WEBVTT

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Where are we and what are we doing?

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We are doing Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast, which is uh about actual

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evolutionary psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists, and we are The

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Davids.

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I'm David Pinsoff, and you are David Petrozowski, uh Dave uh for

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coordination purposes, and we are um here on the podcast and also on Earth and in

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between those, we're both in California right now.

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That's true.

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And you are about to hear some lovely music that I composed.

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David, today we have Josh Schnodgrath on MLS in the German way.

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Is it a sh or a s?

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I think I'm going German.

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I've I lived long enough in Germany that occasionally German five.

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I don't think no, probably I have no idea.

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Okay.

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Do you want to say it?

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So I I I for some reason.

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I thought it was the S, just snodgrass.

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Snodgrass, yes, it is, yes.

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I don't know why.

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For that moment I was slightly German.

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Um uh we had a wonderful conversation.

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Yes, really fun.

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We talked about all things evolution and health, uh the intersection between health and

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psychology and social networks.

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Uh We talked about market integration, how societies transition

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from more of a forager subsistence mode to a market

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economy and the effects that has on mental health and physical health.

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What else do we get into, Dave?

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Yeah, I mean, I think for me, the bottom line on this episode was that moving from a

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hunter-gatherer, hunter-for-cultural um maybe living into like a modern market thing, which

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is something like the Schwar are experiencing, is neither all good or neither all bad.

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And it's not at all straightforward to just say the move has positive consequence or

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negative, or or even what the things are that cause that.

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Um so I I like think a nice analogy for this episode that we talked about was either like

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historical change or even if you just move from one place to another, you know, there's

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like good things and bad things.

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You miss certain things about the past and you like certain things about the future, but

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there's things about where you live now that are not so great and things about the past or

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where you used to live that were better.

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And I think that's generally just true for for what Josh is finding as well.

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That's true.

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In general, a good bet with science is that things are going to be more complicated than

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you think.

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And and this episode is no exception to that rule, but thankfully um using an evolutionary

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perspective helps you navigate the complex complexity and make sense of it.

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And Josh is a wonderful example of uh using uh the evolutionary lens to clarify what is

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going on with these complicated interactions between health, mental health, biology,

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ecology, et cetera.

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Yeah.

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And I think this episode returned to an older theme of the podcast that we've we have

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always been on but haven't hit explicitly is like if you take a

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evolutionary approach or you don't um uh that mode that was a

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negative.

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So let me start over by not saying a negative, but if you integrate biology with psychology

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and evolution, it's a more humane way to think about people because it forces you to think

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about what is good for human flourishing.

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And I think this conversation was a highlighting that point again, which we was something

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we've covered in the podcast, especially in earlier episodes.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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So without further ado, further ado, enjoy.

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So thanks for being here.

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Um, this is great.

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Um, maybe we can get right into it.

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Um David and I have talked and we talked about the evolution human behavior

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um paper lassitude.

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Uh-huh.

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And when I saw this paper, and the argument as I understand it is that lassitude,

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which I think I even had to like double check because I hadn't come across that word.

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It was not in my uh lexicon, so I learned a word, um, is the emotion of being sick,

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but it's the emotion.

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Um, I thought this was one of the coolest thing.

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I think it won the Margot Wilson Award for the best paper in the journal of the year.

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So congratulations.

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Um what uh how is that an emotion?

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Tell us about how do you end up writing a paper about that?

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Tell us the whole story.

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Yeah, no, I'm happy to.

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I will start out by saying I'm not gonna take a whole lot of credit for it because I feel

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like the grad student at the time, Josh Schrock, who was writing it, did so much

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amazing work to bridge, in many ways, to bridge me, me and Larry and kind

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of all our thinking, right?

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And so I mean, I will I'm sure we'll talk more about the the Schwar project, you know, but

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but sort of out of that kind of grew this bigger perspective of like, okay, how do we

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actually do many of the things that had originally been our intention when Larry and I

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started the Schwarz Project, which is actually integrating human biology, human behavioral

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ecology, evolutionary psychology to get at these bigger questions, right?

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And so I feel like over the course of the Schwarz project, we'd kind of touched on some of

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those things and had smaller little projects that really truly brought those together, but

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there hadn't really been much of the sort of bigger sort of theorizing about how all this

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stuff works.

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And so sort of simultaneously we had the disgust work going on, which we could talk about

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later as well.

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And then Josh Schrock really thinking about lassitude.

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But it really grew out of these conversations about changing environments, right?

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So, like one of the big parts of the Schwar project is trying to understand this market

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integration process, this social change, this environmental change.

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And it's so often been focused in at least the human biology literature on the, you

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know, the increase in chronic diseases like, you know, cardiovascular disease and

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diabetes, and not so much focused in on infectious disease and parasitic disease, with the

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exception of like, oh, well, people get vaccinated and infectious disease loads go down as

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chronic disease goes up, right?

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It's very simplistic.

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And so it clearly wasn't simplistic from, you know, from the work that we started doing,

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you know, like there's this complex relationship between these immune changes to

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what's happening in the environment.

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And so it then became clear that, like, not only did we really have to think about this in

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a sophisticated way, just from a physiological standpoint, but that the behavioral

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piece mattered as well.

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And so I just think that was such a great example of like really us in the project being

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able to reach what we had wanted to do from the very beginning, which is really think

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through like, okay, how do we understand the connection between these underlying

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biological processes and then the behavioral pieces, and then start to

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think about it in an evolutionary perspective, as well as how the environment

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that people are living in in the course of their lifetime is shaping things as well.

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So, really basically, like the, I think the piece that I'm most excited about is just

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like really bringing back in the behavioral piece into the human biology.

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Because I mean, as you guys both know, so oftentimes we've got the like behavior people,

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right, living in this HBE and evolutionary psych world.

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And we've got these human biologists kind of living in another world, but they're not

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really connected.

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And so this was very much like, yeah, what like how do we actually look at these emotions

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as adaptive and relevant to these biological systems and

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functional in terms of dealing with environments as they're

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changing in the context of human, social, political, and economic change?

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Amazing.

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Yeah, and just to kind of uh for for people listening at home to clarify.

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So Schwar, uh, Schwarland and the Schwar, we've had several people on.

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So we've had Clark Barrett, uh, Chris von Ruden, we had Mike Gervin on.

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Oh, nice.

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These are all folks who've worked with the Schar Schwar.

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People know that is the Schwar Project, you mentioned Larry who is Larry Sugyama, who we

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will have on, who's a colleague of yours, um, who you know, we we we know, I know um he's

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an academic sibling of mine.

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Um, uh is the Schwar Project a subset of people studying?

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Can you what is the is that um is that something you and Larry started within the

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collection of people studying the Schwar?

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Or can you clarify what that is?

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Yeah, it was, you know, Larry Larry had been working with um John and Lita, right.

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Don John Tubi and Lita Cosmudis for many years, sort of thinking about starting these types

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of projects, right?

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That we needed more of those international projects where there's different environments

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and different social systems and things like that to be able to really understand these

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relationships, these evolutionary processes.

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And so Larry started working in South America and was working with

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Clark Barrett.

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And but then I think Larry started to gravitate to working with the Schwar community.

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So he'd been working with Shiviar before, and there's some papers published in the what

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late 90s, early 2000s.

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But those ones were very like those are the Shiviar are very small populations.

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And so I think it really became clear to Larry that if he wanted to study something like

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market integration, that it was going to be something that required a huge amount of data

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collection in a number of different realms, and that there was really no way to do that

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with Shiviar, both from the perspective of needing a large population to be able to look at

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the variation you get.

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And secondarily, it was going to require a decent sized team to be able to measure these

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different things in different people.

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And the prospect of working in these small Shivyar communities was basically impossible.

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So then Larry started working with Schwar, who um are a much larger population, so over

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50,000 at the time when Larry, you know, in the early 2000s.

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And there was also this huge interest in working with him and then us because they

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were sort of in had this really challenging relationship with the Ecuadorian government.

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And sort of Ecuadorian government came in like, hey, we're going to do a health survey.

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Here's all that data.

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Now do what you want with it.

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And so when I came to Oregon, Larry was Larry had a student, Aaron

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Blackwell, who's gone on and done amazing things.

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And um, and they basically had been given a ton of health data from Schwar saying, you

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know, like we've got all this health data.

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Can you help us interpret this and write this up?

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And then so they did and brought me in as well.

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But then it also sort of opened the door to an opportunity to a larger project to be able

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to start doing work that really was big in the sense of uniting these

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different fields and really thinking about how do we measure these different things that

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are changing with market integration?

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How do we do it in a way beyond just the rural versus urban or you know

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something like that?

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How do we think about this as you know the the level of the country, the level of the

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regions, the level of the communities, the level of the household, the level of the

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individual.

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And so because the Schwar communities were interested in collaborating and then also

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large enough, it just be and had a huge amount of variation across and within them

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that it just created this prospect for launching this study.

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but it was going to then also require a lot of human power in that, which then became, you

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know, Aaron Blackwell first, and then a number of other grad students who were really

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important in that.

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So that then simultaneously was happening while Mike, you mentioned Mike Gervin.

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Mike was setting up the Chimani project in Bolivia.

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And so we ended up kind of oddly enough, independently coming up with almost identical

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names of this life, you know, health life history projects.

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And so, but what's been fascinating about those is we've really approached them in

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different ways, right?

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Like how we're gonna set up those studies.

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And in many ways, there's a lot of overlap in what we as the Schwar project and they as the

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Chamani project are interested in.

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They really started focusing in on aging as the thing that that kind of organized

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it.

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And part of that was funding, right, through NIH.

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And we sort of look more at market integration, right?

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And obviously we're interested in aging too.

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And the projects have kind of grown together, right?

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And so we'll have sometimes where we're sharing data, and we've got, you know, ones where

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we're comparing between the groups.

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Um, but it's also interesting because you know, you look at these populations that sort of

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superficially look very similar, right?

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They live, you know, they're both in tropical areas and not far from each other, But then

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there's some actually subtle differences between Schwar and Chamani.

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You know, obviously there's cultural ones, but also like even environmental ones, like with

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the extent of pathogen exposure being much more extreme in the Chamani, much less in the

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Schwar, which actually leads to whole different pathways and different health risks

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between those two populations that could easily have been dismissed as like whatever

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they're Amazonian populations, they're probably pretty similar.

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Actually, surprising differences there.

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So it's been really cool to have those two projects going simultaneously and sort of

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seeing how they're making decisions at every level from the science to the you know the

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ethics of community work.

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And just, you know, we both learn from each other, and it's been there's been some cool

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opportunities for collaboration.

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Cool.

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I mean, what are some of the biggest um insights and discoveries you've made in terms of

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progressing through these two different projects?

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Um what have you learned about the effects of, say, market integration on health

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or or um you know the different ecological factors that might play a role here as well?

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Yeah, I'll answer that second part first, which is those ecological factors like presence

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of tapeworm, for example, just seems like a minor difference, right?

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But it you you find quite a bit of tapeworm in the area of the chamani and very

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little in schwar areas, but it seems to have a huge effect in terms of like

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hemoglobin levels and anemia risk, and immune systems are developing

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differently for people who are exposed to different things, which then is going to

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influence their experience of disease, even with chronic diseases, right?

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So that's an example, I think, of one small ecological thing that actually seems to have a

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really big effect.

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I think the other piece that we're so we're in the we're in the midst of sort of planning

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a big kind of market integration and health paper that's an update to one that we published

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in 2013.

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And I think, I think a big contribution that we've made is that the model, as I kind

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of alluded to before, the model for market integration and health used to be very simple.

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It was sort of like people are adapted to their environment and then westernization happens

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and it knocks people out of adaptation, right?

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And this is sort of just very vague language, if not well conceptualized, in my opinion,

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but that knocks them out of adaptation.

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And then that lack of adaptation, or you know, whatever you want to call it, sends them

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into higher risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

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And so I think we approached it as like that's theoretically kind of problematic, but also

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like the way that people have approached this scientifically has been very limited.

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And so the way that we approached it was okay, how do we look at these different levels of

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influence, right?

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So community versus region, that kind of thing.

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And then how do we understand it in terms of the different health conditions, right?

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It's not just cardiovascular disease and diabetes, but it's also mental health.

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It's also osteoporosis.

00:16:44.300 --> 00:16:47.020
It's also these other things that are happening.

00:16:47.260 --> 00:16:53.070
And really trying to pull it apart to say, like, what actually is driving these changes?

00:16:53.230 --> 00:16:57.710
What is it about the environment that is, is it running through a stress access?

00:16:58.030 --> 00:17:00.910
Is it running through a nutrition access and access?

00:17:01.070 --> 00:17:02.430
Is it running through something else?

00:17:02.590 --> 00:17:05.950
And so really trying to look at those details.

00:17:06.110 --> 00:17:11.710
And I think what we've really shown is that yes, there are some big regional differences,

00:17:11.790 --> 00:17:16.560
but the bulk of it is actually playing out like within a community and often within a

00:17:16.560 --> 00:17:17.600
household, right?

00:17:17.760 --> 00:17:23.280
That like how people are experiencing this, you know, market integration,

00:17:23.440 --> 00:17:29.360
it's rooted in their behaviors at an individual level in terms of whether that's their

00:17:29.520 --> 00:17:34.240
foraging or you know, types of foraging or the decisions that they're making about this,

00:17:34.320 --> 00:17:35.280
that, or the other thing.

00:17:35.440 --> 00:17:39.600
So I think in some ways it's super, it's really complicated this perspective of market

00:17:39.600 --> 00:17:40.320
integration.

00:17:40.480 --> 00:17:45.710
And one saying, like, we actually have to look at this in a really sophisticated way to

00:17:45.710 --> 00:17:49.390
really understand how all these factors are are playing out.

00:17:49.550 --> 00:17:55.070
And I think we're seeing similar things in terms of how the Chamani project has approached

00:17:55.070 --> 00:17:55.790
it as well.

00:17:55.950 --> 00:18:01.710
And I think we've dug in more on market integration and measured it at more of a sort of

00:18:01.710 --> 00:18:07.310
fine-grained level than they have, but we're seeing the same kinds of things in terms of

00:18:07.310 --> 00:18:09.180
just a lot of variation.

00:18:09.260 --> 00:18:15.180
It's not just Western foods come in and everything changes, but how people navigate that

00:18:15.180 --> 00:18:21.180
relationship with every aspect of the the sort of social the larger

00:18:21.180 --> 00:18:23.500
social context really matters.

00:18:24.380 --> 00:18:29.830
So a a simple sort of naive perspective, which it seems like you're taking

00:18:29.830 --> 00:18:35.590
issue with is that, you know, the more integrated I am with markets and with the Western

00:18:35.590 --> 00:18:41.350
world, uh, the more likely I am to have these Western uh diseases like heart disease or

00:18:41.350 --> 00:18:46.070
these mental health problems, um, or you know, or or or osteoporosis, whatever these these

00:18:46.070 --> 00:18:50.150
things are that are afflicting Western populations, the more engaged I am with the market

00:18:50.150 --> 00:18:54.420
economy, the more that's just gonna thrust me into maladaptation.

