Modern Wisdom - #439 - Glenn Geher - Positive Evolutionary Psychology

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

Glenn Geher is Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of Evolutionary Studies at the State University of New York and an author. Ancestral lifestyles are a big trend at the moment. Taking influence from our paleolithic past to inform how we eat, train and move in the modern world. But taking an ancestral approach to our psychological wellbeing is much rarer and this is Glenn's work - what can insights about our past teach us about how to enjoy the present. Expect to learn why depression and anxiety might actually be useful, why understanding the reason for emotions reduces their power over you, why it's miraculous that the education system has worked at all, why men are twice as likely to die in early adulthood than women, the danger of technology through an evolutionary lens and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on Mission’s high performance teas at https://missionuk.com (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Positive Evolutionary Psychology - https://amzn.to/3oWYhO8  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Glen Gare. He's professor of psychology and founding director of evolutionary studies at the State University of New York and an author. Ancestral lifestyles are a big trend at the moment, taking influence from our paleolithic past to inform how we eat, train and move in the modern world. But taking an ancestral approach to our psychological well-being is much rarer, and this is Glenn's work. What can insight about our past teach us about how to enjoy the present? Expect to learn why depression and anxiety might actually be useful, why understanding the reason for emotions reduces their power of you, why it's miraculous that

the education system has worked at all, why men are twice as likely to die in early adulthood than women, the danger of technology through an evolutionary lens, and much more. It's my final few days in New York City, and then I am back to Austin this weekend, and the programming over the next couple of weeks is insane. So some huge guests, some really exciting episodes,

I'm looking forward to having, and also looking forward to not living out of a suitcase anymore, which has been the last fortnight of my life. So yes, enjoyed the trip, but looking forward to settling down into a somewhat normal routine for at least the next month. And now please welcome Glangare. Glangare, welcome at the show. Hey, thanks so much for having me, Chris. Something that I think is really interesting is that there's been a paleo movement around food and training, but there hasn't really seemed to be an equivalent around psychology.

There's no sort of paleo-psychologists or at least people that have taken that and tried to apply it to their own lives. I haven't seen many people walking around doing paleo-psychology yet. Paleo-psychology, that's a great phrase. I wish I would have come up with that myself. It's a really good question. So when we talk about the paleo lifestyle or the paleo movement, most people are familiar with the dietary component of it. And honestly, as someone who teaches about evolution and the human experience, that is the most vivid and easiest example to get across to people. It makes sense. It matches

data. People can sort of see their own behavior and think about it. And just the idea of eating too much processed food, leading to health problems is kind of something that we all know, and then this really puts sort of a scientific framework around it. So the paleo diet and the paleo solution related to exercise and nutrition tons of sense, and it's definitely a reasonably well-established movement at this point. But as you're talking about this broader concept of paleo psychology, which really is I think an interesting way of framing what I'm calling positive evolutionary psychology, using evolutionary psychology to help us lead better lives to understand ourselves better, to lead better community lives and to help advance the goals

of our communities and so forth in positive kinds of ways. It turns out that the same reasoning that you can apply to the paleo diet movement really can be applied to many issues regarding our emotional social functioning as well. And I think that that's really very much untapped at this point. And I'm hoping to be part of, you know, maybe even just a small part, but part of the solution to sort of get people in a broader sense to think about how broadly applicable this evolutionary perspective is with all aspects of our lives. Is there something that's missing from positive psychology, which evolutionary psychology adds in? I know that for a long time,

psychology was focused on all of the malignant parts and biases and how we mess up. And then positive psychology came along and said, well, we should probably try and actually improve people's lives as well. That would be a useful thing. But then I'm trying to work out what it is that's missing from positive

psych that is added into by evolutionary psychology. Sure, it's a really good question. And if you go back to the history of the two fields, evolutionary psychology and positive psychology, it's super interesting that they have, there's a lot of parallels. So they're both considered relatively new fields within psychology. They both started arguably in the 90s in a lot of ways. Positive psychology emerged when Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association and really made a big call to behavioral scientists

and practitioners saying, you know, exactly what you're talking about. What can, you know, why can't we study the positive features of the human experience scientifically so that we can amplify the good and the positive, which I think is, you know, totally on board with that message and with a lot of the work that's been done. Evolutionary psychology really started, I mean, it started and stopped over the years ever since Darwin in a lot of ways, but the current movement started very much in the 90s with people like David Bus, Stephen Pinker, leader of Cosmonism, John Tubi, and really said, you know, we need to think about

everything and when it comes to human behavior, relative to our evolutionary history. So I think that field has been very powerful and successful at helping shed light on things like human emotions, human relationships, human sexuality, human aggression, social interactions, like tons and tons of fields. And when my co-author, Nicole Wetberg and I were thinking about this idea of positive evolutionary psychology, the big insight that we had was positive psychology is great. But if you look at the literature in the journals, the academic journals of positive psychology, such as the journal of happiness studies and so forth, and the main textbooks in the

field, it's very devoid of evolutionary thinking. And it doesn't seem intentionally so. I think generally speaking, behavioral and social scientists have not been trained in evolutionary thinking across the years. That's a whole separate thread that I could go down. But positive psychologists don't have that training. And so when you read their articles or scientific work, the general theme tends to be how can we make people happier. And Chris, I'm not going to say that's a bad goal at all. I'm not going to argue against that as a goal. But when you start thinking about things from an

evolutionary perspective that starts to look like a very limited, very limited approach to sort of what we should be doing in terms of trying to advance humans, advance our society, advance our scholarly work. So the idea that we came up with, well, why don't we do what we can to evolutionize positive psychology, see if we can integrate these two fields. And I will tell you quickly that my co-author Nicole and I went to a symposium one time. It was all positive psychology research presentations. It was held on our campus.

