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

Dr Diana Fleishman 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 #covid #evolutionarypsychology #personality - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: modernwisdompodcast@gmail.com

Dr Diana FleischmanguestChris Williamsonhost
Mar 5, 20211h 9mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:26

    Post-COVID social anxiety and the question: can illness change personality?

    1. DF

      I certainly am feeling better every day, and kind of more like myself. But there was a period of, of a week or two after I caught COVID where I knew I wasn't infectious, I was, like, going for a walk outside, and strangers scared me more than they usually do. I was much more socially anxious.

    2. CW

      (wind blowing) Talking about whether COVID can change your personality. Uh, what even is that question? What, what are we on about?

  2. 0:26 – 1:37

    Pathogens vs hosts: behavior manipulation, inflammation, and shifting priorities

    1. DF

      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, your goals and priorities from a, 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, 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 a 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.

  3. 1:37 – 3:43

    Aligned and misaligned incentives: sneezing, fever, and appetite suppression

    1. CW

      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.

    2. DF

      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, 'cause 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, like, sneezing on your kids, right? But there's other things where your interests are not aligned. So, fever is one way that your interests are not aligned. The, the virus and the bacteria, whatever you're infected with, does not want you to have a fever, because a fever is really optimal for you. This is why I get very frustrated when people take antifebrile, you know, anti-fever medications when they're sick. I, I never do, because the fever is really the best possible thing for you to be, uh, you know, doing. Um, also, you know, 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. Uh, so they'll, they'll be more costly. Uh, and also it takes a lot of energy to digest. So, in that sense, your body's also winning and... as an appetite suppressant. Um, if a, if a virus or a bacteria could really properly manipulate you, they'd probably try to make you hungry.

    3. CW

      (laughs) It's, um, it's interesting thinking about the individual differences, like what's happening on an individual level with regards to COVID, 'cause almost all of the conversations that we're having, um, are medical rather than psychological. And if they're psychological, they're group differences to do with how are people's mental health, how is society going to come back from th-... 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?

    4. DF

      Yeah.

  4. 3:43 – 6:45

    Lassitude: the ‘emotion of being sick’ and social sensitivity under immune activation

    1. CW

      There's this word, this word that you s- you sent me an article that I learned. Can you explain what lassitude is, please?

    2. DF

      Lassitude. Yeah. So, there's a... you know, we have emotions, happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, but lassitude is the emotion of being sick. It's the whole, you know... so what we think about, uh, 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... I mean, that they won't wrong you again in the future. And when you have lassitude, you are optimizing your behavior, uh, both socially and just a- alone in ways that are going to prevent you from exerting more energy than you need, but also are gonna help you get people around you who are gonna take care of you.

    3. CW

      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 latitude more sort of phenomenological?

    4. DF

      Lassitude is, is the, is the whole thing. Uh, but it's also the, yeah, feeling of malaise, feeling of fatigue, but also feeling chills. You know, when we get angry or embarrassed, you also have physiological changes that happen. Uh, when you're afraid, sometimes you will shit. (laughs) Right? Because you don't want to, if you're running off-

    5. CW

      (laughs)

    6. DF

      ... to be carrying around whatever it is you're digesting. You need all your energy to run away. (laughs) It's funny that snakes do this too. If you scare a snake and they just ate something big, they'll completely throw it up. And so-

    7. CW

      Yeah.

    8. DF

      ... you'll have, like, achieved.

    9. CW

      I've seen that happen.

    10. DF

      Because it's important for them to get away. It's more important than them eating that particular meal. That's the snake's version of shitting their pants.

    11. CW

      (laughs)

    12. DF

      (laughs)

    13. CW

      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 gonna end up tearing a hole in you.

    14. DF

      Uh, yeah, you can't, you can't get away if you've, you know, just eaten a third of your body weight. No. So, lassitude has similar kinds of... you know, it makes you feel, uh, cold, it makes you feel tired, and also can make you feel very sensitive to pain and emotionally sensitive. So, uh, there's a bunch of studies where they injected people with something called endotoxin. It's basically, um, 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 in- injected with this, this ... It's very funny how sensitive people are to rejection. So, imagine this. It's this game 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 (laughs) task, is that people who you can't even see in a game don't pass a ball to you.

    15. CW

      I don't wanna, I don't want that to happen, though.

    16. DF

      (laughs)

    17. CW

      That makes me feel left out. I want the ball. I want to play.

    18. DF

      Yeah. FOMO. FOMO. (laughs)

  5. 6:45 – 9:30

    Why sick people crave comfort foods: safety, energy costs, and ‘food preference crystallization’

    1. CW

      Serious FOMO. So, what ways are there ... Like, talking about food, which is something that you just brought up there, like, what, why is our desire for familiar food important, and why is the change in our appetite important and useful?

