Modern Wisdom - #290 - Dr Diana Fleischman - How Catching Covid Can Change Your Personality

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Dr Diana Fleischman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth and an author. When we get sick with a virus like Covid-19, our bodies respond, but our behaviour and personality also change in a number of important ways and sometimes, it doesn't change back. Expect to learn why avoiding new foods when ill makes evolutionary sense, whether needing the bathroom reduces your belief in free will, why extraversion is reduced when you're sick, what Diana thinks about Evolutionary Psychology's place in mindfulness and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on all pillows at https://thehybridpillow.com Extra Stuff: Follow Diana on Twitter - https://twitter.com/sentientist  Check out Diana's blog - https://dianaverse.com/ Check out Diana's website - https://www.dianafleischman.com/  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Dr. Diana Fleischmann and we're talking about how catching COVID can change your personality. When we get sick with a virus like COVID-19, our bodies respond, but our behaviour and personality also change in a number of important ways, and sometimes it doesn't change back. So today, expect to learn why avoiding new foods when your ill makes evolutionary sense, whether needing the bathroom reduces your belief in free will, why extraversion is reduced when you're sick, what Diana thinks about evolutionary psychology's place in mindfulness, and much more.

This is just super fascinating evolutionary psychology stuff, peering under the hood into the source code of why we do the things we do, why we act the ways we act. why we act, the ways we act. Yeah, I really, really enjoyed this one. Lots to take away. And I'd be interested to know if you've noticed any odd impact that being ill with COVID or any other illness has had on you. Feel free to drop a comment in the YouTube channel or at ChrisWillX wherever you follow me. Also, before we get into the sponsor for the show, don't forget to press subscribe. Please, thank you, the little subscribe button on your app. Just give it a little tap. Tap it away and it

makes me very happy. So, if you do that, that would be great. But now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Diana Fleischmann. Diana Fleischmann, look at the show. Thank you. Pleasure to have you here. Talking about whether COVID can change your personality. What even is that question? What are we on about? So there's a lot of evidence that viruses and bacteria try and change host behavior.

So there's some really interesting stuff about that. How they might try and change your behavior in order to make themselves transmit more easily, but also about how you, as an organism, your goals and priorities from an evolutionary perspective, change a lot when you have an infection. So if you're healthy, you might have certain goals like seeking out new people to engage with, seeking out new social and mating opportunities, feeding, foraging, stuff like that. But when you are sick, your fundamental goals really change.

And what I'm thinking about since I just recovered from COVID is about how my personality changed and how there might be millions of people who have had COVID, who now feel different. And during COVID, you have this incredible level of inflammation. Many people who are long-haulers and otherwise have what's called the cytokine storm, which is a level of inflammation. And when you have high inflammation, it tells your immune system, it tells you that you have an

infection and that you should behave accordingly, which involves a whole bunch of different aspects of personality and behavior changing. So is there a little bit of a battle going on? There is the pathogen, which is trying to find its way around, and then there are the defenses of the host, which are trying to stop its way to get through? Yeah, so there are some things that you're... If you think about what you feel like when you're ill, there are some things that are good for the pathogen and good for the host. So one example of that is sneezing. Sneezing clears you out. It's good to get the pathogens out, but the pathogen also wants you to sneeze because it's the best way for you to spray everybody with copies of itself, right? So that's

one way in which your interests are aligned, so long as you're not sneezing on your kids, right? But there's other things where your interests are not aligned. So fever is one way that you're interested in not aligned. The virus and the bacteria, whatever you're infected with, does not want you to have a fever. Because the fever is really optimal for you. This is why I get very frustrated when people take anti-feveral medications when they're sick. I never do because the fever is really

the best possible thing for you to be doing. Also, there's other things like there's a reason why you're more interested either in not eating or eating familiar foods when you're sick. That's because unfamiliar foods might have pathogens that will compete for access to your immune system. So they'll be more costly and also takes a lot of energy to digest. So in that sense, your body is also winning and as an appetite suppressant. If a virus or bacteria could really properly manipulate you, they'd probably try to make you hungry. It's interesting thinking about the individual differences, like what's happening on an individual level with regards to COVID.

It's almost all of the conversations that we're having a medical rather than psychological, and if they're psychological, their group differences to do with how are people's mental health? How is society going to come back from that? It's never talking about what is it like to be ill? come back from that it's never talking about what is it like to be ill? What are the sort of adaptations that your genes have just sat latent in the back of your mind waiting to deploy, as soon as you get a virus inside of you? There's this word, this word that you sent me an article that I learned. Can you explain what lassitude is, please? Classitude, yeah, so there's, you know, we have emotions, happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, but last but is the emotion of being sick.

It's the whole, you know, so what we think about as evolutionary psychologists is emotions are a way to try and optimize your state of being in any given moment to solve a certain adaptive problem. If you're angry, you want to punish somebody for wronging you, maybe in the hopes that they won't punish you, that they won't wrong you again in the future. And when you have a last-a-tude, you are optimizing your behavior both socially and just alone in ways that are going to prevent you from exerting more energy than you need, but also are going to help you get people around you who are going to take care of you. also are going to help you get people around you who are going to take care of you. So, lassitude is different to the non-conscious things that you do, like having a high fever

and sort of shivering and stuff like that. Is that part of lassitude or is lassitude more sort of phenomenological? Lassitude is the whole thing, but it's also the feeling of malaise, feeling of fatigue, but also feeling chills. When we get angry or embarrassed, you also have physiological changes that happen when you're afraid. Sometimes you will shit, right? Because you don't want to, if you're running off, to be caring around whatever it is you're digesting, you need all your energy to run away. It's funny that snakes do this too if you scare a snake and they just eat something big they'll completely throw it up.

I've seen that happen. Because it's important for them to get away it's more important than them eating that particular meal. That's the snakes version of shitting their pants. I mean if you've got like a full alligator or whatever inside of you and you try and very quickly digest that it's just going to end up tearing a hole in you. You can't get away if you've, you know, just eaten a third of your body weight now. So, last but not least, it has similar kinds of, you know, it makes you feel cold, it makes you feel

tired and also can make you feel very sensitive to pain and emotionally sensitive. So, there's a bunch of studies where they injected people with something called endotoxin. It's basically bacterial particles that don't really make you sick, but they activate your immune response as if you are sick, and they found that people are more sensitive to rejection, social rejection, when they've been injected with this. It's very funny how sensitive people are to rejection. So imagine this, it's this game that people play, where two people are passing a ball back and forth in like a computer simulation. So you just see this ball, like there's two players, they're like dots, they're passing

a ball back and forth, they pass to you once, and then the whole rest of the game they don't ever pass the ball to you. That's the rejection. That's, is that people who you can't even see in a game don't pass a ball to you. I don't want that to happen though. That makes me feel left out. I want the ball.

