Economonkey

or is it? That's right? Today we're talking about whether animals could have money before you shake down your local squirrel. We're not talking about dollars or butt coin or ethereum or whatever, but whether animals could have a currency, make trades and understand when they're getting griffed it. Discover this more as we answer the age old question. You can have an invisible hand, but what about an invisible fall. Joining me today is professor of economics at Collegio Carlo Alberto, who,

coincidental is also my husband, which is pure coincidence. No nepotism here, folks, welcome Dr Brett McCauley. Hey, thanks for having me so I think that sometimes people think of economics as simply money math and you know, just counting dollars, proticting the stocks, stocks and bonds, stocks and bonds. But a lot of it is about studying human behavior and psychology. Right, Yeah, that's right. I'd say just about all of economics is

about studying human behavior. And so, of course we're most well known US economists and the popular imagination as people who do comment on and on prices and stocks and so forth. But but really, what what at least does academic research economists do is is study all all kinds of human behavior, and we study it from a particular perspective. We we like to use quantitative models and econometrics and statistics. But yeah, so so economists asked questions that often relate

to public policy or human behavior. So you know, maybe you study, maybe we study sometimes something about immigration, or about individual choices and behavioral biases. All many of these things fall under the sphere of study of economics. Of course, they are also studied by other fields very well. But uh, you know, we're we're a social science ultimately, so we cover all manner of social phenomena. So when you look at a human being. You don't just see a fleshy

sack of money and uh numbers walking around right right? Yeah, okay, great, good, good to know. So it is interesting. So economics is largely about human behavior, but it can also be about animal behavior. So behavioral economists did a study on tufted capuchins. So tufted capuchins are adorable South American monkeys. They live in trees in tropical rainforests. They have this long, prehensile tail, fluffy brown and black fur, with tufts of black fur on their head that looks like a crazy sort of

Elvis hairstyle, completely side burns. They weigh from around five to ten pounds or two to five kim so they're they're little guys. They're they're pretty tiny. They're not They're not teeny tiny, but they're not huge. They are highly social and live in groups of around ten to fifteen individuals, and even though they are only a distant primate relative

of ours, they are highly intelligent. They seem to use tools such as sticks to dig up food, cracking cash, you nuts with a hammer and anvil stone set up. They even select tools based on their heft and the task they have to do so. For instance, cash you nuts ripen over time, but when they're freshest they have a toxic substance in them that causes skin irritation. So Capuchin's use larger tools on the fresher cashews, despite them being easier to crack open, possibly to protect their little

monkey paws from this toxic irritant. They're also known to understand sponges, using paper towels or dry biscuits to sop up juice and then suck the juice out of a sponge like a kind of weird popsicle. How do you think they originally learned the sponge technique? I mean, I I would guess just trial and air like that. There's a lot of natural curiosity of these highly socially intelligent animals, and they pick something up and then they you know,

dun't get in something else. Then when they put it back in their mouths, they realize, hey, this now is a is a juicy biscuit, and then other Capucheans may copy that behavior. So they're really good at sort of just generating ideas themselves and trying things and being really curious, and they're also good at copying others in their social group and learning from them. Uh, they've even been known to manufacture tools like very primitive sharp stone flakes that

they used to cut away barriers to food. They break off a stone flake from a rock which is now very sharp, and then they can kind of cut away at anything that's blocking their food. So it's the stone is kind of already sharper, they sharpen it, they sharpen it, so they will chip the stone to create like a flake and then use that flake to cut away at something. Well,

I mean, it's pretty high level thinking. So the behavior of actually cutting the barrier, I would say it has only been documented in captive individuals and so it's unknown

whether this is a wider spread phenomenon. And some researchers would contend that the creation of the stone flakes is inadvertent, so like they're using the stones and a mortar and pestel kind of technique and then breaking off the stone and creating the stone flakes as a byproduct or another theories, they like to crack open these stones so that they can lick at sort of the inside, like there may be some kind of nutritive or vitamin like lichens inside.

But some contend like that they don't then use these stone flakes as tools. But because it's a behavior that's been seen in captive individuals, it seems like pretty likely that similar behaviors may be found in wild individuals. And the idea that it's not not a form of tool creation just because they happened upon by accident is kind of It's a little strange to me because like, how else do you learn how to make tools other than like doing stuff, smashing things together and then seeing what

it can be used for. So I think it's still really intelligent. It falls a little bit short of like the human ability to like take one tool, use another tool to refine that, and then use another tool to refine that, and keep going until we get televisions and Twitter at least no monkey Twitter. I thank god, those lucky little little munchkins. So they are intelligent, But do they understand economics or at least do they act like humans do when they are exposed to economic shocks? So

what is a shock? And economics? Is it when Alan Greenspan like charges up a car battery and then attaches it to you and you know, let's it rip. Yeah, that's what he would do during Senate Banking Committee meetings to make sure no one question and them too hard. I don't understand any of that. So, so what is an economics shock. So a shock and economics is it's not so different from our our colloquial understanding of a shock.