00:18:54.660 --> 00:18:59.460
Um and so you might naively expect just a simple relationship with you know market

00:18:59.460 --> 00:19:00.980
integration and poor health.

00:19:01.140 --> 00:19:06.020
But it seems like what you're saying is that that relationship is is not so simple.

00:19:06.340 --> 00:19:09.700
I mean first of all, do do we see relationship there at all?

00:19:10.100 --> 00:19:14.980
Um and and you know if so, what what what are the mediators and the moderators of that

00:19:15.540 --> 00:19:16.020
relationship?

00:19:16.510 --> 00:19:17.950
Yeah, no, that's a great question.

00:19:18.030 --> 00:19:20.990
And and the reality is there's no simple answer to that.

00:19:21.150 --> 00:19:26.110
I would say that even trying to measure health, like what is relevant there, right?

00:19:26.270 --> 00:19:28.510
And so like is it life expectancy?

00:19:28.670 --> 00:19:30.350
Is it healthy life expectancy?

00:19:30.510 --> 00:19:35.630
Is it prevalence of diabetes, or is it some sort of set of all of those, right?

00:19:36.030 --> 00:19:41.630
I think in general there have been with with increasing market as market integration,

00:19:41.870 --> 00:19:44.880
there have been some positive effects, right?

00:19:44.960 --> 00:19:50.480
And often that's related to access to vaccines, for example, or some of the sort of quote

00:19:50.560 --> 00:19:54.720
unquote modern medical care that people that people experience and some levels of

00:19:54.720 --> 00:19:58.160
development, like access to clean water and things like that.

00:19:58.320 --> 00:20:03.360
But the reality is when you start to look at those details, like it kind of, you know,

00:20:03.440 --> 00:20:04.640
there's so much variation.

00:20:04.720 --> 00:20:09.050
And one of the nice things about the Schwarb, you know project is that we've been able to

00:20:09.050 --> 00:20:13.850
set it up where we're working with in dozens of different communities so that we can see

00:20:13.850 --> 00:20:14.730
this play out.

00:20:15.210 --> 00:20:19.690
And so, for example, one thing that we see is some of those more remote communities,

00:20:19.850 --> 00:20:22.810
they're not having problems with lack of clean water, right?

00:20:22.890 --> 00:20:27.530
They're small populations without domesticated animals, and they're they're actually able

00:20:27.530 --> 00:20:31.690
to move around quite a bit in a relatively undisturbed environment.

00:20:31.930 --> 00:20:37.240
But as they start to experience market integration, things get worse, And then

00:20:38.360 --> 00:20:44.040
as they continue on that, things get better and worse simultaneously, right?

00:20:44.120 --> 00:20:49.640
So initially they start to have larger populations, more domesticated animals,

00:20:49.880 --> 00:20:55.720
more issues with you know pathogens coming from those animals or from you know whatever,

00:20:55.880 --> 00:20:58.280
more humans being in the same location.

00:20:58.440 --> 00:21:03.480
But then as they get bigger, there tends to be more market access to antibiotics and things

00:21:03.480 --> 00:21:09.230
like that, which then can deal with some of the issues, but then start to also bring in

00:21:09.230 --> 00:21:14.670
those risks for diabetes and heart disease that, for example, are coming from

00:21:15.150 --> 00:21:18.110
the fact that now market foods are more available.

00:21:18.270 --> 00:21:24.190
And so it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's almost infinitely complicated in terms

00:21:24.190 --> 00:21:25.790
of trying to pull that all apart.

00:21:25.950 --> 00:21:31.630
And I feel like our first 20 years of this project is starting to make some progress on

00:21:31.630 --> 00:21:37.500
this about the sort of trends and all those different factors that drive this and even how

00:21:37.500 --> 00:21:39.020
we set up our studies.

00:21:39.180 --> 00:21:45.020
But it's pretty interesting that we're we're 20 years into this, and it feels like,

00:21:45.100 --> 00:21:47.660
oh yeah, we've had a bunch of successes, right?

00:21:48.060 --> 00:21:53.580
But I feel like we're still just really learning how to set this all up.

00:21:53.740 --> 00:21:55.100
And it's been really interesting.

00:21:55.260 --> 00:22:00.380
I'm now part of this group called Pecan that's um that Herman Ponzer has been running out

00:22:00.380 --> 00:22:01.230
of Duke.

00:22:01.550 --> 00:22:03.790
And we've been meeting now for three years.

00:22:03.870 --> 00:22:08.510
And it's a bunch of people who do this kind of work with small-scale populations.

00:22:08.670 --> 00:22:13.630
So people who work with the Hadza and people who work with, you know, the Chamani and

00:22:13.950 --> 00:22:14.350
others.

00:22:14.590 --> 00:22:19.950
And so having these conversations about market integration and taking those first steps to

00:22:19.950 --> 00:22:25.580
basically say, like, how do we actually set this up to be able to compare and contrast

00:22:25.580 --> 00:22:26.780
between populations.

00:22:27.100 --> 00:22:32.620
And like, how do we, what is our our relevant variable here in terms of looking at health

00:22:32.620 --> 00:22:34.540
and longevity or whatever it is?

00:22:34.700 --> 00:22:37.420
And then what are the factors that are going to influence this?

00:22:37.500 --> 00:22:42.620
And that's been, it's been, I feel like we talked as Pacan as this group for a couple of

00:22:42.620 --> 00:22:42.780
years.

00:22:42.860 --> 00:22:47.900
And we finally, about a month ago, when we all met together, got to a really cool place

00:22:47.900 --> 00:22:52.610
where we can say, like, okay, here's how we test this across different groups.

00:22:52.770 --> 00:22:58.530
And here's how we may be able to come up with some general ideas about how all this works,

00:22:58.770 --> 00:22:59.090
right?

00:22:59.490 --> 00:23:01.570
But that it's just surprising.

00:23:01.730 --> 00:23:05.810
We're like 20 years into the Schwar project and a few years into Pecan.

00:23:05.970 --> 00:23:11.490
And we're just getting to the point where we can sort of start to make some can draw some

00:23:11.490 --> 00:23:17.360
conclusions about the general principles of how all this operates, and then look

00:23:17.360 --> 00:23:22.960
at individual populations as whatever, complying or deviating in different ways.

00:23:24.080 --> 00:23:29.760
So it seems like what you're saying is the modern relationship we see

00:23:29.760 --> 00:23:35.680
between sort of non-market societies slowly integrating into market societies

00:23:35.840 --> 00:23:40.720
is sort of analogous to the historical process of human beings themselves moving away from

00:23:40.720 --> 00:23:45.950
hunting and gathering, moving into agriculture and sedentism, and then developing more

00:23:45.950 --> 00:23:47.950
sophisticated economies and technologies.

00:23:48.190 --> 00:23:53.470
Or at first, when humans uh you know began, you know, uh concentrating together in large

00:23:53.470 --> 00:23:58.510
agricultural settings, uh it just became a huge petri dish for lots of different pathogens

00:23:58.510 --> 00:24:03.230
spreading from uh from livestock to people and from people to one another, given that they

00:24:03.230 --> 00:24:06.260
were in in larger, you know, uh concentrations.

00:24:06.420 --> 00:24:11.620
Uh that combined with the agricultural diet and our lack of adaptation to those new foods

00:24:11.620 --> 00:24:12.420
that we were eating.

00:24:12.580 --> 00:24:16.900
So at first, it seemed like the uh economic development of humans was a really bad thing

00:24:16.900 --> 00:24:17.940
for us in terms of health.

00:24:18.100 --> 00:24:23.060
But then slowly, gradually, as economies developed, um, we started developing more

00:24:23.060 --> 00:24:28.830
technologies, antibiotics, vaccines, new ways to mitigate the health problems

00:24:28.910 --> 00:24:34.350
and cope with the the problems arising from this new agricultural processed diet.

00:24:34.510 --> 00:24:37.630
And then eventually uh we started seeing positive health effects.

00:24:37.790 --> 00:24:42.190
So there was kind of we had to get over this hump of of sort of negative uh health effects

00:24:42.190 --> 00:24:44.510
in order to get to the some of the positive trends.

00:24:45.310 --> 00:24:49.760
And it seems like what you're suggesting is that that may be a similar dynamic at play as

00:24:49.760 --> 00:24:53.520
communities like the Shuar, the Chumane begin to transition into a market society where at

00:24:53.520 --> 00:24:55.280
first it may have negative effects.

00:24:55.440 --> 00:25:00.880
Um, and and maybe once you get some of the positive effects of, say, antibiotics, uh, those

00:25:00.960 --> 00:25:02.240
those effects might diminish.

00:25:02.320 --> 00:25:05.680
And so it might be a similar process of sort of get getting over this hump.

00:25:06.160 --> 00:25:06.800
Absolutely.

00:25:07.040 --> 00:25:08.800
That's definitely a good way to look at it.

00:25:08.960 --> 00:25:13.520
And then on top of that, we're starting to then see some of the negative things that

00:25:13.520 --> 00:25:14.240
happen, right?

00:25:14.400 --> 00:25:19.630
So that some some of the chronic diseases, also mental health issues start to come, you

00:25:19.630 --> 00:25:23.710
know, become a major issue for a lot of these communities, especially indigenous

00:25:23.710 --> 00:25:29.710
communities, as you know, they're sort of they're they're more in these market systems, but

00:25:29.710 --> 00:25:32.590
yet there's a huge level of inequality there, right?

00:25:32.750 --> 00:25:37.950
And so you start to see the mental health challenges, you know, really becoming much more

00:25:37.950 --> 00:25:43.100
common in these populations, as well as you start to see things like immune dysregulation,

00:25:43.180 --> 00:25:43.420
right?

00:25:43.660 --> 00:25:49.260
Start to see this sort of initial movement towards dysregulated immune systems that leads

00:25:49.260 --> 00:25:51.580
to autoimmune diseases and allergies.

00:25:51.740 --> 00:25:57.260
And so, yeah, you see like even those characterizing this law, the swath of

00:25:57.260 --> 00:26:02.060
changes, there are these positives that happen after you these initial negatives, but then

00:26:02.060 --> 00:26:05.340
a whole set of new negatives come online, right?

00:26:05.500 --> 00:26:10.750
And so again, depending on what we're focusing in on in terms of the health issue, it can

00:26:10.750 --> 00:26:14.590
look like something that got way better or way worse.

00:26:14.750 --> 00:26:18.750
And so how do we characterize the collection of those different things?

00:26:19.070 --> 00:26:19.310
Yeah.

00:26:19.390 --> 00:26:21.470
I had a much more prosaic example, David.

00:26:21.550 --> 00:26:25.390
I like the example of history, which is just like even as a as a just individual human

00:26:25.390 --> 00:26:31.150
lifespan, if I move to a new place, I often uh find when I move to the next place,

00:26:31.300 --> 00:26:36.420
um, that I'm I'm trying to live the lifestyle that worked in the place I lived previously

00:26:36.740 --> 00:26:38.020
and apply that to the next place.

00:26:38.100 --> 00:26:39.700
And it happens at different scales.

00:26:39.940 --> 00:26:41.940
But then you realize, oh, this doesn't work here.

00:26:42.020 --> 00:26:43.060
I have to modify things.

00:26:43.140 --> 00:26:47.140
And then you also realize even once you get settled in the new place, there are some pros

00:26:47.140 --> 00:26:48.820
to the new place, but there's some cons.

00:26:48.980 --> 00:26:53.460
And I'm hearing it's the same, it's exactly the same thing historically or society, social

00:26:53.940 --> 00:26:54.420
society.

00:26:55.350 --> 00:26:55.670
It is.

00:26:55.750 --> 00:27:01.270
And it's really that navigation at an individual level of like those things that work and

00:27:01.270 --> 00:27:06.550
what you're familiar with, and then the constraints and opportunities that are shaped by

00:27:06.550 --> 00:27:11.430
the environment that you come from and the environment that you're going in, or you stay in

00:27:11.430 --> 00:27:14.310
the same place and your environment is changing over time.

00:27:14.470 --> 00:27:19.430
And so, you know, there I think the the the piece that I would like to see develop that

00:27:19.430 --> 00:27:24.390
I've really been pushing some of our, you know, my collaborators and grad students to go is

00:27:24.390 --> 00:27:30.320
that oftentimes the way we've looked at market integration has been very much like the

00:27:30.320 --> 00:27:32.400
material conditions changing, right?

00:27:32.480 --> 00:27:37.280
In terms of like, okay, here's your behavior, here's your physical activity level changing,

00:27:37.360 --> 00:27:42.720
or here's your percentage of foods coming from market sources, or here's your access to a

00:27:42.720 --> 00:27:44.800
TV, or those kinds of things, right?

00:27:45.170 --> 00:27:50.290
But on top of that, I think there's also like the cognitive piece of like how do we make

00:27:50.290 --> 00:27:51.010
sense of that?

00:27:51.170 --> 00:27:56.610
And so we've started to do some work sort of taking some of like Bill Dressler's ideas in

00:27:56.610 --> 00:28:01.330
terms of like these congruities and incongruities of how we make sense of what's a good

00:28:01.330 --> 00:28:01.650
life.

00:28:01.730 --> 00:28:06.850
And and so, you know, like um Melissa Liebert, who was one of the grad students who worked

00:28:06.850 --> 00:28:12.080
early on in the Schwar project, She's finished and is now actually tenured faculty at

00:28:12.080 --> 00:28:13.760
Northern Arizona University.

00:28:13.840 --> 00:28:18.160
But some of the work that she's done, a bit of it published, some of it still in process,

00:28:18.400 --> 00:28:23.920
has been looking at like kids and how things change and how they perceive things.

00:28:24.000 --> 00:28:28.880
And so even at the level of like a six-year-old or an eight-year-old, they've got different

00:28:28.880 --> 00:28:34.730
ideas of like what it means to live a good life, and that they're different between

00:28:34.730 --> 00:28:40.650
remote living Schwar communities, who those kids are often saying, like, clean water

00:28:40.650 --> 00:28:46.250
and trees and things like that, to then some of the urbanized Schwar who are saying, Well,

00:28:46.410 --> 00:28:51.210
what it takes to live a good life is a cell phone and a TV and things like that.

00:28:52.100 --> 00:28:57.780
the ability of those individual kids to meet those desires,

00:28:58.100 --> 00:28:58.420
right?

00:28:59.060 --> 00:29:01.460
Vary in those different places, right?

00:29:01.620 --> 00:29:06.660
So your ability to have, you know, and you're you're in a group of 50 people living in a

00:29:06.660 --> 00:29:12.180
remote area, and what you need to have a good life is good social relationships, good

00:29:12.180 --> 00:29:13.140
environment.

00:29:13.570 --> 00:29:15.810
most people can meet that, right?

