Why do we want what we want?

So the question I have is, why do people consume what they consume? And I want to start you off by asking, why would evolution program animals humans for consumption? Right. So evolution does not program for the modern consummatory behaviors that we see. Rather, it programs certain behaviors that would have been adaptive in our environment of our ancestors, which now we see their signatures and contemporary settings. So let me give you an example. So we know, for example, that across many species, when females of a species are sexually receptive and other species, not humans, they will go into estrus, meaning during that period, they are open to mating and other periods, they are not. Well, we know that females in those species will engage in certain signaling behaviors to say, hey, I'm interested in potential mating. Well, so then I take this principle and argue, well, we know that, of course, humans are a high form of an animal. Could we see similar behaviors in human females? And so I have a study that I did many years ago with one of my former doctoral students, where we looked at how women will alter how they dress, how they beautify themselves as a function of where they are in their ovulatory cycle, their menstrual cycle. And so what we found, as you would exactly expect from an evolutionary perspective, is when they are maximally fertile in their menstrual cycles, this is when they engage in the most amount of sexual signaling. They're more likely to wear high heels. They're more likely to be more scantily clad in their dress. They're more likely to put makeup on. And so it's not that evolution has programmed women to wear lipstick. It's that evolution has programmed women to engage in sexual signaling as a function of where they are in their menstrual cycle, which we then see a modern manifestation of that behavior in contemporary settings. So it's kind of like evolution programs you with a set of toolkit to survive, or maybe in some cases go a little bit beyond that. And that toolkit gets represented in modernity in the form of circumsumption or wearing high heels. So that's a manifestation of a baser instinct. Perfectly stated. That's exactly it. The reason why I was interested in marrying evolutionary psychology with consumer behavior, because short of us breathing the set of actions that we most engage in is in consumer behavior, right? And it's not just consumer consuming Coca-Cola and Starbucks and buying jeans. We consume friendships. We consume religious narratives. We consume literature. So our existence is one that is consumatory. And since I was interested in evolutionary psychology, I thought, well, that's great. I will now take these evolutionary principles. And as you exactly said, demonstrate their signatures in modern environments. Very interesting that do you find that the word consuming friendship or consuming religion is appropriate or is it like participating because I'm trying to understand, is it the same base instinct or is there something else to it? Yeah, great question. So it's not necessarily that we consume friendships. But as part of you and I maintaining a friendship, there is a set of consumatory related behaviors that arise. So let me give you a specific example. If you and I are very good friends, it makes good sense for us to remember each other's birthdays. So that I will remember your birthday and when it's your birthday, I will invite you out to dinner with the expectation that when it's my birthday, you will reciprocate. And therefore, that mechanism of reciprocity is an evolved mechanism, which in this case manifests itself in our friendship ritual. And then in a consumatory sense, in that we're inviting each other to restaurants or to buy gifts for each other. So it's in that sense that I say we're consuming friendships. We also consume marriages. In that, for example, there is a slew of consumatory behaviors that happen related to the wedding ritual. But even the process of choosing a mate involves endless consumatory behaviors. So for example, the fact that in many cultures, you buy an engagement ring, well, it turns out that an engagement ring is laden with evolutionary base principles. So for example, the younger the woman is, the more beautiful the woman is, the higher the likelihood of spending more money on purchasing an engagement ring, meaning that the mating market is literally a market, right? I come to the mating market with the set of attributes that either increase my mating value or decrease it. So does my perspective mate. And then there will be all sorts of economic exchanges that happen in recognition of that. And what drives those economic exchanges is rooted in evolution. It reminded me the mating market is a market. Anybody who disagrees is not on dating apps enough to understand that. And I once stated that as a matter of fact on a podcast about how the economics of dating market operates. I've studied God's heart. So I have some understanding of it. And I eventually found people got extremely unhappy about it to think of something so romantic as falling in love and getting married and buying each other gifts as something that would lend itself to a market and consumption dynamic. They found it super offensive. I'm sure you come across that. You speak of things in somewhat logical, cold ways that otherwise people romanticize in fiction and poetry. Why do you think does that happen? Do you have any speculation on that? Well, what a beautiful question. Truly great question. There are many reasons why people ignore the applying of evolutionary principles to human behavior, one of which you exactly intimated in your question, right? I want to feel that there is something transcendental when I read poetry or I read great literature or in the manner by which I fell in love with my wife with whom I've been for 25 years. The fact that I offer an evolutionary explanation for these phenomena in no way reduces or diminishes the fact that they are transcendental, right? But they don't somehow happen in an alternate universe that is the couple from my biology, right? So yes, my heart did be differently when I met my wife. Yes, I had butterflies in my stomach. That doesn't go away. Notwithstanding the fact that I can offer an evolutionary explanation why I was likely to have fallen in love with her and vice versa. So let's give an example. I'm not a tall guy. We know that height is a beautiful thing. And yet this beautiful woman called my wife decided to choose me. Well, then I can ask myself, well, how could it be that notwithstanding that I'm not six foot one? I'm only the height of Lionel Messi. I'm able to have been historically successful with the ladies. Well, it's because I've got other attributes that are desired by women that hopefully compensate for the fact that I'm not a tall guy. I have a good sense of humor. I've worked hard to achieve things in life. I'm attentive. And so I can compensate for not being tall by scoring very highly on other traits that are desired by women. The fact that I just offered that evolutionary explanation offers zero diminishing to the beauty of the romantic reality that I face with my wife. So I can both eat gum, I mean chew gum and walk at the same time. I could appreciate the romance of romance while also offering a scientific explanation for it. Yeah, I feel like people don't understand that reality is layered concepts together. And on some layer, on some level, on some conceptual layer, it is logical. On some level, it's romantic. And they can both coexist. We can move between these planes. And that's the beauty of the human rational. That's where I think it gets interesting. But you know, with consumption, one question that often comes up is why would there be an instinct for over consumption? And you know, we are in the times where it's not so much under consumption that hurts. It's that the poorest people in America are actually overweight, not underweight, which is a unique fact of life. And so it lends itself to asking the question, why do people hold? Why do people over consume? Why is over consumption a problem? Yeah, another great question. So in my earlier books, so the first book was called the evolutionary basis of consumption, which is an academic scientific book. And then in a subsequent book, meant more for the general market called the consuming instinct, I exactly addressed that question. I refer to these as dark side consumption. So for example, pathological gambling is a form of dark side consumption. A pornographic addiction would be that. Eating disorders is the opposite. You're not over consuming, but you're under consuming and that you're not eating, right? So why is it that if we are adaptive creatures, we would engage in maladaptive behaviors, right? Shouldn't evolution have honed us to be these, you know, perfect