WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.120 I'm David Pinsov. 00:00:01.840 --> 00:00:04.080 And I think I'm David Petrozowski. 00:00:05.040 --> 00:00:09.120 Welcome to Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. 00:00:09.440 --> 00:00:15.200 Where you will hear actual evolutionary psychology being done by actual evolutionary 00:00:15.200 --> 00:00:16.480 psychologists. 00:00:26.890 --> 00:00:28.250 David, good to see you. 00:00:28.970 --> 00:00:30.170 Good to see you too, Dave. 00:00:30.250 --> 00:00:31.690 I'm really excited about this guest. 00:00:31.770 --> 00:00:34.090 This this this was an amazing conversation. 00:00:34.250 --> 00:00:39.770 Uh yeah, we have uh Sheena Lou Levy, who is uh professor in the Department of Psychology at 00:00:39.770 --> 00:00:41.930 uh Durham University in the UK. 00:00:42.410 --> 00:00:45.210 And she's just done absolutely mind-blowing work. 00:00:45.370 --> 00:00:50.890 Uh she has done anthropological field work uh in a small group of foragers in the Congo 00:00:50.890 --> 00:00:56.660 Basin studying uh the evolution of childhood learning and childhood itself and child 00:00:56.660 --> 00:01:01.540 development in a culture that is quite distant from ours with child rearing practices that 00:01:01.540 --> 00:01:03.540 are quite different from ours. 00:01:03.700 --> 00:01:07.940 Uh so if you're a parent, I think this will be particularly interesting for you. 00:01:08.100 --> 00:01:13.860 Um, I know I confronted Sheena with three Darwinian mysteries that arose in my own 00:01:13.860 --> 00:01:18.470 experiences being a dad, and I thought she uh absolutely fully solved them. 00:01:18.630 --> 00:01:21.350 She addressed them to my satisfaction right on the spot. 00:01:21.430 --> 00:01:22.790 It was really impressive. 00:01:23.190 --> 00:01:26.790 So uh sit back, relax, and uh take a nap. 00:01:27.110 --> 00:01:31.030 Well don't take a nap because well if you're a parent you might need a nap, but don't take 00:01:31.030 --> 00:01:32.950 a nap because you won't listen to what we're saying. 00:01:33.190 --> 00:01:35.590 So relax and listen. 00:01:35.990 --> 00:01:36.870 Enjoy. 00:01:40.470 --> 00:01:43.350 So Sheena Lulivi is is joining us today. 00:01:43.590 --> 00:01:44.710 Sheena, really good to see you. 00:01:44.790 --> 00:01:45.670 Thanks for joining us. 00:01:45.960 --> 00:01:47.320 Thanks for having me, guys. 00:01:47.640 --> 00:01:52.600 Um, you are the first human behavioral ecologist that we have had on. 00:01:52.920 --> 00:01:53.480 That's fine. 00:01:53.800 --> 00:01:59.480 Uh, and one of the things that we uh were excited to do with this uh thing we're 00:01:59.480 --> 00:02:05.400 doing is explain to people what the evolutionary social sciences are and who the people 00:02:05.400 --> 00:02:06.280 are doing it. 00:02:06.440 --> 00:02:12.370 And because you happen to be the first human behavioral ecologist on, um, well, number 00:02:12.370 --> 00:02:15.410 one, the question is, do you think of yourself that way? 00:02:15.890 --> 00:02:16.130 Yeah. 00:02:16.370 --> 00:02:21.010 And I think that's sort of many, many of the that we've only had two people on so far, and 00:02:21.010 --> 00:02:25.170 both have been um psychologists, like lab psychologists, but they've still sort of talked 00:02:25.170 --> 00:02:31.090 about the um uh their journey to discovering at least an evolutionary approach to 00:02:31.090 --> 00:02:32.530 psychology, for example. 00:02:32.770 --> 00:02:36.800 Um, so yeah, the one question is like, do you consider yourself a human behavioral 00:02:36.800 --> 00:02:37.680 ecologist? 00:02:37.920 --> 00:02:42.640 And then uh and then related to that is like I think a natural maybe question, and I don't 00:02:42.640 --> 00:02:46.320 know this about you, um, is how you you you got into it. 00:02:46.720 --> 00:02:48.160 Oh God, that's a real story. 00:02:48.400 --> 00:02:54.000 Okay, first day, I think my I would say a big part of my training is human 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:58.160 behavioral ecology, but when you study kids, you just need to do a little bit of everything 00:02:58.480 --> 00:03:03.230 because they just defy disciplinary categorization. 00:03:03.950 --> 00:03:08.350 So yeah, definitely a big portion of my training is in human behavioral ecology. 00:03:08.510 --> 00:03:12.990 Um, my PhD is actually in in psychology, which not a lot of people know. 00:03:13.150 --> 00:03:18.670 Um But yeah, I ended up there because I just found the right advisor for me. 00:03:18.750 --> 00:03:24.270 And I to this day have never taken a psychology class, even though I teach psychology now. 00:03:24.430 --> 00:03:29.420 So my training is definitely more in evolutionary anthropology than than 00:03:29.420 --> 00:03:30.460 psychology. 00:03:30.780 --> 00:03:34.140 Um and then how I got into this, oh I'm gonna take you guys on a journey. 00:03:34.220 --> 00:03:35.020 It's great. 00:03:35.180 --> 00:03:35.740 Journeys are great. 00:03:35.900 --> 00:03:41.420 We both did we we literally spent an entire episode talking about how each of us 00:03:41.420 --> 00:03:44.940 discovered an evolutionary approach to psychology in particular. 00:03:45.340 --> 00:03:46.300 Yeah, we got deep into it. 00:03:46.380 --> 00:03:48.380 I Dave got back all the way back to his childhood. 00:03:48.540 --> 00:03:51.020 So I think go as go as deep as you want. 00:03:51.730 --> 00:03:51.970 Okay. 00:03:52.130 --> 00:03:54.530 So I'm going to take you back to my adolescence. 00:03:54.930 --> 00:04:00.610 So as like an older teenager kind of emerging adult, I was very into um 00:04:00.930 --> 00:04:04.770 bushcraft, like uh what we call first skills, right? 00:04:04.930 --> 00:04:10.610 And so I spent actually two years at a survival school in Washington State um tanning 00:04:10.850 --> 00:04:12.770 hides and foraging. 00:04:13.090 --> 00:04:18.770 And this school also had an element like a homeschool or unschooling kind of kids' 00:04:19.010 --> 00:04:20.130 nature program. 00:04:20.960 --> 00:04:25.040 And so we would get all we would learn to mentor people, and they would always tell us, 00:04:25.120 --> 00:04:28.000 like, hunter gatherers learn like this, hunter gatherers do that. 00:04:28.080 --> 00:04:31.520 And I was like, okay, where's the where's the actual research? 00:04:31.680 --> 00:04:34.800 So I started off in cultural anthropology after that. 00:04:35.040 --> 00:04:41.040 And um I found a really great mentor there, but it wasn't quite a right fit in terms of 00:04:41.040 --> 00:04:41.360 content. 00:04:41.440 --> 00:04:44.640 Like I learned so much and I was super passionate about it, but there was always something 00:04:44.640 --> 00:04:45.120 missing. 00:04:45.280 --> 00:04:51.190 And I was scrolling on Facebook during an undergrad class and on a homeschooling 00:04:51.190 --> 00:04:56.790 blog they posted about this book called Hunter Gatherer Childhoods edited by Barry Hewlett 00:04:56.790 --> 00:04:57.590 and Michael Lamb. 00:04:58.070 --> 00:05:02.310 And I was like, this is it, like this is what I want to do. 00:05:02.550 --> 00:05:08.070 So I just went through the list of all the contributors in the book and emailed a bunch of 00:05:08.070 --> 00:05:10.950 people and ended up at Cambridge to work with Frank Marlowe. 00:05:11.040 --> 00:05:14.720 And he unfortunately retired right as I was starting for my master's. 00:05:14.880 --> 00:05:19.120 So I had to find another supervisor who ended up being the editor of the book, the only 00:05:19.120 --> 00:05:20.960 other person there, Michael Lamb. 00:05:21.200 --> 00:05:24.240 So that's kind of how I got into this stuff. 00:05:24.480 --> 00:05:30.480 And my best friend Luke and I we spent like a few months of our lives 00:05:30.560 --> 00:05:35.520 like on these logging roads in Washington State, like trying to make it. 00:05:35.600 --> 00:05:40.370 And we were so hungry and so incompetent and so bad at everything. 00:05:40.450 --> 00:05:45.970 And like we would always fantasize about like other camps being along the different logging 00:05:45.970 --> 00:05:48.370 roads where we could just drop by for some food. 00:05:48.530 --> 00:05:54.530 And for me, it was like really foundational like lessons in like really three things 00:05:54.530 --> 00:05:56.290 in cultural evolution that we talk about. 00:05:56.370 --> 00:06:02.080 Like the first is like it takes a long ass time to learn to be a good hunter-gatherer, like 00:06:02.160 --> 00:06:03.760 you're not gonna do it in two years. 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:06.480 The second thing is you need a lot of cooperation. 00:06:06.640 --> 00:06:10.800 And the third thing, which I think we talk about less, but we were on these like super 00:06:10.800 --> 00:06:12.720 monocrop logging forests, right? 00:06:12.800 --> 00:06:15.120 That just had no ecological diversity. 00:06:15.280 --> 00:06:19.440 But traditionally, a lot of the communities, indigenous communities of that region would be 00:06:19.440 --> 00:06:21.760 really tending the environment to produce food. 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:25.440 So, in terms of niche construction, like that's the other thing, like tending your 00:06:25.440 --> 00:06:28.880 environment to your needs is the third thing that we really learned in the literature. 00:06:29.350 --> 00:06:30.870 So what what is niche construction? 00:06:31.110 --> 00:06:32.630 Just for those who don't know. 00:06:32.790 --> 00:06:32.950 Yeah. 00:06:33.190 --> 00:06:33.430 Yeah. 00:06:33.510 --> 00:06:37.990 So like a beaver is the kind of quintessential example of niche construction, right? 00:06:38.070 --> 00:06:42.550 Like you dam a river and you make a pond and you live in the pond. 00:06:42.710 --> 00:06:44.710 And humans do that all the time, right? 00:06:44.870 --> 00:06:47.670 We curate our environment to fit our needs. 00:06:47.910 --> 00:06:49.270 So we make clothes. 00:06:49.350 --> 00:06:53.670 That's an example of niche, which means that we don't need to be furry in cold 00:06:53.670 --> 00:06:59.600 environments, but we also curate the foragers that I work with in the Congo 00:06:59.600 --> 00:07:04.320 Basin, for example, they'll replant parts of wild tubers to regenerate that growth. 00:07:04.400 --> 00:07:08.160 And they know where those areas are and they can come back to it. 00:07:08.320 --> 00:07:12.880 So the way in which we curate our environment to produce food and other resources that we 00:07:12.880 --> 00:07:17.280 need is really central to uh what it means to be a successful hunter-gatherer. 00:07:17.360 --> 00:07:21.670 And you know, 10 years now that I've been actually doing or nine years that I've been doing 00:07:21.670 --> 00:07:25.750 field work with actual hunter-gathers and I'm still so bad at all of it, even though I try 00:07:25.910 --> 00:07:31.030 like four year olds surpass me in their I've taken whole ass university botany courses in a 00:07:31.030 --> 00:07:31.590 four year old. 00:07:31.670 --> 00:07:33.110 I'm like, is this the food one? 00:07:33.270 --> 00:07:34.390 And she's like, nope. 00:07:36.790 --> 00:07:38.470 Like with an eye with an eye roll. 00:07:38.550 --> 00:07:38.790 Yeah. 00:07:39.190 --> 00:07:39.430 Yeah. 00:07:39.510 --> 00:07:40.550 With a little eye roll. 00:07:40.630 --> 00:07:42.710 Like, come on, girl, you're you're an adult. 00:07:42.870 --> 00:07:44.150 Get this together. 00:07:45.920 --> 00:07:46.400 Amazing. 00:07:46.960 --> 00:07:48.480 So yeah, no, Dave, go ahead. 00:07:48.560 --> 00:07:48.800 Yeah. 00:07:49.440 --> 00:07:54.800 I mean, I mean, what you're describing um challenges sort of this pop 00:07:55.040 --> 00:08:00.640 evolutionary psychology notion that our ancestors were dumb cavemen hitting each other with 00:08:00.640 --> 00:08:05.680 clubs, and that to take an evolutionary approach to human behavior is to figure out how we 00:08:05.680 --> 00:08:11.440 are dumb cavemen or monkeys deep down, and how that is driving us insane in the 00:08:11.440 --> 00:08:12.080 modern world. 00:08:12.240 --> 00:08:16.950 And part of the goal of this podcast is to move beyond that popular understanding to 00:08:16.950 --> 00:08:22.470 recognize that actually making a living as a hunter-gatherer in the 00:08:22.470 --> 00:08:26.950 wilderness is extremely difficult and cognitively demanding. 00:08:27.350 --> 00:08:29.910 And our ancestors were not dumb cavemen. 00:08:29.990 --> 00:08:35.670 They were sophisticated herbalists, horticulturalists, toolmakers, political 00:08:35.670 --> 00:08:38.150 strategists, you name it. 00:08:38.630 --> 00:08:44.300 And so once we take a proper understanding of the complexity and the cognitive 00:08:44.300 --> 00:08:50.220 demands of the of the human evolutionary niche, the design of the human mind 00:08:50.220 --> 00:08:53.580 becomes uh much uh uh clearer. 00:08:53.660 --> 00:08:58.620 Or at least we we we have a better sense of what kinds of cognitive uh equipment we're 00:08:58.620 --> 00:09:02.140 dealing with and and why we why we possess those cognitive tools. 00:09:02.700 --> 00:09:02.940 Yeah. 00:09:03.340 --> 00:09:07.100 I think I'll I'll add to that, but first I'll caveat that I work with contemporary 00:09:07.100 --> 00:09:08.140 hunter-gatherers. 00:09:08.220 --> 00:09:13.470 So I can kind of generalize from there about what would, but they live in modern 00:09:13.470 --> 00:09:18.270 environments every night in the village where I work, which has no electricity, they spend 00:09:18.270 --> 00:09:22.030 all day charging these enormous beakers and we dance all night. 00:09:22.190 --> 00:09:25.710 Like grandmas all the way through four-year-olds just parties. 00:09:25.790 --> 00:09:30.910 So it's like obviously they're contemporary people, but a lot of the activities that they 00:09:30.910 --> 00:09:35.470 do can tell us a lot about, you know, when we take into account whatever changes and 00:09:35.470 --> 00:09:38.270 technology can tell us some things about the past. 00:09:39.880 --> 00:09:45.880 But that said, you know, we have many, many years 00:09:45.880 --> 00:09:48.280 of being of being anatomically modern humans. 00:09:48.440 --> 00:09:54.120 And so we can tell a lot about the past by knowing about this very kind of long-ranging 00:09:54.120 --> 00:09:55.000 subsistence strategy. 00:09:55.160 --> 00:09:59.720 I always say the people are modern people, but the subsistence strategy is our defining 00:09:59.720 --> 00:10:00.600 subsistence strategy. 00:10:00.680 --> 00:10:03.400 And by studying it, we can learn a lot, like you say. 00:10:03.480 --> 00:10:09.370 And it's it is a fact that you know, it's really hard to make a living. 00:10:09.530 --> 00:10:11.690 And then the other thing too is like there's this. 00:10:11.930 --> 00:10:15.930 I have a very close colleague and friend, Annamika Milk, she's an archaeologist, and we've 00:10:15.930 --> 00:10:20.250 worked together on some experimental archaeology with hunter-gatherers because this is 00:10:20.250 --> 00:10:20.890 another fallacy. 00:10:21.130 --> 00:10:25.290 So, archaeologists, when they do experiments with spear throwing and stuff, they get 00:10:25.290 --> 00:10:29.530 undergrads at university with absolutely no background, and they're like, throw these 00:10:29.530 --> 00:10:32.810 spears in in the quad, and then they're really bad at it. 00:10:32.890 --> 00:10:34.810 And they're like, spears are not efficient. 00:10:35.040 --> 00:10:36.400 And so we've done these. 00:10:36.480 --> 00:10:41.680 Um, she started off doing spear throwing experiments with javelin athletes and was able to 00:10:41.680 --> 00:10:45.680 show that they throw really, really far, but they're not very accurate because they don't 00:10:45.680 --> 00:10:47.200 need to in their craft. 00:10:47.440 --> 00:10:51.600 And then we did it with the community that I work with in the Congo Basin that hunt with 00:10:51.600 --> 00:10:52.080 spears. 00:10:52.160 --> 00:10:57.360 And because it's a rainforest, they don't shoot from very far, but they're incredibly 00:10:57.360 --> 00:10:59.360 accurate from where they're comfortable. 00:10:59.600 --> 00:11:04.350 And in her work, she always says, like, the more simple the technology, the harder it is to 00:11:04.350 --> 00:11:09.790 use because you have to be closer, you have to be stronger, you have to be like with a bow 00:11:09.790 --> 00:11:11.790 and arrow, you can be pretty far, right? 00:11:11.950 --> 00:11:17.950 But if you're stalking an animal with a spear, you have to be so quiet, so aware of all 00:11:17.950 --> 00:11:19.070 the elements and everything. 00:11:19.150 --> 00:11:24.190 So the more complex the technology is to make, the easier it is to use, and vice versa. 00:11:24.270 --> 00:11:30.060 So probably early spear hunters, right, which is predates bow 00:11:30.060 --> 00:11:35.340 hunting, for example, would have been just as if not more cognitively complex in terms of 00:11:35.340 --> 00:11:40.380 what they were able to do than than you know folks who came after that. 00:11:41.340 --> 00:11:46.780 Yeah, I mean just thinking about being alone in the wilderness with a spear trying to 00:11:47.170 --> 00:11:49.330 hunt and kill my dinner. 00:11:49.650 --> 00:11:51.250 Uh that doesn't sound easy. 00:11:51.410 --> 00:11:52.770 I mean, you have to build the spear first. 00:11:52.850 --> 00:11:55.890 You have to find you know the right materials, the right kind of wood, the right kind of 00:11:55.890 --> 00:11:56.450 spear tip. 00:11:56.530 --> 00:11:59.570 You have to fashion you have to have the right size, the right length, you have to 00:11:59.570 --> 00:12:04.690 understand the logic of aerodynamics and w what distance, how far away you should be, uh 00:12:05.090 --> 00:12:07.410 you know, all this complicated stuff. 