It was really as you can imagine. It was a positive experience mostly given by students. They had really great projects. They had done some great reading, proposed, and implemented a bunch of great research. And the insight that Nicole and I had after talking to every presenter and looking at every presentation was that not a single one of them mentioned or even came close to thinking about things from an evolutionary perspective. And I'm going to say that without exception, what can we do to make people happier seem to be the singular goal of each and

every project? And that's when we were like, you know what, we got to do our part to shed some light on this situation, which is, you know, how can we look at the goals of positive psychology, but within an evolutionary framework? And maybe that'll be a more powerful way to actually try to implement some of these values and ideas. Well, we derive satisfaction from life on a lot of other pathways than simply happiness. Right? There's a lot of other things that contribute to living a good life than being happy all of the time. And I suppose thinking at it from the reverse, thinking about what the potential holes in evolutionary psychology that are filled by positive psychology are, a lot of evesite consists of harsh, crude and uncomfortable realities

about our genuine, less than admirable motivations for the things that we do. Absolutely. Absolutely. Evolutionary psychology is pretty famous for studying the dark side of the human experience. And there's a general negativity bias that people have. So even if a good percentage of evolutionary psychological research has not been on the dark side, negative dark things tend to stand out in our minds. Just as an example, we had a great speaker on campus the other day, virtually presenting, and it was Todd Shackleford, who's really renowned

alum of David Bus and now he oversees the psychology department at Oakland University in Michigan, and he's published a ton largely on facets of sperm competition and how that relates to behavior and infidelity. No way. Oh, yeah, great research. And he gave a talk that's the specific concept that he had multiple studies on this, was the phrase he used was forced in-pair copulation, which is essentially, I almost feel like after

like trigger warning was something like this, it's essentially like rape within a pairing, within a monogamous pairing. And he presented data, this is not an altogether uncommon experience. You know, and he gave fantastic and well thought out evolution based reasoning for the conditions under which this happens and how it connects with infidelity and how it connects with paternal uncertainty. And a lot of these things that, you know, are bread and butter and evolutionary psychology.

And I'll tell you, I thought it was terrific. There were a few students who heard it that I think were kind of upset about the nature of the content. And I got thinking, it was such a great presentation, but it's almost, and this is without any offense at all to Todd or people who are doing similar kind of research, I think it's important research, I think, that we need to embrace and be open-minded about

studying any and all topics within the academy, but you can see the PR issue, you know? Right, like you can see like well, there's a PR issue in everything to do the evolution of psychology as far as I can see Like look at David Bussey's most recent one men men behaving badly, or bad men, I think it was in America or in the UK. In the UK, right? Dude, it's an entire book telling you that all of the things that you think that you value in your partner or adaptations to try and get around your own sexual defenses that you're basically in a predator prey, it's analogous to predators and play, that we have one party that gets a new type of trick

and then the other one has to learn about how the trick works to then dampen that down. Yeah. Our motivations for most of the things that we do, they're not, it's not that they're not virtuous, but they're not as pure as we think that they are. They often come from a place which is significantly more zero sum. It's significantly more competitive. It's significantly less altruistic. Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And it's funny because I know David reasonably well and I think the world of him and his research. But I do think that he's almost been too successful and what I mean by that is his research on sex differences and human mating and our evolved psychology surrounding mating has been so so prolific and that's one of the things, and there's like you're saying there's multiple things in evolutionary site, but that's one of the things in evolutionary site that makes a lot of people in the modern landscape feel uncomfortable about, you know, this idea. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

It would be nice if David Bussey is looking at some of the darker aspects of human nature through an evolutionary lens. It would be nice to have somebody who is equally well known, but looking at some of the darker aspects of human nature through an evolutionary lens. It would be nice to have somebody who is equally well-known, but looking at some of the lighter sides. But I suppose you're right, it's just less attention grabbing. Who wants to know that you're nicer than you actually thought you were? Right. You know, it's just not going to grab headlines.

So do you think is that one of the big hurdles? Because I'm fascinated by evolutionary psychology and constantly surprised. I'm also fascinated by the fact that it hasn't been integrated into modern society tremendously well. Right, right. Yeah, I think that's, it's quite fascinating that way. I think that, you know, someone like David

has been, you know, he has been so prolific. If you step back, there have been efforts and attempts to study the bright side of our experience from an evolutionary perspective. A good example is David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton, who studies and has studied altruism very extensively, and he studies religion, but from like a very evolution-based scientific perspective. And he's for a secular scientist, David, I think, is very, very kind to religious ideology, kind of talking about how it's steeped in our evolutionary history, and what are the benefits, and what are the communal benefits, and why was this such a successful approach to organizing human social interactions? So I think that there actually is quite a bit of

stuff on all sorts of things about human behavior and community and interactions. But, you know, I will tell you, when you ask people, what do you think about evolutionary stake, a very high proportion of people say, oh, that's the stuff that says that men and women are different and that, you know, it justifies males, bad behavior and this kind of thing. And it's like, you hear this from person after person.

I'm like, no, this is like, it's like, there's a pie and this is like, maybe a small slice of it that's kind of related to what people are talking about, but man, they hear that and they latch onto it. So that's something quite interesting because there's a lot of the time when you bring up the fact that people who are perhaps on the left might have an issue with some of the conclusions that are drawn from evolutionary psychology. And most of the responses to that these people on the left are idiots that are denying the way that we work blah, blah, blah. But another interesting way to look at this is you also are not only getting a

perhaps overzealous response from the people, but you're also not showing everything from the subject area as well. There's another big bit of this which is being missed off. That's an interesting way to look at it. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the stats that you mentioned, you have it in the introduction, you have a couple of interesting insights here. Men are more than twice as likely to experience early mortality death during young adulthood compared with women. Is that risk taking? It's related to risk taking. Yeah, this is the work of Dan Krueger and Randy Nessie. Really super interesting. And I like to present this to give people a sense of how relevant and important evolutionary psychology is. Because sometimes people say, well, that stuff doesn't really matter. It doesn't pertain to the modern world, it doesn't address important social issues.

And the stuff on male to female mortality ratio is huge. It's a very reliable set of findings. So Dan Krueger, who's an evolutionary psychologist who works in a school of public health at University of Michigan, he has access to all kinds of health-related data and started with his then mentor Randy Nessie, who coined the term Darwinian medicine, huge scholar in the field. He said, well, mortality is a pretty big health-health-related issue, and I have a whole bunch of evolution-based predictions surrounding mortality. So Dan was essentially empowered to start looking at this.

And what he found was, you know, it's been known for quite a while that males, in terms of, in terms of simply survival and mortality, don't do as well as women. Men live shorter lives, they're more likely to die at different life stages than our women for various kinds of reasons. And that had been known, but what Dan added to in his research was he said, based on evolutionary reasoning since mating is so intensive and competitive

and mating, mate selection in particular sort of starts in the late teens and, you know, peaks and maybe the early to mid-20s, we would expect that to be a part of life where men are particularly more likely to out-die women. You know, I can't believe that's the best I can in terms of how I can word it. And what he found was exactly that. That man always, males always are more likely to die than women at every population. It's been studied at every age.