machines well adjusted to our environment? Well, of course the answer is no in the following way. Each of these manifestations of maladaptive consumer behavior originates with an adaptive process that goes haywire, right? So let's draw an analogy. Regular cells divide and multiply, cancer cells divide and multiply. The difference between the healthy cell and the cancerous cell is that the cancerous cell doesn't have a stopping algorithm. It replicates endlessly. So what began as a process that is an evolutionary base process, the division of cells becomes maladaptive when it becomes hyperactive. And so now let's apply it to a specific context and consumer behavior. Take for example, compulsive buying, which speaks to your overconsumption. Compulsive buying is a literal psychiatric dysfunction. So it's not just, I've got six pairs of shoes. It's when you typically will get a divorce, you'll go into financial ruin because you are over consuming. But in this case, compulsive buying is almost uniquely restricted to women. So when you, as a psychiatric disorder, it's almost exclusively women who suffer from compulsive buying. But now here is the evolutionary insight. It's not a domain general mechanism whereby they're just overspending on anything, right? They're not compulsively hoarding lawn mowers. They're not compulsively hoarding electronic cameras. They are compulsively hoarding beautification products. So what started off as a perfectly adaptive mechanism, which is, if I'm speaking as a woman now, I'd like to beautify myself to make myself more attractive in the mating market, hyperfires so that now I can't stop purchasing stiletto high heels. I can't stop purchasing all of the various forms of beautification product. Pathological gambling is exactly the same thing. Pathological gambling afflicts largely young men of low social status because all men seek to ascend the social hierarchy. Some of us become famous soccer players, others become bankers, others become artists. We're all using different paths for the one same goal, which is to ascend the social hierarchy because the number one most desired trait by women in men is if they are of high status. The pathological gambler is simply applying a maladaptive strategy for an otherwise adaptive process, which is if I could only get the ball to hit black this time around, I could now make my $3 million and then I could attract all the girls. So all of these various forms of over consumption are ultimately rooted in an adaptive process that misfires. I'll offer something tricky. Tell me if I get this wrong too. I had the chance to read a little bit of Das Kapital back in the day and it's a very interesting report on modern society in a way. It leads into the communist manifesto and that's where it all goes wrong, but Das Kapital has a few interesting insights and one of them talks about how money becomes a commodity for men very often where people gather money for money say not for consumption say as if money itself is a commodity and we want to hold that and that I think is a predominantly male phenomenon. Like men like their money in the bank women like they're in their closets like one of the two and so I wonder I understand why women would like to buy those compulsive buying behaviors. There is a compulsive earning behavior in men parallel or is that a false positive. Do you think that that happens and why would that happen? Well it happens so the desire to seek status is a human universal in men. So you're exactly right. The means by which men pursue that strategy greatly varies depending on the cultural ecosystem. So if I'm in the Hudson tribe in Africa I don't care about having a lot of money in the bank account but the number of cattle head that I own will get me more beautiful girls. In other societies it might put one even in the Western societies. Why do women choose a starving artist? He doesn't have any money yet because they are banking on his future trajectory. No woman has ever said I'd really like to be with a failed potential rock star who shows zero ambition, zero drive and zero talent but I am willing when I'm 22 to bet on the starving romantic future musician because I think that he's got great talent and grit and he will be the next great rock star. So the fact that men hoard money is not because they are specifically drawn to the physical paper but it's because that is a honest signal of how I assort on the social hierarchy. This is why by the way many people in this case it could be both men and women seek very prestigious university degrees that otherwise have zero economic value. Many Americans go to the Ivy League. By the way I'm an Ivy League. I have a. Me too, me too, so I get it. I was learning Ivy League. I'm the Columbia. I'm guessing because you couldn't get into Cornell. That's the reason. Absolutely right. So I did my MSN PhD at Cornell. Well there are of course I studied something useful that led me to have a successful academic career but of course many people will go to Cornell and Columbia and get a degree in underwater lesbian dance therapy but of course I can put that I'm an Ivy Leagueer and that hopefully will impress the idiots within my social circle but I really have zero you know ability to turn that degree into anything meaningful right. So there are many ways by which we can hoard things to achieve social status. Men do it with money because that's the currency that is an honest signal of me having succeeded. Right so it seems like one general principle of many general principles because consumption is such a broad activity for women because men primarily want beauty in women and that's an oversimplification there's a lot of research to that thanks to David Bus and then women want status in men. So men consume to ascend on the status hierarchy and women consume to ascend on the beauty hierarchy. That's a broad enough principle. That's perfect and I'm so delighted that you just mentioned David Bus number one he is a pioneer of evolution psychology number two he's a very good friend of mine number three he wrote the forward to my book The Consuming Instinct so kudos to you for mentioning David he's amazing. Yeah I had the privilege of meeting him and recording with him like a month and a half ago at his residence in Austin he's a great guy I read some of his work too and it's as impressive meeting him in person. Imagine had I been as tall as him I would have been Emperor of the universe. Yeah he's pretty tall you are right you would be Emperor with that sense of humor and height going you'd be the you'd be the prince. I got it I'm on top of you. Is there anything else because look when I think of a consumption from a first principle point of view sure I consume fruits, food, whatever et cetera because there is necessity and there is necessity for shelter and then there is necessity for safety those are primarily they help me to live and survive and reproduce and then there is status and then there is beauty. Is there something else that comes to your mind that generally people lean in for consumption? Yeah beautiful question so I what I do originally in the in the evolutionary basis of consumption is I argue that much of our purpose of behavior in general and in consumer behavior in particular could be broken down using the following four categories within the taxonomy. So number one is survival, number two and I'll give you examples of each in consumer behavior. Number two is reproduction, number three is skin selection, and number four is reciprocal altruism. Those are sort of four foundational Darwinian modules that explain I mean pretty much everything. So unlike say Maslow's hierarchy which by the way I released yesterday a clip on my show where I was talking about a recent biography I read on Maslow. Maslow's fantastic but his hierarchy of needs was not couched within an evolutionary framework. It was more because he was a humanist psychologist he was arguing that yes we could we could be stuck on physiological needs at the base level but really to truly be fulfilled you have to aspire to the fifth level self actualization which is perfectly fine it's true but it is not rooted in the evolutionary framework. So what I decided to do is say okay well I coming as an evolutionary psychologist I would like to root all of our consumatory phenomena within an evolutionary base framework. So survival let's give an example of survival. You and I and every single person in India and any person was ever existed on earth have evolved gustatory preferences taste buds that originate from the fact that we come from an evolutionary environment where caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty would have been endemic right. The main the main challenge facing any species including the human one is first avoid becoming someone's dinner get dinner and then reproduce that's