00:12:07.490 --> 00:12:09.410 It it doesn't sound like a walk in the park by any stretch. 00:12:09.490 --> 00:12:10.610 Yeah, and you imagination. 00:12:11.090 --> 00:12:12.610 Because it's it's a team sport. 00:12:12.850 --> 00:12:16.040 I love like I took this like business class during my masters. 00:12:16.280 --> 00:12:17.640 It was like such a random thing. 00:12:17.880 --> 00:12:19.320 It was about women in business. 00:12:19.480 --> 00:12:21.320 What was I doing there as a mystery? 00:12:21.560 --> 00:12:26.040 And the guy started off by being like, we need to take into account our evolutionary roots. 00:12:26.200 --> 00:12:29.400 Men are solo hunters and women cooperate together. 00:12:29.560 --> 00:12:31.560 And I was like, I'm out of here. 00:12:31.720 --> 00:12:37.560 Like it's so incorrect because so much of hunting is actually a cooperative 00:12:37.560 --> 00:12:38.200 activity. 00:12:38.600 --> 00:12:44.490 Um and if anything, more so than for than like the traditional if we're you know 00:12:44.570 --> 00:12:49.850 we can talk about whether those gender divisions labor of labor are kind of uh 00:12:50.170 --> 00:12:56.170 realistic in the the imaginary one but if we just think about foraging i in terms of 00:12:56.170 --> 00:13:02.170 plant food it's a lot more individualistic than hunting is so you're oh yeah go ahead David 00:13:02.250 --> 00:13:07.940 yeah I mean I was just gonna add to that I mean, beyond the challenges of hunting the 00:13:07.940 --> 00:13:13.380 animal when the animal is in your sights, there is the added, arguably more difficult 00:13:13.380 --> 00:13:15.300 challenge of finding the animal in the first place. 00:13:15.460 --> 00:13:15.700 Yeah. 00:13:16.100 --> 00:13:21.940 And that itself requires a whole lot of cognitive uh skills of 00:13:21.940 --> 00:13:27.140 being able to know the the seasonal mating patterns and the distribution of the local flora 00:13:27.140 --> 00:13:32.150 and fauna, uh, you know, where different uh plants grow, uh where different animals 00:13:32.150 --> 00:13:37.910 congregate, being able to track an animal by its footprints, um or by this the stuff it 00:13:37.910 --> 00:13:39.910 leaves behind or the marks it makes on trees. 00:13:39.990 --> 00:13:42.950 Like this is incredibly complicated detective work. 00:13:43.110 --> 00:13:48.630 Uh and so uh our brains were really um quite useful for us. 00:13:48.790 --> 00:13:52.230 Uh they're they're not just this this uh useless 00:13:56.340 --> 00:13:57.300 Absolutely. 00:13:57.460 --> 00:14:00.180 It's it's a lot of work to power a brain, I think. 00:14:00.260 --> 00:14:01.540 And there's a reason for that. 00:14:01.620 --> 00:14:02.260 Yeah. 00:14:03.700 --> 00:14:06.020 So she you're on this Jeep Road. 00:14:06.180 --> 00:14:09.220 And this is before you were interested in anthropology, is that right? 00:14:09.460 --> 00:14:12.580 So well, I wouldn't say before, because my dad is also an anthropologist. 00:14:12.740 --> 00:14:14.180 So I really tried to get away. 00:14:14.260 --> 00:14:17.140 And I was like, oh, I'm gonna be a lawyer. 00:14:17.300 --> 00:14:20.570 Like I'm gonna subvert my parents and become a lawyer. 00:14:20.730 --> 00:14:24.650 Um and you know, for my best efforts, I was kind of led back. 00:14:25.210 --> 00:14:31.130 I would say like even as a young kid, like whenever we traveled or when I like 00:14:31.130 --> 00:14:35.130 had problems with my friends, like my parents would always say, Well just like take a step 00:14:35.130 --> 00:14:38.090 back and like c approach it like an anthropologist. 00:14:38.250 --> 00:14:41.840 And so that was like very much a lens that I grew up with. 00:14:41.920 --> 00:14:43.280 And my dad, bless his soul. 00:14:43.360 --> 00:14:45.120 Like he's just the he's 80 now. 00:14:45.200 --> 00:14:46.160 He's still writing papers. 00:14:46.240 --> 00:14:47.520 He's like, I'm finally retired. 00:14:47.600 --> 00:14:49.280 I can focus on research. 00:14:49.520 --> 00:14:54.720 Uh and even now, like the way that he under, we were watching. 00:14:54.880 --> 00:14:57.680 Have you guys watched Love is Blind on Netflix? 00:14:59.040 --> 00:15:00.640 It's it's bad television. 00:15:00.800 --> 00:15:01.600 I recommend it. 00:15:02.560 --> 00:15:06.960 And he we he was visiting us and he like got really into it, watched it with us. 00:15:07.040 --> 00:15:11.430 And he was like, I want to write a paper comparing all the different like romantic norms 00:15:11.510 --> 00:15:15.030 because now there's like love is blind Japan, love is blind Sweden, love is blind Germany, 00:15:15.110 --> 00:15:16.630 and he he got like super psyched. 00:15:16.710 --> 00:15:19.510 So I think there's always been that bit of it. 00:15:19.830 --> 00:15:25.190 My dad uh did field work for his PhD but didn't love field work, and I think that's where 00:15:25.190 --> 00:15:30.150 we really differ because I love the communities that I work with, I love being in the 00:15:30.150 --> 00:15:30.710 field. 00:15:30.950 --> 00:15:36.840 Um, I have learned so much and like I you know 00:15:36.920 --> 00:15:40.200 when you just like make great friends, like that's how it feels in the village where I 00:15:40.200 --> 00:15:40.360 work. 00:15:40.680 --> 00:15:44.680 So that's really a motivator for me to keep going at this point. 00:15:44.840 --> 00:15:45.480 Yeah. 00:15:45.960 --> 00:15:50.600 When you I mean, in and we're you when we can start talking about some of the content maybe 00:15:50.680 --> 00:15:51.720 of what you study. 00:15:51.880 --> 00:15:56.360 One of the things we talked about in this the past episodes, and I think one of the themes 00:15:56.360 --> 00:16:02.110 so far has been that science in general and an evolutionary approach. 00:16:02.270 --> 00:16:07.710 And then especially, I think, and you can tell me if you agree with this, anthropology. 00:16:07.870 --> 00:16:11.390 And then even within that, studying children, which is actually something I do as a 00:16:11.390 --> 00:16:16.670 psychologist, or even studying adaptations, or you know, just the way people work, it's 00:16:16.670 --> 00:16:21.960 very um, it's very much that you are um taking 00:16:23.000 --> 00:16:28.840 you're quieting down and you're sort of listening to groups of people who are not 00:16:29.160 --> 00:16:31.240 being listened to by others, right? 00:16:31.320 --> 00:16:36.920 It's sort of there there a common theme, I think, has been that um in the noise and 00:16:36.920 --> 00:16:42.770 bustle, especially of the modern world, um that there's sort of one of the 00:16:42.770 --> 00:16:48.770 the themes of the people we've talked to, and I think even David and myself is that there's 00:16:48.850 --> 00:16:53.650 at some point a realization that like things are complicated, we don't understand them. 00:16:53.810 --> 00:16:59.730 And in order to understand things, we have to ask parts of life that haven't been 00:16:59.730 --> 00:17:00.290 listened to. 00:17:00.370 --> 00:17:05.080 And for example, I mean, uh, kids are a great example of that. 00:17:05.240 --> 00:17:10.200 Um, a non a non-weird society is a great example of that. 00:17:10.440 --> 00:17:16.360 Um, and so you know, I wonder is that is when you talked about your 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 00:17:21.640 --> 00:17:23.000 that um statement. 00:17:23.240 --> 00:17:27.710 And I'm just wondering, is that number one, what does being anthropologist mean to you? 00:17:27.790 --> 00:17:33.310 And then number two, does this idea of uh respecting um 00:17:33.550 --> 00:17:36.030 things that might be overlooked by most people? 00:17:36.190 --> 00:17:38.110 Is that something that sort of resonates with you? 00:17:38.190 --> 00:17:39.390 Or does that sound familiar? 00:17:39.630 --> 00:17:40.030 Yeah. 00:17:40.270 --> 00:17:41.230 I mean, for sure. 00:17:41.310 --> 00:17:45.470 And the shocking thing is like a lot of things that are overlooked are so easily remedied. 00:17:45.550 --> 00:17:49.150 Like even in the west, like I've a friend and colleague Yvonne Kruppen. 00:17:49.390 --> 00:17:52.860 He got his PhD at Harvard doing kind of classic child development. 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 00:17:57.500 --> 00:17:58.460 know anything about kids. 00:17:58.540 --> 00:18:01.820 Like, I spent my entire PhD testing kids and I never talked to any. 00:18:01.980 --> 00:18:03.980 And it's so easy to remedy, right? 00:18:04.060 --> 00:18:08.780 And actually talk to kids about why they make the choices they're doing in experiments. 00:18:09.100 --> 00:18:13.660 Talk to people about why they parent the way they do, why they act the way they do. 00:18:13.870 --> 00:18:17.310 Like people love to tell you about themselves in any culture around the world. 00:18:17.390 --> 00:18:18.670 They would love explaining things. 00:18:18.830 --> 00:18:21.230 So it's like such an easy fix. 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 00:18:27.230 --> 00:18:31.710 like very socially anxious, anxious and like very worried about breaking norms, when you go 00:18:31.710 --> 00:18:35.150 into a culture that you're not familiar with, it's just like you're gonna fuck up. 00:18:35.310 --> 00:18:41.100 Like, and then you just you just let go, you know, and you and then people 00:18:41.180 --> 00:18:44.300 correcting you and telling you you're doing something wrong is actually part of the 00:18:44.300 --> 00:18:44.620 research. 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 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 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 00:18:59.980 --> 00:19:05.410 into a forest camp and I brought a tiny bit of salt and some like magic cubes to share. 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 00:19:10.050 --> 00:19:12.130 like, You're not sharing, right? 00:19:12.290 --> 00:19:16.210 And like basically told me, like, you didn't bring enough stuff to share with everybody. 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, 00:19:20.690 --> 00:19:21.010 right? 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 00:19:26.980 --> 00:19:31.300 a social environment, you just have to be okay with violating norms. 00:19:31.380 --> 00:19:34.100 And it in a way it's a sense of freedom, right? 00:19:34.180 --> 00:19:36.340 Than like, I'm tipping 20%. 00:19:36.660 --> 00:19:37.780 Should I have tipped 22%? 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 00:19:43.150 --> 00:19:44.990 realize that you're having an effect on that. 00:19:45.070 --> 00:19:48.910 And then having that feedback very directly because everybody agrees that you're bad at 00:19:48.910 --> 00:19:52.830 something rather than you're an asshole is really freeing. 00:19:52.990 --> 00:19:57.550 So I think that's been like a really useful lesson of anthropology for me. 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 00:20:02.590 --> 00:20:03.310 quantitative bit. 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 00:20:07.620 --> 00:20:08.340 about what they're doing. 00:20:08.500 --> 00:20:10.020 So that's a lot of fun too. 00:20:10.660 --> 00:20:14.980 I think you get the kind of depth and breadth when you take both approaches. 00:20:15.300 --> 00:20:15.940 Yeah, that's right. 00:20:16.020 --> 00:20:20.820 Historically, I mean my I have a cart car cartoonish possibly, probably very much probably, 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 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 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 00:20:34.930 --> 00:20:39.170 know, somebody going to this strange place and writing a book about their experiences. 00:20:39.250 --> 00:20:42.050 And even as my undergrad experience, like this was a lot of what I was reading, 00:20:42.210 --> 00:20:42.690 ethnographies. 00:20:42.850 --> 00:20:47.170 I loved it, you know, Colin Turnbull, the Mbouti, um, things like that, the Forest People, 00:20:47.250 --> 00:20:47.970 things like that. 00:20:48.210 --> 00:20:53.780 Um, the the the history of sort of adding the quantitative part. 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 00:20:59.060 --> 00:21:04.260 is or yeah, I mean I think in the really early ethnographies there was quantitative work 00:21:04.260 --> 00:21:04.900 involved in it. 00:21:05.060 --> 00:21:10.180 People were taking, you know, kinship diagrams is a social network, right? 00:21:10.740 --> 00:21:15.350 Um even the cooler ring, Malinovsky's work on trade, right? 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 00:21:20.150 --> 00:21:23.750 straight path, they were taking the most beautiful path because that's where all the you 00:21:23.750 --> 00:21:26.230 know, inter like challenging intelligence tests. 00:21:26.470 --> 00:21:30.390 So some of the earliest work I think did include quantitative work. 00:21:30.550 --> 00:21:36.500 And that was when anthropology was a little bit more ingrained within more of 00:21:36.660 --> 00:21:38.740 the social or biological sciences. 00:21:38.820 --> 00:21:42.900 And then as there was a divergence between more of the humanities track and the 00:21:42.900 --> 00:21:47.300 quantitative track, evolutionary and cultural anthropologists kind of separated. 00:21:47.460 --> 00:21:50.500 And then we got more of that distinction. 00:21:50.820 --> 00:21:54.100 And I think there's good reason for that, right? 00:21:54.260 --> 00:21:57.380 Counting people does violence in a way. 00:21:57.460 --> 00:21:59.460 And we need to contend with that in our field. 00:21:59.540 --> 00:22:04.990 You reduce people to numbers, um, you draw out their boundaries, which could be 00:22:04.990 --> 00:22:05.550 wrong. 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 00:22:10.430 --> 00:22:12.750 indigenous land cases. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 00:22:51.970 --> 00:22:57.250 work, which I think evolutionary anthropologists aren't in writing. 00:22:57.410 --> 00:23:00.050 I think we're very actual very critical. 00:23:00.450 --> 00:23:04.610 There are exceptions, but I think we are more willing. 00:23:04.850 --> 00:23:05.730 Let me back up. 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 00:23:10.770 --> 00:23:13.170 about theory, we talk about something that exists in the world. 00:23:13.330 --> 00:23:18.140 But when you actually talk to most evolutionary anthropologists, their theory is like very 00:23:18.140 --> 00:23:20.700 shaped by the community that they work with, right? 00:23:20.860 --> 00:23:26.700 So, like Brooke Shells's work, for example, um, on this kinship category that 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 00:23:32.140 --> 00:23:37.180 on your podcast too, but on um like extramarital um 00:23:37.750 --> 00:23:43.510 children of the himba, there so the husband has a specific 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 00:23:48.470 --> 00:23:49.350 different word. 00:23:49.590 --> 00:23:54.310 And that led to a lot of her research on, you know, these extramarital relationships 00:23:54.310 --> 00:23:55.350 amongst the Himba. 00:23:55.510 --> 00:24:01.320 Thinking of Jeremy Coster's work on hunting and food preferences and how uh amongst 00:24:01.320 --> 00:24:06.280 the um Myagna and Nicaragua, their hunting preferences don't match the expectations we 00:24:06.280 --> 00:24:10.440 would have for optimal forging people because culture and people have food preferences, and 00:24:10.440 --> 00:24:13.160 some food tastes good and other meat doesn't, right? 00:24:13.320 --> 00:24:14.200 So things like that. 00:24:14.280 --> 00:24:18.200 And you realize, like, oh, we're all talking about it at conferences and in our 00:24:18.200 --> 00:24:23.850 presentations, but when you start writing like a scientist, then you have a background with 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 00:24:28.410 --> 00:24:31.450 iterative nature of the development of these theories. 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 00:24:36.410 --> 00:24:37.050 storytelling. 00:24:37.210 --> 00:24:38.890 Scientific articles are so boring. 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 00:24:43.690 --> 00:24:44.250 them anyways. 00:24:44.330 --> 00:24:48.570 And we could do a lot better storytelling through podcasts like this, but also through just 00:24:48.570 --> 00:24:50.650 more narrative writing about our science. 00:24:51.020 --> 00:24:51.180 Yeah. 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 00:24:56.220 --> 00:24:56.860 much as possible. 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. 00:25:03.020 --> 00:25:05.340 Every HBAS, you know, I study group conflict. 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 00:25:09.340 --> 00:25:14.860 candy store, where it was keeping me honest because I'm just like some some dumb 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 00:25:20.150 --> 00:25:23.030 like in a small scale social world where everybody knows everyone else. 00:25:23.110 --> 00:25:27.270 And this is what female leadership looks like, and nobody even knows about it unless you 00:25:27.270 --> 00:25:29.270 know the field site for 30 or 40 years. 00:25:29.430 --> 00:25:34.790 So yeah, no, I really like anthropology is so important to the evolutionary behavioral 00:25:34.790 --> 00:25:35.350 sciences. 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. 00:25:39.910 --> 00:25:45.520 Um, but one of the trends that I I've talked to many, especially evolutionary 00:25:45.520 --> 00:25:51.280 psychologists, about is that um the the separation between sort of evolutionary psychology 00:25:51.280 --> 00:25:55.520 and evolutionary anthropology in terms of like conferences and things, and some of it's 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 00:26:00.160 --> 00:26:01.600 separate more separation. 