Evolutionary psychology is possibly the most important subject you'll come across in your life, because it'll explain a lot of your own behavioral patterns and your friend's behavioral patterns, do you now imagine getting one of the foremost experts on evolutionary psychology on a podcast?

This is Gartside Honor in which you have broken down that subject in a very basic manner.

The ABCs of it promise you that at the end of this episode, your eyes are going to be opened up.

You're going to view the world in a different way. Sex, food, shelter, care, love, friendship, family. All these concepts are explained by the evolutionary psychology expert Godsake on this episode of their own vision. If you feel that this is too heavy an episode makes you check out the individual clips. Our third YouTube channel that's live that will feature the highlights of this podcast. Lots of learnings to take away from this one Gotthard Underachieve show. That's that's an honor having you on the runway show.

I've learned so much from you off of the Internet and I think this is a dream come true that I get some time with you to pick your brain and take your knowledge to the rest of the world.

Thank you so much for having me. A real pleasure. Your books coming out of parasitically mind. You are one of the world's experts on evolutionary psychology. So firstly, could you explain to my audiences and imagine that my audiences are just four or five years old? What is evolutionary psychology?

So evolutionary psychology is basically the application of evolutionary theory to the study of the human mind. So in the same way that we can use evolution to study why we have opposable thumbs, why our pancreas are the way they are, it's simply in this case, the application of evolutionary thinking to know why it is that our minds are the way that we are. Why do we experience jealousy the way that we do? Why do we have certain fear responses? How do we choose mates and the mating market?

So everything that we are doesn't come out of magic. Of course, culture matters, but be below. Culture exists some fundamental principles that makes the Lebanese consumer and the Indian consumer very similar to each other because we share a biological heritage. And so that's what evolutionary theory is.

Why did a Godsake want to go down this path in life?

Well, I always knew that there were two things that interested me and that I was good at. I was a very competitive soccer player. And so my goal was to become a professional soccer player. And also I was always very interested in the pursuit of knowledge. And so I always knew that eventually I would become a professor. I didn't know which field I would be a professor in, but I certainly knew that at the end of my soccer career I would transition to academia.

And then in my late teenage years, I had become a very competitive soccer player. I was, you know, hopefully heading to Europe to play professionally. And the in the Eastern Canadian championships, I had a devastating injury and so my soccer career was over. And so since that didn't pan out, then I then quickly transitioned into academia, how I became an evolutionary and consumer psychologist, as during my doctoral training at Cornell University, my former doctoral supervisor, J.

Russo, Russell was a very famous cognitive psychologist, had suggested that I take an advanced social psychology course with a gentleman by the name of Professor Dennis Regan. And about halfway through the course, he assigned a book called Homicide by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, Margot Wilson and Martin Daly. And in the book, they explained patterns of criminality using an evolutionary lens. And so that was my epiphany. That was my aha moment. I would take this incredible framework, this evolutionary psychological framework and apply it to the study of consumer behavior.

Beautiful. There's a book behind you that you released recently. Why, why, what's the intention behind writing that book in 2020?

Yeah, so that so this is the parasitic mind, how infectious ideas are in common sense. You know, I faced two great wars in my life. As I discussed in chapter one of the book, The First Great War was the Lebanese civil war, an actual literal physical war where we are Lebanese Jews. We are part of the last group of Jewish people who were in Lebanon.

And, you know, this was our homeland. There was no reason for us to leave, even though many Jews have already left Lebanon. But when the civil war broke out in the mid 70s, it became rather impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon. So we had to escape the brutality of the Lebanese war. My parents eventually were kidnapped by Fatah, one of the terror groups. And so the stuff that I saw as a child in the brutality of the civil war was truly horrible.

And it actually made me very cognizant of the ugliness of identity politics because it showed me what happens when a society is organized using tribal lines. In this case, the tribal identity is based on your religious belongingness. Even the Lebanese constitution is based on, you know, the prime minister has to be of this religion and the president has to be about religion. And so that was my first exposure to the ugliness of tribal thinking. Then we moved to Canada.

You know, I got all my training, I studied in the U.S., came back to be a professor in Canada. And then I started seeing the second great war that I faced, which was the war on university campuses, unreason, on logic, on common sense, on science, because there were all sorts of disciplines that were teaching stuff that was completely anti scientific and completely insane. And so then I ah, I thought, OK, well, how can we explain this kind of insanity?

