I am Ryan McKnight.

I'm Kara Santa Maria.

I am Christopher Smith.

Hi, I'm Andrew Torres.

This is Naked Mormonism.

The Serial Mormon History Podcast.

If you understand the words coming out of my mouth right now,

chances are pretty high that you're a human being or it's a

dystopian future and you're an AI listening to this. I hope you're being nice to the humans

that you have enslaved. Anyway, I digress. We all share aspects of humanity, which are, you know,

universal with only some really rare exceptions. So I'm going to speak pretty generally for this kind of introduction to the episode without

any intention of leaving out anybody who doesn't kind of experience the focus of today's

episode.

So what are those aspects of humanity that I'm talking about?

Well, I'm talking about emotions and emotions that fall into two pretty broad categories.

You know, love and hate, happiness and sadness, stress and relaxation, good and bad feelings,

broadly speaking, are universally experienced by everybody, even if the stimuli which excite

those emotions are unique.

We all laugh, whether internally or audibly,

as an expression of an emotion. What that emotion is is much harder to define, but the stimuli may be similar for many of us, you know, a funny joke, a shared memory with a loved one,

you know, an insider reference for only those who know what we're talking about

or what we're thinking about, right? All of these things kind of excite humor and help us feel

...