"Evolution Played A Dirty Trick On Us" - Why Modern Life Feels So Empty - William von Hippel

episode 41 was when you were last on the show and this will be 910 or something maybe so you've been busy yeah well so have you uh but I've you've barbell uh two ends of a half decade of of lots of content um so I was thinking I was just I just got back from a walk and I was thinking about your new book and I had this sort of consideration in my mind whether it would be useful for us to still have hunter gatherers living amongst us today just to remind all of the modern humans about how good we've got it across human history this sort of weird inequality reminder that would sort of be lingering there in the back of our minds yeah that would be awesome I mean we not long ago I remember ordering a pizza and it came with barbecue sauce instead of tomato sauce on my meat L's pizza and I was just devastated I was like how could this happen to me and a couple of Hunter gathers in our existence and I go oh who cares about my pizza right yeah so why given the fact that obviously the joke that everybody hates to hear I hate to hear it I hate to be reminded of my opulent Bourgeois luxurious you know 21st century life uh but given the fact that living standards are objectively the best that they've ever been why is it that so many people are struggling to lead happy lives despite being relatively blessed yeah that's that's the sort of shocking fact that got me started on in this book um and I always thought it was everybody else you know I read this literature I know it very well being wealthy doesn't make you happy and I kind of admit I felt a little Superior to wealthy people and I thought well you know here I am just middle class guy if I were wealthy I would be happier because I would appreciate what I have um and I even remember visiting old friend and just marveling at his inability to appreciate this extraordinary wealth he he accumulated when since we were kids um but it wasn't until I was reading um Frank Marlo's wonderful book on the hza that I realized you know I'm just as bad as he is we all are we don't appreciate these amazing riches that we have and if you think about them you might say well what does it really matter that we have you know a fancier chair or something like that but it's not just the trivial Comforts they H gathers buried almost half their children you know they lived in a world that was dangerous and uncomfortable and unpredictable and we live in this world that's comfortable and safe and um and as an endless opportunities for entertainment and yet we're not any happier than any were and if you look at the literature there's all sorts of bits and Bobs of advice you know Express awe Express gratitude do these things and those are all are pretty good pieces of advice they they help in the moment but it doesn't answer the question of how could we possibly not be happier than they are and that's what got me started in about 10 years ago and it took me that forever to figure out what I think might be an important part of the answer yeah it's uh I don't know it's it it's a upsetting realization that we all know in the back of our minds and we all have this sense of ungratefulness or at least I do I I I have this you know I I understand I can oneclick order my Amazon parcel and it arrives one day late to to my house but I really wanted that sun cream so that I could go to the beach you know on that day or whatever and I had to go to the corner shop and I mean the corner shop had it too but you know it was how inconvenienced I was and it just I don't know I I don't necessarily like being reminded of it but it does give us a very fascinating insight into the way that human psychology well-being satisfaction happiness uh the way that that works because it's so Stark and it's so front and center to all of our experiences even even just over the last 50 years the last 100 years the difference in the quality of our lives and yet are we we you might even know this how do we rank in modern society in terms of Happiness rates overall across the span of human history well across the span of human history is a little hard um we can look at the last 50 years where income has tripled basically in the US and Western Europe and we can see that average happiness levels have an increased an Iota they're completely flat it's called the easterland Paradox while country gets richer and so the little conveniences don't seem to make much difference the you would think and and it's fair enough because it probably annoyed you slightly to your package was a day late but then you probably got on with life right you probably didn't lie there all night going I can't believe I didn't have Sun cream today right um so the little things make sense but what doesn't make sense to me is the big things that when you look at the data so for example um some investigators went to Tanzania and asked the hza how happy are you and over 90% said they're happy basically that was their answer I'm happy whereas when you asked the same question in Poland which is where the investigators were from less than 50% said that I'm happy they chose instead of sometimes I'm happy sometimes I'm sad or even I'm sad and so H gathers look like they're happier than we are and and that life of theirs is so difficult to lead and so part of the story is clearly we get caught up everybody gets caught up in the details of the life but there's got to be a a bigger part of the story when we zoom out that would explain why you know despite all these modern wonderfulness about our lives we don't we don't have a greater higher life satisfaction you know it's human nature to get annoyed at the small things but why is it that we're not just walking through life going God life is great you know why don't we just appreciate this enormous opportunity and wealth that we have which I was feeling very Superior for those people not appreci until IIs I'm not doing it either right none of us are why do you think that is what did you come to understand so after a whole lot of cogitating on the problem and looking into the details what I've come to decide is that it all comes back it comes down to this fundamental tension between our two most important needs so humans evolved that the most important need that we evolved after we left the trees and moved on to Savannah was a need for connection and this is super important for lots of social animals they connect with each other for their safety now humans connect for each other for Hoster reasons and more than happy to chat about that if you're interested but basically it we connected so that we could cooperate so that we could work together and we could instead scurrying around the edges of the Savannah we could slowly rise back to the top of the food chain so it was connection that that turned us into the apex predators on the planet took a long time but it did the job but simultaneous with their evolution of connection which is I would regard our most important need this desire to cooperate to form friendships to form romantic relationships simultaneous with that we also developed this need for autonomy and by autonomy I mean things like self-governance choosing your own path in life and the reason for that is that well you have to stand out a little bit so you can get chosen as a coalition partner when you're out going on a hunt I want you to pick me so that I've got a good chance you know you you and I our ma will catch something together when there's a a woman in our group who's looking for a partner I want her to pick me so that my genes get in the Next Generation that might not be my personal motive but that's my evolutionary r large motive and so the problem is that our need for autonomy and our need for connection are in direct opposition to each other Evolution kind of played this dirty trick on us that in you know in order to be happy we need both but to the degree that I'm autonomous I have to sacrifice my relationships if if you say hey let's go to the bar and I want to go play pool or well that would be in a bar if I I want to go swimming I I have to decide well do I value my relationship with Chris so I can go out with him or do I really want to do what I want to do and the same with relationships as soon as I agree to do what you want I have to sacrifice my own IND individual needs unless we happen to align perfectly and then we get lucky and so what I think is a problem is that our ancestors had a balance between these needs that made sense for humans and the modern world has kicked that balance out of whack so from a an evolutionary lens explain to me why autonomy is so important so that that's a great question the um the thing about autonomy is if we were dung beetles it probably wouldn't matter you know a dung beetle has one path to success in life if it's a male it has to roll the biggest ball of poo that it possibly can and then the female go well that's a big ball of poo I'll mate with you and then she lays her eggs in it and Bobs your uncle you're ready to go but if you're a human there's many many routes to success and so you have to decide what's my best possible Avenue and you know what your motivations are you know what your what you enjoy and you know what your proclivities are and so the person who's best place to choose your route to success is you and you could argue well maybe your your parents have watched your whole life are really better than you are and you don't need autonomy you just need to do you're advised to do but you know there's a zillion stories of people whose parents said no no I want you to do X and and they were determined to do y and they were success I mean you can the author of The Godfather talks about how his mother wanted him to be a clerk in a railroad station because that's a reliable job and you'll always have you know that it's hard to fire you and you'll always have an income and you know if if he taken her advice we wouldn't have those amazing books and movies and so and probably every rockstar I can't imagine one of their parents said oh I think you should be a rockstar so you need to decide decide that for yourself and once you decide that you need to decide what the route is to pursue that goal and so autonomy is what motivates us to find our area of expertise where we might be a success because remember as humans we're not like a dung beetle we've got a million routes autonomy helps us identify what that'll be by seeing where we think we have good prospects seeing what we enjoy and then pursuing it relentlessly what does success look like in the Paradigm that you're talking about here so you know from from an evolutionary point of view success only cares about reproduction all that matters is um do you leave people in the Next Generation who carry your jeans and obviously that's a very biological perspective on success but what that means is that if you think about the ways that our ancestors achieve that goal it's all the things that we think about as success and so what allowed me to find a partner and be a successful a good reputation having other people in my Camp say I want bill on my team when I go hunting or I want to hang out with Bill around the fire and share stories with him so we both learn from each other all the kinds of daily things that matter that sounds like that that sounds like a connection element rather than element yeah absolutely that's the thing the irony here is that our autonomy evolved in service of connection the reason that we want to be autonomous is so we can be a success so people will connect with us so that they'll choose us now if we were ants we wouldn't need autonomy to get there you know there's lots and lots of animals who don't need that that's not a r to their success we're in this unfortunately circumstance where connection is all that matters but in order to be more likely to connect you need autonomy and so think about one of some of the greats in our world LeBron or Steph Curry or somebody who spent hours and hours in the gym you know that's a lot of alone time that's a lot of autonomy but what it did is made them some of the most connected humans on the planet everybody loves them right and so they're in in ancestral terms they're not only a success in our modern world but they're a huge evolutionary success because everybody wants to be around them everybody wants their company and and what the way they achieve that enormous connection is through incredible autonomy that's interesting so just give me whatever we've missed on The evolutionary lens on connection I think everybody has this sense that a solo human doesn't last very long in the wild it's important you versus a lion is not a very good fight you plus 15 of your mates against the line is a little bit more fair of a fight you plus 15 of your mates who've Whitted a bunch of weapons for the last couple of weeks that that might be even more fair of a fight um what else haven't we got from the uh evolutionary lens on