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do you believe the 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 evolve to want children look the fertility rates are going way down 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 into 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 Nanny you would never worry at all interesting Dr William Von hipple 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 having less sex than they were 20 years ago marriage are 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 18501 in 100 of Americans lived alone now it's 1 in seven in the 1970s one in three people spent time with their neighbors now that's completely reversed now let's dive a little deeper 50% of humanity now lives in the city then 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 bizar Le one of the clearest honest signals for men to demonstrate for women as 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 di of here all you've got to do is hit the Subscribe button so actually this this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe because it might end up costing me an [Applause] [Music] awful Dr William Von hipple 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 what we 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 um 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 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 um 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 then the ancestors who enjoyed doing things that were bad for them what is evolution so evolution is as mind this process and all it is is if 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 rates now we have the 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 will be well represented in the Next Generation and about him poor guy even if he's wonderful those 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 are a new mutation that turns out to have great value they becoming they become over represented 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 we look at Evolution for answers on human happiness and success and as a sort of of a guiding compass for what we should be doing with our Lives why is evolution the 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' probably heard oh Express gratitude that'll make you happy if you Express gratitude why why should that make you happy if 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 been a reason it must have done something for our ancestors or it's what um my colleague Robert triers 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 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 fat salt sugar those are the kinds of things that are ancestors s it all the time uh 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 a evolutionary psychologist and someone who understands where we've come from and therefore are sort of innate behaviors 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 the we can 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 going to 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 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 romc com and I'm like I really want to see an action movie we go okay I'll see if the movie's over we just go our own ways and so it could 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 the some of the sort of stats that illuminate this problem from that make it clear that this is actually happening in your view so there's a number of them um 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 so one in 100 now it's one in seven so you know here we are 170 years L 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 in the 1970s when I was a kid um about 30% of people saw their neighbors got together with their neighbors not visually seeing them but got together with their neighbors um 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 and five are seeing their neighbors regularly used to be one and three and now one and three never get together with their neighbors at all so we're we're moving away from each other in a host of different ways even married couples are spending less time together they're 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 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 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 you 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 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 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 unto gathers and so uh there's a team that went to the hodza people who live outside would live 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 hza still lived where Humanity evolved so of course it could have been different a quar to million years ago but it could have been exactly like they live today and so when you look at the hza this particular team ask them over the last week have you been happy sometimes happy and sometimes sad sad over 90% of the hza said happy that was their answer 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 hodza are literally happier than we are now they they bury almost
half their children they 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 they look a lot happier than we are now we can see those same stats in 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 this of my second book is so I'll tell you how I got there how's that so I'm visiting a friend of mine also named Stephen and uh he struck it rich and he invites me over I'm like this is going to be cool I'm gonna 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 Etc and so I turned him I'm like Steve man your life is over the top and he's like yeah it seems that way but 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 benefit that he has how 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 ID 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 Marlo's wonderful book on the hza and I'm reading about their lives and and and how content they are and I'm like holy cow I'm just like my friend Steve compared to them I'm a multi-millionaire I don't my when my kids get sick I'm off to the doctor immediately I don't have this horrible life for a bury Mo 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 hundred years I'm years ago a quarter of the children died by the 150 years ago a quarter of the children died by the time they turned five you know that you you got a the flu or you got you know typhus there was zillion diseases that just killed us when we were young um women died in child birth at rates way skyro compared to today so it's not just looking back at un togethers but even 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 multicausal whenever you get a big effect like that like if you take those data seriously that I told you about the hodza they're basically twice as happy as we are now that's such a big effect it has to be multia 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 have gone wrong but I think what what it returns us to is this problem that we were talking about before about autonomy in connection and so let's take City living as a for example 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 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 hundred 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 whether they live into in cities um communities over a quarter million or in the country