00:29:15.890 --> 00:29:21.650
Whereas you look at then people living in, say, a market center of 10,000 people, and you

00:29:21.650 --> 00:29:26.850
look at then what kids want, inequality is going to play out big time.

00:29:27.010 --> 00:29:31.570
And you're going to have kids who are six to eight years old who really want cell phones

00:29:31.570 --> 00:29:36.560
and access to all these different things or ability to travel, but yet there's a huge range

00:29:36.560 --> 00:29:38.480
of variation between individuals.

00:29:38.720 --> 00:29:42.560
Some individuals are able to provide that for their kids and others aren't.

00:29:42.720 --> 00:29:48.560
And so that ability to kind of reach what you want is going to have huge

00:29:48.560 --> 00:29:50.400
effects on mental health.

00:29:50.480 --> 00:29:55.440
And it's going to have huge effects on stress and then understanding stress's effects on

00:29:55.440 --> 00:29:55.760
the body.

00:29:55.920 --> 00:30:00.850
So I think the next step really is doing more of that kind of work to really understand

00:30:00.930 --> 00:30:05.410
like how people make sense of it, not just how their bodies experience it.

00:30:06.210 --> 00:30:06.450
Yeah.

00:30:06.610 --> 00:30:11.890
I'm I wanna unpack this this relationship between uh mental health and market integration

00:30:12.050 --> 00:30:16.610
because um I would imagine it's it's a complicated one and and there there might be some

00:30:16.610 --> 00:30:21.490
moderators and mediators to that relationship and and and particularly there's complexity

00:30:21.490 --> 00:30:25.330
surrounding how you're measuring mental health and what mental disorders we're looking at.

00:30:25.650 --> 00:30:27.320
So there could be stress, anxiety, depression.

00:30:27.400 --> 00:30:31.400
I'm not sure what it is you're measuring and and where the the relationships are strongest.

00:30:31.480 --> 00:30:36.520
But I kinda just want to unpack like w what is going on there uh and and and what you see

00:30:36.520 --> 00:30:40.040
as as the the the causal mechanisms that are uh at play.

00:30:40.360 --> 00:30:41.640
Yeah, great question.

00:30:41.800 --> 00:30:46.440
I think that often it's kind of playing out in terms of like some people are approaching

00:30:46.440 --> 00:30:50.920
this with the sort of epidemiological tools where it's like, okay, let's measure whether,

00:30:51.000 --> 00:30:55.910
you know, percentage of individuals that have, you depression, or you know, either people

00:30:55.910 --> 00:31:01.910
who have been diagnosed or people who have behaviors that, you know, as they ref, you know,

00:31:02.150 --> 00:31:07.910
in an interview or a questionnaire, would be classified as depressed if they had

00:31:07.910 --> 00:31:09.750
access to a mental health professional, right?

00:31:09.910 --> 00:31:14.070
So there's people who are approaching it in those sort of that epidemiological lens.

00:31:14.230 --> 00:31:19.480
And what we see is populations, especially indigenous groups that are going through market

00:31:19.480 --> 00:31:24.040
integration, you're often seeing the increase in in in these things, right?

00:31:24.200 --> 00:31:29.960
And obviously it's complicated in the sense that like how individual cultures

00:31:29.960 --> 00:31:33.320
make sense of depression is going to vary a lot.

00:31:33.400 --> 00:31:39.160
And so those standard tools to applied globally have their limitations, right?

00:31:39.320 --> 00:31:45.010
But what you can see is definitely more mental health issues, especially

00:31:45.010 --> 00:31:48.770
around anxiety and depression in those communities, right?

00:31:49.010 --> 00:31:53.170
And then there's the other approach, which is sort of coming more out of anthropology and

00:31:53.170 --> 00:31:58.770
human biology, which is it's partly about prevalence of these, but it's also more about

00:31:59.010 --> 00:32:03.890
measurement of anxiety or mostly stress, right?

00:32:03.970 --> 00:32:09.380
And so trying to understand both the subjective experience of stress, but more the sort of

00:32:09.380 --> 00:32:12.740
biological experience of stress through biomarkers.

00:32:12.980 --> 00:32:18.500
And so what we see is, you know, let there, and we can chat more about this too, is like,

00:32:18.660 --> 00:32:24.580
you know, with measuring stress at a biological level, the body is experiencing it

00:32:24.580 --> 00:32:25.860
in different ways, right?

00:32:26.020 --> 00:32:31.710
But we're often seeing increase in chronic psychosocial stress

00:32:32.030 --> 00:32:35.150
as people are going through this process of market integration.

00:32:35.390 --> 00:32:40.270
Obviously, there's a lot of factors that influence that, but that is something that people

00:32:40.270 --> 00:32:45.310
are experiencing in general more of as they're going through market integration.

00:32:45.470 --> 00:32:51.400
And I think, you know, some of it in my mind connects to social, like a lot

00:32:51.400 --> 00:32:55.800
of it would connect to like social networks and sort of social support.

00:32:56.040 --> 00:32:59.080
And then also with sort of feelings of control.

00:32:59.400 --> 00:33:05.000
And so I think oftentimes in these types of new environments that people are moving into or

00:33:05.000 --> 00:33:10.120
having the environment change around them, that oftentimes as you're starting to introduce

00:33:10.200 --> 00:33:15.720
whatever, new economic systems and, you know, increasing population sizes and

00:33:15.720 --> 00:33:21.410
increased inequality, you have perceptions of people being able to control their

00:33:21.410 --> 00:33:27.250
environment and their own circumstances less, in that that tends to lead to higher

00:33:27.250 --> 00:33:32.690
levels of psychosocial stress, whether that's a measured in the HPA axis,

00:33:33.010 --> 00:33:38.770
axis in terms of like cortisol levels being higher or dysregulated, or in an

00:33:38.770 --> 00:33:42.050
inflammatory axis, or other ways to look at things.

00:33:42.210 --> 00:33:46.180
I mean, that's that's just a general character characterization, and there's a lot of

00:33:46.180 --> 00:33:47.620
factors that influence it.

00:33:47.780 --> 00:33:53.700
But in general, we're seeing more chronic psychosocial stress as people go through

00:33:53.700 --> 00:33:59.460
more market integration and are more within living within these complex sort of Western

00:33:59.540 --> 00:34:00.900
type environments.

00:34:01.620 --> 00:34:02.420
That's that's interesting.

00:34:02.500 --> 00:34:08.490
So it seems like part of it is kind of the mundane thing where moving into any new place or

00:34:08.490 --> 00:34:12.730
culture or setting where things work differently is going to be stressful because you

00:34:12.730 --> 00:34:15.050
understand how things work less.

00:34:15.290 --> 00:34:15.530
Right.

00:34:16.410 --> 00:34:21.770
Um so that that I want to set aside that mundane part and focus on what I think is the more

00:34:21.770 --> 00:34:26.330
interesting part, which is you're you're you're also uh seeming to argue that uh it's

00:34:26.330 --> 00:34:28.570
affecting people's social relationships.

00:34:28.730 --> 00:34:34.330
Um and that in turn is having these negative uh uh physical health effects in terms of

00:34:34.330 --> 00:34:37.800
stress and uh mental health uh effects as well.

00:34:37.960 --> 00:34:43.800
Um, and I I'm curious about that because you know, naively you might think, you know,

00:34:43.960 --> 00:34:48.280
you're you're more integrated with you know a market economy, you're you're meeting more

00:34:48.280 --> 00:34:50.360
people, uh, your social network is expanding.

00:34:50.440 --> 00:34:53.560
You might think that might have a positive effect on your social relationships.

00:34:53.640 --> 00:34:57.480
You know, you're you're you're forming new opportunities, new working relationships, you're

00:34:57.480 --> 00:35:00.440
with with people in different um work environments.

00:35:00.570 --> 00:35:06.570
Um so why when when these social relationships seem to increase, do we see uh

00:35:06.570 --> 00:35:10.330
deterioration of people's uh uh social support systems?

00:35:10.570 --> 00:35:12.250
Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great question.

00:35:12.410 --> 00:35:17.210
I do think for some people, for a subset of people, it does get better, right?

00:35:17.370 --> 00:35:20.010
And and I think that there are more opportunities.

00:35:20.170 --> 00:35:23.450
There may be ways that they connect with people in new and different ways.

00:35:23.530 --> 00:35:27.050
There's travel opportunities, there's ways to make money, those kinds of things.

00:35:27.260 --> 00:35:33.020
I think often though, a larger segment of people are finding less

00:35:33.020 --> 00:35:34.220
stability in this.

00:35:34.380 --> 00:35:39.980
So that they may be doing wage labor without a lot of support and a lot of

00:35:40.220 --> 00:35:45.340
predictability, that they may be going off to whatever, you know, some somewhere that's

00:35:45.340 --> 00:35:50.060
distant from you know where they grew up and where their family is, and that all of a

00:35:50.060 --> 00:35:55.150
sudden they're, you know, working in the city that's 200 miles away and they're not making

00:35:55.150 --> 00:35:57.470
a whole lot of money and they're sending some back.

00:35:57.630 --> 00:35:59.630
They're trying to come back when they can.

00:35:59.950 --> 00:36:04.590
And the relationship that they're in the relationships that they're in in those new

00:36:04.590 --> 00:36:09.950
communities are ones where they're very hierarchical and there's a lot of in inequality in

00:36:09.950 --> 00:36:10.110
them.

00:36:10.190 --> 00:36:10.430
Right.

00:36:10.590 --> 00:36:16.590
So I think it's it's it's the details of what happens with these, the quality of those,

00:36:16.750 --> 00:36:22.560
you know, relationships and and sort of like the level of ine inequality w within them.

00:36:22.720 --> 00:36:28.640
So so it definitely it's not universally a bad thing to to have these changes in terms of

00:36:28.640 --> 00:36:30.720
like social networks and things like that.

00:36:30.880 --> 00:36:36.560
But I think often the way it plays out is that more often people tend to be more

00:36:36.560 --> 00:36:42.560
exploited and it and it and it disrupts social networks that that are going to

00:36:42.560 --> 00:36:46.930
be really useful for whatever for people staying afloat.

00:36:47.090 --> 00:36:51.570
I know that some of the some of the studies that we've done, we've asked people like in our

00:36:51.650 --> 00:36:57.170
in our questionnaires or surveys about like their social networks and can how many people

00:36:57.170 --> 00:37:02.130
do you have that you can go to that if you're in an emergency and you need money or you

00:37:02.130 --> 00:37:05.010
need to get taken to the hospital or things like that.

00:37:05.250 --> 00:37:07.330
How many people and who are those people?

00:37:07.490 --> 00:37:13.200
And I think that oftentimes going out of one of these communities leads to that

00:37:13.200 --> 00:37:18.320
disruption of those, those, the social support that's going to be necessary when things get

00:37:18.320 --> 00:37:18.640
bad.

00:37:18.800 --> 00:37:19.200
Right.

00:37:19.520 --> 00:37:19.760
Yeah.

00:37:19.920 --> 00:37:25.600
And and is the idea too that in just as the example of history or personal life

00:37:25.600 --> 00:37:30.240
experience, you try to find the principles that work across locations.

00:37:30.400 --> 00:37:36.080
So would the long-term goal be something like given that this is a natural experiment, um,

00:37:36.320 --> 00:37:42.130
if somebody has more family around or less, or has more predictability in their job or

00:37:42.210 --> 00:37:43.730
less, which is harder to code.

00:37:43.890 --> 00:37:48.290
But I think the ideal would be that it's as you're saying, it's not as simple as just in

00:37:48.290 --> 00:37:49.410
the market or not.

00:37:49.650 --> 00:37:55.490
It's sort of coding these more situation specific things, but that will still

00:37:55.490 --> 00:38:00.000
happen across instances and seeing if those factors are at least protective.

00:38:00.080 --> 00:38:01.440
Is that the long-term goal?

00:38:02.080 --> 00:38:02.640
Absolutely.

00:38:02.880 --> 00:38:03.200
Yeah.

00:38:03.360 --> 00:38:07.920
And really trying to understand that those details of like, yeah, perceptions of control,

00:38:08.240 --> 00:38:12.960
perceptions of autonomy, perception of social support, those kinds of things.

00:38:13.120 --> 00:38:16.560
And so, you know, again, keep saying perception, right?

00:38:16.640 --> 00:38:22.370
Because sometimes like measuring the absolute number of these things doesn't really

00:38:22.370 --> 00:38:24.290
get at how people perceive them.

00:38:24.370 --> 00:38:28.770
And that's going to be shaped by the culture, that's going to be shaped by history, that's

00:38:28.770 --> 00:38:30.450
going to be shaped as individuals.

00:38:30.690 --> 00:38:33.490
And so, but yeah, really trying to understand those details.

00:38:33.650 --> 00:38:39.570
I mean, I feel like it's funny being 20 over 20 years into this project and sort of still

00:38:39.570 --> 00:38:45.440
feeling like we're laying the foundation for getting some of these big questions

00:38:45.440 --> 00:38:45.920
answered.

00:38:46.000 --> 00:38:51.760
I feel like, again, we've like been really productive, but it's it's so like some of these

00:38:51.760 --> 00:38:57.680
larger patterns and generalizations are just so hard to get at that it's really

00:38:57.680 --> 00:39:03.090
taken like setting up this enormous project, right, which is measuring like many, many,

00:39:03.170 --> 00:39:09.010
many hundreds of variables and working with, I think we're over 3,500

00:39:09.010 --> 00:39:11.890
people over these 20 years.

00:39:12.050 --> 00:39:18.050
And so, and and yet I still feel like it's almost like pilot data in some ways, like to set

00:39:18.050 --> 00:39:18.690
stuff up.

00:39:18.930 --> 00:39:20.050
So it's cool.

00:39:20.130 --> 00:39:25.570
And now an increasing number of studies are using kind of our approaches.

00:39:25.730 --> 00:39:31.560
And then now we can compare and contrast with, for example, groups going through similar

00:39:31.560 --> 00:39:37.080
processes in Malaysia or East Africa or other places, but it's still, I don't know, I

00:39:37.480 --> 00:39:43.480
to me, it still seems like we've done a bunch, but there's still so

00:39:43.480 --> 00:39:49.240
much potential to really get at those, like, how do we really understand the big processes

00:39:49.240 --> 00:39:51.640
and and why they exist the way that they do?

00:39:51.960 --> 00:39:52.120
Yeah.

00:39:52.310 --> 00:39:55.510
It even reminds me, like, I mean, there's work on just even like there was experimental

00:39:55.510 --> 00:39:57.670
work, I think, in the UK on advertising.

00:39:57.830 --> 00:40:03.830
And if you just remove what is presumably the effects of the perception of relative

00:40:03.830 --> 00:40:05.670
deprivation by removing advertising.

00:40:05.750 --> 00:40:09.510
So, you know, advertising is largely like you're deprived, you should buy this product and

00:40:09.510 --> 00:40:10.630
not be deprived anymore.

