WEBVTT 00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:01.120 I'm David Pinsov. 00:00:01.280 --> 00:00:01.760 Who are you? 00:00:02.000 --> 00:00:02.960 I am David. 00:00:03.440 --> 00:00:06.160 Oh, Dave Petrozki. 00:00:06.720 --> 00:00:11.920 And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast which features actual 00:00:12.080 --> 00:00:17.840 evolutionary psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. 00:00:18.880 --> 00:00:22.960 Keep on I was gonna say and also listened to by actual evolutionary psychologists. 00:00:23.120 --> 00:00:24.890 Yeah, we we listen to it as well. 00:00:25.210 --> 00:00:30.090 Well I've I've I've gotten a lot of feedback from actual evolutionary psychologists saying 00:00:30.090 --> 00:00:35.130 that this is actual evolutionary psychology and so the actual 00:00:35.690 --> 00:00:39.530 extends to a third place where people who are listening, not everyone. 00:00:39.930 --> 00:00:40.250 Yeah. 00:00:44.860 --> 00:00:46.940 yeah, for actual evolutionary psychologists. 00:00:47.100 --> 00:00:47.580 And you know what? 00:00:47.660 --> 00:00:50.620 You could be an actual evolutionary psychologist even if that's not your day job. 00:00:50.780 --> 00:00:52.860 So so there may be like three or four places. 00:00:52.940 --> 00:00:56.380 We're not going to change the tagline 'cause we have enough trouble with the two elements 00:00:56.380 --> 00:00:59.100 of Yeah, we're barely holding it together on this one. 00:00:59.980 --> 00:01:02.220 Easily uh not holding it together at all. 00:01:02.380 --> 00:01:06.460 So without further ado, let's move on to the next portion of the thing you're about to 00:01:06.460 --> 00:01:07.100 listen to. 00:01:07.260 --> 00:01:08.970 Uh we'll see in a second. 00:01:24.570 --> 00:01:30.540 David, um, that some people describe themselves as old souls, um and 00:01:30.540 --> 00:01:34.460 some people uh so like they're sort of in a young body, but they feel old. 00:01:34.620 --> 00:01:40.620 And then some people who uh um feel young but are but are wait, did I get 00:01:40.620 --> 00:01:41.100 that wrong? 00:01:41.340 --> 00:01:42.060 We wanna have to be a little bit more than that. 00:01:42.220 --> 00:01:45.980 Yeah, they feel young were but they actually are old in an old body. 00:01:46.460 --> 00:01:48.140 Of those two, which are you? 00:01:48.460 --> 00:01:50.140 Oh, I'm definitely the latter. 00:01:50.300 --> 00:01:53.580 I feel like a child in an adult man's body. 00:01:53.900 --> 00:01:54.140 All right. 00:01:54.220 --> 00:01:58.140 Well, we're to we're um bringing this up because today we're gonna talk to Mike Gervin. 00:01:58.410 --> 00:02:03.450 And Mike Irvin, uh, what he studies, and he is an anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara, um, 00:02:03.770 --> 00:02:09.210 is the lifespan and life stages, um, and really sort of if there's evolved 00:02:09.210 --> 00:02:14.090 design for the different life stages, which I think is a really interesting and sort of 00:02:14.090 --> 00:02:18.250 profound and weird question to ask because we often just sort of think about, you know, 00:02:18.410 --> 00:02:23.210 growth and then development and then wearing out as sort of this ballistic process and not 00:02:23.210 --> 00:02:27.450 necessarily as like the reflection of evolved design for different life stages. 00:02:27.770 --> 00:02:28.560 Yeah, absolutely. 00:02:28.640 --> 00:02:33.200 And Mike Irvin is a pioneer in this space studying uh human development, human life 00:02:33.200 --> 00:02:38.160 history, uh, what old people are for and why we evolved to live to old age. 00:02:38.400 --> 00:02:41.840 We also get into a a bunch of other interesting topics uh in this episode. 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:47.840 We talk about um uh heart disease and uh ill health in modern societies and why uh 00:02:47.920 --> 00:02:51.120 small scale societies might not be susceptible to those health problems. 00:02:51.200 --> 00:02:56.990 We get into personality variation, we get into uh the demographic transition, 00:02:57.150 --> 00:03:01.070 why we're not having as many kids, whether we should have paid parental leave. 00:03:01.150 --> 00:03:04.110 Uh it was a it was a really fun, uh wide-ranging conversation. 00:03:04.350 --> 00:03:09.630 Yeah, and uh in Mike's book um is gonna be out um in 00:03:09.950 --> 00:03:14.110 September, on September 16th. 00:03:14.190 --> 00:03:18.190 So if you're listening on September 16th, please go run out and buy his book. 00:03:18.270 --> 00:03:20.190 It's called Seven Decades. 00:03:20.830 --> 00:03:21.150 Yep. 00:03:21.420 --> 00:03:22.300 Seven decades. 00:03:22.460 --> 00:03:25.100 Check it out and uh enjoy the episode. 00:03:27.900 --> 00:03:28.860 Here we go. 00:03:29.100 --> 00:03:30.300 Okay, we're recording. 00:03:30.460 --> 00:03:36.140 Today we are I'm super excited to have uh Professor Mike Gervin, who is in the anthropology 00:03:36.140 --> 00:03:38.060 department at UC Santa Barbara. 00:03:38.220 --> 00:03:43.420 Uh anthropology at UCSB is now integrated anthropological science. 00:03:43.660 --> 00:03:44.780 Mike, is that right? 00:03:45.180 --> 00:03:47.340 Uh yes and no. 00:03:47.580 --> 00:03:52.950 Uh Anthropology, you know, as you know, has gone through many 00:03:52.950 --> 00:03:57.190 different transformations over the years and different institutions. 00:03:57.270 --> 00:04:02.150 And so there's always been the multiple wings, you know, archaeology, cultural 00:04:02.150 --> 00:04:07.750 anthropology, and then the other, which is hilariously named biological 00:04:07.750 --> 00:04:09.990 anthropology, evolutionary anthropology. 00:04:10.150 --> 00:04:13.190 We were biosocial anthropology for a long time. 00:04:13.430 --> 00:04:18.200 And then at some point, like around 2008, we we said, all right, we're just gonna be 00:04:18.200 --> 00:04:20.280 integrative anthro sciences. 00:04:20.600 --> 00:04:25.720 So that it's it draws an umbrella kind of cross cutting 00:04:25.720 --> 00:04:27.080 subdisciplines, right? 00:04:27.160 --> 00:04:29.960 So cultural anthropology can be scientific too. 00:04:30.280 --> 00:04:32.440 So it doesn't necessarily always have to be evolutionary. 00:04:32.520 --> 00:04:36.760 And so yeah, that was the sort of logic, integrative anthrosciences. 00:04:36.920 --> 00:04:42.570 And so it's called a unit, but the university still doesn't quite 00:04:42.570 --> 00:04:44.010 understand what units are. 00:04:44.170 --> 00:04:50.010 And so there's been a push to maybe get rid of the units and just be all one big happy 00:04:50.170 --> 00:04:51.850 anthropological family again. 00:04:52.090 --> 00:04:52.330 Right. 00:04:52.490 --> 00:04:55.530 So yeah, it's like it's a particle, it's a wave, it's both. 00:04:55.770 --> 00:04:56.490 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:04:56.650 --> 00:04:58.650 I mean, I think we have this issue in psych a little bit. 00:04:58.810 --> 00:04:59.450 Oh, sorry, David. 00:04:59.610 --> 00:05:03.450 Just like even where, like, you know, you might be asking social questions, but using 00:05:03.450 --> 00:05:05.050 neuroscientific methods. 00:05:05.210 --> 00:05:07.620 And so I have colleagues who do that in the neuroarea. 00:05:07.860 --> 00:05:09.700 I have colleagues who do that in the social area. 00:05:09.860 --> 00:05:13.780 It's like these bureaucratic distinctions that sort of fall apart scientifically. 00:05:14.180 --> 00:05:15.620 Well, I thought it was hilarious. 00:05:15.780 --> 00:05:19.940 I I once had a lab, wet lab in the neuroscience building. 00:05:20.100 --> 00:05:23.220 And I remember at one meeting, I was like, I'm a little uncomfortable. 00:05:24.180 --> 00:05:27.060 I'm like the only non-neuroscience person here. 00:05:27.220 --> 00:05:29.140 And someone asked me, Do you study behavior? 00:05:29.380 --> 00:05:30.900 I'm like, Well, yeah, of course. 00:05:31.060 --> 00:05:33.300 Oh, then you're a social neuroscientist. 00:05:35.030 --> 00:05:35.510 All right. 00:05:35.670 --> 00:05:35.990 Yeah. 00:05:36.310 --> 00:05:36.950 Yeah. 00:05:37.350 --> 00:05:40.630 But we will get into the fact that an anthropologist, and of course, there are many 00:05:40.630 --> 00:05:43.110 anthropologists at UCSB who have wet labs. 00:05:43.190 --> 00:05:44.230 So we'll get into that. 00:05:44.390 --> 00:05:45.990 But David, you were going to say something. 00:05:46.630 --> 00:05:52.550 Oh, I was just going to do a uh an awkward segue into your uh research 00:05:52.550 --> 00:05:53.510 on your upcoming book. 00:05:53.590 --> 00:05:57.670 So you mentioned that uh the anthropology unit is one big happy family. 00:05:57.900 --> 00:06:03.740 Um, you do research on families and on uh how families interact with 00:06:03.740 --> 00:06:08.460 one another across generations and horizontally within a generation. 00:06:08.860 --> 00:06:14.220 Uh and you have a book about that called uh Seven Decades. 00:06:14.700 --> 00:06:19.260 Um so if you could elaborate, what what are those seven decades? 00:06:19.340 --> 00:06:21.420 What which decades are you referring to? 00:06:21.580 --> 00:06:23.260 Uh and why are they important? 00:06:23.420 --> 00:06:24.780 Why should we care about them? 00:06:25.370 --> 00:06:25.850 Yeah. 00:06:26.010 --> 00:06:27.370 Um, well thank you. 00:06:27.530 --> 00:06:28.970 So it it here it is. 00:06:29.370 --> 00:06:30.090 They are beautiful. 00:06:30.410 --> 00:06:32.810 Ooh, who took who took that photograph? 00:06:33.130 --> 00:06:34.570 Uh I have no idea. 00:06:34.730 --> 00:06:40.490 It it's people assume it's someone it's a photo I took or it's me like in five years. 00:06:40.730 --> 00:06:43.290 But um no, it's a stock photo. 00:06:43.450 --> 00:06:43.610 Okay. 00:06:44.010 --> 00:06:49.290 Photo of a guy it's unclear whether he's like smiling or grimacing in pain or there's so 00:06:49.370 --> 00:06:53.960 it's ambiguous what his emotional like the eyes test, I think. 00:06:54.200 --> 00:06:57.080 So you're supposed to happy the person is smiling. 00:06:57.240 --> 00:06:57.400 Yeah. 00:06:57.560 --> 00:06:57.720 Okay. 00:06:58.120 --> 00:07:02.040 But some people who tell me, Why do you have such an angry person on the cover? 00:07:02.120 --> 00:07:02.760 I'm like, okay. 00:07:02.920 --> 00:07:04.360 I'm getting a bit of angry. 00:07:09.800 --> 00:07:12.280 But this book just recently came out, is that right? 00:07:12.600 --> 00:07:15.640 Yeah, well, technically what's it, the ninth? 00:07:15.770 --> 00:07:19.450 Uh in one week from today, it's it's available. 00:07:20.010 --> 00:07:20.570 Oh great. 00:07:20.810 --> 00:07:22.090 We we can publish this. 00:07:22.170 --> 00:07:23.130 We can just release this. 00:07:23.210 --> 00:07:27.210 So probably by the time people are hearing this, it will be but so when it what date is it 00:07:27.210 --> 00:07:27.450 free? 00:07:28.090 --> 00:07:34.010 Yeah, so uh it's the pre-order people that um I guess are starting to get it right 00:07:34.170 --> 00:07:34.490 about now. 00:07:34.890 --> 00:07:39.450 They're starting to see but sorry you said September, mid-September is September 16th. 00:07:39.530 --> 00:07:42.730 So one week today uh coming out. 00:07:42.810 --> 00:07:47.000 It should be I I guess it'll be available at the bookstore. 00:07:47.240 --> 00:07:52.920 Uh maybe i if I get my act together with editing, maybe I can quick edit this and we'll 00:07:52.920 --> 00:07:57.400 just but put put you up and um cut cut in line a little bit and post this next week. 00:07:57.480 --> 00:07:58.760 So we'll we'll try to do that. 00:07:58.840 --> 00:07:59.400 Yeah. 00:08:00.040 --> 00:08:00.360 Right. 00:08:00.520 --> 00:08:01.880 Oh, so sorry, David. 00:08:01.960 --> 00:08:02.520 You sorry. 00:08:02.600 --> 00:08:06.200 Yeah, we're you uh so what what are what are these seven decades that you that you've 00:08:06.200 --> 00:08:07.640 written an entire book about? 00:08:08.150 --> 00:08:13.110 yeah so uh it's funny you say that I mean a good I guess a good title right should be uh 00:08:13.350 --> 00:08:17.590 kind of you may have a sense of what I want to say but not exactly. 00:08:17.670 --> 00:08:21.350 Uh and depending who you are I've had people write me already and be like are you saying I 00:08:21.510 --> 00:08:26.710 I shouldn't exist because I'm eighty three years old and beyond seven decades and uh and uh 00:08:26.790 --> 00:08:32.710 my old one of my old advisors is you know in his early seventies now and so you know he 00:08:32.710 --> 00:08:37.080 he read this uh like nervously like what do you say? 00:08:37.320 --> 00:08:43.080 So, yeah, part of the idea about seven decades is essentially an argument that 00:08:43.160 --> 00:08:49.000 you know our species typical kind of body is kind of built to last 00:08:49.000 --> 00:08:50.360 about seven decades. 00:08:50.600 --> 00:08:56.440 And so over our long evolutionary history, we would have had that potential to reach 00:08:56.440 --> 00:08:57.240 seven decades. 00:08:57.480 --> 00:09:03.160 Now, notice potential being very different than like an average life lifespan that you 00:09:03.160 --> 00:09:08.670 would expect to see just because of the way averages are computed. 00:09:08.830 --> 00:09:13.950 If you have lots of mortality early in life, that kind of crunches down the average to 00:09:13.950 --> 00:09:15.070 smaller numbers. 00:09:15.310 --> 00:09:21.150 And because we're not really good at thinking about averages and what they really mean, you 00:09:21.150 --> 00:09:25.710 know, even some scholars, not just the public, you know, tend to think that over our long 00:09:25.710 --> 00:09:31.710 evolutionary history, you know, we lived to about 30, 35, and then that's it. 00:09:31.950 --> 00:09:36.540 Um, and so yeah, that that's kind of where the seven decades is coming from. 00:09:37.180 --> 00:09:40.060 So where yeah, I I do see this this misconception. 00:09:40.620 --> 00:09:45.580 I just see this misconception a lot in like bad pop evolutionary psychology that our 00:09:45.580 --> 00:09:49.660 ancestors, you know, didn't live beyond thirty-five or or whatever. 00:09:49.740 --> 00:09:54.860 We had these extremely short lifespans, uh, and that explains all sorts of modern woes. 00:09:55.020 --> 00:10:00.780 So I'm curious uh how you would um put this bad idea to rest and and where you think this 00:10:00.780 --> 00:10:02.060 bad idea came from. 00:10:03.210 --> 00:10:03.770 yeah. 00:10:04.010 --> 00:10:09.610 Um I would like to think that hopefully 00:10:09.850 --> 00:10:14.170 this book will maybe make a little bit of a dent uh 00:10:15.690 --> 00:10:17.290 against that idea. 00:10:17.690 --> 00:10:23.530 Um but the thing is the idea itself though, is it's it's understandable maybe where it 00:10:23.530 --> 00:10:24.810 comes from, right? 00:10:25.050 --> 00:10:30.980 That uh because it's not just the fact that uh it's not just thinking about human survival, 00:10:31.060 --> 00:10:33.460 but it is also thinking about fertility, right? 00:10:33.540 --> 00:10:38.740 So if you've got lots of babies, then all else equal your population pyramid probably gonna 00:10:38.740 --> 00:10:40.500 look something very triangular. 00:10:40.660 --> 00:10:46.420 And so the overall percentage of older adults living in the population is gonna be much 00:10:46.420 --> 00:10:52.270 smaller than even if survival is relatively the same as say it is now, you know, 00:10:52.350 --> 00:10:53.950 you're still going to have a pyramid like this. 00:10:54.030 --> 00:10:59.790 And so it gives that idea that there's just not that very many old people around at any 00:10:59.790 --> 00:11:00.590 given point. 00:11:00.750 --> 00:11:05.230 And of course, once you just reduce fertility, the pyramid starts to look more and more 00:11:05.230 --> 00:11:06.270 rectangular. 00:11:06.590 --> 00:11:10.350 So it's easier to see a lot more older people. 00:11:10.990 --> 00:11:16.520 So I think you know, that's kind of contributes to this idea that that it's sort of 00:11:16.520 --> 00:11:21.880 new because we are living longer, but we're also our fertility has reduced quite 00:11:21.880 --> 00:11:24.440 substantially uh all over the world. 00:11:24.600 --> 00:11:29.320 And so we're definitely noticing that there's more and more people, you know, over the age 00:11:29.320 --> 00:11:31.400 of 65 in our in our society. 00:11:31.480 --> 00:11:37.350 And so we tend to think, you know, that things are always different now than they than they 00:11:37.350 --> 00:11:37.990 used to be. 00:11:38.070 --> 00:11:43.750 And so we kind of forget that, yes, even though survival has been improving, uh, 00:11:43.830 --> 00:11:48.390 it's not the case that just those folks didn't really ever exist. 00:11:48.870 --> 00:11:54.390 You know, and I think there's other arguments, I think, why this perpetuates. 00:11:54.630 --> 00:12:00.630 Um oftentimes when you see the life expectancy was like 25 or 30, that's all you 00:12:00.630 --> 00:12:01.190 hear about. 00:12:01.320 --> 00:12:04.760 You don't really see any more data or hear any more information. 00:12:05.160 --> 00:12:10.280 And certainly the skeletal record's pretty spotty, and so it's hard to even age skeletons 00:12:10.280 --> 00:12:12.360 that might be much older. 00:12:13.160 --> 00:12:16.200 Um everyone loves to quote Hobbes, right? 00:12:16.280 --> 00:12:18.120 That life was nasty, brutish and short. 00:12:18.280 --> 00:12:24.200 So again, all these kinds of ideas sort of perpetuate this this idea that this we 00:12:24.200 --> 00:12:29.810 really didn't have old age and that and pro and particularly the problems of old 00:12:29.810 --> 00:12:33.730 age that we now see in the news every other day. 00:12:33.810 --> 00:12:36.530 You know, are so how are we going to pay for Social Security? 00:12:36.690 --> 00:12:38.690 Where are all the caregivers going to come from? 00:12:38.930 --> 00:12:41.090 Alzheimer's is going to skyrocket. 00:12:41.410 --> 00:12:47.010 You know, and again, these are all sort of portrayed as new ideas and new 00:12:47.010 --> 00:12:47.650 problems. 00:12:48.050 --> 00:12:53.580 And so part of the push that I'm trying to make with this book is that it's a quantitative 00:12:53.580 --> 00:12:53.900 difference. 00:12:53.980 --> 00:12:55.340 It's not a qualitative difference. 00:12:55.500 --> 00:12:57.500 That we've always had old people with us. 00:12:57.740 --> 00:13:00.140 True, survival has improved. 00:13:00.300 --> 00:13:05.020 And so we are living longer now than we've ever lived, you know, before in the history of 00:13:05.020 --> 00:13:05.660 our species. 00:13:05.740 --> 00:13:09.740 And there are more older people around than has ever been before. 00:13:09.980 --> 00:13:15.820 But it's a more than as opposed to there wasn't and now there 00:13:15.820 --> 00:13:16.140 is. 00:13:16.300 --> 00:13:21.130 And I do think that difference matters because this is where the anthropology and the 00:13:21.130 --> 00:13:22.890 evolutionary part comes in. 00:13:23.050 --> 00:13:28.970 Is that you know, I believe that part of the reason for our species success is 00:13:28.970 --> 00:13:34.890 having middle-age and older age life stages as part of our species typical 00:13:34.890 --> 00:13:35.530 design. 00:13:35.930 --> 00:13:40.490 And so I want I'm trying to harness some of those arguments for, you know, we did it once 00:13:40.490 --> 00:13:42.570 throughout our evolutionary history. 