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

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   I certainly am feeling…

   1. DFDr Diana Fleischman0:00

      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. CWChris Williamson0:18

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

   3. DFDr Diana Fleischman0:26

      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.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:37

      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.

   5. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:45

      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.

   6. CWChris Williamson3:07

      (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?

   7. DFDr Diana Fleischman3:43

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson3:43

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

   9. DFDr Diana Fleischman3:50

      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.

   10. CWChris Williamson4:35

       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?

   11. DFDr Diana Fleischman4:53

       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-

   12. CWChris Williamson5:10

       (laughs)

   13. DFDr Diana Fleischman5:10

       ... 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-

   14. CWChris Williamson5:21

       Yeah.

   15. DFDr Diana Fleischman5:21

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

   16. CWChris Williamson5:21

       I've seen that happen.

   17. DFDr Diana Fleischman5:23

       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.

   18. CWChris Williamson5:28

       (laughs)

   19. DFDr Diana Fleischman5:30

       (laughs)

   20. CWChris Williamson5:30

       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.

   21. DFDr Diana Fleischman5:38

       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.

   22. CWChris Williamson6:38

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

   23. DFDr Diana Fleischman6:40

       (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson6:40

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

   25. DFDr Diana Fleischman6:43

       Yeah. FOMO. FOMO. (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson6:45

       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?

   27. DFDr Diana Fleischman7:01

       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)

   28. CWChris Williamson7:51

       (laughs)

   29. DFDr Diana Fleischman7:51

       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.

   30. CWChris Williamson8:08

       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.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah. Th- so this…

   1. CWChris Williamson15:00

   2. DFDr Diana Fleischman15:00

      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.

   3. CWChris Williamson16:14

      That's so interesting.

   4. DFDr Diana Fleischman16:15

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

   5. CWChris Williamson16:20

      Yeah.

   6. DFDr Diana Fleischman16:20

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

   7. CWChris Williamson16:26

      What's the cost of that?

   8. DFDr Diana Fleischman16:27

      ... "I'm really vulnerable."

   9. CWChris Williamson16:28

      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-

   10. DFDr Diana Fleischman16:52

       That's right. (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson16:53

       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?"

   12. DFDr Diana Fleischman17:17

       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.

   13. CWChris Williamson18:22

       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?

   14. DFDr Diana Fleischman18:32

       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.

   15. CWChris Williamson19:33

       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?

   16. DFDr Diana Fleischman19:46

       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.

   17. CWChris Williamson21:34

       Are you familiar-

   18. DFDr Diana Fleischman21:35

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson21:35

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

   20. DFDr Diana Fleischman21:40

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson21:40

       ... 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-

   22. DFDr Diana Fleischman22:50

       (laughs)

   23. CWChris Williamson22:50

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

   24. DFDr Diana Fleischman22:54

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

   25. CWChris Williamson22:54

       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-

   26. DFDr Diana Fleischman23:05

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson23:05

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

   28. DFDr Diana Fleischman23:11

       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.

   29. CWChris Williamson24:24

       ... 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-

   30. DFDr Diana Fleischman24:37

       Mm-hmm.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Well, yeah, I mean,…

   1. CWChris Williamson30:01

      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.

   2. DFDr Diana Fleischman30:11

      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.

   3. CWChris Williamson31:04

      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-

   4. DFDr Diana Fleischman31:13

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

   5. CWChris Williamson31:14

      (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.

   6. DFDr Diana Fleischman31:59

      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-

   7. CWChris Williamson32:22

      (laughs)

   8. DFDr Diana Fleischman32:23

      ... "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, ******.

   9. CWChris Williamson32:44

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

   10. DFDr Diana Fleischman32:49

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson32:49

       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?

   12. DFDr Diana Fleischman33:03

       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.

   13. CWChris Williamson34:54

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

   14. DFDr Diana Fleischman35:03

       Mm-hmm.

   15. CWChris Williamson35:03

       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?

   16. DFDr Diana Fleischman35:11

       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.

   17. CWChris Williamson36:49

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

   18. DFDr Diana Fleischman36:56

       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.

   19. CWChris Williamson39:11

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

   20. DFDr Diana Fleischman39:15

       Yeah. (laughs)

   21. CWChris Williamson39:15

       Great time-

   22. DFDr Diana Fleischman39:16

       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)

   23. CWChris Williamson39:36

       I hope he was wearing his mask.