    2. DF

      I, I get very frustrated, i- in addition to getting frustrated with people endorsing taking fever-reducing medications, I get real 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, 5 and 15% of your, uh, resting energy. You spend a lot of your resting energy, uh, digesting food. But in addition, when you eat food, there's always some chance that it has some E. coli on it. I mean, everything we eat has bacteria, uh, 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, uh, some lemon water. They generally don't want to go to the Chinese buffet and, you know, try the, the pork anuses or whatever's on offer, right? (laughs)

    3. CW

      (laughs)

    4. DF

      Y- you really have a, a preference for, um, incredibly, uh, 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 averse to trying anything new, food-wise. Yeah.

    5. CW

      Mm. 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.

    6. DF

      Yeah.

    7. CW

      But the way that that actually manifests is just, "I want something that feels like home. I want something-"

    8. DF

      Yeah.

    9. CW

      "... 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, it's food that we know is safe.

    10. DF

      Yeah. We, we have this, uh, you know, as we grow up, this crystallization period. So, when we're toddlers, we'll put anything in, in our mouths. I've seen toddlers eat literal dog poo. Like, you'll see toddlers will, will just put anything in their, 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, you know, we evolved all over the planet. We couldn't have a set menu of foods that we could eat everywhere, because, you know, Inuits are eating whale blubber, and Maasai are drinking cow blood. You know, there's this huge variety of, of foods that people eat. And so, it's this period that, that matters. And so, when you want to eat something familiar, your body's saying, "I want to eat something that is very unlikely to have pathogens that I'm not already adapted to."

  6. 9:30 – 14:36

    Needy when sick: signaling vulnerability, avoiding strangers, and relationship strain

    1. CW

      What about being needy? People get needy when they're ill. Why is that happening?

    2. DF

      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 extraversion, extraversion isn't necessarily, "I want to socialize with people all the time." It's, extraversion is often, "I'm interested in meeting new people, and I feel comfortable meeting new people." And that's prioritizing sort of a novel, uh, area of so- of socializing compared to the people that you already know. Whereas introverts often tend to prefer, um, people in their, 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." And interestingly, there've been a bunch of studies with animals where they found, you know, a, a male rat will act sick, but if another male rat comes around who is a rival, he stops acting sick entirely, right? These are the kind of studies that are difficult to do, uh, in, in humans. And so, you see this, that you really can't act vulnerable or sick around, uh, 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, um, chronic inflammation, who have injuries, and who have infections, uh, 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.

    3. CW

      Mm.

    4. DF

      And this is something I don't think people think about enough. You know, when you talk about in sickness 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 gonna be willing to stick with you through that."

    5. CW

      That's the part, the evolutionary psychology adaptation part, that should have been put as a footnote in the marriage details, shouldn't it?

    6. DF

      (laughs)

    7. CW

      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- it kind of all bets are off a little bit, like, like for you've fallen 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.

    8. DF

      Yeah. So th- this is interesting that, uh, many aspects of personality that are valued or that people like about themselves, things like being extroverted, pe- you know, 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 catching a novel pathogen other than the one 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 a- and behavior, things like risk-taking, extroversion, openness to experience, they start to, um, reduce in- in rel- relative to the benefits of just trying to stay in one place, conforming to what you did before. And, you know, it- it's difficult, but, um, I certainly am feeling better every day and kind of more like myself. But there was a period of- of a week or two after I caught COVID where I knew I wasn't 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 (laughs) when I was sick when I barely talked to her twice a month usually.

    9. CW

      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 caregiving behaviors from social allies, I think it was put as in that, uh...

    10. DF

      Yeah.

  7. 14:36 – 17:17

    Faking sickness and social enforcement: costly signals and harsh ‘cures’ as deterrents

    1. CW

      Yeah, signaling vulnerability as well is an interesting one, isn't it? Just perhaps over egging it, uh, people accuse men of man- man flu all the time.

    2. DF

      (laughs)

    3. CW

      But la- the problem is that we're so good at deceiving ourselves, I'm like, "Uh, 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."

    4. DF

      Yeah. Th- so this is the thing, like faking is actually a problem and it's a problem in- in societies. And there's this great paper published last year or the year before by my former colleague and- and friend, Micol de Barra, Irish guy who I think is at, uh, Brunel. Anyway, he did a paper about how when tribes or people go into battle, a lot of times you'll 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, "Oh, I have this migraine, I really have to go." And if you think about things like trepanning, like digging, you know, putting a hole in somebody's skull, or many of the horrible, uh, 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, you know? If you're faking it, you're gonna be like, "Actually, uh, 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 (laughs) fine, I'm gonna go, you know, with you." So this is a, this is a- a social technology that people use to make faking much more expensive.

