The Extended, Cooperative Phenotype with Athena Aktipis
2026-10-06 12:00:00.000 +00:00

I'm David Pinsov. I'm Dave Petrozowski. And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast Actual Evolutionary Psychology. By actual evolutionary psychologists. Look at that. We're getting good at this. David, who is our guest this week? Athena Actipus, a brilliant polymath of many eclectic interest that uh all have a common thread, I think, of the science of cooperation and conflict at multiple scales and levels. Um, we had a really fun, wide-ranging conversation, uh sort of bouncing off all sorts of ideas. Yeah, I I dare you to not be enthusiastic after listening to this uh episode with Athena. And these uh Athena is uh contagious um uh with respect to how much she just we she talks explicitly about she she works on these things that initially maybe she uh spends

0.5 or 20% of her time on that she's really excited about, and then oftentimes can grow them into larger parts of her work. And um, you know, uh she just loves what she's doing and it and it shows. I agree. And uh I think you will love listening to this podcast. On that note, uh without further ado, here's Athena and David and I talking about all things. Um I don't know, how would you put it in a uh cooperation-y, conflicty. Uh yeah. Inter interoperative is was one of the words that we used. And I thought that was really a nice uh inner interoperator or interoperative. I think that's a lovely word. I agree. And you'll hear plenty of other lovely words quite soon. Okay. Uh so here without further ado, here is um here's the episode.

I'll do the first question. Oh, you're gonna do the question. You're okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we guess. Or I guess I could just deliver a statement about um what's going on in my life and then We should we do a check-in? Maybe I'll just I'll just bring an instrument. Can we just start playing music? That would be great. Uh like literally uh my car is filled with instruments. I have a bass, I have a cello, I have a guitar, I have a ukulele. I also have a bunch of instruments up in my studio there, including an accordion I can't play. So whatever you guys want, we can do. Is it an electric cello or an acoustic cello? It's an acoustic cello. Oh wow, in your car. Wow, that's impressive. Okay. Well, in a bass, like a acoustic bass, a double bass in my car.

Yeah. What kind of well? Yeah, that app opens a whole other set of questions that we will we're gonna we're gonna we'll put that in the back burner. David Maybe I'll give it to you in some. I mean I'm very I'm tempted to bring up my guitar and start jamming. Um well Athena um your uh musical prowess is reflected also by your uh research prowess in terms of um you having many different wide ranging interests across the social sciences and the biological sciences. That's part of why I I love your your work so much. You have eclectic interests kind of like mine, uh, and are willing to just follow exciting ideas wherever they lead, even if they lead you outside of your own discipline. So I want to put it to you, uh, if there is any common thread to all of your

research, if there is like a unifying story, or is it just a bunch of random shit you're interested in? Because that's cool too. Uh, that's probably how I would uh answer that question myself. So I'm just curious if if you have a story or if or if it's just uh sound and fury signifying nothing. Yes to both. I mean, like I you know I have so there's so many things that I'm interested in and I I make time in my life. Like I pretty much reserve like twenty percent of my time for whatever it is that I'm most excited about. And it doesn't matter what it is. Like it could be, you know, learning about something in a discipline that I don't yet know. It could be, you know, uh skilling up with some technical skills I don't have yet that

I'm excited about, or it could be learning another instrument because like I'm obsessed with the banjo right now, or whatever it is. Um, but leaving that space for whatever is like most compelling to me. Um, And at the same time, things end up revolving around this sort of vortex of cooperation and conflict. Because that's just, you know, fundamentally, I think the way like my brain works. I tune into those, those things. So, you know, what is it that allows like us as humans to operate as something that's greater than the sum of our parts, or what allows the cells in our body to do that, right? And make us function as a multicellular organism that can do really complex tasks. Those kinds of questions for me just they they compel me wherever,

what whatever kind of system we're talking about. And then, you know, equally we have the other side of conflict and exploitation and hijacking. They're really two sides of the same coin. And let me just do a uh where do zombies come in? Yeah, zombies. Well, I got like all these zombies back here. Um so zombies come in on a couple of levels. So, like the first one is this idea of zombification, which I've used as a metaphor for talking about sort of all of the ways that organisms can hijack each other, or even non-biological things, right, can hijack other things. Uh, it's it's really grounded in the extended phenotype idea that you know Richard Dawkins talked about at the end of Selfish Gene and then also in his book Extended

Phenotype. And the main idea of extended phenotype is that organisms evolve, or really anything that can evolve will evolve to not just have sort of a physical phenotype that allows it to do things in the world and a behavioral phenotype that allows it to do things in the world, but it will evolve essentially to animate anything in the world that it can in order to achieve its goals, right? And so that's the zombification. You know, it's the jewel wasp hijacking the cockroach to take it, you know, to its, you know, den so it can like feed it to its offspring. Or um it's the way that, you know, even technological systems evolve on their own to hijack the way our brain works, right? So you could think about, you know, memes as uh hijacking, you know, our

brains in order to transmit them. Um, and they, you know, the memes even you could say that they hijack the algorithms on social media platforms, you know, and how those interact with our own brains in order to perpetuate them. So these kinds of principles apply across, you know, all of these systems. And that's what I love when you can, you know, work in one domain and one system and you see a phenomenon, and um, it's so general because it has to do with things like evolution, recursion, you know, even like signal detection theory, these things that are just like invariants that operate like laws of physics, right, in the in the world. Um, and then that lets you get insights into systems that are, you know, that people would

be like, How is it that you are working on both of these things at the same time? Well, it's because the underlying laws of how the universe work like apply to all these systems. Yeah, we had Brett Beheim on uh and he was uh talking about uh something similar. And we talked about how bike wheels and galaxies can be both studied uh like in the same under the same rubric. And I love this idea that um something like zombies, uh it gives you this idea that the folk intuition that where evolution starts and ends is a body envelope, but that's not true. Um, and that's a really nice way to sort of poke on and get past people's folk intuitions. Because I think people think about evolution. Like I'm sure we've all taught classes where you teach students or even ourselves, and you

start and you have this idea: well, there's like the physical stuff, and that's where evolution starts and stops. But then, like, behavior is this weird thing, and then, but it's to to push beyond that and to say like even your intuition about where a body envelope starts or stops or where where even genes like the example of you know there's things that genes affect in offspring but not the body envelope so it's like if you're the mother, your genetics affect the offspring um but not yourself like that kind of thing. It's a really good way to get people out of their folk psychology. And zombies are really fun, which is also to your credit a way to hook people. Yeah, for sure. So am I correct in in saying that uh zombification happens when the extended

phenotype of one organism encompasses the phenotype of another organism. The classic example would be a parasite, where the extended phenotype of the parasite is the behavior of the host that it is manipulating. And so the parasite is evolving to control and manipulate the host for its own benefit. So in any case where you have overlapping uh extended phenotypes, you get some kind of zombification or some kind of um manipulation of another organism to serve another organism's interests. Is that sort of the the logic that you're getting at? Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, you could think of a of a zombie in the you know evolutionary biological sort of sense as you know, any entity that is getting

hijacked by something else's extended phenotype, right? And so, so, and then that it it also just becomes so deeply interesting from an evolutionary perspective, right? Because if so, if you're taking an adaptationist perspective, right, and you're saying, okay, the behaviors and the physiology that we see like has some adaptive function, you have to start asking the question, for whom? You can't just assume that it is for the entity that is doing the behavior, right? Sometimes the adaptive function is serving the evolutionary interests of a different entity. Yes. I think that's a really underappreciated point that crops up a lot uh in human social science when we're curious about weird behaviors like cults and religions and weird

beliefs. Um I think we often fail to consider that perhaps the weird beliefs or or the cults are not necessarily serving the members, but are serving the leaders or serving someone else. And a successful manipulation has occurred. And so it may not actually be adaptive for any of the individuals who hold these beliefs or are pursuing these practices. It may be adaptive for someone else who is doing the manipulation. Absolutely. And I'm gonna offer a speculation here, which is that I think very often as humans, you know, we have evolved to hijack other people to do things for us. I mean, like that's what babies evolve to have their parents do. That's, you know, mates evolved, like, you know, even socially, right?

