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I'm David Pinsov.

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And I think I'm David Petrozowski.

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Welcome to Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

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Where you will hear actual evolutionary psychology being done by actual evolutionary

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psychologists.

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David, good to see you.

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Good to see you too, Dave.

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I'm really excited about this guest.

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This this this was an amazing conversation.

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Uh yeah, we have uh Sheena Lou Levy, who is uh professor in the Department of Psychology at

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uh Durham University in the UK.

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And she's just done absolutely mind-blowing work.

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Uh she has done anthropological field work uh in a small group of foragers in the Congo

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Basin studying uh the evolution of childhood learning and childhood itself and child

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development in a culture that is quite distant from ours with child rearing practices that

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are quite different from ours.

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Uh so if you're a parent, I think this will be particularly interesting for you.

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Um, I know I confronted Sheena with three Darwinian mysteries that arose in my own

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experiences being a dad, and I thought she uh absolutely fully solved them.

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She addressed them to my satisfaction right on the spot.

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It was really impressive.

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So uh sit back, relax, and uh take a nap.

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Well don't take a nap because well if you're a parent you might need a nap, but don't take

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a nap because you won't listen to what we're saying.

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So relax and listen.

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Enjoy.

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So Sheena Lulivi is is joining us today.

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Sheena, really good to see you.

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Thanks for joining us.

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Thanks for having me, guys.

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Um, you are the first human behavioral ecologist that we have had on.

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That's fine.

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Uh, and one of the things that we uh were excited to do with this uh thing we're

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doing is explain to people what the evolutionary social sciences are and who the people

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are doing it.

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And because you happen to be the first human behavioral ecologist on, um, well, number

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one, the question is, do you think of yourself that way?

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Yeah.

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And I think that's sort of many, many of the that we've only had two people on so far, and

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both have been um psychologists, like lab psychologists, but they've still sort of talked

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about the um uh their journey to discovering at least an evolutionary approach to

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psychology, for example.

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Um, so yeah, the one question is like, do you consider yourself a human behavioral

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ecologist?

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And then uh and then related to that is like I think a natural maybe question, and I don't

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know this about you, um, is how you you you got into it.

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Oh God, that's a real story.

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Okay, first day, I think my I would say a big part of my training is human

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behavioral ecology, but when you study kids, you just need to do a little bit of everything

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because they just defy disciplinary categorization.

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So yeah, definitely a big portion of my training is in human behavioral ecology.

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Um, my PhD is actually in in psychology, which not a lot of people know.

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Um But yeah, I ended up there because I just found the right advisor for me.

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And I to this day have never taken a psychology class, even though I teach psychology now.

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So my training is definitely more in evolutionary anthropology than than

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psychology.

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Um and then how I got into this, oh I'm gonna take you guys on a journey.

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It's great.

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Journeys are great.

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We both did we we literally spent an entire episode talking about how each of us

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discovered an evolutionary approach to psychology in particular.

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Yeah, we got deep into it.

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I Dave got back all the way back to his childhood.

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So I think go as go as deep as you want.

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Okay.

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So I'm going to take you back to my adolescence.

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So as like an older teenager kind of emerging adult, I was very into um

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bushcraft, like uh what we call first skills, right?

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And so I spent actually two years at a survival school in Washington State um tanning

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hides and foraging.

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And this school also had an element like a homeschool or unschooling kind of kids'

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nature program.

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And so we would get all we would learn to mentor people, and they would always tell us,

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like, hunter gatherers learn like this, hunter gatherers do that.

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And I was like, okay, where's the where's the actual research?

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So I started off in cultural anthropology after that.

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And um I found a really great mentor there, but it wasn't quite a right fit in terms of

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content.

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Like I learned so much and I was super passionate about it, but there was always something

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missing.

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And I was scrolling on Facebook during an undergrad class and on a homeschooling

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blog they posted about this book called Hunter Gatherer Childhoods edited by Barry Hewlett

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and Michael Lamb.

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And I was like, this is it, like this is what I want to do.

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So I just went through the list of all the contributors in the book and emailed a bunch of

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people and ended up at Cambridge to work with Frank Marlowe.

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And he unfortunately retired right as I was starting for my master's.

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So I had to find another supervisor who ended up being the editor of the book, the only

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other person there, Michael Lamb.

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So that's kind of how I got into this stuff.

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And my best friend Luke and I we spent like a few months of our lives

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like on these logging roads in Washington State, like trying to make it.

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And we were so hungry and so incompetent and so bad at everything.

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And like we would always fantasize about like other camps being along the different logging

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roads where we could just drop by for some food.

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And for me, it was like really foundational like lessons in like really three things

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in cultural evolution that we talk about.

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Like the first is like it takes a long ass time to learn to be a good hunter-gatherer, like

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you're not gonna do it in two years.

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The second thing is you need a lot of cooperation.

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And the third thing, which I think we talk about less, but we were on these like super

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monocrop logging forests, right?

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That just had no ecological diversity.

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But traditionally, a lot of the communities, indigenous communities of that region would be

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really tending the environment to produce food.

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So, in terms of niche construction, like that's the other thing, like tending your

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environment to your needs is the third thing that we really learned in the literature.

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So what what is niche construction?

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Just for those who don't know.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So like a beaver is the kind of quintessential example of niche construction, right?

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Like you dam a river and you make a pond and you live in the pond.

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And humans do that all the time, right?

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We curate our environment to fit our needs.

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So we make clothes.

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That's an example of niche, which means that we don't need to be furry in cold

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environments, but we also curate the foragers that I work with in the Congo

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Basin, for example, they'll replant parts of wild tubers to regenerate that growth.

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And they know where those areas are and they can come back to it.

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So the way in which we curate our environment to produce food and other resources that we

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need is really central to uh what it means to be a successful hunter-gatherer.

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And you know, 10 years now that I've been actually doing or nine years that I've been doing

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field work with actual hunter-gathers and I'm still so bad at all of it, even though I try

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like four year olds surpass me in their I've taken whole ass university botany courses in a

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four year old.

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I'm like, is this the food one?

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And she's like, nope.

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Like with an eye with an eye roll.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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With a little eye roll.

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Like, come on, girl, you're you're an adult.

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Get this together.

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Amazing.

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So yeah, no, Dave, go ahead.

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Yeah.

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I mean, I mean, what you're describing um challenges sort of this pop

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evolutionary psychology notion that our ancestors were dumb cavemen hitting each other with

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clubs, and that to take an evolutionary approach to human behavior is to figure out how we

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are dumb cavemen or monkeys deep down, and how that is driving us insane in the

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modern world.

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And part of the goal of this podcast is to move beyond that popular understanding to

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recognize that actually making a living as a hunter-gatherer in the

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wilderness is extremely difficult and cognitively demanding.

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And our ancestors were not dumb cavemen.

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They were sophisticated herbalists, horticulturalists, toolmakers, political

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strategists, you name it.

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And so once we take a proper understanding of the complexity and the cognitive

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demands of the of the human evolutionary niche, the design of the human mind

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becomes uh much uh uh clearer.

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Or at least we we we have a better sense of what kinds of cognitive uh equipment we're

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dealing with and and why we why we possess those cognitive tools.

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Yeah.

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I think I'll I'll add to that, but first I'll caveat that I work with contemporary

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hunter-gatherers.

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So I can kind of generalize from there about what would, but they live in modern

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environments every night in the village where I work, which has no electricity, they spend

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all day charging these enormous beakers and we dance all night.

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Like grandmas all the way through four-year-olds just parties.

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So it's like obviously they're contemporary people, but a lot of the activities that they

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do can tell us a lot about, you know, when we take into account whatever changes and

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technology can tell us some things about the past.

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But that said, you know, we have many, many years

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of being of being anatomically modern humans.

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And so we can tell a lot about the past by knowing about this very kind of long-ranging

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subsistence strategy.

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I always say the people are modern people, but the subsistence strategy is our defining

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subsistence strategy.

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And by studying it, we can learn a lot, like you say.

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And it's it is a fact that you know, it's really hard to make a living.

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And then the other thing too is like there's this.

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I have a very close colleague and friend, Annamika Milk, she's an archaeologist, and we've

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worked together on some experimental archaeology with hunter-gatherers because this is

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another fallacy.

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So, archaeologists, when they do experiments with spear throwing and stuff, they get

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undergrads at university with absolutely no background, and they're like, throw these

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spears in in the quad, and then they're really bad at it.

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And they're like, spears are not efficient.

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And so we've done these.

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Um, she started off doing spear throwing experiments with javelin athletes and was able to

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show that they throw really, really far, but they're not very accurate because they don't

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need to in their craft.

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And then we did it with the community that I work with in the Congo Basin that hunt with

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spears.

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And because it's a rainforest, they don't shoot from very far, but they're incredibly

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accurate from where they're comfortable.

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And in her work, she always says, like, the more simple the technology, the harder it is to

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use because you have to be closer, you have to be stronger, you have to be like with a bow

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and arrow, you can be pretty far, right?

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But if you're stalking an animal with a spear, you have to be so quiet, so aware of all

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the elements and everything.

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So the more complex the technology is to make, the easier it is to use, and vice versa.

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So probably early spear hunters, right, which is predates bow

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hunting, for example, would have been just as if not more cognitively complex in terms of

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what they were able to do than than you know folks who came after that.

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Yeah, I mean just thinking about being alone in the wilderness with a spear trying to

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hunt and kill my dinner.

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Uh that doesn't sound easy.

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I mean, you have to build the spear first.

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You have to find you know the right materials, the right kind of wood, the right kind of

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spear tip.

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You have to fashion you have to have the right size, the right length, you have to

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understand the logic of aerodynamics and w what distance, how far away you should be, uh

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you know, all this complicated stuff.

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It it doesn't sound like a walk in the park by any stretch.

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Yeah, and you imagination.

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Because it's it's a team sport.

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I love like I took this like business class during my masters.

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It was like such a random thing.

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It was about women in business.

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What was I doing there as a mystery?

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And the guy started off by being like, we need to take into account our evolutionary roots.

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Men are solo hunters and women cooperate together.

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And I was like, I'm out of here.

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Like it's so incorrect because so much of hunting is actually a cooperative

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activity.

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Um and if anything, more so than for than like the traditional if we're you know

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we can talk about whether those gender divisions labor of labor are kind of uh

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realistic in the the imaginary one but if we just think about foraging i in terms of

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plant food it's a lot more individualistic than hunting is so you're oh yeah go ahead David

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yeah I mean I was just gonna add to that I mean, beyond the challenges of hunting the

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animal when the animal is in your sights, there is the added, arguably more difficult

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challenge of finding the animal in the first place.

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Yeah.

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And that itself requires a whole lot of cognitive uh skills of

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being able to know the the seasonal mating patterns and the distribution of the local flora

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and fauna, uh, you know, where different uh plants grow, uh where different animals

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congregate, being able to track an animal by its footprints, um or by this the stuff it

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leaves behind or the marks it makes on trees.

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Like this is incredibly complicated detective work.

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Uh and so uh our brains were really um quite useful for us.

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Uh they're they're not just this this uh useless

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Absolutely.

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It's it's a lot of work to power a brain, I think.

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And there's a reason for that.

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Yeah.

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So she you're on this Jeep Road.

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And this is before you were interested in anthropology, is that right?

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So well, I wouldn't say before, because my dad is also an anthropologist.

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So I really tried to get away.

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And I was like, oh, I'm gonna be a lawyer.

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Like I'm gonna subvert my parents and become a lawyer.

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Um and you know, for my best efforts, I was kind of led back.

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I would say like even as a young kid, like whenever we traveled or when I like

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had problems with my friends, like my parents would always say, Well just like take a step

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back and like c approach it like an anthropologist.

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And so that was like very much a lens that I grew up with.

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And my dad, bless his soul.

250
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Like he's just the he's 80 now.

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He's still writing papers.

252
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He's like, I'm finally retired.

253
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I can focus on research.

254
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Uh and even now, like the way that he under, we were watching.

255
00:14:54,880 --> 00:14:57,680
Have you guys watched Love is Blind on Netflix?

256
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It's it's bad television.

257
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I recommend it.

258
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And he we he was visiting us and he like got really into it, watched it with us.

259
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And he was like, I want to write a paper comparing all the different like romantic norms

260
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because now there's like love is blind Japan, love is blind Sweden, love is blind Germany,

261
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and he he got like super psyched.

262
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So I think there's always been that bit of it.

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My dad uh did field work for his PhD but didn't love field work, and I think that's where

264
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we really differ because I love the communities that I work with, I love being in the

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field.

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Um, I have learned so much and like I you know

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when you just like make great friends, like that's how it feels in the village where I

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work.

269
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So that's really a motivator for me to keep going at this point.

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Yeah.

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When you I mean, in and we're you when we can start talking about some of the content maybe

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of what you study.

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One of the things we talked about in this the past episodes, and I think one of the themes

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so far has been that science in general and an evolutionary approach.

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And then especially, I think, and you can tell me if you agree with this, anthropology.

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And then even within that, studying children, which is actually something I do as a

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psychologist, or even studying adaptations, or you know, just the way people work, it's

278
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very um, it's very much that you are um taking

279
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you're quieting down and you're sort of listening to groups of people who are not

280
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being listened to by others, right?

281
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It's sort of there there a common theme, I think, has been that um in the noise and

282
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bustle, especially of the modern world, um that there's sort of one of the

283
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the themes of the people we've talked to, and I think even David and myself is that there's

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at some point a realization that like things are complicated, we don't understand them.

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And in order to understand things, we have to ask parts of life that haven't been

286
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listened to.

287
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And for example, I mean, uh, kids are a great example of that.

288
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Um, a non a non-weird society is a great example of that.

289
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Um, and so you know, I wonder is that is when you talked about your

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00:17:16,360 --> 00:17:21,640
dad sort of said approach things like as an anthropologist, there's a lot of ways to take

291
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that um statement.

292
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And I'm just wondering, is that number one, what does being anthropologist mean to you?

293
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And then number two, does this idea of uh respecting um

294
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things that might be overlooked by most people?

295
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Is that something that sort of resonates with you?

296
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Or does that sound familiar?

297
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Yeah.

298
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I mean, for sure.

299
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And the shocking thing is like a lot of things that are overlooked are so easily remedied.

300
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Like even in the west, like I've a friend and colleague Yvonne Kruppen.

301
00:17:49,390 --> 00:17:52,860
He got his PhD at Harvard doing kind of classic child development.

302
00:17:52,940 --> 00:17:57,500
He was like, finished his PhD, started doing cross-cultural work, and he was like, I don't

303
00:17:57,500 --> 00:17:58,460
know anything about kids.

304
00:17:58,540 --> 00:18:01,820
Like, I spent my entire PhD testing kids and I never talked to any.

305
00:18:01,980 --> 00:18:03,980
And it's so easy to remedy, right?

306
00:18:04,060 --> 00:18:08,780
And actually talk to kids about why they make the choices they're doing in experiments.

307
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Talk to people about why they parent the way they do, why they act the way they do.

308
00:18:13,870 --> 00:18:17,310
Like people love to tell you about themselves in any culture around the world.

309
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They would love explaining things.

310
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So it's like such an easy fix.

311
00:18:21,630 --> 00:18:27,230
Um, and I think like in the be an anthropologist thing, I will say, like, as somebody who's

312
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like very socially anxious, anxious and like very worried about breaking norms, when you go

313
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into a culture that you're not familiar with, it's just like you're gonna fuck up.

314
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Like, and then you just you just let go, you know, and you and then people

315
00:18:41,180 --> 00:18:44,300
correcting you and telling you you're doing something wrong is actually part of the

316
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research.

317
00:18:44,780 --> 00:18:49,340
So unless you violate a norm, you're never gonna realize that that norm exists because it's

318
00:18:49,340 --> 00:18:53,980
implicit and it takes people correcting you and saying, No, you like I remember one of my

319
00:18:53,980 --> 00:18:59,980
first um so the first time I was alone in the field, I went to follow this family

320
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into a forest camp and I brought a tiny bit of salt and some like magic cubes to share.

321
00:19:05,650 --> 00:19:10,050
And this person who now is of my very close friend, this woman came up to me and she was

322
00:19:10,050 --> 00:19:12,130
like, You're not sharing, right?

323
00:19:12,290 --> 00:19:16,210
And like basically told me, like, you didn't bring enough stuff to share with everybody.

324
00:19:16,370 --> 00:19:20,530
You can't just share with one person, like it like laid out all these sharing norms for me,

325
00:19:20,690 --> 00:19:21,010
right?

326
00:19:21,170 --> 00:19:26,980
And like when you just don't know anything and you're completely novice or novel in an in

327
00:19:26,980 --> 00:19:31,300
a social environment, you just have to be okay with violating norms.

328
00:19:31,380 --> 00:19:34,100
And it in a way it's a sense of freedom, right?

329
00:19:34,180 --> 00:19:36,340
Than like, I'm tipping 20%.

330
00:19:36,660 --> 00:19:37,780
Should I have tipped 22%?

331
00:19:37,940 --> 00:19:43,150
I can't remember like if it's this venue or this setting where you're, you know, you

332
00:19:43,150 --> 00:19:44,990
realize that you're having an effect on that.

333
00:19:45,070 --> 00:19:48,910
And then having that feedback very directly because everybody agrees that you're bad at

334
00:19:48,910 --> 00:19:52,830
something rather than you're an asshole is really freeing.

335
00:19:52,990 --> 00:19:57,550
So I think that's been like a really useful lesson of anthropology for me.

336
00:19:57,790 --> 00:20:02,590
Um and then the other bit that we get to do as human behavioral ecologists is the

337
00:20:02,590 --> 00:20:03,310
quantitative bit.

338
00:20:03,390 --> 00:20:07,620
So we're not only talking to people, we're also following them around and taking notes

339
00:20:07,620 --> 00:20:08,340
about what they're doing.

340
00:20:08,500 --> 00:20:10,020
So that's a lot of fun too.

341
00:20:10,660 --> 00:20:14,980
I think you get the kind of depth and breadth when you take both approaches.

342
00:20:15,300 --> 00:20:15,940
Yeah, that's right.

343
00:20:16,020 --> 00:20:20,820
Historically, I mean my I have a cart car cartoonish possibly, probably very much probably,

344
00:20:20,900 --> 00:20:25,060
uh view of the history of anthropology, even though I sort of have a foot in it, which is

345
00:20:25,060 --> 00:20:30,610
sort of there had long time been just sort of the ethnography thing, which is just sort of

346
00:20:30,690 --> 00:20:34,930
you go, and it was sort of, you know, largely colonial sort of, but it was sort of, you

347
00:20:34,930 --> 00:20:39,170
know, somebody going to this strange place and writing a book about their experiences.

348
00:20:39,250 --> 00:20:42,050
And even as my undergrad experience, like this was a lot of what I was reading,

349
00:20:42,210 --> 00:20:42,690
ethnographies.

350
00:20:42,850 --> 00:20:47,170
I loved it, you know, Colin Turnbull, the Mbouti, um, things like that, the Forest People,

351
00:20:47,250 --> 00:20:47,970
things like that.

352
00:20:48,210 --> 00:20:53,780
Um, the the the history of sort of adding the quantitative part.

353
00:20:53,940 --> 00:20:59,060
Do you have um do yeah, do you have thoughts on on sort of what your representation of that

354
00:20:59,060 --> 00:21:04,260
is or yeah, I mean I think in the really early ethnographies there was quantitative work

355
00:21:04,260 --> 00:21:04,900
involved in it.

356
00:21:05,060 --> 00:21:10,180
People were taking, you know, kinship diagrams is a social network, right?

357
00:21:10,740 --> 00:21:15,350
Um even the cooler ring, Malinovsky's work on trade, right?

358
00:21:15,510 --> 00:21:20,150
Um, Margaret Mead was doing IQ tests with kids and showing that they weren't taking the

359
00:21:20,150 --> 00:21:23,750
straight path, they were taking the most beautiful path because that's where all the you

360
00:21:23,750 --> 00:21:26,230
know, inter like challenging intelligence tests.

361
00:21:26,470 --> 00:21:30,390
So some of the earliest work I think did include quantitative work.

362
00:21:30,550 --> 00:21:36,500
And that was when anthropology was a little bit more ingrained within more of

363
00:21:36,660 --> 00:21:38,740
the social or biological sciences.

364
00:21:38,820 --> 00:21:42,900
And then as there was a divergence between more of the humanities track and the

365
00:21:42,900 --> 00:21:47,300
quantitative track, evolutionary and cultural anthropologists kind of separated.

366
00:21:47,460 --> 00:21:50,500
And then we got more of that distinction.

367
00:21:50,820 --> 00:21:54,100
And I think there's good reason for that, right?

368
00:21:54,260 --> 00:21:57,380
Counting people does violence in a way.

369
00:21:57,460 --> 00:21:59,460
And we need to contend with that in our field.

370
00:21:59,540 --> 00:22:04,990
You reduce people to numbers, um, you draw out their boundaries, which could be

371
00:22:04,990 --> 00:22:05,550
wrong.

372
00:22:05,790 --> 00:22:10,430
And then, you know, those are still used in Canada, those are used in court cases around

373
00:22:10,430 --> 00:22:12,750
indigenous land cases.

374
00:22:13,150 --> 00:22:18,990
So there's a lot of kind of tricky things in terms of the ethics of counting.

