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This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

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Actual Evolutionary Psychology.

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By actual evolutionary psychologists.

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We didn't introduce our names.

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Was that Yeah, sometimes we leave that out.

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It's kinda I don't know.

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Do you want to say your name?

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Oh, I'm David Pinsaff.

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I'm David.

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well, I always say David Petruzki, which is correct.

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I mean that's what's on my driver's license, but I should say Dave Petrozowski because

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that's our different things.

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Probably.

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I think the reason we sometimes leave this out is because they're not like an ideal or

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obvious place to put our names.

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Like where should we put it?

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Like at the very beginning?

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But then how do we segue?

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Or the middle?

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Yeah.

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Do we do it after evolutionary cycles?

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This is pretty good.

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At the at the way end?

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This meta thing.

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No, we're just discussing where to put it.

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Um we should just be scientists about it in parametrically very I mean we should keep

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sentences whole, but otherwise we can put it at the beginning, middle, and end.

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Why don't we have our audience vote on it?

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Send us your opinions about where you think we should put our names.

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What are the options?

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Well, at the very beginning, before the name of the podcast and the tagline.

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We could put it in between the name of the podcast and the tagline, or we could put it at

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the end after the tagline.

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Or we have a long pause in the middle of the tagline and we could put it in between there,

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but that feels like an M-dash situation.

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Actual evolutionary psychologist meaning me dated pins off and like put it like in the

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middle of the tagline.

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That's like such an academic writing.

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Like that's that's my bad writing habit.

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I've become a better writer, but I still have such a I really want to just put a I want to

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put a whole clause in between us in just sandwich those sentences, just onion layers.

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All right, let's shut up and get to my pretty music.

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Okay, here we go.

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Enjoy.

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Um you, me, and Madveer saying Yes, Vir Singh, uh,

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excellent scholar, uh, really doing cutting-edge, uh awesome work at the intersection of

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anthropology and cognitive science and uh evolutionary theory.

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Um we covered so many interesting topics in this.

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Um we talked about shamanism, why shamanism uh appears in so many cultures around the world

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and why it's so psychologically compelling and attractive to the human mind.

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Um we talked a lot about um magical thinking like sympathetic magic, divination, and

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and what's going on there.

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Are these practices uh uh quote unquote stupid or irrational?

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Or are they serving some other function?

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Are they cognitive byproducts of um of the way our minds work?

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Or do they reflect a kind of error management logic?

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We get into all that stuff.

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Yeah.

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As a group psychologist, I've always wanted to talk to Monvier and Luke Gowaki about their

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recent work arguing that the social scale of ancestral environments or the EEA

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involves larger scale social communities than you might ordinarily think or

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people sort of thought in a sort of simple way from a in the

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EEA from sort of a diorama model perspective of the savannah.

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I got a chance to ask Man Veer um about that, which was lovely as well.

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Yeah.

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Very fun conversation.

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And yeah, uh this idea that the EEA was broader and more variable than we think, then it's

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not just this picture of the small scale egalitarian hunter-gatherer band, I think, is a

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major advance in our evolutionary thinking and should be continued to uh to be

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reflected on by evolutionary psychologists and scholars.

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And Manveer had a great background uh during the episode.

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If you were only listening on the acoustic modality, go check it out.

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He had Australian, was it Paleolithic megafauna?

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Was that am I remembering that correctly?

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That's right.

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He had a really great background.

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Yeah, yeah.

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And we talked a little bit about Ice Age uh creatures.

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Yes.

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And he's writing a book about mythology on the topic of Ice Age creatures.

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Yes, that's right.

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So get excited for that.

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It's gonna be a banger, I'm sure.

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Yeah.

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Um and uh anything else, David?

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No, I think that about that about does it.

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Okay.

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Well, uh enjoy Manvere and uh yeah, look for the megafauna.

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Look for them.

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Enjoy.

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Man Veer, we're really happy to have you here and and chat with you uh about all your

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interesting uh research interests uh and field work.

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Uh I have to interrupt before we even proceed.

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I'm really sorry.

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Um a terrible podcast co-host.

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Man Veer, can you explain your beautiful background, assuming you can see it yourself?

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Yes.

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Yes, yes, yes.

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This is place to see in Australia.

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Um so these are like places in megafauna.

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So we have the giant short faced kangaroo.

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We have diprotodon.

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It's like a giant wombat.

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Um yeah, yeah, I I I I have I'm kind of enchanted.

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To some degree.

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Yeah, I'm enchanted by the by the world of the megafauna.

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So what is not to be enchanted by?

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Um you you are in a good way a child who who didn't grow up like our children who love

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dinosaurs and are like, This is amazing.

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It is amazing, right?

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Uh it is.

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Yeah.

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I mean we have uh I I live close to the La Brea tar pits and I take my daughter there all

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the time.

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She loves it.

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But what's wild is just like these huge animals that coexisted with our ancestors.

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I remember see the the one exhibit was um an ice age bear that stood t literally 12 feet

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tall.

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Was this a cave bear?

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Just an Ice Age bear.

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Oh, okay.

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It wasn't specifically a cave.

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I don't know.

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And there was a taxidermy exhibit where you actually look up and see this bear standing 12

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feet tall, and imagining what it must have been like for our ancestors to have to contend

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with that in their environment is just wild.

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Yes.

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I'm gonna interrupt both of you again because this is a John Tubi story and it's worth

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saying.

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John Tubi is is he would tell undergraduates that you might think things are difficult, but

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your ancestors dealt with these 12-foot bears.

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Like you are more resilient.

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Your your nature is more uh resilient than you think.

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You your ancestors successfully dealt with this stuff.

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You can deal with what you're dealing with.

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Not in a minimizing way, but in an empowering.

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It put puts our bullshit in perspective.

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Correct.

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So Monvirt that's wonderful.

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Um uh yeah, there's eucalyptus all over here in in is it also in Davis? 'Cause in Southern

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California they the the settlers uh planted eucalyptus, which wasn't great because it's

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like fi firebombs, you know, like during the There's a lot of eucalyptus here.

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Are is there a lot there?

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Yeah, yeah.

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Are are there any megafauna aside from well, koalas are not megafauna unless were there

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giant koalas, do you know?

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Um I don't know.

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I don't know.

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But I think diprotodon, I think wombats and koalas are nice.

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Related.

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Okay.

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I mean there must have been.

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Yeah, because I'm just wondering, like, if there's like the interesting thing, like the

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avocado seed, and there's a giant ground sloth that could pass that pit, right?

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Because like, you know, seeds are for dispersal.

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Um, so the idea that there had to be something that could actually pass the pit of an

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avocado suggests a giant ground slot.

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So I was just wondering if there's any co-evolved megafauna in Australia for that have like

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weird plant relationships like that.

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Oh, I'm sure there are.

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I don't know.

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I don't know exactly.

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Have you seen this thing on a separate note?

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I think there are trees in the British Isles that there's a hypothesis that they're

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adapted to regularly being toppled over by elephants.

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No, that's fantastic.

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Or something like that.

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Or being brushed up against by elephants.

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Something like that.

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Wow.

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What what is the the counter response to that selection pressure?

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How do they deal with that?

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You mean in their can like in a modern world?

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Yeah.

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Or what are you asking?

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What's the design feature that suggests that they're designed to be brushed up?

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Oh, oh.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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And that's a good question.

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Interesting.

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Maybe like uh sharp branches or something.

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Or maybe like um I wonder if the uh uh they're they kind of break easily, but maybe it

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doesn't yeah, I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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Oh, that they can they can withstand uh bran branches breaking better than other trees or

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something like that.

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Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

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Interesting.

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There's a I think there's an argument that black bears are more docile than they should be

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given their relative formidability.

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And it's because especially at least in North America, They co-evolved with saber-tooth

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uh tiger cats and much bigger formidable animals.

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So we are actually very lucky.

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I mean, we killed off the grizzlies here in the continental US or southern or anyway, but

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uh but I think that's the argument is that they're more meek than they probably should be,

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and we're kind of grateful for that.

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But that's an EA holdover as well.

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Interesting.

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Interesting.

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Anyway, this is great.

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Anyway, Bonvier, thanks for coming.

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Uh this is great.

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I mean, it's it's good to start, you know, in broad strokes with the EEA as a concept with

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the ancestral selection pressures that's shaped human psychology.

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Um, and one of the most interesting things to emerge from these ancestral selection

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pressures is the practice of shamanism, which I know you've written um a beautiful

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book about called shamanism.

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I recommend that everyone read it.

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It's a wonderful book.

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And um a a priori, it seems like kind of a strange thing that would

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emerge from ancestral selection pressures.

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Shamanic practices these um elaborate rituals, um going

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into trances, taking uh hallucinogenic substances, um uh healing

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people or putting on ritualistic performances that suggest that some illness has been

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healed or some misfortune has been remedied.

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For me personally, when I think about these practices and how widespread how

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widespread and ubiquitous they are, I find myself very puzzled because I myself,

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as a uh Western science-minded atheist, um cannot wrap my head around

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why people um buy into this and why they aren't more skeptical.

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And I'm curious if if you share that mindset when approaching, or if you shared it in the

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past and and approach this topic with a kind of um uh uh

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bafflement or or at least curiosity as to as to how people could um overcome their

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skepticism and epistemic vigilance.

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And I'm curious is if um as you've studied shamanism more closely, um if that

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mindset has changed and now you you can begin to see um how and why people uh entertain

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these ideas and find them compelling.

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Yeah, there's a lot packaged into that question.

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Um and and there's a there's a lot to talk about.

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So yeah, one of the basic questions that I confronted in

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starting to think about shamanism was the one of why should people

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um pay other experts or specialists to engage in these practices?

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Why are we predisposed to rely on on practices or techniques that that by many

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measures seem to have no effect on their stated purpose.

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You know, you I I I promise to attack babies in a neighboring group, to change the weather,

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to divine the location of animals.

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Um as far as we know, these these kinds of promises, um, these these practitioners or

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specialists don't actually have the capacity to necessarily ensure those.

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Um, and in the book, I I review some evidence for why I think that's the case.

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Um so honestly, at the at the foundation, what I think

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is really important is a kind of error management or uh a a a

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bet-hedging psychology, um, which has been used to understand superstition and magic and

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ritual more generally.

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Um, and so, you know, I think shamanism is is a really intricate or

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elaborate manifestation, but we can start with something as simple as why do sports players

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uh wear the same whatever boxers or sports

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trucks or whatever they're called socks.

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Yeah, or have they have their lucky job strap or whate whatever.

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Yeah, yeah.

250
00:12:45,460 --> 00:12:47,700
Why do they cross lines and dirt?

251
00:12:47,860 --> 00:12:51,700
Why do people who are about to take a big exam um wear certain amulets?

252
00:12:51,780 --> 00:12:56,980
You know, there there are many manifestations, many forms of superstition, magic, ritual

253
00:12:56,980 --> 00:13:00,180
that we find even in contemporary Western societies.

254
00:13:00,900 --> 00:13:06,510
And I think a really powerful theoretical lens for

255
00:13:06,670 --> 00:13:09,470
explaining that has been a kind of error management psychology.

256
00:13:09,710 --> 00:13:14,190
That as people are evaluating causal relationships or

257
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choosing different interventions to act on the world in instrumental ways, there are two

258
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kinds of uh errors they can confront.

259
00:13:22,430 --> 00:13:28,000
They can either have false positives, so they can um they can think there's a relationship

260
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when there isn't one, or they can have a miss.

261
00:13:29,840 --> 00:13:34,320
They can fail to discern a useful relationship when there actually is one.

262
00:13:34,480 --> 00:13:40,400
Um, and uh as a lot of evolutionary psychology or some work in evolutionary psychology,

263
00:13:40,480 --> 00:13:44,640
people like Mart Marty Hazleton have have shown, but also as has been explored in things

264
00:13:44,640 --> 00:13:50,480
like signal detection theory, um or um you know the the the the

265
00:13:50,480 --> 00:13:56,250
body of theory about uh air management more broadly, um uh when

266
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there is an asymmetry of costs um associated with with two kinds of errors,

267
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uh you want to uh you know, natural selection will favor uh setting the

268
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threshold in a way that minimizes the more costly error.

269
00:14:10,810 --> 00:14:14,810
Um and so I don't know what's going on over there.

270
00:14:15,130 --> 00:14:19,850
Okay, if you can't see there's an incredible light show happening in that mirror's

271
00:14:20,970 --> 00:14:22,170
zoom did something very interesting.

272
00:14:22,330 --> 00:14:22,490
Yeah.

273
00:14:22,980 --> 00:14:26,180
And we're just transformed into something supernatural.

274
00:14:26,500 --> 00:14:32,420
So so the the example that comes up a lot is is a um a a smoke detector, a a fire alarm.

275
00:14:32,580 --> 00:14:37,700
Um and so yeah, you're going to you're gonna set the threshold sufficiently low that it's

276
00:14:37,700 --> 00:14:40,180
going to uh go off more than it should be.

277
00:14:40,260 --> 00:14:43,940
It's gonna go off when people are like smoking marijuana in their dorms or when someone's

278
00:14:43,940 --> 00:14:45,780
cooking some veggies and they start to burn.

279
00:14:45,860 --> 00:14:50,450
Um, But you're willing to take these costs, these false alarms, because it means the

280
00:14:50,450 --> 00:14:54,130
threshold is sufficiently low that you're going to minimize the cost of these costly

281
00:14:54,370 --> 00:14:54,930
misses.

282
00:14:55,010 --> 00:14:58,370
That even every time there is a fire, you're hopefully going to capture it.

283
00:14:58,770 --> 00:15:04,770
And so the argument is that magic fundamentally is the product of a

284
00:15:04,770 --> 00:15:05,490
similar psychology.

285
00:15:05,650 --> 00:15:10,620
And you can actually this this theory, this approach, an error management uh explanation of

286
00:15:10,620 --> 00:15:14,220
magic makes all kinds of predictions about the contexts in which people shouldn't should

287
00:15:14,220 --> 00:15:19,820
use magic so they should use magic in contexts where that are um where there are uh high

288
00:15:19,820 --> 00:15:25,420
stakes so what we're what you might think of as very fitness relevant in in um in in high

289
00:15:25,580 --> 00:15:31,410
stakes ways um contexts in which um individuals have have

290
00:15:31,410 --> 00:15:34,530
minimal control in contexts that that resolve randomly in their favor.

291
00:15:34,610 --> 00:15:40,450
And you can actually make a prediction that as the likelihood of the outcome happening

292
00:15:40,450 --> 00:15:43,570
goes low, the potential benefit should should become larger.

293
00:15:43,650 --> 00:15:45,570
You should have this compensatory effect.

294
00:15:46,690 --> 00:15:50,610
And these are these are really well uh borne out.

295
00:15:50,770 --> 00:15:53,700
So um decades of research on magic and superstition.

296
00:15:53,860 --> 00:15:54,340
Oh yeah, Dave.

297
00:15:54,660 --> 00:15:58,180
Can I just poke is that because the ex you're are you talking about something where the

298
00:15:58,180 --> 00:16:02,740
expected value is held constant such that the more variable it is, the higher the benefit

299
00:16:02,740 --> 00:16:02,900
is?

300
00:16:02,980 --> 00:16:05,140
Or can you just uh elaborate on that last point?

301
00:16:05,300 --> 00:16:08,740
I didn't quite follow why that would be Yeah.

302
00:16:08,820 --> 00:16:09,940
Well maybe maybe I'm mistaken.

303
00:16:10,020 --> 00:16:13,140
But yeah I'm thinking it's it's an expected expected benefit kind of thing.

304
00:16:13,570 --> 00:16:14,050
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

305
00:16:14,130 --> 00:16:14,210
Yeah.

306
00:16:14,530 --> 00:16:19,730
So I guess we should actually think it should accounting for the cost of the intervention.

307
00:16:19,970 --> 00:16:21,970
Um, good.

308
00:16:22,130 --> 00:16:26,450
So the cost benefit is constant, but the expected value, so like a low probability but very

309
00:16:26,450 --> 00:16:31,650
high benefit thing versus a lower variability or more probable thing that's a lower

310
00:16:31,650 --> 00:16:34,690
benefit, these might have the same expected value value.

311
00:16:34,770 --> 00:16:35,810
Okay, yes, yes, yes.

312
00:16:36,130 --> 00:16:36,450
I'm with you.

313
00:16:36,530 --> 00:16:36,610
Good.