I want to play. Fombo. Fombo. Serious, Fombo. So what ways are the, like talking about food, which is something that you just brought up there? Why is a desire for familiar food important and why is the change in our appetite important and useful?

I get very frustrated. In addition to getting frustrated with people endorsing, taking fever, reducing medications, I get very frustrated with people like, you have to eat something. It's important that you eat. It's not important that you eat. So, digesting food takes something between like five and 15%

of your resting energy. 5 and 15% of your resting energy. You spend a lot of your resting energy digesting food. But in addition, when you eat food, there's always some chance that it has some equal eye on it. I mean, everything we has bacteria on it. And so, your immune system is activated to some extent by what you eat. This makes sense, you know, when people want to eat food when they're sick, they often want to eat really familiar stuff, you know, some toast with butter or some lemon water. They generally don't want to go to the Chinese buffet and, you know, try the pork anus for whatever the mom will for, right?

You really have a preference for incredibly familiar food. And this has also been my experience with being around people who are sickly or injured, is that they often really prefer familiar food and they can be very diverse to trying anything new food wise. Yeah. So we don't want to expose ourselves to different types of consumption.

There might be some more pathogens in that, which make us even more sick. But the way that that actually manifests is just I want something that feels like home. I want something that feels like what my mum would make. And what that actually is, we might rationalize that as a sense of comfort, which actually is a potential part of it,

the familiarity, which we'll get onto. But perhaps more than that, comfort, which actually is a potential part of it, the familiarity which we'll get onto, but perhaps more than that, it's food that we know is safe. Yeah, we have this, you know, as we grow up, this crystallization period. So when we're toddlers, we'll put anything in our mouths. I've seen toddlers eat little dog poo. We'll eat these in toddlers, we'll just put anything in their faces. And then there's a period where your food preferences crystallize, and it's those foods that you know are safe because you've been eating them since you were young. And as humans, we evolved all over the planet. We couldn't have a set menu of foods that we could eat everywhere because in you

et's are eating whale blubber and messiah drinking cow know, there's this huge variety of foods that people eat. And so it's this period that matters. And so when you want to eat something familiar, your body is saying, I want to eat something that is very unlikely to have pathogens that I'm not already adapted to. What about being needy people get needy when they're ill. Why is that happening? Yeah, so the, you know, one very important aspect of being human is that you have kin and friends around you who can look after you and in our ancestral past, if you had been injured or sick, and there was nobody to look after you, you could have starved or worse, you would have been very vulnerable. So it makes sense that you want people around you who are also familiar, who can help look after you.

And so if you think about something like extroversion, extroversion isn't necessarily, I want to socialize with people all the time. It's extroversion is often, I'm interested in meeting new people and I feel comfortable meeting new people. And that's prioritizing sort of a novel area of socializing compared to the people that you already know, whereas introverts often tend to prefer people in their social circle. So if you think about lassitude, lassitude makes you want to invest social capital in the relationships that you already have.

You want to signal to the people that you know who are not interested in exploiting you, who are interested in looking after you. I'm vulnerable and I need help. Interestingly, they've been a bunch of studies with animals where they found a male rat will act sick. But if another male rat comes around who is a rival, he stops acting sick entirely. These are kinds of studies that are difficult to do in humans. And so you see this, that you really

can't act vulnerable or sick around strangers. And you can't conserve your energy in the same way around strangers. But if you think about from this perspective, people who have chronic inflammation, who have injuries and who have infections can be fundamentally different to be involved in a friendship or relationship with. And if you're with somebody and they get sick or injured, they can really fundamentally change the way they relate to you. And this is something I don't think people think about enough. You know, when you talk about insipidness and in health, you're really talking about,

I'm willing to stay with you even if your personality fundamentally changes from being somebody energetic, socially vivacious, open to experience. If you become more conservative because of illness, I'm going to be willing to stick with you through that. That's the part, the evolutionary psychology adaptation part that should have been put as a footnote in the marriage details, shouldn't it? Because what people think when they think of sickness and in health, they think, oh, well, maybe you'll lose your job or maybe you'll break a leg or maybe you'll need whatever looking after. But the question of who are you is a much broader philosophical one, but if something occurs to you, which makes you sick and that

Fundamentally changes what we subjectively define as you the elements of your personality that manifest to make you unique and the thing that we fell in love with if that changes it kind of all bets are off a little bit like that because you fall in love with someone who's very different to the person that stands in front of you and yet you made a deal with that person that it was in sickness and in health. Yeah, so this is interesting that many aspects of personality that are valued or that people like about themselves, things like being extroverted, people who like, like I'm somebody who's very open to experience, I like weird ideas. I like weird experiences. I like to meet new people and travel to new places. That's a personality construct.

And that's something that's kind of expensive from an evolutionary perspective. There's all kinds of things that can go wrong. If you're not conforming to what other people are doing, then you're taking risks that you might not be able to afford if you have a limited energy budget because you're sick. These are things you might not be able to afford if you have a limited energy budget because you're sick. These are things you might not be able to afford if catching a novel pathogen of it when you already have is going to end your life. And this is something that happens anyway when women become mothers or as people get older, they end up becoming more conservative because the cost and benefit of these personality

and behavior, things like risk-taking, extroversion, openness to experience, they start to reduce and relative to the benefits of just trying to stay in one place, conforming to what you did before. And it's difficult, but I certainly am feeling better every day and kind of more like myself, but there was a period of a week or two after I caught COVID where I knew I was an infectious, I was like going for a walk outside and strangers scared me more than they usually do. I was much more socially anxious and I was much more emotionally sensitive.

And I talked to my mother every day when I barely talked to her twice a month usually. Shit. So the same thing that we're looking for with the food is almost what we're looking for with the relationships. We're looking for that familiarity, something, yeah, deploying strategies to elicit care giving behaviors from social allies. I think it was put as in that. Yeah. Signalling vulnerability was put as in that, yeah, signaling vulnerability as well as an interesting one, isn't it? Just perhaps overreging it. People accuse men of man flu all the time. But the problem is that we're so good at deceiving ourselves.

I'm like, am I as ill as I'm being? Am I as ill as I'm making out? I don't know. Like I'm just being, I'm being me. I'm just trying to fucking get rid of this flu. So this is a thing, like faking is actually a problem and it's a problem in, in societies and there's this great paper published last year of the year before by my former colleague and friend, Micheal Dabara, Irish guy who I think is that that Brunel. Anyway, he did a paper about how when tribes, or people go into battle, a lot of times you'd be like, oh, you know, a mile from the enemy camp, and you're like, oh, man, I just got this thorn in my foot.

