Why You Feel Bad When Nothing Is Wrong - Rob Kurzban

1. 0:00 – 1:21

   How Evolution Explains Our Emotions

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      You are at the intersection of two things that I love, evolutionary psychology and emotions, trying to work out why we feel feelings, what's the reason for them, how did they come to be. Why is this topic interesting to you?

   2. RKRob Kurzban0:12

      So for me, feelings are everything, right? So our motivations basically come from what we feel. So if we feel hungry, we want to eat, and if we feel aroused, we want to do something else. If we feel jealous, we want to take whatever. So like, uh, all- the most interesting pieces, I think, of human behavior, which is what I study, is driven by our feelings. And then the evolutionary piece gives us a way to understand them. So for me, it's really exciting. We have a really good way to understand all of the things that cause us to do the things that we want to do. What could be more interesting than that?

   3. CWChris Williamson0:40

      Why is the evolutionary angle interesting or useful when it comes to looking at feelings and emotions?

   4. RKRob Kurzban0:47

      I would say the evolutionary point of view is going to be critical for studying anything that humans do. We're an animal. We're an ape, just like every other species on the planet. We have an evolutionary history. If you want to explain and understand the behavior of any organism, I mean, it'd be weird to study an ape or a mongoose without the theory of evolution by natural selection. So I just apply, and people like me apply those ideas to humans using the same lens, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. It's not really an optional part of the analysis. You have to ask, well, you've got this brain, it's super complicated. What's it for? What's it trying to get us to do?

   5. CWChris Williamson1:20

      Hmm.

2. 1:21 – 3:44

   Why Do Humans Need Emotions at All?

   1. CWChris Williamson1:21

      Why do feelings need to feel like anything at all? Uh, it- it's not obvious that there needs to be a phenomenology to stuff. Like a thermometer is able to detect heat, and it doesn't seem to be feeling any kind of way. So why couldn't the brain just change our behavior without giving us the subjective experience of it?

   2. RKRob Kurzban1:39

      Yeah, no one knows. I, I mean, I got here today in a driverless Waymo, and it sort of, in some sense, it sort of wanted to pick me up at my hotel.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:46

      [laughs]

   4. RKRob Kurzban1:46

      And then it sort of wanted to make a right on red, which it did, by the way, very safely, just to say. And so I think a Waymo and AI and so on tells us there's something that you can get from artificial systems that-

   5. CWChris Williamson1:56

      Functionally, at least

   6. RKRob Kurzban1:57

      ... yeah, that functionally. But what- for whatever reason, biology isn't like that. You put a bunch of neurons in there, they get really complicated, and then a miracle occurs somewhere in there, and then the magic happens, and it feels like something. My sense is that it's just for organisms like us and probably other organisms. There's just no other way to do it. I do want to add one piece though, which is that we're complicated. And so if you have an organism that's kind of afraid of a bear over there, but it's also hungry because there's something to eat over here, it has to be able to make a decision about which of those things to do. Now, with the Waymo-

   7. CWChris Williamson2:24

      Hmm

   8. RKRob Kurzban2:25

      ... I think there's like some number, right? But for us, it's like, how strong is the fear? How strong is the hunger? And that sort of arbitrates which one we do. So maybe the sense that we have is like a way to figure out, of all the different things that we're kind of motivated, which one should I do right now? Which is the priority? So it's a kind of like a way to check among the different pieces, which is, which is the biggest one.

   9. CWChris Williamson2:45

      That's interesting. So because a thermometer just has one thing to do, a Waymo, to some degree, also just has one thing to do. It needs to get from here to there.

   10. RKRob Kurzban2:54

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson2:55

       You-- They need to be less complex, and they need to weight competing priorities in, uh, a less of a complex way, especially the thermometer, right-

   12. RKRob Kurzban3:05

       Right

   13. CWChris Williamson3:05

       ... which is a single-use device. But for humans, we need to be able to work out which of this fifteen things that I'm feeling right now is the one that I need to triage to the top in order to keep the patient, which is me, going in the direction that I want to, to survive and reproduce.

   14. RKRob Kurzban3:20

       Yeah, totally. It needs some common currency. Like what is three units of hunger, but four units of fear? How do you compare those things?

   15. CWChris Williamson3:25

       Yeah.

   16. RKRob Kurzban3:25

       And so I think consciousness, this experience we have, is that common currency. It says, "Oh, it's this important." You got to do it somehow because, again, as you get more complicated, this problem becomes bigger and bigger. Again, for the Waymo, its main thing is not to get into an accident.

   17. CWChris Williamson3:37

       Mm-hmm.

   18. RKRob Kurzban3:37

       And then the second thing is to get you where you're going. And then there's some other things, make sure they got the music right or whatever it is.

   19. CWChris Williamson3:41

       Mm.

   20. RKRob Kurzban3:41

       But we've got all of these different things, so you have to have a clearinghouse.

3. 3:44 – 8:09

   How Emotions Measure and Motivate

   1. CWChris Williamson3:44

      What is the measurement and motivation language that you use when it comes to feelings?

   2. RKRob Kurzban3:50

      I remember when I was a graduate student, I, um, I went to a lot of different talks. This was by a-- I think it was a physicist, and he, he said, "Look, everything that exists, exists in some quantity." And at first, I thought, "Oh, that's obvious." And I thought, "Oh, that's, that's super deep," because in psychology, we talk about all this stuff, but we never talk about the quantities. Like no one's talking about a unit of jealousy or a unit of hunger, really. So when I talk about the measure motivate, the first part of it is that for organisms to respond adaptively in their environment, they have to measure something, whether something inside, like how much glucose do I have in my blood, or something outside, like how close is that bear. There's no, there's no bears in the studio. But just to say, like you'd have to measure like what's the danger. And so if you're going to build a computational mechanism, which our brains basically are, a thing that processes information, the first stage has to be to measure something. Now, it could be complicated, right? So jealousy is measuring something about is that person a risk to me? Or, um, maybe, you know, admiration is measuring, is that someone I should, you know, kind of look to for advice and for guidance and so on. But it's got to measure something. And then the next part, motivation. Once you've got the measurement, you've got to do something with it. So for, again, from the evolutionary point of view, the information isn't useless unless it does something in terms of changing your behavior, either inside or outside.

   3. CWChris Williamson5:00

      Hmm.

   4. RKRob Kurzban5:00

      So I really like this idea that emotions measure something in the body or outside the world, which is going to be adaptively relevant, and then get you to do something. And that makes sense, right? So if there's an opportunity out there, I got to figure out if it's a good one or not, and if it's big enough, then I should do it. So I find that language really helpful. I also like it because it can get everything from hunger to awe to jealousy to contempt to the feeling that you've seen someone before.

   5. CWChris Williamson5:24

      Hmm.

   6. RKRob Kurzban5:24

      So the same language, the same measure motivate kind of system gets you from all the low-level kinds of feelings to all the high-level ones. And that I find very elegant.

   7. CWChris Williamson5:33

      Are there some emotions that are more measure and some that are more motivate?

   8. RKRob Kurzban5:38

      Well, I think that they all have both components, but for some, the measurement is just very straightforward. Like I said, I think thirsty or the feeling you've, you know, got to go to the bathroom or something like that, that's a pretty simple set of measurements. Whereas other measurements, like I said, for jealousy, they're really complicated.

   9. CWChris Williamson5:54

      Hmm.

   10. RKRob Kurzban5:55

       Um, so I'd say that b- all of them have both components. In some sense, they can't work without both components. You, you don't know what you're gonna, you know, you don't know what you have to do unless you can measure something, and then you have got to, have to act in the world.

   11. CWChris Williamson6:05

       Hmm. If feelings are essentially measurement systems, how often do we misunderstand what they're measuring?

   12. RKRob Kurzban6:12

       I think pretty often, and I think that in the modern world, it can be Especially difficult, right? So let's take envy. I think in, in, as, you know, back in the day, you were around very few people, right, much less than today, and more or less everyone around you was someone who kind of was someone who you might be able to see as a competitor or so on. But now, with all the platforms that the kids are on, Instagram and whatever else it is, you see all these people who have, you know, great success, a lot of friends, the k- kinds of th... So your, your envy system is like in overdrive.

   13. CWChris Williamson6:46

       Mm.

   14. RKRob Kurzban6:46

       Um, being fooled into thinking that, you know, it would be a good idea for you to try to get what they have, even though maybe doing that wouldn't be in your best interest or maybe if it isn't even feasible. I think we often... Same thing again, to go back to the road example, right? So we get anger, angry when let's say you get caught up in traffic. And in the past, that would have been really useful because you're probably gonna see that person again, so you wanna tell them, "Don't do that. I'm gonna be... I might, you know, I'm gonna... might hurt you if you do that again" or something.

   15. CWChris Williamson7:12

       Mm.

   16. RKRob Kurzban7:12

       But now you're never gonna see them again, so the anger doesn't do anything useful for you.

   17. CWChris Williamson7:15

       Mm.

   18. RKRob Kurzban7:15

       But we still experience it.

   19. CWChris Williamson7:18

       Does it mean, the measure and motivate thing, does it mean that unpleasant feelings need to be unpleasant in order to work, and that pleasant feelings need to be pleasant in order to work? The reason that they feel that way is to contribute to the motivation.

   20. RKRob Kurzban7:32

       I think so. There's really sad but very interesting work on the sensation of pain. So there are people who either don't experience pain or don't experience the motivation to get rid of it when they have it. And those people, sadly, they don't live very long because they don't make the adjustments they have to do to stop whatever damage is occurring.

   21. CWChris Williamson7:49

       Mm.

   22. RKRob Kurzban7:50

       Right? If you didn't hate having your hand in a fire, you wouldn't take your hand out of it, and then now your, your hand would burn. So I think for what, you know... I think it does. I think the way that our brains work, if it's not unpleasant, you're not gonna take the appropriate action in the same thing. So it's sort of an un- it's an unfortunate effect just of the way the nervous system is wired

4. 8:09 – 11:17

   The Hidden Intelligence of Body Maintenance

   1. RKRob Kurzban8:09

      up.

   2. CWChris Williamson8:09

      You created a taxonomy of five kingdoms, five different groups that emotions go into. What's interesting about the body maintenance one? What did you find uniquely interesting about that?

   3. RKRob Kurzban8:22

      Well, I, I... First of all, I should say I, I'm not a feelingist. I treat all feelings equally. I don't have favorites. I love, I love them all. Um, but I mean, there's, there's all sorts of interesting stuff there. I, I think parasites are super interesting. Like, you know, here we are in the modern era, and yet the biggest event in our adult lives was this one parasite that plunged the world into chaos for a couple of years in the, amid the COVID pandemic. And so, um, one of the things I, I always thought was interesting was itchiness, right? So the-

   4. CWChris Williamson8:50

      Mm

   5. RKRob Kurzban8:50

      ... there's, you have all these really fancy things on the surface of your skin that detect when there's something on there. And for the most part, you know, that's on there because there's little insects that might do bad things to you. They might put holes in you, or they might lay eggs in you, i- in the case of botflies and so on. And so you have to have little defense systems. And so there's l- like an interesting kind of way in which, um, you need to defend yourself against, you know, all the things that are coming to eat you or, um, exploit you in some way. And I think itchiness is sort of one of the more interesting ones.

   6. CWChris Williamson9:18

      Isn't it crazy that e- everyone's had the experience of sitting on a plane and feeling an itch and going, "Actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna lock in. Like, I don't need to... My body's not gonna tell me what to do. I know that I don't even need to worry this." And it just crescendos and crescendos, and sometimes it falls off, and then sometimes it doesn't. And you're like, "I can't. This is so compelling, and I can't think of anything else other than my whole body screaming at me." This thing that isn't painful.

   7. RKRob Kurzban9:44

      Right.

   8. CWChris Williamson9:44

      Right? We know that it's not pain. It's distinct from pain. It's not like someone sticking a hot poker in the side of you or stabbing you with something sharp, but it's just as captivating with a different flavor. It's kind of fascin- It's, like, crazy how smart our systems are-

   9. RKRob Kurzban9:58

      And it's-

   10. CWChris Williamson9:58

       ... to be able to distinguish that

   11. RKRob Kurzban9:59

       ... crazy too because it can be socially transmitted. So, like, this conversation, if people are watching it, they might start to feel itchy. By the way, sorry, everyone. But you, you could feel itchy just because people are talking about it. Being-

   12. CWChris Williamson10:08

       Tens of thousands of people-

   13. RKRob Kurzban10:09

       They're all itch-

   14. CWChris Williamson10:09

       ... in unison itching themselves right now

   15. RKRob Kurzban10:10

       ... they're all scratching at the same time. Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson10:12

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   17. RKRob Kurzban10:12

       Yeah, yeah. Uh, which is kind of interesting, right? But that might even... You-- Look, evolutionary psychologists often get criticized for telling stories or whatever, but it seems plausible to me that if other people are itching, there just might be things around that you haven't detected yet that are kinda crawling on you, and maybe this is a time to be a little more vigilant. You know what I mean? Like, could be. I don't know.

   18. CWChris Williamson10:29

       What about yawning, and why is that contagious?

   19. RKRob Kurzban10:31

       Oh, man, that's a hard one. Yeah, I, I, uh, yawn- There's, like, there's a, there's a pretty good paper that came out a number of years ago which listed 20 different possible explanations for yawning. I will say this. We know, uh, other critters do it, so it's not just a human thing. We do know that there's some social transmission. We do know that it gets some additional oxygen in there. Maybe you're getting ready to do so- I don't, uh, I don't, I don't-

   20. CWChris Williamson10:53

       It's a messy one.

   21. RKRob Kurzban10:54

       It's a messy one. I just want to say that some of the... One of the things I did, you know, that I, when I was, when I was, you know, trying to work on all of these different feelings was, I'm reading all these papers and, like, there's so many feelings for which as you-- recently as five or 10 years people are saying, "There's not enough research to answer this question," or, "There's very little research." I'm like, "What are people doing?" Like, what are you-

   22. CWChris Williamson11:11

       Are you telling me that the yawning field is horribly underfunded?

   23. RKRob Kurzban11:14

       I think it is underfunded.

   24. CWChris Williamson11:15

       We need to make yawning great again. That's what I think.

5. 11:17 – 13:24

   Why Humans Are So Good At Pooping

   1. RKRob Kurzban11:17

      [laughs]

   2. CWChris Williamson11:17

      Uh, okay. What about the need to poop?

   3. RKRob Kurzban11:19

      I thought you might be f- I mi- thought you might be fishing for that one.

   4. CWChris Williamson11:22

      Top of my list.

