Athena:	00:00:04	Have you been zombified by your friends? Welcome to the Zombified podcast, your source for fresh brains. Zombified is a production of Arizona State University and the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. I'm your host, Athena Aktipis, psychology professor at ASU and the chair of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance.
Dave:	00:00:26	And I'm your co-host, Dave Lundberg-Kenrick, media outreach program manager at ASU and brain and friend enthusiast.
Athena:	00:00:35	Yeah. If you had to choose between brains and friends?
Dave:	00:00:38	Oh, I, I probably, friends without brains. Zombie friends. [laughter]
Athena:	00:00:41	Or, or, or brains without friends?
Dave:	00:00:48	Uh, just in jars? I don't know. That seems weird.
Athena:	00:00:53	Yeah. That would be weird. All right. So, today's episode, we talked to Jamie Krems who is a, a friend expert. I don't know, can we call her a 'friendspert'? No, not really. That doesn't really work.
Dave:	00:01:08	No. Well, now we've done it, so we just gotta roll with it. So we've got our resident 'friendspert', Jamie Krems. Here.
Athena:	00:01:14	Yeah. Well, so she was a grad student here in the psychology department at ASU and now she is an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University. So she's, uh, she's fledged, which is great for her, but it sucks because she's not here anymore for us to talk to her all the time.
Dave:	00:01:31	That's true. Yeah. And, uh, and I think we were both friends with her and so that's, uh.
Athena:	00:01:35	Right. So, so, so unfortunately, uh, I had to interview Jamie not here, so you couldn't be here for it. I was at a conference and I was like, Jamie, come, let me interview you. So, so we had the chance to talk about friends and to what extent friends manipulate us and is that a good thing? Is a bad thing? It's kind of both. I think that was the, that was the conclusion. Um, but, uh, I think the ways that friends manipulate us or it's interesting to sort of think about like, to what extent are they manipulating us for our own good, right? Like in a way, it kinda ties back a little bit to our puppypocalypse episode, right? Because like on some level, when you're being manipulated by people who you're close to, who have shared interests with you, it's like, you enjoy coordinating and doing things together. And, you know, that requires some level of, you know, influencing each other and so,
Dave:	00:02:34	And it helps you meet your goals and things like that.
Athena:	00:02:36	Right. So, yeah. But you don't always know, like, are your interests really aligned or are they just pretending or I guess you kind of get into like Game of Thrones kind of territory. Where it's like, I thought they were my friend, but actually they were just getting close to me to try to completely undermined.
Dave:	00:02:51	Sure. To try and sabotage.
Athena:	00:02:51	Yeah. Right. So friends: usually probably good, right? Overall friends, definitely. Good thing. Um, important for us to feel good on a day to day basis that we have friends, important for helping us meet our goals. In our evolutionary history, people who didn't have friends, have friends, like they were totally screwed. Right? Friends in general, probably good, but not always.
Dave:	00:03:16	Yeah. I guess that's what we're going to find out, right? Is it really that good? Maybe. Maybe I should change my answer and just go with jars of brains. No more friends. [laughter]
Athena:	00:03:25	Yeah, we'll see. So, so listen on and we'll hear from Jamie Krems about friend-zombies.
Intro:	00:03:36	['Psychological' by Lemi]
Athena:	00:04:12	Jamie Krems. How are you?
Jamie:	00:04:16	I'm exhausted and happy. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. So thank you. This is a really cool thing you're doing.
Athena:	00:04:21	Thank you for being on the show. So, uh, a full disclosure. I feel like there needs to be full disclosure on the show. Jamie is, uh, she used to be a grad student in the program where I'm a professor and now she has an assistant professor position. [clapping] Awesome! That's so great. Um, and now that she is not a graduate student in the program that I'm a professor in, I can say, 'Jamie is my friend! Jamie is my friend', so, welcome my friend Jamie, oh and Jamie and I also collaborate. So we're friends and collaborators. Um, and um, and Jamie, you know a little bit about the show, it's about manipulation, about all these things that control our behavior. And it's really, um, inspired by everything from kind of parisitology to like social influence to zombies. So we were, we kind of bring it all together and um, we try to have fun with it. So, you study friendship.
Jamie:	00:05:29	Indeed. I do.
Athena:	00:05:30	From an evolutionary perspective, from a social perspective. Um, and yeah, I was wondering if you could tell us just a little bit about why you got interested in friendship, why, um, it's your thing. Why, why do you study it?
Jamie:	00:05:46	So, um, the reason that I started looking into friendship was because I am interested in female social relationships, in general and women's cooperation and competition as well, you know, is really complex, really beautiful. If you start looking at it, it turns out to be a mystery because female friendships are the zenith of pro-sociality. They're so nurturing and tight, emotionally close and characterized by all this self-disclosure. And yet, they're shorter lived and more fraught and more tenuous than male friendships.
Athena:	00:06:20	But not our friendship.
Jamie:	00:06:22	Well, no. Not our, friendship.
Athena:	00:06:24	Well, of course not our friendship. Yeah.
Jamie:	00:06:24	Well we have, uh, I believe that there are distributions where you can have the more female typical versus male typical. I don't think that it's a binary sex or gender kind of thing anymore. Um, I am coming to believe that.
Athena:	00:06:40	So, so we get along because we're more dude-like?
Jamie:	00:06:43	Am I allowed to say that?
Athena:	00:06:44	Yeah, you can say that.
Jamie:	00:06:45	Okay. I went to a women's college. I'm morally credentialing. Yes. [laughter]
Athena:	00:06:51	So, so sex differences were, were there like where it's like the first three minutes of the show and we're talking about sex differences.
Jamie:	00:06:58	You're welcome David Buss.
Athena:	00:06:58	So, um, why would there be sex differences in, in friendship? Let's, let's get that out there.
Jamie:	00:07:08	Um, from, from my perspective, women have experienced some different selection pressures than men have. Or, currently. So, pregnancy, for example, men don't get pregnant. We do. There's one thing. Um, additionally, we solve some of those problems that both men and women face in a slightly different way. So if we're going to aggress and men are going to agress against same-sex, others, we might do it slightly differently than men would. We're less likely, for example, to hit each other in the face. We're much more likely, for example, to gossip behind one another's backs. So given these different pressures and the costs and benefits of cooperation with other group members in particular, I think that women's friendships have taken on very neat shape. That is still a mystery. There is so much descriptive work to be done, let alone the theoretically motivated experimentalist, fun stuff that we're going to play with forever.
Athena:	00:08:05	Okay so, male friendships are about what? From an evolutionary perspective.
Jamie:	00:08:11	In my mind, I and many others, including people like Richard Wrangham and Jake Vehill,
Athena:	00:08:17	Lots of very smart people.
Jamie:	00:08:18	Yes, lots of very smart people. Um, it would be about cooperation and group defense. The more males you have that you can band together, the greater your chances are of staying safe, protecting your group and getting other groups stuff from females to fruit.
