1
00:00:02,960 --> 00:00:04,320
I'm David Pinsov.

2
00:00:04,560 --> 00:00:06,160
I'm Dave Petrozowski.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:11,280
And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast Actual Evolutionary Psychology.

4
00:00:11,600 --> 00:00:14,240
By actual evolutionary psychologists.

5
00:00:14,720 --> 00:00:15,520
Look at that.

6
00:00:15,760 --> 00:00:16,800
We're getting good at this.

7
00:00:29,730 --> 00:00:31,730
David, who is our guest this week?

8
00:00:32,210 --> 00:00:37,890
Athena Actipus, a brilliant polymath of many eclectic interest

9
00:00:38,450 --> 00:00:43,730
that uh all have a common thread, I think, of the science of cooperation and conflict at

10
00:00:43,730 --> 00:00:45,890
multiple scales and levels.

11
00:00:46,130 --> 00:00:51,650
Um, we had a really fun, wide-ranging conversation, uh sort of

12
00:00:51,640 --> 00:00:53,240
bouncing off all sorts of ideas.

13
00:00:53,640 --> 00:00:59,480
Yeah, I I dare you to not be enthusiastic after listening to this uh episode with

14
00:00:59,480 --> 00:00:59,960
Athena.

15
00:01:00,120 --> 00:01:05,960
And these uh Athena is uh contagious um uh with respect to how much she just we

16
00:01:06,200 --> 00:01:12,200
she talks explicitly about she she works on these things that initially maybe she uh spends

17
00:01:12,390 --> 00:01:18,310
0.5 or 20% of her time on that she's really excited about, and then oftentimes

18
00:01:18,310 --> 00:01:21,270
can grow them into larger parts of her work.

19
00:01:21,590 --> 00:01:27,030
And um, you know, uh she just loves what she's doing and it and it shows.

20
00:01:27,510 --> 00:01:28,390
I agree.

21
00:01:28,630 --> 00:01:32,630
And uh I think you will love listening to this podcast.

22
00:01:33,460 --> 00:01:38,660
On that note, uh without further ado, here's Athena and David and I talking about all

23
00:01:38,660 --> 00:01:39,220
things.

24
00:01:39,380 --> 00:01:44,900
Um I don't know, how would you put it in a uh cooperation-y,

25
00:01:45,380 --> 00:01:46,340
conflicty.

26
00:01:47,300 --> 00:01:48,500
Uh yeah.

27
00:01:51,620 --> 00:01:54,580
Inter interoperative is was one of the words that we used.

28
00:01:54,660 --> 00:01:58,820
And I thought that was really a nice uh inner interoperator or interoperative.

29
00:01:58,900 --> 00:02:00,180
I think that's a lovely word.

30
00:02:00,670 --> 00:02:01,230
I agree.

31
00:02:01,390 --> 00:02:05,790
And you'll hear plenty of other lovely words quite soon.

32
00:02:06,190 --> 00:02:06,510
Okay.

33
00:02:06,910 --> 00:02:11,550
Uh so here without further ado, here is um here's the episode.

34
00:02:16,190 --> 00:02:17,550
I'll do the first question.

35
00:02:17,790 --> 00:02:19,070
Oh, you're gonna do the question.

36
00:02:19,150 --> 00:02:19,550
You're okay.

37
00:02:19,630 --> 00:02:19,870
Yeah, yeah.

38
00:02:20,030 --> 00:02:20,910
Yeah, we guess.

39
00:02:21,710 --> 00:02:26,990
Or I guess I could just deliver a statement about um what's going on in my life and then We

40
00:02:27,070 --> 00:02:27,870
should we do a check-in?

41
00:02:29,470 --> 00:02:32,360
Maybe I'll just I'll just bring an instrument.

42
00:02:32,600 --> 00:02:33,880
Can we just start playing music?

43
00:02:33,960 --> 00:02:34,600
That would be great.

44
00:02:34,760 --> 00:02:37,880
Uh like literally uh my car is filled with instruments.

45
00:02:37,960 --> 00:02:41,880
I have a bass, I have a cello, I have a guitar, I have a ukulele.

46
00:02:42,200 --> 00:02:46,440
I also have a bunch of instruments up in my studio there, including an accordion I can't

47
00:02:46,440 --> 00:02:46,680
play.

48
00:02:46,840 --> 00:02:48,520
So whatever you guys want, we can do.

49
00:02:48,760 --> 00:02:51,080
Is it an electric cello or an acoustic cello?

50
00:02:51,240 --> 00:02:52,040
It's an acoustic cello.

51
00:02:52,280 --> 00:02:53,000
Oh wow, in your car.

52
00:02:53,080 --> 00:02:53,800
Wow, that's impressive.

53
00:02:53,880 --> 00:02:54,040
Okay.

54
00:02:54,200 --> 00:02:57,640
Well, in a bass, like a acoustic bass, a double bass in my car.

55
00:02:57,890 --> 00:02:58,130
Yeah.

56
00:02:58,610 --> 00:02:59,810
What kind of well?

57
00:03:00,130 --> 00:03:04,610
Yeah, that app opens a whole other set of questions that we will we're gonna we're gonna

58
00:03:04,690 --> 00:03:05,810
we'll put that in the back burner.

59
00:03:05,890 --> 00:03:07,330
David Maybe I'll give it to you in some.

60
00:03:07,570 --> 00:03:11,650
I mean I'm very I'm tempted to bring up my guitar and start jamming.

61
00:03:11,970 --> 00:03:17,490
Um well Athena um your uh musical prowess is reflected also by your uh

62
00:03:17,570 --> 00:03:22,850
research prowess in terms of um you having many different wide ranging interests

63
00:03:23,010 --> 00:03:26,320
across the social sciences and the biological sciences.

64
00:03:26,480 --> 00:03:28,880
That's part of why I I love your your work so much.

65
00:03:29,360 --> 00:03:34,800
You have eclectic interests kind of like mine, uh, and are willing to just follow exciting

66
00:03:34,800 --> 00:03:39,440
ideas wherever they lead, even if they lead you outside of your own discipline.

67
00:03:39,680 --> 00:03:45,440
So I want to put it to you, uh, if there is any common thread to all of your

68
00:03:45,440 --> 00:03:49,520
research, if there is like a unifying story, or is it just a bunch of random shit you're

69
00:03:49,520 --> 00:03:49,920
interested in?

70
00:03:50,000 --> 00:03:51,040
Because that's cool too.

71
00:03:51,120 --> 00:03:53,990
Uh, that's probably how I would uh answer that question myself.

72
00:03:54,070 --> 00:03:58,230
So I'm just curious if if you have a story or if or if it's just uh sound and fury

73
00:03:58,310 --> 00:03:59,510
signifying nothing.

74
00:03:59,910 --> 00:04:01,030
Yes to both.

75
00:04:01,190 --> 00:04:07,110
I mean, like I you know I have so there's so many things that I'm interested in and I I

76
00:04:07,110 --> 00:04:08,550
make time in my life.

77
00:04:08,710 --> 00:04:13,750
Like I pretty much reserve like twenty percent of my time for whatever it is that I'm most

78
00:04:13,750 --> 00:04:14,310
excited about.

79
00:04:14,390 --> 00:04:16,160
And it doesn't matter what it is.

80
00:04:16,320 --> 00:04:21,040
Like it could be, you know, learning about something in a discipline that I don't yet know.

81
00:04:21,200 --> 00:04:27,040
It could be, you know, uh skilling up with some technical skills I don't have yet that

82
00:04:27,040 --> 00:04:31,200
I'm excited about, or it could be learning another instrument because like I'm obsessed

83
00:04:31,200 --> 00:04:33,200
with the banjo right now, or whatever it is.

84
00:04:33,280 --> 00:04:38,000
Um, but leaving that space for whatever is like most compelling to me.

85
00:04:38,240 --> 00:04:44,230
Um, And at the same time, things end up revolving around this sort of

86
00:04:44,230 --> 00:04:46,150
vortex of cooperation and conflict.

87
00:04:46,230 --> 00:04:50,950
Because that's just, you know, fundamentally, I think the way like my brain works.

88
00:04:51,110 --> 00:04:53,350
I tune into those, those things.

89
00:04:53,510 --> 00:04:59,400
So, you know, what is it that allows like us as humans to operate as

90
00:04:59,400 --> 00:05:03,640
something that's greater than the sum of our parts, or what allows the cells in our body to

91
00:05:03,640 --> 00:05:04,200
do that, right?

92
00:05:04,280 --> 00:05:09,080
And make us function as a multicellular organism that can do really complex tasks.

93
00:05:09,320 --> 00:05:15,240
Those kinds of questions for me just they they compel me wherever,

94
00:05:15,320 --> 00:05:17,160
what whatever kind of system we're talking about.

95
00:05:17,560 --> 00:05:21,560
And then, you know, equally we have the other side of conflict and exploitation and

96
00:05:21,560 --> 00:05:22,280
hijacking.

97
00:05:22,440 --> 00:05:24,440
They're really two sides of the same coin.

98
00:05:25,290 --> 00:05:28,570
And let me just do a uh where do zombies come in?

99
00:05:28,970 --> 00:05:29,850
Yeah, zombies.

100
00:05:29,930 --> 00:05:32,250
Well, I got like all these zombies back here.

101
00:05:32,410 --> 00:05:36,410
Um so zombies come in on a couple of levels.

102
00:05:36,490 --> 00:05:42,490
So, like the first one is this idea of zombification, which I've used as a metaphor

103
00:05:42,490 --> 00:05:48,090
for talking about sort of all of the ways that organisms can hijack each other, or even

104
00:05:48,330 --> 00:05:51,530
non-biological things, right, can hijack other things.

105
00:05:51,690 --> 00:05:57,360
Uh, it's it's really grounded in the extended phenotype idea that you know

106
00:05:57,440 --> 00:06:01,680
Richard Dawkins talked about at the end of Selfish Gene and then also in his book Extended

107
00:06:01,680 --> 00:06:02,480
Phenotype.

108
00:06:02,560 --> 00:06:08,240
And the main idea of extended phenotype is that organisms evolve, or really anything that

109
00:06:08,240 --> 00:06:14,240
can evolve will evolve to not just have sort of a physical

110
00:06:14,240 --> 00:06:18,720
phenotype that allows it to do things in the world and a behavioral phenotype that allows

111
00:06:18,720 --> 00:06:24,570
it to do things in the world, but it will evolve essentially to animate anything in

112
00:06:24,570 --> 00:06:28,330
the world that it can in order to achieve its goals, right?

113
00:06:28,490 --> 00:06:30,330
And so that's the zombification.

114
00:06:30,410 --> 00:06:35,690
You know, it's the jewel wasp hijacking the cockroach to take it, you know, to its, you

115
00:06:35,690 --> 00:06:38,810
know, den so it can like feed it to its offspring.

116
00:06:39,130 --> 00:06:45,130
Or um it's the way that, you know, even technological systems evolve on their

117
00:06:45,130 --> 00:06:48,090
own to hijack the way our brain works, right?

118
00:06:48,250 --> 00:06:54,100
So you could think about, you know, memes as uh hijacking, you know, our

119
00:06:54,100 --> 00:06:55,940
brains in order to transmit them.

120
00:06:56,100 --> 00:07:00,820
Um, and they, you know, the memes even you could say that they hijack the algorithms on

121
00:07:00,820 --> 00:07:05,140
social media platforms, you know, and how those interact with our own brains in order to

122
00:07:05,140 --> 00:07:05,940
perpetuate them.

123
00:07:06,100 --> 00:07:10,020
So these kinds of principles apply across, you know, all of these systems.

124
00:07:10,100 --> 00:07:15,190
And that's what I love when you can, you know, work in one domain and one system and you

125
00:07:15,190 --> 00:07:21,030
see a phenomenon, and um, it's so general because it has to do with things like

126
00:07:21,030 --> 00:07:25,510
evolution, recursion, you know, even like signal detection theory, these things that are

127
00:07:25,510 --> 00:07:30,630
just like invariants that operate like laws of physics, right, in the in the world.

128
00:07:30,790 --> 00:07:36,390
Um, and then that lets you get insights into systems that are, you know, that people would

129
00:07:36,390 --> 00:07:39,670
be like, How is it that you are working on both of these things at the same time?

130
00:07:39,830 --> 00:07:45,760
Well, it's because the underlying laws of how the universe work like apply to all these

131
00:07:45,760 --> 00:07:46,000
systems.

132
00:07:46,240 --> 00:07:51,600
Yeah, we had Brett Beheim on uh and he was uh talking about uh something similar.

133
00:07:51,760 --> 00:07:57,040
And we talked about how bike wheels and galaxies can be both studied uh like in the same

134
00:07:57,200 --> 00:07:58,080
under the same rubric.

135
00:07:58,160 --> 00:08:03,680
And I love this idea that um something like zombies, uh it gives you this

136
00:08:03,680 --> 00:08:09,440
idea that the folk intuition that where evolution starts and ends is a body envelope,

137
00:08:09,550 --> 00:08:10,670
but that's not true.

138
00:08:10,830 --> 00:08:15,390
Um, and that's a really nice way to sort of poke on and get past people's folk intuitions.

139
00:08:15,550 --> 00:08:17,230
Because I think people think about evolution.

140
00:08:17,310 --> 00:08:22,270
Like I'm sure we've all taught classes where you teach students or even ourselves, and you

141
00:08:22,270 --> 00:08:25,870
start and you have this idea: well, there's like the physical stuff, and that's where

142
00:08:25,870 --> 00:08:28,110
evolution starts and stops.

143
00:08:28,270 --> 00:08:33,700
But then, like, behavior is this weird thing, and then, but it's to to push beyond that and

144
00:08:33,700 --> 00:08:38,420
to say like even your intuition about where a body envelope starts or stops or where where

145
00:08:38,420 --> 00:08:44,100
even genes like the example of you know there's things that genes affect in

146
00:08:44,100 --> 00:08:48,340
offspring but not the body envelope so it's like if you're the mother, your genetics affect

147
00:08:48,340 --> 00:08:51,300
the offspring um but not yourself like that kind of thing.

148
00:08:51,380 --> 00:08:54,340
It's a really good way to get people out of their folk psychology.

149
00:08:54,420 --> 00:08:58,980
And zombies are really fun, which is also to your credit a way to hook people.

150
00:08:59,730 --> 00:09:00,370
Yeah, for sure.

151
00:09:00,530 --> 00:09:06,050
So am I correct in in saying that uh zombification happens when the extended

152
00:09:06,050 --> 00:09:11,570
phenotype of one organism encompasses the phenotype of another organism.

153
00:09:12,210 --> 00:09:17,570
The classic example would be a parasite, where the extended phenotype of the parasite is

154
00:09:17,570 --> 00:09:20,770
the behavior of the host that it is manipulating.

155
00:09:20,850 --> 00:09:26,560
And so the parasite is evolving to control and manipulate the host for its own benefit.

156
00:09:26,720 --> 00:09:32,640
So in any case where you have overlapping uh extended phenotypes, you get some kind of

157
00:09:32,640 --> 00:09:37,520
zombification or some kind of um manipulation of another organism to serve another

158
00:09:37,520 --> 00:09:38,640
organism's interests.

159
00:09:38,720 --> 00:09:41,120
Is that sort of the the logic that you're getting at?

160
00:09:41,440 --> 00:09:42,640
Yeah, absolutely.

161
00:09:42,800 --> 00:09:48,000
And so, you know, you could think of a of a zombie in the you know evolutionary

162
00:09:48,240 --> 00:09:53,310
biological sort of sense as you know, any entity that is getting

163
00:09:53,310 --> 00:09:57,230
hijacked by something else's extended phenotype, right?

164
00:09:57,390 --> 00:10:02,190
And so, so, and then that it it also just becomes so deeply interesting from an

165
00:10:02,190 --> 00:10:03,630
evolutionary perspective, right?

166
00:10:03,710 --> 00:10:08,110
Because if so, if you're taking an adaptationist perspective, right, and you're saying,

167
00:10:08,270 --> 00:10:14,110
okay, the behaviors and the physiology that we see like has some adaptive function,

168
00:10:14,270 --> 00:10:17,630
you have to start asking the question, for whom?

169
00:10:17,920 --> 00:10:22,880
You can't just assume that it is for the entity that is doing the behavior, right?

170
00:10:22,960 --> 00:10:28,240
Sometimes the adaptive function is serving the evolutionary interests of a different

171
00:10:28,240 --> 00:10:28,720
entity.

172
00:10:29,040 --> 00:10:29,440
Yes.

173
00:10:29,680 --> 00:10:35,520
I think that's a really underappreciated point that crops up a lot uh in human

174
00:10:35,520 --> 00:10:41,280
social science when we're curious about weird behaviors like cults and religions and weird

175
00:10:41,280 --> 00:10:42,080
beliefs.

176
00:10:42,160 --> 00:10:47,650
Um I think we often fail to consider that perhaps the weird beliefs or or the

177
00:10:47,890 --> 00:10:51,970
cults are not necessarily serving the members, but are serving the leaders or serving

178
00:10:51,970 --> 00:10:52,530
someone else.

179
00:10:52,690 --> 00:10:55,570
And a successful manipulation has occurred.

180
00:10:55,730 --> 00:11:00,530
And so it may not actually be adaptive for any of the individuals who hold these beliefs or

181
00:11:00,850 --> 00:11:02,050
are pursuing these practices.

182
00:11:02,210 --> 00:11:07,170
It may be adaptive for someone else who is doing the manipulation.

183
00:11:07,810 --> 00:11:08,690
Absolutely.

184
00:11:08,930 --> 00:11:14,720
And I'm gonna offer a speculation here, which is that I think very

185
00:11:14,960 --> 00:11:20,800
often as humans, you know, we have evolved to hijack other people to do things

186
00:11:20,800 --> 00:11:21,200
for us.