We do a lot of division of labor. So you could, you know, you could look at that as, you know, having a very cooperative side to it, but it also can have a dark side of, you know, where we get other people to do things for us so we don't have to do them ourselves. Um, and whenever you're in a situation where you have multiple individuals, right, who have an extended phenotype that is about getting others to do things for them or that would be better for them than their other behavior, you can start to then have conflict, right? And when you're almost like invading each other's body envelopes, right, with that, um, the potential for escalation of conflict is massive. And so, you know, we see this biologically with um mother and fetus, right?

Where the um conflict between maternal and fetal interests over resources can lead to escalation of conflict and sort of fighting over the resources, which can then lead to eclampsia or pre eclampsia, which can be devastating, right? So you have this escalation of conflict because, you know, you have this inside the body envelope. Well, you can have this escalation of conflict with the invasion of the body envelope without it having to literally be inside if you have, say, two people that are both trying to influence each other through this sort of extended phenotype mechanism. And I think oftentimes some of the really, you know, seemingly dysfunctional relationships or, you know, escalation of conflict that leads sometimes to, you know, psychosis,

mental illness, all of that. Like, I think we really should be digging into this with this extended phenotype framework because it can explain, I think, a lot of why you see, you know, dysregulation of emotion and how, you know, people can end up doing things that are really not very good for them and also not very good for the other. And you can have like, you know, things completely blow up in ways that are catastrophic. It's like, how do you explain that without this notion of manipulation and extended phenotype, I haven't I haven't heard a another good hypothesis for what is happening there when you get this really destructive interpersonal behavior. Yeah. No, it's interesting. There's there's lots of cool work from uh Hugo Mercier and and uh

related colleagues about epistemic vigilance. This idea that we have evolved um psychological and epistemic defenses to being manipulated, to being conned, to being talked into doing things or misled in various ways. And we're actually quite skeptical of most information and quite hard to fool. And you know, there's there are these prevailing narratives that are actually quite wrong that humans are very gullible and they'll believe anything. It's actually quite the opposite. We're quite vigilant, we're quite resistant to being manipulated, we're quite skeptical. Um, and the sort of conspiratorial mindsets that you see flourishing in different spaces are actually an example of the opposite of gullibility.

It's being so skeptical of even the most established wisdom that you're willing to entertain these conspiracy theories in the first place. It's sort of it extends from a kind of hyper skepticism rather than a hyper-gullibility a lot of the time. And so there you know this wonderful book, Not Born Yesterday, uh, where uh Hugo Marcia goes into this psychology of epistemic vigilance and skepticism of information. Uh, but what's interesting, what I find to be an extremely underexplored topic is the flip side of this. Because if we do have adaptations for epistemic vigilance of resisting being manipulated, then we must also have adaptations for doing the manipulating. There must have, in order for those systems to have evolved, there must have been a

selection pressure. There must have been manipulators trying to manipulate people in the first place, which means that there has to be a kind of counter strategy uh that exists as well. So in in the same way that we have an epistemic vigilance psychology, we must also have a manipulation psychology where we try to understand what people's weaknesses are, what their uh assets and liabilities are, and how to get our way with them. Um and it's entirely possible, as in any kind of arms race and evolution, that one side of the arms race could have the upper hand at any given time. You know, the predator could uh be in a place where it's it's winning a lot of the time and the prey is going extinct, or vice versa.

Uh so it it's quite possible that we have this manipulation psychology that is you know completely underexplored. Like I know of no w work uh trying to nail down the design features of this. Uh and it's entirely possible it explains a lot of of of human behavior and uh and a lot of times human behavior that is the byproduct of another person's manipulation psychology. Yeah. I would add another framework on top of that that I think can could be really helpful, which is that really the most important thing to know if you're trying to detect if you're being manipulated or not, or even, you know, what kind of manipulation you should try to engage in, if you should, is having an understanding of the

alignment that you do or don't have with the other party that you're engaging with, right? So if you have um fully aligned interests with respect to whatever the domain is that you're operating in, right? You don't have to have like aligned interests for everything, right? But if you have fully if you have aligned interests in that domain that you're operating in, then you can allow manipulation. Um, and any manipulation that you would be doing would actually not be a negative thing, right? If you have fully aligned interests, that's just allowing yourself to efficiently and effectively cooperate and to not have filters up and all of that, right? It's like, okay, we'll just act kind of as one nervous system and do what needs to be done.

Um, but if interests are not aligned, um, or if there's sort of deception, right? If you're like sort of luring people in with this idea that, you know, we all have the same goals, um, but you know, that that could be an effective way to get them to let their guard down and maybe even um positively reinforce them. Like you could, you know, get into their reward and reinforcement systems and and all of that. Um, but then you know, if you start to realize, oh well, maybe the interests aren't aligned, then you need to actually flip right really quickly and stop allowing that manipulation. Now I don't know if you have the same intuition that I do, but to me, that sounds a lot like um some of the characteristics that you see in things that are

diagnosable mental illnesses, right? Where it's like people will say, Oh, like we have totally aligned interest, I totally trust you. And then some little thing happens, and then it's like, oh no, wait, you're totally against me. And all of this was all about manipulating me in the first place. So to me, that seems like a miscalibration of a system that actually is designed to be really effectively detecting cues of alignment or misalignment because that tells you whether you should be you putting all of your energy into doing something with someone that they're saying we should do, or whether actually you're being hijacked and it's not in your own best interest to allow that person to influence you.

It seems like what you're talking about is what borderline personality disorder? Yeah. Uh it's it seems like what might be going on there is a kind of fickleness of detecting when someone is on your side or not, and like an overwillingness to just flip your radically flip your assessment on a dime on you know pretty flimsy evidence such that you're constantly, you know, uh falling in love with people and then all of a sudden thinking that they're evil and out to get you. Uh is that sort of uh the hypothesis you're but I would you know frame it more computationally so you know not so much about fickleness but you could say you know say we have like a signal detection system for interest being aligned and we have a signal

detection system for in you know uh interest being not aligned. Um depending on uh how you're evaluating evidence coming in and where your thresholds are set, um, they may be so close together that you know, ambiguous information, depending on the state that the organism is in, right? You could have ambiguous information. Even if you're there's the same information, but it's coming into you when you're more stressed or less stressed, that could just influence sort of, you know, whether it's hitting a threshold for, oh yeah, this is actually a positive relationship that's aligned, or interpreting that information actually as evidence of manipulation. So I think that we can really actually break this down into a set of, you

know, formal principles for how the information is being processed that I think make it potentially a lot easier to understand, you know, what's going on and maybe even how we could mitigate some of the challenges that you know people who suffer from borderline disorder or related disorders have to deal with. Yeah. I and even beyond that, I really like this. I like this idea that manipulation, um, broadly construed, if you if you that is actually the intuitive category manipulation is this broader thing of co-coordination. It's like epistemic coordination or this inter um uh we're we're all uh looking at it that way, this extended phenotype way, then um I think there's a lot of things. Like even if there's cues of misalignment, like things like politics, right?

That might have information processing consequences of that increases motivation to consume episodes about like what people did or you know, provoke uh outrage. So I would even argue things like consuming politics or political um uh appetites might be a byproduct of this psychology, too. That if you're um in the same way, like the memes are just feeding themselves, right? And they're just what which memes get selected for? Oh, there's people and they're out to get you, right? That's really attractive. That's really interesting. It suggests that we're not as aligned as I thought. Like I thought I was just driving, going to restaurants, everything seemed pretty good, but no, it turns out there's people trying to get me.

