storyteller or the singer or or to or to remember

1003
00:57:46,440 --> 00:57:46,920
certain information.

1004
00:57:47,080 --> 00:57:51,320
Is that are these proper adaptations or I mean another view you could take is that these

1005
00:57:51,320 --> 00:57:56,760
are actually byproducts of adaptations and that as people try to figure out what's the best

1006
00:57:56,760 --> 00:58:00,680
way to communicate this information, what's the best way to remember this information about

1007
00:58:00,680 --> 00:58:01,890
this animal.

1008
00:58:02,050 --> 00:58:05,250
What's the best way to uh get people to remember what I'm telling them?

1009
00:58:05,410 --> 00:58:10,450
What's the best way to like get my kids appropriately afraid of this animal or this plant?

1010
00:58:10,610 --> 00:58:15,250
And in, you know, through processes of trial and error and figuring out what works in

1011
00:58:15,250 --> 00:58:20,770
achieving my goals here and what doesn't, people just hit upon stories and songs as an

1012
00:58:20,770 --> 00:58:23,660
effective way to achieve those uh social goals.

1013
00:58:23,740 --> 00:58:27,900
And then through social learning, people just the the most successful ones get passed on

1014
00:58:27,980 --> 00:58:30,140
and they stick around and people imitate them.

1015
00:58:30,300 --> 00:58:34,780
And it's really more of a byproduct of other social goals rather than an the rather than a

1016
00:58:34,940 --> 00:58:36,380
an adaptation in its own right.

1017
00:58:36,540 --> 00:58:41,180
So do you view these things uh um uh so so which sort of side of the spectrum are are you

1018
00:58:41,260 --> 00:58:44,940
are you more close to in in terms of viewing storytelling and song?

1019
00:58:45,370 --> 00:58:49,130
I think they're inventions that are built on adaptations.

1020
00:58:49,210 --> 00:58:53,450
There are certain cognitive um abilities that you have to have in order to do these things,

1021
00:58:53,530 --> 00:58:56,730
you know, symbolic behavior, language, you know.

1022
00:58:56,890 --> 00:59:00,890
Um, but no, I think that they're inventions, and like you said, they're things that you

1023
00:59:00,890 --> 00:59:03,690
know humans have stumbled upon probably initially, right?

1024
00:59:03,770 --> 00:59:08,570
And then realize, oh, this is really effective, right, for getting people's attention, um,

1025
00:59:08,810 --> 00:59:12,810
for you know, getting them emotionally engaged, getting them to remember, you know, my

1026
00:59:12,810 --> 00:59:13,450
kids, right?

1027
00:59:13,700 --> 00:59:17,860
I need I want my kids to, you know, don't go wandering around in the forest at night, you

1028
00:59:17,860 --> 00:59:18,260
know, alone.

1029
00:59:18,500 --> 00:59:20,660
Um how can I discourage them from doing that, right?

1030
00:59:20,740 --> 00:59:22,180
And so you just hit upon these solutions.

1031
00:59:22,260 --> 00:59:26,900
And I and I think cognitive biases um are involved in this as well.

1032
00:59:27,060 --> 00:59:32,740
Um so hunter-gatherers don't leave um the transmission of important information to the

1033
00:59:32,740 --> 00:59:34,260
winds of cognitive bias, right?

1034
00:59:34,340 --> 00:59:35,940
But they exploit them.

1035
00:59:36,100 --> 00:59:42,020
Um so um, so like counterfactuals, um, you know, including um, you know,

1036
00:59:42,210 --> 00:59:46,850
one or two counterfactual representations, you know, in a story, right?

1037
00:59:47,250 --> 00:59:49,970
You know, about say an animal, like talking animals, right?

1038
00:59:50,130 --> 00:59:53,090
So at some point they probably stumbled across this, right?

1039
00:59:53,650 --> 00:59:58,450
Oh, when I, you know, say characterize the animals as talking, oh, people remember that,

1040
00:59:58,690 --> 00:59:59,010
right?

1041
00:59:59,330 --> 01:00:05,040
Um, and or when I, you know, say that, oh, this this animal person was capable of

1042
01:00:05,040 --> 01:00:08,000
transforming you know him or herself you know into something else.

1043
01:00:08,160 --> 01:00:09,120
Oh, that sticks.

1044
01:00:09,200 --> 01:00:10,320
People remember that.

1045
01:00:10,480 --> 01:00:16,320
Um and so yes, I think that they're um they're in the inventions um built on you know

1046
01:00:16,480 --> 01:00:18,160
already existing adaptations.

1047
01:00:18,400 --> 01:00:18,720
Yeah.

1048
01:00:19,040 --> 01:00:19,280
Yeah.

1049
01:00:19,440 --> 01:00:24,960
It seems like it it ties nicely into um Manvir Singh's work on on subjective

1050
01:00:24,970 --> 01:00:29,610
selection and how cultural evolution often takes the form of people trying things out in

1051
01:00:29,610 --> 01:00:34,250
terms of uh you know uh what is going to successfully serve my goals and what is not, uh

1052
01:00:34,330 --> 01:00:38,890
what is useful, what is not, and remembering the things that are useful uh and effective

1053
01:00:38,970 --> 01:00:40,890
and uh discarding the things that aren't.

1054
01:00:40,970 --> 01:00:46,570
And through this process of selecting the most personally advantageous cultural variants,

1055
01:00:46,650 --> 01:00:49,130
um, cultures evolve in in particular directions.

1056
01:00:49,290 --> 01:00:52,880
That there's there's some inventions that are just objectively good, like stories.