connection well so what you got what you said so far is exactly On Target those are the kinds of things that make connection important for all animals and then humans start to become different because remember you just said whittling your weapons for a few weeks humans are the only species that can think about tomorrow think about where they are today and think about what do I need to do between now and tomorrow in order to make that a success rather than a failure and so we sit around whittling weapons for weeks when no other animals ever occurred to them to do that and I say to you you know Chris maybe this time if you hide behind the tree and I come out from the right and you're like no no no no no I'm left-handed you come out and I oh great idea you know we make plans right all that really matters it's one more element to human connection though that makes it magical and that I think is what makes our society such an incredible success and the threat to connection is always that um a there might be free riters so like I do all my cooperating and hard work and then you run off with the prize and B there might be um uh there might be a cost to it that I can't pay and so for example if I'm a vampire bat and you are too and we've gone out hunting for the night we can't go for too many nights with without success and so if you haven't had any success you'll come to me and you'll you'll expose yourself in a certain way that that's sort of begging for some of the blood that I successfully hunted for that night and if we're buddies I'll give it to you I it's not pleasant but I'll regurgitate into your throat I'm sure they think it's fine so the problem is though that you and I could be best mates but if I was a failure too I can't give you anything I'm like sorry Chris man I'd love to help you but I'm I I got in the blood I'm starving too and so now we're both at risk now you think about what humans share that matter the most sometimes it's food sometimes it's shelter but nine times out of 10 it's information I tell you something that's incredibly valuable and you're like holy cow I will invest in Apple or wow I I won't go around that corner because there's a lion right there you know I will sell my open AI stock yeah exactly so the um the thing is that I can give you that for free if if I know something that you don't know it doesn't matter if you're ever going to repay me you know you and I are walking through the national park and I say hey mate you may want to turn around there's a bear 50 meters ahead of you and you go oh I'd like to turn around so I just saved your life I don't even know you it doesn't matter and I don't the fact that you'll never repay me doesn't matter because it was so easy to give you that essentially Costless yeah so we're information machines that's our Niche and it turns out we're so good at communicating we can give it to each other for free when we want to okay how does that add complexity in well it it it solves a bunch of problems so if I'm a um a vampire bat and I'm going to give you some of my blood I I have to say well let me think what happen what did Chris say last time I asked him and and you know is he gonna come through for me next time and how do I know well I just don't care if all I'm doing is telling you something because you don't ever need to repay me I can it's it's Costless for me to give it to you and so humans have created societies where by and large we pay it forward we live in a world where we all kind of trust each other where we all look out for each other and it's so easy it's so Costless um I remember you know it's also nice because what happens along with the Costless is the person who received it doesn't reflect on the cost of the giving they reflect on the value of the receiving and so I remember the first time I ever went to a conference and um I I didn't know a soul and so I I got my plate you know I'm sitting down next to my fellow academics I'm really excited because I'm this brand new academic and I'm learning about my world and I sit down between these two people who I now know well and are really nice people but they're actually super shy and they literally turned their back on me and so I'm like I'm sitting all by myself at this first conference I don't know a whole and this this pretty famous Professor from Santa Barbara sees this situation and he walks over pops down the table behind me turns his chair around says hey I'm Dave great to meet you what do you do like I'm sure he couldn't care less but he's just like politely welcoming to the F because it's Costless it's just chitchatting information well now I I remember that so fondly that many years later when he's retiring I wrote about that in his little retirement blog and he we run into each other again and he goes oh that was so nice you to write about that I have to admit I have no memory for it at all I I was like a little bit hurt like how could he have saved me at my very first conference and he can't even remember well now the shoes on the other foot and I run into a colleague of mine who's 15 years younger and I say to he and I run other in the hall and I say to the person who's with him oh he and I have known each other since we were grad students or he was a grad student and he goes no no I met you when I was an undergrad and I was like really and he goes yeah yeah I was at a conference um I I was standing there you just walked up to me and asked me how I'm doing and what I'm interested in and then the people you with were going off to lunch or or talk or whatever and you invited me to come along I was like oh sorry I I don't remember that because it's like so easy to do that for somebody else but it means so much to them and so obviously I was just channeling the lesson I'd learned before it was so easy to do it was a nothing and the consequence of all this is that we feel this enormous debt when others help us out we think I'm going to do that myself I'm going to pay forward in this kind of way and we create these sort of societies with these virtuous circles in them where people are actually really good to each other all the time because it's so easy to do that no other animal can come close to that yeah I imagine that the complexity the compute that's needed to be able to keep track of all of this because there is a sense of Coalition going on here there is a sense of reciprocity even if it's relatively Costless that means that the information can be spread more strategically you can give it to some and not to others if you're a bat that's only got however many milliliters of seal blood that it's got over the last evening of of hunting uh the algorithm's relatively easy it's like is this enough for me to survive if yes maybe I can give some to my friend how long ago was it that they gave me whereas if it's free information well how valuable is this information and how close to my Coalition is this person and do I really want them to know that and there's all those competitions but but nine times out of 10 you know every once in a while I know something that I just don't want you to know and we can talk all about privacy because that's where priv gets all caught up into it but setting that aside and also every once in a while I know some really cool information that I can leverage if you don't know it and so I want to keep that to myself those two things definitely happen but it's also the case that most of the things I know are are aren't necessarily valuable to me but could be very valuable valuable to you so if we take a look at the one of the most cited papers in the social sciences it's called the strength of weak ties and in that paper the the author argues that it's not your close friends who are really valuable to you in making career mov moves and things like that it's your distant friends and the reason for that is your close friends are highly motivated to help you but you know what they know your distant friends are barely motivated to help you but you don't know what they know and so the moment they run across a job that's in your in your you know wheelhouse it's not theirs they don't want it but they know of its existence if you ask them oh hey anybody hiring at your firm they go oh yeah actually we're looking for a new engineer to work on the wing and you're like I'm a Wing engineer I'd love to do that right so he argued this um they tested it on LinkedIn and sure enough it's true that the people who are you're more distant ties they manipulated the algorithm as an experimental test across millions of people and your more distant ties were more likely to help you find a job than your close ties were now humans well there's one of the species that can kind of do this Dolphins can do this males form these coalitions across very broad networks where they um cooperate with each other and interesting kinds of ways in their mating competitions but so far as we know no other animal can come close to what humans can do by forming these kind of coalitions across distant ties where we can transmit information that's so valuable so how did hunter gatherers manage this balance so Hunter gathers man manage this in interesting ways you know they first of all they Hunter gathers have very tight group boundaries and so if you you're you're one of us or you're not now it that's an ethnic linguistic kind of decision people in the in our ancestor World never met somebody who was a different color because of course those gradients were were long across latitudes but they would meet somebody who dresses or marks themselves differently they would meet somebody who has a different accent and those meetings were always Frau with danger you know sometimes they're an opportunity it doesn't mean things are going to go badly like maybe my group meets yours and and um some of the people switch groups or or find Partners in the other group so we can avoid inbreeding Etc but but it was risky business it's inside the group where everybody knows everybody or at least knows them by relationship and so for example in Papa New Guinea if two strangers run into each other they stop at a say distance this is in the North Highlands traditionally where it's really risky very violent culture they stop at a safe distance and they say hi I'm I'm Bill son of AR and you say oh I'm Chris son of Bob and I go don't know Bob all right um my cousin is Joe Schmo and you say oh Joe's my sister's niece's brother I oh we're good and so we just have to look for a way that we that things are going to be okay right we have to look for a way that we can connect so that it's not a risk but so long as it's not so long as we're okay then we're happy to share information we're happy to do all those kinds of things so long as we're not you know giving away things that are critically important for us I'm going to guess that without laws and police and stuff hunter gatherers needed more connection to enforce group Norms to ensure that behavior didn't get too crazy so that that need for connection is driven by a need for uh cooperation uh calmness inside of the group hunter gatherers create their own kind of informal laws and so they police each other they monitor each other but there's no formal network of protection and so if you decide that to Pummel me um and I can't stop you either physically or maybe I your Coalition is stronger than mine well pummeled I will be right and so we have to find a way to navigate our social networks it's a little bit like the grade school was when I was a kid in the 60s and early 70s where you know you teachers let you resolve your differences your your bloody nose will dry up in the cold weather and things are going to be fine and so you you have to resolve your own differences and what that means is that I you know I'm a little guy how am I going to navigate this world where everyone can Pummel me well I've got to have good friends I've got to have a lot of people who see my value and then even though you're twice my size when you run into me you're not g to even consider pummeling me because you go if I Pummel Bill all sorts of other people who matter and who are large matter matter to him are going to be angry at and so I'll treat him with kindness because that's in my best interest and and so not only did people were kind to each other because they like each other but they're kind to each other because they're members of coalitions that demanded it the selection pressures the difficulty of the environment I imagine also must have driven way more connection because you need it's it's you versus the elements whereas all I need to go do is Twist The Nest thermostat and the the elements can go [ __ ] themselves yeah no that's exactly right and so we formed super tight connections because we had to and so remember earlier I talked about how we've lost the balance of our ancestors well they lived in a world where connection was everything and so if you if if I'm going to go off in the savannah I want to go with you because like there's two of us