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

Are we fighting against our own biology? Dr Bill von Hippel reveals how evolutionary psychology impacts love, success, and happiness. Dr Bill von Hippel is a renowned social psychologist, evolutionary specialist, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland. He is the author of books such as, ‘The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy’. In this conversation, Dr Bill and Steven discuss topics such as, why high-achieving women struggle to find love, the top trait that makes you more attractive, the link between your wealth and social skills, and the future impact of falling birth rates. 00:00 Intro 02:21 What Does Dr. Von Hippel Do? 05:35 What Are We Getting Wrong as a Species? 09:01 Were Our Ancestors Happier Than Us? 12:45 Are We Forgetting to Be Grateful? 15:10 What Is the Price We Pay for Living in Cities? 17:07 Does Money Make You Happy? 18:03 What Is the Perfect Combination to Achieve Happiness? 20:56 How to Be Attractive 23:08 Why Is Humor an Attractive Trait? 24:11 Do Nice Guys Finish Last? 24:55 What Makes a Woman Attractive? 26:10 Is Attraction an Evolutionary or Social Construct? 27:22 Do Men Care If Women Are Rich? 29:09 Evolution and Homosexuality 31:40 The Economic Mismatch in Finding a Partner 34:52 What Tinder Tells Us About Matchmaking 37:06 What Are Dating Apps Like for Women? 39:59 What Is Pornography Doing to Us? 43:19 Are Populations Declining? 46:24 Are We at Risk of Extinction Due to Lack of Sex? 46:56 How Bill Would Encourage People to Have Children Again 49:11 Robots Raising Our Kids 52:44 Robot Experiments on Monkeys 53:27 Marriage and Happiness 56:33 Ads 57:28 Is There an Evolutionary Basis for ADHD and Neurodivergence? 59:57 Will There Be Less Neurodivergence With AI Development? 1:00:17 Will We Merge With Technology? 1:01:19 What Is the Evolutionary Basis for Depression and Anxiety? 1:02:53 Religion and Its Effect on Happiness 1:05:56 Why Do We Want to Believe in Something? 1:06:58 What Is the Meaning of Life? 1:10:07 How We Band Together in Tough Times Against Others 1:11:54 What Bill Knows About Power in Evolutionary Terms 1:12:53 What Is Powerful Body Language? 1:14:29 What Designer Brands Say About You 1:15:18 What Bill Learned About the Hadza Tribe and Living a Happy Life 1:17:06 Who Needs Each Other More, Men or Women? 1:19:06 Are We Meant to Be Monogamous? 1:20:22 Is Cheating Natural? 1:26:12 Ads 1:28:12 What's the Problem With Money? 1:30:53 The Benefits of Doing These 5 Things 1:34:04 What Is the Cost? 1:38:38 New Findings on Exercise and Unhealthy Habits 1:43:45 Do We All Need the Same Amount of Sleep? 1:48:44 Coffee's Impact on Our Bodies 1:49:12 How Can We Be More Social? 1:51:43 How Would You Save Humanity? Follow Dr Bill: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/aLJcqJMR0Qb Twitter - https://x.com/BillvonHippel Research document: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/DOAC-Bill-Von-Hippel-Independent-research-further-reading.pdf You can pre-order Dr Bill’s book, ‘The Social Paradox: Autonomy, Connection, and Why We Need Both to Find Happiness’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/pRZgxqRR0Qb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett WHOOP - https://JOIN. WHOOP. COM/CEO PerfectTed - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe the robots are going to raise our kids? Because it feels like a slippery slope.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Well, it's not too far away from us. And we never evolved to want children. Look, 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 in today's world. So you want to make having kids to be as much of the plus as it possibly can be. And with the perfect robot nanny, you would never worry at all.

• 0:24Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. Dr. William von Hippel is the world-renowned evolutionary psychologist who has spent decades studying and finding the answers to how instincts that once helped our ancestors survive still drive us today, often in ways we don't even realise. As a species, what are we getting wrong?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Well, young people having less sex than they were 20 years ago. Marriage steadily going down. And our lives are so much better, but we're not any happier. And part of the problem is that we're constantly choosing to do our own thing rather than connect. So here's the data. In 1850, 1 in 100 of Americans lived alone. Now it's 1 in 7. In the 1970s, 1 in 3 people spent time with their neighbours. Now that's completely reversed. Now, let's dive a little deeper. 50% of humanity now lives in the city. And they're about 25% wealthier than people who live in the country. And yet, the data shows people in the country are happier because cities are all about, "I want to do what I want." And the problem is that we can't introduce social connection into our life willy-nilly, or we won't keep it up.

• 1:15Steven Bartlett?

  So what do we do about that?

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Two things. One...

• 1:18Steven Bartlett?

  And then what does evolution tell us about how to attract the opposite sex?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  You want honest signals of quality. And bizarrely, one of the clearest honest signals for men to demonstrate for women is...

• 1:31Steven Bartlett?

  I have been forced into a bet with my team. We're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube, which is our biggest milestone ever. Thanks to all of you. And we want to have a massive party for the people that have worked on this show for years behind the scenes. So they said to me, "Steve, for every new subscriber we get in the next 30 days, can $1 be given to our celebration fund for the entire team?" And I've agreed to the bet. So if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes at Diary of a CEO, all you've got to do is hit the subscribe button. So actually, this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe because it might end up costing me an awful...

• 2:17Steven Bartlett?

  Dr William von Hippel. What have you spent the last four decades of your life doing?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Oh, mostly in the lab, trying to figure out why humans do what they do.

• 2:28Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean by why we do what we do?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Well, I'm super interested in not just what we do, but what the underlying cause might be. You know, why does having a nice dinner with your friends make you happy? It just seems inherently obvious. Well, of course it does. But there's got to be a reason for that. And there's got to be a reason that it's very different if it's not with your friends, or if it's different kinds of foods, or, you know, the list goes on. It could be anything. And so what I try to do is I look into our evolutionary history. I say, how did we get here? What were the factors that made us success? And the things that made us successful are likely to, as a species, are likely to be the things that make us happy. Because happiness is one of the tools that evolution uses to guide us in the direction that it wants us to go. You know, evolution has no foresight. But evolution shapes us the way we are.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  And the things that make us successful, those ancestors who enjoy doing those things are going to be the ancestors who have more kids than the ancestors who enjoy doing things that were bad for them.

• 3:25Steven Bartlett?

  What is evolution?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  So evolution is this mindless process. And all it is, is if it's the case that not everybody has the exact same number of kids, and if it's the case that not everybody's kids survive at the exact same rates, now we have room for evolution. Because there's variability. Something about me caused me to have lots of children that survived in the next generation. And something about this other guy caused him not to have any, maybe. And so whatever there is about me that's heritable will be well represented in the next generation. And about him, poor guy, even if he's wonderful, those traits are gone. And so evolution just works with whatever's there. And the things that make you a success, either because they're just useful in that environment, or they're a new mutation that turns out to have great value, they become overrepresented in the gene pool.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:25Steven Bartlett?

  And why should we look at evolution for answers on human happiness and success? And as a sort of a guiding compass for what we should be doing with our lives? Why is evolution a place to look?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  There's lots of tiny answers to that question, but they don't necessarily link together very well. So people say, you've probably heard, oh, express gratitude. That'll make you happy if you express gratitude. Why? Why should that make you happy? If there's a good reason for it, then it makes sense that we should do it, and it should have some kind of lasting effect. And so every single thing that people tell you, this will make you happy. There has to be a reason. It must have done something for our ancestors. Or it's what my colleague, Robert Trivers, calls a phenotypic indulgence, which means it mimics something that was good for our ancestors. So for example, you know, video games are pretty novel, right? They may mimic things that were super important for our ancestors and give us the same endorphin rush or whatever, even though they're not actually necessarily good for us anymore. Junk food is the same.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  It's loaded with fat, salt, sugar. Those are the kinds of things our ancestors saw all the time. We don't need them anymore, but they were super important back then. And so it makes us happy when we eat those things.

• 5:34Steven Bartlett?

  As a evolutionary psychologist and someone who understands where we've come from and therefore our 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?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  So the big thing that I think we're getting wrong is the balance that we maintain between autonomy and connection. And we can talk about why this is, but the big thing that we've got wrong right now is doing what I want to do right now, rather than connecting. Autonomy is all about self-governance. What do I feel like doing right now? And everybody's going off in their own direction. And this is not good for us. It's not good for our happiness. It's not good for us in a host of different ways. That mistake is particularly problematic if you live in the West, if you're well-educated, and if you live in cities, and if you're wealthy. So if you're Western, wealthy, urbanite, well-educated, you've got that problem in spades.

• 6:25Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  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 gonna go to a movie. And you say, I really wanna hit a rom-com. And I'm like, I really wanna see an action movie. We go, okay, I'll see you if the movie's over. We just go our own ways. And so it can be trivial little things, but it's across our lives. We're continually setting aside our connections to do what we want.

• 6:54Steven Bartlett?

  And what are some of the stats that illuminate this problem? From that make it clear that this is actually happening, in your view?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  So there's a number of them. You can look at the propensity of Americans to live alone. We've got good data in the States, but the picture's the same in every industrialized country. In 1850, 1% of Americans lived alone. Now it's so 1 in 100, now it's 1 in 7. So, you know, here we are 170 years later, 175 years later. And it used to be crazy rare, and now it's 1 in 7 is pretty darn common. If you look in the 1970s, when I was a kid, about 30% of people saw their neighbors, got together with their neighbors, not visually seeing them, but got together with their neighbors at least a few times a week. And only 1 in 5 pretty much never saw their neighbors at all. Now that's completely reversed. Now only 1 in 5 are seeing their neighbors regularly.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  It used to be 1 in 3, and now 1 in 3 never get together with their neighbors at all. So we're moving away from each other in a host of different ways. Even married couples are spending less time together. 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 you look at marriage and cohabitation, in some parts of the world, they haven't changed at all. But in the wealthy parts, United States, Western Europe, they're steadily going down.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:39Steven Bartlett?

  And why does that matter?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 9:02Steven Bartlett?

  And are there any stats or data that proves that? We're getting this wrong in terms of happiness. Are there other tribes or communities or people in history that were doing it differently and had higher rates of happiness?