   24. DFDr Diana Fleischman39:37

       (laughs)

   25. CWChris Williamson39:38

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

   26. DFDr Diana Fleischman39:41

       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.

   27. CWChris Williamson39:49

       Oh my God.

   28. DFDr Diana Fleischman39:50

       I haven't really been around.

   29. CWChris Williamson39:51

       Any-

   30. DFDr Diana Fleischman39:51

       I'm going to be in New York in March, so maybe I'll let you know, but ... (laughs)
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   You mean like mukbangs?…

   1. CWChris Williamson45:00

      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.

   2. DFDr Diana Fleischman45:07

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

   3. CWChris Williamson45:10

      I'm talking about muscles. Um-

   4. DFDr Diana Fleischman45:11

      Oh, muscles. (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson45:13

      Yeah. Uh-

   6. DFDr Diana Fleischman45:15

      (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson45:16

      And, um, is it the same with extroversion? Is it, "Look at how much more outgoing I am. Look at how much more I can put myself out there because I have so much fitness inside of me. I have so much energy and vigor inside of me."

   8. DFDr Diana Fleischman45:31

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson45:31

      "And if you mate with me, your children could have this as well, sexy son."

   10. DFDr Diana Fleischman45:36

       Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a certain, uh ... you know, if somebody's extroverted and they identify strongly with being extroverted, there's a signaling aspect to that, and they can show off, you know, how extroverted they are, how many people they know, how big their social circle is. Uh, but that's certainly a lot of I think what social media is based on, is, is signaling that. Um, I was confused about the muscles and the excess calories, 'cause to me, like, muscles just have like a direct fitness signaling. They're not really necessarily signaling, "I have a lot of excess calories." They're just signaling, "I'm, I'm strong and, uh, and formidable." And if you have two different ways of gaining status, you know, prestige and form- uh, and formidability, uh, prestige is acquired by being somebody smart or wise that people want to talk to. You see like the, the gurus these days are people who are trying to signal that they have both, right? "I can give you great advice, but also, you know, watch me deadlift this." (laughs) So ...

   11. CWChris Williamson46:30

       Do you think those two work against each other? Do you think that it's a confusing signal to members of the opposite sex to have that? Is it easier to block people into archetypes?

   12. DFDr Diana Fleischman46:41

       Um, I do think that it's easier to block people, um, into archetypes to some extent. But people who are trying to signal that they're both, like a really muscular, you know, big dude often tries to signal just as hard that he's like a nice person, 'cause he recognizes that people are very likely to typecast him as like a tough or ... What, what is, what is it that you guys say in B- Britain if somebody's really built, that they're super hench? (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson47:10

       Well, I mean, I, I s- I can sort of attest to that myself. Certainly that for quite a while, I tried to downplay my looks and like overplay the vocabulary that I would use or the, the things that I would say or the, the way that I would talk and the stuff that I would cite, because I knew that coming from my background if people knew who I was, being a club promoter for 14 years-

   14. DFDr Diana Fleischman47:31

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson47:31

       ... and perhaps the way that I look a little bit, that people would just go to immediately think, "Fuck boy." So, I would, I would try my best to signal, "No, no, no, no, no. Enigma." Like, onion layers. Like, I would try my absolute best to try and get that to come across, because I desperately didn't want to be typecast as that fuck boy despite however much my history may have-

   16. DFDr Diana Fleischman47:55

       Well, I'm too good, I'm too good-looking now. I know somebody who wears glasses for that reason even though he doesn't need to, 'cause, 'cause he thinks he looks cleverer in glasses. And, uh, and I was like, "I don't wear glasses." He's like, "Yeah, you look Jewish. That does the same." (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson48:09

       (laughs) So moving forward, there must be ... there's gonna be like a couple of things at play, because obviously we have like our genetics, uh, our, our genes trying to deploy themselves through our, our behavior, right? And that may be there's been a virus floating around. To women, go, go steady. You need, you need to be a little bit careful here. If you have ki- children, it's, it's costly. But there will be an alternative-... system at work, which is, "You haven't had sex in ages. Like, you need to go have sex." So, surely-

   18. DFDr Diana Fleischman48:41

       Yeah. Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson48:41

       ... these two things are going to be pulling against each other.

