1
00:00:00,240 --> 00:00:03,680
Let's do uh should we do another one that maybe more of a more of a confident vibe?

2
00:00:03,920 --> 00:00:04,240
Sure.

3
00:00:04,560 --> 00:00:06,640
Okay, maybe I'll do welcome this time.

4
00:00:07,280 --> 00:00:07,600
Okay.

5
00:00:08,480 --> 00:00:14,320
Let's do like a like a 1920s um uh like no da da da

6
00:00:14,720 --> 00:00:15,920
like sure, yeah.

7
00:00:16,560 --> 00:00:18,960
All right, a little bit more confident, a little more fast pace.

8
00:00:19,360 --> 00:00:24,240
Yeah, you don't have to do like a mid-Atlantic fake accent, but like like Kennedy's, but

9
00:00:24,320 --> 00:00:24,480
yeah.

10
00:00:25,150 --> 00:00:26,190
David Pinsoff.

11
00:00:26,430 --> 00:00:27,950
I'm David Petrozowski.

12
00:00:28,270 --> 00:00:30,670
Welcome to Evolutionary Psychology.

13
00:00:30,910 --> 00:00:32,030
The podcast.

14
00:00:32,750 --> 00:00:34,590
Actual Evolutionary Psychology.

15
00:00:34,910 --> 00:00:37,870
By actual evolutionary psychologists.

16
00:00:48,510 --> 00:00:49,630
Hey David.

17
00:00:50,190 --> 00:00:50,990
Hey Dave.

18
00:00:51,470 --> 00:00:56,660
Well, it's quite fitting that you are my friend and we're friends because this episode is

19
00:00:56,660 --> 00:01:02,180
about friendship with the premier scholar of friendship, Jamie Krems, a

20
00:01:02,180 --> 00:01:06,900
professor at University of California, Los Angeles, where I do research and we uh

21
00:01:06,900 --> 00:01:08,180
collaborate on some stuff.

22
00:01:08,260 --> 00:01:11,620
Uh, she is a fascinating top-notch thinker.

23
00:01:11,700 --> 00:01:16,660
Uh, she has really incredible insights about the nature of friendship and why it is more

24
00:01:16,660 --> 00:01:20,660
complicated and nuanced and in some ways darker than you might think.

25
00:01:21,830 --> 00:01:23,110
We cover a lot of stuff.

26
00:01:23,190 --> 00:01:28,070
I mean, we get into loneliness, uh, whether there is a loneliness epidemic, we get into the

27
00:01:28,070 --> 00:01:33,190
so-called Dunbar number, whether there is a maximum limit to the number of people we can

28
00:01:33,190 --> 00:01:34,470
keep in our heads.

29
00:01:34,710 --> 00:01:37,590
Uh we talk a lot about Philadelphia.

30
00:01:37,750 --> 00:01:39,190
Uh we do.

31
00:01:39,430 --> 00:01:40,710
Surprising amount of Philadelphia.

32
00:01:41,030 --> 00:01:42,390
Yeah, a lot of Philadelphia content.

33
00:01:42,470 --> 00:01:46,230
So if you have opinions about Philadelphia, uh this episode is for you.

34
00:01:46,390 --> 00:01:46,630
Yeah.

35
00:01:46,710 --> 00:01:46,950
Yeah.

36
00:01:47,560 --> 00:01:49,080
Uh enjoy.

37
00:01:53,000 --> 00:01:53,400
All right.

38
00:01:53,480 --> 00:01:56,360
So Jamie, I'll do a we'll do a countdown and then we'll actually start.

39
00:01:56,600 --> 00:01:56,920
Okay.

40
00:01:57,480 --> 00:01:58,040
Yeah?

41
00:01:58,280 --> 00:02:00,680
Uh uh, okay.

42
00:02:01,640 --> 00:02:02,120
All right.

43
00:02:03,480 --> 00:02:06,920
So uh five three, two, oh you can do five?

44
00:02:07,160 --> 00:02:07,960
Let's do five.

45
00:02:08,840 --> 00:02:11,230
I thought you could do three, but I love you, Farker.

46
00:02:11,870 --> 00:02:13,150
We should just start this now.

47
00:02:13,310 --> 00:02:13,710
Yeah.

48
00:02:14,590 --> 00:02:15,630
So ten?

49
00:02:16,430 --> 00:02:16,750
Yeah.

50
00:02:19,390 --> 00:02:22,030
So where do you so Jamie?

51
00:02:23,310 --> 00:02:23,710
Hi Jamie.

52
00:02:24,350 --> 00:02:29,070
Do you stand with the three two ones or the five four three two ones or the ten nine seven

53
00:02:29,230 --> 00:02:30,030
eight seven six?

54
00:02:30,590 --> 00:02:31,310
I even got that wrong.

55
00:02:31,470 --> 00:02:31,550
Yeah.

56
00:02:32,030 --> 00:02:32,750
Ten, three, or five.

57
00:02:32,830 --> 00:02:33,390
What's the right content?

58
00:02:34,590 --> 00:02:38,830
Uh three for podcast, five for TV, ten for rockets.

59
00:02:39,560 --> 00:02:41,800
Okay, I think that's the that's the correct answer, I think.

60
00:02:41,960 --> 00:02:42,200
Wow.

61
00:02:42,360 --> 00:02:43,560
Is there a hundred?

62
00:02:45,400 --> 00:02:49,400
Maybe if you're you're in a James Bond movie and the bomb is about to go off, you'd start

63
00:02:49,400 --> 00:02:49,800
from a hundred.

64
00:02:50,200 --> 00:02:51,480
Building demolition.

65
00:02:51,960 --> 00:02:55,160
Oh that you want to give people a lot of time to get out of there.

66
00:02:55,320 --> 00:02:55,400
Yeah.

67
00:02:55,800 --> 00:02:57,160
That's a Scholi paper.

68
00:02:57,240 --> 00:02:58,440
That's what that makes me think of.

69
00:02:58,600 --> 00:02:59,480
The omission effect.

70
00:03:00,200 --> 00:03:00,360
Okay.

71
00:03:00,840 --> 00:03:01,800
We wouldn't get into that.

72
00:03:02,200 --> 00:03:02,440
Dr.

73
00:03:02,520 --> 00:03:04,600
Jamie Krems, it's good to see you.

74
00:03:05,270 --> 00:03:06,390
Thank you for having me.

75
00:03:06,470 --> 00:03:07,430
It's good to see you guys.

76
00:03:07,830 --> 00:03:09,910
Professor at UCLA.

77
00:03:10,630 --> 00:03:11,110
Yes.

78
00:03:11,750 --> 00:03:14,310
Um, we're gonna you study friendship.

79
00:03:14,390 --> 00:03:17,830
Um, and we're gonna talk about that, hopefully, or not.

80
00:03:18,070 --> 00:03:21,830
Uh we're gonna talk about Evpsych and how you got interested in it.

81
00:03:22,070 --> 00:03:26,230
But there's one question that is extremely important, probably more important than all

82
00:03:26,390 --> 00:03:31,190
those things to discuss, which is what is your opinion about the city of Philadelphia?

83
00:03:32,000 --> 00:03:33,680
It's the best city in the world.

84
00:03:33,840 --> 00:03:35,840
Thank you very much for letting me say that.

85
00:03:36,080 --> 00:03:38,320
You could see Gritty behind there.

86
00:03:38,560 --> 00:03:44,240
And if I were to pan this way, there's Gritty and in fact the world's

87
00:03:44,240 --> 00:03:49,200
greatest mascot, the Philadelphia fanatic, who is from the Galapagos, which is a place that

88
00:03:49,200 --> 00:03:50,800
is critical to our field of study.

89
00:03:50,960 --> 00:03:51,840
So there you go.

90
00:03:52,130 --> 00:03:53,730
Are you from Philadelphia?

91
00:03:54,050 --> 00:03:54,450
I am.

92
00:03:54,530 --> 00:03:57,090
I was born in Philadelphia, like Lita.

93
00:03:57,330 --> 00:04:03,170
Um, I grew up mostly in Bucks County, like Alex Shaw, Mike Gervin, uh, I

94
00:04:03,170 --> 00:04:08,690
think Joe Henrick and Annie's, you know, from nearby basically.

95
00:04:08,930 --> 00:04:14,240
Um, so you just you just give us a huge list of of guests that you have to have.

96
00:04:14,560 --> 00:04:16,880
That's a great, it's an incubator of great minds.

97
00:04:17,200 --> 00:04:18,320
There's something in the water.

98
00:04:18,400 --> 00:04:22,000
It's a weird place full of terribly literate belligerents.

99
00:04:22,400 --> 00:04:22,880
Mm-hmm.

100
00:04:23,680 --> 00:04:28,880
I imagine that was what like the uh early days of the Republic were like literate

101
00:04:28,880 --> 00:04:29,760
belligerents.

102
00:04:30,160 --> 00:04:31,760
Yeah, it still feels like that.

103
00:04:31,920 --> 00:04:37,040
Um and it it actually reminds me a lot of your work, uh Dave, because

104
00:04:37,680 --> 00:04:41,680
the uh people have commented on this when they've come to conferences.

105
00:04:42,030 --> 00:04:44,830
the place feels like its own team.

106
00:04:44,990 --> 00:04:47,070
Um, so if you're in Philly, you're on the team.

107
00:04:47,150 --> 00:04:52,830
It doesn't matter your uh color, creed, SES, ecology,

108
00:04:53,150 --> 00:04:55,230
race, uh, political view.

109
00:04:55,390 --> 00:05:00,110
There are people with opposing views sitting next to each other at the stadium or at the

110
00:05:00,110 --> 00:05:01,390
bar watching the game together.

111
00:05:01,550 --> 00:05:03,470
If you're on the team, you're on the team.

112
00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:09,840
So team supersedes race, class, gender, sexual oriented all the whole enchilada

113
00:05:09,840 --> 00:05:10,640
team is above all.

114
00:05:11,440 --> 00:05:11,680
Yeah.

115
00:05:11,760 --> 00:05:14,480
If you're on if you're on team Philly, you're on team Philly.

116
00:05:14,560 --> 00:05:20,320
And if you're on Team Dallas or you're on you're a Giants fan, um, you know, you're

117
00:05:20,320 --> 00:05:21,840
gonna get hurt.

118
00:05:22,480 --> 00:05:23,200
Interesting.

119
00:05:23,440 --> 00:05:27,200
I it was a kind of a joke question, but actually is that why you love Philly?

120
00:05:27,870 --> 00:05:28,190
Yeah.

121
00:05:28,270 --> 00:05:32,510
I, you know, I didn't realize this until I was interviewing for grad school.

122
00:05:32,670 --> 00:05:38,350
Um, and I think I'd either just come from Santa Barbara or just maybe I was headed to, but

123
00:05:38,350 --> 00:05:44,110
I I was at ASU and Rebecca Neal, who's now a professor at the University of

124
00:05:44,110 --> 00:05:48,350
Toronto, who does EV and stereotyping stuff, prejudice stuff.

125
00:05:48,590 --> 00:05:54,280
Um, she and I were chatting for a while, and she's like, You really love

126
00:05:54,520 --> 00:05:55,000
teams.

127
00:05:55,160 --> 00:05:57,480
You have such a coalitional psychology.

128
00:05:57,640 --> 00:06:00,120
I was like, Yeah, I I never realized that.

129
00:06:00,280 --> 00:06:01,800
But I love teams.

130
00:06:01,880 --> 00:06:03,640
Um, I love Aaron Sorkin.

131
00:06:04,120 --> 00:06:05,640
I love the West Wing.

132
00:06:05,800 --> 00:06:11,320
Um, I love smart people working together and arguing and pranking each other to get to the

133
00:06:11,320 --> 00:06:14,040
truth and disagreeing, but getting there.

134
00:06:14,190 --> 00:06:18,910
Um, and I think that's probably why I love our academic community so much.

135
00:06:18,990 --> 00:06:20,830
It's the closest thing I found to that.

136
00:06:21,630 --> 00:06:22,030
Wow.

137
00:06:22,270 --> 00:06:24,270
We're the West Wing of social science.

138
00:06:24,670 --> 00:06:25,950
We really are.

139
00:06:26,190 --> 00:06:30,590
Um instead of a walk and talk.

140
00:06:30,750 --> 00:06:30,910
Yes.

141
00:06:37,550 --> 00:06:38,510
Dave and I are working on our banter.

142
00:06:38,910 --> 00:06:42,270
This is the first this is the first episode with any banter for the record, too.

143
00:06:42,700 --> 00:06:43,180
That's true.

144
00:06:43,260 --> 00:06:45,980
Yeah, it's been pretty light on the banter so far.

145
00:06:46,460 --> 00:06:47,820
I mean, I've been working on it.

146
00:06:48,220 --> 00:06:49,980
I can West Wing the hell out of this.

147
00:06:50,060 --> 00:06:52,140
Just say the word and I'll start quoting.

148
00:06:52,860 --> 00:06:53,340
Nice.

149
00:06:53,740 --> 00:06:57,740
Uh David, please uh jump in um at any point.

150
00:06:57,820 --> 00:07:03,340
Um, but uh I I'm following up on the on the Philly thing, which is um the Teams

151
00:07:03,340 --> 00:07:05,900
thing and coalitional.

152
00:07:06,140 --> 00:07:11,290
One thing I like about you, Jamie, is you're not coalitional in the way you just explain

153
00:07:11,370 --> 00:07:12,410
what coalitional means.

154
00:07:12,490 --> 00:07:17,450
It's not like um we talked, David and I talked, I think it was last episode or the episode

155
00:07:17,450 --> 00:07:22,970
before, about um people being really coalitional in the sense of really

156
00:07:22,970 --> 00:07:24,570
attacking the outgroup.

157
00:07:25,370 --> 00:07:30,650
Um, but what I like about your version of it and when you describe what it is, is very much

158
00:07:30,650 --> 00:07:33,210
sort of we're all on the same team, right?

159
00:07:33,690 --> 00:07:37,820
Um Is that something you always liked?

160
00:07:37,900 --> 00:07:42,780
And is that something that you felt like or is part of what attracted you to Ev Psych, the

161
00:07:42,780 --> 00:07:43,820
feeling of getting that?

162
00:07:43,900 --> 00:07:49,340
And therefore, do you feel like sometimes that's missing in in real real life or regular

163
00:07:49,340 --> 00:07:49,900
life?

164
00:07:50,380 --> 00:07:54,380
Oh man, uh it is missing in so much of real life.

165
00:07:54,620 --> 00:08:00,140
It is part of the reason that I love evolutionary social science and Ev in

166
00:08:00,140 --> 00:08:00,700
general.

167
00:08:01,190 --> 00:08:05,990
It does feel more like a team than I mean, social psychology is huge.

168
00:08:06,230 --> 00:08:09,110
And maybe there are sub-areas that feel like that.

169
00:08:09,750 --> 00:08:15,030
But I haven't found one other than you know the evolutionary lens.

170
00:08:15,750 --> 00:08:18,310
And I've had a foot in so many worlds.

171
00:08:18,470 --> 00:08:24,470
I mean, um uh so my master's is in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology.

172
00:08:24,920 --> 00:08:29,960
Our building, ISEA, the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, was literally

173
00:08:29,960 --> 00:08:34,200
on the opposite side of the street for the cultural from the cultural anthropology

174
00:08:34,200 --> 00:08:34,680
building.

175
00:08:34,840 --> 00:08:37,720
So that was a coalition against a coalition.

176
00:08:41,160 --> 00:08:45,160
It does feel like we are we are on the same team.

177
00:08:45,480 --> 00:08:50,950
We think alike and we think in a way that It's

178
00:08:50,950 --> 00:08:51,590
better.

179
00:08:52,950 --> 00:08:54,470
I just gotta interject.

180
00:08:54,790 --> 00:08:55,110
It's better.

181
00:08:56,470 --> 00:08:57,350
We can stop the podcast.

182
00:08:57,510 --> 00:08:59,830
We can stop the episode and then a high note.

183
00:09:00,230 --> 00:09:01,750
It made me feel less alone.

184
00:09:01,910 --> 00:09:06,710
So I I was um uh through a weird series of events.

185
00:09:06,870 --> 00:09:12,150
I came to read some Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, and I was like, oh my god, other

186
00:09:12,150 --> 00:09:13,350
people think like me.

187
00:09:13,590 --> 00:09:19,180
It I I think a lot of people who find it become acolytes for that

188
00:09:19,180 --> 00:09:23,100
reason, um, more than they learn to think that way.

189
00:09:23,740 --> 00:09:29,660
Um, so you found it as it was it was echoing intuitions and ways of

190
00:09:29,660 --> 00:09:34,140
thinking that were already in you rather than you know giving you a new perspective that

191
00:09:34,140 --> 00:09:35,260
you hadn't considered before.

192
00:09:35,740 --> 00:09:39,020
Yeah, I mean, I was certainly an idiot when I started out.

193
00:09:39,180 --> 00:09:44,030
I didn't know anything, it just it uh reflected how I thought about the world.

194
00:09:44,110 --> 00:09:48,830
And it was the most satisfying level of why explanation that I found.

195
00:09:49,070 --> 00:09:54,990
Other explanations, you know, um like even I I love Dove Cohen's work and

196
00:09:54,990 --> 00:09:56,910
the the stuff on culture of honor.

197
00:09:56,990 --> 00:09:59,070
And I think there's really something there, right?

198
00:09:59,870 --> 00:10:05,310
But ideas like, oh well it comes back to philosophy and it's Aristotelian thinking versus

199
00:10:05,310 --> 00:10:10,280
Confucian thinking, to me, that is not a satisfying explanation.

200
00:10:10,440 --> 00:10:16,360
That that doesn't if I were a two-year-old or a whatever age, uh you guys know

201
00:10:16,360 --> 00:10:21,560
this, whatever age where they keep asking why, why, why, if I were that age child, that

202
00:10:21,560 --> 00:10:24,520
would not stop me asking why, I wouldn't be satisfied yet.

203
00:10:24,680 --> 00:10:26,360
You'd be up for another hour.

204
00:10:26,760 --> 00:10:29,400
Yeah, you want to hit explanatory bedrock.

205
00:10:29,560 --> 00:10:32,360
I mean, that's one of the things I love about Tubian Cosmeties.

206
00:10:32,870 --> 00:10:38,550
Um, you know, they I I remember someone joking that um every Tubi and Cosmeties paper

207
00:10:38,550 --> 00:10:42,470
starts with the Big Bang and then gets to the the topic at hand.

208
00:10:42,790 --> 00:10:47,430
Uh, you know, they have a wonderful paper, uh, the second law of thermodynamics is the

209
00:10:47,430 --> 00:10:52,550
first law of psychology, uh, just sort of grounding psychology and the idea that uh

210
00:10:52,710 --> 00:10:54,390
entropy is a thing.

211
00:10:54,630 --> 00:10:57,270
Uh things tend toward disorder, not order.

212
00:10:57,500 --> 00:11:02,220
Whenever we see order and functionally organized complexity, that demands a very special

213
00:11:02,220 --> 00:11:03,020
kind of explanation.

214
00:11:03,100 --> 00:11:08,380
And the only explanation for it that has yet been devised is Darwin's explanation, which is

215
00:11:08,380 --> 00:11:09,420
natural selection.

216
00:11:09,820 --> 00:11:15,740
The replication promoting variants uh outreplicate the non replication promoting

217
00:11:15,740 --> 00:11:20,940
variants, and over time you get increasingly uh complex and elaborate forms of uh

218
00:11:21,180 --> 00:11:24,620
replication promoting uh uh complexity.

219
00:11:25,050 --> 00:11:27,530
I think I just repeated the word complexity twice.

220
00:11:27,690 --> 00:11:31,770
Um you should have been there to to mock me for that, because we gotta work on our banter.

221
00:11:32,330 --> 00:11:38,330
I'm trying to figure out uh okay, so I think you know there's that quote that

222
00:11:38,330 --> 00:11:42,650
nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, but there's a quote at the

223
00:11:42,650 --> 00:11:47,210
foot of the Darwin statue in the London Natural History Museum.

224
00:11:47,770 --> 00:11:52,420
Um I'll see if I can Can we Google things on the show?

225
00:11:52,500 --> 00:11:53,380
Is that okay?

226
00:11:54,740 --> 00:11:56,180
No, you can't.

227
00:11:56,900 --> 00:11:58,180
Cut off the knowledge.

228
00:11:59,140 --> 00:12:02,020
I mean, it kind of feels like cheating sometimes.

229
00:12:02,260 --> 00:12:06,580
Um uh but does it say this is Charles Darwin?

230
00:12:06,900 --> 00:12:10,580
I mean, it does say his name on the statue, that's for sure.

231
00:12:10,820 --> 00:12:16,530
Um does it say my my favorite meme is the orangutan with like the ha

232
00:12:16,610 --> 00:12:21,810
eyes half closed and says the caption is tell my wife I'm an orangutan

233
00:12:24,370 --> 00:12:25,970
It's funny but I don't even understand it.

234
00:12:26,050 --> 00:12:26,610
Yeah.

235
00:12:28,050 --> 00:12:32,850
Uh yeah, it's funny on many different levels, but is the is does it just say tell my wife

236
00:12:32,930 --> 00:12:34,210
I'm Charles Darwin?

237
00:12:34,800 --> 00:12:35,680
No, it doesn't.

238
00:12:35,760 --> 00:12:41,680
And maybe I'm confusing it with the quote in the Pitt Rivers Museum

239
00:12:41,680 --> 00:12:47,200
in Oxford, but it's uh oh man, I had it on my Facebook when I had a

240
00:12:47,200 --> 00:12:47,760
Facebook.

241
00:12:48,160 --> 00:12:49,760
Um it doesn't matter.

242
00:12:49,920 --> 00:12:55,600
It's just, you know, the the way to illuminate men's minds is is this thinking this way.

243
00:12:55,920 --> 00:12:57,440
And I think that's true.

244
00:12:57,600 --> 00:13:03,530
And I think um it's great to be on a team that also thinks that way.

245
00:13:03,690 --> 00:13:09,370
And sometimes when our when our team does well, we can convince other people to entertain,

246
00:13:09,450 --> 00:13:12,090
if not accept our explanations as well.

247
00:13:12,490 --> 00:13:13,530
Join the team.

248
00:13:13,770 --> 00:13:14,090
Yeah.

249
00:13:14,330 --> 00:13:19,610
So s so it seems like you got on board to the team through, you know, popularizations like

250
00:13:19,610 --> 00:13:20,730
Pinker and Dawkins.

251
00:13:21,130 --> 00:13:22,250
Is that was that accurate?

252
00:13:22,570 --> 00:13:24,490
Because that's sort of how I got there as well.

253
00:13:25,000 --> 00:13:25,400
Yeah.

254
00:13:25,480 --> 00:13:29,800
Um, so I was working in music in Philadelphia after I went to college.

255
00:13:30,120 --> 00:13:34,360
I uh was a classics and uh Near Eastern archaeology major.

256
00:13:34,520 --> 00:13:37,240
Um and I was an incredible hipster.

257
00:13:37,480 --> 00:13:43,320
Um, and there was this guy in a band um who

258
00:13:43,560 --> 00:13:48,040
uh if you remember the treadmill video on YouTube, that band OK Go.

259
00:13:48,440 --> 00:13:50,680
Um, I think they won a Grammy for that video.

260
00:13:50,760 --> 00:13:54,550
It was like the first big YouTube video of a band.

261
00:13:54,950 --> 00:13:58,950
Um, and I still have this piece of paper, and he wrote down all of these things that I

262
00:13:58,950 --> 00:13:59,670
should read.

263
00:13:59,910 --> 00:14:05,510
Um, and it includes um some of those books, and um

264
00:14:06,070 --> 00:14:11,590
I probably read them and did some other things in a very in a way that David Buss could

265
00:14:11,590 --> 00:14:12,950
explain really well.

266
00:14:13,270 --> 00:14:19,220
Um and so yeah, I uh I read those books and I didn't realize

267
00:14:19,220 --> 00:14:22,740
that it would actually change my life and I would find my people.

268
00:14:22,900 --> 00:14:24,340
And I found my people.

269
00:14:24,900 --> 00:14:27,860
And then I had to figure out how to go to do it.

270
00:14:28,020 --> 00:14:33,460
Um, and so I um I was in Philly and I started sort of volunteering in a lab at Penn

271
00:14:34,900 --> 00:14:36,660
and applied to graduate school.

272
00:14:36,820 --> 00:14:42,340
I didn't get into any PhD programs my first round, but I got into Oxford for um

273
00:14:42,580 --> 00:14:48,330
masters and went there and worked with Robin Dunbar and Oliver Curry and this great um

274
00:14:48,650 --> 00:14:50,730
musicologist Ian Morley.