It's just something that is surprising that happens to economic agents. Surprising in the sense that they couldn't anticipate it. So an example of an economic shock would be something like the sudden rise in gas prices that has happened over the last few months, and most people didn't anticipate that, and therefore they have to react in real time to the change in prices and and sort of reallocate or change their their driving patterns or whatever. So yeah, this

is actually what researchers did to Capuchins. They raised their gas prices and they tried to drive their little Capuchin cars and they were really upset. Now, so there is a researcher Keith Chin and his co authors, there are a group behavioral economists, neuroscientists, and psychologists who can get along. Also, they can study the behavior of tufted Capuchins when given economic shocks and choices, and to do this, they had to give the monkeys a fiat currency. So, Professor Brett,

what is a fiat currency? I'm glad you asked. A fiat currency is just some medium of exchange, so some item. It could be digital, it could be physical, which allows one to easily trade between people, but the actual medium of exchange, the currency has no intrinsic value. So it would be like if I suddenly issued creature books, which is just like a picture of my smiling face on a piece of paper given the thumbs up, and this is like, this is one creature book and you can

exchange it for one podcast. Yeah, exactly. Well no, but then it would be backed by a podcast, so would have the podcast standard, right, very much more stable than the gold standard, any standard, the podcast standard. Okay, So if if I had a Katie or if I had a creature box, uh, and it's not backed by the podcast episode, but the creature book you can use to purchase any and all you know, podcast related goods, right.

I mean, the fundamental premise of the fiat currency is that it has value, because we all believe it has value, and we do all believe that creature books have a lot of value. Go to www dot creature books bu x dot, or don't go there. It's not an actual I don't have an actual website called that. So if you go there and it's all spam and viruses, it's

not my fault. So uh. The Capucheans were trained to have a fiat currency, so they were trained that they could exchange tokens for a variety of food rewards, and the researchers allowed the monkeys to gamble with their tokens for food when the gambling was framed as gambling for a bonus, so sometimes they would receive more food than originally displayed. They were more likely to be willing to

take the gamble. But when the gambling was framed as a loss, so food would be taken away from the display. Even if the final amount of food given to the capuchin was the same as the food given and the like bonus gambles, they were more avoiding of the lossy gambles. So, yes, the researchers did teach capuchin's to gamble. Yes, they have led these poor little monkeys down to a life of

sin advice. Um, but here is the setups. So you have a capuchein faced with two dealers, just like you would at any kind of casino that you find in the middle of the rainforest. So one dealer is the bonus guy. He displays one apple slice, and when the Capuchein gives him his token, the dealer has a chance of giving the capuchin either just that one apple slice or hey, hooray, you win an extra apple slice. On the other side of the room is the lost dealer.

He displays two apple slices. The monkey gives him a token, and he either gives him both the apple slices or takes one away. So in either case you have the same odds of winning two apple slices. It is just presented in different ways, either as adding a slice or taking one away. And the capucheans far preferred the bonus dealer. They liked winning the extra slice, perceiving this as a

bonus rather than perceiving it as being taken away. And it shows that these capuchins are capable of somewhat human reactions to a gambling situation in terms of loss a version and reference dependence. So what is loss of version and reference dependence? So, so reference dependence just means that you you have some reference, which determines how you view

certain tradeoffs or choices. So like, for example, you and I just moved from Los Angeles to Turn, and so our reference for certain qualities of food like Mexican food is dependent on what they made in Los Angeles. And then when we eat Mexican food in Turn, we just get absolutely furious and just tear the place apart. So

you know that's that's reference dependence. And then loss of version is the notion that and these really come from psychology, I should I should point out, but loss of version is where you'd you might face equal odde of getting some payoff in this case one you know, one apple slice, but you really hate to lose something much more than you enjoy gaining an equivalent amount. So this happened. So

let's let's go back to the stock market. The the the typical economics per view, which is where people really really suffer when they when they get some huge, you know, big loss to their their portfolio stocks. But when they make a lot of money in the stock market, they don't get nearly the same amount of satisfaction or enjoyment to sort of offset what happened with that huge loss.

And that's what you see with these monkeys. It seems like money is just made for us to suffer because like we're it hurts so much more to lose money, and we're so much more likely to lose money in the stock market. But but I mean, but it's not just money, right, because actually this experiment shows that just like apples, like that's that has intrinsic value. It's enjoyable to eat apples. It's not even money, and there's still loss a version. I guess the root of all evil

isn't money, it's apples. That yeah. That that was from the famous Pink Floyd song called Apples. Yeah, I remember that one Apples. It's it's a crime. Right now, we're going to get copyrights right from from Pink Floyd and their famous song Apples. So the capucheons not only displayed this like humanlike behavior in terms of this gambling situation, they also responded to changes in prices for different food rewards. So, okay, new experiment. The capuchins were presented with the same amounts