• 9:14Speaker 01

  So the best example in my mind is if you look at hunter-gatherers. And so there's a team that went to the Hadza, people who live outside, would live Kenya and Tanzania. They're as close as we know to what our ancestors would look like. And in my mind, they're perfect because they're also where it all happened. The Hadza still lived where humanity evolved. So of course, it could have been different a quarter million years ago, but it could have been exactly like they live today. And so when you look at the Hadza, this particular team asked them, over the last week, have you been happy? Sometimes happy and sometimes sad? Sad. Over 90% of the Hadza said happy. That was their answer. When you ask Westerners that same question, you get about 50% will say happy over the last week.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And so the data suggests the Hadza are literally happier than we are. Now, they bury almost half their children. They live a life where they've got no savings whatsoever. They've got nothing in the bank. They don't know what tomorrow's going to bring. They don't know if tomorrow's hunt's going to be successful. They have so many cultural rules that they have to abide by that requires them to be constantly connected with each other because they rely on each other like an insurance policy. And yet, they look a lot happier than we are. Now, we can see those same stats in different modern contexts, but in my mind, that's a stat that blows me away.

• 10:29Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 10:34Speaker 01

  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 he struck it rich. And he invites me over. I'm like, this is going to be cool. I'm going to see how the super-rich live. And it was over the top. You know, this monumentally huge apartment, beautiful view, cooks over there, maids over there, et cetera. And so I turned to him, I'm like, Steve, man, your life is over the top. And he's like, yeah, it seems that way, 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 benefits that he has?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  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 this sense of superiority. I thought to myself, if I were crazy rich like you were, I'd be happy every day. I would appreciate this lifestyle that I had earned rather than just taking it for granted. So then, fast forward a few years, this is a decade or so ago, fast forward a few years, and I'm reading Frank Marlowe's wonderful book on the Hadza. And I'm reading about their lives and how content they are. And I'm like, holy cow, I'm just like my friend Steve. Compared to them, I'm a multimillionaire. I don't, when my kids get sick, I'm off to the doctor immediately. I don't have this horrible life where I bury my own children. I have savings, I don't have to worry about tomorrow. I get up and get something out of the fridge. I'm comfortable when it's hot, I'm comfortable when it's cold. The list goes on.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Compared to them, I'm a zillionaire. And yet, they're probably happier than we are. And so, I realized it's not just Steve, it's all of us. You know, we're failing to appreciate this amazing modern world we live in. And you know, even if we look back 100 years, 100 years ago, a quarter of the children died by the, 150 years ago, a quarter of the children died by the time they turned five. You know, you got the flu, or you got, you know, typhus. There was a zillion diseases that just killed us when we were young. Women died in childbirth at rates way skyrocket, compared to today. So, it's not just looking back at it together, 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.

• 12:44Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Look, I think it's multi-causal. Whenever you get a big effect like that, like, if you take those data seriously that I told you about the Hadza, they're basically twice as happy as we are. Now, that's such a big effect, it has to be multi-causal, has to be a lot going on there. And of course, these changes happen over generations, they don't happen overnight. If they happened overnight, I think it'd be super obvious to us what had gone wrong. But I think what it returns us to is this problem that we were talking about before, about autonomy and connection. And so, let's take city living as a for example. Remember earlier I said that cities are about 5,000 years old. So, human beings have been moving to cities for 5,000 years. By 1960, you had one people out of every three living in cities in the world. And by 2007 was the year we crossed over.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Fifty percent 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 a hundred and so years. And mass moving to cities. Now, there's lots of reasons for it, we can talk about it. But, one of the costs is happiness. If you look at happiness and you divide people up by whether they live in cities, communities over a quarter million, or in the country, communities less than 2,500 people. They're happier in the country than they are in the city. Which is a remarkable fact, 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 gets burned on expensive city living, but far from all of it.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And so, you're literally poorer in the country, but happier.

• 14:21Steven Bartlett?

  And that's this graph here that, from your book. Percentage of Americans who are very happy or not too happy in urban and rural communities.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 14:29Steven Bartlett?

  And it shows that people are pretty significantly happier in rural areas and report to having less unhappiness in rural areas.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  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 in fact, I'll make more money. The data are very clear. But I'm gonna pay a price. And people don't even realize the price they're paying.

• 15:10Steven Bartlett?

  What is the price that we pay? We become more isolated.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, bizarrely, we become more isolated, because in the city, you've got a thousand people right next to you, right? You're cheek by jowl with your neighbor. You're in an apartment building, and there's somebody on your left, somebody on your right, somebody above you, somebody below you. But what are your chances of even know that person? So if you ask people, there's a couple of ways you can ask the question. If you say, do you know someone well enough that you trust them with your house keys? You're more likely to give that answer a yes in the country than you are in the city. Even though in the country, probably your nearest neighbor is a long way down the road. Whereas in the city, your nearest neighbor is five feet away. That person five feet away, in principle, you ought to be good buddies with. Or if you don't like that person, there's somebody else in your building you ought to be good buddies with. But we're just not. Whereas in the country, we connect with each other. Similarly, if you say, how satisfied are you with your friendships?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  People are more satisfied with their friendships in the country than they are in the city.

• 16:00Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is amazing, right? And so the thing is that the problem is that if you're rich, you don't need your neighbors. You know, if I'm out of coffee beans, I want to borrow some, I can just drone them in or whatever. I can, I can call Instacart or whatever, whoever your favorite delivery program is. But if you're poor, you can't afford to do that. And so poor people literally need each other. They live in these neighbors and these complex webs of interdependence where they borrow each other's tools. They look out for each other's kids, they look out for each other's pets. Because they can't afford to outsource any of that. And that's actually how humans evolved. We evolved to need each other all the time. And so ironically, although rich people are happier than poor people. So it's not, giving away all your material goods will not make you happy. Nonetheless, poor people are happier with their friendships. They're more likely to get together with their neighbors.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And we see the exact same effect with education as well. The more educated you are, the less you get together with your neighbors. But of course, wealth and education tend to go hand in hand in our society.

• 17:06Steven Bartlett?

  So money does make you happy.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  It's a funny thing. So money makes you a lot happier in real time. So if you start to make more money, you get happier. And the more important money is to you, the bigger that effect is. And it keeps going well past where we thought it did. We used to think it's ceilinged at around a hundred thousand dollars a year. It doesn't. Past six hundred thousand 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 happiness in the United States since 1940s

• 17:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:03Steven Bartlett?

  So what is the perfect combination to achieve happiness in that regard then? Wealth does matter, but something else matters as well, which we tend to abandon when we get wealth.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Well, the problem is this. There's a couple of things. First, we can come back to the big issue, which I think is this balance. That's the underlying issue why I think hunter gatherers are happier than we are, is this balance that they maintain between autonomy and connection, which we can return to. But in direct answer to your question, part of the problem with humans is that we're this wonderful species in many ways, that we can avoid this zero-sum game that is life. And by zero-sum game, I mean that my gain is your loss. Like, there's only so many goods out there, and for me to have more means you have to have less. And in the animal world, lots of the world works that way. And they're able to cooperate with each other when they can create positive-sum relationships. So for example, vampire bats, they go out and they try to get blood from large animals,

• 18:54Speaker 01

  like land on their back, bite them a little bit and leave, drink a little bit of their blood. If they don't get any food at all at night, they're at risk of starvation within just a few nights. And so if I've come back and I got nothing, and you were successful, I'll beg to you. And if we're friends, you'll regurgitate a little bit of the blood from me. Now, if you weren't successful, even if we're best mates, there's nothing you can do for me. Now, if you think about the way humans give things to each other, it's sometimes goods. But we're this different animal. We're this cognitive animal. We're an animal where information has enormous value. And information, I can give it to you without losing any of it myself. And so we create these relationships with each other where we don't even need to worry about reciprocation. We can do things for each other all the time. They're crazy easy to do,

• 19:39Speaker 01

  because they don't require me to give you anything. I still have the information I told you. So we already have this advantage over the animal kingdom. But we're still animals. And one of the ways that we're still animals is that we're still zero sum in the sense of, well, what about our status? Who's going to get picked for the mating relationships? Who's going to get picked to be on the teams? And there it always comes down to, well, who's at the top of the local heap? And who's at the bottom of the local heap? And so in our ancestral communities, that would be a very small group of hunter gatherers. All I had to do was be valuable or better than you guys in something. In our world today, it's awfully hard to be better than everybody. And money is one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to do it because everyone can see it. And so even though money doesn't make us happy, as the whole country's three times richer,

• 20:23Speaker 01

  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 going to 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 get the best partner they can of the opposite sex. And so they're competing with each other. Men compete with men to try to have women choose them. Women compete with women to try to have men choose them. And that's a zero sum status game.

• 20:56Steven Bartlett?

  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 do I need to be demonstrating in order to attract the opposite sex as a human?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what you want are what we call honest signals of quality. And the thing is that we've all evolved to look through fake signals. And so lots of animals will pretend to be things that they aren't. They puff up their chest or raise up their shackles or do something to look big and intimidating. We all, we have human ways of doing that too. But in humans, bizarrely, well, in all animals, actually, one of the clearest honest signals for men to demonstrate for women is what is risk taking. Now, that seems bizarre. Why would taking a risk attract females? Well, it attracts females because there's two outcomes when you take a risk. You either succeed, showing just how skilled you are at whatever the domain is, or you fail and either turn into a resh and therefore you've removed yourself from the gene pool,

• 21:53Speaker 01

  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 attractive to them. And it may only be getting other men to back off. When I take these big risks, you may say, well, I'm not going to try to crowd in on Bill Sein, he's too tough. We don't know with certainty. But they take these risks. And then, once they partner up, then their testosterone levels go back down. Because once you have a family, taking risks is foolish. You want to take risks to get in the mating game, but you don't want to keep taking risks once you've got people depending on you.

• 22:35Steven Bartlett?

  So I've got honest signals of, did you say quality?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:39Steven Bartlett?

  Honest signals of quality as being attractive as a man. I've got risk-taking. What else?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Things like physical size is an honest signal of quality. Things like wealth. If you earned all that money, you know, there's inherited wealth. We live in this kind of funny world, but it still gives you all the advantages of wealth if you earned it yourself. There's ambition, things like that. People look for ambition because if you are out there working hard all the time, it's an honest signal that you're going to probably continue to do that, provide for somebody, etc.

• 23:08Steven Bartlett?

  I often think about like personality. And why is humor an attractive quality in men?