00:13:42.810 --> 00:13:48.740 And so let's try to take uh what we you know, those 00:13:48.740 --> 00:13:53.220 adaptive benefits of being alive at middle and later ages. 00:13:53.700 --> 00:13:59.620 And let's kind of transform the way we think of the older adults as a burden and 00:13:59.620 --> 00:14:03.540 think of that as untapped potential, untapped opportunity. 00:14:03.780 --> 00:14:09.540 So that's sort of the the push that the the book makes to kind of bring 00:14:09.700 --> 00:14:11.380 home the contemporary message. 00:14:11.830 --> 00:14:12.070 Yeah. 00:14:12.150 --> 00:14:13.510 I think it's the the idea. 00:14:13.590 --> 00:14:17.990 I mean, we've talked in this podcast so far about design-mindedness and thinking about 00:14:17.990 --> 00:14:19.670 evolution producing design. 00:14:19.910 --> 00:14:24.870 A lot of the design we've talked about has been psychological, sort of real, real-time 00:14:24.950 --> 00:14:28.230 contingent design, or even, you know, something like how does a plant grow? 00:14:28.390 --> 00:14:33.430 Or, you know, how does the the mind respond to a certain situation or motivate certain 00:14:33.430 --> 00:14:33.910 behavior? 00:14:34.150 --> 00:14:38.470 What you're talking about is something I think we've alluded to, but maybe not explicitly. 00:14:38.550 --> 00:14:44.420 And I think it's a subtle and profound point, which is the idea that the stages of life, 00:14:44.580 --> 00:14:50.260 just in the same way that, like a butterfly, uh, you know, is a is a life stage compared to 00:14:50.260 --> 00:14:55.940 a chrysalis compared to a caterpillar, in the same way, there can be design for 00:14:55.940 --> 00:14:57.460 stages of the life. 00:14:57.620 --> 00:15:03.140 And it's not that anyone's stage is sort of just a um a 00:15:03.140 --> 00:15:07.290 purgatory, but it is its own, it's its own point, right? 00:15:07.450 --> 00:15:09.930 And it has certain design features. 00:15:10.410 --> 00:15:15.130 Um, so in the same way we can think about the contingent design of software, we can think 00:15:15.130 --> 00:15:19.610 about the contingent design features of lifespan stages. 00:15:19.770 --> 00:15:21.450 Is that sort of what you're talking about? 00:15:21.850 --> 00:15:23.610 Yeah, that's that's exactly there. 00:15:23.770 --> 00:15:29.530 Uh and especially because I do th I'm glad you say life stage, because you know, 00:15:29.690 --> 00:15:33.160 some skeptics have said, well, like a little pushback. 00:15:33.320 --> 00:15:39.000 Everyone's talking about you know menopause, postmenopausal lifespan as like somewhat 00:15:39.080 --> 00:15:40.840 human uniqueness. 00:15:41.080 --> 00:15:46.600 Uh but we know that there's postmenopausal kind of survival in other 00:15:46.600 --> 00:15:47.240 species. 00:15:47.560 --> 00:15:52.520 Um, but postmenopausal survival is not the same thing as thinking about an actual like life 00:15:52.520 --> 00:15:53.080 stage. 00:15:53.320 --> 00:15:58.360 So given that you survive to adulthood, you know, the chance, even in a hunt-and-gathering 00:15:58.360 --> 00:16:04.310 lifestyle that you make it to menopause is way higher than in any of these species 00:16:04.310 --> 00:16:08.950 that you typically see some postmenopausal um survival. 00:16:09.190 --> 00:16:12.870 So I definitely do think that you know there's a clear life stage there. 00:16:13.030 --> 00:16:14.150 And it's exactly right. 00:16:14.310 --> 00:16:19.030 Part of what I'm trying to argue is well a lot of it does focus on some of the the physical 00:16:19.030 --> 00:16:25.030 and physiological, uh but the idea is that with the design of about seven decades, that 00:16:25.030 --> 00:16:26.390 should impact everything. 00:16:26.630 --> 00:16:31.300 Not just you know immune function, but the mind as well and how we think. 00:16:31.700 --> 00:16:37.140 So I actually do uh you know Dave, I've dabbled in psychology here and there. 00:16:37.380 --> 00:16:43.380 And so I had fun kind of tapping back into thinking about uh some 00:16:43.380 --> 00:16:48.820 of those kinds of um aspects of the mind and behavior in those different life stages. 00:16:49.190 --> 00:16:49.430 Yeah. 00:16:49.510 --> 00:16:53.670 And even, I mean, the physical stuff, I hope we get to because I think there's just so much 00:16:53.670 --> 00:16:55.510 here that I think is so different. 00:16:55.670 --> 00:17:00.390 And I assume this is part of why you wrote the book, is because there's just so so little 00:17:00.390 --> 00:17:05.190 knowledge, you know, beyond this sort of like eat raw meat and run barefoot and you're 00:17:05.190 --> 00:17:06.310 gonna die when you're 30. 00:17:06.390 --> 00:17:10.870 So that's sort of you know what an evolutionary approach says about physiology, right? 00:17:10.950 --> 00:17:11.110 Yeah. 00:17:11.430 --> 00:17:15.030 Well, this is where I kind of thought that I did have something to say. 00:17:15.190 --> 00:17:21.120 I mean, I think like like you, uh my discipline doesn't necessarily reward 00:17:21.120 --> 00:17:23.200 us for write we I don't need to write a book, right? 00:17:23.280 --> 00:17:26.480 I don't need the book for tenure, I don't need the book for promotion. 00:17:26.720 --> 00:17:32.720 Um but at the same time, you know, I've written enough papers that wonderful, a lot of 00:17:32.720 --> 00:17:34.320 people incredible the number of papers. 00:17:34.480 --> 00:17:35.520 Like they're very prolific. 00:17:35.920 --> 00:17:38.240 Well you and eight other people maybe have read them, right? 00:17:38.320 --> 00:17:43.040 But like you know, you're you're getting a limited audience with any paper, n even if it's 00:17:43.040 --> 00:17:44.400 in the top journal. 00:17:44.560 --> 00:17:50.330 Um let alone just the the little you know, increasingly reduced word 00:17:50.330 --> 00:17:51.130 counts. 00:17:51.530 --> 00:17:54.010 It's hard to tell a comprehensive story. 00:17:54.170 --> 00:17:58.730 So it's true that there's elements in the book that are like peppered throughout some of my 00:17:58.730 --> 00:18:04.650 papers, but I think I wanted to do something that isn't in any of the papers and 00:18:05.370 --> 00:18:11.290 really build out this kind of argument and then do apply it to our situation 00:18:11.610 --> 00:18:12.250 today. 00:18:12.970 --> 00:18:18.780 And it was a little scary because entering the aging longevity health market, you know, 00:18:18.860 --> 00:18:21.020 it's a glutted market for sure. 00:18:21.340 --> 00:18:27.260 Uh but I think or hope that it's doing something a little bit different that these other 00:18:27.260 --> 00:18:28.380 books haven't done, right? 00:18:28.540 --> 00:18:34.380 So I'm not really telling you 10 ways, you know, to extend your life, 00:18:34.570 --> 00:18:34.890 right? 00:18:35.130 --> 00:18:39.450 Um, I'm not telling you what you should and shouldn't eat and all that. 00:18:39.610 --> 00:18:44.410 Uh although I do have a little list towards the end where I I cave a little bit, but at 00:18:44.410 --> 00:18:48.730 least the list sort of makes sense in light of everything else I've talked about. 00:18:48.970 --> 00:18:54.730 And you know, and it isn't, you know, I'm not a molecular biologist, so I'm 00:18:54.730 --> 00:19:00.660 not focused, you know, on you know, mTOR and Metformin, and 00:19:00.660 --> 00:19:05.380 that, you know, we're on the precipice of living, you know, a thousand years. 00:19:05.860 --> 00:19:08.260 So it's not that kind of argument either. 00:19:08.420 --> 00:19:13.780 You know, and I do think, you know, I don't want to put these other approaches, books down. 00:19:13.860 --> 00:19:15.620 I think the world is a big place. 00:19:15.780 --> 00:19:19.220 We need all of these kinds of books, and we we need the visionaries. 00:19:20.020 --> 00:19:23.300 But I also think we need to kind of look back at where we've come from. 00:19:23.540 --> 00:19:29.350 And you know, part of the traditional medical establishment is is basically, as you all 00:19:29.350 --> 00:19:34.150 all both know, is to ignore ev our evolutionary past, our evolutionary history. 00:19:34.310 --> 00:19:39.030 And some people have actually gone and said explicitly that if we want to study aging and 00:19:39.030 --> 00:19:43.830 lifespan, we need to look at the lowest mortality populations because those are the ones 00:19:43.830 --> 00:19:49.350 that have eliminated all the sort of extraneous causes of death, and it's all 00:19:49.350 --> 00:19:49.990 aging. 00:19:50.150 --> 00:19:53.590 And so that's where you have to look and focus. 00:19:54.230 --> 00:20:00.100 You know, and maybe for this audience, that seems, you know, how could you just ignore our 00:20:00.100 --> 00:20:00.740 natural history? 00:20:00.900 --> 00:20:06.820 How could you ignore, you know, everything that w are that about our lives and 00:20:06.820 --> 00:20:08.020 how we've lived? 00:20:08.580 --> 00:20:14.260 And so that's again part of the push here is to kind of shine light on there. 00:20:14.340 --> 00:20:17.690 And I do think, you know, I I probably wouldn't have been able to write this book, you 00:20:17.690 --> 00:20:21.930 know, ten, fifteen years ago, because now that you know there there are clear lessons of 00:20:21.930 --> 00:20:26.330 things we have learned that we would never have found if we didn't kind of shine the 00:20:26.330 --> 00:20:31.450 flashlight uh outside the context of you know low 00:20:31.450 --> 00:20:34.570 mortality industrialized West. 00:20:34.970 --> 00:20:35.290 Yeah. 00:20:36.160 --> 00:20:37.120 Uh an example. 00:20:37.200 --> 00:20:41.200 Could you give an example maybe of like what's a good because I mean, you know, people I 00:20:41.200 --> 00:20:46.240 think are their interest has peaked in their sort of thinking, okay, so what what what have 00:20:46.240 --> 00:20:46.800 we learned? 00:20:46.880 --> 00:20:51.280 Uh and maybe then we can get into like how you've how you know the backstory of where you 00:20:51.280 --> 00:20:55.600 got the data, but like, is there an example of sort of what we've learned that we wouldn't 00:20:55.600 --> 00:20:59.440 have known 10 or 15 years ago or definitely wouldn't have gotten if we didn't take uh an 00:20:59.440 --> 00:21:04.970 evolutionary um natural fertility, for example, or you know, hunter forager, hunter 00:21:05.130 --> 00:21:06.810 horticultural population. 00:21:07.850 --> 00:21:08.250 Sure. 00:21:09.130 --> 00:21:12.570 Well an easy one, I guess, because I don't want to give away all the reveals. 00:21:12.890 --> 00:21:13.690 Oh yeah, no, for sure. 00:21:13.770 --> 00:21:14.010 Yeah, yeah. 00:21:14.250 --> 00:21:14.810 Spoiler alert. 00:21:15.050 --> 00:21:15.130 Yeah. 00:21:16.250 --> 00:21:22.250 But the, I mean the easiest one is just the the very fact that, you know, hunter-gatherers 00:21:22.250 --> 00:21:24.410 don't get heart disease, right? 00:21:24.650 --> 00:21:29.700 And don't seem to have Alzheimer's dementia either. 00:21:30.020 --> 00:21:35.940 And there's been suspicions of this before, but I think part of 00:21:35.940 --> 00:21:38.980 the argument was always that, well, people didn't live long enough to get them. 00:21:39.140 --> 00:21:42.420 And that if they only lived longer, then they would get them. 00:21:42.980 --> 00:21:47.700 And in fact, you know, some of the really exciting work, uh 00:21:48.180 --> 00:21:53.050 cardiologists and radiologists who who, you know, anything they can get their hands on, 00:21:53.130 --> 00:21:58.330 they throw on under a CT scanner and mummies in particular. 00:21:58.490 --> 00:22:03.210 And by looking at mummies in different parts of the world, you know, they found evidence of 00:22:03.210 --> 00:22:06.490 calcification in in different arterial beds. 00:22:06.890 --> 00:22:12.810 And it wasn't just like the the rich fat cats, you know, the Egyptian mummies, but 00:22:12.810 --> 00:22:18.660 even like in the Aleutian Islands, a few cases, and uh in Peru, Incan mummies, and 00:22:18.660 --> 00:22:21.940 so which would have been more kind of everyday people. 00:22:22.500 --> 00:22:25.460 Uh and so that was pretty interesting and revealing. 00:22:25.620 --> 00:22:29.620 Um of course we don't know what they died of, but we know that there might have been some 00:22:29.620 --> 00:22:31.780 calcification in their arteries. 00:22:32.020 --> 00:22:37.620 Uh and so that that sort of led to this idea that well heart 00:22:37.620 --> 00:22:43.300 disease and particular its most pernicious form, atherosclerosis, uh 00:22:43.460 --> 00:22:48.210 that we tend to see, um, that that's been with us forever. 00:22:48.530 --> 00:22:54.290 Um, and which is kind of grim, but it also it it gives a certain view of what 00:22:54.290 --> 00:22:55.250 aging is, too. 00:22:55.490 --> 00:23:01.250 You know, there's aging, biological aging, there's diseases of aging, you know, there's 00:23:01.250 --> 00:23:02.610 lots of arguments back and forth. 00:23:02.770 --> 00:23:04.130 Are those one and the same? 00:23:04.290 --> 00:23:09.740 But if you think heart disease and atherosclerosis is kind of one and the same with 00:23:09.740 --> 00:23:15.260 aging as a universal, then first of all, it's what we have to look forward to, 00:23:15.500 --> 00:23:15.820 right? 00:23:16.220 --> 00:23:19.500 Um, and it also makes it a little bit unavoidable. 00:23:19.900 --> 00:23:25.260 And so, and certainly we know that Dave, you're a healthy guy. 00:23:25.420 --> 00:23:29.710 Uh, you probably eat well and you're move your body uh quite a bit. 00:23:33.950 --> 00:23:34.190 Yeah. 00:23:34.510 --> 00:23:40.030 I'm on an upswing, but boy, I've yeah, I've been the most inactive I've ever been since 00:23:40.030 --> 00:23:40.990 since having a child. 00:23:41.150 --> 00:23:42.670 It's wonderful, but yeah. 00:23:43.390 --> 00:23:48.190 Well sitting here, see this is why I was standing on the balance board here during this 00:23:48.190 --> 00:23:48.750 podcast. 00:23:48.830 --> 00:23:48.990 Yeah. 00:23:49.220 --> 00:23:50.340 Then my head was cut off. 00:23:50.420 --> 00:23:52.020 So I I'm off the balance board. 00:23:52.260 --> 00:23:52.500 Okay. 00:23:52.660 --> 00:23:52.980 Sorry. 00:23:53.060 --> 00:23:54.980 We're we're we're reducing your lifespan. 00:23:55.140 --> 00:23:55.620 Sorry. 00:23:55.940 --> 00:23:57.060 Thank you for the sacrifice. 00:23:57.140 --> 00:23:57.300 Yeah. 00:23:57.540 --> 00:24:01.940 Well it's just that we we we know that, you know, being acting healthier will make you 00:24:01.940 --> 00:24:05.780 healthier, but still it's like potential lightning. 00:24:05.860 --> 00:24:11.730 It it it can strike us, uh and and then we're we're doomed to to suffer 00:24:11.730 --> 00:24:12.130 from it. 00:24:12.210 --> 00:24:17.650 And so what we found, uh, you know, we started like lots of other people had with just 00:24:17.650 --> 00:24:22.690 basic risk factors, you know, looking at blood pressure, cholesterol in the blood, you 00:24:22.690 --> 00:24:25.170 know, the easy things basically. 00:24:25.490 --> 00:24:28.210 And you know, those are pretty revealing. 00:24:28.290 --> 00:24:33.170 You know, blood pressure was kind of low, didn't seem to increase with age, cholesterol was 00:24:33.170 --> 00:24:33.570 low. 00:24:33.730 --> 00:24:37.250 Uh so all that would suggest that maybe there's not a whole lot of heart disease. 00:24:37.410 --> 00:24:43.080 But again, if you don't always know if like predicts like, you know, in 00:24:43.080 --> 00:24:45.080 different types of environments. 00:24:45.240 --> 00:24:51.240 And so what you know, making it kind of next level, um, we actually 00:24:51.240 --> 00:24:57.240 did uh what's called a ankle brachial index, which is to basically look at the 00:24:57.240 --> 00:24:59.560 blood pressure in your arms and your ankles. 00:24:59.800 --> 00:25:03.960 You know, and if all is good, blood should be flowing nicely all around your body. 00:25:04.120 --> 00:25:09.870 If it's sort of getting slowing down, obstructions, it might differ between your arms and 00:25:09.870 --> 00:25:10.590 your legs. 00:25:10.830 --> 00:25:16.350 And so, you know, looking at the blood pressure throughout the body, uh, 00:25:16.990 --> 00:25:22.030 you can basically assess if you've got peripheral arterial disease in your arms, you know, 00:25:22.110 --> 00:25:26.670 blockages in your arms, your legs, and that's kind of like subclinical 00:25:26.670 --> 00:25:28.190 atherosclerosis. 00:25:28.270 --> 00:25:33.790 So it could be like you know, a decade out before you might hit see it hit the coronaries. 00:25:33.950 --> 00:25:39.780 And we found not a single person had you know below the cutoff level on that measure. 00:25:40.020 --> 00:25:42.020 Okay, also pretty instructive. 00:25:42.260 --> 00:25:47.780 And then going the the next route, the next level, uh to really be sure, 00:25:48.020 --> 00:25:52.580 because again, from some of this work, we were starting to get a little bit of the 00:25:52.580 --> 00:25:58.530 attention of like the cardiology world and such, but not really, because you have to kind 00:25:58.530 --> 00:26:02.530 of use their methods and their uh technology. 00:26:02.690 --> 00:26:07.570 Uh and so this is where we actually teamed up with some of those very same radiologists and 00:26:07.570 --> 00:26:13.250 cardiologists I mentioned that use CT scanners to to look at calcification in 00:26:13.250 --> 00:26:14.050 mummies. 00:26:14.210 --> 00:26:16.610 And and we did this in Bolivia. 00:26:16.930 --> 00:26:22.480 So, you know, I could pour all your listeners and all the different ways it 00:26:22.480 --> 00:26:28.480 takes to get people from remote Amazonian villages, you know, to a place, 00:26:28.640 --> 00:26:33.680 you know, it's not even the town closest to these villages, but a somewhat distant town 00:26:33.920 --> 00:26:39.040 where uh the French government had donated a CT scanner some years ago. 00:26:39.200 --> 00:26:44.560 And so collaborating with the hospital and social workers there, uh, we're able to use that 00:26:44.650 --> 00:26:50.570 CT scanner and through uh imaging of people, we 00:26:50.570 --> 00:26:53.610 could actually look directly at their coronary arteries. 00:26:53.850 --> 00:26:59.770 And and the amazing thing was that basically we focused mostly like people 45 years of age 00:26:59.770 --> 00:27:00.410 and up. 00:27:00.730 --> 00:27:05.130 So it wasn't the case that, well, there are no people again who are old. 00:27:05.290 --> 00:27:11.290 Yeah, and it was a decent sample, close to a thousand people uh over the age of 45, which 00:27:11.600 --> 00:27:14.720 by small scale society standards, that's really big. 00:27:14.880 --> 00:27:15.280 Yeah. 00:27:15.440 --> 00:27:21.360 Um, and 85% of people had absolutely no calcification in their 00:27:21.360 --> 00:27:22.880 coronary arteries. 00:27:23.440 --> 00:27:27.680 And at first, you know, I was like, okay, this just reifies what we saw before, but I 00:27:27.680 --> 00:27:31.600 didn't quite realize the import of that because you know, comparing it to every other 00:27:31.600 --> 00:27:37.570 population level you know data that existed, uh Way 00:27:37.570 --> 00:27:42.610 more people in way more places, including healthy places like you know, Japan with much 00:27:42.610 --> 00:27:47.970 higher life expectancy than we do, uh, there's more calcification in the coronary arteries. 