275
00:14:51,930 --> 00:14:54,490
Dunbar, the the Dunbar of the Dunbar number.

276
00:14:54,970 --> 00:15:00,730
The great Robin Dunbar is what I would consider my second of four dads in

277
00:15:01,050 --> 00:15:02,810
um the evolutionary world.

278
00:15:03,450 --> 00:15:04,570
Or the Dunbar Circle.

279
00:15:04,650 --> 00:15:08,090
I forget what the I feel like one of his Dunbar's number.

280
00:15:08,170 --> 00:15:08,250
Yeah.

281
00:15:08,330 --> 00:15:11,370
I feel like that's made it into the popular culture as like a means.

282
00:15:12,220 --> 00:15:12,460
Yeah.

283
00:15:12,860 --> 00:15:18,860
There's um just for those who don't know, the Dunbar number is the number of slots

284
00:15:18,860 --> 00:15:21,260
in your I don't know how would you describe it?

285
00:15:21,340 --> 00:15:24,540
Like the like the the maximum capacity of your social network.

286
00:15:24,620 --> 00:15:26,140
It's like 150 or something like that.

287
00:15:26,780 --> 00:15:27,020
Yeah.

288
00:15:27,100 --> 00:15:32,220
So 150 seems to be I mean, I think he used to describe it as sort of a cognitive

289
00:15:32,220 --> 00:15:36,830
constraint, but um he would say your social network, sort of defined as the number of

290
00:15:36,830 --> 00:15:40,910
people that if you saw them in an airport, you'd feel comfortable sitting down and talking

291
00:15:40,910 --> 00:15:43,070
to them, was about 150.

292
00:15:43,630 --> 00:15:49,390
And he found, you know, when people sent Christmas cards, their network was about 150.

293
00:15:50,110 --> 00:15:55,880
Different army battalions or groupings ended up being about 150, Anabaptist

294
00:15:55,880 --> 00:15:58,200
communities split off around 150.

295
00:15:58,280 --> 00:16:01,400
This number kept appearing and appearing and appearing.

296
00:16:01,560 --> 00:16:07,560
Um, and uh in his mind, it was linked to um brain size

297
00:16:07,560 --> 00:16:10,200
and group size and across different primates.

298
00:16:10,360 --> 00:16:13,480
But um, yeah, I think it it is in popular culture.

299
00:16:13,640 --> 00:16:17,160
Uh a lot of people in the tech world know Dunbar's number.

300
00:16:17,400 --> 00:16:23,190
Um, and it even made it into um I read a lot of fiction, and there's a book called The

301
00:16:23,190 --> 00:16:27,030
Midnight Library by Haig, I think it is.

302
00:16:27,510 --> 00:16:30,310
Um, and they mention Robin Dunbar in it.

303
00:16:30,390 --> 00:16:31,830
And like, holy shit!

304
00:16:31,990 --> 00:16:34,070
Oh holy moly, uh, he made it.

305
00:16:34,710 --> 00:16:35,510
You can swear, Jamie.

306
00:16:35,670 --> 00:16:36,070
That's fine.

307
00:16:36,310 --> 00:16:36,950
You can swear.

308
00:16:37,270 --> 00:16:37,510
Thank you.

309
00:16:37,590 --> 00:16:40,550
You did mention Philadelphia, and they do go hand in hand.

310
00:16:40,790 --> 00:16:41,030
Yeah.

311
00:16:41,190 --> 00:16:41,350
Yeah.

312
00:16:41,560 --> 00:16:46,280
I mean it is kind of an intoxicating idea that there's this number that keeps recurring in

313
00:16:46,280 --> 00:16:48,840
places where you wouldn't expect it to recur.

314
00:16:49,160 --> 00:16:52,760
Do you are you aware of like whether it holds up now?

315
00:16:52,840 --> 00:16:56,920
Like whether how it's done, you know, in the wake of the replication crisis if if it's

316
00:16:56,920 --> 00:16:57,720
still pretty solid?

317
00:16:58,120 --> 00:17:00,280
There's been some back and forth on it.

318
00:17:00,520 --> 00:17:04,680
Um, I would not be surprised if it holds up in many ways.

319
00:17:04,840 --> 00:17:10,230
I I do kind of think that there are these, I don't know, uh strange

320
00:17:10,230 --> 00:17:12,470
attractory ideas like fractals.

321
00:17:12,630 --> 00:17:17,190
So when you're flying in a plane, the mountain ridges look like you know they're fractals,

322
00:17:17,270 --> 00:17:23,110
and the rivers are fractals, and the veins and leaves, and in our bodies, there's there's

323
00:17:23,110 --> 00:17:28,150
something, there's you know, some sweet spot of efficiency.

324
00:17:28,310 --> 00:17:33,750
Um, and maybe for many people's brains, for most of human history,

325
00:17:34,070 --> 00:17:35,270
it's been that.

326
00:17:35,500 --> 00:17:37,340
Um, I could believe it.

327
00:17:37,580 --> 00:17:42,540
As for the latest, uh, I don't I don't think I know, but I do know there's been some back

328
00:17:42,540 --> 00:17:43,420
and forth lately.

329
00:17:43,580 --> 00:17:43,740
Yeah.

330
00:17:44,140 --> 00:17:44,700
Got it.

331
00:17:44,940 --> 00:17:50,620
So uh if I remember correctly, the Dunbar number was derived just by like looking at a

332
00:17:50,620 --> 00:17:55,340
graph of brain size and group size and just putting all the dots, you know, this is just

333
00:17:55,340 --> 00:18:00,970
across a number of different species, um, and just drawing a line through the dots to get

334
00:18:00,970 --> 00:18:06,810
the, you know, the uh and uh just extrapolating from that graph to you know, if humans are

335
00:18:06,810 --> 00:18:11,530
on this graph based on the line, their predicted group size based on their brain size is

336
00:18:11,530 --> 00:18:12,170
150.

337
00:18:12,650 --> 00:18:13,210
Yeah, exactly.

338
00:18:13,370 --> 00:18:19,130
You had um the brain size on the x-axis across the bottom and on the y-axis, you had group

339
00:18:19,130 --> 00:18:25,130
size, and um he uh plotted all of the different primate brain sizes and

340
00:18:25,130 --> 00:18:28,480
group sizes, drew that line, exactly what you're saying.

341
00:18:28,560 --> 00:18:30,480
You should expect humans to be 150.

342
00:18:30,640 --> 00:18:33,920
You should also expect the Neanderthals, they had larger brains.

343
00:18:34,000 --> 00:18:36,000
So they should have had larger groups.

344
00:18:36,640 --> 00:18:41,360
And so one of the ways that I think he and his group were dealing with that, including a

345
00:18:41,360 --> 00:18:45,920
woman named Ellie Pierce, was trying to understand why.

346
00:18:46,240 --> 00:18:51,680
And the last that I remember was that the occipital lobe of Neanderthals was

347
00:18:51,680 --> 00:18:57,450
particularly um large, or the the indentation, I guess, would have

348
00:18:57,450 --> 00:18:57,690
been.

349
00:18:57,850 --> 00:19:03,770
And what they were thinking is that they evolved, particularly at certain latitudes, where

350
00:19:03,770 --> 00:19:08,730
they would have needed a larger brain size because of something with the light.

351
00:19:09,210 --> 00:19:14,890
I'm not really remembering, but they had to dedicate that size not to social brain regions,

352
00:19:15,130 --> 00:19:17,960
but to other mechanics, basically.

353
00:19:18,280 --> 00:19:18,600
Got it.

354
00:19:18,680 --> 00:19:21,240
So they would be an outlier on that graph, presumably.

355
00:19:21,560 --> 00:19:21,720
Yeah.

356
00:19:21,800 --> 00:19:24,120
I love when exceptions can help you prove the rule.

357
00:19:24,200 --> 00:19:25,320
And so I remember that one.

358
00:19:25,480 --> 00:19:31,400
Sort of like when Doug Kenrick and uh Rich Keefe talked about, I think the either

359
00:19:31,400 --> 00:19:37,400
the Poro or the Tiwi, or one of those societies where the young men end up with much

360
00:19:37,400 --> 00:19:43,210
older women, which is against the evolutionary, evolutionarily derived prediction, and

361
00:19:43,210 --> 00:19:47,050
it's because the young men have no status and they have to marry the widows.

362
00:19:47,370 --> 00:19:48,970
It's not because it's what they want.

363
00:19:49,130 --> 00:19:51,770
And so yeah, when the exception proves the rule, it's fun.

364
00:19:52,410 --> 00:19:52,890
Cool.

365
00:19:53,210 --> 00:19:59,210
So he's also um a proponent of of uh an increasingly popular idea known

366
00:19:59,210 --> 00:20:03,450
as the social brain hypothesis or the social brain theory.

367
00:20:03,690 --> 00:20:07,610
Uh and as far as I'm aware, it's been gaining increasing prominence.

368
00:20:08,220 --> 00:20:13,900
So this idea is that humans don't have huge brains to help them

369
00:20:15,020 --> 00:20:20,380
solve problems and think rationally and make tools, which is sort of the prevailing view.

370
00:20:20,540 --> 00:20:25,820
The reason why we have these huge noggins is so we can get inside each other's heads and

371
00:20:25,820 --> 00:20:30,380
get inside each other's heads, getting inside of our heads, and think through many layers

372
00:20:30,380 --> 00:20:34,460
of social complexity and recursive mentalizing of I'm trying to predict what you're

373
00:20:34,460 --> 00:20:38,590
thinking, I'm thinking, you're thinking, uh, and navigating the political landscape,

374
00:20:38,750 --> 00:20:44,670
forming alliances, uh, maybe secretly flouting social norms in a way that you can get away

375
00:20:44,670 --> 00:20:44,910
with.

376
00:20:45,070 --> 00:20:50,670
These kinds of of social challenges are really the main selection pressure driving

377
00:20:50,670 --> 00:20:51,870
brain expansion.

378
00:20:51,950 --> 00:20:56,590
Um, and if you think about it intuitively, like, what do you devote most of your brain

379
00:20:56,590 --> 00:20:56,990
power to?

380
00:20:57,150 --> 00:21:01,950
You don't devote it to like auto parts or like, you know, furniture repair.

381
00:21:02,190 --> 00:21:07,200
You devote it to thinking about people and people related stuff and how you're going to

382
00:21:07,200 --> 00:21:11,840
deal with these people and get them to uh respect you or give you what you want or patch

383
00:21:11,840 --> 00:21:12,560
things up.

384
00:21:12,800 --> 00:21:18,800
Um so uh what do you think of this social brain theory?

385
00:21:19,120 --> 00:21:25,040
Do we need a uh a paradigm shift in how we think about the evolution of

386
00:21:25,200 --> 00:21:26,640
the human brain?

387
00:21:27,670 --> 00:21:33,670
Uh I mean, I I think a lot of people would buy this theory, whether or not they call it the

388
00:21:33,670 --> 00:21:39,510
social brain hypothesis, whether or not they subscribe to all of the potential tenants and

389
00:21:39,510 --> 00:21:40,950
related hypotheses.

390
00:21:41,110 --> 00:21:47,110
Um we are uh actually so the same way that Tubi and Cosmodee started a lot of papers with

391
00:21:47,110 --> 00:21:48,070
the Big Bang.

392
00:21:48,230 --> 00:21:54,020
You guys might remember in like the 2010s, uh almost all HBS

393
00:21:54,180 --> 00:21:57,300
talks and posters started with, well, humans are ultra social.

394
00:21:57,940 --> 00:21:58,260
Right?

395
00:21:58,660 --> 00:21:59,220
Yes.

396
00:22:00,100 --> 00:22:06,100
And I I think we all have bought that so hook, line, and sinker at this point, and we

397
00:22:06,100 --> 00:22:10,100
all agree on it so much that I don't even hear that sentence anymore.

398
00:22:10,500 --> 00:22:14,420
Um so I I I think we're moving past that and we buy it.

399
00:22:14,500 --> 00:22:15,060
Yeah.

400
00:22:15,350 --> 00:22:15,750
Yeah.

401
00:22:15,990 --> 00:22:21,590
I mean, it seems to me that like a lot of topics that were once considered a purely

402
00:22:21,590 --> 00:22:26,790
cognitive or rational part of the mind are now being reconsidered as a social adaptation.

403
00:22:26,950 --> 00:22:32,230
So it used to be that reasoning was sort of seen as this solitary rational practice that

404
00:22:32,230 --> 00:22:35,430
you'd work through these syllogisms of if P, then Q.

405
00:22:36,150 --> 00:22:40,950
And uh then, you know, Hugo Mercier and Dance Berber come along and say, Well, no, uh,

406
00:22:41,190 --> 00:22:43,270
reasoning is a social tool.

407
00:22:43,350 --> 00:22:49,340
It's for justifying and making excuses to other members of your social group and for trying

408
00:22:49,340 --> 00:22:52,940
to win arguments and get them to do what you want.

409
00:22:53,180 --> 00:22:58,860
And really it's much more insightful to view reasoning as a social tool

410
00:22:59,020 --> 00:23:02,540
rather than an instrument of solitary rationality.

411
00:23:03,340 --> 00:23:04,700
I'm trying to think of other examples.

412
00:23:04,780 --> 00:23:07,100
I think Episodic Memory had had a paper.

413
00:23:10,350 --> 00:23:15,870
uh uh phenomenon episodic memory is biased by social goals, uh, has social

414
00:23:15,870 --> 00:23:16,510
functions.

415
00:23:16,670 --> 00:23:21,870
Um there's a paper by Klein and uh Tubian Cosmedys basically arguing that the reason we

416
00:23:21,870 --> 00:23:27,710
have episodic memory uh as it's as distinct from semantic memory uh is

417
00:23:27,710 --> 00:23:33,470
that it allows us to reconsider all of the social interactions we've had with a person in

418
00:23:33,470 --> 00:23:34,910
light of new information.

419
00:23:35,310 --> 00:23:41,120
So if uh if you uh prove to be untrustworthy uh or a liar,

420
00:23:41,200 --> 00:23:46,480
I can reflect on all of the past experiences I might have had with with you and reinterpret

421
00:23:46,480 --> 00:23:51,040
them in light of this novel infation in a way that I couldn't with semantic memory, because

422
00:23:51,040 --> 00:23:54,400
it's just a list of facts as opposed to a list of raw experiences.

423
00:23:54,720 --> 00:23:59,840
Um so I I I I think that this is a good direction to go.

424
00:23:59,920 --> 00:24:01,600
I think we should continue going in this direction.

425
00:24:01,760 --> 00:24:06,830
So I have a blog post arguing that what we find interesting uh isn't is not really driven

426
00:24:06,830 --> 00:24:11,550
by what is practically uh useful to us, but but but what is socially useful to us.

427
00:24:11,710 --> 00:24:16,030
Um, that what what helps us, you know, signal our membership in various groups and show off

428
00:24:16,030 --> 00:24:17,230
how smart we are.

429
00:24:17,390 --> 00:24:22,670
Um those kinds of social goals are are driving our curiosity uh and and and what we read

430
00:24:22,670 --> 00:24:27,550
and what we click on way more than any kind of practical utility.

431
00:24:27,950 --> 00:24:33,540
Um so yeah, I don't know if uh yeah, I don't know if I have a a question.

432
00:24:33,860 --> 00:24:36,740
Uh so you do you know Eshin Jolly's work?

433
00:24:36,900 --> 00:24:39,780
He just knew at UC San Diego.

434
00:24:40,020 --> 00:24:44,420
He's a social neuroscientist in the sort of Carolyn Parkinson vein.

435
00:24:44,820 --> 00:24:50,150
Um, and both of them are doing incredible work that um uh would

436
00:24:51,110 --> 00:24:53,190
would go really nicely with what you're saying.

437
00:24:53,270 --> 00:24:58,870
But um one of Eshin's cool findings is that the way that you remember people is basically

438
00:24:58,870 --> 00:25:00,470
through relationships.

439
00:25:01,670 --> 00:25:07,110
All of these components that we think are for, you know, of this lonely Rodin

440
00:25:07,270 --> 00:25:12,800
statue thinking really probably are for uh navigating the social world.

441
00:25:12,960 --> 00:25:17,200
And the social world is way more complex than we've bothered to think it is.

442
00:25:17,360 --> 00:25:20,320
So it's not a person thinking alone.

443
00:25:20,480 --> 00:25:24,480
Um, the Rodin Museum is also in Philadelphia on the parkway, by the way.

444
00:25:24,880 --> 00:25:29,040
Um, it's not um even just, you know, one-on-one.

445
00:25:29,600 --> 00:25:34,880
It is people embedded in these interconnected networks that are um

446
00:25:35,200 --> 00:25:39,170
interesting exactly, and terrifying sometimes.

447
00:25:39,410 --> 00:25:45,410
And um probably the best way to get anything you want is through

448
00:25:45,410 --> 00:25:48,450
those people and anything you need.

449
00:25:49,330 --> 00:25:55,250
Um Jamie, you we this is w we're going through your travels,

450
00:25:55,330 --> 00:26:00,760
so you discover you're in uh Oxford in your

451
00:26:00,760 --> 00:26:01,640
masters.

452
00:26:02,040 --> 00:26:06,600
Did you did you want to be in social psychology?

453
00:26:06,760 --> 00:26:07,960
Did you want to be in psychology?

454
00:26:08,120 --> 00:26:10,280
Were you toying with anthropology?

455
00:26:10,440 --> 00:26:12,120
What how did you get to Oh?

456
00:26:12,680 --> 00:26:13,240
Yeah.

457
00:26:13,480 --> 00:26:14,440
Um, all right.

458
00:26:14,520 --> 00:26:20,520
So my honest answer um is that I wanted to do evolutionary social science and I

459
00:26:20,520 --> 00:26:26,330
did not care whether I was in anthropology or psychology because I think that our remits

460
00:26:26,330 --> 00:26:26,970
are the same.

461
00:26:27,130 --> 00:26:29,370
We're trying to figure out human nature.

462
00:26:30,570 --> 00:26:36,490
Practically, that, you know, that comes up against some issues, which is that

463
00:26:37,610 --> 00:26:41,130
I didn't know this at the time, but there are fewer jobs in anthropology.

464
00:26:41,610 --> 00:26:43,050
I didn't know this at the time.

465
00:26:43,210 --> 00:26:47,560
But if you want to get a job in psychology, it's probably easier to be a social

466
00:26:47,560 --> 00:26:51,320
psychologist who leverages evolutionary tools than it is to be an evolutionary

467
00:26:51,320 --> 00:26:55,560
psychologist, particularly in the United States.

468
00:26:55,800 --> 00:27:01,320
Um, and practically, uh, if you want to be an anthropologist, probably at some point you're

469
00:27:01,320 --> 00:27:02,760
gonna go into the field.

470
00:27:02,920 --> 00:27:05,240
And like a motel is the field for me.

471
00:27:05,400 --> 00:27:11,320
I am I am a city mouse, I am a um a Persian cat that needs a

472
00:27:11,320 --> 00:27:12,440
velvet pillow.

473
00:27:12,680 --> 00:27:13,640
I am that.

474
00:27:13,930 --> 00:27:18,410
And so um fighting a jaguar, that could be kind of cool.

475
00:27:18,650 --> 00:27:24,650
Having to put my shoes like on a branch so that a dangerous person

476
00:27:24,730 --> 00:27:28,810
killing centipede doesn't get in them is not for me.

477
00:27:29,050 --> 00:27:29,610
Yeah.

478
00:27:29,930 --> 00:27:34,730
So that's that's my honest answer that I probably never said out loud before.

479
00:27:35,210 --> 00:27:37,210
So how did you give it a little bit?

480
00:27:37,450 --> 00:27:38,170
I had a similar experience.

481
00:27:38,330 --> 00:27:43,940
I was debating whether to go into anthropology or psychology, and I remember asking uh Dan

482
00:27:43,940 --> 00:27:48,980
Fessler about it uh and uh I'm like so this fieldwork thing like that's kind of optional

483
00:27:49,060 --> 00:27:53,620
right I can I can be an anthropologist and not have to like go to a place without air

484
00:27:53,620 --> 00:27:55,780
conditioning and with you know man eating spiders.

485
00:27:56,020 --> 00:27:57,380
He's like, oh no it's very important.

486
00:27:57,460 --> 00:27:57,940
It's crucial.

487
00:27:58,020 --> 00:28:02,100
You you uh we take field work very seriously and you you can't get you can't graduate

488
00:28:02,100 --> 00:28:03,620
without doing really extensive fieldwork.

489
00:28:03,700 --> 00:28:06,260
You know, sometimes you stay there for months or a year.

490
00:28:06,580 --> 00:28:08,470
I'm like okay, no thank you.

491
00:28:08,790 --> 00:28:08,950
Yeah.

492
00:28:09,110 --> 00:28:13,990
And then I love I love uh talking to uh I I dear I mean we and we're people have some like

493
00:28:13,990 --> 00:28:17,590
human behavioral ecologists or like field anthropologists on and I dearly love them.

494
00:28:17,670 --> 00:28:21,830
But then whenever more than like two or three of them get together, they'll like exchange

495
00:28:21,830 --> 00:28:26,630
their field stories of like, you know, the communicable or flesh eating diseases that, you

496
00:28:26,630 --> 00:28:28,630
know, like compare their scars, right?

497
00:28:28,710 --> 00:28:34,240
And and or the story of the person on the path that thought about killing them and they

498
00:28:34,240 --> 00:28:37,760
convinced them not to because they knew them from when they were a child, which is a true

499
00:28:37,760 --> 00:28:39,680
story from an anthropologist I heard from.

500
00:28:39,840 --> 00:28:44,320
So is this Kim Hill or it's uh uh it was John Patton actually.

501
00:28:46,240 --> 00:28:51,360
I remember uh uh Chris Chris Smith who does research with the Hadza uh in uh what Tanzania

502
00:28:51,440 --> 00:28:52,240
I think is where they are.

503
00:28:52,320 --> 00:28:56,640
Or uh and uh he was staying in a tent and he was having horrible diarrhea.

504
00:28:57,150 --> 00:28:59,470
and uh he had in in in the middle of the night.

505
00:28:59,630 --> 00:28:59,950
Yes.

506
00:29:00,190 --> 00:29:02,030
Oh maybe I shouldn't be divulging this.

507
00:29:02,110 --> 00:29:02,510
Sorry.

508
00:29:02,830 --> 00:29:07,150
We'll have Chris on and and we'll have to tell him an important story about yourself and

509
00:29:07,150 --> 00:29:09,710
Chris can decide whether or not Yeah.

510
00:29:10,110 --> 00:29:10,590
That's true.

511
00:29:10,670 --> 00:29:10,830
Yeah.

512
00:29:11,150 --> 00:29:12,110
We're all a family, it's fine.

513
00:29:12,270 --> 00:29:12,910
We're all it's okay.

514
00:29:13,870 --> 00:29:14,510
Uh yeah.

515
00:29:14,590 --> 00:29:19,070
Uh so uh this this story stuck in my head because it it strikes me as the most horrifying

516
00:29:19,070 --> 00:29:19,310
possible.

517
00:29:19,470 --> 00:29:22,110
So he's out in the middle of the night at like three in the morning because he's having

518
00:29:22,110 --> 00:29:27,740
diarrhea, and you can't you know poop in the camp uh because there are you know taboos

519
00:29:27,820 --> 00:29:28,220
around that.

520
00:29:28,380 --> 00:29:31,660
So you have to go wander away from camp in order to poop.

521
00:29:31,820 --> 00:29:35,980
And he's and he's wandering out having horrible diarrhea away from the camp, and he hears

522
00:29:35,980 --> 00:29:38,700
lions, literal lions, roaring.

523
00:29:38,780 --> 00:29:44,780
And he has to debate whether he's gonna go out and outside of camp, away from other people,

524
00:29:44,940 --> 00:29:46,140
where there are lions roaring.

525
00:29:46,220 --> 00:29:47,660
And he was it was like an emergency.

526
00:29:47,740 --> 00:29:49,820
And he has to poop or die.

527
00:29:50,060 --> 00:29:51,020
Poop or die.

528
00:29:52,390 --> 00:29:55,750
He ultimately chose poop uh and he survived, thankfully.

529
00:29:55,910 --> 00:29:58,710
Uh, but that's not the kind of decision that I want to ever have to make.

530
00:29:59,030 --> 00:30:04,230
Oh, we're still at Oxford, and you get so get to get us to um uh

531
00:30:04,550 --> 00:30:05,430
ASU.