and now we can defend ourselves much more easily I want to be with my group and there's all sorts of rules that demand that I share with my group that I do things that help us protect each other the clearest example is that even though humans form societies that are all sorts of the rainbow of colors of ways of doing things there's a couple of rules that never change and one of those rules is that in immediate return on gather societies where you eat today what you kill today so that's why we call them immediate return You always have to share the proceeds of the hunt and so if women go out they typically did the Gathering if they gathered up lots of food they don't have to share that outside their household if they don't want to they would typically share it with the people they're Gathering but men have to share the proceeds of the hunt to cross everybody so there's a lot of rules that we simply can't violate and I could decide to if I'm the biggest guy I'm like okay I'm eating all this elk you guys can all piss off well tomorrow morning when I wake up I'm sitting there by myself you guys have pissed off and now I'm in De dooo because I might have been the biggest guy in a group but I still am not a force that I can contend with nature on my own and so everybody's compelled to keep the group interest in mind to do what the group wants you to do and feel these really really tight connections to say sa to stay safe what are some of the other Universal rules bizarrely I I I can't make heads or Tales out of this this one maybe somebody and I've never met anyone who knows the answer um women always do the cooking so I I I don't know why that is you know people have conjectured well maybe it's it's the the process of giving her the meat from the Hunt is a form of connection but I I can't it's it's possible I haven't I've never heard a compelling answer sharing the proceeds of the hunt makes good sense because most hunts fail so you want an insurance policy where everybody gets to eat at least something but but why should she always cook I have no idea that's interesting I'm trying to think about some sort of psychological sex differences women's better local uh memorization like spatial memorization close by maybe they know what herbs go in the pot more effectively or something I mean I'm really I'm really grasping at straws here that she knows the difference between time and Sage because she can remember it more effectively I'm like uh yeah that's that's really interesting that's really interesting possible and women are more connected you know men are more autonomous machines and women are more connected machines both need both and and maybe that connection compels you is part of the process while you're preparing for I I don't know I have no idea I'm only yeah I like your time Sage explanation though sure we'll go with that one um materialism uh how materialistic did you find out hunter gatherers were well that's a funny one so you know hunted GS essentially own nothing and for a host not nothing but very little for a host of reasons um a it's hard to make things when you're on together because you don't have the modern equipment B you got to carry with you everywhere you go so you can't exactly own that winter coat that you might want to use two days out of the year because you're schlepping at the other 363 um and then the final reason for that is remember I mentioned this this this mandatory sharing of meat well there's mandatory sharing of anything if you own more than one or two of them because this a society where everybody has to work together and so what that means it creates this really remarkable life St where this rule about meat sort of gets spread across to everything and so if I own two or three shirts you can say you know Bill I really like your shirt and that right answer is oh okay you know here you go mate and so the thing is that we you end up with this Society that's that's wonderfully equal in the sense that everybody shares everything with each other but this so that looks really nice it looks kind of utopian but the downside of it is I don't actually have the right to keep my own stuff and so I remember this anecdote where this old guy and Huda I think he was had been given a a sweatshirt um from a tourist and he's talking to the Anthropologist who visits the group and he says I'm meant to share this I know I shouldn't keep it for myself but I'm tired of sharing everything I own with everybody and I just want to keep it I want to be comfortable and you you kind of can't blame the guy right you know he's probably feel old and cold sometimes and he just wants to keep it we see this in a lot of different domains um I remember I worked with this uh I worked up on this remote island in Northern Australia with an and da Aqua people and um I I joined them for a couple of days while we're doing what's called ghost netting these nets get break loose from fishing boats and kill lots and lots of fish and so people around the world gather them up catalog what they are and then we can see where the they're getting accidentally released and what might be done to help the problem and it's crazy hard work because these nets get caught up in everything and so you're dragging this like rubbish out of the sea anyway these guys were doing an amazing job and I was talking to their manager afterward and he goes yeah so they doing amazing work I mean they're crazy hardworking in the hot sun and so I tried to give them a raise and they were like no thanks and he's like no thanks and they're like when I come home everybody takes all my money that I earn and so I don't benefit from that at all it's just kind of frustrating that now I'm losing more money and he says oh well how about if I bought you really nice breakfast when you arrive in the morning and they're like oh I'd love a really nice breakfast and so you know they're they're just as materialistic as we are all humans are materialistic and in fact the Anthropologist say that when they arrive they're constantly saying well look you've got two of those I'd like to have one of them actually I actually need these right and so they they look like they're not materialistic but they're just the same as we are in that regard they just don't judge others by the material Goods so if I see you in the street and you're in a Flash car I'm like wow that Chris Williamson's really cool he's more successful than I am they don't do that because they'd say hey can I have your car and you got no choice F to give it to them right I there has to be an incentive it's such an such an interesting game that was played there where um let me give you a thing that you can consume without the conspicuous consumption of the rest of your group seeing you consume it uh there must be hun gather of stories where they make a kill and they just eat there and then they don't bring it back to the tribe there must be a time where they find a new berry bush or nut nut Bush or something and they just go to town they're like well I mean we came back with it's a few berries but you know the Tre it was it was very it was kind of sparse overall he bu juice all over his face yes no that's exactly right that happens all the time and the classic example is honey the um honey is the they they they'll find honey up in the tree you know it's pretty dicey business getting it but they love it because you know here we have access to sugar as much as we want but nothing in in our ancestor world is as sweet and delicious as honey is and so it's way up on the on the want list and you just don't bring it home it it you come home cover honey and you have this little tiny piece you know they but everybody knows that about each other right and so you say to me um oh bill I think I'm gonna wander off today and I'm thinking Chris is after honey and I'm like hey V I'm with you because at least now you and I are gonna score it together right and and there's even some interesting animals that help us find honey um because then we make a little bit of mess and then they get some too and so there's these interesting cross species cooporation and I see one of those birds near you and I say yeah I'm hanging with Chris today because I think he's got plans because they know for well that you know they they eat today what they catch today but they're going to eat right then and there what they get when it's really really good what was that story about eggshell beads oh so yeah eggshell beads are a great example so um the this this comes to a a tradition that's quite related to what we've been talking about before and it's among the ksan in the Kalahari Desert and so they have this tradition which I don't even know how to pronounce Karo or something like that I'm not quite sure how it's said but what that tradition is is that they've got a set group of a network that sometimes they're K but by and large they're friends and that network is required to share with each other and they maintain the network with regular gifts and so if you're in my network um and I know your Camp is somewhere over there sometimes it's hard to find each other because we all wander around but eventually I find you and when I know where you're going to be I'll try to put together a collection of gifts for you so that I can re connect with you and you'll do the same for me and one of the most common gifts that you would give is these these um beads that are made out of ostrich eggshells and so the're they're pretty and they travel well they're they're kind of like our equ of money um you know they're they're easy to put in your pocket so to speak and they're really nice so the um the interesting thing about these networks is that you're actually mandated to help me if I run out of steam and so let's say that my there's a drought in my section of the desert and which there is commonly I can go to you and say Chris I'm really hungry and you're like oh well here okay have my pizza because you've got no choice but I've got on choice too we're going to look out for each other no matter what if we're part of that Network and one of the interesting things about those net networks is that they can be super Broad and in fact they almost always are there's almost always one or two people in your network who live at least 100 kilometers away from you now you think why would you do that that's a lot of schlepping to give you some ostrich beads shake hands say I hope you're well brother and then move on and the reason for that of course well what we believe the reason for that is that you know things could go very pair shaped in my region of the world the farther away you are the better chances are that your part of the world is still okay and so we don't maintain very many connections that far away but they do they always maintain at least a few and they make sure that you know on a reasonably regular basis that they catch up with everybody so that they always know they've got this insurance policy in place you know they're e can not living in a really hard part of the world yeah one of the other things I was really fascinated to learn was this tension between competence and warmth and that these two things are uh they're opposed in in some ways yeah they are opposed and so if you come back to this argument I was making about autonomy and that we we develop a sense of autonomy in order to develop competence that's how we we decide the area where we have best prospects if we're Mario PUO and we want to write The Godfather we don't listen to our mother when she says I want you to become a railroad Clerk and we we go for it right we we put everything on the line and try to make it as a writer or whatever we see our competence well so autonomy is in service of competence it's what gets us there now the the downside of that is that for me to develop competence sometimes it's working together as a team but very often it's trying to develop my own skill carving that Arrow over and over again um sneaking up on the hunt doing whatever it is that I do that that I think makes me special and that that often requires a lot of self-focused attention a lot of you say hey man I'm gonna go to the party and I say you go I've I've got baskets to shoot or I've got baskets to weave you know whatever my competence is right and and so the the upshot is that the more I develop competence the more I have to SAC sacrifice my connections and that's certainly the case in today's world I mean if you look at what school asks us to do it's all about study study study study and so yes you sometimes study in groups but what you're really trying to do is learn the material yourself and so what it means is sacrificing don't go out on recess and play you know work hard and do these other things the consequence of that is that we tend to see people who are competent as being cold if we know nothing else about them and we and vice versa if we see somebody what's cold and warm in this context so cold is our and warm refer to our natural tendency and