Are we yes? Where are we here? Why are we here not entirely clear? We are misfits thrust into existence by random chance with no hints at all as to how we're supposed to make sense of it all.

It's immensely bizarre. Here we are.

Hello everybody and welcome to a special edition of the Here We Are podcast. It's the seven year anniversary. We're going into the eighth year of the podcast and I thought I'd record a solo episode. So this is much different just in case you happen to be tuning into this one.

And this is the first ever here we are podcast that you've listened to. This is not a good represent. I don't know what's all going to come out of my mouth. I can tell you that it's not a good representation of what the show normally is.

So if your first time hearing this is listening to some guy blab about himself for an hour and a half or let's try to keep it to an hour. And then you're like, well that was kind of boring reasonable. That would be a reasonable assessment of what I believe is probably going to happen.

And that's not representative of the show. I just wanted to share some thoughts about some of my background. And I've done this a couple of times in the past. I hate talking to I hate talking to myself.

The while being recorded rather I talked to myself all the time in regular life. Very healthy thing to do, by the way, if you don't talk to yourself, get into it.

But don't like recording talking to a microphone looking in a camera by myself, not terribly comfortable with it.

And something that I should probably get better at sometimes if you ever hear the intros or outros that I do part of the reason why I don't do them very often is simply because I just don't like talking solo into a camera and microphone.

And I've literally released episodes late or not plugged shows or done like important announcements and things just because I get anxious doing this. So I'm I'm getting out of my comfort zone.

I'm confronting a source of insecurity and anxiety by doing this show. And yeah, hopefully it's hopefully it's gives you just a little bit of an idea of what this shows about and some reflections on the past year. So I don't really have a plan.

Just in my head, I thought I'll give a little bit of a background. I'll talk about some of the things a little bit of background of how I got interested in science in the first place, how I started doing a science podcast, the topics that we like talking about the most on this show.

And why and maybe some reflections on the last year or so. I think it's been about a year since I did one of these and perhaps some thoughts about the future or share a few of the few of the ideas I have in other projects that I'm working on. So we'll see if I stick to any of that. Who knows. So if you happen to be.

Maybe I sent this to you because you're a potential guest or something like that. And or just someone that I wanted to give the kind of basics of what the show is about overall.

The main topics that we talk about on the here we are podcast lots of how the mind works. It's quite a bit of I particularly like thinking about the evolutionary underpinnings that gave rise to our many preferences, the way that we think our conscious experience. So

one of the things that I'm going to make this a very, very 101 simplified basics type stuff. But one of the things that I'm very interested in is when we think about evolution.

And it's it's easy to think about it as, hey, okay, cool. We started we were these we were these apes. And then we started standing up right and

Yeah, isn't that neat. We have a evolution like I made our thumbs the way they are something like that. And what a lot of people aren't privy to and the topic that I just find endlessly fascinating is what were the pressures through time, what were the pressures through our ancestors, not just human ancestors before humans.

The our ancestors that gave rise to early humanity and what pressures were faced after that, what pressures were faced by all of life on earth that created various predictable kind of behaviors and biases. And things like, for example, negativity bias is a very simple one.

And with with any of these things, it's often way too simplified and can't be applied to every situation and context is is important. But just just the idea that, you know, if a good thing happens to you, that's great and everything.

But if a bad thing happens to you, that could mean the end of your life and that cost is much higher, that cost that might make it so that you never spread your genes on.

And and because of that, some of our ancestors that were a bit more cautious intended to wait negative experiences greater than positive experiences survived and reproduced more because of that.

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