Bill von Hippel: Behavioural Psychologist: We're Not Having Enough Sex! Fat Makes You Attractive & The Poorer You Are The Friendlier You Are!
Guests: Bill von Hippel
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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Do you believe robots are going to raise our kids?
Because it feels like a slippery slope.
Well, it's not too far away from us, and we never evolved to want children.
Look, fertility rates are going way down, and a lot of countries are going to be literally half their size by the year 2100 because they're shrinking so fast.
And the list is really long about how hard it is to raise the child in today's world.
So you want to make having kids to be as much of the plus as it possibly can be.
And with the perfect robot, man, you would never worry at all.
Interesting.
Dr.
William Von Hippel is the world-renowned evolutionary psychologist who has spent decades studying and finding the answers to how instincts that once helped our ancestors survive still drive us today, often in ways we don't even realize.
As a species, what are we getting wrong?
Well, young people are having less sex than they were 20 years ago.
Marriage is steadily going down.
And our lives are so much better, but we're not any happier.
And part of the problem is that we're constantly choosing to do our own thing rather than connect.
So here's the data.
In 1850, one in a hundred Americans lived alone.
Now it's one in seven.
In the 1970s, one in three people spent time with their neighbor.
Now that's completely reversed.
Now, let's dive a little deeper.
50% of humanity now lives in the city.
And they're about 25% wealthier than people who live in the country.
And yet the data shows people in the country are happier because cities are all about I want to do what I want.
And the problem is that we can't introduce social connection into our life willy-nilly or we won't keep it up.
So what do we do about that?
Two things.
One.
And then what does evolution tell us about how to attract the opposite sex?
You want honest signals of quality.
And bizarrely, one of the clearest honest signals for men to demonstrate for women is...
I have been forced into a bet with my team.
We're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube, which is our biggest milestone ever, thanks to all of you.
And we want to have a massive party for the people that have worked on this show for years behind the scenes.
So they said to me, Steve, for every new subscriber we get in the next 30 days, can $1 be given to our celebration fund for the entire team?
And I've agreed to the bet.
So if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes at Diary of a CEO, all you've got to do is hit the subscribe button.
So actually, this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe because it might end up costing me an awful...
Dr.
William von Hippel.
What have you spent the last four decades of your life doing?
Oh, mostly in the lab trying to figure out why humans do what they do.
What do you mean by why we do what we do?
Well, I'm super interested in not just what we do, but what the underlying cause might be.
You know, why does having a nice dinner with your friends make you happy?
It just seems inherently obvious.
Well, of course it does.
But there's got to be a reason for that.
And there's got to be a reason that it's very different if it's not with your friends or if it's different kinds of foods or, you know, the list goes on.
It could be anything.
And so what I try to do is I look into our evolutionary history.
I say, how did we get here?
What were the factors that made us success?
And the things that made us successful are likely to, as a species, are likely to be the things that make us happy.
Because happiness is one of the tools that evolution uses to guide us in the direction that it wants us to go.
You know, evolution has no foresight.
But evolution...
Shapes us the way we are and the things that make us successful, those ancestors who enjoy doing those things are going to be the ancestors who have more kids than the ancestors who enjoy doing things that were bad for them.
What is evolution?
So evolution is this mindless process.
And all it is is if it's the case that not everybody has the exact same number of kids, and if it's the case that not everybody's kids survive at the exact same number of kids,
Same rates.
Now we have room for evolution because there's variability.
Something about me caused me to have lots of children that survived in the next generation.
And something about this other guy caused him not to have any, maybe.
And so whatever there is about me that's heritable will be well represented in the next generation.
And about him, poor guy, even if he's wonderful.
Those traits are gone.
And so evolution just works with whatever's there and the things that make you a success, either because they're just useful in that environment or they're a new mutation that turns out to have great value, they become overrepresented in the gene pool.
And so evolution can create things that are species typical.
All of our species have that.
We all have two eyes.
You know, that's just...
Part and parcel of being human, and then it can make variability within humans.
And there's tons of variability in our size, our stature, all sorts of things about us.
And why should we look at evolution for answers on human happiness and success and as a sort of a guiding compass for what we should be doing with our lives?
Why is evolution a place to look?
There's lots of tiny answers to that question, but they don't necessarily link together very well.
So people say, you've probably heard, oh, express gratitude.
That'll make you happy if you express gratitude.
Why?
Why should that make you happy?
If there's a good reason for it, then it makes sense that we should do it and it should have some kind of a lasting effect.
And so every single thing that people tell you, this will make you happy, there has to have been a reason.
It must have done something for our ancestors.
Or it's what my colleague Robert Trivers calls a phenotypic indulgence, which means it mimics something that was
Good for our ancestors.
So, for example, you know, video games are pretty novel, right?
They may mimic things that were super important for our ancestors and give us the same endorphin rush or whatever, even though they're not actually necessarily good for us anymore.
Junk food is the same.
It's loaded with fat, salt, sugar.
Those are the kinds of things that our ancestors saw all the time.
We don't need them anymore, but...
But they were super important back then.
And so it makes us happy when we eat those things.
As an evolutionary psychologist and someone who understands where we've come from and therefore our sort of innate behaviours and needs and desires and so on, what are the things that we're getting wrong as a species at the moment from your view?
So the big thing that I think we're getting wrong is the balance that we maintain between autonomy and connection.
And we can talk about why this is, but the big thing that we've got wrong right now is doing what I want to do right now rather than connecting.
Autonomy is all about self-governance.
What do I feel like doing right now?
And everybody's going off in their own direction.
And this is not good for us.
It's not good for our happiness.
It's not good for us in a host of different ways.
That mistake is particularly problematic if you live in the West, if you're well-educated, and if you live in cities, and if you're wealthy.
So if you're Western, wealthy, urbanite, well-educated, you've got that problem in spades.
And by autonomy, you mean the sort of individualism where I don't need anybody anymore.
It's about me.
It's about my gratification, what I want now versus others and a community, a tribe.
That's right.
And it doesn't.
It doesn't even need to feel like a big thing.
It's just, let's say you and I are buddies and we're going to go to a movie and you say, I really want to hit a rom-com.
And I'm like, I really want to see an action movie.
We go, okay, I'll see you at the movies over.
We just go our own ways.
And so it can be trivial little things, but it's across our lives.
We're continually setting aside our connections to do what we want.
And what are some of the sort of stats that illuminate this problem, that make it clear that this is actually happening, in your view?
So there's a number of them.
You can look at the propensity of Americans to live alone.
We've got good data in the States, but the picture is the same in every industrialized country.
In 1850, 1% of Americans lived alone.
Now it's one in 100.
Now it's one in seven.
So, you know, here we are 170 years later, 175 years later, and it used to be crazy rare.
And now it's one in seven is pretty darn common.
If you look in the 1970s, when I was a kid, about 30% of people saw their neighbors, got together with their neighbors, not visually seeing them, but got together with their neighbors at least a few times a week.
And only one in five pretty much never saw their neighbors at all.
Now that's completely reversed.
Now only one in five are seeing their neighbors regularly.
It used to be one in three.
And now one in three never get together with their neighbors at all.
So we're moving away from each other in a host of different ways.
Even married couples are spending less time together.
It's weird.
We don't understand what they're doing.
But what I suspect is happening is that, let's say that you both want to exercise and she kind of likes to jog and you kind of like to jog.
Lift weights.
We used to sort of do those together, off for a jog and then a little weightlifting.
But now with 10 zillion options, you go to your gym and she goes to hers, and you just don't see each other as much as you used to.
So across our lives, we're spending far more time alone.
And if you look at marriage and cohabitation, in some parts of the world, they haven't changed at all.
But in the wealthy parts,
United States, Western Europe, they're steadily going down.
So it's not just, well, people aren't getting married because they're living together outside of marriage.
If you lump all those together, they're steadily going down over the last 50 years.
And why does that matter?
Well, the question is, first on the one hand, it's not a problem at all.
Vote with your feet.
Do what you want, of course, right?
But on the other hand, what if it's making you unhappy?
What if you think you're doing this because it's going to make you happy, but in fact you're wrong and you keep making decisions over and over again that make you increasingly less happy?
And that's what I think is happening here.
I think every one of those decisions is an error.
And are there any stats or data that proves that we're getting this wrong in terms of happiness?
Are there other tribes or communities or people in history that were doing it differently and had higher rates of happiness?
So the best example in my mind is if you look at hunter-gatherers.
And so there's a team that went to the Hadza, people who live outside, would live in Kenya and Tanzania.
They're as close as we know to what our ancestors would look like.
And in my mind, they're perfect because they're also where it all happened.
The Hadza still lived where humanity evolved.
So, of course, it could have been different a quarter million years ago, but it could have been exactly the same.
Like they live today.
And so when you look at the Hadza, this particular team asked them, over the last week, have you been happy?
Sometimes happy and sometimes sad?
Sad.
Over 90% of the Hadza said happy.
That was their answer.
When you ask Westerners that same question, you get about 50% will say happy over the last week.
And so the data suggests the Hadza are literally happier than we are.
Now, they bury almost half their children.
They live a life where they've got no savings whatsoever.
They've got nothing in the bank.
They don't know what tomorrow's going to bring.
They don't know if tomorrow's hunt's going to be successful.
They have so many cultural rules that they have to abide by that requires them to be constantly connected with each other because they rely on each other like an insurance policy.
And yet...
They look a lot happier than we are.
Now, we can see those same stats in different modern contexts.
But in my mind, that's the stat that blows me away.
And why do you think they are happier than us?
You think it's because they're living in tribes and groups, or is it something else?
Well, I think it's the balance that they've struck.
And I think it's that balance between connection and autonomy.
And so that's really the focus of my second book.
So I'll tell you how I got there.
How's that?
So I'm visiting a friend of mine, also named Stephen, and he struck it rich.
And he invites me over.
I'm like, this is going to be cool.
§02Transcript — part 2
I'm going to see how the super rich live.
And it was over the top.
You know, this monumentally huge apartment, beautiful view, cooks over there, maids over there, et cetera.
And so I turned to him, I'm like, Steve, man, your life is over the top.
And he's like, yeah, it seems that way.
It's just not.
And I'm like, seriously?
And he goes, yeah, I'm no happier than I used to be.
And he starts listing off all the problems that he's facing.
And I'm like, how could this person not appreciate these amazing benefits that he has?
How is it even possible that a person could have so much and not just feel happy about it every day?
And I have to admit, I felt the sense of superiority.
I thought to myself, if I were crazy rich like you were, I'd be happy every day.
I would appreciate this lifestyle that I had earned rather than just taking it for granted.
So then...
Fast forward a few years.
This is a decade or so ago.
Fast forward a few years, and I'm reading Frank Marlowe's wonderful book on the Hadza.
And I'm reading about their lives and how content they are.
And I'm like, holy cow, I'm just like my friend Steve.
Compared to them, I'm a multimillionaire.
I don't, when my kids get sick, I'm off to the doctor immediately.
I don't have this horrible life where I bury my own children.
I have savings.
I don't have to worry about tomorrow.
I get up and get something out of the fridge.
I'm comfortable when it's hot.
I'm comfortable when it's cold.
The list goes on.
Compared to them, I'm a zillionaire.
And yet, they're probably happier than we are.
And so I realized it's not just Steve, it's all of us.
You know, we're failing to appreciate this amazing modern world we live in.
And, you know, even if we look back 100 years, 100 years ago, a quarter of the children died by, 150 years ago, a quarter of the children died by the time they turned five.
You know, you got the flu or you got, you know, typhus.
There was a zillion diseases that just killed us when we were young.
Women died in childbirth at rates way skyrocketed compared to today.
So it's not just looking back at our togetherness, but even looking at our togetherness.
Looking back recently, our lives are so much better, but we're not any happier.
If anything, I think we're maybe a little less happy.
And is that just because we don't take a moment to be grateful?
Or is there something fundamental about the way we're pursuing happiness?
Look, I think it's multi-causal.
Whenever you get a big effect like that, like if you take those data seriously that I told you about the Hadza, they're basically twice as happy as we are.
Now, that's such a big effect.
It has to be multi-causal.
There has to be a lot going on there.
And of course, these changes happen over generations.
They don't happen overnight.
If they happen overnight, I think it'd be super obvious to us what had gone wrong.
But I think what it returns us to is this problem that we were talking about before, about autonomy and connection.
And so let's take city living as a for example.
I remember earlier I said that cities are about 5,000 years old.
So human beings have been moving to cities for 5,000 years.
By 1960, you had one people out of every three living in cities in the world.
And by 2007 was the year we crossed over.
50% of humanity now lives in the city.
So people have been voting with their feet for a long time, but by long time I mean 100 and so years.
And mass moving to cities.
Now, there's lots of reasons for it.
We can talk about it.
But one of the costs is happiness.
If you look at happiness and you divide people up by where they live in cities, communities over a quarter million, or in the country, communities less than 2,500 people, they're happier in the country than they are in the city.