it. Good night everybody right. So survival one way by which it manifests itself in is in food consumption so because you and I have evolved the test gustatory preferences to prefer fatty foods then I can pretty reliably predict that you and I probably prefer some fatty food over raw celery. Now the individual differences between us might be that I prefer a fatty steak you prefer a chocolate mousse but we both prefer some instantiation of fat over celery. So many many food consumption phenomena would fit under the survival module. Let's do reproduction while we've already alluded to that for example the fact that women engage in sexual signaling in the mating market using specific products while men use other products to do so for example 99% of Ferrari owners happen to be drum roll and and it doesn't change across cultures it doesn't change across time periods notwithstanding the fact that there are innumerable women who are millionaires and billionaires who could certainly afford the Ferrari yet they don't line up at the car dealership why because men couldn't give a damn I could take a very unattractive woman who owns a Ferrari versus a gorgeous drop dead woman who takes the bus guess what 99.9% of men would prefer to mate with right now again that doesn't mean it's the only metric it's most men don't only choose based on beauty but it certainly is a driver of my mate choice and yours okay so so that would be survival survival and reproduction now let's come to the next two kin selection and reciprocity now it turns out we see this in many species including humans that organisms are willing to go to great lengths to even to sacrifice their lives for their kin right so why would I jump into a river to save my three children at the risk of me potentially dying if Darwinian selection operated at the organism level you should never see that behavior right because I only care about my survival it makes absolutely no evolutionary sense for why I would engage in kin ultruism to jump and save my kids but JBS Haldane who by the way spent some time in India Haldane H-A-L-D-A-N-E was a evolutionary geneticist he basically solved that conundrum which has then been explained further by guys like Bill Hamilton Hamilton who unfortunately passed away from a malaria infection if you understand that evolution operates at the gene level and if you understand that each of my children on average shares half of my genes with me therefore if I jump into the river and save this packet of genes called three children well it makes perfect evolutionary sense for that behavior to have evolved right and you see it in many many species where it's as if literally that calculus is built into the organism's brain okay so that it's engaging in a cost-benefit analysis as to whether to risk its life to save the packet of genes that are in the burrow okay or whatever or in the river now how would that manifest itself in consumer behavior well gift giving patterns follow exactly that calculus to a T okay so with one of my by the way I'm only dropping this because I'm speaking on an Indian show my greatest doctoral student of all time is a gentleman by the name of TripAdGill who is a is a very close friend now and a gem of a human being well with him we published a paper way back in 2003 where we looked at the manner by which people allocate their gift giving budgets as a function of the genetic relatedness between them and the recipient and guess what it is perfectly calibrated meaning let's put it in easier terms most people are much more likely to give a larger gift to their sibling than to their second cousin right and and I mean the data is just it's lit it's just perfect it's gorgeous okay so that would be so now I've given examples of consumer phenomena in survival in reproduction in kin let's do the fourth one well okay we understand why I jump into the river to save my three children why do I jump into the river to save you you're not biologically related to me you could be a friend or even more paradoxical why would I ever jump into a river to save you if you're a total stranger right that there are evolutionary explanations that might explain why you and I for close friends we might engage in in these behaviors but why a total stranger this is where the brilliance of Robert Trivers comes in who is one of the greatest evolutionary biologist since Darwin which is saying a lot well he is the gentleman who proposed the evolutionary explanation for why reciprocal altruism evolves within human species and then I'll link it to to consumer behavior in a second but let's look at our primate cousins our primate cousins engage in a behavior called reciprocal grooming what is reciprocal grooming well there I'm now some primate other than human the humans are called hairless primates but we have a lot of primates who are have a lot of hair when you have a lot of hair there are all sorts of ticks and parasites that come into your hair I can't reach in my back to take out those annoying things how about I show you my back and you spend the next half an hour taking away those ticks with the understanding that once we do it one way I will reciprocate right so this reciprocal grooming builds bonds forges alliances there's even related to hierarchy in terms of who grooms whom first and so the mechanism of reciprocity is built into social species now why do humans do it there are several reasons but let's go back to our ancestral environment when you and I are walking around in the African savanna or our ancestors remember earlier I said we face caloric uncertainty and caloric scarcity which means that I might die of hunger and my family might die of hunger if we bring down this three thousand pound game there is no refrigeration it's difficult to to save all of it how about we engage in the following insurance policy I will share my spoils with your family that is not biologically related to me on the understanding that in the future you will reciprocate and kind by us engaging in this reciprocal arrangement we end up increasing our chances of survival now by way there's fantastic studies which I discuss in several of my books that shows how this understanding of reciprocity has shaped our mind example if I show you a bunch of photos of people okay you ready to get your mind blown I show you a bunch of photos of people and I ask you to memorize their faces and the only thing I add to the face is whether this person is a social cheater meaning that this person would violate norms of reciprocity or not but otherwise I keep how physically attractive they are controlled like I do the proper experimental design guess what happens to people's memories they're much more likely to remember the faces of social cheaters showing to you that our memory system has evolved to solve specific evolutionary problems and therefore reason why I remember whether you're a social cheater or not and hence your face is because that has a clear survival benefit to me in remembering that because if I know that when I give you a gift I can be assured that you're going to be a parasite and never reciprocate this is valuable information for me to have from an evolutionary perspective don't trust this asshole and so therefore I could then demonstrate that this reciprocity Darwinian mechanism manifests itself in many consumer Tory context including in the alignment of our friendship if I invite you three times three years in a row for your birthday and you fail each of those three times believe me I'm going to remember that were you showing these faces was the signal for social cheating something like a fake smile where the eyes don't move but the lips too no it isn't that although that it's that what you just said is also something I mean not exactly the way you framed it has also been studied by Robert Trivers I remember I just mentioned them earlier about theory of reciprocal altruism well Robert Trivers is also the gentleman who solved the conundrum of why we engage in self deception right so and now you're going to see why it's related to your story about some of these facial signatures when you and I are having a conversation there's an evolutionary arms race because I would like to potentially manipulate you to my advantage and you're carefully looking at my face listening to the intonation of my voice looking to see if there's any shifted nonverbal cues that I'm exhibiting that suggest that I'm being duplicitous so there's an evolutionary arms race between the two of us and I don't mean literally the two of us I mean in the way evolution has shaped us now because for most people short of psychopaths if I engage in duplicitous behaviors there are micro cues that I exhibit that shows that I'm lying what better way if I want to protect myself from exhibiting those cues to you since you're very much on the lookout for it if I self deceive