It's just terrible. I really have to turn back. Like, ah, this migraine, I really have to go. And if you think about things like trepidating, like digging, you know, putting a hole in somebody's skull, or many of the horrible cures that they used on people, things like leeches or drinking your own urine, or, you know, giving people mercury or whatever terrible things that they used to do to people, these are ways of really making sure that people are actually sick.

If you're really sick, then you have to take this medicine. If you're faking it, you're going to be like, actually, given that the cure for having a thorn in your foot before going to the enemy camp is having your foot cut off later, I'm actually fine. I'm going to go with you. So this is a social technology that people use to make faking much more expensive. That's so interesting. Faking is not expensive anymore, as we know, from like how much vulnerability people display all the time. Yeah.

There's very little skepticism or cynicism about people saying I'm really hurt or I'm really vulnerable. Yeah, I tell you another thing that's interesting about you were talking about people getting more conservative as they get older. I always find it really hilarious every time in the uk that there's a general election because our country's so small that we can quite easily see the voting demographic like your country's basically 50 countries like stuck together like our country's actually just one country or yes four different countries and

all of them hate each other um what fascinates me and it always makes me laugh, is when people re, they get the election map and they redistribute it based on age and they go like, look, look at all of these old people voting conservative. And you think, that's you, that's you in 30 years. Do you think you're still going to be bothered about fucking socialism when you're 65? Are you mental? Do you think you're still going to be bothered about fucking socialism when you're 65? Are you mental? Yeah. People have a lot of difficulty imagining that their future self is going to be very different. And honestly, there's a lot of anxiety about changing fundamentally.

I think this is part of the anxiety around, you know, motherhood and getting older is becoming a different person. But it is bizarre, especially with this whole COVID thing, being so much more likely to kill elderly people. It really was a stark contrast to how people in East Asia were treating this versus people in the West for treating this. On the one hand, complete lockdown,

inability to say that we were willing to sacrifice anyone for the greater good of everybody keeping the economy going. But on the other hand, very little conversation about who died and what happened to them. After 9-11, there was moments of silence all the time for people who died on 9-11. I only remember one time that I've been involved in any online meeting or anything,

but there was a moment of silence for people who died recently from COVID. So I do think that there's an alienation because of the distribution of deaths. Does that relate to the openness to experience of being sick as well? You mentioned about some countries with higher pathogen loads

are more conservative and more conformist. Yeah, so this is this research and it's pretty controversial. Randy Thornhill is the main person who's he's written a whole book about it. He basically talks about looking at the pathogen load of various different countries and then examining things like liberalism, progressivism, religiosity, and they talk about how countries with these high pathogen loads, it's much more important for them to stick to traditional ways of doing things because the traditional ways of doing things are less expensive than finding out new ways of doing

things, but also things like cooking in a traditional manner. You know that that's safe. You know that avoiding and eating certain foods is safe from a pathogen perspective. And there's of course a lot of other problems with these countries. People have criticized this research, but I think it's really plausible that you would see people becoming more conformist if they are sick, because the costs of doing new things and figuring things out on your own just become so much greater. Isn't that one of the justifications for why many religions choose not to eat pork that pigs often tend to have all manner of sort of nasty creatures

inside of them? Pigs are do you carry you know, zoonotic diseases and there's a variety of reasons why. Some people say that among desert people, like among Jews and Arabs, it would have been very costly to keep pigs because they need a lot of water. But it is likely that some of the new, the zoonotic diseases that have occurred in the last whatever, 50 years,

H1N1 is a great example, was actually passed very likely from birds to pigs and then to humans. So pigs have a similar physiology humans. We often use pigs in medical experiments or we have medical students dissect them because they have a similar kind of physiology. And they're, you know, when I was reading about COVID initially, it also seems very likely that if you have an animal market where you have a bunch of animals put together, that if a virus can pass from some weird animal like a penguin to a pig, then it's going

to be much more easy, as much smaller step for it to pass than to humans. Because the physiology of humans and pigs is more similar than other animals like chicken. Okay, basically, this is part of the reason why I think it's really important that we stop doing animal agriculture entirely, that we eat meat, you know, that's cultivated rather instead because this kind of stuff is going to keep happening. And there's, you know, a great piece by Philip Limlon in Kualaet about how comparing how long it took China to talk about COVID versus

how long it took the United States to talk about H1N1. They're very comparable. I think there's only like 11 days between them. And it's very likely that any country that factory farms animals is going to be the next hot spot for a new pathogen like this. Are you familiar with a guy called Cosmic Skeptic, Alex O'Connor, he's a YouTuber. Okay, so he's a really good buddy of mine. I was talking to him earlier on about this conversation I was going to have with you. I really want I really want you to link up. I really want you to go on his show off for him.

Have a conversation because fuck me if he hasn't really read, piled me hard. I challenge anyone to listen to Alex talk and synthesize stuff like Peter Singer's work and everybody else that's in this space of like animal rights philosophy I suppose and not be convinced by the case not to eat meat. I now have fully accepted that my lifestyle is not in alignment with my morals. And before having that conversation with Alex, that's not the case. Now, I mean, he hasn't pushed the guilt

or degree of care for me sufficiently high to actually overcome always eating meat, but certainly small changes I've made like now always almond milk or coconut milk rather than cow's milk. He did this amazing video where he said, when you go up to a Starbucks kiosk, you can stop this entire vertically integrated chain of suffering simply by changing one word in your order by adding almond or coconut or whatever wheat milk or whatever it's called now. I don't mean wheat milk, what's it called? I don't mean wheat milk, what's it called? I don't know. Oh milk, oh milk. It's a Friday, it's fine.

Yeah, I just really, really think that that space is interesting at the moment. And it seems like the development in terms of animal rights philosophy is moving along at a pretty terrifying pace. Yeah, in brief, I'm writing up something about how clean me is what we call it. That's the new term for it because lab meat sounds weird.