1057
01:00:53,040 --> 01:00:58,160
And those tend to recur in cultures around the world because it's just inherently effective

1058
01:00:58,160 --> 01:01:02,800
at achieving various uh communicative and information transmission functions.

1059
01:01:02,960 --> 01:01:07,760
Um, and so he has argued similar things about shamanism, that it has particular properties

1060
01:01:07,760 --> 01:01:13,760
that are useful in satisfying people's goals um for uh uh healing, for

1061
01:01:13,760 --> 01:01:19,410
um uh uh uh capturing people's attention, signaling uh various uh beneficial qualities uh

1062
01:01:19,410 --> 01:01:23,810
among shamans for uh um there are also political functions to it.

1063
01:01:23,890 --> 01:01:28,130
Uh I'm I'm I'm sort of oversimplifying it, but um, do you do you buy this uh emerging

1064
01:01:28,130 --> 01:01:33,490
perspective that a lot of that a really potent uh driver of cultural evolution is sort of

1065
01:01:33,490 --> 01:01:39,170
instrumental reasoning uh that's seated atop these more basic uh social uh and evolved

1066
01:01:39,170 --> 01:01:39,650
goals?

1067
01:01:40,130 --> 01:01:41,890
Yeah, I mean that makes perfect sense to me.

1068
01:01:42,050 --> 01:01:48,020
Um yeah, it's um okay, we can take our ability to you know reason counterfactually,

1069
01:01:48,180 --> 01:01:53,460
our ability to, you know, our um really sophisticated understanding of cause and effect,

1070
01:01:53,620 --> 01:01:59,220
and we can use those things to envision um solutions to problems um and then you know

1071
01:01:59,380 --> 01:02:00,420
test them out, right?

1072
01:02:00,500 --> 01:02:03,620
And then what what works we keep, what doesn't work, we discard.

1073
01:02:03,780 --> 01:02:05,060
It's like try something else.

1074
01:02:05,220 --> 01:02:05,860
Yeah.

1075
01:02:06,420 --> 01:02:06,980
Cool.

1076
01:02:07,270 --> 01:02:12,470
Um, I'm kind of curious about your take on um the modern environment, which is in many ways

1077
01:02:12,710 --> 01:02:17,510
very different from uh uh a hunter gatherer society or what we think of as the uh a

1078
01:02:17,510 --> 01:02:19,510
variable ancestral environment.

1079
01:02:19,670 --> 01:02:25,670
Um we're obviously uh on um we're using a a recording uh technology

1080
01:02:25,670 --> 01:02:26,070
right now.

1081
01:02:26,230 --> 01:02:30,470
People who are listening to this are listening probably on a podcast app uh on their

1082
01:02:30,470 --> 01:02:31,030
phones.

1083
01:02:31,110 --> 01:02:34,710
Um their phones are connected to the internet and have social media and we're bombarded

1084
01:02:34,710 --> 01:02:37,720
with various stories, both real and fictional.

1085
01:02:37,880 --> 01:02:43,800
Um, do you view the modern environment as presenting us with any um mismatches

1086
01:02:43,800 --> 01:02:49,560
that might be inappropriately uh hijacking our evolved psychology, or do you view the

1087
01:02:49,560 --> 01:02:54,280
modern incarnations of of these stories and songs as continuous with what we might have

1088
01:02:54,280 --> 01:02:56,680
encountered in the ancestral environment?

1089
01:02:57,510 --> 01:02:59,350
I'm just thinking fake news.

1090
01:03:01,590 --> 01:03:07,270
This technology really enables um the greatly enables the

1091
01:03:07,270 --> 01:03:11,430
dissemination of manipulative narratives, right?

1092
01:03:11,590 --> 01:03:16,470
That are you know rooted in self-interest as opposed to helping your group members, right?

1093
01:03:16,790 --> 01:03:20,710
Um I don't study modern storytelling, so I don't really want to say too much about it.

1094
01:03:20,790 --> 01:03:23,430
I don't I don't feel like I have the the expertise.

1095
01:03:23,590 --> 01:03:29,060
Um, But certainly there's a proliferation of what might be characterized as

1096
01:03:29,060 --> 01:03:32,580
nefarious storytelling in today's world.

1097
01:03:33,060 --> 01:03:38,260
Is that just to clarify is the idea that I I think I heard you already answer this, but I

1098
01:03:38,260 --> 01:03:42,980
want to clarify is the idea that in a smaller scale social world, there's monitoring.

1099
01:03:43,140 --> 01:03:48,530
For example, if Michelle, if you're telling us something, we're sort of monitoring the the

1100
01:03:48,770 --> 01:03:54,690
the consequences or and even externalities of the of what your stories are doing

1101
01:03:54,930 --> 01:04:00,770
and if we feel like it's not in our interest over time we're gonna stop listening to you

1102
01:04:01,170 --> 01:04:07,010
but the idea is that if you have a technology for creating representations

1103
01:04:07,010 --> 01:04:12,680
in people far away and distal from you you don't care about what

1104
01:04:12,760 --> 01:04:17,400
consequences it has on them, only insofar as it benefits you.

1105
01:04:17,800 --> 01:04:23,720
So, by in the same way, like a vector of a disease of a mosquito makes it so you don't

1106
01:04:23,720 --> 01:04:26,680
care about the hosts, you know, being able to walk around.

1107
01:04:26,920 --> 01:04:32,920
If the technology is that if I can get something um beneficial by

1108
01:04:32,920 --> 01:04:38,470
saying it, and I'm not so close to you socially, there's going to just be selection for

1109
01:04:38,470 --> 01:04:39,830
more exploitative content.

1110
01:04:39,910 --> 01:04:40,710
Is that the idea?

