 All right. Hello, Randy. How are you doing today? We vote Chris. Great to be with you. Yeah, I'm so glad you were able to come on. And we're going to be talking about good reasons for bad feelings. When I came across your book, it was it just blew my mind because I ever since I got sober nine years ago and, you know, my addiction started with, you know, self-medicating depression and anxiety. I was like trying to figure out ways to manage my mental health and all these other things. And your book was the first one why I came across. I'm like, Oh, like it really got me interested in evolutionary psychology and kind of what your book title is. I think that's the perfect book title. Good reasons for bad feelings. So can you know, Chris, I wish I just called it evolutionary psychiatry. Because people, you know, it's kind of a long title and people like short titles. But really what it is is trying to put psychiatry in a solid scientific foundation. Yeah, you started like your book before that, which I apologize. I have not read yet because biology books are difficult for me. But you started with evolutionary biology. What what led you to getting ideas for just even researching this and writing about it? You know, it was originally after I had been on the psychiatry faculty at University of Michigan for about 10 years, I was frustrated. Well, I wanted to find some kind of solid scientific foundation. It didn't seem to me that people all had brain diseases. And it didn't seem to me that cyclonellysis would be all and then though I did lots of behavior therapy and I wanted something where I could integrate all these different ways of helping people and trying to understand. So I wandered over to the museum of all places where there were a bunch of Greek biologists and they they basically said, what? You're a psychiatrist. You don't know about how evolution explains behavior. How is that possible? And I spent basically the rest of my life trying to help everybody explain that. But I took a big side trip for about 25 years because before explaining mental disorders, you got to explain disease in general. Why the heck did natural selection leave us so vulnerable to cancer and heart disease and hemorrhoids and acne? Yeah, all those were big. Yeah. Yeah. And I and I did get a better understanding of it. Like it it helped me get it because, you know, a lot of us who struggle with mental illness were like, why? Why me and all these other things? And and you you go over, you know, depression, anxiety, you touch on other disorders like eating disorders and bipolar and schizophrenia and some of all, we don't have great explanations for aside from just kind of like glitches in our system. Is that safe to say? The meaning of this gets such a simplistic view, isn't it? There's something wrong with the with the mechanism, you know? I'm interested, Deirey, more from you, Chris, about your own experiences and how they fit with all this. But let me just emphasize what I think you grasped. We're asking an entirely different question here. We had almost all research and all the self-help books say, what's wrong with this person? How can they be fixed quick? And I'm taking two steps back from that and asking, how come we all are vulnerable to depression? How can we all are vulnerable to addiction? Why didn't natural selection make us more robust and more happy? And why don't we all just cooperate in little happy lives, you know? And those questions have to be answered by asking how natural selection shaped us and why it didn't do a better job. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, feel free to ask me whatever you like because I love learning about me and I'm probably going to ask you some questions about my personal experience. But I guess a good place to start because I feel it was very enlightening to me. And as I mentioned, when we first started talking, I my audience was largely a mental health audience. And I explained to him, like, hey, check out this guy's book, you know? But when you started talking with, you know, clients, patients about some of these ideas of how we evolve, like you have some little stories in there, like, how does it help people to understand like the root causes and why why we evolved this way? You know, already we're going to how does it help? And we're going to go there in great depth in a little while. But I just want to pause again for a second and say, you know, everybody wants to figure out how can I get help right now? Please. And doctors and therapists. I mean, they're sitting right there with a real person who's suffering. And, you know, I've been there. I did that for 40 years and you got to do whatever is going to work. You got to figure out what can I do to help this person right now or at least over the next few months or or whatever. So I don't think I have any quick fixes, Chris. Yeah. So there are there are ways for, I mean, both therapists and patients to stepping back and asking, so why does the capacity for low motor exists at all? And that's for emotional problems, which is mostly what we treat in psychotherapy and in psychiatry and psychology. I mean, I think the usual approach is, hey, what made this person have problems? Yeah. And my approach is, gosh, let's if this person is having low mode, let's pause and say, in what situations is low mode useful? Is that situation present? And if it is, what can we maybe do to get rid of that situation instead of just jumping in and trying to, you know, get rid of it? You know, yeah. So let's yeah, let's let's discuss that a little bit and kind of like how it takes a while because, for example, with my with my personal experience, you know, before getting sober, finally, I had multiple relapses and I had this idea like, you know, for example, you get you get sober and the clouds are supposed to part angels saying and everything. But, you know, I was I was in my 20s. I destroyed my life, you know what I mean? And and things weren't fixed immediately. So I would turn back to the substances or whatever. But only when I got sober in 2012, I realized like, Chris, there was a lot of things. There's a lot of there's so many things going on from my childhood to my current circumstances. For example, in 2012, I wasn't even allowed to see my son anymore. You know what I mean? Like there were multiple things and you discuss this in the book, how we have to kind of get the broader picture. But anyways, in so since then, I've been trying to help people. I've worked with people in 12 step meetings. I ended up working at a treatment center where we help where we were dual diagnosis of mental illness as well as addiction. And I see this all the time, right? Like, hey, it's not I mean, one thing it's a I think you really realize that some people it's not the same for everybody. Mm hmm. We mean, you know, there's some people whose grandfather and father and brothers all took one drink and that was the other lives. And, you know, it hasn't had too much to do with what's going on in her life. There's other people who were fine until they found their wife in bed with another man or a bunch of you know. And and it's it's really different. We've got to understand people one by one. Why no simple kind of thing can work. But addiction is so fascinating. I just got an invitation to talk with a group of Italians about why addiction exists. Yeah. I mean, you I mean, I think here's a real reason for addiction. I think, Chris, let me know. We believe in a free will. OK, can you think there's nobody who starts drinking and thinks, oh, you know, I'll probably become addicted. No, everybody says, I can stop anytime I want. Right. I mean, was that your experience? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. The drinks and that a few times when you thought you were drinking too much, you said, oh, I can stop if I want to. And then you stopped for a little bit. Mm hmm. Yeah. And kind of bad for myself. Right. And then it came back, right? Mm hmm. And we think we can control ourselves completely. And we can solve. People do decide to stop drinking and stop drinking. But it's not so simple as just I decide, you know, are these mechanisms and I say, get us to keep doing things that do those dopaminergic systems. And we got to ask, well, why is that? My answer is that, you know, substance use and alcoholism, they hadn't been big problems until the last thousand years, especially the last couple hundred years. And it's once we could really distill alcohol. And once we could have less potent substances available 24 seven, that's what it really becomes a problem. But if you can only get drunk once a month, because, hey, the yeast didn't ferment. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I it's it's interesting because, you know, just going back to the topic of like quick fixes, that's that's kind of what my problem was. I, you know, if I if I had low mood, right, I was like, I want to get rid of this now. I couldn't sit with it. I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to feel it. Anxiety, I would struggle with that. And I didn't want my racing thoughts and my worries. So I wanted to numb it. And so even the substance use was this kind of quick fix that I was trying to do when I was trying to get better. It was I was searching for more quick fixes. But do you what are your thoughts on the whole behavioralist idea, like be a skinner? Like, do you think we evolve for the, you know, trigger behavior reward? And then in what? Why does the capacity for learning exist at all? Mm hmm. And the answer is because those animals that had a capacity for learning did better than others. But the system is somewhat different to different people. And here is, I think, an unanswered question about substance use and abuse. There are people who can drink and not be bothered by it. And there are people even who can take heroin. Apparently, most people who try heroin can even enjoy it some and then just not keep doing it. Other people, they take one hit and that's it in their life, you know, these stuff. And there's a lot of evidence that the difference is genetic. So does this mean some people have abnormal genes that makes them vulnerable and going back to this idea that these are new problems in the last few hundred years or thousand years? I don't think it means that at all. I think it means that people's brains are a little bit different and probably people foraged for food a little bit differently because that's what those mechanisms are for, you know, that are take us back to the good nut tree again or had different hunting strategy or or different social strategies. And for some people, the mechanism is wired. So once you get that kind of reward, it just kicks in and sticks there. For other people on the system isn't nearly so rigid. And I think it's just bad luck that some people have systems that get get trapped. I mean, alcohol hijacks the system and just takes control of it. I bet if we go to other planets, we find other species. If their motivation systems are run by chemicals, they're going to have big problems with substance abuse, just like we do because good feelings you get when you start using substances in that. I mean, why does why does it feel good? Yeah. And the other part of it is why does feeling bad feel so bad? What is it just hurt? And the answer is because those people really did things to try to get out of those situations like you were doing with your drinking to try to get out of bad feelings in general, those people had an advantage. Yeah. Yeah. And and that's what's what's so interesting about it. And if we if we could, let's talk about, you know, some of those underlying bad feelings and like depression, for example, or low mood, rather, right? I'm just going to pause for a minute. I'm so glad you gave both of those, right? You guys have talked for years about, you know, all natural selection, shape the capacity for depression. But with all the ads on TV and everything about depression and drugs and stuff, everybody assumes that depression is an abnormal state. Yeah, I finally decided to just go along with that. And instead I say low mood is kind of like depression when it might be normal. Yeah, as we all know, there are times when feeling blue and low and unenthusiastic about stuff and kind of pessimistic might be appropriate. Yeah, let's let's let's sit on that for a second before we we dive specifically to the page because I've been dying to ask you, do you think do you think that we're we're pathologizing too much in 2021 or in recent years? Like you've been doing this for a while. Has has this become a problem where where it's just like, oh, everybody, you know, like the I see the the depression and the and anxiety rates going up and all these diagnosis, people are like, something's wrong. Something's wrong with people. Something's wrong with our kids. And I'm like, is it or are we just throwing more labels on it? Because even with the DSM five, you know, there's so many people that get into these vague descriptions. So based on your years in this, like, has this become a problem over time? We know there sure are a lot of people who have mental disorders who won't acknowledge it or won't accept it and they could be helped a lot. So we've got to start with that. But then there's so many people who start to interpret their own lives as mental problems and say, for instance, that you're an Olympic superstar and you're going in there and everybody expects you to win gold. And you kind of know that you're not going to be able to do it again. And that is going to arouse perfectly normal, awful, anxious feelings. And you also feel like, hey, if I don't get gold, I'm going to lose, I'm going to drag my whole team down. And that's the bad thing, but everybody expects it. What a dilemma, you know? Does this mean that that person, and you know who I'm talking about, right? Yeah, yeah. Does this mean that person has a mental disorder and that dropping out is taking care of her mental health? Or is this a person who's having feelings and coping with a difficult situation? And I think calling all of these things mental health problems implies that there's something wrong with the person. And I think very often there's nothing wrong with the person. They're having normal, very difficult, painful feelings that are as normal as they could be. Yeah, as so, you know, I am a father and my sons in the other room playing video games. He's 12 years old. He's about to hit the beauty of teenage years. And I get worried because I think about, you know, my my younger experience, but mainly like relationships and breakups, but something that I plan on teaching him that I've tried to help others understand, too, is exactly what you're saying. Like I've worked with so many people where, you know, or even friends where they're with somebody for three, four, five years in a relationship and they break up and they're sad. And I'm like, you're supposed to feel sad. Like you're this is this is normal, right? If I'm about to give a huge presentation in front of thousands of people, something might be wrong if I'm not nervous, if I don't care how I'm perceived. So I don't know, how do we, how do we kind of ship? Because here's my issue ready. I used to think we didn't talk about mental health enough. And now I almost feel like we're talking about it too much. So do you see any solutions to kind of balance it and bring people back towards the middle? You know, I think one of the really valuable things about an evolutionary perspective, Tris, is it encourages us to respect our feelings as a starting point and to examine and see is this feeling actually likely normal and useful for me? Or, and I like to talk about this more with you, is it normal but useless? I think most feeling, most bad feelings we have are normal, but useless. Well, that's been true. That's what I want to hear about. What's a little bit useless? Why do I have that? Um, you know, I mean, I want to pause here for just a minute. I mean, I think the fundamental schema, the fundamental idea people have about mental problems is if you're having bad feelings, there's got to be something wrong, right? And especially if it's something like, you know, unjustified anxiety or low mood, it doesn't seem to be justified. People say, hey, I'm having these bad feelings. And the doctor or clinician says this person's having bad feelings that are interfering with their ability to do everything they want and pleasure in life. So it must be there's something wrong with this person. But if you step back to an evolutionary view about why these feelings exist at all, there are five other reasons. Why normal bad feelings are usually useless. I'll go through them one by one. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to learn. Yeah. I mean, the first thing we have to ask is, I mean, why do these bad feelings exist at all for any of us? And the reason for that is that individuals whose whose whole system goes into a special state in certain kinds of situations, they get a big advantage. I mean, for instance, you suddenly hear behind you on the African savanna. And then you smell the hot breath of a lion. If your experience is the emotion of, oh, wow, this is so cool. Yeah, there were there were people like that. And they didn't pass on any genes, right? Yeah, yeah, we don't have their ancestors around. But if your reaction is get the hell out of here. And then not thinking about anything else until you're a mile away. Those people survive. That's a panic attack, basically. And that's a useful thing. But anxiety is it's kind of easy to see high anxiety. It's useful. But let's go now into in what situation is low mood you useful? Have you thought about that? Yeah, it's it's something it's something I'm curious about, even with anxiety. And I want to I want to have some time to a little bit talk about I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder. And I have some specific experiences that I want to go back to. I'm like, that was completely useless. But low mood when you when you talk about it and and I feel like I'd never explain it right because you use this like very picking analogy and kind of like this optimal like very picking time deal for low mood. And but you explain depression and low mood as kind of the body or the mind's signal like, hey, maybe it's time to give up and move on. And I'm like, wait a second, wait a second, right? Like if I just went I live in Las Vegas, I went down to the strip and you know, people are probably having fun, but there's a lot of people out there. I said, what's the most depressing thing in her life? And they're like, my job, my relationship. And I'm like, well, are you clinging on it too hard? Like, are you clinging on it too long? Are you not giving up when you should, right? And and that's so when you when I read that in your book, I was like, brain exploded. So in my first 20 years of psychiatric practice, I saw thousands of patients and and for everybody who was depressed, I told them, you know, I'm sorry you feel pessimistic, but don't it's your depression talking. Keep trying. Keep trying. There's another way. Keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. And then I got older and I watched my own life and I and I saw people living over decades and I got to know some patients over decades. And I realized that there were a whole lot of people I was seeing who were never ever going to be able to succeed at the thing they were so committed to. Yeah, the simple one is some kid trying to get to medical school for the fourth time and another one is somebody in love desperately with somebody who won't talk with them for 10 years. Well, and there's a lot of parents trying to get their kids to stop drinking and they can't do it. And they spend their whole lives trying to get their kids to stop drinking and they can't do it. And they're depressed about it or and I saw lots of patients. What do you do if you have cancer? I mean, obviously, your goal is to get rid of the cancer, but what if you can? I mean, these are really poignant, personal, awful kind of situations. And sometimes, I mean, it's you got to go one by one, Chris. You've got to understand people one by one. And you can't just say, oh, you're having trouble and you're depressed because you're pursuing a reachable goal. So just quit. No, you know, the person would just quit themselves. On the other hand, once I figured this out, I could have much deeper conversations with my patients about. Let's try to ask, is there something you're trying to do in life that seems overwhelmingly important and you can't give it up, even though you kind of know you're not going to succeed. And then they talk. Yeah, I have a long conversation. I might. I really hope I'm not thinking of a completely different book. But I believe in the book, you discuss the story of a college student and a relationship, something like that. And then there was a little break and you you saw him later and he was just glorious. Did can you can you kind of I can read that that is from good reasons for bad feelings. I love it. I love it. And it really made an impression on me, actually. This was a time when I was supervised in the work of other psychiatry residents and the like. And and this kid comes in and he says, my life is fine, but I'm depressed. Can you help me? I'm in junior college and I'm looking out because I'm, you know, not doing my work. I don't feel like anything. I feel like a failure. And we say, well, how's the rest of your life? Because I got a great girlfriend. Oh, she's wonderful. I'm never going to get a girl that great. She's so smart and pretty and and gosh, she's fabulous. But she says they got a good college the other way. She's going to leave me. And we say, well, that's good. But good relationship, good relationship. Yeah, I'm going to just have to get rid of this depression. So we gave him medications. We gave him cognitive behavioral therapy. Um, I talked to the resident and month later, he says, well, kid, isn't it really any better? Um, and then I went back and saw him with the resident a few months later and the guys ask him, how are you doing? And he says, well, fine. Yes, I stopped my meds. I don't need them anymore. I said, well, what about that girl? But what about everything? And he says, oh, my girlfriend, I really enjoy my girlfriend. So really, I thought like she was going to go off to that college at East, a place called Bassar. Yeah. He says, oh, that girlfriend. No, she was too uppity for me. I decided to quit her and quit that college stuff. And I'm working with my dad now and I've got another girl. I mean, it's kind of a sexist and classist kind of story. But it's the reality for a lot of people of trying to do things that they kind of know are never going to work, but they don't want to give them up because we all pursue big goals. Yeah, it's it's interesting, too, because I've been reading a lot and talking with different authors about this kind of a we've kind of moved into this idea of like individualism and just like you work hard, you know, that kind of like hustle culture and entrepreneurial mindset. Like if you work hard, you can make anything happen. And that's kind of, you know, that's kind of like how I live my life. Like I can do anything I put my mind to. But then like now that I have this new kind of just even way to look at things, I can sit back and assess and say, OK, because because like you keep saying, like it's situational, like I don't always give up and I don't want to teach my son like, oh, it's a little hard to give up. You know what I mean? But there's a certain time where it feels like we have to pause and look look at the situation at a wider angle and say, is this coming from my my my fear of letting go? Is that what you would say? Like, is there a time where we should like assess it? So I've even wondered, Gresson, this is something that really needs study. It was sort of that it's hard to get support from the government to study about whether part of the reason people are so it. Why are depressed people so pessimistic? I mean, you would think if things were really going badly, people would think, hey, this isn't working. I'm a good person. I can get out of here and do better elsewhere. You know, and a lot of people do that and it doesn't work very well because your marriage isn't going well this week and you leave it. You know, everybody's marriage isn't going well for a week or a month sometime, you know, but if the person in that situation thinks, you know what, probably nobody else is going to love me. So I better stick around here. That's probably a better thing. You know, being somewhat pessimistic, unrealistically pessimistic in that circumstance keeps you in a relationship that probably is going to be valuable in the long run so long as you don't bag it too quickly. But this problem with the same thing is it does keep you in a relationship or a job or some giant pursuit you're after. I mean, I think about all these people going for Olympic gold devoting your entire life to maximizing whether it's, you know, canoe sprinting or, you know, some specialized sport. And, you know, it's only one out of a hundred people or one out of a thousand who even gets to the Olympic tryouts and then some of them get to the Olympic tryouts and some of them get to the Olympics. There's only one person who gets gold. We should be talking more with the people who didn't even get browns. Yeah. And and and all the decisions they make about do you want to try again next time? Hmm. And and it's it's just so hard. And and I think mass society and mass media, in spite you were saying this a minute ago, inspires everybody to go for the big time. And the people who really win big are the people who do that. But I think a lot of them also are prone to mood problems. As you know, the people who are just committed to succeeding at all costs, I think are also the people who are especially vulnerable to persisting in the unreachable goals of college's depression. Yeah, I that's pure speculation on my part. I wish the studies could be done. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Like I 1000 percent agree because I am just a curious guy. And I read all sorts of books and like with what you're talking about. Like I dove into a bunch of books about success versus luck. And, you know, just people getting certain opportunities and all this. And there's kind of a almost a selection bias, right? Where we're focusing on the people who get to that platform. But like you mentioned, there's thousands who didn't. But then, you know, I'm curious about, you know, self-deception. Sometimes we have to say, I'm going to be the one who gets that goal because that's that's advantageous to keep moving us forward. You know what I mean? Well, and I think natural selection has shaped us to pursue large goals, even though most of us fail most of the time for most of our goals. Um, it's because there have been big payoffs. But I want to go back for a minute to these reasons why bad feelings are usually. Oh, yes, yes, useless. I mean, that's kind of a cool and useful thing for people to take a back. Well, in the first thing is the smoke detector principle. Oh, yes. We all put up with wreaking smoke detectors when we burn our toast because we want to be absolutely sure that that smoke detector goes off every time there's a real fire. And it's something called signal detection theory, if you want to get into the fancy math. But the basics are, hey, the cost of a false alarm is small and the cost of not having the alarm when you need one could be death. And this is why my patients with panic disorder, even though they've been in the grocery store five times and never had a lion chase them, even so, they still keep having panic attacks because what if it was a one percent chance there was a lion or some other bad threat back there? And what really happens with those folks with panic disorder is the panic attacks themselves become the source of danger, especially if some well-meaning doctor said, oh, I don't think it's your heart. Yeah, thank you very much, doctor. So I think for a lot of emotional problems, the smoke detector principle explains why we those protective mechanisms, anxiety and low mood, they go off just like a smoke detector. Because the normal system has to have a lot of false alarms to function optimally. Yeah, I think that's a cool idea. You know, it's very useful. Yeah, yeah. The way you you explained that. I'm like, yeah, I guess I'd rather have it accidentally going off than me not freaking out because Randy, trust me, I look around. My girlfriend and I, we often talk about this. I feel like there's so many people who don't have that. The smoke detector is malfunctioning, right? They're they're just like, you know what, there's a global pandemic, but I don't need a mask. I don't need a bad thing. Like they don't have enough worries. I live in Las Vegas. If you go down to the strip, there's no regard for like street lights and signs and I'm just like, we need to fix your smoke detector. So so now I kind of look at it and I get grateful. I'm like, OK, it goes off a little. It's a little too sensitive sometimes, but I'd rather have that than doing these crazy, reckless things. You know, go ahead and opportunity to work with the world's real expert on anxiety, Isaac March, for several years. And then our big paper called fear and fitness. We recognize a new anxiety disorder that nobody was identifying or treating. You realize that we and other anxiety disorders doctors have always been treating people who had too much anxiety. But there are a whole lot of people who just don't have enough anxiety. They never come for treatment, even though they have a fatal disorder. They're not wearing masks. They're driving too fast. They think being drunk and driving isn't going to all be careful, you know. And yes, but I'm not going to set up a clinic for hypophobia. Right. Yeah. Not a good business proposition. I couldn't imagine those people ever wanting to get help because the optimism is just off the charts. Right. Like I've never nothing's ever going to happen to me. I'm invincible. I could drive 100 miles an hour. I could do whatever I want. So at what point would that person even say, you know what? Maybe I need help for this. But but it's kind of like people who can't sense pain, right? Like we have to be able to feel pain. I'm so glad you brought that up. Right. I mean, I always thought that pain was a problem, right? Because what we do in medicine, if somebody comes in with pain, we try to figure out what's causing it, except on psychiatry. Try to figure what's causing it and try to relieve it, right? But but there are these people who are born without the ability to experience pain and their bodies fall apart. And most of them are dead by middle age. Capacity for pain is useful, but the ability to ignore it. And it's essential. Well, the experience of pain means something was wrong. But the pain isn't the problem. The pain is part of the solution. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So so we talked about low mood and the smoke detector. And I think one more. You said there was five. I'm going to go over four other reasons real quickly. OK, why bad feelings can be normal but used and by normal. I mean, coming from a normal brain mechanism, you know. So the next one is that the whole system wasn't shaped to benefit us. Shaped to benefit our genes. And this means that, you know, we get very upset about things like sex. I mean, sex is sex is not good for us. It's good for our genes. Yeah, yeah. Alma, what proportion of problems in life are caused by sex and wanting it, not being able to get it? Though, whoa, and a different version of that, though, is caring about what happens with our kids. I mean, people so often are just in tizzy because they're desperate to help their kids, whether it's to get into the right school or to stop drinking or to get away from the bad partner or something. You know, those are normal, useful, good, bad feelings, right? On the other hand, those are good for our genes, not for us as our individuals. Another is very interesting. It's called sensitization. I mean, many of these mechanisms are designed by natural selection. To get more sensitive if they go off repeatedly. That doesn't make any sense, does it? Right? It's just, but think about pain, for instance, if you constantly are smashing your finger, that means that you're not having enough pain to be a sensible person. So let me pause you right there real quick because something might have just clicked for me. So for example, trauma. Is this something that we're kind of talking about? Because I've seen some research and studies, like, for example, like the ACEs test, like adverse childhood experiences. Like, like the adverse childhood experiences, right? Or there's like complex PTSD, and it's people with repeated trauma and things can start to be really triggering. So like, for example, I grew up, my mom got sober when I was 20. So my entire childhood was living in a very crazy, chaotic household, right? Then in my 20s after I got sober and stopped self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, I started having realizing I had symptoms of anxiety. So is that kind of something that, like, I was in an environment where being on the alert constantly was advantageous for me? Is that what I'm getting from you? You know, kids who grew up with alcoholic parents are never quite certain what's going to happen next, at least a lot of them. I mean, it's my mom going to be crying and trying to help me. Is my mom going to be coming out and screaming at me? Is she going to leave me alone? I mean, it's just that kind of uncertainty. These people, you just, like you say, always on alert. You get the experience of the world being unpredictable. Yeah. So is that kind of like the thumb smashing? Like, yeah, that