532
00:30:08,390 --> 00:30:10,390
To several programs.

533
00:30:10,630 --> 00:30:15,830
Um I I think Marty would be fine with me saying this because uh Marty Hazleton is here at

534
00:30:15,830 --> 00:30:17,590
UCLA in communication.

535
00:30:17,750 --> 00:30:22,640
Um I applied to work with Marty and she turned me down.

536
00:30:23,120 --> 00:30:28,080
Um, and someone else who applied to work with Marty is one of your other guests, Dan Conroy

537
00:30:28,080 --> 00:30:29,680
Beam, and she turned him down.

538
00:30:29,840 --> 00:30:35,760
And we were walking her home uh with Larry Sugiyama one night at HBus, and Dan

539
00:30:35,760 --> 00:30:40,080
and I were on either side of Barney, and she just looked at us and she's like, You're my

540
00:30:40,080 --> 00:30:41,120
greatest regrets.

541
00:30:41,280 --> 00:30:42,880
Oh it was very sweet.

542
00:30:43,680 --> 00:30:47,650
Um but she said yes to pin soft, and that's that that worked out.

543
00:30:49,730 --> 00:30:50,530
Yep, that's true.

544
00:30:51,410 --> 00:30:54,850
So uh I applied to a bunch of places.

545
00:30:55,010 --> 00:30:59,570
Um I thought I would end up at Santa Barbara, the high church.

546
00:30:59,810 --> 00:31:05,730
Um so uh and I visited and I loved it, and the people were great.

547
00:31:05,890 --> 00:31:09,730
Um Aldo was there and he was hilarious to me.

548
00:31:09,890 --> 00:31:12,370
Yeah, I never met such a human Eeyore.

549
00:31:12,690 --> 00:31:14,530
Yeah, oh he's Aldo is wonderful.

550
00:31:14,770 --> 00:31:16,920
Yeah, He was just fantastic.

551
00:31:17,160 --> 00:31:19,160
Um, Andy and Tess were there.

552
00:31:19,320 --> 00:31:22,200
It was actually the day that Max got the job at Harvard.

553
00:31:22,840 --> 00:31:28,840
Um, I didn't know what an amazing fellow Andy was at the time.

554
00:31:29,000 --> 00:31:31,240
I didn't realize that they'd both gone up for that.

555
00:31:31,320 --> 00:31:36,680
And um, how what an incredible friend and colleague and pal Andy was.

556
00:31:36,760 --> 00:31:38,840
Um, though I would come to learn that.

557
00:31:39,160 --> 00:31:43,510
Um anyway, so I visited Santa Barbara and it was amazing.

558
00:31:43,670 --> 00:31:49,510
Um, and I took a picture of the CEP because, you know, it's this is

559
00:31:49,510 --> 00:31:52,070
the font from whence we came in my mind.

560
00:31:52,310 --> 00:31:56,870
Um, and uh uh it was wonderful.

561
00:31:57,030 --> 00:32:00,630
Then I went to ASU and I really did not think I would go there.

562
00:32:00,790 --> 00:32:05,910
Actually, I think I only visited ASU because they were the ones who paid for my plane

563
00:32:05,910 --> 00:32:07,430
ticket from England.

564
00:32:07,510 --> 00:32:09,520
Uh Santa Barbara wouldn't do it.

565
00:32:09,760 --> 00:32:12,480
Um I think that yeah, I think that's true.

566
00:32:12,640 --> 00:32:18,000
Um and so uh I told Doug,

567
00:32:18,080 --> 00:32:23,680
Kenrick and Steve Newberg during my recruitment trip, uh, listen,

568
00:32:23,920 --> 00:32:27,440
um, can you make me the best evolutionary psychologist?

569
00:32:27,600 --> 00:32:32,320
Um and I have to like squeeze up all my courage to ask them that, right?

570
00:32:32,400 --> 00:32:34,320
Because it's kind of a prickish question.

571
00:32:34,400 --> 00:32:35,610
Um It's a badass question.

572
00:32:35,690 --> 00:32:37,050
I wish I'd asked it.

573
00:32:37,370 --> 00:32:40,170
I mean, it's it's a it's a difficult question.

574
00:32:40,330 --> 00:32:45,690
Um and I don't even remember what they told me, but they did

575
00:32:45,690 --> 00:32:51,690
convince me that what they would be able to do is get me a job so that

576
00:32:51,690 --> 00:32:53,530
I could do this forever.

577
00:32:53,850 --> 00:32:56,090
Um, and I think they were right.

578
00:32:56,170 --> 00:33:01,450
I I think there have been few people in the history of our

579
00:33:02,020 --> 00:33:07,140
field or lens or whatever you want to call it approach that

580
00:33:07,860 --> 00:33:13,860
whatever we say that's appropriately non-threatening at the time, that have

581
00:33:14,020 --> 00:33:19,940
uh successfully gotten so many people jobs so that they could keep doing this and making

582
00:33:19,940 --> 00:33:20,900
more of us.

583
00:33:21,460 --> 00:33:25,540
Um so uh that that is how I got to ASU.

584
00:33:26,370 --> 00:33:27,010
Yeah.

585
00:33:27,570 --> 00:33:28,850
And you did get a job.

586
00:33:28,930 --> 00:33:29,730
You have an awesome job.

587
00:33:29,810 --> 00:33:29,970
Yeah.

588
00:33:30,130 --> 00:33:30,610
So that worked.

589
00:33:30,930 --> 00:33:31,570
I do now.

590
00:33:31,810 --> 00:33:34,850
I, you know, I got a job out of grad school.

591
00:33:34,930 --> 00:33:35,970
I was very lucky.

592
00:33:36,130 --> 00:33:40,450
It's so hard, especially given that I had an EV background.

593
00:33:40,610 --> 00:33:45,890
Um, and so many people who do social psych work, you know, um,

594
00:33:46,530 --> 00:33:48,640
uh, so this was 2018.

595
00:33:48,880 --> 00:33:53,600
It wasn't um, you know, I did a little bit of stereotyping and prejudice stuff, but that's

596
00:33:53,600 --> 00:33:58,000
the an intergroup, that's the great, great majority of social psych now.

597
00:33:58,080 --> 00:34:03,920
Um, and that's not the great great majority of the human mind or the

598
00:34:03,920 --> 00:34:09,760
social world, um, but the it's the great great majority of the work that you see and the

599
00:34:09,760 --> 00:34:11,120
jobs that are advertised.

600
00:34:11,440 --> 00:34:15,730
Um, So I was lucky that there was a job for an experimental psychologist.

601
00:34:16,050 --> 00:34:16,930
I applied.

602
00:34:17,570 --> 00:34:20,050
I got the job at Oklahoma State University.

603
00:34:20,130 --> 00:34:25,730
And with Jen Bird Craven, we created the Oklahoma Center for Evolutionary Analysis, or

604
00:34:25,730 --> 00:34:31,410
Ocean, which is going strong to this day with uh CEP alum Daniel

605
00:34:31,410 --> 00:34:37,170
Sneeser and Jen and Juliana French was there for a little while.

606
00:34:38,290 --> 00:34:41,580
So I was very, very lucky to get a job at all.

607
00:34:41,660 --> 00:34:47,500
And I was so lucky that I could do the work I wanted to do and had to do at Oklahoma.

608
00:34:47,660 --> 00:34:53,660
And yeah, now I have uh what I would consider like a job that would impress a person on

609
00:34:53,660 --> 00:34:57,900
a plane, you know, like when you sit next to them and you're like, I'm a professor at UCLA,

610
00:34:58,060 --> 00:35:02,300
and I'm a little vain, and that is how I measure my worth sometimes.

611
00:35:02,460 --> 00:35:05,420
And so that feels really nice.

612
00:35:05,870 --> 00:35:07,950
It's not it's not vain at all, Jamie.

613
00:35:08,510 --> 00:35:09,470
No, it's human.

614
00:35:09,630 --> 00:35:09,870
Yeah.

615
00:35:10,030 --> 00:35:10,590
Congratulations.

616
00:35:10,910 --> 00:35:11,630
Well, humans are vain.

617
00:35:12,590 --> 00:35:13,150
Yes, that's true.

618
00:35:13,390 --> 00:35:14,270
Very well deserved.

619
00:35:14,590 --> 00:35:20,510
Um in a cartoonish way, I sort of have friend a friendship bubble next to

620
00:35:20,510 --> 00:35:24,270
my picture of you in my uh slots of 150 people.

621
00:35:24,590 --> 00:35:30,380
Um, when you were out at Oklahoma, when you left ASU, and so

622
00:35:30,460 --> 00:35:36,460
when you were in Oklahoma and now at UCLA, is friendship for you, and we'll

623
00:35:36,460 --> 00:35:42,380
talk pro presumably about it in in a in a bit, but is friendship for you the

624
00:35:42,380 --> 00:35:47,180
thing that you think about, or is friendship sort of a way station to a bigger point?

625
00:35:48,060 --> 00:35:53,980
Um, so you know, like what is your as you've been going through this, um,

626
00:35:54,300 --> 00:35:59,690
what is what's the thing that you're looking at as you keep proceeding through that sort of

627
00:35:59,850 --> 00:36:03,610
is your North Star that you're really interested in thinking about and tackling?

628
00:36:04,250 --> 00:36:09,610
I mean, I'll tell you really honestly, it was originally pragmatic, which was I need to

629
00:36:09,610 --> 00:36:11,530
publish papers so that I could get a job.

630
00:36:11,690 --> 00:36:17,130
My my North Star wasn't um lofty in any way, or noble in the very

631
00:36:17,610 --> 00:36:19,210
it wasn't noble in the least.

632
00:36:19,370 --> 00:36:24,730
Um uh and then it became, you know, I really did want to understand

633
00:36:24,730 --> 00:36:29,940
women's social relationships, both the competition,

634
00:36:30,100 --> 00:36:32,420
aggression stuff as well as the friendship.

635
00:36:32,580 --> 00:36:38,260
But it turns out that the competition and aggression is sort of built on the same machinery

636
00:36:38,260 --> 00:36:38,900
as friendship.

637
00:36:39,060 --> 00:36:42,500
It's the same rails that runs that kind of aggression.

638
00:36:43,140 --> 00:36:48,820
And I think what we call variously indirect aggression, relational aggression, social

639
00:36:48,820 --> 00:36:54,370
aggression, things like gossip, Uh we all know they're not unique to women.

640
00:36:54,530 --> 00:36:59,490
Um what I think we don't realize enough is that they are um

641
00:37:00,130 --> 00:37:04,690
it's just a different name for friendship and alliance competition.

642
00:37:05,010 --> 00:37:07,410
Um we don't talk about friendship competition.

643
00:37:07,570 --> 00:37:11,170
I think we largely pretend that it doesn't exist or we'd like to think that we never

644
00:37:11,170 --> 00:37:15,570
compete for friends or friends' affections, but we do Which is itself a tactic in the

645
00:37:15,570 --> 00:37:16,050
competition.

646
00:37:16,480 --> 00:37:17,280
Yes, it is.

647
00:37:17,520 --> 00:37:18,320
We don't do that.

648
00:37:18,560 --> 00:37:19,040
No, okay.

649
00:37:19,200 --> 00:37:20,560
Romantic partners, sure.

650
00:37:20,640 --> 00:37:22,800
People do that, but we don't compete for friends.

651
00:37:22,960 --> 00:37:28,240
I never try and make one friend like me better than they like their other friend by talking

652
00:37:28,240 --> 00:37:28,720
shit.

653
00:37:29,040 --> 00:37:31,040
No, but of course we do.

654
00:37:31,280 --> 00:37:36,800
Um, and it's really hard to um to uh

655
00:37:37,040 --> 00:37:40,960
understand friendship without understanding that sort of grimy bit of it too.

656
00:37:41,120 --> 00:37:47,050
So in any case, I started thinking about women's sociality that became a lot

657
00:37:47,050 --> 00:37:48,090
about friendship.

658
00:37:48,890 --> 00:37:50,010
That's the machinery.

659
00:37:50,090 --> 00:37:51,850
Those are the rails, like I was saying.

660
00:37:52,010 --> 00:37:57,930
And so yeah, I mean, one of my goals would be that at the end of

661
00:37:57,930 --> 00:38:03,450
my career, I've created enough people studying friendship, because we don't do that,

662
00:38:04,410 --> 00:38:08,730
who are getting us to the point where we could, you know, if I had to build a robot to do

663
00:38:08,730 --> 00:38:13,450
friendship, they would be able to deploy the programs to build the robot to do friendship.

664
00:38:14,320 --> 00:38:20,320
I think my my larger goal, if I'm honest, um, and whatever, I have

665
00:38:20,320 --> 00:38:22,160
tenure, so I could just say this now.

666
00:38:22,320 --> 00:38:25,200
Um, it's it's the way we think.

667
00:38:25,360 --> 00:38:25,920
It's us.

668
00:38:26,080 --> 00:38:31,440
I want the way that we think to pervade the social sciences.

669
00:38:31,680 --> 00:38:33,680
Um it should.

670
00:38:34,390 --> 00:38:40,070
If you think this way in any other area, it is a boon.

671
00:38:40,310 --> 00:38:46,310
I mean, even engineering, you know, goal-wing design, the design of birds' beaks.

672
00:38:46,630 --> 00:38:52,470
We have made better machines and tools by looking at nature because evolution has helped to

673
00:38:52,470 --> 00:38:53,110
create them.

674
00:38:53,670 --> 00:38:58,660
And if we can start thinking that way about the human mind without all of this really

675
00:38:58,660 --> 00:39:04,420
stupid stuff, um, I think we'll actually be able to give the taxpayers their money's

676
00:39:04,420 --> 00:39:09,140
worth and help them solve real social problems that they actually give a shit about.

677
00:39:09,540 --> 00:39:15,460
Um, but uh so yes, um to that end, I would like to lift up

678
00:39:15,460 --> 00:39:18,900
and spread our uh our gospel, let's say.

679
00:39:19,300 --> 00:39:19,620
Yeah.

680
00:39:19,860 --> 00:39:20,500
But yeah, thank you.

681
00:39:20,740 --> 00:39:25,650
I mean I mean, you mentioned, you know, giving the taxpayers their money's worth and

682
00:39:25,650 --> 00:39:26,850
solving real problems.

683
00:39:27,090 --> 00:39:32,450
I mean one of the biggest problems that we have in the modern world is a is a lack of deep

684
00:39:32,450 --> 00:39:37,970
social connections with other people, um uh problems making friends as an

685
00:39:37,970 --> 00:39:38,610
adult.

686
00:39:39,170 --> 00:39:44,210
Um we we feel I mean there's some evidence to suggest that loneliness is on the rise at

687
00:39:44,210 --> 00:39:46,210
least a little bit, at least in the in the United States.

688
00:39:46,370 --> 00:39:50,720
We can, you know, quibble about you know where and when this is this is occurring, but it

689
00:39:50,720 --> 00:39:54,960
seems like a lot of people are starved for social connection.

690
00:39:55,200 --> 00:40:00,640
Uh, and figuring out how to help them solve that problem it would be a huge benefit, not

691
00:40:00,640 --> 00:40:03,360
merely for their well-being, but for their physical health.

692
00:40:03,600 --> 00:40:09,440
Um, there's tons of evidence showing that your uh social relationships have a huge effect

693
00:40:09,760 --> 00:40:14,560
on your your physical health, presumably because maybe if you're if you're more stressed.

694
00:40:14,640 --> 00:40:15,520
Um I don't know.

695
00:40:15,600 --> 00:40:21,530
I mean uh uh so number one, what do you think is going on with

696
00:40:21,850 --> 00:40:25,690
with the the relationship between friendship and physical health?

697
00:40:25,850 --> 00:40:31,290
Uh and number two, uh are you at the point where you can start to see what a potential

698
00:40:31,290 --> 00:40:35,290
solution to these social problems might look like, or is that too far on the horizon?

699
00:40:36,010 --> 00:40:39,050
So to one, that is an amazing question.

700
00:40:39,210 --> 00:40:40,650
Um, here's what we know.

701
00:40:40,920 --> 00:40:45,720
We know that social connection at the very least, and sometimes specifically friendship,

702
00:40:45,880 --> 00:40:49,720
not just, you know, social support, not just marriage, right?

703
00:40:50,120 --> 00:40:52,920
Um, can lead to better health outcomes.

704
00:40:53,080 --> 00:40:59,080
So friendships can be a route not only to things like arriving at work or

705
00:40:59,080 --> 00:41:04,600
thriving in your life or feelings of well-being, or even I think Chetty has some stuff on

706
00:41:05,240 --> 00:41:10,690
how friendships among folks from different economic backgrounds can

707
00:41:11,090 --> 00:41:16,690
improve the economic trajectory of people who have grown up in disadvantaged uh

708
00:41:16,690 --> 00:41:17,250
places.

709
00:41:18,290 --> 00:41:20,050
The economist Raz Chetty, I believe.

710
00:41:20,370 --> 00:41:21,570
Did he win the Nobel Prize?

711
00:41:22,130 --> 00:41:23,090
I think he might have.

712
00:41:23,330 --> 00:41:27,410
This is a one of the sort of twin 2022 working papers.

713
00:41:27,570 --> 00:41:28,210
It's really cool.

714
00:41:28,530 --> 00:41:31,890
Economic mobility is an outcome of some friendships.

715
00:41:32,130 --> 00:41:34,290
But then there's all this stuff about health.

716
00:41:34,460 --> 00:41:40,460
And so you see, to give some concrete examples, uh, women recover more quickly from

717
00:41:40,460 --> 00:41:44,540
breast cancer surgery if they feel like they're socially supported, particularly by their

718
00:41:44,540 --> 00:41:45,420
female friends.

719
00:41:45,580 --> 00:41:51,180
Um, men in Sweden are less likely to have heart attacks if they have

720
00:41:51,180 --> 00:41:55,500
friends and it's not about their social support, it's not about being married, it's

721
00:41:55,500 --> 00:41:56,300
friends.

722
00:41:56,460 --> 00:42:02,300
Um, we see uh so Julianne Holt Lundstadt had this sort of seminal meta-analysis

723
00:42:02,300 --> 00:42:08,170
that suggests that having social support, which I would argue is including and perhaps

724
00:42:08,170 --> 00:42:13,930
mostly friends, is so lacking social support, let's say, is equivalent to

725
00:42:13,930 --> 00:42:19,050
smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which has led folks like Robin Dunbar to say that having

726
00:42:19,050 --> 00:42:22,890
friends is the next best thing you could do for your health behind quitting smoking.

727
00:42:23,290 --> 00:42:29,260
And there's a billboard here in Los Angeles that I sometimes see on my way home that

728
00:42:29,260 --> 00:42:35,020
actually has a live tally of the predicted number of people who've died this year due to

729
00:42:35,020 --> 00:42:36,620
smoking-related deaths.

730
00:42:37,820 --> 00:42:43,500
So if you just sort of switch that to loneliness-related deaths, um,

731
00:42:43,820 --> 00:42:45,180
that number is huge.

732
00:42:45,340 --> 00:42:46,860
That number is insane.

733
00:42:47,420 --> 00:42:53,020
So I mean, I think this is a really valuable problem in terms of you know

734
00:42:53,210 --> 00:42:55,850
human happiness, longevity.

735
00:42:56,250 --> 00:43:00,170
And then if you want to look at it by the numbers, healthcare costs and things like that,

736
00:43:00,250 --> 00:43:00,570
right?

737
00:43:01,370 --> 00:43:06,650
So, and it's uh loneliness is prevalent among older adults, among new mothers, among the

738
00:43:06,650 --> 00:43:11,610
young, among college students, I among men, especially.

739
00:43:11,770 --> 00:43:17,700
So I haven't found a paper that suggests that any particular demographic has been

740
00:43:17,700 --> 00:43:23,220
buffered by this, buffered from this loneliness epidemic that is in the West, that it's in

741
00:43:23,300 --> 00:43:24,100
uh the UK.

742
00:43:24,260 --> 00:43:30,180
I think they have a loneliness czar, like a czar, um, uh, Korea,

743
00:43:30,340 --> 00:43:32,020
um, a lot of places in the West.

744
00:43:32,340 --> 00:43:37,860
I I have spoken to Mike Gervin and it doesn't seem to be a problem and sort of um uh

745
00:43:38,020 --> 00:43:43,870
small-scale societies um For reasons that we could try and play with and get into.

746
00:43:43,950 --> 00:43:46,590
But in any case, yes, it's a huge problem.

747
00:43:47,230 --> 00:43:51,710
What are the mechanisms that lead from friendship to health

748
00:43:52,990 --> 00:43:54,670
or social support to health?

749
00:43:55,230 --> 00:43:56,110
We don't know.

750
00:43:56,270 --> 00:43:57,790
That's the short answer.

751
00:43:58,270 --> 00:44:03,630
My guess would be that you probably have to bear extra energetic costs

752
00:44:04,190 --> 00:44:06,820
to get and do everything yourself, right?

753
00:44:07,300 --> 00:44:12,500
Um, and we do know how stress impacts the immune system.

754
00:44:12,820 --> 00:44:14,900
That's energetically costly.

755
00:44:15,300 --> 00:44:18,260
Um, so maybe it upregulates that.

756
00:44:18,740 --> 00:44:24,580
Um, we do know that uh loneliness itself can be a cue of stress,

757
00:44:24,740 --> 00:44:27,140
um, which might feed back on itself.

758
00:44:27,300 --> 00:44:32,980
Um, so you've uh in sort of that Mark Leary sociometer sense, um, if you're lonely,

759
00:44:33,140 --> 00:44:35,780
you're probably doing something wrong.

760
00:44:36,290 --> 00:44:39,970
You might have a low opinion of yourself and that can feed back on itself.

761
00:44:41,090 --> 00:44:44,450
So we haven't elucidated those mechanisms.

762
00:44:44,770 --> 00:44:47,010
There is a world of work to be done.

763
00:44:47,490 --> 00:44:51,410
It's probably not even that difficult to do some of that work.

764
00:44:51,570 --> 00:44:57,330
There's really great groundwork that folks like Brenda Major have laid out between

765
00:44:57,570 --> 00:45:03,490
obesity stigma and the outcomes related to it, obesity

766
00:45:03,490 --> 00:45:03,970
itself.

767
00:45:04,210 --> 00:45:06,520
So there are models to use.

768
00:45:07,480 --> 00:45:11,080
The second question was how do we actually do something about it?

769
00:45:11,240 --> 00:45:11,480
Right.

770
00:45:11,640 --> 00:45:11,960
Yeah.

771
00:45:12,520 --> 00:45:12,840
Okay.

772
00:45:13,160 --> 00:45:15,000
Uh we don't fucking know.

773
00:45:16,200 --> 00:45:20,120
People people have started to ask me this question.

774
00:45:20,200 --> 00:45:23,800
Um, how do we help people not be lonely?

775
00:45:24,120 --> 00:45:24,440
Right.

776
00:45:24,600 --> 00:45:29,770
Um and so so first I should just say most of the people that I talk to are what Musa

777
00:45:29,930 --> 00:45:32,090
Algarbi would call symbolic capitalists.

778
00:45:32,170 --> 00:45:36,250
They do jobs like we do, they go to college, they move around a lot.

779
00:45:36,410 --> 00:45:41,930
Um, they have they are the people who are writing the essays about having trouble making

780
00:45:41,930 --> 00:45:43,370
friends in adulthood.

781
00:45:43,530 --> 00:45:49,450
Um it is entirely possible that that's a problem for folks like us because

782
00:45:49,450 --> 00:45:52,810
we are moving around a lot in adulthood, right?

783
00:45:53,290 --> 00:45:55,850
This is a symbolic capitalist problem more.

784
00:45:56,490 --> 00:45:56,970
Potentially.

785
00:45:57,220 --> 00:45:57,700
Potentially.

786
00:45:57,860 --> 00:45:58,100
Interesting.

787
00:45:58,420 --> 00:45:58,580
Yeah.

788
00:45:58,660 --> 00:46:04,340
So if you live in the same place and all the people you went to uh a grade school and made

789
00:46:04,340 --> 00:46:10,260
friends with live in the same place, you don't face this challenge of making new friends or

790
00:46:10,260 --> 00:46:15,300
having to recruit the same sort of systems and face the same sort of challenges you needed

791
00:46:15,300 --> 00:46:18,340
to recruit to essentially solve friendship, right?

792
00:46:18,500 --> 00:46:18,660
Right.

793
00:46:19,060 --> 00:46:23,380
You break it down to its components, you need to find, make, and keep friends.