    5. CW

      That's so interesting.

    6. DF

      Faking is not expensive anymore as we know from like how much vulnerability people display all the time.

    7. CW

      Yeah.

    8. DF

      There's- there's- there's very little of skepticism or cynicism about people saying, "I'm really hurt," or-

    9. CW

      What's the cost of that?

    10. DF

      ... "I'm really vulnerable."

    11. CW

      Yeah. I'll tell you another thing that's interesting about, um, 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 is so small that we can quite easily see the voting demographic. Like your country is basically 50 countries like stuck together. Like our country is actually just one country. Uh, well, yeah, four different countries and all of them hate each other. Um-

    12. DF

      That's right. (laughs)

    13. CW

      What fascinates me and makes me, e- m- always makes me laugh is when people re-, uh, 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 gonna be bothered about fucking socialism when you're 65? Are you mental?"

  8. 17:17 – 19:33

    Pathogen load and culture: conservatism, conformity, and taboo logic

    1. DF

      Yeah. People, they have a lot of difficulty imagining that their future self is going to be very different. And- and ho- honestly, there's a lot of anxiety about, uh, changing fundamentally. I think this is part of the anxiety around, you know, motherhood and getting older is- is becoming a different person. But it- it is bizarre, especially with this whole COVID thing being so much more likely to kill elderly people, it really, uh, was a stark contrast to how people in East Asia were treating this versus people in the West were treating this. On the one hand, complete lockdown, inability to say that we were willing to sacrifice anyone for the- for the greater good of everybody, you know, keeping the economy going. But on the other hand, very little conversation about wh- who died and- and what happened to them. Um, y- you know, after 9/11, there was like moments of silence all the time for people who died on 9/11. I only remember one time that I've been in- involved in any online meeting or anything where there was a moment of silence for people who- who died recently from COVID.... so I do think that there's an alienation because of the, the distribution of, of deaths.

    2. CW

      Does that relate to the openness to experience thing of being sick as well? You, uh, you mentioned about, um, some countries with higher pathogen loads are more conservative and more conformist?

    3. DF

      Yeah. So this is this research, and it's, it's pretty controversial. Uh, Randy Thornhill, uh, is the main person who's... and he's, you know, written a whole book about it. Um, he basically talks ab- about looking at the pathogen load of various different countries, and then examining things like, uh, liberalism, progressivism, um, 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 those 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, uh, perspective. And there's, of course, a lot of other problems with these, 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 becomes so much greater.

  9. 19:33 – 24:59

    From zoonoses to factory farming: pandemics, ‘clean meat,’ and practical ethics

    1. CW

      Isn't that, uh, 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?

    2. DF

      Uh, pigs are... do carry, you know, zoonotic diseases, and there's a variety of reasons why. Uh, some people say that in... among desert people, like, uh, among Jews and, and Arabs, it would have been very costly to keep pigs because they need a lot of water. Um, 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, uh, was actually passed from... very likely from birds to pigs and then to humans. So pigs have a similar physiology to humans. We often use pigs in, in medical experiments, or, um, we have medical students dissect them because they have a similar kind of physiology, and there... 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 pangolin, uh, to a pig, then it's gonna be much more easy, is much smaller step for it to pass then to humans, because the physiology of, of humans and pigs is more similar than other animals like chicken ... okay, I'm kind of... (laughs) 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, um, this kind of stuff is gonna keep happening. And there's a, you know, a great, uh, piece by Philippe Lemoine in Quillette about how... comparing how long it took China to talk about, uh, COVID versus how long it took the United States to talk about H1N1. Um, they're very comparable. I think there's only like 11 days between them. And, uh, it's, it's very likely that any country that factory farms animals is gonna be the next hotspot for a new pathogen like this.

    3. CW

      Are you familiar-

    4. DF

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      ... with a guy called Cosmic Skeptic? Alex O'Connor, he's a YouTuber. Okay. So he's a-

    6. DF

      Yeah.

    7. CW

      ... he's a really good buddy of mine, and I was talking to him earlier on about this conversation I was gonna have with you. I really want, I really want you two to link up. I really want you to go on his show or if... and have a conversation, 'cause, fuck me, if he hasn't really red-pilled me hard. I, I challenge anyone to listen to Alex talk and synthesize stuff like Peter Singer's work and, and, and, a- 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, 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, uh, degree of care for me sufficiently high to actually overcome always eating meat. But certainly small changes I've made, like now, uh, 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, uh, wheat milk or whatever it's called now." Uh-

    8. DF

      (laughs)

    9. CW

      ... I find... I, I don't mean wheat milk. What's it called?