communities less than 2 200 people they're happier in the country than they are in the city which is a remarkable fact remarkable fact in part because they're also 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 now some of that it's burned on comp on expensive city living but far from all of it and so they you're literally poorer in the country but happier and that's this graph here that from your book um percentage of Americans who are very happy are not too happy in urban and rural communities that's right and it shows that people are pretty significantly happier in R rural areas and report to 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 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 of 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 got a thousand people right next to you right you're you're cheek by gal 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 you 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 5T away that person 5T away in principle you ought to be good buddies with or if they 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 I'm out of coffee beans I want to borrow some I can just drone them in or whatever I I can I can call instacart or whatever whoever your your favorite deliveries um 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 it'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 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 inand in our society so money does make you happy it's 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 sealing at around $100,000 a year it doesn't past 600,000 a year money still makes you happier it's it's remarkable it makes a difference but there's this thing known as the easterland 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 um happiness in the United States since 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 per perfect combination to achieve happiness in that regard then wealth does matter but something else matters as well 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 why I think H gathers 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 this Zero Sum gain that is life and by Zero Sum gain 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 come home 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 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 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 zerm in the sense of 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 100 gathers 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 than 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 gonna say hey Bill's cooler than Stephen I'm going with him and so status matters it's a process of sexual selection whereby both sexes are always trying to CH 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 men choose them and that's a zero sum status game and what does evolution tell us about that that competitive sort of Dating Game what does it tell us if I'm trying to be attractive as a man what I need to be demonstrating in order to attract the opposite sex as a human yeah so what 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 um 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 in all animals actually one of the clearest on 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 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 r rash and therefore You' removed yourself from the gene pool or you bounce right back up because you're such a robust organism 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 attracted to them and it may only be getting other men to back off when I take these big risks you may say well all right I'm not going to try to crowd in on Bill 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 and they because once you have a family taking risks are is foolish you want to take risk to get in the Mating Game but you don't want to keep taking taking risk once you got people depending on you so I've got honest signals of did you say quality yeah honest signals of quality as being attractive as 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 uh ambition things like that people look for ambition because it's if you are out there working hard the time it's an honest signal that you're going to probably continue to do that provide for somebody Etc 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 they don't you don't sit down they 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° 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 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 the good thing about being in a nice guys they they tend to finish first and so when we look at Hunter gather 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 burst because lots of people take advantage of them and so I share with you and you never share back with me but if I'm a nice guy I'm like that's okay you know Steven 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 caught so they they they're 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 you were to design a perfectly attractive woman from an evolutionary basis what would that woman be like the different the 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 you you're making 100 million sperm a day 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 um under the age of
40 basically once our ancestral females hit 40 they almost never reprodu 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 wellfed 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 wellfed 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 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 it's well it's always both right you know humans are are wildly malleable and you can move things around in crazy ways you know what look at what what people found attractive just 50 years ago compared to today but there's a lot of Basics that underly it and so for example if you look at the actual shape of women and their hip to- waist ratio whether the 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 Prem 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 thigh 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 but and 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 Mon Rose day to really really skinny for
a while and then back to heavier again do men typically care for woman's Rich from an evolutionary perspective does it matter in principle it doesn't matter much I mean remember but there's there's your phenotype you're you're you want to be well taken care of but but as far as what you're actually attracted to um women so 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 and hunting you want somebody who's going to look out for you and your kids these are the variables that really matter and 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 and here's the 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 and and male businessmen people who are really rich and famous the the women that they um date and marry go are entirely across the social class Spectrum some are super rich some are super poor a waitress has a great chance with MC Jagger um and so does some high society Elite person but if you turn 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 and men don't care about that as much in women what is the basis for homosexual relationships and 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 we don't often see exclusive homosexuality in the animal kingdom that
seems to be much more common in humans nobody's 100% sure 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 brandan Z 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 so 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 um and it works a ton bit different than 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 okay which kind of feels like a bit of a contradiction to the idea that testosterone and risk taking and being brwn and being well mascul 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 what is it about the being a little bit gay like what are the features what are the what are the features of being a little bit gay we know the genes um this C this paper was published in um 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 there we don't understand these polygenic scores very well yet but if I had to guess um you know if you think of