1111
01:04:40,790 --> 01:04:43,750
That there's not feedback from the social world in the same way.

1112
01:04:44,150 --> 01:04:46,150
I I would say that that makes sense to me.

1113
01:04:46,230 --> 01:04:52,150
Um, yeah, in um, you know, small scale hunter-gather societies, um there are checks

1114
01:04:52,150 --> 01:04:53,670
on antisocial behavior, right?

1115
01:04:53,750 --> 01:04:59,240
So if it people discover that someone's been lying and they've been lying um in a um, you

1116
01:04:59,240 --> 01:05:04,680
know, in a way that serves their interests at the cost of the the the interest of the group

1117
01:05:04,680 --> 01:05:09,960
as a whole, then that person is going to suffer negative, they're going to be sanctioned,

1118
01:05:10,040 --> 01:05:11,160
negatively sanctioned, right?

1119
01:05:11,240 --> 01:05:15,320
They may be um the people just ignore them, they'll stop cooperating with them, they might

1120
01:05:15,400 --> 01:05:16,840
might kick them out of the group, right?

1121
01:05:16,920 --> 01:05:18,200
There are consequences to that.

1122
01:05:18,440 --> 01:05:22,440
On this, on that point, though, um, I was talking about storytelling rules earlier.

1123
01:05:22,600 --> 01:05:27,130
Uh, one of the rules is that when these you know culturally important stories are being

1124
01:05:27,130 --> 01:05:32,890
told, the audience is allowed and typically expected to

1125
01:05:32,890 --> 01:05:37,850
correct the narrator if the narrator deviates from the culturally accepted version?

1126
01:05:37,930 --> 01:05:41,210
So there are checks on accuracy, right?

1127
01:05:41,610 --> 01:05:44,970
And people will say, that's not how it's how it goes, that's not right.

1128
01:05:45,180 --> 01:05:49,180
And then the group will the story will stop and the group will have a discussion and they

1129
01:05:49,180 --> 01:05:51,340
reach agreement on the correct version.

1130
01:05:51,500 --> 01:05:55,900
So that's because you know, um fidelity is a big problem in oral cultures, right?

1131
01:05:56,140 --> 01:06:01,260
Um, because yeah, the the the story the and the information in it could get corrupted or

1132
01:06:01,340 --> 01:06:03,500
could get lost or could get corrupted over time.

1133
01:06:03,660 --> 01:06:09,100
And so um hunter-gatherer societies have um strategies for um maintaining

1134
01:06:09,100 --> 01:06:10,550
fidelity, accuracy.

1135
01:06:10,790 --> 01:06:11,110
That's interesting.

1136
01:06:11,270 --> 01:06:16,310
And and and also, you know, sort of checking the authority of the the narrator, right?

1137
01:06:16,790 --> 01:06:21,990
That's and there's people say like there's um a lot of um anthropologists express

1138
01:06:22,070 --> 01:06:25,430
frustration and ethnolinguists and you know they ask someone to tell a story and they'll

1139
01:06:25,430 --> 01:06:27,190
say I I can't tell that story.

1140
01:06:27,270 --> 01:06:32,470
I I'm not it's I'm not authorized to tell it um because I don't know it well enough, right?

1141
01:06:32,550 --> 01:06:36,920
And there's there's real there are social consequences um to doing that.

1142
01:06:37,080 --> 01:06:43,000
There's a story about an anthropologist who asked an older man in, I forget what group

1143
01:06:43,000 --> 01:06:45,240
it was, to tell a story and he refused to tell it.

1144
01:06:45,320 --> 01:06:47,960
I don't know what his reasons were, but he refused to tell it.

1145
01:06:48,280 --> 01:06:49,080
He knew it.

1146
01:06:49,400 --> 01:06:52,440
But then his daughter stepped up and said, and she was an adult, right?

1147
01:06:52,520 --> 01:06:53,720
She said, I'll tell it.

1148
01:06:53,880 --> 01:06:58,040
So she started telling it, and the father was nearby, and at one point he interrupted her

1149
01:06:58,120 --> 01:07:01,000
and he said, If you're gonna tell the story, tell it right.

1150
01:07:01,240 --> 01:07:02,680
She wasn't telling it right.

1151
01:07:03,240 --> 01:07:07,530
So, yeah, so there are mechanisms um for yeah, controlling these things.

1152
01:07:08,170 --> 01:07:09,130
That's that's really cool.

1153
01:07:09,290 --> 01:07:14,570
I mean it it reminds me a lot of um Dan Sperber's work on cultural attraction and how the

1154
01:07:14,570 --> 01:07:20,250
processes that lead to uh a a a cultural variant being stable or being faithfully

1155
01:07:20,250 --> 01:07:24,330
transmitted from one person to another or from one generation to another are in many ways

1156
01:07:24,330 --> 01:07:28,410
extremely complicated and and cannot be taken for granted or brushed aside because that

1157
01:07:28,410 --> 01:07:30,250
itself is the thing that we want to explain.

1158
01:07:30,410 --> 01:07:33,260
How does an idea remain stable in a culture?

1159
01:07:33,420 --> 01:07:34,220
How does it persist?

1160
01:07:34,380 --> 01:07:35,980
How does it get faithfully transmitted?

1161
01:07:36,060 --> 01:07:40,460
And there are lots of psychological and social processes that we need to investigate to

1162
01:07:40,460 --> 01:07:42,060
figure out uh how that works.

1163
01:07:42,140 --> 01:07:46,060
And so it's an interesting example of that problem that we can't just take for granted that

1164
01:07:46,060 --> 01:07:50,620
a story is going to be faithfully replicated from one mind to another, that there are a lot

1165
01:07:50,620 --> 01:07:56,060
of different social processes that could lead to that failing to occur or that occurring.