That's really appealing. What does that do? And so I think like a lot of the content, a lot of the junk content of uh media, uh, one could argue might also be running in a in a either abnormal or even normal way, but it's just the the output of this psychology of assessing alignment. I really like this idea. Well, and this also brings up that, you know, it's not just like a one time period thing, right? It's not you get information, you evaluate it, and we're aligned or not. You have multiple time periods, right? You're integrating over information that's happened in many different contexts. You have been in a different physiological state when you've been getting that information. If you then, you know, have a a memory that you pull back and you pull it into your current

state, you may um look at it differently. So you may be sort of, you know, foraging for information from the from the past, reinterpreting it. And then also, you know, if you get a signal that, well, you know, maybe um I thought we were aligned, but we're not, um, or then then you might go and seek out as you go forward new information that could, you know, confirm your suspicion, right? So you could be for sort of foraging for information in the past or then changing your information seeking as you go forward in ways that actually then change the base rates, right, that go into the signal detection system that, you know, we're we're using without even realizing that we're using it. Right. So I think that, you know, the all these sort of feedback loops that you can have when you

start looking at this, you know, social cognition and alignment in a signal detection kind of framework. Um, it you know, it just lets us computationally model what's happening in a way that we otherwise couldn't. Yeah. That's really great. And I just like the the I'm sorry, Dave. I just and I really like the getting out of the instinct blindness of that manipulation is always bad. Like this from an evolutionary perspective, it's this idea that manipulation, we're designed to worry about that possibility space. But there's this whole other possibility space. It's actually we we do all the time. It's actually wonderful. It's what we do by and large, but our evolved psychology really registers the problematic

zone and kind of scientifically, we probably spend too much time on that. Yeah, for sure. I mean, speaking of of the darker side of manipulation, so you could think of it as the spectrum of parasitism to symbiosis, where you know, symbiosis would be a kind of uh mutually beneficial manipulation where the symbiote wants to be manipulated, quote unquote, by someone else. Uh, in the same way that um, you know, my child might want to be manipulated by me to a certain extent in terms of wanting to be taught you know various lessons about safety or or whatever. Unfortunately, she is not so easily manipulated by me these days. But uh in addition to these ideas of alignment and misalignment, and when you're in the

aligned zone, then you're going to be more comfortable with being manipulated. Uh and when you're in the misaligned zone, you're going to be more vigilant and skeptical and antagonistic. Um, you there are ways of creating alignment between people by creating perceptions of misalignment with outsiders. And you see this a lot in politics, even in social life, where you know common enemies uh can bring people together. Uh and so that brings this back full circle to this idea of manipulation where one perhaps one of the best ways to create more fitness interdependence between people is to manipulate each other into thinking that they have uh that that they're in conflict with outsiders. Because uh, I'm much more independent with you, interdependent with you if we have a common

enemy, or if we have some common danger, or if we're both being singled out by the same hostile force, then all of a sudden we become much more valuable to each other. Uh and um the the the value of coordinating and cooperating with each other increases dramatically. So uh uh there's also the the tendency to create the kinds of positive cooperation um that that you talk about. Uh there's also uh one of the best ways to do that is via manipulation and and conflict. Yeah well and I would say you know the the maybe the key phrase that you you said is like some outside threat, right? And so and that could be another group. And you know, that can be problematic, right? If you're like, oh, we're gonna increase cooperation by making people hate outsiders, like

that isn't necessarily the way that you know we want to go forward, you know, as humans. Um, but really any um common knowledge, any you know, shared understanding of vulnerability to a threat and feeling that you're um you're interdependent in some way, that can get people aligned, especially vis-a-vis that particular threat. And so, you know, I think that's part of why you see extremely high levels of cooperation, altruism in the aftermath of disasters, right? Because everyone is in a shared environment that is this disaster. And it's very clear that, you know, in that kind of situation, the best thing is for everybody to help each other. And uh, you know, if they can, you know, if you need shelter and I have shelter, if you

need water and I have water, like we go into that mode of just helping each other and not keeping track of accounts or anything like that. Um, so that that kind of very powerful cue that you're in a hostile environment, that, you know, where the threat really is that we might not all survive and make it through unless we share and we're all interdependent, you know, because we're part of the same, you know, group, uh, and people go into that mode very readily. Um, so I think any sort of shared understanding of vulnerability and a feeling of sort of being, you know, if you have an environment where that is salient, that threat is salient, then I think you can get very high levels of cooperation.

Um, you do see, you know, fatigue in that though, right? So like if you have say a disaster that occurs and um, you know, people are often for like the first two weeks or so, they're very, very cooperative and helping. But then if like the disaster persists for a very long time, if those efforts of you know collective recovery don't translate into things happening, like, so for example, you know, if there's a disaster and like the neighbors, you know, come out and like it was like, oh, there's a tree blocking the road, and you, you know, you unblock it and like everybody gets fed, and then you have this positive experience and things kind of get cleaned up quickly. Um, but if on the other hand you have a disaster and people sort of try to help, but

there's even institutional blocks, or you know, the county says, Well, you're not allowed to come and clean up your road. We're supposed to do that. So they're like waiting and things don't actually happen. Then you get this fatigue and people actually, you know, often will have, you know, decreases in cooperation much earlier and just like they they don't then have a positive experience of that disaster if there are things that kind of block seeing the results of that collective effort. So I think there's all sorts of things that, you know, that go on when humans are in these environments where there are threats, they have shared attention on their threats. They can act together to mitigate those threats or, you know, recover from the damage that

has occurred. Then I think that feeds back as like an on a signal, right? That you are with people who you have aligned interest with and you can cooperate effectively with and that actually will be there for you if you need them. So I think that that's a it's a really interesting kind of place to see that is in these contexts where the you know the outside threat is not necessarily another human group, but it's a environment that is is challenging. That's super interesting. Um it it the way I'm thinking about that, I I I'm not familiar with this this work on how people react in the context of natural disasters. But it seems like, you know, uh when disaster strikes, we want to try to solve that problem

via collective action and via producing uh resources together to get through it. But if collective action and the production of resources doesn't work for whatever reason, then all of a sudden we start to register the fact that uh resources are in fact limited, uh, which means that we are in zero-sum relationships with one another, such that the more I get, the less you get. Uh, and as soon as we start to register that fact, uh, then cooperation begins to break down or in some sense becomes zero sum. So I can cooperate with Dave to exclude you from the resource. Uh and when that starts to happen, um we need useful narratives. Like maybe the reason we're excluding you is because you're a witch.

It's not because we're selfish and greedy and we want more stuff for ourselves and we're callous toward your suffering. It's that you're a witch. And that helps us exclude people from the zero sum resource without paying reputational costs for the exclusion. And so what might be going on is that initially we try to solve our problems via positive sum cooperation and the production of new resources such that my gain is not necessarily your loss, because if we're all growing the pie, then we can all get a bigger slice. But as soon as the pie stops growing and there's limited pie for everyone, then uh competition starts to uh take place. And there could even be cooperative competition where we cooperate to displace or exploit

or exclude um other people. Um and so I think the crucial variable there seems to be uh to what extent the the interaction is zero sum or positive sum and to what extent resources can be multiplied uh rather than being fixed. I'm just kind of running my mouth here, but that's sort of what what what's coming to mind as as uh a a way to uh strategically explain what what you're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. I I've been thinking about a lot of these things in um terms of like two constructs of uh you so when you get into a group and you have the potential to create something of value that there's um two sort of inputs into these systems that are really important. One is what I'm just calling cooperation energy, which is basically like how much are we

ready to do stuff together and just put energy in? And another one is coordination capacity or coordination energy, which is like, you know, how much are we actually able to have the resources flow, have the information flow in ways that allow us to do things that are, you know, better than the sum of our parts, right? And you have this really interesting situation where like say there's the three of us if we all have high cooperation energy and coordination capacity slash energy that actually means that the reality is that our group is a pretty non-zero sum thing because we're all doing this and we are actually creating things that are greater than some of those parts. But as soon as we start to worry, like, oh, well, you know, is Dave really

in, you know, or did he oh he didn't do this thing he said he was gonna do? Is that because he was busy, or did he is he just not really motivated anymore? The thing falls apart, unravels very quickly because it actually becomes a zero sum situation where it's just okay, well, whatever we've created already is what's there, and how are we gonna split the pie? You know? So these recursive loops that happen in these social interactions are so, so important to um allowing cooperation to be maintained and the beliefs about alignment, right? Like that that can turn a situation that is positive some into one that's zero sum, just like that as well. So I think understanding the computational structure of these systems, both in our minds