myself into believing the lie I'm about to share with you then you could look all you want on my face you'll never see it so this is why so you could you could begin to see why Robert Trivers was so brilliant although not an easy guy to have a communication with I hate to say it because I've tried to have conversations with him and he's someone who regrettably has suffered from some mental illness so a standingly brilliant guy perhaps not the greatest in terms of personal charms so this shows you how these types of cues might be things that we are very much attuned to I recently did a clip to your question to your point on Mamdani and and I'm going to now do the Mamdani. The Mamdani's igniter you see you see how you see how smiley I am well for anybody who's a three day old pigeon you recognize that there is something astoundingly sinister in his smile and the reason for that there's a scientific term for everything it's called the non duchin smile duchin was a neurologist who was actually trained by Shakhko who is the father of neurology and duchin demonstrated that when you are exhibiting a genuine smile versus a fake smile there's a different set of facial muscles that are activated so when you engage in the non duchin smile it is very very easy to to see that it is a fake one and so I hope I've answered your question yeah yeah you have but it begs the question because if people are programmed so let me get this straight first of all there's a lot to unpack so people engage in self-deception so that they can actually deceive other people so it's a means of actually communicating the like without being recognized and I want to bring back Mamdani I have no personal affiliation no affection for Mamdani it's just something that happens in the distance that people talk about but it's an interesting phenomenon nonetheless and my personal view on him a little bit is that I've gone to college with guys like him I know I know what this champagne socialist types look like and I'm largely untrustworthy but if you if that deceptive smile is so obvious why did he win what do you think happened there I know it's a little bit of a detraction great no really I'm gonna do a look I'm gonna look for a a prop for a second I'll answer you ready okay this is a memory stick this is a memory stick but for a second I'll ask you in your audience to assume or pretend that it is the cork of a wine bottle one of the beauties of being a multilingual speaker Arabic is my mother tongue is that you come up you have sayings and the other languages that are not as I'm sure is the case in they don't translate exactly so there's an expression in Arabic that says getting drunk by smelling the cork of the wine bottle okay now what does that mean it means that you are of such weak constituency that you don't even have to go through the hard work of actually drinking the the wine bottle you just take a whiff and you're already drunk well but it also is used as a metaphor for someone who is weak minded right if I if I just tell you a few sweet words and you're already drunk by the cork of the wine bottle then it's easy to deceive you so now here's the answer I think you you know where I'm going with the answer to your question regrettably most people when it comes to choosing their political readers don't activate their cognitive system but they activate their affective system and there there's a there's a persuasion theory called the elaboration likelihood model that speaks exactly to that point which by the way is used a lot in psychology of advertising the the cognitive system is called the central root persuasion the affective system is called the peripheral root persuasion now advertisers know this very well without knowing all these fancy scientific terms if I'm trying to sell you a perfume at forgive me if I put you on the spot do you think that I'm going to activate your cognitive system or your affective system that's the system my perfective system yeah right exactly so that so this is why it's a hedonic product so therefore here's what I'm going to do I'm going to show you a girl on a horse with her hair flowing they'll be no talking and then there's going to be some obnoxious brand name me stay right so I what I have done is I have activated your peripheral system your affective system I don't usually sell you perfumes by telling you here is what eight Harvard physiologist said is the molecular structure benefits to your perfume that's triggering your cognitive system I don't want my cognitive system when you're selling me perfume on the other hand if I'm telling you here are the reasons why you should invest in my mutual fund then I should technically be triggering or invoking your cognitive system so now let's link it back to Mamdanian and political choices when we are making very consequential decisions about the people who are going to lead us I would hope to cross my fingers that every person in the electorate is going to activate their cognitive system you're ready very few people do why because thinking is hard thinking involves effort most people are cognitive measures as I like to remind people they it's a lot less effortful to invoke my emotional system than it is to invoke my cognitive system so if you have a politician who can say enough of the bullshit so that it could get us most of us drunk then good enough for me so this is what explains how people vote and by the way I don't mean this as a political partisan point but this is how people fall in love with the majesty of Barack Obama now it is true that every single word that he utters is complete vacuous fatuous bullshit but my god does he say it with the cadence of a southern Baptist preacher right he's got this beautiful malefluous voice let's look at even someone much worse than Barack Obama our own recently departed prime minister Justin Trudeau he's tall he's got beautiful hair he's young he's a feminist who really cares about women's plight so much so that he changes words like recovery economic recovery to chicavory he changes words like recession to see see session look I'm getting drunk I'm not sure I don't know if I could go on with this interview because I'm already getting drunk just thinking about him I'm getting put turned on so therefore why does Mamdani win because most people are bafflingly ambicylic therefore if I do and I say everything is free everything there'll be free food there'll be free transportation there'll be free anything you want because tax the rich because the wealthy are exploiting you my god that sounds like a good message I'd rather not spend my effort thinking about the accounting of how things could be free and therefore you know what I'm voting for Mamdani it literally is that simple you know I often told my team early on I said the right psychological category between whether someone will do something or not is not good or bad or right or wrong it's cognitive load and cognitive freedom people do not want to be loaded cognitively and they want for it to be as simple cognitively as like that's the real spectrum of action when it comes to pure understanding of the mind and I also think that marketers understand intuitively something about psychology that psychologists do not for instance Edward Bernays who's kind of a cross-pollination between marketing and psychology he convinced women smoking was the most feminist thing ever it was a sign of freedom and all of us got too bad he convinced people that bacon and eggs are the great American breakfast and that led to hard disease and all that and so is that something that these people who actually have skin in the game when it comes to selling something when it comes to moving the human action needle do they know something more than what psychologists do or is it different well if I can just correct you one bit although I understand the gist of your question it's not psychologists versus marketing marketers are the ultimate psychologists right I mean I did my PhD was at the Johnson School of Graduate Management I mean my doctoral supervisor is a cognitive psychologist I was trained in psychology of decision-making but the fact that I apply it in consumer psychology doesn't suddenly make it not psychology right so so it's the marketer may not be a psychologist in that he didn't get a degree in psychology but he is the ultimate psychologist because he is wedded to reality it pays or it doesn't pay if I fully understand human psychology and I act accordingly this is why by the way usually as I started my career in applying evolutionary psychology to consumer psychology when I would give lectures in front of practitioners business leaders advertising executives they were like this is gorgeous perfect when I would give the exact same talk in front of academic psychologists now some of them said yes gorgeous perfect David bus but others said this is