of apple, jello, and grape. They showed no preference among these food rewards. They liked all of them relatively equally. And when given a budget of tokens, they would buy them in early equivalent amounts like apple, jello, and grape all good. They like to have a variety of these foods because they were all they were all tasty, and they enjoyed all of them about equivalently. But then the experiment ers cut the price of apples by giving them

an extra apple slice per token. And maybe you could explain how did how do the even understand what the tokens traded for. It's a combination of showing them what happens when you put the token in the tray and then reinforcements. So they put the token in the little receiving tray, uh, and then they receive a reward. And you do that enough and they associate putting the token

in with getting a reward. And then also, you know, if you have sort of different stalls, So this is the apple stall, this is the jello stall, this is the grape stall. They learned like, oh, if I put it in front of this little apple area, I get an apple. Or this is the jello stall, I get a jell. It's like I mean, essentially like what we do with vending machines. So the experiment ers cut the price of apples by giving them an extra apple slice per token, so it'd be like if you used a

vending machine. And then suddenly now whenever you press the the button for funyans, you got two funyans for the price of one. And so, yes, it's the fantasy we all dream of. So then the researchers cut the capuchin's budgets, so now they don't have as many tokens and totals. They're like, hey, I know, we kept giving you, you know, ten tokens, but now you're only getting five tokens. And so now that these Capucheans were forced to be on a budget, the Capucheans responded like a lot of humans do,

by buying more of the cheaper item, the apple. They realize, okay, we're on a budget. We got to tighten our little capuchin belts, so now I'm going to buy apple, which are the budget item. And this is what we often do as humans when we have to go on a budget.

If we don't have a lot of funds, we will buy cheaper things, especially when there are there's like a sudden sort of economic shock of having to significantly change your budget you go for cheaper items, right, I mean, that's just what all of us are doing with this whole inflation about and uh increasing prices of gas and so forth. And now we're we're buying less less cheesecake factory more McDonald's. Right. I don't really like cheesecake, and

I'm borderline about McDonald's. So you know, if I could. Katie is not a woman of the people. If I could just have some apple slices, he'll be as happy as one of these little capuchins. But yeah, I am curious, and I couldn't find any of these. But I wonder if there are follow up studies or if anyone would

be interested in doing a follow up study. Winkly to all you Copuchan researchers out there that show the compute Copuchin show an increase in preference for the more expensive food when the apples are no longer on sale, like, because I think that's sometimes with humans, at least for me,

and I think with other people too. When something was previously expensive and then the price goes down to something that fits with the items that were generally in your budget, I sometimes would go for the more expensive item that's now at a discount because I have this perception that this thing is of higher quality because it's more expensive, even if that's not true. Right, It's almost like two interacting phenomenon. One is reference dependence, so you're you're reference

point is a higher priced item. But then also this notion that price confers the quality of something, so it's like, oh, it's a high quality good because it has a high you know as a high price. And then when the when price drops and it's at a discount, it's like, oh, this previously it's this high quality good is now so yeah,

I think that makes a lot of sense. And the reason I want to know if Capuchins do this as well is that I'm starting to become suspicious that we're all just like little Capuchins and that marketers are taking advantage of us, just like these researchers are manipulating and twisting these Capuchin's behaviors. So I am I am concerned. You know, us researchers would never do that to you. You you keep winking and like, I'm I want to remind you this as an audio podcast, and they can't

actually see you repeatedly winking and nudging me. But I can see them. We're not supposed to tell them that we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. So, uh, professor McCully, you can confirm that we have a dog, right we do? Yeah. Do you think she understands money? I think she understands treats, which in her world. I guess there some equivalent version of money. She can be bribed with treats or I guess I guess I should put it like she actually extorts us.

It's not really us bribing her, it's her extorting us. It's exchange. It's classic economic exchange. We give her a treat and she stops being a bad girl. So there is this thing in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations where he says, quote, nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal, by its gestures and natural cries, signify to another that this is mine, that yours. I am willing to give this for that.

So the study we just discussed proves that this is wrong about Capucca ends. But was Adam Smith also wrong about dogs? What do you think he did right that? Like a hundred years before Darwin was on the scene. So the guy was a little ignorant about animals. So I'm I'm guessing you're about to tell me that that he was wrong about this other thing. That's right, Adam Smith was a dumb, stupid poopy head who was wrong about everything, all right, But you know, is that too

too strong? You know, he had some some good ideas, some I'm not so up to the up to date ideas. Invisible hand more like invisible brain because he doesn't have one with wait was and Smith invisible hand man? Yeah? Well he yeah, yeah, he's invisible hand man. And I guess it would be a good invisible paw joke. I mean, you kind of just made it, but then you stepped all over I know. Well, you know, I was trying

to I was trying to think on my feet. It's like on your invisible feet, on my invisible feet, and that's the problem. My invisible brain didn't kick in. Yeah, but um, what I do mean is that Adam Smith was a dumb dumb because he was so wrong about animals and dogs. We tend to think of dogs is giving us unconditional love and infection. Being guileless not being little penny pinchers, but they actually are. They can sense