ability to connect and so if I connect easily and in a friendly manner to you I'm a warm person so you meet me on the and and you say you know oh excuse me and you sit down and I go and I just don't pay any attention to you I'm not friendly and warm like oh of course mate I'd be happy to move over it's good to see you yeah these trains sure are wobbly hard to read you know whatever I I just engage with you then I'm I'm being warm and people vary dramatically in how warm or cold they are they vary dramatically in how competent or incompetent they are but because trying to be more warm tends to sacrifice your competence you know when I when you sit down next to me on the bus if I had then pay attention and chat with you the whole trip I'm not reading that book that I really should learn in order to be a better accountant right I'm sacrificing my own time to dedicate it to you and so these two things tend to be negatively correlated and we know that and so we regard warm people as incompetent you know so you meet somebody who's warm and you go yeah I bet they're not very good and you meet somebody who's cold you go oh I bet they're pretty competent because on average that's true that's a I I wonder whether that could be manipulated in a job interview to go in and seem overly cold and like an absolute killer uh I my abilities are completely terrible but I mean he seemed he seemed like he was such a serious actor exactly you'd want to make it you what would be the perfect thing is if I could say you know you and I you my potential boss you and I really connect man we're going to be on the same page I hate everybody else all I like to do is you know I'm a competence machine yeah so it's is it another way to put this would be that people that are very competent there is this subex that in order to have achieved this level of competence I must have been quite selfish for a good while yeah you at the very least you were self-oriented you may not have denied other people requests that they made of you but when given the opportunity you ignored them and did your own thing and that's what it and some people are so crazy good that they can get there and be friendly every day you know one of my old roommates is a professor at Harvard Medical School and all he ever did his whole life was hang out and play I I don't understand how he does it he's just that good right somehow Al also as an awesome Professor yeah exactly 10 zillion grants changing the world um but somehow but most of us can't do that and so most of us if we become highly competent we have to sacrifice at least for a while we have to sacrifice our connections again the irony is I'm becoming competent so that down the road you're going to want me on your team you're going to want to connect with me and and the other side of that that's interesting is if you look at Hunter gathers they actually prefer the warm ones over the competent ones so long as you achieve some baseline level of competence when they're choosing teams to go hunting in the morning they choose the warm one because think about it this way you know if I'm the best in the group but I don't share nice with you what good does it do you to pick me but if I'm the best if I'm a adequate Hunter and I always go hey no you have the hind leg you're a great guy you're like I want to go out with bill because I'm gonna benefit more from it and so warmth actually trumps competence so long as you're not incompetent wow so even when going on a hunt a warmer friendlier better hang will be chosen over a better Hunter yeah every time yeah I I I've been thinking a lot about bands and how bands tour recently and um I wondered I asked a friend a bunch of friends this question actually which is how many times when you've tried to find somebody new for a group or previous groups have in the past have you found someone who's a [ __ ] virtuoso like man he just on the base you know it's like it's an extension of his body uh but when they get back on the tour bus he sucks uh or or the the equivalent whichever other position it is and uh apparently it happens all the time you think okay well what does that show it shows that competence actually doesn't always win out even in something which is you know very tight performance you're on stage nobody on stage no one in the thousands of people in the crowd that's looking at you really cares about the Vibe back on the tour bus Beyond however much it impacts your performance but you can't separate out what it's you don't stop you don't turn your brain off as soon as you step off stage and go oh god I've got to sit down with Rick again he's going to do my head in for the next 23 hours until we get back on stage and I finally get a bit of peace from him and he gets to do the one thing that he's actually good at um so yeah it's even in even in uh modern environments I think we still have this this sort of sense this subtext so just to kind of I guess kind of summarize and ensure that I'm at the right place the thing that's most important to humans is connection one of the ways that we can get to connection is by being pro-social by being reciprocal by bonding by being warm by being friendly that's a suggestion that if times are tough we will help you and we will bound together we're trustworthy uh one of the other things that we can do is to develop competences these competences help us to stand out they give us value they make sort of each unit of effort that we can give to you more valuable because we're kind of more effective with with our units of effort uh but in order to be able to develop these competences we need to use autonomy because it's very difficult to work on our skills whilst also being super pro-social because those two things tend to be at least a little bit in opposition I can't focus on me whilst focusing on you I need to go away Steph Curry it for 500 shots for today and then come back and then we can run some drills as a team or whatever it might be and these two things are intention because the most direct route to doing it is the human connection part but human Connection in the absence of competence means that you're probably going to be beaten for mate Choice you're going to be beaten for uh selecting being being selected to go on the hunt you're not going to have the same kind of status and as soon as you put hierarchies in and as soon as you have female mate choice you end up as soon as you have mate choice at all you end up with everybody trying to jostle and this is where that tension comes from how how close am I you nailed it that's exactly right let's go I knew I was listening right and so the upshot of all that is that we we really want to connect we really want people that we like but remember that when they're trying to side between Rick and Stu to play bass for them they're never even considering bill because Bill sucks at the bass and he's they love him they think they think Bill's A really lovely guy they can't wait to catch up with me again at a bar someday but that guy is not joining our band under circumstance no matter how much they love him but that doesn't change the fact that you also made the point you know if if ste's impossible he probably won't be on the the thing either and so I remember when Simon and Garf funka were still a were still a group and Simon said when he when he couldn't when they split he's like look I know people prefer our sound with Garfunkle I can't work with them anymore and so you know it it just it matter he's he's potentially risking his whole career it matters that much now the the bills never get to join the band you have to have that minimal level of competence but but then you have to get along because that's what humans are designed to do and so the thing is that what that means is that we actually really enjoy getting along we don't think gee getting along with something super important to me I will get along we think boy I really like this guy and we you know Evolution guides us with our emotions and so it gets us to enjoy doing those things that are in our best interest did certain ancestral environments or times or uh periods of History setups prioritize one over the other do you think can you imagine I'm thinking uh high conflict I'm thinking uh battle for leadership I'm thinking war with a neighboring tribe uh predation starvation cold snaps in the climate stuff like that I imagine that there would be periods where competence uh and autonomy would be more heavily valued and periods where the connection uh Pro social stuff would be more valued I think you're absolutely right and in the end what's going to always matter the most when conflict is is Harsh when times are harsh is how well do we work together as a team and so remember earlier I said well women are a bit more connected than men on average that's true they feel tighter connections usually to smaller groups of women than men do who feel looser connections to larger groups there's one exception to that rule and that's in when you're in Intergroup conflict and so when two groups come into conflict with each other guys bond with each other in an enormous way and the evolutionary pressure on that's clear because what we have to do now if you you know Bill may or may not be a good fighter but he's on our team and so he's still everybody has to work together as the best possible unit put the Bas down you never going to be in the ban pick the stick up we need to kill someone exactly use that base like this and so the thing is that in those circumstances connection becomes Paramount and in fact when you talk to soldiers particularly soldiers who face live fire together they talk about never feeling closer to anybody in their life than they feel to their fellow soldiers in that moment when their life is being threatened by another group and it's teamwork that's going to either get them out of that or fail to and so there's enormous evolutionary pressure on us particularly on men because they're the ones who typically engaged in the Intergroup conflict and when you lost every one of the men are going to die there's no cap taking prisoners you either run away and you get lucky or you're dead um the women will typically survive not necessarily in the happiest way but they're going to make it whereas the men are not I can't remember whether it was Tracy venor or Joyce bennon that did the study on female basketball players have you seen this um so keep going I'm not it's not familiar so far you may you may you may have done so basically she looked at the physical affection between players on their own team and players on opposing teams in male games and in female games and Men on opposing teams showed more physical affection than female uh competitors on the same team wow wow that's interesting yeah and I just as you were talking there I I thought about that sort of coalitional Warfare type like let's just let's just crack up we need to just get our heads down we need to do this thing you know men just sort of drop in and whether it's toddlers learning to play like what is it that the girls are doing they're learning to look after a rabbit or they're playing nurse or they're raising a baby or they're doing whatever what are the boys doing they're fighting aliens or Cowboys or you know whatever it is um I I always think about that sort of disposition that that um tend this this tendency toward toward dropping in and you see it with guys at football matches like you both support the same team I'll happily go and fight the other supporters of the other team for you for no reason for no reason but that's the Brit in me coming out it's funny isn't it but when you look at teams what's so interesting also is that men you know you you gave that awesome example I don't know that study but it's a lovely one and it does in some ways it doesn't surprise me so when men are opposing teams they can just be harsh as each other I can drive my shoulder into you going for the basket and your thought is wow good move bill I would have done that to you if I could have scored a basket like that and so two years later when we get traded and I'm now on your team we're totally mates and you're like hey I want you to do that with me to the other guys whereas women um remember I said mentioned earlier that they tend up smaller Circles of closer friends as a consequence they're less forgiving of what you might call betrayal so if if I go against you it takes a lot of repair work for us to be tight again whereas two guys if I go against you you say well I would have done the same thing if I were Bill shoes I got no problem with that and we can be mates again when the conditions are right when it suits both of us yeah I it's it's so funny we romanticize the Deep connection that hunter gatherers have got as if they have a different psychology to us but we are them this is the funny thing that we sort of look at as if they're a different species right and um you go no same species different environment species different setup exactly that