nonsense are you arguing that human beings and consumers are animals yes idiot I'm exactly arguing that right consumers don't suddenly cease to be biological beings when they are navigating the marketplace right so to your point the reason why many psychologists are more likely to to be the tractors of my work is because they are wedded to ideological principles that might be contrary to evolutionary psychology so for example if I believe that all consumer behavior is due to socialization as an endless number of business scholars would think well then I don't like Gatsad because Gatsad is saying no no no of course socialization matters but there is a set of underlying biological imperatives that holds true whether I'm in Mumbai or Chennai or I am in Nagasaki that's what makes us all universally the same well the academic psychologists may not like that the practitioner goes yeah no kidding and so the reason why Bernays was so good is yes because he married psychological principles to in his case manipulate consumers no kidding right right so you'd mention survival you'd mention reproductive success you'd said kin altruism and reciprocal altruism is the four sort of broad categories yes sir I have one more tell me if that fits somewhere and that's pure mimesis pure mimetic desire my friend has that watch I want that watch everybody who's my colleague has this car I want this car that kind of stuff and we end up like when I think of human consumption my sense would be purely as an amateur that most people consume things that they consume largely because other people consume those things yes TV shows whether that's music pop culture trends virality tiktok it's all probably explained by mimesis is that a fair proposition yeah great question I can fit that phenomenon within the four Darwinian modules and there are several ways to do it so let's let's let's begin in terms of your social comparison because he did it I'm going to do it well there is a phenomenon called keeping up with the Joneses right keeping up with the Joneses is I live in on a street and this asshole show off neighbor of mine just bought a cooler car I don't like that because I want to be the top dog in the neighborhood and therefore to your point I will engage in some form of social comparison that then drives me right so that positional economy and the envy associated with that position economy can easily be fitted into one of those four Darwinian modules so in the case of keeping up with the Joneses in terms of the car I didn't say oh he got a really nice lawn mower this is pissing me off therefore I better get a similar lawn mower because lawn mowers are not publicly consumed they're privately consumed so that's not going to serve as a very powerful signal to the world to the mating market of my value but if when that asshole buys the cooler car than me that is emasculating me and therefore I might also go by so so yes you're the phenomenon that you describe is certainly an important one it's because we are a social comparative species but it easily can be sub demalgamated within one of those four marches follow follow follow follow God it God it God there's one more interesting phenomena and that's kind of like so I am aware of the idea of like there's a Havien principle which is where I let's say if I'm fighting Himanshu here I'll tie my hand around my back to say I am your worth one hand and that's signal strength by proving a handicap I signal strength but you know how rich people they want to signal their brooks so they'll wear these hoodies these tech billionaires will be in their hoodies and flip flops I've met quite a few who don't even sometimes wear shoes and it's kind of interesting but the aspirational class will try and get their Rolexes and their petite Philips or whatever watches APs they wear and then the intellectuals want to look pedestrian the pedestrians want to look intellectual and it seems like this what is this concoctimate like what is happening in society well first of all you you don't know the amount of pleasure to my heart it brings me when I'm on a show and I hear the words zahavien signaling so kudos to you sir of course I discuss zahavien signaling at length and in my work let me give you the background to your audience before I answer it specifically to what you asked so earlier we said life is a two-step process eat dinner avoid becoming someone's dinner and reproduce that there's no point of me surviving if I don't end up reproducing okay great so now Darwin comes along and in or on the origin of species he explains all natural selection which is channeled for survival but then in a subsequent book a few years later he then says but what explains then the evolution of the peacock stale right because the peacock stale could not have evolved because it confers greater survival advantage to the peacock it actually does the exact opposite right it makes me more conspicuous to predators it makes it more difficult for me to take flight and escape from predators so why could such a tail evolve and why are the p-hens choosing the males that have the biggest and most iridescently colored and conspicuous tail well that's where then we get into sexual selection which says that it also is important that I evolve traits that confer mating advantage a key feature of that is what's called honest signaling or costly signaling or zahavian signaling which basically says that for a mating signal to actually be discriminating for the females of that species I mean there are some species that are sexual reversal but for most it works one way the males are impressing the females well if if the trait is simply let's see who can do five push-ups and therefore the females will choose the one who does it well it's not a very honest signal because most of us can meet that signal most of us can do five push-ups on the other hand if the signal is as happens in some Amazonian tribes put your hands in a glove of leaves that are filled with really pissed off bullet ants where one bite from the bullet ant a single sting is as painful as getting shot hence it's called the bullet ant if I could put my hand in there and the ants can now engage in multiple things and I still am standing after that while the ladies will go hmm that seems like a pretty tough guy right so zahavian signaling evolves precisely because it is an honest signal of the phenotypic quality of that particular organism it's a very very powerful concept which I then go on and use in consumer behavior so now I come to your question the reason why the ultra ultra rich don't purchase maseratis but the nouveau rich purchase maseratis because when I'm a nouveau rich entrance into that ecosystem having a maserati is an honest signal of my having arrived within that social class but when I am Elon Musk who if I can engage in not to name drop is a good friend of mine Elon Musk and the the ecosystem that he lives in the maserati is not a very honest signal of because every single member of my ultra billionaire class could afford a maserati so I better look for alternate ways to differentiate myself from those other lowly billionaires if I want to show that I'm a serious billionaire then I'm going to find other ways to do it here is a way I can do it you ready how about if I engage and this is not Elon Musk now right this is this is from this is actually I have a whole section of this in my 2007 book when I argue that art consumption is a form of Zahavian signaling that's exactly what I'm doing but it's not art consumption in that I'm purchasing a recently discovered Leonardo da Vinci painting because that we might argue up at least there's a unique talent that came with Da Vinci to be able to create such an aesthetically beautiful piece how about if I pay a hundred and fifty million dollars for a painting that just has three lines on it which literally a monkey on crystal meth could have produced now this is all more than art thank you now I have really differentiated you differentiated myself from all you other lowly bullshit or billionaires because if I could take a hundred and fifty million dollars and literally burn it by spending a hundred and fifty million dollars on those three lines then boy I must be the real deal to be able to engage in wasteful consumption and hence it's a costly signal so therefore all of those things that you're talking about are a recognition of that dynamic I don't have to wear fancy clothes when I'm Elon Musk because there's a million other ways by which I can demonstrate the honest signaling of my status is in there something called poor signaling for like you know the intellectuals who kind of wear clothes that look very pedestrian is the word used is it poor signaling or poverty signaling or something of that nature I might be forgetting yeah I don't know about the specific term you're thinking of but I can