   5. RKRob Kurzban11:22

      Yeah. Super, super interesting one. I mean, as we know, everybody poops. Um, any organism that takes in, you know, stuff and then has to get rid of it, they're gonna have to poop. And so, yeah, there is this adaptive problem, which is you wanna poop kind of op- You want optimal pooping, so you don't wanna just poop anywhere, right? Especially if you're a creature that might be stalked 'cause then you're leaving evidence. Um, in a lot of species, including ours, pooping near where other organisms or men, th- their group, they shouldn't do that. Just viewers, take that-

   6. CWChris Williamson11:50

      Mm-hmm

   7. RKRob Kurzban11:50

      ... take note. So you wanna kind of poop when it's necessary, but not more often. And so you have these cool sensory systems in the rectal area that's measuring sort of the pressure on, uh, the, that tube.

   8. CWChris Williamson12:02

      Mm-hmm.

   9. RKRob Kurzban12:02

      Your intestinal tube. And as that pressure goes up, that's what the measurement is. Basically, how much pressure is there forcing that tube to get bigger?

   10. CWChris Williamson12:09

       Mm-hmm.

   11. RKRob Kurzban12:09

       And that pressure, uh, leads to... That's the measurement, and then the motivation is to poop, and then you do the pooping by releasing a little- Oh, little valve kind of thing-

   12. CWChris Williamson12:18

       Uh

   13. RKRob Kurzban12:18

       ... it opens up. And so it's a really well-designed system, which isn't that surprising because it's ancient. Like, that there's been millions and millions of years for the pooping system to get debugged by evolution, by natural selection. So now we are very good at, at pooping.

   14. CWChris Williamson12:31

       Would that explain a little bit of the need for privacy and shame that people have around pooping, that they know they're uniquely vulnerable during the act?

   15. RKRob Kurzban12:39

       Yeah, we're not the only critters, so there's so-called latrine behavior. There's organisms that-

   16. CWChris Williamson12:42

       Latrine behavior

   17. RKRob Kurzban12:43

       ... latrine behavior.

   18. CWChris Williamson12:44

       Brilliant.

   19. RKRob Kurzban12:44

       Yeah. Not my term, but wonderful.

   20. CWChris Williamson12:46

       Yeah.

   21. RKRob Kurzban12:46

       Where, yeah, there's a spot that they go, it's away from the group, and then they do their thing. Because the, the thing about poop is that, um, it attracts parasites. Same thing.

   22. CWChris Williamson12:53

       Mm.

   23. RKRob Kurzban12:54

       Because the poop can't defend itself, it doesn't have an immune system, and so parasites come in there, like if, you know, you get a nice meal or whatever and you hang out, and those parasites are bad for you and for the other groups. So you sort of want to keep the poop elsewhere. Yeah, so if you can, you can bury it. This is why so those of us with, you know, with our, uh, canine friends, you see the little poop that-

   24. CWChris Williamson13:12

       Flick, flick, flick. Yeah

   25. RKRob Kurzban13:12

       ... yeah, the little flick, f- flick thing, um, which is a little residual behavior. But, um, that's a well-designed system. It's cool. It's like it's telling you, "Oh, only poop when I have to." And then what? "Oh, I want to... Want... I should go over there to do it, where everyone else has done it"

   26. CWChris Williamson13:23

       Mm.

   27. RKRob Kurzban13:23

       And then scoot it

6. 13:24 – 17:31

   How the Body Uses Nausea As a Tactical Response

   1. RKRob Kurzban13:24

      away.

   2. CWChris Williamson13:24

      What about nausea?

   3. RKRob Kurzban13:26

      Interesting one. So, um, again, par- these... it's all parasites, right? So the thing about nausea is that if you are nauseous long enough, it motivates throwing up. And the nice thing about vo- uh, throwing up or vomiting is that if you do have a lot of parasites in your, um, digestive system, that gets them out, and it gets them out without m- having to go through the whole two, which takes a while.

   4. CWChris Williamson13:46

      Mm.

   5. RKRob Kurzban13:46

      Um, and so the cues that give, you know, to, to nausea are things that you've been poisoned. Um, it's just interesting because a lot of people talk about motion sickness in this context. And the thing is, a lot of times when you've got parasites on board or if you've been, uh, you have a toxin on board, is it affects the vestibular system, it affects your, um, ability to-

   6. CWChris Williamson14:05

      You feel dizzy as well

   7. RKRob Kurzban14:06

      ... you feel dizzy. And so, um, there's a mismatch between what your eyes are seeing and what your body is feeling, right? So the same thing that happens when you, let's say, walk downstairs in a moving boat, um-

   8. CWChris Williamson14:16

      Mm-hmm

   9. RKRob Kurzban14:16

      ... or-

   10. CWChris Williamson14:17

       Fucking nightmare. Yeah

   11. RKRob Kurzban14:17

       ... it's the worst. Yeah. Do not try.

   12. CWChris Williamson14:19

       [laughs]

   13. RKRob Kurzban14:19

       Do not try. And so the one hypothesis, which might not be true, but the main one is that your system is saying, "Look, if my senses don't agree with each other, that's a pretty good signal that I've either got a toxin on board or some s- like, there's some parasite or whatever, and I should get rid of it really quickly."

   14. CWChris Williamson14:33

       Mm.

   15. RKRob Kurzban14:33

       And so because that's what they do, they mess with your perceptual systems. And so the same thing is happening with motion sickness. You've got, here's my visions doing this, my body, my vestibular system's saying I'm doing that. That they don't match, so let's just be safe and just get rid of whatever's in there right now.

   16. CWChris Williamson14:47

       I remember New Year's Eve, 2016 maybe, 2017. I was working in Manchester running one of our nightclubs, and my business partner's first kid had had his first birthday party a couple of days before. Unbeknownst to us, norovirus was running rampant, 24-hour stomach bug. And I text him and I'm saying, "How's Newcastle going?" Because he was looking after that event. I was down in Manchester. "How's Newcastle going?" He says, "I don't know. I'm in the disabled toilet." I was like, "Okay, well, unlucky for you, but I, I, I've got Manchester. It's gone really well. We've sold out. Everything's great." And then 10:00, 10:30, I started being really catty and short with everyone around me.

   17. RKRob Kurzban15:28

       Mm.

   18. CWChris Williamson15:28

       I was like, just, uh, uh, terse, unnecessarily brusque with everybody. And I was like, took myself to one side and was like, I had a little word with me. And I was like, "What the fuck are you doing? Like, it's New Year's Eve. You sold out. You're in Manchester. This is a cool adventure. Like, just g- enjoy the... What are you doing? Just stop being such a dick." And then I started to sort of feel a little bit hot and a little bit sort of sweaty, and then there was, like, a cold feeling in my stomach, and I was like, connected the dots and thought, "I was with him. He feels sick. His wife feels sick. He's in the to- Oh, shit. I'm 150 miles away from home. This is now a Faustian bargain of whether or not I open the taps here or try and hold it in until 5:00 in the morning once I've driven back to Newcastle," which I tried, uh, and then exploded as soon as I stepped through the door into my own house in Newcastle. Um, but yeah, I, I... That was, like, so interesting to me, this weird cascade of emotions, of, of sensations maybe. Um, felt a little bit short and maybe like I didn't want to be around people and like I was being, like, protective of me somewhat. And then I was distancing myself, and then I felt a bit hot, and then my stomach felt cold, and then I felt dizzy, and then I f- felt sick, and then ba, ba, ba, ba, all the way around.

   19. RKRob Kurzban16:38

       Yeah. Lots of interesting parts of that story. My favorite was the conversation with me, which, uh, the, this very self-aware thing, like, "Why am I being a dick?"

   20. CWChris Williamson16:46

       Mm-hmm.

   21. RKRob Kurzban16:46

       I think a lot of people should stop every now and then and say, "Huh. Am I just... What's going on here?" But the other piece goes back to your very first question, which is we've got this feel- these feelings, but we don't always know exactly what their origin is. I don't know. Have you ever been, like, on a hike and there's, like, a... So you're at a canyon or something, and all of a sudden you sort of feel afraid. And I, I have this sense that there's this residual, like, little thing in our head somewhere that says, "Man, if you're on the low ground and there's people who could see you but you can't see them easily, like-

   22. CWChris Williamson17:11

       Well, that's interesting

   23. RKRob Kurzban17:12

       ... that is a, that is a bad spot to be in." I mean, obviously right now when you're in a national forest, no one's gonna, like, throw rocks on you or something like that. You're not gonna be ambushed in the middle of Yosemite. But I'm just saying, I sometimes get this weird, like, just a little bit of a funny feeling. I, I guess my point simply is, like, there's all these different feelings. Like, you're-

   24. CWChris Williamson17:27

       Yeah

   25. RKRob Kurzban17:28

       ... am I sick? Am I just being a dick? I don't know.

   26. CWChris Williamson17:29

       Yeah.

   27. RKRob Kurzban17:30

       Um, that we have to kind of

7. 17:31 – 21:21

   The Evolutionary Reason We Fear Small Spaces

   1. RKRob Kurzban17:31

      figure out.

   2. CWChris Williamson17:31

      What do you think about claustrophobia?

   3. RKRob Kurzban17:34

      Yeah, so I mean, I should... In many of these things, I have to say most of this stuff comes from my own experience. So I, um, started experiencing claustrophobia late in life, and I discovered that when I was inside a cave, which was not the best time to discover it. So here's what I think, and I think this is sort of supported by people like Randy Nesse and, and, and others who-

   4. CWChris Williamson17:52

      Friend of the show

   5. RKRob Kurzban17:52

      ... Is that right? Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson17:54

      Yeah.

   7. RKRob Kurzban17:54

      I mean, he did some of the pioneering work in, in all of this

   8. CWChris Williamson17:57

      People should go back and listen to that episode once they're done with this one. Evolutionary psychiatry, good feelings for, uh, good reasons for bad feelings.

   9. RKRob Kurzban18:03

      Roots of Empathy and Feelings. Great book.

   10. CWChris Williamson18:04

       Unreal.

   11. RKRob Kurzban18:05

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson18:05

       Yeah.

   13. RKRob Kurzban18:05

       Really good.

   14. CWChris Williamson18:05

       Nice primer as well. A two, two-car garage with your one.

   15. RKRob Kurzban18:09

       Yeah. People should definitely go out and buy, get both books, for sure.

   16. CWChris Williamson18:11

       Yeah. Agreed.

   17. RKRob Kurzban18:12

       Um, yeah, so I think the, the challenge that evolution faces is sort of getting your dials set right. So you know, you're born into a world. Sh- should you be especially credulous 'cause everyone's really nice, or should you be really skeptical 'cause you're in a world in which people are gonna be deceiving you? And as you go through life, you gotta set these dials. How much should I feel of this? How much should I feel of that? And then there's some genetic noise and so on. And I think, you know, those dials just get misset sometimes. I think in my case, my... You know, you should be afraid of enclosed spaces because you don't have so-called prospect and refuge, right? The best place to be-

   18. CWChris Williamson18:41

       Prospect and refuge

   19. RKRob Kurzban18:42

       Yeah. It's a fancy way to say, um, I can see what's coming, and I can escape, right?

   20. CWChris Williamson18:47

       Oh.

   21. RKRob Kurzban18:47

       Which is in the land-

   22. CWChris Williamson18:48

       Very nice.

   23. RKRob Kurzban18:49

       Yeah. Super interesting. And, like, w- I would say in a box you have neither of those, right? You can't see anything, and you're not going anywhere, right? So the-

   24. CWChris Williamson18:56

       I'm gonna guess that a, uh, closed space that's dark would be worse than a closed space that's light.

   25. RKRob Kurzban19:04

       Absolutely, 'cause you lose prospect, right? So the, you l- Yeah. Well done.

   26. CWChris Williamson19:07

       Interesting.

   27. RKRob Kurzban19:07

       A+

   28. CWChris Williamson19:08

       Um, is this why we like big vistas? You know, the, the house that's got the beautiful view is more beautiful than the house that backs onto a gray brick wall.

   29. RKRob Kurzban19:19

       I mean, we don't know the answer, but for, I, I would, I would bet a, a wager a lot that's right. If you look at pictures of landscapes, just what do people choose to, to paint?

   30. CWChris Williamson19:26

       Expansive.
8. 21:21 – 30:59

   Why You’re Not Attracted to Your Siblings

   1. CWChris Williamson21:21

      What about disgust? So nausea, I guess, like adjacent to disgust but different. What's going on with disgust?

   2. RKRob Kurzban21:28

      Yeah. So nausea I think is the motivational piece. So disgust is a whole different... So again, a path is, it feels like this is a pathogen disgust. There's, there's the, the world out there has all these different pathogens, and we have particular spots that are vulnerable to them, right? All the different holes in our bodies. And so disgust is, does the... It's measuring the risk of pathogen preference. Like just think about what do you find really disgusting, like the smell of feces, right? That's, that's where the organisms li- Like little maggots, like that's a really good indication that there's some kind of parasites in there. Um, the, uh, the smell of decaying flesh, people really don't like that. And so it's measuring what is the probability that there's some pathogen nearby, and so what's the right design if there are pa- is to go away, right? So we tend to wanna distance ourselves. We're motivated to put some space between us or to, if it's on us, we very quickly wanna get rid of it.

   3. CWChris Williamson22:18

      Mm.

   4. RKRob Kurzban22:18

      Even the disgust face has that little, like the tongue, as if you're expelling something.

   5. CWChris Williamson22:21

      Yeah, what's going on? What's going on with-

   6. RKRob Kurzban22:22

      I think that's an ex- Like my former colleague at Penn, Paul Rozin, I think his idea, or it might have been Darwin. Darwin, Rozin. Um, uh, this idea that the tongue is sort of like if you ingest something that might have pathogens, it has the cues that there's whatever.

   7. CWChris Williamson22:35

      You're pushing it out.

   8. RKRob Kurzban22:35

      You're pushing it out. You're expelling it.

   9. CWChris Williamson22:36

      And I suppose as well if m- I'm worried about maybe flies getting into my eyes-

   10. RKRob Kurzban22:40

       Yeah

   11. CWChris Williamson22:40

       ... I'm closing up. It's almost as if I'm making it, distancing myself from it.

   12. RKRob Kurzban22:43

       Exactly.

   13. CWChris Williamson22:44

       That's interesting.

   14. RKRob Kurzban22:44

       Yeah, so all these defenses against pathogens, and they all, you know, act in this coordinated way. I think disgust is super fascinating. People also like disgust 'cause there's the sexual disgust part too, right, where-

   15. CWChris Williamson22:53

       Yeah, when people that are grossed out by sex or-

   16. RKRob Kurzban22:55

       Yeah

   17. CWChris Williamson22:55

       ... situations that cause you to be grossed out by sex. Typically we would think, wow, survival and reproduction. Explain to me why being ever repulsed by a sexual opportunity would be a good idea. But-

   18. RKRob Kurzban23:07

       Yeah

   19. CWChris Williamson23:07

       ... it obviously is.

   20. RKRob Kurzban23:08

       Well, if they're, if the other person is closely related, it's often a bad idea, right? So the main-

   21. CWChris Williamson23:12

       Oh, Westermarck effect

   22. RKRob Kurzban23:13

       ... yeah, the Westermarck stuff, right?