375
00:22:19,230 --> 00:22:23,790
Um, but then at the same time, like I always come back, I work with a lot of social

376
00:22:23,790 --> 00:22:28,000
anthropologists, and we often like, for example I did a study on play and work and a social

377
00:22:28,320 --> 00:22:32,720
and you know I was quantifying this and a social a social anthropologist was like we you

378
00:22:32,720 --> 00:22:36,560
can't separate them like they're part of the same and I was like I know it's just a model

379
00:22:36,640 --> 00:22:42,560
it's not real I'm not saying this is how the community conceives of it I'm saying we have

380
00:22:42,560 --> 00:22:47,250
to make a boundary somewhere if we're gonna look at the trade off in these activities.

381
00:22:47,330 --> 00:22:51,970
And I think that's where we have to make concessions on, we have to be critical of our

382
00:22:51,970 --> 00:22:57,250
work, which I think evolutionary anthropologists aren't in writing.

383
00:22:57,410 --> 00:23:00,050
I think we're very actual very critical.

384
00:23:00,450 --> 00:23:04,610
There are exceptions, but I think we are more willing.

385
00:23:04,850 --> 00:23:05,730
Let me back up.

386
00:23:05,890 --> 00:23:10,770
So I think we come from a scientific tradition in writing, which means that when we talk

387
00:23:10,770 --> 00:23:13,170
about theory, we talk about something that exists in the world.

388
00:23:13,330 --> 00:23:18,140
But when you actually talk to most evolutionary anthropologists, their theory is like very

389
00:23:18,140 --> 00:23:20,700
shaped by the community that they work with, right?

390
00:23:20,860 --> 00:23:26,700
So, like Brooke Shells's work, for example, um, on this kinship category that

391
00:23:26,700 --> 00:23:32,140
is, I'm gonna butcher it, but it's on, and she would be a great person for you guys to have

392
00:23:32,140 --> 00:23:37,180
on your podcast too, but on um like extramarital um

393
00:23:37,750 --> 00:23:43,510
children of the himba, there so the husband has a specific

394
00:23:43,830 --> 00:23:48,470
kin term for that child, which me which means child, but has a different, like it's a

395
00:23:48,470 --> 00:23:49,350
different word.

396
00:23:49,590 --> 00:23:54,310
And that led to a lot of her research on, you know, these extramarital relationships

397
00:23:54,310 --> 00:23:55,350
amongst the Himba.

398
00:23:55,510 --> 00:24:01,320
Thinking of Jeremy Coster's work on hunting and food preferences and how uh amongst

399
00:24:01,320 --> 00:24:06,280
the um Myagna and Nicaragua, their hunting preferences don't match the expectations we

400
00:24:06,280 --> 00:24:10,440
would have for optimal forging people because culture and people have food preferences, and

401
00:24:10,440 --> 00:24:13,160
some food tastes good and other meat doesn't, right?

402
00:24:13,320 --> 00:24:14,200
So things like that.

403
00:24:14,280 --> 00:24:18,200
And you realize, like, oh, we're all talking about it at conferences and in our

404
00:24:18,200 --> 00:24:23,850
presentations, but when you start writing like a scientist, then you have a background with

405
00:24:23,850 --> 00:24:28,410
theory and then a method section, and you don't, it's harder to report that kind of

406
00:24:28,410 --> 00:24:31,450
iterative nature of the development of these theories.

407
00:24:31,530 --> 00:24:36,410
And I think that's something we could probably work on in terms of improving even just our

408
00:24:36,410 --> 00:24:37,050
storytelling.

409
00:24:37,210 --> 00:24:38,890
Scientific articles are so boring.

410
00:24:39,130 --> 00:24:43,690
They're boring to write, they're boring to read, they're behind a paywall, so nobody reads

411
00:24:43,690 --> 00:24:44,250
them anyways.

412
00:24:44,330 --> 00:24:48,570
And we could do a lot better storytelling through podcasts like this, but also through just

413
00:24:48,570 --> 00:24:50,650
more narrative writing about our science.

414
00:24:51,020 --> 00:24:51,180
Yeah.

415
00:24:51,260 --> 00:24:56,220
And I think like anthropo every anthropologist I talk to, uh, and I try to talk to them as

416
00:24:56,220 --> 00:24:56,860
much as possible.

417
00:24:56,940 --> 00:25:02,860
Like John Patton, who uh was a dear uh dear person I talked to who passed away recently.

418
00:25:03,020 --> 00:25:05,340
Every HBAS, you know, I study group conflict.

419
00:25:05,500 --> 00:25:09,340
And I feel like every time I got to talk to John Patton, it was like I was like a kid in a

420
00:25:09,340 --> 00:25:14,860
candy store, where it was keeping me honest because I'm just like some some dumb

421
00:25:14,860 --> 00:25:20,150
psychologist, you know, in the lab and talking to John, he's like, no, this is what it's

422
00:25:20,150 --> 00:25:23,030
like in a small scale social world where everybody knows everyone else.

423
00:25:23,110 --> 00:25:27,270
And this is what female leadership looks like, and nobody even knows about it unless you

424
00:25:27,270 --> 00:25:29,270
know the field site for 30 or 40 years.

425
00:25:29,430 --> 00:25:34,790
So yeah, no, I really like anthropology is so important to the evolutionary behavioral

426
00:25:34,790 --> 00:25:35,350
sciences.

427
00:25:35,510 --> 00:25:39,750
And really, and I'm I'm uh maybe we can talk about this a little bit later.

428
00:25:39,910 --> 00:25:45,520
Um, but one of the trends that I I've talked to many, especially evolutionary

429
00:25:45,520 --> 00:25:51,280
psychologists, about is that um the the separation between sort of evolutionary psychology

430
00:25:51,280 --> 00:25:55,520
and evolutionary anthropology in terms of like conferences and things, and some of it's

431
00:25:55,520 --> 00:26:00,160
practical, like just summer field work and things, but but there's a concern of that being

432
00:26:00,160 --> 00:26:01,600
separate more separation.

433
00:26:01,680 --> 00:26:05,920
And I think really anthropologists really keep us, meaning like the psychologists, honest.

434
00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:09,520
And I really don't want to be in an evolutionary behavioral sciences where there's no

435
00:26:09,520 --> 00:26:11,680
anthropology talking to psychologists.

436
00:26:12,090 --> 00:26:12,330
Right.

437
00:26:12,490 --> 00:26:17,850
You don't want it to all be like mating stuff, college mating studies.

438
00:26:18,250 --> 00:26:22,010
Even that, I mean, even in it's a similar thing to like what you described in your class,

439
00:26:22,170 --> 00:26:28,010
the the the the the management class, um, where I went to a psychology department

440
00:26:28,090 --> 00:26:31,930
uh and I was in a psychology department for a while where there was no interaction with the

441
00:26:31,930 --> 00:26:36,820
anthropology department here at UCSB, you know, as an undergrad or as a grad student, I

442
00:26:36,820 --> 00:26:38,260
took classes with Mike Gervin.

443
00:26:38,500 --> 00:26:41,540
You know, the CP is in an anthropology is in the anthropology department.

444
00:26:41,620 --> 00:26:45,060
You know, it was if you look at the faculty, it's like anthropsych, anthropsych,

445
00:26:45,220 --> 00:26:45,780
anthropsych.

446
00:26:45,940 --> 00:26:46,660
I mean, just down the line.

447
00:26:47,460 --> 00:26:50,260
And then I went to a psychology department where there was no interaction with

448
00:26:50,260 --> 00:26:55,540
psychologists and or psychology department, no anthropology uh anthropologists, excuse me,

449
00:26:55,780 --> 00:27:00,390
and people would just say things and I'd be like, no, there's like this society that does

450
00:27:00,390 --> 00:27:00,550
this.

451
00:27:00,630 --> 00:27:04,550
I became like the anthropologist in the room for my you know, my the novice one, but at

452
00:27:04,550 --> 00:27:10,550
least the amateur, like, so I was really struck with how important it is to

453
00:27:11,030 --> 00:27:16,550
have this like broad cultural, ecological perspective for psychological claims.

454
00:27:16,710 --> 00:27:22,550
And in uh evolutionary psychology and psychologists especially, I think, uh really

455
00:27:23,110 --> 00:27:28,740
are not kept in check without having um talking to to folks like you

456
00:27:28,900 --> 00:27:34,660
for example and i think i think also vice versa i mean experiments

457
00:27:34,900 --> 00:27:38,980
can really help deepen your understanding of a community especially when you talk to people

458
00:27:38,980 --> 00:27:44,580
during the experiment so like for example this summer i i i always say i only do

459
00:27:44,580 --> 00:27:49,700
experiments to prove them wrong um and this summer we were doing a an imitation experiment

460
00:27:50,100 --> 00:27:54,110
um because we have this idea that we have age-based imitation biases.

461
00:27:54,270 --> 00:27:58,510
So kids prefer to learn from adults, presumably because adults have like survived in the

462
00:27:58,510 --> 00:28:00,750
until adulthood and they probably know more, right?

463
00:28:00,910 --> 00:28:04,830
And a lot of my work has shown that kids spend a lot of time learning from other kids.

464
00:28:04,990 --> 00:28:09,390
So we're like, let's do an experiment and see in these communities where there's a lot of

465
00:28:09,390 --> 00:28:15,150
peer imitation or sorry, peer learning, whether we were able to instigate this

466
00:28:15,150 --> 00:28:17,280
in in this community.

467
00:28:17,440 --> 00:28:19,840
And so I'm doing this experiment with this little girl.

468
00:28:19,920 --> 00:28:23,680
And first we're showing them pictures of a peer and an adult that they don't know from a

469
00:28:23,680 --> 00:28:24,800
different village far away.

470
00:28:24,880 --> 00:28:26,320
And we're like, who do you want to learn from?

471
00:28:26,480 --> 00:28:28,800
And that she's just like, skip, skip.

472
00:28:28,960 --> 00:28:32,240
And then finally she like looks at me, she must have been like six or seven, super

473
00:28:32,240 --> 00:28:32,640
frustrated.

474
00:28:32,720 --> 00:28:35,280
She's like, I can't pick because I don't know these people.

475
00:28:35,440 --> 00:28:39,520
And it was like, oh, like of course, like in a small-scale society where you know every

476
00:28:39,520 --> 00:28:43,760
single person there, you're not using age heuristics, those are meaningless.

477
00:28:43,890 --> 00:28:47,810
You're using your detailed knowledge of what people can do, like in a much more

478
00:28:47,810 --> 00:28:48,690
straightforward way.

479
00:28:48,850 --> 00:28:51,570
And it was like, okay, that's gonna go in the paper, I think.

480
00:28:51,730 --> 00:28:51,890
Yeah.

481
00:28:53,250 --> 00:28:54,130
That's so fascinating.

482
00:28:54,370 --> 00:28:59,010
I mean, the idea, I mean, that our entire society is structured around learning from

483
00:28:59,010 --> 00:29:01,490
strangers, that we don't know our teachers.

484
00:29:01,730 --> 00:29:01,890
Yeah.

485
00:29:02,130 --> 00:29:05,730
That that is an incredibly alien way of learning.

486
00:29:05,970 --> 00:29:06,370
Yeah.

487
00:29:06,600 --> 00:29:11,640
Um which is kind of frightening when when you think about it, just just how weird and alien

488
00:29:11,800 --> 00:29:16,760
our our entire education system is to in terms of the design of the human mind.

489
00:29:17,080 --> 00:29:22,920
That we are sitting down in chairs um passively receiving information

490
00:29:22,920 --> 00:29:28,920
from an adult stranger who uh doesn't really have our best interests at heart at the end

491
00:29:28,920 --> 00:29:32,680
of the day and is just being paid to be there uh and to teach us stuff.

492
00:29:32,840 --> 00:29:38,630
Uh and uh it's it's kind of shocking that there uh isn't as much

493
00:29:38,630 --> 00:29:44,550
integration between um anthropological research on children's learning and our

494
00:29:44,630 --> 00:29:45,910
our actual education system.

495
00:29:46,070 --> 00:29:49,670
You would think that this would be vital information for designing educational sist uh

496
00:29:49,830 --> 00:29:54,630
systems that uh jive with the human mind and with in with the natural way in which we learn

497
00:29:54,630 --> 00:29:56,630
things, and yet they're completely disconnected.

498
00:29:56,710 --> 00:30:02,390
Uh I I don't I know of no uh person in education who is familiar with uh

499
00:30:02,720 --> 00:30:05,200
this kind of anthropological research.

500
00:30:05,440 --> 00:30:11,360
Um so what do you think are the implications of your work for for education, given that you

501
00:30:11,440 --> 00:30:15,840
you know so much about the ways in which children learn, how are those ways different from

502
00:30:15,840 --> 00:30:19,440
how they learn in in uh Western uh societies?

503
00:30:19,920 --> 00:30:24,160
Yeah, I'll tell you first about what I thought before my kids started doing phonics and

504
00:30:24,160 --> 00:30:29,840
then I'll tell you what I think about so I mean what we know from

505
00:30:30,160 --> 00:30:36,010
the research in many, many small-scale communities, including migrant communities to the US

506
00:30:36,090 --> 00:30:40,410
who, you know, come from indigenous backgrounds but are living in like Los Angeles, right?

507
00:30:40,890 --> 00:30:46,810
Um we know that they're much better able to attend to more stimuli

508
00:30:47,130 --> 00:30:49,690
at the same time than one thing at a time.

509
00:30:49,770 --> 00:30:54,970
So they're paying attention to many, many individuals doing things rather than focusing on

510
00:30:54,970 --> 00:30:56,490
one person at a time.

511
00:30:56,810 --> 00:31:02,640
There's um an emphasis on doing things together rather than, you know, well,

512
00:31:02,720 --> 00:31:03,360
I'm the adult.

513
00:31:03,440 --> 00:31:06,560
Here's some like kind of disarticulated tasks.

514
00:31:06,720 --> 00:31:09,680
Trust me, they lead to something meaningful, right?

515
00:31:10,080 --> 00:31:15,920
Um and um the goal is not learning, the learning is peripheral to the

516
00:31:15,920 --> 00:31:17,040
goal of doing something together.

517
00:31:17,200 --> 00:31:21,600
And that's a really different perspective on learning, right?

518
00:31:21,760 --> 00:31:27,150
Um I think it's important to think back to the history of formal education, which uh

519
00:31:27,470 --> 00:31:33,390
really is about two things and um might get a little bit political here, but

520
00:31:33,390 --> 00:31:36,990
one is about well, what do we do when there's child labor laws and everybody's gotta be in

521
00:31:36,990 --> 00:31:41,390
the factory and the kids are in the streets, like we gotta put them in school.

522
00:31:41,630 --> 00:31:45,520
And number two, how do we make future workers.

523
00:31:45,760 --> 00:31:51,280
And those are valid kind of every education system, formal or informal, is about how do you

524
00:31:51,280 --> 00:31:55,920
make kind of individuals who are able to do things that they need to do in their society,

525
00:31:56,080 --> 00:31:56,400
right?

526
00:31:56,560 --> 00:32:02,480
And that I think a lot of our education system reflects those, the, those things.

527
00:32:02,640 --> 00:32:08,490
The problem is that we have path dependencies in our in our institutions, and we're we're

528
00:32:08,570 --> 00:32:13,290
we don't seem to be able to adapt to the fact that that's not really true anymore, and

529
00:32:13,290 --> 00:32:17,050
probably most people aren't working in factories, and probably they could learn to work in

530
00:32:17,050 --> 00:32:19,210
factories pretty straightforwardly.

531
00:32:19,370 --> 00:32:25,290
So then, how do we, you know, support the kind of

532
00:32:25,290 --> 00:32:30,900
creative learning that and more independent learning that happens in a lot of these

533
00:32:30,900 --> 00:32:33,700
places, in a lot in the majority world.

534
00:32:33,780 --> 00:32:35,380
Um, there's some cool initiatives.

535
00:32:35,540 --> 00:32:41,300
So there's like schools, like uh um democratic schools that David

536
00:32:41,300 --> 00:32:43,940
Lancey writes a lot about, and and David Gray as well.

537
00:32:44,020 --> 00:32:46,820
A lot of Davids coming up in this talk, guys.

538
00:32:47,700 --> 00:32:49,940
I know it gets becomes confusing, yeah.

539
00:32:50,970 --> 00:32:55,610
And that's a lot more about collective decision making where the kids are saying to these

540
00:32:55,610 --> 00:32:59,690
teachers that are roaming about, okay, we want to work on a project on this topic.

541
00:32:59,850 --> 00:33:02,170
And can you support us in learning about this topic?

542
00:33:02,330 --> 00:33:06,170
So a lot more student student led learning.

543
00:33:06,410 --> 00:33:12,090
Um I think it doesn't necessarily have to be somebody that you know

544
00:33:12,090 --> 00:33:16,880
that's teaching you, but there is a lot of research, not mine, but a lot of interesting

545
00:33:16,880 --> 00:33:22,800
research that suggests that socio um communicative norms, if they're not in line with your

546
00:33:22,800 --> 00:33:25,200
teachers, you're just going to have a harder time learning.

547
00:33:25,280 --> 00:33:28,800
And this has a lot of implications, especially for minority kids who come from different

548
00:33:28,800 --> 00:33:29,840
cultural backgrounds.

549
00:33:30,080 --> 00:33:34,000
There's some great examples in anthropology of norms about eye contact.

550
00:33:34,080 --> 00:33:36,880
So we think of eye contact as polite.

551
00:33:37,040 --> 00:33:41,120
And in some indigenous societies, making eye contact is considered really rude.

552
00:33:41,280 --> 00:33:47,130
And so when you have, you know, a majority like probably European descent

553
00:33:47,130 --> 00:33:50,970
teacher working with an indigenous kid, and she's like, This kid is so rude, he's not

554
00:33:50,970 --> 00:33:52,330
making eye contact with me.

555
00:33:52,490 --> 00:33:57,130
Then you have this mismatch of norms in the classroom that can really hinder learning.

556
00:33:57,370 --> 00:34:02,250
So, even just an awareness of that, not in a superficial way, but you know, in getting to

557
00:34:02,250 --> 00:34:06,170
know students and getting to know the different ways they communicate, um, I think is

558
00:34:06,170 --> 00:34:08,090
something that would be really cool to do.

559
00:34:08,250 --> 00:34:13,130
There are more and more kind of teacher researcher

560
00:34:13,130 --> 00:34:18,140
initiatives where teachers are being trained to do

561
00:34:18,140 --> 00:34:22,380
anthropological work in their students' households.

562
00:34:22,620 --> 00:34:27,260
And one great example of this is called the funds of knowledge approach, which was done, I

563
00:34:27,260 --> 00:34:31,100
think it was in Arizona, where there's a lot of Mexican migrants.

564
00:34:31,260 --> 00:34:34,940
And they train these teachers in anthropological methods, sent them out to these

565
00:34:34,940 --> 00:34:35,500
households.

566
00:34:35,660 --> 00:34:39,020
And then the teachers are like, oh, like these families know things.

567
00:34:39,180 --> 00:34:41,500
Like we can, we're not starting at zero.

568
00:34:41,660 --> 00:34:46,230
We're starting from all the knowledge that they have in terms of their social networks, in

569
00:34:46,230 --> 00:34:49,670
terms of like their business acumen, like kids are participating in all this commerce.

570
00:34:49,750 --> 00:34:52,550
Like, let's let's build our lessons around that.

571
00:34:52,790 --> 00:34:56,630
And it's such an amazing, refreshing way.

572
00:34:56,790 --> 00:35:01,910
And I think if a big problem is that we don't, at least in the UK, there's so much pressure

573
00:35:01,910 --> 00:35:06,870
on meeting these milestones for teachers that there's not really the time for them to be

574
00:35:06,870 --> 00:35:09,270
creative in their approach to education.

575
00:35:09,510 --> 00:35:11,720
Um, And that's what it would really need.

576
00:35:11,880 --> 00:35:16,680
Like a big, you know, there's the need that justifies innovation, but there's also having

577
00:35:16,680 --> 00:35:19,480
time, which I think is probably more the human approach, right?

578
00:35:19,640 --> 00:35:21,560
The more time you have, the more creative you have.

579
00:35:21,720 --> 00:35:24,040
You can make mistakes, you have that protected time.

580
00:35:24,600 --> 00:35:28,680
And it would be, I think that's the bit where we could really make some progress.

581
00:35:28,920 --> 00:35:33,720
Okay, but then that said, so now that my kid is learning to read, I think one thing that

582
00:35:33,720 --> 00:35:38,330
I've learned is there are some skills where you need dedicated teachers who are really

583
00:35:38,330 --> 00:35:40,090
specialized at teaching things.

584
00:35:40,330 --> 00:35:45,930
And I have wondered now whether our kind of pivot in the

585
00:35:45,930 --> 00:35:51,370
post-industrialized West towards so much teacher-led teaching has a lot to do with

586
00:35:51,370 --> 00:35:56,490
literacy and kind of disembodied math, like right, just like numbers that aren't related to

587
00:35:56,490 --> 00:35:57,370
actual things.

588
00:35:58,090 --> 00:36:04,000
And that you kind of need to get over that hurdle with very direct active teaching um

589
00:36:04,160 --> 00:36:10,080
in that setting before and then that leads to kind of these recursive loops where then

590
00:36:10,320 --> 00:36:15,280
once you're able to read and you have you've been exposed to that type of education, then

591
00:36:15,280 --> 00:36:19,840
you just reproduce that and over and over with your family and you get kind of runaway

592
00:36:19,840 --> 00:36:23,120
cultural evolution in in that type of um teaching style.

593
00:36:23,280 --> 00:36:26,770
I don't know, but it's been, you know, rattling around in my head.

594
00:36:27,010 --> 00:36:27,250
Yeah.

595
00:36:27,330 --> 00:36:33,250
So the idea to so um to make sure I understand the idea is that it might be sort of an all

596
00:36:33,250 --> 00:36:39,090
the above approach in that there are some cases where that direct

597
00:36:39,170 --> 00:36:45,090
disembodied math or that just m mapping phonemes to to weird squiggles on the page.