314
00:16:36,690 --> 00:16:37,010
Good good.

315
00:16:37,250 --> 00:16:37,330
Okay.

316
00:16:37,410 --> 00:16:38,930
And and this is controlling for cost.

317
00:16:39,140 --> 00:16:39,700
Yeah, cool.

318
00:16:39,780 --> 00:16:39,860
Okay.

319
00:16:40,180 --> 00:16:45,620
Um so I I wanna chime in and and say why, you know, I I do f I find this logic

320
00:16:45,620 --> 00:16:50,660
compelling, I find the error management framework compelling, but I still don't find I I

321
00:16:50,660 --> 00:16:55,700
find that this doesn't quite scratch the itch for me in terms of satisfying my

322
00:16:55,700 --> 00:16:59,780
curiosity about why people believe uh this stuff.

323
00:16:59,940 --> 00:17:05,790
Because I can I can understand the error management logic, but it doesn't make it seem to

324
00:17:05,790 --> 00:17:11,710
me plausible that the particular causal relationship in question is at play.

325
00:17:11,950 --> 00:17:17,790
So, yes, um, insofar as errors are inevitable, we would expect natural selection to um

326
00:17:18,030 --> 00:17:20,990
uh favor the less costly error.

327
00:17:21,470 --> 00:17:26,270
Um, but also we would expect natural selection to minimize error in general, right?

328
00:17:26,480 --> 00:17:28,560
Insofar as there is any kind of cost.

329
00:17:28,720 --> 00:17:34,320
And one way to minimize error in general is to ground one's

330
00:17:34,320 --> 00:17:40,240
causal models on plausible regularities or folk ontologies, right?

331
00:17:40,480 --> 00:17:46,320
And so it seems to me that there is a plausible causal connection between, say, the

332
00:17:46,320 --> 00:17:49,050
type of bat that I use if I'm playing baseball.

333
00:17:49,210 --> 00:17:52,970
Say, you know, maybe maybe I'm more likely to hit the ball if the if the bat is lighter,

334
00:17:53,050 --> 00:17:53,530
let's say.

335
00:17:53,690 --> 00:17:58,250
Maybe I'm more likely to hit the ball if I'm standing a little uh closer to the base,

336
00:17:58,490 --> 00:17:58,810
right?

337
00:17:59,370 --> 00:18:03,690
These are plausible, these have plausible causal connections to the outcome of interest to

338
00:18:03,690 --> 00:18:04,890
me, which is hitting the ball.

339
00:18:05,370 --> 00:18:10,410
Whereas what jock strap I'm wearing, that just does not seem to have any kind of plausible

340
00:18:10,490 --> 00:18:14,600
causal mechanism that could increase the likelihood that I would hit the ball.

341
00:18:14,760 --> 00:18:20,440
And so it still seems odd to me that people would favor these explanations without a

342
00:18:20,440 --> 00:18:22,600
plausible causal mechanism at play.

343
00:18:22,680 --> 00:18:28,440
And ways that seem to violate our folk ontologies in a certain way.

344
00:18:28,680 --> 00:18:34,600
Usually we have folk physics, we have intuitions about how objects interact with each

345
00:18:34,600 --> 00:18:40,430
other, about how objects can't be in two places at once, about how if one thing is going to

346
00:18:40,430 --> 00:18:42,750
impinge upon another object, it has to make contact.

347
00:18:42,910 --> 00:18:44,270
We have all these intuitions.

348
00:18:44,430 --> 00:18:49,950
And it seems like uh there just doesn't seem to be a connection between, say, a

349
00:18:49,950 --> 00:18:52,750
jockstrap and and me hitting a home run.

350
00:18:52,910 --> 00:18:58,590
So I'm still my itch has not quite been scratched as to why people find these uh

351
00:18:58,830 --> 00:19:00,350
explanations compelling.

352
00:19:00,750 --> 00:19:00,830
Okay.

353
00:19:01,870 --> 00:19:05,150
Sorry, there's sorry, there's there's one more, there's one more uh part of it.

354
00:19:05,420 --> 00:19:11,340
Even if we accept the error management logic, um that um it is less costly to

355
00:19:11,340 --> 00:19:16,860
say wear the jock strap than to miss out on a potentially valuable causal relationship.

356
00:19:17,020 --> 00:19:22,540
Even if we buy that, that doesn't necessarily imply that that I need to

357
00:19:22,540 --> 00:19:28,250
sincerely believe that the jockstrap causes um the the the home run hitting, let's say.

358
00:19:28,410 --> 00:19:28,570
Right.

359
00:19:28,730 --> 00:19:33,690
I could just I could just think, you know, it probably it doesn't have any effect at all.

360
00:19:33,850 --> 00:19:37,610
But I'm just gonna wear it anyway because on the off chance that it does have an effect,

361
00:19:37,770 --> 00:19:41,850
um, it'll you know, that's you know, the the benefit is so large that it's still worth it

362
00:19:41,850 --> 00:19:44,730
for me to wear the jack strap, even though probably it doesn't do anything.

363
00:19:44,970 --> 00:19:47,920
Usually that's not how people talk about their superstitions.

364
00:19:48,080 --> 00:19:52,960
Usually they they have a sincere belief that it does have a causal connection, or at least

365
00:19:52,960 --> 00:19:55,440
that a causal connection is very significantly likely.

366
00:19:55,600 --> 00:19:59,360
So those are the two um areas that I would push back on in terms of this explanation.

367
00:19:59,440 --> 00:20:04,640
So why is the belief sincere um as opposed to say a low probability?

368
00:20:05,120 --> 00:20:10,960
Um and uh why do why are uh implausible or um

369
00:20:11,280 --> 00:20:15,200
folk ontologically unlikely causal relationships favored?

370
00:20:15,570 --> 00:20:16,210
Okay, awesome.

371
00:20:16,290 --> 00:20:16,530
Yeah.

372
00:20:16,610 --> 00:20:19,730
So let's maybe let's address the the second and then we can come back to the first.

373
00:20:19,810 --> 00:20:22,130
My my microphone is like blinking in and out of existence.

374
00:20:22,610 --> 00:20:23,010
Fantastic.

375
00:20:23,090 --> 00:20:25,650
It's so it's so on point for this conversation.

376
00:20:26,210 --> 00:20:29,570
Um okay, so for the second, I I think you're totally right.

377
00:20:29,730 --> 00:20:35,650
And in in fact, the empirical literature, the empirical evidence

378
00:20:35,730 --> 00:20:41,100
to my understanding, is not that people will profess um

379
00:20:41,340 --> 00:20:43,500
sincere and absolute belief in these superstitions.

380
00:20:43,660 --> 00:20:48,060
So the example that that I'm thinking about, which I I um touch upon in the book, is

381
00:20:48,060 --> 00:20:53,820
there's a study where people survey baseball players in Japan and the United States about

382
00:20:53,820 --> 00:20:54,860
their various superstitions.

383
00:20:54,940 --> 00:21:00,060
And, you know, they do jock straps, they're marking X's in the the dirt, whatever.

384
00:21:00,220 --> 00:21:03,130
Um a number of these other interventions.

385
00:21:03,210 --> 00:21:06,650
Um, and they actually asked them about their perceived efficacy.

386
00:21:06,890 --> 00:21:11,930
And um, although I I forget the exact number, it's like 75% or 80% of players engage in

387
00:21:11,930 --> 00:21:16,570
these superstitions, their uh evaluation for the efficacy is something like it's something

388
00:21:16,570 --> 00:21:20,730
between like almost never has an impact and maybe hasn't, or and maybe sometimes has an

389
00:21:20,730 --> 00:21:21,050
impact.

390
00:21:22,570 --> 00:21:28,280
And and that we should look at the paper, or or someone can look at the paper.

391
00:21:28,360 --> 00:21:30,920
Um, so so it's not necessarily do you believe in this?

392
00:21:31,000 --> 00:21:33,640
Yes, no, but it's like how effective do you think this actually is?

393
00:21:33,720 --> 00:21:36,440
And people's evaluation of the efficacy is is pretty low.

394
00:21:36,520 --> 00:21:41,960
Um and so I mentioned that to say that that um uh at least in the Western

395
00:21:42,760 --> 00:21:48,360
in this context, and kind of a weird context, um, people are not professing

396
00:21:49,370 --> 00:21:51,850
what we might call sincere absolute belief in this.

397
00:21:52,090 --> 00:21:55,770
In the in context where people are going to shamans, and one thing I talk about in my book

398
00:21:55,770 --> 00:22:01,130
is that I also think there's often there isn't an uh what there is,

399
00:22:02,890 --> 00:22:06,970
you know, ethnographically speaking, is there seems to be some faith that there are shamans

400
00:22:06,970 --> 00:22:08,570
somewhere who have these capacities.

401
00:22:08,730 --> 00:22:13,240
Um, but there is actually a constantly a lot of skepticism about individual practitioners.

402
00:22:13,400 --> 00:22:17,320
Some people have have skepticism about many practitioners or or all of the shamans who

403
00:22:17,320 --> 00:22:18,200
exist right now.

404
00:22:18,280 --> 00:22:23,640
Um, and so I think people go to shamans often without

405
00:22:23,640 --> 00:22:27,720
necessarily expecting them totally to to to work.

406
00:22:27,880 --> 00:22:29,880
Um so so that's the your second point.

407
00:22:30,040 --> 00:22:34,530
Your first point is a really interesting one and something that I have been thinking about

408
00:22:34,530 --> 00:22:37,490
a lot with one of my PhD students.

409
00:22:37,890 --> 00:22:39,250
We're thinking about.

410
00:22:39,650 --> 00:22:42,370
So are you familiar with the idea of sympathetic magic?

411
00:22:43,730 --> 00:22:45,330
Why don't you um I can go through it?

412
00:22:45,650 --> 00:22:45,890
Define it.

413
00:22:45,970 --> 00:22:46,210
Define it.

414
00:22:46,290 --> 00:22:46,370
Yeah.

415
00:22:46,610 --> 00:22:46,690
Yeah.

416
00:22:46,770 --> 00:22:51,570
So sympathetic magic is the basic principle that we find in a lot of magical practices as

417
00:22:51,570 --> 00:22:54,130
they occur across societies that like affects like.

418
00:22:54,370 --> 00:22:59,410
And there are two principles of sympathetic magic that are kind of codified in the

419
00:22:59,620 --> 00:23:00,980
anthropological literature.

420
00:23:01,140 --> 00:23:06,740
One is this idea of contagion that um something that touches something else, uh things that

421
00:23:06,740 --> 00:23:10,020
that touch end up impacting each other uh for a long time.

422
00:23:10,180 --> 00:23:13,940
So I can take one of your hairs and I can do magic on it and it will affect you.

423
00:23:14,100 --> 00:23:18,900
You can step in the dirt and I can you know affect w your footprint and it it'll affect

424
00:23:18,900 --> 00:23:19,140
you.

425
00:23:19,380 --> 00:23:23,170
Um The other one is uh similarity.

426
00:23:23,330 --> 00:23:29,010
Um, and this is more like that, like effects like the the quintessential example is the um

427
00:23:29,250 --> 00:23:32,610
the voodoo doll that uh or an effigy.

428
00:23:32,850 --> 00:23:37,330
I can make something that resembles something else, and I I can uh uh act on it and it will

429
00:23:37,330 --> 00:23:38,130
affect the target.

430
00:23:38,290 --> 00:23:42,290
Or, you know, I want to make rainfall, and so I sprinkle water on a little thing that

431
00:23:42,290 --> 00:23:43,570
resembles my house.

432
00:23:43,890 --> 00:23:49,700
Um and um There's this question of why

433
00:23:49,700 --> 00:23:55,300
is sympathetic magic, why are similarity and contagion so culturally sticky, and we might

434
00:23:55,300 --> 00:23:56,740
even say cognitively sticky?

435
00:23:56,820 --> 00:24:01,540
What is predisposing humans everywhere to so reliably gravitate towards these practices?

436
00:24:01,700 --> 00:24:04,980
And one hypothesis is actually kind of in accordance with what you're saying.

437
00:24:05,140 --> 00:24:10,500
Um maybe humans are endowed with particular causal

438
00:24:10,500 --> 00:24:11,220
intuitions.

439
00:24:11,380 --> 00:24:16,210
You know, we in in trying to map a causal structural of the world, uh, we are especially

440
00:24:16,210 --> 00:24:21,570
attentive, or or we are apt to suspect that things that touch end up imposing or are

441
00:24:21,570 --> 00:24:26,050
affecting each other, um, or somehow that things that that resemble each other have some

442
00:24:26,050 --> 00:24:28,930
kind of causal relationship or causal association.

443
00:24:29,090 --> 00:24:32,610
Um, and that predisposes us to favor those forms of magic.

444
00:24:32,770 --> 00:24:37,170
Now, that actually raises the question of why people should be endowed with predispositions

445
00:24:37,170 --> 00:24:41,420
that make them uh gravitate towards these causal relationships because it is not actually

446
00:24:41,420 --> 00:24:46,060
the fact that acting on things that resemble each other means that that they're they're

447
00:24:46,060 --> 00:24:46,860
affected.

448
00:24:47,100 --> 00:24:52,780
Um but but it's it's just to say that that I think at least one approach or one hypothesis

449
00:24:52,780 --> 00:24:57,100
is that yes, forms of magic that actually do accord with some kind of folk ontology of of

450
00:24:57,100 --> 00:24:58,700
causality are favored.

451
00:24:59,020 --> 00:25:04,780
Um now I've had actually pushback, and and my PhD student has has made me

452
00:25:06,630 --> 00:25:12,390
Uh uh a bit more skeptical or or a bit more open to the to the

453
00:25:12,390 --> 00:25:15,510
possibility that this isn't the case, that this isn't actually the best way to explain

454
00:25:15,510 --> 00:25:16,710
sympathetic magic.

455
00:25:16,870 --> 00:25:22,070
Um, and what she has really been arguing to me in a really interesting way from engaging

456
00:25:22,070 --> 00:25:28,070
with people in computational cognitive science is that um epistemic vigilance may

457
00:25:28,070 --> 00:25:34,040
apply to information that's coming from social others, um, but maybe it doesn't apply

458
00:25:34,040 --> 00:25:39,400
as much to us mapping out causal relationships or or or ways of intervening on the world

459
00:25:39,480 --> 00:25:44,440
that maybe in fact people are are quite yes, we're we're we're we're skeptical and careful

460
00:25:44,440 --> 00:25:48,520
of when when confronted with information by you know presented from from people who are

461
00:25:48,520 --> 00:25:49,800
maybe attempting to deceive us.

462
00:25:49,880 --> 00:25:54,360
But when actually trying to discern how what's affecting uh other things in the world, yes,

463
00:25:54,440 --> 00:25:58,040
we might have some folk physics, but we might actually be much more epistemically

464
00:25:58,040 --> 00:25:59,960
promiscuous or or open.

465
00:26:02,030 --> 00:26:07,630
Which which I find interesting and and goes against maybe some of the the things that I've

466
00:26:07,630 --> 00:26:12,910
really been been invited to think about or or ways that I've I've I've really thought about

467
00:26:12,990 --> 00:26:16,430
how humans get information and evaluate information from the world.

468
00:26:17,230 --> 00:26:20,350
But yeah, those are those are just some thoughts for your for your first question.

469
00:26:20,510 --> 00:26:24,190
Now actually going from your first question to shamanism, the interesting thing about

470
00:26:24,190 --> 00:26:29,300
shamanism is that shamans are not, you know, giving people jock straps and saying that this

471
00:26:29,300 --> 00:26:35,300
will affect your um your your your baseball playing um they are actually really

472
00:26:35,940 --> 00:26:41,700
acting within people's folk ontologies people's models of the world um and so

473
00:26:42,020 --> 00:26:46,580
uh what shamans almost overwhelmingly do is that they um

474
00:26:47,790 --> 00:26:53,710
uh provide some service or promise to to uh produce some desired outcome by engaging

475
00:26:53,710 --> 00:26:59,150
with unseen agents that are believed to to oversee or be related to the outcome that that

476
00:26:59,150 --> 00:27:00,190
you're interested in.

477
00:27:00,270 --> 00:27:04,830
Um so you believe that you're sick because a witch has harmed you the shaman will attack

478
00:27:04,830 --> 00:27:10,510
that witch you believe that um yeah you're you're sick because a a a a particular

479
00:27:10,510 --> 00:27:15,360
ghost um attacked you, or because your soul was lost somewhere, they'll call back your

480
00:27:15,360 --> 00:27:15,600
soul.