   23. CWChris Williamson23:15

       Yeah.

   24. RKRob Kurzban23:15

       So people who were raised with someone, they, they find just the idea of sex with them, and this is Deb Lieberman's work, um, excellent r- research on this

   25. CWChris Williamson23:22

       Friend of the show.

   26. RKRob Kurzban23:23

       Yeah, friend of the show.

   27. CWChris Williamson23:24

       [laughs]

   28. RKRob Kurzban23:24

       Um, excellent research showing that the people who you're raised with, even if they're not related, but as long as they were in the same spot at the same time, you get, you're, you're disgusted by the thought of having sex with them.

   29. CWChris Williamson23:32

       Have you seen her work? Is it, uh, Thai or Filipino families from a particular religious, uh, subset that the, uh, parents of young boys would find the future wife at one or two years old-

   30. RKRob Kurzban23:50

       Yeah
9. 30:59 – 35:51

   The Most Surprising Thing About Anxiety

   1. CWChris Williamson30:59

      Anxiety, kind of the buzzword emotion of the last decade or so. What surprised you in your research about anxiety?

   2. RKRob Kurzban31:08

      Well, I mean, an- like everything else, this, this turned out to be complicated. I mean, I think, so I don't know if Jon Haidt is a friend of the show.

   3. CWChris Williamson31:14

      Friend of the show.

   4. RKRob Kurzban31:14

      Yeah. Um, so he's obviously done some wonderful work on this. One thing about anxiety that strikes me about the modern moment is that social media has put us in something of a, you know, like a fishbowl because our actions are constantly being broadcast, um, you know, either by ourselves or by others. And so if you're a social creature, which we humans are-

   5. CWChris Williamson31:38

      Mm-hmm

   6. RKRob Kurzban31:38

      ... and you, whatever, like the, the biggest threat for the most part for humans is other humans and what they think of us and so on. And so there is good reason to be more vigilant in a world in which you're constantly being observed. Because the stakes-

   7. CWChris Williamson31:52

      Vigilance about reputation management?

   8. RKRob Kurzban31:53

      Exactly. Managing your reputation.

   9. CWChris Williamson31:55

      Right.

   10. RKRob Kurzban31:55

       So who, you know, who are you with, and what am I doing, and how am I spending my time, and what successes I've had. So in some sense, I mean, I don't know if the anxious generation findings are gonna hold up. They look-

   11. CWChris Williamson32:07

       Bro, they're in the middle-

   12. RKRob Kurzban32:08

       ... pretty good to me, but

   13. CWChris Williamson32:08

       ... they're in the middle of the quickest 180, 360, 547-

   14. RKRob Kurzban32:13

       Oh, is that right?

   15. CWChris Williamson32:13

       Like just the replication of that. Every what feels like month I see something that proves it, then disproves it-

   16. RKRob Kurzban32:21

       Ah, yeah

   17. CWChris Williamson32:21

       ... bunks it, then re-bunks it, and I'm like, I, I'm gonna wait for the-

   18. RKRob Kurzban32:25

       Yeah

   19. CWChris Williamson32:25

       ... cards to sort of fall.

   20. RKRob Kurzban32:26

       Fair.

   21. CWChris Williamson32:27

       Um, but yeah. Get, get a little bit more ancestral for me from an anxiousness perspective. Like what's happening proximately? What's happening ultimately? Like what's, what's going on with anxiousness?

   22. RKRob Kurzban32:38

       Yeah. So I think, so anxiety is basically this, um... I think of it as fear for the future. So like there's gonna be some danger down the road, and I need to be able to address it, and the first thing I need to do is sort of measure it. So how likely is it that... So public speaking, right? So before people go public speaking or do a podcast, they often feel anxiety. Why?

   23. CWChris Williamson32:55

       Mm.

   24. RKRob Kurzban32:55

       Is because you're about to be in a context in which, for this one, millions of people will obviously be viewing it, and that's going to have an effect on your reputation and, and other kinds of things. So it is actually useful potentially to think about, okay, well, how should I behave? What kind of hand motions should I use?

   25. CWChris Williamson33:11

       Mm.

   26. RKRob Kurzban33:11

       What kind of questions will we ask? So it's leading me to strategies to help mitigate whatever that danger is or exploit the opportunity.

   27. CWChris Williamson33:18

       Mm.

   28. RKRob Kurzban33:18

       And so anxiety, if it's set too high, if you're constantly afraid about everything, then it, yes, you could have paralysis. But a little, again, going back to the mouse case with the, with the cat, like a good design should be to anticipate where are the dangers about to lurk in my future and what can I do to mitigate them should those things occur.

   29. CWChris Williamson33:36

       Momentous just made one of my favorite products significantly better and $50 cheaper. They have reformulated their Sleep Packs with a better and more research-backed form of magnesium, making the new formula even stronger than before. I have taken these things every single night, whether I'm at home or on the road, and it does make a genuine difference. The formula helps you to wind down, fall asleep more quickly, and stay asleep throughout the night with no melatonin, so no sleep paralysis demon sitting at the foot of your bed. Plus, it's NSF certified for sport, meaning that it is third-party tested for dosage accuracy, screened for heavy metals and banned substances, with every result published on the Momentous website. Best of all, they've got a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can buy it completely risk-free, use it for 29 nights, and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Why not just have anxiety at the maximum all the time? Surely that would mean that people are prepared for the future even better. That would mean that they've got a, a increased likelihood of not being surprised. They're gonna come across as someone that knows what might, what might happen. What's the reason for not-

   30. RKRob Kurzban34:57

       Yeah
10. 35:51 – 39:42

    How Much Anxiety Is Actually Normal?

    1. RKRob Kurzban35:51

       else.

    2. CWChris Williamson35:51

       Do you think it would've been more adaptive to have been more anxious in the past than now?

    3. RKRob Kurzban35:59

       I mean, I really am a little bit of a Panglossian on this, as it were. Like, I think evolution is an incredibly powerful causal process, and I think we arrived at a point where our dials are set honestly pretty good for the ancestral world. Now again, in the modern world, we've got all this weird stuff, so those dial settings are strange.

    4. CWChris Williamson36:18

       Hmm.

    5. RKRob Kurzban36:19

       Um, but I, I think I-- my default is to say evolution does a pretty good job, so probably we have about the right amount of anxiety under-

    6. CWChris Williamson36:26

       Hmm

    7. RKRob Kurzban36:26

       ... again, if w- especially if we were living in a normal everyday hunter-gatherer context. But again, the modern context is weird, right?

    8. CWChris Williamson36:32

       Yeah.

    9. RKRob Kurzban36:33

       We're around strangers every day. Like in the past, I don't think we would've been around strangers every day. And so like, I mean, for me just walking around the streets of Philly, I'm sure there's a certain amount of background anxiety because again, like I'm around people I don't know.

    10. CWChris Williamson36:45

        Who are all of these people?

    11. RKRob Kurzban36:46

        Yeah.

    12. CWChris Williamson36:46

        I'm not sure if they've got my best interests at heart.

    13. RKRob Kurzban36:48

        Yeah.

    14. CWChris Williamson36:48

        Yeah, I think this is one of the battles that smart, reflective, you know, curious, internally curious people have, which is, huh, I understand maybe, especially after listening to you and people like Randy Nesse, I understand why these emotions exist. I also understand that the past seemingly was much more predatory and uncertain than the current moment is. And this leads to a tension because the story that we tell ourselves about our concerns and our anxieties and our fears and worries almost always doesn't come to pass. And maybe that would've been true in the past too, but like there literally could've been a fucking famine three hundred years ago that could've wiped you and your area of... And forget three thousand years ago or thirty thousand years ago, right? So what people are kind of stuck with is almost a degree of self-judgment and shame around feeling the things that I feel. Like how silly for somebody to have to admit walking down the street in a perfectly civilized society mostly, being surrounded by strangers, or even just seeing some strangers, has contributed to my background anxiety. Because rationally you can explain to yourself, "That's stupid." Like, "I don't need to do that." And yet there might very well be this need to admit, "Huh, you know, like living in the city kinda contributes to this feeling of overwhelm and uncertainty and vigilance, and it's not really that nice for me." And there's this tension between sort of what we think we should be able to feel and what we do feel, and the fact that we've got this weird opulent, luxurious fucking velvet prison that we're in now compared with the horrible cave with the saber-tooth tigers that we would've had a few, you know, tens of thousands of years ago.

    15. RKRob Kurzban38:40

        Yeah. Well, that's why I think the, the evolutionary view is so potentially powerful for everyday lives because let's take something like envy and, and anger or two, that the... When, when you feel something, I think the first kind of reaction to that should be ask this question: What is evolution trying to get me to do and why? Like once you understand the function of these emotions, then I think you can step back for a second and say, "Okay, should I give into that?" And so in the anger case on the road, you're like, "Oh, evolution's saying, oh, you need to deter that guy from doing it again, but I'm never gonna see him again, so I, you know what? I can just ignore that." And the same thing with envy. It's like, "Oh, evolution's telling me I gotta keep up with everyone who I can detect in my world because that person has access to better the... You know, they're gonna get the good stuff, and they're gonna be the king-

    16. CWChris Williamson39:22

        Yeah. Yeah

    17. RKRob Kurzban39:22

        ... and they're gonna be mates." But that doesn't actually matter for me, 'cause you know what? I have a home, and I have people who care for me, and I have a, you know, I have, you know, um, all the food I need. I don't need to worry about that. So like once you understand what evolution's trying to get you to do, you can take the next step, which is saying, "Should I give into that or should I just sort of ignore it?" And then there is a challenge of ignoring it, but yeah,

11. 39:42 – 40:49

    Why Everyone Feels Overstimulated

    1. RKRob Kurzban39:42

       that's hard.

    2. CWChris Williamson39:42

       What about being overstimulated?

    3. RKRob Kurzban39:46

       Yeah, and I think here's a good-- another case where there's a lot of, um, individual variation. Um, and there I think, you know, for most... A, a luxury that people have these days is for the most part, we can choose our environments. And I think ri- there the trick really is to know thyself, figure out what is the level of stimulation that you would like.

    4. CWChris Williamson40:04

       Hmm.

    5. RKRob Kurzban40:05

       It's tricky when you, um, spend a lot of time like with your partner because your partner might be somebody who wants more or less.

    6. CWChris Williamson40:11

       Hmm.

    7. RKRob Kurzban40:11

       And so speaking completely hypothetically, one might have a partner who, um, wants to have music on in the household, and then one might be someone who is more introverted and wants to have less music on in the household. So there might be a little bit of a, a conflict there.

    8. CWChris Williamson40:23

       Sensory mismatch.

    9. RKRob Kurzban40:24

       Yeah, a little sensory mismatch, yeah, which can be certainly arbitrated very lovingly and-

    10. CWChris Williamson40:30

        Mm-hmm

    11. RKRob Kurzban40:30

        ... with care and effectively. But, you know-

    12. CWChris Williamson40:32

        And with proper soundproofing.

    13. RKRob Kurzban40:33

        And with per-- and, and with separate rooms, yeah. Um, but you know, I think that's the thing is that you, you-- one way that we learn, kind of to your point about claustrophobia, is you gotta figure out what are the things that you like and what are the things you don't like.

    14. CWChris Williamson40:45

        Hmm.

    15. RKRob Kurzban40:45

        And then again, we have the luxury of manipulating our environments to accord

12. 40:49 – 42:58

    Can Panic Actually Be Useful?

    1. RKRob Kurzban40:49

       with that. So-

    2. CWChris Williamson40:49

       What about panic?

    3. RKRob Kurzban40:51

       Yeah, panic is super interesting. Again, this is another one which, which is an area where there's not a lot of research on this, but there's this video of a, um, net full of fish sitting on a dock, and there's this one fish manages to flop its way out of the net, and then it flops its way. Just, it's just flopping randomly-

    4. CWChris Williamson41:11

       Hmm

    5. RKRob Kurzban41:11

       ... 'cause it's a fish out of water. And it flops around randomly, and then just by one random flop, it gets back into the water, and that fish escapes.

    6. CWChris Williamson41:18

       Hmm.

    7. RKRob Kurzban41:19

       And I wanna say, this fish didn't have a plan. It just did the one thing it could do when all was nearly lost, which was just move its muscles in random different ways. You know, um, I suspect that when people are facing panic, the, the, the measurement there is, if I don't do something, it's all over or it's going to be whatever the, the-

    8. CWChris Williamson41:39

       Hmm

    9. RKRob Kurzban41:40

       ... I mean, some massive amount of danger. And oftentimes the only thing left to do is to move, to locomote, to whatever, if you're underwater, to splash around. And so I think that, um... And then the place where I think is really interesting is in the context of, um, military conflict, where at certain points in history in military conflicts, it's become clear to the participants that one side was about to win and one side was about To lose

    10. CWChris Williamson42:04

        Mm

    11. RKRob Kurzban42:04

        And under those circumstances, you get this kind of panic and route psychology that sets in. With, on the losing side, they say, "Yes, we could beat a hasty retreat, orderly back to our ships," or wherever it is. This was, um, I like this example. I think it was the Battle of Marathon where, you know, um, the, you know, the, the Greeks had an advantage, and then the Persians had to beat a retreat. But they-

    12. CWChris Williamson42:27

        Mm

    13. RKRob Kurzban42:27

        ... didn't beat a hasty retreat. They panicked, and so any given soldier just threw their weapons down and runs for the ships to try to escape. Um, and that was bad overall because that is not the best way to retreat, is in disorder. But for that particular soldier, that was the best way to avoid the worst possible outcome, and some were cut down, and some survived. But this panic psychology seems to be, "If I don't do something, bad things are really gonna happen, and I'm gonna do the only things I can do," which often just is random movements, like the fish story I

13. 42:58 – 45:16

    Are Aesthetic Pleasures Different From Sensory Pleasures?

    1. RKRob Kurzban42:58

       started with.

    2. CWChris Williamson42:58

       Mm. Something that's maybe a little bit harder for people to understand is aesthetic pleasures. Now, why do we like things that look nice?

    3. RKRob Kurzban43:05

       Yeah. That is hard. I mean, first of all, aesthetics is very complicated. But there is this thing where we tend to find aesthetically pe- appealing, those things are sort of correlated with stuff that would be kind of good for us. So like the, um, prospect and refuge is a good example where we like those pictures, right? Oh, that would be a good place for me. I should be attracted to that sort of thing.

    4. CWChris Williamson43:26

       Mm.

    5. RKRob Kurzban43:26

       Um, same thing for, you know, physical bodies that are sort of people who are healthy, in shape, so on. I don't know if you know this, but people are attracted to those kinds of images, and they will, you know, spend a large time, amount of time looking at them-

    6. CWChris Williamson43:40

       Mm

    7. RKRob Kurzban43:40

       ... on the internet, on various platforms and so on. And those are like, I think of them as like little kind of like fitness, little fitness landscapes or little fitness, um-

    8. CWChris Williamson43:51

       What do you think that the-

    9. RKRob Kurzban43:52

       ... diamonds

    10. CWChris Williamson43:52

        ... people are trying to achieve with that? Uh, cue motivation, just observe something that's, that, that might en- encourage them to emulate that in their own lives?