Athena:	00:08:35	And female friendships? What are they about, from a sort of evolutionary perspective?
Jamie:	00:08:40	That's a really good question.
Athena:	00:08:42	Okay, so that's the mystery and that's why you're looking at this.
Jamie:	00:08:46	That is why I want to understand friendship. They are, on the surface, very different than they might be in real life. Are they completely egalitarian? No. But egalitarianism isn't as competitive, competitively enforced, so they're competitive and not. They're incredibly close, but incredibly fraught. They are sung as the paradigms of true friendship and they're also decried as impossibilities. Women can't actually be friends with one another.
Athena:	00:09:12	Okay. I love all of that mellifluous wording that you just used. But let's break it down a little bit. You're saying, like there's a paradox sort of in female friendship, right? That on one hand women talk about friendships as being really egalitarian, that there isn't competition, that it's all cooperation, but that if you look at the reality that doesn't necessarily reflect what women are saying. Is that, is that what you're...?
Jamie:	00:09:43	That is exactly what I'm saying.
Athena:	00:09:45	Okay, so, they're actually more short lived they, they're not as long lasting as male friendships on average. Is that?
Jamie:	00:09:53	That's correct. Yeah. They're not as long lasting. They, even in a shorter time span of a female best friendship, there are likely to have been more insults to the friendship or things that women might remember as potential damage to the friendship. Even in a shorter amount of time. Males just seem to be more tolerant of those. They matter far, far less.
Athena:	00:10:15	Hmm. So, women seem to be a little more sensitive to things that are happening in the friendship and that can kind of disrupt the friendship. But, male friendships seem to be more robust to, like doing things that might offend or,
Jamie:	00:10:31	They can punch one another and then go for a beer. We can give a side-eye and then never speak again because of that side-eye. "Why was she doing that side-eye?" I believe that you came up with this metaphor a few years ago, but male friendships are the jumbo jets.
Athena:	00:10:48	Yeah. Oh actually that was not me. That was my husband when I was trying to explain to him, like, these differences between male and female friendship that we started talking about. He's like, oh, so male friendship is like a passenger airplane that's like built to be stable and just get from point A to point B, you know, like slow and steady without, you know, getting, you know, off kilter from interference and stuff. But,
Jamie:	00:11:22	It can take the turbulence, it can carry your bags, it can do 17 different things, feed you, water you, you can pee in it. [laughter] Whereas women's friendships,
Athena:	00:11:33	Yeah, yeah. Then, and then the women's friendship, the metaphor that he used is that, it's like, um, a fighter plane. So, super high performance and, but perhaps inherently not stable because in order to be really high performance, in order to be able to respond to, uh, to cues really quickly. Um, the, the fighter plane actually has to be inherently unstable. So you have to work to keep it stable. Um, and that's sort of the tradeoff so that you could, you know, maneuver really quickly. Um, so it's a kind of these very two different kind of systems. So that was the analogy that he used to just talk about it.
Jamie:	00:12:19	I love that. And I think it's right. If you conceive of whether it's patrilocality, meaning that males stayed in their natal area and cooperated with kin for a really long time. And so, all of their behavior was underlain by 'R'.
Athena:	00:12:34	Wait. Wait. Wait, all of their behavior was underlain by 'R'. What does that mean?
Jamie:	00:12:38	Their genetic relatedness. Sorry about that.
Athena:	00:12:40	So, so men are living with kin more. And so, they can kind of just like rely like, oh, you're my dudes and I don't have to worry.
Jamie:	00:12:49	You're my bros." I don't have to worry if you take something that I wanted. Well, it's not as bad for me is if some stranger took something, I wanted necessarily and I'll probably get it back in return and in kind of some point later." So, if you assume that their relationships were recurrently underlain by those benefits of interacting with kin and/or that they're simply more benefits to be had by banding together and cooperating and tolerating one another, growing the size of their group for men than for women. Which seems to be the case, at least in some non-human primates as well as hunter-gatherer women. Um, so either patrilocality or the costs and benefits of cooperation.
Athena:	00:13:33	Okay. So some men. It's like bigger groups, better. [Jamie agrees] Oftentimes they were with, um, men were with men who were also their kin. And that was just because humans tended to be more patrilocal rather than matrilocal. If we look in our, our best guess about human evolutionary history from looking at hunter gatherers and other small societies.
Jamie:	00:14:02	Genetics and hunter gatherers.
Athena:	00:14:02	Oh, and then genetics also? Does that tell us that there's more, there's more patrilocality?
Jamie:	00:14:08	There does seem to be a much stronger case for patrilocality. Although some people that study hunter-gatherers would disagree with that. I think Kim Hill would disagree with that.
Athena:	00:14:17	Yeah. Okay. All right. So there's still some controversy about this. But the basic idea is men's friendships and women's friendships probably had different functions for our ancestors and that can potentially help to explain why they're sort of different. [Jamie agrees] All right, so, so let's, now that we kind of have like, here's what you do and here's the basics about friendship. Um, I want to ask about the zombification side of it. The control side of it. So, do friends manipulate us? Is that part of what happens in, in friendship and like is that for our own good, is it mutually beneficial? Is it exploitative? So, what's going on in friendship in terms of social influence and is it a inherently manipulative situation or is it sort of very like, autonomous mutual goals? What's your sense of that?
Jamie:	00:15:22	I certainly believe we manipulate one another, whether or not it's manipulative in a dark way, I would not say. My best guess is that we get what we need out of different people and particularly for women. Since a lot of what we need and want, um, our routes to resources are other people. Perhaps more often than men's are. If men just go get meat, we get meat via the men who got the meat. It's a very simplified version of it.
Athena:	00:15:53	This is like Caveman Central, right? The idea that like men are the ones who have the resources and women in order to get the resources have to go through the men.
Jamie:	00:16:05	We have to go through other women, too. We have to go through a lot of other people and men have to go through other people as well. I think women are much more adept at doing it without making it seem dirty or conflictual and yet it is quite conflictual.
Athena:	00:16:20	So, you're saying that like, ancestrally there was, it wasn't that men had everything on, women didn't have everything. But maybe men were more likely to have high value resources like meat. And in order to get those, women had to go through men, but men also had to go through men in order to get those sometimes. So sort of everybody had to go, maybe not everybody, but a lot of individuals would have to go through other humans in order to get their needs met. And there might be some of these symmetries between men and women and how much they need to do that. But um, that we're,
Jamie:	00:16:59	We're not just vaginas with legs for reproduction, certainly.
Athena:	00:17:03	Oh, okay. That's good to know.
Jamie:	00:17:05	I am not calling women 'ovulating ware-wolf hussies' - lady that wrote that article.
Athena:	00:17:09	Did somebody say that you called women that?
Jamie:	00:17:11	Yes.