People are, as I've just talked about a lot, are very adverse to foods that have strange names or strange connotations. But it's really going to be very important in terms of preventing any future pandemics for us to do that. And I don't think that the world is going to become vegan in any way, shape, or form. I've been involved, was involved very heavily with the vegan movement for a long time. And I became very disillusioned with it because the needle never moved on the proportion of vegans. And most people who say they're vegetarian, eat chicken and fish, I wrote a piece called practical veganism about this, about how it's actually better to eat

beef once or twice a week than to eat eggs every day from a suffering perspective. And cowsmilk matters a little bit, but doesn't actually matter that much in the grand scheme of things. So you know, my point is is basically you can make some small changes that don't involve giving up me entirely. It can make you cause less suffering than somebody who has given up animal products, you know, or who has given up everything but eggs, for example. I got, I had a conversation with someone who is into quite green and into saving the planet and stuff like that. I've gone down the existential risk rabbit hole recently with Toby Orde's work and I've got a Brian Christian on the show soon. Is it not mad? People who are green,

but not vegan. Is that not like the single biggest ironic, like misalignment of someone's values that you're here to try and save animals from suffering? And yet the most direct cause that you could find in order to cause suffering is still there, satan you played. I agree that people who are super eco warriors and who are into preserving the sanctity of nature have a lot to answer for, like me and stuff like that, but I also think that nature is in some fundamental sense, just a suffering cesspool. We enjoy nature because we evolve to enjoy nature. I love to see, you know, a beautiful panoramic view of Iceland or a herd of bison as much as the next person, but I know that fundamentally, all the

animals that we see in nature, especially small animals, are having lives that are terrible, and many of them are having lives that are just as bad as the animals that are factory-farmed. So because these ethical issues are so tricky, and because we evolved in no way, shape, or form to consider animals as more agents, other than children and people learned to understand animals very well, because that was an adaptive characteristic to learn to kill and exploit them. The only affinity we have of animals is actually just a byproduct of our desire to eat them. Sorry. I mean, cats and dogs are kind of bred to look like babies. That's a kind of different thing. We didn't evolve to eat them. But yeah, overall, yeah, there's a lot of Gary confused logic about eating me. I would say that you in particular if you're

Are you like paleo at all without your dealers? No, just trying to be healthy failing You just trying to be healthy. Yeah, I mean you could absolutely if you think that it's important for human health to eat Me once a week as I you know I don't actually think everyone thrives on a vegan diet That's something I really changed my mind about in the last 10 years. And I've endorsed people eating muscles and clams and other kinds of bibles. If you want to try and cause very little suffering, because I don't think that those animals are capable

of suffering. And they also fill in some gaps nutritionally in a vegan diet. But I hope that in the next couple of years, it's going to be chicken that you can buy that was grown, cellularly. And it sounds so weird to say, grow in a chicken. Grow chicken cells. Grow a chicken.

You know, as much bloody fried chicken as they want. And, you know, I predict, and people like David Pierce, the transhumanist, also predicts that when this clean meat is widely dispersed to the population and people are eating it when it's cheaper and considered healthier than meat off the hoof or from killed animals, people are going to be incredibly judgmental about people who eat ordinary meat because it's going to be almost cost-free to have that more latitude. I found that out to do with our sensation or our love for scandal. Why is that we love scandal so much? Because it allows us to feel a moral emotion whilst having to do nothing moral to achieve it.

Yeah, I mean, this is when people talk about virtue signaling, there's good virtue signaling and there's also like really cheap talk signaling. People love cheap talk signaling. Yeah, scandal is like, I can morally oppose you, and nobody knows really anything about me, so it's super easy to do. There's a great book. It's now a few years old called Why Everyone Else is a Hypocrite, and it lays out the whole evolutionary

psychology of why we're constantly looking for moral loopholes, looking for ways to indict the behavior of others while maintaining our own behavior. Everybody, if you look at surveys, thinks that they're more moral than other people, and actually hating on vegans is a major way that people try and make themselves feel superior. Did you ever see that film with Jet Li? It was called The One. Okay, so it's maybe about 15 years old. Oh, I don't know why this film always comes back to me. Whenever I have conversations,

especially to do with status, it's basically a zero sum game with yourself. So you can imagine there's like, in the future, there's this police force that polices all the universes, and there's maybe 300 universes. And you exist. So there's a Diana in all 324 universes, but she's slightly different in one of them, you're an artist and in the other one, you're a full-time mom and in the other one, you're that. But there is an amount of energy that you have, like kind of like a superhuman.

And there are certain people that realize that if you go through all of the different universes and kill yourself You take their energy, but the problem is obviously that over time all of the other versions of you are getting stronger too And they don't understand why only you know that you're getting stronger because you're killing everyone else And when I hear about like non-zero some status games to do with bringing other people down to make yourself better I always think about jet Lee killing himself in the one. That's like, yeah, that's a very interesting trade-off because we evolved, kin selection, identical twins, you know, very rarely have terrible fights, they're very likely to cooperate. And killing yourself is just the most perverse thing.

I actually went in a date with a guy this like 15 years ago who told me that he didn't speak to his identical twin brother and they fought all the time and I just thought that was the creepiest thing I ever heard. Wow. You're right. Yeah, because I mean what? You would have to adapt if if evolution if you're going to have identical twins, evolution is going to have to put something in that makes you help each other live. Well, yeah, I mean, we're all evolved to help people. There's a super interesting study.

Lisa DeBroin is a researcher in the UK who did this interesting study where she morphed. Let's say you have two different faces and and I morph one of them with a stranger, so it's half stranger face anyway. And then I morphed the other face with your face. So unbeknownst to you, it actually looks like you, and has some facial characteristics in common with you. You're gonna be much more cooperative, if I say, you're playing a game with these two people.

You won't know why, but you're gonna be much more cooperative with the face of the person who will similar to you, whether the same sex to the opposite sex, because all of us have these kin selection mechanisms. And as much as people want to promote things like diversity and harmony in a multicultural society, it's very difficult to escape the fact that we are just more generous and kind

to people who look more similar to us. Did you see this study? I remember hearing about this years ago, well before the podcast, so it could be total bullshit. Not that I fact-check anything that I say on this in any case. But I remember seeing a study saying that babies, young babies, are able to tell the difference between different sheep and different cows. They're able to detect differences because they're continually entranced. They're constantly looking when you show them different sheep. Whereas there's a line around about three years old, I think,

where toddlers will look for a little bit. And then, although they are different sheep to them, they look like the same sheep, so they get bored and distracted and look somewhere else. I imagine, I know that this is the same, that white people have a difficulty in telling similar looking black people apart, similar looking Asian people have a problem with telling similar looking Indian people apart, etc, etc. Yeah, this mum, friend of mine, she was really worried about her son and she said, you know, we went to this playground, I'm worried that this COVID is really screwing them up socially because we went to this playground and he started playing with this kid and he was calling this kid the name of a kid in

his class. Even though that kid's name wasn't really Hudson, he was calling him Hudson. And I was like, was the kid black? And she's like, yeah, how did you know? I was like, oh, your kid is having trouble telling these two kids apart because of the other race effect, which is well known in criminal psychology. And this has been a terrible thing for people who have been convicted on this basis because you get a lineup and white people

who can't tell Neil de Grasse Tyson from O.J. Simpson. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, okay, and that's called the other race effect. Yeah. Amazing. I love having names for stuff like that. Right, so, lassitude. Surely once you've gotten over an illness, you're just fine. Like, why wouldn't acute non-traumatic incident cause a state change long term? So, there are the COVID long haulers. These are people who have inflammatory markers that last for a really long time after they recover. And COVID seems to be more likely to cause these kinds

of problems than some other diseases. Mononucleosis, which in the blog I have coming out, I talk about this woman that I know who had mono and her personality really fundamentally changed. She became very anxious and depressed. And there's a lot of idea that depression, anxiety, other mental health problems might actually have something to do with inflammation. So even after you've fought off an infection, your immune system can still be on high alert. You can still have this inflammation.