598
00:36:45,250 --> 00:36:50,820
That's just sorry, for a little while we're just gonna do regular uh regular teaching.

599
00:36:50,900 --> 00:36:54,420
Somebody's gonna stand up and talk to you and tell you what to do and you're gonna like it.

600
00:36:54,660 --> 00:37:00,660
But but of course, then the thing where we have like collective autonomy, creativity, that

601
00:37:00,660 --> 00:37:05,300
also needs to be nourished too, or in and and it's all the above sort of thing.

602
00:37:05,700 --> 00:37:06,180
Absolutely.

603
00:37:06,340 --> 00:37:10,820
And I think there's a lot of parts of our lives that we could probably do better.

604
00:37:10,980 --> 00:37:12,340
Like there's no kids in the street.

605
00:37:12,420 --> 00:37:16,020
I don't know if you guys have noticed, like, there's no kids about when you go to any

606
00:37:16,870 --> 00:37:21,750
country anywhere else in a majority of the world, there's like children out and about doing

607
00:37:21,750 --> 00:37:21,990
things.

608
00:37:22,070 --> 00:37:23,110
Even you go to Spain.

609
00:37:23,430 --> 00:37:24,150
Yeah, Germany.

610
00:37:24,230 --> 00:37:26,070
I was I was just living in Germany for the past nine years.

611
00:37:26,150 --> 00:37:30,310
I mean, actually, I mean, selfishly, one of the reasons I like we wanted to invite you so

612
00:37:30,310 --> 00:37:36,150
soon was because I spent my my existence in Germany was like great

613
00:37:36,150 --> 00:37:42,080
playgrounds, seeing having autonomy in Germany and again coming back

614
00:37:42,080 --> 00:37:43,040
to the US.

615
00:37:43,280 --> 00:37:49,200
And the playgrounds in the US are sort of like I'm doing a pat on the head, like

616
00:37:49,600 --> 00:37:50,800
you know, nonverbal.

617
00:37:50,880 --> 00:37:53,760
Like it was clearly designed by somebody.

618
00:37:53,840 --> 00:37:56,800
Um, and this is like almost all playgrounds, they're getting a little bit better.

619
00:37:56,880 --> 00:38:02,400
And there is a there is a um uh a movement to cut to create what are called in innovative

620
00:38:02,400 --> 00:38:07,470
playgrounds, where basically it's the the you know, you just ask the question, is this look

621
00:38:07,470 --> 00:38:08,590
fun to you as an adult?

622
00:38:08,750 --> 00:38:10,590
Like is this somewhere that would be pleasant or interesting?

623
00:38:10,990 --> 00:38:13,150
Or is it basically like a bunch of stairs, you know?

624
00:38:13,390 --> 00:38:18,750
Um and uh and it like playgrounds in Europe and especially Germany, uh I didn't realize

625
00:38:18,750 --> 00:38:20,830
this, but playgrounds were started in Berlin.

626
00:38:20,990 --> 00:38:24,990
Um playgrounds in Berlin are amazing and it was a huge part of our life.

627
00:38:25,230 --> 00:38:29,950
My son having autonomy, walking around, kids walking around, kids are just everywhere, and

628
00:38:29,950 --> 00:38:35,380
the social structure is is built to like think about kids and then coming back to the US

629
00:38:35,460 --> 00:38:37,700
and I'm like, wow, not at all.

630
00:38:37,940 --> 00:38:43,380
You know, and I realize I really feel this that um and maybe the UK is similar to US in

631
00:38:43,380 --> 00:38:45,460
this respect, maybe it's a bit in the middle.

632
00:38:45,540 --> 00:38:50,180
So we so just like for listeners, like in Germany, because we were in Leipzig and in

633
00:38:50,180 --> 00:38:55,220
Germany it's like I can only describe as like a World War II bombsite turned into a

634
00:38:55,220 --> 00:38:55,700
playground.

635
00:38:55,780 --> 00:39:00,890
Like I don't know if that was your like a lot of jagged edges and like 20-foot high slide.

636
00:39:01,370 --> 00:39:03,050
YouTube playgrounds in Germany.

637
00:39:03,130 --> 00:39:04,090
And uh you'll see.

638
00:39:04,170 --> 00:39:04,330
Yeah.

639
00:39:04,730 --> 00:39:06,970
You know, it's like the definition of risky play.

640
00:39:07,050 --> 00:39:11,850
And then here is like the kind of foamy grounds, like no, no kids are getting hurt, but

641
00:39:11,850 --> 00:39:14,330
it's also a little bit less fun at the same time.

642
00:39:14,570 --> 00:39:18,490
Um, and yeah, there's just not a lot of place to to involve kids.

643
00:39:18,570 --> 00:39:23,210
There's like kid-focused stuff that you have to drive them, drive them to, but there's not

644
00:39:23,210 --> 00:39:27,300
like places for adults hang out with their kids.

645
00:39:27,460 --> 00:39:29,140
That's not the yeah.

646
00:39:29,220 --> 00:39:33,380
The exception here is that you can take kids to pubs, which is very different for me as a

647
00:39:33,380 --> 00:39:35,860
Canadian, where you never take a kid to a bar, right?

648
00:39:35,940 --> 00:39:36,020
Right.

649
00:39:36,260 --> 00:39:39,220
But here, like there's a few pubs with playgrounds in them.

650
00:39:39,380 --> 00:39:41,780
So you can watch your kids while you have a beer.

651
00:39:41,940 --> 00:39:42,260
Exactly.

652
00:39:42,420 --> 00:39:44,740
Um, so I think that's kind of the British exception.

653
00:39:44,900 --> 00:39:49,300
So every country has its own kind of strange exception that feels surprising to everybody

654
00:39:49,300 --> 00:39:49,700
else.

655
00:39:49,860 --> 00:39:55,610
Um, but yeah, overall, I would say like kids are out of sight, They're not part of society,

656
00:39:55,690 --> 00:39:56,970
and that's a shame.

657
00:39:57,290 --> 00:39:58,970
Yeah, what what consequences?

658
00:39:59,130 --> 00:40:04,970
I mean, and and maybe this starts getting into you as a human being

659
00:40:05,210 --> 00:40:08,810
living in these in a very different culture, and every culture is different.

660
00:40:09,050 --> 00:40:14,490
But you know, what do you either either from a scientific perspective or just a personal

661
00:40:14,490 --> 00:40:18,410
perspective, being a parent, but also you know, being knowing the people in these different

662
00:40:18,410 --> 00:40:21,370
places, you have a very unique perspective.

663
00:40:21,450 --> 00:40:25,380
Like, what do you think are the the consequences?

664
00:40:25,540 --> 00:40:30,340
And is it the I mean I think a cartoonish view I might have, and I'm just thinking this out

665
00:40:30,340 --> 00:40:34,580
loud right now, is that maybe like Aka are the right and we're wrong.

666
00:40:34,740 --> 00:40:36,500
And maybe that's oversimplified.

667
00:40:36,660 --> 00:40:42,660
But just in terms of you know what the kids are like or the consequences for

668
00:40:42,660 --> 00:40:46,570
the um for humans because every generation grows up, right?

669
00:40:46,650 --> 00:40:49,530
Like you become you become an adult.

670
00:40:49,690 --> 00:40:53,450
And so every kid now will be an adult and every adult was a kid.

671
00:40:54,490 --> 00:40:59,930
You know, you what is tell I don't even know what the question is because I don't even know

672
00:40:59,930 --> 00:41:02,490
what what the question should be because you have that perspective.

673
00:41:02,650 --> 00:41:08,090
So please like what what what do you think is important to share about that that knowledge

674
00:41:08,090 --> 00:41:08,650
that you see?

675
00:41:08,810 --> 00:41:14,080
These are kids growing up in a very different place, very different responsibilities, very

676
00:41:14,080 --> 00:41:16,480
different ability to take risks, have autonomy.

677
00:41:16,720 --> 00:41:16,960
Yeah.

678
00:41:17,200 --> 00:41:17,840
Yeah.

679
00:41:18,160 --> 00:41:23,360
So I think, like, again, coming back to the thing that like every formal and informal

680
00:41:23,360 --> 00:41:28,160
education is adapted to this social and ecological environment that you grew up in, right?

681
00:41:28,320 --> 00:41:34,000
And so like we we had my son in Denmark, and there they do

682
00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:37,760
something that I would never do, even though I come from an equally cold country, which is

683
00:41:37,760 --> 00:41:42,350
like led keep let kids sleep in a stroller outside and sometimes like out of sight.

684
00:41:42,590 --> 00:41:48,430
Like you're just like, all right, that's something, but it's very adapted to that

685
00:41:48,430 --> 00:41:52,510
social environment and to that ecology, and the kids grow up fine.

686
00:41:52,750 --> 00:41:57,070
And what was really interesting for us is like for me, at least.

687
00:41:57,310 --> 00:42:02,900
Um, so when the nurses visit you at home and they do the assessments after you have a

688
00:42:02,900 --> 00:42:05,380
baby and like they then they come again a few times.

689
00:42:05,540 --> 00:42:09,380
And at nine months they do an assessment like, is your kid ready for preschool, like for

690
00:42:09,460 --> 00:42:14,260
nursery kindergarten for um uh what do they call it in North America?

691
00:42:14,420 --> 00:42:16,340
Now I've gone fully British.

692
00:42:16,900 --> 00:42:17,380
Yeah.

693
00:42:17,700 --> 00:42:19,860
Um French.

694
00:42:19,940 --> 00:42:20,020
Yeah.

695
00:42:20,100 --> 00:42:24,110
So is it for like child daycare, daycare, daycare, thank you.

696
00:42:24,270 --> 00:42:26,030
Yeah, because I had it, I had kita in Germany.

697
00:42:26,110 --> 00:42:27,870
So yeah, no, David can tell us.

698
00:42:27,950 --> 00:42:28,270
Yeah, yeah.

699
00:42:28,510 --> 00:42:29,790
It's 10 30 p.m., guys.

700
00:42:29,950 --> 00:42:30,590
I'm doing my best.

701
00:42:30,830 --> 00:42:31,310
No, thank you.

702
00:42:32,430 --> 00:42:35,870
So so that she she comes through and she's like, Can your kid wave?

703
00:42:36,030 --> 00:42:36,750
Write the assessment.

704
00:42:36,830 --> 00:42:38,030
Like, are they ready for daycare?

705
00:42:38,110 --> 00:42:39,150
Can they wave?

706
00:42:39,390 --> 00:42:41,150
Um, do they eat well?

707
00:42:41,310 --> 00:42:46,080
And then the last one is like, do they fall asleep in the stroller, in the like in the

708
00:42:46,080 --> 00:42:46,960
buggy, right?

709
00:42:47,120 --> 00:42:53,040
And that's not a question that we would include in the UK on child development, right?

710
00:42:53,200 --> 00:42:55,120
That's a very culturally specific one.

711
00:42:55,360 --> 00:43:00,880
I loved for my kids, so the UK wide assessments that they do, one of the

712
00:43:00,880 --> 00:43:04,640
assessments for social development was like, can they get dressed alone?

713
00:43:04,880 --> 00:43:08,640
Which is of course not a so it's not about the social at all.

714
00:43:08,720 --> 00:43:10,720
It's about the individual autonomy, right?

715
00:43:10,950 --> 00:43:13,670
So again, these are all things that reflect the environment.

716
00:43:13,750 --> 00:43:17,510
And I think for the bayaka that I work with, the way that they parent also reflects their

717
00:43:17,510 --> 00:43:18,470
environment.

718
00:43:18,790 --> 00:43:22,870
So from very, very early on, there's a lot of physical stimulus, right?

719
00:43:23,030 --> 00:43:25,350
Kids are held upright very early on.

720
00:43:25,430 --> 00:43:29,910
They're worn inside slings so they have the full view of what's going on around them.

721
00:43:30,070 --> 00:43:33,190
And the moms, you know, for the most part, take them into the forest.

722
00:43:33,270 --> 00:43:38,960
So they feel that rhythm of it's hard to imagine like using a machete while you're

723
00:43:38,960 --> 00:43:39,600
carrying your baby.

724
00:43:39,760 --> 00:43:44,080
But if you think about the embodied lessons of that from the earliest age, right?

725
00:43:44,240 --> 00:43:49,600
We think about the evolution of our brains, but the kind of brain-body connection,

726
00:43:49,680 --> 00:43:53,360
especially when you're using your body all the time, is really important too.

727
00:43:53,440 --> 00:43:56,640
So they're getting that input from very, very early on.

728
00:43:56,800 --> 00:43:58,160
Also, a lot of touch.

729
00:43:58,240 --> 00:44:03,910
So co sleeping, on demand breastfeeding, you just see these kids passed around,

730
00:44:04,070 --> 00:44:05,510
everybody in camp.

731
00:44:05,750 --> 00:44:11,430
Um, so they're getting a lot of alloparental support and a lot of play and a lot of

732
00:44:11,430 --> 00:44:12,950
autonomy from an early age.

733
00:44:13,030 --> 00:44:18,710
So you'll often see kids as early as they can grasp with a dull knife just

734
00:44:18,710 --> 00:44:22,790
hacking away at something, doing the kind of object play that we see here with kids with

735
00:44:22,790 --> 00:44:23,670
blocks, right?

736
00:44:23,830 --> 00:44:25,270
Hit the block over and over again.

737
00:44:25,350 --> 00:44:27,030
Hey, that's great, that makes a noise.

738
00:44:27,240 --> 00:44:31,720
Doing it with knives, and you know, some people in the literature have called it

739
00:44:31,720 --> 00:44:35,880
laissez-faire parenting, where you kind of hands off, but actually, it's not that at all.

740
00:44:36,120 --> 00:44:37,320
Everybody, right?

741
00:44:37,560 --> 00:44:41,800
If you think of like the average American living room, you've got 30 people living in that

742
00:44:41,800 --> 00:44:42,120
space.

743
00:44:42,280 --> 00:44:47,080
Everybody's very aware of what the kid is doing and whether or not they're safe.

744
00:44:47,160 --> 00:44:52,770
And I've definitely seen parents turn kids away or change out a knife for a duller one so

745
00:44:52,770 --> 00:44:55,890
that they can't hurt themselves, move a kid away from a fire.

746
00:44:55,970 --> 00:44:59,970
And it's these really subtle interactions that are redirecting kids.

747
00:45:00,210 --> 00:45:04,450
And these are other parents that are moving the kid away from everybody.

748
00:45:04,850 --> 00:45:09,490
Everybody's in teenage girls, teenage boys, siblings, grandparents.

749
00:45:13,490 --> 00:45:18,540
If I were to pick up someone else's child and move them out of harm's way.

750
00:45:18,780 --> 00:45:24,380
I remember my wife and I were at a restaurant, and our daughter was like climbing this hill

751
00:45:24,380 --> 00:45:27,900
and like sliding down the hill and like treating this hill like a slide.

752
00:45:28,220 --> 00:45:34,220
And some random woman just like picked her up and thought that she was like falling.

753
00:45:34,700 --> 00:45:39,420
And it was crazy, it was like this monstrous violation of a social norm that she would have

754
00:45:39,420 --> 00:45:41,660
the gall to pick up our child.

755
00:45:41,980 --> 00:45:45,180
And then she's like, apparently she's okay, is what she said.

756
00:45:45,420 --> 00:45:51,410
Um and but the contrast between that and an environment where everyone has

757
00:45:51,410 --> 00:45:56,770
got an eye on everyone else's kid and it's totally fine if I go up and pick up someone

758
00:45:56,770 --> 00:45:58,450
else's kid and move them away.

759
00:45:58,850 --> 00:46:00,850
It's just a very different world.

760
00:46:01,570 --> 00:46:06,450
Uh and I mean, but I I don't know what it was like in West Germany, David, other David, but

761
00:46:06,450 --> 00:46:11,160
in East Germany, people tell kids off in like public transit all the time for being too

762
00:46:11,160 --> 00:46:11,400
loud.

763
00:46:11,720 --> 00:46:13,320
Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no, totally.

764
00:46:13,400 --> 00:46:13,640
Yes.

765
00:46:13,880 --> 00:46:14,040
Yeah.

766
00:46:14,120 --> 00:46:16,840
And adults yell at other adults for violating norms.

767
00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:21,320
We were there during the pandemic and the rules were constantly changing about what type of

768
00:46:21,320 --> 00:46:22,120
masks you were allowed in.

769
00:46:22,360 --> 00:46:26,520
So if you just weren't up to date from a midnight change, you could get yelled at in a

770
00:46:26,520 --> 00:46:29,320
grocery store by another adult in German, and I don't speak German.

771
00:46:29,400 --> 00:46:30,360
So that was always tough.

772
00:46:30,440 --> 00:46:32,120
Like, I don't know why you're yelling at me.

773
00:46:32,270 --> 00:46:32,670
No, exactly.

774
00:46:32,910 --> 00:46:38,910
So I think it the kind of rugged individualism of North America of yeah, North America

775
00:46:38,990 --> 00:46:43,710
all through Canada in there is is quite different where from these a little bit more

776
00:46:43,710 --> 00:46:46,110
collectivistic cultures where there's a lot more.

777
00:46:46,190 --> 00:46:48,590
And in in the UK you would never do that too.

778
00:46:48,750 --> 00:46:51,470
But in Germany you definitely would.

779
00:46:51,790 --> 00:46:53,870
And in Denmark maybe a little bit as well.

780
00:46:54,270 --> 00:46:58,920
So letting the kids play with a dull knife, um, you know, that's sort of the opposite of

781
00:46:58,920 --> 00:47:00,520
helicopter parenting.

782
00:47:00,680 --> 00:47:02,440
And it's not random, like you said.

783
00:47:02,600 --> 00:47:08,040
To what do you attribute why that is either in the minds of the people?

784
00:47:08,120 --> 00:47:13,480
Like what is to be anthropological, sort of what's the emic or etic uh explanation of that?

785
00:47:13,560 --> 00:47:15,640
You know, what's the what's going on in the minds of the people?

786
00:47:15,720 --> 00:47:20,840
And then what from an ecological perspective, why is that sort of what where where

787
00:47:20,840 --> 00:47:21,800
everyone's at?

788
00:47:22,070 --> 00:47:22,470
Mm-hmm.

789
00:47:22,710 --> 00:47:28,630
So in terms of like what people say, um, for them, there's a high

790
00:47:28,630 --> 00:47:33,910
premium on childhood autonomy, but it's a very different type of autonomy that we think

791
00:47:33,910 --> 00:47:35,990
about, which is very individualistic.

792
00:47:36,230 --> 00:47:40,310
Um, the autonomy that a lot of hunter-gatherers, including the community that I work with,

793
00:47:40,470 --> 00:47:42,630
practices like cooperative autonomy.

794
00:47:42,790 --> 00:47:46,630
So the idea everybody's doing their own thing, but you all kind of know that everything's

795
00:47:46,630 --> 00:47:47,750
gonna benefit the group.

796
00:47:47,910 --> 00:47:51,400
And this is like a very classic thing that we see, like in the morning, everybody's like

797
00:47:51,480 --> 00:47:54,120
ping, ping, ping, like off to their own activities.

798
00:47:54,200 --> 00:47:56,680
And you're like, even if you ask a husband, like, where's your wife?

799
00:47:56,760 --> 00:47:58,600
He's like, oh no, she she's out.

800
00:47:58,840 --> 00:48:02,840
Um, but then at the end of the day, it's like all the food's being cooked.

801
00:48:02,920 --> 00:48:07,400
And then there's you have these kids running from hearth to hearth, sharing these plates of

802
00:48:07,400 --> 00:48:09,480
food and redistributing those resources.

803
00:48:09,560 --> 00:48:09,800
Right.

804
00:48:09,880 --> 00:48:13,080
And if I don't have enough palm nuts, I'll come grab some for you from you.

805
00:48:13,160 --> 00:48:18,030
And if you don't have enough castle cassava leaves, um, I'll give you some, right?

806
00:48:18,110 --> 00:48:20,830
Like, so it's very kind of communal in that way.

807
00:48:21,070 --> 00:48:26,990
But with very strong norms, it's hard because you don't tell people what to do, but

808
00:48:26,990 --> 00:48:29,470
you can demand goods from them.

809
00:48:29,790 --> 00:48:34,510
So you can demand things, but you can't tell people what to do.

810
00:48:34,670 --> 00:48:40,510
And even inferring what people think, often I'll be like, why did that person go off into

811
00:48:40,510 --> 00:48:41,070
the forest?

812
00:48:41,150 --> 00:48:47,080
Like trying to do behavioral observations in absence, and people will be like, uh,

813
00:48:47,240 --> 00:48:49,000
I don't know, it's their own thing.

814
00:48:49,160 --> 00:48:53,960
Like, even if they're even if they probably do know, you would never kind of verbalize why

815
00:48:53,960 --> 00:48:57,720
you think somebody is doing something if they've not expressed that themselves.

816
00:48:57,960 --> 00:48:59,240
So there are those norms.

817
00:48:59,320 --> 00:49:05,090
And I'll also say, like, the only time I've seen people tell each other what to do is when

818
00:49:05,090 --> 00:49:08,770
a parent was trying to tell their kid what to do or not to do.

819
00:49:08,930 --> 00:49:12,610
And that's when other parents intervened and like let them do their thing.

820
00:49:13,170 --> 00:49:18,450
And so there's this view that kids um wait wait so so so parents were telling their kids

821
00:49:18,450 --> 00:49:24,130
what to do and then other parents interjected on the child's behalf so that the child could

822
00:49:24,130 --> 00:49:25,490
be could be left alone.