187
00:11:21,360 --> 00:11:24,560
I mean, like that's what babies evolve to have their parents do.

188
00:11:24,640 --> 00:11:28,080
That's, you know, mates evolved, like, you know, even socially, right?

189
00:11:28,160 --> 00:11:29,600
We do a lot of division of labor.

190
00:11:29,680 --> 00:11:34,050
So you could, you know, you could look at that as, you know, having a very cooperative side

191
00:11:34,050 --> 00:11:38,450
to it, but it also can have a dark side of, you know, where we get other people to do

192
00:11:38,450 --> 00:11:40,850
things for us so we don't have to do them ourselves.

193
00:11:41,090 --> 00:11:46,850
Um, and whenever you're in a situation where you have multiple individuals,

194
00:11:46,930 --> 00:11:52,850
right, who have an extended phenotype that is about getting others to do things for them or

195
00:11:52,850 --> 00:11:57,250
that would be better for them than their other behavior, you can start to then have

196
00:11:57,410 --> 00:11:58,700
conflict, right?

197
00:11:59,020 --> 00:12:04,940
And when you're almost like invading each other's body envelopes, right, with that, um, the

198
00:12:04,940 --> 00:12:07,580
potential for escalation of conflict is massive.

199
00:12:07,660 --> 00:12:13,420
And so, you know, we see this biologically with um mother and fetus, right?

200
00:12:13,580 --> 00:12:19,420
Where the um conflict between maternal and fetal interests over resources can lead to

201
00:12:19,650 --> 00:12:24,290
escalation of conflict and sort of fighting over the resources, which can then lead to

202
00:12:24,290 --> 00:12:27,330
eclampsia or pre eclampsia, which can be devastating, right?

203
00:12:27,410 --> 00:12:31,650
So you have this escalation of conflict because, you know, you have this inside the body

204
00:12:31,650 --> 00:12:32,050
envelope.

205
00:12:32,210 --> 00:12:36,130
Well, you can have this escalation of conflict with the invasion of the body envelope

206
00:12:36,130 --> 00:12:41,490
without it having to literally be inside if you have, say, two people that are

207
00:12:41,730 --> 00:12:46,940
both trying to influence each other through this sort of extended phenotype mechanism.

208
00:12:47,260 --> 00:12:52,700
And I think oftentimes some of the really, you know, seemingly dysfunctional relationships

209
00:12:53,420 --> 00:12:59,100
or, you know, escalation of conflict that leads sometimes to, you know, psychosis,

210
00:12:59,260 --> 00:13:00,540
mental illness, all of that.

211
00:13:00,700 --> 00:13:05,900
Like, I think we really should be digging into this with this extended phenotype framework

212
00:13:06,220 --> 00:13:11,790
because it can explain, I think, a lot of why you see, you know, dysregulation

213
00:13:12,110 --> 00:13:18,030
of emotion and how, you know, people can end up doing things that are really not very good

214
00:13:18,030 --> 00:13:20,190
for them and also not very good for the other.

215
00:13:20,270 --> 00:13:24,350
And you can have like, you know, things completely blow up in ways that are catastrophic.

216
00:13:24,510 --> 00:13:30,420
It's like, how do you explain that without this notion of manipulation and extended

217
00:13:30,420 --> 00:13:35,700
phenotype, I haven't I haven't heard a another good hypothesis for what is happening there

218
00:13:35,700 --> 00:13:38,740
when you get this really destructive interpersonal behavior.

219
00:13:39,140 --> 00:13:39,380
Yeah.

220
00:13:39,620 --> 00:13:40,340
No, it's interesting.

221
00:13:40,420 --> 00:13:45,780
There's there's lots of cool work from uh Hugo Mercier and and uh

222
00:13:45,940 --> 00:13:48,900
related colleagues about epistemic vigilance.

223
00:13:49,060 --> 00:13:54,130
This idea that we have evolved um psychological and epistemic defenses to being

224
00:13:54,130 --> 00:13:59,410
manipulated, to being conned, to being talked into doing things or misled in various ways.

225
00:13:59,490 --> 00:14:05,010
And we're actually quite skeptical of most information and quite hard to fool.

226
00:14:05,650 --> 00:14:09,250
And you know, there's there are these prevailing narratives that are actually quite wrong

227
00:14:09,330 --> 00:14:11,330
that humans are very gullible and they'll believe anything.

228
00:14:11,410 --> 00:14:12,610
It's actually quite the opposite.

229
00:14:12,770 --> 00:14:16,850
We're quite vigilant, we're quite resistant to being manipulated, we're quite skeptical.

230
00:14:16,930 --> 00:14:21,940
Um, and the sort of conspiratorial mindsets that you see flourishing in different spaces

231
00:14:21,940 --> 00:14:24,180
are actually an example of the opposite of gullibility.

232
00:14:24,340 --> 00:14:28,980
It's being so skeptical of even the most established wisdom that you're willing to

233
00:14:28,980 --> 00:14:31,460
entertain these conspiracy theories in the first place.

234
00:14:31,620 --> 00:14:36,180
It's sort of it extends from a kind of hyper skepticism rather than a hyper-gullibility a

235
00:14:36,180 --> 00:14:36,820
lot of the time.

236
00:14:36,980 --> 00:14:41,700
And so there you know this wonderful book, Not Born Yesterday, uh, where uh Hugo Marcia

237
00:14:41,860 --> 00:14:46,020
goes into this psychology of epistemic vigilance and skepticism of information.

238
00:14:46,180 --> 00:14:51,170
Uh, but what's interesting, what I find to be an extremely underexplored topic is the flip

239
00:14:51,170 --> 00:14:51,730
side of this.

240
00:14:51,890 --> 00:14:57,490
Because if we do have adaptations for epistemic vigilance of resisting being manipulated,

241
00:14:57,650 --> 00:15:00,610
then we must also have adaptations for doing the manipulating.

242
00:15:00,770 --> 00:15:04,850
There must have, in order for those systems to have evolved, there must have been a

243
00:15:04,850 --> 00:15:05,650
selection pressure.

244
00:15:05,730 --> 00:15:10,690
There must have been manipulators trying to manipulate people in the first place, which

245
00:15:10,690 --> 00:15:15,600
means that there has to be a kind of counter strategy uh that exists as well.

246
00:15:15,760 --> 00:15:20,640
So in in the same way that we have an epistemic vigilance psychology, we must also have a

247
00:15:20,640 --> 00:15:25,360
manipulation psychology where we try to understand what people's weaknesses are, what their

248
00:15:25,360 --> 00:15:29,360
uh assets and liabilities are, and how to get our way with them.

249
00:15:29,520 --> 00:15:34,160
Um and it's entirely possible, as in any kind of arms race and evolution, that one side of

250
00:15:34,160 --> 00:15:37,280
the arms race could have the upper hand at any given time.

251
00:15:37,440 --> 00:15:41,690
You know, the predator could uh be in a place where it's it's winning a lot of the time and

252
00:15:41,690 --> 00:15:44,330
the prey is going extinct, or vice versa.

253
00:15:44,490 --> 00:15:49,930
Uh so it it's quite possible that we have this manipulation psychology that is you know

254
00:15:50,010 --> 00:15:51,130
completely underexplored.

255
00:15:51,290 --> 00:15:55,210
Like I know of no w work uh trying to nail down the design features of this.

256
00:15:55,370 --> 00:16:00,490
Uh and it's entirely possible it explains a lot of of of human behavior and uh and a lot of

257
00:16:00,490 --> 00:16:05,290
times human behavior that is the byproduct of another person's manipulation psychology.

258
00:16:05,700 --> 00:16:05,940
Yeah.

259
00:16:06,100 --> 00:16:11,780
I would add another framework on top of that that I think can could be really helpful,

260
00:16:11,940 --> 00:16:17,780
which is that really the most important thing to know if you're trying to detect if

261
00:16:17,780 --> 00:16:22,100
you're being manipulated or not, or even, you know, what kind of manipulation you should

262
00:16:22,100 --> 00:16:27,220
try to engage in, if you should, is having an understanding of the

263
00:16:27,380 --> 00:16:32,750
alignment that you do or don't have with the other party that you're engaging with, right?

264
00:16:32,910 --> 00:16:38,910
So if you have um fully aligned interests with respect to whatever the domain is that

265
00:16:38,910 --> 00:16:39,790
you're operating in, right?

266
00:16:39,870 --> 00:16:41,550
You don't have to have like aligned interests for everything, right?

267
00:16:41,630 --> 00:16:44,670
But if you have fully if you have aligned interests in that domain that you're operating

268
00:16:44,670 --> 00:16:48,430
in, then you can allow manipulation.

269
00:16:48,590 --> 00:16:53,550
Um, and any manipulation that you would be doing would actually not be a negative thing,

270
00:16:53,630 --> 00:16:53,870
right?

271
00:16:54,110 --> 00:16:59,140
If you have fully aligned interests, that's just allowing yourself to efficiently and

272
00:16:59,140 --> 00:17:03,700
effectively cooperate and to not have filters up and all of that, right?

273
00:17:03,780 --> 00:17:08,740
It's like, okay, we'll just act kind of as one nervous system and do what needs to be done.

274
00:17:09,060 --> 00:17:14,100
Um, but if interests are not aligned, um, or if there's sort of deception, right?

275
00:17:14,180 --> 00:17:18,020
If you're like sort of luring people in with this idea that, you know, we all have the same

276
00:17:18,020 --> 00:17:23,070
goals, um, but you know, that that could be an effective way to get them to let their guard

277
00:17:23,070 --> 00:17:26,430
down and maybe even um positively reinforce them.

278
00:17:26,510 --> 00:17:30,670
Like you could, you know, get into their reward and reinforcement systems and and all of

279
00:17:30,670 --> 00:17:30,910
that.

280
00:17:31,150 --> 00:17:36,110
Um, but then you know, if you start to realize, oh well, maybe the interests aren't

281
00:17:36,110 --> 00:17:41,550
aligned, then you need to actually flip right really quickly and stop allowing that

282
00:17:41,550 --> 00:17:42,350
manipulation.

283
00:17:42,670 --> 00:17:48,340
Now I don't know if you have the same intuition that I do, but to me,

284
00:17:48,580 --> 00:17:53,860
that sounds a lot like um some of the characteristics that you see in things that are

285
00:17:53,860 --> 00:17:55,620
diagnosable mental illnesses, right?

286
00:17:55,700 --> 00:18:00,020
Where it's like people will say, Oh, like we have totally aligned interest, I totally trust

287
00:18:00,020 --> 00:18:00,260
you.

288
00:18:00,340 --> 00:18:04,260
And then some little thing happens, and then it's like, oh no, wait, you're totally against

289
00:18:04,260 --> 00:18:04,420
me.

290
00:18:04,500 --> 00:18:07,220
And all of this was all about manipulating me in the first place.

291
00:18:07,460 --> 00:18:13,250
So to me, that seems like a miscalibration of a system that actually is designed to

292
00:18:13,250 --> 00:18:19,090
be really effectively detecting cues of alignment or misalignment because that tells you

293
00:18:19,090 --> 00:18:23,890
whether you should be you putting all of your energy into doing something with someone that

294
00:18:23,890 --> 00:18:29,810
they're saying we should do, or whether actually you're being hijacked and it's not in your

295
00:18:29,810 --> 00:18:33,170
own best interest to allow that person to influence you.

296
00:18:34,020 --> 00:18:37,780
It seems like what you're talking about is what borderline personality disorder?

297
00:18:39,220 --> 00:18:39,540
Yeah.

298
00:18:39,940 --> 00:18:45,860
Uh it's it seems like what might be going on there is a kind of fickleness of detecting

299
00:18:45,860 --> 00:18:49,860
when someone is on your side or not, and like an overwillingness to just flip your

300
00:18:49,940 --> 00:18:53,940
radically flip your assessment on a dime on you know pretty flimsy evidence such that

301
00:18:53,940 --> 00:18:57,060
you're constantly, you know, uh falling in love with people and then all of a sudden

302
00:18:57,060 --> 00:18:59,300
thinking that they're evil and out to get you.

303
00:18:59,460 --> 00:19:04,370
Uh is that sort of uh the hypothesis you're but I would you know frame it more

304
00:19:04,370 --> 00:19:09,010
computationally so you know not so much about fickleness but you could say you know say we

305
00:19:09,010 --> 00:19:13,570
have like a signal detection system for interest being aligned and we have a signal

306
00:19:13,570 --> 00:19:17,970
detection system for in you know uh interest being not aligned.

307
00:19:18,210 --> 00:19:24,210
Um depending on uh how you're evaluating evidence coming in and where your

308
00:19:24,210 --> 00:19:30,180
thresholds are set, um, they may be so close together that you

309
00:19:30,180 --> 00:19:35,140
know, ambiguous information, depending on the state that the organism is in, right?

310
00:19:35,220 --> 00:19:36,420
You could have ambiguous information.

311
00:19:36,500 --> 00:19:40,820
Even if you're there's the same information, but it's coming into you when you're more

312
00:19:40,820 --> 00:19:44,900
stressed or less stressed, that could just influence sort of, you know, whether it's

313
00:19:44,900 --> 00:19:50,660
hitting a threshold for, oh yeah, this is actually a positive relationship

314
00:19:50,660 --> 00:19:56,010
that's aligned, or interpreting that information actually as evidence of manipulation.

315
00:19:56,250 --> 00:20:02,250
So I think that we can really actually break this down into a set of, you

316
00:20:02,250 --> 00:20:08,090
know, formal principles for how the information is being processed that I think make

317
00:20:08,090 --> 00:20:12,570
it potentially a lot easier to understand, you know, what's going on and maybe even how we

318
00:20:12,570 --> 00:20:18,090
could mitigate some of the challenges that you know people who suffer from borderline

319
00:20:18,090 --> 00:20:20,970
disorder or related disorders have to deal with.

320
00:20:21,320 --> 00:20:21,640
Yeah.

321
00:20:21,800 --> 00:20:24,200
I and even beyond that, I really like this.

322
00:20:24,280 --> 00:20:30,040
I like this idea that manipulation, um, broadly construed, if you if you

323
00:20:30,120 --> 00:20:35,400
that is actually the intuitive category manipulation is this broader thing of

324
00:20:35,400 --> 00:20:36,440
co-coordination.

325
00:20:36,520 --> 00:20:42,280
It's like epistemic coordination or this inter um uh we're we're all

326
00:20:42,570 --> 00:20:48,170
uh looking at it that way, this extended phenotype way, then um I think there's a lot of

327
00:20:48,170 --> 00:20:48,410
things.

328
00:20:48,570 --> 00:20:53,210
Like even if there's cues of misalignment, like things like politics, right?

329
00:20:53,290 --> 00:20:59,130
That might have information processing consequences of that increases motivation to

330
00:20:59,130 --> 00:21:05,080
consume episodes about like what people did or you know, provoke uh outrage.

331
00:21:05,160 --> 00:21:11,160
So I would even argue things like consuming politics or political um uh

332
00:21:11,480 --> 00:21:15,800
appetites might be a byproduct of this psychology, too.

333
00:21:15,960 --> 00:21:20,680
That if you're um in the same way, like the memes are just feeding themselves, right?

334
00:21:20,840 --> 00:21:24,120
And they're just what which memes get selected for?

335
00:21:24,280 --> 00:21:26,790
Oh, there's people and they're out to get you, right?

336
00:21:26,870 --> 00:21:27,910
That's really attractive.

337
00:21:27,990 --> 00:21:28,710
That's really interesting.

338
00:21:28,790 --> 00:21:30,790
It suggests that we're not as aligned as I thought.

339
00:21:30,870 --> 00:21:34,150
Like I thought I was just driving, going to restaurants, everything seemed pretty good, but

340
00:21:34,150 --> 00:21:35,910
no, it turns out there's people trying to get me.

341
00:21:36,070 --> 00:21:37,270
That's really appealing.

342
00:21:37,430 --> 00:21:38,310
What does that do?

343
00:21:38,470 --> 00:21:43,990
And so I think like a lot of the content, a lot of the junk content of uh

344
00:21:44,310 --> 00:21:50,080
media, uh, one could argue might also be running in a in a either abnormal or

345
00:21:50,080 --> 00:21:55,920
even normal way, but it's just the the output of this psychology of assessing alignment.

346
00:21:56,000 --> 00:21:57,120
I really like this idea.

347
00:21:58,000 --> 00:22:03,680
Well, and this also brings up that, you know, it's not just like a one time period thing,

348
00:22:03,760 --> 00:22:04,000
right?

349
00:22:04,080 --> 00:22:07,760
It's not you get information, you evaluate it, and we're aligned or not.

350
00:22:08,480 --> 00:22:10,770
You have multiple time periods, right?

351
00:22:10,850 --> 00:22:14,690
You're integrating over information that's happened in many different contexts.

352
00:22:14,850 --> 00:22:18,610
You have been in a different physiological state when you've been getting that information.

353
00:22:18,850 --> 00:22:23,650
If you then, you know, have a a memory that you pull back and you pull it into your current

354
00:22:23,650 --> 00:22:26,130
state, you may um look at it differently.

355
00:22:26,210 --> 00:22:30,370
So you may be sort of, you know, foraging for information from the from the past,

356
00:22:30,530 --> 00:22:31,490
reinterpreting it.

357
00:22:31,720 --> 00:22:37,080
And then also, you know, if you get a signal that, well, you know, maybe um I thought we

358
00:22:37,080 --> 00:22:43,080
were aligned, but we're not, um, or then then you might go and seek out as you go

359
00:22:43,080 --> 00:22:48,440
forward new information that could, you know, confirm your suspicion, right?