And so there I am. The reason why it's called the parasitic mind, because there I use a principle from neuro parasitology. Parasitology is the study of how parasites can affect a host. So for example, a tapeworm can enter your intestine and parasitize your intestines. And neural parasite is one that actually goes to the brain of a host. So, for example, if you take a parasite like Toxoplasma Gambi, it will infect the the brain of mice such that a mouse will lose its innate fear of cats.

It'll actually become sexually attracted to the cat's urine, which is not really a good thing for a mouse to have. And so I take this principle and then I argue for my 26 plus years as a professor that humans can suffer from another class of brain parasites. I call these idea pathogens. They are they are ideas that in the same way that an actual parasite can cause the host to behave in maladaptive, irrational ways, these dreadful ideas can kind of lead us to the abyss of infinite lunacy.

And so I trace where these bad ideas come from. They come from the university. It takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas. And and then I trace their trajectory. I explain these idea pathogens. And then I offer a vaccine, if you like, just like we're trying to identify a vaccine against coronavirus. I try to identify a vaccine against this type of disordered thinking. And so maybe if you'd like, I can discuss examples of some of these dreadful ideas.

No, of course. Please. That that was going to be my next question.

So, for example, you take something like postmodernism. This is the granddaddy of dreadful ideas because postmodernism actually argues that there are no objective truths. We are completely shackled by subjectivity. We are shackled by our personal biases. So there's no point in seeking a absolute objective truth because there are no.

Hold on, hold on. God, by saying no objective truth, you mean nobody knows whether right wing is correct or left wing is going to this religion's correct.

Correct. That religion. Oh no. A much more basic even so, let me give you specific examples. So in 2002, I had one of my doctoral students have just defended his doctoral dissertation. And so we were going out for a celebratory dinner myself, my wife, him and his date for the evening. And so prior to us going out, he had given me a heads up to tell me that his date in question was a graduate student in postmodernism and cultural anthropology and radical feminism, sort of the holy trinity of bullshit.

And so and so I basically I hope we can say bullshit on your show if none of you can say whatever you want.

And so he was telling me this to sort of kind of warn me, you know, let's let's be on our best behavior because, you know, we don't want to get into big arguments about. Oh, don't worry, I'm going to be on my best behavior, which, of course was not true. And so about halfway through the evening, I turned to this lady in question and I ask her, oh, I hear you're a you you're a postmodernists.

Yes. Do you mind if I ask if I proposed to you some what I consider to be universal truths? And then you could tell me you don't think that they are universal truths, correct? She said that. No, they are not OK. Well, let me propose what I think are some universal truth, because I'm an evolutionary psychologist. So I do know that there is a universal human nature. For example.

Excuse me, she goes, OK, go for it. I said, well, is it not a universal truth that within Homo sapiens, within humans, only women bear children? Is that not a truth? She's she looks at me, she scoffs, she scowls, she rolls her eyes. She can't believe my stupidity and says absolutely not. So it's not true that only women bear children. She said, no. I said, how is that?

She said, well, because there is some tried off some exotic Japanese island where within their mythological folklore, it is the men who bear children. So by you restricting the conversation to the biological round, that's how you keep us barefoot and pregnant. OK, so she didn't accept that only women bear children. So I thought, OK, well, it seems like it's too controversial for you to concede that only women bear children. Let me give you maybe a less controversial example.

Is it true that from anywhere on Earth, sailors have always relied on the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and he or she used something from Deconstructionism, a subfield of postmodernism, where she said, what do you mean by East and West? Those are just arbitrary labels. What do you mean by the sun that what you call the sun I might call dancing hyaena, to which I answered, find the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the US.

And she said, No, I'm not going to play those label games. So to answer your original question, postmodernism is not saying there are no truths when it comes to whether the right wing or the left wing they don't accept. Gravity is a social construct. Sex differences are a social construct. There is no such thing as east and West. There is no such thing as the sun. Right? As a matter of fact, Alan Sokal, who is a famous physicist at New York University, had written a paper, a satirical paper, a hoax paper in 1996, which he published in one of the top post modernist journals, academic journals, where he was arguing that gravity is a social construct and the rest of it.

But he was being satirical. It was a hoax paper and it was accepted in that journal. So then he went and said, oh, I've got an admission to make. It's all nonsense. It's gibberish. What I wrote. They said, Oh, but that proves nothing because meaning is subjective. So imagine when you are training generations of students to instead of learning engineering and economics and neuroscience, you're teaching them all this kind of nonsense. That's a bad parasitic idea.

