Behavioural Psychologist: We’re Not Having Enough Sex! Fat Makes You Attractive & The Poorer You Are The Friendlier You Are!

0:00:03 Do you believe the robots are going to raise our kids because it feels like a slippery slope?
0:00:06 Well, it’s not too far away from us, and we never evolved to want children.
0:00:10 Look, the fertility rates are going way down, and a lot of countries are going to be literally
0:00:13 half their size by the year 2100, because they’re shrinking so fast.
0:00:17 And the list is really long about how hard it is to raise the child in today’s world.
0:00:21 So you want to make having kids to be as much of the plus as it possibly can be.
0:00:24 And with the perfect robot, Annie, you would never worry at all.
0:00:25 Interesting.
0:00:30 Dr. William von Heppel is the world-renowned evolutionary psychologist who has spent decades
0:00:34 studying and finding the answers to how instincts that once helped our ancestors survive still
0:00:37 drive us today, often in ways we don’t even realize.
0:00:39 As a species, what are we getting wrong?
0:00:42 Well, young people are having less sex than they were 20 years ago.
0:00:43 Marriage is steadily going down.
0:00:46 And our lives are so much better, but we’re not any happier.
0:00:50 And part of the problem is that we’re constantly choosing to do our own thing rather than connect.
0:00:51 So here’s the data.
0:00:54 In 1850, 1 in 100 Americans lived alone.
0:00:55 Now it’s 1 in 7.
0:00:58 In the 1970s, 1 in 3 people spent time with their neighbors.
0:01:00 Now that’s completely reversed.
0:01:01 Now, let’s dive a little deeper.
0:01:03 50% of humanity now lives in the city.
0:01:06 And they’re about 25% wealthier than people who live in the country.
0:01:09 And yet, in the data shows, people in the country are happier.
0:01:11 Because cities are all about I want to do what I want.
0:01:14 And the problem is that we can’t introduce social connection into our life willy-nilly,
0:01:15 or we won’t keep it up.
0:01:16 So what do we do about that?
0:01:17 Two things.
0:01:17 One.
0:01:21 And then what does evolution tell us about how to attract the opposite sex?
0:01:23 You want honest signals of quality.
0:01:27 And bizarrely, one of the clearest honest signals for men to demonstrate for women is–
0:01:34 I have been forced into a bet with my team.
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0:02:02 So actually, this is the first time I’m going to tell you not to subscribe,
0:02:05 because it might end up costing me an awful–
0:02:19 Dr. William Von Hippel.
0:02:23 What have you spent the last four decades of your life doing?
0:02:28 Oh, mostly in the lab, trying to figure out why humans do what they do.
0:02:31 What do you mean by why we do what we do?
0:02:33 Well, I’m super interested in not just what we do,
0:02:35 but what the underlying cause might be.
0:02:39 Why does having a nice dinner with your friends make you happy?
0:02:41 It just seems inherently obvious.
0:02:42 Well, of course it does.
0:02:43 But there’s got to be a reason for that.
0:02:45 And there’s got to be a reason that it’s very different
0:02:49 if it’s not with your friends or if it’s different kinds of foods.
0:02:50 Or if the list goes on, it could be anything.
0:02:55 And so what I try to do is I look into our evolutionary history.
0:02:56 I say, how did we get here?
0:02:58 What were the factors that made us success?
0:03:02 And the things that made us successful as a species
0:03:04 are likely to be the things that make us happy.
0:03:08 Because happiness is one of the tools that evolution uses
0:03:10 to guide us in the direction that it wants us to go.
0:03:12 Evolution has no foresight.
0:03:15 But evolution shapes us the way we are.
0:03:18 And the things that make us successful,
0:03:19 those ancestors who enjoy doing those things
0:03:21 are going to be the ancestors who have more kids
0:03:24 than the ancestors who enjoy doing things that were bad for them.
0:03:26 What is evolution?
0:03:29 So evolution is this mindless process.
0:03:32 And all it is is if it’s the case that not everybody
0:03:34 has the exact same number of kids.
0:03:35 And if it’s the case that not everybody’s kids
0:03:37 survive at the exact same rates,
0:03:39 now we have the room for evolution.
0:03:40 Because there’s variability.
0:03:43 Something about me caused me to have lots of children
0:03:45 that survived in the next generation.
0:03:47 And something about this other guy caused him not to have any,
0:03:48 maybe.
0:03:51 And so whatever there is about me that’s heritable,
0:03:54 but will be well represented in the next generation.
0:03:55 And about him, poor guy,
0:03:58 even if he’s wonderful, those traits are gone.
0:04:00 And so evolution just works with whatever’s there.
0:04:02 And the things that make you a success,
0:04:04 either because they’re just useful in that environment
0:04:07 or they’re a new mutation that turns out to have great value,
0:04:10 they become overrepresented in the gene pool.
0:04:14 And so evolution can create things that are species typical.
0:04:15 All of our species have that.
0:04:16 We all have two eyes.
0:04:18 You know, that’s just part and parcel of being human.
0:04:21 And then it can make variability within humans.
0:04:23 And there’s tons of variability in our size,
0:04:25 our stature, all sorts of things about us.
0:04:28 And why should we look at evolution
0:04:31 for answers on human happiness and success
0:04:34 and as a sort of a guiding compass
0:04:35 for what we should be doing with our lives?
0:04:37 Why is evolution a place to look?
0:04:40 There’s lots of tiny answers to that question,
0:04:42 but they don’t necessarily link together very well.
0:04:43 So people say you’ve probably heard,
0:04:44 “Oh, express gratitude.
0:04:46 That’ll make you happy if you express gratitude.”
0:04:48 Why?
0:04:49 Why should that make you happy?
0:04:51 If there’s a good reason for it,
0:04:53 then it makes sense that we should do it
0:04:54 and it should have some kind of a lasting effect.
0:04:56 And so every single thing that people tell you,
0:04:57 this will make you happy.
0:04:59 There has to have been a reason
0:05:01 it must have done something for our ancestors.
0:05:03 Or it’s what my colleague, Robert Trivers,
0:05:05 calls a phenotypic indulgence,
0:05:06 which means it mimics something
0:05:08 that was good for our ancestors.
0:05:12 So for example, video games are pretty novel, right?
0:05:15 They may mimic things that were super important for our ancestors
0:05:17 and give us the same endorphin rush or whatever,
0:05:18 even though they’re not actually
0:05:20 necessarily good for us anymore.
0:05:22 Junk food is the same.
0:05:24 It’s low-dose fat, salt, sugar.
0:05:25 Those are the kinds of things
0:05:26 that our ancestors sought all the time.
0:05:28 We don’t need them anymore,
0:05:32 but they were super important back then.
0:05:34 And so it makes us happy when we eat those things.
0:05:36 As an evolutionary psychologist
0:05:39 and someone who understands where we’ve come from
0:05:41 and therefore are sort of innate behaviors
0:05:43 and needs and desires and so on,
0:05:45 what are the things that we’re getting wrong
0:05:47 as a species at the moment from your view?
0:05:50 So the big thing that I think we’re getting wrong
0:05:51 is the balance that we maintain
0:05:52 between autonomy and connection.
0:05:56 And we can talk about why this is,
0:05:58 but the big thing that we’ve got wrong right now
0:06:00 is doing what I want to do right now
0:06:02 rather than connecting.
0:06:04 Autonomy is all about self-governance.
0:06:06 What do I feel like doing right now?
0:06:08 And everybody’s going off in their own direction.
0:06:09 And this is not good for us.
0:06:10 It’s not good for our happiness.
0:06:13 It’s not good for us in a host of different ways.
0:06:15 That mistake is particularly problematic
0:06:18 if you live in the West, if you’re well-educated,
0:06:20 and if you live in cities, and if you’re wealthy.
0:06:22 So if you’re Western, wealthy, urbanite,
0:06:24 well-educated, you’ve got that problem in spades.
0:06:28 And by autonomy, you mean the sort of individualism
0:06:29 where I don’t need anybody anymore.
0:06:30 It’s about me.
0:06:33 It’s about my gratification, what I want now,
0:06:35 versus others and a community of tribe.
0:06:36 That’s right.
0:06:38 And it doesn’t even need to feel like a big thing.
0:06:39 It’s just, let’s say you and I are buddies
0:06:41 and we’re going to go to a movie
0:06:43 and you say, “I really want to hit a rom-com.”
0:06:44 And I’m like, “I really want to see an action movie.”
0:06:46 We go, “Okay, I’ll see if the movie’s over.”
0:06:47 We just go our own ways.
0:06:49 And so it could be trivial little things,
0:06:50 but it’s across our lives.
0:06:53 We’re continually setting aside our connections
0:06:54 to do what we want.
0:06:56 And what are some of the sort of stats
0:06:58 that illuminate this problem
0:07:00 from that make it clear
0:07:02 that this is actually happening in your view?
0:07:03 So there’s a number of them.
0:07:06 You can look at the propensity of Americans to live alone.
0:07:08 We’ve got good data in the States,
0:07:11 but the picture is the same in every industrialized country.
0:07:13 In 1850, 1% of Americans lived alone.
0:07:16 Now it’s a 1 in 100.
0:07:17 Now it’s 1 in 7.
0:07:22 So here we are 170 years later, 175 years later.
0:07:23 And it used to be crazy rare.
0:07:25 And now it’s 1 in 7.
0:07:26 It’s pretty darn common.
0:07:29 If you look in the 1970s, when I was a kid,
0:07:32 about 30% of people saw their neighbors,
0:07:33 got together with their neighbors.
0:07:34 That’s visually seen them,
0:07:35 but got together with their neighbors,
0:07:38 at least a few times a week.
0:07:40 And only 1 in 5 pretty much never saw their neighbors at all.
0:07:42 Now that’s completely reversed.
0:07:46 Now only 1 in 5 are seeing their neighbors regularly.
0:07:47 Used to be 1 in 3.
0:07:50 And now 1 in 3 never get together with their neighbors at all.
0:07:53 So we’re moving away from each other
0:07:55 in a host of different ways.
0:07:57 Even married couples are spending less time together.
0:07:59 It’s weird.
0:08:01 We don’t understand what they’re doing.
0:08:02 But what I suspect is happening is that,
0:08:04 let’s say that you both want to exercise
0:08:05 and she kind of likes to jog
0:08:07 and you kind of like to lift weights.
0:08:09 We used to sort of do those together,
0:08:11 offer a jog and then a little weightlifting.
0:08:13 But now with 10 zillion options,
0:08:14 you go to your gym and she goes to hers.
0:08:17 And you just don’t see each other as much as you used to.
0:08:20 So across our lives, we’re spending far more time alone.
0:08:23 And if you look at marriage and cohabitation,
0:08:26 in some parts of the world, they haven’t changed at all.
0:08:29 But in the wealthy parts, United States, Western Europe,
0:08:30 they’re steadily going down.
0:08:33 So it’s not just, well, people aren’t getting married
0:08:34 because they’re living together outside of marriage.
0:08:36 If you lump all those together,
0:08:39 they’re steadily going down over the last 50 years.
0:08:40 And why does that matter?
0:08:42 Well, the question is, first on the one hand,
0:08:43 it’s not a problem at all.
0:08:46 You vote with your feet, do what you want, of course, right?
0:08:49 But on the other hand, what if it’s making you unhappy?
0:08:51 What if you think you’re doing this
0:08:52 because it’s going to make you happy?
0:08:54 But in fact, you’re wrong.
0:08:56 And you keep making decisions over and over again
0:08:57 that make you increasingly less happy.
0:08:59 And that’s what I think is happening here.
0:09:02 I think every one of those decisions is an error.
0:09:04 And are there any stats or data that proves
0:09:08 that we’re getting this wrong in terms of happiness?
0:09:10 Are there other tribes or communities
0:09:12 or people in history that we’re doing it differently
0:09:14 and had higher rates of happiness?
0:09:16 So the best example, in my mind,
0:09:18 is if you look at it on gathers.
0:09:22 And so there’s a team that went to the haads of people
0:09:25 who live outside, would live in Kenya and Tanzania.
0:09:27 They’re as close as we know to what our ancestors
0:09:28 would look like.
0:09:29 And in my mind, they’re perfect
0:09:30 because they’re also where it all happened.
0:09:33 The haads that still lived where humanity evolved.
0:09:34 So of course, it could have been different
0:09:36 a quarter million years ago,
0:09:38 but it could have been exactly like they lived today.
0:09:39 And so when you look at the haads,
0:09:42 this particular team asked them,
0:09:44 over the last week, have you been happy?
0:09:46 Sometimes happy and sometimes sad?
0:09:49 Sad. Over 90% of the haads that said happy,
0:09:50 that was their answer.
0:09:52 When you ask Westerners that same question,
0:09:53 you get about 50%.
0:09:55 We’ll say happy over the last week.
0:09:58 And so the data suggests the haads
0:09:59 are literally happier than we are.
0:10:03 Now, they bury almost half their children.
0:10:07 They live a life where they’ve got no savings whatsoever.
0:10:08 They’ve got nothing in the bank.
0:10:10 They don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring.
0:10:12 They don’t know if tomorrow’s hunt’s going to be successful.
0:10:14 They have so many cultural rules that they have to abide by
0:10:16 that requires them to be constantly connected
0:10:18 with each other because they rely on each other
0:10:20 like an insurance policy.
0:10:23 And yet, they look a lot happier than we are.
0:10:26 Now, we can see those same stats in different modern contexts,
0:10:28 but in my mind, that’s a stat that blows me away.
0:10:31 And why do you think they are happier than us?
0:10:33 You think it’s because they’re living in tribes and groups,
0:10:34 or is it something else?
0:10:36 Well, I think it’s the balance that they’ve struck,
0:10:39 and I think it’s that balance between connection and autonomy.
0:10:43 And so that’s really the focus of my second book is…
0:10:45 So I’ll tell you how I got there. How’s that?
0:10:48 So I’m visiting a friend of mine, also named Stephen,
0:10:50 and he struck it rich.
0:10:52 And he invites me over.
0:10:53 I’m like, “This is going to be cool.
0:10:55 I’m going to see how the super rich live.”
0:10:56 And it was over the top.
0:10:59 Monumentally huge apartment, beautiful view,
0:11:01 cooks over there, maids over there, et cetera.
0:11:02 And so I turned him on.
0:11:05 I’m like, “Steve, man, your life is over the top.”
0:11:07 And he’s like, “Yeah, it seems that way, but it’s just not.”
0:11:08 And I’m like, “Seriously?”
0:11:10 And he goes, “Yeah, I’m no happier than I used to be.”
0:11:13 And he starts listing off all the problems that he’s facing.
0:11:17 And I’m like, “How could this person not appreciate
0:11:18 these amazing benefits that he has?
0:11:21 How is it even possible that a person could have so much
0:11:23 and not just feel happy about it every day?”
0:11:25 And I have to admit, I felt the sense of superiority.
0:11:28 I thought to myself, “If I were crazy rich like you were,
0:11:29 I’d be happy every day.”
0:11:32 I would appreciate this lifestyle that I’d earned
0:11:34 rather than just taking it for granted.
0:11:37 So then, fast forward a few years.
0:11:39 This is a decade or so ago, fast forward a few years.
0:11:42 And I’m reading Frank Marlow’s wonderful book on the Hadza.
0:11:44 And I’m reading about their lives and how content they are.
0:11:47 And I’m like, “Holy cow, I’m just like my friend Steve.”
0:11:50 Compared to them, I’m a multi-millionaire.
0:11:53 I don’t, when my kids get sick, I’m off to the doctor immediately.
0:11:56 I don’t have this horrible life where I bury my own children.
0:11:58 I have savings. I don’t have to worry about tomorrow.
0:11:59 I get up and get something out of the fridge.
0:12:02 I’m comfortable when it’s hot. I’m comfortable when it’s cold.
0:12:04 The list goes on. Compared to them, I’m a zillionaire.
0:12:07 And yet, they’re probably happier than we are.
0:12:10 And so, I realize it’s not just Steve, it’s all of us.
0:12:13 We’re failing to appreciate this amazing modern world we live in.
0:12:17 And even if we look back 100 years, 100 years ago,
0:12:19 a quarter of the children died by the, 150 years ago,
0:12:22 a quarter of the children died by the time they turned five.
0:12:26 You know, you got the flu or you got typhus.
0:12:29 There was a zillion diseases that just killed us when we were young.
0:12:33 Women died in childbirth at rates way scarier compared to today.
0:12:36 So, it’s not just looking back at it together,
0:12:38 but even looking back recently. Our lives are so much better,
0:12:40 but we’re not any happier.
0:12:43 If anything, I think we’re maybe a little less happy.
0:12:48 And is that just because we don’t take a moment to be grateful,
0:12:51 or is there something fundamental about the way we’re pursuing happiness?
0:12:54 Look, I think it’s multi-causal, whenever you get a big effect like that.
0:12:57 Like, if you take those data seriously that I told you about the Hadza,
0:12:59 they’re basically twice as happy as we are.
0:13:02 Now, that’s such a big effect. It has to be multi-causal.
0:13:04 There has to be a lot going on there.
0:13:05 And of course, these changes happen over generations.
0:13:06 They don’t happen overnight.
0:13:10 If they happen overnight, I think it’d be super obvious to us what had gone wrong.
0:13:14 But I think what it returns us to is this problem that we were talking about before,
0:13:16 about autonomy and connection.
0:13:19 And so, let’s take city living as a, for example.
0:13:23 I remember earlier I said that cities are about 5,000 years old.
0:13:26 So, human beings have been moving to cities for 5,000 years.
0:13:32 By 1960, you had one people out of every three living in cities in the world.
0:13:35 And by 2007 was the year we crossed over.
0:13:37 50% of humanity now lives in the city.
0:13:41 So, people have been voting with their feet for a long time,
0:13:46 but by a long time, I mean, 100 or so years, and mass moving to cities.
0:13:48 Now, there’s lots of reasons for what we can talk about it,
0:13:51 but one of the costs is happiness.
0:13:55 If you look at happiness and you divide people up by whether they live in cities,
0:13:58 communities over a quarter million, or in the country,
0:14:03 communities less than 2,500 people, they’re happier in the country than they are in the city.
0:14:08 Which is a remarkable fact, remarkable fact, in part because they’re also poorer in the country.
0:14:10 People who live in cities in the United States, for example,
0:14:13 are about 25% wealthier than people who live in the country.
0:14:17 Now, some of that gets burned on expensive city living, but far from all of it.
0:14:20 And so, you’re literally poorer in the country, but happier.
0:14:23 And that’s this graph here that from your book,
0:14:28 percentage of Americans who are very happy or not too happy in urban and rural communities.
0:14:29 That’s right.
0:14:34 And it shows that people are pretty significantly happier in rural areas,
0:14:38 and report to having less unhappiness in rural areas.
0:14:42 Which is remarkable because there’s so many opportunities in cities.
0:14:45 People have been voting with their feet for over 100 years,
0:14:47 and arguably for 5,000 years, moving to cities.
0:14:49 And yet, it’s making them less happy.
0:14:53 And so, in my mind, this is another symptom of the same exact problem we’ve been talking about,
0:14:56 which is cities are all about autonomy.
0:14:57 Cities are about opportunity.
0:14:59 If I go to city, I can get any kind of education I want.
0:15:01 I can have any kind of job that I want.
0:15:02 And so, people are drawn to cities.
0:15:04 And in fact, I’ll make more money.
0:15:05 The data are very clear.
0:15:07 But I’m going to pay a price.
0:15:10 And people don’t even realize the price they’re paying.
0:15:12 What is the price that we pay we become more isolated?
0:15:15 Yeah, bizarrely, we become more isolated because in the city,
0:15:16 you’ve got 1,000 people right next to you, right?
0:15:18 You’re cheek by jowl with your neighbor.