Athena:	00:17:12	Wow! Well, I mean all monsters are welcome on this podcast.
Jamie:	00:17:18	I also don't like babies.
Athena:	00:17:20	It's like, okay, so you don't like babies. But,
Jamie:	00:17:23	I loves dogs.
Athena:	00:17:25	You love dogs! Are you zo-, I actually wanted to ask you about this so now that you brought it up. We should talk about it. So, um, uh, two shows ago we had Clive Wynne on and we talked about dogs. And are you zombified by your dog?
Jamie:	00:17:36	Absolutely! They manipulate the living hell out of me.
Athena:	00:17:39	So, and one of the things that we were talking about is like, you know, does having a dog, is that like a replacement for having babies? Like, is it like, activating those parental investment mechanisms and like giving you all those like cues that like you're successfully raising? So, I had to ask you, cause I know you love dogs and like, dogs or your thing and I'm just wondering like are you zombified by them?
Jamie:	00:18:06	I am. I have five of them. I have five rescued dogs that are all sad and needy and named after scientists. And,
Athena:	00:18:14	Can you give us um, some examples of the names of your dogs.
Jamie:	00:18:18	There's a Napoleon Yanomamo.
Athena:	00:18:20	Okay. Named after?
Jamie:	00:18:22	Um, Nap Chagnon. Um, who studied the Yanomamo. Uh, there is Frederica de Laguna, Margo Wilson, General Pitt Rivers. Martin Daily knows that I named that dog that. Thinks that I'm a loon. Um, there is a, he's a toy poodle. He had a twitch. He's very anxious. So his name is Twitchard Dawgkins. Likola Tesla and Charles Pickles Darwin.
Athena:	00:18:51	That's a quite a menagerie.
Jamie:	00:18:53	I also have a taxidermied Ring-tailed Lemur named Lemur Cosmedies.
Athena:	00:18:57	So, you like to collect animals. Both dead and alive.
Jamie:	00:19:02	Uh, non-human animals. Yeah, all about it. [laughter]
Athena:	00:19:09	Yeah. So, so your dogs, like they control your behavior? They do. They are the, when people talk about their children and how rewarding they find looking at their babies and their babies doing essentially nothing, just the baby's looking at their own feet. I cannot understand it unless I sort of find and replace baby with dog because I could look at Likola Tesla chew his pawsy, for hours. I have have a video of it that's two minutes long. No one else wants to see that. But I find it so inherently rewarding to watch him happily chew his own paw.
Athena:	00:19:50	Wow. You really are zombified by your dogs.
Jamie:	00:19:53	Yeah. And they're expensive little zombies cause they're all blighty. But anything they want, and I'm the one, I'm the parent that always wants to give them more food, let them in because they're cold. I hate to see them shiver. I've lost my mind.
Athena:	00:20:15	Yeah, so, you're zombified by your dogs. But, you get a lot out of it. Right?
Jamie:	00:20:21	I do. I find it so rewarding. They are relaxing. I'm not spreading my genes that way certainly. But, I find it so lovely and relaxing and simply the smell of their breath, which is like the bad ocean; I love it. Oh, I love bad dog breath.
Athena:	00:20:43	Oh, well and so you know, people who live with dogs have more similar microbiomes to their dogs than, on average, other entities and people who live in the same house with dogs have more similar microbiomes to each other apparently than people who don't have dogs in their houses. So,
Jamie:	00:21:03	Are you telling me that Charles Pickles Darwin, has licked inside my husband's mouth and then inside my mouth? Cause, yes.
Athena:	00:21:09	That's gross. [laughter] But, I think that it's, you know, you might not be spreading your germline genes, but your microbial genes, they're certainly getting around.
Jamie:	00:21:21	And probably into some voles that my dogs are chasing. Definitely those Yorkies they're trying to front on in the backyard.
Athena:	00:21:30	Yeah. So your microbiome via, your dogs. I dunno. Maybe. Maybe that's what's going on.
Jamie:	00:21:36	Is that why? Do you think that's why a lot of people, um, particularly in my generation, who are waiting longer to have kids and maybe never having kids, are having dogs instead. Are they replacement children?
Athena:	00:21:49	I don't know. We're sort of speculating about whether that might be the case. We've talked about with Clive a little bit and uh, certainly seems like puppies sort of. Hmm. Tap in, hijack the parental investment mechanisms with, you know, being so cute and big eyes and it just make you like want to pick them up and keep them warm and feed them.
Jamie:	00:22:17	Run across traffic when you see a sheep dog, for example. Chestnut Street. It was busy that day. It was worth it! It was a sheep dog! His tummy.
Athena:	00:22:24	Yeah. So, so, okay. So we've established you're pretty zombified by your dogs, but that's okay. Right.
Jamie:	00:22:35	Completely.
Athena:	00:22:36	Completely zombified.
Jamie:	00:22:36	They must have some big plan that they want me to be an evolutionary psychologist in Oklahoma because I would do whatever they said.
Athena:	00:22:43	Okay. All right. Um, so, uh, let's talk about like friends again. So, so dogs get you to take care of them, feed them, make them not cold, attend to their every need, take videos of them eating their paws, all sorts of things. Yes. How about friends? Like what do, what kinds of things do friends induce friends to do?
Jamie:	00:23:10	All of those. All of those minus the paws. Oh, probably. So if I invest in you, then you're more likely to invest in me, perhaps. And we start this feedback loop of helping one another out in times of need. So if you're sick or somebody peeves you, I can bring you soup or kneecap someone in the parking lot.
Athena:	00:23:31	Would you do that for me?
Jamie:	00:23:32	You know I would, yeah!
Athena:	00:23:33	You're so silly!
Jamie:	00:23:33	Thank you. I would hide a body in the trunk for you. I would wear a gritty outfit and punch a Nazi for you. I would also just punch the Nazi but, I'd wear a gritty outfit, too. They can be orthogonal.
Athena:	00:23:48	So, so let's like kind of like break down the landscape of like friend influence. Like, so there can be things that friends are doing for each other that are really like mutually beneficial sometimes.
Jamie:	00:24:02	Yes. There, whether it's um, a feedback loop like that, that brings us closer and closer together or it's just a tit-for-tat reciprocity or it's simply, hey, I need this now. I need this later. There are many ways to get to there. Yeah.
Athena:	00:24:20	Okay. So you could have like the positive, like the manipulation, but for mutual benefit, like, um, you know, trying to create a really positive interaction and having like eye contact and responding, like all of those things maybe, or you could say that they're, you know, manipulative in the sense that they're influencing the other party, but they're establishing a rapport which maybe makes it more likely to successfully cooperate and you'd get mutual benefit. [Jamie confirms] Okay. But then you've got like the other side, which is friends potentially manipulating each other for their own benefit and like not in the interest of the person who's being manipulated.