• 23:14Speaker 01

  That's a great example. Humor is an honest signal of quality. Now, it's funny because you could think, well, you could just be funny by memorizing jokes. But if you think of your friends who are funny, you don't sit down and go, hey, did I tell you one about Pat and Mike? That's not how people are funny. You know, unless they're paid to do that up on stage. People are funny by making connections that you hadn't thought of, by twisting the world 90 degrees and linking things together. And that takes an agile mind. And, you know, there's more genetic expression in our brain than anywhere else in our bodies, 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.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:11Steven Bartlett?

  Do nice guys finish last in the evolutionary world?

• 24:14Speaker 01

  They don't, actually. So the good thing about being a nice guy is they tend to finish first. And so when we look in hunter-gatherer communities, and we look at people choosing their partners to go out on hunts in the morning, they actually choose the nice guys over the better hunters. Now, again, you need a minimal level of competence. Now- They pay a big price to finish first because lots of people take advantage of them. And so I share with you and you never share back with me. But if I'm a nice guy, I'm like, that's okay. You know, Stephen will come around someday. He'll learn to share with me too. Or if he doesn't, that's okay. He's a good guy and I like to give him half my rabbit that I call it. So they they they're in economist's 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.

• 24:55Steven Bartlett?

  What about for women in terms of attraction? If you were to design a perfectly attractive woman from an evolutionary basis, what would that woman be like?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  The different 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're making 100 million sperm a day or whatever that number is. They're tiny little cells. You can just do it even if you're old and desiccated. Fertility is crazy hard for a woman. You need to be under the age of 40, basically. Once our ancestral females hit 40, they almost never reproduce anymore. And we could talk about why that is. It's an interesting evolutionary solution to a problem. But then during that time, you have to be well fed and you have to be healthy because it's super hard to maintain a pregnancy. That's, you know, nine months where if you're not getting enough food, it's hard to feed that fetus. So for women, they need fat on their bodies, which was hard in our ancestral world. That meant they're well fed.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:10Steven Bartlett?

  So is attraction an evolutionary thing in your view versus like a social thing?

• 26:14Speaker 01

  It's well, it's always both, right? You know, humans 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 underlie it. And so, for example, If you look at the actual shape of women and their hip to waist ratio, whether their bum is big or not big in the current climate, the hip to waist ratio doesn't change. And that's because that hip to waist ratio is correlated with fertility. But the size of your bum, not so much. And in fact, when women deposit fats pre-menopause, they deposit them on their thighs and their bum, which is where those fats are really good for the baby. They help neural development. You know, your brain is loaded with fat. When you're in utero, you need your mother to have lots of fat, ideally on her bum and thighs,

• 26:58Speaker 01

  because that's going to help feed your growing brain.

• 27:00Steven Bartlett?

  So there's like a perfect hip to waist ratio?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  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 Monroe's day to really, really skinny for a while and then back to heavier again.

• 27:22Steven Bartlett?

  Do men typically care for women's rich? From an evolutionary perspective, does it matter?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  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, 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 in 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.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And that means they need to be able to fall in love with, you know, the Bill Gates of the world, who aren't these big macho guys, but can really take care of you. And so women have a lot more of what we call sexual plasticity than men. Men have a particular shape they're looking for and a particular appearance on average, because that correlates with fertility. Now, if you then have a choice, oh, here's one who's poor, here's one who's rich, you're going to go with the one who's rich, right? But if you look at male rock stars and and male businessmen, people who are really rich and famous, the the women that they 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 Mick Jagger. And so does some high society elite person.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  But if you turn it on the other way, a waiter doesn't have much chance with this rich female or a 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.

• 29:09Steven Bartlett?

  What is the basis for homosexual relationships in evolution?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  So homosexuality is a really interesting question. We see it across the animal kingdom, so we know that we're not the only species who does it, but we don't often see exclusive homosexuality in the animal kingdom. That seems to be much more common in humans. Nobody's 100% sure why it is, but the best evidence I've ever seen, the best evolutionary evidence, comes out of this lab of a colleague of mine, an ex-colleague of mine, Brendan Zeich. And what he shows is that most human behaviors are driven by a number of genes, not just one. We call them polygenic. A whole bunch of genes contribute to a particular behavior. And especially a complex behavior like homosexuality. And so there's going to be a polygenic score for homosexuality. And the more of those, the higher your polygenic score is, the more likely you are to be attracted to same sex. And it works a tiny bit different in men and women, but basically the same.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:09Steven Bartlett?

  You're more attractive?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:36Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 30:39Steven Bartlett?

  Which kind of feels like a bit of a contradiction to the idea that testosterone and risk-taking and being brawn and being masculine.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Well, but 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.

• 30:55Steven Bartlett?

  So what is it about being a little bit gay? Like, what are the features? What are the features of being a little bit gay?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  We know the genes. This paper was published in Science, if I remember right, a few years ago, and laid out the genes, and they don't make sense. Some of them relate to your sense of smell. We don't understand these polygenic scores very well yet. But if I had to guess, you know, if you think of extreme straight males versus gay males, gay males are much cleaner, they look after their bodies much better, their hygiene's much better, their sense of aesthetics is much better. And so maybe being a little bit gay means you're metrosexual, and now you've got these qualities where you're not so downright disgusting to women.

• 31:39Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that kind of dovetails into this is some of the stats that I was reading about education these days. This one stat here says that 58% of college graduates in the most recent cohorts were women, with one woman on campus for every two men. And with this scenario where there's more women becoming college-educated than men at increasing numbers, you're going to get a bit of a mismatch in terms of women looking for those men who are up and to the right economically, but there's fewer men there.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a real problem. And so, you know, we talk about, for example, that women are underrepresented in some fields, like they're underrepresented in the sciences, and people worry about that a lot. But there's a much, much bigger problem than we're facing. And in fact, I'm not even convinced the other one is a problem, and we can come back to that if you'd like, because I do think there's reasons for that that might have to do with preferences and not being held out. But setting that issue aside, if we look at the rates of going to university, my birth cohort, I was born in 1963, is the first year where women attended college/university at equal rates to men in the United States. And those lines crossed and they'd never gone back. And so now, the stat you were talking about is there's basically...

• 32:59Speaker 01

  It's sixty forty, basically, female to male. That means there's three women on campus for every two men. And so, in principle, that first of all makes it harder to date on campus if you're female, because there's not as many men on campus as there are women. And so the competition is fierce. But setting just dating on campus aside, on average, women are looking for men who are as educated as themselves or more, and men are looking for women who are as educated as themselves or less. And so we're creating a problem, because women are getting really well-educated, and then there's not as many educated men available for them to partner up with. And so what you end up with is lots more people living single. Now, remember, we 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,

• 33:43Speaker 01

  making a lot of money, means they can afford to live as a single person, which they literally could not do up until 1960. If you're a female in most countries, you couldn't have a job, really. And so the way to be an economic success is to marry. Those days are gone. But it does mean that it's harder for women to find partners when they're, on average, more likely to be educated than men. And we don't know why men are attending college at lower rates than women, but I suspect that school itself just doesn't suit boys as well as it suits girls. And so it's harder for boys to hold still. Boys are less likely to want to please their teachers. Now, the list is long. It's hard to raise boys in those kinds of ways. And uneducated, unpartnered men are the biggest problem in every society. You know, if you've got men with poor prospects, who can't find good jobs, and who don't have

• 34:28Speaker 01

  a partner, they're the guys running around with high tea who are committing all the crimes. So as a society, you want to be very invested in men partnering up with women, because that tames them, and you want to be very invested in men being viable partners for women, which means whatever we're doing wrong in schools that's pushing men out, we need to undo.

• 34:48Steven Bartlett?

  If women are looking for men that have more resources than them on average, which is what I read in some of the studies, I think it was roughly seventy percent of women say they want a man that has equal or more money than they do. There's a mismatch there, isn't there? Because as both become sort of more equalized, if there's still a desire for the man to have more and provide more, there's, again, it doesn't, the numbers don't.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  It's, the numbers don't match. It's a really unfortunate problem. And so the easiest way to look at that problem is to basically look at Tinder or one of these dating apps. And there you can see that basically 20% of the guys on Tinder get 80% of the swipes. What that means is that 80% of the men basically largely get ignored on the app and 20% are flound 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 know, men look for the same thing in women and women look for the same thing in men. And there's just a lot more competition among the men to get women. And so it's a smaller subset of men who our women are interested in.

• 35:55Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  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've just got to find, you're not going to get swiped right on Tinder. That's not going to be your way of finding. If that's you, if you're the kind, reliable, but you don't have a great career, you don't have those other things, then the apps aren't the right place for you. But people who meet you are going to really like you

• 36:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:00Steven Bartlett?

  Speaking of the apps and swiping, we talked about how men on those apps, if they're not in that sort of top echelon of demonstrating authentic quality on the surface, so like rich, muscly, whatever, then their chance of getting swiped on are very, very low. What about for women? Because a lot of my female friends say that they hate the dating apps, they have no luck, then they're only getting bad swipes.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  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 luck are getting no swipes.

• 37:31Steven Bartlett?

  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 Christ, I wish I had this many swipes.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:44Steven Bartlett?

  Because as a guy, I mean, I had, must have had Tinder for about a month back in 2000, when I was 20, I'm gonna say 23, 24, I couldn't get swipes.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:56Steven Bartlett?

  And if I got some, listen, it wasn't anything to write home about. It was like, it was very, very rare. But when I looked at her Tinder that she was complaining about, she had hundreds of men, but she just didn't like any of them.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  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-linked chromosomes. You only inherit Y-linked 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. And that's weird, because it takes two to tango. But what it means is that some of the dads were getting lots of women, and lots of, lots of potential dads were getting no women at all. And so in our ancestral past, there's lots of men who nobody swiped right. They couldn't find a partner. And

• 38:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:58Steven Bartlett?

  So what do they have to do to lower their standards?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  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 the salt of the earth. He'd be a perfect partner for me for my life. I know he's kind of ugly or he's kind of whatever, but who cares, right? He's gonna be a perfect life partner. Very hard to see that on an app.

• 39:29Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so I was thinking about the attraction features of a woman that we talked about earlier. I know that if I'm a guy and I'm trying to have more success on the apps, on social media, what I need to do is I need to pull up in my Lamborghini, I need to hit the gym. I need to signal my quality and authentic way that can't be disproven. And if I'm a woman, therefore, I need to be showing my hip ratio.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Well, I want to look attractive and I want to look healthy and I want to look young.