00:40:10.790 --> 00:40:15.140
There's there were slight in this as an experiment in a natural experiment, there were

00:40:15.140 --> 00:40:19.300
slight changes in well-being, even just by removing the ads people were exposed to.

00:40:19.460 --> 00:40:23.620
So this is a a real world example of exactly the thing you're describing, which is like

00:40:23.780 --> 00:40:28.580
even that is just one study, but you're doing this natural experiment across many things.

00:40:28.820 --> 00:40:31.940
Trying to measure people's experiences or perceptions is really hard.

00:40:32.340 --> 00:40:34.980
Yeah, but that proximity piece is so important, right?

00:40:35.140 --> 00:40:40.410
And so, like, are you seeing other people getting more of these things that you might want

00:40:40.490 --> 00:40:41.930
or that now you really want?

00:40:42.090 --> 00:40:46.890
And so in the past, human biologists have measured that in like distance to these different

00:40:46.890 --> 00:40:51.290
communities, or are you in a neighborhood, a poor neighborhood that's right next to a rich

00:40:51.290 --> 00:40:51.770
neighborhood?

00:40:51.850 --> 00:40:56.010
But yet with advertising, you're you're bringing you're doing that in a different way.

00:40:56.170 --> 00:41:01.450
And and so I think one of the challenges has been with the Schwartz project is that you

00:41:01.420 --> 00:41:05.500
know, we've set it up and we're doing this work, but every year it changes.

00:41:05.660 --> 00:41:11.180
And so, like, you know, oftentimes we'll have enough, we'll collect data over 10 years to

00:41:11.180 --> 00:41:12.780
really address a question.

00:41:13.020 --> 00:41:17.260
But then are all those 10 years and those communities equal?

00:41:17.420 --> 00:41:17.740
Right.

00:41:17.820 --> 00:41:19.180
And and it's accelerated.

00:41:19.260 --> 00:41:25.100
Like the last five years has accelerated even faster with the sense of like, now there's

00:41:25.100 --> 00:41:27.100
these like little internet cafes.

00:41:27.260 --> 00:41:32.330
I guess they're not really that, but like access to Starlink in the middle of the forest

00:41:32.490 --> 00:41:36.810
where you were all of a sudden getting connection on the internet in a way that literally a

00:41:36.810 --> 00:41:39.610
year before there was no opportunities.

00:41:39.850 --> 00:41:45.530
Or like all of a sudden this road goes in and it totally changes this entire region in

00:41:45.530 --> 00:41:46.570
terms of their access.

00:41:46.730 --> 00:41:52.000
So like it's cool from a sort of natural, you know, like experiment standpoint, but I just

00:41:52.000 --> 00:41:54.880
wish the natural experiment would like slow down.

00:41:55.280 --> 00:41:56.560
Slow down exactly.

00:41:56.640 --> 00:41:58.400
Like I want to compare this versus this.

00:41:58.560 --> 00:42:00.080
I don't want it like everywhere.

00:42:00.400 --> 00:42:00.720
Yeah.

00:42:01.360 --> 00:42:02.320
Your time machine.

00:42:02.560 --> 00:42:05.920
If somebody's got a time machine, if somebody has a time machine, please contact Josh,

00:42:06.160 --> 00:42:06.240
please.

00:42:06.560 --> 00:42:06.720
Yeah.

00:42:06.800 --> 00:42:07.600
Yeah, exactly.

00:42:07.680 --> 00:42:13.200
And I think, you know, we're also really we're we really focus in on doing this work

00:42:13.200 --> 00:42:14.640
ethically and responsibly.

00:42:14.720 --> 00:42:20.160
And and and I think really Larry has been fantastic and has been the push on this: is like,

00:42:20.370 --> 00:42:25.170
how do we how do we work with communities that they're getting something out of this,

00:42:25.250 --> 00:42:25.490
right?

00:42:25.570 --> 00:42:30.690
That it's not just us, obviously, it's not just us coming in and taking and then

00:42:30.690 --> 00:42:35.650
reproducing stuff and then like essentially the parachute research model, but it's one

00:42:35.650 --> 00:42:41.570
where like, how do we navigate this where like they are getting as many things

00:42:41.570 --> 00:42:44.130
out of this that they want as we are?

00:42:44.290 --> 00:42:50.140
And so what that translates to is we're not always controlling

00:42:50.140 --> 00:42:51.260
where we go, right?

00:42:51.420 --> 00:42:55.660
It's kind of like, you know, we work with the Schwartz Federation and the the leadership

00:42:55.660 --> 00:42:56.700
within Schwartz.

00:42:56.780 --> 00:43:02.140
And then we sort of navigate like, okay, what are the communities that are

00:43:02.460 --> 00:43:05.900
possible to work in because they want to work with us?

00:43:06.060 --> 00:43:10.620
But it may not be perfect in the sense that, like, if I got to choose or Larry got to

00:43:10.620 --> 00:43:13.260
choose, we'd be like, oh, let's pick this, this, this, and this.

00:43:13.340 --> 00:43:18.130
And we've got our whatever five communities designed scientifically.

00:43:18.370 --> 00:43:23.970
It's the reality of it is there's some of that, but also this like,

00:43:24.130 --> 00:43:26.450
okay, well that we can't really do that.

00:43:26.530 --> 00:43:29.250
So let's try to find a way that works for everyone.

00:43:29.410 --> 00:43:34.850
So it's just, I think it's the reality of doing this work with people, you know, in

00:43:34.850 --> 00:43:36.690
communities in a responsible way.

00:43:36.850 --> 00:43:42.130
Obviously international is is really makes it really clear because of you know working with

00:43:42.130 --> 00:43:45.120
indigenous communities, but find the same thing here.

00:43:45.280 --> 00:43:48.240
I do work with homeless communities in Eugene.

00:43:48.560 --> 00:43:50.480
And you know, it's the same kind of thing.

00:43:50.560 --> 00:43:56.480
It's like, how do we figure out how it's mutually beneficial and how we balance the sort

00:43:56.480 --> 00:43:58.880
of ethics of it with the science of it?

00:43:59.200 --> 00:44:01.840
Because that's the way you have to do it.

00:44:03.120 --> 00:44:08.640
Yeah, one of the many pitfalls of doing research on humans rather than rats, which you can

00:44:08.640 --> 00:44:10.480
just pick up and you know put wherever you want.

00:44:10.960 --> 00:44:11.600
Exactly.

00:44:11.840 --> 00:44:12.240
Yeah.

00:44:12.450 --> 00:44:15.490
Uh with humans you have to, you know, offer them something that they want.

00:44:15.570 --> 00:44:15.810
You know.

00:44:16.130 --> 00:44:16.690
Yeah, right.

00:44:16.850 --> 00:44:17.810
Exactly.

00:44:18.610 --> 00:44:20.290
Yeah, it gets really challenging.

00:44:20.770 --> 00:44:21.090
Yeah.

00:44:21.250 --> 00:44:26.610
Um, speaking of of of what humans want, I want to return to an idea that you touched on uh

00:44:26.850 --> 00:44:32.690
um earlier that uh is you know sticking with me, this idea of, you know, what a good

00:44:32.690 --> 00:44:38.210
life means and how that differs between um people as they

00:44:38.240 --> 00:44:40.720
navigate this transition into market economies.

00:44:41.280 --> 00:44:46.880
And so you you mentioned that um, you know, prior to this transition, people's life

00:44:46.880 --> 00:44:50.080
aspirations or what they view as a good life are are much simpler.

00:44:50.240 --> 00:44:56.000
It's just if they have access to clean water and and friends, like that's that's good

00:44:56.000 --> 00:44:56.240
enough.

00:44:56.400 --> 00:44:58.800
That's that that's what it means to to live a good life.

00:44:59.040 --> 00:45:04.830
And yet that changes such that people's aspirations get much higher once

00:45:04.830 --> 00:45:09.790
they transition into uh market economies, where it's it's no longer enough to just have

00:45:09.790 --> 00:45:11.390
clean water and friends.

00:45:11.470 --> 00:45:17.390
You also need the cell phone, the TV, uh w whatever it is that that the the market is

00:45:17.390 --> 00:45:17.630
offering.

00:45:17.950 --> 00:45:19.230
Or or you think you need, right?

00:45:19.550 --> 00:45:20.190
Or you think you need it.

00:45:20.350 --> 00:45:21.150
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:45:21.470 --> 00:45:26.760
Um and so I I'm I find that puzzling and interesting.

00:45:27.080 --> 00:45:33.080
So why why shouldn't I be ecstatic if I'm living in a in a market economy and I

00:45:33.080 --> 00:45:34.520
have all the clean water I want?

00:45:34.680 --> 00:45:37.560
And I have these amazing new technology, I have air conditioning.

00:45:37.640 --> 00:45:40.680
I have, you know, maybe I have a uh a cell phone or or whatever.

00:45:40.840 --> 00:45:45.080
Maybe I have these all these new amenities that are above and beyond my basic needs, and my

00:45:45.080 --> 00:45:46.200
basic needs are being met.

00:45:46.410 --> 00:45:47.770
Why shouldn't I be ecstatic?

00:45:47.850 --> 00:45:51.130
What what is it about this new environment that makes me unsatisfied with that?

00:45:51.290 --> 00:45:53.610
Whereas I was satisfied with it in the previous environment.

00:45:53.850 --> 00:45:54.090
Yeah.

00:45:54.250 --> 00:45:58.250
I it's yeah, that it's it's such a it's it's so interesting to think about.

00:45:58.410 --> 00:46:03.370
So I think part of it is that you start to see there there's going to be variation in who

00:46:03.370 --> 00:46:04.170
gets what, right?

00:46:04.330 --> 00:46:06.810
I think that's always true in these market economies.

00:46:07.130 --> 00:46:12.680
And that often is particularly true in these fast transitioning communities, right?

00:46:12.760 --> 00:46:17.960
So, like a market center, right, like in lowland Ecuador or wherever it is in the world

00:46:17.960 --> 00:46:21.800
that we're talking about, is gonna have a huge amount of variation.

00:46:21.880 --> 00:46:26.360
And some people who are really doing well and got access to all these things, and then the

00:46:26.360 --> 00:46:30.440
other end of the spectrum where people are really struggling and are sort of the exploited

00:46:30.440 --> 00:46:31.400
labor class, right?

00:46:31.560 --> 00:46:37.390
So some of it is that it's not equally distributed, and it's not that the society says,

00:46:37.550 --> 00:46:41.710
okay, here we're going to give everybody their basic needs, right, in terms of food and

00:46:41.710 --> 00:46:42.830
water and things like that.

00:46:42.990 --> 00:46:46.430
And then you've got all these opportunities above and beyond that, right?

00:46:46.750 --> 00:46:48.110
That's not happening.

00:46:48.270 --> 00:46:52.110
It's kind of like, here's all these things that are rapidly changing, right?

00:46:52.190 --> 00:46:55.390
And people are getting access to some of them and not others.

00:46:55.470 --> 00:46:58.190
And other people are getting access to almost none, right?

00:46:58.510 --> 00:47:04.080
And then there's the exposure to just all the

00:47:04.320 --> 00:47:07.520
variation in terms of what's out there, you're seeing it, right?

00:47:07.680 --> 00:47:11.760
So it's not just that you've got some opportunities and not others, but you're seeing

00:47:11.760 --> 00:47:15.760
another individual, you know, that's sort of keeping up with the Joneses or whatever it is

00:47:15.840 --> 00:47:21.600
that like I'm now seeing on advertisements or TV, or I'm in a large

00:47:21.600 --> 00:47:27.050
society that, or I'm in a large community that's now 10,000 people compared to like

00:47:27.050 --> 00:47:28.090
200 people.

00:47:28.250 --> 00:47:33.770
And the range of variation what you have in the 200 person community versus in 10,000 is

00:47:33.770 --> 00:47:34.090
different.

00:47:34.170 --> 00:47:36.730
So that inequality becomes really obvious.

00:47:36.810 --> 00:47:42.170
And so that that becomes something psychologically, not and also

00:47:42.490 --> 00:47:45.050
practically in terms of those things, right?

00:47:45.290 --> 00:47:47.690
Becomes they becomes really meaningful.

00:47:47.820 --> 00:47:53.580
So not to say that market economies are bad or that these transitions are bad at all, but I

00:47:53.580 --> 00:47:59.580
think it it naturally, maybe naturally is not the right word, but it typically becomes

00:47:59.580 --> 00:48:02.140
one where there's a huge amount of inequality.

00:48:02.380 --> 00:48:08.060
And and and so oftentimes it's the indigenous populations

00:48:08.220 --> 00:48:12.860
that tend to experience the bad end of the inequality, right?

00:48:13.020 --> 00:48:18.370
And I actually had a review paper now about 10 years ago with Claudia Vallegia, who that

00:48:18.370 --> 00:48:22.610
was looking at indigenous communities around the world as they go in through market

00:48:22.610 --> 00:48:23.250
integration.

00:48:23.410 --> 00:48:29.010
And universally, you see these communities, you know, because of racism and

00:48:29.010 --> 00:48:33.970
discrimination and various different things in all these different locations lead to them

00:48:34.610 --> 00:48:39.570
experiencing market integration in a different way than some of the majority communities.

00:48:39.810 --> 00:48:44.700
So I think it's just all about the details here in terms of, yeah, like theoretically,

00:48:44.780 --> 00:48:50.220
there's a whole lot of these amazing things that people get access to, but the

00:48:50.220 --> 00:48:56.060
inequality matters, and then it also matters, I think, how our bodies and minds

00:48:56.060 --> 00:48:59.500
are designed by evolution to deal with those environments.

00:48:59.660 --> 00:49:04.780
I I'm certainly not an expert on this, but I think a lot about the like what

00:49:05.470 --> 00:49:11.310
psychologically it means to be in a town of whatever, 200,000 or

00:49:11.310 --> 00:49:17.310
a million versus in a town of or a small community of 50 people, in terms of who

00:49:17.310 --> 00:49:22.990
you know, the relationships that you have, the faces you see, the

00:49:23.310 --> 00:49:25.870
status differences you're exposed to.

00:49:26.030 --> 00:49:31.760
Like in some ways, I just think we're not designed to live in these, whether it's us

00:49:31.760 --> 00:49:36.240
talking in the United States or whether we're talking about these indigenous communities

00:49:36.240 --> 00:49:38.560
transitioning in a place like Ecuador.

00:49:39.760 --> 00:49:45.440
So am I am I correct in in reading you uh and and saying that um a big part of what we

00:49:45.440 --> 00:49:51.200
strive for or aspire to in life is really dependent on the people around us and

00:49:51.200 --> 00:49:52.910
what they have compared to us.

00:49:52.990 --> 00:49:55.790
And a lot, there's this huge social comparison element.

00:49:56.190 --> 00:50:00.670
And in some sense, you might expect that from an evolutionary perspective.

00:50:00.910 --> 00:50:04.110
And that fitness is a relative uh thing.