360
00:22:48,600 --> 00:22:52,760
So you could be for sort of foraging for information in the past or then changing your

361
00:22:52,760 --> 00:22:58,040
information seeking as you go forward in ways that actually then change the base rates,

362
00:22:58,190 --> 00:23:03,710
right, that go into the signal detection system that, you know, we're we're using without

363
00:23:03,710 --> 00:23:04,990
even realizing that we're using it.

364
00:23:05,070 --> 00:23:05,310
Right.

365
00:23:05,470 --> 00:23:10,110
So I think that, you know, the all these sort of feedback loops that you can have when you

366
00:23:10,110 --> 00:23:14,430
start looking at this, you know, social cognition and alignment in a signal detection kind

367
00:23:14,430 --> 00:23:15,150
of framework.

368
00:23:15,310 --> 00:23:20,830
Um, it you know, it just lets us computationally model what's happening in a way that we

369
00:23:20,830 --> 00:23:21,710
otherwise couldn't.

370
00:23:21,940 --> 00:23:22,180
Yeah.

371
00:23:22,500 --> 00:23:23,060
That's really great.

372
00:23:23,140 --> 00:23:24,900
And I just like the the I'm sorry, Dave.

373
00:23:24,980 --> 00:23:29,380
I just and I really like the getting out of the instinct blindness of that manipulation is

374
00:23:29,380 --> 00:23:29,940
always bad.

375
00:23:30,100 --> 00:23:33,940
Like this from an evolutionary perspective, it's this idea that manipulation, we're

376
00:23:33,940 --> 00:23:36,580
designed to worry about that possibility space.

377
00:23:36,660 --> 00:23:38,500
But there's this whole other possibility space.

378
00:23:38,580 --> 00:23:40,420
It's actually we we do all the time.

379
00:23:40,500 --> 00:23:41,540
It's actually wonderful.

380
00:23:41,620 --> 00:23:47,140
It's what we do by and large, but our evolved psychology really registers the problematic

381
00:23:47,140 --> 00:23:50,820
zone and kind of scientifically, we probably spend too much time on that.

382
00:23:51,870 --> 00:23:52,590
Yeah, for sure.

383
00:23:52,830 --> 00:23:56,830
I mean, speaking of of the darker side of manipulation, so you could think of it as the

384
00:23:56,830 --> 00:24:01,950
spectrum of parasitism to symbiosis, where you know, symbiosis would be a kind of uh

385
00:24:02,110 --> 00:24:06,830
mutually beneficial manipulation where the symbiote wants to be manipulated, quote unquote,

386
00:24:06,910 --> 00:24:07,710
by someone else.

387
00:24:07,870 --> 00:24:13,390
Uh, in the same way that um, you know, my child might want to be manipulated by me to a

388
00:24:13,390 --> 00:24:18,940
certain extent in terms of wanting to be taught you know various lessons about safety or or

389
00:24:18,940 --> 00:24:19,260
whatever.

390
00:24:19,420 --> 00:24:23,660
Unfortunately, she is not so easily manipulated by me these days.

391
00:24:25,020 --> 00:24:29,260
But uh in addition to these ideas of alignment and misalignment, and when you're in the

392
00:24:29,260 --> 00:24:32,780
aligned zone, then you're going to be more comfortable with being manipulated.

393
00:24:32,860 --> 00:24:36,540
Uh and when you're in the misaligned zone, you're going to be more vigilant and skeptical

394
00:24:36,540 --> 00:24:37,820
and antagonistic.

395
00:24:37,980 --> 00:24:43,510
Um, you there are ways of creating alignment between people by creating perceptions of

396
00:24:43,510 --> 00:24:45,750
misalignment with outsiders.

397
00:24:46,070 --> 00:24:51,590
And you see this a lot in politics, even in social life, where you know common enemies uh

398
00:24:51,750 --> 00:24:53,350
can bring people together.

399
00:24:53,430 --> 00:24:58,870
Uh and so that brings this back full circle to this idea of manipulation where one perhaps

400
00:24:58,870 --> 00:25:04,460
one of the best ways to create more fitness interdependence between people is to manipulate

401
00:25:04,460 --> 00:25:09,020
each other into thinking that they have uh that that they're in conflict with outsiders.

402
00:25:09,180 --> 00:25:13,020
Because uh, I'm much more independent with you, interdependent with you if we have a common

403
00:25:13,020 --> 00:25:17,100
enemy, or if we have some common danger, or if we're both being singled out by the same

404
00:25:17,100 --> 00:25:20,700
hostile force, then all of a sudden we become much more valuable to each other.

405
00:25:20,860 --> 00:25:26,060
Uh and um the the the value of coordinating and cooperating with each other increases

406
00:25:26,060 --> 00:25:27,020
dramatically.

407
00:25:27,450 --> 00:25:33,290
So uh uh there's also the the tendency to create the kinds of positive cooperation

408
00:25:33,530 --> 00:25:35,370
um that that you talk about.

409
00:25:35,530 --> 00:25:41,130
Uh there's also uh one of the best ways to do that is via manipulation and and conflict.

410
00:25:41,610 --> 00:25:47,130
Yeah well and I would say you know the the maybe the key phrase that you you said is like

411
00:25:47,130 --> 00:25:48,570
some outside threat, right?

412
00:25:48,810 --> 00:25:50,890
And so and that could be another group.

413
00:25:51,610 --> 00:25:54,240
And you know, that can be problematic, right?

414
00:25:54,320 --> 00:25:58,720
If you're like, oh, we're gonna increase cooperation by making people hate outsiders, like

415
00:25:58,800 --> 00:26:03,120
that isn't necessarily the way that you know we want to go forward, you know, as humans.

416
00:26:03,280 --> 00:26:08,560
Um, but really any um common knowledge, any you know, shared

417
00:26:08,560 --> 00:26:14,160
understanding of vulnerability to a threat and feeling that you're um you're

418
00:26:14,160 --> 00:26:20,090
interdependent in some way, that can get people aligned, especially

419
00:26:20,090 --> 00:26:22,970
vis-a-vis that particular threat.

420
00:26:23,210 --> 00:26:29,050
And so, you know, I think that's part of why you see extremely high levels of cooperation,

421
00:26:29,290 --> 00:26:31,930
altruism in the aftermath of disasters, right?

422
00:26:32,090 --> 00:26:35,690
Because everyone is in a shared environment that is this disaster.

423
00:26:35,850 --> 00:26:41,210
And it's very clear that, you know, in that kind of situation, the best thing is for

424
00:26:41,210 --> 00:26:42,650
everybody to help each other.

425
00:26:42,980 --> 00:26:47,620
And uh, you know, if they can, you know, if you need shelter and I have shelter, if you

426
00:26:47,620 --> 00:26:52,500
need water and I have water, like we go into that mode of just helping each other and not

427
00:26:52,500 --> 00:26:54,820
keeping track of accounts or anything like that.

428
00:26:54,980 --> 00:27:00,740
Um, so that that kind of very powerful cue that you're in a hostile environment,

429
00:27:00,980 --> 00:27:05,940
that, you know, where the threat really is that we might not all survive and make it

430
00:27:05,940 --> 00:27:10,260
through unless we share and we're all interdependent, you know, because we're part of the

431
00:27:10,260 --> 00:27:14,870
same, you know, group, uh, and people go into that mode very readily.

432
00:27:15,110 --> 00:27:21,110
Um, so I think any sort of shared understanding of vulnerability and

433
00:27:21,110 --> 00:27:25,510
a feeling of sort of being, you know, if you have an environment where that is salient,

434
00:27:25,670 --> 00:27:30,550
that threat is salient, then I think you can get very high levels of cooperation.

435
00:27:30,790 --> 00:27:34,180
Um, you do see, you know, fatigue in that though, right?

436
00:27:34,260 --> 00:27:40,180
So like if you have say a disaster that occurs and um, you know, people are often for like

437
00:27:40,180 --> 00:27:44,180
the first two weeks or so, they're very, very cooperative and helping.

438
00:27:44,420 --> 00:27:50,340
But then if like the disaster persists for a very long time, if those efforts of

439
00:27:50,420 --> 00:27:55,220
you know collective recovery don't translate into things happening, like, so for example,

440
00:27:55,300 --> 00:27:59,490
you know, if there's a disaster and like the neighbors, you know, come out and like it was

441
00:27:59,570 --> 00:28:03,970
like, oh, there's a tree blocking the road, and you, you know, you unblock it and like

442
00:28:04,050 --> 00:28:08,290
everybody gets fed, and then you have this positive experience and things kind of get

443
00:28:08,290 --> 00:28:09,970
cleaned up quickly.

444
00:28:10,290 --> 00:28:15,730
Um, but if on the other hand you have a disaster and people sort of try to help, but

445
00:28:15,730 --> 00:28:20,450
there's even institutional blocks, or you know, the county says, Well, you're not allowed

446
00:28:20,450 --> 00:28:22,050
to come and clean up your road.

447
00:28:22,210 --> 00:28:23,250
We're supposed to do that.

448
00:28:23,330 --> 00:28:26,000
So they're like waiting and things don't actually happen.

449
00:28:26,320 --> 00:28:31,360
Then you get this fatigue and people actually, you know, often will have, you know,

450
00:28:31,760 --> 00:28:37,360
decreases in cooperation much earlier and just like they they don't then have a positive

451
00:28:37,360 --> 00:28:41,920
experience of that disaster if there are things that kind of block seeing the results of

452
00:28:41,920 --> 00:28:42,960
that collective effort.

453
00:28:43,120 --> 00:28:47,030
So I think there's all sorts of things that, you know, that go on when humans are in these

454
00:28:47,030 --> 00:28:50,630
environments where there are threats, they have shared attention on their threats.

455
00:28:50,710 --> 00:28:55,990
They can act together to mitigate those threats or, you know, recover from the damage that

456
00:28:55,990 --> 00:28:56,630
has occurred.

457
00:28:56,790 --> 00:29:00,390
Then I think that feeds back as like an on a signal, right?

458
00:29:00,470 --> 00:29:05,990
That you are with people who you have aligned interest with and you can cooperate

459
00:29:05,990 --> 00:29:10,310
effectively with and that actually will be there for you if you need them.

460
00:29:10,550 --> 00:29:16,300
So I think that that's a it's a really interesting kind of place to see that is in these

461
00:29:16,540 --> 00:29:20,460
contexts where the you know the outside threat is not necessarily another human group, but

462
00:29:20,460 --> 00:29:23,260
it's a environment that is is challenging.

463
00:29:23,740 --> 00:29:24,780
That's super interesting.

464
00:29:24,940 --> 00:29:30,860
Um it it the way I'm thinking about that, I I I'm not familiar with this this work on

465
00:29:30,860 --> 00:29:33,650
how people react in the context of natural disasters.

466
00:29:33,730 --> 00:29:39,170
But it seems like, you know, uh when disaster strikes, we want to try to solve that problem

467
00:29:39,170 --> 00:29:44,690
via collective action and via producing uh resources together to get through it.

468
00:29:44,850 --> 00:29:49,330
But if collective action and the production of resources doesn't work for whatever reason,

469
00:29:49,490 --> 00:29:54,450
then all of a sudden we start to register the fact that uh resources are in fact limited,

470
00:29:54,610 --> 00:29:59,760
uh, which means that we are in zero-sum relationships with one another, such that the more

471
00:29:59,760 --> 00:30:01,200
I get, the less you get.

472
00:30:01,280 --> 00:30:06,720
Uh, and as soon as we start to register that fact, uh, then cooperation begins to break

473
00:30:06,720 --> 00:30:08,800
down or in some sense becomes zero sum.

474
00:30:08,960 --> 00:30:13,040
So I can cooperate with Dave to exclude you from the resource.

475
00:30:13,200 --> 00:30:18,530
Uh and when that starts to happen, um we need useful narratives.

476
00:30:18,610 --> 00:30:21,170
Like maybe the reason we're excluding you is because you're a witch.

477
00:30:21,250 --> 00:30:24,930
It's not because we're selfish and greedy and we want more stuff for ourselves and we're

478
00:30:24,930 --> 00:30:26,610
callous toward your suffering.

479
00:30:26,690 --> 00:30:27,570
It's that you're a witch.

480
00:30:27,730 --> 00:30:33,410
And that helps us exclude people from the zero sum resource without paying reputational

481
00:30:33,410 --> 00:30:35,090
costs for the exclusion.

482
00:30:35,570 --> 00:30:40,210
And so what might be going on is that initially we try to solve our problems via positive

483
00:30:40,210 --> 00:30:45,800
sum cooperation and the production of new resources such that my gain is not necessarily

484
00:30:45,800 --> 00:30:49,480
your loss, because if we're all growing the pie, then we can all get a bigger slice.

485
00:30:49,640 --> 00:30:54,200
But as soon as the pie stops growing and there's limited pie for everyone, then uh

486
00:30:54,440 --> 00:30:57,800
competition starts to uh take place.

487
00:30:58,120 --> 00:31:03,800
And there could even be cooperative competition where we cooperate to displace or exploit

488
00:31:03,880 --> 00:31:05,960
or exclude um other people.

489
00:31:06,440 --> 00:31:12,360
Um and so I think the crucial variable there seems to be uh to what extent

490
00:31:12,350 --> 00:31:16,990
the the interaction is zero sum or positive sum and to what extent resources can be

491
00:31:16,990 --> 00:31:19,470
multiplied uh rather than being fixed.

492
00:31:19,870 --> 00:31:22,830
I'm just kind of running my mouth here, but that's sort of what what what's coming to mind

493
00:31:22,830 --> 00:31:26,910
as as uh a a way to uh strategically explain what what you're talking about.

494
00:31:27,310 --> 00:31:28,270
Yeah, absolutely.

495
00:31:28,430 --> 00:31:34,030
I I've been thinking about a lot of these things in um terms of like two constructs of uh

496
00:31:34,110 --> 00:31:37,710
you so when you get into a group and you have the potential to create something of value

497
00:31:37,790 --> 00:31:41,780
that there's um two sort of inputs into these systems that are really important.

498
00:31:41,940 --> 00:31:46,180
One is what I'm just calling cooperation energy, which is basically like how much are we

499
00:31:46,180 --> 00:31:48,980
ready to do stuff together and just put energy in?

500
00:31:49,140 --> 00:31:53,460
And another one is coordination capacity or coordination energy, which is like, you know,

501
00:31:53,620 --> 00:31:58,660
how much are we actually able to have the resources flow, have the information flow in ways

502
00:31:58,660 --> 00:32:02,340
that allow us to do things that are, you know, better than the sum of our parts, right?

503
00:32:02,580 --> 00:32:07,630
And you have this really interesting situation where like say there's the three of us if we

504
00:32:07,630 --> 00:32:13,230
all have high cooperation energy and coordination capacity slash energy that actually

505
00:32:13,230 --> 00:32:18,670
means that the reality is that our group is a pretty non-zero sum thing because

506
00:32:18,990 --> 00:32:22,990
we're all doing this and we are actually creating things that are greater than some of

507
00:32:22,990 --> 00:32:23,470
those parts.

508
00:32:23,630 --> 00:32:29,120
But as soon as we start to worry, like, oh, well, you know, is Dave really

509
00:32:29,360 --> 00:32:33,280
in, you know, or did he oh he didn't do this thing he said he was gonna do?

510
00:32:33,440 --> 00:32:37,840
Is that because he was busy, or did he is he just not really motivated anymore?

511
00:32:38,080 --> 00:32:43,840
The thing falls apart, unravels very quickly because it actually becomes a zero sum

512
00:32:44,400 --> 00:32:48,880
situation where it's just okay, well, whatever we've created already is what's there, and

513
00:32:48,880 --> 00:32:50,400
how are we gonna split the pie?

514
00:32:50,480 --> 00:32:50,960
You know?

515
00:32:51,280 --> 00:32:56,950
So these recursive loops that happen in these social interactions

516
00:32:57,270 --> 00:33:03,110
are so, so important to um allowing cooperation to be

517
00:33:03,110 --> 00:33:06,710
maintained and the beliefs about alignment, right?

518
00:33:06,870 --> 00:33:12,870
Like that that can turn a situation that is positive some into one that's

519
00:33:12,870 --> 00:33:15,110
zero sum, just like that as well.

520
00:33:15,350 --> 00:33:20,900
So I think understanding the computational structure of these systems, both in our minds

521
00:33:21,060 --> 00:33:25,700
and then what happens in the interactions when you have multiple individuals, right, and

522
00:33:25,700 --> 00:33:30,500
you're processing the information about, you know, both your beliefs and your feelings and

523
00:33:30,500 --> 00:33:35,780
your spidey sense about like, you know, the people, um, and then also the actual outputs of

524
00:33:35,780 --> 00:33:37,620
what's happening in your group, right?

525
00:33:37,780 --> 00:33:42,710
Like um, you know, it are you actually creating something that is of value?

526
00:33:42,950 --> 00:33:48,470
And uh I actually I went to Burning Man for the first time um a few weeks ago.

527
00:33:48,550 --> 00:33:52,470
And I think there's a lot of really interesting dynamics along these lines that are

528
00:33:52,470 --> 00:33:55,590
actually happening at Burning Man in these camps.

529
00:33:55,750 --> 00:34:00,870
There's a lot of sort of costly signaling of cooperation effort, of the capacity to

530
00:34:00,870 --> 00:34:05,590
coordinate, to build these elaborate camps, to build these, you know, art projects that you

531
00:34:05,590 --> 00:34:07,110
then literally burn.

532
00:34:07,350 --> 00:34:13,120
Um To me, so much of what is going on there is costly signaling

533
00:34:13,120 --> 00:34:17,520
of the cooperation energy and the coordination capacity.

534
00:34:18,240 --> 00:34:23,840
And, you know, and that's, I think, not just signaling to the outside world, but you're

535
00:34:23,840 --> 00:34:25,280
signaling to your own group.