    11. RKRob Kurzban44:03

        Either emulate that or, or to do the kind of thing that one does with it. So if you see a food item that meets your, all the criteria, right? So it's, it looks very a- appealing, like a ripe apple.

    12. CWChris Williamson44:14

        Mm.

    13. RKRob Kurzban44:14

        Um, it di- directs your attention to it, and then it causes you eventually, often, to do the right thing with it, which is to, you know, to consume it or what have you.

    14. CWChris Williamson44:21

        Mm.

    15. RKRob Kurzban44:21

        So it's sort of like focusing your attention on it, and then I take advantage of that fitness opportunity if I can, right? So like some fitness opportunities are easy to take it, take, take advantage than, than others. So sort of like guiding your attention to it and then, you know, causing you to exploit it.

    16. CWChris Williamson44:35

        Do you think of aesthetic pleasures as distinct from sensory pleasures?

    17. RKRob Kurzban44:39

        It's really, it's tough, right? To draw that distinction. I think aesthetic pleasures, the, I'd say they tend to be more abstract.

    18. CWChris Williamson44:45

        Mm-hmm.

    19. RKRob Kurzban44:46

        Right? So just being pet or whatever, it's a very concrete sort of a thing. Whereas that's very different somehow from the arc of a, of a beautiful play or something like that-

    20. CWChris Williamson44:56

        Mm

    21. RKRob Kurzban44:56

        ... which yields this kind of satisfaction or pleasure. But the parts of it are super abstract. Other than that, though, I think they're pretty similar. They're both sort of saying, "Oh, this is stuff that's kind of fitness-"

    22. CWChris Williamson45:05

        Good for me.

    23. RKRob Kurzban45:06

        Yeah, fitness good, right? This is like-

    24. CWChris Williamson45:07

        Mm

    25. RKRob Kurzban45:07

        ... somehow this w- is correlated with rep- you know, with in ancestral environments, reproductive success. So I should kind of attend to it and be attracted to it.

14. 45:16 – 52:02

    Why Humans Love Grooming Each Other

    1. CWChris Williamson45:17

       What about people that like being scratched or having their hair played with? Like, what, what's going on there?

    2. RKRob Kurzban45:23

       Yeah, grooming. Uh, so some of our relatives, of course, they groom all, you know, all the time, and only some of that could be accounted for by, you know, picking little insects off or getting dirt off. Uh, my guess is, and again, a lot of this is speculation, but if someone is close enough to you that they can touch you, um, and chooses to do something which is gentle rather than hurtful, that is a really good indication that this is an ally of yours. So my sense is that these grooming, I do it to myself, these grooming-

    3. CWChris Williamson45:52

       Mm

    4. RKRob Kurzban45:52

       ... you know, is, is-

    5. CWChris Williamson45:54

       Tens of thousands of people rubbing their head right now

    6. RKRob Kurzban45:56

       [laughs] Exactly. Is, is this sort of this, it's very, it's a, it's kind of an appealing thing to know, oh, this is an individual who could be hurting me, but they're not, and therefore they're probably an ally of mine, and that's sort of fitness good for me. And I think, yeah, there's gotta be some grooming piece in there. So ancestrally, this all started with some kind of like insect removal or parasite-

    7. CWChris Williamson46:16

       Mm

    8. RKRob Kurzban46:16

       ... extraction from the, from the skin or the fur or whatever. And then in the modern, in, in humans, yeah, it turns into this, you know, this is a positive indication of, you know, some kind of good social outcome.

    9. CWChris Williamson46:27

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    10. RKRob Kurzban47:40

        Oh, I have not.

    11. CWChris Williamson47:41

        Mark, can you try and ChatGPT this for me? Um, what does the research say about pressure and speed when it comes to the pleasure from, uh, one person rubbing or like, uh, itching another person's skin or touching another person's skin? Basically, I think the original study was done on babies, and I can't remember what it-- but something like, um, between two centimeters and six centimeters per second at no more than this many Newton meters or whatever. And it's that if you move more quickly than that, the, uh, uh, whatever, uh, senses are that are on, on your skin They are not detecting that you're basically paying enough attention to actually be able to pick what was needed. So you've got this vestige of perhaps the grooming, which has created some sort of boundary in which... And you all know, like, if somebody goes really, really painfully slowly, like what the fuck is going on here? And if somebody was to go like this. Uh, the surprisingly consistent findings in the affective touch literature. Pleasantness is strongly related to both how fast someone moves across your skin and how much pressure they apply. For speed, the relationship is roughly an inverted U. Across multiple experiments, people tend to rate gentle stroking at around one to 10 centimeters a second as most pleasant. Hey, I was fucking-- I read this thing four years ago. I'm-

    12. RKRob Kurzban49:00

        Now the-

    13. CWChris Williamson49:00

        ... impressed with that. With around three centimeters per second repeatedly emerging [chuckles] the peak. Very slow movement, 0.1 to 0.3 centimeters, and fast movement of over 30 centimeters per second are generally rated as less pleasant. In practical terms, three centimeters per second is really slow. Moving your hand about 12 inches would take 10 seconds. Holy shit. That's much closer to the slow caress than rubbing someone's arm. This appears partly related to tactile afferents, touch sensitive nerve fibers in hairy skin. Peak firing rate is pleasant because a correspondent between CT firing. Pressure is another dimension. Soft light stroking more pleasant than hard heavy stroking. Speak for yourself. Um, yeah, just a, we have some ve- Can you just say, like, what's the adaptive explanation for this?

    14. RKRob Kurzban49:47

        Well, I mean, first I just want to point something out there. I love that sentence in there. Um, the Nature Neuroscience paper found a striking correspondence between CT firing and subjective pleasant, pleasant... That's like, that is a classic example of a measurement that is feeding into the conscious experience. Like there we have the ex- very explicit notion of what does it measure? Well, it's measuring about how fast it's going along, how this kind of thing.

    15. CWChris Williamson50:06

        Mm-hmm.

    16. RKRob Kurzban50:06

        And that gives rise to exactly the... That's why I like the, the model, is because particularly at the low level, you can just see it. It's right there.

    17. CWChris Williamson50:12

        It's happening.

    18. RKRob Kurzban50:12

        It's right there.

    19. CWChris Williamson50:12

        Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    20. RKRob Kurzban50:13

        Yeah. Uh-

    21. CWChris Williamson50:13

        Yeah, this isn't you having some weird preference.

    22. RKRob Kurzban50:15

        Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson50:16

        Uh, adaptive explanation. The leading adaptive explanation is that the system evolved less for detecting objects and more for social bonding and caregiving. Uh, discriminative touch. What touched me where? How hard? And affective touch. How does this touch feel emotionally? Uh, natural stroking, caressing, and grooming from social people. It's the speed that humans spontaneously lose when gently stroking a partner, child, or other person. Light pressure is affiliation rather than threat. That's exactly what you just said. Warmth identifies another living body, reinforces attachment. Infancy may be particularly important. So I mean, one of the most fascinating things that I learned this year from Stephen Porges, the guy that, uh, uh, like has a ton of stuff around nervous system regulation. He taught me that one of the reasons that dogs and horses bond so well with humans is that the, uh, mothering frequency that they speak at to their young is the same frequency that we speak at to our young. Which is why-

    24. RKRob Kurzban51:18

        Hmm

    25. CWChris Williamson51:18

        ... when you say, "Come on, here we are. Let's g- we-- let's go for a walk. Here we... Da da da da da." Like you're in the same tonal range. You're in that same frequency, and that is why humans and horses and humans and dogs relate in that same sort of way.

    26. RKRob Kurzban51:31

        I did not know. That's fascinating.

    27. CWChris Williamson51:33

        Let's say-

    28. RKRob Kurzban51:33

        Yeah, so there's all this work on infant-directed speech and animal-directed speech, right? When you're talking. And there, there's all these things which are-

    29. CWChris Williamson51:39

        The intonation is similar

    30. RKRob Kurzban51:39

        ... similar. Yeah.
15. 52:02 – 55:45

    Where Does Our Spice Tolerance End?

    1. RKRob Kurzban52:02

       cool.

    2. CWChris Williamson52:02

       What about spiciness? Something that some people like, some people really fucking don't.

    3. RKRob Kurzban52:06

       Yeah. Super interesting. I mean, again, this is another one where I always have to preface it by, uh, there's debate about this. I don't really know. But I'll tell you the, the, like here is the thing about spiciness which is a little bit weird. I like the analogy of a roller coaster. So I don't know about you, but there's some roller... I love being on a roller coaster. But there's some-

    4. CWChris Williamson52:21

       I like roller coasters too.

    5. RKRob Kurzban52:22

       Yeah, but are there some roller coasters you won't go on?

    6. CWChris Williamson52:25

       Are there some that I won't?

    7. RKRob Kurzban52:25

       That are too, that are like too, that are just too much.

    8. CWChris Williamson52:27

       It's been a while since I've been to a theme park that's had one, but certainly in the past, yes.

    9. RKRob Kurzban52:32

       Yeah. So with roller coasters, it's like I want the... If it was just a train going like this, it'd be like, "Oh, that's really boring."

    10. CWChris Williamson52:38

        Mm-hmm.

    11. RKRob Kurzban52:38

        But if it's going like this, you'd be like, "That's really fun." But then once you get to some point, you're like, "I'm not getting on that."

    12. CWChris Williamson52:42

        Right. Right, right, right.

    13. RKRob Kurzban52:42

        Like that's one... But spiciness is like this. Like we like spicy. A little bit of spice is good. Oh, this is really spicy. But then once we get past that point-

    14. CWChris Williamson52:49

        Hmm

    15. RKRob Kurzban52:49

        ... we're like, "Oh, that's too spicy." It's not just not fun, it's painful. In the same way, uh, that roller coaster isn't just, you know, sc- It's terrifying. I'm not getting on that thing.

    16. CWChris Williamson52:57

        Yeah.

    17. RKRob Kurzban52:58

        So, right? So there's like some drop-off point, right? Where-

    18. CWChris Williamson53:00

        Yes.

    19. RKRob Kurzban53:00

        Yeah. And so the best... So spices probably are important for... They all... Going back to pathogens. They seem to have some role in suppressing pathogens, both within the nervous system and, um, when, in the food preparation. And so there's this classic work, which I think has held up. You always have to sort of like wave with old psychology work because you never know, to your point, but-

    20. CWChris Williamson53:21

        Duplication crisis is gonna come for us all eventually.

    21. RKRob Kurzban53:23

        Yeah. It, it's coming for all of us.

    22. CWChris Williamson53:24

        Yeah.

    23. RKRob Kurzban53:25

        But it, the, there was this finding that places were more, that were warmer and wetter, so they had more parasites, used more spices in their food. And that's controlling for the spices that were around.

    24. CWChris Williamson53:33

        Hmm.

    25. RKRob Kurzban53:33

        So, um, then the idea was, well, if you're eating more meat and that meat is gonna get parasites on it faster 'cause of the environment, you put more spices in there and they inhibit the growth of those pathogens.

    26. CWChris Williamson53:43

        Does that actually work?

    27. RKRob Kurzban53:44

        Uh, yeah. There's-

    28. CWChris Williamson53:44

        Apparently.

    29. RKRob Kurzban53:45

        Apparently, yeah. Pepper is the big one. It's like, and it's not a coincidence that everywhere you look around, people are using peppers. And in places with a lot of pathogens, they use a lot of different peppers.

    30. CWChris Williamson53:52

        Hmm.
16. 55:45 – 58:06

    What is Fun and Excitement?

    1. CWChris Williamson55:45

       though-

    2. RKRob Kurzban55:45

       Yeah, yeah

    3. CWChris Williamson55:45

       ... Rob.

    4. RKRob Kurzban55:45

       Fair.

    5. CWChris Williamson55:46

       What about fun and excitement? I think this is... Like, I, I've had a lot of debates over the last couple of years about what fun is.

    6. RKRob Kurzban55:52

       Yeah.

    7. CWChris Williamson55:53

       Like, what, what, what constitutes it? Sex can be fun, but sex can be sexy. Play can be fun, but play can be serious. Like, what's happening with fun and excitement?

    8. RKRob Kurzban56:02

       I mean, like, again, usual caveat. No one knows, but it certainly looks like there's a few pieces in common, right? So, like, the... If you go into, um, non-human animals, you see them sort of playing. It certainly looks like they're doing some fun things, right? So, you got these monkeys which will climb up to the top of a, you know, tower and then jump into a little water trough, and they certainly look like they're having fun. And w- there's, I think, a few different pieces about having fun is, one, one important piece is you're sort of training. So, you know, when, when I was a kid and I played soccer, that was some of the best fun I had when I was a kid. There's something about team sports, and I think in ancestral environments, practicing coordinating with your, you know, your group probably was training for, you know, w- violent activities, whether on a hunting activity or-

    9. CWChris Williamson56:47

       Mm-hmm

    10. RKRob Kurzban56:47

        ... or warfare or whatever. But you're doing it in a context in which you can learn, and you can learn safely.

    11. CWChris Williamson56:52

        Mm.

    12. RKRob Kurzban56:52

        And so, and you really don't want to learn lessons about how to coordinate with your troop in the middle of a fight, right? That's the worst time to figure it out. So, I think part of it, and the evolution wants to reward you for this learning process. And so fun is evolution's way of saying, "Yes, this is a good thing for you to do in the safety of-"

    13. CWChris Williamson57:07

        Do more.

    14. RKRob Kurzban57:07

        "Do more of that. Keep doing it. It's doing great." And I think a lot of fun things are like that, where we're either learning something or practicing something in a safe environment. So, you're sort of, like, setting it aside from whatever the real thing is.

    15. CWChris Williamson57:19

        Hmm.

    16. RKRob Kurzban57:19

        It's, it's complicated, though. I mean, because some stuff is weird. I mean, I, I... When I... Back when I was at Penn, I had a graduate student. We were working on dancing for a while. Why is dancing fun?

    17. CWChris Williamson57:29

        Yeah.

    18. RKRob Kurzban57:29

        And I think there's some new work on this. Uh, I think Hagan has a paper. But there's something a-

    19. CWChris Williamson57:34

        Friend of the show.

    20. RKRob Kurzban57:35

        Yeah, it's a, a friend of the show. Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson57:36

        Mm-hmm.