481
00:27:15,680 --> 00:27:18,480
You want rain, they'll engage with some kind of rain goddess.

482
00:27:18,640 --> 00:27:24,480
Um, and so so uh yeah, if we think about y'all might be

483
00:27:24,480 --> 00:27:30,000
familiar with model free and model-based learning, this idea that um when people are um

484
00:27:31,040 --> 00:27:35,520
learning or evaluating actions, they both use kind of expected costs and benefits, but also

485
00:27:35,520 --> 00:27:36,800
simulated models of the world.

486
00:27:36,880 --> 00:27:40,350
And I think to understand shamanism, it kind of helps to think about both that there's an

487
00:27:40,350 --> 00:27:46,030
error management way in which people um just um uh

488
00:27:46,670 --> 00:27:51,310
are using expected reward in ways that minimize costly errors, but then they're also

489
00:27:51,310 --> 00:27:54,990
actually evaluating practices within their own models of of reality.

490
00:27:55,150 --> 00:27:59,870
I mean, that then raises the question or begs the question of why do people believe that

491
00:27:59,870 --> 00:28:05,820
gods, ghosts, spirits, witches uh are involved in the outcomes that that they're

492
00:28:05,820 --> 00:28:11,740
interested in, but um but I do think shamans are are actually tapping into

493
00:28:11,740 --> 00:28:14,780
people's folk ontologies of causality, if that makes sense.

494
00:28:15,340 --> 00:28:15,820
For sure.

495
00:28:15,980 --> 00:28:16,220
Yeah.

496
00:28:16,300 --> 00:28:19,180
I mean, what what do you think about this way of thinking about it?

497
00:28:19,340 --> 00:28:25,020
So this the sympathetic magic stuff doesn't really make sense in terms of folk

498
00:28:25,180 --> 00:28:25,740
physics.

499
00:28:25,980 --> 00:28:30,610
So if I if I water a model of a miniature model of my house.

500
00:28:30,770 --> 00:28:35,410
There's not really a physical mechanism that could link that to the rain, to real rain

501
00:28:35,730 --> 00:28:37,410
raining on my house, right?

502
00:28:39,490 --> 00:28:45,090
But in the social world, that relationship might actually make

503
00:28:45,410 --> 00:28:45,970
sense.

504
00:28:46,210 --> 00:28:51,920
So if I attack or burn an image of you or a statue of you,

505
00:28:52,080 --> 00:28:55,120
that really does suggest some animus toward you.

506
00:28:55,360 --> 00:28:59,760
How I uh interact with something that is similar to you or symbolically represents you

507
00:29:00,000 --> 00:29:03,520
really could tell you important information about my allegiances.

508
00:29:03,680 --> 00:29:08,000
If I burn the American flag, for instance, uh, that might tell you something really

509
00:29:08,000 --> 00:29:11,280
important about my uh coalitional allegiances.

510
00:29:11,440 --> 00:29:16,800
So while sympathetic magic doesn't really make sense in terms of uh folk physics, it might

511
00:29:16,800 --> 00:29:19,230
make a kind of social sense, right?

512
00:29:19,390 --> 00:29:25,390
And insofar as the sympathetic magic ritual is a social ritual designed to affect

513
00:29:25,550 --> 00:29:31,550
um the actions of supernatural agents, um maybe it could be seen

514
00:29:31,550 --> 00:29:37,070
as a kind of intentional signal or communicative uh gesture toward um uh another

515
00:29:37,070 --> 00:29:40,750
supernatural agent as opposed to a physical mechanism.

516
00:29:41,150 --> 00:29:46,750
In other words, that the the the logic of social life and symbolism and communication is

517
00:29:46,750 --> 00:29:51,200
being um brought into the domain of physics where it doesn't belong.

518
00:29:51,440 --> 00:29:53,440
Do you buy that way of thinking of this?

519
00:29:54,800 --> 00:30:00,320
So so then would you say that um sympathetic magic as it's used for non-social

520
00:30:00,400 --> 00:30:04,400
instrumental ends, hunting magic, for example, is like a kluge byproduct?

521
00:30:04,560 --> 00:30:05,680
Is that the account?

522
00:30:06,160 --> 00:30:06,400
Yeah.

523
00:30:06,480 --> 00:30:10,640
So I would I would suspect, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that that maybe the model

524
00:30:10,640 --> 00:30:15,510
that's that's uh that people have in their head is that there's some agent, some

525
00:30:15,510 --> 00:30:20,630
supernatural agent that is causally responsible for whether I succeed in this hunt or not.

526
00:30:20,950 --> 00:30:26,390
And if I make some kind of communicative or symbolic gesture that this agent would

527
00:30:26,390 --> 00:30:29,670
understand, then that might help me succeed in this hunt.

528
00:30:29,910 --> 00:30:35,350
So it's not so much that um the symbolic act is causally related to the to the success of

529
00:30:35,350 --> 00:30:39,910
the hunt in a way that a billiard ball is related to the movement of another billiard ball.

530
00:30:39,990 --> 00:30:45,900
Uh it's that the ritual is a symbolic gesture or a social gesture or communicative

531
00:30:45,900 --> 00:30:47,740
act to an imagined agent.

532
00:30:48,220 --> 00:30:48,380
Yeah.

533
00:30:48,700 --> 00:30:50,380
Just to interrupt, it's like a storyboard.

534
00:30:50,540 --> 00:30:51,980
It's the function of storyboarding.

535
00:30:52,060 --> 00:30:57,180
So it's sort of storyboarding for the future to spirits as opposed to storyboarding so we

536
00:30:57,180 --> 00:30:59,180
can all make a movie.

537
00:31:00,300 --> 00:31:05,340
So that would that would predict that that these rituals would coincide with some belief in

538
00:31:05,340 --> 00:31:09,730
a supernatural agent, and you would rarely, if ever, see these kinds of rituals in the

539
00:31:09,730 --> 00:31:14,450
absence of any belief about a spirit or or a or s or a supernatural agent.

540
00:31:14,930 --> 00:31:16,850
Yeah, I the thing I struggle with.

541
00:31:17,250 --> 00:31:18,370
So it's an interesting account.

542
00:31:18,450 --> 00:31:22,130
The thing I struggle with is that it it does seem like sympathetic magic.

543
00:31:22,370 --> 00:31:27,330
So so I do think like the the practitioners of sympathetic magic also often do hold beliefs

544
00:31:27,330 --> 00:31:28,850
in supernatural agents.

545
00:31:30,130 --> 00:31:34,530
When they're engaging in it, it doesn't seem like they often necessarily

546
00:31:36,930 --> 00:31:40,820
are invoking those supernatural agents, are trying to communicate with them.

547
00:31:41,220 --> 00:31:47,220
They do seem like actions devoid of these kinds of supernatural

548
00:31:47,220 --> 00:31:48,100
third parties.

549
00:31:48,740 --> 00:31:53,220
You know, you might you might argue back, well, that doesn't necessarily mean that they

550
00:31:53,220 --> 00:31:54,900
don't represent them as being there.

551
00:31:55,140 --> 00:31:59,300
Um yeah, I I I'll say that uh it's an interesting account.

552
00:31:59,460 --> 00:32:03,430
I am a little skeptical, but But it's interesting.

553
00:32:05,350 --> 00:32:10,150
Is that response sort of, I think, for for many listeners, presumably their more similar

554
00:32:10,150 --> 00:32:15,510
experience would be something like if you're in church, there's sort of a right way to do a

555
00:32:15,510 --> 00:32:16,310
ritual.

556
00:32:16,550 --> 00:32:21,430
But we're not thinking like, oh, where is God in the building such that he's or Jesus or

557
00:32:21,430 --> 00:32:23,750
the Holy Spirit such that he's watching us right now?

558
00:32:23,910 --> 00:32:27,510
Is that the sort of flavor of what your response was?

559
00:32:27,590 --> 00:32:33,120
Is that if it's true, if David's storyboarding account is true, the

560
00:32:33,120 --> 00:32:38,800
proximate experience, at least on the ground, isn't

561
00:32:39,040 --> 00:32:43,520
really explicit awareness of the agent in the same way that I just described for most

562
00:32:43,520 --> 00:32:44,720
people's experience of church.

563
00:32:44,880 --> 00:32:47,040
Is that a fair characteristic?

564
00:32:47,360 --> 00:32:51,600
Yeah, you're saying if I wanted to buttress the account against the response that people

565
00:32:51,600 --> 00:32:57,310
aren't invoking it, one response might be that just as people are maybe

566
00:32:57,310 --> 00:33:01,310
without awareness but still feeling watched in church or something.

567
00:33:01,710 --> 00:33:07,390
Yeah, or or maybe just uh I think I was just sort of many people aren't familiar with the

568
00:33:07,550 --> 00:33:12,670
the ethnographic or cross-cultural uh work that you are.

569
00:33:12,830 --> 00:33:18,750
And so I'm just sort of trying to imagine a more mundane for listeners and for myself even

570
00:33:18,910 --> 00:33:24,060
experience that's very similar that I think you could see it both ways, right?

571
00:33:24,140 --> 00:33:27,420
Like you can argue that there's this weird ritual we do in church.

572
00:33:27,580 --> 00:33:29,660
And if some kid is like, Well, why do we do this?

573
00:33:29,740 --> 00:33:32,220
It's because, well, honey, because God is watching us.

574
00:33:32,460 --> 00:33:36,060
But nobody's like, you know, like looking around, being like, Where is God?

575
00:33:36,220 --> 00:33:39,980
Or, you know, I mean But so I'll say like the difference I think.

576
00:33:40,060 --> 00:33:42,780
So I'll give you an example just uh uh in Mentui.

577
00:33:43,350 --> 00:33:48,230
so I I have for many years worked off the west coast of Sumatra in the Mintawe Islands.

578
00:33:48,310 --> 00:33:50,630
And as a part of my work, we built a small house.

579
00:33:50,710 --> 00:33:55,910
And whenever you build a house, you have to engage in a lot of magic to um protect it.

580
00:33:56,070 --> 00:34:01,910
Um and so you plant plants outside in the front, some of which um promise good and some of

581
00:34:01,910 --> 00:34:03,110
which deter bad.

582
00:34:03,270 --> 00:34:08,720
Um and so the plants that deter bad, there's one that um one of these plants that when you

583
00:34:08,720 --> 00:34:10,160
touch it, it kind of closes.

584
00:34:10,320 --> 00:34:13,600
There's another plant that is very twisty.

585
00:34:14,000 --> 00:34:19,520
And there's a lot of sympathetic causality invoked that when the evil comes or

586
00:34:20,000 --> 00:34:24,000
bad things come, these deter it in in very many ways.

587
00:34:25,120 --> 00:34:30,970
And so I when they're planting it and and thinking about this, uh uh

588
00:34:31,370 --> 00:34:37,130
the sense is more that this there's some kind of causal relationship here than there

589
00:34:37,130 --> 00:34:42,010
is some kind of it's not even like they say that God is watching or spirits are watching,

590
00:34:42,090 --> 00:34:43,770
but they don't know they're not aware of them.

591
00:34:43,930 --> 00:34:48,970
It's it's it's really kind of detached from the discussion about supernatural agents, if

592
00:34:48,970 --> 00:34:49,450
that's clear.

593
00:34:49,900 --> 00:34:50,940
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

594
00:34:51,100 --> 00:34:56,940
I mean, I yeah, it and this is maybe my question too is that it might be also that magic

595
00:34:56,940 --> 00:35:00,780
or shamanism or rituals are s are a very heterogeneous class.

596
00:35:00,940 --> 00:35:02,700
And in fact, both things might be right.

597
00:35:03,180 --> 00:35:03,900
Yes, yes, yes.

598
00:35:04,060 --> 00:35:06,700
No, no, I think they are a very heterogeneous class.

599
00:35:06,780 --> 00:35:09,660
And I think you can have different mechanistic experiences.

600
00:35:09,980 --> 00:35:14,460
Did Clark Clark had uh some talks, and I don't know, hi Clark, if you're listening, um, on

601
00:35:14,460 --> 00:35:15,180
hunting magic.

602
00:35:15,470 --> 00:35:15,870
I remember that.

603
00:35:16,030 --> 00:35:17,390
Uh in his argument.

604
00:35:17,870 --> 00:35:19,470
Yeah, and I think I don't know if it's published.

605
00:35:19,550 --> 00:35:21,550
I know he has this cool volume.

606
00:35:21,790 --> 00:35:23,710
Um, we can listen back to our episode.

607
00:35:23,790 --> 00:35:25,630
I think he talked about it when we interviewed him.

608
00:35:25,870 --> 00:35:31,070
But his argument was that um hunting magic in Monvere, you might know even better than me,

609
00:35:31,150 --> 00:35:32,430
um, if you remember more.

610
00:35:32,510 --> 00:35:38,030
But essentially it's sort of self-mental technology um of uh

611
00:35:38,670 --> 00:35:44,350
having a routine, just like meditation is it's a technology of um

612
00:35:45,720 --> 00:35:51,240
providing inputs to your own information processing system to, for example, de-stress,

613
00:35:51,720 --> 00:35:53,400
focus, attend.

614
00:35:54,200 --> 00:35:56,760
And those things can work, right?

615
00:35:57,000 --> 00:36:02,840
Like if you're too worried about performing, like you know, if you're on a sports

616
00:36:02,840 --> 00:36:08,550
team, then you might systems might be engaged that actually are counterproductive to peak

617
00:36:08,550 --> 00:36:09,110
performance.

618
00:36:09,270 --> 00:36:14,950
And it might be some rituals like goalies wiping the mistake off the off the goalpost

619
00:36:15,190 --> 00:36:20,950
is is a way to ritualize getting in a certain information processing state.

620
00:36:21,030 --> 00:36:26,950
And I think Clark's argument was that some of hunting magic was like this, where it was

621
00:36:26,950 --> 00:36:32,310
a way to calibrate which systems within the phenotype are sort of turned on and how much

622
00:36:32,390 --> 00:36:38,360
and which ones aren't, and to get in that reliable state that apparently is fairly well

623
00:36:38,360 --> 00:36:42,200
attuned for, you know, for example, noticing prey animals or something.

624
00:36:42,680 --> 00:36:44,760
Monvir, I'm curious what you think about that.

625
00:36:44,920 --> 00:36:46,280
Is that a different account?

626
00:36:46,440 --> 00:36:49,400
Is that a different account for a different part of the elephant, so to speak?

627
00:36:49,640 --> 00:36:50,840
Pardon the the pun.

628
00:36:51,240 --> 00:36:54,120
Um or or or am I getting it wrong?

629
00:36:54,200 --> 00:36:55,640
What do what are your thoughts about that?

630
00:36:55,720 --> 00:36:55,960
Yeah.

631
00:36:56,360 --> 00:37:00,570
Yeah, so I don't remember the exact account, but what you said does does vaguely accord

632
00:37:00,570 --> 00:37:01,610
with what I what I remember.

633
00:37:01,690 --> 00:37:05,530
So I um I I trust that that's like a solid representation.

634
00:37:05,770 --> 00:37:11,690
Um yeah, so I would say there's a there's a whole class of explanations of magic uh

635
00:37:11,770 --> 00:37:16,890
uh that also are empirically borne out to some degree that argue for what we might call

636
00:37:17,130 --> 00:37:18,330
intrinsic benefits.

637
00:37:18,490 --> 00:37:22,810
Um so there's also a bunch of literature, including some experimental work, showing that um

638
00:37:22,890 --> 00:37:28,520
people who are engage in magic or rituals or superstitions also um uh

639
00:37:29,240 --> 00:37:33,800
it it functions to reduce stress or anxiety and you can measure that in physiological

640
00:37:33,800 --> 00:37:33,960
measures.

641
00:37:34,360 --> 00:37:34,840
Yeah totally.

642
00:37:36,120 --> 00:37:41,640
Um yeah uh I think that's all plausible.

643
00:37:41,800 --> 00:37:43,880
I think it's plausible that it has those effects.

644
00:37:44,120 --> 00:37:50,120
Um I I'm honestly I tend to be a little skeptical that those are the

645
00:37:51,890 --> 00:37:55,890
that is the function of magic, or that is the driving effect, that is the effect of magic

646
00:37:55,890 --> 00:37:58,690
that that contributes to its existence in the first place.