    10. DF

      Uh, oat milk. (laughs) It's fine.

    11. CW

      Oat milk, oat milk. Um, it's a Friday, it's fine. Yeah, I, uh, I just really, really think that that space is interesting at the moment, and it seems-

    12. DF

      Yeah.

    13. CW

      ... like the development in terms of animal rights philosophy is, is moving along at a pretty terrifying pace.

    14. DF

      Yeah. In, in brief, I'm writing up something about how clean meat, is what we call it, uh, that's the new, the new, uh, term for it, uh, because lab meat sounds weird (laughs) and, and people are... as I've just talked about a lot, are very averse to foods that have strange names or strange connotations. Um, but, uh, is really gonna be very important in terms of preventing any future pandemics for us to do that, and I don't think that the world is gonna become, uh, 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. Uh, I wrote a piece, uh, 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 cow's milk matters a little bit, but doesn't actually matter, uh, that much in the grand scheme of things. So, you know, my point is, is basically, um, you can make some small changes that don't involve giving up meat entirely that can make you cause less suffering than somebody who has given up, um, animal products, you know, or who has given up everything but eggs, for example.

    15. CW

      ... I got- I had a conversation with someone who is into, quite green and into saving the planet and stuff like that. Um, I've gone down the existential risk rabbit hole recently with Toby Ord's work, and I've got-

    16. DF

      Mm-hmm.

    17. CW

      ... Bryan Christian on the show soon.

    18. DF

      Okay.

    19. CW

      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-

    20. DF

      Hm.

    21. CW

      ... in order to cause suffering is still there, sat on your plate?

  10. 24:59 – 32:49

    Nature, hypocrisy, and cheap moral emotions: scandal and virtue signaling

    1. DF

      Uh, I agree that people who are, yeah, super eco-warriors and who are into preserving the sanctity of nature have a lot to answer for- (laughs)

    2. CW

      (laughs)

    3. DF

      ... by eating meat and stuff like that. But I also think that nature is, in some fundamental sense, uh, just a suffering cesspool. We enjoy nature because we evolved to enjoy nature. I love to see a, you know, a beautiful panoramic view of Iceland or a herd of bison as much as the next person. But I know that fundamentally, um, all the animals that we see in nature, especially small animals, are having lives that are terrible. Um, and many of them are having lives that are just as bad as- as animals that are factory farmed. So it, because these- these ethical i- issues are so tricky, and because we evolved in no way, shape, or form to consider animals as- as moral agents, other than, you know, children and- 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 with animals is actually just a byproduct of our desire to eat them. Sorry. (laughs) 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. Uh, but yeah, overall, yeah, there's a lot of very confused logic about eating meat. I would say that you in particular, if you're, are you into paleo at all?

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. DF

      Is that what your deal is?

    6. CW

      No, just trying to be healthy. Failing.

    7. DF

      You're just trying to be healthy? Yeah, I mean, you could abs- if you think that, um, it's important for human health to eat meat 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 mussels and- and clams and other kinds of bivalves if you want to try and cause very little suffering, because I don't think that those animals are capable of suffering. A- and they also fill in some gaps nutritionally in a- in a- in a vegan diet. Um, but I hope that in the next couple years, there's gonna be, you know, chicken that you can buy that was grown cellually. Uh, and, you know, I- I- I predict, and people like David Pearce, the transhumanist, also predicts that when this clean meat is, you know, widely, uh, dispersed through 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 gonna be incredibly judgmental about people who eat ordinary meat, because it's gonna be almost cost-free to have that moral attitude.

    8. CW

      I found that out to do with our sensation, our- our love for scandal, why it 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.

    9. DF

      Yeah, I mean, this is, when people- people talk about virtue signaling, there's good virtue signaling, and there's also, like, really cheap talk signaling. And people love cheap talk signaling. Yeah, scandal is like, I can- I can morally oppose you, and nobody knows really anything about me, so it's super easy to do. There's a great book, uh, 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 do, look at surveys, thinks that they're more moral than other people. And, um, actually, hating on vegans is a major way that people try and make themselves feel superior.

    10. CW

      Did you ever see that film with Jet Li? It was called The One.

    11. DF

      Hm.

    12. CW

      Okay, so it's maybe about 15 years old. I, oh, I don't know why this film always comes back to me. Like, I, whenever I have conversations, especially to do with status, it's- 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 'cause you're killing everyone else. And when I hear about, like, non-zero-sum status games to do with bringing other people down to make yourself better, I always think about Jet Li killing himself in The One.