0:15:20 You’re in an apartment building, and there’s somebody on your left,
0:15:23 somebody on your right, somebody above you, somebody below you.
0:15:25 But what are your chances of even knowing that person?
0:15:29 So, if you ask people, there’s a couple ways you can ask the question.
0:15:33 If you say, do you know someone well enough that you trust them with your house keys?
0:15:36 You’re more likely to give that answer a yes in the country than you are in the city.
0:15:40 Even though in the country, probably your nearest neighbor is a long way down the road,
0:15:42 whereas in the city, your nearest neighbor is five feet away.
0:15:46 That person five feet away in principle, you ought to be good buddies with.
0:15:48 Or if you don’t like that person, there’s somebody else in your building
0:15:51 you ought to be good buddies with, but we’re just not.
0:15:53 Whereas in the country, we connect with each other.
0:15:57 Similarly, if you say, how satisfied are you with your friendships?
0:16:00 People are more satisfied with their friendships in the country than they are in the city.
0:16:01 There was a graph that I saw.
0:16:04 I think it was in your book, the percentage of Americans who spend evenings
0:16:06 with neighbors at different frequencies by income.
0:16:09 And it basically shows that the more money you have,
0:16:11 the less time you spend with your neighbors.
0:16:13 Yeah, which is amazing, right?
0:16:15 And so the thing is that the problem is that if you’re rich,
0:16:16 you don’t need your neighbors.
0:16:19 You know, if I’m out of coffee beans, I want to borrow some,
0:16:21 I can just drone them in or whatever.
0:16:26 I can call Instacart or whatever, whoever your favorite delivery program is.
0:16:28 But if you’re poor, you can’t afford to do that.
0:16:31 And so poor people literally need each other.
0:16:33 They live in these neighbors and these complex webs of interdependence,
0:16:36 where they borrow each other’s tools, they look out for each other’s kids,
0:16:38 they look out for each other’s pets,
0:16:40 because they can’t afford to outsource any of that.
0:16:42 And that’s actually how humans evolved.
0:16:44 We evolved to need each other all the time.
0:16:48 And so ironically, although rich people are happier than poor people,
0:16:51 so it’s not giving away all your material goods will not make you happy,
0:16:54 nonetheless, poor people are happier with their friendships.
0:16:56 They’re more likely to get together with their neighbors.
0:16:59 And we see the exact same effect with education as well.
0:17:02 The more educated you are, the less you get together with your neighbors.
0:17:06 But of course, wealth and education tend to go hand in hand in our society.
0:17:08 So money does make you happy.
0:17:09 It’s a funny thing.
0:17:12 So money makes you a lot happier in real time.
0:17:15 So if you start to make more money, you get happier.
0:17:18 And the more important money is to you, the bigger that effect is.
0:17:20 And it keeps going well past where we thought it did.
0:17:23 We used to think it’s ceilinged at around $100,000 a year.
0:17:23 It doesn’t.
0:17:27 Past 600,000 a year, money still makes you happier.
0:17:28 It’s remarkable.
0:17:29 It makes a difference.
0:17:32 But there’s this thing known as the Easterland Paradox.
0:17:37 And that is that as society gets richer, people get no happier.
0:17:40 So if you look at the United States, going back to around 1940,
0:17:44 people earned about a third what they earned today in real terms.
0:17:47 So we’re three times richer than we used to be.
0:17:52 And we’ve been measuring happiness in the United States since 1940s
0:17:53 on representative samples.
0:17:55 So we know that that holds true for the whole country.
0:17:56 We know what the country looks like.
0:17:58 It hasn’t moved an inch.
0:18:00 So real terms, money gone way up.
0:18:02 Happiness exactly flat.
0:18:07 So what is the perfect combination to achieve happiness in that regard then?
0:18:09 Wealth does matter, but something else matters as well,
0:18:11 which we tend to abandon when we get wealth.
0:18:12 Well, the problem is this.
0:18:13 There’s a couple of things.
0:18:16 First, we can come back to the big issue, which I think is this balance.
0:18:20 That’s the underlying issue why I think hunter-gatherers are happier than we are,
0:18:23 is this balance that they maintain between autonomy and connection,
0:18:25 which we can return to.
0:18:29 But in direct answer to your question, part of the problem with humans is that
0:18:34 we’re this wonderful species in many ways that we can avoid the zero-sum game that is life.
0:18:38 And by zero-sum game, I mean that my game is your loss.
0:18:40 Like there’s only so many goods out there,
0:18:42 and for me to have more means you have to have less.
0:18:45 And in the animal world, lots of the world works that way.
0:18:49 And they’re able to cooperate with each other when they can create positive some relationships.
0:18:54 So for example, vampire bats, they go out and they try to get blood from large animals,
0:18:58 like land on the back, bite them a little bit and leave, drink a little bit of their blood.
0:19:00 If they don’t get any food at all at night,
0:19:03 they’re at risk of starvation within just a few nights.
0:19:07 And so if I’ve come back and I got nothing and you were successful,
0:19:08 I’ll beg to you.
0:19:11 And if we’re friends, you’ll regurgitate a little bit of the blood for me.
0:19:14 Now, if you weren’t successful, even if we’re best mates,
0:19:16 there’s nothing you can do for me.
0:19:19 Now, if you think about the way humans give things to each other,
0:19:20 it’s sometimes goods.
0:19:24 But we’re this different animal, we’re this cognitive animal,
0:19:27 we’re an animal where information has enormous value.
0:19:30 And information, I can give it to you without losing any of it myself.
0:19:33 And so we create these relationships with each other
0:19:35 where we don’t even need to worry about reciprocation.
0:19:37 We can do things for each other all the time.
0:19:40 They’re crazy easy to do because they don’t require me to give you anything.
0:19:42 I still have the information I told you.
0:19:45 So we already have this advantage over the animal kingdom,
0:19:49 but we’re still animals.
0:19:51 And one of the ways that we’re still animals is that
0:19:55 we’re still zero sum in the sense of, well, what about our status?
0:19:57 Who’s going to get picked for the mating relationships?
0:19:59 Who’s going to get picked to be on the teams?
0:20:02 And there it always comes down to, well, who’s at the top of the local heap
0:20:04 and who’s at the bottom of the local heap?
0:20:06 And so in our ancestral communities,
0:20:08 that would be a very small group of hunter-gatherers.
0:20:11 All I had to do was be valuable or better than you guys in something.
0:20:15 In our world today, it’s awfully hard to be better than everybody.
0:20:17 And money’s one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to do it
0:20:19 because everyone can see it.
0:20:21 And so even though money doesn’t make us happy
0:20:25 as the whole country’s three times richer, we’re no happier.
0:20:27 If I’m richer than you, I am happier than you
0:20:30 because that’s one way that I can be higher than in status.
0:20:32 And so then maybe I can steal your girlfriend
0:20:35 or maybe the guys who are in your group who I really want to be in my group
0:20:38 are going to say, “Hey, Bill’s cooler than Steven. I’m going with him.”
0:20:40 And so status matters.
0:20:43 It’s a process of sexual selection whereby both sexes
0:20:47 are always trying to get the best partner they can of the opposite sex.
0:20:48 And so they’re competing with each other.
0:20:51 Men compete with men to try to have women choose them.
0:20:53 Women compete with women to try to have men choose them.
0:20:55 And that’s a zero sum status game.
0:20:58 And what does evolution tell us about that,
0:21:00 that competitive sort of dating game?
0:21:04 What does it tell us if I’m trying to be attractive as a man,
0:21:08 what do I need to be demonstrating in order to attract the opposite sex as a human?
0:21:12 Yeah. So what you want are what we call honest signals of quality.
0:21:17 And the thing is that we’ve all evolved to look through fake signals.
0:21:20 And so lots of animals will pretend to be things that they aren’t.
0:21:22 They puff up their chest or raise up their shackles
0:21:24 or do something to look big and intimidating.
0:21:26 We all, we have human ways of doing that too.
0:21:30 But in humans, bizarrely, well in all animals,
0:21:33 actually one of the clearest honest signals for men
0:21:36 to demonstrate for women is what is risk taking.
0:21:38 Now that seems bizarre.
0:21:40 Why would taking a risk attract females?
0:21:44 Well, it attracts females because there’s two outcomes when you take a risk.
0:21:48 You either succeed showing just how skilled you are at whatever the domain is
0:21:51 or you fail and either turn into a rush
0:21:53 and therefore you remove yourself from the gene pool
0:21:56 or you bounce right back up because you’re such a robust organism.
0:22:00 In either case, you’re demonstrating that’s an honest signal of quality.
0:22:01 When we follow the date over time,
0:22:04 we see that high testosterone men are more likely to pair up.
0:22:05 They take these risks.
0:22:08 Women find them attractive at some level,
0:22:11 even if they don’t personally feel like it’s attractive at the moment.
0:22:13 But something about that is attractive to them.
0:22:15 And it may only be getting other men to back off.
0:22:16 When I take these big risks, you may say,
0:22:20 well, I’m not going to try to crowd in on Bilsey and he’s too tough.
0:22:22 We don’t know with certainty.
0:22:23 But they take these risks.
0:22:25 And then once they partner up,
0:22:27 then their testosterone levels go back down.
0:22:30 And because once you have a family, taking risks is foolish.
0:22:32 You want to take risks to get in the mating game,
0:22:35 but you don’t want to keep taking risks once you’ve got people depending on you.
0:22:38 So I’ve got honest signals of, did you say quality?
0:22:38 Yeah.
0:22:42 Honest signals of quality is being attractive as a man.
0:22:43 I’ve got risk taking.
0:22:44 What else?
0:22:48 Things like physical size is an honest signal of quality.
0:22:51 Things like wealth, if you earned all that money.
0:22:52 There’s inherited wealth.
0:22:53 We live in this kind of funny world,
0:22:56 but it still gives you all the advantages of wealth if you earned it yourself.
0:22:59 There’s ambition, things like that.
0:23:03 People look for ambition because if you are out there working hard all the time,
0:23:06 it’s an honest signal that you’re going to probably continue to do that,
0:23:08 provide for somebody, et cetera.
0:23:10 I often think about personality.
0:23:14 And why is humor a attractive quality in men?
0:23:14 That’s a great example.
0:23:17 Humor is an honest signal of quality.
0:23:18 Now, it’s funny because you could think,
0:23:20 well, you could just be funny by memorizing jokes.
0:23:22 But if you think of your friends who are funny,
0:23:24 they don’t sit down and go, hey, did I tell you the one about Pat and Mike?
0:23:28 That’s not how people are funny unless they’re paid to do that up on stage.
0:23:31 People are funny by making connections that you hadn’t thought of,
0:23:34 by twisting the world 90 degrees and linking things together.
0:23:36 And that takes an agile mind.
0:23:40 And there’s more genetic expression in our brain than anywhere else in our body,
0:23:41 so it’s a sign of good genes.
0:23:43 And also, we’re a cognitive species.
0:23:45 Being smart is super important for men and women.
0:23:47 That’s how you succeed.
0:23:50 But as humans, we also care an enormous amount about kindness.
0:23:53 And if that person who has nothing else going for them is kind,
0:23:54 that person is going to do well in life.
0:23:57 Because kindness ends up trumping everything,
0:23:59 just because there’s a host of reasons for the bonus,
0:24:01 which is that if you’re a kind person,
0:24:02 you’re a great partner to me,
0:24:04 even if you’ve got almost no other good qualities.
0:24:06 You need some minimal levels of competence.
0:24:08 But once you cross minimal competence,
0:24:10 kindness means you’re going to look out for me.
0:24:11 And that matters a lot.
0:24:14 Do nice guys finish last in the evolutionary world?
0:24:15 They don’t, actually.
0:24:19 So the good thing about being in a nice guy is they tend to finish first.
0:24:22 And so when we look in hunter-gatherer communities,
0:24:23 and we look at people choosing their partners
0:24:25 to go out on hunts in the morning,
0:24:28 they actually choose the nice guys over the better hunters.
0:24:30 Now, again, you need a minimal level of competence.
0:24:33 Now, they pay a big price to finish first,
0:24:35 because lots of people take advantage of them.
0:24:38 And so I share with you, and you never share back with me.
0:24:39 But if I’m a nice guy, I’m like, that’s okay.
0:24:41 You know, Steven will come around.
0:24:42 Someday he’ll learn to share with me, too.
0:24:43 Or if he doesn’t, that’s okay.
0:24:46 He’s a good guy, and I like to give him half my rabbit that I call it.
0:24:50 So they’re in economist terms, they’re suckers a lot.
0:24:52 They give a lot more than they get.
0:24:54 But as far as winning in the world, everybody wants to be with them.
0:24:59 What about for women in terms of attraction?
0:25:02 If you were to design a perfectly attractive woman
0:25:06 from an evolutionary basis, what would that woman be like?
0:25:10 The factors that matter for women are different for men,
0:25:12 because men are fertile throughout their whole lives,
0:25:14 and it’s so easy to be fertile.
0:25:17 You’re making 100 million sperm a day or whatever that number is.
0:25:18 They’re tiny little cells.
0:25:21 You can just do it even if you’re old and desiccated.
0:25:23 Fertility is crazy hard for a woman.
0:25:26 You need to be under the age of 40, basically.
0:25:28 Once our ancestral females hit 40,
0:25:30 they almost never reproduced anymore.
0:25:31 And we could talk about why that is.
0:25:34 It’s an interesting evolutionary solution to a problem.
0:25:36 But then during that time, you have to be well-fed,
0:25:40 and you have to be healthy, because it’s super hard to maintain a pregnancy.
0:25:43 That’s nine months where if you’re not getting enough food,
0:25:45 it’s hard to feed that fetus.
0:25:47 So for women, they need fat on their bodies,
0:25:49 which was hard in our ancestral world.
0:25:50 That meant they’re well-fed.
0:25:53 They need to be healthy, and they need to be young.
0:25:54 And so when you have those qualities,
0:25:57 that’s more important than anything else for men,
0:26:00 because when it comes down to it, living forever is nice,
0:26:03 but evolution doesn’t care about it if you don’t reproduce.
0:26:06 Reproduction is the currency of evolution.
0:26:08 And so what men are looking for in a partner
0:26:10 is somebody who’s reproductive, who’s fertile.
0:26:12 So is attraction an evolutionary thing in your view,
0:26:14 versus like a social thing?
0:26:15 It’s– well, it’s always both, right?
0:26:18 You know, humans are wildly malleable,
0:26:20 and you can move things around in crazy ways.
0:26:23 You know, look at what people found attractive just 50 years ago,
0:26:24 compared to today.
0:26:27 But there’s a lot of basics that underlie it.
0:26:30 And so, for example, if you look at the actual shape of women
0:26:32 and their hip-to-waste ratio,
0:26:35 whether their bum is big or not big in the current climate,
0:26:37 the hip-to-waste ratio doesn’t change.
0:26:40 And that’s because that hip-to-waste ratio is correlated with fertility.
0:26:42 But the size of your bum, not so much.
0:26:46 And in fact, when women deposit fats pre-menopause,
0:26:48 they deposit them on their thighs and their bum,
0:26:50 which is where those fats are really good for the baby.
0:26:51 They help neural development.
0:26:53 You know, your brain is loaded with fat.
0:26:56 When you’re in utero, you need your mother to have lots of fat,
0:26:57 ideally on her bum and thighs,
0:27:00 because that’s going to help feed your growing brain.
0:27:02 So there’s like a perfect hip-to-waste ratio.
0:27:03 Yeah, yeah.
0:27:04 And it rarely changes.
0:27:08 So there’s analyses of like every playboy bunny from 1950
0:27:10 to whenever, I don’t know if a playboy even exists anymore.
0:27:13 And they’re always at the exact same ratio,
0:27:16 even though the actual weight of the model would have changed dramatically.
0:27:18 They went from pretty heavy in Marilyn Monroe’s day
0:27:20 to really, really skinny for a while,
0:27:22 and then back to heavier again.
0:27:23 Do men typically care for women’s rich?
0:27:26 From an evolutionary perspective, does it matter?
0:27:27 In principle, it doesn’t matter much.
0:27:30 I mean, remember, but there’s your phenotype,
0:27:33 you want to be well taken care of.
0:27:36 But as far as what you’re actually attracted to,
0:27:41 women, so we call it sexual plasticity,
0:27:45 that women have evolved to basically be able to find almost any guy attractive,
0:27:47 because the qualities that are going to make men successful
0:27:49 are often on the inside.
0:27:51 Because remember, I told you all men are fertile,
0:27:53 even when they get really old.
0:27:55 So a skinny guy, a fat guy, a strong guy, a weak guy,
0:27:56 they’re all fertile.
0:27:57 You don’t have to worry about that.
0:28:01 But what you do have to worry about is raising kids is really hard.
0:28:02 You want help.
0:28:05 So you want somebody who’s going to be successful in hunting.
0:28:08 You want somebody who’s going to look out for you and your kids.
0:28:09 These are the variables that really matter.
0:28:11 And so women look for that.
0:28:12 And that means they need to be able to fall in love
0:28:15 with the Bill Gates of the world, who aren’t these big macho guys,
0:28:17 but can really take care of you.
0:28:20 And so women have a lot more of what we call sexual plasticity than men.
0:28:23 Men have a particular shape they’re looking for
0:28:25 and a particular appearance on average,
0:28:28 because that correlates with fertility.
0:28:30 Now, if you then have a choice,
0:28:32 so here’s one who’s poor, here’s one who’s rich,
0:28:34 you’re going to go with the one who’s rich, right?
0:28:38 But if you look at male rock stars and male businessmen,
0:28:40 people who are really rich and famous,
0:28:44 the women that they date and marry
0:28:47 go all or entirely across the social class spectrum.
0:28:49 Some are super rich, some are super poor.
0:28:52 A waitress has a great chance with Mick Jagger.
0:28:55 And so does some high society elite person.
0:28:56 But if you turn it on the other way,
0:29:00 a waiter doesn’t have much chance with this rich female or rock star,
0:29:02 sometimes, but way less likely.
0:29:06 And that’s because women are looking for features of status
0:29:06 and dominance in men,
0:29:09 and men don’t care about that as much in women.
0:29:12 What is the basis for homosexual relationships and evolution?
0:29:14 So homosexuality is a really interesting question.
0:29:16 We see it across the animal kingdom,
0:29:18 so we know that we’re not the only species who does it,
0:29:21 but we don’t often see exclusive homosexuality in the animal kingdom.
0:29:23 That seems to be much more common in humans.
0:29:25 Nobody’s 100% sure why it is,
0:29:26 but the best evidence I’ve ever seen,
0:29:27 the best evolutionary evidence,
0:29:30 comes out of this lab of a colleague of mine,
0:29:32 an ex colleague of mine, Brendan Zeich.
0:29:34 And what he shows is that most human behaviors
0:29:36 are driven by a number of genes, not just one.
0:29:38 We call them polygenic.
0:29:41 A whole bunch of genes contribute to a particular behavior,
0:29:44 and especially a complex behavior like homosexuality.
0:29:47 And so there’s going to be a polygenic score for homosexuality.
0:29:50 And the higher your polygenic score is,
0:29:52 the more likely you are to be attracted to same sex.
0:29:54 And it works a tiny bit different in men and women,
0:29:55 but basically the same.
0:29:59 And what Brendan argued, and as now demonstrated,
0:30:02 is that as you gain more gay genes,
0:30:05 genes that make you more attracted to the opposite sex,
0:30:07 but you’re not completely homosexual yet,
0:30:09 you’re more attractive to the opposite sex.
0:30:10 You’re more attractive.
0:30:11 Yeah.
0:30:15 So men who have more gay genes, but are still straight,
0:30:16 have more sexual partners,
0:30:19 than men who have fewer gay genes and are also straight.