00:26:01.680 --> 00:26:05.920 And I think really anthropologists really keep us, meaning like the psychologists, honest. 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 00:26:09.520 --> 00:26:11.680 anthropology talking to psychologists. 00:26:12.090 --> 00:26:12.330 Right. 00:26:12.490 --> 00:26:17.850 You don't want it to all be like mating stuff, college mating studies. 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, 00:26:22.170 --> 00:26:28.010 the the the the the management class, um, where I went to a psychology department 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 00:26:31.930 --> 00:26:36.820 anthropology department here at UCSB, you know, as an undergrad or as a grad student, I 00:26:36.820 --> 00:26:38.260 took classes with Mike Gervin. 00:26:38.500 --> 00:26:41.540 You know, the CP is in an anthropology is in the anthropology department. 00:26:41.620 --> 00:26:45.060 You know, it was if you look at the faculty, it's like anthropsych, anthropsych, 00:26:45.220 --> 00:26:45.780 anthropsych. 00:26:45.940 --> 00:26:46.660 I mean, just down the line. 00:26:47.460 --> 00:26:50.260 And then I went to a psychology department where there was no interaction with 00:26:50.260 --> 00:26:55.540 psychologists and or psychology department, no anthropology uh anthropologists, excuse me, 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 00:27:00.390 --> 00:27:00.550 this. 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 00:27:04.550 --> 00:27:10.550 least the amateur, like, so I was really struck with how important it is to 00:27:11.030 --> 00:27:16.550 have this like broad cultural, ecological perspective for psychological claims. 00:27:16.710 --> 00:27:22.550 And in uh evolutionary psychology and psychologists especially, I think, uh really 00:27:23.110 --> 00:27:28.740 are not kept in check without having um talking to to folks like you 00:27:28.900 --> 00:27:34.660 for example and i think i think also vice versa i mean experiments 00:27:34.900 --> 00:27:38.980 can really help deepen your understanding of a community especially when you talk to people 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 00:27:44.580 --> 00:27:49.700 experiments to prove them wrong um and this summer we were doing a an imitation experiment 00:27:50.100 --> 00:27:54.110 um because we have this idea that we have age-based imitation biases. 00:27:54.270 --> 00:27:58.510 So kids prefer to learn from adults, presumably because adults have like survived in the 00:27:58.510 --> 00:28:00.750 until adulthood and they probably know more, right? 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. 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 00:28:09.390 --> 00:28:15.150 peer imitation or sorry, peer learning, whether we were able to instigate this 00:28:15.150 --> 00:28:17.280 in in this community. 00:28:17.440 --> 00:28:19.840 And so I'm doing this experiment with this little girl. 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 00:28:23.680 --> 00:28:24.800 different village far away. 00:28:24.880 --> 00:28:26.320 And we're like, who do you want to learn from? 00:28:26.480 --> 00:28:28.800 And that she's just like, skip, skip. 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 00:28:32.240 --> 00:28:32.640 frustrated. 00:28:32.720 --> 00:28:35.280 She's like, I can't pick because I don't know these people. 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 00:28:39.520 --> 00:28:43.760 single person there, you're not using age heuristics, those are meaningless. 00:28:43.890 --> 00:28:47.810 You're using your detailed knowledge of what people can do, like in a much more 00:28:47.810 --> 00:28:48.690 straightforward way. 00:28:48.850 --> 00:28:51.570 And it was like, okay, that's gonna go in the paper, I think. 00:28:51.730 --> 00:28:51.890 Yeah. 00:28:53.250 --> 00:28:54.130 That's so fascinating. 00:28:54.370 --> 00:28:59.010 I mean, the idea, I mean, that our entire society is structured around learning from 00:28:59.010 --> 00:29:01.490 strangers, that we don't know our teachers. 00:29:01.730 --> 00:29:01.890 Yeah. 00:29:02.130 --> 00:29:05.730 That that is an incredibly alien way of learning. 00:29:05.970 --> 00:29:06.370 Yeah. 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 00:29:11.800 --> 00:29:16.760 our our entire education system is to in terms of the design of the human mind. 00:29:17.080 --> 00:29:22.920 That we are sitting down in chairs um passively receiving information 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 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. 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 00:29:38.630 --> 00:29:44.550 integration between um anthropological research on children's learning and our 00:29:44.630 --> 00:29:45.910 our actual education system. 00:29:46.070 --> 00:29:49.670 You would think that this would be vital information for designing educational sist uh 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 00:29:54.630 --> 00:29:56.630 things, and yet they're completely disconnected. 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 00:30:02.720 --> 00:30:05.200 this kind of anthropological research. 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 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 00:30:15.840 --> 00:30:19.440 how they learn in in uh Western uh societies? 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 00:30:24.160 --> 00:30:29.840 then I'll tell you what I think about so I mean what we know from 00:30:30.160 --> 00:30:36.010 the research in many, many small-scale communities, including migrant communities to the US 00:30:36.090 --> 00:30:40.410 who, you know, come from indigenous backgrounds but are living in like Los Angeles, right? 00:30:40.890 --> 00:30:46.810 Um we know that they're much better able to attend to more stimuli 00:30:47.130 --> 00:30:49.690 at the same time than one thing at a time. 00:30:49.770 --> 00:30:54.970 So they're paying attention to many, many individuals doing things rather than focusing on 00:30:54.970 --> 00:30:56.490 one person at a time. 00:30:56.810 --> 00:31:02.640 There's um an emphasis on doing things together rather than, you know, well, 00:31:02.720 --> 00:31:03.360 I'm the adult. 00:31:03.440 --> 00:31:06.560 Here's some like kind of disarticulated tasks. 00:31:06.720 --> 00:31:09.680 Trust me, they lead to something meaningful, right? 00:31:10.080 --> 00:31:15.920 Um and um the goal is not learning, the learning is peripheral to the 00:31:15.920 --> 00:31:17.040 goal of doing something together. 00:31:17.200 --> 00:31:21.600 And that's a really different perspective on learning, right? 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 00:31:27.470 --> 00:31:33.390 really is about two things and um might get a little bit political here, but 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 00:31:36.990 --> 00:31:41.390 the factory and the kids are in the streets, like we gotta put them in school. 00:31:41.630 --> 00:31:45.520 And number two, how do we make future workers. 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 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, 00:31:56.080 --> 00:31:56.400 right? 00:31:56.560 --> 00:32:02.480 And that I think a lot of our education system reflects those, the, those things. 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 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 00:32:13.290 --> 00:32:17.050 probably most people aren't working in factories, and probably they could learn to work in 00:32:17.050 --> 00:32:19.210 factories pretty straightforwardly. 00:32:19.370 --> 00:32:25.290 So then, how do we, you know, support the kind of 00:32:25.290 --> 00:32:30.900 creative learning that and more independent learning that happens in a lot of these 00:32:30.900 --> 00:32:33.700 places, in a lot in the majority world. 00:32:33.780 --> 00:32:35.380 Um, there's some cool initiatives. 00:32:35.540 --> 00:32:41.300 So there's like schools, like uh um democratic schools that David 00:32:41.300 --> 00:32:43.940 Lancey writes a lot about, and and David Gray as well. 00:32:44.020 --> 00:32:46.820 A lot of Davids coming up in this talk, guys. 00:32:47.700 --> 00:32:49.940 I know it gets becomes confusing, yeah. 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 00:32:55.610 --> 00:32:59.690 teachers that are roaming about, okay, we want to work on a project on this topic. 00:32:59.850 --> 00:33:02.170 And can you support us in learning about this topic? 00:33:02.330 --> 00:33:06.170 So a lot more student student led learning. 00:33:06.410 --> 00:33:12.090 Um I think it doesn't necessarily have to be somebody that you know 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 00:33:16.880 --> 00:33:22.800 research that suggests that socio um communicative norms, if they're not in line with your 00:33:22.800 --> 00:33:25.200 teachers, you're just going to have a harder time learning. 00:33:25.280 --> 00:33:28.800 And this has a lot of implications, especially for minority kids who come from different 00:33:28.800 --> 00:33:29.840 cultural backgrounds. 00:33:30.080 --> 00:33:34.000 There's some great examples in anthropology of norms about eye contact. 00:33:34.080 --> 00:33:36.880 So we think of eye contact as polite. 00:33:37.040 --> 00:33:41.120 And in some indigenous societies, making eye contact is considered really rude. 00:33:41.280 --> 00:33:47.130 And so when you have, you know, a majority like probably European descent 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 00:33:50.970 --> 00:33:52.330 making eye contact with me. 00:33:52.490 --> 00:33:57.130 Then you have this mismatch of norms in the classroom that can really hinder learning. 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 00:34:02.250 --> 00:34:06.170 know students and getting to know the different ways they communicate, um, I think is 00:34:06.170 --> 00:34:08.090 something that would be really cool to do. 00:34:08.250 --> 00:34:13.130 There are more and more kind of teacher researcher 00:34:13.130 --> 00:34:18.140 initiatives where teachers are being trained to do 00:34:18.140 --> 00:34:22.380 anthropological work in their students' households. 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 00:34:27.260 --> 00:34:31.100 think it was in Arizona, where there's a lot of Mexican migrants. 00:34:31.260 --> 00:34:34.940 And they train these teachers in anthropological methods, sent them out to these 00:34:34.940 --> 00:34:35.500 households. 00:34:35.660 --> 00:34:39.020 And then the teachers are like, oh, like these families know things. 00:34:39.180 --> 00:34:41.500 Like we can, we're not starting at zero. 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 00:34:46.230 --> 00:34:49.670 terms of like their business acumen, like kids are participating in all this commerce. 00:34:49.750 --> 00:34:52.550 Like, let's let's build our lessons around that. 00:34:52.790 --> 00:34:56.630 And it's such an amazing, refreshing way. 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 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 00:35:06.870 --> 00:35:09.270 creative in their approach to education. 00:35:09.510 --> 00:35:11.720 Um, And that's what it would really need. 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 00:35:16.680 --> 00:35:19.480 time, which I think is probably more the human approach, right? 00:35:19.640 --> 00:35:21.560 The more time you have, the more creative you have. 00:35:21.720 --> 00:35:24.040 You can make mistakes, you have that protected time. 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. 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 00:35:33.720 --> 00:35:38.330 I've learned is there are some skills where you need dedicated teachers who are really 00:35:38.330 --> 00:35:40.090 specialized at teaching things. 00:35:40.330 --> 00:35:45.930 And I have wondered now whether our kind of pivot in the 00:35:45.930 --> 00:35:51.370 post-industrialized West towards so much teacher-led teaching has a lot to do with 00:35:51.370 --> 00:35:56.490 literacy and kind of disembodied math, like right, just like numbers that aren't related to 00:35:56.490 --> 00:35:57.370 actual things. 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 00:36:04.160 --> 00:36:10.080 in that setting before and then that leads to kind of these recursive loops where then 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 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 00:36:19.840 --> 00:36:23.120 cultural evolution in in that type of um teaching style. 00:36:23.280 --> 00:36:26.770 I don't know, but it's been, you know, rattling around in my head. 00:36:27.010 --> 00:36:27.250 Yeah. 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 00:36:33.250 --> 00:36:39.090 the above approach in that there are some cases where that direct 00:36:39.170 --> 00:36:45.090 disembodied math or that just m mapping phonemes to to weird squiggles on the page. 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. 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. 00:36:54.660 --> 00:37:00.660 But but of course, then the thing where we have like collective autonomy, creativity, that 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. 00:37:05.700 --> 00:37:06.180 Absolutely. 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. 00:37:10.980 --> 00:37:12.340 Like there's no kids in the street. 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 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 00:37:21.750 --> 00:37:21.990 things. 00:37:22.070 --> 00:37:23.110 Even you go to Spain. 00:37:23.430 --> 00:37:24.150 Yeah, Germany. 00:37:24.230 --> 00:37:26.070 I was I was just living in Germany for the past nine years. 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 00:37:30.310 --> 00:37:36.150 soon was because I spent my my existence in Germany was like great 00:37:36.150 --> 00:37:42.080 playgrounds, seeing having autonomy in Germany and again coming back 00:37:42.080 --> 00:37:43.040 to the US. 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 00:37:49.600 --> 00:37:50.800 you know, nonverbal. 00:37:50.880 --> 00:37:53.760 Like it was clearly designed by somebody. 00:37:53.840 --> 00:37:56.800 Um, and this is like almost all playgrounds, they're getting a little bit better. 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 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 00:38:07.470 --> 00:38:08.590 fun to you as an adult? 00:38:08.750 --> 00:38:10.590 Like is this somewhere that would be pleasant or interesting? 00:38:10.990 --> 00:38:13.150 Or is it basically like a bunch of stairs, you know? 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 00:38:18.750 --> 00:38:20.830 this, but playgrounds were started in Berlin. 00:38:20.990 --> 00:38:24.990 Um playgrounds in Berlin are amazing and it was a huge part of our life. 00:38:25.230 --> 00:38:29.950 My son having autonomy, walking around, kids walking around, kids are just everywhere, and 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 00:38:35.460 --> 00:38:37.700 and I'm like, wow, not at all. 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 00:38:43.380 --> 00:38:45.460 this respect, maybe it's a bit in the middle. 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 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 00:38:55.220 --> 00:38:55.700 playground. 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. 00:39:01.370 --> 00:39:03.050 YouTube playgrounds in Germany. 00:39:03.130 --> 00:39:04.090 And uh you'll see. 00:39:04.170 --> 00:39:04.330 Yeah. 00:39:04.730 --> 00:39:06.970 You know, it's like the definition of risky play. 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 00:39:11.850 --> 00:39:14.330 it's also a little bit less fun at the same time. 00:39:14.570 --> 00:39:18.490 Um, and yeah, there's just not a lot of place to to involve kids. 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 00:39:23.210 --> 00:39:27.300 like places for adults hang out with their kids. 00:39:27.460 --> 00:39:29.140 That's not the yeah. 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 00:39:33.380 --> 00:39:35.860 Canadian, where you never take a kid to a bar, right? 00:39:35.940 --> 00:39:36.020 Right. 00:39:36.260 --> 00:39:39.220 But here, like there's a few pubs with playgrounds in them. 00:39:39.380 --> 00:39:41.780 So you can watch your kids while you have a beer. 00:39:41.940 --> 00:39:42.260 Exactly. 00:39:42.420 --> 00:39:44.740 Um, so I think that's kind of the British exception. 00:39:44.900 --> 00:39:49.300 So every country has its own kind of strange exception that feels surprising to everybody 00:39:49.300 --> 00:39:49.700 else. 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, 00:39:55.690 --> 00:39:56.970 and that's a shame. 00:39:57.290 --> 00:39:58.970 Yeah, what what consequences? 00:39:59.130 --> 00:40:04.970 I mean, and and maybe this starts getting into you as a human being 00:40:05.210 --> 00:40:08.810 living in these in a very different culture, and every culture is different. 00:40:09.050 --> 00:40:14.490 But you know, what do you either either from a scientific perspective or just a personal 00:40:14.490 --> 00:40:18.410 perspective, being a parent, but also you know, being knowing the people in these different 00:40:18.410 --> 00:40:21.370 places, you have a very unique perspective. 00:40:21.450 --> 00:40:25.380 Like, what do you think are the the consequences? 