and then what happens in the interactions when you have multiple individuals, right, and you're processing the information about, you know, both your beliefs and your feelings and your spidey sense about like, you know, the people, um, and then also the actual outputs of what's happening in your group, right? Like um, you know, it are you actually creating something that is of value? And uh I actually I went to Burning Man for the first time um a few weeks ago. And I think there's a lot of really interesting dynamics along these lines that are actually happening at Burning Man in these camps. There's a lot of sort of costly signaling of cooperation effort, of the capacity to coordinate, to build these elaborate camps, to build these, you know, art projects that you

then literally burn. Um To me, so much of what is going on there is costly signaling of the cooperation energy and the coordination capacity. And, you know, and that's, I think, not just signaling to the outside world, but you're signaling to your own group. Like, hey, we can do this stuff and we are ready to put in the effort to do these things together that we benefit from collectively. So I think it's a really it's a really cool place to potentially study some of these things. That's that's amazing. I the thing you said about the cleanup and then the county won't let us is really ringing in my ears too, because I also think this is a way to understand how bureaucracy gets things wrong or it's a vocabulary for understanding how to design a bureaucracy where if

you have rules or institutional structure where the cooperation energy, is that the right term? Cooperation energy, um, is there. But for for probably well-intended reasons, if you don't really engineer an organization structure, whether it's a government or a a university or your house, you know, it could be at lots of different levels, yeah, you can really screw things up where people just feel like this is a this is bullshit. Like the structure doesn't work. And I think a lot of like the felt like I don't trust the government or I don't feel like people care about me, you could be living in a very, very affluent, very safe world. But this fundamental need to feel like, man, if like if I can't even clean up the dirt on

my driveway, What that's telling my evolved psychology, there's no way that like people are going to help me if like my kid gets sick or if like somebody tries to like steal from me. Like I don't trust anybody, right? And like that's a very um rational response from the evolved psychology. And it might be there's a good rule for the mud cleanup, but I think like it sounds like we're missing an entire aspect of our evolved psychology to just come to this person and do something to prevent everyone's evolved psychology from feeling like nobody's looking out for me in this kind of like modern bureaucratic world. Yeah. I I think also, you know, maybe with not as uh, you know, high stakes for feeling like nobody's gonna be looking out for me, but still extremely important.

The kind of things that, you know, happen in corporations and big institutions when you have bureaucratic blocks that actually prevent cooperation energy or coordination capacity and energy from kind of forming like I call it a vortex. I think that just like is kind of intuitive. It's like you have this feedback loop, this energy can build, people are seeing others are doing it, and they're seeing that, and they're like, oh, I'm gonna put more in. Um, but you know, if you have bureaucratic systems that actually interfere with that flow, you know, interfere with like a new project happening that actually would be really great to see to fruition that would benefit the whole institution. But you have, you know, systems that, you know, they're designed to protect the institution

or to protect individuals. But if they get in the way of actually those new things arising and collecting that energy that allows them to move forward, then we're, we're, we're losing a lot of potential value in these institutions that have gotten sort of mired in these bureaucratic processes, which you know, we need a lot of those, right, to prevent exploitation of big institutions, right? Because a big institution is, you know, a source of resources and energy and people's time and all of that. And so you, you know, there are incentives to try to hijack the institution, right? So you need to have these systems, but then how do you have those systems to protect it that also allow the good things to not lose energy because of that friction?

Yeah. Yeah. You don't want an autoimmune attacked uh institution where it's just all defense, uh defensive institutions. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it occurs to me that there can be a negative feedback loop where the more that the cooperation uh vortices are being blocked or interfered with, the more that resources become limited and zero sum. And on top of that, whoever has the the political power to to do the interfering, to to stop the vortices, well, that power itself becomes a zero-sum limited resource that that people fight over. And it seems, and then it becomes where you know the only way to get ahead in this society is to acquire the power to to stop these vortices and producing things collectively

is no longer the best strategy. The best strategy is just trying to cozy up to whoever's in power and climb the power hierarchy, and it becomes just a zero sum world. That sounds so much like what is going on in Locke System R. Yeah. It's like, oh, that's so glum. That's so sad. Sorry, I'm dispositionally inclined to take things in the one direction. I apologize. It's also it feels very much like a low trust society too, right? Or like a society transitioning, you know, like I've we've all like lived different enough places, you know, like you go from like very variability and even even within a culture, a culture like a a country or something, you know, you go to a high trust or low trust institution, or even just like friend group or you know, social thing.

It just feels this this feels like it's describing uh the kind of grammar of that high or low trust continuum to some degree. Totally. Yeah. I mean, there's tons of literature on like how there's just more uh political and and governmental corruption in in low trust society, which which makes sense, you know. The government is preventing cooperation from uh from uh taking place. And it's also a limited sum resource itself, right? Yeah. If the rules don't work, if the rules don't work, you can't follow them. You know, like you gotta get stuff done some way. Yeah. Yeah. And and also, I mean, it is fundamentally the case that cooperation at the lower level is often threatening to the institution at the higher level, right?

I mean, that's what a revolution is, right? And so um there, you know, there is a uh uh you know an evolutionary process kind of of like institutions that are able to suppress uh cooperation at the lower level that could undermine the institution. And it doesn't even have to be like a full-on revolution, right? But it could just be like, you know, things happening at the lower level that change the rules of operation of the institution, right? Because, you know, you could think of an institution as kind of like an entity of like algorithms, right? Of like how it's operating. And that that set of algorithms is going to persist to the extent that it is good at keeping those algorithms in existence.

So there's a really interesting sort of emergent, like you know, computation of institutional evolution that comes from approaching it in this kind of way. Yeah. You just describe schools too, right? Where uh where kids like have their own dynamics and then schools are the institution. I've also thought, I mean, uh, if you know, you've I I I would I would love to get your thinking about this. I've often thought, as like a group psychologist person, that a lot of the conflicts or cooperation across cohorts is really interesting too, because that lower level cooperation can also be like these damn kids and like, you know, get off my lawn and all the like grexing about uh kids these days. Like it seems like a common trope that um, you know, once you get older and you have stuff,

the kids are threatening, you know, to some degree or not, uh, depending on what they're doing. But that can be some of that lower level cooperation too, whether you're a school as an institution or just like the older cohort and you have your status scheme. Yeah. I mean, if if you kind of think ancestrally, right? Like it would usually be the case that the people who are older are the ones that are kind of the keepers of whatever institutional structures there are. And those institutional structures without outside influence will come to represent the interests of the older generation more, right? And we know from parent offspring conflict, right, that you don't have completely aligned interests between parents and offspring, or you could say between older generations and

younger generations, right? Because, you know, you have cohorts that could sort of collude about rules, et cetera. And so, you know, to the extent that, you know, we're products of our evolved psychology, where, you know, as an older human, you may want to have uh, you know, uh uh your offspring actually doing things that are more, you know, beneficial for the your descendants as a whole, right? Versus um for each other, right? So then you get this sort of tension between maybe the older generation um wanting to have institutions that are more cooperative and younger generation wanting to have more autonomy and you know be able to do the things that benefit them the most. Um now that doesn't mean that it's always like actually best for younger people to just do

what benefits them the most because oftentimes they don't have the context. They can't understand, oh yeah, actually there are outside threats we need to cooperate and collaborate on, or there's just a coordination problem that needs to be solved. And you know, someone who is older can help to solve that coordination problem. So then we get into this trust and alignment issue again, right? It's like, do the kids trust that the, you know, information and the influence that is coming from the, you know, older generation is actually for their benefit or are they suspicious of it? And the answer is both, right? And like you go through these periods, right? You know, it's pretty normal for kids to go through periods of trusting their parents and

then rebelling against everything their parent does or says just because their parents says it. So we can, I think, understand a lot of that in this context. And then some of that kind of you know scales up, I think, into these intergenerational conflict issues and these, you know, like, you know, well, what should these institutions be serving? And how do they balance individual autonomy with like, you know, top-down control and all of that? I love the frame of like ancestor descendant conflict, like more generally. It's like one of my like favorite theories that people don't talk about enough because you know it does, it's just you know a generalization of parent offspring conflict. But you know, it really um it really shows well what happens when you add cultural

influence, when you um, you know, look at it over multiple generations, right? It really is the case that like you know, our great great great grandparents, uh, ultimately their genes would benefit if all of their descendants would cooperate as if they're all one. Yeah. Right? Like evolutionarily. And then, you know, you look across societies at like lots of spiritual traditions and you see the golden rule. It's like, okay, where do you think that came from? You know, it's it probably came from that psychology of like you should, you know, do unto others as they do unto you. And uh, you know, that's that is the thing that would be most beneficial for the ancestor of all of those individuals. So Yeah.