Which is a remarkable fact, in part because they're all
So poorer in the country.
People who live in cities in the United States, for example, are about 25% wealthier than people who live in the country.
Some of that gets burned on expensive city living, but far from all of it.
And so you're literally poorer in the country, but happier.
And that's this graph here from your book, percentage of Americans who are very happy or not too happy in urban and rural communities.
That's right.
And it shows that people are pretty significantly happier in rural areas and report having less unhappiness in rural areas.
Which is remarkable because there's so many opportunities in cities.
People have been voting with their feet for over 100 years and arguably for 5,000 years, moving to cities, and yet it's making them less happy.
And so in my mind, this is another symptom of the same exact problem we've been talking about, which is cities are all about autonomy.
Cities are about opportunity.
If I go to a city, I can get any kind of education I want.
I can have any kind of job that I want.
And so people are drawn to cities.
And in fact, I'll make more money.
The data are very clear.
But I'm going to pay a price.
And people don't even realize the price they're paying.
What is the price that we pay?
We become more isolated.
Yeah, bizarrely, we become more isolated because in the city, you've got a thousand people right next to you, right?
You're cheek by jowl with your neighbor.
You're in an apartment building and there's somebody on your left, somebody on your right, somebody above you, somebody below you.
But what are your chances of even know that person?
So if you ask people, there's a couple ways you can ask the question.
If you say, do you know someone well enough that you trust them with your house keys?
You're more likely to give that answer a yes in the country than you are in the city.
Even though in the country, probably your nearest neighbor is a long way down the road, whereas in the city, your nearest neighbor is five feet away.
That person five feet away, in principle, you ought to be good buddies with.
Or if you don't like that person, there's somebody else in your building you ought to be good buddies with.
But we're just not.
Whereas in the country, we connect with each other.
Similarly, if you say, how satisfied are you with your friendships?
People are more satisfied with their friendships in the country than they are in the city.
There was a graph that I saw, I think it was in your book, the percentage of Americans who spend evenings with neighbors at different frequencies by income.
And it basically shows that the more money you have, the less time you spend with your neighbors.
Yeah, which is amazing, right?
And so the thing is that the problem is that if you're rich, you don't need your neighbors.
You know, if I'm out of coffee beans, I want to borrow some, I can just drone them in or whatever.
I can call Instacart or whatever, whoever your favorite delivery program is.
But if you're poor, you can't afford to do that.
And so poor people literally need each other.
They live in these neighborhoods, in these complex webs of interdependence where they borrow each other's tools.
They look out for each other's kids.
They look out for each other's pets because they can't afford to outsource any of that.
And that's actually how humans evolved.
We evolved to need each other all the time.
And so ironically, although rich people are happier than poor people, so it's not giving away all your material goods will not make you happy.
Nonetheless, poor people are happier with their friendships.
They're more likely to get together with their neighbors.
And we see the exact same effect with education as well.
The more educated you are, the less you get together with your neighbors.
But of course, wealth and education tend to go hand in hand in our society.
So money does make you happy.
It's a funny thing.
So money makes you a lot happier in real time.
So if you start to make more money, you get happier.
And the more important money is to you, the bigger that effect is.
And it keeps going well past where we thought it did.
We used to think it's ceiling at around $100,000 a year.
It doesn't.
Past $600,000 a year, money still makes you happier.
It's remarkable.
It makes a difference.
But...
There's this thing known as the Easterlin Paradox, and that is that as society gets richer, people get no happier.
So if you look at the United States going back to around 1940, people earned about a third what they earn today in real terms.
So we're three times richer than we used to be.
And we've been measuring happiness in the United States since the 1940s on representative samples, so we know that that holds true for the whole country.
We know what the country looks like.
It hasn't moved an inch.
So real terms, money, gone way up.
Happiness, exactly flat.
So what is the perfect combination to achieve happiness in that regard then?
Wealth does matter, but something else matters as well, which we tend to abandon when we get wealth.
Well, the problem is this.
There's a couple of things.
First, we can come back to the big issue, which I think is this balance.
That's the underlying issue why I think hunter-gatherers are happier than we are, is this balance that they maintain between autonomy and connection, which we can return to.
But in direct answer to your question, part of the problem with humans is that
We're this wonderful species in many ways that we can avoid the zero-sum game that is life.
And by zero-sum game, I mean that...
My gain is your loss.
Like there's only so many goods out there.
And for me to have more means you have to have less.
And in the animal world, lots of the world works that way.
And they're able to cooperate with each other when they can create positive some relationships.
So, for example, vampire bats, they go out and they try to get blood from large animals, like land on their back, bite them a little bit and leave, drink a little bit of their blood.
If they don't get any food at all at night, they're at risk of starvation within just a few nights.
And so if I've come back and I got nothing and you were successful, I'll beg to you.
And if we're friends, you'll regurgitate a little bit of the blood for me.
Now, if you weren't successful, even if we're best mates, there's nothing you can do for me.
Now, if you think about the way humans give things to each other, it's sometimes goods.
But we're this different animal.
We're this cognitive animal.
We're an animal where information has enormous value.
And information, I can give it to you without losing any of it myself.
And so we create these relationships with each other where we don't even need to worry about reciprocation.
We can do things for each other all the time.
They're crazy easy to do because they don't require me to give you anything.
I still have the information I told you.
So we already have this advantage over the animal kingdom, but we're still animals.
And one of the ways that we're still animals is that we're still zero-sum in the sense of, well, what about our status?
Who's going to get picked for the mating relationships?
Who's going to get picked to be on the teams?
And there it always comes down to, well, who's at the top of the local heap and who's at the bottom of the local heap?
And so in our ancestral communities, that would be...
A very small group of hunter-gatherers.
All I had to do was be valuable or better than you guys in something.
In our world today, it's awfully hard to be better than everybody.
And money is one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to do it because everyone can see it.
And so even though money doesn't make us happy, as the whole country is three times richer, we're no happier.
If I'm richer than you, I am happier than you because that's one way that I can be higher in status.
And so then maybe I can steal your girlfriend.
Or maybe the guys who are in your group who I really want to be in my group are going to say, hey, Bill's cooler than Steven.
I'm going with him.
And so status matters.
It's a process of sexual selection whereby both sexes are always trying to get the best partner they can of the opposite sex.
And so they're competing with each other.
Men compete with men to try to have women choose them.
Women compete with women to try to have men choose them.
And that's a zero-sum status game.
And what does evolution tell us about that competitive sort of dating game?
What does it tell us if I'm trying to be attractive as a man?
What do I need to be demonstrating in order to attract the opposite sex as a human?
Yeah, so what you want are what we call honest signals of quality.
And the thing is that...
we've all evolved to look through fake signals.
And so lots of animals will pretend to be things that they aren't.
They puff up their chest or raise up their shackles or do something to look big and intimidating.
We all, we have human ways of doing that too.
But in humans, bizarrely, well, in all animals, actually, one of the clearest honest signals for men to demonstrate for women is what is risk-taking.
Now, that seems bizarre.
Why would taking a risk attract females?
Well, it attracts females because there's two outcomes when you take a risk.
You either succeed, showing just how skilled you are at whatever the domain is, or you fail and either turn into a road rash, and therefore you've removed yourself from the gene pool, or you bounce right back up because you're such a robust organism.
§03Transcript — part 3
In either case, you're demonstrating that's an honest signal of quality.
When we follow the data over time, we see that high testosterone men are more likely to pair up.
They take these risks.
Women find them attractive at some level, even if they don't personally feel like it's attractive at the moment.
But something about that is attractive to them.
And it may only be getting other men to back off.
When I take these big risks, you may say, well, I'm not going to try to crowd in on Bill's scene.
He's too tough.
We don't know with certainty.
But they take these risks.
And then once they partner up, then their testosterone levels go back down.
Because once you have a family, taking risks is foolish.
You want to take risks to get in the mating game, but you don't want to keep taking risks once you've got people depending on you.
So I've got honest signals of, did you say quality?
Yeah.
One of the signals of quality is being attractive as a man.
I've got risk-taking.
What else?
Things like physical size is an honest signal of quality.
Things like wealth.
If you earned all that money, you know, there's inherited wealth.
We live in this kind of funny world, but it still gives you all the advantages of wealth if you earned it yourself.
There's ambition, things like that.
People look for ambition because if you are out there working hard all the time, it's an honest signal that you're going to probably continue to do that.
For somebody, et cetera.
I often think about like personality and why is humor a attractive quality in men?
That's a great example.
Humor is an honest signal of quality.
Now, it's funny because you could think, well, you could just be funny by memorizing jokes.
But if you think of your friends who are funny, you don't sit down and go, hey, did I tell you the one about Pat and Mike?
That's not how people are funny, you know, unless they're paid to do that up on stage.
People are funny by making connections that you hadn't thought of, by twisting the world 90 degrees and linking things together.
And that takes an agile mind.
And, you know, there's more genetic expression in our brain than anywhere else in our body.
So it's a sign of good genes.
And also, we're a cognitive species.
Being smart is super important for men and women.
That's how you succeed.
But as humans, we also care an enormous amount about kindness.
And if that person who has nothing else going for them is kind, that person's going to do well in life.
Because kindness ends up trumping everything just because there's a host of reasons for that.
But one of which is that if you're a kind person, you're a great partner to me, even if you've got almost no other good qualities.
You need some minimal levels of competence.
But once you cross minimal competence, kindness means you're going to look out for me.
And that matters a lot.
Do nice guys finish last in the evolutionary world?
They don't, actually.
So the good thing about being a nice guy is they tend to finish first.
And so when we look in hunter-gatherer communities, and we look at people choosing their partners to go out on hunts in the morning, they actually choose the nice guys over the better hunters.
Now, again, you need a minimal level of competence.
Now, they pay a big price to finish first because lots of people take advantage of them.
And so I share with you.
You never share back with me.
But if I'm a nice guy, I'm like, that's okay.
You know, Stephen will come around.
Someday he'll learn to share with me too.
Or if he doesn't, that's okay.
He's a good guy and I like to give him half my rabbit that I call it.
So in economist terms, they're suckers a lot.
They give a lot more than they get.
But as far as winning in the world, everybody wants to be with them.
What about for women in terms of attraction?
If you were to design a perfectly attractive woman from an evolutionary basis, what would that woman be like?
The factors that matter for women are different for men because men are fertile throughout their whole lives, and it's so easy to be fertile.
You're making 100 million sperm a day or whatever that number is.
They're tiny little cells.
You can just do it even if you're old and desiccated.
Fertility is crazy hard for a woman.
You need to be under the age of 40, basically.
Once our ancestral females hit 40, they almost never reproduced anymore.
And we could talk about why that is.
It's an interesting evolutionary solution to a problem.
But then during that time, you have to be well-fed and you have to be healthy because it's super hard to maintain a pregnancy.
That's, you know, nine months where if you're not getting enough food, it's hard to feed that fetus.
So for women, they need fat on their bodies, which was hard in our ancestral world.
That meant they're well-fed.
They need to be healthy and they need to be young.
And so when you have those qualities, that's more important than anything else for men.
Because when it comes down to it, living forever is nice, but evolution doesn't care about it if you don't reproduce.
Reproduction is the currency of evolution.
And so what...
What men are looking for in a partner is somebody who's reproductive, who's fertile.
So is attraction an evolutionary thing in your view versus like a social thing?
Well, it's always both, right?
You know, humans are wildly malleable.
And you can move things around in crazy ways.
You know, look at what people found attractive just 50 years ago compared to today.
But there's a lot of basics that underlie it.
And so, for example...
If you look at the actual shape of women and their hip-to-waist ratio, whether their bum is big or not big in the current climate, the hip-to-waist ratio doesn't change.
And that's because that hip-to-waist ratio is correlated with fertility.
But the size of your bum, not so much.
And in fact, when women deposit fats pre-menopause, they deposit them on their thighs and their bum, which is where those fats are really good for the baby.
They help neural development.
You know, your brain is loaded with fat.
When you're in utero, you need your mother to have lots of fat, ideally on her bum and thighs, because that's going to help feed your growing brain.
So there's like a perfect hip-to-weight ratio.
Yeah, yeah.
And it rarely changes.
So there's analyses of like every Playboy bunny from 1950 to whenever, I don't know if Playboy even exists anymore.
And they always had the exact same ratio, even though the actual weight of the model would have changed dramatically.
They went from pretty heavy in Marilyn Monroe's day to really, really skinny for a while, and then back to heavier again.
Do men typically care if a woman's rich?
From an evolutionary perspective, does it matter?
In principle, it doesn't matter much.
I mean, remember, but there's your phenotype.
You want to be well taken care of.
But as far as what you're actually attracted to,
Women, so we call it sexual plasticity, that women have evolved to basically be able to find almost any guy attractive because the qualities that are going to make men successful are often on the inside.
Because remember, I told you, all men are fertile, even when they get really old.
So a skinny guy, a fat guy, a strong guy, a weak guy, they're all fertile.