0:30:23 So being a little bit gay is super attractive to women.
0:30:25 Being too gay, maybe they’re attracted to you,
0:30:25 but you don’t care anymore,
0:30:27 because now you’re only attracted to men.
0:30:29 And so from an evolutionary perspective,
0:30:30 it’s this balancing act.
0:30:32 You want to give men enough gay genes
0:30:33 so that women are attracted to them,
0:30:35 but not so many that they don’t care about women.
0:30:36 Okay.
0:30:41 Which kind of feels like a bit of a contradiction
0:30:43 to the idea that testosterone and risk taking,
0:30:45 and being brawn and being masculine.
0:30:46 Some gay men are feminine,
0:30:48 but some gay men are very masculine.
0:30:49 They’re hypermasculine.
0:30:50 So there’s both types.
0:30:53 You can be gay and be wildly masculine,
0:30:55 or you can be gay and be quite feminine.
0:30:57 So what is it about being a little bit gay?
0:30:58 Like what are the features?
0:31:00 What are the features of being a little bit gay?
0:31:01 We know the genes.
0:31:05 This paper was published in Science,
0:31:06 if I remember right a few years ago,
0:31:09 and laid out the genes and they don’t make sense.
0:31:11 Some of them relate to your sense of smell.
0:31:15 We don’t understand these polygenic scores very well yet.
0:31:17 But if I had to guess,
0:31:22 if you think of extreme straight males versus gay males,
0:31:24 gay males are much cleaner.
0:31:26 They look after their cells, their bodies much better.
0:31:27 Their hygiene is much better.
0:31:31 Their sense of aesthetics is much better.
0:31:34 And so maybe being a little bit gay means you’re metrosexual.
0:31:36 And now you’ve got these qualities
0:31:38 where you’re not so downright disgusting to women.
0:31:42 One of the things that kind of dovetails into this
0:31:44 is some of the stats that I was reading
0:31:46 about education these days.
0:31:50 This one stat here says that 58% of college graduates
0:31:52 in the most recent cohorts were women
0:31:57 with one women on campus for every two men.
0:32:00 And with this scenario
0:32:03 where there’s more women becoming college educated than men
0:32:04 at increasing numbers,
0:32:06 you’re going to get a bit of a mismatch
0:32:09 in terms of women looking for those men
0:32:12 who are up and to the right economically.
0:32:14 But there’s fewer men there.
0:32:16 Yeah, it’s a real problem.
0:32:19 And so we talk about, for example,
0:32:22 that women are underrepresented in some fields.
0:32:25 Like they’re underrepresented in the sciences.
0:32:26 And people worry about that a lot.
0:32:28 But there’s a much, much bigger problem than we’re facing.
0:32:30 And in fact, I’m not even convinced
0:32:31 the other one is a problem.
0:32:32 And we can come back to that if you’d like.
0:32:34 Because I do think there’s reasons for that
0:32:36 that might have to do with preferences
0:32:37 and not being held out.
0:32:38 But setting that issue aside,
0:32:42 if we look at the rates of going to university,
0:32:45 my birth cohort, I was born in 1963,
0:32:48 is the first year where women attended college,
0:32:51 university at equal rates to men in the United States.
0:32:54 And those lines crossed and they’d never gone back.
0:32:56 And so now the stat you were talking about is,
0:33:02 there’s basically, it’s 60/40 basically, female to male.
0:33:05 That means there’s three women on campus for every two men.
0:33:08 And so in principle, first of all,
0:33:10 it makes it harder to date on campus if you’re female
0:33:13 because there’s not as many men on campus as there are women.
0:33:14 And so the competition is fierce.
0:33:16 But setting, just dating on campus aside,
0:33:19 on average, women are looking for men
0:33:22 who are as educated as themselves or more.
0:33:23 And men are looking for women
0:33:25 who are as educated as themselves or less.
0:33:26 And so we’re creating a problem
0:33:29 because women are getting really well educated
0:33:31 and then there’s not as many educated men available
0:33:33 for them to partner up with.
0:33:34 And so what you end up with
0:33:36 is lots more people living single.
0:33:38 Now remember we talked about that before,
0:33:39 couples are less likely to get together.
0:33:41 On the one hand, this is not necessarily a bad thing
0:33:44 because women going to college, making a lot of money,
0:33:46 means they can afford to live as a single person,
0:33:49 which they literally could not do up until 1960.
0:33:51 If you’re female in most countries,
0:33:53 you couldn’t have a job really.
0:33:56 And so the way to be an economic success is to marry.
0:33:58 Those days are gone.
0:34:00 But it does mean that it’s harder for women to find partners
0:34:02 when they’re on average,
0:34:03 more likely to be educated than men.
0:34:05 And we don’t know why men are attending college
0:34:06 at lower rates than women,
0:34:09 but I suspect that school itself
0:34:11 is just doesn’t suit boys as well as it suits girls.
0:34:13 And so it’s harder for boys to hold still.
0:34:16 It’s boys are less likely to want to please their teachers.
0:34:17 Now the list is long.
0:34:19 It’s hard to raise boys in those kinds of ways.
0:34:22 And uneducated, unpartnered men
0:34:25 are the biggest problem in every society.
0:34:26 And if you’ve got men with poor prospects
0:34:29 who can’t find good jobs and who don’t have a partner,
0:34:31 they’re the guys running around with high T
0:34:32 who are committing all the crimes.
0:34:36 So as a society, you want to be very invested
0:34:39 in men partnering up with women because that tames them.
0:34:41 And you want to be very invested in men
0:34:43 being viable partners for women,
0:34:45 which means whatever we’re doing wrong in schools
0:34:47 that’s pushing men out,
0:34:47 we need to undo.
0:34:49 If women are looking for men
0:34:52 that have more resources than them on average,
0:34:53 which is what I read in some of the studies,
0:34:55 that I think it was roughly 70% of women
0:34:58 say they want a man that has equal or more money than they do,
0:35:02 there’s a mismatch there, isn’t there?
0:35:06 Because as both become sort of more equalized,
0:35:08 if there’s still a desire for the man
0:35:09 to have more and provide more,
0:35:12 there’s again, it doesn’t, the numbers don’t…
0:35:13 It’s the numbers don’t match.
0:35:14 It’s a really unfortunate problem.
0:35:16 And so the easiest way to look at that problem
0:35:17 is to basically look at Tinder
0:35:20 or one of these dating apps.
0:35:22 And there you can see that basically
0:35:25 20% of the guys on Tinder get 80% of the swipes.
0:35:27 What that means is that 80% of men
0:35:29 basically largely get ignored on the app
0:35:31 and 20% are flaunt upon.
0:35:34 In contrast, women, about 80% of them
0:35:37 are getting swiped by people on a regular basis.
0:35:38 They’re just not getting swiped
0:35:40 by the guys that they’re interested in.
0:35:42 It’s set up so that both sexes want the same thing.
0:35:44 Men look for the same thing in women
0:35:46 and women look for the same thing in men.
0:35:49 And there’s just a lot more competition
0:35:50 among men to get women.
0:35:52 And so it’s a smaller subset of men
0:35:54 who are women are interested in.
0:35:56 Interesting.
0:35:59 On an individual level, I guess if you’re a man,
0:36:02 you really do need to focus on your career
0:36:03 if you want to have a chance of…
0:36:06 Well, focus on your career is definitely
0:36:06 an easy way to do it.
0:36:08 But look, not everybody’s a career person.
0:36:11 And so you have to decide where your best prospects are.
0:36:13 And that comes back to like, why do we have autonomy?
0:36:15 Well, we’ve evolved that because there’s lots
0:36:16 of ways to skin a cat.
0:36:18 And so basically autonomy means I’m going to pick
0:36:21 my path in life where I think I have the best prospects.
0:36:23 Usually that means career.
0:36:27 But there’s also ways of being just a really kind person.
0:36:29 The person who’s always going to look out for you.
0:36:31 The person who’s going to be great helping with the kids.
0:36:33 Lots of men don’t meet those criteria.
0:36:36 And so that’s a perfectly successful way.
0:36:37 You just got to find…
0:36:38 You’re not going to get swiped right on Tinder.
0:36:40 That’s not going to be your way of finding…
0:36:43 If that’s you, if you’re the kind, reliable,
0:36:44 but you don’t have a great career,
0:36:45 you don’t have those other things,
0:36:47 then the apps aren’t the right place for you.
0:36:49 But people who meet you are going to really like you
0:36:51 and women are going to want to be with you
0:36:52 because they’re going to realize,
0:36:53 “Oh, they may not want to be with you when they’re younger.”
0:36:55 But as they get a little older and they’ve been through
0:36:57 a few of the guys who everybody else is chasing,
0:36:58 they’re going to say,
0:37:00 “Boy, I could really use somebody like you.”
0:37:01 Speaking of the apps and swiping,
0:37:03 we talked about how men on those apps,
0:37:06 if they’re not in that sort of top echelon
0:37:09 of demonstrating authentic quality on the surface.
0:37:12 So like rich, muscly, whatever.
0:37:16 Then their chance of getting swiped on are very, very low.
0:37:18 What about for women?
0:37:19 Because a lot of my female friends
0:37:21 say that they hate the dating apps.
0:37:22 They have no luck.
0:37:24 Then they’re only getting bad swipes.
0:37:25 Yeah, that’s the difference.
0:37:27 They’re getting bad swipes.
0:37:29 Meaning they don’t like the guys who swipe them.
0:37:31 The guys who have no luck are getting no swipes.
0:37:32 This is true because actually,
0:37:34 when I think about the particular friend I was thinking of,
0:37:39 I asked to see her Tinder or whatever app it was many years ago.
0:37:40 And I was like, “Oh, my God.
0:37:43 Jesus Christ, I wish I had this many swipes.”
0:37:44 Yeah.
0:37:48 Because as a guy, I had must have had Tinder
0:37:51 for about a month back in 2000.
0:37:55 When I was 20, I’m going to say 23, 24, I couldn’t get swipes.
0:37:56 Yeah.
0:37:59 And if I got some, listen, it wasn’t anything to write home about.
0:38:01 It was very, very rare.
0:38:03 But when I looked at her Tinder that she was complaining about,
0:38:07 she had hundreds of men, but she just didn’t like any of them.
0:38:08 Exactly. That’s the difference.
0:38:11 And so the thing is that throughout our evolutionary history,
0:38:15 men have often been left out of the mating game entirely.
0:38:17 And we know this if we look at the variability
0:38:18 on our Y-linked chromosomes.
0:38:21 You only inherit Y-linked genes from your father
0:38:23 because women don’t have a Y chromosome.
0:38:26 For women, you can look at mitochondrial DNA,
0:38:28 which you only inherit from your mother.
0:38:31 And if you look at the mitochondrial DNA and the variability there,
0:38:34 you can see that we have about twice as many moms as dads.
0:38:35 Yeah.
0:38:37 And that’s weird because it takes two to tango.
0:38:41 But what it means is that some of the dads were getting lots of women
0:38:44 and lots of potential dads were getting no women at all.
0:38:46 And so in our ancestral past,
0:38:48 there’s lots of men who nobody swiped right.
0:38:50 They couldn’t find a partner.
0:38:52 And there’s lots of men who women were very interested
0:38:54 and they probably had multiple partners.
0:38:58 And so we still live in that exact same world.
0:39:00 So what do they have to do to lower their standards?
0:39:02 Well, you could say lower their standards,
0:39:05 but you could also say you’re not liking him for all the wrong reasons.
0:39:06 You know, yeah, so what?
0:39:07 He doesn’t drive a Ferrari and so what?
0:39:10 He doesn’t look super cool or whatever.
0:39:11 But he could be a great guy.
0:39:13 The problem is that apps aren’t well suited for that.
0:39:17 And so, you know, when we were all just people who met in person,
0:39:19 you would realize, oh, this guy’s the salt of the earth.
0:39:21 He’d be a perfect partner for me for my life.
0:39:24 I know he’s kind of ugly or he’s kind of whatever, but who cares, right?
0:39:26 He’s going to be a perfect life partner.
0:39:27 Very hard to see that on an app.
0:39:32 Okay. So I was thinking about the attraction features of a woman
0:39:34 that we talked about earlier.
0:39:36 I know that if I’m a guy and I’m trying to have more success
0:39:38 on the apps, on social media, what I need to do
0:39:39 is I need to pull up in my Lamborghini.
0:39:40 I need to hit the gym.
0:39:44 I need to signal my quality and authentic
0:39:46 way that can’t be disproven.
0:39:47 And if I’m a woman,
0:39:50 therefore I need to be showing my hip ratio.
0:39:53 Well, I want to look attractive and I want to look healthy
0:39:54 and I want to look young.
0:39:54 Okay.
0:39:57 But keeping in mind, I could be none of the above
0:39:59 and I’m still going to guess what I tried.
0:40:02 How does pornography confound all of this stuff?
0:40:04 Yeah, pornography is a funny business.
0:40:08 It allows us to vicariously engage in sex
0:40:10 without actually doing it, right?
0:40:12 And so we evolved in a world where there was no pornography.
0:40:14 We certainly evolved in a world where there’s masturbation,
0:40:16 but we evolved in a world that didn’t have pornography.
0:40:20 And so it’s kind of hijacking our system a little bit.
0:40:22 It feels like you’re having sex when, you know,
0:40:25 you’re on OnlyFans or whatever those sites are that interest you.
0:40:27 It mimics a lot of the features.
0:40:29 And so, you know, I become interested
0:40:31 in the social media world we live in
0:40:34 and this possibility that social media
0:40:38 makes so many things so easy that you stop going out.
0:40:39 You stop, you know,
0:40:40 because you can connect with your friends in social media.
0:40:42 Why go through the snow and go across town
0:40:45 and maybe not know anybody at the party, et cetera.
0:40:48 And I think what’s happened is that as we get lazy
0:40:52 and we start putting our life online, you know, our social life,
0:40:56 we even start to put more, you know, our sexual life online.
0:40:59 And so there’s even evidence is very tentative
0:41:00 as to what it might mean.
0:41:02 But recently in the United States, at least,
0:41:04 if you look at young single people,
0:41:06 their actual sexual behaviors going down,
0:41:09 they’re having less sex than they were 20 years ago.
0:41:10 And if you’d asked me 20 years ago
0:41:12 when Tinder, whenever those things got invented,
0:41:14 I would say, oh, sex is going to go way up.
0:41:15 This is going to be, you know,
0:41:17 this is going to be the best thing for hooking up ever.
0:41:20 In actual fact, though it went up for a little bit,
0:41:22 it went back down and instead of what’s going up
0:41:23 is pornography watching.
0:41:26 And so it may be that pornography is getting better,
0:41:27 tailored to what people want.
0:41:29 Maybe people are just getting lazy
0:41:30 and they instead of going to the party
0:41:32 and maybe meeting somebody who they would have sex with,
0:41:34 they just pick it up and watch it on TV.
0:41:35 I don’t know.
0:41:37 Because I’m thinking about this graph that was in your book
0:41:40 which shows how much sex we’re having
0:41:41 and how much porn we’re watching.
0:41:45 And very simply, it shows that we’re having less sex
0:41:46 and we’re watching more porn.
0:41:51 And it’s quite a considerable drop between 2006 and 2012.
0:41:54 It said a percentage of 18 to 25 year olds
0:41:57 who had had sex or watched porn within the last year.
0:42:02 And about 80% of 18 to 25 year olds
0:42:04 had had sex in the last year.
0:42:09 And now it’s getting down nearer to 65, 70%.
0:42:10 Which is remarkable.
0:42:12 These are young single people.
0:42:14 You know, this is when we are most likely to have sex
0:42:17 with partners or random hookups or whatever.
0:42:20 So they’re at the peak of their sexuality.
0:42:22 And nonetheless, 20 years later,
0:42:23 they’re less likely to have sex
0:42:25 and more likely to be watching porn.
0:42:26 It looks like pornography consumption
0:42:30 is almost like tripled in that time period.
0:42:31 It’s always, it’s been accessible
0:42:33 over that entire time period.
0:42:35 But basically what I think those data,
0:42:39 I refer to this, I know it’s an absurd acronym.
0:42:40 I refer to this as smilching.
0:42:41 Smilching.
0:42:44 Social media induced laziness in our social habits.
0:42:46 I know it’s a, it’ll never catch on.
0:42:48 But I think that what they’re doing is smilching.
0:42:51 They’ve got friends, we’re at a party.
0:42:52 It’s across town.
0:42:53 It’s kind of a pain to get there.
0:42:55 It’ll cost you subway and everything else.
0:42:56 And you’re not sure if you’re going to have fun
0:42:57 when you get there.
0:42:59 And so you go screw it, I’m not going to go.
0:43:01 Now, what you didn’t know is that would have,
0:43:02 that’s the party where you would have met that person
0:43:04 who you would have ended up hooking up with
0:43:06 either as short-term or long-term partner.
0:43:07 But you didn’t go.
0:43:08 And instead of what you did as you stay at home,
0:43:10 and so there’s a decent chance you watched porn.
0:43:13 And so we’re, we’re letting these fake substitutes
0:43:16 take over in place of our actual real socializing,
0:43:17 which I think is hugely problematic.
0:43:18 And does this explain in part,
0:43:21 when we’re thinking about the pornography rise,
0:43:25 why there is declining fertility rates,
0:43:27 we’re having less and less kids than ever in the Western world
0:43:29 and something we’re concerned about population collapse.
0:43:32 Well, I actually think it’s separate from pornography,
0:43:35 because right now we’ve already separated our sexual activity
0:43:36 from our reproduction, right?
0:43:38 You can just use, be on the pill, use the condom,
0:43:39 use whatever you want,
0:43:42 which our ancestors couldn’t do and other animals can’t do.
0:43:46 And so the amount of sex that we have is completely uncorrelated
0:43:47 with how many kids we decided to have.
0:43:50 And so if you set pornography aside,
0:43:52 fertility rates are going way down.
0:43:53 And I think that’s simply because
0:43:55 we never evolved to want children.
0:43:57 We evolved to want sex.
0:44:00 And so if you want sex, if you enjoy sex,
0:44:02 and then you’ve also evolved to be nurturing
0:44:04 to whatever child comes along from that, bingo,
0:44:05 you’re a mom or a dad.
0:44:08 But if you evolved to want kids,
0:44:09 you go back a little ways,
0:44:10 you would have no idea how to achieve that.
0:44:12 You wouldn’t have known what to do.
0:44:14 We evolved to want to have sex.
0:44:15 And in a world without the pill,
0:44:17 that automatically resulted in children.
0:44:18 Equals kids.
0:44:20 And then all you have to do is evolve to be nurturing to them
0:44:22 because they’re so dependent in humans when they’re born.
0:44:25 Which is what happens when you had your baby recently
0:44:27 and you have this huge sort of magnetic pull to the child.
0:44:29 And I wasn’t keen to have more kids.
0:44:32 I have some children who’ve grown to adulthood.
0:44:34 I felt like I don’t need any more kids,
0:44:35 but then I have another kid
0:44:37 and I’m just in love with her, right?
0:44:39 You can’t help yourself.
0:44:42 So we’ve intervened in nature’s natural course.
0:44:43 We’ve intervened and that intervention
0:44:46 is what’s potentially going to lead to there be no more humans.
0:44:49 So if you look at the current population of the globe,
0:44:52 it’s meant to peak somewhere between, say, 2070 and 2090.
0:44:56 Probably around 8 billion and some change.
0:44:58 And then it starts to go down.
0:45:00 And then it may continue to go down forever.
0:45:04 Now it may be that if what causes you to want to have kids
0:45:05 is very societal.
0:45:07 It’s very, well, my apartment’s small
0:45:08 and I don’t want to slip them around.
0:45:09 It’s hard work.