1166
01:07:56,510 --> 01:08:01,070
Um, and uh another thing you you mentioned that's that's really interesting to me is the

1167
01:08:01,070 --> 01:08:05,070
use of storytelling for political or manipulative purposes.

1168
01:08:05,230 --> 01:08:09,710
So it may be that you know what my goal could be altruistic if I'm telling a story to my

1169
01:08:09,710 --> 01:08:14,590
kids to get them appropriately uh uh afraid of a particular danger in the environment.

1170
01:08:14,750 --> 01:08:18,420
That's an altruistic goal that I'm trying to help uh my kids.

1171
01:08:18,580 --> 01:08:21,380
Uh, but it's possible that my goal might not be so altruistic.

1172
01:08:21,460 --> 01:08:24,740
I might want to mobilize my group against uh an outgroup.

1173
01:08:24,900 --> 01:08:28,980
I might want to mobilize someone against a leader that I'm in competition with.

1174
01:08:29,060 --> 01:08:33,940
And in so doing storytelling can also be a really useful way of achieving that goal.

1175
01:08:34,100 --> 01:08:40,100
I can mobilize opposition to the hated outgroup by by telling um a a story about how

1176
01:08:40,100 --> 01:08:43,700
they are devious, how they've been, you know, eating children or or whatever.

1177
01:08:43,860 --> 01:08:45,140
And that can be a really effective way.

1178
01:08:46,590 --> 01:08:47,150
Yeah, exactly.

1179
01:08:47,550 --> 01:08:47,710
Sorry.

1180
01:08:47,950 --> 01:08:48,110
Yes.

1181
01:08:48,350 --> 01:08:48,670
I know.

1182
01:08:48,910 --> 01:08:51,550
I know a little too troubling how how close to home this is hitting.

1183
01:08:51,950 --> 01:08:54,270
But yeah, uh they're they're they're eating cats and dogs.

1184
01:08:54,350 --> 01:08:59,070
They're uh you know uh uh using the blood of Christian babies and baking it into their

1185
01:08:59,070 --> 01:08:59,790
matzo, you know.

1186
01:08:59,950 --> 01:09:04,270
You know there there are tons of examples of these stories and um there's interesting you

1187
01:09:04,270 --> 01:09:09,720
know uh work um by Don Horowitz on on how um a lot of ethnic

1188
01:09:09,720 --> 01:09:15,480
riots um start with some rumor about uh a member of an outgroup uh

1189
01:09:15,480 --> 01:09:19,080
committing some horrible atrocity against a member of the in-group.

1190
01:09:19,240 --> 01:09:21,880
And that's often what precipitates violence.

1191
01:09:22,120 --> 01:09:26,760
So have you have you thought about the role of storytelling um for for political or

1192
01:09:26,760 --> 01:09:31,640
coalitional purposes, uh, and whether uh the logic there is the same or whether it's

1193
01:09:31,640 --> 01:09:32,360
different?

1194
01:09:45,510 --> 01:09:47,510
Which is of course a form of storytelling, right?

1195
01:09:47,670 --> 01:09:52,150
Um, so you know, maybe behind the scenes talking to, you know, certain people um and trying

1196
01:09:52,150 --> 01:09:55,750
to persuade them of certain things about, you know, those people over there are evil.

1197
01:09:55,830 --> 01:09:57,830
We really need to do something about it.

1198
01:09:58,070 --> 01:10:03,560
Um, but um, but I haven't come across um reports of people

1199
01:10:03,880 --> 01:10:09,880
um you know telling stories um you know to rile people up um you know as sort of calls

1200
01:10:09,880 --> 01:10:15,640
to action um not like you see in modern environments um yeah um

1201
01:10:16,200 --> 01:10:22,040
is it is it just because um th uh ethnic violence or integroup violence is just more

1202
01:10:22,040 --> 01:10:24,030
rare in these societies.

1203
01:10:24,110 --> 01:10:28,430
And that, you know, if they were to occur more frequently, you might view, might see rumors

1204
01:10:28,430 --> 01:10:33,790
or or uh demonizing narratives precipitating them, or or is it is it some other difference

1205
01:10:33,790 --> 01:10:36,750
between uh uh those two environments?

1206
01:10:37,950 --> 01:10:39,790
Um I I don't know.

1207
01:10:40,110 --> 01:10:43,070
I mean, I there are people do tell war narratives, right?

1208
01:10:43,150 --> 01:10:44,910
They keep they these are oral histories, right?

1209
01:10:44,990 --> 01:10:50,510
They keep track of um you know battles um and who you know who their enemies are.

1210
01:10:50,670 --> 01:10:56,340
And so um these are these stories are told as part of people's training

1211
01:10:56,660 --> 01:11:02,020
because they also include information about tactics that were used and casualties, how many

1212
01:11:02,020 --> 01:11:04,820
people were killed, how many people were involved in the fighting, right?

1213
01:11:05,540 --> 01:11:08,740
And you know what which tactics were successful, which weren't.

1214
01:11:09,140 --> 01:11:15,140
But it's really it's more of an educational thing, a prepar you know, preparation, um,

1215
01:11:15,540 --> 01:11:21,190
not so much um as propaganda, you know, to actually call people to action.

1216
01:11:21,430 --> 01:11:27,350
Um so I that's about all I could, you know, s say to, you know, on the subject.

1217
01:11:27,510 --> 01:11:30,070
Um it's um yeah.

1218
01:11:31,110 --> 01:11:31,350
Cool.

1219
01:11:31,510 --> 01:11:33,510
Yeah, it reminds me of uh Anthony Lopez.

