The Evolution of Human Longevity with Mike Gurven
2025-09-16 12:00:00.000 +00:00

I'm David Pinsov. Who are you? I am David. Oh, Dave Petrozki. And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast which features actual evolutionary psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. Keep on I was gonna say and also listened to by actual evolutionary psychologists. Yeah, we we listen to it as well. Well I've I've I've gotten a lot of feedback from actual evolutionary psychologists saying that this is actual evolutionary psychology and so the actual extends to a third place where people who are listening, not everyone. Yeah. yeah, for actual evolutionary psychologists. And you know what? You could be an actual evolutionary psychologist even if that's not your day job. So so there may be like three or four places.

We're not going to change the tagline 'cause we have enough trouble with the two elements of Yeah, we're barely holding it together on this one. Easily uh not holding it together at all. So without further ado, let's move on to the next portion of the thing you're about to listen to. Uh we'll see in a second. David, um, that some people describe themselves as old souls, um and some people uh so like they're sort of in a young body, but they feel old. And then some people who uh um feel young but are but are wait, did I get that wrong? We wanna have to be a little bit more than that. Yeah, they feel young were but they actually are old in an old body. Of those two, which are you? Oh, I'm definitely the latter.

I feel like a child in an adult man's body. All right. Well, we're to we're um bringing this up because today we're gonna talk to Mike Gervin. And Mike Irvin, uh, what he studies, and he is an anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara, um, is the lifespan and life stages, um, and really sort of if there's evolved design for the different life stages, which I think is a really interesting and sort of profound and weird question to ask because we often just sort of think about, you know, growth and then development and then wearing out as sort of this ballistic process and not necessarily as like the reflection of evolved design for different life stages. Yeah, absolutely. And Mike Irvin is a pioneer in this space studying uh human development, human life

history, uh, what old people are for and why we evolved to live to old age. We also get into a a bunch of other interesting topics uh in this episode. We talk about um uh heart disease and uh ill health in modern societies and why uh small scale societies might not be susceptible to those health problems. We get into personality variation, we get into uh the demographic transition, why we're not having as many kids, whether we should have paid parental leave. Uh it was a it was a really fun, uh wide-ranging conversation. Yeah, and uh in Mike's book um is gonna be out um in September, on September 16th. So if you're listening on September 16th, please go run out and buy his book. It's called Seven Decades.

Yep. Seven decades. Check it out and uh enjoy the episode. Here we go. Okay, we're recording. Today we are I'm super excited to have uh Professor Mike Gervin, who is in the anthropology department at UC Santa Barbara. Uh anthropology at UCSB is now integrated anthropological science. Mike, is that right? Uh yes and no. Uh Anthropology, you know, as you know, has gone through many different transformations over the years and different institutions. And so there's always been the multiple wings, you know, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and then the other, which is hilariously named biological anthropology, evolutionary anthropology. We were biosocial anthropology for a long time. And then at some point, like around 2008, we we said, all right, we're just gonna be

integrative anthro sciences. So that it's it draws an umbrella kind of cross cutting subdisciplines, right? So cultural anthropology can be scientific too. So it doesn't necessarily always have to be evolutionary. And so yeah, that was the sort of logic, integrative anthrosciences. And so it's called a unit, but the university still doesn't quite understand what units are. And so there's been a push to maybe get rid of the units and just be all one big happy anthropological family again. Right. So yeah, it's like it's a particle, it's a wave, it's both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think we have this issue in psych a little bit. Oh, sorry, David. Just like even where, like, you know, you might be asking social questions, but using

neuroscientific methods. And so I have colleagues who do that in the neuroarea. I have colleagues who do that in the social area. It's like these bureaucratic distinctions that sort of fall apart scientifically. Well, I thought it was hilarious. I I once had a lab, wet lab in the neuroscience building. And I remember at one meeting, I was like, I'm a little uncomfortable. I'm like the only non-neuroscience person here. And someone asked me, Do you study behavior? I'm like, Well, yeah, of course. Oh, then you're a social neuroscientist. All right. Yeah. Yeah. But we will get into the fact that an anthropologist, and of course, there are many anthropologists at UCSB who have wet labs. So we'll get into that.

But David, you were going to say something. Oh, I was just going to do a uh an awkward segue into your uh research on your upcoming book. So you mentioned that uh the anthropology unit is one big happy family. Um, you do research on families and on uh how families interact with one another across generations and horizontally within a generation. Uh and you have a book about that called uh Seven Decades. Um so if you could elaborate, what what are those seven decades? What which decades are you referring to? Uh and why are they important? Why should we care about them? Yeah. Um, well thank you. So it it here it is. They are beautiful. Ooh, who took who took that photograph? Uh I have no idea. It it's people assume it's someone it's a photo I took or it's me like in five years.

But um no, it's a stock photo. Okay. Photo of a guy it's unclear whether he's like smiling or grimacing in pain or there's so it's ambiguous what his emotional like the eyes test, I think. So you're supposed to happy the person is smiling. Yeah. Okay. But some people who tell me, Why do you have such an angry person on the cover? I'm like, okay. I'm getting a bit of angry. But this book just recently came out, is that right? Yeah, well, technically what's it, the ninth? Uh in one week from today, it's it's available. Oh great. We we can publish this. We can just release this. So probably by the time people are hearing this, it will be but so when it what date is it free? Yeah, so uh it's the pre-order people that um I guess are starting to get it right

about now. They're starting to see but sorry you said September, mid-September is September 16th. So one week today uh coming out. It should be I I guess it'll be available at the bookstore. Uh maybe i if I get my act together with editing, maybe I can quick edit this and we'll just but put put you up and um cut cut in line a little bit and post this next week. So we'll we'll try to do that. Yeah. Right. Oh, so sorry, David. You sorry. Yeah, we're you uh so what what are what are these seven decades that you that you've written an entire book about? yeah so uh it's funny you say that I mean a good I guess a good title right should be uh kind of you may have a sense of what I want to say but not exactly.

Uh and depending who you are I've had people write me already and be like are you saying I I shouldn't exist because I'm eighty three years old and beyond seven decades and uh and uh my old one of my old advisors is you know in his early seventies now and so you know he he read this uh like nervously like what do you say? So, yeah, part of the idea about seven decades is essentially an argument that you know our species typical kind of body is kind of built to last about seven decades. And so over our long evolutionary history, we would have had that potential to reach seven decades. Now, notice potential being very different than like an average life lifespan that you would expect to see just because of the way averages are computed.

If you have lots of mortality early in life, that kind of crunches down the average to smaller numbers. And because we're not really good at thinking about averages and what they really mean, you know, even some scholars, not just the public, you know, tend to think that over our long evolutionary history, you know, we lived to about 30, 35, and then that's it. Um, and so yeah, that that's kind of where the seven decades is coming from. So where yeah, I I do see this this misconception. I just see this misconception a lot in like bad pop evolutionary psychology that our ancestors, you know, didn't live beyond thirty-five or or whatever. We had these extremely short lifespans, uh, and that explains all sorts of modern woes.

So I'm curious uh how you would um put this bad idea to rest and and where you think this bad idea came from. yeah. Um I would like to think that hopefully this book will maybe make a little bit of a dent uh against that idea. Um but the thing is the idea itself though, is it's it's understandable maybe where it comes from, right? That uh because it's not just the fact that uh it's not just thinking about human survival, but it is also thinking about fertility, right? So if you've got lots of babies, then all else equal your population pyramid probably gonna look something very triangular. And so the overall percentage of older adults living in the population is gonna be much smaller than even if survival is relatively the same as say it is now, you know,

you're still going to have a pyramid like this. And so it gives that idea that there's just not that very many old people around at any given point. And of course, once you just reduce fertility, the pyramid starts to look more and more rectangular. So it's easier to see a lot more older people. So I think you know, that's kind of contributes to this idea that that it's sort of new because we are living longer, but we're also our fertility has reduced quite substantially uh all over the world. And so we're definitely noticing that there's more and more people, you know, over the age of 65 in our in our society. And so we tend to think, you know, that things are always different now than they than they

used to be. And so we kind of forget that, yes, even though survival has been improving, uh, it's not the case that just those folks didn't really ever exist. You know, and I think there's other arguments, I think, why this perpetuates. Um oftentimes when you see the life expectancy was like 25 or 30, that's all you hear about. You don't really see any more data or hear any more information. And certainly the skeletal record's pretty spotty, and so it's hard to even age skeletons that might be much older. Um everyone loves to quote Hobbes, right? That life was nasty, brutish and short. So again, all these kinds of ideas sort of perpetuate this this idea that this we really didn't have old age and that and pro and particularly the problems of old

age that we now see in the news every other day. You know, are so how are we going to pay for Social Security? Where are all the caregivers going to come from? Alzheimer's is going to skyrocket. You know, and again, these are all sort of portrayed as new ideas and new problems. And so part of the push that I'm trying to make with this book is that it's a quantitative difference. It's not a qualitative difference. That we've always had old people with us. True, survival has improved. And so we are living longer now than we've ever lived, you know, before in the history of our species. And there are more older people around than has ever been before. But it's a more than as opposed to there wasn't and now there

is. And I do think that difference matters because this is where the anthropology and the evolutionary part comes in. Is that you know, I believe that part of the reason for our species success is having middle-age and older age life stages as part of our species typical design. And so I want I'm trying to harness some of those arguments for, you know, we did it once throughout our evolutionary history. And so let's try to take uh what we you know, those adaptive benefits of being alive at middle and later ages. And let's kind of transform the way we think of the older adults as a burden and think of that as untapped potential, untapped opportunity. So that's sort of the the push that the the book makes to kind of bring

home the contemporary message. Yeah. I think it's the the idea. I mean, we've talked in this podcast so far about design-mindedness and thinking about evolution producing design. A lot of the design we've talked about has been psychological, sort of real, real-time contingent design, or even, you know, something like how does a plant grow? Or, you know, how does the the mind respond to a certain situation or motivate certain behavior? What you're talking about is something I think we've alluded to, but maybe not explicitly. And I think it's a subtle and profound point, which is the idea that the stages of life, just in the same way that, like a butterfly, uh, you know, is a is a life stage compared to

a chrysalis compared to a caterpillar, in the same way, there can be design for stages of the life. And it's not that anyone's stage is sort of just a um a purgatory, but it is its own, it's its own point, right? And it has certain design features. Um, so in the same way we can think about the contingent design of software, we can think about the contingent design features of lifespan stages. Is that sort of what you're talking about? Yeah, that's that's exactly there. Uh and especially because I do th I'm glad you say life stage, because you know, some skeptics have said, well, like a little pushback. Everyone's talking about you know menopause, postmenopausal lifespan as like somewhat human uniqueness.