extreme straight males versus gay Mal gay males are much cleaner they look after their themselves their bodies much better their their hygiene's much better they take you know they're 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 where you're not so downright disgusting to women one of the one of the things that kind of Dove tells into this is some of the stats that I was reading about education these days um this one stat here says that 58% of college graduates in the most recent cohorts were women with women on campus with one women 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 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 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 uh 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 and that those lines crossed and they never gone back and so now the the stat you were talking about is there's basically uh the it's 6040 basically um 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 who are as as educated as themselves or more and men are looking for women who are as educated 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 singal single now remember 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 you couldn't have a job really and so you 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 and we don't know why men are attending college at lower rates than women but I suspect that school itself is just doesn't suit boys as well as it suits girls and so it's harder for boys to hold still it's 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 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 un do 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 there's still a desire for the for the man to have more and provide more there's again it doesn't the numbers don't 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 um 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 you men look for the same thing in women and women look for the same thing in men um and there's just a lot more competition among the men to get women and so it's a smaller subset of men who are 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 find 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 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 only their chance of getting swiped on are very very low what about for women cuz a lot of my female friends say that they hate the dating apps they have no luck then they're only getting bad swipes yeah that's that's the difference they're
getting bad swipes meaning they don't like the guys who swipe them the guys who have no Locker 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 I jesus I wish I had this many swipes yeah cuz as a guy I mean what I had 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 like and it was very very rare but when I looked at her Tinder that she was complaining about she had hundreds of men yeah but she just didn't like any of them exactly that's the difference and so the thing is that throughout our evolutionary history men have often been left out of the out of The Mating Game entirely and we know this if we look at the variability on our y l chromosomes you only inherit yl genes from your father because women don't have a y chromosome for 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 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 some lots of lots of potential that as we're 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 they 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 when we were all just people who met in person you would realize oh this guy's ass salt to 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 the attraction um 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 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 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 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 swiped right how does pornography confound all of this stuff yeah pornography is a funny business it 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 um 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 only fans or whatever those sites are that interest you it it mimics a lot of the features and so you know I become interested in the social media world we live in and this possibility that social media Mak 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 Etc and and I think what's happened is that as we get lazy and we we 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 evid I 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 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 although it went up for a little bit it went back down and instead of what's going up is pornography watching and so it 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 25y olds had had sex in the last year and now it's getting down nearer to 60 five 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 of 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 is almost like tripled yeah in that time period it's it's always it's been accessible over that en time entire time period but basically what what I think those dat I I I refer to this I know it's a absurd acronym I refer to this as smiling social media induced laziness in our social habits I know it's it'll never catch on but I think that what they're doing is sming they they they've got friends we 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 would have that's the party where you would have met that person who you would have end up hooking up with either as short-term or long-term partner but you didn't go and instead what you did is you stay at home and so there's a decent chance you watchh porn and so we're 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 the 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 I actually think it's separate from pornography because right now we've already separated our sexual activity from our reproduction right can just use 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 evolve 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 evolv 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 evolv 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 I wasn't Keen to have more kids my I have some children who grown to adulthood I felt like I don't need any more kids but then I have another kid and I I'm I'm just in love with her right you can't help yourself so we've intervened in Nature's natural 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 um probably around 8 billion and some change and then it start to go down and then it may continue to go down forever now it may be that if what 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 SHP 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 EC commute or whatever maybe suddenly we'll want to have six or eight of them again because our robot's the one who gets up in the middle of the night with him 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 indu industrialized and Rich the reproduction the reproductive 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 a lot of countries that are going to be literally half their size by the year 00 because they're shrinking so fast really half of East Asia um 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 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 [ __ ] sex are we well we'd still be having sex we just wouldn't be having kids right but we are having less as well aren't we well that varies yeah lots and lots of us having less sex there 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 and and various pollutants that um that change our endocrine system that that reduce sperm counts I we think that's what's going on and redu 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 what would you do well the 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 um 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 that they're really interesting this is some wonderful work by Danny Conan who won the Nobel Prize and he 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 till you were done before you answered your Bieber but you you said oh I'm having a great time and as it goes with 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 the dishes doing the laundry if you 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 everever 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 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 that you get to be part of as you see the world through new eyes again and so and for a good evolutionary reasons where you get your whole mind and body and identity caught up in them and so kids end up being a h 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 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 I you know robot has infinite patience if you design it nice and soft and fluffy it's going to be more cuddly than we are um the kids might like the robots more than they like us last night I was with a with my girlfriend and I was joking cuz 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 um like one of them will like like raise the