But when you get to the teenage, about 15 to 25, you see a big peak. It's huge. It was a huge spike in the data. And then it kind of smooths out a little bit. And I'm like, that's relevant. You know, if you think that's not, if you think that's irrelevant to societal functioning, you know, I got news for you.

If it helps us understand life and death for, you know, millions of people at any given time, I'd say that's highly relevant and something that we would do better just understanding. So. I'd say that's highly relevant and something that we would do better just understanding so that's when men are getting into gangs that's when men are doing any social behavior it's when the testosterone levels highest yeah starts to taper off to the end of the 20s when they're getting into prison it's when they're causing most violent crimes it's when the most likely I'm going to guess probably to be killed or to kill someone both both and physical causes That's probably to be killed or to kill someone. Both, both. And physical causes. So, so, Dan divided things into what he calls internal versus external causes of death.

And these effects were big for both kind, but they were particularly exacerbated for what he called external causes. So that is fights and murder and homicide, and things that he calls like like like, risky kinds of things. Car crashes, driving fast. Car crashes. Yeah, exactly.

The reason that men are paying higher, you know, young men are paying higher insurance rates than young women is. It's all tied into the same exact thing. There's a phrase to capture this put forward by Dalyam Wilson, some other folks who sort of carved out the field. And the phrase is young man El syndrome. And the idea is that young men who engage in risky behavior to the point that it can be dangerous and leads all kinds of

adverse outcomes, including premature death, that's a natural feature of the male experience. In other words, when we see this kind of stuff, it's not like, oh, that guy's an idiot. What it is is that that's part of the male developmental experience. And it's so common, those kinds of things are so common. And then if you think about like, I remember I used to watch the show, Jackass, common, those kinds of things are so common. And then if you think about like shows like,

I remember I used to watch the show, Jackass, or if you remember, like that's, it's just guys, you know, it's guys being stupid, it's young men being stupid. And, and risky and always. But it was young men being stupid, but Johnny Knoxville's in his late 40s or 50s now, and they've come back and done Jackass 3 and Steve was back in it and everyone else is pretty good. And that's just come out. So I think they might be allies that just haven't learned their lesson, but you're totally correct. What's adaptive about that risk-taking behavior for you or what would have been adaptive about that super high risk-taking behavior for young men? Sure. Well, you know, as is true and most sexually reproducing species, not everyone gets to reproduce, you know, and from an evolutionary perspective, reproduction is what I like to

call Darwin's bottom line. And being shut out of reproduction from an evolutionary perspective is something that you would totally expect any and all kinds of adaptations to emerge to prevent being shut out of reproduction from an evolutionary perspective is something that you would totally expect any and all kinds of adaptations to a murder is to prevent being shut out of reproduction because any of our ancestors that didn't reproduce didn't become ancestors. So the ones who did reproduce

had whatever behavioral and physical adaptations that ultimately cultivated reproduction. So I think, you know, then you step back and be like, well, why are men like young men like this? And mathematically, the answer essentially is that it's a risky strategy under some conditions. It's going to lead to early death or adverse outcomes, but it's also likely that the benefits, the reproductive benefits on average over large periods of time likely outweighed the survival related costs.

The same reason that the peacock's tail emerged. A lot of peacocks died at the teeth of tigers, but the ones who reproduced on average... They had the house edge equivalent. Yeah, dude. I mean, that's a really good way to look at it. And I suppose this summarizes one of the key issues that you find with the modern era, which is this mismatch, which is that we are designed for one particular type of environment, and now we're living in another, and this mismatch causes us unhappiness or trauma or just a suboptimal approach to the way that we live.

Yeah, definitely. I feel like the idea of mismatch is so powerful and it is something that we've only scratched the surface. I feel like it is so relevant, it's so powerful. And what I like about it from a PR perspective is it's very different. Like once when you start talking to students or other academics about a lot of the stuff, like the male female differences, that kind of stuff, people start getting, they politicize it and start going down all kinds of rabbit holes.

When you start talking to people about, you know, generally speaking, if you look at the human mind that our experience and the conditions under which our ancestors evolved, it's night and day. There are so many obvious and important mismatches between the modern world and the world that we evolved to live in. And I feel like people across all kinds of ideologies and backgrounds can really connect with this particular message.

I like to think about it as a very simple way to think about is a fish that gets out of the fish bowl. I was teaching for a few years. It was great experience. I was teaching evolution based classes in China. And they were all second English as a second language learners. And I remember I gave a whole. What I thought was a really great lecture on mismatch. And a very bright student came up to me, her name is Vicki, and she said,

Professor, we don't understand what you just said. And I was like, after an hour and a half of lecturing, I was like, oh, man. So I went back to my hotel room, I thought about it, I came back the next day. And I'm like, raise your hand if you ever had a pet fish, half the kids raise their hand. I'm like, you ever see the fish?

You ever have that experience where you go in your room and it's on the carpet dead? And I'm like, the students made a face, like a bunch of them, you know, are gonna raise their hand. I'm like, you ever see the fish? You ever have that experience where you go on your room and it's on the carpet dead? And I'm like, the students made a face, like a bunch of them, you know, are going to raise their hand at that. I'm like, well, that's because the ancestors of the fish were completely aquatic. And all the adaptations of the fish are completely designed for a fully aquatic experience kind of thing. And, you know, so I use that as an example of, experience kind of thing. And, you know, so I use that as an example of now think about, then I think I talk about the monkey in the cage and all the work by Henry Harlow. What's the story there? Well, so he's famous for showing how infant monkeys, he's kind of famous for traumatizing young monkeys. So he did research and in labs,

I think it was one of the UC schools years ago. And if you take a monkey away from a little baby monkey away from its mom, these were Reese's monkeys and McCaxley was using. And you give it a choice of a mother, a fake mother that's either like a stuffed animal, kind of like a fluffy monkey, a fake mother that's either like a stuffed animal, kind of like a fluffy monkey like stuffed animal versus a fake mother that's wire like made out of metal and but has milk on it. Like the monkeys are torn because they feel the comfort of the one but they need the milk from the other. But a secondary, you know, so that's a lesson on natural impulses regarding need for maternal care kind of thing. But a secondary thing is all the monkeys that

were in his research who were taken away from their mothers for experimental purposes. When they were released with the rest of the colony that he had, they were messed up. And they weren't able to engage in regular, appropriate mating behavior or friendship behavior or colloitional behavior. They really showed just a deep set of problems and you can think about as well. Their experiences were completely mismatched. Under ancestral conditions, little baby monkeys

weren't taken out of their natural environment for several years and then, sorry, my light goes off automatically. Modern technology, right? And so, and this is the reason in New York, the the Bronx Zoo, and I was a kid, I would go the Bronx Zoo all the time and there's this great place called the Monkey House. The Monkey House was just this big old building and had maybe 50 cages, and the cages just had random monkeys. Sometimes they were with the same species. Sometimes not.