647
00:37:59,010 --> 00:38:04,930
Um now, yeah, I guess I maybe I'm so stuck in in kind of

648
00:38:04,930 --> 00:38:10,450
an error management point of view, but I find really, really compelling it's the the

649
00:38:10,450 --> 00:38:16,000
capacity of an error management approach or an approach that simply like trusts the

650
00:38:16,000 --> 00:38:22,000
instrumental ends that people are are ex explicating for explaining just the differentials

651
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:25,840
and costs and benefits, the contexts in which people are engaging in magic.

652
00:38:26,000 --> 00:38:31,280
I just think that approach has been so predictively powerful for explaining so much of the

653
00:38:31,280 --> 00:38:35,120
the context in which people are are using magic, just how how they think about it.

654
00:38:35,280 --> 00:38:40,480
And it it what I find also kind of compelling and and you know I I don't necessarily think

655
00:38:40,480 --> 00:38:46,010
we should always trust people's word for it, but it's it's an approach where it it like is

656
00:38:46,010 --> 00:38:49,690
pretty rigorous and sophisticated about the kinds of predictions it's making and it also

657
00:38:49,690 --> 00:38:53,770
totally accords with how people actually explicate their thought processes.

658
00:38:53,850 --> 00:38:57,690
You know, I am trying to use this practice because I want to have this objective on the

659
00:38:57,690 --> 00:38:58,010
world.

660
00:38:58,650 --> 00:39:03,770
So I I I think of these intrinsic benefits, this this whole class of intrinsic benefits as

661
00:39:03,770 --> 00:39:09,690
potentially epiphenomenal, but not necessarily I'm I'm I'm sometimes I'm I'm

662
00:39:09,690 --> 00:39:15,660
skeptical that if you want to understand why humans engage in magic, like that is the the

663
00:39:15,660 --> 00:39:16,300
place to start.

664
00:39:16,620 --> 00:39:17,900
Yeah, that's totally fair.

665
00:39:18,060 --> 00:39:23,500
I think I'm channeling you when I say this, which we had Pascal Boy on recently,

666
00:39:25,020 --> 00:39:26,460
what did I say, on recently.

667
00:39:26,620 --> 00:39:32,460
And he was saying how your work and other people's work have moved him towards thinking

668
00:39:32,460 --> 00:39:38,450
not just about the consumers of epistemic, uh, you know,

669
00:39:38,530 --> 00:39:44,050
almost memes to kind of put it, to give it a gloss, you know, consumers of ideas

670
00:39:44,370 --> 00:39:49,650
or representations, but also the logic of the producers.

671
00:39:49,810 --> 00:39:53,730
And so one other thing, and I think your work you know has focused on this, is then there's

672
00:39:53,730 --> 00:39:58,770
also this issue that we haven't really talked about yet, which is we've talked about why

673
00:39:58,850 --> 00:40:01,560
would consumers consume shamanism.

674
00:40:01,720 --> 00:40:06,120
But then there's also the question of well, why would there be people who produce

675
00:40:06,120 --> 00:40:06,840
shamanism?

676
00:40:06,920 --> 00:40:12,280
And it strikes me as there might be a lot of benefits to being seen as a shaman.

677
00:40:12,440 --> 00:40:17,160
I mean, I think you gotta you gotta win them over, and that's that ain't easy, right?

678
00:40:17,320 --> 00:40:18,440
So could you talk?

679
00:40:18,520 --> 00:40:23,080
Have have you thought, you know, this is one of your themes of your work as I take it.

680
00:40:23,240 --> 00:40:29,070
So can you talk a little bit about the production end of shamanism and um to what

681
00:40:29,070 --> 00:40:33,710
extent, if our conversation has been largely about the consumer end, what is there to say

682
00:40:33,710 --> 00:40:36,510
or know about the production and how have you been thinking about that?

683
00:40:36,990 --> 00:40:37,310
For sure.

684
00:40:37,390 --> 00:40:41,550
I mean, I think the question is like, yeah, we we've talked a little, let's say we we are

685
00:40:42,510 --> 00:40:48,110
taking a bet hedging or error management approach where people are engaging in magic

686
00:40:48,110 --> 00:40:51,870
because they want to influence outcomes in the world that are self-serving.

687
00:40:52,030 --> 00:40:54,350
Um how then do you get from that to shamanism?

688
00:40:54,430 --> 00:40:59,640
How do you get from that to practitioners entering non-ordinary states, you know, healing

689
00:40:59,640 --> 00:41:00,840
people, et cetera, et cetera?

690
00:41:01,000 --> 00:41:06,520
And I really think you you need to think about there being an entire class of producers who

691
00:41:06,520 --> 00:41:10,600
are competing amongst themselves to provide these benefits or provide these services for

692
00:41:10,600 --> 00:41:11,000
benefits.

693
00:41:11,080 --> 00:41:16,280
I think then it actually really aids us to honestly use like a market analogy.

694
00:41:16,650 --> 00:41:21,450
Um, and so yeah, what I think is really critical is that once you have people who are

695
00:41:21,450 --> 00:41:27,210
willing to to pay small costs or or or costs relative to the expected benefit to have these

696
00:41:27,210 --> 00:41:32,650
outcomes, then you have sp other specialists competing amongst themselves to provide these

697
00:41:32,650 --> 00:41:33,370
services.

698
00:41:33,610 --> 00:41:38,650
Um and those specialists will uh you

699
00:41:39,100 --> 00:41:43,500
Invest in these practices to the extent that they can expect benefits.

700
00:41:43,580 --> 00:41:49,500
The elaboration of those practices will track the potential for the for the consumers to

701
00:41:49,660 --> 00:41:50,220
pay for them.

702
00:41:50,300 --> 00:41:55,980
And so for outcomes like death and illness, you can have really, really elaborate practices

703
00:41:55,980 --> 00:41:58,860
where consumers are willing to invest quite a bit.

704
00:41:59,420 --> 00:42:02,940
Producers are incentivized to invest a lot to reap those benefits.

705
00:42:04,620 --> 00:42:10,470
I think shamanism inherently requires uh a species that is social enough where you can have

706
00:42:10,470 --> 00:42:11,910
people trading services.

707
00:42:12,310 --> 00:42:12,550
Yeah.

708
00:42:12,790 --> 00:42:17,350
I wonder too, to channel David a little bit, it once something becomes common knowledge.

709
00:42:17,510 --> 00:42:23,510
So I'm just imagining, let's suppose that somebody's child was sick

710
00:42:23,670 --> 00:42:25,990
and they took their child to some shaman.

711
00:42:26,630 --> 00:42:30,870
And whether or not it worked, they tried, right?

712
00:42:31,120 --> 00:42:35,920
And then my child becomes sick, and people are like, Well, did you go to the shaman?

713
00:42:36,000 --> 00:42:37,760
You know, and my child's not better yet.

714
00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:43,680
It kind of looks like, and even to my own representation, I'm not doing everything I can

715
00:42:43,920 --> 00:42:45,680
for my child, and that sucks.

716
00:42:45,840 --> 00:42:46,160
Right.

717
00:42:46,480 --> 00:42:52,160
So I think this this common knowledge thing, once you kind of get it going, um

718
00:42:52,560 --> 00:42:57,810
uh that that's another thing too, where it's like, well, you know, why would it why would

719
00:42:57,810 --> 00:43:02,130
David have taken his child, even if it didn't work, he did something about it.

720
00:43:02,370 --> 00:43:07,570
You know, so I think there's you can you can imagine with all these caveats of there's

721
00:43:07,570 --> 00:43:12,850
competition, you can see how these things could sort of build on each other once they're

722
00:43:12,850 --> 00:43:13,810
established.

723
00:43:14,610 --> 00:43:20,240
Yeah, I really like that um argument, David, and something I've been thinking about um

724
00:43:20,400 --> 00:43:26,080
in terms of how low efficacy actions can actually um convey more

725
00:43:26,400 --> 00:43:31,040
information to recipients as a signal than high probability actions.

726
00:43:31,520 --> 00:43:37,120
Because if I'm investing a huge amount of time and energy to do something that only shifts

727
00:43:37,120 --> 00:43:42,670
the probability of say helping my child or my wife or my friend by a tiny amount,

728
00:43:42,830 --> 00:43:46,350
then that shows that I really care about their welfare.

729
00:43:46,750 --> 00:43:51,310
Whereas if I do something that's very cheap and that um with a hundred percent likelihood

730
00:43:51,310 --> 00:43:57,150
of helping them, um, you know, I uh I don't know, I I I quickly do the Heimlich any anyone

731
00:43:57,150 --> 00:44:00,590
would do the Heimlich manumer if they knew how to do it and someone was choking, even a

732
00:44:00,590 --> 00:44:04,030
total stranger, right? 'Cause that has, you know, really high efficacy.

733
00:44:04,420 --> 00:44:05,780
were thirsty give them water.

734
00:44:05,860 --> 00:44:05,940
Yeah.

735
00:44:06,500 --> 00:44:06,660
Exactly.

736
00:44:06,740 --> 00:44:09,140
If you're in the canteen and someone's thirsty, you give them water.

737
00:44:09,460 --> 00:44:13,860
Even if you even if you don't know the person, it doesn't send a strong signal of of

738
00:44:13,860 --> 00:44:18,980
loyalty and and toward that individual as doing something that a doing a low probability

739
00:44:18,980 --> 00:44:19,860
action does.

740
00:44:20,100 --> 00:44:24,900
So if I if I spend a lot of time and effort doing a ritual to say cure your your illness

741
00:44:24,980 --> 00:44:28,980
and it has a very small chance of working, that sends a stronger signal that I care about

742
00:44:28,980 --> 00:44:32,660
you than if I than if I'm your doctor and if I do something that's actually effective,

743
00:44:32,830 --> 00:44:32,990
right?

744
00:44:33,150 --> 00:44:35,230
Or if I prescribe you a medication, say.

745
00:44:35,470 --> 00:44:41,470
And so it may be that um the the low efficacy is actually a feature, not a bug, and

746
00:44:41,470 --> 00:44:43,870
that they're sending stronger social signals.

747
00:44:44,350 --> 00:44:44,670
Yikes.

748
00:44:44,910 --> 00:44:48,750
Yeah, I would say, of course, that I think like for if my child is sick, we would expect

749
00:44:48,750 --> 00:44:52,110
people to first prioritize those kinds of outcomes that would maximize the benefit.

750
00:44:52,990 --> 00:44:57,860
And so like and because there are also opportunity costs for interventions, you know, I can

751
00:44:58,500 --> 00:45:02,660
even w with the mentality, I can spend time going to the clinic, I can go get herbs, I can

752
00:45:02,660 --> 00:45:06,500
call a shaman, I can, you know, massage my child, I can do any number of things.

753
00:45:06,660 --> 00:45:12,100
So I definitely think this might shift it, move some stuff around, but I do think the

754
00:45:12,100 --> 00:45:15,940
driving thing immediately, especially if my child has an illness that seems dire, would be

755
00:45:15,940 --> 00:45:18,580
to maximize expected benefit first.

756
00:45:18,890 --> 00:45:19,290
of course.

757
00:45:19,450 --> 00:45:19,690
Yeah.

758
00:45:20,010 --> 00:45:20,250
Yeah.

759
00:45:20,330 --> 00:45:25,130
But within the cost-benefit calculus is what people are going to infer about me based on

760
00:45:25,130 --> 00:45:26,090
the actions I take.

761
00:45:26,250 --> 00:45:31,770
How good of a father am I if I don't do anything to help my child, if I don't take them to

762
00:45:31,770 --> 00:45:34,170
the shaman, if I don't perform the rituals?

763
00:45:34,330 --> 00:45:39,130
What are people going to infer about my level of parental investment in the child?

764
00:45:39,320 --> 00:45:39,640
right?

765
00:45:39,880 --> 00:45:44,680
And so in addition to the direct, I I obviously would want to help the child and do

766
00:45:44,680 --> 00:45:46,680
whatever I can to make sure that they're better.

767
00:45:46,840 --> 00:45:51,800
But in addition to those costs and benefits, there are the added social and reputational

768
00:45:51,800 --> 00:45:52,600
costs and benefits.

769
00:45:52,680 --> 00:45:56,600
And I think that's part of the calculus and that that might be part of the mechanism that

770
00:45:56,600 --> 00:46:00,760
drives these actions toward low efficacy rituals.

771
00:46:02,110 --> 00:46:02,510
Yeah.

772
00:46:02,670 --> 00:46:08,670
Or David, then also might this is related, it's not an alternative, but it

773
00:46:08,670 --> 00:46:14,430
also might explain coordination of what the rituals are, in the sense of if

774
00:46:14,430 --> 00:46:19,150
you just do something because you're desperate and nothing else has worked, per what Monvir

775
00:46:19,310 --> 00:46:23,550
said is you're gonna go with efficacy, but you're trying everything, and then you start

776
00:46:23,550 --> 00:46:28,190
going to the low probability, higher cost things, but you still it's a high cost, like your

777
00:46:28,190 --> 00:46:30,030
kid's sick, so you'll do it.

778
00:46:30,240 --> 00:46:30,640
Yeah.

779
00:46:30,880 --> 00:46:35,040
But you do that one thing because there are, you know, you can only do one thing and

780
00:46:35,040 --> 00:46:36,960
there's opportunity cost, as Monvier said.

781
00:46:37,120 --> 00:46:42,480
If I'm the social learner and I look at you, I don't know everything that's going into your

782
00:46:42,480 --> 00:46:47,280
calculation, but I'm like, well, if David did it, there probably was some reason for why he

783
00:46:47,280 --> 00:46:47,760
did it.

784
00:46:47,920 --> 00:46:53,830
And so if if among all the other low probability things, I'll probably just do what

785
00:46:53,830 --> 00:46:57,510
David did because why would he have gone through all that effort if there wasn't some

786
00:46:57,510 --> 00:46:59,750
chance it might work, even if it was low?

787
00:46:59,990 --> 00:47:05,430
So you could imagine, even in the absence of a shaman coordinating information about what

788
00:47:05,430 --> 00:47:10,710
the ritual is, whatever you just land on, David, if your kid gets sick before mine, I might

789
00:47:10,710 --> 00:47:16,710
just copy you because I might just it's just, you know, it's just social learning where

790
00:47:16,710 --> 00:47:20,630
I just assume you found out something that I didn't have access to.

791
00:47:22,140 --> 00:47:23,500
Yeah, that might be part of it too.

792
00:47:23,580 --> 00:47:27,820
I mean, so another thing that I think might be driving this is, you know, we're not so much

793
00:47:27,820 --> 00:47:31,740
interested in in people's reputation in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense.

794
00:47:31,980 --> 00:47:37,660
We want to know who is relatively more loyal to me or to the community uh than than other

795
00:47:37,660 --> 00:47:42,380
people, where loyalty is a continuous dimension, where I could be well, I could care more

796
00:47:42,380 --> 00:47:44,140
about the group than you, say.

797
00:47:44,460 --> 00:47:49,500
And so if there is a low probability ritual that we can perform to benefit the group, say a

798
00:47:49,500 --> 00:47:55,430
rain dance, um, and everyone is participating in that raindance but me, that sends a

799
00:47:55,430 --> 00:47:58,870
signal that I don't care about the group as much as everyone else.

800
00:47:59,030 --> 00:48:01,670
And that all of a sudden paints a target on my back.

801
00:48:01,830 --> 00:48:07,270
And so once there emerges, once there once uh common knowledge of a low

802
00:48:07,270 --> 00:48:11,910
efficacy way to benefit the group emerges, it takes on a life of its own and suddenly

803
00:48:11,910 --> 00:48:17,510
everyone is sort of forced to engage in that low efficacy activity, lest they pay a social

804
00:48:17,510 --> 00:48:23,360
price for looking less uh altruistic or less loyal than everyone else in the group.

805
00:48:23,520 --> 00:48:27,120
And all of a sudden it becomes a kind of tragedy of the commons or prisoner prisoners'

806
00:48:27,200 --> 00:48:32,320
dilemma, where we all benefit from not doing the wasteful thing, but individually we pay a

807
00:48:32,320 --> 00:48:34,320
price if any of us decides not to.

808
00:48:34,480 --> 00:48:38,400
And so it just kind of continues and stabilizes, even though it's not really effective,

809
00:48:38,560 --> 00:48:42,960
it's stabilizing uh uh um for social reputational reasons.

810
00:48:44,320 --> 00:48:45,520
Yeah, that's interesting.