For sure. The intergenerational conflict conference. We got to get going on that and come up with a with a catchy name for it. That sounds funny. That's actually a really interesting idea because you know, the so much of the dialogue about intergenerational issues really focuses on the cooperation side, which yes, obviously we should be thinking about that. And we should be thinking about, you know, future generations and past generations and information flow and all of that. But if we don't appreciate and understand that there's also this conflict dimension that is being managed on both sides, where there's vigilance about that on both sides, then that's actually going to get in the way of us figuring out how to work effectively with future

generations and older generations currently alive today, right? To have a positive future for everyone. Yeah. Ooh, and just to editorialize one thing there, that it might be is institutional propaganda, because uh you if you have a scientific body that's sort of it's like paternal, it selects for paternalism a little bit, right? Where it's sort of like we know the right thing to do. And so a conference that's all about like, well, you gotta respect the autonomy of the upstarts who might not accept the pre-existing structure, it's kind of threatening, right? Like it's pretty subversive to sort of be like, well, actually, the things that the kids are doing that's outside of the purview of like the PTA and the principal and the teachers,

we have to respect that. You know, you're not gonna get a lot of like, you know, funding for that, probably. Or you might. Um, but it's a particular way to frame it, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to connect this idea of inter intergenerational conflict back to this uh positive sum, zero sum distinction. Because if we're in a positive sum ecology where we're producing lots of stuff and each generation has more stuff than the previous generation, well then the offspring are gonna win in the parent offspring conflict because they have more stuff than their parents, they have more skills and experience, uh, they're wealthier in various ways, and the parents have less bargaining power.

And so uh in those types of societies, like you know, the societies we we live in where uh the economy is is growing uh pretty fast and each generation is wealthier than the previous generation in terms of standard of living, then all of a sudden, you know, uh the okay boomer mentality arises and respect for elders kind of goes out the window. But if we're in a limited resource ecology where um the only way to uh acquire resources is to gain political power, cozy up to uh i the existing people with power, uh, you know, respect your elders, then all of a sudden, you know, you you the only way to really get ahead is to get on the good side of your elders, right? Because they're the ones who control everything.

Resources are limited. Uh we're not producing more stuff each generation. We just have to fight over the existing stuff. Um and in that case you get these kinds of gerontocracies um where respect for elders is is you know more politically important. Um so I think there's another uh connection there between the you know the various threads we've been talking about. Yeah, yeah, we can actually look at this in terms of like the sort of pools or the pies, right? So um in a you know zero-sum situation, um, you know, all of the pies are fixed, but also like the familial pie is more fixed, right? And so you're gonna have more um uh uh more of a sort of need to manage that that conflict among offspring and also between parents and offspring,

right? You have both higher offspring offspring conflict and higher parent offspring offspring conflict. In a more zero sum situation, um, it's not necessarily that the offspring are gonna win, but kind of everybody can win, right? Because you don't have a limited pie that you then have to spend your energy fighting over, right? You can use your energy to get more resources for whatever that pool is. And everybody can have uh, you know, a beneficial outcome. So, you know, if you think of um even just like, well, if everybody has limited time and energy, in a zero-sum situation, you're gonna use a bunch of that time and energy fighting over the pie. Um, versus in a non-zero sum situation, you're gonna use some of that limited time and

energy to make the pie bigger, as long as you understand, right, that that's possible and you understand that everyone is gonna be doing that, that we're all gonna be working to make that pie bigger. Um, so then that shared, you know, that common knowledge and shared understanding comes into play as well. Yeah. There's also an uh David, the argument you were just making about um uh gerontocracies also has argue there's an argument anthropologically or orthographically about um even just siblings. It's not as the the Sullaway argument that it's always older or younger, I think I'm not sure that pans out. But I think this idea that, you know, in Athena, just as you were talking about, like you can have this strategy of I'm gonna expand the pie.

And that's where you don't like, you don't cozy up to your parents. You're just like, I'm gonna go strike it out of my own. You know, I'm gonna go to California and mine for gold or something. I don't know. I'm in California. Um but you know, the but canonically the older sibling is like, Oh, I respect my parents because I'm gonna inherit the farm or something, you know. So um so the same kind of thing I think even can happen in families, whether or not it's older or younger kind of might vary. But yeah. For sure. Yeah. Are you um uh just completely d uh uh Athena, do you have siblings? Are you older, younger only child? If you I'm the I'm the older sibling, and my younger sibling is the more like

institutional one. So he's, you know, uh worked in the State Department and is a lawyer. And uh um, and I'm more the, you know, one who's always sort of like going off and and doing weird and interesting things and literally focusing on how do we make the pie bigger. Like that's my work, you know. Like take that Frank Solo. I'm kidding. He's the wonderful wonderful person. I actually yeah, yeah. Um how in and I don't want to get too meta here too. This has been wonderful, but you talked earlier about you know, you reserve, I forget what the percentage was, 20% of the year. Like twenty percent. Yeah, twenty percent of my time. Yeah. I I talk to a lot of academics, especially academics who may be not early, like right early

career, but sort of, you know, post-tenure, there's a little bit of like fear people encounter where they say, look, you know, like it's it's scary to do something new or uncertain or something I like. Like I do I just even deserve to pursue that. Um for people who are who are listening who might be in that situation, do you have any like I I I think you're um you're living as an academic uh I would say you're one of the best examples of living your best life if I can put it that way. So do you have any advice for people who feel scared to do that? Who feel like, oh I don't know there's this thing I really do care about but I don't know if anybody's gonna like it. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but yeah, is there is there any advice to that or

how what what would be helpful um uh or what was helpful for you to to sort of go through that? Because I think that's something that everybody struggles with, especially if they get a little bit of success and then there's sort of the uncertain future. Yeah. Well, I I would say two two main things. So one is don't wait to start doing it. There's never going to be the time where you're like, oh, I now have the time to spend 20% of my time on the things that I'm most excited about. You just have to make the time and you have to trust that that is going to pay off in the short term, medium term, and long term. In the short term, it'll pay off because you will be less burnt out. You will start to find that joy again.

You will feel more aligned with your own goals and the energies that you uniquely bring to whatever space you're in. In the medium term, it'll pay off because those things that you start with at 20%, those are things that you are gonna be more uniquely able to contribute to, right? So they're gonna be projects that you know aren't things that people are already looking at, probably, right? Or you're gonna go and learn about something in another discipline that then you bring to your discipline and you do something that otherwise wouldn't have been possible with that. So in the medium term, you'll have new projects, um, they will be more innovative, and you may even find that you are able to get funding that you couldn't before.

So, for me, the best example of this is the human generosity project. That started for me as a 20% of my, it was even less than that. It was literally one day a month that I was spending on it. So it was like technically five uh 0.5% of my time that I was spending on that. And um that started just because I thought it was really interesting. Lee and I had started talking about making a model of uh need-based transfer systems. And I really thought it would be a one and done thing, but it was just something I was interested in. So um for you know a better part of a year, Lee and I would um just spend to pick one day a month and either I would drive from Philly to New Jersey and we would work in person for that day, or vice versa.