kids and then the other one would like take the kid to school and stuff cuz 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 Mommy cuz 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 caus the baby to release different types of hormones based on their gender yeah so you almost can't the robot 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 in the at night time 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 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 the the pitch of that cry is you could put whatever scent on them you want you could make it Mom or Dad you can make it even smell like you if you want to why not have that person help you out you know the our ancestors engag in what 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 ried 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 ask 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 um the parent releases certain hormones in the child by 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 parenting is one of the it's 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 247 and it would have driven me nuts if I were it's kids are are wonderful and boring and horrible and so why not when you Outsource and we all do we have since time began we've 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 uh it's it's a strange feature 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 then 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 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 do you believe that's going to be that's going to happen so if 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 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 uh 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 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 I'm putting everybody together now we've got these amazing data sets for from Germany for example where we track people for so many years that we 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 were 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 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 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 their the year of their marriage was happier than before they met and the next year's happier still and it just keeps working its way up and so when you aage all that together getting married doesn't make you happy it's a 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 overweighting autonomy and overweighting it is probably what they're doing everywh 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 the it's the individualism yes 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 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 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 they find ways to make their marriage work even if it's no better than the marriage of the less happy Folks at my company flight Studio which is part of my bigger company flight group we're constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences whether that's a new show a product or a project it's why I launched the conversation cards I've relied on
Shopify before who's a sponsor of today's podcast and I'll be using them again for the next big launch which we'll hear about soon and I use them because of how easy it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you no matter where you are in the world with Shopify the usual pain points of launching products online Disappear Completely no matter the size of your business Shopify has everything you need to make your business go to the next level and better connect with your customers all over the world to say thank you to all of you for listening to my show we're giving you a trial which is just $1 a month you can sign up by going to to shopify.com Bartlet that's shopify.com Bartlet or find the link in the description below and what about things like ADHD and neurod Divergence is there an evolutionary basis for why why that occurs yes so the um neurod Divergence is a complicated one the um 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 in areas where there's lots of pollutants people are more likely to be neurod Divergent but I think neurod Divergence has always been with this 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 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 um 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 R Rising but of course I don't know I'm only guessing based on the data I've seen now in the case of neurod Divergence I think they've always played a really important role in humanity and the reason for that is that you know humans are 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 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 hunted gatherers do that and neurod Divergent people are less likely to do that because they're less socially connected and so probably most of the great inventions of humanity were created by neurodivergent people now those 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 that the technical things that that make our lives so easy now ADHD is a a different ball wax we know it's highly heritable we know a lot of the genes are we also suspect that it didn't it wasn't even a noticeable thing in a hunter gather 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 dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex that ows 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 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 in the AI doing everything for 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 a AI can do everything that we can do do you think we're going emerge with um 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 would 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 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 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 insert an electrode into their brain and stimulate this particular region and 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 the goes 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 that what's the evolutionary basis for humans getting depressed and anxious because presumably that's that's not productive for our survival not so remember that that with every generation with 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 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 oh no lion life is co everything's copesthetic I'll go back to eating grass and being happy whereas if I'm a human running away from a line be oh my God that was really scary I wonder when there's another line coming now the biggest gift that Evolution gave us is the capacity to simulate the future Evolution doesn't give any gifts without costs you pay a price for every one of them and the capacity to simulate the future also comes with the realization it is 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 something that really um 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 is one of just the effect of believing right so lots of people worry about a life without meaning you know people of religion have solve 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 NeverEnding chain Etc and it doesn't they can be wildely different religions but they all hold this notion that there's 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 won't 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 um where we say let's look at the General Social Survey and in fact anybody wants to can get online and look at the General Social Survey and answer any question that's available in that it's a remarkably remarkable publicly available data set which I used repeatedly in this book and praying actually makes you happier if you among people who don't go to church they're not praying and in my mind that's that's life has meaning versus it doesn't people who have religion have meaning people 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 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 think that God wants you to go to church if 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 whe 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 social of 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 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 it 