Uh but we know that there's postmenopausal kind of survival in other species. Um, but postmenopausal survival is not the same thing as thinking about an actual like life stage. So given that you survive to adulthood, you know, the chance, even in a hunt-and-gathering lifestyle that you make it to menopause is way higher than in any of these species that you typically see some postmenopausal um survival. So I definitely do think that you know there's a clear life stage there. And it's exactly right. Part of what I'm trying to argue is well a lot of it does focus on some of the the physical and physiological, uh but the idea is that with the design of about seven decades, that should impact everything.

Not just you know immune function, but the mind as well and how we think. So I actually do uh you know Dave, I've dabbled in psychology here and there. And so I had fun kind of tapping back into thinking about uh some of those kinds of um aspects of the mind and behavior in those different life stages. Yeah. And even, I mean, the physical stuff, I hope we get to because I think there's just so much here that I think is so different. And I assume this is part of why you wrote the book, is because there's just so so little knowledge, you know, beyond this sort of like eat raw meat and run barefoot and you're gonna die when you're 30. So that's sort of you know what an evolutionary approach says about physiology, right?

Yeah. Well, this is where I kind of thought that I did have something to say. I mean, I think like like you, uh my discipline doesn't necessarily reward us for write we I don't need to write a book, right? I don't need the book for tenure, I don't need the book for promotion. Um but at the same time, you know, I've written enough papers that wonderful, a lot of people incredible the number of papers. Like they're very prolific. Well you and eight other people maybe have read them, right? But like you know, you're you're getting a limited audience with any paper, n even if it's in the top journal. Um let alone just the the little you know, increasingly reduced word counts. It's hard to tell a comprehensive story.

So it's true that there's elements in the book that are like peppered throughout some of my papers, but I think I wanted to do something that isn't in any of the papers and really build out this kind of argument and then do apply it to our situation today. And it was a little scary because entering the aging longevity health market, you know, it's a glutted market for sure. Uh but I think or hope that it's doing something a little bit different that these other books haven't done, right? So I'm not really telling you 10 ways, you know, to extend your life, right? Um, I'm not telling you what you should and shouldn't eat and all that. Uh although I do have a little list towards the end where I I cave a little bit, but at

least the list sort of makes sense in light of everything else I've talked about. And you know, and it isn't, you know, I'm not a molecular biologist, so I'm not focused, you know, on you know, mTOR and Metformin, and that, you know, we're on the precipice of living, you know, a thousand years. So it's not that kind of argument either. You know, and I do think, you know, I don't want to put these other approaches, books down. I think the world is a big place. We need all of these kinds of books, and we we need the visionaries. But I also think we need to kind of look back at where we've come from. And you know, part of the traditional medical establishment is is basically, as you all all both know, is to ignore ev our evolutionary past, our evolutionary history.

And some people have actually gone and said explicitly that if we want to study aging and lifespan, we need to look at the lowest mortality populations because those are the ones that have eliminated all the sort of extraneous causes of death, and it's all aging. And so that's where you have to look and focus. You know, and maybe for this audience, that seems, you know, how could you just ignore our natural history? How could you ignore, you know, everything that w are that about our lives and how we've lived? And so that's again part of the push here is to kind of shine light on there. And I do think, you know, I I probably wouldn't have been able to write this book, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, because now that you know there there are clear lessons of

things we have learned that we would never have found if we didn't kind of shine the flashlight uh outside the context of you know low mortality industrialized West. Yeah. Uh an example. Could you give an example maybe of like what's a good because I mean, you know, people I think are their interest has peaked in their sort of thinking, okay, so what what what have we learned? Uh and maybe then we can get into like how you've how you know the backstory of where you got the data, but like, is there an example of sort of what we've learned that we wouldn't have known 10 or 15 years ago or definitely wouldn't have gotten if we didn't take uh an evolutionary um natural fertility, for example, or you know, hunter forager, hunter

horticultural population. Sure. Well an easy one, I guess, because I don't want to give away all the reveals. Oh yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Spoiler alert. Yeah. But the, I mean the easiest one is just the the very fact that, you know, hunter-gatherers don't get heart disease, right? And don't seem to have Alzheimer's dementia either. And there's been suspicions of this before, but I think part of the argument was always that, well, people didn't live long enough to get them. And that if they only lived longer, then they would get them. And in fact, you know, some of the really exciting work, uh cardiologists and radiologists who who, you know, anything they can get their hands on, they throw on under a CT scanner and mummies in particular.

And by looking at mummies in different parts of the world, you know, they found evidence of calcification in in different arterial beds. And it wasn't just like the the rich fat cats, you know, the Egyptian mummies, but even like in the Aleutian Islands, a few cases, and uh in Peru, Incan mummies, and so which would have been more kind of everyday people. Uh and so that was pretty interesting and revealing. Um of course we don't know what they died of, but we know that there might have been some calcification in their arteries. Uh and so that that sort of led to this idea that well heart disease and particular its most pernicious form, atherosclerosis, uh that we tend to see, um, that that's been with us forever.

Um, and which is kind of grim, but it also it it gives a certain view of what aging is, too. You know, there's aging, biological aging, there's diseases of aging, you know, there's lots of arguments back and forth. Are those one and the same? But if you think heart disease and atherosclerosis is kind of one and the same with aging as a universal, then first of all, it's what we have to look forward to, right? Um, and it also makes it a little bit unavoidable. And so, and certainly we know that Dave, you're a healthy guy. Uh, you probably eat well and you're move your body uh quite a bit. Yeah. I'm on an upswing, but boy, I've yeah, I've been the most inactive I've ever been since since having a child.

It's wonderful, but yeah. Well sitting here, see this is why I was standing on the balance board here during this podcast. Yeah. Then my head was cut off. So I I'm off the balance board. Okay. Sorry. We're we're we're reducing your lifespan. Sorry. Thank you for the sacrifice. Yeah. Well it's just that we we we know that, you know, being acting healthier will make you healthier, but still it's like potential lightning. It it it can strike us, uh and and then we're we're doomed to to suffer from it. And so what we found, uh, you know, we started like lots of other people had with just basic risk factors, you know, looking at blood pressure, cholesterol in the blood, you know, the easy things basically.

And you know, those are pretty revealing. You know, blood pressure was kind of low, didn't seem to increase with age, cholesterol was low. Uh so all that would suggest that maybe there's not a whole lot of heart disease. But again, if you don't always know if like predicts like, you know, in different types of environments. And so what you know, making it kind of next level, um, we actually did uh what's called a ankle brachial index, which is to basically look at the blood pressure in your arms and your ankles. You know, and if all is good, blood should be flowing nicely all around your body. If it's sort of getting slowing down, obstructions, it might differ between your arms and your legs.

And so, you know, looking at the blood pressure throughout the body, uh, you can basically assess if you've got peripheral arterial disease in your arms, you know, blockages in your arms, your legs, and that's kind of like subclinical atherosclerosis. So it could be like you know, a decade out before you might hit see it hit the coronaries. And we found not a single person had you know below the cutoff level on that measure. Okay, also pretty instructive. And then going the the next route, the next level, uh to really be sure, because again, from some of this work, we were starting to get a little bit of the attention of like the cardiology world and such, but not really, because you have to kind

of use their methods and their uh technology. Uh and so this is where we actually teamed up with some of those very same radiologists and cardiologists I mentioned that use CT scanners to to look at calcification in mummies. And and we did this in Bolivia. So, you know, I could pour all your listeners and all the different ways it takes to get people from remote Amazonian villages, you know, to a place, you know, it's not even the town closest to these villages, but a somewhat distant town where uh the French government had donated a CT scanner some years ago. And so collaborating with the hospital and social workers there, uh, we're able to use that CT scanner and through uh imaging of people, we

could actually look directly at their coronary arteries. And and the amazing thing was that basically we focused mostly like people 45 years of age and up. So it wasn't the case that, well, there are no people again who are old. Yeah, and it was a decent sample, close to a thousand people uh over the age of 45, which by small scale society standards, that's really big. Yeah. Um, and 85% of people had absolutely no calcification in their coronary arteries. And at first, you know, I was like, okay, this just reifies what we saw before, but I didn't quite realize the import of that because you know, comparing it to every other population level you know data that existed, uh Way more people in way more places, including healthy places like you know, Japan with much

higher life expectancy than we do, uh, there's more calcification in the coronary arteries. And the reason why calcification is such an important measure, because certainly in normal healthy people, it's like the best predictor that you will have heart disease and that there will be you know the the heart events uh down the line. And so yeah, that was sort of an indication, wow, it's not just like one or two healthy people that are eating right and physically active. This is like at a whole population level, this whole population has basically avoided atherosclerosis. And even of the people who had it, they were over 80 years of age and very likely are going to die of something not at all related to atherosclerosis.