1220
01:11:33,670 --> 01:11:37,670
I mean it might also I mean just to just follow up with David's point, it might be that if

1221
01:11:37,670 --> 01:11:43,380
you look at propaganda, it has this structure, but it's that the base rate of

1222
01:11:43,380 --> 01:11:47,220
propaganda occurring is sort of variable, at least.

1223
01:11:47,300 --> 01:11:52,500
Um, so that if you if you're I think like Amp Anthony has he's got that paper in leadership

1224
01:11:52,500 --> 01:11:57,940
quarterly about making my problem your problem, about sort of demagoguery and the the

1225
01:11:58,180 --> 01:12:04,020
structure of making my interests your interests by telling narratives

1226
01:12:04,020 --> 01:12:05,620
about outgroups, for example.

1227
01:12:06,170 --> 01:12:10,650
There is another dimension to war narratives that might speak to um your question, David,

1228
01:12:11,290 --> 01:12:17,050
which is that in you know recounting past battles, um, I mean some of them are

1229
01:12:17,210 --> 01:12:21,050
the the there they recount atrocities, right?

1230
01:12:21,370 --> 01:12:27,220
And um and so in in so doing that mean they teach people okay what you know, those people

1231
01:12:27,220 --> 01:12:31,780
over there who aren't friendly with us, who are our enemies, um, what they might do to you,

1232
01:12:31,940 --> 01:12:32,260
right?

1233
01:12:32,340 --> 01:12:36,660
And so they instill fear and um, you know, motivate people to be prepared.

1234
01:12:36,740 --> 01:12:41,700
Um, but they, you know, they probably do stir up animosity or, you know, keep they keep the

1235
01:12:41,700 --> 01:12:43,060
animosity going, right?

1236
01:12:43,220 --> 01:12:45,300
Instead of saying, oh, let's make peace with those people.

1237
01:12:45,380 --> 01:12:49,700
It's like, you know, it cut in my grandfather's time, those people did the this to us,

1238
01:12:49,860 --> 01:12:50,020
right?

1239
01:12:50,340 --> 01:12:52,420
And they're just, they are horrific stories.

1240
01:12:53,300 --> 01:12:56,650
But um so so there might be that going on, right?

1241
01:12:56,890 --> 01:12:59,530
Um you can't trust those people over there, right?

1242
01:12:59,610 --> 01:13:01,290
They did these terrible things to us.

1243
01:13:01,530 --> 01:13:02,650
Um, yeah.

1244
01:13:03,130 --> 01:13:03,850
Super interesting.

1245
01:13:04,090 --> 01:13:04,250
Yeah.

1246
01:13:04,410 --> 01:13:10,410
And also makes the relationship between history or at least a a modern version of history

1247
01:13:11,210 --> 01:13:17,050
as a concept versus sort of, you know, um social propaganda.

1248
01:13:17,210 --> 01:13:22,090
The dividing line between those, you know, I think there's there's a lot of scholarship on

1249
01:13:22,090 --> 01:13:25,610
arguing that almost all history is social propaganda in one way or another.

1250
01:13:25,720 --> 01:13:26,200
Um yeah.

1251
01:13:26,520 --> 01:13:26,840
Right.

1252
01:13:27,080 --> 01:13:27,560
Right.

1253
01:13:27,880 --> 01:13:30,040
History is told by the victors, right?

1254
01:13:30,840 --> 01:13:31,160
Yeah.

1255
01:13:31,880 --> 01:13:32,200
For sure.

1256
01:13:33,800 --> 01:13:34,040
Yeah.

1257
01:13:34,200 --> 01:13:37,400
No, it it makes you you wonder, you know, how much of the history is right.

1258
01:13:37,560 --> 01:13:40,600
I mean, I ideally you'd you'd want to triangulate and try to get, you know, multiple

1259
01:13:40,600 --> 01:13:43,960
propagandists at least so you can, you know, figure out what, you know, where the truth

1260
01:13:43,960 --> 01:13:46,040
lies with the different uh propagandists.

1261
01:13:46,200 --> 01:13:50,350
Um but if you only if it's only told by the victors, that that poses a major problem.

1262
01:13:51,390 --> 01:13:55,150
There's one particular horrific account that was witnessed by um I don't know if it was

1263
01:13:55,150 --> 01:13:58,270
European or American, but by a non-native person.

1264
01:13:58,430 --> 01:14:03,070
Um he was he'd hired um some local, you know, native people as guides.

1265
01:14:03,150 --> 01:14:04,430
He was an explorer.

1266
01:14:04,670 --> 01:14:10,540
And um in the course of exploring, wherever they were exploring, um they um

1267
01:14:10,540 --> 01:14:15,180
paused, the the people paused to um they came across some an enemy group and they paused to

1268
01:14:15,180 --> 01:14:15,980
massacre them.

1269
01:14:16,140 --> 01:14:19,420
And this guy, you know, he saw it and he so he reported it.

1270
01:14:19,580 --> 01:14:23,500
So, you know, you can you that that provides somewhat of a check, right?

1271
01:14:23,660 --> 01:14:28,140
Um against um, you know, it addresses the question of, you know, are these accounts

1272
01:14:28,140 --> 01:14:29,020
exaggerated, right?

1273
01:14:29,100 --> 01:14:33,510
Are they are they, you know, propagandistic or are they, you know, truthful?

1274
01:14:33,910 --> 01:14:34,710
Um, yeah.