794
00:46:23,730 --> 00:46:28,290
You are just keeping friends at that point if you stay in the same place.

795
00:46:28,930 --> 00:46:34,770
Um, uh, so but I'm I'm glad that people are realizing that this is a challenge.

796
00:46:34,930 --> 00:46:40,210
I think that's been one of the key hurdles is that um most of us make friends when we're

797
00:46:40,210 --> 00:46:42,050
young and it doesn't feel hard.

798
00:46:42,290 --> 00:46:47,090
Um, and we only realize that there's a challenge to be solved because now we're adults and

799
00:46:47,090 --> 00:46:51,860
it feels hard and we're um professional women and we're trying to set our husbands up on

800
00:46:51,860 --> 00:46:53,940
play dates with other men, right?

801
00:46:54,260 --> 00:46:57,540
Um, that sounds condescending, and I don't mean it that way at all.

802
00:46:57,700 --> 00:47:00,180
Um, I've just encountered that over and over again.

803
00:47:00,340 --> 00:47:02,100
So yeah, people are starting to ask me.

804
00:47:02,260 --> 00:47:03,860
So, how do we actually solve this problem?

805
00:47:04,020 --> 00:47:05,380
What do the data say?

806
00:47:05,700 --> 00:47:08,020
The data don't exist.

807
00:47:08,340 --> 00:47:10,180
The data simply do not exist.

808
00:47:10,340 --> 00:47:14,570
We're starting to um do some friendship interventions here.

809
00:47:15,210 --> 00:47:20,890
We might work with Dan Conroy Beam's lab to do the prospective mating

810
00:47:20,890 --> 00:47:26,170
study that he's doing there at Santa Barbara to figure out: okay, can we pair people up and

811
00:47:26,170 --> 00:47:27,610
make good romantic relationships?

812
00:47:27,770 --> 00:47:29,610
Maybe we could do that for friendship.

813
00:47:30,170 --> 00:47:35,930
Matt Lieberman, a social neuroscientist here, has a company called Resonance that's

814
00:47:35,930 --> 00:47:37,610
starting to try and play with this.

815
00:47:38,340 --> 00:47:44,180
I'm working with an amazing scientist and gentleman named Victor Kaufman, and

816
00:47:44,180 --> 00:47:49,620
with some of my students and with his postdoc, Lisa Walsh, trying to

817
00:47:49,860 --> 00:47:55,700
maybe get toward what we'd call a mega study, sort of in the Liz Dunn sense

818
00:47:55,780 --> 00:48:01,780
of what are all of the interventions that journalists have suggested, and academics to the

819
00:48:01,780 --> 00:48:05,940
sense that any of them have suggested anything as an intervention for actually helping

820
00:48:05,940 --> 00:48:07,540
people make friends in adulthood.

821
00:48:07,750 --> 00:48:08,790
What are they?

822
00:48:09,350 --> 00:48:15,350
Okay, now that we know what they are, um, let's deploy them across countries and

823
00:48:15,350 --> 00:48:16,790
see what actually works.

824
00:48:16,950 --> 00:48:22,790
Um, that requires massive time, money, effort, and infrastructure, and we're

825
00:48:22,790 --> 00:48:23,510
building that.

826
00:48:23,670 --> 00:48:29,270
So um that's part of what I've been doing here at UCLA, part of the Center for Friendship

827
00:48:29,270 --> 00:48:33,590
Research, part of this friendship alliance thing that I am I've been building.

828
00:48:33,750 --> 00:48:38,120
Um, Because we don't even have the data to answer that question.

829
00:48:38,360 --> 00:48:42,200
If I wanted to answer that, I'd point you to essays that say go join a club.

830
00:48:42,600 --> 00:48:43,080
Yeah.

831
00:48:44,760 --> 00:48:50,600
I mean, I I love that answer because I feel um that the premature giving of

832
00:48:50,600 --> 00:48:54,520
advice is all too pervasive in social science.

833
00:48:55,000 --> 00:49:00,840
Um the urge to uh give lessons and takeaways uh and

834
00:49:00,840 --> 00:49:06,770
glib tips, uh uh it you know, it gets you status, it

835
00:49:06,770 --> 00:49:11,650
gets you uh in the door for for job applications, it gets you prestige.

836
00:49:11,810 --> 00:49:15,170
Um everyone's constantly asking you, what do we do with this information?

837
00:49:15,330 --> 00:49:16,290
What do we do with this information?

838
00:49:16,450 --> 00:49:20,210
How can I use this to to better myself or or my relationships or whatever?

839
00:49:20,450 --> 00:49:25,650
You know, every pop psychology book, oh, this has lessons for the boardroom in the bedroom.

840
00:49:25,730 --> 00:49:28,840
You know, it's like we need to stop giving advice as a field.

841
00:49:29,000 --> 00:49:32,600
We are giving way too much advice on way too little data.

842
00:49:32,680 --> 00:49:34,760
Uh and we need to shut the fuck up.

843
00:49:34,920 --> 00:49:36,280
Uh uh pardon my French.

844
00:49:36,680 --> 00:49:36,840
Great.

845
00:49:37,080 --> 00:49:38,360
Would you would you agree with that?

846
00:49:38,840 --> 00:49:39,320
Amen.

847
00:49:39,400 --> 00:49:40,280
Yes, a hundred percent.

848
00:49:40,440 --> 00:49:44,520
We don't, especially in my area of work, we don't know what the hell we're doing.

849
00:49:44,680 --> 00:49:45,320
I mean, yeah.

850
00:49:45,480 --> 00:49:47,960
And even when I read other people's papers, right?

851
00:49:48,040 --> 00:49:53,650
Uh so um, Dave, if I were reading some of your papers on race and coalitions,

852
00:49:53,730 --> 00:49:57,090
I'd be like, okay, so how do we solve racism sports?

853
00:49:57,410 --> 00:50:01,250
Um and to some extent, that's actually a kind of practical answer.

854
00:50:01,410 --> 00:50:05,650
I mean, you look at the the Philadelphia Eagles or any sports team, right?

855
00:50:06,290 --> 00:50:09,170
And you just don't see the kind of war.

856
00:50:09,330 --> 00:50:10,050
Those are the two.

857
00:50:10,130 --> 00:50:10,450
Yeah.

858
00:50:10,770 --> 00:50:11,010
Yeah.

859
00:50:11,090 --> 00:50:13,410
So I mean, I wouldn't give the advice of war.

860
00:50:13,650 --> 00:50:19,170
Um, certainly it comes to mind, but um, you know, if we have to, Canada's close.

861
00:50:20,820 --> 00:50:21,540
Too soon.

862
00:50:21,860 --> 00:50:22,580
Too soon?

863
00:50:22,740 --> 00:50:22,980
Yeah.

864
00:50:23,220 --> 00:50:25,460
Um, I have a question for you, Jamie.

865
00:50:25,540 --> 00:50:29,140
So I was living in Germany um until recently.

866
00:50:29,300 --> 00:50:33,780
And I've actually noticed so in Germany, in Berlin, um, there's really good public

867
00:50:33,780 --> 00:50:34,740
transportation.

868
00:50:35,060 --> 00:50:40,900
Um, and I kind of walked everywhere, uh, saw a lot of people, some people

869
00:50:40,900 --> 00:50:45,220
who I knew in my neighborhood, a lot of people who I didn't, like on public transportation.

870
00:50:45,810 --> 00:50:48,690
um would eat out often.

871
00:50:49,570 --> 00:50:55,170
And because you know, eating out was cheap because for lots of reasons, including

872
00:50:55,170 --> 00:50:56,290
healthcare was cheaper.

873
00:50:56,370 --> 00:50:58,850
So you don't have to pay the healthcare or the weight staff, whatever.

874
00:50:58,930 --> 00:51:03,890
You can tip like two Euros and you know a meal is like 30 euros as opposed to like 80 plus

875
00:51:03,970 --> 00:51:05,410
tip, you know, whatever.

876
00:51:06,660 --> 00:51:11,780
long winded way of saying since I moved back to the US, I've found myself at a baseline

877
00:51:11,860 --> 00:51:13,060
being lonelier.

878
00:51:15,860 --> 00:51:21,860
It's sort of an obvious attribution, but like, has there been work that you know of

879
00:51:21,940 --> 00:51:27,060
on sort of maybe outside of friendship per se, but just sort of the psychophysics or the

880
00:51:27,460 --> 00:51:31,460
sort of structural issues beyond sort of like an individual level intervention, that

881
00:51:31,460 --> 00:51:33,810
there's just certain things.

882
00:51:33,890 --> 00:51:35,650
Like, I mean, this is the Gervin point, right?

883
00:51:35,730 --> 00:51:38,530
Like if you look at Schwarand, people aren't lonely.

884
00:51:38,690 --> 00:51:43,010
Um, presumably it's not just because they're like, you know, seizing the day every morning.

885
00:51:43,090 --> 00:51:47,650
It's also a function of sort of the environment and how the environment's structured.

886
00:51:47,890 --> 00:51:49,490
Um, am I crazy?

887
00:51:49,650 --> 00:51:55,640
Is this an anecdotate, does this comport with sort of what you think uh maybe part of the

888
00:51:55,640 --> 00:51:56,680
loneliness epidemic.

889
00:51:56,760 --> 00:51:57,400
What do you think about that?

890
00:51:57,960 --> 00:52:02,280
I mean, I I think that's absolutely true and that must be correct.

891
00:52:02,360 --> 00:52:08,200
Um so the the psychophysics of it or like a sort of institutional architecture of

892
00:52:08,200 --> 00:52:14,040
loneliness is part and parcel of a lot of cities, um particularly affluent

893
00:52:14,040 --> 00:52:17,480
places where you don't need to rely on one another.

894
00:52:17,730 --> 00:52:23,570
um, and where you can live your life with a different Uber driver, a different

895
00:52:23,570 --> 00:52:26,930
postmate, a different whomever every day.

896
00:52:27,010 --> 00:52:31,410
And you take your car to work and you work alone in your office and you come home and

897
00:52:31,410 --> 00:52:32,210
that's that.

898
00:52:32,370 --> 00:52:38,370
Um I so I have talked to folks like um anthropologists Luke Lowackey and Zach Garfield

899
00:52:38,450 --> 00:52:39,730
who are interested in this.

900
00:52:39,890 --> 00:52:42,530
Um and like you said, Mike Gervin talks about it.

901
00:52:42,690 --> 00:52:48,580
But um I mean, if you look at the HRAF, the electronic human relations area files that

902
00:52:48,580 --> 00:52:49,620
Yale keeps.

903
00:52:50,260 --> 00:52:56,020
And you look at sort of uh or other surveys of how people spend their time in small

904
00:52:56,100 --> 00:53:01,540
scale societies, um, you end up seeing a lot of time on shoot the

905
00:53:01,540 --> 00:53:02,180
shit.

906
00:53:02,420 --> 00:53:08,260
Um, but it's it's time that co occurs or overlaps with doing chores or anything

907
00:53:08,260 --> 00:53:08,740
else.

908
00:53:08,900 --> 00:53:10,740
Um, we don't do that.

909
00:53:11,210 --> 00:53:15,450
We don't even have the architecture for that anymore.

910
00:53:15,610 --> 00:53:18,010
We don't have a common courtyard.

911
00:53:18,170 --> 00:53:20,890
We don't have those kinds of spaces.

912
00:53:21,690 --> 00:53:27,130
So in our little area, there are people who are thinking about this now with regard to

913
00:53:27,130 --> 00:53:31,530
social uh social connection, with regard to friendship in particular.

914
00:53:32,250 --> 00:53:37,130
And then, you know, you can go back to the city planning work and Jane Jacobs, right?

915
00:53:37,610 --> 00:53:43,220
And she would talk about how some of the greatest public parks were the greatest because

916
00:53:43,220 --> 00:53:46,260
they had this sort of mixed-use space around them.

917
00:53:46,420 --> 00:53:51,700
The hinterlands were I always think of Riton House Park in Philadelphia as being a great

918
00:53:51,700 --> 00:53:54,580
example of this, particularly pre-pandemic.

919
00:53:54,820 --> 00:54:00,580
It was surrounded by restaurants and shops and apartments and coffee houses.

920
00:54:00,740 --> 00:54:05,770
It had the giant Barnes and Noble right on the corner, or next to the corner on the corner

921
00:54:05,850 --> 00:54:08,570
was anthropology, the uh store.

922
00:54:08,810 --> 00:54:14,810
Um uh and what that meant was that people are always walking through

923
00:54:14,810 --> 00:54:17,050
the park at all of these different times.

924
00:54:17,210 --> 00:54:20,330
Um, people are using it for all of these different things.

925
00:54:20,490 --> 00:54:24,650
You always saw people, and quite often you would see some of the same people.

926
00:54:25,620 --> 00:54:28,580
So her point was really just about the use of the space.

927
00:54:28,820 --> 00:54:34,740
But if you are seeing some of the same people, then you can form these acquaintances

928
00:54:35,060 --> 00:54:40,900
or loose ties, things like that that could go on to become truly supportive friendships.

929
00:54:41,860 --> 00:54:47,780
One of the things that I love about some of the advice is

930
00:54:47,780 --> 00:54:51,030
that it non-consciously takes from this, right?

931
00:54:51,110 --> 00:54:54,390
Like go to the gym, form a habit, join a club.

932
00:54:54,630 --> 00:54:55,510
We don't know.

933
00:54:55,750 --> 00:54:56,950
We have to say we don't know.

934
00:54:57,110 --> 00:54:58,550
We should be saying we don't know.

935
00:54:58,790 --> 00:55:04,390
But that advice uh at least builds on this idea of repeated

936
00:55:04,390 --> 00:55:05,350
interaction, right?

937
00:55:05,510 --> 00:55:10,390
That's like the thing without which you cannot have a relationship.

938
00:55:10,630 --> 00:55:16,160
Um, one of the things that this idea of sort of an architecture of loneliness misses,

939
00:55:16,240 --> 00:55:21,760
though, is that it's not just about the mixed-use space and the time and seeing the

940
00:55:21,760 --> 00:55:22,640
same people.

941
00:55:23,280 --> 00:55:27,600
At some point, you're actually going to have to have time to spend on them.

942
00:55:28,080 --> 00:55:31,280
And so there's a really uh there's a fun study.

943
00:55:31,440 --> 00:55:33,120
It's admittedly very small.

944
00:55:33,280 --> 00:55:39,030
It's admittedly with undergrads by Hall out of Kansas that says it takes

945
00:55:39,030 --> 00:55:40,870
200 hours to make a friend.

946
00:55:41,110 --> 00:55:45,590
Um someone should absolutely do a giant version of that study.

947
00:55:45,670 --> 00:55:46,870
It would be very cool.

948
00:55:47,110 --> 00:55:53,110
Um but in any case, yeah, uh one of the things that it it misses is the time it takes to

949
00:55:53,110 --> 00:55:55,110
actually make a friend.

950
00:55:55,270 --> 00:55:59,670
Um, and that's something that uh a lot of us lack too.

951
00:55:59,910 --> 00:56:03,360
Um or uh so it pins off.

952
00:56:03,840 --> 00:56:07,840
And and just and the difficulty of coordinating schedules, everyone's got all their shit

953
00:56:07,840 --> 00:56:08,320
going on.

954
00:56:08,720 --> 00:56:10,480
Oh my god, yeah, right?

955
00:56:10,800 --> 00:56:15,040
Just like finding a common time is like the planets aligning, you know, it's it's crazy.

956
00:56:15,360 --> 00:56:18,480
And that's after you solve the problem of wanting the friend.

957
00:56:18,720 --> 00:56:19,920
So uh Yes, yes.

958
00:56:20,160 --> 00:56:23,600
Yeah, I there are people that probably want to be your friends, right?

959
00:56:23,680 --> 00:56:28,090
And I'm sure this is true for both of you, that you're just like, eh, I'd rather not, you

960
00:56:28,090 --> 00:56:31,290
know, and you see them and they want to have this conversation.

961
00:56:31,610 --> 00:56:36,810
Um, and yeah, Pinself, I'm thinking about that uh curb your enthusiasm episode where he

962
00:56:36,810 --> 00:56:40,010
always talks to the guy on his way into the golf club.

963
00:56:40,490 --> 00:56:45,450
And um, it's just this like rigmarole of a conversation he doesn't want to have, he just

964
00:56:45,450 --> 00:56:48,010
wants to go and play golf with his real friends.

965
00:56:48,250 --> 00:56:50,970
Um, he's he has enough friends, he's good.

966
00:56:51,290 --> 00:56:56,500
Um, and uh so when the next guy comes, he never rolls down the window like to start the

967
00:56:56,500 --> 00:56:57,060
conversation.

968
00:56:57,140 --> 00:56:59,220
He just doesn't even go there.

969
00:56:59,460 --> 00:57:05,300
Um, but yeah, anyway, so you have to find the friends that you want and then

970
00:57:05,380 --> 00:57:10,820
actually make time for them while they're doing the same for you because you're not just

971
00:57:10,820 --> 00:57:15,700
picking friends like a claw game, you're trying to pick somebody who picks you back.

972
00:57:16,430 --> 00:57:17,070
Yes.

973
00:57:17,390 --> 00:57:23,230
I mean, do you think that part of the problem of why it's so hard to make friends is

974
00:57:23,230 --> 00:57:27,630
precisely because we're so choosy about our friends?

975
00:57:28,270 --> 00:57:30,990
Uh well, that's really interesting.

976
00:57:31,630 --> 00:57:37,470
Um, and uh I mean what feeds into this is being eager to make friends

977
00:57:37,470 --> 00:57:42,240
with someone, we all sometimes take as a cue that you're kind of low status and cringe.

978
00:57:42,320 --> 00:57:44,960
That like you must not have a lot of friends, so you must be kind of a loser.

979
00:57:45,120 --> 00:57:47,920
And if you're eager to be my friend, then you must be kind of a loser.

980
00:57:48,080 --> 00:57:53,920
Uh and so we get caught in this feedback loop where none of us have friends, but in

981
00:57:53,920 --> 00:57:58,000
order to uh try to get a friend, you have to look eager to make friends, which makes you

982
00:57:58,000 --> 00:57:59,440
look like an unappealing friend.

983
00:57:59,520 --> 00:58:00,800
Uh, could that be going on?

984
00:58:00,880 --> 00:58:01,440
I don't know.

985
00:58:01,870 --> 00:58:04,430
Yeah, so I think that's probably part of it.

986
00:58:04,590 --> 00:58:06,430
I would guess that's a mistaken.

987
00:58:06,590 --> 00:58:08,350
So that is a perception.

988
00:58:08,430 --> 00:58:13,150
I I believe I have anek data, and I think we have some preliminary data from an honors

989
00:58:13,310 --> 00:58:14,670
project we're doing on.

990
00:58:14,910 --> 00:58:20,350
So there's a lot of work in the romantic relationships literature on um singles

991
00:58:20,750 --> 00:58:25,950
and how they're stigmatized, and especially people who are voluntarily single, they're just

992
00:58:26,030 --> 00:58:27,150
they feel good on their own.

993
00:58:27,310 --> 00:58:29,790
People are like, what's wrong with those nutters?

994
00:58:29,950 --> 00:58:35,660
Um, And uh we're trying to do a similar line of work, just

995
00:58:35,660 --> 00:58:41,580
understanding basic person perception stuff about what we'd call friend singles,

996
00:58:41,740 --> 00:58:41,980
right?

997
00:58:42,140 --> 00:58:44,700
So people who um don't have friends.

998
00:58:44,940 --> 00:58:48,860
And then we could split that further into people who want friends and don't have them, and

999
00:58:48,860 --> 00:58:53,070
people who don't want friends and don't have them, the sort of lone wolf kind of folks.

1000
00:58:53,550 --> 00:58:53,790
Yeah.

1001
00:58:54,030 --> 00:58:59,790
Um, and uh, I would guess that there is a negative perception of people who don't have

1002
00:58:59,790 --> 00:59:05,710
friends compared to people who do have friends, and a cue of not having friends is wanting

1003
00:59:05,710 --> 00:59:06,270
friends.

1004
00:59:06,430 --> 00:59:10,110
And so, yes, exactly what you're saying would likely be true.

1005
00:59:10,350 --> 00:59:14,110
If this person wants to be my friend, what's wrong with them that they don't already have

1006
00:59:14,110 --> 00:59:14,670
friends?

1007
00:59:14,880 --> 00:59:15,120
Yeah.

1008
00:59:15,280 --> 00:59:16,960
You know, it's uh what is that?

1009
00:59:17,120 --> 00:59:19,360
I don't want to be a member of any club that would have me.

1010
00:59:19,440 --> 00:59:19,840
Who is that?

1011
00:59:20,000 --> 00:59:20,160
Yes.

1012
00:59:20,400 --> 00:59:21,200
Groucho Marks.

1013
00:59:21,760 --> 00:59:22,480
That sounds about right.

1014
00:59:22,560 --> 00:59:22,640
Yeah.

1015
00:59:22,800 --> 00:59:22,960
Yeah.

1016
00:59:23,120 --> 00:59:23,840
Something like that.

1017
00:59:23,920 --> 00:59:24,240
Yeah.

1018
00:59:24,560 --> 00:59:28,400
So we have to somehow make friends without making it look like we want to make friends.

1019
00:59:28,560 --> 00:59:29,280
That sounds really hard.

1020
00:59:30,400 --> 00:59:32,080
I mean, grad school was great for this.

1021
00:59:32,240 --> 00:59:34,400
You're all in a room together hanging out.

1022
00:59:34,560 --> 00:59:36,480
You're forced to be next to each other.

1023
00:59:36,640 --> 00:59:42,320
You're in a foxhole essentially fighting for the one job out of 500 that might

1024
00:59:42,320 --> 00:59:43,520
possibly, you know.

1025
00:59:43,790 --> 00:59:49,710
But um yeah, you can't artificially put people in stressful situations next to

1026
00:59:49,710 --> 00:59:55,070
people that have the same interests as them four years, uh, day in and day out.

1027
00:59:55,310 --> 00:59:58,110
But that would probably be a good way to make friends.

1028
00:59:58,350 --> 00:59:58,670
Yeah.

1029
00:59:58,830 --> 01:00:03,310
I suspect another part of uh why it's so hard to make friends, or at least part of the

1030
01:00:03,310 --> 01:00:07,710
anxiety about it, is that in order to be friends with someone, you sort of have to

1031
01:00:07,820 --> 01:00:09,500
equivalently like each other.

1032
01:00:09,660 --> 01:00:13,180
And that itself is a really hard coordination problem to solve.

1033
01:00:13,260 --> 01:00:16,620
Because you don't want to be in a relationship where you like the person way more than they

1034
01:00:16,620 --> 01:00:17,260
like you.

1035
01:00:17,500 --> 01:00:17,980
Right.

1036
01:00:18,140 --> 01:00:22,700
Uh, and oftentimes, like we find ourselves in these relationships where we're liked more,

1037
01:00:22,860 --> 01:00:24,780
where the person likes us more than we like them.

1038
01:00:25,020 --> 01:00:30,220
And we're often reluctant to signal that to them because that could uh sorry, do you hear

1039
01:00:30,220 --> 01:00:30,300
that?

1040
01:00:30,380 --> 01:00:31,420
My daughter's crying.

1041
01:00:31,820 --> 01:00:32,700
Uh no, okay, good.

1042
01:00:32,780 --> 01:00:33,740
I'm glad you don't hear it.

1043
01:00:33,900 --> 01:00:39,010
Um so we don't wanna so if if I secretly don't like someone as much as they like me, or if

1044
01:00:39,010 --> 01:00:43,730
I don't like them at all, like we're very reluctant to sh let them know.

1045
01:00:43,890 --> 01:00:48,130
Like, so it's really hard to actually figure out whether someone likes you as much as you

1046
01:00:48,130 --> 01:00:50,930
like them because if if they didn't, they wouldn't tell you, right?

1047
01:00:51,250 --> 01:00:51,410
Yes.

1048
01:00:51,730 --> 01:00:52,850
That's the other side of it.

1049
01:00:52,930 --> 01:00:53,250
Yeah.

1050
01:00:53,570 --> 01:00:55,810
They're not gonna tell you that they don't like you.

1051
01:00:56,300 --> 01:00:59,340
Yeah, there's just yeah, there's tremendous uncertainty.

1052
01:00:59,580 --> 01:01:03,100
Uh, and there's really no way around that uncertainty.

1053
01:01:03,660 --> 01:01:06,460
It's the it's the same thing as in romantic relationships.

1054
01:01:06,540 --> 01:01:11,580
So let's just think of it as a dyadic kind of thing, but you have to calibrate, right?