So you know we took the time to do that in person too, which is much more positively reinforcing, right? Than like having a project where you're just, you know, doing it remotely. Um, and that ended up growing into the human generosity project. You know, we got um, you know, funding from multiple agencies, you know, for it, you know, and foundations, including a $2 million grant from the Templeton Foundation for that project. And it grew into, you know, something that then wasn't the 20%. It was in the, you know, more the bulk of my work. Um, and then so in the you know, medium and long term, then your portfolio starts to reflect the things that you're really excited about and interested in. And you also will learn, like as you're as you're working in these spaces, like with the

Human Generosity Project, I really I did think it was just gonna be, you know, initially this one paper we would do, but the results that we got were much more interesting than I initially thought because it was an agent-based model. So you, you know, the things emerged that we weren't expecting and it was like, oh well, we should now do this other model and then we should put it in a network. So it had an energy of its own that, you know, I couldn't have known what the potential was there without spending that time just exploring this because I thought it was interesting and exciting and just worth it for me as a human because I wanted to know what was happening in the system. So you have to trust that those payoffs will come.

Um, and that those initial that initial payoff of just being less burnt out is so valuable because you know, then you'll you'll be able to bring better energy to the other projects that you have going on as well. So, um, so so that's you know, one piece of advice like don't don't delay that you know, you'll get benefits in all of these, you know, terms. Um, and then the other thing is uh, you know, if you're an academic or you're you know you're trying to sort of work within this existing system where you know you have to have certain number of papers in these right journals you have to have you know colleagues that um you you know cultivate relationships with where they you know respect you as a serious

scholar and all of that um it can be a challenge to balance you know having these you know side projects some of which people might not really be able to readily understand with the current sort of, you know, epistemic states that they are in, right, within these subdisciplines. And so there is, you know, often some discomfort around that, right? Because, you know, you're operating in a world that has sort of a shared uh set of assumptions. And if you start doing things that are outside of that world of that shared set of assumptions, like you have to be ready for, you know, dealing with that discomfort, especially as you start presenting that work. And, you know, people are like, oh, well, that doesn't fit my model for what's happening.

So, so yeah, so you have to be, you have to be ready for that. But I think that, you know, there is a sort of higher goal of like how do we make science better, which involves us actually all doing that and all being ready to step outside of the assumptions that are all shared and push that. So, you know, so if you can, you know, be happy knowing like you're you're actually doing something good for science as a whole by pushing those boundaries, then I think that'll it will make everything better for everyone in the sciences. Yeah. For that second part, is it hardest at first? Because if you're, for example, um doing something that isn't part of the value system of your, you know, uh personnel committee or something at your university, but

you're doing this thing that you know is going to be impactful. In the beginning, I would imagine um you're not getting cues from the outside world because it's just starting, but you're getting all the frows, the bur the frows, the bur the furrowed brows, frows, furrowed brows of your of your colleagues. But then when you actually start going out and you see, oh, look, I'm making this impact, You're meeting people. Is that fair? Like it's actually hardest at the beginning. Yeah. And I think also, you know, one thing that you can do at the beginning is, you know, find the other people who are starting to think in these ways and also give your own brain the cues that that's your environment. Right.

Um, and uh to the extent that they can also sort of help support your work. So, you know, I had this experience as a grad student working on things that were really outside of, you know, the way that people were working, using methods that people weren't using. So, you know, I taught myself how to do agent-based modeling actually as an undergrad and then was using that in my dissertation. Um, and nobody on my committee had any expertise in agent-based modeling because it was still super new. So it's like it wasn't even really being taught at all. In, you know, I actually taught one of the first agent-based modeling graduate courses at Portland State University right after I graduated from Reed because I was only one of the

only people who knew how to do that. So, you know, so then I was in a grad program that didn't have any expert, I was the expert on it. And um, I honestly don't know whether I would have been able to actually graduate with a dissertation on agent-based modeling, if it weren't for the fact that I was already published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, right? So like I was able to, you know, have enough connections sort of in the world of people who were working on these questions in this domain. And then, you know, was able to get a paper published that went through peer review, you know, and luckily, like, you know, the it got sent to reviewers who understood enough about what I was doing that they were able to validate, yes, this is an important contribution.

So then I was able to graduate, you know, with a PhD. Um, even though my committee, you know, they honestly said, like, we can't evaluate this method and this approach because we're not experts in it. So um, so you kind of have to curate the environment around you, um, uh, both like in terms of the social intellectual interactions you're having and then also the sort of institutional piece, right? Whether, you know, going through peer review, finding the right journals, you know, all of that so that you can get your work out there and um, you know, have it have that stamp of approval that then lets you navigate within the system more effectively. Yeah. Yeah. And what you're talking about reminds me of uh a blog post uh of yours that I read a while

ago. It's uh that's been sticking with me about the experience of serendipity. Um so could you talk a little bit about what you think this this feeling is and what function it might be serving and how it connects to uh all the things you've just been talking about, about building new networks of of collaboration and exploring new ideas. Yeah, absolutely. So uh I love this idea of, you know, we were talking about this earlier too, like when we feel this sort of magic, right? It's like, oh, something's happening and like I don't know what it is, but like it feels like we're connected and like, you know, it's something greater than like it's some higher thing, right? And I think that like literally that feeling is related to our

brains detecting that there is a positive cooperative opportunity there. And I use the language of positive assortment, which is this principle in evolutionary biology and especially in the evolution of cooperation, that if cooperators can interact with each other more often than would happen at random. So that's the positive assortment, right? The cooperation with cooperation. Then that allows cooperators to get higher payoffs, right, than they otherwise would, which can scaffold the evolution of cooperation or just the emergence of cooperation when you have individuals that can, you know, choose their strategies, right? So, so the idea is basically that, you know, when when we're in a situation, we start, we

have a conversation with someone, we meet someone, and we're like, wow, like this feels like there's there's something special here that what we're feeling is this like sort of, you know, emotional readout of positive assortment and the potential that is there for actually doing something together that um is cooperative. We have, you know, maybe we're also detecting cues that we would be good at coordinating. Maybe you're having a really animated conversation, you're sharing information, you're like, wow, we can really interoperate effectively, right? So I think that that's sort of what we're tuning into. And um I uh I I made a a follow-up post where I kind of break down a little bit more like what the cues are that I think we're we're detecting.

Um, you know, one of those is the alignment, which we talked about, um, and then the cooperation energy and uh the coordination energy capacity. And then I think also uh actually a separate category is um the absence of exploiters or hijackers. And I actually distinguish that from the cooperation energy because I think that there's a difference between like, oh, I have a bunch of energy that I want to put into this thing right now versus, you know, maybe not, maybe you're just a little more passive, but you're not necessarily exploiting, right? I think that's, you know, versus someone who's there sort of with the intention to hijack and exploit. And I think we have a specific detection system for that cheating that is different from

like detecting maybe like less effort or less engagement. Um, so even though you might be able to say, uh you might be able to say they're on some sort of spectrum, I think the way our brains work is actually we kind of pull those out as sort of separate things because um they're they're different in terms of the opportunity and threat profile that they offer, right? Like if there's an exploiter in your midst, then you probably want to just walk away from that group entirely. Um, versus if there's, you know, maybe some variation in like how energized people are, like that's something that can be modified by the environment and the feedback and and all of that. Yeah, no, it it certainly resonates with my personal experience.

Like if you're with a group of people and there's like one asshole in the group, you can like feel the energy of the group change when the asshole leaves the room. You know, it's like, oh, they're they're gone. Now we can just like work together as as cooperators, you know, without the burden of this person, like, you know, creating this suffocating vibe. Yeah. Um, and uh, I think that that rings true. And I mean it's I think it's unfortunate there hasn't been more work on this psychology because it feels like so central to so many things. Um yeah, I think that part of why there hasn't been um enough work on it is because, you know, it feels like a woo or magical thing, right? And like, I mean, like, and literally like the my inspiration for writing this piece was um

being at a music festival and somebody giving me this sticker that said, you know, find the others. And it was, you know, somebody we were like dancing and hanging out and chatting and and she was like, Oh, you're like one of my people, and like, here's the sticker. And then I was like, find the others. That sounds like positive assortment. And then, you know, my brain just kind of started like going. I'm like, huh, you know, like maybe there is something like really important about what is happening in this, like, we have a good vibe together thing. Um, and you know, sometimes that gets facilitated by, you know, people drinking or doing other substances or whatever, right? Like that maybe their nervous systems are in a more calm state and they can be like, you

know more receptive to that so yeah I think that's also an interesting tangent that we could we could go down but um regardless I think it's uh you know it just there's there are a lot of things that kind of academics you know often don't take seriously because they seem like they're they're they're too much just about like the things that we do as humans and that's not really science. It's like no actually that is the science you know um I you know I had some colleagues uh I have some colleagues who, you know, a few years ago when um you all know Jamie Krems, you know, who's like made this amazing career like on friendship, um, and very early on there were some senior colleagues who basically said, you know, well, that's not a topic.