Sometimes there was like a log in there kind of thing to try to make it seem a little bit natural-ish. And in 2012, the Bronx do close the monkey house, and worse, they turn it into administrative offices. But from a mismatch perspective, you can totally see it. At some point, zoologists figured out, wait a minute, this is, we're torturing these animals. We're putting them in mismatched conditions.

They're showing stress responses, they're showing anxiety responses and so forth. It only makes sense once you start to think about things from the evolutionary perspective and from the mismatched perspective in particular. The next step is, well, let's take a look at the modern human experience and look at us, you know, engaging in like a Skype conversation, look at us, you know, sitting in our chairs, you know, official lights on the night time. Yeah, sure. And engaging in interactions, a lot of times with strangers.

So you were just saying before you're in New York City, I mean, the number of strangers that you see if you walk Down a block in New York City on a busy day hundreds or even thousands and you don't think anything of it, but under ancestral conditions We didn't experience strangers regularly and when we did it usually meant that there was some danger or some kind of problem so you know Modern evolutionary psychologists have really started thinking about how many, in how many ways are our modern conditions mismatched from the environments that we evolved to be in.

And maybe we're kind of like, like the fish in the fish bowl. Maybe it's like, we're so surrounded by these conditions and have been our whole lives that it's hard to question it. So I feel like the evolutionary perspective gives us the tools, the infrastructure, to actually question some of these things. And I think that's really very, very powerful and can lead to a lot of positive changes.

Well, the question here is which of the new adaptations, which of the mismatches are actually beneficial, the fact that I don't need to go and go to a stream to get water. I've just had in a bottle here or the fact that I can be cooler when it's warm or warmer when it's cool. You know, those are good things. What are the things that we have as a part of society and specifically for you that are making us psychologically unhealthy? So what would be some of the big problems that you've got or what would be the main, the main enemies in terms of mismatch?

That's such a great question. And as you know, I've thought about this quite a bit. Over the past several years, a lot of the research in my lab has been on this question. We've demonstrated that modern public education is mismatched in a whole bunch of ways that can have adverse effects. Modern politics is mismatched. We've done research showing that humans

are not really good at processing large scale politics. So if you see like, why is the political world such a mess these days, part of the reason is because our minds evolved for small-scale politics and not large-scale politics. The one that I've focused on quite a bit of late that I'm really interested in is, I guess what we'd have to call like social media or like modern communication systems under ancestral conditions. If you were gonna communicate with someone,

it was gonna be face to face, and that was it. You know, that was the only choice for lion share of human evolutionary history. And if you're face to face with someone that you know, your interactions are going to be very different than if you're anonymous and you're dealing with a stranger. And if you're anonymous and dealing with a stranger and you're communicating through a screen, you know, suddenly like the number of mismatches

that creep into it are enormous. So when I teach about this, I'll ask my students, I'll say, what percentage of your, just write down what percentage of your communications with other people in the last week has been of the non-face to face variety. And on average, we usually see about, they'll say 70, 80%.

And I've got to tell you, that it's for my generation that's starting to be true as well. We used to sort of laugh at the young kids in their cell phones and now everyone, grandma's, grandpa's, everyone's addicted to their cell phones. And it's such a problem because like you're saying, Chris, there are a number of benefits that come for this or obvious. The way the simple way to think about it is,

you know, with this simple thing right here, I can ask and answer any question in the entire history of the world within one second, you know, like every, at any moment at any time. It's crazy. The power that that has, I can communicate with people immediately if I have a family member that is in trouble, I can immediately provide financial or some other kind of help. So the benefits are all, I think, very obvious. We think quite a bit about those benefits.

What we don't see, because again, because we're the fish and the fishmull, what we don't see is the problems associated with it. And when you start thinking about it from a mismatch perspective, man, there are problems. So I'll give one example, anonymous communication. Under ancestral conditions, there wasn't anonymous communication. And in fact, we kind of evolved to be a little skittish about anonymous communication. So when you go to the grocery store, someone has their name badge on. When a student comes into my class, I say, hi, I'm Glenn.

What's your name? Your name's on the roster. Doctors introduce themselves by name. If you think about the professions where anonymity is part of what they're doing, it's really rare. I like to give the example of clowns. I wrote a whole piece about why clown phobia is pretty common. Well, clowns are like, that's the only job where you're hiding your identity. They have a made-up name. They're in a mask, they're in a costume, they don't break character.

That's creepy, but it's partly creepy because under ancestral conditions, we were only dealing with people in a face-to-face variety. On top of that, when you look at research on anti-social behavior, the best way to get people to do bad things is hide their identity. So, and that's it. There was a Halloween experiment about this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What was that? So, this is a study done by Deener in the 1970s

where they brought kids, kids were trick-or-treating. And so the kids were going to this one particular house where they were videotaping the kids. And they measured whether the kids were going to this one particular house where they were videotaping the kids. And they measured whether the kids were wearing a mask or not. Some Halloween costumes have masks and some don't, of course. And they looked at whether the kids were in a group or not because they were in a group, your own identity kind of gets diffused.

And then they did the classic where they put out the bucket on the front porch, and that bucket almost without fail will have the phrase, you know, on a yellow post it saying, take one. Like, you know, everyone knows the rule. And so of course, kids are kids, and they're not going to always take one. And what they found was that both of those variables, if they were in a group group. Kids each individual kid was more likely to take a whole handful. And if there identity was hidden if they're if they were wearing a mask people can tell they were if they were Darth Vader this kind of thing under that condition. They were also more likely to engage in anti social behavior and just like snag snag a bunch. What do you think the effect on the group

says, is that just diffusion of responsibility? Yeah, yeah. So diffusion of responsibility is a phrase that a lot of behavioral scientists will use for that where it's an ironic finding. And the finding essentially is that when there's more people and there's a bigger group of people, each individual has less feels and experiences, less responsibility for whatever's going on.