1055
01:01:11,820 --> 01:01:16,060
So I like you a three, and uh you like me a four.

1056
01:01:16,140 --> 01:01:21,770
So maybe I go up to four if I want to, because you showed four, but if I like you a three

1057
01:01:21,850 --> 01:01:25,610
and you like me an eight, I'm like, oh, this is a little uncomfortable.

1058
01:01:25,770 --> 01:01:26,890
I don't know here.

1059
01:01:27,050 --> 01:01:32,330
And I can't like it, does not behoove me to tell you that I like you a three when you like

1060
01:01:32,330 --> 01:01:32,810
me an eight.

1061
01:01:32,970 --> 01:01:37,370
Because if you like me that much, you're gonna take my side over more people, you're gonna

1062
01:01:37,370 --> 01:01:39,690
prioritize my needs over more people.

1063
01:01:39,930 --> 01:01:45,450
So it's great for me if you think that I think you're my best friend, even though I think

1064
01:01:45,450 --> 01:01:46,810
that you're a wanker, right?

1065
01:01:46,970 --> 01:01:48,410
And it could and it could be bad for you.

1066
01:01:50,120 --> 01:01:53,880
And it could be bad for you if the truth came out, because if you told the person that you

1067
01:01:53,880 --> 01:01:57,320
were a three, that could end the relationship and they could become your enemy.

1068
01:01:57,640 --> 01:02:01,480
They could become actually hostile to you and do things to damage your reputation.

1069
01:02:01,640 --> 01:02:02,680
They could become an enemy.

1070
01:02:03,000 --> 01:02:06,040
Yeah, you so you want these people to like you.

1071
01:02:06,440 --> 01:02:08,600
And you have to put out a lot of energy.

1072
01:02:08,680 --> 01:02:14,520
Well, if you're me, you have to put a lot of energy out in order to like be likable, right?

1073
01:02:14,920 --> 01:02:17,350
Um that's not true, Jamie.

1074
01:02:17,430 --> 01:02:18,150
That's not true, Jamie.

1075
01:02:18,230 --> 01:02:18,950
You're very likable.

1076
01:02:19,270 --> 01:02:21,270
Well, with you guys, it's not work.

1077
01:02:21,590 --> 01:02:22,950
Um, but you know.

1078
01:02:23,430 --> 01:02:28,310
We we also there's another thing too, which is that uh I mean, with the romantic thing is

1079
01:02:28,310 --> 01:02:31,990
sort of analogous, but it's even worse for friendship than the romantic thing because you

1080
01:02:31,990 --> 01:02:36,310
know, presumably the romantic thing, at least there's sort of some notion of like standard.

1081
01:02:36,870 --> 01:02:41,510
This is the most like non-sexual way to put the idea of sexuality, but it's almost like a

1082
01:02:41,510 --> 01:02:43,830
canalization of like possibility space, right?

1083
01:02:43,990 --> 01:02:47,560
Yeah, sort of like there's Yeah, you know, like there's no first base, second base, or

1084
01:02:47,560 --> 01:02:48,920
third base for friendship.

1085
01:02:49,160 --> 01:02:49,640
So exactly.

1086
01:02:49,800 --> 01:02:55,320
So there's even the additional problem of sort of like we are going to uh slowly like

1087
01:02:55,560 --> 01:03:00,120
escalate the relationship, and that's an additional complication of a friendship.

1088
01:03:00,200 --> 01:03:05,080
Like, there's no like, oh yeah, having sex, having a family, like you know, getting

1089
01:03:05,080 --> 01:03:05,480
married.

1090
01:03:05,640 --> 01:03:10,120
It's it's like a friendship, there's no delineation of uh of that.

1091
01:03:10,280 --> 01:03:16,210
And so if you start early and there's minimal friendship cues, that's

1092
01:03:16,210 --> 01:03:21,970
hiding a latent ideal, but neither person knows the other person well enough, maybe, or

1093
01:03:21,970 --> 01:03:24,130
maybe they do, and then then it's easier to coordinate.

1094
01:03:24,210 --> 01:03:29,970
But that's an additional complication of sort of we don't even know what the other wants or

1095
01:03:29,970 --> 01:03:32,210
even what we want because we don't know the other person well enough.

1096
01:03:32,290 --> 01:03:33,650
So it's really complicated.

1097
01:03:33,730 --> 01:03:33,970
Yeah.

1098
01:03:34,290 --> 01:03:39,700
No, it really it's a a coordination problem, a common knowledge problem,

1099
01:03:40,340 --> 01:03:42,980
a liking problem, a timing problem.

1100
01:03:43,860 --> 01:03:45,780
It's all of these problems.

1101
01:03:45,860 --> 01:03:51,140
And I I love what you're both saying about it, how it's similar to and at once different

1102
01:03:51,140 --> 01:03:54,260
from the romantic relationship space.

1103
01:03:54,900 --> 01:04:00,020
And to complicate it more, you know, you are not looking for, as most people typically are,

1104
01:04:00,180 --> 01:04:03,380
a single person that you then pair off with, right?

1105
01:04:03,670 --> 01:04:07,110
Um, you have to navigate multiple friendships at any one time.

1106
01:04:07,190 --> 01:04:11,670
And maybe you have a best work friend and a best friend from high school and another best

1107
01:04:11,670 --> 01:04:14,390
friend from this other situation.

1108
01:04:14,710 --> 01:04:18,550
Um, but I uh so okay, I'm gonna ask you all a question now.

1109
01:04:18,630 --> 01:04:19,750
Is that is that okay?

1110
01:04:20,070 --> 01:04:20,470
Please.

1111
01:04:20,710 --> 01:04:26,400
I'm going to put it in the most uh crass way possible, But out of curiosity, uh Pins

1112
01:04:26,560 --> 01:04:32,160
off going back to what you said, what is the hand down the pants of friendship to you all?

1113
01:04:32,560 --> 01:04:33,920
Yeah, what's what's the BJ?

1114
01:04:34,160 --> 01:04:34,800
Yeah, I don't know.

1115
01:04:35,280 --> 01:04:37,680
I mean, like when are you friends?

1116
01:04:37,840 --> 01:04:39,600
Um I I have no idea.

1117
01:04:39,760 --> 01:04:41,360
I I honestly have no idea.

1118
01:04:41,600 --> 01:04:44,240
I think that's part of the that's why making friends is so hard.

1119
01:04:44,480 --> 01:04:49,930
At least with romantic relationships, we have, you know, a shared background understanding

1120
01:04:49,930 --> 01:04:52,090
of like what it means to progress in a relationship.

1121
01:04:52,250 --> 01:04:57,450
The stages, you know, you got the bases, you got, you know, marriage, you got, you know,

1122
01:04:57,610 --> 01:04:58,650
you know, w uh kids.

1123
01:04:58,730 --> 01:04:59,690
We we have all of these stages.

1124
01:05:06,090 --> 01:05:09,610
Yep, you got the you got the first kiss and then you got you know, but we have none of that

1125
01:05:09,610 --> 01:05:10,410
for friendship.

1126
01:05:10,570 --> 01:05:13,370
Like I don't even know I don't even know where to begin.

1127
01:05:13,450 --> 01:05:14,570
Like I I don't know.

1128
01:05:14,650 --> 01:05:17,930
Do you have any intuitions about what what the equivalent would be?

1129
01:05:18,250 --> 01:05:21,060
I mean, I like the first kiss or something like that.

1130
01:05:22,020 --> 01:05:27,620
You have made plans to hang out with one another on your own without

1131
01:05:27,780 --> 01:05:32,580
um uh you know the whatever structure in which you met.

1132
01:05:32,980 --> 01:05:38,820
Um so you met each other and then you you go forth and have

1133
01:05:38,820 --> 01:05:40,820
a coffee date or something.

1134
01:05:41,060 --> 01:05:46,790
Um so my best friend um uh who is Keela

1135
01:05:47,030 --> 01:05:50,470
Williams, a professor of psychology at Hamilton College.

1136
01:05:50,630 --> 01:05:56,630
Um, also, I think she's taught the first class on friendship that I know of at the college

1137
01:05:56,630 --> 01:05:57,430
level, period.

1138
01:05:57,750 --> 01:05:58,710
That's insane.

1139
01:05:59,030 --> 01:06:00,310
It is insane, right?

1140
01:06:00,550 --> 01:06:01,670
We have to circle back to that.

1141
01:06:01,750 --> 01:06:04,550
Why, why is friendship uh yeah, we have to circle back.

1142
01:06:04,790 --> 01:06:05,270
Yeah, exactly.

1143
01:06:05,510 --> 01:06:09,620
Um, so uh, and it was people loved that class.

1144
01:06:09,780 --> 01:06:12,100
I'm gonna zoom into it at 5 15 a.m.

1145
01:06:12,260 --> 01:06:13,380
in a couple weeks.

1146
01:06:13,540 --> 01:06:15,060
Um, because I love that class.

1147
01:06:15,140 --> 01:06:16,820
So I love the idea of that class.

1148
01:06:17,060 --> 01:06:22,820
Um so um uh I for the first

1149
01:06:22,820 --> 01:06:26,740
year that we knew each other, um, I thought she hated me.

1150
01:06:26,980 --> 01:06:28,500
It turns out that's her face.

1151
01:06:28,750 --> 01:06:29,470
You know her.

1152
01:06:29,550 --> 01:06:32,430
And I think you exactly you find it funny because you know her.

1153
01:06:33,070 --> 01:06:35,070
Resting bitch face, I believe is the term.

1154
01:06:35,390 --> 01:06:37,070
Uh it it's one of them, man.

1155
01:06:37,150 --> 01:06:37,310
Yeah.

1156
01:06:37,550 --> 01:06:42,350
Um, and so she, but we bonded over Val Kilmer.

1157
01:06:42,750 --> 01:06:48,670
Um, in any movie that Val Kilmer is in, with the exception of Heat, uh, you should

1158
01:06:48,670 --> 01:06:50,110
want to be Val Kilmer.

1159
01:06:50,300 --> 01:06:55,340
So if I am romantically dating you and you tell me that you want to be Maverick, that is

1160
01:06:55,340 --> 01:06:55,980
the end.

1161
01:06:56,140 --> 01:06:56,860
That is it.

1162
01:06:57,020 --> 01:06:59,980
Like you want to be a shortfoot to that guy?

1163
01:07:00,220 --> 01:07:01,340
Absolutely not.

1164
01:07:01,580 --> 01:07:01,900
No.

1165
01:07:02,460 --> 01:07:06,220
Um, but Iceman, that's the right answer.

1166
01:07:06,380 --> 01:07:09,740
Uh, I mean, you could also Viper is cool and whatever.

1167
01:07:09,900 --> 01:07:15,020
Anyway, um, Doc Holiday, who by the way went to Penn for dentistry.

1168
01:07:15,260 --> 01:07:18,380
So um, you should want to be him.

1169
01:07:18,770 --> 01:07:20,130
I'm here, Huckleberry.

1170
01:07:20,210 --> 01:07:23,650
That's come on, like, yeah, you ain't no Daisy at all.

1171
01:07:23,890 --> 01:07:29,010
Um, Real Genius, which is what I thought academia would be a little bit as well.

1172
01:07:29,090 --> 01:07:33,170
I thought it would be the West Wing crossed with the movie Real Genius, where they blow up

1173
01:07:33,170 --> 01:07:35,890
the guy's house with popcorn and lasers.

1174
01:07:36,050 --> 01:07:38,210
And anyway, it doesn't hold up.

1175
01:07:38,450 --> 01:07:39,410
Val Kilmer.

1176
01:07:39,570 --> 01:07:42,210
Anyway, so we bonded over Val Kilmer.

1177
01:07:42,450 --> 01:07:48,340
Um, and uh we were in some room on campus at

1178
01:07:48,340 --> 01:07:52,180
ASU, um, just the two of us talking about work.

1179
01:07:52,260 --> 01:07:53,940
We were talking about ideas.

1180
01:07:54,180 --> 01:07:59,860
Um, and uh we started sort of baring the

1181
01:07:59,860 --> 01:08:05,700
neck a little bit in terms of sharing secrets and ideas or evaluative

1182
01:08:05,700 --> 01:08:07,940
concepts and ideas about other people.

1183
01:08:08,420 --> 01:08:14,250
Um, I told her uh something um that was very private

1184
01:08:14,250 --> 01:08:17,850
about my partner at the time, not in the that's like third base.

1185
01:08:18,330 --> 01:08:20,730
That's like divulging sensitive information.

1186
01:08:20,810 --> 01:08:22,410
That's like hand down the pants, right?

1187
01:08:22,650 --> 01:08:24,410
It re It really might be.

1188
01:08:24,570 --> 01:08:27,610
Um I think those are sort of like entrees.

1189
01:08:27,770 --> 01:08:31,450
So people talk about bids for attention and romantic relationships.

1190
01:08:31,850 --> 01:08:36,730
Um I think sharing sensitive information is a bit of a bearing of the neck or a showing of

1191
01:08:36,730 --> 01:08:37,290
the stomach.

1192
01:08:37,450 --> 01:08:43,440
It's um social play, but it can have really serious consequences in a way that just, you

1193
01:08:43,440 --> 01:08:45,440
know, some play might not.

1194
01:08:45,600 --> 01:08:49,760
Um so anyway, that to me is I remember that moment.

1195
01:08:49,920 --> 01:08:52,880
I remember that is when we became friends.

1196
01:08:53,120 --> 01:08:58,640
Whereas uh with some other friends, like if um folks you've uh so you've had Dan Conroy

1197
01:08:58,640 --> 01:09:02,160
Beam on your show, he and I can't even remember when we met.

1198
01:09:02,810 --> 01:09:06,410
The first time I really remember talking to him is an H bus.

1199
01:09:06,650 --> 01:09:11,770
I sat down next to him and I congratulated him on a BBS paper, which by the way, he did not

1200
01:09:11,770 --> 01:09:12,090
have.

1201
01:09:12,490 --> 01:09:16,010
Um, and we just started talking and we became friends.

1202
01:09:16,170 --> 01:09:17,210
And I don't know.

1203
01:09:17,450 --> 01:09:18,250
I I don't know.

1204
01:09:18,410 --> 01:09:20,570
I don't know when I met Eric Peterson.

1205
01:09:21,050 --> 01:09:26,340
Uh Dave, I met you uh at an EvSec pre

1206
01:09:26,500 --> 01:09:27,860
conference, I think.

1207
01:09:28,020 --> 01:09:31,300
And Rob Kurzban introduced us.

1208
01:09:31,460 --> 01:09:37,460
Uh, you and Annie were there, and I maybe it was I don't know, 2014, 2015,

1209
01:09:37,620 --> 01:09:38,500
around there.

1210
01:09:38,660 --> 01:09:42,100
Um, I remember that, but I don't remember meeting you.

1211
01:09:42,180 --> 01:09:45,540
I just remember that I was going to be introduced to you and I was excited.

1212
01:09:45,780 --> 01:09:48,820
Um, pince off, I don't know how the hell we met.

1213
01:09:48,900 --> 01:09:54,020
And I figured that we were friends before I moved here and we like actually became friends.

1214
01:09:54,470 --> 01:09:57,270
I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I think we met at HBAS.

1215
01:09:57,750 --> 01:09:59,350
It must have been true, right?

1216
01:09:59,430 --> 01:09:59,590
Yeah.

1217
01:09:59,910 --> 01:10:01,830
Like where else would we have met?

1218
01:10:02,310 --> 01:10:08,310
Yeah, I think I remember, yeah, it was maybe I we weren't we didn't become like like

1219
01:10:08,310 --> 01:10:12,710
good friends until you moved to LA, but I remember we were like we knew each other at

1220
01:10:12,710 --> 01:10:13,430
HBS's.

1221
01:10:13,510 --> 01:10:17,750
I remember like we just complimented each other's research or something at one of the HBSs.

1222
01:10:17,990 --> 01:10:18,230
Yeah.

1223
01:10:18,470 --> 01:10:23,780
Um I do think it's easier, at least for me, to become friends with other Ev people

1224
01:10:24,180 --> 01:10:27,380
because we share so many of the same ideas.

1225
01:10:28,020 --> 01:10:30,980
Um uh first principles, maybe.

1226
01:10:31,140 --> 01:10:32,340
Um, I don't know.

1227
01:10:32,420 --> 01:10:37,700
It's uh uh I'm much more relaxed with those folks.

1228
01:10:37,940 --> 01:10:43,780
Um it could also be a particular like personal idiosyncratic weirdness

1229
01:10:43,860 --> 01:10:48,610
of I always worry that I'm not nice because I'm I'm not.

1230
01:10:48,930 --> 01:10:52,210
Um, but or at least it takes a lot of effort.

1231
01:10:52,450 --> 01:10:56,450
Um, and I don't put it in unless there's reason.

1232
01:10:56,770 --> 01:11:02,210
Um and uh social psychologists really value

1233
01:11:02,210 --> 01:11:08,210
niceness and the performance of niceness and thanking people after the talk and all

1234
01:11:08,210 --> 01:11:12,930
these things that I would consider to be gargantuan wastes of time that they could do

1235
01:11:12,930 --> 01:11:15,810
quickly with the same impact on the other person.

1236
01:11:16,200 --> 01:11:22,200
Um uh so anyway, um I don't feel as I don't I worry that I'm an asshole and I

1237
01:11:22,200 --> 01:11:24,840
don't feel that way with you guys in in our world.

1238
01:11:25,080 --> 01:11:27,080
Not even the anthropologists.

1239
01:11:27,320 --> 01:11:28,280
So yeah.

1240
01:11:28,600 --> 01:11:34,280
Behavioral ecologists, some of them, but is that is that is that kind of a throwback to

1241
01:11:34,280 --> 01:11:35,400
Philly too?

1242
01:11:36,690 --> 01:11:37,730
I think it is.

1243
01:11:37,890 --> 01:11:43,490
We're I I mean, I don't I don't think we were particularly colonized by the Dutch or

1244
01:11:43,490 --> 01:11:45,970
anything, but we don't sugarcoat a lot.

1245
01:11:46,130 --> 01:11:48,130
Uh, we're very straightforward.

1246
01:11:48,210 --> 01:11:50,130
Um, and I really appreciate that.

1247
01:11:50,290 --> 01:11:55,730
I appreciate that in everyone I interact with, a directness and and honesty.

1248
01:11:55,810 --> 01:12:01,460
And like there's a level of respect to that, but I think you don't you don't get

1249
01:12:01,620 --> 01:12:07,460
with all of this, you know, baroque niceness um or the performance

1250
01:12:07,460 --> 01:12:08,980
of anyway.

1251
01:12:09,460 --> 01:12:12,740
Uh yeah, I I don't know what the hell is wrong with me.

1252
01:12:14,020 --> 01:12:19,700
I mean, I I suspect another part of the friendship loneliness crisis,

1253
01:12:19,780 --> 01:12:24,020
whatever you want to call it, um, is that it really helps to have a shared thing that

1254
01:12:24,020 --> 01:12:24,420
you're into.

1255
01:12:24,500 --> 01:12:26,020
So we're all into F-Psych.

1256
01:12:26,500 --> 01:12:32,150
Um and it's really hard to be friends with someone if you don't have a shared thing.

1257
01:12:32,390 --> 01:12:38,230
And I think what's happening with culture is that it's getting more and more divided and

1258
01:12:38,230 --> 01:12:40,230
nichefied for lack of a better word.

1259
01:12:40,390 --> 01:12:44,310
Like there are so many different kinds of shows and different kinds of music and different

1260
01:12:44,310 --> 01:12:46,470
kinds of food and different kinds of cloak, whatever.

1261
01:12:46,550 --> 01:12:48,070
There's so many different subcultures.

1262
01:12:48,230 --> 01:12:52,630
And the odds that you're gonna find a friend who is into the same shit that you're into are

1263
01:12:52,630 --> 01:12:53,270
very low.

1264
01:12:53,500 --> 01:12:57,260
And that's a huge problem because you really need a shared thing in order to, you know,

1265
01:12:57,340 --> 01:12:58,940
really escalate a friendship.

1266
01:12:59,340 --> 01:13:03,900
Yeah, there's some really cool work on shared reality that folks are doing here.

1267
01:13:04,060 --> 01:13:09,900
Uh, Grace Meow, um, uh, this uh who's a communication student

1268
01:13:09,900 --> 01:13:13,500
and social neuroscientist working with Rick Dale and Matt Lieberman.

1269
01:13:13,740 --> 01:13:19,740
Um Matt Lieberman's student uh Bear Goldstein is doing this ridiculously

1270
01:13:19,890 --> 01:13:23,890
badass study that I'll probably butcher right now.

1271
01:13:23,970 --> 01:13:29,650
But essentially people who are friends, and this comes from some Carolyn Parkinson's work,

1272
01:13:30,050 --> 01:13:34,050
they have, and people who are closer in the social network and necessarily friends

1273
01:13:34,130 --> 01:13:35,010
sometimes, right?

1274
01:13:35,170 --> 01:13:40,850
So end up having more brain synchrony when they watch videos.

1275
01:13:41,410 --> 01:13:47,090
So if we all watched an episode of the Hulu show the bear or FX show the

1276
01:13:47,090 --> 01:13:53,080
bear, Um, there's one episode where Sydney and Carmi are fighting, and

1277
01:13:53,080 --> 01:13:55,240
you could take one side or the other.

1278
01:13:55,480 --> 01:14:01,480
Um, and as Bear describes it, um, he took one person's side and someone else took

1279
01:14:01,480 --> 01:14:06,200
another person's side, and then they couldn't believe that they weren't seeing the same

1280
01:14:06,200 --> 01:14:10,360
thing, like that dress meme that some people saw it blue and black black, and other people

1281
01:14:10,360 --> 01:14:11,560
saw it white and gold.

1282
01:14:12,010 --> 01:14:13,690
They couldn't even see it.

1283
01:14:13,770 --> 01:14:18,250
And that's what I love about the dress is that I can't even see it the other way.

1284
01:14:18,570 --> 01:14:24,570
Um, and so uh the then they talked about it and they changed perspectives

1285
01:14:24,570 --> 01:14:25,530
and blah, blah, blah.

1286
01:14:25,690 --> 01:14:31,290
But what he's going to try to do is actually um get the sort of

1287
01:14:31,290 --> 01:14:36,480
average of the, I'm just going to call it because I'm not a neuroscientist, and this is

1288
01:14:36,480 --> 01:14:41,040
going to be really clear in a second, because I'm going to call it the brain wavery of the

1289
01:14:41,120 --> 01:14:44,960
um people that are on Carmi side versus Sydney side.

1290
01:14:45,200 --> 01:14:50,720
And while some of these patient people are actually patients undergoing brain

1291
01:14:50,720 --> 01:14:56,690
surgery, um, he's going to try and activate that pattern to see

1292
01:14:56,690 --> 01:15:00,370
if while they watch they have to be awake during the surgery, while they watch this episode

1293
01:15:00,370 --> 01:15:05,410
of the bear, activating that pattern makes them more likely to take the side of one person

1294
01:15:05,410 --> 01:15:06,050
or another.

1295
01:15:06,210 --> 01:15:11,730
So um basically is going to get the average of you know the Carmi side versus the

1296
01:15:11,730 --> 01:15:12,770
Sydney side.

1297
01:15:13,490 --> 01:15:14,770
And it's so cool.

1298
01:15:14,930 --> 01:15:20,400
So people are doing really, really neat work about um synchrony and

1299
01:15:20,400 --> 01:15:26,160
shared reality and i think coming from having something in common like evpsych perhaps in

1300
01:15:26,160 --> 01:15:32,000
particular evpsy for reasons i don't quite understand um provides you a

1301
01:15:32,000 --> 01:15:37,920
shared reality provides you um all of these coordination points um

1302
01:15:38,080 --> 01:15:43,920
things in common uh times you might see each other that lend themselves to creating

1303
01:15:43,920 --> 01:15:48,250
these friendships or alliances Um there was more I was gonna say, but I got totally

1304
01:15:48,250 --> 01:15:50,490
distracted by how cool that study is.

1305
01:15:50,810 --> 01:15:53,850
That that's uh some weird freaky sci-fi stuff.

1306
01:15:54,250 --> 01:15:55,290
It is, right?

1307
01:15:55,850 --> 01:15:56,250
Yeah.

1308
01:15:56,410 --> 01:16:00,410
Uh I also I just can I say I love the idea of you're about to get brain surgery and

1309
01:16:00,410 --> 01:16:04,170
somebody's like, We're gonna have you watch a TV during your brain surgery.