• 39:54Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  But keeping in mind, I could be none of the above and I'm still going to get swayed, right?

• 40:00Steven Bartlett?

  How does pornography confound all of this stuff?

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, pornography is a funny business. It allows us to vicariously engage in sex without actually doing it, right? And so we evolved in a world where there was no pornography. We certainly evolved in a world where there's masturbation. But we evolved in a world that didn't have pornography. And so it's kind of hijacking our system a little bit. It feels like you're having sex when, you know, you're on OnlyFans or whatever those sites are that interest you. It mimics a lot of the features. And so, you know, I become interested in the social media world we live in. And this possibility that social media makes so many things so easy that you stop going out. You stop, you know, because you can connect with your friends on social media. Why go through the snow and go across town and maybe not know anybody at the party, et cetera?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  And I think what's happened is that as we get lazy and we start putting our life online, you know, our social life, we even start to put more, you know, our sexual life online. And so there's even evidence, the evidence is very tentative as to what it might mean. But recently, in the United States at least, if you look at young, single people, their actual sexual behavior is going down. They're having less sex than they were 20 years ago. And if you'd asked me 20 years ago, when Tinder, whenever those things got invented, I would say, oh, sex is going to go way up. This is going to be, you know, this is going to be the best thing for hooking up ever. In actual fact, though it went up for a little bit, it went back down. And instead of what's going up is pornography watching. And so maybe the pornography is getting better tailored to what people want.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:35Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:42Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:57Steven Bartlett?

  And about 80% of 18 to 25 year olds had had sex in the last year. And now it's getting down nearer to 65, 70%.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Which is remarkable. These are young, single people. You know, this is when we are most likely to have sex with, you know, partners or random hookups or whatever. So they're at the peak of their sexuality. And nonetheless, 20 years later, they're less likely to have sex and more likely to be watching porn.

• 42:25Steven Bartlett?

  It looks like pornography consumption has almost like tripled.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:29Steven Bartlett?

  In that time period.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  It's always, it's been accessible over that entire time period. But basically, what I think those data, I refer to this, I know it's an absurd acronym. I refer to this as smilching.

• 42:40Steven Bartlett?

  Smilching.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  That's 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 smilching. They, they've got friends who are 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 gonna have fun when you get there. And so you go, screw it, I'm not gonna 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 ended up hooking up with either as short term or long term partner. But you didn't go. And instead of what you did is you stay at home. And so there's a decent chance you watch 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.

• 43:17Steven Bartlett?

  And does this explain in part, when we're thinking about a pornography rise, why there is declining fertility rates? We're having less and less kids than ever in the Western world.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are.

• 43:28Steven Bartlett?

  And some people are concerned about population collapse.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Well, I actually think it's separate from pornography because right now, we've already separated our sexual activity from our reproduction, right? You can just 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 evolved to want sex. And so if you want sex, if you enjoy sex, and then you've also evolved to be nurturing to whatever child comes along from that, bingo, you're a mom or a dad. But if you evolved to want kids, you go back a little ways, you would have no idea how to achieve that. You wouldn't have known what to do.

• 44:12Steven Bartlett?

  We evolved to want to have sex. And in a world without the pill, that automatically resulted in children.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Equals kids. 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.

• 44:22Steven Bartlett?

  Which is what happens when you had your baby recently. You have this huge sort of magnetic pull to the child.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  And I wasn't keen to have more kids. My, I have some children who've grown to adulthood. I felt like I don't need any more kids. But then I have another kid and I'm, I'm just in love with her, right? You can't help yourself.

• 44:39Steven Bartlett?

  So we've intervened in nature's natural course.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  We've intervened. And that intervention is what's potentially going to lead to there to be no more humans. So if you look at the current population of the globe, it's meant to peak somewhere between, say, 2070 and 2090. Probably around 8 billion and some change. And then it starts to go down. And then it may continue to go down forever. Now, it may be that 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 schlep them around. It's hard work. You could imagine a world where now robots are everywhere and where you've got all the space in the world because there's not that many humans. Or we've moved to the country and e-commute or whatever. Maybe suddenly we'll want to have six or eight of them again because our robot's the one who gets up in the middle of the night with them and we don't have to. But right now, if you think about having kids, it's hard yards.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  And so lots and lots of people say, well, I just don't want to do that. And the consequence is that in every single country that's industrialized and rich, the reproduction, the 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 gonna be, I promise you, in 50 years, that argument's gonna be the exact opposite. How can we convince people of country X to come into our country because we're gonna shrink and disappear? There's a lot of countries that are gonna be literally half their size by the year 2100 because they're shrinking so fast.

• 46:05Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Half of East Asia, half of Western Europe. They're just shrinking crazy fast. They're demolishing houses. Japan is demolishing houses and there's nobody to buy them.

• 46:14Steven Bartlett?

  Because the women are having less than that 2.1?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, the average child rate in a lot of these countries is around 1.5 to 1.7, very, very low.

• 46:23Steven Bartlett?

  You don't think it's possible that we're gonna make ourselves extinct because we're not having fucking sex, are we?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Well, we'd still be having sex. We just wouldn't be having kids, right?

• 46:31Steven Bartlett?

  But we are having less sex as well, aren't we?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Well, that varies. Yeah, lots and lots of us are having less sex. There's reasons for that that probably have more to do with ecotoxicology than with psychology. There's so many hormone mimics in our environment, in plastics, in various pollutants that change our endocrine system, that reduce sperm counts. We think that's what's going on. And reduced sperm count often is associated with reduced sex drive, et cetera.

• 46:56Steven Bartlett?

  So if you were Prime Minister or President of the world, and it was your job to get us having children again, based on what you know about evolutionary psychology and human incentives, what would you do?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Well, the main thing is that because humans didn't evolve to want children, you can't just play on their, don't you really want children? Because the answer's often no. What you wanna do is, you wanna make having kids to be as much of the plus as it possibly can be and as little of the minus. So if you look at kids, they're really interesting. There's some wonderful work by Danny Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize. And he asks you in the moment, what are you doing and how much fun it is? Is it? And what he finds is, no surprise, if you're having sex when you got the request and now you probably waited till you were done before you answered your beeper, but you said, oh, I'm having a great time. And as it goes, TV was actually in second place. Watching TV is good fun in the moment. And then a little way down the list is like doing dishes, doing laundry.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  If you're with your kids, you're, on average, about doing the dishes or doing the laundry. That's how much fun your kids are. But if you ask people... What gives you great satisfaction in life? What makes you happy? Nobody says, "I'm crazy happy because I've watched a ton of TV." That's just not an answer anyone's ever given. Or because I folded my laundry really well. What they do say, though, is, "Oh, my kids give me enormous joy." So how could it be both? How could it be that, on average, your kids are as much fun as laundry, but when you look back on your life, they're the key thing? And what we think the answer is, is that they provide these peak moments that laundry simply doesn't, right? No matter how well you fold your clothes, it's not exciting. But your kids have these amazing moments in their lives that you get to be part of as you see the world through new eyes again. And so, and for good evolutionary reasons,

• 48:36Speaker 01

  where you get your whole mind and body and identity caught up in them. And so, kids end up being a huge source of satisfaction. So what that means is, if you want to get people to start having kids again, try to get rid of the drudge side of it. You know, look, 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. And 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.

• 49:11Steven Bartlett?

  But aren't we going to raise loads of messed up kids in such a world?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  I don't, I, you know, a robot has infinite patience. If you design it nice and soft and fluffy, it's going to be more cuddly than we are. The kids might like their robots more than they like us.

• 49:25Steven Bartlett?

  Last night, I was with my girlfriend, and I was joking because I read this article that Tesla's Optimus robots are now going into production, and they're hiring the team, which are these sort of humanoid robots that'll be in your house and help with the chores and dishes and stuff. And as a joke, I turned to my partner, I was like, "We'll get two of those." And like, one of them will like, like, raise the kids, and then the other one will like, take the kid to school and stuff. Because I knew her, it was a joke, I knew her reaction would be pretty...

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Negative.

• 49:49Steven Bartlett?

  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?" Because the kid wouldn't really know the difference. And I sat here with a child psychotherapist, psychologist, who said that in those first three years, it's so critical for the primary caregiver to be around, and that the man and the woman cause the baby to release different types of hormones based on their gender.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:15Steven Bartlett?

  You almost can't get, the robots.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  All that's true, but here's the thing. Currently, we outsource them to nannies for a big chunk of the day. If you're wealthy enough, people often hire a night nurse, somebody who comes in and helps out at nighttime, too, if you've got the cash. And so when I hire those people, I can't be positive they're going to be kind to my children. I can't be positive they know every possible disease my kid could get and all the rest. I would rather hire this incredible robot, who's super cuddly, who has an encyclopedia of medical knowledge, who memorizes every detail about my kid and knows exactly what the pitch of that cry is. You could put whatever scent on them you want. You could make it mom or dad. You can make it even smell like you if you want to. Why not have that person help you out? You know, our ancestors engaged in what's called allo parenting all the time.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  And what that meant was the men are out hunting, probably gone for most of the day. The females need to form these tight bonds with each other because it's hard work with a bunch of little kids and predators who want to eat them. You need eyes on them all the time, but you also need to be digging up tubers of whatever variety you're trying to eat. And so they relied on each other. Parenting is not a solo operation, which is mom and dad. It's this, I know it's cliche, but it takes a village kind of thing. So why not hire out this robot, who is like perfect in every way? You know they're not going to abuse your kid. You know they're never going to do anything wrong. They're always going to be kind. When your kid asks for the 10 millionth time, but why? They're going to keep giving them answers. They don't mind, right? Why not have the perfect parent when you're not there?

• 51:40Steven Bartlett?

  Because then the parent releases certain hormones in the child. By their touch, the oxytocin. Robots don't release oxytocin.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Why not have a robot that mimics all that and would cause the kid to do that, too? Because you don't want to replace yourself. Parenting is one of the, 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 24/7, and it would have driven me nuts if I were. It's, kids are wonderful and boring and horrible. And so why not, when you outsource them? And we all do. We have since time began. We've relied on others to help take care of our kids. Why not make it the perfect nanny, rather than the, that'll have to do nanny, because it's all I can afford?