And there are certain other very normal diseases of civilization that are caused by this. When you are overweight or obese, you can have chronic systemic inflammation. And when your body doesn't know the difference between, I have too much weight on me and I'm actively fighting off an infection, you're going to experience the same kind of sickness behavior or elasticity in response to that. So, you know, your body, the sixth sense that you have, where your body is monitoring whether or not there's an infectious agent in your body and whether or not you're fighting off something, it's not going to be perfect. And it's less costly for it to make the mistake of carrying on with inflammation than it is for it to stop.

So you have to think about this thing. It's called the smoke detector principle, right? People have smoke detectors that go off when they're not supposed to, because that's a better mistake for the smoke detector to make than for the smoke detector to not go off when there's a fire. And similarly, when your psychology is examining whether or not you have an infection, it's better for it to make a mistake thinking that you have an infection than that you don't have an infection. That negativity bias, which continues to come up throughout all of evolutionary psychology, being reframed as a smoke detector effect is really cool. Does that mean that on average,

fatta people are more introverted. Fatta people are going to be less open to new experience. I do not know any studies on that and I like don't, I'm not going to be the person to do that. I even, there was a guy who used to have a really great podcast called SmartDroguesSmartz. Now I can't, Jesse Lawler is his name. I can't remember the guess that he had on, but he had on a guess too, is talking about the cognitive changes that come with being overweight or obese. And people talk about when they talk about having COVID, they talk about things like brain fog because inflammation also interferes with mental functioning. But brain fog also might be a way that people describe, I don't feel like thinking about new ideas. I don't feel like thinking about new ideas.

I don't feel like sitting down and reading. I just feel like preserving my energy. Even when I was sick, I was watching, I love Mitchell and Webb as you may also. I love Mitchell and like Peep Show and stuff. I was watching clips of things. I've watched hundreds of times. Just familiar stuff that I wanted to engage in.

And that's a possibility. Not just for people who have these kinds of conditions based on like food that they eat. People are always talking about what foods are inflammatory and anti-inflammatory, but also potentially other kinds of diseases like multiple sclerosis. The last thing I was going to say is that there's some studies where they gave people like an aspirin or I think it was an ad fill, they gave people an anti-inflammatory drug and they examined their behavior afterwards. And people who were given, I think it was an ibuprofen every day, were less emotionally sensitive. This was a small effect, but you can actually see that if you lower people's inflammation

that also changes their behavior in socially important ways. Wow. How does having a pathogen in the world change the attraction and sexual dynamics that are going on? I'm very interested in how this is going to play out. So men and women have quite different responses to infection threats. There's some marsupial mouse that I love to talk about, who they only live for one breeding season, and they spend no energy at all on maintaining their bodies.

They're entirely, their whole energy budget goes to try to have as many meetings as possible. And by the end of the mating season, they're literally falling apart. There's like infections all over them. They're just riddled with disease, and they're still trying to have sex with as many females as possible because that's their whole raison d'etre, right? And so in humans, you know, it's not definitely not that exaggerated, but men don't conserve their energy budget as much to try and maintain their bodies as women do. Because for men, mating is much more rewarding. A man can just have sex once and have a baby whereas a woman often has to have sex

more than once. It can only produce a child every you know an ancestral population every four years with nine months of gestation and three years on average of breastfeeding. That's what hunter-gatherer generally do is it takes four years to make somebody who could potentially become an adult and also women have to maintain their bodies better in order to carry a child. Spurm is really cheap and eggs and pregnancy are really expensive. So you might see even more misalignment of sexual desire and motivation and men and women because women are much more sensitive to infection threat. And post-COVID, certainly you're going to see a dip on libido. This is something that you see with all the seizes.

But when you look at like male rats and female rats, for example, the males are much more likely to carry on having sex and not reduce their libido in response to inflammation compared to females. So this could have long-term effects. I've become obsessed with a Reddit which is called Dead Bedroom where people talk about their sexual mismatches. They have a high libido partner, usually in the low libido partner, and it's fascinating, but I think that these mismatches, they happen usually, you know, men want to have more sex than women do, but you

could imagine that this could be exacerbated. This mismatch could be exacerbated by disease or even the threat of disease. Good time to be gay then. If you gay. Yeah. Great time. I didn't expect you to be gay. There was one just that guy. There was the like the Hungarian MP who got busted for being in a gay orgy. And the people who, you know, in the 1970s and 80s, you'd be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe he was in a gay orgy

in nowadays. I can't believe he was in an environment in which he could have spread COVID. That's so irresponsible. I hope he was wearing his mask. I hope he was wearing not that one, not that mask, different one. The answer is just saying that he thought COVID

was gonna bring back glory holds. I don't know if we had actually really been around. I'm in New York and March, so may I let you know, but Anyone that's listening who has found an uptick in glory hold usage during COVID, please comment below. Yeah, I mean, there's so much that's fascinating that I tweeted the other day saying that COVID's been fantastic for productivity and mustaches, but awful for sex. Like, how much of it aside from the concerns that we have around viruses being out there, is there a restart to something that's becoming grained in terms of like someone's habit of not talking to guys or girls, not having sex, not being open and spending time with other people. Is there like a brief acute period that might end up spreading out?

Are we going to have a population dip in 24 years time or something like that? I think that there's been some controversy about whether or not we're going to see a baby dip or a baby boom. You know, lots of people who were paired up ended up spending all their time together. And people, I think, who were in couples who were isolated together probably had a lot more sex. There was just a whole lot more time and boredom. So that makes sense. But as far as I know, the full tally of whether or not there's been an increase or a decrease

hasn't been accounted for. And I know that some people were worried that COVID was going to have some kind of long-term impact on children. Doesn't seem right now like women who catch COVID when they're pregnant have children that have serious problems with any kind of birth weight or anything. But what we saw in the influenza pandemic, this was like a hundred years ago, in Denmark was that there was an uptick in schizophrenia afterwards. And so there's some psychological problems, things like schizophrenia or autism,

that you actually wouldn't see until children were older, so we actually won't fully know what influence COVID might have on pregnant women until three or four, even 20 years pregnant women until, you know, three or four, even 20 years down the line, you don't actually have onset of schizophrenia until you're 25 years old on average. So is that, what is that due to stress? That's due to the psychological profile of the women during the pregnancy?