when things are unfair in an exchange. So researchers did an experiment where they included dogs who knew the shake trick, so dogs would do the trick whether they were rewarded or not, which seemed to indicate that they felt an intrinsic reward in completing the trick. So they were really well trained. And if they continued to be unrewarded while observing other dogs getting rewards, they went on strike and

they refused to perform the trick anymore. There's kind of similar analysis empirical evidence from economics about inequality and how much people hate to observe the same sort of thing. So there's this common practice in by employers in the United States where they make people hide how much they earn from other employees because they're afraid that they would

get jealous. And just like these dogs, employees would not That not that we want to compare employees to dogs, and I'm just saying the same phenomenon, uh, kind of happens where employers know that people hate to see someone who they feel like maybe works the same as hard as they do, and yet makes more money than they do. And so, uh, there's very good reason that they would

be concerned about that. There is empirical evidence that people really resent if they if you're at the same firm and you have one employee, you have a couple employees, and then suddenly the employees learn about what how much everyone is paid. That people really resent when they are paid less than other people for seemingly identic coal output.

And and so dogs seem to have the same kind of intrinsic sense of fairness based on what you're saying, Yeah, I think this means that dogs should form a union, right, Yeah, again, I'm trying to I keep trying to think about invisible paw, invisible dog body parts. You'll the invisible How can you shake with the invisible pawn pod? How can you shake with the invisible paw? Wait? Oh shake? Oh? I see right? Or are you shaking the invisible paw or is the

invisible tail shaking the invisible dog? I'm literally gonna die, so uh the yeah, it is really interesting. So basically, these dogs, when they were unrewarded, they were fine with that because they just got to kick out of doing the trick. But when they saw other dogs getting rewarded, and they weren't bad as when they stopped doing the trick, that is when they started to get upset about things being unfair. And and so did they do is sit down, strike, nice,

sit down and roll over strike. So does this mean that dogs are as intelligent as primates. It's really hard to make value judgments on intelligence when you're comparing animals, but suffice it to say that their intelligence remains different from primates. So there was another study on tufted capuchin's uh, the same species of monkey we talked about earlier, where they would exchange a token for a slice of cucumber.

But capucheans like grapes more than cucumbers because obviously so when a capuchin who had previously been happy to trade the token for cucumber saw another monkey getting a beloved grape instead of a stupid cucumber for that same token, the monkey would get upset and go on strike and refuse to pay for his cucumbers. Right, And that's that's where he would throw the invisible feces. Oh my god, and I made such a huge mistake bringing up Adam Smith. This was that was a great bit I'm just gonna

beat it today for the rest of this episode. So so, unlike these capucheons, the dogs aren't able to make the distinction between more coveted food, so they get jealous if they see a dog getting rewarded and they aren't being rewarded at all. But if a other dog gets a better ord, like a tastier tree to higher value treat,

they don't get jealous. So okay, I'm I'm skeptical. I mean, if we fed, if we showed Cookie another dog getting beautifully cooked salmon, and then we offered for her treat just some dumb dog food like dry dog food, I feel like she would be smart enough to know what

was going on. I mean, Cookie, my our our dog, might be an outlier in terms of pettiness though, because she seems to use almost a hundred percent of her brain power on pettiness and a sense of fairness to her to her exclusively, not fairness to us or to other dogs, So she she might be an outlier. But

I do share some of your skepticism. I'm curious. I think the disparity between the treats may have been too small, so if they made a much larger disparity between the treats, and like say you gave one dog a bunch of really good smelly treats and a lot of praise, and then the other dog got bub kiss. It's a it's a good point. I am. I am curious to well, Actually, they love cat turns. That's like the caviare of dog treats.

They covet cat turds and they will eat them if given the chance, because cat feces are higher in fat content and it just smells and tastes great to them. I mean, there can also be kind of different effects

depending on the dog. That is, maybe on average dogs don't really react to this, but you have some fraction of dogs that are really upset by fairness, So Cookie would be in that like twenty percent of dogs that are upset by the clear unfairness and the treat the quality of the treat given, but maybe the rest of the dogs don't. Then you can estimate no effect in in the in the whole study. This is we're getting in statistics here. Please, folks, don't turn off your headsets.

Were well stop, I will I will kick him off the podcast if he brings up any more statistics. Now I'm kidding, statistics are good. So while dogs do seem to understand fairness when it comes to themselves, they don't

necessarily understand reciprocity. So there was an experiment where dogs were faced with a human who could either press a give food or don't give food button, and some of the human volunteers were quote unquote helpful, so they would press the give food button more and others were unhelpful and wouldn't press the give food button as much, and

the dogs would wine at the unhelpful humans. But when it came time for reciprocity, so now dogs were armed with buttons that could give the humans food, they were just happy to let the humans starve. Yes, so they had been previously trained on these buttons to give themselves foods, so they knew that the buttons caused food to happen.