You don't have to worry about that.
But what you do have to worry about is raising kids is really hard.
You want help.
So you want somebody who's going to be successful in hunting.
You want somebody who's going to look out for you and your kids.
These are the variables that really matter.
And so women look for that.
And that means they need to be able to fall in love with, you know, the Bill Gates of the world, who aren't these big macho guys, but can really take care of you.
And so women have a lot more of what we call sexual plasticity than men.
Men have a particular shape they're looking for and a particular appearance on average because that correlates with fertility.
Now, if you then have a choice, oh, here's one who's poor, here's one who's rich, you're going to go with the one who's rich, right?
But if you look at male rock stars and male businessmen, people who are really rich and famous,
The women that they date and marry are entirely across the social class spectrum.
Some are super rich, some are super poor.
A waitress has a great chance with Mick Jagger, and so does some high society elite person.
But if you turn it around the other way, a waiter doesn't have much chance with this rich female or rock star, sometimes, but way less likely.
And that's because women are looking for...
Features of status and dominance in men.
Men don't care about that as much in women.
What is the basis for homosexual relationships in evolution?
So homosexuality is a really interesting question.
We see it across the animal kingdom, so we know that we're not the only species who does it, but we don't often see exclusive homosexuality in the animal kingdom.
That seems to be much more common in humans.
Nobody's 100% sure why it is, but the best evidence I've ever seen, the best evolutionary evidence, comes out of this lab of a colleague of mine, an ex-colleague of mine, Brendan Zeach.
And what he shows is that most human behaviors are driven by a number of genes, not just one.
We call them polygenic.
A whole bunch of genes contribute to a particular behavior, and especially a complex behavior like homosexuality.
And so there's going to be a polygenic score for homosexuality.
And the more of those, the higher your polygenic score is, the more likely you are to be attracted to same sex.
And it works a tiny bit different in men and women, but basically the same.
And what Brendan argued and has now demonstrated is that as you gain more gay genes, genes that make you more attracted to the opposite sex, but you're not completely homosexual yet, you're more attractive to the opposite sex.
You're more attractive.
Yeah.
So men who have more gay genes but are still straight have more sexual partners than men who have fewer gay genes and are also straight.
So being a little bit gay is super attractive to women.
Being too gay, maybe they're attracted to you, but you don't care anymore because now you're only attracted to men.
And so from an evolutionary perspective, it's this balancing act.
You want to give men enough gay genes so that women are attracted to them, but not so many that they don't care about women.
Oh, okay.
Which kind of feels like a bit of a contradiction to the idea that testosterone and risk-taking and being brawn and being masculine.
Some gay men are feminine, but some gay men are very masculine.
They're hyper-masculine.
So there's both types.
You can be gay and be wildly masculine, or you can be gay and be quite feminine.
So what is it about...
The being a little bit gay?
Like, what are the features?
What are the features of being a little bit gay?
We know the genes.
This paper was published in Science, if I remember right, a few years ago, and laid out the genes, and they don't make sense.
Some of them relate to your sense of smell.
We don't understand these polygenic scores very well yet.
If I had to guess, you know, if you think of extreme straight males versus gay males, gay males are much cleaner.
They look after their bodies much better.
Their hygiene is much better.
You know, their sense of aesthetics is much better.
And so maybe being a little bit gay means you're metrosexual.
And now you've got these qualities where you're not so downright disgusting to women.
One of the things that kind of dovetails into this is some of the stats that I was reading about education these days.
This one stat here says that 58% of college graduates in the most recent cohorts were women, with one woman on campus for every two men.
And with this scenario where there's more women becoming college educated than men at increasing numbers, you're going to get a bit of a mismatch.
in terms of women looking for those men who are up and to the right economically, but there's fewer men there.
Yeah, it's a real problem.
And so, you know, we talk about, for example, that women are underrepresented in some fields, like they're underrepresented in the sciences.
And people worry about that a lot.
But there's a much, much bigger problem than we're facing.
And in fact, I'm not even convinced the other one is a problem.
And we can come back to that if you'd like, because I do think there's reasons for that that might have to do with preferences and not being held out.
But setting that issue aside.
If we look at the rates of going to university, my birth cohort, I was born in 1963, is the first year where women attended college, university at equal rates to men in the United States.
And those lines crossed and they'd never gone back.
And so now the stat you were talking about is there's basically...
It's 60-40, basically, female to male.
That means there's three women on campus for every two men.
And so, in principle, that first of all makes it harder to date on campus if you're female because there's not as many men on campus as there are women.
And so the competition is fierce.
But setting just dating on campus aside, on average, women are looking for men who are as educated as themselves or more.
And men are looking for women who are as educated as themselves or less.
And so we're creating a problem because women are getting really well educated.
And then there's not as many educated men available for them to partner up with.
And so what you end up with is lots more people living single.
Now, remember, we...
We talked about that before.
Couples are less likely to get together.
On the one hand, this is not necessarily a bad thing because women going to college, making a lot of money means they can afford to live as a single person, which they literally could not do up until 1960.
If you're a female in most countries, you couldn't have a job, really.
And so the way to be an economic success is to marry.
Those days are gone.
But it does mean that it's harder for women to find partners when they're, on average, more likely to be educated than men.
§04Transcript — part 4
And we don't know why men are attending college at lower rates than women, but I suspect that school itself just doesn't suit boys as well as it suits girls.
And so it's harder for boys to hold still.
Boys are less likely to want to please their teachers.
Now, the list is long.
It's hard to raise boys in those kinds of ways.
And uneducated, unpartnered men are the biggest problem in every society.
You know, if you've got men with poor prospects who can't find good jobs and who don't have a partner, they're the guys running around with high tea who are committing all the crimes.
So as a society, you want to be very invested in men partnering up with women because that tames them.
And you want to be very invested in men being viable partners for women, which means whatever we're doing wrong in schools that's pushing men out, we need to undo.
If women are looking for men that have more resources than them on average,
which is what I read in some of the studies, that I think it was roughly 70% of women say they want a man that has equal or more money than they do.
Um,
There's a mismatch there, isn't there?
Because as both become sort of more equalized, if they're still...
The desire for the man to have more and provide more.
Again, the numbers don't add up.
The numbers don't match.
It's a really unfortunate problem.
And so the easiest way to look at that problem is to basically look at Tinder or one of these dating apps.
And there you can see that basically 20% of the guys on Tinder get 80% of the swipes.
What that means is that 80% of the men basically largely get ignored on the app and 20% are fawned upon.
In contrast, women, about 80% of them are getting swiped by people on a regular basis.
They're just not getting swiped by the guys that they're interested in.
It's set up so that both sexes want the same thing.
Men look for the same thing in women, and women look for the same thing in men.
And there's just a lot more competition among men to get women.
And so it's a smaller subset of men who women are interested in.
Interesting.
On an individual level, I guess if you're a man, you really do need to focus on your career if you want to have a chance of...
Well, focusing on your career is definitely an easy way to do it.
But look, not everybody's a career person.
And so you have to decide where your best prospects are.
And that comes back to like, why do we have autonomy?
Well, we've evolved that because there's lots of ways to skin a cat.
And so basically autonomy means I'm going to pick my path in life where I think I have the best prospects.
Usually that means career.
But there's also ways of being, you know, just a really kind person, the person who's always going to look out for you, the person who's going to be great helping with the kids.
Lots of men don't meet those criteria.
And so that's a perfectly successful way.
You just got to find.
You're not going to get swiped right on Tinder.
That's not going to be your way of finding.
If that's you, if you're the kind, reliable, but you don't have a great career, you don't have those other things, then the apps aren't the right place for you.
But people who meet you are going to really like you and women are going to want to be with you because they're going to realize, oh, they may not want to be with you when they're younger.
But as they get a little older and they've been through a few of the guys who everybody else is chasing, they're going to say, boy, I could really use somebody like you.
Speaking of the apps and swiping, we talked about how men on those apps, if they're not in that sort of top echelon of...
Demonstrating authentic quality on the surface, so like rich, muscly, whatever, then their chance of getting swiped on are very, very low.
What about for women?
Because a lot of my female friends say that they hate the dating apps, they have no luck, they're only getting bad swipes.
Yeah, that's the difference.
They're getting bad swipes, meaning they don't like the guys who swipe them.
The guys who have no luck are getting no swipes.
This is true, because actually, when I think about the particular friend I was thinking of, I asked to see her Tinder or whatever app it was many years ago.
And I was like, oh, my God.
Jesus Christ, I wish I had this many swipes.
Yeah.
Because as a guy, I mean, I must have had Tinder for about a month back in 2000.
When I was 20, I'm going to say 23, 24, I couldn't get swipes.
Yeah.
And if I got some, listen, it wasn't anything to write home about.
It was very, very rare.
But when I looked at her Tinder that she was complaining about, she had hundreds of men.
But she just didn't like any of them.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That's the difference.
And so the thing is that throughout our evolutionary history, men have often been left out of the mating game entirely.
And we know this if we look at the variability on our Y-linked chromosomes.
You only inherit Y-linked genes from your father because women don't have a Y chromosome.
For women, you can look at mitochondrial DNA, which you only inherit from your mother.
And if you look at the mitochondrial DNA and the variability there, you can see that we have about twice as many moms as dads.
Yeah.
And that's weird because it takes two to tango.
But what it means is that some of the dads were getting lots of women and lots of potential dads were getting no women at all.
And so in our ancestral past, there's lots of men who nobody swiped right.
They couldn't find a partner.
And there's lots of men who women were very interested in.
They probably had multiple partners.
And so...
We still live in that exact same world.
So what do they have to do, lower their standards?
Well, you could say lower their standards, but you could also say, you know, you're not liking him for all the wrong reasons.
You know, yeah, so what?
He doesn't drive a Ferrari, and so what?
He doesn't look super cool or whatever.
But he could be a great guy.
The problem is apps aren't well suited for that.
And so, you know, when we were all just people who met in person, you would realize, oh, this guy is the salt of the earth.
He'd be a perfect partner for me for my life.
I know he's kind of ugly or he's kind of whatever, but who cares, right?
He's going to be a perfect life partner.
Very hard to see that on an app.
Okay, so I was thinking about the attraction features of a woman that we talked about earlier.
I know that if I'm a guy and I'm trying to have more success on the app,
Apps on social media.
What I need to do is I need to pull up in my Lamborghini.
I need to hit the gym.
I need to signal my quality and authentic way that can't be disproven.
And if I'm a woman, therefore, I need to be showing my hip ratio?
Well, I want to look attractive and I want to look healthy and I want to look young.
Okay.
But keeping in mind...
I could be none of the above and I'm still going to get so much right.
How does pornography confound all of this stuff?
Yeah, pornography is a funny business.
It allows us to vicariously engage in sex without actually doing it, right?
And so we evolved in a world where there was no pornography.
We certainly evolved in a world where there's masturbation.
But we evolved in a world that didn't have pornography.
And so it's kind of hijacking our system a little bit.
It feels like you're having sex when, you know, you're on OnlyFans or whatever those sites are that interest you.
It mimics a lot of the features.
And so, you know, I've become interested in the social media world we live in and this possibility that social media makes so many things so easy that.
You stop going out.
You stop, you know, because you can connect with your friends on social media.
Why go through the snow and go across town and maybe not know anybody at the party, et cetera?
And I think what's happened is that as we get lazy and we start putting our life online, you know, our social life, we even start to...
Put more, you know, our sexual life online.
And so there's even evidence, the evidence is very tentative as to what it might mean.
But recently in the United States, at least, if you look at young single people, their actual sexual behavior is going down.
They're having less sex than they were 20 years ago.
And if you'd asked me 20 years ago when Tinder, whenever those things got invented, I would say, oh, sex is going to go way up.
This is going to be, you know, this is going to be the best thing for hooking up ever.
In actual fact, though it went up for a little bit, it went back down.
And instead of what's going up is pornography watching.
And so maybe the pornography is getting better tailored to what people want.
Maybe people are just getting lazy and they, instead of going to the party and maybe meeting somebody who they would have sex with, they just...
Pick it up and watch it on TV?
I don't know.
Because I'm thinking about this graph that was in your book, which shows how much sex we're having and how much porn we're watching.
Yeah.
And very simply, it shows that we're having less sex and we're watching more porn.
And it's quite a considerable drop between 2006 and 2012.
It said a percentage of 18 to 25-year-olds who had had sex or watched porn within the last year.
Yeah.
And about 80%...
Of 18 to 25-year-olds had had sex in the last year.
And now it's getting down nearer to 65, 70%.
Which is remarkable.
These are young, single people.
You know, this is when we are most likely to have sex with, you know, partners or random hookups or whatever.
So they're at the peak of their sexuality.
And nonetheless, 20 years later, they're less likely to have sex and more likely to be watching porn.
And it looks like pornography consumption has almost like tripled.
Yeah.
In that time period.
It's been accessible over that entire time period.
But basically what I think those data, I refer to,
I know it's an absurd acronym.