1275
01:14:35,110 --> 01:14:38,790
A good, a good just to editorialize for a second, a good littness test is probably very

1276
01:14:38,790 --> 01:14:42,950
analogous to like the interpersonal history where like if somebody doesn't think they've

1277
01:14:42,950 --> 01:14:47,590
ever made a mistake, uh, it's probably a good sign that they're not being quite accurate,

1278
01:14:47,670 --> 01:14:47,830
right?

1279
01:14:47,990 --> 01:14:53,270
In the same way of like if you're if you're allergic to saying that my social identity, um

1280
01:14:53,780 --> 01:14:59,540
whatever that is, a country or you know, whatever has never done anything wrong versus, you

1281
01:14:59,540 --> 01:15:04,020
know, probably we've all the history is full of all sides doing horrible things.

1282
01:15:04,100 --> 01:15:07,140
You know, I think that's that's a good litmus test.

1283
01:15:07,220 --> 01:15:11,700
You know, if you think you can't, if if the group you happen to belong to can do no wrong,

1284
01:15:11,780 --> 01:15:16,740
then you're probably it's probably more you're more likely to be the consumer or uh

1285
01:15:17,300 --> 01:15:21,700
continuer of uh of some of this historical propaganda.

1286
01:15:22,100 --> 01:15:22,430
For sure.

1287
01:15:22,590 --> 01:15:24,910
Or if the outgroup can do nothing right, you know, the case.

1288
01:15:25,070 --> 01:15:25,870
Yeah, no, for sure.

1289
01:15:26,190 --> 01:15:26,910
Yeah, exactly.

1290
01:15:26,990 --> 01:15:27,470
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1291
01:15:28,590 --> 01:15:29,710
Um, yeah.

1292
01:15:30,030 --> 01:15:35,870
Um, although I mean I've come across um reports of um, you know, groups that are enemies

1293
01:15:36,110 --> 01:15:38,350
having a very healthy respect for each other, right?

1294
01:15:38,430 --> 01:15:40,910
It's like, oh yeah, those guys are really fierce.

1295
01:15:41,550 --> 01:15:43,230
We try to avoid finding them.

1296
01:15:43,390 --> 01:15:43,550
Yeah.

1297
01:15:43,630 --> 01:15:43,710
Yeah.

1298
01:15:43,950 --> 01:15:44,110
Yeah.

1299
01:15:44,190 --> 01:15:45,710
Respecting and yeah, that's true.

1300
01:15:45,790 --> 01:15:51,620
I I I like that when um uh representing formidability or whether there's a conflict of

1301
01:15:51,620 --> 01:15:57,540
interest but still respecting um um uh an entity with whom you have conflicts

1302
01:15:57,620 --> 01:16:03,380
of interest is a very interesting um thing yeah for sure right it's it's it's in your s

1303
01:16:03,460 --> 01:16:08,900
your interest to have a an accurate assessment of the formidability of the groups around

1304
01:16:08,900 --> 01:16:09,910
you right Right.

1305
01:16:10,150 --> 01:16:13,190
So you can prepare or you know, take take appropriate action.

1306
01:16:13,510 --> 01:16:13,750
Absolutely.

1307
01:16:15,110 --> 01:16:16,070
Run away, run away.

1308
01:16:16,390 --> 01:16:16,710
Exactly.

1309
01:16:16,870 --> 01:16:21,030
Yeah, but it's not necessarily in your interest to have an accurate view of, say, the moral

1310
01:16:21,030 --> 01:16:26,950
character of of your enemy, because that could um you know prevent the uh an attack from

1311
01:16:27,030 --> 01:16:27,990
from being mobilized.

1312
01:16:28,150 --> 01:16:31,830
If people knew that they're just normal people like like us, then no one would join the

1313
01:16:31,830 --> 01:16:32,630
collective action.

1314
01:16:32,710 --> 01:16:37,340
But if they're, you know, horrible, uh wicked uh predators who are hell bent on uh

1315
01:16:37,420 --> 01:16:38,300
exterminating us.

1316
01:16:38,380 --> 01:16:41,900
Well then all of a sudden everyone has a really strong reason to participate in the

1317
01:16:41,900 --> 01:16:42,860
collective action.

1318
01:16:42,940 --> 01:16:45,580
Uh and that helps the collective action uh get off the ground.

1319
01:16:45,900 --> 01:16:49,660
Insofar as we all have common knowledge of that narrative and we expect other people to

1320
01:16:49,660 --> 01:16:53,660
expect other people to uh endorse the narrative, then we can all be more confident that

1321
01:16:53,660 --> 01:16:55,580
we're gonna join in on the collective action.

1322
01:16:56,700 --> 01:16:56,860
Yeah.

1323
01:16:57,510 --> 01:17:00,790
this is why it's good to live in a different culture for a little while.

1324
01:17:01,590 --> 01:17:04,550
You sometimes see the forest from the trees in this respect.

1325
01:17:04,710 --> 01:17:05,030
Yeah.

1326
01:17:05,430 --> 01:17:05,910
Yeah.

1327
01:17:06,150 --> 01:17:06,630
Uh-huh.

1328
01:17:06,870 --> 01:17:09,590
Um so we're we're coming up on an hour and a half.

1329
01:17:09,670 --> 01:17:14,550
I'm I'm curious if there's any topic that that we missed that that you you would have loved

1330
01:17:14,550 --> 01:17:18,310
to talk about or that or that um we should have asked you about.

1331
01:17:18,550 --> 01:17:21,750
Um any area, any stone that we left unturned.

1332
01:17:22,230 --> 01:17:24,310
I think you guys did a pretty thorough job.

1333
01:17:24,550 --> 01:17:26,140
Um thank you.

1334
01:17:26,380 --> 01:17:28,940
We're efficient information transmitters.

1335
01:17:30,860 --> 01:17:31,740
We employ any of the people.