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 what they refer to well not just in Psychology but in psychological terms as a god-shaped whole 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 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 they get happier which suggests that they find it I've never actually taken the time to reflect and search for meaning okay so but maybe it's the the pursuit of something then that's creating the happiness versus them finding H meaning maybe we don't know you 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 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 and 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 we 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 and but I made three humans I did my part I only did the small part but I was 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 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 cucura cucur lay two eggs and then they weigh 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 a 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 and to cooperate that's what got us to where we are and it was all sorts of interesting things that got us there was cognitive things like division of labor you know cers 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 must have been really rough every was eating us for dinner and now it's the shoes on the other foot we're the apex predator on this planet but doesn't our evolutionary history tell us that we ban together in tough
times yes but we band together to attack the others yeah we do it's not look there's 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 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 as even by hom rectus once so our ancestors one and two million years ago when they band together they are already the deadliest force in this planet we've got good evidence that they're eating huge animals like mammoths so it's your ability had 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 at 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 with 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 prehuman other homoerectus and you're saying that with like America versus China and America versus Mexico and whatever it might be the 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 our groups the benefit of the doubt but we very quickly become tribal and negative toward them I was sat here um yesterday with the wonderful gentleman who I'm a big fan of called Robert Green who wrote the book about power mhm 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 aoral 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 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 bys every human goes to sleep and when when you go to sleep the weakest of humans in your group can kill you easily and so to be powerful you you part of it is to be tough and scary but part of it also 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 UNP powerful or powerless body language looks like it's super easy to look in other animals because because they can't talk they appease they got ways of shrinking themselves and says no no don't beat me up this whatever you want is yours and humans mimic some of that we shrink ourselves when 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 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 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 himself down as the really powerful because they can afford to say no no I'm I'm nobody you don't want to B with me and the second they say that in those cultures like oo 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 and 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 powered 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 out for every day and they don't wear the designer Brands and have Louis Von yeah the the thing is that we use those Brands to compete for status but they're already at the very top of deep they won their competition and anybody who knows them knows that and their act 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 you 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 was if he had a Louis Vuitton bag he would actually be lowering himself to the status CLA he's just a regular millionaire he's not the multibillionaire that he is you've studied um the hadza tribe you 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 is was really rare for our ancestors they evolve to want both they 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 they're going to their real Niche is going to be what their best prospects are how to stand out in the group everybody has to be H to gather but you could still be the best arrow maker or Storyteller or whatever make make yourself valuable to the group so you need autonomy so 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 that 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 Lon food I've got to compromise or persuade you with my you know what 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 miswan him 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 our hunt to gather friends who still exist on this Earth don't do that that's the one thing that you can learn from the hza they're constantly thinking about each other and then thinking about well what do I want and kind finding a compromise that's much closer to balance in that regard uh 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 CU 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 longevities 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 it's that they're giving us more emotional support typically than we're 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 these hads of tribes that we keep talking about do they do they stay together in marriages it turns out so they're they're their best well what the person I regard as a premier ethnographer is Frank Marlo he would live with the hodza and write about them and he estimated from his life experience with them that about 20% of them stay married for life so one and five which is not high very low now if you think about it why is that such a high divorce rate well Hunter gathers don't institutionalize marriage the way that agriculturalists do when agriculturals get married that's a financial Arrangement it didn't matter in the same way to our hunted gather ANC SS 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 hza tend not to have more than one wife at a time it happens but it's rare does our evolutionary par suggests that humans are serial monogamist 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 is not monogamous it has a Herm 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 um the their mating system is lots of male chimps have sex with lots of females so who knows who his 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 pumped so much sperm into her
that the previous guy who just had sex with her his sperm is literally washed out as if you're in 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 we ours are way bigger than theirs which suggests that we did a little bit of washing out of our own which suggests we were monogamous but we're also sneaking around at the same time so cheating might might be a natural part of 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 there they are 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 orangutang has like pretty similar DNA to us is it the orangutang which which monkey is it that well chimps are the closest to us the chimp 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 I 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 interest in doing immediate communication but it's 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 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 our homus is the first animal on this planet who think about separate SE 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 in the house I come home an hour later I tell him all he doesn't know why you're upset yeah that Poo's 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 and Link it to it's the we know from psychology that if you want to punish an animal for pooing which is effective if you do you don't you shouldn't rub the nose in 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 