Jamie:	00:25:07	Yeah. So, um, if I'm allowed to plug work from Oklahoma State, Ashley Rankin and Jennifer Byrd-Craven have this paper that talked about yesterday showing that when women come into the lab and co-ruminate.
Athena:	00:25:23	What's co-rumination?
Jamie:	00:25:23	So, women come into the lab, they talk about their problems to a pretty extreme extent and continue to talk about that problem for quite some time.
Athena:	00:25:34	So it's like often about mating stuff, right? Like, my boyfriend, what's, you know, is, why did he text me that he didn't want to meet up tonight and said he wanted to study? Is he really studying or is he going out with Becky?
Jamie:	00:25:50	It's a lot of it is about mating to my understanding. I think a lot of it certainly for me, as an old married lady is about, the social landscape and the people that we both know that we have absolutely no mating interest in. Who is befriending whom? Who is giving what to whom? And is this person friend or foe? Or simply this person is foe, let's talk shit about this person.
Athena:	00:26:17	Okay. All right. So, co-rumination is like going over these like, issues, where you're not really sure what's going on and you just kind of keep talking about it and talking about it and talking about it.
Jamie:	00:26:28	Rehash, rehash. Move to a different seat in the room. Rehash, get a different perspective rehash.
Athena:	00:26:35	Okay. How do you feel about rehashing and co-rumination, like personally?
Jamie:	00:26:39	Personally? I wish I did less of it. It's hard me to not do that. Now I can just sometimes text and say so and so is such a, bad word. But, I think maybe I do less of it now that I'm older. Probably not. Certainly not at these conferences. [laughter] Um, I do think there are two really cool things going on there though. One that they've studied is that the friend with whom you are co-ruminating and you end up synchronizing on a hormonal level and then, 20 minutes later, you're still synchronized to this person. Suggesting that maybe they're playing it over in their minds. At least on a physiological level, something is going on with their bodies based on the co-rumination. You have infected that person with your thoughts and your troubles and maybe they are trying to rehash it to come to a solution. So, that could be cool.
Athena:	00:27:48	Okay. So, two friends are sitting around and talking about something that was like really stressful for one friend. And just the act of having that conversation. You can say it zombifies the friend who's listening and gets their physiological systems like in sync with the person who is talking about the problem.
Jamie:	00:28:11	Yeeaah! I have zombified you, I have um, gotten you to come up to my level of "What the hell is going on here?" The same way that mothers can calm down babies and say, "Oh yeah, I know it hurts, but, come down, chill." Uh, this is, "Something is up here. We're going to figure it out."
Athena:	00:28:30	So, this whole like physiological synchrony thing, we haven't really talked about that so much in the podcast yet. We like talked a little bit about stress and how people can manipulate others by stressing them out. Because if you stress someone out then, um, so, Mary Davis was on the last show and she talked about how, if you stress somebody out, um, when you're stressed, you, you're thinking actually gets less complex. It's harder to think about complex issues and that can make you more manipulable. So we've talked a little bit about that, but we haven't really talked about this like physiological synchrony thing and that like if you are having an intense interaction with someone that there can actually be a sort of contagion of your emotional state, which is then reflected in your hormonal state, your nervous system.
Jamie:	00:29:25	Your hormonal state 20 minutes later after you've been separated from one another. You're not even talking. I think that Ashley mentioned that they had a hard time keeping the people from talking, uh, during the separation period because they wanted to keep rehashing this. And by contrast; it's almost impossible to get men to co-ruminate and they've tried lots of different ways. Look at this horrible sports game, let's watch this together. But, they'll say, "Oh, that was a bad catch." But women are hormonally attuned to one another 20 minutes later. I have zombified you and I don't know how long that lasts.
Athena:	00:30:05	So, when you say, hormonally attuned, you mean like stress hormones, not like, not reproductive hormones necessarily?
Jamie:	00:30:11	Cortisol. No, we are not necessarily ovulating at the same time, but maybe we are. I don't know.
Athena:	00:30:15	There's a lot of controversy about that. Right? [laughter]
Jamie:	00:30:19	So here is my, can I say a crazy ovulation thing?
Athena:	00:30:23	Yes. Please say a crazy ovulation thing.
Jamie:	00:30:25	So there is one good study looking at women's ovulation and moon cycles because apparently that really does affect whether we're going to ovulate, menstruate, etcetera where we are in our cycles.
Athena:	00:30:40	That's cause of the light. Right? Like, the light at night. It has some effect on physiology?
Jamie:	00:30:45	So you would, yes, I believe that that's the mechanism. If that's true, A. it would be really cool if we are able to be attuned to the light so that we can be protected from predators and/or sneak copulate in the dark.
Athena:	00:31:01	Are we zombified by the moon?
Jamie:	00:31:03	We might be zombified by the moon.
Athena:	00:31:04	So it's like we're in werewolf land.
Jamie:	00:31:08	I am calling women 'ovulating werewolf hussies'!
Athena:	00:31:09	You are! Apparently!
Jamie:	00:31:12	You're right, Blogger. Um, so not only that, but if you think of, this is where I'm gonna like link women to turtles instead of werewolves. Turtles hatch, they're attracted by the light in an area, they should go to the ocean, but instead they ended up going toward this town.
Athena:	00:31:32	Yeah. Right. Because there's, their like sort of looking for the moon reflecting off the water.
Jamie:	00:31:38	Yup. Instead they end up in traffic and in storm drains, away from the water at the beach town. So wouldn't it be cool if our cycles are being influenced-not necessarily good-cool-if our cycles are being influenced by all of the artificial light in the environment.
Athena:	00:31:58	Yeah. Well there are all sorts of physiological effects of having light at night and it's one of the risk factors for cancer.
Jamie:	00:32:08	I didn't know that.
Athena:	00:32:09	Yeah. So it's, you know, mechanistically it seems like there, well we know that nighttime light can have all sorts of effects. So,
Jamie:	00:32:19	Is it blue light? Or red light? Or just simply city lights? What kind of light?
Athena:	00:32:24	Um, so I don't remember exactly what they were measuring in the study, but I'm pretty sure it was just correlational. So, it was probably of exposure to nighttime light. Um, generally.
Jamie:	00:32:39	Could it be really people who have to work night shifts and stress?
Athena:	00:32:43	So, there's a bunch of work on sleep disturbance as well.
Jamie:	00:32:48	Right? And the gut.
Athena:	00:32:49	Yeah. And the gut, but also cancer. So yeah, all of this stuff with sleep and, and light, it has physiological effects. And yeah, so the moon, the light the werewolves.
Jamie:	00:33:03	Turtles.
Athena:	00:33:04	Turtles.
Jamie:	00:33:05	Turtles and werewolves. The next game we'll make.
Athena:	00:33:07	Yeah. So friends, then friends and ovu- okay, so now we're, we're to figure out where we were. Right. We were talking about friends.