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 00:40:30.340 --> 00:40:34.580 loud right now, is that maybe like Aka are the right and we're wrong. 00:40:34.740 --> 00:40:36.500 And maybe that's oversimplified. 00:40:36.660 --> 00:40:42.660 But just in terms of you know what the kids are like or the consequences for 00:40:42.660 --> 00:40:46.570 the um for humans because every generation grows up, right? 00:40:46.650 --> 00:40:49.530 Like you become you become an adult. 00:40:49.690 --> 00:40:53.450 And so every kid now will be an adult and every adult was a kid. 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 00:40:59.930 --> 00:41:02.490 what what the question should be because you have that perspective. 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 00:41:08.090 --> 00:41:08.650 that you see? 00:41:08.810 --> 00:41:14.080 These are kids growing up in a very different place, very different responsibilities, very 00:41:14.080 --> 00:41:16.480 different ability to take risks, have autonomy. 00:41:16.720 --> 00:41:16.960 Yeah. 00:41:17.200 --> 00:41:17.840 Yeah. 00:41:18.160 --> 00:41:23.360 So I think, like, again, coming back to the thing that like every formal and informal 00:41:23.360 --> 00:41:28.160 education is adapted to this social and ecological environment that you grew up in, right? 00:41:28.320 --> 00:41:34.000 And so like we we had my son in Denmark, and there they do 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 00:41:37.760 --> 00:41:42.350 like led keep let kids sleep in a stroller outside and sometimes like out of sight. 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 00:41:48.430 --> 00:41:52.510 social environment and to that ecology, and the kids grow up fine. 00:41:52.750 --> 00:41:57.070 And what was really interesting for us is like for me, at least. 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 00:42:02.900 --> 00:42:05.380 baby and like they then they come again a few times. 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 00:42:09.460 --> 00:42:14.260 nursery kindergarten for um uh what do they call it in North America? 00:42:14.420 --> 00:42:16.340 Now I've gone fully British. 00:42:16.900 --> 00:42:17.380 Yeah. 00:42:17.700 --> 00:42:19.860 Um French. 00:42:19.940 --> 00:42:20.020 Yeah. 00:42:20.100 --> 00:42:24.110 So is it for like child daycare, daycare, daycare, thank you. 00:42:24.270 --> 00:42:26.030 Yeah, because I had it, I had kita in Germany. 00:42:26.110 --> 00:42:27.870 So yeah, no, David can tell us. 00:42:27.950 --> 00:42:28.270 Yeah, yeah. 00:42:28.510 --> 00:42:29.790 It's 10 30 p.m., guys. 00:42:29.950 --> 00:42:30.590 I'm doing my best. 00:42:30.830 --> 00:42:31.310 No, thank you. 00:42:32.430 --> 00:42:35.870 So so that she she comes through and she's like, Can your kid wave? 00:42:36.030 --> 00:42:36.750 Write the assessment. 00:42:36.830 --> 00:42:38.030 Like, are they ready for daycare? 00:42:38.110 --> 00:42:39.150 Can they wave? 00:42:39.390 --> 00:42:41.150 Um, do they eat well? 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 00:42:46.080 --> 00:42:46.960 buggy, right? 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? 00:42:53.200 --> 00:42:55.120 That's a very culturally specific one. 00:42:55.360 --> 00:43:00.880 I loved for my kids, so the UK wide assessments that they do, one of the 00:43:00.880 --> 00:43:04.640 assessments for social development was like, can they get dressed alone? 00:43:04.880 --> 00:43:08.640 Which is of course not a so it's not about the social at all. 00:43:08.720 --> 00:43:10.720 It's about the individual autonomy, right? 00:43:10.950 --> 00:43:13.670 So again, these are all things that reflect the environment. 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 00:43:17.510 --> 00:43:18.470 environment. 00:43:18.790 --> 00:43:22.870 So from very, very early on, there's a lot of physical stimulus, right? 00:43:23.030 --> 00:43:25.350 Kids are held upright very early on. 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. 00:43:30.070 --> 00:43:33.190 And the moms, you know, for the most part, take them into the forest. 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 00:43:38.960 --> 00:43:39.600 carrying your baby. 00:43:39.760 --> 00:43:44.080 But if you think about the embodied lessons of that from the earliest age, right? 00:43:44.240 --> 00:43:49.600 We think about the evolution of our brains, but the kind of brain-body connection, 00:43:49.680 --> 00:43:53.360 especially when you're using your body all the time, is really important too. 00:43:53.440 --> 00:43:56.640 So they're getting that input from very, very early on. 00:43:56.800 --> 00:43:58.160 Also, a lot of touch. 00:43:58.240 --> 00:44:03.910 So co sleeping, on demand breastfeeding, you just see these kids passed around, 00:44:04.070 --> 00:44:05.510 everybody in camp. 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 00:44:11.430 --> 00:44:12.950 autonomy from an early age. 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 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 00:44:22.790 --> 00:44:23.670 blocks, right? 00:44:23.830 --> 00:44:25.270 Hit the block over and over again. 00:44:25.350 --> 00:44:27.030 Hey, that's great, that makes a noise. 00:44:27.240 --> 00:44:31.720 Doing it with knives, and you know, some people in the literature have called it 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. 00:44:36.120 --> 00:44:37.320 Everybody, right? 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 00:44:41.800 --> 00:44:42.120 space. 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. 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 00:44:52.770 --> 00:44:55.890 that they can't hurt themselves, move a kid away from a fire. 00:44:55.970 --> 00:44:59.970 And it's these really subtle interactions that are redirecting kids. 00:45:00.210 --> 00:45:04.450 And these are other parents that are moving the kid away from everybody. 00:45:04.850 --> 00:45:09.490 Everybody's in teenage girls, teenage boys, siblings, grandparents. 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. 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 00:45:24.380 --> 00:45:27.900 and like sliding down the hill and like treating this hill like a slide. 00:45:28.220 --> 00:45:34.220 And some random woman just like picked her up and thought that she was like falling. 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 00:45:39.420 --> 00:45:41.660 the gall to pick up our child. 00:45:41.980 --> 00:45:45.180 And then she's like, apparently she's okay, is what she said. 00:45:45.420 --> 00:45:51.410 Um and but the contrast between that and an environment where everyone has 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 00:45:56.770 --> 00:45:58.450 else's kid and move them away. 00:45:58.850 --> 00:46:00.850 It's just a very different world. 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 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 00:46:11.160 --> 00:46:11.400 loud. 00:46:11.720 --> 00:46:13.320 Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no, totally. 00:46:13.400 --> 00:46:13.640 Yes. 00:46:13.880 --> 00:46:14.040 Yeah. 00:46:14.120 --> 00:46:16.840 And adults yell at other adults for violating norms. 00:46:17.000 --> 00:46:21.320 We were there during the pandemic and the rules were constantly changing about what type of 00:46:21.320 --> 00:46:22.120 masks you were allowed in. 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 00:46:26.520 --> 00:46:29.320 grocery store by another adult in German, and I don't speak German. 00:46:29.400 --> 00:46:30.360 So that was always tough. 00:46:30.440 --> 00:46:32.120 Like, I don't know why you're yelling at me. 00:46:32.270 --> 00:46:32.670 No, exactly. 00:46:32.910 --> 00:46:38.910 So I think it the kind of rugged individualism of North America of yeah, North America 00:46:38.990 --> 00:46:43.710 all through Canada in there is is quite different where from these a little bit more 00:46:43.710 --> 00:46:46.110 collectivistic cultures where there's a lot more. 00:46:46.190 --> 00:46:48.590 And in in the UK you would never do that too. 00:46:48.750 --> 00:46:51.470 But in Germany you definitely would. 00:46:51.790 --> 00:46:53.870 And in Denmark maybe a little bit as well. 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 00:46:58.920 --> 00:47:00.520 helicopter parenting. 00:47:00.680 --> 00:47:02.440 And it's not random, like you said. 00:47:02.600 --> 00:47:08.040 To what do you attribute why that is either in the minds of the people? 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? 00:47:13.560 --> 00:47:15.640 You know, what's the what's going on in the minds of the people? 00:47:15.720 --> 00:47:20.840 And then what from an ecological perspective, why is that sort of what where where 00:47:20.840 --> 00:47:21.800 everyone's at? 00:47:22.070 --> 00:47:22.470 Mm-hmm. 00:47:22.710 --> 00:47:28.630 So in terms of like what people say, um, for them, there's a high 00:47:28.630 --> 00:47:33.910 premium on childhood autonomy, but it's a very different type of autonomy that we think 00:47:33.910 --> 00:47:35.990 about, which is very individualistic. 00:47:36.230 --> 00:47:40.310 Um, the autonomy that a lot of hunter-gatherers, including the community that I work with, 00:47:40.470 --> 00:47:42.630 practices like cooperative autonomy. 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 00:47:46.630 --> 00:47:47.750 gonna benefit the group. 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 00:47:51.480 --> 00:47:54.120 ping, ping, ping, like off to their own activities. 00:47:54.200 --> 00:47:56.680 And you're like, even if you ask a husband, like, where's your wife? 00:47:56.760 --> 00:47:58.600 He's like, oh no, she she's out. 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. 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 00:48:07.400 --> 00:48:09.480 food and redistributing those resources. 00:48:09.560 --> 00:48:09.800 Right. 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. 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? 00:48:18.110 --> 00:48:20.830 Like, so it's very kind of communal in that way. 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 00:48:26.990 --> 00:48:29.470 you can demand goods from them. 00:48:29.790 --> 00:48:34.510 So you can demand things, but you can't tell people what to do. 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 00:48:40.510 --> 00:48:41.070 the forest? 00:48:41.150 --> 00:48:47.080 Like trying to do behavioral observations in absence, and people will be like, uh, 00:48:47.240 --> 00:48:49.000 I don't know, it's their own thing. 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 00:48:53.960 --> 00:48:57.720 you think somebody is doing something if they've not expressed that themselves. 00:48:57.960 --> 00:48:59.240 So there are those norms. 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 00:49:05.090 --> 00:49:08.770 a parent was trying to tell their kid what to do or not to do. 00:49:08.930 --> 00:49:12.610 And that's when other parents intervened and like let them do their thing. 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 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 00:49:24.130 --> 00:49:25.490 be could be left alone. 00:49:25.730 --> 00:49:26.050 Yeah. 00:49:26.610 --> 00:49:27.090 Wow. 00:49:27.330 --> 00:49:27.650 Yeah. 00:49:27.890 --> 00:49:28.690 That is fascinating. 00:49:29.250 --> 00:49:31.810 If there's any kids listening they're like man that sounds awesome. 00:49:32.290 --> 00:49:32.770 Yeah. 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 00:49:37.220 --> 00:49:37.620 right now. 00:49:37.780 --> 00:49:42.740 And even if um my colleague Dasha Bomjakova has done a lot more kind of cultural 00:49:42.740 --> 00:49:46.900 anthropology work, but people will talk about um from a child develop like on child 00:49:46.900 --> 00:49:47.300 development. 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 00:49:52.420 --> 00:49:54.180 child development is like a ripening fruit. 00:49:54.340 --> 00:49:57.540 You cannot speed up a fruit to ripen, right? 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 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 00:50:09.570 --> 00:50:14.050 physically make it ripe ripen, which is very different than plant metaphors in other 00:50:14.050 --> 00:50:14.770 places. 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 00:50:19.170 --> 00:50:20.370 need to straighten it, right? 00:50:20.530 --> 00:50:24.690 So it's very much about the modification of the kid themselves. 00:50:25.020 --> 00:50:28.220 Whereas in what we see is not about modifying the kid. 00:50:28.300 --> 00:50:31.740 It's about modifying the environment around the kid to ensure that they learn. 00:50:31.900 --> 00:50:37.900 And so people doing things around a campfire is a way for kids 00:50:37.900 --> 00:50:38.220 to learn. 00:50:38.380 --> 00:50:40.300 We tried to do this experiment and it failed. 00:50:40.380 --> 00:50:45.420 And it took me years to understand that I failed the experiment, not that my like 00:50:45.660 --> 00:50:47.100 participants didn't understand. 00:50:47.180 --> 00:50:50.300 Like they understood exactly what they were telling me, and I was someone that didn't 00:50:50.300 --> 00:50:50.700 understand. 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 00:50:56.730 --> 00:50:58.490 them, is this teaching yes or no? 00:50:58.570 --> 00:50:59.450 Why or why not? 00:50:59.610 --> 00:51:05.290 And then I wanted to start the experiment by showing them clips of things that were 00:51:05.370 --> 00:51:09.610 to me definitely not teaching, like a mom like braiding her kid's hair. 00:51:09.850 --> 00:51:13.130 Um, and everybody was like, Yep, it's teaching, yep, they're teaching. 00:51:13.210 --> 00:51:16.330 And then I just dropped the experiment because I was like, it's fatally flawed. 00:51:16.490 --> 00:51:17.770 I've done something horribly wrong. 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 00:51:23.700 --> 00:51:24.100 teaching. 00:51:24.260 --> 00:51:25.700 Like it's just that simple. 00:51:25.860 --> 00:51:28.340 Living together is sharing information. 00:51:29.380 --> 00:51:29.860 Wow. 00:51:30.260 --> 00:51:35.780 Do you find that there is a concept of a bad parent or bad 00:51:35.780 --> 00:51:39.380 parenting in this culture that you work with? 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 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, 00:51:50.390 --> 00:51:53.990 whether we're being irresponsible, whether we have the the kid's best interests at heart, 00:51:54.150 --> 00:51:55.430 whether we're keeping them safe. 00:51:55.590 --> 00:51:59.350 You know, you you mentioned the the story of people interjecting on the child's behalf. 00:51:59.510 --> 00:52:03.430 Often in Western cultures it's actually the opposite where where people will interject 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. 00:52:07.750 --> 00:52:08.870 You're not keeping them safe. 00:52:09.030 --> 00:52:10.870 You're not paying enough attention to them. 00:52:11.030 --> 00:52:13.510 It's actually the opposite kind of of interjection. 00:52:13.750 --> 00:52:19.360 Um so I'm curious if there is this kind of parental 00:52:19.360 --> 00:52:25.120 status competition, for lack of a better term, in that community, 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. 00:52:29.600 --> 00:52:33.440 Like these are a big part of the cultural conversation here, and you could have tremendous 00:52:33.440 --> 00:52:36.720 loss of status for being seen as a bad mother or a bad parent. 00:52:38.000 --> 00:52:43.950 Is there similar kinds of status loss in the community you study, um, 00:52:44.110 --> 00:52:46.030 do people judge each other as a bad parent? 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? 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 00:52:56.830 --> 00:53:00.990 really seen people talk about bad parenting. 00:53:01.070 --> 00:53:05.710 I've seen people talk about good parenting, which is doing things with your kid, feeding 00:53:05.710 --> 00:53:07.870 your kid properly, taking them into the forest. 00:53:08.040 --> 00:53:13.080 But in terms of bad parenting, I've seen grandmothers be annoyed that their daughter went 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. 00:53:17.240 --> 00:53:19.080 But it's not really considered bad parenting. 00:53:19.160 --> 00:53:25.000 I think the one exception would be breaking taboos around diet during 00:53:25.000 --> 00:53:30.600 pregnancy, around sexual intercourse during pregnancy and postpartum, 00:53:31.030 --> 00:53:34.550 coming out of the line in period too early, eating the wrong food. 00:53:34.790 --> 00:53:39.270 So I would say more taboo breaking, especially in terms of diet. 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 00:53:43.750 --> 00:53:48.950 consequences to kids, um, is in terms of those things. 00:53:49.190 --> 00:53:50.310 Um, yeah. 00:53:51.080 --> 00:53:51.560 Interesting. 00:53:51.800 --> 00:53:56.280 I mean, there are certainly lots of taboos around dieting and and and pregnancy here as 00:53:56.280 --> 00:54:01.320 well, um which, you know, makes evolutionary sense given the importance of fetal 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 00:54:04.920 --> 00:54:10.760 and the potential for, you know, uh uh teratogens to uh screw with fetal development. 00:54:11.080 --> 00:54:16.040 So that makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense that that um 00:54:16.680 --> 00:54:22.090 diet and pregnancy would be a hot topic for for taboos to arise. 