00:27:48.130 --> 00:27:54.050 And the reason why calcification is such an important measure, because certainly in normal 00:27:54.130 --> 00:27:59.780 healthy people, it's like the best predictor that you will have heart disease and that 00:27:59.780 --> 00:28:04.180 there will be you know the the heart events uh down the line. 00:28:04.740 --> 00:28:09.620 And so yeah, that was sort of an indication, wow, it's not just like one or two healthy 00:28:09.620 --> 00:28:11.780 people that are eating right and physically active. 00:28:11.940 --> 00:28:17.620 This is like at a whole population level, this whole population has basically avoided 00:28:17.620 --> 00:28:18.980 atherosclerosis. 00:28:19.060 --> 00:28:24.690 And even of the people who had it, they were over 80 years of age and very 00:28:24.850 --> 00:28:30.770 likely are going to die of something not at all related to atherosclerosis. 00:28:30.850 --> 00:28:35.570 So kind of like the mummies that may have had some calcification probably died from 00:28:35.570 --> 00:28:36.210 something else. 00:28:36.290 --> 00:28:42.050 You know, Otsy, the the Iceman, and the Tyrolean Iceman, uh had 00:28:42.050 --> 00:28:47.650 some calcification in his arteries, but you know, had also had an arrow kind of shot in his 00:28:47.650 --> 00:28:47.970 back. 00:28:48.130 --> 00:28:51.560 So, you know, probably that might be tomato tomato. 00:28:52.360 --> 00:28:53.320 Yeah, exactly. 00:28:53.480 --> 00:28:53.640 Yeah. 00:28:53.800 --> 00:28:58.760 So I think that's kind of a s you know, a an interesting, kind of surprising thing that 00:28:59.000 --> 00:29:01.560 then it it uh it begged all those questions. 00:29:01.960 --> 00:29:07.240 You know, well, what is it about a hunter gatherer lifestyle that can lead to a a life 00:29:07.240 --> 00:29:11.240 without heart disease, you know, even well into your seventies and eighties. 00:29:11.640 --> 00:29:17.560 Um, and and then it does bring up some of the all the some of the fads, of course, but it 00:29:17.560 --> 00:29:21.830 really, you know, uh uh forces us to really just kind of, all right, can we actually answer 00:29:21.830 --> 00:29:27.750 this question scientifically rather than you know whatever hobby horse that you 00:29:27.750 --> 00:29:33.350 happen to focus on, um, you know, that that must be the magic bullet. 00:29:33.670 --> 00:29:38.310 And so and so that uh you know opened up a whole kind of new wave of of work too, to you 00:29:38.310 --> 00:29:43.900 know, to try to piece apart can we actually look at all these different pieces that we 00:29:43.900 --> 00:29:49.660 think might matter, like what you eat, how you move your body, uh other infectious 00:29:49.820 --> 00:29:55.420 critters that are invading our body, our social lives and the level of stress that we have, 00:29:55.580 --> 00:30:00.060 you know, are we living alone or are we living in, you know, tight communities? 00:30:00.220 --> 00:30:05.180 You know, all those elements we basically just have been trying to build out over the last 00:30:05.180 --> 00:30:10.850 decade to try to see ultimately what what kind of matters and what 00:30:10.850 --> 00:30:11.250 doesn't. 00:30:11.730 --> 00:30:17.410 Well I I would imagine that uh many of our listeners are uh very curious about the question 00:30:17.570 --> 00:30:20.690 uh how can I not get heart disease? 00:30:20.930 --> 00:30:26.690 I'm certainly curious about that question myself as an ape who would very much uh like to 00:30:26.690 --> 00:30:28.940 not die uh prematurely. 00:30:29.180 --> 00:30:33.500 I'd like to, you know, at at minimum live seven decades, hopefully more. 00:30:33.740 --> 00:30:38.300 Uh but, you know, heart disease is probably uh one of the things that might prevent that 00:30:38.300 --> 00:30:39.100 from happening. 00:30:39.340 --> 00:30:44.060 So uh based on all this research, I mean, first of all, it's it's a it's a a fascinating 00:30:44.060 --> 00:30:48.700 finding that we don't see the same prevalence of heart disease uh in these populations that 00:30:48.700 --> 00:30:49.420 you study. 00:30:49.580 --> 00:30:54.770 Um but I you know I gotta know what what are they doing right that I'm not doing or that 00:30:54.770 --> 00:30:55.330 we're not doing? 00:30:55.410 --> 00:30:57.490 What how can we uh be like them? 00:30:57.730 --> 00:30:59.810 What do you think is is the answer there? 00:31:00.610 --> 00:31:01.170 Yeah. 00:31:01.410 --> 00:31:07.330 Uh well certainly, you know, you could just walk into traffic and get hit by a bus and 00:31:07.330 --> 00:31:08.290 you won't die. 00:31:09.090 --> 00:31:11.090 That's one one way answer. 00:31:11.490 --> 00:31:14.210 But uh that won't get you to seven decades though. 00:31:14.610 --> 00:31:14.850 No. 00:31:15.250 --> 00:31:16.610 Uh yeah. 00:31:16.930 --> 00:31:19.060 So I mean, good question. 00:31:19.220 --> 00:31:24.420 You know, the short, quick answer is I don't have a hundred percent answer. 00:31:24.820 --> 00:31:27.780 And and part of that is because it is complicated. 00:31:28.100 --> 00:31:34.020 Things don't change one at a time in in the way we would ideally want to do as 00:31:34.100 --> 00:31:35.860 you know an experimentalist. 00:31:36.260 --> 00:31:42.260 And and so on one level, even if you measure almost everything, uh 00:31:42.420 --> 00:31:46.180 we're gonna be limited by what we can say from one population. 00:31:46.550 --> 00:31:51.750 And so that's why actually we've been working with another population, the Mosaten, 00:31:52.470 --> 00:31:58.470 who culturally, ethnically, linguistically similar to the Chimane, but given where they 00:31:58.470 --> 00:32:04.310 live, uh they've just been exposed to missionaries and uh 00:32:05.030 --> 00:32:08.070 somewhat a little bit more period type of lifestyle. 00:32:08.150 --> 00:32:10.230 Everyone speaks Spanish, there's stores. 00:32:10.630 --> 00:32:15.910 Uh and so they kind of represent a little bit what the future of Chimane could look like 00:32:16.120 --> 00:32:22.120 with increasing modernization, uh, which is sort of like a nice, dare I say, you 00:32:22.120 --> 00:32:27.720 know, quasi-experimental, you know, what would happen if different aspects of lifespan were 00:32:27.720 --> 00:32:28.360 changing. 00:32:28.600 --> 00:32:34.040 And what is interesting is that the most attention also have very little heart disease, um, 00:32:34.280 --> 00:32:38.920 even though they're drinking a lot more soda, but they're still pretty pretty darn 00:32:38.920 --> 00:32:40.120 physically active. 00:32:40.290 --> 00:32:44.770 Uh, because even though they're making money, they're all they're also they're not making 00:32:44.770 --> 00:32:46.770 money from podcasts, right? 00:32:46.850 --> 00:32:49.010 They're making money from not yet. 00:32:49.330 --> 00:32:50.610 We're we're in that club too. 00:32:50.690 --> 00:32:52.930 So that's right. 00:32:53.010 --> 00:32:54.530 We gotta get some more books on that shelf. 00:32:54.850 --> 00:32:55.570 Yes, exactly. 00:32:56.050 --> 00:33:00.850 Um they're making money from selling crops from their fields. 00:33:01.060 --> 00:33:03.860 So which is still involving physical labor. 00:33:04.020 --> 00:33:09.540 Now it's interesting, the last five years I've seen an uptick uh I was just in Bolivia a 00:33:09.540 --> 00:33:10.820 few weeks ago. 00:33:11.220 --> 00:33:17.140 And, you know, now a lot more people have, you know, weed whackers and, you know, 00:33:17.380 --> 00:33:22.260 other, you know, new forms of technology that is going to cut down some of those labor 00:33:22.260 --> 00:33:26.980 costs so they can increase their producti their agricultural productivity, but using their 00:33:26.980 --> 00:33:28.190 body less. 00:33:28.750 --> 00:33:33.470 Um, so it'll be interesting to see if the physical activity might start to shift. 00:33:33.710 --> 00:33:39.550 But what I would say, you know, the the one thing that cross-cuts, maybe this 00:33:39.550 --> 00:33:44.430 isn't too much of a of a reveal, but there there's nothing super special about the Chimane 00:33:44.670 --> 00:33:47.150 per se as far as small-scale societies go. 00:33:47.470 --> 00:33:52.280 The only thing is that they just happen to be the only one that went under a CT scanner. 00:33:52.440 --> 00:33:58.120 You know, if we if we did the same to the Hadza, the Ace, but the Hadza maybe be 88% 00:33:58.920 --> 00:34:02.520 for all we know without without coronary calcification. 00:34:03.000 --> 00:34:08.360 And even though technically, you know, the chimane, as you know, having animal and plant 00:34:08.360 --> 00:34:12.790 domestication are mismatched from a hunting and gathering lifestyle. 00:34:13.030 --> 00:34:16.150 Herders, you know, are a little bit mismatched. 00:34:16.390 --> 00:34:21.430 But across all these different small-scale subsistence societies, which very likely don't 00:34:21.430 --> 00:34:26.790 have much heart disease, or if they do at much lower rates than we do, 00:34:27.030 --> 00:34:32.660 physical activity definitely seems to be kind of central to all 00:34:32.660 --> 00:34:34.660 aspects of their lifestyle. 00:34:34.980 --> 00:34:39.060 And not and there's a good and bad to that. 00:34:40.020 --> 00:34:43.220 You know, the the good is like, whoa, physical activity. 00:34:43.380 --> 00:34:45.540 That that's not expensive, right? 00:34:47.060 --> 00:34:52.500 But the bad might be, well, you know, didn't we, you know, we evolved to sort of be 00:34:52.500 --> 00:34:54.020 efficient foragers, right? 00:34:54.100 --> 00:34:57.860 So why should I have to move my body unless I absolutely have to? 00:34:58.250 --> 00:34:59.690 doesn't that make much more sense? 00:34:59.770 --> 00:35:01.610 And and of course, yes, it does. 00:35:01.850 --> 00:35:07.290 Uh but the good news there is it's not like you have to run a marathon every couple days, 00:35:07.530 --> 00:35:07.770 right? 00:35:07.930 --> 00:35:13.450 That that a lot of the physical activity when you actually put accelerometers on hunter 00:35:13.530 --> 00:35:19.370 gatherers uh and farmers, uh it's yeah, there is more vigorous activity than 00:35:19.370 --> 00:35:22.970 probably you or me, but not a huge amount more. 00:35:23.210 --> 00:35:27.660 The real big difference is just there's a lot of moderate light activity. 00:35:27.980 --> 00:35:33.900 So it's just it's literally the not being sedentary, but but you know, light activity, 00:35:34.060 --> 00:35:37.340 which means even you know, you could do a walking podcast, right? 00:35:37.420 --> 00:35:42.700 And and then just by walking, uh you're getting you know much more activity. 00:35:43.180 --> 00:35:46.060 It is true, people ask, is there a magic number? 00:35:46.670 --> 00:35:52.270 Your listeners probably maybe know that the 10,000 for 10,000 steps was sort of made up 00:35:53.230 --> 00:35:56.990 at the time for marketing reasons. 00:35:57.150 --> 00:36:01.950 But uh the Chamana tend to get about 17,000 steps a day. 00:36:02.350 --> 00:36:07.470 And you know, that's that is a bit tough to get with our everyday kind of 00:36:07.470 --> 00:36:08.430 lifestyle. 00:36:08.590 --> 00:36:11.070 Uh you have to work at it a little bit. 00:36:11.470 --> 00:36:15.420 But you know, at least some of the empirical studies seem to show there are kind of 00:36:15.420 --> 00:36:19.980 saturated benefits, you know, beyond 10,000 steps anyway. 00:36:20.140 --> 00:36:24.060 And so it's not like you have to get 17,000 steps. 00:36:24.220 --> 00:36:29.980 Uh, but I do think increasing our physical activity, uh, and not just in the 00:36:30.300 --> 00:36:36.110 you know, at the end of the weekend I go on, I go to the gym, but just 00:36:36.110 --> 00:36:41.150 incorporating it into everyday activities, walks around the block, um 00:36:43.390 --> 00:36:49.390 parking when you have to drive, you know, park in Isle of Vista, Dave, and then you have to 00:36:49.390 --> 00:36:52.510 walk all the way over, you know, to to campus. 00:36:53.070 --> 00:36:58.190 Although I always see you walking back and forth to to IV for for lunch like three or four 00:36:58.190 --> 00:36:58.910 times a day. 00:36:59.150 --> 00:37:02.270 So I think you're getting probably a decent number of stats. 00:37:02.840 --> 00:37:07.880 Actually, it's interesting because I used to drive my son to preschool and now he's going 00:37:07.880 --> 00:37:08.600 to elementary school. 00:37:08.680 --> 00:37:13.640 And where I'm biking everywhere, I don't drive anymore to a first approximation, except for 00:37:13.640 --> 00:37:14.280 grocery shopping. 00:37:14.360 --> 00:37:16.120 And that's the way it used to be in Germany. 00:37:16.280 --> 00:37:21.800 And I can say just sitting in the car for about a half hour to 40 minutes a day versus just 00:37:21.800 --> 00:37:27.400 being on a bike, at least now that I'm, you know, in my mid forties, uh, it's a 00:37:27.400 --> 00:37:28.600 enormous difference. 00:37:28.680 --> 00:37:30.650 And that's not a marathon. 00:37:30.730 --> 00:37:36.410 That's not even, you know, it's um, you know, my my pulse is elevated, but um, but no, 00:37:36.570 --> 00:37:39.210 anecdotally, like just getting some activity. 00:37:39.370 --> 00:37:40.730 But it's also an example. 00:37:40.890 --> 00:37:43.130 I have a watch that tracks steps. 00:37:43.450 --> 00:37:47.850 And when I went back to Berlin, uh, where there's public transportation. 00:37:47.930 --> 00:37:50.970 So, you know, it's a 10-minute walk to the public transportation. 00:37:51.130 --> 00:37:53.290 Then you're on public transportation, but you're moving around. 00:37:53.370 --> 00:37:58.800 And then, you know, I was getting like easily 15,000, 17,000 steps here in Santa Barbara, 00:37:58.880 --> 00:38:00.800 which is beautiful year-round weather. 00:38:00.960 --> 00:38:03.440 Uh, you know, there's not a lot of places to walk to. 00:38:03.520 --> 00:38:04.480 It's car culture. 00:38:04.560 --> 00:38:09.120 It's like institutionally, you know, it's like unpleasant to be a pedestrian in most places 00:38:09.120 --> 00:38:14.480 in the US, unless you live in New York like David did, or in a city, um, you know, or if 00:38:14.480 --> 00:38:16.160 you're like living in Europe or somewhere. 00:38:16.320 --> 00:38:22.050 And so this also sounds like um uh institutional design of the 00:38:22.050 --> 00:38:27.570 environment situation where you have to make the environment walkable or pedestrian 00:38:27.650 --> 00:38:28.370 friendly. 00:38:28.530 --> 00:38:30.850 Um I think that's exactly right. 00:38:31.010 --> 00:38:36.930 And I think, you know, and even going b again, going back to our you know, putting 00:38:36.930 --> 00:38:40.840 all the blame on us, you know, that we lack willpower. 00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:45.080 You know, why can't you just fit in a little bit more extra activity? 00:38:45.400 --> 00:38:49.960 You know, where it seems to be going against all of our kind of impulses. 00:38:50.280 --> 00:38:53.000 Uh that's really hard. 00:38:53.080 --> 00:38:56.440 You know, there's gonna be some select few who are gonna be able to do it. 00:38:56.600 --> 00:39:00.760 But I do think, and and this is kind of the approach I have with with the book, is you 00:39:00.760 --> 00:39:06.440 know, thinking about the the the the majority of folks that you know either don't have 00:39:06.610 --> 00:39:12.610 elite memberships to gyms or don't necessarily have a drive to want to 00:39:12.610 --> 00:39:18.450 be physically active all the time and and I mean pay so much 00:39:18.450 --> 00:39:23.010 attention to nutrition that you know you're obsessed with what you put in your body and all 00:39:23.010 --> 00:39:23.650 that stuff. 00:39:23.890 --> 00:39:28.850 And so this is where I really, yeah, strongly agree that we have to 00:39:29.170 --> 00:39:34.780 structure our communities in ways that the easier 00:39:34.780 --> 00:39:36.860 option is the healthier option. 00:39:37.580 --> 00:39:43.260 From the simplest things as like, you know, what's at eye level, you know, at the grocery 00:39:43.260 --> 00:39:49.100 store, to yeah, side put in a few sidewalks and bike lanes, and 00:39:49.260 --> 00:39:54.860 you can really instantly transform at a population level, 00:39:55.020 --> 00:39:57.260 community level, people's people's health. 00:39:57.420 --> 00:39:59.900 And there are initiatives to do this. 00:40:00.540 --> 00:40:02.540 Probably all heard about the blue zones. 00:40:02.690 --> 00:40:06.610 you know, there's like these blue zone communities where communities buy in. 00:40:06.690 --> 00:40:11.730 But as you can imagine, it's it's not it's not just local governments, it's it's local 00:40:11.730 --> 00:40:17.730 businesses, you know, you know, schools, uh across the board, you 00:40:17.730 --> 00:40:23.090 know, with transportation, everything to basically create a structured 00:40:23.090 --> 00:40:29.060 environment where the healthier alternatives, you know, particularly in in terms of diet, 00:40:29.380 --> 00:40:34.420 food, you know, and then of course you want to be able to walk outside and not inhale lots 00:40:34.420 --> 00:40:36.500 of pollution as well. 00:40:37.060 --> 00:40:39.940 And so that's again also pretty critical. 00:40:40.100 --> 00:40:45.620 But you know, some of the initial experiments with doing that, like in Minnesota, uh there 00:40:45.650 --> 00:40:51.490 was like a noticeable shift in people's BMI and people's cholesterol and 00:40:51.490 --> 00:40:52.690 blood pressure. 00:40:52.930 --> 00:40:58.370 And even if you were just thinking, you know, from the economic cost perspective, that 00:40:58.370 --> 00:41:03.250 level of prevention, you know, has huge cost savings writ large through the public health 00:41:03.250 --> 00:41:03.570 system. 00:41:03.890 --> 00:41:09.730 So I actually think that's it's it's the smart way to go thinking about the future, uh, 00:41:09.890 --> 00:41:15.250 as opposed to just thinking only about our health, but then this with this idea that, yeah, 00:41:15.520 --> 00:41:18.480 but it's gonna be so expensive and there's all these trade-offs. 00:41:18.560 --> 00:41:23.360 It's like, yeah, it is gonna be expensive, but it'll actually start paying for itself uh 00:41:23.600 --> 00:41:25.680 through a lot of health cost savings. 00:41:26.080 --> 00:41:27.760 Right, yeah, pennywise and pound foolish. 00:41:27.920 --> 00:41:32.080 And that's a really interesting, I mean, this is also where taking a scientific approach to 00:41:32.080 --> 00:41:33.760 humans is really interesting. 00:41:33.840 --> 00:41:39.590 Cause what you're essentially saying, I think, is that it's almost an urban planning issue 00:41:40.230 --> 00:41:42.550 for uh our health, right? 00:41:42.710 --> 00:41:45.190 And that we're sort of not designing our environments. 00:41:45.350 --> 00:41:50.310 I mean, these environments were not designed at all for for thinking about sort of well, 00:41:50.390 --> 00:41:54.630 what is the person's experience or what's the like effect on their body was for for other 00:41:54.630 --> 00:41:54.950 issues. 00:41:55.030 --> 00:41:59.430 And of course those other issues matter, but like we can integrate those other concerns 00:41:59.590 --> 00:41:59.910 too. 00:42:00.480 --> 00:42:00.880 Exactly. 00:42:00.960 --> 00:42:03.920 And and and and certainly well beyond heart disease, right? 00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:09.600 I mean, just think about you know any city that has green space for the and ones you know 00:42:09.600 --> 00:42:10.960 that don't have any green space. 