    22. RKRob Kurzban57:36

        But it's a little puzzling, right? Like, people just sort of coordinate their movements with one another, and that... And when there's music, and there's some sort of rhythm. And-

    23. CWChris Williamson57:44

        Mm

    24. RKRob Kurzban57:45

        ... it doesn't seem like it's practicing for something or learning anything. I guess I'm learning something about the fact that, you know, I can coordinate with this person, but-

    25. CWChris Williamson57:53

        Hmm

    26. RKRob Kurzban57:54

        ... I don't really know why it's fun. Games, I think, are fun because, again, yeah, they're training you to think strategically or to think about cer- you know, whatever this kind of stuff, if this could happen in the real world. So, I think it's, a lot of it is training, learning, and practicing.

17. 58:06 – 1:03:40

    Is Music Just Sexual Signalling?

    1. CWChris Williamson58:06

       What do you make of the music is basically sexual signaling done on mass theory?

    2. RKRob Kurzban58:12

       I mean, music is, uh, as mysterious as dancing. Yeah, so the production of music, and here Jeffrey Miller. I, I feel like everyone's gonna be a friend of the show at this point.

    3. CWChris Williamson58:18

       Friend of the show.

    4. RKRob Kurzban58:19

       Friend of the show. Um, you know, Jeffrey Miller's point about this, which is that you can't make beautiful music unless you are... You know, you have really good... You, yeah, have to be smart. You have to be creative. You have to-

    5. CWChris Williamson58:28

       Taste

    6. RKRob Kurzban58:28

       ... you have to have taste. And so yeah, there's some sexual signaling there saying, "Yeah, I'm pretty good at this." And it is a good signal because it is really hard. As someone who is completely atonal.

    7. CWChris Williamson58:37

       A-musical.

    8. RKRob Kurzban58:38

       Yeah, a-musical, atonal.

    9. CWChris Williamson58:39

       [laughs]

    10. RKRob Kurzban58:39

        You know, disaster. Um, I can say it's hard, right? And people who do it, they're like, "Oh, this is really easy." I'm like, "For you it is." [laughs]

    11. CWChris Williamson58:45

        Yeah, right.

    12. RKRob Kurzban58:46

        Um, and so I think there's something to that, and the way people react to musicians, right? So, I think about the old videos of The Beatles and the modern videos of people-

    13. CWChris Williamson58:53

        People losing their minds.

    14. RKRob Kurzban58:54

        Yeah, people lose their mind. It's like-

    15. CWChris Williamson58:55

        I've got a guy in here, uh, this afternoon called Riley Green. It's the closest thing to, like, chicks faint... Like, Elvis Presley chicks fainting level stuff. I have another, uh, friend of the show, Joe Santagato. He did Madison Square Garden, and he's quite rare. Him and his co-host, pretty rare in the podcasting world. Two guys who are talking about kind of bro stuff, but with an 80, 85% female audience. And, uh, he did MSG, and I didn't know this because I don't have an Apple Watch. But apparently, your Apple Watch can detect the local noise levels and can warn you if you're in a, a, you know, an industrial park, and the sound's too loud or whatever it is. And the screams of the girls as they came out on stage were so loud that everyone's Apple Watches went off, telling them-

    16. RKRob Kurzban59:42

        Oh, that's fantastic

    17. CWChris Williamson59:42

        ... that they were in a daisy- a dangerous noise environment.

    18. RKRob Kurzban59:45

        Yeah, so there's a few things I like about that. I mean, I love, I mean, I love the story. But two things, the, the measurement piece. So, one, the Apple Watches are doing measurement, right? So, in some sense, everything's always doing measuring all these things all the time, but the other piece is, yeah, you got to measure who a good mate is. And so some- and sometimes that dial goes off the charts, right? I think, I think... Where you gotta look at their accomplishments, their physical bodies, whatever else you know about them. So, you need some sort of mate assessment system, um, which is, again, Jeffrey Miller's talked about.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:00:11

        Hmm.

    20. RKRob Kurzban1:00:11

        And sometimes that dial just goes... But I think you... It's sort of like a super normal stimulus.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:00:15

        Stimuli.

    22. RKRob Kurzban1:00:15

        You know what I mean?

    23. CWChris Williamson1:00:16

        Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    24. RKRob Kurzban1:00:16

        Like, I think that's what was going on again in some of the, whatever. I, uh, I'll just say pornography is like this, right? So, like, in pornography, you get this super normal stimulus, and sometimes it's not just one super nor- it's like multiple. And then your evolved system is just like, "That's crazy." [laughs]

    25. CWChris Williamson1:00:29

        You know what I learned about from Dr. Kay, who's a psychiatrist? He taught me about death grip syndrome. So guys that are not having sex with a person but are masturbating a lot, the ability for your fist to, your hand to grip is way, way more than it is for any female human body-

    26. RKRob Kurzban1:00:47

        Oh, interesting

    27. CWChris Williamson1:00:47

        ... to be able to grip in the same way.

    28. RKRob Kurzban1:00:49

        Huh.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:00:50

        These men are basically de-training their penis-

    30. RKRob Kurzban1:00:53

        How interesting
18. 1:03:40 – 1:09:49

    How Hunger Can Work Against Us

    1. CWChris Williamson1:03:40

       You kind of mentioned there that, this, this, the, the, the mismatch thing. What do you think are some of the best examples of feelings that are functioning exactly as they're designed but producing terrible outcomes in the modern world?

    2. RKRob Kurzban1:03:52

       Oh, I mean, well, I mean, hunger is obviously one of them. It's ... This is changing a little bit with modern technology, with Ozempic and the, you know, that, that line of, of... But clearly, you know, our hunger systems have evolved in a world to take advantage of food opera, and we just keep doing it. And I think, you know, the, the ... We've seen the effects and the so-called obesity epidemic. I don't take a position on the moral weight of that or the-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:04:15

       Mm

    4. RKRob Kurzban1:04:15

       ... I just defer on the health stuff. But, like, that seems to be pretty bad. Uh, uh, my favorite system, in a sense that it's my least favorite system, is speaking of appetite. So humans have an appetite for morally condemning other people. Like, we just love sitting around and saying that that person, they're bad, bad, bad.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:04:37

       Right.

    6. RKRob Kurzban1:04:37

       Like, people love that.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:04:38

       Why?

    8. RKRob Kurzban1:04:38

       People... Well, that is a difficult question. I suspect it's because a lot of times when you were part of the mob that was condemning someone else, you benefited.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:04:48

       Were safe.

    10. RKRob Kurzban1:04:48

        Yeah. You, first of all, you distract attention from yourself, but also oftentimes you or your allies can get their stuff. There's one less competitor. In lots of cases, it's just really good, um, to be on the same side as everyone else. It's always good to ... Like, w- you know, it's like, um, it's like the thin 30 ages when there was the revolution. You know, w- when, when bad things are happening, it's a good time to pick up the leavings. There's always gonna be some kind of stuff that you could scavenge. Um, and so I think more-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:05:14

        Or at the very least be on the side of the non-persecuted.

    12. RKRob Kurzban1:05:17

        Exactly. So you always wanna be on the side, the big side.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:05:20

        Yeah.

    14. RKRob Kurzban1:05:21

        Um, and so we're evolved to figure out opportunities, particularly when other people are making more accusations, and to, to ... We just love jumping onto that. And in the modern world, particularly with social media, but of course even in the old day, like with newspapers and then with television and ... But it's just been metastasized with social media. People that, people just love indulging their appetite. I mean, if you look at, you know, you're supposed to say X, not Twitter, but, and then Blue whatever it is.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:05:47

        Blue Sky.

    16. RKRob Kurzban1:05:47

        Yeah. I mean, I-

    17. CWChris Williamson1:05:48

        You know, I pulled William off of Blue Sky. For the people that are just listening-

    18. RKRob Kurzban1:05:50

        Oh, sorry

    19. CWChris Williamson1:05:50

        ... William Costello is outside, sat in the green room cock chair listening because he's a fan of and a friend of both of us. Hi, William. Um, but he, uh, he was on Blue Sky and would, uh, we would have these conversations. I'd be like, "Dude, uh, uh, every single time that you try and put anything that's evolutionarily adjacent on Blue Sky, you're getting pilloried."

    20. RKRob Kurzban1:06:11

        Oh, totally.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:06:11

        And then we have a conversation about it, and, and I'm like, "Man, you're, you're just voluntarily trading your own sanity here." And then when I see him put stuff out on, uh, uh, the equivalent post on Twitter, he'll be accused of being like a blue pilled, like feminist or something. Like, "Oh, you're not pointing the finger enough." Meanwhile, he's a full-blown eugenicist on Blue Sky.

    22. RKRob Kurzban1:06:31

        [laughs] That's right.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:06:32

        You know?

    24. RKRob Kurzban1:06:32

        Yeah. That illustrates the point, right? So everybody wants to be on the accusing side. And, like, with these platforms, people can indulge. So I think of it as like, you know, uh, the- Our culture, whatever, made a world in which we could indulge our appetite for food and fat and sugar and salt. I mean, and then we indulged-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:06:49

        And moral condemnation

    26. RKRob Kurzban1:06:49

        ... and then we built a world in which you could indulge your appetite for moral attacks and moral condemnation. We indulged that.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:06:54

        Mm.

    28. RKRob Kurzban1:06:55

        And I don't... Yeah, I think to, to me, that's one of the most... I mean, I have, I have some biases in this area, but, like, that's one of the most toxic, unpleasant aspects of the modern world, is that, yeah, no matter what platform you go on, doesn't matter what you say, for the most part, that the result is a pile-on. The result is a-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:07:11

        Yeah

    30. RKRob Kurzban1:07:11

        ... is attacks. And the thing about attacks is that moral attacks, and I stole this from my former graduate, Peter Shully, probably not a friend of the show yet-
19. 1:09:49 – 1:18:06

    Which Emotions Are Uniquely Human?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:09:49

       Um, all right. What do you got getting into sort of the social world? I think some of the more uniquely human, uh, emotions are some of the more complex ones. Romantic love, family love. What's happening there?

    2. RKRob Kurzban1:09:59

       Family love I don't think is unique to humans. I mean, to just come out and contradict you, 'cause I... Like all organisms, you would expect them-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:10:06

       Gen chip bias.

    4. RKRob Kurzban1:10:07

       Yeah, yeah. Well, they've go- So, like, every organism has a... I mean, for mammals, mothers and father, whatever. And so you would expect that adaptation to care for kids, parents, and so on, the family love. That, that, that's phenomenology, I would guess, or who knows. It's probably comparable in some-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:10:23

       Pretty universal.

    6. RKRob Kurzban1:10:23

       Yeah, it's pretty comparable. But I mean, humans are weird in other respects. I mean, so, um, obviously we're pretty monogamous-ish or right is-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:10:33

       Monogamish

    8. RKRob Kurzban1:10:33

       ... monogamish. And so, um, there seems to be adaptations designed for monogamy, right? So this, like, what Dorothy Tennov called limerence, so this, like, in love kind of love. I'm gonna write you a sonnet, and I'm gonna sing for you, and I'm gonna do brave deeds or whatever.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:10:47

       Mm-hmm.

    10. RKRob Kurzban1:10:47

        Um, you know, that might... That could be whatever. There's other organisms who are monogamous, right? So a lot of birds are monogamous, and so maybe there's something similar with two swans. When they're swimming together, they might feel pretty-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:10:57

        Hmm. I think penguins are together for life basically as well

    12. RKRob Kurzban1:10:59

        ... barring unfortunate incidents, yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:11:02

        They're together until one of them dies-

    14. RKRob Kurzban1:11:03

        Yeah, then-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:11:04

        ... of a cold, horrible death.

    16. RKRob Kurzban1:11:05

        Yeah, or a seal. Yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:11:07

        Or a seal.

    18. RKRob Kurzban1:11:07

        Yeah.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:11:07

        Which is a hungry, horrible death.

    20. RKRob Kurzban1:11:09

        Yeah. Um, but I think for me, some of the, some of that stuff is, um, on the human side, which is, I think, understudied again, is, um... I mean, there's not a lot of organisms that have kind of friends like humans do. So you know, the dolphins have some friends, and it looks like there's chimpanzees who sort of affiliate more with some more than others. But humans, I mean, how much of our lives is dedicated to cultivating and enjoying our, our friendships, people who we're not in a romantic relationship with but were our allies and support us in tough times and help us practice and do fun things. And that phenomenology I think is very powerful, right? I mean, some of the... You know, you think about the most powerful kinds of feelings that we have, I think, in, in humans, some of those friendship emotions are very, very strong, as well, designed-

    21. CWChris Williamson1:11:51

        Mm-hmm

    22. RKRob Kurzban1:11:51

        ... to find out who our friends are, to keep track of who our friends are, to ensure that we retain those friendships, and so on.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:11:56

        And then on the other side as well, the betrayal perhaps, the resentment, the, the enemy, frenemy, ex-friend, enemy situation that you can go through.

    24. RKRob Kurzban1:12:05

        Yeah, a lot of, uh, friends can also be rivals, and that, that could be specific, so they could be helpful in one domain and then hurt for another.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:12:12

        Mm.

    26. RKRob Kurzban1:12:12

        But then, yeah. Humans also... I don't know to what extent other creatures. I'd be interested if there's people who know about this, but like, humans have hatred, which who knows if that's something that other-

    27. CWChris Williamson1:12:20

        What do you think hatred is?

    28. RKRob Kurzban1:12:22

        I think it's a design to cause you to try to get rid of or at least minimize the effect of people who really want to have, to harm you or have harmed you so that they don't do it again.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:12:31

        Right.

    30. RKRob Kurzban1:12:31

        So it's a deterrence psychology to do harm.
20. 1:18:06 – 1:20:27

    Nature vs Culture: Where Do Emotions Come From?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:18:06

       You s- used the word social learning there. What do you make of some of the explanations around emotions, that they're socially constructed rather than evolved?

    2. RKRob Kurzban1:18:15

       I guess what I would say is when I look at the emotions, they just look so obvious. To me, they look so obviously like evolved adaptations, right? So they, to your point about their design, I mean, you look at all these feelings. They look excruciatingly well designed to execute their functions. Many of them have all the hallmarks of adaptations. You see them cross-culturally. You see them historically. They're the same ones. I mean, when I started doing the research on this, I was in Greece, and part of the reason I wanted to write about emotions is I'm looking at the myths and I'm reading about the stories and the plays, and you see the same emotions, right, in, in the, in the, uh, in the classics, not to mention the ancients. You see it in the Bible and you see it in other things. So, like, through time, humans have had jealousy and they've had envy. I mean, it's not a coincidence that, you know, it's in the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not covet. It's like- I don't, you know, we, we didn't independently invent envy a million different times in human culture.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:19:04

       Hmm.

    4. RKRob Kurzban1:19:04

       And they look well-designed. So what does envy do? Well, it focuses your attention on an individual who's doing better than you. And what it does? Well, it causes you to strive a little bit harder so that you can get whatever it is that they've got.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:19:13

       Hmm.

    6. RKRob Kurzban1:19:13

       So they have all... And they look, again, they're excruciatingly well-designed. Jealousy. I mean, here we are in Austin, David Buss-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:19:18

       What's the difference between envy and jealousy?