So people are more likely to do the wrong thing, especially if other people are doing it, they're less likely to help someone in need and this kind of thing. One ironic thing on that is that if you need help, you want fewer people around rather than more people around. There's those stories about blocks of flats and somebody being attacked downstairs and nobody calling the police because everybody presumed that somebody else is going to call the police. Yeah, absolutely. What do you think is happening, ancestrally, with that effect there? Is it the fact that reciprocal ultrasonry and sympathy and empathy and kindness and giving and stuff like that? A less necessary, if you're in a group because

you already have support of other people, therefore giving away something when you already have that support to an extra person doesn't make as much sense? That's super interesting. I had never thought about it quite that way, but I think that certainly might contribute partly to this. So this idea of reciprocal altruism came from trivers is huge, huge renounce figure in the field. And essentially said that we evolved a lot of adaptations

around the fact that humans engage in reciprocal altruism and that's a very basic feature of who we are and what we do. So I help you, you help me. And our species fits a lot of the criteria of that, which is we generally live in stable groups. So we see the same individuals over and over. We have good memory for individual faces and voices and that kind of thing. And we live relatively long lives, so there's like a long, you know, arc of time to sort of

pay people back, but that gets screwed up when we're dealing with strangers, right? Because reciprocal altruism evolved under conditions where we were surrounded by members of our clan. You know, small clans where you knew every individual in- The long-term game, yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So once we're dealing with strangers, everything gets, a lot of our evolved psychology wasn't, it wasn't designed for that. So things like reciprocal altruism, like if I'm in a group and we're all a part of a team

and we know each other and we're gonna see each other tomorrow. And then there's someone who needs help who's outside the group and I'm like, well, that's a stranger who's never gonna help me and might even be dangerous for me. So so many of these things that we might get outraged about and I can't believe people did this or that or didn't help, a lot of it can really be understood

by this idea that so many of the modern situations we might run into are outside the bounds of what our minds would have evolved to experience. That's just in group out group mentality, but I suppose if you're part of a group, it's easier to find an out group as opposed to if you were on your own, if there was just two of you, then you might behave in more of that, so a reciprocally altruistic way. What did you learn about education? Yeah, so that was a really fascinating area to get into.

So, we have a public, obligatory public education, and that's true in so much of the modern world these days. And I had a student named Katie Gruskin, who was, she was in my evolutionary study seminar and became super interested in, she just started thinking about education. She was an Ed major and she was thinking about education from an evolutionary perspective. So I pointed toward the literature of Peter Gray, who's a Boston college who's written extensively about education from an evolutionary perspective. The skinny of what he finds is that modern

public school systems have very mismatched and unnatural ways of educating young kids. This idea of sitting, you know, having kids in the same age, so like age stratification is one problem. Everyone here is 10 and there's 30 of you and there's one 30 year old woman over there and you're gonna sit there for eight hours every single day and listen to what that person says. And the knowledge that you're gonna get is what we might call secondary instead of primary knowledge.

So instead of like learning how to do something, which is under ancestral conditions, what education would have looked like. We're like writing about it and instead of like, you know, throwing a ball and seeing what happens, we're like writing about the physics of it and arcs and the math of it. That stuff's, you know, it's important, but we have such a such a focus on that kind of secondary knowledge. There's less time for play, there's less time for natural interactions, there's less time for mixed-age kinds of groups. And one of the outcomes associated with that

is you tend to see tons of kids and it seems to increase every year are diagnosed with attentional kinds of problems and are given prescriptions for pharmaceuticals. And maybe the problem is not the kid, maybe the problem is the situation. So my student Katie did a whole study that really took this approach of thinking of schools as derivative of factory mindsets. And so when you look at when public schools were started largely in the UK, actually, is where her research took her. It was, you know, the bell rings at the factory

and everyone's gonna start working and the bell rings again and it's lunchtime and this kind of thing. I had to use the same bells in schools as they did in factories. That's what Katie had said, yeah, yeah. The same bells. I mean, if that's not showing the hand of the ruthless capitalists that are trying to compromise

the proletariat's labor, I don't know what it is. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, there's so so many mismatches. So that's like the entire idea. And now we don't even question it. You know, it's like I was saying that I think that whole thing about like, we're so much of what we have is just, you know, question it. You know, most of us don't, like, public schools, public school, you gotta go to school, you gotta do this, you gotta learn that, because that's, because that's what we do. But if you step back and be like, wait a minute, where did this come from? You know, why is it like this?

And what Peter Gray did, and Katie leaned a lot on his research for her work. But he did, was he looked extensively at what does learning and education look like in pre-Westernized societies or nomadic societies, of which there's lots of examples of nomadic societies in Africa, in the Pacific Islands, in South America, lots of places. The common theme he found was there's not a single thing that looks at all like public education. That kids that the word learning and playing and education, none of those concepts are keysed apart in these pre-westernized groups. And regularly, kids are learning from other kids

that the main teachers in pre-westernized nomadic societies aren't adults, but their kids that are usually slightly older, so an eight-year-old might learn from a 12-year-old, and a 16-year-old might be teaching something through a 15-year-old or a 14-year-old. And they're learning while they're playing them, while they're just kind of out for the day and interacting. And wow, that is wisely different than sit down and take this standardized test

and use number two pencil. And if you can't do it, take this pill, you know, and we're going to have to talk to your mom and dad because there's something that matter with you. And, you know, it's, I feel like this mismatched perspective really forces us to step back and just look at the problems we have and just step back and think about them from this deeper level.

And I feel like it's powerful. And what Katie found, the short version of her work and she published it in evolutionary behavioral sciences was that she asked people, she gave a whole list of things that are typical of nomadic education, nomadic learning context, learning in groups, learning in mixed-age groups, less or project-based kinds of experiences. And what she found was people who reported a higher proportion of those experiences in their own elementary school experiences,

like school better later and did better school at all levels later than that. So, to the extent that we can like step back and this kind of goes to your original question about paleo psychology, like how can we use this perspective, not just for what we eat and nutrition, and that kind of thing, but for sort of our broader

Paleo education. Paleo education, exactly, exactly. And there's something to it. Going on to the emotions that you looked at, what did you learn about kindness? I find this quite an interesting thing to think about evolutionarily because kindness is one of those, it's quite bizarre why you would decide to give away

some of your time or feel a compulsion to help another person. We're told survival of the fittest that evolution is this sort of ruthless tool. Kindness appears to be a little bit of an fittest, that evolution is this sort of ruthless tool. Kindness appears to be a little bit of an interesting dynamic in that. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So, kindness from an evolutionary perspective is super interesting for all the reasons that you just pointed out. And one of the things about kindness is we like it in mates. Let me just kind of start there. I'll sort of unpack things a bit more from there, but when David Busce, probably the best known figure in the field, there's certainly one of them and it's a great guy and a great researcher.