    13. DF

      (laughs) that's like, yeah, that's- that's a very interesting trade-off, because, you know, 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 on a date with a guy, this was like 15 years ago, um, 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 and we never spoke again. (laughs)

    14. CW

      Wow. You're right, yeah, because I mean, what- you would have to adapt. If- if evolution, if, um, you're gonna have identical twins, evolution's gonna have to put something in that makes you help each other live.

    15. DF

      Well, yeah, I mean, we- we are all evolved to help people. There's a super interesting study. Um, Lisa DeBruine is a researcher in the UK who did this interesting study where she morphed...... like, let's say you have two different faces and I morph one of them with a stranger, so it's half stranger face ... anyway. And then I morph the other face with your face, so unbeknownst to you, it actually looks like you. It has some facial characteristics in common with you. You're going to be much more cooperative if I say, "You're playing a game with these two people." You won't know why, but you're going to be much more cooperative with the face of the person who looks similar to you, whether they're the same sex or the opposite sex, because all of us have these kin selection, uh, mechanisms. And as much as people want to promote, you know, things like diversity and, um, harmony in a multicultural society, it's very difficult to escape the fact that we are just more generous and, and kind to people who look more similar to us.

    16. CW

      Did you see the study, I remember hearing about this years ago, well before the podcast, so it could be total bullshit. Not, not that I fact check anything that I say on this in any case, but, um-

    17. DF

      Please can you ******* me. (laughs)

    18. CW

      (laughs) No. Um, 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, um, entranced, they're constantly looking when you show them different sheep. Whereas there's a, 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, et cetera, et cetera.

    19. DF

      Yeah. This, this mom friend of mine, she was really worried about her son and she said, you know, "We went to this playground. I'm worried that, that this COVID is really screwing him 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?" (laughs) I was like-

    20. CW

      (laughs)

    21. DF

      ... "Oh. (laughs) Your kid is having trouble telling these two kids apart because of the other race effect," which is well-known in, in criminal psychology, and this has been a, a terrible thing for, um... People have been convicted on this basis because you get a lineup and, you know, White people who, who can't tell Neil deGrasse Tyson from O.J. Simpson. Like, ******.

    22. CW

      (laughs) Fuck. And that's called the, the other race effect.

    23. DF

      Yeah.

  11. 32:49 – 36:49

    Long COVID, inflammation, and persistent personality shifts: smoke detector principle

    1. CW

      Amazing. I love, 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 would an acute non-traumatic incident cause a state change long term?

    2. DF

      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, uh, which, um, in the, 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, this inflammation. And there are certain other very normal diseases of civilization that are caused by this. Um, when you are overweight or obese, you can have chronic systemic inflammation, and when your body doesn't know the difference between, uh, "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 lassitude in response to that. So, you, you know, your body, the s- sixth sense that you have where your body is monitoring whether or not there's an infectious agent in your, i- i- in your body and whether or not you're fighting off something, it's not gonna 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.

    3. CW

      That negativity bias, which continues to come up throughout all of evolutionary psychology being reframed as a smoke detector effect is really cool.

    4. DF

      Mm-hmm.

    5. CW

      Does that mean, does that mean that on average fatter people are more introverted, fatter people are going to be less open to new experience?

    6. DF

      I do not know any state studies on that, and I, like, don't... I'm not gonna be the person to (laughs) do that. Um, I even... Uh, there was a guy who used to have a really great podcast called Smart Drug Smarts. Uh, now I can't... Jesse Lawler is his name. I can't remember the guest that he had on, but he had on a guest who was talking about the cognitive changes that come, um, with being overweight or obese. And people talk about, when they talk about having COVID, they talk about things like, uh, like brain fog, because inflammation also interferes with, 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 sitting down and reading. I just feel like preserving my energy." You know, even when I was sick, I was watching, you know, You-... I, I love Mitchell & Webb as you may also love Mitchell & Webb, the, the, uh, and like Peep Show and stuff. I was watching clips of things I've watched hundreds of times, just, just familiar stuff that I wanted to, to engage in. And that's a possibility, um, not just for, you know, people who have these kinds of in- in, uh, conditions based on, like, food that they eat. People are always talking about what foods are inflammatory and anti-inflammatory. Um, but also potentially, uh, you know, other kinds of diseases, um, like, uh, multiple sclerosis.Um, the last thing I was gonna say is that there are some studies where they gave people, like, an aspirin, or I think it was an Advil, they gave people an anti-inflammatory, uh, drug, and they examined their behavior afterwards. And people who were given, uh, I think it was 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.