• 52:21Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Could do if you wanted to. I'd still rather that than you abuse your kids and be a terrible parent yourself, which we know is happening all the time.

• 52:34Steven Bartlett?

  Don't you think a better answer is just not to have the kids?

• 52:37Speaker 01

  That is the best answer, but you can't stop people from deciding to have kids. And we know that when we look at abusive parents, for example, and the kids, if they're so bad that their kids literally get taken away, what do they do? They move to a new town and they have more. And so you know that you're subjecting these children to these horrible environments, but there's nothing you can do about it. I would way rather that those parents who think they want kids for whatever reason than have the robot there to look out for them and make sure that kid's well taken care of.

• 53:02Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe that?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yes, that's gonna happen.

• 53:05Steven Bartlett?

  So if you've just had a baby, right?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got a one and a half year old.

• 53:08Steven Bartlett?

  One and a half year old. Would you allow a robot to?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:25Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm. And in marriage, this graph that I saw in your book shows that the percentage of Americans who are very happy or not too happy as a function of marital status quite clearly shows that if you want to be happy, you should be married. And if you want to be not too happy, you should be separated.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  So here's the data. If, when people get married, on average, they get no happier. So if you get married, and then I look at you 10 years later, on average, you're going to be exactly as you are now. Now, how does that average work out? Well, in lots of different directions, because I'm putting everybody together now. We've got these amazing data sets from Germany, for example, where we track people for so many years that we, 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.

• 54:23Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Couples who are going to stay together, their happiest year is the marriage year itself, not the year before it. So that's a good sign. If you're happier when you're walking down the aisle than you were last year, this marriage has a much better chance of lasting. Now, if you look at those marriages, the ones who last, they go in three directions. You've got the really bad ones where they stay together for economic or religious or whatever reasons. They're miserable. They don't like each other and they're way less happy than before they met. Thankfully, they're relatively rare. If we look at the ones who are average, they're a little bit happier. These are among couples who stay together. They're a little bit happier for the first few years of their marriage than they were before they met, and then they slowly settle down to about where they were. So it's not plus or minus, it's basically where they were.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  If you look at the really lucky folks, they get happier every single year for almost 10 years. So the year of their marriage was happier than before they met, and the next year's happier still, and it just keeps working its way up. And so when you average all that together, getting married doesn't make you happy. It's a zero. So how could it be that marriage is a zero? And I think the answer to that question is that people who don't marry, it's not the fact that they didn't marry that's the problem, it's that they're overweighting autonomy. And overweighting it is probably what they're doing everywhere else in their life as well. So when they're making decisions about what to do with their friends, about whether they live with somebody else or live alone, all those decisions, they keep going with autonomy rather than going with connection. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be unhappy, but it makes, on average,

• 55:52Speaker 01

  it means that they're about half as likely to be very happy as somebody who would go and get married.

• 55:57Steven Bartlett?

  So it's the individualism

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:59Steven Bartlett?

  that's causing their unhappiness, that's causing them not to marry?

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Yep, that's what I believe.

• 56:03Steven Bartlett?

  And people that are less individualistic are getting married, and that's why?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  And so it's just a different kind of person who's doing that. In the same sense, interestingly, if you look at divorce, we can also see that the people who are going to get divorced were also less happy before they even met their partner. So on average, happier people tend to stay together in marriages. We don't know why that is, but my guess is that happier people just tend to be happier about everything, and so they're less like, they find ways to make their marriage work, even if it's no better than the marriage of the less happy folks.

• 56:33Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 57:17Steven Bartlett?

  You can sign up by going to Shopify.com/Bartlett. That's Shopify.com/Bartlett or find the link in the description below. And what about things like ADHD and neurodivergence? Is there an evolutionary basis for why that occurs?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Yes, so the neurodivergence is a complicated one. The it seems to be much more common now. When we look at the epidemiological data, it seems to be associated with high toxin environments. So if you live in areas where there's lots of pollutants, people are more likely to be neurodivergent. But I think neurodivergence has always been with us. I think it's just become more common. Now, why would it become more common with these various toxins? I don't know. My guess is that the brain is a social organism, the human brain is. We've evolved, connection is our most important need. And it requires all sorts of different parts to work right, which means that if you break the brain in any way, you're going to break your sociality because it's so implicated in so many different areas.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  And if these toxins that we're exposed to cause any damage to the brain, I think you're particularly likely to end up with social problems because the brain is a social organ. And so that's why I think autism rates are rising. But of course, I don't know. I'm only guessing based on the data I've seen. Now, in the case of neurodivergence, I think they've always played a really important role in humanity. And the reason for that is that, you know, humans are a super innovative species. But if you ask yourself or your friends, how often have you ever invented anything? The answer is almost always never. And that's because we solve our problems socially. When something goes wrong, we go to our friends, we talk to them, we try to work together to figure out our problems. And we've always been that way. Hunter gatherers do that. And neurodivergent people are less likely to do that because they are less socially connected.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  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, the technical things that make our lives so easy. Now, ADHD is a different ball of wax. We know it's highly heritable. We know a lot of the genes are. We also suspect that it 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 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

• 59:45Speaker 01

  that allows you to force yourself to attend to things. And for our ancestors, you're loaded with energy, you're probably a great hunter. And so it's, it's a modern problem that you have to sit still and listen problem, which our ancestors were never asked to do.

• 59:57Steven Bartlett?

  I wonder if it will still be the case when we have all the robots and the AI doing everything for us?

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  I'm betting not. I'm betting that you could decide to learn or not learn. Now, why would you even learn your multiplication tables if you don't need to? You can just ask your phone what the answer is. And so why, tons of the schooling that we go through is superfluous in this world where AI can do everything that we can do.

• 1:00:17Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think we're going to merge with technology more deeply?

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  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 want it 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.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Well, why not have that for knowledge that you can access? You know, I could spend my huge amounts of time studying Greek, or I could shove one of those in, and now I can go to Greece and speak with the locals, right? Without my phone telling me what they're saying.

• 1:01:19Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  No, it's not. So remember that, that with every generation of sexual reproduction, you're going to have people who have things that maybe evolution wouldn't like. Remember earlier, we talked about homosexuality, that if you have more gay genes, women like you more. But then if you have too many, you don't like them in return, right? So that's a case where a little bit is a good thing evolutionarily, and a lot is a bad thing evolutionarily, because you're not going to have offspring. Not a moral judgment, just a judgment based on what evolution cares about. Well, with anxiety, that makes perfect sense, right? So animals that can't envision the future have no anxiety. All they feel is fear in the moment. Oops, there's a lion. I'd better run as fast as I possibly can. And then as soon as they've run away, oh, no lion. Life is, everything's copacetic. I'll go back to eating grass and being happy.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Whereas if I'm a human running away from a lion, I'd be, oh, my God, that was really scary. I wonder when there's another lion coming. Now, the biggest gift that evolution gave us is the capacity to simulate the future. Evolution doesn't give any gifts without cost. You pay a price for every one of them. And the capacity to simulate the future also comes with the realization that 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.

• 1:02:39Steven Bartlett?

  So does that mean that evolution tells us that the cure for anxiety is to stop thinking about the future effectively?

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:53Steven Bartlett?

  I was, something that really I found quite interesting as well in your book. I think it was in chapter nine where you talk about religion. And the fact that people that are associated with religious participation are typically more happy than those who are not.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  The effect is remarkable. And so you can look at it in two different ways. One of it's just the effect of believing, right? So lots of people worry about a life without meaning. You know, people of religion have solved that problem because religion gives you life meaning. There is a point. If you believe any of the religions that exist, you're part of this never-ending chain, et cetera. And it doesn't, they can be wildly 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 where we say, let's look at the general social survey. And in fact, anybody who wants to can get online and look at the general social survey

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  and answer any question that's available in that. It's a remarkable, 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 than not praying. And in my mind, that's, that's, life has meaning versus it doesn't. People who have religion have meaning. People who don't often don't. Sometimes they do, but they often don't. But there's a social component to religion as well, and I think it's way more important. And so now you can, 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.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  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, the 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, because remember, we're talking about religion now, then you're going to go to church even if you 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.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  So it's sort of like this experiment that's being played on you, whether you believe in or not, if you believe you should go to church, that's kind of coming from on high. It's not because you necessarily want to socialize. And we see that the effects of going to church are, they have bigger happiness effects on rich than on poor. Because poor people are getting a lot of the benefit already of that socializing, whereas rich people have separated themselves from others. And so those rich people who go to church several times a week are like twice as likely to be very happy as rich people who never go to church at all.

• 1:05:48Steven Bartlett?

  So rich people need to go to church?

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or, you know, whatever they call church. They need to go somewhere where they're socializing regularly, in person.

• 1:05:56Steven Bartlett?

  Why do we want religion? Because it's quite clear that there's something within us that wants to believe. And you see this, I think we're seeing a little bit at the moment where we're seeing a return to religious belief in some degree. I know that it's, you know, it might not just be the religious belief that we think of. It might be spirituality or horoscopes or whatever, you know, it might be. But there's a, seems like there's a real surge of it, especially amongst young men.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. People talk about in psychology what they refer to, well, not just in psychology, but in psychological terms as a God-shaped hole. There's a hole in your psyche that can only be filled by God. Whatever God is for you. And I think lots of people have that hole, but not everybody. And why do I think lots of people have it? Well, remember those prayer data we talked about? People who pray are happier on average than people who don't. And so if you have a God-shaped hole, but you don't believe, that's gonna 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.

• 1:06:58Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think the meaning of life is?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  I think it's devoid of meaning. And so if life is truly devoid of meaning, then what do you do? And the only answer to me is you make the best of this meaningless thing that you can. And how do you do that? Well, you be aware of what we've evolved to do. And we've evolved to connect. And so if connection is the most important thing I can do as a human, and I believe it is, then you be kind to each other. Because that's facilitating connection.

• 1:07:25Steven Bartlett?

  You believe life is devoid of meaning?

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Steven Bartlett?

  People won't like that.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  I know, I don't like it. I don't like the fact that I don't think life has meaning. When people search for meaning, they get happier, which suggests that they find it. I've never actually taken the time to reflect and search for meaning.

• 1:07:41Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so maybe it's the pursuit of something then that's creating the happiness versus them finding meaning.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Maybe, we don't know.

• 1:07:49Steven Bartlett?