the whole system becomes more sensitive. I mean, there's a there's. If you keep smashing your thumb, it turns out that there's a built in mechanisms for making the pain system more sensitive. And, you know, chronic pain is a gigantic problem for humans. Just as big as chronic depression. And I think a lot for the same reason. I gave a paper for the Royal Society last year, and just just the article came out recently about how the pain system because it self sensitizes after pain continues is really prone to go into a feedback mode where the more pain you get, the more pain you get. Yeah. And it's it's it's a useful system, but it is prone to run away in an in a vicious cycle. And I think depression, too, is prone to run away in a vicious cycle and anxiety where, especially for anxiety, I mean, the more anxiety you get, the more you start avoiding things. And the more you think that the world is. Yeah. And every time you run out of the grocery store because you're having a panic deck. I mean, you know, it's silly, but your inner mind says, wow, you just saved your life because it's much better to get out of there. And it's so hard to help patients understand that you have to do things that seem really abnormal, like staying in a place where you're having a panic attack to get over it. But an evolutionary perspective helps them enormously. And once instead of telling people you have panic disorder, it's a problem in your brain. Do this exercise, but that's that doesn't help them. That helps some. But yeah, you tell them that panic attack you're having would be very useful to save your life if you are in life threatening danger. And your system is going off with false alarms. And all of a sudden they can make sense of all of their symptoms that fast breathing is so you can run fast and the sweating is so you're slippery and and your heart pounding is so you can run fast. Well, once they make sense of those symptoms, they're not as frightened of them anymore. And once you explain that staying in this situation when you're having that anxiety naturally down regulates the anxiety. It just helps them do the exercises that they need to do to get over it. Yeah, I yeah, something I think about all the time. One of the reasons I, you know, like to write about it and help others is my life is pretty great today, right? Like my anxiety is very minimum. And a lot of it's just because I learned I learned, you know, the evolutionary reasons for it and different techniques to kind of manage it. And now it's just I can I can go through it, right? And I've had conversations with people, you know, I'm nine years sober and it's like, oh, do you think you're ever going to drink again or use a substance again? And I'm like, I don't really have a reason to anymore because I've learned to cope with these things and realize like, hey, this is a low mood, probably for a good reason. Or, you know, there's all these things that I've kind of, I don't know, maybe conditioned myself to. So I think you're putting a finger on the most central important thing that evolutionary psychiatry offers, along with lots of other things. But the most central one is, you know, these bad feelings exist for good reasons. And while we should work to get rid of them, we should work to get rid of them in the right way by looking to see if there's something we can do to get out of the bad situation that's causing them or and the best thing to do, Chris, very often. Wait, I mean, I was in the emergency room with a hundred young people who had broken up with their lovers and they thought, I've got to kill myself now. Yeah. And I kept if you could only help them to see, excuse me, in two years, you're going to look back with this and make jokes about it. But for right now, it seems like the end of your life. Can we please help you? And of course, despite my best wishes that hardly ever worked because, you know, people are not rational in those. Yeah. Right. One of the most beneficial things I learned about it, I'm curious your thoughts, because this is kind of a theory of adaptation is, you know, hedonic adaptation, right? Like basically the idea, and if I explain this one, please correct me, but we are we evolved for to kind of reach back to this kind of baseline. So if we get too happy, if I get a million dollars tomorrow in a few months, I'm going to kind of level back out. If I get extremely sad, it's not great for me to stay down there. So eventually I'm going to come back up and we're kind of designed to reach this like homeostasis. And that's about interest. That is so profound. And I think it has a lot to do with what's wrong in people who have bipolar disorder and kind of, I mean, we've been talking about how bad feelings can be useful. But there sure are a lot of people whose brains just are not working right. And I think we shouldn't pretend like most, I mean, most bad feelings are normal, but useless. And some bad feelings are just abnormal. Yeah, because the brain is not working right. But you have to ask in control theory, they go, what's gone wrong with the people who slip into excessively high moods and excessively low moods? And I think what you just said is the answer about why most of us are not bipolar. Most of us have some great success. And we say, well, fabulous, you did it. Yeah. And two days later, we're kind of feeling like shit. Yeah. Isn't it weird? Did you experience it? Oh, yeah. I talk to people all the time, like people who are just like, this job doesn't pay me enough and they're so mad and they go into work. And then they get that raise and they're just ecstatic. I'm like, how long does it take for you to start wanting even more? Right. And but I think it's more than that. I think for most people after a great success, they feel bad and pessimistic and feel bad about themselves. And and I think that's the perfect. That's the system stopping itself from running away. Oh, OK. Because a lot of what what positive mood is for is to give you more energy to try harder and do more while times are good, right? And it's good to take advantage of good times while they're there and take risks and put in energy and stay up late. But if that runs away, then you slip into a bipolar manic episode and you're doing well and crazy stuff and spending your money and alienating your friends and all the rest. Yeah. For most of us, we have a built-in safety valve for that. You have a governor that turns off the high mood just when it's starting to feel really great. Yeah. And we wonder, how come I'm feeling bad now? Well, I think that is a natural governor. And most of us have one on the way down as well. And some happens and a few days later we think, gosh, I thought that was end of everything. And actually, life is continuing. And I feel okay. But but people with bipolar disorder, those natural control systems are not there. Yeah. The high mood leads to more high mood and more optimism and more energy until the whole system collapses with 48 hours without sleep. And then they flip into a depressed state and stay there. Yeah. And Randy, see, just right there, you're reminding me why I read your book twice. And I love it so much because it makes sense like going back to when we were talking about people who don't have enough anxiety, right? It would not be beneficial for me to barely escape death and then just keep doing it because of that high I got. Or if I want a million dollars and then I spent it and, you know, I stayed up there, I'm going to start feeling too confident, too invincible. And so we need to be able to come back down. So so that's that's interesting. That's really interesting. I hadn't even thought about that one. So is it was there one more thing too that you were that was on your list? Yeah, all the assistance were shaped based on the kinds of experiences we used to have and how to get our lifestyles, right? And we're not there anymore. We're so far away from that. I mean, I mean, if you're in a group of 30 people and there's only two or three eligible others for you for marriage, you're going to be pretty good looking. So yeah, you're going to be desirable because and you're going to not have that much choice with other people. And nowadays, I mean, put yourself on an online app, a dating app or watch other people on YouTube or or on a podcast and, you know, or Facebook. I mean, everybody puts their best stuff on Facebook and makes their lives seem super duper and they're very attractive and stuff. And so we all compare