There are some people who think that mental illness, many mental illnesses are actually caused by disease. There's some correlation, for example, between having a high fever when you're young, having a dramatic fever, and having obsessive compulsive disorder when you're older. So it makes sense, from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that many of the ways that psychology changes that are at least adaptive are some kind of noise that is introduced into the system that undermines the adaptive, you know, functioning of the system. So it is possible. I'm not, I'm really not trying to scare monger, you know, coronaviruses are super common

and it's just as likely that nothing will happen at all. But we do know that flu is correlated with an uptick in schizophrenia diagnosis. Why would schizophrenia and autism be adaptive? That's what I'm saying, that they're not. So they're maladaptive, but there is some way that a virus changes the development of the brain that makes it more likely. So there can be a nature and a nurture effect here, such that you have a genetic predisposition to just get to Frania, but unless your mother had the flu when she was pregnant, you won't

get it. And, you know, there's considerations about this. When you see identical twins who are born, oftentimes the smaller twin, the one who got for whatever reason, lower blood supply, less placental access to whatever, will have a different personality than the other twin. So that's a great example of nature and nurture that this guy, you know what I mean,

to tell me about these twins that he knew where one was much more aggressive and much more extroverted than the younger one, for a few minutes later who ended up being smaller, who was basically trying to get social capital from her parents and get their attention in a completely different strategy by being cute and sweet and quiet, whereas the bigger one was being more grobby and aggressive and, you know, shouny, right? So we all figure out the best strategy to get attention. Those things are somewhat genetic predisposed, but, you know, there's also a correlation with extroversion and attractiveness in men and women.

Attractive people are more likely to be extroverted and men, attractive people are more likely to be extroverted, and men, strong men are more likely to be extroverted. And that's because being extroverted, as I said before, is kind of expensive. There's a lot of things that can go wrong, and you don't want to be extroverted unless you can afford it in terms of social capital. Yeah. So is that, I had this conversation with Rob Henderson and the penny drop there. He talked about how muscular men, even in 2021, where we have far too much food and there's lots of fat people everywhere, muscular men as signaling, I can acquire excess calories, I am so fit and I am so good at resource acquisition that look, not only can I eat what I need to eat, but I can eat more so that I can have these ridiculous

things attached to me. Does it seem like the muscles? You're in no things, right? I'm talking about muscles. I'm a problem. Yeah. And is it the same with extraversion? Is it look at how much more outgoing I am, look at how much more I can put myself out there

because I have so much fitness inside of me, I have so much energy and vigor inside of me, and if you mate with me, your children could have this as well, sexy sun. Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a certain, if somebody's extroverted and they identify strongly with being extroverted, there's a signaling aspect to that.

And they can show off how extroverted they are, how many people they know, how big their social circle is. That's certainly a lot of, I think, what social media is based on is signaling that I was confused about the muscles in the excess calories, because to me, like muscles just have like a direct fitness signaling. They're not really necessarily signaling. I have a lot of excess calories. They're just signaling. I'm strong and formidable. And if you have two different ways of gaining status, you know, prestige and form and formability prestige is acquired by being somebody smart or wise that people want to talk to you. You see like the gurus these days or people who are trying to signal that they have both right, I can give you great advice, but also, you know, watch me deadlift this. So... Do you think those two work against each other? Do you think that it's a confusing signal to members of the opposite sex? To have that? Is it

easier to block people into archetypes? I do think that it's easier to block people into archetypes to some extent, but people who are trying to signal to their both, like a really muscular, you know, big dude, often tries to signal just as hard that he's like a nice person, because he recognizes that people are very likely to typecast him as like a tough or what is what is it that you guys say in Britain, somebody's really built that they're super hench? Well, I mean, I can sort of a test to that myself, certainly that for quite a while, I tried to downplay my looks and like overplay the vocabulary that I would use or the things that I would say or the way that I would talk and the stuff that I would cite,

because I knew that coming from my background if people knew who I was, being a club promoter for 14 years, and perhaps the way that I look a little bit, that people would just go into immediately think fuckboy. So I would try my best to signal, no, no, no, no, enigma, like onion layers. I would try my absolute best to try and get that to come across because I desperately didn't want to be tight cast as that fuck boy.

Despite, however much my history may have... No, I'm too good looking now. I know somebody who wears glasses for that reason, even though he doesn't need to, because he thinks he looks cleverer in glasses. And I was like, I don't wear glasses. He's like, yeah, you look Jewish, that doesn't speak. So moving forward, there's gonna be like a couple of things at play because obviously we have like our genetics,

our genes trying to deploy themselves through our behavior, right? And that maybe there's been a virus floating around to women go steady. You need to be a little bit careful here if you have children, it's costly. But there will be an alternative system at work which is you wanna have sex in ages.

Like you need to go have sex. So surely these two things are going to be pulling against each other. Yeah, there's this whole literature that's really fascinating. It's called Life History Theory. And it says people respond to threats differently depending on whether they're fast-life history or slow-life history. So slow-life history means that you give birth later, you take care of your offspring for a long time, and you live a long time, whereas live fast and die long. Young is like the fast life history where you're trying to have lots of sex partners, have

as many babies as possible. And if you get a threat from the environment that there's a threat of death around, if you are slow life history, you might actually try to become more cautious or try to engage in a steady long-term relationship more likely, whereas if you are a live fast, dying young kind of phenotype, you're like, well, I need to have sex with as many people as possible. I need to breed before I die, kind of like those mice that fall apart that I was talking about.