So kind of like the mummies that may have had some calcification probably died from something else. You know, Otsy, the the Iceman, and the Tyrolean Iceman, uh had some calcification in his arteries, but you know, had also had an arrow kind of shot in his back. So, you know, probably that might be tomato tomato. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think that's kind of a s you know, a an interesting, kind of surprising thing that then it it uh it begged all those questions. You know, well, what is it about a hunter gatherer lifestyle that can lead to a a life without heart disease, you know, even well into your seventies and eighties. Um, and and then it does bring up some of the all the some of the fads, of course, but it

really, you know, uh uh forces us to really just kind of, all right, can we actually answer this question scientifically rather than you know whatever hobby horse that you happen to focus on, um, you know, that that must be the magic bullet. And so and so that uh you know opened up a whole kind of new wave of of work too, to you know, to try to piece apart can we actually look at all these different pieces that we think might matter, like what you eat, how you move your body, uh other infectious critters that are invading our body, our social lives and the level of stress that we have, you know, are we living alone or are we living in, you know, tight communities? You know, all those elements we basically just have been trying to build out over the last

decade to try to see ultimately what what kind of matters and what doesn't. Well I I would imagine that uh many of our listeners are uh very curious about the question uh how can I not get heart disease? I'm certainly curious about that question myself as an ape who would very much uh like to not die uh prematurely. I'd like to, you know, at at minimum live seven decades, hopefully more. Uh but, you know, heart disease is probably uh one of the things that might prevent that from happening. So uh based on all this research, I mean, first of all, it's it's a it's a a fascinating finding that we don't see the same prevalence of heart disease uh in these populations that you study. Um but I you know I gotta know what what are they doing right that I'm not doing or that

we're not doing? What how can we uh be like them? What do you think is is the answer there? Yeah. Uh well certainly, you know, you could just walk into traffic and get hit by a bus and you won't die. That's one one way answer. But uh that won't get you to seven decades though. No. Uh yeah. So I mean, good question. You know, the short, quick answer is I don't have a hundred percent answer. And and part of that is because it is complicated. Things don't change one at a time in in the way we would ideally want to do as you know an experimentalist. And and so on one level, even if you measure almost everything, uh we're gonna be limited by what we can say from one population. And so that's why actually we've been working with another population, the Mosaten,

who culturally, ethnically, linguistically similar to the Chimane, but given where they live, uh they've just been exposed to missionaries and uh somewhat a little bit more period type of lifestyle. Everyone speaks Spanish, there's stores. Uh and so they kind of represent a little bit what the future of Chimane could look like with increasing modernization, uh, which is sort of like a nice, dare I say, you know, quasi-experimental, you know, what would happen if different aspects of lifespan were changing. And what is interesting is that the most attention also have very little heart disease, um, even though they're drinking a lot more soda, but they're still pretty pretty darn physically active.

Uh, because even though they're making money, they're all they're also they're not making money from podcasts, right? They're making money from not yet. We're we're in that club too. So that's right. We gotta get some more books on that shelf. Yes, exactly. Um they're making money from selling crops from their fields. So which is still involving physical labor. Now it's interesting, the last five years I've seen an uptick uh I was just in Bolivia a few weeks ago. And, you know, now a lot more people have, you know, weed whackers and, you know, other, you know, new forms of technology that is going to cut down some of those labor costs so they can increase their producti their agricultural productivity, but using their

body less. Um, so it'll be interesting to see if the physical activity might start to shift. But what I would say, you know, the the one thing that cross-cuts, maybe this isn't too much of a of a reveal, but there there's nothing super special about the Chimane per se as far as small-scale societies go. The only thing is that they just happen to be the only one that went under a CT scanner. You know, if we if we did the same to the Hadza, the Ace, but the Hadza maybe be 88% for all we know without without coronary calcification. And even though technically, you know, the chimane, as you know, having animal and plant domestication are mismatched from a hunting and gathering lifestyle. Herders, you know, are a little bit mismatched.

But across all these different small-scale subsistence societies, which very likely don't have much heart disease, or if they do at much lower rates than we do, physical activity definitely seems to be kind of central to all aspects of their lifestyle. And not and there's a good and bad to that. You know, the the good is like, whoa, physical activity. That that's not expensive, right? But the bad might be, well, you know, didn't we, you know, we evolved to sort of be efficient foragers, right? So why should I have to move my body unless I absolutely have to? doesn't that make much more sense? And and of course, yes, it does. Uh but the good news there is it's not like you have to run a marathon every couple days,

right? That that a lot of the physical activity when you actually put accelerometers on hunter gatherers uh and farmers, uh it's yeah, there is more vigorous activity than probably you or me, but not a huge amount more. The real big difference is just there's a lot of moderate light activity. So it's just it's literally the not being sedentary, but but you know, light activity, which means even you know, you could do a walking podcast, right? And and then just by walking, uh you're getting you know much more activity. It is true, people ask, is there a magic number? Your listeners probably maybe know that the 10,000 for 10,000 steps was sort of made up at the time for marketing reasons. But uh the Chamana tend to get about 17,000 steps a day.

And you know, that's that is a bit tough to get with our everyday kind of lifestyle. Uh you have to work at it a little bit. But you know, at least some of the empirical studies seem to show there are kind of saturated benefits, you know, beyond 10,000 steps anyway. And so it's not like you have to get 17,000 steps. Uh, but I do think increasing our physical activity, uh, and not just in the you know, at the end of the weekend I go on, I go to the gym, but just incorporating it into everyday activities, walks around the block, um parking when you have to drive, you know, park in Isle of Vista, Dave, and then you have to walk all the way over, you know, to to campus. Although I always see you walking back and forth to to IV for for lunch like three or four

times a day. So I think you're getting probably a decent number of stats. Actually, it's interesting because I used to drive my son to preschool and now he's going to elementary school. And where I'm biking everywhere, I don't drive anymore to a first approximation, except for grocery shopping. And that's the way it used to be in Germany. And I can say just sitting in the car for about a half hour to 40 minutes a day versus just being on a bike, at least now that I'm, you know, in my mid forties, uh, it's a enormous difference. And that's not a marathon. That's not even, you know, it's um, you know, my my pulse is elevated, but um, but no, anecdotally, like just getting some activity. But it's also an example.

I have a watch that tracks steps. And when I went back to Berlin, uh, where there's public transportation. So, you know, it's a 10-minute walk to the public transportation. Then you're on public transportation, but you're moving around. And then, you know, I was getting like easily 15,000, 17,000 steps here in Santa Barbara, which is beautiful year-round weather. Uh, you know, there's not a lot of places to walk to. It's car culture. It's like institutionally, you know, it's like unpleasant to be a pedestrian in most places in the US, unless you live in New York like David did, or in a city, um, you know, or if you're like living in Europe or somewhere. And so this also sounds like um uh institutional design of the

environment situation where you have to make the environment walkable or pedestrian friendly. Um I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, and even going b again, going back to our you know, putting all the blame on us, you know, that we lack willpower. You know, why can't you just fit in a little bit more extra activity? You know, where it seems to be going against all of our kind of impulses. Uh that's really hard. You know, there's gonna be some select few who are gonna be able to do it. But I do think, and and this is kind of the approach I have with with the book, is you know, thinking about the the the the majority of folks that you know either don't have elite memberships to gyms or don't necessarily have a drive to want to

be physically active all the time and and I mean pay so much attention to nutrition that you know you're obsessed with what you put in your body and all that stuff. And so this is where I really, yeah, strongly agree that we have to structure our communities in ways that the easier option is the healthier option. From the simplest things as like, you know, what's at eye level, you know, at the grocery store, to yeah, side put in a few sidewalks and bike lanes, and you can really instantly transform at a population level, community level, people's people's health. And there are initiatives to do this. Probably all heard about the blue zones. you know, there's like these blue zone communities where communities buy in.

But as you can imagine, it's it's not it's not just local governments, it's it's local businesses, you know, you know, schools, uh across the board, you know, with transportation, everything to basically create a structured environment where the healthier alternatives, you know, particularly in in terms of diet, food, you know, and then of course you want to be able to walk outside and not inhale lots of pollution as well. And so that's again also pretty critical. But you know, some of the initial experiments with doing that, like in Minnesota, uh there was like a noticeable shift in people's BMI and people's cholesterol and blood pressure. And even if you were just thinking, you know, from the economic cost perspective, that

level of prevention, you know, has huge cost savings writ large through the public health system. So I actually think that's it's it's the smart way to go thinking about the future, uh, as opposed to just thinking only about our health, but then this with this idea that, yeah, but it's gonna be so expensive and there's all these trade-offs. It's like, yeah, it is gonna be expensive, but it'll actually start paying for itself uh through a lot of health cost savings. Right, yeah, pennywise and pound foolish. And that's a really interesting, I mean, this is also where taking a scientific approach to humans is really interesting. Cause what you're essentially saying, I think, is that it's almost an urban planning issue

for uh our health, right? And that we're sort of not designing our environments. I mean, these environments were not designed at all for for thinking about sort of well, what is the person's experience or what's the like effect on their body was for for other issues. And of course those other issues matter, but like we can integrate those other concerns too. Exactly. And and and and certainly well beyond heart disease, right? I mean, just think about you know any city that has green space for the and ones you know that don't have any green space. I mean it makes a a huge difference. Uh you know being in parks and having that ability to just kind of unwind a little bit from from the grind. Uh yeah.