Jamie:	00:33:16	Freinds. There were two things on co-rumination. So one, we talked about was the hormonal synchrony. And how I might zombify you by talking about Becky. And whether or not my boyfriend is dating Becky. Because you're now attune to me hormonally.
Athena:	00:33:33	Is your boyfriend dating Becky?
Jamie:	00:33:35	I would shiv Becky, first of all. Becky better not mess, and yeah. Am I allowed to say husband? Sorry, parents. Um, I wanted all that Le Creuset from their friends. But,
Athena:	00:33:47	What are you talking about? Le Creuset from whose friends?
Jamie:	00:33:50	My parents' friends don't know that I'm married because I wanted wedding gifts. But,
Athena:	00:33:54	Okay. So you, so your parents', friends don't know that you're married. But, Your parents know. But not their friends. Are you going to like have a wedding?
Jamie:	00:34:02	I was planning to but, ain't nobody got time for that shit.
Athena:	00:34:06	You know I had a wedding-you can swear it's okay- I had a wedding, uh, like five years after actually got married.
Jamie:	00:34:15	Yeah, that's, that's probably what we'll do. So, I wanted to have it at the SPSP two years from now in Austin cause that's where my favorite hotel is. And then everyone I like will already be there for the preconference. Um, that idea was shut down.
Athena:	00:34:29	I'll get you some Le Creuset.
Jamie:	00:34:29	Really?
Athena:	00:34:31	Yeah. [Jamie and Athena agree]
Jamie:	00:34:32	I can't cook though, so don't really bother.
Athena:	00:34:34	All right.
Jamie:	00:34:35	I don't even know how to pronounce it. I just think it's pretty.
Athena:	00:34:38	All right. Well I'll, I'll give you Le Creuset and a cooking lesson.
Jamie:	00:34:42	Oh, please don't.
Athena:	00:34:45	Okay. So, um, so all right. So you want the Le Creuset from your parent's friends so you, so you don't want to say 'husband' on the show, but now everybody knows. Everybody knows that you're married, right? And I mean your parents' friends probably aren't listening so, I think you're right.
Jamie:	00:34:57	If they do, they didn't make it this far. So, I love you Uncle Bob. Um, so thing one: hormonal synchrony. Thing two: and this is something we haven't played with so it's entirely speculative, but I firmly believe that co-rumination and venting are pretty similar, right? [Athena confirms] So, if I vent to you about someone being unfair to me and really nice to somebody else and I'm talking about this horrible inequality and this great unfairness and I'm going on about it and we know we both know this person. I believe that I am manipulating you. I am not only, perhaps making you feel closer to me because I am sort of showing you my juggler. I'm telling you my real true thoughts about this mutual friend. Which you could use to trip me up later. But additionally, I think I am making you like that person a little bit less. So, venting feels good. We all know it feels good, but it's not because- why does it feel good? It's not because we're less angry at the end of it. There's no sort of steam valve, that was the idea. We know that's not true. But we don't know why it feels good. I think it feels good because you like me better at least relative to that person, you now, like less that I've vented about.
Athena:	00:36:21	So venting feels good because you're changing the other person's state and in particular because you're kind of zombifying them?
Jamie:	00:36:34	I'm zombifying you to eat the brains of that asshole that I'm venting about. Or at least trick him.
Athena:	00:36:41	So the prediction is like, venting should feel good in proportion to how much the act of venting gets the person you were venting to, to be more your ally and less aligned with the person that you're having the issue with.
Jamie:	00:37:01	Exactly. You will like me better. You will like that person less. Hopefully. I think that's the fun in venting. Um, we could say Santa Barbara style welfare tradeoff ratios. We could just say closeness. I think liking does it just find you like me better. You like that person less.
Athena:	00:37:22	And that's what makes venting feel good is, changing how someone feels. So that's the prediction that you're making.
Jamie:	00:37:28	I think, so. I think I have infected your feelings toward other people, including me. But if I have infected your feelings and made you like somebody less that I think is kind of shitty, kind of not great. Then, that is awesome. Good for me. I am hurting, hurting that person's relationship with someone important.
Athena:	00:37:49	I think you've infected me with this hypothesis. I like it. [Jamie and Athena agree and cheer together] All right. So, uh, so here's another question, then. From an evolutionary perspective, why are we vulnerable to being manipulated by friends? Like, why not just like, be like, impenetrable, like not be affected by someone who is trying to influence you? Like is it, is it a good thing to be swayed by what your friends are saying about other people? Or is it at, are you just a tool?
Jamie:	00:38:29	Wait, uh, am I just a tool for talking shit? [laughter]
Athena:	00:38:32	No, no, no, no, no. [laughter]
Jamie:	00:38:36	Or like a tool that pros use, tools.
Athena:	00:38:36	Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, I was not calling you a tool. [laughter]
Jamie:	00:38:44	I can never tell. [laughter]
Athena:	00:38:50	Yeah. So, so are, right. So, if like being manipulated by others is, just making you a tool of their intentions, right, then.
Jamie:	00:39:03	I simply weaponized you, but I'm not, you're not getting any benefits.
Athena:	00:39:06	Oooo weaponized your, I like, weaponized. Weaponize your friends. Does that happen? Do people weaponize their friends?
Jamie:	00:39:13	Absolutely. Absolutely. So anytime that I derogate a mutual friend. Um, particularly if I were to tell you, and I know that this has happened because A. I've done it, uh, when I was much younger and B. I've had it done to me. But, I could tell you something untrue that someone said, you know, um, "Becky said that she thought your socks were ugly", but probably something more important than that. Or, "I saw Becky kissing your boyfriend." Even if I just don't like Becky, you're likely to dislike Becky. You are likely to jettison Becky from any social event that you would have. And maybe you'd even shiv Becky.
Athena:	00:39:56	I'm really not liking Becky.
Jamie:	00:39:58	I know. I don't actually know a Becky, so this is fine by me. Okay.
Athena:	00:40:04	All right. So people weaponize their friends by saying that other people said things that they didn't say?
Jamie:	00:40:17	There's that. Yeah, they weaponize their friends simply by derogating somebody's reputation. So maybe you're less likely to have Becky hang around if I tell you I don't like her. Um, I think one of the ways that we zombify our friends is saying, um, "Oh, I don't like that person." If that person's a newcomer, particularly among women, you'll ask, and, uh, Jennifer Byrd-Craven and I have chatted about this quite a bit. "Oh, so and so, do we like her?" So you are infecting your friend with your preconceived feelings about somebody else that maybe you don't want, don't want around, and maybe it would even serve you to have this person around. So I, I don't know if I, I don't know if it's good or not to the extent that you can trust me and that I benefit from you benefiting, then yeah. Maybe it's maybe it's pretty good to the extent that I am, uh, a tool in the bad sense of the word, then maybe it's not good and I'm just weaponizing you for my own benefit. And at the same time, sabotaging relationships that could have been beneficial to you.