that's and that that's where you nail it it's that environment that changes who we are and so they do feel tighter connections than we feel because they spent their whole lives doing it you know the the example I like to use so um I don't know if you've heard of the superior Warf hypothesis it's this idea that you don't if you don't have a word some for something you can't think it and it was this idea that was super popular in the 30s called the super Warf super uh superar Warf so they the two guys who had this hypothesis and um in different time points but it kind of got Blended together and it was super popular idea that if you have no word for snow well then you can't think about snow and it kind of disappeared after a while because the problem is that if you have you know lots of experience with snow well then of course you have words for it and so is it your experience that helps you think about it or is the does the word make any difference but um lra boritzki at Stanford came along and said well let's turn the problem on its head let's look at people who have equal experiences but they either use these things in their words all the time or they don't and so there's here in Queensland we have a couple of Aboriginal groups who have no word for left right front or back everything that they do is cardinal directions and so they would say to you oh hey Chris be careful there's a snake North by Northwest of your foot and if they said that to me I'm screwed because I don't know which direction that is but if they say that to each other they go ah and they jump back from the snake right and so they remember this forever and so when they're telling stories they'll go oh yeah um so there North by Northwest from me and South by Southeast I've got this emu and how am I going to resolve this problem and um and you know if you and I telling the story you go there on my right was a lion and there on my left was it this so they asked well if you ask them well was it on the side of you with a butt or the side of you with a face right because they didn't have a word for front or back they had no problem answering that question they go no that was the side with the face and so it's clear evidence that superar and War were wrong you don't have a word for it you're perfectly capable of thinking about it but what's amazing is that these guys know where North is all the time they think about it all the time and so when these ideas are in your head if you're accustomed to thinking about you you start to color the world that way so H gathers very much of our we're them and they're us but they're connection machines and so everything that happens to them they think in the lens of how does this affect me in my group what are going to be the consequences for me in my group and you and I just don't think about our group that much we think oh that's pretty cool I like that outcome or that doesn't suit me without saying well it'll suit everybody else I should you know get involved or whatever whatever so our habits of thought can change our psychology to some degree it can become our dominant way of viewing the world despite the fact that underlying we are the exact same people isn't it crazy that every single person who's listening to this now or me or you had we have by some weird hospital quook being dropped in with the hza tribe you just ended up with this this little baby we would have been them that would have been our psychology you know for all that you're you're certain that it's your anxious attachment and it's your genetic predisposition to not clearing dopamine so quickly and it's the fact that blah blah blah blah blah blah it's like if you were there you would almost certainly just be exactly the same as them that's right you your psychology be there now the thing is that with that said there's a course variability on everything and so some people feel like they're really good fit to their culture wherever you live and those people tend to be really happy some people feel like they're kind of an outsider and so Stu the bass player who nobody on the band l you know he's like his thing is playing the base because he doesn't connect to other humans very well and maybe just maybe if Stu had been a hza their rules would have fit him better and so there are there around the edges there's going to be people who feel like they're a tighter fit or a looser fit but the the loosest fitting hza and the loosest fitting you know Brit or American or Azie whatever are going to be miles apart in what they do but they could have switched and B each other what are the forces that shape autonomy and con connection then so the there's a lot of forces um one of them is some of them emerge from inside us and so if we're highly empathic for example some people just have a very high capacity for empathy and some people don't and and we can you can look at that really easily so you can even put me in an fmri magnet which measures blood flow in my brain and then watch I I have to watch somebody get poked in their hand or tortured in some way and you can just see me cringing and going and feeling their pain like the brain regions that would be activated if you did to me light I'm highly empathic I and and so when you hurt I hurt and what that means is I become much more of a connection machine because your pain is my pain and I want to alleviate it just like I want to alleviate my own and so social justice matters to me a lot when you experience a harm I experience harm now it's sort of a selfish way to look at it but that that selfish way of looking at has really nice interpersonal consequences other people are lower in empathy you you poke them in the hand and they're like oh I wonder if that hurt interesting oh BL blood I bet that did hurt um and and it doesn't phase them you know there we we see all sorts of differences between these people if you're high in empathy you tend to be politically on the left if you're low in empathy you tend to be politically on the right if you're really low in empathy you tend to be a Libertarian um and it's not like being a Libertarian is a bad thing but then autonomy starts to become more important to you you know for Libertarians autonomy is a sacred value if if if I'm a Libertarian that's so interesting of course being being a Libertarian is maximum autonomy and if if low empathy severe low empathy sorry if very high empathy is associated with uh connectedness and very low empathy is associated with high autonom that this is almost mapping perfectly your hypothesis yeah it it fits the it's this political ramifications of exactly what we're talking about right and so if you look at what Libertarians are willing to do I I you know I'm not disrespecting libertarian values autonomy matters to all of us but but once it becomes ascendant think about the consequences so Phil tetlock did this wonderful study where he asks you should a person be allowed to do X and should a person be allowed to hire someone to clean their home you know pretty much people go of course uh should a person be able to sell their kidney if they want extra money um a lot of people start to go no now it's weird to say no to me I I want to sell you my kidney you're gonna die without it I could use the 20 grand but I'm not it's actually illegal I can't do that it goes even farther than that should a person be able to sell their votes should a person be able to sell their jail time and so for a Libertarian the answer is always yes and so if I if I get a DUI and I um and I live in a totally libertarian world I would just put up on Fiverr um who will um have their license suspended and go to jail for me uh for half a million dollars and I promise you lots of hands are going to go up and now I'm back in my car and everything's copasetic right and so if you if you put autonomy at the top of your list you start to see the connection consequences but but from a philosophical perspective it's a defensible Viewpoint what about gender roles and their influence on autonomy connections stuff like that yeah yeah it's a great question it all these things are tied together and so there is no human on this planet who's well almost no humans on this planet who are insensitive to the culture they grew up in right we were just discussing that you just become a different person if you're a hodza than if you're a Brit or an American or whatever but you're intrinsically the same but that culture changes you a lot and so of course our gender roles change us a lot I remember watching this video um it was put on by the ABC the Australian broadcasting uh company where they um they looked at these two women having a debate in the 1960s about whether women should go to university and the one woman who was Pro says think of all the interesting things you learn and the one woman who's anti was like why do you need to know that stuff when your husband comes home you want to hear about his day you're taking kid care of kids all day in fact I could even imagine to be slightly frust ating to be thinking about Marxist philosophy but changing nappies all day or you know doing whatever you're doing and so there that debate would never happen anymore where two women are arguing about whether women should get an education so our culture changes and and we all change with us we don't even consider that a reasonable argument anymore even though back in those times we understand the Viewpoint that both of them were taking so gender roles matter a lot but they also matter in ways you less than you'd think and in and they don't matter in ways you might think they would so for example if you look at sex differences on any domain and and remember I was talking about men being more autonomy and women being more connection so women are more likely to reward kindness in others if you're kind to me and I'm female I'm gonna be more likely to go out of my way to repay it than if I'm male if you're male you're more likely to punish unkindness or unfriendliness in others because you know that you you've impinged on my autonomy when you were unfriendly to me and and I'm going to show you you can't do that than than if you're female both do it but men do it more now if you look at societies that are more gender egalitarian where there's fewer rules about what men and women can do those sex differences get larger they don't get smaller and so men in Scandinavia are more likely to punish unfriendliness and women in Scandinavia are more likely to reward kindness than men women in Tunisia where they've got very strict gender roles about how they're meant to behave so they often work exactly opposite that you think arguing for their being underlying the strong cultural impact a very strong biological impact as well yes Steve Stewart will Will's new book is going to be all about sex differences apparently which I'm uh I'm super excited for him to do even though he will be maybe he won't be stepping into that much of a he might not be stepping into that much of a land mine I guess given what's happened over the last couple of months but uh it definitely wouldn't have been particularly popular five years ago I know that much yeah it would be a hard it hard book write and it's unfortunate it's a hard book to write because science and morality have nothing to do with each other you if you look at what nature does there's a bug out there where every time she she always lays six eggs they're inside her body they're OVO VI vious so they the eggs hatch inside her and there's one boy and five girls he then has sex with all of his sisters they kill him and eat him and then they instead of being birthed naturally they bite their way out of her like in the movie Alien what and now what's this cold I I can't it's some kind of a dust mite if I remember right and and the thing is I know and but of course now this is like a Greek tragedy it's going to happen to them too because they had sex with their brother before they went out and so this exact same story is enacted for all eternity where they're all going to die like they're in the movie Alien after having incest with their sibling while they're inside their mother it's Happ forever and so like is there a morality lesson here do we learn something from this bug that should guide human behavior in any way no it's irrelevant and you can find every if there's something nasty that's that that could happen it's happening somewhere in nature does that mean that we as humans should go oh it's natural and and therefore important and good and we should guide ourselves by it no it's got nothing to do with it so he should be able to write a book about the biology of sex differences that should not have any impact on what humans ought to do to each other it should be an easy book to write in fact everyone who cares about gender relations should want to read that book so they know what they're dealing with but unfortunately it worked the other way right aact alidium is a genus of mites known for its unusual life cycle an