00:50:04.270 --> 00:50:07.630
You know, um, it's about you know some doing better than others.

00:50:07.790 --> 00:50:11.070
Uh competition is integral to Darwinism as we know it.

00:50:11.230 --> 00:50:16.440
And so when I'm stri when I'm deciding what I should strive for as an organism, uh it makes

00:50:16.440 --> 00:50:21.400
sense for me to evaluate that striving relative to my competitors in the environment.

00:50:21.720 --> 00:50:26.920
And insofar as I'm doing better than the people or the organisms around me, then that is a

00:50:26.920 --> 00:50:29.640
good sign from an inclusive fitness perspective.

00:50:29.720 --> 00:50:33.960
Or if my family is doing better than the families I see around me, that is a good sign that

00:50:33.960 --> 00:50:36.360
my inclusive fitness is in a good place.

00:50:36.600 --> 00:50:36.920
Right.

00:50:37.720 --> 00:50:43.470
And so it could be that, you know, if if I'm living um in a in a

00:50:43.470 --> 00:50:48.750
different type of social setting where um maybe the the best maybe there's just not a lot

00:50:48.750 --> 00:50:50.430
of accumulatable wealth.

00:50:50.990 --> 00:50:51.230
Right.

00:50:51.470 --> 00:50:57.070
And and the best that people can do really is just have clean water uh and and and good

00:50:57.070 --> 00:50:59.870
friends and that's really like as as good as it gets in this place.

00:51:00.030 --> 00:51:03.870
Whereas if you move to a different place where as as good as it gets is like 10 times

00:51:03.870 --> 00:51:09.540
higher up in terms of the amount of stuff you have, then all of a sudden what I should

00:51:09.540 --> 00:51:14.500
strive for changes dramatically because now I'm I'm comparing myself to a different set of

00:51:14.500 --> 00:51:14.820
people.

00:51:15.060 --> 00:51:17.540
Um and my my competitors have changed.

00:51:17.700 --> 00:51:22.420
And all of a sudden I've moved from a place where I, you know, you know, perhaps somewhere

00:51:22.420 --> 00:51:25.540
in the middle of the hierarchy, I've entered into a new social system where I'm at the

00:51:25.540 --> 00:51:26.580
bottom of the hierarchy.

00:51:26.740 --> 00:51:30.900
So when when these communities are transitioning into the market uh economy, they're not,

00:51:30.980 --> 00:51:35.950
you know, uh moving right into the top of the of the economic stratum of that society.

00:51:36.030 --> 00:51:39.630
They're moving into the bottom of the economic stratum, both socially and economically.

00:51:40.110 --> 00:51:40.670
Absolutely.

00:51:41.390 --> 00:51:47.390
And so uh uh uh am I correct in in seeing that this is really a phenomenon of of social

00:51:47.390 --> 00:51:48.110
comparison?

00:51:48.190 --> 00:51:50.270
Aaron Powell I think a lot of it is, right?

00:51:50.430 --> 00:51:56.140
And I think it it in some ways we're just not designed to deal with the levels of

00:51:56.140 --> 00:52:01.420
inequality and the various factors that that are gonna be used to evaluate people, right?

00:52:01.500 --> 00:52:05.900
And at one level we could say like, what does it really matter if we have a TV or it really

00:52:05.980 --> 00:52:10.860
matters, but we really do know that it matters and people even in the US, right, are

00:52:10.860 --> 00:52:13.980
evaluating people based on wealth and things like that.

00:52:14.060 --> 00:52:17.020
And it can have effects in terms of fitness, right?

00:52:17.180 --> 00:52:17.420
Right.

00:52:17.660 --> 00:52:22.150
It's obviously super complicated given all the other factors, but it's it's still relevant,

00:52:22.230 --> 00:52:22.550
right?

00:52:22.710 --> 00:52:28.630
But I feel like we often get very disconnected from the like, what do we

00:52:28.630 --> 00:52:30.630
actually need and what do we want?

00:52:30.790 --> 00:52:31.110
Right.

00:52:31.270 --> 00:52:36.150
And that oftentimes there's just so many messages in a place like the US where it's just

00:52:36.150 --> 00:52:39.110
like, oh, you need this to be happy or whatever.

00:52:39.190 --> 00:52:44.580
And what I'm not sure it's it's it's like even the language around this or the variables

00:52:44.580 --> 00:52:47.060
that we're looking at are not necessarily the best ones.

00:52:47.220 --> 00:52:50.580
Like, is happiness the thing that we really want to focus in on?

00:52:50.740 --> 00:52:54.740
And or is it finding meaning in your life or those kinds of things?

00:52:54.820 --> 00:52:54.980
Right.

00:52:55.140 --> 00:53:00.260
And so I don't know, I guess my for me as a human biologist who's spending a lot who spent

00:53:00.260 --> 00:53:05.220
a lot of my career focused in on market integration and health, and simultaneously have

00:53:05.220 --> 00:53:10.930
done a lot of work on sort of larger trends in human evolution and human evolutionary

00:53:10.930 --> 00:53:11.410
history.

00:53:11.570 --> 00:53:16.930
I guess I keep on wanting to sort of step back and be like at a root level, what do we as

00:53:16.930 --> 00:53:22.690
humans, whether whatever society we're living in, what do we need to be

00:53:22.690 --> 00:53:27.570
healthy, to be happy, or whatever it is that we're evaluating this?

00:53:27.730 --> 00:53:30.690
And oftentimes it's not that complicated, right?

00:53:30.850 --> 00:53:34.840
I mean there's always going to be haves and haves nots, and there's always going to be

00:53:34.840 --> 00:53:35.400
competition.

00:53:35.560 --> 00:53:41.240
I mean, I think that's normal, but it doesn't have to be the way that we've designed

00:53:41.240 --> 00:53:44.200
societies and in like Western societies, right?

00:53:44.360 --> 00:53:49.960
And so oftentimes it's it is about social relationships fundamentally that really

00:53:49.960 --> 00:53:50.440
matter.

00:53:50.680 --> 00:53:56.440
It's about individuals who feel like they have autonomy to be able to reach whatever their

00:53:56.520 --> 00:54:02.010
potential or do things that are meaningful or do things within a society that matter to

00:54:02.010 --> 00:54:07.690
that society to get access to the foods that we need to survive and whatever

00:54:07.930 --> 00:54:08.730
thrive.

00:54:09.130 --> 00:54:12.090
It's really not a whole lot of things that we need.

00:54:12.330 --> 00:54:17.930
And so I think we're just in some ways we've totally lost the plot

00:54:18.250 --> 00:54:24.060
in places like the US, I think, in terms of being able to evaluate like what is human need

00:54:24.300 --> 00:54:29.820
and desires and then how does that map on or how should we try to map

00:54:30.460 --> 00:54:36.060
human society or country and politics onto those basic human

00:54:36.300 --> 00:54:38.460
physical and psychological needs.

00:54:38.860 --> 00:54:40.140
Yeah it's really weird.

00:54:40.300 --> 00:54:44.220
There's this thing called human factors engineering, which I'm sure you you know about

00:54:45.210 --> 00:54:48.250
you've you've heard of, but just saying it for out loud for people.

00:54:48.410 --> 00:54:52.970
Um, which is, you know, designing like a cockpit around like how a human thinks, right?

00:54:53.050 --> 00:54:54.330
So it's more intuitive.

00:54:54.410 --> 00:54:59.610
Uh and and and even like urban planning or things like that, ideally one would have that.

00:54:59.770 --> 00:55:05.770
And I think I hear what you're describing is there's this weird paradox where people

00:55:05.930 --> 00:55:11.050
are aware that they're unhappy or happy based on their local conditions.

00:55:11.450 --> 00:55:17.140
But there's another layer of in essence human factors engineering of a

00:55:17.140 --> 00:55:17.540
society.

00:55:17.700 --> 00:55:20.260
Whether in probably no no one person is doing it, right?

00:55:20.340 --> 00:55:22.580
It's just this dynamic emergent outcome.

00:55:22.900 --> 00:55:28.900
But that different places end up in different sort of parts of this landscape of

00:55:28.900 --> 00:55:30.020
human flourishing.

00:55:30.420 --> 00:55:35.060
And we're doing this weird thing of everybody sort of is like, yeah, the vibe here feels

00:55:35.060 --> 00:55:35.620
good or worse.

00:55:35.700 --> 00:55:39.490
Like you experience this when you go to a nice place or worse place, or like I know in

00:55:39.490 --> 00:55:43.650
Germany I felt a little bit better, even though it was still Western, you know, because

00:55:43.730 --> 00:55:49.650
there and and I don't but what I found surprising about that was I was conscious of

00:55:49.650 --> 00:55:55.250
the experience of the difference between the US and Germany, but I had to be intellectual

00:55:55.250 --> 00:55:59.330
about it to figure out what it was, and I'm still not even sure it's right.

00:55:59.810 --> 00:56:04.370
So there's this weird thing of like our evolved psychologies are really good at detecting

00:56:04.610 --> 00:56:06.930
displeasure and producing.

00:56:08.520 --> 00:56:12.440
I don't want to I don't want to reify that we're like dumb evolved organisms that aren't

00:56:12.440 --> 00:56:16.840
smart enough to figure out the structural differences we need, but I'm kind of getting at

00:56:16.840 --> 00:56:17.000
that.

00:56:17.240 --> 00:56:20.200
Maybe that's too cartoonish, but I feel like that's a little bit true.

00:56:20.600 --> 00:56:23.720
No, I think you're I think you're exactly right on with that.

00:56:23.880 --> 00:56:29.160
I mean, I do feel like we sort of we we've got this evolved psychology, and then we're

00:56:29.160 --> 00:56:34.970
situated within, I mean, cultures and histories at a particular time period,

00:56:35.130 --> 00:56:35.450
right?

00:56:35.610 --> 00:56:37.530
That we do go these different directions.

00:56:37.690 --> 00:56:43.370
And I do feel like sometimes we we, yeah, we we evaluate in particular ways and and

00:56:43.370 --> 00:56:48.970
almost just get away from those basic, not basic needs, but just the kind of ba

00:56:49.210 --> 00:56:53.450
perspective on what we need to do well, right?

00:56:53.530 --> 00:56:55.130
At a basic level.

00:56:55.290 --> 00:57:00.720
And but it is very interesting how different societies go, like the

00:57:00.720 --> 00:57:06.320
directions they go for totally weird reasons, like historical factors, too.

00:57:06.400 --> 00:57:06.640
Right.

00:57:06.720 --> 00:57:12.480
And and and there are some comparisons you can make with non-human, you know, like primate

00:57:12.480 --> 00:57:16.560
species, for example, that live in highly social environments like baboons.

00:57:16.720 --> 00:57:20.960
And, you know, if you've ever read any of Robert Sapolsky's work, right, there are times

00:57:20.960 --> 00:57:26.590
where, you know, like baboon societies have things happen to them that are not

00:57:26.590 --> 00:57:28.430
related to fitness or anything like that.

00:57:28.590 --> 00:57:32.990
They may take out certain individuals and leave other individuals, and then it goes a

00:57:32.990 --> 00:57:34.190
totally different direction.

00:57:34.350 --> 00:57:40.030
And you may have these baboon societies that are just really non-functional and

00:57:40.030 --> 00:57:45.760
highly unequal just because of weird historical factors related to

00:57:45.840 --> 00:57:50.000
whatever tourism by some like lodge in Kenya or something like that.

00:57:50.240 --> 00:57:56.000
And so it's really interesting to see like we have that ability to get shaped by

00:57:56.000 --> 00:57:57.200
that so rapidly.

00:57:57.280 --> 00:58:02.320
And now we've got this modern world that's whatever, because of inequality and because of

00:58:02.320 --> 00:58:07.760
consumption and sort of this situated within capitalism, it really pushes us in a lot of

00:58:07.760 --> 00:58:08.400
different directions.

00:58:08.480 --> 00:58:10.480
And we know it doesn't feel good.

00:58:12.510 --> 00:58:18.030
But like getting out of that or having the perspective to understand that is

00:58:18.430 --> 00:58:19.150
really hard.

00:58:19.310 --> 00:58:23.630
And it also goes back to what we were talking about before, which is, but at some level,

00:58:23.710 --> 00:58:25.310
there's a lot that's good, right?

00:58:25.470 --> 00:58:29.950
Like I love that I go and like turn on the tap and I don't have to worry about you know

00:58:30.190 --> 00:58:31.390
dirty water coming out.

00:58:31.470 --> 00:58:33.870
And that's true for most places in the US.

00:58:33.950 --> 00:58:39.120
And and so there's a lot that's good, but I think psychologically, like we've we've really

00:58:39.120 --> 00:58:40.720
messed things up a lot.

00:58:41.200 --> 00:58:41.520
Right.

00:58:41.600 --> 00:58:46.160
And and and certainly there are other axes, right, whether it's physical activity or sleep

00:58:46.240 --> 00:58:49.680
or diet or things like that, that also have their own challenges.

00:58:49.920 --> 00:58:55.440
But like I feel like we just keep getting away from or not having our understanding of

00:58:55.440 --> 00:59:00.850
evolution inform how we design our societies, right?

00:59:01.090 --> 00:59:05.490
I I've been really wanting to write a book on this topic and I just haven't had the time to

00:59:05.490 --> 00:59:05.890
do it.

00:59:06.130 --> 00:59:11.810
But I so I started teaching a class on this and and so I settled on this um it's called

00:59:11.970 --> 00:59:17.010
evolutionary medicine and how to live a long, healthy and meaningful life.

00:59:17.250 --> 00:59:21.650
And it's been it's been interesting sort of figuring out like, okay, how like how do you

00:59:21.650 --> 00:59:22.930
even approach this?

00:59:23.250 --> 00:59:28.720
And and it's it's you know, and and and of course, for me, my my experience, like what I

00:59:28.720 --> 00:59:33.920
was initially trained in is looking at energetics and diet and change, you know, whatever,

00:59:34.080 --> 00:59:39.120
whether that's long-term perspective on diet or whether that's market integration and

00:59:39.120 --> 00:59:40.320
dietary change.

00:59:40.560 --> 00:59:43.200
But then there's all these other factors that matter.

00:59:43.360 --> 00:59:48.570
And so, like, how do I design a 10-week class where it's like, okay, this week we're

00:59:48.570 --> 00:59:51.530
talking about this, and this week we're talking, and it's I love it.

00:59:51.770 --> 00:59:55.530
But the conversations are just so all over the place.

00:59:55.690 --> 01:00:00.570
But I think at the end of the day, most people are like, what are we doing with where we're

01:00:00.570 --> 01:00:01.050
living now?

01:00:01.210 --> 01:00:06.330
Like, here are the good things that are great about our society and help us thrive as

01:00:06.330 --> 01:00:06.730
humans.

01:00:06.810 --> 01:00:08.170
And then here's all this other stuff.

01:00:08.250 --> 01:00:09.930
And wait, why are we doing that?