   20. DFDr Diana Fleischman48:45

       Yeah. There's, there's, there's this whole literature that's really fascinating. It's called life history theory, and it says people respond to threats differently depending on whether they're fast life history or slow life history. So, slow life history means that you, um, give birth later, you take care of your offspring for a long time, and you live a long time. Whereas live fast and die long- young is like the, the fast life history, where you're trying to have lots of sex partners, have as many babies as possible. And, uh, if you get a threat from the environment that there's a threat of death around, if you're a slow life history, you might actually try to become more cautious or try to engage in, in a steady long-term relationship more likely. Whereas if you are a live fast, die young kind of phenotype, you're like, "Well, I need to have sex with as many people as possible. I need to breed before I die," kind of like those mice that fall apart that I was talking about. And so, the, the best example of different life histories is between men and women, and men h- uh, in- inherently have a faster life history, um, on average than, than women do. But there's this idea that if you experience hardship when you're young, you're getting cues that the environment is volatile and unstable, and that it's important that you, um, breed quickly. There's some correspondence, for example, with, uh, having early life hardship and having earlier puberty, that boys, their voice drops.

   21. CWChris Williamson50:08

       No way.

   22. DFDr Diana Fleischman50:09

       Uh, like-

   23. CWChris Williamson50:09

       That it triggers them to go into puberty more quickly, because that would mean that they're able to protect themselves.

   24. DFDr Diana Fleischman50:15

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson50:15

       Oh, my God.

   26. DFDr Diana Fleischman50:15

       And, and I knew a guy who, who said that, uh, he thinks he would have been, like, a foot taller if he hadn't had a stepdad. Because having a stepdad, having an unrelated male in the house who was aggressive to him, he didn't have a nice stepdad, um, sort of made him put his energy into maturing earlier rather than growing. And this is actually what you see in, in the Congolese pygmies, is that they're very, very small. They're like, uh, I can't remember how tall they are. Um, but they have much earlier puberty timing than other groups. It's because their strategy is, instead of getting big and tall, which is kind of a more long life history strategy, they instead shunt that energy into becoming reproductively viable earlier, because they live in an insecure, unstable environment. So, this is, you know, uh, this is a controversial idea, but if you want to talk to somebody about this, uh, Marco Del Giudice, he does, uh, really great work on this. And he's tried to translate many different psychiatric conditions into this possibility that they, they have something to do with life history. And you do see, uh, people's, you know, their, how early they go through puberty and various other things about them reproductively correlate with certain aspects of their psychology and, and mental health.

   27. CWChris Williamson51:29

       That's mental. Like, the way that our life experience can kind of turn on or turn off things that we presume are like, what, like, bestowed on us by God, or, like, immutable truths, or, like, some weird source code thing that's inside of us? And we're talking about in utero, like, before you've even entered the world, shit can happen that is going to fundamentally change the way that your life is going to happen, in ways that you're never even going to know. And you're not able to split test your own, yourself into a different, a different version where it didn't happen. That's mental. Are we gonna see more people be asexual during this period as well?

   28. DFDr Diana Fleischman52:10

       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-

   29. CWChris Williamson52:50

       Are you being, are you being serious?

   30. DFDr Diana Fleischman52:52

       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. 1:00:00 – 1:09:37

   Yeah. People, people feel…

   1. CWChris Williamson1:00:01

   2. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:00:01

      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.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:01:26

      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.

   4. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:01:37

      (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson1:01:37

      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-

   6. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:01:44

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:01:44

      ... 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-

   8. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:01:54

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:01:54

      ... 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.

   10. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:02:34

       Yep.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:02:34

       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-

   12. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:02:53

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:02:54

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

   14. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:03:01

       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.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:04:35

       That's dumb because-

   16. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:04:37

       (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson1:04:37

       ... 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-

   18. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:04:47

       (laughs)

   19. CWChris Williamson1:04:47

       ... 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-

   20. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:05:06

       (laughs)

   21. CWChris Williamson1:05:06

       ... 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-

   22. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:05:18

       Awesome.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:05:18

       I've spent a lot of time-

   24. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:05:18

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

   25. CWChris Williamson1:05:21

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

   26. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:05:27

       If-

   27. CWChris Williamson1:05:27

       ... 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.

   28. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:05:33

       So what is that, an hour a day?

   29. CWChris Williamson1:05:33

       But-

   30. DFDr Diana Fleischman1:05:34

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

Episode duration: 1:09:37