So I think across the board for just living well, uh having walkable, livable communities that, yeah, are designed more for people, a little bit less for cars, uh, would be yeah. Yeah, and and there's a good example of taking an evolutionary approach. We talked about this earlier in the podcast, but we kind of got away from it. But it's sort of one of the themes has been uh if you understand human the design of the human phenotype, it it allows you to create a more humane uh context for people to be in, and this is a good example of that. It and not just health, but also just like well-being and feeling like, oh yeah, I feel comfortable and safe, and I'm not a grumpy asshole. Um, you know, yeah.

Yeah. Well, and that's yeah, so a whole other kind of big chunk of the book is is about the quality of life and not just the quantity of life. Uh, and so and that's where you know the the the thing I mentioned about sort of a rethink about you know what are the roles of older adults and and and again thinking about hunter-gatherers, you know, there's no such thing as retirement, right? That's something that was like literally, you know, invented, a formal retirement. Uh and not to say that people's activities don't shift over the life course. I mean, of course they do. Uh and it's true that even some people will no longer hunt, for example. I know plenty of older men that no longer hunt, uh, but they still might do some farming.

Um, and even the ones that don't do the more difficult aspects of farming, like chopping down big trees, they still go out there with a little machete and clear some of the underbrush. And even the ones who don't do that will at least help with the harvest or help with the burning. So there's still economic contributions. And then, of course, there's contributions across so many different other domains of family and community life. You know, from your advisors, your leaders, your shamans, uh conflict mediators, your lawyers essentially. There's so many different ways that uh you know we humans with our big brains, you know, make themselves useful uh in later ages. Um and so that kind of reshift uh happens,

but it's it's not a quick just flipping off the switch, you know, and and if we're so career oriented and then all of a sudden you just flip off the switch from your career, it's like what's left? You know, you invested so much in your career that you didn't have a chance to invest in your community. You had kids, but your kids are grown and left. Uh so you're not inter you know dispersed with that community anymore. And so then it's like this big gulf, you know, and many, many more of us now, especially we're having fewer kids, we live alone. So now we're seeing, you know, uh just a a a big shift in the social structure and just the approach that people are thinking about and you know what do they want out of those later years.

And so this is where I do think, you know, actually some of these ideas, um, you know, with like so many things, you know, come back to uh tube and cosmides, um that one paper of theirs on the banker's paradox, uh, you know, in some ways it inspired a paper I wrote 20 years ago uh about hunter-gatherers and food sharing and how you know making it so that others will care for you when you're sick or injured, not just out of the generosity of their heart, but because if you're not there to be kind of productive and useful, then they themselves will actually suffer. So it's in their interest to help you. So and it's a similar kind of a logic, I think, with at late ages. If you're if you're shifting and you're retiring, and all of a sudden you're, you know,

you're part of these embedded, you know, communities where you're doing a lot and contributing. And if you all of a sudden you're not contributing, Okay, people might love you and have compassion for you and might help you a little bit, but up to what point? You know, up to what level of need are people going to still um watch over you? And especially when they have they themselves might have seven kids. Uh, and so there's a lot of competing demand on people's time and resources. So I do think even in you know hunter-gatherer societies, there is this sort of impetus to you know think about what you should be doing with your life and how you should you be using your time in ways that others see as value added.

And what's amazing is that the same ideas apply in our society, right? No one wants to feel like they're a burden, right? It's like the number one thing older people say to their kid, I don't want to be a burden. Um, and and so even though, like, all else equal, if you're receiving and not giving, whoa, isn't that great? It's like, no, you're you're in a position where in fact we even found this. If you're in a position where you're kind of a net giver, net your your net transfers to people is positive, you're way happier with your life than if you're in the position where you're receiving more than you're giving out. Um and so I do think even in the case where you know we we don't necessarily need a community to survive, our minds are still shaped in a way that

we even though I have all my economic needs met, I still feel like I need a community. I still feel like I need others to need me and to belong to someone, uh to others in a in a substantial way. And so I think taking all those ideas to heart really forces a kind of a rethink of what should retirement look like? Should there be retirement? Should there be partial retirement, phased-out retirements? You know, there's already conversations like this all over the place uh, and you know, fierce pushbacks like in France, you know, just changing it by a couple years and massive protests. Uh, you know, and and some of that is even just based on the fact that, well, maybe a 65-year-old today is sort of as healthy as you know an

83-year-old, you know, back in the past. And so once you're 65, maybe you could continue working until you're 68 and then retire. So there's that whole element of the conversation. But there's also just you know, there's now, you know, these sort of subcultures of thinking about you know your these encore years and shifting from your first career to your second career, your third career. Uh, and that, and because we are living long enough, you know, it's not like your life is over. You can and those are like reboots. Like I've always wanted to write poetry, but I, you know, I had to pay for, you know, the bills and and support my family growing up. And so, you know, I was just doing business.

And now I can do poetry. Now I can do community theater. Uh and so there's all those possibilities as well. But you know, I think one kind of core element to all of that seems to be the social relevance, right? It's usually not like now I can finally make tons of money, you know, with crypto coin. No. It's like it usually involves some aspect of of contributing. You know, the what is it you psychologists call uh generativity? The you know the Ericsson. Yeah, I don't know. We wouldn't we're Dave and I are like the last people who invent that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's the last that's not the psychic kind of psychology word to it. We don't talk about that kind of psychology on the podcast. Oh, that's I think that's the Maslow stuff.

Yeah. It has an interesting history in Southern California hippie movements, but anyway, yeah, Erlin. Yeah. Well, anyway, that that was I guess going back to that original question about lessons and and rethinking and sort of harnessing what we know and have learned about how we've lived over most of revolutionary history can be insightful when we think about whether it's something like a heart disease, like heart disease, versus even just our our general well-being and thinking about how to spend our later years. Yeah. I think that's a really important and and beautiful insight that we evolved to not want to be a burden on others, that we that we really uh fear and loathe uh a situation where we are taking in uh more than we are giving out.

Um and we really uh value and appreciate situations where we are giving out more than we're taking in. Uh and it makes you know uh very clear uh evolutionary logic that if you're in a place where you're receiving more than you're giving, well that's that's a really bad place to be in uh from an evolutionary perspective. Uh that means that you you are you know if there's a famine or or or a flood or or or or a drought or whatever, uh you're gonna be the first to go. Uh, and that's not where you want to be uh uh from a Darwinian perspective. Uh for the and for the same reason, the opposite end of the continuum, where you are a a vital resource to the community, where you're really valuable in providing crucial uh

knowledge and services, that's a really good place to be uh from an evolutionary perspective. So it makes uh really uh a beautiful sense that we would have this kind of psychology. Um, And I think it's an important point for people studying the psychology of well-being and what we ought to expect to be correlated with psychological well-being. That said, I think I might have a bit more of a pessimistic take on the ability of us to continue to be valuable contributors into old age. I think there is something about the structure of our society that is preventing that from happening. I think our culture is changing way more rapidly than it has changed in ancestral environments. And I think the type of the types of knowledge that are valuable to others have become way

more specialized and niche fied uh than than they would have been in ancestral environments. So if I'm getting to old age now, uh the lessons and insights that I acquired during my youth are in all likelihood not going to be relevant to my children and grandchildren. They're going to be out of date. The software I learned when I was a young person is probably going to be updated. And there are different kinds of software now. They're going to be di society will be different. Even the career I'm in, you know, my my dad's a lawyer. His advice for how to be a good lawyer might not translate into being a good evolutionary psychologist. There are just non transferable knowledge between different domains of specialization.

And uh even within his own uh realm of being a lawyer, I'm sure a lot of his knowledge and insight uh that was valuable when he was a young man, uh, is probably not as applicable to uh young lawyers entering the profession today because we live in a very different legal environment, a very different cultural environment. We have the internet and social media, which has changed our society in innumerable ways. We have AIs that can write uh legal briefings now. So it's a completely different environment. And so I think we're living in an age where uh our elders have never been uh so worthless. Um I think we're at we're at peak uh elders being useless. Oh okay, boomer, that mentality uh uh really makes sense in terms of if you think about the

economic structure of our society. And it's really unprecedented because uh as far as I'm aware, in most small-scale hunter, forager, horticultural societies, elders tend to receive a lot of respect and reverence and they're looked to for wisdom and knowledge. In our society, it's quite the opposite. Uh uh old people are often ignored, dismissed. There's the okay boomer mentality. We're much more obsessed and excited by youth and what the young people are doing, and young young people are cool, and old people are not. Um it's a very different, unprecedented environment that we're living in. And I don't see a lot of ways to to really change that without completely overhauling our economic system.

So what do you think about that pessimistic take? Um well thanks for that question. I actually think that's uh a a a perfect representation I think what I think a lot of people might might think. Um and I have yeah, a number of responses. F first of all, even in hunter-gatherers society and from the ethnographic literature, in almost every society, you see some elements of yeah, respect and honor for the elderly, at the same time that you see sometimes poor treatment of the elderly. Just like in our society, we kind of think about old age as prestige and honor, but then youth-oriented, you know, how do people actually get treated? So I think that sort of dichotomy has always sort of existed. And that age itself doesn't necessarily get you anything.