And so the best example of different life histories is between men and women inherently have a faster life history on average than women do. But there's this idea that if you experience hardship when you're young, you're getting cues that the environment is volatile and unstable, and that it's important that you breathe quickly. There's some correspondence, for example, with having early life hardship with having early life hardship and having earlier puberty that boys their voice drops. No way that it triggers them to go into puberty more quickly because that would mean that they're able to protect themselves. Yeah and I knew a guy who who said that he thinks he would have been like a foot tall or if he hadn't

had a stepdad because having a stepdad having an unrelated meal in the house who was aggressive to him he didn't have a nice stepdad sort having a stepdad, having a really meal in the house, who was aggressive to him, he didn't have a nice stepdad, sort of made him put his energy into maturing earlier rather than growing. And this is actually what you see in the Congolese picnies is that they are very, very small. They're like, I can't remember how tall they are, but they have much earlier puberty timing than other groups. It's because their strategy is instead of getting big and tall,

which is kind of a moral long life history strategy, they instead shut that energy into becoming reproductively viable earlier because they live in an insecure, unstable environment. So this is a controversial idea, but if you want to talk to somebody about this, Marco Del Giugice, he does a really great work on this, and he's tried to translate many different psychiatric conditions into this possibility that they have something to do with

life history. And you do see people's, you know, how early they go through puberty and various other things about them reproductively correlate with certain aspects of their psychology and mental health. That's mental. Like the way that our life experience can kind of turn on or turn off. Things that we presume are like,

what, like bestowed on us by God or like immutable truths or like some weird source code thing that's inside of us. And we're talking about in utero, like before you've even entered the world, shit can happen that is going to fundamentally change the way that your life is going to happen, in ways that you're never even going to know and you're not able to split test your own yourself into a different version where it didn't happen. That's mental. Are we going to see more people be asexual during this period as well? I think that's possible. I mean, the whole controversy about asexuality, and I'm working on a paper about asexuality, is whether or not it's

a sexual orientation or whether or not it's a disorder. Certainly, if you have anorexia, not like anorexia, the condition, but what's the biological term anorexia, not like anorexia, the condition, but what's the biological term anorexia, you don't feel like eating. People say that that's the outcome of some kind of disease, but asexuality is being seen less that way. But I also think that asexuality, because there's this population of people who are having fast sex with people that they barely know, now there's this lexicon of people who are like demisexual. I only want to have sex with people when I get to know them very well. Otherwise known as women. Okay.

Are you being serious? Yeah, the demisexual and gray sexual, there's this lexicon of identities that I think corresponds to generally perfectly normal behavior. And some women who are asexual, like in the study that we did, I think 75% of asexuals

were women. Interestingly, there are people who are asexual and they are also trans. They start taking testosterone and guess what happens when they start taking testosterone. They stop being asexual, right? So it definitely seems like there's something hormone going on. And it's amazing to me how a verse we are to these biological explanations. People will tell you that you know an offhanded remark their mother made change them forever but they won't talk about how they had like a fever or they broke their

leg or something and people are really averse to the idea that these biological effects really have an influence on their personality. I think it's like modern-day dualism. You know, I have a soul and it has no, it's not influenced by testosterone. It's untouched by my hormones and disease. What's your opinion of people being able to step into their own programming around this stuff then? If you're sufficiently well-versed in evolutionary psychology and sufficiently mindful and you've done all of the meditation and you can observe the texture of your own mind to the fidelity where you actually perhaps allow this stuff to manifest in consciousness

because the front of your brain isn't taken up, like scrolling through Tinder or fucking TikTok or whatever. How do you feel around people being able to pull back some of that programming and source code? I feel like I have some insight into myself, but myself insight is at the cost of having an incredibly cynical view of myself. When I think about how I feel about the people in my life, I know that I love my mother, but I also know that I might have been calling her more often when I was sick because I had an inherent interest in getting more of her investment.

I know that I love my husband, but I also know that if he lost me value, or I gained me value, or if I became ugly or disfigured, that it would fundamentally change our relationship. We're not two souls together. We are two bodies.

We are physically embodied. And it's impossible for us to get away from that. So what seems like it's going on in the culture is that people have the strong desire to think about themselves as these kind of disembodied souls. And it's not very dignified to talk about yourself in these other more embodied ways. I don't think that you can have a perfect view. I have a close friend who had a lot of psychological problems and didn't realize until he was 50 that he had had a serious illness and a favor so high that he had a seizure

until he read some letters that his mother wrote. She had never told him. And it elucidated so much about him. There's so much I can never know about myself, about my birth and about, my mother gave birth to me in Brazil. And I'd embraced you for like two days because they gave her so many sedatives.

Like, who knows what I would have been like if I hadn't been heavily sedated when I was born? I'll never know. Isn't it fascinating that we live in a society now where people pride themselves on the rationality were a meritocracy, people are able to become whatever they want to be. I am in complete control.

And yet, there is still this element, this sacred, ephemeral, religious sense of us that is outside who I am. People talk about it as if it is this sort of universal thread jetley, jetley again and his other jetleys. People talk about it in that way, there definitely seems to be a little bit of, and it's not even cognitive dissonance because people just aren't aware that it's happening. But we do seem to have, I would, dualism I think is a good way to put it.

We think that there's two different things going on, but it seems like almost everybody, at least in the West, has on this pedestal the utilitarian rationalist perspective, science is gonna be able to explain everything and they still allow this who I am my true sense of being and can become incredibly upset and insulted if that gets challenged. Do you know what when someone needs to urinate it reduces their belief in free will? No way.

Aving serious. Yeah. How? Why? I think it's because you feel like you're so tethered to something physiological. Like you're like, yeah, it releases your ability to believe in free will. So what you were basically just talking about is this kind of modern day dualism. And what I think is really at the root of that, B.F. Skinner, back in the like 1950s and 1960s,

talked about something called counter-control that we don't want to be controlled by others. He was using this reward and punishment kind of paradigm. And in my view, the more social media gets to know about us, the more we have these findings about sex differences and things, people don't want to be predictable or controllable. It's fine on your Spotify when your Spotify tells you what songs you're going to like, but people are really not happy about being told that they're more likely to have specific

interests or be able to think about certain things more easily than other things. You know, the idea that men and women have different cognitive styles is now incredibly controversial. And I think more and more people are identifying as non-binary or they're not willing to talk about various things that would make you able to predict their behavior. I mean, just looking at personality, you can predict if somebody is male or female with 96% accuracy, right? Like if you just look at a long form of personality inventory, you can detect somebody's sex with high fidelity, just looking at their brains.

And people don't like that. People don't like the idea that you can predict what they're like on the basis of something like their sex, assigned at birth. And I think that what's going on is that this is getting muddied by people identifying in best different ways. And my view is that some of that is really identity, but some of it is trying to escape control. But some of it is trying to escape control. I can't believe that thing about the personality at 96% I've never heard that before. This is an interesting thought for everybody that's listening as well and yourself.

Do you think given the current political and cultural furor around bodies determining gender and sex, do you think that people would be more insulted by you taking an inventory of their body proportions and determining it from that or from their personality? Yeah, people feel like their personality is part of their soul, and so I think people are also, they know that they can change their minds about their personality.