00:54:23.930 --> 00:54:24.490 Yeah. 00:54:24.730 --> 00:54:30.730 I I I just find it so so fascinating that um among us, you 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 00:54:36.090 --> 00:54:38.810 being a bad parent is such a huge driver of our behavior. 00:54:38.890 --> 00:54:44.180 But it seems like that that fear uh isn't present to the same extent. 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 00:54:50.500 --> 00:54:52.340 quite as widespread as it is here. 00:54:52.900 --> 00:54:53.060 Yeah. 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 00:54:57.620 --> 00:54:59.060 people take care of your kids. 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 00:55:04.980 --> 00:55:08.340 different um like cultural communities. 00:55:08.740 --> 00:55:11.790 And everybody lives in quite close quarters. 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 00:55:15.550 --> 00:55:20.990 because it's pretty much as big as my a little bigger than my living room. 00:55:21.150 --> 00:55:24.750 And there's a grandmother, a grandfather, like four adult couples. 00:55:24.830 --> 00:55:28.590 So that's like eight people, and then all their kids that all live there. 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 00:55:32.910 --> 00:55:34.430 more and more people coming out. 00:55:34.800 --> 00:55:36.880 And they just live in super tight quarters. 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 00:55:40.000 --> 00:55:40.480 they come back. 00:55:40.560 --> 00:55:44.240 Like, so you just have that freedom of movement too, which also makes sure that people 00:55:44.240 --> 00:55:46.640 don't get too much on each other's nerves. 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. 00:55:53.040 --> 00:55:58.080 Um, you're really seeing front lines sort of the difference between parenting in a weird 00:55:58.080 --> 00:56:02.320 environment versus um kind of more ecologically valid, quote unquote. 00:56:02.560 --> 00:56:04.570 Um, What's your sense of that? 00:56:04.730 --> 00:56:08.970 Is that something like you know, we're all parents to fairly young children right now? 00:56:09.210 --> 00:56:14.970 Um do you have in your own experience, like do you feel like 00:56:15.130 --> 00:56:19.450 do you ever think like, oh, I wish my child was growing up in in there? 00:56:19.690 --> 00:56:21.850 Or or you know, or is it just everything's different? 00:56:21.930 --> 00:56:23.530 And in um, yeah. 00:56:24.120 --> 00:56:25.640 There's so many trade-offs, right? 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 00:56:29.480 --> 00:56:32.200 infant to the Congo, it's gonna be awesome. 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 00:56:37.400 --> 00:56:39.160 was like, that is so dangerous. 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 00:56:43.160 --> 00:56:47.090 unsequenced mosquito born illnesses, right? 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 00:56:51.250 --> 00:56:52.770 future is like better medical care. 00:56:52.850 --> 00:56:55.090 And we have the luxury of that. 00:56:55.250 --> 00:57:00.930 So it's hard to say like what would I want more or less of, right? 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 00:57:06.370 --> 00:57:11.160 anti-vaccine when you haven't seen kids die from those illnesses. 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. 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 00:57:21.080 --> 00:57:21.880 access to. 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 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, 00:57:33.710 --> 00:57:36.110 so six hours away, the other part lives in Canada. 00:57:36.270 --> 00:57:39.630 And he just doesn't get to grow up with like loads and loads of kids. 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 00:57:45.470 --> 00:57:46.190 play with their kids. 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 00:57:50.030 --> 00:57:50.830 them to play with. 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? 00:57:54.190 --> 00:57:54.910 Stare at a wall? 00:57:54.990 --> 00:57:55.870 Like, what are they gonna do? 00:57:55.950 --> 00:57:57.630 I've gotta get on the floor and play. 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 00:58:03.660 --> 00:58:06.220 weird versus non-weird settings. 00:58:06.460 --> 00:58:09.820 There's a lot of diversity in how kids grow up. 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, 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 00:58:21.890 --> 00:58:22.770 do what I'm doing. 00:58:22.850 --> 00:58:26.290 And I don't always have to be doing what he's doing. 00:58:26.450 --> 00:58:29.090 Like sometimes it can go in the other way. 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 00:58:34.450 --> 00:58:37.170 him play with knives, but like slightest bit dangerous. 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 00:58:41.490 --> 00:58:41.970 more risk. 00:58:42.130 --> 00:58:44.450 That said, he is the most cautious child in the world. 00:58:44.530 --> 00:58:46.370 And that's my fault and my anxiety. 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 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. 00:58:55.940 --> 00:59:00.660 So I think in that way, um, yeah, it has shaped me. 00:59:00.820 --> 00:59:04.660 Again, like I just wish there's more public places for kids to congregate. 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 00:59:10.020 --> 00:59:10.340 thing. 00:59:10.660 --> 00:59:16.550 I think that would make a big change in in child development generally and parenting 00:59:16.550 --> 00:59:17.750 well-being as well. 00:59:17.910 --> 00:59:20.470 I don't know how you guys feel about that too. 00:59:20.950 --> 00:59:22.950 Yeah, I mean, uh, it's been striking. 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 00:59:28.950 --> 00:59:32.630 even Berlin versus you know Santa Barbara. 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. 00:59:38.120 --> 00:59:41.480 It was like they're just like hanging out in like beautiful parks, you know. 00:59:41.640 --> 00:59:44.680 And it's just sort of and it just feels sad. 00:59:45.000 --> 00:59:46.120 I feel bad for the kids. 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 00:59:50.280 --> 00:59:54.520 animals, which is sort of a weird, it is kind of like an alien anthropological perspective. 00:59:54.680 --> 00:59:55.880 Like, what would you put in there? 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 01:00:00.520 --> 01:00:01.320 sit together. 01:00:01.560 --> 01:00:07.510 And it's weird how our planning, at least in the suburbs, 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 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. 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 01:00:24.950 --> 01:00:30.600 stay in a 20 square kilometer or mile zoo pen, 01:00:31.000 --> 01:00:36.920 I would have preferred Berlin uh uh to to to to to Santa Barbara um 01:00:37.240 --> 01:00:38.840 wet weather notwithstanding. 01:00:39.000 --> 01:00:41.560 Um so that's that's my experience too. 01:00:41.720 --> 01:00:43.080 I don't know for David. 01:00:43.880 --> 01:00:46.120 Yeah, no, it's it's it's pretty similar. 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 01:00:51.990 --> 01:00:57.350 by how well integrated uh the playgrounds were with the adult spaces and and I just 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 01:01:00.870 --> 01:01:01.030 that. 01:01:01.110 --> 01:01:04.310 I remember there was this awesome public space with like bars and restaurants and a 01:01:04.310 --> 01:01:06.630 playground, and it was all just mixed together. 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 01:01:11.030 --> 01:01:11.670 isn't. 01:01:11.990 --> 01:01:13.590 Um Yeah. 01:01:14.860 --> 01:01:20.300 So I have two Darwinian mysteries that are on my mind about child 01:01:20.300 --> 01:01:21.100 development. 01:01:21.420 --> 01:01:23.100 I'm curious if you can help me solve them. 01:01:23.180 --> 01:01:24.380 It's okay if you don't have the solution. 01:01:24.700 --> 01:01:25.020 Okay. 01:01:25.580 --> 01:01:27.260 I feel it feels like a test. 01:01:27.900 --> 01:01:29.820 Okay, we'll see, we'll see if we can solve it together. 01:01:30.140 --> 01:01:31.980 Darwinian mystery number one. 01:01:32.460 --> 01:01:37.260 So food and sleep are two basic human needs, right? 01:01:37.340 --> 01:01:37.660 Uh huh. 01:01:37.900 --> 01:01:41.850 And yet, my uh two-year-old daughter, she's about to be three in April. 01:01:42.010 --> 01:01:44.890 I cannot get her to eat, and I cannot get her to sleep. 01:01:45.050 --> 01:01:50.330 You'd think from an evolutionary perspective that she would be thrilled to get fresh, ripe 01:01:50.410 --> 01:01:54.170 fruit, delicious food beyond the wildest dreams of her ancestors. 01:01:54.330 --> 01:01:55.290 It's available for her. 01:01:55.450 --> 01:01:56.170 It's right there. 01:01:56.330 --> 01:01:57.290 She doesn't eat it. 01:01:57.450 --> 01:01:59.450 It's bedtime, she's clearly tired. 01:01:59.530 --> 01:02:04.170 She's rubbing her eyes and yawning and crabby, and she refuses to go to sleep. 01:02:04.650 --> 01:02:07.450 Why won't my kid eat and sleep? 01:02:07.930 --> 01:02:09.640 Okay, so what does she eat? 01:02:09.800 --> 01:02:12.120 Because presumably she eats something. 01:02:13.240 --> 01:02:17.000 Uh well, it's so random and capricious. 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. 01:02:21.720 --> 01:02:24.440 And she'll take one bite and say, I want different food. 01:02:24.600 --> 01:02:27.480 And then she'll eat one bite of another thing and say, I want different food. 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 01:02:31.640 --> 01:02:31.880 food. 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 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 01:02:38.670 --> 01:02:40.750 and get her to preschool or get her to bed or whatever. 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. 01:02:46.190 --> 01:02:49.230 So like like I think it has to do with schedules. 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 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 01:02:58.430 --> 01:03:00.110 porridge, we're gonna be late for school. 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 01:03:07.160 --> 01:03:11.160 and get in tune with these and because we do the same, right? 01:03:11.320 --> 01:03:14.600 Like kids are doing that in school too. 01:03:14.680 --> 01:03:16.680 Like raise your hand if you need to use a toilet. 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 01:03:21.480 --> 01:03:22.120 you're hungry. 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 01:03:26.630 --> 01:03:31.830 hungry, um, kind of thing, and trying to fit into a schedule, which again is cultural 01:03:31.830 --> 01:03:32.470 learning, right? 01:03:32.550 --> 01:03:37.990 Like you do in our society need to suppress and learn to control these different 01:03:37.990 --> 01:03:42.390 desires um so that you can function as a member of society. 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 01:03:48.680 --> 01:03:49.560 to do that. 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 01:03:54.600 --> 01:04:00.280 one of my PhD mentors, Alyssa Crittenden, that our brain really needs our growing brain 01:04:00.280 --> 01:04:01.960 needs a lot of sugar to grow. 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 01:04:07.850 --> 01:04:10.170 the things that she probably does like, is my guess. 01:04:10.250 --> 01:04:14.730 Like, does she like blueberries and raspberries and like Cheerios and that kind of ice 01:04:14.730 --> 01:04:14.970 cream? 01:04:15.050 --> 01:04:17.850 I'm assuming is a a preference. 01:04:18.170 --> 01:04:18.330 Yeah. 01:04:18.570 --> 01:04:22.650 And it's all to feed, like, yeah, all to feed a growing brain. 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 01:04:27.920 --> 01:04:29.120 feeding him loads of weird stuff. 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. 01:04:33.120 --> 01:04:34.480 What are you gonna eat tonight, dude? 01:04:34.560 --> 01:04:36.960 Like there's not a lot of diversity there. 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 01:04:43.600 --> 01:04:44.880 variations of the same thing. 01:04:44.960 --> 01:04:47.920 And I think we might have too much diversity in our diets. 01:04:48.080 --> 01:04:51.760 Like we're just like eating something different every single day. 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 01:04:57.370 --> 01:04:59.850 having cassava leaves with antelope tonight? 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 01:05:04.730 --> 01:05:05.210 changes. 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 01:05:11.210 --> 01:05:14.810 here's the same nutritious food every single day, get on with it, kind of thing. 01:05:15.130 --> 01:05:17.610 So you think if I fed her the same thing every day? 01:05:18.420 --> 01:05:20.900 I don't know if you wanna do you want to do an unethical experiment. 01:05:21.380 --> 01:05:22.420 Run the experiment. 01:05:23.380 --> 01:05:25.940 All right, it's cassava leaves every day, whether you like it or not. 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, 01:05:30.660 --> 01:05:31.700 two and a half year old, yeah. 01:05:31.780 --> 01:05:33.460 We're my my son's a little bit over five. 01:05:33.620 --> 01:05:35.860 You know, you're uh is four and something. 01:05:35.940 --> 01:05:36.100 Yeah. 01:05:36.420 --> 01:05:36.900 Four and a half. 01:05:37.140 --> 01:05:38.660 It's easier David as they get older. 01:05:39.540 --> 01:05:39.700 Okay. 01:05:39.780 --> 01:05:40.420 That's good to know. 01:05:40.500 --> 01:05:40.830 That's good. 01:05:41.150 --> 01:05:43.230 I think there's also like an aspect of control. 01:05:43.390 --> 01:05:48.430 Like she is probably learning like how like how you're gonna parent her too. 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 01:05:52.510 --> 01:05:56.270 like learning what you're willing to do for her, which is part of attachment, right? 01:05:56.350 --> 01:05:59.310 So it's not it's a good thing, even though it's tiring. 01:05:59.470 --> 01:06:00.910 And I would say the sleep thing too. 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? 01:06:04.110 --> 01:06:04.910 In her own room. 01:06:05.120 --> 01:06:05.520 Yeah. 01:06:05.680 --> 01:06:06.160 A lot. 01:06:06.240 --> 01:06:09.440 It's really hard for kids in their own room. 01:06:09.600 --> 01:06:13.360 It's so funny because we co-slept and we planned to co-sleep. 01:06:13.440 --> 01:06:16.800 All anthropologists delude themselves that they're gonna sleep really well because they're 01:06:16.800 --> 01:06:19.440 co-sleeping and um kind of thing. 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 01:06:23.280 --> 01:06:24.640 sleeping through the night. 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 01:06:30.670 --> 01:06:31.470 and a half. 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, 01:06:36.110 --> 01:06:37.870 and then when he wakes up, he crawls into our bed. 01:06:37.950 --> 01:06:39.790 So is he really sleeping independently? 01:06:39.950 --> 01:06:41.150 That's debatable. 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, 01:06:47.230 --> 01:06:48.910 like sleep training, that was so easy. 01:06:49.070 --> 01:06:50.590 Like my kids slept on their own. 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 01:06:55.140 --> 01:06:57.860 like really amazing parents who just had it all figured out. 01:06:57.940 --> 01:07:00.340 And it turns out they just had like a really easy kid. 01:07:00.500 --> 01:07:03.380 And then the second kid is like, We can't get her to sleep. 01:07:03.460 --> 01:07:06.500 She's in our night every night, like in her bed every night, touching me. 01:07:06.660 --> 01:07:10.980 Like, so I think it just has to do a lot with like diversity in kids. 01:07:11.140 --> 01:07:16.830 But I think most kids don't aren't comfortable sleeping alone. 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 01:07:21.950 --> 01:07:24.990 well rested and get to work and do their work, right? 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 01:07:29.550 --> 01:07:35.550 paying Facebook was paying for sleep consultants for their staff because they were like, 01:07:35.710 --> 01:07:40.520 when aren't when our employees get good night's sleep, they are better employees. 01:07:40.600 --> 01:07:43.480 So they were that was like one of the perks of working at Facebook. 01:07:43.640 --> 01:07:45.000 And like frankly, he's right. 01:07:45.160 --> 01:07:49.160 Like sleep deprivation is a really big issue for parents. 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. 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. 01:07:59.880 --> 01:08:00.360 Got it. 01:08:00.570 --> 01:08:00.810 Okay. 01:08:00.890 --> 01:08:02.570 Well that that's a pretty good solution. 01:08:02.650 --> 01:08:05.370 I think I I think I buy that for the most part. 01:08:05.770 --> 01:08:06.010 All right. 01:08:06.090 --> 01:08:07.450 Here's the other one. 01:08:10.810 --> 01:08:10.970 Yeah. 01:08:11.130 --> 01:08:12.250 No, I mean it makes sense. 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 01:08:16.090 --> 01:08:17.370 predators and attackers. 01:08:17.530 --> 01:08:19.050 Like, that's an unsafe situation for her to be in. 01:08:19.210 --> 01:08:21.610 It makes sense that she wouldn't want to be in that situation. 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 01:08:25.800 --> 01:08:26.040 sleep. 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 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 01:08:34.520 --> 01:08:36.520 during so that's it's not a good situation. 