    8. RKRob Kurzban1:19:20

       So I th- I think, um, jealousy is specifically designed around threat to a relationship, either a friendship relationship or a romantic rela- relationship.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:19:31

       Hmm.

    10. RKRob Kurzban1:19:31

        So it's designed to detect the threat and then take steps to undermine that threat. So if it's a mating relationship, maybe you make yourself a better partner, you know, maybe compose a sonnet or something like that.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:19:42

        Hmm.

    12. RKRob Kurzban1:19:42

        Whereas envy is more directing your attention to people who are doing well in some domain. So it's not really a threat to your relationship, it's just, oh, that guy's doing... He's doing really well. He's got a big house. He's got a very, um, well-viewed podcast, whatever it is.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:19:57

        Hmm.

    14. RKRob Kurzban1:19:57

        I should do what they do so that I can enjoy that success, or maybe I can just undermine them if it's something like that.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:20:02

        Yeah.

    16. RKRob Kurzban1:20:02

        But it's directing your attention to sort of like opportunities to do better because there's somebody who is doing really well as opposed to wha-... So jealousy is like defense, right? I've got a threat, gotta counter it. Envy is like a little bit more, okay, opportunity. Okay, this guy's doing better. Um, maybe he's a threat, but more, more importantly, I can learn something maybe about that person. How did they get so successful?

    17. CWChris Williamson1:20:22

        Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    18. RKRob Kurzban1:20:23

        How did they build their following?

    19. CWChris Williamson1:20:24

        I guess envy in that way is at least somewhat functional, whereas

21. 1:20:27 – 1:27:04

    Why Jealousy is So Unflattering

    1. CWChris Williamson1:20:27

       jealousy... Again, it's interesting, right? I, I always... I've had this line for a long time at one of my old live shows, which was, "Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good." And it's kind of interesting, right?

    2. RKRob Kurzban1:20:37

       Hmm.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:20:37

       Sloth can feel good, that gluttony can feel good-

    4. RKRob Kurzban1:20:40

       Right

    5. CWChris Williamson1:20:40

       ... that lust can feel good. Why does jealousy have such a terrible reputation? Like if e- evolution apparently considered it useful enough to preserve, why does it feel so shitty? Why do we condemn not only each other, but ourselves for having it? Why do we feel a lot of shame around our jealousy? What do you think is going on there?

    6. RKRob Kurzban1:20:58

       I mean, for... It's complicated. My sense is, though, jealousy is interesting. Like in some sense, like suppose I did manage to persuade other people that jealousy was a bad feeling, it- in some sense I'm causing them to drop their defenses. I mean, as long as I keep my jealousy and I maintain-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:21:13

       [laughs]

    8. RKRob Kurzban1:21:13

       ... you know, whatever. Like, I actually think that might be true, is like some of this mor- you know, that jealousy, moralizing it, it-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:21:19

       The zero-sum view of jealousy

    10. RKRob Kurzban1:21:21

        ... Yeah. It's like... Yeah. It's like if you're, you know... I don't know. I think a lot about these c- you know, whatever places, uh, historically. It's the '60s, it's California, and everyone's saying, "Oh, jealousy is a pathology."

    11. CWChris Williamson1:21:31

        Hmm.

    12. RKRob Kurzban1:21:32

        And then the next thing you know, that guy who's saying that is like sleeping with your girlfriend because whatever. It's like-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:21:36

        You've taken your eye off the ball.

    14. RKRob Kurzban1:21:37

        Yeah, you took your eye off it. So, so I think in some cases, some of these cult, whatever, are like causing other... And you see this a little bit in the intersexual competition literature as well, where you're, you know, there's, there's a, an increasing through line now about, you know, women telling other women about, "Oh," you know, "your short hair looks great on you." Like-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:21:54

        Cut your hair off. Take, take more off.

    16. RKRob Kurzban1:21:55

        Yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:21:56

        You're beautiful, you're beautiful as you are.

    18. RKRob Kurzban1:21:57

        Just the way you are.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:21:57

        You don't need to dye it.

    20. RKRob Kurzban1:21:58

        Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:21:58

        Yeah. No, no, no, no.

    22. RKRob Kurzban1:21:59

        And so you're, you're sort of undermining their defenses a little bit. And so I think the cultural di- like you gotta be careful about it, right? Like it is unpleasant, but like y- a lot of this stuff is strategic, you know?

    23. CWChris Williamson1:22:07

        You're among friends here. It's fine.

    24. RKRob Kurzban1:22:08

        Yeah. Okay.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:22:09

        Uh-

    26. RKRob Kurzban1:22:09

        But you see what I'm saying? Like it's like a little bit strategic.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:22:10

        Well, it's very unflattering, and I think that one of the problems of-

    28. RKRob Kurzban1:22:15

        Hmm

    29. CWChris Williamson1:22:15

        ... taking a non-evolutionary view is that analysis looks a lot like justification if you don't have the evolutionary perspective when we're talking about stuff like this. If you have the evolutionary perspective, you can almost say, "Okay, um, this is something that exists, and it's something that I feel, and this is why," without saying, "And that's good." Like the naturalistic fallacy basically doesn't have as much place to exist. It does... This is one of the accusations that gets levied at-

    30. RKRob Kurzban1:22:43

        Yeah
22. 1:27:04 – 1:33:59

    Is Evolutionary Psychology Accurate?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:27:04

       Going back to the, uh, social constructed theory of emotions thing, one of the common accusations that gets thrown at evolutionary theorists is this is a just so story.

    2. RKRob Kurzban1:27:16

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:27:16

       You know, you're, uh, constructing a very believable but largely confabulated narrative in the present to explain something from the past, and we have no way of judging whether or not this is true. What do you make of that argument?

    4. RKRob Kurzban1:27:30

       Well, I'll say a few things. I mean, so for me s- when I think about a story, usually the way people talk about it is it's really just another word for explanation. I mean, stories are often just explanations. And then the question is, is do you have a scientific explanation which can be falsified or not? One of the things I did for this work was that I put all of the sources online so people who are reading can look at the evidence that I marshal for each of the different fields and just go to the particular field and look at the citations, look at the endnotes. I think in the future people are gonna be doing that more. So I guess what I'm saying is, like, I want to be very careful and clear about what empirical support I use to back the claims. I mean, I think also it's important to be speculative. But the fact of the matter is that every hypothesis is a story. And the, the crucial piece that I think is often missed is that my hypotheses, people in evolutionary psychology, we're not saying something about the past per se. We're talking about the design of some particular mechanism. So if I said to you, you know, "The eye is for seeing," you'd be like, "Well, how do you know?" "Well, it's got this transparent, you know, it's got a retina, it's got this transparent lens, all these features that make it really good for that function." You wouldn't say, "Well, that's a story." You'd say, "Oh yeah, that's it. The, the eye is good for seeing." Psychological adaptations are the same sort of thing, like hunger. I mean, it's-- look, it's got some measurement system. It makes it good at, at its job, which is figuring out do I need calories?

    5. CWChris Williamson1:28:46

       Mm.

    6. RKRob Kurzban1:28:47

       Is my stomach full? Has it been a long time since my meal? How much blood is in whatever? And so the evidence of design is what we use as evidence for, um, supporting a particular proposal or hypothesis, no different from what anyone else does. The only difference in the evolutionary approach is that we say, can we use what's, what's known about humans' evolutionary history to guide our guesses about what the functions are?

    7. CWChris Williamson1:29:07

       Mm-hmm.

    8. RKRob Kurzban1:29:07

       And then we test those. So I've always found this critique weird because I feel like they have guesses, they have hypotheses, I have hypotheses. They have data, I have data.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:29:15

       Mm.

    10. RKRob Kurzban1:29:15

        I have whatever. And the only difference is you just made your hypothesis up 'cause you said, "Well, social this, cultural that." So sorry about... You know, I don't want to diss anyone, so whatever. But I, but I used a theory, and I used that theory to develop a plausible evolution, evolved hypothesis.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:29:28

        Mm-hmm.

    12. RKRob Kurzban1:29:29

        And then I looked at the data to see if they support that particular proposal. So I, I confess, you know, I've heard this story since, you know, I started in the academy in nineteen ninety-three, probably before that.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:29:39

        Mm.

    14. RKRob Kurzban1:29:39

        And I, I find it, if, to be candid, quite silly. I think it's a misunderstanding of the way science works and what is happening in the field of evolutionary psychology, which is hypothesis generation and testing about function, not some story about, well, what happened three million years ago.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:29:54

        Well, also, let's not forget that a lot of the hypotheses, like if you've got pre-registered research, a lot of the time they end up being right. Like behavioral... I- it's fascinating to me that in a world of replication crises and the social sciences basically just eating shit over the last decade and a half, two decades, two of the fields that haven't had that happen all that much have been the two that are the most controversial to talk about, evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. Those have actually stood up really nicely. So if you're gonna point the finger, I understand that if you do the analysis as justification thing, if you have this anti blank slatisht approach, um, it can f- make you feel a little uncomfortable, especially if you've got a worldview that suggests inequality is something that we need to get rid of. I think everybody wants to try and have an equal society. Wouldn't that be lovely? But it, it, it sort of reminds you that shit isn't fair and that the world is not, uh, infinitely malleable, that the right social policies can right all wrongs, and that you can flatten the, the playing landscape for everybody simply through the, the correct interventions. There is going to be mean, nasty people. Some people out there are going to misbehave regardless of what you try to do with rehabilitation or schooling or whatever, because we have pretty ancient motives that you can't re-pattern with the, the correct, like scare them straight intervention or whatever.

    16. RKRob Kurzban1:31:22

        Yeah, totally. And I think this, this com- the, the question is always compared to what, right? Like, so for evolutionary psychology, I think your point is really well made. When I was in grad school, you know, the people who were looking at human social behavior, which we also were, but without the evolutionary point of view, all they did was stuff... And all they did. They did a lot of stuff on stereotype threat.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:31:41

        Mm.

    18. RKRob Kurzban1:31:41

        They did a lot of stuff on the implicit association task, all this implicit racism. And they were sitting there and telling us that we weren't doing science because we are evolutionary people, and then here we are, you know, 25, 30 years later, and that stuff has completely fallen apart. It's like, you know... And we... At the time we were... We... So to ourselves, not to them, we'd say, "Well, at least we're not just like, you know, doing advocacy, but with some veneer of science to it."

    19. CWChris Williamson1:32:03

        Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

    20. RKRob Kurzban1:32:03

        Which is what they were really doing.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:32:04

        Yeah.

    22. RKRob Kurzban1:32:04

        Like, because, because that was also driven by the moralistic stuff. It's like, you know, the stereotype stuff.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:32:09

        This is good.

    24. RKRob Kurzban1:32:09

        Was it, this is... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stereotypes are, that's bad.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:32:11

        Right.

    26. RKRob Kurzban1:32:11

        Whatever. And then here we are 30 years later, and I could have told them how it was gonna come out. It's like, well, my work, you know, on, on race, which was just about, you know, can, can you, um, provide place- cases in which people don't sort of notice one another's race, that work has held up pretty, pretty well. I'm pretty proud.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:32:25

        Who was your, who was your grad supervisor?

    28. RKRob Kurzban1:32:27

        It was, uh, Leda Cosmides and, and the late John Tooby were, were, were... I-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:32:31

        Fuck. Tooby.

    30. RKRob Kurzban1:32:31

        I was... Yeah.
23. 1:33:59 – 1:37:24

    Is Empathy Really Investment Advice?

    1. RKRob Kurzban1:33:59

       Yeah.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:33:59

       Uh, empathy. Tell me about empathy. Kind of interesting.

    3. RKRob Kurzban1:34:01

       Yeah, super interesting. I, I mean, empathy's kind of... It get... It, it has a lot, uh... It's certainly got a lot written about it. Paul Bloom has done some nice work on it.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:34:10

       Against Empathy, yeah.

    5. RKRob Kurzban1:34:10

       Against Empathy. And I mean, again-

    6. CWChris Williamson1:34:13

       Friend of the show

    7. RKRob Kurzban1:34:13

       ... for, friend of the show. Everyone's a friend of the show. Um, I'm gonna have to find out who an enemy of the show is.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:34:19

       Oh, I've got enough.

    9. RKRob Kurzban1:34:19

       No. Okay.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:34:19

        Yeah, they'll be in the comments.

    11. RKRob Kurzban1:34:20

        Oh, okay. In the comments. Great. Yeah, we'll see them in the comments. Um, yeah, I mean, I think for social creatures such as us, it's pretty important to kind of be able to measure what other people are feeling, because that helps you with your own strategy with respect to them. So if they're an ally and they're feeling sad, like-

    12. CWChris Williamson1:34:37

        It's like theory of mind type stuff?

    13. RKRob Kurzban1:34:38

        It's a little bit of theory of mind, but it's not just their mind. It's, it's all of these, uh... So I think of it as I'm measuring what you're trying to measure. So it is a little bit of a meta thing. So like I'm... If you're sad, I'm trying to measure how sad are you and how sad are you, while you're trying to figure out how bad things are.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:34:52

        Mm.

    15. RKRob Kurzban1:34:53

        And that can help me, right? Because in both directions, and I think this is one thing that, that, that Paul has identified. So one thing that's h- nice about empathy is that if you're, you know, sad, then I can comfort you, and that's good for me, 'cause you're my friend and I can make you feel better, and maybe help you think about how to feel better. But if you're my enemy, and I have a certain amount of empathy, that is, I know what you're feeling, I can make you feel worse, right?

    16. CWChris Williamson1:35:11

        Mm.

    17. RKRob Kurzban1:35:11

        This is why torture is so effective, is that we know what's gonna hurt, both mental and physical, right? So, um, you know, if I know that you are, and let's go back to jealousy, the jealous sort, and I say, "Well, your girlfriend or partner or whatever it is, Cindy or John or whatever it is," no judgment, um, "I saw them with another person," then I can make you feel bad-

    18. CWChris Williamson1:35:28

        Mm

    19. RKRob Kurzban1:35:28

        ... because I know that that's gonna hit your, your own measurement system. So empathy is a pretty useful thing because it helps us figure out both how to help and hurt others. Mostly we think about it in the, in the sense of helping, right? Because empathy usually leads to sometimes-

    20. CWChris Williamson1:35:42

        Pro-social

    21. RKRob Kurzban1:35:43

        ... yeah, care.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:35:44

        What do you make of the theory that empathy in some ways is investment advice? That this person is so down on their luck that they will be unusually overly appreciative of any assistance that I give them.

    23. RKRob Kurzban1:36:00

        Yeah. I like to think about the question sometimes, what is the best possible thing that could happen to me in my day? And one of the things I, that I think about is I'm walking along a stream, and I'm, I happen to be carrying a life preserver, and Elon Musk is drowning, right? And he's w- And so at relatively minimal cost, I can send him the life preserver, and then he's, you know, saved his life.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:36:20

        In your pocket. Yeah.