0:45:12 You could imagine a world where now robots are everywhere
0:45:14 and where you’ve got all the space in the world
0:45:15 because there’s not that many humans
0:45:18 or we’ve moved to the country and e-commuter, whatever.
0:45:20 Maybe suddenly we’ll want to have six or eight of them again
0:45:22 because our robot’s the one who gets up
0:45:24 in the middle of the night with him and we don’t have to.
0:45:26 But right now, if you think about having kids,
0:45:27 it’s hard yards.
0:45:29 And so lots and lots of people say,
0:45:30 “Well, I just don’t want to do that.”
0:45:33 And the consequence is that in every single country
0:45:35 that’s industrialized and rich,
0:45:39 the reproductive rate of females is less than 2.1 per female,
0:45:42 which is what you need in order to maintain population
0:45:44 at the current level.
0:45:46 And so every single country on earth is shrinking,
0:45:48 but for immigration.
0:45:51 And so right now, we have all these fights about immigration.
0:45:52 It’s going to be, I promise you,
0:45:54 in 50 years that argument’s going to be the exact opposite.
0:45:57 How can we convince people of country X to come into our country
0:45:59 because we’re going to shrink and disappear?
0:46:01 There’s a lot of countries that are going to be literally
0:46:03 half their size by the year 2100
0:46:05 because they’re shrinking so fast.
0:46:05 Really?
0:46:09 Half of East Asia, half of Western Europe,
0:46:10 they’re just shrinking crazy fast.
0:46:11 They’re demolishing houses.
0:46:13 Japan is demolishing houses.
0:46:15 There’s nobody to buy them.
0:46:18 Because the women are having less than that 2.1?
0:46:20 Yeah, the average child rate in a lot of these countries
0:46:23 is around 1.5 to 1.7, very, very low.
0:46:24 You don’t think it’s possible
0:46:26 that we’re going to make ourselves extinct
0:46:28 because we’re not having fucking sex, are we?
0:46:30 Well, we’d still be having sex.
0:46:31 We just wouldn’t be having kids, right?
0:46:33 But we are having less sex as well, aren’t we?
0:46:34 Well, that varies.
0:46:36 Yeah, lots and lots of us are having less sex.
0:46:37 There’s reasons for that.
0:46:40 There probably are more to do with ecotoxicology
0:46:41 than with psychology.
0:46:44 There’s so many hormone mimics in our environment
0:46:47 and plastics and various pollutants
0:46:49 that change our endocrine system,
0:46:51 that reduce sperm counts.
0:46:52 We think that’s what’s going on.
0:46:54 And reduce sperm count often is associated
0:46:56 with reduced sex drive, et cetera.
0:47:00 So if you were Prime Minister or President of the world
0:47:03 and it was your job to get us having children again,
0:47:06 based on what you know about evolutionary psychology
0:47:08 and human incentives, what would you do?
0:47:11 Well, the main thing is that because humans
0:47:12 didn’t evolve to want children.
0:47:13 You can’t just play on there.
0:47:14 You don’t really want children
0:47:16 because the answer is often no.
0:47:20 What you want to do is you want to make having kids
0:47:22 to be as much of the plus as it possibly can be
0:47:24 and as little as the minus.
0:47:26 So if you look at kids that they’re really interesting,
0:47:28 there’s some wonderful work by Danny Connemann
0:47:29 who won the Nobel Prize.
0:47:31 And he asks you in the moment,
0:47:33 “What are you doing and how much fun it is?
0:47:34 Is it?”
0:47:36 And what he finds is no surprise
0:47:38 if you’re having sex when you got the request
0:47:39 and now you probably waited until you were done
0:47:41 before you answered your beeper,
0:47:43 but you said, “Oh, I’m having a great time.”
0:47:46 And as it goes, TV was actually in second place,
0:47:48 watching TV is good fun in the moment.
0:47:49 And then a little way down the list
0:47:51 is like doing dishes, doing laundry.
0:47:53 If you’re with your kids,
0:47:55 you’re on average about doing the dishes
0:47:56 or doing the laundry.
0:47:57 That’s how much fun your kids are.
0:47:59 But if you ask people,
0:48:02 “What gives you great satisfaction in life?
0:48:03 What makes you happy?”
0:48:04 Nobody says, “I’m crazy happy
0:48:05 because I’ve watched a ton of TV.”
0:48:07 That’s just not an answer anyone’s ever given
0:48:09 or because I’ve folded my laundry really well.
0:48:10 What they do say though is,
0:48:12 “Oh, my kids give me enormous joy.”
0:48:13 So how could it be both?
0:48:15 How could it be that on average,
0:48:16 your kids are as much fun as the laundry?
0:48:18 But when you look back on your life,
0:48:20 they’re the key thing.
0:48:22 And what we think the answer is,
0:48:23 is that they provide these peak moments
0:48:25 that laundry simply doesn’t, right?
0:48:26 No matter how well you fold your clothes,
0:48:27 it’s not exciting.
0:48:29 But your kids have these amazing moments
0:48:31 in their lives that you get to be part of
0:48:33 as you see the world through new eyes again.
0:48:36 And for a good evolutionary reasons
0:48:39 where you get your whole mind and body
0:48:41 and identity caught up in them.
0:48:45 And so kids end up being a huge source of satisfaction.
0:48:45 So what that means is,
0:48:47 if you want to get people to start having kids again,
0:48:49 try to get rid of the drudge side of it.
0:48:51 You know, look at daycare is crazy hard.
0:48:52 It’s crazy expensive.
0:48:55 Women want to be able to go back to work.
0:48:56 The list is really long
0:48:58 about how hard it is in so many different ways.
0:48:59 You just remove those barriers.
0:49:01 You know, especially once we’re in this robot world,
0:49:03 which I don’t think is far away from us,
0:49:05 where I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night
0:49:06 and do that unless I want to.
0:49:07 I can if I want.
0:49:09 My robot’s not going to stop me
0:49:10 from getting up and feeding them
0:49:11 and changing their nappy.
0:49:12 But aren’t we going to raise loads of messed up kids
0:49:13 in such a world?
0:49:17 I don’t, I, you know, robot has infinite patience.
0:49:19 If you design it nice and soft and fluffy,
0:49:21 it’s going to be more cuddly than we are.
0:49:24 The kids might like the robots more than they like us.
0:49:26 Last night I was with my girlfriend
0:49:29 and I was joking because I read this article that
0:49:31 Tesla’s Optimus Robots are now going into production
0:49:32 and they’re hiring the team,
0:49:34 which are these sort of humanoid robots
0:49:36 that will be in your house and help with the chores
0:49:37 and dishes and stuff.
0:49:38 And as a joke, I turned to my partner
0:49:40 and I was like, we’ll get two of those.
0:49:43 And like one of them will like raise the kids
0:49:45 and then the other one will like take the kid to school
0:49:46 and stuff because I knew her, it was a joke,
0:49:49 I knew her reaction would be pretty negative.
0:49:50 Negative.
0:49:51 And she was horrified.
0:49:54 She goes, can you imagine a world where a robot would,
0:49:57 the kid would turn to the robot and call it daddy and mummy?
0:49:58 Because the kid wouldn’t really know the difference.
0:50:02 And I sat here with a child psychotherapist, psychologist,
0:50:04 who said that in those first three years,
0:50:06 it’s so critical for the primary caregiver to be around
0:50:09 and that the man and the woman cause the baby
0:50:13 to release different types of hormones based on their gender.
0:50:13 Yeah.
0:50:16 So you almost can’t, the robot’s not good.
0:50:18 All that’s true, but here’s the thing.
0:50:20 Currently, we outsource them to nannies
0:50:21 for a big chunk of the day.
0:50:24 If you’re wealthy enough, people often hire a night nurse,
0:50:27 somebody who comes in and helps out at night time too,
0:50:28 if you’ve got the cash.
0:50:32 And so when I hire those people, I can’t be positive
0:50:34 they’re going to be kind to my children.
0:50:36 I can’t be positive they know every possible disease
0:50:38 my kid could get and all the rest.
0:50:41 I would rather hire this incredible robot who’s super cuddly,
0:50:44 who has an encyclopedia of medical knowledge,
0:50:46 who memorizes every detail about my kid
0:50:49 and knows exactly what the pitch of that cry is.
0:50:51 You could put whatever scent on them you want.
0:50:52 You could make it mom or dad.
0:50:54 You could make it even smell like you if you want to.
0:50:57 Why not have that person help you out?
0:50:58 You know, there are ancestors engaged
0:51:01 in what’s called alloparenting all the time.
0:51:03 And what that meant was the men are out hunting,
0:51:04 probably gone for most of the day.
0:51:07 The females need to form these tight bonds with each other
0:51:09 because it’s hard work with a bunch of little kids
0:51:11 and predators who want to eat them.
0:51:12 You need eyes on them all the time,
0:51:14 but you also need to be digging up tubers
0:51:16 of whatever variety you’re trying to eat.
0:51:18 And so they rely on each other.
0:51:20 Parenting is not a solo operation, which is mom and dad.
0:51:22 It’s this, I know it’s cliche,
0:51:24 but it takes a village kind of thing.
0:51:28 So why not hire out this robot who is like perfect in every way?
0:51:29 You know they’re not going to abuse your kid.
0:51:31 You know they’re never going to do anything wrong.
0:51:32 They’re always going to be kind.
0:51:34 When your kid asks for the 10 millionth time,
0:51:36 but why, they’re going to keep giving them answers.
0:51:37 They don’t mind, right?
0:51:40 Why not have the perfect parent when you’re not there?
0:51:43 Because the parent releases certain hormones in the child
0:51:45 by their touch, the oxytocin.
0:51:46 Robots don’t release oxytocin.
0:51:47 Not yet.
0:51:52 Why not have a robot that mimics all that
0:51:54 and would cause the kid to do that too?
0:51:55 Because you don’t want to replace yourself.
0:51:57 Parenting is one of the,
0:51:59 it’s one of the nicest things that we humans ever do.
0:52:00 It’s some of my fondest memories.
0:52:02 And I don’t want to give those away.
0:52:04 But I wasn’t with my kid 24/7.
0:52:06 And it would have driven me nuts if I were.
0:52:09 It’s, kids are wonderful and boring and horrible.
0:52:12 And so why not when you ask for something we all do.
0:52:13 We have since time began.
0:52:15 We’ve relied on others to help take care of our kids.
0:52:18 Why not make it the perfect nanny rather than the,
0:52:20 that’ll have to do nanny because it’s all I can afford.
0:52:23 I just, it’s a strange feature to think about
0:52:24 because it feels also like a slippery slope
0:52:26 where we might start having kids
0:52:29 and then giving them completely robot parents.
0:52:30 Could do if you wanted to.
0:52:32 I’d still rather that than you abuse your kids
0:52:33 and be a terrible parent yourself,
0:52:34 which we know has happened in all the time.
0:52:37 Do you think a better answer is just not to have the kids?
0:52:38 That is the best answer.
0:52:40 But you can’t stop people from deciding to have kids.
0:52:43 And we know that when we look at abusive parents, for example,
0:52:44 and the kids, if they’re so bad
0:52:45 that their kids literally get taken away,
0:52:46 what do they do?
0:52:48 They move to a new town and they have more.
0:52:50 And so you know that you’re subjecting these children
0:52:51 to these horrible environments,
0:52:53 but there’s nothing you can do about it.
0:52:56 I would way rather that those parents
0:52:58 who think they want kids for whatever reason,
0:53:00 then have the robot there to look out for them
0:53:02 and make sure that kid’s well taken care of.
0:53:03 Do you believe that?
0:53:04 Do you believe that’s going to be–
0:53:04 Yes, that’s going to happen.
0:53:06 So if you’ve just had a baby, right?
0:53:08 Yeah, I’ve got a one and a half year old.
0:53:09 One and a half year old.
0:53:11 Would you allow a robot to–
0:53:13 I love the nannies I have.
0:53:16 But every single one of them, when you start, is a risk.
0:53:17 You don’t know, right?
0:53:19 These are just, they’ve been hired by the daycare.
0:53:20 They’re probably really good.
0:53:23 But if you had the perfect robot nanny,
0:53:24 well, then you would never worry at all.
0:53:30 And in marriage, this graph that I saw in your book
0:53:31 shows that the percentage of Americans
0:53:33 who are very happy or not too happy
0:53:36 as a function of marital status quite clearly
0:53:39 shows that if you want to be happy, you should be married.
0:53:43 And if you want to be not too happy, you should be separated.
0:53:45 So here’s the data.
0:53:49 If when people get married, on average, they get no happier.
0:53:53 So if you get married and then I look at you 10 years later,
0:53:55 on average, you’re going to be exactly as you are now.
0:53:57 Now, how does that average work out?
0:53:58 Well, in lots of different directions
0:54:00 because I’m putting everybody together now.
0:54:02 We’ve got these amazing data sets from Germany, for example,
0:54:05 where we track people for so many years
0:54:06 that we know what they were like
0:54:09 before they even met their partner, much less married them.
0:54:10 And so we see how happy they are
0:54:12 and we see how it changes over time.
0:54:14 And so, for example, couples who get divorced,
0:54:16 they actually, their happiest year
0:54:17 was the year before their marriage.
0:54:19 So they met their partner, they got happier, happier,
0:54:21 and then they already started going downhill
0:54:22 before they even got married.
0:54:25 Couples who are going to stay together,
0:54:27 their happiest year is the marriage year itself,
0:54:29 not the year before it.
0:54:30 So that’s a good sign.
0:54:32 If you’re happier when you’re walking down the aisle,
0:54:34 then you were last year,
0:54:36 this marriage has a much better chance of lasting.
0:54:38 Now, if you look at those marriages,
0:54:40 the ones who last, they go in three directions.
0:54:42 You’ve got the really bad ones,
0:54:44 where they stay together for economic or religious
0:54:46 for whatever reasons, they’re miserable.
0:54:47 They don’t like each other
0:54:49 and they’re way less happy than before they met.
0:54:52 Thankfully, they’re relatively rare.
0:54:54 If we look at the ones who are average,
0:54:55 they’re a little bit happier,
0:54:57 these are among couples who stay together,
0:54:58 they’re a little bit happier
0:54:59 for the first few years of their marriage
0:55:01 than they were before they met,
0:55:03 and then they slowly settle down to about where they were.
0:55:05 So it’s not plus or minus,
0:55:07 it’s basically where they were.
0:55:08 If you look at the really lucky folks,
0:55:11 they get happier every single year for almost 10 years.
0:55:15 So the year of their marriage was happier than before they met,
0:55:16 and the next year is happier still,
0:55:17 and it just keeps working its way up.
0:55:21 And so when you average all that together,
0:55:23 getting married doesn’t make you happy.
0:55:24 It’s a zero.
0:55:27 So how could it be that marriage is a zero?
0:55:28 And I think the answer to that question
0:55:30 is that people who don’t marry,
0:55:32 it’s not the fact that they didn’t marry that’s the problem,
0:55:34 it’s that they’re over-weighting autonomy.
0:55:36 And over-weighting it is probably
0:55:38 what they’re doing every well in their life as well.
0:55:39 So when they’re making decisions
0:55:40 about what to do with their friends,
0:55:43 about whether they live with somebody else or live alone,
0:55:46 all those decisions, they keep going with autonomy
0:55:47 rather than going with connection.
0:55:50 Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean
0:55:51 they’re going to be unhappy,
0:55:52 but it makes, on average,
0:55:55 it means that they’re about half as likely to be very happy
0:55:57 as somebody who would go and get married.
0:56:00 So it’s the individualism that’s causing their unhappiness,
0:56:02 that’s causing them not to marry.
0:56:03 Yep, that’s what I believe.
0:56:06 And people that are less individualistic are getting married,
0:56:06 and that’s why-
0:56:09 And so it’s just a different kind of person who’s doing that.
0:56:12 In the same sense, interestingly, if you look at divorce,
0:56:15 we can also see that the people who are going to get divorced
0:56:17 were also less happy before they even met their partner.
0:56:22 So, on average, happier people tend to stay together in marriages.
0:56:23 We don’t know why that is,
0:56:25 but my guess is that happier people
0:56:26 just tend to be happier about everything,
0:56:27 and so they’re less like,
0:56:29 they find ways to make their marriage work,
0:56:32 even if it’s no better than the marriage of the less happy folks.
0:56:34 At my company Flight Studio,
0:56:36 which is part of my bigger company flight group,
0:56:38 we’re constantly looking for ways
0:56:40 to build deeper connections with our audiences.
0:56:43 Whether that’s a new show, a product, or a project,
0:56:45 it’s why I launched the conversation cards.
0:56:47 I’ve relied on Shopify before.
0:56:48 Who’s a sponsor of today’s podcast?
0:56:50 And I’ll be using them again
0:56:52 for the next big launch, which you’ll hear about soon.
0:56:54 And I use them because of how easy it is
0:56:56 to set up an online store that reaches all of you.
0:56:58 No matter where you are in the world,
0:57:00 with Shopify, the usual pain points
0:57:02 of launching products online disappear completely.
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0:57:13 To say thank you to all of you for listening to my show,
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0:57:17 which is just $1 a month.
0:57:21 You can sign up by going to Shopify.com/Bartlet,
0:57:24 that’s Shopify.com/Bartlet,
0:57:26 or find the link in the description below.
0:57:30 And what about things like ADHD and neurodivergence?
0:57:32 Is there an evolutionary basis for why that occurs?
0:57:37 Yes, so the neurodivergence is a complicated one.
0:57:42 It seems to be much more common now.
0:57:44 When we look at the epidemiological data,
0:57:47 it seems to be associated with high toxin environments.
0:57:51 So if you live in areas where there’s lots of pollutants,
0:57:53 people are more likely to be neurodivergent.
0:57:56 But I think neurodivergence has always been with us.
0:57:57 I think it’s just become more common.
0:57:59 Now, why would it become more common with these various toxins?
0:58:00 I don’t know.
0:58:04 My guess is that the brain is a social organism,
0:58:05 the human brain is.
0:58:07 We’ve evolved, connection is our most important need.
0:58:10 And it requires all sorts of different parts to work, right?
0:58:12 Which means that if you break the brain in any way,
0:58:13 you’re going to break your sociality.
0:58:16 Because it’s so implicated in so many different areas.
0:58:19 And if these toxins that we’re exposed to
0:58:20 cause any damage to the brain,
0:58:23 I think you’re particularly likely to end up with social problems
0:58:24 because the brain is a social organ.
0:58:28 And so that’s why I think autism rates are rising.
0:58:29 But of course, I don’t know.
0:58:30 I’m only guessing based on the data I’ve seen.
0:58:33 Now, in the case of neurodivergence,
0:58:36 I think they’ve always played a really important role in humanity.
0:58:40 And the reason for that is that humans are super-innovated species.
0:58:43 But if you ask yourself or your friends,
0:58:45 how often have you ever invented anything?
0:58:46 The answer is almost always never.
0:58:49 And that’s because we solve our problems socially.
0:58:51 When something goes wrong, we go to our friends,
0:58:53 we talk to them, we try to work together
0:58:54 to figure out our problems.
0:58:55 And we’ve always been that way.
0:58:56 How do gatherers do that?
0:58:59 And neurodivergent people are less likely to do that
0:59:01 because they’re less socially connected.
0:59:04 And so probably most of the great inventions of humanity
0:59:06 were created by neurodivergent people.
0:59:08 Now, those of us who are not neurodivergent
0:59:10 immediately go, “Wow, I’d like one of those.”
0:59:12 And so we’re really good at spreading that
0:59:13 by virtue of our social networks.
0:59:15 But I think we’ve always relied on neurodivergent people
0:59:17 to create the amazing innovations
0:59:20 that the technical things that make our lives so easy.
0:59:23 Now, ADHD is a different ball of wax.