811
00:48:45,680 --> 00:48:51,050
Can uh maybe I I I

812
00:48:52,330 --> 00:48:56,570
just kind of more more generally, sometimes I and maybe this is something for us to talk

813
00:48:56,570 --> 00:49:01,370
about, I'm sometimes skeptical of the ext- I think we can have our intuitions about the

814
00:49:01,370 --> 00:49:06,170
signaling value of behavior from weird contexts with a not a lot of anonymous interactions

815
00:49:06,170 --> 00:49:12,160
in very very fluid partner markets and infer those or extrapolate those to

816
00:49:12,160 --> 00:49:13,120
small-scale societies.

817
00:49:13,280 --> 00:49:18,800
But I I am sometimes skeptical because in small-scale societies,

818
00:49:18,960 --> 00:49:21,440
relationships and behaviors are much more contextual.

819
00:49:21,520 --> 00:49:27,280
They're related to very long histories of interaction, how, you know, how I

820
00:49:27,280 --> 00:49:33,030
interact with someone is partly informed by some trait that they have,

821
00:49:33,190 --> 00:49:37,590
some enduring trait, but I think is m much more strongly shaped by the history of

822
00:49:37,590 --> 00:49:38,070
interaction.

823
00:49:38,150 --> 00:49:41,750
And that's just to say that I think sometimes I think we can be quick to extrapolate

824
00:49:41,910 --> 00:49:43,990
signaling benefits to to other contexts.

825
00:49:44,070 --> 00:49:49,350
But my own experience s has very in many in ways that often have really surprised me about

826
00:49:49,350 --> 00:49:53,990
the ways that people actually do not extrapolate so much information from how people

827
00:49:53,990 --> 00:49:57,510
interact with other people towards how they're going to interact with themselves.

828
00:49:57,920 --> 00:50:03,280
But wouldn't wouldn't one just to sell to be devil's advocate for David's position is

829
00:50:03,440 --> 00:50:04,960
wouldn't it just shift from then?

830
00:50:05,120 --> 00:50:08,720
I'm not making a character inference maybe as strongly, but I'm just thinking David's

831
00:50:08,800 --> 00:50:09,440
making a mistake.

832
00:50:09,520 --> 00:50:14,080
So for example, it's just that I know David's a good guy, but boy, his kid's sick and he's

833
00:50:14,080 --> 00:50:14,560
not doing this.

834
00:50:14,640 --> 00:50:16,240
So I don't think he doesn't care about his kid.

835
00:50:16,320 --> 00:50:19,840
I think he's making a mistake, though, because I believe this intervention does work.

836
00:50:20,080 --> 00:50:23,120
I think he's got his cost-benefit calculus wrong in this decision.

837
00:50:23,200 --> 00:50:25,040
I might go over and be like, David, come on, man.

838
00:50:25,120 --> 00:50:26,000
I think you should do this.

839
00:50:26,190 --> 00:50:30,270
It worked for Bob down the street, which is another way it may work, right?

840
00:50:30,350 --> 00:50:33,390
If it's random, it's going to work every once in a while, or it's going to look like it's

841
00:50:33,390 --> 00:50:34,270
going to work every once in a while.

842
00:50:34,350 --> 00:50:36,990
And then there's the one person in the village who's like, this worked for me, you should

843
00:50:36,990 --> 00:50:37,470
do it too.

844
00:50:37,630 --> 00:50:39,950
Cause, you know, it was just luck of the draw.

845
00:50:40,110 --> 00:50:44,910
But I mean, that might be a way to salvage this even uh thing where it's not, I'm

846
00:50:44,910 --> 00:50:49,630
abandoning David or changing drastically how I think about him, but it's more just I think

847
00:50:49,630 --> 00:50:53,470
he's making a bad decision in this situation because I think it he should do it.

848
00:50:53,630 --> 00:50:55,710
And he's he's doing a bad thing.

849
00:50:55,900 --> 00:51:01,180
Um, you know, that that kind of inference would still exist even in this model that

850
00:51:01,180 --> 00:51:03,740
David's um accounting for, I think.

851
00:51:04,220 --> 00:51:08,060
Yeah, you could you could pay a cost to to either your moral reputation or your

852
00:51:08,060 --> 00:51:12,460
intellectual uh reputation by not participating in in a group ritual.

853
00:51:12,620 --> 00:51:14,620
Yeah, that that could also be a play.

854
00:51:14,780 --> 00:51:15,020
Yeah.

855
00:51:15,340 --> 00:51:16,940
Yeah, like it doesn't have to be long term.

856
00:51:17,020 --> 00:51:21,990
Like it's not like I'm I'm doing this calculus of like, do I abandon who do I fluidly

857
00:51:21,990 --> 00:51:23,430
choose, as you said, Man Veer?

858
00:51:23,590 --> 00:51:27,270
But it could just be like more generally, what kind of inferences do I make about how he

859
00:51:27,270 --> 00:51:31,190
will behave towards me based on how he is behaving in this other context?

860
00:51:31,510 --> 00:51:32,550
Yeah, that might be it.

861
00:51:32,630 --> 00:51:38,630
Or like a more a more uh a more or another version would be I know David's a good

862
00:51:38,630 --> 00:51:43,110
guy, but I think he's making a mistake now, and that's still important for me and has

863
00:51:43,110 --> 00:51:47,510
fitness consequences for him, and I care about him, or it has fitness consequences for me,

864
00:51:47,590 --> 00:51:48,390
his welfare.

865
00:51:48,630 --> 00:51:54,240
So even if it doesn't change those It's wait, is that still a signaling account?

866
00:51:54,720 --> 00:51:55,200
I don't know.

867
00:51:55,360 --> 00:51:58,000
I I think there's also I don't want to centralize signaling.

868
00:51:58,080 --> 00:52:02,640
I don't actually know what where a signal it you're making an inference, right?

869
00:52:02,720 --> 00:52:06,960
You're you're you're saying, look, but you're making an inference doing making there's

870
00:52:07,040 --> 00:52:08,800
there's some costs.

871
00:52:09,200 --> 00:52:14,880
Um it's indicative of he's taking a stance towards how he's gonna deal with his sick

872
00:52:14,880 --> 00:52:15,520
child.

873
00:52:15,840 --> 00:52:21,590
And I'm making inferences about that and assessing what the effects are on him, on me, on

874
00:52:21,590 --> 00:52:22,710
everyone else.

875
00:52:22,950 --> 00:52:28,710
And those inferences in one case might be uh very broad in a weird society.

876
00:52:28,870 --> 00:52:34,070
They might be more narrow in the sense of, you know, David and I in a small scale society,

877
00:52:34,150 --> 00:52:38,230
we're locked in in terms of what I think of his character, how much we interact.

878
00:52:38,390 --> 00:52:42,150
But I might be like, dude, you're making a big mistake because your kid's going to still be

879
00:52:42,150 --> 00:52:45,510
sick and it's going to affect you and I because you can't go hunting when your kid's sick,

880
00:52:45,590 --> 00:52:47,510
and I need to eat, and my kids need to eat.

881
00:52:47,670 --> 00:52:50,780
Um, so I don't know if that's signaling, but yeah.

882
00:52:51,580 --> 00:52:56,780
I think it it would be signaling insofar as the inferences are anticipated by the actor and

883
00:52:56,780 --> 00:52:58,060
factored into their behavior.

884
00:52:58,460 --> 00:53:04,140
It seems like signaling insofar as Dave's inference about David then

885
00:53:04,140 --> 00:53:10,060
impacts how Dave interacts with David and David and anticipating that benefit changes his

886
00:53:10,060 --> 00:53:10,540
behavior.

887
00:53:10,860 --> 00:53:11,020
Right.

888
00:53:11,980 --> 00:53:15,660
Yes, that would that would be a yeah, that would be an intentional signal as opposed to an

889
00:53:15,660 --> 00:53:16,330
evolved signal.

890
00:53:16,570 --> 00:53:16,970
Yeah, right.

891
00:53:17,050 --> 00:53:18,170
That would be an intentional signal.

892
00:53:18,490 --> 00:53:23,610
Um but yeah I don't I'm not trying to like I know in like Q versus signal like I I'm not

893
00:53:23,930 --> 00:53:25,450
right now I'm not so worried about it.

894
00:53:25,530 --> 00:53:31,130
I think I mean for me at least the argument would be that I could see many mechanisms

895
00:53:31,290 --> 00:53:36,940
whereby the inference that David is not doing this thing is

896
00:53:36,940 --> 00:53:42,380
perceived as a cost, and there's motivation on the part of me, for example, in this

897
00:53:42,380 --> 00:53:46,860
example to go over to David and be like, hey man, you should do this ritual.

898
00:53:47,980 --> 00:53:48,540
Yeah.

899
00:53:48,860 --> 00:53:51,820
And cues have a way of becoming signals in our in our species.

900
00:53:51,900 --> 00:53:55,420
So even if you if you as soon as you point out that something is a cue, it has a way of

901
00:53:55,420 --> 00:53:59,260
transforming into a a signal as soon as people gain common knowledge of that.

902
00:53:59,420 --> 00:54:05,310
Um in Manvir, I wanted to shift a little bit to uh and we can come

903
00:54:05,310 --> 00:54:09,950
back to shamanism too, but I also wanted to talk a little bit about, and this comes back to

904
00:54:09,950 --> 00:54:11,550
your background, the EA.

905
00:54:11,950 --> 00:54:17,550
Um, you and other people have argued that the scale of social interaction

906
00:54:18,750 --> 00:54:23,710
for human groups may have been much more variable and might have included much larger

907
00:54:23,870 --> 00:54:24,510
scale.

908
00:54:24,750 --> 00:54:30,500
Um I don't I don't know what word to use, but social structures for lack of a better word.

909
00:54:30,740 --> 00:54:36,660
So to just contextualize this, the background is as evolutionary psychology

910
00:54:36,660 --> 00:54:42,260
grew up, there was very much an argument that we evolved for a small-scale social world of

911
00:54:42,260 --> 00:54:48,260
face-to-face interaction, and that the design features in the mind are for this

912
00:54:48,420 --> 00:54:52,660
vanished world coming from a scientific, modern, weird perspective.

913
00:54:53,510 --> 00:54:56,070
I've seen you give talks about this.

914
00:54:56,230 --> 00:54:58,870
Can you talk a little bit about that work as well?

915
00:54:59,030 --> 00:55:03,510
Because you know, in what what should people know about that?

916
00:55:03,590 --> 00:55:07,270
And then maybe we can have some discussion about that point as well.

917
00:55:07,750 --> 00:55:08,630
For sure, for sure.

918
00:55:08,790 --> 00:55:09,190
Yeah.

919
00:55:09,430 --> 00:55:15,190
So I think that there has long been a sense,

920
00:55:15,830 --> 00:55:21,680
both among academics and in the popular conversation, the popular

921
00:55:21,680 --> 00:55:27,600
consciousness, that um humans spent most of our evolutionary history in relatively

922
00:55:27,600 --> 00:55:28,480
small scale societies.

923
00:55:28,560 --> 00:55:34,560
And and when people often sketch that out, it's like small, relatively egalitarian, mobile

924
00:55:34,560 --> 00:55:35,200
bands.

925
00:55:35,760 --> 00:55:41,680
There's this discussion of the magic number of 25 um bands of 25, but they could be fluid

926
00:55:41,680 --> 00:55:44,960
enough that people are moving around within some kind of ethnolinguistic group.

927
00:55:45,040 --> 00:55:50,550
Um they're mobile, there's often a sense that uh they live in dry, open,

928
00:55:50,790 --> 00:55:56,630
arid habitats, um, which was for a long time a pretty dominant model

929
00:55:57,270 --> 00:56:00,630
of the um of the Plaistocene.

930
00:56:01,030 --> 00:56:06,790
Um and so that has ended up impacting, you know,

931
00:56:06,950 --> 00:56:11,430
how we think about how social organization has transformed throughout history, how we think

932
00:56:11,430 --> 00:56:15,560
about um the environments in which humans evolved, which kinds of societies we think

933
00:56:15,560 --> 00:56:19,960
provide the best models for making inferences about human history, which societies we

934
00:56:20,200 --> 00:56:25,400
researched, you know, studying small, mobile, relatively egalitarian groups like the Hadza

935
00:56:25,560 --> 00:56:30,840
or the Agta or the Aceh versus societies that are sedentary, that have larger societies

936
00:56:30,920 --> 00:56:32,840
that have institutionalized hierarchy.

937
00:56:33,000 --> 00:56:38,680
Um, and so an argument that I and Luke Lowacki have made, and we are uh you can say part of

938
00:56:38,680 --> 00:56:43,000
a larger conversation or a larger set of scholars who are pushing against it, is that um

939
00:56:43,210 --> 00:56:46,970
based on what we know now, we should be much more open to the hypothesis that there was

940
00:56:46,970 --> 00:56:52,330
much more social diversity, that groups, um, residential groups could be in the hundreds,

941
00:56:52,410 --> 00:56:58,010
maybe even the low thousands, that um you uh had

942
00:56:58,010 --> 00:57:03,130
semisetism, that you had hierarchy and potentially institutionalized hierarchy or very

943
00:57:03,130 --> 00:57:04,490
formal hierarchy.

944
00:57:05,420 --> 00:57:09,740
You had large-scale cooperation, people, you know, hundreds of people potentially

945
00:57:09,740 --> 00:57:11,980
cooperating on projects.

946
00:57:13,740 --> 00:57:19,020
Another thing that we have argued is that there has probably been cultivation and maybe

947
00:57:19,020 --> 00:57:23,180
even incipient domestication, but that's not something we necessarily have to cover today.

948
00:57:23,580 --> 00:57:28,970
And as a result, we should rethink the kinds of broad trajectory stories we tell about

949
00:57:28,970 --> 00:57:29,530
human history.

950
00:57:29,610 --> 00:57:35,370
We should rethink the societies in which humans necessarily evolved and and the all the

951
00:57:35,370 --> 00:57:38,010
inferences we make then about evolved psychology.

952
00:57:38,090 --> 00:57:41,930
And we should revisit the kinds of societies in the contemporary world that we think

953
00:57:41,930 --> 00:57:45,210
provide the best models for human evolutionary history.

954
00:57:46,330 --> 00:57:50,570
I can go a little bit into the evidence for why we m make that argument.

955
00:57:51,760 --> 00:57:52,720
Should I do that?

956
00:57:53,040 --> 00:57:57,600
I I well maybe like one or one or two examples.

957
00:57:57,680 --> 00:57:57,920
Yeah.

958
00:57:58,320 --> 00:57:58,560
Yeah.

959
00:57:58,640 --> 00:58:04,480
Well, I mean the basic story is that um we now appreciate or or the basic story is that

960
00:58:04,480 --> 00:58:09,920
when human groups, including uh non-agricultural societies, live in environments with

961
00:58:09,920 --> 00:58:14,400
dense, rich, reliable resources, especially aquatic environments or places with aquatic

962
00:58:14,400 --> 00:58:19,770
resources, um They make larger, sedentary, more

963
00:58:19,770 --> 00:58:20,810
hierarchical societies.

964
00:58:20,890 --> 00:58:26,890
So the Pacific Northwest, parts of New Guinea, here in California, Florida, and then

965
00:58:26,970 --> 00:58:29,210
many places before agriculturalists got there.

966
00:58:29,370 --> 00:58:35,210
Japan, Scandinavia, the really rich parts of China, the

967
00:58:35,210 --> 00:58:39,960
Nile, the southern African coast, many of these places exhibit these features.

968
00:58:40,040 --> 00:58:43,720
And I think there has just been, there have been a number of paradigm shifts since the

969
00:58:43,720 --> 00:58:49,160
1960s when this generalized forager model or the nomadic style was institutionalized

970
00:58:49,640 --> 00:58:55,320
or articulated that I think now lead us to question that as a general model for

971
00:58:55,320 --> 00:58:59,650
hunter-gatherers and especially for hunter or for hunter-gatherers in the past, and and

972
00:58:59,650 --> 00:59:01,250
definitely for hunter-gatherers more generally.

973
00:59:01,330 --> 00:59:05,010
And and I one thing that I think is really important or relevant to this conversation,

974
00:59:05,090 --> 00:59:10,210
especially in thinking about evolutionary psychology, is that in the 1960s, you have, you

975
00:59:10,210 --> 00:59:13,330
know, some researchers, you have a number of researchers who are studying hunter-gatherers,

976
00:59:13,410 --> 00:59:17,890
but you have a big project, the Harvard Kalahari Project, which uh involves Richard Lee and

977
00:59:17,890 --> 00:59:18,770
Irv Devor.