00:42:11.040 --> 00:42:13.120 I mean it makes a a huge difference. 00:42:13.520 --> 00:42:19.200 Uh you know being in parks and having that ability to just kind of unwind a little bit from 00:42:19.280 --> 00:42:20.400 from the grind. 00:42:20.720 --> 00:42:21.520 Uh yeah. 00:42:21.680 --> 00:42:27.390 So I think across the board for just living well, uh having 00:42:27.390 --> 00:42:32.750 walkable, livable communities that, yeah, are designed more for people, a little bit less 00:42:32.750 --> 00:42:35.630 for cars, uh, would be yeah. 00:42:36.350 --> 00:42:38.670 Yeah, and and there's a good example of taking an evolutionary approach. 00:42:38.750 --> 00:42:41.870 We talked about this earlier in the podcast, but we kind of got away from it. 00:42:41.950 --> 00:42:46.670 But it's sort of one of the themes has been uh if you understand human the design of the 00:42:46.670 --> 00:42:52.540 human phenotype, it it allows you to create a more humane uh context for people to 00:42:52.540 --> 00:42:54.540 be in, and this is a good example of that. 00:42:54.620 --> 00:42:59.020 It and not just health, but also just like well-being and feeling like, oh yeah, I feel 00:42:59.020 --> 00:43:02.220 comfortable and safe, and I'm not a grumpy asshole. 00:43:02.300 --> 00:43:03.660 Um, you know, yeah. 00:43:04.300 --> 00:43:04.620 Yeah. 00:43:04.860 --> 00:43:10.780 Well, and that's yeah, so a whole other kind of big chunk of the book is is 00:43:10.780 --> 00:43:14.300 about the quality of life and not just the quantity of life. 00:43:14.620 --> 00:43:20.350 Uh, and so and that's where you know the the the thing I mentioned about sort of a 00:43:20.350 --> 00:43:26.030 rethink about you know what are the roles of older adults and and and again 00:43:26.190 --> 00:43:31.950 thinking about hunter-gatherers, you know, there's no such thing as retirement, right? 00:43:32.190 --> 00:43:37.550 That's something that was like literally, you know, invented, a formal retirement. 00:43:37.870 --> 00:43:43.360 Uh and not to say that people's activities don't shift over the life course. 00:43:43.440 --> 00:43:44.880 I mean, of course they do. 00:43:45.040 --> 00:43:48.720 Uh and it's true that even some people will no longer hunt, for example. 00:43:49.040 --> 00:43:54.480 I know plenty of older men that no longer hunt, uh, but they still might do some farming. 00:43:54.800 --> 00:43:59.840 Um, and even the ones that don't do the more difficult aspects of farming, like chopping 00:43:59.840 --> 00:44:04.450 down big trees, they still go out there with a little machete and clear some of the 00:44:04.450 --> 00:44:05.170 underbrush. 00:44:05.330 --> 00:44:09.170 And even the ones who don't do that will at least help with the harvest or help with the 00:44:09.170 --> 00:44:09.650 burning. 00:44:09.810 --> 00:44:12.370 So there's still economic contributions. 00:44:12.850 --> 00:44:18.130 And then, of course, there's contributions across so many different other domains of family 00:44:18.130 --> 00:44:19.490 and community life. 00:44:19.730 --> 00:44:24.850 You know, from your advisors, your leaders, your shamans, uh 00:44:25.620 --> 00:44:29.060 conflict mediators, your lawyers essentially. 00:44:29.780 --> 00:44:35.780 There's so many different ways that uh you know we humans with our 00:44:35.780 --> 00:44:41.300 big brains, you know, make themselves useful uh in later ages. 00:44:41.540 --> 00:44:46.580 Um and so that kind of reshift uh happens, 00:44:47.330 --> 00:44:51.970 but it's it's not a quick just flipping off the switch, you know, and and if we're so 00:44:51.970 --> 00:44:55.810 career oriented and then all of a sudden you just flip off the switch from your career, 00:44:55.970 --> 00:44:57.250 it's like what's left? 00:44:57.410 --> 00:45:01.250 You know, you invested so much in your career that you didn't have a chance to invest in 00:45:01.250 --> 00:45:02.050 your community. 00:45:02.290 --> 00:45:05.090 You had kids, but your kids are grown and left. 00:45:05.250 --> 00:45:09.170 Uh so you're not inter you know dispersed with that community anymore. 00:45:09.330 --> 00:45:14.400 And so then it's like this big gulf, you know, and many, many more of us now, especially 00:45:14.480 --> 00:45:17.360 we're having fewer kids, we live alone. 00:45:17.600 --> 00:45:23.440 So now we're seeing, you know, uh just a a a big shift in 00:45:23.440 --> 00:45:29.360 the social structure and just the approach that people are thinking about and you know what 00:45:29.360 --> 00:45:31.360 do they want out of those later years. 00:45:31.520 --> 00:45:37.440 And so this is where I do think, you know, actually some of these ideas, um, you 00:45:37.470 --> 00:45:43.070 know, with like so many things, you know, come back to uh tube and 00:45:43.150 --> 00:45:48.590 cosmides, um that one paper of theirs on the banker's paradox, 00:45:49.070 --> 00:45:54.590 uh, you know, in some ways it inspired a paper I wrote 20 years ago uh 00:45:54.910 --> 00:46:00.910 about hunter-gatherers and food sharing and how you know making it so that others will care 00:46:00.910 --> 00:46:05.870 for you when you're sick or injured, not just out of the generosity of their heart, but 00:46:05.870 --> 00:46:10.920 because if you're not there to be kind of productive and useful, then they themselves will 00:46:10.920 --> 00:46:11.560 actually suffer. 00:46:11.640 --> 00:46:13.560 So it's in their interest to help you. 00:46:13.800 --> 00:46:19.000 So and it's a similar kind of a logic, I think, with at late ages. 00:46:19.160 --> 00:46:23.080 If you're if you're shifting and you're retiring, and all of a sudden you're, you know, 00:46:23.160 --> 00:46:27.720 you're part of these embedded, you know, communities where you're doing a lot and 00:46:27.720 --> 00:46:28.760 contributing. 00:46:29.000 --> 00:46:34.590 And if you all of a sudden you're not contributing, Okay, people might love you and have 00:46:34.590 --> 00:46:39.950 compassion for you and might help you a little bit, but up to what point? 00:46:40.110 --> 00:46:45.950 You know, up to what level of need are people going to still um watch 00:46:45.950 --> 00:46:46.430 over you? 00:46:46.590 --> 00:46:50.910 And especially when they have they themselves might have seven kids. 00:46:51.150 --> 00:46:56.350 Uh, and so there's a lot of competing demand on people's time and resources. 00:46:57.360 --> 00:47:03.280 So I do think even in you know hunter-gatherer societies, there is this sort of impetus to 00:47:03.840 --> 00:47:08.800 you know think about what you should be doing with your life and how you should you be 00:47:08.800 --> 00:47:13.520 using your time in ways that others see as value added. 00:47:13.760 --> 00:47:18.890 And what's amazing is that the same ideas apply in our society, right? 00:47:19.050 --> 00:47:21.290 No one wants to feel like they're a burden, right? 00:47:21.370 --> 00:47:25.130 It's like the number one thing older people say to their kid, I don't want to be a burden. 00:47:25.370 --> 00:47:31.210 Um, and and so even though, like, all else equal, if you're 00:47:31.210 --> 00:47:34.250 receiving and not giving, whoa, isn't that great? 00:47:34.570 --> 00:47:38.890 It's like, no, you're you're in a position where in fact we even found this. 00:47:39.050 --> 00:47:43.690 If you're in a position where you're kind of a net giver, net your your net transfers to 00:47:43.690 --> 00:47:49.340 people is positive, you're way happier with your life than if you're in the position where 00:47:49.340 --> 00:47:52.300 you're receiving more than you're giving out. 00:47:52.780 --> 00:47:58.460 Um and so I do think even in the case where you know we we don't 00:47:58.460 --> 00:48:04.300 necessarily need a community to survive, our minds are still shaped in a way that 00:48:04.300 --> 00:48:08.940 we even though I have all my economic needs met, I still feel like I need a community. 00:48:09.100 --> 00:48:14.770 I still feel like I need others to need me and to belong 00:48:14.930 --> 00:48:20.690 to someone, uh to others in a in a substantial way. 00:48:20.850 --> 00:48:26.610 And so I think taking all those ideas to heart really 00:48:26.850 --> 00:48:31.090 forces a kind of a rethink of what should retirement look like? 00:48:31.330 --> 00:48:32.530 Should there be retirement? 00:48:32.690 --> 00:48:36.210 Should there be partial retirement, phased-out retirements? 00:48:36.450 --> 00:48:40.880 You know, there's already conversations like this all over the place uh, and you know, 00:48:41.120 --> 00:48:45.760 fierce pushbacks like in France, you know, just changing it by a couple years and massive 00:48:45.760 --> 00:48:46.640 protests. 00:48:46.880 --> 00:48:52.320 Uh, you know, and and some of that is even just based on the fact that, well, maybe a 00:48:52.320 --> 00:48:58.080 65-year-old today is sort of as healthy as you know an 00:48:58.080 --> 00:49:00.800 83-year-old, you know, back in the past. 00:49:00.960 --> 00:49:06.890 And so once you're 65, maybe you could continue working until you're 68 00:49:07.770 --> 00:49:09.130 and then retire. 00:49:09.290 --> 00:49:11.530 So there's that whole element of the conversation. 00:49:11.690 --> 00:49:17.450 But there's also just you know, there's now, you know, these sort of subcultures 00:49:17.450 --> 00:49:23.130 of thinking about you know your these encore years and shifting from your first career to 00:49:23.130 --> 00:49:25.370 your second career, your third career. 00:49:25.610 --> 00:49:31.400 Uh, and that, and because we are living long enough, you know, it's not like your life 00:49:31.400 --> 00:49:31.880 is over. 00:49:32.040 --> 00:49:34.040 You can and those are like reboots. 00:49:34.120 --> 00:49:39.880 Like I've always wanted to write poetry, but I, you know, I had to pay for, 00:49:39.960 --> 00:49:43.640 you know, the bills and and support my family growing up. 00:49:43.880 --> 00:49:46.360 And so, you know, I was just doing business. 00:49:46.440 --> 00:49:47.960 And now I can do poetry. 00:49:48.120 --> 00:49:50.120 Now I can do community theater. 00:49:50.280 --> 00:49:53.080 Uh and so there's all those possibilities as well. 00:49:53.320 --> 00:49:58.350 But you know, I think one kind of core element to all of that seems to be the social 00:49:58.590 --> 00:49:59.630 relevance, right? 00:49:59.790 --> 00:50:04.190 It's usually not like now I can finally make tons of money, you know, with crypto coin. 00:50:04.350 --> 00:50:04.590 No. 00:50:04.670 --> 00:50:09.310 It's like it usually involves some aspect of of contributing. 00:50:09.630 --> 00:50:15.310 You know, the what is it you psychologists call uh generativity? 00:50:15.550 --> 00:50:17.230 The you know the Ericsson. 00:50:17.710 --> 00:50:18.270 Yeah, I don't know. 00:50:18.350 --> 00:50:21.150 We wouldn't we're Dave and I are like the last people who invent that. 00:50:21.230 --> 00:50:21.390 Yeah. 00:50:21.470 --> 00:50:21.550 Yeah. 00:50:21.870 --> 00:50:24.830 Yeah, that's the last that's not the psychic kind of psychology word to it. 00:50:25.310 --> 00:50:27.760 We don't talk about that kind of psychology on the podcast. 00:50:34.240 --> 00:50:36.160 Oh, that's I think that's the Maslow stuff. 00:50:36.240 --> 00:50:36.320 Yeah. 00:50:36.880 --> 00:50:41.200 It has an interesting history in Southern California hippie movements, but anyway, yeah, 00:50:41.280 --> 00:50:41.600 Erlin. 00:50:42.640 --> 00:50:43.200 Yeah. 00:50:44.000 --> 00:50:48.960 Well, anyway, that that was I guess going back to that original question about lessons and 00:50:49.120 --> 00:50:54.570 and rethinking and sort of harnessing what we know and have learned 00:50:54.890 --> 00:51:00.890 about how we've lived over most of revolutionary history can be insightful when we think 00:51:00.890 --> 00:51:06.650 about whether it's something like a heart disease, like heart disease, versus even 00:51:06.730 --> 00:51:12.410 just our our general well-being and thinking about how to spend our later years. 00:51:13.320 --> 00:51:13.560 Yeah. 00:51:13.800 --> 00:51:18.920 I think that's a really important and and beautiful insight that we evolved to not want to 00:51:18.920 --> 00:51:24.920 be a burden on others, that we that we really uh fear and loathe uh a situation 00:51:24.920 --> 00:51:28.840 where we are taking in uh more than we are giving out. 00:51:29.080 --> 00:51:34.840 Um and we really uh value and appreciate situations where we are giving out more than we're 00:51:34.870 --> 00:51:35.750 taking in. 00:51:35.830 --> 00:51:41.110 Uh and it makes you know uh very clear uh evolutionary logic that if you're in a place 00:51:41.110 --> 00:51:45.190 where you're receiving more than you're giving, well that's that's a really bad place to be 00:51:45.190 --> 00:51:47.430 in uh from an evolutionary perspective. 00:51:47.590 --> 00:51:52.790 Uh that means that you you are you know if there's a famine or or or a flood or or or or a 00:51:52.790 --> 00:51:55.510 drought or whatever, uh you're gonna be the first to go. 00:51:55.660 --> 00:51:59.500 Uh, and that's not where you want to be uh uh from a Darwinian perspective. 00:51:59.580 --> 00:52:03.340 Uh for the and for the same reason, the opposite end of the continuum, where you are a a 00:52:03.340 --> 00:52:07.580 vital resource to the community, where you're really valuable in providing crucial uh 00:52:07.580 --> 00:52:11.500 knowledge and services, that's a really good place to be uh from an evolutionary 00:52:11.500 --> 00:52:11.740 perspective. 00:52:11.900 --> 00:52:17.500 So it makes uh really uh a beautiful sense that we would have this kind of psychology. 00:52:17.660 --> 00:52:21.530 Um, And I think it's an important point for people studying the psychology of well-being 00:52:21.530 --> 00:52:25.850 and what we ought to expect to be correlated with psychological well-being. 00:52:27.050 --> 00:52:32.810 That said, I think I might have a bit more of a pessimistic take on the ability 00:52:32.810 --> 00:52:38.570 of us to continue to be valuable contributors into old 00:52:38.570 --> 00:52:38.970 age. 00:52:39.210 --> 00:52:43.930 I think there is something about the structure of our society that is preventing that from 00:52:43.930 --> 00:52:44.650 happening. 00:52:45.130 --> 00:52:50.920 I think our culture is changing way more rapidly than it has changed in ancestral 00:52:50.920 --> 00:52:51.480 environments. 00:52:51.640 --> 00:52:56.920 And I think the type of the types of knowledge that are valuable to others have become way 00:52:56.920 --> 00:53:01.480 more specialized and niche fied uh than than they would have been in ancestral 00:53:01.560 --> 00:53:02.200 environments. 00:53:02.360 --> 00:53:08.120 So if I'm getting to old age now, uh the lessons and insights that I acquired during my 00:53:08.120 --> 00:53:12.630 youth are in all likelihood not going to be relevant to my children and grandchildren. 00:53:12.710 --> 00:53:14.070 They're going to be out of date. 00:53:14.310 --> 00:53:18.950 The software I learned when I was a young person is probably going to be updated. 00:53:19.030 --> 00:53:20.950 And there are different kinds of software now. 00:53:21.030 --> 00:53:23.190 They're going to be di society will be different. 00:53:23.510 --> 00:53:26.870 Even the career I'm in, you know, my my dad's a lawyer. 00:53:28.710 --> 00:53:33.990 His advice for how to be a good lawyer might not translate into being a good evolutionary 00:53:33.990 --> 00:53:34.630 psychologist. 00:53:34.790 --> 00:53:40.390 There are just non transferable knowledge between different domains of specialization. 00:53:40.550 --> 00:53:45.980 And uh even within his own uh realm of being a lawyer, I'm sure a lot of his knowledge and 00:53:45.980 --> 00:53:51.260 insight uh that was valuable when he was a young man, uh, is probably not as applicable to 00:53:51.260 --> 00:53:55.100 uh young lawyers entering the profession today because we live in a very different legal 00:53:55.100 --> 00:53:56.940 environment, a very different cultural environment. 00:53:57.100 --> 00:54:01.260 We have the internet and social media, which has changed our society in innumerable ways. 00:54:01.420 --> 00:54:04.060 We have AIs that can write uh legal briefings now. 00:54:04.220 --> 00:54:06.910 So it's a completely different environment. 00:54:07.390 --> 00:54:13.150 And so I think we're living in an age where uh our elders have never been uh 00:54:13.470 --> 00:54:14.830 so worthless. 00:54:15.070 --> 00:54:20.350 Um I think we're at we're at peak uh 00:54:20.510 --> 00:54:21.950 elders being useless. 00:54:22.110 --> 00:54:26.830 Oh okay, boomer, that mentality uh uh really makes sense in terms of if you think about the 00:54:26.830 --> 00:54:28.270 economic structure of our society. 00:54:28.350 --> 00:54:33.620 And it's really unprecedented because uh as far as I'm aware, in most small-scale hunter, 00:54:33.700 --> 00:54:39.620 forager, horticultural societies, elders tend to receive a lot of respect and reverence and 00:54:39.620 --> 00:54:42.420 they're looked to for wisdom and knowledge. 00:54:42.580 --> 00:54:44.500 In our society, it's quite the opposite. 00:54:44.580 --> 00:54:47.460 Uh uh old people are often ignored, dismissed. 00:54:47.540 --> 00:54:49.300 There's the okay boomer mentality. 00:54:49.380 --> 00:54:53.940 We're much more obsessed and excited by youth and what the young people are doing, and 00:54:53.940 --> 00:54:56.610 young young people are cool, and old people are not. 00:54:56.690 --> 00:55:00.290 Um it's a very different, unprecedented environment that we're living in. 00:55:00.370 --> 00:55:05.810 And I don't see a lot of ways to to really change that without completely overhauling our 00:55:05.810 --> 00:55:06.530 economic system. 00:55:06.770 --> 00:55:08.930 So what do you think about that pessimistic take? 00:55:10.130 --> 00:55:12.130 Um well thanks for that question. 00:55:12.210 --> 00:55:18.130 I actually think that's uh a a a perfect representation I think what I think a lot 00:55:18.130 --> 00:55:20.130 of people might might think. 00:55:20.530 --> 00:55:25.220 Um and I have yeah, a number of responses. 00:55:25.460 --> 00:55:30.660 F first of all, even in hunter-gatherers society and from the ethnographic literature, in 00:55:30.660 --> 00:55:36.660 almost every society, you see some elements of yeah, respect and honor for the elderly, at 00:55:36.660 --> 00:55:39.460 the same time that you see sometimes poor treatment of the elderly. 00:55:39.540 --> 00:55:45.140 Just like in our society, we kind of think about old age as prestige and 00:55:45.460 --> 00:55:51.050 honor, but then youth-oriented, you know, how do people actually get treated? 00:55:51.210 --> 00:55:55.530 So I think that sort of dichotomy has always sort of existed. 00:55:55.770 --> 00:56:00.090 And that age itself doesn't necessarily get you anything. 00:56:00.810 --> 00:56:05.850 Going back to this idea about being useful, you know, it's easy to focus on, you know, the 00:56:05.850 --> 00:56:10.940 world leaders who are all, you know, the average age of a world president, you know, 00:56:11.100 --> 00:56:14.140 country president is like 62 right now. 00:56:14.300 --> 00:56:16.140 So, and and that's an average. 