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 poor self-control because it's a dog but second he can't think about uh-oh in the future Steven'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 uhoh I'm in trouble and so he knows for 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 [ __ ] all the 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 um but he can't think about the future so take a 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 I if 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 5:00 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 don't they can't think they 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 but some animals store food don't they they do but they do it they do it um automatically they don't go oh it's going to be like for example squirrels who bury nuts well do that if they'd never been through a winter so they don't go uh oh I was cold last winter I better store some nuts cuz there weren't many around they just have evolved to store nuts when the weather starts to get cold or whatever their signal is cu cuz my my dog Pablo he's never been around I mean he has been around other dogs of course but I don't I only have one dog so he's only ever lived uh with me and I wondered the first time I got a bone like from the 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 end 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 from another animal system where we've studied it really closely so Mir cats do you know Mir cats those cute little things like oh yeah I think from the movies um Mir cats eat uh scorpions and so they need to teach their ba they're they're very good Hunters they need to teach their babies to kill something that could kill them and so if 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
Al live scorpion like 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 us to the mother or the whoever's bringing the food cuz it's not always mothers it'll kill the Scorpion and throw it in there even if the 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 if I'll have them later now it doesn't know 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 it's also a company that I have invested in and it's one that you guys ask me about a lot the biggest question I get asked is why I use whoop over other wearable technology options and there is a bunch of reasons but I think it really comes down to the most Overlook yet crucial feature it's noninvasive nature when everything in life seems to be competing for my attention I turn to whoop because it doesn't have a screen and will armed the CEO who came on this podcast told me the reason that there's no screen because screens equal distraction so when I'm in meetings or I'm at the gym my whoop doesn't demand my attention it's there in the background constantly pulling data and insights from my body that are ready for when I need them if you've been thinking about joining whoop you can head to join. whoop.com CEO and try whoop for 30 days risk-free and zero commitment that's join. woop.com CEO let me know how you get on I've invested more than a million pound into this company Perfect Ted and they're also a sponsor of this podcast I switched over to using matcher as my dominant energy source and that's where perfect Ted comes in they have the matcha powders they have the matcha drinks they have the pods and all of this keeps me focused throughout a very very long recording day no matter what's going on and their team is obsessed with
quality which is why they Source their ceremonial grade matcha from Japan so when people say to me that they don't like the taste of matcha I'm guessing that they haven't tried perfect head unlike lowquality matcha that has a bitter grassy taste perfect headed is smooth and naturally sweet and without knowing it you're probably a perfect Ted customer already if you're getting your match at places like blank Street or Joe in the juice but now you can make it yourself at home so give it a try and we'll see if you still don't like matcha so here's what I'm going to do I'm going to give you 40% off our matcher if you try it today head to perfect ted.com and use code steven4 or if you're in a supermarket you can get it at tesos or Holland and Barett or in the Netherlands at Albert Heine and those you in the US you can get it on Amazon it's a really interesting um such an interesting subject matter because you know I 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 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 it it does help make you happy and we've talked about how important you know money is a 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 at something in my group I could be the richest I could 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 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 happy 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 the 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 I mine looks kind of dumpy whereas that ski holiday actually becomes part of yourself it becomes this memory that's self that that that you think back on and that you you're happy when you think about it and especially if you do it 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 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 the F we evolved in families um not just small families but extended families and it 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 want trade him 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 eating was a key moment for ancestors they got together around the fire they if it was a successful hunt they're cooking up their meal together and they're eating it together there's 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 evolve to be storytellers we evolve 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 in in comparison to the long-term benefits of continually getting together these rituals of of eating together and having conversation together is hugely important okay number two number two is it's also going to be connection and and it sounds silly but it's like when when you're trying to plan your day and you you've got this list of things you want to do and you got a list of things your friends are doing you can't always do what your friends are doing but if if you can get yourself to sacrifice what you really preferred and do what they're doing and 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 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 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 trying to put myself in the in the head of the person that's hearing that and a lot of entrepreneurs and audience that are like very buil 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 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 I 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 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 thring basket after basket after basket trying to become the person he wants to be look how well it works for what's the cost the cost is is paid at the time you're going to be lonely when you do that but if you're if you're loving what you're doing and if you think it as a real chance will 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 I 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 in 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 and the problem is that if if what you really want to do right now is work yeah I I say when you're young do it because you can you can let your connections Fray try not to let them disappear and then you can rebuild them when you now have got there but the key is you got to get there you have to set yourself in 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's 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 oursel if we don't make that 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 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 um and maybe one day as you were talking I was thinking maybe people are going to get robots someday and that's a sad fure 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 our ancestors happy there's a lot of seemingly pointless sitting around and doing doing nothing together and the problem with our world today I believe but don't know I don't