tell you the following you ready it turns out that there has been a study actually I've got a funny story about this so it the higher your academic status at an academic conference the less lowly that you dress right that that's been tested and I remember that I was actually listening to a at a conference to that research being presented and in my inimitable style I put up my hand and I said can you see how I'm dressed in my bermudas I guess it supports your theory of course everybody laughed but that's exactly the point which is big and now I can I can change it from sartorial garb to a slightly different thing I've noticed that when I go to conferences or I give academic talks usually the truly top academics don't I mean it's not always true there are some really obnoxious super high status academics but this typically the super high don't do this and they don't interrupt you and so on but the the ones in the middle that are doing this not so much because they want to engage me but because they want to use it as a signal to the big alpha dogs in the audience to impress them they're the ones who score very high on obnoxiousness right so and I'll give you a great example that had happened I I believe David bus was one of the so my first time that I ever presented at the top evolution conference it's called H best H best is for human behavior and evolution society so all of the top evolutionary behavioral scientists are there that the who's who this was my first time this is almost 25 years ago so I'm this young professor you know not many people know who I am and I'm noticing in the back there is David bus there is John to be Lida Cosmides I know that many of the people in your audience may not know who they are there's Martin daily and Margo Wilson I mean that's probably the the five top pioneers actually I do remember David bus was there the five pioneers of evolution psychology which to me at the time would be from an academic perspective like meeting you know Lionel Messi and Zidane and soccer right and so at after I gave my talk this was at UCL University College London in England they they ushered me over to see them and they were just the loveliest most humble folks super supportive oh this is great stuff it's such a pleasure to meet you you're doing great work and I remember I left there my my wife was with me and I was like buzzing for three hours because you know you might think that these these folks given how you know famous they are and so on they might beat up on me no but it's the next strong that act obnoxious because they're signaling to others so there's definitely a lot of truth to what you said interesting um I don't know if this concept came from reading something about you or from you directly but it's in the same time as I was reading you I found this super interesting and I know people just do not understand this there is a specific kind of a woman that is used to advertise to men and a specific kind of woman that is used to advertise to women right is that of is that something that exists in theory yeah so that I mean I don't know if that's what you're what you're alluding to but I think it is in in sexual selection there are two mechanisms remember I mentioned earlier natural selection and sexual selection sexual selection is the selection of traits that confer a mating advantage now within sexual selection there is intrasexual competition and intersexual competition so let's first do it for other animals and then we'll do it for humans to do your question intrasexual competition are traits that evolve for competition within the same sex so for example when rams evolve this very thick cranial structure with those big horns so that they can butt heads with me I mean literally at 50 60 miles an hour for most of us it would lead to our death for them it just results in the winner getting all the ladies that trait has evolved for intrasexual competition between same sex parties on the other hand the peacock still that I mentioned earlier evolved for intersexual competition that trait is not meant to intimidate other peacocks it's meant to woo the ladies right so both of these forms of sexual selection exist in nature so your question speaks to that distinction I could sometimes where I'm speaking as a woman now I could wear high heels as a form of intersexual signaling because I am trying in this case to draw the attention of men on the other hand when I don myself in luxury brands I'm engaging in intrasexual competition right as I mentioned earlier men don't typically go oh my god Sydney Sweeney you're gorgeous but you're not wearing high-end balenciaga's right sorry no sex for you tonight right but on the other hand women will compete with each other using those cues of luxury and and actually there is a paper maybe that's what you were thinking of or maybe you did read it in some of my stuff but there is a paper not published by me I think it was published in Journal of Consumer Research that exactly made that point which is why would women ever be interested in luxury brands if men don't care about that signal well because they're not trying to impress men in that case no I think fair point but what I think I was referring to is and I'll butcher it but tell me there is men women and women women in advertising and specific kind of women are used to advertise to men because they appeal to the male gaze instantly like they are generally more curvy and you know broad like bigger breasts whatever and there is a woman woman that is maybe not as hot in the evolutionary sense but more beautiful that appeals to women specifically and it's an organizing you're saying which type of female endorser I use in advertising will come in these two types yes right right so I don't know if I can think of a specific study that has done that but that makes perfect sense to me in the following way so for example to your point if I'm a very sexy I'm a woman now I'm a very sexy waitress at a restaurant who is dressed in a scantily clad manner what do you think will happen to the size of the tips depending on whether the patron is a male or female patron I mean that literally will answer your question what can you tell what right so with the male they go above normal with the female they might go below normal but stick to normal exactly or or or I'll punish her yeah right may go below normal by quite a bit yeah that that that slut showing her her cleavage to us you know what I was going to give a 15% screw her okay on the other hand for men and so the recognition that different and by the way that is exactly in a manifestation of the power of evolutionary thinking right it is an understanding that the exact same stimulus will be perceived differently by different groups of consumers for very clear evolutionary reasons and let me give you a beautiful example of that actually this is another study would I mention them earlier trip out gale it was a study that we did many years later after the gift giving one and I hate whenever I mentioned this study because we still haven't published it only because you know you're busy with a million other things but maybe having this conversation with you today will will light the fire for us to finally publish it so trip at an eye about 10 years ago had decided to do a set of studies looking at what happens to people's perceptions of a dating profile as a function of the types of consumer products that are shown in their profiles okay so one example is we take a male nothing changes everything in the description is the same the photo is the same but there's a place where it says my favorite personal possession is and we either show that it's a red Porsche beautiful or it's a sorry to anybody who owns a beaten up Kia it's an old beaten up dreadful Kia okay nothing else changes nothing now I'm going we measured many dependent measures but I'm only going to focus on one now and you will see how I am answering your original question using another example now at the end of seeing this particular per dating app a dating ad I'm going to ask men and women to rate how tall was this guy you ready so now I've set you up for it what do you think happens to the guy's height as a function of whether women or men are evaluating the Porsche guy so men would think he's shorter women would think he's taller is that right yeah that's why you're also an evolutionary psychologist because your brain is shaped by the same evolutionary forces that have shaped my brain I just have the official title evolutionary psychologist but so are you okay so women look at that actually that trick that product that product is a signal of status we have another signal phenotypic signal of status called height therefore I magically through the magic of evolution suddenly the same guy becomes taller in the Porsche to women now look at intra versus intersectional for a guy