  So you just said that when people search for meaning, they get happier?

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Steven Bartlett?

  So that could imply one of two things, that they end up finding it, or that it's the search itself.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Or a little of both. It's usually a little of both. But we don't know with certainty. There's not enough good data on this problem. Because lots of people search for meaning. And in the end, you can also decide that, well, there isn't meaning, and I'm a small cog in a big machine, and I'm a pointless small cog in a big machine, but it's all I've got. And so, you know, Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow says, "We're the lucky ones because we're gonna get to die." Now, what he really means by that is first, we get to live. And almost nobody gets to live, right? You think of the 100 million sperm that I'm making every day, they don't go anywhere, they never get a chance. But I made three humans, I did my part, I only did the small part. But I was played a role in making three humans, who then got lucky and got to live.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  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 kookaburra. Kookaburras lay two eggs and then they wait a little bit and then they lay a third. And Australia is very drought prone, so some seasons are good and some are bad. If the season's good, that third egg has a decent chance of making it to adulthood because there's so much food being brought back to the nest. If it's not good, that third egg never makes it. And why doesn't it make it? Well, the two older siblings peck it to death.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  And they've got an adaptation on their beak, a little hook, that allows them to kill their little sibling more easily. So they've literally evolved to kill their little sibling when times are tough. What have we evolved to do when times are tough? To band even closer together and to work together and to cooperate. That's what got us to where we are. And it was all sorts of interesting things that got us there. It was cognitive things, like division of labor. You know, kookaburrs don't do that because they 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. Everybody was eating us for dinner. And now it's the shoes and the other foot. We're the apex predator on this planet.

• 1:10:07Steven Bartlett?

  But doesn't our evolutionary history tell us that we band together in tough times?

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:12Steven Bartlett?

  But we band together to attack the others?

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do. It's not, look, there's never something that's done just for the niceness of it. Evolution doesn't care about nice at all. What's really nice, though, is that our solution, our way of becoming deadly, and every animal that survives becomes deadly or avoids being eaten in another way. Now, it turns out that once you band together, and even by Homo erectus, once, so our ancestors, one and two million years ago, when they band together, they are already the deadliest force on this planet. We've got good evidence that they're eating huge animals, like mammoths. So it's your ability to have division of labor to plan, to say, all right, you chase that mammoth and we'll put this trap here. You know, do things that other animals simply can't, they can't do that. They can't make a scenario in their mind and then enact it.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  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 pre-human, other Homo erectus.

• 1:11:16Steven Bartlett?

  And you're seeing that with like, America versus China and

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 1:11:19Steven Bartlett?

  America versus Mexico and whatever it might be.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 1:11:22Steven Bartlett?

  And nationalism.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:53Steven Bartlett?

  I was sat here yesterday with the wonderful gentleman, whom I'm a big fan of, called Robert Greene, who wrote the book about power. Forty-Eight 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?

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  So, evolution doesn't care about morality, right? It's amoral. It's not amoral, it just doesn't care. And what that means is might is right. Humans are the only ones who understand possession. And I say, this is mine. And you're like, no, no, it's mine. And we can argue about the actual ownership of it, but for an animal, there's never an argument. If you made the kill and I'm bigger than you, I take it from you. Now, in human groups, power is achieved by, no human is strong enough on their own to have power by themselves. Every human goes to sleep. And when you go to sleep, the weakest of humans in your group can kill you easily. And so to be powerful, 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.

• 1:12:52Steven Bartlett?

  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 languages or un-powerful or powerless body language looks like.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  It's super easy to look in other animals because because they can't talk, they appease, they've got ways of shrinking themselves and says, 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. In some societies, you know, America comes to mind, you demonstrate your power by showing your wealth, by showing what you can do, by being very in your face. I can, I'm great at this, you know, I'm, we're number one kind of thing. Many cultures don't like that. Many, the more collectivist your culture is, the more frowned upon that is, and the less likely you are to do it, even if you are the powerful.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  And then you get to cultures where the only person who ever puts themselves down is the really powerful, because they can afford to say, no, no, I'm, I'm nobody. You don't want to bother with me. And the second they say that in those cultures, like, ooh, this person runs the show around here. And so in a lot of cultures, the richest person is the one who dresses the most modestly. The most powerful person is because that's what the culture understands. But it's always, you have to follow the cultural rules. In a we're number one society, that's not going to work for you. Everybody's just going to think you're nobody. And so the rules of power vary dramatically by where you are. But you can always see that somebody who is relaxed and looks comfortable is probably relatively high powered person in that circumstance.

• 1:14:29Steven Bartlett?

  I've always wondered why billionaires who have more sort of objective power end up not wearing designer clothes and being more understated and wearing just the same outfit every day and they don't wear their designer brands and have a Louis Vuitton.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the thing is that we use those brands to compete for status, but they're already at the very top of the heap. They won that competition and anybody who knows them knows that in their ox. 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.

• 1:15:01Steven Bartlett?

  And maybe it's a counter signal at that point.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:15:04Steven Bartlett?

  If he was, if he had a Louis Vuitton bag, he would actually be lowering himself to the status class below.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  He's just a regular millionaire. He's not the multi billionaire that he is.

• 1:15:12Steven Bartlett?

  You've studied the Hadza tribe. You mentioned them repeatedly.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Only indirectly. I've never been there. Yeah.

• 1:15:18Steven Bartlett?

  Well, 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?

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Well, autonomy is, was really rare for our ancestors. They evolved 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 gonna, their real niche is gonna be, what their best prospects are, how to stand out in the group. Everybody has to be hunter gatherer, 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 you can decide where your 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

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  go north when you go south or I'm going to be lion food. I've got to compromise or persuade you with my, you know, what I want to do, which means that opportunities for true autonomy were really rare for our ancestors. The problem is now we don't need connection anymore. We can survive just fine without it. So we have opportunities for autonomy all the time. Cities are an example. They're full of opportunities for autonomy and humans are moving there in droves. Every time that we get a choice between connection and autonomy, I fear that we're choosing autonomy. It's a form of miswanting because for our ancestors, they rarely could get that choice where they could really pick either. And when they had it, they wanted to jump on autonomy. So now I think that we're constantly choosing to do our own thing rather than to connect. And that's steadily making us unhappy.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  And our, our hunter gatherer friends who still exist on this earth don't do that. That's the one thing that you can learn from the Hadza. They're constantly thinking about each other and then thinking about, well, what do I want and finding a compromise that's much closer to balance.

• 1:17:06Steven Bartlett?

  In that regard. Men need women more than women need men as it relates to connection.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:29Steven Bartlett?

  Because I read that marriage is more beneficial for men's longevity than it is for women.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  It is. It's not a huge difference. So if you look at people in their mid 60s, where now longevity is in the offing, right? Men will live an extra two years if they're married, and women will only live an extra year and a half if they're married. So women do more for men than men do for women, but both are getting something out of it, and that's not a huge difference.

• 1:17:52Steven Bartlett?

  And they're giving us more emotional support typically than women?

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Well, also, I mean, think about how slovenly and disgusting we are. They're probably helping us with their 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.

• 1:18:13Steven Bartlett?

  These Hadza tribes that we keep talking about, do they stay together in marriages?

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  It turns out, so their best, well, the person I regard as their premier ethnographer is Frank Marlowe. He would live with the Hadza and write about them. And he estimated from his life experience with them that about 20% of them stay married for life. So one in five.

• 1:18:34Steven Bartlett?

  Which is not high.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Very low. Now, if you think about it, why is that such a high divorce rate? Well, hunter-gatherers don't institutionalize marriage the way that agriculturists do. When agriculturists get married, that's a financial arrangement. It didn't matter in the same way to our hunter-gather ancestors. When that's no longer nice, they moved out and chose somebody else.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  And so it's low, it's... They're serial monogamists. They don't, you know, Hadza tend not to have more than one wife at a time. It happens, but it's rare.

• 1:19:07Steven Bartlett?

  Does our evolutionary path suggest that humans are serial monogamists?

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe humans evolved to be serial monogamists who cheat a little bit. Now, why do I think we also cheat a little bit? Because if we're purely monogamous, men would not need testicles as large as they are. A gorilla is not monogamous. It has a harem of several females, but it doesn't. No other male gorilla can approach those females because he will physically attack them. And so he knows that he's the only one having sex with them, and he has very small testicles. And in fact, they're inside his body. They're not at risk of damage. A chimpanzee, who, their mating system is lots of male chimps have sex with lots of females. So who knows who's 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.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  So maybe his sperm will be the one that inseminates her.

• 1:19:56Steven Bartlett?

  Wash out, what do you mean by wash out?

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Like literally pump so much sperm into her that the previous guy who just had sex with her, his sperm is literally washed out as if you were there with a hose. I know it doesn't, it's not, it's not, anyway. So if we were ancestrally purely monogamous, we'd have little gorilla testicles and we don't. Ours are way bigger than theirs, which suggests that we did a little bit of washing out of our own, which suggests we were serially monogamous, but we're also sneaking around at the same time.

• 1:20:22Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, so cheating might be a natural part of things.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Cheating, 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're on 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.

• 1:20:49Steven Bartlett?

  The orangutan has like pretty similar DNA to us, isn't it? The orangutan, which monkey is it?

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Well, chimps are the closest to us.

• 1:20:55Steven Bartlett?

  The chimps.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  And then gorillas and then orangutans, but they're all great apes. So they're all pretty close to us.

• 1:20:58Steven Bartlett?

  Can chimps talk?

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:21:00Steven Bartlett?

  So if they, if I'm a chimp and I leave the tree for a while and then my boy comes over and he has sex with my wife.

• 1:21:10Steven Bartlett?

  I can't then find out that he did that.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  No, there's no one telling you. Now, they do sign language, lots of things that they're interested in doing, immediate communication. But if you think about sign language, it's really good for saying, you know, there's something behind you. It's really good for saying, I'm gonna punch you in the face if you don't give me your food, whatever. But it's not good for saying, you know, yesterday I had sex with your wife. How do they communicate that? They're terrible at communicating that kind of, things that are separated by space or by time. They just simply can't communicate. And so, but they can't think about it either. And so, our Homo erectus is the first animal on this planet who could think about separate things, separate by space and time. And so my guess is our complex communication began with them.

• 1:21:53Steven Bartlett?