    25. RKRob Kurzban1:36:21

        And now, like, so... And the reason I was able to... 'Cause I know that drowning is bad, and I sort of have that whatever psychology. So it is good investment. But, but think about other cases that we don't invest, right? So if Philly, going back to, to Philly, you know, the fact is people go by, um, people who are currently experiencing homelessness, as they say these days.

    26. CWChris Williamson1:36:39

        Yeah.

    27. RKRob Kurzban1:36:39

        And they don't... [laughs]

    28. CWChris Williamson1:36:44

        [laughs] It's the, uh, people of color, of the unhoused.

    29. RKRob Kurzban1:36:48

        People experiencing being unhoused.

    30. CWChris Williamson1:36:50

        People experiencing no roof over their heads.
24. 1:37:24 – 1:49:27

    Why Gratitude Is More Powerful Than You Think

    1. CWChris Williamson1:37:24

       lovely.

    2. RKRob Kurzban1:37:24

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:37:25

       Uh, what about gratitude?

    4. RKRob Kurzban1:37:28

       Yeah. So, um, first of all, really should have more of in our lives, and I want to say thank you for having me on the show.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:37:34

       Thank you for being... I want to do nothing else. 11:37 AM, I don't want to be anywhere else other than talking bullshit with you.

    6. RKRob Kurzban1:37:41

       It's such a great conversation.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:37:41

       That's it. I don't want to be anywhere else.

    8. RKRob Kurzban1:37:42

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:37:43

       Yeah.

    10. RKRob Kurzban1:37:43

        Um, so thank you for that. So I do... And I think, you know, going back to the point that humans are, are social, um, when people do nice things for you, which is usually the antecedent of gratitude, you want to signal, "Okay, I acknowledge that, and this is going to increase the extent to which I am potentially going to deliver benefits to you down the road too."

    11. CWChris Williamson1:38:04

        Mm.

    12. RKRob Kurzban1:38:04

        So because the person who's giving you benefits, it's good f- wh- one of the things they're probably going to get out of it. I mean, if we're friends and I help you, then that's good for me because then you're, you're better off and whatever. But another thing is there's going to be potential help down the line. So gratitude, you want to make sure you signal, "Look, I recognize that, A, you've just helped me," and B, more importantly, you generally... You're saying, "I know that you go around the world thinking that I'm someone who you want to help, not someone you want to hurt or just ignore."

    13. CWChris Williamson1:38:29

        Mm.

    14. RKRob Kurzban1:38:30

        And so you're reinforcing the cycle of reciprocal benefits and potentially alliance. And if you d- uh, uh, uh, just think about what happens if you don't express gratitude. You're like, "Well, I'm not sure I'm going to help that guy again because he didn't acknowledge that I delivered this benefit t- to, to him."

    15. CWChris Williamson1:38:44

        Yeah, of course.

    16. RKRob Kurzban1:38:45

        Right? So you, you, you're sort of upping the, the psychological little, uh, bookkeeping.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:38:48

        Did he even know that I did it?

    18. RKRob Kurzban1:38:49

        Yeah.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:38:49

        Did he even notice that I helped him in this way? Yeah, I think... So I, and I think a lot of the people that listen to this show are in a category of people that pay attention maybe more than on average, and that can be a real blessing because you notice things. If you don't wrangle it correctly, then that can turn into anxiety, rumination, intrusive thoughts. But one of the sort of challenges there is if you don't have a good set point for gratitude, what you can do is pay a lot of small benefits to somebody. Like, um, uh, my housemate, for instance. Like he might have... He might leave something out or, uh... Like, he leaves his hoodies around, and I'm like, I'll tend to like fold the hoodie and just put it on the desk, personally because I like the environment to be tidy.

    20. RKRob Kurzban1:39:35

        Fair.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:39:35

        But also because I'm like, "Ha," like if he puts it on and it's usually a Modern Wisdom hoodie, like if that looks a bit shitty, it's not gonna be cool for him, and it's bad rep for the brand. But because he pays attention, he notices. So there is this sort of balance between how much attention you pay and then how much gratitude, and this is on both the giver and the receiver. And I think that your goal should be to have the level of gratitude and show the level of gratitude at the level of attention that you pay. Because if you have a mismatch with that, what you can end up doing is feeling like there's an imbalance in the resolution that you're looking at things with. "I did this little thing, and isn't that cute?"

    22. RKRob Kurzban1:40:14

        Mm-hmm.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:40:14

        Like what's... It- it's great. You do some grand gesture. Obviously, you organize a, a surprise for your friend. For instance, my business partner, uh, in Neutonic, uh, he... It was his 40th birthday in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and me and a couple of the other guys got together and decided that we were gonna buy him and his family with his kids a trip to Lapland. Full thing. The, you know, the kids are not gonna go to Kingston upon Thames to go and see Santa. They're gonna go to fucking Finland, and we'd sorted the whole thing and flights and hotels and the reindeer sled and all the rest of it, and we gave it to him, and he cried, and it was really, really beautiful.

    24. RKRob Kurzban1:40:47

        Mm.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:40:47

        That wasn't it lovely? Um, that's obviously going to be something which is worthy of gratitude. He's gonna go. He's gonna have these memories. He's got... We did it at the approximate, the appropriate time before. He's got four months to like owe us before actually having to cash in the favor, so to speak.

    26. RKRob Kurzban1:41:00

        Right.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:41:00

        But I think what's really cool when it comes to gratitude is, oh, like s- this person came around to my house for dinner, and they know that I like this particular flavor of soft drink, and I got, I got just one can for them in advance. Oh, isn't that cool? And I think that the small elements like that, continuing to lower your threshold for what you believe is worthy of celebration and gratitude, I think that is something that everyone can do. And one of the pieces of advice that I get asked for a lot at the live shows is, uh, "I don't feel my successes emotionally, even though I achieve them quantifiably or objectively. What do you think I should do to try and bring more of this in?" I'm like, "Look, gratitude is, is great, but it's kind of hard to do." But what you can do is celebrate your friends when they achieve basically anything, no matter how small it is, is worthy of an achievement. Uh, uh, some balloons, a cake, a cookie, a cuddle, a fucking dinner, a, you know, a big party or whatever. One of my friends at the start of this year had his first album launch, and I was like, "I'm gonna organize an album launch for you. Isn't this great?" And it's actually kind of a vicious, uh, reciprocal gratitude practice. 'Cause if I make it plain that I'm prepared to celebrate you for something small, we're horrible at celebrating ourselves, but we're great at celebrating others. So even if we can't do it for ourselves, if we do it for others, they might start doing it for us. And you end up with this, "Ha. Yeah, I did, I did do that, complete that tour or write that book or, you know, publish that thing or whatever," like, and everyone else did it on my behalf, and I'll do it for them. So I think that's kind of a way to hack this system that you can use, and this is what's great. If you understand, well, this is why we have friendships, and this is why alliances are important, and this is why reciprocal altruism exists. And gratitude's important, but it's kind of hard to do for ourselves, but it's easy to do for other people. And if you pay attention, you have small things, you can create this, like, feedback, positive feedback loop, a boom loop rather than a doom loop of, "I'm gonna do more for other people." And that's one of the ways that tactically I've, like, tried to put some of this stuff into practice.

    28. RKRob Kurzban1:43:02

        Yeah, totally. And I think this is an area where I'm, uh, typically pretty critical of, of, uh, clinical psychology, which I'm not sure how much it's done for us. But this they seem to have gotten right, which is that adding gratitude to your life really does, at least my read of this literature, holding aside, replicate, whatever. It seems like this does make people happier, more content, calmer. Um, and it probably... I mean, look, so evolution's sitting there, and it is rewarding you for... Like, we wouldn't feel the, the warm glow of gratitude if it wasn't doing something for us.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:43:28

        Mm.

    30. RKRob Kurzban1:43:28

        And I think to your point, yeah, you gotta figure out the right amount. But there's something really deep in there about relationships, which is, you know, figuring out, and this goes back to empathy, you know, what does that person care about with respect to how I think about them? So in my own particular case, I don't do it often enough, but my partner loves having... She just loves having flowers in the kitchen, like where she can see them.
25. 1:49:27 – 1:51:00

    Does Clinical Psychology Actually Work?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:49:27

       well, you've mentioned a couple of times clinical psychology. What's your perspective on that? What's your opinion?

    2. RKRob Kurzban1:49:32

       I think clinical psychology has probably helped a lot of people. I should say in this context, I've been heavily influenced by my relationship with, uh, Josh Zlotnick, future friend of the pod.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:49:42

       Mm.

    4. RKRob Kurzban1:49:42

       Um, he works with me on, on Living Fossils. He's a clinician who's become interested-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:49:45

       By the way, everyone needs to go and subscribe to Living Fossils on Substack. I'm a subscriber, and uh, it absolutely rules.

    6. RKRob Kurzban1:49:51

       Uh, thanks. I'm expressing gratitude.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:49:52

       Very good.

    8. RKRob Kurzban1:49:53

       Um, but he has, he has a up-close seat that I don't have. I mean, when I was at Penn, I, I saw clinical psychology among my colleagues. Some of them were clinicians. But he's been in the clinic, and he was re- he was trained as a clinical psychologist, and he's directed my attention to a lot of this literature that says, "Look, you- There's a lot of different techniques out there. As far as anyone can tell, ain't none of them better than the others. I mean, CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, seems to be the front runner right now. And then he says, "Look, it looks to me, and, you know, that the, the, you know, um, all the good that's done is kind of to your point, is the trusting relationship-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:50:27

       Yeah

    10. RKRob Kurzban1:50:27

        ... itself, not the technology of clinical psychology." Again, don't get me wrong, some stuff has been important, like the pharmacological stuff that's-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:50:33

        Mm-hmm

    12. RKRob Kurzban1:50:34

        ... helped people with psychiatric conditions. There's no denying that that has ... That's an advance and that's real scien- that's whatever.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:50:40

        Hmm.

    14. RKRob Kurzban1:50:40

        I'm skeptical about clinical psychology, particularly now because as far as I can tell, the training has been politicized, right? Um-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:50:46

        Yeah

    16. RKRob Kurzban1:50:47

        ... and-

    17. CWChris Williamson1:50:47

        I think you have a, a somewhat disproportionate cohort of people that are doing it as well that maybe have a particular worldview. Yeah, hey, I read the Contra CBT three-part series-

    18. RKRob Kurzban1:50:57

        Yeah, yeah, yeah

    19. CWChris Williamson1:50:58

        ... on Living Fossils. I'm, I'm fucking-

26. 1:51:00 – 1:57:12

    What Depression Does to Your Behaviour

    1. RKRob Kurzban1:51:00

       Yeah

    2. CWChris Williamson1:51:00

       ... I'm there as well. Um, okay, depression, talking about psychology and interventions like that. We've talked about anxiety. What's interesting about depression?

    3. RKRob Kurzban1:51:09

       Yeah. Um, again, disclaimer, depression's horrible, and so this is gonna be an explanation for it that might not be right and in no way sh- should minimizes the condition. This is another one where I will self-disclose and say, I can say from firsthand experience, there's almost nothing that's, almost nothing that's worse than genuine depression.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:51:26

       Mm-hmm.

    5. RKRob Kurzban1:51:26

       I mean, it's, it's hard for someone who hasn't experienced it. A little bit like y- what you were saying with the incest case.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:51:30

       Incest, yep.

    7. RKRob Kurzban1:51:30

       Like, you know, I remember when I was depressed and people said, "Well, just feel happier." You're like, [scoffs] "Okay, whatever."

    8. CWChris Williamson1:51:36

       Thanks.

    9. RKRob Kurzban1:51:36

       Like, um, it's very unpleasant.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:51:39

        Hey diabetic, why don't you just produce more insulin?

    11. RKRob Kurzban1:51:41

        Yeah. More insulin, please.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:51:42

        Yeah.

    13. RKRob Kurzban1:51:42

        Or, you know, whatever. So, uh, a lot of this goes back to Ed Hagen's work, friend of the pod.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:51:46

        Friend of the pod.

    15. RKRob Kurzban1:51:47

        Um, so de- depression, it, it's, it doesn't seem like it's just sadness, and I think the other, another piece of it is, uh, recently in the news, postpartum depression, something that occurs often after pregnancy. So one way to look at depression goes something like this. It sees it as a way to bargain. So people who are depressed, they withdraw from whatever they're doing, including childcare if it's postpartum depression. Um, and they show signs that they might kill themselves, right? They have suicidal ideation.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:52:13

        Hmm.

    17. RKRob Kurzban1:52:13

        They, uh, might make movements in that direction, right? So they might get tools or whatever. And from the ... Think about the perspective of the people around them, right? In some sense, losing someone who is close in your s- your, your, potentially your, your mate-

    18. CWChris Williamson1:52:27

        Hmm

    19. RKRob Kurzban1:52:27

        ... or your daughter or your whatever, that's a big cost.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:52:30

        Hmm.

    21. RKRob Kurzban1:52:31

        And so one proposal that people have made is that it's basically saying, "I'm gonna do the things that kind of look like I might kill myself or take myself out of the social world-

    22. CWChris Williamson1:52:42

        Hmm

    23. RKRob Kurzban1:52:42

        ... which is bad for other people, as a way to get them to invest more in me, to support me." It's sort of interesting in the case of postpartum depression, when do you suddenly need much more support? Well, now you've got another organism who you have to care for, right? There's no one else who-

    24. CWChris Williamson1:52:55

        So the burden is now increased on you, which means, "Hey, I really could do with some fucking help here."

    25. RKRob Kurzban1:53:01

        I'm in need. And so it's a-

    26. CWChris Williamson1:53:02

        But what about the behavior of depression? Like, o- okay, I, I understand if you get to the, you know, the, the, the end-

    27. RKRob Kurzban1:53:08

        Yeah

    28. CWChris Williamson1:53:08

        ... the, uh, you know, finality of it, which would be a, a suicide or a suicide attempt. What about when we come back a little bit more, the sort of withdrawal-

    29. RKRob Kurzban1:53:16

        Yeah

    30. CWChris Williamson1:53:16

        ... the making themselves small?
27. 1:57:12 – 2:00:18

    Contempt vs Resentment: What’s the Difference?

    1. RKRob Kurzban1:57:12

       yeah.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:57:12

       Interesting. Okay. So we've talked anger, jealousy, envy. What about contempt?

    3. RKRob Kurzban1:57:17

       Yeah. Good one. Uh, contempt's so interesting. I use this analogy about, um... Not that I play a lot of video games, 'cause that's obviously not very appealing. But if you are going through a video game and you've got a lot of magic items and so on, and you see some, you know, whatever, a cudgel or some tool or whatever that, whatever, you just ignore it because it's not worth picking up or whatever. And I think contempt is basically measuring, is this a person who in, by their very nature or in their history, has done something which makes them unworthy of my friendship, alliance, relationship, whatever?