  12. 36:49 – 51:59

    Sex, libido, and mating under disease threat: sex differences and life history strategies

    1. CW

      Wow. How does having a pathogen in the world change the attraction and sexual dynamics that are going on?

    2. DF

      I don't ... I mean, I'm very interested in, in how this is going to, to play out. So, men and women have quite different responses to infection threats. Uh, there are some marsupial mouse, that I love to talk about, who, uh, they only live for one breeding season, and they spend no energy at all on maintaining their bodies. Their enco- entirely, their whole energy budget goes to trying to have as many matings 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, uh, 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, uh, 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, can only produce a child every, you know, in ancestral populations, every four years with nine months of gestation and three years on average of breastfeeding. That's what hunter-gatherers generally, uh, 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. Sperm is really cheap, and eggs and pregnancy are really expensive. So, you might see even more misalignment of sexual desire and motivation in men and women because women are, are much more sensitive to infection threat. And post-COVID, certainly you're going to see a dip in libido. This is something that you see with all diseases. 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, uh, to females. Uh, so this could have long-term effects. I've become obsessed with a Reddit, which is called Dead Bedrooms, where people talk about, um, their sexual mismatches. They have a high libido partner usually and a low libido partner. And it's, it's fascinating, but I think that these mismatches, they happen usually, you know, men want to have more sex than, than women do. But you could imagine that, uh, this could be exacerbated. This, this mismatch could be exacerbated by disease or even the threat of disease.

    3. CW

      Good time to be gay then, if you're gay.

    4. DF

      Yeah. (laughs)

    5. CW

      Great time-

    6. DF

      I don't know ............................gay. There was... Or just that... There was a guy... There was a ... Like, say, Hungarian MP who, uh, got busted for being in a gay orgy. And the people who, you know ... Se- in, in the 1970s and '80s, we'd be like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe he was in a gay orgy." And nowadays, they're like, "I can't believe he was in an environment in which he could have spread COVID." That's so irresponsible. (laughs)

    7. CW

      I hope he was wearing his mask.

    8. DF

      (laughs)

    9. CW

      I hope he was wearing... Not that one, not that mask. Different one.

    10. DF

      What was it that Dan Savage was saying, that, uh, he thought COVID was gonna bring back glory holes? (laughs) I don't know if it has.

    11. CW

      Oh my God.

    12. DF

      I haven't really been around.

    13. CW

      Any-

    14. DF

      I'm going to be in New York in March, so maybe I'll let you know, but ... (laughs)

    15. CW

      Anyone that's listening who has found an uptick in glory hole usage during COVID, please comment below.

    16. DF

      Let us know.

    17. CW

      Yeah. I mean, there's so much that's fascinating there. I, 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, um, like, a restart to something that's become ingrained 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, a, a brief acute period that might end up spreading out? Like, are we gonna have a population dip in 24 years' time or something like that?

    18. DF

      I think that there's been some controversy about whether or not we're gonna 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. (laughs) So, that, that makes sense. But I, as far as I know, the, the, the full tally of whether or not there's been an increase or a decrease, um, hasn't been accounted for. And I know that some people were worried that COVID was, like, gonna have some kind of long-term impact on, on children. It doesn't seem right now like women who catch COVID when they're pregnant have children that have, um, serious problems with any kind of birth weight or anything. But, you know, what we saw in the influenza pandemic, um, this was like 100 years ago, um, in Denmark, was that there was an uptick in schizophrenia afterwards. And so there are some psychological problems, things like schizophrenia or, um, autism, that you actually wouldn't see until children were over- were older. So, we actually won't fully know what influence COVID might have on 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.

    19. CW

      Oh. So, is that ... What ... Is that due to stress? That's due to the psychological profile of the women during the pregnancy?

    20. DF

      There are some people who think that mental illness, many mental illnesses, are actually caused by disease. Like, there's, there's some cor- correlation, for example, between having a high fever, uh, when you're young, uh, having rheumatic fever, and having obsessive-compulsive disorder, um, when you're older. So, it, it makes sense. You know, from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that many of the, the ways that psychology changes that are least adaptive are some kind of noise that was introduced into the system-... that undermines the adaptive, you know, functioning of the system. So, it, it is possible. I'm, I'm not ... I'm really not trying to scaremonger. You know, coronaviruses are super common, and it's, it's just as likely that, that nothing will happen at all. But we do know that, that flu is correlated with an uptick in schizophrenia diagnosis.

    21. CW

      Why would schizophrenia and autism be adaptive?