impregnated female might feeds upon a single egg of thrips rapidly growing five to eight female Offspring in one male a single male might made to all of his sisters while they're still inside the mother the new female is now impregnated eat their way out of the mother's body so they can emerge to find new thrips eggs killing their mother in the process through the cycle may only be four days old starting the cycle again the male urges emerges as well but does not look food or matate and then dies after a few hours Oh I thought they ate him too so I misremembered that so that's good he gets to get out of there he's a little bit of fresh air you know what I mean it's good it's good to stretch your legs after you've had see Sun yeah um okay let's move into the modern world how is all of this off balance when we get into contemporary Society yeah that's a great question and so I thought about this for a long time and and I think that the problem is this so let me rewind the clock a tiny bit um we used to live in a world where connection was Paramount and so if you guys wanted to go north and I wanted to go south even though our cultural rules are actually every we're all the galarian we're all autonomous I can do what I want I can't go south unless I can persuade you guys to go my way because I'm going to end up being eaten by a lion and you guys are going to end up being fine and so I had to rely on my connections and my opportunities for autonomy were actually relatively rare every once in a while I had a true choice where I didn't need to connect where safety was fine and I could do whatever I wanted when that happened what I believe is that we evolved to pick autonomy because it was so rare that we could actually pick it so connection was what we needed autonomy was what we wanted it wasn't uncommon and so we evolved to grab it whenever we could now we often create what are called evolutionary mismatches where our biology changes slowly our culture changes rapidly and so things that we wanted in the past that were very we want them because they're good for us remember Evolution guides us so to speak by via our emotions and so we all seek out fat sugar and salt all the time for example they're all really rare on the Savannah and so now we live in a modern world where fat sugar and salt are is two meters away from me all the time the problem is that even if there was a lot of it one day I probably should eat more because there's probably not going to be any of it tomorrow and so I want fat salt sugar when I ought to stop eating because our ancestors never suffered from eating too much fat salt and sugar but now of course that's an enormous problem it's a form of what I would call miswan thing you can imagine an evolutionary mismatch leading to miswan thing you can also Imagine an evolutionary mismatch leading to what I call misfeed of spiders they they wig me out and um I was in Sydney um on a a trip with a bunch of biologists and we went to the grocery store first when we got to our campsite and we opened up our um box a funnel web spider hopped out which is the world's deadliest spider now they're biologists and so and I'm just a psychologist right so they immediately captured underglass which I already thought was crazy and then when I suggest yeah now one of us should stomp on it by by which I mean one of them they're like are you crazy this thing is beautiful and they flick it into the grass like right next to our barbecue so the whole night I've got the Willies I'm like I can't everything that touches my skin is making me nervous now nobody's died of a funnel web spider bite despite them being all around since the 1970s even though they can kill you really easily because hospitals keep antivenom people are good at avoiding them Etc on the other hand you know think about all the ways that we can die Automobiles and and electricity are two really good examples I've shocked myself once changing a lamp out it threw me across the floor I'm not scared of lamps at all I've never been bit by a spider they scared they they give me the the heebie chibies um cars whiz by me all the time even the smallest one could fly me and drivers are really inattentive but I don't walk down the road going you know afraid of of cars I I walk down the sidewalk think giving them no thought and so I should be afraid of cars and electrical outlets and I shouldn't be afraid of spiders but I'm the opposite I'm Mis feeling and I think what we've got ourselves into is this exact kind of evolutionary mismatch with regard to autonomy and connection and I think the way it's happened is that think about our modern world and all the things that you could do now I want to be a YouTuber I where I just talk about my opinions I want to do there's a zillion things that's like the most popular thing that kids want to do there's a zillion things that I could do our ancestors never wondered what they were going to do for a living they were in the no choice condition I will hunt and gather because that's what every human on this planet does right and so we've got a zillion opportunities for autonomy and if I'm right and if autonomy and connection are in fundamental tension then every time we choose autonomy we're sacrificing our connections and we've gotten out of balance what has encouraged this lean toward autonomy in the modern world well I think wealth and education and urban living all have played a huge role and so if you look if you start with Urban living living in the cities um in the mid- 1800s uh about up in well cities started about 5,000 years ago uh the very first cities were getting large around that time so let's call cities in existence for 5,000 years so up until 200 years ago fewer than one in 10 people on this planet lived in a city so people voted with their feet very very slowly they' very slowly migrated cities over thousands of years 5,000 years 10% of us had migrated to cities between um we go from 1 and 10 in in 1850 to 1960 we now have one and three by 2007 it was equal 50% of people live in cities and 50% live in the country and so there's been a massive movement to the cities what does this have to do with anything well cities are places for autonomy I can pursue anything I want in the city there's all sorts of opportunities everything is available to me in a city and so I go to cities for the opportunities the job the whatever those domains might be and you think in principle that's fine because you could have your cake and need it too but it turns out you can't and so even though when I live in the city I'm cheat by Jou with a lot of other people you know my apartment building might have a thousand humans in it it turns out I usually don't know them I might not even know the people in the apartment right next to mine whereas if I live in the country and my nearest neighbor is you know 500 meters away I probably know them well so when you ask people in cities do you know someone that you trust with your hous keys they're less likely to say yes than when you ask someone in in the country despite having people all around them all the time and so what we've done when we cities is living as an example we've sacrificed our connections in order to gain that autonomy City living and then you say all right fine people have been voting with their feets feet all the humans on the planet are doing it it must make you happier actually it doesn't if you look at happiness in City versus the country people are more likely to be very happy in the country than they are in the city so we're making ourselves unhappy when we choose autonomy and humans are doing it all over the planet what about wealth and technological advances education those are great examples so wealth is you know poor people need each other if you live in a poor neighborhood and you want to mow your lawn and your lawnmower broke you probably can't afford to have it repaired to buy another one but you could borrow one from your neighbor and the same holds if if you need your dog hat while you're out of town or whatever the case might be you can't hire a dog sit or you're broke so poor people live in this kind of network of interdependence with each other whereby they just count on each other all the time in that sense they're a lot like our hunter gather ancestries they have these tight connections because they need to rich people don't need each other at all if I you know run out of my favorite coffee beans I'll just drone it in you know my latte will be here in 45 minutes I I've got the money to solve all my problems and so again when I'm rich I don't even necessarily know who my neighbors are so if you ask rich people and poor people how much time do you spend with your neighbors poor people are more than twice as likely to get together with their neighbors regularly as rich people are and so rich people are sacrificing their connections now you might say Well they're still happy because they're doing exactly what they want but again the data rich people are happier than poor people but the data suggests that when they're forced to make connections that actually makes a big difference in their life that's so interesting it's kind of the same as the uh competent people not being seen as quite quite so warm that if you see somebody who's quite Rich you have to assume I mean unless they've made it unless their friends have just given them tons of money you it's because of all of my pro-social contacts uh you have to assume that they've spent a lot of on themselves and that's a a kind of isolating autonomous individualistic existence no that's right and so getting rich the kind of person who gets rich is often a very is an autonomy machine because that's usually a route to get there not always you can get there by glad handing and and if you're sales that might be how you did it but the the other side of that coin though is you could be born into a wealthy family you did nothing to gain that wealth you're your your your very wealthy Dad or Mom married somebody who's highly connected and then you just inherited all that you still don't need your neighbors and when you don't need your neighbors like there's these really interesting studies that Paul piff and their colleagues do where they bring people into the lab and who they grew up poor or grew up rich and they have them to get acquainted conversations and people who grew up poor are engaged with each other and they're talking back and forth they're connecting and people are rich a far more likely to look down at their phone if they don't have their phone they're likely to Doodle they pay less attention they're less capable of taking each other's perspective because they're just less engaged they don't need each other and unfortunately even though they don't need need each other physically which is where we evolved we still need each other socially even if we don't know it and so all those decisions that rich people are making on a daily basis to not connect with their neighbor to not do those things because in the moment they'd rather watch TV they'd rather do whatever those are building up a cost why do you think it is that this kind of explains what's enabled the autonomy thing but this worship of individualism this worship of autonomy given the fact that the evidence suggests the more connected you are the happier you're going to be and so on and so forth where you look at the that Harvard study the longitudinal thing number of close connections are the best predictor of your out etc etc how is it that our autonomy seeking systems our individualistic seeking systems have been so hijacked how have they been run arai and sped up to this sort of really overclocked way yeah that's a great question I don't know why it is it you know what the underlying psychology is in the background but what I can say is that in the moment when what you want to do competes with what you your social obligations are you're we tend to default if we can to well what I really want to do right now is X and it's because I believe that our ancestors face that problem 75 times a day and 74 they had to choose go along with everybody else and so when that one moment when they can do what they want they're going to grab it and so we've evolved this psychology I believe that focus is and what we want in the moment and forgets about what we need in the longer term and so let me give you a for example if you look at poor and rich people who either never go to religious services or who go regularly the effect of going to religious Services is larger among the rich than it is among the poor it has a bigger impact on their happiness now there's a countless reasons why it ought to be the opposite and for example if if you look at if you ignore services but you just look at prayer prayer makes poor people happier than rich people does so people pray versus never pray and don't ever go to Services it has a bigger bump in happiness for poor than Rich which makes sense because poor people don't have a lot of stuff