1310
01:16:04,250 --> 01:16:04,730
I just love that.

1311
01:16:05,370 --> 01:16:06,490
It's the bear, by the way.

1312
01:16:06,650 --> 01:16:07,450
Do you like the bear?

1313
01:16:07,530 --> 01:16:08,650
Have you seen it?

1314
01:16:08,970 --> 01:16:11,290
Um I have not I'm yeah, I'm sorry.

1315
01:16:11,640 --> 01:16:12,680
Oh, it's really good.

1316
01:16:13,080 --> 01:16:13,800
Oh, right.

1317
01:16:14,040 --> 01:16:19,800
So um one of the experiments that I would love to do that you cannot do, um, even though

1318
01:16:19,800 --> 01:16:21,320
this one is like, could you do that?

1319
01:16:21,400 --> 01:16:22,840
Yes, they're gonna do that.

1320
01:16:23,000 --> 01:16:26,680
Um uh so pins off to what you were saying.

1321
01:16:26,920 --> 01:16:32,440
Um back when there was a shared reality, when anybody everybody watched either like

1322
01:16:32,440 --> 01:16:35,640
CBS or ABC or NBC, right?

1323
01:16:36,310 --> 01:16:36,710
Yeah.

1324
01:16:36,950 --> 01:16:39,430
So there were common touch points.

1325
01:16:39,510 --> 01:16:41,350
There was a shared reality there.

1326
01:16:41,590 --> 01:16:47,430
And how cool would it be if we forced people to only have those three channels for a

1327
01:16:47,430 --> 01:16:53,270
little while and see if people that had less choice or fewer

1328
01:16:53,270 --> 01:16:59,270
choices in these cultural touchstones actually ended up being less lonely because

1329
01:16:59,270 --> 01:17:02,070
they had more shared reality with other people.

1330
01:17:02,560 --> 01:17:04,720
I think that could be a possibility.

1331
01:17:05,520 --> 01:17:09,680
I also think that they can go on their phones and get on the internet and find, you know, a

1332
01:17:09,680 --> 01:17:15,120
13-year-old SoundCloud rapper with a Xanax problem and a face tattoo that four other people

1333
01:17:15,120 --> 01:17:17,760
have heard of and it ruins everything.

1334
01:17:19,280 --> 01:17:24,000
Yeah, it would be cool to see if, you know, the rise of streaming and the decline of big

1335
01:17:24,000 --> 01:17:30,000
cable networks is associated with changes in loneliness to do like, you know,

1336
01:17:30,370 --> 01:17:32,130
time series or something like that.

1337
01:17:32,770 --> 01:17:33,170
Yeah.

1338
01:17:33,410 --> 01:17:38,530
You'd have to do a time series to get anything close to causality because of the massive

1339
01:17:38,530 --> 01:17:39,490
cohort effects.

1340
01:17:39,570 --> 01:17:41,410
But that would be that would be really cool.

1341
01:17:41,650 --> 01:17:43,410
Someone listening to this should do that.

1342
01:17:43,890 --> 01:17:48,610
I mean, I know, I mean, just anecdotally, like a lot of the reason why people are into

1343
01:17:48,610 --> 01:17:53,090
sports is precisely for social reasons, because it's such a great way to connect with

1344
01:17:53,090 --> 01:17:53,330
people.

1345
01:17:53,650 --> 01:17:59,020
Um, but the thing is like I hate sports and uh I know that if I watch sports I'd probably

1346
01:17:59,020 --> 01:18:02,940
have an easier time connecting with people, but I don't want to connect with sports people.

1347
01:18:03,260 --> 01:18:04,220
I don't know why.

1348
01:18:04,380 --> 01:18:07,740
Maybe they're not high enough on on uh on my friendometer.

1349
01:18:07,980 --> 01:18:08,780
I'm too picky.

1350
01:18:09,180 --> 01:18:11,100
But yeah, I don't I don't like sports.

1351
01:18:11,260 --> 01:18:12,860
Uh I find them boring.

1352
01:18:13,020 --> 01:18:14,540
Um but there's another question.

1353
01:18:16,860 --> 01:18:20,860
Um I you know, I don't I don't know about I don't know about repellent.

1354
01:18:21,180 --> 01:18:23,910
Maybe sports the sports people is what I mean.

1355
01:18:24,310 --> 01:18:26,150
Sports people can sometimes be repellent.

1356
01:18:26,310 --> 01:18:26,630
Yeah.

1357
01:18:26,870 --> 01:18:28,310
Um not always.

1358
01:18:28,390 --> 01:18:29,190
I don't know.

1359
01:18:29,510 --> 01:18:31,830
I think I just find it in intrinsically boring.

1360
01:18:32,310 --> 01:18:33,270
I think that's that's it.

1361
01:18:33,430 --> 01:18:36,470
And you know, I find boring things and boring people kind of repellent.

1362
01:18:36,710 --> 01:18:38,790
Uh so that's probably tied in with it.

1363
01:18:39,030 --> 01:18:42,230
Um I just need a lot of intellectual stimulation.

1364
01:18:42,470 --> 01:18:44,870
And and sports just doesn't get me going.

1365
01:18:45,110 --> 01:18:49,750
Uh but um anyway, leaving aside sports, I'm curious what you think.

1366
01:18:49,990 --> 01:18:55,760
You mentioned at the beginning uh that Psyche has a weird sense of

1367
01:18:55,760 --> 01:19:01,680
community and camaraderie that is probably absent from like social psych or um other

1368
01:19:02,240 --> 01:19:03,040
like large areas, yeah.

1369
01:19:03,120 --> 01:19:04,560
Like larger like yeah, yeah, yeah.

1370
01:19:04,640 --> 01:19:08,320
Like not one of the small con subconferences like CESP or something, yeah.

1371
01:19:08,720 --> 01:19:14,320
So I'm wondering if an ingredient of friendship is not merely having a shared thing or a

1372
01:19:14,320 --> 01:19:19,360
shared group identity, but having a shared group identity that is in some way embattled.

1373
01:19:20,830 --> 01:19:22,910
Well, I was gonna say distinct, but embattled.

1374
01:19:22,990 --> 01:19:28,350
That would be embattled in in the minority, basically lowering the amount of

1375
01:19:28,590 --> 01:19:31,790
outside options for people who are in that group.

1376
01:19:32,030 --> 01:19:36,270
Because if I am a diehard evolutionary psychologist, it's a you know, as we know, it's a

1377
01:19:36,270 --> 01:19:37,310
controversial field.

1378
01:19:37,390 --> 01:19:42,510
Uh, that's going to limit my outside options for the number of people who will be friends

1379
01:19:42,510 --> 01:19:48,480
with me, compared to if I was in more of a mainstream field or a mainstream discipline, or

1380
01:19:48,480 --> 01:19:51,920
if I if I was uh into sports psychology, say.

1381
01:19:52,240 --> 01:19:58,160
Um so maybe there's something about the perception of outside options of a of a

1382
01:19:58,160 --> 01:20:02,960
minority or embattled group that increases camaraderie over and above group membership

1383
01:20:02,960 --> 01:20:03,520
itself.

1384
01:20:04,240 --> 01:20:07,680
So I I I don't think that that's the thing.

1385
01:20:07,840 --> 01:20:09,970
Um Um, I think it's possible.

1386
01:20:10,290 --> 01:20:15,730
I think being embattled, you know, I think that's probably a cue that you're willing to

1387
01:20:15,730 --> 01:20:16,930
take these costs.

1388
01:20:17,170 --> 01:20:21,810
But I would say, and where I thought you were going was that it's not just a shared

1389
01:20:21,810 --> 01:20:27,570
identity, but it's a shared identity that's distinct from maybe something larger that

1390
01:20:27,570 --> 01:20:29,570
anyone else could hold on to.

1391
01:20:29,810 --> 01:20:35,410
And if you think about like the oh god, like the Frankfurt school kind of stuff or all of

1392
01:20:35,410 --> 01:20:41,260
the um sociology of popular culture on adorno and subcultures

1393
01:20:41,260 --> 01:20:47,260
of style and what's that hebdage um uh the that you have a

1394
01:20:47,260 --> 01:20:53,180
style that is not only yours but sufficiently different

1395
01:20:53,180 --> 01:20:58,860
from others is what's so important and that's what cues the the

1396
01:20:58,860 --> 01:21:04,170
membership to one another um and so I I could see the

1397
01:21:04,170 --> 01:21:09,530
distinctness of it being a component, but that it is embattled

1398
01:21:10,010 --> 01:21:15,290
means you're really you are willing to pay a cost to engage in the yeah.

1399
01:21:15,610 --> 01:21:16,970
I mean that that's an idea.

1400
01:21:17,050 --> 01:21:17,370
I don't know.

1401
01:21:17,610 --> 01:21:18,890
They're they're entry costs.

1402
01:21:19,130 --> 01:21:20,250
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1403
01:21:21,050 --> 01:21:23,930
So it's sort of like the it's it's oh sorry, Jamie, go ahead.

1404
01:21:24,200 --> 01:21:26,760
No, I said I was leaning back far from the mic.

1405
01:21:26,920 --> 01:21:29,320
I taking all of this in.

1406
01:21:29,480 --> 01:21:30,920
This is so much fun, by the way.

1407
01:21:31,400 --> 01:21:31,560
Sorry.

1408
01:21:33,560 --> 01:21:34,680
Yeah, that's why yeah.

1409
01:21:34,840 --> 01:21:40,840
Um uh there's an idea that um hazing is sort of a like the sousis

1410
01:21:40,920 --> 01:21:41,480
in other people.

1411
01:21:41,560 --> 01:21:45,830
I know Andy Dalton was sort of in Aldo, Chimino Hi, Aldo.

1412
01:21:45,910 --> 01:21:50,550
I'm not sure where you are now, but uh Aldo uh people were looking at this with the idea

1413
01:21:50,550 --> 01:21:56,390
that sort of hazing is sort of the institutional structure that's a workaround when it's

1414
01:21:56,390 --> 01:21:57,430
not an embattled thing.

1415
01:21:57,510 --> 01:22:02,310
That's sort of that there's a um cost to

1416
01:22:02,950 --> 01:22:07,030
enroll up front that show that weeds out people who aren't actually interested.

1417
01:22:07,190 --> 01:22:11,910
Sort of like the fight club thing where they have to just sort of stand outside for in the

1418
01:22:11,910 --> 01:22:14,310
rain for a day before they're even let in.

1419
01:22:15,160 --> 01:22:16,600
I mean that makes a lot of sense.

1420
01:22:16,680 --> 01:22:17,000
Yeah.

1421
01:22:17,320 --> 01:22:17,480
Yeah.

1422
01:22:17,560 --> 01:22:22,680
I know Richard Sosas has some data showing looking at like communes and how long they're

1423
01:22:22,680 --> 01:22:27,880
likely to last and whether they disband, and basically showing a correlation between the

1424
01:22:27,880 --> 01:22:33,640
costliness of the of the rituals uh and the initiation rites uh predicting the longevity of

1425
01:22:33,640 --> 01:22:34,120
the group.

1426
01:22:34,440 --> 01:22:40,370
Um connecting to this idea of entry costs sort of selecting for

1427
01:22:40,370 --> 01:22:42,690
people who are committed to the group.

1428
01:22:43,730 --> 01:22:44,530
It's interesting.

1429
01:22:44,770 --> 01:22:44,930
Yeah.

1430
01:22:45,090 --> 01:22:47,970
I wondered if you're not going to be able to please go.

1431
01:22:49,090 --> 01:22:54,850
So the becoming part of a group sort of solves some of the problems we were

1432
01:22:54,850 --> 01:22:57,010
talking about in dyadic friendship.

1433
01:22:57,170 --> 01:23:01,300
So Pinsaf, Pin you were mentioning about uh mentioning pickiness.

1434
01:23:01,940 --> 01:23:06,820
And so um, I mean, that in and of itself could be a problem because you have to get picked

1435
01:23:06,820 --> 01:23:07,060
back.

1436
01:23:07,140 --> 01:23:11,780
But presumably if you have high friend value or association value, you'd be more likely to

1437
01:23:11,780 --> 01:23:12,980
get picked back.

1438
01:23:13,300 --> 01:23:18,900
Um and uh Dan Conroy Beam and I have some work suggesting that and

1439
01:23:18,900 --> 01:23:24,810
maybe um but uh the the cost of like the the common

1440
01:23:24,810 --> 01:23:26,490
knowledge and calibration.

1441
01:23:26,730 --> 01:23:32,650
Cause if you there's a group and person A wants to be part of the group, that's that's

1442
01:23:32,650 --> 01:23:33,370
really simple.

1443
01:23:33,530 --> 01:23:35,770
You you know you're in the group.

1444
01:23:35,930 --> 01:23:41,210
Um you don't have to do that for the sort of dyadic or maybe you know few person friendship

1445
01:23:41,210 --> 01:23:43,290
of that calibration cost.

1446
01:23:43,690 --> 01:23:45,690
Um I hadn't thought about that before.

1447
01:23:46,120 --> 01:23:50,680
I actually have a student uh with Dan, uh Clara Labrador, who's doing the agent-based

1448
01:23:50,680 --> 01:23:52,920
modeling, and there's an association value.

1449
01:23:53,160 --> 01:23:56,280
Um, and then it's looking at group formation and how stable they are.

1450
01:23:56,360 --> 01:24:01,720
And basically what you find is that um the agents all have their own sort of association

1451
01:24:01,720 --> 01:24:07,640
value, and eventually they actually sort of it's just it's just

1452
01:24:07,640 --> 01:24:09,640
sort of an arbitrary in the in the toy game.

1453
01:24:09,720 --> 01:24:14,970
It's uh it's something like you could be a hundred, which means you're really great to be

1454
01:24:14,970 --> 01:24:19,610
around and or a zero, which means you're not really great in the in the artificial world,

1455
01:24:19,690 --> 01:24:20,970
it's just a hundred to zero.

1456
01:24:21,050 --> 01:24:25,930
But it would be presumably a stand in for you know the ability to you you're a good hunter,

1457
01:24:26,010 --> 01:24:27,770
you have resources, you're funny.

1458
01:24:28,090 --> 01:24:28,650
Okay, cool.

1459
01:24:28,890 --> 01:24:29,610
Anything like that.

1460
01:24:29,850 --> 01:24:30,410
Yeah, exactly.

1461
01:24:30,490 --> 01:24:34,890
But it sort of just gets um distilled artificially down to like a zero to a hundred or or

1462
01:24:35,130 --> 01:24:36,890
got it, um roughly speaking.

1463
01:24:37,690 --> 01:24:43,320
But what she finds is that um if you include uh agents tracking

1464
01:24:43,320 --> 01:24:48,760
reciprocity, so I sort of see if you'll be friends with me and then I'll wait back to see

1465
01:24:48,760 --> 01:24:50,200
if you reciprocate.

1466
01:24:50,360 --> 01:24:53,640
Um, and then also use third party representations.

1467
01:24:53,720 --> 01:24:58,760
So I sort of the triad things of like, you know, do I'll try to sort of befriend people

1468
01:24:58,760 --> 01:25:01,880
that uh I'm are friends with people I'm friends with, right?

1469
01:25:01,960 --> 01:25:04,600
Um that kind of thing, that sort of transitivity.

1470
01:25:04,840 --> 01:25:10,550
Um, if you include the reciprocity tracking and the third party or

1471
01:25:10,550 --> 01:25:12,630
social learning, the transitivity.

1472
01:25:12,710 --> 01:25:18,470
So I'm using if we're already friends, I'm gonna use how I see you interacting with

1473
01:25:18,470 --> 01:25:23,750
other people as a gauge to see whether or not I should also try those people as friends.

1474
01:25:23,910 --> 01:25:29,830
What you end up finding is that uh people will actually, the groups will assort by

1475
01:25:30,140 --> 01:25:34,220
value, by association value, even then that's not programmed into the agents.

1476
01:25:34,380 --> 01:25:39,980
If you strip out the third party representation where I don't use that

1477
01:25:39,980 --> 01:25:44,460
transitive model and I'm just looking at who reciprocates, you don't get it.

1478
01:25:44,700 --> 01:25:46,860
Um interesting.

1479
01:25:47,020 --> 01:25:51,500
So in the same way that like in the mating domain, uh the tens will pair up with the tens

1480
01:25:51,660 --> 01:25:55,740
and the nines will pair up with the nines, you see that in the group game where the tens

1481
01:25:55,820 --> 01:26:01,090
will form a group of tens, the cool kids, the popular kids, and the k in the cafeteria and

1482
01:26:01,170 --> 01:26:03,250
and so forth down the line.

1483
01:26:03,650 --> 01:26:03,890
That's right.

1484
01:26:04,370 --> 01:26:05,810
They're especially stable when they do.

1485
01:26:05,890 --> 01:26:10,770
There's the occasional sort of um, and and some of the details are sort of a function of

1486
01:26:10,770 --> 01:26:14,290
some of the details of implementing it, but the general principle applies.

1487
01:26:14,450 --> 01:26:18,130
Um, but generally, you know, you get like stable groups of four, for example, and they're

1488
01:26:18,130 --> 01:26:19,090
almost like carbon atoms.

1489
01:26:19,170 --> 01:26:23,570
They're really hard to sort of break up, but occasionally it gets sort of like, you know, I

1490
01:26:23,570 --> 01:26:29,080
think where there's somebody on a uh an edge where they're acceptable to one person in the

1491
01:26:29,080 --> 01:26:30,120
group but not the others.

1492
01:26:30,200 --> 01:26:33,960
So they're kind of constantly it's sort of a five then a four, a group of five then a four,

1493
01:26:34,120 --> 01:26:35,160
group of five, then a four.

1494
01:26:35,240 --> 01:26:35,800
Yeah.

1495
01:26:36,200 --> 01:26:37,240
So interesting.

1496
01:26:37,720 --> 01:26:43,400
If you amplify the hazing costs there or the the costs of entry,

1497
01:26:43,800 --> 01:26:49,160
does that allow for a more heterogeneous uh group in terms of association value?

1498
01:26:49,240 --> 01:26:51,080
Or it's a great question.

1499
01:26:51,320 --> 01:26:53,400
Uh I should talk to Clara about that.

1500
01:26:53,480 --> 01:26:54,520
And just curious.

1501
01:26:54,680 --> 01:26:55,000
Yeah.

1502
01:26:55,320 --> 01:26:59,630
That is I if anything, it might um reduce heterogeneity.

1503
01:27:00,190 --> 01:27:05,070
So insofar as yeah, your ability to to incur those costs is correlated with your

1504
01:27:05,070 --> 01:27:05,790
association value.

1505
01:27:05,870 --> 01:27:06,910
So only that's right.

1506
01:27:06,990 --> 01:27:08,350
What's the relationship between that?

1507
01:27:08,510 --> 01:27:08,830
Yeah, yeah.

1508
01:27:09,310 --> 01:27:09,390
Yeah.

1509
01:27:09,790 --> 01:27:14,590
So if if the the costs function to sort of filter out people by their association value,

1510
01:27:14,750 --> 01:27:20,540
then you could it could actually help, you know, uh stabilize groups of tens because only

1511
01:27:20,540 --> 01:27:23,020
tens are willing or able to pay the costs.

1512
01:27:23,100 --> 01:27:27,180
And so that's gonna ensure that only tens enter the group or stay in the group.

1513
01:27:27,980 --> 01:27:28,780
Oh wow.

1514
01:27:28,940 --> 01:27:31,260
That is yeah, that's a lot of fun.

1515
01:27:31,500 --> 01:27:37,500
Um it also makes me think of so when I gave my job talk here at UCLA, the very

1516
01:27:37,500 --> 01:27:43,180
first question I got was from Carrie Johnson, and it was about um couple's

1517
01:27:43,340 --> 01:27:44,220
friends.

1518
01:27:44,510 --> 01:27:50,510
Uh, and so if you are partnered with somebody who is like this is

1519
01:27:50,510 --> 01:27:55,470
your partner, uh, most social outings in your, you know, time is inelastic.

1520
01:27:55,550 --> 01:27:58,110
A lot of social outings, they're gonna have to be with you.

1521
01:27:58,270 --> 01:28:03,950
And if they kind of suck or they're uh disagreeable, that can pose so many

1522
01:28:03,950 --> 01:28:08,990
problems for you, not only um having couples' friends, but for you yourself having friends.

1523
01:28:09,220 --> 01:28:12,420
Um, and uh thank God I love each of your wives.

1524
01:28:12,500 --> 01:28:13,540
They're really cool.

1525
01:28:13,700 --> 01:28:19,380
Um, but uh I what I told Carrie was like, my husband's really difficult.

1526
01:28:19,540 --> 01:28:23,540
And I didn't mean that to be funny, but everybody thought that was really funny.

1527
01:28:23,860 --> 01:28:28,260
Um somebody needs to have a somebody needs to have a theory of humor to explain that.

1528
01:28:28,420 --> 01:28:30,820
So if only that existed.

1529
01:28:30,900 --> 01:28:36,660
Um it does make it more difficult when you have

1530
01:28:36,660 --> 01:28:39,150
to go into the group with someone.

1531
01:28:39,390 --> 01:28:45,070
And typically, you know, uh, romantic couples will probably have similar association value,

1532
01:28:45,150 --> 01:28:49,230
even if the good itself is not the same good that they're high on, right?

1533
01:28:49,710 --> 01:28:55,550
Um, but um, and this is why in like the real world outside of academia, if I get

1534
01:28:55,550 --> 01:29:01,470
stuck in like a sort of traditional gender group that is not a bunch of academics where all

1535
01:29:01,470 --> 01:29:06,910
the women are in the kitchen and they're talking about God knows what, like their children,

1536
01:29:07,400 --> 01:29:11,160
I oh man, I cannot get out of there soon enough.

1537
01:29:11,240 --> 01:29:12,520
Thank God Bob doesn't talk to us.

1538
01:29:12,920 --> 01:29:15,400
Yeah, it's like me being in a group of dudes talking about sports.

1539
01:29:15,640 --> 01:29:17,160
Yeah, we could switch.

1540
01:29:17,320 --> 01:29:19,560
I would totally talk about sports.

1541
01:29:19,880 --> 01:29:21,320
I would totally talk about kids.

1542
01:29:23,880 --> 01:29:24,440
It does.

1543
01:29:24,600 --> 01:29:26,600
It really like, let's do this.

1544
01:29:26,760 --> 01:29:32,600
Um, but also uh yeah, the the people that you associate with

1545
01:29:32,760 --> 01:29:36,150
um do really, really affect you.

1546
01:29:36,310 --> 01:29:41,350
Um, we don't we don't always think about it in that way, that they're sort of the, you

1547
01:29:41,350 --> 01:29:45,910
know, pair-bonded atom that comes with you in the conversation.

1548
01:29:46,950 --> 01:29:51,270
Jamie, one thing we've talked about in other episodes is sort of from an evolutionary

1549
01:29:51,270 --> 01:29:56,310
perspective, one gets a sense of respect for the complexity and sort of

1550
01:29:56,310 --> 01:29:59,430
fragility of human nature.

1551
01:30:00,180 --> 01:30:01,220
Friendship.

1552
01:30:01,380 --> 01:30:05,300
Well, I was thinking when I, you know, when you were coming on, I was thinking about how I

1553
01:30:05,300 --> 01:30:09,620
think about friendship or how I think about the culture thinks about friendship.

1554
01:30:09,780 --> 01:30:11,700
And it feels like such a luxury.

1555
01:30:11,940 --> 01:30:16,500
It sort of feels like giving somebody a hug almost, where it's sort of seen as this sort of

1556
01:30:16,660 --> 01:30:20,420
all it's a luxury that's not respected, or it's almost campy.

1557
01:30:20,500 --> 01:30:21,700
It's sort of like, well, friendship.

1558
01:30:21,780 --> 01:30:22,020
Yeah.

1559
01:30:23,060 --> 01:30:24,340
Do you agree with that?

1560
01:30:24,420 --> 01:30:27,860
And then do you have a thought about why that is?

1561
01:30:28,670 --> 01:30:33,630
So I sort of agree with that to the extent that, and this is to the second part of your

1562
01:30:33,630 --> 01:30:38,510
question, when people think about it, they don't think about it in terms of trade-offs or

1563
01:30:38,510 --> 01:30:39,710
the net benefits.

1564
01:30:39,790 --> 01:30:42,430
They just think friendship is a pure good.

1565
01:30:42,910 --> 01:30:45,950
Like friendship is great, hugs are great.

1566
01:30:46,110 --> 01:30:48,990
Um, at the very least, there's an opportunity cost.