0:59:25 We know it’s highly heritable.
0:59:26 We know a lot of the genes are.
0:59:30 We also suspect that it wasn’t even a noticeable thing
0:59:31 in a hunter-gatherer, right?
0:59:34 What ancestor ever tried to get you to pay attention
0:59:36 to something that you were bored with?
0:59:37 But if you’re ADHD,
0:59:39 it’s crazy hard to pay attention when you’re bored,
0:59:40 but it’s perfectly easy to pay attention
0:59:41 when you’re interested.
0:59:43 You just don’t have to kind of dorsal out
0:59:45 our prefrontal cortex
0:59:47 that allows you to force yourself to attend to things.
0:59:49 And for our ancestors, you’re loaded with energy.
0:59:51 You’re probably a great hunter.
0:59:52 And so it’s a modern problem
0:59:54 that you have to sit still and listen problem,
0:59:56 which our ancestors were never asked to do.
0:59:58 I wonder if it will still be the case
1:00:01 when we have all the robots in the AI doing everything for us?
1:00:02 I’m betting not.
1:00:04 I’m betting that you could decide to learn or not learn.
1:00:06 Now, why would you even learn your multiplication tables
1:00:07 if you don’t need to?
1:00:09 You can just ask your phone what the answer is.
1:00:12 And so why tons of the schooling that we go through
1:00:14 is superfluous in this world
1:00:16 where AI can do everything that we can do.
1:00:20 Do you think we’re going to merge with technology more deeply?
1:00:21 It’s very possible.
1:00:22 You could easily imagine,
1:00:25 like if there’s a feature about yourself that you don’t like,
1:00:28 I suspect it’ll be hard to genetically engineer it.
1:00:30 And the reason I think it’ll be hard to genetically engineer it
1:00:33 is that most of our genes have more than one effect
1:00:36 and most of our traits are caused by more than one gene.
1:00:37 So you can’t just tweak one gene
1:00:39 and become the person you want it to be.
1:00:41 It’s going to have other effects that you may not want.
1:00:47 So the upshot is that why not have a little mind module
1:00:50 that you either attaches to your head or goes inside it even?
1:00:52 Or we already are treating people with this.
1:00:55 There’s some kinds of depression that just are untreatable.
1:00:56 And for some of those people,
1:00:58 they literally insert an electrode into their brain
1:01:00 and stimulate this particular region.
1:01:02 And the people who experience this say,
1:01:03 it’s like my world was in black and white
1:01:04 and suddenly it became in color.
1:01:08 Well, why not have that for knowledge that you can access?
1:01:12 I could spend my huge amounts of time studying Greek
1:01:14 or I could shove one of those in.
1:01:16 And now I can go to Greece and speak with the locals, right?
1:01:19 Without my phone telling me what they’re saying.
1:01:20 You mentioned depression there.
1:01:22 What’s the evolutionary basis for humans
1:01:23 getting depressed and anxious?
1:01:25 Because presumably that’s not productive.
1:01:27 No, it’s not.
1:01:31 So remember that with every generation of sexual reproduction,
1:01:32 you’re going to have people who have things
1:01:34 that maybe evolution wouldn’t like.
1:01:36 Remember earlier, we talked about homosexuality,
1:01:38 that if you have more gay genes, women like you more,
1:01:39 but then if you have too many,
1:01:41 you don’t like them in return, right?
1:01:43 So that’s a case where a little bit
1:01:44 is a good thing evolutionarily.
1:01:46 And a lot is a bad thing evolutionarily
1:01:47 because you’re not going to have offspring.
1:01:49 Not a moral judgment,
1:01:52 just a judgment based on what evolution cares about.
1:01:55 Well, with anxiety, that makes perfect sense, right?
1:01:58 So animals that can’t envision the future have no anxiety.
1:02:00 All they feel is fear in the moment.
1:02:01 Oops, there’s a lion.
1:02:03 I’d better run as fast as I possibly can.
1:02:04 And then as soon as they’ve run away,
1:02:07 “Oh, no lion, everything’s copacetic.
1:02:09 “I’ll go back to eating grass and being happy.”
1:02:11 Whereas if I’m a human running away from a lion,
1:02:12 I’d be like, “Oh my God, that was really scary.
1:02:14 “I wonder when there’s another lion coming.”
1:02:17 Now, the biggest gift that evolution gave us
1:02:18 is the capacity to simulate the future.
1:02:20 Evolution doesn’t give any gifts without costs.
1:02:22 You pay a price for every one of them.
1:02:24 And the capacity to simulate the future
1:02:26 also comes with the realization it is,
1:02:28 first of all, it’s not always going to be good.
1:02:30 And second of all, it’s always going to end badly.
1:02:32 Once you understand life,
1:02:34 you understand I’m going to die someday.
1:02:36 And the other animals don’t have that realization.
1:02:37 They can’t project themselves forward
1:02:38 in time the way we can.
1:02:40 So does that mean that evolution tells us
1:02:41 that the cure for anxiety
1:02:43 is to stop thinking about the future effectively?
1:02:45 If you didn’t think about the future,
1:02:46 you would not be anxious.
1:02:48 If you could get yourself to be mindful in the moment
1:02:49 and set aside the future,
1:02:52 your anxiety will disappear because it’s all future-based.
1:02:54 I was at something that really,
1:02:56 I found quite interesting as well in your book.
1:02:58 I think it was in chapter nine where you talk about religion.
1:03:02 And the fact that people that are associated
1:03:05 with religious participation
1:03:07 are typically more happy than those who are not.
1:03:08 Yeah.
1:03:09 The effect is remarkable.
1:03:11 And so you can look at it in two different ways.
1:03:13 One of it’s just the effect of believing, right?
1:03:17 So lots of people worry about a life without meaning.
1:03:19 You know, people of religion have solved that problem
1:03:21 because religion gives their life meaning.
1:03:22 There is a point.
1:03:23 If you believe any of the religions that exist,
1:03:26 you’re part of this never-ending chain, etc.
1:03:28 And it doesn’t, they can be wildly different religions,
1:03:30 but they all hold this notion
1:03:32 that there’s something before and something after.
1:03:35 Now, you can look at the effect of that by saying,
1:03:39 “All right, let’s select only people who never go to church.
1:03:41 So we won’t, we’ll take the sociality part out of it.”
1:03:42 And then we’ll look at people who pray
1:03:44 versus people who don’t pray.
1:03:46 And we can do this with these national samples
1:03:49 where we say, “Let’s look at the general social survey.”
1:03:51 And in fact, anybody who wants to can get online
1:03:52 and look at the general social survey
1:03:54 and answer any question that’s available in that.
1:03:57 It’s a remarkable publicly available data set,
1:03:59 which I used repeatedly in this book.
1:04:01 And praying actually makes you happier if you,
1:04:03 among people who don’t go to church, they’re not praying.
1:04:08 And in my mind, that’s, life has meaning versus it doesn’t.
1:04:09 People who have religion have meaning.
1:04:11 People who don’t often don’t.
1:04:12 Sometimes they do, but they often don’t.
1:04:15 But there’s a social component to religion as well.
1:04:17 And I think it’s way more important.
1:04:20 And so now you can, you can’t do it quite as cleanly.
1:04:21 Now you want people who go to church
1:04:23 and you want to look at the effect of going to church.
1:04:25 And there the data are remarkable.
1:04:27 The effect of going to church is huge.
1:04:30 It’s like you’re like twice as likely to be happy
1:04:31 if you go to church regularly
1:04:33 than if you never go to church at all.
1:04:35 Now I don’t think going to church
1:04:37 would have made our ancestors any happier at all.
1:04:38 Why does it make us happier?
1:04:40 Well, the way to answer that question
1:04:42 is to then dive a little deeper into the data.
1:04:44 And so what I did is I separated people
1:04:45 by whether they’re poor or whether they’re rich.
1:04:48 Now remember, earlier we talked about
1:04:50 how the fact that poor people live
1:04:52 in these tight interdependent networks
1:04:53 because they count on each other all the time.
1:04:55 They borrow things from each other.
1:04:57 They rely on each other to keep the boat afloat.
1:04:59 And so they have, they get together,
1:05:01 the poor people get together with their neighbors
1:05:02 much more often than rich people, right?
1:05:04 Rich people don’t do that.
1:05:06 So what that means is that if now,
1:05:09 if you think that God wants you to go to church,
1:05:11 because remember we’re talking about religion now,
1:05:12 then you’re going to go to church
1:05:14 even if you necessarily want to see the people there,
1:05:17 even if you don’t necessarily feel a need for them,
1:05:19 but you’re going to be forced into socializing.
1:05:22 So sort of like this experiment that’s being played on you,
1:05:24 whether you believe in or not,
1:05:26 if you believe you should go to church,
1:05:27 that’s kind of coming from on the high.
1:05:29 It’s not because you necessarily want to socialize.
1:05:31 And we see that the effects of going to church
1:05:35 are, they have bigger happiness effects on rich than on poor.
1:05:37 Because poor people are getting a lot of the benefit
1:05:40 already of that socializing where as rich people
1:05:42 have separated themselves from others.
1:05:43 And so those rich people who go to church
1:05:45 several times a week are like twice as likely
1:05:48 to be very happy as rich people who never go to church at all.
1:05:49 So rich people need to go to church.
1:05:52 Yeah, or whatever they call church.
1:05:56 They need to go somewhere where they’re socializing regularly, in person.
1:05:58 Why do we want religion?
1:06:00 Because it’s quite clear that there’s something within us
1:06:01 that wants to believe.
1:06:05 I think we’re seeing a little bit at the moment
1:06:10 where we’re seeing a return to religious belief in some degree.
1:06:13 It might not just be the religious belief that we think of,
1:06:17 it might be spirituality or horoscopes or whatever it might be.
1:06:19 But there’s a seems like there’s a real surge of it,
1:06:21 especially amongst young men.
1:06:23 Yeah, that’s a great question.
1:06:27 People talk about in psychology what they refer to.
1:06:29 Well, not just in psychology, but in psychological terms,
1:06:30 there’s a God-shaped hole.
1:06:34 There’s a hole in your psyche that can only be filled by God.
1:06:36 Whatever God is for you.
1:06:41 And I think lots of people have that hole, but not everybody.
1:06:43 And why do I think lots of people have it?
1:06:45 Well, remember those prayer data we talked about.
1:06:48 People who pray are happier on average than people who don’t.
1:06:50 And so if you have a God-shaped hole, but you don’t believe,
1:06:53 that’s going to make you unhappy.
1:06:55 Whereas if you have that need for that,
1:06:57 and you do believe that’s going to make you happy.
1:06:58 It’s like anything else.
1:06:59 What do you think the meaning of life is?
1:07:02 I think it’s devoid of meaning.
1:07:05 And so if life is truly devoid of meaning, then what do you do?
1:07:08 And the only answer to me is you make the best
1:07:10 of this meaningless thing that you can.
1:07:11 And how do you do that?
1:07:14 Well, you be aware of what we’ve evolved to do,
1:07:16 and we’ve evolved to connect.
1:07:18 And so if connection is the most important thing I can do
1:07:21 as a human, and I believe it is, then you be kind to each other.
1:07:25 Because that’s facilitating connection.
1:07:26 You believe life is devoid of meaning.
1:07:27 Yeah.
1:07:28 People won’t like that.
1:07:30 I know. I don’t like it.
1:07:33 I don’t like the fact that I don’t think life has meaning.
1:07:36 When people search for meaning, they get happier,
1:07:37 which suggests that they find it.
1:07:41 I’ve never actually taken the time to reflect and search for meaning.
1:07:44 Okay. So maybe it’s the pursuit of something, then,
1:07:48 that’s creating the happiness versus them finding meaning.
1:07:49 Maybe. We don’t know.
1:07:51 So you just said that when people search for meaning,
1:07:52 they get happier.
1:07:53 Yeah.
1:07:55 So that could imply one of two things,
1:07:57 that they end up finding it, or that it’s the search itself.
1:07:58 Or a little of both.
1:08:01 It’s usually a little of both.
1:08:02 But we don’t know with certainty.
1:08:04 There’s not enough good data on this problem.
1:08:06 Because lots of people search for meaning.
1:08:09 And in the end, you can also decide that,
1:08:11 well, there isn’t meaning.
1:08:13 And I’m a small cog in a big machine.
1:08:16 And I’m a pointless small cog in a big machine.
1:08:16 But it’s all I’ve got.
1:08:20 And so, you know, Richard Dawkins in “Unweaving the Rainbow”
1:08:22 says, we’re the lucky ones because we’re going to get to die.
1:08:26 Now, what he really means by that is, first we get to live.
1:08:28 And almost nobody gets to live, right?
1:08:30 You think of the 100 million sperm that I’m making every day,
1:08:31 they don’t go anywhere.
1:08:32 They never get a chance.
1:08:34 But I made three humans.
1:08:35 I did my part.
1:08:36 I only did the small part.
1:08:39 But I played a role in making three humans,
1:08:42 who then got lucky and got to live out of all the other sperm
1:08:43 that came out that day.
1:08:44 They’re the one that made it into the egg
1:08:46 and they get a chance at it.
1:08:50 And we just happen to be really lucky, I believe as humans,
1:08:55 that the solution that evolution landed us on was a kind one.
1:08:57 We have the kindest solution in my mind
1:08:59 to solving life’s problems.
1:09:02 So you look at this, one of my favorite birds in Australia
1:09:03 is the cuckaburra.
1:09:05 Cuckaburras lay two eggs and then they weigh a little bit
1:09:06 and then they lay a third.
1:09:09 And Australia is very drought prone,
1:09:11 so some seasons they’re good and some are bad.
1:09:13 If the season’s good, that third egg has a decent chance
1:09:14 of making it to adulthood
1:09:16 because there’s so much food being brought back to the nest.
1:09:19 If it’s not good, that third egg never makes it.
1:09:20 And why doesn’t it make it?
1:09:23 Well, the two older siblings peck it to death.
1:09:26 And they’ve got an adaptation on their beak, a little hook,
1:09:28 that allows them to kill their little sibling more easily.
1:09:31 So they’ve literally evolved to kill their little sibling
1:09:32 when times are tough.
1:09:35 What have we evolved to do when times are tough
1:09:37 to band even closer together and to work together
1:09:37 and to cooperate?
1:09:39 That’s what got us to where we are.
1:09:41 And it was all sorts of interesting things that got us there.
1:09:44 It was cognitive things like division of labor.
1:09:45 You know, cuckaburras don’t do that
1:09:46 because they’re inherently mean.
1:09:48 It’s the only way they can solve the problem.
1:09:50 Humans solve that problem very differently.
1:09:53 Now, admittedly, we did our share of infanticide too,
1:09:56 but mostly what we do is cooperate, work together,
1:09:59 have division of labor, and we go from being this,
1:10:00 like, you know, when we first left the trees
1:10:01 must have been really rough.
1:10:03 Everybody was eating us for dinner.
1:10:04 And now it’s the shoes on the other foot
1:10:06 where the apex predator on this planet.
1:10:09 But doesn’t our evolutionary history tell us
1:10:11 that we band together in tough times?
1:10:12 Yes.
1:10:15 But we band together to attack the others?
1:10:15 Yeah, we do.
1:10:18 It’s not, look, there’s never something
1:10:20 that’s done just for the niceness of it.
1:10:22 Evolution doesn’t care about nice at all.
1:10:25 What’s really nice, though, is that our solution,
1:10:28 our way of becoming deadly and every animal that survives
1:10:31 becomes deadly or avoids being eaten in another way.
1:10:33 Now, it turns out that once you band together
1:10:37 and even by homorectis, so our ancestors
1:10:40 one in two million years ago, when they band together,
1:10:42 they are already the deadliest force on this planet.
1:10:44 We’ve got good evidence that they’re
1:10:46 eating huge animals like mammoths.
1:10:49 So it’s your ability to have division of labor to plan
1:10:51 to say, all right, you chase that mammoth
1:10:53 and we’ll put this trap here, you know,
1:10:55 do things that other animals simply can’t,
1:10:56 they can’t do that.
1:10:58 They can’t make a scenario in their mind
1:10:59 and then enact it.
1:11:01 And so it was that mental ability
1:11:03 that turned us into these apex predators.
1:11:05 But it doesn’t take long as an apex predator
1:11:07 who can work together with division of labor
1:11:09 to realize, all right, there’s only one predator left
1:11:12 on this planet who has a chance of killing me
1:11:14 and that’s other humans or, you know,
1:11:15 if it’s pre-human other homorectis.
1:11:18 And you’re saying that with like America versus China and–
1:11:19 Everything.
1:11:21 America versus Mexico and whatever it might be.
1:11:22 Everything.
1:11:23 In nationalism.
1:11:24 Yeah, so remember, I referred to us earlier
1:11:27 as being tribal and I talked about how chimpanzees
1:11:29 are 600 times more aggressive within the group
1:11:31 but equally aggressive between.
1:11:33 So we’ve evolved in a world to be totally tribal,
1:11:34 to just look out for ourselves
1:11:36 because that other group might kill us.
1:11:38 They may be nice, we may get along,
1:11:39 but they might be vicious.
1:11:42 And so we need to be prepared to be vicious in return.
1:11:44 Thankfully, though, we didn’t evolve
1:11:45 where we know we’re the vicious.
1:11:47 We evolved where we just don’t know.
1:11:48 It may be good and it may be bad.
1:11:50 So we give out groups the benefit of the doubt
1:11:53 but we very quickly become tribal and negative toward them.
1:11:58 I was sat here yesterday with the wonderful gentleman
1:12:00 who I’m a big fan of called Robert Green,
1:12:03 who wrote the book about power, 48 Laws of Power.
1:12:05 What have you learned about power
1:12:08 as it relates to our evolutionary past
1:12:10 and who ends up getting power in the world?
1:12:14 So evolution doesn’t care about morality, right?
1:12:14 It’s amoral.
1:12:16 It’s not amoral, it just doesn’t care.
1:12:18 And what that means is might is right.
1:12:20 Humans are the only ones who understand possession
1:12:23 and I say this is mine and you’re like, no, no, it’s mine.
1:12:26 And we can argue about the actual ownership of it.
1:12:27 But for an animal, there’s never an argument.
1:12:29 If you made the kill and I’m bigger than you,
1:12:30 I take it from you.
1:12:31 Now in human groups,
1:12:35 power is achieved by no human is strong enough
1:12:37 on their own to have power by themselves.
1:12:39 Every human goes to sleep.
1:12:40 And when you go to sleep,
1:12:42 the weakest of humans in your group can kill you easily.
1:12:46 And so to be powerful, part of it is to be tough and scary
1:12:48 but part of it also be kind
1:12:50 and to look out for people who are on your side
1:12:52 so that you have a network of people who care about you.
1:12:54 And what about body language in this as it relates to power?
1:12:57 Is there anything that we can learn from humans
1:13:00 and other animals about what powerful body language is
1:13:03 or unpowerful or powerless body language looks like?
1:13:05 It’s super easy to look in other animals
1:13:07 because they can’t talk.
1:13:09 They appease, they’ve got ways of shrinking themselves.
1:13:11 It says, no, don’t beat me up.
1:13:13 This whatever you want is yours.
1:13:15 And humans mimic some of that.
1:13:17 We shrink ourselves when we want to not be intimidating.
1:13:19 We elevate ourselves.
1:13:21 We open ourselves when we want to be powerful and intimidating.
1:13:24 But in humans, almost all humans, almost all the time,
1:13:26 power doesn’t emanate from our physical presence
1:13:28 but from what we’re capable of.
1:13:31 And some societies, you know, America comes to mind,
1:13:33 you demonstrate your power by showing your wealth,
1:13:36 by showing what you can do, by being very in your face.
1:13:37 I can, I’m great at this.