And dogs didn't really seem to care at all about delivering the humans food, and they didn't seem to care whether the human was one of the generous volunteers or not. And when the dogs were allowed to interact with the humans, they were just as affectionate with the stingy humans as with the non stingy humans. I think it's interesting because to me, I don't think this necessarily means dogs wouldn't

have a preference for humans is based on kindness. I think they just were unable to make the connection between the buttons and the food and the the idea of like, oh, you're giving me more food intentionally, so I should press this button that delivers you a cheeseburger. It didn't, It

didn't work. I mean, it makes sense to me just thinking like about the evolution of dogs, because it's never been that the dog has really helped feed the human, and then the dog would like read the body language right of the human of like, oh, the human really enjoys the food, whereas I'm sure the dog can read the body language like Cookie could read the body language of another dog that's really enjoying it's salmon. Well, Cookie

has no salmon, for example. I feel like, you know, the direction of food distribution has always been going one way throughout the history of man and dog, from man to dog, and and therefore why why why would dogs ever be able to discern how the human? Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. I agree with that. I think it is really interesting because yes, dogs we domesticated dogs, but dogs in turn kind of domesticated us towards their ends of providing them handouts and food. And it's the

invisible hand that feeds. Oh my god, I folks, this is going to continue long after we're done recording. I just want you to know what I suffer through. Yeah, so the psychology of the dog would be to please humans, but not necessarily to give food directly to humans or understand that flow of like food from dog to human.

Although it's interesting because cats will try to teach you to hunt sometimes because they will teach their kittens, their offspring how to hunt, and so female cats will often bring you a half dead mouse and leave it there for you, because I think that this is, uh, it's a learning experience for you because you will be able to easily kill this half dead mouse, and of course they're going to be confused when you scream and run away. Yeah.

I remember my aunt's cat bringing up one of those half dead mice, and then my uncle took my flip flop and finished the job. And uh, yeah, I could never use that flip flop again. It was it was very upset. It's upset. Eleven year old yeah, I mean your your uncle probably really pleased your cat though, because your cats thinking like, oh, you know, he learned, he finished the job, and then when your uncle didn't proceed to eat the mouse, cat was probably very confused. Yeah.

I think Fletcher was pretty triumphant about the whole situation. So, in addition to understanding fairness, dogs are susceptible to friendly marketing techniques. When presented with two food bowls of equal amounts of food, they prefer to approach a food bowl when it is next to an image of their owner's face. So it's unknown exactly why they do this, whether they associate their owner's face with a trusted reward, But it's kind of neat to know that you're like your dog's

personal food mascot. In a dog society, there'd probably be a bunch of billboards with like human faces next to dog food. We don't really do the Okay, this is what's weird. We don't use companion animals much to advertise food for us to eat, But we do use the animals that we eat themselves and make them look cute and have them advertise the food of themselves. I find

out weird. What you mean like like a chicken advertising chicken. Yeah, like cartoon chickens will advertise chicken, but a cartoon dog doesn't necessarily advertise chicken. But we empathize more with the dogs than with the chicken. Well that's true, but then you also have the chick filo, a cow advertising chicken. So there's a bit of a reversal. Real Benedict Arnold of the animal world just selling out its animal peers, like,

eat them, not me, it's the invisible hoof. No, we've talked about Capuchin's adorable little monkeys, and we've talked about dogs, and they're both really smart. There are other really smart animals out there, like primates and dolphins and elephants. But could something with a tiny brain like an insect make economic decisions? What do you think I mean? If by economic decisions you just mean you just mean maximizing some outcome based on constraints, which is at a very abstract level,

what economists think of humans doing. Then yeah, but it's not maybe not exactly economics. Uh, you're saying that you don't think insects could do your job. I'm saying the invisible antennae are are not going to be as economically minded as as what we think of humans invisible hands. Well that's fair enough. I guess you don't have to worry too much about bugs coming for your job as an economist yet. But I think what's interesting is that

insect behavior can be very similar to economic models. So if you want another reason to hate wasps, they're also landlords. So paper wasps will build these nests that are clusters of little chambers. They gather fibers from dead wood and plants and regurgitate them into a sort of paper mache like substance, and that's why they're called paper wasps. A dominant paper wasp usually controls an nest structure, and these dominant female wasps will rent out nests in return for childcare.

So a dominant female paper wasp will allow subletting paper wasps into her complex of nests in return for them helping to care for her offspring. So she's kind of like a landlord, but instead of renting, you have to feed her babies. And if you don't do enough work for her off no, no you don't. You don't feed her babies. Although if you're feeding her like larva from you know, another species, I'm sure she wouldn't complain. But you have to feed, give food to the babies of

this wasp. And if you do not do enough of this, if you do not do enough work for her offspring, she will evict you. So well, it's less I thought she would just kill you, So that's less severe than I thought. There there, I guess there's a self regulating market here. Yeah, I mean she she'll just force them out of the little cubicles. And not only do paper wasps have this rental setup, but researchers have found that

they respond to rental market forces. So when there are more rentals available, so more competition among landlord wasps, these landlord wasps will accept lower pay. That is, they won't evict their tenants even if their tenants are not doing as much labor as perhaps they would want. But so,

so how does that How does the market adjust? I guess? So, like, suppose you have let's say, quote unquote stable market equilibrium, and then you have an introduction of new new housing, essentially new wasp housing, and so the market price should go down. But like, how long does it take the wasps to sort of recognize that? Uh, it's harder to actually fill their their available housing. How long does it take the wasps to to sort of find the new housing?