978
00:59:19,880 --> 00:59:25,480
They come, they coordinate the 1960 conference, the Man the Hunter conference, at which you

979
00:59:25,480 --> 00:59:28,200
have for the first time hunter-gatherer specialists coming from everywhere.

980
00:59:28,360 --> 00:59:32,200
There is some articulation of variation in hunter-gatherer societies, even then.

981
00:59:32,360 --> 00:59:37,560
But you have a formalization of the generalized forager model or the nomadic style in a

982
00:59:37,560 --> 00:59:43,400
chapter written by Leon DeVore, great scholars, but but that honestly, and I think we all

983
00:59:43,400 --> 00:59:49,230
do this to some degree, uses the Kung as kind of a stand-in for for human history.

984
00:59:49,310 --> 00:59:53,870
And they have already been articulating, you know, arguing that the Kung provide a great

985
00:59:53,870 --> 00:59:56,590
model for human history to justify their project.

986
00:59:56,750 --> 01:00:01,470
And then you have evolutionary psychology really develop in the shadow or in the literal

987
01:00:01,470 --> 01:00:03,230
living room of Irv Devore.

988
01:00:03,310 --> 01:00:09,230
You have uh Tubi and Cosmodese meet in Irv Devore's living room at a um Simeon seminar,

989
01:00:09,310 --> 01:00:09,950
I I believe.

990
01:00:10,350 --> 01:00:16,080
Um you have a number of those other, you know, you have um and although he's not

991
01:00:16,080 --> 01:00:20,160
explicitly speaking it just as like a foundational evolutionary psychologist, you have Bob

992
01:00:20,160 --> 01:00:23,840
Trivers who's spending all of his uh evenings in Herve Devore's living room.

993
01:00:24,080 --> 01:00:28,720
You have this figure who uh has been so critical, so important in establishing what

994
01:00:28,720 --> 01:00:32,080
hunter-gatherer societies looked like, and especially what they've looked like for a

995
01:00:32,080 --> 01:00:32,720
hundred thousand years.

996
01:00:32,800 --> 01:00:38,160
And by no coincidence, you also have this field really strongly developing in his uh

997
01:00:38,320 --> 01:00:39,520
literal orbit.

998
01:00:39,760 --> 01:00:42,590
Um Yeah.

999
01:00:43,390 --> 01:00:49,230
Um what what one oh yeah uh David, you know, I just think it's it's a beautiful example

1000
01:00:49,230 --> 01:00:54,350
of um the field of evolutionary psychology advancing uh and and you making a major

1001
01:00:54,350 --> 01:01:00,030
contribution to the overall uh theoretical framework uh by which we we do research.

1002
01:01:00,190 --> 01:01:04,830
Because you know, as we know, the ancestral environment uh is a hugely important concept

1003
01:01:04,830 --> 01:01:08,350
for developing theories about the human cognitive phenotype.

1004
01:01:08,510 --> 01:01:12,740
And insofar as we are wrong about what the ancestral environment was like, what the

1005
01:01:12,740 --> 01:01:17,620
ancestral selection pressures were like, we are going, our theories about the phenotype are

1006
01:01:17,620 --> 01:01:18,420
going to be wrong.

1007
01:01:18,740 --> 01:01:24,500
And so making sure that we have an accurate picture of what kinds of

1008
01:01:24,500 --> 01:01:30,260
dimensions existed and what the variation was like on those dimensions is going to help us

1009
01:01:30,260 --> 01:01:34,750
develop a better, more precise, more rigorous theories.

1010
01:01:34,910 --> 01:01:39,070
And I think it's it's a it's a really great example of science moving forward and

1011
01:01:39,390 --> 01:01:45,390
challenging a lot of different hypotheses that exist in the field that are that

1012
01:01:45,390 --> 01:01:51,070
are based on this premise that the ancestral environment was necessarily small scale and

1013
01:01:51,070 --> 01:01:52,190
egalitarian.

1014
01:01:52,350 --> 01:01:57,960
Um I think now we need to begin entertaining the hypothesis that actually there may have

1015
01:01:57,960 --> 01:02:03,640
been selection pressure for large-scale cooperation, for large-scale social hierarchy.

1016
01:02:03,800 --> 01:02:07,080
And we can begin to investigate what that psychology might look like.

1017
01:02:07,240 --> 01:02:13,080
And certainly it won't be a rigid context-insensitive psychology, because we know that

1018
01:02:13,080 --> 01:02:15,400
not all societies were uh were like this.

1019
01:02:15,560 --> 01:02:16,760
There was substantial variation.

1020
01:02:16,840 --> 01:02:22,520
So we would expect a context-sensitive psychology that can adjust um behavioral strategies

1021
01:02:22,520 --> 01:02:28,510
based But I any anyway, I just want to um compliment you on really

1022
01:02:28,750 --> 01:02:32,910
a wonderful paper that I think has uh advanced the field uh significantly.

1023
01:02:33,790 --> 01:02:34,510
Thanks, David.

1024
01:02:34,590 --> 01:02:35,150
Yeah, thank you.

1025
01:02:35,470 --> 01:02:40,670
And I wanted to and I wanted to ask a question, which is to what extent do you think

1026
01:02:42,270 --> 01:02:48,120
there is a substantial implication for people like me who are psychologists, who are fans

1027
01:02:48,120 --> 01:02:53,720
of ethnography or anthropology and love reading it and love keeping up to date.

1028
01:02:53,960 --> 01:02:55,800
And I can see two models.

1029
01:02:55,960 --> 01:03:00,520
One, and I think an analogy with food might be relevant, which is sort of like, you know,

1030
01:03:00,760 --> 01:03:05,320
as an evolutionary psychologist, really interested in the psychology.

1031
01:03:05,560 --> 01:03:09,960
If I think about food, I think, well, the EEA of food was variable, right?

1032
01:03:10,360 --> 01:03:16,030
And I suspect like a modern environment is probably a range of the variation for most of

1033
01:03:16,030 --> 01:03:20,590
us, because we most of us aren't starving for long periods of time, at least involuntarily,

1034
01:03:20,910 --> 01:03:21,870
fortunately.

1035
01:03:22,910 --> 01:03:28,590
But I can understand, you know, that there's sort of a intuitive range of sort of the level

1036
01:03:28,590 --> 01:03:29,790
of resources.

1037
01:03:30,030 --> 01:03:33,390
And I sorry, I have sort of a picture of the EEA.

1038
01:03:33,870 --> 01:03:39,560
Um and there's there's a version where I can have my picture of the EEA of food

1039
01:03:39,560 --> 01:03:43,480
psychology and do studies on the psychology of food and be right.

1040
01:03:43,880 --> 01:03:48,680
There's another version though where I've completely missed a feature of the ancestral

1041
01:03:48,680 --> 01:03:49,480
environment.

1042
01:03:49,720 --> 01:03:54,440
And in fact, there was more variability to the point where it's almost qualitative, that

1043
01:03:54,520 --> 01:03:57,800
like there's something wrong about the way I'm thinking about the design.

1044
01:03:58,280 --> 01:04:04,270
Now shift over to groups where I have this idea, like, you know, one of my day jobs is

1045
01:04:04,270 --> 01:04:05,390
being a group psychologist.

1046
01:04:05,470 --> 01:04:10,510
And I do have this idea that I'm thinking, you know, what any one individual's social

1047
01:04:10,590 --> 01:04:14,350
existences in groups is sort of uh probabilistic.

1048
01:04:14,430 --> 01:04:18,270
They're gonna have some very direct, interpersonal.

1049
01:04:18,430 --> 01:04:20,270
There's gonna be some more abstract ones.

1050
01:04:20,350 --> 01:04:26,060
I almost think about it as like a probability cloud coming up on your work, hearing that

1051
01:04:26,060 --> 01:04:30,780
there might have been selection for even larger scale social interaction than we have

1052
01:04:30,780 --> 01:04:36,620
imagined, I have been unclear in my own mind where to place my

1053
01:04:36,780 --> 01:04:41,660
so far intuition about, you know, in and maybe it's unanswerable, but I'm just curious:

1054
01:04:41,740 --> 01:04:47,610
like, what's your do you suspect if I am imagining an EEA of

1055
01:04:47,610 --> 01:04:53,210
relatively small scale, like as you said, 25 or like the Dunbar 250 or

1056
01:04:53,210 --> 01:04:53,690
something.

1057
01:04:54,490 --> 01:04:59,450
And I'm thinking about all the design features for that kind of a world versus the one

1058
01:04:59,450 --> 01:05:00,650
you're describing.

1059
01:05:01,130 --> 01:05:04,170
Am I or people like me, are we missing something?

1060
01:05:04,410 --> 01:05:06,010
Or are we not there yet?

1061
01:05:06,090 --> 01:05:10,490
Because there still hasn't been a lot of fleshing out of what the design features would be

1062
01:05:10,570 --> 01:05:16,540
even for the 250 world, let alone the 250,000 world or the 25,000 world.

1063
01:05:17,020 --> 01:05:17,180
Yeah.

1064
01:05:17,260 --> 01:05:20,860
So the question is what's at stake intellectually for our models of psychology?

1065
01:05:21,980 --> 01:05:23,260
That's much more concisely said.

1066
01:05:23,420 --> 01:05:25,100
We can cut out the other 15 minutes.

1067
01:05:26,620 --> 01:05:30,460
No, I mean I I I can articulate it because it's just something I've I've wondered to

1068
01:05:30,460 --> 01:05:30,780
myself.

1069
01:05:31,180 --> 01:05:34,380
Um so in the paper, we gestured a couple of things.

1070
01:05:34,620 --> 01:05:40,460
Um I mean, the the very ear easy, not necessarily super easy, but clear example is is a

1071
01:05:40,550 --> 01:05:45,990
lot of the discussion about hierarchy and and the evolution of of of um of

1072
01:05:46,310 --> 01:05:47,750
humans' dominance psychology.

1073
01:05:47,830 --> 01:05:53,590
And you know, there's one approach that says that um efforts to dominate were uh

1074
01:05:53,910 --> 01:05:58,310
very strongly curbed, even to the point of execution.

1075
01:05:58,550 --> 01:06:03,980
Um you know, I think the thing to to interrupt myself for a moment, I think the thing that

1076
01:06:03,980 --> 01:06:08,380
evolutionary psychologists have had to contend with is on the one hand that they are

1077
01:06:08,380 --> 01:06:12,540
building a model or often working with a model of the human past as small-scale, relatively

1078
01:06:12,540 --> 01:06:14,220
egalitarian, mobile bands.

1079
01:06:14,300 --> 01:06:18,380
And on the other hand, that we live in this society where we have a president and we have,

1080
01:06:18,460 --> 01:06:21,180
you know, school bullies and gangs and whatnot.

1081
01:06:21,420 --> 01:06:24,060
And you uh fundamentally have to reconcile them.

1082
01:06:24,140 --> 01:06:30,110
And so um, if I were to um argue against myself that there are stakes here, I would

1083
01:06:30,110 --> 01:06:33,790
say, well, from the for for a very long time we've had to, we've had to deal with this,

1084
01:06:33,950 --> 01:06:37,550
with this discrepancy um and we've had to account for variation.

1085
01:06:38,030 --> 01:06:43,870
Um so so I I I want to acknowledge that and say that I think like psychologists and

1086
01:06:43,870 --> 01:06:46,590
evolutionary psychologists in particular have for a very long time.

1087
01:06:46,750 --> 01:06:50,220
It's not like they're working with a species that they only think lives in small,

1088
01:06:50,300 --> 01:06:51,500
relatively egalitarian bands.

1089
01:06:51,580 --> 01:06:55,500
They're working with a species that shows incredible variation and their their theories

1090
01:06:55,500 --> 01:06:56,620
have to contend with that.

1091
01:06:57,420 --> 01:07:03,100
On the other hand, uh I, you know, when I look at some of the the research on

1092
01:07:03,340 --> 01:07:08,300
how has human morality evolved and and the critical role of egalitarianism in that, or how

1093
01:07:08,300 --> 01:07:12,780
has social psychology evolved and the critical role of egalitarianism in that, or um

1094
01:07:15,570 --> 01:07:20,210
you know, how how the kinds of arguments people make about the evolution of dominant

1095
01:07:20,210 --> 01:07:20,610
psychology.

1096
01:07:20,770 --> 01:07:24,610
Again, just to focus on this one example, I do see a uh quite a discrepancy over there

1097
01:07:24,690 --> 01:07:29,890
where there's often a a very strong emphasis on egalitarianism being this really critical

1098
01:07:29,890 --> 01:07:32,690
shaper of human moral psychology, of pro-so-so psychology.

1099
01:07:32,770 --> 01:07:37,010
You can just look at the number of papers that have cited um Chris Bohm's book or Chris

1100
01:07:37,010 --> 01:07:40,530
Bohm's classic 1993 reverse dominance hierarchy paper.

1101
01:07:41,660 --> 01:07:47,340
So that's less about our models of how human psychology works and more our models of where

1102
01:07:47,340 --> 01:07:49,180
human psychology has come from.

1103
01:07:50,860 --> 01:07:56,780
Another context, though, that we mention in the paper is what is often taking us this

1104
01:07:56,780 --> 01:08:02,430
fundamental question in evolutionary approaches to behavior: how can an organism

1105
01:08:02,670 --> 01:08:08,110
adapted to or that that spent its evolutionary history in very small groups then live in

1106
01:08:08,110 --> 01:08:10,590
large complex societies as they exist today?

1107
01:08:11,710 --> 01:08:16,830
And my own view is that that's actually the the the puzzle is misstated.

1108
01:08:16,910 --> 01:08:20,350
The way that I think about human evolutionary history is not that we lived in these tiny

1109
01:08:20,350 --> 01:08:22,670
bands and now we live in these large scale societies.

1110
01:08:22,750 --> 01:08:25,550
It's that we have been incredibly variable.

1111
01:08:25,710 --> 01:08:31,140
In fact, we evolved the critical period of human evolution, you know, the last 2.5 million

1112
01:08:31,140 --> 01:08:35,700
years, when you find this explosion in brain growth is arguably one of the most

1113
01:08:35,700 --> 01:08:40,660
climatically volatile periods with you know incredible climatic fluctuations that have

1114
01:08:40,660 --> 01:08:43,380
occurred in the evolutionary history of mammals.

1115
01:08:43,700 --> 01:08:49,060
And so we are, in many ways, a species that is fundamentally adapted, I would say, less to

1116
01:08:49,390 --> 01:08:51,790
dry arid plains than constant volatility.

1117
01:08:51,870 --> 01:08:54,110
This is the variability selection hypothesis.

1118
01:08:54,190 --> 01:08:58,910
Um, and so what is really notable about the the last 10,000 years is that we have left the

1119
01:08:58,910 --> 01:09:04,510
incredible volatility of the ice age and we have entered a period of incredible stability

1120
01:09:04,510 --> 01:09:06,590
and been able to accumulate these efforts in a way.

1121
01:09:06,670 --> 01:09:12,590
And so I think the puzzle gets gets we kind of shift how we view the puzzle, not

1122
01:09:13,040 --> 01:09:18,000
you know, tiny mobile bands, but but instead a species that has adapted to variability and

1123
01:09:18,000 --> 01:09:23,920
and contended with variability, suddenly put in a period of of like very nice

1124
01:09:23,920 --> 01:09:26,480
temperateness for twelve thousand years.

1125
01:09:26,560 --> 01:09:27,520
Yeah if that makes sense.

1126
01:09:27,760 --> 01:09:28,320
Yeah, it does.

1127
01:09:28,480 --> 01:09:28,640
Yeah.

1128
01:09:28,960 --> 01:09:34,160
And uh I I think it's um actually uh it gives an important insight about

1129
01:09:34,570 --> 01:09:37,530
why the human brain is so big.

1130
01:09:37,690 --> 01:09:43,130
Because if the ancestral environment was very stable and very predictable, such that there

1131
01:09:43,130 --> 01:09:48,010
were the same types of foods that were available in every possible ancestral environment,

1132
01:09:48,170 --> 01:09:53,370
the same type of climate, the same type of ecology, the same type of social environment.