  It made me think of my dog. My dog does something, he does a poo in the house. I come home an hour later, I tell him off.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  He doesn't know why you're upset. That poo's, that happened an hour ago, he doesn't know what the problem is.

• 1:22:05Steven Bartlett?

  But he can't think about the past and the future in terms, and link it to...

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  It's, we know from psychology that if you wanna punish an animal for pooing, which is effective if you do, 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.

• 1:22:24Steven Bartlett?

  But when I come home and say my dog's pooed in the house or something, or he's done something naughty, he's hiding.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  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 has poor self-control because it's a dog. But second of all, he can't think about, uh-oh, in the future, Steven's gonna come home and he's gonna be pissed. But now, when you do come home and he's like looking over the torn couch, he's like, uh-oh, I'm in trouble. And so he knows full well what's coming.

• 1:22:59Steven Bartlett?

  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 gonna be like, fuck, and all the...

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're gonna yell at him. And he also knows that if he does in front of you, you'll yell at him. And if he poops in front of you, you'll yell at him. So he knows all those things, but he can't think about the future. So, take an animal way smarter than a dog, a monkey, or even a chimp, let's get way smarter. Chimps can't plan for tomorrow the way a human can. So I, 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 gonna stash some of my food because I'm gonna get hungry at 5pm 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 can't think about a world that has unfelt needs.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  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 gonna be a world with all sorts of unfelt needs. I'll be hungry again, I'll be cold, I'll be whatever.

• 1:24:06Steven Bartlett?

  But some animals store food, don't they?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  They do, but they do it, they do it automatically. They don't go, oh, it's gonna be, like, for example, squirrels who bury nuts will do that if they'd never been through a winter. So they don't go, oh, I was cold last winter, I better store some nuts because there weren't many around. They just have evolved to store nuts when the weather starts to get cold or whatever their signal is.

• 1:24:25Steven Bartlett?

  Because my, my dog Pablo, he's never been around, I mean, he has been around other dogs, of course, but I don't, only have one dog, so he's only ever lived with me. And I wondered, the first time I got a bone, like, from the shop and I gave it to him, he like played with it a little bit, but then he picked it up and buried it in the couch.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:42Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm like, what the hell are you doing? Like, and then I'd 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?

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  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 meerkats, do you know meerkats, those cute little things like?

• 1:25:03Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Timo and I think, yeah.

• 1:25:05Steven Bartlett?

  From the movies.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Um, meerkats eat 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 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 a live scorpion. Like, you kill it and eat it, because it's gotta learn how to do that. Like, it seems rough, but it's gotta learn that. If you play the sounds of a little baby to us, to the mother or the whoever's bringing the food, because 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.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  And worse yet, if you have babies and you play juvenile sounds, it'll throw the live scorpion to the baby who's gonna 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. Win, give and 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 do the, I don't know if I'll have it later, but it's evolved to solve that problem.

• 1:26:12Steven Bartlett?

  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 overlooked yet crucial feature. It's non-invasive 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 Ahmed, 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.

• 1:26:53Steven Bartlett?

  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.whoop.com/CEO. Let me know how you get on. I've invested more than a million pounds into this company, Perfect Ted, and they're also a sponsor of this podcast. I switched over to using matcha 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 Ted.

• 1:27:36Steven Bartlett?

  Unlike low-quality matcha that has a bitter, grassy taste, Perfect Ted is smooth and naturally sweet. And without knowing it, you're probably a Perfect Ted customer already. If you're getting your matcha at places like Blank Street or Joe and 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 gonna do. I'm gonna give you 40% off our matcha if you try it today. Head to perfectted.com and use code DAILY40 at checkout. Or if you're in a supermarket, you can get it at Tesco's or Holland and Barrett, or in the Netherlands at Albert Heine. And those of you in the US, you can get it on Amazon. It's really interesting and such an interesting subject matter because, you know, I spent so much time talking to people about our evolution and what it tells us about our

• 1:28:20Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  We've talked a fair bit about how money doesn't make you as happy as you think it would, but it does help. It does help make you happy. And we've talked about how important, you know, money is a proxy for status, 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 our 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

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  partially a status game. It's partially about buying a nicer car and a nicer house. And those things actually tend not to make us happy. But interestingly, spending our money on doing things tends to make us much happier, which is surprising, because it feels like spending money on activities is kind of wasteful. I always felt like when I was young and broke, that if I had money, it was hedonistic and wasteful to spend it skiing, whereas it was sensible to spend it on a new couch, because I need a couch. And then I'll have that couch for a very long time, whereas the ski day is over in a day. But it turns out that if you have disposable income, it makes you a lot happier when you spend it on things to do rather than things to have. And we don't know exactly why that is yet, but I suspect that the reason is, is that things to

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  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 self, that you think back on, and that 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 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.

• 1:30:53Steven Bartlett?

  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, and you have to give me five.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:11Steven Bartlett?

  What are those five things?

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  Families first.

• 1:31:14Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  We evolved in families, not just small families, but extended families. And you may not get along with your family, and then you want to find a proxy family, or you want to create one of your own. So I'm not telling you, you need to get along with that jerk of an uncle of yours, or your hopeless parents, or whatever. But I'm saying, spend time with your family, and if it's not the family you want, trade them in for a new one. But we evolved to have the close confines, regular contact, constant contact with family. And so if you can't do it in person because they're far away, or 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.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  If it was a successful hunt, they're cooking up their meal together, and they're eating it together. This bad habit of a lot of families to just watch TV together. And there's nothing wrong with TV, but you should also talk together, because we evolved to be storytellers. We evolved to share stories with each other. They're super important for us. So trust me when I say, those momentary desires to do your own thing will pale in comparison to the long-term benefits of continually getting together, these rituals of eating together and having conversation together. It's hugely important.

• 1:32:30Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Number two?

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Number two is, it's also going to be connection, and it sounds...

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Silly, but it's like when you're trying to plan your day and you've got this list of things you want to do and you've got a list of things that your friends are doing. You can't always do what your friends are doing, but if you can get yourself to sacrifice what you really prefer and do what they're doing, and they're going to eventually do the same for you, of course, too. Give up some of that autonomy in order to reestablish some of that connection. And the reason I say this is when we look at married couples even, they're spending less time together. When we look at friends, they're spending less time together. I think we need to go back to this world.

• 1:33:09Steven Bartlett?

  When I think about doing that, I'm just going to be completely honest.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  No, you should be, because if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

• 1:33:16Steven Bartlett?

  No, no, when I think, yeah, so I'm just going to put myself in the head of the person that's hearing that. And a lot of entrepreneurs, my audience, that are like very busy building their startup, they've got jobs that are demanding of them, that they're striving, and they're striving away from a life that they didn't like towards a life that they hope they will. So that's requiring them to give so much time and energy to like separate themselves from the crowd. So when they hear that they need to spend more time with their partner, many of them will be thinking, but then my business will fail.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  And I agree with them. When I'm given this generic advice, I'm not tailoring it to that person. And I completely agree with that person's life choice. When we're young, we're autonomy machines, and that takes precedence, especially if you have a big dream that you think you could get to, you're this entrepreneur, and especially if you're trying to get away from something that wasn't much, like materially, you just didn't have enough to really get by, whatever the case might be. LeBron James throwing basket after basket after basket, trying to become the person he wants to be. Look how well it works for him.

• 1:34:13Steven Bartlett?

  What's the cost?

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  The cost is paid at the time. You're going to be lonely when you do that. But if you're loving what you're doing and if you think it has a real chance, well, 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.

• 1:34:39Steven Bartlett?

  I do think I'm bullshitting myself a little bit because I go, can I spend another hour with my partner a day or another two, three hours a week and my business would be fine? Of course I could, but there's, like you said, there's an inherent. Striving, which can be out of whack.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  And the problem is that if what you really want to do right now is work.

• 1:34:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  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 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 ourself if we don't make that plan in advance. I'll just give it another minute. 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

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  and it never got there. And so, my recipe is when you start something, you give yourself an end date. You say, what would it mean for me to be a success? And so, you can have an end date that's both good and bad. How much money do I have to make? And now I won? How much time do I get, do I give it without making any money? And therefore, I lost. And you should set those two things in advance. Because once you're in it, I promise you, you're going to move the bar.

• 1:36:07Steven Bartlett?

  Number three.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:35Steven Bartlett?

  Dogs are amazing. And maybe one day, as you were talking, I was thinking, maybe people are going to get robots someday. And that's a sad future to think about. They're just like a robot generally to be their friend, which is quite grim. Number four?

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  When you ask yourself, well, what made our ancestors happy? There's a lot of seemingly pointless sitting around and doing nothing together. And the problem with our world today, I believe, but don't know. I don't have good data on this, this is Bill's intuition, is that we can always be doing something. There's a 10 zillion actually very good shows on TV. And I suspect that what we are giving up when doing that is random chit chat with friends. Now, when I used to walk by construction sites 20 years ago, you'd see all these guys eating their lunch together and just shooting the shit, right? Just having a good time. When I walk by construction sites today during lunch, I see most of the guys on their phone, not even talking to the guy right next to them.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  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-

• 1:37:40Steven Bartlett?

  Be present?

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Be present in idle conversation times. It doesn't seem as interesting as it is, it's super important.

• 1:37:48Steven Bartlett?

  And number five, last but not least.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  I would say, and this is going to sound a little bit redundant, but we all have lifestyle goals that we pursue. And they could be getting more fit. They could be learning a foreign language. They could be learning to paint. They could be anything like that. The data show very clearly you're way more likely to achieve those 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 wanna, 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.

• 1:38:25Steven Bartlett?

  And on that point about health, fitness and lifestyle goals, I found out that you are a senior scientist at a company that I'm an investor in called Whoop. They also are a sponsor of this podcast, I should probably say. But you're a senior scientist there.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  That's right, well, I'm a contractor. I don't work directly for them, but they've contracted me to work with them. That's right.

• 1:38:43Steven Bartlett?

  And what is it you're doing at Whoop?

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  I have the coolest job in the world. So I work as part of the Performance Science team. And what we're tasked to do is just look at all the data that WHOOP collects and ask the question, how can we do it better? What are things that people are doing that really help them? Let them know how much it's helping them. What are people, 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.

• 1:39:24Steven Bartlett?

  And what are some of the cool questions you've asked that have garnered interesting answers thus far?