Do you know what I'm saying, Like, how does how does this play out? How does the changes over time happen? How do the wasps even realize it? I mean, it probably is a pretty rapid rate given sort of the wasp lifespan. And I would assume it probably has something to do with them, like the number of wasps that

you have in your little wasp apartment complex. So if you're you have a bunch of wasps all kind of trying to get into your apartment complex, you probably have a sense that, hey, you know, the competition is good. It's not. It's not as if the the landlord wasps are scoping out other sort of wasp apartment complexes and making a decision based on that. It's probably are they trying to clip the wings of competing uh wasps form

a you know, like the mafias. Your style just sort of break the knees of the competition, break the many. It takes a while because there's a few knees. It would be funnier if these were bees, because I could say bees knees, But these are unfortunately wasps. I think it's that they can sense whether there's a lot of you know, wasps trying to vie for position in this WASP apartment complex. But if there's not as many, they need all the help they can get, essentially, so they

will be less finicky. And so what about if there's a new development, a new real estate development, how how does the landlord, a landlord of a new property development, let's say, how do they advertise to other wasps like, Hey, come on over to to the our new beautiful luxury apartments. We offer reasonable rates. That's a really good question. I

don't know it could. I mean, if they did advertise at all, it'd probably be through pheromone signaling, so like they could maybe detect the pheromones of like a new dominant WASP in that area. But that is a really

good question. I would assume it's either something like that or them, like as they're flying around visually spotting this new uh, this new nest and then checking it out if they're unhappy with the conditions in their other nest, right, the new landlords just write a banner that says, if you lived here, you'd be home already. One of those signs that they put up in new Land development with like a smiling family. But it's just like wasps cradling a larvae. It's like a great place for your larvae

to grow up. Right, Yeah, we we have the best schools for what even would the analog even be? What would I'm sorry, are you asking me what the analog what a wasps school would be? For wasps? There is none. I mean, yeah, they're they're just they're just cradled to grave working. I guess there's no there's no school time. They don't need to build up the human capital, I should say, the wasp capital inside of each of them.

And yeah, yeah, they grow up so fast. So if you wonder why wasps would engage in this rental system in the first place, the tenant wasps get a benefit. They can sometimes inherit the rental complex and become the new dominant wasp, or at least they can lay a few eggs themselves, since building the nest is costly. The social system actually increases their chance at reproductive success. So

it's rare to have kids in this in the WASP communities. Well, it's not so much that it is rare to have offspring. Is that it takes a lot of resources to build a an entire nest. So like the time you spend investing in building this whole nest structure is it takes

away from your time and resources to reap news. So if you can use someone else's nest structure and you know, maybe sort of sneakily lay some of your own eggs or hope that someday you'll be big and strong enough to become the new dominant wasp, that maybe a safer bet than trying to build your own wasp apartment complex. Right, So it's all about the productivity. And as you have higher and higher income, you can afford to invest more

in your in your children. It's just you know, I mean, we're we're talking about white Anglo Saxon Protestants now right right exactly. This whole time I we were just talking about wasps, you know, all right that now I'm on board, all right, But yeah, so it is it is interesting. I mean, it's like it is in theory, the idea behind landlords. The argument for them is that they take

on the risk of ownership and development. In reality, you know, the the just disparity in terms of wealth between tenants and landlords means that they're not really taking on that much risk, and the tenants are not getting that much like long term benefit other than a place to stay.

So it kind of breaks down. But in in theory, like in this kind of system with these wasps, the landlord is investing resources and taking on sort of a risk, and even though they may get more benefits from the situation once they get tenants, the tenants at least didn't have to risk building a whole new nest. Right And because this landlord landlord tenant relationship exists in nature, that means it's morally correct in human society's right. Yes, this

is uh, this is of course. The lesson always to take is that if animals do it, it's moral. So you should eat your babies, you know us actually know, like I should probably eat your head because spiders do that. Um no, that's that's okay. Changed your tune pretty quickly, so uh. Speaking of other insects, scorpion flies, that was a good segue. So scorpion flies also respond to market forces in competition. Scorpion Flies are a type of insect

related to flies. They look like a fly with a scorpion stinger on the end, but this is actually just the genital bulb of the males and not an actual stingard. Don't you like that word genital bulb? Yeah, that's pretty that's a pretty good one. So they don't oh my god. So they don't really kill or bite living creatures and prefer to eat carrion or dead insects. So there are a lot nastier looking than they actually are. There are many different species of scorpion flies, and some of these