rich people have the stuff that poor people are praying for and so but so it's not the belief side that that that matters about the going into Services it's forcing you to connect so if you're a religious person and you feel you're meant to be in church every week or more than once a week that's a lot of connection that's being forced foisted upon you you know you're now like a hunter gather you don't have choice and it makes an enor difference in the happiness of people's lives and it makes an even bigger difference for Rich than poor because they're avoiding those connections otherwise and so and each time we make that decision in the moment do I want to go over to Chris's and borrow some coffee beans ah he's gonna bug me when I'm busy screw it I'm gonna order it on Amazon each time we do that we're happier for that micro decision but we're adding a little chip to our unhappiness by sacrificing our connections that's so interesting yeah I I love your term around sad success stories uh people who have achievements but they don't feel particularly fulfilled because they don't actually have a tight network of friends to share it with I think that's a like an endemic problem to the high performer you know you look at the people that everybody aspires to be like the ones that have got the most Accolade and acclaim and reputation and so on and so forth and you really probably should look at them with some degree of pity to think well what's Driven this person to get to this stage and what have they had to sacrifice in order to get there and how alienating is it for them to be in that situation and how few people have they got to share this with and how few people understand what they've gone through in order to be able to yeah sad success stories I think were uh good me it's it's it's kind of heartbreaking because they've they've achieved the dream that that all of us dream about that we want and and I remember I can't remember which congressman it was but he talked about I I've achieved everything I ever wanted and all day long I'm I'm with people and that should be great but they're all shallow connections and I go home and I'm alone and it just the discrepancy between what I've achieved at work and what I've achieved in my personal life is so great that I just I can barely face it and and that's like this epitome of a sad success story right and the problem is that for a lot of us to get there either we had to sacrifice those connections because we really worked hard or maybe we didn't work that hard and we didn't have to sacrifice the connections but we're still making the wrong choice every day because those autonomy choices are so available to us and so you say to me you know Bill I'd really like to see a Schwarzenegger flick and I'm like I want to see a romcom and I say well I'll see you later forget it um and when I should just go to whatever movie you want to see because it's less important than you and I getting together hanging out talking about it afterwards on that sort of thing how do you ensure I mean this is not an issue uh and it it it's it's interesting and I'm I'm particularly fascinated with this sort of open loop about why we've tended toward autonomy as opposed to uh sort of connection um but there is a risk of sacrificing too much autonomy there has to be there has to be some downsides to that too oh absolutely and the thing is that I do think the balance was wrong our ancestors had no choice they had to be connection machines and when you look around the world as every society gets wealthier they become more individualistic so it's and that's understandable you you you feel sorry for the old guy who got this sweatshirt and then knew he was gonna have to give it away and he's like forget it I'm just keeping this one I'm not giving this away this time just you know the the notion of not having anything you can call your own sounds hard to us right and so the that that balance needed to be corrected but of course the problem is now shifted in the other direction where we're constantly making these decisions we're we're making these choices that each choice makes the small sacrifice you know that each choice is a good one every time I say well i' I'd rather just have the latte I wanted or I'd rather do whatever you know we even see this among married couples quite remarkably people are spending less time with their friends than they ever did before they're spending less time with their neighbors than they ever did before and married couples are spending more time separately now if you get lucky you have people in your life who want to do exactly what you want to do and then you don't have any of these problems right you've got somebody who's right beside you when you're busy doing your thing they're busy doing theirs and then you guys reconnect and you have the same leisure activities Etc but it's that takes a lot of luck and so aot for on average what's happening is that he's going to the gym and she's going to run outside or whatever right and the upshot is that that even married couples are spending less time together and so as far as time alone is concerned being quality time even in the closest relationships we have it's going down I was going to say how much can relationships and marriage assuage these problems of disconnection and overreliance on autonomy they have to make some sort of an impact they they definitely matter the um it's the time alone that kills us and so the thing is that if you've got a partner who you enjoy quality time with then that's a huge plus and especially if neither of you has to sacrifice your autonomy because both of you like you're both art lovers and so now you get to do what you want to do and you get to do it together and you can stand in front of that Monae painting and both Marvel at it together and that's really nice those are bonding moments but not everybody has that and then you have to find the way when she wants to go to the movies and you want to go to the art show or ski or you know whatever your preferences are and and I don't think that it has to be your romantic partner that that you do those things with but what I have come to realize is that and it was actually Co that showed me this that there's lots of things that we do alone that people who matter to us also do alone that we could just do them together now in the best case scenario we do them together physically you and I are both trying to get fit so we meet every Thursday or twice a week or whatever and we go run or lift or whatever we're doing um but of course you actually live a long way from me and so if we're made from way back um we have to do it EC connecting but the great thing is e-c connecting is awfully easy now you know we we disparage it and there's reasons to but it also allows us to get together when we can't so my little sister lives in London and she always likes to do the crossw and I always likees to do the cross word and so when Co started we were both locked down a lot we just started doing the cross word together and so we just get on the phone and we're doing the crossword and of course there's lots of random chitchat and we' kind of catch up on each other's day now even though I love her dearly I used to speak to her you know once every month at best and suddenly we're not talking three or four days a week because we're just we have these defaults on these days when she wakes up and makes her coffee it's now at the end of the day for me we do the cross word and and and why not you know why not take Connection in it easily I remember there was this guy he wrote this up in the New York Times about how he was going to reconnect with all of his old friends and so he went way out of his way to find them all and got together with him and then he ends up by saying am I going to keep this up probably not it was just too much effort and that's the problem with us we're lazy when your closest friend moves an hour away you're just not going to see them in person anymore and so we have to find we have to know yourself you have to know know you're lazy or busy you know it's not just bad right we're busy people and then you have to find ways to add Connection in without sacrificing additional time ideally without sacrificing your autonomy continue to do what you want to do but connecting at the same time has this research giving you a better lens on why there's such a widespread sense of isolation and sort of dissatisfaction in the modern world material Comfort but psychological dis disease yeah yeah I used to marel at it because you know when I was a little kid in the 60s and 70s the world was a much rougher place and our attitudes were pretty rough you know I had a lot of friends who were gay for example who I didn't know they're gay because they're telling nobody because you just get beat up you know it was not a good time to be different in any way and now it's a great time to be different you can be anybody you want to be and even if what you are is super rare you can still find people to connect with on the internet who you could never have found you know when I was a kid and all that in prior to that world we're also way kinder to each other you know literally the solution to fighting on the playground was when the bell and when the bell rang at the end of the playground and somebody lost and somebody won and the hierarchy was reshuffled or kept the same depending on the outcome but teachers never stepped in to stop someone from beating somebody else up it just didn't happen if it was outside the school rounds you could you're not allowed to beat up in class of course and so you know when you look at that world and how rough it was and how unpleasant it was you'd think oh well probably people had a lot of mental health problems then that that just have gotten a lot better and of course you went I know that it's the opposite that this the current generation is more anxious the current generation of adolescence and young adults are more anxious than any generation before them even though the world's so much better of a place and I think that part of it is exactly what we're talking about this this lack of balance that we have between autonomy and connection that it's gone ay and it's gotten worse in the last 50 years why anxiety do you think what is it about that that's the emotion dour of contemporary world it's a great question um I think I I don't know I I don't know but I would conjecture that the answer is is Chris Rock once said um you know if you think words hurt you then you've never been punched in the face and um and I agree with him I've been punched in the face and it's not nice and when I was a kid you know the the this this little phrase that we were taught as somebody's making fun of you is sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me and so in other words I don't care what you say to me I only care if you punch me in the face my feelings are my problem not yours and you're not going to be able to impinge on them either way well as our world's gotten so wonderful you know it's so much safer than it used to be I I rolled out of a car when I was a little kid because the door SW open and there's not even a seat Bel in the back and I'm four years old and I roll across the street you know that just doesn't happen anymore as as we don't get hurt in random Mayhem kinds of ways then we we start lowering the bar on what it means to be hurt and eventually what it means to be hurt is that neuroscientists can write in all seriousness that words are violent that they cause harm because when people read mean words or people say mean things to them un painful thoughts happen in their mind well of course painful thoughts happen in your mind but we used to be robust to that because that was the least of our concerns and now we're just less robust to it and so think about all the kinds of ways the world could go bad and if even words are scary to you the things people might say or think about you well then the world is a scary place and it makes sense that you would be a lot more anxious than you used to be m H what I'm interested in whether you think it's possible for people to rebalance this in their own lives you know we can't step outside of the Contemporary world I don't know how many people are going to go and move and live with the hza um so what do you think can be done yeah that's super hard and for me I I think the answer is small fixes that have to become habit and the key is there's two components one is you can't do like that guy in the New York Times uped who finds all of his old friends and puts you Jeff into seeing them and then just doesn't have the time for that and so quits doing it there's no accomplishment there um but you can do like what I did where now when I'm going to do the crossroad anyway I immediately call my sister first and we just do it together because what difference does it make to me and it's nice it's actually more fun to chat with her and I'm not good enough at crosswords to