823
00:49:25,730 --> 00:49:26,050
Yeah.

824
00:49:26,610 --> 00:49:27,090
Wow.

825
00:49:27,330 --> 00:49:27,650
Yeah.

826
00:49:27,890 --> 00:49:28,690
That is fascinating.

827
00:49:29,250 --> 00:49:31,810
If there's any kids listening they're like man that sounds awesome.

828
00:49:32,290 --> 00:49:32,770
Yeah.

829
00:49:33,140 --> 00:49:37,140
So so like what we see is like parents will be like, my kid knows what they need to learn

830
00:49:37,220 --> 00:49:37,620
right now.

831
00:49:37,780 --> 00:49:42,740
And even if um my colleague Dasha Bomjakova has done a lot more kind of cultural

832
00:49:42,740 --> 00:49:46,900
anthropology work, but people will talk about um from a child develop like on child

833
00:49:46,900 --> 00:49:47,300
development.

834
00:49:47,460 --> 00:49:52,420
And from her work, we know that in the same community where I work, like the conception of

835
00:49:52,420 --> 00:49:54,180
child development is like a ripening fruit.

836
00:49:54,340 --> 00:49:57,540
You cannot speed up a fruit to ripen, right?

837
00:49:57,860 --> 00:50:03,570
But you can curate the environment around it, So you can clear the ground, you can add

838
00:50:03,570 --> 00:50:09,410
nutrients, you could do the things that will help that ripen, but you can't be the one

839
00:50:09,570 --> 00:50:14,050
physically make it ripe ripen, which is very different than plant metaphors in other

840
00:50:14,050 --> 00:50:14,770
places.

841
00:50:14,850 --> 00:50:19,170
Like in Japan, some of the plant metaphors are, you know, uh a child is like a tree, you

842
00:50:19,170 --> 00:50:20,370
need to straighten it, right?

843
00:50:20,530 --> 00:50:24,690
So it's very much about the modification of the kid themselves.

844
00:50:25,020 --> 00:50:28,220
Whereas in what we see is not about modifying the kid.

845
00:50:28,300 --> 00:50:31,740
It's about modifying the environment around the kid to ensure that they learn.

846
00:50:31,900 --> 00:50:37,900
And so people doing things around a campfire is a way for kids

847
00:50:37,900 --> 00:50:38,220
to learn.

848
00:50:38,380 --> 00:50:40,300
We tried to do this experiment and it failed.

849
00:50:40,380 --> 00:50:45,420
And it took me years to understand that I failed the experiment, not that my like

850
00:50:45,660 --> 00:50:47,100
participants didn't understand.

851
00:50:47,180 --> 00:50:50,300
Like they understood exactly what they were telling me, and I was someone that didn't

852
00:50:50,300 --> 00:50:50,700
understand.

853
00:50:50,860 --> 00:50:56,730
So it's trying to um show videos of things that we would call teaching and ask

854
00:50:56,730 --> 00:50:58,490
them, is this teaching yes or no?

855
00:50:58,570 --> 00:50:59,450
Why or why not?

856
00:50:59,610 --> 00:51:05,290
And then I wanted to start the experiment by showing them clips of things that were

857
00:51:05,370 --> 00:51:09,610
to me definitely not teaching, like a mom like braiding her kid's hair.

858
00:51:09,850 --> 00:51:13,130
Um, and everybody was like, Yep, it's teaching, yep, they're teaching.

859
00:51:13,210 --> 00:51:16,330
And then I just dropped the experiment because I was like, it's fatally flawed.

860
00:51:16,490 --> 00:51:17,770
I've done something horribly wrong.

861
00:51:17,930 --> 00:51:23,700
And then I realized, like, oh no, like for them, any act of being together is a form of

862
00:51:23,700 --> 00:51:24,100
teaching.

863
00:51:24,260 --> 00:51:25,700
Like it's just that simple.

864
00:51:25,860 --> 00:51:28,340
Living together is sharing information.

865
00:51:29,380 --> 00:51:29,860
Wow.

866
00:51:30,260 --> 00:51:35,780
Do you find that there is a concept of a bad parent or bad

867
00:51:35,780 --> 00:51:39,380
parenting in this culture that you work with?

868
00:51:39,460 --> 00:51:45,140
Um, because I know uh from you know personal experience with my own culture that that that

869
00:51:45,140 --> 00:51:50,230
is a huge uh concept for us of judging each other based on how good of a parent we are,

870
00:51:50,390 --> 00:51:53,990
whether we're being irresponsible, whether we have the the kid's best interests at heart,

871
00:51:54,150 --> 00:51:55,430
whether we're keeping them safe.

872
00:51:55,590 --> 00:51:59,350
You know, you you mentioned the the story of people interjecting on the child's behalf.

873
00:51:59,510 --> 00:52:03,430
Often in Western cultures it's actually the opposite where where people will interject

874
00:52:03,590 --> 00:52:07,670
because you're not uh keeping us uh you're not you're not telling your child what to do.

875
00:52:07,750 --> 00:52:08,870
You're not keeping them safe.

876
00:52:09,030 --> 00:52:10,870
You're not paying enough attention to them.

877
00:52:11,030 --> 00:52:13,510
It's actually the opposite kind of of interjection.

878
00:52:13,750 --> 00:52:19,360
Um so I'm curious if there is this kind of parental

879
00:52:19,360 --> 00:52:25,120
status competition, for lack of a better term, in that community,

880
00:52:25,280 --> 00:52:29,440
along the lines of say, you're a bad mother because you don't breastfeed or whatever.

881
00:52:29,600 --> 00:52:33,440
Like these are a big part of the cultural conversation here, and you could have tremendous

882
00:52:33,440 --> 00:52:36,720
loss of status for being seen as a bad mother or a bad parent.

883
00:52:38,000 --> 00:52:43,950
Is there similar kinds of status loss in the community you study, um,

884
00:52:44,110 --> 00:52:46,030
do people judge each other as a bad parent?

885
00:52:46,110 --> 00:52:49,950
Is there a different concept of a bad parent, or is that concept not even uh apply?

886
00:52:51,150 --> 00:52:56,830
I mean, I have to say, like there's with one exception that I'll say in a sec, I haven't

887
00:52:56,830 --> 00:53:00,990
really seen people talk about bad parenting.

888
00:53:01,070 --> 00:53:05,710
I've seen people talk about good parenting, which is doing things with your kid, feeding

889
00:53:05,710 --> 00:53:07,870
your kid properly, taking them into the forest.

890
00:53:08,040 --> 00:53:13,080
But in terms of bad parenting, I've seen grandmothers be annoyed that their daughter went

891
00:53:13,080 --> 00:53:17,080
off to a forest camp with her husband and didn't come back for longer, kind of thing.

892
00:53:17,240 --> 00:53:19,080
But it's not really considered bad parenting.

893
00:53:19,160 --> 00:53:25,000
I think the one exception would be breaking taboos around diet during

894
00:53:25,000 --> 00:53:30,600
pregnancy, around sexual intercourse during pregnancy and postpartum,

895
00:53:31,030 --> 00:53:34,550
coming out of the line in period too early, eating the wrong food.

896
00:53:34,790 --> 00:53:39,270
So I would say more taboo breaking, especially in terms of diet.

897
00:53:39,510 --> 00:53:43,750
Again, I wouldn't say it's bad parent, but that's how people would explain negative

898
00:53:43,750 --> 00:53:48,950
consequences to kids, um, is in terms of those things.

899
00:53:49,190 --> 00:53:50,310
Um, yeah.

900
00:53:51,080 --> 00:53:51,560
Interesting.

901
00:53:51,800 --> 00:53:56,280
I mean, there are certainly lots of taboos around dieting and and and pregnancy here as

902
00:53:56,280 --> 00:54:01,320
well, um which, you know, makes evolutionary sense given the importance of fetal

903
00:54:01,320 --> 00:54:04,840
development and what you're eating at the time that the that the fetus is developing and

904
00:54:04,920 --> 00:54:10,760
and the potential for, you know, uh uh teratogens to uh screw with fetal development.

905
00:54:11,080 --> 00:54:16,040
So that makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense that that um

906
00:54:16,680 --> 00:54:22,090
diet and pregnancy would be a hot topic for for taboos to arise.

907
00:54:23,930 --> 00:54:24,490
Yeah.

908
00:54:24,730 --> 00:54:30,730
I I I just find it so so fascinating that um among us, you

909
00:54:30,730 --> 00:54:36,090
know, being seen as a good parent is such a huge part of our identities and the fear of

910
00:54:36,090 --> 00:54:38,810
being a bad parent is such a huge driver of our behavior.

911
00:54:38,890 --> 00:54:44,180
But it seems like that that fear uh isn't present to the same extent.

912
00:54:44,820 --> 00:54:50,500
Um or or at least it's restricted to uh say food food taboos or sexual taboos, but it isn't

913
00:54:50,500 --> 00:54:52,340
quite as widespread as it is here.

914
00:54:52,900 --> 00:54:53,060
Yeah.

915
00:54:53,140 --> 00:54:57,620
And I think part of that is like there's just this evening out effect of having loads of

916
00:54:57,620 --> 00:54:59,060
people take care of your kids.

917
00:54:59,700 --> 00:55:04,980
Um like real like in the village where I work, there's there's 700 people from two

918
00:55:04,980 --> 00:55:08,340
different um like cultural communities.

919
00:55:08,740 --> 00:55:11,790
And everybody lives in quite close quarters.

920
00:55:11,950 --> 00:55:15,390
There's one house in the center of the village that I call the house of a thousand people

921
00:55:15,550 --> 00:55:20,990
because it's pretty much as big as my a little bigger than my living room.

922
00:55:21,150 --> 00:55:24,750
And there's a grandmother, a grandfather, like four adult couples.

923
00:55:24,830 --> 00:55:28,590
So that's like eight people, and then all their kids that all live there.

924
00:55:28,750 --> 00:55:32,910
And like it's like a clown car when you see people come out in the morning, like just like

925
00:55:32,910 --> 00:55:34,430
more and more people coming out.

926
00:55:34,800 --> 00:55:36,880
And they just live in super tight quarters.

927
00:55:36,960 --> 00:55:40,000
And when people get annoyed with each other, they go off to a forest camp for a while, then

928
00:55:40,000 --> 00:55:40,480
they come back.

929
00:55:40,560 --> 00:55:44,240
Like, so you just have that freedom of movement too, which also makes sure that people

930
00:55:44,240 --> 00:55:46,640
don't get too much on each other's nerves.

931
00:55:47,600 --> 00:55:52,880
And this brings us to like um, so like you mentioned, like there's a lot of L parenting.

932
00:55:53,040 --> 00:55:58,080
Um, you're really seeing front lines sort of the difference between parenting in a weird

933
00:55:58,080 --> 00:56:02,320
environment versus um kind of more ecologically valid, quote unquote.

934
00:56:02,560 --> 00:56:04,570
Um, What's your sense of that?

935
00:56:04,730 --> 00:56:08,970
Is that something like you know, we're all parents to fairly young children right now?

936
00:56:09,210 --> 00:56:14,970
Um do you have in your own experience, like do you feel like

937
00:56:15,130 --> 00:56:19,450
do you ever think like, oh, I wish my child was growing up in in there?

938
00:56:19,690 --> 00:56:21,850
Or or you know, or is it just everything's different?

939
00:56:21,930 --> 00:56:23,530
And in um, yeah.

940
00:56:24,120 --> 00:56:25,640
There's so many trade-offs, right?

941
00:56:25,720 --> 00:56:29,480
So like when I was pregnant, I was like so romantic about it, it's like, I want to take my

942
00:56:29,480 --> 00:56:32,200
infant to the Congo, it's gonna be awesome.

943
00:56:32,360 --> 00:56:37,400
And then I have a friend who's like works in medical anthropology and epidemiology, and he

944
00:56:37,400 --> 00:56:39,160
was like, that is so dangerous.

945
00:56:39,320 --> 00:56:43,160
There's like no hospital, there's no road in the village where you work, like there are

946
00:56:43,160 --> 00:56:47,090
unsequenced mosquito born illnesses, right?

947
00:56:47,330 --> 00:56:51,250
And I think when I talk to a lot of people in the village about what they want for their

948
00:56:51,250 --> 00:56:52,770
future is like better medical care.

949
00:56:52,850 --> 00:56:55,090
And we have the luxury of that.

950
00:56:55,250 --> 00:57:00,930
So it's hard to say like what would I want more or less of, right?

951
00:57:01,010 --> 00:57:06,370
And this is like I guess a hot topic right now, but like I think it's very easy to be

952
00:57:06,370 --> 00:57:11,160
anti-vaccine when you haven't seen kids die from those illnesses.

953
00:57:11,240 --> 00:57:16,040
And I've had, I've seen that in the villages where I work, despite vaccination campaigns.

954
00:57:16,200 --> 00:57:21,080
So, in that sense, I feel very grateful to have access to the medical care that I have

955
00:57:21,080 --> 00:57:21,880
access to.

956
00:57:22,040 --> 00:57:27,720
But at the same time, I do feel sad for my kid, who will probably be an only

957
00:57:27,720 --> 00:57:33,630
child, that he doesn't, you know, and his part of his family lives in the south of England,

958
00:57:33,710 --> 00:57:36,110
so six hours away, the other part lives in Canada.

959
00:57:36,270 --> 00:57:39,630
And he just doesn't get to grow up with like loads and loads of kids.

960
00:57:39,870 --> 00:57:45,470
So it's, you know, in you David Lancy talks about like in most of the world, parents don't

961
00:57:45,470 --> 00:57:46,190
play with their kids.

962
00:57:46,270 --> 00:57:50,030
And it's easy not to play with your kids when there's 20 other kids in the neighborhood for

963
00:57:50,030 --> 00:57:50,830
them to play with.

964
00:57:51,070 --> 00:57:54,030
But if you're alone in a house, it's like, okay, then they're gonna what?

965
00:57:54,190 --> 00:57:54,910
Stare at a wall?

966
00:57:54,990 --> 00:57:55,870
Like, what are they gonna do?

967
00:57:55,950 --> 00:57:57,630
I've gotta get on the floor and play.

968
00:57:57,870 --> 00:58:03,660
So there are obviously changes, but I think it's not for me, it's not a question of like

969
00:58:03,660 --> 00:58:06,220
weird versus non-weird settings.

970
00:58:06,460 --> 00:58:09,820
There's a lot of diversity in how kids grow up.

971
00:58:09,900 --> 00:58:15,740
And it does in some ways calm my parent fear or my bad parent anxiety when I'm like,

972
00:58:15,980 --> 00:58:21,890
okay, if I just go out in the garden and like work on my garden, he can just come and

973
00:58:21,890 --> 00:58:22,770
do what I'm doing.

974
00:58:22,850 --> 00:58:26,290
And I don't always have to be doing what he's doing.

975
00:58:26,450 --> 00:58:29,090
Like sometimes it can go in the other way.

976
00:58:29,490 --> 00:58:34,450
Or, you know, sometimes he does something that feels like the slightest bit, I don't let

977
00:58:34,450 --> 00:58:37,170
him play with knives, but like slightest bit dangerous.

978
00:58:37,250 --> 00:58:41,490
I'm like, okay, just this is nothing and compare and like just let him take that little bit

979
00:58:41,490 --> 00:58:41,970
more risk.

980
00:58:42,130 --> 00:58:44,450
That said, he is the most cautious child in the world.

981
00:58:44,530 --> 00:58:46,370
And that's my fault and my anxiety.

982
00:58:46,450 --> 00:58:51,380
So I don't think I've been super successful, but sometimes I when I'm able to turn that

983
00:58:51,380 --> 00:58:55,700
part of my brain on, it's like just take a step back, let him fall, he's gonna survive.

984
00:58:55,940 --> 00:59:00,660
So I think in that way, um, yeah, it has shaped me.

985
00:59:00,820 --> 00:59:04,660
Again, like I just wish there's more public places for kids to congregate.

986
00:59:04,740 --> 00:59:10,020
And then you could just let them run around and just make sure they're still there, kind of

987
00:59:10,020 --> 00:59:10,340
thing.

988
00:59:10,660 --> 00:59:16,550
I think that would make a big change in in child development generally and parenting

989
00:59:16,550 --> 00:59:17,750
well-being as well.

990
00:59:17,910 --> 00:59:20,470
I don't know how you guys feel about that too.

991
00:59:20,950 --> 00:59:22,950
Yeah, I mean, uh, it's been striking.

992
00:59:23,110 --> 00:59:28,950
I mean, again, you know, it's nothing like Congo versus um UK or Canada, but just

993
00:59:28,950 --> 00:59:32,630
even Berlin versus you know Santa Barbara.

994
00:59:32,870 --> 00:59:37,880
I'm I'm seeing like the adolescent kids like hanging out at like Target and in Berlin.

995
00:59:38,120 --> 00:59:41,480
It was like they're just like hanging out in like beautiful parks, you know.

996
00:59:41,640 --> 00:59:44,680
And it's just sort of and it just feels sad.

997
00:59:45,000 --> 00:59:46,120
I feel bad for the kids.

998
00:59:46,200 --> 00:59:50,120
And you can, you know, it's just like, you know, I always think like if we were zoo

999
00:59:50,280 --> 00:59:54,520
animals, which is sort of a weird, it is kind of like an alien anthropological perspective.

1000
00:59:54,680 --> 00:59:55,880
Like, what would you put in there?

1001
00:59:56,040 --> 01:00:00,040
Like, you need like a common space, like for people to just sort of like hang out and like

1002
01:00:00,520 --> 01:00:01,320
sit together.

1003
01:00:01,560 --> 01:00:07,510
And it's weird how our planning, at least in the suburbs,

1004
01:00:07,670 --> 01:00:13,590
um, and I, you know, there's a there's a whole history of sort of racism and uh white

1005
01:00:13,590 --> 01:00:18,870
flight and all kinds of reasons for why the the planning is the way it is in car culture.

1006
01:00:19,030 --> 01:00:24,950
But um but no like Berlin, it felt like um it would it would have been a if I had to like

1007
01:00:24,950 --> 01:00:30,600
stay in a 20 square kilometer or mile zoo pen,

1008
01:00:31,000 --> 01:00:36,920
I would have preferred Berlin uh uh to to to to to Santa Barbara um

1009
01:00:37,240 --> 01:00:38,840
wet weather notwithstanding.

1010
01:00:39,000 --> 01:00:41,560
Um so that's that's my experience too.

1011
01:00:41,720 --> 01:00:43,080
I don't know for David.

1012
01:00:43,880 --> 01:00:46,120
Yeah, no, it's it's it's pretty similar.

1013
01:00:46,280 --> 01:00:51,990
Um I I I remember uh when I was traveling, I visited Berlin and I was all similarly struck

1014
01:00:51,990 --> 01:00:57,350
by how well integrated uh the playgrounds were with the adult spaces and and I just

1015
01:00:57,350 --> 01:01:00,870
hungered for something like that uh in the US and there just isn't really anything like

1016
01:01:00,870 --> 01:01:01,030
that.

1017
01:01:01,110 --> 01:01:04,310
I remember there was this awesome public space with like bars and restaurants and a

1018
01:01:04,310 --> 01:01:06,630
playground, and it was all just mixed together.

1019
01:01:06,790 --> 01:01:11,030
Uh and I man, I just wished that that there was something like that here, and there just

1020
01:01:11,030 --> 01:01:11,670
isn't.

1021
01:01:11,990 --> 01:01:13,590
Um Yeah.

1022
01:01:14,860 --> 01:01:20,300
So I have two Darwinian mysteries that are on my mind about child

1023
01:01:20,300 --> 01:01:21,100
development.

1024
01:01:21,420 --> 01:01:23,100
I'm curious if you can help me solve them.

1025
01:01:23,180 --> 01:01:24,380
It's okay if you don't have the solution.

1026
01:01:24,700 --> 01:01:25,020
Okay.

1027
01:01:25,580 --> 01:01:27,260
I feel it feels like a test.

1028
01:01:27,900 --> 01:01:29,820
Okay, we'll see, we'll see if we can solve it together.

1029
01:01:30,140 --> 01:01:31,980
Darwinian mystery number one.

1030
01:01:32,460 --> 01:01:37,260
So food and sleep are two basic human needs, right?

1031
01:01:37,340 --> 01:01:37,660
Uh huh.

1032
01:01:37,900 --> 01:01:41,850
And yet, my uh two-year-old daughter, she's about to be three in April.

1033
01:01:42,010 --> 01:01:44,890
I cannot get her to eat, and I cannot get her to sleep.

1034
01:01:45,050 --> 01:01:50,330
You'd think from an evolutionary perspective that she would be thrilled to get fresh, ripe

1035
01:01:50,410 --> 01:01:54,170
fruit, delicious food beyond the wildest dreams of her ancestors.

1036
01:01:54,330 --> 01:01:55,290
It's available for her.

1037
01:01:55,450 --> 01:01:56,170
It's right there.

1038
01:01:56,330 --> 01:01:57,290
She doesn't eat it.

1039
01:01:57,450 --> 01:01:59,450
It's bedtime, she's clearly tired.

1040
01:01:59,530 --> 01:02:04,170
She's rubbing her eyes and yawning and crabby, and she refuses to go to sleep.

1041
01:02:04,650 --> 01:02:07,450
Why won't my kid eat and sleep?

1042
01:02:07,930 --> 01:02:09,640
Okay, so what does she eat?

1043
01:02:09,800 --> 01:02:12,120
Because presumably she eats something.

1044
01:02:13,240 --> 01:02:17,000
Uh well, it's so random and capricious.