    22. DF

      That, that's what I'm saying, is that they're, that they're not. So they're, they're maladaptive, but there is some way that a virus, uh, changes the development of the brain that makes it more likely. So there can be a, a nature and a nurture effect here, such that you have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia. But unless your mother had the flu when she was pregnant, uh, you won't get it. And, um, you know, there's, there's considerations about this. You know, when you see identical twins who are born, um, oftentimes the, um, smaller twin, the one who got, for whatever reason, a lower blood supply, a less placental access or whatever, will have a different personality than the other twin. So, that's a great example of, of nature and nurture that, uh ... this, this, this guy he knows me and he told me about these twins that he knew where one was much more aggressive and much more extroverted, uh, than the, the younger one, born a few minutes later who ended up being smaller, who was much m- who was basically trying to get social capital from her parents and get their attention in a completely different strategy, uh, by being cute and sweet and quiet. Whereas the bigger one was being more grabby and aggressive and, you know, shouty, right? So, we all figure out the best strategy to get attention. Uh, those things are somewhat genetic predisposed. But, you know, there's, there's also a correlation with extroversion and attractiveness in men and women. Attractive people are more likely to be extroverted. And men, strong men are more likely to be extroverted. And that's 'cause being extroverted, as I said before, is, 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-

    23. CW

      Yeah.

    24. DF

      ... and in terms of, yeah.

    25. CW

      So is that ... I had this conversation with Rob Henderson, and, and the penny dropped 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-

    26. DF

      Yeah.

    27. CW

      ... muscular men are 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." Um, does it seem ... like, the muscles.

    28. DF

      You mean like mukbangs? What are you talking about? (laughs)

    29. CW

      I'm talking about muscles. Um-

    30. DF

      Oh, muscles. (laughs)

  13. 51:59 – 57:20

    Asexuality, hormones, and modern dualism: resisting biological explanations

    1. CW

      you're not able to split test your own, yourself into a different, a different version where it didn't happen. That's mental. Are we gonna see more people be asexual during this period as well?

    2. DF

      I think that's possible. Uh, I mean, the, the whole controversy about asexuality, and I've, I've, I'm working on a paper about asexuality, is whether or not it's a sexual orientation or whether or not it's a, it's a disorder. Certainly if you have anorexia, not like anorexia the condition, but what's the, the biological term anorexia, you don't feel like eating, people say that that's, uh, the outcome of some kind of disease. But asexuality is being seen, uh, 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." Right? I think there's-

    3. CW

      Are you being, are you being serious?

    4. DF

      Typical. Yeah, the demisexual and, like, gray-sexual, um, there's this lexicon of identities, uh, that I think correspond to generally perfectly normal behavior. And, uh, some women who are asexual, like, in the study that we did, I think 75% of, um, asexuals, uh, were women. Um, interestingly, there are people who, uh, are asexual and they, uh, they're 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 hormonal going on. And it's amazing to me how averse we are to these biological explanations. People will tell you that, you know, an offhanded remark their mother made changed them forever, but they won't talk about how they had, like, a fever or they broke their leg or something. Uh, and people are really averse to the idea that these biological effects really have a, 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-

    5. CW

      Yes.

    6. DF

      ... and, uh, disease.

    7. CW

      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.

    8. DF

      (laughs)

    9. CW

      What, uh, how do you feel around people being able to pull back some of that programming and source code?

    10. DF

      Um, I feel like I have some insight into myself, but my self-insight is at the cost of having an incredibly cynical view of myself.

    11. CW

      Yeah.

    12. DF

      You know, 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 l- love my husband, but I also know that if he lost mate value or I gained mate 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 is going on in the culture is that people have this strong desire to think about themselves as these, you know, kind of disembodied souls. And it's not very dignified to talk about yourself in, in these other more embodied, uh, ways. I don't think that you can have a perfect view. You know, I have a, I have a, a close friend who, um, had a lot of psychological problems and didn't realize until he was 50 that he had had a serious illness, um, and a, and a, and a fever 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, uh, about my birth and about ... You know, my, my mother gave birth to me in Brazil, and I, I didn't breastfeed for, like, two days 'cause they gave her so many sedatives. Like, who knows what I would've been like if I hadn't been heavily sedated when I was born? I'll never know.

    13. CW

      Isn't it fascinating that we live in a society now where people pride themselves on their rationality, we're, we're a meritocracy, people are able to become whatever they want to be, I am in complete control, and yet-

    14. DF

      Yep.

    15. CW

      ... 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. Jet Li. Jet Li again.

    16. DF

      Yep.

    17. CW

      And his, and his, uh, the Jet Lis. Um, people talk about it in that way, there, there definitely seems to be a little bit of, and- and it's not even cognitive dissonance, 'cause people just aren't aware that it's happening. But we, we do seem to have, I would, dualism, I think, is a good, a good way to put it. That 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, uh, who I am, my true sense of being, and can become incredibly upset, uh, and insulted if that gets challenged.