my biggest threat is not that you are cuter than me or have prettier lips than me if you have higher status than me I don't like it therefore when I see the guy with the Porsche I engage in intersectional derogatory tactics how do I derogate you well there are many ways one of which I say well he must be some short little guy that's why he's overcompensating by getting the Porsche so the same product the same guy resulted either status elongation or status contraction depending on whether I am male or female so yes to your question you're exactly right I wonder if there's a study to this effect because I found this phenomena we live in we live in a unique time and so your generation for instance got you grew up on television and newspapers my father's generation who's probably a little bit older was radio newspapers and television came during his time we come with social media my nephew comes with AI and so there is this sort of medium mapping that happens with generation when technological progress is as fast and for instance with my father anything that's written he automatically assumes is true and so he's so susceptible to advertising and propaganda that's written for me and my colleagues I find anything that they see on a screen given what's going to happen with Sora given what's going to happen with artificial intelligence man they automatically assume it's correct and then they have to recheck in the head we like maybe it's not you know there's a lot of fake news around and so on and so forth I wonder if there's a study about how generations rely on specific mediums for advertising and how susceptible they might be to it is there some data on that I don't know if there is data but but someone is going to take exactly what you just said and steal it and turn it into a PhD dissertation the way that you just laid out is exactly the mechanism that I try to teach my students when I'm saying come back to me with 10 different research questions the don't start giving me convoluted stuff I just want a single sentence and if I read that sentence and I fully understand what your research question is you're exactly on the right track so if I say does women's ovulatory cycle affect their clothing choices a 10-year-old will understand that so your question that you asked perfectly fits that I exactly get there's an intergenerational element there's a likelihood of being persuaded I get it so I don't think that there is any study that at least that I'm aware of that has looked at that but certainly the way you've laid it out makes sense to me but that speaks in a sense to a greater universality which is intergenerationaly the mechanism by which I try to persuade you changes but the capacity for the architecture of the human mind to be used and advertised exactly is an inherent part right all that changes is the mode of delivery by which I get to you but I can always find the frailties in your in your mind you know we are like I have one large theme to cover before we finish but it just struck me and I think it's my folly it would have been great to talk to you about why people consume certain ideologies and from that it would have gotten into say the technology side and how sort of the world operates in the non-material sense but maybe the intellectual sense so maybe at a later point but I wonder with these algorithms and you see this now right outrage which is pure anger has become this common participatory ritual of a sort we all engage in anger whether this directed this side or that side and it happened very recently with this Sydney Sweeney ad right where on one level outrage was being consumed on another level genes and I mean like American Eagle genes I mean Levi's genes like genes for being consumed not genes hasn't how you might use it in a lab what do you think of that what do you think happened there what do you think from an evolutionary point of view well you're taking an emotion that is easy to deploy so usually when you get angry in a situational sense it's it it has to be easily deployable right so for example if I'm taking a shortcut down a you know a dark alley and someone costs me aggressively it wouldn't make sense that it would take 30 minutes for me to build up an evolutionary based anger response right because I detect a threat there's an autonomic mechanism that says you better rise up to that challenge quickly and so to your question and to the early one where I said oh it's just new modes of delivery for a mechanism that is part of our indelible human nature what social media is doing is it's sending us down that dark alley every second of the day right so someone says something to me on social media that could be viewed as defamatory insult to my character guess what you're attacking me in the alley I'm now going to get pissed so oftentimes people say you know you you put out a lot of positive content professor sad and so on but you seem a lot more intimidating and combative on social media than when I meet you in person you seem so much more friendly and affable in person how do you explain that I go well that's the difference between disposition and situational traits by disposition I'm very affable and warm but if you keep accosting me in obnoxious ways on social media you are going to trigger the honey barrier in me so I think that's what's happening in terms of the outrage now oftentimes the outrage is not well justified but that's what social media does to us it is tickling this easily deployable emotion which makes evolutionary sense in the dark alley perhaps doesn't make evolutionary sense when we get pissed because Sydney Sweeney says I wear nice jeans right and I mean I wonder why morality is such an interesting part of it because so first of all social media is very unique in which it'll find all participants worthy of anger in its quest to engage most people right so it literally searches for people with specific emotions to maximize engagement but then anytime I see this anger and it could be from whatever political side it could be from whichever ideological background it always garbs itself in morality that there is a higher morality and you have somehow betrayed it and you are not part of it and I need to point out that you are lower morality and this is the standard morality or else it doesn't work where is the principle of morality playing into evolution and how important is morality in evolution yeah so a couple of ways to answer this first one thing that upsets me greatly is what not that you've done this but will often happen is when people are usually arguing for the unique insights of religion as compared to science they usually will invoke the morality argument to explain why religion is so important they say if it if it isn't through some divine source that we get our morality then how do you know what's right or wrong complete nonsense because there are very clear evolutionary arguments which I won't necessarily get into now there are very clear evolutionary arguments many books written many articles written scientific articles explaining why the moral sense would have evolved in a social species like human beings so it's not in the least bit mysterious how you would explain morality from an evolutionary perspective but to to your more specific pointed question and here I keep joking about this but I'm being truthful I have so often in the recent past plugged this particular book that I'm now thinking that I need to write to those two authors to tell them that I deserve some of their book royalties how many times I've plugged it and I'm going to now plug it again there's a book by two French psychologists called dance perber and Hugo Mercier the book is titled the enigma of reason and they basically argued in the book that we haven't evolved the capacity to reason in the quest of some objective truth but rather to win arguments now that already is quite a pessimistic perspective to someone who tries to develop a mind vaccine so that people can actually navigate the truth because the reality is most people go la la la I don't want to hear it my tribe is right and therefore my tribe is right and no amount of evidence that you could ever offer me professors are is ever going to move me from my anchored position so now how do we link that to morality one of the ways I ensure that my tribe is always right is to invoke a moral justification for my position right now that could be totally false and could be could be incorrect but if I can put the weight of morality on my side that makes it that much easier for me to win the argument and I hate to say this not to turn it political the left is much more likely to do this than the right not that the right doesn't commit its own cognitive and emotional biases but when it comes to invoking morality to justify my position the left does it more there's the old I'm gonna botch the the saying