Going back to this idea about being useful, you know, it's easy to focus on, you know, the world leaders who are all, you know, the average age of a world president, you know, country president is like 62 right now. So, and and that's an average. So there's you know, some that are you know much older than that, but that they might not represent everyone in their age class, right? And so I do think going back to this idea about okay, how can one be valuable and useful? Uh, and so even in hunter-gather societies, there is a point. You know, in fact, maybe in the evolutionary world, because we're used to thinking about the grandmother hypothesis and these other ways that we can be adaptively, you know,

indirectly reproducing through through care and other forms of of trans resource transfers and such. Uh, but even with those arguments, remember there there's got to be a point at which your net transfers are zero, right? And that's when if you're still alive, you're probably not going to be alive for very much longer. And there's various ways that people go from being alive to not being alive. Uh, and some of it includes actually direct geronticide. Right? So, in a from our cultural context, you know, murdering old people doesn't seem compatible with respect and honor uh of the elderly. But in the actual context in which it occurs, it's actually, you know, a deeply personal experience. It's basically some of the same issues that we're dealing with now with euthanasia, and at

what point is enough enough. And not just with terminal illness, right? But thinking about, you know, okay, I'm done. So I think there is that element that has existed even in hunter and gathering contexts. And then the next step of what I would say is there is a difference between Thinking about people in their 90s and thinking about people even in their 60s. Because from what you're saying, my kids already think I'm old. Uh what is my my son was trying to trick me into doing a six-seven thing. Uh right. See, Dave doesn't even know it yet. Your kid, if your kid was a little bit older, you would know that, right? And so you're already obsolete in your 40s. And which is true, taking it to the extreme, it's not just the elderly who are o

obsolete, but you know, we're obsolete by age 30, you know. And but I I I think um Right. And so it's true that the the rate of population growth is highest at some of those latest ages, but uh just in terms of sheer numbers, the biggest chunk of like elder population is going to be in that young old category. Right. So like like 50, 75. And that's the that's still the age range that even in hunter-gatherers, people are contributing uh in valuable ways, right? And so so I'm not really talking about you know the people who are 95 need to kind of get out there and and make a difference, you know, and it's true that that that aspect still might carry more burden than benefit, you know, that of course will depend on a whole

bunch of factors. But it's not like everyone 60 and up is going to be all burdened. So there's that element too, that I do think the ages matter. And so the kinds of things a sixty year old can do might be very different than what a ninety year old can do, given how we live today. And then the final point about all of that, yes, society is changing super rapidly, and you know, knowledge becomes obsolete very rapidly. But I think there's certain skills that even in the with ChatGPT and Wikipedia and you know rapidly changing norms and fads, that a little bit of wisdom and experience are just very valuable. Um and you know, from just simple advice, you know, to say your grandchildren, uh, to even, you know, there's been sort of a, I don't know if we call it a

movement, but you know, Chip Connolly and others sort of harness this idea that, yeah, older people have a lot to contribute, but they can't do it by themselves. So bring them in as partners, working with some of the young folks who have you know much more recent knowledge about say technology and the way things are working today, combined with some of the wisdom and experience of older folks, and then all of a sudden, you know, it can make a huge difference. I mean, just even think about you know some of your academic advisors. The academic climate today is a lot more competitive than when our advisors, you know, just whenever they thought they would just like go onto the market and get a job and and but

you wouldn't probably say that your advisors still have nothing to contribute given that the academic market has shifted. There's still a lot of wisdom and experience when it comes to the day-to-day type things. So I think we just need to be kind of creative and and create those niches where there are still some contributions, but we can't necessarily expect the same exact contributions that we would expect probably from people in their 20s and 30s as we might expect for people in their 70s. Does that does that make sense? So you know, I I still think at the end of the day, and there's been a lot of increasing activity towards even just like mentorship programs and and things that, you know, trying to kill two birds, one stone.

There's still plenty of literacy and you know, wayward youth that that you know will get themselves into trouble. And then they're partnered with older adults, kind of mentorship programs, uh, kind of like big brother, big sister, but with older adults that you know not only reduces loneliness in older adults and gives them a sense of meaning and purpose by contributing to their community, but you're also you know, preventing future crime, you're improving literacy, improving their job prospects down the road. And those those types of arrangements are win-win. And but the better thing, even better, would be like, well, is that only a volunteer thing? Like, I still need to eat, you know, and I can't rely on my social security and I don't

have savings. And so, right, can we create a system where there it's not necessarily for free, uh, but that these things are monetized, there's you know exchange economy. Uh I I just think we haven't really been thinking about those things as much, nearly as much, as what's the numerical breakthrough that's going to extend my life to 150 years of age. And so, yeah, I guess I would say part of the shift of this book by looking back, it's it's it's a way of looking forward, but but focusing on different things. Maybe we're gonna live to 150 um through you know other folks doing their work, but that's not happening anytime soon. And given the world we do live in, how can we kind of maximize not just quantity but the

quality of life? And and part of the I think the important bit too is that no one's really just altruistic towards older people. Right. But but the idea is that by integrating older people, you're actually helping everybody of all ages. And and th that's the idea. Yeah, I like that. It's you're finding the value in people and respecting it them, and it's not a handout in the same way you said, you know, people won't want to feel like they're actually contributing. I agree with David too. I think that's really profound because there's a lot of sort of rhetoric about we have to really be careful about the moral hazard of giving anything to anybody because left unchecked, people will just want to be sponges.

Um and it sounds like what you're saying is that um that and that that that that view is often framed as sort of like a uh a very steel, open-eyed, sort of no no Pollyanna view of human nature, right? Where like people will just free ride the hell out of things, and it's actually human nature. And and it sounds like what you're saying is um that's that is an oversimplification. And in fact, people want to feel like they're contributing. Exactly. You know, and there's always gonna be some small percentage of that. But but that's easy to contain when you have the vast majority, you know, paying their taxes, basically, uh in in in a variety of different ways. And and from so much of what you know studies that have been done, we do know that people

want to do more, but there's always obstacles. Like I live, like I live in a place and I can't get to the elementary school. How am I gonna I can't drive anymore? How am I actually gonna get there? And so again, this becomes goes back to the urban planning elements of you know you know how many people that are with you know with with big house older people with big empty houses and then you have all these like college students that can't find a place to live. Exactly. It's like you know put the peanut butter with the chocolate. Yeah. It's a coordination problem. It's a coordination problem. Yeah. Yeah. But I think just having those conversations and brainstorming those things and le is a first step for really trying to help kind of implement that.

And that that's what I'm hoping uh happens with with well, not just with the book, but you know, as we kind of move forward. Um yeah. Well, you at the beginning of the episode, you mentioned um a really interesting and profound fact about the difference between modern uh civilization and and what we see in small-scale hunter, forager, horticulturalist societies, which is that fertility has gone down quite a bit uh in the modern world. Um and you you talked about, you know, the the pyramidal structure of society where, you know, it used to be that um there were relatively few old people and and lots of young people because fertility was so high. But now we have more of a cylindrical or tower-like structure where there's evenly

distributed numbers of old people and young people because we're just not having as many kids. And from a Darwinian perspective, this is a really huge and important puzzle because you might expect the opposite from an evolutionary perspective, that in times of unprecedented wealth and abundance, you would expect fertility to boom, that we would be having more kids. And yet the opposite has happened. And you know, there's been tons of you know empirical and theoretical work on this. It's known as the demographic transition, it's sometimes called a paradox. Um, so I'm curious, uh, given your knowledge of human development, human life history, human psychology, human health, uh, do you have a take on on this uh

profound change uh in human population structure? Is there a particular theoretical approach that you favor? Uh uh what is what is your take on this question? I guess you know these days now you know we've shifted from you know worries about the population bomb and the population boom and to you know population collapse, right? And so we're starting to see uh you know, a lot of you know op-eds you know about this kind of thing, and of course the Elon Musk's trying to you know do their part. Uh and you know, I think um well, on one level, the the fact that you have a population pyramid like this, you know, probably never before in history have we had this many generations sort of coexistent, which which is kind of cool.

Like, wow, what are all the potential? So it's not even just like grandparents with kids, it's like great grandparents, you know, great great grandparents potentially. So so that's kind of wild in terms of thinking about those possibilities. Um, you know, there's economists and others who've kind of been working on, you know, should we be as panicked as we are? Uh are we just being selfish by not wanting kids? You know, I have a I have a colleague who thinks we're selfish if we do want kids because of you know r equals point five. I was like, clearly that person's never had a kid because you know. Um but you know, I I do think you know, it's an older idea within sort of the evolutionary perspectives on

the demographic transition, right? That we're not just built to kind of maximize the total number of babies, right? But but in terms of you know maximizing our sort of genetic income stream, uh you know, it is the you know is it the case, or at least psychologically, that we feel that we need to provide in a certain way uh for kids? And so we're we don't seem to be hitting that diminishing returns on on the few kids that we do have. Right? So if we were, then you'd hit diminishing returns and you'd have another child. Uh but you know, coupled with the fact that it takes a whole bunch, you know, like alpha in the evolutionary models, like the age of first pre first birth, uh, you know, that's sort of the shift from growth to reproduction, right?

But but for us now, I mean, if if that's happening at age 30, right, that's clearly beyond just somatic growth. That's you know, all that human capital in our brain, you know, to the point where you are sort of economically somewhat independent, uh, and then all of a sudden now you're having children. So you're you're ready like way too late in the in the or not too way too late, but later in the game. And then we don't seem to be having these diminishing returns. You know, I do kind of think you know this whole idea it's not the right time, it's not the right time, you know, my grandmother always used to say, you know, it was never the right time. We never we just had kids. Like you know, that that was just the you know what what we did.