1336
01:17:31,900 --> 01:17:34,220
I'm sure I'll think of something you know 15 minutes from now.

1337
01:17:34,540 --> 01:17:34,700
Yeah.

1338
01:17:34,860 --> 01:17:35,100
Yeah.

1339
01:17:35,420 --> 01:17:39,820
Um, Michelle, can you just tell a little bit about um either just for people who may not

1340
01:17:39,820 --> 01:17:45,580
know, um, do you do field work like with particular groups or do you um have particular

1341
01:17:45,820 --> 01:17:46,780
like do you have books out?

1342
01:17:46,860 --> 01:17:51,180
Like if just people are more interested in you or your work, are there a few sort of

1343
01:17:51,180 --> 01:17:57,150
highlighted emphases uh in terms of like groups you work with or topics that you either in

1344
01:17:57,150 --> 01:18:02,270
the past are currently studying, just to kind of give a highlight reel of things you've

1345
01:18:02,270 --> 01:18:03,470
done or are currently doing.

1346
01:18:04,190 --> 01:18:10,110
One topic I'm um exploring right now is mimicry, which is really pervasive in storytelling,

1347
01:18:10,190 --> 01:18:16,030
in song, in dance, and in games, like games of tag, um, which are really popular in

1348
01:18:16,030 --> 01:18:17,070
hunter-gatherer societies.

1349
01:18:17,150 --> 01:18:20,750
So you have some kids pretending to be the wolves and other kids pretending to be the

1350
01:18:20,750 --> 01:18:23,310
caribou being chased by the wolves, you know, things like that.

1351
01:18:23,550 --> 01:18:28,080
Um But with regard to um, you know, do I do field work?

1352
01:18:28,240 --> 01:18:30,000
You know, what are what's what are my methods?

1353
01:18:30,160 --> 01:18:31,840
Um, I actually have a story about that.

1354
01:18:32,000 --> 01:18:35,680
Um, so um, so I come from literary studies, right?

1355
01:18:35,760 --> 01:18:38,240
I I came to F psych from literary studies.

1356
01:18:38,560 --> 01:18:44,080
And um when I was in my like my first year of grad school, I started wondering, I saw that

1357
01:18:44,160 --> 01:18:47,280
with storytelling, literature, whatever you want to call it, is this is something that all

1358
01:18:47,280 --> 01:18:51,330
humans do, and um they don't need to be taught, you know, how to tell a story.

1359
01:18:51,410 --> 01:18:55,810
Um and I started seeing all these patterns in content, you know, cross-culturally.

1360
01:18:55,970 --> 01:19:00,290
And at the same time and literary theory does not address so I so I started wondering,

1361
01:19:00,370 --> 01:19:05,890
well, how far back in human history does storytelling go and and um in what role did it

1362
01:19:05,890 --> 01:19:07,090
play, you know, when it emerged?

1363
01:19:07,170 --> 01:19:08,290
What what was it for, right?

1364
01:19:08,370 --> 01:19:09,810
Why do people do this thing?

1365
01:19:09,890 --> 01:19:12,850
Um both the d telling stories and listening to stories.

1366
01:19:12,930 --> 01:19:15,680
Um and literary studies doesn't address these questions.

1367
01:19:15,760 --> 01:19:16,720
And I thought that was weird.

1368
01:19:16,800 --> 01:19:18,960
That seems to be pretty fun, you know, fundamental.

1369
01:19:19,120 --> 01:19:23,760
And at the same time, Larry was in the anthropology department, you know, he was in their

1370
01:19:23,760 --> 01:19:28,160
program learning about evolutionary psychology and human evolution.

1371
01:19:28,240 --> 01:19:30,480
And so I thought, oh, well, maybe there's an answer there, right?

1372
01:19:30,560 --> 01:19:31,840
That's the deep past, right?

1373
01:19:31,920 --> 01:19:33,360
Maybe that will tell me something.

1374
01:19:33,680 --> 01:19:38,480
And so but I but I, you know, I so I had to quickly you know read about you know human

1375
01:19:38,480 --> 01:19:41,040
evolution, F PSYC, and get up to speed.

1376
01:19:41,120 --> 01:19:45,630
Um, and but I was I couldn't put my finger on it's like is storytelling an adaptation?

1377
01:19:45,790 --> 01:19:47,150
You know, what what's going on here?

1378
01:19:47,230 --> 01:19:49,390
There's all these patterns, they they're non-random.

1379
01:19:49,550 --> 01:19:51,390
And so I went to talk to Don Simons.

1380
01:19:51,470 --> 01:19:54,590
And so I was telling him this, you know, I see all these patterns, you know, there is you

1381
01:19:54,590 --> 01:19:55,630
know, is this an adaptation?

1382
01:19:56,590 --> 01:20:01,710
And I th I swear to you, I think the only thing he said the whole time was, because I was

1383
01:20:01,710 --> 01:20:04,750
using the word literature because I'm I was in a literary studies program, right?

1384
01:20:04,960 --> 01:20:07,920
And he's like, but Michelle, literature can't be an adaptation.

1385
01:20:08,080 --> 01:20:09,840
And I'm like, but but but there's all these patterns.

1386
01:20:11,040 --> 01:20:13,600
But Michelle, literature can't be an adaptation.

1387
01:20:13,760 --> 01:20:17,680
So after 10 minutes of this, I, you know, thanked him and I left.

1388
01:20:17,760 --> 01:20:19,280
I was very frustrated.

1389
01:20:19,440 --> 01:20:21,840
Um, but and I felt kind of stupid.

1390
01:20:22,080 --> 01:20:26,320
I couldn't communicate to you know him what you know what I was, you know, seeing.