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  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 Fosdick 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 at WHOOP is that exercise amplifies other behaviors. And so if I do something that's good for me, even if it's got nothing to do with exercise and I exercise that day, it's better for me. If I do something that's bad for me and even if it's got nothing to do with exercise, it's worse for me on a day that I exercise.

• 1:40:12Steven Bartlett?

  Give me an example.

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  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 like three points, if I remember right. I could be getting those numbers a little bit off. It's that kind of magnitude. And every drink just, it's this linear effect up to at least 10 drinks. We see that in our data with thousands and thousands of people. If you have those drinks on days that you're basically sedentary, you did almost nothing, their effect is smaller than if you have those drinks on days where you exercised.

• 1:40:46Steven Bartlett?

  So I could exercise in the morning, then I drink.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:40:50Steven Bartlett?

  And the impact of the drink is worse.

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:52Steven Bartlett?

  Because I exercised.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  Because you exercised. And the same holds for good things. I know, it's ridiculous. I don't understand the physiology at all, but this is what we're seeing.

• 1:41:00Steven Bartlett?

  So drink and don't exercise.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. On days that you're gonna misbehave, and it's probably not just alcohol, that's just one of the ones I've analyzed. On days that you're gonna 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 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. Which is super cool. I have no idea why. We were obviously gonna write it up and tell the world about it. And when we do, maybe I made a mistake

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:41:49Steven Bartlett?

  So if I'm having a bit of like a naughty day, you know, if I'm like breaking all my rules.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Don't exercise.

• 1:41:56Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. And then if I'm having a great day, like I'm eating really, really healthy and everything's good, I'm sleeping well.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:42:43Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm guessing here that what you saw in the data is, you could look at someone who is drinking alcohol every day, for example. And then you could see on the days that they exercised as well. The impact of the alcohol on their biomarkers was more significant.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Yes. And what we, what we have is fortunately, we've got thousands and thousands of people. So big data sets who log alcohol relatively often. They don't drink every day 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 to hit at the same time. And sometimes they don't. And what I try to do in these analyses, what we all try to do in these analyses, is look within person. Because if you're the kind of person who exercises when you drink and I'm not, well, who knows what else differs between us? So what I really want to know is what does Steven look like when he drinks two drinks on days that he also exercised the same as usual, less than usual, more than usual? We want to make it all against what you usually do.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  And there we see these effects very clearly.

• 1:43:45Steven Bartlett?

  Are there any of the cool answers you've discovered in your time at Weep?

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  You know, if you look at how much sleep people need, the argument is everybody needs the same, basically, on average, right? But some people need a little less and some people need a little more. I think men need less sleep than women. I don't know that yet, but there's lots of reasons to think that. First of all, hunter-gatherers, when you look at the data they've gathered with Actograph, where they put a motion capture on hunter-gatherers, 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 hunter-gatherers. When we put these things on zillions of people, we see men sleep about 20 minutes less than women do.

• 1:44:23Steven Bartlett?

  When you put the Whoop on?

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so we see the exact same thing they see, but it's wildly statistically significant, our data say, 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 my data suggests is that men get more bang for the buck out of every hour of sleep. And as a consequence, they sleep about 20 minutes less. That's right off the press.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  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 want to play with it more.

• 1:45:16Steven Bartlett?

  I just did some research as you were explaining that. Also really interesting finding or hypothesis on the previous one, which is about why if I drank alcohol on a day when I exercised, it would cause my biomarkers to have a, reflect a worse sort of state. And it says on days when you both drink alcohol and exercise, the combined psychological stresses can lead to alterations in your biomarkers reflecting increased oxidative stress, liver strain, dehydration, and inflammation.

• 1:45:47Steven Bartlett?

  In contrast, on days when you consume alcohol without exercising, these effects might be less pronounced, resulting in different biomarker profiles.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  I think that's super possible. Yeah, it's very possible. That could be the mechanism. The it could be all about hydration. And so all you've got to do is be doubly conscientious about hydrating and then problem solve. But here's the thing. Every negative thing I've looked at has gotten worse when it's when you exercise. And every positive thing I've looked at has gotten better. So it may be as simple as as something very specific with alcohol and exercise. But maybe there's a broader principle at play. And so somebody out there who's super smart, like Trivers came along and lined up how every animal mating system worked. He says, look, here's how it works. Females make the larger sex cell. They typically then put more effort into it. So males compete for females. And then low and behold, you see that across the animal kingdom.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  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 with super smart and they'll hear what I just said. And they go, I know what the answer is to that, but I don't know. And the beauty is that when a when I hear a scientific explanation that nails it, I immediately go, oh, that's it. And I wish I thought of it, but at least I can see that they've they've got the answer when I, you know, didn't.

• 1:46:58Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else? One last thing from your work as a senior scientist at WHOOP that is intriguing to you? Or any hypotheses you have that you're discovering from the data?

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  Well, so we're seeing lots of nice evidence of a couple of 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 it probably works the opposite. Like now they get caught up in the novel they're reading and they can't sleep. So you have to be super thoughtful about what works for you. CBD works really well, but it actually works for some people really well. And for others, it even has a negative effect. You know, our samples are big enough that we can see across the board. We find things like a weighted blanket,

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  blue light blockers in the evening, dimming your lights in the evening. Those are big. They have big effects across the course of the night. By big, I mean like 15, 20 minutes of more sleep, more time in REM and slow wave. You add all those things together, it ends up being a lot.

• 1:48:05Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  The final thing that we find is a lot of people have sleep worries. You know, they worry they won't sleep well. And the downside of that is that if you have sleep worries, what ends up happening is they get produced by your poor sleep. Like, I think, gee, I'm 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 when you woke up in the morning, how did it go? And what role did your worries play, et cetera? And when we disentangle it, we see that the worries start to cause their own problems. 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 gonna be beneficial.

• 1:48:44Steven Bartlett?

  Is there much data on coffee and the impact that that has?

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Coffee actually overall is not bad. You don't wanna 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 2:00 PM, it can be pretty disruptive for some people. And what we'd also advise is, when you're eating, try to restrict that to daylight hours. That seems to make a big difference. It's, you know, your body, you're trying to get parasympathetic dominance when you go to sleep. And if you've got food in there, your body's working hard to digest it, and that makes it difficult.

• 1:49:13Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  So the last thing I would say is, that we haven't covered, is that, alright, 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 op-ed piece about it, he decided to reconnect with all of his old friends. And so he's calling them up and finding them, and they're getting together. And then he answered by saying, am I gonna keep this up every week? No, I just don't have time. And that's really, really an important lesson. That we lead these busy lives that are not the same as hunter-gatherers. We have so many things that we can do and are meant to be doing, that we can't just introduce social connection into our life willy-nilly,

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  or we won't keep it up. We have to be Socratic and know yourself and know your weaknesses and know what you're gonna sustain and what you're not. And from my perspective, that means two things. One, trying to say, well, whenever I do something alone, that I'm doing something I enjoy, like maybe the crossword puzzle or running or whatever your thing is. Is there a way to do that with others? Don't, you know, match my connection need with my autonomy need. I want to do that, that's my autonomy speaking. But are there others who want to do it who I can do it with? So in my case, I love to do the New York Times puzzle. My sister lives in London. So we reconnect in a way that we just weren't doing before because we're both busy. But we're both doing the puzzle anyway, so why not do that? If you have to decide to do something, every single time you do it, you just won't do it. You want to surrender control of that decision-making process

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  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 wanna do the same thing. Oh, after breakfast, I'll call my sister and we'll do the puzzle together. You wanna set rule so you don't have to decide to do it. And then these things become habit. And so what I want to argue is that people should reintroduce connection by trying not to do things alone, but they should do it in the easiest way possible in the way that's most likely to become habitual and that doesn't actually add more time to their busy day. And it's surprisingly doable.

• 1:51:31Steven Bartlett?

  William, thank you. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Uh-oh.

• 1:51:36Steven Bartlett?

  Not knowing who they're leaving it for. And-

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  So this question's gonna come out of left field.

• 1:51:41Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  If I had one chance to do one thing.

• 1:51:56Steven Bartlett?

  To save humanity.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  To save humanity. I would, and I'm magic, right? I can make it whatever I want.

• 1:52:01Steven Bartlett?

  Whatever you want.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  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 gonna get, that there'll be consequences for that behavior. Because I think that the one thing that humanity's not gonna 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 gonna get their, and it doesn't, I don't mean justice when you die, I mean justice in real time, they're gonna stop doing that and people will just be better to each other.

• 1:52:32Steven Bartlett?

  What would be the cost of that? Because there's always a cost, right?

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  The cost to that is that, well, look, you can't get away with anything anymore. I get away with a lot of little things, like I speed all the time, and I do it because I know I can get away with it. And I like doing that, but I think that perfect justice would have the advantage that it's harm to others. See, in the past, we cared about property crimes a lot and not so much harm to others. I would want in this world that it's, that perfect justice comes with harm to others.

• 1:52:59Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, but with justice, there's a subjective element, right, to what is just? Because if you look back through history, what we thought was just.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  That's true. You're absolutely right. And so the cost might be getting, missing the mark. We might, we might, as a human population today, have come up with a consensual decision about what justice is, then a thousand years from now, they look back and they're utterly appalled that that was what we were doing.

• 1:53:18Steven Bartlett?

  Which is what we look, we look back at.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:53:20Steven Bartlett?

  Two hundred years and go, justice? What the fuck?

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, what the hell was that?

• 1:53:23Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much, William. Thank you for writing an incredible book. Your first book here, called The Social Leap, was a smash hit and is an extraordinary book. But this book is exceptional, and it's exceptionally timed. I think that has to be said, because where the world is at the moment, it feels like we're all, we're drifting to some degree. It feels like we're drifting from the, the island where our tribe are, and we're getting further and further away from knowing exactly what it is to be human. I think we're feeling the consequences of that, if you look at a lot of the data. We're feeling we have the mental health crisis around the world, the increase in suicidal ideation and suicide, the increase in purposelessness, the increase in opioid addictions and things like that.

• 1:54:05Steven Bartlett?

  And I don't think anybody 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 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. Know 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,

• 1:54:49Steven Bartlett?

  by William von Hippel. Thanks, Stephen. I really enjoyed chatting with you about it. I can't wait. I can't wait for people to read it and to send me lots of messages. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. Thank you. Totally my pleasure. This has always blown my mind a little bit. Fifty-three percent of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? 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.