And so, you know, is it that you know we're all kind of stuck on this treadmill thinking that we need more schooling and we need to hit a certain level of well-being, economic well-being, before we feel comfortable introducing a child into the world? And then what do we feel that child needs to have? And how can I afford that? And so, I mean, certainly what people seem to say, you know, when this was first happening in like in Italy and places where, you know, growth rates were declining rapidly, you know, and the total fertility rates were well below replacement, you know, well before it was hitting other countries. And it was this economic thing and the time thing just really, you know, come up

again and again and again. Uh, you know some people were blaming well this is what happens with you know when you let women work and they were throwing this weird spin of like gender equality is leading to fertility decline and but but it sort of implies that well then left to your druthers to pick the best choices in life that kids somehow become less and less a part of that story. Um you know, I also think I don't know about you, Dave, but you know, I didn't have tons of experience with babies until I had my own. David's a father too. Yeah. Oh, okay, David. Uh David, how old how old? Yeah, mine's five and a half. She's uh three and a half. Three and a half. Oh, three and a half. Yeah. Yeah.

And and so, yeah, there's a lot of like, oh, I'm not ready for this. That there were certain elements that were easy or much easier than I thought they would be. Uh, and then of course, elements that were much harder. And of course, because of the relatively you know, isolated way we live, it it definitely adds to the the costs of raising children, you know, and we're much less free-range childhoods than we've ever been before, even in our compared to like when I was a kid. Uh and all that just seems to raise the costs more. And so I do feel like there's these uh there it seems to be more psychological, you know, explanations for why we're sort of tricked into uh getting by with with fewer children, even though all the data would show you

could have more kids and they would still survive. And but yeah, they might survive. But then where you do see some of the trade-offs is definitely how many of them are going to get college education, how many of them are gonna be making a decent salary, you know, by the time that they're 30. And there you do see the trade-offs that make you like great quantity quality kind of arguments about fertility and investment. So which is probably why there's you know a small sector of like super wealthy who are increasing their fertility because they can farm out everything, right? From literally like your breasts, you know, having wet nurses to you know childcare to everything. Um yeah, so that that's I don't know my my quick you know, what

what is interesting is is you know from having worked you know with small scale societies for a while where fertility's been always high. So with the Aceh, you know, they had about average seven births. The Chumane had about eight births over or eight or nine births over their life course. And it's true not all survive, but you know, a good number survive. And surrounded by kids all the time, you know, you really get the sense that someone who's worthwhile, competent, has status, should have a family and have a big family. And so, you know, me coming in with my college education and working towards my PhD and beyond, you know, I was sort of seen as the poor person who doesn't really know how to be an adult.

What are you looking for? Why are you even here? We're just living our lives. Um, you know, and it's interesting because even you know some of the Bolivians I'm good friends with who you know are from the cities still have some of that mentality too, that family is is key. You know, there's certain decisions they wouldn't make for you know they wouldn't move across the country to another country for a job when there's all these sort of ties that bind and keep you keep you keep you local. So I don't know, I'm just veering off into la la land here. Uh but I mean it's not it's not not la la land. I mean, I think it it showcases um uh one area where I think uh it's crucial to take uh an evolutionary psychological approach rather than, you know, say a behavioral

ecological approach. Because here in this case we have a behavior that is clearly not maximi maximizing fitness. Uh and the only way to really understand it is to is to think about what's actually going in on inside people's heads. You know, what are what are the emotions, what are the thought processes, what is leading to this outcome. Because it's c it's clearly not uh maximizing fitness in a straightforward Darwinian sense. There must be some kind of mismatch uh between say ancestral selection pressures and the current environment. There there must be something in in the head that is that is causing these types of behaviors to emerge. And for that, we need to delve into the psychology of social status, of uh of passing

social status on to our kids and making sure our kids are competitive in the social environment, what the social environment is like, what kinds of cues the mind is receptive to when it comes to planning out the life course and planning out uh their families. Um, so it seems like what you're saying, uh, is that there's something about um the way that social status and wealth is organized in modern societies that is feeding into our evolved minds and giving us cues that we really need to invest a lot uh in our kids in order for them to be competitive uh uh with with other kids in the environment. And uh we just don't have the resources to have a large number of offspring because we can't make sure that each one of them is going to say, go to college, become successful and

and prestigious. And the only way we can really have comp competitive children is if we invest tons of resources in those children. Is that basically the the the I think so well in our children and potentially ourselves. And so uh one kind of like unpub unpublished paper number you know, twelve that you know just never made it to light from years ago was was trying to get at this exact question. And I was trying to and I was using like consumer data. So it's like all right, if your income's increasing well what better way to kind of give us some insight into the mind? What are you spending your money on? Like, you know, there's only so much food you can eat, right? And so are you maybe you're not spending more money on food, but you're spending it on

other things. But you could maybe just spend it on food, but just much more expensive, high-quality food. Um and what what I was suspecting and what ended up finding, yeah, it wasn't, yeah, there's more on food because you are now, well, you see a lot more meat come on, and then organic meat, and then, you know, uh much the each adjective you add to your food, you know, adds a little bit more money that's that's spent. But it's it's more on sort of like luxury items and and luxury, you know, status oriented kinds of expenditures, which then all of a sudden, you know, you see increasing much more dramatically. So yeah, it really is seemed to be the case that like you could get by without having the all of those things and just, you know, spend, save that money

and put that towards another child. But it's this idea that, you know, s since status is such a positional good, right, it's always changing. You know, and it could be very well that, you know, given that we're social creatures and comparative creatures, you know, the fact that our social world through social media and everything, we're we're level of comparisons are are insane. And so we'll will we ever reach diminishing returns? Because there's always going to be people out there that will have something that you don't have, or uh at one level a little bit better. And so I I it feels really hard to kind of get off that treadmill. Uh and our expenditures seem to be going along with that. Um our brains and our level of satisfaction seem to go along with that.

So yeah, I I do think it it definitely is kind of a uh a psychological kind of argument. But you know, I I I think it's a it's one of those perfect meshes of like behavioral ecology and and evolutionary psychology, because the certainly under more traditional natural fertility environments, maximizing status would have maximized fertility. Right. In almost every traditional society, when you look at like how many cows or how much land, uh, pretty much maps onto number of partners and number of children uh almost everywhere. And it really is in this sort of heavy competitive cap post capitalist kind of market economy where you really see that kind of shift. Yeah. Yeah. And even the decision, I mean we talked a lot about structural issues.

Um Germany was one of the places that had low fertility and so parental leave and childcare was became free um completely. And there was an enormous uptick um in in people having kids. And the did the decision of sort of like well will I lose my job? um, you know, do I have the resources while I am a young adult to to uh to have kids? That also feels like a very behavioral, ecological, but also evolutionary psychological decision because it really maps onto sort of like, you know, what's the ballistic trajectory of my ability to actually have a career or get the returns on my, you know, intellectual investment. Um, and then how much is having a child gonna eat into that? And so I think this is another way where I think in a funny way, at least anecdotally to

me, many of the people who are opposed to things like paid parent, like extending parental leave for like, you know, seven months or a year or 14 months, or like free childcare for everybody. Like many of the people who are against that are also the people who are super concerned about like plummeting fertility rates. I know. And I think that's absolutely silly because uh, you know, those are actually some of the one argument would be that's one of the reasons for that. Um yeah. And so I think uh to my mind, this is another example of um very much an evolutionary psychological problem, but it's a but the solution is a structural problem. It's not wagging your finger at people and say, have babies, don't be an idiot.

Um, it's actually respecting the the intelligence of not wanting to have a baby in the context of a concern about like, you know, am I gonna be okay in my job? Like, do I have to leave, you know, three months or three weeks of parental? I mean, it's like crazy, right? Well, yeah. Well, and so some of that pushback I've heard is from people who would have wanted that when they were younger, but now they're older and they didn't have it. Yeah, that's the best argument. I didn't have it, so you can't either. That's that's a great way to do that. Well, right. And so it's like why why should I have my taxes go to subsidize other people's kids and you know the luxuries that I didn't have. then you don't feel like you wanna actually contribute to those people that you're not

related to, but make for a better society, better economy, everything. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So uh approaching approaching the end of of the episode. Um are there any topics that you're that you're dying to cover, Dave, or that we haven't covered yet? Uh I mean with Mike, so many that we're just gonna have to have Mike on again. So yeah. Yeah, probably. Yeah, yeah. Uh I'm kind of curious. I mean, I remember I I was looking through your um publications and I saw something on um personality, which is a really interesting topic in evolutionary psychology that we haven't really talked a lot about. I don't think we've talked really delved into this topic in any of our episodes. Um, I know you have some thoughts on that.