1045
01:02:17,240 --> 01:02:21,560
Like things that she was into the previous day, she's totally not into the next day.

1046
01:02:21,720 --> 01:02:24,440
And she'll take one bite and say, I want different food.

1047
01:02:24,600 --> 01:02:27,480
And then she'll eat one bite of another thing and say, I want different food.

1048
01:02:27,720 --> 01:02:31,640
And then she'll just like get distracted by playing with some toy or like playing with her

1049
01:02:31,640 --> 01:02:31,880
food.

1050
01:02:32,040 --> 01:02:34,990
She's she's much more inclined on playing with her food than eating it, which is

1051
01:02:34,990 --> 01:02:38,670
frustrating because I need to get her to eat her food so that we can get her on a schedule

1052
01:02:38,670 --> 01:02:40,750
and get her to preschool or get her to bed or whatever.

1053
01:02:40,910 --> 01:02:45,870
Um and okay, I think we found your so your I think we found your Darwinian problem.

1054
01:02:46,190 --> 01:02:49,230
So like like I think it has to do with schedules.

1055
01:02:49,390 --> 01:02:53,470
So all of the like the kind of stress we put on ourselves and we put on our kids is just

1056
01:02:53,710 --> 01:02:58,430
trying to get them to the next thing, which I am the same with like eat your goddamn

1057
01:02:58,430 --> 01:03:00,110
porridge, we're gonna be late for school.

1058
01:03:01,160 --> 01:03:07,160
so I think we're often training kids in our culture to be out of tune with their bodies

1059
01:03:07,160 --> 01:03:11,160
and get in tune with these and because we do the same, right?

1060
01:03:11,320 --> 01:03:14,600
Like kids are doing that in school too.

1061
01:03:14,680 --> 01:03:16,680
Like raise your hand if you need to use a toilet.

1062
01:03:16,760 --> 01:03:21,480
How dare you get up and follow your bodily functions or open a banana in class even though

1063
01:03:21,480 --> 01:03:22,120
you're hungry.

1064
01:03:22,280 --> 01:03:26,630
So I think a lot of it is that we're trying to get kids to eat when they're not really

1065
01:03:26,630 --> 01:03:31,830
hungry, um, kind of thing, and trying to fit into a schedule, which again is cultural

1066
01:03:31,830 --> 01:03:32,470
learning, right?

1067
01:03:32,550 --> 01:03:37,990
Like you do in our society need to suppress and learn to control these different

1068
01:03:37,990 --> 01:03:42,390
desires um so that you can function as a member of society.

1069
01:03:42,870 --> 01:03:48,680
And unfortunately at two and three that's it just is a little bit more time consuming

1070
01:03:48,680 --> 01:03:49,560
to do that.

1071
01:03:49,800 --> 01:03:54,600
Um, but in terms of food preferences, like there's a lot of research, uh, for example, by

1072
01:03:54,600 --> 01:04:00,280
one of my PhD mentors, Alyssa Crittenden, that our brain really needs our growing brain

1073
01:04:00,280 --> 01:04:01,960
needs a lot of sugar to grow.

1074
01:04:02,120 --> 01:04:07,850
And so kids have these huge cravings for fruit, for honey, for sweet things, and those are

1075
01:04:07,850 --> 01:04:10,170
the things that she probably does like, is my guess.

1076
01:04:10,250 --> 01:04:14,730
Like, does she like blueberries and raspberries and like Cheerios and that kind of ice

1077
01:04:14,730 --> 01:04:14,970
cream?

1078
01:04:15,050 --> 01:04:17,850
I'm assuming is a a preference.

1079
01:04:18,170 --> 01:04:18,330
Yeah.

1080
01:04:18,570 --> 01:04:22,650
And it's all to feed, like, yeah, all to feed a growing brain.

1081
01:04:22,970 --> 01:04:27,920
So I don't have a solution because we would did all the like child led weaning and we were

1082
01:04:27,920 --> 01:04:29,120
feeding him loads of weird stuff.

1083
01:04:29,200 --> 01:04:33,040
And now at four and a half, it's like pasta or cucumber or pizza and cucumber.

1084
01:04:33,120 --> 01:04:34,480
What are you gonna eat tonight, dude?

1085
01:04:34,560 --> 01:04:36,960
Like there's not a lot of diversity there.

1086
01:04:38,080 --> 01:04:43,600
I will say though, like in the Congo, people eat the same thing every day, like different

1087
01:04:43,600 --> 01:04:44,880
variations of the same thing.

1088
01:04:44,960 --> 01:04:47,920
And I think we might have too much diversity in our diets.

1089
01:04:48,080 --> 01:04:51,760
Like we're just like eating something different every single day.

1090
01:04:51,920 --> 01:04:57,370
And like there it's just like, are you having cassava leaves with caterpillars or are you

1091
01:04:57,370 --> 01:04:59,850
having cassava leaves with antelope tonight?

1092
01:04:59,930 --> 01:05:04,730
Like so it's like a lot more kind of stable and there's maybe seasonal variation that

1093
01:05:04,730 --> 01:05:05,210
changes.

1094
01:05:05,370 --> 01:05:10,810
So I have wondered if we're just trying to cram too much diversity and it's just like

1095
01:05:11,210 --> 01:05:14,810
here's the same nutritious food every single day, get on with it, kind of thing.

1096
01:05:15,130 --> 01:05:17,610
So you think if I fed her the same thing every day?

1097
01:05:18,420 --> 01:05:20,900
I don't know if you wanna do you want to do an unethical experiment.

1098
01:05:21,380 --> 01:05:22,420
Run the experiment.

1099
01:05:23,380 --> 01:05:25,940
All right, it's cassava leaves every day, whether you like it or not.

1100
01:05:26,900 --> 01:05:30,500
Or David, I feel like I we're just like a therapy session for David because two and a half,

1101
01:05:30,660 --> 01:05:31,700
two and a half year old, yeah.

1102
01:05:31,780 --> 01:05:33,460
We're my my son's a little bit over five.

1103
01:05:33,620 --> 01:05:35,860
You know, you're uh is four and something.

1104
01:05:35,940 --> 01:05:36,100
Yeah.

1105
01:05:36,420 --> 01:05:36,900
Four and a half.

1106
01:05:37,140 --> 01:05:38,660
It's easier David as they get older.

1107
01:05:39,540 --> 01:05:39,700
Okay.

1108
01:05:39,780 --> 01:05:40,420
That's good to know.

1109
01:05:40,500 --> 01:05:40,830
That's good.

1110
01:05:41,150 --> 01:05:43,230
I think there's also like an aspect of control.

1111
01:05:43,390 --> 01:05:48,430
Like she is probably learning like how like how you're gonna parent her too.

1112
01:05:48,510 --> 01:05:52,510
So as long as she can say no and you're like, okay, here's a different food, then she's

1113
01:05:52,510 --> 01:05:56,270
like learning what you're willing to do for her, which is part of attachment, right?

1114
01:05:56,350 --> 01:05:59,310
So it's not it's a good thing, even though it's tiring.

1115
01:05:59,470 --> 01:06:00,910
And I would say the sleep thing too.

1116
01:06:00,990 --> 01:06:03,790
I don't know, does she sleep with you guys or is she in her own room?

1117
01:06:04,110 --> 01:06:04,910
In her own room.

1118
01:06:05,120 --> 01:06:05,520
Yeah.

1119
01:06:05,680 --> 01:06:06,160
A lot.

1120
01:06:06,240 --> 01:06:09,440
It's really hard for kids in their own room.

1121
01:06:09,600 --> 01:06:13,360
It's so funny because we co-slept and we planned to co-sleep.

1122
01:06:13,440 --> 01:06:16,800
All anthropologists delude themselves that they're gonna sleep really well because they're

1123
01:06:16,800 --> 01:06:19,440
co-sleeping and um kind of thing.

1124
01:06:19,520 --> 01:06:23,280
And then we all at conferences talk about how tired we are that our kids still aren't

1125
01:06:23,280 --> 01:06:24,640
sleeping through the night.

1126
01:06:24,880 --> 01:06:30,670
And um so our kid slept with us until we moved into this house, so until he was like three

1127
01:06:30,670 --> 01:06:31,470
and a half.

1128
01:06:31,790 --> 01:06:36,030
We finally started getting him into his own room, but we fall asleep with him in his bed,

1129
01:06:36,110 --> 01:06:37,870
and then when he wakes up, he crawls into our bed.

1130
01:06:37,950 --> 01:06:39,790
So is he really sleeping independently?

1131
01:06:39,950 --> 01:06:41,150
That's debatable.

1132
01:06:41,470 --> 01:06:47,070
But then I started talking to other people who sleep train, and some people are like, oh,

1133
01:06:47,230 --> 01:06:48,910
like sleep training, that was so easy.

1134
01:06:49,070 --> 01:06:50,590
Like my kids slept on their own.

1135
01:06:50,900 --> 01:06:55,140
And then you then you beat them when they've had a second kid and they thought they were

1136
01:06:55,140 --> 01:06:57,860
like really amazing parents who just had it all figured out.

1137
01:06:57,940 --> 01:07:00,340
And it turns out they just had like a really easy kid.

1138
01:07:00,500 --> 01:07:03,380
And then the second kid is like, We can't get her to sleep.

1139
01:07:03,460 --> 01:07:06,500
She's in our night every night, like in her bed every night, touching me.

1140
01:07:06,660 --> 01:07:10,980
Like, so I think it just has to do a lot with like diversity in kids.

1141
01:07:11,140 --> 01:07:16,830
But I think most kids don't aren't comfortable sleeping alone.

1142
01:07:16,990 --> 01:07:21,950
And then again, it's about making sure that the parents can sleep so that they can wake up

1143
01:07:21,950 --> 01:07:24,990
well rested and get to work and do their work, right?

1144
01:07:25,150 --> 01:07:29,550
And I think there was like even a Facebook, like a Zuck, a Zuckerberg thing where they were

1145
01:07:29,550 --> 01:07:35,550
paying Facebook was paying for sleep consultants for their staff because they were like,

1146
01:07:35,710 --> 01:07:40,520
when aren't when our employees get good night's sleep, they are better employees.

1147
01:07:40,600 --> 01:07:43,480
So they were that was like one of the perks of working at Facebook.

1148
01:07:43,640 --> 01:07:45,000
And like frankly, he's right.

1149
01:07:45,160 --> 01:07:49,160
Like sleep deprivation is a really big issue for parents.

1150
01:07:49,480 --> 01:07:54,200
So my guess is that that's probably what, but I I I couldn't tell you for sure.

1151
01:07:54,280 --> 01:07:59,480
But co sleeping seems to be a pretty universal thing in in most parts of the world.

1152
01:07:59,880 --> 01:08:00,360
Got it.

1153
01:08:00,570 --> 01:08:00,810
Okay.

1154
01:08:00,890 --> 01:08:02,570
Well that that's a pretty good solution.

1155
01:08:02,650 --> 01:08:05,370
I think I I think I buy that for the most part.

1156
01:08:05,770 --> 01:08:06,010
All right.

1157
01:08:06,090 --> 01:08:07,450
Here's the other one.

1158
01:08:10,810 --> 01:08:10,970
Yeah.

1159
01:08:11,130 --> 01:08:12,250
No, I mean it makes sense.

1160
01:08:12,330 --> 01:08:16,090
Like, you know, if she's sleeping by herself in the dark, she's like vulnerable to

1161
01:08:16,090 --> 01:08:17,370
predators and attackers.

1162
01:08:17,530 --> 01:08:19,050
Like, that's an unsafe situation for her to be in.

1163
01:08:19,210 --> 01:08:21,610
It makes sense that she wouldn't want to be in that situation.

1164
01:08:21,770 --> 01:08:25,800
And yet, you know, I don't want her to sleep with me because she moves around a lot in her

1165
01:08:25,800 --> 01:08:26,040
sleep.

1166
01:08:26,120 --> 01:08:29,880
And I I've slept with her a few times and and it I always get horrible sleep when that

1167
01:08:29,880 --> 01:08:34,440
happens because she you know she pokes me and you know tickles me or you know whatever

1168
01:08:34,520 --> 01:08:36,520
during so that's it's not a good situation.

1169
01:08:36,600 --> 01:08:39,960
So it's it's a genuine case of parent offspring conflict where she's better off if she's

1170
01:08:39,960 --> 01:08:40,840
safer in the bed with me.

1171
01:08:41,000 --> 01:08:43,240
I'm better off if I can better get a better night's sleep.

1172
01:08:43,320 --> 01:08:45,560
And we just have incompatible preferences there.

1173
01:08:46,600 --> 01:08:50,790
The food thing I think is still a little mysterious 'cause like uh you know, if if you're

1174
01:08:50,790 --> 01:08:54,710
in a hundred-gatherer society, you don't know when your next meal y is gonna be, you know,

1175
01:08:54,790 --> 01:08:58,550
like you wouldn't it be a good idea to eat the food when it's there and it's available and

1176
01:08:58,630 --> 01:09:04,150
and you know I haven't seen that much of people being b going

1177
01:09:04,150 --> 01:09:04,710
hungry.

1178
01:09:04,790 --> 01:09:10,220
Like I mean sometimes you just like have some tubers or whatever, but people usually have

1179
01:09:10,220 --> 01:09:13,580
enough food to share with me, for example.

1180
01:09:13,820 --> 01:09:19,660
Um so I haven't seen as many cases of of food insecurity of people really going hungry.

1181
01:09:19,980 --> 01:09:21,580
Um yeah.

1182
01:09:21,660 --> 01:09:26,780
So I maybe I'm maybe I'm overestimating overestimating how horrible uh life as a hunter

1183
01:09:26,860 --> 01:09:27,500
gatherer must be.

1184
01:09:29,100 --> 01:09:30,060
I have to say.

1185
01:09:30,370 --> 01:09:34,850
like, I mean, people eat enough that the kids will stay up till like one in the morning

1186
01:09:34,850 --> 01:09:36,130
playing and partying, right?

1187
01:09:36,210 --> 01:09:40,210
So you have to have some kind of but you know, when you were talking about like parent um

1188
01:09:40,370 --> 01:09:45,810
offspring conflict, so what's really interesting to me about that is like parent offspring

1189
01:09:45,810 --> 01:09:49,730
conflict can only ever be enacted in specific socioecologies, right?

1190
01:09:49,810 --> 01:09:53,420
And so in the communities where I work, people wake up.

1191
01:09:53,500 --> 01:09:59,260
We've done, like my colleague Lee Gettler and also David Samson and I have done um

1192
01:09:59,660 --> 01:10:02,220
like ectigraphy studies on sleeping.

1193
01:10:02,460 --> 01:10:06,380
And people wake up in the night and they get less sleep than we think people need, and

1194
01:10:06,380 --> 01:10:07,420
they're fine.

1195
01:10:07,580 --> 01:10:11,340
Like they're smarter, they're more capable, smarter than I am.

1196
01:10:11,500 --> 01:10:16,700
And I've seen instances of the opposite where this kid was like to his mom, like, please,

1197
01:10:16,860 --> 01:10:18,110
please, can we go to sleep?

1198
01:10:18,190 --> 01:10:19,310
Like, I really want to go to sleep.

1199
01:10:19,390 --> 01:10:20,430
And she's like, I'm not done.

1200
01:10:20,510 --> 01:10:21,550
I'm not, I'm still out.

1201
01:10:21,630 --> 01:10:24,350
Like, I'm not going, I'm not taking you home yet.

1202
01:10:24,830 --> 01:10:26,670
Wow, the parent is begging the kid.

1203
01:10:26,830 --> 01:10:29,550
Sorry, the parent is sorry, the kid is begging the parent to sleep.

1204
01:10:29,790 --> 01:10:30,830
That's crazy.

1205
01:10:31,150 --> 01:10:31,630
Yeah.

1206
01:10:31,950 --> 01:10:37,230
So it just depends on on you know the context of the conflict, right?

1207
01:10:37,310 --> 01:10:40,110
Your need is to have a good sleep so you can get up and go to work.

1208
01:10:40,350 --> 01:10:46,200
But in these communities, your need might be to stay up and socialize and you know do the

1209
01:10:46,200 --> 01:10:50,360
kind of political hobnobbing that you have to do to make it in an egalitarian community.

1210
01:10:50,600 --> 01:10:53,240
Egalitarianism is so stressful.

1211
01:10:53,640 --> 01:10:57,000
Everybody thinks it's like utopia, but it's a lot of work to maintain.

1212
01:10:57,160 --> 01:11:03,160
It's like gossip and redistribution and leveling and like punishment and like all

1213
01:11:03,160 --> 01:11:07,080
this stuff happening constantly all the time in all these micro and macro social

1214
01:11:07,080 --> 01:11:07,880
interactions.

1215
01:11:08,120 --> 01:11:12,590
So it might be in your best interest to be there for that for those interactions.

1216
01:11:12,750 --> 01:11:14,830
And then your kid, it's like 11 p.m.

1217
01:11:14,910 --> 01:11:18,110
and they just want to go to sleep because they've had a long day kind of thing.

1218
01:11:18,350 --> 01:11:19,390
So yeah.

1219
01:11:20,110 --> 01:11:20,430
Okay.

1220
01:11:20,670 --> 01:11:24,750
Well my confusion about the food and sleep thing has been considerably reduced.

1221
01:11:24,830 --> 01:11:27,710
I think you did a great job responding to that one.

1222
01:11:28,190 --> 01:11:34,190
I I don't really study either of those things, but okay I have my second my second mystery

1223
01:11:34,190 --> 01:11:34,590
for you.

1224
01:11:34,840 --> 01:11:35,160
Okay.

1225
01:11:35,400 --> 01:11:41,320
So my daughter often has extremely strongly held, seemingly

1226
01:11:41,320 --> 01:11:43,320
arbitrary preferences.

1227
01:11:43,560 --> 01:11:48,200
So for example, she feels very strongly that mama has to pour the milk and not Dada, even

1228
01:11:48,200 --> 01:11:50,280
though it's the same damn milk.

1229
01:11:50,600 --> 01:11:54,120
Or we're eating at dinner and there's you know a bowl of tortilla chips, and we're all

1230
01:11:54,120 --> 01:11:58,520
sharing the tortilla chips, and there's plenty of tortilla chips for all of us, and then

1231
01:11:58,520 --> 01:12:04,210
randomly she has a meltdown because uh, you know, I I took a bite of a chip and she was

1232
01:12:04,210 --> 01:12:07,090
mad because she wanted that particular chip.

1233
01:12:07,810 --> 01:12:11,250
It wasn't that she wanted chips in general, and she was worried that there would be she

1234
01:12:11,330 --> 01:12:12,450
wanted that chip.

1235
01:12:13,170 --> 01:12:17,010
And she thought that I should have known that she wanted that chip before I took a bite of

1236
01:12:17,010 --> 01:12:17,170
it.

1237
01:12:17,330 --> 01:12:20,370
Or you this used to happen, you know, I was trying to get her, you know, all the the

1238
01:12:20,370 --> 01:12:22,130
bedtime routine, trying to get her to bed.

1239
01:12:22,290 --> 01:12:24,610
She would have these arbitrary preferences around bedtime.

1240
01:12:24,690 --> 01:12:29,360
Like she would insist that I would wear a yellow hat uh every time I'd put her to bed while

1241
01:12:29,360 --> 01:12:31,040
I read her the bedtime story.

1242
01:12:31,520 --> 01:12:32,720
She wants me to wear the yellow hat.

1243
01:12:32,960 --> 01:12:34,880
I don't care, I'll wear I'll I'll wear the yellow hat, whatever.

1244
01:12:34,960 --> 01:12:36,880
I uh you gotta pick your battles at a as a parent.

1245
01:12:37,040 --> 01:12:38,240
But why the yellow hat?

1246
01:12:38,320 --> 01:12:39,040
What what is it?

1247
01:12:39,120 --> 01:12:43,280
Like why why does she have these strongly and she'll have a meltdown if I say no?

1248
01:12:43,520 --> 01:12:47,760
So like why does she have these strongly held, arbitrary preferences?

1249
01:12:49,390 --> 01:12:51,790
Oh God, that's a real stumper.

1250
01:12:52,670 --> 01:12:52,990
Okay.

1251
01:12:53,310 --> 01:12:55,230
Let's like the cog turns.

1252
01:12:55,870 --> 01:12:56,990
The cog's turn.

1253
01:12:57,070 --> 01:12:58,350
The turns cog.

1254
01:12:58,430 --> 01:13:00,190
It's almost 11.

1255
01:13:00,430 --> 01:13:05,630
Um okay, so I have I have I have two

1256
01:13:06,590 --> 01:13:09,550
further questions about what could happen.

1257
01:13:09,630 --> 01:13:13,390
And you tell me what you think feels like it rings true.

1258
01:13:13,470 --> 01:13:13,790
Okay.

1259
01:13:14,110 --> 01:13:19,520
So the one kind of avenue would be well, we're humans and we like

1260
01:13:19,520 --> 01:13:20,160
rituals.

1261
01:13:20,320 --> 01:13:24,960
And so she's creating these everyday rituals to make sense of her world.

1262
01:13:25,200 --> 01:13:30,800
And so that's just part of, you know, and maybe the kind of relatedly, but the second

1263
01:13:30,800 --> 01:13:33,520
avenue is like rituals help us gain control.

1264
01:13:33,680 --> 01:13:39,600
And probably if she's two or three, she doesn't probably have a lot of control over her

1265
01:13:40,050 --> 01:13:41,250
everyday life, right?

1266
01:13:41,330 --> 01:13:45,410
Like you're probably deciding maybe with her input what you're cooking, what you're doing,

1267
01:13:45,650 --> 01:13:49,490
but ultimately she's not in charge.