00:56:16.220 --> 00:56:21.020 So there's you know, some that are you know much older than that, but that they might not 00:56:21.020 --> 00:56:23.420 represent everyone in their age class, right? 00:56:23.980 --> 00:56:29.740 And so I do think going back to this idea about okay, how 00:56:29.740 --> 00:56:32.220 can one be valuable and useful? 00:56:32.460 --> 00:56:36.780 Uh, and so even in hunter-gather societies, there is a point. 00:56:37.100 --> 00:56:40.870 You know, in fact, maybe in the evolutionary world, because we're used to thinking about 00:56:40.870 --> 00:56:45.510 the grandmother hypothesis and these other ways that we can be adaptively, you know, 00:56:45.670 --> 00:56:51.590 indirectly reproducing through through care and other forms of of trans resource transfers 00:56:51.590 --> 00:56:52.150 and such. 00:56:52.310 --> 00:56:57.350 Uh, but even with those arguments, remember there there's got to be a point at which your 00:56:57.350 --> 00:57:00.070 net transfers are zero, right? 00:57:00.310 --> 00:57:06.220 And that's when if you're still alive, you're probably not going to be alive for very much 00:57:06.220 --> 00:57:06.620 longer. 00:57:06.780 --> 00:57:12.140 And there's various ways that people go from being alive to not being alive. 00:57:12.300 --> 00:57:16.620 Uh, and some of it includes actually direct geronticide. 00:57:16.780 --> 00:57:17.100 Right? 00:57:17.260 --> 00:57:22.940 So, in a from our cultural context, you know, murdering old people doesn't seem 00:57:22.940 --> 00:57:27.420 compatible with respect and honor uh of the elderly. 00:57:27.580 --> 00:57:32.380 But in the actual context in which it occurs, it's actually, you know, a deeply personal 00:57:33.010 --> 00:57:33.810 experience. 00:57:34.370 --> 00:57:38.850 It's basically some of the same issues that we're dealing with now with euthanasia, and at 00:57:38.850 --> 00:57:41.170 what point is enough enough. 00:57:41.890 --> 00:57:44.210 And not just with terminal illness, right? 00:57:44.370 --> 00:57:48.770 But thinking about, you know, okay, I'm done. 00:57:50.290 --> 00:57:56.050 So I think there is that element that has existed even in hunter and gathering contexts. 00:57:56.370 --> 00:58:01.650 And then the next step of what I would say is there is a difference between 00:58:02.580 --> 00:58:07.460 Thinking about people in their 90s and thinking about people even in their 60s. 00:58:07.700 --> 00:58:11.300 Because from what you're saying, my kids already think I'm old. 00:58:11.780 --> 00:58:16.820 Uh what is my my son was trying to trick me into doing a six-seven thing. 00:58:17.140 --> 00:58:18.020 Uh right. 00:58:18.260 --> 00:58:20.100 See, Dave doesn't even know it yet. 00:58:20.340 --> 00:58:23.620 Your kid, if your kid was a little bit older, you would know that, right? 00:58:23.700 --> 00:58:26.420 And so you're already obsolete in your 40s. 00:58:26.500 --> 00:58:32.490 And which is true, taking it to the extreme, it's not just the elderly who are o 00:58:32.490 --> 00:58:35.370 obsolete, but you know, we're obsolete by age 30, you know. 00:58:35.530 --> 00:58:40.650 And but I I I think um Right. 00:58:40.730 --> 00:58:45.770 And so it's true that the the rate of population growth is highest at some of those latest 00:58:45.770 --> 00:58:51.210 ages, but uh just in terms of sheer numbers, the biggest chunk of like 00:58:51.500 --> 00:58:55.820 elder population is going to be in that young old category. 00:58:55.980 --> 00:58:56.300 Right. 00:58:56.380 --> 00:58:58.620 So like like 50, 75. 00:58:59.180 --> 00:59:04.540 And that's the that's still the age range that even in hunter-gatherers, people are 00:59:04.540 --> 00:59:08.380 contributing uh in valuable ways, right? 00:59:08.460 --> 00:59:13.820 And so so I'm not really talking about you know the people who are 95 need to kind of get 00:59:13.820 --> 00:59:19.450 out there and and make a difference, you know, and it's true that that that aspect 00:59:19.450 --> 00:59:24.650 still might carry more burden than benefit, you know, that of course will depend on a whole 00:59:24.650 --> 00:59:25.530 bunch of factors. 00:59:25.690 --> 00:59:29.610 But it's not like everyone 60 and up is going to be all burdened. 00:59:29.770 --> 00:59:32.810 So there's that element too, that I do think the ages matter. 00:59:32.890 --> 00:59:36.330 And so the kinds of things a sixty year old can do might be very different than what a 00:59:36.330 --> 00:59:39.610 ninety year old can do, given how we live today. 00:59:40.170 --> 00:59:46.160 And then the final point about all of that, yes, society is changing super rapidly, and 00:59:46.400 --> 00:59:49.200 you know, knowledge becomes obsolete very rapidly. 00:59:49.360 --> 00:59:55.200 But I think there's certain skills that even in the with ChatGPT 00:59:55.200 --> 01:00:00.880 and Wikipedia and you know rapidly changing norms and fads, that 01:00:01.120 --> 01:00:05.120 a little bit of wisdom and experience are just very valuable. 01:00:05.570 --> 01:00:11.090 Um and you know, from just simple advice, you know, to say your 01:00:11.090 --> 01:00:15.570 grandchildren, uh, to even, you know, there's been sort of a, I don't know if we call it a 01:00:15.570 --> 01:00:20.770 movement, but you know, Chip Connolly and others sort of harness this idea that, yeah, 01:00:21.010 --> 01:00:24.530 older people have a lot to contribute, but they can't do it by themselves. 01:00:24.770 --> 01:00:30.690 So bring them in as partners, working with some of the young folks who have 01:00:30.850 --> 01:00:36.780 you know much more recent knowledge about say technology and the way things are working 01:00:36.780 --> 01:00:42.700 today, combined with some of the wisdom and experience of older folks, and then all of 01:00:42.700 --> 01:00:45.260 a sudden, you know, it can make a huge difference. 01:00:45.420 --> 01:00:48.780 I mean, just even think about you know some of your academic advisors. 01:00:49.020 --> 01:00:54.540 The academic climate today is a lot more competitive than when our advisors, you know, just 01:00:54.700 --> 01:01:00.270 whenever they thought they would just like go onto the market and get a job and and but 01:01:00.590 --> 01:01:04.510 you wouldn't probably say that your advisors still have nothing to contribute given that 01:01:04.510 --> 01:01:06.190 the academic market has shifted. 01:01:06.350 --> 01:01:11.550 There's still a lot of wisdom and experience when it comes to the day-to-day type things. 01:01:11.790 --> 01:01:17.550 So I think we just need to be kind of creative and and create those niches where there 01:01:17.550 --> 01:01:23.360 are still some contributions, but we can't necessarily expect the same exact 01:01:23.360 --> 01:01:29.360 contributions that we would expect probably from people in their 20s and 30s as we might 01:01:29.360 --> 01:01:31.920 expect for people in their 70s. 01:01:32.640 --> 01:01:34.320 Does that does that make sense? 01:01:34.560 --> 01:01:40.000 So you know, I I still think at the end of the day, and there's been a lot of 01:01:40.640 --> 01:01:46.480 increasing activity towards even just like mentorship programs and and things that, 01:01:46.870 --> 01:01:49.030 you know, trying to kill two birds, one stone. 01:01:49.190 --> 01:01:54.950 There's still plenty of literacy and you know, wayward youth that that you know will get 01:01:54.950 --> 01:01:56.070 themselves into trouble. 01:01:56.150 --> 01:02:01.510 And then they're partnered with older adults, kind of mentorship programs, uh, kind of like 01:02:01.510 --> 01:02:06.870 big brother, big sister, but with older adults that you know not only reduces loneliness in 01:02:06.870 --> 01:02:10.630 older adults and gives them a sense of meaning and purpose by contributing to their 01:02:10.630 --> 01:02:16.600 community, but you're also you know, preventing future crime, you're improving literacy, 01:02:16.840 --> 01:02:19.240 improving their job prospects down the road. 01:02:19.400 --> 01:02:22.120 And those those types of arrangements are win-win. 01:02:22.440 --> 01:02:28.440 And but the better thing, even better, would be like, well, is that only a volunteer thing? 01:02:28.600 --> 01:02:33.240 Like, I still need to eat, you know, and I can't rely on my social security and I don't 01:02:33.240 --> 01:02:33.880 have savings. 01:02:34.040 --> 01:02:39.960 And so, right, can we create a system where there it's not necessarily for 01:02:39.960 --> 01:02:45.570 free, uh, but that these things are monetized, there's you know exchange economy. 01:02:45.890 --> 01:02:51.810 Uh I I just think we haven't really been thinking about those things as 01:02:51.810 --> 01:02:57.170 much, nearly as much, as what's the numerical breakthrough that's going to extend my life 01:02:57.170 --> 01:02:59.570 to 150 years of age. 01:02:59.810 --> 01:03:05.620 And so, yeah, I guess I would say part of the shift of this book by looking back, it's 01:03:05.700 --> 01:03:09.620 it's it's a way of looking forward, but but focusing on different things. 01:03:09.860 --> 01:03:15.860 Maybe we're gonna live to 150 um through you know other folks doing their 01:03:15.860 --> 01:03:18.580 work, but that's not happening anytime soon. 01:03:18.900 --> 01:03:24.660 And given the world we do live in, how can we kind of maximize not just quantity but the 01:03:24.660 --> 01:03:26.180 quality of life? 01:03:26.340 --> 01:03:31.650 And and part of the I think the important bit too is that no one's really just 01:03:31.650 --> 01:03:33.570 altruistic towards older people. 01:03:33.890 --> 01:03:34.130 Right. 01:03:34.290 --> 01:03:39.090 But but the idea is that by integrating older people, you're actually helping everybody of 01:03:39.090 --> 01:03:39.970 all ages. 01:03:40.290 --> 01:03:42.450 And and th that's the idea. 01:03:43.570 --> 01:03:44.370 Yeah, I like that. 01:03:44.450 --> 01:03:49.890 It's you're finding the value in people and respecting it them, and it's not a 01:03:49.890 --> 01:03:54.520 handout in the same way you said, you know, people won't want to feel like they're actually 01:03:54.520 --> 01:03:54.920 contributing. 01:03:55.160 --> 01:03:55.960 I agree with David too. 01:03:56.040 --> 01:04:00.760 I think that's really profound because there's a lot of sort of rhetoric about we have to 01:04:00.760 --> 01:04:06.520 really be careful about the moral hazard of giving anything to anybody because left 01:04:06.520 --> 01:04:10.120 unchecked, people will just want to be sponges. 01:04:10.760 --> 01:04:15.080 Um and it sounds like what you're saying is that um that 01:04:16.470 --> 01:04:21.830 and that that that that view is often framed as sort of like a uh a very steel, 01:04:21.990 --> 01:04:27.110 open-eyed, sort of no no Pollyanna view of human nature, right? 01:04:27.190 --> 01:04:32.230 Where like people will just free ride the hell out of things, and it's actually human 01:04:32.230 --> 01:04:32.470 nature. 01:04:32.630 --> 01:04:38.070 And and it sounds like what you're saying is um that's that is an oversimplification. 01:04:38.150 --> 01:04:40.470 And in fact, people want to feel like they're contributing. 01:04:40.870 --> 01:04:41.350 Exactly. 01:04:41.510 --> 01:04:45.000 You know, and there's always gonna be some small percentage of that. 01:04:45.160 --> 01:04:50.200 But but that's easy to contain when you have the vast majority, you know, paying their 01:04:50.200 --> 01:04:54.280 taxes, basically, uh in in in a variety of different ways. 01:04:54.440 --> 01:04:58.520 And and from so much of what you know studies that have been done, we do know that people 01:04:58.520 --> 01:05:01.320 want to do more, but there's always obstacles. 01:05:01.480 --> 01:05:05.160 Like I live, like I live in a place and I can't get to the elementary school. 01:05:05.240 --> 01:05:06.760 How am I gonna I can't drive anymore? 01:05:06.840 --> 01:05:08.280 How am I actually gonna get there? 01:05:08.520 --> 01:05:13.710 And so again, this becomes goes back to the urban planning elements of you know you know 01:05:13.710 --> 01:05:18.510 how many people that are with you know with with big house older people with big empty 01:05:18.510 --> 01:05:22.190 houses and then you have all these like college students that can't find a place to live. 01:05:22.430 --> 01:05:22.670 Exactly. 01:05:22.990 --> 01:05:25.470 It's like you know put the peanut butter with the chocolate. 01:05:25.710 --> 01:05:25.870 Yeah. 01:05:25.950 --> 01:05:27.150 It's a coordination problem. 01:05:27.230 --> 01:05:28.350 It's a coordination problem. 01:05:28.430 --> 01:05:28.750 Yeah. 01:05:29.070 --> 01:05:29.710 Yeah. 01:05:30.660 --> 01:05:36.500 But I think just having those conversations and brainstorming those things and le is a 01:05:36.500 --> 01:05:39.620 first step for really trying to help kind of implement that. 01:05:39.780 --> 01:05:45.620 And that that's what I'm hoping uh happens with with 01:05:45.860 --> 01:05:50.260 well, not just with the book, but you know, as we kind of move forward. 01:05:50.580 --> 01:05:52.470 Um yeah. 01:05:52.870 --> 01:05:57.190 Well, you at the beginning of the episode, you mentioned um a really interesting and 01:05:57.190 --> 01:06:03.190 profound fact about the difference between modern uh civilization and and what we see in 01:06:03.190 --> 01:06:08.630 small-scale hunter, forager, horticulturalist societies, which is that fertility has gone 01:06:08.630 --> 01:06:11.030 down quite a bit uh in the modern world. 01:06:11.190 --> 01:06:15.270 Um and you you talked about, you know, the the pyramidal structure of society where, you 01:06:15.270 --> 01:06:18.790 know, it used to be that um there were relatively few old people and and lots of young 01:06:18.790 --> 01:06:20.310 people because fertility was so high. 01:06:20.540 --> 01:06:25.420 But now we have more of a cylindrical or tower-like structure where there's evenly 01:06:25.420 --> 01:06:28.860 distributed numbers of old people and young people because we're just not having as many 01:06:28.860 --> 01:06:29.340 kids. 01:06:29.500 --> 01:06:35.260 And from a Darwinian perspective, this is a really huge and important puzzle because you 01:06:35.260 --> 01:06:39.420 might expect the opposite from an evolutionary perspective, that in times of unprecedented 01:06:39.420 --> 01:06:44.140 wealth and abundance, you would expect fertility to boom, that we would be having more 01:06:44.140 --> 01:06:44.540 kids. 01:06:44.700 --> 01:06:46.550 And yet the opposite has happened. 01:06:46.630 --> 01:06:50.470 And you know, there's been tons of you know empirical and theoretical work on this. 01:06:50.550 --> 01:06:53.910 It's known as the demographic transition, it's sometimes called a paradox. 01:06:54.310 --> 01:07:00.230 Um, so I'm curious, uh, given your knowledge of human development, 01:07:00.390 --> 01:07:05.910 human life history, human psychology, human health, uh, do you have a take on on this uh 01:07:06.150 --> 01:07:09.270 profound change uh in human population structure? 01:07:09.590 --> 01:07:12.150 Is there a particular theoretical approach that you favor? 01:07:12.470 --> 01:07:15.990 Uh uh what is what is your take on this question? 01:07:24.480 --> 01:07:30.320 I guess you know these days now you know 01:07:30.400 --> 01:07:35.040 we've shifted from you know worries about the population bomb and the population boom and 01:07:35.040 --> 01:07:37.120 to you know population collapse, right? 01:07:37.200 --> 01:07:42.730 And so we're starting to see uh you know, a lot of you know 01:07:42.970 --> 01:07:48.730 op-eds you know about this kind of thing, and of course the Elon 01:07:48.890 --> 01:07:51.210 Musk's trying to you know do their part. 01:07:51.610 --> 01:07:57.530 Uh and you know, I think um 01:07:58.970 --> 01:08:04.090 well, on one level, the the fact that you have a population pyramid like this, you know, 01:08:04.250 --> 01:08:09.700 probably never before in history have we had this many generations sort of coexistent, 01:08:09.940 --> 01:08:11.700 which which is kind of cool. 01:08:11.940 --> 01:08:13.860 Like, wow, what are all the potential? 01:08:13.940 --> 01:08:17.940 So it's not even just like grandparents with kids, it's like great grandparents, you know, 01:08:18.260 --> 01:08:20.420 great great grandparents potentially. 01:08:20.980 --> 01:08:25.220 So so that's kind of wild in terms of thinking about those possibilities. 01:08:25.460 --> 01:08:30.010 Um, you know, there's economists and others who've kind of been working on, you know, 01:08:30.170 --> 01:08:32.330 should we be as panicked as we are? 01:08:32.570 --> 01:08:35.610 Uh are we just being selfish by not wanting kids? 01:08:35.850 --> 01:08:39.370 You know, I have a I have a colleague who thinks we're selfish if we do want kids because 01:08:39.370 --> 01:08:41.370 of you know r equals point five. 01:08:41.530 --> 01:08:45.770 I was like, clearly that person's never had a kid because you know. 01:08:45.930 --> 01:08:51.680 Um but you know, I I do think you know, 01:08:51.760 --> 01:08:56.800 it's an older idea within sort of the evolutionary perspectives on 01:08:57.600 --> 01:08:59.520 the demographic transition, right? 01:08:59.680 --> 01:09:05.360 That we're not just built to kind of maximize the total number of babies, right? 01:09:05.520 --> 01:09:11.200 But but in terms of you know maximizing our sort of genetic income stream, 01:09:11.520 --> 01:09:17.510 uh you know, it is the you know is it the case, or at least psychologically, 01:09:17.830 --> 01:09:23.670 that we feel that we need to provide in a certain way uh for kids? 01:09:24.230 --> 01:09:30.070 And so we're we don't seem to be hitting that diminishing returns on on the 01:09:30.070 --> 01:09:31.830 few kids that we do have. 01:09:32.150 --> 01:09:32.550 Right? 01:09:32.710 --> 01:09:37.190 So if we were, then you'd hit diminishing returns and you'd have another child. 01:09:37.350 --> 01:09:43.160 Uh but you know, coupled with the fact that it takes a whole bunch, you know, like alpha in 01:09:43.160 --> 01:09:49.080 the evolutionary models, like the age of first pre first birth, uh, you know, that's 01:09:49.080 --> 01:09:52.440 sort of the shift from growth to reproduction, right? 01:09:52.520 --> 01:09:58.200 But but for us now, I mean, if if that's happening at age 30, right, that's clearly beyond 01:09:58.200 --> 01:09:59.480 just somatic growth. 01:09:59.640 --> 01:10:05.160 That's you know, all that human capital in our brain, you know, to the point where you are 01:10:05.160 --> 01:10:10.920 sort of economically somewhat independent, uh, and then all of a sudden now you're 01:10:11.310 --> 01:10:12.510 having children. 01:10:12.670 --> 01:10:18.270 So you're you're ready like way too late in the in the or not too way too late, but later 01:10:18.270 --> 01:10:19.310 in the game. 01:10:20.350 --> 01:10:23.150 And then we don't seem to be having these diminishing returns. 01:10:23.310 --> 01:10:29.310 You know, I do kind of think you know this whole idea it's not the right time, it's not 01:10:29.310 --> 01:10:33.310 the right time, you know, my grandmother always used to say, you know, it was never the 01:10:33.310 --> 01:10:33.710 right time. 01:10:33.950 --> 01:10:35.310 We never we just had kids. 01:10:35.390 --> 01:10:40.180 Like you know, that that was just the you know what what we did. 01:10:40.500 --> 01:10:45.860 And so, you know, is it that you know we're all kind of stuck on this treadmill thinking 01:10:45.860 --> 01:10:51.620 that we need more schooling and we need to hit a certain level of well-being, economic 01:10:51.620 --> 01:10:57.460 well-being, before we feel comfortable introducing a child into the world? 