You have some interesting data showing that um personality is very different uh in small-scale forager societies. Uh that we don't see the same kind of uh differentiation and and so-called big five factors uh in personality. Um so I'm curious uh what your take is on the evolution of personality, why we are so different in these patterned ways, why modern environments are you showcase even larger uh uh uh differences between people in terms of their personalities than you might see uh in a small scale society and and what what might be going on there. Yeah so if I can start from from the I've never actually I I think told this story about how how I even got started um uh uh thinking about personality because i it certainly didn't set out to be that guy like the

one just uh big five that's you know it doesn't exist here and so you know it's it's um someone a colleague once made a joke about they think I have like a a gr the same graph in every paper, you know, where there's some y-axis, things that people in the West get, and then you know, as a function of age or whatever, and then like it's always flat, like zero. I just changed the y-axis label. Uh and so it's like, uh, big five, look, that doesn't exist either. Uh no, that was never actually the point. You know, the point was just that actually, you know, I was running, you know, a big health and aging project, and and you know, you get to know people uh in these communities. So, you know, every data point is a person, and it just seems like, you know, we've

got their age and all these biomarkers and all these other characteristics, but doesn't seem to be capturing some element of them as a person that I know impacts whether they're even here showing up, whether they're gonna actually take the meds that you know we may have prescribed, whether they're conscientious and you know, some caution precautions that they might need to take or whatnot. Uh and weren't measuring that at all. And so this was really just me like, okay, let let me just find a personality instrument and let's just kind of add it to our kind of circus of things we're trying to get at the individual level. Uh now, certainly I had some exposure to not so much I'm not a personality psychologist,

and I know the industry is quite large as I tried to, you know, pave my way into it a little bit. And so it was interesting to me from the behavioral syndromes kind of literature, right? That, oh wow, you know, from a behavioral ecologist perspective, if if things are adaptive, you know, and conditions are different, you should shift Towards whatever that local adaptive thing is. And there could be obstacles. But the idea that, you know, under variety of different conditions, you might act consistently, you know, it's just kind of an intriguing kind of concept. Uh and and so thinking about those repercussions and then what would that mean? Uh and then yeah, are there elements of certain folks seem very wide open, speak

easily, they're extroverted? Are those people faring better differently than the folks who are more quiet, you know, internalizing things and um all that kind of stuff? So I was like, all right, let me get a big five inventory. Um I found one that was in Spanish and it wasn't too onerous. I had like 40, 20, 40 items, I think. Uh, and it was just fun actually working with Chumane back and forth and trying to uh how do you translate this? And and th this was like kind of an early preview of the fact that like there aren't words to describe all these nuances in personality. You can now it doesn't mean it doesn't exist as a concept. You can describe it in a phrase or you know a sentence or two. But there it wasn't like you know uh you know a single word kind of descriptor that would

adequately kind of capture you know s a lot of those uh a lot of those terms and so we did kind of translate it all and you know always wary you know It's kind of new, it's strange, you know. Can people you know respond well? We back translated, people kind of understood what was going on, but we also just recorded information about like the person who was doing the interview would record whether the person would smile, were they you know open with their words, or did they seem really quiet and reticent, uh, and all that kind of stuff. And so not only did we find, you know, we were able to kind of collect those kinds of data, it actually did map onto what people said. So the extroverted people, you know, were rated as having been more talkative, more

open, uh, with their thoughts and talking about themselves and such. Uh, and then the people on the, you know, emotional stability that were lower on that. Um, the former N uh neuro neuroticism. Uh you know, those were less a little bit less so. Uh and so that showed that, you know, I think we're actually collecting, you know, real data. Because certainly the the personality psychologists, as soon as you find something that's not big five, it's it's go straight for the methodological jugular, right? It's like it's a translation issue. It's you know, how do you know your instrument is measuring the exact same thing? And blah, blah, blah. And part of the argument was like, well, I don't think it's measuring the exact same thing,

but that's part of what we're actually, you know, actually finding. So it was it was through the initial just designing that instrument in local language and trying to capture some elements of personality that might be relevant for thinking about health, economic activity, fertility, marriage, all these things. Um, but as the initial sort of exercise of like, let's just do the PCA and get the big five, and I was like, oh, wait, that that's not really a big five uh by any means. And then it was like sort of going through all these different lengths. Well, what if we just focused on the people who speak Spanish, maybe who are educated? Maybe they would act differently, and you know, uh, what about instead of you know David,

you rating yourself, I have Dave rate you. Okay, and see if that so we did all these different permutation, all these different ways, you know, and and yeah, people are somewhat agreeable. So you can ask the question in the negative, and we had agreeableness checks, did all that, and basically we didn't really have a big five. Uh what we called it loosely like a big two that seemed to be like there's such industriousness and like pro-sociality seem to be kind of two dimensions. And you know, some of the initial ideas were kind of laid out in that initial paper, but that was probably one of the hardest papers to write because it was it was selling it to what was it? Not psych science, but uh JPSP, the Journal of Personality, Social Psychology.

So it was kind of like playing with the big boys of of psychology, personality, and you know, trying to convince them that, hey, I think I have something to say, and having to learn their tools and language. But it was from that initial exercise that you know, I didn't really think it was well, because I was I was a little nervous, like maybe it really is just a translation thing or something I'm doing wrong. Um and it wasn't that you can't get measures for the each of the big five right it's just it's this weird thing about thinking about the the the personality structure itself right that basically uh if they were like five bands on a equalizer, they still have equalizers on radios. Uh I mean they're virtual now, but yeah.

Yeah, okay. Instead of each of those moving really independently, it's kind of like if you were to move it, they would be stuck and a couple will be moving together. Uh and so yeah, what it does mean is in terms of the combinatorics, you'd have a fewer, you'd have a less diversity of personalities out there. Whereas if you had more independent factors moving, more possibilities, you can get more different ways of being. And so you know certainly you know the initial ideas were just like well it seems to be the case that in Chimane life and probably a lot of other, you know, similar groups, um there's all different types of personalities, but at the same time there's certain limits and constraints over how you can act around other people.

Um like there's no computer programmers, right? You can't just be like a genius that holds up and does your own thing if you're not socially competent enough to interact with other people. Uh and and so it just got me thinking about sort of niche space of modern societies in contrasting with small scale societies. And the easiest thing to think about was just like jobs, right? But certainly the idea, and why we, I think, called it socioecological complexity or something, was to move beyond just thinking about jobs. But jobs are an easy thing to kind of measure, or how many products you know, your society is producing. And so with the idea that if there's many more different ways to make a living, then sort of like in the old ecological theory, you know,

individuals will sort of like fill up that niche space until there's sort of diminishing returns and look elsewhere, you get what you know, the ideal free distribution. Uh, and so all the niche space gets kind of spilled uh filled up. And so what's sort of determined though is what does the niche space actually look like. And so the initial approach we had was just using country level data and taking personality data and just looking at the sort of correlation structure across the different big five, with the idea that if it's a high correlation, then even though again you get the big five measures, they're sort of hanging together. You know, in the simplest case, it's all one, right? If correlation's one, uh, versus if it's zero, and they're completely uncorrelated.

And but the idea is like, what could you look at at the country level that would give you some insight into like that sort of niche diversity? And we looked at a variety of different things from sort of like GDP, like proxies like GDP, gross domestic product, uh to like you know, these like economic portfolio indices that like apply these entropy terms for like how many different products does your country make and what's the relative abundance of them. Right. Um with the idea that more products comes from more jobs and that sort of uh hierarchical structure where you're going to require lots of different types of jobs and different types of ways of being. And so the idea was that with more jobs and more niche space, that that

your equalizer is like the preset that maybe like makes you a little bit better at one thing than another. And so the idea was kind of attractive. We did some number of empirical analyses that actually all showed some nice correlations that that uh That personality structure, even in places where there's supposedly you know big five, that the overall correlation varies. And it varies in a way in relation to the niche diversity, such that where there's a more diverse set of niches, you see less correlation between those factors. In other words, more ways of being, of personality. so that was the initial kind of empirical set of observations. And then of course, uh, you know, part of what I like to do is like, all right, there's

some results, and I'll let other people think about how that could actually come to be. And but we actually did do some some modeling um with Paul Smaldino. Uh you know, h could something like that actually come to exist uh in a sort of processed way, you know, and we did find some some kind of consistent support for that. Uh it's actually it was a fun exercise. There were all these new directions that uh would be really interesting to kind of think about that I just haven't kind of returned to, but I was sort of hoping, you know, because part of it was also, again, that we we just don't know that much about personality measured in small scale societies, so it was sort of all new. You know, luckily uh there have been some more recent versions of things, and you know,

they might not be getting a big two, but they seem to be getting a similar kind of story that you know there's not as many factors as you might think, and that maybe it varies in relation to that. But to me, yeah, the developmental story would be really amazing, right? You can think of all these, you know, parents coming from you know, you know, small scale society context and now moving to the big city. But you know, how are children developing? What are the inputs that sort of shape and bring things out? Uh, because what does it even look like at the individual level as opposed to you know the construct we were using with a population structure, right? It's really the correlation structure of these personality dimensions.

I d you know, I still think there's elements of all those items that you see in people. But again, it's really how they kind of covary in people. And maybe when you kind of there are there's a niche diversity elements. We didn't really kind of test so much this idea about constraints, right? If you're s purely egalitarian in a way that everyone can be however they want to be, maybe that releases the shackles a little bit as well. Um anyway, it was a it was a fun kind of foray into personality psychology that to me I was like trying to bring some evolutionary kind of perspective. What blew me away, I just sort of assumed that you guys had all worked it all out, right? That like and then the fact of the big five is just it's just this big inductive exercise,

right? It's just a description. Yeah. Uh and it must be true because it exists everywhere, but there's no theory that actually generates the big five. It's like you just described all literally you'll read things of like this thing must be true because there's so much data for it. And that is this uh the cycle of just tautological looking under the the lamp or yeah. I mean it's not a bad part place to start. You need data, you need results. But but then there yeah, we just need more people, maybe not coming from the center of the discipline or subdiscipline to you know shake things up a little bit. And so yeah, I'm hoping that I haven't actually checked too recently to see if others have kind of been building upon some of those ideas, but it would be fun.