get them by myself and so it's great when I've got her help right so think everything's better when I do it that way but the second component to that is it has to become habit because if we have to decide to connect we just don't do it and so you want it to be habit like the same way brushing your teeth is you don't wake up in the morning go should I brush my teeth today you know you just you you follow your routine you ate breakfast you brush your teeth it's it's what we call surrendering control of our Behavior to the environment after breakfast I brush my teeth you want your new habits to work the same way your socializing habits and so you want to think about what are the activities that I do alone and could I connect while I do them and then once you decide that you you think well what are my contingencies that are going to cause me to do that not every morning will I decide to do it because you just won't decision is hard but if you say all right well on Tuesdays I like to do X and so so and so I'll always call while I'm cleaning up the toys after the toddlers I'll call my old high school friend because she's doing the same thing or whatever the case might be right you reintroduce Connection in ways that become habitual that are triggered by events in the environment and then it just becomes part of your life again and it's really nice you know we we do spend a lot of time alone it our environment enables that but you don't have to be fully alone when you do it what about adjusting our expectations I imagine that that's something else that people need to get used to yeah expectations are hard because you know we it's it's sort of like when I get upset because they put barbecue sauce on my meat lovers Pizza um we things work awfully smoothly in our world and so we want that continued smooth friction free existence and it's it's easy enough if somebody steps and says hey hold on Bill are you really that upset that you don't have the pizza sauce that you wanted isn't that absurd of course I'm gonna say oh you're right that's absurd but we're locked up in our momentto moment lives we're not locked up in our long-term life you know the world has gotten so much better than it used to be in 100 years ago 90% of people were illiterate 90% of people lived in abject poverty and now those numbers are reversed over 90% of the human on this planet are literate over 90 less than 10% lived in AB poverty the world is so much better than it used to be and a huge chunk of that is in my lifetime but it still happens really really slowly you don't notice it the papers aren't full of this good news it's all the momentary tiny tidbits of bad news of what happened today and the things that happen today that are bad are just more noticeable than the things that happen that are good and so we we get really caught up with those friction and it's hard for us to back up and I don't have good advice you know some of us have the Good Fortune that we're glass as half full kind of people we just see opportunity and and good and some of us have the bad fortune that we're sort of genetically glass half empty type people that there's strong evolutionary not Evolution but genetic component to that and so if you're the glass is half empty that's making you unhappy you need to start trying really hard to focus on the part that's full yeah I had a conversation with Rick Hansen that wrote hardwiring happiness and um you know digging into the sort of neurobiology of where happiness comes from what our sort of set point is how much we can actually nudge it over time uh it's both reassuring and fatalistic at the same time I think and uh look you're working within this kind of an interesting one you know lots of people believe that they have agency when it comes to things like their career uh that their earnings where they're going to live the sort of partner that they choose the kind of partner that they're going to show up and be but as soon as we get past the boundary of the outside of our own skull lots of our assumptions and sort of whims and wishes about agency kind of go by the way it's well you know I'm just as happy as I'm ever I'm going to see things in this kind of a way and uh I think that level of you have a bracket that you're working within that bracket is very heavily predisposed but within that bracket it's all on you and I think that thinking about thinking about things in that kind of a way um is it should humble people that people who have got well success but in a dis Qui should feel huh maybe my worldly success kind of was a little bit less in my uh agency than I might have thought maybe I was kind of dragged Along by my nature because I have this sense inter internally that something is my nature and my agency isn't able to get get its way around it but when it comes to the meritocracy thing I'm more than happy to sort of lay it at the feet of how hard I worked in my sweat and my spit and my sawdust yeah cuz those are easy to to see and I think your examples is right on On Target and the example I like to think about is we now have pretty good polygenic scores for obesity where we know all the genes that are combined and the role they play and the data suggest that they're they play up to 70% of your obesity is driven by your genes and obviously that's an interaction between genes and environment because nobody was obese when I was a little kid or hardly anybody was and now Lots almost everybody is so there's environmental changes that we can remake and and get back to where we were but setting all that problem aside if you look at you can look at people's polygenic score and if you look at if you have obese polygenic score you're much more likely to be obese than if you don't but there's lots of thin people who have obese polygenic scores and there are very few thin people who are OB who have thin polygenic scores who are obese so you're much more likely to push in the direction you want to be than in the direction that nobody wants to be and so you can change your life your it's harder for some than others you know if you have good luck that your genes are of a thin person well you can go through life eating a fair few Donuts and things are going to be okay if you don't have those genes it's hard work you can't eat those donnuts you can't have the easy life that others have but you can still achieve your goals and so it just depends in the end how important it is to you and then finding the route to get there and I believe that that route is often the route of least genetic resistance and so if if I have poly my polygenic score for obesity is high we don't know what that means but we do know that the outcome is likely to be that I'm obese so then I have to think well where are my weaknesses okay I can't stop eating Brown fine never ever going to buy them not going to go to that corner of the mall where that Mrs field shop is you know I'm just going to create my life so that because humans are terrible at self-control but they're good at organizing and so I create my life to make it so that I don't have to resist temptation because I just can't do it and I think the same holds for happiness you you have to step back and say all right I've I am the material success that I want to be I can't quit I'm not done I have to keep doing that but now I can start to ask myself all right well what's missing and what makes me the happiest and how can I incorporate that into my life with the path of least resistance that makes the most sense for me genetically and if I'm just not the kind of guy who's going to go to parties of full of people I don't know don't put that on your list because it's just not going to happen right you want to choose the path that seems the least the most likely to lead to success yeah well I suppose it kind of relates back to what you were talking you were saying with regards to a partner that you the the path of most easy connection and autonomy is to choose a partner whose interests align with yours so that your autonomy is your connection and uh it's the same when it comes to you know you can try and swim against the tide as much as you want with trying to make yourself into this kind of a person but so for instance you mentioned earlier on about the the highly empathic person look man like if you know you really feel the pain of others very deeply that you you have the opportunity to to connect you seem to sort of make connections more quickly and sort of drop in uh more EAS easily than other people do you probably shouldn't be a Navy SEAL Sniper like that's probably that's probably not the career for you but working with soldiers that have got PTSD or you know working with a job that requires that that level of connection therapy stuff like that oh my God you know like that's really that's really your wheelhouse as long as you can avoid bringing your work home with you um so yeah I had a I've been talking about this a ton I I did a a DNA test about three or four months ago with this company called intellex DNA no affiliation but they're cool and I'd already taken the Robert pman behavioral genetics red pill a long long time ago um but I'd never actually thought well what are you talking about when you talk about your genes what is it you're actually referring to well you're referring to pairs of Al and there's very specific pairs of now you've got the polymorphic thing which is sort of these big bundles of them that come together which tend toward traits of X and Y uh but very idual Al do very specific things especially when you're talking sort of neurobiologically when you're talking and uh getting to see your the building blocks of your behavioral genetics in front of you written out it's like oh you've got the one copy of the Cy 4kk Gene which means that you clear adrenaline and norepinephrine less uh more slowly or something like that this is one of the reasons why after uh an emotional event it takes you longer to come back into land but it's also associated with uh you being able to work incredibly hard at one thing for a long period of time and you're seeing written in front of you the bricks literally the the bricks that make up the house that is you it was so fascinating I can't I can't stop thinking about it it was great it is super cool and I I've only done the 23 and me one which doesn't got dive into that level of detail maybe it does now um I did it because I was interested in my long-term Health score like Alzheimer's risk and things like that um and I was amused to see that I have this neol Al that makes it hard for me to discard rarely used items and I've always just felt like well I might need that again it would be I've got room to store that it makes sense that I should keep that old shelf bracket um and and then you're like oh maybe I'm just the product of my inner workings and I'm not running the show at all I'm just who knew yeah it is entertaining and it's super interesting and and you also rais a good point where these genes have multiple effects right and so we we often believe we're going to come to this world where we can genetically just adjust ourselves to what we want to be but every Gene has more almost every Gene has more than one consequence and so you have to ask yourself well do I want to be able to focus for a long periods of time and is it worth paying the price of not being able to come back down and clear my adrenaline you know because they don't just have one effect and so it's not easy to build the perfect human you have to build a human full of compromises yeah Bill you're awesome I think your research is fantastic uh it's so cool for someone to go deep into the hunter gatherer stuff and and sort of use that to help us understand ourselves uh where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing check out the book so um I'm now on Instagram I just set up my I just set up my account I was told um by my publicist I need to do this so I'm William Von hipple or however it works at William Von hipple or something like that I've got a full 40 followers so I've got Legions of people who are already Keen to to hear what I have to say but but I'm posting there it links to my website that I've created and coincidentally this arrived in the mail yesterday this is my my new book so you can't quite get it yet but you can it'll be on you know all the books places audio e hard copy in just a few weeks well you're awesome I can't wait to see what you write next and uh yeah I people should go and check it out the book's fantastic super readable I really loved how many stories were in there it's uh it's really great and I think it's given a a good New Perspective that I didn't have before so I appreciate all your work thanks Chris it's great talking to you I really enjoyed it until next time mate do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a God is able to know things about that you don't know about yourself well the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you bespoke so go and go and check it out