1567
01:30:49,150 --> 01:30:52,510
The hug that you are giving is the meal you're not hunting, right?

1568
01:30:52,590 --> 01:30:56,510
And an evolutionary psychologist would at least get that.

1569
01:30:56,990 --> 01:31:02,760
Um, I think a lot of people think that it really is this fuzzy, happy,

1570
01:31:03,080 --> 01:31:05,400
purely beautiful thing.

1571
01:31:06,360 --> 01:31:10,840
And so that would be that would be my best answer to that.

1572
01:31:11,640 --> 01:31:16,600
We don't think about the fact that friendships are costly.

1573
01:31:16,840 --> 01:31:19,160
You end up fighting some of your friends' battles.

1574
01:31:19,320 --> 01:31:21,000
Your friends take some of your time.

1575
01:31:21,640 --> 01:31:27,630
I'm working on this paper with uh Doug Kenrick and some grad students uh from across

1576
01:31:27,630 --> 01:31:33,550
labs at ASU, actually a couple papers um on uh what we're calling

1577
01:31:33,550 --> 01:31:34,270
bad friends.

1578
01:31:34,350 --> 01:31:36,510
And it's not really bad so much as ambivalent.

1579
01:31:36,590 --> 01:31:41,310
And there's some cool work on ambivalent ties, but um basically when we think about

1580
01:31:41,310 --> 01:31:43,470
friends, we think about all the great things they do for you.

1581
01:31:43,550 --> 01:31:47,070
And I even said, you know, friendship is the next best thing you could do for your health

1582
01:31:47,070 --> 01:31:48,430
behind quitting smoking.

1583
01:31:48,740 --> 01:31:53,220
Presumably, although we never say it, that is good friends, right?

1584
01:31:53,780 --> 01:31:57,300
High quality, positive friendships.

1585
01:31:58,100 --> 01:32:03,940
But you've probably had friends or former friends or colleagues

1586
01:32:03,940 --> 01:32:07,300
who are a net drain on you, right?

1587
01:32:08,020 --> 01:32:11,860
Or friends of friends who you can't get rid of because you can't get rid of the friend who

1588
01:32:11,860 --> 01:32:13,060
are a net drain on you.

1589
01:32:13,140 --> 01:32:14,980
And that's an indirect drain.

1590
01:32:15,630 --> 01:32:21,630
So yeah, I think a part of the reason we think of it as a luxury or as a fluffy thing

1591
01:32:21,950 --> 01:32:27,550
is we don't think about its uh gnarly underside and it has one.

1592
01:32:27,790 --> 01:32:31,230
And an Ev person absolutely thinks about that.

1593
01:32:31,470 --> 01:32:37,310
Um it's uh so there's this book series called the Sholomance series.

1594
01:32:37,390 --> 01:32:43,360
It's like a young adult, um, dark Harry Potter, And it's a three-book series.

1595
01:32:43,520 --> 01:32:45,200
The first book is really awesome.

1596
01:32:45,360 --> 01:32:51,280
Um, and for to do magic, you need

1597
01:32:51,280 --> 01:32:53,360
to incur costs.

1598
01:32:53,520 --> 01:32:59,520
So, for example, you might do 50 push-ups or something to be able to cast a spell to clean

1599
01:32:59,520 --> 01:33:00,240
your room.

1600
01:33:00,480 --> 01:33:06,090
Um in Harry Potter, you're just Alohomora or whatever it is, right?

1601
01:33:06,170 --> 01:33:08,330
You you magic is free.

1602
01:33:08,410 --> 01:33:10,170
Um, and that's bullshit.

1603
01:33:10,330 --> 01:33:12,730
Uh, I like worlds where magic is costly.

1604
01:33:12,890 --> 01:33:15,610
Like the same thing in Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

1605
01:33:15,690 --> 01:33:17,210
You have to pay a cost.

1606
01:33:17,370 --> 01:33:22,490
But um, the Sholeman series makes the trade-offs so apparent and embedded into the world,

1607
01:33:22,570 --> 01:33:26,090
it's it's almost like reading Ev fiction or something.

1608
01:33:26,650 --> 01:33:30,730
Um how is it possible that there's so little work on friendship?

1609
01:33:32,660 --> 01:33:35,780
Okay, so why is there so little work on friendship?

1610
01:33:36,020 --> 01:33:39,460
Um so it is a compounding problem.

1611
01:33:40,100 --> 01:33:45,860
Um first, people don't tend to think of it as a problem that needs to be solved.

1612
01:33:46,020 --> 01:33:49,620
Um there's a real instinct blindness there, right?

1613
01:33:49,700 --> 01:33:54,740
That friendship is a challenge or um consists of challenges that we have to solve in order

1614
01:33:54,740 --> 01:33:55,700
to realize it.

1615
01:33:55,860 --> 01:33:57,940
And so we haven't bothered with it.

1616
01:33:58,580 --> 01:34:03,630
Whereas, you know, the most easy and direct comparison is romantic relationships.

1617
01:34:03,790 --> 01:34:09,550
People have trouble having romantic relationships throughout history all the time, right?

1618
01:34:09,790 --> 01:34:12,990
So we know that that's a problem to solve and we study it.

1619
01:34:13,150 --> 01:34:16,190
Um, and maybe we even throw some money at it.

1620
01:34:16,430 --> 01:34:17,310
Very cool.

1621
01:34:17,630 --> 01:34:23,470
Um so if you don't realize it's a problem to solve, you

1622
01:34:23,470 --> 01:34:25,310
don't even think to study it.

1623
01:34:25,580 --> 01:34:31,580
Um, if you don't see it as a phenomenon that's interesting, you don't think to study

1624
01:34:31,580 --> 01:34:31,740
it.

1625
01:34:31,900 --> 01:34:35,260
And again, the direct comparison would be romantic relationships.

1626
01:34:35,420 --> 01:34:38,700
People are always going to find it sexy and interesting because they're definitely going to

1627
01:34:38,700 --> 01:34:42,060
want to have a romantic relationship, or most people, right?

1628
01:34:42,460 --> 01:34:48,460
Um uh most people want to have friendships, but again, it's not a thing they see as

1629
01:34:48,460 --> 01:34:50,270
a challenge that they have to solve.

1630
01:34:51,310 --> 01:34:54,590
So that's sort of the first step of the problem.

1631
01:34:55,790 --> 01:35:00,430
There people haven't studied it because they didn't realize it was a thing that was needed,

1632
01:35:00,670 --> 01:35:05,310
worthy of study, or a challenge that the mind had to solve, or however you want to put it.

1633
01:35:13,180 --> 01:35:18,140
So some sociologists study friendship, some anthropologists study friendship,

1634
01:35:21,180 --> 01:35:23,180
psychologists who study friendship.

1635
01:35:23,260 --> 01:35:26,780
So within social developmental psychologists study it all the time.

1636
01:35:26,940 --> 01:35:27,660
Let's say that.

1637
01:35:27,740 --> 01:35:29,820
I should say for adult friendship, right?

1638
01:35:31,500 --> 01:35:36,140
So then you end up in health psychology, and maybe they look at older adults because

1639
01:35:36,140 --> 01:35:38,700
they're worried about their loneliness and health outcomes.

1640
01:35:39,830 --> 01:35:44,870
for just um healthy adults um

1641
01:35:45,830 --> 01:35:51,670
who's studying friendship you can look in social psychology and in the subfield of um the

1642
01:35:51,830 --> 01:35:57,830
close relationships um and there are very very few people which means there are very very

1643
01:35:57,830 --> 01:36:03,510
few labs for um undergrads to get trained in friendship or exposed to

1644
01:36:03,510 --> 01:36:09,240
friendship um i think I think that a lot of our textbooks don't even

1645
01:36:09,240 --> 01:36:10,440
mention friendship.

1646
01:36:10,520 --> 01:36:15,880
So they don't read about friendship in science and social psychology.

1647
01:36:17,640 --> 01:36:20,040
So yeah, they don't realize it exists.

1648
01:36:20,200 --> 01:36:21,960
They don't get exposed to it.

1649
01:36:22,200 --> 01:36:23,960
They don't get training in it.

1650
01:36:24,120 --> 01:36:28,680
And so if the time comes where they want to go to grad school to study friendship, then

1651
01:36:28,680 --> 01:36:29,800
where are they going to apply?

1652
01:36:29,960 --> 01:36:31,400
There are like 10 places.

1653
01:36:34,770 --> 01:36:40,370
uh part of what we're doing at the Center for Friendship Research is we have a page on our

1654
01:36:40,370 --> 01:36:43,810
website that's just all of the places that you can go to study friendship.

1655
01:36:44,050 --> 01:36:48,850
And a lot of those people are people who are willing to study friendship, but don't

1656
01:36:48,850 --> 01:36:50,530
actually do it as their bread and butter.

1657
01:36:50,610 --> 01:36:52,050
They study relationships.

1658
01:36:52,290 --> 01:36:56,130
Um and so actually, this is serendipitous.

1659
01:36:56,210 --> 01:37:01,330
I have this book by Bev Fair on my desk, Friendship Processes from 1996.

1660
01:37:01,650 --> 01:37:07,360
I know it's on page six, And this is sort of the state of the art of friendship

1661
01:37:07,360 --> 01:37:11,440
in 1996 in relationship science and still now.

1662
01:37:13,360 --> 01:37:18,960
In any case, the the whole point of it is that in friendship science,

1663
01:37:19,360 --> 01:37:24,720
um, there is simply in relationship science, they don't differentiate

1664
01:37:24,720 --> 01:37:26,750
friendship from other relationships.

1665
01:37:26,910 --> 01:37:29,710
So they study attraction and relationships.

1666
01:37:29,790 --> 01:37:31,070
They're all grouped together.

1667
01:37:31,310 --> 01:37:34,510
There is literally no theory of friendships per se.

1668
01:37:34,670 --> 01:37:38,990
That's the quote that I was looking for, which I'm sure is underlined in there somewhere.

1669
01:37:40,110 --> 01:37:45,710
And so that's that's the state of the art then, and that remains the state of the art now

1670
01:37:46,030 --> 01:37:49,950
in mainstream social psychology and relationship science.

1671
01:37:50,190 --> 01:37:56,020
Um and also, I should say those relationship science is not like a big job getter

1672
01:37:56,180 --> 01:37:56,900
sub-area.

1673
01:37:58,020 --> 01:38:00,020
So that can be difficult too.

1674
01:38:00,100 --> 01:38:03,860
You sort of have to rub up against health to get a job, to get a grant.

1675
01:38:04,020 --> 01:38:09,620
People aren't spending a lot of money for basic science on romantic relationships,

1676
01:38:09,940 --> 01:38:15,430
the way that they are for things that have more directly uh that are more directly linked

1677
01:38:15,430 --> 01:38:16,310
to health outcomes.

1678
01:38:16,470 --> 01:38:21,750
Hopefully that will change because of this loneliness epidemic, because of um the

1679
01:38:21,750 --> 01:38:25,350
economic and social costs of not having friends.

1680
01:38:25,510 --> 01:38:28,550
Um, because so few people are studying friendship.

1681
01:38:28,710 --> 01:38:33,270
If you were to put in a grant on friendship, I think it would have a good chance.

1682
01:38:33,350 --> 01:38:37,990
Uh Templeton, as far as I know from Michael Barlov, doesn't have a single grant that

1683
01:38:37,990 --> 01:38:42,360
they're funding on friendship, but it's a very John Templeton kind of topic.

1684
01:38:42,520 --> 01:38:46,200
Um, NSF doesn't have a lot on friendship right now.

1685
01:38:46,280 --> 01:38:52,040
Um, I have their career award, um, and that's all friendship stuff that we're

1686
01:38:52,040 --> 01:38:53,240
doing in my lab.

1687
01:38:53,640 --> 01:38:59,160
Um, and then the Center for Friendship Research that we started here at UCLA with Carolyn

1688
01:38:59,160 --> 01:39:04,550
Parkinson, Matt Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger, and Victor Kaufman, and this panoply of

1689
01:39:04,550 --> 01:39:09,990
amazing grad students spanning developmental and social neuroscience and com and social

1690
01:39:12,070 --> 01:39:17,990
and postdocs who are now at other places, and some of your grad students come

1691
01:39:17,990 --> 01:39:19,110
in and hang out.

1692
01:39:21,270 --> 01:39:26,710
We are trying to sort of galvanize the community and change this.

1693
01:39:27,190 --> 01:39:32,200
But yeah, the reason people don't do it is they don't realize it's a a thing to be studied.

1694
01:39:32,280 --> 01:39:36,200
They don't get exposed to friendship as a thing worthy of study.

1695
01:39:36,360 --> 01:39:41,800
Um, and then even if they do, there are so few places to go to study it.

1696
01:39:42,280 --> 01:39:44,200
That was the answer I should have given it first.

1697
01:39:44,440 --> 01:39:45,800
No, that's great.

1698
01:39:46,440 --> 01:39:51,630
I mean, I wonder if part of the reason why we view friendship

1699
01:39:51,630 --> 01:39:57,550
incorrectly as a kind of frivolous thing is that we're so alienated from

1700
01:39:57,550 --> 01:40:03,390
the Darwinian functions of friendship and our modern prosperous society that if you think

1701
01:40:03,390 --> 01:40:07,470
about what the selection pressures for friendship might have been for our ancestors, it was

1702
01:40:07,470 --> 01:40:10,590
probably something like really extreme hardships.

1703
01:40:10,920 --> 01:40:13,400
You're injured and you can't forage.

1704
01:40:13,560 --> 01:40:16,280
You're sick and you need someone to take care of you.

1705
01:40:16,520 --> 01:40:20,680
You know, people in the group are conspiring against you and you need allies who will take

1706
01:40:20,680 --> 01:40:21,160
your side.

1707
01:40:21,320 --> 01:40:24,680
You're accused of a transgression and you need people to stick up for you.

1708
01:40:24,840 --> 01:40:28,040
Like these would have been life or death situations.

1709
01:40:28,600 --> 01:40:34,440
Um, and precisely because we're living in such modern, affluent, safe societies with police

1710
01:40:34,440 --> 01:40:40,120
forces and fire departments and modern medicine, um, we don't

1711
01:40:40,370 --> 01:40:45,970
really have those hardships uh that we would need friends to help us out with.

1712
01:40:46,610 --> 01:40:52,450
Um and this is an argument that um Tubian Cosby's make in their paper um the evol

1713
01:40:52,610 --> 01:40:57,490
on the on the banker's paradox and the evolution of altruism, which is that because that um

1714
01:40:57,650 --> 01:41:03,170
these kinds of extreme hardships are often the best sources of information gathering about

1715
01:41:03,170 --> 01:41:04,610
who your true friends are.

1716
01:41:04,690 --> 01:41:08,210
Uh, because it it's often unclear who your tr true friends are, whether they're a fair

1717
01:41:08,290 --> 01:41:13,620
weather friend who's just in it uh when it's in their short term self interest to to help

1718
01:41:13,620 --> 01:41:18,660
you out, or whether they truly care about your your well being, independent of what you can

1719
01:41:18,660 --> 01:41:19,860
uh do for them.

1720
01:41:20,100 --> 01:41:26,100
Um and when you're sick or people are conspiring against you or injured or whatever,

1721
01:41:26,340 --> 01:41:31,090
that's an opportunity to figure out who's who's truly on your side, who truly uh has a

1722
01:41:31,090 --> 01:41:33,810
stake in your welfare and who's just a fair weather friend.

1723
01:41:33,970 --> 01:41:38,930
But because we don't have those kinds of experiences nearly as frequently as we did in

1724
01:41:38,930 --> 01:41:44,370
ancestral environments, there's just so much more uncertainty about who our true friends

1725
01:41:44,370 --> 01:41:44,690
are.

1726
01:41:45,330 --> 01:41:49,330
And so we really don't know who our true friends are because we have we have so little

1727
01:41:49,330 --> 01:41:51,410
evidence one way or the other.

1728
01:41:52,050 --> 01:41:56,740
So I'm wondering if that is not only the the answer to why we don't take friendship

1729
01:41:56,740 --> 01:42:01,300
seriously, is because we have so few of these these hardship moments where where friends

1730
01:42:01,380 --> 01:42:04,740
you know are are um are so necessary.

1731
01:42:05,780 --> 01:42:11,380
But it's also one of the uh many causes of of the loneliness

1732
01:42:11,380 --> 01:42:15,300
epidemic, which is that there's just so much more uncertainty about who our friends are

1733
01:42:15,380 --> 01:42:18,740
because we don't have these kinds of moments to figure out who our true friends are.

1734
01:42:18,900 --> 01:42:20,260
What do you what do you think about that?

1735
01:42:21,150 --> 01:42:22,830
I absolutely buy that.

1736
01:42:23,230 --> 01:42:29,150
It also, so um, we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of well, theory,

1737
01:42:29,230 --> 01:42:34,910
period, but theory of friendship in Evpsy, whereas there does not exist one in relationship

1738
01:42:34,910 --> 01:42:35,790
science, right?

1739
01:42:36,030 --> 01:42:40,910
So we have this alliance hypothesis of friendship that suggests that friendship is in part

1740
01:42:40,990 --> 01:42:45,710
the output of cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble antagonist or um designed to

1741
01:42:45,710 --> 01:42:50,110
assemble support for uh future um agonistic interactions.

1742
01:42:50,340 --> 01:42:55,860
And so, on that view, I should, for example, take the side of the friend in a fight between

1743
01:42:55,860 --> 01:42:56,260
two friends.

1744
01:42:56,340 --> 01:43:00,500
I should take the side of the friend who's most likely to take my side later so that they

1745
01:43:01,300 --> 01:43:05,700
survive the fight and live to take my side another day, right?

1746
01:43:06,500 --> 01:43:12,260
And then we have this sort of Tubian Cosmodies view that could potentially encompass that,

1747
01:43:12,500 --> 01:43:15,210
but friendship is really social insurance.

1748
01:43:15,450 --> 01:43:21,370
And so if a drought and famine strikes our community and we're in need and other people

1749
01:43:21,370 --> 01:43:26,490
around us in need, um, that's exactly when strangers are least likely to invest in us

1750
01:43:26,570 --> 01:43:28,970
because we look like bad bets for reciprocity.

1751
01:43:29,370 --> 01:43:32,410
And I know you guys know this, but just for your listeners.

1752
01:43:33,050 --> 01:43:34,520
So what do we need?

1753
01:43:34,920 --> 01:43:35,720
We need help.

1754
01:43:36,040 --> 01:43:37,880
We might not be able to survive without it.

1755
01:43:38,040 --> 01:43:39,080
How do we get this help?

1756
01:43:39,240 --> 01:43:41,800
We need people who have a stake in our continued welfare.

1757
01:43:42,040 --> 01:43:44,600
And our good friends might have a stake in our welfare.

1758
01:43:45,000 --> 01:43:49,720
Not only that, but they might have a stake in our welfare and help us over other people who

1759
01:43:49,720 --> 01:43:51,400
are in similar need as us.

1760
01:43:51,640 --> 01:43:53,640
And so we survive.

1761
01:43:53,960 --> 01:43:57,080
And that benefits our friends because we have a stake in their welfare.

1762
01:43:57,240 --> 01:44:01,080
And when they inevitably face their own times of illness, injury, et cetera, we'll be

1763
01:44:01,080 --> 01:44:02,120
around to help them.

1764
01:44:02,670 --> 01:44:08,110
And the Tubi and Cosmides version sort of more directly comes from an

1765
01:44:08,110 --> 01:44:11,950
anthropological view of the human world, right?

1766
01:44:12,110 --> 01:44:18,110
This is what a challenge that people would have faced over evolutionary time.

1767
01:44:18,590 --> 01:44:22,190
The alliance hypothesis is also part of that.

1768
01:44:22,350 --> 01:44:27,950
We certainly would have faced that, but that seems uh still part and part of our

1769
01:44:27,950 --> 01:44:32,920
worlds, even today, divorced from everything, when you have to, you know, form your little

1770
01:44:32,920 --> 01:44:37,480
alliances at work to get the person that you want hired or whatever, right?

1771
01:44:38,040 --> 01:44:43,720
Um, and it kind of reminds me again of the the schism between who we are as

1772
01:44:43,720 --> 01:44:46,120
psychologists and who we study.

1773
01:44:46,280 --> 01:44:50,840
Um, sometimes we just study each other and college students, and they're all going to face

1774
01:44:50,840 --> 01:44:52,040
this alliance problem.

1775
01:44:52,930 --> 01:44:58,850
But we don't study a lot of people who don't go to college and live in the same place that

1776
01:44:58,850 --> 01:45:04,290
they grew up and might face or be more likely to face in some instances those real

1777
01:45:04,290 --> 01:45:05,250
hardships.

1778
01:45:06,130 --> 01:45:10,690
They might have better insight into human friendship psychology than any of us do,

1779
01:45:10,770 --> 01:45:13,250
precisely because of pins off what you're saying.

1780
01:45:13,600 --> 01:45:18,720
our friendships are divorced from the challenges um that the

1781
01:45:18,880 --> 01:45:22,320
friendships arose to to combat, to face.

1782
01:45:23,200 --> 01:45:25,200
Did that make any sense the way that I said it?

1783
01:45:25,520 --> 01:45:25,760
Totally.

1784
01:45:26,000 --> 01:45:26,560
Oh absolutely.

1785
01:45:26,800 --> 01:45:26,960
Yeah.

1786
01:45:27,200 --> 01:45:27,600
Yeah.

1787
01:45:28,240 --> 01:45:32,880
Yeah, I think about this sometimes, the the two different views of friendship there.

1788
01:45:33,120 --> 01:45:38,930
Um uh I uh I don't know what the

1789
01:45:38,930 --> 01:45:44,690
right term is, non-symbolic capitalists, like heartland folks, real people.

1790
01:45:44,770 --> 01:45:49,890
Like it depends on who you talk to, but we actually have to talk to people who aren't us to

1791
01:45:49,890 --> 01:45:51,170
understand friendship better.

1792
01:45:51,250 --> 01:45:54,130
And I think we've done a piss poor job at that.

1793
01:45:54,530 --> 01:45:57,010
Um, but also time isn't elastic.

1794
01:45:57,170 --> 01:46:02,130
So um somebody needs to go out there with like a little tape recorder and just start

1795
01:46:02,120 --> 01:46:06,760
interviewing people who are not us in this weird world.

1796
01:46:06,920 --> 01:46:12,360
Um, not the Henrik weird, but like just very strange, weird world, and ask them about their

1797
01:46:12,360 --> 01:46:13,000
friendships.

1798
01:46:13,160 --> 01:46:19,160
Um, and I bet you'll see things like um Ann Campbell recounts this in her um book that's in

1799
01:46:19,160 --> 01:46:20,680
part on female friendships.

1800
01:46:20,920 --> 01:46:26,520
Um, just being able to count on your female friend for some money to leave a bad romantic

1801
01:46:26,520 --> 01:46:28,920
relationship was the difference between life and death.

1802
01:46:29,080 --> 01:46:29,640
Yeah.

1803
01:46:31,010 --> 01:46:33,650
Anyway, I think that's a really nice insight.

1804
01:46:33,810 --> 01:46:34,450
Pensoff.

1805
01:46:34,530 --> 01:46:40,370
I yeah, it's it's fun to think about this stuff and why we give friendship

1806
01:46:40,370 --> 01:46:41,250
the shaft.

1807
01:46:41,570 --> 01:46:41,970
Yeah.

1808
01:46:42,130 --> 01:46:42,770
Yeah.

1809
01:46:45,010 --> 01:46:49,970
And yeah, uh Dave, you were gonna say that there uh something about Keela teaching the

1810
01:46:49,970 --> 01:46:51,970
classes and that there aren't even classes on it.

1811
01:46:52,130 --> 01:46:55,090
I think that's part of the exposure problem, right?

1812
01:46:55,700 --> 01:47:01,300
Most people would say, I think there's a Gallup poll from like 2015 that good friendships

1813
01:47:01,300 --> 01:47:07,220
are part of well being, like right up there with their health and having a job.

1814
01:47:07,460 --> 01:47:11,460
Um, but we don't have a class on it.

1815
01:47:11,540 --> 01:47:16,420
You know, we have classes on jobs, we have classes on health, we have classes on romantic

1816
01:47:16,420 --> 01:47:20,500
relationships, we have classes on 19th century Russian literature.

1817
01:47:20,660 --> 01:47:26,530
Um, but friendship is one of uh the human universals that we don't think about or talk

1818
01:47:26,530 --> 01:47:27,650
about or teach about.

1819
01:47:27,890 --> 01:47:32,450
In fact, I went to Dan uh uh Don Brown's book about it.