01:10:57.700 --> 01:11:02.100 And then what do we feel that child needs to have? 01:11:02.500 --> 01:11:04.500 And how can I afford that? 01:11:06.550 --> 01:11:10.710 And so, I mean, certainly what people seem to say, you know, when this was first happening 01:11:10.790 --> 01:11:16.230 in like in Italy and places where, you know, growth rates were declining 01:11:16.230 --> 01:11:21.350 rapidly, you know, and the total fertility rates were well below replacement, you know, 01:11:21.510 --> 01:11:24.230 well before it was hitting other countries. 01:11:24.550 --> 01:11:30.310 And it was this economic thing and the time thing just really, you know, come up 01:11:30.310 --> 01:11:31.990 again and again and again. 01:11:32.230 --> 01:11:37.120 Uh, you know some people were blaming well this is what happens with you know when you let 01:11:37.120 --> 01:11:42.000 women work and they were throwing this weird spin of like gender equality is leading to 01:11:42.000 --> 01:11:47.920 fertility decline and but but it sort of implies that well then left to your druthers 01:11:48.240 --> 01:11:54.240 to pick the best choices in life that kids somehow become less and less a part 01:11:54.240 --> 01:11:55.840 of that story. 01:11:56.480 --> 01:12:02.230 Um you know, I also think I don't know about you, Dave, but 01:12:02.310 --> 01:12:07.750 you know, I didn't have tons of experience with babies until I had my own. 01:12:08.230 --> 01:12:09.030 David's a father too. 01:12:09.110 --> 01:12:09.190 Yeah. 01:12:09.430 --> 01:12:10.390 Oh, okay, David. 01:12:10.550 --> 01:12:12.870 Uh David, how old how old? 01:12:13.030 --> 01:12:13.990 Yeah, mine's five and a half. 01:12:14.230 --> 01:12:15.110 She's uh three and a half. 01:12:15.270 --> 01:12:15.670 Three and a half. 01:12:15.910 --> 01:12:16.710 Oh, three and a half. 01:12:16.870 --> 01:12:17.270 Yeah. 01:12:17.510 --> 01:12:18.070 Yeah. 01:12:18.390 --> 01:12:23.080 And and so, yeah, there's a lot of like, oh, I'm not ready for this. 01:12:23.160 --> 01:12:27.320 That there were certain elements that were easy or much easier than I thought they would 01:12:27.320 --> 01:12:27.560 be. 01:12:27.720 --> 01:12:30.600 Uh, and then of course, elements that were much harder. 01:12:30.760 --> 01:12:36.680 And of course, because of the relatively you know, isolated 01:12:36.680 --> 01:12:42.440 way we live, it it definitely adds to the the costs of raising children, 01:12:42.600 --> 01:12:48.210 you know, and we're much less free-range childhoods than we've ever been before, 01:12:48.370 --> 01:12:51.490 even in our compared to like when I was a kid. 01:12:51.650 --> 01:12:55.170 Uh and all that just seems to raise the costs more. 01:12:55.410 --> 01:13:01.330 And so I do feel like there's these uh there it seems to be more psychological, 01:13:01.410 --> 01:13:07.300 you know, explanations for why we're sort of tricked into uh 01:13:08.260 --> 01:13:14.260 getting by with with fewer children, even though all the data would show you 01:13:14.260 --> 01:13:17.380 could have more kids and they would still survive. 01:13:18.340 --> 01:13:20.580 And but yeah, they might survive. 01:13:20.660 --> 01:13:25.300 But then where you do see some of the trade-offs is definitely how many of them are going 01:13:25.300 --> 01:13:29.300 to get college education, how many of them are gonna be making a decent salary, you know, 01:13:29.380 --> 01:13:30.980 by the time that they're 30. 01:13:31.220 --> 01:13:36.390 And there you do see the trade-offs that make you like great quantity quality kind of 01:13:36.390 --> 01:13:39.670 arguments about fertility and investment. 01:13:40.710 --> 01:13:46.150 So which is probably why there's you know a small sector of like super 01:13:46.150 --> 01:13:51.750 wealthy who are increasing their fertility because they can farm out everything, 01:13:51.990 --> 01:13:52.310 right? 01:13:52.630 --> 01:13:58.550 From literally like your breasts, you know, having wet nurses to you know childcare 01:13:58.710 --> 01:14:00.310 to everything. 01:14:00.630 --> 01:14:06.360 Um yeah, so that that's I don't know my my quick you know, what 01:14:06.520 --> 01:14:11.080 what is interesting is is you know from having 01:14:12.680 --> 01:14:18.680 worked you know with small scale societies for a while where fertility's been 01:14:18.680 --> 01:14:19.720 always high. 01:14:20.040 --> 01:14:24.200 So with the Aceh, you know, they had about average seven births. 01:14:24.430 --> 01:14:29.950 The Chumane had about eight births over or eight or nine births over their life course. 01:14:30.190 --> 01:14:35.470 And it's true not all survive, but you know, a good number survive. 01:14:35.870 --> 01:14:41.710 And surrounded by kids all the time, you know, you really get the sense that 01:14:41.710 --> 01:14:47.680 someone who's worthwhile, competent, has status, 01:14:48.000 --> 01:14:50.720 should have a family and have a big family. 01:14:50.960 --> 01:14:56.640 And so, you know, me coming in with my college education and working towards my 01:14:56.640 --> 01:15:01.600 PhD and beyond, you know, I was sort of seen as the poor person who doesn't really know how 01:15:01.600 --> 01:15:02.560 to be an adult. 01:15:02.800 --> 01:15:03.680 What are you looking for? 01:15:03.840 --> 01:15:04.800 Why are you even here? 01:15:06.640 --> 01:15:08.400 We're just living our lives. 01:15:08.640 --> 01:15:13.250 Um, you know, and it's interesting because even you know some of the Bolivians I'm good 01:15:13.250 --> 01:15:19.170 friends with who you know are from the cities still have some of that mentality too, that 01:15:19.170 --> 01:15:20.770 family is is key. 01:15:21.010 --> 01:15:24.690 You know, there's certain decisions they wouldn't make for you know they wouldn't move 01:15:24.690 --> 01:15:30.610 across the country to another country for a job when there's all these 01:15:30.610 --> 01:15:35.090 sort of ties that bind and keep you keep you keep you local. 01:15:36.050 --> 01:15:40.940 So I don't know, I'm just veering off into la la land here. 01:15:41.420 --> 01:15:44.780 Uh but I mean it's not it's not not la la land. 01:15:45.020 --> 01:15:50.860 I mean, I think it it showcases um uh one area where I think uh it's crucial to 01:15:50.860 --> 01:15:55.820 take uh an evolutionary psychological approach rather than, you know, say a behavioral 01:15:55.900 --> 01:15:57.420 ecological approach. 01:15:57.660 --> 01:16:02.220 Because here in this case we have a behavior that is clearly not maximi maximizing fitness. 01:16:02.300 --> 01:16:06.550 Uh and the only way to really understand it is to is to think about what's actually going 01:16:06.550 --> 01:16:08.070 in on inside people's heads. 01:16:08.390 --> 01:16:12.470 You know, what are what are the emotions, what are the thought processes, what is leading 01:16:12.470 --> 01:16:13.430 to this outcome. 01:16:13.590 --> 01:16:18.070 Because it's c it's clearly not uh maximizing fitness in a straightforward Darwinian sense. 01:16:18.230 --> 01:16:22.870 There must be some kind of mismatch uh between say ancestral selection pressures and the 01:16:22.870 --> 01:16:23.750 current environment. 01:16:23.910 --> 01:16:28.940 There there must be something in in the head that is that is causing these types of 01:16:28.940 --> 01:16:29.740 behaviors to emerge. 01:16:29.820 --> 01:16:35.180 And for that, we need to delve into the psychology of social status, of uh of passing 01:16:35.180 --> 01:16:39.180 social status on to our kids and making sure our kids are competitive in the social 01:16:39.180 --> 01:16:43.340 environment, what the social environment is like, what kinds of cues the mind is receptive 01:16:43.340 --> 01:16:48.780 to when it comes to planning out the life course and planning out uh their families. 01:16:49.110 --> 01:16:54.950 Um, so it seems like what you're saying, uh, is that there's something about um 01:16:55.190 --> 01:17:00.870 the way that social status and wealth is organized in modern societies that is 01:17:00.870 --> 01:17:06.870 feeding into our evolved minds and giving us cues that we really need to invest a lot uh 01:17:06.950 --> 01:17:11.200 in our kids in order for them to be competitive uh uh with with other kids in the 01:17:11.200 --> 01:17:11.920 environment. 01:17:12.080 --> 01:17:16.960 And uh we just don't have the resources to have a large number of offspring because we 01:17:16.960 --> 01:17:21.360 can't make sure that each one of them is going to say, go to college, become successful and 01:17:21.360 --> 01:17:22.320 and prestigious. 01:17:22.480 --> 01:17:27.680 And the only way we can really have comp competitive children is if we invest tons of 01:17:27.680 --> 01:17:29.360 resources in those children. 01:17:29.520 --> 01:17:35.390 Is that basically the the the I think so well in our children and 01:17:35.390 --> 01:17:36.670 potentially ourselves. 01:17:36.910 --> 01:17:42.750 And so uh one kind of like unpub unpublished paper 01:17:42.910 --> 01:17:48.910 number you know, twelve that you know just never made 01:17:48.910 --> 01:17:53.630 it to light from years ago was was trying to get at this exact question. 01:17:53.790 --> 01:17:57.390 And I was trying to and I was using like consumer data. 01:17:57.630 --> 01:18:03.560 So it's like all right, if your income's increasing well what better way to kind of give us 01:18:03.560 --> 01:18:05.000 some insight into the mind? 01:18:05.560 --> 01:18:07.080 What are you spending your money on? 01:18:07.320 --> 01:18:10.680 Like, you know, there's only so much food you can eat, right? 01:18:10.760 --> 01:18:14.680 And so are you maybe you're not spending more money on food, but you're spending it on 01:18:14.680 --> 01:18:15.160 other things. 01:18:15.400 --> 01:18:20.520 But you could maybe just spend it on food, but just much more expensive, high-quality food. 01:18:20.760 --> 01:18:26.590 Um and what what I was suspecting and what ended up 01:18:26.590 --> 01:18:31.070 finding, yeah, it wasn't, yeah, there's more on food because you are now, well, you see a 01:18:31.070 --> 01:18:36.670 lot more meat come on, and then organic meat, and then, you know, uh 01:18:37.630 --> 01:18:42.910 much the each adjective you add to your food, you know, adds a little bit more money that's 01:18:43.070 --> 01:18:43.790 that's spent. 01:18:43.950 --> 01:18:49.760 But it's it's more on sort of like luxury items and and luxury, you know, status 01:18:49.840 --> 01:18:54.880 oriented kinds of expenditures, which then all of a sudden, you know, you see increasing 01:18:54.880 --> 01:18:56.000 much more dramatically. 01:18:56.160 --> 01:19:02.000 So yeah, it really is seemed to be the case that like you could 01:19:02.000 --> 01:19:06.960 get by without having the all of those things and just, you know, spend, save that money 01:19:07.040 --> 01:19:08.800 and put that towards another child. 01:19:08.960 --> 01:19:14.870 But it's this idea that, you know, s since status is such a positional good, right, 01:19:15.110 --> 01:19:16.870 it's always changing. 01:19:17.110 --> 01:19:22.150 You know, and it could be very well that, you know, given that we're social creatures and 01:19:22.150 --> 01:19:27.510 comparative creatures, you know, the fact that our social world through social media and 01:19:27.510 --> 01:19:31.780 everything, we're we're level of comparisons are are insane. 01:19:32.420 --> 01:19:35.620 And so we'll will we ever reach diminishing returns? 01:19:35.700 --> 01:19:40.020 Because there's always going to be people out there that will have something that you don't 01:19:40.020 --> 01:19:43.860 have, or uh at one level a little bit better. 01:19:44.020 --> 01:19:48.020 And so I I it feels really hard to kind of get off that treadmill. 01:19:48.180 --> 01:19:52.500 Uh and our expenditures seem to be going along with that. 01:19:52.740 --> 01:19:57.460 Um our brains and our level of satisfaction seem to go along with that. 01:19:58.190 --> 01:20:04.110 So yeah, I I do think it it definitely is kind of a uh a psychological kind 01:20:04.110 --> 01:20:05.070 of argument. 01:20:05.550 --> 01:20:10.830 But you know, I I I think it's a it's one of those perfect meshes of like behavioral 01:20:10.830 --> 01:20:16.270 ecology and and evolutionary psychology, because the certainly under more 01:20:16.270 --> 01:20:22.120 traditional natural fertility environments, maximizing status would have maximized 01:20:22.120 --> 01:20:23.080 fertility. 01:20:23.320 --> 01:20:23.640 Right. 01:20:23.800 --> 01:20:28.760 In almost every traditional society, when you look at like how many cows or how much land, 01:20:29.080 --> 01:20:35.000 uh, pretty much maps onto number of partners and number of children 01:20:35.160 --> 01:20:36.600 uh almost everywhere. 01:20:36.760 --> 01:20:42.040 And it really is in this sort of heavy competitive cap post 01:20:42.120 --> 01:20:47.080 capitalist kind of market economy where you really see that kind of shift. 01:20:47.750 --> 01:20:47.990 Yeah. 01:20:48.470 --> 01:20:48.630 Yeah. 01:20:48.710 --> 01:20:53.110 And even the decision, I mean we talked a lot about structural issues. 01:20:53.350 --> 01:20:58.950 Um Germany was one of the places that had low fertility and so parental leave and 01:20:58.950 --> 01:21:03.270 childcare was became free um completely. 01:21:03.590 --> 01:21:08.630 And there was an enormous uptick um in in people having kids. 01:21:09.430 --> 01:21:14.230 And the did the decision of sort of like well will I lose my job? 01:21:14.480 --> 01:21:20.320 um, you know, do I have the resources while I am a young adult to to 01:21:20.480 --> 01:21:22.000 uh to have kids? 01:21:22.240 --> 01:21:27.280 That also feels like a very behavioral, ecological, but also evolutionary psychological 01:21:27.280 --> 01:21:33.040 decision because it really maps onto sort of like, you know, what's the ballistic 01:21:33.040 --> 01:21:38.570 trajectory of my ability to actually have a career or get the 01:21:38.570 --> 01:21:42.010 returns on my, you know, intellectual investment. 01:21:42.650 --> 01:21:46.650 Um, and then how much is having a child gonna eat into that? 01:21:46.890 --> 01:21:52.010 And so I think this is another way where I think in a funny way, at least anecdotally to 01:21:52.010 --> 01:21:56.250 me, many of the people who are opposed to things like paid parent, like extending parental 01:21:56.250 --> 01:22:02.180 leave for like, you know, seven months or a year or 14 months, or like free childcare for 01:22:02.180 --> 01:22:02.500 everybody. 01:22:02.660 --> 01:22:06.340 Like many of the people who are against that are also the people who are super concerned 01:22:06.340 --> 01:22:08.100 about like plummeting fertility rates. 01:22:08.260 --> 01:22:08.500 I know. 01:22:08.660 --> 01:22:13.540 And I think that's absolutely silly because uh, you know, those are actually some of the 01:22:14.100 --> 01:22:16.180 one argument would be that's one of the reasons for that. 01:22:16.500 --> 01:22:17.060 Um yeah. 01:22:17.220 --> 01:22:22.660 And so I think uh to my mind, this is another example of um 01:22:23.220 --> 01:22:29.110 very much an evolutionary psychological problem, but it's a but the solution 01:22:29.110 --> 01:22:31.270 is a structural problem. 01:22:31.430 --> 01:22:36.390 It's not wagging your finger at people and say, have babies, don't be an idiot. 01:22:36.550 --> 01:22:42.070 Um, it's actually respecting the the intelligence of not wanting to have a baby in the 01:22:42.070 --> 01:22:46.790 context of a concern about like, you know, am I gonna be okay in my job? 01:22:46.950 --> 01:22:51.270 Like, do I have to leave, you know, three months or three weeks of parental? 01:22:51.510 --> 01:22:52.790 I mean, it's like crazy, right? 01:22:53.940 --> 01:22:54.500 Well, yeah. 01:22:54.660 --> 01:22:58.900 Well, and so some of that pushback I've heard is from people who would have wanted that 01:22:58.900 --> 01:23:01.380 when they were younger, but now they're older and they didn't have it. 01:23:01.780 --> 01:23:03.220 Yeah, that's the best argument. 01:23:03.380 --> 01:23:04.820 I didn't have it, so you can't either. 01:23:04.900 --> 01:23:05.860 That's that's a great way to do that. 01:23:06.100 --> 01:23:06.340 Well, right. 01:23:06.420 --> 01:23:12.020 And so it's like why why should I have my taxes go to subsidize other people's kids and you 01:23:12.020 --> 01:23:13.780 know the luxuries that I didn't have. 01:23:21.450 --> 01:23:26.090 then you don't feel like you wanna actually contribute to those people that you're not 01:23:26.090 --> 01:23:29.850 related to, but make for a better society, better economy, everything. 01:23:30.090 --> 01:23:30.330 Yeah. 01:23:30.490 --> 01:23:30.730 Yeah. 01:23:30.890 --> 01:23:31.450 Exactly. 01:23:31.530 --> 01:23:32.010 Yeah. 01:23:33.850 --> 01:23:34.490 Yeah. 01:23:37.130 --> 01:23:42.250 So uh approaching approaching the end of of the episode. 01:23:42.600 --> 01:23:46.920 Um are there any topics that you're that you're dying to cover, Dave, or that we haven't 01:23:46.920 --> 01:23:47.480 covered yet? 01:23:47.880 --> 01:23:51.240 Uh I mean with Mike, so many that we're just gonna have to have Mike on again. 01:23:51.320 --> 01:23:51.640 So yeah. 01:23:51.960 --> 01:23:52.440 Yeah, probably. 01:23:52.840 --> 01:23:53.640 Yeah, yeah. 01:23:54.040 --> 01:23:55.240 Uh I'm kind of curious. 01:23:55.400 --> 01:24:00.360 I mean, I remember I I was looking through your um publications and I saw something on um 01:24:00.680 --> 01:24:05.160 personality, which is a really interesting topic in evolutionary psychology that we haven't 01:24:05.160 --> 01:24:06.520 really talked a lot about. 01:24:06.680 --> 01:24:09.670 I don't think we've talked really delved into this topic in any of our episodes. 01:24:09.830 --> 01:24:11.590 Um, I know you have some thoughts on that. 01:24:11.670 --> 01:24:16.470 You have some interesting data showing that um personality is very different uh in 01:24:16.470 --> 01:24:18.550 small-scale forager societies. 01:24:18.710 --> 01:24:24.390 Uh that we don't see the same kind of uh differentiation and and so-called big five factors 01:24:24.470 --> 01:24:25.750 uh in personality. 01:24:25.830 --> 01:24:31.510 Um so I'm curious uh what your take is on the evolution of personality, why we are so 01:24:31.510 --> 01:24:37.190 different in these patterned ways, why modern environments are you showcase even larger 01:24:37.300 --> 01:24:41.700 uh uh uh differences between people in terms of their personalities than you might see uh 01:24:41.700 --> 01:24:44.980 in a small scale society and and what what might be going on there. 01:24:45.780 --> 01:24:51.700 Yeah so if I can start from from the I've never actually I I think 01:24:51.860 --> 01:24:57.770 told this story about how how I even got started um uh uh 01:24:58.090 --> 01:25:02.730 thinking about personality because i it certainly didn't set out to be that guy like the 01:25:02.730 --> 01:25:08.170 one just uh big five that's you know it doesn't exist here and so you know 01:25:08.570 --> 01:25:14.490 it's it's um someone a colleague once made a joke about they 01:25:14.490 --> 01:25:19.210 think I have like a a gr the same graph in every paper, you know, where there's some 01:25:19.210 --> 01:25:24.020 y-axis, things that people in the West get, and then you know, as a function of age or 01:25:24.020 --> 01:25:26.660 whatever, and then like it's always flat, like zero. 01:25:27.300 --> 01:25:29.380 I just changed the y-axis label. 