Athena:	00:41:27	Are you doing that?
Jamie:	00:41:29	Not right now.
Athena:	00:41:30	Okay, good.
Jamie:	00:41:31	Yeah, a little bit earlier we had a conversation, but I, I just firmly believe that that was, that was good venting and I'm, I mean I'm right. So.
Athena:	00:41:41	Of course you are. I'm not actually trying to, well anyway, I agree. Um, so you have like the possibility, in friendships, it could be that you're manipulating someone for sort of mutual benefit somehow. Or you could be actually zombifying them. And so if you're the target of this and like, someone is trying to manipulate you, one of your friends is trying to manipulate you. How do you figure out if they're like trying to tell you information that you should know so you can protect yourself, right. Cause that might be like a very cooperative thing to do. It'd be like, oh, watch out for this person because they, you know, are bad news and they might try to exploit you versus someone telling you that in order to manipulate you so that you don't interact with them or so that you are a sort of tool of their intention to exclude this person. So how do you as like a human being sort through that incoming information to know, are they, is it something that's potentially real information that you should be paying attention to that it's in your benefit to know it versus is being used to exploit you or manipulate you?
Jamie:	00:43:12	I don't think we have any idea how people do that. A best guess, you sort through the landscape of everybody's relationships and you have an idea of how reliable that information is. But essentially I'm still saying we don't know. And that's the typology. It's just that does that, which is the same thing. It does the same thing. Um, can, am I allowed to tell an anecdote?
Athena:	00:43:35	Of course.
Jamie:	00:43:36	So, um, I went to a women's college and I left that college and living in Philadelphia, it was really awesome. I had a roommate who graduated the year before me and a best friend of 20 years, and another roommate from also from Brinmar. Um, they would tell me so much nasty shit about one another. And I thought, wow, we're really close. If you aren't telling me these horrible things, you think about somebody that is our really good friend and roommate, you must like me better than you like this person. We must have a closer relationship. I didn't think for a second that they were probably doing the same thing, talking about me to our other roommate. Turns out they were. Um, and they're horrible people and I hope they're really unhappy. And occasionally I'll look on Facebook to make sure that they are and they are so, all is well. Um, but I mean it was a two hour g-chat conversation about how they wished my mother would die, so I'd be alone. It was intense. Don't have it on my computer next time, Mia. Um, so she was never very bright. Um, so I don't know if I have figured out whether or not information is trustworthy. You would imagine that if you saw two strangers, um, having a conversation about one of their really close friends and about how horrible that really close friend was, maybe you would think that the, these friends are untrustworthy because they're really close friends with this person they're saying horrible things about. But when it's your friend saying horrible things about your mutual friend to you, I think it just makes you feel like you two are closer.
Athena:	00:45:27	That's interesting. So, so this, this like venting thing like talking bad about somebody, there, maybe there's some sort of interesting vulnerability there, right? Like, if you're the recipient of like, hearing someone say a lot of bad stuff. Like, you can feel like oh this is reflective of intimacy. But, it might also be reflective of someone who uses this strategy in order to create intimacy, in general. [Jamie agrees] So, you should maybe like, if we're going to do like, take home messages, like if someone talks a lot of shit about other people to you, you should ask yourself are they talking shit about you to other people?
Jamie:	00:46:16	I think that would be a wise question to ask yourself. There are some people to whom you can bare your neck, tell your secrets. If this person is telling everyone else's secrets, are you really their number one best friend? Or are you simply one person to whom they vent and they're doing it to other people? I've described this situation before to some men, um, and there were women in the room at the time, and the guy said, "So wait, you really don't know and it seems pretty fraught and you could be friends for a while and you'd disclose all of this important information and it could be used against you. Kind of a hostage taking situation. I'll give you a cousin, you give me a cousin, then I'll give you your kidnapped sister. Then you give me the kidnapped sister.
Athena:	00:47:07	But with information?
Jamie:	00:47:08	But with information. Um, but you never really know what's going on. "This sounds complicated and horrible and draining. The sounds so difficult!" And all at the same time, the woman in the room were like, "Yeesss!" So, there's something kind of vindicating in giving words to what is going on in our heads. Um, but I think you and I and some other people are starting now, to study the incredible complexity of it. That people might have not realized existed or didn't take it seriously or simply didn't care about.
Athena:	00:47:48	Yeah. All right. So I've got a couple other questions. So one is, what is going on with social media and friendships? Like, is that changing how people are able to manipulate each other in friendships or is it changing like our emotional responses in a way that makes us, you know, more unhappy or more happy or, so, how has social media changing this landscape of friendship?
Jamie:	00:48:17	So one part of it, that is kind of neat, is that we are holding onto friends longer because we can see what they're doing and follow them. So, maybe our friendships are not - something you're doing with Jessica Ayers- maybe our friendships are not dissolving at the same rate. That's kind of interesting that we can keep those peripheral friends. But I'm really interested in the shared knowledge aspects of social media. Who gets to see what I'm doing because Facebook, your Facebook wall, your Instagram, um, I don't know about the thing with the ghost. The ghost thing.
Athena:	00:48:58	Yeah. What is that one?
Jamie:	00:48:58	Um, doesn't matter. I'm old.
Athena:	00:49:00	Yeah, we're, we're like old now. I wonder what the ghost one is.
Jamie:	00:49:04	Whatever those new fangled the kids are up to. Um, you control what people see about you in a way that I don't think you can do face to face. There's multichannel communication face to face. But, on your Facebook wall you are, unless you're posting a Facebook live video, you're talking about, um, a picture that you posted where you look just right, you deleted 17 other pictures because you didn't like how you looked in those and maybe you also filtered it and photo shopped it. Same thing with Instagram. So people are probably seeing often unattainable happiness. I wonder if kids now aren't pretty savvy than everyone else is. Showing an attainable savviness. It's almost like the, um, the shit talking we just discussed. Do you, you have to ask yourself, is this person showing real happiness to everyone or is this person, is this person genuinely that happy or is this person only that happy to me and their audience on Instagram? It would be cool if you could. Okay. This is my crazy speculative thing about social media. Um, Robin Dunbar and some other people did this neat study with macaques and social groups and macaques that lived in larger groups had larger social brain areas, just over development.
Athena:	00:50:32	Oh wow!
Jamie:	00:50:33	Really cool stuff.
Athena:	00:50:34	So your brain gets bigger if you're in a bigger group, if you're a macaque? That's crazy.
Jamie:	00:50:38	Those areas of your brain. Yeah. So I wonder if social media and the advent and pervasiveness of it is not maybe changing our brain structures. How many people we can keep track of. Michael Varnum mentioned how many faces we can, maybe it's growing our face area.
Athena:	00:50:59	Okay. So was it that, that part of the brain that's responsible for social stuff was bigger and everything else was the same? Or was it like crowding out other stuff?