    4. CWChris Williamson1:57:51

       Hmm.

    5. RKRob Kurzban1:57:51

       So contempt is sort of saying, look, I have a limited amount of time in my day. I have a limited amount of time in my life. I have a limited number of friendship slots. I have a limited number of partner slots. In virtue of whatever it is you did or whoever it is you are, I'm just not interested in affili- So it's sort of measuring, you know, the, the fact that you've got a person or a thing which is just not very valuable. And then what does it motivate? It motivates usually avoidance a little bit. It's got some other motivations too. Usually, there's some communicative thing, which is to say, you know, you suck or they suck or-

    6. CWChris Williamson1:58:23

       Mm-hmm

    7. RKRob Kurzban1:58:23

       ... whatever it is.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:58:23

       Mm-hmm.

    9. RKRob Kurzban1:58:24

       Which is maybe signaling, yeah, I recognize that that particular individual is, is beneath my contempt or whatever. And I think this is important for a social creature. Look, we have, we do have limited slots, just like limited inventories in video games.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:58:36

        Yeah.

    11. RKRob Kurzban1:58:36

        We can only affiliate with so many people during the day. And so contempt is basically guiding us away from that and saying, "Yeah, this is not an individual with whom you want to associate."

    12. CWChris Williamson1:58:45

        And then resentment. Is that similar to contempt?

    13. RKRob Kurzban1:58:48

        I think resentment is more with respect to, um, an act that has occurred as opposed to a person. So, um, resentment is something like, hey, that person was promoted because they have a relationship with a boss, not because they excelled at their job. So they got some benefit to which they weren't entitled.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:59:09

        Hmm.

    15. RKRob Kurzban1:59:09

        And so r- that measures the extent to which some benefit has been gotten that wasn't, or the reverse, when someone didn't-

    16. CWChris Williamson1:59:14

        Okay. So it's about fairness in some ways.

    17. RKRob Kurzban1:59:15

        Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of fairness in there. So contempt is low status, um, whereas, you know, yeah, I would, I would say, um, resentment is much more associated with this sort of violation of an exchange principle.

    18. CWChris Williamson1:59:29

        And w- w- what is the behavior and what is the behavior trying to motivate in-

    19. RKRob Kurzban1:59:34

        In-

    20. CWChris Williamson1:59:34

        ... the other person?

    21. RKRob Kurzban1:59:37

        So yeah, I mean, I think in contempt it's a little bit fear that it's sort of an avoidance or something. But in resentment, it's interesting. I, I... First of all, again, I don't know. Is... It seems like most people when they're experiencing, what they do is they wanna talk about it. Not always, but often.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:59:50

        Hmm.

    23. RKRob Kurzban1:59:50

        They wanna identify. They wanna say, "That person got a thing to which they weren't entitled." My guess is what they're trying to do is motivate one of these moralistic attacks that we've talked about.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:59:58

        Hmm.

    25. RKRob Kurzban1:59:58

        They're, they're trying to say, "You should... Look, I didn't get the promotion, and you should be irritated because they did, and they didn't deserve it. They didn't actually meet the requirement. So let's all condemn the person who did that-"

    26. CWChris Williamson2:00:09

        Yep.

    27. RKRob Kurzban2:00:09

        "... and maybe I can revert." We were asking earlier what's the use of moral equa- Well, that's a good example, right? Well, if I can displace that unj- injustice, well, then maybe I can get the promotion.

28. 2:00:18 – 2:05:27

    What Embarrassment Does to Your Body

    1. CWChris Williamson2:00:18

       Mm-hmm. How about embarrassment?

    2. RKRob Kurzban2:00:20

       Another good one, and also tough. I mean, it seems to be something like, um... So what causes people to be embarrassed? It's like usually they violated some social norm, right? Your fly is down or [laughs] burped at a wedding or, I don't know-

    3. CWChris Williamson2:00:34

       Yeah

    4. RKRob Kurzban2:00:34

       ... pick your favorite-

    5. CWChris Williamson2:00:35

       Yep

    6. RKRob Kurzban2:00:35

       ... embarrassing things. Watch Seinfeld or The Office or whatever. And one of the things that we haven't talked a lot about is all, is like facial stuff when it comes to emotions.

    7. CWChris Williamson2:00:42

       Hmm.

    8. RKRob Kurzban2:00:43

       So embarrassment has this interesting flushy bit to it-

    9. CWChris Williamson2:00:45

       Hmm

    10. RKRob Kurzban2:00:45

        ... which is involuntary. So my guess-

    11. CWChris Williamson2:00:48

        And what's that doing?

    12. RKRob Kurzban2:00:48

        Yeah, good question. So what is it measuring? So embarrassment seems to be measuring something like, did I just violate some social norm? Um, 'cause I think that usually is what it is. There's other cases, right? So sometimes it's a little bit different from that. So like the group project is done, and I ideally did a bit of it, but I get all the credit. I'm like sort of embarrassed about that.

    13. CWChris Williamson2:01:08

        Okay.

    14. RKRob Kurzban2:01:08

        It's kind of like violating a norm.

    15. CWChris Williamson2:01:10

        Yep. Yep.

    16. RKRob Kurzban2:01:10

        Yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson2:01:10

        Yep.

    18. RKRob Kurzban2:01:11

        But you, I think what it is, is something like this. You wanna make sure other people know for sure that you normally would violate the norm and it was an accident. So you know the norm and you wanted... Your intention was to, to obey it, but it was an accident.

    19. CWChris Williamson2:01:23

        Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I, I, how, how could I? Da, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa.

    20. RKRob Kurzban2:01:27

        Why'd am I doing it? And then what's an honest signal? An involuntary flush. Because then you're like, "Oh, it, they didn't even have to say that they, whatever. I can see that they know they violated it-"

    21. CWChris Williamson2:01:35

        Hmm

    22. RKRob Kurzban2:01:35

        ... "because it was an involuntary reaction. Now I'm sure." 'Cause it'd be easy to say, "Oh, I didn't know you weren't supposed to-"

    23. CWChris Williamson2:01:40

        Yeah, yeah.

    24. RKRob Kurzban2:01:40

        "... act a way Z." But with the blushing it's like, "Oh yeah, they knew."

    25. CWChris Williamson2:01:43

        Hmm.

    26. RKRob Kurzban2:01:43

        "And they, and then, and then now I've got this honest signal." So my guess is you're basically saying, "Yeah, I'm a norm follower. I get the rules. In the future I'm gonna be following them. I'm always gonna have my fly up. I'm not gonna burp or whatever."

    27. CWChris Williamson2:01:53

        Hmm.

    28. RKRob Kurzban2:01:53

        "This was a one-off thing. Don't have to worry. And here's the signal. Definitely I knew it, and I, and I recognize it as a, as a mistake."

    29. CWChris Williamson2:02:00

        Is it to... Em- embarrassment has to be as well due to perceived loss of social status?

    30. RKRob Kurzban2:02:06

        I think that's what happens. So if, like, if you, if you're seen as a non-norm follower-
29. 2:05:27 – 2:09:33

    Why Do We Feel Shame and Guilt?

    1. CWChris Williamson2:05:27

       that this is ridiculous. Okay, so that's embarrassment. And then taking it up a notch, what about shame and guilt?

    2. RKRob Kurzban2:05:32

       Yeah. Super interesting. Again, moral emotions, um, having to do with, yes, so past behavior. So I mean, you know, if you look at something like, um, shame, again, it has the kind of avoidance thing or so people are trying to put their head down. They try to be small. Um, and that does seem to have to do with the fact... So what is it measuring? It's measuring something like I did or people think I did something which again violates a norm, right? Th- think about the difference between shame and embarrassment. The embarrassment is I, um, I, I broke a norm and maybe I didn't intend. Shame might be I broke a norm and I, maybe I intended to, or people think I did.

    3. CWChris Williamson2:06:06

       Yeah.

    4. RKRob Kurzban2:06:06

       And then you gotta repair that, right? So how do you repair that? You sort of have to, um, say-

    5. CWChris Williamson2:06:10

       Grovel.

    6. RKRob Kurzban2:06:11

       You have to grovel. You have to say something like, "I knew the norm. I intentionally violated it. But in the future, I, I am telling you in the future I am not going to do that, and I will accept a certain amount of cost in the form of whatever it is, social censure, whatever, um, for having, for having, um, broken it." It's interesting, though, because you see shame not just in cases where, uh, it is an intentional violation. So in some cultures, people will experience shame. Like, so if they're the victim of an, of a certain kind of assault.

    7. CWChris Williamson2:06:41

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    8. RKRob Kurzban2:06:42

       You know, people experience shame.

    9. CWChris Williamson2:06:43

       What do you think is going on there?

    10. RKRob Kurzban2:06:44

        Yeah. It's sort of interesting. I, I, I think it's an acknowledgment that under those circumstances, because of the rules that govern the culture, that person really has lost some social value.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:06:58

        Hmm.

    12. RKRob Kurzban2:06:58

        And they're sort of acknowledging that and trying to figure out what to do about it.

    13. CWChris Williamson2:07:01

        Yeah.

    14. RKRob Kurzban2:07:01

        Now, to some extent, you're also trying to evade it. Like again, the hiding your face or whatever looks like-

    15. CWChris Williamson2:07:05

        Yeah

    16. RKRob Kurzban2:07:05

        ... it's sort of a hiding thing. Um, but it does look like you're acknowledging the loss of social value-

    17. CWChris Williamson2:07:11

        Yeah. It's kind-

    18. RKRob Kurzban2:07:11

        ... even though it wasn't your fault.

    19. CWChris Williamson2:07:12

        Yeah. It's a kind of v- vulnerability. It's an acceptance of the vulnerability, the injustice, uh, that's happened. Yeah, that's, that's strange. Um-

    20. RKRob Kurzban2:07:21

        Yeah. You're acknowledging sort of there's been a switch in the hierarchy, the rules, the whatever, the values. And, um, sorry, and yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson2:07:27

        People might, people might judge me otherwise as well.

    22. RKRob Kurzban2:07:30

        Yeah. In some cases it would be worse not to acknowledge it, right? And-

    23. CWChris Williamson2:07:34

        Mm

    24. RKRob Kurzban2:07:34

        ... um, and also you've got to sort of start thinking about what my life is now that the, this, this change has occurred.

    25. CWChris Williamson2:07:39

        I wonder if some of it is people front running the, their, uh, estimated opinions of others about themselves too.

    26. RKRob Kurzban2:07:51

        Totally.

    27. CWChris Williamson2:07:51

        Like, "Oh, I know that I am, that you see me in this sort of a way" because if somebody has done something that's shameful or if something has happened to someone that they think other people are going to see as shameful, and they sort of walk into the room-

    28. RKRob Kurzban2:08:04

        Yeah

    29. CWChris Williamson2:08:04

        ... and they're sort of full of beans, as we would say in the UK.

    30. RKRob Kurzban2:08:08

        Yeah.
30. 2:09:33 – 2:11:50

    The Personal Relationship to the Mind and Attention

    1. CWChris Williamson2:09:33

       What's interesting about the mind and attention? 'Cause I think when people think about feelings, they're kind of thinking about the suite that we've gone through so far. But there's a whole host of your relationship to your own mind, to your own thoughts, and to the thoughts of others. Now, what's, what's interesting there?

    2. RKRob Kurzban2:09:50

       I, I mean, I find this fascinating. So I, you know, sort of early in my career I was doing the social stuff, and then later in my career I started moving to stuff like the sense of mental effort. So this is the kind of thing you have, I mean, I don't know, you're doing the SATs or maybe you're, you know, persisting on some problem. Maybe you have a job, uh, which causes you to do the same thing over and over. Um, or you're trying to multiply three-digit numbers in your head. Anything, you, you, mental effort. And, and I, it's so interesting. I think it is a not obvious question. Like, why does it feel like anything? Why does that feel like something? And particularly, why does it feel negative, to your point, about the bad feelings? And so I think that's an interesting one. Um, and my sort of response to that, which might not be right, is again, the opportunity cost point, which is that when you're doing something effortful, you're using these really fancy parts of your mind that are good at, you know, like your working memory or what have you. And working memory can be doing lots of different things. It could be planning. It could be, you know, multiplying. It could be solving problems. It could be remembering. And so every time you're using it for one thing, you can't use it for another thing.

    3. CWChris Williamson2:10:53

       Yep.

    4. RKRob Kurzban2:10:53

       And in order for, figure out what to use it for, you have to somehow measure what that cost is. Like, what is the benefit of the next best thing I could be doing? And so effort is the felt sensation of, is there something else I could be doing right now with those, not physically, but with those mental systems, that would be more beneficial to me? And I find that kind of interesting, that your mind needs to keep track of itself. Like, there's got to be one part of your mind-

    5. CWChris Williamson2:11:15

       Mm

    6. RKRob Kurzban2:11:15

       ... that's figuring out what the other part of your mind is doing, and at the same time trying to figure out what could it be doing.

    7. CWChris Williamson2:11:19

       Yep.

    8. RKRob Kurzban2:11:20

       Which I think is just a miracle. I mean, I think boredom is a little bit like this.

    9. CWChris Williamson2:11:22

       Yes.

    10. RKRob Kurzban2:11:22

        Which is why do people feel bored? Which is sort of like measuring, uh, you know, how rewarding is my current thing? Usually not very, if you're bored. And then it's measuring sort of like, well, what could I be doing, right? Um, something better than this. And so boredom is like saying, "Yeah, you could be doing something better." Uh, and so try to manufacture the circumstances such that you are. So and, and again, it's one of these interesting cases where the mind is sort of monitoring what we're doing with our own minds. I, I kind of find that cool.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:11:48

        It's fascinating. W- what, uh,

31. 2:11:50 – 2:14:09

    The Emotions Robert Has Changed His Mind About

    1. CWChris Williamson2:11:50

       or which feeling did you understand most differently from pre- and post-research, do you think?

    2. RKRob Kurzban2:11:56

       Oh, that's a tough one. Um, well, uh, I mean, I hadn't thought about a lot of these feelings before. I mean, some of the little ones, like itchiness, I'd never really thought about [laughs] uh, you know, why we itch. And then, you, the, there's this whole literature on bugs crawling on you, and they stimulate your efferents in exactly the right way. And then you're like, "Oh, there's a bug on there."

    3. CWChris Williamson2:12:15

       Mm.

    4. RKRob Kurzban2:12:15

       I thought that was pretty, pretty cool. Um, I mean, contempt I hadn't really thought about either for, for long. But when we just discussed it, I didn't really know where that, um, came from. I mean, one feeling that is, I think, wildly understudied, which I got to read a little bit more about, having... I did a little bit of work on this, but is, uh, going back to jealousy, but of friends. So like the saying where if you, if we're friends and you start hanging out with another person, especially kids, but also adults, they find that very irritating. Like they, they get jealous of that.

Episode duration: 2:28:12