species offer nuptial gifts to their mate. So nuptial gifts is a food item presented to a female to convince her to copulate. So male scorpion flies will offer a tasty French kiss to the female where they regurgitate some nutrients through their saliva as a nuptial gift, and this is how you would me remember. So larger nuptial gifts are often preferred as they both indicate male fitness and

give the females a large meal. So when there is more competition in the saliva business, meaning there are more males around, females tend to be choosier and will hold out for larger nuptial gifts. But when there are fewer males around, they become less choosy and accept some kind of peddling droplet of nasty saliva. Right, I see. So, but are are males competing only along this one dimension

basically of quantity of quality of saliva that they can produce? No? No, I mean there's all sorts of different dimensions of competition for these males, so you know, their ability to go around and find females. So yeah, no, there's there are many other elements to the competition, but this is a

very major point of the competition. You know. I think economists kind of model marriage markets, as we call them, in a similar way for humans, where you know, there there's each mate is looking for kind of the best match, the person that will make them happiest over their entire lifetime, is how we would characterize it. But it's it's usually

hard to tell. There's what we call asymmetric information. You don't know from the beginning of the relationship if it's going to be a lifelong, happy relationship or maybe it'll be kind of a a quick quick burn one which quickly turns not so happy. And so it's important it can be helpful for a partner to invest in a signal that they are in fact a good match for someone.

But where this I asked about there being many dimensions because this is you know, we typically think of a human relationship to be multidimensional, not just not just be about my incredible good looks or or whatever. So for humans, there there's some person who's a good match for another person, but they'd be a bad match for someone else. So what you're saying is you viewed our relationship entirely in

terms of marketability and economics, is what I'm learning right now. Yeah, I I viewed our relationship as something which would maximize my lifetime discounted utility. Obviously. Ah, that's so romantic. But yeah, I mean you know, um, you did win me over with giving me a cup of neutral it of saliva, and that was sufficient for me to calculate your fitness. And so here we are a match made in heaven. Yeah. No, it's it's been great. But so I have one more

question on these guys. Can a male get some saliva from another male from his bro his his let's say, wingman. You I feel like you only ask that question because you had the wingman pun. But I'll allow it, so I don't think so. But there are cases of duplicity in terms of nuptial gifts with spiders where sometimes a male will wrap up a you know, basically they will have like an insect that's been wrapped up in spider

silk and presented to the female. But some of these spiders will wrap up which seems to be a large gift, but it's just like a twig or a dead leaf or something. So they trick the female into sticking around for copulation and when they like unwrapped this gift, it's just full of garbage. So has this has this duplicity led to all these spider women checking out their gifts immediately? I mean they I think they unwrap them as fast as they can. It's one of those things that it's

fast as they can't. What do you mean, is the copulation just uh yeah, No, the male will go out of as quickly as he can and get out of

there as quickly as he can, because classic males. But yeah, so what is interesting about that is that kind of cheating and this is just a general thing for for like cheating in nature, duplicity is you can only have a certain level of that to be sustainable, because if you start to have that happen all the time, females are gonna become wise to that and stop accepting nuptial gifts that will no longer be an aspect. They'll probably just turn around and like eat the male as soon

as they can. So it is a delicate balance. So yeah, that's actually the subject of Nobel Prize winning economist George acker lost paper A Market for Lemons, which was about the used car market where you have used cars, some of them are so called lemons where they just don't work, and you can have a so called unraveling of the market where all the all the used cars on the market are just lemons, and so then no one wants to buy them, and then there's no demand, and then

no more market exists. So you can't essentially can't have too high of a rate of lemons in the market. In order for there to be some demand for used cars, you have to have a good amount of reasonably working cars. And it's the same, you know, ultimately we can apply a lot of the same kind of logic for any

kind of sort of theoretical model of behavior. We're talking about animal behavior, but human behavior, there's a lot of similarities and and uh, I think at the beginning of the podcast I mentioned like evolutionary game theory, which is very much uh, it's just drawing on the same type of math and tools that we use in economics to model animal behavior. Because there's there's quite a lot of overlap. Isn't that the whole point of this this whole pod

test here? Yeah, no, I mean that that was you know, I think it is interesting because when we sort of talk about are you talk about economics and I talk about evolutionary biology, there is a lot of overlap and that that lemon theory is kind of present. Yeah, and a lot of game theory in in evolutionary biology of you know, you can't you can't overwhelm the quote unquote market with false signals, otherwise animals will learn to ignore

that signal. And this case, sometimes the results can be deadly of a female uh spider and species where they practice sexual cannibalism, deciding it's not worth waiting around long enough to like open this nuptial gift and instead they just like turn around and eat the mail. Oh really, Yeah, I mean, you know, just keep that in mind. So she she has her wedding cake and eats him too, exactly, yes,

or he is the wedding cake. That'd be cute, right, spider wedding and then the mail is the wedding cake, right yeah. Yeah. It reminds me from that scene in Spider Man. There was a scene in Spider Man where they got married and then what you can see how in tune I am with popular culture the Spider Man. Now everybody's talking about Morbius. Now it's all about the Morbus. What the heck is that? What are what are kids