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 01:08:39.960 --> 01:08:40.840 safer in the bed with me. 01:08:41.000 --> 01:08:43.240 I'm better off if I can better get a better night's sleep. 01:08:43.320 --> 01:08:45.560 And we just have incompatible preferences there. 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 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, 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 01:08:58.630 --> 01:09:04.150 and you know I haven't seen that much of people being b going 01:09:04.150 --> 01:09:04.710 hungry. 01:09:04.790 --> 01:09:10.220 Like I mean sometimes you just like have some tubers or whatever, but people usually have 01:09:10.220 --> 01:09:13.580 enough food to share with me, for example. 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. 01:09:19.980 --> 01:09:21.580 Um yeah. 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 01:09:26.860 --> 01:09:27.500 gatherer must be. 01:09:29.100 --> 01:09:30.060 I have to say. 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 01:09:34.850 --> 01:09:36.130 playing and partying, right? 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 01:09:40.370 --> 01:09:45.810 offspring conflict, so what's really interesting to me about that is like parent offspring 01:09:45.810 --> 01:09:49.730 conflict can only ever be enacted in specific socioecologies, right? 01:09:49.810 --> 01:09:53.420 And so in the communities where I work, people wake up. 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 01:09:59.660 --> 01:10:02.220 like ectigraphy studies on sleeping. 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 01:10:06.380 --> 01:10:07.420 they're fine. 01:10:07.580 --> 01:10:11.340 Like they're smarter, they're more capable, smarter than I am. 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, 01:10:16.860 --> 01:10:18.110 please, can we go to sleep? 01:10:18.190 --> 01:10:19.310 Like, I really want to go to sleep. 01:10:19.390 --> 01:10:20.430 And she's like, I'm not done. 01:10:20.510 --> 01:10:21.550 I'm not, I'm still out. 01:10:21.630 --> 01:10:24.350 Like, I'm not going, I'm not taking you home yet. 01:10:24.830 --> 01:10:26.670 Wow, the parent is begging the kid. 01:10:26.830 --> 01:10:29.550 Sorry, the parent is sorry, the kid is begging the parent to sleep. 01:10:29.790 --> 01:10:30.830 That's crazy. 01:10:31.150 --> 01:10:31.630 Yeah. 01:10:31.950 --> 01:10:37.230 So it just depends on on you know the context of the conflict, right? 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. 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 01:10:46.200 --> 01:10:50.360 kind of political hobnobbing that you have to do to make it in an egalitarian community. 01:10:50.600 --> 01:10:53.240 Egalitarianism is so stressful. 01:10:53.640 --> 01:10:57.000 Everybody thinks it's like utopia, but it's a lot of work to maintain. 01:10:57.160 --> 01:11:03.160 It's like gossip and redistribution and leveling and like punishment and like all 01:11:03.160 --> 01:11:07.080 this stuff happening constantly all the time in all these micro and macro social 01:11:07.080 --> 01:11:07.880 interactions. 01:11:08.120 --> 01:11:12.590 So it might be in your best interest to be there for that for those interactions. 01:11:12.750 --> 01:11:14.830 And then your kid, it's like 11 p.m. 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. 01:11:18.350 --> 01:11:19.390 So yeah. 01:11:20.110 --> 01:11:20.430 Okay. 01:11:20.670 --> 01:11:24.750 Well my confusion about the food and sleep thing has been considerably reduced. 01:11:24.830 --> 01:11:27.710 I think you did a great job responding to that one. 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 01:11:34.190 --> 01:11:34.590 for you. 01:11:34.840 --> 01:11:35.160 Okay. 01:11:35.400 --> 01:11:41.320 So my daughter often has extremely strongly held, seemingly 01:11:41.320 --> 01:11:43.320 arbitrary preferences. 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 01:11:48.200 --> 01:11:50.280 though it's the same damn milk. 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 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 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 01:12:04.210 --> 01:12:07.090 mad because she wanted that particular chip. 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 01:12:11.330 --> 01:12:12.450 wanted that chip. 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 01:12:17.010 --> 01:12:17.170 it. 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 01:12:20.370 --> 01:12:22.130 bedtime routine, trying to get her to bed. 01:12:22.290 --> 01:12:24.610 She would have these arbitrary preferences around bedtime. 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 01:12:29.360 --> 01:12:31.040 I read her the bedtime story. 01:12:31.520 --> 01:12:32.720 She wants me to wear the yellow hat. 01:12:32.960 --> 01:12:34.880 I don't care, I'll wear I'll I'll wear the yellow hat, whatever. 01:12:34.960 --> 01:12:36.880 I uh you gotta pick your battles at a as a parent. 01:12:37.040 --> 01:12:38.240 But why the yellow hat? 01:12:38.320 --> 01:12:39.040 What what is it? 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? 01:12:43.520 --> 01:12:47.760 So like why does she have these strongly held, arbitrary preferences? 01:12:49.390 --> 01:12:51.790 Oh God, that's a real stumper. 01:12:52.670 --> 01:12:52.990 Okay. 01:12:53.310 --> 01:12:55.230 Let's like the cog turns. 01:12:55.870 --> 01:12:56.990 The cog's turn. 01:12:57.070 --> 01:12:58.350 The turns cog. 01:12:58.430 --> 01:13:00.190 It's almost 11. 01:13:00.430 --> 01:13:05.630 Um okay, so I have I have I have two 01:13:06.590 --> 01:13:09.550 further questions about what could happen. 01:13:09.630 --> 01:13:13.390 And you tell me what you think feels like it rings true. 01:13:13.470 --> 01:13:13.790 Okay. 01:13:14.110 --> 01:13:19.520 So the one kind of avenue would be well, we're humans and we like 01:13:19.520 --> 01:13:20.160 rituals. 01:13:20.320 --> 01:13:24.960 And so she's creating these everyday rituals to make sense of her world. 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 01:13:30.800 --> 01:13:33.520 avenue is like rituals help us gain control. 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 01:13:40.050 --> 01:13:41.250 everyday life, right? 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, 01:13:45.650 --> 01:13:49.490 but ultimately she's not in charge. 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 01:13:54.290 --> 01:13:55.250 minor ways. 01:13:55.490 --> 01:13:57.970 Um, how how does that does that ring true? 01:13:58.130 --> 01:14:00.690 Does that sound like psycho babble bullshit to you? 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 01:14:06.850 --> 01:14:10.760 wants to have some control over my behavior. 01:14:11.160 --> 01:14:12.120 It's still a little puzzle. 01:14:12.360 --> 01:14:12.680 Yeah. 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. 01:14:19.000 --> 01:14:22.040 Maybe you also live in, maybe both Davids live in California. 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? 01:14:26.760 --> 01:14:31.240 I haven't seen that in many of the communities that I work in as much. 01:14:32.570 --> 01:14:33.050 no meltdowns. 01:14:35.450 --> 01:14:41.290 I've seen s I've seen a couple meltdowns, uh-huh, but nowhere like my 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 01:14:46.330 --> 01:14:46.810 house. 01:14:47.050 --> 01:14:50.810 But like there, I I haven't seen that frequency of meltdown. 01:14:50.890 --> 01:14:54.400 I've seen it when kids have been fascinating really tired. 01:14:54.640 --> 01:14:56.320 Um, I've seen meltdowns. 01:14:56.480 --> 01:14:57.440 I I actually did. 01:14:57.600 --> 01:14:58.800 So let me tell you a little story. 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 01:15:02.560 --> 01:15:04.080 I'm also close with his mom. 01:15:04.480 --> 01:15:10.480 Um, he had this meltdown, and I was like, He's tired, because that's 01:15:10.480 --> 01:15:11.360 what we always say, right? 01:15:11.520 --> 01:15:13.920 Anytime there's a meltdown, we're like, the kid's tired. 01:15:14.080 --> 01:15:15.950 And she was like, he's hungry. 01:15:16.110 --> 01:15:17.710 And he fell asleep in my arms. 01:15:17.790 --> 01:15:19.310 And she while she was cooking the food. 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. 01:15:22.190 --> 01:15:24.430 And I was like, Oh my God, do you never wake them up? 01:15:24.510 --> 01:15:25.790 Like, what are you talking about? 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 01:15:30.830 --> 01:15:31.150 hungry. 01:15:31.230 --> 01:15:33.230 So I better feed get food in them, right? 01:15:33.390 --> 01:15:37.870 Um, and he it wasn't it wasn't like he'd just skip dinner, right? 01:15:38.030 --> 01:15:42.030 So, but so I've seen a couple meltdowns of very, very young kids. 01:15:42.340 --> 01:15:46.260 But for the most part, it's not a daily occurrence. 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. 01:15:49.460 --> 01:15:51.060 So I see them all the time. 01:15:51.380 --> 01:15:53.700 So that's one thing. 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 01:15:59.700 --> 01:16:02.900 like just sweeping them up and then taking them on activities. 01:16:03.060 --> 01:16:08.980 Like this one time, this mom took her kid who usually hung out in 01:16:08.980 --> 01:16:11.230 camp foraging with her and her husband. 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 01:16:15.550 --> 01:16:18.270 you or did you not take your kid with you foraging? 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 01:16:24.110 --> 01:16:27.310 equivalent, but you when you hear it, you know it's like Kiri Kiri. 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? 01:16:32.660 --> 01:16:32.820 Yes. 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 01:16:38.500 --> 01:16:40.020 making fights with people and freaking out. 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. 01:16:45.380 --> 01:16:50.260 Um, and so there's a little less kind of 01:16:51.350 --> 01:16:54.790 tailoring to the crazy whims of the two and a half year old. 01:16:55.030 --> 01:16:59.670 But because they have a lot of autonomy over their everyday, they maybe also have fewer 01:16:59.670 --> 01:17:00.390 crazy whims. 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 01:17:05.830 --> 01:17:10.470 proxim approximate solution, approximal solution to your question, but I'm not sure there's 01:17:10.470 --> 01:17:13.510 actually an ultimate question there because there's so much diversity. 01:17:13.670 --> 01:17:17.110 I don't think it's necessarily an evolutionary puzzle. 01:17:17.600 --> 01:17:18.080 Interesting. 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 01:17:23.600 --> 01:17:29.520 meltdowns is bec is because they have so much autonomy and and ability to control 01:17:29.760 --> 01:17:32.080 what they do and when they do it. 01:17:32.240 --> 01:17:37.520 Uh and the reason why we see more meltdowns in uh Western educated, industrialized, rich 01:17:37.600 --> 01:17:43.530 democratic societies is that they have so much less control, that everything is 01:17:43.530 --> 01:17:46.650 dictated for them, what they do, when they do it, where they do it. 01:17:47.210 --> 01:17:53.050 And they have meltdowns to try to get some of the autonomy that they are 01:17:53.050 --> 01:17:55.610 desperately craving and not getting. 01:17:56.970 --> 01:18:02.810 And perhaps that explains the strongly held arbitrary preferences, which is that 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 01:18:08.800 --> 01:18:11.920 in a in an author gatherer society, but that she's not getting here. 01:18:12.240 --> 01:18:15.040 And question, does she go to like does she go to daycare? 01:18:15.200 --> 01:18:16.800 Does she go to some Yeah, no. 01:18:17.200 --> 01:18:18.080 She's in preschool right now, yeah. 01:18:18.320 --> 01:18:19.120 She's in preschool. 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 01:18:24.560 --> 01:18:25.440 preschool. 01:18:26.000 --> 01:18:31.950 And like kids are so good at controlling themselves in the right scenarios that 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 01:18:36.030 --> 01:18:39.390 and you're like freak out at your parents, right? 01:18:39.710 --> 01:18:45.550 Um, because one of the things that I have to shoehorn peer learning in, sorry guys. 01:18:45.790 --> 01:18:49.710 So like basically in a hunter-gatherer community, right? 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 01:18:54.110 --> 01:18:59.500 follow These other kids, and you try to go with these other kids. 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 01:19:05.180 --> 01:19:08.460 10-year-old kids who look after them and make sure they're okay. 01:19:08.620 --> 01:19:14.540 But when you're around peers or when you're around um, yeah, like kids 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 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 01:19:23.250 --> 01:19:24.130 self-regulate. 01:19:24.210 --> 01:19:30.130 And I've definitely seen seen kids tell tell other kids 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, 01:19:35.250 --> 01:19:39.730 or like tease them about having a like having a meltdown in the rear kit. 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 01:19:43.570 --> 01:19:43.650 it. 01:19:43.730 --> 01:19:48.040 And so they're kind of teaching each other these self-regulation skills. 01:19:48.280 --> 01:19:52.840 And also they're not having to control themselves for these like very intense periods of 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 01:19:56.920 --> 01:19:57.720 they want to. 01:19:58.040 --> 01:20:00.200 So I I wonder about that too. 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 01:20:05.080 --> 01:20:09.320 each other in terms of those self-regulation behaviors and then holding it together all 01:20:09.320 --> 01:20:09.560 day. 01:20:09.640 --> 01:20:11.720 It's just so tiring for young kids. 01:20:11.910 --> 01:20:17.590 Again, very good skill set in a Western industrialized society to regulate your 01:20:17.590 --> 01:20:18.550 emotions in that way. 01:20:18.630 --> 01:20:23.350 And also for a small-scale society, but just in different kind of distributions throughout 01:20:23.350 --> 01:20:24.230 the day. 01:20:25.110 --> 01:20:25.990 Interesting. 01:20:26.230 --> 01:20:28.070 Yeah, no, I I buy that. 01:20:28.150 --> 01:20:33.660 That that's that's really fascinating, just like how much domination there is of 01:20:33.660 --> 01:20:39.500 children in in Western societies compared to what you see in hunter-gatherer societies. 01:20:39.660 --> 01:20:42.220 And like it's no wonder they're they're melting down all the time. 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 01:20:46.620 --> 01:20:49.100 to do by people who are much bigger and stronger than me. 01:20:49.340 --> 01:20:49.580 Yeah. 01:20:49.740 --> 01:20:54.700 You know, yeah there's this um let me remember his name. 01:20:54.870 --> 01:20:59.110 There's this amazing book by the sociologist in the 80s called Life in a Classroom. 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 01:21:05.110 --> 01:21:05.830 sociology. 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 01:21:10.630 --> 01:21:12.390 see what life is like in the classroom. 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 01:21:18.470 --> 01:21:24.360 um deep dive into the social life of classrooms because his point is basically 01:21:24.520 --> 01:21:26.840 like it's just self-regulation central. 01:21:27.000 --> 01:21:30.200 You you never get to finish an activity that you want to finish, right? 01:21:30.280 --> 01:21:32.040 You're on the teacher's schedule. 01:21:32.280 --> 01:21:37.720 You have to raise your hand to have basic bodily functions or ask questions. 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 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 01:21:47.610 --> 01:21:50.650 breaking a classroom normal norm or rule, right? 01:21:50.970 --> 01:21:54.890 And like so you also have to control yourself in that way. 01:21:55.050 --> 01:22:01.050 So presumably, schools are about transmitting specific bits of knowledge, but 01:22:01.050 --> 01:22:06.330 in practice, it's a lot more about specific norms, especially in terms of managing in 01:22:06.330 --> 01:22:07.770 classroom in that way. 01:22:08.160 --> 01:22:11.520 And so you're constantly having to switch on other people's schedules. 01:22:11.600 --> 01:22:12.720 And it's probably the case. 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. 01:22:16.080 --> 01:22:18.800 Maybe she just wants to finish playing. 01:22:18.960 --> 01:22:20.240 But then, like, I'm tired. 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. 01:22:23.440 --> 01:22:27.040 Not necessarily because he's always ready for it. 01:22:27.280 --> 01:22:30.800 So, and I need that schedule and I need that time to decompress. 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 01:22:36.670 --> 01:22:38.590 schedules, those pesky schedules. 01:22:38.670 --> 01:22:39.790 How dare they? 01:22:40.430 --> 01:22:43.630 There's no schedule in a hunter gatherer society. 01:22:43.710 --> 01:22:44.670 You're right. 01:22:45.150 --> 01:22:47.230 You follow your whims. 01:22:47.310 --> 01:22:47.950 Yeah. 01:22:48.670 --> 01:22:50.430 Cursed by the schedule. 01:22:51.790 --> 01:22:54.270 Um the pure um pure learning. 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 01:22:59.870 --> 01:23:01.230 you want to say about that? 01:23:03.200 --> 01:23:08.320 So most of my research at so I kind of like accidentally 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? 