536
00:34:25,440 --> 00:34:31,280
Like, hey, we can do this stuff and we are ready to put in the effort to do these things

537
00:34:31,280 --> 00:34:34,000
together that we benefit from collectively.

538
00:34:34,530 --> 00:34:39,010
So I think it's a really it's a really cool place to potentially study some of these

539
00:34:39,010 --> 00:34:39,410
things.

540
00:34:39,730 --> 00:34:40,610
That's that's amazing.

541
00:34:40,770 --> 00:34:45,410
I the thing you said about the cleanup and then the county won't let us is really ringing

542
00:34:45,410 --> 00:34:50,210
in my ears too, because I also think this is a way to understand how bureaucracy gets

543
00:34:50,210 --> 00:34:56,060
things wrong or it's a vocabulary for understanding how to design a bureaucracy where if

544
00:34:56,060 --> 00:35:00,860
you have rules or institutional structure where the cooperation energy, is that the right

545
00:35:00,860 --> 00:35:01,020
term?

546
00:35:01,180 --> 00:35:03,900
Cooperation energy, um, is there.

547
00:35:04,300 --> 00:35:09,900
But for for probably well-intended reasons, if you don't really engineer an

548
00:35:09,900 --> 00:35:15,740
organization structure, whether it's a government or a a university or your house, you

549
00:35:15,740 --> 00:35:20,300
know, it could be at lots of different levels, yeah, you can really screw things up where

550
00:35:20,300 --> 00:35:23,770
people just feel like this is a this is bullshit.

551
00:35:23,850 --> 00:35:25,210
Like the structure doesn't work.

552
00:35:25,370 --> 00:35:30,570
And I think a lot of like the felt like I don't trust the government or I don't feel like

553
00:35:30,570 --> 00:35:36,090
people care about me, you could be living in a very, very affluent, very

554
00:35:36,090 --> 00:35:37,050
safe world.

555
00:35:37,130 --> 00:35:42,410
But this fundamental need to feel like, man, if like if I can't even clean up the dirt on

556
00:35:42,410 --> 00:35:48,240
my driveway, What that's telling my evolved psychology, there's no way that like people are

557
00:35:48,240 --> 00:35:54,240
going to help me if like my kid gets sick or if like somebody tries to like steal from me.

558
00:35:54,320 --> 00:35:55,920
Like I don't trust anybody, right?

559
00:35:56,080 --> 00:36:00,800
And like that's a very um rational response from the evolved psychology.

560
00:36:01,040 --> 00:36:05,360
And it might be there's a good rule for the mud cleanup, but I think like it sounds like

561
00:36:05,360 --> 00:36:11,280
we're missing an entire aspect of our evolved psychology to just come to this person and

562
00:36:11,600 --> 00:36:17,310
do something to prevent everyone's evolved psychology from feeling

563
00:36:17,310 --> 00:36:22,750
like nobody's looking out for me in this kind of like modern bureaucratic world.

564
00:36:23,550 --> 00:36:23,790
Yeah.

565
00:36:23,950 --> 00:36:29,950
I I think also, you know, maybe with not as uh, you know, high stakes for

566
00:36:29,950 --> 00:36:34,350
feeling like nobody's gonna be looking out for me, but still extremely important.

567
00:36:34,670 --> 00:36:39,710
The kind of things that, you know, happen in corporations and big institutions when you

568
00:36:39,710 --> 00:36:45,400
have bureaucratic blocks that actually prevent cooperation energy or coordination

569
00:36:45,560 --> 00:36:49,160
capacity and energy from kind of forming like I call it a vortex.

570
00:36:49,240 --> 00:36:50,600
I think that just like is kind of intuitive.

571
00:36:50,680 --> 00:36:54,520
It's like you have this feedback loop, this energy can build, people are seeing others are

572
00:36:54,520 --> 00:36:57,400
doing it, and they're seeing that, and they're like, oh, I'm gonna put more in.

573
00:36:57,560 --> 00:37:03,000
Um, but you know, if you have bureaucratic systems that actually interfere with that flow,

574
00:37:03,080 --> 00:37:07,800
you know, interfere with like a new project happening that actually would be really great

575
00:37:07,800 --> 00:37:11,470
to see to fruition that would benefit the whole institution.

576
00:37:11,630 --> 00:37:16,350
But you have, you know, systems that, you know, they're designed to protect the institution

577
00:37:16,350 --> 00:37:18,110
or to protect individuals.

578
00:37:18,270 --> 00:37:24,270
But if they get in the way of actually those new things arising and collecting that energy

579
00:37:24,270 --> 00:37:30,030
that allows them to move forward, then we're, we're, we're losing a lot of potential value

580
00:37:30,030 --> 00:37:35,980
in these institutions that have gotten sort of mired in these bureaucratic processes, which

581
00:37:36,060 --> 00:37:40,300
you know, we need a lot of those, right, to prevent exploitation of big institutions,

582
00:37:40,380 --> 00:37:40,540
right?

583
00:37:40,620 --> 00:37:45,260
Because a big institution is, you know, a source of resources and energy and people's time

584
00:37:45,340 --> 00:37:45,900
and all of that.

585
00:37:46,060 --> 00:37:50,380
And so you, you know, there are incentives to try to hijack the institution, right?

586
00:37:50,540 --> 00:37:55,100
So you need to have these systems, but then how do you have those systems to protect it

587
00:37:55,260 --> 00:38:01,020
that also allow the good things to not lose energy because of that friction?

588
00:38:01,250 --> 00:38:01,570
Yeah.

589
00:38:01,650 --> 00:38:01,890
Yeah.

590
00:38:02,050 --> 00:38:07,570
You don't want an autoimmune attacked uh institution where it's just all defense, uh

591
00:38:07,650 --> 00:38:08,530
defensive institutions.

592
00:38:08,770 --> 00:38:09,010
Exactly.

593
00:38:09,890 --> 00:38:10,210
Exactly.

594
00:38:10,290 --> 00:38:10,530
Yeah.

595
00:38:10,610 --> 00:38:10,850
Yeah.

596
00:38:11,010 --> 00:38:11,490
Yeah.

597
00:38:11,730 --> 00:38:11,970
Yeah.

598
00:38:12,050 --> 00:38:16,770
I mean, it occurs to me that there can be a negative feedback loop where the more that the

599
00:38:16,770 --> 00:38:22,450
cooperation uh vortices are being blocked or interfered with, the more that resources

600
00:38:22,450 --> 00:38:24,290
become limited and zero sum.

601
00:38:24,800 --> 00:38:30,720
And on top of that, whoever has the the political power to to do the interfering, to

602
00:38:30,880 --> 00:38:36,480
to stop the vortices, well, that power itself becomes a zero-sum limited resource that that

603
00:38:36,480 --> 00:38:37,680
people fight over.

604
00:38:37,840 --> 00:38:42,240
And it seems, and then it becomes where you know the only way to get ahead in this society

605
00:38:42,320 --> 00:38:48,290
is to acquire the power to to stop these vortices and producing things collectively

606
00:38:48,290 --> 00:38:49,650
is no longer the best strategy.

607
00:38:49,730 --> 00:38:54,130
The best strategy is just trying to cozy up to whoever's in power and climb the power

608
00:38:54,130 --> 00:38:57,330
hierarchy, and it becomes just a zero sum world.

609
00:38:59,410 --> 00:39:03,730
That sounds so much like what is going on in Locke System R.

610
00:39:04,050 --> 00:39:04,130
Yeah.

611
00:39:04,210 --> 00:39:05,490
It's like, oh, that's so glum.

612
00:39:05,570 --> 00:39:06,130
That's so sad.

613
00:39:06,850 --> 00:39:10,530
Sorry, I'm dispositionally inclined to take things in the one direction.

614
00:39:10,690 --> 00:39:12,050
I apologize.

615
00:39:13,060 --> 00:39:16,740
It's also it feels very much like a low trust society too, right?

616
00:39:16,820 --> 00:39:20,580
Or like a society transitioning, you know, like I've we've all like lived different enough

617
00:39:20,580 --> 00:39:25,460
places, you know, like you go from like very variability and even even within a culture, a

618
00:39:25,460 --> 00:39:30,260
culture like a a country or something, you know, you go to a high trust or low trust

619
00:39:30,260 --> 00:39:34,660
institution, or even just like friend group or you know, social thing.

620
00:39:34,740 --> 00:39:40,170
It just feels this this feels like it's describing uh the kind of grammar of that high or

621
00:39:40,330 --> 00:39:42,410
low trust continuum to some degree.

622
00:39:42,810 --> 00:39:43,130
Totally.

623
00:39:43,290 --> 00:39:43,450
Yeah.

624
00:39:43,530 --> 00:39:47,450
I mean, there's tons of literature on like how there's just more uh political and and

625
00:39:47,450 --> 00:39:50,730
governmental corruption in in low trust society, which which makes sense, you know.

626
00:39:51,290 --> 00:39:55,050
The government is preventing cooperation from uh from uh taking place.

627
00:39:55,210 --> 00:39:57,850
And it's also a limited sum resource itself, right?

628
00:39:58,170 --> 00:39:58,250
Yeah.

629
00:39:58,410 --> 00:40:01,290
If the rules don't work, if the rules don't work, you can't follow them.

630
00:40:01,370 --> 00:40:03,530
You know, like you gotta get stuff done some way.

631
00:40:03,610 --> 00:40:03,770
Yeah.

632
00:40:04,320 --> 00:40:04,400
Yeah.

633
00:40:04,800 --> 00:40:10,800
And and also, I mean, it is fundamentally the case that cooperation at the lower level is

634
00:40:10,800 --> 00:40:14,080
often threatening to the institution at the higher level, right?

635
00:40:14,160 --> 00:40:15,840
I mean, that's what a revolution is, right?

636
00:40:16,080 --> 00:40:21,920
And so um there, you know, there is a uh uh you know

637
00:40:22,000 --> 00:40:27,070
an evolutionary process kind of of like institutions that are able to suppress uh

638
00:40:27,070 --> 00:40:30,510
cooperation at the lower level that could undermine the institution.

639
00:40:30,590 --> 00:40:32,990
And it doesn't even have to be like a full-on revolution, right?

640
00:40:33,070 --> 00:40:38,190
But it could just be like, you know, things happening at the lower level that change the

641
00:40:38,190 --> 00:40:40,670
rules of operation of the institution, right?

642
00:40:40,750 --> 00:40:43,710
Because, you know, you could think of an institution as kind of like an entity of like

643
00:40:43,710 --> 00:40:44,510
algorithms, right?

644
00:40:44,590 --> 00:40:45,950
Of like how it's operating.

645
00:40:46,110 --> 00:40:50,830
And that that set of algorithms is going to persist to the extent that it is good at

646
00:40:50,830 --> 00:40:53,150
keeping those algorithms in existence.

647
00:40:53,470 --> 00:40:58,880
So there's a really interesting sort of emergent, like you know,

648
00:40:59,200 --> 00:41:04,480
computation of institutional evolution that comes from approaching it in this kind of way.

649
00:41:04,800 --> 00:41:04,960
Yeah.

650
00:41:05,120 --> 00:41:07,520
You just describe schools too, right?

651
00:41:07,760 --> 00:41:12,320
Where uh where kids like have their own dynamics and then schools are the institution.

652
00:41:12,480 --> 00:41:16,880
I've also thought, I mean, uh, if you know, you've I I I would I would love to get your

653
00:41:16,880 --> 00:41:17,760
thinking about this.

654
00:41:18,000 --> 00:41:23,430
I've often thought, as like a group psychologist person, that a lot of the conflicts or

655
00:41:23,430 --> 00:41:29,430
cooperation across cohorts is really interesting too, because that lower level cooperation

656
00:41:29,430 --> 00:41:33,750
can also be like these damn kids and like, you know, get off my lawn and all the like

657
00:41:34,070 --> 00:41:36,310
grexing about uh kids these days.

658
00:41:36,390 --> 00:41:41,990
Like it seems like a common trope that um, you know, once you get older and you have stuff,

659
00:41:42,070 --> 00:41:45,820
the kids are threatening, you know, to some degree or not, uh, depending on what they're

660
00:41:45,820 --> 00:41:46,060
doing.

661
00:41:46,140 --> 00:41:50,380
But that can be some of that lower level cooperation too, whether you're a school as an

662
00:41:50,380 --> 00:41:54,060
institution or just like the older cohort and you have your status scheme.

663
00:41:54,540 --> 00:41:54,700
Yeah.

664
00:41:54,780 --> 00:41:57,180
I mean, if if you kind of think ancestrally, right?

665
00:41:57,340 --> 00:42:03,260
Like it would usually be the case that the people who are older are the ones that are kind

666
00:42:03,260 --> 00:42:06,700
of the keepers of whatever institutional structures there are.

667
00:42:06,780 --> 00:42:12,570
And those institutional structures without outside influence will come to

668
00:42:12,570 --> 00:42:15,290
represent the interests of the older generation more, right?

669
00:42:15,450 --> 00:42:19,770
And we know from parent offspring conflict, right, that you don't have completely aligned

670
00:42:19,770 --> 00:42:24,410
interests between parents and offspring, or you could say between older generations and

671
00:42:24,410 --> 00:42:25,530
younger generations, right?

672
00:42:25,770 --> 00:42:29,770
Because, you know, you have cohorts that could sort of collude about rules, et cetera.

673
00:42:30,010 --> 00:42:35,130
And so, you know, to the extent that, you know, we're products of our evolved psychology,

674
00:42:35,370 --> 00:42:41,200
where, you know, as an older human, you may want to have uh, you know,

675
00:42:41,520 --> 00:42:47,440
uh uh your offspring actually doing things that are more, you know, beneficial for

676
00:42:47,760 --> 00:42:50,640
the your descendants as a whole, right?

677
00:42:50,880 --> 00:42:52,400
Versus um for each other, right?

678
00:42:52,480 --> 00:42:57,600
So then you get this sort of tension between maybe the older generation um wanting to have

679
00:42:57,600 --> 00:43:02,960
institutions that are more cooperative and younger generation wanting to have more autonomy

680
00:43:03,120 --> 00:43:06,530
and you know be able to do the things that benefit them the most.

681
00:43:06,850 --> 00:43:12,290
Um now that doesn't mean that it's always like actually best for younger people to just do

682
00:43:12,290 --> 00:43:15,730
what benefits them the most because oftentimes they don't have the context.

683
00:43:15,810 --> 00:43:19,970
They can't understand, oh yeah, actually there are outside threats we need to cooperate and

684
00:43:19,970 --> 00:43:23,810
collaborate on, or there's just a coordination problem that needs to be solved.

685
00:43:23,890 --> 00:43:27,410
And you know, someone who is older can help to solve that coordination problem.

686
00:43:27,920 --> 00:43:30,880
So then we get into this trust and alignment issue again, right?

687
00:43:30,960 --> 00:43:36,960
It's like, do the kids trust that the, you know, information and the influence that is

688
00:43:36,960 --> 00:43:41,440
coming from the, you know, older generation is actually for their benefit or are they

689
00:43:41,440 --> 00:43:42,240
suspicious of it?

690
00:43:42,400 --> 00:43:44,160
And the answer is both, right?

691
00:43:44,320 --> 00:43:46,400
And like you go through these periods, right?

692
00:43:46,720 --> 00:43:50,690
You know, it's pretty normal for kids to go through periods of trusting their parents and

693
00:43:50,690 --> 00:43:54,930
then rebelling against everything their parent does or says just because their parents says

694
00:43:54,930 --> 00:43:55,170
it.

695
00:43:55,490 --> 00:43:59,170
So we can, I think, understand a lot of that in this context.

696
00:43:59,250 --> 00:44:03,730
And then some of that kind of you know scales up, I think, into these intergenerational

697
00:44:03,890 --> 00:44:09,010
conflict issues and these, you know, like, you know, well, what should these institutions

698
00:44:09,010 --> 00:44:09,570
be serving?

699
00:44:09,650 --> 00:44:15,490
And how do they balance individual autonomy with like, you know, top-down control and all

700
00:44:15,490 --> 00:44:15,970
of that?

701
00:44:16,660 --> 00:44:20,020
I love the frame of like ancestor descendant conflict, like more generally.

702
00:44:20,100 --> 00:44:25,060
It's like one of my like favorite theories that people don't talk about enough because you

703
00:44:25,060 --> 00:44:29,060
know it does, it's just you know a generalization of parent offspring conflict.

704
00:44:29,220 --> 00:44:34,820
But you know, it really um it really shows well what happens when you add cultural

705
00:44:34,820 --> 00:44:39,140
influence, when you um, you know, look at it over multiple generations, right?

706
00:44:39,220 --> 00:44:43,410
It really is the case that like you know, our great great great grandparents, uh,

707
00:44:43,650 --> 00:44:48,050
ultimately their genes would benefit if all of their descendants would cooperate as if

708
00:44:48,050 --> 00:44:48,850
they're all one.

709
00:44:48,930 --> 00:44:49,170
Yeah.

710
00:44:49,250 --> 00:44:49,490
Right?

711
00:44:49,650 --> 00:44:50,850
Like evolutionarily.

712
00:44:51,090 --> 00:44:55,730
And then, you know, you look across societies at like lots of spiritual traditions and you

713
00:44:55,730 --> 00:44:56,610
see the golden rule.

714
00:44:56,690 --> 00:44:59,010
It's like, okay, where do you think that came from?

715
00:44:59,170 --> 00:45:04,690
You know, it's it probably came from that psychology of like you should, you know, do unto

716
00:45:04,690 --> 00:45:06,370
others as they do unto you.

717
00:45:06,610 --> 00:45:12,260
And uh, you know, that's that is the thing that would be most beneficial for the

718
00:45:12,260 --> 00:45:14,020
ancestor of all of those individuals.

719
00:45:14,180 --> 00:45:14,740
So Yeah.