1:13:40 You know, I’m, we’re number one kind of thing.
1:13:41 Many cultures don’t like that.
1:13:43 Many, the more collectivist your culture is,
1:13:45 the more frowned upon that is
1:13:47 and the less likely you are to do it
1:13:48 even if you are the powerful.
1:13:50 And then you get to cultures where the only person
1:13:54 who ever puts himself down is the really powerful
1:13:56 because they can afford to say, no, no, I’m nobody.
1:13:57 You don’t want to bother with me.
1:13:59 And the second they say that in those cultures like,
1:14:02 ooh, this person runs the show around here.
1:14:04 And so in a lot of cultures,
1:14:06 the richest person is the one who dresses the most modestly.
1:14:08 The most powerful person is,
1:14:10 because that’s what the culture understands.
1:14:12 But it’s always, you have to follow the cultural rules.
1:14:14 In a weird number one society, that’s not going to work for you.
1:14:16 Everybody’s just going to think you’re nobody.
1:14:20 And so the rules of power vary dramatically by where you are.
1:14:23 But you can always see that somebody who is relaxed
1:14:26 and looks comfortable is probably
1:14:29 a relatively high power person in that circumstance.
1:14:30 I’ve always wondered why billionaires
1:14:34 who have more sort of objective power end up
1:14:37 not wearing designer clothes and being more understated
1:14:39 and wearing just the same out for every day.
1:14:42 And they don’t wear the designer brands and have Louis Vuitton.
1:14:43 Yeah.
1:14:46 The thing is that we use those brands to compete for status.
1:14:48 But they’re already at the very top of the heap.
1:14:49 They won that competition.
1:14:51 And anybody who knows them knows that in their ox.
1:14:54 They’re also, especially as you start to get rich,
1:14:56 all the fancy brands, and then as you get even richer
1:14:57 and you’ve been that way longer,
1:14:59 it becomes less important to you
1:15:00 because you’ve got status in other ways.
1:15:03 And maybe it’s a counter signal at that point.
1:15:06 So maybe if he had a Louis Vuitton bag,
1:15:09 he would actually be lowering himself to the status class.
1:15:10 He’s just a regular millionaire.
1:15:12 He’s not the multi-billionaire that he is.
1:15:14 You’ve studied the Hadza tribe.
1:15:15 You mentioned them repeatedly.
1:15:17 Only indirectly. I’ve never been there.
1:15:17 Yeah.
1:15:19 Well, what is the most interesting thing you’ve learned
1:15:22 about them as it relates to happiness and purpose
1:15:23 and living a good life
1:15:24 that you might pass to all of us that are listening?
1:15:28 Well, autonomy was really rare for our ancestors.
1:15:30 They evolved to want both.
1:15:32 They need connection to survive
1:15:36 and to be part of the collective that will go on the hunt
1:15:37 and do all the things that is necessary
1:15:39 for living every single day.
1:15:41 But they also need autonomy to choose
1:15:43 where their real niche is going to be,
1:15:44 what their best prospects are,
1:15:46 how to stand out in the group.
1:15:47 Everybody has to be undergathered,
1:15:49 but you could still be the best arrow maker
1:15:51 or storyteller or whatever.
1:15:53 Make yourself valuable to the group.
1:15:54 So you need autonomy
1:15:56 so you can decide where your best prospects
1:15:57 and decide what you want to do
1:16:00 and put your efforts into the domains that matter to you
1:16:01 that where you think you’ll succeed.
1:16:05 But for ancestors, true autonomy was rare
1:16:07 because even though we all decide by consensus
1:16:09 and you guys say you want to go south
1:16:10 and I want to go north,
1:16:11 I can’t just go north when you go south
1:16:13 or I’m going to be lying food.
1:16:15 I’ve got to compromise or persuade you with my,
1:16:18 what I want to do.
1:16:20 Which means that opportunities for true autonomy
1:16:22 were really rare for our ancestors.
1:16:24 The problem is now we don’t need connection anymore.
1:16:26 We can survive just fine without it.
1:16:28 So we have opportunities for autonomy all the time.
1:16:29 Cities are an example.
1:16:31 They’re full of opportunities for autonomy
1:16:33 and humans are moving there in droves.
1:16:35 Every time that we get a choice
1:16:36 between connection and autonomy,
1:16:38 I fear that we’re choosing autonomy.
1:16:40 It’s a form of miswanting
1:16:41 because for our ancestors,
1:16:42 they rarely could get that choice
1:16:44 where they could really pick either.
1:16:45 And when they had it,
1:16:46 they wanted to jump on autonomy.
1:16:48 So now I think that we’re constantly choosing
1:16:51 to do our own thing rather than to connect
1:16:53 and that’s steadily making us unhappy.
1:16:55 And our hunter-gatherer friends
1:16:57 who still exist on this earth don’t do that.
1:16:59 That’s the one thing that you can learn from the Hadza.
1:17:01 They’re constantly thinking about each other
1:17:02 and then thinking about,
1:17:04 well, what do I want and finding a compromise
1:17:06 that’s much closer to balance.
1:17:07 In that regard,
1:17:11 do men need women more than women need men
1:17:12 as it relates to connection?
1:17:14 Yes and no.
1:17:16 So we all need to connect,
1:17:18 but I believe women need it more than men,
1:17:19 largely for the reasons we were talking about earlier
1:17:21 where women need to get more help parenting
1:17:23 so they need to form these tight bonds
1:17:24 so people will help them.
1:17:26 But of course, men need connection too
1:17:27 and women provide men
1:17:29 with a lot of the closest connection that they have.
1:17:33 Because I read that marriage is more beneficial
1:17:35 for men’s longevity than it is for women.
1:17:36 It is.
1:17:37 It’s not a huge difference.
1:17:39 So if you look at people in their mid-60s,
1:17:40 we’re now longevity is in the offing, right?
1:17:44 Men will live an extra two years if they’re married
1:17:46 and women will only live an extra year and a half
1:17:47 if they’re married.
1:17:49 So women do more for men than men do for women,
1:17:50 but both are getting something out of it
1:17:52 and that’s not a huge difference.
1:17:54 And they’re giving us more emotional support
1:17:55 typically than we are.
1:17:56 Well also, I mean, think about how
1:17:57 slovenly and disgusting we are.
1:17:59 They’re probably helping us with our hygiene.
1:18:00 They’re probably helping in a variety of ways.
1:18:03 But yes, I think emotional support really matters.
1:18:06 And I think that you need to have something to live for
1:18:07 and kids provide us with that,
1:18:09 grandkids provide us with that,
1:18:10 connection provides us with that.
1:18:12 Nobody wants to die alone.
1:18:13 That’s a miserable thought.
1:18:16 These had the tribes that we keep talking about.
1:18:18 Do they stay together in marriages?
1:18:21 It turns out, so they’re best,
1:18:23 well, the person I regard as their premiere
1:18:24 ethnographer is Frank Marlowe.
1:18:27 He would live with the hadza and write about them.
1:18:29 And he estimated from his life experience with them
1:18:32 that about 20% of them stay married for life.
1:18:34 So one in five.
1:18:35 Which is not high.
1:18:36 Very low.
1:18:37 Now, if you think about it,
1:18:40 why is that such a high divorce rate?
1:18:42 Well, hunter-gatherers don’t institutionalize marriage
1:18:44 the way that agriculturalists do.
1:18:46 When agriculturalists get married,
1:18:47 that’s a financial arrangement.
1:18:49 It didn’t matter in the same way
1:18:51 to our hunter-gather ancestors.
1:18:53 When that’s no longer nice,
1:18:54 they moved out and chose somebody else.
1:18:58 And so it’s low.
1:19:01 It’s, they’re serial monogamists.
1:19:02 They don’t, you know,
1:19:05 hadza tend not to have more than one wife at a time.
1:19:06 It happens, but it’s rare.
1:19:09 Does our evolutionary past suggest
1:19:10 that humans are serial monogamists?
1:19:13 I believe humans evolved to be serial monogamists
1:19:14 who cheat a little bit.
1:19:17 Now, why do I think we also cheat a little bit?
1:19:18 Because if we’re purely monogamous,
1:19:21 men would not need testicles as large as they are.
1:19:23 A gorilla is not monogamous.
1:19:25 It has a harem of several females.
1:19:27 But it doesn’t, no other male gorilla
1:19:28 can approach those females
1:19:30 because he will physically attack them.
1:19:32 And so he knows
1:19:33 that he’s the only one having sex with them
1:19:35 and he has very small testicles.
1:19:36 And in fact, they’re inside his body.
1:19:38 They’re not at risk of damage.
1:19:43 A chimpanzee who their mating system
1:19:45 is lots of male chimps have sex with lots of females.
1:19:48 So who knows whose father has these enormous testicles
1:19:50 because part of his job is to wash out,
1:19:51 I know it doesn’t sound nice,
1:19:53 wash out the guy who’s there before him.
1:19:55 So maybe his sperm will be the one that inseminates her.
1:19:57 Wash out, what do you mean by wash out?
1:19:59 Like literally pump so much sperm into her
1:20:01 that the previous guy who just had sex with her,
1:20:03 his sperm is literally washed out
1:20:04 as if you’re in there with a hose.
1:20:08 I know it doesn’t, it’s not, it’s not, anyway.
1:20:11 So if we were ancestrally purely monogamous,
1:20:13 we’d have little gorilla testicles and we don’t.
1:20:15 We, ours are way bigger than theirs,
1:20:16 which suggests that we did a little bit
1:20:17 of washing out of our own,
1:20:19 which suggests we were serially monogamous,
1:20:21 but we’re also sneaking around at the same time.
1:20:25 Oh, so cheating might be a natural part of the human.
1:20:27 Cheating, well, natural doesn’t mean good.
1:20:28 I’m not saying it’s a good thing, right?
1:20:30 I’m, but I’m saying it’s what our ancestors did.
1:20:32 So my guess is when they could get away with it.
1:20:33 You know, there they are in the cave.
1:20:35 There’s this couple who aren’t a couple,
1:20:36 but nobody else is around.
1:20:38 Both of them have reasons to do it.
1:20:39 Males want to cheat
1:20:41 because it gives them a greater chance
1:20:43 of having offspring they otherwise wouldn’t have.
1:20:45 Females can’t have an infinite number of kids
1:20:47 like males can because they could have sex with 20 guys.
1:20:49 They’re still only going to have one kid.
1:20:51 The orangutan has like pretty similar DNA to us.
1:20:52 Is it the orangutan?
1:20:53 Which monkey is it?
1:20:54 Well, chimps are the closest to us.
1:20:55 The chimps.
1:20:56 And then gorillas and then orangutans.
1:20:57 But they’re all great apes,
1:20:58 so they’re all pretty close to us.
1:20:59 Can chimps talk?
1:21:00 No.
1:21:04 So if they, if I’m a chimp and I leave the tree for a while
1:21:08 and then my boy comes over and he has sex with my wife,
1:21:13 I can’t then find out that he did that.
1:21:13 No.
1:21:15 There’s no one telling you.
1:21:17 Now, they do sign language lots of things
1:21:18 that they’re interested in doing.
1:21:19 Immediate communication.
1:21:21 But it’s, if you think about sign language,
1:21:22 it’s really good for saying, you know,
1:21:24 there’s something behind you.
1:21:25 It’s really good for saying,
1:21:26 I’m going to punch you in the face
1:21:28 if you don’t give me your food, whatever.
1:21:29 But it’s not good for saying, you know,
1:21:31 yesterday I had sex with your wife.
1:21:33 How do they communicate that?
1:21:35 They’re terrible at communicating that kind of things
1:21:37 that are separated by space or by time.
1:21:39 They just simply can’t communicate.
1:21:42 And so, but they can’t think about it either.
1:21:46 And so our homorectis is the first animal on this planet
1:21:48 who could think about separate,
1:21:49 separate things separate by space and time.
1:21:52 And so my guess is our complex communication began with them.
1:21:53 It made me think of my dog.
1:21:55 My dog does something.
1:21:58 He does a poo in the house.
1:21:59 I come home an hour later.
1:22:00 I tell him off.
1:22:01 He doesn’t know why you’re upset.
1:22:04 He had poos that happened an hour ago.
1:22:05 He doesn’t know what the problem is.
1:22:06 But he can’t think about the past and the future
1:22:08 in terms of and link it to…
1:22:10 It’s the, we know from psychology
1:22:12 that if you want to punish an animal for pooing,
1:22:13 which is effective if you do.
1:22:15 You shouldn’t rub the nose in things that aren’t nice,
1:22:17 but punishment is very effective.
1:22:19 If you punish them for pooing, you’re a bad girl.
1:22:20 You do it right away.
1:22:22 They’ll stop pooing in your house.
1:22:23 You punish them an hour later.
1:22:24 They go, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
1:22:25 But when I come home and say my dog’s pooed in the house
1:22:27 or something, or he’s done something naughty,
1:22:28 he’s hiding.
1:22:30 Yeah, because he now knows
1:22:31 that when you find a poo in the house,
1:22:33 he gets in trouble.
1:22:35 When you find a torn up furniture, he gets in trouble.
1:22:36 He knows that.
1:22:37 That’s an association.
1:22:39 Dogs are really, really good about learning associations.
1:22:41 And so all that, he doesn’t, you know,
1:22:43 when he tears it up,
1:22:45 first of all, he has poor self-control because it’s a dog.
1:22:46 But second of all, he can’t think about,
1:22:48 “Uh-oh, in the future,
1:22:50 Steven’s going to come home and he’s going to be pissed.”
1:22:52 But now when you do come home
1:22:53 and he’s like looking over the torn couch,
1:22:55 he’s like, “Uh-oh, I’m in trouble.”
1:22:57 And so he knows for a while what’s coming.
1:23:01 Okay, so he doesn’t actually know that it was,
1:23:04 that I didn’t want him to tear up the couch or whatever.
1:23:07 But he does know that when the couch is torn up
1:23:08 and I come home,
1:23:10 that I’m going to be like, “Fucking hell, they’re coming.”
1:23:11 Yeah, and you’re going to yell at him.
1:23:13 And he also knows that if he does in front of you,
1:23:14 you’ll yell at him.
1:23:15 And if he poops in front of you, you’ll yell at him.
1:23:17 So he knows all those things,
1:23:19 but he can’t think about the future.
1:23:21 So take an animal way smarter than a dog,
1:23:23 a monkey, or even a chimp.
1:23:24 Let’s get way smarter.
1:23:28 Chimps can’t plan for tomorrow
1:23:29 the way a human can.
1:23:32 So if you feed a chimp or a monkey or any of these animals
1:23:34 as much food as they want, but only one meal a day,
1:23:35 they don’t like that
1:23:38 because they like to eat several meals a day, just like we do.
1:23:40 But they’ll never go,
1:23:41 “I’m going to stash some of my food
1:23:43 because I’m going to get hungry at 5 p.m. today
1:23:44 because I’m only fed at two.”
1:23:47 It never occurs to them day after day after day to stash it.
1:23:50 When they’re full, they’ll literally throw it at each other
1:23:55 because they can’t think about a world that has unfelt needs.
1:23:57 All they can think about is the world
1:23:59 where their needs are the same as they are right now.
1:24:01 And because we can project our mind into the future,
1:24:03 we know there’s going to be a world with all sorts of unfelt needs.
1:24:06 “I’ll be hungry again. I’ll be cold. I’ll be whatever.”
1:24:07 But some animals store food, don’t they?
1:24:10 They do, but they do it automatically.
1:24:11 They don’t go, “Oh, it’s going to be,
1:24:13 like for example, squirrels who bury nuts.
1:24:15 We’ll do that if they’ve never been through a winter.”
1:24:17 So they don’t go, “Uh-oh, I was cold last winter.
1:24:20 I’d better store some nuts because there weren’t many around.”
1:24:21 They just have evolved to store nuts
1:24:25 when the weather starts to get cold or whatever their signal is.
1:24:28 Because my dog, Pablo, he’s never been around,
1:24:30 I mean, he has been around other dogs, of course,
1:24:33 but I don’t only have one dog, so he’s only ever lived with me.
1:24:37 And the first time I got a bone from the shop,
1:24:39 and I gave it to him, he played with it a little bit.
1:24:41 But then he picked it up and buried it in the couch.
1:24:44 And I’m like, “What the hell are you doing?”
1:24:45 And then I give him another bone,
1:24:46 and he picks it up and buries it in the couch.
1:24:48 And then I end up lifting up the couch,
1:24:49 and there’s all these bones buried in it.
1:24:50 I’m like, “How?”
1:24:51 That’s an evolved behavior
1:24:53 that he doesn’t understand the purpose
1:24:54 of what he knows he wants to do.
1:24:56 And so let me give you an example
1:24:59 from another animal system where we’ve studied it really closely.
1:25:00 So, meerkats.
1:25:02 Do you know meerkats?
1:25:04 Those cute little things, like T-Melon, I think.
1:25:05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, from the babies.
1:25:08 Meerkats eat scorpions.
1:25:10 And so they need to teach their bait,
1:25:12 they’re very good hunters.
1:25:13 They need to teach their babies
1:25:14 to kill something that could kill them.
1:25:16 And so when they have tiny babies,
1:25:18 they kill the scorpion and give it to it dead.
1:25:20 And then the baby eats the scorpion,
1:25:21 once it’s weaned from milk,
1:25:22 because, of course, they’re mammals.
1:25:23 When the babies get a little bit bigger,
1:25:25 they break the stinger off
1:25:26 and throw the scorpion to it alive
1:25:29 so that the baby can practice killing the scorpion.
1:25:30 And then when the baby’s bigger still,
1:25:32 it’s almost ready to go out on its own,
1:25:35 they throw it alive, scorpion, like, you kill it and eat it.
1:25:36 Because it’s got to learn how to do that.
1:25:38 Like, it seems rough, but it’s got to learn that.
1:25:42 If you play the sounds of a little baby to us,
1:25:44 to the mother, or whoever’s bringing the food,
1:25:46 because it’s not always mothers,
1:25:47 it’ll kill the scorpion and throw it in there,
1:25:49 even if the, who it’s throwing into are juveniles,
1:25:51 who could kill it themselves.
1:25:53 And worse yet, if you have babies
1:25:54 and you play juvenile sounds,
1:25:56 it’ll throw the live scorpion to the baby
1:25:57 who’s going to kill the baby.
1:25:59 Because all it knows is when I hear that sound,
1:26:01 I do X to the scorpion.
1:26:02 Your dog is doing the same thing.
1:26:04 When given bone, chill on it for a little while,
1:26:06 then bury it for later.
1:26:07 Because I don’t know if I’ll have them later.
1:26:09 Now, it doesn’t do that, I don’t know if I’ll have it later,
1:26:11 but it’s evolved to solve that problem.
1:26:14 As you guys know, Woop is one of my show sponsors.
1:26:17 It’s also a company that I have invested in.
1:26:18 And it’s one that you guys ask me about a lot.
1:26:21 The biggest question I get asked is why I use Woop
1:26:23 over other wearable technology options.
1:26:24 And there is a bunch of reasons,
1:26:26 but I think it really comes down
1:26:28 to the most overlooked yet crucial feature.
1:26:30 It’s non-invasive nature.
1:26:33 When everything in life seems to be competing for my attention,
1:26:36 I turn to Woop because it doesn’t have a screen.
1:26:39 And Will Armid, the CEO who came on this podcast,
1:26:40 told me the reason that there’s no screen.
1:26:43 Because screens equal distraction.
1:26:45 So when I’m in meetings or I’m at the gym,
1:26:47 my Woop doesn’t demand my attention.
1:26:48 It’s there in the background,
1:26:51 constantly pulling data and insights from my body
1:26:53 that are ready for when I need them.
1:26:55 If you’ve been thinking about joining Woop,
1:26:59 you can head to join.woop.com/CEO
1:27:03 and try Woop for 30 days risk-free and zero commitment.