That's not a that's not a social psychology topic. And it's like, well, that's the point because it is, it's like it should be, right? It's like such an important thing um for humans. And so I think you know, there's often these blind spots that come from like, you know, well, if it isn't something that already has a history of, you know, being worked on. And if it's something that involves like human positive emotions and it can seem like a little fuzzy, then it's like, oh, that's not a serious topic, you know? But but actually, like, what are our po positive emotions for? Right? They are to direct our energy and attention and effort. And I think we just need to pay a lot more attention about what is going on computationally

with those, especially when it comes to these emergent properties that can happen when there's a potential for cooperation and coordination and doing things that you could not literally otherwise do. Right. Um if you have if you have people who are aligned, right? And they know they're aligned, they have, you know, energy to work on things together and they are effective at dividing labor and communicating, like you can get so much done. Yeah. This that what you just said really reminded me of like a it felt like very John Tube-ish. Like at the point is like go to the woo. Like you be secure in your science enough that like there is no woo. It's all science, right? So just you can go to it. You don't have to be insecure about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Go to the vortex. Yes, exactly. So yeah, true. No, but it's like security, right? Like you have to be like self-confident and like not worry about it. Because there will be people who don't take it seriously, like which is like the whole history of science, like right. Like nobody took everyone who made progress seriously at some point. Right. For sure. Yeah, as long as you have the right intellectual foundations, I think you can you're free to explore and you know go forth and you know find whatever excites you because you can be s secure in those foundations, you know, like natural selection. Humans are evolved organisms. You know, uh, we have motivational and emotional structures that uh facilitated um

uh fitness in ancestral environments. Like those are our intellectual foundations, you know, with game theory and like how strategies interact with each other. Like as long as you live in that framework, you can do whatever you want, explore any idea. Like it it's it's you know, anyway. Exactly. Well and and now we get back kind of full circle with the sort of institutional discussion too, right? And the, you know, ancestor descendant conflict, right? Like we can even think of, you know, that as like, you know, well, are you participating in the environment that I have created where I have status and you're gonna do things that contribute to my status by working on, you know, this this topic that I have developed, and

then you know, you're sort of part of my extended phenotype, right? Or are you gonna say, oh no, like actually what we should be doing is in a decentralized way, trying to understand all of the things. So, you know, like grad student, I want you to go and do this thing that you're interested in and figure this out, and like I will help you, even if it's not the next paper in my legacy, right? So I think that you know, thinking about how all of these things interact with the institutions that we've built around learning, around research, around, you know, sort of building the um knowledge commons, right, that we have as humans uh is a whole other layer and level. And uh it's it's kind of exciting now though, because there are things that we can do with

this sort of like global knowledge commons that we couldn't before. So uh yeah. So I'm optimistic in general about, you know, kind of where things will go with uh our ability to you know look at these topics that maybe have not been central in the academic study of you know human psychology. On that last point, there's a lot of things you can do. Can you tell people, because I don't even like I, you know, I don't I don't know you that well, but we know each other. Um what do you do? Like I'm I'm confused about like what is the zombie apocalypse? Um like you do so many cool things and I always want to be like, what I want to talk to Athena and find out like what these things are. Can you tell the listener who either knows you, knows you well or doesn't know you at all?

Like what are some of the things you've done just to give people an idea of what they want to look look into you more or the kinds of things like what what what are you doing or what have you done or what are you gonna do? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I can kind of put it in three buckets. So um the first bucket is uh the work that I'm doing at ASU and really like in the academic environment with cooperative futures at ASU, which is um this new entity that really is about how do we take the science of cooperation and apply it to emerging challenges. So, you know, that includes relationship with technology, especially navigating our future with AI. We have lots of workshops. We have a um a summer academy and a winter academy on the topic.

Uh, we have um uh artist residency. So, like right now, Shane Moss um is our artist in residence as a comedian. We're um doing a bunch of events uh where we're sort of working on how do you communicate with the public using comedy about issues like what's going on right now with AI, for example. Within that, we also have other labs, one about heritage fermentation and interspecies cooperation. So, what can we learn from the way that you have uh you know cooperation at very, very high levels happening inside these sort of fermentation systems? Um, how can that also uh how can that understanding influence human health as well, right? So looking at that essentially cellular cooperation um among different species.

There's also a focus on looking at our bodies um as cooperative systems uh and cancer and other diseases as a breakdown of that cooperation. Um, it includes also like some of the things that we were talking about with genetic conflict and uh you know conflict with other entities. So you can you can kind of bring all of those things in this in that domain. We're also interested in these questions about how we build uh educational and academic and research institutions going forward. Um and also uh another lab focused on storytelling and that as a mechanism for coordination and cooperation um that uh kind of helps humans to work through the practicalities of uh you know how to operate especially in

new domains and and uh uh with you know new problems. So so at ASU right now that's my focus and and really trying to bring um diverse disciplines together at ASU around these topics and then have events where anybody can come, you know, for for workshops for these academies, um, and uh, you know, sort of building that out. So that's my ASU focus. There's a lot of opportunities for you to be involved, whether you're at ASU or not. Um now I'm also building a company outside of ASU um called Agentic Intelligence Systems, and that's all about how do we take the science of cooperation and build that in to all the layers of the tech stack in AI. So from how we do sort of multi-agent interaction, how you figure out if agents are

aligned or not aligned, how you correct when things are kind of going off track, um, to actually building a foundation model that uses these principles of cooperation. Um, so that's something I'm extremely excited about. And there's, you know, uh that's it's early. We're right now um kind of in our seed round for that. So very excited about that on the building side. It's really, really cool to build stuff. Also, just want to say like if you're a person who, you know, likes to build things, what you can do right now with vibe coding is amazing. And especially if you have a background already in coding, you understand recursion and feedback and you know what it's possible to do, then um, you know, you can just uh

the the extent to which you can kind of take those coding abilities and use that with uh AI right now is is amazing. So I would highly encourage people to to do that just as an aside. And then on the sort of more um arts and experience and uh you know my like 20% um side, I have a lot of um things that you know for me help me be uh in my creative space and where I like to be. So I have my um uh Substack not for peer review where I you know put out ideas that um like you know my positive assortment idea things that I'm just like you know I I just want to get this out to everyone quickly. My my original intention with that was actually to um start publishing things from my stacks of notebooks because I have stacks of notebooks, you know, going back to when I was

uh an undergrad. Um, but I literally haven't even been able to crack those notebooks because there's just been so many things that I'm like, oh, I'm thinking of this now and I want to get it out. So um I want to make more time for that in the future. Um, but then there's also uh things that others can kind of come and join in this space. So uh I mentioned this show that Shane and I are producing. Um it's called Surviving AI, and it's a variety show about how we have a positive future with technology, has you know a comedy set in it, then it has a science panel, a science and expert panel about AI in the future. And then we always have an art segment at the end where we have artists that use AI,

artists that don't use AI, And there's a you know performance and audience engagement kind of about, well, you know, how does AI impact how we interact as humans and art as a lens for that? So we've done that in a number of cities and we'll continue to do that. And then the zombie apocalypse world. So the zombie apocalypse medicine meeting, um, that is coming up at the end of October. It's October 26th through 28th in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which is a wonderful little Victorian town. And essentially that meeting is about creating a very playful frame for engaging about uh topics that are kind of scary, frontier, like what you know, how are we actually going to navigate this future given how