01:25:29.620 --> 01:25:33.060 Uh and so it's like, uh, big five, look, that doesn't exist either. 01:25:33.300 --> 01:25:35.300 Uh no, that was never actually the point. 01:25:35.540 --> 01:25:40.020 You know, the point was just that actually, you know, I was running, you know, a big health 01:25:40.020 --> 01:25:45.700 and aging project, and and you know, you get to know people uh in these communities. 01:25:45.860 --> 01:25:51.810 So, you know, every data point is a person, and it just seems like, you know, we've 01:25:51.810 --> 01:25:57.410 got their age and all these biomarkers and all these other characteristics, but doesn't 01:25:57.410 --> 01:26:03.330 seem to be capturing some element of them as a person that I know impacts 01:26:03.330 --> 01:26:08.130 whether they're even here showing up, whether they're gonna actually take the meds that you 01:26:08.130 --> 01:26:14.050 know we may have prescribed, whether they're conscientious and you know, some 01:26:14.050 --> 01:26:17.330 caution precautions that they might need to take or whatnot. 01:26:17.650 --> 01:26:21.620 Uh and weren't measuring that at all. 01:26:21.940 --> 01:26:27.940 And so this was really just me like, okay, let let me just find a personality instrument 01:26:28.020 --> 01:26:33.140 and let's just kind of add it to our kind of circus of 01:26:33.620 --> 01:26:36.500 things we're trying to get at the individual level. 01:26:36.660 --> 01:26:42.660 Uh now, certainly I had some exposure to not so much I'm not a personality psychologist, 01:26:42.740 --> 01:26:48.650 and I know the industry is quite large as I tried to, you know, pave 01:26:48.650 --> 01:26:50.730 my way into it a little bit. 01:26:53.210 --> 01:26:58.730 And so it was interesting to me 01:26:59.610 --> 01:27:02.090 from the behavioral syndromes kind of literature, right? 01:27:02.170 --> 01:27:07.370 That, oh wow, you know, from a behavioral ecologist perspective, if if things are adaptive, 01:27:07.450 --> 01:27:11.980 you know, and conditions are different, you should shift Towards whatever that local 01:27:11.980 --> 01:27:12.860 adaptive thing is. 01:27:13.020 --> 01:27:14.860 And there could be obstacles. 01:27:15.100 --> 01:27:20.620 But the idea that, you know, under variety of different conditions, you might act 01:27:20.620 --> 01:27:24.700 consistently, you know, it's just kind of an intriguing kind of concept. 01:27:24.940 --> 01:27:29.820 Uh and and so thinking about those repercussions and then what would that mean? 01:27:29.980 --> 01:27:35.740 Uh and then yeah, are there elements of certain folks seem very wide open, speak 01:27:35.740 --> 01:27:37.340 easily, they're extroverted? 01:27:37.670 --> 01:27:42.790 Are those people faring better differently than the folks who are more quiet, you know, 01:27:43.030 --> 01:27:47.350 internalizing things and um all that kind of stuff? 01:27:47.430 --> 01:27:50.390 So I was like, all right, let me get a big five inventory. 01:27:50.790 --> 01:27:54.630 Um I found one that was in Spanish and it wasn't too onerous. 01:27:54.790 --> 01:27:59.350 I had like 40, 20, 40 items, I think. 01:27:59.590 --> 01:28:05.110 Uh, and it was just fun actually working with Chumane back and forth and trying to 01:28:05.430 --> 01:28:09.080 uh how do you translate this? 01:28:09.400 --> 01:28:15.240 And and th this was like kind of an early preview of the fact that like there aren't words 01:28:15.240 --> 01:28:18.440 to describe all these nuances in personality. 01:28:18.600 --> 01:28:21.560 You can now it doesn't mean it doesn't exist as a concept. 01:28:21.720 --> 01:28:26.120 You can describe it in a phrase or you know a sentence or two. 01:28:26.360 --> 01:28:32.290 But there it wasn't like you know uh you know a single word kind of descriptor that would 01:28:32.290 --> 01:28:37.730 adequately kind of capture you know s a lot of those uh a lot of those terms 01:28:38.210 --> 01:28:42.690 and so we did kind of translate it all and 01:28:44.530 --> 01:28:50.340 you know always wary you know It's kind of 01:28:50.340 --> 01:28:51.860 new, it's strange, you know. 01:28:52.020 --> 01:28:53.700 Can people you know respond well? 01:28:53.860 --> 01:28:59.140 We back translated, people kind of understood what was going on, but we also just recorded 01:28:59.460 --> 01:29:05.460 information about like the person who was doing the interview would record whether 01:29:05.460 --> 01:29:10.340 the person would smile, were they you know open with their words, or did they seem really 01:29:10.340 --> 01:29:13.860 quiet and reticent, uh, and all that kind of stuff. 01:29:14.150 --> 01:29:18.550 And so not only did we find, you know, we were able to kind of collect those kinds of data, 01:29:18.710 --> 01:29:20.790 it actually did map onto what people said. 01:29:20.950 --> 01:29:26.390 So the extroverted people, you know, were rated as having been more talkative, more 01:29:26.390 --> 01:29:30.630 open, uh, with their thoughts and talking about themselves and such. 01:29:30.710 --> 01:29:35.350 Uh, and then the people on the, you know, emotional stability that were lower on that. 01:29:35.590 --> 01:29:40.060 Um, the former N uh neuro neuroticism. 01:29:40.620 --> 01:29:43.980 Uh you know, those were less a little bit less so. 01:29:44.700 --> 01:29:49.580 Uh and so that showed that, you know, I think we're actually collecting, you know, real 01:29:49.580 --> 01:29:50.220 data. 01:29:50.460 --> 01:29:54.140 Because certainly the the personality psychologists, as soon as you find something that's 01:29:54.140 --> 01:29:58.460 not big five, it's it's go straight for the methodological jugular, right? 01:29:58.540 --> 01:30:00.780 It's like it's a translation issue. 01:30:01.020 --> 01:30:04.070 It's you know, how do you know your instrument is measuring the exact same thing? 01:30:04.150 --> 01:30:04.950 And blah, blah, blah. 01:30:05.110 --> 01:30:08.550 And part of the argument was like, well, I don't think it's measuring the exact same thing, 01:30:08.630 --> 01:30:11.590 but that's part of what we're actually, you know, actually finding. 01:30:11.750 --> 01:30:17.030 So it was it was through the initial just designing that 01:30:17.030 --> 01:30:22.710 instrument in local language and trying to capture some elements of 01:30:22.710 --> 01:30:28.470 personality that might be relevant for thinking about health, economic activity, 01:30:28.900 --> 01:30:31.780 fertility, marriage, all these things. 01:30:32.020 --> 01:30:38.020 Um, but as the initial sort of exercise of like, let's just do the PCA and get the 01:30:38.020 --> 01:30:43.700 big five, and I was like, oh, wait, that that's not really a big 01:30:43.700 --> 01:30:45.940 five uh by any means. 01:30:46.180 --> 01:30:50.100 And then it was like sort of going through all these different lengths. 01:30:50.260 --> 01:30:55.060 Well, what if we just focused on the people who speak Spanish, maybe who are educated? 01:30:55.300 --> 01:31:00.530 Maybe they would act differently, and you know, uh, what about instead of you know David, 01:31:00.610 --> 01:31:03.330 you rating yourself, I have Dave rate you. 01:31:03.890 --> 01:31:08.930 Okay, and see if that so we did all these different permutation, all these different ways, 01:31:09.090 --> 01:31:12.050 you know, and and yeah, people are somewhat agreeable. 01:31:12.290 --> 01:31:17.090 So you can ask the question in the negative, and we had agreeableness checks, did all that, 01:31:17.170 --> 01:31:19.650 and basically we didn't really have a big five. 01:31:19.890 --> 01:31:25.240 Uh what we called it loosely like a big two that seemed to be like there's such 01:31:25.400 --> 01:31:30.600 industriousness and like pro-sociality seem to be kind of two dimensions. 01:31:31.000 --> 01:31:36.680 And you know, some of the initial ideas were kind of laid out in that initial paper, 01:31:36.840 --> 01:31:40.520 but that was probably one of the hardest papers to write because it was it was selling it 01:31:40.520 --> 01:31:42.520 to what was it? 01:31:42.680 --> 01:31:48.390 Not psych science, but uh JPSP, the Journal of Personality, Social Psychology. 01:31:48.550 --> 01:31:54.390 So it was kind of like playing with the big boys of of psychology, personality, and 01:31:54.470 --> 01:32:00.230 you know, trying to convince them that, hey, I think I have something to say, and having to 01:32:00.230 --> 01:32:02.230 learn their tools and language. 01:32:03.350 --> 01:32:08.390 But it was from that initial exercise that you know, I didn't really think it was well, 01:32:08.630 --> 01:32:13.860 because I was I was a little nervous, like maybe it really is just a translation thing or 01:32:13.860 --> 01:32:15.220 something I'm doing wrong. 01:32:15.380 --> 01:32:21.060 Um and it wasn't that you can't get measures for the each of the big five right 01:32:21.380 --> 01:32:26.980 it's just it's this weird thing about thinking about the the the personality structure 01:32:26.980 --> 01:32:32.830 itself right that basically uh if they were 01:32:32.830 --> 01:32:38.110 like five bands on a equalizer, they still have equalizers on radios. 01:32:38.830 --> 01:32:40.670 Uh I mean they're virtual now, but yeah. 01:32:40.990 --> 01:32:41.390 Yeah, okay. 01:32:42.830 --> 01:32:47.310 Instead of each of those moving really independently, it's kind of like if you were to move 01:32:47.310 --> 01:32:50.750 it, they would be stuck and a couple will be moving together. 01:32:50.990 --> 01:32:56.740 Uh and so yeah, what it does mean is in terms of the combinatorics, 01:32:56.900 --> 01:33:01.300 you'd have a fewer, you'd have a less diversity of personalities out there. 01:33:02.020 --> 01:33:07.620 Whereas if you had more independent factors moving, more possibilities, you can get more 01:33:07.620 --> 01:33:09.300 different ways of being. 01:33:09.700 --> 01:33:14.980 And so you know certainly you know the initial ideas were just like well 01:33:15.940 --> 01:33:20.570 it seems to be the case that in 01:33:21.450 --> 01:33:27.450 Chimane life and probably a lot of other, you know, similar groups, um there's all 01:33:27.450 --> 01:33:32.890 different types of personalities, but at the same time there's certain limits and 01:33:32.890 --> 01:33:36.890 constraints over how you can act around other people. 01:33:37.530 --> 01:33:41.200 Um like there's no computer programmers, right? 01:33:41.440 --> 01:33:46.320 You can't just be like a genius that holds up and does your own thing if you're not 01:33:46.320 --> 01:33:48.880 socially competent enough to interact with other people. 01:33:49.440 --> 01:33:54.880 Uh and and so it just got me thinking about sort of 01:33:55.040 --> 01:34:00.720 niche space of modern societies in contrasting with 01:34:01.070 --> 01:34:03.150 small scale societies. 01:34:03.950 --> 01:34:07.710 And the easiest thing to think about was just like jobs, right? 01:34:07.870 --> 01:34:13.630 But certainly the idea, and why we, I think, called it socioecological 01:34:13.630 --> 01:34:18.430 complexity or something, was to move beyond just thinking about jobs. 01:34:18.670 --> 01:34:24.190 But jobs are an easy thing to kind of measure, or how many products you know, your society 01:34:24.190 --> 01:34:25.070 is producing. 01:34:25.710 --> 01:34:31.280 And so with the idea that if there's many more different ways to make a 01:34:31.280 --> 01:34:37.280 living, then sort of like in the old ecological theory, you know, 01:34:37.440 --> 01:34:42.320 individuals will sort of like fill up that niche space until there's sort of diminishing 01:34:42.320 --> 01:34:46.960 returns and look elsewhere, you get what you know, the ideal free distribution. 01:34:47.120 --> 01:34:50.640 Uh, and so all the niche space gets kind of spilled uh filled up. 01:34:50.800 --> 01:34:54.960 And so what's sort of determined though is what does the niche space actually look like. 01:34:55.360 --> 01:35:00.690 And so the initial approach we had was just using country 01:35:00.850 --> 01:35:06.530 level data and taking personality data and just looking at the sort of correlation 01:35:06.530 --> 01:35:12.210 structure across the different big five, with the idea that if it's a high 01:35:12.210 --> 01:35:17.650 correlation, then even though again you get the big five measures, they're sort of hanging 01:35:17.650 --> 01:35:18.530 together. 01:35:19.170 --> 01:35:21.580 You know, in the simplest case, it's all one, right? 01:35:21.660 --> 01:35:27.340 If correlation's one, uh, versus if it's zero, and they're completely uncorrelated. 01:35:27.740 --> 01:35:33.740 And but the idea is like, what could you look at at the country level that would give 01:35:33.740 --> 01:35:37.740 you some insight into like that sort of niche diversity? 01:35:37.980 --> 01:35:43.100 And we looked at a variety of different things from sort of like GDP, like proxies like 01:35:43.100 --> 01:35:48.380 GDP, gross domestic product, uh to like you know, 01:35:48.830 --> 01:35:54.190 these like economic portfolio indices that like apply these entropy 01:35:54.430 --> 01:35:59.470 terms for like how many different products does your country make and what's the relative 01:35:59.470 --> 01:36:00.830 abundance of them. 01:36:01.150 --> 01:36:01.550 Right. 01:36:01.950 --> 01:36:07.630 Um with the idea that more products comes from more jobs and that 01:36:07.630 --> 01:36:13.550 sort of uh hierarchical structure where you're going to require lots of 01:36:13.550 --> 01:36:16.960 different types of jobs and different types of ways of being. 01:36:17.120 --> 01:36:22.400 And so the idea was that with more jobs and more niche space, that that 01:36:22.880 --> 01:36:28.240 your equalizer is like the preset that maybe like makes you a little bit better at one 01:36:28.240 --> 01:36:30.160 thing than another. 01:36:30.480 --> 01:36:33.120 And so the idea was kind of attractive. 01:36:33.280 --> 01:36:39.040 We did some number of empirical analyses that actually all showed some nice correlations 01:36:39.520 --> 01:36:45.450 that that uh That personality structure, even in 01:36:45.450 --> 01:36:51.370 places where there's supposedly you know big five, that the overall correlation varies. 01:36:51.610 --> 01:36:57.450 And it varies in a way in relation to the niche diversity, such that where 01:36:57.450 --> 01:37:03.290 there's a more diverse set of niches, you see less correlation between those factors. 01:37:03.450 --> 01:37:07.450 In other words, more ways of being, of personality. 01:37:09.220 --> 01:37:13.540 so that was the initial kind of empirical set of observations. 01:37:13.780 --> 01:37:17.300 And then of course, uh, you know, part of what I like to do is like, all right, there's 01:37:17.300 --> 01:37:22.340 some results, and I'll let other people think about how that could actually come to be. 01:37:22.580 --> 01:37:27.860 And but we actually did do some some modeling um with Paul Smaldino. 01:37:28.260 --> 01:37:34.110 Uh you know, h could something like that actually come to exist uh in a sort 01:37:34.110 --> 01:37:39.230 of processed way, you know, and we did find some some kind of consistent support for that. 01:37:39.470 --> 01:37:41.870 Uh it's actually it was a fun exercise. 01:37:42.030 --> 01:37:47.390 There were all these new directions that uh would be really interesting to kind of think 01:37:47.390 --> 01:37:53.300 about that I just haven't kind of returned to, but I was sort of hoping, you know, 01:37:53.380 --> 01:37:57.620 because part of it was also, again, that we we just don't know that much about personality 01:37:57.620 --> 01:38:01.780 measured in small scale societies, so it was sort of all new. 01:38:02.020 --> 01:38:07.140 You know, luckily uh there have been some more recent versions of things, and you know, 01:38:07.220 --> 01:38:11.380 they might not be getting a big two, but they seem to be getting a similar kind of story 01:38:11.700 --> 01:38:17.690 that you know there's not as many factors as you might think, and that maybe 01:38:17.690 --> 01:38:19.450 it varies in relation to that. 01:38:19.690 --> 01:38:23.290 But to me, yeah, the developmental story would be really amazing, right? 01:38:23.370 --> 01:38:28.570 You can think of all these, you know, parents coming from you know, you know, small scale 01:38:28.570 --> 01:38:31.290 society context and now moving to the big city. 01:38:31.450 --> 01:38:33.530 But you know, how are children developing? 01:38:33.770 --> 01:38:37.210 What are the inputs that sort of shape and bring things out? 01:38:37.370 --> 01:38:41.770 Uh, because what does it even look like at the individual level as opposed to you know the 01:38:41.770 --> 01:38:45.400 construct we were using with a population structure, right? 01:38:45.480 --> 01:38:49.640 It's really the correlation structure of these personality dimensions. 01:38:49.800 --> 01:38:55.000 I d you know, I still think there's elements of all those items that you see in people. 01:38:55.400 --> 01:38:58.600 But again, it's really how they kind of covary in people. 01:38:58.920 --> 01:39:03.640 And maybe when you kind of there are there's a niche diversity elements. 01:39:03.880 --> 01:39:08.520 We didn't really kind of test so much this idea about constraints, right? 01:39:08.920 --> 01:39:14.590 If you're s purely egalitarian in a way that everyone can be however they want to be, maybe 01:39:14.590 --> 01:39:17.710 that releases the shackles a little bit as well. 01:39:18.110 --> 01:39:23.630 Um anyway, it was a it was a fun kind of foray into personality 01:39:23.630 --> 01:39:29.310 psychology that to me I was like trying to bring some evolutionary kind of perspective. 01:39:29.710 --> 01:39:34.820 What blew me away, I just sort of assumed that you guys had all worked it all out, right? 01:39:34.900 --> 01:39:39.780 That like and then the fact of the big five is just it's just this big inductive exercise, 01:39:39.860 --> 01:39:40.100 right? 01:39:40.180 --> 01:39:41.460 It's just a description. 01:39:41.620 --> 01:39:41.860 Yeah. 01:39:42.020 --> 01:39:47.060 Uh and it must be true because it exists everywhere, but there's no theory that actually 01:39:47.060 --> 01:39:48.260 generates the big five. 01:39:48.340 --> 01:39:53.540 It's like you just described all literally you'll read things of like this thing must be 01:39:53.540 --> 01:39:56.550 true because there's so much data for it. 01:39:56.710 --> 01:40:01.990 And that is this uh the cycle of just tautological 01:40:02.390 --> 01:40:04.950 looking under the the lamp or yeah. 01:40:05.430 --> 01:40:07.190 I mean it's not a bad part place to start. 01:40:07.350 --> 01:40:08.950 You need data, you need results. 