I refer to this as smilching.
Smilching.
Social media-induced laziness in our social habits.
I know it'll never catch on.
But I think that what they're doing is smilching.
They've got friends.
We're at a party.
It's across town.
It's kind of a pain to get there.
It'll cost you subway and everything else.
And you're not sure if you're going to have fun when you get there.
And so you go, screw it, I'm not going to go.
Now, what you didn't know is that's the party where you would have met that person who you would have ended up hooking up with either as short-term or long-term partner.
But you didn't go.
And instead what you did is you stayed home, and so there's a decent chance you watched porn.
And so we're letting these fake substitutes take over in place of our actual real socializing, which I think is hugely problematic.
And does this explain in part when we're thinking about a pornography rise, why...
There is declining fertility rates.
We're having less and less kids than ever in the Western world.
And some people are concerned about population collapse.
Well, I actually think it's separate from pornography because right now we've already separated our sexual activity from our reproduction, right?
You can just be on the pill, use a condom, use whatever you want, which our ancestors couldn't do and other animals can't do.
And so the amount of sex that we have is completely uncorrelated with how many kids we decide to have.
And so if you set pornography aside, fertility rates are going way down.
And I think that's simply because we never evolved to want children.
We evolved to want sex.
And so if you want sex, if you enjoy sex, and then you've also evolved to be nurturant to whatever child comes along from that, bingo, you're a mom or a dad.
But if you...
Evolved to want kids, you go back a little ways, you would have no idea how to achieve that.
You wouldn't have known what to do.
We evolved to want to have sex.
And in a world without the pill, that automatically resulted in children.
And then all you have to do is evolve to be nurturing to them because they're so dependent in humans when they're born.
Which is what happens when you had your baby recently.
You have this huge sort of magnetic pull to the child.
And I wasn't keen to have more kids.
I have some children who've grown to adulthood.
I felt like I don't need any more kids, but then I have another kid and I'm just in love with her, right?
You can't help yourself.
So we've intervened in nature's natural course.
We've intervened, and that intervention is what's potentially going to lead to there to be no more humans.
So if you look at the current population of the globe, it's meant to peak somewhere between, say, 2070 and 2090, probably around 8 billion and some change.
And then it starts to go down, and then it may continue to go down forever.
Now, it may be that what causes you to want to have kids is very societal.
It's very, well, my apartment's small and I don't want to schlep them around.
It's hard work.
You could imagine a world where now robots are everywhere and where you've got all the space in the world because there's not that many humans or we've moved to the country and e-commute or whatever.
Maybe suddenly we'll want to have six or eight of them again because a robot's the one who gets up in the middle of the night with them and we don't have to.
But right now, if you think about having kids, it's hard yards.
And so lots and lots of people say, well, I just don't want to do that.
And the consequence is that in every single country that's industrialized and rich, the reproduction, the reproduction.
§05Transcript — part 5
rate of females is less than 2.1 per female, which is what you need in order to maintain population at the current level.
And so every single country on earth is shrinking, but for immigration.
And so right now, you know, we have all these fights about immigration.
It's going to be, I promise you, in 50 years, that argument is going to be the exact opposite.
How can we convince people of country X to come into our country because we're going to shrink and disappear?
There's a lot of countries that are going to be literally half their size by the year 2100 because they're shrinking so fast.
Really?
Half of East Asia, half of Western Europe.
They're just shrinking crazy fast.
They're demolishing houses.
Japan is demolishing houses.
There's nobody to buy them.
Because the women are having less than that 2.1.
Yeah, the average child rate in a lot of these countries is around 1.5 to 1.7, very, very low.
You don't think it's possible that we're going to make ourselves extinct because we're not having fucking sex, are we?
Well, we'd still be having sex.
We just wouldn't be having kids, right?
But we are having less sex as well, aren't we?
Well, that varies.
Yeah, lots and lots of us are having less sex.
There's reasons for that that probably have more to do with ecotoxicology than with psychology.
There's so many hormone mimics in our environment, in plastics, in various pollutants, that change our endocrine system, that reduce sperm counts.
We think that's what's going on.
And reduced sperm count often is associated with reduced sex drive, etc.
So if you were prime minister or president of the world, and it was your job to get us having children again, based on what you know about evolutionary psychology and human incentives,
What would you do?
Well, the main thing is that because humans didn't evolve to want children, you can't just play on their, don't you really want children?
Because the answer is often no.
What you want to do is you want to make having kids to be as much of the plus as it possibly can be and as little of the minus.
So if you look at kids, they're really interesting.
There's some wonderful work by Danny Kahneman who won the Nobel Prize.
And he asks you in the moment, what are you doing and how much fun it is?
Is it?
And what he finds is no surprise if you're having sex when you got the request and now you probably waited until you were done before you answered your beeper.
But you said, oh, I'm having a great time.
And as it goes, TV was actually in second place.
Watching TV is good fun in the moment.
And then a little way down the list is like doing dishes, doing laundry.
If you're with your kids, you're on average about doing the dishes or doing the laundry.
That's how much fun your kids are.
But if you ask people, what gives you great satisfaction in life?
What makes you happy?
Nobody says, I'm crazy happy because I've watched a ton of TV.
That's just not an answer anyone's ever given.
Or because I folded my laundry really well.
What they do say, though, is, oh, my kids give me enormous joy.
So how could it be both?
How could it be that on average, your kids are as much fun as the laundry, but when you look back on your life, they're the key thing?
And what we think the answer is, is that they provide these peak moments that laundry simply doesn't, right?
No matter how well you fold your clothes, it's not exciting, but your kids have these amazing moments in their lives that you get to be part of as you see the world through new eyes again.
And so...
And for good evolutionary reasons where you get...
Your whole mind and body and identity caught up in them.
And so kids end up being a huge source of satisfaction.
So what that means is if you want to get people to start having kids again, try to get rid of the drudge side of it.
You know, look at daycare is crazy hard.
It's crazy expensive.
Women want to be able to go back to work.
The list is really long about how hard it is in so many different ways.
You just remove those barriers.
You know, especially once we're in this robot world, which I don't think is far away from us, where I don't have to get up in the middle of the night and do that unless I want to.
I can if I want.
My robot's not going to stop me from getting up and feeding them and changing their nappy.
But aren't we going to raise loads of messed up kids in such a while?
I don't, I, you know, a robot has infinite patience.
If you design it nice and soft and fluffy, it's going to be more cuddly than we are.
The kids might like the robots more than they like us.
Last night I was with my girlfriend and I was joking because I read this article that Tesla's Optimus robots are now going into production and they're hiring the team, which are these sort of humanoid robots that will be in your house and help with the chores and dishes and stuff.
And as a joke, I turned to my partner, I was like, we'll get two of those.
And like one of them will like raise the kids and then the other one will like take the kid to school and stuff because I knew her, it was a joke, I knew her reaction would be pretty...
Negative.
Negative.
And she was horrified.
She goes, can you imagine a world where a robot would, the kid would turn to the robot and call it daddy and mummy?
Because the kid wouldn't really know the difference.
And I sat here with a child psychotherapist, psychologist, who said that in those first three years, it's so critical for the primary caregiver to be around.
And that the man and the woman cause the baby to release different types of hormones based on their gender.
Yeah.
So you almost can't get...
All that's true, but here's the thing.
Currently, we outsource them to nannies for a big chunk of the day.
If you're wealthy enough, people often hire a night nurse, somebody who comes in and helps out at nighttime too, if you've got the cash.
And so when I hire those people, I can't be positive they're going to be kind to my children.
I can't be positive they know every possible disease my kid could get and all the rest.
I would rather hire this incredible robot who's super cuddly, who has an encyclopedia of medical knowledge, who memorizes every detail about my kid and knows exactly what the pitch of that cry is.
You could put whatever scent on them you want.
You could make it mom or dad.
You could make it even smell like you if you want to.
Why not have that person help you out?
You know, our ancestors engaged in what's called aloe parenting all the time.
And what that meant was the men are out hunting, probably gone for most of the day.
The females need to form these tight bonds with each other because it's hard work with a bunch of little kids and predators who want to eat them.
You need eyes on them all the time, but you also need to be digging up tubers of whatever variety you're trying to eat.
And so they relied on each other.
Parenting is not a solo operation, which is mom and dad.
It's this, I know it's cliche, but it takes a village kind of thing.
So why not hire out this robot who is like perfect in every way?
You know, they're not going to abuse your kid.
You know, they're never going to do anything wrong.
They're always going to be kind.
When your kid asks for the 10 millionth time, but why?
They're going to keep giving them answers.
They don't mind.
Right?
Why not have the perfect parent when you're not there?
Because the parent releases certain hormones in the child by their touch, the oxytocin.
Robots don't release oxytocin.
Not yet.
Why not have a robot that mimics all that and would cause the kid to do that too?
Because you don't want to replace yourself.
Parenting is one of the nicest things that we humans ever do.
It's some of my fondest memories.
And I don't want to give those away.
But I wasn't with my kid 24-7.
And it would have driven me nuts if I were.
Kids are wonderful and boring and horrible.
And so why not when you outsource them?
And we all do.
We have since time began.
We've relied on others to help take care of our kids.
Why not make it the perfect nanny rather than the that'll have to do nanny because it's all I can afford?
I just, it's a strange future to think about because it feels also like a slippery slope where we might start having kids and then giving them completely robot parents.
Could do if you wanted to.
I'd still rather that than you abuse your kids and be a terrible parent yourself, which we know is happening all the time.
Don't you think a better answer is just not to have the kids?
That is the best answer.
But you can't stop people from deciding to have kids.
And we know that when we look at abusive parents, for example, and the kids, if they're so bad that their kids literally get taken away, what do they do?
They move to a new town and they have more.
And so you know that you're subjecting these children to these horrible environments, but there's nothing you can do about it.
I would way rather that...
Those parents who think they want kids for whatever reason, then have the robot there to look out for them and make sure that kid's well taken care of.
Do you believe that?
Yes, that's going to happen.
So you've just had a baby, right?
Yeah, I've got a one-and-a-half-year-old.
One-and-a-half-year-old.
Would you allow a robot to...
I love the nannies I have.
But every single one of them, when you start, is a risk.
You don't know, right?
These are just...
They've been hired by the daycare.
They're probably really good.
But if you had the perfect robot nanny, well, then you would never worry at all.
And in marriage, this graph that I saw in your book shows that the percentage of Americans who are very happy or not too happy as a function of marital status quite clearly shows that if you want to be happy, you should be married.
And if you want to be not too happy.
You should be separated.
So here's the data.
If when people get married, on average, they get no happier.
So if you get married, and then I look at you 10 years later, on average, you're going to be exactly as you are now.
Now, how does that average work out?
Well, in lots of different directions, because I'm putting everybody together now.
We've got these amazing data sets from Germany, for example, where we track people for so many years that we know what they were like before they even met their partner, much less married them.
And so we see how happy they are, and we see how it changes over time.
And so, for example, couples who get divorced, they actually, their happiest year was the year before their marriage.
So they met their partner, they got happier, happier, and then they already started going downhill before they even got married.
Okay.
Couples who are going to stay together, their happiest year is the marriage year itself, not the year before it.
So that's a good sign.
If you're happier when you're walking down the aisle than you were last year, this marriage has a much better chance of lasting.
Now, if you look at those marriages, the ones who last, they go in three directions.
You've got the really bad ones where they stay together for economic or religious or whatever reasons.
They're miserable.
They don't like each other, and they're way less happy than before they met.
Thankfully, they're relatively rare.
If we look at the ones who are average, they're a little bit happier.
These are among couples who stay together.
They're a little bit happier for the first few years of their marriage than they were before they met.
And then they slowly settle down to about where they were.
So it's not plus or minus.
It's basically where they were.
If you look at the really lucky folks, they get happier every single year for almost 10 years.
So the year of their marriage was happier than before they met, and the next year is happier still, and it just keeps working its way up.
And so...
When you average all that together, getting married doesn't make you happy.
It's a zero.
So how could it be that marriage is a zero?
And I think the answer to that question is that people who don't marry, it's not the fact that they didn't marry that's the problem.
It's that they're over-weighting autonomy.
And over-weighting it is probably what they're doing everywhere else in their life as well.
So when they're making decisions about what to do with their friends, about whether they live with somebody else or live alone, all those decisions, they keep going with autonomy rather than going with connection.
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be unhappy, but it makes, on average, it means that they're about half as likely to be very happy as somebody who would go and get married.
So it's the individualism that's causing their unhappiness, that's causing them not to marry.
Yep, that's what I believe.
And people that are less individualistic are getting married, and that's why.
And so it's just a different kind of person who's doing that.
In the same sense, interestingly, if you look at divorce, we can also see that the people who are going to get divorced were also less happy before they even met their partner.
So on average, happier people tend to stay together in marriages.
We don't know why that is, but my guess is that happier people just tend to be happier about everything.
And so they're less like they find ways to make their marriage work, even if it's no better than the marriage of the less happy folks.