1268
01:13:49,730 --> 01:13:54,290
And so she's having to she's making these rituals to feel like she's in charge in these

1269
01:13:54,290 --> 01:13:55,250
minor ways.

1270
01:13:55,490 --> 01:13:57,970
Um, how how does that does that ring true?

1271
01:13:58,130 --> 01:14:00,690
Does that sound like psycho babble bullshit to you?

1272
01:14:01,170 --> 01:14:06,850
No, I mean I I I buy that as a as like approximate level explanation that that she

1273
01:14:06,850 --> 01:14:10,760
wants to have some control over my behavior.

1274
01:14:11,160 --> 01:14:12,120
It's still a little puzzle.

1275
01:14:12,360 --> 01:14:12,680
Yeah.

1276
01:14:13,160 --> 01:14:18,840
There's not so it's true that in our culture, but we all live in different places.

1277
01:14:19,000 --> 01:14:22,040
Maybe you also live in, maybe both Davids live in California.

1278
01:14:22,200 --> 01:14:26,520
But here in the UK or in Canada or in Denmark, it's true that kids have meltdowns, right?

1279
01:14:26,760 --> 01:14:31,240
I haven't seen that in many of the communities that I work in as much.

1280
01:14:32,570 --> 01:14:33,050
no meltdowns.

1281
01:14:35,450 --> 01:14:41,290
I've seen s I've seen a couple meltdowns, uh-huh, but nowhere like my

1282
01:14:41,290 --> 01:14:46,330
kid has a meltdowns like three, four times, just any time we're just trying to get the

1283
01:14:46,330 --> 01:14:46,810
house.

1284
01:14:47,050 --> 01:14:50,810
But like there, I I haven't seen that frequency of meltdown.

1285
01:14:50,890 --> 01:14:54,400
I've seen it when kids have been fascinating really tired.

1286
01:14:54,640 --> 01:14:56,320
Um, I've seen meltdowns.

1287
01:14:56,480 --> 01:14:57,440
I I actually did.

1288
01:14:57,600 --> 01:14:58,800
So let me tell you a little story.

1289
01:14:58,880 --> 01:15:02,560
So this two and a half-year-old kid that I became very close to during my field work, and

1290
01:15:02,560 --> 01:15:04,080
I'm also close with his mom.

1291
01:15:04,480 --> 01:15:10,480
Um, he had this meltdown, and I was like, He's tired, because that's

1292
01:15:10,480 --> 01:15:11,360
what we always say, right?

1293
01:15:11,520 --> 01:15:13,920
Anytime there's a meltdown, we're like, the kid's tired.

1294
01:15:14,080 --> 01:15:15,950
And she was like, he's hungry.

1295
01:15:16,110 --> 01:15:17,710
And he fell asleep in my arms.

1296
01:15:17,790 --> 01:15:19,310
And she while she was cooking the food.

1297
01:15:19,390 --> 01:15:22,030
And then she was like, Oh my God, I think I should wake him up and feed him.

1298
01:15:22,190 --> 01:15:24,430
And I was like, Oh my God, do you never wake them up?

1299
01:15:24,510 --> 01:15:25,790
Like, what are you talking about?

1300
01:15:26,030 --> 01:15:30,830
But like in her conception of like why kids have meltdowns, is that like they're really

1301
01:15:30,830 --> 01:15:31,150
hungry.

1302
01:15:31,230 --> 01:15:33,230
So I better feed get food in them, right?

1303
01:15:33,390 --> 01:15:37,870
Um, and he it wasn't it wasn't like he'd just skip dinner, right?

1304
01:15:38,030 --> 01:15:42,030
So, but so I've seen a couple meltdowns of very, very young kids.

1305
01:15:42,340 --> 01:15:46,260
But for the most part, it's not a daily occurrence.

1306
01:15:46,340 --> 01:15:49,380
And keep in mind, I'm living in camp with people and I'm doing my research.

1307
01:15:49,460 --> 01:15:51,060
So I see them all the time.

1308
01:15:51,380 --> 01:15:53,700
So that's one thing.

1309
01:15:53,780 --> 01:15:59,540
And then the other thing that I'll say is like when kids have a meltdown, parents are

1310
01:15:59,700 --> 01:16:02,900
like just sweeping them up and then taking them on activities.

1311
01:16:03,060 --> 01:16:08,980
Like this one time, this mom took her kid who usually hung out in

1312
01:16:08,980 --> 01:16:11,230
camp foraging with her and her husband.

1313
01:16:11,390 --> 01:16:15,550
And I was doing this research where I was asking parents every day, like why did why did

1314
01:16:15,550 --> 01:16:18,270
you or did you not take your kid with you foraging?

1315
01:16:18,510 --> 01:16:24,110
And she said, oh my kid is like there's a word that doesn't really have an

1316
01:16:24,110 --> 01:16:27,310
equivalent, but you when you hear it, you know it's like Kiri Kiri.

1317
01:16:27,470 --> 01:16:32,500
So it's like all over the place, like kind of which is like a great word, right?

1318
01:16:32,660 --> 01:16:32,820
Yes.

1319
01:16:32,980 --> 01:16:38,260
Um she was like, my kid is just like yeah, my kid was just like Kiri Kiri in camp, like

1320
01:16:38,500 --> 01:16:40,020
making fights with people and freaking out.

1321
01:16:40,180 --> 01:16:45,140
So we just went out foraging and like just like we just went out and like did something.

1322
01:16:45,380 --> 01:16:50,260
Um, and so there's a little less kind of

1323
01:16:51,350 --> 01:16:54,790
tailoring to the crazy whims of the two and a half year old.

1324
01:16:55,030 --> 01:16:59,670
But because they have a lot of autonomy over their everyday, they maybe also have fewer

1325
01:16:59,670 --> 01:17:00,390
crazy whims.

1326
01:17:00,550 --> 01:17:05,830
So I'm not sure your question is a I don't I don't think that I think we found maybe a

1327
01:17:05,830 --> 01:17:10,470
proxim approximate solution, approximal solution to your question, but I'm not sure there's

1328
01:17:10,470 --> 01:17:13,510
actually an ultimate question there because there's so much diversity.

1329
01:17:13,670 --> 01:17:17,110
I don't think it's necessarily an evolutionary puzzle.

1330
01:17:17,600 --> 01:17:18,080
Interesting.

1331
01:17:18,240 --> 01:17:23,600
I mean, so could it be that the reason why those kids aren't having uh so many

1332
01:17:23,600 --> 01:17:29,520
meltdowns is bec is because they have so much autonomy and and ability to control

1333
01:17:29,760 --> 01:17:32,080
what they do and when they do it.

1334
01:17:32,240 --> 01:17:37,520
Uh and the reason why we see more meltdowns in uh Western educated, industrialized, rich

1335
01:17:37,600 --> 01:17:43,530
democratic societies is that they have so much less control, that everything is

1336
01:17:43,530 --> 01:17:46,650
dictated for them, what they do, when they do it, where they do it.

1337
01:17:47,210 --> 01:17:53,050
And they have meltdowns to try to get some of the autonomy that they are

1338
01:17:53,050 --> 01:17:55,610
desperately craving and not getting.

1339
01:17:56,970 --> 01:18:02,810
And perhaps that explains the strongly held arbitrary preferences, which is that

1340
01:18:02,810 --> 01:18:08,800
that's another way to have the autonomy that that she would otherwise be getting in a in

1341
01:18:08,800 --> 01:18:11,920
in a in an author gatherer society, but that she's not getting here.

1342
01:18:12,240 --> 01:18:15,040
And question, does she go to like does she go to daycare?

1343
01:18:15,200 --> 01:18:16,800
Does she go to some Yeah, no.

1344
01:18:17,200 --> 01:18:18,080
She's in preschool right now, yeah.

1345
01:18:18,320 --> 01:18:19,120
She's in preschool.

1346
01:18:19,360 --> 01:18:24,560
Because the other thing that comes to mind is like she's probably not having meltdowns at

1347
01:18:24,560 --> 01:18:25,440
preschool.

1348
01:18:26,000 --> 01:18:31,950
And like kids are so good at controlling themselves in the right scenarios that

1349
01:18:31,950 --> 01:18:36,030
that self-regulate like you get that self-regulation kind of fatigue and then you get home

1350
01:18:36,030 --> 01:18:39,390
and you're like freak out at your parents, right?

1351
01:18:39,710 --> 01:18:45,550
Um, because one of the things that I have to shoehorn peer learning in, sorry guys.

1352
01:18:45,790 --> 01:18:49,710
So like basically in a hunter-gatherer community, right?

1353
01:18:49,790 --> 01:18:54,110
Like when you're about that age, like two or three, as soon as you can walk, basically, you

1354
01:18:54,110 --> 01:18:59,500
follow These other kids, and you try to go with these other kids.

1355
01:18:59,580 --> 01:19:05,180
And I've seen like what look to me like babies like toddle off into the forest behind like

1356
01:19:05,180 --> 01:19:08,460
10-year-old kids who look after them and make sure they're okay.

1357
01:19:08,620 --> 01:19:14,540
But when you're around peers or when you're around um, yeah, like kids

1358
01:19:14,540 --> 01:19:19,810
your age or a little bit older than you, you kind of have to self-regulate, and they're

1359
01:19:19,810 --> 01:19:23,250
probably even if they're a little bit older than you too, they're probably helping you

1360
01:19:23,250 --> 01:19:24,130
self-regulate.

1361
01:19:24,210 --> 01:19:30,130
And I've definitely seen seen kids tell tell other kids

1362
01:19:30,210 --> 01:19:34,930
like how to self-regulate, either through play, like, oh, don't cry, like here have this,

1363
01:19:35,250 --> 01:19:39,730
or like tease them about having a like having a meltdown in the rear kit.

1364
01:19:39,970 --> 01:19:43,570
Like if they hurt themselves and they cry for too long, they'll give them a hard time about

1365
01:19:43,570 --> 01:19:43,650
it.

1366
01:19:43,730 --> 01:19:48,040
And so they're kind of teaching each other these self-regulation skills.

1367
01:19:48,280 --> 01:19:52,840
And also they're not having to control themselves for these like very intense periods of

1368
01:19:52,840 --> 01:19:56,920
time because they can go back and forth to their parents when their parents are in camp if

1369
01:19:56,920 --> 01:19:57,720
they want to.

1370
01:19:58,040 --> 01:20:00,200
So I I wonder about that too.

1371
01:20:00,280 --> 01:20:05,080
Like maybe at school when she's playing with other kids and they're kind of engaging with

1372
01:20:05,080 --> 01:20:09,320
each other in terms of those self-regulation behaviors and then holding it together all

1373
01:20:09,320 --> 01:20:09,560
day.

1374
01:20:09,640 --> 01:20:11,720
It's just so tiring for young kids.

1375
01:20:11,910 --> 01:20:17,590
Again, very good skill set in a Western industrialized society to regulate your

1376
01:20:17,590 --> 01:20:18,550
emotions in that way.

1377
01:20:18,630 --> 01:20:23,350
And also for a small-scale society, but just in different kind of distributions throughout

1378
01:20:23,350 --> 01:20:24,230
the day.

1379
01:20:25,110 --> 01:20:25,990
Interesting.

1380
01:20:26,230 --> 01:20:28,070
Yeah, no, I I buy that.

1381
01:20:28,150 --> 01:20:33,660
That that's that's really fascinating, just like how much domination there is of

1382
01:20:33,660 --> 01:20:39,500
children in in Western societies compared to what you see in hunter-gatherer societies.

1383
01:20:39,660 --> 01:20:42,220
And like it's no wonder they're they're melting down all the time.

1384
01:20:42,460 --> 01:20:46,620
Like I I would melt down all the time if I was constantly being bossed around and told what

1385
01:20:46,620 --> 01:20:49,100
to do by people who are much bigger and stronger than me.

1386
01:20:49,340 --> 01:20:49,580
Yeah.

1387
01:20:49,740 --> 01:20:54,700
You know, yeah there's this um let me remember his name.

1388
01:20:54,870 --> 01:20:59,110
There's this amazing book by the sociologist in the 80s called Life in a Classroom.

1389
01:20:59,270 --> 01:21:05,110
So he was this like very kind of test-takey type of psychologist who worked on school

1390
01:21:05,110 --> 01:21:05,830
sociology.

1391
01:21:05,990 --> 01:21:10,630
And then he met some primatologists and he was like, Oh, I'm gonna do some observations and

1392
01:21:10,630 --> 01:21:12,390
see what life is like in the classroom.

1393
01:21:12,550 --> 01:21:18,310
Uh, Jackson, his name is, and so he wrote this book, and it's like a great

1394
01:21:18,470 --> 01:21:24,360
um deep dive into the social life of classrooms because his point is basically

1395
01:21:24,520 --> 01:21:26,840
like it's just self-regulation central.

1396
01:21:27,000 --> 01:21:30,200
You you never get to finish an activity that you want to finish, right?

1397
01:21:30,280 --> 01:21:32,040
You're on the teacher's schedule.

1398
01:21:32,280 --> 01:21:37,720
You have to raise your hand to have basic bodily functions or ask questions.

1399
01:21:38,040 --> 01:21:42,840
And one thing that he pointed out, which is really interesting, is like, it's very rare for

1400
01:21:42,840 --> 01:21:47,610
a teacher to tell you off for doing something wrong, but very common to be told off for

1401
01:21:47,610 --> 01:21:50,650
breaking a classroom normal norm or rule, right?

1402
01:21:50,970 --> 01:21:54,890
And like so you also have to control yourself in that way.

1403
01:21:55,050 --> 01:22:01,050
So presumably, schools are about transmitting specific bits of knowledge, but

1404
01:22:01,050 --> 01:22:06,330
in practice, it's a lot more about specific norms, especially in terms of managing in

1405
01:22:06,330 --> 01:22:07,770
classroom in that way.

1406
01:22:08,160 --> 01:22:11,520
And so you're constantly having to switch on other people's schedules.

1407
01:22:11,600 --> 01:22:12,720
And it's probably the case.

1408
01:22:12,800 --> 01:22:15,920
Like, maybe she's not ready to go to bed when you tell her to go to bed.

1409
01:22:16,080 --> 01:22:18,800
Maybe she just wants to finish playing.

1410
01:22:18,960 --> 01:22:20,240
But then, like, I'm tired.

1411
01:22:20,320 --> 01:22:23,280
I like when I put my kid to bed, it's because I'm tired and I need a break.

1412
01:22:23,440 --> 01:22:27,040
Not necessarily because he's always ready for it.

1413
01:22:27,280 --> 01:22:30,800
So, and I need that schedule and I need that time to decompress.

1414
01:22:31,040 --> 01:22:36,670
So, yeah, again, we're like butting up to a lot of those kind of post industrial

1415
01:22:36,670 --> 01:22:38,590
schedules, those pesky schedules.

1416
01:22:38,670 --> 01:22:39,790
How dare they?

1417
01:22:40,430 --> 01:22:43,630
There's no schedule in a hunter gatherer society.

1418
01:22:43,710 --> 01:22:44,670
You're right.

1419
01:22:45,150 --> 01:22:47,230
You follow your whims.

1420
01:22:47,310 --> 01:22:47,950
Yeah.

1421
01:22:48,670 --> 01:22:50,430
Cursed by the schedule.

1422
01:22:51,790 --> 01:22:54,270
Um the pure um pure learning.

1423
01:22:54,350 --> 01:22:59,870
You you you sort of were like, I'm sorry to to to bring that in, but please, um, what do

1424
01:22:59,870 --> 01:23:01,230
you want to say about that?

1425
01:23:03,200 --> 01:23:08,320
So most of my research at so I kind of like accidentally

1426
01:23:09,600 --> 01:23:14,480
learnt through so when you ask people like who did you learn who do you learn skills from?

1427
01:23:14,640 --> 01:23:18,000
People always say, like, my mom, my dad, my mom, my dad taught me these skills.

1428
01:23:18,160 --> 01:23:21,760
But when you actually observe what kids are doing and who they're interacting with in these

1429
01:23:21,760 --> 01:23:27,680
communities, like like 75% of the teaching that they're getting and receiving is from other

1430
01:23:27,680 --> 01:23:32,640
kids of varying ages, but it's happening, you know, kind of

1431
01:23:33,010 --> 01:23:35,330
horizontally within their age group.

1432
01:23:35,570 --> 01:23:39,250
And that's really um, and also in play.

1433
01:23:39,410 --> 01:23:44,690
And so that's really opened up a series of questions that we're now pursuing with my lab

1434
01:23:44,930 --> 01:23:50,770
and also with like my amazing uh collaborators to really understand how kids are learning

1435
01:23:50,770 --> 01:23:53,890
from each other and what they're learning from each other and how it works and how it

1436
01:23:53,890 --> 01:23:55,090
differs across culture.

1437
01:23:55,250 --> 01:23:59,410
So I don't have many answers yet, unfortunately, because all the research is kind of

1438
01:23:59,410 --> 01:23:59,970
active.

1439
01:24:00,240 --> 01:24:06,240
But one thing that Dorsa Amir and I, who's now at Duke, um, have written about is

1440
01:24:06,240 --> 01:24:11,280
that maybe what kids are doing and learning from each other isn't actually all that much

1441
01:24:11,280 --> 01:24:17,040
about what adults think they should learn, but a lot more about kids doing their own thing

1442
01:24:17,200 --> 01:24:22,880
and that that might actually be part of an adaptive social structure where kids almost act

1443
01:24:22,880 --> 01:24:25,760
like innovation incubators or startups, right?

1444
01:24:25,920 --> 01:24:28,830
Like they're these little working things.

1445
01:24:28,990 --> 01:24:31,870
All they have is free time to figure stuff out.

1446
01:24:32,270 --> 01:24:33,390
They can work together.

1447
01:24:33,550 --> 01:24:36,590
They have to adjust to each other's skill set.

1448
01:24:36,750 --> 01:24:38,110
They have different bodies.

1449
01:24:38,350 --> 01:24:42,030
So it's not the case that you can just shrink a spear, right?

1450
01:24:42,190 --> 01:24:43,390
Their strength is different.

1451
01:24:43,550 --> 01:24:44,670
They're like head.

1452
01:24:44,830 --> 01:24:46,350
Why do they all have such big heads?

1453
01:24:46,510 --> 01:24:47,230
Like they're like right.

1454
01:24:47,310 --> 01:24:51,550
They're like they're right at doorknob level too right now for both for both Gina and I.

1455
01:24:51,630 --> 01:24:52,350
Yeah, you and I.

1456
01:24:52,430 --> 01:24:54,830
Yeah, where they're just constantly hitting doorknobs.

1457
01:24:55,140 --> 01:24:55,940
Yeah, that's right.

1458
01:24:56,020 --> 01:24:56,980
Yeah, exactly.

1459
01:24:57,140 --> 01:24:58,660
So all their proportions are different.

1460
01:24:58,740 --> 01:25:03,060
So they need to kind of adjust the adult world to their benefit.

1461
01:25:03,220 --> 01:25:05,780
And that involves a lot of innovative thinking.

1462
01:25:06,020 --> 01:25:10,260
And so if we think about those innovations and what they might do, like they might not

1463
01:25:10,260 --> 01:25:15,460
matter that much most of the time, but they might really matter when there's a change in

1464
01:25:15,460 --> 01:25:15,860
the system.

1465
01:25:16,020 --> 01:25:17,780
And then you need these innovations.

1466
01:25:17,940 --> 01:25:20,260
You you need a pool of innovations to draw from.

1467
01:25:20,420 --> 01:25:25,310
And rather than starting from scratch, you can start from what the kids have created

1468
01:25:25,470 --> 01:25:26,270
basically.

1469
01:25:26,430 --> 01:25:28,430
Um, so that's where we're at in our thinking.

1470
01:25:28,510 --> 01:25:32,110
It's all very it all feels like Disneyland still because you have a theory, you have an

1471
01:25:32,110 --> 01:25:35,870
idea, and you haven't tested it, and then you like put it to data and it all falls apart,

1472
01:25:35,950 --> 01:25:37,710
and you're like, Oh, that was so stupid.

1473
01:25:37,790 --> 01:25:38,910
Why did I think that?

1474
01:25:39,390 --> 01:25:44,750
But we've we've read enough literature at this point that we are like confident that

1475
01:25:44,750 --> 01:25:50,030
there's something there is just actually testing the adaptive the the

1476
01:25:50,030 --> 01:25:51,630
adaptation aspect of it.

1477
01:25:52,000 --> 01:25:57,920
One one question that is sort of, I mean, there's so much to um to do when you're

1478
01:25:57,920 --> 01:25:58,640
a kid.

1479
01:25:58,960 --> 01:26:04,240
One is coordinating, because that cohort is going to be the cohort you'll need to

1480
01:26:04,240 --> 01:26:05,680
coordinate as adults.

1481
01:26:05,920 --> 01:26:10,720
So that's one thing that, you know, you're doing now, and that's an investment in the

1482
01:26:10,720 --> 01:26:15,200
future, even if kids change, you know, like maybe the maybe the small, weak kid becomes the

1483
01:26:15,200 --> 01:26:18,480
strongest kid, you know, or maybe the kid who, you know, whatever.

1484
01:26:18,640 --> 01:26:20,450
Um there's that part.

1485
01:26:20,610 --> 01:26:24,770
But then another part, then it sounds like, and and you can tell me if this is wrong.

1486
01:26:24,930 --> 01:26:30,770
Um, but then there's just they're creating their own innovative

1487
01:26:31,010 --> 01:26:36,290
ways to be socially, or even ways to use the environment, or tools, or artifacts, or of

1488
01:26:36,290 --> 01:26:41,650
course, linguistically, or social structures, or games, or just almost anything you can

1489
01:26:41,650 --> 01:26:43,330
think of that could be created.