01:23:14.640 --> 01:23:18.000 People always say, like, my mom, my dad, my mom, my dad taught me these skills. 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 01:23:21.760 --> 01:23:27.680 communities, like like 75% of the teaching that they're getting and receiving is from other 01:23:27.680 --> 01:23:32.640 kids of varying ages, but it's happening, you know, kind of 01:23:33.010 --> 01:23:35.330 horizontally within their age group. 01:23:35.570 --> 01:23:39.250 And that's really um, and also in play. 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 01:23:44.930 --> 01:23:50.770 and also with like my amazing uh collaborators to really understand how kids are learning 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 01:23:53.890 --> 01:23:55.090 differs across culture. 01:23:55.250 --> 01:23:59.410 So I don't have many answers yet, unfortunately, because all the research is kind of 01:23:59.410 --> 01:23:59.970 active. 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 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 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 01:24:17.200 --> 01:24:22.880 and that that might actually be part of an adaptive social structure where kids almost act 01:24:22.880 --> 01:24:25.760 like innovation incubators or startups, right? 01:24:25.920 --> 01:24:28.830 Like they're these little working things. 01:24:28.990 --> 01:24:31.870 All they have is free time to figure stuff out. 01:24:32.270 --> 01:24:33.390 They can work together. 01:24:33.550 --> 01:24:36.590 They have to adjust to each other's skill set. 01:24:36.750 --> 01:24:38.110 They have different bodies. 01:24:38.350 --> 01:24:42.030 So it's not the case that you can just shrink a spear, right? 01:24:42.190 --> 01:24:43.390 Their strength is different. 01:24:43.550 --> 01:24:44.670 They're like head. 01:24:44.830 --> 01:24:46.350 Why do they all have such big heads? 01:24:46.510 --> 01:24:47.230 Like they're like right. 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. 01:24:51.630 --> 01:24:52.350 Yeah, you and I. 01:24:52.430 --> 01:24:54.830 Yeah, where they're just constantly hitting doorknobs. 01:24:55.140 --> 01:24:55.940 Yeah, that's right. 01:24:56.020 --> 01:24:56.980 Yeah, exactly. 01:24:57.140 --> 01:24:58.660 So all their proportions are different. 01:24:58.740 --> 01:25:03.060 So they need to kind of adjust the adult world to their benefit. 01:25:03.220 --> 01:25:05.780 And that involves a lot of innovative thinking. 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 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 01:25:15.460 --> 01:25:15.860 the system. 01:25:16.020 --> 01:25:17.780 And then you need these innovations. 01:25:17.940 --> 01:25:20.260 You you need a pool of innovations to draw from. 01:25:20.420 --> 01:25:25.310 And rather than starting from scratch, you can start from what the kids have created 01:25:25.470 --> 01:25:26.270 basically. 01:25:26.430 --> 01:25:28.430 Um, so that's where we're at in our thinking. 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 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, 01:25:35.950 --> 01:25:37.710 and you're like, Oh, that was so stupid. 01:25:37.790 --> 01:25:38.910 Why did I think that? 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 01:25:44.750 --> 01:25:50.030 there's something there is just actually testing the adaptive the the 01:25:50.030 --> 01:25:51.630 adaptation aspect of it. 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 01:25:57.920 --> 01:25:58.640 a kid. 01:25:58.960 --> 01:26:04.240 One is coordinating, because that cohort is going to be the cohort you'll need to 01:26:04.240 --> 01:26:05.680 coordinate as adults. 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 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 01:26:15.200 --> 01:26:18.480 strongest kid, you know, or maybe the kid who, you know, whatever. 01:26:18.640 --> 01:26:20.450 Um there's that part. 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. 01:26:24.930 --> 01:26:30.770 Um, but then there's just they're creating their own innovative 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 01:26:36.290 --> 01:26:41.650 course, linguistically, or social structures, or games, or just almost anything you can 01:26:41.650 --> 01:26:43.330 think of that could be created. 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 01:26:49.200 --> 01:26:51.120 actually their own culture. 01:26:51.440 --> 01:26:53.360 Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. 01:26:53.520 --> 01:26:59.120 I think like one like thought experiment, especially knowing your research, 01:26:59.280 --> 01:26:59.920 David. 01:27:00.880 --> 01:27:02.400 The David at the top of my screen. 01:27:03.600 --> 01:27:05.760 One thing we've clarified is I I'll go by Dave. 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. 01:27:10.960 --> 01:27:11.120 Yeah. 01:27:11.440 --> 01:27:12.320 It's really bad. 01:27:12.720 --> 01:27:13.680 It's even PI. 01:27:13.760 --> 01:27:14.960 I'm looking at our names right now. 01:27:15.600 --> 01:27:16.240 Yeah. 01:27:17.690 --> 01:27:23.610 So like one thing that um we propose as a thought experiment in 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 01:27:29.370 --> 01:27:30.810 gather community, right? 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 01:27:36.010 --> 01:27:41.960 10 of them or less will be kids and those kids will range from like zero 01:27:41.960 --> 01:27:43.240 to adulthood, right? 01:27:43.320 --> 01:27:45.000 So they're a big age range. 01:27:45.160 --> 01:27:47.640 There's not a lot of room for competitive games. 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 01:27:51.800 --> 01:27:52.760 17-year-old, right? 01:27:52.840 --> 01:27:53.800 It's really hard. 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 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 01:28:04.130 --> 01:28:04.690 cooperative. 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 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 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 01:28:18.290 --> 01:28:18.450 is. 01:28:19.730 --> 01:28:23.250 But what happens when you settle in a bigger setting. 01:28:23.410 --> 01:28:27.810 So even before a transition to agriculture in the past, you would have had fishing 01:28:27.810 --> 01:28:33.740 communities that could settle in bigger communities, and all of a sudden you have a 01:28:33.740 --> 01:28:37.420 lot more kids, and you might be able to play competitive games. 01:28:37.660 --> 01:28:43.420 So it's possible that shifts from egalitarian to non-egalitarian social structures 01:28:43.420 --> 01:28:47.580 could start, for example, with kids playing and bringing up those norms that they develop 01:28:47.580 --> 01:28:50.780 in their play with their peers into adulthood. 01:28:50.940 --> 01:28:55.580 And it it would only take a few generations before that becomes the main ethos, right? 01:28:55.660 --> 01:29:01.570 Like um So, like what kids are doing 01:29:01.570 --> 01:29:03.330 is is pretty interesting. 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 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 01:29:15.410 --> 01:29:21.170 anti-Soviet kind of like we're a democratic country, we've we were democratic families. 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. 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 01:29:30.620 --> 01:29:30.940 Union. 01:29:31.020 --> 01:29:31.740 That's how it started out. 01:29:31.820 --> 01:29:32.940 That's where this concept came out. 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 01:29:39.100 --> 01:29:41.980 in our state, and we're democratic at home kind of thing. 01:29:42.220 --> 01:29:44.540 So that yeah, that's hilarious. 01:29:44.940 --> 01:29:45.980 Isn't that hilarious? 01:29:46.300 --> 01:29:50.550 So so these kids grow up, all of them in these suburbs, right? 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 01:29:56.710 --> 01:29:57.430 suburbs. 01:29:57.670 --> 01:30:03.270 And then they're also getting these like super democratic values hammered into them at 01:30:03.270 --> 01:30:07.270 school, hammered into them at home, loads of space to play. 01:30:07.430 --> 01:30:11.830 And then finally they come up and get to university and they're like, Vietnam War? 01:30:12.220 --> 01:30:13.660 that doesn't sound right. 01:30:13.820 --> 01:30:16.780 Like anti-women attitudes, that's not right either. 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 01:30:21.340 --> 01:30:26.300 and in culture change throughout, you know, the world, basically. 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, 01:30:32.620 --> 01:30:38.190 um, bringing norms that were instilled in them or that they developed on their own into 01:30:38.190 --> 01:30:41.950 their adult lives and leading to kind of bigger changes in culture. 01:30:42.510 --> 01:30:48.430 So is is the argument then that the parents of the 50s uh worked very hard 01:30:48.430 --> 01:30:52.270 to instill egalitarian and democratic values into their children? 01:30:52.510 --> 01:30:56.830 Values that they themselves did not actually hold, that they were just paying lip service 01:30:56.830 --> 01:31:02.740 to as a kind of uh political signal of of loyalty to the United States 01:31:02.820 --> 01:31:03.620 or something like that. 01:31:03.860 --> 01:31:07.860 But because of all this lip service, they accidentally instilled those values into their 01:31:07.860 --> 01:31:08.180 children. 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 01:31:12.900 --> 01:31:13.460 for social change. 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 01:31:17.380 --> 01:31:17.780 that I read. 01:31:18.100 --> 01:31:18.660 Okay, interesting. 01:31:20.980 --> 01:31:26.820 Um from what we know from studies around demographic change in communities, 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 01:31:32.370 --> 01:31:38.130 you know the uh spread of norms that didn't maybe were weren't so popular 01:31:38.130 --> 01:31:38.690 before. 01:31:39.090 --> 01:31:41.250 And I think it would make sense that that's what we would see. 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 01:31:46.370 --> 01:31:52.260 values, but the society of the structure, the sorry structure of the society d didn't 01:31:52.260 --> 01:31:56.180 hold true to those structures, which of course we know because of segregation, the suburbs 01:31:56.180 --> 01:32:00.980 were key to um kind of segregationist city planning. 01:32:01.460 --> 01:32:07.300 Um so all of a sudden those structures which are both doing and undoing, right? 01:32:07.540 --> 01:32:09.380 Um those types of inequalities. 01:32:09.860 --> 01:32:15.850 It's really interesting because, you know, you think about the claim, it's sort of 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 01:32:21.770 --> 01:32:27.610 old to, as an adult scientist, look at what a group of kids are growing 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 01:32:32.170 --> 01:32:32.730 their kids. 01:32:32.890 --> 01:32:36.010 I mean, this is where sort of history has to come in. 01:32:36.170 --> 01:32:38.330 What a hard thing to study. 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 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 01:32:49.820 --> 01:32:55.580 defenseless they need to be um taken care of and um you know 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 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 01:33:06.550 --> 01:33:08.870 know, I I would prefer, for example. 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 01:33:14.470 --> 01:33:15.670 least collectively, right? 01:33:15.830 --> 01:33:16.950 Um, in the future. 01:33:17.190 --> 01:33:21.670 And I think it's easy to forget that because most adults don't see that. 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 01:33:24.870 --> 01:33:26.790 it, they're so old. 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 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 01:33:35.140 --> 01:33:35.860 consequences. 01:33:36.180 --> 01:33:36.420 Yeah. 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 01:33:40.420 --> 01:33:42.100 Adolescence on Netflix yet? 01:33:42.820 --> 01:33:43.540 I I have not. 01:33:43.620 --> 01:33:46.500 I I we started but we we haven't gotten around to finishing it. 01:33:46.580 --> 01:33:48.260 So I'm no spoilers, please. 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 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 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 01:34:00.930 --> 01:34:05.250 a teenager because I don't know, those conversations you can't just kind of like 01:34:06.770 --> 01:34:10.530 like they need to be practiced, right? 01:34:10.770 --> 01:34:15.250 Like Jerome Lewis, who's a social anthropologist who's been working with the same community 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 01:34:21.490 --> 01:34:25.570 of norms, and it's like a religious system that the Bayaka have. 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 01:34:31.660 --> 01:34:32.140 through the list. 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 01:34:37.420 --> 01:34:41.660 before they go hunting, they overhear certain people can go hunting or not, why? 01:34:41.740 --> 01:34:44.060 Because of Aquila is always this word akila. 01:34:44.380 --> 01:34:49.500 And then they start, as they grow older, start to make sense of all this stuff. 01:34:49.740 --> 01:34:54.570 So it's not like this kind of like cut, okay, now you're a teenager. 01:34:54.730 --> 01:34:57.130 Now we talk about like blood, right? 01:34:57.290 --> 01:35:00.810 It's like very much a gradual thing that you're always exposed to. 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 01:35:05.370 --> 01:35:07.130 I'm like, we start talking about it now. 01:35:07.210 --> 01:35:09.850 We're like, we start talking about consent now. 01:35:10.010 --> 01:35:14.650 We start talking about this stuff now, even amongst ourselves, so that those conversations 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 01:35:20.600 --> 01:35:21.480 about this stuff, right? 01:35:21.560 --> 01:35:23.560 It's like always been part of your life. 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 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? 01:35:34.200 --> 01:35:38.680 You know, for example, like like some I one one example would be something like death. 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 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 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 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 01:35:56.950 --> 01:36:02.470 there's worms eating her what's the uh w what what's your take 01:36:02.630 --> 01:36:05.670 given your experience um it's a good question. 01:36:05.830 --> 01:36:08.740 I mean kids see death all the time there. 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 01:36:14.180 --> 01:36:15.380 known will have died. 01:36:15.620 --> 01:36:15.940 Right. 01:36:16.420 --> 01:36:20.420 So it they're experiencing death all the time. 01:36:20.580 --> 01:36:21.940 It's very traumatic for them. 01:36:22.020 --> 01:36:24.980 Bon Bonnie Hewlett's work on this shows that. 01:36:25.140 --> 01:36:28.660 Um, they remember people who've died for a long time and they miss them. 01:36:29.330 --> 01:36:34.210 They see death of animals all the time because obviously they hunt a lot. 01:36:34.690 --> 01:36:40.290 Um, so death is just part of living there. 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 01:36:46.530 --> 01:36:49.010 conversations about like where meat comes from. 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 01:36:52.900 --> 01:36:53.780 carving up in it. 01:36:53.860 --> 01:36:55.300 We were like, okay, look at the bones. 01:36:55.380 --> 01:36:56.820 Like that's food that we eat. 01:36:56.900 --> 01:36:58.180 Like, just know that. 01:36:58.420 --> 01:37:02.900 Sometimes kids then like get really weird about that stuff where they like want to see 01:37:02.900 --> 01:37:03.540 loads of death. 01:37:03.620 --> 01:37:05.860 And then you need to have a conversation about that too. 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 01:37:11.700 --> 01:37:12.260 of thing. 01:37:12.500 --> 01:37:18.100 Um, but I can't tell you from a scientific point of view 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 01:37:24.990 --> 01:37:27.710 so honest that you just scare the life out of them, right? 01:37:28.590 --> 01:37:30.190 And I think that's the Akila thing. 01:37:30.270 --> 01:37:35.710 Like they're not a lot of the knowledge that happens in this system of 01:37:35.710 --> 01:37:41.540 taboos, um a lot of it is initiated when kids are a little bit 01:37:41.540 --> 01:37:43.780 older, but that doesn't mean it's not being talked about. 01:37:43.940 --> 01:37:47.700 It doesn't mean they're not exposed to those things in their everyday, also. 01:37:48.180 --> 01:37:53.460 So more specialized knowledge, more kind of cog, more 01:37:54.260 --> 01:37:59.300 ritualized knowledge, you probably would wait until their adolescence, but you lay the 01:37:59.300 --> 01:38:00.260 groundwork earlier. 01:38:00.340 --> 01:38:02.020 So it's less of a kind of cut. 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. 01:38:07.110 --> 01:38:11.510 We come back to the joining in of what the community does. 01:38:12.390 --> 01:38:17.190 Is there anything like as like oh sorry, David, go ahead. 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 01:38:22.790 --> 01:38:23.190 themselves? 