When he did his famous research in the late 80s, early 90s, about what do people want in mates? What got famously amplified from that was how men and women want different things across lots of cultures. And that's true, but the headline that really got sort of dismissed is that kindness and mutual love were for both men and women across pretty much all these cultures. Number one, that was ubiquitous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, there's something very, it's not as sexy. You know, it's, it's, you know, people are like, well, that's, that's fine. But wow, men like this and women doing a women like this. It's much easier to say, oh, men are after youth and fertility and women are after resources and status. Yes. Then both of them are after kindness.

And I saw a recent study on this that just came out last month and humor is up there for both men and women. For both, absolutely. For lots of good reasons. So, one of the reasons that kindness exists is, if it's effective in securing a mate and if it's effective in maintaining an effective mateship, then it's going to be selected. That's kind of evolution 101 in a sexually reproducing species. So even though that didn't get a lot of air time with the findings from what

Boston is colleagues found, you know, it's really, really critical and it makes a lot of sense. You know, if you have a kind mate, then that means that that's some of that you can trust your feelings with, you can be vulnerable with, you can expect that person to help you and to provide you benefits. And then it becomes a reciprocal altruism kind of thing where you're providing benefits back and forth and that kind of thing. So, and again, kindness doesn't exist in every species, but where species where we evolve to be surrounded

by the same individuals over long periods of time. And that social ecosystem has to be considered strongly when we think about our evolved psychology. That social ecosystem has to be considered strongly when we think about our evolved psychology. So under that kind of condition, it makes sense that kindness would evolve because individuals need to get along with one another. And if someone gets a reputation as exploitative or stealing from others and not putting in their fair share, they're going

to be outed by others. They might end up being ostracized or punished in various kinds of ways. I think that the importance of kindness as essentially an adaptation that helps make people attracted as mates, as friends. We're doing a study right now about leadership. And there's multiple paths toward leadership. Some leaders become leaders because they're ruthless and intimidating

and selfish and scary. And some people become leaders because they're so kind and genuine and other oriented that people trust them and like, yes, this person has my interest in mind. So I think that that kind of certainly has a place in the human evolutionary story for lots of different reasons. I suppose that you can see quite easily here how the evolutionary mismatch is it play because in the modern world we can live on our own in an Airbnb, getting food delivered to us and we're safe because the police

have the streets and we're warm because there's electricity and heating and we don't need other people. You know, if you have sufficient resources, you can go through your entire life, basically not interacting with other people, and apart from maybe over the internet, your remote work job. But the difference is, we would have never been able to survive on our own previously.

And that kindness would have engendered other people to want to help us. It would have meant that we would have been less likely. Speaking of that, actually, what, I know this isn't specifically what you looked at, but I'm fascinated by the evolutionary explanation for depression and anxiety. Have you ever looked at that? Yeah, absolutely.

And that's something else that we cover a bit in the book. It's really interesting because from a positive psychology perspective, generally speaking, eradicating negative affect, negative emotional states seems to be a paramount goal. Trust me, I don't like anxiety or depression as much as the next guy. But there's a great anecdote that I included in part of the book by Randy Nessie. So So Randy coined the term Darwinian medicine has published extensively including several books on Darwinian psychiatry and how all the mental and physical health fields will benefit from being

Darwinized and evolutionized and his background as a psychiatrist. And he had this great anecdote that led him to thinking this way, which was, he was working at the University of Michigan. And one of his, he was doing therapy in addition to his faculty position. And he had a client who was also a professor

in a different department. And the client said he was pretty anxious. And so Randy talked to him and then prescribed him some anti-anxiety pills, you know, the equivalent of Xanax at the time and said, come back in a month and talk to me and the guy came back and said, all right, well, how you doing?

He said, well, I feel good, I'm not anxious anymore. And so Randy's like, all right, and he said, but there's still a problem. He's like, well, what is it? And he's like, well, I got a pile of papers this big on my desk. And I don't care to grade them whatsoever. And the students are knocking on my door and I can be not doing your work. And what's up with you? And apparently that motivation to sort of get that stuff done went away with the anxiety, which gave Nessie the insight of, wait a minute, maybe the negative affective states such as anxiety, as unpleasant as they may be, have a very

important evolutionary function. And, you know, once you start thinking from an evolutionary perspective, if there's some feature of the organism, that is species typical. If humans across the world have tendencies toward anxiety, especially under certain kinds of the same kinds of conditions, then instead of saying, oh, anxiety feels bad, let's get rid of it, you know, well, why don't we step back and say, you know, what is this? Why what's the function of it? What is the evolutionary function? Why is this part of our evolved psychology? And then in treating it, you know, what is this? Why, what's the function of it? What is the evolutionary function? Why is this part of our evolved psychology? And then in treating it, you have a different perspective.

You know, you can step back and say, we don't want to just get rid of anxiety. We want to keep it controlled. So it's not like running someone's life, but this idea of making everyone just as happy and free of anxiety and so forth as possible, that doesn't make any evolutionary sense. What about depression?

Depression, I'd say very similar. Very similar. There's a guy Matt Keller, who I think, I know he was at the University of Colorado. I think he may still be there, very bright scholar, published research a while back really extensively looking at depression from an evolutionary lens. And it was, he was asking the same questions. He was like, well, instead of just getting rid of depression, which obviously, you know, depression can be, can be debilitating and have all kinds of adverse outcomes.

It's like, but what, what might be the evolutionary function of depression? It's essentially the question of what he found was even though the DSM, which is the main book that you use for diagnosing mental psychopathologies and mental health issues on a large global scale, the DSM at that time, when it talked about depression, it did not take, and it still doesn't. It didn't take an evolutionary approach. So it just had all these symptoms. And if you've had these symptoms over this amount of time, then we're going to call you depressed. And what Matt Keller found was that depression can actually come about by multiple pathways. And probably the best way to address depression

is to think about the pathway that led to it. The two specific contrasting examples he gave, one was the loss of a loved one. So loss of a loved one is a classic catalyst for depression. People might become depressed depending on the closeness of the relationship and so forth for extensive periods of time. And when people lose a loved one, they tend to reach out to others and try to form social connections. So a common thing that's found in people who have depression caused by loss is a reaching out to others.