01:40:09.350 --> 01:40:15.350 But but then there yeah, we just need more people, maybe not coming from the center 01:40:15.350 --> 01:40:20.470 of the discipline or subdiscipline to you know shake things up a little bit. 01:40:20.550 --> 01:40:25.840 And so yeah, I'm hoping that I haven't actually checked too recently to see if others have 01:40:25.840 --> 01:40:28.640 kind of been building upon some of those ideas, but it would be fun. 01:40:28.880 --> 01:40:29.040 Yeah. 01:40:29.280 --> 01:40:32.880 And just to make that concrete, the idea of like a developmental thing would be, for 01:40:32.880 --> 01:40:38.320 example, something of like if if there's a child coming from a more egalitarian 01:40:38.320 --> 01:40:42.880 society, there's almost like software in the child to sort of be like, Do I have to be as 01:40:42.880 --> 01:40:44.320 conscientious as my parents? 01:40:44.480 --> 01:40:48.640 Like it's sort of looking out in the world and sort of being like, could I actually get by 01:40:48.640 --> 01:40:52.970 with, and not maybe consciously, but somewhere in the software of sort of being maybe a 01:40:52.970 --> 01:40:55.610 little more of an asshole or being a little less conscientious. 01:40:55.690 --> 01:40:59.450 And I still see people who are more conscientious than my parents getting by. 01:40:59.610 --> 01:41:04.250 And I see my parents sort of getting the sucker's payoff of being too conscientious in the 01:41:04.250 --> 01:41:06.970 social or ecological niche now. 01:41:07.210 --> 01:41:12.810 And so the idea would be there's like really software in the mind of every generation to 01:41:12.810 --> 01:41:16.360 sort of be like, i is this a savvy way to make a living? 01:41:16.520 --> 01:41:18.280 Like what's the way to be a person? 01:41:18.440 --> 01:41:18.680 Right. 01:41:18.920 --> 01:41:19.160 Right. 01:41:19.400 --> 01:41:23.640 And of course it's relative to the particular social group that you happen to be a part of. 01:41:23.720 --> 01:41:28.280 So what is the norm for conscientiousness or neuroticism within my particular peer group is 01:41:28.280 --> 01:41:30.760 going to be different than what the norm is in a different peer group. 01:41:30.840 --> 01:41:34.920 And as soon as you get more fractionation and more, you know, diversity of peer groups, you 01:41:34.920 --> 01:41:40.770 get different local averages and local norms, and that allows this greater diversity of 01:41:41.010 --> 01:41:41.810 social niches. 01:41:41.890 --> 01:41:46.130 So what might be a profitable personality in one social group will be a different type of 01:41:46.130 --> 01:41:48.610 uh profitable personality in a different social group. 01:41:48.690 --> 01:41:52.610 And as long as you get more and more subcultures and more and more divisions of people 01:41:52.610 --> 01:41:57.010 finding these niches, you get more diversity in the expression of personality. 01:41:57.170 --> 01:41:58.770 It's sort of that's one analogy. 01:41:59.250 --> 01:41:59.730 Exactly right. 01:42:00.130 --> 01:42:04.800 And that's essentially when we say urbanization, it's sort of like this proxy for this like 01:42:04.800 --> 01:42:10.080 flowering of all these like niches and sub niches that you know you just don't really see 01:42:10.080 --> 01:42:11.920 that in very small-scale societies. 01:42:12.000 --> 01:42:15.200 There's still there's it's a limited kind of niche set. 01:42:15.760 --> 01:42:15.920 Yeah. 01:42:16.080 --> 01:42:19.360 I mean uh an analogy that I have in my head, and you can tell me if this is a bad analogy, 01:42:19.520 --> 01:42:24.400 is uh you know, maybe at the at the heyday, the dawn of of uh television, there weren't as 01:42:24.400 --> 01:42:24.960 many genres. 01:42:25.040 --> 01:42:27.280 Maybe it was just like comedy and drama, you know, that was it. 01:42:27.440 --> 01:42:30.800 But now that we have all these streaming platforms and it's so easy we have this 01:42:30.990 --> 01:42:35.550 proliferation and abundance of different uh platforms, you know, different ways of of 01:42:35.550 --> 01:42:36.670 entertaining ourselves. 01:42:36.830 --> 01:42:41.870 And it's so much easier for weird weirdos to like find their weird audience. 01:42:42.110 --> 01:42:43.630 You know, we have so many more genres now. 01:42:43.710 --> 01:42:46.190 It's not just comedy, it's like dark comedy and animated comedy. 01:42:46.270 --> 01:42:51.630 We have sci-fi and fantasy and you know, all these different uh types of entertainment that 01:42:51.630 --> 01:42:54.830 are enabled because of the economic structure of our society. 01:42:54.990 --> 01:42:59.760 And you could make a similar argument that this that we get more genres of people when you 01:42:59.760 --> 01:43:05.600 have a more variegated social environment, uh, where it's easier for people to find uh 01:43:05.600 --> 01:43:10.560 like-minded people and gravitate toward you know subcultures that have you know more of 01:43:10.560 --> 01:43:12.000 their type of personality in them. 01:43:12.160 --> 01:43:16.480 Like I can hang out with a nerdy subculture, and that's kind of an unprecedented thing. 01:43:16.640 --> 01:43:20.960 Like in an ancestral small-scale environment, I probably could maybe find, I don't know, 01:43:21.040 --> 01:43:24.240 maybe one or two other, you know, nerdy people like me. 01:43:24.480 --> 01:43:29.910 But in um in the modern world, I can, you know, basically enter a job that is specifically 01:43:29.910 --> 01:43:34.630 selecting for nerdy people and surround myself with nerds in a way that's kind of 01:43:34.630 --> 01:43:40.390 unprecedented and that will probably bring the nerdy aspects out of me uh much more than 01:43:40.470 --> 01:43:44.310 you know that that would that would have brought out of me if I was in a different uh 01:43:44.470 --> 01:43:45.350 social context. 01:43:45.590 --> 01:43:47.430 So yeah, it's it's fascinating stuff. 01:43:47.670 --> 01:43:53.280 Um you yourself, Michael Gervin, have carved out a wonderful niche for yourself in the uh 01:43:53.280 --> 01:43:54.800 academic subculture. 01:43:54.960 --> 01:44:00.480 Um uh it has now come to the time in the interview where we ask you if there's anything you 01:44:00.480 --> 01:44:05.200 wish we had asked you oh um 01:44:07.680 --> 01:44:13.510 I wish yes That we should have asked you, or that we neglected to 01:44:13.510 --> 01:44:13.990 mention. 01:44:14.470 --> 01:44:17.830 But then if I anything I mentioned, are you gonna turn around and ask me it? 01:44:18.710 --> 01:44:19.590 Well, I think we put it. 01:44:19.750 --> 01:44:20.470 Do you want us to? 01:44:20.790 --> 01:44:21.270 Well, it depends. 01:44:21.350 --> 01:44:24.230 If you No, you don't have to No, we actually we don't there's no rule. 01:44:24.310 --> 01:44:27.590 So yeah, we could just say it and then just uh and then just draw. 01:44:28.070 --> 01:44:33.990 Well no, I guess uh Or we could talk about what the the thing you 01:44:33.990 --> 01:44:36.310 wanted us to ask you that we could talk about another time. 01:44:36.390 --> 01:44:39.280 That's yeah that's that's that's one thing you can know. 01:44:39.360 --> 01:44:39.840 Yeah. 01:44:40.080 --> 01:44:45.360 Well uh uh I guess it it wasn't that I wanted you to ask, but I I guess I was wondering you 01:44:45.360 --> 01:44:49.840 know, thinking whether you're gonna ask about, you know, the future of evolutionary social 01:44:49.840 --> 01:44:55.600 science, those kinds of you know d you know uh those kinds of things 01:44:55.760 --> 01:45:00.560 or or something about the future of small scale societies and what is working to look like 01:45:00.560 --> 01:45:01.840 moving forward. 01:45:02.160 --> 01:45:08.050 Um uh and is that gonna kind of largely still 01:45:08.050 --> 01:45:13.250 be housed within like anthropology departments or is that diffusing across, you know, 01:45:13.330 --> 01:45:14.290 different places? 01:45:14.450 --> 01:45:19.650 And, you know, d as the divides between small scale and large scale, you know, are those 01:45:19.650 --> 01:45:25.250 dissipating and since groups everywhere are are changing, and what does that mean? 01:45:25.490 --> 01:45:31.400 You know uh what and what's the untapped opportunity, uh you know, I I definitely think 01:45:31.400 --> 01:45:35.480 that you know there's there is definitely value for like relatively you know 01:45:35.720 --> 01:45:39.800 unacculturated, remote uh human societies. 01:45:39.960 --> 01:45:45.400 Uh but as groups are kind of going under various degrees of changes on all fronts, you 01:45:45.400 --> 01:45:50.830 know, I feel like it's like a it's a laboratory for asking so many interesting questions in 01:45:50.830 --> 01:45:55.470 all of our disciplines and everything about the mind and behavior, in fact, almost 01:45:55.470 --> 01:45:58.430 everything that was mentioned today, you know, has implications. 01:45:58.590 --> 01:46:02.270 And like David, you were asking about the decline in fertility. 01:46:02.590 --> 01:46:05.630 Fertility is start people are starting to shift and think about fertility. 01:46:05.710 --> 01:46:10.990 You know, a lot of Chimane girls have Depo Provera injected in their arms now, and they're 01:46:10.990 --> 01:46:16.380 thinking about, you know, should their kids be going to school and and not just like fifth 01:46:16.460 --> 01:46:21.900 grade education, but now the possibility for for high school education or even beyond. 01:46:22.140 --> 01:46:28.060 So yeah, all these kinds of questions are fascinating to explore uh in 01:46:28.060 --> 01:46:30.380 in these kinds of changing worlds. 01:46:30.460 --> 01:46:36.220 Uh but focusing on the change rather than well sometimes I feel people 01:46:36.220 --> 01:46:38.540 feel they need to hide the change, right? 01:46:38.620 --> 01:46:43.420 Because they're trying to portray the sense that that groups have been sort of untouched. 01:46:43.630 --> 01:46:49.310 Um, and 'cause that's what in the evolutionary world what they expect people to to want to 01:46:49.310 --> 01:46:50.110 hear about. 01:46:50.190 --> 01:46:54.110 You know, and and so I think that aspect kind of needs to shift a little bit. 01:46:54.190 --> 01:47:00.030 And it'll be really fun to think about, well, what would that look like if we're what 01:47:00.030 --> 01:47:02.270 kinds of questions could we ask and all that? 01:47:02.990 --> 01:47:05.470 Anyway, yeah, that's what I thought you were gonna ask. 01:47:05.620 --> 01:47:06.500 Uh that's okay. 01:47:06.580 --> 01:47:07.060 You have it. 01:47:07.140 --> 01:47:08.020 You don't have to ask a thing. 01:47:08.340 --> 01:47:09.140 There's a there's a job. 01:47:09.540 --> 01:47:11.060 That was a that was a great set of questions. 01:47:11.140 --> 01:47:16.420 You did you if you want a job as a co-host, you've got where we're just like, you know, 01:47:16.580 --> 01:47:20.980 talking about, you know, I don't know what uh nerds in Germany. 01:47:21.140 --> 01:47:21.540 I don't know. 01:47:21.620 --> 01:47:22.500 We're we're useless. 01:47:22.580 --> 01:47:22.900 But yeah. 01:47:23.060 --> 01:47:23.700 No, that's great. 01:47:23.860 --> 01:47:28.180 And actually that sounds like we should have a uh we should like apply for funding for a 01:47:28.180 --> 01:47:30.180 conference or something about that or workshop. 01:47:30.260 --> 01:47:31.780 That sounds like a fun thing to do. 01:47:32.330 --> 01:47:32.570 Yeah. 01:47:32.650 --> 01:47:34.490 I mean, maybe maybe that's what we should do. 01:47:34.570 --> 01:47:37.850 We should have a dedicated episode on the future of evolutionary social science. 01:47:37.930 --> 01:47:41.370 I know a number of our guests uh expressed an interest in that topic. 01:47:41.850 --> 01:47:46.890 We just had Brett Beheim on and we I think somebody alluded to him giving a talk about the 01:47:46.890 --> 01:47:51.850 end of uh Hunter or Egalitarian or you know, Hunter. 01:47:51.930 --> 01:47:55.290 Uh I don't want to put words in his mouth, but we didn't even get a chance to ask him 01:47:55.290 --> 01:47:59.130 that 'cause we were like like again, like idiots were talking about his whiteboard, you 01:47:59.130 --> 01:47:59.290 know. 01:47:59.370 --> 01:48:01.480 So yeah, we're we're still working on this. 01:48:01.560 --> 01:48:01.720 Yeah. 01:48:02.040 --> 01:48:02.440 You're right. 01:48:02.520 --> 01:48:02.920 You were right. 01:48:03.000 --> 01:48:06.120 About two hours flying by, and I feel like we we barely got started. 01:48:06.680 --> 01:48:06.920 Exactly. 01:48:07.480 --> 01:48:07.960 Yeah, yeah. 01:48:08.040 --> 01:48:11.320 Um but but Mike, thank you so much for coming on. 01:48:11.560 --> 01:48:17.080 Uh really um, you know, personally, you were really important for me in grad school. 01:48:17.160 --> 01:48:18.200 I took a class with you. 01:48:18.280 --> 01:48:22.440 Um, I'm back now as professor, but like you really introduced me to like this, the 01:48:22.440 --> 01:48:24.520 behavioral ecology, human behavioral ecology. 01:48:24.680 --> 01:48:27.560 I still have the textbook, the Smith and Winterhall there ninety. 01:48:29.330 --> 01:48:30.370 It's a great book. 01:48:30.770 --> 01:48:31.010 Yeah. 01:48:31.170 --> 01:48:35.410 That's a great book where you just sort of quantify things in a way that I never knew you 01:48:35.410 --> 01:48:35.970 could do. 01:48:36.050 --> 01:48:38.450 Um and it was just uh it was revealing. 01:48:38.530 --> 01:48:43.250 And so for anybody who doesn't know about human human behavioral ecology or Mike's work, 01:48:43.410 --> 01:48:44.610 please check it out. 01:48:44.770 --> 01:48:47.650 Um it's just there's it's an incredible list. 01:48:47.810 --> 01:48:52.120 Mike talked about like 12 papers that didn't see the light of day, and that sounds like a 01:48:52.120 --> 01:48:55.160 lot, but it's because he's got so many that did see the light of day. 01:48:55.240 --> 01:48:58.600 It's actually the percentage is probably the same as everyone else's, if not smaller. 01:48:58.760 --> 01:49:04.280 So um and then Mike, the book comes out on September sixteenth. 01:49:04.600 --> 01:49:05.240 Sixteenth. 01:49:05.480 --> 01:49:05.720 Okay. 01:49:05.880 --> 01:49:08.520 So we'll hopefully this episode will be coming out September sixteenth. 01:49:08.680 --> 01:49:10.520 And then where can people get the book? 01:49:11.000 --> 01:49:16.590 Um, well, I know it's available on Amazon and Target for some reason. 01:49:16.750 --> 01:49:16.990 Okay. 01:49:17.150 --> 01:49:21.550 Uh I'm hoping it'll be available, you know, your local bookstore, you know, maybe go 01:49:21.550 --> 01:49:24.590 beforehand and ask them to make sure they have it in. 01:49:24.750 --> 01:49:24.990 Yeah. 01:49:25.150 --> 01:49:29.870 Uh it can be also ordered through the Princeton University Press website. 01:49:30.030 --> 01:49:35.840 Uh and if you put P U P thirty uh as a little code, get thirty 01:49:35.840 --> 01:49:36.400 percent off. 01:49:36.640 --> 01:49:36.880 Whoa. 01:49:37.120 --> 01:49:42.800 Although that's I don't know if that will disappear the 16th, but I know reordering that uh 01:49:42.960 --> 01:49:44.560 you can get a thirty percent discount. 01:49:44.800 --> 01:49:46.480 Wow, that's our first real ad. 01:49:46.800 --> 01:49:47.440 That's good. 01:49:48.160 --> 01:49:49.600 That's a very very good, very good. 01:49:53.600 --> 01:49:54.400 No, this is great. 01:49:54.560 --> 01:49:55.040 This is great. 01:49:55.200 --> 01:49:59.280 But uh but no it's uh it's a really great and I am really glad that you're doing this kind 01:49:59.280 --> 01:50:05.010 of thing because yeah I think there's so many snake oil salesmen who are trying to s sell 01:50:05.170 --> 01:50:07.890 snake oil, which is why they're called snake oil salesman. 01:50:08.050 --> 01:50:13.170 But anyway, you know, like and I'm glad that like actual uh scientists are are venturing 01:50:13.170 --> 01:50:16.450 into these these formats of what is the lifespan like. 01:50:17.010 --> 01:50:17.250 Great. 01:50:17.490 --> 01:50:18.130 Well thank you. 01:50:18.210 --> 01:50:21.010 I really enjoyed this and thanks for doing what you do. 01:50:21.090 --> 01:50:26.770 I think this is a lot more productive way to get people excited about 01:50:26.770 --> 01:50:30.130 ideas and uh it's great what you're doing. 01:50:30.440 --> 01:50:30.760 Thanks. 01:50:30.920 --> 01:50:31.400 Thanks, Mike. 01:50:31.480 --> 01:50:33.000 Uh David, good to see you. 01:50:33.080 --> 01:50:38.760 Uh yeah, and well David uh Mike, we'll have to have you on again to talk about all a whole 01:50:38.760 --> 01:50:40.600 other set of things that you're you're doing. 01:50:40.760 --> 01:50:42.040 So but this is wonderful. 01:50:42.200 --> 01:50:42.760 Thank you so much. 01:50:43.000 --> 01:50:43.320 Yep. 01:50:43.480 --> 01:50:43.880 Thank you. 01:50:43.960 --> 01:50:44.440 Take care. 01:50:44.680 --> 01:50:45.240 You too. 01:50:50.280 --> 01:50:55.810 Well, David, um I I start uh let's start over. 01:50:55.970 --> 01:50:56.290 Okay. 01:50:57.330 --> 01:50:58.690 You you you start. 01:50:58.850 --> 01:50:59.970 I lost it. 01:51:00.450 --> 01:51:01.170 Well, we did it. 01:51:01.250 --> 01:51:02.450 We did another episode. 01:51:02.530 --> 01:51:03.650 Uh it was fun. 01:51:03.890 --> 01:51:06.210 Uh the guest had a good time, I'm assuming. 01:51:06.290 --> 01:51:07.970 Uh you had a good time, I'm assuming. 01:51:08.050 --> 01:51:10.050 And you, the listener, probably had a good time. 01:51:10.130 --> 01:51:11.890 Well, you must have if you're still listening. 01:51:12.130 --> 01:51:12.370 Yeah. 01:51:12.450 --> 01:51:15.970 I mean, I I the gu the guests really make the episode. 01:51:16.130 --> 01:51:19.810 I mean, I think we just sort of, you know, stumble around and get in their way 01:51:19.810 --> 01:51:20.530 occasionally. 01:51:20.690 --> 01:51:22.960 Um, but we provide the Zoom. 01:51:23.040 --> 01:51:24.640 So, you know, that's but yeah. 01:51:25.120 --> 01:51:27.600 Yeah, we we pick we we we we pick good guests. 01:51:27.680 --> 01:51:28.400 I mean that's that's our role. 01:51:28.880 --> 01:51:30.800 That's a more positive way to put it. 01:51:30.880 --> 01:51:31.040 Yeah. 01:51:31.280 --> 01:51:31.760 That's okay. 01:51:31.920 --> 01:51:32.560 I'll I'll go with that. 01:51:32.640 --> 01:51:33.840 Yes, we pick great guests. 01:51:33.920 --> 01:51:35.040 Yes, our guests are wonderful. 01:51:35.600 --> 01:51:35.840 Yes. 01:51:36.000 --> 01:51:40.800 And if you're happy with our picks, um please say so on social media, leave us a kind 01:51:40.800 --> 01:51:42.320 review, check out our Patreon page. 01:51:42.480 --> 01:51:46.720 And if you have any ideas for other guests or other topics that we should cover or general 01:51:46.720 --> 01:51:48.400 feedback, please let us know. 01:51:48.720 --> 01:51:50.480 Or other formats, yeah. 01:51:50.830 --> 01:51:56.830 yeah who knows maybe maybe we should uh interview uh a chair like a 01:51:56.990 --> 01:52:01.150 like a a person who has the job of being a chair of a department or like actually interview 01:52:01.150 --> 01:52:05.470 a chair like an like a physical like a physical chair we we just we interview the chair 01:52:05.710 --> 01:52:11.710 like uh like sort of between two ferns sort of vibe yeah except kind of chair chair roast 01:52:12.080 --> 01:52:14.880 Except the chair is between two people and yeah. 01:52:15.200 --> 01:52:16.480 Oh, interesting. 01:52:16.640 --> 01:52:16.960 All right. 01:52:17.040 --> 01:52:18.720 Well, let's uh let's workshop this. 01:52:18.800 --> 01:52:19.520 I like this idea. 01:52:19.600 --> 01:52:23.840 Okay, uh, maybe next week we'll hear from a chair question mark. 01:52:24.000 --> 01:52:25.280 Okay, interesting, David. 01:52:25.360 --> 01:52:26.480 Okay, very interesting. 01:52:26.560 --> 01:52:27.760 Okay, we'll see you next week. 01:52:28.000 --> 01:52:28.960 All right, see ya.