720
00:45:14,900 --> 00:45:15,140
For sure.

721
00:45:15,540 --> 00:45:17,220
The intergenerational conflict conference.

722
00:45:17,380 --> 00:45:21,300
We got to get going on that and come up with a with a catchy name for it.

723
00:45:22,500 --> 00:45:23,060
That sounds funny.

724
00:45:24,020 --> 00:45:28,340
That's actually a really interesting idea because you know, the so much of the dialogue

725
00:45:28,340 --> 00:45:33,620
about intergenerational issues really focuses on the cooperation side, which yes, obviously

726
00:45:33,700 --> 00:45:34,740
we should be thinking about that.

727
00:45:34,820 --> 00:45:40,030
And we should be thinking about, you know, future generations and past generations and

728
00:45:40,030 --> 00:45:41,470
information flow and all of that.

729
00:45:41,630 --> 00:45:46,510
But if we don't appreciate and understand that there's also this conflict dimension that is

730
00:45:46,510 --> 00:45:50,670
being managed on both sides, where there's vigilance about that on both sides, then that's

731
00:45:50,670 --> 00:45:56,590
actually going to get in the way of us figuring out how to work effectively with future

732
00:45:56,590 --> 00:46:00,350
generations and older generations currently alive today, right?

733
00:46:00,430 --> 00:46:02,430
To have a positive future for everyone.

734
00:46:02,670 --> 00:46:02,830
Yeah.

735
00:46:02,910 --> 00:46:07,540
Ooh, and just to editorialize one thing there, that it might be is institutional

736
00:46:07,540 --> 00:46:13,460
propaganda, because uh you if you have a scientific body that's sort of

737
00:46:13,540 --> 00:46:16,340
it's like paternal, it selects for paternalism a little bit, right?

738
00:46:16,420 --> 00:46:18,580
Where it's sort of like we know the right thing to do.

739
00:46:18,740 --> 00:46:22,260
And so a conference that's all about like, well, you gotta respect the autonomy of the

740
00:46:22,260 --> 00:46:27,670
upstarts who might not accept the pre-existing structure, it's kind of threatening, right?

741
00:46:27,750 --> 00:46:32,310
Like it's pretty subversive to sort of be like, well, actually, the things that the kids

742
00:46:32,310 --> 00:46:37,110
are doing that's outside of the purview of like the PTA and the principal and the teachers,

743
00:46:37,270 --> 00:46:38,310
we have to respect that.

744
00:46:38,470 --> 00:46:42,310
You know, you're not gonna get a lot of like, you know, funding for that, probably.

745
00:46:43,350 --> 00:46:44,150
Or you might.

746
00:46:44,230 --> 00:46:46,710
Um, but it's a particular way to frame it, I guess.

747
00:46:46,790 --> 00:46:47,030
Yeah.

748
00:46:47,110 --> 00:46:47,350
Yeah.

749
00:46:47,750 --> 00:46:47,910
Yeah.

750
00:46:48,150 --> 00:46:53,520
It's interesting to connect this idea of inter intergenerational conflict back to this uh

751
00:46:53,760 --> 00:46:55,760
positive sum, zero sum distinction.

752
00:46:55,840 --> 00:47:00,480
Because if we're in a positive sum ecology where we're producing lots of stuff and each

753
00:47:00,480 --> 00:47:04,640
generation has more stuff than the previous generation, well then the offspring are gonna

754
00:47:04,640 --> 00:47:08,160
win in the parent offspring conflict because they have more stuff than their parents, they

755
00:47:08,160 --> 00:47:12,160
have more skills and experience, uh, they're wealthier in various ways, and the parents

756
00:47:12,160 --> 00:47:13,280
have less bargaining power.

757
00:47:13,440 --> 00:47:18,670
And so uh in those types of societies, like you know, the societies we we live in where uh

758
00:47:18,830 --> 00:47:23,310
the economy is is growing uh pretty fast and each generation is wealthier than the previous

759
00:47:23,310 --> 00:47:27,470
generation in terms of standard of living, then all of a sudden, you know, uh the okay

760
00:47:27,630 --> 00:47:31,150
boomer mentality arises and respect for elders kind of goes out the window.

761
00:47:31,310 --> 00:47:37,150
But if we're in a limited resource ecology where um the only way to uh acquire resources

762
00:47:37,150 --> 00:47:42,920
is to gain political power, cozy up to uh i the existing people with

763
00:47:42,920 --> 00:47:47,240
power, uh, you know, respect your elders, then all of a sudden, you know, you you the only

764
00:47:47,240 --> 00:47:50,520
way to really get ahead is to get on the good side of your elders, right?

765
00:47:50,600 --> 00:47:52,040
Because they're the ones who control everything.

766
00:47:52,200 --> 00:47:53,240
Resources are limited.

767
00:47:53,320 --> 00:47:55,480
Uh we're not producing more stuff each generation.

768
00:47:55,560 --> 00:47:57,720
We just have to fight over the existing stuff.

769
00:47:57,880 --> 00:48:03,400
Um and in that case you get these kinds of gerontocracies um where respect for

770
00:48:03,400 --> 00:48:06,950
elders is is you know more politically important.

771
00:48:07,190 --> 00:48:11,510
Um so I think there's another uh connection there between the you know the various threads

772
00:48:11,510 --> 00:48:12,310
we've been talking about.

773
00:48:12,950 --> 00:48:17,190
Yeah, yeah, we can actually look at this in terms of like the sort of pools or the pies,

774
00:48:17,350 --> 00:48:17,590
right?

775
00:48:17,750 --> 00:48:23,590
So um in a you know zero-sum situation, um, you know, all of the pies are fixed,

776
00:48:23,670 --> 00:48:26,630
but also like the familial pie is more fixed, right?

777
00:48:26,710 --> 00:48:32,520
And so you're gonna have more um uh uh more of a sort of

778
00:48:32,520 --> 00:48:37,000
need to manage that that conflict among offspring and also between parents and offspring,

779
00:48:37,080 --> 00:48:37,240
right?

780
00:48:37,320 --> 00:48:40,840
You have both higher offspring offspring conflict and higher parent offspring offspring

781
00:48:40,840 --> 00:48:41,320
conflict.

782
00:48:41,560 --> 00:48:47,320
In a more zero sum situation, um, it's not necessarily that the offspring are

783
00:48:47,320 --> 00:48:50,360
gonna win, but kind of everybody can win, right?

784
00:48:50,680 --> 00:48:55,800
Because you don't have a limited pie that you then have to spend your energy fighting over,

785
00:48:55,960 --> 00:48:56,120
right?

786
00:48:56,200 --> 00:49:00,590
You can use your energy to get more resources for whatever that pool is.

787
00:49:00,830 --> 00:49:03,950
And everybody can have uh, you know, a beneficial outcome.

788
00:49:04,110 --> 00:49:10,030
So, you know, if you think of um even just like, well, if everybody has limited time and

789
00:49:10,030 --> 00:49:14,990
energy, in a zero-sum situation, you're gonna use a bunch of that time and energy fighting

790
00:49:14,990 --> 00:49:15,790
over the pie.

791
00:49:15,950 --> 00:49:20,110
Um, versus in a non-zero sum situation, you're gonna use some of that limited time and

792
00:49:20,110 --> 00:49:24,990
energy to make the pie bigger, as long as you understand, right, that that's possible and

793
00:49:24,990 --> 00:49:29,660
you understand that everyone is gonna be doing that, that we're all gonna be working to

794
00:49:29,660 --> 00:49:30,620
make that pie bigger.

795
00:49:30,780 --> 00:49:36,060
Um, so then that shared, you know, that common knowledge and shared understanding comes

796
00:49:36,060 --> 00:49:37,100
into play as well.

797
00:49:37,340 --> 00:49:37,580
Yeah.

798
00:49:37,740 --> 00:49:43,420
There's also an uh David, the argument you were just making about um uh gerontocracies also

799
00:49:43,580 --> 00:49:48,850
has argue there's an argument anthropologically or orthographically about um even just

800
00:49:48,850 --> 00:49:49,490
siblings.

801
00:49:49,650 --> 00:49:53,730
It's not as the the Sullaway argument that it's always older or younger, I think I'm not

802
00:49:53,730 --> 00:49:54,690
sure that pans out.

803
00:49:54,770 --> 00:49:59,410
But I think this idea that, you know, in Athena, just as you were talking about, like you

804
00:49:59,410 --> 00:50:02,450
can have this strategy of I'm gonna expand the pie.

805
00:50:02,610 --> 00:50:05,090
And that's where you don't like, you don't cozy up to your parents.

806
00:50:05,170 --> 00:50:07,010
You're just like, I'm gonna go strike it out of my own.

807
00:50:07,090 --> 00:50:09,490
You know, I'm gonna go to California and mine for gold or something.

808
00:50:09,620 --> 00:50:09,860
I don't know.

809
00:50:09,940 --> 00:50:10,820
I'm in California.

810
00:50:10,980 --> 00:50:15,060
Um but you know, the but canonically the older sibling is like, Oh, I respect my parents

811
00:50:15,140 --> 00:50:17,300
because I'm gonna inherit the farm or something, you know.

812
00:50:17,460 --> 00:50:21,540
So um so the same kind of thing I think even can happen in families, whether or not it's

813
00:50:21,540 --> 00:50:23,460
older or younger kind of might vary.

814
00:50:23,540 --> 00:50:24,340
But yeah.

815
00:50:24,660 --> 00:50:25,060
For sure.

816
00:50:25,220 --> 00:50:25,540
Yeah.

817
00:50:25,940 --> 00:50:29,940
Are you um uh just completely d uh uh Athena, do you have siblings?

818
00:50:30,020 --> 00:50:31,540
Are you older, younger only child?

819
00:50:31,620 --> 00:50:37,300
If you I'm the I'm the older sibling, and my younger sibling is the more like

820
00:50:37,630 --> 00:50:38,510
institutional one.

821
00:50:38,670 --> 00:50:43,150
So he's, you know, uh worked in the State Department and is a lawyer.

822
00:50:43,230 --> 00:50:48,510
And uh um, and I'm more the, you know, one who's always sort of like going off and and

823
00:50:48,510 --> 00:50:53,310
doing weird and interesting things and literally focusing on how do we make the pie bigger.

824
00:50:53,470 --> 00:50:54,590
Like that's my work, you know.

825
00:50:54,670 --> 00:50:56,030
Like take that Frank Solo.

826
00:50:56,670 --> 00:50:56,990
I'm kidding.

827
00:50:57,070 --> 00:50:58,430
He's the wonderful wonderful person.

828
00:50:58,510 --> 00:50:59,550
I actually yeah, yeah.

829
00:50:59,790 --> 00:51:02,350
Um how in and I don't want to get too meta here too.

830
00:51:02,430 --> 00:51:07,180
This has been wonderful, but you talked earlier about you know, you reserve, I forget what

831
00:51:07,180 --> 00:51:08,300
the percentage was, 20% of the year.

832
00:51:08,540 --> 00:51:09,020
Like twenty percent.

833
00:51:09,180 --> 00:51:10,060
Yeah, twenty percent of my time.

834
00:51:10,140 --> 00:51:10,380
Yeah.

835
00:51:10,620 --> 00:51:16,300
I I talk to a lot of academics, especially academics who may be not early, like right early

836
00:51:16,300 --> 00:51:21,580
career, but sort of, you know, post-tenure, there's a little bit of like fear people

837
00:51:21,740 --> 00:51:27,100
encounter where they say, look, you know, like it's it's scary to do something new or

838
00:51:27,100 --> 00:51:28,540
uncertain or something I like.

839
00:51:28,620 --> 00:51:31,500
Like I do I just even deserve to pursue that.

840
00:51:31,740 --> 00:51:37,090
Um for people who are who are listening who might be in that situation, do you have any

841
00:51:37,170 --> 00:51:43,090
like I I I think you're um you're living as an academic uh I would

842
00:51:43,090 --> 00:51:46,690
say you're one of the best examples of living your best life if I can put it that way.

843
00:51:47,810 --> 00:51:51,010
So do you have any advice for people who feel scared to do that?

844
00:51:51,170 --> 00:51:54,850
Who feel like, oh I don't know there's this thing I really do care about but I don't know

845
00:51:54,850 --> 00:51:56,290
if anybody's gonna like it.

846
00:51:56,780 --> 00:52:00,540
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but yeah, is there is there any advice to that or

847
00:52:00,540 --> 00:52:06,540
how what what would be helpful um uh or what was helpful for you to to sort of go

848
00:52:06,540 --> 00:52:06,940
through that?

849
00:52:07,100 --> 00:52:10,540
Because I think that's something that everybody struggles with, especially if they get a

850
00:52:10,540 --> 00:52:13,740
little bit of success and then there's sort of the uncertain future.

851
00:52:14,060 --> 00:52:14,700
Yeah.

852
00:52:14,940 --> 00:52:18,140
Well, I I would say two two main things.

853
00:52:18,300 --> 00:52:22,090
So one is don't wait to start doing it.

854
00:52:22,250 --> 00:52:26,330
There's never going to be the time where you're like, oh, I now have the time to spend 20%

855
00:52:26,650 --> 00:52:29,210
of my time on the things that I'm most excited about.

856
00:52:29,530 --> 00:52:34,890
You just have to make the time and you have to trust that that is going to pay off

857
00:52:35,530 --> 00:52:37,930
in the short term, medium term, and long term.

858
00:52:38,250 --> 00:52:42,650
In the short term, it'll pay off because you will be less burnt out.

859
00:52:43,020 --> 00:52:45,580
You will start to find that joy again.

860
00:52:45,740 --> 00:52:51,500
You will feel more aligned with your own goals and

861
00:52:51,820 --> 00:52:56,940
the energies that you uniquely bring to whatever space you're in.

862
00:52:57,820 --> 00:53:03,740
In the medium term, it'll pay off because those things that you start with

863
00:53:03,820 --> 00:53:09,580
at 20%, those are things that you are gonna be more uniquely able to

864
00:53:09,580 --> 00:53:10,540
contribute to, right?

865
00:53:10,620 --> 00:53:14,690
So they're gonna be projects that you know aren't things that people are already looking

866
00:53:14,690 --> 00:53:15,810
at, probably, right?

867
00:53:16,130 --> 00:53:20,450
Or you're gonna go and learn about something in another discipline that then you bring to

868
00:53:20,450 --> 00:53:24,850
your discipline and you do something that otherwise wouldn't have been possible with that.

869
00:53:25,170 --> 00:53:30,690
So in the medium term, you'll have new projects, um, they will be more innovative, and you

870
00:53:30,690 --> 00:53:35,490
may even find that you are able to get funding that you couldn't before.

871
00:53:35,650 --> 00:53:39,730
So, for me, the best example of this is the human generosity project.

872
00:53:39,940 --> 00:53:43,700
That started for me as a 20% of my, it was even less than that.

873
00:53:43,780 --> 00:53:47,460
It was literally one day a month that I was spending on it.

874
00:53:47,540 --> 00:53:53,460
So it was like technically five uh 0.5% of my time that I was spending on that.

875
00:53:53,940 --> 00:53:58,980
And um that started just because I thought it was really interesting.

876
00:53:59,140 --> 00:54:04,340
Lee and I had started talking about making a model of uh need-based transfer systems.

877
00:54:04,500 --> 00:54:08,100
And I really thought it would be a one and done thing, but it was just something I was

878
00:54:08,150 --> 00:54:08,870
interested in.

879
00:54:09,110 --> 00:54:14,950
So um for you know a better part of a year, Lee and I would um

880
00:54:14,950 --> 00:54:19,430
just spend to pick one day a month and either I would drive from Philly to New Jersey and

881
00:54:19,430 --> 00:54:22,230
we would work in person for that day, or vice versa.

882
00:54:22,390 --> 00:54:25,590
So you know we took the time to do that in person too, which is much more positively

883
00:54:25,590 --> 00:54:26,550
reinforcing, right?

884
00:54:26,630 --> 00:54:29,910
Than like having a project where you're just, you know, doing it remotely.

885
00:54:30,140 --> 00:54:33,900
Um, and that ended up growing into the human generosity project.

886
00:54:33,980 --> 00:54:39,100
You know, we got um, you know, funding from multiple agencies, you know, for it, you know,

887
00:54:39,180 --> 00:54:44,140
and foundations, including a $2 million grant from the Templeton Foundation for that

888
00:54:44,140 --> 00:54:44,540
project.

889
00:54:44,700 --> 00:54:48,460
And it grew into, you know, something that then wasn't the 20%.

890
00:54:49,100 --> 00:54:52,300
It was in the, you know, more the bulk of my work.

891
00:54:52,540 --> 00:54:58,490
Um, and then so in the you know, medium and long term, then your portfolio starts

892
00:54:58,490 --> 00:55:02,410
to reflect the things that you're really excited about and interested in.

893
00:55:02,730 --> 00:55:07,850
And you also will learn, like as you're as you're working in these spaces, like with the

894
00:55:07,850 --> 00:55:12,010
Human Generosity Project, I really I did think it was just gonna be, you know, initially

895
00:55:12,090 --> 00:55:17,130
this one paper we would do, but the results that we got were much more interesting than I

896
00:55:17,130 --> 00:55:19,050
initially thought because it was an agent-based model.

897
00:55:19,130 --> 00:55:22,480
So you, you know, the things emerged that we weren't expecting and it was like, oh well, we

898
00:55:22,480 --> 00:55:25,040
should now do this other model and then we should put it in a network.

899
00:55:25,120 --> 00:55:31,120
So it had an energy of its own that, you know, I couldn't have known what the potential

900
00:55:31,120 --> 00:55:36,560
was there without spending that time just exploring this because I thought it was

901
00:55:36,560 --> 00:55:41,360
interesting and exciting and just worth it for me as a human because I wanted to know what

902
00:55:41,360 --> 00:55:42,960
was happening in the system.