01:00:10.090 --> 01:00:10.410
Right.

01:00:10.490 --> 01:00:15.770
So it's it's really fascinating to try to map on sort of our evolved biology and

01:00:15.770 --> 01:00:21.700
psychology with the pace of change and the crazy societies

01:00:21.700 --> 01:00:22.660
that we live in.

01:00:22.820 --> 01:00:25.940
I think, you know, the US being a prime example.

01:00:26.340 --> 01:00:26.500
Yeah.

01:00:26.660 --> 01:00:26.820
Yeah.

01:00:26.900 --> 01:00:28.500
I I also like this idea.

01:00:28.740 --> 01:00:32.660
It comes back to what we talked about earlier, which is this uh David's analogy of sort of

01:00:32.660 --> 01:00:37.220
this historical change, where, and it's what you were saying a second ago, Josh.

01:00:37.460 --> 01:00:41.380
I feel like you know, people used to build buildings during the Industrial Revolution that

01:00:41.380 --> 01:00:44.020
were just really bad, you know, like unsafe.

01:00:44.180 --> 01:00:46.170
And then things got better that way.

01:00:46.250 --> 01:00:48.010
And then you know, we were putting lead in things.

01:00:48.090 --> 01:00:49.690
And then we like learned, oh, that's bad.

01:00:49.850 --> 01:00:55.850
So like physical stuff, chemistry, but we are still in the dark ages psychologically in

01:00:55.850 --> 01:00:59.850
terms of like common knowledge of how to build a large-scale society.

01:01:00.010 --> 01:01:05.770
And I I think maybe in a broad sweep of history, the fact that psychology and

01:01:05.770 --> 01:01:11.530
understanding what you need to have a good life mentally is such a new science compared to

01:01:11.530 --> 01:01:15.960
the effects of chemicals on the body or like what makes a good building or not.

01:01:16.120 --> 01:01:18.200
We're we're just further behind on that part.

01:01:18.760 --> 01:01:20.760
No, I think that's such an important observation.

01:01:21.000 --> 01:01:22.680
I feel like I completely agree.

01:01:22.840 --> 01:01:26.840
And yes, there's all these other things that we need to learn more about, right?

01:01:27.000 --> 01:01:30.920
Whether that's like that this thing is toxic and leads to problems and you shouldn't

01:01:30.920 --> 01:01:32.920
consume it or you shouldn't be exposed to it, right?

01:01:33.000 --> 01:01:35.240
That's that there's progress needing to be made.

01:01:35.320 --> 01:01:40.890
But I think your point that we have made a lot of progress, a huge amount of progress is a

01:01:40.890 --> 01:01:41.610
really important one.

01:01:41.770 --> 01:01:45.610
But psychologically, like we are still very much in the dark.

01:01:45.690 --> 01:01:51.450
And I think because so oftentimes psychologists have been focused in on

01:01:51.450 --> 01:01:53.290
sort of what's normal, right?

01:01:53.370 --> 01:01:58.170
Rather than characterizing the variation or focusing in on the US rather than the

01:01:58.170 --> 01:01:58.650
international.

01:01:58.810 --> 01:02:03.300
And obviously this stuff is changing and has been changing for several decades now, but

01:02:03.300 --> 01:02:04.740
we're way behind, I think.

01:02:04.980 --> 01:02:08.820
And then also, and this is going back to one of the ideas that I was talking about

01:02:08.820 --> 01:02:14.580
initially, which is the way that we've set up these different fields, like human

01:02:14.580 --> 01:02:20.580
biology and evolutionary psychology, is one where like the human biologists who really

01:02:20.580 --> 01:02:25.460
understand the physiology and the manifestations that change us and lead us to negative

01:02:25.460 --> 01:02:31.330
health are not the ones who know a whole lot about psychology and our evolved

01:02:31.330 --> 01:02:33.570
brains and kind of how we perceive things.

01:02:33.730 --> 01:02:39.010
And so I think some of those just the way that academic disciplines have grown up in the US

01:02:39.170 --> 01:02:44.610
and in other places too have really prevented us from getting at some of these

01:02:44.610 --> 01:02:45.330
connections.

01:02:45.490 --> 01:02:50.180
And that really it's that integrative work that's being done now, but only in the last

01:02:50.180 --> 01:02:54.740
several decades, that's really putting these pieces back together that should have been

01:02:54.740 --> 01:02:57.140
obvious pieces even a hundred years ago.

01:02:57.460 --> 01:03:01.140
Yeah, it's weird too, because policymakers, especially like, I mean, forget about

01:03:01.140 --> 01:03:06.180
academics, but even just like policymakers, you don't often hear about people talking about

01:03:06.180 --> 01:03:08.580
like people's mental well-being.

01:03:08.740 --> 01:03:12.500
Or if they are, it's almost sort of like a trope of this is a bleeding liberal.

01:03:12.660 --> 01:03:16.890
So, I mean, like a good example I would say is like breastfeeding and we know there's

01:03:16.890 --> 01:03:21.930
really good data that if if you know w all these people worried about like people getting

01:03:21.930 --> 01:03:26.170
dumber and like using that as a political cudgel like the best thing you could do for a

01:03:26.170 --> 01:03:28.730
developing brain is like let it breastfeed for two years.

01:03:28.890 --> 01:03:29.850
That's like what we're just saying.

01:03:30.010 --> 01:03:34.010
How many people talk about that or how many people talk about like what we should put in

01:03:34.010 --> 01:03:39.940
food because it affects how well people feel and like can think and be productive

01:03:40.020 --> 01:03:40.180
members.

01:03:40.660 --> 01:03:42.980
Like that's not a discussion, and that's sort of weird.

01:03:43.060 --> 01:03:43.220
Right.

01:03:43.860 --> 01:03:44.420
Absolutely.

01:03:44.500 --> 01:03:49.620
I I teach a human growth and development class and I talk about these ideas about like, you

01:03:49.620 --> 01:03:54.260
know, what we know about breastfeeding and both from the science Western sort of scientific

01:03:54.260 --> 01:03:58.660
model, but also what we know from hunter-gatherer societies and other small-scale

01:03:58.660 --> 01:03:59.300
populations.

01:03:59.650 --> 01:04:01.170
And it's so interesting.

01:04:01.250 --> 01:04:07.170
It's so already ingrained in like the minds of people that, like, okay, your your

01:04:07.170 --> 01:04:10.290
statement I completely agree with in terms of like the best thing we could do for a

01:04:10.290 --> 01:04:14.610
developing brain is you know breastfeeding for at least a couple years, right?

01:04:14.690 --> 01:04:19.570
And then you're close to you know the mother, and there's so many benefits of this, right?

01:04:19.810 --> 01:04:24.700
But immediately people are like, but like that's gonna make them dependent, right?

01:04:24.780 --> 01:04:29.260
Like that, like all of a sudden, like the you to be a good American, you know, that kid

01:04:29.260 --> 01:04:33.980
needs to be in another room separate from the parents from like literally day one.

01:04:34.140 --> 01:04:37.420
And like, no, like not not really.

01:04:37.580 --> 01:04:41.900
Like, and you know, and if you're it if you've ever been a parent, you know that that

01:04:41.900 --> 01:04:43.970
doesn't generally feel right.

01:04:44.290 --> 01:04:50.290
But then situate that within these ideas of what it means to be independent and the the

01:04:50.290 --> 01:04:55.970
importance of that in terms of the sort of American spirit, and then parents working and

01:04:55.970 --> 01:04:59.330
trying to like manage their lives and their careers.

01:04:59.410 --> 01:05:04.050
Yeah, and then this little infant that like you're just like, can you just go to sleep?

01:05:04.210 --> 01:05:04.450
Right.

01:05:04.610 --> 01:05:06.610
So there's like so many layers of it.

01:05:06.770 --> 01:05:12.360
But I do feel like, yeah, we're we're rarely connecting down to the

01:05:12.360 --> 01:05:17.720
evolved biology and psychology that is going to help us understand all of these different

01:05:17.720 --> 01:05:23.560
things and what we need, what we want, and then I guess how we would manage that in the

01:05:23.560 --> 01:05:25.960
context of this complex and changing world.

01:05:26.200 --> 01:05:26.360
Yeah.

01:05:26.440 --> 01:05:27.720
I wonder I'm looking at David.

01:05:27.800 --> 01:05:30.600
I mean, David's one of David's things is common knowledge.

01:05:30.760 --> 01:05:36.630
And I think if you can moralize something by pointing to it, then you create common

01:05:36.630 --> 01:05:36.870
knowledge.

01:05:37.030 --> 01:05:41.110
So if there's something like this chemical makes causes cancer, and look, here's a baby

01:05:41.110 --> 01:05:43.830
with cancer, that's really vivid.

01:05:44.230 --> 01:05:48.870
A lot of this stuff that we're talking about, it's hard to get common knowledge because

01:05:48.870 --> 01:05:54.710
it's so abstract, because somebody could very easily um say it's kind of

01:05:55.030 --> 01:05:59.670
could make a counterargument, and there's not a lot of sort of common ground to look at

01:05:59.670 --> 01:06:03.860
yet, as evidence to say, look, we need this.

01:06:04.340 --> 01:06:08.260
Um, and so I wonder if that's part of it too, that it's just hard to it's hard to have

01:06:08.260 --> 01:06:12.660
common knowledge yet around these things that would make life better, even if everybody

01:06:12.660 --> 01:06:13.780
individually agrees on it.

01:06:13.940 --> 01:06:18.660
It's just that nobody else thinks that everyone else thinks that they would want this too,

01:06:18.740 --> 01:06:18.980
you know.

01:06:19.540 --> 01:06:20.100
Absolutely.

01:06:20.260 --> 01:06:21.300
That makes total sense.

01:06:21.460 --> 01:06:25.130
And it's just so bloody complicated too, right?

01:06:25.210 --> 01:06:31.050
And and so even just thinking about like whatever dietary recommendations or something like

01:06:31.050 --> 01:06:36.890
that, like the sort of common knowledge, conventional wisdom, the like how

01:06:37.130 --> 01:06:42.890
do you do that given all the different messages and the different factors that are gonna

01:06:42.890 --> 01:06:43.930
influence that, right?

01:06:44.010 --> 01:06:48.970
So it's both like, am I getting the energy I need, the protein that I need, the microbiome

01:06:49.130 --> 01:06:54.280
that I need, like all all of all of those are people are

01:06:54.280 --> 01:06:57.640
hearing in from so many different sources.

01:06:57.800 --> 01:07:02.040
Like there's the, you know, whatever what you learn in school, and then the, you know,

01:07:02.200 --> 01:07:07.960
whatever things that you learn from books versus advertising versus social networks

01:07:07.960 --> 01:07:09.000
and social media.

01:07:09.160 --> 01:07:15.080
And I think it's hard to have a simple message that's right, that then it

01:07:15.080 --> 01:07:17.640
could become something that is common knowledge.

01:07:17.960 --> 01:07:18.280
Yeah.

01:07:18.440 --> 01:07:24.350
And mean it's a job for cultural evolutionists to tag where ideas come from and then figure

01:07:24.350 --> 01:07:25.390
out how they got shaped.

01:07:25.470 --> 01:07:25.630
Yeah.

01:07:25.950 --> 01:07:26.430
Yeah.

01:07:26.750 --> 01:07:28.110
And then reshape them.

01:07:28.350 --> 01:07:29.390
Yeah, exactly.

01:07:29.950 --> 01:07:35.630
Yeah, I mean, why do you think that is it just a disciplinary convention or a

01:07:35.630 --> 01:07:40.910
historical thing that we need to get over that psychology and biology and health are so

01:07:40.910 --> 01:07:43.230
separated in terms of how they're studied?

01:07:43.390 --> 01:07:44.400
Um, is it more than that?

01:07:44.560 --> 01:07:48.880
Because it seems to me like they should be and are so deeply intertwined.

01:07:49.200 --> 01:07:54.800
Like uh getting sick is is affected by behavior and the types of activities I engage in,

01:07:54.960 --> 01:07:59.920
the people I hang out with, the decisions I make, that determines my level of of uh

01:07:59.920 --> 01:08:01.280
pathogen exposure.

01:08:01.440 --> 01:08:06.080
And likewise being sick also affects my behavior in countless ways, as you've written about

01:08:06.160 --> 01:08:07.120
with lassitude.

01:08:07.520 --> 01:08:12.450
Uh stress, likewise, the things I do can affect my stress levels, which affects my my

01:08:12.450 --> 01:08:12.850
health.

01:08:13.010 --> 01:08:15.250
And being stressed also affects my behavior.

01:08:15.410 --> 01:08:19.890
And so pretty much every aspect of our physical health and our biology has this

01:08:19.890 --> 01:08:22.770
bi-directional relationship with brain and behavior.

01:08:22.930 --> 01:08:27.010
And yet we're studying them as if they're separate, disconnected things when they're

01:08:27.010 --> 01:08:28.530
fundamentally intertwined.

01:08:28.690 --> 01:08:32.610
Uh so, like why why do you think that the these two things are are just are seen as so

01:08:32.610 --> 01:08:33.490
separate and so different?

01:08:33.730 --> 01:08:34.050
Yeah, yeah.

01:08:34.210 --> 01:08:35.620
Yeah, that's a great, great point.

01:08:35.780 --> 01:08:36.500
Great question.

01:08:36.740 --> 01:08:41.780
I think that, yeah, I think most people recognize that these things are all intertwined.

01:08:42.020 --> 01:08:46.500
I think the the reasons, I guess two things that come to mind as really important.

01:08:46.900 --> 01:08:50.980
One is sort of a positive and one's a real negative, but they both contribute to that.

01:08:51.140 --> 01:08:55.620
I think at one level, kind of this reductionism can be useful, right?

01:08:55.700 --> 01:09:01.550
Like, okay, let's just take a subset of this and let's kind of focus in on it and then have

01:09:01.710 --> 01:09:03.230
specialization in that, right?

01:09:03.310 --> 01:09:07.630
And and that certainly, you know, it really comes out of the Western scientific model.

01:09:07.710 --> 01:09:12.510
And certainly there's been a huge number of successes based on that, right?

01:09:12.750 --> 01:09:15.310
But I think we've reached the limit of that, right?

01:09:15.390 --> 01:09:21.150
And I think the the recognition that there is a limit to that is something that's really

01:09:21.150 --> 01:09:21.630
important, right?

01:09:21.710 --> 01:09:26.700
So in some ways I see that as like positive things, but then it's kind of got to a point

01:09:26.700 --> 01:09:29.820
where it's now starting to have negative implications.

01:09:29.980 --> 01:09:30.860
So that's one.

01:09:31.020 --> 01:09:36.140
I would say the other is just kind of the history of like, especially in the US and how

01:09:36.140 --> 01:09:40.780
sort of science and social science and humanities and sort of different ways of

01:09:40.780 --> 01:09:46.300
understanding the world have jockeyed for position over the course of the 20th century.