But there's studies that have been done that they say, if you're a bigger, stronger man, you're more likely to not tolerate people scrounging from you. You're less likely to be generous. You're less likely to be in favor of things like welfare, things like that. And so these studies that have shown that you're able to tell a lot about somebody's beliefs

and psychology on the basis of their face, what people are calling the the new chronology, right? This is going to take off. Governments are going to be using this. You can absolutely predict things about somebody's psychology on the basis of their face. People, you know, if you, if I show you a 10 second clip of somebody without sound, you'll be able to tell me whether or not they're gay or straight, with like 70% accuracy.

There's like, all of us, when people talk about knowing your gut or having a gut feeling about somebody, that's not something that's spiritual or that is something special about being human. A computer can do that. A computer can take in all of the heuristics that humans are using to make imperfect decisions and determine with some accuracy whether

somebody is a psychopath or somebody's generous or somebody's going to be monogamous. These are all things that are going to be possible, looking at people physiologically in the future and people are horrified by that because of stuff that they can't do anything about. That's a really good point. I think this is one of the reasons why I've fallen in love so much with evolutionary psychology. My academic awakening has been quite late, I would say, I'm a late bloomer. Especially given the fact I was at uni for five years, I just did a subject that I thought was fucking shit and spent a lot of money pointlessly. But my love and evolution of psychology is that it allows us to see kind of, it is close

to seeing things for what they are, I think, as it can be. And that to me is fascinating. Like I read the book that made me fall in love with it is the moral animal. And every other page, I'm just reading this thing like this, how to create a human document, like from first principles that's just explaining how all of this stuff happens. And it does come up against the idea that we're a sovereign free will.

And I can imagine why people find that to be uncomfortable. To me, every time that I discover why it's painful, why it's more painful to lose a child that's 10 years old than one that's three or 17, that totally blew my mind because they're the closest that they could be to being almost to be fertile and you've lost them and your genetic heritage has gone. And you just say, there is so much of that that I didn't know. And although it's like, obviously, that particular example is tragic. Think of it non-tragic example. Isn't that fucking interesting and cool?

Like, you must have doing the research that you do. You must be endlessly engaged and fascinated. Yeah, I mean, my own behavior, my own responses are endlessly fascinating to me. I sometimes feel like, you know, I'm an alien who's been reincarnated as a human woman. And someday I'll have to give a report about what it was like and how weird it was being in this body, in this time, in this mind, and having the thoughts that I do. and it's I think something that people really really miss out on when they're unwilling to look at themselves with this often very cynical perspective. For somebody to say, you can't possibly know the pain that I feel. You can't possibly know why I'm interested in this person and not interested in that

person. It's you know, it's a mystical experience. People won't necessarily use the word mystical, but there is this attitude of willful ignorance around people's own behavior and psychology. I was just listening to this dating coach talking about how there's all these women who want to get married before they're 40 and they're not dating online. They're hoping they're going to like need a man at the grocery store or whatever. And people are often so unwilling to be tactical about things matters of love and life and psychology because they don't want to look themselves in the face. They don't want to say, you know, this is very unlikely to work. They don't want to think tactically, rationally, strategically about things that are supposed to be ephemeral, beautiful, spiritual. That's dumb because I'm more than prepared to spend all of my time walking in and out of

whole foods in America, speaking really loudly in a British accent because I know it's a competitive advantage when I'm ready to start a family. Like, I've used all of the things I've got. Like, if you've managed to make it to your 30s and you want to have a family, spend a bit of time assessing your strengths and just annihilate people with them. Like, another thing, here's something I put this in my news, I've put this in my news letter a couple of weeks ago. I think personally, because I've spent a lot of time

meditating, I just broke a thousand days, congratulations Chris. I've spent a lot of time- I'm gonna have to check that honestly, but yeah. Oh god, whatever. I thought it was good. I've spent a lot of time meditating I've spent a lot of time meditating, I'm still mostly terrible at it, but sometimes I get interesting insights into the texture of my

body. 15 minutes a day, does that mean I'm here to say? 15 minutes a day, everything. But without evolutionary psychology, particularly, it could be something else, there could be something else that could come in its place, perhaps a sufficient understanding of psychiatry, a psychology, particularly, it could be something else. There could be something else that could come in its place. Perhaps it's efficient understanding of psychiatry or psychology or whatever might give you this. Me learning the tiny sliver I have of Eve's psych has reframed so much of my mindfulness practice in a way that I find incredibly beneficial because it a lot of what I needed and there may be people listening that are a little bit more sort of cerebral like me or perhaps just have a strong in a monologue. I needed the context. I needed the justification of why. The question of why was so strong to me that simply being able to observe things appearing consciousness wasn't enough.

I needed to understand why they were there. Do you sort of get the point I'm making? Yeah, so I've done three 10-day retreats, actually we were all in the UK, and the kinds of insane reminations that you have when you're on retreat are baffling. And also, I've never wanted to be out of my own skin and another person. I've never been so sick of myself as I was on her tree. So you do know the sense of that when you do a 15-minute meditation. But for example, I'm not really a very jealous person.

I had jealous remination that lasted like three days where I was having this conversation myself over and over again until I made myself so sick of myself. This woman told me, this pregnant woman who was on retreat with me, told me that she was playing and playing and playing over and over in her head again and again on an argument that she had with her best friend who used all of the hot water showering before her. They had an argument. That was what she was playing in her head. I thought that she was pregnant. She'd be like thinking about baby names or like what her fiance was doing in Amsterdam that weekend or whatever. That's what I would be ruminating about. And so we all have the things that we are ruminating about. And Buddhism has a whole language for

what these little, you know, mental demons are. But absolutely, I agree that an evolutionary psychology perspective is really explanatory. And also helps you figure out, okay, of course I'm thinking about this stuff all the time. This is stuff that's, you know, sitting here thinking of nothing is the last thing that my mind wants to do. But until I can hold my evolved psychology at arms length, I'm gonna be too into it to actually figure out what's going on.

Yeah, very much so. I think anyone that wants to understand their own mind, and there's a lot of people listening who are very similar to myself in that regard, because they keep on listening apparently. I think that the framing of evolutionary psychology can go a long way to helping you self actualize, because it just allows you to peer into your own source code. And there's not many subject areas, I think, that do that.

Look, Diana, thank you for coming on. People want to nosy around with your stuff. Where should they go? I have a Twitter that has all my links. It's at sentientist. That's S-E-N-T-I-E-N-T-I-S-T. I'm at DianaFlyshman.com that has my links and then I also blog a couple places. One of them is Dianaverse where there will be blog about the Concouverteacher

Personality topic. Amazing. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to getting you back on to work out, can you train your boyfriend? When's that out? When are you doing that? It's taking ages, so I won't not. I should have never told anyone I was even riding it, but can you hurry up, please? I'll speak to you on behalf of your publisher as well. Can you hurry up? Thank you. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,