903
00:55:43,360 --> 00:55:46,990
So you have to trust that those payoffs will come.

904
00:55:47,230 --> 00:55:52,750
Um, and that those initial that initial payoff of just being less burnt out is so valuable

905
00:55:52,910 --> 00:55:56,590
because you know, then you'll you'll be able to bring better energy to the other projects

906
00:55:56,590 --> 00:55:58,190
that you have going on as well.

907
00:55:58,430 --> 00:56:04,190
So, um, so so that's you know, one piece of advice like don't don't delay

908
00:56:04,350 --> 00:56:07,470
that you know, you'll get benefits in all of these, you know, terms.

909
00:56:07,630 --> 00:56:12,860
Um, and then the other thing is uh, you know, if you're an academic or you're you know

910
00:56:12,940 --> 00:56:18,140
you're trying to sort of work within this existing system where you know you have to have

911
00:56:18,300 --> 00:56:23,340
certain number of papers in these right journals you have to have you know colleagues that

912
00:56:23,500 --> 00:56:28,860
um you you know cultivate relationships with where they you know respect you as a serious

913
00:56:28,860 --> 00:56:34,860
scholar and all of that um it can be a challenge to balance you know having these

914
00:56:34,940 --> 00:56:39,930
you know side projects some of which people might not really be able to readily understand

915
00:56:40,170 --> 00:56:44,810
with the current sort of, you know, epistemic states that they are in, right, within these

916
00:56:44,810 --> 00:56:45,690
subdisciplines.

917
00:56:45,850 --> 00:56:50,010
And so there is, you know, often some discomfort around that, right?

918
00:56:50,250 --> 00:56:55,530
Because, you know, you're operating in a world that has sort of a

919
00:56:56,010 --> 00:56:58,970
shared uh set of assumptions.

920
00:56:59,210 --> 00:57:03,540
And if you start doing things that are outside of that world of that shared set of

921
00:57:03,540 --> 00:57:07,940
assumptions, like you have to be ready for, you know, dealing with that discomfort,

922
00:57:08,020 --> 00:57:10,260
especially as you start presenting that work.

923
00:57:10,420 --> 00:57:15,380
And, you know, people are like, oh, well, that doesn't fit my model for what's happening.

924
00:57:15,620 --> 00:57:18,980
So, so yeah, so you have to be, you have to be ready for that.

925
00:57:19,140 --> 00:57:25,090
But I think that, you know, there is a sort of higher goal of like how do we make science

926
00:57:25,090 --> 00:57:30,690
better, which involves us actually all doing that and all being ready to step outside of

927
00:57:30,690 --> 00:57:33,170
the assumptions that are all shared and push that.

928
00:57:33,330 --> 00:57:37,650
So, you know, so if you can, you know, be happy knowing like you're you're actually doing

929
00:57:37,650 --> 00:57:42,210
something good for science as a whole by pushing those boundaries, then I think that'll it

930
00:57:42,210 --> 00:57:45,490
will make everything better for everyone in the sciences.

931
00:57:45,730 --> 00:57:45,890
Yeah.

932
00:57:46,050 --> 00:57:48,370
For that second part, is it hardest at first?

933
00:57:48,530 --> 00:57:54,460
Because if you're, for example, um doing something that isn't part of the value

934
00:57:54,460 --> 00:57:59,820
system of your, you know, uh personnel committee or something at your university, but

935
00:57:59,820 --> 00:58:03,100
you're doing this thing that you know is going to be impactful.

936
00:58:03,660 --> 00:58:08,860
In the beginning, I would imagine um you're not getting cues from the outside world because

937
00:58:08,860 --> 00:58:13,020
it's just starting, but you're getting all the frows, the bur the frows, the bur the

938
00:58:13,020 --> 00:58:17,020
furrowed brows, frows, furrowed brows of your of your colleagues.

939
00:58:17,100 --> 00:58:20,620
But then when you actually start going out and you see, oh, look, I'm making this impact,

940
00:58:20,670 --> 00:58:21,790
You're meeting people.

941
00:58:22,030 --> 00:58:22,750
Is that fair?

942
00:58:22,830 --> 00:58:24,750
Like it's actually hardest at the beginning.

943
00:58:25,150 --> 00:58:25,390
Yeah.

944
00:58:25,790 --> 00:58:31,390
And I think also, you know, one thing that you can do at the beginning is, you know, find

945
00:58:31,390 --> 00:58:37,070
the other people who are starting to think in these ways and also give your own brain the

946
00:58:37,070 --> 00:58:38,750
cues that that's your environment.

947
00:58:39,070 --> 00:58:39,390
Right.

948
00:58:39,550 --> 00:58:45,500
Um, and uh to the extent that they can also sort of help support your work.

949
00:58:45,660 --> 00:58:50,140
So, you know, I had this experience as a grad student working on things that were really

950
00:58:50,140 --> 00:58:54,140
outside of, you know, the way that people were working, using methods that people weren't

951
00:58:54,140 --> 00:58:54,380
using.

952
00:58:54,540 --> 00:58:59,100
So, you know, I taught myself how to do agent-based modeling actually as an undergrad and

953
00:58:59,100 --> 00:59:01,820
then was using that in my dissertation.

954
00:59:01,980 --> 00:59:06,350
Um, and nobody on my committee had any expertise in agent-based modeling because it was

955
00:59:06,350 --> 00:59:06,910
still super new.

956
00:59:06,990 --> 00:59:09,470
So it's like it wasn't even really being taught at all.

957
00:59:09,550 --> 00:59:14,910
In, you know, I actually taught one of the first agent-based modeling graduate courses at

958
00:59:14,910 --> 00:59:19,310
Portland State University right after I graduated from Reed because I was only one of the

959
00:59:19,310 --> 00:59:20,350
only people who knew how to do that.

960
00:59:20,430 --> 00:59:24,430
So, you know, so then I was in a grad program that didn't have any expert, I was the expert

961
00:59:24,430 --> 00:59:24,990
on it.

962
00:59:25,230 --> 00:59:30,350
And um, I honestly don't know whether I would have been able to actually graduate with a

963
00:59:30,480 --> 00:59:34,640
dissertation on agent-based modeling, if it weren't for the fact that I was already

964
00:59:34,640 --> 00:59:37,280
published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, right?

965
00:59:37,440 --> 00:59:43,440
So like I was able to, you know, have enough connections sort of in the world

966
00:59:43,440 --> 00:59:46,880
of people who were working on these questions in this domain.

967
00:59:46,960 --> 00:59:52,000
And then, you know, was able to get a paper published that went through peer review, you

968
00:59:52,000 --> 00:59:57,090
know, and luckily, like, you know, the it got sent to reviewers who understood enough about

969
00:59:57,090 --> 01:00:01,730
what I was doing that they were able to validate, yes, this is an important contribution.

970
01:00:01,890 --> 01:00:04,850
So then I was able to graduate, you know, with a PhD.

971
01:00:05,250 --> 01:00:10,530
Um, even though my committee, you know, they honestly said, like, we can't evaluate this

972
01:00:10,530 --> 01:00:13,010
method and this approach because we're not experts in it.

973
01:00:13,170 --> 01:00:18,850
So um, so you kind of have to curate the environment around you, um,

974
01:00:19,170 --> 01:00:25,020
uh, both like in terms of the social intellectual interactions you're having and

975
01:00:25,020 --> 01:00:27,660
then also the sort of institutional piece, right?

976
01:00:27,820 --> 01:00:32,300
Whether, you know, going through peer review, finding the right journals, you know, all of

977
01:00:32,300 --> 01:00:36,860
that so that you can get your work out there and um, you know, have it have that stamp of

978
01:00:36,860 --> 01:00:40,700
approval that then lets you navigate within the system more effectively.

979
01:00:40,940 --> 01:00:41,260
Yeah.

980
01:00:41,820 --> 01:00:42,060
Yeah.

981
01:00:42,210 --> 01:00:47,650
And what you're talking about reminds me of uh a blog post uh of yours that I read a while

982
01:00:47,650 --> 01:00:47,810
ago.

983
01:00:47,890 --> 01:00:52,850
It's uh that's been sticking with me about the experience of serendipity.

984
01:00:53,330 --> 01:00:58,930
Um so could you talk a little bit about what you think this this feeling is and what

985
01:00:58,930 --> 01:01:03,650
function it might be serving and how it connects to uh all the things you've just been

986
01:01:03,650 --> 01:01:08,050
talking about, about building new networks of of collaboration and exploring new ideas.

987
01:01:08,450 --> 01:01:09,250
Yeah, absolutely.

988
01:01:09,410 --> 01:01:15,180
So uh I love this idea of, you know, we were talking about this earlier too, like

989
01:01:15,260 --> 01:01:16,700
when we feel this sort of magic, right?

990
01:01:16,780 --> 01:01:20,940
It's like, oh, something's happening and like I don't know what it is, but like it feels

991
01:01:20,940 --> 01:01:25,420
like we're connected and like, you know, it's something greater than like it's some higher

992
01:01:25,420 --> 01:01:26,140
thing, right?

993
01:01:26,300 --> 01:01:31,820
And I think that like literally that feeling is related to our

994
01:01:31,820 --> 01:01:37,250
brains detecting that there is a positive cooperative opportunity there.

995
01:01:37,410 --> 01:01:43,330
And I use the language of positive assortment, which is this principle in

996
01:01:43,330 --> 01:01:49,090
evolutionary biology and especially in the evolution of cooperation, that if

997
01:01:49,090 --> 01:01:54,930
cooperators can interact with each other more often than would happen at random.

998
01:01:55,090 --> 01:01:56,850
So that's the positive assortment, right?

999
01:01:56,930 --> 01:01:59,010
The cooperation with cooperation.

1000
01:01:59,330 --> 01:02:05,080
Then that allows cooperators to get higher payoffs, right, than they otherwise would,

1001
01:02:05,240 --> 01:02:09,800
which can scaffold the evolution of cooperation or just the emergence of cooperation when

1002
01:02:09,800 --> 01:02:13,080
you have individuals that can, you know, choose their strategies, right?

1003
01:02:13,400 --> 01:02:18,680
So, so the idea is basically that, you know, when when we're in a situation, we start, we

1004
01:02:18,680 --> 01:02:22,200
have a conversation with someone, we meet someone, and we're like, wow, like this feels

1005
01:02:22,200 --> 01:02:27,720
like there's there's something special here that what we're feeling is this like sort of,

1006
01:02:27,800 --> 01:02:33,790
you know, emotional readout of positive assortment and the potential that is there

1007
01:02:33,790 --> 01:02:38,110
for actually doing something together that um is cooperative.

1008
01:02:38,270 --> 01:02:42,270
We have, you know, maybe we're also detecting cues that we would be good at coordinating.

1009
01:02:42,430 --> 01:02:45,310
Maybe you're having a really animated conversation, you're sharing information, you're

1010
01:02:45,310 --> 01:02:48,430
like, wow, we can really interoperate effectively, right?

1011
01:02:48,510 --> 01:02:50,910
So I think that that's sort of what we're tuning into.

1012
01:02:51,070 --> 01:02:56,840
And um I uh I I made a a follow-up post where I kind of break down a little bit more

1013
01:02:56,920 --> 01:02:59,880
like what the cues are that I think we're we're detecting.

1014
01:02:59,960 --> 01:03:04,360
Um, you know, one of those is the alignment, which we talked about, um, and then the

1015
01:03:04,360 --> 01:03:09,800
cooperation energy and uh the coordination energy capacity.

1016
01:03:10,200 --> 01:03:16,150
And then I think also uh actually a separate category is um the absence

1017
01:03:16,150 --> 01:03:18,630
of exploiters or hijackers.

1018
01:03:18,870 --> 01:03:23,350
And I actually distinguish that from the cooperation energy because I think that there's a

1019
01:03:23,350 --> 01:03:27,590
difference between like, oh, I have a bunch of energy that I want to put into this thing

1020
01:03:27,590 --> 01:03:32,470
right now versus, you know, maybe not, maybe you're just a little more passive, but you're

1021
01:03:32,470 --> 01:03:33,830
not necessarily exploiting, right?

1022
01:03:33,910 --> 01:03:39,620
I think that's, you know, versus someone who's there sort of with the intention to hijack

1023
01:03:39,620 --> 01:03:40,500
and exploit.

1024
01:03:40,660 --> 01:03:46,260
And I think we have a specific detection system for that cheating that is different from

1025
01:03:46,340 --> 01:03:50,340
like detecting maybe like less effort or less engagement.

1026
01:03:50,580 --> 01:03:54,100
Um, so even though you might be able to say, uh you might be able to say they're on some

1027
01:03:54,100 --> 01:03:58,820
sort of spectrum, I think the way our brains work is actually we kind of pull those out as

1028
01:03:58,820 --> 01:04:02,980
sort of separate things because um they're they're different in terms of the opportunity

1029
01:04:02,980 --> 01:04:04,660
and threat profile that they offer, right?

1030
01:04:04,740 --> 01:04:08,870
Like if there's an exploiter in your midst, then you probably want to just walk away from

1031
01:04:08,870 --> 01:04:09,990
that group entirely.

1032
01:04:10,150 --> 01:04:15,030
Um, versus if there's, you know, maybe some variation in like how energized people are,

1033
01:04:15,190 --> 01:04:19,590
like that's something that can be modified by the environment and the feedback and and all

1034
01:04:19,590 --> 01:04:20,150
of that.

1035
01:04:20,790 --> 01:04:24,390
Yeah, no, it it certainly resonates with my personal experience.

1036
01:04:24,550 --> 01:04:28,470
Like if you're with a group of people and there's like one asshole in the group, you can

1037
01:04:28,550 --> 01:04:31,860
like feel the energy of the group change when the asshole leaves the room.

1038
01:04:31,940 --> 01:04:33,620
You know, it's like, oh, they're they're gone.

1039
01:04:33,700 --> 01:04:39,060
Now we can just like work together as as cooperators, you know, without the burden of this

1040
01:04:39,060 --> 01:04:42,340
person, like, you know, creating this suffocating vibe.

1041
01:04:42,580 --> 01:04:42,820
Yeah.

1042
01:04:42,980 --> 01:04:45,540
Um, and uh, I think that that rings true.

1043
01:04:45,620 --> 01:04:50,980
And I mean it's I think it's unfortunate there hasn't been more work on this psychology

1044
01:04:51,060 --> 01:04:53,700
because it feels like so central to so many things.

1045
01:04:53,860 --> 01:04:59,710
Um yeah, I think that part of why there hasn't been um enough work on it is because,

1046
01:05:00,190 --> 01:05:03,950
you know, it feels like a woo or magical thing, right?

1047
01:05:04,030 --> 01:05:09,310
And like, I mean, like, and literally like the my inspiration for writing this piece was um

1048
01:05:09,630 --> 01:05:15,230
being at a music festival and somebody giving me this sticker that said, you know, find the

1049
01:05:15,230 --> 01:05:15,470
others.

1050
01:05:15,550 --> 01:05:19,310
And it was, you know, somebody we were like dancing and hanging out and chatting and and

1051
01:05:19,470 --> 01:05:22,430
she was like, Oh, you're like one of my people, and like, here's the sticker.

1052
01:05:22,750 --> 01:05:24,200
And then I was like, find the others.

1053
01:05:24,280 --> 01:05:25,720
That sounds like positive assortment.

1054
01:05:25,800 --> 01:05:27,960
And then, you know, my brain just kind of started like going.

1055
01:05:28,040 --> 01:05:33,560
I'm like, huh, you know, like maybe there is something like really important about what is

1056
01:05:33,560 --> 01:05:37,160
happening in this, like, we have a good vibe together thing.

1057
01:05:37,320 --> 01:05:41,880
Um, and you know, sometimes that gets facilitated by, you know, people drinking or doing

1058
01:05:41,880 --> 01:05:43,480
other substances or whatever, right?

1059
01:05:43,560 --> 01:05:47,710
Like that maybe their nervous systems are in a more calm state and they can be like, you

1060
01:05:47,710 --> 01:05:51,870
know more receptive to that so yeah I think that's also an interesting tangent that we

1061
01:05:51,870 --> 01:05:57,550
could we could go down but um regardless I think it's uh you know it just there's there are

1062
01:05:57,550 --> 01:06:03,550
a lot of things that kind of academics you know often don't take seriously because they

1063
01:06:03,550 --> 01:06:08,030
seem like they're they're they're too much just about like the things that we do as humans

1064
01:06:08,110 --> 01:06:08,990
and that's not really science.

1065
01:06:09,070 --> 01:06:14,590
It's like no actually that is the science you know um I you know I had some colleagues uh

1066
01:06:15,040 --> 01:06:19,440
I have some colleagues who, you know, a few years ago when um you all know Jamie Krems, you

1067
01:06:19,440 --> 01:06:23,760
know, who's like made this amazing career like on friendship, um, and very early on there

1068
01:06:23,760 --> 01:06:27,680
were some senior colleagues who basically said, you know, well, that's not a topic.

1069
01:06:27,840 --> 01:06:30,240
That's not a that's not a social psychology topic.

1070
01:06:30,560 --> 01:06:34,400
And it's like, well, that's the point because it is, it's like it should be, right?

1071
01:06:34,480 --> 01:06:37,280
It's like such an important thing um for humans.

1072
01:06:37,440 --> 01:06:41,890
And so I think you know, there's often these blind spots that come from like, you know,

1073
01:06:42,050 --> 01:06:47,170
well, if it isn't something that already has a history of, you know, being worked on.

1074
01:06:47,410 --> 01:06:51,970
And if it's something that involves like human positive emotions and it can seem like a

1075
01:06:51,970 --> 01:06:55,730
little fuzzy, then it's like, oh, that's not a serious topic, you know?