1:27:06 That’s join.woop.com/CEO.
1:27:08 Let me know how you get on.
1:27:09 I’ve invested more than a million pounds
1:27:11 into this company, Perfect Ted.
1:27:13 And they’re also a sponsor of this podcast.
1:27:16 I switched over to using Matcher as my dominant energy source.
1:27:17 And that’s where Perfect Ted comes in.
1:27:19 They have the matcha powders.
1:27:20 They have the matcha drinks.
1:27:21 They have the pods.
1:27:22 And all of this keeps me focused
1:27:24 throughout a very, very long recording day,
1:27:26 no matter what’s going on.
1:27:28 And their team is obsessed with quality,
1:27:31 which is why they source their ceremonial-grade matcha
1:27:32 from Japan.
1:27:34 So when people say to me that they don’t like the taste of matcha,
1:27:36 I’m guessing that they haven’t tried Perfect Ted.
1:27:40 Unlike low-quality matcha that has a bitter, grassy taste,
1:27:42 Perfect Ted is smooth and naturally sweet.
1:27:43 And without knowing it,
1:27:45 you’re probably a Perfect Ted customer already
1:27:46 if you’re getting your matcha at places
1:27:48 like Blank Street or Joe in the Juice.
1:27:51 But now, you can make it yourself at home.
1:27:52 So give it a try.
1:27:54 And we’ll see if you still don’t like matcha.
1:27:55 So here’s what I’m going to do.
1:27:58 I’m going to give you 40% off our matcha
1:27:59 if you try it today.
1:28:03 Head to PerfectTed.com and use code diary 40 at checkout.
1:28:04 Or if you’re in a supermarket,
1:28:07 you can get it at Tesco’s or Holland & Barra
1:28:08 or in the Netherlands at Albert Hine.
1:28:11 And those of you in the US, you can get it on Amazon.
1:28:13 It’s really interesting.
1:28:15 I’m such an interesting subject manager
1:28:18 because I spend so much time talking to people
1:28:20 about our evolution and what it tells us about our future
1:28:21 and who we are.
1:28:24 And you’re, I mean, you’re the guy.
1:28:27 You’re the guy that knows more about our evolutionary past
1:28:28 than I think anybody I’ve ever met.
1:28:31 So I’m so curious to know if there’s just anything else
1:28:33 that someone like me should be aware of
1:28:38 from all the work you’ve done in studying evolution,
1:28:43 any study, any story that was particularly pivotal
1:28:44 for you and your thinking that shaped you
1:28:46 that we haven’t yet talked about.
1:28:49 We’ve talked a fair bit about how money
1:28:51 doesn’t make you as happy as you think it would,
1:28:52 but it does help.
1:28:54 It does help make you happy.
1:28:56 And we’ve talked about how important,
1:28:58 you know, money is a proxy for state.
1:29:01 It’s how important that was in our ancestral society.
1:29:03 But you have to remember that our ancestral societies
1:29:03 were very small.
1:29:06 And so it was feasible that I could be the best
1:29:07 at something in our group.
1:29:08 I could be the richest.
1:29:10 I could be the best arrow maker or the best storyteller.
1:29:11 You name it.
1:29:13 There’s something I’ve got a shot at.
1:29:14 Nobody can be the best at anything anymore.
1:29:16 You can’t even be the richest.
1:29:18 I mean, tomorrow, Elon Musk made some,
1:29:20 I’m out this year that’s like so astronomical,
1:29:22 it’s hard to even imagine.
1:29:26 And so the, there’s always going to be people
1:29:27 who have more than you do.
1:29:28 And so the problem with money is that
1:29:30 it’s partially a status game.
1:29:32 It’s partially about buying a nicer car
1:29:33 and a nicer house.
1:29:36 And those things actually tend not to make us happy.
1:29:40 But interestingly, spending our money on doing things
1:29:43 tends to make us much happier, which is surprising,
1:29:46 because it feels like spending money on activities
1:29:47 is kind of wasteful.
1:29:49 I always felt like when I was young and broke,
1:29:52 that if I had money, it was hedonistic and wasteful
1:29:54 to spend it skiing, whereas it was sensible
1:29:57 to spend it on a new couch, because I need a couch.
1:29:59 And then I’ll have that couch for a very long time,
1:30:01 whereas the ski day is over in the day.
1:30:05 But it turns out that if you have disposable income,
1:30:06 it makes you a lot happier when you spend it
1:30:09 on things to do rather than things to have.
1:30:11 And we don’t know exactly why that is yet,
1:30:13 but I suspect that the reason is,
1:30:15 is the things to have our status game.
1:30:17 And that status game is impossible to win, right?
1:30:19 Because there’s just too many humans on the planet.
1:30:21 And I’m gonna open up my Instagram tomorrow
1:30:23 and find that somebody else has a better car
1:30:24 or whatever it is that I just bought.
1:30:27 And now mine looks kind of dumpy.
1:30:30 Whereas that ski holiday actually becomes part of yourself.
1:30:34 It becomes this memory that you think back on
1:30:35 and that you’re happy when you think about it.
1:30:37 And especially if you do it with friends.
1:30:40 And so the advice I would give is, if you’re trying to,
1:30:43 especially if you’re successful and you’re trying to find a way
1:30:46 to not feel like all that success was a lot of effort
1:30:48 and not really worth it,
1:30:51 is to use your money in ways to enhance your experiences
1:30:53 in life rather than to enhance your things.
1:30:55 So what are the, if I had to force you,
1:30:57 I don’t like doing this, but if I had to force you
1:31:01 to give me a summary of the top five things
1:31:04 that are most correlated to my happiness in your opinion,
1:31:07 are most likely to increase my probability
1:31:09 of living a happy filled life.
1:31:10 And you have to give me five.
1:31:11 Okay.
1:31:12 What are those five things?
1:31:14 Families first.
1:31:15 Okay.
1:31:19 We evolved in families, not just small families,
1:31:21 but extended families.
1:31:24 And it, you may not get along with your family
1:31:25 and then you want to find a proxy family
1:31:26 or you want to create one of your own.
1:31:28 So I’m not telling you, you need to get along
1:31:29 with that jerk of an uncle of yours
1:31:31 or your hopeless parents or whatever.
1:31:33 But I’m saying spend time with your family.
1:31:34 And if it’s not the family,
1:31:35 you want to trade them in for a new one.
1:31:40 But we evolved to have the close confines,
1:31:43 regular contact, constant contact with family.
1:31:44 And so if you can’t do it in person
1:31:46 because they’re far away or you know,
1:31:48 the finance means whatever,
1:31:49 you just do it every day on the phone anyway.
1:31:52 Find a reason to chat regularly with family.
1:31:54 Ideally eat with family.
1:31:57 Eating was a key moment for ancestors.
1:31:58 They got together around the fire.
1:32:00 They, if there was a successful hunt,
1:32:01 they’re cooking up their meal together
1:32:03 and they’re eating it together.
1:32:04 There’s a bad habit of a lot of families
1:32:06 to just watch TV together.
1:32:08 And there’s nothing wrong with TV,
1:32:10 but you should also talk together
1:32:12 because we evolved to be storytellers.
1:32:14 We evolved to share stories with each other.
1:32:16 They’re super important for us.
1:32:17 So trust me when I say,
1:32:19 those momentary desires to do your own thing
1:32:23 will pale in comparison to the long-term benefits
1:32:25 of continually getting together
1:32:27 and these rituals of eating together
1:32:28 and having conversation together.
1:32:30 It’s hugely important.
1:32:31 Okay, number two.
1:32:35 Number two is, it’s also going to be connection.
1:32:39 And it sounds silly, but it’s like,
1:32:42 when you’re trying to plan your day,
1:32:44 and you’ve got this list of things you want to do
1:32:46 and you got a list of things that your friends are doing,
1:32:48 you can’t always do what your friends are doing,
1:32:51 but if you can get yourself to sacrifice
1:32:53 what you really prefer to do what they’re doing,
1:32:55 and they’re going to eventually do the same for you,
1:32:55 of course, too.
1:32:58 Give up some of that autonomy
1:33:01 in order to re-establish some of that connection.
1:33:02 And the reason I say this is,
1:33:04 when we look at married couples even,
1:33:05 they’re spending less time together.
1:33:06 When we look at friends,
1:33:07 they’re spending less time together.
1:33:09 I think we need to go back to this world.
1:33:12 When I think about doing that,
1:33:14 I’m just going to be completely honest.
1:33:16 Oh, you should be, because if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
1:33:17 No, no, when I think, yeah.
1:33:19 So I’m just trying to put myself in the head of the person
1:33:20 that’s hearing that.
1:33:22 And a lot of entrepreneurs and modians
1:33:24 that are like very busy building their startup,
1:33:26 they’ve got jobs that are demanding of them,
1:33:28 that they’re striving,
1:33:30 and they’re striving away from a life
1:33:32 that they didn’t like towards a life that they hope they will.
1:33:35 So that’s requiring them to give so much time and energy
1:33:38 to like separate themselves from the crowd.
1:33:40 So when they hear that they need to spend more time
1:33:41 with their partner, many of them will be thinking,
1:33:44 but then my business will fail.
1:33:46 And I agree with them.
1:33:48 I, when I’m giving this generic advice,
1:33:50 I’m not telling it to that person.
1:33:52 And I completely agree with that person’s life choice.
1:33:55 When we’re young, we’re autonomy machines.
1:33:56 And that takes precedence,
1:33:58 especially if you have a big dream
1:33:59 that you think you could get to,
1:34:00 you’re this entrepreneur,
1:34:01 and especially if you’re trying to get away
1:34:03 from something that wasn’t much,
1:34:05 like materially, you just didn’t have enough
1:34:07 to really get by whatever the case might be.
1:34:10 LeBron James Thorne, basket after basket after basket,
1:34:12 trying to become the person he wants to be.
1:34:13 Look how well it works for him.
1:34:13 What’s the cost?
1:34:15 The cost is paid at the time.
1:34:17 You’re going to be lonely when you do that.
1:34:19 But if you’re loving what you’re doing,
1:34:21 and if you think it has a real chance,
1:34:24 will I say pay that loneliness price when you’re young?
1:34:26 Don’t pay it every single day.
1:34:28 Please go out with your friends on Friday night
1:34:30 and talk with your fellow entrepreneurs
1:34:32 and do things that still allow you to be connected
1:34:34 so you’re not suicidal by the time you get there.
1:34:37 But I totally get that autonomy push.
1:34:39 It’s what makes us a success.
1:34:41 I do think I’m bullshitting myself a little bit
1:34:42 because I go, “Could I spend another hour
1:34:46 with my partner a day or another two, three hours a week
1:34:46 and my business would be fine?”
1:34:47 Of course I could.
1:34:51 But like you said, there’s an inherent striving
1:34:52 which can be out of whack.
1:34:55 And the problem is that if what you really want to do right now
1:35:00 is work, I say when you’re young, do it.
1:35:02 Because you can let your connections fray,
1:35:05 try not to let them disappear,
1:35:07 and then you can rebuild them when you now have got there.
1:35:09 But the key is you got to get there.
1:35:11 You have to set yourself an answer in advance.
1:35:12 And here’s the reason I say that.
1:35:15 I have found myself waiting for a bus
1:35:17 longer than it would have taken me to walk.
1:35:19 And so once I do that a few times,
1:35:21 I realize, “Oh, the bus schedule’s erratic.
1:35:22 I can do the walking.
1:35:25 I’m going to wait X minutes and then I’m going to walk.”
1:35:28 Our problem is that we keep setting new bar for ourselves
1:35:30 if we don’t make that plan in advance.
1:35:31 “Oh, I’ll just give it another minute.
1:35:32 Oh, I’ll just give it another minute.
1:35:35 Or I’ll just push this business for another year.
1:35:36 I’ll just push it for another year.”
1:35:38 And you can find yourself doing it forever.
1:35:39 You may not succeed.
1:35:41 You may have a miserable life where all you did was work
1:35:42 and you kept pushing it for another year
1:35:44 and it never got there.
1:35:46 And so my recipe is when you start something,
1:35:48 you give yourself an end date.
1:35:51 You say, “What would it mean for me to be a success?”
1:35:53 And so you can have an end date that’s both good and bad.
1:35:55 How much money do I have to make?
1:35:56 And now I won?
1:35:59 How much time do I give it without making any money?
1:36:00 And therefore I lost.
1:36:02 And you should set those two things in advance.
1:36:04 Because once you’re in it, I promise you,
1:36:05 you’re going to move the bar.
1:36:07 Number three.
1:36:08 Yes.
1:36:11 If you’re this hard driving entrepreneur
1:36:13 who’s putting that aside,
1:36:15 I’m dead serious when I say get a dog, a cat,
1:36:17 whatever your preferred animal is.
1:36:19 And the data show that having a pet
1:36:20 actually makes people quite happy.
1:36:21 And I very mindfully did it
1:36:23 when I was a brand new assistant professor.
1:36:24 You know, in this American system,
1:36:27 I’m going to either get tenured and promoted
1:36:28 after seven years or I’m going to get fired.
1:36:31 So I knew that I was a work machine for seven years.
1:36:33 Everything else was going to take second place.
1:36:35 But my dog wouldn’t care.
1:36:35 Dogs are amazing.
1:36:38 And maybe one day as you were talking,
1:36:40 I was thinking maybe people are going to get robots some day.
1:36:42 And that’s a sad feature to think about.
1:36:44 They’re just like a robot generally to be their friend,
1:36:45 which is quite grim.
1:36:46 Number four.
1:36:50 So when you ask yourself,
1:36:52 well, what made our ancestors happy?
1:36:56 There’s a lot of seemingly pointless
1:36:58 sitting around and doing nothing together.
1:37:00 And the problem with our world today,
1:37:01 I believe, but don’t know.
1:37:04 I don’t have good data on this, this Bill’s intuition,
1:37:06 is that we can always be doing something.
1:37:10 There’s a 10-zillion, actually very good shows on TV.
1:37:13 And I suspect that what we are giving up when doing that
1:37:15 is random chitchat with friends.
1:37:20 Now, when I used to walk by construction sites 20 years ago,
1:37:23 you’d see all these guys eating their lunch together
1:37:24 and just shooting the shit, right?
1:37:25 Just having a good time.
1:37:27 When I walk by construction sites today during lunch,
1:37:29 I see most of the guys on their phone
1:37:31 not even talking to the guy right next to them.
1:37:33 They’re still sitting in a line at the construction site,
1:37:34 but they’re not engaged with each other.
1:37:36 And those guys are not as tight
1:37:38 and their job is not going to be as good.
1:37:40 And so I would say–
1:37:40 Be present.
1:37:44 Be present in idle conversation times.
1:37:46 It doesn’t seem as interesting as it is.
1:37:47 It’s super important.
1:37:50 And number five, last but not least.
1:37:53 I would say, and this is going to sound a little bit redundant,
1:37:56 but we all have lifestyle goals that we pursue.
1:38:00 And they could be getting more fit.
1:38:01 They could be learning a foreign language.
1:38:02 They could be learning to paint.
1:38:04 They could be anything like that.
1:38:05 The data show very clearly you’re way more likely
1:38:07 to achieve those lifestyle goals
1:38:09 if you commit to doing them with somebody else
1:38:11 because they’ll push you and you’ll push them.
1:38:13 People join gyms every year that they attend five times
1:38:14 and never go back.
1:38:15 And so you want to–
1:38:18 Whenever you want to make a change in your life,
1:38:20 try to use connection to make that change more effective
1:38:22 because not only will it make the change more effective,
1:38:25 but it’ll overall in the long term make you a happier person.
1:38:28 And on that point about health, fitness, and lifestyle goals,
1:38:32 I found out that you are a senior scientist
1:38:34 at a company that I’m an investor in called Woop.
1:38:36 They also respond to this podcast, I should probably say.
1:38:38 But you’re a senior scientist there.
1:38:39 That’s where– Well, I’m a contractor.
1:38:40 I don’t work directly for them,
1:38:42 but they’ve contracted me to work with them.
1:38:43 That’s right.
1:38:45 And what is it you’re doing at Woop?
1:38:47 I have the coolest job in the world.
1:38:50 So I work as part of the performance science team.
1:38:55 And what we’re tasked to do is just look at all the data
1:38:57 that Woop collects and ask the question,
1:38:59 how can we do it better?
1:39:01 What are things that people are doing that really help them?
1:39:02 Let them know how much it’s helping them.
1:39:04 What are things that people are doing
1:39:05 that maybe aren’t helping them?
1:39:07 Let them know that it’s not helping.
1:39:11 And more so, sleep is not well understood.
1:39:12 Exercise is not well understood.
1:39:14 This relationship to eating is not well understood.
1:39:16 You’ll have learned that from lots of guests
1:39:17 prior to previously on the show.
1:39:19 And so I get this really cool job
1:39:22 where we just dive into our data all the time
1:39:24 to try to answer these fundamental questions.
1:39:25 And what are some of the cool questions you’ve asked
1:39:29 that have garnered interesting answers thus far?
1:39:30 So these aren’t published data yet.
1:39:32 And so what that means, the caveat on them
1:39:34 is that we could be wrong, right?
1:39:35 I could be telling you stuff that I’m going to send it
1:39:37 to a journal and they’re going to laugh in my face
1:39:39 and say, “You’re forgetting the phosetic effect.”
1:39:40 That’s total nonsense, right?
1:39:41 That could happen.
1:39:44 So going with, you have to understand the caveat here
1:39:46 that these are raw data that we’ve just discovered
1:39:49 that we haven’t vetted yet in the scientific community.
1:39:50 But let me give you an example.
1:39:52 One of the quite remarkable things
1:39:54 that we’re finding at Woop is that
1:39:59 exercise amplifies other behaviors.
1:40:01 And so if I do something that’s good for me,
1:40:03 even if it’s got nothing to do with exercise
1:40:06 and I exercise that day, it’s better for me.
1:40:08 If I do something that’s bad for me
1:40:10 and even it’s got nothing to do with exercise,
1:40:12 it’s worse for me on a day that I exercise.
1:40:12 Give me an example.
1:40:15 Yeah, so if I drink, we know that alcohol,
1:40:17 every alcoholic drink that I have
1:40:20 raises my resting heart rate by,
1:40:22 I think it’s about a beat, beat and a half if I remember right,
1:40:25 and lowers my HRV by like three points
1:40:26 if I remember right.
1:40:28 I could be getting those numbers a little bit off.
1:40:30 But it’s that kind of magnitude.
1:40:33 And every drink just, it’s this linear effect
1:40:34 up to at least 10 drinks.
1:40:37 We see that in our data with thousands and thousands of people.
1:40:40 If you have those drinks on days
1:40:41 that you’re basically sedentary,
1:40:44 you did almost nothing, their effect is smaller
1:40:46 than if you have those drinks on days where you exercised.
1:40:48 So I could exercise in the morning,
1:40:52 then I drink and the impact of the drink is worse.
1:40:53 Because I exercised.
1:40:54 Because you exercised.
1:40:56 And the same holds for good things.
1:40:57 I know, it’s ridiculous.
1:40:59 I don’t understand the physiology at all,
1:41:00 but this is what we’re seeing.
1:41:01 So drink and don’t exercise.
1:41:02 Exactly.
1:41:03 On days that you’re going to misbehave,
1:41:04 and it’s probably not just alcohol,
1:41:06 that’s just one of the ones I’ve analyzed.
1:41:08 On days that you’re going to misbehave,
1:41:10 be relatively sedentary.
1:41:12 Now the thing is, it also works the other way.