1133
01:09:53,930 --> 01:09:59,720
If that was true, there would be no need for a large brain to make

1134
01:09:59,720 --> 01:10:04,840
context-sensitive evaluations of what's going on in the physical and social environment and

1135
01:10:04,840 --> 01:10:06,280
respond strategically.

1136
01:10:06,440 --> 01:10:10,440
Because if everything is predictable and everything is stable, you can just develop a very

1137
01:10:10,440 --> 01:10:15,640
predictable, stable uh adaptation uh in response to that feature of the environment.

1138
01:10:15,800 --> 01:10:21,170
But if the environment is volatile and variable, then

1139
01:10:21,650 --> 01:10:27,170
the selection pressures favor a context-sensitive psychology that can adapt to whatever the

1140
01:10:27,170 --> 01:10:32,930
circumstances are and learn the relevant contingencies and deploy the optimal

1141
01:10:32,930 --> 01:10:36,530
or quasi-optimal strategies given those conditions.

1142
01:10:36,770 --> 01:10:41,840
And that I think is a more insightful explanation of of human brain evolution.

1143
01:10:42,000 --> 01:10:47,680
That uh we're not so much adapted to a specific EEA, uh, but to a very uncertain

1144
01:10:47,680 --> 01:10:48,960
range of possibilities.

1145
01:10:49,120 --> 01:10:54,560
And the reason why our brains are so big is to figure out what kind of environment we

1146
01:10:54,560 --> 01:10:59,040
actually are in and how can we best make a living in that environment.

1147
01:10:59,200 --> 01:11:04,250
Um I think yeah yeah totally agree totally agree I mean that's increasingly how I how I

1148
01:11:04,250 --> 01:11:08,730
also think about it and uh something that I've really appreciated is this just to use one

1149
01:11:08,730 --> 01:11:12,170
example this shift in how we think about the evolution of the human diet and the human

1150
01:11:12,170 --> 01:11:12,570
niche.

1151
01:11:12,730 --> 01:11:16,330
You know, I I think for a long time it's this idea that humans are omnivores.

1152
01:11:16,730 --> 01:11:21,290
Um but there that has shifted because we don't actually look like a lot of omnivores.

1153
01:11:21,370 --> 01:11:25,050
You look at a raccoon, I'm not eating garbage, you know, I'm not eating like little bits of

1154
01:11:25,050 --> 01:11:25,450
eggs.

1155
01:11:25,690 --> 01:11:29,160
Um Instead, it's this idea that humans are generalist specialists.

1156
01:11:29,240 --> 01:11:32,840
We look like specialists, and yet we look like the specialists in every environment.

1157
01:11:33,080 --> 01:11:38,680
We eat whales, we eat honey, we dig up tubers, we are hunting meat, we are getting um, you

1158
01:11:38,680 --> 01:11:40,440
know, lots of fruit or whatever.

1159
01:11:40,680 --> 01:11:46,600
Um and it's it's it's that we're very we're we're specialized at um

1160
01:11:47,240 --> 01:11:49,000
adapting quickly to new environments.

1161
01:11:49,160 --> 01:11:52,840
And you know, there are arguments that this is this is a manifestation of culture, but I

1162
01:11:52,840 --> 01:11:54,680
honestly think it goes it goes deeper than that.

1163
01:11:54,760 --> 01:12:00,530
You look at um Neanderthals had lived at the edge of the Arctic for tens of thousands of

1164
01:12:00,530 --> 01:12:00,690
years.

1165
01:12:00,770 --> 01:12:05,570
Homo sapiens comes in and within 10,000 years is already b into the Arctic.

1166
01:12:05,810 --> 01:12:11,810
Um I guess that's not a great ar argument against culture or about culture, but um

1167
01:12:11,890 --> 01:12:17,250
the the point is that I think um, yeah, I I I I I think humans are are

1168
01:12:17,250 --> 01:12:23,100
incredible at um being versatile and at um specializing in

1169
01:12:23,100 --> 01:12:26,060
new environments and and learning about their new environments and learning different ways

1170
01:12:26,060 --> 01:12:27,980
to intervene in their environments to do well.

1171
01:12:28,700 --> 01:12:32,300
And I think that's a product of us having evolved in such volatile of during the

1172
01:12:32,300 --> 01:12:33,100
Pleistocene.

1173
01:12:33,340 --> 01:12:39,180
And and there there's an argument that many African species um I mean humans are are an

1174
01:12:39,180 --> 01:12:42,700
extreme example or or homo has been an extreme example and we can think about it.

1175
01:12:42,860 --> 01:12:47,390
But then in many African species you've actually seen an uh adaptation for greater

1176
01:12:47,390 --> 01:12:53,310
variability throughout the Pleistocene, that that um the ancestors of hippos um were you

1177
01:12:53,310 --> 01:12:58,670
know less variably able to to move between aquatic and non-aquatic environments, that that

1178
01:12:58,670 --> 01:13:02,670
uh the ancestors of warthogs were much more specialized and different from modern warthogs,

1179
01:13:02,750 --> 01:13:06,510
which can actually uh contend with many environments just because of how climatically

1180
01:13:06,510 --> 01:13:08,910
volatile the world, including Africa, was.

1181
01:13:09,340 --> 01:13:09,900
That's awesome.

1182
01:13:09,980 --> 01:13:11,820
We should put all those animals on a t-shirt.

1183
01:13:11,900 --> 01:13:12,620
That's fantastic.

1184
01:13:12,860 --> 01:13:15,260
Do you view the extractive foraging account?

1185
01:13:15,500 --> 01:13:19,180
This idea that, you know, why we have big brains is also because, as you said, we're

1186
01:13:19,180 --> 01:13:25,100
generalist about real specializing in the context-dependent extractive foraging.

1187
01:13:25,260 --> 01:13:29,260
Do you view variability and extractive foraging accounts as rival or complementary?

1188
01:13:29,900 --> 01:13:30,220
No, no.

1189
01:13:30,300 --> 01:13:32,620
I would say no, no, no, no, no, no.

1190
01:13:32,700 --> 01:13:38,030
I I see I see kind of like extracting foraging as a mechanism toward

1191
01:13:38,590 --> 01:13:39,550
contending with variability.

1192
01:13:39,790 --> 01:13:40,510
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1193
01:13:40,590 --> 01:13:40,830
Yeah.

1194
01:13:41,070 --> 01:13:41,310
Yeah.

1195
01:13:41,550 --> 01:13:46,830
So just for for just to uh say it out loud for everyone listening, the idea is that

1196
01:13:46,830 --> 01:13:51,470
extractive foraging is that there's resources in the environment, but there's a high sort

1197
01:13:51,470 --> 01:13:55,310
of search or handling cost or knowledge cost to get them.

1198
01:13:55,870 --> 01:14:01,620
And we are really good at doing that, but lots of different places using lots of different

1199
01:14:01,620 --> 01:14:02,020
methods.

1200
01:14:02,180 --> 01:14:08,100
And so there's this idea that um part of needing a big brain too is to have

1201
01:14:08,100 --> 01:14:12,820
models about what that process is to extract those resources and make a living in that

1202
01:14:12,820 --> 01:14:17,460
environment, both food, shelter, you know, just getting around being comfortable.

1203
01:14:17,860 --> 01:14:18,340
Totally.

1204
01:14:18,500 --> 01:14:18,820
Yeah.

1205
01:14:18,980 --> 01:14:24,570
Um yeah, if if the but i the resources in question require lots of knowledge and

1206
01:14:24,570 --> 01:14:29,770
specialization, uh in a in a way that is radically opposite to, say, eating a eucalyptus

1207
01:14:29,770 --> 01:14:31,610
leaf that is abundant in your environment.

1208
01:14:31,850 --> 01:14:35,690
You don't need to do any processing, you don't need to there they're very low search costs,

1209
01:14:35,850 --> 01:14:37,770
the leaves are right there, they're abundant.

1210
01:14:37,930 --> 01:14:43,050
Um that is not the type of selection pressure that would lead to a complex uh um psychology

1211
01:14:43,290 --> 01:14:47,050
forging psychology and and um food learning psychology.

1212
01:14:47,520 --> 01:14:49,600
Did you just insult koala bears?

1213
01:14:49,920 --> 01:14:50,880
I think I did, actually.

1214
01:14:51,120 --> 01:14:52,240
Sorry, koalas.

1215
01:14:55,920 --> 01:14:58,000
But also to link this back with No value.

1216
01:14:58,160 --> 01:14:58,880
No value judgment.

1217
01:14:59,440 --> 01:15:03,520
To further link this to the to the thing about variable social organization, one way that I

1218
01:15:03,520 --> 01:15:08,720
think about it is that humans were not only living in

1219
01:15:09,310 --> 01:15:12,670
arid open habitats, they were living in a variety of environments.

1220
01:15:12,750 --> 01:15:15,070
And that was, I imagine this kind of cyclical thing.

1221
01:15:15,150 --> 01:15:16,350
The environment is very variable.

1222
01:15:16,510 --> 01:15:21,790
Humans or Homo, ancestral Homo becomes better adapted to living in more environments.

1223
01:15:21,870 --> 01:15:27,470
And then can can, and we know this, the range expansion of Homo expands, it starts to adapt

1224
01:15:27,550 --> 01:15:30,750
to new environments, including aquatic environments.

1225
01:15:30,830 --> 01:15:33,470
It can start to extract very high value resources.

1226
01:15:33,630 --> 01:15:38,040
And that ends up just because of the ways in which ecology shapes social organization,

1227
01:15:38,120 --> 01:15:43,160
leading to more social diversity and and favoring a selection on a more socially

1228
01:15:43,480 --> 01:15:48,440
variable or a psychology that is prepared for more social variation.

1229
01:15:48,840 --> 01:15:49,320
Yeah, absolutely.

1230
01:15:49,480 --> 01:15:55,480
And so insofar as as the resources um that people are subsisting on vary and the strategies

1231
01:15:55,480 --> 01:16:00,330
and the properties of those resources vary, then the social threats and opportunities are

1232
01:16:00,330 --> 01:16:02,330
going to vary along with the ecology.

1233
01:16:03,370 --> 01:16:06,970
Some resources are easier to loot, to store, to hide.

1234
01:16:07,690 --> 01:16:10,330
And that has social implications, right?

1235
01:16:10,890 --> 01:16:16,330
Certain environments have different opportunities for aggression, predation,

1236
01:16:17,130 --> 01:16:18,730
weaponry, poisoning.

1237
01:16:19,050 --> 01:16:22,090
All these are features of the ecology that can affect the social world.

1238
01:16:22,250 --> 01:16:26,090
And so there's an intimate link between both the social structure and the ecology and the

1239
01:16:26,090 --> 01:16:27,640
way that people make a living.

1240
01:16:27,800 --> 01:16:32,440
So yeah, we would expect not only a sensitive psychology to the structure of the physical

1241
01:16:32,440 --> 01:16:35,640
world, but also uh to the social world.

1242
01:16:36,680 --> 01:16:38,440
Nothing's new under the sun.

1243
01:16:38,920 --> 01:16:39,160
Yeah.

1244
01:16:39,480 --> 01:16:41,480
In a certain level of abstraction.

1245
01:16:42,680 --> 01:16:43,800
Yeah, for sure.

1246
01:16:44,120 --> 01:16:48,360
Um Monvir, we're we're we're kind of running and uh towards our end here.

1247
01:16:48,440 --> 01:16:50,920
Um, is there anything that we should have asked you?

1248
01:16:52,360 --> 01:16:58,310
Um or that you would have liked to, or you would like to mention something exciting that

1249
01:16:58,310 --> 01:17:04,070
you're currently doing, or that students or people who want to look at your work, or

1250
01:17:04,230 --> 01:17:09,030
um, you know, just what is there something people might want to know that they might not

1251
01:17:09,030 --> 01:17:09,270
know?

1252
01:17:09,750 --> 01:17:14,630
Well, uh so uh this is unrelated to our conversation really, but I'm currently working on a

1253
01:17:14,630 --> 01:17:18,870
book on early Indo-European mythology that I think will be awesome and people should

1254
01:17:18,870 --> 01:17:21,510
definitely check out when it's out.

1255
01:17:21,900 --> 01:17:27,260
But otherwise I mean I've also a lot of what we've talked about, the Ice Age, Variability

1256
01:17:27,260 --> 01:17:31,660
and Social Organization, Generalists, Specialists, is something that I've also been trying

1257
01:17:31,660 --> 01:17:34,460
to package into a book, but that's a a slower project.

1258
01:17:34,940 --> 01:17:37,420
How do you do the research on the mythology?

1259
01:17:38,380 --> 01:17:41,980
Yeah, well so the the story of this book, do you all maybe we can take like two minutes

1260
01:17:42,060 --> 01:17:45,030
about do you all know much about early Indo-European mythology?

1261
01:17:45,270 --> 01:17:45,590
No, no.

1262
01:17:46,390 --> 01:17:47,830
I know at least two books worth.

1263
01:17:48,070 --> 01:17:48,790
No, I know nothing.

1264
01:17:49,030 --> 01:17:49,190
Okay.

1265
01:17:49,510 --> 01:17:52,870
Well, and so maybe you're familiar with the Indo-European language family.

1266
01:17:52,950 --> 01:17:54,550
So this is these are languages.

1267
01:17:54,710 --> 01:18:00,630
Um, so languages from the from Sanskrit to Icelandic, many languages are

1268
01:18:00,630 --> 01:18:02,070
part of a single language family.

1269
01:18:02,150 --> 01:18:07,830
So um there's all the Baltic languages, the Slavic languages, the Italic languages, so the

1270
01:18:07,830 --> 01:18:12,720
Romance languages, the Celtic languages, the Germanic languages, and then also Iranian

1271
01:18:12,880 --> 01:18:16,720
languages and these North Indian languages that derive from Sanskrit are all part of a

1272
01:18:16,720 --> 01:18:17,520
single language family.

1273
01:18:17,600 --> 01:18:21,280
They all derive from a single language called Proto-Indo-European.

1274
01:18:21,360 --> 01:18:23,200
This is the Indo-European language family.

1275
01:18:23,600 --> 01:18:29,440
Proto-Indo-European was probably spoken above the in the Eurasian steppe about 5,000

1276
01:18:29,440 --> 01:18:29,920
years ago.

1277
01:18:30,240 --> 01:18:32,960
And so there are linguistic relatives across these languages.

1278
01:18:33,120 --> 01:18:39,050
My name, Munvir, the Mun, shares the etymology with words like remember or

1279
01:18:39,050 --> 01:18:39,290
mind.

1280
01:18:39,930 --> 01:18:45,210
Um it can invoke like the mind or the soul, and then the vir shares uh

1281
01:18:45,210 --> 01:18:49,610
etymology with words like virile or werewolf or world.

1282
01:18:49,770 --> 01:18:53,930
Um, and it um can mean like strong man, brave.

1283
01:18:54,330 --> 01:18:59,610
Um but just as as words share origins, uh, so do mythologies.

1284
01:18:59,690 --> 01:19:01,610
And one example is the sky father.

1285
01:19:01,850 --> 01:19:07,050
So in Greek you have Zeus Pater, uh in uh um

1286
01:19:07,780 --> 01:19:13,780
Latin, you have Jupiter, Jupiter in Old Sanskrit, you have Dyaus Pitr, and people

1287
01:19:13,780 --> 01:19:18,900
have been able to reconstruct these mythological figures that are behind Greek, Norse,

1288
01:19:19,300 --> 01:19:22,740
Roman, uh, Old Indian, Ancient Iranian mythology.

1289
01:19:22,900 --> 01:19:24,580
There's kind of a progenitor mythology.

1290
01:19:24,660 --> 01:19:27,780
So my book is trying to retell these mythologies.

1291
01:19:27,860 --> 01:19:32,770
So every chapter is like me in vivid prose retelling one of these reconstructed myths along

1292
01:19:32,770 --> 01:19:34,210
with some scholarly attestations.

1293
01:19:34,290 --> 01:19:38,050
So how scholars know that these particular figures, and you can do it partly based on

1294
01:19:38,290 --> 01:19:39,330
similarities in text.

1295
01:19:39,410 --> 01:19:43,810
So for example, we know that many of these, uh, or we're pretty sure that that there was an

1296
01:19:43,810 --> 01:19:49,250
ancestral tale of a thunder god who slew a serpent, a

1297
01:19:49,250 --> 01:19:54,480
brash-bearded thunder god who liked to drink a lot, that then manifests as like Zeus and

1298
01:19:54,480 --> 01:20:00,400
Typhon, as Thor and the Midgard Serpent, as um Indra and And Vrithra.