1076
01:06:56,290 --> 01:06:59,810
But but actually, like, what are our po positive emotions for?

1077
01:06:59,970 --> 01:07:00,130
Right?

1078
01:07:00,290 --> 01:07:04,210
They are to direct our energy and attention and effort.

1079
01:07:04,530 --> 01:07:08,770
And I think we just need to pay a lot more attention about what is going on computationally

1080
01:07:08,770 --> 01:07:13,120
with those, especially when it comes to these emergent properties that can happen when

1081
01:07:13,280 --> 01:07:18,640
there's a potential for cooperation and coordination and doing things that you could not

1082
01:07:18,640 --> 01:07:20,000
literally otherwise do.

1083
01:07:20,160 --> 01:07:20,480
Right.

1084
01:07:20,640 --> 01:07:22,960
Um if you have if you have people who are aligned, right?

1085
01:07:23,040 --> 01:07:27,920
And they know they're aligned, they have, you know, energy to work on things together and

1086
01:07:27,920 --> 01:07:32,430
they are effective at dividing labor and communicating, like you can get so much done.

1087
01:07:32,670 --> 01:07:32,910
Yeah.

1088
01:07:33,070 --> 01:07:37,790
This that what you just said really reminded me of like a it felt like very John Tube-ish.

1089
01:07:37,950 --> 01:07:39,870
Like at the point is like go to the woo.

1090
01:07:39,950 --> 01:07:44,590
Like you be secure in your science enough that like there is no woo.

1091
01:07:44,670 --> 01:07:45,710
It's all science, right?

1092
01:07:45,790 --> 01:07:46,830
So just you can go to it.

1093
01:07:46,990 --> 01:07:48,750
You don't have to be insecure about that.

1094
01:07:48,830 --> 01:07:49,150
Yeah.

1095
01:07:49,230 --> 01:07:49,390
Yeah.

1096
01:07:49,790 --> 01:07:50,830
Go to the vortex.

1097
01:07:51,070 --> 01:07:51,630
Yes, exactly.

1098
01:07:51,790 --> 01:07:52,510
So yeah, true.

1099
01:07:52,830 --> 01:07:54,590
No, but it's like security, right?

1100
01:07:54,670 --> 01:07:59,150
Like you have to be like self-confident and like not worry about it.

1101
01:07:59,310 --> 01:08:03,520
Because there will be people who don't take it seriously, like which is like the whole

1102
01:08:03,520 --> 01:08:04,960
history of science, like right.

1103
01:08:05,040 --> 01:08:09,920
Like nobody took everyone who made progress seriously at some point.

1104
01:08:10,000 --> 01:08:10,400
Right.

1105
01:08:10,880 --> 01:08:11,200
For sure.

1106
01:08:11,360 --> 01:08:16,240
Yeah, as long as you have the right intellectual foundations, I think you can you're free

1107
01:08:16,240 --> 01:08:20,960
to explore and you know go forth and you know find whatever excites you because you can be

1108
01:08:20,960 --> 01:08:24,470
s secure in those foundations, you know, like natural selection.

1109
01:08:24,550 --> 01:08:26,470
Humans are evolved organisms.

1110
01:08:26,550 --> 01:08:32,310
You know, uh, we have motivational and emotional structures that uh facilitated um

1111
01:08:32,390 --> 01:08:34,470
uh fitness in ancestral environments.

1112
01:08:34,550 --> 01:08:38,790
Like those are our intellectual foundations, you know, with game theory and like how

1113
01:08:38,790 --> 01:08:40,310
strategies interact with each other.

1114
01:08:40,390 --> 01:08:46,150
Like as long as you live in that framework, you can do whatever you want, explore any idea.

1115
01:08:46,310 --> 01:08:48,440
Like it it's it's you know, anyway.

1116
01:08:49,160 --> 01:08:49,480
Exactly.

1117
01:08:49,560 --> 01:08:54,120
Well and and now we get back kind of full circle with the sort of institutional discussion

1118
01:08:54,280 --> 01:08:54,840
too, right?

1119
01:08:55,000 --> 01:08:57,800
And the, you know, ancestor descendant conflict, right?

1120
01:08:57,880 --> 01:09:01,960
Like we can even think of, you know, that as like, you know, well, are you participating in

1121
01:09:01,960 --> 01:09:07,160
the environment that I have created where I have status and you're gonna do things that

1122
01:09:07,160 --> 01:09:11,890
contribute to my status by working on, you know, this this topic that I have developed, and

1123
01:09:11,890 --> 01:09:15,890
then you know, you're sort of part of my extended phenotype, right?

1124
01:09:16,130 --> 01:09:21,010
Or are you gonna say, oh no, like actually what we should be doing is in a decentralized

1125
01:09:21,010 --> 01:09:23,330
way, trying to understand all of the things.

1126
01:09:23,570 --> 01:09:27,890
So, you know, like grad student, I want you to go and do this thing that you're interested

1127
01:09:27,890 --> 01:09:32,930
in and figure this out, and like I will help you, even if it's not the next paper in my

1128
01:09:32,930 --> 01:09:33,970
legacy, right?

1129
01:09:34,130 --> 01:09:38,780
So I think that you know, thinking about how all of these things interact with the

1130
01:09:38,780 --> 01:09:43,740
institutions that we've built around learning, around research, around, you know, sort of

1131
01:09:43,740 --> 01:09:49,500
building the um knowledge commons, right, that we have as humans uh is a whole other layer

1132
01:09:49,500 --> 01:09:50,060
and level.

1133
01:09:50,220 --> 01:09:54,780
And uh it's it's kind of exciting now though, because there are things that we can do with

1134
01:09:54,780 --> 01:09:58,030
this sort of like global knowledge commons that we couldn't before.

1135
01:09:58,190 --> 01:09:59,310
So uh yeah.

1136
01:09:59,390 --> 01:10:04,590
So I'm optimistic in general about, you know, kind of where things will go with uh our

1137
01:10:04,590 --> 01:10:10,350
ability to you know look at these topics that maybe have not been central

1138
01:10:10,590 --> 01:10:13,870
in the academic study of you know human psychology.

1139
01:10:14,270 --> 01:10:16,510
On that last point, there's a lot of things you can do.

1140
01:10:16,670 --> 01:10:20,830
Can you tell people, because I don't even like I, you know, I don't I don't know you that

1141
01:10:20,830 --> 01:10:22,030
well, but we know each other.

1142
01:10:22,190 --> 01:10:23,900
Um what do you do?

1143
01:10:23,980 --> 01:10:27,900
Like I'm I'm confused about like what is the zombie apocalypse?

1144
01:10:28,060 --> 01:10:31,420
Um like you do so many cool things and I always want to be like, what I want to talk to

1145
01:10:31,580 --> 01:10:34,060
Athena and find out like what these things are.

1146
01:10:34,220 --> 01:10:38,620
Can you tell the listener who either knows you, knows you well or doesn't know you at all?

1147
01:10:38,700 --> 01:10:42,220
Like what are some of the things you've done just to give people an idea of what they want

1148
01:10:42,220 --> 01:10:46,700
to look look into you more or the kinds of things like what what what are you doing or what

1149
01:10:46,780 --> 01:10:48,220
have you done or what are you gonna do?

1150
01:10:48,380 --> 01:10:48,860
Yeah.

1151
01:10:49,180 --> 01:10:49,420
Yeah.

1152
01:10:49,530 --> 01:10:49,850
All right.

1153
01:10:49,930 --> 01:10:52,170
Well, I can kind of put it in three buckets.

1154
01:10:52,330 --> 01:10:58,010
So um the first bucket is uh the work that I'm doing at ASU and really

1155
01:10:58,090 --> 01:11:04,010
like in the academic environment with cooperative futures at ASU, which is um

1156
01:11:04,250 --> 01:11:09,290
this new entity that really is about how do we take the science of cooperation and apply it

1157
01:11:09,290 --> 01:11:11,050
to emerging challenges.

1158
01:11:11,290 --> 01:11:16,780
So, you know, that includes relationship with technology, especially navigating our future

1159
01:11:16,780 --> 01:11:17,580
with AI.

1160
01:11:17,740 --> 01:11:19,340
We have lots of workshops.

1161
01:11:19,500 --> 01:11:24,060
We have a um a summer academy and a winter academy on the topic.

1162
01:11:24,300 --> 01:11:27,660
Uh, we have um uh artist residency.

1163
01:11:27,820 --> 01:11:31,900
So, like right now, Shane Moss um is our artist in residence as a comedian.

1164
01:11:31,980 --> 01:11:37,450
We're um doing a bunch of events uh where we're sort of working on how do you

1165
01:11:37,450 --> 01:11:42,090
communicate with the public using comedy about issues like what's going on right now with

1166
01:11:42,090 --> 01:11:43,450
AI, for example.

1167
01:11:44,570 --> 01:11:50,570
Within that, we also have other labs, one about heritage fermentation and

1168
01:11:50,570 --> 01:11:51,930
interspecies cooperation.

1169
01:11:52,010 --> 01:11:58,010
So, what can we learn from the way that you have uh you know cooperation at very, very

1170
01:11:58,010 --> 01:12:01,770
high levels happening inside these sort of fermentation systems?

1171
01:12:01,930 --> 01:12:07,000
Um, how can that also uh how can that understanding influence human health as well, right?

1172
01:12:07,160 --> 01:12:13,000
So looking at that essentially cellular cooperation um among different species.

1173
01:12:13,320 --> 01:12:19,240
There's also a focus on looking at our bodies um as cooperative systems uh and

1174
01:12:19,240 --> 01:12:22,840
cancer and other diseases as a breakdown of that cooperation.

1175
01:12:23,000 --> 01:12:27,030
Um, it includes also like some of the things that we were talking about with genetic

1176
01:12:27,030 --> 01:12:29,910
conflict and uh you know conflict with other entities.

1177
01:12:29,990 --> 01:12:33,910
So you can you can kind of bring all of those things in this in that domain.

1178
01:12:34,150 --> 01:12:40,070
We're also interested in these questions about how we build uh educational and academic and

1179
01:12:40,070 --> 01:12:42,150
research institutions going forward.

1180
01:12:42,230 --> 01:12:47,910
Um and also uh another lab focused on storytelling and that as a

1181
01:12:47,910 --> 01:12:53,500
mechanism for coordination and cooperation um that uh kind of

1182
01:12:53,500 --> 01:12:59,260
helps humans to work through the practicalities of uh you know how to operate especially in

1183
01:12:59,260 --> 01:13:02,940
new domains and and uh uh with you know new problems.

1184
01:13:03,180 --> 01:13:08,940
So so at ASU right now that's my focus and and really trying to bring um diverse

1185
01:13:08,940 --> 01:13:14,710
disciplines together at ASU around these topics and then have events where

1186
01:13:14,710 --> 01:13:20,230
anybody can come, you know, for for workshops for these academies, um, and uh, you know,

1187
01:13:20,550 --> 01:13:21,350
sort of building that out.

1188
01:13:21,430 --> 01:13:23,110
So that's my ASU focus.

1189
01:13:23,190 --> 01:13:26,790
There's a lot of opportunities for you to be involved, whether you're at ASU or not.

1190
01:13:27,110 --> 01:13:32,710
Um now I'm also building a company outside of

1191
01:13:32,710 --> 01:13:38,240
ASU um called Agentic Intelligence Systems, and that's all about how do we take the science

1192
01:13:38,240 --> 01:13:43,120
of cooperation and build that in to all the layers of the tech stack in AI.

1193
01:13:43,280 --> 01:13:48,800
So from how we do sort of multi-agent interaction, how you figure out if agents are

1194
01:13:48,800 --> 01:13:54,720
aligned or not aligned, how you correct when things are kind of going off track, um, to

1195
01:13:54,720 --> 01:14:00,080
actually building a foundation model that uses these principles of cooperation.

1196
01:14:00,320 --> 01:14:04,190
Um, so that's something I'm extremely excited about.

1197
01:14:04,270 --> 01:14:09,470
And there's, you know, uh that's it's early.

1198
01:14:09,550 --> 01:14:12,190
We're right now um kind of in our seed round for that.

1199
01:14:12,350 --> 01:14:14,670
So very excited about that on the building side.

1200
01:14:14,830 --> 01:14:16,270
It's really, really cool to build stuff.

1201
01:14:16,510 --> 01:14:20,990
Also, just want to say like if you're a person who, you know, likes to build things, what

1202
01:14:20,990 --> 01:14:24,430
you can do right now with vibe coding is amazing.

1203
01:14:24,510 --> 01:14:28,440
And especially if you have a background already in coding, you understand recursion and

1204
01:14:28,440 --> 01:14:33,720
feedback and you know what it's possible to do, then um, you know, you can just uh

1205
01:14:34,440 --> 01:14:40,040
the the extent to which you can kind of take those coding abilities and use that with

1206
01:14:40,360 --> 01:14:42,360
uh AI right now is is amazing.

1207
01:14:42,440 --> 01:14:45,640
So I would highly encourage people to to do that just as an aside.

1208
01:14:46,280 --> 01:14:52,120
And then on the sort of more um arts and experience and uh you know my like

1209
01:14:52,120 --> 01:14:58,030
20% um side, I have a lot of um things that you know for me help

1210
01:14:58,270 --> 01:15:01,630
me be uh in my creative space and where I like to be.

1211
01:15:01,710 --> 01:15:07,390
So I have my um uh Substack not for peer review where I you know

1212
01:15:07,630 --> 01:15:12,110
put out ideas that um like you know my positive assortment idea things that I'm just like

1213
01:15:12,190 --> 01:15:14,590
you know I I just want to get this out to everyone quickly.

1214
01:15:14,750 --> 01:15:20,460
My my original intention with that was actually to um start publishing things from my

1215
01:15:20,460 --> 01:15:24,700
stacks of notebooks because I have stacks of notebooks, you know, going back to when I was

1216
01:15:24,700 --> 01:15:25,820
uh an undergrad.

1217
01:15:26,140 --> 01:15:30,140
Um, but I literally haven't even been able to crack those notebooks because there's just

1218
01:15:30,140 --> 01:15:33,260
been so many things that I'm like, oh, I'm thinking of this now and I want to get it out.

1219
01:15:33,420 --> 01:15:36,860
So um I want to make more time for that in the future.

1220
01:15:37,020 --> 01:15:42,940
Um, but then there's also uh things that others can kind of come and join in

1221
01:15:42,940 --> 01:15:43,420
this space.

1222
01:15:43,660 --> 01:15:48,010
So uh I mentioned this show that Shane and I are producing.

1223
01:15:48,090 --> 01:15:54,090
Um it's called Surviving AI, and it's a variety show about how we have a positive future

1224
01:15:54,090 --> 01:15:59,370
with technology, has you know a comedy set in it, then it has a science panel, a science

1225
01:15:59,450 --> 01:16:02,490
and expert panel about AI in the future.

1226
01:16:02,650 --> 01:16:06,650
And then we always have an art segment at the end where we have artists that use AI,

1227
01:16:06,810 --> 01:16:12,200
artists that don't use AI, And there's a you know performance and audience engagement kind

1228
01:16:12,200 --> 01:16:17,640
of about, well, you know, how does AI impact how we interact as humans and

1229
01:16:18,120 --> 01:16:19,640
art as a lens for that?

1230
01:16:19,880 --> 01:16:24,280
So we've done that in a number of cities and we'll continue to do that.

1231
01:16:25,240 --> 01:16:27,560
And then the zombie apocalypse world.

1232
01:16:27,640 --> 01:16:32,440
So the zombie apocalypse medicine meeting, um, that is coming up at the end of October.

1233
01:16:32,520 --> 01:16:38,070
It's October 26th through 28th in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which is a wonderful

1234
01:16:38,550 --> 01:16:40,390
little Victorian town.

1235
01:16:41,270 --> 01:16:47,030
And essentially that meeting is about creating a very playful frame

1236
01:16:47,350 --> 01:16:52,390
for engaging about uh topics that are kind of scary,

1237
01:16:52,950 --> 01:16:57,190
frontier, like what you know, how are we actually going to navigate this future given how

1238
01:16:57,190 --> 01:16:58,470
things are unfolding?

1239
01:16:58,710 --> 01:17:04,360
Um, and uh I like to say it's you know sort of all topic all topic zombie and apocalypse,

1240
01:17:04,520 --> 01:17:09,400
which actually really means um, you know, anything having to do with like zombification,

1241
01:17:09,480 --> 01:17:11,320
manipulation, parasitism, right?

1242
01:17:11,400 --> 01:17:13,000
All of that is fair game.

1243
01:17:13,320 --> 01:17:16,200
And also, you know, cooperation is a part of it too, right?

1244
01:17:16,280 --> 01:17:20,280
Like, how do you, you know, because you can, you know, influence others and hijack them in

1245
01:17:20,280 --> 01:17:21,480
ways that are good for them.

1246
01:17:21,640 --> 01:17:26,670
Um, and then the sort of apocalypse side is like, well, what is the the future?

1247
01:17:26,750 --> 01:17:28,430
What's a positive future we want to make?

1248
01:17:28,510 --> 01:17:29,710
What are the barriers to that?

1249
01:17:29,870 --> 01:17:35,870
Can we kind of playfully engage about you know the apocalyptic future as a way of

1250
01:17:35,870 --> 01:17:41,470
actually um creating uh like a low stress

1251
01:17:41,470 --> 01:17:44,910
environment to engage about things that are actually really challenging?

1252
01:17:44,990 --> 01:17:47,950
And you know, sort of storytelling and that framing helps a lot.

1253
01:17:48,190 --> 01:17:53,060
Um, one of the things I didn't really realize at first when I started the Zombie Apocalypse

1254
01:17:53,140 --> 01:17:58,020
Medicine meeting is that the sort of language and framing of the zombie apocalypse would

1255
01:17:58,020 --> 01:18:03,940
also create a shared language that let people kind of drop their jargon and you know,

1256
01:18:04,100 --> 01:18:10,020
sort of talk playfully about zombification and zombies and you know the the the apocalypse.

