If you want to hear about the title topic of this episode, temper your expectations. At the very least, you'll have to patiently wait for Jarid and Jake to randomly fire off their Cleveland Browns and morality takes for the first 10 minutes of the show.

And even if you make it through that, please know that your hosts didn't follow their show sheets at all. They instead had an unpredictable conversation about values, avoidant behavior, news and algorithmic content consumption, and how it all compares to the life of ancestral humans. We recommend you stay for Jake's deconstruction and transformation of Jarid's terrible pornography/masturbation metaphor.

Of course, you'll also get Jarid's weekly random histrionic soliloquy about the impossibility of the universe -- and even an accidental reprise of the "Teasing Not Telling," where Jarid alludes to things in the news but won't actually say them.

Why does music make mathematical sense? Why do toddlers know how to dance before they've seen other humans doing it? How exactly do we know when a note is off-key? What the hell is a key? Did music exist in the universe before humans? Or before the Earth itself, perhaps, as Pythagoras theorized? Jake and Jarid explore humans' oldest art form and also discuss whether Taylor Swift is the most positively impactful human of all time.

As Jarid is closes in on his PsyD, he's focused on completing his dissertation. The topic: secular faith — in other words, faith without religion — and how it might impact the health of veterans.

These two professionals get over halfway through the episode before even saying the title of that dissertation draft.

That’s because the show opens with Jarid trying to tell Jake that the whole idea of his dissertation came from something he read in Jake’s first novel … or was it the second one? And what exactly did Jake write that was so inspiring? As it turns out, Jarid’s not actually sure, but he spends 3 solid ADD minutes trying to get Jake to figure it out.

Jake seems to hijack the episode quickly in order to present a hypothesis of his own. He also, of course, talks too much about talking, while disguising it as ideas about the influence of language on the subject matter. Who doesn’t love a language nerd?

What the hell is actually going on underneath all of this? In this episode, Jake and Jarid take on “interminable complexity”: The increasingly bizarre reality that we spend our lives using technology and systems we can’t fathom, couldn’t recreate, and require their own kind of blind faith. Your phone works. Your money moves around. Electricity comes out of the wall. Bananas somehow show up in Baltimore in February. And almost nobody understands the entire chain of events required to make any of that happen. Did we humans escape dependence on a natural world we didn’t understand by constructing an artificial world we understand even less?

Along the way, Jake debuts a new limited sound effects board, Jarid gets vulnerable about his personality and performance issues, and we learn something really odd about crickets.

The first Galactic Animals guest ever is a badass — Tom Shroder, award-winning reporter, editor of The Washington Post Magazine from 2001 to 2009, and bestselling author of several books, including one of Jake’s all-time favorites: “Old Souls – Scientific Evidence for Reincarnation From Children Who Recall Past Lives.”

Jarid and Jake talk to Tom about his experience getting to know Dr. Ian Stevenson, the original reincarnation researcher, including six months traveling overseas with him to investigate cases. It’s a fascinating conversation that covers the edges of science and what it takes to believe in truths that can’t be understood.

In this episode, we learn that Jarid is a human being who has spent years studying psychology in academic settings and helping to treat people with psychological issues, but is definitely NOT a psychologist.

Nevertheless, he and Jake discuss what so many of us humans have in common: a desire to change. Jarid calls Jake an asshole again, Jake defends his methods, and then Jarid ironically explains the value of healthy intention.

They also discuss addiction, denial, and the difficulty of finding redemption after bad deeds. And, as usual, Jake tries to tie it into evolutionary psychology and our tribal nature.

Is reincarnation really the most important issue in humanity? Jarid is skeptical. So Jake makes the case by referencing quantum and Newtonian science, relaying documented cases of children remembering past lives (including his own), questioning the existence of death itself, and even quoting the Bible. Stay till the end if you want to hear about Jarid's new kitten, NASA's new space telescope, and some super-amazing trivia about our relationship to the moon.

After the usual technical difficulties, Jake introduces Jarid to one of the most-clicked New York Times articles ever: "The 36 Questions That Lead to Love." Then, they each fall in love a little more by asking each other several of the questions.