1391
01:20:26,400 --> 01:20:30,080
And and I can't, I can't tell you if it was like three hours later, three days, three

1392
01:20:30,080 --> 01:20:35,550
weeks, but all of a sudden it's like, oh, literature can't be an adaptation.

1393
01:20:35,710 --> 01:20:37,790
Literature is written, right?

1394
01:20:38,510 --> 01:20:42,030
The word literature comes from the Latin literas, letters, right?

1395
01:20:42,190 --> 01:20:44,990
And writing was only invented, you know, 5,000 years ago.

1396
01:20:45,150 --> 01:20:50,350
So it's like, oh, I need to look at oral storytelling because for the overwhelming majority

1397
01:20:50,350 --> 01:20:53,310
of our existence as a species, storytelling was oral.

1398
01:20:53,470 --> 01:20:58,360
And so when I put that together with John's, you know, foundational precept, which is that

1399
01:20:58,520 --> 01:21:03,160
in order to elucidate the design of the human mind, you look, you need to observe its

1400
01:21:03,160 --> 01:21:06,440
operation under the conditions under which it evolved, right?

1401
01:21:06,600 --> 01:21:07,800
Hunter-gather societies.

1402
01:21:07,960 --> 01:21:12,040
So it's like, oh, I need to look at oral storytelling in hunter-gather societies.

1403
01:21:12,200 --> 01:21:17,430
And lucky for me, one of the among the data that early anthropologists and

1404
01:21:17,430 --> 01:21:19,750
ethnolinguists collected was stories.

1405
01:21:19,830 --> 01:21:25,670
So there's all these collections out there from 100 years ago of hunter-gather

1406
01:21:25,670 --> 01:21:26,070
stories.

1407
01:21:26,150 --> 01:21:27,430
So no, I don't do field work.

1408
01:21:27,670 --> 01:21:28,950
I do archival research.

1409
01:21:29,110 --> 01:21:34,870
I um I piggyback on the research of my my forebears, my ancestors, um,

1410
01:21:35,030 --> 01:21:40,920
my academic ancestors, um, and I do cross-cultural, you know, comparative studies of, you

1411
01:21:40,920 --> 01:21:45,880
know, things like content and formal properties of of storytelling.

1412
01:21:46,040 --> 01:21:48,840
Um, and so that's that's my methodology.

1413
01:21:49,080 --> 01:21:52,200
Yeah, well it's appropriate because it's a story about a story.

1414
01:21:52,440 --> 01:21:53,080
Yeah.

1415
01:21:54,440 --> 01:21:59,800
And I will tell a story about that story, about that story, which is uh we had a wonderful

1416
01:21:59,800 --> 01:22:02,120
guest here on Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

1417
01:22:02,200 --> 01:22:03,880
Her name is Michelle Sugiyama.

1418
01:22:03,960 --> 01:22:05,400
Uh it was delightful to have you on.

1419
01:22:05,480 --> 01:22:07,160
Uh thank you so much for talking to us.

1420
01:22:07,480 --> 01:22:08,710
Thanks for having me guys.

1421
01:22:08,950 --> 01:22:09,670
It's been a pleasure.

1422
01:22:09,910 --> 01:22:10,150
Bye.

1423
01:22:10,230 --> 01:22:11,350
Have a good summer, Michelle.

1424
01:22:11,430 --> 01:22:11,510
Yeah.

1425
01:22:11,750 --> 01:22:12,870
Thanks, you too.

1426
01:22:14,710 --> 01:22:15,910
All right, David.

1427
01:22:16,550 --> 01:22:22,150
Uh we just recorded a uh a previous outro and I

1428
01:22:22,150 --> 01:22:27,990
forgot to record it and there was a lot of we we just we didn't banter in that one did we?

1429
01:22:28,780 --> 01:22:32,380
Uh I think I just said banter, banter, banter, banter.

1430
01:22:32,780 --> 01:22:33,340
Yeah, that'll work.

1431
01:22:33,420 --> 01:22:33,900
That'll work.

1432
01:22:33,980 --> 01:22:34,220
Yeah.

1433
01:22:34,700 --> 01:22:38,700
And and now we're bantering about the lack of banter in the in the in the part that we

1434
01:22:38,700 --> 01:22:39,580
failed to record.

1435
01:22:39,820 --> 01:22:40,060
Yeah.

1436
01:22:41,020 --> 01:22:41,580
It's okay.

1437
01:22:41,980 --> 01:22:42,940
It's all a story.

1438
01:22:43,420 --> 01:22:47,500
Anyway, please subscribe, uh support us on Patreon.

1439
01:22:47,900 --> 01:22:53,900
And um yeah when you're out and about this week, you know, tell a story or

1440
01:22:53,900 --> 01:22:55,420
consume a story.

1441
01:22:55,670 --> 01:23:00,230
And uh and as a qualifier to that, don't don't don't let it don't leave it to the

1442
01:23:00,230 --> 01:23:00,790
professionals.

1443
01:23:00,950 --> 01:23:06,550
Produce one or hear one from an amateur who's probably not uh trying to sell you something.

1444
01:23:07,190 --> 01:23:07,830
Yeah.

1445
01:23:08,390 --> 01:23:09,590
Great advice.

1446
01:23:09,830 --> 01:23:10,390
All right.

1447
01:23:10,550 --> 01:23:12,870
Well, David, uh everybody, thanks for listening.

1448
01:23:12,950 --> 01:23:14,230
David, I'll I'll see you next week.

1449
01:23:14,470 --> 01:23:15,270
I'll see you next week.

1450
01:23:15,510 --> 01:23:15,670
Okay.