things are unfolding? Um, and uh I like to say it's you know sort of all topic all topic zombie and apocalypse, which actually really means um, you know, anything having to do with like zombification, manipulation, parasitism, right? All of that is fair game. And also, you know, cooperation is a part of it too, right? Like, how do you, you know, because you can, you know, influence others and hijack them in ways that are good for them. Um, and then the sort of apocalypse side is like, well, what is the the future? What's a positive future we want to make? What are the barriers to that? Can we kind of playfully engage about you know the apocalyptic future as a way of actually um creating uh like a low stress

environment to engage about things that are actually really challenging? And you know, sort of storytelling and that framing helps a lot. Um, one of the things I didn't really realize at first when I started the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine meeting is that the sort of language and framing of the zombie apocalypse would also create a shared language that let people kind of drop their jargon and you know, sort of talk playfully about zombification and zombies and you know the the the apocalypse. And um, that's been been really fun. And it it's you know, honestly, it's also just like a self-selection kind of thing, right? So you you invite someone to come to zombie apocalypse medicine meeting. And I would say more than half of people are just like, no, and they don't even want to

talk. They're like, what are you even talking about? Right. And then half the people are like, oh, that's interesting. And maybe they'll like talk to you a little bit about it. Um, and then it's something like, you know, five to 10% of people are like, oh fuck yeah. Yeah. And they get it and they're like, I'm I'm coming. You know, and so then when you get all of that that that five percent of the fuck yeah people in the room together, then that creates this environment where you know those are the peers that are then saying, Yeah, like push those boundaries, ask those questions, like, yeah, nobody's working on that, and people should be working on that. Yeah. And that's kind of the magic of Zam.

And uh, you know, a lot of really awesome things have come out of Zam. It's it's almost like a like a melting pot, right? Or not even a melting pot, because like people will connect who might not otherwise connect, they'll share information, new projects will start. Um, you know, that it's like that, it's a collective like 20%, right? Where it's like, okay, we all like stuff that we're all excited about is happening in this, and we can find other people who are also excited about it. And then that can, you know, lead to that sort of snowball effect where those things can then become part of our more serious scholarship, right? That can enter into the institutional structures that exist. Yeah.

Awesome. Um, and and we talked before we started recording about music. Um Is there I feel like the Z the Zam is the if that's that's the acronym. Um I'm imagining a lot of like bluegrass, but maybe there's no music at all. I have no idea. Yeah, we we have actually had um bluegrass. So the uh the surviving AI show that were the first one we ever had, we had bluegrass musicians um at the end, the one that we're doing at ASU. Um we have bluegrass musicians in it. And for many of the zombie apocalypse medicine meetings, um we've also had the Apocalypse Roadshow, which is the alternative book tour that I had for my book, A Field Guide to the Apocalypse. And that, so we've actually did the shows like as part of Zam too and uh had bluegrass

musicians in. And I, you know, one of the things that I like to do in my 20% is, you know, write music, play music. And um some of the music that I write and play is actually about uh putting into a storytelling context the uh work that I do, right? So I have a, I have a song that I do um that is it's called the O So Trois Song. And it's basically the story of this field work that I've done over the course of, you know, um more than a decade and you know, others on our team have done that explains what happened at all these field sites, but it's very playful. There's swearing in it. It's a sing-along, you know. It was like literally the first sing-along that ever happened, you know, in the Harvard

book uh program that they had. So, like, as I went and did the road show there. So, you know, I'm I'm always like kind of peppering those things in, like, where it's like, okay, can you know, fit this in here in an institutional context where it might not otherwise happen? But um, but yeah, more generally, like music is a very big part of my life. And um I just this weekend was um collecting data at the Pickin' in the Pines Bluegrass Festival. Um it's a pilot study that we have um looking at physiological synchrony when people are jamming together. And um, that really came out of my experience um where like I, you know, literally have some of the best peak experiences of my life in jam circles where

you're playing music and you're all entrained and you're, you know, you're you're doing something that you're like, how am I even doing this? Like something, something magical seems to be happening. And, you know, for me, it's like, well, what is that magic? Right. It's uh I I have to try to understand what's happening there. And so uh so yeah so we have, you know, this this study we collected data from nine different groups jamming with we had physiological sensors on them and we recorded the audio as well. So we're going to be able to look at, you know, how the acoustic features of their playing relate to their physiological synchrony. We also had groups that are professional musicians that jam together, social jamming in the

campground, and groups with amateurs jamming. So we're going to be able to compare, you know, and uh contrast a little bit. And uh we already have another festival um that is ready to collaborate with us um because they were you know the person who runs it was super excited seeing what we were doing so um I'm uh I'm really really pumped about that because that was like definitely a twenty percent of my time project, right? And now it's like okay we, you know, I have a I have colleagues that you know flew in from Georgetown and from UCLA. You all know Greg Bryant. He's um part of this study too and two grad students who got on the project and then and now we have all these people in the music world and festival world who are excited about

it. And I even heard from um one of the professional musicians that the musicians were talking about it backstage and they're like, oh that would be cool. I'd be interested in doing that. I want to see what's going on. So you know that's that like that energy of that vortex, you know. It's like, okay, we started this thing, it's in this 20%. Um, but you know, these grad students are excited, you know, all my colleagues are excited, the person who runs the festival is excited, somebody who runs another festival is excited and wants it to happen. The musicians are like, we would want to do this. So um, you know, and then it's like, okay, I guess this is not gonna be a twenty percent project anymore.

It's like, you know, it's coming into the the mainstream. So um to me that's uh it's super exciting when that happens. That's awesome. Awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, I mean, I think that's a pretty good note to uh to end on. We we rarely end on a positive note because we've covered a lot of dark topics on this podcast, but I'm glad to end on a more joyous and optimistic note. Thank you so much for uh taking the time to be with us today, Athena. Yeah, and it's so fun. Oh, sorry, Athena. Oh, I'm just gonna say it was so fun talking to you, but it's like you know, like sometimes you you know do podcasts and you're like, oh, we're like trying to like learn from each other and like have a good conversation.

And this just felt like, oh, we're just like shooting shit about cool things. And I love it when that happens. So yeah, no, totally. And uh you know, I just like whenever we have people on to I always think about like what I think about like as you were wrapping up, I just think like you uh I imagine you, you're sort of like guys, you know, we're allowed to just like do this fun, interesting stuff. You realize that right? And like I think many people I've talked to have been inspired by your um, I don't think it's too much to say, like courage to do that kind of thing. And I think that uh I wish there were more people like you and thank you for being in the evolutionary behavioral sciences. I think it's much better for you being in it, and I think that um I think there will be

hopefully many other people who follow and have been inspired by you. So thank you for doing it. Well, thank you so much for saying that. And also let me say to everyone if you do it, you set an example to others that it can be done and that it's okay to do it. So you are not just helping yourself, you are helping others realize they can also do it. So you kind of have a responsibility to do it, not just to yourself, but to the rest of the world. Yeah. All right. Awesome. Great advice. Long live the vortex. Take care. Yes, join the vortex. Join the vortex. Athena, thank you so much. It's not a cult, don't worry. It's okay, maybe. What a lovely vibe for this episode. Yes, as we're talking about vibes and and woo.

Yeah, and vortexes. That's that was always a confusing word for me. The plural of vortex. Yeah, I think it's vortices, isn't it? Uh sure. Uh yeah. That's also a word I think would be difficult to spell. Spelling was never one of my strong suits. Yeah, uh, that's true. But um, if you're still here listening, that means you've emerged from our vortex with Athena. Um, we engaged in a fun cooperative uh interaction. And if you want to join the vortex and help us help you and others spread these interesting ideas, you can uh write us a kind review. You can say nice things about us on social media. We have a Patreon page where you can support us. Is there anything else uh listeners can do, David? You know, play a mandolin or a banjo or a guitar or a bass and join a bluegrass band or

just play some music with somebody. Get a harmonica. Play some music or enjoy some music. Yeah. Great. All right. Um, great advice. So David, it was lovely to talk to you. And uh well, have a great week, everybody. Um and just just cooperate in a in a lovely way with somebody this week. Yes. All right. All right. I'll see you next week. See you next week.