ourselves to that. And guess what? Nobody measures up. So it's this illusory world where people naturally try to put forward their best selves and their most attractive selves and the paradox is that it makes most of us feel bad about ourselves. Yeah. So let me let me ask you that because that's something I'm always just thinking about is, you know, we've been evolving for for just so many years, right? And now and then like the technology boom, you know, just how it's just like kind of with what you're saying within a group of 30 people, there's a limited amount of competition, right? But now with dating apps are now that if I'm a if I'm mad, let's say I'm out at company and we have locations all over the country, I'm no longer in competition with the people in my building. I'm in competition with people over there. And then there's the the hierarchy. So do you think like we just we haven't been able to catch up? Do you think like what hopefully the world doesn't explode, but in a thousand years we will catch up? I don't know. Like, you know, things are competitive enough when I was a kid, but I feel bad for kids now. I mean, I mean, often we talk about as if everybody goes to college, excuse me, everybody doesn't go to college and everybody shouldn't go to college, but trying to get into the best college and what a brutal process. I went for a semester where they just to find back, right? Yeah, I mean, it's stupid to have expect everybody to go to college. Yeah, well, but the process of trying to get in now is just brutal. I mean, you got to do this and the extra curriculars and the red and then there's this filtering mechanism where, you know, you get in. Gosh, it's just the competition is really awful. Of course, you could try to break into the country music scene or you were she at rock and roll. And you know, there's a few tens of thousands of people who are trying for that star spot. And you're probably not going to make it, but you got to try. Yeah, if you don't try now, now's the time. Yeah, I think what's, you know, what's been beneficial for me and something I try to teach my son is, you know, it's about more of the way, especially when it comes to competitive aspects, like it's more about the effort than the results. You know what I mean? Because like I recently did a couple of episodes with about like college and college admissions and things like that. Like if you if you like the best application or like college essay, if the person reading it has a bad day, they might totally see it wrong or not like it or you don't know the other underlying circumstances. So it's helped me just kind of deal with life as it goes. Realizing my limited amount of control. Right. And our minds were shaped on the assumption that judgments people made about us had a lot to do with us. But I talked with my academic colleagues often and the young young colleagues, when they're submitting their papers, most papers get turned down, right? And most grants get turned down. You know how how likely you are to get a grant that you submit to the federal government to work on mental health problems? No, I heard it. I heard it slow, but tell me the numbers. It's something like 10%. Wow. How do you are getting submitted like quantity wise? That means not out of 10 people stayed up late for months working on a grant. And the answer is no. Yeah. What a tease. Yeah. And we're just talking about how hard life is, but we all have to cope with it. And technology is here. And that kind of competition is here. And I think your attitude of doing it for doing it, you know, in my goal has been to bring evolutionary biology to medicine and to psychiatry because these are fundamental missing scientific foundations that can help both all of medicine and especially psychiatry and do their jobs better. And I've been frankly only modestly successful in that because these structures of those fields, you know, are not just based on, you know, what's interesting and true, that they're based on people trying to help patients right now and pharmaceutical companies wanting to make money and the like. And you can't blame them. That's just the way the world is. Yeah. So it might take a little. So and I think your attitude is the one I try to adopt. You know, I just do what I do and I say what seems sensible and a lot of people seem to appreciate it and I appreciate it when they appreciate it. In the meanwhile, I'll write more papers and write more books and try to make them interesting for people. Yeah. Yeah, no, I love it. Yeah, we got to at least try to have that attitude and you talk about this. And this is something I'm curious about. Like my mom, she's a psychologist clinical director at a rehab. It's something I was considering pursuing, but I've worked with a lot of therapists. I talked to a lot of therapists and psychologists. My girlfriend, actually, she's currently in a master's program for social work, right? And so just the field as a whole, like in the book, you talk about, I believe it's called the fundamental attribution error. Yes, right. So my memory is pretty good. And and so and basically, I'll have you explain it in just a second. But like, do you think this is something that should be trained like, like do colleges need to start making this part of the curriculum like an evolutionary aspect? Or is it just such a perfect thing you bring up, Chris? The fundamental, a Kurt Lewin was the father of social psychology, a German fellow who moved to the United States. And he pointed out that all feelings and behavior were products of the person in the situation. And he further pointed out that most people assume that a person's behavior is explained by that person. But they don't pay much attention to the situation. And social psychologists have done all kinds of sly and beautiful experiments to demonstrate that situations hugely affect what people actually do. One of my favorites is it took a bunch of seminary students and they had them in a seminar about what the Good Samaritan. Yeah, the Good Samaritan study. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. And so they had them do that. And then they had them walk across campus to another meeting. And some of them were told you got to hustle because otherwise you're going to be late. If you're late, it's going to be real trouble. And the others were not told anything about that. And guess what? The ones who weren't rushing at all stopped and helped this poor guy who was lying on the ground to hurting him. Sorry, it hurt because he fell down. But the other seminary students who had just had a seminar about the Good Samaritan walked right past quickly averting their gaze because they were going to get in trouble if they weren't on time for the next seminar. I've grossly simplified a whole bunch of stuff there. But but we all are profoundly influenced by the situation we're in. Those are short term situations. But I think larger term situations like being in a job where the bosses are asking you, but you don't have another job and you hope that he's going to retire soon or she's going to retire soon. And we are in these longer term life situations. And this is what's missing from psychiatric research. Chris, we measure life events because they're tangible and you can say did get a divorce didn't get a divorce. It didn't get pregnant, didn't get pregnant. But the life situation of trying to get pregnant and thinking you really want to get pregnant and it's really difficult and you're already 40 years old. A marvelous bunch of studies related to this are done by a woman out in California named Jutta Heckhausen. Previously she did her studies in Germany and she talked about women who wanted to get pregnant and they were approaching menopause. Guess what? They all were very upset and very pessimistic and trying. But you know, is it going to work? It's probably not going to work. And then she followed them after menopause and found that for the vast majority of them, once they gave up on that goal, yeah, those bad feelings went away. And then they started telling themselves of why the heck did I ever want to have kids anyhow? They're a lot of trouble. And you know, and yeah, and this goes back to the most fun. This is, I mean, everybody wants quick solutions now on the newest thing. You go back to Greek times and religions. I mean, the problem of how to manage desire is right at the base of all of these bad feelings. And the main solutions have been there all the time. One is to go for