1299
01:20:00,560 --> 01:20:06,400
So anyway, it's a yeah I'm I'm drawing on a lot of scholarship and it's it's just like a

1300
01:20:06,400 --> 01:20:07,840
a fun project.

1301
01:20:08,160 --> 01:20:08,800
So that's awesome.

1302
01:20:09,120 --> 01:20:10,480
Let's green light that movie too.

1303
01:20:10,720 --> 01:20:12,640
Yeah I really wanna I'm excited to read it.

1304
01:20:12,720 --> 01:20:18,720
Do you have any um thesis or argument about um what function these myths are serving or why

1305
01:20:18,720 --> 01:20:23,360
they have the properties they do or is it more of a descriptive um historical uh

1306
01:20:23,550 --> 01:20:24,590
anthropological project.

1307
01:20:24,990 --> 01:20:27,390
It's more of a descriptive historical anthropological project.

1308
01:20:27,470 --> 01:20:31,230
There are a a number of theories about what these myths were serving.

1309
01:20:31,310 --> 01:20:34,590
But the thing is that as these myths so the two things.

1310
01:20:34,750 --> 01:20:40,110
One is that even what we call the Proto-Indo-Europeans, that's a a thousand-year period and

1311
01:20:40,110 --> 01:20:42,350
they're over a long expanse.

1312
01:20:42,430 --> 01:20:45,790
And I I'm sure that these myths were doing different things in different places.

1313
01:20:45,950 --> 01:20:49,480
And you know, to come back to the producer-consumer conversation at the outset.

1314
01:20:49,640 --> 01:20:52,520
Um, you know, there's a lot of conversation about what is the function of myth?

1315
01:20:52,600 --> 01:20:53,640
Why do people tell myths?

1316
01:20:53,720 --> 01:20:59,080
And I think it's sometimes to justify or um yeah,

1317
01:20:59,240 --> 01:21:03,480
justify some kind of social arrangement, but it can also be to praise a leader.

1318
01:21:03,560 --> 01:21:05,960
It could also be just for pure entertainment.

1319
01:21:06,120 --> 01:21:09,400
Um it can be, yeah, I think there are many functions.

1320
01:21:09,560 --> 01:21:14,050
And I think just even in the ancestral like early Indo-European society, they probably

1321
01:21:14,050 --> 01:21:15,250
served a number of functions.

1322
01:21:15,330 --> 01:21:18,370
And that was especially the case as it diversified.

1323
01:21:19,490 --> 01:21:24,290
And so, yeah, it's more of a honestly, it's like my my own feeling is that for two

1324
01:21:24,290 --> 01:21:30,210
centuries, scholars have been these like really very detail-oriented, very careful

1325
01:21:30,370 --> 01:21:33,330
scholars working with comparative evidence have reconstructed these things.

1326
01:21:33,410 --> 01:21:39,010
And it's this incredibly rich imaginative world that has all of these, it's both uncanny in

1327
01:21:39,080 --> 01:21:42,360
its familiarity, but also really rich and and new.

1328
01:21:42,440 --> 01:21:46,600
Um but it's locked in scholarly tones and and it's a world that I think is incredibly cool.

1329
01:21:46,680 --> 01:21:50,600
So I my book is really more of like it's it's like a paternity leave project.

1330
01:21:50,680 --> 01:21:55,880
It's it's just like a an excuse to to share this this really cool scholarship, these

1331
01:21:55,880 --> 01:21:58,520
incredible stories with a with a a broader audience.

1332
01:21:58,840 --> 01:21:59,080
Cool.

1333
01:21:59,240 --> 01:22:04,680
So I I I I would imagine um the the storytelling that you might be doing for your your

1334
01:22:04,680 --> 01:22:10,330
children as well might um be a a happy uh synthesis with with sure yeah yeah my

1335
01:22:10,330 --> 01:22:14,730
daughter's at the age where she's like every like hour like tell me a story and then it's

1336
01:22:14,730 --> 01:22:18,650
like actually but some of these stories are are you know it's like a primal giant was

1337
01:22:18,650 --> 01:22:22,890
massacred and his body was used to create the world is not necessarily like the happiest

1338
01:22:22,890 --> 01:22:23,050
story.

1339
01:22:23,370 --> 01:22:23,770
That's true.

1340
01:22:23,850 --> 01:22:27,050
My daughter would be into that story, but perhaps not all children.

1341
01:22:27,690 --> 01:22:29,450
Although Germanic uh right?

1342
01:22:29,530 --> 01:22:30,650
Yeah you're you're fine.

1343
01:22:30,730 --> 01:22:30,810
Yeah.

1344
01:22:30,970 --> 01:22:32,090
Hansel and Renault, yeah.

1345
01:22:32,400 --> 01:22:33,680
Well, brother's grim.

1346
01:22:33,760 --> 01:22:35,120
It's it's grim, is correct.

1347
01:22:35,360 --> 01:22:35,680
It is grim.

1348
01:22:35,840 --> 01:22:36,320
Yeah, no.

1349
01:22:36,400 --> 01:22:38,880
I mean, yeah, the stories were much more violent back back in the day.

1350
01:22:38,960 --> 01:22:42,960
I don't know what happened, but uh just like the playgrounds.

1351
01:22:43,120 --> 01:22:45,280
Um Monvir, this has been wonderful.

1352
01:22:45,440 --> 01:22:50,240
Uh, you know, we'll we'll put show notes to your website and and things like that.

1353
01:22:50,400 --> 01:22:56,250
But um but just as you said, you know, um the book is sort of a window into a cool

1354
01:22:56,250 --> 01:22:57,210
scholarship.

1355
01:22:57,450 --> 01:22:58,730
We're trying to do the same thing.

1356
01:22:58,890 --> 01:23:00,730
And it's been wonderful to have you on.

1357
01:23:00,970 --> 01:23:05,930
And um, you know, I think w one of our goals of having this podcast has been to just

1358
01:23:05,930 --> 01:23:11,530
highlight cool work that's showing that evolutionary behavioral sciences are not stale and

1359
01:23:11,530 --> 01:23:13,290
there's things happening.

1360
01:23:13,370 --> 01:23:15,530
And I think your work is an excellent example of that.

1361
01:23:15,690 --> 01:23:17,690
So thanks for doing that and thank you for being on.

1362
01:23:18,090 --> 01:23:18,330
Yeah.

1363
01:23:18,410 --> 01:23:20,970
Thank you so much for having me and for doing this project.

1364
01:23:21,050 --> 01:23:23,930
It's it's um both are are deeply appreciated.

1365
01:23:24,010 --> 01:23:25,130
And this was a lot of fun.

1366
01:23:25,460 --> 01:23:25,700
Cool.

1367
01:23:25,940 --> 01:23:26,500
Thank you so much.

1368
01:23:27,540 --> 01:23:32,740
And uh and if you weren't uh in a visual format, do check out Monvere's background um on

1369
01:23:32,740 --> 01:23:33,380
the YouTube channel.

1370
01:23:34,020 --> 01:23:34,980
It is visually stunning.

1371
01:23:35,060 --> 01:23:38,500
I I I will attend I I kinda wanna have that wallpaper in my home.

1372
01:23:38,580 --> 01:23:39,780
It's just beautiful.

1373
01:23:40,020 --> 01:23:40,740
Yeah, yeah.

1374
01:23:40,900 --> 01:23:42,260
I love I love paleo art.

1375
01:23:42,500 --> 01:23:46,180
I love I mean, just as I love like mythical reconstruction, I love people who have like

1376
01:23:46,340 --> 01:23:50,610
really put a lot of time into trying to figure out what Lost Worlds look like.

1377
01:23:50,690 --> 01:23:55,010
Um and so uh Monveer Coffee Table Book, uh Paleo uh Worlds.

1378
01:23:55,250 --> 01:24:00,130
Okay next book after the after the mythology one, Coffee Table and Paleo Worlds.

1379
01:24:00,210 --> 01:24:00,290
Yeah.

1380
01:24:00,690 --> 01:24:01,730
I would totally buy that.

1381
01:24:02,050 --> 01:24:02,690
All right, good.

1382
01:24:02,930 --> 01:24:03,090
All right.

1383
01:24:03,330 --> 01:24:04,450
Monveer, thank you so much.

1384
01:24:04,690 --> 01:24:05,730
Yeah, thank you, boo.

1385
01:24:09,890 --> 01:24:10,690
Well, here you are.

1386
01:24:10,770 --> 01:24:14,690
You listened to another episode of Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast, this time with

1387
01:24:14,930 --> 01:24:15,970
Manver Singh.

1388
01:24:16,120 --> 01:24:20,520
We referred back to some of our greatest hits, like the the one with Pascal Boyer.

1389
01:24:20,920 --> 01:24:25,480
Uh what can the listener do to support uh what they're hearing, Dave?

1390
01:24:25,960 --> 01:24:31,720
Well, uh we have a Patreon account and we all we have David, both you and I have

1391
01:24:31,720 --> 01:24:35,160
children and presumably we're gonna have to put them through college.

1392
01:24:35,240 --> 01:24:36,600
So That's true.

1393
01:24:36,920 --> 01:24:38,590
You know, I'm just putting it out there.

1394
01:24:38,910 --> 01:24:44,350
Yeah, so if you want to support our reproductive success, uh you know, throw in some money

1395
01:24:44,350 --> 01:24:45,070
on the Patreon too.

1396
01:24:45,950 --> 01:24:46,350
Yes, exactly.

1397
01:24:46,510 --> 01:24:47,550
Yeah, that's one way to do it.

1398
01:24:47,710 --> 01:24:48,110
Yes.

1399
01:24:48,670 --> 01:24:50,030
That's probably the easiest way to do it.

1400
01:24:50,750 --> 01:24:51,470
The best way.

1401
01:24:55,470 --> 01:24:57,870
It's the uh the most ethical way to do it.

1402
01:24:58,190 --> 01:25:03,940
And um uh on that note, boom boom, um anything else

1403
01:25:04,020 --> 01:25:04,660
people should know?

1404
01:25:04,740 --> 01:25:10,740
Well, I mean we really do need um just just contact us and volunteer yourself to be

1405
01:25:10,740 --> 01:25:14,980
on this podcast if you're an evolutionary behavioral scientist.

1406
01:25:15,060 --> 01:25:19,780
Uh we've actually uh the summer is very difficult um scheduling people and we've had

1407
01:25:19,780 --> 01:25:20,980
wonderful guests.

1408
01:25:21,170 --> 01:25:25,250
Um, but if we've contacted you and you haven't gotten back to us, please get back to us.

1409
01:25:25,330 --> 01:25:28,290
And if we haven't gotten back to you, apologies.

1410
01:25:28,370 --> 01:25:30,210
And I think I'm going to edit all of that out.

1411
01:25:30,690 --> 01:25:31,090
Oh no.

1412
01:25:31,170 --> 01:25:33,890
I mean, it's totally like, yeah, the summer's been a little hazier.

1413
01:25:34,050 --> 01:25:35,890
I feel like, yeah, people have been a little flakier.

1414
01:25:35,970 --> 01:25:38,530
It's been a little harder to schedule stuff.

1415
01:25:38,690 --> 01:25:42,210
So uh apologies for the patchiness of this summer.

1416
01:25:42,530 --> 01:25:45,250
I think it'll it'll get better when things cool down.

1417
01:25:45,650 --> 01:25:49,100
Yeah, I mean I I mean jury duty was a big was a big one.

1418
01:25:49,500 --> 01:25:50,380
Yeah that was a big one.

1419
01:25:50,540 --> 01:25:52,060
I just moved into a new house.

1420
01:25:52,380 --> 01:25:55,420
It's uh it's been a really chaotic summer so far.

1421
01:25:55,820 --> 01:25:59,660
There's not full time um school during summers.

1422
01:25:59,820 --> 01:26:01,420
People are traveling.

1423
01:26:01,900 --> 01:26:07,890
Um you know there's there's a lot of first world problems during the summer.

1424
01:26:08,210 --> 01:26:09,570
Lots of first world problems.

1425
01:26:09,650 --> 01:26:12,610
So um So you should really donate on Patreon to see.

1426
01:26:13,010 --> 01:26:13,170
Right.

1427
01:26:13,250 --> 01:26:15,650
We need your support to help us with our first world problems.

1428
01:26:15,890 --> 01:26:18,690
David, has anybody sent you a fanny pack with french fries?

1429
01:26:19,090 --> 01:26:22,050
No, I'm still waiting on the fanny pack with the french fries inside it.

1430
01:26:22,290 --> 01:26:26,130
We also have to get to uh get to France with Pascal.

1431
01:26:26,920 --> 01:26:28,040
Yes, that too.

1432
01:26:28,200 --> 01:26:28,920
That would be great.

1433
01:26:29,160 --> 01:26:29,640
Yeah, you can't.

1434
01:26:29,880 --> 01:26:30,680
You know, it's so hot.

1435
01:26:30,760 --> 01:26:35,800
I feel like the heat would probably preserve the French fries at the optimal temperature.

1436
01:26:36,200 --> 01:26:41,720
Oh good uh good uh topical because it's hot in in in Europe right now.

1437
01:26:42,120 --> 01:26:45,800
It's also hot it's yeah it's it's hot you know in most places.

1438
01:26:46,040 --> 01:26:46,600
Yeah.

1439
01:26:46,970 --> 01:26:49,050
Santa Barbara's pretty moderate.

1440
01:26:49,450 --> 01:26:51,770
Except maybe the southern hemisphere, not not so hot there.

1441
01:26:52,090 --> 01:26:53,690
Doesn't the seasons work differently there.

1442
01:26:53,850 --> 01:26:54,090
Yeah.

1443
01:26:54,250 --> 01:26:55,290
Hi, Australia.

1444
01:26:55,530 --> 01:27:00,410
We should have um we there's some Australian folks and New Zealand folks we should have on.

1445
01:27:00,810 --> 01:27:01,690
Yeah, we really should.

1446
01:27:01,770 --> 01:27:03,690
We have have we had any Australians on?

1447
01:27:04,090 --> 01:27:05,770
Uh no, nor New Zealanders.

1448
01:27:05,850 --> 01:27:08,730
I think the time difference is quite a challenge, but that's true.

1449
01:27:08,810 --> 01:27:10,090
It's a really big time difference.

1450
01:27:10,330 --> 01:27:10,650
Yeah.

1451
01:27:10,810 --> 01:27:13,450
But but we know who you are and we're thinking about you.

1452
01:27:13,740 --> 01:27:15,660
Yeah, don't be afraid to invite yourself on.

1453
01:27:15,980 --> 01:27:17,580
Uh we love it when when people do that.

1454
01:27:17,820 --> 01:27:18,060
Okay.

1455
01:27:18,220 --> 01:27:21,340
So maybe we can we can have a kangaroo on as well.

1456
01:27:21,580 --> 01:27:22,780
Yeah, that would be great.

1457
01:27:23,180 --> 01:27:23,420
Yeah.

1458
01:27:23,580 --> 01:27:23,900
Okay.

1459
01:27:24,140 --> 01:27:26,940
Anyway, thank you for bearing with us.

1460
01:27:27,100 --> 01:27:30,700
Uh we'll see you either next week or following week.

1461
01:27:30,860 --> 01:27:33,420
And enjoy the rest of your summer.

1462
01:27:33,500 --> 01:27:39,500
Or if you're listening later, enjoy whatever season it is and um do something

1463
01:27:39,500 --> 01:27:40,860
for yourself this week.

1464
01:27:41,100 --> 01:27:41,420
Yep.

1465
01:27:41,580 --> 01:27:42,620
Take it easy.

1466
01:27:42,870 --> 01:27:46,070
Do something ethical though, not unethical for yourself.

1467
01:27:46,310 --> 01:27:47,190
Yeah, do something nice.

1468
01:27:47,430 --> 01:27:49,430
Yes, that's a good better way to put it.

1469
01:27:49,590 --> 01:27:50,150
Yeah.

1470
01:27:50,390 --> 01:27:50,710
Okay.

1471
01:27:50,950 --> 01:27:51,110
Cool.

1472
01:27:51,350 --> 01:27:52,390
On that note, okay.

1473
01:27:52,470 --> 01:27:52,870
Bye, David.

1474
01:27:52,950 --> 01:27:53,270
I'll see you.

1475
01:27:53,430 --> 01:27:54,150
See you next week.