Coltan Scrivner

And so, again, when the zebra notices the lion does not look hungry or does not look like it's motivated to hunt and it's in a safe position to observe it, it'll do that because gathering information about it is a good thing.

It can recognize how many lions are out there.

Does it look like he's actually hungry?

Is he actually hunting?

Is he really just laying around?

So they're assessing their landscape of danger, the landscape of threat.

And zebras are not alone here.

Gazelles do this with cheetahs.

Minnows do this with pikes and water, bodies of water.

It's a pretty common instinct for prey animals to, under certain conditions, inspect predators.

Now, humans are really unique because the rest of the animal kingdom, the only way to learn about your predator is to stop and look at it.

Can't learn about it from your peers because they can't really speak to you in the same kind of way.

You don't have books or transmissible culture in any kind of way.

You can't learn about it like that.

Humans, of course, have stories.

We can tell true stories, but we can also create versions of stories that are realistic.

where we can essentially have an unlimited number of ways that you could interact with something dangerous.

And so it's very cheap for us to learn about danger because we can tell it in the form of a story where you really are in no danger when you're learning about it.

And that makes us incredibly morbidly curious compared to other animals.

Yeah, I thought that was just me.