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§06Transcript — part 6
And what about things like ADHD and neurodivergence?
Is there an evolutionary basis for why that occurs?
Yes.
So the neurodivergence is...
It's a complicated one.
It seems to be much more common now.
When we look at the epidemiological data, it seems to be associated with high toxin environments.
So if you live in areas where there's lots of pollutants, people are more likely to be neurodivergent.
But I think neurodivergence has always been with us.
I think it's just become more common.
Now, why would it become more common with these various toxins?
I don't know.
My guess is that the brain is a social organism.
The human brain is.
We've evolved.
Connection is our most important need.
And it requires all sorts of different parts to work right, which means that if you break the brain in any way, you're going to break your sociality because it's so implicated in so many different areas.
And if these toxins that we're exposed to cause any damage to the brain, I think you're particularly likely to end up with social problems because the brain is a social organ.
And so that's why I think autism rates are rising.
But of course, I don't know.
I'm only guessing based on the data I've seen.
Now, in the case of neurodivergence, I think they've always played a really important role in humanity.
And the reason for that is that...
You know, humans are a super innovative species.
But if you ask yourself or your friends, how often have you ever invented anything?
The answer is almost always never.
And that's because we solve our problems socially.
When something goes wrong, we go to our friends, we talk to them, we try to work together to figure out our problems.
And we've always been that way.
Hunter-gatherers do that.
And neurodivergent people are less likely to do that because they are less socially connected.
And so probably most of the great inventions of humanity were created by neurodivergent people.
Now, those of you...
of us who are not neurodivergent immediately go, wow, I'd like one of those.
And so we're really good at spreading that by virtue of our social networks.
But I think we've always relied on neurodivergent people to create the amazing innovations, the technical things that make our lives so easy.
Now, ADHD is a different ball of wax.
We know it's highly heritable.
We know a lot of the genes are.
We also suspect that it wasn't even a noticeable thing in a hunter-gatherer, right?
You know, what ancestor ever tried to get you to pay attention to something that you were bored with?
But if you're ADHD, it's crazy hard to pay attention when you're bored, but it's perfectly easy to pay attention when you're interested.
You just don't have the kind of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that allows you to force yourself to attend to things.
And for our ancestors, you're loaded with energy.
You're probably a great hunter.
And so it's a modern problem that you have to sit still and listen problem, which our ancestors were never asked to do.
I wonder if it will still be the case when we have all the robots and the AI doing everything for us.
I'm betting not.
I'm betting that you could decide to learn or not learn.
Now, why would you even learn your multiplication tables if you don't need to?
You can just ask your phone what the answer is.
And so why tons of the schooling that we go through is superfluous in this world where AI can do everything that we can do.
Do you think we're going to merge with technology more deeply?
It's very possible.
You could easily imagine, like, if there's a feature about yourself that you don't like, I suspect it'll be hard to genetically engineer it.
And the reason I think it'll be hard to genetically engineer it is that most of our genes have more than one effect, and most of our traits are caused by more than one gene.
So you can't just...
Just tweak one gene and become the person you wanted to be.
It's going to have other effects that you may not want.
So the upshot is that why not, you know, have a little mind module that you either attaches to your head or goes inside it even, or, you know, we already are treating people with this.
There's some kinds of depression that just are untreatable.
And for some of those people, they literally inserted an electrode into their brain and stimulate this particular region.
And the people who experience it say it's like my world was in black and white and suddenly it became in color.
Well, why not have that for knowledge that you can access?
You know, I could spend my huge amounts of time studying Greek, or I could shove one of those in, and now I can go to Greece and speak with the locals, right?
Without my phone telling me what they're saying.
You mentioned depression there.
What's the evolutionary basis for humans getting depressed and anxious?
Because presumably that's not productive for our survival.
No, it's not.
So remember that with every generation of sexual reproduction, you're going to have people who have things that maybe evolution wouldn't like.
Remember earlier we talked about homosexuality, that if you have more gay genes, women like you more, but then if you have too many, you don't like them in return, right?
So that's a case where a little bit is a good thing evolutionarily, and a lot is a bad thing evolutionarily, because you're not going to have offspring.
Not a moral judgment, just a judgment based on what evolution cares about.
Well, with anxiety, that makes perfect sense, right?
So animals that can't envision the future have no anxiety.
All they feel is fear in the moment.
Oops, there's a lion.
I'd better run as fast as I possibly can.
And then as soon as they've run away, no lion, everything's covered.
I'll go back to eating grass and being happy.
Whereas if I'm a human running away from a lion, I'd be like, oh my God, that was really scary.
I wonder when there's another lion coming.
Now, the biggest gift that evolution gave us is the capacity to simulate the future.
Evolution doesn't give any gifts without cost.
You pay a price for every one of them.
And the capacity to simulate the future also comes with the realization that, first of all, it's not always going to be good.
And second of all, it's always going to end badly.
Once you understand life, you understand I'm going to die someday.
And the other animals don't have that realization.
They can't project themselves forward in time the way we can.
So does that mean that evolution tells us that the cure for anxiety is to stop thinking about the future effectively?
If you didn't think about the future, you would not be anxious.
If you could get yourself to be mindful in the moment and set aside the future, your anxiety will disappear because it's all future-based.
I was at something that really I found quite interesting as well in your book.
I think it was in chapter nine where you talk about religion and the fact that people that are associated with religious participation are typically more happy than those who are not.
The effect is remarkable.
And so you can look at it in two different ways.
One of it is just the effect of believing, right?
So lots of people worry about a life without meaning.
You know, people of religion have solved that problem because religion gives your life meaning.
There is a point.
If you believe any of the religions that exist, you're part of this never-ending chain, etc.
And it doesn't, they can be wildly different religions, but they all hold this notion that there's something before and something after.
Now,
You can look at the effect of that by saying, all right, let's select.
Only people who never go to church.
So we'll take the sociality part out of it.
And then we'll look at people who pray versus people who don't pray.
And we can do this with these national samples where we say, let's look at the general social survey.
And in fact, anybody who wants to can get online and look at the general social survey and answer any question that's available in that.
It's a remarkable publicly available data set, which I used repeatedly in this book.
And praying actually makes you happier among people who don't go to church than not praying.
And in my mind, that's life has meaning versus it doesn't.
People who have religion have meaning.
People who don't often don't.
Sometimes they do, but they often don't.
But there's a social component to religion as well, and I think it's way more important.
And so now you can't do it quite as cleanly.
Now you want people who go to church, and you want to look at the effect of going to church.
And there the data are remarkable.
The effect of going to church is huge.
It's like you're like twice as likely to be happy if you go to church regularly than if you never go to church at all.
Now, I don't think going to church would have made our ancestors any happier at all.
Why does it make us happier?
Well, the way to answer that question is to then dive a little deeper into the data.
And so what I did is I separated people by whether they're poor or whether they're rich.
Now, remember, earlier we talked about how the fact that poor people live in these tight, interdependent networks because they count on each other all the time.
They borrow things from each other.
They rely on each other to keep the boat afloat.
And so they have, they get together, poor people get together with their neighbors much more often than rich people, right?
Rich people don't do that.
So what that means is that if now, if you...
you think that God wants you to go to church, because remember, we're talking about religion now, then you're going to go to church even if you don't necessarily want to see the people there, even if you don't necessarily feel a need for them.
But you're going to be forced into socializing.
So it's sort of like this experiment that's being played on you, whether you believe in...
Or not, if you believe you should go to church, that's kind of coming from on high.
It's not because you necessarily want to socialize.
And we see that the effects of going to church are, they have bigger happiness effects on rich than on poor.
Because poor people are getting a lot of the benefit already of that socializing, whereas rich people have separated themselves from others.
And so those rich people who go to church several times a week are like twice as likely to be very happy as rich people who never go to church at all.
So rich people need to go to church.
Yeah.
Or, you know, whatever they call church.
They need to go somewhere where they're socializing regularly, in person.
Why do we want religion?
Because it's quite clear that there's something within us that wants to believe.
You see this, I think we're seeing a little bit at the moment where we're seeing a return to religious belief in some...
degree.
I know that it's, you know, it might not just be the religious belief that we think of.
It might be spirituality or horoscopes or whatever, you know, it might be, but there's a, seems like there's a real surge of it, especially amongst young men.
Yeah, that's a great question.
People talk about in psychology, what they refer to, well, not just in psychology, but in psychological terms as a God-shaped hole.
There's a hole in your psyche that can only be filled by God.
Whatever God is for you.
And I think lots of people have that hole, but not everybody.
And why do I think lots of people have it?
Well, remember those prayer data we talked about.
People who pray are happier on average than people who don't.
And so if you have a God-shaped hole, but you don't believe, that's going to make you unhappy.
Whereas if you have that need for that, and you do believe, that's going to make you happy.
It's like anything else.
What do you think the meaning of life is?
I think it's devoid of meaning.
And so if life is truly devoid of meaning, then what do you do?
And the only answer to me is you make the best of this meaningless thing that you can.
And how do you do that?
Well, you be aware of what we've evolved to do, and we've evolved to connect.
And so if connection is the most important thing I can do as a human, and I believe it is, then you be kind to each other.
Because that's facilitating connection.
You believe life is devoid of meaning?
Yeah.
People won't like that.
I know.
I don't like it.
I don't like the fact that I don't think life has meaning.
When people search for meaning, they get happier, which suggests that they find it.
I've never actually taken the time to reflect and search for meaning.
Okay, so maybe it's the pursuit of something then that's creating the happiness versus them finding meaning.
Maybe, we don't know.
So you just said that when people search for meaning, they get happier.
Yeah.
So that could imply one of two things, that they end up finding it or that it's the search itself.
Or a little of both.
It's usually a little of both.
But we don't know with certainty.
There's not enough good data on this problem.
Because lots of people search for meaning.
And in the end, you can also decide that, well, there isn't meaning, and I'm a small cog in a big machine, and I'm a pointless small cog in a big machine, but it's all I've got.
And so, you know, Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow says, we're the lucky ones because we're going to get to die.
Now, what he really means by that is first we get to live.
And almost nobody gets to live, right?
You think of the 100 million sperm that I'm making every day, they don't go anywhere.
They never get a chance.
But I made three humans.
I did my part.
I only did the small part.
But I played a role in making three humans who then got lucky and got to live out of all the other sperm that came out that day.
They're the one that made it into the egg, and they get a chance at it.
And we just happen to be really lucky, I believe, as humans, that the solution that evolution landed us on was a kind one.
§07Transcript — part 7
We have the kindest solution in my mind to solving life's problems.
So you look at this, one of my favorite birds in Australia is the kookaburra.
Kookaburras lay two eggs, and then they wait a little bit, and then they lay a third.
And Australia is very drought-prone, so some seasons are good and some are bad.
If the season's good, that third egg has a decent chance of making it to adulthood because there's so much food being brought back to the nest.
If it's not good, that third egg never makes it.
And why doesn't it make it?
Well, the two older siblings peck it to death.
And they've got an adaptation on their beak, a little hook, that allows them to kill their little sibling more easily.
So they've literally evolved to kill their little sibling when times are tough.
What have we evolved to do when times are tough?
To band even closer together and to work together.
together and to cooperate.
That's what got us to where we are.
And it was all sorts of interesting things that got us there.
It was cognitive things like division of labor.
You know, kookaburras don't do that because they're inherently mean.
It's the only way they can solve the problem.
Humans solve that problem very differently.
Now, admittedly, we did our share of infanticide too, but mostly what we do is cooperate, work together, have division of labor, and we go from being this, like, you know, when we first left the trees, it must have been really rough.
Everybody was eating us for dinner, and now it's the shoes and the other foot.
We're the apex predator on this planet.
But doesn't our evolutionary history tell us that we band together in tough times?
Yes.
But we band together to attack the others.
Yeah, we do.
It's not, look, there's never something that's done just for the niceness of it.
Evolution doesn't care about nice at all.
What's really nice, though, is that our solution, our way of becoming deadly, and every animal that survives becomes deadly or avoids being eaten in another way.
Now, it turns out that once you band together, and even by Homo erectus, so our ancestors one and two million years ago, when they band together, they are already the deadliest force on this planet.
We've got good evidence that they're eating huge animals like mammoths.
So it's your ability to have division of labor to plan, to say, all right, you chase that mammoth and we'll...
Put this trap here, you know, do things that other animals simply can't.
They can't do that.
They can't make a scenario in their mind and then enact it.
And so it was that mental ability that turned us into these apex predators.
But it doesn't take long as an apex predator who can work together.
division of labor to realize, all right, there's only one predator left on this planet who has a chance of killing me, and that's other humans.
Or if, you know, if it's pre-human, other Homo erectus.
And you're seeing that with like America versus China and...
Everything.
America versus Mexico and whatever it might be.
Everything.
In nationalism.
Yeah, so remember I referred to us earlier as being tribal, and I talked about how chimpanzees are 600 times more aggressive within the group, but equally aggressive between.