So that's one example I could give you others if you like. What's gotten fucked up about the world in the last 10 years? Well, I think many things and I discuss all these in the book, I think one, for example, is we've lost our will to defend freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry. There is now forbidden knowledge. There are things that you shouldn't study as an academic because it might hurt someone's feelings. There are things that you shouldn't discuss when you're discussing politics because it's offensive.

It's racist.

Like. Like what? Like, could you give some subject examples?

Well, for example, in academia, you certainly want to be careful when you're studying sex differences. Now, it doesn't matter if you study sex differences, if the findings come out according to the politically correct position, if a finding comes out that women are superior to men on some task, then you should publish that and you will be hailed as a great scientist. If you publish research that shows that on a particular memory task, men perform better. All while you're a Nazi.

You're a sexist, you're a misogynist. You certainly shouldn't study any racial differences. Only Nazi bigots would do that. So that's in academia. There's a class of things that you're allowed to say or not say in terms of the public discourse. And I discuss this in one of the chapters of the Pacific Mind. There's a chapter where I talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome where, you know, you put your head in the sand and you go, la, la, la, don't want to hear it.

Well, I could show you a clip of a terrorist saying that I'm about to go and blow up this train station because of these 17 different reasons that is proscribed by my religion. And I am doing this only because of my religion. There is no other reason I'm doing this because of my religion. And then when the terrorist commits the act, all of the progressive, nuanced thinkers will come out and say, ah, it's because of climate change, it's because of the Zionist occupation, it's because of British imperialism.

It's because of beard bullying. It's because of the drought in Syria. It's because of lack of art exposure. It's because of alienation. It's because of lone wolf ism. So there are 70 different reasons that they'll come up with that reject what he told you in his own words, which as I am doing this because my religion prescribes it. So that would be an example of how people decide to reject reality because they're trying to protect a particular, you know, narrative, someone's feelings that everyone's too worried about, the world being too sensitive.

That's basically what it is. So, God, you know, I read this beautiful thing about historians as a concept. It said that what's the point of being a historian, a point of being a historian as you study history so that you can predict the future and therefore try to make it a slightly better future? And I would apply that same logic to evolutionary psychology that you've studied human history in a way. You've cited the history of the human mind and therefore you're able to predict what's going to happen going forward.

So do you think that by 2030, 2040, 2050, also keeping in mind technological advancements like NewLink and things like that, what's going to happen to our minds? Like I'll be becoming smarter? Are you becoming stupider? I'll be becoming way more sensitive, or is this just a phase? I'll be just going through a phase of being oversensitive about everything.

So the fact that you study the evolution of the human mind doesn't necessarily mean that you can, if I may correct. You predict the future, because what evolution does is it operates within a particular environment to then create changes. Right. So when it comes to the evolution of a gene that allows you to synthesize lactose. Right. So some there are some cultures where they have a gene that allows them to synthesize lactose and other cultures they don't want that type of gene can actually evolve pretty quickly within a few generations, you know, a couple of hundred years.

You have the selection pressures for that. But on the other hand, when it comes to the fact that we now have ten fingers and there's likely not going to be any selection pressures that I can think of that's going to alter the morphology of our hands to go from ten fingers to 11. You follow what I mean? So so for things to change so that they become fixated as a trait within the human species, it's going to take a lot more than 2030 or 2050.

Do you? What I mean, so, for example, yesterday we we have DNA paternity testing kits. If I want to know if little Johnny is my child, I could actually do a DNA paternity test to know if he's mine or not. Correct. But our human minds have evolved to a time when we didn't have DNA paternity testing. So, for example, the fact that men are very sexually territorial, the fact that. I don't accept that their women go with other men as not due to the patriarchy, but it's because it is an evolutionary solution to the very real threat of paternity uncertainty.

Right. We are a parental species, meaning that both men and women invest heavily in their children. And so your ancestors and mine come from a from men who didn't actually appreciate their women going and sleeping with other men, because I don't want to be investing 20 years of my life in a child that's not mine. Now, why am I saying all this? So now let's put it together. So even though today there are DNA, paternity tests that would allow me to absolutely know whether Johnny is my kid or not, my brain hasn't had a chance to catch up to that reality because my brain is an evolutionary solution to problems that existed in our evolutionary past.