  14. 57:20 – 1:01:26

    Predictability, ‘counter-control,’ and the future of behavioral inference from faces and data

    1. DF

      Yeah. Do you know that when someone needs to urinate, it reduces their belief in free will? (laughs)

    2. CW

      No way.

    3. DF

      Yeah. (laughs)

    4. CW

      Are you being serious?

    5. DF

      Yeah. (laughs)

    6. CW

      How? Why?

    7. DF

      Um, I think it's because you, you're, you feel like you're so tethered to something physiological that you're like, yeah, it reduces your ability to, to believe in free will. So, what you were basically just talking about is this kind of modern day, uh, 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, uh, we don't want to be controlled by others. He was using this reward and, and punishment kind of paradigm, and in my view, the more, you know, 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 gonna like, but it, 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. Um, you know, the idea that men and women have different cognitive styles is now incredibly, uh, 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, uh, a long form, a personality inventory. You can d- detect somebody's, um, 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, um, I think that what's going on, you know, is, is that this is getting muddied, uh, by people identifying in, as, you know, different ways. And, and, you know, my view is that some of the, some of that is really identity, but some of it is trying to escape control.

    8. CW

      I can't believe, that, that thing about the, uh, personality at 96%, I'd 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, uh, proportions and determining it from that, or from their personality?

    9. DF

      Yeah. People, people feel like their personality is part of their, 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, you know, 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, um, welfare, things like that. And so, uh, 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 phrenology, right? This is gonna take off. Governments are gonna be using this. You could absolutely predict things about somebody's psychology on the basis of their face. Uh, people o- you know, if you, if you t- 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% (laughs) accuracy. There's like, all of us, you know, when we, when people talk about k- 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's 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 it's stuff that they can't do anything about.

  15. 1:01:26 – 1:09:37

    Evolutionary psychology as self-knowledge: meditation, rumination, and seeing the ‘source code’

    1. CW

      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, uh, academic awakening has been quite late, I would say. I'm a late bloomer.

    2. DF

      (laughs)

    3. CW

      Um, eh, es- especially given the fact I was at uni for five years. I just did a subject that I thought was fucking shit, um-

    4. DF

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      ... and spent a lot of money pointlessly. But my love in evolutionary psychology is that it allows us to see kind of... It's, it's as close to seeing things for what they are-

    6. DF

      Mm-hmm.

    7. CW

      ... I think, as it can be. And that to me is fascinating. Like, I read, like, the book that made me fall in love with it is, uh, The Moral Animal. And, um, 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, um, 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 3 or 17.

    8. DF

      Yep.

    9. CW

      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 is gone. And you're just like, there is so much of that that I didn't know. And although it's, like, obviously that particular example is tragic, we think of a non-tragic example, isn't that fucking interesting and cool? Like-

    10. DF

      Yeah.

    11. CW

      Uh, you must have, doing the research that you do, you must be endlessly engaged and fascinated.

    12. DF

      Yeah, I mean, my own behavior, my own responses are endlessly fascinating to me. Just I, I sometimes feel like a, you know, I'm an alien who's been reincarnated as a human woman, and, uh, 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, and having the thoughts that I do. And it, it, it's, I think, something that people really, uh, really miss out on when they're unwilling to look at themselves with this often very cynical perspective. Uh, 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, uh, listening to this, 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, meet a man at the grocery store or whatever. And people are often so unwilling to be tactical about things, matters of, of love and life and, 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.

    13. CW

      That's dumb because-

    14. DF

      (laughs)

    15. CW

      ... I'm, I'm (laughs) , I'm more than prepared to spend all of my time walking in and out of Whole Foods in America, speaking really loudly-

    16. DF

      (laughs)

    17. CW

      ... 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, here's something I put, I put this in my news-

    18. DF

      (laughs)

    19. CW

      ... I put this in my newsletter (laughs) , uh, a couple of weeks ago. I think, personally, because I've spent a lot of time meditating, I just broke 1,000 days. Congratulations, Chris. Um-

    20. DF

      Awesome.

    21. CW

      I've spent a lot of time-

    22. DF

      You're not supposed to track that, honestly, but you know. (laughs)

    23. CW

      Yeah, yeah, kind of a... whatever. I thought it was good. I've spent-

    24. DF

      If-

    25. CW

      ... spent a lot of time, 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 mind.

    26. DF

      So what is that, an hour a day?

    27. CW

      But-

    28. DF

      15 minutes a day? Is that Sam Harris's thing?

    29. CW

      15 minutes a day, every day.

    30. DF

      Awesome. Yeah.

Episode duration: 1:09:37

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