1:41:14 So if you like, if you sometimes
1:41:16 wear blue light blocking glasses late in the evening,
1:41:18 or you dim the lights late in the evening,
1:41:20 you’re conscientious about getting ready for bed,
1:41:23 that has a bigger positive effect on your recovery
1:41:24 on days that you exercise.
1:41:26 Even though blue light and exercise
1:41:27 have nothing to do with each other.
1:41:30 So it doesn’t seem to matter what the behavior is.
1:41:32 If it’s positive, it has a bigger positive effect
1:41:33 on days you exercise more.
1:41:35 If it’s negative, it has a bigger negative effect
1:41:36 on days you exercise more.
1:41:38 Which is super cool.
1:41:39 I have no idea why.
1:41:41 We’re obviously going to write it up
1:41:42 and tell the world about it.
1:41:44 And when we do, maybe I made a mistake
1:41:45 and we’ll discover what I did wrong
1:41:47 and what I just told you isn’t true.
1:41:48 But for now, I believe that’s true.
1:41:53 So if I’m having a bit of like a naughty day, you know,
1:41:54 if I’m like breaking all my rules.
1:41:55 Don’t exercise.
1:41:57 Interesting.
1:42:00 And then if I’m having a great day,
1:42:02 like I’m eating really, really healthy
1:42:04 and everything’s going on sleeping well.
1:42:06 Here’s the thing, eating might be the exception.
1:42:09 The data also show that if you, like imagine,
1:42:11 you stuff your face full of fatty foods
1:42:12 and all that kind of stuff,
1:42:13 exercise exactly what you should be doing now
1:42:14 after you eat.
1:42:18 Use the fuel you process.
1:42:19 Don’t just store it.
1:42:23 And so food is something we need.
1:42:24 Too much food is obviously a bad thing,
1:42:27 but I don’t count food in the naughty behavior list.
1:42:30 And so I haven’t actually, everybody eats every day
1:42:32 and I don’t have good data on how much they’ve eaten.
1:42:36 But what our data do suggest is that going for a walk,
1:42:38 even just a walk, like zone two is fabulous.
1:42:39 Even zone one is good.
1:42:41 Going for a walk, doing stuff after you eat
1:42:42 helps you just feel better.
1:42:45 And I’m guessing here that what you saw in the data is,
1:42:49 you could look at someone who is drinking alcohol every day,
1:42:51 for example, and then you could see on the days
1:42:55 that they exercised as well, the impact of the alcohol
1:42:58 on their biomarkers was more significant.
1:42:59 Yes.
1:43:00 And what we have is fortune.
1:43:02 We’ve got thousands and thousands of people.
1:43:05 So big data sets who log alcohol relatively often.
1:43:06 They don’t drink every day.
1:43:08 And I can even show you what the pattern looks like.
1:43:10 People don’t drink much Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
1:43:11 Thursday, they have a drink or two.
1:43:13 You know, Friday more, Saturday and Sunday more,
1:43:14 and then go back.
1:43:17 But they also exercise at different points across the week.
1:43:18 And so some people, those two things
1:43:20 happen to hit at the same time.
1:43:22 And sometimes they don’t.
1:43:23 And what I try to do in these analyses,
1:43:25 what we all try to do in these analyses,
1:43:27 is look within person.
1:43:28 Because if you’re the kind of person
1:43:30 who exercises when you drink and I’m not,
1:43:32 well, who knows what else differs between us.
1:43:34 So what I really want to know is what does Stephen look like
1:43:37 when he drinks two drinks on days that he also exercised,
1:43:39 the same as usual, less than usual, more than usual.
1:43:42 We want to make it all against what you usually do.
1:43:44 And there we see these effects very clearly.
1:43:47 Are there any other cool answers you’ve discovered
1:43:47 in your time at Weep?
1:43:51 You know, if you look at how much sleep people need,
1:43:54 the argument is everybody needs the same, basically,
1:43:56 on average, right?
1:43:57 But some people need a little less,
1:43:59 and some people need a little more.
1:44:00 I think men need less sleep than women.
1:44:03 I don’t know that yet,
1:44:04 but there’s lots of reasons to think that.
1:44:06 First of all, hunter-gatherers,
1:44:08 when you look at the data they’ve gathered with Actograph,
1:44:11 where they put a motion capture on hunter-gatherers,
1:44:13 the men sleep about 20 minutes less than the women do.
1:44:17 Now, that’s not significant in their samples,
1:44:19 because they have small samples of hunter-gathers.
1:44:21 When we put these things on zillions of people,
1:44:23 we see men sleep about 20 minutes less than women do.
1:44:24 When you put the loop on.
1:44:24 Yeah.
1:44:27 And so we see the exact same thing they see,
1:44:29 but it’s wildly statistically significant in our dataset,
1:44:31 because it’s so huge, 20 minutes is a lot.
1:44:32 Now, here’s the thing.
1:44:34 If men don’t need as much sleep as women,
1:44:35 why is that the case?
1:44:37 So recently, now this hot off the press,
1:44:38 I can’t promise you I’m doing it right,
1:44:39 but I believe I am.
1:44:43 Our data suggests men sleep more impactfully,
1:44:44 more effectively than women.
1:44:46 That for every hour of sleep that a man gets,
1:44:48 he gets a little more bang for the buck
1:44:49 on his recovery than women get.
1:44:51 I have no idea why that might be.
1:44:54 It could be they have bigger slow ways
1:44:55 when they’re in slow way sleep.
1:44:57 It could be a thousand different things.
1:45:00 I don’t know, but what my data suggests
1:45:02 is that men get more bang for the buck
1:45:03 out of every hour of sleep,
1:45:05 and as a consequence, they sleep about 20 minutes less.
1:45:07 That’s right off the press.
1:45:09 I can’t even promise you that holds up.
1:45:13 If I, it holds up, I’ve looked at it in two samples,
1:45:14 but I could be making a mistake.
1:45:15 I want to play with it more.
1:45:17 I am, I was just, I just did some research
1:45:20 as you were explaining that also really interesting finding
1:45:23 or hypothesis on the previous one,
1:45:26 which is about why if I drank alcohol
1:45:28 on a day when I exercised,
1:45:32 it would cause my biomarkers to have a reflect
1:45:33 a worse sort of state.
1:45:35 And it says on days when you both drink alcohol
1:45:38 and exercise, the combined psychological stresses
1:45:41 can lead to alterations in your biomarkers
1:45:43 reflecting increased oxidative stress,
1:45:46 liver strain, dehydration, and inflammation.
1:45:49 In contrast, on days when you consume alcohol
1:45:51 without exercising, these effects might be less pronounced
1:45:53 resulting in different biomarker profiles.
1:45:55 I think that’s super possible.
1:45:57 Yeah, it’s, it’s very possible.
1:45:58 That could be the mechanism.
1:46:01 The, it could be all about hydration.
1:46:04 And so all you got to do is be doubly conscientious
1:46:06 about hydrating and then problem solved.
1:46:07 But here’s the thing.
1:46:10 Every negative thing I’ve looked at has gotten worse
1:46:12 when it’s, when you exercise
1:46:14 and every positive thing I’ve looked at has gotten better.
1:46:16 So it may be as simple as,
1:46:19 as something very specific with alcohol and exercise,
1:46:21 but it may be there’s a broader principle at play.
1:46:23 And so somebody out there who’s super smart,
1:46:25 like Trivers came along and lined up
1:46:27 how every animal mating system worked.
1:46:28 He says, look, here’s how it works.
1:46:30 Females make the larger sex cell.
1:46:32 They typically then put more effort into it.
1:46:34 So males compete for females.
1:46:34 And then low and behold,
1:46:36 you see that across the animal kingdom
1:46:38 and the rare exceptions where males put more effort,
1:46:40 now the females compete for the males.
1:46:43 So, you know, somebody’s going to come along super smart
1:46:44 and they’ll hear what I just said and they go,
1:46:46 I know what the answer is to that, but I don’t know.
1:46:50 And the beauty is that when I hear a scientific explanation
1:46:52 that nails that I immediately go, oh, that’s it.
1:46:53 And I wish I thought of it,
1:46:55 but at least I can see that they’ve,
1:46:57 they’ve got the answer when I, you know, didn’t.
1:46:59 Is there anything else?
1:47:03 One last thing from your work as a senior scientist at Woop,
1:47:06 that is intriguing to you or any hypotheses you have
1:47:08 that you’re discovering from the data?
1:47:10 Well, so we’re seeing lots of nice evidence
1:47:11 of a couple of different things.
1:47:14 First of all, there’s a lot of little things that help a lot.
1:47:16 And I’m a big believer in lots of little things helping a lot,
1:47:18 but they have to suit you
1:47:20 because we also find huge individual variability
1:47:21 on how well they work.
1:47:23 So reading in bed, on average,
1:47:24 actually not only helps you sleep,
1:47:25 fall asleep more regularly,
1:47:27 but it even helps you sleep longer.
1:47:28 I suspect, but don’t know,
1:47:30 that you’re clearing your mind of the day’s worries.
1:47:33 That probably works for some people,
1:47:34 but some people probably works the opposite.
1:47:36 Like now they get caught up in the novel,
1:47:37 they’re reading and they can’t sleep.
1:47:40 So you have to be super thoughtful about what works for you.
1:47:41 CBD works really well,
1:47:43 but it actually works for some people really well
1:47:44 and for others it even has a negative effect.
1:47:46 You know, our samples are big enough
1:47:48 that we can see across the board.
1:47:51 We find things like a weighted blanket,
1:47:54 blue light blockers in the evening,
1:47:55 dimming your lights in the evening,
1:47:56 those are big.
1:47:58 They have big effects across the course of the night.
1:48:00 By big, I mean like 15, 20 minutes of more sleep,
1:48:02 more time in REM and slow wave.
1:48:03 You add all these things together,
1:48:05 it ends up being a lot.
1:48:05 Wow.
1:48:07 The final thing that we find is
1:48:09 a lot of people have sleep worries.
1:48:11 You know, they worry they won’t sleep well.
1:48:12 And the downside of that is that
1:48:14 if you have sleep worries,
1:48:16 what ends up happening is they get produced
1:48:17 by your poor sleep.
1:48:19 Like I think, gee, I’m gonna have trouble falling asleep
1:48:20 because lo and behold, I did.
1:48:21 But then when we analyze the data,
1:48:23 we’ve run these surveys where we ask,
1:48:25 what was your worry going into the night?
1:48:26 And when you woke up in the morning,
1:48:29 how did it go and what role did your worries play, et cetera?
1:48:30 And when we disentangle it,
1:48:33 we see that the worries start to cause their own problems.
1:48:36 They, the worries themselves make it harder to sleep.
1:48:39 And so if you could find ways to short-circuit those worries,
1:48:41 again, things like reading in bed,
1:48:43 whatever it is to get your mind elsewhere,
1:48:44 it’s gonna be beneficial.
1:48:47 Is there much data on coffee and the impact that that has?
1:48:49 Coffee actually overall is not bad.
1:48:51 You don’t wanna do it too late in the day.
1:48:52 And some people can,
1:48:53 friends who can drink a coffee at dinner
1:48:54 and go right to sleep.
1:48:55 So it’s not everybody,
1:48:56 but some people after 2 p.m.,
1:48:59 it can be pretty disruptive for some people.
1:49:01 And what we’d also advise is when you’re eating,
1:49:02 try to restrict that to daylight hours.
1:49:04 That seems to make a big difference.
1:49:05 It’s, you know, your body,
1:49:07 you’re trying to get parasympathetic dominance
1:49:08 when you go to sleep.
1:49:09 And if you’ve got food in there,
1:49:10 your body’s working hard to digest it,
1:49:11 and that makes it difficult.
1:49:14 What’s the most important thing in your book,
1:49:15 The Social Paradox,
1:49:19 when finding what you want means losing what you need?
1:49:21 That we haven’t talked about.
1:49:23 That is important for someone who’s listening
1:49:24 that wants to improve their life
1:49:26 and increase their probability of happiness.
1:49:30 So the last thing I would say is that we haven’t covered
1:49:32 is that, all right,
1:49:34 so I’m arguing you need to increase your sociality.
1:49:36 And I’m arguing that your socialness,
1:49:38 you need to be more social, more connected.
1:49:40 And I’m arguing that we’re too autonomous.
1:49:42 But that’s a big ask.
1:49:43 And I remember reading this article
1:49:44 in The New York Times about this guy,
1:49:46 he wrote an op-ed piece about it.
1:49:48 He decided to reconnect with all of his old friends.
1:49:49 And so he’s calling them up and finding them,
1:49:51 and they’re getting together.
1:49:52 And then he answered by saying,
1:49:53 am I going to keep this up every week?
1:49:55 No, I just don’t have time.
1:49:58 And that’s really, really an important lesson
1:50:00 that we lead these busy lives
1:50:02 that are not the same as hunter-gatherers.
1:50:04 We have so many things that we can do
1:50:05 and are meant to be doing
1:50:10 that we can’t just introduce social and social connection
1:50:12 into our life willy-nilly, or we won’t keep it up.
1:50:14 We have to be socratic and know yourself
1:50:16 and know your weaknesses
1:50:18 and know what you’re going to sustain and what you’re not.
1:50:21 And from my perspective, that means two things.
1:50:24 One, trying to say, well, whenever I do something alone,
1:50:25 that I’m doing something I enjoy,
1:50:27 like maybe the crossword puzzle or running
1:50:29 or whatever your thing is,
1:50:30 is there a way to do that with others?
1:50:33 Don’t, you know, match my connection need
1:50:34 with my autonomy need.
1:50:35 I want to do that.
1:50:36 That’s my autonomy speaking.
1:50:39 But are there others who want to do it or I can do it with?
1:50:41 So in my case, I love to do the New York Times puzzle.
1:50:42 My sister lives in London.
1:50:45 So we reconnect in a way that we just weren’t doing before
1:50:46 because we’re both busy.
1:50:47 But we’re both doing the puzzle anyway,
1:50:48 so why not do that?
1:50:51 If you have to decide to do something,
1:50:52 every single time you do it, you just won’t do it.
1:50:56 You want to surrender control of that decision-making process
1:50:59 to either your past or to the environment itself,
1:51:01 by which I mean in the same way that we say,
1:51:03 I’ll brush my teeth after breakfast.
1:51:05 We don’t say, I wonder if I should brush my teeth today.
1:51:07 We just know I eat breakfast, then I brush.
1:51:08 You want to do the same thing.
1:51:10 Oh, after breakfast, I’ll call my sister
1:51:11 and we’ll do the puzzle together.
1:51:14 You want to set rule so you don’t have to decide to do it.
1:51:16 And then these things become habit.
1:51:19 And so what I want to argue is that people
1:51:20 should reintroduce connection
1:51:22 by trying not to do things alone,
1:51:23 but they should do it in the easiest way possible
1:51:25 in the way that’s most likely to become habitual
1:51:28 and that doesn’t actually add more time to their busy day.
1:51:29 And it’s surprisingly doable.
1:51:31 William, thank you.
1:51:34 We have a closing tradition on this podcast
1:51:36 where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.
1:51:36 Uh-oh.
1:51:38 Not knowing who they’re leaving it for.
1:51:41 And so this question’s going to come out on left field.
1:51:42 Probably, yeah.
1:51:45 You’re given the chance, plus the power,
1:51:49 to do one thing to save humanity,
1:51:51 plus make everyone happy.
1:51:52 What would that be?
1:51:56 If I had one chance to do one thing.
1:51:57 To save humanity.
1:51:58 To save humanity.
1:52:00 I would, and I’m magic, right?
1:52:01 I can make it whatever I want.
1:52:02 Whatever you want.
1:52:05 Um, I would make sure that there’s perfect justice.
1:52:08 Because if there’s perfect justice,
1:52:11 then everybody who misbehaves does wrong by somebody else.
1:52:13 It knows that they’re going to get,
1:52:15 that there’ll be consequences for that behavior.
1:52:17 Because I think that the one thing that humanity’s
1:52:18 not going to get its way out of
1:52:21 is people being horrible to other people.
1:52:23 But if there’s perfect justice,
1:52:25 everybody who’s horrible to somebody else is going to get there.
1:52:27 And it doesn’t, I don’t mean justice when you die.
1:52:28 I mean justice in real time.
1:52:29 They’re going to stop doing that,
1:52:31 and people will just be better to each other.
1:52:34 What would be the cost of that?
1:52:36 Because there’s always a cost, right?
1:52:37 The cost of that is that,
1:52:39 well look, you can’t get away with anything anymore.
1:52:41 I get away with a lot of little things,
1:52:43 like I speed all the time.
1:52:45 And I do it because I know I can get away with it.
1:52:47 And I like doing that.
1:52:50 But I think the perfect justice would have the advantage
1:52:51 that it’s harm to others.
1:52:54 See, in the past, we cared about property crimes a lot
1:52:55 and not so much harm to others.
1:52:57 I would want in this world that
1:52:59 the perfect justice comes with harm to others.
1:53:01 Okay, but with justice,
1:53:04 there’s a subjective element, right, to what is just.
1:53:05 Because if you look back through history,
1:53:07 what we thought was just– That’s true, you’re absolutely right.
1:53:09 And so the cost might be missing the mark.
1:53:12 We might, as a human population today,
1:53:15 come up with a consensual decision about what justice is,
1:53:16 that a thousand years from now they look back
1:53:18 and they’re utterly appalled that that was what we were doing.
1:53:20 Which is what we look back at. Exactly.
1:53:22 200 years ago, justice, what the fuck?
1:53:23 Yeah, what the hell was that?
1:53:24 Thank you so much, William.
1:53:25 Thank you for writing an incredible book.
1:53:28 Your first book here, called The Social Leap,
1:53:31 was a smash hit and is an extraordinary book.
1:53:34 But this book is exceptional.
1:53:35 And it’s exceptionally timed.
1:53:37 I think that has to be said.
1:53:38 Because where the world is at the moment,
1:53:41 it feels like we’re drifting to some degree.
1:53:46 It feels like we’re drifting from the island,
1:53:47 where our tribe are.
1:53:49 And we’re getting further and further away
1:53:51 from knowing exactly what it is to be human.
1:53:53 I think we’re feeling the consequences of that
1:53:54 if you look at a lot of the data.
1:53:56 We’re feeling we have the mental health crisis
1:53:59 around the world, the increase in suicidal ideation
1:54:02 and suicide, the increase in purposelessness,
1:54:05 the increase in opioid addictions and things like that.
1:54:09 And I don’t think anybody could make the case,
1:54:11 in a way that’s founded on what we’re seeing,
1:54:14 that we’re any closer to being human,
1:54:16 or whatever that means than we’ve ever been.
1:54:18 And this book, I think, helps us to course correct,
1:54:20 it helps us to understand it turns the lights on.
1:54:22 And as it says on the front,
1:54:26 it helps us to understand that there’s this important balance
1:54:27 between autonomy and connection.
1:54:29 We need both of them,
1:54:31 but we need to get the balance correct.
1:54:33 And many of us, including myself,
1:54:37 know deep inside that maybe we’re not getting that balance correct.
1:54:38 And this is why this book is so wonderful,
1:54:41 because it’s confronting in the nicest possible way,
1:54:42 and in an important way.
1:54:44 So I highly recommend everybody give it a read.
1:54:45 It’s called The Social Paradox
1:54:48 when finding what you want means losing what you need.
1:54:51 By William Von Hippel.
1:54:52 Thank you.
1:54:53 Thank you, Stephen.
1:54:55 I really enjoyed chatting with you about it.
1:54:55 I can’t wait.
1:54:56 I can’t wait for people to read it
1:54:57 and to send me lots of messages.
1:54:58 Thank you so much.
1:54:59 I appreciate you.
1:54:59 Thank you.
1:55:00 Totally my pleasure.
1:55:03 This has always blown my mind a little bit.
1:55:06 53% of you that listen to this show regularly
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1:55:53 [Music]