1257
01:18:10,100 --> 01:18:12,980
And um, that's been been really fun.

1258
01:18:13,060 --> 01:18:17,330
And it it's you know, honestly, it's also just like a self-selection kind of thing, right?

1259
01:18:17,410 --> 01:18:21,570
So you you invite someone to come to zombie apocalypse medicine meeting.

1260
01:18:21,810 --> 01:18:25,650
And I would say more than half of people are just like, no, and they don't even want to

1261
01:18:25,650 --> 01:18:25,890
talk.

1262
01:18:25,970 --> 01:18:27,330
They're like, what are you even talking about?

1263
01:18:27,410 --> 01:18:27,650
Right.

1264
01:18:27,730 --> 01:18:29,570
And then half the people are like, oh, that's interesting.

1265
01:18:29,650 --> 01:18:32,210
And maybe they'll like talk to you a little bit about it.

1266
01:18:32,370 --> 01:18:37,780
Um, and then it's something like, you know, five to 10% of people are like, oh fuck yeah.

1267
01:18:37,940 --> 01:18:38,020
Yeah.

1268
01:18:38,180 --> 01:18:40,580
And they get it and they're like, I'm I'm coming.

1269
01:18:40,820 --> 01:18:44,660
You know, and so then when you get all of that that that five percent of the fuck yeah

1270
01:18:44,740 --> 01:18:50,580
people in the room together, then that creates this environment where you know those are

1271
01:18:50,580 --> 01:18:55,140
the peers that are then saying, Yeah, like push those boundaries, ask those questions,

1272
01:18:55,300 --> 01:18:58,740
like, yeah, nobody's working on that, and people should be working on that.

1273
01:18:58,950 --> 01:18:59,110
Yeah.

1274
01:18:59,270 --> 01:19:01,430
And that's kind of the magic of Zam.

1275
01:19:01,830 --> 01:19:06,310
And uh, you know, a lot of really awesome things have come out of Zam.

1276
01:19:06,470 --> 01:19:09,350
It's it's almost like a like a melting pot, right?

1277
01:19:09,430 --> 01:19:13,110
Or not even a melting pot, because like people will connect who might not otherwise

1278
01:19:13,110 --> 01:19:15,990
connect, they'll share information, new projects will start.

1279
01:19:16,070 --> 01:19:20,880
Um, you know, that it's like that, it's a collective like 20%, right?

1280
01:19:20,960 --> 01:19:25,200
Where it's like, okay, we all like stuff that we're all excited about is happening in this,

1281
01:19:25,280 --> 01:19:27,760
and we can find other people who are also excited about it.

1282
01:19:27,920 --> 01:19:32,000
And then that can, you know, lead to that sort of snowball effect where those things can

1283
01:19:32,000 --> 01:19:35,280
then become part of our more serious scholarship, right?

1284
01:19:35,360 --> 01:19:38,560
That can enter into the institutional structures that exist.

1285
01:19:38,800 --> 01:19:39,040
Yeah.

1286
01:19:39,200 --> 01:19:39,680
Awesome.

1287
01:19:40,400 --> 01:19:43,840
Um, and and we talked before we started recording about music.

1288
01:19:44,000 --> 01:19:49,150
Um Is there I feel like the Z the Zam is the if that's that's the acronym.

1289
01:19:49,310 --> 01:19:53,470
Um I'm imagining a lot of like bluegrass, but maybe there's no music at all.

1290
01:19:53,550 --> 01:19:54,350
I have no idea.

1291
01:19:54,670 --> 01:19:57,310
Yeah, we we have actually had um bluegrass.

1292
01:19:57,390 --> 01:20:01,950
So the uh the surviving AI show that were the first one we ever had, we had bluegrass

1293
01:20:01,950 --> 01:20:05,470
musicians um at the end, the one that we're doing at ASU.

1294
01:20:05,550 --> 01:20:07,310
Um we have bluegrass musicians in it.

1295
01:20:07,390 --> 01:20:12,240
And for many of the zombie apocalypse medicine meetings, um we've also had the Apocalypse

1296
01:20:12,240 --> 01:20:16,240
Roadshow, which is the alternative book tour that I had for my book, A Field Guide to the

1297
01:20:16,240 --> 01:20:17,040
Apocalypse.

1298
01:20:17,360 --> 01:20:22,720
And that, so we've actually did the shows like as part of Zam too and uh had bluegrass

1299
01:20:22,720 --> 01:20:23,440
musicians in.

1300
01:20:23,520 --> 01:20:29,520
And I, you know, one of the things that I like to do in my 20% is, you

1301
01:20:29,520 --> 01:20:31,440
know, write music, play music.

1302
01:20:31,680 --> 01:20:36,770
And um some of the music that I write and play is actually about uh putting into a

1303
01:20:36,770 --> 01:20:41,090
storytelling context the uh work that I do, right?

1304
01:20:41,170 --> 01:20:45,970
So I have a, I have a song that I do um that is it's called the O So Trois Song.

1305
01:20:46,050 --> 01:20:49,970
And it's basically the story of this field work that I've done over the course of, you

1306
01:20:49,970 --> 01:20:55,890
know, um more than a decade and you know, others on our team have done that explains what

1307
01:20:55,890 --> 01:20:58,840
happened at all these field sites, but it's very playful.

1308
01:20:58,920 --> 01:20:59,960
There's swearing in it.

1309
01:21:00,040 --> 01:21:01,560
It's a sing-along, you know.

1310
01:21:01,800 --> 01:21:06,680
It was like literally the first sing-along that ever happened, you know, in the Harvard

1311
01:21:06,680 --> 01:21:08,920
book uh program that they had.

1312
01:21:09,000 --> 01:21:11,000
So, like, as I went and did the road show there.

1313
01:21:11,080 --> 01:21:15,480
So, you know, I'm I'm always like kind of peppering those things in, like, where it's like,

1314
01:21:15,560 --> 01:21:19,560
okay, can you know, fit this in here in an institutional context where it might not

1315
01:21:19,560 --> 01:21:20,440
otherwise happen?

1316
01:21:20,600 --> 01:21:25,010
But um, but yeah, more generally, like music is a very big part of my life.

1317
01:21:25,330 --> 01:21:31,090
And um I just this weekend was um collecting data at the Pickin' in the Pines

1318
01:21:31,170 --> 01:21:32,370
Bluegrass Festival.

1319
01:21:32,530 --> 01:21:37,970
Um it's a pilot study that we have um looking at physiological synchrony when people are

1320
01:21:37,970 --> 01:21:38,930
jamming together.

1321
01:21:39,090 --> 01:21:44,530
And um, that really came out of my experience um where like I, you know,

1322
01:21:44,690 --> 01:21:50,380
literally have some of the best peak experiences of my life in jam circles where

1323
01:21:50,380 --> 01:21:54,700
you're playing music and you're all entrained and you're, you know, you're you're doing

1324
01:21:54,700 --> 01:21:56,460
something that you're like, how am I even doing this?

1325
01:21:56,540 --> 01:21:59,260
Like something, something magical seems to be happening.

1326
01:21:59,580 --> 01:22:02,940
And, you know, for me, it's like, well, what is that magic?

1327
01:22:03,020 --> 01:22:03,260
Right.

1328
01:22:03,420 --> 01:22:07,020
It's uh I I have to try to understand what's happening there.

1329
01:22:07,180 --> 01:22:12,390
And so uh so yeah so we have, you know, this this study we collected data from nine

1330
01:22:12,390 --> 01:22:17,750
different groups jamming with we had physiological sensors on them and we recorded the

1331
01:22:17,750 --> 01:22:18,550
audio as well.

1332
01:22:18,710 --> 01:22:24,470
So we're going to be able to look at, you know, how the acoustic features of their playing

1333
01:22:24,470 --> 01:22:26,550
relate to their physiological synchrony.

1334
01:22:26,870 --> 01:22:32,470
We also had groups that are professional musicians that jam together, social jamming in the

1335
01:22:32,470 --> 01:22:34,790
campground, and groups with amateurs jamming.

1336
01:22:34,870 --> 01:22:39,030
So we're going to be able to compare, you know, and uh contrast a little bit.

1337
01:22:39,190 --> 01:22:44,880
And uh we already have another festival um that is ready to

1338
01:22:44,880 --> 01:22:48,640
collaborate with us um because they were you know the person who runs it was super excited

1339
01:22:48,640 --> 01:22:54,560
seeing what we were doing so um I'm uh I'm really really pumped about that because that was

1340
01:22:54,560 --> 01:22:56,880
like definitely a twenty percent of my time project, right?

1341
01:22:57,120 --> 01:23:02,570
And now it's like okay we, you know, I have a I have colleagues that you know flew in from

1342
01:23:02,570 --> 01:23:04,410
Georgetown and from UCLA.

1343
01:23:04,890 --> 01:23:06,090
You all know Greg Bryant.

1344
01:23:06,170 --> 01:23:11,210
He's um part of this study too and two grad students who got on the project and then and

1345
01:23:11,210 --> 01:23:14,730
now we have all these people in the music world and festival world who are excited about

1346
01:23:14,730 --> 01:23:14,890
it.

1347
01:23:15,050 --> 01:23:20,250
And I even heard from um one of the professional musicians that the musicians were talking

1348
01:23:20,250 --> 01:23:22,810
about it backstage and they're like, oh that would be cool.

1349
01:23:22,890 --> 01:23:24,010
I'd be interested in doing that.

1350
01:23:24,090 --> 01:23:25,130
I want to see what's going on.

1351
01:23:25,290 --> 01:23:29,100
So you know that's that like that energy of that vortex, you know.

1352
01:23:29,180 --> 01:23:31,500
It's like, okay, we started this thing, it's in this 20%.

1353
01:23:32,060 --> 01:23:36,780
Um, but you know, these grad students are excited, you know, all my colleagues are excited,

1354
01:23:37,100 --> 01:23:41,260
the person who runs the festival is excited, somebody who runs another festival is excited

1355
01:23:41,260 --> 01:23:42,060
and wants it to happen.

1356
01:23:42,140 --> 01:23:44,140
The musicians are like, we would want to do this.

1357
01:23:44,220 --> 01:23:48,380
So um, you know, and then it's like, okay, I guess this is not gonna be a twenty percent

1358
01:23:48,380 --> 01:23:49,020
project anymore.

1359
01:23:49,100 --> 01:23:51,980
It's like, you know, it's coming into the the mainstream.

1360
01:23:52,140 --> 01:23:55,500
So um to me that's uh it's super exciting when that happens.

1361
01:23:55,830 --> 01:23:56,550
That's awesome.

1362
01:23:56,710 --> 01:23:57,110
Awesome.

1363
01:23:57,190 --> 01:23:57,510
Yeah.

1364
01:23:57,910 --> 01:23:58,390
All right.

1365
01:23:58,630 --> 01:24:01,510
Well, I mean, I think that's a pretty good note to uh to end on.

1366
01:24:01,670 --> 01:24:06,070
We we rarely end on a positive note because we've covered a lot of dark topics on this

1367
01:24:06,070 --> 01:24:09,990
podcast, but I'm glad to end on a more joyous and optimistic note.

1368
01:24:10,150 --> 01:24:13,350
Thank you so much for uh taking the time to be with us today, Athena.

1369
01:24:13,510 --> 01:24:14,550
Yeah, and it's so fun.

1370
01:24:14,790 --> 01:24:15,510
Oh, sorry, Athena.

1371
01:24:15,670 --> 01:24:19,350
Oh, I'm just gonna say it was so fun talking to you, but it's like you know, like sometimes

1372
01:24:19,430 --> 01:24:23,640
you you know do podcasts and you're like, oh, we're like trying to like learn from each

1373
01:24:23,640 --> 01:24:25,080
other and like have a good conversation.

1374
01:24:25,160 --> 01:24:28,120
And this just felt like, oh, we're just like shooting shit about cool things.

1375
01:24:28,200 --> 01:24:29,800
And I love it when that happens.

1376
01:24:29,880 --> 01:24:31,000
So yeah, no, totally.

1377
01:24:31,080 --> 01:24:34,840
And uh you know, I just like whenever we have people on to I always think about like what I

1378
01:24:34,840 --> 01:24:40,600
think about like as you were wrapping up, I just think like you uh I imagine you, you're

1379
01:24:40,600 --> 01:24:44,120
sort of like guys, you know, we're allowed to just like do this fun, interesting stuff.

1380
01:24:44,440 --> 01:24:45,240
You realize that right?

1381
01:24:45,400 --> 01:24:51,190
And like I think many people I've talked to have been inspired by your um, I

1382
01:24:51,190 --> 01:24:54,870
don't think it's too much to say, like courage to do that kind of thing.

1383
01:24:55,030 --> 01:24:59,590
And I think that uh I wish there were more people like you and thank you for being in the

1384
01:24:59,590 --> 01:25:01,030
evolutionary behavioral sciences.

1385
01:25:01,190 --> 01:25:05,430
I think it's much better for you being in it, and I think that um I think there will be

1386
01:25:05,430 --> 01:25:08,390
hopefully many other people who follow and have been inspired by you.

1387
01:25:08,470 --> 01:25:09,750
So thank you for doing it.

1388
01:25:10,070 --> 01:25:11,990
Well, thank you so much for saying that.

1389
01:25:12,150 --> 01:25:17,840
And also let me say to everyone if you do it, you set an example to

1390
01:25:17,840 --> 01:25:21,120
others that it can be done and that it's okay to do it.

1391
01:25:21,280 --> 01:25:26,320
So you are not just helping yourself, you are helping others realize they can also do it.

1392
01:25:26,480 --> 01:25:30,720
So you kind of have a responsibility to do it, not just to yourself, but to the rest of the

1393
01:25:30,720 --> 01:25:31,200
world.

1394
01:25:31,520 --> 01:25:31,920
Yeah.

1395
01:25:32,240 --> 01:25:32,800
All right.

1396
01:25:33,040 --> 01:25:33,440
Awesome.

1397
01:25:33,760 --> 01:25:34,240
Great advice.

1398
01:25:34,400 --> 01:25:35,680
Long live the vortex.

1399
01:25:36,000 --> 01:25:36,400
Take care.

1400
01:25:36,640 --> 01:25:37,520
Yes, join the vortex.

1401
01:25:37,920 --> 01:25:38,720
Join the vortex.

1402
01:25:39,630 --> 01:25:40,590
Athena, thank you so much.

1403
01:25:40,910 --> 01:25:42,110
It's not a cult, don't worry.

1404
01:25:44,990 --> 01:25:46,270
It's okay, maybe.

1405
01:25:51,470 --> 01:25:53,550
What a lovely vibe for this episode.

1406
01:25:53,710 --> 01:25:56,270
Yes, as we're talking about vibes and and woo.

1407
01:25:56,590 --> 01:25:57,710
Yeah, and vortexes.

1408
01:25:59,070 --> 01:26:00,910
That's that was always a confusing word for me.

1409
01:26:01,070 --> 01:26:02,110
The plural of vortex.

1410
01:26:02,350 --> 01:26:04,350
Yeah, I think it's vortices, isn't it?

1411
01:26:04,740 --> 01:26:05,700
Uh sure.

1412
01:26:05,860 --> 01:26:06,820
Uh yeah.

1413
01:26:07,300 --> 01:26:09,700
That's also a word I think would be difficult to spell.

1414
01:26:09,860 --> 01:26:11,540
Spelling was never one of my strong suits.

1415
01:26:12,020 --> 01:26:13,380
Yeah, uh, that's true.

1416
01:26:13,540 --> 01:26:18,100
But um, if you're still here listening, that means you've emerged from our vortex with

1417
01:26:18,100 --> 01:26:18,900
Athena.

1418
01:26:19,220 --> 01:26:23,940
Um, we engaged in a fun cooperative uh interaction.

1419
01:26:24,100 --> 01:26:29,700
And if you want to join the vortex and help us help you and others

1420
01:26:29,700 --> 01:26:35,150
spread these interesting ideas, you can uh write us a kind

1421
01:26:35,150 --> 01:26:35,870
review.

1422
01:26:36,190 --> 01:26:38,910
You can say nice things about us on social media.

1423
01:26:38,990 --> 01:26:41,310
We have a Patreon page where you can support us.

1424
01:26:41,390 --> 01:26:43,790
Is there anything else uh listeners can do, David?

1425
01:26:44,190 --> 01:26:49,950
You know, play a mandolin or a banjo or a guitar or a bass and join a bluegrass band or

1426
01:26:49,950 --> 01:26:51,230
just play some music with somebody.

1427
01:26:51,390 --> 01:26:52,350
Get a harmonica.

1428
01:26:53,070 --> 01:26:55,070
Play some music or enjoy some music.

1429
01:26:55,310 --> 01:26:55,950
Yeah.

1430
01:26:56,260 --> 01:26:56,740
Great.

1431
01:26:56,900 --> 01:26:57,380
All right.

1432
01:26:57,540 --> 01:26:58,900
Um, great advice.

1433
01:26:58,980 --> 01:27:00,660
So David, it was lovely to talk to you.

1434
01:27:00,740 --> 01:27:02,740
And uh well, have a great week, everybody.

1435
01:27:02,900 --> 01:27:07,620
Um and just just cooperate in a in a lovely way with somebody this week.

1436
01:27:08,020 --> 01:27:08,660
Yes.

1437
01:27:09,220 --> 01:27:09,780
All right.

1438
01:27:10,020 --> 01:27:10,660
All right.

1439
01:27:11,060 --> 01:27:12,100
I'll see you next week.

1440
01:27:12,340 --> 01:27:13,540
See you next week.