have good data on this is Bill's intuition is that we can always be doing something there's a t zillion actually very good shows on TV and I suspect that what we giving up when when doing that is is random chitchat 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 and just shooting the [ __ ] 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 be present in idle conversation times it 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 but we all have lifestyle goals that we Su 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 lifestyle 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 um I found out that you are a senior scientist at a company that I'm an investor in called whoop they also are sponsor of the podcast I should probably say but you're a senior scientist there that's well I'm a contractor I don't work directly for them but they've contracted me to 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 could we do it better what are things that are people are doing that really help them let them know how much it's helping them what are people do things that people are doing that maybe aren't helping them let them know that it's not helping and more so let's you know 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 prior 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 laugh in my face and saying you're forgetting the fosic effect that total 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 is at woop 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 every drink 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 uh 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 that 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 Y and the impact of the drink is worse yeah because I EXC 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 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 like 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 posit 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 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 I'm eating really really healthy and everything's going 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 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 I haven't actually Everybody Eats every day and I don't have good data on how much they've eaten but what I 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 and I'm guessing here that what you saw in the data is you 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 what we have is fortunately we got thousands and thousands of people so big data sets who log alcohol relatively often they don't drink every day 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 weekend so some people those two things happen hit at the same time and sometimes they 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 Steven look like when he drinks two drinks on days that he also exercis 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 weep 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 hunted gathers when you look at the data they've gathered with actograph where they where they put a motion capture on hunted 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 un gathers when we put these thing 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 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 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 ways when they're in slow way sleep it could be a thousand different things I don't know but what what my data suggests is that men get more bang for the buck out of every hour sleep and as a consequence they sleep about 20 minutes less that's right off the press I I can't even promise you
that holds up if I it holds up I've looked at it in two samples but I could be making a mistake I I want to play with it more I am I was just I just did some research as you explaining that also really interesting finding or hypothesis um on the previous one which is about why if I 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 com 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 this is super possible yeah it's it's very possible that could be the mechanism uh the it could be all about hydration and so all you 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 it's um when you exercise and every positive thing I've looked at it's gotten better so it may be as simple as 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 triers 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 the answers 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' 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 hypothesis 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 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 uh a weighted blanket um 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 and more sleep more time and 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 they get produced by your poor sleep like I think GE I'm gonna 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 and when you woke up in the morning how did it go and what role did your worries play Etc and when we disentangle it we see that the worries start to cause their own problems they 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
disrupted 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 that 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 opad piece about her 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 up by saying am I going to keep this up every week no I just don't have time and and that's really really an important lesson that we lead these busy lives that are not the same as Hunter gathers we have so many things that we can do and are meant to be doing that we can't just introduce social and social connection and 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 from 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 what who I can do 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 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 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 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 and 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 if you want um I would make sure that there's perfect Justice because if there's perfect Justice then everybody who misbehaves does Wrong by somebody else it 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 it doesn't 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 what would be the cost of that because that's always a cost right the the cost of that is that well look you can't get away with anything anymore I 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 um and I like doing that and but but I think that perfect Justice would have the advantage that
it's harm to others see in the past we we cared about property crimes a lot and not so much harm to others I would want in this world that it's 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 true absolutely right and so the cost might be getting hit missing the Mark we might 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 we look back at 200 years and go Justice what the [ __ ] yeah what the hell was that thank you so much William thank you for writing an incredible book um your first book here called the social leap was a Smash Hit and it's 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 all we're drifting to some degree it feels like we're drifting from the the the island where our tribe are and we're getting further and further away from knowing exactly what it is to be human um I think we're feeling the consequences of that if you look at a lot of the data we're feeling we had 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 I don't think anybody would could 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 of course correct it helps us to understand it turns the lights on and as it says on the front it helps us to understand that there's this important balance between autonomy and connection and 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 hippo thanks Stephen I really enjoy 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 appreciate you thank you totally my pleasure this has always blown my mind a little bit 53 % of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much [Music] oh [Music]