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 01:38:28.470 --> 01:38:29.510 longer working? 01:38:29.670 --> 01:38:32.870 Uh what how do they conceptualize this? 01:38:33.400 --> 01:38:36.920 Yeah, so there's a lot of different conceptions. 01:38:38.040 --> 01:38:44.040 So people tend to have a shorter mourning period for when kids die because kids are 01:38:44.040 --> 01:38:48.600 reincarnated and come back in the same gender body, actually. 01:38:48.760 --> 01:38:51.960 And then so souls are gendered amongst the bayaka. 01:38:52.760 --> 01:38:56.490 And then older people tend not to come back. 01:38:56.810 --> 01:39:02.730 Um, people who are very um kind of selfish um 01:39:03.050 --> 01:39:07.290 come back as gorillas because gorillas think they're owners of the forest. 01:39:07.610 --> 01:39:13.210 And also bayaka say that when they die, they come back 01:39:13.770 --> 01:39:19.440 as these kind of white uh people, which has meant with colonialism 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 01:39:25.200 --> 01:39:25.920 European people. 01:39:26.000 --> 01:39:27.360 Like, is that true? 01:39:27.600 --> 01:39:31.200 To which I say, I I don't know what happens when you die, guys. 01:39:31.280 --> 01:39:33.440 Like, I don't have those types of insight. 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 01:39:39.360 --> 01:39:40.320 very forthcoming. 01:39:40.400 --> 01:39:41.840 I'll be like, What happens when you die? 01:39:41.920 --> 01:39:44.290 And they'll be like, I don't know, haven't been dead yet. 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 01:39:49.890 --> 01:39:52.770 knowledge that's deeper around what happens around that. 01:39:53.650 --> 01:39:54.530 Interesting. 01:39:55.010 --> 01:39:55.330 Cool. 01:39:55.410 --> 01:39:58.130 Yeah, I just wanted to know what what uh what the story was there. 01:39:58.450 --> 01:39:58.690 Yeah. 01:39:59.490 --> 01:40:01.010 Anyway, I interrupted you, Dave. 01:40:01.330 --> 01:40:04.770 I was just gonna ask, um, you know, the peer learning thing. 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 01:40:09.810 --> 01:40:11.010 after school. 01:40:11.250 --> 01:40:15.440 Um, it's a weird c institution, maybe, or maybe not. 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. 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 01:40:24.640 --> 01:40:26.880 roughly standardizing like what they can do. 01:40:26.960 --> 01:40:28.560 And so it makes sense to do that. 01:40:28.960 --> 01:40:32.640 But then the consequences of that, there may be externalities or byproducts that are 01:40:32.640 --> 01:40:33.440 unintended. 01:40:33.600 --> 01:40:39.550 Do you think that that's uh a weird not in like the the acronym 01:40:39.550 --> 01:40:45.550 sense, but just sort of like, is that a really strange artificial thing for our development 01:40:45.630 --> 01:40:51.390 to really just be around uh really same age mates and 01:40:51.390 --> 01:40:55.710 not be essentially alloparented or alloparent as kids? 01:40:56.190 --> 01:40:57.630 Yeah, so I think a few things. 01:40:57.710 --> 01:41:01.790 I think it is strange how much time kids are spending in single-age classrooms. 01:41:01.870 --> 01:41:06.270 I think it would be awesome for them to have more opportunities for multi-age learning. 01:41:06.840 --> 01:41:11.720 Also, just in terms of empathy development, like older kids being able to hang out with 01:41:11.720 --> 01:41:17.560 younger kids is really important for their development of like just being nice people, 01:41:17.800 --> 01:41:18.120 right? 01:41:19.880 --> 01:41:25.720 I also think that we often over, maybe not over focus, but 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 01:41:31.110 --> 01:41:33.030 friend group in their neighborhood. 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 01:41:39.030 --> 01:41:41.910 weekends they're just like going house to house, which is cool. 01:41:42.070 --> 01:41:46.870 Um, and it's like from three to eight, I think they are. 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. 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 01:41:56.070 --> 01:42:00.880 friend group tends to be a little bit more autonomous and a little bit more diverse. 01:42:00.960 --> 01:42:06.880 Then again, you know, very kind of stranger things child autonomy, which I think 01:42:06.880 --> 01:42:10.080 we are losing a little bit that pesky schedule. 01:42:10.240 --> 01:42:11.440 We come back to that. 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 01:42:16.000 --> 01:42:20.240 community structured around age sex that you're initiated with and to. 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 01:42:26.050 --> 01:42:27.170 women marry in. 01:42:27.410 --> 01:42:32.930 So in some communities, age is really the foundational structure of the entire community. 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 01:42:38.850 --> 01:42:39.170 degree. 01:42:39.250 --> 01:42:42.130 I think those age sects aren't like just one-year slices, though. 01:42:42.210 --> 01:42:45.730 I think it's like a few, like maybe three or four years. 01:42:45.980 --> 01:42:49.340 um, but still quite strat stratified by each. 01:42:49.500 --> 01:42:49.820 Yeah. 01:42:50.140 --> 01:42:50.540 Yeah. 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 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 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 01:43:05.340 --> 01:43:06.540 that you do field work. 01:43:07.020 --> 01:43:12.300 Um for you like as a person because we don't do field work um 01:43:12.930 --> 01:43:16.210 What is your experience of like going back and forth to the field? 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 01:43:22.210 --> 01:43:24.210 this or you know, years ago. 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 01:43:27.890 --> 01:43:29.090 field once they have kids. 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 01:43:34.290 --> 01:43:35.410 like how it's changed you? 01:43:35.490 --> 01:43:39.330 Because we don't, we certainly the people listening, most people probably don't know what 01:43:39.330 --> 01:43:39.730 that's like. 01:43:39.890 --> 01:43:43.860 And David and I, you know, we've done things, but not that. 01:43:44.020 --> 01:43:46.820 So I'm just curious, like, what what you think about that? 01:43:47.460 --> 01:43:48.260 Yeah, for sure. 01:43:48.420 --> 01:43:54.340 So I mean, I I won't I won't be like super like heroic 01:43:54.340 --> 01:43:56.820 and say that my first field season wasn't heard. 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 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 01:44:06.100 --> 01:44:07.300 word that they were saying. 01:44:07.460 --> 01:44:09.510 Um this is the Congo Basin. 01:44:09.670 --> 01:44:11.430 I mean, this is the Congo Basin, right? 01:44:11.590 --> 01:44:11.670 Yeah. 01:44:11.910 --> 01:44:12.310 Yeah, yeah. 01:44:12.390 --> 01:44:13.190 In the Congo Bas. 01:44:13.270 --> 01:44:15.910 Yeah, I was in Republic of the Congo in the north. 01:44:16.070 --> 01:44:18.150 So it's a village that's quite remote. 01:44:18.230 --> 01:44:24.230 So you fly to Brazzaville, you take a very long bus journey 01:44:24.550 --> 01:44:30.320 to a cap the capital of the north, then you continue over a river, a 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 01:44:35.360 --> 01:44:38.320 motorboat, you can make it in four hours to the village where I work. 01:44:38.400 --> 01:44:40.240 So there's no no road. 01:44:40.320 --> 01:44:43.040 And so we get there and we're like unloading our stuff. 01:44:43.200 --> 01:44:44.400 I have no idea where we are. 01:44:44.480 --> 01:44:46.160 I've never been there before. 01:44:46.400 --> 01:44:50.960 Um I'm French is my mother tongue, but nobody there speaks French. 01:44:51.120 --> 01:44:54.320 Um, French is the also the national language of Congo. 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 01:44:59.950 --> 01:45:04.270 a sudden, like, and like the bayaka are very, they sit very close to each other. 01:45:04.350 --> 01:45:06.510 So all these people are like entangled with me. 01:45:06.670 --> 01:45:10.910 And I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna, I'm gonna die here. 01:45:11.550 --> 01:45:14.910 And like I got I got I got stuck in pretty quickly. 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 01:45:20.600 --> 01:45:22.520 Bayak is also a Bantu language. 01:45:22.600 --> 01:45:26.040 So all the words are different, but I knew how the grammar worked. 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 01:45:31.320 --> 01:45:34.280 researcher who was there my language skills pretty quickly. 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 01:45:39.970 --> 01:45:41.010 in forest camps. 01:45:41.090 --> 01:45:43.890 I'm in the village, and I'm like, who's in the forest, guys? 01:45:43.970 --> 01:45:46.610 And they're like, Nobody lives in the forest. 01:45:46.770 --> 01:45:52.290 And I'm like, hmm, all right, well, there goes like my PhD plans. 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 01:45:58.450 --> 01:46:00.290 that aren't part of the set that I know. 01:46:00.370 --> 01:46:02.280 So I'm like, Well, who's this person? 01:46:02.360 --> 01:46:04.920 And they're like, oh, well, he lives in the forest. 01:46:05.000 --> 01:46:06.840 I'm like, well, you told me nobody lives in the forest. 01:46:06.920 --> 01:46:09.320 And they're like, nobody lives in the forest, but he lives in the forest. 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, 01:46:14.600 --> 01:46:15.320 three days. 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. 01:46:19.960 --> 01:46:21.720 He never comes to the village ever. 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, 01:46:27.610 --> 01:46:28.810 they just don't think of them. 01:46:28.890 --> 01:46:31.370 And I was like, okay, well, can you take me to this camp? 01:46:31.690 --> 01:46:35.930 So I get to this camp, I get along super well with the host dad. 01:46:36.010 --> 01:46:38.170 Um, well, the host camp. 01:46:38.250 --> 01:46:40.010 Now I call him my host dad. 01:46:40.170 --> 01:46:43.610 Um, and I stayed there for four months, and it was awesome. 01:46:43.850 --> 01:46:49.700 Except it turns out you can't just bring like rice and beans in mesh bags 01:46:49.700 --> 01:46:52.020 into the rainforest and they're just gonna be fine. 01:46:52.260 --> 01:46:54.420 So all my stuff went moldy. 01:46:54.500 --> 01:46:55.860 All my food went more moldy. 01:46:55.940 --> 01:47:00.100 All my underwear went moldy like everything you can imagine went moldy. 01:47:00.180 --> 01:47:03.220 And so I like wasn't gonna eat moldy rice and beans. 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 01:47:08.660 --> 01:47:10.660 forest and I just didn't quite feel well enough. 01:47:10.740 --> 01:47:12.580 So I was like I think I'm gonna go home. 01:47:12.740 --> 01:47:15.780 So I ended up going home a month early then. 01:47:20.810 --> 01:47:21.370 Planned. 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 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 01:47:29.210 --> 01:47:30.010 friendships I made. 01:47:30.090 --> 01:47:31.690 Now it really feels like I'm going home. 01:47:31.770 --> 01:47:34.410 Like I've it's like my other home. 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 01:47:40.340 --> 01:47:44.580 friends have passed away in between um and I'm not there for their funerals. 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 01:47:50.180 --> 01:47:53.860 but I'm not there for those things so that's always a little bit difficult. 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 01:47:59.460 --> 01:48:01.860 there's cell phone reception which is really nice. 01:48:02.070 --> 01:48:05.350 Um, and yeah, it feels like our our lives are intertwined. 01:48:05.430 --> 01:48:06.150 You know what I mean? 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 01:48:11.990 --> 01:48:15.430 hope that they feel as taken care of as I do by them. 01:48:15.670 --> 01:48:16.870 That's like the main thing. 01:48:17.030 --> 01:48:17.350 Yeah. 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 01:48:22.710 --> 01:48:24.550 home or the world shrinks a bit. 01:48:24.900 --> 01:48:25.860 Yeah, I think so. 01:48:26.020 --> 01:48:26.420 Think so. 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. 01:48:30.420 --> 01:48:33.700 If not everybody's made for field work, and that's all right. 01:48:33.860 --> 01:48:36.500 You can I'm not made for field work. 01:48:36.740 --> 01:48:40.820 I can see David during the during the moldy beans and rice. 01:48:40.900 --> 01:48:42.500 I'm just nope nope nope nope nope. 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. 01:48:48.020 --> 01:48:51.060 That's that's yeah. 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. 01:48:57.630 --> 01:48:58.510 Uh yeah. 01:48:58.670 --> 01:49:00.510 I have I like my daughter. 01:49:02.110 --> 01:49:05.310 I have lots of s of strongly held arbitrary preferences like my like my daughter. 01:49:05.550 --> 01:49:06.350 So Okay. 01:49:06.590 --> 01:49:08.270 That sounds like an inherited crazy. 01:49:08.830 --> 01:49:10.350 Yeah, maybe that's the solution of the mystery. 01:49:13.150 --> 01:49:15.790 She knows is there anything we should have asked you? 01:49:16.670 --> 01:49:17.240 I don't know. 01:49:17.320 --> 01:49:18.760 Is there anything you should have asked me? 01:49:18.840 --> 01:49:19.560 You guys tell me. 01:49:19.800 --> 01:49:21.800 Is there anything else you want to know? 01:49:24.920 --> 01:49:28.200 Um I think we we covered a lot. 01:49:28.680 --> 01:49:31.240 It was pretty pretty cool, wide-ranging discussion. 01:49:31.560 --> 01:49:36.200 Yeah, and I really I I I feel like um what I love about 01:49:36.200 --> 01:49:42.110 anthropology is uh it is a window into like our 01:49:42.110 --> 01:49:42.590 world. 01:49:42.670 --> 01:49:48.590 And it's such a privileged thing to talk to you and to people who do 01:49:48.590 --> 01:49:48.830 it. 01:49:49.630 --> 01:49:54.030 And I hope, like I mean this, it sounds cheesy, but I mean this like sincerely. 01:49:54.190 --> 01:50:00.190 Like it's, I think it's a really special time and place to be, to 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 01:50:05.710 --> 01:50:08.670 ordinarily wouldn't be like part of the conversation. 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 01:50:14.460 --> 01:50:15.180 the UK. 01:50:15.420 --> 01:50:21.260 Um, but we're talking about these stories from the Congo Basin, and that's 01:50:21.260 --> 01:50:22.540 because of you, right? 01:50:22.620 --> 01:50:25.260 And like your your life uh doing that. 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 01:50:30.940 --> 01:50:36.780 express appreciation of like that the fact that you do that is what allows all 01:50:36.780 --> 01:50:42.470 of us to like understand ourselves better because like we we're all people 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 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 01:50:53.270 --> 01:50:59.030 hardships that um you you you dealt with to to bring that i mean given give 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 01:51:05.160 --> 01:51:07.480 your service to military uh uh personnel. 01:51:07.800 --> 01:51:11.560 Oh my god I know don't thank you can I thank you for your service? 01:51:13.880 --> 01:51:19.400 I mean like honestly like I think a lot of the all like all of the 01:51:19.400 --> 01:51:23.560 kudos go to these communities because they don't have to welcome us in, right? 01:51:23.720 --> 01:51:28.230 We're like we are such a burden on these communities who make such a mess. 01:51:28.310 --> 01:51:29.350 We're so bad at everything. 01:51:29.510 --> 01:51:31.110 They have to take care of us. 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, 01:51:36.230 --> 01:51:41.830 they're the the real heroes because like I there's a a story 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 01:51:47.510 --> 01:51:48.950 the middle of the night and moved camp. 01:51:49.030 --> 01:51:51.670 So I'm just always and left them alone in the bush. 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. 01:51:56.080 --> 01:51:58.560 So you're just waking up every morning like, okay, okay. 01:51:59.520 --> 01:52:00.320 They're still here. 01:52:00.560 --> 01:52:02.480 That's today will be okay. 01:52:02.640 --> 01:52:03.760 Everybody's still here. 01:52:03.920 --> 01:52:04.240 Yeah. 01:52:04.320 --> 01:52:04.880 Yeah. 01:52:05.120 --> 01:52:05.360 Yeah. 01:52:05.440 --> 01:52:06.480 Well, thank you, Bayaka. 01:52:07.360 --> 01:52:07.440 Yeah. 01:52:07.600 --> 01:52:07.840 Thank you. 01:52:07.920 --> 01:52:09.360 Yeah, no, thank you so much. 01:52:09.520 --> 01:52:10.880 Um, thank you, Bayaka. 01:52:11.200 --> 01:52:11.440 Yeah. 01:52:11.680 --> 01:52:11.920 Yeah. 01:52:12.000 --> 01:52:12.960 Thank you, Bayaka. 01:52:13.200 --> 01:52:14.160 That's the right move. 01:52:14.320 --> 01:52:14.960 Yeah. 01:52:18.080 --> 01:52:22.910 We've reached the end of another episode of Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. 01:52:23.150 --> 01:52:26.830 David, um, how can people help us out if they'd like? 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 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. 01:52:38.350 --> 01:52:44.270 Uh, or you can stay tuned for the next episode, which should be coming out next 01:52:44.270 --> 01:52:44.510 week. 01:52:44.750 --> 01:52:45.070 Yeah. 01:52:45.230 --> 01:52:47.870 And David, I'll see you between now and then. 01:52:48.220 --> 01:52:48.700 Sounds good. 01:52:48.860 --> 01:52:50.220 Looking forward to it.