But if for the next million years there are selection pressures that would remove my evolved sexual jealousy, then it will happen, but it won't be by 2030. You follow. Yes, when I mean, could you put a rough number as to when it could be, is it in the year 3000 that I'll be able to I wouldn't be able to because it really depends on the specific traits.

Some traits, as I said, could really evolve very, very rapidly. And some traits take, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of years to evolve. So it's very, very difficult. I would be giving you a completely random number. All I could say is, depending on the trait, the rate at which that trait becomes fixated within the species varies. So basically, for the last two million years or so, human beings have been evolving and for the bulk of that two million years, we didn't have writing, we didn't have religion, we didn't have organized society.

And things that we did then in our daily life have gotten stuck in our genetics, in our minority.

So keeping that in mind, I'd like to also ask you the relationship based human traits that surprised you as a student, as a person who studies evolutionary psychology, things that just jumped out at you. You said, OK, that's how my relationships are affected. That's why I think like this as a guy. What were those nuggets? Yes, absolutely.

So I actually it's a great question, because when you first are exposed to the power, the explanatory power of evolutionary thinking, it truly alters your understanding of human behavior. You now have kind of a know, not kind of you have a universal explanatory key to explain endless different behaviors. Right. So one of the things that I tell my students whenever we start a course, so I might be teaching an MBA course on consumer behavior and I tell them, well, I'm going to explain to the evolutionary and biological roots of our consumer behavior.

I tell them. But just for you to know, I'm not teaching you a recipe of how to be a better marketer. I'm actually teaching you something much bigger. I'm offering you a universal key to understand human behavior, how you choose to then apply it. You can apply it in a million different ways. And what ends up happening is five years down the road, I will get some former student who writes to me and says, I just had a fight with my wife about X, Y, Z.

And I remember your lecture on the evolution of romantic jealousy, and it exactly explains why I became jealous at that party. So so evolutionary theory truly allows you to understand under one framework all the things that happen in our daily lives. Now, to answer your question more directly, in terms of what surprises me, I think one of the things that really surprises me is the extent to which humans have a huge repertoire of possible behaviors. We could be unbelievably loving, cooperative, altruistic, and we can also be the exact opposite.

We can be brutal, abusive, genocidal. And so I think that's what makes the study of human nature so extraordinary. So because when you look at a dog, in a sense, a dog has all of the noble qualities that we should have without any of our faults. It is loyal, it is protective, it is altruistic. So it has all the noble qualities without any of the faults. I think humans are a lot more complex. We're both loving and caring and brutal and genocidal.

So I think maybe that's one of the things that's both sad but also very exciting to study about the human condition. Is there any chance you have any predictions about the year 2030, like what's going to happen in this decade because of coronavirus?

Could you quantify happiness and keep that as the subject theme of this question that do you think will become happier people?

I think it really varies across people. I don't think as a human race we will become happier or less happy. I think that there are certain recipes and prescriptions that can try to optimize your happiness. And actually, I discussed this yesterday on the Joe Rogan show, which will I think will be posted today.

So, for example, doing something that you're truly passionate about. Look, most of your day is spent at work, right? Most of your waking hours is spent pursuing whatever job you're doing. So if you look at the chunk of your life that you are spending at work, it's a rather large part of your life. Now, imagine if you're either spending that time doing something that you really hate, but you have to do it just because it's a job or if you are lucky enough to find something that you could do as a job.

But that also brings you great happiness and passion. Now, of course, not everybody has the luxury of making that choice. But if you do have the possibility to think carefully about how to choose the right career path, I think that's a really important path to happiness. One of the reasons why I wake up every morning incredibly happy like a child in a candy store is because I love what I do. If I'm not working on a book, I'm speaking to a podcast or that has a big show in India.

If I'm not doing that, I'm speaking to one of my graduate students and we discuss wonderful ideas. If I'm not doing that, I'm working on the next scientific project. So there's always an endless number of sources of ways by which I am infinitely happy. So that would be one way by which we could achieve happiness. I think a second way is pick the right life partner another. Right. And again, it sounds like, oh, that's easy to say, but hard to to implement.

But I truly think that if if if your life partner is also the person with whom you truly want to spend all your time with, my wife is really my best friend. It's not as though she's my wife, but when I want to hang out and have fun, I go out with my male friend. No, she I like to do things with her. And so I think if you could find a partner who appreciates who you are and vice versa, who I think you've already on your way to finding happiness because you're spending most of your day doing a job that you love, you come home at night to a person that you love and who respects you and cherishes you.