Whereas another catalyst for depression is an error, a major error. You mess something up, there was something that was your fault, you failed at something. Cheat upon the... Yes, yeah, messed up, you can't take it back, it becomes public, this kind of thing. And with this kind of thing, the depression that follows from that, people can't take it back, it becomes public. This kind of thing, and with this kind of thing, the depression that follows from that, people don't reach out to others, people withdraw, people stay in bed late, people stop eating,

people like, I don't wanna talk to anyone. They really, and the way he puts it is, and you also see a lot of obsessive thinking, and he says, people are like, it's like your mind goes into overdrive of, let me replay that. And let me figure out, what can I do in the future to not do that again? So a lot of the symptoms will look the same,

but they're actually very different kinds of experiences. And the specific patterns that go with those two different forms of depression seem to be adaptive given the sort of context under which they each came about. So the grief depression that is I've lost somebody that was close to me Presumably this person would have provided me with support and maybe food and maybe attention and state is perhaps also It is in my interests to reach out to other people because I need to become more integrated into the tribe, the group around me and I'm going to do

that by reaching out more. Whereas if I'm out on a hunt and I mess up and somebody gets hurt or I cheat on my partner and I get found out, reaching out to other people in the tribe when they might think of me badly, is probably not going to be tremendously effective. So something that I can do is keep myself to myself, reduce my energy expenditure, try and overthink whatever it is that's just gone on in a desperate attempt to try and drill that lesson into me

and then move forward. Dude, that's so interesting. That's so fascinating that I didn't think about the adaptive, effective depression in that way. Yeah, yeah. He was one thing that I thought. Sure. What emotions do you think we would have felt

in ancestral times that are more rare now in the modern world? Interesting question. ancestral times that are more rare now in the modern world. Interesting question. I know there's a guy passed away recently, unfortunately John Montgomery, neuroscientist, who became super interested in evolutionary psych, moved to New York at some point from California and was doing research in my lab actually for a while. And he wrote pretty extensively about affective states and emotional states across

nomadic versus westernized kinds of societies. And his main claim, it's probably overstated, but he essentially made the case that what we call mental illness and things that especially emotional base mental illness severe depression, severe anxiety, mood stability issues. What his claim was is that these are relatively rare in pre-westernized societies. and pre-westernized societies. So getting it's kind of like, you know, somewhat roundabout way getting into your question of what emotional states would we have experienced in different proportions?

I think I- To bring it to extreme depression and anxiety, loneliness. Exactly, exactly. And I think part of it is that we now have these context, these social context where we're not constantly And I think part of it is that we now have these contexts, these social contexts, where we're not constantly surrounded by support, we're not constantly surrounded by family,

we're not constantly surrounded by secondary family or friends that we've been connected with over and over again, extensively, like we're now running into all kinds of situations where we run into people that are non-relatives, we run into people that are strangers. So we have all these environmental conditions that are especially socially that are so different from ancestral conditions. And what you find is anxiety and depression are way more common in urbanized areas than even in suburban areas or rural areas,

or certainly in nomadic kinds of environments. And I feel like from an evolutionary perspective, we can totally understand this. So people are asking like, why? Well, maybe we need more psychiatrists in large cities. Maybe we need better pharmaceuticals. This kind of thing, maybe we need more group therapy. And I'm not saying that these are bad things and certainly could, you know, it could be beneficial. But again, the evolutionary perspective really encourages us to step back and say, wait a minute, let's take a big picture, look at this and see why is this happening in the first place. Hmm.

I wondered whether all would be an emotion that we might feel a little bit more ancestral, just that people try and chase that down now by going to a movie and seeing really cool special effects. I think our radar has been tuned down a little bit because of what we can have delivered to us by technology and also a detachment from the natural world. It's very rare that you would see a beautiful night sky and yet the times when you do, at least for me, I look up and I think, I need to do this more. I must spend more time staring at the night sky. And then you don't. And I think, well, why? What is it about that? The same as a big field, a beautiful, wide, open space. Why is it that I like the look of that? Well, probably because I could see predators and prey from an absolute mile off. And yet, for the most part, my vision is

constrained by walls or buildings or the pillars of my car. And yeah, I felt like all would be, would perhaps be one of them. Yeah, I think that's a great question. There's this concept of a super normal stimulus. And a super normal stimulus is something that an organism evolved to respond to. And it's like, for some reason or another, usually artificially by human means, there's

an expanded or amplified version of the stimulus is made. And a lot of times, we can think of companies as making all kinds of products that are just amplified versions of things that we gravitate towards. You like food that's high in carbohydrates and sugar and salt. Well, here's McDonald's. It's cheap on top of that kind of thing. I feel like in the modern world, we have things that are just like,

like would have been unbelievable under ancestral conditions. Would have been, you know, a McDonald's milkshake 20,000 years ago would have been by far and away the sweetest thing anyone on earth would have ever experienced. And now you can get one every single day for like $2. And so we get a little bit desensitized to it.

And then the other part of what you're talking about, Chris. And I'm a huge advocate of the outdoors. And I lead hikes on our campus. We have great mountains right here in New Pals and try to get outside as much as I can. That there's something to it. There really is. And I know E.O. Wilson, who passed away recently, unfortunately, huge. as I can, that there's something to it. There really is.

And I know E.O. Wilson, who passed away recently, unfortunately, huge, posthumously canceled as well, passed away and then got posthumously canceled. Oh, it's too easy. He'll come back, though. He'll come back. But he wrote about biofilia, which is essentially what exactly we're talking about, which is we have an inherent natural love of the living world, and we do because our ancestors needed that. We needed to know flora and fauna. We needed to know where the water was, and when the water was going to be at a high point versus a low point, and eventually we became very

sensitive to solar events and knowing, okay, the sun's rising here. That means the days are going to get longer, the days are going to get shorter. And I feel like the experience of awe, because it's funny at 52, I feel like I find myself chasing those kinds of experiences. And I had this insight the other day, I was talking with a good friend about the sun, you know, and it's funny because like where I live, I can actually watch the sun rise right over the Hudson River, which on mornings where I catch it, it's just like magical. Like there's nothing that beats it. And I can track it. I can see now it's starting to come northward every morning, just a little bit more and a little bit earlier. And like these things are so like,

imagine if you had never seen or experienced the sun and at some point just someone unveiled it and it's like there's the sun like nothing in the world could be that amazing you know it's so beautiful so powerful and you think about so many like nomadic groups and ancestral groups that were like sun worshippers like yeah because that thing that's that's the energy for all of us, that's providing everything for all the food that we're gonna need for our sustenance. Following that is something that, of course,

our ancestors would have been highly attuned to. So getting ourselves the real short message, I guess, if there is a message is step back and think about how can I make my life more similar to what it would have been like on ancestral conditions, eating natural foods, being surrounded by people who I feel real genuine loyalty to toward and friendship with and kinship with. Finding, you know, finding real love where there's someone

that you actually really appreciate in a very deep way and connect with in a deep kind of way, getting into the out of doors, eating natural foods, it's so easy to just kind of look at your phone and just eat fast food and get into these habits. The modern world makes it so easy to sort of just sit on your button, do nothing, but there's costs associated with that that are I think very hard for us to see.