1490
01:26:43,570 --> 01:26:49,200
It's not that they're um just sort of trying to be little adults, they're

1491
01:26:49,200 --> 01:26:51,120
actually their own culture.

1492
01:26:51,440 --> 01:26:53,360
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

1493
01:26:53,520 --> 01:26:59,120
I think like one like thought experiment, especially knowing your research,

1494
01:26:59,280 --> 01:26:59,920
David.

1495
01:27:00,880 --> 01:27:02,400
The David at the top of my screen.

1496
01:27:03,600 --> 01:27:05,760
One thing we've clarified is I I'll go by Dave.

1497
01:27:06,080 --> 01:27:10,880
And David And you're both peas too, so I don't know David P it's terrible.

1498
01:27:10,960 --> 01:27:11,120
Yeah.

1499
01:27:11,440 --> 01:27:12,320
It's really bad.

1500
01:27:12,720 --> 01:27:13,680
It's even PI.

1501
01:27:13,760 --> 01:27:14,960
I'm looking at our names right now.

1502
01:27:15,600 --> 01:27:16,240
Yeah.

1503
01:27:17,690 --> 01:27:23,610
So like one thing that um we propose as a thought experiment in

1504
01:27:23,610 --> 01:27:29,210
an early paper is basically like if you think of like a mobile small like a mobile hunter

1505
01:27:29,370 --> 01:27:30,810
gather community, right?

1506
01:27:31,130 --> 01:27:36,010
So you have these communities that are pretty you have a group of like 30 people, so maybe

1507
01:27:36,010 --> 01:27:41,960
10 of them or less will be kids and those kids will range from like zero

1508
01:27:41,960 --> 01:27:43,240
to adulthood, right?

1509
01:27:43,320 --> 01:27:45,000
So they're a big age range.

1510
01:27:45,160 --> 01:27:47,640
There's not a lot of room for competitive games.

1511
01:27:47,720 --> 01:27:51,800
Like, how do you play a game of soccer, like three the three-year-old versus the

1512
01:27:51,800 --> 01:27:52,760
17-year-old, right?

1513
01:27:52,840 --> 01:27:53,800
It's really hard.

1514
01:27:54,040 --> 01:27:58,440
So, what we often find in these small-scale hunter-gatherer communities is that a lot of

1515
01:27:58,440 --> 01:28:04,130
the games are a lot more like a test of your own skill and they're or they're very

1516
01:28:04,130 --> 01:28:04,690
cooperative.

1517
01:28:04,850 --> 01:28:09,890
Like one of the things the kids in the camp got got into doing at one point was like they

1518
01:28:09,890 --> 01:28:14,210
would tie this string around all of them and they would run around the camp trying not to

1519
01:28:14,210 --> 01:28:18,290
break the string, which is like if that's not a cooperative game, like I don't know what

1520
01:28:18,290 --> 01:28:18,450
is.

1521
01:28:19,730 --> 01:28:23,250
But what happens when you settle in a bigger setting.

1522
01:28:23,410 --> 01:28:27,810
So even before a transition to agriculture in the past, you would have had fishing

1523
01:28:27,810 --> 01:28:33,740
communities that could settle in bigger communities, and all of a sudden you have a

1524
01:28:33,740 --> 01:28:37,420
lot more kids, and you might be able to play competitive games.

1525
01:28:37,660 --> 01:28:43,420
So it's possible that shifts from egalitarian to non-egalitarian social structures

1526
01:28:43,420 --> 01:28:47,580
could start, for example, with kids playing and bringing up those norms that they develop

1527
01:28:47,580 --> 01:28:50,780
in their play with their peers into adulthood.

1528
01:28:50,940 --> 01:28:55,580
And it it would only take a few generations before that becomes the main ethos, right?

1529
01:28:55,660 --> 01:29:01,570
Like um So, like what kids are doing

1530
01:29:01,570 --> 01:29:03,330
is is pretty interesting.

1531
01:29:03,490 --> 01:29:09,090
And I mean, even a more modern example, I was reading a book about the baby boom and how

1532
01:29:09,090 --> 01:29:15,090
all these kids that did you guys know that the family meeting comes from like an anti uh

1533
01:29:15,410 --> 01:29:21,170
anti-Soviet kind of like we're a democratic country, we've we were democratic families.

1534
01:29:21,330 --> 01:29:24,930
Like that's what the idea of a family meeting is, like we make a decision together.

1535
01:29:25,420 --> 01:29:30,620
So wait, the the the concept of a family meeting was an act of rebellion against the Soviet

1536
01:29:30,620 --> 01:29:30,940
Union.

1537
01:29:31,020 --> 01:29:31,740
That's how it started out.

1538
01:29:31,820 --> 01:29:32,940
That's where this concept came out.

1539
01:29:33,180 --> 01:29:39,100
Yeah, we're like an anti kind of like an like we're American, we're democratic

1540
01:29:39,100 --> 01:29:41,980
in our state, and we're democratic at home kind of thing.

1541
01:29:42,220 --> 01:29:44,540
So that yeah, that's hilarious.

1542
01:29:44,940 --> 01:29:45,980
Isn't that hilarious?

1543
01:29:46,300 --> 01:29:50,550
So so these kids grow up, all of them in these suburbs, right?

1544
01:29:50,790 --> 01:29:56,710
With loads of same-age kids to the point where for a while there were no teenagers in the

1545
01:29:56,710 --> 01:29:57,430
suburbs.

1546
01:29:57,670 --> 01:30:03,270
And then they're also getting these like super democratic values hammered into them at

1547
01:30:03,270 --> 01:30:07,270
school, hammered into them at home, loads of space to play.

1548
01:30:07,430 --> 01:30:11,830
And then finally they come up and get to university and they're like, Vietnam War?

1549
01:30:12,220 --> 01:30:13,660
that doesn't sound right.

1550
01:30:13,820 --> 01:30:16,780
Like anti-women attitudes, that's not right either.

1551
01:30:17,020 --> 01:30:21,260
And so, and then all of them come of age at the same time and lead to this huge groundswell

1552
01:30:21,340 --> 01:30:26,300
and in culture change throughout, you know, the world, basically.

1553
01:30:26,540 --> 01:30:32,540
So we we see these themes of like kids coming up and it in under the right conditions,

1554
01:30:32,620 --> 01:30:38,190
um, bringing norms that were instilled in them or that they developed on their own into

1555
01:30:38,190 --> 01:30:41,950
their adult lives and leading to kind of bigger changes in culture.

1556
01:30:42,510 --> 01:30:48,430
So is is the argument then that the parents of the 50s uh worked very hard

1557
01:30:48,430 --> 01:30:52,270
to instill egalitarian and democratic values into their children?

1558
01:30:52,510 --> 01:30:56,830
Values that they themselves did not actually hold, that they were just paying lip service

1559
01:30:56,830 --> 01:31:02,740
to as a kind of uh political signal of of loyalty to the United States

1560
01:31:02,820 --> 01:31:03,620
or something like that.

1561
01:31:03,860 --> 01:31:07,860
But because of all this lip service, they accidentally instilled those values into their

1562
01:31:07,860 --> 01:31:08,180
children.

1563
01:31:08,340 --> 01:31:12,900
And then when they come of age, they uh stay true to those values and use them to advocate

1564
01:31:12,900 --> 01:31:13,460
for social change.

1565
01:31:13,540 --> 01:31:17,380
Is that is that the basic idea that you're you're proposing that's the argument of the book

1566
01:31:17,380 --> 01:31:17,780
that I read.

1567
01:31:18,100 --> 01:31:18,660
Okay, interesting.

1568
01:31:20,980 --> 01:31:26,820
Um from what we know from studies around demographic change in communities,

1569
01:31:26,980 --> 01:31:32,290
um, and in how that or at least modeling studies about how demographic change can lead to

1570
01:31:32,370 --> 01:31:38,130
you know the uh spread of norms that didn't maybe were weren't so popular

1571
01:31:38,130 --> 01:31:38,690
before.

1572
01:31:39,090 --> 01:31:41,250
And I think it would make sense that that's what we would see.

1573
01:31:41,410 --> 01:31:46,370
And I wouldn't even say it's like parents then like definitely didn't hold true to those

1574
01:31:46,370 --> 01:31:52,260
values, but the society of the structure, the sorry structure of the society d didn't

1575
01:31:52,260 --> 01:31:56,180
hold true to those structures, which of course we know because of segregation, the suburbs

1576
01:31:56,180 --> 01:32:00,980
were key to um kind of segregationist city planning.

1577
01:32:01,460 --> 01:32:07,300
Um so all of a sudden those structures which are both doing and undoing, right?

1578
01:32:07,540 --> 01:32:09,380
Um those types of inequalities.

1579
01:32:09,860 --> 01:32:15,850
It's really interesting because, you know, you think about the claim, it's sort of

1580
01:32:15,850 --> 01:32:21,770
outside the bounds of psychology because as a researcher, you can't be 200 or 300 years

1581
01:32:21,770 --> 01:32:27,610
old to, as an adult scientist, look at what a group of kids are growing

1582
01:32:27,610 --> 01:32:32,170
up in and then see how what they look like as adults, and then maybe how they're raising

1583
01:32:32,170 --> 01:32:32,730
their kids.

1584
01:32:32,890 --> 01:32:36,010
I mean, this is where sort of history has to come in.

1585
01:32:36,170 --> 01:32:38,330
What a hard thing to study.

1586
01:32:38,570 --> 01:32:43,900
Um, but it's it's really interesting because i had sort of naively sort of i i think one

1587
01:32:43,900 --> 01:32:49,820
has a naive thought i will say i i have a naive thought that sort of you know kids they're

1588
01:32:49,820 --> 01:32:55,580
defenseless they need to be um taken care of and um you know

1589
01:32:55,740 --> 01:33:01,510
a lot of times the social structure doesn't especially in the US or the UK it's

1590
01:33:01,590 --> 01:33:06,550
like I was we were talking about earlier, it's not um respecting them the way that, you

1591
01:33:06,550 --> 01:33:08,870
know, I I would prefer, for example.

1592
01:33:09,110 --> 01:33:14,470
Um, but at the same time, they're very powerful in the sense of they will be in charge, at

1593
01:33:14,470 --> 01:33:15,670
least collectively, right?

1594
01:33:15,830 --> 01:33:16,950
Um, in the future.

1595
01:33:17,190 --> 01:33:21,670
And I think it's easy to forget that because most adults don't see that.

1596
01:33:21,750 --> 01:33:24,870
And if they do, they're just thinking about their kids as adults, and by the time they see

1597
01:33:24,870 --> 01:33:26,790
it, they're so old.

1598
01:33:26,950 --> 01:33:31,620
Um, but that's a very different way to think about kids and why we should care about them

1599
01:33:31,860 --> 01:33:35,140
is because they will actually be in charge even if we're not around to see the

1600
01:33:35,140 --> 01:33:35,860
consequences.

1601
01:33:36,180 --> 01:33:36,420
Yeah.

1602
01:33:36,500 --> 01:33:40,420
I don't know if you got like this will sound like a pivot, but have you guys watched

1603
01:33:40,420 --> 01:33:42,100
Adolescence on Netflix yet?

1604
01:33:42,820 --> 01:33:43,540
I I have not.

1605
01:33:43,620 --> 01:33:46,500
I I we started but we we haven't gotten around to finishing it.

1606
01:33:46,580 --> 01:33:48,260
So I'm no spoilers, please.

1607
01:33:48,340 --> 01:33:52,340
Yeah I'm looking forward to spoil we're not done either but like we're like okay we're

1608
01:33:52,340 --> 01:33:56,180
gonna talk to Emmett about the manosphere like now he's four and a half but he needs to

1609
01:33:56,180 --> 01:34:00,930
know like you know, like we want to talk to him now about the stuff that's gonna come up as

1610
01:34:00,930 --> 01:34:05,250
a teenager because I don't know, those conversations you can't just kind of like

1611
01:34:06,770 --> 01:34:10,530
like they need to be practiced, right?

1612
01:34:10,770 --> 01:34:15,250
Like Jerome Lewis, who's a social anthropologist who's been working with the same community

1613
01:34:15,250 --> 01:34:21,250
as me, but like for many, many, many more years, he talks about this um system of

1614
01:34:21,490 --> 01:34:25,570
of norms, and it's like a religious system that the Bayaka have.

1615
01:34:25,810 --> 01:34:31,660
Um, but the way that kids learn it is not like, okay, let's sit down and let me run you

1616
01:34:31,660 --> 01:34:32,140
through the list.

1617
01:34:32,300 --> 01:34:37,420
They like hear these food taboos, they see people acting a certain way or not a certain way

1618
01:34:37,420 --> 01:34:41,660
before they go hunting, they overhear certain people can go hunting or not, why?

1619
01:34:41,740 --> 01:34:44,060
Because of Aquila is always this word akila.

1620
01:34:44,380 --> 01:34:49,500
And then they start, as they grow older, start to make sense of all this stuff.

1621
01:34:49,740 --> 01:34:54,570
So it's not like this kind of like cut, okay, now you're a teenager.

1622
01:34:54,730 --> 01:34:57,130
Now we talk about like blood, right?

1623
01:34:57,290 --> 01:35:00,810
It's like very much a gradual thing that you're always exposed to.

1624
01:35:00,890 --> 01:35:05,370
And I think that's like kind of where I'm at with all this scary Andrew Tate stuff where

1625
01:35:05,370 --> 01:35:07,130
I'm like, we start talking about it now.

1626
01:35:07,210 --> 01:35:09,850
We're like, we start talking about consent now.

1627
01:35:10,010 --> 01:35:14,650
We start talking about this stuff now, even amongst ourselves, so that those conversations

1628
01:35:14,650 --> 01:35:20,600
are happening, so that it's not like and all of a sudden we pivot now you're 13 and we talk

1629
01:35:20,600 --> 01:35:21,480
about this stuff, right?

1630
01:35:21,560 --> 01:35:23,560
It's like always been part of your life.

1631
01:35:24,120 --> 01:35:29,240
Is that this so the idea that is that um you don't protect your kids from things that feel

1632
01:35:29,240 --> 01:35:33,960
like they're too young for, or is that too strong of a way of putting it?

1633
01:35:34,200 --> 01:35:38,680
You know, for example, like like some I one one example would be something like death.

1634
01:35:38,760 --> 01:35:43,640
You know, like there's a philosophy that says, oh no, no, no, grandma is, you know, when to

1635
01:35:43,640 --> 01:35:47,670
go be with yeah or you know something as opposed to oh no no she's dead and you know like

1636
01:35:47,750 --> 01:35:51,590
what's happening to her she's decomposing you know like what what what is your thought on

1637
01:35:51,590 --> 01:35:56,870
that uh continuum from like you know she's playing golf with uh with grandpa or you know

1638
01:35:56,950 --> 01:36:02,470
there's worms eating her what's the uh w what what's your take

1639
01:36:02,630 --> 01:36:05,670
given your experience um it's a good question.

1640
01:36:05,830 --> 01:36:08,740
I mean kids see death all the time there.

1641
01:36:09,140 --> 01:36:14,180
Barry Hewlett estimates that by the time an Akka kid is 18, 50% of the people they'll have

1642
01:36:14,180 --> 01:36:15,380
known will have died.

1643
01:36:15,620 --> 01:36:15,940
Right.

1644
01:36:16,420 --> 01:36:20,420
So it they're experiencing death all the time.

1645
01:36:20,580 --> 01:36:21,940
It's very traumatic for them.

1646
01:36:22,020 --> 01:36:24,980
Bon Bonnie Hewlett's work on this shows that.

1647
01:36:25,140 --> 01:36:28,660
Um, they remember people who've died for a long time and they miss them.

1648
01:36:29,330 --> 01:36:34,210
They see death of animals all the time because obviously they hunt a lot.

1649
01:36:34,690 --> 01:36:40,290
Um, so death is just part of living there.

1650
01:36:41,090 --> 01:36:46,530
Um, so definitely in terms of death, like we we've we've had a lot of

1651
01:36:46,530 --> 01:36:49,010
conversations about like where meat comes from.

1652
01:36:49,250 --> 01:36:52,900
We went to this like farm shop butcher and they had like a goat, like that they were

1653
01:36:52,900 --> 01:36:53,780
carving up in it.

1654
01:36:53,860 --> 01:36:55,300
We were like, okay, look at the bones.

1655
01:36:55,380 --> 01:36:56,820
Like that's food that we eat.

1656
01:36:56,900 --> 01:36:58,180
Like, just know that.

1657
01:36:58,420 --> 01:37:02,900
Sometimes kids then like get really weird about that stuff where they like want to see

1658
01:37:02,900 --> 01:37:03,540
loads of death.

1659
01:37:03,620 --> 01:37:05,860
And then you need to have a conversation about that too.

1660
01:37:05,940 --> 01:37:11,700
Like, no, it's not something that like we want to happen, like just so we can see it kind

1661
01:37:11,700 --> 01:37:12,260
of thing.

1662
01:37:12,500 --> 01:37:18,100
Um, but I can't tell you from a scientific point of view

1663
01:37:19,150 --> 01:37:24,990
For sure, either way, but I think it's probably always good to be honest with kids, but not

1664
01:37:24,990 --> 01:37:27,710
so honest that you just scare the life out of them, right?

1665
01:37:28,590 --> 01:37:30,190
And I think that's the Akila thing.

1666
01:37:30,270 --> 01:37:35,710
Like they're not a lot of the knowledge that happens in this system of

1667
01:37:35,710 --> 01:37:41,540
taboos, um a lot of it is initiated when kids are a little bit

1668
01:37:41,540 --> 01:37:43,780
older, but that doesn't mean it's not being talked about.

1669
01:37:43,940 --> 01:37:47,700
It doesn't mean they're not exposed to those things in their everyday, also.

1670
01:37:48,180 --> 01:37:53,460
So more specialized knowledge, more kind of cog, more

1671
01:37:54,260 --> 01:37:59,300
ritualized knowledge, you probably would wait until their adolescence, but you lay the

1672
01:37:59,300 --> 01:38:00,260
groundwork earlier.

1673
01:38:00,340 --> 01:38:02,020
So it's less of a kind of cut.

1674
01:38:02,180 --> 01:38:06,660
Okay, now we're in it in this new thing, and more of a gradual joining in.

1675
01:38:07,110 --> 01:38:11,510
We come back to the joining in of what the community does.

1676
01:38:12,390 --> 01:38:17,190
Is there anything like as like oh sorry, David, go ahead.

1677
01:38:17,590 --> 01:38:22,790
So do they have a kind of afterlife story that they tell kids or that they believe in

1678
01:38:22,790 --> 01:38:23,190
themselves?

1679
01:38:23,350 --> 01:38:28,470
Or do they say when something's dead, it's dead and it's gone and it's its body is no

1680
01:38:28,470 --> 01:38:29,510
longer working?

1681
01:38:29,670 --> 01:38:32,870
Uh what how do they conceptualize this?

1682
01:38:33,400 --> 01:38:36,920
Yeah, so there's a lot of different conceptions.

1683
01:38:38,040 --> 01:38:44,040
So people tend to have a shorter mourning period for when kids die because kids are

1684
01:38:44,040 --> 01:38:48,600
reincarnated and come back in the same gender body, actually.

1685
01:38:48,760 --> 01:38:51,960
And then so souls are gendered amongst the bayaka.

1686
01:38:52,760 --> 01:38:56,490
And then older people tend not to come back.

1687
01:38:56,810 --> 01:39:02,730
Um, people who are very um kind of selfish um

1688
01:39:03,050 --> 01:39:07,290
come back as gorillas because gorillas think they're owners of the forest.

1689
01:39:07,610 --> 01:39:13,210
And also bayaka say that when they die, they come back

1690
01:39:13,770 --> 01:39:19,440
as these kind of white uh people, which has meant with colonialism

1691
01:39:19,760 --> 01:39:25,200
that some of their farmer neighbors say, Well, the bayaka say that they come back as like

1692
01:39:25,200 --> 01:39:25,920
European people.

1693
01:39:26,000 --> 01:39:27,360
Like, is that true?

1694
01:39:27,600 --> 01:39:31,200
To which I say, I I don't know what happens when you die, guys.

1695
01:39:31,280 --> 01:39:33,440
Like, I don't have those types of insight.

1696
01:39:33,680 --> 01:39:39,360
So, um, very kind of diverse beliefs around death, and a lot of people, I mean, bayaka are

1697
01:39:39,360 --> 01:39:40,320
very forthcoming.

1698
01:39:40,400 --> 01:39:41,840
I'll be like, What happens when you die?

1699
01:39:41,920 --> 01:39:44,290
And they'll be like, I don't know, haven't been dead yet.

1700
01:39:44,450 --> 01:39:49,890
Like they're and then some people will have kind of deeper, maybe even be initiated into

1701
01:39:49,890 --> 01:39:52,770
knowledge that's deeper around what happens around that.

1702
01:39:53,650 --> 01:39:54,530
Interesting.

1703
01:39:55,010 --> 01:39:55,330
Cool.

1704
01:39:55,410 --> 01:39:58,130
Yeah, I just wanted to know what what uh what the story was there.

1705
01:39:58,450 --> 01:39:58,690
Yeah.

1706
01:39:59,490 --> 01:40:01,010
Anyway, I interrupted you, Dave.

1707
01:40:01,330 --> 01:40:04,770
I was just gonna ask, um, you know, the peer learning thing.

1708
01:40:04,930 --> 01:40:09,810
I remember as a kid loving to hang out with older kids, and we get a chance to do that

1709
01:40:09,810 --> 01:40:11,010
after school.