There's only sleep left. And so that's a pretty good path to happiness. So I can't tell you whether you Manetti will be happier, but I can certainly tell you that there are specific Reppas recipes that we can pursue to maximize our happiness. Absolutely love how you encapsulated the two best aspects of your life and use that as a blueprint. No, but I completely agree. And you don't allow me to add a third factor to that for you. I remember seeing a Geordie episode where you began it talking about your daughter.

And I'm not a father myself. But I imagine that fatherhood is the third factor that really adds meaning and purpose that you are spot on, as a matter of fact, as a.

And thank you for pointing that out. Of course, it was the start of a great episode where my daughter had given me a little note because my family had come with me to meet Joe. I mean, I've met him many times before and she gave me this little note. And so I showed it to Joe. I said, you know, I am the wealthiest man in the world because of the snow. And I don't say this hyperbolically. I'm being literal that, you know, when you have a family that that you love and loves you back, you know, my you know, in the Middle Eastern culture and I don't mean to stereotype, but there's often this attitude of, you know, children, shut up and be quiet.

The grown ups are talking. Right. This very hierarchical system. You know, I don't like that. I mean, children are little people that you want to nurture, like a plant. And so when I speak to my children, one of the greatest joys I get, for example, my my children ask me that. And they're very young. They're still quite young. What's your book about? So now I actually have to answer.

Remember at the start of the show you said, please speak to me as though my audience is made up of young children. Well, how do I take these ideas and put them in such a way that my children can walk away and say, oh, that's cool, I want to read about that. They are parasites and the brains of animals and humans can be parasitize. Oh, that's cool stuff. And so there is nothing more beautiful and magical than seeing your children grow up.

And so I would agree with you, fatherhood or motherhood is certainly a third component. I'm I'm with you there.

You know, that's that's the thing I gain from doing these podcasts. You said that you love your life because you get to study your favorite subject. You get to talk about your favorite subject. You get to go deeper in it through the science experiments. The reason I love my job is I get a doctor, although people like yourself have seen more of the world, have seen more of life.

I also feel that, you know, you guys had a luckier than us in terms of people in the 20s today. And teenagers of today have way more pressure because of what social media tells us that the vision of life should be where you guys didn't have that much access to information. And that actually was a blessing. So keeping in mind evolutionary psychology, again, I believe that human brain is a limited sponge. It can absorb a certain level of information.

And beyond that, your brain starts breaking down because it's just too heavy load to hold. So, I mean, keeping in mind the social media generation and all the mental health issues you're seeing all over the world, do you have hope? Are you a little afraid? Also, keep in mind your young daughter who's going to grow up in this world, what do you think of her future?

Yeah, I you know, social media is both a blessing and a curse, right. As most things in life. So it's it's a blessing. And that allows connections to happen that otherwise would have never happened. You and I would have never met you would have never reached out to me. Maybe you would have never been exposed to my ideas. Were there not social media? I can appear on the Joe Rogan show and, you know, within a week.

Twenty million people have downloaded this. And so so there is a velocity, a speed of information transmission that is wonderful. So from the perspective of a professor, I mean, I have really two jobs as a professor, I need to create new knowledge and then I need to disseminate this knowledge. And so to the extent that now you're offering me tools by which I can put out a tweet that within an hour has been viewed by three hundred thousand people, well, that's a great thing.

So on the one hand, so I don't want to castigate social media as this great evil. So there are wonderful things about social media. It allows connections to happen that otherwise would have never happened. But of course, as you correctly pointed out, social media is also a huge trap. And if you thought that bullying when you're growing up as a teenager was bad because there were four kids who you hated in high school who were tormenting you, well, now what happens when instead of four kids that are tormenting you, we now do cyber bullying where 40000 people can be bullying you?

When we put up a picture of you that is spread everywhere. Now, imagine a young kid who's 14, 15 years old, whose personhood is not fully developed, who doesn't yet have the full thickness of the skin to withstand an attack or scrutiny from forty thousand people. That child is going to be brittle. They're going to break even someone like me who can usually kind of go to.

This, I don't know, problem, I can let things roll off my back. It's not easy because, yes, 99 percent of people will write things that are incredibly positive. But the human mind doesn't read the 99 percent that you look at, the one percent of the people who wrote hateful things about you, who make up things about you, the bigger you become, the more stuff they make up about you. And there's no way to stop it.