Jamie:	00:51:11	I have no idea. I don't remember. And I should look that up because that would be really cool. So,
Athena:	00:51:16	Our friends are eating our brains, if so. I mean, I don't know, Right?
Jamie:	00:51:19	Woah! Our friends are eating it. That would be really neat. Yeah. And maybe if we have GPS's and Facebook on our phones, a la, Michael Varnum's prediction; our hippocampal areas will shrink and our fusiform gyrus areas will grow and we'll just be, our brains will be eaten by your friends.
Athena:	00:51:41	You're blowing my mind or eating my brain or something right now.
Jamie:	00:51:43	I would eat your brain. Your brain's probably like, I wished in a Highlander sense, I could eat your brain.
Athena:	00:51:51	I don't know what that means and I don't think I want to. So let's move on.
Jamie:	00:51:53	Sorry. Yes.
Athena:	00:51:54	Um, all right, so what is the friend apocalypse? Like if we take like what we know about like friends and how friends can manipulate each other. Like, what is the worst case scenario like of the world of friends manipulating each other? Like what would it be like in the apocalypse of friends zombifying each other.
Jamie:	00:52:15	Can it be being stuck in an elevator with the women you knew in high school that didn't like you? That said they liked you but really didn't like you.
Athena:	00:52:26	Yeah, that sounds bad.
Jamie:	00:52:27	That would just, but that's maybe more hell than apocalypse. Um, so tell me more. What do you mean by apocalypse?
Athena:	00:52:32	So, so we always sort of asked this question of like, if you take this, this kind of zombification that we're looking at in the episode. So today we're talking about friends and friends manipulating each other and um, let's take the negative aspect of that, right? Like I'm manipulating for your own benefit. You're like manipulating your friends for your own benefit. You're getting manipulated by your friends for their own benefit. And if we just like amp that up and say like, you know, friends can manipulate each other, you know, to the Nth degree. Um, what does the world look like when friends can control each other's behaviors so intensely?
Jamie:	00:53:17	Um, a less hierarchical Jones Town or Manson Family. [laughter] Really. Truly. I know those people are really charismatic and there is some hierarchy there. And also a lot of mating involved. None of those things need to be involved. Neither hierarchy nor mating. But the ability to influence people to do your bidding, you get all the goodies and very few of the risks. I think that's what it looks like.
Athena:	00:53:44	Yeah. I guess it's kind of hard to think about what would happen if everyone were able to manipulate everyone.
Jamie:	00:53:52	Oh, I don't even, yeah, I, in my head I automatically assumed that some people were really good manipulators and other people simply didn't have that skill.
Athena:	00:53:59	Right, right. Yeah. Cause it's different if it's like the friend apocalypse because like 5% of people are like super good at manipulating their friends and everyone else doesn't do it. But if everyone is manipulating everyone, then like, I mean would just like the world halt because people are just trying to manipulate each other and then they're just like stuck? And that, because one is trying to manipulate the other, but like they don't have aligned interests and so they're spending all of their energy trying to manipulate each other and getting nowhere.
Jamie:	00:54:32	So either nothing would happen exactly like that. Everything would halt or we're in it.
Athena:	00:54:38	Oh, we're in the friend apocalypse.
Jamie:	00:54:40	And we're manipulating each other all the time. And maybe we don't even realize it. It's like gravity. We cried once when our friends were mean to us in high school and now it's just normal. [laughter] That's so dark. Oh man.
Athena:	00:54:58	So if we kind of then like come full circle back to the sex differences thing. I mean, not to put words in your mouth, but you're almost saying if you're female, you're maybe more likely to be actually in it, in the friend apocalypse, right now. And if your male, maybe you're not in the friend apocalypse.
Jamie:	00:55:19	Maybe you're in it, but you have this immunity, it just doesn't affect your affect.
Athena:	00:55:25	Hmm. So there's the like manipulation side and then there's the vulnerability to being manipulated and females maybe are a little more zombifiable by friends. Is that the idea?
Jamie:	00:55:39	Yeah, we have to react quickly. We're the fighter planes. The guys are, um, zombified but, how could you tell the difference? They're still just punching each other and then playing video games together. Such a horrible, I don't mean to stereotype.
Athena:	00:55:56	This is not at all stereotyping sexes, so. [Laughter]
Jamie:	00:56:00	I don't study that or anything.
Athena:	00:56:02	Yeah. Well, and just to kind of like go a little bit big picture, we're sort of talking, you know, tongue in cheek about sex differences stuff. But I mean we all know and fully appreciate that there's huge diversity in how people are at, right, across, you know, people who identify as male and people who identify as female, and some, you know, the, there's a hugely overlapping distribution there. So we're kind of like painting these like stereotypes to sort of be like kind of funny. But really in reality it's a, it's a spectrum, right? And you have like, you know, we, we've sort of joked about this, about how our friendship is more guy-like because we don't, I don't know, I feel like I'm not constantly monitoring to make sure that everything that, you know.
Jamie:	00:56:52	Are you trusting me? Can I trust you? Can I trust that, It's not uh, um, uh, so yeah, it's not one pink room at one, at the end of the hall. And then at the total, other end of the hall, is a blue room. It's rather, a room with a whole lot of purple and a lot of men and women are in the middle.
Athena:	00:57:10	Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Jamie:	00:57:12	So, it's really cool. And what I'm planning to do with some students of mine right now is actually explore non-heterosexual friendships. So asking the question that they've been asking for years and years and years in mating of how do non-heterosexual men and women act in their friendships? Do they act more "male typical"? So, more toward the bluer end of the hallway. Do they act more "female typical" and more toward the pink end of the hallway? So, both in friendships and in aggression. Because there's this stereotype of the "very bitchy gay man", but a lot of the literature doesn't actually take into account the fact that there are tons of rich categories of gay man. Um, that I can thankfully list very many of thanks to this research.
Athena:	00:57:59	Cool. Um, so one, one last question, which is, given all the stuff that we know about friendship and how friends interact with each other, how they potentially manipulate each other, how can we be better friends to others? Like, are there take home messages about like how we can act and be in our friendships in order to be a better friend?
Jamie:	00:58:27	Take -such as- wow! This is the most applied I think I might ever get. Okay. Um, I guess we could ask ourselves, when we are about to, co-ruminate and complain and rehash. Are we doing it for us? Will it really make us feel better? Are we doing it simply to um, knock out the person that we're talking about? Are we doing it simply to manipulate our friend. So that our friend doesn't dislike that person? I don't, I don't know if I believe that.
Athena:	00:59:09	Yeah, I would think like sometimes. So with co-ruminating, so if it is that like what's, what you're trying to do if you bring something up for co-ruminating is to kind of get that person on your side a little more. I don't know. Like, maybe sometimes being a good friend is like letting yourself be manipulated a little bit about it.
Jamie:	00:59:35	Yeah. and saying, do we like her? And when your friend says, no, we don't like her, maybe you don't like her?