01:09:46.460 --> 01:09:51.890
And that I think many of the things that were happening in the 1960s and 70s

01:09:52.210 --> 01:09:54.610
really are still reverberating, right?

01:09:54.690 --> 01:10:00.530
In terms of like, I see a lot of these different fields and different effects on this.

01:10:00.690 --> 01:10:03.410
But just one perspective coming from human biology.

01:10:03.570 --> 01:10:08.290
I've been super frustrated with many of my, you know, human biology colleagues, and I'm

01:10:08.290 --> 01:10:13.010
obviously not going to name names, but people who have this very old school view of like,

01:10:13.330 --> 01:10:18.900
well, you know, the brain evolved, and then then basically like it stopped evolving and

01:10:18.900 --> 01:10:23.780
then really culture is really everything and there's not really this sort of a I mean I

01:10:23.780 --> 01:10:28.420
don't have to tell you guys this right and that like it's all about culture and let's let's

01:10:28.420 --> 01:10:34.260
forget about talking about like selection and like whatever right and then

01:10:34.260 --> 01:10:37.270
let's just focus in on the body, right?

01:10:37.430 --> 01:10:41.030
As totally disconnected from the brain or the mind.

01:10:41.190 --> 01:10:44.310
And that let's just focus in on these physiological systems.

01:10:44.470 --> 01:10:48.950
And that's like, I mean, I've actually read some like textbook chapters that I got as a

01:10:48.950 --> 01:10:49.190
reviewer.

01:10:49.350 --> 01:10:51.030
And I'm like, are you insane?

01:10:51.190 --> 01:10:54.230
Like this can't, that doesn't work like this, right?

01:10:54.310 --> 01:10:59.350
And like if you step back and think about it, like this couldn't exist this way.

01:10:59.430 --> 01:11:01.910
But yet it's so entrenched in the like

01:11:03.840 --> 01:11:09.600
anti-sociobiology training that in fragmentation of fields

01:11:09.760 --> 01:11:12.400
that like we're still haven't put this all back together.

01:11:12.560 --> 01:11:18.240
And I think part of it is then the way that those fields then developed

01:11:18.400 --> 01:11:23.280
and they have different opportunities for funding and sort of some of them are science and

01:11:23.280 --> 01:11:24.320
some of them are not.

01:11:24.400 --> 01:11:30.150
And that that whole piece of it has just really we it didn't start out in a

01:11:30.150 --> 01:11:31.110
good place, right?

01:11:31.270 --> 01:11:35.830
In terms of just this, like, you're in, you know, you're coming into my territory and like

01:11:35.990 --> 01:11:36.310
whatever.

01:11:36.390 --> 01:11:41.430
I mean, I really think it's in many ways as simple as some of those conversations that were

01:11:41.430 --> 01:11:46.950
going on, especially in the sort of 60s and then EO Wilson sociobiology.

01:11:47.270 --> 01:11:50.070
Like we're still there in some ways.

01:11:50.230 --> 01:11:55.350
And there are effects of that that I think people would deny that it's related to that, but

01:11:55.350 --> 01:11:57.700
it a hundred percent is related to that.

01:11:57.940 --> 01:12:03.940
So I think r you know, obviously, you know, there is some need

01:12:04.100 --> 01:12:09.060
to sp to focus in on individual systems and things like that to really understand.

01:12:09.220 --> 01:12:14.580
But I think stepping back and saying, like, the the way that we move forward on all this

01:12:14.580 --> 01:12:20.390
stuff is integration of of of and understanding this across these different

01:12:20.390 --> 01:12:26.150
physiological systems and that like it's not this brain you know body dualism

01:12:26.230 --> 01:12:32.230
like it's all we're all it's our it is us right and it is one thing and it is in you know

01:12:32.310 --> 01:12:38.230
it's all connected all the time for every reason and and even those things that

01:12:38.310 --> 01:12:44.070
like yeah I don't know I I you know like all of those things that are so

01:12:45.340 --> 01:12:50.780
seeming obvious in some ways, but yet difficult to understand, make total sense when you

01:12:50.780 --> 01:12:52.620
think about it all as one, right?

01:12:52.700 --> 01:12:57.580
Like one example I always give is just kind of like the gut microbiome and how that's

01:12:57.580 --> 01:12:58.780
connected to mental health.

01:12:58.860 --> 01:13:01.900
And right, we know that there are these relationships between that.

01:13:02.060 --> 01:13:06.300
And I think at one level, people are like, How is that even possible that like what your

01:13:06.300 --> 01:13:11.890
gut microbiome biome composition is and that's affecting your like whether you

01:13:11.890 --> 01:13:15.170
experience PTSD or anxiety or depression.

01:13:15.330 --> 01:13:17.810
But at another level, like of course those are related.

01:13:18.130 --> 01:13:19.650
Like we're these are our bodies.

01:13:19.810 --> 01:13:22.690
Like our brains are literally made out of food.

01:13:22.770 --> 01:13:28.770
Like eat only Twinkies for a month and tell us how how your mental health Abs Absolutely.

01:13:28.930 --> 01:13:34.640
So it's it kind of like you step back and look at it and it's almost comic, except for that

01:13:34.640 --> 01:13:39.760
it's painted us into these weird corners where we're doing these things either

01:13:39.760 --> 01:13:43.920
academically or societally that are not necessarily helpful.

01:13:44.240 --> 01:13:44.400
Yeah.

01:13:44.560 --> 01:13:47.600
I also wonder, I mean, I I I completely agree with everything you're saying.

01:13:47.680 --> 01:13:51.040
And I think it's also alluding to something you said earlier, which is just like there's

01:13:51.040 --> 01:13:54.000
this institutional selection dynamics too.

01:13:54.240 --> 01:13:58.650
So like a lot of this stuff, there's this community of people who they can do an

01:13:58.650 --> 01:14:02.250
intervention by doing something to your body when you go into that building, right?

01:14:02.330 --> 01:14:03.850
And that's like medical stuff.

01:14:04.570 --> 01:14:09.770
Um, or in I think like the the the exception that proves the rule is when you can give a

01:14:09.770 --> 01:14:13.850
drug for a mental disorder, it's still medical, it's within that umbrella.

01:14:14.010 --> 01:14:18.410
But when it's a mental thing, that the solution is a structural one, yeah.

01:14:18.730 --> 01:14:24.170
Either changing the the person's immediate small scale social world or

01:14:24.420 --> 01:14:29.380
the larger literal like social community, like what cues are they exposed to?

01:14:29.940 --> 01:14:31.700
That's a whole other ballgame.

01:14:31.860 --> 01:14:36.660
And I think like that's that's the other spot place of that dualism where it's sort of like

01:14:36.820 --> 01:14:40.980
what are the things that you can intervene by just like poking on the body and then there's

01:14:40.980 --> 01:14:41.620
everything else.

01:14:41.860 --> 01:14:42.100
Yeah.

01:14:42.260 --> 01:14:42.580
Yep.

01:14:42.820 --> 01:14:43.380
Absolutely.

01:14:43.540 --> 01:14:47.700
And this class that I was talking about, this this how to live a long, healthy, meaningful

01:14:47.700 --> 01:14:53.210
life, it's really trying to walk that line of like, what can you do as

01:14:53.210 --> 01:14:56.490
somebody or to somebody versus the structural.

01:14:56.650 --> 01:15:02.650
And I feel like, you know, you've either got a literature and sort of guides of like

01:15:02.730 --> 01:15:04.090
that are all about the individual.

01:15:04.250 --> 01:15:06.810
Like, here's this information, do this thing, right?

01:15:06.890 --> 01:15:10.730
Like you got to make this change in your diet or you got to change this sleep.

01:15:11.050 --> 01:15:13.530
And it's all very individualistic, right?

01:15:13.770 --> 01:15:19.160
And it is also one where it's often really problematic because you're an individual

01:15:19.160 --> 01:15:21.080
situated within a context, right?

01:15:21.480 --> 01:15:26.360
Or the other end of the spectrum is ah, you can't do anything as an individual.

01:15:27.000 --> 01:15:32.600
We really have to change all these structural factors, which in some ways has got an equal

01:15:32.600 --> 01:15:36.680
number of problems in the sense that it becomes like, well, I can't do anything.

01:15:36.840 --> 01:15:39.800
So, like, are you going to change my society now?

01:15:40.120 --> 01:15:41.560
And so I I don't know.

01:15:41.640 --> 01:15:45.000
I I I think a lot about the like, how do we do both?

01:15:45.170 --> 01:15:45.410
Right.

01:15:45.570 --> 01:15:51.090
How do we how do we think about individuals having agency and information and making

01:15:51.090 --> 01:15:51.890
decisions?

01:15:52.210 --> 01:15:57.410
And then also how do we make these changes in society and how do we have those things

01:15:57.410 --> 01:15:57.970
integrated?

01:15:58.290 --> 01:15:58.610
Yeah.

01:15:58.850 --> 01:16:02.450
We've become an anarchist podcast over the course of the hour and a half.

01:16:03.890 --> 01:16:05.010
Absolutely.

01:16:05.410 --> 01:16:06.850
I like this, yes.

01:16:07.410 --> 01:16:13.010
Yeah, no, I I I very much like that way of thinking because you don't want to go on either

01:16:13.010 --> 01:16:17.700
end of the extreme where you're focusing too much on individual behavior and you're saying,

01:16:17.860 --> 01:16:18.660
Hey, you're doing it wrong.

01:16:18.740 --> 01:16:20.820
Do this differently, and you're putting it all on you.

01:16:20.900 --> 01:16:24.500
When in many cases, people are just making the the best out of the situation that they're

01:16:24.500 --> 01:16:25.060
in and dealing with it.

01:16:25.300 --> 01:16:26.100
Trying to get through the day.

01:16:26.420 --> 01:16:30.340
Trying to get through the day, like dealing with the hand that you know the world has dealt

01:16:30.340 --> 01:16:30.580
them.

01:16:30.820 --> 01:16:34.580
And you know, it's in some sense you gotta change the hand that they're being dealt if you

01:16:34.580 --> 01:16:35.380
want to change their behavior.

01:16:35.540 --> 01:16:38.820
On the other hand, if you say that it's all these larger structural things, like that that

01:16:38.820 --> 01:16:42.470
leads to a certain kind of helplessness, Like, oh well, what the hell can I do anyway?

01:16:42.550 --> 01:16:43.670
Why, why even bother?

01:16:43.910 --> 01:16:49.750
And so we have to, you know, navigate, find some middle ground between um over uh

01:16:49.910 --> 01:16:55.830
emphasis on the individual and and overemphasis on the larger things that we can't control

01:16:55.990 --> 01:17:00.870
and and find some middle ground where we can both do things as an individual and start to

01:17:00.870 --> 01:17:03.670
think about how we can maybe design society differently.

01:17:03.990 --> 01:17:04.230
Yeah.

01:17:04.470 --> 01:17:10.260
I think groups of face to face people is a good that that I think is like a simple middle

01:17:10.420 --> 01:17:10.820
ground.

01:17:10.980 --> 01:17:16.500
I think like often those that that that range is typically like in person, face to face,

01:17:16.740 --> 01:17:17.540
small groups of people.

01:17:17.620 --> 01:17:17.780
Yeah.

01:17:18.100 --> 01:17:18.660
Abs absolutely.

01:17:18.900 --> 01:17:24.500
And and so I think a lot these days, especially with AI and all these like things that make

01:17:24.500 --> 01:17:26.900
it even more difficult to know what is real.

01:17:27.220 --> 01:17:31.930
I think a lot about the like sort of re-localizing, right?

01:17:32.010 --> 01:17:33.690
Rather than the sort of globalizing.

01:17:33.770 --> 01:17:38.730
And obviously you don't want it all sort of provincial and very focused in internally and

01:17:38.730 --> 01:17:41.770
then doesn't know how like what's out there and how to interact.

01:17:41.930 --> 01:17:47.530
But I think so much argues for changing the

01:17:47.530 --> 01:17:49.050
scale of this, right?

01:17:49.210 --> 01:17:54.660
So that that community or neighborhood or whatever that means Actually, is

01:17:54.660 --> 01:18:00.260
what's most important and also allows you to know who you're

01:18:00.260 --> 01:18:05.780
interacting with and also have a chance to make these changes that are going to meaning be

01:18:05.780 --> 01:18:10.500
meaningful to you and families and you know, neighbors and things like that.

01:18:10.740 --> 01:18:11.140
Yeah.

01:18:11.380 --> 01:18:15.810
How this is a weird question, but how important is have you come across as just like a

01:18:15.810 --> 01:18:17.810
mundane thing like transportation?

01:18:18.210 --> 01:18:24.130
Um, so you know, like you go from like the the bush to the city, and like is

01:18:24.130 --> 01:18:27.890
that a factor that you guys have looked at where like what's the means of actually just

01:18:27.890 --> 01:18:29.010
getting around?

01:18:29.250 --> 01:18:31.810
Are you interacting with people when you're getting around?

01:18:32.290 --> 01:18:34.450
The scope of the scale of getting around?

01:18:34.770 --> 01:18:36.610
Yeah, we've tried to get at that.

01:18:36.690 --> 01:18:41.060
I mean, I think part of that is like, you know, approaching it from a physical activity

01:18:41.060 --> 01:18:43.940
standpoint and the that that influence, right?

01:18:44.100 --> 01:18:49.700
In terms of how much you're physically like walking to where you're going in the day versus

01:18:49.700 --> 01:18:52.340
driving, or there's that's one.

01:18:52.580 --> 01:18:58.180
Another is like the distance you go and sort of how that connects to market integration and

01:18:58.180 --> 01:19:03.940
some ideas, some ways of um operationalizing market integration really get at that,

01:19:04.100 --> 01:19:09.610
like transport or movement of people, because it's going to be related to

01:19:09.850 --> 01:19:14.410
exposure to ideas or different languages or whatever it is that we're talking about.

01:19:14.570 --> 01:19:20.410
Um, and then yeah, then just trying to get at what the range of variation is that you see

01:19:20.570 --> 01:19:22.330
because of that movement.

01:19:22.570 --> 01:19:28.360
Um, and so trying to get at those things, but not not easy to quantify or not

01:19:28.360 --> 01:19:29.560
easy to make sense of.

01:19:29.720 --> 01:19:34.600
I mean, in some ways it's easy to quantify, but like what does that actually mean in terms

01:19:34.600 --> 01:19:35.720
of the exposure?

01:19:35.880 --> 01:19:41.880
So it's it's definitely important, but exactly how it's important or why it's important,

01:19:41.960 --> 01:19:46.920
I think, is is one that I don't think we know the details of, but it always is relevant in

01:19:46.920 --> 01:19:47.560
these models.

01:19:47.870 --> 01:19:48.030
Yeah.

01:19:48.110 --> 01:19:51.790
And is it like where I can spend time with my family more or less?

01:19:51.950 --> 01:19:53.950
Can I do it with my family, interact with them?

01:19:54.030 --> 01:19:56.910
You know, like yeah, like those are all things that are hard to quantify.