It goes viral and there it is. So so it's a very, very challenging thing to have the right discipline, to take the best that you can from social media without succumbing to all of the traps. And so one of the things that I struggle with as a parent is how do I modulate how much time my children spend on online? And, you know, as you know, all of these apps and so on, they're designed to be addictive.

The people who designed these understand marketing and understand psychology of persuasion and understand ergonomics. And they designed these things so that it's impossible for me to disassociate from my damn iPhone. Sometimes even my my family will say, if if we see you, that is pulling out your iPhones, we're going to be very upset. Please don't. We're having dinner. And I do it usually not because I'm having fun. It's usually work related, but it becomes hard to create a delimitation between your free time, your family time and your social media time.

So I hear you. I, I, I'm scared for the young generation because as you said, I didn't grow up at 16 years old with some of the trappings of social media. Yeah, got this do things I want to highlight, again, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, the first thing is the theory of negative biases that you spoke of, that if there's 99 positive comments, your human mind will go to that one negative comment because some ancestor of yours was always wary of the lions and tigers roaming around them at night.

So he always thought, OK, you know, this mainly bill and elephant and friendly animals. But for that one lion, I'm going to be like suppo and that's where that concept of negative biases, I believe, finds its.

So let me add to that. If I forgive me for interrupting you, but let me ask. There's actually something called the negativity, the negativity bias in evolutionary theory, which I actually used in that paper that I published, I think in 2014, that speaks exactly this point. So maybe I can explain it a bit. Please, please.

So there's something called the framing effect, which was developed by two two of the greatest psychologists, you know, certainly of the 20th century. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman cornerman ended up winning the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in studying decision making. And so one of the many phenomena that they uncovered is something called the framing effect. So if I tell you, for example, that this burger is 90 percent fat free, or if I tell you that this burger contains 10 percent fat, those two statements are isomorphic, meaning they are logically exactly the same.

And yet people will judge the burger differently if I frame it as 90 percent fat free or if I frame it as 10 percent fat. Let me give you another example. If I tell you that three out of five dentists recommend this toothpaste, it's the same thing as telling you two out of five don't recommend this toothpaste. But if I give you one frame or the other, you have a completely different impression of the toothpaste.

So I took this principle with one of my former doctoral students and we studied the framing effect and the context of make choice. And so let me explain to you what I mean. So if I tell you, hey, would you like to go out with this person on a date, seven out of 10 of her friends think she's intelligent. That's the positive frame. I can also tell you the negative frame, which is three out of ten of her friends don't think she's intelligent.

Those two friends are identical. Seven out of 10 think she is intelligent as the exact same thing as telling you three out of 10 think she's not yet. People don't come up with the same final desire to go out with the person as a function. But now I'm going to come to the negativity bias. We predicted and found that when it comes to mate choice, women would be much more likely to succumb to the framing effect because they're negatively framed.

Information looms much larger in their brain. Why? Because the costs of making a bad mate choice is much greater to a woman than it is to a man. This is something called parental investment theory. Are you with me on my blowing your mind yet? Yes, yes. So how so? Parental investment theory basically argues that the two sexes don't have the same minimal obligatory parental investment. So, for example, women have just if you look at the gametes and a man's ejaculation, they are two hundred and fifty million spermatozoa.

Women will have 400 ovulation. So women a woman's ovum is is much more expensive than a man's spermatozoa. Right. So that's already is tipping the scale to a woman. Women have to bear the gestational costs. Women have to bear the likelihood of childhood mortality, childbearing more so for all sorts of reason. The cost of minimal parental investment loom much larger for women than it does for men. Therefore, we expect women to have evolved much more stringent made choice strategies.

That's why women are much less interested in engaging in short term mating. Not that they're not. Sometimes they are, but much less so than men, right? Precisely because of this parental investment difference. And so we take this principle and argue that when it comes to framing within the mating market, then negatively framed information will serve as a neon sign much more in a woman's psyche. So this demonstrates to you the evolutionary roots of the negativity bias. So let me get this straight, God, basically, because of our past as stoneage people and odd habits they are sending of our life was our reproductive process and probably eating process.

So everything was centered around these two things like you choose a mate and you should enjoy your next meal is coming from.

It was like going I was going to say you exactly summarize it. The game of life is made up of two steps survival. But I could survive all you want if I can't propagate my genes. My my genes end with me. It's a Darwinian dead end. So so the game of life is made up of two steps. First, survive and then secondly, procreate. And so in some of my other work, not in the Pacific mind, but in some of my previous books I talk about, there are four key Darwinian modules that drive much of our purpose of behavior.