1820
01:47:32,530 --> 01:47:33,330
Dan Bro now.

1821
01:47:33,890 --> 01:47:35,490
Yeah, Don Brown, yeah, Definitely Universals.

1822
01:47:35,570 --> 01:47:38,850
Yeah, we talked about that in my coming coming to EP story.

1823
01:47:39,090 --> 01:47:40,210
Oh awesome, yeah.

1824
01:47:40,450 --> 01:47:46,450
I almost said Don Brown, who I think wrote um the those Tom Hanks movie books.

1825
01:47:46,690 --> 01:47:47,090
Exactly.

1826
01:47:47,330 --> 01:47:47,980
Oh Dan Brown.

1827
01:47:48,220 --> 01:47:48,700
Yeah, that's right.

1828
01:47:49,740 --> 01:47:50,540
The Da Vinci Code.

1829
01:47:51,260 --> 01:47:52,300
The Da Vinci Code, yeah.

1830
01:47:52,460 --> 01:47:56,780
So in the Da Vinci Code, uh talking about human universals and friendship, there's an

1831
01:47:56,780 --> 01:47:59,420
albino monk played by Paul Bettney.

1832
01:47:59,660 --> 01:48:02,940
The Da Vinci Code is the book that brought me to EbSec, that's right.

1833
01:48:04,380 --> 01:48:07,100
Going back to the Don Brown Human Universals book.

1834
01:48:07,340 --> 01:48:10,220
Yeah, so I don't think friendship is in there.

1835
01:48:10,380 --> 01:48:15,340
I remember looking this up, and I didn't find friendship.

1836
01:48:15,980 --> 01:48:18,590
Um human universals.

1837
01:48:18,830 --> 01:48:19,070
Interesting.

1838
01:48:19,310 --> 01:48:24,590
Yeah, I I think I probably have that book in here, but um, I pulled it up when I when I

1839
01:48:24,670 --> 01:48:25,550
when I was talking about it.

1840
01:48:25,790 --> 01:48:31,310
Here, let me pull it up, see if I can uh let's see here.

1841
01:48:31,550 --> 01:48:35,630
At least in the physical copy of the book that I have, it wasn't in there.

1842
01:48:35,710 --> 01:48:40,270
Um the first yeah, first first stab at the huge list.

1843
01:48:41,680 --> 01:48:47,200
I mean it's a it's an amazing list and I'm no no T no shade at this list,

1844
01:48:47,440 --> 01:48:48,320
but yeah.

1845
01:48:48,640 --> 01:48:49,920
Are you finding it?

1846
01:48:50,240 --> 01:48:52,320
I don't know how I found it the first time.

1847
01:48:54,560 --> 01:48:56,640
Uh yeah, I maybe I did Google Scholar.

1848
01:48:56,960 --> 01:48:57,280
Yeah, David.

1849
01:48:57,360 --> 01:48:59,200
Well take it, David, take a second while you're doing that.

1850
01:48:59,440 --> 01:49:03,840
Jamie, this is a weird thing to ask this late in the conversation, but if an alien asked

1851
01:49:03,840 --> 01:49:07,280
you what is friendship, what is it?

1852
01:49:07,750 --> 01:49:08,070
Okay.

1853
01:49:08,870 --> 01:49:14,870
Um, I would call it a voluntary, mostly, most of the

1854
01:49:14,870 --> 01:49:20,870
time, uh communal most of the time, bond between two

1855
01:49:20,870 --> 01:49:25,830
or more people uh who have stakes in one another's welfare.

1856
01:49:26,150 --> 01:49:31,830
And then I would try to differentiate it from other relationships by saying that typically

1857
01:49:31,830 --> 01:49:36,400
this would occur between folks who are not highly genetically related.

1858
01:49:36,960 --> 01:49:41,280
It turns out friends are more genetically related to one another than they would be by

1859
01:49:41,280 --> 01:49:42,000
chance alone.

1860
01:49:42,160 --> 01:49:44,880
But I think there's some Christakis work on this.

1861
01:49:45,440 --> 01:49:51,200
And that it's people you also don't want to have sex with or aren't in a

1862
01:49:51,200 --> 01:49:56,880
romantic relationship with, which is a weird thing because that's part of the

1863
01:49:57,170 --> 01:49:59,170
uh practicals of studying it.

1864
01:49:59,330 --> 01:50:04,370
We sort of have to define it that way to make it distinct from romantic relationships.

1865
01:50:04,450 --> 01:50:09,170
But most of the things that make romantic relationships good and successful are probably

1866
01:50:09,170 --> 01:50:11,250
things that make friendships good and successful.

1867
01:50:11,810 --> 01:50:17,810
Um, so anyway, put that in your type of difficulty and choke on the

1868
01:50:17,810 --> 01:50:18,610
smoke.

1869
01:50:21,860 --> 01:50:27,060
I'm curious, i uh in there is that a way of bridging the to be Cosby's banker

1870
01:50:27,220 --> 01:50:31,220
paradox approach with the alliance hypothesis approach?

1871
01:50:31,460 --> 01:50:37,300
If you posit that um we form alliances and take the sides of uh

1872
01:50:37,620 --> 01:50:42,690
people that we have a higher stake in, So we use, you know, interdependence or how much of

1873
01:50:42,690 --> 01:50:48,610
a stake you have uh in someone else as um a uh heuristic for choosing

1874
01:50:48,610 --> 01:50:49,410
allies.

1875
01:50:49,970 --> 01:50:53,490
Um and so if that's the case, then that is a way to bridge those two theories.

1876
01:50:53,730 --> 01:50:56,530
So if if I have a high stake in you, I'm gonna take your side.

1877
01:50:56,690 --> 01:51:00,770
Um and so I'm not only more likely to help you when you're when you're sick, but I'm also

1878
01:51:00,770 --> 01:51:05,250
more likely to to take your side because uh I'm I'm gonna rank my allies based on how much

1879
01:51:05,250 --> 01:51:07,010
of a stake I have in their welfare.

1880
01:51:07,600 --> 01:51:08,000
Yeah.

1881
01:51:08,160 --> 01:51:13,360
So I I talk about um sort of the cognitive mechanics of how people

1882
01:51:13,680 --> 01:51:19,520
figure out whose side to take in a um in a conflict between two of their friends.

1883
01:51:19,680 --> 01:51:24,080
Um and then I always tell people, I'm gonna give you the like difficult answer, and then

1884
01:51:24,080 --> 01:51:28,000
I'm gonna give you the answer that you're probably thinking of right now, um, which is the

1885
01:51:28,000 --> 01:51:28,960
answer that you're bringing up.

1886
01:51:29,040 --> 01:51:31,270
You take the side of the person you like better, right?

1887
01:51:31,670 --> 01:51:37,350
Um, the more difficult version, and this is uh Peter DeSholy and Rob Kurzban would say that

1888
01:51:37,510 --> 01:51:43,510
um uh so we have these Alicentric representations or representations of

1889
01:51:43,510 --> 01:51:46,950
where we think our friends rank us relative to their other friends.

1890
01:51:47,110 --> 01:51:53,110
Um, probably more like a linear hierarchy than um a sort of dispersed

1891
01:51:53,110 --> 01:51:53,510
network.

1892
01:51:53,670 --> 01:51:58,360
So it's a little bit different than how Dunbar thinks about friendship as a sort of

1893
01:51:58,360 --> 01:52:00,760
network, like a 2D circle.

1894
01:52:00,920 --> 01:52:02,680
This is a 2D column.

1895
01:52:02,760 --> 01:52:07,160
Um it's like basically you're talking about you know best friend, second best friend that's

1896
01:52:07,640 --> 01:52:08,120
exactly.

1897
01:52:08,280 --> 01:52:08,600
Yeah.

1898
01:52:08,760 --> 01:52:11,160
So we have these allocentric representations.

1899
01:52:11,320 --> 01:52:16,040
So another person would think that, you know, she has her best friend and I'm her second

1900
01:52:16,040 --> 01:52:17,640
best friend, and so on.

1901
01:52:17,800 --> 01:52:22,440
And so she would take my side over everyone else's in a fight between me and all her other

1902
01:52:22,440 --> 01:52:24,600
friends, excepting her best friend.

1903
01:52:24,790 --> 01:52:25,030
Okay.

1904
01:52:25,750 --> 01:52:25,910
Yeah.

1905
01:52:26,070 --> 01:52:30,710
So then we use these allocentric representations, which are our best bet, right?

1906
01:52:30,870 --> 01:52:36,790
This is not necessarily reality to form uh reciprocally our egocentric friend

1907
01:52:36,790 --> 01:52:41,110
ranking, which is just our best friend at the top, our next best friend, and so on.

1908
01:52:41,350 --> 01:52:41,510
Right.

1909
01:52:41,750 --> 01:52:41,910
Yeah.

1910
01:52:42,070 --> 01:52:45,110
I want to be best friends with the person who thinks they're best friends with me.

1911
01:52:45,270 --> 01:52:47,750
I want to be second best with the person who thinks they're second best with me.

1912
01:52:48,310 --> 01:52:48,710
Exactly.

1913
01:52:48,870 --> 01:52:49,670
Yeah, exactly.

1914
01:52:49,830 --> 01:52:55,720
And so our egocentric friend ranking, So what I'd say is it's not

1915
01:52:55,720 --> 01:52:59,480
like out of a beautiful mind where you're just like coldly calculating these things on a

1916
01:52:59,480 --> 01:53:00,120
window.

1917
01:53:00,360 --> 01:53:06,040
Um it's the same thing as taking the side of the friend you like better, because um

1918
01:53:06,280 --> 01:53:10,520
the reciprocal nature of it means that in a fight between your second ranked friend and

1919
01:53:10,520 --> 01:53:14,360
your fourth ranked friend, you're taking the side of your second ranked friend, i.e.

1920
01:53:14,520 --> 01:53:17,240
the friend you like better than your fourth ranked friend, right?

1921
01:53:17,400 --> 01:53:17,720
Yep.

1922
01:53:17,880 --> 01:53:21,000
Um, so I think these things are hand in glove.

1923
01:53:21,160 --> 01:53:24,010
Um And they make a lot of sense.

1924
01:53:24,170 --> 01:53:26,010
I think they do go together.

1925
01:53:26,650 --> 01:53:31,690
I do think there are valid questions about whether it's, you know, like a um

1926
01:53:32,570 --> 01:53:38,570
a 3D sort of um like a think of goo and you lift goo

1927
01:53:38,570 --> 01:53:44,490
up by a tip, like it's uh a representation of a network like that, rather than a 2D

1928
01:53:44,490 --> 01:53:50,010
column or a 2D circle or concentric circles and what the networks really look like, and

1929
01:53:50,010 --> 01:53:50,810
blah, blah, blah.

1930
01:53:50,890 --> 01:53:56,480
And there are really interesting questions about how we try and game these

1931
01:53:56,480 --> 01:54:01,200
allocentric representations in order to make other people like us better.

1932
01:54:01,440 --> 01:54:07,120
Because ideally, you know, um everyone would think that I am their best friend and I would

1933
01:54:07,120 --> 01:54:12,880
take their side in a conflict because then they'd all take mine, um, which is a

1934
01:54:12,880 --> 01:54:17,200
really horrific pressure if you think about it on friendships and can make them really

1935
01:54:17,200 --> 01:54:18,000
messy.

1936
01:54:18,160 --> 01:54:23,650
Um and uh then it you are back to that sort of

1937
01:54:23,650 --> 01:54:26,610
Aristotle quote that a friend to all is a friend to none.

1938
01:54:26,770 --> 01:54:29,490
Um there are many, many ways for that to be true.

1939
01:54:29,730 --> 01:54:31,090
And this is one of them.

1940
01:54:31,330 --> 01:54:32,290
Anyway, yeah.

1941
01:54:32,530 --> 01:54:38,210
I do, I do think that that's sort of how they go together as this liking component is

1942
01:54:38,210 --> 01:54:42,370
built on stakes and welfare, which we can measure by welfare trade-off ratio.

1943
01:54:42,770 --> 01:54:48,760
Um, I do think that we have to be sensitive not just to the absolute value of the

1944
01:54:48,760 --> 01:54:50,120
welfare trade-off ratio.

1945
01:54:50,280 --> 01:54:53,960
So like uh pins off if I value you a five, right?

1946
01:54:54,200 --> 01:54:58,840
Um, we're gonna interact and I'm gonna do positive things for you, and that's awesome.

1947
01:54:59,080 --> 01:55:05,000
Um, uh, but if you put me in a room with you and now Dave, but I value Dave a seven,

1948
01:55:05,160 --> 01:55:09,800
although absolutely nothing has changed about the absolute value or quality of our dyadic

1949
01:55:09,800 --> 01:55:13,640
relationship, now everything I was doing for you, I might do for him instead.

1950
01:55:14,090 --> 01:55:19,850
Um, and so I think we have to think about these things um in terms

1951
01:55:19,850 --> 01:55:25,610
of their being embedded in a network, um, and not just in terms of the dyad, which is how

1952
01:55:25,610 --> 01:55:30,410
we typically study them, um, because it's easier and also because that's how people think

1953
01:55:30,410 --> 01:55:32,810
about friendship as a dyadic relationship.

1954
01:55:32,970 --> 01:55:36,570
Um, but uh it's uh yeah.

1955
01:55:36,730 --> 01:55:39,210
And anyway, there are massive implications of that.

1956
01:55:39,700 --> 01:55:40,260
Totally.

1957
01:55:40,420 --> 01:55:41,380
No, I I get that.

1958
01:55:41,460 --> 01:55:45,140
I think that's a really beautiful insight that is underappreciated.

1959
01:55:45,380 --> 01:55:50,740
Just how much um friendship is beyond the dyad, and how much, say,

1960
01:55:50,900 --> 01:55:56,180
Dave's friendship rankings uh have externalities for me, and how your friendship rank so

1961
01:55:56,260 --> 01:56:00,790
like if you bump Dave up in your friendship hierarchy, um there are often times where you

1962
01:56:00,790 --> 01:56:01,990
have to choose between me and Dave.

1963
01:56:02,070 --> 01:56:05,990
You only have one concert ticket or one spot left at the at the dinner reservation.

1964
01:56:06,070 --> 01:56:07,270
Are you gonna choose me or Dave?

1965
01:56:07,430 --> 01:56:11,270
If you bump Dave up, then then you're gonna be less likely to choose me and I'm gonna pay

1966
01:56:11,270 --> 01:56:11,990
costs for that.

1967
01:56:12,150 --> 01:56:13,670
That's gonna be a direct threat to me.

1968
01:56:13,750 --> 01:56:17,750
Uh and we need to think about those kinds of positive and negative externalities of of

1969
01:56:17,750 --> 01:56:18,070
friendship.

1970
01:56:18,150 --> 01:56:20,710
And you know a relationship with you is not just a relationship to you.

1971
01:56:20,790 --> 01:56:23,430
It affects everyone else in the social network.

1972
01:56:23,590 --> 01:56:26,470
Um it's it it's way more complicated than we think.

1973
01:56:26,710 --> 01:56:31,220
Um so I pulled up the human universals, and you are correct.

1974
01:56:31,380 --> 01:56:34,340
The word friendship is not on the list.

1975
01:56:34,820 --> 01:56:40,100
However, there are there are some relate there's like cooperation is there, um

1976
01:56:40,340 --> 01:56:45,220
reciprocity is there, affection expressed and felt is there.

1977
01:56:45,620 --> 01:56:48,900
Um you have like coalitions and collective identities.

1978
01:56:49,380 --> 01:56:54,650
Alliances Uh the word alliance is not there.

1979
01:56:55,050 --> 01:56:58,330
You have coalitions, collective identities, and conflict.

1980
01:56:59,610 --> 01:57:01,210
You have insulting.

1981
01:57:03,130 --> 01:57:07,530
You have division of labor, role social roles.

1982
01:57:07,690 --> 01:57:11,850
So stuff that's sort of like related to friendship on the periphery of it.

1983
01:57:12,330 --> 01:57:14,010
Do you have the romantic stuff?

1984
01:57:14,410 --> 01:57:19,850
Do you have um mating or pair bonds or any of those?

1985
01:57:20,580 --> 01:57:25,220
Um let's have those and you don't have friendship.

1986
01:57:25,380 --> 01:57:29,860
Um, you only have some of the features that are sometimes common to friendship, then it

1987
01:57:29,860 --> 01:57:31,220
would be more egregious.

1988
01:57:31,460 --> 01:57:35,060
Again, it's still an amazing list, it's really important, etc.

1989
01:57:35,300 --> 01:57:35,540
etc.

1990
01:57:36,020 --> 01:57:37,460
Not yeah.

1991
01:57:38,100 --> 01:57:38,500
Yeah.

1992
01:57:38,660 --> 01:57:41,790
Uh so yeah, uh this I don't know.

1993
01:57:41,870 --> 01:57:42,670
It's it's interesting.

1994
01:57:42,750 --> 01:57:43,550
It's an interesting omission.

1995
01:57:43,630 --> 01:57:48,110
So yeah, there's sexual attracti attraction, sexual attractiveness, sexual jealousy, uh

1996
01:57:48,270 --> 01:57:49,150
stuff like that.

1997
01:57:49,390 --> 01:57:54,910
Um so yeah, this this this could be uh an important omission.

1998
01:57:55,070 --> 01:57:56,110
Um I think it is.

1999
01:57:56,750 --> 01:57:57,230
Yeah.

2000
01:57:57,550 --> 01:57:57,870
Cool.

2001
01:57:58,030 --> 01:58:03,200
Um Yeah, I mean it goes back to what you guys have been saying about we don't even have

2002
01:58:03,200 --> 01:58:04,800
words for some of these things, right?

2003
01:58:04,960 --> 01:58:09,600
We don't have friendship um canalization or friendship first base, second base.

2004
01:58:09,920 --> 01:58:10,080
Yeah.

2005
01:58:10,320 --> 01:58:15,520
We don't have um, you know, uh Pensaff, what did you say?

2006
01:58:15,600 --> 01:58:16,640
Uh sexual attraction.

2007
01:58:16,720 --> 01:58:18,640
We don't have like friend attraction.

2008
01:58:18,960 --> 01:58:23,200
We don't have like um your friend sociosexuality.

2009
01:58:23,970 --> 01:58:24,290
Yeah.

2010
01:58:25,410 --> 01:58:25,490
Yeah.

2011
01:58:25,730 --> 01:58:28,770
Bromance is probably the closest thing, but that's even not quite attraction.

2012
01:58:28,850 --> 01:58:30,530
That's what happens after the attraction.

2013
01:58:30,610 --> 01:58:30,850
Yeah.

2014
01:58:31,010 --> 01:58:31,170
Yeah.

2015
01:58:31,330 --> 01:58:32,370
That's more like courtship.

2016
01:58:32,450 --> 01:58:32,850
Yeah.

2017
01:58:33,090 --> 01:58:33,330
Yeah.

2018
01:58:33,730 --> 01:58:34,450
What is friendship?

2019
01:58:34,610 --> 01:58:35,090
Courtship.

2020
01:58:35,170 --> 01:58:36,290
What is like it?

2021
01:58:36,450 --> 01:58:42,370
We are so good at denying that we are doing this friendship flirting that because

2022
01:58:42,370 --> 01:58:45,330
it would be bad, like you don't want to be the friendship flirt, right?

2023
01:58:45,410 --> 01:58:47,730
No one wants to be the person courting the friendship.

2024
01:58:47,810 --> 01:58:52,770
So, like you're saying, um, so we don't even have words for it.

2025
01:58:53,080 --> 01:58:54,600
Um maybe that.

2026
01:58:54,680 --> 01:58:57,960
So I keep getting approached by people to be like, write a book on friendship.

2027
01:58:58,040 --> 01:59:01,000
Then I'll be like, I will when I have data to write about.

2028
01:59:01,240 --> 01:59:06,840
Um, but that might be a first chapter, is just all the words that we don't have for,

2029
01:59:07,080 --> 01:59:10,760
you know, this is the list of romantic relationship things.

2030
01:59:10,920 --> 01:59:16,920
Um, this is the list of sort of uh slang in in the popular lexicon.

2031
01:59:17,000 --> 01:59:21,230
You have your bromance, but um what would be the actual word for this?

2032
01:59:21,390 --> 01:59:25,550
What is the give us a language to use at least?

2033
01:59:25,710 --> 01:59:28,910
Um so yeah, maybe one day.

2034
01:59:29,310 --> 01:59:33,870
And we don't have a a a girl mance word as far as I'm aware.

2035
01:59:34,190 --> 01:59:40,120
Um no, I'm I'm pretty sure that that's like an XNXX search term, but

2036
01:59:40,120 --> 01:59:40,440
yeah.

2037
01:59:43,640 --> 01:59:44,840
Yeah, don't Google that at work.

2038
01:59:45,160 --> 01:59:46,280
Yeah, and I won't Google that.

2039
01:59:46,680 --> 01:59:49,880
That'll be my my OnlyFans page, Girl Mance.

2040
01:59:50,520 --> 01:59:51,000
Awesome.

2041
01:59:51,160 --> 01:59:51,480
Yeah.

2042
01:59:51,720 --> 01:59:54,280
Jamie, is there any question we should have asked you?

2043
01:59:54,760 --> 02:00:00,680
Oh, um uh I

2044
02:00:00,680 --> 02:00:03,000
mean I don't have a good F psych animal name.

2045
02:00:03,160 --> 02:00:03,800
You do.

2046
02:00:04,040 --> 02:00:09,830
Um what There is

2047
02:00:09,830 --> 02:00:11,670
nothing that I can think of.

2048
02:00:11,910 --> 02:00:15,430
This was so much fun and very thorough.

2049
02:00:15,590 --> 02:00:21,430
And I am really, I forgot how great it was to just talk about

2050
02:00:21,430 --> 02:00:26,870
ideas without having a necessary return on investment.

2051
02:00:27,270 --> 02:00:32,870
Um, you know, there needs to be a paper at the end of this, or let's talk about this toward

2052
02:00:32,870 --> 02:00:33,830
a paper.

2053
02:00:34,180 --> 02:00:38,020
um, just open-ended conversation about ideas.

2054
02:00:38,180 --> 02:00:41,220
It makes me want to cry to remember that I like this.

2055
02:00:41,940 --> 02:00:42,820
So thank you.

2056
02:00:43,300 --> 02:00:45,300
Yeah, you gotta let people breathe.

2057
02:00:45,540 --> 02:00:45,940
Yeah.

2058
02:00:46,180 --> 02:00:47,700
We gotta let ourselves breathe.

2059
02:00:47,940 --> 02:00:48,340
Yeah.

2060
02:00:48,660 --> 02:00:50,180
Really good to talk to you, Jamie.

2061
02:00:50,740 --> 02:00:55,060
Unless unless you've thought of a question between now and the the previous thing.

2062
02:00:55,460 --> 02:00:56,020
I wish.

2063
02:00:56,180 --> 02:00:56,660
I wish.

2064
02:00:56,740 --> 02:00:57,140
I know.

2065
02:00:57,300 --> 02:01:01,220
I just um someday I want to ask you all about your friendships.

2066
02:01:01,540 --> 02:01:03,220
I think that would be really fun.

2067
02:01:03,430 --> 02:01:05,510
Um, but thank you for having me.

2068
02:01:05,670 --> 02:01:06,550
I really appreciate it.

2069
02:01:06,630 --> 02:01:08,150
This was fantastic.

2070
02:01:08,470 --> 02:01:08,790
Cool.

2071
02:01:08,950 --> 02:01:09,670
This was lots of fun.

2072
02:01:09,750 --> 02:01:13,510
Maybe we'll bring you back sometime and we'll talk about our friendship stories.

2073
02:01:18,710 --> 02:01:19,990
Thank you for listening.

2074
02:01:20,150 --> 02:01:25,030
Uh if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a kind review or check out our Patreon

2075
02:01:25,030 --> 02:01:26,870
page if you want to throw us some money.

2076
02:01:27,110 --> 02:01:29,360
Uh Yeah.

2077
02:01:29,520 --> 02:01:29,840
Yeah.

2078
02:01:30,720 --> 02:01:31,200
I don't know.

2079
02:01:31,680 --> 02:01:32,720
Is there anything else to say?

2080
02:01:33,040 --> 02:01:39,040
Um uh come back for the next episode and um or if you're in the middle of binge

2081
02:01:39,120 --> 02:01:41,120
listening, you know, go for that.

2082
02:01:41,680 --> 02:01:42,000
Okay.

2083
02:01:42,480 --> 02:01:45,120
Um stay tuned for the for the next episode.