it, you know, go try to get as much pleasure educated right now because life is short. Those are the hedonists, right? Yeah. And that leads to trouble and suffering of its own sort. But a lot of good times in the meanwhile. And then the Stoics are the opposite of that. They say, um, do your responsibility. Don't pursue pleasure. Stick it out, you know, and just just do what's right. And that's another strategy of deny your or inhibit your impulses and desires. And that is the Epicureans. And those are folks who thoughtfully pursue desires in order to get the best without too much of the suffering that comes from going overboard. And finally, I think there's a fourth one which is more congruent with an evolutionary view. And that's the Buddhist view is to realize that all these things are basically, you know, illusions. And the natural selection has shaped us to want desperately all these things. And we can't stop those desires. And we can't just tell ourselves it's all silly. But it is kind of, you know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, just kind of my path and journey to my own, you know, just personal development because I got really into mindfulness and meditation. And then I'm like, I want to learn more about Buddhist philosophy. And I read Robert Wright's Why Buddhist, why Buddhism is true. Isn't that a wonderful book? Robert Wright and that book is a masterpiece. Yeah. And and yet like it helps me and it's these things. And I recently had a guess because there's kind of like this aspect of people are trying to make a lot of money off of like Buddhist philosophy. But but it's helped me so much when I'm talking like I do. I have talks with authors about they write books about political polarization and you know, just all these things. And I'm like, man, I'm so glad that on my journey, I started with mindfulness because it's helped me pause. It's helped me kind of look back and realize like, Hey, maybe I'm perceiving this wrong. I've got another good book for you along these lines. Oh, let it on. Get the author's name. But how's this for a book title? How to want what you have. Oh, I'm writing it down. Isn't that lovely? It's about evolution and Buddhism and the same things we're talking about here. I love it. And yeah, it's so helpful. And I don't know, I'm obsessed with the idea of just learning why we evolved in these ways, you know, for this, because it's helped me. I think it's helped me cut cut myself and my emotions some slack. And that's why I try to teach people about it. It's it's difficult because I'm always thinking about, you know, there's the messenger, and then there's a person receiving the message, right. And it's like, okay, who should we try to get to change? Because for example, we're living in this fast paced society. And on your phone, you can download 50 meditation apps. So that quick fix idea, it's everywhere, right? People are coming, they're like, Hey, sniff this essential oil, it'll get rid of your anxiety like that, you know, and we all want that because we have stuff to do. You know, I got a job, I got kids, I'm yeah, fix me now. So I can go do that. And I'm like, okay, so do we try to change the people who are putting this message out? Or do we try to reach the masses and say, Hey, it's okay if these things take time, you know, when and now we come back to the fundamental attribution error that you mentioned, because, you know, the assumption with all of these things is there's something wrong with the person that's making this, they should be meditating, they should be doing this, they should be doing that. I'm stepping back and looking in more depth at the situation, and helping people to choose thoughtfully their situations, I think is just as important. And and when they had bad feelings pausing and not just saying, what's wrong with me? I'm having this bad feeling. How can I think different? Instead of saying, well, let's assess this bad feeling thoughtfully about, you know, is it appropriate? And if it's normal, is it useful might not be useful even though it's normal. But it just allows you to step back. Yeah, I think I think that if I if I had a magic wand right now, anybody listening to this, I would just, you know, I would just put a sign in their house or something like that. Is this useful? Right? Is there a reason for this? Or is this is this a normal response? Right? Like, if if so, but when the hooker here is a turkey is a lot of normal responses are not good for us. They're either good for our genes or they're disposed or their sensitization. And it doesn't mean there's something wrong with your brain, just because you're having useless bad feelings. Sometimes it's up wrong with your brain. But I think in pharmacologically interventions, this is another way that evolutionary approaches is very useful. People say to me often, oh, Dr. Nessie, you think that a bad emotions are useful. Therefore, you must think that using drugs is never smart to treat them. Absolutely not. I mean, I'm a doctor, I treat pain. And when you can relieve pain safely, do it for goodness sakes. Medicine is for and likewise, if you can relieve mental pain safely, either with medications or with other kinds of psychotherapy, do it. But don't ignore possible causes of pain. I actually wrote a tweet just yesterday about an article in this week's New England Journal of Medicine. The article is all about all depression in adolescence and what doctors should do about it. It's a very influential article because it'll guide general physicians and what they do. And it gives a very nice summary of how to diagnose depression and different scales you can use. And it gives you know, some evidence that drugs can be useful and cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful. And it talks about assessing the patient and saying and checking to see if these adolescents are using drugs, which is a huge problem, causing depression. But you know what, Tris? It said nothing at all about talking with that teenager about what their life is like. Nothing. Nothing about whether their parents are alcoholics, nothing about whether they're failing in school, nothing about whether their girlfriend left them for another guy or boyfriend left them for another cow. Nothing about whether they are their parents are desperate for them to get into a fancy college and actually they'd rather not. We should be talking with people one by one about what they're trying to do in life and how it's going. And this business of just assuming that the symptoms are the disease. Sometimes they are. But we shouldn't just assume that bad feelings are a disease. A lot of times they're normal, even if they're not useful. Yeah, it's it's interesting because I feel that's what we want. At least that's my experience. I used to eight doctors and anybody else because it felt like they were just trying to figure it out and move on to the next one, right? They would come in, talk to me and trust me like because when I got sober, I had congestive heart failure at the right age of 27. So I've seen a lot of specialists and I saw this a lot just, you know, and they'll throw out them like you're not even talking to me, right? But I've had this primary care doctor for the last few years. And I love this woman. If I if I moved across town, oh, I actually did move across town. I still go see her because she takes the time. She will sit there, talk to me, ask me questions, answer any and she goes you as an individual. And it's just it's amazing. And I'm like, if we had more people like that because it just feels like, you know, and there's there's a lot of things going on in different systems, like, you know, where people are understaffed and they got to move to the next person. And so I empathize with that. All right, ready. So on these kind of topics about, you know, you're not against medication. And there's there's kind of debates that go on. And I don't want to dive like all the way into all the research. But there's the idea of like chemical imbalances, right? And, you know, are there are these kind of glitches and errors and I've read a lot of books, you know, trying to understand, you know, the placebo effect and all that. But I'll use myself as a primary example. I was on Lexapro for four or five years. Then I switched to Prozac, which I've been on and because of, you know, learning more and coping better and learning all these other skills. There's been a few times, and I always emphasize this, with a doctor