There is the reproductive module, everything related to meeting. There is the survival module. And when it comes to survival, basically there are two key things that you can easily kind of remember. Don't become somebody's dinner and try to get dinner, right. So, for example, the evolution of camouflaging. Right. The fact that some animals evolve so that they can perfectly be camouflaged. This is the evolution of a trait that ensures that I don't become someone's dinner.

Right. On the other hand, my gustatory preference is the fact that you and I probably prefer to eat something fatty and rich and calories more than something that is low and calories. Rachel, I might prefer juicy steak. You might prefer a fatty chocolate mousse, but we both prefer those things to raw celery because your ancestors and mine evolved in an environment of caloric uncertainty and caloric scarcity. So the survival module is really make sure you eat dinner and make sure you don't become someone's dinner.

Right. And the other two modules are called the kin selection module. Right. Why do I jump into a river to save three of my brothers? Why would I risk my life for my three brothers? Well, because my brothers share on average half my half our genes with one another. And so even if I were to die, if I do that in the service of saving three of my brothers from an evolutionary calculus, that makes perfect sense.

And then the fourth Darwinian module is called reciprocal altruism. Why would I jump into the river to save you? You and I are not biologically related. Well, the reason I do that is because we've evolved something called reciprocity, which is I scratch your back today and you'll scratch mine tomorrow. So the idea is that we engage in many forms of reciprocity because of this original problem that we're trying to solve, evolutionarily speaking. So this is why if you and I are best friends, I will make sure to remember your birthday and invite you for dinner on your birthday.

But then when it's my birthday, you better not forget and you better reciprocate. From an economic perspective, there's no reason for us to engage in this ritual. I'm going to pay fifty dollars for your dinner. You're going to reciprocate and pay fifty dollars for my dinner. We're going to end up at the exact same point. So why don't we just forget the whole thing and not do it? The reason why we do it is because these reciprocal obligations is what oils.

It's the social lubricant that oils our friendship. You follow.

I can't. Yeah, I can't imagine what you went through after college and after studying these, you know, truths about life, because according to me, if you take the case of an entrepreneur going out on a date, it captures all these false ideas. The Ford model is in place in his professional life, but he's doing some work to get something in return. The third one is where he's doing it with a school founders or something for his family.

The second one about Rebadow, he sees the pretty girl on the date and then his horny stoneage guy gets turned on and the first one is the forty eats at the date.

So every everything you go through in the human experience is actually an outcome of what your ancestors went through in your Stone Age, which is a very fascinating of course, in a sense, this this is why I'm both incredibly excited in my life, because I've got this universal key to explain all these wonderful, bizarre phenomena that we engage in. But also it's what upsets me a lot in my both of my professional in my public life, because as you may know, if you follow my work, there is a huge list of, frankly, imbeciles who despise evolutionary psychology and they despise evolutionary psychology for all of the wrong reasons.

Right. So radical feminists despise evolutionary psychology because they don't like the idea that there might be biological based sex differences while the average newborn pigeon knows that there are sex differences. Right. But yet we're supposed to argue that men and women are indistinguishable. It's only social construction that made us different, right? If only Lydda had been taught differently. And Rahul, let's put an Indian name.

Had been trained differently then we would have they would have come out different. Well, of course socialization matters, but underneath us, by the way, socialization exists, not outside of biology. Socialization exists in its form because of biology. So there is no nature versus nurture. Everything is nature. Nurture exists in its form because of nature. Right. But yet you've got all sorts of social scientists and humanities professors who hate the idea that humans are biological beings.

They they certainly are willing to accept that evolution explains the behavior of the dog, of the cow, of the zebra, of the mosquito. But don't you dare say, Dr. Side, that evolution explains the human mind. What are you, some kind of Nazi? Well, what do you mean? What do you think the human mind comes from? You think it's by magic? It came to be so. There's all sorts of people who put up many, many roadblocks against the spread of biological thinking, certainly in the social sciences, for all sorts of idiotic reasons.

And so what my scientific career has been all about is to introduce evolutionary thinking in the behavioral sciences in general. But in the business school in particular, how could you study consumers without studying biology? How could you study employees, employers, managers, traders? You don't think our hormones affect our behaviors? You could ask me to make a decision before lunch and ask when my blood sugar is low and you can ask me to make the exact same decision after lunch when I'm now satiated and I might come to a different decision.