Yeah. And just to make that concrete, the idea of like a developmental thing would be, for example, something of like if if there's a child coming from a more egalitarian society, there's almost like software in the child to sort of be like, Do I have to be as conscientious as my parents? Like it's sort of looking out in the world and sort of being like, could I actually get by with, and not maybe consciously, but somewhere in the software of sort of being maybe a little more of an asshole or being a little less conscientious. And I still see people who are more conscientious than my parents getting by. And I see my parents sort of getting the sucker's payoff of being too conscientious in the

social or ecological niche now. And so the idea would be there's like really software in the mind of every generation to sort of be like, i is this a savvy way to make a living? Like what's the way to be a person? Right. Right. And of course it's relative to the particular social group that you happen to be a part of. So what is the norm for conscientiousness or neuroticism within my particular peer group is going to be different than what the norm is in a different peer group. And as soon as you get more fractionation and more, you know, diversity of peer groups, you get different local averages and local norms, and that allows this greater diversity of social niches. So what might be a profitable personality in one social group will be a different type of

uh profitable personality in a different social group. And as long as you get more and more subcultures and more and more divisions of people finding these niches, you get more diversity in the expression of personality. It's sort of that's one analogy. Exactly right. And that's essentially when we say urbanization, it's sort of like this proxy for this like flowering of all these like niches and sub niches that you know you just don't really see that in very small-scale societies. There's still there's it's a limited kind of niche set. Yeah. I mean uh an analogy that I have in my head, and you can tell me if this is a bad analogy, is uh you know, maybe at the at the heyday, the dawn of of uh television, there weren't as

many genres. Maybe it was just like comedy and drama, you know, that was it. But now that we have all these streaming platforms and it's so easy we have this proliferation and abundance of different uh platforms, you know, different ways of of entertaining ourselves. And it's so much easier for weird weirdos to like find their weird audience. You know, we have so many more genres now. It's not just comedy, it's like dark comedy and animated comedy. We have sci-fi and fantasy and you know, all these different uh types of entertainment that are enabled because of the economic structure of our society. And you could make a similar argument that this that we get more genres of people when you have a more variegated social environment, uh, where it's easier for people to find uh

like-minded people and gravitate toward you know subcultures that have you know more of their type of personality in them. Like I can hang out with a nerdy subculture, and that's kind of an unprecedented thing. Like in an ancestral small-scale environment, I probably could maybe find, I don't know, maybe one or two other, you know, nerdy people like me. But in um in the modern world, I can, you know, basically enter a job that is specifically selecting for nerdy people and surround myself with nerds in a way that's kind of unprecedented and that will probably bring the nerdy aspects out of me uh much more than you know that that would that would have brought out of me if I was in a different uh

social context. So yeah, it's it's fascinating stuff. Um you yourself, Michael Gervin, have carved out a wonderful niche for yourself in the uh academic subculture. Um uh it has now come to the time in the interview where we ask you if there's anything you wish we had asked you oh um I wish yes That we should have asked you, or that we neglected to mention. But then if I anything I mentioned, are you gonna turn around and ask me it? Well, I think we put it. Do you want us to? Well, it depends. If you No, you don't have to No, we actually we don't there's no rule. So yeah, we could just say it and then just uh and then just draw. Well no, I guess uh Or we could talk about what the the thing you

wanted us to ask you that we could talk about another time. That's yeah that's that's that's one thing you can know. Yeah. Well uh uh I guess it it wasn't that I wanted you to ask, but I I guess I was wondering you know, thinking whether you're gonna ask about, you know, the future of evolutionary social science, those kinds of you know d you know uh those kinds of things or or something about the future of small scale societies and what is working to look like moving forward. Um uh and is that gonna kind of largely still be housed within like anthropology departments or is that diffusing across, you know, different places? And, you know, d as the divides between small scale and large scale, you know, are those

dissipating and since groups everywhere are are changing, and what does that mean? You know uh what and what's the untapped opportunity, uh you know, I I definitely think that you know there's there is definitely value for like relatively you know unacculturated, remote uh human societies. Uh but as groups are kind of going under various degrees of changes on all fronts, you know, I feel like it's like a it's a laboratory for asking so many interesting questions in all of our disciplines and everything about the mind and behavior, in fact, almost everything that was mentioned today, you know, has implications. And like David, you were asking about the decline in fertility. Fertility is start people are starting to shift and think about fertility.

You know, a lot of Chimane girls have Depo Provera injected in their arms now, and they're thinking about, you know, should their kids be going to school and and not just like fifth grade education, but now the possibility for for high school education or even beyond. So yeah, all these kinds of questions are fascinating to explore uh in in these kinds of changing worlds. Uh but focusing on the change rather than well sometimes I feel people feel they need to hide the change, right? Because they're trying to portray the sense that that groups have been sort of untouched. Um, and 'cause that's what in the evolutionary world what they expect people to to want to hear about. You know, and and so I think that aspect kind of needs to shift a little bit.

And it'll be really fun to think about, well, what would that look like if we're what kinds of questions could we ask and all that? Anyway, yeah, that's what I thought you were gonna ask. Uh that's okay. You have it. You don't have to ask a thing. There's a there's a job. That was a that was a great set of questions. You did you if you want a job as a co-host, you've got where we're just like, you know, talking about, you know, I don't know what uh nerds in Germany. I don't know. We're we're useless. But yeah. No, that's great. And actually that sounds like we should have a uh we should like apply for funding for a conference or something about that or workshop. That sounds like a fun thing to do.

Yeah. I mean, maybe maybe that's what we should do. We should have a dedicated episode on the future of evolutionary social science. I know a number of our guests uh expressed an interest in that topic. We just had Brett Beheim on and we I think somebody alluded to him giving a talk about the end of uh Hunter or Egalitarian or you know, Hunter. Uh I don't want to put words in his mouth, but we didn't even get a chance to ask him that 'cause we were like like again, like idiots were talking about his whiteboard, you know. So yeah, we're we're still working on this. Yeah. You're right. You were right. About two hours flying by, and I feel like we we barely got started. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Um but but Mike, thank you so much for coming on.

Uh really um, you know, personally, you were really important for me in grad school. I took a class with you. Um, I'm back now as professor, but like you really introduced me to like this, the behavioral ecology, human behavioral ecology. I still have the textbook, the Smith and Winterhall there ninety. It's a great book. Yeah. That's a great book where you just sort of quantify things in a way that I never knew you could do. Um and it was just uh it was revealing. And so for anybody who doesn't know about human human behavioral ecology or Mike's work, please check it out. Um it's just there's it's an incredible list. Mike talked about like 12 papers that didn't see the light of day, and that sounds like a

lot, but it's because he's got so many that did see the light of day. It's actually the percentage is probably the same as everyone else's, if not smaller. So um and then Mike, the book comes out on September sixteenth. Sixteenth. Okay. So we'll hopefully this episode will be coming out September sixteenth. And then where can people get the book? Um, well, I know it's available on Amazon and Target for some reason. Okay. Uh I'm hoping it'll be available, you know, your local bookstore, you know, maybe go beforehand and ask them to make sure they have it in. Yeah. Uh it can be also ordered through the Princeton University Press website. Uh and if you put P U P thirty uh as a little code, get thirty

percent off. Whoa. Although that's I don't know if that will disappear the 16th, but I know reordering that uh you can get a thirty percent discount. Wow, that's our first real ad. That's good. That's a very very good, very good. No, this is great. This is great. But uh but no it's uh it's a really great and I am really glad that you're doing this kind of thing because yeah I think there's so many snake oil salesmen who are trying to s sell snake oil, which is why they're called snake oil salesman. But anyway, you know, like and I'm glad that like actual uh scientists are are venturing into these these formats of what is the lifespan like. Great. Well thank you. I really enjoyed this and thanks for doing what you do.

I think this is a lot more productive way to get people excited about ideas and uh it's great what you're doing. Thanks. Thanks, Mike. Uh David, good to see you. Uh yeah, and well David uh Mike, we'll have to have you on again to talk about all a whole other set of things that you're you're doing. So but this is wonderful. Thank you so much. Yep. Thank you. Take care. You too. Well, David, um I I start uh let's start over. Okay. You you you start. I lost it. Well, we did it. We did another episode. Uh it was fun. Uh the guest had a good time, I'm assuming. Uh you had a good time, I'm assuming. And you, the listener, probably had a good time. Well, you must have if you're still listening. Yeah.

I mean, I I the gu the guests really make the episode. I mean, I think we just sort of, you know, stumble around and get in their way occasionally. Um, but we provide the Zoom. So, you know, that's but yeah. Yeah, we we pick we we we we pick good guests. I mean that's that's our role. That's a more positive way to put it. Yeah. That's okay. I'll I'll go with that. Yes, we pick great guests. Yes, our guests are wonderful. Yes. And if you're happy with our picks, um please say so on social media, leave us a kind review, check out our Patreon page. And if you have any ideas for other guests or other topics that we should cover or general feedback, please let us know. Or other formats, yeah. yeah who knows maybe maybe we should uh interview uh a chair like a

like a a person who has the job of being a chair of a department or like actually interview a chair like an like a physical like a physical chair we we just we interview the chair like uh like sort of between two ferns sort of vibe yeah except kind of chair chair roast Except the chair is between two people and yeah. Oh, interesting. All right. Well, let's uh let's workshop this. I like this idea. Okay, uh, maybe next week we'll hear from a chair question mark. Okay, interesting, David. Okay, very interesting. Okay, we'll see you next week. All right, see ya.