So this evolutionary perspective, really I think, gets us to sort of step back and open our eyes and think about liabilities of modern technologies and modern living, but also think about, well, what can I do to sort of really live a richer life today? It's something that I think about a lot. I think it's something that everybody thinks about. Everybody knows that the things that they do on a daily basis are probably not all the

best for them, right? We constantly have this tension inside of our mind, this, whether it be productivity, guilt, or connection with family, guilt, or overwork, guilt, whatever it is, right? There's some sort of shame or resentment that we have for the way that we've spent the last 24 hours because we could have got up earlier and seen the sun or we should have gone out for a walk more or we should have called our parents or we should have done whatever. And you know, previously, there wouldn't have been anything else to do that wasn't that. It would have been the majority of your life would have been spent outdoors with your family

eating natural foods because there was no alternative. That was it. And it very much is increasingly I'm thinking about this that we are kind of trying to reinvent a happier version of life. That's generally what modern, the modern world is. Right. We've tried to create a happier, safer, more convenient version of life for us. Because otherwise, we'd just still be living on, on fields and plains. And it is very much the job, I think, of the modern human to try and think, right, what has the world thrown out, which part of this bath with bath water was baby, and which bit of it should I have

held onto? And, you know, that's the sort of the perennial challenge that everybody has at the moment, you know, how much am I supposed to, how much is it worth me chasing down this new job role or this new bit of status when I don't need any more status. When I genuinely might take more pleasure from just getting home an hour earlier and spending it with my kids or I genuinely might prefer to just get a job that is five minutes down the road because I already have enough money, I already have enough whatever it else it is. And it means that I can spend my time training and doing whatever

it else it is that I really, really enjoy to do which is again more naturalistic. People that choose to spend, I've been spending a bit of time around people in New York who have some very, very expensive apartments and what one of them in Tribeca. I thought for this sort of money you could probably have a house and the flights to be able to get there on three different continents in some small little place. And which ones going to give you more satisfaction. And it really is, and that's not to say that there isn't value in having a beautiful apartment that's convenient and downtown and your kids can have good education and all that stuff. But we do get lied to, both by ourselves

and by what the people around us do and by what culture tells us that we're supposed to do. And very much the most effective people that I know aren't people that are going out and seeking new information. They're ones that are fantastic at filtering the information that they get. They're the ones that are able to really discriminate the signal from the noise and they go, okay, this is something that I need. This is just, this is horse shit. I don't need this.

This point, this point doesn't add anything to my life. And that convenience is the final sort of nail in the coffin that when you mix hypernormal stimuli with always on availability, it's really different. I'm walking down the strait, I was going to the gym, you're on a walk past the crispy cream and time square. I thought, I'm on my way to the gym, why am I looking at this crispy cream place as if I want to go to it? I'm literally going to offset it, because it's there, it's because it's directly in front of me, and because there's basically no benefit in the here and now for me doing it. There'll be benefit that there'll be a pain, sorry, for me to pay tomorrow or in a couple of weeks time when I'm not as lean as I want to be.

But yeah, man, I think I really hope that paleo psychology becomes more of a field that people pay attention to because I genuinely do think it's probably got a lot of the answers to questions that people feel are super existential and are actually just mismatches between what the system is used to and what they're doing now. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I appreciate it. I think you've articulated that really well. And certainly a lot of the work that I've done in the last few years has really been trying to advance exactly this.

One angle that I've thought about quite a bit has to do with government and business organizations where especially like producers of technology so you can imagine you know the companies that are social media companies or Apple or companies that are making these technologies wouldn't it be great if they had trainings or personnel or something, some structure that connected with, explicitly connected with an evolutionary approach. Wouldn't it be great if Snapchat and Instagram had people at a very high level with an understanding of, you know, this stuff can be addictive, this stuff can be problematic. And what can we do understanding human evolve psychology? What can we do with this product to help minimize those unforeseen liabilities?

I think what they're doing, what these people are doing, they do understand the evolution or at least in part they understand it, but they're using it to further magnify the revenue and the time on site that they do with these apps. So yeah, I think, first of you would need to have a change of philosophy. If you give these people a deeper understanding of how the human brain works, to me, that just seems a lot like you're giving them

more leverage to be able to take people's time away. But dude, I think that you're right with that as well. It would be fantastic if these technology companies could use the insights around how our minds work to make our lives better because they have, it's their choice. What we do with our devices, they could make the apps less addictive, they could make the time that we spend on them more meaningful to us, they could connect us with stuff that makes us feel better, rather the more outraged and blah, blah, blah. And I wonder whether we're going to look back in 50 years time, at this period, in the same way as us looking back at those ladies that used to

lick the nibs of the paintbrushes that had radium on them. And think, what are you doing? Are the people that worked in next to factories that were spewing out smoke? And just see it as, you know, this was a perhaps necessary cost on route to finding a more refined version of something that would later be a completed product. But God, I'm glad that I didn't live through that time. Wow, that's a very powerful idea. And to be honest, I think what you're painting

is almost the best case scenario. Or that it get better? That's presuming that it gets better. Right. With VR and Metaverse and augmented reality and mirror link and stuff like that. Yeah, when you can't escape it anymore, if we don't fix the philosophy problem around this misalignment between what we want and what the what the apps do, yeah, it just gets deeper, right? Just gets more embedded. Yeah, I think so. I think you're absolutely right on that. Glenn Gaire, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the work

that you do, where should they go? Well, I've got my website glengaire.com, and I also have a psychology today blog called Darwin Subterranean World, and I would be more than happy to connect with people who have questions or want to engage in discussions. So, thanks, Gwen.

Yep, thanks so much, Chris. Appreciate being on the show. you