You don't think that affected my behavior, but yet we have 100 years of theories in economics and sociology and marketing that are all outside of biology. And so one of the things that I try to do in my work is to say, no, no, of course we have to understand the biological roots of who we are.

Yeah, God, I mean, after evolutionary psychology is then other state of psychology that focuses on different countries like people from different races, you know, like other actually differentiate those injuries, whether on a physical level or the psychological level.

Yeah, that's a good question. So this is how I'll answer it. Evolutionary psychology both explains human universals, things that make the Indian consumer, the Lebanese consumer and the Bolivian consumer similar to one another. But it also explains differences between consumers or people in general. So let me explain. There are some things that are universal, irrespective of culture. There are some things that are culturally different because of biology, and there are other things that are culturally different, not due to biology.

So, for example, the fact that the color green might be considered to be a symbol of fertility in one culture and it's considered a symbol of disease and another might not be related to biology. But let me give you an example of a cross-cultural difference that is due the biology. OK, take, for example, the use of spices and culinary traditions. So on average, Indian food is spicier than Swedish food. Yes. Now, if I were a cultural anthropologist, I would simply revel in having made that statement and it would end there.

Swedish people eat less spicy foods. Indian people eat more spicy food. Good night, everybody. We're done. And evolutionary psychology says, no, no, no, that's not enough. I want to know, is there a phenomenon that explains why Indian people eat more spicy food than Swedish people? And so there is a field called Darwinian gastronomy that actually explains the distribution of spice use around the world. And the explanation is magically beautiful. It turns out that spices are used as a solution to something called it's called the antimicrobial hypothesis.

In hot climates, there is a greater proliferation of pathogens, food borne pathogens. Therefore, certain culinary traditions like the use of spices, like pickling, like salting, like smoking are cultural solutions to biological problems. So even in India, you see differences in spice use. In northern India, where it's colder there, it won't be as much use of spices than in southern India, where it is much hotter. Therefore, there might be greater density of food borne pathogens.

So in this case, you're using evolutionary theory to explain differences between groups. So it's not true that evolutionary psychology is only about studying human universals. It also explains cross-cultural differences.

OK, God, like we're coming to the end of the podcast and I have a couple of quick questions for you, the first is just if someone wants to go deeper into these subjects like psychology, like evolutionary psychology, like cultural psychology, could you give like five book recommendations which have helped you a lot?

Yes, of course. I would say anybody who wants to learn about evolutionary psychology read Martin Daly and Margot Wilson's book Homicide. That's the book that got me into evolutionary psychology. Another book that's a bit more technical is a classic sort of one of the Bibles of evolution psychology. It's called The Adapted Mind. It was a book that was it's an edited book from 1992 that has some of the big original pioneers of evolutionary psychology, all in one book. If you want a book that's specific about the evolutionary roots of human mating.

David Buss wrote a fantastic book many years ago called The Evolution of Desire. So those are some of the evolutionary books. If you're interested in psychology, of decision making, which was, you know, my original training in my in my doctorate read stuff by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman wrote a book about six, seven years ago called Thinking Fast and Slow about System One and System two thinking fantastic book. So those are some of the books that if you're interested in psychology, of decision making, our evolutionary psychology, you must read.

OK, and one final question for you, God, like from all of your life's learnings, if you were dying today and you had to give the current generation three pieces of learning to carry into the future, from all your learnings of life, what would it be?

Always support freedom of speech. Everything flows from freedom of speech. We don't have anything if you don't have freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. So defend that principle. Above all, others live a purposeful and meaningful life. Life is very short. We're on this planet for a very short time period. We'd love to think that we are immortal. Let your work and your legacy and your children be your path to immortality.

And thirdly, so these are not necessarily things that I learned in the book, but things that I learned through the wisdom of life is to be happy. You know what I mean? Life is magical. There's so much exciting things. We all go through difficult periods. My background is I come from the horrors of the Lebanese civil war. And yet I wake up every morning thankful that I'm alive. So I'll live life to the fullest, don't regret anything and move forward.

Got every single podcast teaches me something about the subject that we're speaking about, but also from the person and from you have learned about the happiness that you can take away from keeping your curiosity and your willingness to learn a life. Thank you, brother. God bless you. You're giving a lot to the world. And I'm glad I could take your story to my country and my audience. Thank you, brother.

Pleasure to be with you. And keep doing what you're doing. You're doing a great job. Cheers.