01:19:56.990 --> 01:19:57.150
Yeah.

01:19:57.470 --> 01:19:58.030
Absolutely.

01:19:58.190 --> 01:20:02.270
But yeah, getting at the social networks and and like what is the extent of that?

01:20:02.350 --> 01:20:08.110
And I feel like a place like the US is at a extreme in the sense of lots of mobility,

01:20:08.270 --> 01:20:13.710
lots of movement, but also simultaneously lots of loneliness and isolation.

01:20:13.950 --> 01:20:15.470
Yeah, for sure.

01:20:16.580 --> 01:20:20.740
Well, Josh, we're we're coming up on an hour and a half and I wanna make sure that we've

01:20:20.740 --> 01:20:23.780
covered everything that that you're that you've wanted to cover.

01:20:23.940 --> 01:20:28.900
Is there anything that we have not talked about that you're particularly excited about and

01:20:28.900 --> 01:20:30.500
would and would like to talk about?

01:20:30.660 --> 01:20:33.540
Any new uh uh direction you're pursuing?

01:20:33.780 --> 01:20:37.060
Um what what what have we missed so far in this conversation?

01:20:37.490 --> 01:20:38.530
Yeah, no, this is great.

01:20:38.610 --> 01:20:43.090
And I've been trying to sprinkle those things that I'm most excited about into the

01:20:43.090 --> 01:20:44.290
conversation so far.

01:20:44.450 --> 01:20:49.010
But I think, you know, for me, really the the big thing that really excites me, which

01:20:49.010 --> 01:20:53.490
hopefully has come through with this, is really integrating, you know, and really

01:20:53.490 --> 01:20:59.490
integrating across anthropology and to psychology and biology and really thinking

01:20:59.490 --> 01:21:04.980
about like just the ways that we take these sort of methodological

01:21:04.980 --> 01:21:10.420
differences or theoretical differences and really recognize that we're often looking at the

01:21:10.420 --> 01:21:13.940
same thing, and that we each have ways to contribute to that.

01:21:14.100 --> 01:21:19.780
And so I think for me, like where that's most coming out is like the market integration

01:21:19.780 --> 01:21:25.700
research and really thinking about ways to do this that really get at all the

01:21:25.700 --> 01:21:31.450
ways that environments, both social and physical and biological environments, change

01:21:31.450 --> 01:21:34.010
with these larger economic processes.

01:21:34.170 --> 01:21:40.010
So I'm I'm just super excited that we're now as a field getting to a place where

01:21:40.010 --> 01:21:45.930
we can compare across places and use similar approaches and really integrate across these

01:21:45.930 --> 01:21:46.810
different domains.

01:21:46.970 --> 01:21:50.220
So anyway, those are the things that I'm most excited about these days.

01:21:50.460 --> 01:21:50.620
Yeah.

01:21:50.780 --> 01:21:54.860
Is there any s resource like so if a student is listening, somebody's listening and you

01:21:54.860 --> 01:21:57.740
mentioned you're gonna you're you might be writing a book and it sounds like there are

01:21:57.740 --> 01:21:59.740
maybe there's things already that do exist.

01:21:59.980 --> 01:22:05.900
If somebody's interested, are there books or papers or conferences or journals

01:22:05.900 --> 01:22:10.940
where people can look to find this integration of these it sounds like roughly three or

01:22:10.870 --> 01:22:12.630
four different things.

01:22:12.790 --> 01:22:15.430
I feel like there are places that that's starting to happen.

01:22:15.510 --> 01:22:21.510
I wouldn't say it's universally in all of these, but I feel like some of the the the I'm

01:22:21.590 --> 01:22:25.270
I'm always excited about the Human Biology Association meetings.

01:22:25.430 --> 01:22:30.470
And now even more excited as we're starting to integrate more of the evolutionary

01:22:30.470 --> 01:22:36.380
anthropologists who typically used to meet with the AAA meetings, are now starting to meet

01:22:36.380 --> 01:22:37.740
with the human biologists.

01:22:37.820 --> 01:22:43.020
And it's a cool opportunity because all of a sudden you've got very different people in

01:22:43.020 --> 01:22:48.460
terms of their training and how they approach their research now in the same space who are

01:22:48.460 --> 01:22:50.060
talking about the same issues.

01:22:50.140 --> 01:22:55.180
And I think the really lovely thing about those meetings is the scale of it isn't too

01:22:55.180 --> 01:22:55.980
large, right?

01:22:56.140 --> 01:23:01.510
I mean, I think that some things like the AAA meetings where you have 4,000 or 5,000 or

01:23:01.510 --> 01:23:06.710
whatever it is, number of people are really hard to do those kinds of have those

01:23:06.710 --> 01:23:08.790
conversations and do that integrative work.

01:23:08.950 --> 01:23:13.110
But I think at the level of two or three hundred people at a meeting, like it's actually

01:23:13.110 --> 01:23:19.030
very doable to start to have those integrate, those conversations with other people who see

01:23:19.030 --> 01:23:22.150
the world and approach the world and research in different ways.

01:23:22.310 --> 01:23:26.540
So I'm I'm very excited about the potential for the human biology meetings.

01:23:26.780 --> 01:23:32.060
I also think that Evolution Medicine and Public Health, that journal is kind of a cool, um,

01:23:32.300 --> 01:23:36.220
cool journal in terms of one that's bringing together people in different ways, right?

01:23:36.300 --> 01:23:39.420
It's people kind of across the spectrum of anthropology.

01:23:39.660 --> 01:23:44.460
But then evolutionary medicine has had such interesting contributions, right?

01:23:44.620 --> 01:23:45.820
Coming from different places.

01:23:45.900 --> 01:23:50.870
And so some of it is the anthropologists and human biologists, but in other places it's

01:23:50.870 --> 01:23:53.430
more like the evolutionary psychiatrists.

01:23:53.510 --> 01:23:56.630
And so they're sort of coming into it with a very different perspective.

01:23:56.790 --> 01:24:02.630
So I'm liking how that journal and the and the conference that goes with that are

01:24:02.630 --> 01:24:08.630
grow, you know, now reaching a a really cool time that they um, you know, that

01:24:08.710 --> 01:24:13.110
that that it really is starting to bring together those different perspectives in the way

01:24:13.110 --> 01:24:15.830
that I think a lot of us was hoping that it would.

01:24:15.990 --> 01:24:17.830
It really is being realized.

01:24:18.420 --> 01:24:19.220
That's fantastic.

01:24:19.380 --> 01:24:23.380
And uh the Schwar project itself, does it have a website or it does, yeah.

01:24:23.460 --> 01:24:25.780
I think it's SchwarProject.org.

01:24:25.860 --> 01:24:27.140
I could be totally wrong with that.

01:24:27.380 --> 01:24:29.060
We can put it in the we put it in the show notes, yeah.

01:24:29.300 --> 01:24:31.140
But I but I will put a plug in.

01:24:31.380 --> 01:24:36.900
We just had a special issue of American Journal of Human Biology that was published.

01:24:36.980 --> 01:24:40.900
It actually the full thing came together about two months ago.

01:24:41.060 --> 01:24:47.060
And the last paper in that was my paper that I led, which was uh basically like a

01:24:47.150 --> 01:24:52.990
how we navigate political, you know, practical and ethical challenges of

01:24:52.990 --> 01:24:54.750
doing this long-term work.

01:24:54.910 --> 01:24:57.790
And so it was one that actually took about two years to write.

01:24:57.950 --> 01:25:00.670
There's like 10 of us as co-authors on that.

01:25:00.830 --> 01:25:06.190
But a lot of it was me and Larry Sugiyama sort of talking about like the whole like all

01:25:06.190 --> 01:25:10.190
these challenges, but also situating it in sort of the history of it.

01:25:10.350 --> 01:25:15.760
So some of the conversation that we had earlier today about the history of that project is

01:25:15.760 --> 01:25:17.040
all within that article.

01:25:17.200 --> 01:25:22.880
And it's open access, it's in uh the latest, one of the latest issues of American Journal

01:25:22.880 --> 01:25:23.840
of Human Biology.

01:25:23.920 --> 01:25:27.760
But there's 10 other Schwar articles in that special issue.

01:25:27.920 --> 01:25:33.360
So anybody who's interested in the Schwar, right, definitely check out that special issue.

01:25:33.440 --> 01:25:34.800
Definitely check out the website.

01:25:35.120 --> 01:25:35.440
Awesome.

01:25:35.520 --> 01:25:36.320
That's fantastic.

01:25:36.480 --> 01:25:40.110
Uh Josh, uh, do you only do difficult things?

01:25:40.270 --> 01:25:44.430
Uh from this impression or from this conversation, I get the impression that you're not

01:25:44.430 --> 01:25:48.110
afraid to tackle very hard things like you're even talking about the political and ethical

01:25:48.110 --> 01:25:48.590
things.

01:25:48.670 --> 01:25:52.910
Uh uh, do you have a um a guilty pleasure that's uh that's something?

01:25:53.390 --> 01:25:54.110
Yeah, I don't know.

01:25:54.190 --> 01:25:59.870
I had some some sort of psychopathology, I think is the way I'm department head too, right?

01:26:00.350 --> 01:26:04.910
You seem like you're having a great time tackling like incredibly difficult huge projects

01:26:05.240 --> 01:26:07.400
with huge uh important implications.

01:26:07.480 --> 01:26:08.840
It's a it's a it's a virtue.

01:26:09.000 --> 01:26:10.040
But yeah, it's uh yeah.

01:26:10.600 --> 01:26:15.560
Maybe I think the other piece is just having done this for a long time and and you know,

01:26:15.640 --> 01:26:19.960
Larry and I working on this and sort of running, keeping this project going.

01:26:20.440 --> 01:26:25.240
We've you know, we often see other people who are starting out projects and they'll ask us,

01:26:25.320 --> 01:26:28.870
you know, about you know what we're doing or how we've made decisions.

01:26:28.950 --> 01:26:33.670
And it became really clear that many of the most of these projects kind of exist in

01:26:33.670 --> 01:26:34.310
isolation.

01:26:34.390 --> 01:26:40.390
And you see what you see in a paper or here in a conference presentation, excuse me, but

01:26:40.390 --> 01:26:43.590
you don't see sort of what's under the hood of the project.

01:26:43.670 --> 01:26:49.510
And so I sort of, I guess maybe I'm at that annoying career stage or age where I'm just

01:26:49.510 --> 01:26:52.840
like, you know, these are the things that we should be writing about these.

01:26:52.920 --> 01:26:55.720
So like these sort of ethics of the community work.

01:26:55.880 --> 01:27:00.040
I've also got another paper that I'm working on right now with some other colleagues that's

01:27:00.040 --> 01:27:05.320
all on data sharing and sort of balancing that, like, yeah, we should from a scientific

01:27:05.320 --> 01:27:07.720
standpoint share data.

01:27:08.120 --> 01:27:13.410
But we should also really be thinking about what does that mean for certain communities,

01:27:13.490 --> 01:27:17.490
especially indigenous communities, and sort of the commodification of data?

01:27:17.650 --> 01:27:21.410
And so, how do we balance those and how do we deal with those tensions?

01:27:21.490 --> 01:27:27.010
And so I don't know, some of it I think just comes from like wanting to share wisdom, such

01:27:27.010 --> 01:27:32.210
as it is, from the kind of work that we're doing and the and the different challenges that

01:27:32.210 --> 01:27:32.930
that pop up.

01:27:33.010 --> 01:27:37.170
And I think oftentimes when we'll say something about these different projects, people are

01:27:37.170 --> 01:27:40.560
like, oh wow, I didn't think about that.

01:27:40.800 --> 01:27:44.960
And so I think that's like, okay, that's clearly an indication that we need to do these

01:27:44.960 --> 01:27:46.080
kinds of things.

01:27:46.240 --> 01:27:47.120
Um yeah.

01:27:47.280 --> 01:27:48.400
So I don't know.

01:27:48.480 --> 01:27:52.960
Yeah, wanting wanting to tackle challenging problems because I think that also leads to

01:27:52.960 --> 01:27:54.720
some of the biggest successes.

01:27:54.880 --> 01:28:00.720
But then also just wanting to share kind of the the the dark underside or whatever of

01:28:00.720 --> 01:28:05.120
like how this stuff actually happens and how you make it work on the ground.

01:28:05.360 --> 01:28:05.680
Yeah.

01:28:05.870 --> 01:28:06.190
Cool.

01:28:06.350 --> 01:28:08.590
As David says, thank you for your service.

01:28:10.110 --> 01:28:15.150
To all of our anthropology, uh everybody who's doing the hard, uh, not just in the lab

01:28:15.150 --> 01:28:15.310
stuff.

01:28:15.390 --> 01:28:15.470
Yeah.

01:28:15.790 --> 01:28:16.830
We're all a little crazy.

01:28:16.910 --> 01:28:18.350
I think that's part of it.

01:28:19.630 --> 01:28:20.190
All right.

01:28:20.430 --> 01:28:22.270
Well, on that note, thank you so much, Josh.

01:28:22.350 --> 01:28:23.950
This was a really fun conversation.

01:28:24.270 --> 01:28:24.430
Yeah.

01:28:24.590 --> 01:28:26.030
Thank you for sharing that wisdom with us.

01:28:26.270 --> 01:28:26.750
This is great.

01:28:26.830 --> 01:28:27.070
Yeah.

01:28:27.390 --> 01:28:27.870
This is great.

01:28:27.950 --> 01:28:29.630
I really enjoyed it as well.

01:28:31.870 --> 01:28:32.270
All right.

01:28:32.350 --> 01:28:33.710
Well, you're still listening.

01:28:33.880 --> 01:28:39.560
We did another episode of Evolutionary Psychology the podcast, which means it is time for

01:28:39.560 --> 01:28:41.880
us to tell you to support us.

01:28:42.280 --> 01:28:42.680
Great.

01:28:42.760 --> 01:28:43.400
You just did it.

01:28:43.480 --> 01:28:45.480
And you told everyone they're still here.

01:28:45.880 --> 01:28:46.680
Uh great.

01:28:46.760 --> 01:28:47.640
Thanks for listening.

01:28:47.800 --> 01:28:49.240
We'll see you next week.

01:28:49.560 --> 01:28:49.960
Yep.

01:28:50.040 --> 01:28:54.360
Uh kind review, Patreon, social media, you know the you know the rest.

01:28:54.760 --> 01:28:55.320
Yeah.

01:28:55.560 --> 01:28:57.080
I yeah, good.

01:28:57.490 --> 01:28:58.530
Punked period.

01:28:58.690 --> 01:28:58.930
All right.

01:28:59.090 --> 01:28:59.250
All right.

01:28:59.490 --> 01:29:00.450
See you guys next week.

01:29:00.610 --> 01:29:00.850
Yeah.

01:29:00.930 --> 01:29:01.090
Bye.

01:29:01.330 --> 01:29:01.650
See ya.