So we've evolved in a world to be totally tribal, to just look out for ourselves because that other group might kill us.
They may be nice, we may get along, but they might be vicious.
And so we need to be prepared to be vicious in return.
Thankfully, though, we didn't evolve where we know where they're vicious.
We evolved where we just don't know.
It may be good and it may be bad.
So we give out groups the benefit of the doubt, but we very quickly become tribal and negative toward them.
I was sat here yesterday with the wonderful gentleman who I'm a big fan of called Robert Greene, who wrote the book about power, 48 Laws of Power.
What have you learned about power as it relates to our evolutionary past and who ends up getting power in the world?
So...
Evolution doesn't care about morality, right?
It's amoral.
It's not immoral.
It just doesn't care.
And what that means is might is right.
Humans are the only ones who understand possession.
And I say, this is mine.
And you're like, no, no, it's mine.
And we can argue about the actual ownership of it.
But for an animal, there's never an argument.
If you made the kill and I'm bigger than you, I take it from you.
Now, in human groups, power is achieved by no human is strong enough on their own to have power by themselves.
Every human goes to sleep.
And when you go to sleep, the weakest of humans in your group can kill you easily.
And so to be powerful, part of it is to be tough and scary, but part of it also is to be kind and to look out for people who are on your side so that you have a network of people who care about you.
And what about body language in this as it relates to power?
Is there anything that we can learn from humans and other animals about what powerful body language is or unpowerful or powerless body language looks like?
It's super easy to look in other animals because they can't talk.
They appease.
They've got ways of shrinking themselves.
It says, no, don't beat me up.
This, whatever you want is yours.
And humans mimic some of that.
We shrink ourselves when we want to not be intimidating.
We elevate ourselves.
We open ourselves when we want to be powerful and intimidating.
But in humans, almost all humans, almost all the time, power doesn't emanate from our physical presence, but from what we're capable of.
In some societies, you know, America comes to mind, you demonstrate your power by showing your wealth, by showing what you can do, by being very in your face.
I can, I'm great at this.
You know, I'm, we're number one kind of thing.
Many cultures don't like that.
Many, the more collectivist your culture is, the more frowned upon that is, and the less likely you are to do it, even if you are the powerful.
And then you get to cultures where the only person who ever puts themselves down is the really powerful because they can afford to say, no, no, I'm nobody.
You don't want to bother with me.
And the second they say that in those cultures, like, ooh, this person runs the show around here.
And so in a lot of cultures, the richest person is the one who dresses the most modestly.
The most powerful person is because that's what the culture understands.
But it's always you have to follow the cultural rules.
In a We're number one society, that's not going to work for you.
Everybody's just going to think you're nobody.
And so the rules of power vary dramatically by where you are.
But you can always see that somebody who is relaxed and looks comfortable is probably...
Relatively high power person in that circumstance.
I've always wondered why billionaires who have more sort of objective power end up not wearing designer clothes and being more understated and wearing just the same outfit every day.
And they don't wear the designer brands and have Louis Vuitton.
Yeah.
The thing is that we use those brands to compete for status, but they're already at the very top of the heap.
They won that competition.
And anybody who knows them knows that.
And they're also, especially as you start to get rich, all the fancy brands, and then as you get even richer and you've been that way longer, it becomes less important to you because you've got status in other ways.
And maybe it's a counter signal at that point.
So maybe if he had a Louis Vuitton bag, he would actually be lowering himself to the status class below.
He's just a regular millionaire.
He's not the multi-billionaire that he is.
You've studied the Hadza tribe.
You mentioned them repeatedly.
Only indirectly.
I've never been there.
Yeah.
What is the most interesting thing you've learned about them as it relates to happiness and purpose and living a good life that you might pass to all of us that are listening?
Well, autonomy was really rare for our ancestors.
They evolved to want both.
They need connection to survive and to be part of the collective that will, you know, go on the hunt and do all.
the things that is necessary for living every single day, but they also need autonomy to choose where their real niche is going to be, what their best prospects are, how to stand out in the group.
Everybody has to be a hunter-gatherer, but you could still be the best arrow maker or storyteller or whatever.
Make yourself valuable to the group.
So you need autonomy so you can decide where you have best prospects and decide what you want to do.
And put your efforts into the domains that matter to you, where you think you'll succeed.
But for ancestors, true autonomy was rare.
Because if you guys, even though we all decide by consensus, and you guys say you want to go south and I want to go north, I can't just go north when you go south or I'm going to be lion food.
I've got to compromise or persuade you with my...
You know, what I want to do, which means that opportunities for true autonomy were really rare for our ancestors.
The problem is now we don't need connection anymore.
We can survive just fine without it.
So we have opportunities for autonomy all the time.
Cities are an example.
They're full of opportunities for autonomy.
And humans are moving there in droves.
Every time that we get a choice between connection and autonomy, I fear that we're choosing autonomy.
It's a form of miswanting because for our ancestors, they rarely could get that choice where they could really pick either.
And when they had it, they wanted to jump on autonomy.
So now I think that we're constantly choosing to do our own thing rather than to connect, and that's steadily making us unhappy.
And our hunter-gatherer friends who still exist on this earth don't do that.
That's the one thing that you can learn from the Hadza.
They're constantly thinking about each other and then thinking about, well, what do I want?
And finding a compromise that's much closer to balance.
Regard, do men need women more than women need men as it relates to connection?
Yes and no.
So we all need to connect, but I believe women need it more than men, largely for the reasons we were talking about earlier, where women need to get more help parenting, so they need to form these tight bonds so people will help them.
But of course men need connection too, and women provide men with a lot of the closest connection that they have.
Because I read that...
Marriage is more beneficial for men's longevity than it is for women's.
It is.
It's not a huge difference.
So if you look at people in their mid-60s, where now longevity is in the offing, right?
Men will live an extra two years if they're married, and women will only live an extra year and a half if they're married.
So women do more for men than men do for women, but both are getting something out of it, and that's not a huge difference.
And they're giving us more emotional support typically than we are.
Well, also, I mean, think about how slovenly and disgusting we are.
They're probably helping us with our hygiene.
They're probably helping in a variety of ways.
But yes, I think emotional support really matters.
And I think that you need to have something to live for.
And kids provide us with that.
Grandkids provide us with that.
Connection provides us with that.
Nobody wants to die alone.
That's a miserable thought.
These Hadza tribes that we keep talking about, do they stay together in marriages?
It turns out, so their best, well, the person I regard as their premier ethnographer is Frank Marlowe.
He would live with the Hadza and write about them.
And he estimated from his life experience with them that about 20% of them stay married for life.
So one in five.
Which is not high.
Very low.
Now, if you think of...
about it.
Why is that such a high divorce rate?
Well, hunter-gatherers don't institutionalize marriage the way that agriculturalists do.
When agriculturalists get married, that's a financial arrangement.
It didn't matter in the same way to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
When that's no longer nice, they moved out and chose somebody else.
And so it's low.
It's, it's, they're serial monogamists.
They don't, you know, Hadza tend not to have more than one wife at a time.
It happens, but it's rare.
Does our evolutionary past suggest that humans are serial monogamists?
Yeah, I believe humans evolved to be serial monogamists who cheat a little bit.
Now, why do I think we also cheat a little bit?
Because if we're purely monogamous, men would not need testicles as large as they are.
A gorilla is not monogamous.
It has a harem of several females, but it doesn't, no other male gorilla can approach those females because he will physically attack them.
And so he knows that he's the only one having sex with them, and he has very small testicles.
And in fact, they're inside his body.
They're not at risk of damage.
A chimpanzee who...
Their mating system is lots of male chimps have sex with lots of females.
So who knows whose father has these enormous testicles because part of his job is to wash out, I know it doesn't sound nice, wash out the guy who was there before him.
So maybe his sperm will be the one that inseminates her.
Wash out?
What do you mean by wash out?
Like literally pump so much sperm into her that the previous guy who just had sex with her, his sperm is literally washed out as if you were there with a hose.
I know it doesn't, it's not, it's not.
Anyway, so if we were ancestrally purely monogamous, we'd have little gorilla testicles, and we don't.
Ours are way bigger than theirs, which suggests that we did a little bit of washing out of our own, which suggests we were serially monogamous, but we're also sneaking around at the same time.
§08Transcript — part 8
Oh, so cheating might be a natural part of being human.
Well, natural doesn't mean good.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, right?
But I'm saying it's what our ancestors did.
So my guess is when they could get away with it, you know, they're there in the cave, there's this couple who aren't a couple, but nobody else is around.
Both of them have reasons to do it.
Males want to cheat because it gives them a greater chance of having offspring they otherwise wouldn't have.
Females can't have an infinite number of kids like males can because they could have sex with 20 guys, they're still only going to have one kid.
The orangutan has like pretty similar DNA to us.
Is it the orangutan?
Which monkey is it?
The chimps are the closest to us.
The chimps.
And then gorillas and then orangutans.
But they're all great apes, so they're all pretty close to us.
Can chimps talk?
No.
So if they, if I'm a chimp and I leave the tree for a while and then my boy comes over and he has sex with my wife.
I can't then find out that he did that.
No.
There's no one telling you.
Now, they do sign language, lots of things that they're interested in doing, immediate communication.
But if you think about sign language, it's really good for saying, you know, there's something behind you.
It's really good for saying, I'm going to punch you in the face if you don't give me your food, whatever.
But it's not good for saying, you know, yesterday I had sex with your wife.
How do they communicate that?
They're terrible at communicating that kind of things that are separated by space.
Or by time, they just simply can't communicate.
And so, but they can't think about it either.
And so...
And our, Homo erectus is the first animal on this planet who could think about separate, things separate by space and time.
And so my guess is our complex communication began with them.
It made me think of my dog.
My dog does something, he does a poo in the house.
I come home an hour later, I tell him off.
He doesn't know why you're upset.
Yeah.
That happened an hour ago.
He doesn't know what the problem is.
But he can't think about the past and the future in terms of, and link it to...
We know from psychology that if you want to punish an animal for pooing, which is effective if you do, you shouldn't rub their nose in it, things that aren't nice, but punishment is very effective.
If you punish them for pooing, you're a bad girl, you do it right away, they'll stop pooing in your house.
You punish them an hour later, they go, I don't know what you're talking about.
But when I come home and say my dog's pooed in the house or something, or he's done something naughty, he's hiding.
Yeah, because he now knows that when you find a poo in the house, he gets in trouble.
When you find a torn up furniture, he gets in trouble.
He knows that.
That's an association.
Dogs are really, really good about learning associations.
And so all that he doesn't, you know, when he tears it up, first of all, he's poor self-control because it's a dog.
But second of all, he can't think about, uh-oh, in the future, Stephen's going to come home and he's going to be pissed.
But now when you do come home and he's like looking over the torn couch, he's like, uh-oh, I'm in trouble.
And so he knows for a while what's coming.
Okay, so he doesn't actually know that it was, that I didn't want him to tear up the couch or whatever.
But he does know that when the couch is...
torn up and I come home that I'm going to be like, fucking hell, the cat.
Yeah.
And you're going to yell at him.
And he also knows that if he does in front of you, you'll yell at him.
And if he poops in front of you, you'll yell at him.
So he knows all those things, but he can't think about the future.
So take an animal way smarter than a dog, a monkey, or even a chimp.
Let's get way smarter.
Chimps can't plan for tomorrow the way a human can.
So if you feed a chimp or a monkey or any of these animals as much food as they want, but only one meal a day, they don't like that because they like to eat several meals a day, just like we do.
But they'll never go, I'm going to stash some of my food because I'm going to get hungry at 5 p.m.
Today because I'm only fed at 2.
It never occurs to them day after day after day to stash it.
When they're full, they'll literally throw it at each other because they can't think.
They can't think about a world that has unfelt needs.
All they can think about is the world where their needs are the same as they are right now.
And because we can project our mind into the future, we know there's going to be a world with all sorts of unfelt needs.
I'll be hungry again.
I'll be cold.
I'll be whatever.
But some animals store food, don't they?
They do, but they do it automatically.
They don't go, oh, it's going to be, like, for example, squirrels who bury nuts.
We'll do that if they've never been through a winter.
So they don't go, uh-oh, I was cold last winter.
I better store some nuts because there weren't many around.
They just have evolved to store nuts when the weather starts to get cold or whatever their signal is.
Because my dog, Pablo, he's never been around.
I mean, he has been around other dogs, of course, but I only have one dog, so he's only ever lived with me.
And I wondered, the first time I got a bone, like,
from the shop and I gave it to him.
He like played with it a little bit, but then he picked it up and buried it in the couch.
Yeah.
And I'm like, what the hell are you doing?
Like, and then I give him another bone and he picks it up and buries it in the couch.
And then I ended up like lifting up the couch and there's all these bones buried in there.
I'm like, how?
That's an evolved behavior that he doesn't understand the purpose of, but he knows he wants to do.
And so let me give you an example from another animal system where we've studied it really closely.