into these days? More bus? I just told you. Anyways, before we go, we gotta we had a play a little game. Do you want to play a little game? Sure? I don't know what impression you're doing, but yeah, do you've you've fallen into my trap and now we're going to play a little game. Is that saw? No? I guess he didn't talk like that. Know what the heck are you doing? I don't know, man, I just remember in the Jigsaw, you know, like and he's like, play

my danger puzzles. So yeah, and then the little puppet guy goes like, play my saw puzzles. You do a puzzle, but it's with saws. Maybe maybe in post you should you should modulate your voice to sound like the squid game. I thought I sounded exactly perfect. Though. Welcome to our squid games the Deadliest Praise man. Remember that it's good games. Anyways, we're gonna play Guess Who's squawking? It's the animal sound

guessing game. Yeah, where you guess, Hey, who's squawking? I say squawking, but it can be any animal on the planet, and so here is that animal. Here's an unfortunate reality about recording a podcast, uh with someone like right over my shoulder, is that you get to see my computer screen, which is something I didn't really think about before we did this. Yeah, you also showed me this. Yeah, I

didn't not that I would remember the name of the animal. Yeah, I did show this to you, but it is so I'm not gonna let you guess because that would be cheating. But I would say, like, if you heard this and you weren't cheating right now, like you are, what what would you think it was? Yeah? I think I would guess some kind of bird, which now that i'm you know, I'm looking at it and it sounds ridiculous. But I feel like if I didn't know, if i'd avail of ignorance,

that would be my guess. I don't know what kind of bird because I don't know birds, but some bird, some bird. Well, you're wrong, you're dumb, dumb, Sorry, I don't mean it. Uh no, it is a melan tape here. Congratulations to Joey P who guessed correctly. This is a large pig like ungulate with a long proboscis like nose, with coloration like a panda, except it's got an all black head. This interesting color blocking actually interrupts its silhouette,

making it more difficult for predators to identify it. They can grow up to eight ft long, which is two point five meters, and way up to over seven hundred pounds around three hundreds, and they have that long nose is a short prehensile trunk that they can use to grip vegetation. So I think they're adorable and fun and funky. Yeah, they're they're snout looks. I mean, I'm looking at a picture where the guy's turning up his snout and it

looks really weird, like it's a split snout. I don't know, well, it's because the underside of it, like you actually have the roof of their mouth sort of on the underside, and then this like pink coloration of you know, basically what is like their upper lip. But then it's really elongated. Yeah, it's like it's like someone took the tape ears lip and just stretched it all the way out to the end of the snoot and it looks uncomfortable. They're fine.

They love it. Onto this week's mystery animal sound. Um, and here's the hint. Though featured in the Silence of the Lambs, this fellow is not silent. So I'm gonna play a sound close your eyes a lamb. Do you think I would do that? Seriously? Then it would be the noise of the lambs, not the silence of the lambs? Wow? Wow, wonderful. So I'm gonna play this, but close your eyes? Are they closed? You're not cheating? Okay? Hang on, it's our dog.

That definitely sounds like our dog. Okay, So you know, other than the dog barks in the background, who do you think was squawking there? Maybe maybe Dana Carvey. I feel like he is a wide range Carvey. What does he have to do with the Science of the Lambs, The Science of the Lambs, Silence of the Lambs. At first I was like, maybe this is some kind of rodent, but then it's like the it's too low pitched to be a rodent. So then I then I had no idea.

All right, well, uh, if you have an economists, if you out there are not suffering from being an economist and you want to write into me with your guesses about what this say is, you can write to me a Creature Feature pod at gmail dot com. I'm also on Twitter at Creature feet Pod. That's t And usually I would tell people where they can find my guests, but uh, yes, I can't be found. You can't be found.

I keep them locked up in here in my little pod loft and like lit them like I dangle Wealth of Nations out to lure him out and then feed him like the Dindns. Yeah, I can use some help. Listeners. Everything's fine, So thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you want to leave a rating review, I really appreciate that. That actually really helps the show a lot. And it also I read all of the reviews, every single one of them. I'm compiling

them in a binder and carrying it around. And whenever I feel, you know, self conscious or anything like, I open up my binder of positive reviews and I go through them and I feel great, and people look at me and they stare, but I it doesn't bother me because I got my book of positive reviews and like their stairs, their judgment doesn't mean anything because they're invisible stairs. They're invisible stairs because Kirby Kirby Sonic Mario one D told me that I have a cool podcast and a

nice voice. Was that like a forty year old gamer? Yeah? For these characters, come on with the times. Forty year old gamers love to listen to the podcast, So don't eat there, but smirch the smirched them. So yeah, thank you so much for listening, and thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song. Exceluminate Creature features a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts, or he Gets what You even listen to

your favorite show? Don't I don't actually care. I mean I care about you, I just don't care where you listen to your shows because that's that's your business. It's not mine. See you next Wednesday.