Coltan Scrivner

If it's really short and maybe you're further away, you feel a little safer, right?

Kind of like we feel when we watch a TV show.

That's all great and fine.

And predator inspection is pretty commonly observed in many different animals.

One of the explanations for it is that prey animals can learn about their predators that way.

Yeah, yeah.

All of life is one big learning experience.

And you've got to take the opportunities you get.

And when it comes to dangerous things,

In most of nature, there's a lot of danger around, but not a lot of good opportunities to learn about it because it's typically dangerous for you to witness something.

Yeah, you learn about it while you're getting chased.

And that's not a good time.

You're going to have really accurate information, but it comes at a pretty high risk, right?

Fast forward to humans.

We have language, transmissible culture.

We tell stories.

What does that allow us to do?

Well, it allows us to retain almost all of the learning benefit of a situation, but remove virtually all the cost.

And we can envision future scenarios that we've never encountered, or maybe variations of a scenario.

What if this happened in the woods versus the savanna versus the lake?