So meerkats, do you know meerkats?
Those cute little things like T-Mobile, I think.
Yeah, from the movies.
Mere cats eat scorpions.
And so they need to teach their babies.
They're very good hunters.
They need to teach their babies to kill something that could kill them.
And so when they have tiny babies, they kill the scorpion and give it to it dead.
And then the baby eats the scorpion once it's weaned from milk because, of course, they're mammals.
When the babies get a little bit bigger, they break the stinger off and throw the scorpion to it alive so the baby can practice killing the scorpion.
And then when the baby's bigger still, it's almost ready to go out on its own, they throw it a live scorpion.
You kill it and eat it.
Because it's got to learn how to do that.
Like, it seems rough, but it's got to learn that.
If you play the sounds of a little baby to the mother or whoever's bringing the food, because it's not always mothers, it'll kill the scorpion and throw it in there, even if who it's throwing into are juveniles who could kill it themselves.
And worse yet, if you have babies and you play juvenile sounds, it'll throw the live scorpion to the baby who's going to kill the baby.
Because all it knows is when I hear that sound, I do X to the scorpion.
Your dog is doing the same thing.
When given bone, chew on it for a little while, then bury it for later.
Because I don't know.
I'll have them later.
Now, it doesn't do that.
I don't know if I'll have it later, but it's evolved to solve that problem.
As you guys know, Whoop is one of my show sponsors.
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When everything in life seems to be competing for my attention, I turn to Whoop because it doesn't have a screen.
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Because screens equal distraction.
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It's really interesting and such an interesting subject matter because, you know, I spend so much time talking to people about our evolution and what it tells us about our future and who we are.
And you're, I mean, you're the guy, you're the guy that knows more about our evolutionary past than I think anybody I've ever met.
So I'm so curious to know if there's just anything else that someone like me should be aware of from...
All the work you've done in studying evolution, any study, any story that was particularly pivotal for you and your thinking that shaped you that we haven't yet talked about?
We've talked a fair bit about how money doesn't make you as happy as you think it would, but it does help.
It does help make you happy.
And we've talked about how important
You know, money is a proxy for state.
It's how important that was in our ancestral society.
But you have to remember that our ancestral societies were very small.
And so it was feasible that I could be the best.
It's something in our group.
I can be the richest.
I can be the best arrow maker, the best storyteller, you name it.
There's something I've got a shot at.
Nobody can be the best at anything anymore.
You can't even be the richest.
I mean, tomorrow, Elon Musk made some amount this year that's like so astronomical, it's hard to even imagine.
And so the...
there's always going to be people who have more than you do.
And so the problem with money is that it's partially a status game.
It's partially about buying a nicer car and a nicer house.
And those things actually tend not to make us happy.
But interestingly, spending our money on doing things tends to make us much happier, which is surprising because it feels like spending money on activities is kind of wasteful.
I always felt like when I was young and broke that if I had money, it was hedonistic and wasteful to spend it skiing, whereas it was sensible to spend it on a new couch because I need a couch.
And then I'll have that couch for a very long time, whereas the ski day is over in a day.
But it turns out that if you have disposable income, it makes you a lot happier when you spend it on things to do rather than things to have.
And we don't know exactly why that is yet, but I suspect that the reason is, is that things to have are a status game.
And that status game is impossible to win, right?
Because there's just too many humans on the planet.
And I'm going to open up my Instagram tomorrow and find that somebody else has a better car or whatever it is that I just bought.
And now mine looks kind of dumpy.
Whereas that ski holiday actually becomes part of yourself.
It becomes this memory that you think back on and that you're happy when you think about it.
And especially if you do.
with friends.
And so the advice I would give is, you know, if you're trying to, especially if you're successful and you're trying to find a way to not feel like all that success was a lot of effort and not really worth it, is to
use your money in ways to enhance your experiences in life rather than to enhance your things.
So what are the, if I had to force you, I don't like doing this, but if I had to force you to give me
a summary of the top five things that are most correlated to my happiness in your opinion.
Are most likely to increase my probability of living a happy, filled life.
You have to give me five.
Okay.
What are those five things?
Families first.
Okay.
We evolved in families, not just small families, but extended families.
And you may not get along with your family, and then you want to find a proxy family, or you want to create one of your own.
So I'm not telling you you need to get along with that jerk of an uncle of yours or your hopeless parents or whatever.
But I'm saying spend time with your family, and if it's not the family you want, trade them in for a new one.
But we evolved to...
Have the close confines, regular contact, constant contact with family.
And so if you can't do it in person because they're far away or, you know, the financial means, whatever, you just do it every day on the phone anyway.
Find a reason to chat regularly with family.
Ideally, eat with family.
§09Transcript — part 9
Eating was a key moment for ancestors.
They got together around the fire.
If it was a successful hunt, they're cooking up their meal together, and they're eating it together.
There's a bad habit of a lot of families to just watch TV together.
And there's nothing wrong with TV, but you should also talk together because we evolved to be storytellers.
We evolved to share stories with each other.
They're super important for us.
So trust me when I say those momentary desires to do your own thing will pale in comparison to the long-term benefits of continually getting together, these rituals of eating together and having conversation together.
It's hugely important.
Okay.
Number two?
Number two is it's also going to be connection.
And it sounds silly, but it's like when you're trying to plan your day and you've got this list of things you want to do and you've got a list of things that your friends are doing.
You can't always do what your friends are doing, but if you can get yourself to sacrifice what you really prefer and do what they're doing, and they're going to eventually do the same for you, of course, too.
Give up some of that autonomy in order to reestablish some of that connection.
And the reason I say this is when we look at married couples, even, they're spending less time together.
When we look at friends, they're spending less time together.
I think we need to go back to this world.
When I think about doing that, I'm just going to be completely honest.
No, you should be, because if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
No, no, when I think, yeah, so I'm just going to put myself in the head of the person that's hearing that.
And a lot of entrepreneurs and my audience that are like very busy building their startup, they've got jobs that are demanding of them, that they're striving, and they're striving away from a life that they didn't like towards a life that they hope they will.
So that's requiring them to give so much time and energy to like separate.
Themselves from the crowd.
So when they hear that they need to spend more time with their partner, many of them will be thinking,
But then my business will fail.
And I agree with them.
When I'm giving this generic advice, I'm not tailoring it to that person.
And I completely agree with that person's life choice.
When we're young, we're autonomy machines.
And that takes precedence.
Especially if you have a big dream that you think you could get to.
You're this entrepreneur.
And especially if you're trying to get away from something that wasn't much.
Like materially, you just didn't have enough to really get by.
Whatever the case might be.
LeBron James throwing basket after basket after basket, trying to become the person he wants to be.
Look how well it works for him.
What's the cost?
The cost is paid at the time.
You're going to be lonely when you do that.
But if you're loving what you're doing and if you think it has a real chance, I say pay that loneliness price when you're young.
Don't pay it every single day.
Please go out with your friends on Friday night and talk with your fellow entrepreneurs and do things that still allow you to be connected so you're not suicidal by the time you get there.
But I totally get that autonomy push.
It's what makes us a success.
I do think I'm bullshitting myself a little bit because I go, could I spend another hour with my partner a day or another two, three hours a week and my business would be fine?
Of course I could.
But there's, like you said, there's an inherent.
striving, which can be out of whack.
And the problem is that if what you really want to do right now is work, I say when you're young, do it.
Because you can let your connections fray, try not to let them disappear, and then you can rebuild them when you now...
I've got there.
But the key is you've got to get there.
You have to set yourself an answer in advance.
And here's the reason I say that.
I have found myself waiting for a bus longer than it would have taken me to walk.
And so once I do that a few times, I realize, oh, the bus schedule is erratic.
I can do the walking.
I'm going to wait X minutes and then I'm going to walk.
Our problem is that we keep setting new bar for ourself if we don't make that plan in advance.
Oh, I'll just give it another minute.
Oh, I'll just give it another minute.
Or I'll just push this business for another year.
I'll just push it for another year.
And you can find yourself doing it forever.
You may not succeed.
You may have a miserable life where all you did was work and you kept pushing it for another year and it never got there.
And so my recipe is when you start something, you give yourself an end date.
You say, what would it mean for me to be a success?
And so you can have an end date that's both good and bad.
How much money do I have to make?
And now I won.
How much time do I get?
Do I give it without making any money?
And therefore I lost.
And you should set those two things in advance.
Because once you're in it, I promise you, you're going to move the bar.
Number three.
Yes.
If you're this hard-driving entrepreneur who's putting that aside, I'm dead serious when I say get a dog, a cat, whatever your preferred animal is.
And the data show that having a pet actually makes people quite happy.
And I very mindfully did it when I was a brand-new assistant professor.
You know, in this American system, I'm going to either get tenured and promoted after seven years or I'm going to get fired.
So I knew that I was a work machine for seven years.
Everything else was going to take second place.
But my dog wouldn't care.
Dogs are amazing.
Maybe one day as you were talking, I was thinking, maybe people are going to get robots someday.
And that's a sad future to think about.
But just like a robot generally to be their friend, which is quite grim.
Number four.
So when you ask yourself, well, what made our ancestors happy?
There's a lot of seemingly pointless sitting around and doing nothing together.
And the problem with our world today, I believe, but don't know, I don't have good data on this, this is Bill's intuition, is that we can always be doing something.
There's a ten zillion actually very good shows on TV.
And I suspect that what we are giving up when doing that is random chit-chat with friends.
Now, when I used to walk by construction sites 20 years ago, you'd see all these guys eating their lunch together and just shooting the shit, right?
Just having a good time.
When I walk by construction sites today during lunch, I see most of the guys on their phone not even talking to the guy right next to them.
They're still sitting in a line at the construction site, but they're not engaged with each other.
And those guys are not as tight and their job is not going to be as good.
And so I would say...
Be present?
Be present in idle conversation times.
It doesn't seem as interesting as it is.
It's super important.
And number five, last but not least.
I would say, and this is going to sound a little bit redundant, but we all have lifestyle goals that we pursue.
And they could be getting more fit.
They could be learning a foreign language.
They could be learning to paint.
They could be anything like that.
The data show very clearly you're way more likely to achieve those lifestyles.
goals if you commit to doing them with somebody else, because they'll push you and you'll push them.
People join gyms every year that they attend five times and never go back.
And so you want to, whenever you want to make a change in your life, try to use connection to make that change more effective, because not only will it make the change more effective, but it'll overall in the long term make you a happier person.
And on that point about health, fitness, and lifestyle goals, I found out that you are a senior scientist at a company that I'm an investor in called Whoop.
They also are a sponsor of this podcast, I should probably say.
But you're a senior scientist there.
Well, I'm a contractor.
I don't work directly for them, but they've contracted me to work with them.
That's right.
And what is it you're doing at Whoop?
I have the coolest job in the world.
So I work as part of the performance science team.
And what we're tasked to do is just look at all the data that Whoop collects and ask the question, how can we do it better?
What are things that people are doing that really help them?
Let them know how much it's helping them.
What are things that people are doing that maybe aren't helping them?
Let them know that it's not helping.
And more so, sleep is not well understood.
Exercise is not well understood.
This relationship to eating is not well understood.
You'll have learned that from lots of guests previously on the show.
And so I get this really cool job where we just dive into our data all the time to try to answer these fundamental questions.
And what are some of the cool questions you've asked that have garnered interesting answers thus far?
So these aren't published data yet.
And so what that means, the caveat on them is that we could be wrong, right?
I could be telling you stuff that I'm going to send it to a journal and they're going to
laughing in my face and saying, you're forgetting the Fosdick effect.
That's total nonsense, right?
That could happen.
So going with, you have to understand the caveat here that these are raw data that we've just discovered that we haven't vetted yet in the scientific community.
But let me give you an example.
One of the quite remarkable things that we're finding at WHOOP is that
Exercise amplifies other behaviors.
And so if I do something that's good for me, even if it's got nothing to do with exercise, and I exercise that day, it's better for me.
If I do something that's bad for me, and even if it's got nothing to do with exercise, it's worse for me on a day that I exercise.
Give me an example.
Yeah.
So if I drink, we know that alcohol, every alcoholic drink that I have raises my resting heart rate by, I think it's about a beat, beat and a half, if I remember right, and lowers my HRV by like three points, if I remember right.
I could be getting those numbers a little bit off.
But it's that kind of magnitude.
And every drink just, it's this linear effect up to at least 10 drinks.
We see that in our data with thousands and thousands of people.
If you have those drinks on days that you're basically sedentary, you did almost nothing, their effect is smaller than if you have those drinks on days where you exercised.
So I could exercise in the morning, then I drink.
Yep.
And the impact of the drink is worse because I exercised.
Because you exercised.
And the same holds for good things.
I know, it's ridiculous.
I don't understand the physiology at all, but this is what we're seeing.
So drink and don't exercise.
Exactly.
On days that you're going to misbehave, and it's probably not just alcohol, that's just one of the ones I've analyzed.