now but the left usually says about the right that they are morally degenerate right that's why we have to violently respond to them because they are literally Hitler whereas the right simply says hey I think your position is wrong now let's have dinner together so so morality could be asserted so that it allows me to win arguments um to your point about religion and morality there is a singular piece from a debate between um Jordan Peterson and Shlava she checked that settle this debate for me right and Jordan said something about it is in the presence of God that nothing is permissible you know in the sense of bad things and then Shlava said no no it is exactly in the presence of God that everything is permissible take for instance 9/11 and you know you just might drop like morality is put into question at that point but um it's also very interesting the left and right comparison the left likes to virtue signal and we see the metastatic left likes to virtue signal and the metastatic right is beginning to vice-signal and you see how openly they're owning their racism and how openly they're owning for instance their discrimination against the other tribe and so you see this metastatic political behavior on both sides it's very interesting um I want to ask you a speculative question and I'm sure you wonder about it we are at a precipice technology forever is going to change with the way the last few years have gone in technology after a after a somewhat um latent period we've hit something enigmatic in this magical thing which we call natural language processing or large language models in artificial intelligence formats robotics are on a rise Elon saying we'll go to space we'll go to the Mars and he's going to put a chip in my head and suddenly I can think of all these all of this is happening and I just wonder with all this technological energy that's brewing how do you think will consumption change and I know it's a purely speculative question we don't even know what will actually become a thing what will manifest what do you think what are you seeing already yeah and it is a very open and a question but certainly a variation one I can take maybe a stab at one angle of that question although like I've been many branches we could have gone off I remember when I was doing my MBA in the late 80s there is a term that I learned that has stuck with me to today uh called mass customization and let me step back a second uh in the in the in the production centric era Henry Ford the goal then was if you remember the the the the famous quip by Henry Ford the consumer can have the car in any color he wants as long as it's black right now what is he saying there he's saying I don't give a shit about what your consumer preferences are my job in a production centric economy is to meet consumer demands so there is going to be an inflexible manufacturing system that just puts out cars then later the marketing centric perspective comes in says no no wait a minute we have to produce cars to fit the fact that there is consumer heterogeneity and so on right now mass customization links those two together because it says can I create flexible manufacturing systems that still appeal to the masses can I have a system that produces the run a la Henry Ford but that is sufficiently flexible that it can produce different cues of product or well I think what AI and technology does is it takes this mass customization mechanism and turns it into an orgeastic process right the fact that the AI algorithm can give me it I said I mean literally it's it's I will sometimes go to my Instagram feed and what I'm doing just the the mindless you know scrolling through the feed and I go how the hell is it possible that I am now being shown these endless old school vintage watches which is something that I really love what what which behavior that I I don't remember ever entering a Google search where I said show me vintage watches but yet somehow the magic of AI is giving me things as though it is literally spewing it from my brain and I really can't remember what was the overt behavior that I engaged in that allowed it to guest this but clearly I must have done something that it gets that who knows I don't know and so that's I think from a consumer behavior perspective is to take mass customization as I would have learned it in the late 80s as an MBA student and turn it into the capacity to engage in this flexible delivery to every single individual on earth might perhaps be the most obvious way by which I see AI altering how we consume I also think we will have empathetic advertising where listen I understand your pain by this it'll solve it which is a very unique kind right and it slips in I think open AI announced that advertising bit very recently I also think it would be very interesting to study how men women and different cultures consume chat GBD because it's become this very intimate space for people and I often see a huge difference in how my wife my soon to be wife and I consume chat GBD and it's like polls apart and I I ask people like just like how I ask them what their explore feeds on Instagram are because that tells you a lot about what a person's thinking without them saying it in the similar in the similar rain what do you do with chat GBD is also very interesting because it's just so private it seems like you're having a conversation with yourself but not quite hey well remember earlier I said when you were talking about the intergenerational mode of delivery and I said while you just came up with a PhD dissertation research question while you just came up with number two uh listen your students will be very happy research question sex differences in chat GBT interactions and now I can I can start listing you know off the top of my head 10 different hypotheses that I can engage in so that's perfect because by the way in every single course that I've ever taught at the bachelor's level MBA level masters of science level and PhD level I always use the following project come up with a research question proposes a set of hypotheses develop the data collection instrument to collect that data analyze the data and give me what the conclusions are give me the practical implications give me the so I mean like they're literally doing a thesis in a one semester course when they first come in they're like what the hell professor what are you talking about I don't even know how to by the end of the course they will all come up to me and say of all the things that we learned going through that process from eight to z of how the scientific method works is arguably the thing that we you know that we're most thankful for uh and so if nothing else that people take away from our conversation you just came up with two research questions that are worthy of a doctoral dissertation so what are you waiting to sign up for a PhD program not with standard very successful show whenever you invite me I think I need a I need a great advisor and I think you could do it I'm honored no but you know it's it's really interesting because I really think that you know it's a very powerful way for me to pick up the pedagogic value that I give to students because when I see how when they start off the first week when they send me their research questions how that document looks versus 13 weeks later what it looks like it's as if I could visibly see that you've lost a hundred pounds they're a different human being that's the power of the scientific method you're right um god I have no more questions do you have any questions or any comments any suggestions for me oh well first uh great job uh I don't I don't give people easy compliments they have to earn it uh your questions were totally fair totally right I loved our conversation keep doing your great job I only have compliments for you no questions thank you god um I am waiting for your next book to come out whenever it does I'll reach out to you we'll set up something else uh I think I I mean it I this is probably from somebody who's non-academic I think one of your most interesting contributions to culture has been the coinage of terms like the parasitic mind virus uh now suicide empathy I see it being replicated in intellectual circles in India and people may not even recognize you but they know the term and so you put these interesting physiology and I think you need a sense of humor for that I think you need this sort of levity for that and you don't have to take yourself super seriously for you to actually influence culture in that way so thank you so much you've defined culture and that's that's a very very rare compliment of all the people I get to speak to which is my privilege very few people have defined culture and you have so thank you so much for that um and if there's anything else I can do please let me know this has been an absolute pleasure likewise cheers