1710
01:40:11,250 --> 01:40:15,440
Um, it's a weird c institution, maybe, or maybe not.

1711
01:40:15,600 --> 01:40:19,440
You know, you're saying what you're saying about like fishing, where you there is a reason.

1712
01:40:19,600 --> 01:40:24,640
I mean, the logic of stratifying kids by age makes sense from the perspective of you're

1713
01:40:24,640 --> 01:40:26,880
roughly standardizing like what they can do.

1714
01:40:26,960 --> 01:40:28,560
And so it makes sense to do that.

1715
01:40:28,960 --> 01:40:32,640
But then the consequences of that, there may be externalities or byproducts that are

1716
01:40:32,640 --> 01:40:33,440
unintended.

1717
01:40:33,600 --> 01:40:39,550
Do you think that that's uh a weird not in like the the acronym

1718
01:40:39,550 --> 01:40:45,550
sense, but just sort of like, is that a really strange artificial thing for our development

1719
01:40:45,630 --> 01:40:51,390
to really just be around uh really same age mates and

1720
01:40:51,390 --> 01:40:55,710
not be essentially alloparented or alloparent as kids?

1721
01:40:56,190 --> 01:40:57,630
Yeah, so I think a few things.

1722
01:40:57,710 --> 01:41:01,790
I think it is strange how much time kids are spending in single-age classrooms.

1723
01:41:01,870 --> 01:41:06,270
I think it would be awesome for them to have more opportunities for multi-age learning.

1724
01:41:06,840 --> 01:41:11,720
Also, just in terms of empathy development, like older kids being able to hang out with

1725
01:41:11,720 --> 01:41:17,560
younger kids is really important for their development of like just being nice people,

1726
01:41:17,800 --> 01:41:18,120
right?

1727
01:41:19,880 --> 01:41:25,720
I also think that we often over, maybe not over focus, but

1728
01:41:25,720 --> 01:41:31,110
we focus a little bit more on school and forget that kids tend to have a more diverse

1729
01:41:31,110 --> 01:41:33,030
friend group in their neighborhood.

1730
01:41:33,270 --> 01:41:39,030
Um, so we've got like kids, a few households with kids on our street, and like some

1731
01:41:39,030 --> 01:41:41,910
weekends they're just like going house to house, which is cool.

1732
01:41:42,070 --> 01:41:46,870
Um, and it's like from three to eight, I think they are.

1733
01:41:47,030 --> 01:41:51,270
Um, and there's just, you know, five of them, but they have a they have a great time.

1734
01:41:51,750 --> 01:41:56,070
Um, and we know from you know, research even going back to the 80s, that the neighborhood

1735
01:41:56,070 --> 01:42:00,880
friend group tends to be a little bit more autonomous and a little bit more diverse.

1736
01:42:00,960 --> 01:42:06,880
Then again, you know, very kind of stranger things child autonomy, which I think

1737
01:42:06,880 --> 01:42:10,080
we are losing a little bit that pesky schedule.

1738
01:42:10,240 --> 01:42:11,440
We come back to that.

1739
01:42:11,600 --> 01:42:16,000
Um, but then the other thing I'll say is like in some pastoralist communities, the whole

1740
01:42:16,000 --> 01:42:20,240
community structured around age sex that you're initiated with and to.

1741
01:42:20,800 --> 01:42:26,050
And in some communities, the age sect even goes off and makes their own village, and then

1742
01:42:26,050 --> 01:42:27,170
women marry in.

1743
01:42:27,410 --> 01:42:32,930
So in some communities, age is really the foundational structure of the entire community.

1744
01:42:33,250 --> 01:42:38,850
Um, but again, it just it just varies so much in terms of how it's structured and to what

1745
01:42:38,850 --> 01:42:39,170
degree.

1746
01:42:39,250 --> 01:42:42,130
I think those age sects aren't like just one-year slices, though.

1747
01:42:42,210 --> 01:42:45,730
I think it's like a few, like maybe three or four years.

1748
01:42:45,980 --> 01:42:49,340
um, but still quite strat stratified by each.

1749
01:42:49,500 --> 01:42:49,820
Yeah.

1750
01:42:50,140 --> 01:42:50,540
Yeah.

1751
01:42:50,780 --> 01:42:56,620
Um, but we David and I had talked previously about field work and sort of um uh David

1752
01:42:56,700 --> 01:43:00,940
for example it's sounded he had this anecdote of talking to Dan Fessler at UCLA about you

1753
01:43:00,940 --> 01:43:05,340
know this whole field work thing do I actually have to do it um you know it's really badass

1754
01:43:05,340 --> 01:43:06,540
that you do field work.

1755
01:43:07,020 --> 01:43:12,300
Um for you like as a person because we don't do field work um

1756
01:43:12,930 --> 01:43:16,210
What is your experience of like going back and forth to the field?

1757
01:43:16,370 --> 01:43:22,210
Like, how do you feel like, you know, as a and now that you're, you know, you started doing

1758
01:43:22,210 --> 01:43:24,210
this or you know, years ago.

1759
01:43:24,450 --> 01:43:27,890
And I know people who keep going to the field, some people who don't keep going to the

1760
01:43:27,890 --> 01:43:29,090
field once they have kids.

1761
01:43:29,330 --> 01:43:34,290
Sort of like, how do you think about the field and your your own relationship to it and

1762
01:43:34,290 --> 01:43:35,410
like how it's changed you?

1763
01:43:35,490 --> 01:43:39,330
Because we don't, we certainly the people listening, most people probably don't know what

1764
01:43:39,330 --> 01:43:39,730
that's like.

1765
01:43:39,890 --> 01:43:43,860
And David and I, you know, we've done things, but not that.

1766
01:43:44,020 --> 01:43:46,820
So I'm just curious, like, what what you think about that?

1767
01:43:47,460 --> 01:43:48,260
Yeah, for sure.

1768
01:43:48,420 --> 01:43:54,340
So I mean, I I won't I won't be like super like heroic

1769
01:43:54,340 --> 01:43:56,820
and say that my first field season wasn't heard.

1770
01:43:56,980 --> 01:44:02,980
Like I was so I was so scared, first of all, when we got to this village and like all these

1771
01:44:02,980 --> 01:44:06,100
people and I didn't know, and everybody was coming to talk to me and didn't understand a

1772
01:44:06,100 --> 01:44:07,300
word that they were saying.

1773
01:44:07,460 --> 01:44:09,510
Um this is the Congo Basin.

1774
01:44:09,670 --> 01:44:11,430
I mean, this is the Congo Basin, right?

1775
01:44:11,590 --> 01:44:11,670
Yeah.

1776
01:44:11,910 --> 01:44:12,310
Yeah, yeah.

1777
01:44:12,390 --> 01:44:13,190
In the Congo Bas.

1778
01:44:13,270 --> 01:44:15,910
Yeah, I was in Republic of the Congo in the north.

1779
01:44:16,070 --> 01:44:18,150
So it's a village that's quite remote.

1780
01:44:18,230 --> 01:44:24,230
So you fly to Brazzaville, you take a very long bus journey

1781
01:44:24,550 --> 01:44:30,320
to a cap the capital of the north, then you continue over a river, a

1782
01:44:30,320 --> 01:44:35,360
very long car ride along some logging roads to then get to a boat, and then on the

1783
01:44:35,360 --> 01:44:38,320
motorboat, you can make it in four hours to the village where I work.

1784
01:44:38,400 --> 01:44:40,240
So there's no no road.

1785
01:44:40,320 --> 01:44:43,040
And so we get there and we're like unloading our stuff.

1786
01:44:43,200 --> 01:44:44,400
I have no idea where we are.

1787
01:44:44,480 --> 01:44:46,160
I've never been there before.

1788
01:44:46,400 --> 01:44:50,960
Um I'm French is my mother tongue, but nobody there speaks French.

1789
01:44:51,120 --> 01:44:54,320
Um, French is the also the national language of Congo.

1790
01:44:54,480 --> 01:44:59,950
Um, and I get pulled into this group of women who made make me sit with them and now all of

1791
01:44:59,950 --> 01:45:04,270
a sudden, like, and like the bayaka are very, they sit very close to each other.

1792
01:45:04,350 --> 01:45:06,510
So all these people are like entangled with me.

1793
01:45:06,670 --> 01:45:10,910
And I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna, I'm gonna die here.

1794
01:45:11,550 --> 01:45:14,910
And like I got I got I got stuck in pretty quickly.

1795
01:45:14,990 --> 01:45:20,600
I was I'm lucky that in my undergrad, I'd taken some Swahili courses and so and

1796
01:45:20,600 --> 01:45:22,520
Bayak is also a Bantu language.

1797
01:45:22,600 --> 01:45:26,040
So all the words are different, but I knew how the grammar worked.

1798
01:45:26,120 --> 01:45:31,320
And so I was able to slot in and was able to develop also with the help of another

1799
01:45:31,320 --> 01:45:34,280
researcher who was there my language skills pretty quickly.

1800
01:45:34,440 --> 01:45:39,970
Um, but then all of a sudden I was like alone in a f so I also at first I was gonna go work

1801
01:45:39,970 --> 01:45:41,010
in forest camps.

1802
01:45:41,090 --> 01:45:43,890
I'm in the village, and I'm like, who's in the forest, guys?

1803
01:45:43,970 --> 01:45:46,610
And they're like, Nobody lives in the forest.

1804
01:45:46,770 --> 01:45:52,290
And I'm like, hmm, all right, well, there goes like my PhD plans.

1805
01:45:52,530 --> 01:45:58,450
And all of a sudden, like, as I started to know everybody's names, I start hearing names

1806
01:45:58,450 --> 01:46:00,290
that aren't part of the set that I know.

1807
01:46:00,370 --> 01:46:02,280
So I'm like, Well, who's this person?

1808
01:46:02,360 --> 01:46:04,920
And they're like, oh, well, he lives in the forest.

1809
01:46:05,000 --> 01:46:06,840
I'm like, well, you told me nobody lives in the forest.

1810
01:46:06,920 --> 01:46:09,320
And they're like, nobody lives in the forest, but he lives in the forest.

1811
01:46:09,400 --> 01:46:14,520
And all of a sudden, this like mental map of all these kin who are like some are like two,

1812
01:46:14,600 --> 01:46:15,320
three days.

1813
01:46:15,400 --> 01:46:19,880
There's one guy who who he's old who lives in the forest full time with his wife.

1814
01:46:19,960 --> 01:46:21,720
He never comes to the village ever.

1815
01:46:21,960 --> 01:46:27,370
Like, so there's ecology people that like, because you know they're far away, you know,

1816
01:46:27,610 --> 01:46:28,810
they just don't think of them.

1817
01:46:28,890 --> 01:46:31,370
And I was like, okay, well, can you take me to this camp?

1818
01:46:31,690 --> 01:46:35,930
So I get to this camp, I get along super well with the host dad.

1819
01:46:36,010 --> 01:46:38,170
Um, well, the host camp.

1820
01:46:38,250 --> 01:46:40,010
Now I call him my host dad.

1821
01:46:40,170 --> 01:46:43,610
Um, and I stayed there for four months, and it was awesome.

1822
01:46:43,850 --> 01:46:49,700
Except it turns out you can't just bring like rice and beans in mesh bags

1823
01:46:49,700 --> 01:46:52,020
into the rainforest and they're just gonna be fine.

1824
01:46:52,260 --> 01:46:54,420
So all my stuff went moldy.

1825
01:46:54,500 --> 01:46:55,860
All my food went more moldy.

1826
01:46:55,940 --> 01:47:00,100
All my underwear went moldy like everything you can imagine went moldy.

1827
01:47:00,180 --> 01:47:03,220
And so I like wasn't gonna eat moldy rice and beans.

1828
01:47:03,300 --> 01:47:08,660
So I got really really thin and then the camp was breaking up to move further into the

1829
01:47:08,660 --> 01:47:10,660
forest and I just didn't quite feel well enough.

1830
01:47:10,740 --> 01:47:12,580
So I was like I think I'm gonna go home.

1831
01:47:12,740 --> 01:47:15,780
So I ended up going home a month early then.

1832
01:47:20,810 --> 01:47:21,370
Planned.

1833
01:47:21,450 --> 01:47:24,810
And I think it's important to tell those stories because, like, um, but then like the more

1834
01:47:24,810 --> 01:47:29,210
I went, the more I got used to food, the better my language skills went, the closer

1835
01:47:29,210 --> 01:47:30,010
friendships I made.

1836
01:47:30,090 --> 01:47:31,690
Now it really feels like I'm going home.

1837
01:47:31,770 --> 01:47:34,410
Like I've it's like my other home.

1838
01:47:34,730 --> 01:47:40,340
I one thing I find really hard about being away from the field is that a a few of my

1839
01:47:40,340 --> 01:47:44,580
friends have passed away in between um and I'm not there for their funerals.

1840
01:47:44,660 --> 01:47:50,020
I always send a bit of money to contribute to the um party but um to the funeral ceremony

1841
01:47:50,180 --> 01:47:53,860
but I'm not there for those things so that's always a little bit difficult.

1842
01:47:54,100 --> 01:47:59,460
Um but at the same time I always get news when people come to the bigger towns where

1843
01:47:59,460 --> 01:48:01,860
there's cell phone reception which is really nice.

1844
01:48:02,070 --> 01:48:05,350
Um, and yeah, it feels like our our lives are intertwined.

1845
01:48:05,430 --> 01:48:06,150
You know what I mean?

1846
01:48:06,230 --> 01:48:11,990
And so it's nice to have that feeling of I have a home away from home and and I

1847
01:48:11,990 --> 01:48:15,430
hope that they feel as taken care of as I do by them.

1848
01:48:15,670 --> 01:48:16,870
That's like the main thing.

1849
01:48:17,030 --> 01:48:17,350
Yeah.

1850
01:48:17,990 --> 01:48:22,710
So the world sort of the the cost of entry being that difficult, you sort of get a second

1851
01:48:22,710 --> 01:48:24,550
home or the world shrinks a bit.

1852
01:48:24,900 --> 01:48:25,860
Yeah, I think so.

1853
01:48:26,020 --> 01:48:26,420
Think so.

1854
01:48:26,500 --> 01:48:30,180
And you know, sometimes you might not like get along with people, and that's okay too.

1855
01:48:30,420 --> 01:48:33,700
If not everybody's made for field work, and that's all right.

1856
01:48:33,860 --> 01:48:36,500
You can I'm not made for field work.

1857
01:48:36,740 --> 01:48:40,820
I can see David during the during the moldy beans and rice.

1858
01:48:40,900 --> 01:48:42,500
I'm just nope nope nope nope nope.

1859
01:48:42,660 --> 01:48:47,860
I'm just David David is like, man, I don't like if they get my order wrong at a restaurant.

1860
01:48:48,020 --> 01:48:51,060
That's that's yeah.

1861
01:48:51,550 --> 01:48:56,030
I I'm Kvetching if I'm, you know, a few degrees below the optimal temperature or above.

1862
01:48:57,630 --> 01:48:58,510
Uh yeah.

1863
01:48:58,670 --> 01:49:00,510
I have I like my daughter.

1864
01:49:02,110 --> 01:49:05,310
I have lots of s of strongly held arbitrary preferences like my like my daughter.

1865
01:49:05,550 --> 01:49:06,350
So Okay.

1866
01:49:06,590 --> 01:49:08,270
That sounds like an inherited crazy.

1867
01:49:08,830 --> 01:49:10,350
Yeah, maybe that's the solution of the mystery.

1868
01:49:13,150 --> 01:49:15,790
She knows is there anything we should have asked you?

1869
01:49:16,670 --> 01:49:17,240
I don't know.

1870
01:49:17,320 --> 01:49:18,760
Is there anything you should have asked me?

1871
01:49:18,840 --> 01:49:19,560
You guys tell me.

1872
01:49:19,800 --> 01:49:21,800
Is there anything else you want to know?

1873
01:49:24,920 --> 01:49:28,200
Um I think we we covered a lot.

1874
01:49:28,680 --> 01:49:31,240
It was pretty pretty cool, wide-ranging discussion.

1875
01:49:31,560 --> 01:49:36,200
Yeah, and I really I I I feel like um what I love about

1876
01:49:36,200 --> 01:49:42,110
anthropology is uh it is a window into like our

1877
01:49:42,110 --> 01:49:42,590
world.

1878
01:49:42,670 --> 01:49:48,590
And it's such a privileged thing to talk to you and to people who do

1879
01:49:48,590 --> 01:49:48,830
it.

1880
01:49:49,630 --> 01:49:54,030
And I hope, like I mean this, it sounds cheesy, but I mean this like sincerely.

1881
01:49:54,190 --> 01:50:00,190
Like it's, I think it's a really special time and place to be, to

1882
01:50:00,190 --> 01:50:05,710
be a scientist who sort of you're doing science, but you're also talking to people who

1883
01:50:05,710 --> 01:50:08,670
ordinarily wouldn't be like part of the conversation.

1884
01:50:08,750 --> 01:50:14,460
Like we are talking, you know, over we're both in David and I are in California, you're in

1885
01:50:14,460 --> 01:50:15,180
the UK.

1886
01:50:15,420 --> 01:50:21,260
Um, but we're talking about these stories from the Congo Basin, and that's

1887
01:50:21,260 --> 01:50:22,540
because of you, right?

1888
01:50:22,620 --> 01:50:25,260
And like your your life uh doing that.

1889
01:50:25,420 --> 01:50:30,940
And I think that's such a um every time I talk to an anthropologist, I I just like want to

1890
01:50:30,940 --> 01:50:36,780
express appreciation of like that the fact that you do that is what allows all

1891
01:50:36,780 --> 01:50:42,470
of us to like understand ourselves better because like we we're all people

1892
01:50:42,630 --> 01:50:47,670
right and but to see that that part of humanity expressed in that way is like really

1893
01:50:47,670 --> 01:50:53,270
rewarding and thank you for for bringing that to us um in in dealing with all the

1894
01:50:53,270 --> 01:50:59,030
hardships that um you you you dealt with to to bring that i mean given give

1895
01:50:59,350 --> 01:51:05,160
given those hardships you know we have a social norm here uh where we say thank you for

1896
01:51:05,160 --> 01:51:07,480
your service to military uh uh personnel.

1897
01:51:07,800 --> 01:51:11,560
Oh my god I know don't thank you can I thank you for your service?

1898
01:51:13,880 --> 01:51:19,400
I mean like honestly like I think a lot of the all like all of the

1899
01:51:19,400 --> 01:51:23,560
kudos go to these communities because they don't have to welcome us in, right?

1900
01:51:23,720 --> 01:51:28,230
We're like we are such a burden on these communities who make such a mess.

1901
01:51:28,310 --> 01:51:29,350
We're so bad at everything.

1902
01:51:29,510 --> 01:51:31,110
They have to take care of us.

1903
01:51:31,350 --> 01:51:36,150
Um, and the fact that they're willing, they're willing to share their lives with us,

1904
01:51:36,230 --> 01:51:41,830
they're the the real heroes because like I there's a a story

1905
01:51:42,150 --> 01:51:47,510
of a group of hunter gatherers who didn't like an anthropologist and they just got up in

1906
01:51:47,510 --> 01:51:48,950
the middle of the night and moved camp.

1907
01:51:49,030 --> 01:51:51,670
So I'm just always and left them alone in the bush.

1908
01:51:51,830 --> 01:51:55,840
So I was just forever grateful that they haven't just abandoned me in the bush alone.

1909
01:51:56,080 --> 01:51:58,560
So you're just waking up every morning like, okay, okay.

1910
01:51:59,520 --> 01:52:00,320
They're still here.

1911
01:52:00,560 --> 01:52:02,480
That's today will be okay.

1912
01:52:02,640 --> 01:52:03,760
Everybody's still here.

1913
01:52:03,920 --> 01:52:04,240
Yeah.

1914
01:52:04,320 --> 01:52:04,880
Yeah.

1915
01:52:05,120 --> 01:52:05,360
Yeah.

1916
01:52:05,440 --> 01:52:06,480
Well, thank you, Bayaka.

1917
01:52:07,360 --> 01:52:07,440
Yeah.

1918
01:52:07,600 --> 01:52:07,840
Thank you.

1919
01:52:07,920 --> 01:52:09,360
Yeah, no, thank you so much.

1920
01:52:09,520 --> 01:52:10,880
Um, thank you, Bayaka.

1921
01:52:11,200 --> 01:52:11,440
Yeah.

1922
01:52:11,680 --> 01:52:11,920
Yeah.

1923
01:52:12,000 --> 01:52:12,960
Thank you, Bayaka.

1924
01:52:13,200 --> 01:52:14,160
That's the right move.

1925
01:52:14,320 --> 01:52:14,960
Yeah.

1926
01:52:18,080 --> 01:52:22,910
We've reached the end of another episode of Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

1927
01:52:23,150 --> 01:52:26,830
David, um, how can people help us out if they'd like?

1928
01:52:27,230 --> 01:52:32,750
Well, you can leave us a kind review, you can say something nice about us on social

1929
01:52:32,750 --> 01:52:38,110
media, you can visit our Patreon page and give us a bit of money to support us.

1930
01:52:38,350 --> 01:52:44,270
Uh, or you can stay tuned for the next episode, which should be coming out next

1931
01:52:44,270 --> 01:52:44,510
week.

1932
01:52:44,750 --> 01:52:45,070
Yeah.

1933
01:52:45,230 --> 01:52:47,870
And David, I'll see you between now and then.

1934
01:52:48,220 --> 01:52:48,700
Sounds good.

1935
01:52:48,860 --> 01:52:50,220
Looking forward to it.