On days that you're going to misbehave, be relatively sedentary.
Now, the thing is, it also works the other way.
So if you sometimes wear blue light blocking glasses late in the evening or you dim the lights late in the evening, you're conscientious about getting ready for bed, that has a bigger positive effect on your recovery on days that you exercise, even though blue light and exercise have nothing to do with each other.
So it doesn't seem to matter what the behavior is.
If it's positive, it has a bigger positive effect on days you exercise more.
If it's negative, it has a bigger negative effect on days you exercise more.
Interesting.
Which is super cool.
I have no idea why.
We're obviously going to write it up and tell the world about it.
And when we do, maybe I made a mistake and we'll discover what I did wrong and what I just told you isn't true.
But for now, I believe that's true.
So if I'm having a bit of like a naughty day, you know, if I'm like breaking all my rules.
Don't exercise.
Interesting.
And then if I'm having a great day, like I'm eating really, really healthy and everything's going well, I'm sleeping well.
Here's the thing.
Eating might be the exception.
The data also show that if you, like imagine you stuff your face full of fatty foods and all that kind of stuff, exercise is exactly what you should be doing now after you ate.
Use the fuel you process.
Don't just store it.
And so food is something we need.
Too much food is obviously a bad thing, but I don't count food in the naughty behavior list.
And so I haven't actually, everybody eats every day and I don't have good data on how much they've eaten.
But what our data do suggest is that going for a walk, even just a walk,
Like zone two is fabulous.
Even zone one is good.
Going for a walk, doing stuff after you eat helps you just feel better.
And I'm guessing here that what you saw in the data is you could look at someone who is drinking alcohol every day, for example, and then you could see on the days that they exercised as well.
The impact of the alcohol on their biomarkers was more significant.
Yes.
And what we have is, fortunately, we've got thousands and thousands of people, so big data sets, who log alcohol relatively often.
They don't drink every day.
§10Transcript — part 10
And I can even show you what the pattern looks like.
People don't drink much Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Thursday, they have a drink or two.
You know, Friday, more.
Saturday and Sunday, more.
And then go back.
But they also exercise at different points across the week.
And so some people, those two things happen to hit at the same time.
And sometimes they don't.
And what I try to do in these analyses, what we all try to do in these analyses, is look within person.
Because if you're the kind of person who exercises when you drink and I'm not, well, who knows what else differs between us?
So what I really want to know is what does Stephen look like when he drinks two drinks on days that he also exercises the same as usual, less than usual, more than usual?
We want to make it all against what you usually do.
And there we see these effects very clearly.
Are there any other cool answers you've discovered in your time at Whoop?
You know, if you look at how much sleep people need, the argument is everybody needs the same, basically, on average, right?
But some people need a little less and some people need a little more.
I think men need less sleep than women.
I don't know that yet, but there's lots of reasons to think that.
First of all, hunter-gatherers, when you look at the diary,
When you look at the data,
data they've gathered with ActiGraph, where they put a motion capture on the gathers, the men sleep about 20 minutes less than the women do.
Now, that's not significant in their samples because they have small samples of fun together.
When we put these things on zillions of people, we see men sleep about 20 minutes less than women do.
When you put the whoop on?
Yeah.
And so we see the exact same thing they see, but it's wildly statistically significant in our data set because it's so huge.
20 minutes is a lot.
Now, here's the thing.
If men don't need as much sleep as women, why is that the case?
So recently, now this is hot off the press.
I can't promise you I'm doing it right, but I believe I am.
Our data suggests men sleep more impactfully, more effectively than women.
That for every hour of sleep that a man gets, he gets a little more bang for the buck on his recovery than women get.
I have no idea why that might be.
It could be they have bigger slow waves when they're in slow wave sleep.
It could be a thousand different things.
I don't know.
But what my data suggests is that men get more bang for the buck out of every hour of sleep.
And as a consequence, they sleep about 20 minutes less.
That's right off the press.
I can't even promise you that holds up.
I've looked at it in two samples, but I could be making a mistake.
I want to play with it more.
I just did some research as you were explaining that also really interesting finding or hypothesis on the previous one, which is about why if I drank alcohol on a day when I exercised, it would cause my biomarkers to have a
reflect a worse sort of state.
And it says on days when you both drink alcohol and exercise, the...
The combined psychological stresses can lead to alterations in your biomarkers reflecting increased oxidative stress, liver strain, dehydration, and inflammation.
In contrast, on days when you consume alcohol without exercising, these effects might be less pronounced, resulting in different biomarker profiles.
I think that's super possible.
Yeah, it's very possible.
That could be the mechanism.
It could be all about hydration.
And so all you've got to do is be doubly conscientious about hydrating and then problem solved.
But here's the thing.
Every negative thing I've looked at has gotten worse when you exercise.
And every positive thing I've looked at has gotten better.
So it may be as simple as something very specific with alcohol and exercise, but it may be there's a broader principle at play.
And so somebody out there who's super smart, like Trivers, came along and lined up how every animal mating system worked.
He says, look, here's how it works.
Females make the larger sex cell.
They typically then put more effort into it.
So males compete for females.
And then lo and behold, you see that across the animal kingdom.
And the rare exceptions where males put more effort, now the females compete for the males.
So, you know, somebody's going to come along super smart and they'll hear what I just said and they go, I know what the answer is to that, but I don't know.
And the beauty is that when a...
When I hear a scientific explanation that nails it, I immediately go, oh, that's it.
And I wish I thought of it, but at least I can see that they've got the answer when I, you know, didn't.
Is there anything else, one last thing, from your work as a senior scientist at WHOOP?
That is intriguing to you or any hypotheses you have that you're...
Discovering from the data.
Well, so we're seeing lots of nice evidence of a couple different things.
First of all, there's a lot of little things that help a lot.
And I'm a big believer in lots of little things helping a lot, but they have to suit you because we also find huge individual variability on how well they work.
So reading in bed, on average, actually not only helps you sleep, fall asleep more regularly, but it even helps you sleep longer.
I suspect but don't know that you're clearing your mind of the day's worries.
That probably works for some people, but some people probably works the opposite.
Like now they get caught up in the novel they're reading and they can't sleep.
So you have to be super thoughtful about what works for you.
CBD works really well, but it actually works for some people really well, and for others it even has a negative effect.
You know, our samples are big enough that we can see across the board.
We find things like a weighted blanket, blue light blockers in the evening, dimming your lights in the evening.
Those are big.
They have big effects across the course of the night.
By big, I mean like 15, 20 minutes of more sleep, more time in REM and slow wave.
You add all those things together, it ends up being a lot.
Wow.
The final thing that we find is a lot of people have sleep worries.
You know, they worry they won't sleep well.
And the downside of that is that if you have sleep worries, what ends up happening is they get produced by your poor sleep.
Like I think, gee, I'm going to have trouble falling asleep because lo and behold, I did.
But then when we analyze the data, we've run these surveys where we ask, what was your worry going into the night?
And when you woke up in the morning, how did it go?
And what role did your worries play, et cetera?
And when we disentangle it, we see that the worries start to cause their own problems.
The worries themselves make it harder to sleep.
And so if you could find ways to short circuit those worries, again, things like reading in bed, whatever it is to get your mind elsewhere, it's going to be beneficial.
Is there much data on coffee and the impact that that has?
Coffee actually overall is not bad.
You don't want to do it too late in the day.
And some people can, I have friends who can drink a coffee at dinner and go right to sleep.
So it's not everybody, but some people, after 2 p.m., it can be pretty disruptive for some people.
And what we'd also advise is when you're eating, try to restrict that to daylight hours.
That seems to make a big difference.
It's, you know, your body, you're trying to get parasympathetic dominance when you go to sleep.
And if you've got food in there, your body's working hard to digest it.
And that makes it difficult.
What's the most important thing in your book, The Social Paradox, when finding what you want means losing what you need, that we haven't talked about, that is important for someone who's listening that wants to improve their life and increase their probability of happiness?
So the last thing I would say is, that we haven't covered, is that...
All right, so I'm arguing you need to increase your sociality.
And I'm arguing your socialness.
You need to be more social, more connected.
And I'm arguing that we're too autonomous.
But that's a big ask.
And I remember reading this article in the New York Times about this guy.
He wrote an op-ed piece about it.
He decided to reconnect with all of his old friends.
And so he's calling them up and finding them, and they're getting together.
And then he ends it by saying, am I going to keep this up every week?
No, I just don't have time.
And that's really, really an important lesson, that we lead these busy lives that are not the same as hunter-gatherers.
We have so many things that we can do and are meant to be doing that we can't just...
introduce social connection into our life willy-nilly, or we won't keep it up.
We have to be Socratic and know yourself and know your weaknesses and know what you're going to sustain and what you're not.
And from my perspective, that means two things.
One, trying to say, well, whenever I do something alone that I'm doing something I enjoy, like maybe the crossword puzzle or running or whatever your thing is,
Is there a way to do that with others?
Don't, you know, match my connection need with my autonomy need.
I want to do that.
That's my autonomy speaking.
But are there others who want to do it or I can do it with?
So in my case, I love to do the New York Times puzzle.
My sister lives in London.
So we reconnect in a way that we just weren't doing before because we're both busy.
But we're both doing the puzzle anyway, so why not do that?
If you have to decide to do something, every single time you do it, you just won't do it.
You want to surrender control of that decision-making process to either your past or to the environment itself, by which I mean in the same way that we say, I'll brush my teeth after breakfast.
We don't say, I wonder if I should brush my teeth today.
We just know I eat breakfast, then I brush.
You want to do the same thing.
Oh, after breakfast, I'll call my sister and we'll do the puzzle together.
You want a set rule so you don't have to decide to do it.
And then these things become habit.
And so what I want to argue is that people should reintroduce connection by trying not to do things alone, but they should do it in the easiest way possible, in the way that's most likely to become habitual, and that doesn't actually add more time to their busy day.
And it's surprisingly doable.
William, thank you.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.
Uh-oh.
Not knowing who they're leaving it for.
So this question is going to come out of left field.
Probably, yeah.
You're given the chance plus the power to do one thing to save humanity plus make everyone happy.
What would that be?
If I had one chance to do one thing...
To save humanity.
To save humanity.
I would...
And I'm magic, right?
I can make it whatever I want.
Whatever you want.
I would make sure that there's perfect justice.
Because if there's perfect justice, then everybody who misbehaves, does wrong by somebody else, knows that they're going to get, that there'll be consequences for that behavior.
Because I think that the one thing that humanity is not going to get its way out of is people being horrible to other people.
But if there's perfect justice, everybody who's horrible to somebody else is going to get their...
And I don't mean justice when you die.
I mean justice in real time.
They're going to stop doing that, and people will just be better to each other.
What would be the cost of that?
Because there's always a cost, right?
The cost of that is that...
Well, look, you can't get away with anything anymore.
I get away with a lot of little things, like I speed all the time, and I do it because I know I can get away with it.
And I like doing that, but I think that perfect justice would have the advantage that it's harm to others.
See, in the past, we cared about property crimes a lot and not so much harm to others.
I would want in this world that perfect justice comes with harm to others.
Okay, but with justice, there's a subjective element, right, to what is just.
Because if you look back through history, what we thought was just...
That's true.
You're absolutely right.
And so the cost might be missing the mark.
We might, as a human population today, come up with a consensual decision about what justice is that a thousand years from now they look back and they're utterly appalled that that was what we were doing.
Which is what we look back at 200 years ago.
Justice?
What the fuck?
Yeah, what the hell was that?
Thank you so much, William.
Thank you for writing an incredible book.
Your first book here, called The Social Leap, was a smash hit and is an extraordinary book.
But this book is exceptional, and it's exceptionally timed.
I think that has to be said, because where the world is at the moment, it feels like we're drifting to some degree.
It feels like we're drifting from the...
The island where our tribe are, and we're getting further and further away from knowing exactly what it is to be human.
I think we're feeling the consequences of that if you look at a lot of the data.
We're feeling we have the mental health crisis around the world, the increase in suicidal ideation and suicide, the increase in purposelessness, the increase in opioid addictions and things like that.
And I don't think anybody could make the case in a way that's founded on what we're seeing that we're...
Any closer to being human, or whatever that means, than we've ever been.
And this book, I think, helps us to course correct.
It helps us to understand.
It turns the lights on.
§11Transcript — part 11
And as it says on the front, it helps us to understand that there's this important balance between autonomy and connection.
We need both of them, but we need to get the balance correct.
And many of us, including myself,
No deep inside that maybe we're not getting that balance.
Correct.
And this is why this book is so wonderful, because it's confronting in the nicest possible way and in an important way.
So I highly recommend everybody give it a read.
It's called The Social Paradox When Finding What You Want Means Losing What You Need by William von Hippel.
Thanks, Stephen.
I really enjoyed chatting with you about it.
I can't wait.
I can't wait for people to read it and to send me lots of messages.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate you.
Thank you.
Totally my pleasure.
This has always blown my mind a little bit.
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