supervision, I have weaned off of that. But it seems like it comes back, right, the depression or anxiety or whatever it is. And I look at my situations and I'm like my situations are fine. So am I not just am I just not getting enough serotonin or do I need these medications? So that's I'm curious like now now when when is medical intervention necessary? So the first principle is that we humans are simplistic thinkers, all of us. And both doctors and patients want a simple way of understanding these disorders. And it's so attractive to think of depression in particular as being a serotonin deficiency or something like that. I mean, there's no evidence for that whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, the way these drugs work is the same way that aspirin works for pain. In pain is a normal, useful response. And you can use medications that interrupt various parts of the mechanism to relieve pain. And that's a wonderful thing. So long as the pain isn't really necessary. And usually it isn't really necessary, you know, even when you break your leg, once you've got it in a cast, relieve the pain, you don't need that much pain to keep the person for moving around. So pain is usually normal, but useless, or at least excessive, just like it. So I think it's important to think about how these medications work. The simplistic idea of everything is caused by the brain, therefore it must be caused by brain abnormality. I mean, give me a break. That's just not right. Once you start recognizing that these emotions are there for good reasons, and the mechanisms are there for good reasons, you realize that the medications can disrupt the normal mechanisms. And that's a good thing. So long as you're looking carefully for what might actually be arousing the problem in the first place. But then we have to be more careful about the practicalities of it, Chris. What about the long term effects? Yeah. I mean, this article in the New England Journal this week highlighted the idea that, you know, 63% of kids got benefit compared with 37% was their approximations of those on the placebo kind of treatment. But they were cherry picking, you know. Yeah, no, yeah. Other studies that make it much less good. And they didn't mention in that study that they quoted at 32 weeks out, the cognitive behavioral therapy kids were doing exactly as well as the ones who had been on medications. And their side effects, these medications, especially sexual side effects and dry mouths and sleepiness and sometimes anxiety. On the other hand, an individual decision that a patient and doctor make together about is this medication worthwhile for this person at this time given side effects and the like, this needs to be done individually. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's kind of what, you know, the way I do it and when people ask us, you know, obviously, I'm not a doctor. I kind of take it as I go and I communicate with my doctor. I'm like, Hey, for example, I've been feeling great. I'm gonna, what do you think about me trying to wean down right and then I'll do follow ups. One thing I do to is I let my girlfriend know I'm like, Hey, this is what I'm doing with my medication. So I started acting weird. Let me know because I might not realize it and I communicate that in that it's, you know, it's something I've learned to cut myself some slack for because I, you know, even working with people, I think there's a lot of just like, I wish I didn't have to take these or I didn't need to need to do these and it's like, you know, whatever, like if you had diabetes and you had to take insulin, like it would, you know, so, but, but I because of all the things that you mentioned, these side effects that come along with it, like in a perfect world, I'd be fine and just never need to. So I'd go in months and stuff and just been fine. And I don't know. You know, I found half of my job in psychiatry was trying to help people accept that they needed medications and the other half was trying to help people stop medications that they were taking that they probably didn't need. And I got good experience with that. And I think what you are describing of telling people that you're going off meds, principle one, do it very, very slowly. I mean, if you're watching and waiting, oh, do you notice that I'm going down hill? Well, guess what? There's going to be bad weeks or even months while you're tapering your meds. So don't just assume that those bad feelings are caused by withdrawal effects. Sometimes they are withdrawal effects. Sometimes there are the problem coming back again. And sometimes it's just what happens, you know? Yeah, it really takes a lot of patience and doctors and patients working together over the long term to to see what's best for an individual, the proportion of people who are on antidepressants now in this country. I keep looking up the number. It blows my mind that it's more than 25 percent of middle to upper age women. Maybe you have more data on that than I know. Yeah, it's it's it's something that I'm really curious, but I actually got an early copy of a book where it's kind of addressing this. Why are so many people, you know, depressed or struggling or suffering or whatever it is? And we touched on this earlier in the conversation. It's like because I see these statistics of, oh, more people are on antidepressants. I'm like, but that doesn't necessarily mean that more people had this chemical imbalance type depression, you know, it could and even the idea that depression is a new epidemic with covid and other kind of stuff. Maybe. But everybody always thinks that now things are worse than they used to be, you know, in ancient Rome, read Libby and somebody's ancient Roman authors, they talk about the problem now is modern times. Chariots are just too fast. Life is just too fast, you know. Probably it was. Yeah. So I think we should pause and not just assume that things are worse now. On the other hand, I think no, like you were saying there's new technology and new media that set expectations that are not achievable for most of us. And we may be creating a mental space for the whole world that is toxic for our evolved minds. So I think we need an open mind about that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And just keep, you know, learning and talking and researching and and all this kind of stuff. And I appreciate it so much, Randy, this made this made my week being able to sit here and talk with yourself. I tried talking with Chris. It's great to have somebody who's been there, done that. And he was trying so hard to help other people to understand how they can cope. Yeah, basics are for all of this. Absolutely. So so let me let me know. I found you. I can't on Twitter. But is there anywhere else people could find you and like the research of you? Yeah, I mean, the book is Good Reasons.info and it's an easy reading fun book with lots of cases. Although I put a lot of kind of basic new science in there as well for psychiatrists and and clinicians. I really enjoyed writing it and gotten great reviews and stuff. So Good Reasons.info. My website is nasi.us and and there's a couple you know, scores of papers there for people who want the more academic versions of these kinds of things. And I actually am very deep into the evolutionary medicine movement. Really, I got this field of evolutionary medicine started because I was so frustrated with psychiatry. And so anybody who's interested in evolutionary medicine more generally can just go to evolutionarymedicine.org or just look up evolutionary medicine. It'll take you to our scientific society. Awesome. Last quick question. You any books planned for the future? Or we're taking a break. You know, I want to write. A book for psychiatrists and clinicians just called evolutionary psychiatry. OK, and not provide quite so many interesting things that I did in this last book and just put it in people's face that we're missing a whole foundation for understanding behavior. It all the rest of evolutionary study of studies and behavior based on evolution. Yeah. Let's psychiatrists and clinical psychologists never have an opportunity to learn that, at least very few of them do. And I'm hoping that once once people do have a chance to learn that, it'll make the world better, at least a little. Absolutely. Yeah. I would love that to get more an academic circle. So again, Randy, thank you so much. It's a good conversation, Chris. Talk to you another time, perhaps. You too.