Athena:	00:59:41	I don't know.
Jamie:	00:59:42	That would be a really good friend. That flies in the face of all the high school, afterschool TV I've ever watched about being your own person. But you'd be a good friend.
Athena:	00:59:53	So, is there like a conflict between being a good friend and being a good person then? This is, I don't like this. What are we talking about? [laughter]
Jamie:	01:00:01	Yeah. Um, let yourself be manipulated and don't be a good person and no, it's not this dark.
Athena:	01:00:12	Yeah. So can you,
Jamie:	01:00:15	Or maybe, sorry, maybe it is this dark. And people talk about friendship is this solely positive thing and maybe they've been zombified by the idea that friendship is a wonderful, beautiful, some aristotelian ideal. And in reality, just like everything else, it's a little bit dirty and sleazy, too.
Athena:	01:00:38	Oh man.
Jamie:	01:00:39	Gritty. It can be gritty.
Athena:	01:00:41	Okay. Gritty. I can. Philly. Gritty, so both of us lived in Philly. So, gritty, I can deal with. I don't know about dirty though because I mean the fact is like there are in, there are a lot of like mutually beneficial things from, that we get from friendships that don't necessarily like impose costs on others outside of the friendship. Right?
Jamie:	01:01:06	Yes. I didn't mean dirty as in a bad way. Dirty as in, it has good elements and it has what people would call bad elements. So, uh, the way that anthropologists used to want to think of the ancient Maya or even the Yanomomos, these noble creatures that really, oh, they're just all positive. They don't kill, they don't murder. Everything is great. Maybe that's how we've been thinking about friendship for a really long time. But in reality there's some manipulation and there is some murder and maybe we think it's bad, but maybe in the long run it's really just, well-designed.
Athena:	01:01:44	Okay. So friendship can have these positive elements, but it can also potentially have these negative elements where you have individuals manipulating each, each other for their own gain and hijacking each other's nervous systems. And, and all of that. Um, and it's kind of this balance of, you know, how do you engage in friendship in order to have those mutually beneficial interactions?
Jamie:	01:02:14	Pushing yourself to be bet- better, being supported. All of those good things. While,
Athena:	01:02:20	On the other hand, not number one, being vulnerable to getting manipulated and like checking yourself that you're not being manipulative to your friends. Right?
Jamie:	01:02:34	I like the way you're saying that. I agree with that entirely. Yes. Yeah. That is a nice way to put it.
Athena:	01:02:41	Hmm.
Jamie:	01:02:43	Can we do that?
Athena:	01:02:45	Hmm? Do you think we can do that?
Jamie:	01:02:48	I have no idea. I don't think I can do that, as a person. But, I imagine there are better men than I. [laughter]
Athena:	01:02:56	Well, Jamie, thank you so much for talking with us on Zombified for today's episode. It was really fun and good luck with all the work that you're doing on friendship and work that, some of the stuff we're doing together, which is super exciting. So I don't know how, I have a couple of months, couple of years, we'll have some papers out there, maybe.
Jamie:	01:03:19	Yes. Tons of them and that will be awesome.
Athena:	01:03:20	Lots of them. Yeah.
Jamie:	01:03:22	We'll manipulate each other into writing papers.
Athena:	01:03:24	You know what? Let's do that. Let's agree to manipulate each other into getting some of those papers written.
Jamie:	01:03:30	I would clap but, I don't want to. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This is really cool. This is a fun conversation.
Athena:	01:03:36	I agree. Thank you so much for being here.
Outro:	01:03:38	['Psychological' by Lemi plays]
Athena:	01:04:55	All right. It is shout out time. Thank you to the Department of Psychology and to ASU for supporting this podcast, especially the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative and the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics and my lab, the Aktipis Lab, also, the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. If you want to find us on social media, we're on Twitter and Instagram as zombifiedpod, we're on Patreon as zombified. And our website is zombified.org. Please consider supporting us. If you love what we're doing. We're educational. There's no ads. We don't believe in zombifying people with ads. So, um, think about it. Support us $1 a month that'll help us make more episodes. And yes. So thank you to all of you for sharing this bit of your brains for the last hour and thanks to all of the brains who help to make this podcast. Thanks to Tal Rom who does our sound, Neil Smith who does our illustrations and Lemi, the artist behind the song 'Psychological', which you can listen to on our website if you like.
Athena:	01:06:03	And finally I will share some of my brains at the end of the episode now, like I do at the end of every episode. So friends, yes, I'm going to offer a few ideas about friends that, really have not much to do with my research in any way, but just something that I've been thinking about. Which is, in this episode with Jamie, we talked a lot about how, you know, we're, sort of really driven to have these deep interactions and engagements with our friends or at least pay attention to them, engage with them. And I wonder how much social media and social media companies are essentially free riding off of that. Because you know, we've kind of given up a lot of our autonomy with regard to maintaining our relationships. And even building new ones by engaging so deeply with social media. Like I'm just thinking in the last couple of weeks I've been traveling and met some people who are cool and rather than like, you know, exchanging phone numbers or emails, they want to like just connect on Instagram or on Facebook and yeah, that's, that's fine and that's cool. But, then there's no way to actually reach each other except by going into Instagram or Facebook or whatever social medium you use to connect with other people. So that then like gives a lot of power to those companies. And it also means that in order to reach out to those friends and engage with those friends, we have to give up a piece of our attention, right? Because when you go on those platforms, you can sometimes see ads, right? And you often do see ads. And so we're kind of unwittingly paying a lot of our attention. And I guess there's a reason why it's called 'paying attention' cause it really is, you know, attention to something really valuable. And like if you give it up, you're giving up something valuable. So, you know, we're, we're giving up a lot of our attention to these channels, um, because that's where our friends are and we want to engage with them, develop those relationships, maintain those relationships, build new relationships, and then the social media companies get a little piece of our brains because we have to go to those platforms in order to find people. Okay. I guess that was much more of a rant then a story or a connection to my work or a wild speculation. But, um, I guess that's what it's going to be for today. So, thank you for listening to Zombified, your source for fresh brains.
Outro:	01:09:00	[Psychological by Lemi]
Athena:	01:09:19	Okay. So like if there's some genes in me that are also in others.
Jamie:	01:09:25	The other cat, then, the head cat. I believe they're cats. Those friends made out of cats. [laughter] Cat robots.
Athena:	01:09:34	I don't know what we're talking about now, but maybe it has to do with Toxo, somehow.
Jamie:	01:09:38	Now it does.
Athena:	01:09:38	Now it does. Um, okay, so, so like Voltron is actually like an abstract thing that is all of your genes. You know, I don't even, I don't get it.
Jamie:	01:09:50	Can we delete that part?
Athena:	01:09:51	We can delete that part. Yeah. All right. All right. Let's start. Let's start again.
Jamie:	01:09:56	Yay! Yaay. Sorry.